by Reed King
Here, the carpet was grubby and smelled like mildew. The clutter of old junk put me in mind of images I’d seen of Arizona after evacuation—so many abandoned, useless items, slowly accumulating sifting layers of grime.
Hanging above a massive desk was Mark J. Burnham in replica, smiling with only half his mouth, looking down at me as if we were in on the same joke. For a second I stood there, waiting for the picture to move, before realizing it was static. There was an old-fashioned clock wedged in the corner ticking away the minutes, one of the standing kinds with a pendulum that swung back and forth. All the furniture was old—a mix of clubhouse leather and exposed wood plus midcentury utility, polyurethane and plastic, stuff that looked like it had been scavenged by a climate refugee and sold for pennies and a six-pack of water.
From a side table, I picked up a photograph of Mark C. Burnham, suited up for an official function, trying for a squint at the woman behind him. It was for her, they said, that Mark C. Burnham had let the whole union tumble.
Whitney Heller was the blond-white of the Confederacy or the New Kingdom of Utah, and looked sneaky as hell. She smiled like someone who’s just ganked your wallet and knows she’s going to get away with it. But even then she must of been dying. Even then, cancer was nibbling into her organs, and the long shadow of what would come as a result—the Burnham Prize, the bankrupting of the Treasury, the riots and secessions—trailed her, darkening her name and memory.
I set the photograph down again. Next to it, an enormous glass jar filled with murky liquid let out a queasy green light. Suspended inside of it were two small globes that trailed long, pink tentacles. I bent down for a closer look.
Two human eyes, vivid blue against the slick of liquid suspension, glared out at me through the glass. I stumbled backward.
“They looked better in situ, I promise.”
I spun around and banged the corner of the table. The photograph of Burnham and Whitney Heller tumbled to the floor.
President and CEO Mark J. Burnham looked nothing like his portrait, or the corporate holos I’d been watching since birth. He was completely bald, first of all, about half the size of a normal man, and tucked into a massive wheelchair. In fact, he looked a little like he’d been milled through one of the dehydration machines in Production-22: all gravelly texture, dry skin, and chasms of wrinkles, like what he could really use was a good plumping. For a second, I could only stare.
He gestured to the photograph, facedown on the carpet. “Do you mind…?”
I fumbled quickly to slot it back into position. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to … I was just curious.…”
“Ah. Curiosity. Like nostalgia, almost impossible to kick.” The eyeballs, rotating slowly, shot me an evil look. “My dad’s life was this company,” he said, gesturing to them. “Now, he can always keep an eye on it. Two eyes, actually.”
I swallowed my stomach back in place. “Those are…?”
“Presidential relics, yes sir.” For a second, his smile tightened. “Nostalgia’s awful, son, I’ll tell you that too. The past has the advantage of being harmless. Even predators look pretty, so long as they’re good and dead.”
He wheeled up about an inch from my feet. His fingers rapped a rhythm on the underside of my palm when he mauled me for a handshake.
“Truckee Wallace, the young corporation hero. An orphan, I understand. Never knew your father. Your mother worked in our freight division, is that right? I heard about the accident. I’m sorry. She was a sharp woman. Very sharp, according to reports.”
“Thank you” was all I could say. It hurt me to think of how amped my mom would be that I was here, in the president’s office—that the uppercrust of all uppercrusts knew who she was.
“Go on, sit down, take a load off. No use standing on ceremony, right? I never do.” When I sat down, the couch let out a wheeze of old dust. “There. That’s better. Now I won’t have to cut your legs off.” He had the big grin of a grifter trying to sell you a bag of maggoty flour or a heap of drained batteries. Then: “It was a joke, Mr. Wallace. Surely you have those over in Low Hill?”
“A joke. Sure.” I managed to squeeze out a dribble of laughter.
