FKA USA

by Reed King

  The first word I ever recognized and learned to speak, ironically, was “biscuit”—I say ironically because I am, in point of fact, gluten intolerant. Incidentally, it was identifying the source of my gastrointestinal distress that provoked my first outbreak of language. The mouth and stomach are far more conjoined than people might think. I have been driven many times to invective due to a similar fury of the stomach, and people full of gas must rid it either through their bowels or by using their tongues.

  This was, perhaps, the only thing of use my father ever taught me. He was crippled when I was very young. So disgusted was he by his own body, he tried to chew off his own legs; he succeeded only in severing vital nerve connections and rendering himself an invalid. After that, he became quickly addicted to the pain tablets they delivered in his kibble, to the point that he would beg for dosage all through the night, to anyone who would listen, or fake new injuries just to receive increased pain-management intervention. It was a mercy, in many ways, when he killed himself, and I can’t say I’m sorry he did.

  I suppose in some ways, my existence at the base was not so bad. We were exercised regularly in the training facilities next to conscripts and android soldiers. The Agricultural Division included acres of irradiated citrus groves, where Cowell’s teams of acolytes strolled through uranium orchards debating the impact of bacterial infection in neurodegenerative disorders, and snipers took potshots at spy drones from turreted stucco towers. We were given plenty to eat, and I had company in the form of other experimental specimens in different stages of recuperation, including a very clever rat; his size, however, meant that he had absorbed only enough connections to feel a general sense of malaise he largely expressed through modern sculptural works assembled from a collection of found objects.

  Several of my cousins had been selected for brain transposition as well. Many of them received human neural tissue in amounts too proportionately small to make a difference, and several of them died during surgery. But one, whom I called Nan, was a source of comfort to me. Roughly 15 percent of her brain mass was Homo sapien, and though she was sweet, she was also plodding and very slow. She had a childish and, to my mind, baffling fascination with the mechanics of shoelaces. She was inclined to skittishness and nerves; the letter C disturbed her, and she failed to learn her numbers past seven, meaning she was hopeless at telling time.

  And that, ultimately, was the problem with those long and lonesome years: I was bored. A cage is a cage, whether it sprouts persimmon or not; and despite my relatively fair treatment, I was a prisoner, pure and simple. I longed to see the world beyond the perimeter fence, to explore the distant twinkle of downtown San Francisco, to know through experience the words I was learning by absorption: “ocean,” “landfill,” “quinoa,” “electric blanket.” But security was far too tight.

  It was the San Andreas Fault that gave me my chance. A terrible irony, that the same terrestrial hiccup responsible for millions of human deaths should be the same thing that launched me to freedom—but the world, I suppose, is a zero-sum game, and what one man—or animal—receives, another one must forfeit. When the first Big One1 came—which, of course, we learned after the Real Big One,2 and then during the Literally Biggest One Ever,3 was actually rather modest—the Laguna-Honda Base cracked in two. I mean that literally: the tsunami swept Nan into a foam of filthy ocean not four feet from where I stood. I survived the initial shockwaves—a pummeling gale that lasted for nearly eighteen hours—by a combination of luck and ingenuity, at one point taking shelter beneath a pile of asseverated robotic limbs that absorbed the blunt trauma of objects hurled ashore by the waves.

  When the sky at last cleared, I found that the majority of the concrete-and-steel perimeter had washed away, that the citrus groves now yielded their fruit to the open ocean that had ripped them out to sea, and that nearly a third of the base’s personnel, tumbled by the waves or crushed beneath falling debris, was now beginning to swell with postmortem gas. This proved especially useful, as I was able to lash together a makeshift raft of swollen human bodies to coast me south as the floodwaters receded. Yes, it’s true. I escaped on a flotational device made of corpses. But don’t forget—humans had used me, too, and used me horribly.

