by Joshua Klein
Tonx sighed and leaned back into the grey polyplastic of the taxi, suddenly very tired. He should message Pharoe, set up some credits as a token thanks, hint at future services to be rendered. But he was tired. Now that he was able to act the action was done. A monumental sense of hubris filled the back of cab, sat thick and steaming over Tonx all the way to the hotel.
When he arrived he tossed his duffle on the cheap bed and took a shower first thing. Crawling out of the steam he decided against hitting the nightlife; he was too burnt to do any good. He sent out some mails to Pharoe and Cass, promised to contact them in the morning and slipped into clean, air-conditioned sheets.
When he woke up the light coming through the three-foot-wide porch windows was metallic and thin. After fumbling behind the curtains for a while he found the LCD tint control and slid it off entirely. Tiny, electrically controlled pixels embedded in transparent film in the glass turned sideways, the window became clear, and solar heat washed over Tonx's body. It was going to be a hot day.
His first order of business was to find someplace safe to hole up Poulpe, and maybe others. He didn't know if Pharoe's guys were going to want to hang with him - chances were good Pharoe would want to ensure his investment, and Tonx would have to provide some kind of push-back. Their bid wasn't a sure thing, but if it worked out he didn't need any "help" with artificial debts to pay off.
Tonx had been to Texas a few times. There were some serious hardcore mods developed out here, biological rejection therapies tested on backwater hicks in clandestine mountain cults, radiation tattoo gangs, trailer-park gene therapies, the works. Texas was a big place - big enough to hide just about anything.
Now Tonx had to find a place to hide himself and a few friends, some place clean and safe and with a solid comm feed they could access.
The first order of business was getting a hold of John Tucker. John's Dad had pioneered the bodmod scene ages ago as an errant son to a medical equipment supply company maven. He'd decided to use his training to make real tools for hardcore bodmodders. Laser cutters, epidermal lifts, osseointegrated plug-nuts and more - securing patents for all of them, of course. John's dad had held rituals in his living room, implanting nails into break-point posts to make real spiked mohawks. He'd been the first to use lasers for scarification purposes (intentional, anyway) and developed the entire field of teflon-coating implants. He was on the wanted list in four different states, received permanent protected status from the Hell's Angels, and eventually fled to Texas. This was just after he discovered the use of coral as an implant medium for making horns, elbow spikes, and the like. There'd been an incident where he was trying to irradiate the coral to control its growth and accidentally turned his subject's frontal lobes to sludge. When the police arrived he provided the waivers and legal documents protecting him from all liability and was pronounced a danger to society on the spot. While his lawyers (who were many - lawyers always have kinks and always love favors) started heading for the supreme court with his case he fled straight to Austin. Your average Texan didn't much like the kind of people Phil Tucker serviced, but they sure as hell weren't going to put up with being told what they could and couldn't do with their own bodies. Besides, it was one short step from controlled-growth coral horns to tummy-tucks and the ubiquitous titanium mesh breast implants, and although nobody wanted to say it they sure as hell weren't going to do without them. It wasn't the easiest place for a pioneering bodmodder to be, but in a lot of ways it was the safest.
So John had grown up with a powerful sense of personal liberty and a nation of awed miscreants to back him up. Tonx and John had gotten on like a house on fire when they met at the Implant and Scarification Consortium in New York, and after a three-day bender had established a lifelong friendship. They'd always stayed in touch, and a lot of Tonx's work had been built on stuff John had come up with or scraped off his boots after tromping through the filthy nooks and crannies of the Texas plains.
He rummaged through his bag for some jeans, found an ancient Punky Brewster brand beer shirt and tugged it on. It was a tight fit; Tonx kept himself in good shape between the muscle work and his Aikido, but a tight shirt that emphasized your biceps was almost de rigueur down here. Next he pulled out the grayed leather kit with his toothbrush and tattoo needles (just in case) and sat down in front of the obligatory dressing-room makeup table. This was the part of being in Texas he didn't like; the constant need for makeup. First he slathered on a generous coating of sunscreen, covering his arms and face and the back of his neck. He was careful to get his ears; last time he was down here he'd forgotten them and they'd developed tiny white pustules that slowly secreted millimeter-long, waxy eggs of dead tissue. For weeks. Next he drew on dark eyeliner and thick red lipstick pulled out wide across his cheeks. Texas was a goth state, especially Austin, and if you wanted any credibility you had to play to the audience. Finally he pulled out a topical numbing agent and threaded microfilament needles through his cheeks along his jaw line, over the lipstick, white LED posts glowing like pearly teeth through a head-wide smile. It was a look he'd come up with just out of school, and it'd taken off big down south. He was over it now, had been for a long time, but knew it'd emphasize his cred.
