by Rich Larson
“Same pod?” he asked.
“Don’t we always?” Schorr’s lopsided frown returned. “Oh. Would it remind you?”
“It’s fine,” Default chatted, too tired to speak, and slipped inside the sleep pod. The gel rippled a moment later as Schorr climbed in after him. It made Default remember a trip to the nocturns orbits and orbits ago for a Five festival, collapsing spent in a pod with Schorr beside him. There was only one difference.
“Why’d you change sex again?” he chatted.
“Still trying to find something different,” Schorr replied. Her shrug sent vibrations.
“Is it?”
Schorr shifted in the dark. “Not so different, no. Still bored.”
Default slept.
When he woke up, Default had a mass of updates sitting in his skull. Sleeping for a few days could easily take you out of the know, but it looked like Schorr had charitably cut him into her own feed. There was no way he’d already made that many new friends.
“Ready to go?” Schorr asked. Default glanced over and realized that the pockmarks on her skin were slowly healing. He wondered what his own looked like. He combed through the updates and found an invitation from the Plagueman.
“Back to the basement?”
“You scan my mind. He’s been chatting me about something new.”
The pod gave them a send-off in the form of exfoliation and amphetamine injections, and then they were back in the street. It was dark and loud and wild and as if they hadn’t left it. Bands of revelers passed and Default saw runny noses, puffy eyes, but more than anything he saw shiny pink blisters. Schorr was right. It was going nova.
“How long have we been alive, Default?” Schorr asked as they stepped onto a freebus. She had traded her now-unvogue-flutterdroids for swirling fabric and spray-on, but her eyes were still ringed dark and seemed suddenly serious.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, from the instant we were genemixed . . .” Schorr moved her finger in a slow arc. “ . . . to this moment here on the freebus. How many orbits have elapsed between?”
“I’ve never calculated that,” Default admitted.
“I did,” Schorr said. “692.3487 orbits. We’re old.”
“Stars are old.”
“We’re old,” Schorr said firmly. Then her face broke into a grin as the freebus passed a familiar vendor. “Vatmeat? I’ll buy.”
“I’ll vomit,” Default said, glad the mood had passed.
“Deal,” Schorr said.
Pox was over, bacterial was in. Preferably, in both lungs. Default and Schorr lay side by side while the Plagueman, who was now called Epi, injected them. They clasped clammy hands.
“You’re going to feel this one,” Epi promised. “Really feel this one. It’s like nothing else.”
And Epi was right. Before they even hit the next party, Default and Schorr were coughing at each other and wheezing laughs between alcohol eyedrops, suddenly short of breath. Default’s ear canals felt permanently plugged and the world was surreal, almost soundless. They chatted instead of airtalk for the whole duration. Default had never felt so curiously detached, so . . . floating. It was intoxicating. They stumbled through the streets in their own personal world, a soundless world where fever crept across their foreheads and every breath was dredged.
Default gave it to a select few, sometimes with Schorr’s approval first, sometimes not. Only a small handful of fems and sirs and neuts rode the razor-edge of the bacterial trend. Those without connections were left mimicking the effects, walking bent double and faking coughs between words.
There were more bugs, and Schorr wanted them all. At first Default thought he was following because he’d always followed Schorr, because he’d never had social stock this high or funtime this exclusive, but no.
There was something else drawing him to the bright white basement where Epi, now No-Skin, did his work. Default was breaking his body down so thoroughly, so deeply, that he knew himself in ways he never had before. In ways Memmi never had either, but Memmi was distant now, a dim thought on the periphery.
Sometimes the infections hit so quickly Default and Schorr couldn’t even leave the basement. They collapsed against each other and No-Skin apologized, talked about reducing potency, but when they were entwined on the floor with entropy swimming their veins they couldn’t hear him and didn’t care.
Sometimes they stayed there with No-Skin for days on end instead of spreading the word, spreading the vogue, but he seemed to enjoy their company. They shivered and groaned and reveled in pus from a new orifice, an interesting discoloration of the gums, a bone-deep ache.
