by Julian North
Finely dressed couples wandered the streets and filled the restaurants and pleasure parlors, their concerns a world away from mine. They strolled while I rushed. Every time a group blocked my path on the sidewalk I gritted my teeth, struggling to maintain my outward appearance of belonging. I forced myself not to look up at the surveillance drones buzzing overhead. I arrived at the designated corner and stood next to a towering woman in a silky black dress and impossibly high heels. She crossed the street when the light changed. I stayed, focused on the traffic around me.
A steady stream of vehicles passed, going west to east and north to south, but not so many as to clog the streets. Their low humming motors sounded like bees’ song, rather than the chaotic rumble of gasoline engines I was used to in Bronx City. U-cabs continuously picked up and deposited passengers on both sides of the street. Pedestrians flowed to and from the subway station one block south on Eighty-Sixth Street. I hid in that constant stream of people and machines. My feet shuffled of their own volition. I glanced at my viser every twenty seconds. I stared down the headlights of every vehicle that slowed near my corner.
A dark U-cab approached the intersection, the soft puff of its engine dissipating as it slowed. It was one of the Austin FX3 replicas—the twentieth-century London taxis that had become popular rent-a-rides over the past few years in Manhattan. The windows were tinted, but the “U” on the curb side window was illuminated, indicating it was awaiting a fare. I cursed under my breath. If it was picking up, the vehicle might stay here for five minutes or more, waiting for the passenger who had summoned it with their viser. I didn’t need a clogged corner or additional witnesses arriving at a bad moment.
My heart jumped into my throat when the U-cab’s headlights flashed at me. I blinked, not trusting myself. U-cabs don’t have drivers. They are summoned, they pick up, they drop off. The passenger controls did not include the ability to switch the vehicle’s headlights on and off. It flashed a second time. Then a third. I moved to the curb. The door opened as I got close, the way it would have had I summoned it. I held my breath as I slid inside. The door shut behind me.
I swallowed the gasp that tried to escape my lips the moment the darkened interior of the car became visible. My brother lay across the rear seat, bare-chested, an ugly mess of crimson expanding through the bandage pressed to the left side of his ribs. His eyes were shut, his face haggard. His friend Chris-Chris knelt on the floor beside him, holding the slapdash dressing in place. Panic reigned in Chris-Chris’s wide eyes; his hands shook. Chris-Chris had been at Mateo’s side for as long as I could remember, an enforcer and trusted lieutenant. On the streets, he projected steady maturity. Right now, he looked like a kid, even if he was a few years older than me.
“Kortilla told me we were getting a doc, not M’s little sister,” he near screamed. The car was soundproof, but I still didn’t like the yelling. I felt the numbness in my hands spreading as I looked at Mateo and the frightened boy trying to nurse him.
I forced certainty that I didn’t feel into my voice. “Doc’s coming. We can’t stay here without attracting attention. U-cabs don’t sit around. What’s the deal with this thing? How did you control the lights?” I looked around the interior. The vehicle had been modified. A portable terminal had been set up on the floor. A row of seats had been removed, creating a roomy interior space. One big enough to hold…well, almost anything.
“Cab’s command node has been hacked,” Chris-Chris informed me. “I can set any destination. It’s reportin’ whatever we want back to its central dispatch. Everyplace we go shows up as a requested ride from some dummy viser. Internal cameras are on a loop. We got fake passenger pictures and everything. Totally pro.”
He sounded stupidly proud of the set-up. My heart sank. It was way more than Chris-Chris could have managed by himself. Or even Mateo. Oh, big brother, how deep in the deuce are you this time?
“Take us somewhere, then. A place a normal richie customer would go. Then back here. Let’s hope the doc is ready by then.” The more I spoke, the steadier my voice became. I stopped shaking. My blood turned cold.
“Hold the bandage, and keep pressin’. I gotta check the terminal.”
I put my hand on the bloody cloth, the sticky warmth of my brother’s blood leaking onto my fingers. I placed my other hand on Mateo’s forehead. His skin felt like a low-burning fire. I watched his chest straining to rise and fall. Chris-Chris tapped a virtual keyboard with his visered hand, looking at the screen as he worked.
