by Reed King
“That’s all right. I should get back to my squat.” I had no desire to sit in this dim little room inhaling the fust of old breath and this guy’s BO.
“Thanks for all your help.”
The girl just rolled her eyes. “Don’t be such a lint.” She removed a razor-thin visor from a jacket pocket—it must of cost a fortune—and set it down on the counter, along with a scrum of other things, gum wrappers and change, cigarette butts and a few loose keys. “Go on, Slick. You can bug him through mine.”
The guy sighed heavily and straightened up to look at me for the first time. “Visor,” he grunted, holding out a hand.
“Wait a second.” I felt like I’d stumbled into a holoscript without knowing any of the lines. “What do you mean, bug me? What do you need my visor for?”
The girl blinked at me. Even though I was annoyed, I couldn’t help but think about what her body might look like under that leather. “That’s how you get access. Through a virus,” she said. And then, with a little huff of impatience, “You are looking for the Yellow Brick Road, aren’t you?”
18
Why did the chicken cross the Road? Because it wanted to buy methamphetamines.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
The first thing that hit me was the noise: the blast of audio kickback, the roar of unmuted chat, the music.
Coded like an actual landscape, where each admin had acreage for design, the Yellow Brick Road was one of the most detailed, insane, and enormous virtual worlds I’d ever seen. For a second I stood at the edge of the simulation, fumbling to turn down the reverb, trying to make sense of the sharp pixelation of the effects. A glistening gold ribbon of road unfurled in front of me, winding between impossible construction: buildings hanging upside down or hovering in midair or balancing on spindly stalks of wood too skinny to hold them in real life.
I scrolled into a small cottage advertising Santeria, and found shelves packed with century-old rooster talons and crusty vials of virgins’ blood. Product details hovered above each item as soon as it was handled. An empty cart in the lower left corner of my visual field could be filled with merch simply by double tapping.
I skated out of the Santeria store and scrolled on. Down the road, a hovercraft was trading currencies: All kinds, one-tenth the price! Cash shipped straight to your door! An alien avatar was arguing with the admin on the patio that counted for the help desk. “I nearly got arrested in the Green Mountain Associated Intentional Communities,” she was saying. “Do you know how hard it is to get arrested in Green Mountain? They don’t even believe in police.…”
I navigated to an enormous Information Palace, a Multi-Channel Network obviously patchworked out of hundreds of different sites. If I had any prayer of surviving to clear my name, I needed to know who’d sold me out for a traitor, and how far the news had spread. Inside were vaulted halls and tiny, leather-heavy studies, old-fashioned libraries and modernist atriums, neat sitting rooms and psychedelic-heavy smoking dens, all of them individual sites operated by avatars with names like MissBehaviorRants or TruthHurts, information-rich spaces that shouted propaganda at you if you so much as placed a toe over their domains. It was loud and ugly and clamorous with lies that sounded good and truth you’d always pin for lies.
I found an InfoPay stand boasting data downloadable from any intranet on the continent. The site was coded like an old RV, and scaly with pieces of paper advertising data specials, arrest-record hacks, even bank-account information.
I waited in line behind a weedy-looking centaur wanting info on some Sexy Saam last seen on a train platform headed into the Dakotas—the centaur knew her VIN number and everything. Just my luck, as soon as it was my turn, the searchbot manning the counter glitched up. A drifting speech bubble announced technical difficulties and told me to try again in five minutes.
I scrolled around the Information Palace to kill time. There was news from all over the continent, and feeds streaming data from international territories long blocked by the Crunch, United, firewall. Dodging a thick-lipped duck trying to sell me a porno package, I swiped into Bad Kitty’s Litter Box, a small, jewel-colored room, plush and vibrant red, like the inside of an organ.
Bad Kitty herself was a person-sized black cat wearing platform heels and a miniskirt. The yellow indicator light between her ears proved she wasn’t actually logged on, and I quickly cycled through her avatar’s preprogrammed responses. But I found I could get a limited bio by scratching a spot just below her chin.
