by John Shirley
But first we had to get the jumper to the hospital. Mercedes drove, I rode shotgun. “You got that gun with you?” she asked suddenly, working the stick shift with quick, angry motions of her hand.
“Just the little plastic one.”
Something came on TVnet in the truck cab about Senator Boxell’s plan to harvest the kid gangs. Maybe it was the word harvest that caught my attention, that being some of my own jargon. “There’s just no point in not facing the reality of today’s world,” he said, on the little screen. “If it weren’t for the planetary climate change emergency, why, we could manage all this population. As it is, with millions of orphans—we estimate more than half a million of them on the street in every major American city—it’s just cruel and nonsensical to leave these kids to starve to death. The right thing to do is euthanasia and organ harvesting. It’s a matter of triage . . .”
Mercedes gave a bitter little laugh, hearing that. When Dad died, she ran off on her own. I spent two weeks looking for her; finally found her living on the streets—in one of those orphan kid gangs.
After Senator Boxell was a news spot then about the war in Pakistan, another thousand men caught in a nerve-gas cloud, along with about four thousand civilians—that old prick General Marsh saying he had it all under control . . .
Then a commercial. A sexy woman’s mouth appeared on the little dashboard screen, saying, “The SINGULARITY is here. Sign up for Singular! Search it. Do it. Free it.”
“Someone’s always claiming the Singularity is here or about to be, or something,” Mercedes snorted, looking at a side street, as we passed. The street, down the hill a little, was flooded by the rising tide. “I wish they’d just let us hook into it and go somewhere else . . . Any fucking place else . . .”
I didn’t say, “Could be worse, Mercedes. Least we have a place to live. We pull in some WD.”
I used to say that to her. But lately it gets her mad and there are still bruises on my shoulder from where she punched me last time.
I glanced in back again. The woman’s eyes were tight shut but the hand on her good arm was making funny little clutching motions. Still alive.
We got to the hospital in about five minutes. We nosed the truck slowly through the indigent crowds outside, the homeless, people trying to get into the hospital. Lots of people sick with the mutated malaria.
We had no air conditioning, and away from the bay, when I rolled down the window, the air was thick, and muggy, smelled like unwashed people. Mosquitoes whined at us. Hostile faces turned toward us. Someone threw a bottle that clacked into the side of the truck. I rolled up the window again.
We drove slowly up to the wall next to the emergency line to the public ER entrance. But we ignored the line—Mercedes had the woman’s Gold Medicard. If it was up to date, it’d get our jumper into any medical facility. Only the rich, the connected, and certain government types had them.
We pulled up by the high steel gate to the inner hospital lot, and the ExAd kiosk. I could see four paramil guards in full armor standing inside the gate, under the overhang, faces shut away in opaque, reflective helmets, idly toying with their recoil-reversal batons.
It started to rain, one of those glutinous, warm downpours we get now. She started the wipers and they left streaks of dark grease from the rain on the windshield. Rain clouds even more polluted than usual, probably just got here from overseas. Thanks for sharing, China.
Mercedes got out, hurried over to the reader in the Express Admissions kiosk, slipped the little card through and a screen flickered in response. From the truck, I could see she was talking to someone on the screen, pointing at the truck for the kiosk camera. I glanced back at the broken woman lying on the old, folded rug on the truck bed, next to my harvest bag, saw her grimacing, hands fisting, eyes shut. And then, out behind the truck, a sudden surge of motion—a kid gang, pushing through the crowd, coming our way.
This gang of little kids had those bullet-shaped slam-helmets they steal from the Japan Center. Some kind of trendy gear from Tokyo. They came ramming through the waiting crowd, heads down, using the helmets to penetrate the throng like bullets nosing through flesh.
“Those kids,” Mercedes said, coming back to the truck, blinking in the rain. “I know ’em. We need to get the fuck out of their way . . .”
