Before she took five steps, she had already counted seven dogs in the corner—if you could even call such enormous beasts by that name. They circled and bit at each other, growling at some invisible fiend in the corner. Maybe that was the direction the quake came from. Ana had heard that dogs knew such things, sometimes.
Dogs—in Ana’s world—were tiny, docile, happy-tongued little creatures that fit in your lap or your purse or sometimes even a pocket, if someone was high class enough. Like Kadaya Sarin and her extra-miniature Rhodesian Ridgeback, Pip. That dog even had its own tech, a tiny series of gentle grappling hooks keeping him connected to Kadaya even when she sang in concerts. Pip could hop off her expensive dresses, swing about, and always return to his safe little pocket.
These dogs were not those kinds of dogs. These dogs were not any kind of dogs that Ana had seen before. These dogs were beasts.
Outside, narrow tower lights spiraled away to keep hoverfloats and drones in line and to prevent them from crashing into the Tower. Didn't really matter anymore. The shadows from the light rotated over dogs’ enormous circling forms, so that Ana could not get a good look at one for very long. But she got a good enough look to be scared, to know that the dogs’ mouths could easily encapsulate her arm or her neck or even her entire head.
She had heard of dogs of this type. Wild dogs, living in packs in the middle of Junktown. Some years ago, it had been one of the dangers of traveling through the slum without protection. Ana only traveled through the city proper in the first place for entertainment—festivals, parties, and the like—so it had been easy to find safe ways to go. Dog attacks happened day and night for nearly a year, and then all of a sudden they stopped. The city congratulated itself, applauded its law enforcement, but everyone knew this was a lie. Cops only got called after the fact of any crime. The only people patrolling streets were gangsters—and so everyone knew that gangsters had stopped the dogs.
And maybe they had taken the most vicious, the meanest among the animals, and dedicated them to breeding.
The large hall was criss-crossed with tall load-bearing pillars, each one straining and bending. Large shelves of pipe-filled concrete caved in everywhere. Walls that led nowhere. Offices built but never finished. Empty portals in rows of steel and concrete like some kind of industrial forest.
If it was an industrial forest, then the dogs were industrial killers. Layered with grease and dirt. Black with dried blood. Dust poured off them as they barked and howled. Their leathery faces ragged, layered in long pink scars. Every coat a badlands, with spires of fur floating in odd directions. Ana whimpered, seeing them more and more clearly, and hurried after Ore.
The light shifted slightly. The hall became more visible. Bones. Beneath the dogs were bones. Bones, ragged pieces of hair, mutilated flesh.
Oh, no. No, no. Why did she have to see that?
Not seeing all those body parts would have changed nothing, she knew that. But what was anyone's situation but a collection of perspectives?
Halfway across the big open hall now and the dogs still hadn’t noticed them. Step by step, careful, slow. Taking the time to step around what she now realized were frequent piles of dead bone and tissue. Through the rotating lights, she saw the end of the large room—or a wall, at any rate, and what she hoped in the shadows was a door.
And then Gary stepped and stumbled on a big pile of bones, prompting a series of very appropriately Garyish yelps. He was so tired, could barely keep himself up. He swore loudly—and all the dogs zeroed in on him.
Victor grabbed Ana’s arm, sprinting full speed. “Run,” he said, almost idiotically calm. “Run, run, run.”
But Ana was slower than him. He tried to push her forward, and Ana twisted in his grip.
“I've got it!”
He pushed still, sprinting faster, and Ana twisted all the way out. Victor stumbled and hit a wall. The dogs got closer and closer.
Gary ran at Victor. “I've got him, Ana, don't worry!”
She wasn't worried—she was running. Behind her, she could hear the dogs snapping up, their jaws working around and grunting out deep, horrible barks that echoed off the walls. She matched Ore pace for pace, running beside the smaller woman. The sound of the dogs approaching punished her ears. Their scratches on the floor, the heavy pounds of their paws slapping after her. Every sound they made was violence, potential and actualized.
