Lightspeed Magazine - October 2016

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  I spun in my combination again. “Let me get my stuff.”

  • • • •

  We’d walked less than half a city block before Domino started in asking questions about Rash. He was totally oblivious to the signals I was throwing off to drop the subject.

  “So you must have gotten all his swank artifacts and gear when he didn’t come back, huh?”

  “Nah,” I said.

  “Really?”

  I sighed. “He carried the good stuff with him. Anything he didn’t have, my mom boxed up and sent over to the research division of Municipal Anomaly Control. I think the new Alpha Response uses the really flash stuff.”

  “So you don’t have any loot?” Domino was trying to keep from sounding disappointed, but I could hear it. Here he had found a famous dungeonspace crawler’s kid brother and he’d never been into d-space, didn’t even inherit anything chill after he died. He wanted to think I was flash. Weird thing was, I wanted him to think it, too.

  “I have this one piece of art,” I said, pausing in our walk. I took a deep breath. “Just this stupid silver coin, like an old quarter. The only way you can tell it’s d-space art is that when you flip it, the face on it changes and it always lands heads-side up.”

  Domino’s eyes widened. “A probability-modifier? That’s practically a full-blown ’fact. Can I see it?”

  I dug into my hip pocket. The metal of the coin was just warm enough that I could always feel it through the fabric of my jeans. I’d only started carrying it with me after Jonah aka “Rash” was officially declared killed-in-crawl by the MAC. I was afraid Mom would send it away, too, if she found it in my room. She had accused me a couple of times of crawling, and we’d had huge, screaming fights about it. Maybe that’s why I had geared up. If she was going to accuse me of something, I might as well give her a reason? I was so tired of paying for my brother’s mistakes. But then, going into d-space, that was like following in his footsteps in the worst way, wasn’t it?

  “It’s not worth more than a couple hundred lootbucks,” I said as I passed it to him. “Not that I wanna sell it.”

  Domino took the coin into his thin hands and cradled it like a stick of unstable dynamite. He held it up to his face, carefully examining both sides.

  “Do you mind?”

  I shrugged. “Go for it.”

  He flipped the coin and caught it in his clenched palm. He opened his fingers slowly. It was heads-up, of course. The man on the coin had a high, regal collar, two pairs of eyes, and a condescending smirk.

  “That’s so chill,” Domino said. He reluctantly returned the coin to me.

  “Nah, it’s vendor trash,” I said, and put the coin back in my pocket. “But I kind of like it.” It was the only thing of Jonah’s—Rash’s—that I had left.

  Domino looked up and down the street theatrically, then put his hand on my shoulder before I could step back.

  “Let’s form a team. You and me. We can train on low-level dungeons, build up our gear, skills, and maybe even develop d-space talents. Me, I’m hoping to develop as an escapist, but I’m not dumb, I know we don’t get to choose.”

  I felt the panic rising like bile in my stomach. “I don’t think—” I managed, but he was worked up into a fanboy frenzy and I couldn’t stop him.

  “Your brother was great, but maybe you could be greater. When we’re ready, we’ll succeed where he failed, and conquer the Black Hole itself!”

  He looked so earnest when he said it, I felt bad immediately after I punched him. He fell backwards onto the pavement, silent for once. Luckily, his gear pack softened his fall.

  He stared at me, wide-eyed, and a trickle of blood ran down from his right nostril onto his upper lip.

  I wanted to say that I was sorry, that I over-reacted, that it was all too much, too fast. I opened my mouth and what came out instead was, “No thanks.”

  I walked away as fast as I could, and when he finally called out to me, I pretended I couldn’t hear him.

  • • • •

  The school was locked up, so I stowed my gear in the alley behind our building in the West Barrio. I didn’t want to go up to our apartment, but I hadn’t eaten anything all day and if there was one thing that could convince me to brave Mom’s presence, it was food. I didn’t have the cash to buy something from a street vendor. Mom wasn’t working much lately.

  I expected I would have to make up an excuse about why I was so late, but she didn’t look away from the projector screen when I dropped my school bag on the kitchen table. The silhouette of where my Alpha Response patch had been sewn on the bag seemed to stare at me like an eye of accusation. I turned away.

