Supplejack

by Les Petersen

  Canada, oh sweet Canada, was the only sane nation on that side of the planet. I don’t know why. Maybe, like Australia, she was isolated enough by her misplaced culture to handle the double-barrelled charge of the Great Depression of 2017 and the Indigenous People’s movement, or maybe her nationhood wasn’t too strong at the time, especially after the third debate on the Quebec question. It could accept the change in cultural divergence when it came, but it was a struggle nevertheless.

  But other things affected me then, like personal fulfilment and self-awareness. Even the whole gender issue was getting to me. Maybe I’m too old fashioned – I couldn’t quite accept what was happening with gender shifts. I was a well-built man, I liked women, liked the way I had grown up. I’m still all those things and I like being a man., but back then…

  It’s a complex issue, one I won’t try to tell you all in one go. You’d scan it without understanding my point of view, and judge me harshly. You need to understand what I was feeling, not just hear what I say., but I’ll tell you how the gender shifting began.

  It started with experimental sports drugs in the 1990s—the Turtle Jelly controversy. In the search for the perfect athlete a synthetic drug had given the world a way to change from one sex to the other in a matter of a few months, with no after effects. Turtle Jelly was the drug’s nickname. The scientific name is about four hundred letters long and you wouldn’t want to have to spell it in a contest. Most people just called it TJ. What was so enticing about it was that with TJ you could be one month a man, the next month a woman and the other way around a month later. Walk a mile in their shoes, so to speak. It became a sliding scale of gender. And TJ was just the first in a long line of other drugs. Eventually the drugs were so complex that the authorities had no way to check your identity, though DNA and aura readings gave some clues, and the authorities could always apply for a writ if they suspected something. Then they’d look for scars because minor surgery that some users underwent to fixed up the small bits left over after TJ. Surgeons were working on atomic scales though, so it became damn near impossible to tell. Aside from finding nothing, the authorities would be left with a lawsuit for invasion of privacy on their hands.

  So, you had TJ and the Cut, which was used to become completely sexless. It became acceptable to change at will, then even fashionable. Gender politics went crazy for a while—no one could keep up with the changes to the correct forms of address, let alone deal with the implications of it all. Too many rushed to try it on and life as I knew it went out the window.

  My best buddy, Kren Morlmeiser, had the Cut a few months after I arrived at Bell. He came out looking like a blonde bombshell – a beach babe, as he called himself; and all the guys whistled when he came in the next day. I wasn’t shocked by it: in fact, I didn’t really have an opinion at the time. It was just something everyone was doing and he/she did it. I didn’t have to make a judgement, so I didn’t.

  I tried to stay calm about the whole thing, but every now and then Kren would come into the office and show me her breasts. They were nice enough, considering what he had paid for them, but he (she?) would leave them exposed while she talked about the way she could still feel the penis between his legs. Even though every nerve had been removed and the insert made him more a woman than she had ever dreamed to be, she could still feel the penis. I commiserated, told her that limbs and organs had senses we didn’t understand, that it might have been an unknown side effect to do with the drugs she had used to change her shape – that sort of thing. Now that I’ve had time to think on it, I’m certain she wasn’t ready for the change, had rushed into it for the thrill. It wasn’t about truth to self, more just a fad.

  But there were uncomfortable moments. Kren offered to make love to me on the desk more than once, to jack me through her ports so I could experience what it was like for her. I’d just laugh and find reasons to leave the office – it was a form of sexual harassment, I know, but I couldn’t bring myself to report it. He was still a buddy.

  Then Shahn began taking the tabs, began changing shape and growing a beard. I tried to accept it, but I couldn’t get used to her sharing the shaving mirror with me, borrowing my shirts or taking me shopping for bisexual underwear. Her hands became callused, too hard, as if she was trying to tear me apart to find out how I ticked. I worked later and later and after a while began to doubt my own sexuality, let alone everyone else’s. It’s a wonder I didn’t doubt my sanity. Maybe I was insane already.

