“In position.”
“Looks like your ride’s for nineteen minutes, plus or minus. Dean built the pad in a storage shed in the back yard, and every story he’s ever told indicates he couldn’t get it to work and abandoned it there until he finished his first bachelor’s degree … in ninth grade. So you shouldn’t have any spectators. Get in, read the tag, and hide until you ride back. Good to go?”
“Do it.”
Tiny beams of sunlight illuminated motes of dust kicked up by her arrival. She coughed into the crook of her elbow and waited for her eyes to adjust. The landing pad didn’t look like a prototype, it looked like a junk pile. Wires and tubes snaked everywhere over a stainless steel grid, a twisted mélange of spaghetti wiring. She never would have agreed to the jump had she seen the landing pad first. Still, nobody could beat Barry at his job, and the foam ride had been both painless and instantaneous.
The storage shed—more of a rickety wooden shack—held massive piles of old tech: laptop computers, photomultiplier tubes, smart phones, oscilloscopes, and heaps of engineering-related equipment she didn’t recognize. Amidst the tech stood rakes, shovels, a stack of faux-clay pots, and several bags of red cedar mulch. A paper wasp nest buzzed in the far corner; the insects paid her no attention whatsoever.
A peek out the door crack yielded the expected intel, a fenced-in yard with a dog pen and two young maple trees behind a double-wide trailer with cracked, peeling siding that might once have been a light beige. Contrasting this humble beginning with Dean Crossing’s multitrillionaire lifestyle made her brain hurt. She opened the door with a lazy creak, stepped out, and approached the trailer. En route she put on the mask, but kept it bunched on her head like a cap.
A peek inside the back window told her everything she needed to know: a female pit bull with a black and brown brindle coat snoozed on her back, legs spread, in the middle of the single unmade bed in the back of the living area. The pink collar looked promising. Laundry covered every surface—the bed, both chairs, the tiny kitchen table. Lace panties hung even from the kitchen faucet, but at least they looked clean. Aside from the dog and a dubious plate of what might have been food some months ago next to the preposterously thick 2DTV, there were no signs of life.
She crept around to the front of the house and put her hand on the front door handle. The cheap aluminum blazed in the afternoon sun, almost too hot to touch. She opened the outer door, tried the inner knob. Locked, of course. She knelt, pulled out the B&E kit, set the brass knuckles on the ground, and opened the bag of jerky. If Fido wasn’t friendly, she might be more interested in food than guard duty.
She jammed the shim through the door and lifted, wiggling until it jammed in next to the deadbolt. She twisted, released, twisted again. Eighty seconds later she opened the door and stepped inside with her gear, a smile on her face and bag of jerky in-hand.
The dog bounded to her, tail wagging, eyes bright and happy.
“Hi, puppy!” She upended the bag on the kitchen floor, and the dog went to town, gobbling down morsels without bothering to chew. She grabbed the collar and looked at the tag. BERNIE. “Are you a good girl, Bernie?” Bernie ignored her in favor of jerky, tail beating against her legs. She turned the collar—harder than it should have been, but the nylon squeezed too tight and Bernie’s neck rippled with hard muscle.
Another twist revealed the number: 254-469-2848-74. She reached under her wig and pressed the cylinder in her memory jack, saving the data. “Good girl!” She patted the dog on the head.
“Excuse me,” a woman said behind her.
She whirled to find a blonde girl, no more than twenty-five, in a Pearl Jam T-shirt and Daisy Dukes, fists on her hips, stance wide just inside the door. Pretty in a way, her skin pulled too tight on her face, her eyes still baggy and dark under too much makeup. She sneered at Alyssa with teeth brown from methamphetamine abuse.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Sorry, I was—”
The woman kicked, a practiced move more Tai Bo than Tai Kwon Do. Alyssa dropped prone, then leapt to her feet, brass knuckles in hand. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Fuck you, bitch.” She drew out the last word to two syllables, “bee-itch,” as she pulled a steak knife from the counter. And then she swung. Alyssa blocked the swing and drove brass knuckles into her assailant’s solar plexus. She dropped to the ground without even catching herself, a dull thud and a clatter of steel on linoleum.
