Rewired

by James Patrick Kelly

  People were pointing to the sky. Bash looked up.

  One of the famous TimWarDisVia aerostats cruised serenely overhead, obviously dispatched to provide an overhead view of the parade. Its proteopape skin featured Bash’s face larger than God’s. Scrolling text reflected poorly on Bash’s parentage and morals.

  “God damn!” Bash turned away from the sight, only to confront the dragon. Its head now mirrored Bash’s, but its body was a snake’s.

  Small strings of firecrackers began to explode, causing shrieks, and Bash utilized the diversion to bull onward toward the shuttered Paramount Theater. He darted down the narrow alley separating the deserted building from its neighbors.

  “Tito! Any tips on getting inside?”

  “One of our webcams on the first floor shows something funky with one of the windows around the back.”

  The rear exterior wall of the theater presented a row of weather-distressed plywood sheets nailed over windows. The only service door was tightly secured. No obvious entrance manifested itself.

  But then Bash noticed with his trained eye that one plywood facade failed close-up inspection as he walked slowly past it.

  Dagny had stretched an expanse of proteopape across an open frame, then set the pape to display a plywood texture.

  Bash set his phone on the ground. “Tito, I’m going in alone. Call the cops if I’m not out in half an hour.”

  “Uptaken and bound, fizz!”

  Rather vengefully, Bash smashed his fist through the disguising pape, then scrambled inside.

  Dagny had hotwired electricity from somewhere. The Paramount was well lit, although the illumination did nothing to dispel a moldy atmosphere from years of inoccupancy. Bash moved cautiously from the debris-strewn backstage area out into the general seating.

  A flying disc whizzed past his ear like a suicidal mirror-finished bat. It hit a wall and shattered.

  Dagny stood above him at the rail of the mezzanine with an armful of antique DVDS. The platters for the digital projectors must have been left behind when the Paramount ceased operations. The writing on a shard at Bash’s feet read: The Silmarillion.

  Dagny frisbee’d another old movie at Bash. He ducked just in time to avoid getting decapitated.

  “Quit it, Dagny! Act like an adult, for Christ’s sake! We have to talk!”

  Dagny pushed her clunky eyeglasses back up her nose. “We’ve got nothing to talk about! You’ve proven you’re a narrow-minded slave to old hierarchies, without an ounce of imagination left in your shriveled brainpan. And you insulted my art!”

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to, honest. Jesus, even you said that the Woodies were a big joke.”

  “Don’t try putting words in my mouth! Anyway, that was before I won one.”

  Bash stepped forward into an aisle. “I’m coming up there, Dagny, and you can’t stop me.”

  A withering fusillade of discs forced Bash to eat his words and run for cover into an alcove.

  Frustrated beyond endurance, Bash racked his wits for some means of overcoming the demented auteur.

  A decade of neglect had begun to have its effects on the very structure of the theater. The alcove where Bash stood was littered with fragments of concrete. Bash snatched up one as big as his fist. From his pocket he dug the sheet of proteopape that had blinded him, and wrapped it around the heavy chunk. He stepped forward.

  “Dagny, let’s call a truce. I’ve got something here you need to read. It puts everything into a new light.” Bash came within a few meters of the lower edge of the balcony before Dagny motioned him to stop. He offered the ball of pape on his upturned palm.

  “I don’t see what could possibly change things—”

  “Just take a look, okay?”

  “All right. Toss it up here.”

  Dagny set her ammunition down to free both hands and leaned over the railing to receive the supposedly featherweight pape.

  Bash concentrated all his anger and resolve into his right arm. He made a motion as if to toss underhand. But at the last minute he swiftly wound up and unleashed a mighty overhand pitch.

  Dagny did not react swiftly enough to the deceit. The missile conked her on the head and she went over backwards into the mezzanine seats.

