The Long List Anthology Volume 3

by Aliette de Bodard

  The man busied himself with the black device, pushing small pieces of wood in through a door in its front. Then he grabbed a box, took out a toothpick-looking thing, and struck it against the side. The toothpick lit up, and he tossed it in with the wood. As Marmeg watched in fascination, the smaller pieces caught fire, and soon everything started to burn.

  The man noticed her fixed gaze. “It’s a wood-burning stove.”

  “Not legit.”

  “That’s true. It’s illegal in California to burn anything that smokes, but it’s the only way to survive out here.”

  “You Mountain Mike?”

  His eyes twinkled. “Is that what they’re calling us?”

  Marmeg caught the plural. “Who else?”

  “We’re a network. Now, enough standing around. You’d better lie on the bed while I look at that hack job you did on your leg.”

  The stove warmed the cabin. Marmeg sank onto the cot, wary but glad of the comfort. The mattress had lumps and smelled moldy, but it was better than a bed of pine needles. Pain wrenched at her leg as she swung it onto the pallet.

  Mike, or whoever he was, had removed a plastic box with basic medical supplies from the metal trunk. He placed the stool next to the bed, sat, and cut away her makeshift bandage. His face twisted into a grimace as he examined the wound.

  “I can’t do much, but I’ll disinfect the outside and cover it with sterile gauze. You’ll have to get it looked at tomorrow after you’re back in civilization. What I can do,” he said, glancing briefly at her before looking back at the leg, “is help you with the other calf chip. I’ve got rubbing alcohol to clean off that knife blade some, and I can make a better incision than you can. Will you let me?”

  Marmeg winced as he applied the ointment. If he’d wanted to hurt her or kill her, he could’ve done so by now, and she could use the help. Then again, nothing in life was free.

  “Why? What you want of me?”

  “Your word that when you win this race, you’ll help our movement.”

  “Help how?”

  “You give us half your prize money.”

  “Half! If I don’t?”

  “We’ll provide evidence to Minerva of this encounter—that you took help from me—and they’ll disqualify you and take their money back.”

  “If I don’t place?”

  “You will. You might even come in first. The people we help always end up in the top three.”

  Marmeg frowned. “All cheats? Every year?”

  “The last four years. That’s when we first got the idea. I suppose it’s cheating, but it’s a win-win situation the way I see it. We choose someone who deserves a little help, like you, and we get to keep doing our work.”

  That explained the dark horse winners.

  “Look around, kid! Nature isn’t static, and it’s always full of surprises. Take this cold front right now. Everyone comes into these races believing they just have to be strong and fast, that studying images of the terrain and digital maps is enough to know what they’re going to get. It rarely is. You know that already from that glacier you and the other fellow had to climb.”

  “You were there? Thought I saw someone.”

  Mike nodded. “You did, but it wasn’t me. We’ve been watching from the start. That’s how we know who to pick. We have to be careful, choose someone who could plausibly win. Now let’s get back to the question at hand: do you want my help with that other calf? Do you want to win this race?”

  Marmeg looked down at her cuff and her brothers’ goofy smiles. She didn’t have to tell them the whole story, but she did have to come home with some money. It was that or call her mother to come bail her out. That was the worst possibility Marmeg could imagine.

  Amihan would never forgive Marmeg for the enormous sin of spending her money on gear and race fees. She would call it gambling. And she would be convinced that God was punishing Marmeg for partaking of such an evil pastime. She might be right, considering that Marmeg would be back to club security and nothing more if she didn’t place. Winning by any means, even for half the prize money, would be better than that.

  “Do it.”

  Mike handed her a few white pills. “These won’t help with the pain now, but they will later.”

  He went back to the trunk and pulled out a dark-brown glass bottle. He worked the cork out and handed Marmeg the bottle. She washed the pills down in one swallow, glad that Jeffy had given her opportunities to drink cheap booze. At least she didn’t make a fool of herself by choking on whatever this was. It burned the back of her throat. A pleasant, tingling warmth soon spread through her body. She leaned her head back against the rough wood and closed her eyes.

