FKA USA

by Reed King

  It took me hours to make it back to the Petrossian. The army was cordoning off the Strip, funneling everyone through newly sprouted immigration checkpoints. Chokeholds of tourists sweated it out in the dark, waiting for hundreds of robotic agents to verify their identity tags. I almost regretted not springing straight for one of the city’s celebrity sculptors—easier to skulk unnoticed if I could of blended with one of the hundreds of Sook Ming1 fanboys foaming the streets. But it was too late now.

  Half the city was still blacked out, and the darkness was full of the distant rise and fall of wailing, a sound that took me right back to Low Hill, the knitted cry of feral cats, the scream of dimeheads.

  War had come. Evaline wouldn’t help me. President Burnham was moldering in rehab on a leave of absence somewhere, and besides, I wasn’t sure he hadn’t been the one to sell me out to begin with. I was almost totally alone.

  Almost.

  Finally I found an open fly-service: drones, both mechanic and in-the-flesh, who would send messages and light haul anywhere on the continent, though results weren’t guaranteed. The messages to Jared and Annalee took me an age to write out, even with help from my new visor—I’d held a pencil only once or twice in my life. So I kept it short.

  If you can read this pls meet me here your friend always TRW.

  I packed in a data chip loaded with the Yellow Brick Road and a direct-message URL where they could reach me, forking out extra for a stealth drone to sneak it to the border of Crunch 407 and a well-known local grifter to hoof it into Low Hill on the back of his pack. Now I would just have to pray that the load wasn’t intercepted.

  I squeaked it back into the Petrossian by a pubic hair. Sammy nearly blew a circuit when she saw me, and in her relief about a thousand apps froze up her interface. Tiny Tim, trying to clear the lobby only a half an hour later, was stopped by an outfit of pubescent Libertine soldiers checking the creds of everyone coming in and out. He paid it past the cordon, luckily, but only after off-loading all his winnings for the night: 10,000 Vegas RoundChips, gone in a blink. At least Barnaby was safe; he’d been holed up for most of the night with the Sexy Saam who’d complimented his beard down at the bar. We had to practically pry them apart, and the girl started leaching turquoise tears that reminded me of Marjorie and made me feel sick all over again. Barnaby told me afterward they’d shared a real soul connection, what with both of them squatting somewhere between human and not.

  We hunkered down to see what morning—or what counted as morning in a timeless zone, where the real homegrown patriots lit up like glowworms—would bring. I must of dropped off to sleep, because I woke to air sirens with a scream in my throat. The blackout curtains were drawn against the neon backwash of the skyline. My head felt like the blunt end of a meat cleaver.

  “Texas had its planes over the city three hours ago,” Tiny Tim said, by way of good morning. He was livestreaming the newsfeeds onto a projector in the living room, so we could watch the thunder of jets. “Now Libertine’s got a fleet of Russian B-57s doing turn-and-tricks for show.”

  According to the feeds, a riot of black-eyed, cranked-up anarchists had gone and tumbled the grid that kept the freedom fighters of New Hampshire lit. They weren’t RFN Army, but it didn’t matter. The RFN had been pushing back on the rebellion from their military outpost off the island of Nova Scotia, and Texas saw a pattern. The New Kingdom of Utah granted a delegation of Texas long guns passage into the northern wastelands of Libertine. From there, they trekked north to New Los Angeles to blow up half of Rodeo Drive.

  In response, the RFN fired long-range missiles on the New Kingdom, but when they blasted Libertine airspace, Libertine sent a rain of pornography down on Salt Lake City, and Texas blew up a checkpoint outside of Las Vegas, and suddenly all three countries were deploying military to the border.

  The sirens rose and fell and rose again, like the howl of a thousand feral cats moving in a pack. “How are the streets looking?” I asked.

  Tiny Tim shook his head. “Pretty clear for now. Just a ragtag guard strutting for the coverage. They must of moved the big boys out to the border.”

  “Which border, though?” Libertine got traffic from both Texas and the RFN, sure, but they’d had scrums with both governments too.2 And the New Kingdom of Utah had been gunning for a holy war for half a century.

