A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  Matt was recording the conversation by then.

  “So, you guys. You're besties, right? Where'd you meet?”

  “College. At a self-defense workshop,” said Georgia.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Have you seen the data on campus rape?” said Cady, using a pair of chopsticks to awkwardly move a large piece of fried crab meat into her bowl.

  “So you're like unstoppable killing machines of death?” he asked, with poker-faced sincerity.

  “Worse,” Georgia answered. “Female game devs.”

  “Our superpower is ruining everything,” said Cady.

  “So, Georgia, did you help Cady on Murder City?”

  “Nope. It's all her own work. She doesn't play well with others.”

  “It's true,” said Cady. “I'm just a girl with mad coding skills, but no people skills.”

  “And your diagnosis,” Georgia prodded. “Don't be modest. You're a high functioning sociopath too.”

  “According to 4Chan.”

  Matt took out a Field Notes reporter’s notebook. It looked to be about half full already.

  “According to Reddit,” he said, flipping through the pages, “you're an insufferable lesbian, and every boy you ever dated died mysteriously after placing five-star reviews of Murder City in the gaming press.”

  “The technical term is ‘corrupt gaming press’.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  “You're actually sitting down,” Georgia teased. “This is why nobody trusts the media anymore.”

  More food arrived. More food than they needed.

  The restaurant was uncomfortably hot and noisy with the crowd by then. A family moved into the booth behind Matt, a single dad and three daughters. They looked young, the oldest possibly not even in school yet, and they were hideously excited. Their father looked pained as the girls launched themselves at the moving buffet.

  “Choose careful, girls. I only got thirty bucks to get us through. Maybe some avocado rolls?”

  Cady was looking directly at him when he spoke, and his eyes locked on hers, his voice trailing away at the end, the three hungry children ignoring him completely. She felt herself blushing again. Without asking Georgia or Matt, she grabbed the plate of hand rolls which had just arrived at their table, stood up, and walked them back to the next booth.

  “We over-ordered,” she said. “You should have these.”

  The girls fell on the food.

  “Rocket ships!” the oldest one cried out.

  Their dad started to say, “That won't be necessary—”

  But Cady spoke over him.

  “Yeah it will. We ordered too much. Chill. It's all good.”

  She spotted their waitress a few tables over, and before anyone could stop her, she marched over, pointed out her booth and the family next to it, and explained she would be paying for the little girls and their dad. Satisfied, she returned to Georgia and Matt. He was smiling crookedly at her. Georgia was not smiling at all.

  “What?” she asked, slipping back into her booth.

  “Nothing,” said Georgia, in a tone of voice that said everything.

  “I'm gonna just … go to the bathroom,” said Matt.

  “What are you doing?” Georgia whispered fiercely when he had excused himself.

  The embarrassment Cady felt when the girl's father had caught her looking at him returned, doubled in strength. She dared not look in his direction.

  “Shut up,” she said, in as low a voice as she could and still be heard. “I was just helping.”

  “You're not,” said Georgia. She flicked her eyes over the back of Matt's seat. The guy was still sitting in the booth, his daughters oblivious to any disturbance in the Force.

  But even Cady could tell now there was a great disturbance in the Force. The man was concentrating fiercely on his food, staring at the hand rolls—“rocket ships!”—as if defusing a time bomb. The three girls feasted merrily, but he did not eat at all.

  “We'll talk about this later,” said Georgia, “but promise me you won't do anything stupid to look good for Matt again. Anything else,” she added.

  Embarrassment threatened to flare into anger then, but Cady got a hold of her temper before it broke free.

  “I don't know what you mean,” she said.

  “Yes, you do,” Georgia shot back. “You were being selfish in that very special way you have, Cady. When you don't think about anyone else. Just yourself and what's best for you. But I said we'd talk about it later.”

  “No, we'll talk about it now.”

  Her anger was returning, like a wrestler who had been pinned suddenly finding a way out of the hold down.

  “I wasn't being selfish. I was thinking about—”

  Georgia leaned right into her personal space.

  “You were thinking about how it would look when Matt wrote you up as the most generous girl in the world. But that's not how it will turn out, trust me, because that's not how it is.”

  She almost left then.

  Almost stormed out into the cold.

  She could even see herself slamming her last sixty-three dollars down on the table of the booth next door. And it was only that image, of a crazy woman throwing money and shade at three little girls and their poor single dad which brought her up short.

  Maybe she had been a jerk?

  Maybe she was insufferable?

  Considering the possibility was enough to drain her foul temper. It was like losing herself in the effort of solving a really complex coding problem.

  She took a sip of her beer.

  “Okay,” she said, quietly, being even more careful not to catch the eye of anyone in the next booth. Not the children, and certainly not the father she'd probably embarrassed.

  Humiliated, even.

  “But now I gotta pay for their dinner, too,” she said quietly, knowing Georgia would understand what she meant. Georgia knew her better than she knew herself. “Can I borrow some money? Or do you think we can hit up BuzzFeed Guy for it?”

