by Rich Larson
Then Ash Rigsby slams around the corner, dragging her shirtless boyfriend in tow. “Retroparty!” she hollers. “Everyone turn off your fucking Socialights! We’re doing it freestyle!”
She drapes her boyfriend’s shirt over her head and starts clapping, furious-like, and he does too, kind of grudgingly, and this time it catches for real, and everyone starts hard applauding. Ash kisses her boyfriend and flips off his Socialight while her fingers are all wormed in his hair; he gets the idea and does it back. They bash noses in a totally freestyle mess, and all around the room people are switching off and joining the retroparty.
Dyl, looking dazed as fuck, raises his bony arms in a victory V, then wades over to slap me on the back. He’s smiling, Wendee’s smiling, I’m smiling. I spot Hamza leaning on the faux-oak stairway, holding two champagne flutes full of Jägermeister and post-coital smiling even though he doesn’t know what the fuck just happened to his party. It’s heaps cinematic, and for a blissy millisecond I think everything’s going to pan out perfect.
The timing goes first, like, whoa. Some bru starts talking at the same time as three other people, then they stop, then they all go at the same time again. Nobody’s dancing anymore because we’re all desynched from the party playlist, and then the quiet goes viral with everyone kind of just standing there, even Ash, who looks like she might need the Barf Bathroom soon. I turn back to Wendee and we look at each other with zero shit to say.
“Retroparty,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says, but kind of smiling.
“Yeah.”
“Yo, all you hellacious hedonists!” Hamza yells from the banister, raising one of his Jäger flutes. Everyone looks up. “Got an announcement for all my gorgeous guests. My new mix, HoodF3els, just dropped. Synch up, motherfuckers!”
Suddenly bad blip-hop is a life preserver in a big old ocean of awkward. The Socialights come back on in a wave, blinking calm blue, illuminating people’s faces, which are no longer creased and hard worried about what to say. Hamza gives me a look from the stairway, not a meanmug, just sort of a “wick effort, little bru, but maybe don’t try to retroparty until you have the ending down.”
Then I notice Wendee’s looking at the stairway, too, Socialight pulsing bright again, Flirty engaged, and from the color of her cheeks someone just pinged her one wick, wick fleshflash. She grins that white-ass grin. “Hey, Shad, I’ll be right back, okay?”
I think Maestro might tell me to grab her, maybe tell me the only thing to try is a last ditch kiss, but I end up just watching her slither up the stairs. Hamza hands her one of the flutes. He smiles, she smiles. I don’t wait for the toast.
I tune into the VR, and since none of the tracking ribbons say Suicide Cliff, I have to settle for the Porch.
It’s only halfway snowing when I go outside, the little flakes that don’t stick on the ground, but I’m still wishing I brought a jacket along for the sulk-fest. Some people are peacing out early, stumbling back down the long row of cars. A couple brus are pissing on the nearest Glowtree and telling it to grow. I plant my bony ass on the steps and look out at the burbs, all the big cubic houses and manicured lawns, and want them all to catch fire at the same fucking time.
The front door heaves open. “Hey, sad Shad.”
“Hey, Dildo.”
I listen to Dyl hip-check the door shut behind him. He comes over and sits in my periphs, clinking down a couple cans of Molson between us.
“I’m still freestyling,” he says. “So I don’t really know what to say.”
I tap my switched-off Socialight. “Same. Didn’t feel like getting apology-pinged.”
“Bru, she’s just running Flirty. So what if they dock up?” He tap-tap-taps the top of his first beer and pops it open. “Sometimes a girl just wants some, you know, general genital proximity. Flirty goes for the sure thing. Don’t mean she don’t like you.”
“Yeah. I know. It’s just, you know, it’s fucking shitty.” I grab the other beer and dig my thumb under the tab. It’s cold enough that the aluminum stings. “How the fuck can I compete, Dyl? We run UnderTheRadar for a reason, you know?”
“Not tonight we didn’t.” Dyl clanks his Molson down for emphasis. “Tonight we ran shit, Shad. You almost turned Hamza Hamidi’s big fest into a fucking retroparty. And I don’t know about you, but I met heaps girls.”
“Heaps,” I admit.
