FKA USA

by Reed King

  “I got a serial number off one of them.” I didn’t tell her we’d ripped it from his hard drive—no point in freaking her out. I switched to split screen, fumbled for the chip in my rucksack, and scanned it in to her, hoping she wouldn’t notice any residual chemical bloodstain. “But the Federal Corp keeps the movement of its androids confidential.”

  She squinted at me. Smoke unraveled from one of her nostrils. “You think someone sent them for you?”

  There was a foul taste in my mouth. “It’s possible,” I said. I remembered what President Burnham had said: I’m sending some of our best agents out to Granby. Maybe President Mark J. Burnham wanted me set up from the start, to distract from the way he’d let Rafikov slide into so much power.

  “And you want me to hack the system and find out?”

  I couldn’t read the tone of her voice. When I pulled up Female, Romantic Prospect in my new translator settings, I just got a blast of spiral eyes and shrug emojis back at me. “It’s important,” I said.

  She looked away. In the quiet, I could hear the hiss of smoke as she exhaled.

  “Evaline?” I said, after a little while. “Are you okay?”

  Suddenly she whirled on me. “Okay? Am I okay?” The translator was still enabled, and lobbed a bunch of grenades at my head. I barely had time to duck. “No. I am not okay. You ghost for more than a week. No explanation, no message, nothing.”

  Smoke was pouring from her nostrils. I switched into manual mode. I couldn’t chat you. My visor was dead.

  “For seven days?” She obviously didn’t believe me, and I didn’t blame her. Without knowing about Walden, it was more than a stretch. “For fuck’s sake, how dumb do you think I am?”

  I don’t think you’re dumb at all—

  “You could’ve been hurt. You could’ve been dead. I ate an entire carton of my mom’s Oxygenated Wheatgrass Cookies. It was disgusting.” She snubbed a claw into my chest, and I felt it, hard hook-nail and everything. “And then you just—poof—re-up like nothing happened, without even a squeak of explanation, saying you want my help…”

  All right, all right. Forget I asked.

  It was the wrong thing to say and I knew it right away. Her eyes narrowed to pale yellow slits. The air reeked of singed nose hair.

  “I’ve been honest with you. And you’ve done nothing but scam me.”

  I’m not scamming you. I swear.

  She rolled her eyes so hard a burst of flame shot from each nostril. “Oh really, John Doe? You haven’t told me where you live. You haven’t told me your name. You haven’t told me a single thing about you. Maybe you’re just some forty-five-year-old creep who likes to scam on seventeen-year-old girls. How am I supposed to trust you? Even your avatar is standard issue.”

  Like suiting up as a cat or a dinosaur is so much better. Am I supposed to track you down based on fur and horn patterns?

  The horns on her head cranked several inches higher. Interesting feature.

  Sorry. Look. I didn’t mean—

  “Forget it. I’m done.” By now her nose looked like the exhaust pipe of a jet engine: she was exhaling full-on flames. When she turned her head, she lit half a flower bed on fire. I watched a bed of pansies incinerate and then recode. “You know what the worst part of all of it is? I was actually starting to like you.”

  And then, of course, she logged off.

  35

  I been with androids and I been with born women, and to me there’s not much of a difference: the destination’s the same, whether you ride by rig or rail. But with an android you always know when she’s faking—at least on the old models, since you have to choose it in Settings.

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

  There were times in a man’s life when the only reasonable thing to do was to get well and truly blackout.

  Tiny Tim, Barnaby, and I went off in search of alcohol, and a lot of it. Sammy opted to stay in—she made no secret of disapproving of the number of Sexy Saams working the Vegas nightlife.

  The hotel lobby could of swallowed all of 1 Central Plaza. Chemical growth in radical colors clawed up massive pillars to the frescoed ceilings. Vast aquariums were swarming with different species of gentech, some of the first sea life I’d ever slapped an eye on: gigantic toothsome fish with massive grins, tiny variants of sharks with dozens of fins, even miniature mermaids with humanoid faces and long, tapered tails.

