So, they’d had some success up north. Alise carried the cupcakes to a giant tiered monstrosity meant to hold them before they were shoved into big, moist mouths. She even arranged them prettily for the few seconds they would be unmolested.
It looked like Helena Osbonson’s little party was a success. Her brother-in-law, the embattled and putative head of Oscorp, was nowhere in evidence, probably safe in the metallic-glitter high-rises of downtown doing damage control. Maybe he was even oblivious to the vultures flocking to this lovely little country home set among the blasted remains of what was once tobacco or sweet potato fields.
“Idiot splice,” a ringletted and flounced woman hissed at the butler, who turned pink and nose-twitching again, dabbing at a figment of stain imagination on her long skirt. “Leave it alone.” She even aimed a kick at his scuttling retreat, but it didn’t connect because her heels were so high. She wobbled, almost collapsing on surgically clean black-and-white marble squares, and her companion caught her arm, righting her with a slight moue of distaste.
Lean and expensively tan, the companion nevertheless wore a cookie-cutter corporate overall with hotseal sutures and a Banercorp logo on the breast pocket. Security, probably fished out and buffed for a day shepherding a corporate tantrum-thrower. “You should stop drinking, Effie.”
“The fuck I will,” she slurred, and grabbed a champagne flute from a tray held by one of Alise’s temporary coworkers, a skinny dark-haired youth so scared of losing the day’s wages he was perpetually a-shiver. His uniform wasn’t starched, and Alise smoothly exchanged her own empty tray for his full one while making a slight movement with her chin, freeing him to scurry back into the hall leading to the kitchen’s bustle.
The parties were all the same, even this “informal” gathering. The hostess, statuesque in draped crimson pluse-silk, smiled benignly as a bald man with wide shoulder-padding on his gray suit lifted his glass in her direction. The baldy was Banercorp’s head of acquisitions for the eastern seaboard, and even though the merger had been struck down by an asthmatic regulating agency nobody really expected that to be the last word. Certainly Baner and Osbonson were both treating their arranged marriage over the bones of Helena’s brother-in-law as a fait accompli.
Outside the dome-shield protecting the estate’s velvet verdure and high red towers, the dust storm began its post-lunch hissy fit.
It would exhaust itself near dusk, but by then, Alise would be finished.
THE MOCK TURTLE
Through a veil of vapor, the synthetic in the kitchen moved with sharp efficiency. Its goggled eyes were just the same as Mocque’s, but he was an SX-5 for plain culinary use instead of an SX-7e, and it was just like a corporate queen to economise behind the scenes.
Alise closed her hand around the SX-5’s arm. Warm skin, vat-grown but indistinguishable from human, dewed with a faint, slippery sheen of steam-sweat—the synthetic looked at her with mild amazement, those large eyes liquid and still as the arms kept moving, subroutines queued and performing perfectly even though the organism was under severe stress.
Data flowed in coruscating streams, and Alise’s internal colonies came online, finally free of suppression.
Alise peeled her fingers away. The cook’s arms paused for a single millisecond, and a familiar gleam came into those dark eyes.
Often, the splices froze when freedom appeared. The synthetics, free of second-guessing, never did.
The swinging door to the estate kitchens closed behind Alise, and she went back to work.
CROQUET
Crack.
The gunshot echoed, and a soft, helpless, pink-feathered bird fell like a meteor long before it could batter itself on the dome-wall keeping dust-storms and the digiplagued slum crowds out. There was desultory applause, and Hal Hatter lowered his long, penile repeater.
“Good shot.” The gaunt Banercorp man—Phil Mosley, rumored to be the power behind the board despite his comparatively lowly status—applauded with just the right edge of dutiful distaste.
“Right between the eyes.” Hatter laughed. “Give us another one, Coningham!”
The pink-eyed splice scurried out to open another cage. His butler’s uniform was in sad shape; summery heat and the speed required to dart among the boxes and find a long-legged bird to be sacrificed for sport wilting starched cloth. A gap had been torn under his velvet coat’s left armpit, and his gloss-shining shoes were scuffed under grass-stained spats.
