FKA USA

by Reed King

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

  We would have to move fast and stay on guard. The Underground was shitpacked with criminals and not all of them innocent. There were murderers, skinflints, thieves, rapists, and the usual flow of drug runners—the tunnels supposedly led all the way to the Denver Airport, the Juarez cartel’s territorial base. There were full-time lurks skulked homes there too—a nasty bunch of worms, half of them off their straw. They scrabbled a living picking off travelers and stealing what they could, went blind as mole rats with backs crooked from bending over.

  The first few hours we saw no one. Still, the echo of other voices and footsteps shook the hair on the back of my neck. We came to intersects where clumsy, hand-painted signs pointed the way to safe houses or dropped hints to other travelers. ASK FOR BERTHA AT WARRENSVILLE. THIS WAY TO FRESH WATER. WARNING: RED LETTER INN CLOSED. 203 MILES TO DENVER. C-JO WENT FOR HOP MEET @ 41 AND FREE. Four-by-fours and sandbags shored up the walls where moisture had started to decay them. Makeshift latrines—spongy cabins built over vertical mine shafts—filled the air with a sulfur stink.

  All in all, it was the kind of safe route only Tiny Tim could scrum up.

  I lost track of the hours. My SmartBand had only stubbly service, and started squeezing me every few minutes. Probably it needed a battery swap—but I couldn’t help but think it was losing clock too. But at some point we came on a crude set of bunk beds, minus the bedding, and Tiny Tim suggested we screw down for the night. If it was night.

  “A little down the road, and things get busy,” he said. “Best to have both eyes open and your wits about you.”

  I wasn’t hooked on the idea of staying underground longer than we had to, but I knew he was right. Besides, Sammy had run herself thin on batteries trying to light the way, and needed to switch packs.

  I took a seat on one of the splintered bunks. Setting my rucksack next to me, I saw a hole where a bullet had passed clean through the nylon. The shell was clinging like a tiny silver bug to the leather-bound hide of the book Billy Lou Ropes had given me years ago. The thing had saved my life.

  “You’re finally reading the Bible, then.” Tiny Tim toggled his chin toward the book and worked a finger in his nostril to clear it. “I figged you’d a’ known about the Underground yourself. That’s the reason I never said squirrel or bones about it. The Man used these tunnels all the time, to get back and forth to wherever the winds was blowing him.”

  I settled down, using my backpack as a pillow and my windbreaker for a blanket. The air was humid and it was cold. I was homesick—really sick, like missing Crunch 407 was a feeling curdling my guts. I missed my shoebox and my cot with its regulation sheets and the tissue-thin walls and the shower slicked with soap scum and even the Pervert, whose real name no one bothered with, blazing his junk in a too-small towel. I missed red-dust dawns and the river’s shimmering chemical glow and the smell of baking shiver. I missed the warren of streets in Low Hill, even the Crunchtown Crunk© rattling our brains at six every morning.

  I missed Jared and Annalee, especially, and knowing they knew I wasn’t a terrorist, that I wasn’t anybody at all.

  I missed being a nobody.

  I wished, more than anything, I could ask my mom for advice. For a split second, I could almost understand why Mark C. Burnham had done what he’d done, all those years ago during the last presidency—why he’d been willing to break the back of the whole known world just to keep Whitney Heller from disappearing.

  But then—with a sudden sizzle of clarity—I realized my mom wasn’t totally gone.

  At least, not all the way.

  * * *

  As soon as Tiny Tim and Barnaby bedded down and Sammy switched into sleep mode, I powered on my visor: 19 percent battery, and no telling how long it would be before I would get juice.

  Already, I was getting the shakes.1

  Even the Underground was wired with the Yellow Brick Road. I navigated right away to the Information Palace and the searchbot, Patch. The system had been upgraded for high speed, so I didn’t have to wait behind a logjam of other users.

  “I need intel on a Sugar Wallace,” I said. A growth of numbers near the hot-condiment window kept a register of intel buyers satisfied—it sped through from 2,230,00 to 2,436,000 even as I was standing there. “Originally from Charlotte, before it became a part of the Confederacy. She worked in Crunch 407 until she died.” Even my avatar had a hard time spitting out the word.

