The Digital Plague

by Jeff Somers

  “—Security Droids,” I finished. “Get up slow and stay behind me.”

  “Citizen,” the building shell boomed through the hallway, “please lie facedown on the floor and await security personnel.”

  I held a finger against my lips without looking away. “Pretty harmless. They just herd the taxpayers as long as the taxpayers don’t do anything wonky. But you were never registered, kid—you’re a blank, and they don’t like blanks, okay? They will fire on you. And your blade won’t do anything against them.” I patted her cheek. “So stay behind me, okay?”

  She nodded, nose runny, eyes wide. “Okay.” She looked fifteen again.

  “Citizen, please lie facedown on the floor and await security personnel.”

  I knew the Droids wouldn’t fire on a citizen; they’d just browbeat me to death. I stood up and made sure I was between them and Glee. The Droids just floated, two gleaming black balls, emitting a soft, deep hum I could feel in my chest.

  “The elevators,” I said. “Slow. Stay behind me.”

  We scuttled awkwardly backward.

  “Citizen, please lie facedown on the floor and await security personnel.”

  “Where do we go?” Glee whispered. “If the System Pigs are coming, they’re coming down the elevators, right?”

  I nodded. “Eleven eighty-five Sixth Avenue,” I said over my shoulder, eyes on the humming Droids as they herded us, “is an old building, Glee. Built before fireproof materials.”

  I bumped into her and stopped. “Elevator,” she said.

  I grinned at the Droids. “And thus it has a standard public-access fire alarm system,” I said, and gestured.

  Immediately, a piercing alarm erupted like a solid thing all around us, and the building shell started talking over itself, first telling me to get on the floor and then announcing a fire emergency. Behind me, I heard the whoosh of the elevator doors as they opened, and every door in the hall snapped open at the same time.

  “Fucking chaos,” Glee said. “I fucking love it. Avery’s a fucking genius.”

  I was loved and adored by adolescent girls everywhere.

  I backed my way into the cab, the Droids following just a foot away. When I was barely inside I reached over and gestured, and the doors shut. The cab immediately started heading down.

  “Where are we going?” Glee asked, grinning at me. I tried to keep my face straight, but I smiled back, feeling an unfamiliar and not unwelcome energy bristling inside me. I peered at the kid—she was so flushed and sweaty I worried for a moment that I’d missed something, that she’d gotten tagged somehow.

  “In these old pre-Uni buildings,” I said, “in event of a fire they can’t very well send you up to the roof to watch in horror while the building burns, kiddo. So they send you down to a bunker below street level.” I’d gotten so used to giving Glee these little lessons I almost didn’t notice I was doing it anymore. I got down on one knee and laced my hands together. “Come on, I’ll give you a boost.”

  She squinted at me. “Where am I going? Why not just walk out of the bunker?”

  I nodded. “Sure, if you want to get killed. Kid, they can see this elevator moving right now. If they’re of a mind to intercept us, all they have to do is wait downstairs for us. So, we’re going up.”

  She nodded dubiously, putting one old cracked boot into my hands and grabbing onto my shoulders for balance. I took a deep breath and hauled her up toward the maintenance hatch of the cab. “Up?” she said as she traced its lines with her fingers. “How far up? They invented elevators so we didn’t have to, you know, climb and shit.”

  “Just the second floor,” I said. “You lazy kid. We’ll be able to make a jump from there.”

  With a soft ooh, she found the latch and the maintenance hatch released, hanging down and instantly forming a little ladder for us. A breeze rushed into the cab, making the stray strands of Glee’s red hair whip around. She reached forward and pulled herself onto the ladder without waiting, and in a second had disappeared above me. I took a breath and followed her, emerging onto the top of the elevator just as it coasted to a stop, making us both dance a little to keep our balance. I looked around, squinting, and spied the maintenance ladder clinging precariously to the shaft wall behind Glee. I nodded at it, and she turned to examine it.

  “This? You want us to climb this?” She looked back at me over her shoulder. “It’s rusted. It looks like it’s a hundred years old.”

  “It might be,” I said. “Ladies first.”

