The Uploaded

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Who could blame him for wanting to leave me behind? I’d lied to him, manipulated him, put his sister in danger… everything I’d done in the last two days looked more like an enemy than a friend.

  “…thank you anyway,” I said, my mouth dry.

  I wondered how long Peaches would retain control of the copter. If it was automated enough to avoid crashing, it was automated enough to be remote-piloted. Once Wickliffe rescinded Hsiang’s access, he’d fly us back.

  I checked the IceBreaker, which was down to a 17 percent charge; all my frequency-scanning and camera-blasting had sucked the batteries dry. I flipped through the program stack, seeing if there was anything to get me root access to a spirocopter, doubting even Mama Alex was that prescient.

  Still, even if I got root, what then? We’d never make it to Passaic. President Wickliffe had access to every camera. We’d be visible the moment we flew over a populated area.

  Evangeline stabbed herself in the arm.

  Peaches whirled around in her pilot’s seat. “What the…?”

  Evangeline sliced deep into her bicep, extracting a grape-sized chip.

  Peaches and Dare gave me a dropjawed stare as if to say, you brought her in here?

  “A fine idea,” said Dr Hsiang. “I’d forgotten about the tracking implants.”

  Evangeline examined it with the bland expression of someone who’d found an ant on their shoulder, then flicked the tracking chip out the window.

  “You NeoChristians are hardcore,” I said. She smiled.

  “Doesn’t that hurt?” Peaches asked, looking a little green around the gills.

  Evangeline shrugged. “Others have suffered much more for me.”

  “Who suffered for… oh. That guy, right? Your cross-guy.”

  With evident effort, Evangeline swallowed back a retort. “Yes. Him.”

  “I’ve got nothing against your kind, you know.” Peaches spoke slowly, as if Evangeline might have trouble understanding her. “I think if you want to worship a fish or two pieces of wood or whatever, you go right ahead.”

  Mercifully, a military spirocopter whizzed up over the horizon, roaring over the Roosevelt River to twirl to a stop over the branch server. It dipped down so fast I thought it had lost power, dropping into the space between the four buildings.

  “That’s unusual,” Hsiang said, adjusting her glasses. “He should be bringing in the erasure team, not calling for a pickup.”

  There was a blinding flash, then a rumble we heard even over the turbine jets.

  The military spirocopter popped out of the top of the collapsed buildings, outracing the stream of flame erupting from its belly. The four buildings swayed drunkenly, then crumbled inwards in a gout of fire.

  “Well, that’s good news,” said Dr Hsiang cheerfully. “He’s called the erasure team! He’s afraid we might get away!”

  The military copter’s turbines changed angles to zoom straight towards us, chewing up the space in between. Its guns glowed a deep green.

  “…that’s not so good,” Dr Hsiang admitted, as the spirocopter roared into range.

  24: GREENWICH VILLAGE, AT A SPEEDY CLIP

  * * *

  “Turn away!”

  Peaches had been looking back at the enemy spirocopter. I caught her attention just as dazer lights swept the cabin, making us all woozy.

  “They want us alive,” Evangeline muttered. “That’s something.”

  “You haven’t Shrived in a few days, and you have recording devices,” Dr Hsiang said. “President Wickliffe hates unknowns.”

  The copter banked to one side to get a better shot at us. Peaches angled straight down, dropping into the gap between Greenwich Village brownstones.

  Webs of laundry lines strung between the apartment complexes snapped against our windshield. Our turbine wash sent gales of underwear and socks soaring high into the sky, then fluttering back down into the gardens like a rain of smallclothes. The “Live Local, Die Global” initiatives had forced the Village to abandon cars for ponies – so they’d repurposed the asphalt, planting long strips of squash and soybeans in old wheel ruts. The people in the streets cursed, flinging rocks.

  “If they want to shoot us down, they’ll have to take out Greenwich Village to do it,” she muttered.

  “They just might,” Dare said. “The LifeGuard’s never loved the Village…”

  Peaches zipped around Greenwich’s winding streets, making wild lefts and rights to confuse them – but we all knew she couldn’t lose them. Once Wickliffe called in more copters, we were dead.

