Convergence

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  The data chip disappeared into her pocket. She folded her hands in her lap. “And the girl?” she asked, quickly changing tracks.

  The hooker and her bruised face. I could see her clearly when I closed my eyes. The chiang had preferred them dark, but he’d also liked them afraid and beaten. According to Jaime, the girl was one of the chiang’s favorites, which made her somebody he could trust, as much as a chiang in Los Angeles could trust anyone these days.

  “He beat on her some,” I said, “but she’ll heal.”

  “Will she be a problem?”

  I pretended to give it some thought and scratched at the stubble around my chin. I was really thinking about the DMT rush I would get back at home in a few hours, reliving the chiang’s death and a few other mems in my greatest hits collection. Being in Chinatown, watching the PRC sniggering at me, made me realize I’d been straight for too long.

  I wasn’t sure how much to tell Alice. The girl had been afraid of the general, and she had agreed to the job on the condition that she get passage out of the state and into Northern Alliance territory. We used a young Korean guy to help coyote some of our people into the northern reaches of Nevada. The massive influx of refugees meant they weren’t exactly welcome in the old heartland, but she stood a good chance of a new life in Minneapolis or Michigan—if she survived the route through the Sun Belt and into the Corn Belt. That latter leg of the journey would be easier than the former, given the tentative alliances. The Sun Belt states shared easy borders with the Conclave, and those Corn Belt regions were allied with the Alliance or Canada or, if they were wise and business-savvy, both.

  “No, she won’t be a problem,” I said.

  She gave me a hard look.

  “We’re working on getting her disappeared.”

  She smiled. She liked words like “disappeared.” I liked her smile, so I said stupid things like “getting her disappeared.” She had a nice smile and nice lips. Not too thin, but not too full. They gave her mouth a proportionate appearance. Her dark eyes were nicely slanted. Some guys were into that. I usually wasn’t, but I would have made an exception for her.

  “I trust you have already made your copies of his memories?” she asked, switching tracks again.

  “I have.”

  “Then you have payment enough.”

  She operated on the “information is power” principle. The memories on that memchip would mean a lot to a great many people. I knew a couple buyers who would be very interested.

  I nodded, and she smiled again. She gave a small nod, and the door opened beside me. Hai helped me out, gently putting his hand under my arm, then closed the door behind me with a soft click. He stood beside the car until I was far enough away to be safely deemed unthreatening.

  A slow drizzle started as I walked down toward Lei Min. Flashes of light in the distance were followed by thunderous explosions. I sat at the bench near a bus stop and waited, watching thick columns of black smoke curl into the air over the freeway.

  Chapter 3

  I made it back to the tents before nightfall. The PRC guards stationed at the camp’s entrance gave me the usual pat down, wanded me, and then ran me through the security clouds. I was allowed to pass through the gate and the chain-link fence and into what used to be a rec center.

  Traffic had been stop-and-go the whole way through. The explosions had shut down the 101, and vehicles making their way off the freeway had congested the surface roads after police shut down the on – and off-ramps and redirected everybody. Nobody was happy, and it didn’t take long before motorists tried to find shortcuts and new routes, gumming up the works even further. The bus ride home had taken an hour and a half to get out of Chinatown and into Echo Park.

  My eyes were tired and gritty, and my headache was building up to a migraine. The dim lights were already too glaring, and I was squinting against them. I was moving slowly, and people swarmed around me as they made their way through the checkpoints. The line to get in had been long, and it only grew longer as curfew drew closer. The guards had quickly come to recognize us, but they knew not to become complacent.

  Four months ago, a suicide bomber detonated herself while in line and killed twenty-six people. She’d waited until she was close to the cloud so that she could take out a few PRC guards, but the casualties were largely civilian.

  Every security check was exactly the same—a long, methodical process that was sometimes slow, depending on luck of the draw. The guard’s temperament that day and whether or not you were stuck behind a family or the elderly determined how random the random full-body searches were.

