FKA USA

by Reed King

  That wiped the smile off Tim’s face. Instantly, I felt terrible.

  Before I could say sorry, he leaned forward and cranked my shirt in one giant fist, nearly snapping my neck. He pulled me so close we almost bumped noses.

  “You want real talk? Okay, then, Truckee. I’ll give you some real talk.” His voice was different than I’d ever heard it. Real low, but sharper somehow, like in an instant he’d shaved off the rounds of all his lowland-alligator drawl. “You walk around crying like a skinned squirrel about what’s the point, what’s the meaning, why should I bother, why me? Well, this is it, kid. You’re looking at it.”

  We were inches apart. His eyes were huge, bright, veined, like the moon yellow behind carcinogen winds. His breath warm with the smell of animal-imitate. Time stopped. There was me and Tim and our foreheads sweating out the seconds of our life.

  “You want some advice? Well, I been grifting on this continent for thirty damn years, seen every corner and sinkhole, every trash heap and wasteland, known a thousand women if I tipped my head to one, been shot at, sliced up, locked up, roughed up, left for dead. But I ain’t dead yet.

  “Here’s what I got for you: If it looks like Chiken™ and smells like Chiken™, it’s Chiken™. Wipe your ass from front to back and never drink the water in Mexico. Get drunk sometimes, always back your good boys in a fight. Learn to sit and look and do nothing. Never take money from someone you don’t want to owe a favor to.

  “You ever come across a peach—a real one, grown on a tree, in sunlight, from oxygen—eat it. You ever get arrested and thrown in prison, do not drop the soap. Don’t look down. Look up.

  “Here’s another tip: if a pretty girl ever asks you to dance, you say yes. I don’t give a rat’s cooch what else is happening in this world, if someone is dropping a nuke or trying to shave your nuts off—you got time to slow dance with a pretty girl. And the most important thing of all—”

  But he didn’t finish. Just then, a distant burst of gunfire rattled the night and Tim let me go. Both of us went still, listening. Something bright passed overhead—a rocket, I thought, but moving silently. And then, one, two, three seconds later, a roar blasted the earth into a geyser miles away and shuddered us all the way in our holes, dropping a miniature landslide of earth on our heads. A swell of groundwater sputtered into our foxhole, sloshing around our ankles.

  Barnaby came awake only to faint. I dropped, covering my head as the aftereffects loosed a rubble of shoal on our heads.

  “What the fuck?” I coughed out a mouthful of gravel. My first idea was that the androids had sold us out. But seconds passed and then the sound of artillery exchange started up, miles and miles away. Soon, I had my answer: a formation of RFN B-72s wheeled east from the base, clawing the night sky into one long furnace blast of propulsion fuel.

  “The Russians,” Tim said. His face was grayed by dust. As soon as the rumbling settled, he clawed up the side of the trench, shifting more dirt into a rain.

  “Careful,” I whispered. The famous green fogs hadn’t rolled in yet, and Tim’s head was so shiny it might as well of been a lamp in the moonlight.

  “They won’t be peeking this way, believe me, not with the Russkis trying to bug up their dickhole,” he said. A second later, he cursed, and dropped next to me again.

  “What do you see?” I asked him.

  “Jacknuts. Too dark. And the squall’s too far.” It was good news, but somehow didn’t feel like it. He kneeled down and stripped the display case from the rest of his pack, shouldering just his supplies. “You stay here. I’ll scope our exit plan. They’ll be flooding the border with backup now.”

  “But…” I was talking to air. He was already gone.

  Me and Barnaby huddled by and listened to the fighting in the distance. At least the front line was a ways off—the noise of gunfire was a bare echo by the time it reached us. Still, Rafikov’s forces were on the march—straight for us. She had to be desperate. She had to be suicidal. She’d just declared war against the entire RFN while stranded on their territory with a scattershot force.

  Unless …

  My stomach fell down a long pit and bottomed my intestines with it.

  Unless her force wasn’t so scattershot.

  Unless this was a bait and switch.

  Unless she was about to crank on the juice, wire up her network, and turn tens of millions of Jumpheads into so many boots on the ground.