Then the gate slid back, for us, as Mercedes climbed in, the guards stepping forward, one of them waving us through while the others brandished their RR sticks to keep the crowds back. Several of the kids charged the paramils, pretty kamikaze thing to do—the kids were half the guards’ size. The RR sticks went crack, sparked with energy, the kids were flung back, spinning through the air.
Mercedes went too fast through the open gate, almost nailing one of the guards. He had to jump out of the way, shouting angrily, his amplified voice barking something that might’ve been, “Tweakin’ sperm-puddle!”
She stopped the truck and we got out. Two burly orderlies were rolling a gurney through the sliding doors toward our truck. I was worried about leaving the harvest bag out there, where the guards might go through it, but no choice, we had to get that transfer out of the woman, and she had to be awake to do it . . .
So fuck it, we followed the gurney into the hospital. I was afraid that they’d pat me down, being as the metal detectors aren’t much good anywhere, with the hardened plastic guns around, but they didn’t . . .
Anytime things are urgent—you end up waiting. It’s like life wants to make sure you get a chance to savor every last possible split-second of frustration; like it wants to make sure you torture yourself with hopeless impatience.
But finally they let us come in from that piss hole of a waiting room, to see the broken woman cleaned up and tubed, in her little clean white booth, one of the few private rooms in the hospital. A bank of monitors hooked up to her.
It was just us and a white-painted metal-and-plastic healthbot trundling around her, scanning, humming inside itself, whirring irritably when we got in the way.
Mercedes was on one side of the hospital bed, I was on the other. The woman was stripped to a green hospital gown. Both long legs and one arm in instacasts. Small breasts, wide apart, tenting the gown, her head going side to side in a druggy semidelirium.
“Hey bridge lady,” Mercedes said.
The broken woman opened her eyes to slit. “You got here,” she croaked at us. “Same ones, from the bridge?”
“We’re here,” I said.
“Told ’em you had to . . . had to come in.” She gave a bloodstained, sad little smile. “Said you were my only relatives.”
“Heartwarming,” Mercedes said. “How we do the transfer?”
“You got to do . . .” She cleared her throat. Took a breath. Managed, “. . . something else for me. First.”
“That wasn’t the deal!” Mercedes hissed, her dark eyes snapping.
“You got . . .” The woman swallowed hard. “You got a transpod?”
Mercedes snorted. “What you think?” She reached into her coat pocket, pulled it out, held it up: one of the flat models, slim as a playing card. We harvested it a month ago off what was left of a depressed accountant.
“Okay,” the broken woman said, her voice barely audible. She paused and sighed as the healthbot extruded a needle from its utility column and squirted some meds into her IV. It trundled away, and the woman went on, “I’ll give you half the money now. But . . .” She took a breath. “But to get the rest, you got to bodyguard me for an hour till my people get here. The soulless are pressing ’em hard. You got to stick with me maybe hour and a half . . .”
I remember thinking: Did she say “soulless” ?
“Bodyguard?” I said. “Lady there’s guards all around this place. Plus the hospital has two city cops in it.”
“They might be Empties . . . soulless . . . or . . . the soulless’ll push buttons on ’em . . . most of the Empties, they’re rich bigshots . . . I wasn’t trying to jump off that bridge—it was that, or . . .”
<
br /> Mercedes sniffed and shook her head so that her curls bounced. “You’re in some kinda cult? Talking about soulless people and shit?”
The broken woman licked her lips. “I’m . . . was with Justice Department. Field officer. Internal Affairs. Some of us found out about the Empties . . . the Singularity thing. The soulless . . .” She was pretty stoned on the meds. Not making much sense. “Independent investigation . . .” She took a ragged breath. “They say we rogued out but . . . they’re offering new bodies to everyone . . .”
“Which version of the Singularity you talking about?” I asked. Not knowing what else to say. Thinking we ought to just get the five grand and get out with that. But not wanting to leave her here either.
She lifted her good arm up, shakily wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Upload minds to new bodies . . . bodies fixed up to last longer . . . nanobot refreshers. Some of the bodies are vat grown. Some are, like, stolen.”
