FKA USA

by Reed King

  “You were my friends.” I cracked on the word and almost lost it.

  “We still are,” Annalee said. “If you’d just turn yourself in, it will be better for you in the end, they promised they wouldn’t hurt you, that you can cut a deal with HR—”

  “Fuck you.”

  I stood up and nearly blacked out.

  “They’re going to find you anyway.” She was babbling now, her voice pitching to a scream. “They know where you are, they can track you, and when they do you’ll—”

  I cut the feed, blind with rage, with my own stupidity. I was reeling like a drunk, turned around by grief. Stupid. Why else would it have taken them so long to reach out to me? They were working out their goddamn deals. I leaned over, and puked up a fistful of acid and chemical burn onto the wash of trash. Hard shudders of nausea nearly split my rib cage, but finally I was done, and there was nothing left to come up.

  I leaned back against the whisper of paper warnings and closed my eyes, trying to catch my breath. As I stood there, I heard the wind pass a hand through all the deaths on advertisement. A strange sound disturbed the quiet—a kind of music that wasn’t music, a series of notes played on an instrument I couldn’t name.

  “Truckee Wallace.”

  I didn’t open my eyes right away. I didn’t need to. I stayed where I was, breathing, trying to fight my way up into the sky, trying to figure where that strange sound was coming from, what it could possibly mean. Only when a shadow fell across me did I straighten up.

  President Burnham looked even worse than when I last saw him, like a human scab stitched up in pain inside his wheelchair. Behind him a rank of Laguna-Honda soldiers had their rifles pointed at me in a hey-hi. Still, he managed a smile.

  “I thought you were in rehab,” I said, as a dozen military greenbacks swarmed me to cuff my hands behind my back.

  He shook his head. “That’s the standard line. Comes in handy when you need to drop away for a little while. Although I do find the coast very relaxing. When the sun sets on the oil slick, the whole ocean looks like it’s catching fire.”

  He wheeled around and bumped over the rot of the encampment toward the street, and one of the soldiers shoved a fist in my back to move me forward.

  It was over. It was all over. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t even afraid. They could of shot me right there and I doubt I would of noticed. The fog had burned off, and as the sun set over the Pacific, layers of color floated up through the pollution: intestinal pink, blood-spatter red, beauty that felt like a wound.

  Something small and black and unfamiliar darkened the narrow alley of sky above us before settling on a grid of wires to preen. It took me a half second to remember what to call it.

  A bird.

  It sang, and kept singing, as we marched in slow procession toward the base. And in my head, I wasn’t going off to die. I was a vibration made of birdsong. I was riding high out of the world, on a back made of dark feathers. I was held inside a fragile, hollow throat that still managed, somehow, to sing.

  47

  The introduction of fast-cycling crops may’ve saved 20 or so million people from starvation in the first half of the century, but for fuck’s sake, watch out for the alfalfa. I’ve seen it smother a man before he could tie his shoelaces to run. Grapes too. I lost a good friend to a California vineyard, got swallowed by the grapevines and squeezed until he burst. I guess that’s payback for you.

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

  My first impression of the Laguna-Honda Military Base was of a glittering complex of bunkers, hangars, and administrative complexes nested in dizzying formation into a rolling landscape of asphalt, shimmering behind the petroleum flatulence of convoys of armored vehicles. An industrial grind of drones and robots, the clamor of mechanized doors, and the kickback roar of fly traffic shuddered the air into sound waves. I counted six planes before a mosquito landed on my neck and bit me, and I fell out of San Francisco and passed down the long needle of a syringe, landing down inside the dark of my own eyelids.

  For a second, when I woke up, freezing with aftereffects, I couldn’t remember where I was, or even who I was. I tried to shake my head of its spermicidal fog. In one dark corner, President Burnham, half-shadowed by a heavy drape of fabric that must of been drawn across the windows, whispered urgently to himself.

  “They’ll be along any minute to split him open,” he said. I swear I heard him giggle. I swear I saw him touch his throat and beat his eyelashes, like in the dark shadow split-screening his face he saw the shape of someone he’d once loved. “Then we’re in the clear, my darling … you and me … forever.”

