by Sean Kennedy
“I have?” Slate squinted.
“You sure did, and you were cordial and cooperative. The crazy thing with space sickness, Vince, is there are so many ways that the disease can manifest. You can hardly blame a sick man for what he does or says in the throes of a fever, especially someone with as distinguished a service record as yours.”
Vincent let a small chuckle rock his body and suppressed a cough.
“So, I’ve been able this to handle this. Since the zone fringe is under my jurisdiction, and since you’ve agreed to stay under house arrest for two years.”
Slate nodded as Stan went on, “Of course the boy has been expelled and can never set foot in Alcazar again, so that door’s closed.”
“Understood,” Slate said, and Stan looked hard into the old man’s eyes.
“This has been a hell of a reach for me, Vince, maybe too much, but if you stay low I might be able to smooth this.”
“You have my word Stan.”
“That’s good enough for me.” Stan turned on his heel, stepping back onto the patrol cruiser’s ramp.
“Now if you don't mind, I'd like to get back to dealing with some real problems.”
“Stan...” Slate called after him, and the Sheriff looked back.
“...Thanks.”
Stan tipped his hat, “Everything in orbit always comes back around, Sergeant Major.”
Chapter 12
Vincent Slate stood watching Stan’s VTOL cruiser vanish into the afternoon sky.
“He’s a good man.” Mac said through the earbud.
“We got lucky today.” Slate said and turned back to the house.
“The day’s not over yet. There's a fighting age male with a blade and bag approaching you on a bicycle.”
Slate waited beside the central stack as a teenager in a leather jacket with a courier bag slowed his bike to a stop a dozen feet away. The boy put down his feet to brace the bike, but kept hold of the handlebars.
“He was the one with Jacob at Alcazar,” Mac said.
“Uh...h-hello, Sir... I’m Teeva.” He began. “I know...well... I met Jacob last night, and uh... I just wanted to drop off his stuff an’ see... y’know...how bro’s doing.”
“How do you know Jacob?” Slate asked and Teeva relayed the long story of Jacob’s sailboat rescue as quickly as he could.
Teeva finished by saying, “Don’t be too mad, tetrazine shakes make you wander.”
“Do they?”
“Oh yeah, like... coming off that stuff makes you all antsy, and you just keep walking.” Teeva said, still straddling his bike in launch position. “It’s kinda like how some people gotta pace when they talk wireless.”
If it was a lie, it was a good one for the right reasons. After years terrifying armor jocks and flyboys, Teeva wasn’t a challenge for Slate to read.
“Bro left something with us last night and I wanted to give it back. So... is he around?”
“Jacob hasn’t woken up yet. You can leave his things with me if you like.”
“I think it was gift for you, if you’re Mac.” Teeva adjusted his courier bag strap.
“Something for me?” Mac said in his ear, “Well, it may be helpful to have him speak to Jacob. It's not much, but he’s familiar. His voice may help bring him out of it."
Slate knew that with neural injuries, the mind’s tendency was to shut out reality and escape to into a dream. In the Corps, consciousness trauma techs were on hand to cut through the heaviest cerebral shock, reaching deep into an unconscious mind to bring them out. CT techs were too high end for the zone, out here it was ditch medicine at best.
“My name is Slate. Mac’s inside. Follow me.” Slate turned on his heel. Teeva stepped off his bike, leaning it against the center cargo spire out of sight. He hurried to follow Slate through the stacks, his head twitching like a nervous cat.
“Are there any Kaizen around?” he asked.
“Always...” Slate walked up mismatched front steps “...and they're watching every move you make right now.”
Teeva swallowed and stayed silent through the odd front doors, across the strange living room, and up the attic stairs. Slate knocked at the attic door before leading Teeva in.
“No-way!” Teeva whispered horrified.
A medical monitor mounted on a thin stainless pole had braided cords separating into sensor wires, attaching around Jacob's chest and scalp where he lay. The empty attic seemed larger with the bare floor covered by a faded but clean rug.
