Cyberpunk
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cramped, but we would have lived in Stennie’s car if our parents had let us.
“You okay there, Mr. Boy?” said Stennie.
“Mmm.” As I watched the trees whoosh past in the rain, I pretended that
the car was standing still and the world was passing me by.
“Think of something to do, okay?” Stennie had the car and all and he was
fun to play with, but ideas were not his specialty. He was probably smart for
a dinosaur. “I’m bored.”
“Leave him alone, will you?” Comrade said.
“He hasn’t said anything yet.” Stennie stretched and nudged me with his
foot. “Say something.” He had legs like a horse: yellow skin stretched tight
over long bones and stringy muscle.
“Prosrees! He just had his genes twanked, you jack.” Comrade always took good care of me. Or tried to. “Remember what that’s like? He’s in damage
control.”
“Maybe I should go to socialization,” Stennie said. “Aren’t they having a
dance this afternoon?”
“You’re talking to me?” said the Alpha. “You haven’t earned enough
learning credits to socialize. You’re a quiz behind and forty-five minutes short of E-class. You haven’t linked since—”
“Just shut up and drive me over.” Stennie and the Alpha did not get along.
He thought the car was too strict. “I’ll make up the plugging quiz, okay?” He
probed a mess of empty juice boxes and snack wrappers with his foot. “Anyone
see my comm anywhere?”
Stennie’s schoolcomm was wedged behind my cushion. “You know,” I said,
“I can’t take much more of this.” I leaned forward, wriggled it free, and
handed it over.
“Of what, poputchik?” said Comrade. “Joyriding? Listening to the lizard here?”
“Being stunted.”
Stennie flipped up the screen of his comm and went online with the school’s
computer. “You guys help me, okay?” He retracted his claws and tapped at
the oversized keyboard.
“It’s extreme while you’re on the table,” I said, “but now I feel empty. Like
I’ve lost myself.”
“You’ll get over it,” said Stennie. “First question: Brand name of the first
wiseguys sold for home use?”
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“NEC-Bots, of course,” said Comrade.
“Geneva? It got nuked, right?”
“Da.”
“Haile Selassie was that king of Ethiopia who the Marleys claim is god,
right? Name the Cold Wars: Nicaragua, Angola . . . Korea was the first.”
Typing was hard work for Stennie; he did not have enough fingers for it.
“One was something like Venezuela. Or something.”
“Sure it wasn’t Venice?”
“Or Venus?” I said, but Stennie was not paying attention.
“All right, I know that one. And that. The Sovs built the first space station.
Ronald Reagan—he was the president who dropped the bomb?”
Comrade reached inside of his coat and pulled out an envelope. “I got you
something, Mr. Boy. A get-well present for your collection.”
I opened it and scoped a picture of a naked dead fat man on a stainless-
steel table. The print had a DI verification grid on it, which meant this was
the real thing, not a composite. Just above the corpse’s left eye there was a
neat hole. It was rimmed with purple that had faded to bruise blue. He had
curly gray hair on his head and chest, skin the color of dried mayonnaise, and
a wonderfully complicated penis graft. He looked relieved to be dead. “Who
was he?” I liked Comrade’s present. It was extreme.
“CEO of Infoline. He had the wife, you know, the one who stole all the
money so she could download herself into a computer.”
I shivered as I stared at the dead man. I could hear myself breathing and
feel the blood squirting through my arteries. “Didn’t they turn her off?” I
said. This was the kind of stuff we were not even supposed to imagine,
much less look at. Too bad they had cleaned him up. “How much did this
cost me?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Hey!” Stennie thumped his tail against the side of the car. “I’m taking a
quiz here, and you guys are drooling over porn. When was the First World
Depression?”
“Who cares?” I slipped the picture back into the envelope and grinned at
Comrade.
“Well, let me see then.” Stennie snatched the envelope. “You know what I
think, Mr. Boy? I think this corpse jag you’re on is kind of sick. Besides, you’re 286
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going to get in trouble if you let Comrade keep breaking laws. Isn’t this
picture private?”
“Privacy is twentieth-century thinking. It’s all information, Stennie, and
information should be accessible.” I held out my hand. “But if glasnost bothers you, give it up.” I wiggled my fingers.
Comrade snickered. Stennie pulled out the picture, glanced at it, and
hissed. “You’re scaring me, Mr. Boy.”
His schoolcomm beeped as it posted his score on the quiz, and he sailed the
envelope back across the car at me. “Not Venezuela, Vietnam. Hey, Truman
dropped the plugging bomb. Reagan was the one who spent all the money.
What’s wrong with you dumbscuts? Now I owe school another fifteen minutes.”
“Hey, if you don’t make it look good, they’ll know you had help.” Comrade
laughed.
