by John Shirley
Spanx, articulating his free-association, glanced down past the catwalk at the street. “How many stories down, those little cars, those little people, that little truck? Twenty?” A seagull flew by beneath him. “Hey bird the sky’s up here ya dumb featherhead!” he called.
Chattering to himself, Spanx reached the steep stairs he wanted, this one made of old railroad ties, and climbed it, holding onto the frayed yellow-plastic ropes that served as banisters. It was colder up here, and a wet wind was blowing. A big dented mystercyke vertical sewage pipe, four feet in diameter, gurgled next to the stairway. He could smell the sewage in it, running down to the drains in the center support building, dollops leaking out badly connected joints.
Spanx reached the top, found himself in Rooftown itself, squinting against a drift of smoke. Smell of burning garbage, gasoline and trash in metal drums—the old gasoline storage tanks were still being sucked out for basic fuel. This level was a maze of interconnected shanties, made of scrap tin and allwall and mystercyke; on his left were fifty square yards of shanties, on his right Rooftown rose in tiers, becoming a haphazard tower of improvised, stacked boxes, swaying in the wind. He licked his lips. His mouth was so dry, now, it was hard to talk here. Needed a drink. “Just a little slip of a sip between brain and lips, whippity whip whip!”
Hugging himself against the chill, Spanx walked along a track made out of random, dissimilar segments of scrap wood and planks of mystercyke. Faces looked out at him from the shanty doors, holes cut for windows; most of them Latino, some African, a few Asian, a salting of grimy white faces. The post-global warming immigration surge mostly found work, absorbed into service jobs and blue collar work—whatever was cheaper than maintaining robots. But they were always underpaid and housing was expensive, so some of “The Population Overflow”, as the iNews sites called it, overflowed to Rooftown. The Immigration people were afraid to come up here, and not only because of the perpetual risk of the whole structure collapsing; one or two immigration agents had vanished, were rumored to have joined the mummies in the walls.
Spanx turned past a group of bundled-up men huddled around a flaming, rust-red steel drum on a deck made of mystercyke freight pallets. The wind carried a shred of low-altitude cloud to break against them, and Yodeller—a man with burnt-red skin, his face mostly hidden in red beard, red dreadlocks drooping over his eyes—called out to Spanx as he passed. “Hey it’s Stick Figure!” Yodeller having an unnaturally high-pitched voice. “Have some wine, Sticky, ya freak-hode!”
Spanx paused, drew deep on the half-gallon of sweet red wine. Took a deep breath. Took another swig. Passed it back, talking again as soon as the bottle had left his mouth. “Whoa I’m all, like, unstuck now, my lips was stuck together and my brain was stuck and my rotters was stuck and my thoughts was stuck–”
“Hey you got those rotters, hode?” one of the men asked; a vulpine man looking at Spanx narrowly.
“Nah, nah, nah, I mean, feels that way ...” Spanx did have the microscopic rotor shaped nanos, paid for by the money they’d made off the single—a tune called “Make it Last Way Past”—a few years back, and the “rotters” were still running, little nanobots swimming in his brain, tuning his brain cells to stimulation, always stimulation. The rotters were supposed to let you sleep when fatigue-poison levels reached a certain point, but he’d had the rotters signal-set so that they maximized the stimulation and so it took three times the fatigue poisons it should to get them to switch on the brain’s sleep center. The manual advised against that. “Nah nah, haven’t, haven’t got ’em ...” Denying it to the vulpine guy because there was a story that people who found out you had valuable brainbots would follow you and jump you, and kill you and crack open your head and they used some machine to go through the brain tissue and magnetize the little bots out and use ’em themselves or sell ’em. Maybe the story was just paranoia, just myth. Sure, right, right, could be. Or maybe not. In that moment, Spanx was able—just barely able—to keep from talking aloud about his rotters.
