by Jerry
She was angelic, leaning against an old kerosene pump at the side of the station Deep chocolate skin, radiant in the hazy noon sun. Fine bones. Short cropped hair highlighting a perfectly shaped skull. Beaming smile. Timeless fashion sense, if her jumpsuit and scarf ensemble wasn’t a fluke.
All in all, one of the prettiest nine-year old girls I’d ever seen. “My god,” Dave said, his cigarette dropping into his lap. “She’s a kid.”
“Looks that way.”
“Quick—I don’t think she’s seen us. Turn the car around and floor it.”
“No way, buddy,” I said, smiling for the first time since this little road trip started. “I live to see you mortally embarrassed, and this promises to be the big one.”
“I hate you. Really.”
“I know. And your jeans are on fire.”
He yelped and started patting his lap.
In the back, Bill was waking up. “We’re stopping? What’s going on?”
“Make yourself presentable. We’re gon’na meet Dave’s significant other.”
During the car ride to a sushi and waffle joint, Dave and Salona—that was the kid’s name—didn’t say much to each other. I figured it was just the expected uneasiness of a first meeting in the flesh, which the surprise age difference wasn’t helping. But it was more than that: Dave was in a true funk. I could see it in the way he held himself as he drove, in the shortness of his answers to the small talk I was trying to keep alive, in his avoiding eye contact with the kid. Why, I couldn’t put a finger on.
At the restaurant, Dave wasn’t any more lively. In fact, his funk was evolving in to a seething. It was all I could do to keep the conversation light. Of course, that responsibility didn’t keep me from asking how she’d managed to make Dave think she was ten-years older than tier actual nine-years “I used an AI agent to up my vocab, use bigger words, ya know,” Salona said, swishing a straw in her Coke “I thought you were closer to my age—but you were probably using an agent to dumb yourself down, right?”
i had to bite my inner cheek to keep from chuckling. Dave shrugged non-commitally, then drew deep on his cig. “So what else were you lying about?”
“Davey, I wasn’t really lying. It was more like playing, okay? Please don’t be hurt.”
She paused for him to say something, anything, but he only exhaled and stared into his coffee.
“Except for the age thing, everything I told you was true. I do have two moms, I’m into Burroughs and Lucas and Neo-Paganism. I love walking up the beach even when its nasty out and I have to wear a tox suit. That was all real.”
“You have two moms?” Bill asked. He’d been silent so for, slowly and precisely eating his lunch of eggs and bacon-flavored tofu, which he’d paid for in advance with ten-dollar coins. “Biological? Or just the old divorce and remarriage game?”
“Biological.”
“Which one carried you?”
“Neither of them wanted the hassle. They rented a surrogate.”
“Human?”
“Goat.”
“Umm,” Bill mumbled, then went back to his food.
Dave looked up from his coffee. “Speaking of sex . . .”
“We’re we?” I asked, desperately wanting to avoid the topic. Salona didn’t take the opportunity to change the subject. “Oh, that.” She sounded awfully blasé for a nine year old. “We never actually had sex, Dave.”
“I was there, remember?”
“You may have been—but I wasn’t. Whenever things started to get ichy I let Barbarella take over.”
“Barbarella?”
“That’s what I call it.”
“Another agent?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure got a lot of agents.”
“Got a friend who sends me Iranian pirate-ware.”
“So, we never had sex?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Well.” After a long pause, he asked, “Can I get a copy of Barbarella?”
“If you want.”
Dave ground his cigarette out in the disposable paper ashtray. His normal goofy smile returned, and the cloud of tension lifted from our table. “Cool.”
Salona seemed relieved. “Cool.”
Bill picked that moment to finish his lunch and excuse himself. He headed for the bathroom.
As soon as he was out of earshot, Salona leaned forward conspiratorially. “So, where’d you pick him up?”
“Outside of Salt Lake,” Dave said. “This morning. He’s kind of weird, but harmless enough.”
