by Sean Platt
“I need a pickup,” said Kitty’s voice. “At…” She paused, as if calculating exactly where she was. The pause went on for so long that Micah wondered if the rest was cut off and blank.
“Canvas,” Micah said into Kitty’s pause, “where is this coming from?”
“It was transmitted from a beacon.”
“A beacon?”
“Yes, Micah. It entered The Beam at the western end of the Brooklyn Bridge, but its path prior to that has been obscured. It may have originated far from there.”
“That sounds like Kitty. And what…?”
Kitty resumed speaking, so Micah stopped to listen.
“I’ve attached an encrypted shot of my surroundings. The unarchive password will come separately. I don’t know where I am. At least partially because I can’t think straight.” She swallowed, and Micah heard several shallow breaths. “Use the City Surveillance DB to pattern-match my location. And Noah Fucking West, hurry. I can’t risk a live call, but I’m…I don’t think I have much left in me. I don’t…I can read some of my numbers, and…and they fried a lot of my nanos. I don’t know that I’ve got ten minutes. I’m fucked up, Champ.” That was her codename for Micah: Champ. Not as cute as his codename for her, but Kitty was cunning, not especially creative.
Then the message ended.
“Canvas, when was this received in Brooklyn?” he asked.
“Twenty-seven seconds ago…now,” said the soft voice.
The message made Micah jittery — both because one of his prime connections was somehow in peril and because it might make Micah himself vulnerable. And, frankly, because he liked Kitty. She was like the brother Isaac had never been.
“What the hell happened?” he muttered.
“You cannot return the ping, Micah,” said his canvas. “The message is listen-only.”
“I know it’s fucking listen-only,” he snapped. “I wasn’t talking to you, bitch.”
A moment later, a second message blipped in, containing the enormous alphanumeric password he’d need to decrypt the image attached to the first message.
“Process the image attachment,” said Micah.
Nothing happened.
“Canvas, process the image attachment,” he repeated.
There was a chirp, and a flashing blue square appeared next to the message, indicating a readable attachment.
He said, “What, you’re not talking to me now?”
Nothing.
“Canvas.”
“Yes, Micah?”
“Stop being a cunt.”
“Yes, Micah.”
He sighed, summoning his composure and glad that no one else was around to see him arguing with a computer and losing his cool. He wasn’t often unfettered. Isaac was quick to anger and impetuosity, which was probably why their mother (whom, Micah reminded himself, he needed to pay a requisite visit to soon) liked him less. It was why Micah had taken over his father’s majority stake in Ryan Enterprises and his sizable holdings in Xenia Labs despite being younger, while Isaac managed only to gather a few shittier bits of his father’s business’s detritus.
Micah closed his eyes and forced his mind to be still.
Kitty had unsettled him. There was so much wrong with her message. He’d taken a risk, going in with her early. He’d trained her; he’d mentored her; he’d paid for her add-ons (including the nanos that kept her so young) before she’d grown wealthy enough to buy them herself. Soon, she’d achieve Beau Monde status — and in the hands of someone like Kitty, Beau Monde status would damn near make her a god. There weren’t many people out there like Kitty, and she’d never intentionally betray Micah. But there were always connections and loose ends when you exposed yourself and gave someone your trust and compassion. It was hard, at times like these, not to regret it.
Regardless, Kitty was in trouble, and it had become his problem. She’d sent a beacon message rather than risk a live call. She had sounded exhausted and near death and didn’t think she had much time. He had to help her. Kitty was a significant asset. Micah had plans; if she expired now, his house of cards would collapse. He’d lose everything he’d invested in her. Certain…plans would never bear fruit.
He tapped the blue square.
The voice asked Micah if he wanted immersion.
“No. I don’t even want a holo projection or a 2-D. Just run it through CS for a location match. Hurry.” But that last was idiotic, too. Computers worked at the speed they worked at. They did nothing slow and were incapable of hurrying, whether they were part of emerging consciousnesses or not.
