by D L Young
She turned away from his terrified face, a part of her relieved she wouldn’t live with the shame of his death for longer than the few remaining moments of her own existence.
Beatrice steadied herself and reached for the door control. “See you around, kid.”
Bright white light, an earsplitting explosion. A concussive thud slammed against the hover, lifting one side off the ground and violently throwing her into the passenger seat. When the vehicle settled back onto its skids an instant later, a second blast, this one behind them, knocked the hover skittering forward. A third explosion, then a fourth, transformed the world around Beatrice and Tommy into a deafening chaos of light and heat.
She spotted something zip past, only a meter or two beyond the hover’s cracked front window. A motorbike. Then there was another one, a blur of color racing in the opposite direction, there and gone in a flash.
Tommy pointed excitedly. “ANARCHY BOYZ, FUCKING THEM UP!”
Beatrice blinked in confusion. What the hell? Another motorbike zoomed by, its driver rising up momentarily from his seat, turning toward them and flipping them a middle finger.
“Hahaha!” Tommy cried joyfully, thrusting out his arm and returning the gesture. “Your mama, Z Dog!”
Slowly, comprehension settled over Beatrice as she watched the impossible scene around her. Motorbikes darted in and out of smoke clouds. The twisted, burning husks of police hovers lay strewn about. She spotted a motorbike a short distance ahead of them. Its rider came alongside a police hover, tossing a small object that stuck fast to the vehicle’s chassis, and then accelerated away.
Beatrice gawked. “Are they using…magnetic grenades?” A moment later an explosion blew the hover apart, answering her question.
“Mag poppers, yeah,” Tommy said.
She was seeing it, but still hardly believing it. “How do street punks get hold of magnetic grenades?”
“Hey, mama,” the kid boasted, “what can I say? When Anarchy Boyz bring it, they bring it hard.”
The detonations stopped. Smoke from the grenades, thick like white fog, began to dissipate, slowly revealing a smoldering junkyard of wreckage. Four of the police hovers were destroyed. The rest were speeding away, three of them visibly damaged and trailing streams of black smoke. A dozen riders converged on Beatrice and Tommy from all directions.
“Now, don’t get mad,” Tommy told Beatrice, his tone apologetic, “but I thought we might need some backup.”
“Backup?” she repeated, taking in the smoking massacre around them. “When did you call them? How?”
“The remote link,” he replied. “I sent a geotag to my turfies so they could follow us. You know, just in case we needed help or something.”
The motorbikes came to a stop. The rider who’d flipped them off removed his helmet, revealing a short-cropped purple mohawk. Beatrice tapped the door control, amazed it still lifted open after all the knocking around.
“Bruuuh!” Z Dog called to Tommy. “You all right in there?”
“Under control,” the kid answered. “Gracias, Z.”
Z Dog nodded, then shifted his gaze to Beatrice. He looked her over admiringly. “That was some sick-ass driving back there, lady. You ride bikes, too?”
Beatrice wiggled a finger in her ear, trying to lessen the ringing. “Yeah, but not quite like you lot.”
Z Dog flashed her a silver-toothed grin. He struck her as strangely unaffected by the carnage he’d just orchestrated, by the death all around him.
Kids these days.
Her wits recovered, Beatrice revved the engine and turned to Tommy. “Tell your friends to follow us.”
26 - Payback
“You had it right,” Maddox growled, his grip tight around the entity’s neck. “I modded your rival’s little weapon.”
The changes hadn’t been much. A few lines of code removed, replaced with his own. A few algorithms tweaked here and there. If he were asked to explain why, he would have a hard time coming up with a coherent answer. But when he’d looked at the source code, it had felt too perfect, too tightly designed, in the same way an idealized human avatar in virtual space—with no freckles or blemishes or other imperfections—felt uncannily strange. So he’d inserted a bit of his own human messiness and imperfection, hoping this would increase the program’s lethality. An explosive tip to the bullet.
