Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

by J. M. Kaukola

  "And yet all you have is the assurance of a program, whose base code you have seen, that it believes that it exists. The zombie presents its challenge."

  "When did you pick up philosophy?" He asked.

  She answered with a devilish grin and said, "Last semester. You knocked out those 'soft' credits. I believe you called it an 'easy four-pointer'?"

  He made a sound like a deflating balloon. "Yeah, well, I didn't expect you to get all existential on me."

  "Deal with it." She replied. She put their hands between them, once more, and asked, "The question stands. Do you believe me? Is my word enough?"

  "It has to be." He said. He let her go and met her stare, dead on. "It has to be, or the argument is circular, and I'm losing my mind."

  "Did this solve your question?"

  "No."

  "Then why did you ask?" She had that look again. The sad/concerned one that tore him apart.

  "Because I can, and I must." He answered. This time, he pulled her close and didn't flinch away.

  She whispered, "I knew I liked you."

  "That's what all the masks say."

  That got him a punch in the stomach. The hardjack conveyed a good approximation of bludgeoning, which did make him question the designers' intents. He must have thought it too loud because that line of questioning brought a giggle from the mask.

  They laid in the chair for some time, until the chime sounded in his head. Lauren perked up and advised, "Time to get up. You need to get something to eat."

  Firenze waved his hand. A macro executed, and a conjured sandwich appeared on the table with a refilled glass of water. He reached for the food but grabbed empty air.

  "No." Lauren admonished. The ephemeral trails of the delete command swirled around her fingertips. "You need real food, not simulated, not a meat-space IV. You need to get up, stretch, drink water, and eat a decent meal. Come back to me in forty, for your meeting with Professor Neland. I'll take messages until then, pretend to be you if I have to, but you've skipped two meals this week. No more."

  Firenze sighed. "Alright, alright. You don't have to nag me about it."

  She glared at him.

  "I'm going!" he insisted. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and cut the connection, like a puppet taking scissors to his own strings.

  In darkness, he fell.

  Severing felt like the vertigo he got just before he fell asleep. First came the sudden plunge and twist, then he grabbed the bed and realized he'd never fallen at all. When he opened his eyes, though, he was hollow. The world was desaturated, a million sensations collapsed into seven. This was a lesser world, small, shallow, and viewed through a tunnel. In the single moment of collapse, he experienced the death of reality: beaches dried, trees withered, winds stripped the sand from the bedrock. Code and pure math retreated as a world ground to dust. From grandeur to void, through a light-speed rush of entropic force, he crashed back into the frail, sickly thing called reality.

  This was where he'd make his fatal error.

  Curiosity

  Grant Firenze opened his eyes and awoke to the dream. The ceiling-fan blades beat a faltering rhythm, their motor grinding over chipped bearings. Through sleep-crusted eyes, all he could see was the beige-on-gray blur of the prop against the peeling paint. His arm stung from the hardjack and the tug of the IV.

  Hurt. The first thing he felt was a dull, oppressive pain. He reached for the plug with numb fingers and plucked it free with a groan. The IV followed, popped clean of the dock just above his wrist.

  He forced himself to sit and waited for the diffused ache to resolve. Minutes passed, and the world transformed from noise to muted blobs of color. Only then did he pull his glasses over his nose and attempt to confront 'reality'.

  His apartment was too cold. The temperature had fallen with the sun, and the sliding door was off its track. The wind cut through the cracks on the balcony blinds, escorting in the neon sunset, alternating blasts of purple and green. Firenze glanced towards his clock. Seven. The sun would have gone beyond the towers by now, and wouldn't be back until ten tomorrow. Loward never got much light.

  A foil wrapper danced from the overflowed trash and scampered across the threadbare carpet. It bounced on the frigid breeze and crumpled against his naked foot. Disgusted, he snatched it up.

  He staggered across the studio apartment, shoved the wrapper deep into the can, and stumbled towards the fridge. Loward was never silent, even at night. The lights buzzed, and the pipes choked. His fingers closed on the bare metal of his ancient fridge, and he heard the sirens rise again. It was another beautiful night in the city.