“I have a match, Micah.” A map appeared on the countertop, centered with a red dot. Micah pinched in and out, trying to get his bearings. Eventually, he recognized where the map had placed Kitty: near the Xenia warehouse in the sticks, way the hell off of Manhattan. It was lucky City Surveillance even had any usable images out that far. She was maybe a mile or three from the warehouse itself, in the wilds beyond. The area had once been a neighborhood, but the neighborhood had been struck by a stray Chinese missile in the ’30s, had been razed after the lattice went up, and had never been never rebuilt. Over the past fifty years, the place had become a strange sort of quasi-jungle surrounded by housing and industrial parks, filled with trees and pocked with hovels that were used by transients. There had been many reports of wildlife in the area — and not gophers.
“What the fuck is she doing there?” he said. Then, to forestall another annoying response from his canvas, he added, “Never mind. Show me Capital Protection in the area. Not Beamers. I don’t trust those assholes. Just CP agents.”
Blue dots peppered the screen, all to the right of the red one. He’d zoomed out to assess Kitty’s location, and when he pinched in again to show only officers within a reasonable distance, the blue dots vanished.
“How far is this — ” He placed one finger on the red dot and another on the blue one closest to it. “ — by car or hover?”
“Approximately two hours by car. One hour by hover, depending on observance of speed regulations.”
“How long by screetbike?”
“There’s heavy traffic in the area, Micah. At least forty minutes.”
“What if the copter uses line of sight, avoiding the skyroads?”
“That is illegal, Micah.”
“That’s not what I fucking asked!” Micah bellowed. He wished the canvas had a throat, so that he could choke it.
“Maybe twenty minutes at full speed, if the bike is not stopped by autocops,” said the canvas.
Micah thought of the message and its barely contained sense of panic. Kitty didn’t complain, so if she was admitting to being near death, then she was convinced it was true. Her breathing had sounded labored, her voice sober and too quiet. At least five minutes would have already passed between the time Kitty had recorded the message and he’d received it, given the time a stealth beacon took to float up undetected. Twenty-five minutes total from recording to rescue wasn’t much, but Micah was suddenly certain it wouldn’t do.
“Send bike CP017,” said Micah, reading the tag beside the closest blue dot. But then, quite suddenly, a new blue dot appeared much closer, labeled CP518.
“Wait. Who’s this?”
“Agents Kevin Jameson and Jason Whitlock,” answered the voice.
“On bikes?”
“Yes.”
“Do they have a Neuralin kit?”
“Yes, Micah.”
He had no idea why Whitlock was way the hell out near the warehouse or why his locator seemed to be fritzing sporadically on and off (Jameson was new and didn’t have one yet), but it didn’t matter. They could be at Kitty’s location in two minutes at most.
“Send them Kitty’s location and tell them to get her. Tell them to burn air to get there.”
The canvas chirped as the message was delivered. Immediately, on the zoomed-in map, the blue dot began to move. It winked off, then on again, closer.
“Hurry, you bastards,” he whispered.
> The canvas said, “They can’t hear you, Micah.”
Once, years ago, Kai had owned a cat named Saul. Everyone agreed it was a ridiculous name for a cat.
When she’d owned Saul, Kai had been living in a shitty street-level apartment near the park, in gangland territory. The place had rats, which Saul loved plenty — that being the primary reason Kai wanted the cat in the first place. Saul had done his job well, exploring exposed holes in the tattered walls and seeking nests, leaving Kai one macabre trophy after another.
One day, after those holes in the wall were all cleared of rodents and after he had lived a long and happy and useful life, Saul climbed inside the walls, refused to come out, and died the next day. Kai, crying, had to root him out and extricate him by the tail.
The cat had somehow known his days were over.
Now, with her breathing shallow and her pulse slowing, Kai crawled on her hands and knees toward a bombed-out and abandoned shack, knowing as surely as Saul had that her days were over, too.