Mercedes was shaking her head again. But I was feeling kind of funny, looking at this woman. This woman was badass. This woman had lived through something that kills most people and she was all crunched up but she was still negotiating, working her situation. This woman had some kind of gravitas. Made me take her seriously. Gave me another feeling too . . . I looked at her name on the hospital’s patient info sheet. Said she was Dresden Dennings. What a badass name, too. Dresden. Maybe I could find out her birthday, add up the numbers, see if they felt friendly to me. I looked at her, past all the bruises, thinking I could fall in love with this woman. Even if she was five or six years older than me.
Living with your sister gets old. Don’t get me wrong Syke. I love Mercedes even more than you do. Different, is all.
“It’s not a fucking cult,” Dresden said. “It’s just . . . what happens. They found a way to upload minds. The mind gets transferred but . . . turns out . . . souls are real. Mind goes, the soul . . .” She licked her lips. “Soul doesn’t go with it. People end up soulless. Empties. What goes in the upload—it’s not . . . holographic.” “What the fuck?” Mercedes muttered.
“Holographic consciousness,” Dresden said, a sort of awe in her voice. “What gets uploaded, it’s missing a dimension. And empathy, love, all that—it’s in that dimension, see . . . and they . . . the Empties don’t have it.” She laughed raspily. “They don’t even have a sense of humor anymore. The Singularity is mass producing sociopaths. Thousands, tens of thousands of sociopaths. They don’t trust feeling people. We can’t be predicted, see. Senator Boxell . . .” Her eyelids drooped. Her voice drooped too. “The Joint Chiefs. The President. The mayor. The police chief. They’ve all had it. Supposed to be a body that doesn’t age . . . holes with eyes . . . Empties . . .”
The meds were really kicking in now and her words slurred together, her eyes rolled back, mostly whites.
“She can’t transfer the money all dozey like this, Mercedes,” I said. “We got to wait for her.”
Mercedes bitched and cussed but it was no good, Dresden was too stoned. There were two chairs, and we pulled them up, and waited . . . thinking over what she’d said.
We were supposed to be bodyguards protecting her from the soulless. From . . . the Empties.
Lunacy. But someone had chased her off that bridge.
We did have that working gun—the hardened-plastic disposable pistol, use and lose, good for five shots, compacted-polymer slugs. Metal detectors don’t pick it up. Use it and throw it away. Kill a man with it, if it doesn’t break—some of them are made crappy. I had the gun in my baggy army coat pocket.
But bodyguarding? Not our specialty. Let’s face it, we were water buzzards, not raptors.
“This is suck-ugly bullshit,” Mercedes said. “Maybe I’ve got a stimpill I can put in her mouth, stim her up and get her to transfer the money.”
“That might kill her,” I said.
She looked at me defiantly. “So?”
“Um—I just . . .” I shrugged.
Mercedes shook her head in disgust. “You’re getting all humpy for this woman.”
“No, I . . .”
She shook her head again and got out her viddy, and that’s when she called you up. You remember that, anyhow.
I remember when we met, me and you, Syke, if you want to call that meeting. Mercedes talked me into visiting the VR social space with her, though she knows I don’t like them. She insisted I had to meet “Psych”. I didn’t know how you spelled it then. “He likes to psych people out but he’s a good guy,” she said. She seemed so up about it, and I hardly ever saw her up, so I gave in and there we were, in that neutral space, feeling like we’re physically walking through a shiny digital hallway, passing people who were jabbering about this and that, people with their little 3D persicons floating over their heads.
Somehow Mercedes found you in that cloud room that’s like your second home. I don’t know how you can find your way around in there. Going from one weird little cluster of furniture to another in all that colored fog. But there you were, you popped up out of nowhere, arms spread to hug Mercedes, beaming with that big wide mouth and eyes. I wonder if you really look like that? Looked like a real face to me. I remember you had that persicon of some skinny twentieth century actor dancing in a top hat, around and around.
Mercedes said, “Hey Syke, this is my older brother Whim. Anyway he’s a year older . . .”