Finally he gelled his hair into a hard shell of spikes and went to wash his hands. Too goddamn much product. That done he pulled on his glasses and thumbed his comm for a taxi, grabbed his jacket and went outside.
Fifteen minutes later he was standing in downtown Austin. The place was clean, pristine, and as angry as he remembered. Austin's government had gone for wind power as an alternative to oil once the reserves had started to tap out and been largely very successful. They'd also decided to go with the Gay theory, which said that in order for a city to grow and profit it needed a large population of educated, artistic young spenders. Homosexuals were pegged as a the benchmark for success along the metric, and the city planners had done everything they could to import them. They attracted a wildly diverse population, including a lot of educated people, a lot of artistic people, and a lot of young spenders. They also got a shitload of angry radicals and a furious split of opinions among the general populace. Between the emphasis on clean energy and environmentalism and the continually escalating tension between "locals", Austin had wound up a very angry place. Tonx didn't know anywhere else that bar fights were started with intentional littering. Now he was here in the thick of it, smelling the hot grease stink of the streets, taking in the feeling of the city, watching the body language and modeling his own to fit. Tonx didn't want any undue attention, he wanted to find John and get some results.
Unfortunately John didn't own a comm. It was a complete pain in the ass but Tonx had to admit it ensured both his safety and his rep. If you wanted to talk to John Tucker, you had to ask for him, and the person you asked had to decide to tell you. This meant that you never found him until he knew you were coming - and you both knew a half a dozen people knew also. John had plenty of theories on the social dynamic he claimed he was using, such as the idea that it went both ways. John thought that by requiring word of mouth and local social networking he was enabling a six-degree rule - that he knew everybody in the world by a string of relationships through no more than six people. His name was widely known, and continued to be known by constant reinforcement, even if only as "the crazy bodmodder from Texas who has no comm." It was true John did exceedingly well at contacting folks and finding that one right person for a job, but Tonx wasn't convinced it didn't have more to do with his fame. John, for example, was fully Roo'd.
Being Roo'd was the quintessential bodmod, being exceedingly dangerous and risky as well as dramatic and beautiful. It was developed out of nowhere by a team of Icelandic prostheticists working in conjunction with a team of Israeli surgeons, and the number of people in the world who were fully Roo'd could be counted on both hands. The number of people who had tried but failed numbered considerably more. Those people spent their lives, if they lived, in wheelchairs.
To get Roo'd you had to have your legs effectively amputated below the knees. The first person to be Roo'd, Haldor Haldorsson, had had his legs run over by a semi-autonomous rock-crusher in the arctic deserts of Iceland's highlands. This was not an entirely new occurrence; what was new in his case was the salinated cold packs they stuck his lower body in when it happened. That's where his luck started. Then he was rushed to a hospital that happened to be right in the middle of a convention on new prosthetic technologies coming out of Iceland, and had attracted the attention of fifteen world specialists on leg surgeries including the group from Israel. Haldor was a very lucky man.
It turned out that the nerve tissue and much of the muscles in his legs were salvageable, but most of his bones were absolutely ruined. A big chunk of his tibia had snapped straight out of his right shin, and in the rush to get him to a hospital was now missing. (It turned up later, stuck in the tire of the rock-crusher). The scientists in residence conceived of a radical and bizarre suggestion for saving his legs. It was later reported that they were all drunk when they had come up with it, but nevertheless when Haldor regained consciousness he was presented with twenty-three cocktail napkins detailing a radical experimental surgery. Haldor was a typical Icelander, blue-collar and fluent in three languages. His hobbies included competition-level team handball and translating Latin texts to Icelandic. In his own words, broadcast across the world in dozens of languages, he said: "having my legs reshaped like a kangaroo's sounds fine. Very fine."
