by Sean Platt
“Somehow I avoided the Crew and made it into England, but England, even then, wasn’t much better. Eventually I realized that the west was getting close to cutting itself from the rest of the world and sealing its borders, so I decided I had to find a way there or die trying. That was when they were grounding everything other than military aircraft and old America was blowing everything out of the sky, so as the barbarian armies came up north, I sneaked into a shipyard, stowed away on a transatlantic ship, and hoped for the best. I got lucky and after eating rats for weeks, I arrived in Philadelphia’s harbor and got into an immigration line. I hear I was one of the last — maybe the last — person allowed in before they closed the borders and started gunning ships.”
Doc was probably impressed, but if he was, he wouldn’t allow himself to show it. He speared a marshmallow on a sharp stick and started to roast it.
“And how do you know our lady here?”
“We’re friends,” said Kai before Nicolai could answer. Something in Doc’s manner made Kai nervous, and she didn’t want to add any sort of testosterone-fueled competition to their already messy situation. Outwardly, it looked like Doc was keeping cool, but there had been an edge growing in him over the past few hours. Doc didn’t like to show weakness, but Kai could read it on him. Among her handful of add-ons that didn’t require Beam connectivity was a heat map in her right eye. She could see Doc’s pulse and how his breathing had shallowed. Fight or flight. Doc was already keyed up, and for some reason his agitation was increasing as he listened to Nicolai.
“Friends,” said Doc, not at all fooled.
There was a moment of quiet. In it, Kai could hear a few noises she thought might be frogs and the buzz of something she couldn’t identify. Overhead, a few stars had dotted the sky. Their captors had heard Nicolai’s criticism and had made adjustments. Kai hadn’t been out in the wilderness much either, but the camping experience felt authentic to her. The fire was nice, and she found herself wanting to get closer.
She watched the two men over the fire’s dancing orange light. They were both tense. She could see stress in Nicolai too, despite his calm exterior.
“Let’s play a game,” she said.
They both looked at her as if she’d suggested swimming in acid.
“Seriously. If they’re going to give us a quiet night and a fire, let’s use it. Let’s tell our best client stories. Tell the truth. The others have to try to keep the storyteller honest, to see if they believe it.”
“Shouldn’t we be drinking for this?” said Doc.
Three bottles of Clearzo appeared on the ground. Doc picked one up, raised it, and said loudly, “Anyone else not want to play while a bunch of Beamer assholes are listening?”
Nicolai looked at Doc. Kai’s gaze went from one man to the other. Doc’s comment should have been funny, but nobody was laughing.
Nicolai’s eyes softened first. “Okay. You start, Kai,” he said.
Kai watched Doc’s temperature drop half a degree. Some of the tension left his neck and shoulders as he lowered the bottle.
“I had a client who wanted me to dress like a man,” she began. “But not a sexy man. A fat freight driver. He brought a holo synth to make me look like I had a huge gut and was all hairy. I wore a cap and a filthy white shirt. He brought a pair of jeans with him. They smelled. He said that when I wore them, I was supposed to let my ass crack hang out.”
Nicolai snickered, but Doc looked disgusted. “You did it?” said Doc.
“He didn’t even want to fuck me. He just watched me walk around like that while he beat off. Paid me very well for a half hour of being a guy.”
“Who was it?” Nicolai asked.
Kai smiled demurely. “I can’t tell you that.”
“A fat freight driver himself,” said Doc, looking at his bottle.
“My clients are at the top of the food chain,” said Kai, insulted. She wasn’t a bargain streetwalker, and she never did anything for money that didn’t amuse or please her in some way. At least not anymore.
“A high-ranking Directorate official, then. They’re all secretly perverts.” He looked at Nicolai. Kai wondered if it was a jab. Doc practically wore an Enterprise flag on his head everywhere he went, and he knew that Isaac was Directorate. But she couldn’t tell if it was a playful joke or a shrouded insult.
She let it go and shrugged, playing coy.
“How about you, boy scout?” said Doc, still looking at Nicolai.
“I only have one client and our relationship is confidential. So I can’t play. Should I leave?”
