FKA USA

by Reed King

  I couldn’t understand more than half the words he used. But I got the topline well enough: Yana Rafikov was pulverizing code into a snortable drug even more powerful than shiver. “But why? What’s the long game?”

  “Remember when I told you Rafikov had found a way to forever? That’s why. She now has hundreds of thousands—millions—of bodies at her disposal, to do with as she likes. She can download straight into their bodies. She can freeze or wipe their consciousnesses at will. We’ll soon have an army of little Rafikovs, marching to her every command, obeying her every order.” He paused to let that sink in. “In the meantime, Jump is creeping into every country on the continent. And you’ve seen what it can do. We put down a riot in the sublevels1 of Broadway in New New York only a few days ago. A swarm of RFN terrorists blew their way into wet country run by the Boise Swarm.2 Idiots. The warlords will just cut the flow down the basin.” He shook his head in disgust. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that was her plan all along, you know—to bring the continent to within a pubic hair’s width of war. It’s easier to take control of a world at war than a world at peace.”

  “You think she wants to…?”

  “Take control of every country on the continent? I don’t think. I’m sure of it.” When he smiled, he showed off gums the pink of an inner organ. “Why be immortal if you’re not omnipotent too? Why live forever unless you can play God?”

  I thought of what Billy Lou said to me up there on the catwalk just before the drug ruptured all the membranes in his eyes. All men are gods.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “Simple. I need your help to stop it.”

  7

  History tells like a slophead drunk on fire whiskey—somehow, the story always ends in blood.

  —from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA

  A few long seconds ticked by. Even Daddy Burnham’s eyes looked sorry for me—sorrier, I mean, than they did just floating around in a jar of what looked like nuclear waste.

  “President Burnham, sir…” I tried to think of a way to phrase what I needed to say that wouldn’t get me canned—or slapped into Jersey Federal.1 “I don’t know where you get your intelligence, but I’m just a hand-crank operator—and not even a very good one. I always take all my pee breaks. I mean, I just said the word ‘pee’ to the president.” I hadn’t been planning to use this argument, but it seemed pretty watertight, at least from where I was sitting. “I’m a nobody, sir.”

  “I know,” he said. I was just a tiny bit annoyed he’d agreed with me so quick. “That’s exactly why we want you. We’ve bought ourselves a few days—a week, at the outside. The Commonwealth has sanctioned the Federation by crippling its servers.”

  That was a shock to the nuts. If the Commonwealth was cooperating with New New York, things must be teetering on apocalypse. Rivalry between the two was practically written into the Constitution.2

  “But it was meant as a slap on the wrist,” he continued, “and it’s only a matter of time before the Federation servers are up and running again. In the meantime, Rafikov can’t even catch a whiff of what we’re doing.”

  “But what are we doing?”

  He sighed as if he’d been hoping I wouldn’t ask. “There’s only one person in the world smart enough to stop Yana Rafikov. And that, unfortunately, is Yana Rafikov. But as you can imagine, her cooperation is, in this case, extremely unlikely.”

  “Can’t you just kill her?” I hated to point out the obvious, but Crunch did have a reputation for dealing with diplomatic deadlocks by the simplest route. Even a company kid could read between the lines whenever one of our public enemies suddenly choked on a chicken bone or drowned in a lake while on vacation. Because really, who had chicken bones nowadays? Where would you even find a lake that wasn’t toxic to swim in? We were pretty sure that the whole point of the Foreign Exchange Trade and Services Division was to drop assassins and spies all over the continent. Jared’s older sister, Riley, had been appointed to the Commonwealth right after standard, and had once sent back a necklace made of ancient seashells—pretty, except for all the blood caked inside of them.

  President Burnham didn’t flinch. “We would, if we knew exactly where she was. But she’s well protected. And access to the Russian Federation is nearly impossible, given the military threat in Pennsylvania.3 Besides, if she’s cabled up to other individuals—if she has managed to override their conscious thinking, or store it in the cloud—all of them might die with her. No.” He shook his head. “Rafikov dreamed up the technology. She’s the one who must dream up a way to stop it.”

