Proxy

by Alex London

  Using the poor to control the poor kept everyone in the Valve at one another’s throats and kept them from looking too far up in the direction of the skyscrapers and the private communities. The Guardians rarely showed up to haul anyone off. The market preferred to keep its enforcers more invisible than that.

  But a girl had died. Syd couldn’t believe it. His patron had actually killed someone. Syd never imagined a crime like that or a punishment like this. He never imagined he’d find himself here.

  It had to be one of those intelligence centers that SecuriTech ran. “Enemies of the market” disappeared inside them and never came out.

  Last year, after the Rebooters hacked an insurance datastream, two or three dozen guys were pulled out of the Valve in night raids, accused of anti-market terrorism and supporting the debt revolutionaries hiding in Old Detroit. The Rebooters, as they called themselves, were always trying to hack corporate systems to erase data, but they never managed to inflict much damage. The network was resilient.

  The men who’d been rounded up in night raids disappeared into a place like this one. Their bodies started showing up in the gutters of the Valve a few days later, dumped out with the rest of the Upper City trash. It was an effective reminder not to upset the status quo.

  Syd remembered Egan laughing at one of the headless bodies lying arms akimbo on a heap of discarded processors.

  “That’s Doolaine,” he said. “The butcher who used to pay us to hunt rats and then rip us off when we brought ’em in.”

  “How do you know?” Syd had asked.

  “The neck tattoo. I’ll never forget that big knockoff’s neck tattoo.” Egan spat on the body and the bead of saliva rolled across the purple skin of his chest. “You don’t remember the beatings he used to give us?”

  Syd had shrugged. He remembered, but he’d developed the philosophy that it was better to forget old beatings. A grudge was just another debt owed.

  “No way he was a Rebooter,” Syd said. “He wasn’t political. He didn’t care about debt reform.”

  “Who cares what he was or what he believed?” Egan shrugged. “Someone must have informed on him for some reason. It’s not our problem.”

  They had walked on, but the idea stuck with Syd. Someone didn’t like Doolaine and had made an accusation. It didn’t matter if it was true. Truth was a commodity no one down in the Valve could afford. Protection mattered a lot more than truth and Doolaine didn’t have any. Too many enemies.

  Syd remembered feeling glad he didn’t know anyone well enough to have enemies like Doolaine had. He’d kept to himself, private. But now, lying on the floor listening to the tortured screams of whoever it was in those other rooms, he couldn’t help but consider the coincidence. The same day he agreed to help Tom, the same day his crush on Atticus Finch came to light, was the day he was taken by the Guardians. Had he formed too many connections, reached out just far enough to get cut off? Did he have more enemies than he’d thought? Or maybe, the wrong friends?

  No.

  This wasn’t about him. It was his patron. It had nothing to do with Syd. That was his weakness. When he got to thinking, it always turned back on himself, his failings, his mistakes.

  But he didn’t matter in this. He was just a body for the rich to use and to discard when it suited them. That was his place, his market niche, as they called it. He was a proxy and his life was on loan.

  His forearm ached. Or rather, it ached in a different way than the rest of him. He looked at it and saw the angry red welt of skin with silver metallic letters embedded in it. They’d done it. They had actually branded him.

  MARIE LOUISE ALVAREZ, 16. His arm glistened at him. The metal letters implanted in his skin were hard and surprisingly warm to the touch. They were slick with antibacterial gel.

  Syd pressed the base of his hands into his eyes. Another mark on his body. The birthmark, the scars from fights and cheap vaccines, now this, another reminder he had as much control of his skin as he did over the weather. None.

  Rage boiled inside him, pushing the pain in his body down. Sixteen more years, added just like that, and in Sterling Work Colony. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

  He had played by the rules, mostly, for his whole life. He didn’t turn squatter or scavenger or freelance. He didn’t hook up with the revolutionaries. He didn’t care about all the Rebooter stuff, deleting the debts, restoring equality to a corrupt blah blah blah . . . the sermons got tiresome. The debts were tied to the data; the data was in the blood. There was no deleting it, and the people who thought otherwise were no better than mystics, praying for a hopeless deliverance.

