The Uploaded

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  A record-scratch. The shipping announcements on the overhead speakers cut off, replaced by a mournful version of the national anthem.

  Everyone looked up. Wickliffe’s voice boomed overhead, reciting the speech he’d made all those years ago:

  The Upterlife offers eternal life, boundless liberty, and infinite happiness. Black or white, rich or poor, zealot or atheist; all should pass through, but for the lowliest of criminals. And if you do not allow this, then this country is not free, and this server is not paradise.

  A LifeGuard clamped his hand on Josie’s good shoulder. “Ma’am, you’ll have to–”

  And Josie’s clothes exploded in a fine powder, covering everyone within ten yards in dusty irritant.

  As did every other rebel’s clothes.

  That had been a particularly nice trick the Brain Trust had developed a while back – a complex chemical compound that, when triggered, burst open in a crossbreed between a super-itching powder and a chemical fog. Some LifeGuards tugged gas masks onto their face – but fine fiberglass particles dug in underneath, turned their cheeks caustic, made them rip the masks off.

  Some popped dazers. The smoke diffused the light into ineffectiveness.

  That’s when I appeared on the screens above them, mounted on Therapy, who in turn stood on a pile of crates. It was a beautiful image: me holding a spear in one hand, the American flag on its end rippling magnificently.

  “All should pass through!” I cried. “Except for the NeoChristians, who Wickliffe has decided are lab rats! Except for the whistleblowers, who Wickliffe has condemned as criminals!”

  I paused dramatically. “Except for you! Who won’t make it to the Upterlife because he will rewrite your minds!”

  All across New York State, alerts popped up: “AMICHAI DAMROSCH SIGHTED”.

  “Wickliffe has given up on the living!” I looked quite noble as the LifeGuard struggled through the crowd to get at me. “He’s sold you out to the ghosts! He wants to tell you that you can’t fight back – but the ghosts can’t exist without our labor!

  “Wickliffe wants you believe you can’t fight the power. But trust me.” I took a moment to pat Therapy’s flank. “If a mere pony can baffle them…”

  The civilians in the square ran riot, knocking down the guards. The LifeGuard battled back to their feet, hunting down the rebels. It wasn’t hard – all the rebels were naked except for me. The guards shouted “Get the Pony Boy!” And then…

  They heard the low rumble of incoming hooves.

  And I will tell you: if there is a sight more glorious than the cops’ widening eyes when they see a herd of genetically engineered superponies bearing down upon them, I do not know what that is.

  Oh, it had taken pretty much all our resources, hacking every autobridle in Central Park to get the ponies to make a break for it simultaneously. Hacking the autobridles to navigate the ponies to each of our fallen rebels was a tricky thing algorithmically but…

  …just in case, each naked person was equipped with a bundle of tasty carrots.

  The ponies thundered through Times Square, causing havoc, knocking over the dead’s precious merchandise, trampling the LifeGuard as they heroically hurled themselves underfoot.

  I, however, stood my ground, having leapt onto a forklift. The cops let the others go to concentrate their efforts on me, looking overhead for guidance, making their way through the thick fog.

  “You can fight the Upterlife!” I cried exultantly as the rebels staged their preplanned escape, darting down into old subway tunnels. “Don’t believe what you see on Sins of the Flesh – Wickliffe will create CGI versions of me to spout lies! But I promise! I have never ever in my life created a CGI version of me to fool anyone!”

  The LifeGuard had finally fought their way to the forklift I stood on. Except, as they wiped their watering eyes, they discovered I wasn’t there. They looked down at real life, but doublechecked the screens.

  I looked down at them.

  “Well,” I winked, “maybe once.”

  Just like at the branch server, the living trusted readouts over their sad little meat-eyes. My onscreen image gave a little wave and flickered out of existence, leaving cops from all across the state to blink in confusion.

  Meanwhile, I was two hundred miles away, waiting for the generators to explode at Lacona Springs.

