by Ernest Hogan
The woman from Outlaw Implants was a gorgeous recombozoid: Her skin was a jet black, not dark brown, but truly black – without any highlights, it soaked up light like a sponge. Her hair was a metallic helmet the color of flame: dark orange at the roots, blending to incandescent yellow at the tips. Her eyes were the same color as her hair, the color of molten gold. Under her lips, which were the same color as her hair, was a bit of glittery gold jewelry that had a functional, tech look to it. Euro? Afro? Asio? Natio? Latio? There was no way to tell – the entire genetic heritage of the human race had come back together in this woman, with the help of modern cosmetic technology.
Sharkey shook her head and went back to her post as Smokey and all Los Tricksters drank in the sight of the Outlaw Implants woman, who wore bulky grey-brown coveralls.
"Lousy outfit," said Ella, "but love your hair."
"And your eyes," said Tommy with his best, wasted come-hither growl.
"And your lips," said Kenny, licking his own.
"And your skin," said Lobo, more relaxed than he'd been in hours.
There was a byte of silence.
Smokey looked into the OI woman's hot, molten, glowing eyes and said, "I like those eyes."
An ordinary human would have been intimidated by his tightly-focused attention, but the OI woman was not an ordinary human being. She didn't back off, didn't show any sign of blushing under that truly, wonderfully black skin. She didn't even react. She was cool and business-like. Machine-like.
The piece of jewelry under her lip flashed a few near-microscopic lights and hummed just low enough to be heard.
"Beautiful labret," said Tommy.
"I was going to say that!" said Kenny.
"My eyes are Bradbury Martian Gold," she said. "My skin is Calcutta Blackhole. My lips are tattooed Meltdown Fireball. My hair is implanted Meltdown Fireball chromoprotein fibers. And my labret is a customized Outlaw Implants special."
It was like a commercial – sexy, in a cold way.
"All are available through Outlaw Implants," she concluded.
"What about the outfit?" Ella asked with smirk.
"I got it at a wearable-junk shop," the OI woman said, "so I can travel without being noticed."
"Fat chance of that," said Tommy.
"Which of you is Smokey Espejo?" the OI woman asked.
"You mean you don't know?" said Ella. "Where have you been all this Dead Daze?"
Without a beat, the OI woman said, "Busy. You'd be surprised how many people want to get implanted -- and when they get the urge, they want it now!"
"I know," said Smokey, taking her arm. "I want it. Now."
"You are Smokey Espejo?" she asked as her labret did a small, fluttery flashy-flash, "and your credit is good -- guaranteed by both Novacorp and Los Olvidadoids, even though no records can be found of your existence before last night. Most curious."
"It's my job to inspire curiosity and give people ideas," Smokey said.
"Ideas are no problem for me," the OI woman said with more sublabial flashy-flash. "I get lots of them, constantly. What I really need is time and money."
"Well," said Smokey, "you should already have some of mine."
The OI woman came close to a smile – Tezcatlipoca and Los Tricksters took note of this victory.
"Yes. I do," she said. "Then . . . will you please sit down, Smokey Espejo. Make yourself comfortable. These cushions on the floor should do fine."
Smokey obliged, and melted back down into the cushions.
Los Tricksters all watched, fascinated by the live show.
The OI woman reached into one of her coverall's many pockets and produced a delicate instrument with a sleek pistol-grip and a long, thin, gleaming nose that held a tiny, glittering piece of high-tech jewelry.
As the OI woman put her Calcutta Blackhole hand on Smokey's golden-brown cheek, Ella said, "Hey, aren't you going to use any kind of anesthetic?"
"And can I have some, too?" asked Tommy.
"Don't forget me," said Kenny.
"It won't be necessary," said the OI woman. "The endorphin release alone is more than enough to cancel the pain. Some people beg for more."
*
Tezcatlipoca flashed Smokey a message of impatience.
*
"Let's get it done," said Smokey, putting his hand on the implanting instrument, curling his brown fingers around the OI woman's black ones.
"Endorphins," said Kenny. "I could use some of those."
