by Jim Keen
“If that was such a resounding success, then why are you here?”
“Winter, see? No sun, no crops, need a job.”
“What about your schoolwork?” The Professor knew Red had quit school months ago and was making a point of his low standing.
“Don’t teach electricals in school, do they? Anyways, my rig is a damn sight more complex than some aged-out wires in a sign.”
The Professor raised his arms and the crowd silenced; drunken faces stretched from barstools and wet tables to watch the verdict. He rolled down his sleeves with care, made an exhibition of tying the silver cufflinks, then flexed his fist open and closed. Down or up? Red’s heart thumped so hard he couldn’t hear.
The thumb emerged level, then rotated up.
Riots.
Cheering.
Look straight ahead—don’t crack now. Red made his face a stone mask. You done nothing yet ’cept make eight lifelong enemies. The kids lined up against the worn brick wall stared at him with hatred. He pushed them from his mind and walked to the Professor.
“Give it,” Red said, snatched at the envelope, missed.
“Three hours for the delivery, boy. It has to be there by six, not a minute more. Understand? No second chances, no late arrivals. This is important.”
The Professor lowered the cream-colored envelope. Red hesitated for a moment, then took it. When was the last time he’d held anything man-made? Maybe his uncle’s wool blanket. That was crude, though, old and cheap. This was different: hard edged, rectangular, sealed with a thick blob of wax embossed with the Professor’s sigil—two circles around a central dot. Red turned it over. His filthy hands had already defaced it; a thumb print smeared the virgin paper. His cheeks flushed; the stupid kid who didn’t wash his hands.
He looked at the address. The handwritten script was delicate, beautiful and clear.
For personal delivery to:
Charles Takamatsu,
Cortex Intelligent Machines Inc.
1357 Broadway,
Suite 405,
Manhattan
It was hard to know which was the bigger shock; that this wrinkled old reptile knew the most important person in the world, or that the delivery was to an actual business address on the island.
No one trusted digital communications anymore. Cortex’s analytical engines were just too good at listening in. If it was urgent, it was hand delivered—and that’s where street runners came in. Red had assumed this mail drop was a note to a local bodega or something unimportant. It wasn’t.
This was an audition for talent.
Sweat ran under his jacket, his skin slick against its cold lining; a strong, bitter odor rose from his filthy T-shirt. If he could do this, and get a few more runs, he’d earn enough to bring his mom home once and for all, maybe even get a place where his uncle could stay over.
But three hours to Manhattan was impossible, more so with such a precious cargo. Word would be out, and he’d be tagged the whole way, local gangs beating on him to steal it.
The Professor watched him with arched eyebrows; Red hid his confusion and shoved the letter into a pocket.
“When did you write this?” Red said.
“I forget. Five, six hours ago?”
“And you made me wait until I can’t make it? I’ve no chance in three hours. This ain’t no fair test.”
“Look at me.” The Professor swept a stick-thin arm around the room. “Think this is fair, do you, boy? I helped build the first Mechanical Intelligence. Think after what I did, the money I earned for someone else, this is all I deserve?”
“No sir.” Maybe you should have thought of that before you built it, not after.
The Professor slumped onto a stool. In a moment he aged, skin wrinkling to leave behind an old man with no future. He met Red’s gaze with a haunted look. “You can’t go back, boy, ever. Let no one tell you otherwise. The only thing we have agency over is our future. Now, name the delivery price or I shall revise my selection.”
Red thought of the biggest number he could, one that would change his life if he played it well.
“Ten dollars.” His voice betrayed him at the last, hope cracking it.
The Professor’s laugh was bitter and cold. “I think we can manage that.” He stood, rummaged behind the bar, and held up an old paper note. “Five dollars for successful completion of delivery.”
“Hey, ten, ten.”
“Five now, five on delivery.” He handed it over. “Now you there, listen up.” The old man turned to the other girls and boys in the lineup. Their tattered clothing and blended layers of dirt formed a unified whole. At the Professor’s beckoning, they shuffled forward. “This boy, Red, has a letter for Manhattan delivery. He has five dollars in cash in his pocket. I don’t care who delivers the letter, in fact I—”
Red sprinted for the door, dragged it open, and was gone, his huge boots sliding over the frozen snow. A staccato rattle clattered behind him as the door was shoved open another eight times.
“Remember, boy, you can never go back,” the Professor shouted from behind as Red pushed harder, faster, and ducked into an alley. The East River’s icecap glittered white in the afternoon sun as thick snow fell.
Red rounded another corner too fast, and crashed to the ground with a bang that rattled his whole body, a bolt of pain shooting upward from his ankle. He struggled upright, blood in his mouth, and set off again, half a block ahead of his pursuers.
He had no idea how to get to the island, let alone make midtown in a couple of hours.
3
“Now that the government has officially canceled all social security, welfare, and Medicaid programs, something else will rise to fill the void. In the past that was organized crime, and we are seeing key indicators that a regrouping is occurring in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.”
