Cypulchre

by Joseph Travers MacKinnon

  “No.”

  “Family?”

  “No,” Paul replies quickly, visibly frustrated.

  “Hey, man. Anyone and everyone’s a snitch. Heck, they’ve got access to my memex.”

  “But you’re not giving everything away…”

  “Privacy-locks keep out other users, but not the admins, not the bigwigs. Outland’s got to be selling that intel to the corporations—to the banks, the insurance companies...Hell—ever since my accident, I can’t have a beer without my insurance premium going up.”

  Paul pinches the ridge of his nose. “Jeeze.”

  “Even my neighbour! Made some minor modifications to his apartment. His landlord referenced my memex number in the petty lawsuit against him. Three-months-worth of airtime up in a flash. Poor guy.”

  “That’s got to be a breach of trust…an invasion of privacy or something.”

  Roddy laughs. “Privacy? Shit. I don’t know what to tell you, Paul. All I know is that if anyone’s ripped bad intel on you, you’re in hot water.” He folds his arms, satisfied with having completed his first cogent thought of the day.

  “Alright.” Paul pushes the SIK forward, hanging his head in half-realized shame. “Just the Walruses today.” Eye contact. “But get your scanner checked. So far as anyone’s concerned, I’m on the straight and narrow. There’s no way…”

  “Sure thing, Paul.”

  Shaking his head in silent protest, Paul peels the red tape on the pack and turns to leave. “Ciao.”

  “So long, Paul.”

  Paul simpers. “Enjoy the rest of the game.”

  “Huh? Oh yeah. Absolutely.” Roddy hooks a half-smile, and leans forward, closing the e-ledger with a flick. Cheeks aflame with embarrassment, he sees Paul out with a nod.

  Paul drags his feet, creating du-wops off the vitric floor. The buzzer on the door sounds, and the crime-prevention crossbar whizzes back into its sheath. Inside, Roddy synchronizes to the CLOUD, leaving his body, once again, inert.

  Turning one into the flame of his lighter, Paul Sheffield tucks the rest of the Walruses away. Heavy with the dose, he looks back slowly, through the wire-mesh, to see Roddy lean back into a morbid pose. Bloody human wasteland.

  Chapter 6: BREAKING EVEN

  PAUL CLAMORS into his ’29 Rapid FürE, and slams the door shut behind him. He looks down the neon strip with bloodshot eyes to mesas hemming the blue sky. Barstow, California—the northernmost tip of the RIM. The rich, the elites, and paying Outland subscribers live in the Blue Zone, formerly Los Angeles central; low-tech, low-lives live in the hell-hole known as the PIT, squeezed against and under the mountains; and everyone else lives along the RIM, including Paul. In Paul’s case, it’s not by choice.

  He once had a nice bungalow in the city, a twenty minute drive to his lab at the Outland Corporation’s former headquarters. For the role he played—unwittingly or not—in Allen Scheele’s death, he was exiled to this big-city satellite, a sand-carved settlement rife with crime and old tech.

  Barstow is far enough away from the Los Angeles Blue Zone for Winchester to feel safe from the perceived threat of a technological riposte from a disgruntled former employee. The old technocrat’s sense of security was doubly assured with the tracking beacon—an M-series NEXUS chip—buried in Paul’s thigh. Paul couldn’t go anywhere without his former boss knowing, which is precisely why he’d recently hacked it, dug it out, and chipped-it into one of his housemates. Winchester has no business knowing mine, especially when my business is ultimately bringing down the CLOUD.

  Paul sets a waypoint on his GPS slat: a pay-terminal on the way to his retreat. He’d automate his payments, if it wasn’t for the satisfaction he took in secreting money away to his family before his creditors took their share.

  He pulls out of the UtilMart lot, and onto the main drag, corralled by sun-bronzed signs and holographic dancers kicking their pixelated legs over uninviting store fronts.

  The fiber terminal Paul’d marked as a destination, decaled with some libertarian propaganda about the “age of state omniscience,” waits ahead, off the side of the road, for his delinquent paychecks. It’s surrounded by fuming, maglev transports.

  With his truck idling behind him, Paul plods over to the pay terminal, stuck with the feeling he’s being watched. He pulls his financial microchip out of his shirt pocket, and blesses the machine with a vertical swipe.

