vicious kick at the doorbone, and it banged open. I went through.
For years I had imagined that if only I could get into the head I could meet
my real mother. Touch her. I had always wondered what she looked like; she
got reshaped just after I was born. When I was little I used to think of her as a magic princess glowing with fairy light. Later I pictured her as one or
another of my friends’ moms, only better dressed. After I had started getting
twanked, I was afraid she might be just a brain floating in nutrient solution,
like in some pricey memory bank. All wrong.
The interior of the head was dark and absolutely freezing.
There was no sound except for the hum of refrigeration units. “Mom?” My
voice echoed in the empty space. I stumbled and caught myself against a
smooth wall. Not skin, like everywhere else in Mom—metal. The tears froze
on my face.
“There’s nothing for you here,” she said. “This is a clean room. You’re
compromising it. You must leave immediately.”
Sterile environment, metal walls, the bitter cold that superconductors
needed. I did not need to see. No one lived here. It had never occurred to me
that there was no Mom to touch. She had downloaded, become an electron
ghost tripping icy logic gates. “How long have you been dead?”
“This isn’t where you belong,” she said.
I shivered. “How long?”
“Go away,” she said.
So I did. I had to. I could not stay very long in her secret place, or I would
die of the cold.
As I reeled down the stairs, Mom herself seemed to shift beneath my feet
and I saw her as if she were a stranger. Dead—and I had been living in a
tomb. I ran past Nanny; she still sprawled where I had left her. All those years I had loved her, I had been in love with death. Mom had been sucking life
from me the way her refrigerators stole the warmth from my body.
Now I knew there was no way I could stay, no matter what anyone said. I
knew it was not going to be easy leaving, and not just because of the money.
For a long time Mom had been my entire world. But I could not let her use
me to pretend she was alive, or I would end up like her.
343
JAMES PATRICK KELLY
I realized now that the door had always stayed locked because Mom had to
hide what she had become. If I wanted, I could have destroyed her.
Downloaded intelligences have no more rights than cars or wiseguys. Mom
was legally dead and I was her only heir. I could have had her shut off, her
body razed. But somehow it was enough to go, to walk away from my
inheritance. I was scared, and yet with every step I felt lighter. Happier.
Extremely free.
I had not expected to find Tree waiting at the doorbone, chatting with
Comrade as if nothing had happened. “I just had to see if you were really the
biggest fool in the world,” she said.
“Out.” I pulled her through the door. “Before I change my mind.”
Comrade started to follow us. “No, not you.” I turned and stared back at
the heads on his window coat. I had not intended to see him again; I had
wanted to be gone before Montross returned him. “Look, I’m giving you back
to Mom. She needs you more than I do.”
If he had argued, I might have given in. The old unregulated Comrade would
have said something. But he just slumped a little and nodded and I knew that he was dead, too. The thing in front of me was another ghost. He and Mom were two
of a kind. “Pretend you’re her kid, maybe she’ll like that.” I patted his shoulder.
“Prekrassnaya ideya,” he said. “Spaceba.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. Tree and I trotted together down the long driveway.
Robot sentries crossed the lawn and turned their spotlights on us. I wanted to tell her she was right. I had probably just done the single most irresponsible thing of my life—
and I had high standards. Still, I could not imagine how being poor could be worse than being rich and hating yourself. I had seen enough of what it was like to be dead.
It was time to try living. “Are we going someplace, Mr. Boy?” Tree squeezed my hand.
“Or are we just wandering around in the dark?”
“Mr. Boy is a damn stupid name, don’t you think?” I laughed. “Call me Pete.”
I felt like a kid again.
344
WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU
By John Shirley
Nine A.M., and Jerome-X wanted a smoke. He didn’t smoke, but he wanted
one in here, and he could see how people went into prison non-smokers
and came out doing two packs a day. Maybe had to get their brains rewired
to get off it. Which was ugly, he’d been rewired once to get off Sink,
synthetic cocaine, and he’d felt like a processor with a glitch for a month
after that.
He pictured his thoughts like a little train, zipping around the cigarette-
burnt graffiti: “YOU FUCKED NOW” and “GASMAN WUZZERE” and
“GASMAN IS AN IDIOT-MO.” The words were stippled on the dull pink
ceiling in umber burn spots. Jerome wondered who GASMAN was and what
they’d put him in prison for.
He yawned. He hadn’t slept much the night before. It took a long time to
learn to sleep in prison. He wished he’d upgraded his chip so he could use it
to activate his sleep endorphins. But that was a grade above what he’d been
able to afford—and way above the kind of brain chips he’d been dealing. He
wished he could turn off the light panel, but it was sealed in.
There was a toilet and a broken water fountain in the cell. There were also
a few bunks, but he was alone in this static place of watery blue light and
faint pink distances. The walls were salmon-colored garbage blocks. The
words singed into the ceiling were blurred and impotent.