Julian Nicole, “Challenges Facing the New York Police Department” presentation to Mayor Thornley, New York, 2052
“Sure, the mortality rate will be high, but the whole point of a law-free research zone is we can kill as many as we need to get it right. The taxes we pay ensure no blowback on us.”
Carrol Wardens, CEO, Signal Pharmaceuticals, Boston, 2053
Alice moved through snowfall so heavy she couldn’t see ten feet ahead. Flakes settled on her jacket; white ones that melted, gray ones that left an oily residue and reeked of fat. The gray-storm was overspill from a furnace chimney, the owners using the storm to hide their actions.
There was only one place around here that turned bodies into ash.
The Bridge.
That rusting hulk, once a symbol of New York prosperity, had become Fourth Ward’s headquarters and home to its fearsome leader, Piggy Bank.
Mike had been taken by one of the Bridge’s snatch crews. It made so much sense Alice cursed herself for not realizing sooner. She hunkered down and opened her mouth to hear better, a tactic learned during Marines basic training. There was her whistling wartime tinnitus—such a part of life she didn’t notice it unless she was paying attention—and behind that the faint clamor of people. Voices talking and shouting; animal calls, birds, cows; the grinding of heavy machinery, gritted cogs sucking and pulping.
She crossed to the nearest wall and wiped away a crust of ice covering an enameled sign held in place with steel bolts. The text was clear, printed with large yellow lettering:
—
You Are Now Entering The Fourth Ward Protective Zone.
The Brooklyn Bridge, and its associated environs, are under the oversight of Mr. Bank and the Fourth Ward.
All inhabitants are required to follow the local charter rules.
Failure to comply will result in immediate termination.
—
HEY ASSHOLE
Don’t go crying to the cops.
You fuck around and we will cut you up,
sell the good parts, burn the rest.
THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING
—
Below that an e
mbossed golden sunflower caught the dim light. She’d only heard of Piggy Bank going after rival gang members, or some recalcitrant supplier, before. His scope had changed, and that was a big problem.
Moving past this warning sign would be in direct breach of the NYPD code of conduct, punishable with immediate contract termination. The Fourth Ward’s territory spanned from what used to be the Brooklyn Bridge out to Chatham Street to the north, and Spruce Street to the west. Beyond this point, she would be unemployed, with no support, no backup, and no payoff.
She’d heard rumors of certain specialist undercover teams working down here—the ones filled with burnouts and psychos run by Toko Morris, the NYPD’s latest golden boy—but for street-meat like her, this was a dead end.
If she gave up on Mike now, however, returned to base and left him to die, she’d never get another partner. Rookies aren’t allowed to patrol alone, so her superiors would stick her on a desk for a month, then fire her for whatever bullshit HR thought up that day.
Alice looked back at the cold street behind her. The wind picked up to tear the snow open. The black tarmac was littered with burning trash; every corner and doorway clotted with huddled groups of unemployed, clothes held together with duct tape.
She had enough money for one more rent check.
She turned to the enameled sign.
Her stomach ached with sour tension.
She looked back again but the snow obscured her view.
If she returned to base she was out of a job; if she went forward she was out of a job.
Or maybe not. Penalties for breaking rules of engagement were severe but discretionary; perhaps Mike could put in a good word for her. If he was still alive, that was.
Get real. He’s in as much shit as you are.
The first general-purpose MI had been unveiled only eleven years ago, their vast, alien intelligences replacing mankind at the apex of civilization in a single presentation. Automation followed in a storm that rolled around the planet, obliterating the workforce. Over the last seven years, three hundred million people had lost their jobs across mainland America. No jobs meant no taxable income, no taxes meant bankruptcy for the country, and bankruptcy meant no social security or safety blanket. Lose your job now and there was nothing, and no one, to help you. Once your savings ran out, homelessness, starvation, disease and death were inevitable.
A Hopper flew overhead, bearing the dark blue Cortex logo, the hiss of its Dyson engines muffled by the snow. It rose out of view, headed to a Blade Tower, its occupants oblivious to the wreckage below.
“Money for help? Give me a Gipper, I’ll carry you outta here?” a voice said.
The young woman was wrapped in bloodied nurse scrubs stuck together with pins. She had no shoes; her body shook so hard her outstretched hand was a blur.
“I’m a cop,” Alice said. “Sorry.”
“Fuckin’ Scorcher,” the woman spat, then slipped away into the white air. Alice stared at the swirling hole left behind. She thought of Mike’s wife, riddled with cancer held at bay by medicines he bought on the streets. His kids, older than their years, but still so young.
Fuck it.
If she was going to lose her job, she might as well be able to face herself in the morning. Crouching, Alice inched past the sign to enter Fourth Ward’s territory, and said goodbye to the last real job she’d ever hold.
Alice didn’t know this area of Manhattan. She’d only been on the streets a few months before they designated the Bridge a police no-go zone.
“Suit, when was the last Fourth Ward intelligence report released?”
“No reliable correspondence since official withdrawal one hundred and seventy-three days ago.”
“Nothing?”
“Didn’t I make myself clear? None I know of.”
“Okay. We’re entering a crowd zone, so keep quiet until I say.”
“Thanks so much for pointing that out, I had no idea.”