  “All of ’em, I reckon,” Tiny Tim said. “The Friendly Militia’s gone and detained two of Libertine’s ambassadors in one of their Bible camps. The RFN’s shut down their flow. And Texas has its long guns in spitting distance of the border. It looks like they might try and get some gear up in the desert for a camp.”

  Barnaby nudged out of the bathroom, green from top to tail. “Don’t go in there,” he said. “The toilet’s not flushing.”

  My stomach curdled. No wonder the coffee tasted like ass: the water was going already.

  “We gotta scram,” Tiny Tim said.

  “Now?” I could barely keep my head on my neck. Plus, the streets were likely to be jam-packed with soldiers and the borders tight as an asshole by now. “I don’t think so. The roads could be laced. A trip-mine could blow us into orbit. We can’t leave. Not until we figure who’s killing who.”

  “No time for that,” Tiny Tim said. He turned back to the windows and waved a hand to clear the curtains. The sirens were so loud they turned solid and nail-darted me right between the eyeballs.

  No. Not sirens. Hard shards of light—so bright they felt like a scream.

  All of a sudden, it hit me: Vegas was full of light.

  Not the normal blazing backwash either. This was a thin, ugly, gray light that touched everything on an angle, and striped the Strip with shadows, like a backlander’s grin full of blackness.

  For the first time in at least forty years, the sun was rising on Las Vegas.

  “They cut the dome,” Sammy said in a whirr of motor function.

  “Maybe they wanted to see who’s coming,” Barnaby whispered.

  But I couldn’t pay too much mind to the sunrise. Winging there outside the window, like pumped-up bats, were two drones—one of them blazing Rafikov’s logo, one of them lettered from Crunch, United.

  “Smile,” Tiny Tim said, and lifted a hand to wave.

  38

  Vegas may be a soulless conglomerate of Russian interests sprayed like a flatulence of asphalt and neon over the unspoiled desert, but I’ll say this about it: You can’t beat their roads. More than half of ’em actually go somewhere.

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

  They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and that might be true.

  Unless what happened is a 2081 all-wheel ride-or-die four-bed painted red and gold and kitted with leather seats. Because that wheeled us the hell outta there.

  It was Sammy who jacked it. She surfed right up to the scrubs pouring into the casino, all of them now stranded indefinitely, and stood there blinking until one of them handed her the code lock.

  “Don’t scratch it,” he said. She wasn’t even dressed like a valet. But because she was an old-model android they mistook her for help. And I felt sick all over again, thinking of Marjorie and what I’d said. What I did. “You are a valet, aren’t you?”

  My heart sank. Sammy was programmed to tell the truth, or get as close to fact as possible. That was her coding. She couldn’t lie.

  Before I could jump in, Sammy spoke up. “Yes, sir. I will take excellent care of your vehicle.”

  I had to take care to snap my jaw shut before it could free fall to the ground. She didn’t so much as swivel a lens in my direction either—just reached for the encrypted fob used in the absence of secure fingerprints.

  Like all rolling shake shacks made for good-time partiers, the RV was outfitted with state-of-the-art scramblers, to mess with drone flight patterns and keep wives, husbands, government agents, or paparazzi from tailing. At least we would be safe as mittens from the drones.

  Sammy sat down, folding her attachment
s carefully. I found myself searching for outward signs of her evolution, but her interface looked just the same as ever, blankly composed and showing the usual applications.

  “You lied,” I said. I didn’t know what to think about it.

  Sammy turned to the window.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. I suppose I’m ready, now, aren’t I?”

  “Ready for what?”

  She didn’t turn around as we slid out of the lot on to streets empty of traffic. Guards posted at the corners glared at the tinted windows, but no one stopped us.

  “To be a real person,” she said. But she didn’t exactly sound happy about it.

  And as we carved through a bald and thirsty city, beneath the hard thresh of copters flying toward the borders, I could skant blame her.

