Amped

by Daniel H. Wilson

  I mentally kick toward the surface, searching for the cradle of my body.

  “Not yet,” whispers Lyle. “Not yet.”

  He pushes his hair out of his face, turns to the crowd of people now standing and watching. Backlit by the fire, it is hard to see their faces. But in shifting neon glints, I catch a few traces of awe—and many more of grim anticipation.

  “All right, y’all. Let’s welcome our brother with our fists, as we were once welcomed,” says Lyle. “If he lives, he can fight alongside us.”

  The hellish shapes come for me, but I am safe inside. I dance with the shadows of the campfire, untouched as dark fists push the night air around my body.

  * * *

  Local Scrap Causes National Outrage

  NOWATA, Okla.—Twenty-two people were injured, seven of them seriously, in an apparent gang fight Tuesday in a field outside the Eden Trailer Park on Cottonwood Avenue near Spiro.

  One of the victims, Sheriff Billy Hardaway, reported that a group of implanted youths approached the field armed with baseball bats, knives, and sticks. Unprovoked, the youths attacked a group of local men who had convened in the field to form a candlelight vigil in support of pure human rights.

  “After hearing reports of unrest from inside Eden, some local citizens were gathered in the field to ensure that any violence coming from the trailer park did not affect the rest of the nearby community,” said Sheriff Hardaway, who added that he himself required a visit to the hospital after the attack.

  Sequoyah County police, aided by state troopers, are still looking for suspects in the late-night ambush. News of the skirmish has been picked up on national talk radio and televised news reports.

  Senator Joseph Vaughn, the head of the Pure Human Citizen’s Council, urged the U.S. government to “crack down on these amped delinquents before the violence can spread beyond their crime-infested ghettos.”

  “You never ate Mister Chicken? Damn, how do you live?” Lyle asks me.

  We’re outside a fast-food shack, a few hours outside Eden, sitting on molded plastic chairs that have faded to the color of dirty cotton candy. The building is perched on the side of a hill, hugging a winding road. A motley collection of trailer houses are roosted along the steep route, bleached and broken, like flotsam left behind after a flood.

  “How have you lived this long, driving that shit heap?”

  Lyle’s blue pickup truck is sitting ten feet away, engine still ticking. The sun-blanched dashboard is buckled with tectonic cracks, and coiled springs root through the foam seats, only occasionally, painfully, breaching. The rattling monster gives me bad memories of high school. And Lyle starts it with a screwdriver. No kidding.

  The cowboy points at his car with a nugget of fry bread that trails gossamer tentacles of honey. “Sometimes you gotta go backward before you can go forward. That heap may be shitty, but she’s never been touched by the government.” Lyle takes a bite, talks with his mouth full. “Lucky for us, Oklahoma never bought into safety inspections.”

  I poke fingers through the red plastic ribs of my chicken basket. The food is greasy, hot, and astonishingly good.

  “Did you call Valentine?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” says Lyle. He activates an e-cigarette and lounges back in the chair. “Couldn’t say much with him under surveillance. Told him enough to put him and his boys on lockdown.”

  “Let’s hope we get there before Vaughn’s Priders,” I say.

  Lyle nods lazily, pushes steam out of his nostrils. The hypnotically wailing cicadas and restless grasshoppers fill in the conversation for a few minutes. It’s peaceful out here. The sporadic rush of cars going past is like a fall wind.

  “What do you really want out of this? Astra?” I ask Lyle.

  He tosses an empty e-cigarette cartridge onto the ground, where it joins a hundred others in various states of decomposition. Activates another.

  “Change, man,” he says. “You ever hear of the scala naturae?”

  “Aristotle. The great chain of being. A medieval categorization of living things. Before there was a difference between science and religion.”

  Lyle shakes his head at me, lips curling up at the corners, takes a drag.

  “Teacher,” I say, shrugging.

  “Then you know the order,” says Lyle. “Plants, animals, men, angels, then God. Difference between men and angels is that men are stuck in a body. They feel pain, hunger, thirst. But me and you, we don’t have to feel them things. Body diagnostics come on level one. Easy. We can turn off the human condition. So maybe we’re closer to angels, you know? Creatures of the mind. A higher morality.”

