But with the IceBreaker, I had a chance of pulling this escapade off.
He squinted, afraid to get near it; his dead family had drummed a fear of programmers into him. “Is that legal technology?”
“…all the parts are legal…”
“And if Gumdrool caught you with those parts hooked together, how much trouble would you be in?”
Technically, programming was knowledge forbidden to the living – you could theoretically hack the dead’s servers. “Orphanage rules are different. According the law, this fine device contains nothing that I have programmed personally.”
“So it does nothing that could get you arrested?”
“So many questions! And no! I’ve merely piped together a bunch of perfectly legal, dead-written programs until their chained output did things their creators never would have intended.”
Dare was skeptical… but one of the benefits of having a reputation as a performance artist was that people will follow you around to see what trouble you get into. “So walk me through this not-illegal plan.”
I lured the pony over to the elevator with another carrot, then fired up the IceBreaker. The alleyway glowed a CRT green as flows of output streamed up a holographic projection on the wall. “I’m not breaking in to the elevator,” I assured him, quietly cracking open the hospital’s wifi network. “This is like… it’s like turning a house’s doorknob to check if it’s unlocked.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then rattling the windows.”
“Sure.”
“And then maybe fitting five hundred thousand of the most commonly used keys into the front door’s lock.”
The elevator’s bells dinged as it rattle-and-creaked its way down to ground level. The pony danced backwards, snuffling warily at the rusted gate, and I couldn’t blame her; that creaky transport looked like it’d been built back in the days of gas-powered cars.
I stroked my pony’s hair, whispering sweet nothings in her ear: “Nothing to fear, mon amour. Amichai has your safety well in mind.”
Dare cleared his throat. “You don’t. That elevator has security cameras, and everyone knows Sins of the Flesh gets their best footage from security cameras – they’ll see you, and report you, and–”
I shushed Dare, then whisked him aside, tasking him with keeping the pony hidden from view.
“I’m in,” I told Dare, tapping in a series of new commands to the IceBreaker. “And now I’m recording the footage these cameras are taking of this empty elevator. And now… I’m broadcasting the looped footage back into the cameras.” I snapped my fingers. “The dead are now watching reruns–”
Dare started hyperventilating so hard the pony licked him on the face.
“Amichai!” he spluttered, pushing the pony’s head away. “You just blinded the dead! There’s no way that’s legal!”
“I never said it was legal! I just said they wouldn’t catch me.”
“Sweet void.”
“ – and all I have to do is creep through the hospital, taking footage and feeding blank loops back to them – they’ll never see me coming –”
“I know you don’t care about your future, Amichai, but Career Day’s coming up soon. This is the sort of thing that gets you a black mark forever. Shit, I could get in trouble just for buying you the pony. And I need my career, I can’t get blackballed, you know I–”
I grabbed him by the shoulders again. “You want out, don’t you?”
He squinched one eye shut, grimacing up at me. “…not if you’re going to guilt me into staying…”
“Nah. This one could turn foul. The pony, the keeping me company – you can exit now and you’ve still done more than enough to be a top-notch friend.”
Though honestly, I had hoped for a partner-in-crime – but if Dare wasn’t into it, I wasn’t going to force the issue.
He pulled me into a hug, and we did that man-thing where we thumped each other on the back because you know, you couldn’t just enjoy a hug from your best friend. Especially not when your best friend happens to be gay, and your orphanage is filled with gossipy jerks whispering your platonic friendship must be something way more.
“All right.” Dare squinted up at the building’s outline. “I’d guess that elevator opens into a storage room behind a nursing station, so watch yourself. If you get into trouble, make alternating lefts and rights to head towards the exit.”
I didn’t question, even though Dare had never visited Izzy in the hospital. The boy had a sixth sense for buildings. He spent all his Upterlife trial time creating the most amazing architectural plans – his biggest dream was that one day, he’d make a building that actually got built.
