Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Well, get your ass back here. They’re sending a car for us. Don’t make them wait.”

  “Don’t you think we kind of need to get out of that field before we start streaming for big sponsors? We’re not going to look super impressive if we get our asses handed to us on—”

  “We’re not going to have big sponsors if we piss them off, so get a move on.”

  I open my mouth to reply, but CALL ENDED is flashing across my field of vision. I blink it away and sigh. “Sorry, guys,” I tell the dogs. “I’ll make it up to you next time.”

  As I run them back toward the rear doors of the school, it occurs to me that this is the same thing Jessa told me yesterday. I hope I’m more convincing.

  * * *

  THE CAR IS waiting when I get back, idling by the sidewalk, Jessa making hurry-up eyes at me through the rear window while I walk my bike around to the lockup. It’s a battered old electric car done over at least twice in flaking suntouch paint, for all the good it’s doing in this weather. The sun hasn’t come out in days. The fact that they’ve left the car running on last week’s battery charge suggests extravagance, probably deliberate. It’s at odds with the general condition of the car itself. It looks like somebody’s DIY project. For all I know, it is.

  Jessa reaches across the back seat and opens the door for me. I realize why when I get in and see there’s no driver. For such an ancient-looking car, this is faintly surprising.

  I settle in, trying to calm my nerves. The car’s interior is aggressively nondescript. Like it’s been expressly calibrated to make it impossible to remember in a witness deposition. Which does wonders for my mood.

  “Please fasten your seatbelt,” the car tells me, and once I do, it takes off at exactly the speed limit. “Would you like music?”

  “No thank you,” Jessa says. Then, quieter, to me: “It’s just a meeting. Sponsors meet with players all the time. You know this.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You were thinking it.”

  I don’t seem to have anything to say to that, so several minutes of silence ensue, both of us looking out our windows. The car pulls out onto the highway and through an underpass, then on past the old mall. People still live there, although it’s older than our hotel, and one whole wing of it has totally collapsed, and there’s a sinkhole in the parking lot that’s visible even from three lanes away at high speed. People live in the lot, too, of course, in tents and lean-tos and campers and cars, just like in the back field of the high school and the old supermarket’s parking lot and anywhere the ground is reasonably open and levelish and not too prone to floods big enough to make the news.

  Like the hotel, the mall has no name anymore. Nobody knows if the signs just broke or vanished with age, or if Stellaxis had them removed when old town was turned into housing and they didn’t want any other brand names appearing on their turf. Probably that.

  Jessa and I exchange a look as we whip past the mall and away. We’re maybe eight miles from the hotel, and I’m officially the farthest I’ve been from old town since I came out of the camps and got relocated there four years ago.

  Maybe five miles after the mall we start slowing down. Traffic’s backed up ahead of us. I see the party lights of cop cars, the gigantic silver-black lump of a roller mech. A checkpoint.

  A little noise comes out of Jessa, and she immediately starts twisting around in her seat to get a clear view. “They’re not going to post any SecOps out here in the middle of the road,” I tell her, although they’ve certainly done weirder. “It’d be a—” I dredge my memory for the newsfeed phrase—“a disproportionate response.”

  “They sent 33 and 38 to sit on the checkpoint out by the Monument that one time,” she replies.

  “Yeah, and 33 and 38 are dead now,” I say, as if there’s an existing crumb of SecOps trivia on which Jessa needs reminding. “They’re not getting sent anywhere.”

  Jessa isn’t listening or doesn’t care. She rolls down her window to crane her neck, but right then the potential reality of the situation hits me, and I reach across her to roll it back up. “The air might not be safe,” I hiss at her. “This thing is driving us into a war zone, Jessa.”

  I mash my sleeve against my nose and mouth like it’s any kind of filter. With my free hand I dig the last two masks out of my backpack, pass one to Jessa, slip the other over my face.

