by Reed King
Susan frowned. “With the money, you mean?” Like I would be asking about anything else. Like anything else mattered.
Like we were staring at a particularly baked-on pile of dog shit and not rich, rich, money, rich, uppercrust rich, straight-to-swag-town, blazes rich.
“Nothing much. I guess we should junk it. But, honestly, even that seems like more trouble than it’s worth.” She shrugged. “Besides, it’s nice to remember how valueless it all is. Slips of paper, promises, debts. It doesn’t really mean anything.”
She leaned over and hooked a handful of Texas dollars from an empty oil drum. I tagged at least four fifties. I had a sudden, violent urge to jack her over the head and make a run for it.
“When I think of my old life, everything I did, everything my parents did, breaking their backs and leaching the land of every drop of its worth, all of it for scraps of ink and paper, worthless as tissues…” She shook her head. “You might as well scav for used tissues. You might as well spend your whole life blowing your nose.”
I was silent, trembling.
“You can have it, you know,” she added, just like that, casual, letting the dollars sift through her fingers.
I stared. “What?”
Her face in the half dark glowed large, like the big bald eyes of the floodlights ringing the border of BCE Tech. “If you want it, you can have it,” she repeated. “But if you take it, if that’s what you want, we can’t let you stay here. That’s not what we do.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “Think about it, Truckee. Okay? Think hard.”
* * *
Twenty-five minutes later, Sammy, Tiny Tim, Barnaby, and I were riding high on an all-wheel rig, squinched next to three old suitcases so gas-bloated with cash we had to lasso them closed with nylon cord.
It seemed like half the population of Walden had turned out to see us off, and the ones who hadn’t made sure to watch from a distance. From the high seat I had a view of hallucination-green fields, rows of clapboard houses, and brown-footed kids calling out their last games of tag. People older than I’d ever seen creaked back and forth on hand-hewn slags, sipping honey wine or smoking fresh, squinting at us from a distance. Girls shy and pretty in their loomed T-shirts, breasts like blossoms against the cotton, ran through cornfields tipped with gold.
In the taffy evening shadows, Susan’s face looked like an Old World map, all creases and roads to nowhere. As soon as I motored up, she stepped forward.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Absolutely and for-sure?”
And for a nanosecond, catching eyes with a beautiful girl in the crowd, who blinked up at me beneath a thicket of lashes, I really thought about it. I pictured falling in love with one of the big-eyed girls with their knees bug-bitten and their nails buffed from working. I pictured chucking my virginity under a confetti parade of stars. I imagined tossing the portal, tossing WorldBurn and the Yellow Brick Road and Crunch products and body pickers, tossing President Burnham and Yana Rafikov and the search for forever and the continent spinning toward war, imagined punting it hard into the past. I’d swap it all for a forever series of blind-bright days, out here in the middle of nowhere, under a bowl of natural sky.
I couldn’t imagine anything worse.
“I’m sure,” I said, minding my manners like Sugar Wallace taught me, even though I wanted to say, What’s your goddamn dosage? I’m an uppercrust now, sucko. “But thank you. For real.”
I took the wheel and pedaled the gas. Moving backward and forward was cake compared to flying. We bumped down the Walden streets and watched the green dissolve into the dust yellows and whites of the desert.
I turned around only once, when the town was still a small violet smear on the horizon, and felt regret ring like a bell between my ribs.
Had I, in fact, scrimped enough cash? We were scramming, leaving millions of dollars of chow still sweating must, unused and unloved, in that dark, run-down squat. But it was too late now. Besides, we still had more money than I would ever be able to spend.
“Well.” Sammy said, after a long minute, exhaling dust hard from her vents. “That was a surprising turn of events.”
Tiny Tim walloped a fly the size of a thumb and scraped it off the dash. “I never seen a thing stranger in my life,” he said. “Imagine sharing everything. How’re you supposed to know what’s yours?”
“They were charming enough,” Barnaby said with a wave of his hoof. “But vastly illiterate, of course. They seemed totally unconcerned with the idea of a lasting intellectual legacy, for example. And of course not a single one of them had read the complete works of Borges.”
