by Tim Scott
He’s a remarkable person, I thought, exchanging a glance with Mat.
Either Mat or I would have been far more suited to going in the Pit because we were way more athletic, but we wouldn’t have had a clue what to do once we were in there. Teb on the other hand knew exactly what to do, but moved like a water-filled balloon.
The Pit floor was about three feet below us, and Teb slowly turned around in a circle, keeping an eye out for anything coming from behind. The first viruses flew at him pretty slowly, like neon butterflies, and he had plenty of time to bat them away with his hands. Then a few more, in waves of three or four, and he jerkily hopped to one side so they floated past before vaporizing as they hit the Pit’s walls. He pulled on a strand of light that protruded out across the Pit, and a weird tangle of laser lines drew toward him. He sifted his way through them with his fingers, pulling at some and moving others away, then drawing out more laser threads from the other sides. These lines had some kind of writing on them, but it was too small to see from where we stood. More viruses flew at Teb, some from behind, and he took a couple of fairly heavy blows to the shoulders but regained his balance quickly, whacking them away clumsily as he continued to sift and pull his way along the maze of laser lines.
“There’s a lot more stuff in the system than last time I was here,” he cried. “It’s a lot harder to find any way through.”
Without warning, a whole swarm of small green viruses flew at him out of a broken thread. Teb dropped the laser line he was following and spun around frantically to bat them off. One by one, with a squeak, they fell to the floor.
“Hey, I may have been lucky. Look at this! I’m a slither away from the Medi-Data complex already,” he shouted, retrieving the strand of light he had been pulling. “It may be that someone’s been planting Tiger Bombs, and I don’t have to tell you what that means.”
Teb for once was quite wrong. I had no idea what that meant, and it always amused me that he assumed more knowledge in those about him than they actually had, no matter how many times you explained it to him.
The Pit was a place he had invented and built from scratch, and it could give him access to pretty well anywhere that had any kind of gadgetry connected to the EtherMat, or vis-media. It wasn’t conventional and he usually came out a bit bruised from the virus attacks, but batting them away physically was a far quicker way of disposing of them than trying to do it with written code at a console, apparently.
At least, that’s what he told me.
It was this leap of imagination that had given him the idea for the Pit in the first place. As he put it, “You could spend a day trying to convince a terrorist, with reasoned argument, not to shoot, or you could just come up behind him and whack him over the head with a shovel. Which is quicker? See, it’s the same with these viruses. Much quicker just to whack them than try to talk to them in code.”
You could sort of see what he meant when he put it like that, but Teb did have a very odd mind and I don’t think too many other people had approached the problem the way he had. So the Pit was pretty unique.
The viruses were coming thick and fast now in their multi-colored, almost luminous, iridescence. Some of them were as big as small birds but they moved fairly slowly; and although Teb slipped a few times and tripped over his own feet, he dealt with it all.
“I’m at the Medi-Data complex,” he cried. “‘Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead!’” But at that moment, plumes of smoke began to erupt frenetically from a console on the far side. “Ahh—it’s shorting! Whack that one! Someone whack it, quick!” he shouted. The light in the Pit began to pulse alarmingly, and it seemed the laser lines would fade away completely. “Quickly, it’s going!” he cried again.
Mat was on the case, fighting his way over to the machine through the clouds of thick black smoke. And when he got there, he hit it with such force the whole contraption shuddered.
Everything in the Pit wound down to a very faint glow.
“Shit,” said Mat under his breath. Then, slowly, the lights around the Pit grew in intensity, the smoke stopped caning out of the machine, and everything returned to normal.
“You’re a very lucky man,” cried Teb, pulling his way carefully along the strand of light. “That thing has enough volts going through it to widen the Pacific. Medi-Data complex! See?” he cried, holding up a small, red line of laser light that spurred off the main thread. “I follow this and find out who’s been listening in, like that.”
