by Jeff Somers
Then, somehow, I was behind a trashcan, still alive, filthy but breathing. I came up with my own gun. Worrying about why I was still alive would come later. With the copper smell of blood in my nose, I swallowed puke and forced myself to be still. I peered over the trashcan and got ready to sell myself dear.
I wasn’t alone anymore. The alley held me, the Monk, Nad’s corpse, and someone else-and the mystery of my survival was clear: An unknown quantity had entered the equation, and the Monk was playing it safe for the moment. I couldn’t see the new person clearly; he was on the other side of the Monk backlit in the wash of streetlight. I knew two things right away: The sound of shots fired didn’t faze him in the least, and the Monk had forgotten all about me. This led me to conclude that the new guy was a System Pig, an SSF officer. I didn’t relax at all. If it had just been a Crusher walking a beat, it wouldn’t have worried me, but in my experience, the elite SSF officers never improved situations, and their presence usually increased my personal chances of getting killed. Everyone complained that the System Cops thought they were gods, but I thought, fuck, they think that because they are gods.
They try to teach all the young kids that the SSF exists to protect them from dangerous fuckers like me, but that isn’t really true. Most of those kids are going to grow up to be dangerous fuckers like me, anyway, since there’s nothing much else to do these days if you want to eat. So the SSF is really there to fuck with everyone on the bottom 99 percent of the pyramid.
Cowering behind my trashcan, fully aware that I should be dead already, I was for the first time in my life glad that the SSF existed. And that the System Pigs were such fucking badasses. Nad was dead, but maybe this guy could help keep me alive. And then I thought of the last few weeks, of all the money and effort I’d had to put into distancing the name Avery Cates from a dead SSF officer shot on the East Side in a botched assasination, and dread replaced my relief, black tendrils inching through the cracks.
They started talking. It gave me time to think, but how fucking weird. The Monk and the System Pig (taking a break from busting heads for shakedown money) meet in a dark alley, guns drawn, and start chatting. I knew they were frisking each other for backup and telecom, making sure they weren’t each going to have a goddamn army on their heads if they made the wrong move, but it was still creepy.
Time to think. Why in fuck had the Monk killed Nad? The answer was fucking surreal, but it stared at me. The Monk was recruiting him. I’d heard the rumors, and I knew a little something about anatomy-when the Monks had been a fairly new phenomenon there’d been all sorts of articles about them in the Vids, the underground, off-net Vids, technical specs and theoretical designs and treatises on brain chemistry and how a human brain could be transferred from a skull to a CPU. You could shoot a man dead in an alley and have him up and running in a Monk body in a few hours, with minimal brain damage. Damage that maybe could be fixed through circuitry, who the fuck knew. Someone you used to pal around with, get high with, woke up one day feeling spiritual and signed up for their metal body, for no reason, and next thing you knew they were doing the ritual introduction, Hiya, I used to be your pal, now I’m a Tin Man, let me chew your ear about eternity for a while. Except now I knew the reason. And people like Nad-people like us-were meaningless, in the grand scheme. No one would miss us, no one would bother investigating us.
It’d killed Nad Muller to recruit him. Nad was going to wake up tomorrow a Monk. And me? I got the feeling I hadn’t been chosen.
I had better things to think about, like lines of sight and escape routes. I needed contact with a System Pig like I needed a hole in my head, and here were both possibilities staring me in the face. It was a banner fucking night. I wished fervently that Kev Gatz had hung around, the fucking freak. He would have come in handy. I squeezed my gun tightly to keep my hand from trembling.
“Hello, officer,” the Monk said, calm and cool. “This man appears to have been attacked.”
Motherfucker, I thought, it’s just buying time.
IV
WRONG IN A GLORIOUS WAY
01000
The cop knew the Monk was just buying time, too. System Pigs generally didn’t do undercover. They strutted around and no one dared fuck with them. You could pick out a System Cop a mile away, and that was just how they liked it. They stepped out of their cars and everything stopped, hardasses standing around whistling like there was nothing in the world could get them to commit a crime. This one just stood there for a moment, looking the scene over, before responding to the Monk.
