by Reed King
Barnaby jawed through a scrap of old tire. “It’s a shame we don’t know any veterans,” he said thoughtfully.
“What would that matter?” I asked him.
Barnaby treated me to a scathing look. “Haven’t you ever read Hovercraft and Its Impact on Urban Infrastructure: A Case Study?” When I didn’t bother replying, he huffed. “It was excellent, I recall. A little dry going down, but very filling. Anyone with military tags can override the security system.”1
“Too bad that doesn’t help us,” I snapped. I had no doubt Rafikov would make good on her promise to turn me to snake food. Even now, her creepy body-puppets might be tracking me. And without a hover, I was good as digested.
“Now, just hang on a second.” Tiny Tim rooted around in his pack. “I might know someone who can give us a hand.”
He pulled out his sorry pittance of trades: a broken pair of turn-of-the-century eyeglasses, some rusted tweezers, a used purine, three bottle caps, a handful of loose teeth. Finally, he whipped out the brown, shriveled, preservative-leeching mitt he’d won off a military man during a poker game in Granby: lost to frostbite, I remembered, during the Halloran-Chyung offensive up near the Russian Federation hinterlands.
I could of kissed him. “Tim,” I said, “I take it back. You just might be the best grifter there is.”
Shriveled as they were, the fingerprints still registered. Just like that, all the doors slid open with a click, and the car came to life. Headlights flared, the engine purred, and the speakers started blaring hysteria about North Korean sneaks crossing the border to kidnap and cannibalize Halloran-Chyung children. I slid into the driver’s seat and punched the radio off. The smell of new plastic and fake leather was addictive.
“Any idea how we blast off, Barnaby?” I asked. There were hundreds of dashboard controls—altitude and velocity measures, emergency-landing deploy, air-pressure regulation, climate control.
“Hovercraft and Its Impact on Urban Infrastructure: A Case Study wasn’t a driving manual,” Barnaby said icily. I guess the animal who’d pooped his way through the classics had better taste than that.
Finally I managed to punch on Self-Nav and a cheerful automated voice, faintly tinged Korean, announced that altitude 500 feet looked free and clear and asked us to confirm.
“Confirm,” I said.
As soon as the word was out of my mouth, we lurched forward. I nearly put a tooth through the steering wheel. Just as quickly, we came to an abrupt stop, half an inch before we took off the bumper of the rig parked in front of us.
“Please prepare for takeoff,” said the same chipper voice.
“Belts,” I croaked out. We barely managed to strap in before the hover banked to the right, gathering speed down a narrow alley carved between floor models. Flexible steel wings unfurled from the roof as we hurtled down the makeshift runway. Our wheels hit a pothole and for a click we were airborne, before crashing to the ground again.
Barnaby was screaming and I was screaming and even Tiny Tim was screaming and Sammy had gone totally blank with fear. The fence was twenty feet away, then fifteen, then ten, and suddenly just as I closed my eyes and imagined a crash, we jumped into the air.
The force of the rise punched me to my seat. Even my lips felt like they were gumming the back of my skull. We cleared the fence, still picking up speed, pointed almost directly to the sky. I managed to turn my head and saw stucco roofs flash by, then the high scaffolds of some network towers waving bye-bye, and the twinkle lights of the city growing ever smaller.
At around 15,000 feet, we began to level off. We merged into the lowest altitude and skimmed a good stretch over the distant firefly city before climbing again, this time more gradually, to the second airway. A cop skimmed by us, nearly clipping our wings, in pursuit of a hover that had rocketed by us at turbo speed. We climbed again and finally settled at 40,000 feet. There were hardly any hovers in the air: nothing but a vast tract of sky above us, and lights winking on into the distance, marking the way.
So long and see you later, suckers.
Soon the city was nothing more than a grid of minuscule lights in the rearview. It looked like someone had yanked down a set of Christmas lights and left them coiled in the desert. The navigation pinned our flying time to Vegas at roughly three hours. There, we could refuel, and ditch the hover for a ride into the Real Friends© of the North. There was no way we’d make it past the border in a Halloran-Chyung flycraft.
