by M M Buckner
“You’ll find a freight chute four hundred meters north-northeast of your position. Two lefts. Then a right.” Verinne’s dry logical wheeze seemed to echo from a crypt.
“Hey, no fair giving directions,” I said. “Grunzie has to escape without help. We’ve got an active wager.”
Grunze flexed his stiff elbows. “I know tins place inside out. Who says I need help?”
Winston said something in the background, and Kat laughed. They were making a new side bet.
A deep, waffling roar told us the fire was spreading into the warehouse. One stack of crates lit up like a wax candle, and the highest crate tumbled to the floor, spreading flames. A vibrant point of fear tickled my nerves.
Kat said, “Does Grunzie have a time limit?”
“Nothing specified,” said Verirme, faithful to facts.
“Lame,” said Kat. “I’ll lay odds they run out of air in fifteen minutes. Who’s in?”
“Me.” Winston hiccuped.
“I’ll take that,” said Verinne.
At the far end of the warehouse, three men stepped into our aisle, wearing employee uniforms and hefting lengths of pipe. I felt a charge of cold fright. They were agitators. Dangerous thugs. In every war, you would find them blogging their twisted truth on the Net, rousing the rabble and provoking even sensible workers to rise up and injure their own Corns. They incensed me. Verinne’s camera flew in close and documented their faces. One of them swatted at the little drone and tried to catch it in his hand.
When they took a step toward us, I waved Grunze ahead. “They’re your protes. You deal with ‘em.”
Protes, protected workers—ingrates is what they were. No generation of employees had ever received more generous protection from their Corns. We execs gave them subsidized food and housing, free uniforms, guaranteed lifetime labor contracts. We took care of their families. We shielded protes from every difficulty in life. It baffled me why they kept stirring up these endless little strikes.
“No prob,” said Grunze. He amped up his Stan gun and sprayed a few bolts of electricity down the aisle toward the agitators. A harmless light show, but it worked. The mugs hurled their pipes, missing us of course, men moved back and melted into the shadows.
“Plasmic.” Winston dribbled his sluggish laugh. “Next time, fry the cheeky bastards.”
“Follow them, Verinne. Show us where they’re hiding,” Kat ordered.
Verinne cleared her throat. “Switching to metavision.”
Her Bumblebee camera buzzed away, chasing the agitators. Her Bee carried the same adaptive optics as our helmet visors to help see through the smoke. Unfortunately, the metavision made everything glow in livid purple and yellow, except the fire. That radiated neon orange.
Another stack of crates lit up, with a sound of shattering glass. Heat burned through my armor; and I felt a wave of animal fear. Zone rush.
I said, “You’re sure the freight chute’s this way?”
“Just keep moving,” Grunze answered.
We loped in single file between the long rows of crates, me limping, Grunzie waddling with leg cramps. The girth of his Herculean thighs made him shuffle from side to side. Through our metavisors, the white crates gleamed tike giant ice cubes, and purple shadows played over the smudged saffron floor. As the harsh chemical smoke seeped around my visor and invaded my nostrils, I bit hard into the plastic mouthpiece and sucked the filtered air. Picture me snorting and gagging. I should have worn that hazard suit.
“Through here,” Grunze said, and we squeezed between crates into the next aisle over.
As we approached the spot where the agitators had slipped away, he flicked his stun gun and zapped die metal shelving. We heard a gasp, and behind the stacked crates, something clattered on the floor. Grunze must have scorched one of the agitators. Score one for our side. Verinne’s camera darted back and forth through the shelves.
“Do you want visuals?” she asked.
“No outside help!” I shouted.
Verinne could have fed her video to our helmet visor displays and shown us the injured worker writhing on the floor, but—I’ll confess it now—the gory stuff sickened me. It reminded me of things from the past, dim ugly scenes and…faces.
But that’s not the point. What I meant to say was, we had a bet Grunze wasn’t supposed to get help, so that’s why I stopped Verinne from showing us visuals. Because I wanted to win the bet.
Behind us, flames ignited another stack of crates, and the metavision orange flared so bright, my eyes watered. Radiant yellow snakes of fire coiled across the ceiling over our heads, and when Grunze saw that, he turned and ran. Before I could follow, another thermal wave exploded behind us, and the blast threw me headlong into Grunze’s body. Heat sliced into my back like a million razor blades, and I wailed like a fiend.
“Ha. You owe me fifty,” Winston laughed in the earphone.
“That was a moan, not a scream,” said Kat.
“You’re splitting hairs. Double or nothing, he’ll scream again. Hey, Nasir, you awright?”