  * * *

  I slid the world into the blue of my homescreen and fired on my visor. I had another pop-up from Evaline, the second she’d flagged as urgent, and when I exploded it, her whiskered face blew up huge in three dimensions.

  “Goddammit, Truckee” was the first thing she said, threshing the air so hard with her tail I recoiled by instinct before remembering she was only in holo. “I’ve been checking my inbox every five minutes and I’m starting to freak the fuck out. Please flick me and let me know you’re okay.” Her whiskers jumped around like live wires teased by hurricane winds. “The blackouts have been bad and the holo skies don’t work to recharge our solar, so I’m conserving batteries.” There was some interference to the feed, and her image blinked out and then re-formed again. “Let me know you got my other message, all right? I’ll be checking whenever I can. I can’t stand to think of you out there with some kind of walking Russian time bomb on your tail.”

  Russian time bomb. The words sent a wet dribble of dread down my spine.

  Quickly, I flashed over to her older pop-up and gave it a sharp jab. Another holo burst her into three dimensions. In this one, she looked even jumpier: all her fur was standing on end.

  “Truckee, it’s me. Obviously. I really hope you see this soon. Look, I got to thinking about Rafikov and how she’s riding you. How she always seems to know where you’re going to turn up. I did some phishing on her whole gig—brain swapping, mind servers, subbing, whatever you want to call it. The whole thing gave me the widgets, for sure.” She shuddered. “Anyway, suddenly I thought how easy it would of been for her to stick you with one of her body-puppets. I mean, how well do you know the crew you’re traveling with? Could one of them be fried full of Rafikov’s neural centers? Think about it. Be safe. Be sure. And hit me back, okay?”

  She disappeared with a flash back into the subject line, leaving me staring hard at my inbox. I fumbled to turn off my visor. My fingers were numb. A leaden cold crept through my whole body.

  How well do you know the crew you’re traveling with?

  What a fudgenut I’d been. What a complete stromboli.

  All of a sudden, I saw everything for clear: Tiny Tim, appearing as if by magic the very night we’d jumped the bullet train. Tim, the grifter who never sold anything and spoke some big story of a seed haul out in San Francisco not even a Straw Man could believe in. Tim, who had a big fat scar that split his forehead, maybe from the Straw procedure, sure, but maybe for getting early-days cabled to a ThinkChip™.

  Tim, who every so often I caught looking at me with something funny going on behind his eyes. Like there was someone else in there looking back.

  “We have to go,” I told Barnaby. It wasn’t time yet—the fog had just started to roll down out of the atmosphere—but we had no choice. I was sure that Tim had snuck off only to bring a shitswell of Russians down on our heads. “We have to go now.”

  He stared. “We can’t go now. The pollution isn’t nearly thick enough. And besides, we have to wait for Tiny Tim to—”

  I grabbed him by his chin hair. He yelped. “Listen to me, Barnaby.” Panic made me sweat, even though I was shivering. “You need to listen very closely, for once in your goddamn life. I don’t have time to explain. But you have to trust me, or we’re both game-over. Got it?”

  Finally, he nodded. I released him and toe-scrabbled up the incline, heart rabid in my chest, until I could just clear the berm with my nose. At the last second I remembered to slide my visor off my head—if the guns on the other side of the demilitarized zone caught so much as
a squint of moon off my lenses, they’d lock and load my head into StringCheez™.

  I waited until a bilious-looking cloud floated green over the moon, then carefully raised my head to scope our options. The looking wasn’t good: a thousand yards of flatland, blasted into uniform gravel, and on the other side a ten-foot concrete wall and the stumpy heads of regular guard towers.

  “We’ll never make it across.” Barnaby’s voice at my elbow nearly made me topple. He’d hop-skipped his way up the slope no problem.

  “Get down.” I cranked him to his knees, and he let out a little whinny of annoyance. He was right. But there was nothing to be done about it. It was death to stay and death to go.2

  “I’m telling you, it’s suicide,” Barnaby said, as if he knew what I was thinking.