  Sansan brought me out of the past, advised me we were a quarter hour out from Adelaide. I had time to clean myself up a little, to get everything recharged and hooked together. She had anticipated my request for transport in town and had a chopper ready to take me east. A new car waited on the pad at Mannum. Within thirty minutes I’d be on the boat at Walker Flat, fishing-line in hand, water lapping against the hull. I called up satellite vision and deep-scanned the town she had chosen as a hideaway, sat musing on it while the Tilt slowed through Gawler.

  As we cruised into Mile End I used visual to look around the other passengers, seeing what they really looked like. They all had faces blocked from vision, had screens up and perfect-feature holos playing, clothing cut and coloured to their preferred gender, SurMots and Drives in abundance. Some of the kids had Pinocchio faces. They were learning about morality through computer interaction. They had to be sly with their lies now if they didn’t want the world to see a nose a meter long. Some lied for the hell of it, ‘til the computer caught onto their ego, made them ugly or older or blind.

  These were the average faces of the multitude, the faces you forget even as you look at them, their specifics already altered by their Avatars. I do business for some of these clowns, some I even bring pornography from Sweden and snuff games from South Africa. For them the world’s a continuous head-up, layered over by satellite feed. Battery hens!

  Remember I mentioned Gilamens? Well, she is the voice of the clowns sitting on the Tilt with me, the one who informs these souls how to live their lives, how to shade the glare of real life by using the screens, how to access reality. She’s the kind of woman (At least I think she’s a woman!) who would sell her own family to get an exclusive on a paedophilia ring or a corporate take-over or anyone selling marriage licenses on the black market. Sanctimonious bitching, when it comes down to it. A war against whatever she thinks is morally right.

  One woman sitting opposite me had an older model of the JON (that’s Joint Operations Network, if you can’t remember) and as she rose from her seat her leads caught on the chair. Her holo lost a feed and went down and a pad slipped off her eye.

  I couldn’t help staring, my eyes locked on the milk white orb in her face, the drooping lid, the crowded flesh that buckled under the pad as the eye stared out blindly, scarred by laser. She saw me looking in her direction, pushed the pad back into place and flamed me to mind my own business. Her holo came up. A young Lisa Simpson disconnected her amplifiers from the seat, hobbled out of her cubicle and pushed past the others in the carriage.

  I sat for a while, reminded of mortality and began shaking from the after-shock of the Girls and their charge into the room, the nearness of death. Charlie dropped a soother bot onto my tongue and it wriggled toward the back of my throat. I spat it out. I wanted the natural shock for some reason, maybe as a reminder of Harry and all he had done for me. I remember playing chess against him, of sitting at the window testing his visual recognition skills. I don’t really know.

  As the clowns beefed themselves down the aisle I disconnected from the cubicle, pushed myself to my feet and clenched my teeth against the rush of adrenaline powering my thighs. Sansan was playing music low enough not to intrude and I was standing on a lakeside, a soft breeze blowing softly through trees behind me, sun warm against my flesh. The pounding of my heart slowed, I felt calmer. Blue sails floated across the surface of the lake.

  A passenger pushed me in the back and I had to restrain Medusa from flaming him/her. I got myself moving, grabbe
d my bag and moved off the Tilt and through the turnstile while the breeze through the trees still ran its calming influence. I ignored the tinman steward in the chair, clicking passenger details into his database. He hadn’t even registered me, would never know I passed. Bleeder steered the station’s security cameras while GaZe clocked the mobile units out of the way. Control would find the gaps soon, but by then we’d be through and gone. They’d see footprints, become suspicious. I set GaZe to working on it while we headed out of the station.

  Sansan had a cab out front. Medusa was primed for micros and limpets, but the cab was clean. It was small and insignificant, sealed against commercials, but almost too old to have guidance. When I took my seat, it lurched into action, began a run down the ramp to Burbridge while I called out my destination. The voice-recog couldn’t understand what I was saying and I suspected trouble, but Medusa gave me an all clear signal and GaZe took the prompt, tagged in and gave it what it needed. Then Medusa followed the pulse to the Cab’s company, left a warrior guarding the journey log for anyone who might have tracked me down that far. The cab’s dilapidated condition was comforting, a reminder that even in these days of rebuilding and beautification things still break down.