  41: IN AMBULANCES, ROCKETING TOWARDS EXPLOSIONS

  * * *

  The hazmat uniform I wore was three sizes too big and stank of BO. We were crouched in an ambulance a couple of miles of down the road from the Lacona Springs factory, which had been built right next to one of the colossal geothermal springs that helped power New York State. Made sense; the chip factory sucked down monstrous amounts of electricity. Steam hissed out from vast pipes, blotting out the sky, causing iron-scented drizzles that fogged the windshield.

  “Dare,” Mama Alex asked. “How long would you say before Ximena inserts the package?”

  “About ten minutes ago.”

  “If.” Mama scowled at floor. It was close packed in the ambulance, with Dare, me, Evangeline, Mama Alex, and Facundo our driver. We all felt the tension.

  If something had gone wrong with Ximena, we’d never know. If we were even close to on-schedule, she was crawling through rock a hundred yards underground – but highbeam communications strong enough to penetrate that much slate and granite would have given our position away.

  The Times Square distraction was going on as we spoke; it was scheduled to reach its height when the maximum number of LifeGuards had been diverted. If Ximena didn’t finish in time, they’d regroup and converge on our position at supersonic speeds.

  We shivered in the electric ambulance, hoping she hadn’t boiled herself in the tunnels.

  “How will we know when she’s successful?” I asked.

  Mama Alex glared at the steam plumes. “We’ll know.”

  “Ugh. My facemask has flopped over again. Evangeline, could you…”

  Evangeline knotted the back of my suit to pull it tight. She looked pale, but had demanded to come along – and I didn’t feel right, telling her to stay home. Mainly because she no longer had a home.

  “I recognize we are low on materials,” she muttered. “But you’d think getting a properly fitted suit would be doable.”

  “You’d think,” Mama agreed cheerfully. “But these hazmat suits are chipcoded to the factory. Normally, they’d do a retina scan and all sorts of other bioconfirmations before letting us in the front gate, but I’m betting they’ll skip a few steps once the explosions start and us helpful emergency technicians show up. Still, without the embedded chiptags to verify our access, we’d set off an alarm the second we stepped over the doorway.”

  “So where’d you get them?”

  “Bribed the real technicians with a tailored norovirus,” Mama Alex said. “Gives you runny noses and sporadic vomiting, but otherwise you feel fine. They’re relaxing in their home, happy for the day off. When you work at these factories, you never get a day off.”

  “Why not just kill them?” Dare asked.

  “Couple of people out sick, they figure something’s going around. Couple of people turn up dead…”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, making a clumsy timeout with wobbling, misfit gloves. “Won’t that void them anyway? When they Shrive, and the dead figure out they were slacking?”

  “No,” Mama Alex said. “Almost everybody’s faked a day off. Almost every technician’s made a profit from selling something illegal to friend. Humans are creative. Even the Upterlife can’t kill crime.”

  “But… they’ll Shrive Criminal once the dead know what they did… they’ll get barred forever…”

  She tapped my faceplate affectionately. “Oh, Amichai,” she sighed fondly. “You think the dead judge you according to some legal system?”

  “I kinda thought law had something to do with it, yeah.”

  “If it did, nobody would make it in!” She laughed. “No, Amichai, they
tell you it’s the lowliest of criminals who don’t get in – but really, that whole Mortal/Venal/Liminal is a good ol’ boy system. They don’t consult the lawyers; void, even the Upterlife doesn’t have that kind of processing power, asking the dead to play jury to every living human’s life.

  “Naw, it’s all gut feel. They get a sense of you; all they care about is, ‘Would I want this guy living next door to me?’ Everybody’s called in fake-sick. Everybody’s taken a bribe. Long as you do most of your job and don’t stick your head up too much, you can get away with spectacularly petty crimes.”

  “But I Shrived Mortal…”

  “Yeah, well, you did something big and splashy. If you’d stolen painkillers for Izzy, nobody would have looked at you sideways. I made charts.”

  “…charts?”

  “They broadcast the names of the voided. Look those people’s histories up, and you can assemble pretty reliable profiles of what crimes are acceptable. And I can tell you: the dead? They don’t mind if you call in sick. Those technicians–”

  The mountains echoed with the muffled sound of an implosion, then the sound of metal creaking. Steam and shrapnel jetted into the air – shrapnel that, since I could see it from miles away, had to be the size of dumpsters. The smokestacks juddered, toppling. Sirens blared.