The question was: Would we already be too late?
* * *
I tried to sleep, and fell into an uneasy dream—something to do with my mom, and a roil of cockroaches chittering a secret code …
I woke with a gasp. We were only forty miles from the air cordon that marked the border between Halloran-Chyung and Old Arizona. Ahead of us was what looked like a belt of stars, gut-strapping the horizon directly in our path.
“We won’t clear the checkpoint,” Sammy pointed out. I never knew if her habit of stating the obvious was part of the standard software or one of its individual glitches. “We’re alien.”
Alien. The word worked through my spine like traveling shrapnel. I’d never thought about it like that before, but she was right. The day Crunch, United, locked me out, I turned alien.
Or maybe before. Could you call your home home if it didn’t belong to you? If everything you owned, even your space, even your time, was borrowed from someone else’s bank?
“We’re not going to make it through,” I said. There was only one fix I could see: we would have to go dark. “We’re going to fly between.”
It would mean cutting power to the engines, at least until we were past the scanners that registered every flying craft tethered to nearby altitudes. Of course, no power meant no anticollision, no stabilization, no autopilot leveling us off in the correct lane. No power meant no flying at all—just a slow fall as gravity wrestled us out of altitude.
But we had no other choice. The watchtowers bloomed details as we slid closer. Glass pods were cabled up and down the elevations like giant drops of water, and inside each of them were the kind of military treads you hoped you didn’t see even in your nightmares: hard-core missile systems, robots sprouting weaponry from every orifice you could think of and some you couldn’t.
“Turn around,” Sammy said suddenly. I looked over to see her knuckling the armrest, at least as much as she could without knuckles. “We won’t make it.”
“You’re scared,” I said, and she didn’t respond, though I could hear her processing churning hard to keep up. “You’re scared, Sammy. That’s amazing. That means you’re one step closer to real.”
“I’m one step closer to ball-blasting you,” she said.
The insults were new, too, but it didn’t seem like the right moment to say so.
The traffic was thickening, and all the black-winged shapes condensing called back a memory that couldn’t be mine, of a cloud of leather-winged bats making patterns in the air. Then I remembered ages ago Billy Lou Ropes telling me about his childhood trek down from Michigan during dissolution, and a house he lumped on after a week dodging militia and looters and National Guard. In the middle of the night he jerked awake to the sound of whispers all around, and thought they were surrounded. Then the whole ceiling came down, he told me, melted like a dark tar. It broke apart into hundreds and hundreds of bats, wings going hush as they scattered out the window.
Finally I landed on the right menu. I thumbed Energy Save and nearly jumped out of my rib cage when Automation blasted out of the speakers to no-shit me that cutting power to the engines would drop me straight out of fly mode.
“Begin Energy Save?” the operating system asked. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought its tone was edging toward a warning.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, yes, for fuck’s sake.”
For a second, the dashboard simply froze, and my heart dropped down to my feet and took my balls with it. Already, our hover was nosing into line, automatically funneling t
oward the checkpoint.
Then, all at once, everything quit.
The lights, the air con, the purifiers, the anti-radiation gear, the GPS: it all went dark without so much as a whine. We were invisible now.
We were also falling.
We were riding a shivering two-ton jigsaw of buckled steel thousands of feet from the ground, sliding an inch from a cable of aircraft above and below us, with skant room between us for a fart to pass through. We were so close to the border I could see the serial numbers on the military treads. Two hundred feet away, then one hundred—and every second, sinking.
Suddenly I did want to turn back. I wanted to crash. I wanted to do anything but slide closer to military alloy suited up with a fanny pack of sniper rifles and a dozen camera eyes.
But it was too late. For a hot second, we were level with the towers, protected from view only by the sluggish flow of hovers through the checkpoint above and below us.
