The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  A few residents had gathered in the lobby again, the silhouette tableau of their huddle along the walls barely visible in the glow from the elevator. Had the glow grown fainter? Amon held out Rick’s gun to ward off anyone that might approach, and crossed back to the thin beam of light between doors, slotting his body in.

  Inside, the lantern hung on a wire from a small hole in the ceiling dissolving furiously, sparkles showering the room, the gray-walled chamber flickering from dim to semi-bright like a noncommittal strobe. Rick was lying flat on the floor of the elevator with the top of his head touching the wall opposite the door. A circular puddle of liquid now ringed his head like a glistening halo that slowly expanded as the tears fed it one after the other. If Amon wasn’t mistaken, they seemed to be growing a bit darker and—was it a trick of the light? No!

  “Rick! Your eyes!” cried Amon. “They’re bleeding!”

  Although the droplets slipping down his cheeks were not as dark as blood, there was a reddish tinge to them whose source seemed obvious.

  “What are you doing here?” said Rick. His tone was firm, but his voice was overly subdued as though he had been sapped of strength, while heavy quivering exhalations betrayed his fear. Despite his unwelcoming words, Amon thought he looked relieved to see him.

  “Come on Rick. I don’t understand you. You know I can’t leave. Definitely not now. What’s happening to you?”

  “Those drones must have dusted me more than once. I never really believed it until now, but I heard rumors that you can cry blood with an overdose.”

  Amon clicked his tongue and ran his fingers through his hair, baring his teeth.

  “I wish you’d done as I asked.”

  “It’s too late. The sun is down.”

  Rick paused for a moment as though thinking. “Did you find anything to drink?”

  “No. Damn, Rick. I’m sorry. I looked around for a bit until some drones came. Then I had to hide for a while. They destroyed all the lanterns and the sunlight started to fade so I kind of got lost and just barely found my way back. I thought it would be too dark to go searching anymore, but maybe I should head back out there.”

  “What about going to Xenocyst?”

  “I told you, the sun is down. There’s no way I’d make it there before morning. We don’t even know where we are.”

  Rick let out a long, quivering sigh. “Then forget about it. Getting yourself lost out there in the night with all the drones on patrol would be suicidal. We’re just going to have to stick it out till morning.”

  Amon looked down at his best friend, at his dull, enervated gaze, at the puddle of pale, bloody tears soaking the back of his head, at his slack open mouth, and he decided that he had to try his luck out there once more. Day or night, unknown or familiar, dangerous or safe, it didn’t matter. He would find a drink for Rick, even if it meant losing his life in the process.

  “Don’t worry,” said Amon. “I’m going to give it another shot, but I’ll be careful. There are other directions I haven’t tried yet.”

  “No. Forget it, Amon. What if you can’t find your way back this time?”

  “Just give me a few minutes to find something. You must be thirsty as hell.”

  “I am. Thirsty. Really, really thirsty. But …” Rick trailed off and closed his eyes.

  “Okay. So I’ll be right back.”

  “…”

  Amon stood up, his intense worry for his friend impelling him to the door. He had only taken two steps when Rick said, “Wait” quietly, but with such charged inflection that Amon’s legs froze and he looked back at him again.

  “I really don’t think you should go this time,” said Rick, his bleeding eyes staring pleadingly at Amon. “Not just because of the darkness and the drones. I don’t think you’ve thought this situation through.”

  “First you say go, and now you say stay? What is this, Rick?”

  “Listen, okay? Do you realize we’re in a war zone? Sure, they call it crowdcare and make it look all fatherly for the vids, but violence is violence, whether it’s non-lethal or semi-lethal or whatever the fuck they say. Every bankdead in their right mind is hiding in their room or whatever, so you’re going to stand out like nothing else on those empty streets. If you do manage to find a feeding station, it’ll be swarming with drones and you’ll be lucky to get past them to a machine. That’s assuming one of the SampleQuitos didn’t suck on you because, if they did, those vending machines will be no better than deathtraps. So don’t even think about going out there. If there’s no way for you to get to Xenocyst and make your appointment with Rashana, the only thing we can do now is wait.”