I couldn’t articulate an answer. My new body armor had heat-welded to my back, and every move ripped a patch of my skin. As Verinne’s camera flitted around us, Grunze hauled me up and dragged me toward the far end of the warehouse. I couldn’t stop moaning. The voices in my earphone kept placing new bets, but my entire world contracted to one sensation, that raw pain washing down my back like acid.
Naturally, my left thumb started vibrating. That was my IBiS, my “Implanted BioSensor,” a medical microprocessor embedded under my thumbnail. It was clanging a health alarm, but the last thing I had time for was to take off my glove and read the tiny screen mounted in my thumbnail. Tears blurred my vision, and I wouldn’t have known where to go if Grunze hadn’t jerked me along.
Then one clear young voice cut through the chatter like a pealing bell. Soft, dewy, brimming with concern. Sheeba, my darling.
“Ask your suit for help, Nass.”
Sheeba hadn’t terminated our connection. The pesky child had been eavesdropping on our private Web site, lurking and watching our surf.
Her words reminded me what to do. “Norphine,” I muttered, “triple dose.” The smart system in my body armor heard my command and triggered the patch.. My underarm felt a slight itch as the patch sank its tiny teeth through my skin, and seconds later, the drug took effect. Numb relief. “Dear Sheeba, thank you.”
“What are doing in that place?” she said. “Are you seeking the dark?”
Grunze was banging on a rusted metal door, and when it wouldn’t open, he fired his stun gun into the key pad.
“Did you forget the code?” I asked.
He growled at me. “It’s been tampered.” Then he started kicking the door, but that didn’t help.
“There’s another exit—” Verinne began.
“Don’t say it,” Grunze cut her off. “Nasir’ll claim you gave me help. No way will I let this little pipsqueak one-up me.”
“Grunzie, this other exit, do you know where it is?” I eyed the orange flames that now engulfed half the warehouse.
Grunze pointed at the ceiling with his gun. “There.”
In a distant purple comer, I saw a golden catwalk leading to a ceiling hatch. The flames ebbed and flowed toward that comer like a neon tide, but they hadn’t reached it yet.
“How do we get up?”
“Ladder,” he said. “Help me look for one. Or will that be considered ‘outside help’?”
“The word in the bet was ‘help,’ nonspecific,” Verinne reported in her raspy monotone. “That implies help in any form. If you ask Nasir to find the ladder, ipso facto, you forfeit. I can play back the footage if you like.”
“Then get the fuck out of my way.” Grunze shoved me against a crate of AIDS vaccine and headed off.
My air gauge showed less than five minutes remaining. For a second, I switched off the lurid purple-and-gold metavision, but black smoke engulfed the warehouse so thickly, I had to turn it back on. That catwalk
hung just under the ceiling, twenty meters overhead. I visually estimated the distance from the top of the nearest metal shelf.
Then I spoke a command to temporarily exclude Grunze from the conference call. “Verinne, our bet was whether Grunze could escape without help, right? That doesn’t apply to me. I can get all the help I want.”
“Slippery Nass. What’re you plotting?” Winston said.
“Grunze is wasting time looking for a ladder. You have to unlock mat freight chute,” Verinne said.
“Give us a look at the key pad. We’ll help.” Winston let out a belch.
‘Take my advice,” said Kat. “You should bribe one of those agitators to guide you.”
I ignored them and slipped off my backpack. “Verinne, can you lend me your eyes? Send your Bumblebee up to check out that catwalk, and feed me the visuals.”
The little camera zoomed up toward the ceiling, and while Verinne’s video played in the lower right corner of my visor, I pulled out my climbing gear. Why didn’t Grunze think of climbing up the shelves to the catwalk? It seemed obvious.
About then, a scream echoed through the warehouse, and a man lurched out from between two stacks of crates with his clothes on fire. As he ran toward me, the flames trailed behind him, and he yowled like a savage beast. Could that be Grunze? No, it was an agitator. As he came closer, I saw his blackened, eyeless face. Like the faces in Lahore, the ones that haunted my sleep. On instinct, I dug through my pack for something to wrap him and smother the flames.
As I flung a foil blanket over his shoulders, Win said, “Why’re you helping a hostile?”
Kat said, “Get out of the way, Nass. You’re blocking Verinne’s camera.”
In any case, I was too late. The man blundered straight on and ran his head against the wall. He was too blind to see. I turned away, fighting nausea.
“Verinne, did you get that? That was Reel.” Kat sounded giggly and overexcited.
“Yes, Reel,” Verinne agreed. “I’m uploading it to our site.”
