by David Wong
Budd picked up a coffee cup and said, “Now, we gotta give you some quick context here. Not to drown you in a bunch of geopolitical rigmarole or anything, but it was right around then that the Chinese were experimentin’ with high-energy weapons—lasers and microwaves and all that Star Wars nonsense. So we start spreadin’ rumors that the rebels had a Chinese handheld microwave gun that could penetrate even the most advanced armor. Now, this was important because the regime’s tanks were mostly a weapon of intimidation. The sound of them tracks clanking down the street, flattening parked cars, and smashin’ through walls—their psychological impact was way more important than their strategic value. So you can imagine how that would change the game if an insurgent had, let’s say, a handheld rifle that could make a tank go up like a firework with a squeeze of the trigger.”
Will said impatiently, “Budd, none of this is helping her understand the oper—”
“I’ve got the floor here. So, we reckon we’ll make one of these Martian death rays. Not a real one—such a thing didn’t exist at the time—but one that was convincing enough to scare the pants off Pyongyang. Now in the real world, you can’t see a laser—guy squeezes the trigger on this end, somethin’ blows up downrange. Keep that in mind. So anyway, we start staging the whole thing, set to take place in the middle of a shopping district, where there’d be lots of cell phone cameras there to capture it all. So Will here, and remember he was only your age at the time, he finds a toy store and buys of one of them giant plastic squirt guns, the ones with the big tanks of water on top. And we take it to the safehouse and paint it, modify it, put real tactical sites on it—really make it look like something that would come out of the PLA’s advanced weapons lab. Then he has an insurgent bombmaker craft for us an antitank satchel charge, but modified. It’d be full of copper sulfate—a chemical you can get from the hardware store—which burns bright green, like this is some kind of crazy alien weapon we’ve got here. So, we had it set up where a runner would stick the satchel charge to the tank—it had magnets inside it, see—and the bomb would be detonated by cell phone, so it was as simple as embedding the phone into the handle of the fake death-ray rifle. Then the gunman would wait for the tank to rumble up, squeeze the ‘trigger,’ and watch the tank erupt in a beautiful green fireball, for the world to see. Boom, instant death ray. It would’ve been amazing. Had it worked.”
Will made a grunting sound.
Zoey said, “What do you means, ‘had it worked’?”
Will said, “It’s not important, what matters is you understand the importance of—”
“The gunman was the weak link,” said Andre, as if remembering it fondly. “The first part of the plan worked pretty good, but remember, for this to all play out, he had to get in point blank, so the people recording it on their phones could get the ‘death ray’ and the tank in the same shot. So the gunman blows the tank and it burns green, looks great.”
“But,” continued Budd, “he then turns to hightail it out of there and immediately trips over his own feet. His super-advanced death ray shatters under him like the hollow plastic toy that it is. He gets snatched up by regime troops and within an hour, all of us were in custody.”
“Holy crap! You got taken prisoner by the North Korean army?”
Andre nodded. “Uh huh. Got thrown into this holding area behind razor wire, bunch of starving POWs in there. Ain’t never seen anything like it. Don’t want to see anything like it again, neither.”
“How’d you get away?”
Andre said, “Your daddy. He was in country on, you know, business and had connections. To make a long story short, he sneaked us across the border and if he hadn’t, we’d have been hung from a bridge. Arthur tracked us down back in the States a bit later, asked if we wanted to go to work for him. The rest is history.”
Zoey asked, “What happened to the other guy?”
“Which other guy?”
“The moron with the gun, who tripped and ruined the whole thing?”
Budd nodded toward Will. “Why don’t you ask him? Fella’s sittin’ right here.”
Zoey laughed, then stopped laughing and said, “We are so screwed.”
Budd said, “Well, we got a special delivery comin’. I reckon it might change your mind.”
FIFTY
That night, she had another Jezza dream.
