by Reed King
“I told you not to eat that Cheez™.” Barnaby shook his head. “But why listen to me? I’m just a goat with a 165 IQ and a digestive tract full of the complete archives of the Oakland Public Library.”
“Shut up. Please. I need to think.” When I closed my eyes I was back at my hand-crank station, tracking the techs who paced the catwalks in protective gas masks, watching a foam of white chemical residue blow back from the enormous churners, like the kickback of a surf. Cheez™, they told us, and why would we what-if them?
It wasn’t my job to think. My job was to make sure that chlorinated polyethylburitane was combined with the supply of crystallized glucolic acid at the right temperature, in just the right way. The vat of chlorinated polyethylburitane glugged into the container of crystallized glucolic acid and boom, my work was finished.
Except I did it roughly 3,267 times a day.
I opened my eyes. I felt like a moonshine drunk: the alley was spinning my gut into my throat.
“Barnaby, listen to me.” I choked on the taste of his name. “I need you to run.”
Barnaby stared. “Run?” he repeated.
“Run as far from here as you can.” A clot of bad taste was tangled in the back of my throat.
“Have you lost your mind?”
I shook my head, and a burst of pain exploded red dust clouds in my vision. “The Federal Corporation lied to me,” I said. “President Burnham lied to me. The Jump isn’t coming from the Russian Federation. It’s shipping straight out of Crunch, United.”
“I don’t understand.” Barnaby squinted. “You told me the Russians were the ones with mind-control technology.”
“Because that’s what President Burnham told me. But maybe he was lying.”
Barnaby frowned. “Then why has Rafikov been on our tail since BCE Tech?”
“I don’t goddamn know, okay?” The words fired up into a shout that stirred a bunch of rodents out of the alley trash. “I don’t know anything.”
But just as soon as the words left my mouth, I did know. A new wave of sick leaned me back against the wall sloughing a dandruff of paper warnings: against mosquitos carrying the C-1 virus, and rats carrying the plague, and humans carrying the plague because they’d eaten all the rats.
“A trap,” I said, and all the Cheez™ burned back up to my tongue. “It must of been a trap. Rafikov was bunkered up in the middle of nowhere on Federation lands. President Burnham was hoping to lure her out.”
“And now, here she is, standing at the RFN’s doorstep, vastly outgunned and likely unprepared,” Barnaby finished for me. “And if she dies…”
“There will be no one left to stop the Federal Corporation. And still, they keep their hands clean.” It was all so clear to me now. I didn’t know what lies Burnham and the Crunch, United, board had fed Rafikov—probably that I was some kind of enemy agent carrying sensitive intel about her operations. I didn’t even know if the board was in on it, or if Burnham had gone rogue. But that hardly mattered.
What mattered is that President Burnham had signed the A-OK on tons and tons of pulverized hot-wire, circuit-laced amphetamine that would soon have half the continent in its grip. And now the board had ousted him, probably so he couldn’t spill the sewage.
What mattered is that I’d marched Rafikov into war, and shepherded a chunk of her neural knowledge to Cowell’s doorstep—shepherded it, literally.
“Now do you see why you have to run? It’s not Burnham and Cowell trying to stop Rafikov. It’s Cowell and his allies in the Corporation that need to be stopped. They’re the ones who want to back-end into her servers. They’re the ones who want to land the Burnham Prize, once and for all.” Just saying the words out loud buffered me back in time: the past and present were collapsing. I almost forgot which President Burnham we were talking about. I half-expected the dissolution crowds to come pouring into the streets, and a surge of unionists to meet them with guns. I wouldn’t of been stunned if Whitney Heller herself had come sashaying down the street to announce that yes, true, guilty as charged, it was all her idea after all.
“But I have nowhere to go.…”
“It doesn’t matter where you go, so long as it isn’t here.” I gave him a little push. “Now, move.”
“No. I’m not leaving you.”
“This is the wrong time to grow a pair, Barnaby. They’re going to kill you. They’re going to split your head like a burst sack, and scoop out your brain like a pile of scrambled Eggz™, and it won’t mean anything, or do anything, or help anything.”