“Such an important man,” said Doc, still using that odd, almost-joking tone. “Tell us something else then, champ. You ever kill a man when you were out marching around the Wild East like Daniel Boone?”
Nicolai took a swig from his bottle of Clearzo.
“We didn’t say when you should drink,” said Doc. “So is that a yes?”
Nicolai shrugged, then drank again.
“Okay, I’ve got one,” said Doc. “I had a client who used to buy a new digestive upgrade from me every month. Big fat Directorate slob — one of the few with dough to burn.” Again he looked at Nicolai. “I don’t think this piece of shit ever moved. He had a cush job for a while, then got a dole high enough that he didn’t have to work and sat around all day like a lot of Directorate do. I had to go to him to sell to him, but I was happy to do it because he paid me so much. You know how a lot of the do-nothings have a ton of useless knowledge about one dumb thing? This guy had encyclopedic knowledge of 80s entertainment. Not twenty-eighties… nineteen-eighties. The whole time I’m hooking him up and helping him unpack the latest crap to send down his throat or inject so he could eat more and more and more, he’s telling me about this guy named John Hughes and something called the Brat Pack. But he’s telling me about it all sideways — like about Molly Whatever’s later projects instead of who the fuck Molly Whatever is. That’s the way these fucking savants are, like their obsession is something that everyone else understands and gives a shit about.”
Nicolai gave Doc a polite smile. Kai watched them both.
“I sold him something to install in his throat once,” Doc went on. “It cut his food like a sink disposal so he didn’t have to chew. Even then, he got like seven varieties of digestive nano injections. Everything was centered around liquifying his food as fast as possible so he could keep eating. He’d do this with EndLax, not instead of it. You know how EndLax will turn you into a bottomless pit and give you one meal of insane gluttony? But even then, you eventually, after hours, fill up, right? Laws of physics; there’s only so much space in a person. But see, this fat piece of shit had tubes going out as much as in, into a reclaimer he could empty through a port. All he did was eat and shit out his tubes. It stunk in there. He spent whatever money he had left on cleaning.”
“I thought this was a drinking game?” said Nicolai.
Doc drank half of his bottle of Clearzo. Kai could see his irises already starting to shake. You couldn’t bolt Clearzo like that. He’d be on the floor in twenty minutes if he kept at it.
“There ya go, boy scout,” said Doc. “Your turn.”
“I don’t drink Clearzo,” said Nicolai.
“Well ain’t you perfect,” said Doc, taking another swig.
“Maybe I should go next,” Kai offered.
“I’m not finished,” said Doc, even though he clearly had been. “I want to tell you more about this fucking Directorate pig who couldn’t get by without making his body half robot, like a weak piece of…”
“What’s wrong with you?” Kai snapped. She and Doc had had the add-ons conversation too many times. Doc sold enhancements for a living, and Kai had bought most of her significant number from him. She felt that everyone could use a little mechanical help to be their best self, and Doc usually agreed.
“What?”
“You sell enhancements. You have plenty yourself.”
Doc shrugged. Kai didn’t know what to make of Doc’s
spiny mood, but now she was getting pissed, too.
Doc took another sip of Clearzo. “Hey, I thought this was a game where we tried to outdo each other. That’s all I’m trying to do, sunshine, is outdo my boy here’s fantastic wilderness story and his outdoorsman knowledge.” He gave Kai a toothy smile. “Now… if this is a drinking game, I know you drink. You’ve downed shots between sucking my…”
“Fine,” said Kai, re-crossing her legs. “You want to see if I can out-do your story? I can. I’ll tell you about another of my clients. Most of the guys who I work with are okay, but in the end, it’s all just business. But one time, a man took me out to dinner, and…”
“I’ve taken you out to dinner,” said Doc. He took another sip.
“This one just took me out to dinner. Twice. That’s all we did those two times.”
“That’s one hot story, sunshine.”
“But,” Kai continued, running her fingers through her long, dark hair and then trailing them down her neck, “on the third date, when the check came, I insisted on paying. The guy fought for a moment, but then I said I was insisting because I wanted for him to owe me a favor.”