  Just listening to him gave me whiplash. “But why would she?”

  “She won’t have a choice.” He leaned forward. “Years ago, when she was a student at MIT, Rafikov donated a sample of her brain tissue to a neurological brain study headed by a promising Ph.D. candidate. He was testing the theory that brain tissue could be transferred between individuals, and even between species.”

  “Albert Cowell,” I said.

  President Burnham nodded. “Cowell cloned the donated brain tissue for use in hundreds of experiments over the next decade—most of them failed. But at one point, half a dozen animal species could boast a small portion of the genius Yana Rafikov’s brain. Staggering, isn’t it? Just imagine a dumpster-diving rat with the neurological firepower and self-consciousness of a higher primate.”

  He was describing the Human Resource agents exactly, but I didn’t say so.

  “But when the San Andreas Fault blew up, and dissolution followed on its heels, he lost every single one of his successful experiments, and all of the remaining brain tissue he had meticulously cloned and shepherded through generations of cell death.” Burnham paused. “All, that is, except for one.”

  Finally, I understood. “The goat.”

  “The goat,” Burnham said, with another nod. “The last living mammal whose neural tissue contains a usable sample of Rafikov’s brain.”

  “Besides Rafikov, you mean,” I said.

  He tried to tap his nose, but his shakes were so bad he wound up fingering his upper lip instead. “I’m not sure how Mr. Ropes and the animal found each other. It’s even possible that Mr. Ropes was under Rafikov’s control, and intended to kill the animal. Or it was a happy coincidence. But it gave us an unexpected way to fight back.”

  “How?”

  “Albert Cowell was a pioneer in Fractal Brain Theory—it is his view that any portion of the brain, no matter how small, reflects the structural pattern and integrity of the whole, meaning that the whole might be rebuilt from any component part. Now he’ll put this theory into practice.”

  It took me a second. “You’re saying Cowell wants to build a brain?”

  “Not just any brain. Rafikov’s brain.” He looked suddenly severe. “And he doesn’t want to—he has to. The fate of the continent—the fate of the world—depends on it.”

  For a while, we sat in silence. The whole thing was nutty. And I still didn’t know where I fit in.

  President Burnham must of known exactly what I was thinking. “You saved the goat’s life,” he said, in a softer voice. “The animal will trust you.”

  And then, all at once, I understood. “You can’t…” I felt like I’d inhaled a fist of Foodstuffz™ soured back to their component chemicals. “You don’t mean…”

  Now President Burnham’s smile was so huge, it looked like a hole cut in his face. “You, young man, are going west.”

  Part II

  CRUNCHTOWN 407 → BCE TECH

  8

  The Crunch International Railway travels from Crunch 407 to the company’s many distribution centers in Oklahoma, now privately owned by “the Backyard Shark,” billionaire Tenner C. Blythe. There are no other stops to make. Nothing out in this cracked tit of the former America but collapsed fracktowns, fissured agrofirms, sinkholes, and rubble—and, of course, the usual assortment of backlanders, vultures, cultists, and criminals you find eve
rywhere nowadays.

  —from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA

  Whenever I’d dreamed about leaving Crunchtown, I’d imagined scrolling off on a vintage motorcycle—the kind that runs on gas and sounds like a giant choking on a chicken bone—maybe stopping to turn around and see the city shrunk to a thumbnail behind me. In my wildest fantasies, I thought of taking off on one of the private aircraft that once or twice a year touched down in the rubble of the old airport to refuel before beating it back to cities where flycraft were common knowledge.

  I didn’t think I’d be squeezed between two scowling HR beltstrappers in the backseat of a twenty-year-old autodrive, praying I wouldn’t end up splattered with animal vomit.

  “Terrible way to go.” The goat’s eyes narrowed to slits, and I could feel his heart beating through his fur. “Buried in a mound of molten metal. Crushed under the tires of an eighteen-wheeler. Pulverized and pounded, turned to roadkill…”

  Every time he twitched, he came within an inch of drilling me in the balls.

  “We’re not going to die,” I said. I was half-tempted to remind him he’d been whining that morning about greener pastures, but didn’t even want to breathe the idea of death in his direction.