“How did you learn to make these?” Default chatted on one of these occasions, half inside a fever dream. They had their own closed web at this point, him and Schorr and the newly-christened Bugwright. The Bugwright pulled down his cowl and shrugged.
“Practice, unit,” he said, breath steaming. “Practice in other places.”
“Schorr never told me you were a pilgrim,” Default chatted. He glanced over to where Schorr was lounging, eyes crusted.
“I’m not forthcoming with it,” the Bugwright admitted. “A lot of people don’t like pilgrims. They like to just think their station is the only station, you know?”
“I had an ex who always wanted to hop stations,” Default chatted.
“You see a lot of things,” the Bugwright said. “I’ve seen a lot of things, and all of them end.”
“Tell him about the finale,” Schorr chatted. Default hadn’t known she was lucid.
“It’s not ready,” the Bugwright said. “When it’s ready.” He pulled the cowl back up over his skinless face and returned to work.
Time had passed; the nocturns had changed. Every unit in the universe had a bug to show off, and bioscans were everywhere you looked, sprayed onto walls and tattooed onto skin. Signature viruses, custom infections. The freebus had divvied into personal transportation pods for units who were no longer walking, or for those pretending they no longer could. The air was swimming with disease.
“We started this, you know,” Schorr said. “How’s that feel? You’re not the steady satellite anymore. You’re nova.”
They were in a corner supshop, squeezed into a booth that was doing its best to massage their back muscles. Default was burning off a mild fever, hair fashionably sweat-slicked. He didn’t know what Schorr was running. Probably something subtle. Discharge was getting too obvious, she thought.
“It feels good,” Default said. Schorr smiled and patted his face. Default caught her hand and held it there. “But I’ve got a lift leaving soon.”
“You want to go back topside?” Schorr asked, incredulous. “Why?”
“It’s time, that’s all,” Default said. He judged his next words. “I want you to come with me.”
“I want you to stay here.” Schorr tugged her hand back and pointed out the wide window. “This is different, unit. This is finally different.”
“You’ve found things like this before. Different things.”
“But this is the last thing, Default.” Schorr looked hurt. “The biggest thing. I was hoping you would do it with me.”
“Do what?” Default asked, heart thumping. They had been docking more often lately, less often with other people, and if she wanted a contract . . . well, Default wanted one, too. He felt Schorr open up a private line.
“Do you remember the Five?”
Of course he remembered the Five. The memory was entrenched in every brain on the station. There was a hundred orbits’ worth of art, music, and gene-shares dedicated to the Five and their ill-fated hull-walk, to the malfunction that let a meteorite slip through the station’s detection system and plow five units into blood and carbon dust.
“What do you think happened to them?” Schorr asked.
Default frowned, unsure where the conversation was headed. “They ceased.”
“What do you think it felt like?”
“It’s impossible to kno
w that.”
“Not impossible.” Schorr peeled back the sleeve of her thermal and raised her arm. Default saw something black and bubbling underneath.
“A different thing,” Schorr said in the air. “A new thing.” She looked sad.
“I thought maybe you meant something else.” Default stared at the infection and remembered a conversation with the Bugwright. Bubonic. Old Old Earth. Fatal, whatever that entailed.
“But I wanted it to be me and you, Default,” Schorr said haltingly. Her eyes roved all the way around the supshop, everywhere but on him, then finally landed.
“Why?” Default asked.
Schorr shrugged. She smiled. “Because then you’d never have to find someone else.”
Their hands entangled, and as they kissed Default dropped his immunity buffer all the way down to zero.
Memmi/Others had missed Default, she/they really had. The polymind probe had circled the edge of the galaxy, watched the decay of a red dwarf, catalogued a crude bacterial life-form on a thawing moon. Memmi/Others had marveled at the vastness, the chaos, but she/they had not forgotten the station, either. It was harder to re-locate than expected, no longer buzzing with wave communication. Maybe something new had been developed, some new frequency the outdated probe instruments could no longer detect.