The woman coughed, and blood sprayed from her mouth. Her eyes open, she didn’t blink, and after a haggard breath didn’t move, or twitch. Alyssa sighed, a sad acknowledgement of the loss of life.
You can’t change the past.
She’d killed this woman twenty-five years ago.
“Dammit, lady, there’s no way I hit you that hard.”
Bernie, done with her snack, licked the dead woman’s face and whined, smearing red blood across her haggard features.
Her internal clock gave four minutes to ride. Give or take. She turned to leave and a school bus stopped right in front of the driveway. A young boy, maybe ten or eleven, bounded down the stairs, laughing at something. His light brown, almost sandy hair and boyish smile drove a knife into her heart, his baby blues killing her as surely as she’d killed his mother.
This isn’t Dean Crossing’s house.
He got the mail and ran toward the door. Bernie bolted outside, tail wagging, the stupid dog unable to process what she’d witnessed through the joy of her boy coming home. She ran in joyous circles around the boy, lunging and running away and lunging again, and oh how he laughed.
She stepped into the darkness, pulling the mask over her face.
“Mom?” Seth cried out.
She bolted into the bedroom and tried to lock the door, but it had no lock. She closed her eyes and fought back tears.
“Mom? Mom!” His cry went from worried to heart-wrenching anguish. She stumbled back, unwilling to hear any more but unable to escape, and a lamp crashed down behind her.
“Who’s there?” Footsteps, then a fist pounding on the door. “I’ll kill you, you motherfucker! If it’s the last thing I do. I’ll fucking—”
She closed her eyes against the bright white glare off the stainless steel tube. She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding, choked down the nausea always felt on return to the present.
“Welcome back,” Barry said. “Sixty-seven microsecond slide, a hundred forty-eight petajoules net loss.” His perfunctory tone softened. “You look like shit.”
The cylinder lifted with a whine of servos. Seth Newell sat against the wall, hands in his lap. Wet streaks marred his cheeks. “She should.”
She held up her hands, and realized the brass knuckles still constricted her fingers.
“Is that how you did it? Is that how you killed my mother?”
“Hey now,” Barry’s voice rang out. “Everything up-and-up there?” Seth touched a button on the wall, killing the intercom.
“I hit her once, just to knock her down,” she said. “It shouldn’t have killed her.” Lame, as apologies went.
“Years of methamphetamine abuse, coupled with syphilis and a couple of other things. She was a junkie hooker, but she was my mom. And you hit her hard enough to burst her pancreas.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It took me a while to figure out what happened, that someone used the prototype to come back for something. I’ve spent my whole life figuring out who. Do you know how many people I’ve sent back? How much money I’ve spent, how many years, to find the person who killed her?” He reached behind his back and pulled out a pistol, a compact military weapon with fin-guided, explosive rounds. And pointed it at her. “And to think it was you.”
She choked up, tried to speak. Nothing came out.
“You remember what I screamed at you, while you hid in
my bedroom?”
She swallowed and tried again. “I didn’t mean to. You know me, know I’d never—”
“You killed my mother!” His eyes blazed, anger and hatred and hurt given form.
“I know. And I’d change it if I could. I’m so sorry. But Seth, you’re not a killer. You’re a gentle man, a decent man. You know me.”
“I do.” He pulled the trigger.
SHORTED
Barry couldn’t breathe.
He stumbled, dizzy, chest squeezed by a sudden, inexplicable panic. The world hazed from the bustle of a New York City crosswalk to red to black. A creeping, omnipresent dread brought him, shaking and sweating, to the asphalt. Legs bumped against him as the crowd skirted his fetal body, other seventy- and eighty-year-olds rushing to and from jobs as meaningless as their lives.
