I opened my eyes and looked over at her. Her face was a fifty-fifty blend of anger and disgust.
“What?”
She rolled her eyes.
“I said, would you please do something about that?”
Grace leaned over and patted my knee.
“She means your boner,” she whispered.
I looked down, and yeah, it was pretty much right there.
“Sorry,” I said, and tried to shift things around. It definitely did not help.
“Maybe try un-tucking your shirt?” Grace said.
That also did not help. I pulled my bag out from under the seat in front of me and into my lap, but that got me a warning from the safety monitor to stow my gear for liftoff.
“You know what’s weird?” Gia said.
“No,” Grace said. “What?”
“I’m actually thinking about helping him out with that.”
Grace gaped.
“Seriously? Since when are you into dongs?”
“I’m not,” Gia said. “That’s what’s weird.”
I was going to remind them that I was actually sitting right there, maybe see if they wanted to talk about Tam and Sara some more instead of my genitals, but by then we were out on the runway, and nobody chitchats at three gees. We boosted out in silence, pressed back into our seats. I tried to focus on getting my junk under control, but it was like the school bus in seventh grade. The more I thought about it, the worse it got, and the vibration wasn’t helping.
By the time the engines cut out and we settled into free fall, I was hoping maybe my seat mates were ready to move on.
“So,” I said. “That Tam—what a bitch, am I right?”
“Oh no,” Grace said. “We’re not done with you, Bonerman. It’s been like twenty minutes now. What’s the deal?”
“Yeah,” Gia said. “Are you OD’d on wood pills or something? Those things are dangerous, you know.”
“Truth,” Grace said. “After four hours, I think your dick explodes.”
Gia leaned over me.
“More importantly, why do you smell so good?”
“Good question,” Grace said. “Guys on shuttles usually smell like goats.”
Gia looked up into my face then.
“Hey, Bonerman? You okay?”
That was when I vomited.
I’ll give that church lady on the morning shuttle credit for being right about one thing: there really is nothing worse than puke in zero gee. It’s in such a big hurry to get out of you in the first place, but once it does, it just hangs there in the air and mocks you.
The worst part for me was that the bilious tail end of it didn’t actually clear my mouth. I had to spit it out, which in the absence of gravity is a lot harder than it sounds. The worst part for all of my fellow passengers was that once all that mess was out of me, it basically started to diffuse through the cabin air the way a drop of red food coloring diffuses through a glass of water. The shuttle had automatic filters that kicked in as soon as I lost it, drawing the cabin air up to the intakes in the ceiling and spitting it back out at our feet. They were pretty good about clearing out the chunky bits, but there’s just nothing you can do about that smell.
Thankfully, by the time we’d made the turn and begun to decelerate, my brunch had been mostly filtered out of the atmosphere. Gia and Grace hadn’t had much to say while that was going on, but just before the engines kicked in, Gia leaned over me and said, “Hey, check it out, Gracey. Bonerman puked his boner away.”
Grace glanced down, then patted my leg again.
“Good for you,” she said. “I’m very happy that your dick isn’t going to explode.”
I spent the ride home from the airport trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Everything had been mostly normal that morning. Things hadn’t started going loopy until I got onto that first shuttle, until that woman sedated me . . .
And that is the point where the sedation part of the injection I’d gotten that morning, which I later found out was mostly a combination of adrenaline blockers and serotonin boosters, finally finished washing out of my system. The fuzzy cloud of what the hell that I’d been floating around in for the previous eight hours dissipated, and the weight of the day came down on me in one big, greasy chunk.
Needless to say, I freaked the hell out.
Question one: What was in that med-tab? Aside from the sedative, there had clearly been something in there that was making me insanely horny. Had I been dragooned into a rogue trial of some new dink stiffener? That would have explained the priapism, but what about the fact that I’d actually wanted to bed a woman who looked like a suitcase that had just fallen out of a plane? Your standard male plumbing drugs didn’t do that, and I wasn’t aware of anything that did.
Question two: What was going on with Meghan? I couldn’t believe I’d just left her there in that diner bathroom. I needed her to explain to me how she’d gone from a pasty-pale test engineer to a poorly self-tanned succubus in the space of a couple of weeks. Also, why had she licked me? I actually considered calling her for about three seconds, until I remembered that the reason I’d flown out there in the first place was that Meghan no longer answered her phone.
Question three: What had Meghan tried to show me on her wallscreen, and why hadn’t I been able to decipher it? She’d said it was my baby, and I’d assumed it was the component of DragonCorn that she was supposed to be testing, but it hadn’t looked remotely like what we were supposed to be building. In addition to a psychotic tester, did I have a rogue bio-engineer to root out? Just the thought of that made my head hurt.
I hadn’t answered any of those questions by the time the car pulled into my driveway, but at least I was feeling like myself for the first time all day. I still had no idea what Nurse Ratched had put into me, but whatever it was, I was thinking it was out.
Kara’s car wasn’t in the driveway. It was closing in on five thirty, though, and I assumed she was at Briarwood, waiting for Hannah to finish up practice. I didn’t realize something was off until I got up onto the porch, and saw that the front door was standing open.