  “Yeah, well, that’s life,” I snapped back. “One giant hara-kiri. Besides, I thought noble death was the last page of your memoir.”

  Barnaby’s breath was a warm fust of trash. For a long second, he said nothing. “Why did they really send you out here, Truckee?” he asked after a minute. “What are we really doing here?”

  Maybe it was exhaustion—I’d caught four hours in the past thirty—or just knowing we were noodled. But I was tired of lying, and being lied to: the world could solve all its energy problems if we could just figure out a way to get the methane out of bullshit.

  “Your brain tissue comes from Rafikov,” I told him. After so long keeping the secret, the words just dropped, turdlike, out of my mouth. “She donated it back when she was first diagnosed with Keller’s Disease. But Cowell believed that the autoimmune shakes might make her brain a good candidate for swapping. He was right.”

  Barnaby turned away. The moon sloughed off its chemical covering, and I could see the silhouette of his long nose touched with white, his wet nostrils slowly pulsating.

  “Albert Cowell is a spy for the Federal Corp. He’s been feeding information to the board all these years. Rafikov’s been using Jump to plant chemical code right into users’ brains so she can map, upload, and exchange their thoughts on the server. Cowell thinks he can extract the code she uses for the network transfers, if only he can reconstitute portions of her memory center from the sample.”

  “The sample,” Barnaby repeated, in a flat voice.

  I took a deep breath. “Your brain.”

  There was another long silence. I’d thought I would feel relieved to tell the truth but I felt worse than ever. I felt like a giant radioactive slug, leaving a trail of poison everywhere. So much for being a hero.

  I thought Barnaby would head-butt me. I thought he might curse me out, or at the very least rapid-fire some literary quotes my way.

  But in the end, he only said, “There’s another way past the zone.” His voice was quiet, calm, lower than usual. “I hope you don’t mind getting your feet wet.”

  * * *

  We hiked west through the trench, swatting off fist-sized flies that came with the chemical fog. Minutes, hours—it was one long and desperate slog through a quicksand of garbage and groundwater. As we got closer to the shoreline, the water rose to our ankles, and then to our knees: the demilitarized zone ran right into the shallows of the Pacific, where usually a fleet of post-dissolution Japanese naval craft was anchored just offshore, helping to defend the RFN’s position.

  But Barnaby bet that with the outbreak of war, much of the fleet would be on the move—especially now that the Russian Federation had joined the scrum. And he was right. When we reached the Pacific, we saw only a few warships looming off the coast, transformed by the chemical veil into featureless shadows. That meant fewer subs, fewer divers, fewer patrol boats to pick off illegals in the water.

  And that meant we had a chance.

  “You do know how to swim, right?” Barnaby asked, as he waded into the water churning with plastic product leached from a continent away, without even pausing to nibble at the brightly colored bits.

  “Sure.” I’d swum plenty of times in sim, and during heat waves Crunch 407 management used to flood the gravel pits so the crumbs could cool off when the grid blacked out.

  The only problem was: I didn’t know oceans were so damn deep.

  I was up to my waist when Barnaby started stroking, putting distance between us even as the waves started blowing me in the chest. I was afraid to call out to him—the last guard tower wasn’t too far from shore, and besides, there might be hidden patrol boats anywhere, hidden by the green haze. It couldn’t, I thought, get much deeper—

  Then, all at once, a wave punched me straight in the face and tumbled me over, and when I tried to kick up from the bottom there was no bottom, only more waves, more trash, more drowning.

  It’s a funny thing about oxygen: somehow you never notice how much you like it until it’s all gone.

  I somersaulted in my own panic. Chemical taste flooded my mouth. My rucksack was a hundred thousand pounds, tunneling me toward the bottom of the ocean. I struggled to slip free of it, gulping gritty ocean backwash, and somehow kicked free of the undertow and broke the surface.

  “Barnaby!” I spat out a pen cap and managed one shout before waves cranked me under again, and I was blinded by a sting of pollution and floating crap. My lungs burst the last air from my chest. My vision was full of starbursts, explosive chemical fire. A roar of pain rang in my ears.

