by Reed King
Tiny Tim clapped me on the back and nearly sent me sprawling. “Women want one thing and one thing only, Truckee. Even a dumb old scarecrow like yours truly knows that.”
I thought about it. “Sex?”
He laughed. “You’re funny. Anyone ever tell you that?”
“No,” I said.
Mama Hazard had given us two adjoining rooms on the top floor, where we would be undisturbed by the pay-by-hour clients who used up the cheaper rooms below us. Barnaby opted to bunk with Tiny Tim, likely because he knew I’d throttle him the first time he tried to quote from his memoir, which left Sammy with me.
Our room was bigger than expected, and cleaner, too, even if there were burns singed into the carpet and an old syringe rolling around in the sink.
I took a nice long shower, holding my nose against the ammonia stink; there were water warnings everywhere, and all the flow was getting pumped up from the sewage plants. I wrung out my clothes of dust and blood spatter and strung them up to dry over the shower-curtain rod, then dressed in the studs I’d stolen from the cargo hold of the bullet train.
It was the first chance I’d had to take a hard look at the damage to Sammy’s eye. The news wasn’t good. She’d need a whole new lens and someone who knew more than a little about wiring. There were repair shops in Granby, sure, but I didn’t know how long getting a new eye would take, and I was pretty sure neither of us could spring for it.
“I’m sorry, Sammy,” I said. I twisted the wires together as neat as I could and secured them with a rubber band. “That’s the best I can do.”
“Oh, well.” Her remaining eye pulsed a slow blue. “It’s my first battle wound, isn’t it?”
“Guess so,” I said.
I helped her clean the dirt from her joints with squares of toilet paper the texture of a rug burn; there was even dirt inside her battery housing. Bits of crushed glass were caught beneath her winged solar panels. Luckily, these came easily apart, so I could blow out the debris. The plastic of her knee joints was so crusty she could barely bend her legs to sit, and I took a handkerchief-sized towel from the bathroom, ignoring the stains that had been steamed on instead of scrubbed out, and began to wipe. But I kept thinking of Mama Hazard, and the scarecrow, and what Tiny Tim had said to me coming up the stairs.
“What do you think Tiny Tim meant,” I said, “about women needing only one thing?”
Sammy was quiet for a minute. I heard the reassuring hum of her processing. “It doesn’t make sense from a literal perspective. Humans need many things; even female humans are organic beings and thus require food, oxygen, sleep, and a whole host of different chemicals and nutrients. So I imagine he was speaking metaphorically, or perhaps allegorically.”
“I think he was talking about feelings,” I said.
Sammy flashed a few lights across her interface. “I’m probably the wrong resource, then.” I thought she was trying to smile, but she sounded upset.
She rotated so I could get to her back. The damage was worse than I thought. Several overlapping steel panels had been forced together at strange angles, and others were dinged or misshapen. I was almost afraid to touch her. I ran a finger carefully over one of the worst of the joints, which should of been lying flat and now rippled and buckled, like shoulder blades.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You can’t hurt me.”
I moved slowly, polishing and wiping, blowing out the seams. I was almost frightened by the look of all those component pieces, how fragile they all seemed. I’d once read even basic androids were wired with more than 10 million chips.
“The generation after mine was the one that got NuSkin™.” Sammy’s voice was warmer and hoarser than usual, as if her speaker grille were blocked. “They say their sensors are so sophisticated that late models can tell the difference in the direction of the winds. They can feel pain and pressure. And … pleasure.”
Suddenly, I realized how close we were sitting. I scanned the polish of her plate metal, and the low whirring of her ops, and the heat cycling through her vents. She was so hot I couldn’t stand to touch her.
“I wish I’d been manufactured just a little bit later.” Now she was so quiet, I could barely hear her above the fan. “Just so I could know. So I could feel…”
She trailed off. I stood up quickly.
“I have to get on the portal,” I blurted out. It was the first thing that came to my head.
Her remaining lens looked even larger than usual. I saw my face reflected in it, sharp and pale and guilty-looking. “There’s access here.”