  I push my food to the side. “The machine doesn’t make us into something new, Lyle. It only amplifies our abilities. More of the same.”

  Lyle stands up, paces.

  “But when you’re whole hog, the decisions come from so far down … goddamn. The machine takes us deeper into our souls. That far inside, we’re capable of anything. Way beyond right or wrong.”

  “A friend of mine once said that if you’re good, you’ll do good things. If you’re not, you won’t.”

  “Don’t let Jim fool you, Owen. We’ve all got a killer inside us.”

  I watch the cowboy pace for a moment, trying to judge how serious he is. “We’re men, Lyle, not angels. The Zenith can’t take the blame. If anything, it makes us more responsible. We can do more.”

  Lyle smokes and watches the road. I ignore the fluttering grasshoppers and winding cars, pulse pounding in my peripheral vision. If Lyle really believes that he is beyond right and wrong, then I have a serious problem.

  Finally, Lyle turns and claps me on the shoulder. “Maybe you’re right,” he says, walking around the side of the shack. “Because I got to piss like a racehorse and I never seen an angel do that.”

  Lyle and I drive maybe a couple hundred miles northeast before the cowboy wordlessly pulls off the main highway. Thirty minutes later, we’ve reached a dust-choked road lined with rusty barbed-wire fences. We follow it until we come upon a tractor trailer beached by the side of the road.

  Lyle slams on the brakes, spraying rocks and gravel. Our rooster tail of dirt catches up to us on the breeze as we get out of the car. I sneeze as the haze swallows the tractor trailer. Leaves it looming there like a Jurassic dinosaur.

  “Pit stop,” said Lyle.

  We’re somewhere in Missouri, I’m guessing. Not to St. Louis yet. Maybe a quarter of the way to Detroit. “We don’t have time,” I say.

  There are only four generals left in charge of protecting amps nationwide and one of them is on the verge of being ambushed.

  “It’s worth it,” says Lyle, getting out of the truck. Reluctantly, I follow.

  The rear half of the abandoned tractor trailer sits cockeyed, sunk hubcaps deep into the reddish dirt. It looks like it’s been here through a few prairie-swept rainstorms, leaning into a sagging barbed-wire fence like a bull scratching himself. Waves of brown grass lie down and stand up at the whim of a hot breeze. It’s been a long day driving.

  Pretty soon the sun is going to go down and the rattlesnakes can all go home.

  We walk closer and I see a beat-up generator sputtering around the side. Next to it, about a half dozen of Lyle’s soldiers sit in the shade of the trailer. A few of them pass an electronic cigarette between them, the LED tip of it glowing in time to their puffs. They nod to Lyle like soldiers.

  Lyle’s got one blood-crusted hand on the clasp that will let those double doors swing wide. He flashes a wry smile my way and gives her a yank.

  I’m hit by a sudden blast of refrigerated air from the back of the trailer. It carries a sharp antiseptic smell that reminds me of my dad. I blink a few times, trying to understand what I’m seeing.

  Some kind of mobile surgery station.

  A surgeon stands in the very back of the trailer, glaring at us with his eyes over his surgical mask. Several layers of clear hanging plastic separate us, but he’s outlined by bright circular spotlig
hts that are mounted from the ceiling, hovering like alien spaceships. A patient sits facedown on a paper-covered massage chair, not moving.

  The surgeon waves his latex-gloved hands at us, urging us to hurry up and get the fuck inside already.

  Lyle nudges me in the small of my back, and I scramble inside, getting a lift from the trailer hitch. He follows me up and we stand in the leaning doorway.

  “Shut the door,” says the surgeon, voice muffled behind his mask.

  Lyle hauls the doors closed. The surgeon drops a magnifying monocle over his right eye and gets back to work.

  “This looks like a bad idea,” I say, breath frosting.

  “You need this,” says Lyle.

  “I’m not going under the knife.”

  Lyle sighs. “A lot of amps are depending on us. In Eden and all over.”

  I remember that anatomy poster on my dad’s office wall. Frontal lobe. Temporal lobe. Motor cortex. Sensory cortex.