  It was a dream, or a hallucination. It had to be. But when I tried to turn my head and found only a whine of resistance, he whipped quickly around to face me.

  “Good morning,” he said in a normal tone of voice. “I didn’t expect you awake.”

  The room was small, windowless, and full of rare dead trees hacked into heavy-footed furniture and butterflied into paper books I would of banked no one had ever read. The shelves were cluttered with old medical devices and evolutionary tech. The head of a prototypical Sexy Saam doll, stripped of hair, lacerated to expose the wiring of her skull, gazed dumbly down at me from just behind the desk.

  “What did you give me?” It felt like my wrists were hand-strapped to the chair, even though I couldn’t see any bindings. I only knew my legs hadn’t vaporized by looking at them.

  “A full dose of tetrazabenzaminoid-55,” he said easily. “A soporific. In large enough doses, a fatal paralytic. Also, as a matter of fact, the secret ingredient in our bestselling Bacon-and-Breadcrumb Six-Cheez Mac-n-Blast™.”

  I should of known. I’d spent years chowing whole boxes only to wake up on the couch hours later with drool crusting my cheek to the upholstery. Some food coma. “No wonder the Russians hate the Federal Corporation,” I said. “You’ve been cutting into the cartel’s business for years.”

  “Forever,” he corrected me, and then shrugged. “Food is a drug too. We’ve always known that.”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing with Jump? Feeding people?”

  If he was surprised I’d figured the whole con, he didn’t show it, except for a small spasm that rocked his hands into fists. “Oh, absolutely,” he said. “We intend to stuff them to the gills.”

  “We? You mean you and your buddies on the board?”

  That made him laugh. The sound scratched a little feeling back into my spine—it was a strange pitch, and made me think of the Laughing Flu, and the sound the dying made just before a well of blood choked the tickle in their throat.

  “The board,” he said, “is a bloated bureaucracy of incompetence. It’s a gas fountain of floating sperm sacks, spineless squids, and dickless bloodfish.”

  “Well, at least we agree on something.”

  “There’s only one man who’s brave enough to help me. There’s only one man who’s always been willing to help.”

  It felt like a cue. The door behind me opened. I tried to turn my head but only managed to get as far as the hand lying on my shoulder; since I couldn’t feel its weight, it struck me first as a giant shriveled husk vacated by an insect. But then my eyes traveled the length of the arm attached to the wrist, and to the chest connected to the arm, and so on, until I landed on a complete picture of the man tying the whole thing together.

  Albert Cowell must not of been a fan of chemical grafting and silicone freeze: he showed his age in a way I’d seen only once or twice in my whole life. Still, his posture was perfect, and he moved easily and without sound, skirting the gigantic stone bust of his younger self that counted for the room’s only art. He did a funny thing when he passed Burnham. He lifted a hand and laid it not on Burnham’s arm or shoulder, but on his cheek.

  The weirdest thing is I’d seen that gesture before—that exact gesture. It was lifted straight from the Meme That Cracked a Country: the long-lens snapshot of the first President Burnham cupp
ing Whitney Heller’s face while she looked up at him with her eyes practically photoshopping adoration, even as a storm of protesters massed outside the White House gates.

  Evaline’s words came shouting back to my head: It’s funny … it’s all happened before.

  “I have to tell you, Truckee, I’m incredibly impressed,” Cowell said. “After the Russians blew up the bullet train, I was sure we’d be shipping you out here in an ice van. It would of been quicker, that’s for sure.”

  “Much quicker,” Burnham chimed in. I had to look away whenever Cowell and Burnham so much as side-eyed each other. It was like they wished their eyeballs were tongues to slobber all over each other’s faces. “By the way, you cost the Federal Corporation almost forty thousand Crunchbucks. HumanAlloy™ doesn’t come cheap.”

  It took me a minute to figure his meaning. “The androids,” I said. “The two beefs back in Granby. You did send them.”

  Burnham shrugged. “Rafikov had already targeted you. So there was no point in keeping you alive. Unfortunately, you insisted on it.” He said this like he expected an apology.

