Cypulchre

by Joseph Travers MacKinnon

  The RIM runs from Anaheim all the way to the Mojave Desert, acting as a buffer between Outland and Military properties and the insidious third sector sequestered to the east: the PIT.

  Like “RIM,” “PIT” is a neologism that stuck, bereft of its initial meaning. Paul isn’t sure, but presumes it stood for People in Transition, granted the area was repurposed to house undocumented refugees from the south the system didn’t care to recognize or remember.

  These days, people don’t so much transition as survive in the PIT. It’s an extremely dense, walled-city populated by refugee children and California’s poor. The government and the military tend to leave it be despite the disease, the overcrowding, and the violence, allowing it to serve as an extreme counterpart to the Blue Zone—as a disclaimer for a life lived beyond Outland’s blessings.

  Separated from the RIM by the Partition—a strictly-monitored three-hundred-foot-high, twenty-foot-deep wall, freckled with guards and guns—the PIT is more of a prison than a city sector. Whatever decay and lawlessness exists in the RIM pales in comparison to the chaos present in the PIT’s vertical slums or the subterranean settlements carved into Mount Baldy. The warlords who run it make Winchester seem benevolent by comparison.

  With Pasadena below them, Samkorksy’s GPS bids him roll west. Paul feels the g-force pull all the blood to his legs, and bats his eyes, trying to stay conscious.

  “Jesus! A little warning,” he slurs through gravity’s pull.

  “Sorry sir.” Samkorsky evens the ship and slows their approach. “Sometimes, when the sun is shining and the ocean glimmers like diamonds on velvet, I just forget myself up here.”

  Attempting to keep last night’s bourbon down, Paul returns his attention outside.

  “Sure,” he says staidly.

  Paul spots his tax dollars at work at the centre of the Blue Zone: the Citadel—a windowless, flat-black behemoth, standing one-half mile above the city. It is Los Angeles’ own cypulchre—an Outland tower brimming with half-a-million translocated minds stewing in the noosphere’s primordial pools. It’s a bloody eyesore.

  The Citadel—the diadem in Winchester’s crown—appears crossed by the Hyperloop’s red mien, which carries blinking, civilian pods northward, past the Partition and shanty-encrusted mountains, to the Barstow Green Zone and beyond.

  In addition to servers, translocators, and honeycombs of data, the Citadel boasts its own private army, nuke-proof shielding, and one-hundred-thousand-or-so permanent residents. Towering fifty storeys above the RIM’s T-blocks as well as the tallest of the Blue Zone’s more humble glass and metal skyscrapers—all latticed together by pedway bridges, dangling wires, and transit tubes—its shadow dials time on much of the city. Paul hates it; how imposing it is; the hubris of it—a Babylonic tower corrupted from the top down.

  On the cloud-swept top floor resides Paul’s former boss, Niles Winchester III, sitting righteous in his imperious and minimalistic, sandstone throne-room, watching the sun rise over the Pacific, living the real life.

  Samkorsky radios to Paul, “One-minute till touchdown.”

  “Whereabouts, exactly?” asks Paul, fumbling with his headset.

  “Your hotel, sir. The concierge will take over and I’ll take my leave. Gotta charge this bad boy.”

  Paul chortles into the mic. “Well, I appreciate the lift.”

  “Dr. Katajima insisted that I refuse your gratitude.”

  Grinning, Paul looks out the window, watching the rooftop of the Grand Hotel magnify beneath the Dragonfly. “My word’s no good in this town, anyhow.”

  Chapter 9: CYPULCHRE

  A PASTY, ACNE-SCARRED bellhop unshoulders Paul’s duffle bag and points to the ground, awaiting some sort of confirmation.

  “Yeah, anywhere is good,” Paul says, distracted, surveying the spartan hotel room.

  The bellhop dumps the duffel bag and cracks the door open, feigning to leave.

  “Hold on one sec,” Paul says, forcing a smile and patting his pockets.

  Sensing a potential exchange, the bellhop abides and closes the door.

  Despite having pleaded to carry his bag himself, Paul intuits a reasonable tip via Monocle, and swipes his hand over the bellhop’s. There’s something to be said for building positive karma, especially when out of your element.

