by Rich Larson
“Yes.” Capricorn’s voice was like bone shards.
Boniface stepped backward into the pod, feeling the cold like a hot iron on his calves, his ass, his shoulder blades. “If you would tell him something from me.” He leaned his head back and the automated arms positioned him in the pod. “When he puts in the request for re-identification, in ten or twelve or however many years, if I’m braindead, I don’t want them to send me to my wife. Tell him to kill me. He’ll find a way.”
“I’ll tell him.”
Then the lid slid shut. Boniface fed the tube down his throat, slowly, slowly, willing himself not to cough, easing it past the gag point with his toes clenched against each other. Gel seeped back into the tube, creeping up his ankles. The last thing he saw was Capricorn crawling on hand and knees, jaw set, eyes fixed on the door. Then he was a smear of orange jumpsuit and white wall, and then there was only the dark.
Boniface slept.
Nyx was flat on his back, watching tendrils of tranq gas descend in ribbons from the ceiling, momentarily disconnected from the stunstick jabbed under his ribs. Then the sweeper flicked the power high, and Nyx howled as it scorched him.
“He told you not to fucking move,” the sweeper said, half-snarling, half-weeping.
Nyx couldn’t speak, but he wanted to apologize, to explain that he had never intended for the medroid’s needle to find a soft puncture point in the webbing that let Dirk turn his helmeted head. He liked repeat customers.
Through a tangle of legs, Nyx could just see the sweeper’s corpse, faceplate blotted with vomit, and further on the medroid’s scattered carcass. The inmates had been tearing it to pieces, using the limbs as clubs, but now the gas was taking effect.
“You fucking piece of shit.” The sweeper punctuated it with another jab, this one to Nyx’s thigh. It felt like a circle burned clear through.
Nyx convulsed. He saw, dimly, the stunstick come up again. He rolled, caught it on his shoulder. As his eyes watered and blurred he saw, past the imploding crowd, a tall thin man standing, swaying, against the freezer door. His shoulders sagged; his head was bowed. His cold eyes sliced back and forth through the chaos, sharp as scalpels.
“Long live the king,” Nyx breathed. His ribs shook around a laugh. The sweeper gave him a final kick and moved off as the inmates began to domino against each other, toppling with lungs full of gas. Nyx held his breath as long as he could, watching the Sixers and the Woadskins and all the rest of them drop to their knees, then prostrate on the floor.
When he finally succumbed, Capricorn was still standing, still watching, lips peeling back in a frostbitten grin.
EDITED
For some reason I thought Wyatt would look different after getting Edited, but when he steps out onto the porch of his parents’ summer reefhouse, swilling a Corona and swiping my we’re here message off his phone, he’s the same as ever. Still tall and bony with gray eyes and pale blonde hair that looks like it’ll stick to your hand but doesn’t.
He stuffs his phone into the pocket of his chinos and gives us a wave. “Boys.”
Dray springs past me and up the porch in three lanky strides, wrapping Wyatt up like it’s been a year instead of a month, then snapping off a slick twisty custom dap, because Dray has a custom dap with everyone and the motherfucking mailman.
“Wyatt, bru, look at this place,” he says, rubbing his hand along the organic coral railing, mottled purple like the rest of the reefhouse, everything grown from some big name designer geneprint because Wyatt’s parents only ever get the best. Dray wraps his hand around the back of Wyatt’s neck and sticks foreheads with him. “We are going to bang some bitches here, bru.”
Wyatt grins, catching my eye in a way that makes me not think about bitches, but more about the last time me and him smoked his mom’s ponic and fooled around in his room with the beats up.
“Yo,” Dray says, going serious. “You got scars?”
Wyatt wriggles away then, muttering like no, no it was all nano, of course there’s no scarring.
By this time I’m up the steps and acting fully glacial even though it’s good to see Wyatt again, like really good. “What’s doing, Y,” I say, cookie cutter dap, precise half a hug, stepback. “You still remember me?”
Wyatt grins again. “It’s vague and shit. But yeah.”
Dray’s already loped past us into the reefhouse, crowing about throwing some ball on the wall screens, about cracking the 18-and-up thumblock on the minibar.