  The outside world was not, I will readily confess, as beautiful as the one I had imagined. The aftershocks rumbled on for days, and proponents of independence clashed violently with unionists in streets filthy with rainwater and sewage. Fires blazed continuously. The sun rose red behind a scrim of ash and smoke. The police clashed with rioters or became rioters themselves, and when the National Guard joined the fray it was too late for anyone to direct them—by then, President Burnham had already fled the White House. Looters stripped the stores of anything useful, and food, already so expensive, became impossible to find.

  I saw at once the danger I was in after a group of desperate, rib-thin children pursued me nearly two miles, trying to stone me to death. Luckily, they were too weak to aim, and I managed to outrun them, only to find myself outside of the rotten husk of a library moldering on the ruined Menlo Park main drag. Who would think of finding anything useful in a library? It was the perfect place to hide. The place had likely seen no foot traffic in twenty years.

  On the whole, it wasn’t a bad place to spend the better part of a decade. Oh, yes. I lived the entirety of California’s First Independence Government, and then the disastrous Guild Years, and the Real Friends© surprise takeover, and the merger that integrated Washington and Oregon, cloistered between the heavy oak shelves of a long-abandoned library. To me, dissolution is Emily Dickinson and the slippery taste of plastic bindings. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes…” I have always thought she must have tried to digest scrap metal herself.

  But it was lonely. Oh, it was lonely. There are only so many times one can read the collected works of Shakespeare aloud in different voices, pretending to be at the theater.

  That is the true legacy of the brain Albert Cowell and his team of trained fanatics “gifted” me: loneliness that has tailed me like a shadow, growing longer and darker and heavier with time.

  10

  The first thing I ever sold was a pack of Shake-N-Take Ibuprofen-Enhanced Chicken Drums™ I’d stolen from a convenience store somewhere north of Rochester. Half a day later I ran up against some backlanders living around some old chemical fields and suffering bad from headaches. Sold it for three times what it was worth in ammo, and took that and sold it at a premium to the next roadslicks that tried to shake me down. From then on, I was hooked.

  —from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA

  We bedded down. In the quiet I imagined I could hear the ghosts of the old frackers and their big machines, still drilling and scraping and pumping the core out of the earth. But I’d won rounds of WorldBurn too many times by sinking troops beneath sinkholes like the ones that had buried thousands under rubble when the ground in Oklahoma turned as soft as a bruise to want to think too much about it.

  Barnaby’s story kept nudging up bad feelings: he’d had a shit life, really, and here I was serving his brain up to be filleted.1

  In my dream, Billy Lou showed up, mangled with blood and stitching, his eyes placed crookedly and burnt patches of skin blackening his chest and shoulders. “The problem,” he was saying, “is that they won’t let sleeping dogs lie.” I saw what he meant: the ground was shaking, and old animal skeletons clawed up from their graves.

  I came awake to the blast of an alarm. Cement dust drifted from cracks in the ceiling. The ground was barely trembling, vibrating the empty cans in the underpass.

  The goat was on his feet, wild-eyed with panic. “What is it? What’s happened?” There was something wrong with his balance. He staggered around in stiff-legged, shuffling circles. “What—?”

  The words died with a gurgle in his throat. His whole body seized up. His eyes rolled back in his head.

  Then he toppled. For a half second, I thought he’d flatlined, and I’d be
saddled with a corpse all the way to the Pacific.

  “Interesting,” Sammy said mildly. “I’ve never encountered a fainting goat.”

  “A what?”

  “A fainting goat,” Sammy repeated. “Otherwise known as a myotonic goat, due to a condition called myotonia congenita, whose most obvious manifestation is sudden and pronounced periods of—”

  The goat unfroze, and staggered back to his hooves. “I’m okay!” he panted. “I’m okay!”

  “We’ve got to move,” I said. The shrill of the alarm was swelled by the underpass into a hideous shriek, like the howling of ten thousand dimehead shakes.

  “It’s funny,” Sammy said. “The alarm frequency sounds almost identical to the one Crunch 407 uses to alert the city to intruders.”

  “It is identical.” I shouldered my backpack. “And guess what? We’re the intruders.”

