FKA USA

by Reed King

  Tiny Tim, tuning into some old-school radio networks beamed on the sly by other grifters, landed on grim news: Silicon Valley was on lockdown while its president met with the CEO of the Real Friends© of the North to renew treaty talks.

  It was obvious the RFN wanted to keep the androids from siding with Libertine, and possibly firing up splinter liberation groups all across the country. Meanwhile, Texas was making friendly noises around Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated, and Crunch, United, was floating more and more warships off the Gulf. Every hour brought new reports of Jumpheads sparking miniature riots, and people pointing fingers, and everyone just one skin cell away from a trigger.

  Every hour, I loaded up the Yellow Brick Road, hoping for an answer from Jared or Annalee, trying not to look for one from Evaline. Every hour that turned up no alerts made me feel even lonelier. Every mile made me feel just like I was stretching a long rubber band to a breaking point, that pretty soon it would snap for good and leave me lost at the edge of a dying world.

  Even if Albert Cowell could figure a way to stop Rafikov, was there any point? Sure, we might strap the world to a ventilator and squeeze out a couple more painful, gasping years. But what good was there in that, really?

  It might be better to pull the plug quick. At least the afterlife was somewhere we hadn’t fucked up yet.

  Thirty miles from the border of Real Friends© of the North—or the Independent Nation of Engineered People-Things, depending on who you were asking—we hit a Podunk backwater gussied up like an electric whore.1 But it was a relief to see a backwash of electric light on the horizon after sweating it out in darkness, while rattlesnakes shook out their warnings from all directions and spiders the size of hubcaps scuttled suddenly into the light of our high beams. It was a relief, too, to pick up a real road again, this one obviously owned and operated by Russian-backed hustlers trying to stake a claim. It was even marked with logos from the Romanaski Palace, the outpost of one of the big Vegas casinos.

  We traded rigs again, this time for the kind of armored, snub-nosed wheeler favored by diplomats for the security features and the cabin beds and showers. This one even had Russian Federation plates, and would give my newly bought ID some reality boost. I was glad for all the spyware that came free with the operating system; I didn’t like the way the seller stared me down like he was trying to pin my look from somewhere.

  But we didn’t get far. A regiment of Libertine soldiers had cordoned the only asphalt into town. The road had sprung a parking lot: a shitpack of wheelies, rigs, RVs, smart cars, mopeds, and freight trucks turned the air blurry with exhaust. We joined the line, inching forward at a crawl.

  “What’s happening?” Sammy asked. She’d been miserable ever since we’d heard the news that Silicon Valley had shut the border. Another human trait she’d picked up recently—she snapped whenever we so much as looked at her wrong, sulked for hours, criticized Tim’s driving or the smell of Barnaby’s fur. The sound of my breathing annoyed her. The way I swallowed was even worse.

  Barnaby angled his head out a window for a better look. “They’re searching vehicles one by one.”

  My insides did a funny pivot. “Searching for what?”

  For once, he had nothing to say. A glob of sweat ran down my neck.

  “I’ll try and get the where-what-how,” Tiny Tim said, and squeezed into an origami shape to fit through the door.

  I slid over to the driver’s seat and rolled us forward another few inches when the soldiers waved another rig through the cordon. In the heat, Tiny Tim shimmered at the edges as he humped along the shoulder toward the soldiers at their station. I told myself there was nothing to twitch about: we had papers, and plenty of green for bribery, if it came to that. The cordon was probably routine, to check for Texas insurgents or sweep citizens of the RFN for weapons or contraband. But a bad feeling kept tickling my stomach.

  Tiny Tim was back in minutes, grim and sweating, hustling through the weave of rigs and moving faster than I’d ever seen him. And as soon as he locked eyes with me, I knew.

  “You got to hide,” he said, between gasping inhales, as soon as he slid inside. He was leaking sweat. The temperature had spiked to 120. “They’re looking for you at the checkpoint.”

