Ruined Cities

by James Tallett (ed)

  He stared. Got you, you marble-meloned monstrosity.

  “Carlyle!” Barlin yelled, pointing. “Caught me an egghead.”

  Carlyle wiggled out of his station, and Barlin smelled the inhalomint seconds before the man’s flabby arm came to rest on his shoulder. He held his breath, regretting having said a word. Damn virtu-junkies, couldn’t be off the network an hour without falling back on smell-stim.

  “You’re dreaming, Barlin,” Carlyle said. “All I see are a bunch of freaks.”

  Chief Barlin turned back to vidsquare six and cursed softly. The street was filled with the usual rabble-horned families talking quietly, elephant-eared women dancing in a circle, children with ridged foreheads playing some bizarre, nonsensical game with rebar poles. But the egg-headed man was gone. As always, he’d slipped into view for a split second, then scooted off.

  “Not this time, freako,” Barlin grunted, issuing mental commands to expand view coverage. The monitors flickered and jumped as the Junebugs flew into a frenzy, sweeping the street from every angle. Some of the freaks looked up, straight into the cameras as the drones buzzed in a swarm, but turned away again after a second. They were used to it.

  Barlin studied the vidsquare wall, now lit with every inch of the crumbling street. But his egg-headed prey had melted away. Frantically, he shot through the last ninety seconds of video, feeling the dawn of a huge migraine as nothing but the usual Beacon Hill monster mash showed on his vidscreen. How was this smoothdome getting past the image recognition software?

  Carlyle yawned behind him. “You’ve just robbed me of three minutes with my pregnant prison guards,” he said, walking away.

  Barlin rubbed his forehead, trying to destroy Carlyle’s latest virtu-fantasy before the image could settle into his brain. Scowling, he turned back to the vidsquares, watching the Junebugs autonomously buzz the crowd. Sometimes he couldn’t believe the Corporament still paid him, or the other two douchebags in South Precinct who labeled themselves ‘Seattle’s Finest’ with a straight face. They were nothing but glorified bouncers, nabbing Freaktown perps after they’d been darted by the Hummingbirds — though the job did come with the title ‘Chief’, as if supervising a bunch of metal bugs was supposed to pump their gonads. Other than those occasional forays into bizarreville, the system mostly ran itself: a million insect-sized drones to capture every square inch of South City, thousands of receivers to send that video to underground quantum computers, and each of those capable of screening a million faces to find one wanted man. Even if that man was covered by horns, armor, eyestalks, or any of the other abominations common among the synth-stem freaks of Georgetown.

  Barlin searched vidsquare six again in vain. Yet there was always an exception. In the past four weeks, that exception took the form of one oval-headed freak, wearing an old-style baseball cap as ridiculous as a teacup on a watermelon. Even in the smiley-face, permissive fake-enlightenment of 2110, there were still some things the Corporament couldn’t tolerate, and a fatally contagious synth-stem strain was on that list. So here he was, chasing one egg-headed ogre through an ocean of freaks, and getting nowhere.

  He yanked the senso-ring off his head and grabbed his bag from the desk. Screw it, he’d been working too late, and for once he was determined to finish his Denny Park run in the daytime.

  Barlin exited the police station into a thick cloud of Particul-Ash, and instantly knew the only place he’d be running today was home, to shove his face behind bio-filters. These kinds of days were becoming more common lately. Shaking his head, he stomped toward the cartyard, wondering what it’d been like in the early twenty-first century, before they’d seeded the atmosphere with ash and particulate matter in a desperate attempt to halt global warming. He grabbed a scooter, told it the address, then hung on with white knuckles as it lurched forward.

  He rode through quiet streets, imagining he was the last person on earth. It was always quiet in this part of the city, the bastion of Seattle’s middle class. On all sides, tall buildings shot into the air like giant mausoleums, each holding thousands of small apartments where the last remnants of ‘normal’ humanity wasted away in the simulators. There were no restaurants or shops at street level, as Barlin had seen in all the twenty-first century Seattle sims. No reason for anyone to poke a bleary-eyed head out of their apartment, except for the few that still had jobs in the real world, and the occasional throwback who felt that primitive desire to see a tree once in a while.

