Beyond Binary

by Brit Mandelo

  “What the hell,” said Charlee.

  Amanda was so pale, almost translucent. Pieces of her were loose, as if she had been hastily thrown together: a patchwork Amanda, composed of pieces of the truth but never adding up to the real thing. Like she wasn’t a real person but she also wasn’t a ghost, at least not yet.

  “Let me love you,” said Amanda. “I want to love you.”

  “You’re not real,” said Charlee. “None of this is real.”

  You can’t outrun the ghost party. You can’t hide from it. Taco had known that when he took her out there. Maybe guys like Taco needed the ghost party to turn them into the people who would actually go through with doing the things that they really wanted to do. People who had nothing left to lose and nowhere else to go.

  “I will make you my Queen,” Taco was saying, licking his lips, his eyes glowing in the ghostly darkness. He stepped menacingly toward her. “Even if I have to chain you to the throne.”

  ∞

  Charlee woke up in the car with Amanda, who was driving her home from the party in the early morning light. She was shivering, but Amanda had given her a blanket from the trunk of her car, so that was helping. “That was a close call,” she said quietly. She kept glancing at Amanda, making sure she hadn’t turned into a ghost.

  “I’m glad you called,” said Amanda. She looked really tired. “It took me forever to find you in the woods. How long had you been running?”

  “I’m glad you came,” said Charlee.

  “You were so drunk. Like, way drunk.” But Amanda was smiling.

  The world rushed past them in the car windows as they headed toward home: the real world, the familiar world. The one that Charlee would stay in, at least for a while. “What were you saying about nightmares?” she asked.

  Amanda stared straight ahead as if she was carefully considering her words. “It started a few days ago. In the nightmare, it’s impossibly dark. And your friend Taco was there. He—”

  She paused.

  “What is it?” asked Charlee.

  “Well,” said Amanda. “He wants to make you into a ghost, just like him. And a ghost can never leave the house it haunts. That’s what he keeps saying to me in the dream.”

  “Oh.”

  “Scary, right?”

  “Listen,” said Charlee. “I’m sorry about earlier. I don’t know what I was thinking. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “What you shouldn’t do is hang out with people like Taco,” said Amanda, as if Charlee trying to kiss her had been no big deal at all. Something they could just forget about, maybe even laugh about later. “He always gave me the creeps. And tonight he proved me right.”

  A deer ran across the road in front of the car, dashing from one side of the forest to the other, and Charlee thought to herself that maybe life was like that: a series of jumps from one place to another, deep breaths before the plunge. There would always be danger, but sometimes you can be the girl who gets away. The girl who makes it to the other side.

  “Goo goo goo,” said Charlee.

  ∞

  Bonehouse

  Keffy R. M. Kehrli

  Evictions are a messy business.

  Muddy gold-brown sunlight filtered through the dust cloud that hung over downtown, putting tiger stripes of light and shadow in the air. Basalt gravel and desiccated eel grass crunched underfoot as I made my way down Holly Street at low tide. There was asphalt beneath it all, slowly crumbling and turning to beach before it washed out to sea.

  There wasn’t much this close to the bay. The buildings used to be two or three story shops before the ground dropped and the water level rose. Now the bottom floors had been opened up to let the tide run past. In the shadows, I could see the remains of rooms—slimy brown mold-and-rot walls, broken toilets and tile; a thick tide sludge that smelled like petroleum and the deaths of a million fish glistened in the shade.

  Another ten years, maybe, and there’d be nothing here anymore.

  Far cry from how it’d been when I’d lived this side of the mountains. Things used to be green, then. Now the lowland forests were full of bleached ghost trees, dead from the saltwater drowning their roots. The buildings were brickwork, and where there might have been ivy clinging to the sides, a thin tracery of metal spidered over the walls. Even in this submerged part of town, there was enough ambient electricity in the air for a decent harvest system to make up for what they didn’t get from sun or tide.

