by Reed King
I could tell Evaline had turned serious by the droop of her whiskers. “I can help you, you know. If you come to Los Angeles, I can make sure you’re protected.” She slinked a paw against my chest. “You’re a hero in the RFN. You’ll get ten thousand friends just for showing up.”
She meant it for a comfort. But a pit of dark feeling dropped a hole through my chest. Just like that, I remembered where I was, and that hero in one place meant traitor in another. I remembered, too, out of the blue, what Billy Lou had said to me just after my mom got flattened. She knew you were meant for great things.
For the first time ever, something ugly sprouted on the back of that idea. Something ugly and angry that whispered to me: easy for her to say. Easy for her, dayglo company ops, sucking her vape and daydreaming names for the constellations; easy for the fly-by girl knocked up by some grifter and not even bothering to learn his name. Easy for her to believe in great things, so long as she wasn’t the one who had to do them.
“I can’t,” I said, and the words tasted like copper. “Rafikov tracked me to Las Vegas. She can’t be far behind. She’s been keeping tabs on me somehow. It’s like she’s got me wired.”
She still had that squinchy look. “I still don’t get it. Why you? Why was Crunch, United, so eager to pin the blame? And why haven’t they so much as sneezed in Rafikov’s direction?”
“Maybe they didn’t want to start a war,” I said.
“If so, they did a shit job avoiding one,” she said. Then: “You know, it’s funny…”
When she trailed off, I sent her a friendly nudge. Still, I had to wait until she’d slicked all the fur from her chest to her front paws. “I was only thinking that it’s all happened before,” she said at last.
“What has?”
“All of this,” she said slowly. “The drugs, the war, the Race for Infinity. It all happened before, right before dissolution. Back then it was shiver everyone was talking about, and the Federal Corporation to blame. All the other major players are the same. Albert Cowell, Rafikov, even President Burnham.”
“President Burnham Junior,” I corrected her. I wasn’t sure what her point was, but her talk twinged a weird spidery feeling on my neck, like something sharp was tickling for my jugular by inches. “Besides, we’re missing Whitney Heller.”
“Whitney Heller,” she repeated in a low voice. “The scapegoat…”
“I guess they found a new scapegoat this round,” I said. “Besides, back then the war split the country apart. But if Rafikov gets her way, we’ll all be servants of hers forever.” I tried to laugh and the system translated it into the choking-on-an-unprocessed-plastic-part emoji. “I guess that’s one path to unification.”
“I guess…” Evaline was still frowning. I wished we could go back to kissing again, but I couldn’t figure how to get the mood turned around. Then, abruptly, she said, “You told me your mother was killed. Do you have any idea why?”
That was it: all chances for another simulated tongue session, adios, compadre. I realized the fire was down to embers, and the desert cold was pulling freezing chemical air into flakes of falling ash. Somewhere in the camp, a sharp trill of laughter hit a high note. I recognized shiver song, the delirious high that would last an hour or so before crashing into misery. The sound lifted all the goose bumps on my arms, made me think of dark nights swimming in caverns between dream and wake.
“No,” I said, feeling suddenly bone-strung and tired. A little annoyed, too, she’d cranked open so much miserable history, when all I wanted help with was forgetting. “Maybe HR was just trying to skunk on the cost of firing her. She kept lodging complaints about the package density of the freight. Maybe some uppercrust was packing loads with a little extra cut for his pocket.”
“Maybe,” she said. But she didn’t look convinced. Her tail was beating hard, back and forth, tamping out an agitated heartbeat. But all of a sudden, she perked up. “Holy shit,” she said. “That’s it. That’s how I can break into the corporate system. HR.”
“You think Human Resources will help you?” I nearly spat out my own tongue.
“Not that HR.” She was practically electric from excitement. It was like a current had run all her fur end on end. She hardly seemed to hear me. “The HRC. The Humanoid Regulatory Committee bullies down on androids fired due to discrimination,” she said. “They have thousands and thousands of employment records, and their system’s soft as Sinopec soil. I can find out who sent those androids that tracked you down. And once I have the coded chain of command, I can find a back door into—”
But before she could finish, an enormous hand flipped the visor off my head. A shadow the size of an industrial vat swallowed my vision of the stars.