A tall, thin man wearing a Kaizen logo hat stood from the bunkside chair as they entered. He slipped off A/VR goggles letting them dangle around his neck over colorfully patched coveralls.
“What’d they do to him?!” Teeva rushed to the side of the bunk.
“Cerebral shock.’ Mac said, “There’s no physical damage we can detect, but he’s just not wakin’ up. Sometimes a friendly voice can work wonders.”
Teeva nodded and knelt next to the bunk.
“Hey, bro! It’s Teeva.” He squeezed Jacob’s clammy hand in his own. “You're like a hero bro! They way you stood up was epic, it’s all over the ambient reports bro!”
Teeva’s eyes fell to the red and weeping burn where the facility bracelet had been.
“What the...” He looked to Mac, “I ain't never even seen a burn like this! A fifteen minute burn doesn’t look this bad!” He shook his head.
“You’ve seen a lot of burns then?” Mac asked.
“Cha! Took twelve minutes once before I got binned by Alcazar” Teeva sneered at the memory. “You’re Mac?”
“Indeed I am.”
Still holding Jacob’s hand Teeva swung his satchel bag in front of him and opened the flap. The short ninjatō sword shifted, as did Mac and Slate exchanging a glance.
“I was telling Mr. Slate that comin’ down off tetrazine can make you walk off sometimes, especially if you're new to it.”
“Does it now?” Mac raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah... it’s not in the medical files, but it's weird, some kids it happens to. It's hard to tell with synthetic side effects.”
“True,” Mac smiled. The young man was scared, but loyal enough to risk coming here alone, and both men knew it.
“Jacob got this for you,” Teeva pulled the box Jacob spotted on the ship from his bag. The logo, still shiny under the plastic, matched Mac’s hat.
His eyes shot open as Mac took the box, and as the intensity grew on Mac’s face, Teeva’s smile began to fade.
“Where did he get this?” Mac’s voice had a fearful edge.
“He didn’t steal it,” Teeva spoke as Slate stepped beside Mac to look at the box.
“That's not what I asked lad, where did he get it?”
“Well, see only I met Jacob last night. I was helping Toes in town, and when I was on my way back I got jumped...”
“I know," Mac said, and Teeva stopped mid-sentence as Mac slit open the box’s plastic film with a thumbnail.
“You got attacked, Jacob saved you, so you took him back to your place.”
“Right,” Teeva was a little unnerved, “and... uh... when we got back we wanted to check Jacob’s bounce, but when we tested him....”
“His bounce?” Slate looked at Mac.
“It’s a ditch-tech metric,” Mac said, “it shoots a signal like a sonar ping and measures the body’s resistance.”
Slate nodded as Teeva shrugged, “Well, usually the best users have the lowest bounce. But see... Jacob’s was zero!”
“Is that strange?” Slate asked.
“Bro!” Teeva forgot how nervous he was, “we couldn't get any read on him at all, so we tried different meters, and it still came back blank.”
“That is weird,” Mac blinked.
“I know right? We didn’t believe it, so we got Jacob to piggyback on a t-droid signal. Usually when you are carrying a second on a t-droid signal, you lower your response time, but the reaction time got faster with Jacob on board!” Teeva rubbed in his brow, his smile faded
as he looked down at Jacob, helpless in the bunk.
“Anyways, while we were in a ship’s bridge, there was a bag tucked under a command console, and that box was in it.” Mac turned box in his hands while he listened. “The minute he saw it he thought of you, so we brought it back.” Teeva finished.
Mac looked up with an intensity than made Teeva nervous. “Do you know what this is, boy?”
Teeva smiled, “It’s a Kaizen part, but like... they’re illegal and all...and they say... you know.... you kinda... got them here...” he trailed off looking at at the two men’s unblinking stare.
“Anyways, Jacob wanted you to have it because you were nice to him. ‘Mac seems nice.’ That’s what he said.” Teeva looked back at Jacob’s pale face.
“I probably should have waited until he woke up to give it to you. Hope he’s not gonna be mad.”
“I’m sure he won't be,” Slate said.