“It’s a hard thing, Mr. Wallace, to spend your life speaking policy to a person’s belt buckle. It’s one of the reasons I use holos for most of my public appearances. No one respects a man in a wheelchair, and that’s the truth.” I was about to naysay him out of politeness, but he went on: “Besides, I’ve seen my share of nut sacks for a lifetime. A man’s balls may make all his decisions, but faces are much easier to read.” He leaned forward, knitting his hands on his lap so they wouldn’t twitch. “Yours says you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing here.”
I wasn’t sure whether it would be good manners to contradict him, even though he was dead-on. So I said nothing.
“See? I knew it. Fair enough. I’ll get right to it.” Mark J. Burnham leaned forward. His eyes flared quickly in the light. “How would you like to save the world, son?”
I waited for him to laugh. When he didn’t, I said, “Is this another joke?”
“No, Truckee. This time, I’m serious.” Behind him, the windows were tinted the dull blue of a generic homescreen: a company promotional video looped silently across them, casting strange patterns on the ceiling.
For a moment, I could only sit there, staring at him. My tongue felt like a wet towel. Finally I managed to wring my voice out of it. “I’m afraid I don’t follow, sir.”
He leaned back, letting his hands tap a rhythm on the armrests. “Tell me, Truckee. How much do you know about the Burnham Prize?”
It was the second time I’d been asked about the Burnham Prize in less than twenty-four hours—and still, the last question I expected. “I know what everyone knows,” I said carefully. “I know that President Burnham”—I stopped—“the first President Burnham, wanted to find a way to cure death.”
“Very good.” He smiled at me the way the health managers do when they’re diagnosing terminal cancer, like with enough pep I might confuse it for a prize. “You can’t imagine the race it inspired. The whole world got involved. The Race to Infinity, they called it. It was the singular goal of every developed nation—to be the one to win.”
“But no one did win,” I said.
For a split second, when he looked at me, I saw buried in that dried-up husk of a body something coiled and feverish. Then President Burnham barked a laugh, and I was sure I’d only imagined it.
“No,” he said, again with a short laugh. “No one won. In fact, I think it’s safe to say we all lost.” Then: “Crunch, United, had flooded the market with dymophosphylase for a profit, and only succeeded in making it nearly worthless—and breeding a generation of dimeheads, of course. When there was no money left in the company, my father used the Treasury as a personal piggy bank. He threw half the budget of the United States at the favorite to win. You’ve heard of Albert Cowell?”
I nearly told him I’d been ear-jawed all morning by a barnyard animal thanks to Albert Cowell. But I just nodded.
“The Wizard of the West Coast, they call him. He’s a brilliant man, and a friend to the corporation—a good friend, despite appearances.” He eyeballed me for a bit to make sure I picked up this piece of subtext: a friend naturalized in the Federal Corporation’s biggest international rival could only mean an agent. “He actually got very close. He managed to transplant brains between mammals—not, however, without consequences. But it was too little, too late.” His smile narrowed. “Do you know what happened next, Mr. Wallace?”
“Sure,” I said. “That was the start of dissolution.”
He cranked his head up and down so enthusiastically, I thought he might snap his spindle of a neck in two. “Yes. Yes, exactly. The whole country came apart. More than two and a half centuries of history, wiped out in the hunt for forever.”
He spun around, and zigzagged over to the windows on soft rubber treads. Even though he wore no visor, he moved throu
gh the office with ease, cutting left and right, missing the furniture by inches. A thrill went through me: he must of been cabled with a knock-off version of the ThinkChip™.6 They were wildly expensive and almost impossible to come by, patented by an experimental tech company just before dissolution. Although the Federal Corp had recently managed to pirate the tech, I’d never seen one in real life.
Abruptly, the homescreen and its loop of promo videos dispersed. My stomach tilted into my throat: I hadn’t totally figured how high up we were.
Then I realized the windows weren’t showing the actual view at all, but a shifting holo of the city as it would of looked PD7, when the whole city was still called Little Rock. The graphics were bonkers. There were people walking around and everything, and old-fashioned rigs that could only talk by honking at one another.