This time she was back in her old greasy apartment again, in the bathtub that was so tiny that even short Zoey had to keep her knees out of the water if she wanted to get her top half under it. The door opened and there was Jezza—only now, in the dream, he was half man, half machine, his eyes replaced by tiny whirring blades like from a blender, his arms bundles of wires and gears. Looming over the tub, grabbing Zoey by the neck and forcing her under the surface, the water burning down her nostrils and flowing down her throat, tasting like soap and bath salts, Zoey clawing at his face while she drowned an inch away from air …
Zoey awoke and sat up, splashing water in every direction and startling Stench Machine, who went skittering across the bathroom tile. She wiped water from her eyes and spent ten seconds trying to remember where she was.
She had fallen asleep in a bathtub that was twice as long as the one she was used to, and without the other end to brace her, had slid under the surface. The tub was in yet another of the guest rooms at the Casa de Zoey, a luxurious device that kept the water heated at a constant temperature, lit the room with simulated candlelight, and generated aromatherapy scents according to whatever mood it detected you were in. The inside of the tub was covered in a layer of some kind of clear gel that molded to your body, so you didn’t have hard fiberglass pressing against your tailbone if you tried to sit up. Zoey wondered if there would be a perfect mold of her butt after she got out.
It was the middle of the night, about twelve hours after the events at Livingston Tower that left it a three-story-tall pile of steel beams and concrete in the center of a ten-block-wide lake of scattered glass. The bath had been Andre’s idea, something he says they teach in the army, to deal with the immediate aftermath of combat trauma. When you get a moment of safety, they say, take time to do the human basics: bathing, grooming, eating, sleeping. Oh, and breathing—that slow, steady breathing, from the belly. You stay tensed up and alert all the time, Andre said, and you wind up frying those circuits in your brain, rendering them useless (“Or slowly drinking yourself to death, like Will here.”).
Zoey stepped out of the guest room (and yes, the tub did in fact have a butt indentation after she got out) and found Wu patiently standing guard outside her door.
At the sight of her he said, “Ms. Ling was looking for you. There is activity in the ballroom.”
“Okay, do you mean an actual ballroom where people hold dances, or that room with the Chuck E. Cheese ball pit?” Zoey imagined Will, Echo, and the rest flopping around in there among the colored balls, like a bunch of kids at a birthday party.
“The former, I would assume.”
“All right, didn’t know I had one of those. Do you have any idea where it is?”
“Perhaps if we join forces, we can find it together.”
At the stairs, they met Carlton who said, “Ah, Ms. Ashe. Mr. Blackwater has asked if he can remove one of the walls of the ballroom.”
Said ballroom was enormous, and smelled like cookies for some reason. It was absolutely choked with Christmas decorations, as if they had done the rest of the house and then realized they still had four metric tons of wreathes, bows, candles, lights, and hundreds of other festive doodads left over, then decided to just cram them all into this room.
A group of men in overalls were already tearing out the far wall with saws and sledgehammers, so Will apparently had just asked permission as a courtesy. Andre came bounding over to meet Zoey and Wu at the door, out of breath. He was in jeans and a paint-stained sweatshirt—work clothes.
“We got a flatbed out there, too wide to get into the garage. Too tall, too. Gonna have to turn the ballroom into
a workshop.”
Andre then walked up to the small table near the door, broke off a corner, and ate it. Zoey stared at him, dumbstruck.
“Gingerbread. Every year Arthur did a big Christmas blowout party in here, all his rich friends and their kids. Called it a Wonka party, turned this whole room into a candy palace where everything was edible. See them snowmen in the corners? They’re all marshmallow, you could go over and take a bite out of one right now. The tree over there is hard candy branches and chocolate ornaments. Graham cracker shelves over there. There’s ’sposed to be chocolate fountains everywhere you could dip the stuff in. Cost over a hundred grand to have it all made. Party was supposed to be the thirteenth but, you know. Got canceled.”
Zoey said, “I feel like you’re trying to distract me from what’s going on with the wall back there.”
