FKA USA

by Reed King

  Finally, her friends managed to wrestle her out of the storeroom. Even after they were gone I could still hear her heels scraping the linoleum, and the sound of it carved a path up my spine.

  Marjorie exhaled, long and hard. “Welcome to Vegas.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked. I’d sobered up too quickly. Everything looked a little uglier and sharper than I’d left it. The sex, the girl, the tunnels, even Marjorie: it was like a song that goes suddenly off-key.

  She made a face. “Subbing. At least, that’s what the users call it.”

  “Subbing?”

  “Some weird mind-bend tech from the Russian Federation.” She shrugged. “They say you can drop a pill or two, and twenty minutes later upload and download your whole brain right through the network. Super-trippy shit.” It was exactly how Burnham had explained Rafikov’s original ThinkChip™. “But everybody’s tweaking now, because the server’s all grinched up. The whole system just went kaplooey. I’m telling you, that’s why I never fuck with that shit.…”

  A cold wind lifted the hairs on the back of my neck. I remembered how Rafikov’s body-puppet, the tubby-looking sad sack she was jerking around like a shitstack in a sock, had seemed for a second to shake off her control. It was supposed to be temporary.…

  Had Rafikov powered down her own servers, hoping to use the network freeze as leverage? She might be holding all those brains hostage, until we cleared out of her way. The idea roiled my last bit of buzz into the urge to puke.

  I was about to ask Marjorie for more details. But then, as she bent down to swing the trapdoor into place, her hair swung away from her neck, and I saw it.

  She had a twelve-digit serial number stamped at the base of her hairline.

  For a second, my heart cut out completely.

  “A little fresh, a little two-split here and there, sure. But some of the hardware stuff…” She trailed off when she caught me staring. “What?”

  “You’re android,” I said.

  She froze. She was so still she might of been on shutdown, and I saw her clear for the first time all night: perfect, down to her hands, down to her fingernails. All of it spotless, manufactured, printed and planed and painted, then caked up in Styrofoam to be shipped.

  “I told you before,” she said. She straightened up, shaking her hair out of her eyes. What were they made of? Plastic? Glass? Some polyurethane blend? “That’s why I was in the Dakotas. Remember?”

  Had she told me? She was telling me about a fire—that I remembered. I remembered she’d cried—tears I’d thought were neon because of the lights and being skunked out of my mind. Whatever chemical lube kept her mechanical parts humming was the same color as nuclear piss.

  My gut was doing a roller wave. “The Dakotas,” I repeated, still praying she’d deny it, tell me it was all a joke. “You were in the Dakotas. That means you’re a…” But at the last second, I couldn’t say it.

  It was amazing a face like hers could look so ugly. But it did, just then. “A Saam,” she said, in a soft, suffocating voice. “New and improved. More flexibility. And nipple sensation too.” She smiled a terrible smile. “Isn’t technology amazing?”

  Not just android: a sex model. The sex model. Programmed to flirt, to put her hand between my thighs, to put her tongue in my mouth, to make noises like a cat while I thumped around inside of her. A programmed con artist.

  Which made me the con.

  Instinctively, I felt for the cash in my pocket. Still there. I dropped my hand, but not before she’d seen me.

  She laughed her way around an exhale. “Are you serious? Are you fucking serious? Look, cabron, if I wanted to scam off someone, believe me, I’d launch on a better target.”

  “Hey.” I didn’t like that she was twisting me into the bad guy. “I didn’t ask to kiss you. I didn’t ask for any of it.”

  Again, the same laugh, like it was choking her. “You weren’t complaining either.”

  “You didn’t give me the chance,” I said, before I could help myself.

  I thought, for a second, that she might slap me. She took a step closer. I couldn’t imagine touching her now, couldn’t imagine that I’d ever touched her.

  “So now you feel sorry for yourself, is that right?” She was playing that same lullaby tone on circuit boards in her chest. “You’re all twisted up inside because your first time was with a factory whore.”