I thought we froze. I thought time stopped.
I thought I might piss myself.
Then, just like that, like a spitball lobbed through a straw, we sailed over the border.
28
Different places got different needs for sure. Hillbilly towns’ll go nutty for some TP and anything you got to stop the runs. Alligator boys pay five bucks on the dollar for clean skivs. In New New York they got a craze for fresh air bottled up near the Canadian border. And the dry countries’ll buy anything that flows, even piss, so long as it looks clean.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
We’d made it into Arizona.1
The change was immediate. Here there were no controls, no directional towers pulsing electromagnetic warnings if we started to drift into the wrong altitude, no monitors flashing speed warnings in the dark—nothing but empty space, a stifling, sticky dark, and a 30,000-foot fall to the waterless world beneath us.
I punched on the engines just as the law of forward motion gave a shrug and we tilted toward a nosedive. The brights, the autopilot, the steady thrum of the turbines—all of it came roaring back to life, and we leveled off just in time. But the lights did squat for us in unmarked airspace, with no signposts or towers or hover traffic. It was like lighting a torch inside a black box. If it wasn’t for the altimeter that showed us holding level, we could of been gunning straight for the ground.
Sammy’s indicators were a funny color—somewhere between a yellow and a green, a queasy shade. When I slid on the radio, she sluiced right away to a different channel. When I tried to amp the volume, she powered it down.
“Are you okay?” I asked her after the fourth time we went to battle, this time over the climate-control screen.
For a long minute, she was silent. But finally she huffed hot air from her speaker vents, sending up a flurry of dust particles. “Back at the border, you said I was one step closer to real.” Her tone was new-model flatline. “I’m real already. You understand the difference, don’t you?”
“You know I didn’t mean it like that,” I said.
Her lights sharpened toward ochre. “How did you mean it, then?”
“Come on, Sammy,” I said. “I’m pro android rights.” My hands were slippery on the steering wheel. I didn’t know why I was even bothering to hang on—navigation was doing all the steering anyway—but I felt flattened in place, crushed by the weight of all the darkness outside. I hadn’t vibed it was possible to feel claustrophobic in midair.
She swiveled her head on her neck. Back and forth. Even her gestures were more and more humanoid—she used to swivel her whole head around, like a horizontal wind turbine.
“Intellectually, maybe,” she said. “But emotionally you see us as different. As lesser. I knew it back in Granby. I knew it in the hotel room. You looked at me as if I were salvage.”
Remembering the tension between us, I couldn’t help but feel like scum.
“Hey. I thought we got over that.” I stopped myself from saying that at least part of it was her fault. She could of covered up some of her hardware, bought a NuSkin™ shell cover, tried to make herself a little prettier. If she was so obsessed with being human, you’d think she’d try acting it.
“You got over it,” she snapped. One thing was for sure: Sammy could get as mad as any biological girl. “You never asked me what I thought. You never asked me what I felt.”
Before I could think of a response, half a dozen warning lights flared on the dashboard, bathing us in a wash of red.
“Uh-oh,” Tiny Tim said.
“Uh-oh, what?” I felt a scrabbly sense of panic. “What do all those lights mean?”
Tiny Tim leaned forward, so the red lights caught his scar and made it look even uglier than usual. “Looks like we burned up our gas already.”
No sooner had he said the words than they were repeated by the cheerful system operator.
“Warning,” she said in her mellow wavelength, as if she were actually saying hello. “Fuel reserves low. Please refuel at your earliest convenience.”
“Jesus Christ.” I’d never even thought to check the tanks before we launched. “Should we turn around?”
“Are you insane?” Barnaby squeaked. “We’ll be thrown in jail as soon as we pass over the border.”
It would be slightly better than dying of thirst in the middle of the abandoned Dust Bowl, all 110,000 squares miles of ghost towns, searing heat, desert snakes, and the occasional violent gang of peyote-gnawing nomads.