  I thought of a dream I once had, where Jared was explaining the rules of some new immersive called Harbinger: Death, just like he would in real life—except his nose was made of a miniature black hole and I didn’t know how to tell him. And for a second, when I woke up sweating, I couldn’t remember which version of life was real and which was dream.

  That’s how I felt just then: like everything I knew was collapsing. But this time, there was no one to explain the game.

  It turned out I could still feel my bladder. Because I wanted to piss my damn pants.

  “Why am I here?” I’d asked the same thing back in Burnham’s office, but knew now the answer he’d given was a pile of catfish. “You wanted me alive. Then you tried to have me killed. You told me the Russians were making Jump. But you’re the ones making it, and Rafikov is only trying to stop you. You wanted a chunk of her brain to rebuild, but you souped me up with drug and let the brain scamper off.”

  “The brain?” President Burnham’s hands jumped around on his chair. “Oh, that was just our little joke. The goat’s neural transplant came from some no-name dimehead who sold off organs one by one for drugs.”

  “You can’t grow a functional brain from its sample tissue,” Cowell said. “Even a crumb should know better.” His eyes narrowed on me. There was a strange murk to them, like his pupils were actually facing backward. “You’ve got everything we need, Mr. Wallace. And it’s all thanks to your good friend Mr. Ropes.”

  Some of the feeling was tingling back into my fingers. But when I tried to move, I still managed nothing but a twitch. “What are you talking about?” I asked, as President Burnham eye-fucked Albert Cowell all over the place.

  “Do you know the story of the Trojan horse, Mr. Wallace?” Mr. Cowell asked. He was as light as air when he moved: the carpet didn’t even take on the imprint of his feet.

  “Sure,” I said. “It blew up all the feeds two years ago. Turns out the Trojan brand was sponsoring Sexy Saams in the Dakotas, and paying them off to spread a rumor about supersyphilis—”

  “Not the Trojan whores. The Trojan horse.” A frown creased Cowell’s wrinkles a little deeper when I shook my head. “According to mythology, the Greeks defeated the Trojans after gifting their enemies an enormous wooden horse, filled to the brim with their own soldiers. Troy accepted the gift, and opened its gates to let the soldiers in, thereby unconsciously heralding their own demise.” After a pause, he added, “In other words, they all died.”

  Fucking uppercrusts. Always wasting CO2 on extra syllables.

  “Of course, the bioengineered N-3 virus that wiped out a quarter of the continent’s population in the late ’20s was a kind of Trojan horse. As you know, the Japanese military released it on the Korean peninsula in 2022 inside the bodies of a local species of ant. But it did not, unfortunately, stay contained.”1 He shrugged. “You were our wooden horse, our Pheidole fervida, our secret freighter.”

  Sweat tickled my ass cheeks, and I couldn’t even clench them. “I still don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  Cowell smiled. His teeth were shock-white and overlarge, like shower tiles sunk down inside exposed pink gums. “I understand you had quite the narrow escape from Production-22,” he said. “The health managers removed nearly sixteen ounces of shrapnel from inside your body. But I wonder, Truckee, whether they really got everything out?”

  48

  Why did the chicken cross the road?

  It couldn’t get its claws on a gun, and pills were too expensive.

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

  In a single, crashing second, I knew.

  Hadn’t I dreamed it, way back in Crunchtown? Hadn’t I imagined President Burnham by my bedside, and my stomach split open like a smile?

  “What’d you stuff me with?” I asked. At least the drug kept me from feeling the panic in my whole body. Instead, it just took me by the throat.

  “Converting the human brain into miniature hard drives is useless unless a server exists to connect them,” Albert Cowell said by way of answer. “Rafikov is the only person in the world who successfully coded instructions for complete, person-to-person, instantaneous brain transfer, dump, and override.”

  “I know that,” I snapped. Now I could wiggle all my toes. Slowly, slowly, the drug was wearing off: like any good crumb out of one of the poorest company outposts, I got most of my kicks from food comas and had a pretty high tolerance. I was sure I could take Burnham and Cowell together, if I could only do more than point a toe at them. “She took the Burnham Prize.”