  Rick’s words reminded Amon of the SampleQuito on the bridge. Although he’d totally forgotten in the flurry of their escape, one had indeed stung him. This meant that some member of the Philanthropy Syndicate had his genome in their database and if they could link it to the recording of him taken by the sensors in the supply lanes, they might discover he was one of the saboteurs and put him on a blacklist. Then he’d definitely be a hungry ghost or, if the charities were really pissed off, the vending machine security systems would take him out on the spot and summon CareBots as backup. So while getting Rick some fluids was of the utmost importance, trying to access a vendor before they spoke with Rashana might get Amon killed or captured, and then his friend would be left crippled and helpless as he …

  Amon stood there by the slit, staring at Rick, the spectacle of his friend shaking in his visual field as Amon’s eyes twitched with concern. The tears had thickened further, oozing down his face to feed the darkening halo that warped as it expanded, the shadows on the floor growing with the gradual dissolution of the lantern as though they were sucking down the light from above.

  “Wait?” Amon replied. “Wait for what? You’re not going to last much longer like this.”

  “What other options do we have?”

  “I’ll be back soon,” said Amon, stepping forward and putting his shoulder into the space between the doors. “Just—”

  “Please!” Rick cried, his voice suddenly quavering, “Can’t you see what’s happening to me? My eyes ache. They ache! Everything’s clouding over in red, and the whole room is so blurry I can hardly make out the walls. And I feel weak. Weaker and weaker each second, like my arms are dumbbells almost too heavy to lift and—and … When you went outside, I wanted you to leave, but I can’t tell you how scary it was to think you weren’t coming back and that I might—I don’t want to be alone like this …”

  Looking into Rick’s desperate bleeding eyes, Amon finally understood their predicament. A bit of sports drink wasn’t going to cure what ailed him. A sheen of blood kept forming over his eyes and then overflowing the bottom of his sockets, creating wine-red rivers that gleamed in the deepening dim with each sparkle from the crumbling sphere of light and dribbled down the sides of his cheeks to send ripples over the surface of the pool. If they were in the Cyst hospital, they might have amputated the tear gland and stemmed the outflow, but that was several kilometers of maze away, not to mention darkness, and drones, and gods and buddhas knew what else. Amon wished he had a scalpel or some kind of blade so he could do it himself, and darted his gaze around the elevator, but of course there was nothing and he realized it was mad to think his untrained, clumsy hands would do anything but kill his friend if there was.

  Amon had seen other victims of tear dust—sprawled together in puddle-filled alleys, licking each others cheeks in rhythmic alternation to trade lost fluids—but never symptoms this severe, and his fear for his friend was suddenly tinged with the hot blush of anger when he realized that what had been done to him would undoubtedly go unpunished. Tear dusters were technically “non-lethal” or “semi-lethal,” even if they might result in death or serious injury from lack of hydration, as the actual cause was limited water rations, which it was not the responsibility of anyone to supply, only an act of compassion from the charities. No single round could kill someone directly and it was difficult
to assign responsibility for delayed, long-term, or cumulative reactions, since bankdead had no BodyBank sensors to collect verifiable evidence of the state of their health after initial dusting. The Fiscal Judiciary therefore only treated tear dust as causing temporary gland stimulation and fined the individual freekeepers who used it for the relatively cheap credicrimes of “assault,” “inducing discomfort,” and so on.