  * * *

  The Holodome gave out like a real sunrise, patchily, holding for a long time at the corners while the sun blazed on through the last of the graphic mist. Daylight shined on the liquid runs of suburban Las Vegas. The picture wasn’t pretty: out here was a desert sprawl of shantytowns and robot-repair houses, plus the same hack shops that grew up in the stairwells and basements of Old Town, everything from Android Paint & Polish to barber shops to Print + Go diners worked by some poor squid who couldn’t make it on the Strip.

  Already, hundreds of people had lined up at the water stations, toting wagons full of metal drums and insulated storage. Traffic slowed to a crawl where the lines snaked across the highway. Troops filled in at every station, herding lines and keeping order, showing off their guns.

  Everyone looked dusty, dirty, and confused. More than one little kid was squalling in the daylight, trying to block out the sun with one pale fist. Android models, loaded with extra battery packs, swarmed the juice stations, too, and even from the bus we could feel tension between the two groups, natural and engineered, coming to a boil. A pair of androids skirting past the water bugs whipped around in response to an insult I didn’t hear. One of them, with a pair of legs that went practically to her ears, lifted her middle finger.1

  A media console on the dash beamed out the news, though the signal cut out the farther we got from the city center. No surprise, most of the talking heads were spouting pro-RFN positions. The CEO of the Real Friends© of the North denied any responsibility in the attacks on the water systems of the Independent Territories. But Texas troops sneaking across the border under the cover of night counted as an act of war.…

  “Stuck in the middle, like the driest turd in a shit sandwich.” The patchy service made mincemeat out of the holo. One of the broadcasters had nothing but air where his nose should be. “Las Vegas can’t afford another recession, and war will eviscerate the tourism industry.…”

  “If the trade groups of the Independent Territories cut access to the dry countries, Libertine could find itself with a critical water shortage. It took a decade to put the WSA2 in place, but one more twitch from the RFN could blow it all to pieces.…”

  “The Crunch, United, board, which in the absence of President Mark J. Burnham is operating without an interim CEO, has reiterated the importance of its trade relationship with Libertine and its commitment to protecting its allies.…”

  The exurbs got sadder and stringier as we went on, until civilization looked just like the gluey bits of matter you might find stuck beneath a rug. These weren’t hillbilly towns—they were on the grid, although it looked and smelled like most of them were running sewage right into the desert basin—but they were just barely better. A quarantine flag strung limply between two useless wind turbines marked it as a superflu-outbreak area, but I could of guessed it myself—there was no one out at all, not even the shadow of a prowling rodent. I was glad when we passed on.

  Air traffic must of been grounded by border control, because the skies stayed clear, and the only drones I spotted were military grade. Thirty miles from the border, the road clotted with traffic: big rigs, self-navigating scooters, and shake shacks like ours knocked one another for space on the road. Thousands of tourists were trying to make it home before the borders closed.

  After a quick huddle with the operating system, we decided our best bet was off the road, heading west through Death Valley and the abandoned stretch of empty space that once was Southern California, before the Big One dropped hundreds of miles of coastline into the ocean. Tiny Tim, who had some experience grifting out west, thought the border would be easier to cross in the south, near San Francisco. That would bring us dangerously close to I.N.E.P.T. and android territory, but that’s where Sammy was heading, and she was sure her status as a refugee would get her in without trouble.

  We bumped off the highway onto a curlicue of roads still buckled from the largest earthquake ever recorded. As we got closer to the new shoreline, the view got sadder than anything I’d seen. Church steeples poked up from inside fat ribbons of caved-in earth. Vast sinkholes, baked to dryness again, were like giant mouths forever sucking on half-swallowed truck beds and streetlights.

  Some hardier squats were still visible in the waves, dark-brown water flowing through their windows and shutters kicking up spray. I saw a squirrel, a real squirrel, perched on a sign pointing the way to an old interstate. But I saw, as it unfurled its tail, the glint of metal jointing. An escaped ModelPet™, no doubt. And I couldn’t help suspecting we were walking the edge of our own true future: an idea that we weren’t moving straight ahead, but in a circle, looping back toward an end that looked a lot like a long, steep drop.

  I was suddenly so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. But before I could sleep, I had something to take care of on the Yellow Brick Road. I logged on, scrolled quickly to the nearest post office, and recorded a quick message to Evaline, ignoring system prompts that kept trying to change the wording.