Barnaby’s nose was jumping. His eyes were wet. I could hardly stand to look at him.
“Go, you dumb animal.” I picked up the first thing I could lay my hands on—a crumpled soda can—and hurled it, striking him right in the nose. “Go.” The next thing I snatched was a chunk of masonry. When I landed a direct hit on his shoulder, he squealed and hopped backward. I was crying, now, tasting the snot running into my mouth. But I kept aiming at him, pelting him with trash and rubble. “Go, go, go.”
And finally, he did.
46
They say there’s no place like home, and I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I want to make good and sure I check out all the options before I stick myself with one.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
I tumbled into simulation, wishing for about the millionth time that I could shake off my skin the way one of the NuSkin™ patients did, and squeeze myself into megabytes to live forever.
I swiped out of a standard stretch of the Road and toggled for my private feed, only to duck a water-balloon-sized alert that missed clobbering my head by inches. It splattered instead against the wall and burst a stream of confetti everywhere.
“Did you know that one of your preferred user contacts, BadKitty414, is having a birthday today?” The system prompts sounded like a Human Resources rat on steroids. “We can’t tell you how old she’s turning, because that data is marked private, but we can tell you she likes neo-punk music, dance parties, PD history, bioengineered-animal rights, and nanotekartsenkraft. Care to send her balloons, a parade float, or a cache of weaponry?”
I swatted away the carousel of suggested content available to send between user accounts—for a premium price, of course. Right away another pop-up exploded across my feed. Evaline had invited me to a birthday hangout she was hosting: a private VR dance party at a retro 2050s-style discotheque.
I finned more than anything to say yes. I wanted to disappear with her inside a firewall forever. I could even understand why Rafikov, in her broken body, had coded a way to pass completely into the cloud. Not for immortality, but just to shake off all the pain of the physical world.
Instead, I shot a no, or tried to—my hands were shaking so bad my aim was for shit. If she’d been logged in, I might of told her everything. I might of asked for her help. I might of begged for it. But she wasn’t, and I was glad I didn’t have to ruin her birthday.
Instead, I sent her a short voicenote, trying to put as much feeling inside the I’m sorry as I could, hoping she would hear what I really meant: that I was head over heels in love, even if we’d never met face-to-face.
That I really was sorry.
That I was saying goodbye.
“I hope it’s a good one,” I told her. “I hope you get everything you want this year.”
Somehow, I didn’t think she would, not in this shitstain of a world. But there was always hope.
Almost as soon as I sent my response winging to her profile, a new invitation—this one a tumbleweed of what looked like mushroom spores—blew over to my inbox and sprouted a chat link. My first thought was that Evaline had signed on after all, but as soon as I maximized the invitation and saw the user participants, my heart stopped.
Roboto26 and Glitterati08 invite you to join a secure chat space.
I hovered over the invite again just to hear it read out loud. This time, a punch of joy dizzied me. Roboto was a handle of Jared’s that dated f
rom an old online RPG he was into, Solar Wars. And the Glitterati were one of Annalee’s first-ever fandoms, a dumbnut pop group turned reality-feed stars she used to worship.1 Plus: her birthday was on the eighth of November.
As soon as I accepted the invitation, my feed melted away, and grafted me straight into what looked like a subterranean bunker: reinforced concrete walls, the high-bright lighting of the Underground, and a muted sound quality that suggested about a hundred tons of packed dirt all around us. It was funny, the way even the added security layers had a VR translation on the Yellow Brick Road.
Two avatars—template, and both identical to mine, except for a pair of breasts and a slop of brown hair on the female—were waiting for me. But when the girl glanced up, I could of sworn I saw a trademark flash of Annalee Kimball in the look on that potato face.
“Truckee!” Her voice touched off every nerve in my body. I wanted to cry. I wanted to kneel. I wanted to pack the sound of her down inside my stomach, like the cotton stuffing in a gutted corpse. “Is it you? Are you there?” I couldn’t even get my mouth to work. After a second, she turned to Jared. “I can’t hear him, can you?”