Finally, a door at the end of the room—the stairs. Once there, Ana stopped and looked back.
Gary tried to help Victor up. The dogs bearing down on them, a snarling cloud of teeth.
“Get off,” said Victor. “Get off!”
Still insistent, Gary grabbed and pulled at him, and Victor pushed him away. Too much time. A dog landed on Victor's chest, and another latched onto his arm.
“O-oh god.” Gary abandoned all help, rushing away. “You should run!”
Victor elbowed the dog on his arm and then rolled, knocking more off his body. The dogs circled around him, all attention to Victor.
“Run, Ana!” he shouted. “Go!”
She did not go. Gary ran around a network of interconnected walls and arrived at the door, blood trailing down his pants and his shoulder. He tried to tug her through the door, and she slapped him away.
Gun in hand now, Victor blew a hole through the head of one dog and then another. The other dogs remained undeterred, snarling, snapping. He tried to shoot as he ran, but one dog leapt up and clamped down on his hand and the gun. Victor fired into him, the dog’s brains trailing out on its back, but its jaw remained locked. He punched another dog and released the gun, freeing his hand.
He closed on the exit. Dogs trailed after him. Ana held the door ready.
Victor careened past Ana into the stairwell, pushing her aside. Ana banged the door shut quick as she could. Tufts of a dog’s tail caught in the door. Three of the beasts managed to rush through the door before Ana closed it. Outside, bodies slammed into the door and wall.
The three dogs inside leapt up on Victor, crowding his chest and arms. Ana tried to grab him, but he pushed her away again, and he and the dogs all tumbled over the rail.
Ana did not see his fall, but she heard him land, again and again, tumbling on down the stairwell.
* * * * *
Gary knew his father quite well before the old man was murdered. They were pals, buds. If he could think of something to do on a Friday night, often it was to hang out with his father.
Gary’s father, Arnold, worked as an accountant for a drone security firm. The firm made tiny drones that protected the small, head-sized drones which constantly surveyed the population, identifying consumption choices and recording data about shop choices, clothing, fads, trends, all that sort of thing. Most laborer homes—such as Arnold’s, as accountants were smack-dab in the middle of the laborer class—were required to have small ports in the walls or ceilings to allow the drones inside for recording at any time of the day. The machines had full, unrestricted access to consumers—except when it came to those in the fringe.
The problem with the fringe, Gary’s father would explain, was that they still buy everything but they don’t want to work in a proper damn job like everyone else. They want to make money, but they don’t want to do it the tried-and-true way, working up with a corporation and creating some loyalty.
Gary did not point out, during these talks, that his mother had been traded from one corporate area to another within Tri-American for almost ten years straight, working for nearly two dozen sub-corps in that time. That didn’t seem like loyalty to him, but why stir up the hornet’s nest?
Anyway, Arnold’s sub-corp, SharpeTech, built tiny wasp-like drones to follow around the eyebot drones, sending out sub-lethal stingers (bullets) loaded with subduing effects (poisons). Without these—and heck, even with them—folks in the fringe would go out of their way to down the drones. Sometimes the drones were broken out of protest, in an attempt to establish some privacy. More often, though, it was to create tech
scrap for bootleg cybernetics shops and doctoring stands.
So, there was a lot of accounting to do, what with all the new drones coming in, the old ones getting scrapped or repaired, and constant upgrades required to make everything hang together. When Gary’s father got home, his brain was usually tired out—working the standard eleven-hour work day, just like any of his compatriots who weren’t really that serious about getting ahead, only getting by—and he was ready to absorb some mindless entertainment.
Arnold and Gary alternated between several channels, but mostly what they watched came down to two things: Singer Contest and wrestling.
Singer Contest, sponsored by Tri-American (everything was sponsored by Tri-American in their house, even the toilets, otherwise Arnold would be arrested and Gary likely sent off to a manufacturing camp in the Yukon), was a weekly program in which the world’s best amateur singers from the fringe and laborer classes competed for a shot at Citizenship. Kadaya Sarin had won some time past—the only real, permanent winner in the past five years, as Gary recalled.