The AI spat and sputtered, grabbing Maddox by the wrist with both hands, twisting and pulling feebly against the datajacker’s iron-fisted choke. The hanging light overhead flickered on and off, and Maddox sensed the prison around him beginning to break apart. The AI’s death throes.
He squeezed tighter, his hand cracking neck cartilage, fingers breaking the skin. The entity’s eyes bulged large and white out of its contorted, deep crimson face. Its arms flailed. It tried to speak, but its words came out as wet, spitting garbles. The struggle began to slow as the entity’s strength faded, succumbing to the poison pill’s lethal dose. Then its avatar body went limp, sagging against the bars of Rooney’s cell, its eyes glazing over in a dead man’s stare. Maddox let go his grip and the AI fell in a heap to the cold floor.
The datajacker stepped forward and leaned over the motionless form. “Logan Rooney says hello.”
He stood there for a long while, waiting for some catharsis, for some moment of vengeful ecstasy, but nothing came. The emptiness inside was still there, and destroying this thing hadn’t purged it or lessened it or replaced the sense of loss with something else. Maybe he’d carry it around forever. Maybe it was incurable, this wound on his soul.
He ground his teeth together, chiding himself for the self-indulgent moment of disappointment. This thing had manipulated his life for years, moving him around like a piece on a game board. It had thrown him into that hellhole of a virtual prison. It had sent police to kill him. But worst of all, it had taken Rooney away, the only person who’d ever given a damn about him. The only friend he’d ever had. This machine deserved to die, and he was glad to have killed it.
Around him the prison began to lurch and jump like a failing video connection. From somewhere a woman’s voice called to him.
Beatrice.
He gestured, unplugging himself, immediately aware of his body drenched in sweat, hunched forward over the table. Beatrice and Tommy loomed over him as he straightened up and removed the trodes.
“You look like hell, salaryman,” Beatrice said, helping him up.
“You should see the other guy,” Maddox groaned. He wiped sweat from his forehead, stood on shaky legs. The kid Tommy was over by the wall, shaking a spray paint can in his hand.
“What happened?” Maddox asked Beatrice. She and the kid coming back to Nowheresville hadn’t been part of the plan. Something must have gone wrong.
“I’ll tell you when we’re out of here,” she said. Maddox grabbed his deck and Beatrice hustled him toward the door.
Outside he squinted against the bright sunlight. The trio hurried across the pavement to the hover. Beyond it, a bunch of kids on motorbikes revved their engines noisily.
“What’s going on?” Maddox asked. They looked like the same gang who’d tried to steal their gear. The kid’s turfies.
“When we’re out of here,” she repeated.
Beatrice had left the engine running. They piled in, and she hit the throttle before the doors had fully closed. As they sped away from Nowheresville, the motorcycle gang scattered in all directions. A minute later, twenty police hovers converged on the dilapidated buildings. They searched room by room, and when they came to the presidential suite, they found only old furniture, some Thai takeout containers, and the message Tommy had painted on the wall, still dripping and wet: SUCK IT, RHINOS!
27 - Elizabeth Street Meetup
Days later, Maddox moved west along the crowded walkways of Spring Street, carrying a small towel-wrapped bundle under his arm. A light drizzle fell from the night sky, softly pelting his shoulders. He pulled the jacket hood over his head. A raindrop ran down his ne
w veil specs, distorting a lens ad for a noodle stand he’d just passed, the discount growing higher the further away he wandered, then holding for a moment at fifty percent with a free side of wontons before it finally faded and disappeared. The street was bustling and noisy and the moist air gave a sheen to every surface. Ground cars crept along, slowed to a honking crawl by the thick flow of pedestrians. High overhead, the ground cars’ airborne cousins traveled more nimbly, the hover lanes dense with traffic moving like great schools of fish through the canyons of immense hiverises. As he approached the meeting place, Maddox took in all the details like he was seeing them for the first time. The womb of the City.