  3

  It wasn't a total disaster. Matt really was a good guy, and he made nothing of the awkward break between Georgia and Cady when he returned from the bathroom. They didn't ask him to cover the extra check, though. Didn't even mention it. Georgia slipped the waitress her corporate Amex.

  “I'll tell Bungie I was trying to recruit you,” she said in a discrete aside before Cady left. “They'd wet themselves if they thought there was a real chance you might work for them, or even consult. Their augmented reality guys are a bunch of ass-clowns.”

  Cady agreed to meet up with Matt the following day. He wanted to watch her at work, but she said that would be as boring as watching him type up a story. Worse. She wrote in Swift, not English. Georgia suggested she take him on a tour of all the local software houses she'd been fired from before opening her own one-woman code shop and writing Murder City.

  Done deal, they said. A date.

  The three little girls and their dad left an hour before Cady. They weren't hanging around for beers with BuzzFeed guy. The oldest of them stopped at the table and gave her a note.

  “I drew you a picture of unicorns,” she said, without explanation.

  “Unicorns are awesome,” Cady smiled, “and so are you. Thank you.”

  “What was that about?” Matt asked, although he totally knew.

  “She had the best kill streak of everyone in her kindergarten,” said Cady. “She just wanted to say thanks. Happens all the time.”

  And it did. Not the kindergarten thing. That was an outrageous lie, which would probably read well in his final story. But it did happen that, on the rare occasions she left the apartment, she was sometimes recognized, and people did come up and tell her all about their latest hit or longest kill streak in the game. You saw people playing Murder City all the time. There had been think pieces about it. And hot takes. So many hot takes.

  That was only going to get more intense after Matt's story ran on BuzzFeed. T
wo thousand words, he said. A major feature. The publicist she'd hired said she should get ready to do some TV after that. Maybe even the morning shows. Cady wasn't entirely sure how she felt about that. Her idea of breakfast TV was Netflix with a microwave burrito lunch. But she knew her parents would be thrilled after years of trying to explain to their friends and neighbors what the hell it was she did for a living, and why she kept getting fired.

  Her dad would probably start sending her VHS tapes of her appearances.

  But it would sell more copies of the game.

  She shivered inside her leather jacket and pulled the scarf tighter around her neck. She had an update she wanted to get ready by the end of the week, and she already knew she was going to work through the night on it. She had warned Matt not to come looking for her before lunch time.

  The streets were much quieter on the way home. The rain had stopped, and the clouds had broken up in patches, letting through the light of a handful of the brightest stars. But only the brightest.

  Her phone buzzed. A message from Georgia. Despite her earlier resolution that she would not stare at her screen while walking along the street like a phone-zombie, she pulled it out and read the series of blue bubbles as they popped up.

  Sorry.

  U know I only want the best 4U.

  Cady, all artists r selfish and selfishness will take u a long way, but it won't get u where u need 2b.

  We only get there by helping each other 4 real.

  Also

  The skull and flame emoji popped up, this time with Edvard Munch's The Scream.

  Translated?

  Die screaming in a fire.

  Cady smiled before she could get angry again.

  L8r, bitch.

  Another canned response, but a genuine one. Georgia had been right. She'd been wrong too. There was a part of Cady that had honestly felt the pain of that dad in the restaurant. She knew what it was like to have to get through a whole week on a handful of carefully hoarded cash. She had no idea why he took those girls out to eat when he was so broke. But he had his reasons, and she was only trying to help.

  Georgia was also right, though, because she'd known exactly what she was doing when she made a show of paying for their dinner.

  She was making sure that Matt Aleveda got a good look at her being Robin Hood, or Cady from the hood or whatever. Taking money from the rich—and who was richer than Apple?—and giving it to three poor little girls sentenced to avocado sushi.

  It was in that exquisitely awkward moment of self-realization, when she was dying on the inside at just how transparent and obnoxious she had been, that they came for her.

  "I don't like you walking the streets at night the way you do," her mother said.

  "Be in the world, not on your phone," the aiki-jutsu guy at the self-defense class said.

  “I'll be fine,” Cady McCall had protested when Georgia and Matt insisted on walking her home after dinner. But they didn't insist very hard. They had just ordered more drinks, and it was obvious where that was going. Her need to get back to the 0.1 update had finally got the better of her, and besides, she had all those self-defense classes and her trusty can of Mace, and it wasn't like she was some retard who walked along the street, alone and lost in Facebook when she should have been "in the world."

  Was it?

  The first she knew of the danger was when one of the men grabbed her arm. She did exactly the wrong thing, trying to pull away instead of going with the flow of the attack as she had been taught. Or to be more accurate, as she had been told, because she hadn't been taught, had she? She had learned nothing.

  She dropped the phone, and the screen shattered. Strangely and stupidly, that was what she cared about, a broken screen on a two-year-old phone, and not the man who had just grabbed her forearm and was dragging her into an alleyway.

  She tried to scream, then.