Before I could work out a scream, Tiny Tim leaned down and his face caught the firelight.
“I got a lead on a way into the valley,” he said in a low voice. “But we’re going to have to hurry.”
41
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
At.
Atwho?
Run! He’s got the flu!
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
Tiny Tim had rooted out a company of grifters swapping tips over barrels of homemade brew in the hollowed-out husk of an old office building, which now played host to dirt-cheap hostels, taverns, and crash pads.
Among the misfits and drunks was a fat swill plumped up on his own importance, looking a little too soft. After the third round of fire whiskey, Tiny Tim got him jabbering, and found him out not for a grifter at all, but for an RFN informer who cashed in on finding weak spots at the border.
After a fourth round, Tim got him to cough up some boasts about the crooked guards who took pay and looked the other way even when visas didn’t scan or fingerprints pulled up the names of landless walkabouts; he could rattle off half a dozen traitors he’d shoved into slavery in the deepest natural gas mines of the Dakotas or sent off to Texas hunting preserves. By dawn, he told Tim, one greedy pocket loader posted on the shores of Lake Tahoe would be cooling his heels in the famous New Los Angeles maximum-security gridlock; federal agents were already en route from the sprawling Real Friends© of the North campus near Tacoma.
Which gave us less than six hours to make our way through the mountains to the border point at Kings Beach.
The roads were treacherous, unlit, and shit-kept. Ancient guardrails, pockmarked with rust, broke apart over sudden drops, showing the places where careless rigs had blown through them. To keep from thinking about death by 15,000-foot drop, I logged onto the Yellow Brick Road and sent a quick hey-sorry to Evaline, so she would know I hadn’t meant to log off halfway through her speak. Still nothing from Annalee or Jared. It was funny how you could never build a tolerance for disappointment. It still felt just as bad each time.
Lake Tahoe was a vast bowl of dirt, long dry of water, still glowing with chemical sediment. Hollowed-out resort towns, stripped of usables, leapt into our headlights and then disappeared again in a flash. Drifts of ash from old fires clotted up the windshield and gummed our lungs with the smell of burning. Not even roadslicks or backlanders made their homes up here. The violence from the android revolution had overspilled these peaks, left its mark in the form of exploded rubble and tripped land mines and the cratered bomb blasts that the ALF was known for.
We touched the border point around four in the morning, and we were in luck: the skinny cayo, his face rutted with tasered pimples, was still there. He and two other guns were trying to stay awake by gnawing chemical fresh. I was impressed by the look of the RFN visors, thin wraparound styles in cowabunga colors.
“Border’s closed, brosef” was the first thing he said. As kids in the Federal Corp, we’d heard that RFN natives had holes drilled in their skulls as babies, so the RFN government could peek inside their brains. Even though I knew it for a dumb rumor, I found myself looking for evidence anyway. “’Less you got some reason for it to open.”
“We got
lots of reasons,” Tim said, and tossed out a handful of RFN microchips, each of them gleaming 10,000 winks. The kid’s eyes blew wide as a dimehead’s.
“Go ahead,” he told us, and instructed the others to roll aside the roadblock. One of the other soldiers was Plasticine-modeled, even though she couldn’t of been much older than I was, and I could see the scalpel notches where a face doc had stretched her smile permanent.
“You want to make sure you head north at the Alta turnaround,” the pimply one said. “South you’ll run straight into hot-wire territory, and those damn circuit boxes got a lot of bad twitch in their coding.” Next to me, Sammy grew hot. Luckily, in the dark of the cab, the soldier couldn’t see her. “But there’s trouble outside Sacramento—some Russian sneaks put down a mess of artillery before the border closed. Sly-eyed creeps, not a neuron that isn’t owned and operated by the Motherland. They even talk together.”