  “Looking for me?” Even though I’d been waiting for it, even though the bad feeling slid down into my groin like it was settling where it belonged, I suddenly felt like I was thinking through a brick.

  “They grimped a deal with the Federal Corp.” He mauled me out of the driver’s seat. “They deliver the terrorist, they’ll get a hand-up in the fight. You got to hide.”

  “Yeah, I heard you. Small glitch. There’s nowhere to hide.”

  The rig was meant for distance travel but not for home base; there was a narrow bed, two slick bench seats covered in a soft leathery skin I was trying to pretend wasn’t human, despite the periodic nipple detailing;2 a marble worktable and a golden shitter, and that was it. I wasn’t even afraid, just sick: there was no way out, no place to go.

  “What about the bathroom?” Sammy said. At least she’d finally snapped her bad mood—maybe when the Libertine Army lopped my head off, she would even smile again.

  Tim shook his head. “They’re boarding all the big rigs. They’ll shake him loose in a nick.”

  “We could tell them he’s sick,” she insisted. “We could say he has the C-1 virus, or that he picked up the plague from a swamp skimmer.”

  “He does look a little pustulant,” Barnaby said thoughtfully. “They might believe it.”

  “They’ll just bring in the circuits. Sorry, Sammy,” Tim added quickly. “But them robots up there got switches for brains. If they catch Truckee with his pants down, they’ll short circuit his balls for the surge.”

  “But there’s nowhere else for him to go,” Sammy said. Even though she’d spoken quietly, the words dropped like an artillery round, and blasted all the panic into a long and terrible silence.

  There was nowhere else for me to go.

  Tiny Tim turned away as a long catcall of horns took up the same cry to move: the line was crawling forward again. Sammy was looking at me with such pity on her interface I nearly told her to reboot. Without a word, Barnaby trotted to the driver’s seat, chewed the manual gear into drive, and gently hoofed the gas to roll us forward.

  We were close enough now to hear the soldiers shouting instructions to one another and ordering people out into the sun, calling for ID chips, IP addresses, blood samples, retinal stamps, or barcode tattoos to be ready and available for verification.

  I tried to smile, but my lips felt like two rubber dildos stapled to my face, and only vibrated a little. “Well, looks like I don’t need the bathroom,” I said, trying for a joke. “I’m already in deep shit.”

  No one laughed. Then Tim looked up, his face alive like I’d never seen it. Like a dense fog had blown off from behind his eyes—for a second, you’d never know him for a Straw Man, even with the scar.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  “No. Not shit. Shit.” He looked at me so wild, so lit up, for a second I thought he’d gone truly bonk. “That’s where you can hide. Deep in shit.”

  Sammy beat me to his meaning by a half second. “The sewage tank,” she said.

  I waited a beat, hoping someone would announce the joke. But no one did.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said. “Really?”

  As if in response, another blast of the car horns nudged us forward. I could make out the cordon now, a knotty wall of scrapwood that two squinty adolescents rolled back and forth across the road.

  “It’s perfect,” Sammy said. “They’ll never think of looking for you there.”

  “True,” Barnaby said as he nudged us into position behind a camper van of Burners, all of them modified to look more like their favorite avatars.3 “Even infrared won’t help, not with that cauldron stewing.”

  “I think I’d rather take my chances with the army,” I said.
Already, I felt like I was going to be sick.

  “In a minute, you’ll be hightail-and-hell out of choices,” Tim said. “So let’s move.”

  He manhandled me to the bathroom and bent down to work the electric toilet loose of the floor. It didn’t take him more than a minute or two, but even so, by the time he dropped the last bolt into his palm and shoved the bowl aside, we’d advanced another ten feet toward the roadblock and Barnaby was getting heady.

  “We’ve got roughly thirty seconds until we’re crawling with Libertine patriots,” he said. “So I highly recommend you put a hoof on it.”

  The smell coming out of the drop sprang tears in my eyes. But I knew I had no choice, not if I wanted to stay alive. And Tiny Tim wouldn’t let me back out anyway.

