Convergence

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  “Hear you’re on reclamation tomorrow, Jonah,” he said.

  I nodded. I knew where this was going.

  “If you find anything, could be worth some credits here.” His arms were folded on top of the bar. He wore a natty denim shirt with the sleeves cut off. He had an old novelty tattoo animated by nanofilaments on his upper bicep. The tattoo was of a skull smoking a long, thin cigarette. The ash lit up orange and slowly died down as a cloud of smoke wafted from the skull’s black nostril pits and drifted up his arm. It paused, then started up again, always with a small flicker between the playback cycles. Maybe he’d missed a software update, or the nanos were dying and cycling down. Soon, he would have a regular old tattoo, instead of a cheap parlor job that had gone out of style a decade ago.

  “I’ll look,” I assured him. I always did. Sometimes, I even found stuff he could use—a bottle of Jack, maybe some wine. Most times, I struck out. Most of the liquor and convenience stores had been looted from top to bottom ages ago. Still, it never hurt to look.

  “Alice had a friend here earlier,” Jaime said.

  It piqued my interest, but I knew what that meant. Her friend had probably “requested” that I make it into the reclamation sites.

  Jaime confirmed my suspicion: “Said if you find any bodies out there, you should chip them. Said Alice would be mighty appreciative.”

  I nodded again. The reclamation sites, out in the ruins of LA, were never short of bodies. More often than not, they were wired for upgrades and memory back-ups. The dead were usually easy pickings. I wondered what Alice was searching for or if she was becoming an addict. She’d been taking an awful lot of chips lately.

  Jaime had long salt-and-pepper hair that he pulled back into a ponytail. The light struck him in a peculiar way, and I was hit by how old he seemed. I knew he was in his late fifties, but suddenly the scars were older, the wrinkles deeper. His left arm and most of his hand was covered in a thick blanket of twisted, warped flesh. He’d said a deep-fryer accident from way back when had burned him all to hell, but it didn’t jibe. A long, puckered scar ran across his face and under his cheekbone. I never talked with him about it, but I’d overheard him telling a customer about the burn once before.

  He reached under the bar and came up with a small paper-thin tablet. Old tech, probably smuggled in from out east or way up north. A mess of cables was routed through it. The illegal hack job picked up the newsfeeds and infolines. It came to life at my touch, the screen filling with small text.

  “Your handiwork got some press.” A smile touched his lips.

  The authorities had no leads, the news piece claimed. The article’s source was a Sacramento feed. The PRC was attributing the chiang’s murder to Liberty’s Children, a terror cell based in Los Angeles.

  The article was at the bottom, so I scrolled back up to the top, to the breaking-news banner and images of burning cars on the 101. A woman, her face smudged black and her hair a bloody paste against her skull and forehead, cradled a small boy who was maybe five or six. His head was canted at an unnatural angle, and a large blackened piece of shrapnel jutted from his neck. Her face was timid and placid, frozen in shock.

  “So did yours.” I turned the pad, slipping a copy of the mem chip I’d burned from the chiang into a data slot. The memories would comp me on the whiskey and food.

  “We’ve had a productive couple of days then.”

  Fingerling’s was Jaime’s public face. His hidden one was more violent—and much more dangerous. He operated a cell of freedom fighters made up mostly of ex-American soldiers, Army guys who had gone AWOL after the United States officially withdrew from combat operations and declared California a lost cause. Although I lacked any formal military training, I’d found over the years that I could kill well enough, and Jaime had found uses for me.

  We bumped fists, and I took another sip of whiskey. When the burn faded, I asked him for an order of his cheesy potatoes. Aside from the whiskey and craft beers, the potato dish was what he was famous for around here. The name of the bar came from the fingerling potatoes, cut into one-inch slices and fried in bacon grease, then smothered in a Roquefort béchamel and topped with bacon and green onions that he grew behind the bar. He grew the potatoes in a community garden, and somebody who must have been artisanal in a past life made fancy cheeses for him. In my past life, most of my cheeses had come wrapped in plastic sleeves or out of a spray can. Some of the park had been cleared out and reclaimed into farmland, with homegrown butchers selling beef, ham, and bacon from the imported cows and pigs they raised there. Civilization was on the rebound, some said.