“No whiskey,” Tiny Tim said. “Not a drop of moonshine, blindside, or corn rye. Fields of corn, and no corn rye to make you blind!”
“Some people,” Sammy said, “strike me as quite illogical.”
“We shouldn’t land too hard on them,” I said. I was feeling generous. And why not? I was richer than the head foreman of the St. Louis outpost of the Federal Corporation of Crunch Snacks and Pharmaceuticals©. I was richer than his boss, and his boss. I was a fat cat now, pure and simple. “The world is full of crazies.”
“Amen to that,” Barnaby said with a sniff. The road dried up beneath our wheels, leaving a dry track of concrete ruts and cracked earth. Our wheels hit a deep rut and jolted us high into the air.
Walden went up like smoke behind us, turning to nothing but smudge.
We turned into the setting sun, in the direction of Las Vegas.
33
Where do you find the greatest concentration of scam artists, fraudsters, hookers, bookies, thieves, pimps, drug dealers, pushers, users, losers, and dopes, in the entire continent formerly known as the United States of America?
Wall Street, of course. But Las Vegas is a close second.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
All my life, my mom told me the fat cats weren’t so different from us. “Everybody wipes their ass the same way, Truckee,” she liked to say.
Now I knew that she was dead wrong. In Las Vegas, it turned out, I didn’t have to wipe my ass at all: an auto-toilet pulsing warm outflows of very slightly salinated water did it for me. Gentle fans dried out my crack, and a creepy metal arm suited up like a towel rack even tried to zip me up after.
I must of swirled half the dust in the Dust Bowl down the gold-inlay drain of our five-person shower in the Executive Crown Suite of the Hotel Petrossian. It was like rinsing off my old life: in new treads, and new licks, and brand-new tailoring, I could of passed for one of those trust-fund kids from New New York.
Gone was the gangly squid with skin the color of wet concrete and arms like waterlogged noodles and analog clothing lumped down from Crunch Human Resources. I was still skinny, but after weeks on the road, tan and ropy with muscle too. I ached to send a blast back to everyone in Crunchtown. If only they could see me now.
If only Evaline could.
As soon as I was cleaned up, I ordered up a brand-new, razor-sharp visor, with built-in Neuro-Tech Sensory™ and Personal ID mapping. When it arrived—shooting straight to the room via our personal service elevator—I powered up and booted up the Yellow Brick Road.
I scooted right over to the same doughboy template who’d quoted me a thousand freedom bucks for an all-inclusive visa back when I couldn’t afford one. My options were nearly limitless now: Libertine was financed half by the Russians and half by the cartels,1 and both ran a good game in ID trade.2
In the end, I chose a visa lifted from one Gregor Dubrovsky, a diplomat from the Federation whose credentials would get me through the RFN without so much as a blink from the firewall keeps. I scrummed up a visa for Tiny Tim, too, who would serve as my bodyguard. Barnaby was no problem—everyone knew the Russians had a taste for luxe, and nothing was more luxurious than a walking and talking fur mat. And we would say goodbye to Sammy in Silicon Valley, which meant we wouldn’t have to try and sneak an android past the RFN gunners guarding the demilitarized zone.
It also meant: we would say goodbye to Sammy.
But that was a tomorrow problem. And even though I was a skinny, big-nosed handle operator whose closest scrum with the opposite sex involved a toilet seat and a late-night wank, I’d learned one thing for sure in my sixteen years on the planet Earth on the continent in what was formerly known as the United States of America. It was better not to think too hard about tomorrow.
“For pickup, right?” The seller whirred a quick calculation. “That’s gonna cost high, brother-man.”
“Pay isn’t important.” The words tasted like a kiss. I half-wanted to repeat them.
His eyes reeled in his head. “That’ll be one thousand gold chits,” he said.
My new visor was so swag that conversions showed up right away, unfurling from the menu bar before I’d so much as twitched toward Settings. But it no longer made a squeak of difference. Crunchbucks, Texas dollars, Utah Manna, Consensual Hugz,3 Real Friends© winks—I was rich in all of them individually, and bonkers rich in all of them combined.