  Screaming was good, the self-defense instructor had told them. Screaming was a natural response to the horror of an attack, and you should not underestimate the horror, the pure, organic fear and loathing you would feel when another human being laid hands on you with hostile intent.

  Use the fear, they said.

  Scream, but scream with intent.

  Turn it into a war cry. A fearsome shriek into the face of an attacker will stun him. Not for long, but it will interrupt the momentum of the attack just long enough for you to respond. It would disrupt him.

  You work in digital, Cady. You should know all about disruption.

  A war cry would take his balance.

  They were very big on "taking balance" in the self-defense class. “Take a man's balance, and you take ninety percent of his strength,” the instructor told them. He said this with the smooth confidence of somebody who knew themselves to be right.

  Take his balance psychologically with a fierce kiai, the warrior's shout. Take his balance physically with kuzushi; when he pulls, push. When he pushes, pull. Do not resist with strength. Meet hard with soft. Be water around the rock.

  It was just a stupid campus self-defense class. Twelve weeks. But those twelve weeks were based on thousands of years of experience in the combat arts. It should have counted for something.

  Maybe it would have, if any of the training had come back to her. Maybe if she’d kept up her training, like Georgia, who still attended classes three times a week.

  But Cady hadn’t, and so none of it counted for shit. Not her twelve weeks of messing around in class. Not the millennia-long history of actual combat and intense training which underlay the ancient fighting art.

  Cady screamed and seized up and struggled and fell to the ground, where her knees hit the edge of the gutter, and she lost even more of her balance, dragging the first man down on top of her.

  A rush of images and sensations.

  Pain in her knee.

  More pain in her arm and shoulder as the man holding her wrenched them, hard.

  Skin scraping off the back of her fingers on the wet surface of the road. The electric jangle of impact running up through her funny bone.

  A harsh, unpleasant smell, like burning motor oil.

  Silence.

  They said nothing to her. Made no threats. No demands. They didn't even breathe heavily.

  Crying pitiably, she tried to twist out of the grip on her right arm, but it was like trying to pull a limb out of a piece of farm machinery. More pain, and no sense at all that she could escape.

  And then she was free.

  She felt the nearness of some great impact, like a car hitting a tree down the street or a heavy load falling out of a high window and landing behind her. And then she could see the stars again, those few, lonely diamond points which managed to peer through the broken cloud cover and the glowing cloak of the city's light dome.

  It wasn't silent then.

  “Leave her alone, you sonsabitches.”

  A man's voice, a deep and rolling thunder in the night.

  And then the dull, concussive pounding of fists on flesh.

  They made some noise then, the two who had come for her. One cried out like an animal, a dog with its tail caught in a slamming door. The other grunted and snarled and said something she could not make out in the chaos and fury of the fight.

  She was in a fight!

  The realization struck her as a solid blow, solid enough to knock her from her feet had she not already been sitting on her ass in the gutter, curled into a ball as three men sailed into each other with fists and boots and elbows and knees.

  And when it couldn't get any worse, it did.

  “Look out, girly!” the big voice called out, the one which had broken over her and her attackers like the opening thunderclap of a summer storm. “Knife!” he shouted.

  And she did move then. She rolled away as best she could from the frenzy of three homicidal maniacs who seemed to be fighting over her.

  A thought occurred to her, or maybe only the fragment of a thought, because it was small and broken, and it flew
through her mind far too quickly for her to hold on to.

  Did she do this?

  Was this her fault? Something to do with the game? Murder City.

  But it really wasn't the most important thing right at that moment, was it? She let the question go as she rolled like a log out into the middle of the road.

  Jesus Christ. She was gonna get run over.

  But if she didn't move, she was going to get cut.

  With that little bit of distance, she could see what was happening for the first time, could finally start to arrange it into some sort of coherent form.

  Two men versus one.

  The duo looked like … well, like nothing and nobody. Unremarkable men, unremarkably dressed. One of them in a pair of jeans and a plain hoodie. The other in chinos and a Seattle Mariners rain slicker. You could stand behind them, waiting for a burger at Red Mill or Zippy's, and two minutes later you wouldn't be able to recall a thing about them.

  Hell, they could have been sitting in the next booth over at sushi tonight.

  The other guy, the cowboy, she thought because …

  Because he looked like a goddamned cowboy.

  Not the sort of heroic idiot who wades into a mugging out of some archaic sense of manly moral obligation. But an actual cowboy. With cows and stuff.

  Of course he had no cows with him right now, but he was wearing a big hat.

  A cowboy hat.

  And a belt full of bullets. And a six-shooter at his waist. And his brown suede jacket looked like he'd cut and tanned the hide from one of those cows of his that she couldn't see right then. And his jeans didn't look fashionable, they just looked old and dirty.

  And he smelled.

  Like cattle dung, wet leather, stale sweat and cigarettes.

  He was holding a knife.

  Which was kind of weird, since he'd been the one who'd shouted the warning about a knife. But the other guys were also holding knives, so Cady supposed that made sense of a kind, although her head was swimming, and she wanted to vomit, and her vision was greying out at the edges.