The probe docked and gave Memmi/Others a troubling report: the station was empty. She/they floated through the station like a ghost, jumping from monitor to monitor. The AIs were dormant, running only the most basic maintenance protocols. The lifts were stalled in their berths. The multihouses were derelict. She/they went down to the nocturns.
Nothing. The holos danced on in the dark streets, music was still relooping and evolving, but the revelers had vanished. A lone autocleaner was still wandering, still shoving debris, and Memmi/Others recognized the dull yellow of old bone only by the probe’s logs. She/they retreated to the station’s main thinker, trying to make sense of it, trying to evaluate.
One ship had left the station. Memmi/Others saw the trajectory like a laser, and she/they directed the probe to follow it. She/they slid through black space for a century. For two. The probe arrived at another station, this one slowly orbiting a double sun. Memmi/Others requested docking. No answer.
The probe sailed on to the next station, and the next, and as desperation grew and then ebbed there came a slow realization: she/they had missed the party.
BRUTE
The apartment’s DNA scanner can pick Anton out of the crowd almost a block away, so the sliding doors were unlocked and the lobby lighting was welcoming when me and him arrived with the crate. Automated apartments are cushy like that, but I would get lonely without human voices. Anton likes it better that way so he can concentrate on work. The latest of which was, of course, the crate: a cube of dull green armor, military–grade stuff that looked ready for an atomic bomb.
“We’ll need cracking equipment,” I said. “It’ll cost.”
“There’s someone with a cracker down Tiber Street,” Anton said, grinning and adjusting the top hat he never sets at the same angle twice. “We can rent.”
Anton is a real piece of eight. He always wears a gilled coat, the kind you see in old European net plays, and when he grins like that people sink into his gravity well to become pucker–faced meteoroids. He has a kind of charisma, and a fire lit under his brainpan that drives him along at unholy speeds when he gets his hands on something exciting, something like the crate.
When the elevator opened, Anton guided the crate inside and I squeezed in behind, boned fish in the corner. We’d found the thing in floodland, sending up a lazy beep beep from Old Vancouver’s watery grave. Extracting it took most of the week—long nights in wetsuits and choking on boat fumes—but the salvage claim had gone through, and it was all ours now. I was moderately curious, but this one was Anton’s holy grail. Anton thought it was going to be something big.
“It could be nothing,” I said again, doing devil’s advocate as was usual.
“Possible, possible,” Anton said. “But why put nothing in a mobile bomb shelter?”
The elevator breezed open and we floated the crate over to Anton’s workshop. Walls recognized him and put on the lights. This was where the business, Anton and Hume Scavenging, went on. Four years of quality and exceptional service.
“We’ll stow it under the counter,” Anton said. “And throw those sheets over it.”
“Nobody’s coming to look for it, Anton,” I said. “It’s all ours now.” We slung it under the counter, no sheets, and it sat there looking real fucking innocuous.
We rented the cracker on Tiber Street, beside the yellow–taped hole they were still planning to fill with cement. It belonged to a woman with two cigarettes in her mouth. Anton thanked her for the discount with pale arms around his neck.
“I didn’t know you knew her,” I said, adjusting the recyclable rucksack we had filled with equipment.
“Biblically,” Anton said, spitting out the taste of her smoke. He laughed at his own little joke and I smiled by accident. Anton. For at least the past decade, except for the incident with Dolly from the supshop, Anton had always told me who he was shacking up with.
“She’s not too troll,” I said, thinking of the seams of her tights and the pristine edge of her collarbone. He grunted his ‘you know, no big issue’ assent. I still don’t know how Anton does it. Friends tell me he’s handsome but I’ve never seen it. His face is just Anton’s face, asymmetrical and, I think, a bit smug.
“We’re going to crack open some bottles, too,” Anton announced, waving his skyper. The order form for a lunch and liquor was still blinking on his screen. “To a week of hard work, yeah?”