  I’d fed him the story President Burnham had suggested: that we were returning him to Cowell for observation, as part of an important prisoner swap between the RFN and the Federal Corp. Although he wasn’t thrilled about returning to the Laguna-Honda Military Base in San Francisco, he seemed to like the idea of being the key to some diplomatic circle jerk.

  “‘The tortures mankind devises for its amusement’”—the goat’s nostrils quivered—“‘will surely render the devil redundant.’” He cracked one yellow eye to gaze at me. “That’s a line from chapter six of my memoir.”

  A writer. Jesus. I wondered where he’d grimped those neurons from.

  We passed over the river where it turned north via an old concrete suspension bridge. Both the unionists and dissolution crowd had left graffiti. TOGETHER WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL. FREE ARIZONA. “BURNHAM” TO THE GROUND. After another mile, the operating system shouted our arrival at the Davie Stevens Natt1 Crunch International Terminal Station. The horizon beyond it was blackened by the looming silhouette of an agrofirm, kitted with a trademark silo where trained security teams kept watch day and night to make sure no backlanders came to steal from the storehouses. To the east, I could only barely see the lump of the city through a haze of chemical smoke.

  It was as far as I’d ever been from home.

  The HR duo rocketed out of the rig as soon as the doors popped, and the goat bounded after them, missing my left nut by an inch. When I tried to stamp some feeling back into my feet, I could of sworn the carpet yelped. Maybe, I thought, the rig was tricked with sensory-equipped fabric. I hurried out of the car nice and quick before it could start complaining about the barnyard stink we’d left behind.

  “The day train’s coming.” The HR goons hadn’t so much as tongued a pebble in my direction since they’d come to hustle me out of Burnham’s office, and they didn’t smile either. But they still had dumbass name tags hovering beneath their holos, and this one’s name was Roger. He had a fir of nose hair making an obvious run for his upper lip, and didn’t even remove his vaporizer to talk. He just shifted it to the corner of his mouth and talked around it.

  “We’re late.” The second HR gun, Biff, had a head shaped like a cinder block, very little neck, and a belt strapped with so many guns he looked like a Level-8 Warrior from my favorite simulation, WorldBurn: Apocalypse: semiautomatic rifles, exploding artillery, strapback revolvers. “Let’s ramp and ride.”

  I had a thousand questions. How were we supposed to get past the Texas border, one of the hardest on the continent? How would we avoid the Denver cartels without cutting south to risk dying in the Dust Bowl? If being a nobody was my cover, wouldn’t a personal security detail give me away? But I wouldn’t ask, not for my life. There was nothing more exciting to HR rats than a crumb with a question, and I wasn’t going to give either one the excuse to splooge their knowledge all over me.

  We hustled for the terminal station as the bullet train approached, hovering silently above its tracks like a puffed-up condom surfing waves of air. Just then I thought I saw a flash of something silver to my right. But when I turned, I saw nothing. Still, I could of sworn that something—or someone—was out there, watching.

  “You dumping in your shorts?” Biff was holding the door for me. A real class act.

  “Coming.” I took one last look at my hometown—the smear of chemical color, the collision of shoebox apartments, the foundries spewing ash into the air over the graveyard plots where what remained of my mom was buried six feet under poisonous dirt—and felt a hard ache in my throat. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d never go back to Crunch 407. I’d never walk through the red-dust streets where I’d walked with my mom when I was little, or stock up on RainbowSweetz™ from the company store. That I’d never see Saanvi again, or hear her brag about her fantasy-football wins. That I’d never sit with Jared and listen to him babble on about product-development breakthroughs and the release of the new Todd-X, Human Resources Champion movie.

  I wasn’t an idiot—at least, I wasn’t any more an idiot than the average squid. I knew that Crunch 407 was a shitdump. I knew I was poor. I knew I was meant for an oil wheel in a machine that worked to crank out cash for the uppercrusts. Despite the Corporate Pride Movement and the songs about the colonial world, despite the jingles and the free Dymase™ with every purchase at the company store, despite the constant smiling and the holos that slicked that everything was better in Crunch 407, I knew it.

