by Linda Nagata
“Shelley!” Jaynie shouts.
I look up, startled to see that I’ve swerved onto the shoulder.
“Turn the display on your overlay off,” she growls at me.
I try, but I have to keep looking up at the road and every time I do, the process aborts.
From the backseat, Delphi says, “We’ve got flashing lights behind us.”
I check the rearview and she’s right. “Fuck.”
Jaynie reaches into my jacket, pulls out my pistol, and passes it, along with her own, to Delphi. “Secure these.” Then to me, “Pull over. And once you’re stopped, get your license out.” She switches to gen-com. “Moon, drive on to the next exit, then wait.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I bring us to a controlled stop. The upload link is still open in my overlay. While the patrol car pulls in behind us, I check the system log. It’s not Joby’s program. It’s the video of the Manhattan bombing that’s uploading—to an address that’s just a random string.
Not forgotten. That’s what I think. And I’m angry it’s back, now, after the silence in New York, but fuck me, I’m relieved too.
Jaynie is still focused on the cop. “Shelley, get your license out!”
“I don’t need to,” I tell her as the upload finishes. “I’m chipped.”
“More machine parts?” she asks with a note of disgust.
“I used to lose my wallet a lot.”
We watch the patrol car, using the rearview camera. I watch the traffic too, but I keep my gaze averted as cars shoot past us. I don’t want to advertise my face.
“Look across the freeway,” Delphi says. “That’s the highway patrol’s drone.”
I see it. It’s an old model—white, cross shaped, flying slowly at a low altitude, keeping an eye on us.
The officer gets out of his car. Jaynie tells me, “Put your window down. Then put your hands on the steering wheel.”
As the window goes down, spring warmth rolls in. I watch the rearview screen as the cop approaches. He’s a man of average height, chunky, wearing a khaki uniform, his opaque gray farsights like blind robot eyes, and he’s got an arsenal around his hips.
I switch my recording function on, and then I turn to look at him. A tiny green light at the corner of his farsights is glowing, indicating he’s recording too. We stare at each other for two seconds. His name badge says “Munroe.” He’s enough of a public figure that my encyclopedia recognizes him and tags him as Terence B. Munroe.
Of course, he’s running facial recognition too.
“Shit,” he whispers when it lets him know who I am. Then he remembers himself, and in a formal voice he says, “Let’s see your driver’s license, Mr. Shelley.”
“Implant,” I tell him.
He sighs—“Should have guessed”—and reaches for his shirt pocket, extracting a three-inch-long wand. “Moving slowly, place your hand on the door.”
I do as he says. He holds the wand over my wrist, frowning over the report that appears in his farsights. Then he looks at me again. “Do you have a weapon in the car, sir?”
“Yes, sir. I do.”
Not the answer he was hoping for. His cheeks pinch and he takes a step back.
I add, “They’re secured in the back cargo area.”
Jaynie leans over. “They’re legally permitted for interstate transport. I have the paperwork.”
His forehead wrinkles. “The weapon in question is a police-issue revolver reported missing by the New York City Police Department. Is that in your possession, Mr. Shelley? Ms. Vasquez?”
“No,” I say. “That is not in our possession.”
He nods. “I heard you tried to chase down that cop killer. NYPD wants to talk to you about that.” He waits for my reaction. When I don’t give him one, he shrugs. “There’s no warrant. You’re under no obligation to return.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you planning to stay in this area?”
“No, sir.”
Relief floods his face and he gives me a tight smile. “Good. God knows we’ve had enough trouble around here since Coma Day. I’m going to issue you a warning for inattentive driving and let you go on your way.”
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.”
One of the tools on his belt is a thumb printer. It spits out a yellow strip of paper, which he tears off and hands to me. “That’s your warning. It also has a contact number for NYPD, if you’d care to talk to them.” He takes a step back. Then he visibly gathers himself, straightening his shoulders, settling his lips into a determined line. “One more thing, sir.”
It’s like some lame line from a movie, spoken right before the smiling assassin pulls his weapon. Fear shoots through me and I tense, my gaze locked on his gun hand while I rehearse in my mind what I’m going to do if he goes for his weapon.
Jaynie puts her hand on my shoulder. “Take it easy,” she whispers.
“For the record, Mr. Shelley . . . the Red . . . is it bullshit? Or is it real?”
Not a question I was expecting, but easy enough to answer: “It’s real.”
He nods. “Around here, a lot of people want it to be real. They’d rather have an out-of-control AI running things than the human nut jobs who let a nuclear bomb go off in Chicago. You ask me, I’ll say no to either choice.”
I don’t think that’s an option, but I keep my opinion to myself.
He nods again. “You’re free to go on your way.”
As he walks back to his cruiser, I end the video recording, and then start the engine. From the backseat, Delphi says, “Every police department between here and Wyoming is going to instruct their drones to look for us.”
Jaynie shrugs. “Good. With the cops watching, hitting us gets a little more risky.”
“We can’t assume every police department is going to have our best interests in mind.”
“You’re right about that. Pass those weapons back up here.”
