by Reed King
“Let me guess—more politics,” I said.
He shook his head. “Natural order.”
I would of given everything I had, everything I’d ever had, for a gun and a trigger finger to shoot with. I would of traded my life. I’d never loved anyone the way I hated him then, not even my mom. It was the black hole from my dream, all those years ago: I could of stuffed all his cells inside it, one by one, to a soundtrack of his screams, and it would still go hungry.
“Throughout most of human history, people accepted this as unavoidable. Some people are meant to use. Others are meant to be used. Only in the last few centuries did we jump the tracks.”
“So you’re just a well-meaning historian, is that it? You’re just trying to get us back on the rails?”
“That’s what leaders do,” he said. Like we’d arrived at the end of some really obvious math.
“And the Burnham Prize had nothing to do with it, huh? This has nothing to do with the fact that Rafikov cracked a problem you couldn’t even fluff?”
The way he looked down at me then swelled the distance between us to a mile. “You’re really very stupid, even for an ant.”
“Admit it. She beat you.” Now that I knew I could at least twist him, I couldn’t lose the pleasure of it. “The first President Burnham fled here with Whitney Heller for your help. But you couldn’t help them.”
Cowell had gone perfectly still. He was looking at me with a funny expression—like he wasn’t really looking at me. Like something behind his eyes had died.
“Their bodies were found not far from here, is that right?” I went on. “Caked by a dump truck during the riots.”
Again, there was a strange pause, like the freeze that comes just before your whole system operator implodes. Then a ripple moved through Cowell’s body, and landed in his eyes to stir their focus.
“Their bodies,” Cowell repeated softly. “Yes. Their bodies were found.” And he started to laugh. If you’ve ever heard an asthmatic cat trying to cough up a petroleum-slicked river rat, you’ll know exactly what it sounded like. “That’s the whole point. It’s the brilliance of what he did,” Albert Cowell said. “Their bodies were found. And everyone assumed they were dead.”
“Mark.” President Burnham spoke his own name sharply.
But it was Cowell who answered. “It’s all right. He’s a dead man, anyway, isn’t he?”
“Any minute now,” Burnham said. To his credit, he didn’t even sound that happy about it. “As soon as the opiates get to his heart.”
As he clutched and unclutched the arms of his wheelchair, his emerald ring caught a bit of light and beamed it into my eyes.
Straight into my eyes.
Passing directly through Albert Cowell’s breastbone, muscle, tissue, and fat without so much as a molecular nudge.
My heart stopped for so long, I thought the tetrazabenzaminoid-55 had gone and done its work.
Albert Cowell was a hologram.
“You see, I’ve never gotten to tell anyone about my little triumph,” said Cowell the hologram. “President Burnham didn’t die out here. He simply left his body behind. Or rather … he traded it in.”
And he turned slowly to Mark J. Burnham, the last president’s only son, trembling in his chair.
49
If you’ve never been to an auction when a whole country’s up for sale, I recommend it for a simple reason: sex. Nothing makes an aphrodisiac quite like the whole world gone belly-up and 50 percent off.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
“No.” The word barely flipped my tonsils before even it lost its nerve and dove back for my toes. “No.”
“The country was coming apart,” Cowell’s hologram said. A big, dark, ugly truth planted its nose right up to my ear and whispered a single name: Whitney Heller. Now that I was paying close attention, I could see the speakers didn’t always work just like they should: these words came from just a squeak too far to the left. I spotted a speaker in the picture frame on the shelves behind his head. “Rumors of mutiny were swelling in the ranks of soldiers on base—they’d been ordered to fight for the union, but many of them wanted secession instead. There was no time to verify the choice of physical shell.…”
I squeezed my hands into fists. My hands. I could move them again.
