by J. I. Greco
“What are we, suckers? Anyway, you and I provide moral support, in kind.” Trip lit a cigarette, cupping his hand over the Zippo to protect the flame from the breeze. “Plus, we play a valuable yet often underappreciated societal role — civilizations are largely defined by the caliber of their criminals. And judged solely by that measure, Cali is the most advanced and handsome civilization ever.”
Rudy’s eyebrows crunched together. “Why the sudden civilization kick? I figured you’d dig the vibe out here. The open, endless road. The anarchy. Everybody’s a potential source of profit. It’s like your perfect milieu.”
“Hardly. Lawlessness isn’t profitable. The margins just aren’t there — you end up spending more time and effort defending what you took than you do enjoying the ill-gotten fruits of your criminal labor.” Trip tapped ashes into an empty mug. “Anarchy’s bad for our business.”
“Don’t worry, the Chinese will get around to this coast soon enough. They’ve got that new Great Five Year Plan for taming the mid-west.”
“Don’t kid yourself — they’ll never get farther than Abilene. Texas will be their Afghanistan, just like it was for the Coloradan-Mexicano Liberation Front back in the ‘80s.”
“Well, then, why don’t you raise an army and take over the place yourself?” Rudy asked over the lip of the jug.
Trip smirked. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. Give me a half-decent militia and virtually unlimited resources and I’d have the Wasteland under my benevolent iron-fisted thumb inside a week.”
“If you weren’t shiftless, lazy, and mortally afraid of responsibility in any form.”
“I’m not saying there aren’t nearly insurmountable obstacles.” Trip took a deep drag off the cig and sneered out at the boisterous, drunken townspeople. “Anyway, it’s probably not even worth civilizing. Might as well give it a good nuclear scrubbing, leave it sit as a glassed-over reminder to future generations that some things deserve to be pulverized into the footnotes of history.”
“Dude, it’s been what, nine years? Let it go.”
Trip almost growled. “What was mom thinking moving us out here?”
Rudy shook his head. “She had a job — that contract for killing Swartz paid for the house in Encinitas, your braces, and the Wound’s armor. Anyway, it was only for two months.”
“Two months that left me scarred for life,” Trip said, holding his closed left fist up and squinting in the dim light at his ring finger. If he didn’t know where to look, he wouldn’t have seen it: a six-millimeter long discoloration just under the first knuckle. He shoved the knuckle into Rudy’s face.
Rudy rolled his eyes, batted Trip’s fist away. “That’s hardly a scar. You can barely see it.”
“I don’t need to see it. I feel it. Fucker hurts when it’s about to rain. Like a tiny little pinprick of white-hot tickle.”
“Which is why you should like the Wasteland.” Rudy took a slug of beer. “It barely rains out here.”
“Go ahead, mock my disfigurement,” Trip said, looking up. As he did, something across the square, past the fountain, caught his eye. His eyes narrowed and his back arched in intense animal focus.
Rudy knew that look. With growing dread, he followed Trip’s eye-line and sighed. “Oh, fuckin’ a... here we go again.”
She was long. All legs, with just enough of a rack thrown in to keep things interesting. Chinese. Maybe Korean. With a little Swiss Miss mixed in. And really working this black leather corset and miniskirt, thigh-high lace-topped chessboard stockings, knee-high stiletto boots, and patent leather nun’s habit. She was making her own slow, graceful way across the other end of the square, the crowd making room for her like she owned the place.
“Well, gotta go,” Trip said, hopping off the table.
“Don’t forget — two o’clock!” Rudy yelled after Trip, already making an intercept course around the edge of the square. Rudy frowned at the beer jug. “He’s gonna forget.”
Shoving aside a cock-blocking kid pushing a beer cart, Trip slid directly in front of the vision in black leather, laying his full crooked-mouth half smile on her. He opened his mouth to say “Howdy” but before he could, he lost himself in the brightest green eyes he’d even seen. All he could do was stammer wordlessly.
She didn’t stop and wait for him to get the words out, just side-stepped around him on those incredible legs, pumping like the pistons of a perfectly maintained machine of awesome. “Excuse me,” she said.