  We surfaced to find Lilian invisible behind a perimeter of enormous floodlights, blazing like bald eyeballs in our direction. The moon was high, beaming through a wispy haze of green cloud smoke. It must of been a little after midnight—my pulse was going so fast I had trouble picking out the rhythm of my SmartBand.

  We ran. The goat nipped at my heels, still muttering, We’re okay, we’re okay, we’re not going to die. Sammy buzzed ahead, circling back once in a while to give the all-clear. The whole thing felt like being in WorldBurn: Apocalypse, except it was no fun at all. I kept waiting for Tenner Blythe’s bodymen to swarm us from the dark, for the sharp crack of artillery fire or the sudden punch of a bullet through my ribs, and this time no health managers there to extract it.

  But just when we reached the end of the platform, the alarm went silent. A metal gate gave access to a switchback set of stairs that ran down into the stitching of the old trainyard. In the distance, rotting homes, old businesses, and the burned-out shells of abandoned retail centers were like the scabbed-over skin of old civilization stuck to the collar of the new city.

  The goat cleared the gate, and I scrambled after him. Sammy had the most trouble. She was old, and her rubberized joints were glitchy. But she managed at last and we went down the stairs together, our footsteps crackshot in the sudden silence.

  The trainyard was riotous with old trash. We had to be careful to avoid all the syringes, and the going was slow. But finally we reached a ribbon of pavement that curved west, and so we followed it.

  The quiet did nothing to reassure me. The farther we got from Lilian, the more uneasy I felt. If we’d been the ones to trip the alarm, we’d been seen. But if we’d been seen, why hadn’t we been chased? It didn’t make any sense.

  Unless we hadn’t been the ones to trigger it.

  Which meant that someone else was coming.

  * * *

  Once in a while back in Crunch 407, when the tornado winds from the west blew away the red haze and a dozen ruined jet streams of pollution collided in just the right way, we could see stars above Low Hill. On those nights all of us went streaming up to the roofs, packing so tight even a fart could of knocked one of us over the edge.

  My mom didn’t know a constellation from a kangaroo but that didn’t stop her from making up her own knowledge. She invented names for the smear of stars: the Shit Shovel and the Tampon, the Rocketship, the Whore’s Bath, the Turd and Dingle. Somehow, her names spread. Even crumbs who never met her would shout out on clear nights that the Turd and Dingle was visible from the roof of 22-C.

  But here in BCE Tech, the stars were clearer than I’d ever seen them. Without even meaning to I picked out the Whore’s Bath and the Tampon and all the other constellations my mom had named. It was nutty to think those same stars had been flowing out their light before fault lines blew up and a tsunami knocked most of old California off the coast. Before Old New York turned green with moss and algae, and rising seawaters flooded the Statue of Liberty to her tits, and the New York Stock Exchange turned into a breeding ground for three-eyed fish and oysters with a taste for dead bodies. Before the Exxon-Mississippi River wiped out forty thousand houses at one go when it thundered over the levees. Before Texas opened its convict camp and 400,000 coastal refugees moved north to shit out their lives in the festering temporary camp once known as Kentucky. Before the droids rebelled and the Real Friends© of the North closed its borders to non-citizens.

  Nutty to think how much had changed for us, while squirrel changed for the sky.

  Soon we’d left Lilian behind, and it was silent except for the gentle fizz of Sammy’s treads and the rhythmic tick-tick of the goat’s hooves on the pavement. I saw no evidence of squatters, hijackers, or roadslicks, and none of Blythe’s famous personal security, either, no patrolling guns-for-hire or five-story machine-gun towers.

  Here there were nothing but fields of buffalo grass, vast and puddly sinkholes, and the every-so-often house that looked as if it’d been blown there by a tornado—and probably had been. The air vibrated with insect song. Mosquitos as big as thumbnails kept buzzing around hopefully. Trees batted their green eyelashes at us. It was the kind of green I’d never seen before, real green, not spray-painted or printed in one of the 3-D plasticine nurseries.

  It wasn’t a color so much as a feeling, my mom told me once, and in the dark I heard the quiet hiss of her vape going. Like holding something alive in your hands. Like when I was pregnant with you and could feel your heart beating when I put a palm to my stomach.