  “Dare, my earputer’s out of juice – give me yours!” I shouted. It was hard to concentrate among the flicker of dazers and Peaches’ chaotic steering.

  “Do you have an actual escape plan this time?” he asked. But he handed it over.

  I copied Dare’s raw footage into the IceBreaker – the Naked Crazies, the NeoChristians being reprogrammed, Peaches’ capture. Sadly, Wickliffe’s voice had some interference shield that prevented recording – whenever he spoke, it sounded like a rusty trombone.

  Yet the scientists’ comments were clear, the implications damning.

  More rocks thunked off the side of the spirocopter as the locals on the rooftops flung rubbish at us. The ones who weren’t chucking coral flipped the bird at us.

  “The locals think it’s a raid,” Dr Hsiang observed. “That could prove interesting.”

  The enemy spirocopter roared overhead, catching another round of jeers from the crowd. I spotted a familiar figure hanging off its side, pointing at us and yelling orders: Gumdrool.

  So that was who they’d picked up. Wickliffe must have hired Gumdrool to hunt us down.

  “Why did we trust that asshole?” Dare asked bitterly. “Oh, that’s right; you said he’d be good for my career.”

  Peaches banked around a corner, where foil tents had been set up in the middle of an intersection: an illegal marketspace. Black marketeers, clad in thick silk hoods and shiny silver buckles, ran out of the tents to see what the commotion was about, their faces obscured so no camera could identify them.

  “Black Hoods?” Dare yelped. “This is going from bad to worse.”

  The spirocopter’s whoosh sent the tents’ entryways fluttering open, revealing panicked locals. They ran. If your black market bust showed up on Sins of the Flesh, kiss your Upterlife goodbye.

  The Black Hoods would sell you almost anything inside those cameraproofed tents. Sometimes they sold camera-jamming equipment, but more often it was serious stuff – slow poisons to send your loved ones to paradise, illicit gene treatments for better looks. And they had weaponry to protect themselves.

  I pointed at the market’s center. “Land there in five minutes,” I told Peaches. “Until then keep circling around the block, but stay within half a mile.”

  “You aren’t getting closer to the Black Hoods–” Dare yelled – but then Peaches hurled the spirocopter into a twirling reversal that nearly made Dare toss his cookies.

  Another enemy spirocopter shot past us, flying directly over the Black Hoods. The Hoods tinkered with a large contraption on the ground, swearing and thumping it. The device convulsed and coughed out a needlelike missile, sucking debris behind it as it flew; the missile arched into the sky, following the spirocopter inexorably like a hi-tech mosquito.

  When the missile made contact, the spirocopter went up in an impossibly bright burst of light, raining fist-sized fragments down onto the pavement.

  “I’m flying closer to the guys with weaponry,” Peaches said through gritted teeth. “Yes, this seems wise.”

  Two other spirocopters popped up on the horizon. The Black Hoods barked orders at their tents, which collapsed into small silver boxes the size of clothing chests. They had heavy-duty defenses to ward off the first wave of LifeGuard incursions, but even they had to retreat from a coordinated government assault.

  Meanwhile, I was seeding files, using the last of the IceBreaker’s battery charge to find all the cameras in t
he area and commandeer them. The cameras at the edge of range winked out of signal as Peaches careened down the street, but the readout showed roughly fifteen hundred cameras in the block.

  “This is Amichai Damrosch,” I said, talking into Dare’s earputer-cam, speaking loud enough to be heard over the copter’s noise. “You might remember me from such films as ‘that hospital pony-smuggling.’ Now I’ve got even better footage – something every living boy and girl in the world needs to see! Copy this immediately, remix it, share it on every network you can find – because if you don’t listen to this today, you will not care tomorrow. They will take the ability to care away from you.”

  I made fifteen hundred different copies of Dare’s footage, filling each with randomized pauses and static, so the file signatures on each copy would be different. If Wickliffe wanted to scrub the files, he’d have to track them down manually.

  “To the ghosts,” I continued, “You are nothing more than a resource to be mined. Your free will is an obstruction. They want to mold you into more obedient servants. Until you’re dead, they do not think you are human.”