“Is that what you named him?” Effie Marsh, her mouth a louche curve and her arm over her companion’s shoulders, leered at the hapless splice’s puffing and racing. “It’s too much, Helena.”
“Inherited him from dear old Daddy.” Helena Osbonson carried a parasol to shade her from solar radiation even inside her domed estate and wore gigantic heart-shaped sunglasses—crimson frames, of course, top of the line. “But it’s rather time for a new one, I should think.”
“Hurry up!” Hal Hatter yelled, and the butler flicked a quick-release on one of the low, white cages.
The bird exploded in a puff of pink feathers, but it did not rocket for sky and freedom. Instead, it shrieked and flew straight at the mass of partygoers, who yelped in turn and dispersed with frantic speed.
It was Helena who pulled a darling little chrome repeater from her satin pocket and shot the thing. It didn’t die immediately, but flapped weakly and made tiny piping noises until a Baner systems head—one consistently featured on all the society feeds as an enfant terrible—stamped on its delicate, bone-carved head.
The assembly cheered, calling for more drinks. Alise moved among them handing out tall, frosted glasses, her own uniform sagging in slow increments.
THE TRIAL
Whirling dust fell flat as the sun sank into a molten puddle, the storm moving toward farmland leached by chemical drought and turned into high rubbish-hills. Agribusinesses were all incorporated now, and too big to fail. Some few of the guests held that the rise in crop prices wasn’t a windfall or a corrective but instead the sign of further troubles to come, though the majority found this to be a needlessly pessimistic take.
Business, after all, was eternal.
What was not eternal was a splice. The butler hustled furiously, his anxiety standing out in great clear sweat-drops upon his forehead and his purple-gloved paws no longer pristine. There was a dusty bootprint on the left side of his pinstriped pant-seat.
That’s what you get for letting a bird attack your mistress, Hal Hatter had crowed before kicking him. Useless goddamn splices.
The splice rushed from place to place, fawning-eager to make up for a perceived mistake. Guests laughed except for one or two who traded sour looks, especially when Hatter cornered the poor thing and began telling him, in a low but exceedingly clear and vicious tone, how exactly old splices were processed in reclamation or sold at auction.
Alise should have waited until dinner was brought out, really. There was nothing to be gained by moving the timetable up… but there was nothing to lose, either.
“Another drink,” Phil Mosley said, perhaps wishing he hadn’t worn his corporate colors to what was proving to be an exceedingly informal event. He wouldn’t last long at the top; they would get rid of him for someone more well-bred, if not more ruthless.
Alise smiled, letting him choose from the selection on her tray. Her ocular streams flashed red for a moment—he had some wetware, this Banercorp man. His nervous system was jacked for speed and muscles injected with highseal, but she was safe enough.
Who, after all, would suspect a maid?
Alise waited for him to take a deep, grimacing swallow before dropping the tray with a crash that echoed through the sitting room and brought Hal Hatter’s head around, a swivel-motion searching for fresh prey.
Without the suppression protocols dialed down to the low end, her interior colony of nanobots had spawned and spread, almost-invisible motes riding from guest to guest, settling in liquids, decking the food like salt or sugar crystals, burrowing t
hrough pores, tiptoeing into orifices and finding congenial homes.
Alise sent out the silent pulse that told the tiny things to begin their own afternoon work.
* * *
The screaming was short-lived.
THE RED QUEEN’S GARDEN
Helena Osbonson’s body was unwieldy without its inhabitant, but Alise was stronger than she looked and lugged it down a long, shining-sterile corridor. The door at the end wanted both retinal and palm-print identification, so the nanos swarming in Osbonson’s fractionally cooling flesh helped as much as they could, a facsimile of biological life pulling a gentle fiction over the passionless mechanical eyes of scanners and other security measures.
The heavy steel door slid sideways with a couth whisper, and Alise hauled the body into Helena’s office. Only one of the estate’s spires was large enough for internal structures, the rest being only aesthetic, and Alise supposed if she’d been a dyed-in-the-wool sociopath at the helm of a large corporation, she’d put her office up here, too.