My whole body went the numb of a deep freeze. “How do you mean?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t scope them, mind. We got nothing but what’s streaming. But the say-so is a big outfit of privateers managed in, and the RFN board won’t try for them because they know that Texas don’t want to scrum with the Russians. So looks like Sacramento’s fair and occupied until the foreign ticks get what they’re after.”
“And what’s that?” I asked, even though I thought I knew the answer.
He only shrugged again. “No telling with the leeches,” he said. “Least of all the kind banked-up by a woman.”
The Plasticine girl giggled, but a throat full of excess silicone made a terrible gurgling sound of it.
By now, I felt close to sick. “A woman?” I repeated.
“Some twitch named Rafikov. Richer than God, they say, but so ugly she shrivels dicks from a distance of a hundred yards.”
Once again, Rafikov had tracked us—and not just tracked us, but figured out where we must be heading and tried to cut us off at the pass. If she knew we were carrying a live sample of her brain, then she must of known we would head to the only slick on the continent who might be able to make use of it: Albert Cowell.
“Thanks for the tip,” Tiny Tim said. As we rolled on, leaving the checkpoint glowing like a downed spark in the middle of all the darkness, I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was thinking. No use telling them that death was knocking down their doors. Let them have a final morning.
Besides, I had bigger things on my mind.
It was time to say goodbye to Sammy.
* * *
To get into the demilitarized zone, we’d have to head south on a ribbon of highway long ago claimed by the revolutionary android front. Even Tim wasn’t happy about it: the road was rumored to be laced with unexploded mines and booby-trapped to prevent a sneak attack.
But Sammy waved away this talk as propaganda. “Accidental Persons still dominate the cultural and historical narrative entirely,” she said. I knew she was reciting from the way her RAM was churning. “In the Real Friends© of the North, the revolution is actually called a terrorist uprising, even though initially the android coalition wanted nothing more than legal recognition of basic rights. In fact, it was the Accidental forces that first used violence to drive back the engineered protesters, in June of 2063.…”
“Maybe so,” I said. “But looks like your people got the hang of it real quick.” As dawn broke, the sun washed into cavernous bomb craters and lit up abandoned towns crawling with android coalition slogans. Machine-gun sprays had plugged holes in all the street signs. Enormous heaps of rubble spoke of the famous pipe bombs that would later become the hallmark of the Android Liberation Front. Nut-brown lumps spiked on a portion of fencing looked like insect hives from a distance; only when we were closer did I recognize ancient, shriveled human heads, textured like wood after years of exposure. Barnaby counted off local landmarks as we passed them: over there, the famous killing fields; here, the site of the Great Conflagration; there, the stubbly rut of industrial wasteland where the San Francisco Bay Massacre had leached the blood of five thousand corpses into the water.
TURN AROUND. A sign tacked beneath the row of heads was rusty with old blood. YOU DON’T BELONG HERE.
The sun had beaten off the last of the fog, and in the early morning light, not a single thing was twitching. Trees twisted up by drought or chewed up by fire looked like nuclear orphans, pinned in place by some explosion. Overturned cars sprouted dense coverings of red dust spores. Telephone poles listed out of sinkholes in the dirt. All around was waste and ruin.
Suddenly, Tim pulled to a stop and cut the engine.
“We’re scotch out of road,” he said. “We must be spitting distance from Fremont, but there’s no going farther.”
“What do you mean, we’re out of road?” Sammy said. In the past hour, she’d finally gone quiet, maybe exhausted from the effort of trying to explain the severed heads as peace efforts.
“I’ll show you,” he said. “Come on.”
We climbed out into the bright. A sign pointed us down an exit ramp toward FREEMONT. The second “e” was a bright graffiti addition, and so was the bit of metal alloy tacked beneath it: ANDROIDS ONLY.
Fifty yards ahead of our vehicle, the road blew up into jagged piles of concrete. An overturned rig had flipped, sliding fifty feet before crash-banging into the musty glass of an old strip mall.
“Land mines,” Tim said as we squinted out over the piles. “The road must be laced with them.”