  “Thank you,” squawks the young man, undoubtedly double-checking the amount displayed over his iris. A surprised grin forces his cheeks up, pre-empting a deluge of withheld information. “I neglected to mention: the room should have everything you need. The most up-to-date Home interface, an InstaMeal printer…The Nespresso machine is beside the net-cube. All of the windows can be tinted.” With a point, he continues. “Dial’s on the wall beside the bed. Windows can also be converted into viewing screens.”

  Paul folds his arms, and scans the room, bobbing his head to simulate interest.

  “And if you’d like to simultaneously synch to the CLOUD and take advantage of our athletics room, we can offer you a number of temporary PILOT inserts to regulate body function. Get your heart thumping while pumping your noggin full of virtual pleasure—SIMHAP and such.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Not a fan, Mr. Kernel?”

  Kernel? Katajima’s evidently keen on downplaying Paul’s return, ascribing to him this moniker for his own amusement.

  “The creator, actually.”

  The bellhop flashes his piano-key smile, silently disregarding Paul’s confession.

  “Well…” says Paul, as if to punctuate their conversation’s end, feeling the onset of his usual anti-social anxiety.

  The bellhop makes a spectacle of turning off his Monocle. He leans forward, cupping his hand over one side of his mouth. “If you need anything off the books, you just let me know. The name’s Fergus.” He points to his ID badge, just in case I’m hard of hearing.

  “Thank you, Fergus. I’ll let you know if the need arises.”

  Fergus scurries out the door before the tip can be reconsidered or recalled.

  Paul deadbolts the door. He’d prefer an electro-shield and a missile system, but expectations regarding comfort and security are best left at home. He picks up his duffle bag, and carries it over to the thin, heavplast desk set by the window. He unzips the bag on the desk and pulls out a stack of Yuan. Might as well get what I came for before masquerading as the man they sent for.

  He closes the bag, stows it under the desk, and trudges over to the bed. Sitting down, he procures the NEXUS chip from his pocket. Scrutinizing it, he schemes how to get the fragmentor back from the RIM without raising any alarms over at Outland.

  “I need my sleep,” Paul lies to an empty room, planting the chip under the mattress.

  PAUL RODE THE DECREPIT Metro to the end of the line, and flagged a cab to take him the rest of the way, paying with cash to avoid his name inciting any queries or interest. The last thing I need is someone from the teacher’s union, out of work because of CLOUD-learning alternatives, or some random, exacting their revenge…

  He greased the driver’s hand with a little-extra incentive to circumnavigate the main roads and to steal by the checkpoints into the RIM.

  To his credit, the driver was phenomenally efficient. He knew where to go and how best to get there, and he knew what to do when minor hindrances posed a threat to his master circuit. He also made a show of his familiarity by driving recklessly down alleys and across construction sites.

  Paul steps out into a neon puddle. “Thanks,” he says reflexively.

  Counting his money, the driver tilts his ear Paul’s way. “The door...”

  Paul shuts it, and steps back to watch the blue and yellow cab accelerate to green and disappear around the bend.

  The street is uncomfortably quiet. No laughter. No commotion. Just the sound of subdued quarreling and far-off car alarms.

  On this tier of the terraced thoroughfare—outdoors but partly covered by makeshift awnings and plastic sheeting—Paul’s virtually alone. He pu
lls his collar up to help block the exhaust from the air purifiers and the smell of battery acid leaking down from the mag-highway.

  The street is bracketed by dark-windowed shops and boutiques shouldering glass and brick apartments that reach past the next tier into khaki-coloured soot. On the lower tier, dilapidated pre-war homes and their artificial palms lean to whatever light’s strayed down with the highway exits. They’d be better off gone than forgotten.

  Heavplast pillars and statues are reclaimed by vines and other bellicose greens. Holographic billboards advertise updates to the technology chipped and spread across the sidewalks. Street-side dumpsters full of chicken bones and rotten fruit indicate that not all of the living that goes on in the RIM is virtual. Notwithstanding this area’s preference for the physical, Outland still projects an undeniable presence.

  An emaciated woman with wax dripping from her chapped lips and desiccated skin quavers by the Newslink hub situated on the median halving the road. Her dark, jaundiced eyes—smoldering in their charcoal pits—snap alert to the presence of another sojourner. “Hey mistah!”

  Paul pretends not to notice. Rained-out junkie.