  I skimmed through the pirated newsfeeds, trying to get a grasp on the world around me. The final death count stemming from a shootout between PRC and militia forces near the Hollywood Bowl the previous day had risen by three. One was a PRC casualty; the other two were UN Peacekeepers who had responded to support the PRC and attempted to quell the violence. A UN spokesman offered up a sanitized quote about the emerging peace, how California as a whole was becoming a more stable region, and that peace itself was a constantly ongoing effort. PR fluff. A sidebar made brief mention of UN inspections of the state’s various refugee camps and said those they had visited so far had received passing marks with minimal suggestions for improvement.

  Smaller stories told about other UN Peacekeeping causalities in Sacramento, where insurgents opened fire on a squad of soldiers from Scandinavia. A schoolyard bombing at a PRC state-run facility had blown thirteen children to bits during their morning recess, and another twenty students and eight teachers had been injured.

  An editorial that had been picked up from the Times-Picayune encouraged Los Angelinos, if they were reading, to move forward and embrace the future. The war was over, the New Orleans writer said, and after four years, the time had come to lay down arms, for what was left of America to rally together and join hands in the unity of brotherhood.

  Fucking armchair quarterbacking without a single clue. The PRC had never made it as far east as Louisiana. Even with the support of their Russian and Iranian allies, they’d had their hands tied in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, busy securing the offshore oil rigs that lined the coast from Long Beach to Santa Maria and seizing control of the Wilmington oil field, the third-largest oil field in the nation, so that they could export that oil back to the resource-starved China.

  I refolded the tablet and slid it across the bar, back to Jaime. I’d read enough, and I worked hard at slowing my breathing, trying to quell the anger the newsfeeds had stirred. I was ready to go back to my tent and get fucked up again, but my stomach reminded me of other, more pressing, needs.

  Behind me, a woman danced, her slender hips swaying back and forth with an easy rhythm. Long, sleek legs stretched out from a frayed denim skirt. Her arms were raised up over her head, her hands turning in waves and flicks of her wrists, her shirt lifting to expose a smooth, tanned belly and the lines of her hips.

  Watching her, I was reminded of other, largely ignored needs.

  The music was loud, as always, but nobody complained, and the PRC didn’t seem to care. Most of the PacRim soldiers felt as trapped here as we did. This was our home, and I suspected some of the troops even viewed themselves as our neighbors. A few—the younger ones, mostly—made attempts to be friendly. They hadn’t been in-country very long and were dumb enough to think of this as an adventure.

  A man joined the woman, and they danced together, their bodies pressed tight, hands roaming. I turned away, and a minute later, Jaime was sliding me a plate of potatoes. I ate slowly, trying to forget, trying to blank my mind.

  A flicker of movement caught my attention as someone sidled up to the bar beside me, slender arms hugging the bar top. She noticed my glance, and her eyes quickly darted away from mine, back down to the bar. She brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi, Mesa.” I slid the potatoes over. “Hungry?”

  “No,” she said wit
hout looking up at me. A tall, slender man with distinctly Asian features stepped up behind her, his hands going around her waist with an unsettling familiarity as he bent in to nuzzle her neck. Her hand came up to stroke the side of his face. “Hey.” She gave him a quick peck on the lips.

  “You coming home tonight?” I asked.

  She at least had the courtesy to pretend to think about it, softly biting her lip. “No,” she said, shaking her head slowly.

  “And why not?”

  “Because it’s not home.” Her voice held an edge of exasperation from the hundred, or thousand, times we’d had this argument before. “It’s a fucking tent in the middle of a fucking park. We don’t have a home.”

  “Hey, baby,” the guy said, trying to soothe her.

  “Shut it,” we both told him. His eyes darted between us, not quite sure whom to be offended by. Quickly putting on the tough-guy façade, he shot me a deadly stare. But he must have seen the look in my eyes and thought better of it. He squeezed Mesa’s shoulder and told her he would be over by a table that he pointed to, then went to sit down.