“Identify yourself,” the cop said. The street was quiet and very dark, but his voice was clear and steady. Human.
I pictured the street and considered my options. If I stood up, I’d just get nailed by the cop, distracting him in the process. This was my best opportunity to just leave the fucking Monk to whatever it was going to do. I didn’t know. I was paralyzed.
“I am Brother Vita,” the Monk replied immediately. “Brother Jeofrey Vita, of the Alpha Brethren, the Electric Church.”
“I can see you’re a goddamn Monk,” the cop snapped. “What happened here?”
And I knew right away the cop wasn’t linked up. He was either on his way to something, or off-duty, or doing something he didn’t want the Worms to find out about-whatever, he wasn’t linked up.
After what I’d just seen the Monk do, I knew he was a dead man.
That was my cue. No link meant he couldn’t beam my picture in, meant I could walk away from him and let Brother Vita do the deed. But fuck if I could move. The fucking Monk was fast. If I’d figured out the cop was unlinked, the Monk couldn’t be far behind, and I didn’t have any doubt that the Monk could nail the cop and shoot me in the back without breaking a sweat. If it did sweat. I crouched against the dirty pavement and tried to think of something to do that wouldn’t end up with me getting shot. Nothing came to mind.
For whatever reason, the Monk didn’t make a move. It played along another moment. “I don’t know, officer. I found this man here, and was about to contact someone.”
It sounded eerily human.
The cop grunted and pushed his long coat back from his sloppy suit-nothing I or anyone I knew could afford, but looking cheap nonetheless-and knelt near Nad, paying no attention to the Monk. A watch glittered dully on his wrist as he lifted Nad’s jacket to inspect the damage.
“Modified Roon,” the cop said thoughtfully. “Funny, I’ve heard that’s the kind of illegal weaponry-”
The Monk pounced, whipping up one arm so fast I thought I must have imagined it, a blur. I was mesmerized. Blink, the Monk standing there watching an officer of the law at work. Blink, the motherfucker has the Roon out, like he’s saying, inspect this, fucker.
I nearly shit my pants. Fucking System Pigs, man. They were not to be fucked with. A System Pig shows up, you look at your shoes and blank out your mind, everyone knows that. But I’d never seen anything as fast and blank as that Monk. The cop moved immediately.
The Monk fired, and the cop rolled and threw something at the Monk-I couldn’t see what-but it hit the Monk on the wrist, knocked its aim off, and then the cop was in shadows, and firing at the Monk. Firing fast. Blam blam blam blam blam-five muzzle flashes in the dark, lighting up the street, showing the Monk in jump cut, moving, dodging, rolling.
When I saw the cop had missed the Monk five times, fuck, something in me finally realized that this was my one and only chance. Whispering prayers to the cop-gods that the Pig had enough in him to give me one stinking, solitary minute, I turned and ran.
I’d bet my last yen I’d see Nad again with freaky mirrored glasses and plastic skin, but I had no fucking desire to join him. Avery Cates was an old man because he knew when to run, believe it.
I ran. Behind me, one last blast and then horrible silence. Within seconds, seconds, there were steady, heavy feet behind me. My legs didn’t want to move after a night of sitting and drinking; I felt like I’d stepped into a river of muddy concrete,
the whole city sucking at my heels, urging me to kneel and kiss this metal freak’s ring.
“Wait, Mr. Cates,” the Monk called out. “Would you take confession? When contemplating eternity, it is advisable to map out a personalized plan of salvation.”
I kept waiting for the shot. I was sweating, soaked through, and I’d gone through drunk, hung over, and thirsty all in about five minutes, my body flushing toxins overtime. I’d pulled just enough ahead of it to queer its aim, or my erratic course was helping, or, fuck, maybe I knew the streets just a little bit better. These were old streets, ancient, back when everyone got around by car, before hovers, before everything else went bullshit and crapped out. Going back to when New York was a much smaller city, not the entire Eastern Seaboard, with Trenton as a neighborhood. I strained my mind for advantages, and thought of Kev Gatz, who crashed nearby; he’d always been a freak, but he was my best hope. He was twenty-three and looked likely to die within the next five years, but he’d looked like that for as long as I knew him. Just another faceless piece of shit swarming through New York, except something in his head was wrong.