I get back on the road, rejoining the westbound flow of scattered traffic. After a few minutes, we link up with Moon, and then it’s another ten miles before Jaynie asks the inevitable question. “So what distracted you back there?”
She deserves the truth. All of it.
I tap the corner of my eye. “I thought my part was done, but the video I took of the bombing—it uploaded on its own.”
“To where?”
“Some anonymous relay.”
“Are you carrying leftover software from the army?” she asks, without much hope.
“So far as I know, they’re out of my head.”
I tell her about the digital footage that went out every night on the cellblock when I was supposed to be locked down, and about my conversation with Joby, who insisted the army no longer had access to my overlay. She already knows about our meeting with Koi Reisman.
“You watched the new episode last night, right?” I ask.
“Yeah, we all did. It streamed while you were outside.”
“Koi Reisman said our part in the story was over. Did it look that way to you?”
She considers this for a few seconds, then nods. “Yeah, it did. But things haven’t exactly been quiet for you since you left DC—and if the Red’s done with you, if you’re not King David anymore, then what the fuck is going on?”
I don’t know, but it’s meaningful to me that there are two more shows.
“Maybe it’s just a leftover process,” Delphi suggests from the backseat.
I look in the rearview mirror and briefly meet her gaze, wondering if she really believes that, or if she’d just like to. “We’re planning on going after Carl Vanda’s nukes,” I point out.
“You’re planning on it,” Jaynie counters. “You’re the one who wants to do it. You need to think about that.”
And Delphi reminds me, “It’s not our mis
sion. I reported what we know. An official agency will take it.”
Jaynie turns to me, channeling sincerity in her voice and her expression as she says, “You’re being manipulated, Shelley. You need to get that wiring out of your skull.”
I stare at the back of Moon’s vehicle, sixty meters ahead. “No. That is not going to happen.”
Delphi plays reinforcement on Jaynie’s side. “You could go back to using a skullcap. You know the effect is essentially the same, but if the Red endangers you like it did at Black Cross, it doesn’t require surgery to take the cap off.”
“Come on, Delphi. You were my handler. There’s a risk, sure, but you know the skullnet is a hell of a lot more advanced than a cap.”
Jaynie hooks her elbow on the back of her seat, turns to Delphi. “He doesn’t want the option of taking off the cap. He doesn’t want anyone else to have that option.” She looks at me again. “That’s what you’re worried about, right, Shelley? That the cap could be taken away?”
I keep my eyes on the road. “You wouldn’t ask me to give up the legs, would you? They’re prosthetics that let me walk. The skullnet is a prosthetic that keeps me humming along while people I love die around me and assholes try to blow up my life. Take either of them away, Jaynie, and I’m a cripple. No use to you. So yeah, I’m more worried about losing that functionality than about the Red hacking into my head.”
She is unimpressed by my rant. “The real story is you don’t mind the Red hacking into your head. It almost killed you at Black Cross, but you trust it anyway.”
“Not true. I just deal with it. Part of the terrain. The Red’s not going away, Jaynie. Sheridan proved that on Coma Day. You either learn to live with it, or be like her and build yourself an Apocalypse Fortress and lock the Red out.”
Jaynie settles back into her seat, her gaze returning to the road ahead. “I thought about that,” she concedes. “Be a lot of money to buy that kind of privacy. More than this job is going to pay.”
“You wouldn’t want to live in a hole in the ground anyway.”
She doesn’t answer, so I just drive.
In Ohio, young corn crops are already several inches high in some of the fields that flank the freeway—but many more fields have gone unplanted. On both sides of the interstate, miles and miles of land are growing a harvest of bright green weeds.
“What the hell?” I finally say. “People don’t need to eat anymore?”
“You ever been hungry, Shelley?” Jaynie asks. “Three-days hungry?”
“No.”
I wait for her to say more. She doesn’t. When I glance at her, she’s staring straight ahead, her back straight, shoulders squared. I return my gaze to the road.
It’s Delphi who fills the silence. “Farms like these, they need fuel, fertilizer, machine parts, bank loans. Cash. The system that used to deliver all that got broken on Coma Day.”
It’s not just the fields. Gas stations are abandoned too. We top up whenever we come across a rare open one. They’re all automated. No one is around to talk to.
At one of our stops I spot an EXALT node floating low above an abandoned field, just north of the interstate. At first, I’m not sure what I’m seeing. It looks like a stack of curved blue reflections just a little brighter than the background blue sky. When I look at it through the binoculars, the curves become the visual edge of a series of small spheres. Their smooth surfaces reflect the color of the sky around them, making them hard to see even with magnification. From the article last night, I know they’re linked together by a filament, but I can’t see it. As I lower the binoculars, a bright white light flashes from the topmost sphere, like a star briefly flaring to life in the daytime sky. A navigation warning light? Maybe. Flynn sees it and wants to know what it is, so I hand her the binoculars and tell her about the EXALT project. “It’s supposed to be a new communications grid, but either it’s not working yet or it requires its own account”—I tap the corner of my eye—“because I’m not getting a link.”