  This time, Patch’s eyes barely flashed to hourglasses until they lit up again. My mom’s download file was less than 20MB, so thin it could of slipped between paragraphs of all the rumors about me. I even thought Patch looked disappointed—the whole kit and noodle was only two Crunchbucks.

  “That’s it?” he said. “Nothing else?”

  “Sorry,” I said. Seeing my mom’s data pack made me even sadder, somehow, and I almost regretted forking for it.

  I wasn’t ready to scrum back into the fester-pit of the Underground. And I wasn’t ready to read the data pack either. Instead I scrolled to Bad Kitty’s Litter Box, hoping to see her. But when her avatar flicked her tail and greeted me with standard code, I knew she was logged off.

  I nearly jumped out of my pixels when an unfamiliar advertisement shoved his way rudely into my sidebar.

  “Hey, man, check it out. I pulled some new recommendations for you based on previous search terms.” He sounded like an algorithm wrapped up in a cloud of New Los Angeles vape. “You interested?”

  I felt a little like someone had just caught me on the shitter with my pants cabled to my ankles. “Can’t you knock or ping or message me or something?”

  He held up both hands. “I’m not the one who enabled pop-up ads in my privacy settings.”

  “My…?” I shook my head, even though he obviously couldn’t see me. “No. Look. Sorry. I’m tight on cash, anyhow.”

  Somewhere beyond the immersive fog of the simulation, Barnaby reminded me testily that some mammals were trying to sleep. I switched into manual chat mode.

  The avatar still didn’t budge from the window of my home screen. “Are you for-sure? Based on your searches for Truckee and Sugar Wallace, ninety percent likely to meet your satisfaction.”

  The whole thing reeked of scam, and his jumble of ad-speak was giving me a headache. Thanks. But no thanks.

  “Last chance. This one’s a whopper, for real.” By which I banked he meant expensive.

  Non me lo posso permettere. I was so impatient I wasn’t inputting carefully enough, and somehow swapped into translation mode instead of calling up an exclamation-point burst.

  By the time I reset my language preferences to Corporation English, the avatar had scrammed. To make sure ads wouldn’t keep dropping in on me unannounced, I lost a few minutes navigating my privacy settings, coded to look like a huge prison town. Annoyingly, I had to round up and lock up all of the things I didn’t want crashing my interface, like pop-up ads and surveys.

  I was just shoving newsletters into their own cell block when a hint bubble floated toward the top of my screen and then burst into a wisp of lettering: Looks like someone is trying to get your attention!

  I turned around, expecting another pop-up that had ducked the settings change. But it was Bad Kitty, tail swishing, eyes large and green, ears stiffly at attention, her whiskers curling around a shy smile. I was so surprised I couldn’t pin a single thing to say.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Hi. I tried to think of something else to swipe, but everything I could think of sounded bunk.

  She crossed her arms. Or paws. Whatever. “What? What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Of course, I wasn’t looking at her like anything. My avatar’s face was still template.

  Which meant she was nervous.

  I didn’t expect to see you, that’s all.

  Her tail gave a vicious flick. “Then how come you logged into my site?”

  In real life, my w
hole face caught fire. How did you…?

  “I told you, I got special spyware. Besides”—she half-shrugged a furry shoulder—“you’re the only visitor I’ve had in a month.”

  That cracked the tension. I sent a couple laughs bubbling her way. A second later a ringing bell signaled that Bad Kitty had switched over to manual mode, and a small bubble of dialogue appeared over her head. I hate chatting when other people are in manual.

  Yeah, me too. It feels so …

  … lopsided, we both swiped, at exactly the same time.

  Her whiskers twitched. Exactly.

  I took the plunge. Look, I’m sorry for what I said to you last time.

  That’s okay.

  It’s not okay. I exploded a few frowny faces with a pipe bomb for emphasis. Like you said. The Federal Corp got me whipped. At least, they used to. I was thinking of the board, and President Burnham’s forced leave of absence, and the way I’d been set up to take the heat for Rafikov and her ambitions.

  That’s okay. You wouldn’t believe the propaganda the Real Friends© feeds try to spoon us.

  So. She was from the West Coast. No accent meant she was probably rich too. Out of my league, for sure.

