by Reed King
As we got closer to the border of BCE Tech, I saw dark shapes turning like real birds in the sky and remembered standing with my mom when I was little to watch drones buzz down through Low Hill, dropping wrapped coupons for our bonuses. But the Federal Corp had cut use to a minimum after a hacking scandal, and it had been a long time since I’d seen so many at once.5
The border was nothing but a chain-link fence tagged with Private Property signs, and some private security goons6 who turned to blur as the train sped by. We were by it in a click. Just like that, I was out of the country for the first time.
But the land on the west side of the border looked a lot like the land on the east side, except for more and more crack-ups that showed the farther we went. Broken-up towns crashed by earthquakes and tornadoes washed by the windows, and ruined fracking plants slunk along in the distance, trying not to look guilty. Only newly patched tornado walls proved the property still had live tenants, employees of Blythe’s financial services firm or just hardscrabble desperadoes who leased run-down patch shacks from the family trust.
Even Lilian,7 our first pit stop, looked a lot like Crunch 407: slum squats jigsawed together, and, beyond them, a grid of ugly treatment plants, water towers, and recycling centers. Passengers got on, passengers got off. Freight was unloaded. The goat shook, then trotted off to shit outside after treating us to a long rap about the barbarism of indoor bathrooms.8
I kept an eye on him from my seat while he nosed around the platform, hoovering up old Singles™ wrappers and drawing stares from just about everybody. It was nuts to think that the same animal making a meal out of synthetic plastic and a handful of broken glass was courier of one of the most sophisticated brains on the continent—or at least, courier of part of it.
Soon, a cheerful automated voice crooned we would leave the station in three minutes. The goat was still copping a squat next to a 2-D billboard faded of original type, now plastered over with more Private Property signs.
I stood up to hustle him along. Biff didn’t budge when I picked my way around the mountain of his lap, but Roger and all his nose hair followed me into the aisle.
“Orders,” was all he said when I glared at him.
I was passing the toilet when I heard a muffled shout from the next train car. I whipped around but couldn’t see squirrel beyond the grimy doors that separated compartments. A second later, two security bots whizzed down the aisle, nearly knocking me off my feet.
Biff stood up, shouldering his AK. Roger yanked me behind him. A high mechanical beeping, like the whine of a jumbo mosquito,9 lifted all the hairs on my neck. The doors opened with a hiss. A marching band of transit officials flowed through them: first a red-faced human engineer, then two more SecureTech robots, pinning a terrified, older-model, four-foot-ten android between them.
Not just any droid either. Sammy. My Sammy. The half in my two and a half friends.
I would of known the look of her circuitry anywhere.
“The train will be departing Lilian in two minutes,” said the sweet female voice of the train.
“Sammy!” I moved for her but Nose Hair stopped me.
“Truckee, you’ve got to diles que me dejan ir.” Even for someone kitted out of screens and circuit boards and motion detectors, she looked terrible. About a hundred system errors lit up her interface at once. In her panic, she kept toggling between language preferences. “Tell them je n’ai rien fait du mal.”
“You shut your mouth.” The engineer turned on her. “One more cough and I’ll wipe you clean.”
I’d never in my life heard that expression lobbed so casually, and I was suddenly furious.10 “Hey. Don’t talk to her like that.”
He leered at me. “I’ll talk to it any way I want.”
“One minute until departure,” announced the sweet female voice of the train.
“What’s your glitch, anyway?” I asked him. “Someone forget to feed you VitaMeds™ this morning?”
The engineer had the mottled face of a home-brew addict. “My glitch,” he said, “is that this bag of zero-ones been hitching since we left company land. My glitch is that it don’t have a ticket, don’t have a tag, and don’t have permits to be on this train.” The engineer was obviously getting off on seeing her pawed around by bots with the combined IQ of a shoelace. “I would wipe it myself, if I could.”