Her jacket’s inner lining contained thousands of heating elements that kept her mobile while she worked the frozen wastelands of New York City. They sucked juice though, the batteries lasting eight hours at best, and today was going to grow long. She switched the elements off and instantly cold crept inward from her collar and cuffs. The jacket’s outer layers were supple like a rock climber’s gear, but woven from bulletproof fibers wrapped around pinhead lights. Those lights enabled it to spell out any warning required; right now it ran the standard NYPD cease-and-desist legal forms. She reached up to her collar and clicked a toggle twice. The jacket went dark. Her weapons were generic enough, being store bought, so she zipped up pockets, removed the wrist keypad and double-checked there were no other tags or markings that would give her away. She looked as much like a cosplay ninja as she could manage at such short notice.
Time to move.
She’d expected Fourth Ward’s protectorate to be similar to the rest of the five boroughs, only worse. She was wrong. Silence was the first thing she noticed; most of New York City was a perpetual chorus of screams and sirens. Here, she was cocooned by the soft fuzz of falling snow, the clop of the occasional horse pulling a plastic loading wagon, and the hushed tones of huddled groups spread around fires.
Alice studied the people with more care than she had in months. A product of New York’s brutal orphanages and, afterward, a low-level street gang, Alice had thought she was emotionally resilient. Her time on Mars had been physically and mentally devastating, but even so her first few months as a cop had taken its toll. Mike had watched with sympathy as she tried to assist everyone she met, but New York’s desperate situation meant she couldn’t help, that her job wasn’t To Protect and Serve anymore, despite what the NYPD’s branding said. No, a modern cop was all about riot control—making sure the mile-long lines for tubes of carbohydrate paste kept moving, that the unemployment halls didn’t turn into drug dens or brothels. Over the last year she’d built an emotional shield about herself that meant the unemployed became objects to be moved around and little more. To her shame she no longer saw the clotted crowds as people, but as a backdrop, saving her attention for the troublemakers and strong willed who wouldn’t follow orders. Real crime—the organized variety that ran New York far more efficiently than the mayor and his staff ever did—was looked after by specialist police divisions kept well away from street-meat like her.
The people here were cleaner and better fed than she was used to; their calorific intake exceeded the emergency rations handed out by the National Guard every morning. Their fires weren’t the gasoline-fueled blazes the Brigade spent the whole day chasing either, but smaller, contained by metal funnels Alice hadn’t seen before.
She watched as children played outside, snowmen built and kicked down, the process starting over. One boy looked at her, waved, then took a bite from an apple. She’d tried an apple when she was working as a runner, but that was years ago, the memory vague. You could buy printed versions now, but they were too sweet, the texture all wrong; something to do with misalignment of the print heads.
She walked on, looking for tracks, boots cracking black ice that melted to reveal red crystals. She squatted and placed one on her tongue. Rock salt. They were salting the streets down here, making it safe for people to get around. Why hadn’t she heard about this before? Why was no one talking about how Fourth Ward had established a haven here?
“Suit, any tracker signals?”
“I would have told you if so.”
The snow abated and Alice moved on, the gray flakes transforming to white dots that melted on her face, her tongue. The bull-black sky fractured and yellow sunlight cut through the clouds to dance over the road. There were Rules and Retribution signs pasted on every wall, but there were also people, more of them, all moving in her direction.
The next corner opened onto a four-lane road, the intersection rising up to the Bridge entrance. Cars were aerial these days, only the poor and desperate at ground level, and so this urban wilderness had been repurposed. Thin c
arbon rods rose to hold fractal camouflage nets over the street, the smart fabric held in tension by a complex system of ties and pulleys. As the wind shifted the nets moved across and back again, maintaining a perfect, flat surface. The upper surface would mimic ground level, but alter the image to show burning trash and crowds fighting for scraps of food. This was military tech, and ferociously difficult to buy on the streets; she had no idea how Fourth Ward had sourced it.
The crowd surged toward this covering; there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people on the move. Alice worked her way to one side and stopped, tried to survey her surroundings without drawing attention.
A security checkpoint sat below the canopy, manned by a team of hack-jobs—part human, part reprint. It was hard to tell much more from this distance, and she didn’t want to use her visor out in the open. An operation this large, well funded, and organized was bound to have aerostats running facial recognition software and for all she knew they’d already scanned her. Would the Bridge’s supervising systems have her biometrics on file? To analyze this number of people it would have to be a smart-system: at least a Type 4, maybe a 5, but not a fully sentient MI. Those cost more than skyscrapers and were all registered with the UN. That meant the security system couldn’t make deductive leaps, and was only good at analyzing information it already had. Her military and police records were all encrypted and stored inside uncrackable federal MIs. So—in theory—the only intel out there should be her orphanage and school reports.
In theory.
As for how she would get through the weapons check … well, that was a different challenge. Everyone around her was carrying products to sell, bulging bags full of anything you could tear from an old building: copper pipes, lights, sticks, broken furniture, and, here and there, the green tufts of real vegetables sourced from window boxes and hidden rooftop gardens.