“My father went on the run with Whitney Heller. After everything, he was still trying to save her.” The way his voice twisted around Heller’s name, I knew he knew that she was the only person in the whole world his father had given two turds about. “I went with them,” he added. “I don’t remember much about it, thankfully. A little denial goes a long way. All I remember is the smell of burning, and the sun turning red behind veils of ash.” He cleared his throat. “They say he was on his way to see Albert Cowell, to convince him to try a brain swap, despite the risks.”
I thought of what the goat had told me: when the fault line blew, Mark C. Burnham was flattened by a garbage truck only a few miles from the Laguna-Honda Military Base, where Cowell had his laboratory. It fit.
But I had no idea what any of it had to do with me.
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m still not sure why I’m here. This was all before my time.…”
I trailed off when he began to laugh. It was the strangest laugh I’d ever heard, like he was hiccupping around a dead rodent. A bad feeling slid its tongue down my spinal cord.
Finally, he got control of himself and pivoted around to face me.
“Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Wallace. You see, the Race to Infinity never ended. It just went underground.” Backlit by the shifting portrait of a lost world, he was nothing but shadow and darker shadow, and narrow slits of darkness for his eyes. “And as of very recently, we have ourselves a winner.”
6
What’s the difference between a grifter and a politician?
Not everything a grifter sells is 100 percent horseshit.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
In the silence, I could hear the old-fashioned clock clucking its tongue at us. “I don’t understand,” I said finally.
“Her name is Yana Rafikov,” was Burnham’s response, “and we hoped she was dead.”
“Yana Rafikov.” The name was familiar, thanks to Jared and his obsession with all things tech. “Wasn’t she—?”
“The inventor of ThinkChip™ technology, yes. It’s thanks to her I don’t have to fiddle around with a lot of nibs and nobs just to buzz around—my chair, like my feed, is linked directly to my frontal lobe.”
Jared would cream his pants worse than the time we first hacked our way into a free porn feed out of Libertine.
“Rafikov herself is in a wheelchair. Has been since her twenty-fifth birthday. She was born with a rare neurological condition called Keller’s Disease that started showing in late adolescence. Eventually, it immobilized her. When she introduced the ThinkChip™ in 2032, it was with the goal of helping people paralyzed by illness or age.” This time, when he smiled, it looked more like a wince. “But over time, it seems her ambitions got larger. Or maybe they were that large all along.” He barely had to twitch to pull up a new image on the windows: an old 2-D video, pixelated so badly I had to blink it into focus. “This video is from 2038, her last known public appearance. She was only thirty-two, and already a billionaire a dozen times over.”
On the vast and empty stage, Yana Rafikov looked like a person dropped from a height, broken on the way down, dumped in the spotlights accidentally. Her legs were as stickly thin as a dimebaby’s, her spine so twisted that her head nestled flush with her shoulder. She had to gravel her words through a voice box, and before the translation kicked in, all I could make out was a slur.
But then, a split second later, the reconfiguration of her voice boomed out through Burnham’s office from 360-degree hidden speakers. I jumped.
“We are all slaves,” she said, and an invisible crowd roared its approval. The hair on my arms lifted. “We are shackled to bodies that betray us. I ask for nothing more and nothing less than freedom.”
The crowd was deafening—they chanted her name, stamped their feet, seemed to grow in waves of sound from the shadows and pour from all the corners of Burnham’s office.
Abruptly, the video cut out, and the view of Crunch 407—the real view, this time—resurfaced. In the short time I’d been in 1 Central, a dust storm had blown in to speckle the windowpanes with residue.
“We lost track of her in the decades after dissolution,” Burnham said, wheeling a little closer again. I couldn’t help but wonder what had dropped him in the chair to begin with, how long the Federal Corporation had been beaming out his body in holographic form. “We assumed she was dead—the fighting at the front of what became the Russian Federation was especially bloody, and she was on half a dozen hit lists because of direct ties to the Kremlin. We assumed the original ThinkChip™ technology had died with her, and pirated our own, although it took us another decade. Rafikov may be a genius, but she skipped several important lessons as a child—one of them the importance of sharing. Everything she has ever made or developed is strictly guarded against replication or piracy. In fact, even before she made waves with the ThinkChip™, she was famous for inventing a self-cannibalizing code, designed to self-destruct if attacked, penetrated, modified, or even copied by outside servers.”