  As I neared the final checkpoint, a fed-up guard got in my face and began swearing at me in Chinese. Nobody paid much attention. He cussed me out for several minutes, pausing intermittently to poke me in the chest with a bony finger, prodding me to nod along. A few of the other guards laughed, and after another brief round of verbal abuse to delight his audience, he pushed me forward.

  Past the final gate, people milled around, deciding what to do next. A small cafeteria doled out rations of thin, greasy soup, or they could join up with the line forming at the opposite end of the rec center, to make their way into the camp and back to the tents they called home. I wasn’t hungry, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to go home yet, either. I figured, fuck it, and stood in line anyway.

  The PRC was a fan of redundancy. That afternoon’s freeway bombing had them on high alert, and I couldn’t blame them. People were trying to kill them on a regular basis. People who lived there, in the tents. People like me. People who remembered a life before the war and the way things used to be and resented the way things had become. People who would fight and die to reclaim a small piece of the past. So they had checkpoints at each entrance and exit. Getting out was barely easier than getting in. They checked people out, scanned ID cards, and scanned people back in before admitting them into the checkpoints in the rec center. Then the process started all over again to get out of the rec center and into the tent grounds. The line from the rec center to the tents was short, and it moved more quickly.

  My head hurt, and the setting sun gave off a bright glare as I passed through the entrance. Outside were rows and rows of Quonset huts and tent shelters. The jogging and bike trails, palm trees, a man-made pond with a beautiful fountain, and the downtown skyline were all gone. The trees had been burned. The pond had been drained and used up. A series of carpet bombings had wiped out much of the skyline. What remained of downtown were ruined shells; once-tall skyscrapers stood like jagged broken teeth in a bloodied jaw.

  The Echo Park neighborhoods were gone, and with them, the boundaries that had divided it between the 101 and the 110. The Heights were gone; Beaudry was gone. The only things the 110 divided anymore were the tents and no-man’s land, where all the dead were buried in ruins of concrete and ash. All that was left was Tent City, a small camp where the survivors and their families were allowed to congregate and live.

  Echo Park was a prisoner camp in all but name. Barbed wire was strung at the top of the tall fences, and guards patrolled the watchtowers at each corner of the camp. The efforts at visible security were for their protection as much as ours. Those of us living inside had no love for the PRC, but practicality had its place. Tent City beat living in the streets, trying to scrounge out a living among the gutters and sewers of our decimated city. The PRC did not treat the homeless well and automatically presumed them to be a threat. Often, they were shot on sight. Those of us in the camps had it a little bit better. We were issued day passes. We were allowed to leave and were expected to return before curfew. And we did, all the time, because these tents were all we had left. The camp was shelter, if not home. They were the last bit of normalcy we knew. The lot of us, we remembered four walls, comfortable living rooms, and kitchens that carried memories of family. We hadn’t forgotten the beds we’d tucked our children into or the beds we’d made love in inside those four walls. But they had been replaced with tan canvas staked to the ground and
zippered flaps for a door. Or we slept in bunk beds under a rounded tin roof with a hundred-plus souls crammed inside, where the bodies heated the room to stifling and the stale air was rank.

  I had an old tent riddled with rough patches. It fit two, me and Mesa, but most nights, I was alone. The dual-separating zippers on the flap were locked together with a small brass padlock. Anybody who wanted to could have picked it or cut through the thin canvas. The lock was more for peace of mind than security. I fished out a key, unlocked it, then relocked the zippers from the inside. Small window flaps on each side of the tent were unrolled and let in enough light to see. I zipped those back up, trying to make the tent as dark as possible. I shut my eyes against the rest of the dimness. I lay on my thin cot, resting my head on an equally thin pillow.