Me and Wyatt follow him in, backs of our hands not quite touching.
We decide to swim while there’s still sun, so the three of us grab trunks and dart off through the backdoor of the house, which shutters shut behind us, and out to the pale gray beach.
There’s a rusty booth for skinspray, because the water’s not so user friendly anymore, even though it’s not as bad as that webdoc where they pull that pilot whale out the Pacific and its hide is all bubbling and falling off in chunks.
Wyatt strips down as pasty as ever and me and Dray bust him on it like always, like whoa, polar bear, and it feels like a standard scene except Wyatt doesn’t go red and squirm like usual, instead just smiles this new kind of smile I can’t quite find the word for.
Dray molds a handful of the gritty orange skinspray to his crotch while the gel is setting, so he comes out of the booth with this wobbly skinspray cock hanging off him. We splash around in the waves, dunking each other and pretending to drown to fuck with the little paddlebot lifeguard, until Dray’s fake dick dissolves and the water gets chilly enough to slice under the sunshine and turn my toes all thick and cold.
Then we slosh out back to the sand and camp down, talking shit about the NBA draft and that seven-footer from Chad who doesn’t want to get a nerve mesh for like, religious reasons. Then about the two girls a little ways off who are cam-chatting someone in a foreign language. They’re both wearing black bikinis and one has an animated tattoo of a flowering vine slithering up and down her leg, which makes Dray pantomime humping his towel.
Wyatt is laughing and seems fully normal, even though I wikied all this shit about post-Edit malaise, how people feel like they lost their phone, but in their head, and they’re patting every part of their brain trying to find it. And his mom, when she chatted me, she said that he might be sad. Might be distant.
But everything seems alright. We talk shit. We laugh. We pick skinspray off ourselves and flick it at each other.
Eventually Dray can take the tattoo no more, and he pressgangs Wyatt and me to go mack on the girls with him. They turn out to be Finnish, holidaying for the summer, and also sisters. Both of them speak airtight English, but that doesn’t stop Dray from pulling up Finnish-English babel apps so he can goof on them with some butchered phrases like “your smile gives me butterflies” and “are you into four-ways.”
Normally Wyatt would just be basing him, but this time he dives right in, touching the tattoo girl’s arm, winking, getting both of them to laugh. Like he’s just realizing for the first time that he’s tall and rich and handsome.
Eventually I get bored and slide off back to the water. From a distance I can tell the Finnish girls are still digging Wyatt, but the one who was giving me looks before points over to me and I hear:
“Your friend? What of your friend?”
Dray looks back and throws me a salute, then says, “Not his thing, yo. Pink is not his favorite color.”
Him and Wyatt come join me a minute later with Finns in phone.
“They’re not twins, but whatever, right?” Dray says, shrugging. “Still sexy.”
Somehow, nonverbally, it is cement that Wyatt gets the girl with the tat, whose name is Viivi, and Dray gets the younger sister, whose name is Heli.
“Viivi’s got a tight little ass on her,” Wyatt says, looking at me when he says it with an edge I am not used to hearing. “Can’t wait to plow that shit.” He thumps my shoulder, like I’m in on it, and lies back in the sand. He stays eyes shut and smiling until his
parents skype to check in on him, then he knocks us fists and heads down the beach with his phone.
For a while me and Dray talk about a Bulls-Satellites final, how brag it would be for Thon Maker to finally get a ring. Before we knew Wyatt, me and Dray were best friends. Same shitty burb, same shitty elementary, playing pick up on the big cement block behind the school with its one rusty hoop.
“His shoulders are different,” Dray breaks out. “Used to slouch them when he asked a question, like, trying to suck it back in.”
Dray’s smart. A lot of people don’t know that.
“Smiles different, sometimes,” I say. “You ask what all they did?”
“No, bru. You should ask.” He pauses. “If you could get Edited, what would you change? Like, if you could Edit anything you wanted.”