Kai, like a poor, dumb animal, didn’t know how she knew her death was waiting, but she did. Something inside her had broken during her time on the Orion, under the uncaring hand of Alix Kane. Inside her mind, Kai’s body had been twisted backward upon itself, every joint snapped, tendons unthreaded from bone and neurons yanked free like loose and sparking power lines. Inside her mind, Kai’s heart had been shredded, her lungs punctured as she struggled for breath, a metal spear impaling her gut and making her swallow rust from the inside. Those experiences had been purely in her brain — senses perverted into feeling things that had not happened — but it made no difference. For centuries, yogis had shown it was possible to still their hearts and lower their skin temperature by force of mind alone. And if the mind controlled the body, why couldn’t the mind kill the body just as easily?
The old wives’ tale: if you die in a dream, you die in life.
Kai had died, and died, and died, and died. If being a killer and whore made her fit for Hell, she would welcome it. No Hell could be worse than what she’d lived through on that chrome table. Satan’s agony would feel like kisses beside it.
With the beacon she’d sent to Micah already forgotten, Kai used her hands to claw through the dirt. She made her way to the shack, punted the door shut behind her with one desperately kicking foot, and gave a tiny, helpless cry as she dragged herself across the shack’s wooden floor. She was finding a spot to die, just as Saul had all those years ago. Still, despite her resignation, she screamed as something grated inside her. It felt like she was being stabbed by a shattered rib, but she couldn’t remember if she’d taken a real fall or if it was all just the evil of artificial memory.
Inside the abandoned shack was a wooden dining room table and a pair of chairs, everything ancient and covered with slick green fungus. Kai dragged her useless corpse under the table and formed a protective ball, soft organs toward the center and backbone around her like a frightened animal’s shell.
Breath came slowly. Kai might have fallen asleep, and might have cried. She certainly revisited her earlier horrors, feeling each finger bend far enough to touch the back of her hand. Bones snapped loudly in her ears. Too late, Kai realized she shouldn’t have moved from her earlier spot. How far had she gone from the place she’d released the beacon? If Micah managed to send a rescue, how would it find her? Would the person who came to find her body know to check the shack?
But really: Did it matter?
Kai waited. And as she did, something itched at the back of her mind. She seemed to remember two other men who’d been with her, and seemed to recall something similar to responsibility — like being sure to turn the oven off — concerning them. Then, with difficulty, she placed them. She’d been with Doc and Nicolai. What had happened to them? Even as dead as Kai felt, she summoned the empathy to hope for their welfare. She hoped they had managed to escape their torture, and missed their dates with the evaporator as she had.
But her escape was so narrow, how could they have made theirs at all?
Kai exhaled a long and shambling breath. She couldn’t care. She had no space in her mind.
The room became black as she drifted away.
Some time later, the sound of boots snapped her awake. She tried to make herself alert, aware of threat’s whisper, but she had nothing left. Her head rose, but at first she couldn’t even open her eyes. She was groggy, sleep sealing her lids as morning brayed.
Her puffy lids rose on swollen eyes. She could see two offending sets of boots on the small room’s far side. The boots were black. Above them, neat black slacks. Kai rolled her eyes up to long black coats, and black gloved-hands clutching shiny black guns. They’d entered with their guns up and their blank, visored faces forward. One of the men’s digital gazes swept to the far side of the room then toward Kai. She curled tighter, trying to ball herself invisible. But of course, that was absurd. She was under a table, not in a box. Or, for that matter, between the walls of a rundown apartment.
“There she is,” said the first Beamer.
“I see her,” said the second. He was looking in the opposite direction as the first man, but of course, thanks to his visor, he saw whatever the first man (or headquarters, or whoever was in charge) wanted him to see.
Surprising herself, Kai suddenly resolved that no matter what, she would not die in the fetal position. And with that thought, she found energy. Hardly any energy…but energy nonetheless.