  Over by the nearest transport, a man and a woman both wearing onyx exosuits creak on their reinforced legs, staring warily at Paul. Paul finds himself nodding to validate their presence and potential threat. He smiles, dumbly, and subtly thumbs the electro-blade on his belt, ignoring the transactions and debts tallied on the projection before him. With a SIK scalene or two, he’d have the stability to recognize or dismiss the voyeurs as a threat. Now, with trembling hands, he’ll just have to wait.

  The terminal queries Paul, demanding him to submit his most recent employment file. He’d written a script just for this purpose. He waves his wristband over the scanner. So far as the City of Los Angeles and the Outland Corporation are concerned, Paul is nothing more than a solar farmer, which is only half true.

  Since going into exile, Paul’s been supplementing his severance pay working odd jobs for a Navajo tech-dealer named Mansueito. The power cells he carts off to Barstow Energy lend credibility to his cover operation, and double to provide him with that little extra to keep him whole.

  At first, he had considered becoming an experience-fetcher, grabbing interesting stimuli for all the CLOUD’s voyeurs and the agentially-retarded. Venture somewhere interesting or do something extraordinary, and then sell the associated memories. Didn’t pan out, though, largely because of his fear of unintentionally uploading personal information, not limited to his crazy thoughts and secrets. If the CLOUD ever got into his head, his fractured mind would clear him of the charges Outland doled out, but it would also make his subsequent criminal activity public record. Not worth the risk. The benefits of Paul’s particular technological know-how are, therefore, inaccessible to the disembodied public.

  Aware of his monopoly on this fringe of information and ability, Paul decided to market his rare skillset to anyone off the Outland circuit with a checking account. Besides, the tech he needs for his personal projects isn’t exactly free.

  Every problem, including visibility or a rogue android, has a tech fix or a final solution, and Paul can make it happen. Choke-collar CCTV blinders. Cowboy-tech. EMP knots. Headspace hacks. And, luckily for Paul, just about everyone needs a fix: RIM mercenaries, white-palace detectives, PIT hookers, wasteland slugs; you name it—they all have his dots. High tech for lowlifes for hard cash on a second’s notice. It isn’t a clean, lead-scientist position at Outland, but it certainly isn’t starving.

  Even with the dirty money he pockets subverting the G-Men, he doesn’t see much at month’s end. By the time the money makes its way into his pockets, the Outland-infiltrated government turns them out, lint and all, in exchange for services he won’t receive.

  After three court hearings and a private meeting with members from city council, Paul and antiques like him were ordered to pay Outland maintenance and tower charges, even though they were slumming it outside of the city. And although he used neither of the two services, the powers that be expressed indifference to his predicament, the majority of them having been backed and compensated in advance by Winchester. So long as you were within city limits (i.e. within the markers, haphazardly dropped throughout the sprawl), you were required to pay in full. The temptation to move further out of state was always there, but Paul wanted to be close to his kids, however estranged. And besides, his restraining order and parole didn’t leave him much wiggle room.

  Pythia and Angela get the bulk of his cash. They were just babies when he lost his Outland job—when Rachel left him. Now they’re little cadets with big ideas. His monthly swipe ensures that Pythia gets the medical treatment and therapy she needs for her cognitive infirmity. The rest, P
aul presumes, is for groceries.

  Again, Paul puts money into the plate, without ever a hope of seeing any kind of redemption or return. His efforts are squandered to serve those rotting in the gutters, keeled over protein bars in caffeine houses, or glass-eyed in UtilMarts.

  The fiber-terminal projects a graphic of his remaining balance. No debt, no savings. Paul sneers. If there’s still income left after all the government dips, it’ll go towards Pythia’s upgrade: a pair of cochlear implants and a transmitter in her Broca’s Area, none of which is still insured by Outland. Paul’s not the first creator to get absolutely brutalized as a show of thanks for his beneficence.

  Paul looks up nervously at the exosuits before pocketing his financial microchip. They’re busy changing one of the magnetic harnesses on their rig. You’re so goddamned paranoid, he scolds himself. He steps away from the fiber terminal, zips up his jacket, and heads back to his truck.

  Inside the humming compartment, he marks his retreat as the endpoint on his GPS, and leans back, mind untaxed and ready to go to work. Dante Alighieri damned his enemies while living in exile; Paul’s ready to go one step further.

