The Nex

by Tim Pratt

  “Here.” Howlaa pointed to the saloon, which was both a relief – because I didn’t want to go near the glass mountain, for instance – and kind of a bummer, because it did look really normal in a kitschy way, like something you’d see in a ghost town theme park, with cheap beer for the parents and sarsaparillas for the kids. There were hitching posts out front and there were things tied to the posts, but they weren’t horses, as even a non-horse-crazy girl like me could tell from the spines and the number of legs.

  Inside matched the outside, with wooden tables and a piano with a drunk guy sleeping with his face on the keys and a bartender with a totally out-of-control mustache. Both human. There were no customers I could see. Wisp’s translating mote was still in my ear, and it whispered: “Tell him you’re here to see Templeton.”

  “Barkeep. I’m looking for Templeton.”

  The bartender raised one of his eyebrows, which was almost as bushy as his mustache. “You don’t look like a geargirl. One of those airy-fairy types. I thought your kind pretended to be allergic to anything mechanical. What do you want to see Templeton for?”

  Howlaa growled. It even made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I knew I wasn’t in any danger from her.

  The bartender raised his hands. “Say no more. Templeton doesn’t pay me enough to ask follow-up questions.” He picked up a black plastic phone from behind the counter and spoke briefly, then hung it up. “He’s not in.”

  Another growl from Howlaa, followed by a cracking of numerous knuckles.

  The bartender sighed. “And the room he’s not in is number 112, right up those stairs.”

  Howlaa flipped something round and shining onto the bar, and the bartender made it disappear quickly. We headed up the stairs, and I whispered, “Was that money? I thought you guys all just stole from each other.”

  Howlaa laughed, a harsh noise from a Nagalinda. “We barter. I gave him a token for the Incarnadine district. Home of legendary robo-prostit–”

  “Howlaa!” Wisp said, and Howlaa gave a nasty cackle. Like I couldn’t figure out what he was going to say.

  “That’s gross,” I said.

  “The robots aren’t shentient, so they don’t mind the work,” Howlaa said. “Could be worshe.”

  “I’m not sure this is appropriate conversation,” Wisp said.

  “Thish ish a brothel, Wishp,” Howlaa said. “We passhed appropriate a long time ago.”

  Wisp sighed. “I didn’t choose the meeting place.”

  “So this guy Templeton is a pimp or something?”

  “Jusht a schientisht,” Howlaa said. “With a tashte for shlumming.”

  “Do try to avoid the letter ‘S’ while in this form, Howlaa. The lisp is distracting. You could have said Templeton has a ‘predilection for low company,’ for instance, and avoided both ‘taste’ and ‘slumming.’”

  “Shushit,” Howlaa said, and at least that sounded the same as usual. The door to room 112 was wooden, but had a crazy lock with blinking lights and interlocking teeth. Howlaa knocked on the door, and when nobody answered, leaned close and whispered to the lock. The lights flashed and it clicked open. “Ha. That’sh the problem with artificially intelligent locksh. If you know how, you can threaten them into opening.” She pushed open the door and stepped inside. “Templeton! We’re here to talk about you-know-what.”

  I followed, and the door swung shut behind me. I’d expected some kind of four-poster-bed in red velvet, but this was more like the back room of an electronics store after an earthquake, wires and gears and electronics piled on shelves and all over the bed. The curtains were drawn over the windows, and it was dark, but I could tell there was a guy sitting in a chair in the corner. He leaned forward into the range of Wisp’s glowing lights, and I couldn’t help it – even after all I’d seen here, I gasped.

  “I thought you said this guy was human,” I said.

  Templeton made a noise. I can’t say if it was a laugh or a snort of contempt or what. When he spoke it sounded like the monotonous disconnected tone of the default voice on a laptop: “Human? I still have pancreas, a spleen, and most of my skin. What DNA I still possess is human.” A pause. “Why, are you racist against cyborgs or something?”

  Chapter 10

  “No? I didn’t know cyborgs were a race.”