Kai almost smiled at the memory. She’d had men before who wanted to date her and “get to know her,” but those cases fell somewhere between annoying and pathetic. Kai was excellent at what she did, and had spent vast amounts of time and credits perfecting the art of making her clients feel loved, as if they were her boyfriends rather than paying customers. It was one of the things that made her so in-demand and allowed her to charge exclusive clients such exorbitant prices, but a side effect was that sometimes guys fell in love with her. Kai didn’t have to turn them down; she subtly cut them off with an anti-pheromone and they stopped being interested and eventually didn’t come back.
But it had been different with the client she was talking about now — with Nicolai. She’d met him at a Directorate dinner that she’d been attending with a member of the senate. She, Nicolai, and the senator found themselves at the same table. The senator got drunk and hit her, then said something coincidentally on-point about how her mother must have been terrible to raise a daughter who turned to whoring. Rather than retaliating, Kai was so shell-shocked that she simply walked off. Nicolai found her outside, eyes wet and loathing her own weakness. He had managed to offer her a ride home without sounding like he was trying to be a knight in shining armor. In Kai’s world, every intimate encounter ended in sex, so she’d been ready to give him a freebie by the time he dropped her off, but he hadn’t asked, or seemed to want it.
Kai told Doc (and Nicolai, for Doc’s sake) about how this mystery client had come to check on her the next day and the day after, and that each time they’d had a platonic, being-there-for-you dinner. Doc rolled his eyes through the story, and Nicolai watched her with an unreadable expression. Then Kai explained that on the third “date,” when she’d insisted on paying the bill, that the “favor” she’d wanted was sex.
“That’s the first and only time I’ve ever had to ask for it,” she said. “I thought he’d be too gentlemanly to do it, though. He knew I was an escort, and maybe would think I was dirty. But that didn’t happen at all.”
Doc rolled his eyes.
“We barely made it back to his place.” She smirked. “We were tearing each other’s clothes off in the cab. And when we did get inside and got the door closed, it was like he could read my mind. He spoke to me like I wanted to be spoken to. He touched me in all the right places. He took his time, and it lasted for hours. And the things he could do with his cock…”
“Please,” said Doc.
“Everything else is nothing by comparison,” said Kai, leaning forward in her camp chair, toward Doc. Her voice had turned into a taunting purr, and a hot feeling was creeping up the back of her neck. “No other lover has ever been able to measure up, literally or figuratively. I can fake my way through it with other clients, but nobody holds a candle to the guy I can’t bring myself to think of as a client, even when he pays me. I hear him in my head when I’m with the others. I feel his hands on my skin, his tongue on my…”
“Noah Fucking West,” said Doc, his face finally, satisfyingly, losing its cocksure expression.
But as Doc looked away, it was like a bubble popped for Kai. She felt suddenly and uncharacteristically embarrassed, aware that Nicolai was giving her a strange look. She blinked and leaned back, disoriented. She’d gotten so caught up in trying to jab Doc that she’d gotten carried away, and had said too much.
She tried giving Nicolai a jesting smile, to show him that it was all just part of the game.
Doc said, “If that’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done with a client, then I’ve grossly misjudged what it is you do. We’ve done crazier stuff than that.”
Nicolai looked at Doc. Something in his eyes shifted.
“I didn’t know you hired escorts, Doc,” said Nicolai. “You must spend all your time telling her how great you are.”
“Someone has to,” said Doc. He wore a grin that sat halfway on his face, like it was hiding something.
“Some men pay women so that they can feel better about themselves,” Nicolai explained.
“Some men pay women, then forget it’s just a transaction,” Doc retorted. “It’s really sad.”
“That’s the problem with you, Doc,” said Nicolai, slowly shaking his head of messy black hair. “You think everyone’s like you.”
“Hey, I’m just honest, scout. I pick my path and keep my feet on it.” He lowered his voice, then turned to Kai. “I know you won’t believe this, sweetheart, but some people sell their souls for cash, then spend all their time wishing they could be something else.”
