War Surf

by M M Buckner

  This buoyant mood had to be a product of NEM secretions in my brain. Still, they were damned good drugs, and they charged me with vigor. No more self-pity for Nasir Deepra. Time to get moving!

  There was bound to be a way to break Sheeba’s addiction to this war zone, and I absolutely knew I would find it After devouring the water and sweet veggies someone had left on a tray, I checked to see if the door was locked. Yes, but the mechanism was a simple latch. My brain must have picked up IQ during the night, and I could see at once how to defeat the latch. Okay, so I needed something thin and narrow to slide through and—my hand closed on the ankh zippered in my longjohn pocket. Sheeba had given me the charm for good luck. This had to be a sign mat I was destined to triumph.

  The juves, the euthanasia order, my dismal insights from the night before, all those memories faded. No recollections distracted me from the present moment. I slipped the little talisman under the latch—gently, steadily—and with a click, the lock fell open.

  Out in the curving corridor, I looked both ways and saw no one. Instinct told me to seek food. The NEMs had synthesized quite a variety of compounds to heal my injuries, and my organism needed replenishment. I recalled hoisting cartloads of food and water up to the ‘pactor room on Deck Four, and although the memory had no context, I didn’t stop to wonder why. I headed for the food.

  With a stealthy, war-surfer tread, I cycled up through the ladder segments, listening to the walls with my fingers. My nerve endings browsed vibrations and fed back eerie tactile images of rooms, objects, humming machinery, humans. It was as if I could use sound waves to see through steel. A group of juveniles conspired in the solar plant. I slipped by, undetected.

  On Deck Four, I immediately recognized the ‘pactor room. Where did that other door lead? I recalled an anteroom, but I didn’t waste time thinking about it. The ‘pactor room held a row of ordinary presses that compacted pro-glu bales into dense, hard cubes. And stacked on the floor, on top of the machines, and in every conceivable niche were the provisions. I tore open the first water sack within reach and gulped.

  A familiar Provendia logo branded every bag of hard crackers and can of stew. I could have torn the cans open with my teeth, but the glass man wanted something better to eat than that pro-glu crap. The lid to one of the compactors hung open, so I looked inside. And what I saw made me salivate like a beast. The glass man recognized what was in there. Seeds.

  Mega-kilos of seeds from the garden. Hard round seeds. Soft pulpy ones. Black. White. Varicolored. Silky. Winged. Big as my thumb. Fine as sand. I plunged in, up to my elbows, scooped up great handfuls and let them slide through my fingers. My mouth craved to taste them. I stuffed my cheeks and crunched the delicious kernels.

  See me hunching over the compactor, chomping, chewing, slobbering in ecstasy. How the glass man relished the nutty flavors, as spicy and carnal as grains of Earth. Half-chewed husks dribbled down my chin as I closed my eyes and feasted. And on my tongue, the fetal DNA unreeled.

  I sampled. I gorged. My belly swelled and ached, and still, the glass man wanted more. Deep hungers drifted toward consciousness. I ate more, fueling more desire for novel strains of DNA. As the unfamiliar compounds hit my bloodstream, my energy surged, and there came a moment when ideas churned and clicked into place. Mine or the glass man’s? I’m still not sure. It was as if the flavors catalyzed a transmutation. A plan formed at the back of my brain: Escape and seek resources, then return.

  I pushed back from the seeds as if waking from a trance. Did I stop to wonder about this abnormal binge? Not for a moment I thought with my feet and made straight for the ladder well.

  Someone’s ragged old EVA suit still draped my body, and the air gauge still read almost full. I slapped my hip and found a collapsible helmet dangling from my belt. The gloves were wadded in my pocket. Outside, a ship waited, and on that ship were resources I needed to break Sheeba free. That’s all I could remember. I headed for the airlock. No more pandering to caution or looking for thrusters. I would space-dive to the ship and take command. One, two, three, like clockwork.

  Not for days had I experienced this level of mental clarity. Deck Two had an airlock exit, but juveniles were there, plotting in the solar plant. How could I slip by them? Then, like flipping a switch, I recalled a full-blown photographic memory of the A13 schematics. The engineers had installed an airlock in the cargo bay. Of course.

