by Reed King
Here, too, there was skant room to breathe. Tourists swarmed the glittering tech shops and androids foamed in and out of beauty tune-up palaces. There were plenty of tour guides shilling day trips to Hell Valley, but I would need to find a place to pawn off the book, first: they were all out of my payday, to the tune of hundreds of dollars.
The itch on my neck stayed with me, though. As I inched down the street with the foot traffic, I knew it wasn’t just paranoia. Someone was following me.
He, too, was wearing a JE SUIS CG3 T-shirt. He was paler than this part of the world usually made them, like he’d crawled out of the shadows of someone’s operating system. His chin and neck seemed to be doing their best to let bygones be bygones and scrub the difference between them.
As I whipped around to face him, he looked like he might say something. Instead he just stood there openmouthed, with a look of fixed concentration, like a first-level android working through a software update.
“You got a problem?” I asked him, trying to channel some of Zeb’s old swagger.
He shook his head. But I didn’t like how he smiled.
I whipped around and kept going. He followed me as I loosed from the crowd, and was still following me when I turned down the Imperial Jade Calle de Santa Maria. Several minutes after that, I tagged him still forty feet behind me, limping along in rubber-soled sneakers.
Who was he? One of Rafikov’s gunners? Or just a would-be swag looking to collect the bounty on my head?
I wasn’t too worried, not yet. There were hours of light left, the streets were full of hustle and flow, the sky was a constant blur of security drones. It wasn’t like he could pop me in broad daylight and expect to get away with it—this wasn’t Texas, after all, and Halloran-Chyung kept a tight leash on its guns.
I turned right down a narrow street, hoping to loop back around to the plaza and shake him off. Bad move: this street was empty of foot traffic. I nearly backtracked, but just then a group of bleach-haired, tattooed fandom types rounded the corner, yukking it up and pawing at something on their feeds.
“Desculpe,” one of them said, as I started to squeeze past him.
Except he didn’t say it.
They all said it—all four of them, speaking together, in exactly the same tone of voice, like robots wired to the same network. But they weren’t robots. Robots weren’t made to look like that, given AdTattoos that crept into new patterns beneath their skin, given piercings and pimples, made to breathe and sweat.
“What the fuck?” I took a step backward and nearly tripped on the curb.
“Don’t be afraid,” they said. A guy with gelled hair and mobile tattoos; a Korean-leaning trot with a scar above her eyebrow; a ze with an orange Afro; a fat guy, real dark, wearing glasses. All of them moving together, speaking together, breathing together—all of them smiling at me with the same blank look on their faces.
Like a first-generation android working through a software update.
I was surrounded. I tried to open my mouth to scream, tried to turn and run, but a great crack of pain vaporized my legs. There was a high ringing in my ears, and then a great fog swept over the city and took me down with it.
26
If you get to Halloran-Chyung, keep your eye out for the Santeria shops hawking nuclear products for the supposed magic. I bought the gland of a river toad to make me hard for two hours straight and a green bean big as a ram’s horn supposed to give me supernatural strength, all from an old Mexican hobbleback with only two teeth. I didn’t feel any stronger but I’ll tell you something, I was rock-solid and ready to party after eating that river-toad gland, though that might’ve been because of the neat little Saamy I took home from one of the pay-houses. Kristina-452, her name was.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
I came awake to Barnaby jumping on my skull. That’s what it felt like anyway: like a sharp hoof probing hard between my frontal lobes. Opening my eyes was like trying to lift a sandbag with a teaspoon.
I was underground. That was obvious in the clamminess of the air and the echoing chitter of rodent feet in the dark. My hands and feet were lashed with jumper cables to my chair.
The single light cabled to the ceiling wasn’t doing any favors for the lowlife who’d tailed me from the plaza. Pit stains darkened his CG3 T-shirt. He bared his teeth in the world’s shittiest smile. “Hello, Truckee.”
“Who are you?” I asked. Not the most original line, but I was trying to think through a pickax buried in my brain.