Wrong in a fucking glorious way, because Kev Gatz was a psionic. If I could get to him maybe he’d be able to Push the Monk. It wasn’t much, but it was the only asset I had.
I rounded a corner with a five-second lead, and I knew exactly where I was and I knew, with a jolt of something approaching joy, that there was an old Safe Room nearby. Not wasting any time, I pounded down an alley, and then immediately bolted down a second alley. Both were just wide enough for a man to run through if he was very careful. You could walk past both a thousand times and never see it.
“Do not flee your destiny, Mr. Cates,” the Monk said, closer than I’d expected. “Can you outrun oblivion? Think, and submit.”
Think and submit, holy fuck. I wish that Pig had taken your fucking metal face off. With a solid kick, I knocked a cheap wooden door off its hinges, revealing a rotting stairway. I pelted up, my weight making the ancient wood sag and dance in unexpected ways. I was turning the third landing, lungs burning, legs aching, when I heard the creak of weight on the stairs below me. I made a desperate leap into a spare, battered room of white plaster and rotten wood flooring. No hesitation, no mistake: I had my five-maybe four-seconds to save myself.
I hit a spot in the plaster that looked like every other bump on the wall, and kept running, leaping into the far wall. I skittered onto a dusty metal floor like a cannonball, getting scraped up pretty badly in the process, and curled up into a ball. I smacked into something unyielding, my whole body lighting up red.
Lungs burning, I froze. Sweat poured into my eyes. I didn’t even allow myself to blink.
There were Safe Rooms all over this area. Everyone floating under the SSF’s radar had hired Techs to come in and set one up at one time or another, cash only, one day’s work, to spec. Heat shielding, signal fuzzing, holographic obfuscations, soundproofing-once you were inside one of these rooms, the System Pigs would need to start knocking out the walls, or shooting into them, to find you. They weren’t comfortable, but they did the job.
A moment later, the Monk was in the room. I clenched my teeth against the desire for a breath. A single, deep breath. Anything. I wished I could suck oxygen in through my pores.
Then, heavy footsteps, moving around. And something else, distant, weak, like hope: the displacement of an SSF hover.
Another moment, the two of us still and silent, me with my vision getting blurry around the edges. Inside the Safe Room, I couldn’t be seen, but I couldn’t risk the noise of my breathing, not with a goddamn cyborg looking for me.
“Why hide, Mr. Cates?” the Monk said. Amazingly, it almost sounded sad. “Oblivion comes to us all. End this game with dignity and embrace your destiny. It appears our friend from the SSF was linked up after all. That is unfortunate, as it means I cannot spend a few profitable minutes shooting randomly into the walls. That would attract attention, would it not?” There was a pause. “Well, as a dutiful citizen of the System, Mr. Cates, the least I can do is pass your name on to the local SSF office and suggest you might have been in the same location as a recently murdered officer. The Electric Church takes citizenship very seriously. Good-bye, Mr. Cates.”
I heard its heavy tread retreat from the room, and then down the stairs. The hover was close. I imagined bright blue light flooding the room, searching for the dark figure of the Monk. I held my breath. I held my breath until I felt like biting my tongue off. I held my breath until my vision fogged and my brain blanked, and I finally passed out.
V
MEN WITH JOBS, THE VANISHING SPECIES
00101
It was too bright, too open. I mashed one finger down on Gatz’s buzzer. I could hear the soft female voice of his apartment’s Shell calling out, “Visitor at the door! Mr. Gatz. Visitor at the door!” Gatz liked to set his Shell to “female” and talk back to it, cursing and calling it names.
