Gunwitch: Rebirth

by Niall Teasdale

  Then a failure in the Sea Wall had prompted the creation of the Bulkhead Walls between the districts and the Factory Wall had been put up to further subdivide Queens. With the construction had come demolition and rebuilding. Areas which had been more suburban had been replaced by tenement blocks for the workers… who had no longer been needed as automation progressed in the factories.

  Brooklyn was poor; Queens was not quite as bad as its neighbour, but it was not doing a lot better, and the ultimate expression of its state seemed to be the roads which ran along the north side of the Factory Wall. They were, essentially, one roadway, but the wall had a kink in it and someone had decided that the eastern part of the roadway was Factory Drive while the western part was Industrial Avenue. There were more low-rent hotels along Factory Drive, more equally low-rent apartments along Industrial Avenue. Both of them had a roughly equal number of women who made their living servicing the requirements of the men coming out of the industrial zone. Annette was not sure what the women walking out through the gates did for entertainment. Perhaps they were less inclined to pay for it, or could get it some other way.

  Annette walked along Industrial Avenue wondering how this state of affairs could exist. She was not naïve enough to think that prostitution of some kind was anathema to Utopia City, but you did not see it on the streets. No one went without; no one was this desperate. Further, the Utopia City legal code did not even include references to sex work and Annette knew that here these women were criminals. Except that they were here, in plain sight, and there were also policemen on patrol, ignoring the women.

  It was the first time Annette had seen actual Long Island PD cops on duty. They wore a dark-blue cap, tunic, and slacks, no obvious body armour, and were armed with handguns and electric batons. Annette’s systems picked up basic analogue radio transmissions from them. Maybe they had powered suits available for emergencies, but they were not the combat-armour-wearing UDF. How they handled the gangs, Annette had no idea, though if Queens had a gang problem, it seemed to be well hidden.

  Or it was until Annette stopped to check her maps and decide on where to go next. She had come to a stop on a corner and her purpose in coming down this far was done with since she had seen the Factory Wall and determined that she would need a reason to get beyond it. She was considering heading north again when the blonde walking down toward the avenue stopped and looked at her.

  ‘You must be new,’ the girl said. ‘If you’re not one of theirs, you can’t be on this corner. It belongs to the Widows.’

  Annette blinked at her, though the effect was likely lost behind her shades. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The Black Widows. They hold this corner for their girls. They’ll… Well, I’m not sure what they’ll do to you if they find you here, but it won’t be nice.’

  ‘Um… Do I honestly look like I’m here looking for work?’

  The blonde looked Annette up and down, and then did the same with herself, as though she needed the comparison. She was young: Annette guessed there was an eighteen-year-old hidden under the make-up and clothes. Her face was fresh, pretty, and more or less heart-shaped with high cheekbones and a slightly upturned nose. Naturally blonde hair fell around her shoulders in a thick mass with curling twists to the ends. Her eyes were a sort of misty dark blue and very clear, almost innocent, except for the thick, pink eyeshadow pasted around them. Her full lips were painted candy pink, as were her nails, to match the boob tube she was squeezed into. Denim shorts, cut as short as they would get, complemented the top, but the dark-blue slingback pumps did not really match. She had a thin denim jacket, but she had to be cold. Yet here she was, stopping to offer advice to someone new to the avenue, even if it was not needed.

  ‘Well… I guess not. Which is good because we don’t need the competition. I’m Sarah.’ A hand was thrust out at Annette and Sarah smiled, almost beamed.

  Annette took the offered hand. ‘Louise,’ she said, giving her middle name because… She was not exactly sure. ‘And I’m just visiting. Who are these Black Widows you mentioned?’

  Sarah’s smile vanished and Annette wondered whether she had said the wrong thing. However, Sarah’s eyes were looking over Annette’s shoulder. ‘Looks like you’re about to find out.’

  Annette turned to see two women approaching, both taller than average and possessed of good muscle definition, and also a penchant for leather clothing. Annette might have classified them as belonging to Sarah’s apparent profession given the brevity of their skirts, except that these two were both carrying large knives and Annette had not seen any of the other girls carrying weapons.

  ‘This corner belongs to us,’ one of the two said. The tone was quite menacing, but they only had close-combat weapons…

  ‘The whole corner?’ Annette asked. ‘I can’t stop to talk on it?’

  ‘If you’re not with us, you don’t get to talk here, no.’

  Annette heard a tiny whimper come from behind her. Sarah was scared, but she also was not leaving. Interesting. Reaching up, Annette took her glasses off and hung them from the neck of her T-shirt. The two Widows took a step back, which was what Annette wanted. ‘I have no intention of taking business from you. Frankly, I’m insulted that you think I would, but I’ll let that slide. You let me finish my conversation and we’ll say no more about it.’

  The talkative one sneered. ‘That fancy rig you’re wearing is stupid. I can gut you like a fish before you can even draw–’ She stopped as she found herself looking down the barrel of one of Annette’s pistols. ‘What the fuck are you?! Some kind of witch?’