“destination is eleven sixty-seven madison avenue, m-pasta cucina,” said the too-sweet-to-be-real female voice of the U-cab. We sped into traffic.
I leaned in close to my brother. “I got you, Mateo. You’ll be fine. Just like always. Just like always.”
One of Mateo’s eyes cracked open, just a fraction. I saw a sliver of white polluted with veins of blood. The lid closed. His mouth jerked. He started coughing, a foul sound. Mateo’s body convulsed.
“Don’t speak,” I urged him, amazed at how calm I sounded. I stroked his hair, remembering the day he carried me home on his shoulders after I won my first track meet. I watched his breathing, matching my rhythm to his. “You can do it, hermano.” I said it, but I felt his life slipping through my hands.
“destination is on your left,” said the artificial U-cab lady. “please use caution when exiting the vehicle. doors will open and close automatically.”
A U-cab opening and closing its doors without anyone getting in or out got a few glances, but nothing serious. The machines were far from perfect, and phantom rides were common enough.
“Take us back to the corner,” I told Chris-Chris. “The doctor should be there.”
I muttered a quick prayer that Alissa and Havelock would come through for me. I didn’t address my pleas to anyone in particular. I just hoped someone was listening—and wasn’t too pissed at me for never having spoken to them before.
As the U-cab made its way to the designated drop-off location along the most efficient possible route, a large twin rotor drone flashed past the window.
“That’s not a regular surveyor,” I said, trying not to sound alarmed.
Chris-Chris craned his neck to get a look at the imposing machine, its belly wide and circular like a plate, a pair of massive rotating engines perched above. It was twice the size of a standard Authority surveillance drone.
“Damn, I think it’s a bluekent.”
“A what?”
“It can see through walls and the carbon fiber of a U-cab.” I heard the tremble in his voice.
“It can see us?”
“I think it can see heat: people or force weapons. Energy. I think.”
Mateo groaned.
“Is it looking for us?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Chris-Chris said. “Mateo got hit while we were running away. Maybe the blood…” He stared at the terminal as if it had the answer. “We’re not carrying weapons, though.”
The U-cab stopped at the corner of Eighty-Seventh and Lexington. I wasn’t worried about people noticing us. U-cabs in Manhattan were like cockroaches in Bronx City. But the drones were another matter. They downloaded their data to a central node at regular intervals. The Authority had computers that collected information from every possible source, sifted it, analyzed it, found patterns. “Technology to maintain order,” went the slogan.
The bluekent lingered over a building several blocks to the south while Chris-Chris blinked the U-cab’s headlights. People on the street were watching the strange drone, alarmed. Not surprising, given the dire warnings on the net lately.
I counted my heartbeats as the vehicle idled. One. Two. Three. How many more times could we circle? Four. Five. Maybe Havelock couldn’t find a doctor. Six. Maybe…
The door swung open. A waifish body ducked inside, her short-hair glittering a precious copper. Beneath her bangs were eyes like twin moons, glowing softly in the half-light of the cab’s interior. She carried a small black handbag in her right hand. Her lumin
ous eyes fixated on Mateo, barely sparing a glance for Chris-Chris or me.
“Take your hand away from that bloody rag, back away, and get this thing moving,” she commanded. There was nothing slight about her voice. This woman expected people to listen to her.
She took something from her bag—a delicate combination of metal and glass that resembled twentieth-century reading spectacles. The lenses changed color as she flicked her fingers. Data splashed across her viser screen.
“A little more light in here.”
“Are you the doctor?” I asked.
She didn’t look at me. “No, I’m the Tooth Fairy. I heard you were smart, Daniela. Please do the smart thing: Be quiet, and let me save your brother’s life.”
I shut up and watched Tooth-Fairy-Doc do her stuff. Her hands matched the confidence of her voice, each movement steady and precise. Mateo’s wound got a spray of something that smelled like a lurker alleyway, then more peering through the special glasses. I alternated between watching the gore and the windows. The bluekent had disappeared, for now.
