Roo'd

by Joshua Klein

  Table of Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Fede was 18 when Tony got roo'd. He'd been prepping for early college admission with late-night com-classes, goggled in and finger-cramped over nasty circa-2009 C++ code examples while longing to toss it in for time to scan some flashy Java virii. Tony had been gone from his life for at least a couple years, five years his senior and a failure, as far as their folks saw it. Bailing out of a prestigious single-course curriculum at MIT, the rumor was that he'd crashed and burned on Pakistani kraft; carefully engineered cold cells delivering a prolonged payload of top-flight methamphetamines directly to the spongy flanges of his right hemisphere.

  "Coulda been a genius" Fed's father had said when he'd said anything about Tony, which wasn't often. He had never said much, plugged in as he was basically 24/7 to a Grecko-Roman massively-multiplayer game world based out of a datahaven in the Balkan Islands. Fed's Dad had been an in-game Wizard, administering illegal betting and avatar trades through a Russian triumvirate. About the time Tony had washed out of MIT their Dad's game servers had been pulled by marketeers and put to use in a retro Furry MUD. Without the reassuring virtual community of brother-love Fed's Dad had simply faded away, dissapearing the same way Tony eventually had.

  Fed's Mom was unfortunately much more present. Plugged in all day to secretarial comstats turning nasty boardroom sharkfights into regurgitated memorandums suitable for shareholders, she was the bland paste that put a shine on corporate "accountability" clauses. Every night she got home and either popped a tricyclic and a red stripe lager, settling in for a long night of Disney-produced medi-dramas, or mixed vodka and an MDMA-derived german sports drink and went out with Bark. Bark was not Fed's favorite in the long line of boyfriends his mom had had, mostly because he insisted on trying to win points with his Mom by palling around with Fed. All Fede wanted was to be left alone to goggle in and wrench his brain around the tightest code he could find, teasing it apart byte by byte until that singing satisfaction of comprehension flooded his brain. One day Fed was going to change the world, and he'd figured out early that you didn't get to change the world by sitting on your ass.

  But it was because of Bark that Fede started seeing Tony again. Bark'd come over for dinner, which was really just an old-fashioned form of foreplay, and had somewhere along the line decided that Fede should keep his tray with theirs on the jittery fomica platform that served as a kitchen table.

  Fede had just unplugged when Bark's yelling had shook through the plyboard walls between his room and the kitchen. Fed ignored it and ran his finger around the mounting post on his right leg. He wiped off the excess antimicrobial grease on his jeans and held it up under the lamp to inspect his work, noting with a grimace the spreading crack in the plastic housing on the shin. Grunting to himself he slid it home and felt it catch. He leaned his head back against the water-stained wallpaper. His head hurt.

  He'd been living on Hawaiian time for weeks, running the normal classes locally and power napping until the start of the courses on the islands. EST plus Hawaiian - which always ran late - was burning him bad, but he wanted the computer virus background something fierce and Hawaii was the only place that offered it. Everywhere else was too political. Fede sighed and finished socketing his legs on before shuffling down the hall.

  "There we go. Like a family" Bark'd said, as though it held some meaning or weight which might translate across the tautological divide between them. Fede stood in the doorway, the kitchen's grease-stained wallpaper rendered in clean RGB scan lines on the inside of his goggles, his chording keyboard clenched tightly in his right hand.

  Bark slapped a meaty paw against the sole empty chair. "C'mon, it'll be fun! Your Mom even fried 'em on the George Forman. And I have a new mesquite margerine spray - got it promo from work today. You'll love it." Bark worked as a distributer and "display maximization consultant" for Easy-Pick, the line of closet-sized convenience stores painted into corners of gas stations and confectionary shops.

  Fede sat down at the table and flipped one goggle cup over his eyebrow, his other hand keying in the combination for single-handed chording.

  "No computers, Fed" his Mom said. "How about we just enjoy each others' company?"

