FKA USA

by Reed King

  “You got the brand-new look of a sprouted pimple two days off from popping. No offense.” She flashed me a big smile. Even her teeth were tatted with little logos.

  “None taken,” I lied. Suddenly I was sick with exhaustion. Zeb, Bee, Fats, even Nikhil—most of the people I knew had turned corpse, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I was the link of bad luck.

  “Where you staying?” Then, when I hesitated: “I’m telling you, Granby’s no joke on the far side of 3 a.m. But nobody messes with me.” I must of looked skeptical, because she opened up her army jacket a little more to show me a massive Homestead Weapons & Securities ad embedded just below her clavicle. “I get half my revenue from the gun shop. And see? They give me product at a discount.”

  Now I saw about four different revolvers sewn into the inside of her jacket lining, along with a ream of extra shells.

  “Thanks,” I said. I was glad enough for the company.

  We made it back to the Starlite quickly, and I was glad the girl didn’t ask me any other questions. She didn’t angle for a tip, either, just gave me a quick salute and waved me off inside. She might of been the only decent person in Granby.

  Sammy was deep in sleep mode when I crept back into the room. I noticed she’d dropped in one of the twin beds and felt a stir of regret. She was trying so hard to be human. Why, I couldn’t figure: we weren’t anything to shout about.

  There was no water in the taps until morning and the old moisture leaking through the ceiling smelled like rubbing alcohol, so I brushed my teeth with mouthwash, swept a couple roaches off my pillow, and slipped into bed. Somewhere down the hall, a pay-girl and her john were just getting into their rhythm—he kept tweaking her prompts until he had her at a register somewhere near high C.

  But I wouldn’t sleep anyway until I knew what I was up against, so I powered up my visor, careful to disable location settings first, and then swiped open the download pack I’d purchased on the Road.

  The search results were ordered by registered impressions, but I could sort them by country of origin too: Patch and his spyware must of been squatting on two dozen foreign servers. Crunch, United’s official release had been swiped, tapped, swapped, saved, liked, and shared more than 20 million times:

  Early intelligence suggests a former Crunch, United, employee, Truckee Wallace, is engaging with a hostile foreign nation to distribute a federally prohibited substance known as “Jump” to employees of the corporation, in service of a wider plan to destabilize corporate stability and profit.

  It is suspected that in an attempt to deceive and defraud the company of hundreds of millions of dollars in resources, and to disrupt production and the functioning of our Human Resources department, he intentionally orchestrated an explosion at Production-22 before finagling a way to escape on the bullet train that soon derailed, again likely due to his intervention.

  He is armed and dangerous.

  Even I could admit I made a pretty convenient scapegoat. Maybe the Federal Corporation was pinning the blame on me so they wouldn’t take the scrap for letting Rafikov run roughshod over their firewalls. Still, Crunchbucks were trading at an all-time low, and even the Delaware dime was nosing up there in comparison.

  I kept scrolling popular results. Plenty of people were calling me a hero, but they were all the kind of people who’d been trying for years to blow us up, so it wasn’t much of a prize. I found chatter about the new drug flow, too, mostly about how and where to buy it—Medi-ware sites always sidled past the censors and sprouted new shiver addicts from free samples. Now they were growing would-be bodies for Rafikov’s army of mind drones. Apparently the side effects—rage, hallucinations, nattering withdrawal, perspiration, paranoia—didn’t rub anybody the wrong way.

  Snortable circuitry, it turned out, came with some kind of sick high.

  So where was Rafikov in all this? A cross-search of her name turned up only a few results, one of them a fifty-year-old thirty-second clip of her in the lab, pinned to a popular web feed of DIY science experiments that looked a lot like how-to bathtub-drug manufacturing.

  The other result was a correction issued by the official data stream of the Commonwealth on the same day the Crunch, United, PR security issuance blew up the portals, so both reports somehow got screen-capped together.

  Yana Rafikov, former American billionaire and founder of ThinkChip™ Technologies, had affirmed that she was not dead, as had previously been assumed and widely reported.