  I stopped near the end of the row, smelling the place I was looking for, even over the salt stench of the ocean. Disinfectant, too much of it, a citrus-tinged sickly scent. You could knock on a hundred abandoned doors if you wanted but I never needed to. I knew the smell of a bonehouse by heart.

  I climbed up the ten feet of rickety wood stairs that were nailed to what had been the sill of the second-floor window. I didn’t like the stairs. Standing at the top, there wasn’t much to hang onto but a rotten banister that looked about ready to fall apart.

  I knocked.

  The owners let me stand out there a good few minutes, while the terns wheeled overhead and screamed.

  When the door opened, a short white man with round glasses and lank greasy hair down to his shoulders squinted out at me. “Evictionist,” he said. “I don’t got anybody here for you. Go find some other House to haunt.”

  The disinfectant smell was stronger, and the room was filled with a dim, flickering light. A woman in ripped jeans sat on a patched-together couch, dividing her attention between the wall-mounted screen and our conversation at the door.

  “You won’t mind if I check their chips, then,” I said. “I’m a good guy. You don’t got what I want, I’ll leave.” Starting to lose my balance on the stairs, I didn’t want to go for that banister, figuring it would snap if I did, so I leaned forward and grabbed the door frame.

  The man flinched like I was too close, so I smiled.

  “They’re all paid up through next year at least,” he said through his teeth. “I don’t have enough flow to return that much cash.”

  I snicked my tongue against my teeth, waiting.

  The woman came over. She said, “Let him in, Justin. Nobody ever gets the good side of an Evictionist.” She shot me a look that was mostly poison with just a dash of hate. “I’ll show him what he thinks he wants to see.”

  Justin growled a bit, under his breath, and let the door swing open. He bowed and gestured inside.

  “Thank you,” I said, and I slammed my boots against the door frame, knocking off as much sand as I could. I kept my eyes on Justin, partways hoping he’d pull a knife. Americans.

  We shook hands. Hers were rough as any bonehouse warden’s. “Doctor Anna Petreus,” she said.

  The front room was cluttered, but not near as filthy as most of the places I’d seen. A few dirty dishes were stacked on the end-table, next to them a pair of cell phones. Petreus had been watching news coverage of the riots in Ottawa. Someone had uncovered evidence that the parliamentary elections had been rigged. Almost normal, that.

  A wiry looking orange tabby came out from under the coffee table and rubbed himself on my leg. Petreus gave me a funny look when I bent to pick up the cat. He wrapped his front legs around my neck and buried his nose in my ear, purring loud enough to wake the dead.

  Petreus led me down the hallway to a dark room. The only light came from a cluster of monitors, each one hooked up to a different guest. The monitors showed vital signs. Steady heartbeats, hormones at the right levels, vitamins to stave off serious illness, everything they needed to live except reality.

  Seven hospital beds full of bones and skin.

  I’d never seen so many in such a small house. I wondered if it was a coastal thing, or if they’d come in as a group. The boy closest to me twitched while he net-dreamed. He’d been under for a while. They get like that, the bones. They’ll twitch all around even after the muscles have gone. The only thing they’ve got left that works is their brain.

  “You must be turnin
g a hefty profit out here,” I said. I put the cat down so I could fumble for my cell phone. “Not having to pay for your electricity.”

  “We’re low-end,” Dr. Petreus said. She scratched the back of her neck and then inspected her nails in the light from one of the vitals displays. “None of these kids paid all that much per month when we plugged them in. We get by, but….”

  I grunted a response. Winding around my legs, the cat purred louder. “Friendly cat,” I muttered.

  “He doesn’t get a lot of attention from our guests,” she answered. “Go on, check them. I’m not leaving you alone in here.”

  Only two of the seven were female.

  The one closest to me didn’t really seem to have a human form under the blanket. From how small she was, I would’ve been curious to see the Vegas odds that she’d plugged in before she was legal. I thumbed open the phone. Nope, not mine.