  “Mistah, ya’ve any airtime?” She lurches forward into the quill of light allowed by the marquee, legs shaking puss loose from hidden bedsores.

  Paul shrugs his shoulders. “Afraid not. Old fashioned, I suppose. Nothing but flesh and bone.” He hides his repulsion and hastens his pace.

  Her eyes disappear into her down-facing disappointment. “Shit. Shit, man. That sucks.” She stops mid-lane, boney arms jutting out like loose straw falling out of a piss-poor scarecrow.

  “Don’t know what to tell you. Sorry.”

  Paul crosses the road, leaving the wiry transient anchored in the real—a refugee formerly committed to the virtual, now returned to her original being, a prisoner of rotten meat and an atrophied brain. The rapture’s already come, taking up the rich and the obedient into the unloving arms of the leviathan.

  Paul aches with discomfort, with guilt. He’s grateful that his daughters won’t succumb. They won’t abandon their bodies willy-nilly.

  He bobs through an asphalt lot, past a smog-browned church—squeezed between nondescript brick buildings—that’d seen one-too-many votive candle go unanswered. A vestigial place for a dematerialized race.

  Against a backdrop of pulsating solar bands and overgrown history, the church’s daughterless Sophia offers a bronzed hand to pigeons fighting over a ration bar. Paul takes a three-step head-start and launches the bar with a straight kick. It fragments, and the scavengers flutter over to a safe distance; Sophia, naturally, unphazed.

  Behind the kick lags a dull ache. It shoots through Paul, straight to his resolve. He hunches over. Stripped by lightning, thigh down to knee, knee up to hip. His muscles throb. The electric storm, sending bolts into places he’d forgot he sensed, immediately blemishes his disposition, already a distorted mess. Suddenly, everyone is an asshole, Shouta especially. Holy shit, that hurts.

  What’s Shouta want? What good does it do him, interrupting his luxurious fantasy, to tease an exiled Luddite stuck at start with the promise of reconciliation and purpose? “Fuck him.”

  Holding his leg as if it were about to come apart at the seams, Paul covets the SIK bottle he’d been denied and decries his foolishness. He regrets having dug the NEXUS chip out of his thigh, then suturing it up like some mafia doctor. Alcohol, anger, and paranoia: a last supper for this schizophrenic.

  Paul is reintroduced to his surroundings by a nearby rumbling. Across the park, a Goliath security drone powers down the street. Its hind-legs lower it, enabling it to scan below the awnings. It inspects a gun store flickering behind an iron-barred façade, and clamors on, stopping before the next block of old buildings. It strews a solid-laser band down an exhaust-filled alleyway, scanning for subversives. The scan stops, turning the plumes of exhaust a deep carmine. The drone’s lasers retract, and the Goliath returns to routine inspections—its taupe chassis absorbing the pale light around it.

  The Goliath, like the rest of the state apparatus marching down the streets, offers nothing more than the illusion of control, or so Paul hopes. Won’t do him any favours having the Goliath effectively lurking around looking for dissidents like himself.

  He checks his Monocle to verify the location of the missing piece to his anarchical puzzle. According to the intel he’d compiled, the seller calls himself “Q,” and runs a hack-shop two blocks away in a cellar hidden beneath an augmentation studio, beside a Chinese restaurant. The Net didn’t have much writ or background on Q, apart from a street-view image of the ramshackle, red-brick building apparently housing his illegal-tech toy shop, and a single comment: “Buyer beware.” Paul is ready to negotiate with Yuan, and if it comes to it, the six armour-piercing-rounds-worth of caution at his fingertips.

  Past a few more rain-outs coughing blood and tar—murmuring resentment between scuffed knees—Paul finds the Chinese restaurant. The windows are glazed-over with epoxy resin, darkly reflecting the Mandarin characters, “Good Eats,” which flicker on the groaning sign, dangling on rusted hinges. There’s a padlocked, wire-mesh door protecting a stairwell up to the augmentation studio, but no entry to or suggestion of another business.

  Paul turns the corner to find another exhaust-filled alley. He coughs immediately, having dared a breath of the poison. Wiping his mouth dry with his collar, he squints binocular vision out of both eyes. An LED “Q” cuts through the amorphous grey; the glyphic tongue penetrating the circle points downwards to a set of stairs that disappears into the side of the building. Hello, Q.