“And you gotta keep that pony in line, Amichai.” I looked down; I had four carrots left. “Because remember: the nurses are legally obligated to keep their patients alive. Every patient in there is desperate for a ticket to the Upterlife, and they’re hungry for fatal accidents they can blame on anyone else. One dies on your watch? That’s a straight ticket to the void. Careful they don’t fling themselves underfoot.”
“They will voiding not,” I told him. “This is an Upterlife quest, Dare. I’m gonna ride her through there like it was a parade. Start a party.”
Dare shook his head, chuckling. “What’s your Shrive-rank these days, Amichai? What are the dead judging you as? Venal? Mortal? Criminal?”
“Liminal,” I lied. He laughed.
“I’d like to see your parade, Amichai, but it’ll be a miracle if you make it up there without getting caught. But if anyone can make miracles happen… it’s you.”
I went for another manly hug – but Dare was already darting between the dead cameras, racing back to the orphanage.
I coaxed the pony into the elevator, then thumbed the button. The elevator showered us in rust and mouse crap as it juddered to life. This was doubtlessly its first use since the Bubbler plague six years back.
“Easy, beautiful,” I said. The pony nickered nervously, leaning against me and pinning me to the wall. She was maybe four feet tall, but that four feet was solid muscle, genetically engineered for superhuman (and superpony) feats. Whereas I have arms like pipe cleaners and flap like a flag in a breeze. Most Sleipnir ponies had autobridles installed, electronic gadgets in their skulls that induced sleep-seizures when they got too frisky, but I’d demanded a pony that was completely free.
I thought about what Dare had said. Maybe I was too rebellious for my own good. Maybe trying to outdo the Upterlife to cheer up my sister was a fool’s game.
I could still call this off. I could bring the pony back to Central Farm, then visit my sister tomorrow with a bouquet of daisies. Something, you know, normal.
But if I did normal things, then my sister would be scared instead of telling everyone stories about her crazy brother.
After they’d vanished into the Upterlife, my parents had taught me all sorts of dippy lessons about being brave and staying true to yourself. But their most lasting lesson came when they died and found cooler things to do:
People leave you if you don’t have anything interesting to offer them.
So when the elevator shuddered to a halt, my hands shook as I unlatched the door. I knew I could get caught. I knew the consequences. But I also knew the truth:
Far better to die a legendary meat-death than to be forgotten.
I stepped into the hospital.
2: PONY CONGA LINES IN THE VIRULENCE WARD
* * *
It had been six years since the Bubbler had killed 94 percent of New York City, and the hospital’s hallways still stank of rotting meat. The nurses had buried the stench under lemon-scented cleanser – but the stink seeped up from the tiles, a sour reek that made the pony whinny and retreat back into the elevator.
That smell brought back memories of my parents’ skin sliding off their bodies. They’d screamed for help until their tongues fell out. And yet instead of giving them painkillers, their dead doctors gave them cheerful lectures about h
ow stupid meat-bodies were. You couldn’t shut off the pain response! Not like in the Upterlife, where filtering out unwanted responses from your electronic body was as simple as changing a setting! No worries, you’ll be dead and happy soon.
The dead doctors were why I’d thought it would be easy to slip in. There wasn’t one living doctor walking the halls of Lenox Hill hospital; you had to do a century’s worth of residency training before anyone would let you work on the living. Izzy kept telling me how lucky she was to have dead professionals looking after her, but me?
I wondered how much these “experienced” doctors had forgotten about mortal discomforts.
The elevator opened up into a nurse’s station, just as Dare had predicted. But I checked the cameras and confirmed there were no physical attendants around. All the living were good for was hauling equipment; most of the work here was done by sensors the dead monitored, surgical bots the dead controlled, computer-controlled IVs the dead dispensed drugs through.
I lured the pony out with my carrot, holding the IceBreaker in front of me like a magic wand, carefully ensuring every camera before me was hacked before creeping into the next safe zone.