  “Twenty seconds,” Barnaby squealed. “They’re coming for us now.”

  “Go on.” Tim nudged me. “There’s worse things to swim in.”

  I couldn’t think of any. But with Tim prodding me and Barnaby counting down the seconds and Sammy mute with fear and worry, I maneuvered into the reeking mouth of the sewage tank. I took one last breath of good air.

  Then I dropped.

  40

  A grifter’s best friend isn’t his gun—it’s his nose. You got to sniff out a deal, sniff out trouble, sniff out the liars, cheaters, and cons. You got to be able to scent your way to backlands towns that move too fast to go on any map, all by the body rot and sewage piles they leave behind. But you can’t be too sensitive either. Some of my best finds came out of trash dumps, shit tanks, and graves. So: know when to smell, and when to hold your breath.

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

  The shitty thing about being curled up in a waist-high slosh of shit is that it is exactly as shitty as it sounds, if not more. At first you think the smell is going to kill you. After a few more seconds, though, you know the smell is going to kill you. You are going to die by suffocation on shit particles, by choking to death on the shit you can’t even see.

  I almost wished the Libertine Army would find me, just so they’d put me out of my misery. I even thought of shouting to draw their attention, but if I so much as cracked my lips a flood of shit would pour into my throat and join the swirl of crap in my nasal passages, and everyone knew that the only thing worse than shit was crap piled on top of it.

  So I stayed put, eyes watering, choking on the need to gag, and wishing I were anywhere else in the world, even dead. Especially dead.

  I could hear muffled foot traffic while the patrol creaked up and down the van, scoping for concealed passengers. There were maybe four or five of them, and every time they crowded at one end of the van or the other, their combined weight surfed new tides of human and animal filth onto my lap. At one point, they marched everybody off the van altogether, and that was when my skin really started crawling. I had no idea how much time was passing—the reek had turned my brain puddly—and began to think that our cover story wouldn’t pass go, and Sammy, Tim, and Barnaby would be rounded up, leaving me to drown. After all, no one would believe Tim was a diplomat from the Russian Federation, where they didn’t even have Straw Men.

  Five minutes or five hours: I drowned in the heat, in a dark slop of hell. But at last, a parade of foot- and hoof-steps announced my friends’ return. And finally, finally, the van began to move again, crawling through the cordon.

  I waited for someone to come for me. But we kept on moving, picking up and jerking down a rutted road that kept the sewage jumping into my lap. I banged like hell on the tank until, at last, we pulled over. By the time Tim uncapped the toilet again, I was murderous.

  “Sorry,” Tim said. To his credit, he reached for me without even flinching. “We had to make sure it was safe.”

  “My God.” Barnaby turned away when Tim lifted me, slick with shit, buzzing with flies, out of the hidey-hole. “You absolutely stink.”

  * * *

  We paid our way into one of the swankier road camps: a sprawling twenty-acre lot surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and a 24/7 patrol of bodymen to guard the periphery from slicks and criminals and opportunity pickers. Luckily, there was also plenty of water for buy, even if most of it wasn’t for drinking.

  It took me five full acid-rain rinses and two saltwater scrubs before I felt clean again. By then the sun was setting, and the heat was taking a nosedive, so Tim bought a few chairs off a local grifter selling them and we sat out to make a fire in the dirt pit. In the desert quiet, with the flicker of campfires like downed stars flaring to life in the darkness, it was hard to believe that we were only thirty miles from a contested border, or that even now the CEO of the Real Friends© of the North was frantically negotiating a treaty with 400,000 androids knocking at his back door.

  Sammy told me how they’d used the serial number lifted off the android we’d fried in Granby to skulk through the cordon without papers. She lied for the second time in her life, telling the Libertine sergeant she was a freelance agent of the Human Resources Department of International Relations, tasked with delivering Tiny and Barnaby back to the famous inland slum of the Washington River Valley.

