All of a sudden, it clicked into place. The whole picture.
Why.
They had reached an empty lot. Someone was growing grapes in it and as they reached the end of the rows, sudden movement in the shadows caught Aman’s eye. Too late. He was so busy sorting it all out, he’d stopped paying attention. The figure stepped out of the leaf shadows, a small, ugly gun in his hand.
“I was right.” Jimi’s eyes glittered. “Didn’t think I was smart enough to track you, huh? I’m stupid, I know, but not that stupid.”
“Actually, I thought you’d be too hung over.” Aman spread his hands carefully. “I think we’re on the same side here, and I think we need to get out of here now.”
“Shut up,” Jimi said evenly, stepping closer, icy with threat. “Just shut up.”
“Jimi?” Daren pushed forward, confused. “Goddess, I haven’t seen you….what are you doing?”
“He found you,” Jimi said between his teeth. “For the feds. You’re not hiding very well, Daren, you idiot. Everything you buy has a damn tag on it. He looked up your buying habits and picked you out of the crowd, just like that. He laughed about how easy it was. You were too easy for him to even give the job to a newbie like me.” Jimi’s eyes burned into the kid’s. “You got to…”
Aman shifted his weight infinitesimally, made a tiny, quick move with his left hand, just enough to catch Jimi’s eye. Jimi swung right, eyes tracking, gun muzzle following his eyes. Aman grabbed Jimi’s gun hand with his right hand, twisted, heard a snap. With a cry Jimi let go of the gun and Aman snatched it from the air, just as Daren tackled him, grabbing for the gun. The hissing snap of a gas-powered gunshot ripped the air. Again. Aman tensed, everything happening in slow motion now. No pain. Why no pain? Hot wetness spattered his face and Jimi sprawled backward into the grape leaves, arms and legs jerking. Aman rolled, shrugging Daren off as if he weighed nothing, seeing the suit now, three meters away, aiming at Daren.
Aman fired. It was a wild shot, crazy shot, the kind you did in sim-training sessions and knew you’d never pull off for real.
The suit went down.
Aman tried to scramble to his feet, but things weren’t working right. After a while, Daren hauled him the rest of the way up. White ringed his eyes and he looked ready to pass out from shock.
“He’s dead. Jimi. And the other guy.” He clung to Aman, as if Aman was supporting him and not the other way around. “Goddess, you’re bleeding.”
“Enough with Goddess already.” Aman watched red drops fall from his fingertips. His left arm was numb, but that wouldn’t last.
“Why? What in the…what the hell is going on here?” His fingers dug into Aman’s arm.
“Thank you.” Hell was about right. “We need to get out of here. Do you know the neighborhood?”
“Yes. Sort of. This way.” Daren started through the grapes, his arm around Aman. “I’m supposed to meet…a ride. This afternoon. A ride to…” He gave Aman a sideways, worried look. “Another place.”
“You’re gonna have to learn some things…” Aman had to catch his breath. “Or you’re gonna bring the suits right after you.” After that he stopped talking. The numbness was wearing off. Once, years and years ago, he had worked as private security, licensed for lethal force, paying his way though school. A burglar shot him one night.
It hurt worse than he remembered, like white-hot spears digging into his shoulder and side with every step. He disconnected himself from his body after a while, let it deal with the pain. He wondered about Jimi’s cat. Who would take care of it? Raul would be pissed, he thought dreamily. Not about Jimi. Raul had no trouble finding Jimis in the world. But Aman was a lot better than Raul. Better even than An Xuyen, although Xuyen didn’t think so. Raul would be pissed.
He blinked back to the world of hot afternoon and found himself sitting in dim light, his back against something solid.
“Man you were out on your feet.” The kid squatted beside him, streaked with sweat, drying blood, and gray dust, his face gaunt with exhaustion and fear. Daren, not Jimi. Jimi was dead.
“I don’t have any first aid stuff, but it doesn’t look like you’re bleeding too much anymore. Water?” He handed Aman a plastic bottle. “It’s okay. It’s from a clean spring.”
Aman didn’t really care, would have drunk from a puddle. The ruins of an old house surrounded them. The front had fallen — or been torn — completely off, but a thick curtain of kudzu vine shrouded the space. Old campfire scars blackened the rotting wooden floor. The Belt, he figured. Edge of it anyway.
“What happened?” Daren’s voice trembled. “Why did he shoot Jimi? Who was he? Who are you?”
The water helped. “What sent you to get hacked?” Aman asked.
“Someone searched my apartment.” The kid looked away. “I found…a bug in my car. I’m…good at finding those. I…told some of my…friends…and they said go invisible. It didn’t matter if I’d done anything or not. They were right.” His voice trembled. “I’d never do what they said I did.”