  Never before had Bash moved so fast. He found Dagny hovering murmurously on the interface between consciousness and oblivion. Reassured that she wasn’t seriously injured, Bash arrowed toward her nest of pillows. He snatched up the sheet of proteopape that displayed his familiar toolkit for accessing the trapdoor features of his invention. With a few commands he had long ago memorized as a vital failsafe, he initiated the shutdown of the hidden override aspects of proteopape.

  From one interlinked sheet of proteopape to the next the commands raced, propagating exponentially around the globe like history’s most efficient cyber-worm, a spark that extinguished its very means of propagation as it raced along. Within mere minutes, the world was made safe and secure again for Immanent Information.

  Bash returned to Dagny, who was struggling to sit up.

  “You—you haven’t beaten me. I’ll find some way to show you—”

  The joyful noises from the continuing parade outside insinuated themselves into Bash’s relieved mind. He felt happy and inspired. Looking down at Dagny, he knew just what to say.

  “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

  The Voluntary State

  Christopher Rowe

  Is there a way to reverse the Singularity? In Christopher Rowe’s bizarre future Tennessee, an AI has created a mind-merged police state, whose citizens are permitted but a few shreds of individuality and just a taste of free will. A raiding party of autonomous humans from Kentucky attempts to hack the digital tyranny.

  Yet from the inside, this polity feels like a giddy Utopia. The technology here is so advanced that it often as not presents as magical, with flowers that sing the national anthem and cars that pine for their owners. Stylistically, this is one of the most crammed - and playful - PCP stories in the collection.

  Soma had parked his car in the trailhead lot above Governor’s Beach. A safe place, usually, checked regularly by the Tennessee Highway Patrol and surrounded on three sides by the limestone cliffs that plunged down into the Gulf of Mexico.

  But today, after his struggle up the trail from the beach, he saw that his car had been attacked. The driver’s side window had been kicked in.

  Soma dropped his pack and rushed to his car’s side. The car shied away from him, backed to the limit of its tether before it recognized him and turned, let out a low, pitiful moan.

  “Oh, car,” said Soma, stroking the roof and opening the passenger door, “Oh, car, you’re hurt.” Then Soma was rummaging through the emergency kit, tossing aside flares and bandages, finally, finally finding the glass salve. Only after he’d spread the ointment over the shattered window and brushed the glass shards out onto the gravel, only after he’d sprayed the whole door down with analgesic aero, only then did he close his eyes, access call signs, drop shields. He opened his head and used it to call the police.

  In the scant minutes before he saw the cadre of blue and white bicycles angling in from sunward, their bubblewings pumping furiously, he gazed down the beach at Nashville. The cranes the Governor had ordered grown to dredge the harbor would go dormant for the winter soon — already their acres-broad leaves were tinged with orange and gold.

  “Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley,” said voices from above. Soma turned to watch the policemen land. They all spoke simultaneously in the singsong chant of law enforcement. “Your car will be healed at taxpayers’ expense.” Then the ritual words, “And the wicked will be brought to justice.”

  Efficiency and order took over the afternoon as the threatened rain began to fall. One of the 144 Detectives manifested, Soma and the policemen all looking about as they felt the weight of the Governor’s servant inside their heads. It brushed aside the thoughts of one of the Highway Patrolmen and rode him, the man’s m
ovements becoming slightly less fluid as he was mounted and steered. The Detective filmed Soma’s statement.

  “I came to sketch the children in the surf,” said Soma. He opened his daypack for the soapbubble lens, laid out the charcoal and pencils, the sketchbook of boughten paper bound between the rusting metal plates he’d scavenged along the middenmouth of the Cumberland River.

  “Show us, show us,” sang the Detective.

  Soma flipped through the sketches. In black and gray, he’d drawn the floating lures that crowded the shallows this time of year. Tiny, naked babies most of them, but also some little girls in one-piece bathing suits and even one fat prepubescent boy clinging desperately to a deflating beach ball and turning horrified, pleading eyes on the viewer.