There had been other winners, of course—every season had to have some winner—but Kadaya was the only one who hadn’t had her Citizenship revoked. None of the others were able to produce consistent hits. Either you were helping stitch the fabric of the economy together, or you were helping it dissolve. Singer Contest winners, mostly, just won larger responsibilities.
Wrestling was a little less depressing. Classic displays of good and evil on display—Gary’s favorite was Jack “Grizzly” Baer, and Arnold’s was “Hot Shot” Henry Shots. Steel cage hover matches, tag team tussles, battle-battle-battle royale-royales, Shots and Baer would do it all. Sometimes they fought each other, and sometimes even for the title. Those were grim nights—son and father shouting over each other to cheer on their favorite, and the loser’s fan sullenly striding off upstairs to pout.
But they would always make up the next day or so; Gary would bring his father flowers or maybe a basket of candy he picked up from a street vendor, or Arnold would bring Gary a spare drone from work to examine. Gary loved science, after all. Anything to do with computers. He really thought he could make it up to Citizenship one day, just so long as he kept his nose to the grindstone and learned all there was to know about his field.
Too bad he had only gotten his start at eight years old. Too late, most of the time, for any would-be strata-jumpers.
It was a nice existence, trading wins and thoughts with his dad. Gary liked it. There was structure and a routine.
Then, one day, Arnold’s sub-corp laid him off, and redacted his pay for the past five years, suddenly finding his work to be sub-standard. This left him in debt to the tune of more than six figures—an impossible amount to pay off with the amount of time he had left before mandatory retirement at eighty-six.
Gary came home that afternoon and found Arnold on the couch where they watched all their shows. Over his father's head was one of the waspbots that he had crunched numbers for, that he had spent years of his life devoted to. The waspbot floated quick, buzzing on one side of Arnold's head and then the other. It turned to fire at Gary, but only hissed out empty pneumatic sounds—all its stingers had already emptied into Arnold.
“No mess,” said his father’s note. “No burden.”
* * * * *
The Tower, even as high up as Samson and Partner were, broke and bent inward. Like an old scarecrow left out in the wind too long, it had started its lean. It would only lean so far before it broke. Everything was on a tilt.
Below them, Junktown burned. Junktown drowned. There was nothing of itself left, not anymore. He and Partner stood next to a window, a bit frozen. They watched as the Dam burst, the full tides of the Mississippi releasing onto the city below. Enormous chunks of concrete and metal slammed into the overturned and leaning buildings, obliterating them. The Tower shook as house-sized concrete boulders slammed into its base.
“It is too bad we are so high up, and that I used my parachute already.”
“Why?”
“Because we could help, Partner-Samson.”
“We'd die down there. We couldn't save them all.”
“Saving them all is never the directive. Just the ones we can.”
This high up in The Tower, the floor plans narrowed as the structure came to a point. There was only one stairwell up, and no elevator. They were near the top floor now, just a floor away. Samson had developed a bit of a limp after the initial shock of the quake, and Partner helped him walk, supporting him with accordion arms. The ceiling and walls continued to sink in on themselves, barely holding up.
Samson had not had much opportunity—any, really—to visit the few floors above his own. Once, he had tried, and Petrov saw him and caned his back for being there without permission. Samson hadn’t been able to stand up straight for a week.
They ascended the stairs of the floor and entered the top floor. There was a powerful door which once blocked the way—thick and metal with complicated circuitry guarding its lock. But the wall around it had crumbled. They stepped through the holes—the door itself supporting the rubble now.
In the room they entered, something like white slime shifted and gathered on the floor, pushing out from an opening in the middle and slipping upward in coils toward the bending, twisting pillars in the room. These coils pushed up wires and attached and re-attached panels of ceiling, repairing them. Long tendrils of quickly-forming cables wrapped around the pillars and straightened them and stayed wrapped, keeping them in place.
