I start to laugh, but Anders isn’t smiling.
“Wait, are you serious? Did she break him in half?”
He shakes his head.
“Didn’t need to. Apparently he broke his own hand on her skull.”
Neckbeard sets our beers down in front of us. Anders taps his glass against mine, then downs half of it without coming up for air. I take a sip, and try not to grimace. I’m not a beer guy. I kind of want a margarita, but not enough to put up with the grief I’d get from Anders. Old Neckbeard doesn’t look like he’d be too friendly to a girl-drink drunk either.
“Anyway,” I say. “What does Terry getting punched in the head have to do with whether or not these idiots will give me a BrainBump with my ham sandwich?”
“Think about it,” says Anders. He takes another long pull at his beer. “Who drinks BrainBump?”
I stare at him blankly.
“I dunno. Everybody?”
He shakes his head.
“Not quite. UnAltered won’t touch it. They think the nanos are a corruption of the natural order of the blah blah blah. You’ve seen a bit of the propaganda they’re pushing about Hagerstown. If you’re some dipshit UnAltered looking for someone to punch, Terry’s a pretty obvious target. What about me, though? Or even you, when you’re not in the middle of a download? Most Engineered, and a lot of folks with serious implants, aren’t so easy to pick out. Maybe looking for people pounding BrainBump makes a nice shorthand for them.”
I hadn’t thought about that.
“So what do you think she meant by ‘the duration’?”
He shrugs.
“Until everything goes back to normal, I guess. Until everybody quits pissing their pants over what happened yesterday, and goes back to living their lives.”
I nod.
“Right. And how long is that, do you think?”
He finishes his beer, and waves to Neckbeard for another.
“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s gonna be a long, long time.”
The sandwich is pretty good, as it turns out. It’s real ham, carved off of an actual pig’s leg with an actual knife. The cheese is just a little melty, and the mustard isn’t too spicy. The salad is just wilted lettuce and tomatoes, but I wasn’t really planning on eating that anyway.
Pretty sticks around to chat up Anders after bringing us our food. I spend a lot of time telling Anders how ugly he is, but apparently she—Anders tells me her name is Charity—doesn’t agree. She plays with her hair while he’s talking, and giggles at his witty little jabs. It becomes clearer and clearer as my sandwich disappears that Anders is going to get laid tonight, and the sure knowledge of that is making my stomach hurt.
“So,” Charity says to me. “Do you tip?”
I wash down the last mouthful of sandwich with the last dregs of my beer.
“That’s a little forward, isn’t it?”
She laughs.
“I’m just trying to figure out if all of his friends are cheapskates, or only the robot ones.”
Ah. Doug.
“No,” I say. “I’m not a cheapskate. Neither is Doug, actually. He just has a thing about tipping.”
“Yeah,” says Anders. “He thinks if nobody tips servers in diners, they’ll eventually all be replaced by super-efficient robots, and he won’t have to worry about people spitting in his eggs anymore.”
“Of course,” I say. “He wouldn’t have to worry about people spitting in his eggs in the first place if he’d just leave a decent tip once in a while.”
“I don’t spit in his eggs,” Charity says. “But I don’t rush his orders, either.”
I glance around. It would be nice if there were another woman in the place. Anders clearly has this one locked up, and I really am not looking forward to a late night of listening to him make that crack in the ceiling bigger while I watch SpaceLab on the living-room wallscreen. There’s not, though. There are three men at a table in the back, working their way through three pitchers of something dark and foamy, and a middle-aged couple near the door, talking over empty glasses. I guess I could take a run at one of the waitresses, but neither of them looks very friendly, and I’m not sure how I’d start a conversation as long as Charity and Neckbeard are here to keep me in sandwiches and beer.
Anders is telling Charity about the time he played one-on-one against the backup point guard for the Celtics. This is not his best story—it ends with him in the emergency room—but she’s eating it up. They’re leaning across the bar, touching and pulling back, laughing more than the story deserves. They might as well be squatting by the watering hole, picking bugs out of each other’s fur. I wave my empty glass at Neckbeard. He grabs a clean one and goes to pour me another IPA. For what it’s worth, he looks to be even less happy about what’s going on here than I am.
Not that I blame him, of course. Charity really is a first-rate piece of work. The Pretty package was the first commercially available gene hack. It was only popular for five or six years, but that cohort is in their prime bikini-body years now, so you see a lot of them around. The Pretty mods are all superficial—hair color and texture, eye color, facial symmetry, base metabolic rate—and when you overlay those things on the body structure that Mom and Dad provided, you sometimes wind up with some pretty funky-looking results. Not Charity, though. I’m guessing she would have been something even without the mods, and she’s obviously put some effort into making sure that she takes full advantage of what God and GeneCraft gave her.