  “We’re persecuted,” Templeton said. He glanced at Howlaa. His eyes bulged out, telescoping like spyglasses. “Howlaa, could you shed that nasty skin? A Nagalinda tore off my original arms. I don’t like them much.” He lifted his hydraulic limbs, all silvery and skeletal, and clenched hands with eight fingers and two thumbs each – he could count to twenty on his fingers. “Not that my new arms aren’t great, but these hands are no good for –”

  “Miranda is young,” Wisp said. “Please contain your lewdness.”

  Templeton couldn’t smile – his mouth was more of a grille – but he made a noise I think was a snigger. “Nobody’s lewd like a teenager is lewd. I remember when I was that age. But, sure, propriety, I can roll with that.”

  Howlaa rippled and changed, taking on her human form again, shadow-suit withdrawing to something like a tank top and baggy shorts, all fuzzy black again. “Templeton, we’re here to –”

  “Please, I was saying something, trying to educate this little Mabling. I know you minions of the Faerie Queen hate tech, and hate cyborgs, but listen, we’re all around you, even the human-looking ones. Everybody who wears corrective eyeglasses or contact lenses is a cyborg. Everyone who has an insulin pump or a pacemaker is mechanically augmented. Just because my enhancements are a little more obvious is no reason to treat me like a freakshow or a monster, I’m no different from someone with a titanium screw in their hip or a plastic knee – it’s a difference of degree, not of kind. Understand? But I’ve been persecuted, stripped of my dignity, shorn of my –”

  “You weren’t fired for being mostly robot,” Howlaa interrupted. “You were fired for testing new technology on yourself without permission.”

  Templeton sniffed. “Semantics.”

  “I don’t have contact lenses,” I said. “Or a plastic knee. But, ah, I do have...” I glanced at Howlaa, who nodded minutely. “I do have these.” I stripped off my gloves, revealing my rings and my bracelets.

  Templeton stared at my jewels for a long moment. He didn’t lean in close to examine them, but for all I know his mechanical eyes were zooming in. “Shee-it,” he said at last. “The jump-engine has already bonded to this girl? That kind of screws my plan.”

  “You were going to activate the engine yourself and steal it, leaving Wisp and me here to deal with the shitstorm fallout of your departure?” Howlaa said.

  Templeton nodded. “Well, yeah.”

  “We figured. That’s why Wisp was going to hijack your body to prevent such a treacherous act. You’ve still got one nostril and working sinuses and an organic brain, so Wisp can run you like a remote control racecar.”

  “Would’ve been a hell of a standoff,” Templeton said, “Especially since my weapons system is on an autonomous AI circuit, and can protect me even if my self-control is compromised.”

  “It would’ve come to fisticuffs?” Howlaa said, sounding a little sad. “That would’ve been entertaining.”

  I pulled my hands back. “You knew this guy was going to betray you, but you were going to come talk to him anyway?”

  “As we’ve already noted, genius is not the sole province of the honorable and the likable,” Wisp said. “Knowing he would betray us is better than wondering if he might, at any rate. We knew exactly how to proceed. Then you came along, and...”

  “How does a second-level Mabling wind up picking up a sparkling bit of tech anyway?” Templeton said. “Aren’t you supposed to pretend to break out in hives if you so much as touch a digital watch?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m just in fairy-cultist drag, Borg-o. Traveling incognito. I’m... new around here. The jump-engine thing was an accident.”

  Templeton grunted an
d abruptly rose. “Nuclear meltdowns are accidents. This is a catastrophe. Once it’s activated, there’s no turning the jump-engine off, folks. Which means the whole revolution-of-three is now in the hands of our unplanned fourth – what’s your name?”

  “Miranda Candle. Randy.”

  “Great. Our fate is in the hands of Randy-Candy here, who I’m guessing isn’t a teenage cat burglar or super spy, but just another unlucky sap who got sucked up by the snatch-engines?”