For a while we just slug from our beers and watch the smokers stamp and shiver in a little circle on the sidewalk, sending little white tunnels up into the air. Some of them point down to the end of the block, where red-and-blue lights are flashing out of the gloom. All good parties end in cops. I wonder if someone inside pinged 911, just to make sure it happened.
“You wish you’d cut me loose when the glitch hit back there?” Dyl asks, quiet-like.
“Yeah,” I say, but it’s a lie and we both know it.
“Nah nah nah.” Dyl swishes the last bit of beer around in the bottom of his can. “You know, now that I got some experience, I think I could get used to freestyling at parties. Could be kind of wick. Not UnderTheRadar, not Buttafly, not Maestro two-point-fucking-oh. Just. Freestyle, you know? Like when we were kids.”
I hard think about it for a bit as the police cars ease up, whooping little bursts of siren to scatter the gun-shy bru still trying to piss on the Glowtree.
“That’d be fucking awful, Dyl.”
Dyl does his stupid hyena laugh that always kind of gets me, and slings his arm over my shoulder. I sling one back.
A cop gets out of her car and stomps up the walkway, no doubt running VoiceOfAuthority or some shit like that. “Is that open alcohol I see?” she asks all weary-like, strobing us with her shoulder-light. I blink. My face and hands and feet are just finally starting to feel warm from the cold beer.
“Here’s our first chance, bru,” I say. “Let’s talk our way out of it.”
Dyl nods thoughtfully. Then we both hurtle off the side of the porch, busting toward the fence and the dark empty lot on the other side, and the night feels pretty wick. Pretty wild.
AN EVENING WITH SEVERYN GRIMES
“Do you have to wear the Fawkes in here?” Girasol asked, sliding into the orthochair. Its worn wings crinkled, leaking silicon, as it adjusted to her shape. The plastic stuck cold to her shoulder blades and she shivered.
“No.” Pierce made no move to pull off the smirking mask. “It makes you nervous,” he explained, groping around in the guts of his open Adidas track-bag, his tattooed hand emerging with the hypnotic. “That’s a good enough reason to wear it.”
Girasol didn’t argue, just tipped her dark head back, positioning herself over the circular hole they’d punched through the headrest. Beneath it, a bird’s nest of circuitry, mismatched wiring, blinking blue nodes. And in the center of the nest: the neural jack, gleaming wet with disinfectant jelly.
She let the slick white port at the top of her spine snick open.
“No cheap sleep this time,” Pierce said, flicking his nail against the inky vial. “Get ready for a deep slice, Sleeping Beauty. Prince Charming’s got your shit. Highest-grade Dozr a man can steal.” He plugged it into a battered needler, motioned for her arm. “I get a kiss or what?”
Girasol proffered her bruised wrist. Let him hunt around collapsed veins while she said, coldly, “Don’t even think about touching me when I’m under.”
Pierce chuckled, slapping her flesh, coaxing a pale blue worm to stand out in her white skin. “Or what?”
Girasol’s head burst as the hypnotic went in, flooding her capillaries, working over her neurotransmitters. “Or I’ll cut your fucking balls off.”
The Fawkes’s grin loomed silent over her; a brief fear stabbed through the descending drug. Then he laughed again, barking and sharp, and Girasol knew she had not forgotten how to speak to men like Pierce. She tasted copper in her mouth as the Dozr settled.
“Just remember who got you out of Correctional,” Pierce said. “And that if you screw this up,
you’d be better off back in the freeze. Sweet dreams.”
The mask receded, and Girasol’s eyes drifted up the wall, following the cabling that crept like vines from the equipment under her skull, all the way through a crack gouged in the ceiling, and from there to whatever line Pierce’s cronies had managed to splice. The smartpaint splashed across the grimy stucco displayed months of preparation: shifting sat-maps, decrypted dossiers, and a thousand flickering image loops of one beautiful young man with silver hair.
Girasol lowered the chair. Her toes spasmed, kinking against each other as the thrumming neural jack touched the edge of her port. The Dozr kept her breathing even. A bone-deep rasp, a meaty click, and she was synched, simulated REM brain-wave flowing through a current of code, flying through wire, up and out of the shantytown apartment, flitting like a shade into Chicago’s dark cityscape.