My skin crawled as I inched forward into the next camera’s field of vision. I couldn’t stop thinking about Dare’s warning: everyone knows Sins of the Flesh gets their best footage from security cameras – they’ll see you, and report you.
I wondered if playing the “I’m just a dumb kid” card would get me out of trouble. It had before. The dead viewed the living as naive idiots.
Then again, most dumb kids hadn’t set a record for “most days in the Time-Out Chamber.”
“Don’t get caught, Amichai,” I whispered to myself. “Don’t get caught.”
The pony licked my face encouragingly.
Lenox Hill was cold, dim, and shabby, with gray unpainted coral walls featuring TV monitors embedded every few feet – the same as every other building in New York. When I’d watched Dare create his artificial buildings in the Upterlife trial zones, he’d showed me all the ways people used to pretty up their living quarters – paint, wallpaper, molded wood. Ever since he’d showed me his designs, I couldn’t stop thinking how beautiful this world could be if we cared about it. I imagined buildings filled with sunlamps, comfortable beds, portraits and paintings. Instead, all we got were the same dreary cut-and-copied hallways.
They’d dimmed the lights to save on electricity, but the patients never slept. They hunched over their glowing computer tablets, dorking around in the Upterlife trial zones.
The pony poked her head into a patient’s room, snuffled around curiously. A dull-eyed middle-aged woman looked up.
I waggled my eyebrows at her: hey, lady, want a pony?
She cocked her gaunt head, slightly irritated as she focused in on us – as if rogue pony-vendors were continually bursting into her ward to promise wild adventures–
And then her tablet beeped, colors reflecting off her face as her game rewarded her with some new dazzling digital sight.
She returned to playing.
I’d seen that look before. Everyone at the orphanage got an hour’s worth of Upterlife trial time a day, and you could get away with murder while everyone was glued to their screens. Game designers had spent centuries perfecting the art of doling out rewards to create addictions.
And while the hospitals wouldn’t give you painkillers, they would give you 24/7 access to the Upterlife trial zones. Since the doctors would only admit you when you had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, the trial zones were considered to be a way of transitioning to a postmortemed existence.
I walked the pony by a few other rooms, knocking on the doorframes, quietly offering ponycentric mischief to the young and the old alike. But usually, a half hour of Upterlife sample play was your reward at the end of a backbreaking day of labor. Now they could get all they wanted for free, the patients guzzled deep on an unlimited supply. They were too busy to even call an orderly in.
Too bad. They were missing an awesome miniparade. If I was in charge of this hospital, I’d bring in cool surprises every day. So the patients would be alert and asking questions like, “Yesterday, Amichai held an impromptu dance-off among the nurses. What’ll he do today?”
“You’re a killer pony,” I said, ruffling her mane to make up for the fact that nobody was paying attention to her. She whinnied appreciatively.
We crept down the hallways. There were blinking eyelights embedded in each wall, floor, and ceiling – so the dead could see you from every angle.
The pony clopped ahead, about to walk right into some live, unhacked cameras.
“Whoa!” I yelled, hauling her to a stop. She looked back in confusion: weren’t you trying to get me in here a moment ago?
I checked my pockets. Two carrots left.
I sure hoped someone was serving carrots for dinner tonight.
Thankfully, there were no living nurses within earshot to hear the clop of her hooves. Plagues regularly swept through New York’s close-packed population, ever since the supergerms had evolved past our antibacterials. But the Bubbler’d been particularly vicious, slaughtering nine out of ten living people before we’d developed gene-treatments to fight it. Six years later, the dead were still struggling to fill meat-jobs with living bodies.
And it’s not like the skeleton crew of nurses cared enough to investigate weird noises. Like all living workers, they were overworked and underenthused, doing their job just well enough to slog into old age and slump wearily into the Upterlife’s wonders.