  He arrived at his building, took the elevator to his fifteenth story apartment, pushed his thumb into the door sensor.

  And tried to swallow his rage as the door opened.

  Keliel lay suspended in her electro-cocoon, senso-ring wired to the simulator, as some Rube Goldberg contraption jiggled her thighs and arms so fast he thought it’d rip them apart.

  Seeing red, Barlin stomped to her senso-ring and yanked it out of its socket. The cocoon unrolled, and Keliel’s eyes shot open.

  “What the hell!” She flailed her arms, struggling to stand. “Where do you get off? I was just talking to Rida in that Caribbean sim!”

  Shaking with anger, Barlin pointed to the machine. “We said no musclestims. Damnit Keliel, we’re not virtu-junkies. Have some pride!”

  She favored him with an icy stare. “Is that what you want, Fred? A girlfriend with taffy muscles? I guess then you’d have an excuse to screw your virtu-whores again.”

  Barlin wondered how this woman could simultaneously make him so angry and so ashamed. She was still pretty, his Keliel. Long, brownish-blond hair, slim body, almond-shaped eyes. A wide mouth that hinted at naughty fun, if you only could make her laugh.

  “Keliel. We agreed no virtu-sex and I’ve kept my end of it. Damnit, we still have parks in Seattle. Get out, do anything except lying around like some damn algae farm.”

  “So I’m an algae farm.” Keliel’s beautiful eyes began watering, and Barlin felt the familiar knot in his stomach. The one that let him know he was the biggest jackass in the world.

  “You know, not everyone is lucky like you.” she said, wiping her eyes. “Most of us don’t have jobs, and the only realshops are in Queen Anne. What am I supposed to do all day?”

  “Walk around, go look at the ocean or something.”

  “Really? Well guess what, I did walk around today. I walked down to Beacon Hill and touched a few fingers. What do you think of that?”

  Barlin thought he’d explode. “You’re giving away my hard-earned vircredits? Just so some stim-starved freak can pretend there’s lemon-pepper on his starchtube?”

  Her glare could’ve melted lead. “Well, those freaks have more compassion in one horn than you’ve got in that entire Cro-Magnon forehead. Maybe I should sleep with one — at least they’re not gone sixteen hours a day avoiding their mates!” With that, she stormed off to their tiny bedroom, and Barlin felt the stomach knot spread to every part of his body.

  Damnit.

  He rubbed his forehead, knowing that walking through their bedroom door still amped would turn the fight into a blowout. He staggered to the apartment’s only window, closed his eyes and forced his breathing to slow. After a long moment, he opened his eyes again, staring into twenty-second century Seattle.

  In the foreground, a forest of high-rises stretched into a permanently hazy sky, their balconies undecorated by plants, furniture, or any sign an actual human being lived inside. No reason why they would — the virtual world was far more attractive than a patch of stained concrete filled with weedy, half dead flowers. Through a break in the steel tombs of downtown, Barlin saw the multi-colored line that marked Beacon Hill, fading into the haze. A line that, had they lived closer, would have resolved into the riot of bizarre costumes and hats worn by even more bizarre horned, tentacled, and fanged freaks of Seattle’s lower classes.

  Way back in ‘020, some pissant at Linotech had figured out how to transmit brainwaves back into the scalp using senso-rings, and the virtual network was born. It didn’t take long for v
net sims to get crazy expensive. If you had money, you got a small patch of steel high-rise equipped with grub-dropper, electro-cocoon, and cleanroom with crapper. If you didn’t, you lived in the decaying tenements of the outercities, where the Corporament fed the welfare masses from mobile food dispensers, while letting the buildings fall around their ears. All those poor saps could do was eat their Corporament-provided fruit sludge while begging for vircredits to buy a smidgen of network stimulation, so they could imagine what real food used to taste like.