  “What are we talking here?” I ask.

  “A simple sensory suite. Retinal and cochlear. Eyes and ears. Outpatient shit. Takes fifteen minutes. It links up with your Zenith and I’m offering it to you for free. And it ain’t even close to free—right, Norman?”

  In reply, the surgeon waves a small shiny tool at Lyle. Then he jams it into his patient’s temple, bracing the guy’s head with his other hand. I hear a pneumatic click, and shudder.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see better in the dark. Hear better than a field mouse. All that shit. But the real advantage is in the connections. Zenith will use the extra information. Retinal talks. Cochlear talks. Zenith takes you to another level. Full sensory network.”

  “And why do you think I’d want that?”

  “Why, to protect Eden,” he says.

  He’s right. Thinking of those spotlighters, of Nick sad and bleeding, makes me want to claw through those plastic sheets and leap into the chair.

  “All my generals have it,” says Lyle, eyebrows up. “Get it. Learn to use it and you won’t bother to hide your face no more. You’ll be the baddest motherfucker on the block. You’ll be Astra.”

  A general? I’ve only been down to level two. Am I ready to lead an army?

  Ducking under a leaf of plastic, I take a closer look and my breath catches. The reality of those surgical instruments drops onto me. Gleaming silver, razor edges, and hypodermic tips.

  “Relax, man,” says Lyle. “Even little Nick has one of these. They’re so simple to install that this guy can do it in a goddamn trailer in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I—I need to think about this—” I stutter.

  “You think Vaughn’s gonna let us just walk in and warn Valentine?” asks Lyle. “You’re gonna need every advantage you can get. We don’t have time to fuck around.”

  Lyle gestures at the patient. He’s a Hispanic guy curled on his side, eyes wide as the surgeon works on his temple. “Look at us. Amps. We’re morons smarter than Lucifer. Cripples stronger than gravity. A bunch of broke-ass motherfuckers, stinking rich with potential. This is our army. Our people. Strong and hurt. We’re the wounded supermen of tomorrow, Gray. It’s time you got yourself healed. New world ain’t gonna build itself. And the old world don’t wanna go without a fight.”

  “Where’s yours?” I ask.

  In response, Lyle leans forward and pulls down his lower eyelid with a greasy fingertip. Faintly, I make out a rectangular square floating over the white of his eye. A trace of gray, it’s nearly invisible.

  “Came with Echo Squad. Part of the package,” he says.

  “You never seemed like the military type.”

  Lyle snorts. “Military was my family for a long time. But all that ended once they put the Zenith in me. Saw things clearer then. Realized I had a whole new family—one that needed me.”

  “So you got lucky that the names of your unit were leaked and the army kicked you out?”

  “Yeah. Lucky,” says Lyle, smirking. Something in the tilt of his smile is off. Some memory, half suppressed. “And you’re lucky, too. This kind of hardware only goes to my closest. Folks with potential. You handled your initiation like a man. I know you can handle these upgrades and a lot more. I’m proud of you, buddy.”

  Lyle’s smile goes genuine.

  Something bumps into me, and I see it’s the patient. He’s stumbling out of the operating room on wobbling legs. Lyle reaches up and grabs the guy’s shoulders, steadying him. Cups the guy’s cheeks in his dirty hands, orients his face toward me.

  “Check out his retinal,” he says.

  I peer into the guy’s eyes. They look the same, except the right one. It has a small rectangle sort of floating on it. Like a circuit diagram or a microscopic tattoo. Hardly noticeable, like the one Nick has.

  “Thank you, Mr. Crosby,” says the guy.

  “Ad astra,” says Lyle.

  “To the stars.”

  Jim told me to trust myself. Absorb the technology into my body and hope like hell that I’m a good man. We’ll see if he was right.

  “If I do this,” I say, “we find who is hunting Zeniths. It’s not enough just to help Valentine. Whether it’s Priders or the government or the military—I don’t care. We’ve got to find out who it is and put an end to it.”

  “You’ll find out,” says Lyle. “I promise.”

  I push through the last plastic sheet and into the operating room. Lyle fades to a blurry figure on the other side. “Your vision is about to get a whole lot clearer, Gray,” he calls. “You’ll be seeing shit you can’t imagine.”