She exploded up from the floor, uncurling as she sprang to her feet, upsetting the table, raising her fists and raking her fingers at them like claws…
…or at least that’s how it seemed in her head. In reality, nothing much happened. She tried to spring, but could barely twitch. She tried to snarl, but she winced instead. She couldn’t extend her arms or uncurl her spine. She stayed in a ball, protecting herself with all the natural defense of a potato bug, apparently doomed to die in the fetal position after all.
The forward-facing Beamer seized her, dragged her from under the table, pulled her upright, and plopped her onto the tabletop like a bag of groceries.
“You don’t run from Beamers,” he said. Below his visor, his lips curled into an angry grimace as if the man was trying to prove something.
“But you caught me,” Kai wheezed. It was hard to speak, but she needed to say the rest: “What a big man you are.”
“I want to beat the shit out of her before we take her in,” the man yelled back to the other.
“Let’s just drag her up,” said the other. “Come on. Hurry. I’m already late for a meeting with my gaming guild.”
“Talk more about your gaming guild,” Kai coughed, still flat on her back. “You’re making me hot.”
The second man stopped and turned to Kai, pausing to assess what she hoped was a condescending smile on her lips.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll beat her just a little.”
When the second Beamer’s face appeared above Kai, she spit up at him. The spit never left her lips, and ran down her cheeks instead.
“Did she just spit at me?”
“She’s drooling. Burned.”
“I think she just spit at me.”
“I would never spit at a man who’s part of a gaming guild,” Kai croaked. “Come over here, big boy. You’re giving me a fever.” She reached for the Beamer’s groin, but it was too far and her arm didn’t have the strength to stray outstretched. It flopped like spaghetti, slapping the table with the sound of a fallen fish.
“Is she coming onto me?” said the second Beamer.
Kai rolled her arm, palm up, and flexed her fingers in a grabbing motion. “Just lay it in my hand.”
The first Beamer said, “Yes, I think she is.”
“I won’t squeeze it until your balls pop or anything.”
Instead of answering or unzipping, the second man used a black-gloved hand to punch Kai hard in the gut. She wanted to laugh and would have if she’d had the air. But Kai didn’t even have the reflexes to fli
nch around the blow, so she just gasped, smiled, and waited to die.
The man who’d hit her said, “Do you have any idea how bad it looks for us, you escaping?”
“As bad as your acne?”
He hit her again.
“Keep mouthing off. We can bring you back dead. It’s what they expect anyway.”
“Then hurry,” she said. “Hit me like a man.”
The shack had a fireplace in the corner. Beside the fireplace was a set of black iron tools. The Beamer tucked his gun into his holster, grabbed the poker, slapped it against his palm, then raised it. With no hesitation for drama, he swung. The swing was already launched when a hovercar-sized cannonball blew through the shack’s far wall and knocked the Beamer sideways. He struck the table’s edge and folded the wrong way. Something snapped, and the man screamed. A robot of some sort charged the room, its skeleton shifting from something wide-bodied, collapsing into something the size and shape of a silver man. Kai didn’t understand where the extra parts went; they seemed to simply melt into the smaller mechanical form. She wondered if she were hallucinating as the robot man removed what looked like a slumbergun from somewhere behind its body and fired it at the yelling Beamer, who fell immediately silent.
The other Beamer was coming at the robot man from behind with his own gun raised, but the robot man blurred to the side, and the shot missed him entirely, obliterating a large mirror on the shack’s opposite wall and venting outside air into the cabin. Kai looked at the robot and saw the lower half of a human face inside its hood. The face’s mouth looked shocked, as if its own movement had been a surprise.
The Beamer aimed and fired again. The man in the suit moved, but again the movement seemed involuntary, judging by how the human mouth gaped, barely able to keep up. The movement was so fast that Kai barely saw it happen. The Beamer’s shot went wide for a second time, blowing a dozen bricks from the fireplace. He wasn’t firing slumbershots, and if anything, the robot man seemed offended by such rude lethality.