“You mean you don’t know who he is?”
I scratched my left ear “Should we?”
“It’s all over the grid. Don’t you guys ever plug in to CNNet?”
“We make news, we don’t watch it,” Dave said. “Anyway, you want to let us in on the story?”
“You heard of Daktarisoft? Your hitchhiker friend is the CEO.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but when I was your age, I thought my neighbor was Jim Carrey. He wasn’t—he was just some old weird guy who liked to dress up in leotards and do bad Jerry Lewis shtick. Maybe Bill just looks like this CEO guy.”
“This isn’t my imagination.” Salona shook her head. “That’s him.”
“Okay, what if he is? So he likes to hitchhike. Big deal. Interesting coincidence we picked him up. That’s all.”
Salona sighed. “He wasn’t on the nets because he likes to hitchhike. He was on the nets because he’s gone AWOL.”
“He walked away from Daktarisoft?”
“Yep. And Daktarisoft wants him back. He’s more than their CEO, he’s their main brain He’s coded about every piece of software they’ve got on the market Go on, ask me how bad they want him back.”
Dave took the bait “How bad they want him back?”
“Real bad. Thirty million bad.”
“That’s bad,” I said, after a whistle.
“Buy a lot of gum,” Salona said.
Suddenly I understood why Dave felt such a connection with the girl. “Yes, it would.”
Across the restaurant, Bill came out of the men’s room. The three of us smiled at each other. A lot of gum, indeed.
On the pretense of giving Salona a ride home, the four of us piled into the Dodge after lunch. Dave and Salona up front, chatting and laughing like old friends, Dave driving, Salona giving directions.
I was in the back with Bill. He didn’t have a clue. I pointed out a midget walking along the sidewalk. He turned to gawk, and that’s when I shoved the magnetosphere stick against his temple and hit the power stud. He convulsed, once, then his eyes glazed, his teeth crackled, and his body went slack.
Dave stopped the car and went to get a straight-jacket from the trunk.
I turned to Salona. “Where can we drop you off?”
“No way. It was my idea,” she said. “I’m going with you.”
“We’ll send you your share.”
“Right Dave I trust You, not.”
“I’m hurt.”
“Like I care. I’m going.”
I sneered. “I could just throw you out, you know. Pavement hurts.” She sneered back. “And I could call the local panther militia and tell them you had your way with me. White boy like you attacking little old me, I’m sure they’d be eager to speak with you.”
I caved. “Fine, but you’re pitching in for gas.”
After we swung by Salona’s to let her grab an overnight bag—understanding moms she had, not even asking why or where she was going with two blatantly disreputable slacker mercenaries and a surfer in a straight jacket We hit the highway in the general direction of Boise and Daktarisoft corporatti headquarters.
Dave was teaching Salona how to drive. That was over my objections, but it was something Salona’s mothers never let her do, and she managed to needle Dave in to it. Like most nine-year olds she was a pro at getting what she wanted.
In the backseat, I was accessing the Net with the cell modem in my second righ
t floating rib. I didn’t feel like having the phone book inside my head so I went flat-screen, piping the directory to the one-inch display on my left palm. I fingered through the listings, looking for a number at the software giant that would get me a human.
“You can’t do this,” Bill said, watching me look up the number. “It’s not right.”
“No, it ain’t, strictly speaking. Then again, it’s profitable.”
“Great attitude. Hope you’ve got a lot of positive karma stored up.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to make a living. But I’m not entirely inhuman. The market price of your head is thirty mil. I’m open to counter offers.”
“I can’t offer anything like that.”
“For a guy who owns one of the biggest corporattis on the planet, you’re displaying an alarming lack of negotiating skills. The word ‘haggle’ mean anything to you?”
“I quit my corp, remember? And the corp controls all my assets. I could write you a check, but I don’t think the bank would honor it.”
“Well, then, I have to tell you, I don’t see much of a reason to let you go.”
“You know what the corp makes me do?”