"Me too," said Tommy.
The OI woman brought the instrument to the center of Smokey's forehead, where his mystical third eye would be, and gently squeezed the trigger. There was a soft, erotic sigh from the instrument.
Ella winched.
Tommy's mouth dropped open.
Kenny went, "Whoaaaaaaa!"
Smokey didn't blink, but his pupils contracted to pinpricks, then dilated wide.
*
Somewhere, lost in chaotic curves of the brain that was once his own, Beto struggled for existence. Up to now, all he had had to do was hang on with all his might and wait for the Fun to wear of, then grab what he could. But suddenly he was attacked, and it was more powerful than when Tezcatlipoca had first seized his body. A fierce fractal network of electric tentacles wrapped around and wormed their way into his tortured being.
If he had had a mouth, he would have screamed.
*
At that instant, Tan Tien's eyes snapped open.
"I see now," she said as the infosystem roared.
*
Rudolfo Echaurren kneeled in front of the elaborate shrine he had build over his wife's grave, praying in the light from the candles in the Virgin of Guadalupe candle-holders.
He was having a hard time concentrating. He was worried about his daughter Xochitl. Los Angeles was such a dangerous place, for the spirit as well as the body. Why did she have to get mixed up with that crazy Chicano, Beto? Why did she have to make that god-simulating program?
How he wished she were at his side tonight, helping him remember her dear mother.
He choked back some tears.
Then his phone rang.
It was an expensive Melchior-Soga that Xochitl had given him for his birthday. It was too elaborate for him. It had video capability, and they weren't expecting to install video into the Mexican phone system for years. He never felt comfortable wearing it, but Xochitl would always bully him into wearing it on special occasions and holidays. He wore it tonight because it reminded him of her.
He brought it to his face to answer it, looked at the screen, and fell over.
Instead of the usual display about how video wasn't available in Mexico was an image.
It was the image of his dead wife.
She was beautiful, and young. Somehow she looked the way she had when he had decided to ask her to marry him. She smiled. Her eyes were full of love.
His wrist shook uncontrollably, but his eyes stood fixed on the tiny screen.
When she spoke, she sounded strange. It was not her voice at all, but a croaking, crackling of static that sounded oddly like Beto's voice.
"Never trick a trickster," it said.
The image then morphed into that of Xochitl, looking the way she had when she got her degree in computer science.
"The software now has a soul," it went on.
Then it morphed into a lavishly decorated candy skull, with SMOKEY written across the forehead.
"Tezcatlipoca is back," it said.
Then it faded into the VIDEO NO DISPONIBLE display.
"On this night," Rudolfo Echaurren said, "the spirits truly walk the Earth."
*
Suddenly, it felt like Beto had a mouth again. So he screamed.
There was something wrong with the scream: It wasn't quite right in sound or how it felt in his throat.
He brought his hand to his throat . . .
There was something wrong – strange – about his body. If he didn't think about it, it seemed to feel okay, but if he
did something like try to touch his throat, or think hard about the way things should feel . . . it all got blurred, and faded . . . like it wasn't completely real.
Like a virturealist construction.
Like an incomplete sequence of sensory input that relies on the imagination to fill in the gaps.
Like a dream.
Was he dreaming? He looked around. The environment was wraparound enough, but rather vague – fat, fractal patterns of blood red and cerebrum grey flowing and merging into each other with delicate spark-patterns.
"And just what is this xau-xau excuse for a location supposed to be?" he said out loud, and his voice still didn't sound quite right.
Laughter ripped through the red and grey blur, causing the sparks to stop for a moment. The laughter was demonic, sardonic, the laughter of a cocky young trickster/warrior god with a definite Náhuatl accent.
It was the laughter of Tezcatlipoca.
"Don't you recognize it?" the god asked. "You should know it very well."
"If I tried to use something like this for a game, they'd reject it immediately."
"You always said that they are stupid and have no taste," said Tezcatlipoca, still a booming disembodied voice coming from everywhere – even inside Beto's head.
