“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“Fine.”
“So what now?”
“I don’t know. Get back to the city, around people. They’re probably going to come looking for us with helicopters or drones, something that can track our heat out here, or the signals from our phones. Let’s just get back and—”
The engine died.
“What the…” Felix banged on the wheel and the console as the car rolled to a stop.
I glanced back up the road. I could still see the parking lot lights. “We only went a mile. I guess the security system locked out the engine because we don’t have the keys with us.”
I sighed as I opened the door and stepped away from the car.
“Lux, scooter.”
My glowing ride materialized and I swung onto it. “You coming?”
“But it won’t hold us both.” Felix got out of the car.
“Not for long, but it’s all we’ve got.”
So he got on and we rode. With a little trial and error, I found that I could keep the scooter stable for about thirty seconds before it flickered out and I had to re-spawn it. So that’s how we got back to the city, thirty seconds at a time. Twenty-five seconds at sixty miles an hour, and the other five seconds slowing down to stop before the scooter vanished out from under us.
It was a long ride.
Chapter 6
Upgrades
Felix’s brother rented a room in a row house just a few blocks from my parents’ house. Getting that close to them made me a little nervous, but I shut off the scooter the moment we rolled up to the front stoop and we walked straight inside, so I felt pretty certain no one had seen us.
We went up to the bedroom where Felix slept on a small cot and his brother slept on a slightly larger cot, both positioned well away from the extremely large wall screen and its impressive array of gaming hardware on the floor. Headsets, gloves, controllers, sensor guns, cameras, microphones…
So far, so normal.
“Marcus probably won’t be home before midnight. He’s got a girlfriend now.”
“Oh? Recent development?” I sat down on the floor in front of the screen and dropped my bag beside me.
“Yeah, he’s really into her, and she’s not a flake like the last one, so maybe it’s getting serious. Which is good for him, but it means we don’t hang out much anymore.”
I nodded. “Sorry.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. Hungry?”
I felt guilty for taking anything from him, but I was hungry, and I was starting to remember that I had literally nothing now. For the last two months since I got fired, I had been clinging to the idea that I was still special, still educated and experienced, still on the verge of getting out. But now, after a night in the woods and two days on the run, it was finally starting to sink in that I couldn’t go back to the way things were. Not ever. I was broke, and technically homeless. “Yeah. Whatever you’ve got.”
He had leftover Chinese, and it was really good. I finished off the sweet and sour chicken and then leaned my head against the wall. Riding the scooter had given me a couple aches and bruises, including a very stiff neck and shoulders.
“So.” Felix tossed the trash in the bin. “Want to watch a movie or something?”
“Actually, I need to work for a little while.” I nodded over at his printer in the corner. It was the same model as mine. “Mind if I do a little printing?”
“Seriously? You’re still going to make those gloves for Susquehanna?”
I grunted. “Nope. I’m going to make more gear for me. I think I need more projection fabric to keep the scooter stable, and to render bigger objects. I’m going to do a jacket and some sort of boots, I think.” The idea was still pretty vague in my mind, but I’d had a lot of time to decide it was the right thing to do when we were struggling to make our way back into the city, thirty seconds at a time. I got out my phone and started working on the new specs to print the holo-projector fabric pieces.
“Oh cool, good idea.” He paused. “I don’t suppose you’d consider making a couple extra gloves, would you?”
“For you?” I glanced up from my little screen. “No, no way. Sorry.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Felix, this little invention of mine has pretty thoroughly ruined my life, and now it’s the only thing keeping me safe. You know, from the men with the guns. If you have it too, then they’ll be after you too. Let’s just hope Frost and his buddies didn’t get a good look at you tonight. You’ve got a home, and family… and food. Trust me. You don’t want to lose that.”
“Oh come on, Cygnus screwed me over, same as you. I can’t work. I’ve got nothing except what my brother gives me. I’m a burden on him. I’m useless.”
“Yeah, well, at least no one’s trying to kill you.” I said it pretty sharply and I gave him a cold look, and I’m not sorry if that was rude. “So drop it. Please, just drop it.”
He shook his head. “Fine. Whatever. Sorry I asked.”
I kept working and he put on the TV to watch a rerun of some sexy prison show. I hate prison shows. It seems like there’s always a dozen of them running at the same time, and they’re all the same. My dad says that when he was kid there used to be tons of shows about outer space. Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape, Stargate, Babylon 5, Lexx… it sounded amazing. Too bad no one cares about space anymore. They did vampires and superheroes for a while, and then pirates and princesses, and now prisons. Just prisons, which are always oddly full of sexy teenagers with really dramatic problems.
I got the webbing jacket figured out and loaded up the feedstock to print it out while I went back to work on the boots.
“Hey.” Felix glanced at me. “Sorry about before. I didn’t mean to get mad at you. I’m just dealing with some stuff.”
“No, I know. It’s okay.”
“So… what are you going to do? I mean, what happens tomorrow? If you’re not going to Susquehanna, what’s the plan?”