“So like when is he gonna wake up?” Teeva asked.
“It’s hard to say with cerebral shock,” Mac said.
“Yeah but so... that’s like a coma right?”
“A bit,” Mac said, “except if you don’t settle the mind within the first forty-eight hours, as a rule, they don't come back.”
“No-way!” Teeva said and looked back at Jacob's pale face.
“Scans show chaotic patterns throughout his cerebral cortex. There’s no physical damage, but the mind is in deep disarray.” Mac said.
“Isn’t there like something you can do to like… realign it?” Teeva asked pulling his vaporizer from his courier bag.
“Unless you know a consciousness trauma tech, I’m afraid not.” Mac sat in the bunkside chair.
“Unless...” Slate added, “... you can get some syntheltryptamine.” Mac jerked his head and Slate met his eyes with a hard edge stare.
“I haven’t got another reorientation drive, we have nothing to...”
“The Vade Mecum.” Slate interrupted and Mac recoiled like he’d been slapped.
“Syntheltryptamine...” Teeva repeated, staring at Jacob as he searched his memory for any knowledge of the drug.
Teeva hit the blue button on the side of his vaporizer and clamped the tube in his teeth like a cigar as he pulled his Immersion A/VR headset from the courier bag, its loose head straps dangling beneath it.
“Can you ship here?" Teeva asked through clamped teeth.
“We’re in town range.” Slate said as Mac looked at the floor shaking his head.
“Vince, we got no idea what that module will do, he’s never had a neural imprint...”
“We know what will happen if we don’t do anything.” Slate interrupted.
“No sense dying with ammo.” Teeva didn’t see Mac or Slate turn hard eyes on him as he took a deep vaporizer pull, sliding on his goggles.
“You can get syntheltryptamine?!” Mac asked.
“Just let me on your network bro,” Teeva said in white smokey words.
Mac shared a nod with Slate before pulling up his own goggles. “I see you,” he started, a moment later he added, “you should be able to get out now.”
Mac slipped off his goggles saying. “Vince, they haven't even made syntheltryptamine in over a decade! He’s not going to be able...”
But Teeva couldn't hear him past the surge of the net.
Chapter 13
The cool surge of the Immersion virtual reality interface washed through Teeva. The tetrahydrocannabinol from his vaporizer repressed his iatrogenic neural twitch, allowing him to run smooth in the pipe.
He thought through the login and confirmation, selecting virtual reality over augmented, and the darkness of his headset exploded into a starfield deployment lobby. The farmhouse link was clean and high speed.
He selected “Toes” from his inventory of location markers and a kaleidoscopic rip in spacetime opened before him.
Teeva moved as he would in a dream, tracked by the A/VR in the goggles EEG. His intention to reach out was translated into the Immersion interface’s Minds-I display, and as his avatar's hand touched the swirling porthole, Teeva was pulled into the chaos.
Immersion allowed the spawning appearance to be skinned. Most wanted elaborate skins for their transport, lightning crashes, and dimensional gateways, but for Teeva, the ninja’s trademark was to be unseen.
Teeva emerged in a Zone Town alleyway dressed in his modified eastern wandering garb. Black tabi boots led to emerald silk pants under a modern kimono robe, with a domed straw hat leaving only his mouth and chin visible.
Immersion’s electric dreams overlaid the grim reality of the quarantine zone’s capital city. In physical reality, the recycled city’s tallest buildings were nine or ten floors, but through Immersion, the Deep City’s refugee favela was a glittering bazaar that set the sky on fire.
Neon lights bathed shadows in discotheque strobes. Each augmented animation blended their light, making a firelight’s flicker on the ghostly crowds of avatars packing the street.
Teeva stepped over a trickle of something running out of the alley into the street, shifting his shoulders to feel the weight of his stellite ninjatō on his courier strap.
The Zone Town market was a no combat zone, but the edges of the market were hard to define. Sometimes crossing a street, you could find yourself in a battle on the yellow line as vehicles zipped around you.