“Attend board meetings? Schmooze with politicians at thousand-dollar a plate orgies? Ooh, must be a rough life.”
“They make me code.”
“Excuse me? I thought that’s what a coder does.”
“They make me code word processors. And spreadsheets. And home and small business finance AI’s. You can’t grok how boring that is.”
“That’s your whole gripe?”
“Man, you know how long its been since they let me code a game?”
“Games?”
“The last one I did was three years ago,” he said, a wistful look passing over his face. “Gun Point: Ultra Wombat. A real beauty. The code sang.”
“You did that one?”
He smiled, a proud father.
“Christ that game sucked.” I punched the main Daktarisoft Public Relations number. “Fucker kept killing me on level seven. Negotiations over. You’re going back.”
“Stop hitting me,” Bill yelped.
The back seat had been a den of whispered harsh words and restless road-borne hijinks for two hours. Both Salona and Bill were acting like children. Now things were getting physical. That was the last straw. I was officially annoyed.
I whipped around in the passenger seat. Salona was in the process of slamming her fist into Bill’s shoulder, but pulled the punch when she saw me glaring at her.
She looked at me innocently. “Hi.”
“She was hitting me.” Bill wriggled in the straight jacket. “Make her stop hitting me.”
“He was on my side,” she said, defiant.
“I was not,” Bill whined.
“Bill,” I growled, “you’ve got an i.q. that’s easily better than ninety-nine percent of the people on the planet So you think you can stop acting like a frigging spoiled brat?”
I turned towards Salona, pointed my finger at her. “And you—the second we give genius toe back to his corporation we become richer than God. You’ll have so much money you’ll be able to hire someone to go through puberty for you. So sit back, shut up, and don’t make me come back there.”
Salona threw her arms over her chest and a pout onto her face. But she didn’t say anything. Even nine year olds respect the power of imminent wealth.
After two days non-stop on the road, the four of us cramped in the two-door Swinger, the nerves of everyone in the car were understandably shaky at best Even Dave, who’d had his stomach chem factory pumping THC straight into his bloodstream, was showing the strain by continually humming the first three bars of Mussorgsky’s Dance of the Persian Slaves just loud enough to drown out the sound of the engine, the wind crashing through the open windows, and my own thoughts.
Good thing the end of our journey was near, ‘cause I was about to take my Walther out of its ankle holster and put a bullet into his throat One more hill to climb and we’d be at the delivery site.
“Oh, that’s interesting,” I said. Over the crest of the hill the car’s telemetry picked up a heat signature. That signature blossomed into a dozen as we got closer to the crest Right at the crest the dozen became hundreds, filling the HUD in my head with little red and pink dots.
Dave mercifully stopped humming. “What’s interesting?”
“Looks like a crowd up ahead, over the hill, blocking the road most likely.”
“Daktarisoft?”
“Since when does a corp send a thousand people to do the job of two stretch limos and an escort tank?”
“Point” Dave reached between his legs and pulled the lever under the driver’s seat to arm the Swinger’s defense systems. From inside the trunk came the ratcheting of the anti-missile missiles coming online. The dirty-beige paint on the skin of the car shifted into a darker brown as nanobots were released and weaved themselves into a coating of armor.
“More weirdness,” I announced. “There’s an infrared and electromagnet hole in the middle of the crowd.”
“A hole?”
“About 15 meters in diameter, spherical. Hiding something from telemetry.”
“I wonder what.”
We crested the hill and Dave’s question was answered.
A thousand or so people, some brandishing small arms, some with clubs and pointed sticks, others with exoskeleton VR rigs and notebooks, stood in a loose throng at the bottom of the hill. Sure enough, they were blocking the road. But not entirely by themselves.