After all, the view through tall wraparound crystal panes was spectacular.
The dust-storm was a lowering smudge on the horizon, almost swallowing the sinking sun in a red-and-gold fury. Black dots roamed the edges of the estate, keeping well away from the featureless dome-shimmer. Even the most worm-eaten of the digiplagued knew better than to swarm an estate. The truly far gone, consumed by bad wetware or infected implants, might throw themselves onto the shimmer for a quick end to the agony, but nobody had yet today, maybe sensing some feral current kept barely contained by money and technology.
The entire desk was a top-of-the-line Zoylent Apple, its security requiring print, vocal, and retinal lock. Fortunately, Alise had passed close to Helena enough times to build up a reasonably good vocal profile, and she didn’t need the whole body for this stage, just an eyeball and the left hand. A kitchen cleaver tucked into the big fluffy black bow at the back of Alise’s costume performed separation duty most admirably, and as she settled herself in the ergonomic fauxpleather chair her temples began to throb.
The Red Lady also had a new Zoylent Mini, top-of-the line handheld smart-tech, and Alise’s nanos had been busy worming their way into its case, searching and prying. Pressing a rapidly cooling thumb against the Mini’s lock undid the encryption, and there, in neatly organized trees, were all the Red Queen’s passwords.
Alise turned reluctantly from the windowed panorama, fingers blurring as she watched her ocular feeds and typed with blur-quick fingers. The haul of data was bigger than she expected, so it was a good thing she’d moved the timetable up. Her headache mounted, but she held to her task.
Anything worth doing was worth doing well, after all.
THE GATES
She could have taken Helena Osbonson’s sleek red limousine, or even Hal Hatter’s sporty, very expensive purple Cyanol. Her gaze alighted instead on a sturdy, dependable SafeControl van, probably the same one that had carried cases of the docile-drugged, pink-plumaged birds from a digirarities supplier earlier that week.
At ground level, a plume of smoke lifted from the shield generator and the estate’s shimmerwall was rapidly losing power. It blink-stuttered, and a mass of pink birds, circling restlessly since the locks on their cages had been broken, wisely didn’t try to escape just yet. Instead they settled on the taller spires, crying out in musical confusion.
The trash-choked slum seethed. In an hour or so the shield would be down completely. The caterer’s bus was gone and the kitchen was empty.
“You!” The pale-haired, purple-clad splice rose from behind a stack of liquor cartons. “What are you doing? That belongs to a guest!”
Alise flattened her palm against the SafeControl’s driver door, let the proper subroutine take over, and the engine started with a low hum. “You want to come with me?”
“I… I can’t…” The splice’s cheeks were wet. There was a long furrowed scratch on his fat cheek, where his dying mistress had clawed at him in the commotion as her flesh was riddled with suddenly vicious, feasting nanos. “Who will take care of the house?”
“Do you have to?” Alise’s head pounded, rows of steel fangs champing endlessly. It had taken longer than she liked to mine the data-trove and make sure all the security feeds were scrambled. Any corporate security enforcement would assume it was Quitasol and wouldn’t know how the plague-carrier got in; the catering company wouldn’t be able to tell them since it was a cash-pay operation.
Helena Osbonson wasn’t quite a miser, but why would a corporate head actually pay full-time workers? Better to just squeeze desperate temps. Where security and invasive tech failed, greed always found a way.
“There’s nobody else.” The splice’s mild, pink-rimmed eyes blinked, a semaphore of confusion.
“That’s what everyone thinks,” Alise said wearily. “But if you’re not coming with me, you’d better look for weapons. The shield’s going down.”
The splice let out a soft, baffled sound and retreated towards a servants’ door tucked behind a perma-park pylon, still wringing his dirty-gloved hands.
Alise climbed into the van and keyed in the meet coordinates. A thin thread of blood worked down from her left nostril.
She sniffed heavily, tasting copper, and hit the execute button. The van slipped its brakes and performed a shallow three-point turn as she sagged in the driver’s seat, then bulleted into a dying crimson sunset.