He crawled on hands and knees toward the shoulder, desperate to get out of traffic before the light turned. The thought of tires crushing his bones and rupturing his organs brought a new wave of panic. Nobody would stop for a Short; he wouldn’t have.
Once on the curb he sat back, squeezed his eyes shut against the flashes of sunlight on passing cars, hummed to himself to drown out the rustling shuffle of a million feet like spiders casting webs across his brain.
He forced himself to recall the Professional Development training for dealing with Shorts, a seminar the government required over thirty years earlier after the first chips failed: Shorts may become confused, anxious, irrational. Desperate.
After decades with the regulation chip, they’ll be at a loss what to do with a world they find suddenly strange and terrifying, and may become violent. Standing protocol: ignore them, get on with your business, and let the police deal with them.
The police!
They’d picked him up sixty years ago for stealing a car, a stupid act brought about by nothing more than boredom. Compassionate but firm, they’d brought him in and given him his chip, and everything had run like clockwork since. With his help they found—
My sister! He hadn’t thought of Sasha since, his moods and concerns regulated by the neural implant. She had had brown hair like his that must have gone gray long ago, and would look just like their mother.
Mama! She couldn’t still be alive, not after all this time.
Lying on the curb, he wept for her.
~
“Why did scientists seed the sky?” Miss Schotts surveyed the room before calling on Barry, to the disappointment of Jayden, who pouted and crossed her arms.
“To increase the albedo of the Earth!” A new word, learned only that day; Barry tasted it on his tongue. Al-bee-dough. A lumpy word, it sounded like a town in Arizona, or a disease that left huge warts all over your skin.
“That’s right.” His teacher said. “By upping the reflectivity of the upper atmosphere—making it shinier—climatologists like your dad are going to save us all from global warming.”
Over the following months, as a way to teach percentages to Barry’s fourth-grade class, Miss Schotts had incorporated the numbers into her lessons—0.7 had gone up to 0.76, an increase of 8.57%, made by dispersing reflective nanoparticles into the upper atmosphere. His pride at successful calculation—on paper but without a calculator—locked the numbers into his mind. They followed the results through the months, adjusting their figures on a paper chart Miss Schotts had pinned up next to the Smart Board. Barry got to adjust the chart every day at the beginning of class, his reward for being the son of the man who led the project that would save mankind.
He remembered her frown when 8.57% became 9.2%, her furrowed brow at 10.1%. When they hit 12.8% Barry leaped up onto the stool before the class bell had rung to add more construction paper to the chart, and almost slipped off at the coughing sob that had erupted from the teacher’s throat. He turned, tacks in one hand, paper in the other, to find her curled up in her chair, shaking, face buried in her knees. She’d shrieked when Becky tried to comfort her and didn’t stop until school security dragged her away—and Barry hadn’t missed the wet streaks down the guard’s cheeks, either.
~
On the curb, he kept his eyes squeezed shut and sobbed, unable to contain the anguish of never seeing again the loved ones he hadn’t thought about in six decades, unable to process the nightmare world around him, billions of citizens acting out the death throes of human existence until their pointless bodies crumbled to dust. Those years flashed through his mind: punching a clock to shuffle countless medical records for the National Health Board and pass them on to someone else, collecting a check of useless money to pay for an apartment where he sat and watched live feeds of other people doing the same kind of work on his giant television, marking off the days on his electronic calendar because the chip found time important enough to notice, jobs important enough to do. He’d exercised to stay in shape, and for a few decades read United Nations updates on the plight of countries who had refused chipping, until he realized they’d been sending the same recycled updates for at least ten years.
Strong arms wrapped him, and he cried into them, muttering fractal despondencies into their unyielding embrace. They lifted him, set him down on a soft surface.