  “Anything to eat?” I asked.

  “Leftover noodles in the ice box,” she said, voice barely loud enough to hear over the voice of the news man talking about a level three d-space anomaly appearing in the middle of the Holson Freeway. Not to worry though; MAC was dispatching Alpha Response to loot-and-banish. Hurray for everyone.

  I popped the leftovers in the oven and sat at the kitchen table while I waited for them to warm up. I wasn’t really thinking about anything special when the delivery tube bell rang out. Mom didn’t react, so I shuffled over to the receiving box and took out the capsule to a rush of pneumatic air. I unrolled the piece of paper tucked inside.

  “If it’s another bill, put on the pile,” Mom said.

  “It’s not,” I said as I scanned the note. Jimmy had pretty good handwriting. I could barely read my own. “It’s from someone at school. About homework.”

  The note actually read:

  Sorry I came on so strong. You seemed really chill until I insulted your brother. Can we maybe still be friends? I don’t know a lot of people here.

  I tore a sheet of paper out of one of my notebooks and did my best to scrawl a reply.

  Sorry I punched you. I’m not my brother. If he was still alive, you’d like him better than me. I don’t know that much about dungeonspace crawling. I don’t want to be a crawler.

  I sent the message into the tube, and went to eat my chicken. As I finished washing my plate, the reply whooshed in. I dried my hands and read it.

  The collapsible carbon fiber ten-foot pole in your locker says otherwise. Meet me at the Speakeasy tonight? If I say anything dumb, you can punch me again.

  I looked over to Mom. She was slumped over, passed out, empty wine bottle at the foot of the couch. The newstape flick-flicked softly in the projector, casting pale, confusing shadows against the screen.

  Okay, I wrote back. Give me an hour.

  • • • •

  I’d thought about visiting the Speakeasy about a million times before and after Jonah died, but I could never work up the guts. It was completely harmless, really, but it was still d-space. Bad things happened in d-space. The unexpected could happen there. Literally anything.

  The entrance was behind a Q-Mart in the South Barrio. It manifested in the visual spectrum as a quarter-meter glassy orb floating in midair. I stared into it, watching the scene around me reflected and distorted. A couple of trollers doing bouncer duty watched over the scene with disinterest—mostly only there to keep out the MAC-payroll teams who had their own official d-space clubhouses around the city. The Speakeasy was neutral territory for a lot of different cliques and factions that agreed on only one thing: Municipal Anomaly Control were a bunch of no-chill swoleheads.

  The flashiest d-space crawlers and thrilljunkies came and went, laughing and talking. The crowds were made up of mundanes, eggheads, mugs, and wind-ups—a parade of sub-subcultures around the whole d-space scene. Three girls dressed in identical green jumpsuits wearing silver wigs carried instrument cases inside at one point. One of them winked at me when they walked past, and I wondered if I knew her from school. If I did, the wig and makeup made her unrecognizable.

  I puzzled over the wink. I wouldn’t have thought I was worth notice, dressed in faded jeans and a button-down shirt. My hair wasn’t even dyed a swank color like my brother alw
ays sported, just its ordinary dirty blond. My swankness was level zero.

  As I was about to give up and go home, I felt a tap on my shoulder and nearly bolted. “Woah,” Domino said and jumped back a step. His nose was badly swollen. I winced.

  “Agh. Sorry about that,” I said and waved my hand in the general direction of his face.

  “Forget it; I was kind of a jerk.” He pointed at the entrance. “You ready to go in?”

  I shook my head. “No, but let’s go in anyway.”

  “This should be easier than the Cavern.” Domino dug around in his backpack and withdrew a pair of chrome-plated timer watches. He set the dials for five minutes shy of two hours and handed me one. “The guide says we should leave before de-sync, unless we want gut-twisting diarrhea.”

  “Yeah, let’s avoid that.”

  I took a step forward and closed my eyes. My fingers turned to ice as they grazed the surface of the space-time anomaly, and then I felt the weirdest sensation of being squeezed into a microscopic tube and squirted back out in a long string of spaghetti. It didn’t really hurt, but for a very long few seconds I was afraid I would never feel normal again.