  Fed's jawbone tightened, slowly recognizing the signs that Mom's antidepressants were hitting the half-life wall and that another round of emotional trauma was coming due. "Enjoying each other's company" was practically a code word for months of repressed guilt and anxiety sloshing heavily against the floodgates, held back by carefully-wrought "producivity" subliminals at work and the crufty remains of his mother's neuro-reuptake inhibitors. Fede flicked back the other cup of his goggles and let the scattered light show flicker out and across their faces, tiny glimmers of blue and red and green laser light pulsing softly against their cheeks as it tried to resolve on a cornea, any cornea. He keyed in a locking sequence and pocketed the chord, bending over the soy patty to industrially cut it into easily-stackable bite-sized chunks.

  "My muscleman loves this shit" Bark said "Gave me a total discount on the ab work I was showing you." He followed this with a wink to Fed's mom. Bark paid precious money to have his sedentary lifestyle painstakingly smoothed away through an injected cocktails of hormones and the electolytic equivelant of a battery charge, individual muscle groups drugged and brainwashed into thinking they'd been working very hard for weeks. As a result Bark's body had the look of someone who worked out very regularly on only one muscle group at a time. It probably also meant he could maintain an erection for hours, a fact that was a sure selling point with Fed's mother. Fede didn't mind; a well known side affect was an inability to ejaculate.

  "You ought to come down to the shop sometime and take a look, Fed" Bark said. "My muscleman, he kinda looks like you. Name's Tony."

  Something inside Fede did a convulsive somersault around half a soy patty.

  "Tony?" asked Fed's Mom, wonderingly, "Tony Farkeren?"

  "Yeah! Old Farker! You know him somehow?" said Bark, delighted in a dull, dog-like way that he had managed to get everyone's attention.

  "We know him" said Fed, steadily. He shoved the remains of his soy patty into his mouth, his cheeks bulging, and went back to his code.

  Chapter 2

  It took two weeks for Fede to find the time and work up the courage to see Tony. After he'd bailed from MIT Fed'd pretty much written him off; he had never come back home, just emailed Fed's Mom that he was done with MIT and was exploring better horizons. Fede knew they'd spoken at least once afterwards, mostly because of the four six-packs of Red Stripe strewn sticky and empty across the living-room floor one Sunday afternoon, but never found out where Tony had ended up. After bringing it up once with his Mom (and regretting it) he'd decided not to think about it anymore - Tony'd never been around much anyway, and this meant Fede could put the bottom bunk to good use by mounting his database cluster of salvaged hardware somewhere that the danger of overheating wasn't such an issue. A few months later Fede took down one of Tony's old The Cure posters to make room for a sheaf of printouts on new chording key combinations and realized he'd cancelled his brother out of his life in exchange for more time focused on coding. The ensuing
twenty-four hour scripting binge had resulted in a render-farm plugin he'd traded for a new rig out of midland China, and Fede had never looked back. Until now.

  The shuttle from his housing park was late as usual, and he ended up stuck at the rail station with a half hour between trains. While he was there he logged in on the local net and double-checked his mail, spawning a couple newsbots to try to dig up anything new on Tony's shop while he waited. Nothing interesting turned up - Greener Pastures was just a regular tattoo / body-shop, pretty much like any other, although the online pics showed some pretty flash stuff with muscle therapies and bone implants. Made sense; Tony had been checked as one of the top candidates in his class in the biosciences at MIT before he'd bailed. And he'd always loved the bodmod scene even if he was too clean-cut to be part of it. Now that he wasn't in school anymore it figured that he'd get involved there.