“Who am I? A good question.” He came forward and pinched my chin between his fingers. I wrenched away. “A better question is what do I want?”
“Okay, then,” I said. I’d been a solid B-study and could regurgitate along with the best of them. “What do you want?”
His smile pivoted nicely into a sneer. “I think you know already.”
Elvis. Goddamn. Presley. I tried a new line. “Did Rafikov send you?”
His laugh sounded like he was trying to cough up a tampon. “Don’t play dumb, Mr. Wallace. This is a dangerous game, and my patience is wearing thin.”
“I’m not playing anything.” An echo rolled back to me. I would of banked he had us plungered in an old parking garage, about fifty packed-earth feet from anyone who would hear me scream.
For a long moment, he looked at me without blinking. “President Burnham gave you something to deliver to San Francisco. Where is it?”
So. Rafikov had known from the beginning what President Burnham set out to do. But she obviously didn’t know the cargo was hitching in the head-cavity of a myotonic goat—which meant that, for the moment, it was safe. And if Rafikov was so desperate to get back snippets of her brain tissue, it meant she was afraid.
And that there might really be a way to stop her.
I decided to lie through my grille. “President Burnham didn’t give me squirrel except what’s in my rucksack,” I said. Again, the space threw back the howl of my voice. I tried to crank myself loose and only popped a wrist bone.
“We checked that already,” he said. “It’s clean.”
“So what the hell do you want from me?”
For a split second, time froze. Actually, he froze. Something funny happened to his face. It was like all his muscles were windows and behind them a whole scrum of people were prepping for a tornado, locking up their shutters at different speeds.
Suddenly, he lunged at me. But instead of landing a punch, he gripped my wrists. A brand-new expression stormed across his face, blowing away the sneer.
“Help,” he rasped out. Even his voice changed. “She won’t get out of my head. It was supposed to be temporary … I just wanted to dip once or twice.…”
The way he moved was all wrong, like his body was just a suit hanging in midair.
He gasped like a Low Hill Riverside kid on a red-haze Sunday. “Please, give her what she wants. Otherwise we’ll never get free. We’ll never—”
He broke off as an invisible shock snapped him backward, blowing his spine into a parabola. The attack lasted one second, maybe two.
Then he went calm again. It was like all the little windows in his face had flown open and someone flat-out different was looking out.
“Forgive me,” he said. His tone was so icy it made my intestines shiver. “As you can see, I’m anxious to retrieve what is rightfully mine.”
And suddenly, I understood. “Yana Rafikov didn’t send you,” I said. “You are Yana Rafikov.”
There was a long moment of silence while he looked at me. And yet, now I thought I could see something—or someone—moving like a hidden current behind the flab of his face. I could see another intelligence, razor-sharp and deadly, holding him neatly in her grip. What had President Burnham said? We’ll soon have an army of little Rafikovs, marching to her every command, obeying her every order.
In the end, she didn’t deny it. “I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said, through the poor sucker she’d conned
into helping her. “But I’ve never been much of a liar.”
“No. Just a psychopath.”
She smiled with lips that weren’t hers, displaying teeth rotten from sugar she’d never eaten. It was something rot, watching this poor skin sack and his quivering man boobs played like a massive puppet. “That’s a rather ironic accusation, especially coming from a murderer,” she said. “I tried to help you in Granby. My little assistant was only twenty-two years old, you know. It’s a shame. She had so much life ahead of her.”
“Wait. You sent the ad-sales girl?” I’d got it into my head that she was President Burnham’s contact.
“My mistake. I thought you could be persuaded to see reason.” She took another step toward me. “I overestimated you.”
“You’re not the first.”
My pulse was going harder than an Okie earthquake.
She ignored that. “But there’s still time to save your skin, Mr. Wallace. You’ve got twenty-four hours to produce the stolen article. After that, I’ll turn your skin inside out, and leave your body in the desert where the snakes and spiders can feast on it. Understood?”
I could skant cred the luck. She was going to let me go and give me space to scram.