“I don’t know. As long as I have the suit and some sunlight, I should be okay. I can ride the scooter wherever I want to go. Maybe Florida, or California.”
He nodded. “Oh.”
Yeah, it wasn’t much of a plan. You can’t really run from a company unless you’re willing to run to a foreign country, and it would have to be one of the meaner countries, one that hates American companies more than it needs American money, I guess. I don’t know much about other countries, really. But whenever they get mentioned on the news, it’s always pretty scary.
But I didn’t want to leave at all. I definitely didn’t want to leave my parents and my friends. And who knew how many more people there were like me and Felix who got royally screwed by the system? And how many more would there be next year, and the year after?
“I wish I could stay.” I put down my phone and looked at him. “I wish I could fix all this. I’d do it, I would, if there was a chance. But there isn’t. As long as I’m around, they’re going to keep hurting the people I care about. They’ve got all the money and the police and the law.”
Felix offered a smile. “But, hey, you’ve got leftover Chinese and a bed tonight.”
I smiled back and glanced at the cots. “Yeah.”
“Too bad you don’t…” Felix raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you do.” He pulled out his phone.
“Maybe I do what?”
“Hang on a sec.”
“Maybe I do what, Felix?”
“I was just thinking, what if you had enough friends to let you stay on a different couch every night?” He kept playing with his phone.
“No, I don’t think so. And Cygnus has my old account info, they know who my friends are.”
“They know about your old friends, yeah. But they don’t know your new ones.”
“What new ones?”
“Them.” He held up his phone to show me the page with the first video of me on the street, fighting off those two guys from the market with my swor
d. I watched the clip for a moment, and then I glanced down at the numbers under it. “That can’t be right.”
“It is. Eight hundred million views, and over ninety percent approval.”
Eight hundred million? I went global?
“And if at least a couple hundred of these fans are living here in the city, then I bet you’ve got a couple hundred friends who would love to hang out with you for an evening and let you bum a meal and a bed for a few hours.”
I sat back and looked at him. There was a real earnestness about him, he was so focused and excited about this idea. It was easy to get excited along with him, but I couldn’t turn off that part of my brain that likes to poke holes in fun ideas. “Yeah, but what’s the point? Spend the rest of my life couch-surfing and running from the cops? That’s not a life.”
He nodded and his smile faded. “Yeah, you’re right. It was just an idea.”
“Thanks anyway.”
We watched the rest of his prison show, and then the next episode.
“Hey Felix?”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry about your bicycle.”
He shrugged. “It’s okay. I know a guy. I can get another one cheap. Don’t worry about it.”
We were in the middle of a Norwegian movie about a ski instructor who fought trolls in his spare time when Felix rested his arm on mine and wrapped his hand around my fingers. I gently squeezed his hand, and then pulled mine back.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“No, it’s fine.” It wasn’t really fine. Maybe it should have been. He was pretty good looking, and he was smart, smart enough to invent a new metal and to find me, and brave enough to run from Frost with me, and nice enough to feed me and give me a place to sleep.
In my head I started to make excuses, that I’d only just met him, that I didn’t really know him, that I had a lot on my mind. All true, of course. But I wasn’t sure what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
It was awkward.
The printer finished the jacket right after the movie ended, so I uploaded the specs for the boots and the machine when back to humming.
“I’m kind of tired,” I said.
“Yeah, me too.” He avoided my eyes at first, but then looked at me and offered a tired smile. “Here, you can take Marcus’s bed. It looks like he’s not coming home tonight.”
“Okay, thanks.”
I sat on the bed for a minute as he turned off the light. Then I kicked off my shoes, slipped the holo-gloves into my pockets, and went to sleep. I tried to, anyway, but I couldn’t stop thinking about everything that was going on, and I stayed up for at least an hour, staring at the wall, listening to Felix snore.
I woke up early. The light through the window was sort of dim and gray, but it was morning and I was awake, and once I’m awake I can’t go back to sleep, so I sat up. Felix was still snoring, and my gloves were still in my pockets. I took the new boots out of the printer and laid them on the floor beside the new jacket and the gloves in a patch of faint sunlight. I had no idea how long it would take to charge them.
In the mean time, I synchronized the wireless connection between the different pieces of holo-fabric and started playing my new favorite game: uploading random object specs into my suit. I upgraded the scooter to a nice big motorcycle so I could carry a passenger and some luggage. I also found some old designs for stealth body armor used by the Marines in the Canal Incident. Mine wouldn’t be very stealthy, what with the bright purple glow all around me, but at least I’d be safe from bullets.
I looked up gizmos to help me escape from a rooftop. A tent for sleeping in the woods. A parachute for jumping out of windows. It all would have seemed pretty random or ridiculous, except they were all things I had already needed in just the last two days. And there was no telling what I would need in the days to come. I uploaded so many designs that I had to come up with a new system for naming and numbering them all.