  Syd could never afford idealism and he never wanted to. He’d rather do his work and get ahead without any stupid games. The debt he had, the debt that had been forced on him for the rescue he never asked for and the upbringing he barely got, he paid. He endured the beatings and the volunteer work and the cruelties inflicted on behalf of his Upper City patron because that’s how it worked. He was almost free.

  And then they changed the terms.

  They changed their policy, just like that.

  Sterling Work Colony was a hell. Everyone knew it. Survivors told stories of brutal guards, relentless disease, and ruthless inmates. There was no escape because there was nowhere to go. The Mountain City was the only civilization on the continent. The rest was swamp and desert and ruins. Sterling was the end, a place without compassion, without even the false kindness of the free market. There was only work and death.

  And soon, Sydney Carton would be sent there. Sixteen years old and off to Sterling with the unredeemable.

  No.

  He refused. It was that simple.

  He was not unredeemable and he was not a terrorist and he was not just a body they could discard and replace to teach some patron a lesson.

  He was Sydney Carton—or whatever his name had been before—and he was a human being and he wasn’t just going to lie down and take this. He had to do . . . something. He had to escape before they came to take him away.

  He pushed himself up and pulled on his clothes.

  He didn’t know how, but he had to get out of the city, find some other place to live. He’d never make Lagos. Even if he could get to a coast, stow away on some kind of global shipping hovercraft, the border at Lagos was closed. The Nigerians kept their prosperity by executing illegal immigrants on sight. There wasn’t room for newcomers and, like here, there was nothing but desert around their city. Here or there, civilization wasn’t an option for a fugitive.

  So it was the wilderness. They said no one could survive out there; drought, earthquakes, and storms had wrecked what the wars didn’t, and all the old cities had been abandoned or destroyed. The world was like a feral dog. It tore out its hair to get rid of its fleas, but a few clung on, digging in where the paws couldn’t scratch. You step out too far, the dog will shake you off.

  But there had to be someone who adapted. It wouldn’t be civilization like Syd knew, but it’d be something. Maybe he could hook up with some desert nomads, learn to find water in the rocks and suck nutrients from the sand. There were worse lives, he guessed. At least he’d be free. Or he could go east, try to find where he’d come from. But the thought of hurricane winds and tropical disease gave him pause. There was a reason everyone had retreated to the Mountain City long ago. There was a reason refugees clambered to get in.

  There were the displacement camps, of course, to the east and the west, but the Benevolent Society knew everything that went on in them. If he tried to hide out there, he’d just get caught again.

  Other options? He could join up with the Rebooters. They were supposed to be in Old Detroit, living in the jungle ruins. They’d probably sell Syd to the organ harvesters as soon as look at him. What good was he to a cause he wanted no part of?

  Syd didn’t plan to live at the mercy of anyone else’s institutions ever again, not the patrons or the Benevolent Society and not the revolutionaries. He’d had enough of institutions.
They were like fire that way. Useful, but if you played with them for too long, burns were inevitable. He’d choose the nomads, if he could find them, if they existed.

  He’d need to get an ID clone first, something to mask his biofeed from the scanners. The system of transmitters and aerial drones could track him, just as advertisers did, unless he could outwit them. With the right hacks, he could overwrite the code in his bloodstream for long enough to get away, but for that he’d need Egan. Egan always knew where to get fake ID.

  First he had to get out of this room. And for that, he needed to use the old journeyman lie, low-tech but time-tested.

  He threw himself to the floor.

  [10]

  “UGGGHHH,” SYD GROANED. “OOOOOO.” He rolled across the tiles. He writhed.

  The door slid open and a six-legged black metal bot entered the room. It looked like a cross between a dog and spider. It had two barrels mounted on a swivel where the dog ears should be, and a series of cameras around its body, like spider eyes. The Arak9 Model 6. Top of the line. Their parts were only just starting to show up on the black market. Mr. Baram spoke of them with awe.

  “Please tell me the nature of your difficulty,” the robot asked in an oddly gentle female voice. Syd was thrown off for an instant.