“They know you didn’t do anything.” Aman closed his eyes and leaned back against the broken plasterboard of the ruined wall. Pain thudded through his shoulder with every beat of his heart. “It’s the guy who killed your girlfriend.”
“Why? I never hurt him. I never even found him…”
“You looked for him,” Aman mumbled. “That scared ’em.”
The kid’s blank silence forced his eyes open.
“I’m guessing the local government is running a little…drug eradication program by eliminating the market,” he said heavily. Explaining to a child. “They cut a deal with the street connections and probably handed them a shipment of…altered…stuff to put into the pipeline. Sudden big drop in users.”
“Poisoned?” Daren whispered. “On purpose?”
“Nasty, huh? Election coming up. Numbers count. And who looks twice at an OD in a confirmed user?” Aman kept seeing Jimi’s childlike curl on the couch, the cat regarding him patiently. Couldn’t make it go away. “Maybe they thought you had proof. Maybe they figured you’d guess and tell your…friends. They might make it public.” He started to shrug…sucked in a quick breath. Mistake. Waited for the world to steady again. “I should have guessed…the suit would know about Jimi. Would be tailing him.” That was why the long look in the office. Memory impression so the suit could spot him in a crowd. “I figured it out just too late.” His fault, Jimi’s death. “How soon are your people going to pick you up?”
“Soon. I think.” The kid was staring at the ground, looked up suddenly. “How come you came after me? To arrest me?”
“Listen.” Aman pushed himself straighter, gritted his teeth until the pain eased a bit. “I told you you’re leaving a trail like a neon sign. You listen hard. You got to think about what you buy…food, clothes, toothpaste, okay?” He stared into the kid’s uncomprehending face, willing him to get it. “It’s all tagged, even if they say it’s not. Don’t doubt it. I’m telling you truth here, okay?”
The kid closed his mouth, nodded.
“You don’t buy exactly the opposite — that’s a trail we can follow, too — but you buy random. Maybe vegan stuff this time, maybe a pair of synth-leather pants off the rack at a big chain next purchase. Something you’d never spend cash on. Not even before you became a Gaiist, got it? You think about what you really want to buy. The food. The clothes. The snacks, toys, services. And you only buy them every fifth purchase, then every fourth, then every seventh. Got it? Random. You do that, buy stuff you don’t want, randomly, and without a chip, you won’t make a clear track. You’ll be so far down on the profile that the searcher won’t take you seriously.”
“I’ve been buying in the Belt,” the kid protested.
“Doesn’t matter.” He had explained why to Jimi. Couldn’t do it again. Didn’t have the strength. Let his eyes droop closed.
“Hey.” The kid’s voice came to him from a long way away. “I got to know. How come you came
after me? To tell me how to hide from you? You really want me to believe that?”
“I don’t care if you do or not.” Aman struggled to open his eyes, stared into the blurry green light filtering through the kudzu curtain. “I’m…not sure how come I followed you.” Maybe because he hadn’t asked why and Jimi had. Maybe because Avi had been right and the job had changed him after all.
“But why? You a closet Gaiist?”
Aman wanted to laugh at that, but he didn’t. It would hurt too much.
Voices filtered through nightmares full of teeth. People talking. No more green light, so it must be almost dark. Or maybe he was dying. Hard to tell. Footsteps scuffed and the kid’s face swam into view, Jimi’s at first, morphing into the other kid…Daren. He tried to say the name but his mouth was too dry.
“We’re gonna drop you at an emergency clinic.” Daren leaned close, his eyes anxious. “But…well, I thought maybe…you want to go with us? I mean…they’re going to find out you killed that Fed guy, right? You’ll go to prison.”
Yes, they would find out. But he knew how it worked. They’d hold the evidence and the case open. No reason to risk pointing some investigative reporter toward the little dope deal they’d been covering up. They’d have expectations, and he’d meet them, and Jimi’s death would turn out to have been another nasty little killing in the Belt. He could adopt Jimi’s cat. No harm done. Just between us.
“I’ll come with you,” he croaked. “You could use some help with your invisibility. And I have the track to the proof you need…about that drug deal. Make the election interesting.” Wasn’t pleading. Not that. Trade.
“You can’t come chipped.” A woman looked over Daren’s shoulder, Hispanic, ice cold, with an air that said she was in charge. “And we got to go now.”
“I know.” At least the chip was in his good shoulder.
She did it, using a tiny laser scalpel with a deft sureness that suggested med school or even an MD. And it hurt, but not a lot compared to the glowing coals of pain in his left arm and then they were loading him into the back of a vehicle and it was fully dark outside.
He was invisible. Right now. He no longer existed in the electronic reality of the city. If he made it back to his apartment it wouldn’t let him in. The corner store wouldn’t take his card or even cash. He felt naked. No, he felt as if he no longer existed. Death wasn’t as complete as this. Wondered if Avi had felt like that at first. I probably could have found him, he thought. If I’d had the guts to try.