But she must of known just what I was thinking. She took a step backward. Shadow dropped across her body-puppet’s stubbled face. “Don’t even think about escaping,” she said. “I have friends on the ground. I have friends at the borders. I have friends everywhere.”
Suddenly she cut the light. I shouted, expecting the bodysuit to grab me. But no hands closed around my neck. No shot rangalanged the silence.
Instead, as my eyes adjusted, I saw movement in the darkness. Ten, twenty, thirty people shuffled closer. They’d been watching the whole time—doing nothing, saying nothing, just standing there.
A cold tongue of fear slid down my spine. They moved in sync, like the kids who’d helped take me down on the street. It was the world’s best-trained army: they even breathed together. I could hear in the stifling quiet the communal in-out of their breath. How many were there? It was impossible to tell.
“Until tomorrow, Truckee.”
I couldn’t tell exactly, but I thought all the others whispered too.
Then the bodysuit came toward me with something in his hand. He shoved a wet cloth to my mouth and I choked on a sharp chemical tang. For a minute after that I was a baby again, rocking slowly in my mother’s arms in a soft haze of cherry bac …
Then, a hundred years later, a ModelPet™ nudged me awake with a cold metal nose.
As soon as I started to sit up, it scampered off, barking. It was dark. The hover traffic had thinned out, but I could still see the flare of safety lights in the air above the city, like the passage of colored stars. Rafikov’s bodyman and his rat pack had dumped me on a quiet residential street, in the doorway of a boarded-up church, maybe figuring someone would take me for a drunk. But I could hear a swell of voices and laughter and knew the launch celebration must still be in full swing.
I cranked to my feet slowly, using the door for support. Amazingly, they’d let me keep my rucksack. In the weed-choked yard someone had flashed up the statue of Virgin Mary with a bright-pink wig. They’d wedged a dildo in her hand too. Her face was covered in graffiti. FUCK HEAVEN, GIVE ME DIME.
Right then, standing there, I knew it was the end. There was nothing left. We’d destroyed all of it, taken everything good and beautiful, picked and picked until we had nothing but ruins. There was no point trying to run. I wouldn’t get through the borders. If I tried, Rafikov would just game me quicker. Friends on the ground, friends everywhere. Good for fucking her.
My SmartBand pulsed. Automatically, without wanting to, I scanned the time: eleven o’clock.
And then, just as quick, the truth smacked me hard in the nozzle: my SmartBand. I’d forgotten all about it. It was hooked up to the Central Time Clock at 1 Central Plaza, cabled to the Crunch, United, server, meant to geotag our locations wherever we went. No wonder Rafikov had pinned me. I might as well of been swagging around with a giant spotlight strapped to my forehead.
It took me a minute to figure out how to get the damn thing off. Underneath it my skin was gray and textured, like something dead. I threw the band as far as I could and didn’t feel any better.
“Hey, mister. Are you okay?”
I whipped around to see a pack of kids had edged out of the darkness. One of them was holding the ModelPet™ by the collar.
“We thought you were dead,” he said. He had a funny lopsided face, and when he talked it was like one side was always trying to catch up with the other.
“Not yet,” I said.
Another boy was holding a miniature rocket, one of the models of the Aphrodite 01.
“We’re going to Mars,” he said. And then: “When I grow up, I’m going to be an astronaut.”
“Me too,” said a girl wearing about a dozen anti-allergy patches. “I’m going all the way to Pluto.”
I wanted to pick them up and run. I wanted to take all of them, all those kids, and carry them like so many pebbles, and run so far away, the place we were going didn’t exist yet.
They didn’t know. They had no idea they’d been born too late. They were just kids, on a playground, and there was a rocket launch tomorrow.
“You can’t. It’s too far.”
“Can too. I’ll build a bigger rocket.”
“It doesn’t matter. Even if it’s bigger you still can’t go.”