“No problem,” I said coolly, just to watch his face toggle its pixels.
The transaction complete, I scooted over to Bad Kitty’s URL, desperate to see her after nearly a week. But she wasn’t logged on. What with Las Vegas a Timeless Zone, it could be breakfast time or four a.m. in New Los Angeles, so I took my time drumming up a private message with the help of my new software prompts.
Hey! Sorry I’ve been incommunicado. I’ve been jumping countries like mad. But now landed in Las Vegas and would love to see you. I’d had plenty of hours to plot how I would hint I was well and truly swag enough for her now, without being too obvious about it. No one liked a brag. It was better to handle the thing indirectly. Just the fact that I was bouncing across the borders would raise eyebrows. I debated ending with I miss you, but decided against it when prompts suggested the alternative of a weepy face and a beating heart. Instead I added a few smiley faces and the hope-you’re-okay-and-can’t-wait-to-catch-up turtle emoji.4
I sent the chat winging to her direct. As soon as it was gone over the horizon, I saw I still had a dump of unsorted data in my archives: I’d forgotten all about my mom’s data pack, the slender compression of Sugar Wallace’s digital life that I’d purchased on the Yellow Brick Road.
Just like that, my mood took a hard plummet. All the money in the world, and I couldn’t do a thing for the person who’d given me the most. Once again, I understood just how the first President Burnham must of felt, and why he’d done what he’d done for Whitney Heller, to try to keep her alive. I would of let the world burn, too, for the chance to bring my mom back to life.
I swiped open her file and got a shock: an outgoing voicemail she’d recorded back when she worked in Public Liaisons, before she switched over to Freight. Husky with smoke and laughter, her voice filled up the whole world.
This is Sugar Wallace. Croon me a song and I’ll blast right back to you. Have a Crunch and Crunk day!
I played it again. And again. This is Sugar Wallace. Thirty days after she died, my visor wiped all my saved crooners after a mandatory update, and I’d near forgot what she sounded like. This is Sugar Wallace. The tears came so thick my visor returned a moisture warning.
The rest of my mom’s file boiled down to a few short scraps: her birth records, some lodging and work detail handed down from the Federal Corp, a write-up of the disciplinary action that got her bumped from Public Liaisons and reassigned to Freight (I’d always been hazy on the details, but apparently she’d swayed from the prescribed responses and promised lifetime supplies of Crunch anti-seizure meds to twelve women who complained that the CrunchMom™ Breast-Flavored Breast Milk Injectables had left their children prone to violent seizures and crippling migraines5). My heart chugged quicker as I saw my birth record. I searched my father’s name, but it was listed as Unknown. Otherwise, there was squirrel but a bundle of messages my mom had lobbed off to her supervisors, and even the head of compliance of Human Resources: a three-ounce difference in the weight of the Cheez™ shipments cranking out of Production-22 was messing with truck mileage.
A whole life, funneled down to a few lines of type, a single crooner, and some interdepartmental Human Resources bulletins. Where was the record of her laugh, like the rattle of glasses on a shelf during a quake? Where was the memo of her hands, like soft orange leather, or her habit of rhyming words just for the hell of it?
The final document in her data file was an order submitted by HR for Plot 2882 to be spruced up for her remains. I was about to flip out of the file when the date of the HR petition for her grave grabbed my attention.
It was dated September 4.
For a long second, I felt like I’d been sucked into an air hose, like all my insides were getting vacced out through my feet.
September 4 was the day before my mom got flattened by a box of Tater Tots in a horrible, senseless accident no one on earth could of predicted.
34
In my experience, there’s two good ways to know if someone’s lying to you. The first way is to check on the eyes—liars either stare too hard or not at all. The second way is to put a gun to the slick’s head and ask to hear the truth or else wham-o, blam-o. That way’s always worked for me.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
I’d minimized the Yellow Brick Road to the size of a distant smudge on the horizon so I could listen to my reading in peace. When a hand thumped my shoulder I nearly screamed.