  “You go ahead and scream if you need to. Nobody’s around to hear it.”

  That sounded like a line in a bad horror vid. Marmeg chuckled, but she kept her eyes closed. The sounds of gear clinking played counterpoint to the pops and crackles from the wood stove. The scent of smoke filled the air. Marmeg sank into a stupor.

  A sensation of cold and wet against her leg snapped her eyes open. Mike rubbed an alcohol pad against the old incision on her other calf.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “As ever.”

  Marmeg lay on her side and clenched her hands around the edge of the mattress. Mike sliced into her flesh, a quick, sure cut. She gritted her teeth against the pain; no screaming, not this time. She was breathing fast and harsh by the time he dug in with a pair of tweezers and extracted the bad chip. While he disinfected the replacement, she took a deep, steadying breath and reached for the brown glass bottle. She gulped three times.

  “You better put that down before I finish this.”

  He was much more deft with the capsule placement than she had been. She was surprised that he knew what to do. Unlike her field surgery, he took the time to close the wound neatly, wiping it clean before applying the glue. The result was a red, ragged mess, but it looked better than her other leg.

  “I’m not going near the quad chips and your femoral artery.” He handed Marmeg her screen. “Your turn.”

  She pulled up the control software and reprogrammed the new capsules. She had splurged for a brain-stem chip as her only legit surgery, using the programming contest money she had ferreted away from her mother. One of its benefits was that her muscles adapted more quickly to program changes. Another was that new chips would integrate faster with her physiology. The pain, however, was something she would have to ignore for the next twelve hours.

  Marmeg hissed as she limped to the table where her gear pack lay open. She gritted her teeth, pulled the calf exos on, and went through a basic test sequence: walk, run in place, jump, balance on one foot. The incisions twinged but the pain intensity decreased with every flexion and extension of her muscles.

  As a final exercise, Marmeg jumped from the floor onto the table, landing on it in a crouch and poised for her next motion. Mountain Mike leaned against the door, his arms crossed across his narrow chest, his expression inscrutable under the facial hair. His eyes followed her movements.

  Marmeg leapt lightly off the table and repacked. She left the two quadriceps exos out. They wouldn’t be worth much on the open market. She’d have plenty of time to replace them once she was done with this race, though she wouldn’t have much money, not after she shared with the Mikes. That meant no license for Felix.

  “What’ll you do with your half?” she said, stowing the last of the gear.

  “We use it to keep up the knowledge of how to live with the land. When catastrophe strikes, which it inevitably will, what are you embeds going to do? Your gear makes you dependent on technology. Same with everyone who never leaves the city. Without electricity and clean water and food delivered to you, you’ll be lost. You’ll need people like us to show you how to survive. Someone has to keep the old skills alive.”

  Mike was busy at the stove, poking inside with a metal rod and splashing water into it from a bucket that Marmeg hadn’t noticed before. The flames die
d down into glowing bits of wood and burnt black sections. He closed the stove door.

  “We also use the money to maintain these cabins, pay for our phones, and supplement our food. This land can provide a lot, but we get hungry for cake and beer sometimes, too.” He grinned. His teeth were yellow but straight. “Let’s go.”

  Marmeg followed him out of the cabin. Cold air struck her bare face. The sun had passed behind the western peaks, and icy rain had turned into flakes of snow. Marmeg’s breath puffed out like a friendly ghost. She flicked on her cuff and checked their path. It wasn’t taking them back to her original route.

  “Where we heading?”

  “Didn’t you wonder how a bunch of survivalists like us could help you embeds win a race?”

  “Wondered, yeah.”

  “We’ve made tunnels under the ridges and built shortcuts through some of the passes as well. They’re hidden from the satellites by plant cover. Nature does most of the work for us.”