  “Tssk, tssk,” sang the Detective, percussive. “Draw filaments on those babies, Soma Painter. Show the lines at their heels.”

  Soma was tempted to show the Detective the artistic licenses tattooed around his wrists in delicate salmon inks, to remind the intelligence which authorities had purview over which aspects of civic life, but bit his tongue, fearful of a For-the-Safety-of-the-Public proscription. As if there were a living soul in all of Tenne ssee who didn’t know that the children who splashed in the surf were nothing but extremities, nothing but lures growing from the snouts of alligators crouching on the sandy bottoms.

  The Detective summarized. “You were here at your work, you parked legally, you paid the appropriate fee to the meter, you saw nothing, you informed the authorities in a timely fashion. Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley, the Tennessee Highway Patrol applauds your citizenship.”

  The policemen had spread around the parking lot, casting cluenets and staring back through time. But they all heard their cue, stopped what they were doing, and broke into a raucous cheer for Soma. He accepted their adulation graciously.

  Then the Detective popped the soapbubble camera and plucked the film from the air before it could fall. It rolled up the film, chewed it up thoughtfully, then dismounted the policeman, who shuddered and fell against Soma. So Soma did not at first hear what the others had begun to chant, didn’t decipher it until he saw what they were encircling. Something was caught on the wispy thorns of a nodding thistle growing at the edge of the lot.

  “Crow’s feather,” the policemen chanted. “Crow’s feather Crow’s feather Crow’s feather.”

  And even Soma, licensed for art instead of justice, knew what the fluttering bit of black signified. His car had been assaulted by Kentuckians.

  Soma had never, so far as he recalled, painted a self-portrait. But his disposition was melancholy, so he might have taken a few visual notes of his trudge back to Nashville if he’d thought he could have shielded the paper from the rain.

  Soma Between the Sea and the City, he could call a painting like that. Or, if he’d decided to choose that one clear moment when the sun had shown through the towering slate clouds, Soma Between Storms.

  Either image would have shown a tall young man in a broad-brimmed hat, black pants cut off at the calf, yellow jersey unsealed to show a thin chest. A young man, sure, but not a young man used to long walks. No helping that; his car would stay in the trailhead lot for at least three days.

  The mechanic had arrived as the policemen were leaving, galloping up the gravel road on a white mare marked with red crosses. She’d swung from the saddle and made sympathetic clucking noises at the car even before she greeted Soma, endearing herself to auto and owner simultaneously.

  Scratching the car at the base of its aerial, sussing out the very spot the car best liked attention, she’d introduced herself. “I am Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails,” she’d said, but didn’t seem to be worried about it because she ran her free hand through unfashionably short cropped blond hair as she spoke.

  She’d whistled for her horse and began unpacking the saddlebags. “I have to build a larger garage than normal for your car, Soma Painter, for it must house me and my horse during the convalescence. But don’t worry, my licenses are in good order. I’m bonded by the city and the state. This is all at taxpayers’ expense.”

  Which was a very great relief to Soma, poor as he was. With friends even poorer, none of them with cars, and so no one to hail out of the Alley to his rescue, and now this long, wet trudge back to the city.

  Soma and his friends did not live uncomfortable lives, of course. They had dry spaces to sleep above their studios, warm or cool in response to the season and even clean if that was the proclivity of the individual artist, as was the case with Soma. A clean, warm or cool, dry space to sleep. A good space to work and a more than ample opportunity to sell his paintings and drawings, the Alley being one of the other things the provincials did when they visited Nashville. Before they went to the great vaulted Opera House or after.

  All that and even a car, sure, freedom of the road. Even if it wasn’t so free because the car was not really his, gift of his family, product of their ranch. Both of them, car and artist, product of that ranching life Soma did his best to forget.

  If he’d been a little closer in time to that ranching youth, his legs might not have ached so. He might not have been quite so miserable to be lurching down the gravel road toward the city, might have been sharp-eyed enough to still see a city so lost in the fog, maybe sharp-eared enough to have heard the low hoots and caws that his assailants used to organize themselves before they sprang from all around him—down from tree branches, up from ditches, out from the undergrowth.