  I dropped down through the ladder segments to Deck One, silent as breath, and opened the door to the cargo bay. As soon as the door fell open, the sugary reek of pro-glu wafted into the ladder well. I stood in the doorway, examining the bales stacked on top of the hidden airlock.

  A slight vibration warned me that someone was coming down from Two. Instantly, I stepped into the cargo bay, pushed the door closed and listened. My hearing had sharpened. I could sense when the person dropped down the ladder and moved away through the opposite door. From the light step, I knew the person was small, probably a child gone astray. Did I waste time questioning why a child would be here? My logic centers ticked through possibilities like a computer. Then I forgot the child and focused on the airlock.

  In full Earth gravity, I shifted the bales aside—never wondering how I could lift objects more than twice my weight. There in the sugary dust, the rim of the airlock gleamed like a jar lid. One full pallet still blocked my way, so I leaned hard and slid it across the deck.

  My mind worked at light-speed, yet how could I fail to notice the blind spots? Familiar details churned like disconnected motes in a fog. Only later did I piece together the clues and understand the full scope of my transmutation. Without my doctors issuing restraining orders through the Net, my NEMs were reinventing themselves on the fly, and for the first time in their constricted little lives, they probed new healing frontiers. Though I didn’t realize it then, my brain NEMs had adapted one of my own native thought patterns, a behavior long established in war surfs. The crystal bugs were editing my memories to safeguard me from the Reel.

  They did a first-rate job, too. They eliminated every troubling doubt,’ every diversion. I felt blissfully at one with the zone. Those NEMs kept me preter-focused, and you should have seen me shoving that pallet out of the way. I performed like a superhero.

  I tell you this now, but at the time, I didn’t even pause to consider it. I wanted only to get outside and find help for Sheeba. The chemicals of zone rush charged through my flesh and saturated my blood. With rapid grace, I donned the old helmet and gloves, opened the airlock and jumped in. I was just about to close the hatch and start the airlock cycling, when an instinct stopped me. Something looked out of place.

  My artificial eyes roved everywhere, scanning for anomalies. Aha. Someone had jimmied the compressor vent. I could almost read the oily fingerprints left on the metal grill. In one confident stroke, I ripped off the vent cover and recognized the booby trap inside. A canister of lethal gas.

  It was connected to the vent’s control valve through a snarl of primitive copper wire. I recalled someone saying how airlocks could be rigged as execution chambers. With uncanny speed, I calculated how to disable the triggering device. Then I did something inexplicable—yet it seemed right. I took off my gloves, nicked my right index finger on the sharp hatch rim, and squeezed a few drops of blood onto the copper wires. At the time, this insane act didn’t faze me, but only now, after long and terrible thought, can I explain it to you. The glass man viewed that booby trap as a cancer, and he deployed those drops of NEM-rich blood to “cure” it.

  While I curled inside the airlock, watching my blood seep among the wires—this may sound incredible, but I swear it’s true—I could perceive the movement of each individual nanoelectronic machine. Not through human eyesight, no, but through some other species of perception altogether, a sort of bond or quantum entanglement. Somehow, I knew what my NEMs were doing. They were dissolving the wire, molecule by molecule—safeguarding my health. And the little suckers worked fast.

  Then I heard ano
ther noise in the ladder well. A squeaking door hinge. A muted footstep that only my meta-normally enhanced hearing could pick up. That child was coming back. After two more footsteps, I extrapolated that the child had thin bones, narrow arches and one supinated ankle. The door to the cargo bay wasn’t completely sealed, and through the sugary reek of product, I deciphered a fine pungency of teenaged female sweat. I eased out of the airlock, leaving my small bloody army to do its work on the wires, and I tiptoed toward the door.

  Something about the child’s gait felt familiar. I knew the sound of that breath. For an instant, my brain went on pause as—inconceivable as this sounds—my NEMs split in factions and debated. The mites were trying to resolve whether this girl would…

  a. remind me of the Reel and therefore distract me, or

  b. provide me with crucial need-to-know data.

  The b’s won, and I identified the child three seconds before she pushed open the cargo bay door.

  “Kaioko.”