“Take us on the highway, someplace without stops,” Doc ordered.
She gave Mateo a shot of something clear. He became still, his breathing steady. The U-cab had entered the highway onramp when I saw the drone sailing in the sky again. It was headed east. Just like us.
“Chris-Chris, is that the same drone?” I asked, tapping the window.
He looked up. “Can’t tell. Don’t matter, anyhow. They link their data.”
“You said they scan for heat, that they can detect weapons. What about medical equipment? Those glasses?”
Chris-Chris shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Deuces,” I commented as we pulled onto the highway. The drone was about seven hundred yards ahead of us, hovering over the traffic, its sensor array examining every vehicle passing beneath it.
“Doc, can you turn those glasses off?” I asked. “And anything else with an unusual power signature.”
She held a translucent rod in one hand, its circumference no larger than a straw. Its tip was long and sharp like a needle. “I need to implant some nanites to stop the bleeding, internal and external. Both are critical right now. He’s lost a lot of blood. The procedure is quick, but it does use power, several quick surges as the nanites power up, and I need the glasses too.”
“Can it wait?”
“If you wanted me to wait, you should’ve told me before I prepped the machines in my syringe. The implant needs to be deposited inside a human host within five minutes of exposure to air or the nanites go bad. I don’t have another group with me. These things aren’t cheap or easy to come by. His best chance to live is if I do it now.”
A shiver ran up my spine.
“We’ve got another choice,” Chris-Chris said. “They gave us something—a J-Pulse they called it. Something like that. It confuses the Authority drones, supposedly sends them into hibernation mode. It’s like a system error. They can fly but they’re effectively blind. We could try it on that thing up there.”
“Who’s ‘they?’” I asked.
“Do you want me to hit it or not?” Chris-Chris flicked his fingers, priming the device or whatever it was. “Or you going to let Mateo bleed to death?”
I glanced at my brother. He was ghost pale. I reached over and placed a hand on his forehead again. That boyish face from days long ago flashed in my head. He had worn an impish grin back then, so full of spark, energy. Some of that was still inside him. Mateo was strong then, and now.
“We can wait four minutes and fifty-eight seconds, doc,” I told her. “Jamming that machine is going to send the Authority into a frenzy. Chris-Chris, whatever you were about to do, power it down.”
“You goin’ to play dice with Mateo’s life? Girl, you—”
There was enough anger in me to birth an inferno. Some of it must’ve shown on my face, because Chris-Chris cut his ill-considered rebuke short. He looked out the window instead.
Doc put on an unhappy frown but said nothing. Instead, she held her viser screen out to where I could see it. It displayed various data—medical information about Mateo, I presumed. But in the middle was a countdown. Just over three minutes were left. Tick, tick, tick. So went the life of the nanites, and my brother.
Our U-cab sped towards the drone, pacing itself with the vehicles around us. Steady, efficient, normal. Nothing to see here. The Authority’s machine hovered low, no more than ten feet above the traffic. The drone disappeared from my view as we passed directly beneath its sensors. I imagined the information being collected above me, an unfathomable collection of binary data to be analyzed by the networked machines that served the Authority. What did it see inside our U-cab? Just a rent-a-ride, like thousands of others? Or did it know more?
I held my breath until the bluekent reappeared outside the rear window. It hadn’t moved; its engines kept it unnaturally steady as it continued to search for the supposed enemies of order. People like my brother. The distance between our U-cab and the drone grew ever longer, the machine’s outline shrinking behind us gradually. Doc still held out her arm, her viser still counted down. A little under two minutes remained before the nanites expired.
“Any idea of the range of that thing’s sensors?” I asked Chris-Chris.
“No idea, state secret, all that Authority slag.”
I looked at Doc’s countdown, then at Mateo. “Steady as she goes, Doc. Let’s take no chances.”
Doc ground her teeth. “You’ve got guts. Or you don’t give a damn. And I wouldn’t be here if it was the second one, would I?”