  Yana Rafikov was alive! She’d been alive all this time. And even though I’d known it since the day of the summons, now it was official. It was like Jared always said: You can’t trust everything people believe. But you can’t trust anything until people believe it.

  I couldn’t think anymore. A headache was chewing its way from the back of my head to my eye sockets.

  I was just shutting down the data—pained, once again, by the template of my factory-settings home screen—when I heard a creak in the hall outside my door, and then a whisper:

  “In here.”

  In an instant, I was completely awake again. I wrenched off my visor and sat up, straining to listen. The pay-girl and her john were still going at it—had to give him credit, keeping up with a girl who could go twenty-four hours straight before she needed recharging—and for a few seconds I could hear nothing except the rhythm of their headboard shuddering the walls and the syncopated moaning of her presets.

  Then: a noise at the door, like the scratching of a rat for entry. The door handle rattled, as if someone had taken hold of it and twisted.

  Someone was trying to pick the lock.

  “Sammy,” I whispered. But she was dead asleep, emitting a soft pulse of blue light.

  I had no time to reach over and shake her awake either. The door wheezed open. A wedge of light grew across the room, and traced the silhouette of a stranger on my ceiling. Then the door clicked softly shut again, and the light was suctioned back into the hall. For a second, I picked out the lung-scrape of another person’s breathing. Then the darkness shat out a shadow coming toward me.

  The first thing I could lay a hand on was the lamp.

  “Don’t! Truckee! Don’t!” the voice was female and weirdly familiar. I tried to strike. She blocked me hard, thudding the lamp to the carpet and shattering it. At the same time, she tackled me. Her grip was surprisingly strong.

  That, too, was familiar.

  It was the ad-sales girl from the street—the Good Samaritan who’d escorted me back to the Starlite. Idiot. I’d led her right to my doorstep.

  I tried to buck her off, but she had the advantage. She leaned in harder, pinning my wrists behind my head.

  “Listen to me, Truckee.” She had her ads powered off but when my eyes adjusted I could still see them leaching residual heat. “I don’t want to have to hurt you, okay?”

  “That makes two of us.” It was squat reassurance from a girl suited up like a walking armory by her sponsor. My first time alone in a hotel room with a girl on my junk, and it was just because she wanted to kill me. “How do you know my name? Who sent you?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have time to explain. You’re in danger.”

  She really had some nuts. “I can see that,” I told her. The butt of one of her Brownings was digging into my hip. Another rifle nosed at the space between my ribs.

  “You don’t understand. I was sent to help you. If you don’t—”

  She never finished. The door blew off its hinges in an explosion of sawdust and wood splinter. The ad-girl reached for her gun. But before she could get a hand on the barrel, a single crack of gunfire blew a hole in her chest and about two cups of blood and tissue onto my face. Her last few breaths sounded like someone trying to gasp air through a block of ice. When I heaved her off me, she slid into the space between the beds, clutching at the coverlet and rolling Sammy out of sleep mode.

  I jumped to my feet as the men who’d been tailing me earlier came swagging into the room.

 
“Looks like we came spic in the nick of time.” Now that the door was open, a green-yellow fluorescence from the hall lit up the hard angles of their jaws, the twin blanknesses of their faces. It was like every bit of soft had been planed away from their bodies, taking their humanity along with it. “I see you got an unwanted visitor.”

  “Three, actually,” I said. I was still reeling from what the ad-girl had said. I was sent to help you. Was she the undercover agent President Burnham had nobbed me with? I wished I’d paid more attention to her brand sponsors.

  One of the men kept his gun on me as his friend took a few steps forward. The way out was blocked, and I doubted anyone would hear me if I screamed—or care even if they did. The Starlite seemed like the kind of place that got its fair share of blood spatter.

  “You got something worth a lot of fleek, kid,” he said.

  “You’ve got me confused for someone else,” I said, even though they didn’t and we both knew it.