  She stepped over the sill, batting her tiny, bright eyes. She looked ghostly. “Hello, sir. You go spacewalk?”

  At the sight of this resurrected girl, my mental concentration fell apart like a depolarized array. Suppressed memories came rioting back in one befuddling swirl. I tugged off my helmet and lowered myself to the floor.

  Kaioko glanced at the open airlock, the vent cover lying askew, the bales of product scattered helter-skelter. She registered each impression with a slight nod. Then she touched my cheek where the bone was still knitting back together.

  “What are you doing here?” I managed to wheeze.

  She blinked her beady eyes. “Sir, I not sure. I feel—changed.”

  Changed was an understatement. The last time I saw Kaioko, she’d been strapped to a mattress in sick-ward, lost in a coma. Now here she was standing in the cargo bay like a spectral vision, interrupting my escape. She must have climbed all the way down the ladders without assistance. Her head scarf was gone, and a fine black fuzz of new hair covered her scalp.

  “I knew you be wanting to leave, sir, so I came.” She tottered a little unsteadily on her feet.

  “Sit down before you fall.”

  “I getting well, sir.”

  “You don’t look well.” But she looked alive, and that was a miracle. None of the other stricken protes had ever recovered from Heaven’s malady. Our scientists hadn’t documented a single survivor. “Sit down, child.” I patted a spot on the floor beside me.

  Kaioko obeyed. “I not feeling afraid anymore. You made me brave, sir.”

  “Me? What did I do?”

  “You gave me this.” She grasped my nicked finger and squeezed it till a crimson bead welled up.

  My blood. That’s right, I’d donated a transfusion. Had my NEMs brought about her cure? Well, that was an intriguing thought.

  Then, to my astonishment, Kaioko stuck my bleeding finger in her mouth. As my blood merged with her saliva, a faint sensation began to flow through my hand. Like a tingling current. A second later, it grew more insistent. Then it swelled like a brilliant explosion, jangling my senses. No, not my five human senses—those other ones that felt like quantum entanglement or maybe data-streaming. My glass man had just recognized his kin.

  My NEMs flowed in Kaioko’s veins, and as she held my nicked finger in her mouth, I knew them. They communed with me. Intimate knowledge vibrated through my flesh, and the crystal lattice inside me sang like a harp. But the onslaught of this new sensory information was too alien. I pulled my hand away and broke the connection.

  Kaioko smiled.

  “Did you feel that?” I asked.

  “Feel what, sir?”

  Softly, I brushed the fine new hairs covering her head like baby fuzz. Apparently, she hadn’t noticed. At the time, this baffled me, but now I understand. Her NEMs had been growing only a few hours, whereas my little fiends had been reproducing for decades. Kaioko’s silicon twin was a mere embryo compared to the seasoned maturity of my glass man.

  “So you don’t want to die anymore?” I asked.

  She grinned. “I not going to the garden yet.”

  “Good.” I tilted her face up with my fingertips to examine her pupils, the way Sheeba would have done. They looked healthy and normal. Her carotid artery pulsed like a clock, strong and steady. Her forehead felt cool. I was no doctor, but her recovery seemed genuine. The strange link we’d shared unsettled me. Meta-bizarre. I studied my nicked fingertip, hesitating.

  “Kaioko, why did you want to—go to the garden?”

  She scrunched up her face and toyed with her silky new hair. The livid scars were fading. On impulse, I seized her arm and pushed back her long sleeve. The crosshatched knife wounds on her forearm had healed over.

  “I want to go be useful,” she said.

  “You thought dying would be useful?” I looked at her quizzically. Her explanation didn’t make sense.

  She drew a deep bream and tried again. “Juani say, all good things go to the garden. Nobi there. Our parents, too. We recycle.”

  I had to replay her words in my head three times to understand. She meant they disposed of their dead in the garden. At some point, I must have read a memo about biomass recycling. Nothing’s wasted on a satellite. I thought of the broccoli.

  “Nobi make the air we breathe.”

  I nodded automatically, letting this information wash over me. My tongue curled. The seeds I’d eaten came from the garden. The water. Even the bream in my lungs flowed from the exhalations of my decomposed employees.

