The Paradise Factory

by Jim Keen

  Alice ran her hands over her uniform. Her pockets were filled with nasty little pieces of equipment, each designed to hurt, maim, or kill, depending upon how much of a jerk the perp was being. She’d bought each piece on the black market; most were illegal but ignored, some only obtainable through off-world contacts. Any self-respecting security guard would pay Obamas just to play with them, let alone purchase.

  She looked around. An old plastic bag was half-visible beneath the melting snow. She picked it up, shook off the ice, and took the wide disk of a Bunny Bopper from a back pocket. It was the most invasive device she owned, a shaped-plasma charge that could carve a hole through an aircraft carrier. If the Bridge was off limits to the law—and covered with this level of security—there had to be markets selling more than salvaged house parts and fresh fruit. She dropped the disk into the bag and mentally added weapons dealing to her growing list of offenses.

  Alice blended into the crowd and moved forward; the crush pressed inward, the cloying space full of sweat and cursing. She tilted her head back and inhaled long drags of cold air; exhaled rods of white frost. The shouts and cries around her lessened as the crowd passed beneath the nets, people aware they were entering dangerous ground. Garish animations scrolled across the underside of the taut fabric contrasting with the digital camouflage on the other side. Some of the videos were Fourth Ward propaganda, others from the mayor’s office encouraging weapons and medical startups to move to New York: Test what you want on our bridges, kill who you want in our tunnels, that’s no problem in the Big Apple!

  Alice approached the security zone. The hack-jobs guarding it were high-quality work. Each graft looked clean, the blue zip-scars showing no signs of infection or immunosuppressant complications. The guards all had boosted arms—some with legs to match—which suggested bespoke MI designs rather than generic knock-offs. Consistent skin tones, symmetrical lengths, random freckle patterns. If it wasn’t for the scars delineating old and new, and the collection of QR codes and DNA registration tags, you wouldn’t know you were dealing with a hybrid.

  Alice elbowed her way to the edge of the crowd and stopped. The Bridge emerged from the snow like the skeleton of a dinosaur; the ancient stone towers, cables, and rods submerged under a coral reef of new growth. Ducts rose a hundred feet into the air, while vast water pipes traced along the towers and down to the frozen East River, billowing clouds of steam. The structure looked more a factory than ever, some immense bootstrapped machine with an unknown purpose.

  Now she understood the NYPD’s general order to leave the Fourth Ward alone. The idea that she might stroll in, bop the kidnappers over the head, and walk out was the delusion of a child. A panicked sickness rose in her stomach, fear and uncertainty coming in waves. She had put herself way beyond the line a cop was allowed to tread.

  To go back was pointless; to go forward was reckless.

  Her heart kicked, adrenaline and stimulants fizzing. Tingling ran across her arms, and she looked at her hands, turned them over and back, the black bulletproof gloves a second skin. She made fists, then stretched her fingers taut, exhaled clouds of fog.

  Be true to yourself: get Mike out, or get the evidence to call SWAT in.

  Alice elbowed forward, ignoring the curses, until she pushed up against the security barrier. An inch-long mylar aerostat dove toward her, tiny engines screeching, and scanned her face with a thin green laser. An alarm rang out: the throng dispersed as if she were an oil drop in soapy water.

  “You,” the closest hack-job said, his head a foot and a half above hers. “On the ground, now.” He drew a needle gun and sighted along the barrel.

  Well, that didn’t take long, Alice thought, as she kneeled and raised her hands.

  4

  “Living out here, under the arches, is better than being in there, and ordered around by a forklift truck.”

  Mark Noble, unemployed warehouse manager, Brooklyn, 2053

  “First time it froze was maybes a few inches, but it’s got worse with all this new weather. Foot or two now, don’t see open water until July, then only for a few months before the snows start again. Shit, be seeing penguins here before too long.”

  Bill Smicer, Hudson River fisherman, NY, USA, 2054

  Red was a skinny kid, decent stamina but neither fast nor nimble on his feet. His huge boots pounded the frigid cobbles as shouts came from behind. His outfit wasn’t made for sprinting: too tight and heavy. Angular types would have worn runners or something light and sensible, but Red would rather have his legs amputated than wear half the stuff street kids rolled in.