I watch Wyatt dragging his feet in the wet surf, shoulders thrust back. I think about my cramped shitty house that he still treats like a museum, like, afraid to touch shit, peering out of the corner of his eye at the mold bloom on my ceiling and the bare wiring on the walls. I would want to make it so I didn’t notice that. Or notice how his parents look at me sideways sometimes, or how he talks so different with his rich boys.
“I’d be funny,” Dray says. “Like, really funny. Really sharp. Always say the smart thing. That’d be brag.”
“You are funny, shithead.”
“But, like, really funny,” Dray insists. “What would you get?”
“Nothing, bru,” I say, tucking my hands under my head. “Don’t be fucking with perfection.”
We go back to the reefhouse once Wyatt’s done his skype. Then we dig the other Coronas out of the fridge, which is one of those sexy gel fridges where the stuff hangs suspended in little air bubbles, and fire up the hot tub.
The scaldy hot water and the glacial beer do their thing, and the steam cloud makes it feel easier to ask questions. When Dray heads off to take a piss, I turn to Wyatt and tap my temple.
“What all did they change when they went in there, Y?”
Wyatt’s head lolls back on the edge. “Just a basic Edit, mostly,” he says. “Chemo plug for anti-anxiety. Some body language modulation. Bigger memory retention, better spatial reasoning.” He goes quiet for a second. “And I don’t feel things as hard. Like, the shitty things. Bad memories. I remember feeling bad, but I don’t feel bad remembering. Yeah?”
Our legs brush together under the water, hairs all swirling up on each other.
“And the good ones?” I say.
“Success, boys,” Dray announces, back with a shit-eating grin and a frosty bottle of Jäger. “Thought I was going to have to go chop someone’s thumb off.” Wyatt shifts over to make room, and Dray ends up between us.
He throws his chats with the Finnish girls up on the wallscreen, so we all get to witness the slow erosion of their plan to sneak out and meet us. By this time we are all tranqed enough to not care, not that I ever did.
“Still a brag first night,” Wyatt says. “Like old times, yeah?”
“Brag,” Dray says. “I’m going to have a place like this when I’m rich, yo. And I’ll fly them Finns over on sub-orbital.”
Wyatt does that new smile again, and I lock down the word for it: permissive. It rubs me so wrong I take two chugs in a row trying to get the happy feeling back.
It works: soon we’re all laughing, all blurred, and it feels almost like we’re drinking for the first time again. I remember Wyatt slipped his parents some bullshit about a midnight pick-up game and instead we all got pulped at this party, and Wyatt finally admitted he never invited us over after ball because he was ashamed of his big swanky house, and I almost hit him then, but by the end of the night we were all level.
That’s when I started liking him, I think. Not just for setting screens tight but also for his slow-mo straight face jokes and the way he flopped his arm around me to slur secrets. I slurred some back, and in a week it got so my hands had a particular zone on his hipbones and kissing him was easy. When my sister got fucked up bad on pills and had to go to emerg, for some reason I told Wyatt first. He came over to the hospital still digging the crusts out of his eyes.
Dray passes out, sliding down the side of the tub, mumbling about learning Finnish, not to impress nobody but because it’s a brag-sounding language. We get him nested on the couch with a bunch of fluffy white towels and turn him on his side, because Dray has been known to up his guts when Jäger is in play.
“Dart to the beach again?” Wyatt says.
I feel a little bad leaving Dray, but I’m drunk, so only a little. We pull on clothes and stagger on out, still dripping. The beach looks good at night, with the tide coming in soft and foamy and smoothing big arcs in the sand. The moon is nearly full, circled up by these jagged-looking clouds.
We plow some seats in the sand, which still feels warm, and watch the buoys at the edge of the swimming area bloom on one by one, bright yellow. The lifeguard is still paddling back and forth, making ripples in the water.
“I missed you,” I finally say, because the week in hospital and the three in neural recovery almost did feel like a year.
“I missed you too,” Wyatt says, and then we’re kissing, his dry lips on my lips and my hand on his hip. It doesn’t feel right. When my tongue touches his lips he shivers, not a sexy shiver, but a shiver like he just touched something dead.
He pulls away.
