Children of Gravity

by E. R. Jess

  The drunk man took a half-step back, leaning his right ear back over the guardrail where a raging storm river flowed.

  Makz picked up a length of rebar from the street.

  Rebar. Scraps of rebar were the single most important commodity in the wastelands and their fringes. Much like all of the civilizations of the globe rose and fell at the whim of their weapons, this one shaped the land into a crooked image of itself. Lengths of rebar made the difference between a polite society and one of disarray.

  And each piece had a personality. Makz's piece had some stories to tell. Broken bone. Shattered armor. The hot grip of an angry man pressing into clouds of teargas. That simple piece of iron had a seat at the top of a great financial institution. It was important. But at that time, found amongst the rubble and soot, it was an atom bomb.

  Makz grabbed the man by the throat, his super-fast reflexes would cost him some torn muscle later, and the bruises might surprise him. He held the man's neck and drew back the rebar club and beat him with it. The man was left in a crumbled heap on the pavement; alive, but broken.

  Makz sat in the man's spot and put his head in his hands. His heart sped up, he sweat rivers. He had to remember to breathe, as his lungs decided to leave that particular detail up to him. A pain shot through beneath his chest.

  The Pulse, Makz thought to himself through the haze. He needed more. Makz stalked off into the wilds.

  A circle of light hovered above a door in what used to be a wind plant control station. A few lazy blades spun above Makz as he put his hand to the door. He was falling in and out of consciousness, dead on his feet, and his senses were blunted.

  A young man opened the door, smiling wide. “Do come in. Mind the rug.”

  Makz caught his breath as he sat on a workbench. He spoke in gasps. “Hadrian, I was no closer this time, that last tank wasn’t everything you promised.” Makz spat out the taste of the night air.

  “You are either lying or really burned out. That was great shit.” Hadrian, with white eyes and a fairly menacing suit of plastic riot armor on his thin frame, lounged on a table with his feet up. “I mean look at you, you're covered in blood, not just splattered with it like usual.” He said, gesturing to the centrifuges and vials and diagnostic equipment around him, “Look, it's up to your body chemistry to provide any more,” Hadrian revealed another dermal vial, “But, it is fortuitous that you've come by, into this one I put a few extra surprises.”

  “I want that sense of order I used to get.” Makz sighed grudgingly.

  “Same thing. Order, week-long orgasms, vices are all the same. The Pulse is what you make of it. Next time you cloud, try yoga instead of skull-cracking. I can’t promise that you will find your inner self, but hell, I can say this will be the best darned synapse-fuck ever.”

  Makz shrugged as he twisted his head around as if he really needed to fight over the decision in his mind. “I don’t know,” he finally voiced.

  Hadrian handed him the container, making the decision for him, and stood suddenly. “And to put this baby to the test, I have something you've been looking for. I have the coordinates of The Elder.” Hadrian smiled and clapped his hands, “Not a bad haul for say... sixty creds?”

  Makz had little to lose. He couldn't have cared less, most any price was worth the chance to get that old feeling back. Glori wouldn’t care anyhow, one more tank. “Sure.” He paid the man and was gone.

  Revolution for One

  Glori wasn't happy. By the time Makz got home, she had worn a path in the floor. They fought for a long while until the Pulse vial felt unbearably heavy in his pocket. He told her he had to get to work.

  The Elder. Finally a chance to do some real good, he thought. Makz had few contacts. He preferred to do his street work by himself. He was little more than a shadow in the underworld. No clever aliases, no trademark tricks, it was Makz and a riot pistol verses the ruins of all of civilization. He didn’t have a reputation to speak of. Just a thug killing roaches at the back door.

  To get The Elder, Makz would have to break some rules. He'd have to break into part of the city controlled by UPC. UPC security was a wall of electronic intelligence. The City-State was a fortress made to keep citizens in, and in control. Every corner of the maze of industrial complexes and corporate towers and layers of magnetic roads and tunnels were equipped with a network of vector cameras. When a violent crime was committed, forensic officers walked around in a rendered reproduction of the scene. Every detail could be recreated for UPC-Sec to analyze. Makz's face would be on the view screens in every UPC officer's left eye. He'd go from anonymous thug to water-cooler gossip by morning if he went after The Elder his usual way.

