FKA USA

by Reed King

  “I’ll kill you!” He was tussling with the curtains, clawing through a wrangle of fabric and dragging his dead legs like a line of trash behind him. “I’ll kill you if you touch even one of those monitors—”

  “It’s all right, bunny. Stop squealing. He can’t hurt me. You know that.”

  Finally, I understood. “You’re Whitney Heller,” I said to the writhing and infuriated mass worming toward me.

  A look of pure female loathing stared out at me from Mark J. Burnham’s face. She said nothing—just spat, landing a big one straight onto my shoe. Now all the bling she wore made sense. Rumor had it she’d robbed half the Treasury for her own personal expense account.

  “You’re going to have to forgive her the outbursts. She’s a real firebrand, always has been.”

  The Disembodied Brain and His Son-Lover: A Real Shit Love Story.

  “How come Heller got the body, and you got stuck in a fish tank?” I asked.

  “Obviously, that wasn’t the initial plan,” he said. Like there was an obvious procedure for body swapping that I was an idiot for not knowing. “My brain should of been swapped with my son’s—not that his was doing anybody any favors—and Whitney was gonna get the drop into a sweet little sergeant with great bone structure.”

  “I’d picked her out special.” Whitney pouted.

  “But we hadn’t counted on the fault rupturing, or the coup that started while half the Laguna-Honda base was being washed out to sea. Cowell was deep in surgery. He did all the tricky bits, the nitty-gritty detachment, but left his team in charge of positioning while he went to help in triage. Unfortunately, Cowell’s chief surgeon was killed in the first counter-defensive, leaving Whitney’s brain in the hands of several interns.”

  “Idiots,” Whitney spat.

  Burnham’s brain pulsed a sympathetic blue. “There was a mix-up,” he went on. “Cowell was killed before he could discover the mistake. Nothing political, actually. His murderer had some real problems, had clashed with Cowell for years. Believed he’d been passed over for promotion. The usual thing.”

  “Must of been a rough trip for you,” I said. “From President of the United States to flotational device.”

  “It’s true. Once you’re used to having a body, it’s hard to just shuck the whole thing.” A crackle of electric activity transformed into a laugh. “But what’s the point of just one body, when you can have millions?”

  It was like my ma always said: give an uppercrust an inch, and he’ll shoot you just to take your ruler.

  Maybe Burnham’s big floaty brain knew just what I was thinking—the 360-degree feeds that streamed info to his visual cortex probably did a bang-up job of reading my face. “See, Truckee, here’s what the whole story comes down to. This world doesn’t have a lot of problems—just one big one. Too many people, and not enough to go around. Not enough food, not enough oil, not enough land. There was never supposed to be enough for everyone. Our only problem was buying into the lie that everybody deserves a fair slice.”

  It was funny, the way he talked, the way his brain static flowed through the liquid soup of nutrients supporting it, like distant lightning bolts threading a sky murky with cloud cover—hypnotic, like hearing someone voice-over the end of time.

  “In nature, the weakest animals starve. The strongest live. Simple as that. And we are just animals, in the end. Time to restore some natural order. Some people will have to die. Millions of people, even. And millions of others will have to serve. But the lion and his lioness will live. They’ll live forever.…”

  Burnham’s voice sounded very far away. I lost track of my body. I was hovering above the room. I was floating through the ceiling, picking up speed, shooting over the roof, and watching the complex beneath my feet become nothing but shapes and geometry; I was soaring over San Francisco, I was blasting through cold atmosphere, and beneath me, unfurling, was the whole continent, all of it, the torched, marred, hurt continent and all of its little towns and big cities, all of its human destruction, from this distance almost invisible. I felt the whole earth like a wound, like some damaged, limping thing, and I reached out a hand to grab it, to keep it safe, and suddenly I was plummeting again, fast, fast, fast, dropping through freezing air and thinness and slamming into my body just as Whitney’s brain was dragging Burnham Junior’s broken body toward a small electronic keypad camouflaged in the paneling.