  Chapter 7: SNAKE-HOLED KINGDOM

  PAUL PULLS OFF Irwin Road onto a gravel driveway about eighteen minutes outside of Barstow. The detour is neither numbered nor marked by any other kind of signage. It is not on any map, at least not plainly defined. Over the next fifteen grid-lined and pixelated miles fed by satellite imaging to Paul’s dash, nothing stands out, no more than anywhere else in San Bernardino County. Just the same cholla- and creosote-speckled desolation, minus a kilometre-long, one-hundred foot mesa.

  To a misguided motorist facing south, it’d look like nothing more than a ruin on a Cretaceous hill, humbled and worn by time. That is exactly the kind of characterlessness Paul needs to go about his business in exile.

  Dirt and debris, kicked back by the maglev stabilizers, blossom behind the truck as it moans up the serpentine track towards Paul’s retreat: an adobe, wood, and steel cottage, built into the mesa.

  The driveway ahead bypasses a grouping of red boulders. The tallest ensconces a sensor array that’s already decided not to pulverize the vehicle with a barrage of incendiary rockets. Paul buries the array in his orange wake and slows at the base of a sandy buttress—the last leg of the ascent—permitting the loosed sand to catch up.

  Securitas, an artificial intelligence Paul had developed on spec for the military and later modified to sate his own domestic-security demands, recognizes the truck’s transponder and retracts the spikes and magnetic caltrops camouflaged at the base of the incline. Paul floors the truck to get over the last hump, and eases-off at the sight of the weathered façade hewn into the shale, in transition from an egg-shell blue to the colour of rot. Home, sweet home. With one last depression of the pedal, Paul veers to the bitter end of the driveway, knotted beneath the front door of the retreat. He stops and turns off the engine.

  He gets out to the sound of ticking and desert static; the former metred to the engine-block’s cooling and contracting, and the latter, sporadic—one billion insects dopplered, rustling in and around windblown junipers and cottonwoods. Roddy, the UtilMart chickenhead clerk in town, calls it the “deafening silence.”

  “You listen hard enough,” he told Paul, “and you can hear nature’s basest commands.” Always wondered whose life-experience, uploaded to the CLOUD, informed Roddy’s idea that day.

  Paul swings around to hook the truck up to charge. Ff-fa-sh goes the power cables, channelling energy to the battery Paul’d exhausted running errands, which had almost been a complete success. Two out of three’s not half-bad.

  Paul interrupts his inspection of the flat bed for items he’d forgotten or shouldn’t forget to turn on his Monocle eyewear. The graphical interface flits across his iris and prompts him with myriad options. Amidst the star field of executables and icons, one figures prominently at the top-left corner of his vision: a prison-barred ‘S’. It shakes, responding to Paul’s intention—decrypted in a nano-second by the Monocle’s neuro- and eye-movement sensors. The ‘S’ expands to a black screen, which is immediately replaced by a talk-to-text window addressed to Securitas.

  “All clear?” Paul comms the AI, immersed both in the virtual and the real.

  “Apart from an innocuous, natural perimeter breach at 11:46:32—which was resolved without force—Sheffield HQ is pristine.” Securitas’ diction and tempo is precise; as natural and efficient as Paul’s parameters will allow. “Cerebus Secondary confirms diagnosis.”

  “Thank you, Securitas. Monitor the perimeter and scan the comms.”

  “Yes, Dr. Sheffield.”

  Paul disables the electrical reinforcement on the front door with a finger swipe on the adjoining scanner. The door swings inward, revealing a modest foyer overrun with polycarb boxes. Scribbles, robot designs, and other writ-on-tree wad the walls. He enters, knocking a pile of disordered thought over, closes and then deflates against the door.

  Securitas’ paranoid entry-beep rouses the attention of Paul’s only remaining flesh-and-blood cohorts: a pair of mutts. Paul hears them on the other side of the retreat, bowling over one another, yelping and barking, and skittling across the floor.

  “Hey guys,” he yells, priming their excitement.

  With tongues swishing, they both bolt out of the central hallway connecting the front foyer to the living quarters sequestered on the far side. The first, a German-shepherd/coyote hybrid—the colour of Boreal-forest decay—and the second, a bionic Rottweiler—painted in the traditional black and tan of his fierce ancestors—find him with noisome, albeit welcoming, kisses. Overjoyed about their master’s return, they run circuits around him, yapping with their ears pinned back.