Burnham looked at me with watery eyes. “Multiple sclerosis,” he said. “Genetic. Didn’t show until my twenties. Even with the best treatment it did fucknuts but delay—”
He broke off as an explosion sounded off deep inside the complex: a massive, distant boom that briefly trembled the walls, like the surface aftereffects of sonic fracking. A second later, the smell of smoke tickled my nose hairs. Footsteps drilled overhead, shaking loose a flurry of ceiling plaster.
“What the hell was that?” Cowell said. As I watched, a snow flurry of dust swirled straight through the crown of his head, sifting down through his chest, stomach, and genital region to drop through his legs onto the carpet.
“Rafikov,” President Burnham said. He was holding tight to his armrests like he was worried about getting bucked off. “She must of made it inside.”
“Impossible.”
“What have I been trying to tell you? She has loyalists everywhere, even in the force. We’ve been suckered by a turncoat.”
Cowell’s holographic eyes just barely flicked in my direction. “Call Lopez-22 and tell him to get his dick out of that sorry cephalopod he calls his sex doll and bring the surgical swarm. IT too. We’ll want their help for the upload.”
I could tell from the way President Burnham’s eyes drifted toward his nose that he was trying hard to make a connection to the intercom system. That was the problem with the knock-off ThinkChips™: complex commands looked a lot like major constipation.
Finally, with a grunt, he pushed out a good connection. “Lopez-22,” he said out loud. “If you were waiting for a formal invitation, won’t you please get your sorry dick down here before we all have to learn the Russian anthem—?”
I launched for him. With a roar I catapulted out of my chair and dove, and I swear I thought when I soared through all that empty space where Albert Cowell’s body should of been that I could feel it—a moist, dewy, inside kind of emptiness, like I really was passing through some kind of body cavity.
I dropped hard on President Burnham and tumbled him straight off his chair and onto the carpet, chin down in the swell wool-and-cashmere weave. He was screaming, and I was screaming, and trying to hold on to him while he lashed around like some fossilized fish species come suddenly to life, and as he thrashed out he managed to topple a bronze bust that looked like a twenty-fifth-work-anniversary present received for being in the business of evil. It just missed pulverizing my ankle by inches when it crashed to the floor.
Suddenly, Cowell’s hologram blinked out. The bust cracked open, revealing a nest of technological innards: a nifty bit of machinery. That explained why Cowell had moved so easily for someone his age.
“Help!” Burnham was blubbering into thin air. It was easy enough to keep Burnham subdued—he could skant worm his way onto his back to keep from suffocating in the carpet. “Help! Help!”
“Shut up.” I climbed to my feet and ribbed him hard. He coughed, whimpered, and went quiet. Looking at him curled up there on the floor, his body twisted around its own failures, I didn’t want to believe it: Cowell had shoveled the original Burnham’s brain into the body of his son. “I could knock your head into a jelly mold, so be smart and tell me the truth. Who’s speaking for Cowell?”
“The drug should of killed you,” Burnham blubbered. “In all our clinical trials, tetrazabenzaminoid-55 effected paralysis and heart failure within minutes.…”
“Yeah, well, I bet your test subjects didn’t grow up in Crunch 407,” I told him. “I’ve been farting out more tetrazabenzaminoid-55 than you pumped me with since I was born. I’ll ask you again. Who’s speaking for Cowell?”
“I speak for myself.
”
The words came blasting out of every hidden speaker at once. There must of been hundreds of them, nested in the bookshelves and the walls, in the everyday objects scattered around the room.
The combined amplification nearly shattered my eardrums. I turned circles, scanning the walls and ceiling, as if the real Cowell—or whoever had his body—might sprout like a water stain from the crown molding.
“Show yourself,” I said. All the hair on my neck was standing up. It wouldn’t be long before Lopez-22—whoever he was—and a press of guards came rushing in to slice me open.
“I can’t. Ruins the magic. Besides, isn’t it fun this way?”
This time, each word came from a different audio output. A crossfire of his voice whipped me around in different directions.
“Tell me where you are,” I said.