  When I opened my eyes, I was standing in the doorway of a smoky tavern. Along one wall was a surprisingly well-stocked bar. On the other side of the room, a small stage where the silver-wigged girls were playing a cello, a guitar, and a flute. The song was some ragged weird piece that sounded like a cover but I couldn’t place it, the notes were just all over. Above us, an alien starscape shimmered. The sky seemed warped, smaller somehow, bending near the edges of the very small dungeonspace universe.

  The place was about half-full of people sitting at an array of mismatched tables and chairs. I recognized maybe one out of every four or five of the faces. Some of Braxis City’s best crawler teams and gangs were gathered for some downtime. Nobody was paying any attention to the music.

  In the corner, a recently successful party made up of freelancers with no discernable team identifiers haggled over divying up the art and ’facts from their run. A spinning gem, floating and glowing green, stood out among the knickknacks and vendor trash—clearly the prize ’fact that had been the heart of an anomaly. Once captured, the anomaly had collapsed, ridding our shard of the prime world of the anomaly’s dangers.

  Near the entrance, I spotted Maligna, one of the highest ranked formulists in the city. She studied her notes and scribbled on a roll of paper, probably working out the calculations and formulas for her next crawl—something that would negate gravity or turn a d-space beast’s bones to jelly. Her left arm was in a sling. Walthen, an equally skilled sympath, poked and prodded at the arm with a glowing finger. Walthen could cut down the healing time on injuries from weeks to hours with his d-space talent. Both were members of the Braxis City Brawlers. My brother had hated them, which meant they were good.

  Domino pressed a beer into my hand and led me to an empty table nearby, surprisingly chill in the face of the legends around us. “This has got to be the best use for a nonlethal dungeon ever! Maybe not as chill as the Coliseum. You ever— right, I keep forgetting. Sorry. How come the dungeon nannies don’t barricade this place? Where I’m from, adults aren’t big fans of underage drinking or smoking—” he took a deep whiff of what passed for air in the Speakeasy, “—whatever that is.”

  “Blood alcohol resets the minute your timer runs out or you leave via the exit, so the nannies look the other way,” said a heavy-set, brown-haired girl dressed in last season’s Kevlar body armor. She was sitting at the table next to ours. Her face was familiar—I thought I recognized her from my ’zine collection—but there were so many crawlers working in the city that they were hard to keep track of unless they were top-tier.

  “Sorry, couldn’t help eavesdropping. You guys new?” She pointed at me. “You look familiar, but you, ” she pointed at Domino, “look like a country bumpkin in those shitkickers. Let me guess; recent transplant into the city, huh?”

  Domino frowned. “You can tell from my boots?”

  “I can spot you farm country kids from a mile away. Got cousins out there. Don’t sweat it. One thing you should know, though—”

  “You’re sitting at our table. So you better move if you know what’s good for you,” a deep voice said from over my shoulder. It wasn’t a normal voice—I could tell by how I felt it not just in my ears but in deep in my bones.

  Domino started to mouth off but I grabbed his arm and stood up before he could make a bigger mess of things. I mean, I already knew he couldn’t take a punch.

  “Sorry,” I said, turning to address the seven-foot-tall troller with blue-green skin looming behind us. He was flanked by a younger boy and a girl; they were shorter, still, and still had mostly the normal brown skin, but their ears had started to sharpen, their features harden. It looked like they had only recently started their treatments.

  “We didn’t know. Now we do,” I said, and took a step back.

  The lead troller laughed. “Just messin’ with you. No violence in here, dude. Jules has a bum rush staff that de-syncs anyone who starts shit. And then they shit themselves. Calls it Karmic Justice.”

  “Wow, a trollboy,” Domino said, and I took another step back. Violence not allowed or not, you just didn’t say some things.

  The lead troller shot me a look. I shrugged.

  “He’s just some hick, Francisco,” the brown-haired girl said. “He probably doesn’t know.”

  “Know what?” Domino asked. “Sheesh, do I really look that out of place?”