Neckbeard brings me my beer. I salute him, and take a long, bitter pull. Chairs scrape across the floor behind me. The couple near the door is leaving. A brief, loud argument breaks out at the table in the back, but then quickly subsides. As the couple walk out, the man holds the door open for someone coming in.
Needless to say, the newcomer is not a pretty girl. In fact, he’s a bland-looking Asian guy, wearing chinos and a black compression shirt. This is not a good look on anyone, but this guy is too flabby to even make it look arrogant. He takes a stool two down from Anders, looks around, and then raps on the bar with his knuckles. Neckbeard seems to have disappeared. Charity is busy brushing Anders’ hair back from his forehead with one hand. Mr. Chinos raps again, louder. Charity rolls her eyes, steps back from Anders, and turns to our new friend.
“What can I getcha, hon?”
“Gin and tonic,” he says. “Not too much ice.”
She turns away to make his drink. Anders is eyeballing Mr. Chinos. How many beers has he downed by now? Four? Five? His sandwich is only half eaten. A drunken Anders is a punchy Anders, and a punchy Anders is an Anders that I have to take to the emergency room because he broke his own fibula.
“Hey,” I say. “You about ready to head home?”
Anders turns to me, one eyebrow raised.
“What? No. I haven’t finished my sandwich yet.”
Charity brings Mr. Chinos his drink. He takes a sip, makes a sour face, and pushes it back across the bar.
“This is vodka,” he says. “I asked for gin.”
She shakes her head. “Sorry, hon. I’m pretty sure you asked for vodka.”
“No,” he says, a little louder. “I asked for gin.”
“Hey,” says Anders. “Do you want to think about maybe being less of a dick?”
Crap.
Mr. Chinos gets to his feet. The guys at the back table have turned to watch us.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Is my drink order getting in the way of your blow job?”
Charity’s jaw drops open. She picks up the drink, and splashes it all over Mr. Chinos’ chinos. He leaps backward, bellowing something unintelligible.
“You know,” I say, “I think he did order a G and T.”
Nobody even glances at me. Anders is laughing as Mr. Chinos swipes at his pants.
; “Stupid Pretty bitch,” he says, then looks up at Anders. “And fuck you too, jackass.”
I put a hand on Anders’ shoulder, but he shrugs me off and stands.
“You need to go,” he says.
Neckbeard is back behind the bar now.
“Truth,” he says. “You need to go, sir. No charge for the drink.”
Mr. Chinos looks at Anders, then Neckbeard, then back at Anders. He’s obviously trying to use psychic powers to make their heads explode, but it’s not working for him. I imagine I can hear his teeth grinding together. After a few seconds that feel more like an hour, he kicks over a barstool and storms out the door.
“Well,” I say after a long, awkward silence. “That was super fun, but I’m pretty tired now. Anders, you ready to head out?”
Anders sits back down and picks up his sandwich. He takes a bite, chews, and swallows. He’s about to take another when the door bangs open.
It’s Mr. Chinos.
He’s carrying a pistol.
He looks much less ridiculous with a gun in his hand. Neckbeard ducks behind the bar. Mr. Chinos takes three steps forward, raises his arm and takes aim at Charity, who’s standing with her mouth hanging open and her arms at her sides.
Anders throws his sandwich.
It sort of comes apart in the air, but the ham and the bottom bun hit Mr. Chinos square in the face. He flinches as he pulls the trigger, and his shot goes into the ceiling over the bar.
It’s at that point that I realize I’ve never actually seen Anders move at full speed. Mr. Chinos never gets off a second shot. Anders is on his feet with a beer glass in his hand before the report from the first one dies away. He takes two steps and throws, and the heavy glass explodes against Mr. Chinos’ forehead like a bomb. Mr. Chinos goes over backward, and his head hits a table on the way down. The gun skitters across the floor.
“Holy shit,” says Charity.
I think for a minute that Mr. Chinos might be dead. Anders takes a cautious step toward him, and Neckbeard comes out from behind the bar. Mr. Chinos is not dead, though. He rolls onto his side, then scrambles to his feet, one hand holding the back of his head, the other groping for the gun that’s no longer there. His face looks like it got shoved into a garbage disposal.
“Easy,” Anders says, but Mr. Chinos is not interested in easy. He backs two steps away, bumps into a table, and then turns and bolts for the door.
“Let him go,” says Neckbeard.
Anders turns on him.
“Are you kidding? He might be going to get his other gun.”
“He’s not,” says Neckbeard. “He’s going home to put a gallon of Bactine on his fucked-up face. Let him go.”
Anders hesitates, then shakes his head and starts for the door. I look at Neckbeard, then at Charity. She raises one eyebrow. I scowl, and take off after Anders at a run. I come through the door just behind him, then smack into his back as he skids to a stop.