“Thanks for the wine hey, ya, hey is Danny around, is he up in the Pisa, he up there, is he with that Linda up there, in the air?” The tower of stacked-up shanties was called Pisa, after the Tower of, because it leaned so much. Something from his childhood came to mind. A Dr. Seuss drawing. His mother had liked to read Dr. Seuss to him. Same old stabbing pain at the thought. “Green eggs and ham my brain, with a bloodstain,” Spanx intoned. “Mommity mom mom, go outta my head, Mommity mom can’t help being dead.” That’s what he called her, Mommity mom. They’d been close. His dad had been a good guy, so far as he remembered, but the old man had died early on, so he’d been all about his mom, and his mom had committed suicide, because of some cancer that kept coming back and coming back and coming back. They’d cure it—and it would stay away for awhile. And then it would come back. It just kept coming back. Something about plastic molecules sticking to DNA. A “pollutant cancer,” the doctor had said. Cure it and it’d come back, and finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. Swallowed a bottle of her pain pills.
The band had made fun of how much he was into his mom. Except Danny, he’d been pretty nice about it. Lost his folks too.
“I don’t know nothin’ about yer mom,” Yodeller said, a bit defensively, not realizing Spanx had been thinking aloud.
“Yeah, but no, but yeah, but what about Danny?” Spanx persisted.
“I saw him go up there,” said Yodeller, “Dunno did he come out, there’s more’n one way. Hey you got any–”
But Spanx had moved on, was climbing a curving ramp made of the recycled-plastic slabs so ubiquitous now. Followed it into the uneven passage between the shanties. Ducking under electric wires; juice stolen from below, seemed like miles of extension cords. Lights from computers, holotubes, televisions, solar-energized animated posters glimmered through cracks and glassless windows. The gear mostly from discarded-tech donation centers.
The Pisa swayed, and creaked and moaned in the wind. Sheets of black bag waterproofing snapped in the wind. Muttering to himself, Spanx passed a community privy, and held his nose. They hadn’t rinsed its ditch-pipes in a while. He climbed to another ad hoc floor of the tower and heard a woman’s voice, a familiar nasal whine, “Danny please don’t ex, please don’t ex ... ” Coming from the left—there: wedged between, below, and above four others, was Bev’s little shack, made of allwall and scrounged aluminum window frames. And there, visible through the window, was Danny, cramming a much spray-painted snapper, partly open to seven inches square, into a backpack. The door, that didn’t quite fit in the doorframe, was closed but not locked. A quarter-inch of air all the way around it.
“Little Danny playin’ with his toys, be a good boy don’t make no noise,” Spanx said, pushing through the door.
“Who’s that, Danny, get him out, Danny don’t go with him!” Bev wailed. A woman who had tanned herself a little too much, so the skin was getting mottled and leathery-lined in places; she wore only an open bathrobe, naked under that, with long but thinning brown hair, tattoos on her breasts, “face not too bad, tits just okay”, was Spanx’s automatic evaluation. She was at least ten years older than Danny. The tat on her left shoulder was bio-electricity active, an animated image of an ugly duckling turning into a swan, over and over again, the swan flying away, the ‘duckling’ reappearing, turning into the swan ...
The shack was about fifteen feet by twenty-five feet, the ceiling bowed by the weight of the shack piled above it. There were plastic jugs of water, and other fluids, against the translucent back wall, there was a big pyramid of dirty clothes, a greasy futon, a cage with two fat scrabbling gerbils in it, and a shadeless lamp, the only light, sitting on the cage.
“Danny don’t! Don’t GO!” Bev was wailing, rocking back and forth, clutching her bathrobe shut.
Wearing snakeskin boots, jeans, a leather jacket with no shirt underneath—the tattoo of a crowing rooster, most of its lower body hidden in his pants, its head bristled red and blue just below hi
s navel—Danny was plucking items of dirty clothes from the pile, the ensuing avalanche of yellowing laundry inducing a memory of Spanx’s first and only year in college. “Demonstrating catastrophe theory,” Spanx said. “That’s what you’re doing, Danny.”
“What you want?” Danny asked. “I got no time to listen to you chatter, hode, I’ve gotta hook-in to go to. Little V-trip. Took me three days to raise the money.” His voice, to Spanx, always sounded like one of those tall women with the low voices.