He side-stepped her side-step to stay in front of her, and found his voice. “Not without a name. It’d be rude.”
She stopped. Drew in a breath, crossed her arms over her chest. Her stiletto boot-tip tapped impatiently. Trip had never been more turned on in his life. “Roxanne.”
“I’m Trip.” He yanked his eyes away from her cleavage and thumbed back across the square. “That furry guy with the dopey grin over there, that’s my attorney Rudy. He’s advised me to buy you a drink. Help you count Rosary. Torture heretics into confessing. Whatever you need, I’m your guy.”
“Good to know.” Those shining green eyes ran up and down his body, sizing him up. She finished and her scowl softened. A little. “But if you don’t mind, I’m kinda running late.”
“Late? But we haven’t even had the sex yet.”
For a long second she just stood there, head tilted, blank-faced staring up into his smirk-smile. Trip was sure he’d overplayed it, that she was just working through how hard she was going to deck him, and where. Crotch, he figured. But then her eyes hit on the nub of his data jack just poking out from behind his ear. Reflexively, she reached up behind her own ear, fingertips brushing aside her hair to reveal her own data jack, her painted black fingernails glinting in the torches lighting the square.
She smiled. “Well... guess we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, should we?”
“Go on, don’t be embarrassed to admit it,” Trip said, “I am rather good.”
Roxanne nuzzled up against him. “And just a little full of yourself, aren’t you?”
They lay tangled in sweat-soaked sheets on a mattress set out on the bare floor of Roxanne’s room, in the third precarious story of a corrugated multi-level shack near the brewery. The walls were lined with racks overflowing with electronic equipment and spare parts. An oil lamp on a workbench in the corner with a red scarf over it gave the room an emergency alert glow.
Trip idly twisted a lock of her bleached-blonde hair. “So were you... but you didn’t seem to mind.” He started to reach for his tux jacket, neatly folded on the floor next to him. “Wanna smoke?”
“No.” She arched a finely plucked eyebrow at him. “And neither do you.”
With a contented smirk, he stopped reaching and went back to twirling her hair. “Okay then.”
She ran a fingertip around the lip of his data jack. “Nice work. No scarring. How much throughput you get?”
“Nine to ten terabit per sec. Eleven if the humidity’s above seventy percent.”
“Really? I’m only getting half that on a good day.”
“Really. Rudy’s a horrible attorney, but he’s one hell of a mechanic.”
“Wish he’d done mine. I hate the scar,” she said, craning her neck and twisting her head around for Trip to see.
He brushed her hair back. The jack was a standard quarter-inch plug, same as his. The skin around it was discolored by a bare, pinkish puckering. “I dunno. It seems fine. I’ve seen worse.” He gave it a peck. “It’s cute.”
“It should have been cleaner. But turns out it’s actually kinda tricky drilling into your own skull with an electric hand-drill and a mirror.”
“You installed it yourself?”
“It was either that or trust Doc Kensey, who I wouldn’t trust to take my temperature.”
“Why? He a communist?”
“Drinker. But not his fault. It’s sort of the town hobby.”
“I noticed. But not you.” He sniffed her playfully. “At least you don’t stin
k of the stuff.”
“Not since I was eleven and joined the Sisters. They frown on mind-altering substances. Outside of official ceremonies, that is, and then it’s mostly just LSD and ‘shrooms. Harmless shit. Not that everybody in the coven’s so orthodox — neither am I, really, but it gives me an excuse. Never much cared for the stuff. Dulls the brain.”
“The Sisters?”
She jogged her head at her habit, corset, miniskirt, and boots, scattered around the floor where she’d dropped them doing a striptease for Trip before the main event. “The Sisters of No Mercy. Praise Be.”
“So there’s actually a reason you wear those? I just thought you liked looking impossibly hot.”
“That, too.” She sat up, leaned back against the wall. “I know, hokey, right? My dad made me join. He’s awful religious ever since mom died. But it’s not too bad. We go on hikes, do charity work — and there are mandatory orgies.”
“They taking new members?” Trip rolled on his side, propping himself up on his elbow. “I can pull off a mini-skirt — I’ve got great calves.”