“Where Bad Kitty lives is none of your damn business,” the avatar recited. “She enjoys anime, RPG games, and rescuing gentech. She dislikes drones, surveillance, the capitalist nation-state, genderism, sexism, androidism, nationalism, prejudice, propaganda, liars, leeches, and the color pink.”
I was half in love already.
The site was cluttered with an archive of funny objects—snow globes and ancient quill pens, porcelain kittens coded down to the whiskers, tiny anime figures doing battle across her shelves. I recognized the Arg from WorldBurn and reached out to check it for a price tag. But as soon as my fingers made digital contact, a long stream of data unfurled from its open mouth.
Somehow, she’d gotten hold of the military gear gifted to the Free State of New Hampshire by Texas, plus a bunch of confidential military reports giving updates on the progress of the fight against the Commonwealth. When I replaced the Arg, the data spiraled back inside of it, like water suctioned down a drain.
The snow globe melted into a low-quality holomovie: a pirated copy of the original, obviously, it showed a chiseled, high-cheeked elder of the Mormon Cabinet delivering his State of the Union, and rallying his troops to a holy war against Libertine. The New Kingdom of Utah was one of the most secretive countries on the continent, and their firewall, known as Heaven’s Gate, had long been considered impenetrable.
“Need help?”
I whipped around, or at least my avatar did. The yellow indicator light nestled between the tabby’s ears had turned green.
“I didn’t see anything,” I blurted out. I could feel my real body go hot with embarrassment. “I was browsing, that’s all. I—I didn’t even mean to come in here.…”
“Nice try, cabron.” She quirked one ear in my direction. “I’ve got your history coded all over. In my line of business, I have to know who’s sniffing around. But don’t worry,” she added, before I could speak, “on the Road, there’s no such thing as espionage. We believe that ideas should be free-market.”
She was, I decided, half off her nut. Ideas never came free: there was always a seller behind them. But I didn’t say so. “You’re a hacker,” I said.
Two delicate fangs appeared in the sleek gloss of her mouth when she smiled. “Power needs secrecy to survive. I’m trying to kill it.” In one fluid motion, she leapt onto an old antique writing carousel and began contentedly licking a paw. “I like to think I’m in the redistribution business. Here. Check it out.”
She hooked her tail around a delicate china mug and lobbed it toward me. I snatched it by instinct, and right away it shattered into hundreds of sentence fragments. Sorting through them, I landed on a familiar logo and felt a weird tingling up my spine, like something venomous was paralyzing me slowly. She’d lifted memos and emails straight from the Crunch, United, executive server, some of them from all the way back when our country was first pushing its borders after dissolution. And even though the hack had corrupted most of the files and made reams of text illegible, there was still plenty of top-secret intelligence in plain view.
“What is this?” I asked. Almost immediately, I wished I hadn’t asked. Half of Crunch, United, was saying I was a traitor. I didn’t need to prove them right.
“Proof,” Bad Kitty said. “The first President Burnham wasn’t trying to save the country. He was betting it would fall. That way he wouldn’t have to lay up a trillion dollars in federal debt to some Russian oligarch’s big win.1 The rest of the world could burn, but
he and Heller would have their Happily Ever After.”
“Come on.” I quickly collapsed the data back into a cup. I’d heard that idea before, or something like it: that when President Burnham realized his front-runner, Cowell, was going to lose out on the Burnham Prize, he triggered the collapse of the union himself. “You can’t really believe it was planned. The riots and Texas’s secession and the New Hampshire Declaration, the National Guard turning, the whole bag of cookies. No one could predict it.”
“Maybe not what would happen, specifically,” she said. “But some of the top dogs made bank on dissolution, believe me.”
“Making money isn’t a crime. Besides, the people at the top got screwed more than anybody. President Burnham wound up dead. Whitney Heller? Dead. Burnham’s cabinet had to go into hiding.”
Her whiskers began to jump. “Wow. They really got you whipped in the Federal Corp, huh?”