The wind soughed through the cracks, and Bev wailed, and Spanx said, “We gotta gig, man, we gotta gig. Pays some money.”
Danny looked at him skeptically, scratched in his explosion of jet-black dyed hair. “How much? When?”
“Twenty-four hundred shared, my guitar sky-god. Saturday night.”
“Not much time for rehearsal. We’re rusty. And you know we only got this because somebody cancelled.
“So Kyu Kim cancelled, whatever. People will come. You got a following and they get a good crowd on Saturday. Sinkitties there. Flow’s okay.”
“Danny don’t go they don’t care about you!” Bev keened, rocking in place.
“Huh,” Danny said. “I need the flow. But I don’t wanna show myself in public like that, my brother’s out of jail, he’ll get wind of it.”
“How you know he’s out, he was gonna be down for the UnMinding a long fucking time, hodey brudder.”
“Because Tranny Tammy saw him in Nodder’s and she called me—why you think I’m packing up, hode? Everybody knows I been staying here.”
“Your cranny’s working? When you get that implant going? You get a signaler?” Spanx’s own phone implant wasn’t paid up, had been shut off.
“Yeah yeah it’s working, don’t matter how. I can’t be doing shows man.”
“You heard him Spanx!” Bev whined, wiping away tears. “He can’t do it he has to stay with meeeeeeeeeeee!”
“Shut up ya, oh ya, ya sweatin’ slit,” Spanx said, wondering what Bev was fucked up on. Something for sure.
“Danny you going to hit him? He says that to me you have to hit him, please Danny, hit him and stay with me—throw him off the platform and stay with me–”
“Shut up, Bev,” Danny said wearily. “Spanx, I could do a session but not a show. Swore I’d stay straight ’cause Rick took the fall for me. And I didn’t stay straight. He’ll be mad. I’d be fucking mad too. He finds me, he’ll surveil my ass till I use, get me busted this time, teach me a lesson.”
“Don’t got a session. Got a show. I’ll give you half my share if you play it, hodey brudder you suction-pump, you.”
“Oh man. Fucking hode.” Danny shook his head. “Then you’ll guilt me about it. ‘I gave you half my share, you V-rat’.”
“Nah I won’t-y won’t-won’t. Come onnnnn, come onnnnnn.”
“Where’s the gig?”
“The Black Glass club, bub. Not a big place, so not a big pay, James Earl Ray.”
“Who’s James Earl Ray?”
“I don’t fucking know, my dad used to say Ray was the gloved finger of the FBI, whatever that means. But my dad died so I didn’t get to ask, Trask. Don’t Crash, trash.”
“Get a grip on that babbling bullshit. Where’s my gear? Zilia don’t have it? She was saying she was gonna go get it to be paid back the money ...”
“She didn’t get it, it’s good debit. I got your best guitar, I got your playbacks, I got your digiflagger, I got your amps, I got all your fucking testicles, wiggledy-wiggledy–”
“You got all the gear?” Danny looked at him with surprise. “Come on, hode. You didn’t pawn none of it?”
Spanx was insulted. He’d stolen some of his sister’s jewelry, visiting her house, and pawned that, without qualms. But band equipment was sacred.
“No fucking way! I’m not like you, my crew!”
“Okay, okay, well—when is this thing? Maybe if it’s pretty soon ... I can do it, and get away before he grabs me ... You guys could keep him busy, while I slip out or something, those clubs are buzzin’ ... we could think of something ...”
“Then come on, come to my place, we’ll get a rehearsal on.”
“No Danny don’t leave me-e-e-e!”
“Just to get the fuck away from that noise, girl—I’m going. Come on, Spanx ... you fuckin’ wanx.”