  Peaches made a hard left. The two other spirocopters sailed overhead, homing in on us. Peaches made a quick figure-eight around a statue, looping back to the flash market.

  “This is what the ghosts do. This is why you can never trust them. This is why you need to revolt now – before they erase the idea of revolution forever!”

  I almost stopped recording, then added:

  “Sorry, sis.”

  I thumbed the “Broadcast” button.

  The three spirocopters closed in, their dazers glowing green.

  “Land there,” I said, pointing to a vacated spot in the market.

  “You’re messing with the Black Hoods?” Dare squealed.

  “Ignore Amichai,” Evangeline barked. She gripped Peaches’ shoulder hard. “Fly to Passaic. Escape while we have the chance.”

  When Peaches didn’t budge, Evangeline leaned over to slap Peaches’ hands off the throttle. She was shocked when Peaches clung tight.

  “We need to get this message out,” I said, thumbing the “Broadcast” button on the IceBreaker. “I’ve uploaded the footage to every camera in range. They’ll emergency-broadcast to every earputer within their range for as long as the IceBreaker’s controlling them. Which means we need to stay put for as long as we can, to ensure that the word gets out. It’s our best chance for letting the world know what Wickliffe’s up to.”

  “And us?” Dare asked.

  “We hope the Black Hoods recognize us as friendlies, and occupy Gumdrool’s attention for a few moments longer.”

  “So we are voiding ourselves to save the world,” Dare said – and though he was still furious at me, he nodded in grim agreement. “Because if we don’t tell people now, they’ll doggify other folks, enslave the living, and they’ll never stop…”

  I clasped Dare’s hand, feeling that swell of brotherhood again.

  “Don’t touch me,” Dare snapped. “We could have planned this better if you hadn’t had to show off! If you’d just told me what was happening, then maybe we wouldn’t have to void!”

  “No!” Dr Hsiang shouted, snatching the gun away from Dare. She took aim at Peaches, holding the gun well out of Evangeline’s reach. “I refuse to be your sacrificial lamb. Take off, Ms Khan-Tien.”

  I had to credit Peaches; the copter never wavered as it spiraled down towards the flash marketplace. Evangeline weighed the options, trying to figure out how to safely disarm Hsiang.

  “I assure you,” Hsiang said, watching as Peaches kept the control stick in a steady descent. “I will shoot, if you don’t escape.”

  “I believe you,” Peaches said serenely. “This is worth it.”

  Hsiang shrugged and fired.

  Blood splattered across the windshield.

  Dare went for the gun as Hsiang pulled the trigger three more times. Peaches’ scream turned into a sucking gurgle.

  “You bitch!” Dare shrieked. “I’ll fucking kill you!”

  Dare wrestled the gun out of her hands, punched Hsiang in the face over and over again–

  Evangeline grabbed at the copter’s controls, but it was too late; we were off balance, smashing into a brownstone. The Black Hoods below us dove for cover as the copter crashed into the dirt, spraying asphalt everywhere.

  I fought my way back to consciousness, but the darkness threatened to drown me. The last thing I remembered before passing out was Gumdrool, hanging off the edge of a spirocopter, blasting the last of the Black Hood resistance as he made his way towards us. And Dare, weeping next to Peaches, screaming for help.

  My eyes unfocused. Then: darkness.

  III

  Come To Jesus

  25: PARALYZED PASSENGERS ON PERILOUS PILGRIMAGES

  * * *

  “… him to,” a voice said.

  I wasn’t awakened so much as switched on. I stared at bright spotlights embedded in a brushed-metal ceiling, trying to remember who I was. Last I knew, I’d been in a crashing spirocopter, trying to save New York, while Peaches–

  Peaches.

  Peaches had been shot.

  I leapt off the bed – or tried to. I ordered my legs to get up, get up; they ignored me. I felt the weight of scratchy blankets resting on my chest, my lungs breathing – but aside from autonomic impulses, my body didn’t respond. My eyes stared straight up into a blinding light, watering from the pain, dumb cameras I could no longer control.

  Something had disconnected my brain from my body.

  “Let him blink,” a familiar voice said. “A man should be comfortable in his last moments.”