“Not fast enough,” I said. “I need more bandwidth.”
There was a terrible silence. I grabbed my rucksack. I couldn’t even look at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and I swear she looked hurt. “Did I upset you?”
“You did nothing. It’s fine. I’m fine.” I practically blew into the hall, slamming the door behind me.
I don’t think I breathed again until I was out on the street.
* * *
The sun had set behind a flare of Texas oil-haze. The streets were hardly less crowded than they’d been earlier, but the vibe was different. Most of the shops were shuttered, and the ones still open were the no-name kind: shiver- and crack-vape dens; slummy sex squats; bars fumigating the stink of liquor onto the streets; pharmas packed with every assortment of voodoo, hoodoo, and nuclear witchcraft you could think of.
The Granby streets were churning with the usual night swill: pop-ups and payday girls and gender-neutral zems and trans-everything, Blythe’s private security bogeymen showing off discreet weapons, Gracelanders crooning their hymns, and even a Confederate soldier wandering around looking about four-hundred-years lost. Congregations packed into prayer houses sang songs of salvation to the tune of automix beats. Arms dealers and hustlers scanned the street for easy targets. A group of Carnivale Moribundi kids on the corner rang their bell over and over, glaring through their face paint. Music foamed out of the bars, pros called to one another from high brothel windows, dimeheads shouted out their highs, and tiny shiver kids3 with dull eyes and twitching hands sobbed in dark corners. Saltbox priests warned of hell and Devil’s Army demons heralded it and a pretty girl with a purple Mohawk leaned against a holo-board smoking an old-fashioned cigarette, blocking the feed.
I stomped off down the street in a crank mood. I hadn’t once given Sammy a sign I was into her. But I’d hurt her feelings anyway. And now when I passed a group of Sexy Saams with their high, round NuSkin™ breasts overspilling their shirts, their synthetic lashes shuttering against perfect blush cheeks, and legs so long they were like ladders to climb on, I couldn’t help but wonder if they, too, were secretly gunning for things they couldn’t have.
“Pleasure for buy, sugar,” one of them said, in a voice like a fingertip running down my spine. “All the newest positions. Three-sixty contortion. Special vacuum suck and new flexibility controls.”
I veered around the corner. I’d lied about needing portal access to get out of the room, but I figured logging on was a good move. President Burnham had told me his agents would find me, but in the meantime I might as well park it in one place.
I beat it straight for a hotspot called the Arcade, dizzyingly enormous, whizzing with colored lights and music. The window display was just an interface running a constant list of products, promotions, and prices. I saw the new WorldBurn VIII: Hellscape had been released, and I missed Annalee and Jared with a sharp, sudden aching that felt just like a kick.
I went inside and paid for a sixty-minute packet of unrestricted data, cutting through the clutter of scurvy-looking teenagers jabbing in simulation suits and skulky old men picking out corners where they could rub themselves to online porn houses without anyone seeing. I found an empty chair, sank into the pleather, and notched my visor over my eyes.
But when I tried to pull up my company feed, an error code started flashing.
Figuring I’d been accidentally logged out, I scrolled to th
e Crunch, United, landing page and tried signing in. When that didn’t work, I closed and rebooted the browser. Again, I got the same error: invalid credentials. Now on the verge of panic, I rebooted my entire visor. My home screen was now a standard, template blue, like an unpolluted sky. All my snaps, feeds, streams, and blasts—erased. Every video of Jared’s sneeze attacks, every freeze-frame of Saanvi’s game plays, every sly moment I’d triggered when Annalee wasn’t paying attention, when she was picking her teeth or blanking out to something on her holo, every snap beaming my mom’s face back to me—wiped, gone, scrubbed from the server.
My collages, compilations, timelines, memories—my whole life—had been backspaced in a single keystroke.
Only the same error message floated in the imaginary space several inches from my nose: SECURITY ERROR 909. INVALID CREDENTIALS. PLEASE CONTACT TECHNICAL SUPPORT AT STATE DEPARTMENT IDENTIFICATION/SUPPORT.CRUNCHGOV.
