Cyberpunk

by Victoria Blake

  vicious kick at the doorbone, and it banged open. I went through.

  For years I had imagined that if only I could get into the head I could meet

  my real mother. Touch her. I had always wondered what she looked like; she

  got reshaped just after I was born. When I was little I used to think of her as a magic princess glowing with fairy light. Later I pictured her as one or

  another of my friends’ moms, only better dressed. After I had started getting

  twanked, I was afraid she might be just a brain floating in nutrient solution,

  like in some pricey memory bank. All wrong.

  The interior of the head was dark and absolutely freezing.

  There was no sound except for the hum of refrigeration units. “Mom?” My

  voice echoed in the empty space. I stumbled and caught myself against a

  smooth wall. Not skin, like everywhere else in Mom—metal. The tears froze

  on my face.

  “There’s nothing for you here,” she said. “This is a clean room. You’re

  compromising it. You must leave immediately.”

  Sterile environment, metal walls, the bitter cold that superconductors

  needed. I did not need to see. No one lived here. It had never occurred to me

  that there was no Mom to touch. She had downloaded, become an electron

  ghost tripping icy logic gates. “How long have you been dead?”

  “This isn’t where you belong,” she said.

  I shivered. “How long?”

  “Go away,” she said.

  So I did. I had to. I could not stay very long in her secret place, or I would

  die of the cold.

  As I reeled down the stairs, Mom herself seemed to shift beneath my feet

  and I saw her as if she were a stranger. Dead—and I had been living in a

  tomb. I ran past Nanny; she still sprawled where I had left her. All those years I had loved her, I had been in love with death. Mom had been sucking life

  from me the way her refrigerators stole the warmth from my body.

  Now I knew there was no way I could stay, no matter what anyone said. I

  knew it was not going to be easy leaving, and not just because of the money.

  For a long time Mom had been my entire world. But I could not let her use

  me to pretend she was alive, or I would end up like her.

  343

  JAMES PATRICK KELLY

  I realized now that the door had always stayed locked because Mom had to

  hide what she had become. If I wanted, I could have destroyed her.

  Downloaded intelligences have no more rights than cars or wiseguys. Mom

  was legally dead and I was her only heir. I could have had her shut off, her

  body razed. But somehow it was enough to go, to walk away from my

  inheritance. I was scared, and yet with every step I felt lighter. Happier.

  Extremely free.

  I had not expected to find Tree waiting at the doorbone, chatting with

  Comrade as if nothing had happened. “I just had to see if you were really the

  biggest fool in the world,” she said.

  “Out.” I pulled her through the door. “Before I change my mind.”

  Comrade started to follow us. “No, not you.” I turned and stared back at

  the heads on his window coat. I had not intended to see him again; I had

  wanted to be gone before Montross returned him. “Look, I’m giving you back

  to Mom. She needs you more than I do.”

  If he had argued, I might have given in. The old unregulated Comrade would

  have said something. But he just slumped a little and nodded and I knew that he was dead, too. The thing in front of me was another ghost. He and Mom were two

  of a kind. “Pretend you’re her kid, maybe she’ll like that.” I patted his shoulder.

  “Prekrassnaya ideya,” he said. “Spaceba.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. Tree and I trotted together down the long driveway.

  Robot sentries crossed the lawn and turned their spotlights on us. I wanted to tell her she was right. I had probably just done the single most irresponsible thing of my life—

  and I had high standards. Still, I could not imagine how being poor could be worse than being rich and hating yourself. I had seen enough of what it was like to be dead.

  It was time to try living. “Are we going someplace, Mr. Boy?” Tree squeezed my hand.

  “Or are we just wandering around in the dark?”

  “Mr. Boy is a damn stupid name, don’t you think?” I laughed. “Call me Pete.”

  I felt like a kid again.

  344

  WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU

  By John Shirley

  Nine A.M., and Jerome-X wanted a smoke. He didn’t smoke, but he wanted

  one in here, and he could see how people went into prison non-smokers

  and came out doing two packs a day. Maybe had to get their brains rewired

  to get off it. Which was ugly, he’d been rewired once to get off Sink,

  synthetic cocaine, and he’d felt like a processor with a glitch for a month

  after that.

  He pictured his thoughts like a little train, zipping around the cigarette-

  burnt graffiti: “YOU FUCKED NOW” and “GASMAN WUZZERE” and

  “GASMAN IS AN IDIOT-MO.” The words were stippled on the dull pink

  ceiling in umber burn spots. Jerome wondered who GASMAN was and what

  they’d put him in prison for.

  He yawned. He hadn’t slept much the night before. It took a long time to

  learn to sleep in prison. He wished he’d upgraded his chip so he could use it

  to activate his sleep endorphins. But that was a grade above what he’d been

  able to afford—and way above the kind of brain chips he’d been dealing. He

  wished he could turn off the light panel, but it was sealed in.

  There was a toilet and a broken water fountain in the cell. There were also

  a few bunks, but he was alone in this static place of watery blue light and

  faint pink distances. The walls were salmon-colored garbage blocks. The

  words singed into the ceiling were blurred and impotent.