“Say that again, you fat stack of shit, and I’ll wipe the floor with your mouth hole.” I felt like I’d stepped out into a red-haze day, like a shimmer of hot dust had lit up my whole body. Rage flowed down into my fist and I stepped forward to crack him one. I’d never punched anyone except for in WorldBurn: Apocalypse, and once in real life when Jared insisted he wanted to know what it felt like. But then I’d tried to go easy and swung low, away from his jaw. This time, I was ready to knock this guy’s teeth out through his nose.
But Roger shoved me backward again. “Stay out of it,” he growled, his teeth still clamped around his stupid pipe. “It’s just a circuit board.”
So I threw the punch at Roger instead.
I cracked him right on the nose, right above the silky flush of his nose hair, finally knocking the vaporizer out of his mouth. The blood came quickly, lots of it. I knocked him again, without even meaning to—it was like my anger took hold of my body and not the other way around.
He stumbled backward, plowing straight into the engineer, and together they toppled into a flail of body parts. The engineer was shouting cusses from half the countries on the continent, and the other passengers were flattening themselves between the seats, and Biff was on his feet, twitching for his guns, like he wanted to shoot me but knew he couldn’t.
The chaos froze the SecureTechs where they stood, and just as soon as they relaxed their grip, Sammy wrenched free. Her lenses were flashing, desperate explosions of purple and blue.
Then she ran. She barreled through them, and for a wild second as she came closer I thought she would toss me too. A cold hand clamped down on my wrist and I nearly flew off my feet as Sammy dragged me to the door.
“What are you doing?” I knew then why some people were so scared of androids: she was three hundred pounds of flexible steel and alloy exoskeleton, and she was freaking the fuck out.
“Thirty seconds,” the train announced cheerful-like.
The engineer was back on his feet. “Get them!”
I twisted around and scried every single vein in his face standing out, as if each one of them were individually angry.
“I want that son-of-a-box wiped! I want to see its hard drive burn! I want to watch that mothernothing go back to zero!”
Biff launched over the seats, trying for the shortest route toward me. Roger still had one hand cupped to his face, and he was yelling something that sounded like muffin tin high. I tried to motion to them—I tried to say I’m sorry, and it’s not my fault, and we’re still a team, right, guys?—but Sammy yanked me so hard I near lost my footing. The train doors were still open and I saw the platform, and early evening shadows purring across it, and the goat standing there blinking at us, looking about as confused as a goat can look.
“This train will depart in five seconds,” piped the automat conductor. “Please make sure you are seated and luggage is secured in the freight cars or in the overhead compartments.”
“Get that goddamn sub-blood son-of-a-box!” was the last thing I heard.
Then Sammy leaped.
She nearly tore my arm from its socket. I was airborne and tumbling after her, and the goat let out a high shriek of terror as our shadows gobbled up the platform and dove for cover. We hit the concrete at the same time the train sent up a final bell and whistle.
At last, Sammy let me go. I rolled twice, leaving a slick of skin behind me. I sat up just in time to see Biff, Roger, and the engineer crowding the closed doors, fogging the glass with CO2, before the train glided silently out of the station and whipped out of view.
9
You’ll want to stay west of Lilian, especia
lly when the Santa Ana winds stir up old isotope clouds from Halloran-Chyung. Lilian processes shit from the Midwest Affiliated Temporary Refuge, home to some 2 million poor suckers dumb enough to think there might be somewhere else to go. Even on a good day, the place reeks like a middle-school bathroom. But when the Santa Ana blows, it’s like having your head in the bowl.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
“Are you off your skids?” As soon as I got to my feet, I rounded on Sammy. My elbow was bleeding, and my visor had been knocked clean off my head. “Did you catch a virus? Did someone code a mistake in your software? Do you have any idea what you just did?”
Sammy was three-quarter height, and came only to my breastbone, but that didn’t stop me from yelling. I was so mad I could of punched her, too, straight in the interface, except that my knuckles were already hurting and, android or not, I would never punch a girl.