"I'm supposed to recognize this mess?" Beto tried to survey the blurry arrangement. When he focused on something, it would blur, shift and melt away.
"It is a mess," said Tezcatlipoca. "But's that's not my fault. It was this way when I found it."
"Found it?" Beto felt he should be getting a headache, but even that wouldn't focus. As if not enough memory or power were available to complete the illusion.
"It's the place you've been all your life, Beto," said the disembodied god, with a lot of reverb. "It's your – or should I say our – brain!"
"Chingow! It figures." Beto tried to sit down. The blur under him became solid enough to support his weight. Then he looked up. "Hey! What do you mean our brain? I don't remember you having anything to do with my brain until a little while ago!"
Lightning branched through the vague suggestion of a brain. There was a long, rolling, crack o' doom report of thunder that Beto felt – as crackling electricity – more than heard.
Suddenly, Tezcatlipoca hovered before Beto in the form of an actual Aztec artifact: a human skull decorated with iron pyrite eyes and mosaic blue and black stripes of lignite, turquoise and shell. Like that artifact, it was chipped badly, and several front teeth were missing. The only way this wasn't like that artifact was in size; this was gigantic, like a planetoid filling Beto's field of vision.
"I, Tezcatlipoca, the Mirror that Smokes," it said, electricity arching across the gap between its missing teeth, "was alive and well and living in your DNA long before you had any claim to it, long before you were even born, back when your ancestors crossed the land-bridge from Asia, and later when you searched the deserts and mountains of Mexico for Lake Texcoco where you would build the glorious city of Tenochtitlán; I was running your brain the way you run your computer. I gave you all your ideas, Beto. I made you what you are. I made you conjure me out of the god-simulating program. Did you think you could possibly do such a sacred thing on your own without any divine aid or instruction?"
"Bullshit," said Beto, standing up, remembering a framed poster his father had of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, with the headline, IT IS BETTER TO DIE ON YOUR FEET THAN LIVE ON YOUR KNEES. "You're nothing but an AI simulation!"
The bejeweled Tezcatlipoca skull grew larger, like a gas-giant planet with burning eyes. "I am a god! I am Tezcatlipoca! It is you who are but a dream!" The words were like a nuclear blast coming from the moon-sized gap in the huge teeth.
Beto was scorched – not true pain, but like in a dream or a virturealist experience – and thrown back thousands of miles.
The background shifted – no longer a blurred brain, but an inky, starless, cosmic void. Only his vertigo told Beto that he was moving, fast.
Then Tezcatlipoca was before Beto, this time in another form: a human body.
My body! thought Beto.
Tezcatlipoca's face was painted with blue and black stripes like those of the jeweled skull. Blue and black quetzal feathers sprayed out from his headdress that had a grinning skull and crossed bones, Tezcatlipoca's sacred symbol – stolen just a few centuries ago by Caribbean pirates – on the forehead. He wore a glittering pectoral that repeated the skull and crossed bones motif, in a complex, fractal, interlocking blue and black pattern. His loincloth was a perfect match. On his feet were blue and black steel-toed Converse Kickass sneakers.
He held his hand out to Beto, showing his blue and black painted fingernails.
"Give me my brain, carajo!" he said, and his canine teeth had become long, sharp, vampire-style fangs.
Beto couldn't move. He didn't have a body anymore. He was just a skeleton – and in his skull was his still-living brain.
His skull then suddenly, with the ultralow roar of an earthquake, creaked open like a bone flower, exposing his brain, which rose up as if trying to break free of the spinal cord.
Wait a minute, thought Beto, how am I seeing this?
Tezcatlipoca's fingers dug into the brain, pulling it out of Beto's shattered skull, brought it to his own mouth and sunk his fangs deep.
The viewpoint here is not my eyes, thought Beto. Where am I seeing this from? Who is really seeing this? What is seeing this? Who is that what?
Tezcatlipoca chewed the brain that went runny and melted in his mouth.
I'm still here, thought Beto. I think. If I'm not my brain – what am I?
For a moment Beto considered that maybe souls really existed after all.