“Budd knew a guy who knew a guy who knew where we could get a fabricator. One like we need, I mean, capable of doing nano-level builds. Tech startup in the Bay Area owned it, was using it to make prototype Blink eyeball implants or somethin’. Now it belongs to us. Fees for the high-speed freight were obscene.”
“Do I want to know what you had to do to get that thing?”
“Let’s put it this way. You now own a tech startup in the Bay Area.”
One of the workers along the wall called out a warning and everyone scattered. The wall collapsed inward in a cloud of dust, revealing the night sky and ushering in a blast of chilled air from the courtyard. A pair of forklifts rolled into the room, leaving muddy tracks across the black and white marble tiles. Behind them came the flatbed truck, an enormous vehicle that Zoey figured they probably used to transport airliner parts or something. On the back was a series of round lumps covered in tarps. So this was what it was like, she thought. Whether you want a pizza, bodyguard, brand-new BMW, or a multimillion-dollar gadget-making machine, you pick up the phone and a little later it comes rolling up your driveway.
The machine was the size of a freight train car. It was cylindrical and flat black—identical to the one she’d seen in Arthur’s death video that Zoey had thought had looked like a huge, black alien worm, or grub. The workers were buzzing around it, staff from the tech firm they’d bought out who had been paid an obscene amount of cash to make the rail trip from Sunnyvale, California, and work through the night. They were running cables and huddling around holographic displays, tweaking settings. Behind them, a team of men were hauling out wall debris in wheelbarrows and three masons were already bricking up the giant hole with startling efficiency. She figured by sunrise the wall would look good as new, an invisible amount of money deducted from some account to cover it all. It really was like a magic trick, just slower, and noisier.
By the time they finished getting the thing set up, Zoey was sitting cross-legged on the floor and eating the leg off a peanut brittle reindeer while Andre stood over her, gnawing on a piece of antler he’d broken off, devouring their prey like a pair of candy-eating jackals. Andre had found eggnog somewhere, and had been adding an unhealthy amount of brandy to each of their glasses.
Will approached just as Andre was crinkling his forehead at Zoey and saying, “I don’t understand, you’re sayin’ my head looks like a hamburger?”
“No, not a Whopper from Burger King. A Whopper, like the candy. Little chocolate balls? Full of some kind of industrial foam?”
Will—the only person in the room still wearing a suit and tie—gestured to the machine and said, “Congratulations, the ballroom is now a fully functional factory. Feed it the raw materials, and it can weave carbon fiber, manufacture graphene or nano-tubes or aerogel, it can build a working microprocessor or circuit board … almost anything.”
Zoey said, “Tell it to make me a mug of hot chocolate, and a baby goat to cuddle.”
“It’s not a Star Trek replicator. It manufactures parts for electronics, and nano-scale components.”
Zoey said, “Right, right. I think it looks like a giant alien caterpillar. Andre says it looks like a turd a giant robot left on the floor. What do you think?”
“Are you guys drunk?”
“Not yet, but we’re working as fast as we can. Be patient.”
Andre said, “I don’t think she has your tolerance, Will. Not as much practice.”
Will ignored this and said, “Anyway, this is the same model Arthur had in his warehouse, the schematics on the coin drive should be specifically written to work with it. You plug in the instructions at this end, where all the monitors are—”
“And the caterpillar poops out a gadget on the other end,” finished Zoey. “Neat.”
Zoey noticed Echo walking over in a cute belted sweater and tights that she probably thought was her gross-manual-labor outfit. “It’s supposedly ready to go. I tried to get a crash course on how to work the machine but the lead tech insisted on talking to me like I was his four-year-old daughter asking him what butterflies are made of.”
Will said, “They can’t stay here, they already know more than I’d prefer, and they sure as hell can’t see what’s on that coin drive.”
Echo shrugged. “I’ll figure it out.” She made a noise like she could feel a headache coming on. “I always do.”
As the techs packed up to leave, Zoey nodded toward Will and asked Echo, “You ever seen him in anything but a suit?”
“I’ve seen him … not in a suit, yes.”
“What was he—oh my god. I’m sorry I asked.”