He opened his eyes when the world jerked. A van, the cab separated from the passenger compartment by a cage. Thick padding covered the floor and walls, the off-white color of clouds choked by smog. Sitting up, he steadied himself on the wall as the driver careened through the streets, barely glimpsed through the window into the passenger’s compartment.
Gray hair tumbled in wondrous curls to spill across the padded shoulders of her police uniform, her wizened face a mass of wrinkled, semi-transparent skin. The police had to wear armor because Shorts could turn violent in a moment. The chipped had nothing to gain, but Shorts had nothing to lose; the difference in behavior couldn’t be more stark, according to the sixty-something who’d given the lecture. He’d be dead by now, too, his estate turned over to the government for caretaking.
Caretaking for what?
Barry shuddered, consumed by childhood memories no longer filtered through a dispassionate lens built of P-N junctions and microscopic solder joints.
~
His parents had pulled him out of school, taking Barry and Sasha into the mountains to a home Dad had bought “in case things went wrong.” A log cabin on the surface, it had a basement six times bigger than the house, all of it given over to hydroponic gardens and rabbit cages. Sasha had loved the garden, and loved watching wolves and deer and the occasional elk with their father’s binoculars, especially the wolves. She worked without complaint but refused to kill rabbits for their meals; his father hadn’t spared Barry that kindness. They home-schooled as winter set in early enough to bury crops in California under first inches of snow, then feet. People fled the mountains as the snow piled high, and their father’s telescoping rods thrust solar panels ever higher in search of every spare watt.
In the Sierra Nevadas, February stretched into June, and the news spoke of famine, of ships ice-locked in New York Harbor, of mass exodus toward the equator, of bodies piled a hundred high at closed borders. It spoke of hydroponics projects beyond a scale mankind had ever dreamed.
And it spoke of Nyloxx.
Recipients determined by anonymous lottery in the Western world, by fiat elsewhere, the drug would sterilize millions, take pressure off of dwindling resources and give the rest of the human race a fighting chance. A year became two as they ate rabbits and watched old TV shows and learned from books in Dad’s library until the day Dad didn’t come out of his study. Mom couldn’t bring herself to look, and Sasha wouldn’t do it, so Barry had put the revolver back in the hidden compartment in the bottom drawer, dragged the body outside where the snow could bury it, and cleaned up the mess—he’d killed and butchered enough rabbits by then that the blood hadn’t bothered him, not all that much, and nothing had struggled under his hands.
; He cried at night, biting on a finger so they couldn’t hear him.
~
The back door opened to a blast of sunlight, snapping Barry from his reverie. Two blank-faced policemen flanked the driver. Salt-and-pepper hair, good muscle tone, they couldn’t have been more than sixty-five. LGs—the last generation.
“Get down, please,” one said.
He did, joints aching as he clambered over the bumper and trailer hitch onto the broken asphalt parking lot.
“What’s going to happen to me?” It came out a blubbering mess, a tumor of worry unleashed across his mind in an orgy of unwanted emotion. Standing straight, he sniffled, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and repeated himself in a calmer tone. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“Do you understand that your regulator has failed?”
He nodded.
“And that the neural interfaces are too delicate? That once failed it cannot be repaired or replaced?”
Another nod.
“Do you understand that we cannot allow the de-chipped to live among the normal populace?”
He hesitated. For the first time he wondered why; but because he understood the fact, he nodded again.
“We have an area for the de-chipped. You’ll not be allowed to leave, but as long as you don’t try to escape or commit violence you’ll be allowed to stay as long as you like. You’ll enjoy all government services uninterrupted.”
“Okay.” He cast his eyes down and allowed the officers to lead him through the door. It closed behind him, and through the wall he heard the crunch of tires on gravel. He looked up.
Men and women sat at tables in an outdoor yard, watching ancient programs on televisions hung on the walls, or talking in small groups. They ignored him, so he returned the favor to sit at an empty picnic table and wait for whatever would happen to happen.
In the Garden of Rusting Gods Page 13