“I’m glad you’re coming with us.” Daren sat beside him as the truck or whatever it was rocked and bucked over broken pavement toward the nearest clear street. “Lea says you probably won’t die.”
“I’m thrilled.”
“Maybe we can use the drug stuff to influence the election, get someone honest elected.”
He was as bad as Jimi, Aman thought. But…why not hope?
“You’ll like the head of our order,” Daren said thoughtfully. “He’s not a whole lot older than me, but he’s great. Really brilliant and he cares about every person in the order. She really matters to him…the Earth I mean. Avi will really welcome you.”
Avi.
Aman closed his eyes.
“Hey, you okay?” Daren had him by the shoulders. “Don’t die now, not after all this.” He sounded panicky.
“I won’t,” Aman whispered. He managed a tiny laugh that didn’t hurt too bad.
Maybe it hadn’t been the final fight after all.
Could almost make him believe in Avi’s Goddess. Almost.
“Your head of the order sucks at hiding,” he whispered. And fainted.
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
Cory Doctorow
If William Gibson and Bruce Sterling were the alpha cyberpunks of last century, then Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow have become the alphas of this one. Here Doctorow geeks fluently about terrorism and net culture, sorrow and idealism. He nods at all those stories about global cataclysm and the end of human civilization but then offers a decidedly PCP take on who might be best suited to do the Adam and Eve thing. To watch his Sysadmins struggling to rebuild politics is to realize that cyberpunk, paradoxically, has become a literature for grownups.
When Felix’s special phone rang at two in the morning, Kelly rolled over and punched him in the shoulder and hissed, “Why didn’t you turn that fucking thing off before bed?”
“Because I’m on call,” he said.
“You’re not a fucking doctor,” she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed’s edge, pulling on the pants he’d left on the floor before turning in. “You’re a goddamned systems administrator.”
“It’s my job,” he said.
“They work you like a government mule,” she said. “You know I’m right. For Christ’s sake, you’re a father now, you can’t go running off in the middle of the night every time someone’s porn supply goes down. Don’t answer that phone.”
He knew she was right. He answered the phone.
“Main routers not responding. BGP not responding.” The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn’t care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a little better.
“Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could login to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power-supplies.
Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. “In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here.” This time she was wrong—he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too—he had logs that showed that after 1 AM, nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity — AKA Felix’s Law.
Five minutes later Felix was behind the wheel. He hadn’t been able to fix it from home. The independent routers’ netblock was offline, too. The last time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had driven a ditch-witch through the main conduit into the data-center and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins who’d stood atop the resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards who labored 24-7 to splice ten thousand wires back together.
His phone went off twice more in the car and he let it override the stereo and play the mechanical status reports through the big, bassy speakers of more critical network infrastructure offline. Then Kelly called.
“Hi,” he said.
“Don’t cringe, I can hear the cringe in your voice.”
He smiled involuntarily. “Check, no cringing.”
“I love you, Felix,” she said.
“I’m totally bonkers for you, Kelly. Go back to bed.”
“2.0’s awake,” she said. The baby had been Beta Test when he was in her womb, and when her water broke, he got the call and dashed out of the office, shouting, ‘The Gold Master just shipped!’ They’d started calling him 2.0 before he’d finished his first cry. “This little bastard was born to suck tit.”
“I’m sorry I woke you,” he said. He was almost at the data-center. No traffic at 2 AM. He slowed down and pulled over before the entrance to the garage. He didn’t want to lose Kelly’s call underground.
“It’s not waking me,” she said. “You’ve been there for seven years. You have three juniors reporting to you. Give them the phone. You’ve paid your dues.”
“I don’t like asking my reports to do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said.
“You’ve done it,” she said. “Please? I hate waking up alone in the night. I miss you most at night.”
“Kelly—”
“I’m over being angry. I just miss you is all. You give me sweet dreams.”
“OK,” he said.
“Simple as that?”
“Exactly. Simple as that. Can’t have you having bad dreams, and I’ve paid my dues. From now on, I’m only going on night call to cover h
olidays.”
She laughed. “Sysadmins don’t take holidays.”
“This one will,” he said. “Promise.”
“You’re wonderful,” she said. “Oh, gross. 2.0 just dumped core all over my bathrobe.”
“That’s my boy,” he said.
“Oh that he is,” she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball.
He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.
It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was given over to humming racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones and multitools.
Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all those bodies were overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six looked up and grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by name. He threaded his belly through the press and the cages, toward the Ardent racks in the back of the room.
“Felix.” It was Van, who wasn’t on call that night.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “No need for both of us to be wrecked tomorrow.”
Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology Page 48