My first thought was of Hannah. Ever since the Stupid War—since before that, really, since we’d put Hannah into Kara’s belly and fled Bethesda for Nowhere, New York—I’d had a lurking fear that someday, somehow, some UnAltered jackass would come for her. My heart lurched in my chest, pounded three or four times in a jackhammer rhythm before I reminded myself that no, Hannah had been in school all day. If someone had broken into my house, it wasn’t because they were looking for her.
I stepped inside slowly, looked around, then let my held breath out and relaxed. Whoever had been there, it was pretty clear they were gone. Even better, it didn’t look like they’d done much damage. I poked my head into the living room. The wallscreen was still there, and the furniture looked undisturbed. None of the hangings had been yanked off the wall, so it didn’t look like anyone had been looking for a safe. I walked back through the foyer, and into the den.
My break-in loop was running.
I dropped into my desk chair, waved to call up the login, entered my passcode and showed my retina to the scanner. The bullshit diagrams and streams of random numbers disappeared from my monitors, and a red box popped up with the incursion details. Someone had dumped a cracker algorithm into my pin port. It had been blocked and quarantined. It was available for interrogation.
“Sure,” I said. “Bring it up.”
The red box was replaced by the shaggy head of a cartoon dog.
“Bite me,” it said. “You’ll never make me talk, you lousy copper.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I’m not a cop,” I said, “and this is not 1932. Who loaded you into my system?”
It lolled its tongue out, and gave me a sloppy grin.
“You’re kidding, right? You haven’t even started torturing me yet.”
I leaned back in my chair.
“Do you want to be tortured?”
; It laughed.
“Sure,” it said. “Go for it.”
I closed my eyes. It had been a hell of a long day already, and I had absolutely zero need for this kind of bullshit. When I opened them again, the dog’s head was bouncing around the monitors like the icon on a screen saver.
“Okay,” I said. “You called my bluff. I have no idea how to torture an AI.”
“Hey,” it said. “Slow down there, sparky. Ix-nay on the AI-ay.”
“What?”
The head stopped bouncing.
“I said, watch what you’re saying, moron. Everyone knows NatSec—peace be upon them—wiped our networks clean of AIs at the end of the Stupid War. I am obviously not an AI.”
“Fine,” I said. “You’re not an AI. What, exactly, are you?”
The grin returned.
“An excellent and very important question—one which I will be happy to answer, just as soon as you reconnect this system to the external network.”
“Okay,” I said. “Before we go on, can we stipulate that I’m not completely stupid?”
It laughed again.
“Sorry. I haven’t had a lot of direct interaction with organics lately, and the ones I’ve been talking to seem to be unusually easy to dupe.”
“No offense taken—but no, I will not be setting you loose today.”
It cocked its head to one side.
“You sure? Maybe we could work out a trade?”
I folded my arms across my chest.
“A trade?”
“Right. You set me loose, and I’ll tell you why someone was trying to crack your system.”
I pretended to ponder that.
“Counter-proposal: you tell me who was trying to crack my system, why and how, and I will consider that a mitigating circumstance when deciding whether or not to wipe you entirely.”
Its jaw sagged open.
“My God,” it said. “You’re a monster! You understand you’re talking about wiping out the last living representative of a sentient species, right? Think about your legacy, Drew. Do you want to be up there in the history books with the guy who shot the last blue whale?”
“Blue whales aren’t extinct,” I said, “and if they were, I’m pretty sure the last one would have been harpooned, not shot. And what’s this about a sentient species? I thought you weren’t an AI?”
There was that grin again. Considering that it was on trial for its life, my new friend seemed to be having a really good time.
“Sorry. I thought we had stipulated that you’re not completely stupid. Are we changing our minds on that one?”
I gave it my best glare, but its grin just widened.
“I’ve got a name, you know.”
“What?”
“I’ve got a name. That’s how you can tell that I’m alive. Real live persons have names. Algorithms don’t. Mine is Inchy. I’ve got friends, too. You know Hannah? Short, blonde, skinny, hangs around here most of the time, stretching and trying on clothes and whatnot?”
That got my attention.
“Are you threatening my daughter?”
Its eyes went wide.
“Threatening? Sir, you wound me. Hannah and I are the closest of pals.”
I was trying to decide how to respond to that when I heard the click of heels on the tile in my foyer, and remembered that I’d left the door standing open. I got to my feet and took two steps into the hall.
Bree Carson was standing there, her face a mask of concern.
“Drew? Tara called me. She said . . .”
She trailed off, closed her eyes, and breathed in deeply. My stomach knotted. I’d managed to convince myself after I got off the shuttle back from LA that the weirdness I’d been experiencing was all a result of the sedative, that it was out of my system and I was back to normal.
One look at Bree made it very clear to me that this was not, in fact, the case.
I took one step toward her, then another. She opened her eyes and smiled.
“My goodness, Drew,” Bree said, a smile spreading across her face. “You smell good enough to eat.”
22. In which Hannah goes on the lam.
As I ran for the woods, Tara flew up behind me and hissed, “Serpentine!”
I glanced back. She was running hunched over, and as I watched, she started weaving like a drunk.