  “… time to get this over with,” Burnham’s brain was saying. “Our surgeons should be here any second now. And hey, silver linings. You did us a huge favor. At least your whole life wasn’t a waste.”

  There was something in my hand. The silver jackknife. I’d been holding on to it all this time.

  “You’d probably like to be laid out with your mom. But the shipping costs have really jumped the shark this year. Sorry about that.” Burnham’s brain bubbled with electrostatic laughter. “By the way, what was it we got her with, again? Biscuitz™?”

  “Tater Totz™,” Whitney said, and began to plug in the long string of numbers that would unlock the panic room. “Funny enough, she didn’t even like Tater Totz™.”

  In two steps I was standing above her. I grabbed the bitch by the scalp, and swept the knife across her throat, letting her blood run out all over the carpet.

  “Funny,” I echoed. That’s the only good thing about uppercrusts: they bleed just as well as anybody else.

  51

  Truth is, I’m not much of a fan of the West Coast. Any place with weather that good has got to be compensating for someshit else.

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

  As the last of Whitney Heller’s life ran out through Mark. J. Burnham’s veins, a shuddering explosion dropped me to my knees. The lights dropped for a split second before a generator kicked the power on again.

  To the extent that a brain cabled up to four dozen computer monitors could scream, Burnham was screaming. “You fucking nothing. You’re in deep shit now, you son of a cunt. Do you have any idea what the fuck you just did?” Now that he was angry, his polished accent rubbed raw into a native seaboard swell.

  Even from the other side of the curtains, I could tell that Whitney had in fact popped the doors to the panic room. The thunder of approaching footsteps told me so.

  “I’ll take your skin apart by the layer. I’ll have you tied up by your intestines. I’ll cut your dick off for a Christmas-tree decoration.”

  For all his talk about millions of bodies, I could tell he would of given anything for just a single one, and a fist to rail me into blood spatter.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. Now I could hear a ricochet of voices. Friendly accents,1 just a little softer than the hard vocal shrapnel of the Russians.

  Someone had smashed up my visor good, roughing me up while I was in a comatose drug haze, but when I loosed the ion-battery cage with a fingernail and exposed the circuitry, the hard drive looked just fine.

  Another bomb shuddered a portion of the complex. I staggered against the wall, dodging a chunk of plaster that dropped from the ceiling. Burnham’s brain trembled on miniature waves of viscous nutritional glop.

  I shook the hard drive—the size of a thumbnail—out into my palm. Crazy to think how much information was buried in the electric hieroglyphs of its software: commands, preferences, instructional loops, access codes, pathways. Crazy to think that the whole entrance to the Yellow Brick Road was squatting in its circuitry, that Bad Kitty was there, and weapons armories and human traffickers and anything else you wanted to find, endless branches breeding other branches, a mass of information that bred new information from it, like an anthill prodded with a stick.

  Like a virus.

  Malware that squatted on your hard drive and opened it up to hundreds of thousands of different servers, to trillions of different lines of code: a massive sensory overload, deafening and blinding, even when choked through the channel of a visor and a single-user profile. But I wondered what would happen if that galaxy
of information, an infinite stream, poured straight down into your brain stem.

  I was no data expert, but I was pretty sure the answer was: nothing good.

  I waded into the nest of monitors and signal boosters. It didn’t matter where I planted my hard drive—the whole system was connected, so I picked the model most similar to the consoles at Production-22 and found the hard drive was caged in the exact same space. As soon as I got close, the monitor started going nutty as Burnham blinked out programs and threw up new firewalls. But it was too late anyway: I ripped away the hardware and the console died with a whine. These systems were wired like the Christmas lights HR strung over the tramway and around the Low Hill dump every holiday, though—the other monitors just spiked a slight energy boost and kept humming.

  “What are you doing?” Mark C. Burnham’s brain sparked with nasty new colors—queasy greens, puke yellows, tornado colors of fury. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  I didn’t answer. Now I could hear sharp individual voices—definitely West Coast drawlers, shouting soldiers down the hall to check the panic room—and knew I had a minute, two tops.