  Waiting for the smart paper to adhere to the shape of my mouth and nose, on full alert for whatever might have already come through the windows and landed in my lungs. The soldiers at the checkpoint ahead are in full filtration gear, but I have no idea if that’s just checkpoint regulation or if there’s an active crisis. Up until now one hundred percent of my checkpoint experience has been from watching news feeds, and one hundred percent of my airborne-chemical-agent experience has been from reading the daily safety announcements and staying inside until the warnings are lifted.

  It could be paralytics, it could be hallucinogens, it could be interface scramblers, it could be anything. I strain my senses for vanguard symptoms but come up empty-handed. No tightness in my throat, no warbly feeling behind my eyes, no pins and needles in my scalp, no phantom tastes in my mouth, and my lenses are still online. And there are no public safety warnings flashing on my display.

  Which just means it could be something new. Something so new that its clinical presentation doesn’t yet trigger an announcement. But I feel fine. Not take-the-mask-off fine, more like barely-avoid-the-inevitable-panic-attack fine, and that’s fine enough for now.

  Jessa, to my horror, hasn’t put her mask on. She’s twirling it on one finger, watching me with one raised eyebrow. “You finished?”

  “What?”

  She rolls her eyes. Rather than deign to reply out loud, my inbox chimes as she forwards me the realtime air quality location tracker so I can lay eyes on the all-clear for myself. “Have a little faith in people, Mal, god.”

  Okay, fine. Point taken. “Sorry,” I say. “It’s just… this is kind of a lot.”

  “Right? Tell you what. If you get killed out here, you have my permission to haunt me. And, like, I mean, really fuck with me. Go nuts. Make the walls bleed.”

  Under the mask, my mouth quirks up a little. “Noted.”

  But we’ve reached the checkpoint by now, and we both shut up fast and do our best to look like people who know exactly where they’re going and exactly what they’re planning to do when they get there. Wherever we’re going, whoever we’re meeting with, whatever we’re supposed to do, I’ll take my chances with it over an interrogation cell any day. They’ve got one over by the roller mech, a pop-up prefab gumdrop shape with the Stellaxis logo on the side and a sentry posted at the door. The faint screams I think I hear are probably just in my head.

  We roll through the scanner field at walking speed and then stop while a soldier analyzes the readout and another soldier inspects us through the windows. I do my best to look bored. Jessa is attempting the same, though it lasts about three seconds before she’s twisting around to stare some more, like she really thinks she stands any chance of spotting 06 or 21 or whoever out here scanning traffic at the ass crack of dawn. I try to ignore how nervous she’s making me. “You look like a tourist,” I mutter at her.

  “Well, we kind of are,” she replies.

  I guess they’re used to this kind of thing, because nobody flags it as suspicious, at least not visibly. Almost immediately there’s a soldier waving us on. The car speeds up and joins the stream of traffic exiting the scanner fields in other lanes, and within a mile we’re in among the glass and steel and concrete of New Liberty City. It spreads around us exponentially like something unfolding.

  If we might have looked like tourists before, we probably definitely do now. We both used to live here, of course, just like Tegan and Talya and Suresh and Jackson and Keisha and Allie and Ryan, and everyone else in the hotel and the mall and all the schools, all throughout old town. But it was so long ago most of us don’t
remember. Or if we do, we remember the idea of the city more than the real thing. The version that’s on the newsfeeds and the entertainment feeds and in the movies. And, of course, in the game.

  The real thing looks both shinier and dirtier, bigger and smaller, safer and more dangerous, realer and more fake. Which of course makes no sense. But I can tell from Jessa’s face that she’s thinking pretty much the same thing.

  Weird to think how we used to live here with families like normal city people, before our families died in the war, one way or another, and we were relocated from camp to camp until we washed up in old town. I haven’t seen my family since I was eight. That’s twelve years ago. Of course, I’m not supposed to think sad things about the war dead. I’m supposed to think about how they died for free trade and liberty and American values, like they stood on the front line themselves and laid down suppressive fire on the enemy.