My cheeks were sweating. I wrestled the visor down to my neck to palm my face off, and saw a fat guy giving me the once-over. Even though he was simulating sex with the back of his chair, his eyes were full of pity, as if I was obviously the one with the bigger problems.
The sad thing was he was right.
I didn’t need to contact the State Department to know what Security Error 909 meant.
I’d been locked out of Crunch, United.
If I’d been in over my head before, now I was six feet under. Locked out. Voided. Nine-oh-fucked.
It had to be a mistake. Maybe the Federal Corporation’s new security firewalls had booted me out accidentally. I slid on my visor again, and pulled up some BCE Tech–sponsored news feed. Happily, BCE Tech, one of those tricky countries that flip-flopped loyalties faster than the history holos can update, had one of the most expansive portal networks I’d ever seen, and I had my choice of international feeds.
I phished for news about the riot at Crunchtown 407. The news was worse than I thought. An overnight rebellion by stockholders had persuaded President and CEO Burnham to step away from leadership temporarily. The Dakotas trumpeted a diplomatic crisis because four of its energy czars had been detained in Crunch 122, in a detention center on the banks of the Exxon-Mississippi River that had once housed storm refugees. The Real Friends© of the North had recalled both of its ambassadors to New New York, and the Federal Corporation had ordered an immediate review of any foreigners in the country on a temporary visa, which made half the continent light up about human-rights violations. Pictures from the border showed tightened cordons all around. Crunchtown 407 was on a list of corporate branches in a state of emergency, along with Crunchtown 202, which bordered the Commonwealth and had been in a state of emergency for as long as I could remember. But twelve other outposts had made the list, too.
Deputy Paula Munez, the Crunch, United, director of PR and marketing, had issued a dark statement warning of the potential for new attacks and blaming a foreign agent for sabotaging the bullet train. Crunch, United, was offering a reward for any information that would lead to the terrorist’s arrest: a pop-up swelled across my feed, flashing a request for the public’s help bringing the agent to justice.
I maximized the pop-up for the picture Crunch was blasting internationally, expecting an old image of Yana Rafikov.
For a second, the whole world went dark. My heartbeat throbbed in my ears. A fog of terror swept me blind.
When it cleared, there I was, or there my holo was, anyway. The image had been lifted from my old company ID and glowered back at me, right above four bright red words, swollen like pustulant pimples.
WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE.
17
The problem with the intranet feeds is that they’re all pumped full of as much shit as a sewage tank. Half a dozen countries say they won the last Olympix, and have the stats to prove it. And you won’t find a squid in the Confederacy under sixty even knows there’s faster ways to travel than a horse cart.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
I don’t know how long I sat there, trying to make sense of those four glowing words, trying to force them to mean something different. Eventually, the portal booted me out. I’d run over my pay-by-hour limit.
My thinking was all shriveled up, like ancient soap scum beveled off a public shower. I was shaking so hard I could barely flag a fare wheeler—which looked a lot like a repurposed squatbot1—to buy another hour.
“That will be ten Blythe notes,” the bot responded, and prompted me to push a noselike button for currency exchange rates. I nearly fell out of my chair: ten Blythe notes came out to nearly forty Crunchbucks.
“It was five Crunchbucks an hour ago,” I said.
The wheeler winked its lights cheerily. “One hour is five Crunchbucks,” it said, switching neatly to the right currency. It was smarter than the squatbots, that was for sure, although so were millipedes. “Every additional hour is forty Crunchbucks.”
I would of bet that’s how Blythe kept the VR porn addicts from clogging his bandwidth. “That’s stealing.”
“Sie scheinen Schwierigkeiten zu haben zu verstehen. Möchten Sie Ihre Sprachauswahl ändern?” the bot proposed cheerily. “Wenn Sie unsere AGBs überprüfen möchten…”
“How about you learn math instead?” There was no way I could spring for another hour at that cost, so I shoved out of my chair, half-itching to throw a punch at its interface. But the robot was about seventeen generations away from feeling pain.
