Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Carl?”

  “Who is this?” He squinted.

  “I’m Avril’s friend, Nina. Would you mind if I stopped by?”

  Carl coughed, stammering. “Of course… Please…”

  “I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

  “Alright.”

  She found his address in the system; the sight of his file made her feel a degree or two less bad for ending Z Bone. Carl worked for the city, repairing PubTran taxis and trams, an honest man making an honest living.

  Her car leapt into the air amid the rattling of laundromat windows. As she gained speed and altitude, the luminescent streaks of passing hovercar engines above changed from trails of light to wavering comets as she matched speed. Twenty minutes later, she dropped out of the hover lane and headed for Carl’s building. A smile came at the memory of Vincent while she slipped between the floor and ceiling of the fourth story parking deck and settled into a spot. She still saw no point to the crazy aerobatics that he used to love. Despite her augmented reflexes making them trivial, there was no need to be reckless.

  A few minutes later, past walls of peeling paint and dozens of sleeping vagrants in the halls, she knocked on his door. He opened it before her knuckles could touch it a third time. Flannel pants and an old sweater gave away his getting ready to go to sleep when she called him.

  “I won’t keep you up long.”

  “Please, come in.” He backed up, pulling the door open wider.

  The room smelled of cinnamon mixed with the fragrance of a burning candle. The warmth inside made Nina’s coat uncomfortable, but she kept it on. A girl of about ten peered out from behind the kitchen doorway, her half concealed face offering a shy smile.

  Nina waved.

  “Is that Tiffany?”

  The girl darted out of sight. Carl looked at the doorway then back to Nina.

  “Yeah.” His eyes watered up. “She’s all I got left.”

  Nina sat on the tan couch, noting how the interior of the apartment did not fit the decay that hung over the rest of the building. This place was well maintained and homey, covered with holographic images of his children. Nina tried not to look at them. Carl sat next to her, shaking with anticipation.

  “I found out what you wanted to know.”

  He grabbed her hand. “Please…”

  Nina turned to look him in the eye. “It is true that they were involved with a street gang.”

  “Oh no…” His head sank. “I thought the police made that up.”

  “They didn’t pass the initiation. They were unwilling to do what was asked of them.”

  “What was it?” Carl trembled.

  Nina bit her lip and leaned in close to whisper. “They were expected to participate in a gang rape. I don’t know who the victims were.”

  “Sweet Jesus.” Carl’s voice fell half an octave.

  “They couldn’t.” Nina squeezed his hand. “They backed out. You raised good sons.”

  He smiled through tears, unable to speak.

  “When they refused, the boss thought they were informants, and ordered them killed.”

  Carl’s mouth opened with a few stalled attempts to talk.

  “Z Bone it won’t be ordering anything ever again.”

  “You arrested him?” He managed to choke out some words.

  The emotion blanketing Carl pulled Tiffany out of the kitchen. She crawled up alongside her father and clung to his arm, trying to comfort him.

  “Not exactly.”

  Carl shot her a look. “Aren’t you with the police?”

  “I am, but I’m not a patrol officer anymore.”

  “You don’t carry yourself like a tech, and you don’t look like cyber swat.”

  Nina stared at the eggshell colored walls. No, I guess I don’t carry myself like a tech anymore.

  “You’re right. I’m with Div 9 now. I made sure he knew why I was there.”

  Carl blinked and let his weight fall into the sofa. His face showed the weight of ages had lifted.

  “Bless you.” He closed his eyes.

  “I’ll leave you to your daughter now.” Nina got up and smiled at them.

  Carl walked her to the door. “Thank you for givin’ me my boys’ dignity back. Just knowing what they did…” His eyes bathed her with gratitude. “I don’t know how that girl convinced you to help me.”

  Nina looked into his eyes. “We both lost someone very dear to us.”

  A knowing look spread over him as he placed Nina’s eyes in Avril’s head.

  “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  As the door closed, Tiffany asked if the strange woman was here because of her brothers. Carl’s inability to answer caused a lump in Nina’s throat. Faces flashed in her imagination, Carl, Tiffany, Vincent, and the startled last look Z Bone would ever make.