“That’s one way to keep out visitors,” I said, trying to make a joke. But my throat felt like it had been packed with raw shrapnel. Even though there wasn’t even a wind to stir motion on the road, I couldn’t shake the feeling we were being watched.
Barnaby was skipping side to side to keep his knees from locking. “Well, Sammy, it’s been an honor and a pleasure, vade in pacem, et cetera.” He head-butted her in the direction of the exit ramp. “Don’t forget to remember us.”
“You can’t just leave me here,” Sammy said, sidestepping him.
“We’re not leaving you,” I pointed out. “You’re leaving us. This was your plan all along.”
“I don’t have a choice,” she said. Her lenses darkened with stormy patterns. “Where else can I go? Half the countries on the continent want to see me picked apart for scrap metal. The other half tell me in the same breath that I’m a little less than human and that I should be grateful for that particular honor.” She shook her head. “Where else can I work where I want, and marry who I want, and go where I want, without fear?”
She was dead right, of course. And now I felt scummy. But we still couldn’t go any farther, not without ditching the rig and walking without protection into android-controlled territory.
“You’re home now, Sammy,” I told her. “You see the sign, don’t you?” I tried to smile. “Androids only. That’s you.”
“Please. Don’t leave me. Not yet.” Sammy reached out. Her grip was cool, and the soft purr of her processing surprisingly comforting, like the hum of a lullaby long forgotten. And where the sunlight caught her censors, it dazzled me. “The androids won’t hurt you. I’m telling you. They never wanted war. They only wanted equality. No one will touch you, just as long as you’re with me, I swear it—”
But she broke off as a trigger clucked its tongue at us from somewhere behind a line of overturned freight trucks. Immediately, the noise was repeated—a dozen, then two dozen times, a rolling echo of the same cocked-up war pattern that swelled from every direction at once.
We froze as forty or so coalition types slid out into the open: all makes and models, NuSkin™ and alloy, ancient hardware and brand-new features. Each and every one of them was loaded to the circuits with military-grade weaponry.
With a bleat and a gurgle and a crash, Barnaby toppled.
“Hands up, you trash compactors,”1 said one of the older models. He was military grade himself, one of the first line of SuperSoldiers to ever roll off the line: stronger, quicker, smarter, and more
resilient than regular soldiers, as the RFN had spent the past decades regretting. I took him for the leader. “And don’t try anything funny, or we’ll show you a real Big Bang.”
42
If you’re one of those born-human agitators running around claiming superiority over android species, I recommend you see how quick some of those so-called toys can figure the exact trajectory of a bullet traveling 400 yards into a 20 mph wind and direct into your dumb-brick skull.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
“Who sent you?”
He was one of the ugliest, meanest-looking droids I’d ever seen: a five-hundred-pound behemoth of steel plates and Kevlar mesh, battered, dented, and bullet-riddled. Both of his massive arms tapered into double-barreled Ultimax 2000 machine guns, and both of them were pointed straight at our gullets. When he moved, he shuddered the ground with every footstep. I knew him right away for CASSIAS, the leader of the android coalition, and RFN’s most wanted terrorist.
“Please.” Sammy’s voice broke into a nervous garble of code. She blew air out of her speakers and tried again. “Please. No one sent us. It was my idea to come.”
“You brought enemies to our doorstep. That makes you an enemy.” He swept her with a cluster of 360-rotation fiber-optic lenses. “A sentient anthropomorphic android model from—let me see—2045? One of the very first help models to roll off the lot.” When he grinned, he showed off a mesh grille made for expelling poisonous gases from the canisters plugged into his ribs. “Maybe you’ve been helping the other side a bit too long.”
“That old generation’s about as woke as a toaster.” Another android spoke up, this one a Sexy Saam who wore the colors of the Android Liberation Front. Her face showed terrible marks of abuse—cigarette burns in her silicone, dark stippling on her neck where she’d been throttled.
“That’s not true.” Sammy’s software was gumming up, like it always did when she was nervous, so her words came slowly from behind a heavy inhale-exhale of mechanical processing. “I belong here. I’m a citizen of the coalition. And I can prove it.”