  Firenze pried the refrigerator open, and the industrial monstrosity clanked in protest. Today was a big day. He could afford to treat himself to a 'peanut butter chocolate' bar instead of a 'peanut butter' for dinner. It was all protein paste, anyway.

  He used hard soda to burn away the clog in his throat, then tried to force down the first gob. The bar was tough as rubber but with less taste. Chewing wasn't the right way to describe eating a dole bar. It was using his teeth to bludgeon a semi-edible springboard into compliance. On the student-dole, though, you couldn't beat it.

  Carefully, he wound his way through the piles of trash and electronics, past his toolkit, flash banks, and microfab, plodding towards the neon glow outside his balcony. He tried to force down the bar, but the mush was still solid. He had to chug down more soda to eat away the mass that glued shut his teeth.

  Inside the net, he could have been eating a five-course meal, instead of the Authority's weaponized protein paste. Right now, he could be standing atop Everest or lying on a beach. Instead, he was stuck in this trash-heap with a heater that swerved from 'freeze' to 'boil' and windows that couldn't hold out frost nor flies.

  He tilted the 'sliding' door aside and ducked onto his porch. Bereft of sunlight, the thousand-story neon barricades turned loward into acid twilight. Above and below, lights. A hundred thousand balconies popped from duracrete towers, close enough he could throw a ball to them, far enough that he never had to know them, stretching from the heat-hissing dronetown baffles to the shining, sun-kissed heights of uptown. A liftcar blasted past. It surfed a heat-mirage wave and cast a steam-cloud wake through the canyon. When it passed, that steam froze in gray slicks upon the walls and dripped towards the tiers below. Across false-bottom of the plaza, half-drowned in liftcar wash, crimson glopaint promised relief, measured in credits per hour. Firenze took a long drink and tried to remember his far-away campus green.

  Online, this was a rolling park with untainted streams. He could play pickup games of flag-football with fellow students from across the world, or talk shop over a beer. He tutored from his favorite hill, sat on a stacked-stone wall, and learned in the stately cathedrals of science.

  Below, a crowd had filled the plaza, their bullhorn chants turned to noise between the echoing towers, lost in the blast of steam, lights, and engines. He could see their signs, at least. The folding OLED banners and glopaint placards were as violently illuminated as the billboards on the walls. Firenze fished his hand through the canted door and snatched his binoculars from the stand. He wanted to see this.

  'End the Occupation!' one sign declared. 'Democracy Now!' called a second. 'YOU are the Crisis!' screamed a third. A chant took the crowd, not that Firenze could make it out, but the call-and-response rhythm was hard to mistake, even through binocs. Firenze chewed his protein sludge and washed it down with carbonated dreck.

  He scanned the crowd and looked for leaders, seeing if it was anyone he knew. Suze and Kendrix were into this shit, but there was no sign of either. No surprise, there. Kendrix did digital work only, and Suze wasn't dumb enough to get caught in the open. The protests were getting worse since Monterrey. He'd seen the leaks. The fucking army had gone full-out on their own city, burned it half-down to 'save it'. The Authority had become a sick punchline to the human joke.

  A flash of blue caught in his lenses, and he traced it down the plaza. He
spotted the cordon just outside the maglev station, where rows of security waited. Cops perched behind barricades. Gendarme guardsmen half-rested against armored cars. All had their lights up, but no sirens. They were tolerating the protest, for now, but stood ready with lines of shields, batons, and stingers in case this rally metastasized.

  The crowd really shouldn't have bothered. That's what he'd told Suze and Kendrix when they started badgering him to 'get involved'. The Authority had been fucked the moment it opened the net. Information was a gate they could never seal, and they couldn't beat out an idea.

  Not that they wouldn't try.

  A new sound echoed through the canyon, one which carried over the humdrum and buzz. This wasn't a chant. Even with the bullhorns, words couldn't travel up this high. No, this was a far more primal message, and it carried just fine. It was a drum-beat, steel on duraplast, the marching thump of oncoming power. The State had had enough of this protest, and it was time to end.