  “– are probably fucked,” Mama Alex admitted, wincing. “Come on, soldiers, let’s roll.”

  But our driver Facundo – Ximena’s son, a man seemingly made entirely of muscle and beard – had already stomped on the accelerator. We roared down the access road to the factory.

  We zoomed towards the steam gouts. The windshield fogged over, then imploded as a chunk of twisted metal smashed through the window, shattering Facundo’s left forearm. He cursed and punched the broken windshield down.

  Without the windshield to buffer the noises, the wildcat sounds of metal tearing itself apart flooded through the ambulance. Superheated steam rolled in off the dirt access road, hot enough to make us sweat inside our hazmat uniforms. We drove blind, with two misty feet of visibility.

  There was a bang as something heavy bounced off the roof, leaving a deep dent in the ceiling. Turbines the size of football fields chewed themselves to shreds, spinning off-kilter as superheated steam from the earth’s core rushed up and around them in a lungmelting hurricane.

  Normally, that energy would be used to make electricity. But Ximena had slowly piloted a small drilling device underground, drilling through rock at an achingly low speed to insert bombs. It had taken her several days to bore a yard-wide tunnel through half a mile of bedrock, but she’d cleared a path to the pipes driven deep into the earth. Then, at great risk, she’d crawled through the tunnels to carefully liquid-patch in a shunt that could be used to pop explosives into. If the shunt had gone wrong, she would have been boiled alive.

  Now those explosives had rocketed up to the surface and were going off, their detonations magnified according to Brain Trust calculations.

  Though I knew this was our plan, it still seemed unwise to drive towards the collapsing smokestacks.

  Dare was hyperventilating. He’d always hated risks. Yet he wasn’t backing down. That made me proud to know him, even though he went out of his way to avoid me.

  Peaches said it was because Dare didn’t understand her. Though Dare had thought I’d talked Peaches into getting herself shot, he had come to terms with the fact the shooting had ultimately been Peaches’ choice. But “humiliating” Peaches by carrying on with that stupid NeoChristian had been the final straw. Our relationship status had been ratcheted back to “tenuous allies.”

  “Keep fighting the good fight,” I told him.

  He looked grateful for the distraction, pathetic as it was. Facundo jerked around a curve.

  Evangeline was hunched down next to me, head lowered like a horse ready to bolt at the start of a race. She too hyperventilated, but this had the staccato sound of an athlete trying to psych herself up.

  Evangeline had not come to me again to snuggle.

  I’d like to say neither Dare nor Evangeline had spoken to me… But we’d needed to plan our attack on Lacona Springs. We’d spent our days in stiff strategy meetings, both Dare and Evangeline shoving aside their evident distaste for me to hash out the best approach.

  It was awkward, painful, and it was all worse because we had to look like a team. This was being filmed; if we survived, we’d edit it into a story and broadcast it. Acting insufficiently heroic during this mission might shatter Pony Boy’s nascent mythology.

  “Chingada!” Facundo shouted, clutching his injured arm as the ambulance smashed through a wooden barrier. We skidded to a stop before a guard house seated in front of a concrete loading dock, steam curling around us. The great, mountain-hugging curve of an inbound monorail track had been crushed beneath a toppled smokestack.

  We ran up the steps to the admittance area, leaping over the boiled-red bodies of security guards sprawled on the steps. They’d either come out to gawk at the explosions, or gone out to fix something; regardless, they’d been blistered to death.

  Behind that was the chip factory’s industrial bulk, a dirty gray box several stories high, its roof obscured by the web of power cables that fed into it. Sludgy trickles of bacterial waste dribbled down the sides.

  Izzy was in there somewhere.