  Marmeg’s conscience pricked her. Cheats were not looked on favorably in her neighborhood, and Jeffy was especially contemptuous of people who didn’t play fair. She hated the idea of lying to him. He’d supported her when she started fixing up embed gear. He’d slipped her money, shielded her from their mother’s ire. Without him, she wouldn’t be at this race today. She didn’t want to let him down, but if she didn’t place somewhere in the top five, she would disappoint everyone, especially herself.

  Far behind them, thunder rumbled. They climbed up through the trees. The wind blew harder as the vegetation thinned out.

  “I’m going to give you a new route,” Mike said.

  He stopped at the base of a large slab of rock that rose like a wall. Marmeg craned her neck, following the vertical expanse until it vanished into the clouds. A snowflake landed in her slack-jawed mouth, a tiny crystal of cold that dissolved on her hot tongue.

  Mike pulled an old-style handheld from his back pocket. Marmeg flicked on her cuff and allowed him to send her a file. It was a map overlay, much like the one she had made, but with a far more direct route.

  “‘Nuf miles?”

  “It’ll be enough. Just don’t hug the next racer you come across.”

  “What?”

  “That boy you helped over the ice field. I’m fairly certain he’s the one who fried your chips. It was probably when you let him get close.”

  “Zir,” Marmeg corrected automatically while her mind raced. Had Ardha been close enough to corrupt her chips? Yes: that final embrace. But zie had been so cooperative. Stupid, stupid, stupid! To fall for a pretty moot face and destroy her chance of winning this race fair and square. She wished she could smash Ardha’s rating then and there, make sure no one trusted zir again.

  Mike shrugged. “Zie, he, she—until you change your genetics, you’re still male or female as far as I’m concerned. You kids want to play at being something that you’re not, that’s between you. I’m not changing the way I talk.”

  “Not playing,” Marmeg said irritably. “Making waves. Changing the world. Better to judge on what you can do, not how you born. Bodies are going out. Nats be left behind.”

  “You think so, eh? What do you expect will happen to the human species if we’re all neutered embeds? Who’s going to make the babies?” Mike shook his head. “You think you’re going to change the world. The reality is that the world is changing us. Pretty soon we’re going to need all the nat skills and abilities that our ancestors had. I should know; I used to be like you, full of bits of silicon and titanium. I fought in the Congo. Nature is stronger than we give her credit for. Best that we learn to coexist peacefully with her.”

  Not only was Mike a nat, he was a converted one—the worst kind when it came to preaching—but his words didn’t convince her. Companies like Minerva specialized in physical enhancements, but others were working on deeper changes. They wouldn’t need babies in the future. They would live forever, bodies enhanced, minds uploaded.

  Mike looked at her and sighed. “Every year I try, hoping that the message gets through to someone . . . someday. You think you understand the world by seeing it through the grid, but reality is messier than bits and bytes.”

  They’d been walking along the base of the massive rock wall. Mike stopped at a cluster of scraggly bushes growing between some rocks. He pushed the branches aside and rolled a couple stones away, revealing an opening that was half Marmeg’s height and as wide as an arm span.

  “You’ll see for yourself when you’re older. Here’s the tunnel. Someone will meet you when you need to get into the next one.”

  “This? Be a tunnel?”

  Mike grinned. “I never said you could run it. Trust me, you’ll crawl through just fine. In fact, your calves are going to thank you while you’re on your knees. It’s too bad you lost the upper leg enhancements, but this will still save you a lot of time.”

  He took something out of his pocket and then stretched it over Marmeg’s head.

  “It’s a head lamp. The switch is here, on top. Good luck. I’m going to cover the entrance once you’re in, so don’t try to turn back.”

  Marmeg looked at him like he was crazy, which he was, and then decided that she was equally crazy to do this. She got down on hands and knees, turned on the lamp, and went in.

  • • • •

  The crawl went on and on until Marmeg’s arms, legs, and back ached. She felt like it lasted for hours, but according to her cuff, it only took forty-five minutes. The sky was nearly dark by the time she emerged into another cluster of bushes and rocks.