  In five minutes, we had boarded a private chopper and were skimming low enough to avoid radar trace and identification, but high enough not to have to log on to Road Control. From the air the city was a cluster of parks and plantations, sculpture-encrusted dwellings and painted rows of townhouses. The streets were like ribbons of lead laid through the green grid, but most of them were deserted. A convoy of cleaning vehicles worked the outer suburbs and Feeders were making deliveries. I saw Remote Vans doing home delivery, their commercials broadcasting across bands, their externals screaming jingles and slogans. Further out, the automated road trains brought in live cattle to the beef factories and others took away the city’s waste to bury in the red heart of Australia. There must have been fifty trucks coming in, two hundred going out.

  We flashed over a Luddite stronghold where kids were playing ball in the yard and some of the older citizens were tending garden or mowing lawns. They were more civilised than the Ferals who had taken to the bush years ago, but still not trusted by most people. I don’t know if they still have church services.

  Two military remotes came out of a nearby park on streaks of fire, closed up alongside and pulled us over, their nose cones locked on. We hung in the air while they looked at our manifest. They wanted clearances, details. I gave it to them straight, no threats or obvious lies, let them see I was minding my own business. Sansan prepared emergency evacuation and Medusa primed a Revenge surge. Two more Mils joined the formation and Bleeder got nervous. He’s kin to the systems that run these things, knows their capabilities and can run them down before they know he’s on them., but a Pack is a different matter.

  GaZe recommended action. Medusa and Sansan agreed. I held them all quiet, waited to see what would happen. The cabin of the chopper was slamming with lock-on warnings, my heart was pounding hard against my chest as if I was playing the slalom run on Everest. These things weren’t any larger than an alley cat, but they were loaded with ordnance. Sixteen barrels peered in our cockpit window. Over fifty finger-sized missiles tracked each blink of my eyes.

  Realising we weren’t Luddite sympathisers, the Mils dismissed us and peeled away to return to their patrol. I sighed relief, wiped sweat off my lip, sat back and looked at white sailed yachts balleting across the blue waters of the lake. The Dry that dropped into my mouth slid down like honey, with the same effect as a belt of whisky or a charge of Gracelands and by the time the chopper dropped to the pad at Mannum I was completely under control again. I marched across the tarmac as if I owned it.

  Chapter 3

  It was a new Ford, an arrowhead of anodised aluminium and rubber. Under the bonnet was a hefty turbo-charged diesel-electric rotary that could launch you fifteen meters into the air just from the turn of the ignition. I slung the bag into the back, had Medusa and Bleeder do a complete check on its controls. Sansan reworked the body to my own personal design and colour – fire engine red, so it would go faster. When I dropped into the seat the door sliced down like a blade and commercial seals snapped into place. I asked for visual silence, logged into Road Control, plugged in a destination override that GaZe had prepared, took it on manual and wheeled it away from the chopper with tyres squealing. Just for the hell of it.

  The Ford lifted me out over the countryside, through the green belt surrounding the bloated town that looked like a poor artist’s expression of confusion, and north along the river road. Road Control was trying to access manual override and Medusa was playing catch words with it, not really putting much effort into hiding the passwords, changing the encryption for a second or two just when RC thought they had it. I had Bleeder check the correspondence between Road Control and the military in case RC was getting too suspicious—they tend to think along the lines of drug smuggling or gun running to the Luddites if manual control lasts for too long—but as yet no alarms were being rung. They probably thought it was some young punks taking the car for a joy ride, or a bored executive flexing his mid-life crisis. They were confident of retrieving control of our computer guidance.