It would take a ruckus to rouse the living from their stupors. Unfortunately, the pony was an imminent ruckus.
Then I saw Izzy – and suddenly, all of this horsing around seemed natural.
She was wide awake in a small bed, kept sterile within an oval vacuum-curtain of airjets. She stared longingly at an Upterlife tablet.
Even though her skin had pulled taut over her shrunken muscles, like a shirt shrunk in the wash, she still sat up straight with the rigid posture they’d drilled into her at the LifeGuard academy. Her shoulders hunched painfully as she waved in commands. They’d paralyzed her for two weeks while the new gene-treatments reknitted her skin to her muscles – but despite their best efforts, her epidermis had reattached in weird places.
She frowned as she stared down at her game tablet, her cheeks reddened with broken blisters – and my heart lifted to see that peevish scowl. Whenever Frank Beldon had filed new paperwork to restrict our visiting hours, Izzy’d give a tiny sigh and frown as though she knew she could fix this problem, she just didn’t know how.
Right now, her problem was leading her army of virtual ponies to victory.
I couldn’t hear what she was playing, not over the low whoosh of the aircurtain that kept her germs separated from the rest of the ward – but I knew Pony Police Action was her favorite game.
I began IceBreaking her surveillance cameras so we could talk privately.
The LifeGuard had tons of recruitment videogames to encourage people to join the cops. If you were into first-person shooters, they’d fling you into messy combat so you’d think every LifeGuard member died in action. If you were into simulations, they’d give you control of artificial cities and reward those who expanded their Upterlife server banks the fastest.
But if you identified as femme and were into strategy games, like Izzy, they gave you a pony farm to breed the most adorable LifeGuard horses, then sent you out on missions to stamp out NeoChristian resistance enclaves.
She scowled down at the screen. Dare could afford the neural-interface modules where you thought commands into the computer, but our family had to make do with antiquated hand gestures.
Izzy’s hands spasmed as she tried to move her ponies into strategic positions and failed. She waved away another failure, relentlessly trying to get her gnarled fingers to obey her, then clumsily flipped the tablet face down on the thin bedsheets. She flopped backwards, staring in despair at the cei
ling…
“Hey,” I said, leading the pony in. “There’s one pony who’ll do what you ask.”
The dazed, happy look on her face was worth all this effort.
Her mouth hung open. “… Is that a Sleipnir-class pony?”
I grinned. “Only the best ponies visit the best sisters.”
It would have been a magical moment, except the pony chose that moment to poop.
“You’re full of horseshit as usual,” Izzy laughed, greeting her pony with open arms. The pony stepped into the whooshing aircurtain between them, then pranced back in surprise as the wind ruffled her ears – but pushed through to the other side.
It would have been heartwarming had the pony nuzzled my sister, but instead she ate the daisies off Izzy’s bedstand.
Izzy hugged the pony awkwardly, struggling with her newly twisted arms. She buried her face in the pony’s mane, hiding her tears.
My stomach sank as I realized there was no way I could take Izzy for a pony ride; I hadn’t brought rope, and her legs were too weak for her to stay on the pony’s back. Maybe all I’d done was to remind her of the things she couldn’t do any more…
“It’s OK,” I told her. “We’ll get a retrial. They’d have fasttracked you to the Upterlife six years ago. It’s the voiding Bubbler – there’s so few living people left, they won’t let anyone die until they’ve squeezed the last of the life out of us. But we’ll get a new judge, new doctors to look you over, we’ll convince them you can’t hold down a job based on physical tasks…”
That frown was suddenly aimed at me, and I realized:
I was her problem.
“We can’t afford a retrial, Amichai,” she said lifelessly. And she was right. A retrial would require money we didn’t have. Maybe it would have worked if Mom and Dad were willing to fight the courts, but they’d gone on a deep quest to fight the Dark Elves and we hadn’t heard from them for months.
“I’ll talk to Peaches – she has to know somebody…”
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