There was no answer. On the floor, President Burnham began to laugh, although I could hardly tell the noise from choking. Lying on his back, with tremors seizing his hands into fists, he looked like some kind of overgrown shiver baby.
I grabbed a silver jackknife on Cowell’s desk, crouched next to Burnham, and got the blade to his throat.
“Tell me who you are,” I repeated to the air, “or Burnham dies. Both Burnhams.”
“You disappoint me, Mr. Wallace.” Even though the speech kept bouncing around the room, and dizzied me with all its directions, at least he’d muted the volume a little. “You really think we would be dumb enough to risk everything on the frailties of a mortal body? Haven’t you been listening at all?”
“He’s a crumb.” Burnham gasped through his own desperate laughter. “The crumbs don’t listen. They don’t think. They can’t.”
“Shut up.” I pressed the knife a little harder to his skin, so a bit of blood leaked onto the blade. “You’ve got ten seconds to show yourself before I knife him.”
“If you do, you’ll die with him,” Cowell’s voice said. “This is a panic room, Mr. Wallace. The door can only be unlocked with a code. So be careful of the president’s vocal cords. I fear that starving to death would be an especially unfortunate end, after all you’ve suffered.”
I knew he wasn’t bluffing. But for a split second, I didn’t care. For a split second, I almost did it anyway. I could see the gasping contractions of Burnham’s pulse, the fine ribbons of his veins ready to open their warmth. It was the closest I’d been to a hard-on since Vegas.
For a split second, I thought it might be worth it.
Then, with a short cry, I let Burnham’s head drop.
“Wise decision,” Cowell drawled.
I staggered to my feet and whirled around, blind with dumb rage, aiming my knife at a speaker almost invisible in an old-century paperweight. I drove the blade straight into the metal, or tried to—all it did was kick back a grinding reverb to my teeth.
“Where are you?” I spat out. Literally. The drug had left me with a bad taste and an excess of saliva. “I want to see you.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” Cowell’s voice responded, this time from an audio output on my left. I lunged, plunging my knife straight into the bookshelf, no longer thinking, no longer planning, cranking on a black desire to destroy, destroy, destroy, like a Jumphead snorting the apocalypse.
But Cowell only laughed.
“You’re stuck, Truckee.” Cowell’s voice still weaved over high notes of laughter. “There’s no point in being angry about it.”
I grabbed the first thing I could get my hands on—the decapitated Saam with the exposed skull of silicone and circuit boards—wound up like a base pitcher in Real Sports Death Challenge, and threw. I didn’t even know what I was aiming for. I wasn’t aiming. When the head sailed toward the curtains in the corner, I thought it would knock up against the wall behind them.
Instead, it sailed right through an invisible gap in the velvet.
Burnham screamed.
The curtains swayed a little, like drunks trying to keep their feet, and then went still. And for once, Cowell was silent.
I froze. One time, and one time only, I had the feeling I had then. It was back in Low Hill, when I was a kid, eight or nine, after the city set up camp for a crowd of backlanders who said they were fleeing violence at the border of Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated: whole backlander towns were being slaughtered during nighttime raids, families executed in their sleep, villages torched.
What they didn’t say was that Sinopec had started raiding after the C-1 virus was reported at the border. From one day to the next, a dozen bodies piled up, then two dozen, then fifty. Airborne, antibiotic-immune, capable of waiting it out on surfaces, clothing, weapons, latrines for more than seventy-two hours, the C-1 flu found a host and then exploded them from inside, rocking them with the death rattle, leaking blood from their eyes and mouth, punching out explosive sneezes that fountained the virus another fifty feet.
Two hundred thousand people died in Low Hill in a single week before every carrier was quarantined. Every carrier but one: a little girl, they said, who’d somehow slipped out of the sick camp using one of the drop chutes to unload bodies straight into reinforced metal tanks usually used for nuclear waste.