  Freekeepers were nonetheless discouraged from firing their assault dusters except when it was a last resort—as it had been during the riot—because it was even cheaper to have CareBots employ crowdcare weaponry. While overdosing Rick might have been an intentional choice made by remote human operators, Amon guessed it was a “decision” made by the drones, which were programmed to look for “abnormal” or “disorderly” activities like the stampede on the bridge. The deterrence algorithms of several drones had probably labeled him a serious threat requiring dust with a high level of lethality, reaching the same conclusion independently rather than as part of a coordinated assault, so that responsibility for the overall result of his being hit multiple times would fail to stick to any one of them. Even if it did, the behavior of these machines was not considered an action any more than that of the bankdead—as they were non-citizens—and could not therefore incur fees, let alone meet the Fiscal Judiciary’s definition of a credicrime. At the same time, the fact that they were nominally autonomous entities limited culpability for those who designed, maintained, and deployed them to cases of negligence such as “faulty programming” or “improper use,” as blame for particular violations could be placed on the drones. This ambivalence surrounding the legal status of drone moral agency made it a cinch for Philanthropy Syndicate lawyers to prevent liability from climbing the chain of command; the end result being nullification, diversion, and reduction of any financial penalties.

  Combined with the half-price rebate on crimes against bankdead always in effect, and the recent Absolute Choice reduction on fines for brutality, CareBots were an affordable mode of crowdcare indeed. In Rick’s case, however much he suffered in the end, the most that might happen was some organization peripherally involved paying a negligible fee, and Amon squeezed his fist so hard with indignation just thinking about it that his whole arm shook. While he was beginning to accept that Rick was right about the futility of going to search for something to drink, accepting the implications of staying here was impossible. Could Amon really just do nothing? How could this awful situation be allowed to unfold?

  Amon slipped out the slit and cried, “Hey! Anyone have any water? Please! My friend needs water, okay? He’s dying. Anyone? Please?”

  It could have been the darkness, but the shadowy figures showed no signs they had even heard him. Not a flinch or a turn of the head. They simply remained slouching along the walls and sprawled on the floor, silent, whether sleeping or awake Amon could not tell.

  Their apparent indifference infuriated him and he squeezed Rick’s gun with ruthless resolve, taking one stomp towards them, determined to find out if they had water and take it from them if he had to.

  “Amon!” called Rick, his voice trilling with concern, and Amon suddenly realized what he was doing, his anger fizzling out as fast as it had struck him. Here he was in the middle of a famine, asking strangers for something to drink after busting into their home with guns and seizing the best room in the house. With the current supply levels, there probably wasn’t a drop of water in the whole condo, and if there was, depriving these people any further could mean taking their lives, killing for the sake of his friend. Filled with revulsion for what he had almost done, Amon retreated back into the elevator, letting Rick’s gun fall from his hand with a clonk.

  “I’m sorry, Amon,” said Rick. “I know it’s my fault you lost the chance to get out of here, but if that’s the way it’s got to be then please stay here and talk to me. Just … talk to me.”

  Amon turned towards his voice and saw Rick holding out his hand from the floor, looking up at Amon with a forlorn and terrified expression, the wine continuing to spill down his twitching cheeks, his jaw quivering. Amon looked from Rick’s outstretched hand to his half-blind, red-clouded brown eyes, and grappled for a few moments with the words that had just launched from his lips. But their meaning outmatched him, and soon Amon resigned himself to taking his friend’s hand, feeling the core of warmth beneath the cool surface of his sweaty skin, and slumped down to his right against the cold, hard wall.

  “I don’t know why you keep saying it’s your fault,” said Amon, shaking his hanging head. “So many people hurt and dead, our friends too maybe. And look what they did to you, all because of my stupid plan.”

  “Like I told you, don’t even think about that now,” said Rick, his voice surprisingly confident as he squeezed Amon’s hand tightly. “Your plan was the only chance we had. It was a good one. We took a chance. Something we couldn’t foresee happened and we got attacked. But it wasn’t a total failure. We got the footage and now there’s a good chance that everything will be better here.”

  Maybe, but will you be there to see it? thought Amon, keeping his despair to himself rather than polluting his friend’s adamant hope. He knew he would never have spoken such optimistic sentiments in Rick’s place, and admired his resilience. The idea that such an incredible person might soon be gone was just too sad and enraging to consider, and Amon squeezed back, quelling the shaking that seemed to arise from the pit of his belly as he held in his own tears.