  ‘I can’t turn you into a toad,’ Annette replied, ‘but I can turn you into a corpse.’ She read tension in muscles, saw the flickers of anger in the woman’s face…

  ‘Finish your conversation fast,’ the Widow said and then backed off, only turning to walk away when she had reversed a couple of metres.

  Annette watched them walk away before handing her pistol back to her pod and turning around.

  ‘Oh!’ Sarah said and Annette felt a slight lurch in her stomach for some reason. Maybe she had been hoping… ‘Those are… kind of awesome.’ Sarah actually started to reach up as though to touch Annette’s eyes, and then obviously thought better of it. ‘I see why they jerked like that, but… Wow!’ Then the blonde’s expression shifted again and she asked, ‘You’re not a Cyber-King, are you?’

  Annette was still trying to get over the flickers of attraction she had seen before Sarah’s mind had, once again, shifted gears. ‘I am not a Cyber-King. I would not go near their surgeons with a three-metre pole.’ She slipped her shades back on, which seemed to displease Sarah, which rather pleased Annette. ‘Which way were you going?’

  ‘Oh, uh, that way.’ Sarah pointed east, away from the direction the Widows had taken.

  ‘Mind if we walk and talk? No point in antagonising them and I’m trying to get to know the area.’

  ‘I don’t mind at all.’ Sarah smiled her bright, slightly brainless, smile and set off to cross the road.

  ‘Good. So, tell me about these Black Widows?’

  ‘They’re the big gang in Queens. All about the girl power. Started by a girl, run by girls.’

  ‘And yet they control prostitution down here?’

  Sarah gave a shrug. ‘Well, they keep the best pitches for themselves. All the ones near the main gates. They have more girls over on Factory Drive, and they’ve got a couple of brothels north of here. It’s like a rite of passage thing. If you join the gang, you work the streets or the brothels to earn them cash, until you get promoted anyway.’

  ‘Do they have any male members?’

  ‘Yeah, but they keep them under their heels.’ Sarah giggled. ‘Joke is that the only men who join the Widows are foot fetishists, because they spend so much time kissing boots.’

  ‘Huh. I guess it takes all kinds. Aren’t you cold? I mean it’s basically winter…’

  ‘Mm, yes,’ Sarah said, brightening. ‘It’ll be Christmas next week.’


  Annette decided not to mention that she had no idea what Christmas was. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s cold, I guess. You get used to it. It’s worse after dark. There’s Jenny, we’re almost at my stop.’

  They were coming up to another junction and Annette could see a red-haired woman, slightly older than Sarah, watching them approach from across the road. ‘I’ll head up from here then,’ Annette said. ‘Thanks for the information.’

  ‘Oh, no problem. And, you know, if you want some company later, I’ll probably still be here.’