  Sammy wheeled around the remains of an old house, now sunk to its roof in a cake of old mud. The sinkholes here had swallowed whole buildings, cars, even a gas station, spitting out a few hubcaps and rubber pumps. “We’ve been journeying for two hours now,” she said. “Don’t you think we should turn around?”

  “And go where?” It was possible security had silenced the alarms just to lure us into a false sense of safety. Crunch HR caught raiding backlanders that way all the time. “Lilian will be full of guns. It’s a miracle we’re not leaking blood out of bullet holes already.”

  “But BCE Plaza is one hundred and six miles away. You can’t be thinking we’ll walk it.”

  “One hundred and six miles?” Barnaby looked outraged. “I’ve got arthritis in my knees. Tendonitis of the hooves. I’ve got bone spurs.”

  I ignored him. “I’m thinking about how to stay alive,” I said to Sammy.

  “But surely we’re more likely to die in the backlands. Statistical models support it—”

  “Shhh.” Before Sammy could spew any more logic at me, I held up a hand to silence her. Sammy was a half inch from rolling into me before her motion sensors froze her midstep.

  “What?” Barnaby whispered. “What is it?”

  “Voices,” I whispered back. I scented something on the wind and shivered. It was like a memory but chewier, with a taste … something burning …

  No. Not burning.

  Better.

  “What is that?” Sammy asked in a low voice. She sounded afraid.

  “I don’t know.” I motioned for Sammy and Barnaby to follow me into the trees. In a world where unfamiliar was usually a fancy way for saying death, I should of known better. But I was drawn toward that smell like it had hooked me in the chest.

  In the loam of rotting trees, mushrooms the size of hubcaps pointed bellies toward the sky. Furry beetles clambered over toppled street signs. A moldy sign pointed the way to a rest stop that hadn’t existed in six decades.

  Through the trees, I could see the glow of a hobo fire. When the wind tossed up the sound of laughter, I dropped into a crouch.

  “You stay here,” I told Barnaby. I couldn’t risk exposing him to harm, not with the neural freight he was carrying. He looked all too happy to obey.

  I moved extra carefully now, trying to make no noise, avoiding the litter of broken glass still camouflaging itself among the leaves. In a sharp dip of land was a scene lifted straight out of prehistory: seven or eight men around a fire pit, shapeless behind a veil of smoke.

  I could hardly cred it, but they were cooking.

&n
bsp; Cooking.

  With an actual heat source.

  It was like we’d tripped and landed back in time.

  I heard a step behind me and figured Sammy had caught up.

  “Look,” I whispered. “They’re actually using fire to—”

  Before I could finish, someone seized me from behind. I felt the cold steel tip of a knife against my throat, and a blast of hot breath on my cheek.

  “Don’t move, Sally”—the man squeezing me reeked of fire whiskey and stale fresh—“or I’ll stick you like a balloon.”

  11

  Body pickers are just like maggots: a swarm of ’em always means death nearby, and half the time it means death nearby for you. But they’re helpful for more than pointing you away from flu towns: I’ve off-loaded some of my best swag from corpses I never even saw. Half the time the body boys are in such a rush to catch the nearest ice van, they’ll let go the big stuff for a song.

  —from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA

  I remember when I was a kid, the C-1 came sweeping into Low Hill on the backs of refugees from the border of Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated, and how for weeks we huffed air through gas suckers or held our breath whenever we skidded past a building marked with a big black X. I remember the census men who came, black-suited corporate types with long-heeled hearses, how they loaded up bodies block by block and chugged them off to the incinerator.

  And I remember how scared I was when a howling in the stairwell signaled the flu had made it all the way into our little block of apartments, and how in the morning, my mom and I stood by the window watching Old Mrs. Donahue loaded into the back of the body rig down below. Someone had bundled her up in plastic, but her skinny little ankles were still visible, and so were the filthy slippers she used to pad around in everywhere. One of them dropped while the census hands were trying to wedge her in next to a stack of corpses.