  I felt shitty. Too fucked up to get really fucked up. I slept, and when I woke, the sky was dark. Bugs smacked against the tent, tiny thuds in the dark. I was thirsty and couldn’t remember when I’d last had water. I kept a small pot in the footlocker at the end of my cot, along with a couple glasses that weren’t exactly clean, a worn-out, ragged toothbrush, a small, chipped mirror, and a few days’ worth of clothes that weren’t exactly dirty. My name and ident designates were stamped and sewn into the collars of my shirts, the waists of my pants and underwear, and the tops of my socks so that they could be laundered by the community service and returned to me by some kid who had been volunteered for the light labor duties until he was old enough to work the reclamation gangs. The DRMR pad was still in my pocket. A couple data/mem chips were hidden in the locker beneath a fake panel that none of the random inspections had been able to suss out yet.

  I grabbed the pot and stood in line for water. The hour was late, and the line was short. I had missed the dinner rush, and the small gathering around me was getting their fill to prepare for morning.

  PRC guards, a dark Latino man and a pouty-looking light-skinned black woman, stood on either side of the water spigot. TIMMONS was imprinted on her shirt; the stamping was dull and worn out. The Latino’s shirt was so faded that I couldn’t make out his name. She had her rifle slung over her shoulder and was responsible for rationing out the water, while the man held his weapon casually between both hands, relaxed but ready.

  Timmons was sweating in the evening heat. The top two buttons of her shirt were unbuttoned and barely hid a string of numbers tattooed along her collarbone. A nine and sixteen were plainly visible, but the rest were hidden beneath the dark-green uniform top. The numbers corresponded to letters of the alphabet—a P and an S—which had probably meant she had been a member of the Crips gang in her former life.

  The PRC had attracted the disenfranchised early in the war. They had unleashed thought-bombs on all the major urban hubs and poorer sections of the city. When the bombs exploded, they unleashed clouds of broadcast particles that quietly, but incessantly, whispered propaganda in the people’s ears and flashed videos of promise in their eyes. Wind currents had carried the particles through the city, into businesses and homes. The messages had forced their way into people’s heads like a catchy pop-rock song, impregnating minds with a future ideal more glorious than anything America could offer, calling for pacifism and offering food, clothing, and jobs. Evacuation efforts were focused on downtown LA, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, where all the money was, where all the powerbrokers and campaign donors lived. The National Guard had been on hand to quell riots and ensure that the borders dividing the rich from the poor were maintained violently. For people in Compton, Inglewood, Echo Park, Watts, and Hacienda Heights, the thought-bombs had confirmed something they had learned a long time ago—their government would do nothing to help them. They were on their own. Allegiances shifted quickly.

  I couldn’t help but think that the winds of change would soon shift again. People would wake up to see what the new order was really about and get sick of how long reclamation and rebuilding was taking. Soon, they would want more than they were being given, and trouble would flare up again. Discontent would build. Those like Timmons, who had bought into the Pacific Rim’s propaganda and traded one gang for another, were in store for an awful wake-up call.

  I shuffled forward and put my pot under the spigot. Timmons turned the knob, and the water flowed, clean and cold. Sometimes, early in the morning, it came out rusty brown, and the guards decided to either to let it run clear or let you take it as it was or walk away with nothing. I tried to go later in the morning or evening whenever possible, figuring I would avoid confrontation over the rust. I didn’t want to die over brown water.

  I moved on, and the lady behind me stepped up. I was a few paces away when voices rose, turning heated. I turned back out of curiosity, in time to see Timmons punch an older black lady in the face. The old lady had cut her lips on her teeth, and she spat at Timmons’ face. The Latino clubbed her with the butt of his rifle, sending her to her knees and taking the feistiness right out of her. She cradled her head, lying in a fetal position in the small depression of mud worn into the earth by feet and loose spray from the spigot. He radioed for back-up, and a terse response came back quickly. The line of people stood still. Everybody stared blankly at anything other than the woman and the guards.

  When Timmons looked up, I made eye contact with her, and she strode forward. We weren’t supposed to make eye contact with the guards because the Chinese viewed it as a deliberate provocation. A simple expression could be a death sentence, particularly with a former gang banger. She unhooked the leather guard on her holster and drew her pistol. She knocked my pot away from me, sloshing water over our boots as the pot hit the dirt. It bounced, landing upended, spilling the rest of the water in a fast deluge.