  Except they didn’t die fighting. They died halfway through Friday pizza dinner because somebody’s smart bomb wasn’t as smart as they thought. I’m only here in this car in one piece because my parents took the ninety-second warning the proximity alert gave them and spent it tossing me in the bathtub with a blanket and a bottle of water and some granola bars and my favorite stuffed dog and then piled in on top of me and told me bad jokes to keep me from crying.

  I don’t even remember my mom’s face that clearly, but I remember the last joke she told:

  Why don’t you ever see elephants hiding in trees?

  Because they’re really good at it.

  And I remember the sound of that bomb. It came down on us like something singing. Like a bird. It took the rescue team two days to find me, and that sound stayed trapped in my head that whole time, echoing.

  Sometimes I wonder where all our dead families are buried. Somehow I can’t picture a graveyard here, not like the one near the diner in old town, with the moss on the gravestones and those huge, ancient trees.

  Not that we all had bodies to bury. Keisha’s family was vaporized in a nano strike. Suresh’s grandmother caught a resonance grenade at a protest and was reduced to a puddle of sludge inside a minute. Tegan and Talya’s parents were crushed like mine, but in the lobby of their building, with three hundred apartments landing on top of them. It’s only because Tegan and Talya were out playing on the sidewalk that they survived.

  My mom didn’t even have time to tell me that punchline herself. I came across the same joke one time by accident, years later, somewhere online.

  * * *

  ONCE UPON A time I guess there was a government that did things. Once upon a time it had its own military, took care of the country’s infrastructure, education, that kind of thing. I wonder if the government would have fought the war the way the corporations do. I wonder if it would have been more careful.

  Once upon a time there were lots of corporations. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe, I don’t know. Once upon a time the government decided to give fifty-one of the biggest corporations control of the fifty-one states there used to be. They just auctioned them off, the way Jessa auctions off her duplicate SecOps merch online. But the corporations merged with each other and bought each other out and took each other over, and when they did, they took control of those corporations’ states at the same time.

  Once upon a time Stellaxis Innovations didn’t control upwards of ninety percent of the country’s water. Once upon a time Greenleaf Industries didn’t control upwards of ninety percent of the country’s agribusiness. They didn’t even start out as water and agribusiness companies. They grew and rebranded and renamed and sucked other corporations into themselves like black holes—biotech, pharma, entertainment, communications, defense industries, you name it—until there were only two left standing. Stellaxis and Greenleaf.

  At the time of the last merger, a few years before I was born, there were forty-five states left that didn’t belong to the ocean. Stellaxis Innovations had control of twenty-three of them, and Greenleaf Industries had the other twenty-two. Then I guess they decided they weren’t going to merge anymore, just divide what was left of what used to be a country between them.

  One of Stellaxis’s states used to be New York. One of Greenleaf’s states used to be Massachusetts. But their original company HQs have been sitting under a few dozen feet of salt water along with good-size pieces of their company-states since the late twenty-first century, long before the last merger. So, at the turn of the century, when New Liberty City was built along with the other amalgam supercities, it was built as kind of a mash-up of the two.

  There are nine supercities in total. All huge, all built on the same principle as a kid putting her sandcastle well back from the tide.

  But either the other supercities didn’t spark corporate turf wars or they settled them some other way, but in any case, right now Stellaxis and Greenleaf each own four. I’ve heard it’s because Stellaxis was founded in New York City and Greenleaf was founded in Boston that they both kind of took the idea of controlling New Liberty a little more personally. Of all the supercities, it’s the only one that’s been sparking and smoldering its way through civil war for longer than Jessa or I or anyone else in our room has been alive. Stellaxis HQ on the west edge of the city, Greenleaf HQ on the east, throwing punches at each other like a couple of cage fighters trying to get control of the ring. The outcome of which makes more or less fuckall practical difference to the forty-eight million people who happen to live in the cage.