“You’re angry,” she said slowly. “I know from the volume of your voice and the direction of your eyebrows.”
“Jesus fucking flam!” I kicked an empty can of RealJuz™ and nearly lost my balance.
“Hey,” the goat said, “I was eating that.”
“I’m sorry, Truckee. But you lied to me.” Sammy swiveled her head around on her neck, a weird way she had of shaking it. “You told me you were going on a corporate retreat. But previously I overheard your two Human Resource representatives debate the length of time required to get to San Francisco. I have been trying to get a temporary visa to I.N.E.P.T. for exactly one hundred and eleven days. The logical choice was to follow you.”
“News blast,” I said. “That train was my ride. Those meatheads were my ticket. There is no more San Francisco.”
“I didn’t mean to cause you any trouble,” Sammy said. Blink, blink, blink. “The Real Friends© of the North is accepting no more manufactured humans. The Independent Territories won’t issue papers until I prove my personhood, but I can only prove my personhood if I get to the Independent Territories. And yet Crunch, United, will grant no permits for travel to enemy countries.”
“All right, all right.”
But Sammy kept yammering. “And then you began to shout, and the other Homo sapien shouted, and you were paled color and your sweat glands were producing.” Sammy’s language software glitched whenever she was upset, like most old-model androids. Some people boasted this as proof that androids weren’t really sentient, that they were only parroting. Other people thought the problem was just schooling, that being wired to the intranet wasn’t the same as having parents and a good holographic education. “Of all the Homo sapien expressions, I find fear the easiest. I’ve had no problem with fear in any of my practice tests. Logically, it followed that we were in danger and it would be best to absent ourselves.”
“I wasn’t scared,” I told her. “I was angry. You need to study harder.”
But the anger had all fled now. My head hurt, my high was wearing off, and I needed to think. I wanted to play shepherd for Rafikov’s brain cells about as badly as I wanted to drink recycled piss in the Dust Bowl, but I didn’t have much of a choice. When someone like President Burnham told you what to do, you did it.
That was the law of the universe. The uppercrusts made the rules. The crumbs obeyed.
The goat spat out a small piece of metal. “Human Resources will wait for you in BCE Plaza,” he said. “Think of what the punishment would be if they lost you. All we have to do is camp here for the night. We can catch tomorrow’s train.”
He was right. Roger would be snitty I’d clocked him, but it didn’t matter. He was on the company payroll, like I was. He would do what the company ordered.
My SmartBand throbbed and unconsciously I registered seven o’clock. “Come on,” I said. “We should find shelter for the night.” The sun was setting. If BCE Tech was smart-wired, most of the lights would go out when it did.
The platform had emptied quick, and our footsteps rang out in the silence. Blythe’s tenants must of hustled home for curfew. At least the station wasn’t patrolled by his army: I hadn’t practiced my cover story yet, the goat had no tags, and a quick scan of Sammy’s serial number would show that she was an escaped migrant worker from Crunch 407.
Ancient signs pointed the way to commuter lines that hadn’t existed in a half a century. The sky was a new color, stirred by its own unique chemical smoke into vivid purples and hot electric pinks and a tornado kind of green. It was a warm night, thank hell. Two years ago in May, BCE Tech was sheeted with ice during a blast of Arctic Freeze that paralyzed the recycling centers and the waste-treatment plants, and filled all of Crunch 407, more than three hundred miles away, with the aroma of chilled shit. Jared told me it was so cold that pee froze before it hit the ground, which was the kind of fact Jared always wanted to share, even though I pointed out to him that no idiot would be idiot enough to pee outside when it was freezing.
We hunkered down in the dark of an underpass that ran beneath the bullet tracks, where the acoustics blew our whispers into huge echoes. Though the shakes that gave Oklahoma its midcentury nickname, Broklahoma, had calmed down since Blythe shuttered the last fracking ops, I could still feel the ground trembling, like the dangerous rumblings of a flu-sick stomach.