“No argument here, but sorry. Strictly girl-girl. Only way they’ll take you is if you lose the third leg, and I’m not quite done with it yet.” She snaked her hand under the sheet, gave him a squeeze. “Speaking of which... you want to help me earn my wireless badge?”
“Your what?”
She stood up, stepping over him and padding bare-footed across to a rack. Trip watched, hypnotized by her naked ass. She crouched, rooted around in the clutter of the second lowest shelf, and eventually pulled out a small box. She spun, opening the box and holding it so Trip could see the pair of whip antennas inside. The antennas had jack-plugs attached to the bulbs at their base.
“WOLFpack antennas?” he asked.
“Close. RATpack. They’re like a WOLFpack but they’re more about the shared experience than giving themselves over to a pack-leader Hub. They don’t even have a hub. It’s all distributed.” She took one out, placed it in Trip’s palm. “Took these out of a Sammy and a Dino at the last Saturnalia Jamboree and hunt, modified them to use data jacks instead of grafting. Did the welding myself.”
Trip gingerly picked it up by the antenna tip and held the bulb near his face. “You could have cleaned the blood and hair off.”
“Don’t be such a baby. What d’ya say?” She took the other antenna out and snicked it into her jack. She twitched her head. Her eyes momentarily rolled to white. She set the box beside the mattress on the floor and ran her finger down his chest. “A little mind-shared roll in the hay? I’m only two badges away from my Master of Science dildo.”
“Who am I to stand in the way of a girl and her toys?” He slapped the antenna into place behind his ear. “What now?”
She smiled, pushed him onto his back. “Turn off your firewall.
He twitched. There was a slight, temporary feeling of weightlessness as the antenna switched on, leaching current from him, and then a feeling of calm as it went through its handshaking protocol routine. “What do I do?”
“Lie back and enjoy the ride,” she said, her voice becoming distant and soft as she mounted him, her eyelids flickering and her smile going sublime. Pixelated white noise began to fill his head. “Oh, and don’t get freaked out. There’s gonna be memory sharing.”
“Memory what now?”
CHAPTER 5: ROBBERY!
“Right.”
Rudy looked up from his watch, a battered and strapless TAG Heuer Monaco sitting in his palm, just as it ticked over to 1:48. He scanned the square, the tables still jammed with townsfolk, still drinking, still boisterous, and still trying to sing three different songs at once. The only difference between now and two hours ago: The lyrics were a bit more slurred.
There was no sign of Trip. “Of course he’s AWOL,” Rudy said aloud. “Why wouldn’t he be? It’s only his hide if we don’t pull this off.”
Rudy grabbed a beer jug and stood, stuffing the watch away in one of his camo’s thigh pockets. He slipped away from the light and din of the square, sipping beer and grumbling to himself as he walked into the shadows towards the beer warehouse.
In the pitch-black beer warehouse, Willie the 9mm rapid-fire robo-gun turret spun slowly around and around on rusty, grinding tracks, its motion sensors fully alert, feeling for trouble.
Underneath the robo-gun, the Wound sat inactive on standby. But it wasn’t quiet. There had been a steady stream of noise coming from her trunk for half an hour: clicks, beeps, and the more than occasional synthesized four-letter curse.
“How about this one?” the synthesized voice in the trunk asked no one in particular. “Be nice if it would work, it is about the last one.”
A click, a sequence of beeps, and then a clank of an audio pickup being pressed against the inside of the trunk, listening.
Willie kept grinding around and around.
“Shatner damn it.” Another click from inside the trunk. “Okay, this is the last one. I hasten to think of the consequences for you if this does not work. But... you have been warned.”
The trunk emitted a different sequence of beeps. This time, Willie ground to a stop and the warehouse fell silent.
“Gotcha!” the voice in the trunk proclaimed. “I think.”
The trunk of the Wound cracked open the smallest amount.
Nothing opened fire.