  The train pulled up and he got on, rolling his eyes inwardly at the solid wall of low-level corporates lined up neat and tidy in their uniforms. Interspersed between them like peacocks among pigions were the contractors - flashy clothes and spiky hair and expensive corneal replacements set in deep-set, sleep-deprived eyes. The difference, in Fed's mind, was in the corporate contract. Most people that wore uniforms didn't know how to bargain, didn't realize that they represented a value proposition to the corp. The contractors were even worse; living in a fantasy world from contract to contract, constantly scrabbling for the next job. When Fede got his chance he'd come into the market with a strong chip - big school cred - and would bargain like hell for his employment agreement. He didn't want the constant worry of freelance. Instead he'd make a secure deal and keep his head down, hide under the waves of uniformed clueless and let the freelancers make their noise. He'd worked it out a while ago, after Tony had disappeared, and now he just had to get into a good school to make it a reality. That's where Tony had screwed up; for some reason he couldn't take it at MIT, and as a result he'd kissed his one good chance at happiness goodbye.

  His Mom wore a uniform, Fede considered idly, and claimed to like how it looked.

  Just as the train was pulling in Fed's goggles pulsed a link from one of his bots showing a new post about Greener Pastures' animal sex pics. Fede sighed and deleted the spam. The stuff was self-mutating now; a bot somewhere had obviously sniffed his query and modified it. The shit was making the net all but unusable these days, and only Fed's aggressive filtering kept his inbox from getting glutted. He killed off the rest of the bots in case they'd been caught too and joined the mob stepping out into the ionized air surrounding the maglev depot. He liked the train; despite being unwilling to pay the per-use fees for its network access. Those same fees had almost killed it as a form of public access, especially since wireless access was free on buses and subways, but it also made it cheap and not quite so full of advertising, which was why Fed liked it.

  The train pulled past him as he hobbled behind the crowd. It was cold in the old station, microclimates funneling a sharp wind from the high-rises over Africatown and out towards the suburbs. Fed shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and looked for a shwag vendor. Sure enough there was one in the far corner of the station. He wandered over to it, his legs making the old familiar hiss-shuffle as their hydraulics softened his steps. They'd need more oil soon, he reminded himself. Better models were available, and lots of people got amputated for the replacements alone, but Fede held on to his old hospital-issue legs as a sign that he wasn't a mod. He hadn't hacked off his legs to get a better jump shot, or faster sprint, or flashy chromium LED-studded cat-toes. Fede hadn't had a choice, and mods weren't his thing. Apparently they were Tony's thing, he reminded himself, afterimages of hasty in-shop comm photos of toeless feet and coral-stud horns lingering in his mind. Fede had always talked shit about bodmod, about how he was going to go whole-hog one day and get roo'd. Fede snorted at the thought, his hips aching as they warmed up to his normal rolling gait. He'd been born without legs below his knees, a "genetic anomaly." Some folks got webbed toes, Fede had got no legs. Tony used to say there was an equal exchange, that Fede had been given better brains instead. It was stupid, but his liked to think about it sometimes, usually when he was plugged in pulling overtime on coursework, trying to get an edge on upping his Prog-SAT scores.

  As he came up to the vendor he fished around in his bag and pulled out a dirty slug of gelatinous plastic, transparent and light blue. The thing was about the size of his thumb and had been injection-molded into the shape of a Japanese-designed bug-eyed alien. It looked like it was wearing a Jewish kippah, an imprint over the back of its head circled in curdled plastic. It had originally been meant to fit over the end of a tablet's stylus for kids, but now it had a John Doe fingerprint sealed on the back of its head. It was kind of old - the print had been pulled out of a vulnerable U.S. marriage certificate database over a week ago - but Fede was pretty confident it would still work. He'd traded it for a quick hack he'd put together for a kid at school, a modified version of the program he'd used once to loop his image on the video conference, and was glad to get to use it before it aged out.

  He stuck the back of the alien's head on the scanner and punched a selection on the touch screen. The vendor's sides flashed, the telephone-box sized thing's every inch suddenly dedicated to announcing the virtues of the Chrysler-Daimler product Fede had chosen a sample of. Thankfully someone had disabled the speakers on the thing so he didn't have to listen to it. Let the John whose print he'd used get the advertising in his mailbox; that's what the vendor really wanted. Pegged for big-business spam for the rest of his life by virtue of selling off his biometrics. Privacy for convenience. Idiot.