  The casino floor was a universe of slot machines and 3-D poker labs, and hotshots swagging around flashing high-price logo tattoos on luminescent skin, looking like neon fish in the dark. I had to turn off facial recognition after only about thirty seconds—the assault of profile pics, come-ons, GIFs, and personalized 3-D avatars that floated in place of the user was just too much. Shotbots shaped like wheeled Barbies rocketed across the casino floor, pumping music from their breasts. Jackpots kept singing and smoke and vape fogged the atmosphere and hopped-up old men twitched at green velvet play tables aglow like jewels in the miasma. Some tall-necked gazelles in necklaces made of pearls the size of golf balls rubbed with Russians sporting diamond-and-gold-encrusted visors and leopard-print suits. I caught a few players trying to stream data on the sly, and saw one of them get chucked by a bouncer with titanium-alloy biceps.

  We found a bar shaped like a horseshoe in the middle of the action and ordered up Champagne on ice and cubes of flavored hop that bled color and flavor into our glasses. The bartender was so sponsored, her tattoos nearly blinded us with all their fluorescence, and she kept pushing shots of the Choco-Loco Double Caffeine Strength Vodka™ she was advertising right above her cleavage.

  Two women, as shimmery and wet-looking as oil slicks, came to coo over Barnaby, running their long, pale hands through his fur, clicking at him with pretty pink tongues and showing off the swell of their breasts when they leaned forward. I was already feeling pretty loopy, and nearly asked them to share our bottle when a hand came down on my wrist.

  Round fingernails. Chipping holo paint. Nice cuticles. I turned and tracked hand to wrist to arm to neck, and then to a pretty heart-shaped face.

  “Payday models,” the girl said, without bothering to whisper. “Be careful or they’ll suck your accounts dry before you’ve given them the passcode.”

  Both androids recoiled in sync. For a quick second, their silicone—or whatever they were made of—rippled, and seemed to tug their mouths into twin frowns. “Fuck off, Ammonia.”

  “It’s Alexandria. And no thank you. Not tonight.” The new girl smiled sweetly as they pivoted and bumped away, hips grinding like windshield wipers against a major squall. “My name’s not Alexandria, by the way,” she said, as soon as they were gone. “It’s Marjorie. They never remember. There must be something wrong with their circuitry.”

  She straddled the stool next to me. She had short hair, blunt-cut, that hung to her jaw, and vivid honey-colored eyes. A small, slightly pointy chin, just exactly like I’d pictured Evaline’s. When she leaned over to order a drink from the bartender, she streamed off a bunch of local lingo I didn’t understand.

  “You work here?” I asked her, and she nodded.

  “I mean, not here here. A club called Club XStasy down the Strip.” She tried to suck vape from her pipe and got nothing but a whistle of air. “Spare a cartridge, by any chance? I’m all out.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She sighed. “No worries. It’s nasty anyhow. But I got hooked on the Cherry Sweet.” She slipped the pipe into her pocket. “Hey, you want to go?”

  “For vape?”

  She rolled her eyes. We were so close I could see a retinal chip glinting behind her left iris, coloring it very slight gray. Here in Vegas, they were common. “No, you squid. For fun. I meant do you want to go to Club XStasy?”

  I did. But I couldn’t help landing on thoughts of Evaline. It was crazy to feel guilty—we’d never even met, and even so she’d managed to break up with me—but I did. Besides, I couldn’t chuck out on Tiny Tim and Bar
naby.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m with friends.”

  She blinked. Mascara flaked a light dust on her cheeks. “Doesn’t look like it.”

  I turned around. She was right: Tiny Tim and Barnaby had both scrammed—scurrying after the payday girls, I would of bet.

  And then, before I could think of another excuse, she slid a hand between my thighs, leaned over, and kissed me, her tongue eager and quick and desperate, like something alive.

  “Come on,” she said, in that husky voice. “Let’s have some fun.”

  Just like that, I was ready to rocket back in time just to marry her the way they used to—for love.

  * * *

  The Strip was like a real life Yellow Brick Road: a shiver dream of lights and music so loud it punched us from a mile away; loudspeaker voices and billboard blasts; dazzling light structures and money froth. Impossible to know what time it was, or whether time had stopped altogether—the Vegas Holodome threw up a 24/7 projection of night sky, a perfect canvas for a never-ending kaleidoscope of ads.