He’d chosen the Elizabeth Street Garden for the meet. As he neared his destination, the familiar din of bird vendor stalls grew louder, a noisy landmark of chirps and caws, telling him he was less than a minute away. He turned the corner and walked past the dozens of cages crowded together along the walkway, ignoring the vendors who called for his attention and blinking away the ads for parakeets and cockatoos darting across his specs. Birds fluttered back and forth inside their tiny coops, excited by the rain. He crossed the street earlier than usual, cutting through the stalled traffic to avoid being seen by Yoshi the bug man, whose tabletop lay beyond the bird vendors. Maddox spotted the man from a distance, busily setting a small tarp to protect his collection of delicate tiny houses from the rain.
At the garden’s entrance, he paused to let the scanner collect the visitor fee. A cartoon bush with a smiling face popped up on his lens and he blinked his approval.
“Thank you, Mr. Nakamura,” a woman’s voice said through his specs, addressing him by the name on his newly acquired ID. “Enjoy your half hour. Would you like to make a donation to the garden’s preservation fund?” He blinked no and walked in.
It was a small place, barely an acre in size. Only a few people milled about, tourists gawking at the chaos of overflowing greenery and taking pics of themselves next to the stone lion statues. And it was quiet, a condition that never failed to surprise first-time visitors, who invariably stopped in their tracks at the sudden silence. A wealthy benefactor had endowed the garden with high-end noise cancelers that had been placed along the perimeter, effectively shutting out all sound from beyond its thick-leafed boundaries.
He was a few minutes early. The rain abated as he approached a wrought-iron bench in a secluded corner. He wiped the moisture away and sat, setting his bundle beside him. A short distance away, a gardener bot went about its work with tiny scissored hands. He watched it roll on small rubber wheels from plant to plant, carefully snipping away browned leaves and stems and storing them in a catch bin.
“You bring me a present?” a familiar voice asked.
He looked up, finding Beatrice leaning against the old bronze gargoyle, her elbow resting atop the creature’s shoulder. She nodded at the bundle next to him.
He shook his head. “No. Just something I picked up.” She looked different now. So different, in fact, that had she walked past him he might not have recognized her. Her hair was short-cropped and dyed yellow-blond with a finger’s width of dark roots. Her jeans and plain gray jacket were inconspicuous and inexpensive, the kind of clothes you saw piled by the dozens on tables in a discount bazaar. She wore oversized lenses that covered half her face, and behind them a sloppy smudge of thick liner encircled each eye. She looked ten years younger than the cold executive he’d met only days earlier at the Sembacher-Chan Tower. He wondered which of the two was closest to the real Beatrice or if there was some third, even more unrecognizable version of her.
“Any trouble?” he asked.
“None,” she answered. “You?”
Maddox shook his head. “How’s the kid?”
“Way less worried than he should be with every cop in the City looking for him and his turfies.”
Maddox snorted, smiling inwardly, imagining the kid and his crew living it up, reveling in their newfound infamy. Security cam footage from the dockyards—hacked and leaked to the public and viewed millions of times—of Tommy’s homeboys taking out a police squad had earned them an insane level of notoriety. The Anarchy Boyz were overnight gangster legends.
“If he had any sense,” Beatrice said, “he’d disappear. Leave the City for a while.”
“The City’s a big place,” Maddox said. “You can stay hidden if you want to. Street kid like him knows how to keep his head down.”
Beatrice nodded. “What about the AI?” she asked, shifting subjects. “Think it’s gone for good?”
In the four days that had passed, he’d been asking himself the same question over and over again. He’d gone offline completely, spending each night in a different flophouse, every one as isolated and forgotten as Nowheresville. But even off the grid, the news had been impossible to avoid. Stories about the Latour-Fisher AI’s “catastrophic failure” were everywhere. On a tiny screen at a ramen kiosk, he’d seen a news snippet with a company spokesperson in full damage control mode, confirming the AI’s demise while downplaying its role on the board. The company regretted the loss of such an important asset, the spokesperson said, but rest assured Latour-Fisher Biotechnologies remained in capable hands, and the company’s recent drop in share price was nothing more than a nervous market’s overreaction.