“Smart,” I said.
“Unfortunate,” he corrected me sharply. “A few years ago, our Consumer Affairs Division”—he lingered briefly on the words, like I might not otherwise figure that CAD was the Federal Corporation’s intelligence branch—“picked up rumors of an experimental software, very illegal, coming out of the Russian Federation, that allowed a brain to communicate not just with smart objects, but with other brains directly.”
Even though I knew that 1 Central was shrink-wrapped in hazmat to keep out even a whiff of natural environment, I felt as if the dust storm was blowing straight into my brain. I couldn’t think straight.
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“In theory, maybe. But in practice, all the information must pass through a central server to be translated and redistributed. That means that it can be collected, trapped—or even rerouted.” Now Burnham’s twitch had spread all the way to his face, and pulled his mouth into a series of grimaces. “Even then, we weren’t too worried—until we found out how the tech was loading to the brain.
“You see, Truckee, the same protections that made ThinkChips™ so difficult to pirate were also a limitation—they were immensely complex, and thus immensely expensive and difficult to produce en masse. But Rafikov herself must have realized this—and found a way around it.”
I was genuinely curious. “How?”
“Synthetic viruses,” he said matter-of-factly. “Deliverable in the form of a single pill, the virus implants in the brain, replicates along sites of neural activity, and communicates the activity back to the server.”
The idea was crazy—and pretty damn genius. “So Rafikov is floating different brains back and forth across the feeds? And all you have to do to join is take a pill?” I could tell she was supposed to be some kind of public enemy, but all I was thinking was how to hunt down a dose from the local grifters next time they passed through town.
President Burnham looked like he knew exactly what I was thinking, and wasn’t happy about it. “Correction—she was floating brains back and forth across the portal, and all you
had to do to join was take a pill. But you see, even that has a limitation: it’s voluntary. You can choose to take a pill—or not.”
A bad feeling started winching my guts around, like whatever shrapnel got left there was trying to work its way out of my small intestines.
“But imagine if there were another way. An easier way. Imagine if you could introduce that neural virus—that code—into people’s brains even without their consent. Imagine if you could spread it without their knowledge. Imagine if you could deliver it straight to the brain, to enormous numbers of people, through distribution channels that already exist, without anyone knowing what you were really giving them?”
My mouth was so dry, my tongue felt like a turd gummed to a piece of toilet paper. “You don’t mean…” I couldn’t get the rest of the words out.
He leaned forward, so close I could feel his words breaking in waves of sound on my face. “Tell me—did you notice anything strange about your friend Billy Lou, when he stormed Production-22 for his grand finale?”
I remembered the way Billy Lou’s pupils started leaking black across his eyes. I swallowed a hard fist of panic. I would of given my right nut for some water, even the murky kind that came out of the tap in Low Hill and would make you gut for days unless you dropped it with chlorine tablets.
They’re coming for our heads, he’d said. They’ll have all our heads soon.
“You think Rafikov’s putting computer code in shiver?” I asked.
“Even worse,” he said bluntly. “She’s putting it in Jump.”
I shook my head. I’d never heard of it.
“Jump, Shake, Special-D, Hyper-Drive. It started popping up on our radar a few months ago. It makes the user euphoric at first. It makes him feel invincible, and increases his pain threshold by tenfold, so he can sustain levels of violence and injury that would cripple anyone else. That’s lucky, since it also makes him very, very violent.” He smiled like he had a razor in between his teeth. “Oh. And it also drops some viral software straight into his frontal lobe, where it proceeds to replicate along the whole vast maze of his neurons.”