“Hey, it worked.” Hunt-R let the trunk open all the way, unfurling himself to stand to his full four feet. Hunt-R was a bipedal robot, with bulky, oversized elbow and knee joints. His composite hard-shell olive skin was dented and dotted with gunshot holes, a natural consequence of years of service to Trip and Rudy. His head was dominated by a glowing, cyclopsian oval of an eye. He titled the oval up at Willie and pounded his chest. “Who’s the robot? I am the robot, in point of fact.”
A knock at the warehouse door shattered the quiet, and sent Hunt-R collapsing back down into the trunk, throwing his arms over his head.
Another knock. More of a pounding this time. “Come on, answer the door already.”
Hunt-R lowered his arms and craned his neck up over the lip of the trunk. His oval eye peered through the darkness, illuminating the warehouse door like a spotlight. “Builder Rudy?”
“Who else is it gonna be?”
“Just a moment, sir.” Hunt-R unfurled and crawled out of the trunk. Three-toed feet clanking with every footstep, he walked across the warehouse to the door and found the door controls. Pressing the big red button, he started the door slowly rising. He bent down to wave at Rudy before the door was fully up. “Hello.”
“Yeah, hello. That machine gun deactivated?” Rudy squinted into the warehouse warily.
“Without encryption it was a simple matter of finding the right frequency on which to transmit the shutdown command.”
“And that worked?” Rudy took a slug from his beer jug.
Hunt-R crossed his arms over his narrow, cylindrical chest. “Since it is motion sensing, and I am standing here, having walked across the warehouse, I think it is safe to say the device is inactive.”
“Don’t get cheeky.” Rudy stepped into the warehouse. He slapped the door controls with his elbow as he did, sending the door rumbling shut behind him. “I’m just double-checking. Been shot at enough today.”
“My apologies.” Hunt-R’s glowing oval stared at the closed warehouse door, then swiveled to look up at Rudy. “Where is Programmer Trip?”
Rudy scowled. “Where you think?”
“Distracted by the local fauna?”
“In his defense, she was insanely distracting.” Rudy finished off the beer jug, flinging it away. He watched it bounce across the warehouse floor. “So, no telling how long he’ll be AWOL.”
Hunt-R gave a patient nod and opened his chest cavity with a double-tap on his belly. A small metal claw clutching a worn leather sack emerged from the cavity. “Pocket Dungeon while we wait?”
“Not this time.” Rudy squared his shoulders and loped towards the Wound. �
��This time we’re doing this my way. Grab the goody bag from the trunk — we’re gonna blow some stuff up good.”
One moment Trip and Roxanne’s cartoon cyberspace avatars were falling, endlessly, a fluffy pink-tinged cloud of a bed falling along with them. Not that they minded falling, or even noticed. There was too much other stuff going on. Too much fucking. Too much... sharing.
The next moment, a flash of nothingness, then a rush of bright lights flooding in from all sides. When the flood passed, a little Korean girl, nine years old and softly weeping for her dead mother, walked hand in hand with her father in his best suit — the one with the zebra skin coat and the purple velvet cowboy hat — away from a fresh grave dug in the middle of a long-abandoned wind farm, a rusted, leaning windmill for a tombstone.
Roxanne’s memory.
Another flash and they were back on the cloud bed. The cloud was getting in on the fun. Puffy tendrils twirled the pair of avatars, nudged their bodies into more interesting inter-twinings and probed unattended and under-served erogenous zones while Trip and Roxanne focused on the major players.
Flash. Trip and Rudy among a group of a thousand other spectators, relaxing on beach chairs, eating popcorn, watching the sky above the corporate-war devastated city of Portland, where armored dirigibles covered with sponsor logos jockeyed for position around a thousand-foot high goal tower, firing screaming rockets at each other. The crowd let out a cheer as one of the dirigibles took a hit amidships and crumbled in on itself, falling on fire from the sky.
Flash. Trip and Roxanne were pretty much inside the cloud, now. So much writhing, prodding, probing... Hard to say where the cloud stopped and they started. It didn’t seem to matter.
Flash. Roxanne, at age thirteen, proudly standing alone in a circle of fire, her fellow sisters smiling lovingly at her over the licks of flame, just having taken the Oath of the Sisterhood. The flames parted and a naked old chick with great tits presented Roxanne with a neatly folded corset and habit.