  “I not worth much here,” Kaioko continued. “Always afraid. Can’t learn to count. Can’t save the people.” She twisted her ringers. “Juani say the garden make everything new.”

  “Oh child.” I took her into my lap. “That’s wrong. We need you alive a hell of a lot more than the garden needs fertilizer.”

  Kaioko grinned shyly. “I not afraid anymore.”

  As if to test her words, Provendia’s gunship launched another round of lethargic strafing. Outside the hull, the noisemakers popped, and their compression waves thundered through the steel deck where we were sitting. Here on Deck One, their uproar shook our bones, and despite Kaioko’s brave boast, she sucked her cheeks between her teeth and hid her face under my arm.

  When the gunfire ended, I continued to hold her. She felt warm in my lap and—precious. Don’t laugh. She felt to me like a living sack of gold. My NEMs were circulating through her body, and that idea fascinated me. We were blood relatives, in a weird synthetic sort of way, and I kept obsessing about our communion. I wanted to know how it worked. When my NEMs disconnected from the Net and started developing their own healing scenarios, something new was unleashed inside me, something robust and preter-resilient. Ye graven idols, my imagination ran rampant. Could the glass man actually come alive?

  I stroked Kaioko’s bony back and thought this over. A silicon life-form sharing my space? Some roommate. But he was a healing dervish. Despite all my injuries, he kept bringing me back to wellness. What if the crystal man could give me what every human being had longed for since the dawn of time? Immortality. The capital I.

  When Kaioko shifted in my lap, I craned to see my thumbnail over her shoulder. More NEMs had come back online. Only a few categories were still struggling for solutions. The nanomachines were evolving fast. They’d healed my wounds in one night, and look at this child in my lap. Hours ago, she couldn’t even sustain a regular heartbeat. I grasped my fingertip and squeezed another drop of blood. Reestablishing our link excited me with equal measures of curiosity and dread.

  Then Kaioko sat up and grinned. “I hungry. You, too, sir?”

  Before I could offer her my bloody fingertip, she hopped out of my lap and began tearing at one of the bales of product. She ripped away the dense outer layer and dug two spongy, brown masses from inside. They looked like spun sugar. She put one in her mouth and offered the other to me. “Don’t eat much,” she said through her mouthful. “It’s been ‘pactored.”

&nb
sp; I gazed at the pulpy mass in her hand. My Com actually sold that dreck as food?

  “Let it melt before you go swallow.” Kaioko opened her mouth and showed me the brown crumbs dissolving on her tongue.

  I must have made a face, because she laughed and almost choked. I had to clap her on the back, and tears ran down her cheeks. But as soon as the coughing ended, she stuffed more of that product in her mouth. “I really hungry,” she said, beaming.

  Shouts ricocheted down the ladder well. “Kai-Kai! Where are you?”

  We both turned at the sound of Geraldine’s voice. Two sets of footsteps shook the ladder, and by the weight, I knew Liam was there. He and the wench were searching for Kaioko. She must have slipped out of sick-ward without telling anyone. Quickly, I glanced at the airlock, where my platoon of silicon soldiers had finally hacked through the wires and disarmed the gas canister.

  “You want to leave,” she said.

  I didn’t answer. There was no time to try our communion again. Geraldine would be here in seconds, and my glass man and I were in full agreement—we had to escape. So I jerked the battered helmet over my head, but before I could slip on the gloves, Kaioko seized my arm.

  “Sir, I come to ask you, please stay.”

  The steps on the ladder sounded closer. “I can’t. I have to go.”

  She grabbed my bare hand. And I knew the bioNEMs in her skin oil. Our sweat intermingled, exchanging data. We shared molecules full of code, and the sensation unzipped my frame of mind. We stared at each other, trying to comprehend what was happening. But this was the wrong time. My NEMs took control again, edited my memories and focused me on escape.

  “Let me go.” I pushed Kaioko away, and when she stumbled, my qualm of regret vanished before it registered.

  Naturally, Geraldine stuck her head through the door just in time to witness Kaioko’s fall. Like a judge wielding a gavel, the wench came at me with her hammer. But I wasn’t the same Nasir she’d kicked down the ladder well. The glass man had grown strong. This time, her hammerblows fell on my NEM-hardened chest like kisses.