An hour later Felix woke up. Apparently he was not quick to wake up because he didn’t say anything and barely waved at me as he shuffled by, turned on the screen, and went into the bathroom down the hall. It took me a minute to realize he wanted the noise of the TV to cover up the noise of whatever he was doing in the bathroom.
I flipped over to the news. The weather report said clear and sunny, which was a relief. The last thing I needed now was a string of dark, overcast days leaving me stranded and defenseless when the suit powered down.
Felix walked back in as the sports report came on. “Morning. Sleep okay?”
“Yeah, thanks.” I flashed a little smile at him. It still felt awkward. “I was just thinking about my parents. Cygnus detained them the other day. They’re home now, but I should call them again.”
“Are they okay?”
“Yeah, I mean, I got them released and my dad said they were fine, so I guess they are, for the moment.”
“Then no worries, they’re safe now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Detention laws. A company can only detain a person once per ninety days and a max of three times per year. So they’re safe for the next three months at least.”
I blinked. “Really? I didn’t know that. Thanks. That’s a relief, it really is.” It was a relief all right, for about ten seconds. “But if they can’t go after my parents anymore, then…”
Felix nodded. “You have any other family in town?”
“No.”
“Friends?”
“Yeah, some.”
“Then you might want to give them a heads-up.”
So I called Mercedes and got her mail, so I said, “Hey Mercy, it’s me. Thanks again for the loan the other day, I’ll pay you back soon, I promise. I just wanted to let you know that you might want to be careful the next couple of days, just in case the people who are after me pay you a visit. Just… avoid men in suits and black cars, okay?”
I tried Dom next and had to leave a similarly confusing message. Then I called two guys I had known at Cygnus, Dean and Angelo, and then my friend from college, Suzanne. I was wondering who else counted as an important friend when Felix said, “Hey, take a look at this.”
He had a clip playing on his phone. It was dark and a little grainy, and it looked like it had been shot from someone’s house, through a window. Across the street, we watched two men carry a body out of an apartment building and toss it in the back seat of a black car, and then drive away. The timestamp said it had happened just three hours ago, a little before sunrise.
“I think one of those guys was our friend Frost,” Felix said.
I sat down on the bed. “That building. I know that building. It’s Mercy’s place.”
“Oh no. I’m sorry.” Felix put his hand over his mouth and went to stare out the window and look down the street.
“They’re rounding up my friends.” It was surreal. On the one hand, it was exactly the same as before when they took my parents. But it felt different now. Before, it had still felt like it was partly my fault, that I had screwed up and set off this legal minefield. But now… now it felt personal, now it felt out of control and vicious.
Now I was pissed.
I grabbed my new jacket and boots and started pulling them on.
“Whoa, whoa. What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I’m going to get them out. I’m going to find my friends and bust them out.” The jacket was a good fit and the boots were nice and snug over my shoes.
“But you don’t even know where they are. They could be anywhere in the city.”
“Yeah. So I should get started.”
“No, just wait a sec.”
“My friends don’t have a sec. They’ve already been in detainment for hours, and Dom needs his meds or he could die. He has a heart problem, and…” I pulled the gloves on, noting that my hands were shaking. I checked the power. Sixty percent and rising. More than enough. “…and I need to go.”
“Okay.” He nodded. “Will I see you again?”
“Maybe.
I don’t know. I probably can’t come back here without putting you and your brother in danger too.”
“So where are you going to sleep? How are you going to eat?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out later.”
Felix frowned as he pointed his phone at mine. “Here’s my info. I’ll be in touch, okay?”
“Okay.” I paused. I really had no idea where I was going or what I was doing, but I had to go, I had to do something. Dom and Mercy were in real trouble, and it was all my fault. “Thanks, Felix.”
I kissed him. Nothing serious, just a quick peck on the lips, and I don’t even know why. Maybe because he was trying to help, maybe because it felt like he was the only person on my side, maybe because I was scared. Who knows why people do anything. But it made me feel better for a second, and it made him smile. And that was nice.
Then I left. I walked straight out the front door and into the street. “Lux, bike.”
The new motorcycle was three times bigger than the old scooter, with fat tires and a contoured seat. Of course, it was still just a hologram, so there was no engine, no electronics, no features, but because it was physically bigger it was more stable and had better traction, so it was faster.
A lot faster.
I raced up toward the harbor and quickly found myself hemmed in by the morning rush, men and women by the hundreds on their bicycles, ringing bells and talking to neighbors and friends and coworkers as they slowly merged into a river of faces and spoked wheels on their way to work.
Most of them were trying to get to South Hanover Street to cross the water on their way south to the reclamation plant, but plenty of them were also in my way, heading north up Light Street toward the old offices, some to sit at desks but lots to just sweep under them.
A light turned red and I found myself stuck in the crowd, sitting there on my huge black motorcycle, perfectly silent, glowing faintly violet. I nodded to the woman on my right. She looked slightly curious but mostly scared.
The light turned green and we started moving again. As I rolled along, I could feel the eyes on me. Everywhere I glanced, people were looking at me and my bike. And then I started seeing the phones pointed at me, filming me.
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