But it was just a system alert: Bad Kitty was reading my DM. That meant she was logged in. With a swipe of my fingers, the Road rushed me again, and I nearly tumbled off my ass as a goosh of air seemed to rattle my skull. I wasn’t used to the sensory tech on my new outfit, or the assault of feeling that prickled my skin, now, inside the simulation.
I lobbed her a private chat request, expecting a response right away. But minutes passed as I struggled to keep my head despite the new assault of feeling. Sound rattled my teeth, sudden movement tweaked my optic nerves, smell tickled my memory sense.
I started to sweat. That date, September 4, rattled around my neurons like a train loosed from its tracks.
They couldn’t of known she was going to die.
Not unless they were the ones that killed her.
“You all right, my man?” A passing cowboy rattled by on enormous glittering spurs. “You look tweaky.”
Great. The new software included response feedback, which meant my real-life reactions reflected in my avatar’s expressions. I cranked up the mirror playback available in tools and saw the cowboy was right. I looked terrible. Beads of sweat rolled off my hairline and new circles had sprouted beneath my eyes.
Before I could disable neural feedback, Bad Kitty finally, finally, responded. Immediately, I got blown into a new portion of the Yellow Brick Road: a private chat room coded to look like an old-century park, with strong firewalls suggested by the high iron gates and the thick rustle of climbing ivy that protected it from view. My heart dropped when I saw Bad Kitty hadn’t showed after all.
Instead I saw an unfamiliar avatar, horned and reptilian, sitting on a bench and digging a claw in the dirt.
And yet, as soon as it looked up at me, I knew.
“Evaline?” I said.
She looked down again. She went on digging her foot—which consisted of a kind of green claw—into the dirt. “Hi,” she said stiffly.
It wasn’t exactly the greeting I’d been angling for. But I took a seat next to her anyway. “You changed your avatar,” I said, when the silence dragged on between us.
She kept digging, trying to make a trench in the virtual dirt. The hole kept refilling itself with pixelated dirt. “It’s Mordich, one of the characters from Sewer Races. You ever played?”
I shook my head. I’d read about the game on some forums—apparently it was lighting up in the Real Friends© of the North—but it had never made it into Crunch, United. “Why’d you switch?”
“Bored
, I guess.” She stood up, hugging her breastplate like she was cold. “So. You’ve been busy, huh?”
I wanted so badly to tell her everything, to crap a long spool of truth into the microphone, to confess. But I couldn’t. What would she say, if she knew who I was? Would she even believe my story? I skant believed it.
“You could say that” is what I said. And because I felt like crying, I almost, almost laughed instead.
She shot me a dark look. Her reptilian nostrils flared. “What?”
“What?”
“You’re laughing at me,” she said.
“No, no.” I kept forgetting all about my visor’s new features. I stood up too. But when I touched her she didn’t react, even though she must of gotten the alert. “I’m sorry I disappeared. Trust me, it wasn’t my choice. I thought about you. A lot.”
She relaxed a little. “Okay.” She looked up at me, biting a lip with one long tooth. Christ. Even as an ugly-ass reptile she was adorable. “I thought maybe you got tired of me or something.”
“I would never. Look, I got into some trouble…” I stopped myself from saying, and when all this is over I’m going to jet up to New Los Angeles and whisk you off to one of those icy restaurants where a bunch of strawgrass costs 500 bucks a plate. “I got robbed, actually. Jumped by a pair of standard android security tails. I think someone must of tipped them off I was coming.” I was proud of myself for that one—she would have to hear the rich between the lines. Besides, it was basically true.
And suddenly, I lit on an idea: the serial number. I still had the ID chip Sammy ripped from the neck of one of my attackers. He’d come from the Federal Corporation. But was it possible he’d been sent by the government? The idea hadn’t even occurred to me, not before I’d seen my mom’s files. But now, anything was possible. “Actually, I was hoping you could help me out.”
She swung her long braid over one shoulder, and exhaled hard through her large nostrils. “Help you out how?”