  “He’s too old for you,” I said.

  “He’s twenty-six.”

  “You’re eighteen. He’s too old for you.”

  “What the fuck do you know?” she asked.

  I shrugged. It was a good question. Maybe I used to know, but I wasn’t quite so sure anymore.

  “I know you ought to be at home,” I said lamely. Still pissed, I added, “Instead of sleeping your way from tent to tent.”

  My reflexes were quick, and I grabbed her wrist before she could slap me in the face. I forced her arm down, and she shot me daggers with her eyes. If looks could kill… I took another sip of whiskey then offered her the glass. She took it, rifled the shot back hard and fast, then slammed the glass down on the bar, giving me all kinds of defiance. I signaled Jaime for another.

  “Just one.” I nodded to Mesa. “Water for her.”

  “I hear Washington’s relaxing its borders,” she said. “Letting people in through Walla Walla and Vancouver. People who want to be repatriated.”

  “People who want to be Canadians,” I said. I wondered about the black woman from the chiang’s motel room the other night. She should have made it into Nevada by that afternoon. She probably had a better chance of making it to the seasteads, but their immigration policies were tight, and breaking through naval patrols was a risky proposition at the best of times.

  “I’m not asking you to go with me,” she said.

  “You don’t owe me explanations. If you want to leave, you can try. Never stopped you before.”

  I speared a potato and ate it quickly.

  She sat quietly, nursing her glass of water. Behind her, the woman danced on, oblivious to the pain around her, lost in her own daze and the music. Bored and dejected, Mesa’s boyfriend sat at a table, scratching at the scarred Formica with his fingernails and picking at it.

  “He PRC?” I asked.

  “No. He was a grad student. Now he’s just one of us.”

  Her voice trailed off, and she slid the glass back and forth across the bar, between her hands.

  “We should go,” she said. “Be like old times. A road trip.” She smiled, still staring down at the bar top. The smile was weighted with sadness, though, and the hurt in her eyes stabbed painfully at my heart.

  Mesa was older than her eighteen years. Her life had been hard, and she’d been forced into adulthood far too soon. Her ears were pierced. One was heavily and colorfully decorated with an assortment of studs and bars and costume jewelry pieces. The other ear had an old, thick, two-gigabyte USB thumb drive dangling from the lobe by a thin, golden S-hook. The red-and-black drive was a custom job. Rugged and unfolded, the shiny metal tip hung loose from a hard shell of shiny plastic. I wondered if it held any data or if it was merely a fashion statement. A maze of tattoos sleeved her arm in shocking bursts of color and tangles of black. A long Japanese dragon, its scales red and green, flowed from a cluster of golden tulips. Its large talons wrapped around a thick Gaelic cross. She’d had more coloring and detail added since I’d last seen her.

  “It’s nice,” I said, surprised by how much I appreciated it. It spoke of her heritage, of her mother, and me.

  “Thanks,” she said, finally making eye contact with me.

  “Will you come home tonight?” I worried I sounded desperate, needy.

  “Don’t call it that. Please. It’s not home. Our home had walls and a kitchen and a bathroom. We had a TV and radios and photographs on the wall and Mom’s paintings and… This isn’t home.” She stared at me hard, urging me to understand a difficult foreign concept, imploring me to understand.

  “Okay,” I said.

  She nodded, slowly, as if I were stupid. “I’ll think about it.”

  I’d heard that before, and it never meant what I wanted it to.

  “Okay,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. Realizing I didn’t have anything else to say kind of hurt. So I said okay again and ate another potato smothered in a cold glop of congealing cheese.

  She took a potato, too. When I looked at her, she giggled the way she had when she was younger, when I would catch her stealing food off my plate. Maybe it was a peace offering, a common ground rediscovered. She kissed me on the forehead, keeping her hand flush against the center of my back.

  “You should sleep,” she told me. “We’re going up the hill. There’s a concert there.”

  She was already moving off before I could say anything, before I said something stupid and caused another fight. My anger died, leaving me tired and desperate.

  “Kids, huh?” Jaime said.