  She stared at me, her gun hanging loosely at her side. Her nostrils were flared, and a violent patchwork of blackheads freckled the bridge of her nose and her cheeks, dotting the darker pouches beneath narrow eyes. Anger and hate were carved into her stony face, and beneath that were embarrassment, an abundance of pride, and a very strong urge to shoot me for no reason at all. I averted my eyes and let my head fall. My shoulders slumped, making my posture relaxed and non-confrontational. I was burning up inside, pissed off that she’d cost me my water, but I said—and did—nothing. I let her gaze burn into me for a hard, long minute. She turned to walk away, shaking her head. She didn’t holster the gun until she was back at the spigot.

  I picked up my pot, thought about getting in line again, and decided against it. Timmons was watching me, her eyes boring into me, making the line of people wait until I was gone, waiting for them to cast some of their scorn and resentment my way. The pot was flecked and streaked with dirt and dust, and mud was caked against the steel rim. I brushed it off with my hand as best as I could. I nodded to her as two PRC hurried past me and grabbed the old woman by either arm and hauled her to her feet. She was dazed and crying as they quickly took her away. I moved off, and the shock of the sudden violence wore off. People got back to normal. Just another day at the camp.

  The old woman would be taken to solitary and locked up for a few days in a hot metal cage with no windows and merely a hint of ventilation. She probably wouldn’t live through it. Thinking about her trapped and dying, slowly being cooked to death, I needed a drink of something stronger than water. One hand in my pocket, my fingers playing with the set of mem chips I carried. Jaime would be glad to have the chips. He ran a small makeshift bar and restaurant, a real DIY venture he’d scrounged up out of the earth, and I knew I could get food and a drink there. My dry mouth and rumbling stomach made my decision.

  I made my way through the twisting alleys between the tents, shooing away mosquitoes. Curfew would be coming up soon, and parents would start rounding up the children playing nearby in small groups, kicking a beat-up old soccer ball back and forth. Voices were hushed, but the hum of conversations went on, filling the night air.

  I wasn’t in any rush to get to Fingerling’s, even though I greatly welcomed the cool burn of a shot. When I made it there, the bar
was getting crowded. It occupied a decent-sized lot not too far from the habitation zones. The PRC, by and large, did not prohibit the use and sale of alcohol, but they frowned upon excess, public intoxication, and disorderly behavior. Drinking too much and being an ass was a good way to get hurt or killed. A guard tower in the northeast corner overlooking the rec lot and Fingerling’s kept the area well-lit for constant supervision.

  Jaime had built the bar from scrap wood rounded up during reclamation runs. Even the small canvas tarp hanging over the bar was shoddy and riddled with small holes. What little liquor could be found in the bombed-out ruins of LA had been hoarded by those living out in the ruins or gathered by reclamation workers. Any booze that was found and sold to people like Jaime was slowly dispensed, but Kristoff had set up quite a microbrewery and distilled his own whiskey.

  Tabletops were scarred and mismatched, and hardly any of the chairs came from the same set. The bench seat from an old Buick had been installed on some cinderblocks to provide additional seating.

  I took a seat at the bar and put my pot up on it. I glanced around and nodded at a few familiar faces, then watched a few of the women dancing while I waited for Jaime. He knew what I wanted, which made ordering easy. He set down a tumbler filled with amber, and I took a slow, appreciative sip.

  The whiskey, smooth and mellowed with a few drops of water, had notes of chocolate, honey, coffee, and oak. It warmed my chest, from the back of my throat to deep inside my belly. I savored it, then held the tumbler up away from the bar, ready for the next sip. People tried to slam Jaime’s whiskey, but that was a total disservice to his craftsmanship. This was a sipping whiskey that should be taken slowly and enjoyed. Its taste was made for studying and appreciating.