  She made a face and I grinned. I was getting soft in my old age. This shit was almost fun. I knew I should be worried—I’d been betrayed, fucked with, and now might end my day with a bullet in the ear. I should be in a bad mood, but instead I was feeling . . . good.

  Glee took hold of the ladder and started pulling herself up. I jumped up right behind her and followed to the next elevator bay.

  “Pull this manual release lever?” she called down, and then pulled it without waiting. The outer elevator doors split open with a rusty scrape. Light and music and the hum of a crowd sifted into the shaft and fell on me like dust, weightless. She pulled herself across and up through the doors. I followed as quickly as I could, panting a little as I stretched myself, reaching for the handholds embedded in the ancient concrete.

  “Avery’s fat,” Glee said breathlessly from the second floor. “Avery’s fucking huge.” Without transition she burst into a ragged coughing fit, croaking hoarsely.

  I squirmed my way up onto the floor and stood, wiping my hands and looking around. The lobby was simple, a dark marble wall a few feet in front of us and a flickering, holographic image of a man in an old-fashioned formal suit, white tie and tails.

  “Welcome to Umano,” the holographic man said crisply, appearing to eye us up and down. “You do not have a reservation. Performing credit scan.” After a moment, he brightened. “Welcome, Mr. Cates! And . . . guest.” I couldn’t tell if it was a true AI hologram or just a projection of an actor in a booth somewhere. “We do have several unfulfilled reservations, and I can seat you. Welcome to Umano.”

  Behind the hologram, the entryway seemed to appear out of the stone, thin lines outlining the doorway and getting thicker. A simple enough trick, but impressive looking. This was what people did with yen. I fucking hated being rich. It was exhausting. When you were broke you always thought money would make life easier, but it just gave you more shit to do.

  We stepped forward and the world’s greatest holographic man actually stepped aside to let us pass. We stepped through the doorway into the largest single room I’d ever seen. The hum of a hundred conversations going on simultaneously became loud, crushing against us. It looked like every load-bearing column in the whole floor had been removed somehow, and I had an image of the immense and ancient weight of the building above us. It smelled . . . wonderful. It smelled like real food, and my mouth watered.

  To my surprise, an actual person carrying a menu was approaching us, looking tired and pissed off. She was of the usual indeterminate age, blond and blue-eyed, tall and, of course, beautiful. Her legs had been lengthened at some point by some butcher, and she walked up to us with a curious insectoid jerking.

  “Welcome to Umano,” she said as she approached. “My name is Mina and I will be your server this morning. Please follow me.”

  I blinked. I’d never heard of a restaurant that didn’t use Droids—but that, I supposed, was the gimmick. If you were rich enough, you could afford to have live, actual human beings bring you your food.

  As we stepped behind her into the dining room, I heard the second elevator doors open out in the lobby and started moving faster. The room sprawled around us, the whole opposite wall just glass and steel, the surrounding block on display. The tables and chairs were just white cubes—big cubes for the tables, smaller cubes for the seats. They looked like the most uncomfortable things ever devised.

  I stepped around our waitress and grabbed Glee’s arm, pushing her ahead of me. I heard the s
udden silence of impending ruckus behind us, and we started to run, Glee coughing wetly as she struggled on ahead, the panes of glass temptingly close. Around us, I had the impression of people staring, of the hum getting smaller.

  We made it to the windows, smacking into them and pushing our faces against the glass. The feeling of an alarmed and frightened crowd around us was exhilarating. As I’d expected, there was a huge garbage skid on the street below us—the restaurants always had nightly cart-aways. I slapped Glee’s shoulder and we whirled to tear-ass along the window a few feet to position ourselves approximately above our soft—if disgusting—landing. Glee grinned at me, and I couldn’t help but grin back. Landing in a load of rotting imported vegetables was going to be a great story, when she told it.

  From behind, I heard a man’s voice, deep and confident, almost completely devoid of any accent—its lack of accent becoming an accent itself. “Mr. Avery Cates!”

  I stopped. One moment I was tearing ass, prepared to take up a chair, smash some glass, and make a jump—the next it seemed like a better idea to just stop, and I stumbled to a halt. Glee ran on a few feet and then spun, her face lit up with alarm, snot running from her nose.