I had known Teb since we were kids, hanging out in third grade and getting into some fantastic scrapes together—or rather Teb getting into some fantastic scrapes and me hanging about on the periphery, loving it, but not quite having enough guts or too much sense to get involved. And that’s kind of how it had always been. We made a team, of sorts. He took all the risks and I loved going along for the ride, being the accomplice; albeit a rubbish one, who spent most of his time laughing uncontrollably from about twenty feet away.
I suppose the most unlikely thing about Teb was that he had been going steady with the same girl since high school. Natasha was a lovely, well-organized, conventional sort of girl, and not anything like Teb at all. With so much chaos in his life, maybe having a girlfriend he could always rely upon was the heart of his courage.
“I’m going to cut it; everything we need to know should be in here,” he said, holding up the same red laser thread but at a point where it bulged into a small pod. He laid it down on the floor and took a knife from his belt.
“This is definitely weird,” said Mat, but I don’t think Teb heard because he was carefully cutting open the small pod of light like it was a real, solid orange. And suddenly I became aware of his tiny actions as he slit through the last of the Light Skin.
“OK, Teb?” I said quietly, as he knelt there motionless for longer than seemed necessary.
“OK,” he echoed, then carefully stood, lifted the bottom half of the pod, paused, and whispered, “‘Now might I do it, Mat.’” And then, abruptly, he flicked the pod over so the contents fell out. Tiny shards of light tumbled and burned in the air like slivers of magnesium as they floated to the floor, where they continued to smolder. I stared at these tiny, blinding lights and realized they were words, coalescing like molten steel on the floor of the Pit.
“‘The play’s the thing wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the King!’” he said, leaping up out of the Pit. “I think we’ve got them.” And at that moment, the console on the far side began smoking again, and this time it was making a rather ungainly hammering sound as well. Mat was standing there and ready to whack it again, but stopped abruptly as Teb screamed, made a surprisingly agile dive over to the power switch, and heaved it up. “I think we’ve pushed our luck enough.” The Pit lights snapped off, and the lights in the room faded up, dragging us all back to reality.
“This machine could take out the whole block if it went up. And the management committee would definitely send a memo around about that. Probably still wouldn’t let up about the parking, though,” he added, more wistfully.
“Teb, remind me never to get you to fix my doorbell,” said Mat after a pause.
“Doorbell. Yeah,” said Teb almost inaudibly, but his eyes were still miles away, as though he were still thinking about the management committee’s parking policy.
“Teb?”
“Let’s have some coffee to celebrate that we’re not all dead,” offered Mat.
“Teb?” I said again, as he stood staring.
“Yeah? What?” he said, coming back to life, like a windup toy that has been given a nudge. “Caught one on my shoulder; those viruses are getting bigger, aren’t they? Come and see! This is the leak. Here!” And he hopped back onto the floor of the Pit and beckoned me down. I followed him warily, eyeing the machines stacked around the Pit wall. They seemed to look on like beady-eyed crocodiles hiding in a swamp. “Here it is.” He was crouched on the floor. “Down here. You see it?”
I looked closely where he was pointing and saw that the words that had fallen moments earlier from the pod had somehow coalesced into hard, solid metal letters, fused to the Pit floor like cooled steel. The largest of them spelled out a name: “Argonaut Logistics,” and an address was there too, “Branciforte Drive.” It wasn’t going to be hard to trace them from that. I glanced at the other words, but they didn’t seem to make much sense. “Remember the eighteenth of October,” one line said. “The acacia tree up on the hill,” another read. Teb shook his head. “That stuff shouldn’t be there. Must be some security thing gone haywire.”
“The eighteenth of October? Didn’t something famous happen on that day?” I said, “A battle or something? Do you remember?”
“Don’t look at me, I didn’t take history; it always seemed to be tubing during those lessons,” said Mat. “Want some more?” he added, waving a mug about.
I’d much rather get going, I thought, pulling myself out of the Pit. “D’ you mind if we head over to this Argonaut Logistics place?”