  I take a deep breath and sit down on the padded chair. Nod at the doctor. Then I call back to Lyle. “How can you pay for this?”

  “It’s covered,” he replies.

  “By who?”

  Lyle stops for a second, thinking about how to respond. Finally, he pushes his blurry face against the plastic and looks me dead in the eye.

  “By the boss. Who do you think?”

  My mind and body are still out of tune.

  I hope they run into each other real soon.

  —JIM MORRISON

  * * *

  Attacks Deplored, Inquiries Pushed

  OKLAHOMA CITY—Against a background of violence and uncertainty, a special federal grand jury was convened today to investigate the outbreaks of violence between implanted and nonimplanted citizens that continue to plague the nation.

  Assistant US Attorney Clarence Albad, in his charge to the grand jury, emphasized the savage beating of Pure Pride demonstrators in Eastern Oklahoma last week that injured two dozen people. Similar incidents have been reported in major metropolitan areas across the nation, including the burning of a house in Houston that was used for Pure Human Citizen’s Council meetings.

  From his offices in Pittsburgh, Senator Joseph Vaughn has announced that a round of new Pure Pride protests have been scheduled to occur around the country. Sequoyah County, near where the beating incident occurred, has become a symbolic destination for protesters. The governor of Oklahoma announced that 300 Oklahoma state troopers and 500 National Guardsmen have been put on alert statewide, ready to back up local police if violence erupts.

  I’m staring up at a four-story row house made of moldering red brick. Shaggy yellow moss coats the seams between bricks like tooth decay. The roof is partly caved in, and swollen slats of plywood cover all the windows but one. Someone has spray-painted a hand-sized image of a bloody star on the porch, and vines have eaten all but the star’s points.

  This building was beautiful once. That was a long time ago.

  Blinking, I feel the rasp of my new retinal implant under my eyelid. My eye is a little tender, but otherwise I feel the same. Lyle says it takes a while for the Zenith to acclimate to the new information being collected by retinal and cochlear. My new eyes and ears.

  “Valentine is in charge of the whole Detroit area?” I ask Lyle. “And he lives in one of these?”

  Lyle makes his way carefully down the sidewalk toward me. Put
s a finger to his lips. Points to the house.

  I stare up into that lone dark window and a wave of white light suddenly bleeds across the surface of the building. The blackness behind the window fades up to gray and I glimpse something inside. I wince and the dazzling light fades. The retinal implant has some kind of autoexposure and it’s always on. I squeeze my eyes shut to block out the overexposed building and to block out something else.

  A glimpse of something gnarled and man-shaped, standing behind that window.

  “Valentine is in charge,” Lyle says quietly, cracking his knuckles and sizing up the boards that cover the front door. “This neighborhood is Beverly Hills compared to the others. There’s ghettos like this over southwest Detroit. Amps got no other place to go.”

  These few blocks of row houses are huddled together in the middle of an abandoned industrial park, falling against one another in a decomposing heap. The carbon lick of extinguished flame rises from some of the gutted windows. At least most of the debris on the street has been stacked or burned. Twisted piles of plastic, broken glass, and scrap metal are scattered like modern art.

  I follow Lyle farther down the block. The front stoop of the house next door leans at a vertiginous angle, permanently italicized by rot and the elements.

  “Let me check this one,” he says.

  “Are you sure he knows we’re coming?” I ask.

  “Told you I sent word. But there’s only five Zeniths left out of twelve. He ain’t likely to answer the door to anybody. Even a good friend like me.”

  “Where are Stilman and Daley?” I ask. The other generals haven’t been back to Eden since their little vote. Off protecting the amps of America, I suppose.

  “They’re around. Checking a couple other spots.”

  Lyle smiles with nicotine-stained teeth. I have no time to wonder why we’re sneaking around, because he’s already on the move. He climbs the broken stone steps with wary grace. As he leans forward to peer in a cracked window, Lyle’s jacket hitches and I catch a glint of black metal. A pistol tucked into the crook of his back. A numbness creeps in around my shoulders—this feels wrong.