“Sorry, bru,” he says. “Thought maybe I could. Can’t.” He puts a finger to his skull, where there is no scarring because they did it all with nano, and I get it now why Dray’s body was always between ours.
“They did that too?” I ask dumbly.
“My parents thought it would be better,” he says. “Simpler. Sorry.”
“They knew about you and me?” I say.
He shakes his head, and that makes it worse, because it means he didn’t tell them. “Nothing like that,” he says. “It’s just simpler, this way. You know, for later in life. Always liked girls more anyway, yeah?”
There’s this new thing swelling big and inky in the space between us, black and bitter so I can almost taste it.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Good call. Way simpler. Simpler the better. Your rich boy life is way complicated.”
“I didn’t know if it would take, or whatever,” Wyatt says. “I thought maybe—”
“That’s why me and Dray are your boys, right?” I say. “We keep it so simple. Couple clowns from the lowburb to make you happy. Help you remember how good you got it.” I’m almost spitting the words. “That’s what this weekend is, right? Therapy. To get you out of whatever post-surgery funk your mom fucking chatted me about.”
“She what?” For the first time, Wyatt flushes like he used to, goes blotchy red. “I had to beg them to let me do the weekend with you. Fucking beg. They wanted me in SAT-prep.” Then the flush is gone again, quicker than should be possible, and he gives his new smile. “We’re still friends, bru. Right?”
I can’t make him mad anymore, or hard, or anything else. But I wonder now if I ever did. If this is Wyatt with something broken, or if this is Wyatt pure, like, Wyatt with the paint stripped off. I wonder if Wyatt was sad after surgery because they Edited me out, or if it was just chemicals getting level in his head.
“Sorry,” Wyatt says again. “Didn’t think you’d care so much.” He grabs my hand and weaves the fingers tight. I look at his bony white knuckles on my brown ones and wonder how different you have to be before you’re a different person.
“I don’t have some swanky surgeon to just turn that shit off when it’s not simple,” I say. “I don’t get to turn none of it off.”
We sit there in the sand, and I can almost hear the countdown ticking through his head. Like, this many minutes to still be a good person, this many to still be a good friend.
I don’t wait for zero. I take my hand back and get up, brush off. I go back up the beach, watching the clouds eat the moon, Edit it right out of the sky like it never was there. Not reall
y.
CIRCUITS
Desert.
The sky is an aching white blank with all the color baked out of it. Below, a cracked and desiccated lakebed is dotted with the rusty heaps of boat wrecks. At the edge of the lake, remnants of a petrified treeline poke up like splintered bones. Beyond that, the irradiated sand is interrupted only by a spiny metal track.
An ancient smartmine is following the curve of this track, trundling along on three stumpy legs. Its joints are stiff with grit; the nozzles that spit lubricant ran dry long ago. Metal rasps metal as it moves. The dull red glow of its optic flickers off and on. Inside the carbon shell, its crude AI is crumbling code, all its approved targets long gone.
When the air fills with a keening hum and particles of sand begin to swirl, rising in vortex, the smartmine blinks. Trembles. Evasion algorithms take over and its rusty drill whines to life. The smartmine burrows into the dust, scooping sand overtop of itself for camouflage only to have it stripped away, dragged upward in delicate spirals.
An enormous train thunders overhead, riding the magnetic cushion. Its segmented body is gleaming in places, rusty and pitted in others. Slick black solar sails spark as they convert the endless sunshine. Self-directed repair modules scuttle up and down the length, hunched against the wind and the billowing sand. For all its bulk, the train glides smoothly over the desert, a phantom.
Inside it: Mu.
Mu takes good care of her train, and good care of her guests. Currently Mu is projecting in the window of passenger pod 942 to check up on the Adebayos.
“If you look out the windows to your right, you’ll see the serene shores of Lake Madarounfa,” Mu recites. “Anyone fancy a dip? Haha!”
While Mu waits for a response, she pivots her avatar from one passenger to the next to give the appearance of eye contact. Eye contact is essential for comfort. Mu has been working hard on her avatar. Its cheery face is now composed of shifting blots that can realign depending on the passenger profile of whoever she’s speaking to.