Almost noon, his stomach rumbling, Jerome was still lying on his back on the
top bunk when the trashcan said, “Eric Wexler, re-ma-a-in on your bunk
while the ne-ew prisoner ente-e-ers the cell!”
Wexler? Oh, yeah. They thought his name was Wexler. The fake ID
program.
He heard the cell door slide open; he looked over, saw the trashcan ushering
a stocky Chicano guy into lockup. The robot everyone called “the trashcan”
was a stumpy metal cylinder with a group of camera lenses, a retractable
plastic arm, and a gun muzzle that could fire a Taser charge, rubber bullets,
JOHN SHIRLEY
tear-gas pellets, or .45-caliber rounds. It was supposed to use the .45 only in extreme situations, but the robot was battered, it whined when it moved, its
digital voice was warped. When they got like that, Jerome had heard, you
didn’t fuck with them; they’d mix up the rubber bullets with the .45-caliber,
Russian Roulette style.
The door sucked itself shut, the trashcan whined away down the hall, its
rubber wheels squeaking once with every revolution. Jerome heard a tinny
cymbal crash as someone, maybe trying to get it to shoot at a guy in the next
cell, threw a tray at it; followed by some echoey human shouting and a
distorted admonishment from the trashcan. The Chicano was still standing
by the plexigate, hands shoved in his pockets, staring at Jerome, looking like
he was trying to place him.
“’Sappenin’,” Jerome sai
d, sitting up on the bed. He was grateful for the
break in the monotony.
“Que pasa? You like the top bunk, huh? Tha’s good.”
“I can read the ceiling better from up here. About ten seconds’ worth of
reading matter. It’s all I got. You can have the lower bunk.”
“You fuckin’-A I can.” But there was no real aggression in his tone. Jerome
thought about turning on his chip, checking the guy’s subliminals, his somatic
signals, going for a model of probable-aggression index; or maybe project for
deception. He could be an undercover cop: Jerome hadn’t given them his
dealer, hadn’t bargained at all.
But he decided against switching the chip on. Some jails had scanners for
unauthorized chip output. Better not use it unless he had to. And his gut told
him this guy was only a threat if he felt threatened. His gut was right almost
as often as his brain chip.
The Chicano was maybe five foot six, a good five inches shorter than
Jerome but probably outweighing him by fifty pounds. His face had Indian
angles and small jet eyes. He was wearing printout gray-blue prison jams,
#6631; they’d let him keep his hairnet. Jerome had never understood the
Chicano hairnet, never had the balls to ask about it.
Jerome was pleased. He liked to be recognized, except by people who could
arrest him.
“You put your hands in the pockets of those paper pants, they’ll rip, and in
LA County they don’t give you any more for three days,” Jerome advised him.
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WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU
“Yeah? Shit.” The Chicano took his hands carefully out of his pockets. “I
don’t want my cojones hanging out, people think I’m advertising—they some
big fucking cojones too. You not a faggot, right?”
“Nope.”
“Good. How come I know you? When I don’t know you.”
Jerome grinned. “From television. You saw my tag. Jerome-X. I mean—I do
some music too. I had that song, ‘Six Kinds of Darkness’—”
“I don’t know that, bro—oh wait, Jerome-X. The tag—I saw that. Your
face-tag. You got one of those little transers? Interrupt the transmissions with your own shit?”
“Had. They confiscated it.”
“That why you here? Video graffiti?”
“I wish. I’d be out in a couple months. No. Illegal augs.”
“Hey, man! Me too!”
“You?” Jerome couldn’t conceal his surprise. You didn’t see a lot of barrio
dudes doing illegal augmentation. They generally didn’t like people tinkering
in their brains.
“What, you think a guy from East LA can’t use augs?”
“No, no. I know lots of Latino guys that use it,” Jerome lied.
“Ooooh, he says Latino, that gotta nice sound.” Overtones of danger.
Jerome hastily changed the direction of the conversation. “You never been
in the big lockups where they use these fuckin’ paper jammies?”
“No, just the city jail once. They didn’t have those motherfucking screw
machines either. Hey, you’re Jerome—my name’s Jessie. Actually, it Jesus”—
he pronounced it “hay-soo”—“but people they, you know . . . You got any
smokes? No? Shit. Okay, I adjust. I get used to it. Shit. No smokes. Fuck.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, to one side of Jerome’s dangling legs, and tilted his head forward. He reached under his hairnet, and under what turned out to
be a hairpiece, and pulled a chip from a jack unit set into the base of his skull.
Jerome stared. “Goddamn, their probes really are busted.”
Jessie frowned over the chip. There was a little blood on it. The jack unit
was leaking. Cheap installation. “No, they ain’t busted, there’s a guy working
on the probe, he’s paid off, he’s letting everyone through for a couple of days because of some Russian mob guys coming in, he don’t know which ones they
are. Some of them Russian mob guys got the augments.”
349
JOHN SHIRLEY
“I thought sure they were going to find my unit,” Jerome said. “The strip
search didn’t find it, but I thought the prison probes would and that’d be
another year on my sentence. But they didn’t.”