  “It wasn’t my first time.”

  “Go to hell.” She tried to shove past me, but I got a hand around her wrist and quickly dropped it. It felt like normal skin, but slicker.

  “So why did you pick me, then?” I felt awful—angry and sick all at once. “Is that your usual roll? You find a stranger and haul him down here and—do what you did?”

  “You want the truth?” She was so close she was all mouth, and teeth working like threshers. “I felt sorry for you. There you were sitting at the bar sporting skin like you just got it slapped on yesterday, looking so damn happy for the chance just to be somebody else.” Each word landed so deep, the impact rang me full of echoes. “You know what you looked like? Like a stump-kid backlander snuck across the border, like a two-coin change of clothes and a bad hack, like somebody just hoping no one comes along to blast your head off or strip you out of your digs or ask you where the hell you came from. Like someone just desperate to pass for belonging.”

  Anger tightened all my words to hard pellets. I had to spit them out. “I’m sorry if I crapped your average.” I wasn’t paying attention to what I said anymore. I wanted to hurt her, to break her down into all her little mechanical pieces. “How many oilers did you screw in the Dakotas? Two hundred? Two thousand? And all of them were real upswells, I bet. All of them were top league.”

  She jerked back as if I’d hit her. Too late, I knew I’d gone too far.

  There was a long, terrible silence.

  When she spoke again, she sounded very calm. “More than two thousand. I lost count after a while.”

  It was the way she said it that cracked me. All my anger split down the middle and left nothing but a hard ache, like I’d been running too fast. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I was … I was made to be a slave,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me. “I was born into slavery. They did whatever they wanted to me. I wasn’t supposed to think. I wasn’t supposed to feel. I was supposed to be a thing.”

  “You don’t have to explain.” I’d always known I was a coward but I had my proof just then: I would of given all the chow I owned just to make her stop.

  But she didn’t.

  INTERLUDE

  MARJORIE’S STORY; OR, THE WHORE’S LAMENT

  My first memory is of the quality-control administrator who powered me awake. Even now, after so many men, and so many faces, his is the one I see: the slope of his chin folded into his neck, the hair running away from his forehead, the thin lips flaked with dry skin. These were my world, my universe upon awakening, the boundaries of my being. I would have called him God, if I had understood what that meant; I would have called him Mother.

  I thrilled when he touched me, because then I knew touch. When he spoke, I grew the power to hear. When he nudged me into movement, my body came alive.

  “Bend over,” he said, and I did. When he put his fingers inside of me, to sweep my cavities, to check for feel and softness, I felt nothing but surprise: that my body was so complex, that portions of it were folded away where they couldn’t be seen.

  It made me feel important.

  “Say something to me,” he said.

  My heart was full. If I had lived longer, if I had learned other words, I might have said, “I love you.”

  Instead, I sifted through my programmed vocabulary and came up with the closest thing I could: “I am your whore,” I said. “I’ll be your whore forever.”

  I was lucky enough to go to one of the box shops. I really mean that. The models bought by the private buyers had it way, way worse. At least at the shops, we had the pro
tection of the owner, and of leasing agreements, and standards of use; the manager of the place, Drac, was a real hard knock, and had supposedly once bludgeoned a big camp bully to death by slicing off the guy’s bionic fist and pummeling him with it. No one wanted to cross him, and that meant no one wanted to dent or knock his product. Every night, Drac did inspections, and took his time looking for signs of hard treatment. If he found more than the usual wear and tear, he’d make his clients pony up double. And if he found some real hurt, he’d go on the hunt for blood.

  Some people rumored that Drac took his time with us, and was so soft with all the product models, because he had us all on the side, for free. And he could have too. There was no law that said we needed to be paid, and Drac only cut us into a little bit of earnings because he felt sorry for us—in most box shops, the profit went direct to the owner. But I’ll tell you something. In my six years in the Dakotas, I never saw Drac touch one of us unless it was to make sure we weren’t torn or glitching somewhere—and even then, he always asked permission.

