Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  “You run this stuff,” Liam said, carefully, thinking it through, like he’d done before he got sick, murdered by his need to feed speedballs to his golden, tracked-out arm. “You run it and while you’re watching a movie, Hollywood 0wnz your box.” Murray heard the zero and the zee in 0wnz. Hacker-speak for having total control. No one wants to be 0wnz0red by some teenaged script-kiddie who’s found some fresh exploit and turned it loose on your computer.

  “In a nutsac. Gimme a butt.”

  Liam shook one out of the pack and passed it to Murray, along with a box of Mexican strike-anywhere matches. “You’re back on these things?” Liam said, a note of surprise in his voice.

  “Not really. Special occasion, you being back from the dead and all. I’ve always heard that these things’d kill me, but apparently being killed isn’t so bad — you look great.”

  “Artful segue, dude. You must be burning up with curiosity.”

  “Not really,” Murray said. “Figgered I’m hallucinating. I haven’t hallucinated up until now, but back when I was really down, you know, clinical, I had all kinds of voices muttering in my head, telling me that I’d fucked up, it was all fucked up, crash the car into the median and do the world a favor, whatever. You get a little better from that stuff by changing jobs, but maybe not all the way better. Maybe I’m going to fill my pockets with rocks and jump in the lake. It’s the next logical step, right?”

  Liam studied his face. Murray tried to stay deadpan, but he felt the old sadness that came with the admission, the admission of guilt and weakness, felt the tears pricking his eyes. “Hear me out first, OK?” Liam said.

  “By all means. It’d be rude not to hear you out after you came all the way here from the kingdom of the dead.”

  “Mostly dead. Mostly. Ever think about how all the really good shit in your body — metabolism, immunoresponse, cognition — it’s all in Ring Minus One? Not user-accessible? I mean, why is it that something like wiggling your toes is under your volitional control, but your memory isn’t?”

  “Well, that’s complicated stuff — heartbeat, breathing, immunoresponse, memory. You don’t want to forget to breathe, right?”

  Liam hissed a laugh. “Horse-sheeit,” he drawled. “How complicated is moving your arm? How many muscle-movements in a smile? How many muscle-movements in a heartbeat? How complicated is writing code versus immunoresponse? Why when you’re holding your breath can’t you hold it until you don’t want to hold it anymore? Why do you have to be a fucking Jedi Master to stop your heart at will?”

  “But the interactions –”

  “More horseshit. Yeah, the interactions between brain chemistry and body and cognition and metabolism are all complicated. I was a speed-freak, I know all about it. But it’s not any more complicated than any of the other complex interactions you master every day — wind and attack and spin when someone tosses you a ball; speed and acceleration and vectors when you change lanes; don’t even get me started on what goes on when you season a soup. No, your body just isn’t that complicated — it’s just hubris that makes us so certain that our meat-sacks are transcendently complex.

  “We’re simple, but all the good stuff is 0wned by your autonomic systems. They’re like conditional operators left behind by a sloppy coder: while x is true, do y. We’ve only had the vaguest idea what x is, but we’ve got a handle on y, you betcha. Burning fat, for example.” He prodded Murray’s gut-overhang with a long finger. Self-consciously, Murray tugged his JavaOne gimme jacket tighter.

  “For forty years now, doctors have been telling us that the way to keep fit is to exercise more and eat less. That’s great fucking advice, as can be demonstrated by the number of trim, fit residents of Northern California that can be found waddling around any shopping mall off Interstate 101. Look at exercise, Jesus, what could be stupider? Exercise doesn’t burn fat, exercise just satisfies the condition in which your body is prepared to burn fat off. It’s like a computer that won’t boot unless you restart it twice, switch off the monitor, open the CD drive and stand on one foot. If you’re a luser, you do all this shit every time you want to boot your box, but if you’re a leet hax0r like you and me, you just figure out what’s wrong with the computer and fix it. You don’t sacrifice a chicken twice a day, you 0wn the box, so you make it dance to your tune.