  “We don’t like to be called ‘trollboys,’” Francisco said. “We’re trollers, my man. That shit is sexist.” He turned to Kevlar girl. “And you, you wanna be called Doom Maiden, or should I call you ‘Maggie?’ In here, I’m Bloodaxe.” I tried not to roll my eyes. A bit too “on the nose” for a troller, given that most of them specialized in solving problems that required strength and more than a little brutality.

  Bloodaxe and his pals took a seat at our table and invited us to stay. “I guess my friends aren’t gonna make it,” Doom Maiden said by way of explaining why she pulled her chair over to join us.

  “This is just so chill,” Domino said. He couldn’t stop grinning.

  I felt like smiling, too, so I did. And the world didn’t end. Go figure.

  “How many beers has this guy had?” Bloodaxe asked.

  “Like, half of one,” I said. “He’s made of pure enthusiasm. It grows on you.”

  “You two developed any talents yet?” Doom Maiden asked.

  “This is our first time in d-space,” Domino admitted. “I’ve been training a lot though. I’m good at lock picks and I’m not bad at hand-to-hand. I also have this ’fact I bought, like, it’s how I came up with my name. Supposedly if I wear my mask in d-space, I’m harder to see. But, uh … I haven’t tried it yet.”

  Doom Maiden nodded. “Not bad; you sound like a natural pick as an escapist, but don’t force it; it’ll come naturally with exposure to dungeonspace.”

  I realized she was staring at me with impressively blue eyes. “What about you?”

  “No talents.” I said, and took a long drink of beer so I wouldn’t have to keep making eye contact.

  “No special skills?”

  “He doesn’t need special skills,” Domino said. “He’s got pedigree.”

  I slammed my stein down. “Really? You couldn’t go a minute without bringing that up?” I started looking for the exit.

  Doom Maiden’s eyes narrowed. She nodded. “That’s why you look so familiar.”

  “Someone bring me up to speed?” Bloodaxe asked.

  “Rash was my brother,” I said. Everyone stared.

  “I should probably go.”

  Bloodaxe clapped me on the back, nearly knocking me back into my seat. “Hey, dude. Sorry to hear. Your bro was a good one.”

  I’d finally had enough of it. “That’s what everybody says,” I snapped. “He was a huge dick to me, though.”

  It spilled out
, like I’d needed to tell someone. I couldn’t tell Mom. She would have never listened to a negative word about her fallen hero. So I told these strangers; I told them how my brother picked on me, calling me lard ass or fatty every day. How when I had begged him to take me along on a milk run some time, he’d said I probably wouldn’t fit through the dungeon entrance.

  An awkward silence settled on our table. I stared at my drink.

  “Ivan, I’m so sorry,” Domino said. He had tears in his eyes. Probably felt dumb for picking a loser like me to befriend.

  “I take back what I said,” Bloodaxe rumbled. “Your bro wasn’t a good one if he treated you like that.”

  I nodded. I was going to leave, but then, Doom Maiden changed the subject.

  “Are you hoping to get recruited to one of the bigger crews?”

  “I want to build my own team. Sounds like more fun.” The fog of my bummer attitude lifted from the table thanks to Domino’s enthusiasm for everything d-space. “Climb the ranks from the bottom. Seems like cheating just to get recruited at the top.”

  “So are you rich, or just crazy?” Bloodaxe asked.

  “Wh-what do you mean?”

  He pointed around the room. “Most everyone in here is in this for the loot. Some of ’em even support their families, at least until their brain chemistry matures and they can’t interface with the anomalies anymore, or d-space wins and they don’t come home. Any time I meet somebody and all they talk about is how much ‘fun’ d-space is, they’re either deranged, or their parents are loaded. So which is it with you?”

  I thought about intervening, but I wanted to know how Domino would react to being cornered about his optimism. He took it better than I thought.

  “Maybe a little of both,” Domino admitted. “My dad’s a scientist, and he’s made some discoveries about why electronics don’t work in or around the d-space entrances. Sorry—I know this is serious. But this is what I’ve dreamed of all my life. I can’t help it if I’m excited.”