I stiffened. In real life, anyway. My avatar just trailed a few thought bubbles into nonexistence. “How did you know I was from the Federal Corp?”
“Relax. I’m no spyware. It’s in the way you yawn your a’s. Besides, you just confirmed it.” She leapt off the desk again, nearly whipping me in the face with her tail. “I bet you think President Burnham and his board of directors care about the working people too.”
“I’m just using common sense,” I said, a little coldly. Her tone was laced with a kind of know-it-all toity that put me in mind of old math holos. “What you’re saying is just old conspiracy. It’s crackpot.”
There was a long, terrible silence.
“Crackpot, huh?” Her eyes flashed yellow.
“Look. That’s just my opinion.…”
But in an instant, she’d logged off.
First Sammy, now Bad Kitty. I couldn’t even talk to a girl online, when she was suited like a different species.
No wonder I was still a virgin.
* * *
At least the searchbot was up and running again. He was coded to look like a wizard and, according to the tag that appeared above his head when I placed a hand on the counter, his name was Patch.
“Howdy-do, John Doe?” he greeted me. The basic template for males was given the name John Doe and a design that included early twenty-first-century studs and a nose that looked like a Tater Tot.
“Can you really get information about anyone?” I asked him.
“Alive or dead,” Patch said.
That meant he must have access to the old internet, too, back when access was free. Maybe it had been preserved, somehow, on the Yellow Brick Road.
“I’m looking for intelligence on Truckee Wallace. From the Federal Corporation.”
Patch’s eyes rolled backward, revealing whites imprinted with an hourglass. He was tabulating results forever, but eventually his eyes rolled back into place. “We’re talking almost four million hits,” he said, and my stomach dropped. “You check out our specials? Ten KB gets you one free.”
“Give me all of it,” I said. I needed to know how I’d ended up taking the hit for Rafikov. Maybe, just maybe, I could figure out how to clear my name.
The price he named was actually okay, but the actual transfer of funds was a pain. It turned out I could access settings by grabbing hold of a small wrench floating in the lower left-hand corner of my screen. The Real Friends© winks, likes, and nudges originally gifted to me by President Burnham had vanished, likely suctioned off by the same HR manager who’d axed me from the system. Thank hell I’d been paid for some of the John Deere swag in good old-fashioned Texas greenbacks uploaded straight to the hard drive.
Even after Patch downloaded the compressed file to my deck, I scrolled the Yellow Brick Road for a while, enjoying being able to move around incognito, without worrying someone would try and pawn my head to the highest bidder. I was already getting used to it: the ring-a-ling of pop-up ads trying to shake my hand or coo me inside their shops; the clamor of unmuted conversation; users who poked or nudged or chatted me; the dizzying whirl of colors. It wasn’t so very different from Low Hill, actually, except for all the giant walking lizards and the one-eyed aliens hawking plug-ins in a babble of different accents.
Zeb was spot-on when he’d said that everything I could think of and many things I couldn’t were available for buy on the Road. High Palaces boasting every kind of drug, Old World and new. Arms dealerships shipped army-grade flavors impossible to find in real life. There was chemical growth and nuclear magic; a live zoo with straggly deer and a few dog pups for sale out of New Hampshire; company IDs, forged visas, human organs, even some new silicone-pour technology that could graft the look of some famous RFN-feed stars onto interested buyers—to the tune of a couple thousand bucks and a couple months’ worth of agonizing pain.
But for all the color of the Yellow Brick Road, there was a dark side too. I passed what looked like a hospital only to realize it was an organ dealership, and found a parking lot filled not with rigs but with children. None of the kids was animated—they were like three-dimensional pictures—but waving at them brought up their stats, ages, weights, ethnicities, and, for some of the girls, whether they’d started their periods or not. I hurried away, feeling sick.
As soon as I swiped out and the Road evaporated, it was like a giant hand reached out and rammed me back into the portal café, into the uncomfortably hard chair on a set of almost-numb butt cheeks. When I took off my visor, I felt the depressions it had left on my cheeks. I must of been at it for hours.