  Two shades emerge from the exhaust, finding form in the light of the LED sign. Paul quickly retreats around the corner, and peaks to confirm his suspicion.

  The two figures are dressed in mechanized exo-skeletons. Mechs. Using the zoom-feature on his Monocle, Paul scrutinizes the insignia printed on their broad shoulders: “OS.” Outland Sentinels.

  Dismissing the presence of Winchester’s cronies as coincidence, Paul reflects on any possible indiscretion on his part that might have tipped them off to his intent. So far as his overseers are concerned, he’s napping in his hotel room, unless, of course, the room is bugged and monitored, in which case…I’m screwed.

  One of the mechs descends the stairs into the hack shop, while the other leans against the exterior wall, smoking contraband with his visor up. Exhaling, the mech turns his gaze up the alley and sees Paul’s face—or enough of it to know he is being watched.

  “Hey! You there!” the mech bellows, throwing the cigarette to the ground.

  Paul vaults off the cornerstone into a sprint, and bounds across the street in search of an out. The click-crunch sound made by the mech’s legs sends more than a shiver up Paul’s spine. His legs deaden with mortal panic.

  “Stop!” bellows the mech, now at the mouth of the alley.

  Outland Sentinels are notorious for being thuggish mercenaries, only facetiously referred to as peace officers. They’re Winchester’s fist; his imperial guard. Away without leave, papers, or a good reason for sector-hopping, Paul’s dead to rights.

  Scanning the storefronts for someplace to hide, Paul recognizes the Outland insignia again, this time on a maglev hover-car crackling his way. Without hesitation, he pulls into the nearest doorway. Red light encapsulates him. He turns to see the nose of the Outland car, and commits to whatever is dammed behind the door.

  The entrance doesn’t give at first, but on his second try, he collapses into the room—a soundproofed antechamber bound by steel bars and egg-foam, with a little wired window on the left.

  Paul hears the click-crunch of the mech’s boots outside. A muffled voice blares over a radio, and the mech belts back, “Giving you trouble, is he? Alright. I’m on my way.” The crunches dampen until they’re no longer audible.

  Thank God.

  Chapter 10: BABYLON

  A GANG-BRANDED bouncer in mirror shades and a vinyl vest enters the antechamber from the
other side on a wave of noise. He presses the door shut behind him, cutting off the cacophonic flood. The room, caged and egg-foamed, is now silent, save for the creak of his leather wrist-cuffs crotched under his bulging biceps.

  Paul gulps, hoping he didn’t trade a beating and incarceration for death. He can hear his heart race, creating a polyrhythm with the guardian’s constant beat.

  The bouncer unfolds his arms and silently motions to a sign posted on the frame above the small, barred window. On the other side of the bars is a converted coat check, now housing a gun closet manned by a blonde-haired and semi-skinned android. The sign reads: “NO WEAPONS OF ANY KIND. NO EVAPS. NO DIDDLERS. NO HACKERS. MONOCLES MUST BE SHUT OFF.”

  With his revolver burning a hole in his side, Paul opts for his other universal key: a bouquet of Yuan. He thrusts a fistful of cash out with a trembling hand. Looking past snippets of Mao’s face, he studies the bouncer’s for a reaction. The mirror shades offer nothing but a dark reflection of Paul’s expectation. His heart skips a beat.

  The bouncer cuts the tension with a grunt and grabs the wad of Yuan. Crinkling it into his vest, he nods to the gun-closet android. Exposed gears on the android’s face grind. It winks back.

  Paul looks at the two of them, locked in agreement over god-knows-what. I could outdraw the bouncer and ring him twice before he got a grip, but the android…that’s a gamble.

  Breaking its stare with the bouncer, the android delicately plays a keypad. The door clicks open, inviting the noise back into the room.

  Avoiding his hopeful reflection in the bouncer’s shades, Paul walks around the brute and into the realm beyond. The ordeal of getting in here probably keeps the paranoids out and the sadomasochists chomping at the bit.

  He descends a staircase, which slopes under a decorative grid of laser beams and strobe lights, and heads into a long, prismatic hollow. The music making the floor tremor is electro mayhem: a sporadic series of wahs linked by a dissonant trickle of modulated chords, all floored through a dozen old, vacuum-tube amplifiers.