  Almost noon, his stomach rumbling, Jerome was still lying on his back on the

  top bunk when the trashcan said, “Eric Wexler, re-ma-a-in on your bunk

  while the ne-ew prisoner ente-e-ers the cell!”

  Wexler? Oh, yeah. They thought his name was Wexler. The fake ID

  program.

  He heard the cell door slide open; he looked over, saw the trashcan ushering

  a stocky Chicano guy into lockup. The robot everyone called “the trashcan”

  was a stumpy metal cylinder with a group of camera lenses, a retractable

  plastic arm, and a gun muzzle that could fire a Taser charge, rubber bullets,

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  tear-gas pellets, or .45-caliber rounds. It was supposed to use the .45 only in extreme situations, but the robot was battered, it whined when it moved, its

  digital voice was warped. When they got like that, Jerome had heard, you

  didn’t fuck with them; they’d mix up the rubber bullets with the .45-caliber,

  Russian Roulette style.

  The door sucked itself shut, the trashcan whined away down the hall, its

  rubber wheels squeaking once with every revolution. Jerome heard a tinny

  cymbal crash as someone, maybe trying to get it to shoot at a guy in the next

  cell, threw a tray at it; followed by some echoey human shouting and a

  distorted admonishment from the trashcan. The Chicano was still standing

  by the plexigate, hands shoved in his pockets, staring at Jerome, looking like

  he was trying to place him.

  “’Sappenin’,” Jerome sai
d, sitting up on the bed. He was grateful for the

  break in the monotony.

  “Que pasa? You like the top bunk, huh? Tha’s good.”

  “I can read the ceiling better from up here. About ten seconds’ worth of

  reading matter. It’s all I got. You can have the lower bunk.”

  “You fuckin’-A I can.” But there was no real aggression in his tone. Jerome

  thought about turning on his chip, checking the guy’s subliminals, his somatic

  signals, going for a model of probable-aggression index; or maybe project for

  deception. He could be an undercover cop: Jerome hadn’t given them his

  dealer, hadn’t bargained at all.

  But he decided against switching the chip on. Some jails had scanners for

  unauthorized chip output. Better not use it unless he had to. And his gut told

  him this guy was only a threat if he felt threatened. His gut was right almost

  as often as his brain chip.

  The Chicano was maybe five foot six, a good five inches shorter than

  Jerome but probably outweighing him by fifty pounds. His face had Indian

  angles and small jet eyes. He was wearing printout gray-blue prison jams,

  #6631; they’d let him keep his hairnet. Jerome had never understood the

  Chicano hairnet, never had the balls to ask about it.

  Jerome was pleased. He liked to be recognized, except by people who could

  arrest him.

  “You put your hands in the pockets of those paper pants, they’ll rip, and in

  LA County they don’t give you any more for three days,” Jerome advised him.

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  WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU

  “Yeah? Shit.” The Chicano took his hands carefully out of his pockets. “I

  don’t want my cojones hanging out, people think I’m advertising—they some

  big fucking cojones too. You not a faggot, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good. How come I know you? When I don’t know you.”

  Jerome grinned. “From television. You saw my tag. Jerome-X. I mean—I do

  some music too. I had that song, ‘Six Kinds of Darkness’—”

  “I don’t know that, bro—oh wait, Jerome-X. The tag—I saw that. Your

  face-tag. You got one of those little transers? Interrupt the transmissions with your own shit?”

  “Had. They confiscated it.”

  “That why you here? Video graffiti?”

  “I wish. I’d be out in a couple months. No. Illegal augs.”

  “Hey, man! Me too!”

  “You?” Jerome couldn’t conceal his surprise. You didn’t see a lot of barrio

  dudes doing illegal augmentation. They generally didn’t like people tinkering

  in their brains.

  “What, you think a guy from East LA can’t use augs?”

  “No, no. I know lots of Latino guys that use it,” Jerome lied.

  “Ooooh, he says Latino, that gotta nice sound.” Overtones of danger.

  Jerome hastily changed the direction of the conversation. “You never been

  in the big lockups where they use these fuckin’ paper jammies?”

  “No, just the city jail once. They didn’t have those motherfucking screw

  machines either. Hey, you’re Jerome—my name’s Jessie. Actually, it Jesus”—

  he pronounced it “hay-soo”—“but people they, you know . . . You got any

  smokes? No? Shit. Okay, I adjust. I get used to it. Shit. No smokes. Fuck.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, to one side of Jerome’s dangling legs, and tilted his head forward. He reached under his hairnet, and under what turned out to

  be a hairpiece, and pulled a chip from a jack unit set into the base of his skull.

  Jerome stared. “Goddamn, their probes really are busted.”

  Jessie frowned over the chip. There was a little blood on it. The jack unit

  was leaking. Cheap installation. “No, they ain’t busted, there’s a guy working

  on the probe, he’s paid off, he’s letting everyone through for a couple of days because of some Russian mob guys coming in, he don’t know which ones they

  are. Some of them Russian mob guys got the augments.”

  349

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  “I thought sure they were going to find my unit,” Jerome said. “The strip

  search didn’t find it, but I thought the prison probes would and that’d be

  another year on my sentence. But they didn’t.”