  The sound of a technician pressing buttons. Blurs of blue-suited men – LifeGuards – moving at my vision’s edge. The scrape of a chair, pulled up next to the bed.

  Gumdrool leaned in.

  Really not good.

  Gumdrool looked grim, carrying the sad nobility of a doctor about to deliver bad news. His eyes were still blackened from where Evangeline had punched him.

  He cleared his throat, silencing the men around him.

  “Would you gentlemen give me some alone time with Mr Damrosch?” he asked.

  The scuffle of boots. The hiss of a door opening; sunwarmed air whooshed in, ruffling Gumdrool’s hair. The constant rattle of the bedframe told me we’d been moved to a monorail.

  “Meat-death is a terrible punishment.” Gumdrool spoke gravely, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Delivered to only the lowliest of criminals. Despite what you may think, I loathe killing.

  “I tried to warn you, Amichai – but you’re the lowliest of criminals now.”

  I should have broken out in a cold sweat. But my body didn’t react, even though inside I shrieked.

  “Not an effective criminal, it’s true,” Gumdrool continued. “We shut down your little broadcast, Amichai. We’ve got people eradicating the seed files you tried to spread. And soon, at our new facility in Lacona Springs, we’ll manufacture the devices to encourage the living to fix this wretched world. You kicked up so much trouble, Amichai… and all you managed was to get Peaches shot.”

  Looking into Gumdrool’s twisted compassion, I felt like a lowly criminal. If I got Peaches killed for a cause, the least I could do was win.

  “It’s ironic,” he continued. “I needed you to get me my big break. And you did! Your security breach made Mr Wickliffe agree He needs better eyes on the ground.” A dreamy smile crossed Gumdrool’s face. “He’s put me in charge of his most critical project. Me. I’m heading up security at Lacona Springs…”

  He blinked, seeming to notice me again, and looked grave.

  “I… must admit I owe you.”

  Would he set me free?

  “Mr Wickliffe,” Gumdrool said thickly, “believes you can be converted. Mr Wickliffe hopes to convince you to become a more amenable citizen. No mind control, no incentives – He believes a heart-to-heart chat will convince you. Whereas I believe…”

  Gumdroo
l swallowed.

  “I believe Mr Wickliffe is irrationally fond of you.”

  As Gumdrool’s brow furrowed, I realized that no. I wouldn’t live.

  “He’s taken too many risks to get you back on His side already. So… I’ll pronounce judgment upon you to save Him. There’ll be an error. A glitch in your paralysis program. It won’t hurt!” he assured me. “But… your death will remove a bad temptation from a good man.”

  He closed his eyes, nodded. “Yes. It’s the right thing to do.”

  Gumdrool leaned in close. “But I promise you, Amichai: I will watch over your sister like the imaginary angels of old. She wanted to be a LifeGuard. She understood her duty. And with my guidance, she will get into the Upterlife. That’s a good last thought to cling to, I think. That you saved your sister.”

  He coughed, embarrassed, and stood up. No, no, no, I thought, I can’t die like this–

  “Yes,” he whispered. “This is the right thing.”

  His hand reached for the switch–

  “I-i-i-ian!”

  Wickliffe’s voice blared over the speakers – but it skipped like a corrupted music file. Gumdrool’s heels clicked as he snapped to attention.

  “Sir?” Gumdrool sounded as horrified as I felt. Wickliffe had always been the world’s voice of reason, his words comforting us during unimaginable tragedies… even when they were tragedies he himself caused. Hearing those comforting tones chopped up into slurred computer damage felt as though the universe itself had gone mad.

  “Thuh- thh- thuh- theeeeeere is a security bre-e-each,” Wickliffe continued. “They’re dooooing something to me, I-i-ian! I’ve traced the SIGnal to the rear of the mmmmonorail! Geh-het the g-g-g-guards into the last car!”

  “Are you OK, sir?”

  “Get the g-g-guards into the car! Uh-uh-all of them!”

  A strange relief flooded Gumdrool’s chiseled face as he removed his hand from my life-support controls. Then he ran out. I heard other doors opening, the rattle-and-bang as the monorail roared down the track, feet scuffling as people ran past me to the back, screaming, “Get to the signal! Go! Go!”