  “Actually, Cowell succeeded long before her,” Cowell said. “But the results could never be replicated.”

  Christballs and Biscuitz™. He was worse than the run-of-the-mill uppercrust. He was the kind of uppercrust who referred to himself in the third person, like he was too important for a one-letter pronoun.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “But I don’t think shoveling brain cells into the goat is what the first President Burnham had in mind.”

  For the first time, Cowell lost his crisp. “I’m not talking about the damn goat,” he snapped.

  And President Burnham said, “Let it go, baby.”

  That confirmed it. These two sad sacks were totally bones for each other. Forget LBGTQANU1 rights—I was all for it. What we needed were laws against evil on evil. It was a fact of life: One turd, cool. Two turds, and suddenly you’ve got shit all over the bathroom floor.

  Burnham took over the story. “For decades, she sunk the server at the command center of the Russian Federation military, a former nuclear bunker north of the hinterlands. She was the only one who had full security access. For decades, we tried to take down her cybersecurity. But even a twenty-person team of the best hackers across the world couldn’t do it. So finally, we hit on a diplomatic solution.”

  For a second I was so clobbered by the scale of what he meant, I could only manage a kind of wheezing. “The blackout,” I said finally. “You told the Commonwealth to cut the power to the Soviet Federated Frontier.”

  I remembered. Jared had mentioned it on the very morning Billy Lou stormed Production-22.

  “Federation subs swarmed the Commonwealth’s exclusive ocean zone, despite repeated warnings to clear off.”2

  “Let me guess. You guys had something to do with that too?”

  President Burnham’s hands did a spastic dance. His fingers were so thin, his big-ass emerald ring was in danger of slipping off the knuckle. But he didn’t deny it. “Russian subs,” he said, “are easier to crack than Rafikov’s data center. Didn’t take long for the twenty best hackers in the world. The hard part was trying to get the Commonwealth to come on board for sanctions. But finally, they did.”

  For forty-eight hours, the vast majority of the Russian Federation had gone completely dark.

  No power, no robotics, no communication
s systems.

  No cybersecurity at all.

  “Luckily, we had operatives ready. We’d been rehearsing the recovery for years.”

  “Recovery? Don’t you mean theft?” I asked him.

  “I mean politics,” he said. “There are always casualties when national interests are on the line.”

  “Your interests seem to come with a lot more casualties than most,” I pointed out.

  “Call it a rounding error,” he said.

  I understood everything now—Rafikov’s desperate game plays, her attack on the bullet train, the raid on Crunch 407. Even the little stuff made a screwy kind of sense: The girl in Las Vegas who offered to sub with me. The guy underground who’d temporarily broken loose of her control and begged me to help him get out from underneath her.

  For weeks, Rafikov’s patented code—the unique program that turned consciousness to translatable impulse, that absorbed thoughts into the cloud and flowed so many hundreds of thousands of minds through Rafikov’s servers—had been squatting next to my spleen.

  And I’d walked it straight into the last place on earth it belonged. “So what’s the big plan, once you boot up Rafikov’s system and take control of all the Jumpheads? Take out the Federation? Take down the corporate board? Or are you just gunning for ten million hand jobs?”

  President Burnham grinned the way corpses do when they’ve died screaming. “We take down all of them,” he said. “The Federation, the board, the Commonwealth, the Confederacy, the New Kingdom, and all of Texas.”

  “That’s insane,” I said.

  Cowell pulled a scowl that stretched nearly to his neck. “Actually, it’s pragmatic.” He came a little closer, skimming the carpet with his weightless tread. “Do you know why we call the poor, uneducated, and addicted masses the ants, Truckee? Because just like ants, they do best when they’re following orders. They are the bodies of this great nation—meant for labor, for physical pains and physical rewards. Sex. Sleep. Chemical highs. Even our patented food comas. Others are made to think, to ruminate, to make decisions, to use those bodies for work, to execute a higher vision for society as a whole. They are the control centers. They are the brains.” He smiled. “And you know what that’s called?”