  That kind of catfish wouldn’t of worked at the national border, but the fact the Libertine boys weren’t charged with doing more than tracking one Truckee Wallace made for easy sliding. After that they’d had to snake-crawl through the swollen traffic to find a place to squat until the borders were reopened—or we could figure out a workaround into the valley.

  As the temperature dropped into the thirties, other swanks in the travel camp began sparking up shiver pipes we could smell at a distance. Every so often, a gun on the perimeter fired off at whatever was lurking in the darkness—rats, criminals, desperados trying for water or gas tanks or whatever they could fleece. While Sammy’s sulk returned, Tim went to seek out news of the border scrum, and Barnaby curled up inside the van, pulling on a leather nipple until he dozed off. I set up near the fire, stuffed a wad of fresh to keep me calm, and booted up the Yellow Brick Road again.

  I nearly choked on a marijuana nub when I scrolled to my profile and saw a bottle, filled to the brim with a message from Bad Kitty, trying to spill its contents all over my mailbox. As soon as I grabbed it, words flowed down my screen, and her voice—husky, rich, with that slight upper-class drawl—filled up my audio.

  Dear Truckee Wallace,

  Someday, I’d like you to tell me how your mom picked the name Truckee. But first, you have to stay alive.

  Thank you for trusting me with your real identity. Any news that comes from east of the Rockies is all twisted around by the time it gets to us, so I’d only heard a little about the manhunt, but I did some of my own scoping around after I got your message and it looks like you got topped real good.

  I saw a holograph of you, by the way. It’s funny. You look just how I thought you’d look—and not like a dangerous person at all.

  I believe you. And I want to help.

  Tap me, okay?

  xoEvaline

  She’d dropped in a dove and some fluttery eyelashes too—and everyone knew what those meant.

  I didn’t even have time to message her back. The last bit of reverb had just tweaked into silence when I got a nudge on the elbow and there she was. She was back to her old avatar, except for the fur color: it was a tawny brown and gold that I knew at once was the look of her real-life hair.

  “I’m sorry,” we both said at the same time.

  And I knew my grin was falling off my jaw and straight into the simulation, and didn’t care. All at once I realized I was happier to see her than I would of been to see anyone—even Jared and Annalee. Even in simulation. Even fronting as a giant tabby.

  “I was worried you would hate me,” I said.

  Her whiskers twitched. “I was worried you would hate me,” she said. “I was complete sewage last time we talked. Here you’ve been hunted across the continent…”

  “And I should of told you that,” I said. “I should of been honest with you
from the start. But I wasn’t sure…”

  “… that you could trust me.” When she smiled, I could see the gleam of two of her fangs. “I get it. Believe me, I do.”

  “So,” I said. “Friends?”

  She looked up at me. Her eyes flashed a color I’d never seen—deeper than money, softer than it too; something like the green of my mother’s stories, like the shimmer of new leaves unfurling to drink in the Walden sun. Like carpets of green unfolding in a memory that wasn’t mine, where growth smelled like skin, and dirt smelled like growth, and Evaline’s legs were bare in my hands.

  “Not friends,” she said.

  And then she kissed me.

  Her lips were soft, warm, familiar. I felt the pressure of her touch like an explosion of color in my head.

  And yeah, that might of been the software, kicking off pressure points, firing electrical signals straight down my skull, lighting up receptors to keep time with the signals flowing from her visor. I’d heard before that kisses were one thing that even the best immersion software couldn’t get right—something about the rhythm, and the subtleties of lips compressing at just the right angles.

  But I thought it was pretty damn good, even though I had to twitch my nose to keep from sneezing out her whiskers.

  When she pulled away, I couldn’t keep from grinning. Flurries of songbirds circled overhead, twittering dumb happiness: the software was pushing suggestions again.

  “What was that for?” I asked her.

  “Incentive,” she said. When I looked at her, she quirked an ear in my direction. “You’re going to have to stay alive, now.”

  “Believe me, I’ve been trying.”