by Nas Hedron
“Okay Gat, I’m all over it.”
“Great. TJ getting in your way?”
“Only when he brushes up against me. Accidentally.”
“Tell him I said to knock it off.”
“Aw, Gat. It’s okay. He’s harmless.” I think I hear a slight warmth in her tone as she says it. Maybe one day TJ’s dreams will come true after all.
“Okay, you know best. Call me when you’ve done a run-through on the North Cali order, okay? I’m going to head home for a bit.”
“No problem.”
I end the call and get on my bike, aiming it home, wondering what the hell I’ve gotten myself into. At first I thought security for Max would be a piece of cake, and a rich one too. Then they told us about the intrusion. Then we found the data burn. Then the attack on me. Now this. The bad guys are starting to look a lot more sophisticated than I expected, and it pisses me off.
At home, I’ve barely showered and changed when Carmen calls.
“Disturb you?”
“Naw. I was just going to eat.”
“Alan went into sim and did some digging, most likely the kind we don’t want to know about in any detail.”
“And the prize goes to?”
“The prize goes to the bad guys. Nothing at all at North Cali Mining—there never was a call from there, it came from somewhere else. Featherweight trace of data burn at Body Work. Somebody hacked the order in, successfully imitated the voice of June the tech, who Brian Forget has spoken to eight zillion times, used NC Mining’s ultra-encrypted codes, and ordered the three shells. Whoever got instantiated I’m betting it wasn’t miners.”
Obviously there’s a voice synth in that mess somewhere, but beyond that I can’t begin to guess what’s going on.
“Thanks Carmen. You going to get some rest?”
“Oh hell, Gat, I got another twelve hours in me before I’ll need a nap.”
“Don’t go burning out on me, Carm. It’s not like you’re replaceable.”
“You can say that again. Don’t worry about me, though. I know my limits.”
“Okay, keep me posted as always.”
“You bet. You get some rest.”
“Yeah, I know my limits too, I just hit them sooner than you do.”
She laughs and hangs up, ever the macho chick.
Despite what I said to Carmen I stay up late into the night. I run through everything in my mind over and over, but I can’t see a point of entry into the case. My thoughts turn in a closed loop, going over the same material repeatedly, like a malfunctioning sim. When that happens in sim it’s unnerving, unsettling at some deep level of consciousness where the human ur-mind knows that events ought not to simply recycle themselves so often, so exactly. At the same time, with a sim glitch there’s a giddy kind of joy that comes with the unreality of it.
Thinking about the case I have the same feeling of unease that a sim breakdown causes, but with none of the fun. In my mind’s eye the case forms a wall made up of the things I know and the many mysterious things I don’t, or that I simply don’t understand. Somewhere in that wall there has to be a crack, something that will let me inside the mystery so I can blow it open, but I can’t find it no matter how hard I try. I have a plan of last resort, but I reject it.
I think some more, then return to it. Reject it again.
I go to sleep rejecting it, but I have a feeling I’ll wake up with no other option.
Thirteen: Spiders and Tics
Morning brings no new clues or revelations. I have two suspects and almost no hard information. There is Porsche, who might or might not have had her wiring tampered with so as to allow her to plot against her grandfather, using her allowance to hire the talent she needed. Then there are the Suerte, whose possible motive is bizarre, but makes its own loopy sense. They have the skill to carry out the intrusion themselves, if not the data burn, and like Porsche they have enough money to hire any outside help they might need. I’m down to the plan of last resort after all.
In these circumstances—one or more suspects but no clear leads—I know that many of my fellow security specialists have, very much on the sly, gone to see the spider. They don’t like to admit it because it smacks too much of magic, of voodoo, but it happens.
I’ve never done it myself, but now it’s on my mind. The evidence points nowhere in particular and I could use a nudge in the right direction. From what I’ve heard, the spider’s oracular advice might do the trick. Admittedly, though, it’s produced mixed results in the past. You never know when she’s telling you the truth so that you will succeed, telling you the truth knowing that it will never help you, lying to you so that you will fail or, most perversely of all, lying to you because by deceiving you she is indirectly pointing you toward the thing you’re looking for. Hell, sometimes she says nothing at all. The spider is neither inherently good nor evil—those notions don’t seem to interest her—but she is powerful, there is no doubt about that.