After a chow of stale vending-machine ReadyMeals™—the goat ate his NoodleFix™ raw, packaging to product code—Sammy told us how she’d escaped from Crunch 407 by slipping underneath the roadster and hooking onto the chassis. That explained the groan I heard when I’d thumped the floor with my foot. Good. The last thing we needed were carpets that talked back.
“You realize you’re going to have to go back, right?” I felt terrible saying it, but that was the world we lived in. Almost everything true was flavored a little like vomit. “As soon as we catch up to the bodymen, you’ll get shipped back in a freight case.”
“But you can’t let them, Truckee.” Sammy’s speakers began to crackle. “You have to help me.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” I fired back. Why did everyone think I was some kind of hero, just because I’d dodged the blow-up at Production-22 with my skin cells intact? “You were the one idiot enough to try and run.”
“I think it was very brave of you,” the goat said to Sammy, through a mouthful of old aluminum.
“Oh, sure,” I said, before Sammy could start fawning. “If the walking trash compactor says so.”
The goat’s eyes were a luminous yellow in the half dark. “I do not eat trash,” he said primly. “Humans waste food. And just so you know, I have a name.”
“Of course you do.”
“It’s Barnaby,” he said, even though I hadn’t asked. “And I’ll thank you to use it.” When I rolled my eyes, he went on. “Do you have any idea what it’s been like for me? Do you have any idea the difficulties I’ve faced? The challenges I’ve overcome? It’s hard enough to be a man or a goat, without having to be both at the same time.”
“Tell us your story, Barnaby,” Sammy said. I shot her a look, but I guess she hadn’t gotten to that chapter lesson yet. Or maybe she had, because she ignored me. “Please.”
The goat gave a heavy sigh, like it was an ask he heard every day. But he twitched around, trying to get a little comfier. “If you insist,” he said. “I suppose, then, it makes sense to begin with my birth, which I am unlucky enough to remember.…”
INTERLUDE
THE GOAT SPEAKS
My first memory, my first true memory, is of the punctuated cry of a heart-rate monitor and the taste of a surgical glove someone had abandoned accidentally in my cage. My first minutes awake, aware, I spent in an agony of fear, slowly consuming the fingers, beginning with the thumb: to this day I find the taste of latex both comforting and sharply painful.
I was a kid when the operation was performed, and though I had no concept of birthdays, or even the passage of time, before the human neural tissue was integrated with my own, I later figured out that I must have been roughly ten months old whe
n I was wheeled into the brain chamber.
Before then, you see, time did not exist. I lived forever and I lived a single day only: even now, thinking back on that wordless soup, I have the idea of a moment folded in on itself infinitely, containing everything I had ever experienced up until that point—the smell of grass clippings, the pleasure of dozing on a sun-parched patch of ground, the twitchy chatter of the flies, the tin trailer that rattled us into captivity—as if it all happened in a single instant.
That is the difference between being conscious and not. You start to die only when you begin to understand.
Of course, even after surgery, I lived the first months in a fog of confusion and grief. The more I understood, the lonelier I became. What was this monstrous place, of terrible metal animals that beeped and hissed and pumped through the night? What was this white-gloved, white-cloaked herd, with their frequent, urgent mutterings, their arbitrary gifts, their alternating cruelty and magic?
Slowly, I separated gummy strands of cause and effect, of minute and hours, of night and day, morning and noon. Slowly, my terror abated—and was replaced, gradually, with curiosity, with the urgent wish, if not the linguistic capacity, to know why, where, what, and who. The metal animals that had for a month been tormenting me with their wiry fur and mechanical teeth slowly nudged my conscious understanding toward the concept of machinery. The herd of white-cloaked, two-legged beasts became humans. Individuals unpeeled themselves from the group as I attached feelings and preferences to each of them. There was a woman named Wanda I remember especially. She snuck me biscuits, and her hands smelled always of nail varnish, Lemon Pledge, and tobacco.