Cyberpunk

by Victoria Blake

  a wheezing sigh of pneumatically driven gases. The boy reeked of a familiar

  oil and hot battery smell that the old man had not noticed in years.

  The veteran locked eyes with the small boy and his armored body began

  to quake. He unconsciously fingered the scars on his face with one hand as

  he lifted his boot from the old man’s back.

  The old man rolled over and grunted, “Run, boy!”

  But the boy did not run.

  “What’s this?” asked the younger officer, unfazed. “Your Dutch wife?”

  The officer popped his impact baton to full length and stood towering over

  the boy. He leaned down and looked directly into the boy’s eye cameras.

  “Hey there, toaster oven,” said the officer quietly. “Think you’re human?”

  These words confused the boy, who said nothing.

  “Watch out!” came a strangled cry from the veteran. He stood with his knees

  bent and his left palm extended defensively. His other elbow jutted out awkwardly as he fumbled for his gun. “That is unspecked hardware!” he shouted hoarsely.

  “Could be anything. Could be military grade. Back away from it!”

  The younger officer looked at the veteran uncertainly.

  The boy took a hesitant step forward. “What did you say to me?” he

  asked. His voice was the low, tortured croak of a rusty gate. He reached for

  the officer with a trembling, three-fingered hand. “Hey,” he said.

  The officer turned and instinctively swung his impact baton. It thumped

  against the boy’s chest and discharged like a crack of lightning. The blow

  charred the boy’s tee shirt and tore a chunk out of his polyurethane chest-

  piece, revealing a metal ribcage frame riddled with slots for hardware and

  housing a large, warm, rectangular battery. The boy sat heavily on the

  ground, puzzled.

  368

  THE NOSTALGIST

  Looking around in a daze, he saw that the old man was horrified. The boy

  mustered a servo-driven smile that pulled open a yawning hole in his cheek. The old man took a shuddering breath and buried his face in the crook of his elbow.

  And the boy suddenly understood.

  He looked down at his mangled body. A single vertiginous bit of

  information lurched through his consciousness and upended all knowledge

  and memory: Not a boy. He remembered the frightened looks of the

  slidewalk pedestrians. He remembered long hours spent playing cards with

  the old man. And finally he came to remember the photograph of the blond

  boy that hung on a plastic hook near the door of the gonfab. At this memory,

  the boy felt deeply ashamed.

  No, no, no, no. I cannot think of these things, he told himself. I must be calm and brave now.

  The boy rose unsteadily to his feet and adopted a frozen stance. Standing

  perfectly still removed uncertainty. It made mentals in physical space

  simpler, more accurate, and much, much faster. The old man had taught

  the boy how to do this, and they had practiced it together many times.

  Ignoring the commands of his veteran partner, the young officer swung

  his impact baton again. The sparking cudgel followed a simple, visible

  trajectory. The boy watched a blue rotational vector emerge from the man’s

  actuated hip, and neatly stepped around his stationary leg. The officer

  realized what had happened, but it was too late: the boy already stood

  behind him. The man’s hair smells like cigarettes, thought the boy; and then he shoved hard between the officer’s shoulder blades.

  The officer pitched forward lightly, but the LEEX resisted and jerked

  reflexively backward to maintain its balance. The force of this recoil

  snapped the officer’s spine somewhere in his lower back. Sickeningly, the

  actuated legs walked away, dragging the unconscious top half of the officer

  behind them, his limp hands scraping furrows in the dirt.

  The boy heard a whimpering noise and saw the veteran standing with his

  gun drawn. A line visible only to the boy extended from the veteran’s right

  eye, along the barrel of the pistol, and to a spot on the boy’s chest over his

  pneumatic heart.

  Carefully, the boy rotated sideways to minimize the surface area of his

  body available to the veteran’s weapon. Calm and brave.

  369

  DANIEL H. WILSON

  A pull trajectory on the veteran’s trigger finger announced an incoming

  bullet. Motors squealed and the boy’s body violently jerked a precise distance

  in space. The bullet passed by harmlessly, following its predicted trajectory. An echoing blast resounded from the blank-walled buildings. The veteran stood

  for a moment, clutched his sweating face with his free hand, turned, and fled.

  “Grandpa!” said the boy, and rushed over to help.

  But the old man would not look at him or take his hand; his face was filled

  with disgust and fear and desperation. Blindly, the old man shoved the boy

  away and began scrabbling in his pockets, trying frantically to put his new

  Eyes™ and Ears™ back on. The boy tried to speak, but stopped when he heard

  his own coarse noise. Uncertain, he reached out, as if to touch the old man on

  the shoulder, but did not. After a few long seconds, the boy turned and hobbled away, alone.

  The old man grasped the cool, black handrail of the slidewalk with his right

  hand. He curled his left hand under his chin, pulling his woolen coat tight.

  Finally, he limped to the decelerator strip and stepped off. He had to pause

  and breathe slowly three times before he reached the house.

  Inside the dim gonfab, he hung his coat on a transparent plastic hook. He

  wet his rough hands from a suspended water bag and placed cool palms over

  his weathered face.

  Without opening his Eyes™, he said “You may come out.”