  “Miranda is quite resourceful,” Wisp said. “And you are hardly the ideal of the stealth commando. Some of your augmentations could have been helpful in the event of armed confrontation, but you are... untrained.”

  “Better than some girl –” he said.

  “What, are you racist against girls?”

  Templeton stopped, then made that snigger again. “Touché, Randy. I guess you’ll have to do, since the alternative for me is sitting in this room and waiting for rust or cascading electrical failures to take me out. Have you figured out how to do anything with the engine yet?”

  “I can hit people, and make them disappear. And when people try to hit me, I teleport.”

  “Ah,” Templeton said. “It’s set in full manual mode, then, with only the self-preservation and non-lethal self-defense functions operating automatically. Everything else you’d have to activate by hand, and you don’t have the instruction booklet.”

  “But you do?”

  “Sweetie, I wrote the manual. I was the Regent’s best usability expert and interface designer before my tragic accident.”

  “Tragic trial, conviction, and punishment,” Howlaa said. “To be fair.”

  “Mmm. Semantics again. Hold out your hands, Randy. If I may?”

  Another glance at Howlaa, another small nod. I guess this guy was our only hope. I held out my hands, palms down, and his robo-fingers touched me. “No snatching the rings off,” Howlaa said.

  “I’d have to snatch her whole hands off, and if I tried, I’d trigger the self-defense circuit and get teleported who knows where, so no thanks. Here, okay, if you twist this ring like this, and slide this ring down as far as you can, and pass this bracelet over this other bracelet – poof, you’ve got line-of-sight teleportation turned on, just turn the thumb ring and you’ll teleport yourself to the farthest point in your vision.” As he turned the rings, they changed color and texture, from silver to gold to platinum to copper, from smooth metal to braided wire to lumpy primitive-style twists. “It’s all color and metal coded, it’s not that complex, really, there’s a learning curve, but once you master it, the pattern’s no harder than mastering a really tough video game or high-end graphic design software. See, twist these and these, and you get coordinate-specific teleportation, just state the particular cartographic system you’re using, name the coordinates, twist this thumb ring, and poof – you go right to your stated coordinates. Adjust the rings this way and you get short-burst evasive teleporting, useful for running like hell from guys with guns. This way, and you can walk through walls – short-hop teleports, with the jump-engine’s density-sensors determining where the next empty space is for you to inhabit. This lets you teleport to any place you’ve been before. And this –”

  “I’ll never remember all this.” I shook my head, already forgetting which ring did what, only remembering the last step, twisting the thumb ring, and without remembering the preceding steps pulling the final trigger could be dangerous.

  “Well, and why the hell would you?” Templeton said. “The full manual mode is for control freaks who don’t trust the machine to do anything on its own, Linux types, you know what I mean? Fear not, there’s a much simpler way.” He twisted both my thumb rings simultaneously, and I winced, expecting to find myself on top of a mountain or inside a tree or something, but instead the rings sort of melted, and slithered, and walked across my fingers, and the bracelets evaporated or shriveled up or shrank to nothing and then...

  ... I was left with just one ring, a gold band inscribed with funny but familiar-looking lettering, on the ring finger of my left hand.

  “There you go,” Templeton said. “Full automatic mode, with the added bonus that guys won’t hit on you because they’ll assume you’re married.” He paused. “I guess you’re kinda young for that though, unless you’re from serious redneck country.”

  “What’s this writing say?” I looked at the ring, amazed at how little it weighed after days of carrying around half a jewelry store on my hands. “What language is this?”

  I wouldn’t have thought a guy with a piece of lab equipment for a face could look sheepish, but he managed. “It’s Tengwar.”

  “I don’t speak that,” Wisp said, sounding doubtful.

  Templeton said “Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “Jeez, Randy, you’re disappointing me here,” Templeton said. “You’re from some kind of Earth, your English sounds basically like mine, and I haven’t been here that long – they don’t have Tolkien where you’re from? The Lord of the Rings? ‘One ring to bring them all’? My little joke. Seemed appropriate.”