No one knows where the spider came from, or even what she really is. Some people speculate that she’s a by-product of the Fall, the result of a military biotech op that went south with everything else, leaving the spider to roam loose in the chaos that followed the collapse of the Empire. Some spooky shaman types see her as a harbinger of returning old gods, come to eat people and speak in riddles in the last days of man’s dominion over the Earth. I have no point of view on her origins—I just hope she’s as useful as her reputation says she is.
The spider’s nest lies in the upper reaches of the Mega, L.A.’s largest shopping mall. The Mega’s roof is so high and inaccessible that she can live there, amongst the girders and steel plating, without most people even realizing that she’s there, high above their heads. Her lifespan is such that she has been there, tending her thousand eggs, for over a hundred years, and it’s quite possible that her spawn won’t have hatched yet a hundred years from now.
The Mega sits on several city blocks, just east of Union Station. This was not anyone’s first choice of location, in fact it was never under consideration at all in the initial stages of planning. The developers and city politicians had squabbled over candidate sites for almost a year before the eventual location dropped in their collective lap. An earthquake reduced everything in the area to rubble, twisted metal, and body parts. Suddenly there was a large downtown space, with no residents’ association because the residents were dead, and no local politician playing to the crowd. They didn’t even have to demolish the existing buildings, just bulldoze away the debris.
In a perfunctory gesture to those who died in the quake, a small memorial was erected at the site. Two weeks later they started excavating the Mega’s foundations. Anyway, that’s history now. The Mega has stood for almost a hundred and forty years and no one alive cares about how it got there. Before I died people used to complain that L.A. had no natural center, no equivalent of Times Square or the Eiffel Tower. The Mega may not have the fame of one or the beauty of the other, but for better or worse, here it stands.
Before heading to the Mega I call Jocelyn Favreau, a woman from my Forces unit who, aside from sharing my French-Canadian heritage, still owes me two serious favors. Jocelyn’s hitch ran out a year before mine, before Tijuana. Since she wasn’t there she doesn’t know exactly how grateful she should be, but she knows she avoided something terrible. While she was still enlisted, though, we served in the Boulder Recon together.
After leaving the service, Jocelyn opened a Forces surplus store on La Mirada in Santa Monica. There was no shortage of vets who needed ready cash, and as often as not they badly wanted to be rid of anything that carried a memory of their time in the military. Everything they’d owned, coveted, even clung to for dear life over their years in uniform was now freighted with such heavy memories that, as desperately as they’d once relied upon it, they now wanted to be rid of it. They sold their uniforms, ration kits, boots, and helmets; medals and citations and flack jackets; climbing gear and backpacks and sleeping bags; Ka-Bar k
nives, kriss knives, switchblades—everything. At the same time there was an equally abundant supply of civilians, especially teenagers and gang members, who were all too happy to play army in someone else’s cast-off uniform—especially if it had a bullet hole or two to give it some extra cachet.
On my way there, I can’t help thinking about Boulder. Unlike Tijuana, Boulder is just a set of memories, not a legion of ghosts. Some of the memories aren’t very pleasant, but they never materialize in the sunlight and walk down the street beside me, mouthing prayers.
The Jennies landed at a makeshift LZ in Central Park so we could avoid buildings and other structures that could impede our landing or provide cover for local forces. Boulder wasn’t a Grey Zone exactly, it still had a patchwork of services and utilities that approximated a functioning infrastructure, but it had no central authority, instead operating as a cluster of loose, overlapping communities of interest. This meant that its military was essentially a guerilla volunteer force that was more likely to take strategic shots at us from a variety of well-covered positions than to confront us head-on. And sure enough, there was no one at all at the LZ, just an eerily quiet park with the leaves rustling as the trees swayed slightly in the breeze.