And you said, “I heard you were gonna be a writer, like your dad, and then you decided to rob dead people instead.”
You were smiling in that weirdly sympathetic way, and I just laughed. I don’t know how you get away with saying shit like that without getting people mad. But I guess that’s your talent.
“Mercedes talks too much,” I said. Thinking that was strange because she normally doesn’t talk too much. But she really trusted you, Syke.
“The thing is,” you said, “being a writer is almost always about robbing dead people. ’Specially nowadays. Take other people’s old ideas and use ’em like kiddy blocks and make castles. You want to go in a ‘world?”
Then we went to that underwater subworld you like. All those caverns where we could fight monsters and laugh when their heads exploded with pretty silver confetti.
I’m thinking about all this, Syke, because it was that day that we met Mr. Dead Eyes. At first we thought he was one of the VR bots, a program simulating a ghost or something, but he was an avatar of somebody real somewhere, and he kept trying to find out where Mercedes lived in the physical world. He found her again and again down there—in that world.
When you looked at the guy—I swear there was this feeling like you could fall into him; like you lean over a deep well to look in and lose your balance and fall in. Big tall guy, his eyes always unfocussed, that red mouth, too red for a man’s lips, and that big hunk of chin, and that archaic little faux hawk haircut . . . And when he talked he seemed so empty . . .
“You make me want to get all the way to the center of you, and out the other side,” Mr. Dead Eyes said—that’s what he said to Mercedes, and more than once. “It’s so sad to have to run from the one you belong to,” he said to her, another time. “Let me open you to big fat sensations, Mercedes.”
Remember that one made you mad, Syke? You told him to fuck off and he just laughed and the laughter didn’t show in his eyes.
And I think he was one of the first ones. Because I heard him talking up the Singularity, and his new body, and how he was going to live ten thousand years.
You remember, Syke?
Okay: The hospital. Mercedes squinting into that little screen she was holding, trying to see your VR semblance in that colored fog, asking you how to do a really secure transfer of funds, saying there was some worrying stuff about the transfer we were about to do, and you were your usual smarmily assured technonerd self, rattling off access protocols at her, which she recorded in a sidebar..
And then I saw that a man was standing in the door to Dresden’s hospital cubby. And it was Mr. Dead Eyes, Syke.
In physical person. Looking just like his semblance. Wearing a black and gray Federal Police uniform, headset, a mike clipped to his shoulder. Those same unfocused eyes, that red, red mouth, that big chin. Big hands. And one of those hands was on a gun butt, at his right hip.
“Why there you are,” he said. “When I saw the scan from outside the hospital, I said, ‘Is that Mercedes, Syke’s little friend from the subworlds?’ And by jiminy it’s her in physical person. I always said we’d meet in the meat . . .”
Mercedes was gaping at him, blinking hard, like she thought something had gone wrong with her eyes. Just looking at the guy she’d had to ditch a dozen times when she was in the social space. The guy who’d stalked her through it. And here he was in person. His cop’s name tag said SGT. IMBER.
Mercedes broke the connection with you, and then she stood up, glaring ice cold at Imber. “You found me.” I never heard three words spoken with more loathing.
He grinned. “Not exactly coincidence. Your name popped up connected to our rogue here, I asked for this one . . .”
“Don’t let him near me.” Took me a second to work out who said that. It wasn’t Mercedes—it was Dresden, her eyes cracked open. “Wants to kill me,” she said. “Soulless. He’s . . . empty.”
“Empty of what?” Imber said, stepping into the little room, his hand tightening on the butt of his pistol. “No big ass deal. It’s more like an appendectomy.”
I felt a long, deep chill, that seemed to go on and on, when he said that. I was thinking, It’s true.
Imber shook his head sadly at the broken woman. “You didn’t have to go through this, Dresden. You didn’t have to run onto the bridge. You didn’t have to fight our people. Didn’t have to jump just to get away from those boys—that was some crazy shit. You’re lucky to be alive.”
Dresden licked her dry lips. “Wasn’t going to let them . . . take my body . . . push me out . . .”