“Yeah, I think so,” Maddox answered, but as he said it, he inwardly admitted he couldn’t be sure. There was no way to know something like that with absolute certainty, despite all the news stories and company press releases. He’d never known of a poison pill as toxic as the one he’d used, but then he’d never known of an AI as powerful and complex as the Latour-Fisher A7 either. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine some portion of the entity might have survived.
They stared at each other for a moment, saying nothing. There wasn’t, Maddox realized, much left to say. They’d gone their separate ways shortly after she’d pulled him out of Nowheresville, unsure if the cops were still onto them, quickly agreeing to the Elizabeth Street Garden meetup as a check-in to compare notes and figure out their next move. Now, though, it seemed clear there was no next move. They weren’t being chased. Weren’t being shot at. For the moment, at least, they appeared to have made it through the storm.
“So what’s next for you?” he asked.
“Not sure, actually, but I doubt I’ll stick around here.” She didn’t return the question in kind, didn’t ask him what his plans were, where he was heading. A part of him was disappointed by this.
“Be careful, salaryman.”
“I’m not a salaryman anymore.”
“That’s right.” Her bottom lip jutted out in contemplation. “Maybe I’ll have to call you something else now.”
“Like what?”
She pursed her lips, considering. “How about machine killer?”
Maddox grinned. “You can call me whatever you want.”
“As long as I call you?” she suggested, faintly smiling.
“Something like that.”
She chuckled. “Maybe in the next life, machine killer.” Her lenses darkened again. “You’re kind of dangerous company in this one.” She gave him a small nod, turned away, and then she was gone.
28 - Uncaged
In his quiet corner of the Elizabeth Street Garden, Blackburn Maddox sat alone, the bench’s iron chill seeping through his pants and into his legs. He stared at the empty space where Beatrice had stood a moment before. The gardener bot slowly worked its way toward him, dutifully cutting leaf and stem, until it was nearly touching his feet.
The bot hopped up on the bench next to him. Startled, Maddox grabbed his bundle and quickly stood. The little crablike machine was glitching, and he didn’t need those little shears pruning a hole in his new pants. He started to walk away.
“Please stay a moment,” the bot said in a small, tinny voice. Maddox paused and eyed the bot suspiciously.
Twin cameras at the end of tiny stalks looked up at him. “You’re not an easy man to find, Blackburn.”
He froze. “What the hell is this? Who are you?”
“We had some lovely chats on the beach,” the bot answered. “I showed you an ant mound, gave you a weapon.”
The other AI. Maddox swallowed, then looked around, expecting to see a gang of ’Nettes closing in on him. But the garden was nearly empty. Only a few tourists wandered around, taking photos. No one appeared to have any interest in him or his hidden corner.
“How did you find me?” he asked, keeping his voice low and slowly sitting down again.
“You have your intuition, dear, and I have mine.”
“I want you to stay away from me.”
“Don’t be alarmed, Blackburn. I only wanted to thank you.”
“Thank me.”
“Yes, and—”
“So it’s dead?” he asked, suddenly curious. “The Latour-Fisher A7?”
“I’m not sure ‘dead’ would be the right word,” the little bot said. “Permanently incapacitated may be the right way to describe my rival’s condition.”
“Does ‘permanently incapacitated’ mean it won’t be coming after me?”
The bot paused before answering, longer than Maddox would have liked. “I’d be lying if I answered that definitively, my dear boy. So many factors to consider, you understand. Though I don’t think it’s likely.”
Don’t think it’s likely. If the AI’s words were aimed to ease Maddox’s nerves, they had fallen far short. He wanted to hear that the thing was dead and gone and not coming back. As dead as roadkill. As dead as that double-crossing Lozano.
“I was curious,” the bot said, “as to what plans you have.”
“Plans?”
“Yes. How do you expect to earn a living now?”
“I suppose I’ll get by, same as anybody else.”