“Truckee, are you there?” That was Jared. “Are you okay? Are you alive?”
“I’m here,” I said, and Annalee shrieked and grabbed Jared’s arm.
“It’s him. It’s him,” she said. “I told you.”
And Jared said, “Calm down.” But his voice was shaking. To me, he said, “Show us your face, man. I want to see that big old schnoz-rocket.”
A second later a new request temporarily froze the feed: Enabling camera view permits the users in this hangout to view, store, and potentially screen-capture your image. Enable anyway?
“Yeah, yeah, fine.” I swiped away the warning and saw the graphics melt away, like a massive colored slug trail winging into the heat of a new day.
A blur of motion and color across my screen crossed my eyes in my head. A frenzy of shouting nearly took out my eardrums. Both Annalee and Jared had rushed forward as if they could squeeze me through the feed, and for a second I could only see them in bits and pieces: Jared’s big old chin, Annalee’s crown of braids, a flash of her brilliant white teeth. I couldn’t make sense of what they were saying, either, and had to tell them to chill, sit, and stop squawking over each other.
“I don’t believe it,” Annalee said after I finally got her to settle down. I couldn’t stop staring at her, even though the feed was imperfect, and a split-second delay seemed to be bugging up the system. She looked incredible. You would of thought the war and the rationing and the tightening of the borders hadn’t landed in Crunch 407. Her eyes were sparkling. Her skin was sparkling. “I swear we thought you were dead.”
“Not yet.”
“What the hell happened, man?” Jared’s hair was standing straight up, looking like it was waving little fists of outrage at me. But he had a new visor—he and Annalee both did, sweet little wraparound SonicImmersion™ 6.0s, maybe new standard issue to keep the crumbs from tweaking about the war knocking a death march outside their door. “One day they tell us you’re in the hospital, and everyone’s calling you a hero. And then the next day—poof! Gone like a free Dymase™ promo at the company store.” That’s what made Jared so good at his job: his whole life was Crunch, United, products; Crunch, United, swag; Crunch, United, gear. “And then right after that everyone was lipping crazy stories about you. They’re saying you’re a terrorist, man.”
Annalee cut in. “And after Burnham dropped into rehab—”
“He didn’t go to rehab,” I told them. “That’s just a story cooked up for PR.”
“What are you talking about?” Annalee stared.
“I don’t have time to explain. But I’m in trouble.”
“No shit, shakra,” Jared said.
Annalee’s face was all folded up with worry. “Where are you now?”
“I made it to San Francisco,” I said. “I’m shouting noise from the Laguna-Honda Military Base.”
“San Francisco?” Jared’s voice practically blew out my speakers. I made a quick adjustment to my audio. “You’re not serious.”
I nodded. “I was set up,” I said. “President Burnham used me as a distraction, and I fell for it hook, line, and liver.”
“I don’t understand,” Annalee said.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “You just need to think I’m innocent.” Then: “You do think I’m innocent, right?”
There was a split second of silence, but I was sure it had to do with the delay in the feed. Probably the data had trouble making it past so many layers of encryption.
“Of course,” Jared said firmly. “And we want to help you.”
“Where are you exactly?” Annalee said.
“I told you. I’m not far from Laguna-Honda. But what matters is I have to get out of here,” I said. “Except I’ve got no money, no guns, and no ideas.”
“Well,” Jared said, “at least you haven’t changed, then.”
I felt like I hadn’t smiled in years. But I did then.
Annalee rounded on Jared. “How can you even think of joking right now? Our friend is balls-deep inside one of the most dangerous places on the continent—”
“What do you want me to do? Cry? Besides, everywhere is a dangerous place for him—”
“Exactly. So maybe instead of spamming around, you could try being helpful—”
“Oh, because you’re being so helpful? Sorry, I must of missed the part where you waved your magic wand—”
“Guys, come on, don’t fight,” I said before Annalee could maul Jared a new one. I could feel the tension even through the data stream. “You know Jared can’t afford to sneeze out any more brain cells.”