  “I . . . ,” he started. “My stomach . . . it hurts!” He groaned. “I think something ruptured. I need medical assistance.”

  “I am fully equipped to evaluate prisoner medical emergencies. Please stand,” the bot requested.

  “I can’t!” he groaned.

  The bot approached. Syd’s biodata appeared in holos in the air around it, monitoring his heart, his blood pressure, his brainwaves. For a moment, he was afraid the machine could read his mind, but, like Mr. Baram said, data was not the same as reading.

  Once the Arak9 was in front of him, he reached his hand underneath its armor-plated base and found the emergency reset exactly where it was supposed to be. He pressed his palm against it and mumbled a thank-you to Mr. Baram and the blessings of an informal education. They’d had the manual for the Arak9 Model 6 for months. His biodata vanished.

  “Now,” Syd told the bot when its active light came on again. “Program override. Recognize speech pattern alpha. Accept voice commands from this pattern only. Confirm.”

  “Pattern confirmed,” the bot replied in its metallic default voice.

  “Take me to the nearest exit,” Syd told it. “Disable any resistance with nonlethal means. Confirm.”

  “Nonlethal. Confirmed,” the bot said and walked into the hallway. Syd followed close enough to keep a hand on its back.

  The hallway was empty. They clattered toward a corner with a panel projecting a 3-D image of a white sand beach. It was meant to be soothing. Syd was not soothed.

  As they neared it, the image changed to a drone’s-eye view of Syd and the Arak9 moving down the hall. A silent alarm had been triggered. The lights in the hallway went out. Guardians could see in the dark. Syd couldn’t. He grabbed on to the bot with both hands.

  “Don’t lose me,” he told it.

  “Confirmed.”

  They moved quickly through the dark hallway. Syd’s body ached and he struggled to keep up. He was totally blind and going on faith that the Arak9 hadn’t been linked back to the network to lead him right into a trap. That’s what he would do if he were trying to catch himself right now.

  The Guardians’ plan, however, was much simpler.

  “Stop!” a female Guardian commanded from up ahead. A panel behind her lit up brightly, framing her in silhouette. A half-dozen more identical silhouettes appeared next to her. All of them armed.

  “You are in breach of contract,” the Guardian said. “And you have vandalized company property.”

  Syd heard the hum of EMD sticks charging up. The silhouettes raised their weapons. Syd braced for the painful convulsions. They never came.

  The Arak9 fired thick foam from its cannons, which flooded the hallway and surrounded the Guardians. The foam hardened instantly and absorbed the charge from their EMD blasts. The robot moved past the mountain of foam and headed toward the exit.

  Within minutes they were outside. It was night and the neon glow of the Upper City shone just beyond the high walls of the compound. The upper offices would have a clear view down into the center. Syd shuddered to think of the things those offices’ workers could see, the things they learned to ignore.

  Syd’s bot fired sonic blasts up to the guard towers that stood silhouetted against the neon lights. He heard the screams of Guardians as they were hit with a wall of concentrated vibrations, enough to shatter their perfectly designed eardrums. Male and female Guardians rolled on the ground in anguish ahead of him. His new toy had disabled every living thing in their path. He didn’t even hear so much as a ringing. This thing knew how to aim.

  He liked having his own bot. Maybe he could bring it with him into his new life, like a pet and a bodyguard all in one, the way people used to keep dogs. He’d need some company, anyway. He wasn’t about to ask Egan to go on the run with him. He wouldn’t want to make his friend turn him down.

  “Let’s go,” he told the bot. “Exit.”

  “Confirmed.”

  The robot charged across a clearing toward a concrete blast barrier with a steel gate. He hoped this bot had a way to get through. The gate was designed to withstand mechanized assault.

  Half a dozen combat robots raced after them, firing their own blasts at Syd. As the dirt kicked up around him and the shock waves nearly knocked him off his feet, he realized that they were not using nonlethal weapons. They weren’t shooting to incapacitate him. They were shooting to kill.

  “Focus,” he told himself. No time to think about dying. This was a time to think about living, about staying alive.