  Fuck Hadrian. He thought quietly to himself as if the man could hear. Hadrian couldn't care less if he ran up and blasted the guys’ head off and got stuck doing life in some sensory replacement rehab chamber. Makz obviously had to find another way. And really, Makz did have to go out of his way. Hopefully time would assassinate the ancient man. Makz had a new strain of Pulse in his hand. He was only honor bound. There was plenty of work to do in the fringes.

  The Elder was, before the purge, the leader of the Free City, the ruins that surrounded the City-State. He built his empire up from the ruins of men weaker than he. He made buildings out of their bones. UPC saw a small warlord turn into a powerful leader right at their doorstep, then decided to put him on the Redlist. Kill or capture orders at any cost. They found him and he was exiled to the perimeter city, a high security area for the rich and dangerous. Everyone hated him for one reason or another.

  Makz had a more personal reason.

  In previous years, The Elder's mere presence in the perimeter made younger inmates uneasy. From inside the city-sized prison, a prison with better amenities by far than any given block in the Free City; running water, plentiful food, from inside The Elder was back to his old self, rebuilding his empire. The Elder could at any time level entire blocks of high-rises and thousands of lives. Makz was a militia officer, a non-citizen who worked in the hopes of joining the City-State elite. Makz was doing daily doses of Pulse and watching his propaganda like a good boy and serving as an LCS, a Light City Soldier, and assigned to guard The Elder in the perimeter. They never met, but Makz knew well of his influence. The Elder spun vast plans to take his prison city as a prize, and one of the stages of his plan was to buy off a squadron of LCS, not including Makz. After a short struggle, the coup left Makz for dead in the ruins with only his loyal service to UPC and half a lung.

  0

  Makz made his way to the top floor of an abandoned building near the perimeter city. Birds had made the old board room their home. Solid streams of dust gave wayward and crooked beams of city lights tangible shape, and the columns of light mixed with the precarious half-collapsed beams and walls.

  The sounds of the City-State were at full volume that night, and a storm rumbled as if in distaste of the poisons that it was made to drop. Gray planks and rain soaked piles of worn cloth surrounded Makz’s boots as he turned from his city view. He knelt by the windows and pulled out a rifle scope.

  He surveyed the perimeter walls, checked the map on his handheld, typed in a few notes. First things first, he thought as he put his Pulse kit on an I-beam.

  Makz pulled off his coat, and the crimson shirt underneath. Rainwater and sweat dribbled down his cold skin. Storm water drove between the cracks and openings in the patchwork roof. The downpour shook Makz free of himself. He leaned forward and took his riot pistol from his jacket.

  There were three bullets left in the long clip. He slammed the clip back into its place in front of the trigger, just behind the guns’ wide, shot gun size barrel. “Always check your exits,” Makz whispered. He set the weapon on the floor by his right hand. On the floor by his left was the tank, the dermal injector. Lightning arced down some roadway and its glow graced Makz’s attic for a brief time. There were shapes all around him, odd things out of the corners of his eyes with the consistency of mist. H
e shut his eyes and moved his left hand. Makz brought the Pulse to his neck. What was left of the light turned to shadow, what was shadow turned to light.

  The playground.

  It was exactly like he remembered it. Smoke rose up like fingers on the horizon. The night air was thin.

  Makz walked up to a boy stumbling around the dirt lot. The child looked up, shielding his eyes from the weak glow of the streetlights around.

  “Makz.” Both stared at one another as the sky shimmered with wave after wave of menacing clouds. “Makz. There are a couple things that need to be said, first of all you can’t stay here. I know you are young; what, seven years old? You have to find a way out. You are important, you are something to be worried about. See, it's all fucked up out here. You see what I’m sayin’? No, okay, Just trust me. You have to look out for your future.”