  I don’t know anyone old enough to remember the prewar world. We all make vague when-it’s-over noises, sure, but nobody really has any kind of clear sense what that might imply. What the world might look like without Stellaxis Innovations SecOps and Greenleaf Industries mechs kicking each other’s asses in the streets every day. Without water rations and air quality alerts and checkpoints and housing lotteries. We’ve seen old movies, seen people living in houses with lawns, water that runs out of the faucet for free. Traveling wherever the fuck they like.

  When Stellaxis wins the war, things will be better. No more fighting. No more power curfew. No more water rationing. The cost of food will drop. Travel restrictions will lift. Where I come from, you learn that around the time you learn your ABCs.

  It sounds… if I’m honest, really truly brutally honest with myself, I don’t even know. A world without all those things is hard to imagine living in. It might as fucking well be Jupiter.

  * * *

  THE CAR SLIDES through traffic in silence and eventually stops across the street from a park. It’s not much of one, just a rectangle of grass maybe the size of the company store. No playground for kids, not like the one near the old town high school. All there is is a statue, dusted with either old snow or pigeon shit or maybe both. Too far away to make out what it’s even a statue of. Some people standing together around something. There’s a sign at the edge of the dead grass that reads PROSPERITY PARK.

  “Here?” I ask the car. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” the car replies. “Look to your right. Two hundred yards.”

  I look. Past the statue, way back at the rear of the park, I spot a woman sitting on a bench, her face obscured by steam from a dispenser coffee. She raises her chin incrementally in my direction.

  “Game on,” Jessa tells me, which doesn’t strike me as being nearly as funny as she probably intends.

  We get out of the car. As soon as we shut our doors behind us, it leaves.

  0004

  JESSA AND I WORK OUR WAY THROUGH the park, following the clear trail of a paved jogging path through the snow. Our route takes us past the statue, close enough to make out what it represents. It’s a group of figures posing in a ring, young people in clean-cut uniforms, holding the broken earth between them like they can push it back together by force.

  The statue looks brand-new, or like it’s been here forever. It looks like something out of the game. In fact I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it in the game. I feel momentarily dizzy.

  I count the figures as I go
past, although I already know how many there’ll be.

  Beside me, Jessa gives a little gasp. “That’s When All Else Fails,” she says, pointing to the statue. “I’ve only seen it in-game.” She elbows me. “Look, there’s your good friend 28.”

  I glance up. From this angle, 28 is beaming down at me beatifically. Someone should really teach you how to drive that thing.

  “Whatever this is, it better be good,” I say. I shove my hands in my pockets and walk faster.

  When we’re maybe twenty feet from the bench, the woman doubles over cursing, messing with her face.

  I hurry the last few steps. “Hey. You okay?”

  “It’s the grit in the air,” she says, blinking hard. “It’s screwing with my lenses. This happens almost every day lately. Don’t you notice it?”

  She removes one lens, then the other, and pops them in their case. She looks back up at me like she’s trying to project a thought into my head. Which is strange. If she’d just kept the lenses in, she could have messaged—

  Oh.

  Here’s the thing, though. Do I trust this random stranger?

  I hesitate, but just for a second. Whatever this is, it’s shaping up to be more interesting than whatever I’d be doing back home. Besides, I have my taser in my backpack in case things go wrong.

  “Ow,” I say. “Oh wow. You’re right, it’s pretty bad here.” I swing my backpack around to get at my lens case. “Oh well, I needed to clean these anyway.” I pop the lenses out of my eyes and into the case, making sure to position myself in full view of Jessa while I do it.

  Lucky for me, she’s smart. She takes about point-five seconds to catch on and take her lenses out too, muttering about air quality and half-assed public safety announcements, a continuous stream of self-righteous irritation that stops abruptly as soon as she shuts the lid on the case. She folds her arms and watches the woman on the bench with the dialed-back aggrievement of a person who really wants to protest a situation and equally really does not want to screw up a potential future situation by doing so.