  A reconstruction of old Saint Petersburg sent a glitter of warm snow down across the tourists foaming in and out of its casino doors. A towering monument to Elvis Presley,1 done entirely in gold, urinated streams of coins into a marble fountain. The thumbprints of the Colorado cartels were visible everywhere, too, in all the new construction sites bearing sponsorships from the Denver Reconstruction Group where no one at all was working, and in the slummier OTB houses and human-stock exchanges.2

  The streets foamed with foot traffic and street performers and hustlers, burlesque girls natural and engineered shimmying in silhouette above flashing marquees, the deep-green gloss of imported palm trees. From the north and west came cavalcades of trucks bearing water, to dilute the liquid solvent that tripled its volume—a constant, never-ending stream of traffic, all of it just to refresh 200,000 toilets flushing a night and fountains designed to play to the tune of “O Come, All Ye Sinful.”3

  I was dazzled by the traffic flow in every dimension, not just of hovers but helicopters and hover trains lit up with neon graffiti. I even scried an airplane for the third time in my life—one of the new, nuclear-powered ones, touching down on a runway flashing its light in the distance. There must of been two thousand drones wheeling in the air above the street, many of them scam cams, patched together, obviously handmade, and used mostly for blackmail. I wasn’t nervous about a shakedown, but if Rafikov knew I’d made it out of Arizona alive, this was the first place she’d think to look.

  And of course, there was still a bounty on my head.

  “Nervous?” Marjorie caught me scanning the drones in the sky. It was like trying to pick out a particular mold spore on the Statue of Liberty’s crown. The good news was that with all the ads flashing missing persons and murderers and fugitives from different countries, there was squat chance anyone would single me out. Trying to pick out a criminal in Las Vegas was like trying to find a Hare in a whore’s nest.4

  “Just thinking I could use a drink, that’s all,” I told her.

  “Don’t worry, cowboy.” She hauled me left, through a blur of revolving doors and into a club so loud my visor chattered against my forehead. “Welcome to Club XStasy.”

  Club XStasy was ear-shattering music, psychedelic AR feeds swirling overhead, Saams twirling at 60 mph on well-greased poles, thousands of sweating, blown-out, gape-eyed club kids. At the tri-level bar, we sucked vaporous alcohol from cylinder bongs and snorted flavored methanol crumbs. Then Marjorie climbed over the polished alloy to mix us drinks the old-fashioned way, showing off a thong elongated between two perfect cheeks.

  I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to kiss her there.

  I was drunk. I was dancing. I was rapping to one of Marjorie’s friends about intermix marriages and android rights, not sure what side he was on or whether we were arguing or even talking about the same thing. There were more shots at the bar with a bachelorette on her last night of freedom before she shipped off to the Dakotas5 to marry a guy she’d never met, through the Gender Equality Act Rebate Program.6 Then another of Marjorie’s friends flashed me her perfect ass, which she’d sold off for a toilet-paper sponsorship that blazed so bright her sheets blinked the logo even in her sleep.

  I was jointed like any dimehead on a high. Marjorie was telling me a long weave about a gas rig and an underground fire that had blown up four hundred androids and then she was crying tears that looked like antifreeze. Marjorie wanted to skip to a new bar, just opened, where every third drink came with a shot of O2 to keep you dancing, but the line was cranked around the block. We ended up downstairs, in the subterranean storerooms that extended for miles beneath the strip, where disabled robots and crates of RealFood™ Ingredients from Crunch, United, were bundled up beneath linen sheets.

  “Watch this.” Marjorie heaved aside a crate blazed with the Crunch logo. Seeing it reminded me of the fight with Evaline, and my mom, and September 4, and turned my stomach. The room was turning and I wasn’t sure if it was optics or because I was drunk.

  A trapdoor set in the floor let up the distant sound of voices on a whiff of musty air.

  A toothy ladder ran down into a long dim tunnel. “You’re part of the Railroad?”

  She stood up, dusting off her hands. “The what?”

  “Never mind,” I said. For some reason the sight of the tunnel gave me the jibbies. “What is it?”

  “We call them the Crypts.” She’d found a new vape cartridge. Now she blew scented fresh in my face. “The tunnels go for miles.”