  Metal rings supporting a curtained partition screeched apart and the boy

  emerged into a shaft of yellow dome light. The ragged wound in his cosmetic

  chest carapace gaped obscenely. His dilated mechanical irises audibly

  spiraled down to the size of two pinpricks, and the muted light illuminated

  a few blond hairs clinging anemone-like to his scalded plastic scalp. He was

  clutching the photograph of the blond boy and crying and had been for

  some time, but there was no sign of this on his crudely sculpted face.

  The old man saw the photograph.

  “I am sorry,” he said, and embraced the boy. He felt an electrical actuator

  poking rudely through the child’s tee shirt, like a compound fracture.

  “Please,” he whispered. “I will make things the way they were before.”

  But the boy shook his head. He looked up into the old man’s watery blue

  370

  THE NOSTALGIST

  Eyes™. The room was silent except for the whirring of a fan. Then, very

  deliberately, the boy slid the glasses from the old man’s face, leaving the Ears™.

  The old man looked at the small, damaged machine with tired eyes full of

  love and sadness. When the thing spoke, the shocking hole opened in its

  cheek again and the old man heard the clear, piping voice of a long-dead

  little boy.

  “I love you, Grandpa,” it said.

  And these words were as true as sunlight.

  With deft fingers, the boy-thing reached up and pressed a button at the

  base of its own knobbed metal spine. There was a win
ding-down noise as all

  the day’s realization and shame and understanding faded away into

  nothingness.

  The boy blinked slowly and his hands settled down to his sides. He could

  not remember arriving, and he looked around in wonder. The gonfab was

  silent. The boy saw that he was holding a photograph of himself. And then

  the boy noticed the old man.

  “Grandpa?” asked the boy, very concerned. “Have you been crying?”

  The old man did not answer. Instead, he closed his eyes and turned away.

  371

  LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

  By Paul Di Filippo

  This story is indebted to Gaia Vince and her article in

  New Scientist , “Surviving in a Warmer World.”

  1. SOLAR GIRDLE EMERGENCY

  Aurobindo Bandjalang got the emergency twing through his vib on the

  morning of August 8, 2121, while still at home in his expansive bachelor’s

  digs. At 1LDK, his living space was three times larger than most unmarried

  individuals enjoyed, but his high-status job as a Power Jockey for New

  Perthpatna earned him extra perks.

  While a short-lived infinitesimal flock of beard clippers grazed his face,

  A.B. had been showering and vibbing the weather feed for Reboot City

  Twelve: the more formal name for New Perthpatna.

  Sharing his shower stall but untouched by the water, beautiful weather idol

  Midori Mimosa delivered the feed.

  “Sunrise occurred this morning at three-oh-two A.M. Max temp projected to

  be a comfortable, shirtsleeves thirty degrees by noon. Sunset at ten-twenty-

  nine P.M. this evening. Cee-oh-two at four-hundred-and-fifty parts per million, a significant drop from levels at this time last year. Good work, Rebooters!”

  The new tweet/twinge/ping interrupted both the weather and A.B.’s

  ablutions. His vision greyed out for a few milliseconds as if a sheet of smoked glass had been slid in front of his MEMS contacts, and both his left palm and

  the sole of his left foot itched: Attention Demand 5.

  A.B.’s boss, Jeetu Kissoon, replaced Midori Mimosa under the sparsely

  downfalling water: a dismaying and disinvigorating substitution. But A.B.’s

  virt-in-body operating system allowed for no squelching of twings tagged

  AD4 and up. Departmental policy.

  Kissoon grinned and said, “Scrub faster, A.B. We need you here yesterday.

  I’ve got news of face-to-face magnitude.”

  “What’s the basic quench?”

  “Power transmission from the French farms is down by one percent. Sat

  photos show some kind of strange dust accumulation on a portion of the

  PAUL DI FILIPPO

  collectors. The on-site kybes can’t respond to the stuff with any positive

  remediation. Where’s it from, why now, and how do we stop it? We’ve got to

  send a human team down there, and you’re heading it.”

  Busy listening intently to the bad news, A.B. had neglected to rinse properly.

  Now the water from the low-flow showerhead ceased, its legally mandated

  interval over. He’d get no more from that particular spigot till the evening.

  Kissoon disappeared from A.B.’s augmented reality, chuckling.

  A.B. cursed with mild vehemence and stepped out of the stall. He had to

  use a sponge at the sink to finish rinsing, and then he had no sink water left

  for brushing his teeth. Such a hygienic practice was extremely old-fashioned,

  given self-replenishing colonies of germ-policing mouth microbes, but A.B.

  relished the fresh taste of toothpaste and the sense of righteous manual self-

  improvement. Something of a twentieth-century recreationist, Aurobindo.

  But not this morning.

  Outside A.B.’s 1LDK: his home corridor, part of a well-planned, spacious,

  senses-delighting labyrinth featuring several public spaces, constituting the

  one-hundred-and-fiftieth floor of his urbmon.

  His urbmon, affectionately dubbed “The Big Stink”: one of over a hundred

  colossal, densely situated high-rise habitats that amalgamated into New

  Perthpatna.