The whirl of noise, the smell of vape, the moonshine fumes—it all made me dizzy. How many countries were looking for my head, right this very minute? How many people were looking to cash in on the reward? Even in the dark of the Arcade, I felt horribly exposed, like someone had stripped me down to organs for a medical farm.2 I thought of those skeevy eyeballs Burnham had on his desk, the way they kept rotating and rotating in the murk of liquid. But now the eyeballs were everywhere.
I kept my visor down, grateful now for its bulk, and cranked up the hood of my sweatshirt as I noodled out the door. The board had its facts twisted—maybe Rafikov even had inside agents laying the blame on me. But with President Burnham gone, getting an image overhaul from HR rehabilitators, who would help me?
I was so wattled in my thoughts, I nearly bowled over a girl with a purple Mohawk just outside the door. “Excuse you,” she said, and bent to snatch up an old-fashioned cigarette.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Didn’t see you.”
I didn’t make it four feet before she called out to me again.
“You shouldn’t waste your pay in squats like that. You’ll never find what you’re looking for.”
I turned around again, slowly, and got treated to a plume of her smoke, direct to the face. She was wearing beat-up jeans and ratty boots, plus a leather jacket that looked like something Zeb would of liked. Then I realized I’d seen her once before already, leaning against a holo.
“How do you know what I’m looking for?” I asked her. I thought at once of President Burnham and what he’d told me: We’ll find you.
True, she didn’t look like an agent. But the good agents never did.
She smiled. Her teeth were very nice and very straight except for one, which was curved like an animal fang. “Come on,” she said, and jumped off the sidewalk into the street.
I stayed where I was. “Come on where?” I knew better than to trust a total stranger in a foreign city. Even if she was my age. Even if she was cute. Even if she had fingernails plastered with tiny skull holes. “Who sent you?”
She didn’t even turn around. But I know she heard me, because she lifted a hand and waved me on with her cigarette.
I hesitated for only a second before plunging into the crowd after her. I’d always been a sucker for girls with 3-D nails.
She darted in and out of the foot traffic, weaving around mopeds and scooters and self-drivers. She didn’t give me a chance to ask her any more questions or even pretend she wanted to talk to me. She only glanced behind her once to make sure
I was still there.
Left, right, right again. Soon the roads dribbled into streets and the streets bled into alleyways. Here, bored-looking girls waited in lit windows or did their business behind shower curtains drawn against the view. The pavement was cracked with weeds and sifty with the red dust that blew in all the way from Arizona, and I started to regret following along. The girl didn’t seem like a pro, and so far she hadn’t tried to kill me, but maybe she was just taking her time—or leading me to someone who would do the dirty work for her.
Just when I’d made up my mind to turn around and beat it, the girl stopped in front of another hotspot, this one about a thousand times dingier and more depressing than the Arcade. A few lumpy secondhand visors were jumbled together in the window, next to a static sign that listed cost per minute for portal access. I couldn’t figure why she’d dragged me across Granby just to bring me to this dump, especially since the prices weren’t all that cheaper from the ones advertised at the Arcade—maybe she took commissions.
But again, before I could question her she’d slipped inside.
Now I wasn’t afraid anymore—just angry.
Inside it was dark, dusty, and just as depressing as it looked from the street. It reeked of vape and FishStix™. There was a single customer slumped in a patchy chair with his visor on, obviously playing some kind of MPG—probably WorldBurn or Revenge, given the way he was triggering. The guy behind the counter had greasy hair combed to his shoulders, as if to make up for the enormous bald spot on the dome of his head. But the girl greeted him like an old friend.
“Heya, Slick,” she said. “How’s business?”
“You’re looking at it,” he said without glancing up. He wasn’t wearing a visor and was hunched over what looked like an early-century magazine. “Who’s your friend?”
“Your newest customer,” she said. She gave me an animal smile, like she was going to eat me.