Very fine. The scientists shredded the muscles in his calves, microscopically separating fast-twitch fibers from slow-twitch. They replaced his lower leg bones with shortened carbon-fiber titanium amalgam plates; stronger, more flexible, and twenty times lighter than bone. His Achilles tendon was stretched, reinforced with cloned tissue, and re-strung. His feet were completely restructured, the last two toes removed. They fused the two toes next to his big toe, giving him two fat pads to stand on, and replaced his heel with a compound amalgam joint. The fine bones in his feet were replaced with one long grooved plate. The ball of his foot was reinforced, artificial muscle grafted along his entire leg, his skin stretched on metal frames in a saline bath while still attached at the thigh. He stayed in the bath for two weeks, drunk on morphine analogs, surrounded by floating bits of his own muscle and skin. When the skin had grown long enough and the muscle grafts fully took, they sewed him back together. One month after the accident Haldor Haldorsson walked out of the hospital a man like no other man had ever been, his blond face ruddy in the sharp wind.
He stood a full seven feet, his thighs canted at a 45-degree angle towards the ground and bulging with hormonally exaggerated muscle. His feet were as long as his thighs, his shins substantially shorter. His toes had been microscopically grated to create thick calluses, and the nail beds had grown together and thickened to provide traction for the extra musculature. They'd implanted a thick sheen of hair over his thighs, and tanned the skin overall for a healthy glow. When reporters had asked him what it had been like to be flayed in a saline tub for two weeks he'd simply said "Yah, yah. No problem. It's very fine."
It turned out to be more than fine. Haldor was able to jump almost twice his normal height, standing, and could take six-foot strides at an incredible pace. His handball team soon rocketed to the top of the Icelandic charts, Icelanders seeing no reason that an unusual surgery should require artificial handicaps in aid of the other teams. The carbon-fiber and titanium bones in his legs bonded perfectly with his muscles such that they flexed slightly, giving him more power and speed than his even his surgeons had imagined. Haldor spent eight wonderful months as the world's most famous man before turning up dead of morphine overdose in his Nike-sponsored summerhouse in Denmark. It turned out that addiction ran in the family.
Since then the U.S. Army, NATO, most of the Caribbean and a hundred individual profiteers had tried to replicate the surgery. The idea of supermen that could out-run and out-jump any normal man appealed enormously, but the realities of massive body reshaping cut everyone's fantasies short. Being kept flayed alive for a month in a salt tub was not, it turned out, especially healthy, and finding the right balance of muscle growth and hormone therapy was almost impossible. Haldor Haldorsson had been a miracle, but he'd inspired the world to think of their bodies as something malleable. One year later a Taiwanese baker underwent the surgery after being run over by a tank and survived. Another wave of attempts followed. It produced three successes, in Russia, Japan, and Austin. John Tucker was one of the winners in the karma lottery that time - and the only previously unharmed volunteer for the procedure. An estimated 130 people weren't so lucky and were left permanently crippled; the process didn't leave a solid enough bone structure to fit normal prosthetics. Two people died. A year after that the bodmod scene had truly taken off, and the cage-fights like those that Marcus competed in began to overtake sports like "normal" boxing. But there had yet to be any more successful Rood's - most folks were happy taking a prosthetic leg and a lifetime of walking to a month of pain and the possibility of being permanently relegated to a wheelchair.
The upshot of this was that a single tattoo from John Tucker earned him about as much as Tonx made in a week of work at Greener Pastures. It also made him a lot easier to find. Tonx headed downtown, the Texas heat making tiny rivulets of gel trickle down his temples as he went.