  Dark gray mist poured down deep past Makz’s feet. Fog reached up, grabbed him and set him into a pool of liquid pain. The water hooked into his nerves, into his spine and deep into his ears with snake-like wires. They dug under his eyes and filled his vision with sharp points of darkness. It happened so fast and absolutely that adaptation was impossible. Makz was, for all intents and purposes, in Hell.

  It's what he wanted. It was the price of getting those old feelings back, the good feelings. He had to first be unmade to be recreated. When he started to fade off into welcome unconsciousness, another blast of ice would invade the most private corners of his brain.

  Makz was watching himself from each and every conceivable point of view, to heighten the torture. He could see himself from miles away and from underneath himself in a sea of torment. His individual cells failed and burst, he saw his veins and capillaries struggle under the exertion of pushing dying blood to fatally damaged areas.

  In his right hand was discomfort only, not the anguish the remainder of his writhing corpse had fallen victim to, but an indifferent stabbing that caused him to believe that his hand had left his person. But no, the gun was there. He threw the barrel up to his temple without hesitation. Always check your exits.

  His left hand experienced a different sensation. Something new, it was warmth. Glori held his hand in hers and the pain subsided gently, as if it had never been. The riot pistol dropped to the floor without a sound. Glori was holding Makz and leading him back out of the ice.

  He laid shivering and sweating in their bed, unable to speak for some time. He was also unable to sleep or rest at all.

  His lover sat with him the whole time, trying to get him to speak one minute, and holding onto him firmly the next. He cleared his throat and speech came in quiet whispers.

  “It was a bad Pulse, Glori.” He sobbed and let the rest of his energy flow away.

  “I gave you a detox in the attic. I didn't think it was going to work.” Glori tried to remain strong while she choked back joyous and sad tears.

  Makz rubbed at the moisture that dripped down from his brow. “It was meant to kill me. I was dying.”

  0

  Makz made his way back to Hadrian's lab. He brought his gun and knife. He was trembling still from the last Pulse. His legs ached when he tried to quicken his pace, so he walked slowly and breathed deeply. He put his hand to the door. It opened and Hadrian was in the room hunched on a stool.

  “Hadrian,” Makz called out.

  Hadrian looked over in Makz's direction. The drug dealer shook his head. He was on something.

  “So, did you have a plan in case that Pulse didn't kill me?” Makz walked over to him with his gun at his side.

  Hadrian looked Makz in the eyes and spoke slowly, “It wasn't me.”

  Makz bit his lip and checked the safety on his gun. “Care to give me an explanation?”

  “They didn't leave me much choice. Some men. They said you had to go, that you were a disruption.”

  Makz swore to the room. “I'm fulfilling an obligation. I'm part of the only civilization left.” He yelled, “Dammit, I liked you, you dumb fuck.”

  Hadrian rolled his head down, “They said you were a wild dog.”

  “Where am I supposed to get Pulse now, huh?” Makz put his riot pistol to Hadrian's chest.

  Hadrian shuddered and forced out, “Do it.”

  Makz hesitated. “Who were they?”

  The drug dealer shook head. “All of your enemies are down the drain, give up.”

  “All except The Elder. He wanted me to have revenge on my mind when I died of that tainted Pulse. How did he find me?”

  Hadrian sobbed. “I don't know, Makz. Let me...” In his hand was a dermal injector. He held it to his neck and looked at Makz with querying eyes.

  Makz nodded, “Yeah, go ahead.”

  Hadrian injected a strong dose of Pulse. Makz waited for it to kick in before shooting him point blank. Hadrian crumpled to the floor and the light left his eyes. Makz set the body behind a work bench. He closed the door and waited in a chair, gun in hand, barrel still hot.

  Makz fell asleep after a few hours. The colored lights on the displays around the lab followed him into his dreams. Silent movie dreams about nothing in particular. Drifting motions and clouded bodies. All in all a pleasant respite. He had to kill a friend and it haunted him. But for the time being, he was swimming peacefully in a sea of soundless water. He woke up calmly and checked the slide on his handgun. He stared at the door patiently. Looked sidelong ruefully at the new Pulse vials on the table. Using them wouldn't have been a good idea for a few reasons.