  I notched in my hard drive and fisted the plastic cage closed. Thumbed on the power. And closed my eyes. My prayer didn’t have words, exactly, just colors: bright flashes, like drifts of chemical dust, that floated familiar faces out of them. Sammy, Tim, Barnaby. Evaline, pointy-eared and silky-haired. Billy Lou Ropes and his neatened cuffs and long, pink fingers.

  My mom, morning hoarse and smiling. Knock, knock.

  Who’s there?

  Better get off your ass and find out.

  When I opened my eyes again, Burnham’s brain was still glowing, huge with its own activity, cracking light pollution through its wire stem and churning a hundred servers at once into an echo of rolling laughter.

  “You sorry sack of shit,” he said. “You can’t kill me. You know that, right? You’ll be dead a hundred years and I’ll just be getting started.”

  The console seemed to take forever to reboot. Now the soldiers were so close, their footsteps traveled straight up my spine through the floor.

  “A hundred thousand generations of worms that cleaned away your bones will be dead, and I’ll just be getting started. You hear those soldiers, boy? They’ll make sure to take their time to kill you. They’ll make sure to keep you awake. That way you’ll feel every last—”

  But he broke off as the monitor lit up to show my homescreen. It was still the standard blue of a newly wiped system, scrubbed of preferences and memories and think-files. Scrubbed of everything but the golden Y-shaped logo of the Yellow Brick Road.

  “Interesting.” Burnham’s brain had gotten the signal of a new program already. “The Yellow Brick Road, huh? And no trademark. No system info either. Is this one of those black-market porn simulators, Truckee? Because I’ve already got plenty of the standards…”

  I touched a finger to it. I felt a hard zip of energy, like an electric shock, and jerked backward. I could swear that for half a second, a wind of laughter passed through the room, threaded with a hundred thousand tones, a hundred thousand accents, a hundred thousand raw edges of humor.

  The Yellow Brick Road didn’t so much open as explode.

  Color broke in a wash across the console, and spread like a tidal surface to the next, and the next, and the next: pinwheels of light, branching arteries and pathways now free to fling their tentacles across a hundred different monitors, a thousand different servers. Untethered from user selections, from retinal feedback, from hands to swipe and choose, the data poured like a flood surge: it crashed through firewalls, it pummeled Burnham’s frantic thought commands before he had time to think them, it overwhelmed his servers and darkened them with blinding feedback, with hallucinogenic color: ads and pop-ups, avatars and trolls, conversation threads stretching for miles, conspiracy sites the size of New New York.

  At the same time, the chatter, music, ad jangle, and unmuted talk that gut-punched me the first time I walked the Road blew up through all the hidden speakers.

  The roar dropped me to my knees. Even with my ears covered, the sound rattled my brain in my skull, made my eyeballs sweat, shook all my insides with its throttle. It was worse than a tornado—it was a wind made up of hundreds of thousands of voices, jingles, clips, and promos, mixed with a hundred thousand different site songs, spackled onto a shrill of alerts and notifications. The universe, it turned out, ended not with a whimper or a bang. It ended with goddamn chat messages.

  I could skant think through the gale of sound. I wanted to die, to crush my head before the noise could crush it. My eyes were leaking tears squeezed out by the pressure of the volume. But still I watched the crashing current of user data spread, flowing backward, ever backward, to its central source; leaping over stopgaps Burnham’s brain was trying hard to think into place.

  Back, and back, and back—all the noise and color of millions of people who hadn’t got the message about Burnham’s natural order.

  Burnham’s brain was surrounded by a fuzz of haywire static. It almost looked like it had grown a covering of hair. Sparking, smoking, backfiring thoughts and impulses into electric violence, all while the tide of data toppled every system, riding toward a single central server—tumbling it, flooding it beneath an infinite surf.

  Maybe he was screaming. I couldn’t hear him over the noise of so many other voices. Billy Lou Ropes was right after all. Numbers never changed their rules, and many was more than one, no matter how important the one was.