  “Avery,” she said again. “What the fuck?”

  Our eyes met and I pushed as hard as I could, trying to force myself into motion. “Fucking psionic,” I panted. “A Pusher. Keep moving. Go!”

  Two men and a woman—kids, really, pink and squeaky-clean—were walking toward me like they owned the place and had just remembered they’d left the lights on. They smelled like cops. They could have been triplets: all white, with dark hair, their faces round in every way—big round eyes that were going to make them look like babies their whole lives, round ears, their skulls globes on top of their necks. The girl was pretty until you realized she was just a female version of the boys. I wanted to turn and check on Glee but couldn’t. The buzz of voices returned with a new urgency, and I could see people talking to the air, using implanted comm units.

  “Avery Cates, I presume?” said the kid in the middle, shooting his cuffs and reaching into his jacket pocket, producing a leather wallet. When he flipped it open, he held it up close to my face, with the air of doing me a courtesy. A rainbow-colored hologram proclaimed him to be Richard Shockley, assistant to Undersecretary of the North American Department Calvin Ruberto, one of the shadowy men and women who’d been running things ever since the Joint Council had slipped away into digital senility.

  I looked from his ID to his face but said nothing. He snapped the wallet shut and the hologram vanished.

  “Mr. Cates,” he said, “I have been asked to come here by Dr. Daniel Terries, director of Public Health, New York Department, to bring you uptown for a conversation.” He spread his hands. “A conversation, only.”

  “Sorry, no,” I said, bluffing out of habit. “My sense of civic duty is a little lackluster these days. I’ve got business to attend to.”

  He turned to smile around at his two companions, who didn’t look back at him, keeping their eyes on me. The girl was still staring at me, and I wished fervently that she would stop.

  From behind, I heard a faint grunt, and Shockley’s hand shot up. Glee’s knife was suddenly suspended in the air between us, hovering as if gravity didn’t apply. A goddamn Telekinetic, I thought. His eyes flicked over my shoulder for a second and my heart lurched. For a moment he stared and then flicked his hand out in a lazy, negligent gesture. I heard Glee scream, followed by the sound of shattering glass. I strained, hoping to hear her soft landing in the garbage, but couldn’t.

  The entire restaurant had gone silent. Dimly, I could hear the building shell repeating its warnings in the distance as a stale, stiff breeze buffeted me from behind. The outside air smelled rotten, sweet and fungoid. A wave of disgusted groans filled the air.

  Shockley looked at me as the knife fell soundlessly to the carpet. “Mr. Cates,” he said, laughing a little, as I found myself rising an inch or two off the floor. Our eyes met, and his were filled with mean humor, like a boy who delighted in pulling wings off flies. “I am afraid we insist.”

  IV

  Day Three:

  I Didn’t have Time for this.

  I Had People to Kill.

  Ears pounding with the muted howl of dis placement, I sat across from the three of them and forced myself to look them in the eye. They were all psionics, I guessed, Shockley the Tele-K and at least one—the girl, I guessed—a Pusher, just like my old friend Kev Gatz had been. Back at the restaurant I’d had the sudden urge to do whatever they wanted me to do, and I’d climbed into a small government hover like it was stuffed with pre-Uni cigarettes and first-class gin. I kept myself still, legs crossed, a bland expression on my face: I was Avery Cates, and this shit did not impress me. I’d expected cops, but it looked like the tension between the Undersecretaries and the SSF had evolved a notch or two—if the government’s first batch of psionic kids had graduated, I suspected the working truce between the civil service and the System Pigs was about to end. Fucking psionics. The System Pigs had been collecting psionics for years; whenever someone displayed any kind of uncanny ability, the next day the cops were there, filling out bullshit forms and taking the kid away. Leaving receipts. They were usually kids. If they made it to adulthood without getting nailed, like Kev had, they usually knew how to hide it.

  I didn’t like thinking about Kev. It always brought back the image of him stretched out, buried inside the old Electric Church complex.