Severyn Grimes felt none of the old heat in his chest when the first round finished with a shattered nose and a shower of blood, and he realized something: the puppet shows didn’t do it for him anymore.
The fighters below were massive, as always, pumped full of HGH and Taurus and various combat chemicals, sculpted by a lifetime in gravity gyms. The fight, as always, wouldn’t end until their bodies were mangled heaps of broken bone and snapped tendon. Then the technicians would come and pull the digital storage cones from the slick white ports at the tops of their spines, so the puppeteers could return to their own bodies, and the puppets, if they were lucky, woke up in meat repair with a paycheck and no permanent paralysis.
It seemed almost wasteful. Severyn stroked the back of his neck, where silver hair was shorn fashionably around his own storage cone. Beneath him, the fighters hurtled from their corners, grappled, broke, and collided again. He felt nothing. Severyn’s adrenaline only ever seemed to spike in boardrooms now. Primate aggression through power broking.
“I’m growing tired of this shit,” he said, and his bodyguard carved a clear exit through the baying crowd. Follow-cams drifted in his direction, foregoing the match for a celebspotting opportunity: the second-wealthiest bio-businessman in Chicago, 146 years old but plugged into a beautiful young body that played well on cam. The god-like Severyn Grimes slumming at a puppet show, readying for a night of downtown debauchery? The paparazzi feed practically wrote itself.
A follow-cam drifted too close; Severyn raised one finger, and his bodyguard swatted it out of the air on the way out the door.
Girasol jolted, spiraled down to the floor. She’d drifted too close, too entranced by the geometry of his cheekbones, his slate gray eyes and full lips, his swimmer’s build swathed in Armani and his graceful hands with Nokia implants glowing just under the skin. A long way away, she was dimly aware of her body in the orthochair in the decrepit apartment. She scrawled a message across the smartpaint:
HE’S LEAVING EARLY. ARE YOUR PEOPLE READY?
“They’re, shit, they’re on their way. Stall him.” Pierce’s voice was distant, an insect hum, but she could detect the sound of nerves fraying.
Girasol jumped to another follow-cam, triggering a fizz of sparks as she seized its motor circuits. The image came in upside down: Mr. Grimes clambering into the limo, the bodyguard scanning the street. Springy red hair and a brutish face suggested Neanderthal gene-mixing. Him, they would have to get rid of.
The limousine door glided shut. From six blocks away, Girasol triggered the crude mp4 file she’d prepared—sometimes the old tricks worked best—and wormed inside the vehicle’s CPU on a sine wave of sound.
Severyn vaguely recognized the song breezing through the car’s sponge speakers, but outdated protest rap was a significant deviation from his usual tastes.
“Music off.”
Silence filled the backseat. The car took an uncharacteristically long time calculating their route before finally jetting into traffic. Severyn leaned back to watch the dark street slide past his window, lit by lime green neon and the jittering ghosts of holograms. A moment later he turned to his bodyguard, who had the Loop’s traffic reports scrolling across his retinas.
“Does blood excite you, Finch?”
Finch blinked, clearing his eyes back to a watery blue. “Not particularly, Mr. Grimes. Comes with the job.”
“I thought having reloaded testosterone would make the world . . . visceral again.” Severyn grabbed at his testicles with a wry smile. “Maybe an old mind overwrites a young body in more ways than the technicians suspect. Maybe mortality is escapable, but old age inevitable.”
“Maybe so,” Finch echoed, sounding slightly uncomfortable. First-lifers often found it unsettling to be reminded they were sitting beside a man who had bought off Death itself. “Feel I’m getting old myself, sometimes.”
“Maybe you’d like to turn in early,” Severyn offered.
Finch shook his head. “Always up for a jaunt, Mr. Grimes. Just so long as the whorehouses are vetted.”
Severyn laughed, and in that moment the limo lurched sideways and jolted to a halt. His face mashed to the cold glass of the window, giving him a close-up view of an autocab as it darted gracefully around them and back into its traffic algorithm.
Finch straightened him out with one titanic hand.
“What the fuck was that?” Severyn asked calmly, unrumpling his tie.
“Car says there’s something in the exhaust port,” Finch said, retinas replaced by schematic tracery. “Not an explosive. Could just be debris.”
“Do check.”