The gray mass of people pushed past me in both directions. Millions of people every day in New York had no jobs, they just darted around looking for something to steal, someplace to sell it, and maybe some free grub here and there. I felt exposed, and my head ached. I suspected the Safe Room was the only thing that had saved my life from the assorted other bottom-feeders, most of whom would have slit my throat out of simple fear if they’d been able to see me.
I leaned on the button again. That flirty fake voice was starting to bug me, it was so fucking cheerful. There was nothing to be cheerful about.
Finally, the front door buzzed. I stepped inside quickly and shut the door behind me, scanning the crowd before mounting the broken escalator and humping it upstairs. Gatz shared the room with two other people in shifts of eight hours. It was just a room with a cot in one corner, a couch that didn’t look too moldy, a kitchen module, and a water closet. Grim, but it was off the street and behind a thick metal door, which provided at least minimum security against the sneak thieves, cutthroats, and other desperate creatures.
Gatz opened the door and stepped aside, waving me in. He wore just a pair of shorts, and his thin, wasted body glowed with ghostly pallor. He was wearing his sunglasses, which relaxed me, because Gatz needed to look you in the eye in order to Push you.
I didn’t really understand the Push. I’d only experienced it once, really; Kev Gatz had been a new face around town back then, a skinny asshole with an attitude. Like just about everyone else, I’d become determined to teach him a hard lesson-you had to hit people first, never let them think you were soft. When I came after him he just took off his shades, and the moment he got a good look at me I felt this calm, peaceful feeling spreading over me. I was suddenly content to just stare at Kev. I didn’t feel anything, want anything, think anything. I was just there.
To Kev’s credit, his revenge wasn’t anything terrible. He sent me away relieved of all my money and gave me a task: Write I will not try to shake down Kev Gatz ever again one hundred times on paper. I was on line thirty-three before it wore off, and I stopped in the middle of the word try and just blinked, everything rushing back to me. The motherfucker-he made me laugh, and when I met up with him again I had to admit that aside from being bug-eyed afraid of looking him in the eye even by accident, I liked that about him.
I sat down on the couch and put my feet on the cot. I fished out some precious cigs and offered him one, which he took silently, sticking it behind his ear. He slumped back down onto the bed next to my feet and squinted at the Shell’s screen. “Fuck, Avery, I’ve got forty minutes before the Teutonic Fuck gets in.”
The German. No one knew his real name. He worked freelance security around the city, cracking heads and guarding drug mules. He was obviously augmented, illegal all the way and probably going to die young. Augments bought on the black market were almost always deadly. Currently, however, the German was a mass of rippling muscles and rage, and he’d made it known to Kev that if Kev wasn’t out of the room when he got back, he’d toss Kev out the win
dow, because the German needed his beauty rest.
“I’m in trouble, Kev,” I said, lighting my cig. “I need help.”
Kev nodded. “How much you paying?”
Ever practical, that was my Kev. I did some quick mental calculations. “Forty.”
“Forty,” Kev repeated, liking the number, “for what?”
“I gotta get out of New York for a while, and it might be tricky. I think my face is in the air with both the SSF and the Electric Church.”
Gatz was scratching his eyes under the dark lenses. “The EC? The fucking plastic Monks standing around telling us how great it is to have mechanical brains? You serious?”
I gave him the short version of my evening. It was hot as fuck up in his little room, and rivulets of sweat were burrowing through my body hair. It smelled like three unwashed men had spent the evening farting continuously, and I fought the urge to just hold my breath.
“Holy shit,” was Gatz’s only comment. “You are fucked, Ave. How long you think you have?”
I shrugged. “No time at all, I’d say. I gotta go underground right away. And I’ll need your special talents to make that happen.” I exhaled smoke into the room. “So, move.”
“What the fuck do you expect me to do? I’m not muscle, Ave.”
He was, though, in a way. “Kev, I need you to be my guardian angel. Make people leave me alone without getting into gunplay or such shit.” I also wanted someone I thought I could trust, and there were precious few of those, but I felt a weird affection for Kev. It was like having a pet.
He shook his head. “Fuck, man-Ave, you’re a friend and all, but this is a lot of danger for forty. System Pigs? I don’t know.”