  Shockley had given the destination—a place on Fifty-second Street, not far from SSF Headquarters in the grim stone and steel tower everyone just called The Rock—and we’d ascended into silence. The hover had a disconcerting amount of glass; I could see New York passing by far beneath us, other hovers slipping between us and the ground. We were moving slowly, almost floating, with a deep vibration settling into the core of my body. It was dizzying and made my stomach lurch every time I glanced down. So I kept my eyes on Shockley’s mean and tight ones. I imagined I could hear them drying out with a light sizzle, dust particles hitting like meteors and leaving microscopic scars behind.

  I was free, though; no Push on my thoughts that I could detect, no invisible hand reaching out. I resisted the urge to test this every few seconds, forcing myself to remain still. They’d grabbed my guns, of course, but missed the blade in my boot. Definitely not cops. A System Pig would have shaken me upside down until everything had fallen out of my pockets.

  “We will be at Dr. Terries’ location in seven minutes,” Shockley said suddenly, his eyes locked on me. “He has just a few questions for you. We appreciate your help.”

  I smiled blandly. If Shockley the Civil Servant wanted to play a game, that was fine. The civil government and the cops had been at each other’s necks ever since the Monk Riots—which I’d caused when I’d killed Dennis Squalor and brought down the Electric Church—as they struggled for supremacy. Even so I had no doubt that this little shit would consider it his duty to deliver me up to the System Police once I’d given my interview or whatever to Dr. Terries. Whoever the fuck Dr. Terries was. I didn’t have any doubt that if I didn’t get off this hover, and soon, I was a dead man, one way or another.

  I looked past them into the cockpit. I could see the pilot, just a pair of shoulders in a blue jacket. Looking back at them, I recrossed my legs, laying one hand on my cracked, worn boot with my thumb and forefinger just above the hidden blade. I concentrated on slowing my breathing and heart rate.

  “You could tell me what this Dr. Terries wants with me, and we’d all be able to bond over the intimacy,” I suggested.

  Shockley cocked his head. “You’re a suspicious man, Mr. Cates.”

  “Last time I was scooped up into a hover, buddy, things didn’t end too well for me.”

  He smiled, a tightening of the corners of his mouth that implied the exact opposite of humor. “Mr. Cates, do you know a woman named,” he shut his eyes, “Candida Murrow?”

  I sq
uinted at him. I knew Candy. I saw her all the time down at Pick’s, but I said nothing. The golden rule with cops—or fucking bureaucrats—was that you asked questions, you never answered them. The only question I had, really, was the identity of the piece of shit selling me out. There was no way the fucking triplets here had found me through their superior investigative work and street contacts. Someone had fucked me.

  I resisted the urge to reach up and touch the healing wound on my neck. Shockley opened his eyes. “Ms. Murrow—a fine, upstanding citizen, no doubt—was found dead late yesterday.”

  I blinked but didn’t react. I hadn’t heard. Big, happy Kenyan, enjoyed her work, her English theoretical at best, but useful. Or had been.

  “She died in a very . . . unusual way. Looks viral—quite gruesome. Dr. Terries is director of Public Health, and he is concerned. She is a known associate of yours, Mr. Cates. You have an . . . organization.” He said this as if the word tasted funny in his mouth. “Dr. Terries is concerned that others in your organization may be similarly . . . infected.”

  I gave him the bland smile again. “Never heard of Dr. Terries. I don’t have a fucking health chip, Mr. Shockley.”

  He nodded. “Yes. When was the last time you had contact with Ms. Murrow, Mr. Cates? Dr. Terries is mainly concerned with her movements over the last few days.”

  I fidgeted; let them believe I was disconcerted, nervous. The tips of my fingers touched the top of the blade’s handle, and I paused, taking my time. I still had a few minutes before we made it to our destination, and I would have only one chance at this, because the second after I moved they would leap on me: the Pusher would grab my mind and Shockley would be ready to toss me around just in case that failed. “I’m afraid I don’t know Ms. Murrow.”

  Shockley smirked and glanced at the girl, and I knew my moment had come; they were going to start Pushing some cooperation into me. I sucked in the crank air and pinched the blade’s handle between my thumb and forefinger.