Everything that existed in Zone Town existed here in real time. Anyone physically in the area was captured by Immersion’s shared interface and could choose how they were viewed, even if not online. Brick and mortar shops would also re-cast a representation to stake a claim from their physical space into VR.
The status of being seen set the tone for social order. In the hierarchy of virtual and augmented reality, the physical meatspace was always on top. Second were the masses of augmented, who accessed the virtual realm for technical purposes, and finally, the digital citizens, existing in the bandwidth of afterlife networks.
In the physical world, avatars were called ghosts, but on this side of the glass, those in the physical were fake. Those unaugmented in the real were represented by gray featureless figures recorded and projected to occupy the cyberspace representation in real time.
Unless using A/VR, The physical shadows were unaware of virtual avatars around them as they pushed down the Zone Town street, appearing and disappearing into private networks as they ducked in and out of the public space.
He wasn't just in Zone Town, he was in the idea of Zone Town, and today the street was packed with Deep City tourists out to slum it. Spawn restrictions had placed Teeva blocks away from Toes Apothecary.
Brightly colored rave freaks and hypersexualised avatars swelled in thronging packs, with signs and banners sticking like spikes from the street side crowds.
Each sign carried the unmistakable logo of ‘Redundant T’, One of the hottest multitrack DJ’s on the net. He used the Chinese symbol for redundant, floating as though nailed to a great capital letter “T”.
The meatspace ghosts walked through the erotic avatars as they massed, waiting for a glimpse of their DJ god and virtually pledge themselves to his remix.
Teeva stepped from the alley alcove and saw the tip of a white Nubian pyramid on the street ahead, glowing above the crowd’s banners.
The four-story slender pyramid sat behind an accurate representation of physical gates, shifting in the augmented wash of neon color over the illuminated text ‘Toes Apothecary’ that floated shimmering above them.
Technomancers by their nature accepted and embraced the far fringes of the unconventional. Apothecarian technomancy took a more shamanic approach to technology as their herbalist name implied.
Toes was the kind of technomancer who respected the balance between physical and virtual, treating his customers with dignity and respect, regardless of whether they were made of light or meat.
Teeva pushed through the ghosts and avatars, each a unique snowflake piling into drifts of digital humanity, to reach the gleaming gates.
Beyond them, a long archway tunnel pushed into the pyramid's base.
Teeva transitioned to the pyramids private virtual network, and instantly all the light and noise of the street fell away. He stepped out of an Edwardian mirror and onto a cobblestone patio as he entered the private network's space. A garden of impossible reality expanded around him. Glowing desert flowers on tropical vines weaved up ancient trees. A fairy bridge connected the cobblestone path over a winding creek ahead of him.
Leaves of exotic fruit trees fluttered in the digital wind as Teeva’s tabi boots padded to the top of the small wooden bridge. He was surrounded by the natural sounds of water and chirping birds over the hum of forest insects.
“C’mon Toes!” he said under his breath, resting his hands on the railing and willing the apothecarian to appear faster.
Teeva would have to wait his turn. In virtual shops, each customer is isolated for security and privacy.
“How can I help you?” An aged voice came from the foot of the bridge, and Teeva turned to see a short white-haired gnome in a green three-piece suit, with half-moon spectacles perched on his nose.
His squinted little eyes widened with recognition. “Teeva! Back so soon? And online?” His voice had a pleasant dryness, like the sound of folding paper.
“Time crunch. I need some of the Toes magic bro.”
“Oh?” Toes’s tiny wrinkled face lit up with a smile; he reached into his vest pocket and produced an impossibly long-stemmed churchwarden pipe like a magic trick. “Sounds serious.”
“Syntheltryptamine.”
“Syntheltryptamine!?” The old Technomancer repeated scowling, “What are you lot getting into?”
“Not for me, bro got a bad brain burn, he’s all shocked out. We need syntheltryptamine to get him out of his loop.”
Without taking his eyes from Teeva, the old apothecarian produced a match out of the air and it ignited with a flick of his wrist.
“Bro’s got a gift Toes, you should see this kid,” Teeva said as the flame flared from the pipe’s bowl.