  I saw the data hit, though. I should of run, should of taken the ten or twenty seconds I had and made off with them before the soldiers came.

  But the colors he thought while he was dying were more beautiful than anything I ever saw. Plum. Tangerine. Orange. Old names. Edibles that didn’t grow anymore.

  Except I swear—standing there, watching the violent sunset of his end—I tasted them.

  52

  Here’s a piece of advice: never be too proud to run like hell.

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

  And then, of course, the lights went out. This time, no generator kicked them back on: either Burnham’s final electric flailings had caused a massive power surge, or Rafikov had cut the juice deliberately.

  Emergency panels lit everything a soft, hell-red. Every alarm in the complex was screaming. A rain of bombs fell somewhere, setting off a rhythm of traveling vibrations.

  I felt my way out of the alcove and fumbled through the curtains, pushing free of the fabric about thirty seconds ahead of a skid of Laguna-Honda soldiers rounding the corner and charging straight for me. In the low light, with their heads lowered, they looked less like people than half a dozen bowling pins tipping toward revenge.

  Good thing bowling was one of my best simulation sports.

  “Hands up.” A dozen voices jostled for the same two words. “Hands up now or we shoot.”

  I spun Mark J. Burnham’s wheelchair from the corner, and heaved Albert Cowell’s cracked bust from the carpet where it had face-planted. It was so heavy I could barely lift it into place.

  Which made for some slick momentum when I cranked the juice on and blew the chair straight down the hall at full speed.

  Perfect strike. The chair careened down the narrow corridor, plowing bang-bangs at the knees, toppling them one by one. A few lucky ones managed to dive to safety, crashing into a secondary hallway. The rest went down like sicks in the flu ward, bleeding at the thigh, or blown backward on twisted ankles, or just flipped and dropped in surprise.

  I ran. I flew over them, tailing Albert Cowell’s bust and his runaway wheelchair like I was drone-surfing their air.

  I veered left at the corner, and a second later heard the thunder crash of the wheelchair blowing the wall. Left, right, left: swimming through noise, through a ricochet of gunfire, the soft explosions of distant bombs, the shrill of the alarms. I took turns without knowing where they led, trying to distance myself from the gunfire,
trying to spot some kind of exit in the murk. Every hallway, washed in red light, looked the same, except for the ones collapsed with rubble or filled with a litter of dead soldiers—Laguna-Honda and Federation military, both.

  But finally I took a turn and spotted sunlight through a plate-glass window. I blew outside, gasping, shocked to find a wheel of stars overhead. I’d been inside only a few hours. Killing a gigantic floating brain and his girlfriend squatting the body of his own son should knock at least a few days off your calendar.

  The Laguna-Honda base was under attack from Federation bombers: Rafikov had moved with the force of the government behind her. Blasts mushroomed against the sky. Visibility was down to ten, twenty feet behind thick clouds of drifting smoke, some of them scented with the stink of chemical weaponry, made even worse because the RFN soldiers were shooting out the high beams and lighting dumpster fires to thwart the bombers’ targeting.

  I took a cue from a scattering of cockroaches and skittered between hiding places. A roar blew out my eardrums as the RFN fighter planes took to the sky, and I watched a Federation Tupalev-152 come down and blow a funnel of fire into the sky that crisped a dozen pipe-bomb drones where they hovered.

  I dodged a maze of biohazard waste, praying no rockets were dropping toward nuclear demolition, and threw myself behind a shipping container as a formation of RFN military blew by me toward the mass of the action.

  And of course—of course—someone started shooting at me.

  I threw my hands up and rolled sideways on a shiny carpet of debris and broken glass. I launched behind a metal tanker as bullets whined shrilly against the steel, like demonic mosquitos. A hundred yards away was a long tongue of runway, where a single freight plane spread its wings above a mass of medical cargo.

  I squinted through a trail of smoke, wondering whether I could somehow, somehow, make it all the way to the plane.… If I was quick enough, maybe …

  Another round went off, ringing the metal behind my head. Every bullet said the same thing.