He and John had been talking about how to make getting Roo'd safer for years now; being Roo'd had been Tonx's dream before he had gotten into MIT, and being out hadn't diminished his dream any. But Tonx was neither as crazy as John nor any less intelligent, and he wasn't ready to take the risk until he had a reasonable chance at success. Recently John had been sending him a steady trickle of emails hinting that he had found some new information, but they'd always been couched in terms of cash flow. Tonx didn't hold it against him - John knew a lot of people, and sometimes getting information cost. John knew Tonx wanted to get Roo'd bad, and Tonx knew John would put him at the head of the list if he ever got the cash, but for now John's lips were sealed. Which was okay - John was a purist. He wouldn't sell the info to the military, he'd make sure a true bodmodder got it first. That didn't make Tonx any less anxious; there were plenty of bodmodders with money out there, and Tonx wanted to be one of the few while there was still time.
After too much time in the afternoon sun Tonx finally found what he was after. Tucked in the basement level of a three-floor polyplast apartment building was the gleaming green sparkle of neon. A glance through the window told Tonx he had the right place and he slouched his way through the undersized doorway. The AC hit him like a blow to the chest, over dried air artificially chilled by a dozen old units mounted in the windows along the top edge of the wall. This was the place. Seven pairs of eyes turned and sized him up as he came through the door, the dim light of the beer sign over the bar illuminating countless rugs and cushions covering the floor around the bar. Tonx had gotten lucky - three of the teenage boys situated in careful nonchalance around the low table in the center of the room were sporting skeleton grins like his. Their luminescent piercings slowly pulsed a reddish hue in a broad imitation of a skull's smile, intricately permed and pressed curls held up with foot-long fakir needles. The remaining two boys wore identical floor-length carbon-fiber trench coats and wraparound sunglasses. Neos. Serious throwback culture there, thought Tonx - despite the Matrix's cult following he was always surprised to see the dated style reappear. The one girl on the floor with the boys was broad-hipped and overweight, white folds of flesh puckering out between the cotton strings of her undersized corset. Her wonderbra exhibited all the gravitationally impossible qualities its advertisements promised, the wattles of her chin pooling slightly where her bizarrely tanned cleavage met with her neck. The curlicues of her eye makeup were uneven, Tonx decided, but her lips looked great. Probably her first mod.
He walked up to the bar. The massive lump of a woman there had her arms folded impassively, the grayish-white plugs of earphones prot
ruding from uneven ears. Her chin nodded slightly in tune with the unheard music, and her deep-set eyes glared over Tonx's shoulder. Someone took a pull from the oxygen bar set in the table on the floor behind him, the burbling sound long and clear.
"Bear" he said.
"Tonx" she replied, her eyes snapping to his, her broad smile spreading to reveal three golden teeth and one silver cap. Bear was serious old school, had been piercing and tattooing for years up in Seattle. She'd moved to Austin for reasons unknown, her steady hand and solid bedside manner making her an instant favorite. Trouble was, she didn't go in for anything more high-tech than antibiotic cream, and most of her clients weren't content with that. He'd spent a few drunken nights teasing it out of her and had been impressed to learn that her reasons were spiritual: she felt that bodmod was a ritual to be honored, a rite of pain and passage, and using machines or tech tools to do the otherwise impossible went against the meaning in it. Not that she held it against those that chose to go that way - just that for her, she only wanted to do what she could do with her own two hands. Bear was a true-blue bodmodder, and Tonx had to respect her for sticking to her guns even if he disagreed with her reasoning.
The downside of all this was that she only really got older folks and kids in her shops, people that were too chickenshit to go for what they usually really wanted. Kids like the ones sitting behind Tonx now.
Didn't matter. Bear was a good egg, as Tonx's dad used to say, and he knew he could trust her. He pulled up a stool and nodded towards the lone beer tap.
"Buy you a drink, Bear?" he asked. She smiled, thick natural muscle rippling up the side of her head and into her graying crew cut.
"You know I don't drink, you little cunt. But I'll cred you a free one for bringing me the looks from the boys there." She glanced briefly over his shoulder at the kids behind him, and Tonx smiled. He could tell by the furtive whispers that he'd been recognized. They'd be messaging their friends now, the bar's reputation jumping on the newsgroups even as he sat there. The mods styles he'd invented weren't popular everywhere, but where they had stuck his name was worth something. Bear should be able to count on a week or so of good business due to the visit. It was a strange currency, but the beer was cold and free for of it.