“OK. But sure you don’t want to chill out, have some more coffee, and get your head together?”
“I can’t chill, Mat. There are four psychopathic, porridge-making Riders out there somewhere.”
“Yeah, yeah, take your point.”
“And anyway, I’m way too pissed off with all of this to chill out at the moment.”
18
We left Teb at the flat, hailed a three-seater Crossfield, and burned up toward Branciforte on the far side of town over near Wah-Wah and Klick Track.
Once, the whole area of blanched hills around there had been covered in thick sweet-smelling pine forest, but only a few swathes of trees remained now, clinging uncertainly to the slopes—squashed between the houses, office blocks, and malls like an echo from a misplaced past. It felt like a reflection of my life. A few bits of it were still recognizable, but otherwise it had changed into something quite different.
The Crossfield rack seemed uncomfortable. Perhaps the seat was just harder than usual, and I wriggled inside my crash suit as I kept an amateurish eye out for anyone tailing us. It gave me a flimsy shred of confidence. I left the visor open, letting the cool wind soothe my rising craving for a cigarette. Being on a bike gave me time to think, time to listen to myself, but mainly, it seemed, time to lust after a gigantic infusion of nicotine like at no other moment.
I breathed in deeply and wondered what Mat was making of it all; I didn’t want to drag him into anything really serious. If there was music to be faced when the time came, I had to face it alone.
I wondered what we were going to do at this place. Just walk in and say: “Excuse me, but I don’t believe you are selling encyclopedias”? and hope they’d throw their hands in the air and say: “You got us!” I considered this briefly, then booted the thought away. Maybe the place didn’t exist. Maybe it would just be one guy with a phone. Maybe I’d get shot the moment I stepped off the bike. Until I knew what was there, it didn’t make much sense to plan.
The bike braked sharply, and I was squeezed to the back of my crash suit. Then we kicked around a tight bend and the Rider leaned aggressively from one side to the other, so the road rose up to meet me, then fell away.
When I looked up again, I realized we had crossed the border into Christmas Single and I sighed.
This was a very silly zone.
If anybody got me started, I could rant on about it for a whole evening and still not be through. At least the artificial snow was not too deep today and the snowplows didn’t look like they’d be out, but then the Rider decelerated to a crawl. I guessed we were almost certainly stuck behind a sleigh. Usually, I gave explicit instructions to all taxi Riders not to take me anywhere near this zone, no matter what the extra cost.
It was partly that the people in Christmas Single had way too much missionary zeal for my liking, always sending out Father Christmases to other zones in an attempt to get more people to come and live there. Every few months you would hear a knock on the door and open it to find a big smiling man in a red suit saying, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” and offering you a real estate brochure and a free tinsel pen. The novelty wears off after about the fifth time and you just want to punch him. And although I’ve managed to control myself, some people haven’t, believe me. Perhaps that’s why they always have backup now, in the shape of a couple of angels.
The ever-present lights and trees and reindeer always make my heart shudder too, because it feels like under every twinkling light is a problem that someone living in this zone has buried away. This was the favorite zone for people who had problems so big they had decided never to face them. I could have done without being reminded of all this now.
At least Teb was pretty certain he could fix my Skin Media and Jab-Tab by going into the Pit and doing it from there, but he was adamant about mending the console first, so we left him prizing open one of the machines with a serving spoon, even though there must have been at least 150 screwdrivers somewhere in that apartment. If Teb said he thought he could probably do something, that was as good as a cast-in-stone certainty.
He always underplayed his talents.
The Rider accelerated jerkily and we swerved out past a sleigh pulled by a gang of huskies and—mysteriously—a couple of wiener dogs as well. They seemed to have found the art of sliding on their stomachs through the snow, because their tiny legs couldn’t keep up. The thing itself was laden with gaily wrapped up parcels and driven by a couple of winged white angels, who were two stoic men in their forties wearing big black boots. I knew Mat would be silently laughing his head off—not just because of the bizarre spectacle, but also because he knew how annoyed it would be making me. Christmas lights twinkled unrelentingly on the strings of stores, and a troupe of Father Christmases strolled past—one of them carrying a shotgun, broken open, and crooked over his elbow. It reminded me I didn’t have a gun and I wondered if Mat had brought his.