  The cordon split, and a phalanx passed. The guardsman in their hatches grinned. The police nodded along to the marching beat. The espos had arrived, in ranks twenty-wide and a half-dozen thick. Every one of them was covered in a black carapace. Each carried a baton and translucent shield, and they beat them with every step. It was a rhythm that took the canyon: thump, crack, thump, crack. The espos came, pitch black, with beetle-masks over their faces, and the only color on their glossy armor was the white eagle on their shields.

  This was about to get ugly.

  The rally fell silent. Every one of them knew what was coming. Badges on the shields meant cops, but eagles announced 'special police' - espos. The police kept the law, but espos kept order. Those weren't the same thing, even if they overlapped. Every one of those black riot troops was a party man, chosen for good standing, fitness, and character, but most importantly, with a willingness to enforce the 'common spirit of unification'. The thump-strike cadence rose, and the crowd began to break.

  Firenze didn't blame them. It was a rule in dronetown: if you pissed off the cops, you went to jail, but if you pissed off the espos, you went there on a stretcher.

  He was surprised, though. Not as many ran as used to. The crowds started sticking around after Monterrey. You'd think they'd have learned not to poke the bear. It would have been smarter to just wait it out.

  One of the bullhorn leaders stepped down from her bulletin-stand perch to stand between her motley gaggle and the espo march. She had guts, Firenze had to give her that.

  The man at the head of the espo column was the only one without armor: the agency handler. Firenze focused his binocs and confirmed the man fit the part. He wore the wide-lapeled black coat, black shirt, and silver tie, his hair was slicked to his skull in a side-part, his jaw chiseled from stone. Man or woman, the blackshirts always looked the same: shiny black suit, holovid-perfect faces, and freezing eyes. The espos were faceless because the agent was their face. He spoke as the State, and they were his hands.

  The protest dwindled, but their core held firm, just over thirty-strong. The woman-in-pink placed herself at the front, hands out, unarmed, and open. She did not flinch. Firenze could appreciate that, but it also made clear that she didn't come from down here. Everyone below midward knew what espos meant: the State had cast its disapproving eye upon you, and you would do well to recant. Only uptown tourists had the right alchemy of naivete and privilege to be stupid enough to stand.

  The march stopped a meter short, placed her face to chest with that silver tie and smiling face, cast against a wall of black. "Run." Firenze whispered. He knew what was about to happen. These activists had just stepped in it. Anyone from down here knew what was coming.

  The pink woman stepped forward, crossed the gap between the lines. Through binocular tunnels, he saw her animated gestures, her impassioned pleas. The agent only smiled, serene.

  Firenze almost wished he had a parabolic mic, so he could hear the argument, but then he remembered what happened to people who pointed things at agency men. His door wasn't near thick enough to save him.

  The pink woman had grown heated. Even from here, he could see the wild flail of her arms, her growing desperation to be understood - to be heard. Firenze could imagine her pleas: enforcement of Article Two, avoiding 'betrayal of the Charter'. Suze used to preach those, before Monterrey. The protests used to be fun. Sound-cannons and pressure-hoses hadn't been the best, but the afterparties had been wild. Then came Monterrey, and everything went wrong.

  Suze stopped talking about Charters, started talking about bombs. Kendrix went from slapping digital graffiti to slicing accounts. And the cops? They got replaced by espos. Firenze told them all to pound sand, and he'd walked away. His family had given to much to push him up this far, and he wasn't throwing it away to chase a falling rock. The Authority was done. He just had to be somewhere safe when it crashed.

  Those kids in the square? Certainly midwarders, immune to the fallout. If he got roped into something like that, he would get shoved right back into dronetown. He was too close to breaking free. His family was counting on him, his scholarship, and the chance that he could pull them over the baffles.

  Down in the square, the pink woman's arguments had accomplished nothing, and the blackshirt stood stonefaced and smirking. Then the protestors made a fatal error. Perhaps in desperation or fear, the pink woman raised her bullhorn and screamed in the agent's face. Firenze heard the buzzing-squawk echo through the canyons, content lost in the noise. The response, though, was quite clear.