  Already, the quiet had gone on a beat too long.

  So what else you got in your archives? The words jumped out of my fingertips before I even knew they were moving.

  She hesitated. Her tail was going hard: she was trying to figure whether she could trust me or not. But finally, she lobbed me a link to a new window.

  As soon as I touched it, the sim morphed. Once again we were standing in the Litter Box, but this time all the miniatures on the shelves had unrolled pictures, videos, spools of data. She crouched on the floor, and a shudder worked its way from her tail to her nose; a second later, she coughed up an index onto the carpet.

  I sorted through the streams, straightening them into topics, countries, and years. This was the admin view, and it was full to popping with data.

  Military requisition forms from the Dakotas. Nuclear agreements signed by Halloran-Chyung. Intercepted messages from the SFF 2 to Russia. What she had would of fetched hundreds of millions of bucks on the open market. Of course, what she had could also get her busted for espionage by half the continent.

  Even though just the knowledge made me accessory, I couldn’t stop looking. A fifty-year-old exchange between the first President Burnham and Albert Cowell at Laguna-Honda nearly blew my jaw off its hinges. The messages were cluttered with coded say-so about the Burnham Prize and Cowell’s progress. One message even dropped a line about the “unexpected psychological complications” of interspecies neural-tissue transfer, and I couldn’t help but think of the story Barnaby had told me, about his father’s shame and suicide.

  When did you get into the game? I swiped her, still untangling the massive hairball of confidential government records.

  Oh, forever ago. She waved a paw. You remember the Mars Mission Launch? 3

  Barely. I was only four.

  I was six, she wrote, and my heart stuttered. It was a stupid thing to be excited about, like we had any chance of meeting, whether she was eighteen or eighty. She was a stranger, and could of been maul,4 a serial killer, one of those fur fetishists, or all three. The funny thing is we didn’t even hear about the launch in the RFN. But I’ll never forget where I was when the rocket blew.

  A tickle of heat moved across my neck. What do you mean, when it blew?

  For a long time, she just stared at me, whiskers drooping. You didn’t get the news in the Federal Corp? The words whispered regret into my audio feed.

  No. I was glad we were in manual mode. My mouth was as dry as a mothball.

  I could tell by the way she started worrying the carpet that she wished she hadn’t let the truth slip. Pieces of rocket burned through the Holodome. It was the first time I’d ever seen rain. It smelled just like ash, because of all the debris blowing through.

  She’d dropped another hint about where she lived. The Holodome was world-famous Nuevo Angelino swank: a multitrillion-dollar float of semi-impermeable balloon gas and a massive holographic projection to keep the skies blue year-round. But I was in no mood to celebrate.

  All the news we got was no news at all.

  Well, sure. Halloran-Chyung wouldn’t want the Russian Feds to know the truth. Crunch, United, must of buried the story.5

  I thought of all the times Jared and Annalee and I had played Imagine and swapped stories about the Mars colonizers and what they were getting up to while we were lumping through Standard classes or working the line.

  All along, they’d been nothing but carbon particles in the New Angelo sand.

  I’m sorry, Bad Kitty wrote.

  That’s all right. I just … never knew.

  That’s just how I felt, when the rocket blew up, I mean, I hadn’t even known there was a rocket. It was like … like my reality blew up too. Her nose twitched. I wanted the truth. And I knew no one was going to surf in and hand it to me.

  That’s amazing, I swiped, with some animation I hoped she wouldn’t think was cheesy. You’re amazing.

  Not really. Just stubborn. But I was learning to read her whiskers, and could tell she was pleased.

  Listen. I should try and catch some sleep. But if it’s bank, I’ll come back and visit soon.

  Bank. Her whiskers jumped again. I never heard that one before. Out here we say “green.”

  For a second we stood there, avatar to avatar, smiling at each other. For a cat, she was especially beautiful: soft-looking, perfectly groomed. I had a flash of what she might really look like: sharp-chinned, with long, silky bangs that fringed her eyes.

  I wondered if her eyes were green in real life too.

  23

  When the world’s gone mad, you can either go mad with it, or you can go your own way. I always chose my own way.