“Yeah, verily,” I said.
We clinked imaginary beer.
Cracking equipment is hard to assemble while drinking, but we did it. By the time Anton positioned the pincers all around the crate, making sure everything was lined up, the excitement was coming off him like radiation.
“Looks ready,” I said. “Let’s shatter the bastard.”
“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction,” Anton said grandly, and he turned the handle.
The crate split apart with a sound like bones breaking. We’d both been getting into the spirit, so when we saw what was inside, it was a bit of an anticlimax. It looked like an incubator, the kind they use to heat up eggs for clone–grown dinosaur collectors.
“Might be a Rex,” I consoled him. “Those sell tidy.” But of course I was kind of glad it was nothing earth–shattering. Anton’s gut feelings were right too often, and gut feelings shouldn’t be.
“Nobody cares about eggs this much,” Anton said, reaching for the control. The incubator gave him a green light, so he flipped it open and we saw that it wasn’t holding an egg at all.
Describing the contents is hard. It was shapeless, furrowed red meat and quicksilver splashes. It undulated and shivered in slow motion. It smelled bitter.
“What the fuck?” I asked.
“Looks like . . . nano.” Anton put out a hand like he was going to touch it.
“Don’t touch it,” I said.
A ripple went through the thing, like responding to the sound. It was flowing together into sort of a starfish shape, all pumping muscle and the silvery stuff weaving into it.
“Nano–bio,” Anton finished. “How fucking peculiar.”
“This is one wyrd gene–job,” I said, watching the thing coil against itself.
It bucked, sudden, like hips at climax, and in a blink it was on Anton’s arm. He gave a muffled whoa of surprise, stumbled back and around in a circle. I made a grab for the thing, but it had already slithered up his sleeve and out of reach.
“Godshit!” Anton gasped. He hit the floor on his knees and I pushed him the rest of the way down, ripping off his red thermal. After that came off, I didn’t know what to do. The thing from the incubator was straddling his spine, stretching little fluttery stubs out over his shoulder blades. It took m
e off my guard, the wyrdness of the whole affair, and how it was sort of beautiful.
“Oh, man, man, man,” Anton said. “Help me remove this little monster.” He didn’t sound panicky, which is another excellent thing about Anton. He stays arctic cold under aggressive circumstances. He was even laughing a little, and a laugh of my own was halfway up my throat when the little stubs sharpened, right before my eyes, and plunged as tiny spines into Anton’s bare back.
He whimpered, and I knew this was bad, because he had never made that noise in my memory. Small beads of blood were welling up, all along his spine, and then somehow sluicing away. My first thought was that Godshit, this thing was vampirous. It was sucking him dry in the unsexy way. I tried to pry it off, but it was like grabbing gelatin, slipping and sliding off my fingers.
Then Anton held up a hand, like suggesting that I stop, and he got up off the floor.
“What the fuck is it doing?” I asked, stepping back. Anton looked slightly woozy, but he was alive. The thing from the incubator seemed to calm down, flattening itself along his back like a fleshy hug. I reached for my skyper where it had toppled from my pocket.
“Hume, I think it plugged in,” Anton said.
“I’m getting the emerg–serv,” I said. “We still have credit with them, right?”
“Leave the skyping,” Anton told me. He grimaced and propped himself up against the counter. Little twitches were running through him, miniature seizures.
“That thing just grafted onto your fucking back, Anton,” I said back. “Make me a damn compelling, you know, argument, or I’m getting them.”
“Hume, Hume,” Anton said, in his calming way. “I’m about to. Whoa.” Another twitch twanged through him. “You remember those spinal gears? For paralyzed people?”
“The things that looked like spiders,” I said. “Yeah, verily.”
“Like spiders, right,” Anton continued. “They lay new roads for the nerve endings. Bypass the damage. We’re looking at some remarkable nano–bio prototype for the same thing.” He was twisting and flexing.