  And from the boredom of those street-sleeping lower classes came the synth-stem madness. It felt like it’d been around forever, but Barlin remembered a time when nanobot stem cell solutions had been just curiosities. He recalled his mother’s shock upon hearing that necro-punks in Redmond were punching their arms with synth-stem to grow bony head ridges, like a two-legged Triceratops. He had to laugh; if only she could see the giant mass of tentacles, horns, lizard-skins, rhinoceros armor and wings of today’s freaks, playing their bizarre mutilation games as they scrabbled through the decaying streets of Georgetown. A useless waste of oxygen as far as he was concerned — he’d be fine if they all caught something terminal so he could scoot to Union lakebed without being accosted by a million damned souls from Dante’s Inferno. Though he’d never say as much to Keliel; she had some sort of soft spot for Seattle’s trolls.

  Oh god. Keliel. He looked into their bedroom. She was right, there was really nowhere worthwhile to go. He’d been working such long hours, he’d deluded himself into imagining she could just flit around the city as if there were something to see, as if the parks held more than a few stunted trees, as if every inch of coastline wasn’t wall-to-wall with desalinization plants. As if it were thirty years ago.

  He pushed himself away from the window and stood inside the bedroom doorway.

  “You know, there’s nothing wrong with being an algae farm — they have the same green tinge as your ultrason shower soap.”

  She was curled in a ball on the liqui-glass bed, her hair feathered over her arms. She lifted her head a moment, brown strands partially covering a scowl. “If you’re here to pitch ‘asshole, the sequel’, I’m not interested.” She put her head back down.

  He winced. “I was trying to be funny.”

  “Go away.”

  Like all women Barlin had known, Keliel had two different levels of ‘go away.’ There was the ‘if you come closer I’m going to scream into your face until your ballsack recedes into your stomach’ version, and there was the ‘come here but shut up’ version.

  This one sounded like the latter.

  He walked to the bed and slipped under the covers, wiggling around until the liqui-glass formed a perfect bowl for his body. After a long, silent moment, he kissed the back of her neck and put an arm around her.

  She didn’t flick it off.

  They stayed like this for some time, as he listened to her breathing, and the hum of the grub-dropper in the living room. Finally, she rolled over to face him. “Why can’t you be like this all the time?” she said.

  “What, charming?”

  “Less of a jerk.”

  He smiled, and touched his lips to hers. After a long moment she responded, and wrapped her arms around him.

  They made love, a slow, sweaty affair with a good amount of tenderness, but little passion. It was impossible to compete against virtu-sex, with its endlessly designable avatars that could be whoever you wanted, do anything you wanted. Barlin suspected the reason middle-classers had so few children nowadays had less to do with too much simulator time, and more with having zero libido after a romp through adult fantasy camp. But he loved the crazy wench, and he’d avoid virtu-sex as long as she did.

  Later, Barlin grabbed Keliel’s hand as she walked out of the cleanroom, stepping close and running fingers down her taut belly.

  “You know, we haven’t eaten out in a while.”

  Her mouth twisted playfully. “Don’t think I forgive you just because we fooled around. A girl’s gotta take care of her needs.”

  Barlin’s expression remained serious. “Yeah. It’s not like I’m so thrilled with you throwing our money into the Beacon Hill Freaktown that I’m suddenly dying to spend the rest.”

  Her playful smile dropped, but returned after she looked at the crinkles around his eyes. “Oh Fred, do we have the money? I sure wouldn’t mind a good mealsim.”

  Barlin led Keliel to the grub dropper. He pulled two plates from the cabinet and pressed a few buttons on the top of the machine. After ten seconds, a starchtube slowly dropped onto the waiting plate with a splat, an image Barlin always tried to erase from his memory. He loaded both plates with the starchtubes, a slab of labmeat, and veggie puree. Then, holding Keliel’s hand, they sat naked at their plexitable and donned their senso-rings.

  “We’re going to the Everest Roost this time. I think you liked their food.”

  Keliel squealed. “I love that place! But that’s not cheap, Fred. Are you sure?”

  He nodded, and she smiled wickedly from beneath her senso-ring. “You must really be sorry. Come to think of it, why don’t you actually say you’re sorry?”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  Barlin pushed a button on his senso-ring, then stuck his index finger into the table scanner. They were immediately surrounded by an endless reddish haze.

  “Everest Roost, party of two,” Barlin said loudly, and a voice echoed out of the haze: “Confirm 180 vircredits.”

  “Confirmed.”