“What’s with this dance anyway? You don’t dance.” I picked Comrade’s
present up and tucked it into my shirt pocket. “You find yourself a cush or
something, lizard boy?”
“Maybe.” Stennie could not blush, but sometimes when he was embarrassed
the loose skin under his jaw quivered. Even though he had been reshaped
into a dinosaur, he was still growing up. “Maybe I am getting a little. What’s
it to you?”
“If you’re getting it,” I said, “it’s got to be microscopic.” This was a bad
sign. I was losing him to his dick, just like all the other pals. No way I
wanted to start over with someone new. I had been alive for twenty-five
years now. I was running out of things to say to thirteen-year-olds.
As the Alpha pulled up to the school, I scoped the crowd waiting for the
doors to open for third shift. Although there was a handful of stunted kids,
a pair of gorilla brothers who were football stars, and Freddy the Teddy—a
bear who had furry hands instead of real paws—the majority of students at
New Canaan High looked more or less normal. Most working stiffs thought
that people who had their genes twanked were freaks.
“Come get me at five-fifteen,” Stennie told the Alpha. “In the meantime,
take these guys wherever they want to go.” He opened the door. “You rest up,
Mr. Boy, okay?”
“What?” I was not paying attention. “Sure.” I had just seen the most
beautiful girl in the world.
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She leaned against one of the concrete columns of the portico, chatting
with a couple other kids. Her hair was long and nut-colored and the ends
twinkled. She was wearing a loose black robe over mirror skintights. Her
schoolcomm dangled from a strap arou
nd her wrist. She appeared to be
seventeen, maybe eighteen. But of course, appearances could be deceiving.
Girls had never interested me much, but I could not help but admire this
one. “Wait, Stennie! Who’s that?” She saw me point at her. “With the
hair?”
“She’s new—has one of those names you can’t pronounce.” He showed me
his teeth as he got out. “Hey, Mr. Boy, you’re stunted. You haven’t got what she wants.”
He kicked the door shut, lowered his head, and crossed in front of the car.
When he walked, he looked like he was trying to squash a bug with each step.
His snaky tail curled high behind him for balance, his twiggy little arms
dangled. When the new girl saw him, she pointed and smiled. Or maybe she
was pointing at me.
“Where to?” said the car.
“I don’t know.” I sank low into my seat and pulled out Comrade’s present
again. “Home, I guess.”
I was not the only one in my family with twanked genes. My mom was a
three-quarter-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. Originally she wanted to
be full-sized, but then she would have been the tallest thing in New Canaan,
Connecticut. The town turned her down when she applied for a zoning
variance. Her lawyers and their lawyers sued and countersued for almost two
years. Mom’s claim was that since she was born human, her freedom of form
was protected by the Thirtieth Amendment. However, the form she wanted
was a curtain of reshaped cells that would hang on a forty-two-meter-high
ferroplastic skeleton. Her structure, said the planning board, was clearly
subject to building codes and zoning laws. Eventually they reached an out-of-
court settlement, which was why Mom was only as tall as an eleven-story
building.
She complied with the town’s request for a setback of five hundred meters
from Route 123. As Stennie’s Alpha drove us down the long driveway,
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Comrade broadcast the recognition code that told the robot sentries that we
were okay. One thing Mom and the town agreed on from the start: no tourists.
Sure, she loved publicity, but she was also very fragile. In some places her
skin was only a centimeter thick. Chunks of ice falling from her crown could
punch holes in her.
The end of our driveway cut straight across the lawn to Mom’s granite-
paved foundation pad. To the west of the plaza, directly behind her, was a
utility building faced in ashlar that housed her support systems. Mom had
been bioengineered to be pretty much self-sufficient. She was green not only
to match the real Statue of Liberty but also because she was photosynthetic.
All she needed was a yearly truckload of fertilizer, water from the well, and
150 kilowatts of electricity a day. Except for emergency surgery, the only time she required maintenance was in the fall, when her outer cells tended to flake
off and had to be swept up and carted away.
Stennie’s Alpha dropped us off by the doorbone in the right heel and then
drove off to do whatever cars do when nobody is using them. Mom’s greeter
was waiting in the reception area inside the foot.
“Peter.” She tried to hug me, but I dodged out of her grasp. “How are you,
Peter?”
“Tired.” Even though Mom knew I did not like to be called that, I kissed
the air near her cheek. Peter Cage was her name for me; I had given it up
years ago.
“You poor boy. Here, let me see you.” She held me at arm’s length and
brushed her fingers against my cheek. “You don’t look a day over twelve. Oh,
they do such good work—don’t you think?” She squeezed my shoulder. “Are
you happy with it?”
I think my mom meant well, but she never did understand me. Especially
when she talked to me with her greeter remote. I wormed out of her grip and
fell back onto one of the couches. “What’s to eat?”