  “But your meat, it’s not under your control. You know you have to exercise for 20 minutes before you start burning any fat at all? In other words, the first twenty minutes are just a goddamned waste of time. It’s sacrificing a chicken to your metabolism. Eat less, exercise more is a giant chicken-sacrifice, so I say screw it. I say, you should be super-user in your own body. You should be leet as you want to be. Every cell in your body should be end-user modifiable.”

  Liam held his hands out before them, then stretched and stretched and stretched the fingers, so that each one bent over double. “Triple jointed, metabolically secure, cognitively large and in charge. I 0wn, dude.”

  Liam fished the last cig out of the pack, crumpled it and tucked it into a pocket. “Last one,” he said. “Wanna share?”

  “Sure,” Murray said, dazedly. “Yeah,” he said, taking the smoke and bringing it to his lips. The tip, he realized too late, was dripping with saliva. He made a face and handed it back to Liam. “Aaagh! You juiced the filter!”

  “Sorry,” Liam said, “talking gets my spit going. Where was I? Oh, yeah, I 0wn. Want to know how it happened?”

  “Does it also explain how you ended up not dead?”

  “Mostly dead. Indeed it does.”

  Murray walked back to the car and lay back on the hood, staring at the thin star-cover and the softly swaying pine-tops. He heard Liam begin to pace, heard the cadence of Liam’s thinking stride, the walk he fell into when he was on a roll.

  “Are you sitting comfortably?” Liam said. “Then I shall begin.”

  The palliatives on the ward were abysmal whiners, but they were still better than the goddamned church volunteers who came by to patch-adams at them. Liam was glad of the days when the dementia was strong, morphine days when the sun rose and set in a slow blink and then it was bedtime again.

  Lucky for him, then, that lucid days were fewer and farther between. Unlucky for him that his lucid days, when they came, were filled with the G-Men.

  The G-Men had come to him in the late days of his tenure on the palliative ward. They’d wheeled him into a private consultation room and given him a cigarette that stung the sores on his lips, tongue and throat. He coughed gratefully.

  “You must be the Fed,” Liam said. “No one else could green-light indoor smoking in California.” Liam had worked for the Fed before. Work in the Valley and you end up working for the Fed, because when the cyclic five-year bust arrives, the only venture capital that’s liquid in the U.S. is military research green — khaki money. He’d been seconded twice to biometrics-and-machineguns bunkers where he’d worked on need-to-know integration projects for Global Semi’s customers in the Military-Industrial Simplex.

  The military and the alphabet soup of Fed cops gave birth to the Valley. After WWII, all those shipbuilder engineers and all those radar engineers and all those radio engineers and the tame academics at Cal Tech and Cal and Stanford sorta congealed, did a bunch of startups and built a bunch of crap their buds in the Forces would buy.

  Khaki money stunted the Valley. Generals didn’t need to lobby in Congress for bigger appropriations. They just took home black budgets that were silently erased from the books, aerosolized cash that they misted over the eggheads along Highway 101. Two generations later, the Valley was filled with techno-determinists, swaggering nerd squillionaires who were steadfastly convinced that the money would flow forever and ever amen.

  Then came Hollywood, the puny $35 billion David that slew the $600 billion Goliath of tech. They bought Congresscritters, had their business-models declared fundamental to the American way of life, extended copyright ad [inifinitum|nauseam] and generally kicked the shit out of tech in
DC. They’d been playing this game since 1908, when they sued to keep the player piano off the market, and they punched well above their weight in the legislative ring. As the copyright police began to crush tech companies throughout the Valley, khaki money took on the sweet appeal of nostalgia, strings-free cash for babykiller projects that no one was going to get sued over.

  The Feds that took Liam aside that day could have been pulled from a fiftieth anniversary revival of “Nerds and Generals.” Clean-cut, stone-faced, prominent wedding-bands. The Feds had never cared for Liam’s jokes, though it was his trackmarks and not his punchlines that eventually accounted for his security clearance being yanked. These two did not crack a smile as Liam wheezed out his pathetic joke.