  “So please stop blaming yourself,” Rick continued. “If anyone screwed up, it was me.”

  “What are you talking about? How?” But Rick merely sighed and continued to lie there in his blood and tears, his chest trembling slightly as it rose and fell with each breath, while Amon slouched beside him, not wanting to press him in his dire condition.

  For a few minutes, they remained silent. The pool was spreading towards Amon, and eventually he had to raise his buttocks off the floor, his shoes becoming two islands. He thought he could feel his friend’s pulse in his hand—or was it his own? Its steady pounding seemed to slowly dwindle, like the ebbing and flowing tide of the ocean being sucked down a drain. Before the world turned to desert, before everything was just sand blowing about, fluid and ephemeral like the city they cowered beneath, was there anything that had to be said, any last words to exhale in the roaring face of the inevitable? Yes, there was. But was it right to expose the truth when the lie could be so much more comforting; to slice open the soft veil of moss and reveal the sharp rocks beneath?

  “Rick,” Amon said, his tongue seizing the initiative and answering his own question for him. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  Rick’s blood-veiled eyes turned to Amon expectantly. “Yes, my friend.”

  “The day we met up here for the first time, when I told you the story about what happened to me after you cash crashed … there was something I sort of left out.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Y-you know?”

  “Well, not everything. Just say what you were going to say. I’m listening.”

  Amon told Rick about how Mayuko had saved him in the Open Source Zone and then took him to a weekly mansion to hide from his pursuers. While this part was easy enough, the rest of the story was difficult to admit, especially when Amon went on to explain how he’d fled the next day after the emoticon man arrived, leaving Mayuko in danger. The final part was the hardest of all, and he hesitated, afraid to hurt his fast-waning friend, until he sensed somehow that maintaining the deception one second longer would only hurt him in some more fundamental way, hurt them both, hurt them all, and heeded the words of sincerity as they cried out to escape into the world at last.

  “The last moment I saw her before we had to disconnect she told me … I don’t know if I should be telling you this now, but you understand? I need everything between us to be clear and true.”

  “… Yes, Amon,” said Rick, his voice wispy and frail. “Whatever it is …”

&
nbsp; “Well, it was … I still want to understand jubilee. And I haven’t forgotten the dream. But now … She told me she still had feelings for me, you know, and that’s one of the things that’s kept me going, the idea that I might get back together with her someday.”

  Amon paused and looked at Rick to see how he was taking it. His eyes were half closed, as though he lacked the strength to keep them open any longer, and Amon couldn’t catch his gaze to read it. Watching the blood gather around the edges of his eyelids, Amon wondered whether any of those tears were shed by sadness. Was every other tear a sad tear? Or was each tear divided into a different proportion? Forty percent sad, 60 percent …

  “I’m sorry, Rick … We—”

  “You don’t need to apologize. I’m … I’m actually relieved.”

  “Relieved? How … You told me you wanted to start a family with her, so I thought … I thought that …”

  “How can I explain?” Rick opened his eyes wide and looked at Amon, his gaze bearing in with intensity from behind the red veil. “I was part of a family once … You know I was adopted. I remember those days as happy times. Then suddenly they abandoned me, and I was in the BioPen where the kids were cruel. They didn’t like newcomers, but you and Mayuko were kind to me from the beginning. Like this one day—it came back to me so clearly in Er when the overlay was gone and I had lots of time to think—this one day when all the other kids were shunning me and just pummeling me in dodgefireball and our SubMom didn’t seem to care, or maybe she hated me, and then I was crying. You and Mayuko took me out to see that star in the afternoon. Do you remember? There was this one steady twinkle in the InfoSky, untouched by all the images, like an oasis of the naked world.”

  Now that Rick mentioned it, Amon did remember and nodded. He had seen the daytime star with Mayuko when they’d first met, and wanted to share this beautiful mystery with Rick when he saw how upset he was, so they’d snuck up to the rooftop again, this time trapped in their training banks.