  Then out of the murk came something huge and white, a drift of cloud. It opened its mouth and jawed onto my shirt, hauling me for the air. I broke the surface, gasping. Before I could drop under again, Barnaby slipped me like a saddle over his back, keeping me angled to the sky. With a grunt and a curse, he turned us in toward the shore. And so I bobbed along the surface like a clinging barnacle, holding tight to Barnaby’s tail to avoid getting bucked off by the waves.

  “I thought you knew how to swim.” He grunted.

  “So did I,” I said, after I’d finished coughing out two lungfuls of filthy water. With the green fog now pulled down all around us, we might of been twenty feet from shore or twenty miles.

  Barnaby shook me off into the shallows. He was trembling so hard that when he tried to stand he just toppled again into the surf. Now it was my turn to gather him up, a mass of stringy fur, shivering and exhausted, surprisingly light in my arms. I sloshed out of the shallows and together we collapsed on the beach. And we lay there panting, holding on to each other, waiting for the fog to lift—arrived, at last, on the shores of the Emerald City.

  Part VI

  SAN FRANCISCO, OR: THE EMERALD CITY

  45

  The biggest problem with a population of shut-ins isn’t a declining birthrate or the increased energy demands: it’s the farting. Imagine millions of cooped-up nerds powering through simulations on canned grease and nutrient supplements, and you have some idea of the miserable storm of methane brewing every day in the cauldron of San Francisco’s discontented belly.

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

  We woke when the city’s poor came out of their tent cities to bathe and do their business in the sand. Sheltered from the scope of drones passing overhead by the heavy morning fog, we crept inland, past the forest of forty-foot-tall sump pumps that worked to churn water out of the downtown and past the sea gates. The massive warehouse district where RFN’s crumbs did mandatory service in the incubators stippled the horizon like enormous pockmarked nests. Half the squats were shrouded in the green algae bloom that gave the city its nickname—ever since the ocean spit up tsunamis over the city, the green was only spreading.

  The faces I saw in the fog-cloudy windows were as pale as tapeworms, and blind with the inner glaze of people long cabled to VR and portal networks. I’d once read that people in the RFN left the house less than anywhere else on the continent, and a whole generation of imaginary boys depended on armies of deliverables to feed and clothe them and on the occasional human-touch nurse to clean their bedsores.

  It was lucky for us the streets grew more chemical flowers than foot traf
fic. I didn’t have a profile on the system, and since the RFN mandated implantable software instead of visors, it would be obvious to the first person who scanned me that I didn’t belong.

  We walked, Barnaby and me, both of us dead tired, squeezed by the pressure of everything I’d told him last night. The loss of my rucksack—and all our cash—hit me hard, and as we scavenged for preserved edibles in the dumpsters, I had to fight the urge to weep. At least the RFN forces were holding Rafikov and her Soviet army off—we couldn’t even hear the sound of the bombers anymore.

  I was sick over Tim, and how I’d trusted him. I was sick over how I’d left Sammy, and how I hadn’t said a goodbye, not properly, not how she deserved.

  More than anything, I was tired of the journey, tired of the fight, ready to be done with all of it. Even lockup didn’t sound too bad, except for one thing: I’d never get to kiss Evaline in real life. Still, at least I might finally sleep in a bed.

  It took us half the day to pick our way up through the rubble of the Mission—still only half-reconstructed, a mess of earthquake shelters and VR rehabs, where quaking addicts chewed fresh on fenced-in patios and struggled to blink in natural light—and through Noe Valley, where the buckled slopes were squatted by tens of thousands of workers who shuttled in and out of the Laguna-Honda base every day. Everything was branded with the military logo, from the desalination plants to the charter hospitals.

  The base itself was a sprawling complex that knuckled into the hills at the end of Market Street, and dribbled all the way into a 64-acre park, now used mostly as a landing pad for the air force. The complex was surrounded by an electrified fence, topped with a crown of barbed wire just in case the climb didn’t turn you right away to bacon. The guards in their towers had a nice tactical advantage, and a clear view of the valley, at least when the wind blew off some of the fog. Other times, they depended on heat sensors—I could see the blink of the infrared through the murk.