“Is this regulation?” asked Partner. “I do not believe this is in my records. We should take several samples. Headquarters will want a report. The database is ever-expanding.”
“No,” said Samson, amazed. “There's nothing like this out there. I did this, I think. I made it.”
“Ah.” Partner clapped its hands together. “Then you can deliver the report yourself. I shall take a sample just in case.”
It leaned down and scooped up some of the goo into one finger.
The pillars of this room seemed to be held in place now, the white mass crystallizing and turning a dark blue color. The remaining mass slithered down to the floor again and slid up underneath Partner and Samson’s feet and under the door back down the stairs.
This repairing mass was not something Samson designed, not truly. It was something he had brainstormed—that he had thought of and theorized in his notebooks complete with diagrams and figures, and then mentioned to Crash—but it was not something he had implemented.
Crash in fact had access to whole notebooks full of Samson’s thoughts and designs. Seven notebooks, in fact, with schematics and ideas of how to make all the tech work. It would be pretty simple for Crash to send someone into Samson’s workshop when Samson wasn’t there and start copying everything.
If Crash could make this work, this self-repairing room, just from what Samson had drawn one Sunday afternoon six months ago...what else could Crash copy?
Was Samson’s true ability in creation or in his conception of creations? All too often they felt intertwined. Most of his best ideas came about from implementing the ideas he had thought of before, and then in implementing those new ideas even more visions of possibilities would flood through his mind. At times in the past, he had become so impressed with his ability to conceptualize that he tried to dedicate whole weeks and months only to that, but these periods quickly expended themselves of ideas. Without regular doing, he became stagnant and morose.
The Tower groaned and leaned. A giant wailing for its children. The escape was not far.
Through the hall, Partner clumping and Samson shuffling. They came across a half-open door, voices inside.
“Where’s the other Bones?”
This was Crash speaking. He was alive! The Faces were alive! He could see little through his angle in the door—Max Bones sitting, leaned back, clearly high. Crash paced around him. Petrov was in one corner, the metal mesh of his face hidden in shadow.
Sam
son almost rushed in, but Partner grabbed him.
“There are weapons inside,” said the copbot. Its voice was quiet, vibrating down only to Samson.
Samson almost said it was okay, that they could go in anyway.
“I don't care about those Bones bastards.” The gravel of Punchee Wallop was unmistakable. “I want to talk about the girl.”
“To hell with the girl,” this was Storey, now. Samson was surprised. She was a survivor. “I want that little slock's head on a pike, Crash. I don't care what he's made for you.”
Samson stopped. That must have been him. He didn't want to just present himself to Storey's murderous rage, not after surviving this long.
“We'll talk about it in a minute, doll. I want to know where the other Bones is.”
“You mean Harry?”
“That’s the other of you, Max, yes.”
Max shrugged long. “Dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yup.”
“Damn, Max. Don’t tear yourself up about it.”
A chair groaned as Max shifted and shrugged. “What are you gonna do about it? Your fancy suit there raises people from the dead now, after getting crushed from such as a ceiling?”
“I’m just saying. You can show some grief for your brother. We all adults here, baby.”
It was hard to imagine, Harry Bones being dead. He ran entertainment in Junktown, which mean he ran women. Prostitutes. Not anymore. There weren't women in Junktown anymore, probably. There wasn't a Junktown anymore.
Crash put a hand down on Max's shoulder. “You all drugged up, honey?”
Partner tensed up. “Drugs?” he whispered to Samson.
“Stay here a minute,” he said to Partner. “Just wait this out.”
Partner's eyeflaps flattened out, clearly unhappy.
“Leave ‘em alone, Crash,” said Wallop
“He ain’t supposed to be getting high on his stash, baby.”
“We ain’t supposed to be sitting in a tower what’s falling down! Uniqueness abounds! Let’s not get caught up in it, huh? I ain't supposed to have a girl get in The Tower trying to kill me. How about that?”
Up The Tower Page 12