Our ostensible target was a tech research facility near Spruce and 17th Streets, about a kilometer away, where we were hoping to mine some pre-Fall documentation on biomimetic design. The underlying mission was to assess Boulder’s defences, it being one of the few reserves of surviving technology in the area.
We had two squads in total and each one would operate independently, taking different routes to the target, to give us some redundancy. My squad moved cautiously north along 9th street, while Jocelyn’s headed east along Boulder Canyon Drive. Within moments they were out of my sight, taking cover as they advanced.
Our advance wasn’t direct. It was clear the Boulder forces knew we were coming because blockades built from junked cars or overturned tractor trailers occasionally blocked our path and forced us to alter course, reversing and taking alternate routes, sometimes getting disoriented. It was somewhere around 9th and Pearl Street, where we turned east, that I noticed Old Tibet.
It had clearly once been a boutique dealing in imported art, but had suffered from whatever frictions existed amongst the local social groups. Along with a few of the neighboring stores, it had its front window smashed and an array of artifacts, including a number of Buddha statues, had been scattered across the street, most of them broken. As I passed a large, intact ivory-colored Buddha, I stooped briefly and straightened it up, standing it properly on its base. It made no strategic sense, but it seemed the right thing to do. I hadn’t started my dharma practice at that point, and in any event my practice is a secular one, so I don’t revere the Buddha in a religious way, but even back then it seemed wrong to leave the guy lying there, disrespected in that way. It was a brief, unremarkable moment, quickly forgotten in the ensuing firefight, but later it stuck with me.
We emerged from the far end of the Pearl Street Mall into the midst of a confrontation. Clearly the block between 15th and 16th streets was where the Boulder guerillas had decided to take their stand. Their forces were concentrated behind barricades down the street. They also had snipers in elevated positions, but our forces had taken them out—all but one. He was on the second storey of a building, above a funky-looking establishment whose sign announced it as the Mountain Sun Pub & Brewery, and he had Jocelyn pinned behind an industrial trash bin, swearing in Joual and unable to get to her squad or to find a route that would take her out of the line of fire.
I drew a bead on one of the windows the sniper had used and waited for any sign of movement, every heightened sense in my military shell cranked up to its maximum. I remained utterly still for almost six minutes before I saw a barely discernable grey-on-grey silhouette of a figure—something an unenhanced human could never have perceived—and I fired without hesitation. I hit the shooter and he must have bounced off something behind him, because he fell forward out the window, like people do in the sims but never do in real life, and Jocelyn managed to scramble back to the rest of her squad. We never did make the target—you had to admire the tenacity of the local fighters—but that was the first favor I did Jocelyn.
The second one was simpler, but from her point of view almost as important. Much later I accidentally came across Jocelyn and her lover, Marina, in each others’ arms. No one gives a damn about homosexuality in the Forces, but Marina was Jocelyn’s superior officer, and that made any relationship strictly forbidden. It could have compromised the judgment of either of them in a critical situation if the other one was threatened. I kept my mouth shut and that was favor number two.
I meet Jocelyn at her store, a large space full of the Force’s detritus. She’s a wiry woman, muscular in a hard, thin sort of way. She stands behind the counter, and I take in her slim physique—I can’t help it, I love the tautness of her. Her Forces T is more revealing than it is concealing, showing off her tight torso. It’s not the first time I’ve wished she was straight.
The musty smell of the place reminds me of the Forces, of supply rooms and staging areas. Of human sweat and the smell of fear. Stacked everywhere are the tools we used, the shelters we huddled under, the clothes we wore. The smell alone is enough to bring on a slew of memories, but I force them back, back, back into the basement of my mind. I can’t let them interfere right now. Still, very distantly, I hear howls, screams, the whine of turbos and the thrum of chopper blades. I hear bullets loosed on their targets, the muffled thump of distant mortar fire, the close-up concussion of mines, and prayers spoken in quick, desperate Spanish.