  She looked around but saw no one. She pushed rocks across the hole and tried to arrange the bushes to hide it from a casual glance. The task was harder than it looked. After three attempts to make it seem natural, Marmeg shrugged and gave up. Let the Mountain Mikes make it better if they wanted to.

  She loaded the map from Mike, oriented herself, and walked in the direction it indicated. As she moved, the kinks in her body relaxed into a minor nuisance. She tried jogging and then running. Jumping didn’t work as well as it had with the quad exos, but at least the pain from her cuts faded to a dull ache. She could maintain a respectable pace.

  Snow dusted the ground like powdered sugar on cinnamon cake. Marmeg’s stomach growled. Her throat felt parched. The booze back at the cabin couldn’t have helped with hydration. She opened her mouth and caught a few snowflakes on her tongue. They melted with a sensation like popping bubbles.

  A laugh burst from her. She wished Felix were there. Lee and Jeffy, too. None of them had left the city, seen true wilderness. Here, with nothing but trees and snow, sky above, dirt below, Marmeg’s spirit soared with glee. It had all gone to shit without a pot, but she was there. She was experiencing something that none of her family could comprehend, surrounded as they were by cement and glass.

  Marmeg ran faster, breathing hard and enjoying the burn of cold air in her lungs. The incisions on her calves tugged with each step, but the sensation was gentle and far removed. Snow blurred into an almost uniform whiteness. She had to land each step by feel and hope her balance held. A trickle of sweat traced the space between her shoulder blades. Fingers and toes warmed as her blood pulsed and breath deepened.

  “I’m alive!” Marmeg yelled into the dark expanse above.

  She’d left the head lamp on. She slowed to a jog and switched it off, then activated the night vision in her contact lenses. Marmeg ran until she saw another massive slab of granite looming ahead. The time on her cuff showed nearly ten o’clock. She’d been out for eleven hours.

  Her mileage showed as forty-five, far more than she expected. GPS access had been blocked inside the tunnel, so the routing software that Minerva required had extrapolated from the terrain. It calculated the miles as if she’d climbed over rather than crawled through. How had the Mountain Mikes found that loophole?

  She arrived near the base of the mountain and couldn’t go farther. The map indicated that she should turn left. Five minutes later, a figure loom
ed out of the darkness, its hooded face wrapped in a giant wooly scarf.

  “This way,” rumbled a low, decidedly male voice.

  Marmeg looked for a beard, but it was impossible to find in the swaddled head, especially with her night vision on. The Mike said nothing more as he revealed the tunnel. He stayed silent even after she went in.

  The light from the head lamp blinded her when she turned it on. Marmeg blinked and squinted until her pupils adjusted, then began the long, painful crawl to the other side. Muscles cooled, breath slowed, and a deep cold seeped into her body from the rock surrounding her.

  This tunnel was considerably longer than the previous one and had some uphill and downhill sections. Halfway through an incline, the pain pills began to wear off. She couldn’t get into the pack for more, so she gritted her teeth and kept moving. Her calves were screaming with pain by the time she came out of the other end. It was nearly midnight. All of the elation from earlier had evaporated.

  Marmeg stopped to stretch her pain-wracked body. She popped a couple more stims and three pain pills into her mouth and tried to work up some spit. The mass went down in a painful, bitter lump that made her gag. The analgesics would take some time to work, but the stimulants were fast.

  She sat and waited for them to hit. She hated this race. Winning by any means, cheating the GPS system, getting help—and for what? So she could give half the prize money to a group of people whose values meant nothing to her. This race was supposed to be her chance to prove herself, to prove that she could compete with those who had the latest and greatest tech. Now she was like every other lowlife filcher. She ignored the rules, broke laws, and stomped on anyone who stood in her way.

  She checked her cuff. The mileage had jumped by another fifteen. That put her total at sixty miles with only fifteen more to go. If all her gear still worked, she could match her earlier four-miles-per-hour pace. She could finish the race and beat the record. Unless that, too, was faked.