  I let it go on for a moment, gave Bleeder the right to interpret RC’s need and just drove. Sansan was feeding me a steady stream of information, the HUD a stream of arrows and vectors, of satellite nav coordinates, cabin flexion and fuel loads. I planed the car through a series of turns, dropped it ten meters and tested out Sansan’s new hardware. She treated it as a game, gave me drop vectors that put me a few centimetres above the dirt then lifted me almost straight up, turned me through a hard 5-g turn and put me back on course. I broke into a smile, patted her with one hand until she reminded me of the rules of the road. I took both hands from the wheel then laughed when she almost bounced me against the surface, stood me on my feet by jacking the seat upright. I gave in to her playfulness, dropped the Ford back into her control and watched the speedo close on five hundred kph while the river flicked east toward Coolcha and Bow Hill. She flipped us upside down and the road roared a meter above our heads.

  Our game ended when Bleeder gave me the twitch and RC took control of the vehicle. We flipped right-side up, lost speed. We were still heading for Walkers Flat, but the pace slowed to fifteen clicks as punishment for our insurrection. As the road wound up through the eucalyptus plantations and the Ford flitted like a night owl through the settling darkness, we settled back, considered our options.

  I dozed for a moment and when I awoke the PAN was working on something: GaZe was out on the Net, just surfing, checking on trade routes; Sansan was doing a little shopping, preparing the houseboat for my occupation and Medusa was building a wave modified virus. It’s like sharpening a knife to her. When Sansan began re-routing and dedicating a few lines for my use I stopped her, had her leave the houseboat free of the Net. She changed tack, set up Harold, my Cameo, at the Ryde Library with an encryption maze beside him, working the pattern in some illogical way so that he was secure.

  I know I’ve said this all before, but without Sansan I’d be lost. Literally. I don’t know Hobart from Hong Kong, even though I been to both places—they look alike now and I’m never likely to know, which one I’m in unless I get directions from Sansan. In real space—the stuff you see through unaided eyes—the landscape doesn’t have hypertext. You don’t have directional guidance reminding you what degree north you are staring at, or your global location. You don’t have enhancement. Drop your holo for a second and the world is an empty room. It’s sobering, lonely and sometimes too quiet. At night, it gets so dark you can’t see more than a few inches in front of your face and even if the moon is out, the night is filled with shadows. Without enhancement, the night world crowds into your head and it feels like you’re smothering, suffocating in a black blanket of air.

  How did the previous generations ever survive?

  The main drag at Walkers Fl
at was still bubbling with activity when we drove through, even though it was one-thirty in the morning when I arrived. The street was lit up like a Christmas tree. I cruised past the pubs, which were doing a roaring trade and the supermarkets still sending out remote deliveries in little green and gold buggies, past the car dealer who wasn’t doing too well and was sitting out the front with a young couple, his finger gliding over a holomap of products. We clicked through an intersection and drove down the lines of drive-thrus, most of, which were on standby. When I turned toward the river jetty, the lights swung over a small group of teenagers standing beneath the police billboard, jacked to the town’s discipline centre. Their holos were down, their eyes were vacant and their bodies twitched as they went through hard labour on the sim. The warden standing guard looked as if he was enjoying himself. He had a grin from ear to ear and he raised a hand cheerfully as I slid past. I would lay odds he had pumped up the volume on the DC.

  I pulled the Ford into the security dome, cracked the seals, tossed the bag out and slid to the ground. The car sealed up tight and Medusa sheathed it with an army of warriors. It settled onto soil, its lights blinking once before dimming. I pumped up the holo to give me infrared, walked around the car and had Bleeder do a finger-print map on the body-work. If anyone touched it, he’d be able to access Flintlock computers and tell me immediately who it was. If I needed to, I could do something about it.

  The jetty creaked as I walked down it and the slapping tide and the thump of my boots reminded me of the walk of a lifetime ago, when I had watched Shahn take the ferry to Manly. Her strides had been masculine then, straight hipped, with the thump of an extra twenty kilograms of muscle. She wore a moustache and gold rim glasses, a plaid shirt, tight jeans, snakeskin boots. At the ticket barrier, she had given the girl a smile, turned and waved to me with the flick of a wrist, like the queen would. After the ferry had left, it took me twenty minutes to pack the flat and leave her.