  The agent spoke, and his voice boomed through every speaker and vidscreen in the plaza. Firenze heard the words clear from ten stories above and below, from every angle and none. "This is unlawful, and you will disperse."

  That got her. Despite herself, she flinched. She gaped towards the heavens and the thunderous voice. The State had spoken.

  One of the other students didn't take the same lesson. A young man, face half-covered and collar popped, took a swing at the agent. The response was a boiling black tide as the espos swarmed.

  Firenze didn't stay to watch, because he already knew how it ended.

  The worst part was, he couldn't even blame the Authority, not really. He owed them too much. They'd won the war, given him the tests that bought him out of dronetown. It was their fancy sim-school he attended, it was their maintenance that kept the net running. Their problem was, they were outmoded and couldn't realize it.

  What good was a lumbering giant in a world of millisecond corrections? The Authority did everything big: industry and government and corporate bureaucracies. They fought over territory in meat-space when the net was the real battle. Every time they got on the airwaves and asked for 'patience and understanding', he'd roll his eyes. They'd put up some cool, collected, conservative old man to explain that 'progress took time' and that Article Two was a 'work in progress', and then wonder why the protests popped and why they couldn't stamp out wildfires with riot police.

  They were dinosaurs who saw the vapor trail split the Cretaceous sky, but kept fighting over good dirt. In a few moments, their contest wouldn't matter, but they couldn't understand the world had already changed.

  It was almost unfair.

  The Authority had done its job too well. They'd rebuilt civilization, united the world, cracked the Bergman field, and brought humanity into a technological age to rival pre-Collapse antiquity. They deserved congratulations, a pat on the back, and a reminder to close the door on the way out.

  Article Two had been quite clear: 'When, in the light of years, it has become apparent that no threat is presented to the united planet, and civilization has been restored to the people, the Terran Provisional Authority shall return all power to the rightful civil government. To establish a free and universal republic, the Authority shall divest itself of all rights assumed for the duration of the crisis.' The section went on dig into specifics, little points like the restoration of free speech, the end of universal service, the right to mass assembly, the ability to own proper
ty outside the State, and even the franchise and an empowered Senate. It was the second paragraph of the Charter, so it wasn't hard to find.

  The problem was the phrase 'for the duration of the crisis'. There hadn't been a real threat in a decade, not since the Faction took their swing. Sure, some dronetown gangs still sprayed the hooked trefoil, and a few academics quoted edgy old papers, but those were few and far between. No one believed in their transhuman utopia or their eusocial fantasies. Now, Faction iconography was just a fashion statement.

  The Path was even worse. It had been beaten down in two system wars, torn apart, and thrown into the frozen DMZ. If they built anything more than a pocket calculator, kaboom! A shot would fall from orbit, courtesy of the Authority. They kept their faith, but nothing more. Maybe raw belief helped them shovel ice? They were a relic, a curiosity, and irrelevant to the arc of the human story.

  There'd been ten years of peace, and a generation had grown up without the wars. Through that lens, the old guard looked very old, indeed. The only crisis he could remember came in fuzzy childhood flashes, seated on his mother's frayed couch, chewing on kinder-paste and watching the aftermath vids, while she hugged him tight. For most of his life, the threat wasn't Path fundamentalists or Faction radicals, it was getting enough dole rations, avoiding cops kicking in the door, and stealing access to the net. The crisis wasn't a foreign threat the Authority needed to fight. The crisis was the Authority failing its people.

  The men in power, obviously, saw it differently.

  Suze had talked him into taking "Transitional Government in the Postwar Era" with Professor Lyle. He'd caught in the gist of it on the first day, and spent the rest of the semester surfing the net through contact smart-lenses. Lyle's points were solid, if over-sold. To an engineer, everything was systems and rules, so her positions were so evident as to be unnecessary. The Authority saw threats in every corner because of how it was designed. To unite humanity, salvage the planet, and save civilization, it had built the most massive military force ever conceived. The Path opted for a conventional war, got their faces caved in, and then blasted their own power-base to atoms when their redlined drives failed. It wasn't the victory anyone had wanted, but it was a victory, nonetheless.