  The door opened a crack after a long while. Makz, from the shadows, tightened the grip on his gun. A man entered, then two more. Metal-fiber trench coats. Taser rifles. The glint of silver off of their necks. They were UCM, Urban Citizen Monitors. The SS of the City-State. Not The Elder's men, but that wasn't important right then. They would have killed Makz in an instant just for being in the room. They walked to the stool Hadrian had been on and one of them typed onto a handheld computer. Another ran his gloved fingers over some of Hadrian's blood on the floor. The third then hefted the taser out of his coat and backed up.

  Makz slid his left hand ever so slowly down to the side of his pants were three extra clips were buckled in. He rested his thumb on one of the buckles.

  The second UCM officer put his hand in his coat and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. He put them on and scanned the room.

  Heat vision, motion detectors, probably not just sunglasses. Makz chewed his lip and took a deep breath to stay motionless. When the man's gaze went to Makz's chair, his eyes seemed to meet Makz's. Their gaze held for a long while. The man went on visually scanning the room until one of them said, “Spread out.” Makz's coat had a cooling unit that masked his body heat.

  Still looking at his handheld, the first man walked over to near where Makz was sitting. The second took off his glasses and went to watch the door. The third inspected the table with the Pulse vials and equipment. Hadrian's body was just a glance away.

  Makz took a light breath. He flexed his leg muscles to get them ready for a leap, as they'd been motionless for some time. He leaned forward slightly and charged the man paying attention to his handheld. Makz fired one shot to the back of his neck that flared out sinew and blood from the front. At the same time he popped the clip holder latch and grabbed another clip from his side and put it in his mouth to hold. Makz caught the man's body mid-fall and pulled it back with him as he fired on the gloved officer by the table.

  By that time, the two remaining men had shot stray taser bolts wildly. The man by the table caught one of Makz's bullets in the hair at the very top of his head. A burst of crimson shot up and that officer was down like a heavy sack. The man by the door dove behind a bank of computers and fired backwards, blindly, and hit Makz's dead human shield. The shock emanating from the taser bolt knocked Makz down with the corpse and he crab-walked to the corner, with no cover there to speak of.

  The UCM officer by the door charged out and emptied an entire clip of taser bolts into the floor leading up to Makz's scrambling feet
. Makz went to load the clip from his mouth, but the officer closed the distance between them and Makz was hit by a taser rifle butt to the temple. Makz reeled and was spun back by his chair. The man hit him again, this time in the kidney and Makz arched his back in pain. The officer went for a pistol in his jacket and Makz struggled for another clip as he tried to get back to his feet. In his haste the man pulled the trigger of his pistol with the safety on and Makz tackled his legs. This knocked the officer's taser pistol somewhere in the lab. Makz put his elbow to the officer's throat and used his free hand to maneuver the clip on the floor into his riot pistol. The UCM officer struggled and spat.

  “Whoa, no no no,” Makz exclaimed. “We're done, it's over.” Makz held his gun up with both hands and slipped off of the officer. The officer grabbed his bruised throat and put his hand out in surrender.

  The man spoke hoarsely, “Makz Selder, Social Serial Number zero, eight, three...”

  Makz worked his way over to the man who got the bullet in the top of the head. That officer was still moving, in pain and groaning. Makz fired another shot into that officer's forehead, ending his life quickly, and Makz swung the gun back to his captive.

  That officer grunted and continued, “Five, seven,”

  Makz nodded towards the Pulse on the table. “Have I been Redlisted?”

  The officer propped himself up on his elbows. “Yes. The Elder was conformed. His enemies are now our enemies.”

  Makz blinked and let the realization sink in. “Jesus. Look, I believe in the system, in UPC, but you leave the Free City unprotected. I'm doing your job out here,” Makz said as he picked up the other officer's handheld from the floor, keeping the gun pointed tightly at his target. The small display had a list of names and coordinates. Makz's name was fourth from the top. Makz looked up at the officer, “Why poison me,