  Annette gave Sarah a smile. ‘I’ll keep that in mind, Sarah. Thanks.’

  ~~~

  It was a little weird. The buildings in southern Queens had been built after the Factory Wall, and yet the older structures to the north looked better and seemed to have received better maintenance. Still, you could tell that the people in this district were not exactly rolling in money. There was a sort of forgotten quality to the place. Queens had been forgotten and was trying to keep up; Brooklyn had been abandoned and did not really seem to care.

  And, so far as Annette could tell, the Black Widows kept a tight lid on things here. Somehow, Annette doubted it was the police who were keeping gang violence, and obvious presence, off the streets. Knowing roughly what she was looking for, Annette could see them now, the girls with attitude who paid a little too much attention to what was going on around them. She spotted a few occasions when the patrolling cops nodded to the watching Widows. It seemed unlikely that the gang had been deputised, but there was some sort of truce in place.

  Queens was definitely a better area. There were more shops open and they did not look like they had to fend off riots on a regular basis. Annette detected several wireless network hubs operating, many of them private, but the public network had several access points around the district too. There seemed to be more of those public network points in the northern areas, but there were some all over.

  With the sun beginning to drop in the sky, Annette hopped the local metro toward Brooklyn. The trains were not the cleanest transportation she had ever been on, but they were operational, reasonably fast, fairly cheap, and they seemed to run on time.

  Plus, there were people to observe on the trains and they behaved differently to when they were on the street. The trains were patrolled by LIPD officers, even going through Brooklyn, and the passengers seemed more relaxed. You did not see it on the street, but on the train, people were using mobile phones. Annette’s systems could detect the transmissions, but she was having no luck with the protocols. In the morning, she decided, she would check out Sky City and get her hands on a phone.

  Manhattan, 18/12/83.

  The stink of rotting flesh filled her nostrils. They had her. She could feel unnaturally strong arms wrapping around her and she fought to get free. Fought and struggled and…

  Found herself tangled in her sleeping bag and awake, even if the images from the dream were still fresh in her mind. It took two goes before Annette managed to get the zip undone and then she stumbled to the window. There was a small balcony outside a French window and she needed the fresh air.

  By the time her nerves were back to firing normally and her adrenaline levels were down, the dream had become more distant. She remembered corpses crawling after her through the tunnels of the Below, but they were vague now and the only detail she remembered was that the foremost of them had been her father, his slack face looking at her with dead, accusatory eyes and a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead.

  The night had started badly and she had had to use more of her precious drug supply, and now it had ended badly, but there was light in the sky. The sun was not yet up, but going back to bed seemed like an unproductive use of her time. She would do the best she could to wash the sweat from her body and see what Sky City had to offer.

  Sky City District.

  The reason for the name became apparent as soon as Annette stepped off the train. Sky City had been constructed from scratch as the population grew, and it had been constructed vertically. There were parks and plazas, and some large low buildings, but the general impression was of height. Tower blocks, usually with shops at their base, formed canyons of concrete, glass, and steel through most of the district as far as Annette could tell.

  Not, however, in the three- or four-kilometre stretch of land which housed the enclave’s centre of government, the Enclave Centre, and its centre of learning, the Long Island Education Centre. Between the government building and the education complex, the land had been set aside for numerous government buildings, including the official residence of the enclave’s president and a couple of embassies, several parks, and a large amphitheatre-like plaza known as the Pnyx. The last weird name was obviously something related to history, but not any history Annette had learned. Still, the most official area in the city made Annette feel more at home than anywhere else she had been.

  There were no gang tags here. The concrete and glass were kept clean. Annette had access to the public network everywhere she walked. Best of all, there was a university! Well, from the looks of it, the Long Island Education Centre catered to more or less everyone from about the age of eleven upward. Though ‘everyone’ was probably an exaggeration. Annette found a bench in one of the quads and sat down to browse the net and watch the people. From the clothes, it looked as though the majority of students, even in the youngest age bracket, came from Sky City or the districts to the east. Sky City and Queens had almost the same population, but Queens was underrepresented, and Brooklyn seemed to be more or less missing. Annette decided to dig into the education system.

  Up to age ten, everyone was required to attend a local elementary school which, as the name suggested, taught the basic elements of education. Students were expected to achieve basic competency in reading, writing, and mathematics. Assessment at the end of their last year allowed them to move on to the education centre for further studies. Annette found links to a couple of additional schools which took older students for further education in the poorer districts. Both were charities, one run by a local religious movement, the other via charitable donations from the companies in the Queens industrial zone. If you wanted to study past the age of eighteen at the education centre, there were fees.

  Education in the enclave was below standard and tended to favour the richer elements of society. On the plus side, you did not get brainwashed into thinking the president was a demigod. The students of Sky City were ordinary people, with ordinary problems and minds free to think what they wanted. When Annette had walked past the Pnyx, there had been a man standing in it shouting about the poor conditions in Brooklyn and how the district was being forgotten by the government. He would probably have been shipped off to re-education in Utopia City before he had managed to get a sentence out.

  Satisfied with her research, and further annoyed with her home town, Annette got to her feet and set off to find a phone.

  ~~~

  ‘The Kumquat netPhone seven is the ultimate in mobile communications, madam.’ Salesmen were less annoying in Utopia City. ‘I can tell that you are a technically savvy woman. The Kumquat is the phone for you.’ Salesmen in Utopia City did not tell you what you wanted; they gave you what you asked for. ‘Complete internetworking, digital call management, and an ultra-high-definition screen.’ Maybe some brainwashing was not a bad thing.

  ‘I really just need a phone,’ Annette said, looking between the device she had asked to see and the one the salesman was trying to force on her. The Kumquat was a datapad device with a screen about fifteen centimetres across the diagonal and, she had to admit, a fairly impressive screen. The Nokey Model 1565 she had picked as being precisely what she needed was a compact unit with just enough room for a keypad and an LCD display. It was a lot thicker than the Kumquat, which probably meant its battery life was longer than an hour, but even that feature was not something Annette required. The Kumquat was also six times the price of the Nokey and Annette was on a budget. ‘Really, ju
st a phone.’

  ‘Everyone says that,’ the salesman said. He was a handsome man, blonde and blue-eyed, and dressed in a suit which looked like it was worn once between cleanings. He was used to women thinking he was something special, but Annette came from a place where no one her age was unattractive. ‘Once you start using the netPhone seven, you’ll discover a world you never knew existed. You’ll never forget another phone number. The netPhone remembers them for you and, with the new InstaSnap technology, you’ll be able to quickly grab photographs to attach to those numbers in case you need a visual reminder.’

  Annette sighed. She had not wanted to do it, but he was leaving her no choice. She took her glasses off and looked around at a man who was suddenly losing his customer-friendly smile. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I have a computer at the base of my skull which is both an order of magnitude smaller than the one in that phone and also several orders of magnitude more powerful. Plus, with my new eyeball technology, I can record everything I see, in real time, including phone numbers. I really just need a phone. A phone to make phone calls. Not one to replace my brain. Okay?’

  ‘I-I’ll register the Nokey for you right away, madam.’

  ‘Great. That’ll be just great.’ She really did not need a phone to make phone calls either. What she wanted was the parts.

  Manhattan.

  Annette peered at the internal workings of the phone she had purchased and, she had to admit, it was a fairly elegant design. A single ASIC chip did all the work. The single, sealed package was connected up to the phone’s keypad, display, microphone, speaker, and antenna array via a few external components. It did everything and more. A little poking around with a signal-analyser probe had uncovered diagnostic contacts and an unused data channel. Annette figured they used the same chip in some of their higher-end phones, just changing the case.