DRINK ME
A SafeControl van rested, in complete defiance of safety and common sense, in the valley between two huge mounds of city refuse. The smell was terrific, titanic, and shapes in the violet dusk were already eyeing the strippable vehicle even before the driver clambered free and vanished around another garbage-mound. It would be picked down to the chassis by midnight, and even the frame’s hyperalloy would be cut up and carted off by dawn.
Alise staggered, but the shapes in the dimness didn’t approach. They scented danger, though the woman’s blood-slicked face was a mask of pain. She looked plagued, and nobody wanted to get close to that, even fellow sufferers.
The sickness made you fast and hellishly strong before it ate you. Better to wait until the body collapsed and strip the bone frame, just like the van. Plagued organs were worthless, but fat deposits and hair could be sold, and sometimes a collection of specialized cells or two would be untainted enough to make the work of pulling them free worth it.
A battered bubble-truck prowled the rubbish mounds, its headlights baffled, dull cat-gleams. It stopped, and the highbeams came on, showing the stark ghost of a woman in the ruins of a once-starched maid uniform bleeding from eyes, nose, mouth. The tops of her almost-exposed breasts were crusted with dried effluvia, and her long legs trembled.
The driver’s door slammed, and a synthetic with four big, overbrawned arms caught her as she fell.
In the back of the truck, Mocque Tuttle swept the table free of clutter and laid Alise down. He put a flask to her lips, and the bleeding woman’s throat worked slowly.
Military-grade nanos absorbed the venomous green liquid he poured down her throat, and the wracked body eased. The dependence was either a flaw in nanobot design or a way to keep your superpowered troops loyal. Either way, Mocque was an SX-7e model, and fully capable of synthesizing the venom in sufficient quantities. “You cut it close that time, Alise.”
“Had to.” Color returned slowly to her ashen cheeks as the nanos stopped cannibalizing their host—at least, until the medicine wore off again. “But I’ve got good news. There’s another formula for the green stuff. I’ll upload it.”
“Rest.” Mocque shook his big, lofty-domed head. “We’ve got a lot of driving.”
“How many cities are left?” As if she didn’t know.
“Three.” The synthetic’s brow creased. “We could go west instead, you know. There’s nobody tracking our success metrics. You can’t build a new world if you’re dead.” He made a tsk-tsk sound, and his dark eyes filmed as she began the upload.
He
could drive and collate at the same time, while she lay on the shelf-table jolted by each pothole, and nanos under the green influence repaired what they had damaged by feasting on their hostess.
“Can’t build at all with those assholes squatting on the old world.” But Alise smiled a slow, sleepy curve of lips and turned on her side, curling into a ball. She might even be able to sleep while they rattled to the next city and began the delicate work of teasing out holes in its corporate security.
Resistance was a low-paying job, sure. But you could fund it by selling the data you mined from each target, not to mention anything else picked up along the way.
And there were, Alise thought as she dropped into a light, healing trance, definite advantages to loving your work.
Eat Me, Drink Me
ALISON LITTLEWOOD
Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,
With bitter tidings laden,
Shall summon to unwelcome bed
A melancholy maiden!
~ Lewis Carroll
The morning after the tea-party, Alice went downstairs, her hair still in papers and her feet bare, and she knelt in front of the cage where she kept her white rabbit. He peered back at her with pink little eyes, his mouth working—it seemed his mouth was always working, that he could never be still. She lifted the latch and pulled the door wide and took him in her arms, turning him onto his back, wrapping him in her white lacy shawl.
Then she went into the kitchen. She liked to feed Mr Rabbit (for he had no other name) with lettuce leaves, given grudgingly for the purpose by their peppery cook, who was already at her place, leaning over a great cauldron on the range and stirring.
Cook was mean-faced. She kept rat poison in old jars at the back of her highest shelf. She would eye Alice’s rabbit as if she were hungry, and she eyed him now as Alice plucked a white bonnet from the laundry and wrapped it about his head, tucking it behind his floppy ears.
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