The boy with the lopsided face frowned. “I guess I’d go to Pluto,” he said. “So long as I could take Rocko with me.” He bent down to pick up the little bundle of metal and plastic parts, and Rocko on cue began to lick his face with a jointed metal tongue, and the boy laughed a laugh I hadn’t heard in years, a real laugh straight from the center, and then he sneezed, three times in a row.
Maybe it was the boy with the rocket. Maybe it was the fact that no matter how fucked up the world was, I didn’t want to die. Maybe I was only a coward.
Or maybe it was the boy with the funny lopsided face who loved his goddamn metal dog so much.
Friends on the ground.
I tipped my head back to watch the distant lights of the hovers, flashing. If you watched long enough, it looked like a pattern. Like a code.
Rafikov had friends on the ground. But she didn’t say squirrel about friends in the air.
27
Lots of people ask me what’s the worst thing I ever seen on one of my routes, thinking I’m likely to say the roadslicks, or the hillbilly towns where the kids are so starved even their talk sounds like death, or those sicko pedo plantation towns down in the Confederacy where grown men slave androids on the sly and keep fourteen-year-old wives. I’ve seen organ farms where they grow livers like potatoes and eyeballs like clusters of grapes. I’ve seen agrofirms printing food from chemical waste, and Plasticine remodeling clinics sump-pumping blood from their drain rooms. Shit. I once saw a hundred-legged spider, grown the size of a rig, chow down a roadslick in one gulp. But the worst thing I ever saw? You go down to Hank’s Watering Hole in Bloomington, and get to watching how that stubborn bastard waters down all that beautiful, beautiful whiskey.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
It took me hours to find my way back to the flophouse. A lifetime of geo-dependency made me shit at judging direction. The streets were quiet and the drones above us were nothing but quick flashes in the air, like stars loosed from their bearings, and the buildings mysterious behind a smoky covering of acidic fog. Finally I turned and spied Barnaby rooting around the gutters, trying to hoover everything the crowds had slubbed off.
“Truckee!” Sammy was still awake, puzzling over a used copy of the Human Sentience Standardized Exam Prep. Back in Granby, Tiny Tim had paid a hefty two haircombs for it. “What happened to you?”
“No time to explain,” I said. “Where’s Tim?”
Barnaby twitched his nose toward a small trailer
down the street, rocking on its wheels like a shanty in the middle of a squall. Unbelievable. I was half-ready to barge in there and tell him to hurry up. Finally, the trailer went still again and Tiny Tim reappeared with a nuclear girl. Maybe it was her three breasts that did the trick.
“Are you finished?” I asked him after he’d sent her packing. “Or is there some other chula in the hemisphere you’d like to hambone?”
“Plenty of them,” Tiny Tim said with no sarcasm at all.
One good thing about being flat broke: traveling light was easy. We hitched up our packs, I cranked on my visor, and we were off.
Outside the downtown with its colorful homes and dizzying tech displays was a sprawl of drone manufacturers, android detailers, and hover dealerships scrolling news of different deals and the best prices. Luckily, the military patrols were mostly keeping order in the city center, and the few guns we passed must of taken us for wandering tourists.
We clipped the chain link and ducked through the fence onto one of the largest car lots. No wonder the security was so light: all of the hovers were locked, their windows unbreakable, and fitted with antitheft tech, which meant that they would open and come to life only for the right retinal scans. Even the oldest hovers in the lot, the used ones, couldn’t be opened or started without a decent owner thumbprint.
“I’m guessing none of you have a million likes on RealFriends©?” I asked, after checking the price tag of one of the larger models, a balloonlike family-friendly float with lots of interior room and top speeds of 400 mph.
“Androids can’t keep accounts,” Sammy said, as if we didn’t know it. “Besides…” She pointed to a static sign I hadn’t pinned before. THIS DEALERSHIP NO LONGER ACCEPTS TEXAS GREENBACKS OR REALFRIENDS© WINKS, LIKES, NUDGES, AND VIEWS. Another rim shot that looked like war.
“You can’t hot-wire them either,” Tim said, “not like the old models. All it took was spit and a handshake to get ’em going.”