  Neither one of them thinking of throwing away the chips. It’d be like

  cutting out an eye.

  “Same story here, bro. We both lucky.”

  Jessie put the microprocessing chip in his mouth, the way people did with

  their contact lenses, to clean it, lubricate it. Of course, bacterially speaking, it came out dirtier than it went in.

  “Does the jack hurt?” Jerome asked.

  Jessie took the chip out, looked at it a moment on his fingertips. It was smaller than a contact lens, a sliver of silicon and non-osmotic gallium arsenide and

  transparent interface-membrane, with, probably, 800,000,000 nanotransistors

  of engineered protein molecules sunk into it, maybe more. “No, it don’t hurt

  yet. But if it’s leaking, it fuckin’ will hurt, man.” He said something else in Spanish, shaking his head. He slipped the chip back into his jack-in unit and

  tapped it with the thumbnail of his right hand. So that was where the activation mouse was: under the thumbnail. Jerome’s was in a knuckle.

  Jessie rocked slightly, just once, sitting up on his bunk, which meant the

  chip had engaged and he was getting a readout. They tended to feed back

  into your nervous system a little at first, make you twitch once or twice; if

  they weren’t properly insulated, they could make you crap your pants.

  “That’s okay,” Jessie said, relaxing. “That’s better.” The chip inducing his

  brain to secrete vasopressin, contract the veins, simulate the effect of

  nicotine. It worked for a while, till you could get cigarettes. High-grade chip could do some numbing if you were hung up on Sim, synthetic morphine, and

  couldn’t get any. But that was Big Scary. You could turn yourself off for good

  that way. You better be doing some damn fine adjusting.

  Jerome thought about the hypothetical chip scanners. Maybe he should

  object to the guy using his chip here. But what the Chicano was doing

  wouldn’t make for much leakage.

  “What you got?” Jerome asked.

  “I got an Apple NanoMind II. Big gigas. What you got?”

  “You got the Mercedes, I got the Toyota. I got a Seso Picante Mark I. One

  of those Argentine things.” (How had this guy scored an ANM II?)

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  WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU

  “Yeah, what you got, they kinda basic, but they do most what you need.

  Hey, our names, they both start with J. And we both here for illegal augs.

  What else we got in common. What’s your sign?”

  “Uh—” What was it, anyway? He always forgot. “Pisces I think.”

  “No shit! I can relate to Pisces. I ran an astrology program, figured out who

  I should hang with. Pisces is okay. But Aquarius is—I’m a Scorpio, like—

  Aquarius, que bueno.”

  What did he mean exactly, hang with, Jerome wondered. Scoping me about

  am I a faggot, maybe that was something defensive.

  But he meant something else. “You know somethin’, Jerome, you got your

  chip too, we could do a link and maybe get over on that trashcan.”

  Break out? Jerome felt a chilled thrill go through him. “Link with that

  thing? Control it? I don’t think the two of us would b
e enough.”

  “We need some more guys maybe, but I got news, Jerome, there’s more

  comin’. Maybe their names all start with J. You know, I mean—in a way.”

  In quick succession, the trashcan brought their cell three more guests: a fortyish beach bum named Eddie; a cadaverous black dude named Bones; a queen called

  Swish, whose real name, according to the trashcan, was Paul Torino.

  “This place smells like it’s comin’ apart,” Eddie said. He had a surfer’s

  greasy blond topknot and all the usual Surf Punk tattoos. Meaningless now,

  Jerome thought; the pollution-derived oxidation of the offshore had pretty

  much ended surfing. The anaerobics had taken over the surf, in North

  America, thriving in the toxic waters like a gelatinous Sargasso. If you surfed you did it with an antitoxin suit and a gas mask. “Smells in here like somethin’

  died and didn’t go to heaven. Stinks worse’n Malibu.”

  “It’s those landfill blocks,” Bones said. He was missing three front teeth,

  and his sunken face was like something out of a zombie video. But he was an

  energetic zombie, pacing back and forth as he spoke. “Compressed garbage,”

  he told Eddie. “Organic stuff mixed with the polymers, the plastics, whatever

  was in the trash heap, make ’em into bricks ’cause they run outta landfill, but after a while, if the contractor didn’t get ’em to set right, y’know, they start to rot. It’s hot outside is why you’re gettin’ it now. Use garbage to cage garbage, they say. Fucking assholes.”

  • • •

  351

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  The trashcan pushed a rack of trays up to the Plexiglas bars and whirred

  their lunch to them, tray by tray. The robot gave them an extra tray. It was

  screwing up.

  They ate their chicken patties—the chicken was almost greaseless,

  gristleless, which meant it was vat chicken, genetically engineered fleshstuff—

  and between bites they bitched about the food and indulged the usual

  paranoid speculation about mind-control chemicals in the coffee.

  Jerome looked around at the others, thinking: at least they’re not ass-

  kickers.

  They were crammed here because of the illegal augs sweep, some political

  drive to clean up the clinics, maybe to see to it that the legal augmentation

  companies kept their pit bull grip on the industry. So there wasn’t anybody in