  “I don’t think so, Truckee Wallace.” He even made my name sound like an insult. With only a few feet of space between us, he slung open his jacket, revealing a long, evil-looking blade, sickle-shaped. A carving knife.

  “I’m going to have to gut you, compadre,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  I tried to dodge him but he was too quick. He threw his shoulder to my chest and cracked me back against the wall. His forearm against my throat nearly bent my Adam’s apple backward.

  Right away I missed the ad-tag girl. At least she smelled nice.

  “Hey, Stash,” his number two piped up. “There’s a tin rattrap on your—”

  He broke off suddenly. A terrible mechanical screech and a hiss of escaping smoke chattered his teeth together.

  The guy leaning on my windpipe eased the pressure on my throat to turn around. His friend was having some kind of attack. His teeth nattered together. He began to tremble. He was drenched. He was sweating so hard, his hair rolled water onto the carpet. A terrible stink of scorched rubber filled the room.

  Then his head began to smoke.

  His eyes rolled back to reveal two question marks. His teeth fell out on the carpet one by one, each of them glistening white and bugged with digi-chips. He collapsed, sparking, on the floor.

  Only then did I notice Sammy a short distance away, holding tight to the now-empty bucket of rainwater.

  The second droid released me and went for Sammy. She skirted behind the bed, and as he scrambled toward her cracked him in the head with the bucket. It barely slowed him down. I tackled him before he could get his fist into her circuitry, and together we crashed to the floor, toppling another lamp from the dresser, shattering the lightbulb.

  I wrenched his arm behind his back, and managed to shake the knife out of his fist.

  “Slice him open!” Sammy was screaming. Her interface was blooming alerts about program errors and the danger of overheating faster than I could read them. “Open up his hard drive!”

  But he was heavy, and strong, and bucked me off like I was no more than a fly. I swung out wildly with the carving knife as he turned, slashing a ragged wound across his back and ribs, severing his shirt and revealing a nest of circuits and wires tucked just beneath his flexible skelemold ribs. But the damage to his silicone skin didn’t stop him for a second. I’m not even sure he noticed.

  With a roar, he pounced on me. He got his fists around my throat. The pressure of his thumbs on my windpipe dizzied me, made stars turn in the airless dark behind my eyelids.

  “You dumb motherfucker.” He was practically growling. His face hovered inches above mine—still perfect, poreless, its manufactured symmetry distorted by his rage. “It was just a job before, you fin? But now I’m going to enjoy seeing you without your head.”

  I tried to hold on to the knife. But I was drowning, swimming in a murk of no air. Already I was losing the edges of my body. A thousand miles down my arm, my fingers relaxed. I was swimming in deep space. The blade of his knife was a curved sunrise.

  I rose outside of my body. I hurtled into orbit. Stars exploded into being, then whizzed past me at a blur of speed. Interstellar fire burned at the edges of the universe. I hurtled toward the red haze of the sun—

  And then began to fall. I slammed back into my body. I felt a burning in my throat. I tasted ash. The rain of stars around me was, I saw, a cascading shower of sparks.

  The android on top of me was raining electricity down onto the carpet. His hair swam with the current. The blue light of a runaway charge swam across the open circuitry. Sammy had peeled back the shell casing of her knuckles to expose her wiring, and from the chatter of electrical static I knew she was reversing power straight down into his hard drive.

  Then, I could of kissed her. If I knew what counted for her lips, at least. I was about to ask her. Then the world slipped away again, and left me sheeted in dark.

  20

  There’s only three things in the world I won’t sell: bodies, dead or alive; drugs, whether snortable or shootable; and false IDs, at least not within shooting distance of the cartel badlands.

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

  We had to get out of Granby. The android guns might of been working the freelance bounty trade. There was plenty of it. Or they might of been shilling for somebody who’d be pissed off double just as soon as the hard drives telegraphed the final crash.

  But first, we had to deal with the bodies.