  His ankle thumped with a sickening pain as the first bands of a stitch tightened about his chest. He pumped his feet, kept his breathing in check, and skidded around another corner. More shouts from behind, louder, closer. This area of Brooklyn was filled with old warehouses, the tall, graffiti-smothered brick walls crowding in on either side. The ground was an assault course of cracked and peeling tarmac and loops of material bent into trip hazards ready to throw him to the floor once again. A rock shattered against the wall near his head, showering him in sharp fragments. Another street, more clumps of unemployed huddled in corners, shouting at him as he raced past. He cleared a mumbling, semiconscious woman in one long leap, fell down hard, boots sliding on black ice, then up and go go go. A scrawny hand grabbed at him from a doorway, missed. Red kept pushing, breath a leaden weight in his lungs, left foot, right foot, move.

  The pain in his ankle, legs, and chest became overpowering. He staggered to a stop and flashed a look behind: the gang was less than twenty feet away. He gulped air and burst forward, as fast as he could go, putting everything he had into one final sprint to shake them off. He needed a plan, something to give him a break. What to do? He tried to think but his mind looped in panic, the urge to hunker in a doorway and give up pounding him in waves. He’d never see his mom again if he did that; he had to keep going.

  Snow flashed onto his skin, across his face, in his eyes. Small white flakes at first, then waxy gray ones that reeked of sour fat. The Bridge was close, its body furnaces fired up. What about there? He’d sold blueberries in its open market a few times, and there were plenty of places to hide if you could sneak onto the main span.

  No. If he went there with nothing to sell, the Bridge kids would chuck him off the side, watch him make a red circle on the ice below.

  Besides, that whole area was Fourth Ward territory, and so locked down you couldn’t even spit on the sidewalk without some ’dult getting in your face about social responsibilities. Last thing he needed was some self-appointed champion of the peace enforcing whatever rules they’d made up that day.

  Cold air burned his throat. His feet skipped over the iced cobbles. Another fall or a twisted ankle and it was over.

  He gave one final panicked burst of speed, and saw the East River’s ice crust bright in the distance. He looked behind him—the gang was closer, lips pulled back in white snarls. In a minute he’d be out in the open and exposed to the local kids. He needed a plan, but exhaustion and fear wouldn’t let his mind settle.

  Red burst onto the waterfront. Across the ice, Manhattan’s Blade Towers rose into the sky, hard and linear trusses lower down, becoming mutated soft structures as they entered the darkening storm clouds. Glittering lines of Hoppers connected them, automated jewels against the leaden sky. Red had been to this area of Brooklyn before, running errands for his uncle, but it had changed since his last visit.

  There were more Fourth Ward signs now, their beachhead growing into Brooklyn. The Manhattan Bridge lurked to his right, what used to be the Brooklyn Bridge to his left. Before Dyson engines made local aerial transport commonplace, these riveted dinosaurs carried cars, people, trains. Now anyone with money took Hoppers, snuggled safe in heated seats while children froze in the streets.

  Where to go? Where? The Bridge was out, and the Manhattan Bridge was even worse—nothing but a festering half mile of drug distilleries and arms dealerships. The Scorchers woul
d sweep through every month or so to keep their arrest numbers high. Red didn’t know what was worse these days—jeeks mashed on the latest chemicals, or the Scorchers acting all superior behind their bulletproof cop gear. His mom was right about one thing: you never, ever, trust the police.

  “Give it up, stop, don’t make me cut you up.” The breathless shout was so close Red didn’t dare look back, just ran for the river, sweat steaming from him like a racehorse.

  He’d seen kids try to make it across the ice a few times before. Not many succeeded. The snow made the entire surface look the same, no way to tell if it was an inch or a mile thick. Red flashed a glimpse at the Bridge. Clouds of fog shrouded the stone towers, while icebergs piled beneath the main span creating a white wall. That, at least, should hold him if he could make it there.