  The second woman was the one I was after. This didn’t surprise me. It didn’t matter how good a bonehouse tech was, she could never mask an IP address well enough to keep me out. And proxies, well. I’ll just say that not all of them are as anonymous as they advertise.

  “Well?”

  “Bad for you,” I said. I pocketed my phone and pointed at the woman tucked over in the corner. “She’s the one I’m after.”

  Laura DeVries, age 29. Used the web like any normal kid until she was seventeen, when she ran away from home and tried to plug in permanently. She’d been evicted four times already. No wonder she’d come out to the coast—she probably had trouble finding a bonehouse that would take her.

  Hers was a family extraction. The loved ones she’d left behind had pooled their money together for a fifth time, the amount much smaller than previous jobs. My cut was barely worth the trip out to the coast.

  “She’s been in three years straight now,” Petreus said. “You know it won’t be any good for her coming out. Why waste the rehab dollars on her?”

  “Because her family wants her back and I get paid by the contract.” I stretched my arms and back. Three years into a netdream, and she wasn’t going to be walking much of anywhere. I’d be carrying her back down Holly and up Bay. “Plus, you might say it ticks me off a bit when people with potential can’t handle unplugging long enough to feed themselves.”

  Petreus just shook her head. She wound between the beds until she got to Laura’s. She called up the ’Net usage on the vitals monitor, and then cut the connection. She was doing it for the money, too.

  It took a full twenty seconds before Laura realized that it was more than just a ’Net hiccup and opened her eyes.

  “Anna?” Her voice was raw, hoarse.

  Petreus patted her on the forehead, and then started disconnecting the IV and monitoring devices. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’ll pro-rate your stay and transfer what’s left back to your accounts.”

  “No,” Laura said. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t violate any codes, I didn’t bring any viruses into the servers. Please.” Her face was green and skeletal in the light from the monitors. “Sammy said he wouldn’t wait for me again if I dropped and he couldn’t find me. He’ll move on, Anna, he’ll move on.”

  I crept up to her bed. She was too busy trying to grab tubes out of Petreus’ hands and stick them back to her body, but she was too weak. The tubes fell against the bed sheets, and Petreus gathered them up. She didn’t answer or look at Laura’s face. “I’m sure he’ll wait,” she said.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Laura’s voice cracked. She was crying.

  I couldn’t figure if she was addled from the ’Net drop—she had to still have some world-ghosting going on in her head—or if she really had forgotten the other times she’d been evicted.

  “Evictionist, Laura.” I rested a hand on the metal bed railing. Good work on Petreus and her tech, getting all this equipment out here and up those stairs out front. “Your mama misses you.”

  “No,” she started sobbing. “This is my life, don’t you understand?”

  I leaned over. “You ever think maybe your real kids want to see more of you than just your avatar?”

  No answer.

  Petreus started shutting down the equipment. Laura didn’t move. She was dressed in what looked like a purloined hospital gown, so I wrapped the bedsheet around her limp form and picked her up like a kid. Couldn’t risk the fireman’s carry, too big a chance that she’d break something. Petreus said, “I’m sorry, Laura.”

  Laura didn’t say another word until we were half-way down Holly Street. The tide was coming in, and I was already wading in an inch or so of surf.

  “I’m just gonna go back,” she said. “Soon as they let me out.” Her chest heaved with every breath. Just the strain of holding onto my neck was enough to wind her. “I’ll plug back in and put my life back together.”

  They all say that. I was expecting it.

  “Go right ahead,” I said. “Keeps me getting paid.”

  “Sammy might not wait,” she said. “But just in case if he does, I’ll be back. There’s nothing you can do.”

  She was still babbling when I put her in the back seat of the car that the company had rented for me, a funny little Russian-made thing that I didn’t think would have outrun the surf if I’d parked it on Holly.

  “What’s your name?” She asked as soon as I’d strapped her in, one weak hand closed on the front of my shirt. “What’s your name?”

  “To you,” I said, “I’m just the Evictionist.”