  Oni had recommended that Paul find himself some canine company with Rachel gone and Outland sending him into quarantine. He’d hoped she would commit as company, but had to face facts and sewer delusion. She’d be promoted with him gone. In any event, Paul ended up with two dependents; the second to provide consistency to the first when he couldn’t.

  The dogs scramble back down the hall to the kitchen, this time with Paul in tow. He motions to turn-on the string of LED lanterns stationed along the passage, but defers, seeing ample rays gild his pups.

  At the juncture of the hallway and the cliff-side of his retreat, Paul bows to open a hidden panel. A biometric scanner prompts him for his handprint. Certain with a high-five, it retracts, offering, instead, a button. Paul hammers it, and two purple energy fences sever the hallway behind him. Nothing can get through or past them. For some people, freedom is a tank full of gas and an open road. For Paul, freedom is being all-that-he-can-be in a well-stocked hole, out of reach and out of sight.

  Paul skirts around the main floor, double-checking to make sure Securitas hadn’t overlooked any unwanted visitors. The AI had already flubbed once, permitting an antagonistic android Paul’d been charged to reprogram to make herself at home. For its transgressions, Paul assigned Securitas a distinct, secondary awareness, codenamed Cerebus, to assure quality and scrutinize response at the most elementary level.

  Satisfied with a somewhat-thorough look around, Paul enters the kitchen—a chaos of wires, small pieces of tech, and paper squares covered in various dot configurations. Paul summons up the dot gram sitting on the top of the pile.

  He activates his heads-up display, rooted under his skin around the temple. This heads-up display, nicknamed Monocle, automatically draws a holographic file from the Net using the coordinates insinuated by the dot formation on the flap. Paul’s Monocle privately projects the hologram ahead of him.

  Coloured in bright 3D, Paul reads: “CYPULCHRE TOWER MAINTENCE CHARGES.” The Outland Corporation logo—a brain, a cloud, and a pyramid—oscillates above the counter. He crumples the dot gram, terminating the related hologram, and whips it over-shoulder. The balled invoice doesn’t go as far as dramatic necessity would normally dictate, vexing Paul even further.

  He seizes
up the next dot gram in the pile. “OUTLAND CORPORATION; PRIVATE MEMO—SUBJECT: ANOMALIES, CLOUD; SCHEELE FUNERAL.” Paul flicks the introjected screen, which scrolls the message: “HOPE TO SEE YOU. WOULD LIKE TO PICK YOUR BRAIN RE: URGENT MATTER. WILL MAKE IT WORTH YOUR WHILE. REGARDS, S. KATAJIMA, PhD.”

  An attached holographic of Allen, circa ten years back, appears, conveyed by the dot gram and projected by Paul’s Monocle. Allen’s brown irises make his shallow eyes seem deeper, drawing attention away from his disproportionately-large ears and his blotchy skin.

  Paul closes his hand around Allen’s apparition, nullifying the projection. “Persistent bugger.”

  The Rottweiler scurries over, scratches itself, and then barks at Paul.

  “Not you, buddy.”

  Paul balls up the flap, hoping to outdo his previous subversion of Newtonian physics. Winding up, he notices a warning light on the Kay9 auto feed. The hopper’s over-packed with food, all out of reach of the dogs.

  “Oh shit,” he says, surrendering the flap to the countertop. “I’m sorry guys.”

  The Rottweiler aggressively paws his leg.

  “Chill out,” Paul murmurs, circumnavigating the hungry dog.

  For a split second, Paul’s gloom is alleviated by the prospect of still being needed. He unjams the dispenser. A single kibble was jarred just-so, preventing the wealth dammed behind to issue forth. Paul smiles, and cranks the lever, watching the aesthetically-neutral sustenance bury Apollo and Zeus’ bowls.

  “Alright, rascals. I gotta go to work.” Paul gently knees through the tangle of fur, and steps out of the kitchen—competitive consumption loud behind him.

  He saunters into the living room, and trades his pack of Walruses for the coding tablet resting on the oak coffee table, asymmetrically planted out of leg’s reach of the couch. He examines his last entry in a long scrawl of code, which—to a stranger’s eyes—ostensibly has no logic or recurring themes to it. If it weren’t for his computers’ consistent and unanimous validation of his code, he would have written the project off as delusional fancy; chalked it up to what Rachel called a “coping mechanism.” He blindly stumbles forward, obsessing over the next string of commands and mathematical if-then statements.