“Won’t be a minute, Mr. Grimes.”
Finch pulled a pair of wire-veined gloves from a side compartment and opened the door, ushering in a chilly undertow, then disappeared around the rear end of the limousine. Severyn leaned back to wait, flicking alternately through merger details and airbrushed brothel advertisements in the air above his lap.
“Good evening, Mr. Grimes,” the car burbled. “You’ve been hacked.”
Severyn’s nostrils flared. “I don’t pay you for your sense of humor, Finch.”
“I’m not joking, parasite.”
Severyn froze. There was a beat of silence, then he reached for the door handle. It might as well have been stone. He pushed his palm against the sunroof and received a static charge for his trouble.
“Override,” he said. “Severyn Grimes. Open doors.” No response. Severyn felt his heartbeat quicken, felt a prickle of sweat on his palms. He slowly let go of the handle. “Who am I speaking to?”
“Take a look through the back window. Maybe you can figure it out.”
Severyn spun, peering through the dark glass. Finch was hunched over the exhaust port, only a slice of red hair in sight. The limousine was projecting a yellow hazard banner, cleaving traffic, but as Severyn watched an unmarked van careened to a halt behind them.
Masked men spilled out. Severyn thumped his fist into the glass of the window, but it was soundproof; he sent a warning spike to his security, but the car was shielded against adbombs, and theoretically against electronic intrusion, and now it was walling off his cell signal.
All he could do was watch. Finch straightened up, halfway through peeling off one smartglove when the first black-market Taser sparked electric blue. He jerked, convulsed, but still somehow managed to pull the handgun from his jacket. Severyn’s fist clenched. Then the second Taser went off, painting Finch a crackling halo. The handgun dropped.
The masked men bull-rushed Finch as he crumpled, sweeping him up under the arms, and Severyn saw the wide leering smiles under their hoods: Guy Fawkes. The mask had been commandeered by various terroractivist groups over the past half-century, but Severyn knew it was the Priesthood’s clearest calling card. For the first time in a long time, he felt a cold corkscrew in his stomach. He tried to put his finger on the sensation.
“He has a husband.” Severyn’s throat felt tight. “Two children.”
“He still will,” the voice replied. “He’s only a wage-slave. Not a blasphemer.”
Finch was a heavy man and his knees scraped along
the tarmac as the Priests hauled him toward the van’s sliding door. His head lolled to his chest, but Severyn saw his blue eyes were slitted open. His body tensed, then—
Finch jerked the first Priest off-balance and came up with the subcutaneous blade flashing out of his forearm, carving the man open from hip to ribcage. Blood foamed and spat and Severyn felt what he’d missed at the puppet show, a burning flare in his chest. Finch twisted away from the other Priest’s arm, eyes roving, glancing off the black glass that divided them, and then a third Taser hit him. He fell with his jaws spasming; a Priest’s heavy boot swung into him as he toppled.
The flare died inside Severyn’s pericardium. The limousine started to move.
“He should not have done that,” the voice grated, as the bleeding Priest and then Finch and then the other Priests disappeared from sight.
Severyn watched through the back window for a moment longer. Faced forward. “I’ll compensate for any medical costs incurred by my employee’s actions,” he said. “I won’t tolerate any sort of retribution to his person.”
“Still talking like you’ve got cards. And don’t pretend like you care. He’s an ant to you. We all are.”
Severyn assessed. The voice was synthesized, distorted, but something in the cadence made him think female speaker. Uncommon, for a Priest. He gambled.
“What is your name, madam?”
“I’m a man, parasite.”
Only a split second of hesitation before the answer, but it was more than enough to confirm his guess. Severyn had staked astronomical shares on such pauses, pauses that couldn’t be passed off as lag in the modern day. Signs of unsettledness. Vulnerability. It made his skin thrum. He imagined himself in a boardroom.
“No need for pretenses,” Severyn said. “I merely hoped to establish a more personable base for negotiation.”
“Fuck you.” A warble of static. Maybe a laugh. “Fuck you. There’s not going to be any negotiation. This isn’t a funding op. We just caught one of the biggest parasites on the planet. The Priesthood’s going to make you an example. Hook you to an autosurgeon and let it vivisect you on live feed. Burn what’s left of you to ash. No negotiations.”