  “What are they for?”

  She shrugged. “Back in the olds days, VIPs used to scrum in secret like that, between casinos and clubs. They still do sometimes.” She looked up at me. “But now they’re used mostly for runners.”

  All my buzz flowed from my head to my knees and turned them liquid. “Drugs?”

  She laughed. “What do you think this place pumps on? These tunnels go all the way to Denver. Wanna see?” She was about to drop when she caught the look on my face. “Hey. Are you okay?” She hauled up from the tunnel again and closed the trap. “I was just playing, you know. I never seen anything in the tunnels but free booze. Seriously.”

  But the idea had taken a machete to my mood, and reminded me of Rafikov, and Jump, and all that was coming.

  “I’m actually kind of tired,” I said. “I think I might call it.”

  She looked at me for a long time. Then, without taking her eyes off me, she snaked an arm behind her back. As she unzipped, her dress fell away from her skin so easy it was like the connection was the thing unzippering. Her straps peeled off her shoulders. The lacy details at her cleavage blossomed off her breasts and left them standing there as nude as seeds. The only snag came at her hips—she had to shimmy a little—but then she was standing in front of me in nothing but a stripe of underwear and lace-up booties.

  Her skin was warm and soft in my hands. All the seconds I’d ever lived poured down into that room, into the liquid-cold taste of her lips and her hips grinding into mine. The only thing that kept me from losing my virginity into my own pants was the liquor: thank God for the liquor.

  My pants were off. She had me in her mouth: my first blowjob. Then she tugged her underwear to her ankles, and at the last click I scanned she wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes had gone out of focus, like she was watching an old feed on her retinal.

  “Are you—?” Before I could say sure, she guided me inside her.

  I should of been excited. And I was, in one way. But in another way, I felt like what the chunks of chlorinated polyethylburitane might of felt like as they were cranked down the line.

  I was having sex for the first time in a musty storeroom with a girl who wasn’t looking at me. Evaline came back to me in shifting visions: her black fur ridged between her ears, her tail straight and quivering; the pointy-chinned girl with fringelike bangs I’d imaged her to be. When I came it was like a shudder.

  Then it was over. I wasn’t a virg
in anymore. I’d slayed the target, taken down the bull’s-eye, knocked the noodle, fucked, banged, boinged, pokered, bonked, slotted one for the bank.

  I’d thought I would feel different. But I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything.

  “So?” Marjorie tried to laugh. Or maybe she did laugh. Maybe I was the one who didn’t think it was funny. “How was it?”

  “Good.” I tried to smile. “Great. Awesome.”

  She gave me a funny look, stood up, and tugged her underwear to her hips. “It wasn’t your first time, was it?” Casually. Which meant: not her first time.

  “No,” I said quickly. “Of course not.”

  She started to say something, but a flood of voices came up through the floor and the trapdoor vibrated so hard at my feet I jumped. A second later, four club kids poured out of the tunnel together, slurry with drink and tailing a fog of smokables. One of them was so drunk she could hardly stand. The three others could barely get her up the ladder. Her eyes drifted to mine and seemed to settle like a coin in the mud.

  “Hey. Hey, you. You want to sub?” Her voice blurred the words into a single exhale.

  “Sorry.” One of her friends hefted her to her feet, looping an arm around her waist. “She’s all fucked up. You’re all fucked up, Vero,” he said, a little louder.

  “That’s not my name, fucko. I told you already.” Her eyes veered back to mine. They kept going in and out of focus, like something was playing on her retina and she kept getting distracted. But she had a visor, new model, crooked around her neck. “It was supposed to be temporary. They told me I could switch back whenever I wanted.…” She started to laugh, and then she started to hiccup.

  “Hey.” Her friend’s ads were so bright they hurt my eyes. IMPACT SPORTS kept flashing from his biceps. “Hey, Vero. Shut up, okay? You’re going home.”

  “My name’s not Vero. This isn’t my home.” She took a sudden, lurching step toward me before her friends could haul her back. “Hey, listen, cabron. If we sub, then I can fuck me and you can fuck you. But we’ll have to wait till the server’s up again.…” With each breath, she blew half a distillery. “You ever sport a pussy before?”