I had never actually fired one in anger and I couldn’t swear there were even bullets in the one I’d had. It was just one of those things that everyone carried because they could. And while most other countries had realized that allowing people guns encouraged violence, America had remained defiant, getting itself into a tangle over our Constitution. I had heard politicians say it wasn’t so much the American Constitution anymore, as the American Constipation; the country had been stuck with it for longer than was healthy, and now most things were really beyond the control of anyone, except perhaps the Zone Traffic Securities.
I should have been feeling excited, pumped up like a soldier about to leap into battle, but I just felt tired. I felt worn through, and my reflexes didn’t seem to want to care. This was not ideal. I never had been much good at going without sleep and I just hoped the adrenaline would start pumping if I needed it. But I suddenly pictured the adrenaline inside my body as tiny little things bent over in exhaustion. Not exactly positive visualization.
We hammered under the gate out of Christmas Single, almost losing the back wheel in an outlandish slide through the last of the snow, flicking past a final waving neon reindeer telling us to hurry back, and into the relative peace and sense of Wah-Wah. Wah-Wah was a step across the Caribbean to single-story shanty houses and corrugated metal stores, and a road pockmarked with holes as big as soccer balls.
I liked it.
It was laid-back and reminded me in many ways of a poor but happy relation of Chillout. We bounced along the road, the Rider killing our speed until we reached Klick Track, and things became facelessly normal. It occurred to me that this might be why they had put Argonaut Logistics here.
It would be like hiding a casino in the Vatican; it’s not a place you would think to look.
As we picked our way through the traffic, someone touched wheels and a couple of bikes slid over, then spun sideways toward us like lazy tops, spiraling down the freeway, growling along the tarmac and grinding off paint as they flew. I closed my eyes when they were almost on top of us, knowing it was inevita
ble we would go down too; but miraculously one must have gone to each side because when I looked around, a second later, they were gliding to a halt down the road. Crashes weren’t unusual and I don’t suppose those Riders were hurt inside their crash suits, just a bit bashed and bruised.
We slipped between the fallen machines, which lay lifelessly on the tarmac, and cruised on through Klick Track, until we finally slowed at a junction and I caught sight of a store called “Big Bob’s Giant Giveaway Basket Warehouse,” which looked about the size of a small cupboard crammed, not surprisingly, with baskets. Outside hung a wickerwork thing that had been woven carefully into the shape of some two-foot-high letters and it clearly spelled out the word “badger.” Three people in overalls were painting it red, using brushes on the end of long poles. I stared, wondering what that was all about, and tried to imagine what was in those people’s lives, what they dreamed of and cared about and whether they had someone to go home to. Then a burst of acceleration from the Rider sent the shop vanishing into the distance and seemed to leave the thought in the air by their sign.
We couldn’t be far from Branciforte and this Argonaut Logistics place now, and a bead of anticipation ran down my neck, but my eyes still ached. And most of all, a heavy knot of confusion lay like a weight in my stomach. It felt as if I’d eaten an extra-large pizza from Raches, the little shack up on Valley.
Why hadn’t I let EasyDreams know why I hadn’t turned up? Habakkuk would be going crazy.
Well let him.
It wasn’t like he would fire me; it was just that if I ever got back to work there, he would give me grief about it for much longer than necessary. He reveled in that kind of thing. It was all ammunition, which he used to fuel the building of his little empire so he could feel like he was in control of all of us. He was a tiresome pain in the ass like that; one of the little people, with little, weasely horizons, but who put so much energy into getting to where he wanted, he inevitably succeeded.