Neither one of them thinking of throwing away the chips. It’d be like
cutting out an eye.
“Same story here, bro. We both lucky.”
Jessie put the microprocessing chip in his mouth, the way people did with
their contact lenses, to clean it, lubricate it. Of course, bacterially speaking, it came out dirtier than it went in.
“Does the jack hurt?” Jerome asked.
Jessie took the chip out, looked at it a moment on his fingertips. It was smaller than a contact lens, a sliver of silicon and non-osmotic gallium arsenide and
transparent interface-membrane, with, probably, 800,000,000 nanotransistors
of engineered protein molecules sunk into it, maybe more. “No, it don’t hurt
yet. But if it’s leaking, it fuckin’ will hurt, man.” He said something else in Spanish, shaking his head. He slipped the chip back into his jack-in unit and
tapped it with the thumbnail of his right hand. So that was where the activation mouse was: under the thumbnail. Jerome’s was in a knuckle.
Jessie rocked slightly, just once, sitting up on his bunk, which meant the
chip had engaged and he was getting a readout. They tended to feed back
into your nervous system a little at first, make you twitch once or twice; if
they weren’t properly insulated, they could make you crap your pants.
“That’s okay,” Jessie said, relaxing. “That’s better.” The chip inducing his
brain to secrete vasopressin, contract the veins, simulate the effect of
nicotine. It worked for a while, till you could get cigarettes. High-grade chip could do some numbing if you were hung up on Sim, synthetic morphine, and
couldn’t get any. But that was Big Scary. You could turn yourself off for good
that way. You better be doing some damn fine adjusting.
Jerome thought about the hypothetical chip scanners. Maybe he should
object to the guy using his chip here. But what the Chicano was doing
wouldn’t make for much leakage.
“What you got?” Jerome asked.
“I got an Apple NanoMind II. Big gigas. What you got?”
“You got the Mercedes, I got the Toyota. I got a Seso Picante Mark I. One
of those Argentine things.” (How had this guy scored an ANM II?)
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WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU
“Yeah, what you got, they kinda basic, but they do most what you need.
Hey, our names, they both start with J. And we both here for illegal augs.
What else we got in common. What’s your sign?”
“Uh—” What was it, anyway? He always forgot. “Pisces I think.”
“No shit! I can relate to Pisces. I ran an astrology program, figured out who
I should hang with. Pisces is okay. But Aquarius is—I’m a Scorpio, like—
Aquarius, que bueno.”
What did he mean exactly, hang with, Jerome wondered. Scoping me about
am I a faggot, maybe that was something defensive.
But he meant something else. “You know somethin’, Jerome, you got your
chip too, we could do a link and maybe get over on that trashcan.”
Break out? Jerome felt a chilled thrill go through him. “Link with that
thing? Control it? I don’t think the two of us would b
e enough.”
“We need some more guys maybe, but I got news, Jerome, there’s more
comin’. Maybe their names all start with J. You know, I mean—in a way.”
In quick succession, the trashcan brought their cell three more guests: a fortyish beach bum named Eddie; a cadaverous black dude named Bones; a queen called
Swish, whose real name, according to the trashcan, was Paul Torino.
“This place smells like it’s comin’ apart,” Eddie said. He had a surfer’s
greasy blond topknot and all the usual Surf Punk tattoos. Meaningless now,
Jerome thought; the pollution-derived oxidation of the offshore had pretty
much ended surfing. The anaerobics had taken over the surf, in North
America, thriving in the toxic waters like a gelatinous Sargasso. If you surfed you did it with an antitoxin suit and a gas mask. “Smells in here like somethin’
died and didn’t go to heaven. Stinks worse’n Malibu.”
“It’s those landfill blocks,” Bones said. He was missing three front teeth,
and his sunken face was like something out of a zombie video. But he was an
energetic zombie, pacing back and forth as he spoke. “Compressed garbage,”
he told Eddie. “Organic stuff mixed with the polymers, the plastics, whatever
was in the trash heap, make ’em into bricks ’cause they run outta landfill, but after a while, if the contractor didn’t get ’em to set right, y’know, they start to rot. It’s hot outside is why you’re gettin’ it now. Use garbage to cage garbage, they say. Fucking assholes.”
• • •
351
JOHN SHIRLEY
The trashcan pushed a rack of trays up to the Plexiglas bars and whirred
their lunch to them, tray by tray. The robot gave them an extra tray. It was
screwing up.
They ate their chicken patties—the chicken was almost greaseless,
gristleless, which meant it was vat chicken, genetically engineered fleshstuff—
and between bites they bitched about the food and indulged the usual
paranoid speculation about mind-control chemicals in the coffee.
Jerome looked around at the others, thinking: at least they’re not ass-
kickers.
They were crammed here because of the illegal augs sweep, some political
drive to clean up the clinics, maybe to see to it that the legal augmentation
companies kept their pit bull grip on the industry. So there wasn’t anybody in
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