Candle was beginning to feel like he was spinning his wheels. He sat at a wobbly table in Nodder’s bar, the place now mostly deserted, playing Hold ’Em poker on a borrowed blueglove, with Nodder and a wild-eyed young blond Norwegian kid who kept overplaying his hands. Nodder and Candle were waiting for Shortstack to get back from his “ginger” so they could finish their business. He glanced at the digital image in the palm of his glove, which showed the community cards and his hole cards—his two-pair were no better than they were last time he’d looked—and asked his thumb what time it was. The thumb on the sheer digital glove soothed, in a woman’s voice, “Four P.M., Pacific Time.”
“You getting impatient?” Nodder asked, glancing at the palm of his blue glove.
“Yeah I am. I’ve gotta go out and find Danny. He hears I’m out, he’s liable to leave town. Ginger’s going to take Shortstack some time—genetic re-engineering takes some goddamn time, like a week in some clinic or ...”
“Nah, not always. Depends. You just think like that because you’re a basic.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what Shortstack calls people that haven’t been gingered.”
“My DNA was screwed up enough when my parents got married. I don’t need some pseudocompetent wanx with a degree from, like, the University of the Falkland Islands retrofitting it. Accidentally giving me a face on my ass or something.” Maybe he should bet ... but Nodder could be slow-playing trips.
“Face on your ass might come in handy. Watch your back for you.”
The young Norwegian laughed at that.
Candle snorted, peering at the little image of his cards in his palm. “If Shortstack’s into that, can’t he ‘ginger’ himself larger? Taller? You’d think ...”
“There’s limitations to retro-engineering. Complications, genetic frontiers. Naw—he can’t do that. He did though give himself an ...” Nodder yawned. “... an enormous—enormous ...” Then Nodder’s head drooped. He started to narcoleptically nod out.
Candle gave out a near-shout: “Raise, a hundred!”
Nodder snapped awake. “What? You’re raising me?”
“I could be bluffing.” But he wasn’t. The dealer—a server in some distant place—had dealt the river card, giving Candle a third five, and a full house.
Nodder frowned at his palm. “Uhhhh ... I call.”
Candle looked at the Norwegian kid who closed his fingers into a fist, folding with a scowl.
“Full house,” Candle said, sending them the image on his palm. Trying not to sound triumphant.
“Shitter shatter! Hey—instead of the cash how about I give you that glove. It’s been ID neutralized. Somebody left it here.”
“Or you pulled it off a sleeping drunk?”
“Same thing.”
“Well hell, if it’s blank, I can put my own stuff on it. Thanks.” It was worth more than Nodder owed him.
Shortstack came in then, all jaunty, grinning energy. He was carrying a pizza box. “You see? Didn’t take long. Just had to get the ATP turned up in my mitochondria. Means I got to eat more, though. Who’s for curried pizza?”
Candle pocketed the blue glove and they ate, sharing pizza with the crestfallen and now much poorer Norwegian, who had murmured of winning the World Hold ’Em Poker Tournament someday. Then Shortstack wiped his mouth and said, “See you later, Knut. Candle, come on.”
Candle got up—and froze, squinting at an upper corner of the dimly lit room. It was like a piece of one of the chain of handcuffs decorating the wall had gotten free and was drifting in the air, near the ceiling ...
Then he realized it was a birdseye. He was being watched by another
silvery, bird-sized surveillance drone. Not quite the same model as earlier. Just slightly larger, its silver body supported by transparent-polymer wings beating with hummingbird rapidity. Watching him.
Either someone at a surveil-monitor somewhere was staring right at him through that thing, or a wide-task law enforcement computer was just doing a biometric scan on them, to see if there were any outstanding warrants here. If there were any, Candle knew, that didn’t mean they’d rush the cops over. They’d run the warrant through a program that triaged for priority and unless it was multiple murder, terrorism, or digital banking fraud, probably no one would show up anytime soon, if at all. But if it was a Slakon bird, they’d send some boys around. They let him slip through their fingers when he got out of jail and now someone was trying to make up for slacking.
“Shortstack,” Candle muttered. “Uh ...”
“I see it,” Shortstack said softly, not looking directly at the drone. He signaled to Rina who was just straightening up from installing a beer keg behind the bar. “Hey you got an audience, Rina. If it’s a man on the other end of the feed, then maybe ...”