  Instead, they introduced themselves gravely. Col. Gonzalez — an MD, with caduceus insignia next to his silver birds — and Special Agent Fredericks. Grateful for his attention, they had an offer to make him.

  “It’s experimental, and the risks are high. We won’t kid you about that.”

  “I appreciate that,” Liam wheezed. “I like to live dangerously. Give me another smoke, willya?”

  Col. Gonzalez lit another Marlboro Red with his brass Zippo and passed him a sheaf of papers. “You can review these here, once we’re done. I’m afraid I’ll have to take them with me when we go, though.”

  Liam paged through the docs, passing over the bio stuff and nodding his head over the circuit diagrams and schematics. “I give up,” he said. “What does it all do?”

  “It’s an interface between your autonomic processes and a microcontroller.”

  Liam thought about that for a moment. “I’m in,” he said.

  Special Agent Fredericks’ thin lips compressed a hair and his eyes gave the hintiest hint of a roll. But Col. Gonzalez nodded to himself. “All right. Here’s the protocol: tomorrow, we give you a bug. It’s a controlled mutagen that prepares your brainstem so that it emits and receives weak electromagnetic fields that can be manipulated with an external microcontroller. In subjects with effective immunoresponse, the bug takes less than one percent of the time –”

  “But if you’re dying of AIDS, that’s not a problem,” Liam said and smiled until some of the sores at the corners of his mouth cracked and released a thin gruel of pus. “Lucky fucking me.”

  “You grasp the essentials,” the Colonel said. “There’s no surgery involved. The interface regulates immunoresponse in the region of the insult to prevent rejection. The controller has a serial connector that connects to a PC that instructs it in respect of the governance of most bodily functions.”

  Liam smiled slantwise and butted out. “God, I’d hate to see the project you developed this shit for. Zombie soldiers, right? You can tell me, I’ve got clearance.”

  Special Agent Fredericks shook his head. “Not for three years, you haven’t. And you never had clearance to get the answer to that question. But once you sign here and here and here, you’llalmost have clearance to get some of the answers.” He passed a clipboard to Liam.

  Liam signed, and signed, and signed. “Autonomic processes, right?”

  Col. Gonzalez nodded. “Correct.”

  “Including, say, immunoresponse?”

  “Yes, we’ve had very promising results in respect of the immune system. It was one of the first apps we wrote. Modifies the genome to produce virus-hardened cells and kick-starts production of new cells.”

  “Yeah, until some virus out-evolves it,” Liam said. He knew how to debug vaporware.

  “We issue a patch,” the Colonel said.

  “I write good patches,” Liam said.

  “We know,” Special Agent Fredericks said, and gently prized the clipboard from his fingers.

  - – - – - – - – - – - -

  The techs came first, to wire Liam up. The new bug in his system broadened his already-exhaustive survey of the ways in which the human body can hurt. He squeezed his eyes tight against the morphine rush and lazily considered the possibility of rerouting pain to a sort of dull tickle.

  The techs were familiar Valley-dwellers, portly and bedecked with multitools and cellular gear and wireless PDAs. They handled him like spoiled meat, with gloves and wrinkled noses, and talked shop over his head to one another.

  Colonel Gonzalez supervised, occasionally stepping away to liaise with the hospital’s ineffectual medical staff.

  A week of this — a week of feeling like his spine was working its way out of his asshole, a week of rough latex hands and hacker jargon — and he was wheeled into a semi-private room, surrounded by louche oatmeal-colored commodity PCs — no keyboards or mice, lest he get the urge to tinker.

  The other bed was occupied by Joey, another Silicon Valley needle-freak, a heroin addict who’d been a design engineer for Apple, figuring out how to cram commodity hardware into stylish gumdrop boxen. Joey and Liam croaked conversation between themselves when they were both lucid and alone. Liam always knew when Joey was awake by the wet hacking coughs he wrenched out of his pneumonia-riddled lungs. Alone together, ignored by the mad scientists who were hacking their bodies, they struck up a weak and hallucinogenic camaraderie.