  Red reached the river’s filthy concrete wall and clambered over, and onto, the ice. His worn rubber soles had no grip and he slid and fell. He pushed himself up as the chasing gang reached the wall. A heavy girl with a broken nose pulled a knife.

  “Give it,” she said and stepped onto the ice.

  Red edged backward, his feet loose under him, arms flailing like sails. “We can talk this out, right?”

  She moved in a relaxed skid. “Give it, or I cuts ya.”

  Red matched her pace, moving away from the shore. The Bridge steamed to his left, icebergs rumbled and cracked as they became wedged underneath its main span. The snow was thick; cold water seeped into his boots as he squelched backward. All he needed to do was—

  There was a crack beneath his feet. Another, another, then one that was longer and louder. In dreadful slow motion the ice disintegrated, and Red fell through into the poisonous river.

  The cold shook Red so hard he gulped a lungful of the oily, black filth. He retched, spat, hands scrabbling for the edge of the ice flow. He went under, came back up, and caught a glimpse of his assailants backing off, mouths open.

  “Help me—” he gargled as the tide seized his boots and dragged him under.

  Red’s mom had bailed near on a year ago. It was hard to know for sure; it wasn’t like he kept a calendar or anything. His uncle took him in without too much fuss. The old horse had his rules, most to do with his music collection, but didn’t everyone? If you spend all day, every day, in your apartment it’s bound to give you a few kinks.

  In those early days the old man treated Red like broken furniture. Only music got him going, old stuff on these big black discs. Red hadn’t liked it at first, then he listened to the words, felt hope behind the noise. It was written by kids like him, fucked up and fucked over, music their only way out.

  The day uncle Joey gave him an old leather jacket had been the breakthrough. Red painted them cool sound waves from one record on the back, and the ransom-note letters from that other album on the front. Afterward it was better between him and his uncle—not great, but Red no longer felt in the way, and slept on the sofa instead of the floor.

  Their apartment was on the fifth floor, its single-leaf brick wall facing south. In the summer it shimmered like a fusion reactor under the inexorable sun. That gave Red the window-box idea, and the fruit sales saved them.

  Red looked up at the yellow disk of the sun, its pale fire weak and distant. He couldn’t imagine ever feeling warm again, the surrounding cold a relentless force. The sun buckled and warped through the passing ice as the tide dragged him along. He reached up with dead fingers to touch the hard surface as it slid by.

  There was a fire in his chest; bubbles rose from his nose to glimmer in the dim light.

  His boots were so heavy, the water so black.

  Most of all he was sorry; sorry he’d never see his mom again, sorry he’d not learned to play the guitar, sorry he had to die doing something as stupid as mail delivery. How would Uncle Joey cope without Red’s income? His mom was certain Joey had money stashed away, but all Red ever saw was an old man living frugally enough to get by.

  His arms dragged behind him, his hands bunched into claws. Blood pulsed in his ears, a thud so loud it he thought his head would split open with it. His lungs burned with the desire to breathe, air pushed at his clamped lips, desperate to be released. It was brighter now, shafts of white light spearing the blackness. This was it—death’s hallucinations, the last thrashing of his subconscious.

  Then the cold lessened, the impossible numbness replaced with an enveloping warmth. Red looked up to glimpse sky rippling through open water, fishermen waving at him as he drifted past. He half felt, half saw, something vast approaching, and he twisted his body. The Bridge’s masonry towers sank away into blackness, while the open mouth of a steel duct belched huge steam bubbles. He pushed upward, kicked with his boots, and his head broke the oily surface. He managed one freezing gulp of air, went under again, then clawed his way back up.

  Ice had melted around the ductwork’s sides to form a circular pool of water, but the tide was carrying Red past it, and back under the ice. He had seconds, at best. He kicked toward the tower and flailed with his hand. An old, rusted metal ladder had been glued to the stone beside the duct. With his last dregs of energy he grabbed the bottom rung and clung on, half in and half out of the water.