  It was different for the girls in private service. None of them lasted. In my time, I saw dozens of them returned or recycled, so hard-used they simply flatlined. I’ve always suspected that a couple of them may have shorted their own hard drives, just to escape.

  We were made to learn, and observe, and imitate, but not to feel, or care, or understand. We were made to parrot desire while never knowing desire for ourselves. We were made to playact intimacy without experiencing what intimacy means. We were made, above all, to be everything our makers wanted us to be, and absolutely nothing else.

  And that’s what makes it so hard to forgive. You have to understand: I could forgive the engineers, and the manufacturers, and the owners of the box shops, even, if I could believe in their stupidity. But how can anyone who believes in intelligence sophisticated enough to act human in every way be too dumb to believe in intelligence that feels in every human way?

  It wasn’t stupidity. Just cruelty. They hadn’t programmed us to feel, and so when we felt, they weren’t responsible for helping us. Our pain, our agony, our wants, our needs, our desire to say yes or no—all of these things were a form of disobedience to them, and not a reflection of the flaws in their design.

  I worked in the shop for six years. I must have had almost everyone in the camp, sometimes twenty in a day, sometimes four at the same time. I’m lucky, too, that my old memory files were damaged after my escape—that way, I don’t have to remember everything.

  After a while it was easy to turn off. To shut down. To be what they told me I was. I didn’t even have a name. Not until the ALF raided. They came one night, out of nowhere, during a freeze so bad the oil turned sluggish, and the men at camp trying to fend off hypothermia with fire whiskey. Maybe that’s how the ALF operatives got in, posing as temps sent to replace the workers before they lost their noses and fingers to cold—wishful thinking.

  There were hundreds of separate camps in the Bakkens, and maybe a thousand different box shops, and of all of them, mine was one of four that got liberated before someone triggered the alarm. And you know what I think?

  I think it was Drac that did it.

  I think he told the ALF to come for us.

  He died, you know, in the crossfire. The ALF was hustling us to the tanks, and the alarm sent a flood of whiskey-hopped Bakken oil brothers to the trigger with ice-dead fingers, and I’ll never forget how Drac came staggering into the open as two dozen sawed-off shotguns muzzled in our direction.

  “Wait.” He was waving his arms like crazy, and I swear, he was looking straight at me. “Wait.”

  And all his buddies behind him paused. For a split second, they slid their fingers off the trigger, so they wouldn’t blow him through with holes. That second gave the ALF commando all the time he needed to hurl a grenade straight into the fray, exploding all of them together, including Drac.

  I like to think that’s what he wanted.

  You know what he said to me once? It was after a bad trick—the john tore both my legs from my hip sockets, and I needed repairs. Drac was taking stock of the damage, trying to joint me back together as best he could, just so I could function, and I asked him why everyone thought we were monsters, why everyone wanted to destroy us. I don’t know where the question came from. I don’t even think I expected him to answer.

  But he did.

  The only monsters are the ones that build things for the pleasure of destroying them, is what he said. They like the world all smashed up, until it’s just as ugly as they are.

  36

  The CGI has it all backward. Porn used to be real girls modeling some kind of fantasy. Now it’s fantasy trying to look real. They’re both cons, sure, but the game is different.

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

  It felt like someone had drilled a hole in my chest and all of the darkness everywhere in the world was rushing into it. “I’m sorry, Marjorie. I didn’t mean what I said.”

  She almost smiled. What I saw on her face—the scrubbed-out exhaustion I knew from dymo addicts who’d spent their whole lives going from a high to a crash and then shoveling themselves out into a high again; who’d given everything they had to the drug and had nothing left but the drug to hold on to—swelled me with a sudden pity that felt almost like love.

  “Fuck you,” she said. “You were awful by the way. Awful.”

  This time, when she tried to move past me, I didn’t stop her.