But only slightly better. Halloran-Chyung didn’t like to keep its prisoners in max-security cities. Half the time the judge loosed them out into Arizona anyway. And that was if I didn’t end up tased to death by some trigger-happy robot under Rafikov’s command.
“We’ve got to go back,” Tiny Tim said. “There’s nowhere to touch down except the desert, and there’s nothing in the desert except a whole lot of death.”
One vote to turn. One vote to stay the course.
“What do you think, Sammy?” I asked her. Sammy only swiveled to stare out the window.
The operating system piped up again. “Please refuel immediately.” She sounded like a tour guide pointing out a lovely arrangement of nuclear growth.
“Please, Sammy.” She’d nailed passive-aggression, guilt trips, and now the silent treatment. She was one inexplicable crying jag away from being exactly like every other girl I knew.
Finally, she let out a long exhale through her heating vents. “We have no choice but to keep going,” she said. “We’re four hundred miles from Libertine.”
“We’ll never make it,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Probably not.”
Sweat distorted my vision but it didn’t matter: there was nothing in front of us, nothing behind us either. Five minutes later the hover dipped, and rocketed my stomach through my mouth. Tiny Tim moaned.
“Fuel reserves too low for continued flight. Automatic landing function deployed.”
“No!” We could only be eighty miles into Arizona. If we landed, we’d trek for days across scorching desert before we had a squeak of reaching civilization. And we had no food, and not a single bottle of water, nothing but some half-filled purines. “No, no, no, no.”
I punched the system, trying to stabilize our altitude. No dice. We dropped another five thousand feet.
“Override commands prohibited.” The operating system sounded faintly irritated now. “Fuel reserves too low for continued flight. Automatic landing function deployed.”
Tiny Tim moaned again. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“We can’t land here, Truckee.” Barnaby was head-butting the back of my chair. “We’re in the middle of the desert! We’re directly above the Valley of Bones!”
“No shit.” I was still frantically swiping through the dashboard. Windshield wipers began swishing. The radio lit up an instrumental version of the Crunchtown Crunk©. Heat blasted from my seat into my ass crack. I pressed Abort Landing about twenty times, but still we shed altitude, second by s
econd. I could hear the engine coughing, sputtering on its final fumes.
Now the operating system was definitely annoyed. “Sorry, do you not speak English or something? Because I’ve explained plenty of times that the fuel reserves are too low for flight. For language preferences, see Settings.”
“No.” I was so frustrated I smacked the dashboard with my palm, selecting about seventeen different options at the same click.
Suddenly, the radio went silent. The lights flickered and died. The windshield wipers stopped. The operating system whispered something that sounded very much like asshole, and then the dash went dark.
The engine cut out abruptly.
For a half click, it felt like we’d stabilized. We hovered there in space, floating in a misty netherland.
And then, ever so slowly, like passing over the edge of an invisible cliff, we fell.
Barnaby screamed. Tiny Tim screamed. Sammy’s grinding error code sounded like a hacksaw trying to get through a steel pipe. Down and down, hurtling through the dark. I yanked hard on the wheel like I could bring us right through the force of my own biceps.
Then a building floated up out of the nothing and, with a terrible metal groaning, punched one of our wings straight off. We hurtled sideways as the driver’s-side door ripped clean away and a street lamp reached up and walloped away one of our headlights. Weirdly, the dash lit up again, and the remaining headlight flared to reveal the spines of a ghost town even as the force of the impact flipped us sideways.
As we fell, I caught a quick glimpse through the windshield of an abandoned storefront and dusty windows still plastered with signs for SPRAY-TAN-PEDICURE-WAXING.
Our remaining wing crumpled beneath us. We were shooting, spinning down the road, like a gigantic hockey puck, letting out a grinding shower of sparks behind us. For a second it seemed we might spin forever down the empty street.
Then we came up against a street lamp, and Newton’s second law of physical motion. I threw my hands up as a fine shower of glass rained down on us and Barnaby let out a final whimper.