  There was nothing for his feet to grip, and the tips of his boots skidded across the submerged stone. A sharp pain grew in his elbow as his weight bore down on the rusted metal. The steam made it hard to breathe, his lungs straining. He squeezed his eyes shut, and stretched upward to find another rung. The metal was hot and wet under his fingers. He gripped, pulled. Again. His whole body shook with the effort, mouth clamped tight, face to the skies, but he repeated the process, arm over arm until his feet found leverage and he lifted himself free of the boiling water.

  Red hung there, sucking huge lungfuls of cold air, then vomited black water down his front. The snow was heavier now, the wind freezing—the storm he’d spotted earlier had arrived. He clung to the ladder, life spreading through him with every breath, and looked back at the open water. Maybe he could jump in, swim against the current, then—

  No point. The kids from the Crazy Horse were running, skidding, and falling their way toward him. He had to go up and onto the Bridge.

  Red summoned what little energy he had left, and pulled himself upward one rung at a time.

  5

  “Some inventions arrive with a bang and are overnight successes. Mechanical Intelligences—MIs—were like that. Once Cortex got their Babbage circuits perfected, those alien life-forms were everywhere. Organic printing is the other kind of invention, the sort built upon years of slow and steady research.

  The dream of being able to manufacture human body parts has been around for decades. The first prints were individually modeled on 3D systems, generic and expensive, but life changing to those they helped. Then MIs came on the scene. What had taken thousands of hours by hand could be brute-forced in minutes, and now anything is possible.

  Full-body reprints, a fountain of youth to the rich, are tightly controlled by the UN’s Department of Proliferation Control (D-PRO), and ferociously expensive. Most reprinted owners reside in the towers and, as such, are of little consequence to us. There are simpler ways to upgrade, though—illegal body shops will replace any organ for the right price. There are laws preventing augmentation, but it requires exhaustive tests to determine if an arm is a standard reprint, or an upgrade with titanium bones capable of puncturing your street armor. Therefore, in stop and search scenarios, it is official policy to shoot first and ask questions later.”

  Michael Strapson, “Augmentations and Approved Violent Retaliation” NYPD academy class lecture, New York, 2051

  Alice lay shivering on the tarmac as the security team spread out to surround her. Weapons hummed and clicked as they spun up or sucked power from battery packs. What had tagged her? Was it the retina scan? If so, that meant the NYPD MI had been compromised by Piggy Bank’s hacker crew. All the big talk about how analytical engines were foolproof and incapable of error was such bullsh
it.

  She had gear in her suit that could take out the locals, but there was no way she’d be able to handle the aerostats. It only needed one with an active suppression system and any escape attempt would be over before it got going.

  I’m sorry, Mike, she thought as the closest hack-job shoved a Glock GS-V handgun into his belt and grabbed her with his reprinted arms. She saw their registration tattoos, bio-equivalent picked out in small red text. The tags were fake; the hack-job lifted her as if she were a child. The muscles had boosted strength at a minimum, maybe marrow batteries wired to alloy bones.

  Alice’s Marines training covered a range of interrogation scenarios. There was a point where the pain of torture overcame any training, so the aim was to prevent it from happening in the first place. There were two approaches—agree or disagree with the interrogator. First was to try to help from the start, stupidity replacing honesty: Me? Oh no, sir, I didn’t mean to, this is all a terrible mistake. The other was to chew the scenery and fight back: Get the hell away from me unless you want to end up hospital.

  This team of hack-jobs were grizzled and street worn. They must have heard every hard-luck story going, desperate people trying to sob their way through the market. Better to go out fighting.

  Alice twisted and beat the thug’s arm as hard as she could. It was like punching a steel plate.

  “Hey numb nuts, put me down before we get ourselves a problem. I’ve errands to run.” She windmilled her arms, struggling within his grip, her combat boots two feet from the floor. Laughter broke out as the guards enjoyed themselves.

  “One-Eye, we got a complication. She triggered the prohibited-tech scan. Check her out.” The hack-job holding her spoke with a light, effeminate voice that contrasted his overly pumped physique.