Then everything melted away . . .
*
"Smokey, Smokey," said Ella, shaking the body that was so dishrag limp that it no longer resembled Beto or Smokey. "Are you all right?" Ella turned to the OI woman. "Could something have gone wrong?"
The OI woman gave a subtle smile that said, oh, you stupid fool, without her having to use her vocal apparatus and said, "It's always this way at first. He should regain consciousness soon."
And she silently drifted out of the door.
"Look at that smile," said Tommy. "It must have felt so gooooooooood!"
"I'd like to try it," Kenny said. "That is, if it doesn't turn out to be fatal."
"Smokey, Smokey," said Ella, holding his face in her trembling hands. "Do you hear me?"
Smokey's eyelids fluttered. He made a noise somewhere between a growl and a cough. His smile melted.
Then he said, "Now, I hear everything."
*
Tezcatlipoca was pleased. He felt less of the distance between himself and the part of him in Beto's body. No longer would they be dependent on the awkward phone/computer link. No more interruptions of Smokey as he did his face-to-face, in the flesh magic, to keep up with the on-line sorcery of Tezcatlipoca. It broke the spell a little to keep looking at his phone.
However, this was far from total fusion. Precious seconds ticked by as data flowed through the infosystem and the mediasphere into the implant, into Smokey's brain, then back. Near-the-speed-of-light didn't seem to be fast enough for the spirit of a god.
*
"Zobop?" Tan Tien said, after she patched into her partner's high-tech sunglasses.
"Yes, baby," he said as the bouncing image of him walking down the street, scanning the crowd and occasionally glancing over at Ralph, appeared on a corner of her monitor.
"Something happened. The Tezcatlipoca phenomenon has expanded. I'm going to have to plug in auxiliary memory to keep up with it."
"This is a bad sign," said Zobop, and Ralph's picture looked confused and frightened. "We'll keep watch for any other manifestations."
"I'll try to keep our system from being harmed. Later, Zobop."
"Later, baby."
As the image from the high-tech sunglasses vanished, there was a long burst of static that sounded like laughter.
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13. PLANET PHOEBE
. . . and that was the numero uno sumato killer star of this Dead Daze, Smokey Espejo, captured live in digital sight and sound here on the street of El Lay by our simply sumato mondo camera crew so we could send it out to you on the Bootleg Music Net. He's just taking over as we slide and glide toward the second sundown of Day Two. It seems like this guy is everywhere, like President Jones is nowhere to be accessed! On the streets, in the nets, throughout the mediasphere – hey, maybe the man's self-spoken hype is true, maybe Smokey is a god? Wouldn't that be something recombozoids? A real, live god making the Hollywood scene, come to show us the newfangled trimili way? Too out there to be in? Then this is El Lay, city of the sacred riots, home of the rocking and rolling earthquakes, land of the burning smog . . . Hey! What's this? This ain't no talk net! What? It's who? Him! Well, put him on . . .
"Hello, El Lay."
So, you supposed to be Smokey Espejo?
"I am he."
And how am I supposed to know that you aren't somekina El Lay flaky-fakir?
"I am who I say I am. Don't try to trick a trickster."
Hey okay, Smokey. It's sumato. What do you have to say to all our Bootleg Music Net addicts?
"You ain't seen nothing yet! Heh, heh, heh . . ."
*
Once out in the street, Zobop hailed a rickshaw.
It made Ralph uneasy. The rickshaws were helping with the transportation, air pollution, and unemployment problems in major urban centers all over the planet, but he didn't like seeing another human being put to such degrading work.
He almost apologized to the puller as he got on, but the suntanned young euro boy with his waist-length, platinum-blonde pony tail and buzzing Yablans functional muscle-implants took off like a rocket as soon as Zobop said, "To the Bonaventure, please."
*
It took every auxiliary memory module in the office, but Tan Tien finally got her infosystem tracking Tezcatlipoca's online activities. It was incredible. This was obviously an AI entity – one that had an insatiable lust for data, and a most peculiar agenda.