The guy at the counter was still paging through that old-fashioned magazine. When he smiled, I saw gums black from opiate chew. “You enjoy yourself?” he asked.
I didn’t know how to answer that. I felt shaken, high and sick all at once, like I’d just coasted a shiver trip all the way to the end.
He chuckled when I didn’t answer. “You get used to it,” he said, and went back to his magazine. “First time’s always a bit of a trip.”
“You use the Yellow Brick Road too?” I asked.
“Oh sure. All the time.” He gave me the smile again, and it looked like someone taking a mouthful of something nasty. “They got the best girls on the Road.”
I thought of the children standing in the sun, frozen in place in that enormous parking lot, and something cold moved up my spine. I left quickly.
19
There’s no law in BCE Tech but what Tenner Blythe can keep on payroll. That means murder’s illegal, but only for you.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
It took me a Confederate’s age1 to find my way back to the Starlite. I didn’t want to risk powering up my map overlay, which would beam my location right back to Crunch, United. But I’d almost never had to navigate without voice instruction, and somehow I kept circling the same blocks, landing in front of the same Missionary Depot, and its window display of Jesus ashtrays and Bible-printed rolling papers. I still couldn’t kick the idea that every scrub on the street was eyeballing me, down to the cluster of whinnying transspecies tonguing drink from a wooden trough outside of a local bar.
So much space. So much world.
So why did I feel like there was nowhere on the whole damn planet I belonged?
Two gunslingers—with the sculpted faces of HR upper management enhancements, and a similar reek of things that grow in corners—turned up twice on different street corners, both times watching me narrowly from beneath their Kevlar helmets. But since I was walking in circles, I couldn’t be sure if they were tailing me or vice versa.
Finally I made it back to a dumpy street that looked familiar. A VR brothel called Imagine had spilled out a few dozen glaze-eyed slubs waiting out a downed broadband connection. Dodging the crowd, I nearly plowed straight into the two strangers again. And now I felt a gut of fear flip my insides.
They were following me, for sure.
I tried to move on, but one of them got his hand on my chest.
“Hey, dross. Not so fast.” His teeth made me nervous. He had t
oo many of them, and they were far too white. “You got a light?”
“Sorry.” I tried to sidestep him again, and his friend crowded me.
“C’mon, brother-man. Not even a match? Nothing in that big rat pack of yours?” He tugged the straps of my rucksack so hard I stumbled.
“I said no.” At least the street was still jammed with people waiting out the surge. I cast around for someone who could help me if things turned shake, but everyone was minding the business of paying no mind to anyone’s business. It was that kind of town, that kind of world.
“Where’d you come from?” the first man said. His breath smelled like WinterFresh.
Before I could think of an answer, I spotted a flame-haired logo-girl pushing toward me, waving an arm high above her head and beaming an ad for bladder medication from her underarm.
“There you are. Thank fuck. I’ve been looking for you all over.” She was flashing dozens of brands from her forearms, chest, and even forehead, bathing us all in a wash of neon as she got closer. Both men quick-stepped backward when she clamped onto my arm. “Rodge and Syara got a booth at the Sweat Drop. They’re all waiting for us.” Her fingers tightened on my elbow, leaving lettered imprints that spelled out Kady’s Candy Lube.
I played along and let her haul me off down the street. She couldn’t of been more than ninety pounds, with the half-starved look of a local tenant, but her grip was surprisingly strong.
Only when we’d left the two strangers behind us did she let go. “Sorry,” she said. “You looked like you needed help. Those guys try and shake you down?”
“I’m not sure what they were after,” I told her, even though I had the queasy feeling I did. Bleached teeth or not, the men looked like the kind of lowlifes who wouldn’t be too picky about where their money came from.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” She looked me up and down. It was hard to tell how old she was, because of all the branding. Mid-twenties, maybe.
There was no point in lying, so I shook my head. “How can you tell?”