Kai watched Nicolai’s eyebrows draw together. Nicolai had the heart and spirit of an artist, but Isaac Ryan had plucked him from the rabble when he’d first come to the NAU and Nicolai, fiercely loyal, had ended up Directorate by circumstance. It was a constant sore spot — one Nicolai must have shared with Doc before purchasing his creativity add-ons.
“You’re drunk,” said Nicolai.
“You’re a sellout,” said Doc. He stood and walked closer to the fire, now inches from Nicolai’s camp chair.
“Sit down, Doc,” said Kai.
“What did you do to get us all picked up, Doc?” said Nicolai, looking up. “Finally sell the wrong defective add-on to the wrong person?”
Doc opened his mouth to answer, but Kai seemed to be the only one of them who remembered that they weren’t actually sitting around a campfire but were instead prisoners locked in a simulator. Doc was about to say something revealing, so she stomped hard on his foot.
“The fuck?” said Doc, staring at her.
She stared back until finally, he seemed to understand. But then he raised his foot, planted it on Nicolai’s chest, and pushed him backward onto the ground.
Nicolai fumbled into an untidy heap. Then, untangling himself from his chair, he rolled and came to his feet. He walked forward until the two men — the tall, broad-shouldered upgrades dealer and the smaller, darker speechwriter — stood chest to chest. They stared at each other, the air hot with tension, until two Beamers entered the room, breaking their campsite illusion.
“Hit him,” one of the Beamers said to Doc.
“Don’t let that fucker get away with disrespecting you like that,” said the other Beamer to Nicolai.
“Dream on,” said the first Beamer. He pointed at Nicolai, then poked his partner in the chest. “You think that little bastard can take my guy? He’d be squashed.”
The second Beamer also pointed to Nicolai. “Are you kidding? Look at his eyes. That’s a kid who’s been fighting his entire life. I’ll bet he’s like a ninja. What kind of ninja shit can you do, kid?”
Nicolai, who was probably older than the Beamer who’d called him “kid,” said nothing. The arrival of the Beamers had broken the spell for Nicolai, and his angry expression was already gone. Doc’s expression, however, had been lubricated by drink and r
emained livid.
“Hit him,” said the first Beamer, again speaking to Doc. “Prove me right and I’ll have the room give you a pie.”
“I’ll have it set you up with a naked chick,” said the second Beamer, looking at Nicolai.
“Two chicks and a pie,” said the first Beamer, to Doc.
“Six chicks.”
When neither man moved, the first Beamer walked over to Kai and pressed his pain pod against her neck. “Prove me right or I’ll turn this pod high enough to make her neck muscles snap her spine.”
Kai was considering her fight options when movement caught her eye. Beside her, Doc reared back and punched Nicolai hard enough in the face to make his feet leave the ground. Nicolai struck the dirt hard. The first Beamer hooted in victory and raised his hands, then said “Watch this!” to the other man. When his “watch” command was followed by nothing, Kai assumed he was replaying slow-motion video of Doc’s punch in their visors to gloat.
Kai ran to Nicolai. The Beamers watched her and then left the room, one laughing and the other sulking. Nicolai was unconscious, a sea of red swallowing one eye. Doc’s muscles had been enhanced with carbon nanotubes and scavenger nano injections, and that had been a hell of a hit — far harder than it should have been.
“I had to,” said Doc, standing over her. “He was going to kill you.”
Kai lashed out with one leg and struck Doc in the chest. Just as he fell toward the campfire, the scene changed and Doc struck grass in an open prairie rather than flame, avoiding well-deserved burns by milliseconds.
Chapter 8
Crumb’s horse trotted along beside Leah, who was riding Missy. They could have doubled up on one horse, but Crumb smelled horrible. There was a strange thing that happened with Crumb that nobody could put their finger on that made him especially pungent on some days, and today was one of those days. Leah had a theory about it. She thought that every once in a while, the food in Crumb’s gray beard reached a critical mass and began to ferment. At those times, he wafted an especially rancid odor that was partially B.O. and partially something acidic, like spoiled dairy.