Connectivity is intermittent as we head west, but frequent enough that at least once an hour an e-mail comes in from Shima. It’s always the same thing: No news to report in the hunt for Vanda’s nukes, and Vanda’s own whereabouts are presently unknown. Maybe the same players who tried to cover up the real story at Black Cross are at work again.
We reach Iowa—and drive past more unplanted fields.
Coma Day throws one hell of a long shadow.
• • • •
We stop for the night half an hour outside of Des Moines at a little commercial development built to capture weary travelers. It includes a three-story hotel—part of a low-priced chain—just off the exit, along with a gas station and a fast-food place. A competing hotel is a hundred meters west along a frontage road that separates the interstate from an abandoned field. There are no other buildings nearby. Jaynie decides we’ll stay at the second hotel—she likes the isolation—but first we fill up the tanks, and pick up dinner.
To make Jaynie happy, I wait in the car while Delphi goes inside with Tuttle and Moon to order the food. I’ve got a feed from Tuttle’s farsights running in my overlay. I shift my attention between that and the traffic on the interstate.
The restaurant is clean and bright, but it’s a sign of the times that half the slots on the electronic menu behind the counter are blank and all the tables are empty. There are only two other customers—both white kids in their early twenties, maybe a brother and sister. As they wait at the counter, they eye Moon and Tuttle nervously. I think if Delphi weren’t there to provide some feminine balance, they’d bolt. “You look like thugs,” I mutter in Tuttle’s ear.
“Beats looking like a victim,” he answers in a low whisper.
When the two kids finally get their food, they leave in a hurry.
Moon steps up to the counter, where a middle-aged woman with short, curly blond hair greets him with an apologetic smile. “I am so sorry to keep you waiting, sir. We don’t get anywhere near the traffic we used to, and I’m down to one assistant in the kitchen.”
“Not a problem, ma’am”—and Moon rattles off an order that keeps the manager and her assistant busy for the next fifteen minutes.
• • • •
We drive slowly along the frontage road to the hotel Jaynie has chosen. It’s three stories high, built like a box, with a brightly lit company logo near the roof, facing the interstate. Lights are on in several rooms, but when we turn in to the huge parking lot behind the hotel, we see only two cars, both near the main door. It makes me wonder if the manager turned on some room lights so the place will seem busier than it is.
We park close to the building so our vehicles can’t be seen from the interstate. The landscaping beside the hotel is neatly tended, but the surrounding field has gone wild. Spillover light shows tall grass and waist-high brush beyond the parking lot—too much for one missed planting. My guess is this section has been sitting idle for a year or more. Maybe it was scheduled to be developed, before Coma Day. Now it’s home to a million crickets, chirping and buzzing in the night.
“Tuttle, launch the angel,” Jaynie says. “Flynn, you’re on watch.”
The skullnet icon flickers to life in my display. A vague, restless feeling comes over me. After a few seconds, the icon fades back to invisibility, but the unsettled feeling remains. It’s like a reminder to stay alert. I look around again.
To the east, streetlights illuminate the frontage road back to the overpass, where a little Midwestern forest grows in the triangles created by the ramps. In the other direction the frontage road is lit only by the occasional headlights of cars passing on the interstate.
Flynn watches me curiously through the faintly glittering lens of her farsights as the rest of the squad disappears into the hotel.
“You’re hooked into the angel?” I ask her.
“Yes, sir.”
I link into angel sight too, and take a look at things in night vision. There’s scattered traffic on the interstate, but I confirm the frontage road is as empty as it looks from the ground. To the west, maybe 120 meters and beyond the reach of the streetlights, the landscape gets even wilder, overgrown with young trees that branch all the way to the ground. There’s no one out there—not that the angel can see—but it was the same last night when that girl popped up out of nowhere.
“I’m going to get checked in,” I tell Flynn, “but I’m coming back out again.”
“Sir?”
The skullnet icon brightens again. Its glow is faint but steady—and I’m feeling edgy. “Everything looks quiet. I just want to make sure it is.”
• • • •
Behind the desk is a Caucasian man in his fifties with iron-gray hair. Unlike the kid last night, he knows who we are, and he wants us to know we’re all on the same side. He talks as he scans our IDs and logs us into the rooms.
“Coma Day ruined me. I used to have a healthy business—I had this place and two other properties. This is the only one still open, but it’s just a matter of time. You know what Coma Day did for me? It gave me a full house. For three days after the bombs went off, every room was booked as people left Chicago, but we haven’t been more than a quarter full since. People around here are desperate—while the richest of the rich buy playhouses in orbit. Have you heard of Sunrise Fifteen? It’s a company launching little prefab space stations, for only a billion dollars or so. Can you imagine having that much money to spend? And there’s talk about a resort being planned for the Moon—but not for people like us. The big shots have got everything now. Everything worth having. But at least you made one pay.”
• • • •
In the room, Delphi watches me suspiciously as I put my armor on over my civilian clothes. “I don’t understand why you have to go out. You’re not on watch until later.”