  Luckily, the Starlite had personal body pickers on ring-up; plenty of people had gamed it in its rooms, either from ODs or brawling or disease or being shitdirt poor. Within an hour, two ugly-looking scrubs were rolling up the ad-sales girl in a plastic tarp and a flea-bitten janitor was scraping up blood from the carpet fibers. Next to arrive were some scavenger types to take apart the androids—a tricky proposition, since this kind of high-swank model was usually registered with the Humanoid Regulatory Committee and pretty soon the court and its investigators would come knocking to ID them.

  Before the scrap sellers could start their work, Sammy took up the carving knife and kneeled down by the hotbox who’d tried to gut me. She sliced a small flap in the silicone skin just behind his left ear, and carefully wiggled the microchip and serial number free.

  “So we can find out where they came from,” she said.

  Just as soon as the room was clear of body litter, I nobbed on my visor back to the Yellow Brick Road, remembering the sad sack who’d tried to track down a Saam from her VIN number.

  But this time, Patch was no help. He couldn’t tell me squat besides they’d been manufactured in Crunch 203, one of the southernmost company outposts, in 2056. That was no surprise. Someone had been paying for upgrades to their systems—moth-eaten or not, they had the newest in silicone flesh and real-response tech—but Patch couldn’t tell me who.

  “That’s International Trib law,” he said. “I couldn’t sell the data to you even if I could hack the federal system. Happened after the Starve,1 and the brouhaha over androids picked for parts.”

  I didn’t see it made much of a difference anyway; they’d obviously been after the reward, which meant others would come for it too.

  Luckily, I’d seen plenty of fake-ID hotspots during my first cruise of the Road.

  The nearest nav directory was shaped like a panda. It turned out I had to rub its belly before it would open its mouth to let me input search terms. A split second later, I was standing in front of a patch of basic building code, probably a standard template. A sign in the window read IDS.

  Inside, there was no customization, no special wallpaper or visual graffiti, nothing but beige walls and an avatar at the counter.

  “I need a new ID,” I said. “Something in sales or diplomacy. I’ll be crossing borders.”

  “You shipping, or picking up yourself?” he asked, through a face of beige pixelation. Whoever owned the spot hadn’t even bothered to give his John Doe hair or a nose or mouth. His face was a small blank circle, as if the flesh ha
d been stretched over the rest of his features to wipe them. A plug-in to disguise his voice turned his words to garble.

  “Picking up,” I said. “I’m in Granby. It’s part of BCE Tech. I need companion visas too. We need to get to San Francisco.”

  “How many?”

  “Three,” I said. I didn’t have to think about it. I couldn’t leave Sammy behind now. She’d saved my life. “But only one human. We also got an android—”

  He cut me off before I could finish. “If you’re in BCE Tech, you’ll have to go through Texas. And Texas don’t permit android travel. Humans only.” I swear, even though he had no face, he managed to sneer.

  “Since when?” I asked.

  “Since they said so. Texas is hard country, boy. One of the hardest borders on the continent, and you know why? They don’t like outsiders. They hate outsiders, in fact. If Crunch, United, didn’t have those Chinese ships pointing nukes straight at Dallas, we’d all be flapping a single star on our flagpoles. What else you got?”

  My visor was making me sweat. “One live animal.”

  “Quite some traveling party, commander.” Even though his face was still blurred out, I could tell I had his attention. “You run one of them traveling zoos?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Huh. I once saw a live elk and a two-headed rattler in a zoo. Turned out the elk was full of stuffing, though.” There was a moment of silence while he whirled through his database of identities stolen, purchased, or commandeered from the dead. “You’re in luck, cowboy,” he said at last. “Looks like a male Noah Turner turned up rotten a few days ago not far from you. Visa status: all-inclusive.”

  My heart leaped. All-inclusive status was nearly impossible to get: it required permissions from every member of the TCA.2

  “Medic sales?”3 I ventured a guess.

  “Gentech control,” he corrected me. It made sense. Ever since a blackout had busted open all the labs fifteen years ago, and thousands of modified species had escaped to chew havoc across the continent, every country was desperate for extra help to combat the damage.