I kept my eye on the timer, the speedometer and the drone. One minute and thirty seconds left.
“Go do your thing, Doc. Save him,” My voice didn’t betray the relief I felt at letting the words out.
She already had the glasses on. They powered up immediately. Hands, poised and confident, went to work. Glass and metal went into my brother’s chest. Mateo didn’t even twitch. Fingers flicked, the rod got a small twist. More flicking. The instrument came out coated in my brother’s blood. But Doc’s face was less unhappy.
She stared at her viser, the light of the screen illuminating her eyes in the twilight of the car’s interior. Reams of data scrolled in the reflection. More flicking. She worked for several minutes. Finally, the corners of Doc’s mouth relaxed.
“It’s done,” she announced. “It’s working.”
My heart beat again. “Thank you.”
“Why four minutes and fifty-eight seconds?” she asked me.
“I like to keep some margin for error.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
“Where to now, locas?” Chris-Chris asked.
Doc told him an address: Arden Street. Upper Manhattan.
“That up in the Vision Quad. What the hell you wanna’ go there for?” Chris-Chris asked. “Just a bunch of fancy techie campuses around there, bunches of AT busters wishing they wus’ in Cali.”
Doc flashed him an annoyed grimace. “This is on the edge of the research parks, where they are still developing land. It’s a safe place. And drone flights are heavily restricted in that area. The thought giant corps don’t trust anyone snooping—not even the Authority.”
“Why can’t I just take him home?” I asked.
“The nanites are repairing the cellular damage of the force gun blast, but he’s not safe yet. It’d be a shame to have gone through all this trouble and have him die from an infection, don’t you think?”
“How do you know about this place we’re going to? How do you know it’s safe?”
“Because I’m a doctor.” Her voice told me to drop it.
“I can ping a few of the boys for protection. You know, just in case,” Chris-Chris offered.
Doc turned on him. “If you reveal our location, if you contact anyone, if you don’t do exactly what I tell you, I’m gone. That goes for both of you. And your boy can go live or die on his own. Clear?”
The U-cab fell silent. Doc to
ok that for acquiescence. She busied herself with the data on her viser. She had a smooth face, no wrinkles. Her eyes were hard, but not worn. The doctor was younger than I had thought initially. Her demeanor masked her youth. I guessed she was in her early twenties, maybe.
We drove northwest, past the tip of Central Park, away from the luxury high rises and stately townhomes of the Manhattan elite. Traffic was lighter up here, the night deeper. The grid pattern of Manhattan broke down as the look and feel of the city transformed. Gone was the block-by-block menagerie of distinct stores, parlors, restaurants, and homes that I associated with Manhattan. Instead, immense edifices, each consuming a square block or more, arose from the newly paved streets as unexpected as a waterfall in the desert. The constructions dazzled in their defiance of architectural norms. We passed twin intersecting arches standing next to a geodesic dome, then a soaring obelisk rising among a sea of greenhouses. But each of those constructions were dwarfed by the soaring glass ziggurat that emerged amid a field of seemingly wild greenery, its base consuming three square city blocks. Bright, multi-colored lights shone upon each of the buildings like proud parents. Some structures bore the names of companies or products I recognized, others meant nothing to me. None were illuminated brighter than the rose helix of Rose-Hart Industries.
“Ay, why build such stupid-looking places? Why can’t the richies work in buildings like everyone else?” Chris-Chris muttered as the U-cab wove its way through the increasingly empty streets.
“Almost everything here has been newly built in the last fifteen years or so. This area used to be government housing, a lot of it anyway. Lots of poor folks, lots of working people,” I said, remembering Mateo’s stories. “After Cali split off, the government razed it to create a new home for the great innovators the country supposedly needs: the so-called thought giants.”
“A lot of the corps came from California rather than face the embargo. Even more were started by Silicon Valley refugees with stolen tech, anxious to get rich off someone else’s work. The rest of the US doesn’t recognize Cali’s patent protections,” Doc added.