  But it was still home. And in a world staggering toward the finish line, that counted for a lot.

  * * *

  It took some wrangling to figure a proper tariff for the goat: the ticket vendor was an ancient-model robot in danger of overheating every time it processed a question. After some negotiation we agreed he should count for a quarter-person, like one of the SAAMs that traveled the route.2 Luckily, President Burnham had hooked me up with a fat stack of Crunchbucks, some Freedom dollars, manna, and Nevada gold chips—currency I’d never even laid eyes on, since it was illegal in the Federal Corp.

  Of course, the beast didn’t even say thank you.

  The bullet train was a beauty on the outside, glittering in hybrid metals and reinforced polyglass. Inside, it smelled like old bac and piss. By the time we boarded, most of the passenger cars were jammed with day laborers and agrofirm reps toting cases of test-tube apples and pork spores. But Biff and Roger managed to find us a cabin shared only by an old man with the mug of a reanimated cadaver.

  “Is that a real animal?” he asked in a whisper. His pupils were electric, and his scabby look gave him away as a dimehead. “A real live animal?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said.

  The man’s nostrils were quivering, as if he could already smell the goat split open and seared on a griddle. “I remember the taste of real animals.…”

  “This one’s no good to eat,” I said. “He’s way too old. All bone and sinew.”

  The goat shot me a dirty look but said nothing, and luckily the man left us alone after that.

  We found a bank of empty seats. The train slipped into motion, smooth as a lubed-up bullet down the throat of a gun. I popped a fresh-laced gummy I’d bought from the vending machine at the terminal station. I’d never been big on weed, not compared to everyone else I knew—Jared vaped every morning and Annalee liked to take blueberry-flavored fresh on her lunch breaks—but since I was sneaking into enemy territory to deliver brain cells to a Crunch sleeper agent in the hopes that we could stop a global apocalypse of mind-controlled zombies, I figured it was as good a time to get high as any.

  Soon we were squarely in agrofirm territory, where Crunch, United’s foodstuffs were printed via data-set instructions or sprouted from harvested stem cells. It was amazing how many fir
ms there were, each of them on its own rolling plot of pavement, separated by high fences and water-harvesting and -treatment plants. I tried to imagine what the colony might of looked like two centuries ago, when it was still called Arkansas; what the whole continent might have looked like to the settlers drawn west by a promise of gold in the hills of what was then California, before California cracked open and a rush of developers, techies, and land grabbers started pushing into Washington and Oregon to make up for lost coastline.

  But I couldn’t. It was like trying to imagine a live cow just by looking at a hamburger patty.3

  After a while, I slipped on my visor. Burnham’s secretary had, true to her word, returned it, and the backstrap even smelled a little like her. I felt a little calmer as soon as all my feeds popped up: the flow of updates and chatter, tags and likes, video and riffs, slowly sloughed off the real world layer by layer down to nothing. But portal service was spotty. The Commons, my usual VR hangout, collapsed into 2-D, and pretty soon, error codes started nudging into my visuals.

  I swiped a message to Jared and Annalee, since there’d been no time to say goodbye. I’d seen Sammy only for a second outside the company store, and when I rapped her my cover story—I was getting a few days off in the company’s Perfect Forest™ retreat4—I had the weirdest feeling she knew I was lying.

  Maybe she did. She’d been studying pretty hard.

  The HR team had loaded me with a rucksack full of currency, a fake passport, and a few changes of clothes, then marched me back to my shoebox, fouling it up with vape while I collected the few things I owned, all of it company-issue: my Crunch dopp kit, a few pairs of skivs, the Crunch Appreciation Pin my mom got for her twentieth year of employment, a hair band Annalee had once lost in my couch cushions. At the last second, I took The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA, one of the books Billy Lou had scavenged for me, even though I’d never been able to shake out more than a sentence’s worth of meaning from the knotty letters on the pages. Still, I wanted to remember old Billy Lou—and not the one I’d seen up there on the catwalk, leaching drug through his eyeballs.