“Doboys, noodles, fries—whatever you want.” She beamed at me and then
bent over impulsively and gave me a kiss that I did not want. I never paid
much attention to the greeter; she was lighter than air. She was always smiling and asking five questions in a row without waiting for an answer and flitting
around the room. It wore me out just watching her. Naturally, everything I
said or did was cute, even if I was trying to be obnoxious. It was no fun being 289
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cute. Today Mom had her greeter wearing a dark blue dress and a very dumb
white apron. The greeter’s umbilical was too short to stretch up to the
kitchen. So why was she wearing an apron?
“I’m really, really glad you’re home,” she said.
“I’ll take some cinnamon doboys.” I kicked off my shoes and rubbed my
bare feet through the dense black hair on the floor. “And a beer.”
All of Mom’s remotes had different personalities. I liked Nanny all right;
she was simple, but at least she listened. The lovers were a challenge because
they were usually too busy looking into mirrors to notice me. Cook was as
pretentious as a four-star menu; the housekeeper had all the charm of a
vacuum cleaner. I had always wondered what it would be like to talk directly
to Mom’s main brain up in the head, because then she would not be filtered
through a remote. She would be herself.
“Cook is making you some nice broth to go with your doboys,” said the
greeter. “Nanny says you shouldn’t be eating dessert all the time.”
“Hey, did I ask for broth?”
At first Comrade had hung back while the greeter was fussing over me. Then
he slid along the wrinkled pink walls of the reception room toward the plug
where the greeter’s umbilical was attached. When she started in about the
broth, I saw him lean against the plug. Carelessly, you know? At the same time
he stepped on the greeter’s umbilical, crimping the furry black cord. She gasped and the smile flattened horribly on her face, as if her lips were two ropes someone had suddenly yanked taut. Her head jerked toward the umbilical plug.
“E-Excuse me.” She was twitching.
“What?” Comrade glanced down at his foot as if it belonged to a stranger.
“Oh, sorry.” He pushed away from the wall and strolled across the room
toward us. Although he seemed apologetic, about half the heads on his
window coat were laughing.
The greeter flexed her cheek muscles. “You’d better watch out for your toy,
Peter,” she said. “It’s going to get you in trouble someday.”
Mom did not like Comrade much, even though she had given him to me
when I was first stunted. She got mad when I snuck him down to
Manhattan a couple of years ago to have a chop job done on his behavioral
regulators. For a while after the operation, he used to ask me before he
broke the law. Now he was on his own. He got caught once, and she
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warned me he was out of control. But she still threw money at the people
until they went away.
“Trouble?” I said. “Sounds like fun.” I thought we were too rich for trouble.
I was the trust baby of a trust baby; we had vintage money and lots of it. I
stood and Comrade picked up my shoes for me. “And he’s not a toy; he’s my
best friend.” I put my arms around his shoulder. “Tell Cook I’ll eat in my
rooms.”
I was tired after the long climb up the circular stairs to Mom’s chest. When
the roombrain sensed I had come in, it turned on all the electronic windows
and blinked my message indicator. One reason I still lived in my mom was
that she kept out of my rooms. She had promised me total security, and I
believed her. Actually I doubted that she cared enough to pry, although she
could easily have tapped my windows. I was safe from her remotes up here,
even the housekeeper. Comrade did everything for me.
I sent him for supper, perched on the edge of the bed, and cleared the
nearest window of army ants foraging for meat through some Angolan jungle.
The first message in the queue was from a gray-haired stiff wearing a navy
blue corporate uniform. “Hello, Mr. Cage. My name is Weldon Montross and
I’m with Datasafe. I’d like to arrange a meeting with you at your convenience.
Call my DI number, 408-966-3286. I hope to hear from you soon.”
“What the hell is Datasafe?”
The roombrain ran a search. “Datasafe offers services in encryption and
information security. It was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2013.
Estimated billings last year were three hundred and forty million dollars.
Headquarters are in San Jose, California, with branch offices in White Plains,
New York, and Chevy Chase, Maryland. Foreign offices—”
“Are they trying to sell me something or what?”
The room did not offer an answer. “Delete,” I said. “Next?”
Weldon Montross was back again, looking exactly as he had before. I
wondered if he were using a virtual image. “Hello, Mr. Cage. I’ve just
discovered that you’ve been admitted to the Thayer Clinic for rejuvenation
therapy. Believe me when I say that I very much regret having to bother you
during your convalescence, and I would not do so if this were not a matter of
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importance. Would you please contact the Department of Identification
number 408-966-3286 as soon as you’re able?”
“You’re a pro, Weldon, I’ll say that for you.” Prying client information out
of the Thayer Clinic was not easy, but then the guy was no doubt some kind
of op. He was way too polite to be a salesman. What did Datasafe want with