  Evaline,

  My name is Truckee Wallace, I’m sixteen years old, and I’m from Crunch 407. You may know the name. I’m one of the most wanted terrorists on the continent.

  And I’m innocent.

  Until three weeks ago, I worked a hand crank on the line in Production, and I’d never been outside of Low Hill, which is where the ants live. Now I’m a fugitive.

  The problem started when Billy Lou Ropes, my favorite dimehead in the world, got high on a brand-new mind tech called Jump and tried to blow up the production floor. Actually, I guess you could say the problem started when he got fired, because I bet that gave him the idea.

  Or maybe it began way before then, before I was even alive, back when the Burnham Prize was announced, and Albert Cowell started splicing brains into new bodies, and Yana Rafikov decided that she wanted to live forever in the belly of a big computer server.

  But you see, my problem is a lot simpler. My problem started the day my mom took a two-ton carton of Crunch Tater Totz™ to the head while she was on shift.

  An accident, they told me. But here’s the thing: they lied.

  Confused? Me too. I don’t know how most of it is linked up, or if it is. All I know is that someone wanted war, and it looks like they’re getting one.

  Actually, I know a couple other things too. Jump is full of computer code, and across the continent users are hoovering their brains into a central server that Rafikov will control. Now the Federal Corporation is trying to pin me for her terrorism, and President Burnham may of been the one to set me up—or maybe not.

  Either way, Rafikov is trying to kill me.

  I know that if I can’t stop her, she’ll drop her brain into millions of bodies like flu germs into so many tissues.

  And I know that there might be only one person in the world who can help me beat her at the brain game: Albert Cowell. So I’m headed to San Francisco. To ask him. To beg him.

  Wish me luck.

  Truckee

  BTW—Most things, I think, are better in sim. Real life is never as good as you imagine it. But I wanted to say … I bet you’re even better.

  I watched the message get whipped away by a bird missing half its coding, and vanish into
a blue sky of interlocking code. Then I logged off, closed my eyes, and tried to sleep for a bit. There wouldn’t be a lot of sleep for us soon, not when we tipped the Emerald City.

  Part V

  LIBERTINE → I.N.E.P.T.

  39

  It’s a well-known fact that there ain’t a bogtrot, logo-girl, pay-whore, city slick, or backwoods chica doesn’t love a grifter. And why not? We do what other guys do, just better: we show up bearing gifts and promises and sweet-smelling all-cures. Only difference is we split before they discover half of it is rot.

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

  The roads were shook up like a demolition site, and passable only for short stretches. We hefted over a fortune just paying out the only slicks desperate enough to make their home in the blazing desert, nomads who hoofed it down to Las Vegas every so often to re-up on camel-packs of water and the rest of the time lived by drinking their own piss. Stationed wherever the highways dropped into dust or broke up into chunks of mountainous concrete, they earned their keep hauling the few travelers on these roads down secret byways carved out of the scrub. I would of banked at least some of the roadblocks were man-made, to justify their earnings. Once I could swear we heard the distant boom of dynamite, and we were nowhere near the fighting.

  Finally the highways got so bad we had to ditch our ride for an ancient army tank, the only rig besides a four-wheeler that could head us through the mountains southwest of San Francisco. The guy who pawned it to us bragged he’d got out every last spot of blood from the interior—the thing had stalled out in the middle of the badlands with an engine problem, locking four soldiers inside and cooking them alive—but he hadn’t buffed out any of the graffiti, scratch marks keyed by desperate unionists in the last days of their lives. USA FOREVER, one read. JOHN MARKS BRIGGS, 07/20/2011–06/?/2034. And: TELL SARA AND THE KIDS I LOVE THEM.

  I wondered where Sara was now, and what the kids’ names were, and whether they were dead too. Probably—people didn’t last long during dissolution, kids especially. I rooted out some old duct tape at the next desert pit stop, and covered up all the graffiti, so I wouldn’t have to think about that dumbfuck soupified in a metal hotbox, and of his poor kids, trailing around his memory like a shadow.