For a whole day, no one could talk about anything but that girl, and the death sentence she was carrying, and where the hell she could be. Jared and I scared each other by pretending to spot her in the distance. We thought of all the ways she could lure us toward her—by twisting herself up in one of the storm drains and pretending she needed help, by hiding her face behind her hair so we wouldn’t notice the blood leak until too late.
Hurrying back from Jared’s squat before curfew, I got bottlenecked behind a crowd stopped to watch HR arrest a low-level quality-control tech whose neighbors had reported him for sneezing on shift. He was resisting—getting sent to quarantine was a death sentence—and I’d just turned onto one of the narrow trash streams we called alleys when I heard HR game him with two gunshots to the head.
I was all alone. The alleys were dark, even when we weren’t blacked out, which we were then; the quarantine camp ran a lot of electricity to keep the air from flowing outside. And suddenly I got the strangest feeling, like a wet willie in the ear but over my whole body: the wet, slippery insertion of something wrong.
I turned around, and there she was. She was smaller than I’d pictured. Her face was mostly in shadow. As far as I could tell her eyes weren’t glowing red, her teeth weren’t sharpened to demon points. She looked like a kid.
Except that when she came forward, into a narrow tunnel of light thrown by my visor, her mouth was crusty with blood.
For a second, she just stared at me, while all the fear in the world made a circuit in my body.
She said, “I’m gonna sneeze.”
And in the split second before my brain sent the order to run down to my legs, standing in the dark with a black-mouthed kid a sneeze away from dragging me into death with her, I felt like how I felt walking toward the velvet curtains.
“Don’t.” Burnham levered himself up on his elbow, clawing for his chair, missing it by inches. I nudged it well out of the way, and panic twisted his face into desperate geometries. “Don’t go back there. You’ll regret it, I swear to God, you’ll be sorry—”
But it was too late. I’d already reached the curtains. The narrow gap between them almost leapt to meet my fingers, like all along the entrance had been waiting.
I took a deep breath. I imagined I heard a hundred hidden speakers sigh with me.
Then I passed through the curtains.
50
Nowadays they can make smart viruses and modified blind shrimp to water-filter out the chemical deposits in the Chesapeake Bay. They can make mosquitos deliver vaccines with every bite and robots to beat your ass at chess any day of the week. But they still can’t figure out how to make a rich-type good.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
The giant brain was, in real life, probably a normal size.
But cabled to a dec
onstructed spine of a thousand filament-thin wires, floating in an amniotic murk, in a fish tank that doubled my reflection on its surface, and raised like a deformed sun above a worshipful city of servers, hard drives, command modules, next-tech, and rec-tech, it looked three, even four times the average.
I don’t know how long I stood there. Time flies, it turns out, when a gigantic disembodied brain is shimmying thoughts at you through a hundred thousand jumper cables and a nutrient-rich solvent the color of severely dehydrated piss.
In the end, I could come up with only one thing to say. “What the actual fuck?”
The brain lit up the neon of mutant fireflies exploding against a flyswatter. “I’d shake your hand, but…” I swear, if a brain could shrug, this one did.
The translation of electrochemical impulses into computer code into a human voice had gone through an algorithmic tweak: the voice that spoke now was gravel-infected with Old New York, more rough around the edges, big money lacquered over very dirty hands.
And I knew it.
“Burnham,” I said. In a split second, I was sure: this massive, globulant mess of neurons was Mark C. Burnham, alive all this time—or half alive, depending on how you counted it.
“Sorry about the Cowell bit” was his response. I watched the brain think all the words a split second before I heard them: a pyrotechnic, multicolored fireworks of different neuronal activity. “But for obvious reasons, I like to stay behind the scenes. Only a few people on the whole base even know that Cowell died during the riots.”
“You’ve been playing Cowell for half a century?” I said.
“Not playing. It’s serious grunt work, running Crunch, United, ops from an RFN military base.” His accent roughed up when he got annoyed.
I was dizzied by the insanity of it all. “But your son—” I started, and broke off when Mark J. Burnham began to shriek.