It was an old joke of ours, a stupid joke that always made Jared laugh. Except just then, he didn’t laugh. He winced.
A funny feeling tickled my spine. A whiff of something wrong.
“You’re not sneezing,” I said. I’d only just noticed. “You haven’t sneezed once.”
Again, I thought he winced, although it was hard to tell. The encryption did funny things to the feed.
“He got an immunoplant,” Annalee said before Jared could speak. Jared looked down, picking at something in his lap. “He doesn’t even get hives anymore. Show him. Show him,” she said again, and Jared lifted his hand to show me unmarked skin. But he didn’t look happy about it.
The tickle turned into a crawl, and pincered down into my rib cage. “Immunotherapy,” I echoed. I hoped they would blame the strain in my voice on bad reverb. “Wow. How’d you get the swag for that?”
Now it was Annalee who winced. I was sure, that time, it was no visual glitch.
This time, Jared answered. “Just a sweepstakes thing,” he said. “Company promotions. You know, for morale.”
“You’re being modest,” Annalee said. For some reason, she glared at him. “He had the most new-customer sales for May in his division.”
It was possible. Crunch did run sweepstakes sometimes, and they did offer company credit for the ants who anted the hardest. Jared had aced plenty of freebies at the company store, late clock-in times, even a new uniform. Cheap stuff. Dumb stuff. Extras and waste. But Jared was always so damn proud.
Because Jared’s whole life was Crunch, United.
Without meaning to, without wanting to, even, I started scanning little details I hadn’t noticed before or had ignored. The visors—how much did those go for? I’d never heard of an upgrade like that for everyone. The room they were in—where was it? It wasn’t a slumtown shoebox, that was for sure. There were no water stains bubbling the walls, or wires draped like bunting from holes in the ceiling. There were no windows masked with hurricane tape and patched with standard-issue towels. There were no windows at all.
I’d taken it at first for one of the underground parking garages, but the light was all wrong. The light was too perfect. Those were high-bright fluorescent, cheerful like an exclamation-point punch to the
face, like a Human Resources pamphlet air-dropped by the military. Under the light, Annalee was so radiant she seemed to glow.
And then I saw: she was glowing.
For a long eternity, I fell into the little death between my heartbeats.
“We want to help you,” Annalee said, and as she leaned forward I saw all of the tiny microflecks of gold leafed into her skin catch the light and flare. She’d always wanted dermamineral skin, ever since she was a kid obsessed with the Glitterati. But we’d always known it was a pipe dream, true swag shit, the fancy fuck-you of the uppercrusts. “But we can’t do anything unless you tell us where you are.”
“Sure,” I said. I could barely swallow. I felt like I was trying to chew myself out of six feet of dirt and grave rot. “Sure. Just as soon as you tell me where you got the floss for all the heavy metal you’re wearing.”
She jerked backward. Jared sucked in a breath. Again, there was a quick pause before she forced a laugh.
“It’s just body paint,” she said. “The grifters came through last week. Do you like it?”
I wanted to believe her. But by then I’d seen the way she touched her neck, the way she and Jared paused before speaking. Like they were waiting for the audio to reach them.
But whose audio?
There was one way to know for sure. I switched to split screen, swiped over to Settings, and notched the volume of my output to maximum.
And then I screamed.
A blast of shuddering sound turned the feed into a deafening whine of acoustic blowback. And for a split second, before they swiped for their visor controls, Jared and Annalee both reached for something in their ears.
Then I knew.
“I don’t fucking believe it.” I didn’t bother reducing the audio volume, and my voice echoed back to me, a cavernous boom, even though I was whispering. The SonicImmersion™ 6.0s didn’t come with earpieces: wraparound sono had been standard since at least version 5.0. “You fucking sell-outs.”
Both of them had the look of rats blinded by pepper spray, desperate and cornered. Jared wet his lips.
“C’mon, man,” he said. “What the hell were we supposed to do?”