  I shrugged.

  “Wash your pot?” He pointed at the smudges of dirt and mud.

  “Thanks.” I pushed my empty plate toward him. He took it and my pot and went to a small washtub to clean them.

  I missed the feel of Mesa’s hand on my back. I missed how I used to carry her when she was a tiny girl, her arms wrapped around my neck, and how she had found so much humor in life, so many things to laugh at. I wasn’t sure how long ago I had last heard her laugh. A few years, at least—probably longer. She had her mother’s long jet-black hair. The slant of her eyes had been softened but not extinguished by my Irish blood. I could still hear her mother’s laugh and feel the press of her lips against mine and the way her hands felt on me. I knew I was lost down dark roads I should have avoided, and suddenly, I was angry again.

  Four years had passed since Selene’s death, since the blackout, and since the end of my world. I’d spent much of my last night with her being an asshole.

  The irritation over small things had built up over a few days—things like picking up the morning newspapers from the driveway, bringing in the mail, and putting dirty dishes in the dishwasher. She couldn’t be bothered with these small tasks. She was content to run over the newspapers with her car on her way to work and then run over them again as she pulled into the garage at the end of her day. Mail and dirty dishes would accumulate for days on end, to the point of overflowing, before she could be bothered with them. She would remind me that “we” needed to clean the house over the weekend, which inevitably meant I would be the one cleaning the house. Or “we” needed to mow the lawn and spruce up the garden, but I couldn’t remember the last time she’d ever done anything even remotely resembling yard work.

  I’d grown sick of it. I was tired of the accumulated weight of all these tiny chores and annoyed to walk in the house to find her sitting on the couch, watching TV. I’d had an attitude when she finally uncurled herself from the sofa to greet me, and it must have been radiating from me in thick, heavy waves. She’d asked me what was wrong, and I’d said something stupid, out of anger, and one thing led to another. We tossed bitter accusations back and forth until I wore her down and berated her to the point of tears. And then I made a simple pasta dish for dinner, but the act of cooking fueled my resentment and left me wondering why, again, I was the only one
who ever contributed.

  The irritation kept rising, and we fought again. I was loud and belligerent when angered, quick to accuse, and fast to find her fatal flaws and pick at her quirks. I’d wanted my words to cut deep, and I was willing to settle for tears.

  I ate quietly, wrung out from the fighting, both physically and mentally. Her pasta sat on the plate, growing cold. She stared at it and picked at the food with her fork but didn’t eat. She tried to speak a few times, stammering out a word or two between lengthy pauses before finally giving up. Her whole body deflated as tears cut swaths through her makeup. I tried to make small talk rather than apologize, but she was on lockdown, afraid that whatever she might say would trigger another vengeful rant. I was almost proud of the way I had reduced her, but I was also disgusted with myself, and eventually, I shut up and let the tension simmer between us, feeling guilty and ashamed.

  Then the blackout happened. The riots started. The explosions. The spreading panic.

  We didn’t know about the attacks on Hawaii or the EMP blasts in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco, and Sacramento. We had no idea how coordinated and organized the attacks were. We never saw it coming. And I’d wasted the last few hours fighting with the love of my life, unaware that we were on borrowed time. Such an oblivious idiot.

  I shot back the whiskey, letting the burn choke me. I grabbed my pot from Jaime and left before I lost all my credits getting drunk, intent on punishing myself by getting fucked up again.

  In my tent, I let the memories crawl over me, jacked into the DRMR, my anger tempered by loss, sadness, and hate. I relived the old days of Mesa’s birth, her first steps, and her first words. I relived my life with Selene, her mother, remembering the better nights. I felt her touch again, remembering her fingers brushing through my hair and the feel of her lips against my mouth and kissing her way down my chest and stomach. All over again, I felt her taking me inside her and driving away all the pain and horror, thrusting against me, her hot breath gasping in my ear as we came. I was crying, and we were fighting again. Then she was dead, Mesa was gone, and I was lost and damned… And, at some point, the sun had come up again, and I hated myself when I disconnected, tired and covered in cold sweat.