  Nina wanted to know why doing good felt so wrong.

  After an hour standing amid jets of warm water in her shower, Nina hit the button for a third round. Two cycles came close to making her feel clean of Z Bone’s filth. She rested her weight on the handrail, gazing at her reflection. Streams of warm liquid trailed over her back and down her legs to the floor. The face staring back looked like the face she had always seen in the mirror. Perhaps it was true that some people deserved to die for the awfulness they visited upon others. She closed her eyes and basked in the nausea of her regrets. She could do it only for as long as she felt like this afterwards. If ever she enjoyed it, she hoped she would be strong enough to get help before she turned into the same kind of monster that ended her dreams.

  The sound of the VidPhone ringing pulled her out of the shower. She walked into the cold apartment air heading to her desk, pausing only to hang a dark blue towel around her neck to catch the runoff from her hair. A spray of water hit the floor around the chair as she fell into it. She hesitated a few seconds, finding it odd that someone would call her on that terminal and not her NetMini or her headphone.

  “Duchenne.” She answered while drying her hair, not looking at the screen.

  “Hey there.”

  Vincent’s voice turned her head like a slap.

  She pulled the towel away from her eyes and stared. He smiled as if everything in the world was normal. The scenery behind him looked like his old apartment had not changed one bit; one of her bras still hung on the shelf above the bed.

  The towel hit the floor as her arms fell slack into her lap. Tears streamed out of her eyes without sound. She touched the holographic image; his face distorted over her fingers and wavered back to rights. After a moment, the idea this may be someone messing with her gave her a voice. Someone could have lifted this from any of a hundred video calls.

  “This isn’t possible.”

  He laughed, the same charming chuckle that he always used whenever he found something she did to be cute.

  “What’s not possible, that I called you? Hey, I wanted to see if you were up for going out tonight. I have a surprise for you.” He hinted as if he was holding something small just out of sight.

  Nina jammed the button to kill the call. Ripples of sadness washed over her as the meaning of what he had said sunk in. How long had she fantasized about the time he would pop the question? That call looked like an ill-concealed setup for an ambush proposal. She folded her arms across her desk and let her head fall on top of them. Dr. Khan said it was okay to cry.

  Her thoughts of what might have been took away any choice.

  eeble light wavered from a single LED lamp over the door, just strong enough to illuminate their immediate surroundings. The hulking columns of scrap in the distance remained shrouded in blackness. The cloying chemical aftertaste of synthetic beer overwhelmed Joey’s mouth, many times stronger in the wake of the last gulp. He chucked the empty while struggling to resist the urge to gag. It fell just short of the trash bin and landed on the wooden deck with a hollow, metallic thud. Kenny chuckled at the grimace.

  A cool wind teased sporadic clatters, creaks, and
metallic groans out from the graveyard of castoff technology, the echoing lamentations of machines long forgotten. The sight felt eerie, even to Joey. Scattered quasi-human shapes of old cyborg parts in the piled scrap painted frightening images upon the ground with brush strokes of shadow and highlights of glinting plastisteel.

  The distant giggles of the girls inside the house lent a surreal wrongness to the nightmare factory Kenny kept in his backyard. The kids had become fast friends; Joey relaxed now that her need to cling to someone shifted off him.

  Kenny lived in the south, past where the perpetual city fragmented into an uneven jigsaw of tiles. It ended in anything but a smooth line; different work teams got farther than others. Immense platforms one mile square and fifty meters thick, the tiles formed the base upon which the continuous urbanization lay. Depending on which political camp you subscribed to, the reason for the city’s end varied. Cronyism, lack of funds, Earth First protestors, assassinations; no one really knew. The jagged edge hung in the distance like an incomplete model.

  With so much loss of plant life from the war and construction, the government built massive air scrubbers to remove carbon dioxide and keep the atmosphere at a state somewhere short of toxic. Joey found it ironic that the technology used to turn far off planets Earth-like had become necessary to keep the Earth itself livable. From the deck behind the house, the outline of one such machine loomed. At night, it was little more than a large block of sky that lacked the usual glow of the smog. Lights flashed from the corners to warn hovercars and flying craft to stay away.