  At least five of the other Arak9’s were closing in. He would never make it to the gate in time, let alone through it. He jumped onto his bot’s back. He was going way beyond the instruction manual now, but it was his only hope.

  “Leap over the obstruction!” he yelled.

  “Leap confirmed,” the bot responded, bent its six legs and sprang into the air. The ground beneath them exploded with blasts from the other bots. He shut his eyes as they flew over the wall. He didn’t know how well this model would handle impact on the other side. He braced himself.

  They hit the ground with a jarring crunch that jolted Syd off the bot’s back and knocked the wind out of him. His bot seemed undamaged. Syd stood to get back on, but he saw the others bots leaping over the wall after them.

  “Damn,” he said, panting, and glanced to the tall buildings around him. He hoped the lower floors were empty, given what he was about to do. “Confirm full core destruct. Five second delay.”

  “Full core destruct confirmed,” the bot said, as the others landed around them in a circle. “Meltdown with five second delay.”

  They didn’t teach this in Mr. Thompson’s Robotics class.

  “Sorry, pal,” Syd muttered, patting the machine on the back. Then he crawled under it and curled into a ball. He hoped he was right that the epicenter of the blast from the core meltdown would be safe, like the eye of the storm in a hurricane. The other bots tightened in around him. Surrounded.

  “Five. Four.”

  He covered his head with his hands. He squeezed his eyes shut. The whole system worked on background radiation, so the explosion from a combat bot’s meltdown should vaporize every machine in a fifty-yard radius and temporarily disable every network in five hundred yards. He’d get a head start and he’d inflict some serious damage on the way out. He just hoped the explosion wouldn’t kill him in the process. He’d never even had his first kiss.

  “Three. Two. One.”

  [11]

  THE MOUNTAINS WERE DARK against an impossibly star-studded sky. The Milky Way made a smudge over the horizon.

  So it was supposed to be night.

  Knox hit a button on the bed, and the 3-D mountain scene was replaced
with a large digital display: 11:43 p.m. 64° Fahrenheit. Air Quality Index: 97.

  Funny, he thought, it wasn’t even midnight. It felt later. He took a deep breath. His ribs didn’t hurt anymore. His head didn’t ache. The biotech they’d been pumping into him must be top-notch to work so quickly. He looked under his hospital gown, relieved to see that he was still all there. He wasn’t even bruised. To tell the truth, felt pretty good. Energized, revitalized.

  But bored.

  He tapped his projector on the table beside the bed, brought up a holo for “entertainment.” He swiped through the menus. Sports and movies and short comedy and long comedy and reality drama and reality comedy and reality classics and news.

  Boring. Boring. Boring. And boring.

  He chewed his nails and spat the little flakes onto the sheets.

  An image popped into his head, uninvited, of Sydney, hanging on that chain. Screaming. He had looked up, right into the hospital room it seemed, right into Knox, except it wasn’t Sydney’s face. It was Knox’s. His own green eyes sliced into him.

  “Marie,” his own face said.

  He bit down through his cuticle and the pain cleared his head. He flipped the holo again to a different menu to see what his friends were up to.

  Grayden: grnded. @home w/ fam

  Simeonie: killr party @Arcadia vry retro

  Nine: @Arcadia w. Simi & Cheyenne. D-troit chic=tyght!

  Cheyenne: crazy tryp!#$^%!!!

  So everyone was at Arcadia, and Cheyenne was tweaked on something. Knox sighed. That party was supposed to be lux.

  Someone had found all these retro cars that ran on gas and parked them all in a giant warehouse end to end, so they were like the floor of the place, with all the roofs and hoods and open-top convertibles forming a crazy desert of dunes and craters. A few of the cars actually ran so that the whole place smelled like classic fumes. It must have cost a fortune to get the antique gas from scavengers.

  Everyone wanted in to this party, and Knox’s friend Nine could make it happen for a price. Nine’s father was some big piracy consultant, so he knew everyone in the entertainment business. Nine and Knox had spent a month making fake ID patches to sell to kids from all over the city, Upper, Lower, whatever, even the Valve, if they could pay.