  New Perthpatna: one of over a hundred such Reboot Cities sited across the

  habitable zone of Earth, about twenty-five percent of the planet’s landmass,

  collectively home to nine billion souls.

  A.B. immediately ran into one of those half-million souls of the Big Stink:

  Zulqamain Safranski.

  Zulqamain Safranski was the last person A.B. wanted to see.

  Six months ago, A.B. had logged an ASBO against the man.

  Safranski was a parkour. Harmless hobby—if conducted in the approved

  sports areas of the urbmon. But Safranski blithely parkour’d his ass all over

  the common spaces, often bumping into or startling people as he ricocheted

  from ledge to bench. After a bruising encounter with the aggressive urban

  bounder, A.B. had filed his protest, attaching AD tags to already filed but

  overlooked video footage of the offenses. Not altogether improbably, A.B.’s

  complaint had been the one to tip the scales against Safranski, sending him

  via police trundlebug to the nearest Sin Bin, for a punitively educational stay.

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  LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

  But now, all too undeniably, Safranski was back in New Perthpatna, and

  instantly in A.B.’s chance-met (?) face.

  The buff, choleric, but laughably diminutive fellow glared at A.B., then

  said, spraying spittle upward, “You just better watch your ass night and day,

  Bang-a-gong, or you might find yourself doing a lâché from the roof without really meaning to.”

  A.B. tapped his ear and, implicity, his implanted vib audio pickup. “Threats

  go from your lips to the ears of the wrathful Ekh Dagina—and to the ASBO

  Squad as well.”

  Safranski glared with wild-eyed malice at A.B., then stalked off, his planar

  butt muscles, outlined beneath the tight fabric of his mango-colored plugsuit,

  somehow conveying further ire by their natural contortions.

  A.B. smiled. Amazing how often people still forgot the panopticon nature

  of life nowadays, even after a century of increasing immersion in and

  extension of null-privacy. Familiarity bred forgetfulness. But it was best to

  always recall, at least subliminally, that everyone heard and saw everything

  equally these days. Just part of the Reboot Charter, allowing a society to

  function in which people could feel universally violated, universally

  empowered.

  At the elevator banks closest to home, A.B. rode up to the two-hundred-

  and-first floor, home to the assigned space for the urbmon’s Power

  Administration Corps. Past the big active mural depicting drowned Perth,

  fishes swimming round the BHP Tower. Tags in the air led him to the workpod

  that Jeetu Kissoon had chosen for the time being.

  Kissoon looked good for ninety-seven years old: he could have passed for

  A.B.’s slightly older brother, but not his father. Coffee-bean skin, snowy

  temples, laugh lines cut deep, only slightly counterbalanced by somber eyes.

  When Kissoon had been born, all the old cities still existed, and many,

  many animals other than goats and chickens flourished. Kissoon had seen

  the cities abandoned, and the Big Biota Crash, as well as the whole Reboot.

  Hard for young A.B. to conceive. The man was a walking history lesson. A.B.

  tried to ho
nor that.

  But Kissoon’s next actions soon evoked a yawp of disrespectful protest from

  the younger man.

  “Here are the two other Jocks I’ve assigned to accompany you.”

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  PAUL DI FILIPPO

  Interactive dossiers hung before A.B.’s gaze. He two-fingered through them

  swiftly, growing more stunned by the second. Finally he burst out: “You’re

  giving me a furry and a keek as helpers?”

  “Tigerishka and Gershon Thales. They’re the best available. Live with

  them, and fix this glitch.”

  Kissoon stabbed A.B. with a piercing stare, and A.B. realized this meatspace

  proximity had been demanded precisely to convey the intensity of Kissoon’s

  next words.

  “Without power, we’re doomed.”

  2. 45TH PARALLEL BLUES

  Jet-assisted flight was globally interdicted. Not enough resources left to support regular commercial or recreational aviation. No military anywhere with a need

  to muster its own air force. Jet engines too harmful to a stressed atmosphere.

  And besides, why travel?

  Everywhere was the same. Vib served fine for most needs.

  The habitable zone of Earth consisted of those lands—both historically

  familiar and newly disclosed from beneath vanished icepack—above the 45th

  parallel north, and below the 45th parallel south. The rest of the Earth’s

  landmass had been desertified or drowned: sand or surf.

  The immemorial ecosystems of the remaining climactically tolerable

  territories had been devastated by Greenhouse change, then, ultimately and

  purposefully, wiped clean. Die-offs, migratory invaders, a fast-forward churn

  culminating in an engineered ecosphere. The new conditions supported no

  animals larger than mice, and only a monoculture of GM plants.

  Giant aggressive hissing cockroaches, of course, still thrived.

  A portion of humanity’s reduced domain hosted forests specially designed

  for maximum carbon uptake and sequestration. These fast-growing, long-

  lived hybrid trees blended the genomes of eucalyptus, loblolly pine, and

  poplar, and had been dubbed “eulollypops.”

  The bulk of the rest of the land was devoted to the crops necessary and

  sufficient to feed nine billion people: mainly quinoa, kale, and soy, fertilized by human wastes. Sugarbeet plantations provided feedstock for bio-polymer