  “I don’t know how the fuck you drink this shit.” Joey tried to will the taste out of his mouth.

  Kenny laughed. “Two credits a can. Real beer’s fourteen. The good shit’s forty. That’s how I drink it.”

  “Oh, like you’re hurting for cash.” Joey strained to grab the empty from the floor where it had rolled to a halt so he could throw it at Kenny.

  Kenny pointed. “That may be true, but there’s no sense pissing it away.”

  Joey laughed. “It’s beer. We will be pissing it away.”

  The static of a failing transmission crackled out of Joey’s NetMini. He took it out of his pocket, wondering who tried to call him at this hour. “Bad signal out here?”

  Kenny shook his head. “Not usually, there’s a relay station over there on that air scrubber.”

  “Joseph…” His father’s voice leaked through the noise. “You must…”

  “What the hell?” Kenny looked at his friend. “Is that your dad?”

  Joey sighed. “No, it’s not. Someone’s fuckin’ with me.” He prodded the device with his thumb and froze.

  “What is it?” Kenny walked over; his boots echoed through the simwood planking.

  “Nothing, it just turned itself off.”

  “It’s off? Then why is it still crackling?” Kenny took a healthy swig from his beer.

  Joey looked up. “We have to be near some kind of microwave transmission tower… Something so strong the mini’s acting like a passive acoustic resonator.”

  “What?” Kenny slapped him on the back of the head with a playful swipe.

  “An unpowered speaker.” Joey smirked at him and fixed his hair.

  Kenny pointed at the glowing white snow. “Will that put snow on the screen too?”

  “…trying to kill them…” The voice crackled through the static.

  “Now that’s the same face I made the first time I saw a rad ghoul.” Kenny laughed.

  “It’s just signal crossover on the circuit board. I gotta be so close to the transmission antenna the video circuit is catching overflow.”

  Both men jumped at a sudden motion in the darkness among the rows of scrap. As soon as they saw it, the NetMini went silent. Joey’s gaze fell to the device before rising back to where he had seen the fleeting shadow. Kenny crept down the wooden steps and eased a handgun off his belt. He held it to the side, not quite aiming at anything.

  “Who’s out there?” Kenny half shouted. “Show yourself.”

  Joey readied his gun and held it with both hands. “Does that ever work? Does anyone really ever just walk out and say “Damn, ya got me?’”

  Kenny let his middle finger rise off the grip of his weapon, making Joey grin.

  “Think it’s one of the Discarded hunting for scrap?” Joey moved to the deck railing and aimed towards that spot.

  “Probably.” Kenny sidestepped to the left, circling for a better view into the aisle between the rows of piled metal. “Rather it’s that than my first thought.”

  “What was your first thought?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Joey rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me you believe in that ghost horseshit?”

  “Let’s just say that I keep an open mind.”

  Joey shook his head and laughed.

  Kenny crept to the edge, swinging around it to aim at a fragment of tarpaulin lofting in the wind. One of the cords that had held it down over an old hovercar drive unit had snapped. Kenny shook his head at Joey and put his gun away.

  “Just a damn tarp.” He tied the cord and went back to the porch.

  Joey exhaled and closed his eyes. He did not want to admit it, but his NetMini had been off the whole time. Even if this area did have good signal, he had no explanation for what just happened. He had the security option set to block automatic power on, plus he had never seen one display snow. Whatever happened was well past Joey’s comfort level. He declined another synth-beer and walked back to his chair. Just as he went to sit, the door slammed open.

  He jerked his pistol from his belt to aim, a reflex at the sudden loud noise. His aim never made it to the door; Kenny lunged and lifted his arm straight up. As the shock faded, he realized a terrified Hayley stared at him.

  One of Alyssa’s nightgowns hung almost to the floor on her. The scent of new nail polish surrounded her, corroborated by the sight of pink toenails. She ran and grabbed Joey around the chest, trembling hard enough to make him shake. He put the gun away and patted her on the back, giving Kenny a “what am I supposed to do?” wince.