  There was a brief silence while the virtu-bank read the card-chip in his index finger, performed the identity brainscan, and sucked the vircredits from his account.

  Then, suddenly, they were sitting on a lonely plateau somewhere in the Himalayas, with snowcapped mountains towering on every side. Sheer, verdant slopes stretched from just below the snowline of the surrounding mountains into the mists of the green valleys far below, bisected by thin blue ribbons that were probably rivers. Patchy clouds rolled across the mountainside beneath them, as if they dined at heaven’s gate.

  Keliel gasped with pleasure, and even Barlin had to issue a grunt. You were never really ready for it. The Roost’s EEG pattern generators had gotten even better since the last time he was here; there wasn’t a single visual or tactile clue he could use to deduce that they were actually imprisoned in a steel building surrounded by Particul-Ash haze. Except maybe that the wind blowing around them seemed uneven — the electro-cocoon would have solved that, but it was hard to eat lying down and wrapped in an electric mesh.

  Keliel clapped her hands. “This is wonderful! You should be a jackass and make it up to me more often!”

  Barlin smiled and looked down at the table. No starchtube and labmeat now; his plate was covered by steak in a creamed pepper sauce, and his starchtube was garlic mashed potatoes with a hint of rosemary. They dug in, and Barlin closed his eyes at the flavor. The Roost’s setting was nice, but the real reason he’d come was for their taste algorithms. No one could turn a starchtube into gourmet spuds the way this place could.

  After a moment of greedy, silent eating, Keliel leaned back with her Malbec and twisted to admire the view. In the distance, a shimmering white strip descended the next slope, probably a waterfall hundreds of feet high.

  “Okay, Fred. You’re officially forgiven.”

  Barlin kept his face serious. “For what?”

  She threw a spoon at him.

  They made small talk. Keliel described her day visiting friends in low grade virtu-sims, though she studiously avoided talking about her actual foray into Beacon Hill. Barlin didn’t ask; he wasn’t ready for another fight. They discussed the latest coffee shop to close in Queen Anne, and commiserated over the loss of middle class meeting spots. It didn’t take long for Barlin to mount his soapbox.

  “How the hell are we supposed to pop out kids if the only place anyone meets is some Wild West sim, and only long enough to guzzle whiskey and shoot a virtu-cowboy?”

  Keliel
brushed hair from her eyes. “The point is moot for us Fred. You don’t want kids anyway.”

  “That’s because you want to punt them off to the Corpo-nurseries. These days no one can stay off the network long enough to shove a pacifier in a baby’s mouth, let alone raise kids the normal way. I had a mom and dad, so did you. What happens to the next gen after they’re all reared by administrators and nursery bots?”

  “They’ll see their parents as soon as they can strap a senso-ring. Nothing says they won’t turn out better than you and me.”

  “Nothing except common sense and a million freaking years of evolution.”

  She sipped her Malbec, watching him. “You really should have been born a hundred years ago.”

  Barlin shook his head and sat back. It was an old argument, and it wasn’t going anywhere. After a long silence, Keliel sighed.

  “So, how was your day?”

  Barlin forced his tapping foot to remain still. “Oh, you know, the usual. Carlyle’s a creep and Tando’s a sadistic bastard. But we get along, so what does that say about me, huh?”

  She wouldn’t let him slide so smoothly. “Oh, don’t be such a cop.”

  “Well, you know, there’s just nothing to…”

  “I don’t believe it for a minute. Something must have happened to crank up the jerko-generator today.”

  And suddenly, Barlin wanted nothing more than to spill the combined stress of the last month. What bizarre cortical twist convinced him to bottle up his tension like a stopped up fart?

  The words tumbled from his mouth. “Well, there’s this one egg-headed freak who’s driving me crazy. I don’t know why these guys exist; the egghead synth-stem kills most everyone who tries it, and it’s contagious. Anyway, sometimes this melonhead shows up in the drone shots, staring straight into the camera. As if he’s looking at me. Then he disappears, and the image-rec algorithms just melt down. I scatter every damn Junebug over a mile-wide radius, but the cameras come up empty. I haven’t seen the quantum computers fail like this since they upgraded the software to 8.0 ten years ago.”