  Her expression closed down into an angry glare. “He’ll find out who you are,” she said.

  “Oh yeah? Sammy Not-Gonna-Wait-No-More?”

  “Sammy Gauge,” she said softly. “And he’s going to break you.”

  She must have seen the recognition in my face, and there was a moment when she must’ve thought about bragging some more. As it was, though, she clammed up. I wanted to kick myself. I knew better than to broadcast my thoughts that way.

  Gauge.

  The possibility of Samuel Gauge being one of the aliases of Cameron Trexell had initially been figured at twenty percent. Both Samuel and Cameron had been good at restricting the personal information they let slip in their online communication. Once the suspicion leaked, Gauge had dropped offline, his actions going from borderline illegal to nothing overnight.

  Cameron Trexell was an eviction so big that the company hadn’t even bothered assigning it directly to one of their agents. Instead, it was open season, and the Evictionist cut was enough to live on comfortably for a while. I wouldn’t stop working if I had that kind of cash, but I could quit living off the easy marks and take on the difficult cases, the ones who really needed to be saved. That, and pay for something I’d been meaning to do for years.

  As for what the company’d get if I brought him in, well, at least half of the Northern Coalition was looking to get him out of the ’Net and into custody. For starters. Trexell or one of his known aliases had been heavily implicated in almost every act of electronic terrorism in the past five years. His group saw no future for the world and they typically made their feelings known by shutting some things down, breaking other things, and generally trying to bring their own prophecies to fruition.

  “Oh yeah, Gauge.” I laughed at her, hard enough that I could see her squirm. It was still more than likely that she was screwing with me. After all, it was more than a little odd that nobody else had turned up Laura while they were searching for Trexell. It was also more than a little unlikely that he’d spend time talking to somebody who’d had as weak a proxy set-up as Laura’s.

  “You’ll see,” she whispered.

  ∞

  I slipped through the border ghost town that was Blaine, through White Rock, which was still doing okay, and Vancouver, which was evolving, filled up with Canadians, with the best of the American ex-pats, with anybody who had enough cash to move north and enough skills to get through the border.

  The guards gave me the fifth degree, as usual, picking apart the di
screpancies between my appearance and my identification even though I knew damn well that they had everything they asked on file from the last ten or twenty times I’d jumped the forty-ninth. They backed off real quick when I asked if they wanted a direct line to my boss.

  I left Laura in a little rehab place, more of a staging location than anything. They ran tests, made sure that the dreamers we dropped off were well enough to send east, in batches, in electric train cars. She’d end up somewhere in Ontario, maybe even Toronto itself, wasting health-care funds. Eventually, she’d run back south, and next time, the fee might be too low for anybody to bother coming after her. She probably knew that, which was why she’d mostly kept her mouth shut, just waiting out the ordeal.

  ’Course, before I left her, I made her a deal.

  “I’ve got enough tech in the car right now to hook you up,” I said.

  She stared out the window, at the lost parts of Vancouver, where not even a dike had been enough to save the streets from flooding. It was a shallow bay now, a couple meters deep, dead trees and telephone poles sticking up like rotten dock pilings. “I’d be less suspicious if you had anything to gain,” she said.

  I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, annoyed with myself. Once the disorientation had faded and she’d cat-napped in the passenger seat, Laura deVries was not stupid. Nobody did favors in this game.

  “I was thinking if you were interested that I’d sell you the time.” I tried to sound a little nervous, barely made eye contact over the rims of my sunglasses, like that was the most ethically shady I ever got.

  She might have been pretty, if she wasn’t so wasted-looking, or if I was able to ignore the nutrient drip in her arm. “That’s pretty low, even for somebody who gets paid to ruin lives,” she said, finally.

  I shrugged. “Do you want to reconnect and settle your accounts, or not? I’ll give you an amount to transfer, and once that’s done, you can have an hour.”

  “An hour.” Her hands clutched at the blanket I’d draped over her legs. “What if I don’t have enough money?”