  And there was a Crow raiding party, the sight stunning Soma motionless. “This only happens on television,” he said.

  The caves and hills these Kentuckians haunted unopposed were a hundred miles and more north and east, across the shifting skirmish line of a border. Kentuckians couldn’t be here, so far from the frontier stockades at Fort Clarksville and Barren Green.

  But here they definitely were, hopping and calling, scratching the gravel with their clawed boots, blinking away the rain when it trickled down behind their masks and into their eyes.

  A Crow clicked his tongue twice and suddenly Soma was the center of much activity. Muddy hands forced his mouth open and a paste that first stung then numbed was swabbed around his mouth and nose. His wrists were bound before him with rough hemp twine. Even frightened as he was, Soma couldn’t contain his astonishment. “Smoke rope!” he said.

  The squad leader grimaced, shook his head in disgust and disbelief. “Rope and cigarettes come from two completely different varieties of plants,” he said, his accent barely decipherable. “Vols are so fucking stupid.”

  Then Soma was struggling through the undergrowth himself, alternately dragged and pushed and even half-carried by a succession of Crow Brothers. The boys were running hard, and if he was a burden to them, then their normal speed must have been terrifying. Someone finally called a halt, and Soma collapsed.

  The leader approached, pulling his mask up and wiping his face. Deep red lines angled down from his temples, across his cheekbones, ending at his snub nose. Soma would have guessed the man was forty if he’d seen him in the Alley dressed like a normal person in jersey and shorts.

  Even so exhausted, Soma wished he could dig his notebook and a bit of charcoal out of the daypack he still wore, so that he could capture some of the savage countenances around him.

  The leader was just staring at Soma, not speaking, so Soma broke the silence. “Those scars” — the painter brought up his bound hands, traced angles down either side of his own face — “are they ceremonial? Do they indicate your rank?”

  The Kentuckians close enough to hear snorted and laughed. The man before Soma went through a quick, exaggerated pantomime of disgust. He spread his hands, why-me-lording, then took the beaked mask off the top of his head and showed Soma its back. Two leather bands crisscrossed its interior, supporting the elaborate superstructure of the mask and preventing the full weight of it, Soma saw, from bearing down on the wearer’s nose. He looked at the leader again, saw him rubb
ing at the fading marks.

  “Sorry,” said the painter.

  “It’s okay,” said the Crow. “It’s the fate of the noble savage to be misunderstood by effete city dwellers.”

  Soma stared at the man for a minute. He said, “You guys must watch a lot of the same TV programs as me.”

  The leader was looking around, counting his boys. He lowered his mask and pulled Soma to his feet. “That could be. We need to go.”

  It developed that the leader’s name was Japheth Sapp. At least that’s what the other Crow Brothers called out to him from where they loped along ahead or behind, circled farther out in the brush, scrambled from limb to branch to trunk high above.

  Soma descended into a reverie space, singsonging subvocally and super-vocally (and being hushed down by Japheth hard then). He guessed in a lucid moment that the paste the Kentuckians had dosed him with must have some sort of will-sapping effect. He didn’t feel like he could open his head and call for help; he didn’t even want to. But “I will take care of you,” Athena was always promising. He held onto that and believed that he wasn’t panicking because of the Crows’ drugs, sure, but also because he would be rescued by the police soon. “I will take care of you.” After all, wasn’t that one of the Governor’s slogans, clarifying out of the advertising flocks in the skies over Nashville during Campaign?

  It was good to think of these things. It was good to think of the sane capital and forget that he was being kidnapped by aliens, by Indians, by toughs in the employ of a rival Veronese merchant family.

  But then the war chief of the marauding band was throwing him into a gully, whistling and gesturing, calling in all his boys to dive into the wash, to gather close and throw their cloaks up and over their huddle.