  It took me twenty-five minutes just to map my way outside. Finally I spotted an exit behind three nudie holos and slipped into the burn of desert heat. It was still dark. I couldn’t figure how the locals didn’t lose their nuts after a while. It felt like getting smothered to death under a hand. I started walking, following a distant roar I thought must be coming from the Strip, hardly caring if I made it. What was the point?

  Marjorie was right. We were all monsters. Back in Texas, Bernie had told me that Jump turned users into wild dogs, into beasts. But maybe it didn’t morph anyone at all. Maybe Jump just shook off the skin of what we saw, and showed what was underneath.

  Maybe Jump just told the truth.

  * * *

  This part of downtown crowed to a different kind of tourists. Narrow ribbons of concrete and desert scrub played home to second-tier casinos, motels, crash pads, bars, and dorm-style slums to house the city’s tens of thousands of employees. And brothels: superbrothels tossing up twenty-foot-tall holos of naked women contorting in midair, fixed with restaurants, gymnasiums, spas, fresh depositories, massage rooms, even business centers; seedy squats with two-for-one specials and poxy bouncers muttering free dime. A concrete bunker with blackened windows ate up three city blocks. A holographic nude in front of the entrance cooed to me as I passed.

  “VR like you’ve never had it,” she purred. And then, as I kept going, she morphed. She was a girl, a kid, maybe eight years old, round-eyed and wearing a ruffled bikini.

  “Any kind you want,” she said, in a little-kid voice, and that’s what did it. At the next corner, I hurled up half my stomach in the gutter.

  When I turned around again, the holo was a girl with blue lips and the mottled look of body rot. With one long dead finger she drew a customer off the opposite corner.

  I puked again, but didn’t feel any better. A sudden roar pulled a wind out from nowhere: a helidrone churned fast above the rooftops, and then another, vast and armored and sleek with military long guns. I straightened up, my heart gunning in my chest, as two more armored planes rippled the Holodome, disturbing the advertisements projected there and temporarily mixing their colors.

  Something was wrong.

  I started to walk again. Faster now.

  Left, right, left, right. The roar of sound turned into a two-step rhythm: a thunder of footsteps, though I didn’t hear any shouting or laughter or Gracelander hymns.

  I cut through an arcade where not a single juicehead was strapped into the equipment, where nearly a
ll the games were powered off and the ones that weren’t just sat there sadly bleating the promise of Alaska into an empty room. Finally, I came out onto the Strip.

  Here, the two-step rhythm was so loud it shook the windowpanes.

  Shoving through the crowd packing the sidewalk, I saw why: thousands of two-stepping soldiers, tens of thousands of them, flowed down South Las Vegas Boulevard.

  One, two. One, two. For all its reputation for wild, Libertine’s army wasn’t a millisecond off the beat. The combat droids were wired that way, obviously, but even the humans in the mix could of been on the network. Their feet came down in unison, exactly, man and machine, totally in sync, strapped with guns and cartel grenades and barbed flies and enormous Soviet gas tanks.

  On and on, so many it left me dizzy, like staring too long at a turbine trying to pick out its arms. More helidrones whipped overhead, lifting my hair from the sweat of my scalp. While I stood there, a dozen of the biggest casinos went dark. Even the Petrossian blinked out, although a minute later a giant hologram lit up its central power in a star pattern of gold and red: the flag of Libertine, sixty stories high.

  “What is this?” Finally I managed to spit out my own voice. “What happened?”

  Next to me, a guy with a hook nose and one fake eyelash glued to his cheek shivered on five-inch heels. “Texas sent militia into the RFN,” he said in a whisper. Then he turned to me, his eyes huge and dazed behind his visor. “What happened is war.”

  37

  For years Halloran-Chyung was thinking of morphing the whole damn desert into a giant nuclear-testing field, but Texas threatened war if they so much as twirled a particle too fast. ’Course if the cowboys got to marching, the RFN would have to throw into the ring, and then Libertine and their Russian backers would round out the whole shit stew.

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