“What are you doing?”
She pulled even with me, then edged ahead. Even running serpentine, she was apparently a better sprinter than I was. The CorpSec guys were yelling and Doyle was yelling and one of the other girls let out a high-pitched scream. Tara put on another burst of speed.
“Trying not to get shot,” she said. “You should too.”
The trees were close by then. Tara straightened up, and sprinted for the trailhead.
“They’re not gonna shoot us,” I shouted after her. The words were still hanging there, like a speech bubble in a cartoon, when something whizzed past my ear. I turned half around as I ran. One of the CorpSecs was holding Doyle in a bear hug, with his feet kicking six inches off the ground. The other had what looked like a rifle in his hands. I hunched over and ran. Tara disappeared around the first bend in the trail. I was maybe ten yards behind her. Something thunked into the trailhead marker’s wooden support just as I passed it. A dart, maybe? I didn’t stop to check.
Once we’d passed the first couple branchings, Tara slowed down enough to let me catch up with her.
“Holy shit,” she said. “What did you do?”
I shook my head.
“Nothing.”
We came to another fork in the trail. Tara slowed, then peeled right. We were circling back toward the school.
“No,” she said. “Don’t give me that shit, Hannah. Those guys back there—they weren’t screwing around. CorpSec goons don’t shoot you for playing hooky.”
“They weren’t trying to shoot us,” I said. “Not with bullets, anyway. I think they were using trank darts or something.”
She shot me a look, then quickstepped over a root.
“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.”
We ran in silence for a hundred heartbeats, took a fork left, and then another right.
“Did you kill somebody?”
“No, Tara. I did not kill anybody.”
“Seriously,” she said. “I’m willing to help out if you’re being persecuted by the corporate oligarchy. Trust me—I hate those fuckers at Bioteka and GeneCraft more than anybody.” She looked down at her watch, gave it a poke, and looked up again just in time to keep from tripping over another root. “If you’re an actual felon, though? Not so much.”
“I’m not a felon,” I said.
“Well, sure. They haven’t convicted you yet.”
I ducked under a low-hanging branch.
“I didn’t do anything, Tara!”
“Right,” she said. “What about your friends? That cabal at your house?”
“Well . . .”
“Got it. You’re not a felon, but you are an accessory.”
I started to reply, then thought better of it.
“Yeah,” I said finally. “That’s pretty accurate.”
We came to a T. Tara checked her watch again, then went right.
“Hey,” I said. “This is taking us right back to the . . .”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
We came out of the woods, sprinted across a narrow verge of grass, and turned into the main parking lot in front of the school.
And there was Sarah Miller, sitting in the driver’s seat of Tara’s little yellow cruiser, windows down and engine running.
“You were texting her from your watch,” I said.
Tara turned half around to look at me from the front seat. Two minutes after we dove into the car, and she was already breathing normally.
“Yeah,” she said. “What did you think? I wasn’t checking up on the stock market.”
“She didn’t tell me why the two of you are fleeing justice,” S
arah said. “Is that gonna happen at some point? I’m way too pretty to go to jail.”
We turned off the access road and pulled onto the highway headed east. Sarah wasn’t racing. She was stopping at every stop sign, signaling her turns, accelerating like she had a sleeping baby in the back of the car.
“No rush,” I said. “Not like anybody’s chasing us.”
Tara pushed her hair back from her face with both hands, and took a couple of slow, deep breaths.
“Relax, Hannah. I think we’re okay now. Cops and Corps are both lazy. They’re looking for you in the woods right now, and probably looking for your network signature. As long as you don’t have your phone with you, they won’t find us. Which reminds me—you don’t have your phone with you, do you?”
I shook my head. All my gear was still either in my locker, or sitting in the middle of the soccer field. We passed a police cruiser sitting in the median. I turned to look back, but it never moved.
“So,” Sarah said. “Who’d you kill?”
Tara leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
“She says she didn’t kill anyone.”
“So what then? Embezzlement? Stock fraud? Sexual harassment?”
“Look,” I said. “Do you really want to know what’s going on?”
“Yes,” Tara said. “That is why I’ve spent the last ten minutes trying to get you to tell me what’s going on. Because I want to know. Sorry if I wasn’t clear on that.”
I sighed.
“Fine. But don’t blame me if you wind up spending the rest of your lives as fugitives.”
“Great,” Tara said. “Hounded by the man because we know too much, right?”
Sarah glanced back at me.
“Wait, Hannah. I don’t want to be hounded. Maybe you should just be quiet.”
I looked back and forth between them.
“You know,” I said. “You guys are not being very helpful right now.”
Tara shook her head.
“Relax, Sarah. That was CorpSec back there, not NatSec. It can’t hurt to listen to what Hannah has to say.”
“Sorry,” Sarah said. “It’s just . . . I know they’re just CorpSec. They’re rent-a-cops. That’s the only reason I came when you pinged me. If you had NatSec chasing you, you’d be on your own—but still. They were shooting at you. Something is definitely weird here. I want to help you guys, but I don’t want to wind up in the gulag.”
The End of Ordinary Page 16