  “I’m not going to sleep,” Joey said, in one timeless twilight.

  “So don’t sleep, shit,” Liam said.

  “No, I mean, ever. Sleep, it’s like a third of your life, 20, 30 years. What’s it good for? It resets a bunch of switches, gives your brain a chance to sort through its buffers, a little oxygenation for your tissues. That stuff can all take place while you’re doing whatever you feel like doing, hiking in the hills or getting laid. Make ‘em into cron jobs and nice them down to the point where they just grab any idle cycles and do their work incrementally.”

  “You’re crazy. I like to sleep,” Liam said.

  “Not me. I’ve slept enough in this joint, been on the nod enough, I never want to sleep another minute. We’re getting another chance, I’m not wasting a minute of it.” Despite the braveness of his words, he sounded like he was half-asleep already.

  “Well, that’ll make them happy. All part of a good super-soldier, you know.”

  “Now who’s crazy?”

  “You don’t believe it? They’re just getting our junkie asses back online so they can learn enough from us to field some mean, lean, heavily modified fighting-machines.”

  “And then they snuff us. You told me that this morning. Yesterday? I still don’t believe it. Even if you’re right about why they’re doing this, they’re still going to want us around so they can monitor the long-term effects.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “You know I am.”

  Liam stared into the ceiling until he heard Joey’s wet snores, then he closed his eyes and waited for the fever dreams.

  Joey went critical the next day. One minute, he was snoring away in bed while Liam watched a daytime soap with headphones. The next minute, there were twenty people in the room: nurses, doctors, techs, even Col. Gonzalez. Joey was doing the floppy dance in the next bed, the OD dance that Liam had seen once or twice, danced once or twice on an Emergency Room floor, his heart pounding the crystal meth mambo.

  Someone backhanded Liam’s TV and it slid away on its articulated arm and yanked the headphones off his head, ripping open the scabs on the slowly healing sores on his ears. Liam stifled a yelp and listened to the splashing sounds of all those people standing ankle-deep in something pink and bad-smelling, and Liam realized it was watery blood and he pitched forward and his empty stomach spasmed, trying to send up some bile or mucous, clicking on empty.

  Colonel Gonzales snapped out some orders and two techs abandoned their fretting over one of the computers, yanked free a tangle of roll-up, rubberized keyboards and trackballs and USB cables, piled them on the side of Liam’s gurney, snapped up the guard rails and wheeled him out of the room.

  They crashed through a series of doors before hitting a badgepoint. One tech thought he’d left his badge back in the room on its lanyard (he hadn’t — he’d drop
ped it on the gurney and Liam had slipped it under the sheets), the other one wasn’t sure if his was in one of his many pockets. As they frisked themselves, Liam stole his skeletal hand out from under the covers, a hand all tracked out with collapsed IV veins and yellowing fingernails, a claw of a hand.

  The claw shook as Liam guided it to a keyboard, stole it under the covers, rolled it under the loose meat of his thigh.

  - – - – - – - – - – - -

  “Need to know?” Liam said, spitting the words at Col. Gonzalez. “If I don’t need to know what happened to Joey, who the fuck does?”

  “You’re not a medical professional, Liam. You’re also not cleared. What happened to Joey was an isolated incident, nothing to worry about.”

  “Horseshit! You can tell me what happened to Joey or not, but I’ll find out, you goddamned betcha.”

  The Colonel sighed and wiped his palms on his thighs. He looked like shit, his brush-cut glistening with sweat and scalp-oil, his eyes bagged and his youthful face made old with exhaustion lines. It had been two hours since Joey had gone critical — two hours of lying still with the keyboard nestled under his thigh, on the gurney in the a locked room, until they came for him again. “I have a lot of work to do yet, Liam. I came to see you as a courtesy, but I’m afraid that the courtesy is at a close.” He stood.