Standing dead in the center of the road was a three-legged metal beast, an autonomous tank robo. But this was no regular military model. This one looked like it was built from spare parts in a garage in the suburbs. Two of its legs were thick, double jointed, rusty, while the third, shiny red and new, had a single joint and a cluster of hydraulic-pump digits as a foot A dozen stalks came off its torso, tipped with lasers, rail cannons, claws, and something that looked like an oversized egg-beater. Topping the torso was a true relic, the refurbished turret of a World War D Soviet T-34. I had a solid hunch the big gun still worked.
Dave hit the breaks, hard.
In the backseat Bill laughed. “Neat My fan club’s here.”
“Fan club?”
“I’m very popular with the gearhead and hacker crowd.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“How’d they know where the delivery was going down?” Salona asked. Suspicious eyes went from Dave, to me, to Bill, then back to me.
“You used a cell phone to call Daktarisoft,” Bill said.
I nodded. “Yeah, so?”
“The encryption on your average cell phone ain’t exactly military grade. Cracking it’s a party trick.”
“Oh, just fucking great.” I took the magnetosphere stick out of the glove compartment and tossed it to Salona. “Buzz him.”
“This is for hogging my side, asshole.” She jammed the stick into his ear. When he was unconscious, she asked, “Now what?”
Outside, the robo tank swiveled its main gun towards us, “They’re bluffing,” Dave said. “No way they’d hurt their hero.”
I shook my head. “Unless they figure Billy-boy’s the kind of guy who’d rather die than be forced to write boring code.”
“Point.”
While Dave nervously gripped and released the steering wheel, the car’s telemetry shot my bio-comp a flash-red warning. “Damn, damn, damn, damn. Sucker just image and radar locked us. I think it’s gon’na fire.”
lire crowd started moving towards us. We had enough ammo aboard to discourage them, but if the tank started lobbing lead, that wouldn’t matter.
Sizing up the tactical possibilities of the situation as they woe recited in order of odds by my bio-comp wasn’t encouraging. A shot list with tong odds.
And then the odds changed.
At first they were only blips on the radar, but at the speed they woe moving they were soon visible. There were a half-dozen of them,
roaring from the north, flattened ovals of reflective blue plastisteel. Copters. Corporate gun-ship copters.
I wasn’t the only one who spotted the copters. In a gentle, almost casual movement, the robo tank rotated its torso around to point the stalk with the egg-beater at the lead copter. The beater glowed red briefly and a second later the copter dropped out of the sty, no outward sign of what caused it to do so. At least that told me what the egg-beater was: HERF, High-Energy Radio Frequency projector. Glad it had been aimed at the copter and not us—it would have melted all the electronics in the car, including the ones in my skull.
The copter force reacted to the downing of their comrade by splitting into two groups, the last in each group loosing a volley of air-to-surface missiles as they peeled by. Two of the missiles hit the tank—one in the turret, the other in the shiny red kg—which the others detonated in the air, fanning shrapnel over the crowd below.
The tank staggered. The crowd got pissed-off En masse they started firing—mostly ineffectually—at the copters with rifles and pistols.
The copters were swinging around for another go, and file hackers got smart A couple of them brought out bazookas and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.
Things were going to get real messy.
“Now would be a good time to turn the car around, Dave.”
“Yeah, yeah, on it.” Dave threw the Dodge into a sharp reverse turn. A second later we ware screaming back over the hill and away from the battlefield. To be on the safe side, I had the car drop a half-dozen spike-mines behind us.
Salona leaned forward against the back of the front seat, “Why are we leaving?”
I huffed, “You notice the war going on back there?”
“What about our money?”
“It’s too hot right now. We’ll call Daktarisoft once we get clear and arrange another exchange. Don’t worry—I’m not about to give up on this yet.”
“What if Daktarisoft gets spooked? Davey,” she said, “you going to let him screw this up for us?”
“Sal,” Dave said, shrugging, “give it a rest.”
At that she flung herself back and launched in to a full-tilt pout.
Ten miles down the road, a copter overshot us. It landed with deliberate slowness on the road ahead It was one of the corporate copters from the battle, and probably friendly, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I had the car target it and kept my finger over the fire icon on my palm display.