  A handful of still-living security guards had retreated to the processing center’s interior; they held cool rags to their mouths as they ushered us in through the doors. The lobby was shadowed, the camera monitors dimmed – as we’d expected. The Upterlife servers had their own power supplies – the dead wouldn’t risk someone pulling their plug. But since the living’s needs weren’t as essential, the East Coast was mostly powered by this single plant. All nonessential devices in New England were experiencing some serious brownouts – including a lot of cameras. The dead could still talk to each other, but we’d fogged their view of the living.

  We made for the inner doors, headed for the biochip factory’s inner sanctum. The guards grabbed our arms.

  “Remove your suits. Mr Drumgoole says all employees are to be face-scanned before entry.”

  “Void, man,” Dare said. “We’ve got minutes before this place blows! We need to fix it!”

  “Mr Drumgoole was quite clear,” the lead guard replied, looking shaken. “He just called us.” He reached for my hazmat hood–

  I smashed him in the nose with my rifle.

  In a movie, the guard would have gone down like a sack of potatoes. Instead, I bloodied his face. He screamed for help as he grappled with me; the other guards went for their earputers.

  Mama Alex shot first.

  The guard above me took Mama Alex’s bullet to the neck, feathering blood across the retinal scanners. Evangeline shook her head, as if waking from a dream – then unloaded her rifle on full auto. She wailed as she walked the gunfire across the guards’ chests, a cry of almost orgasmic relief.

  Followed by an embarrassed silence.

  Mama Alex batted me across the forehead. “Why didn’t you shoot the bastard?”

  The crosses on Facundo’s cheeks contorted with disgust. “Why did you shoot them?” he bellowed. “You just condemned those poor souls to damnation!”

  Dare knelt to search the bodies. “They wanted to die; we needed them to be dead. That’s a good deal.”

  “Murder is never good!” Facundo glared at Evangeline as though she should have known better. “We could have knocked them out.”

  “First off,” said Mama Alex in a firm voice, “I told you we might need to take some people out.”

  “That phrasing,” Facundo said darkly, “is ambiguous.”

  “Second, the only reason Wickliffe hasn’t exterminated us is because his troops turn ordinary battles into suicide missions. If his minions didn’t fling themselves into death at the first bad excuse, we’d have zero hope of overthrowing Wickliffe.” Mama Alex walked down the row to finish off the survivors, punctuating each sentence with a l
ife-ending gunshot. “Now, these good little guards got their Upterlife, we got to live – and if your skybeard has a problem with that, well, we’ll take the hit. We killed. Your hands are clean.”

  The guards, choking on their last breath, didn’t look victorious; they looked horrified. The dream was eternal life, but this shredded-meat reality was awful to witness…

  “So,” Mama Alex finished. “Feel like wasting another minute?”

  Facundo scowled; I wasn’t convinced, either. But we were both in too deep to argue.

  When did I start agreeing with terrorists?

  Who were the terrorists?

  Dare got the door open using the dead guards’ credentials, and we charged through onto the white-tiled floor of the employee locker room. Long rows of biohazard suits hung down, their rips poorly patched. Walls and suits alike were covered in moldy fuzz.

  We grabbed some plastic bags to cover our guns before moving on to the white room airlock chamber. The door hissed shut as caustic chemicals sprayed over us.

  The wait seemed endless, but the Brain Trust had assured us it was an impassable chokepoint. There was simply no way to bypass the mandatory sterilization procedures before entering the biocrystal matrices’ delicate workings. With Gumdrool on the alert, we knew the LifeGuard’s transport ships were evacuating Times Square, redirected to Lacona Springs minutes after the explosion. Once they arrived in force, we’d never escape.

  Bad enough. But the seething silence between Mama Alex and Facundo portended greater schisms to come.

  “So,” Dare asked, “you still think revealing yourself as a CGI trick was a good idea?”

  Was Dare needling me? But no; he shivered with fear. We might all void in the next twenty minutes, and he was trying to rekindle the old banter we’d once shared.

  “Peaches told you, Dare: I’m a supervillain. Supervillains telegraph all their best tricks.”

  I’d argued we needed to explain the trick when the distraction ended, just so the punters would get how very clever I was. The hero had to not just defeat, but outwit his enemies. Dare had countered that the explanation would also explain things to our enemy.