Once the crew had shuffled out, Will handed Echo the coin and said, “Okay, fire it up.”
Zoey thought that as efficient and futuristic as the fabricator looked and probably was, it was still noisy as hell. It whirred and crackled and thunked, pushing components from one process to the next, assembling, soldering, curing, polishing, and god knew what else. It also stank, the flexible ventilation ducts they’d run to the windows unable to contain the smell of a machine that was melting and cooking various presumably toxic materials. Budd said the fabricator used enough juice to power a small city, but she didn’t know if that was an actual amount or just a figure of speech. Somebody would find out when the electric bill came due.
Soon there was a ding and a green light, and everyone gathered at the mouth of the machine, just a chute onto which the caterpillar coughed up the finished product into a cradle lined with black egg crate foam. The object that had slid out was an unimpressive little thing, a little shiny metal pyramid about an inch on each side, with a plastic loop to hook around your hand.
Zoey asked, “So what is it?”
Echo shrugged. “No idea. The device schematics aren’t labeled in any way that I can read. I picked the one that showed the shortest estimated production time.”
“Does it go … inside you?”
Andre said, “Damn, I hope not.”
Will said, “A lot of what’s on here will be test devices, components, early prototypes, and so on. Looks handheld, whatever it is.”
Somewhat drunkenly, Andre said, “Hell, I’ll give it a shot.”
Zoey asked, “How do we know it isn’t a bomb?”
“It has a handle. Why would you wanna strap a bomb to your hand?”
Will said, “Still, you should take it outside. I don’t want you to damage the equipment.”
They took a side door to the courtyard, where a dead pig was suspended from a wooden rig that reminded Zoey of a gallows. Carlton was pulling off a pair of rubber gloves and said, “That is the last of the pig carcasses, I’m afraid.”
Zoey asked, “Why did we have any pig carcasses here?”
Will said, “Actually, they’re by far the best analog for a human body, in terms of measuring impact and damage from projectiles.”
“That is a terrible reason to keep them around.”
Andre said, “E’erybody stop arguing and stand the hell back.”
He stepped out ahead of the group, strapped the gadget to his palm, and held it out toward the pig. Everyone held their breath, standing silently and shivering
in the chilled December air. Zoey put her fingers in her ears, for good measure.
Andre squeezed his eyes closed, and pushed a button.
There was a deep hum, no louder than a fluorescent lightbulb that’s about to go bad. For a moment it appeared that nothing was happening—the pig remained unharmed and Andre didn’t explode in a blue flash.
Then, there was an enraged meow as Stench Machine went sailing through the air, flying toward Andre and slamming into his palm. Andre panicked, yelped, and shook the cat free.
He stared at the gadget in his hand and said, “So it’s a magnet for cats? Hey! It’s a pussy mag—”
“It’s a regular magnet,” interrupted Budd. “It grabbed the metal spikes on his collar. I could feel it tuggin’ on the keys in my pocket.”
“You sure you weren’t just happy to see me?”
“Anyway,” Will said with a sigh, “this doesn’t seem particularly useful. Echo, see what else we got.”
Andre said, “You don’t think a mega-powerful magnet would be useful? You cover your whole body in these things and you’d be a superhero who could manipulate all metal. You could call yourself Magnetor.”
“Yes,” Budd said. “Right up until you sucked a car on top of yourself.”
As they passed back into the ballroom, Zoey said, “Just to summarize, Molech already has an entire arsenal of these gadgets, already implanted in the bodies of him and his goons, all of which are presumably working perfectly. Meanwhile, we’re going to have at least a week tied up in just figuring out what we’ve got in our catalog? What exactly are we hoping to find here?”
Will said, “I don’t know, a piece of equipment that protects a person against all of the gear Molech has?”
Echo said, “You want a hypothetical protection against a railgun that can fire projectiles at Mach 15, a plasma channel device that can produce enough current to turn a car into a black stain on the pavement, and god only knows what else he’s got in his toy box? I can’t even imagine what that would look like.”