Along one wall is a display of guns and other weapons, most of them not surplus at all, simply the guns that Californians are legally entitled to own, brand new from the manufacturers. The Forces, after all, require that you return your arms upon being decommissioned. Still, there’s plenty to choose from. There are handguns of all calibers, rifles, shotguns, flechette launchers, and some old model machine guns.
Jocelyn’s giving instructions to one of her employees. When she turns toward me she smiles, though it has an edge of both sadness and wariness, as smiles so often do between vets.
“Gat,” she says quietly. Now the memories are intruding on my senses despite my efforts to keep them out. Her voice has taken on the sketchy, staticky sound of a comm link gone bad. She seems to me to be at a distance, even though she’s standing right in front of me. The smell of the place isn’t helping. Dust. Fungus. Dirt. Sweat.
“Jocelyn,” I answer. I see the muscles in her arms and shoulders tense a little. Her belly too. We remind each other of too much bad stuff for this to be comfortable, no matter how much we like one another. We have had to jettison each other just as we have our old uniforms and equipment. She’s not unhappy to see me exactly, but she can’t be completely happy about it either.
I wonder how I sound to her, what memories she has carefully hidden away that are coming up on her now. Maybe the harrowing adrenal rush that came with being trapped by that sniper, mixed inextricably with the crisp, clean air of Boulder. Maybe the brilliant flowers in the flowerpots in front of the Mountain Sun, their fragrance carried to her on the breeze while she swears in the language of her ancestors and wonders if she’ll die today.
“Tell me what you need,” she says, knowing I haven’t come by to say hello. I hear her as though she’s talking from a ‘copter, her transmission full of cracks and snaps and pops.
What few people know is that Jocelyn has some supplies that weren’t so much cast off as stolen. I use up one of my favors in return for the illicit merchandise I need. The two of us speak in riddles and codes to defeat any listening devices, a delicate linguistic minuet. Evasion and dissembling are talents the Forces instill whether they mean to or not. Now I’m down to one favor. With everything that’s happening, I wonder if I’ll get the chance to cash it in.
On the way downtown the dreams harass me again. They blend with
the scenery as I ride my cycle, fire erupting where there is no fire, people dying in the streets where, in fact, they walk along calmly, going about their business. One set of images is overlayed on top of the other, and the hell of Tijuana imposes itself on Los Angeles, blurring reality, making it hard to follow the traffic lights. I hear the thump thump thump of chopper blades as I idle my bike at a red light, but there’s nothing in the sky. I look, believe me—it’s that real. I smell the distinctive odor of Angelfire tearing up human flesh, but around me there’s nothing but calm. I realize I’m sweating despite the bit of cool wind that makes its way under my faceplate. When I arrive at the Mega, I park, a little shaky. I stay on the bike for a full five minutes, focusing on my breath, working toward that point where my dharma practice takes me—where the bad things are still there, but I can function nonetheless—and eventually I succeed, more or less. I dismount and take the small box Jocelyn gave me from my saddle-bag and make my way toward the mall.
Entering the Mega through the east doors, I’m immediately hit with a blast of mall air. There is something comforting in that air—a combination of artificial coolness and familiar food smells that brings back memories of my youth. We had nothing like the Mega when I was a kid, but we had malls and the air in them was just like this. I fall in with the gait of the crowd, letting its tides pull me along for a while. There is an omnipresent murmur of voices that never stops, like the sound of a human ocean. Every few meters it’s interrupted by blasts of music emitted by stores trying to lure customers inside. The songs they play are all popular and all current—there is no such thing as history in a mall.
Above me I can see the concentric rings of the upper floors, with teenagers leaning against the railings in groups. Teenagers are everywhere, in fact—running, making out, dancing, play-fighting, scoping the merchandise, scarfing the food, talking in groups or on kaikkis, yelling at one another, and sitting around on the floor as though they were in their own living rooms which, in a sense, is truer here than in their homes. Also above me are a multitude of holos playing out ads for clothes, concerts, banks, sims, computers, cars, and everything else you can think of. Over two-thousand years ago Jesus threw the money-changers out of the temple—eventually they washed up here.