“Hey!” I say, but he’s not paying attention to me. He’s staring at something going on across the street. I lean around him, trying to get a look while keeping my important parts behind him. Mr. Chinos is over there, leaning back against a long, low red car. Someone is with him, a heavily built man dressed entirely in black. They’re close together, almost as if they’re talking—but no, Mr. Chinos isn’t talking. He’s twitching. He’s twitching, and the other man is holding something against the side of his neck.
As I watch, Mr. Chinos goes limp. His head lolls back, and he slides down until he’s sitting on the pavement. The other man crouches beside him, leans in close. He puts whatever he’d been pressing to Mr. Chinos’ throat into a pouch at his waist.
He looks quickly around.
He meets my eyes.
They’re thirty feet away, but my ocular zooms in until I can see the pores on his face. He puts one finger to his lips, and slowly shakes his head. I nod. He stands, ignoring Anders, never taking his eyes from me. Mr. Chinos slumps to the side, then sprawls facedown in the street. The other man glances around once more, then turns and walks away.
I step out from behind Anders. He looks down, as if he’s just noticing that I’m here.
“What the fuck just happened?” Anders whispers.
“Pretty sure Mr. Chinos just got terminated,” I say.
“Holy shit,” Anders says, a little louder. “Holy shit. That guy . . .”
“Yeah,” I say. “That was the guy who was looking for you on Sunday morning. That was Dimitri.”
Fenrir:
Sir Munchalot:
Fenrir:
Sir Munchalot:
Fenrir:
Fenrir links an audio file. I blink to stream. It’s a man’s voice, deep and gravelly, speaking over the sort of low, ominous musical background that you usually only hear in negative political ads:
“Fellow Americans, and fellow humans: the time that we have awaited with both dread and anticipation is upon us. Yesterday, an unknown hero struck the first blow in the holy war against those who would steal from us the one thing that is most precious: our humanity, and the humanity of our children.”
“For more than thirty years, the monsters in Bethesda have been turning humans into something less than human. For what is it that defines us as humans, if not our genome? We have been told that our genes differ from those of the chimpanzees by less than two percent. How much do they differ from those of a Pretty? Or one of the manufactured creatures that the wealthy now call their children? To call these things human is an insult to our species, and to the God who made us.
“Of course, this is not the first time that there have been two species of humanlike creatures on this world. In ages past we shared the Earth with Homo erectus, with the Denisovans, with the true Neanderthals. And how does it end when one species of human encounters another? History is clear. One species thrives. The other species dies.
“Friends, this same dynamic is playing out today. These pseudo-humans have been growing in numbers, year over year. Today, they make up perhaps a tenth of our population. In another twenty years, they may be half of all Americans. Already they refer to true humans as ‘Homo saps.’ How long until they decide that ‘Homo sap’ is an obsolete species, no more deserving of a place in this world than Homo erectus?
“My friends, we, the UnAltered, will not stand by and watch as our species is driven from this world. Our ancestors earned our place on this planet. They paid the price for it in sweat and in blood, and we will not relinquish it without a fight. Rise up, friends, and fight the Altered wherever you find them. God willing, there will be more Hagerstowns. And when there are, the UnAltered will rise up with you, and we will prevent NatSec from striking down the true humans who emerge from them unscathed.
“These are terrible times, my friends, and in times like these, terrible things must sometimes be done. But make no mistake. This is our best chance—our last chance—to save our species from extinction. May God grant you courage, and may God grant you strength.”
Argyle Dragon:
Fenrir:
Argyle Dragon:
Sir Munchalot:
Hayley 9000:
Drew P. Wiener:
Argyle Dragon:
Sir Munchalot:
Argyle Dragon:
Fenrir:
Hayley 9000:
Argyle Dragon:
Hayley 9000:
Argyle Dragon:
Drew P. Wiener:
Sir Munchalot:
I blink the text window closed. My chronometer reads 02:45:05. I sit up on the couch. My neck cracks as I arch my back and stretch.
“Hey,” Charity says. “You finally done with the porn?”
“Why does everybody say that?” I ask. “People do lots of things with their oculars that have nothing to do with porn, you know.”
She laughs.
“Do they? I thought the only reason people got those things implanted was so that they could indulge their perversions in private.”
“That may be true for some people,” I say, “but I use mine strictly for professional purposes.”
She laughs again. I think I like her laugh.
“Sorry about Anders,” I say. “I have no idea why he’s being so unsociable.”
She shrugs.
“Whatever. I was planning on thanking him for saving my life and all, but . . .”
“Yeah,” I say. “Don’t be offended. It’s not about you.”
“What?” she says. “He’s got a girlfriend?”
“Not exactly.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Closer. It’s complicated.”
We sit in silence for a while. I’m just starting to drift when she says, “It’s pretty late. Okay if I crash here?”
I sigh.
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