  Fede palmed the tiny triangular package as it fell into the vending tray and found a quiet corner nearby. He gently pulled the tyvec jacket out of its pouch. It was silk-thin and silver and traced through with fiberoptics, making it look slightly veiny. Still, for something spun out of aerosoled carbohydrates it would cut the wind and hold in his body heat, and Fede had recently gotten a tip for dealing with the blinking ads that covered the jacket's surface. They'd flashed to life as soon as he had pulled it out of its vacuumed-packed container, the Chrysler-Daimler name spinning and blinking around the arms and across its chest and back. Turning the thing over he found the collar, tracing the wire there until he found the discreet bulge near the left lapel. He didn't have anything sturdy enough to bang it with in his bag, but looking around he found that the bolts on one end of the bench he was sitting on were loose. After a minute he'd wedged the bulge into the space between the bench and the floor. After sitting down heavily a couple of times he heard a satisfying crunch and the jacket went dim. By now the station was pretty quiet, and a vendor selling stir-fry across the empty hall yelled at him in Chinese. Fede ignored him and pulled on the jacket. It was stained and rusty around the collar, but Fede wasn't wearing it for the fashion. Even so he thought it made a nice statement to be wearing an almost-new adjacket that wasn't actually flashing anything. Kind of neo-punk. He slung his bag over his shoulder and headed out of the station.

  Chapter 3

  Greener Pastures was in Chinatown, Fede was disappointed to discover. The stink of real chickens and MSG-derived carbonated sodas filled the air, undercut with the sweet-salty reek of the grey water sewer systems set not-far-enough under the street drains. Chinatown had been targeted for unproven water recycling programs like a lot of the cheaper burbs, sold a bill of goods for plant ponds under their streets to separate them from the rest of the city's water supply, make them self-sustaining. Now the burb sat on the biggest cesspool in North America and paid a premium for showering and drinking water to boot.

  A group of Chinese boys came up the street past him as he walked, their rainbow mowhawks filling the road in a tight phalanx. As they got closer he saw that they were pushing a heavily mod'd scooter. It had aftermarket plastic molding all over it, little logos and flashing product names stenciled in carefully ordered lines over every inch of its carbon-fi
ber frame. There was a fairing on it, Fed noticed disbelievingly. A stylish wind fairing on a device that could go twenty miles an hour.

  A few minutes later he had followed the little blinking cursor in his eye to a tight alley off the main shopping street. The end of the alley had a car garage in it, two three foot long red plastic dragons framing the door. As Fede entered the alley the doors opened and a battered mini came roaring out at him, the cold glare of a thousand white LEDs suddenly blazing from the headlights that unfolded from its blunt nose. Fede skipped backwards and out of the way, and as the mini slowed to join the foot traffic he noticed that the alley was covered with some sort of plastic dome, and that the dome had some sort of mold on it. He pushed his goggles back as he walked into the alley, neck straining to make out the green clouds that seemed to be floating motionless above him.

  "Algae tanks" a female voice informed him. "The building's owners skim off the fuel cells from the cars to feed them. But we like it for the color."

  Fede lowered his head to see a Chinese girl standing against a doorway to his left, the bitter smell of burning wood riding the grey smoke wisping out of her hand. She wore olive cargo pants and imitation Russian combat boots, topped with a cropped brown shooting sweater. The rifle patch on her right shoulder had been carefully embroidered with softly glowing white thread. She was long and thin with an animal look, and her smooth belly was a caramel color that looked pleasantly edible in the green light from the algae tank overhead.

  She stuck the stub of a thin hand-roll into her mouth and tightened her short pigtails. Her big eyes were heavily circled with black eye shadow, the pupils thick pools you could fall into, braer tar he'd never come back from. Fede realized he was staring. She was beautiful.

  The girl took the cigarette out of her mouth and puckered her lips at Fed; let a ragged stream of smoke tumble out at him. She tossed the butt on the ground, and as she stamped out the ashes and turned to tug open the doorway Fede saw a sign overhead. "Greener Pastures," it read.