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

  We woke to voices. I barely had time to tap on my flashlight before two blockheads lumbered past us, big and crude-looking, like they’d been winched through a faulty printer. We used it as our cue to get up.

  Before long we were funneled into a busier tunnel, with more shitholes, more graffiti, and a lot more paddle traffic: travelers and moles, hunchbacked and eyes glazy with cataracts; hustlers and grifters; runners and slicks peddling battery charges and lanterns that tapped out five minutes after you’d bought them; plus some regular commuters who wanted to avoid the border fees. Tim hadn’t lied: in general, it was the ugliest, rudest-looking crowd I’d ever seen, counting Bethesda and the Devil’s Army, although there were a few scared-looking rabbits keeping their heads down and their hustle on, just trying to get out of Dodge before they were busted for stealing candy bars or whatever. There were a fair few androids, too, trying to duck Texas policies.

  Almost everyone, I noticed, was going the other way.

  Some hours later, Tiny Tim spotted a face he knew and let out a shout. A second later, he was throttling the life out of a skinny-looking cowboy missing one of his arms to an old infection.

  His name was Kink, and it turned out Tiny Tim knew him from the grifter routes they traveled. He had skin the foamy color of Annalee’s, lots of plastic teeth, and a few prosthetic whizzes and bits: a pinkie finger that doubled for a flashlight, some metal teeth that sent alerts from his visor directly through his skull cap, even a nifty metal nose he could shut down when he wanted. He’d once been a flyboy, smuggling false permits and visas, and high-well paid for it, but the work had gotten too dangerous.1

  “Was a time plenty of the border boys looked the other way,” he explained. “They remembered dissolution, and half of them were secretly unionist anyway. But things have changed.” He shook his head. “Two things you can count on in this world: that change will come, and that you’ll wish it hadn’t.”

  Kink spent nearly half the year underground and knew the secret turn-offs and the caves where pools of vivid water condensed luminescent mush
rooms on the walls. Normally, the local moles would chase off strangers from their territory, but Kink was well-known and had slowly earned their trust by bringing down supplies from the surface to leave in their camps. We camped on a lip of stone at the edge of a hot springs after bathing, and sprawled out naked together while a mortified Sammy went into deep sleep. Kink gathered some purple mushrooms from the walls he said would give us funky dreams, and we cracked open a case of Mini Cheddar Frank ’n’ Roll Chili™ he’d bought off one of the underground sellers. It was obviously counterfeit—the balance of chemicals was all wrong—but I was so hungry, I’d of eaten shoe rubber.2

  “I been in every country across the continent three or four times the last decade,” he told us. “And I tell you, only thing changes deep down is the stank. In the low countries you got the stank of mold and shitjuice. In the Dakotas, it stinks of dirty money. All of Denver reeks like shiver and Russians, the Confederacy like the fester of an armpit hole, and the Dust Bowl has the worst stank of all of them, because there ain’t nothing but death in every direction.”

  Now Kink worked as a flesh drone, delivering letters and small packages in and out of countries where the risk of censorship or interference was high, which was most of them. It was Kink who let drop the info I would of sworn the pop-up ad on the Yellow Brick Road had been trying to sell me: Mark J. Burnham had been forced to resign as CEO, though he’d been allowed to keep his title of president, and had been hustled into some secret rehab on Florida Island. The shareholders blamed President Burnham for being soft on terror—there were even rumors of possible sympathies in that direction.

  The whole thing, Kink said, was notching us toward another world war.

  “Now the board is deadlocked in negotiations and can’t decide who to nominate up,” he said. “Meanwhile the director of international sales is threatening sanctions against Texas if they won’t co-grind in the manhunt for that terrorist blew up the bullet train.” Luckily, he didn’t know he was talking to the country’s most wanted, or I felt sure I’d wake with my intestines hooked to his mail pack. “But to be true with youse, things been flowing in that direction for years now. This cold-war shit was bound to burn hot sometime. Crunch, United’s one of the worst offenders. Blowing up oil tankers in the Gulf and claiming it was RFN interference. Squeezing every last dime from its colonies and even doing back-end deals with the cartels. Oh, yes,” he said, catching view of my face. “The Federal Corp’s been running Dymase™ to shiver addicts all over the world. How else you think it keeps its market share?”