  Kenny leaned close to her. “What happened?”

  “There’s someone in the house.” She squirmed around Joey to put him between her and the doorway. “I heard him when I came out of the bathroom.”

  The kitchen looked dark and quiet through the open door.

  The men exchanged a glance before Kenny spoke again. “Stay with her.”

  He raised his weapon. The faint chirp of a firing circuit turning on felt so loud against the silence that he cringed, fearing it would alert the prowler to his presence. He stepped into the kitchen, sweeping the gun left to right. The kitchen looked clear, as did the hallway beyond it. Nothing appeared disturbed; stillness had the room well in its grasp. The tinny sound of music leaked through the closed door at the end of the hall. Kenny shook his head; Alyssa had her headphones too loud again.

  Despite his best attempt to be quiet, the heels of his boots scuffed over the kitchen floor as he crept into the hall. From the archway, he had a clear view of the living room straight ahead and the hallway to the right that led to the bedrooms. Joey brought Hayley inside and closed the door, in case the prowler had gone around back. He guided her by the shoulder into a crouch behind the island counter. As she lowered herself, she pleaded with him not to leave her alone.

  Joey stayed with her, gun aimed over the counter. Kenny edged into the hallway, seeing nothing out of place among the glow of white walls and moonlight. Fear mixed with the cold kitchen floor upon her legs made Hayley shiver and rattle some standing jars of cooking oil and spice. Kenny whirled at the sound. Joey put a hand on her shoulder in an attempt to calm her.

  Kenny gave him a meaningful look as he let the air out of his lungs. He crept down the hallway toward the bedrooms. The carpet muted his footfalls, giving him confidence that he would surprise an intruder. Without warning, the sound of automatic gunfire erupted from the living room, loud enough to ratt
le the kitchen windows. Hayley’s terrified screams echoed in harmony with a woman’s voice crying out in agony as the gunfire came to an end. Joey’s foot slid away from him as Hayley grabbed him with both arms. If not for his lean upon the counter, she would have pulled him straight off his feet.

  The whump of Kenny’s body hitting the ground broke the silence that followed, as he dove back in the direction of the living room. He crawled forward, whirling to aim into the living room. It looked empty.

  Hayley’s whimpering breathing battled the muted headphones.

  The soft blue glow in the hallway flooded with yellow light from Alyssa’s room as she opened the door. Bopping her head in time with the now louder music, she walked out in a shin-length nightshirt bearing the image of a burning male silhouette with a scrap of wire dangling from his head, and purple socks. Seeing her father on one knee aiming a gun around a corner made her give him a look as if he were a crazy person.

  She pulled her headphones out. “Dad? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Kenny waved her back into her room. She read the worry in his eyes and a look of fear spread over her. Before anyone else could make a sound, a strange man’s voice screamed from the back end of the living room.

  “Nina!”

  Joey retrained his weapon at the sound by the front door. Kenny waved Alyssa towards him and pointed at the kitchen. She ran and slid around the corner; almost falling into the refrigerator as her sock covered feet met the tile floor. Joey caught her around the waist with one arm and slid her into Hayley. The two girls fell into each other and stayed low. Alyssa helped herself to Joey’s other sidearm, making him chuckle.

  “Just don’t shoot me in the ass.” He winked.

  Joey took a step to follow Kenny but Hayley grabbed his leg, staring up at him through tears.

  “Stay down.” Joey whispered. “If someone’s there, I don’t want Kenny taking him on alone.”

  Kenny edged past the couch, heading for the front door. A plastic fork hiding in the carpet splintered into oblivion as he stepped on it.

  Everyone jumped.

  A deep laugh with metallic undertones bellowed out of the same spot, trailed by the disturbing sound of squishing and crackling as if flesh and bones tore apart. The laugh caused Kenny to roll behind the couch and Hayley to make a noise so pathetic that Joey backed up and let her cling. Joey did not react to the sound; fear that did not thrill him made him seem calm.