  “You mean the magic ring they threw into a volcano in all those movies they made in New Zealand?”

  “They made movies from those books?” Templeton said.

  “This whole conversation is confusing and I suspect irrelevant,” Wisp said. “What do you mean by ‘full automatic’ mode?”

  Templeton shrugged, with a whine of motors as his shoulders rose and fell. “Randy is the jump-engine now. It’s part of her, she’s part of it. Where she wants to go, she can go. Poof. Wishing makes it so.”

  “You mean... I could go home? Like, now?”

  “You could,” Templeton said, “but if you do, without saving our asses first, I’ll personally build a new jump-engine from my own guts and use it to chase you down and throw you into a volcano.”

  “I’d come back,” I said. “I just want to leave my Mom a note so she doesn’t worry.” More so I wouldn’t get grounded quite as badly when I did return.

  “Miranda,” Wisp said. “Please... don’t. What if something happened and you couldn’t come back? If you were struck by lightning, hit by a bus?”

  “Eaten by a tiger?” Howlaa said. “That happens on Earth, doesn’t it? We’d be screwed. And you’d never get to find out about your Dad.”

  I sighed. “Fine. Okay. We’ll do it your way. But... can I send things to earth? Like a snatch-engine in reverse?”

  “Sure,” Templeton said, and he even dug up a pen and a scrap of paper for me.

  I wrote a pretty cryptic note: “Mom, am okay, will be home soon, sorry I couldn’t call, not running away forever, promise.” It wouldn’t keep me out of trouble, but sending a note might keep her from killing me when I got home. I looked at the note, then wrote “Love” at the bottom in a loopy scrawl even I could barely read. “Okay. How do I, ah, jump-mail it?”

  “You seem to like punching,” Templeton said. “Just think of where you want it to go, and give it a smack.”

  So I did. I punched the letter and it disappeared. Templeton said it should appear on my kitchen table instantaneously. Better than e-mail. But maybe not as good as texting.

  “All right,” Templeton said. “Your girl has some of the most powerful technology on the Nex in her hands. What’s the next step?”

  “I can just poof my way into the palace and wreck up the snatch-engines, right?” I said. “Punch ‘em into outer space?”

  “Small problem: you’ve never been there. You don’t know where you’re going, so you can’t just teleport there. I could give you coordinates and let you jump to a specific location, but the palace is... tricky. You might end up jumping blindly inside a furnace or a deathworm torture pit or something if we do that. So you’ll have to get close to the engines, step through a few walls, work your way in gradually. Of course, after you’ve gotten a good look at the heart of the pa
lace, you can come and go back there at will. Though we all hope more than one trip won’t be necessary.”

  Howlaa burped. “First we have lunch. Then Miranda practices until she can teleport in her sleep. Then we help her with some personal business. Then we defeat the Regent.”

  “Shit. What personal business are you talking about?”

  “It’s personal,” I said. “Are you coming with us?”

  Templeton lifted one of his legs, which had some patches of actual skin and muscle left, and pointed to a blinking black anklet. “See that? It’s tamperproof, and infallible, and it keeps me here.”

  “Ohhh. Like, house arrest? You leave and the cops come?”

  “No, like self-destruct. I leave and I implode. Just as lethal as exploding, only with less property damage. The Regent doesn’t want me running around loose, though he doesn’t seem to care who visits me.”

  “You are probably under surveillance,” Howlaa said. She turned, shivered, and began transforming back into a Nagalinda.

  Templeton nodded. “Sure. Nothing mechanical, nothing in here – I can keep my own room clean, at least. But I’m sure the barkeep is an informant. Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “Explains his curiosity,” Wisp said. “Curiosity isn’t usually a survival trait in a landlord around here. But all he saw was a high-level Minion of Mab and her bodyguard come in. We just need a... plausible explanation for that.”

  “Good luck.” Templeton began sorting a pile of wires heaped on his bed. “Might as well come up with a plausible reason for oil to hang out with water.”