Reel was our surfer lingo for the visceral photogenic underseams of our sport Real War. Of all the surfer Web pages, the Agonist site had the sleekest, savviest Reel on the Net Our broadcasts were meta-vivid. And meta-private. We bounced our signal in untraceable reverb loops that not even the World Trade Org could crack, although millions of fans knew where to find us. They lurked every time we surfed a zone and usually gave our Reel five-star reviews. But I didn’t care about that. The smell of the man’s cooking flesh had leaked into my helmet.
Tune it out, Deepra. Ditch the sappy attitude. You’re the ace of war surfers.
Ace. Right. I covered my mouth and swallowed. The Reel was the one part of our sport I dreaded. Of course, I pretended to be as blase” as everyone else. The betting helped.
My gauge showed three minutes of air left, so I voiced a command to bring Grunze back into the conference call. “Grunzie, you still alive?”
“Have you finished whispering behind my back? I’m already outside. How about that, nasty Nass? You lose.”
“You’re out? I’m still in here!” I ogled my air gauge. My voice may have registered panic.
“How about another little wager?” he asked. “One mil says you can’t get out without my help.”
“Grunze, you sodder. You tricked me.”
His asinine giggle bleated through my earphone, but I concentrated on the ceiling hatch. The flimsy metal shelf stood about fifteen meters high, and the catwalk hung at least five meters above it. I checked my air gauge. Barely two minutes left. Verinne’s camera buzzed around my head like a pest. My climbing cord lay tangled at my feet, neon flames wafted toward me, and the approaching heat was blistering my body armor. If not for the Norphine coursing through my veins, I would probably have wept.
“I’ll come back for you, sweet-piss. All you have to do is beg.”
Ah, Grunze, how skillfully you fanned my flame. Adrenaline shivered through my limbs, and I relished its copper taste. This was why I came to the zone. This delicious, galvanizing angst. Verging on the brink of chaos, grappling for control, feeling my fate in jeopardy. Moments like this revived my will to live. I thrust out my chest and whispered, “Be here now.”
Aloud I said, “Behold the master at play.”
Flames already lapped halfway up the shelf unit that would take me to the catwalk. I gathered my climbing cord and raced down the aisle toward it. As soon as I reached the lowest shelf, I pulled myself up, hand over hand, past the burning plastic crates, ignoring the flames. Wounds meant extra status points, and besides, I felt no pain. The Nor-phine was kicking into high gear, and the glass bioNEM man inside me would repair my damaged cells.
A new caller rang through. “Boss, I don’t like to disturb you now, but your InterMerc stock is tanking. Should I sell short?”
It was Chad, my personal cyberassistant. What timing. “How much has it fallen?” I asked.
“Three-point-seven billion and change.”
“Yes, sell.” I dumped Chad’s call and clambered up the shelf.
When I made it to the top, all I had to do was throw my rope, swing to the catwalk and climb through the hatch. Ye gilded gods, I felt alive. I could almost hear the Net audience cheering me on. Being light made me an agile climber, so I bounded upward, feeling young and strong and free from the laws of gravity. Almost in a dream, I sensed the shelf unit sway. Then it toppled backward.
“Fifty says he’ll crack his skull on the floor.”
“I want part of that”
“Nasir, throw your rope!” Sheeba cried. Dear Sheeba child.
2
I FEEL REVIVED ALREADY
“No one may have the guts to say this, but If we could make better human beings by knowing now to add genes, why shouldn’t we?”
-DR. JAMES WATSON,
FOUNDING DIRECTOR OF THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT
When a surf goes right, it’s transcendent. You plan ahead, prepare your gear. You anticipate every contingency. Then you enter the zone, all senses alert, adrenaline charging through your veins like speed. You smell a whiff of smoke. You see flames, hear the rumbling growl of a particle beam shearing steel. Deep inside, the drama catches you, and for a while, your life accelerates. Taking chances, teasing destiny, running the slalom gates of war, you pull spiritual G-forces that press you hard against the present moment, so hard you know in your gut it’s the only thing that’s real. Be Here Now. You want to shout at the stars. And that’s when you stretch beyond the envelope of your own puny life span. You spread out like fire and music, wider than thought, and for an instant, you brush against eternity. Ye idols of gold, I love it.
Radiant Sheeba, what did she think that afternoon as she secretly spied on our war surf? Her first vision of a zone, was she frightened? Or fascinated? As I sit alone in this anteroom, probing my past by the vile blink of fluorescence, I can only speculate. She’d never witnessed war. So far, her short young life had played out in softly cushioned therapy chambers with aromatic candles, sizz music and scented oils. No violence had touched her. Oh, I may have told her about war surfing. During our long and frequent therapy sessions, I possibly mentioned my exploits, but that’s not the same as seeing live action. Until that infamous afternoon when she lurked on our private Web site and watched me crash in flames, Sheeba didn’t know.
Sheeba Zee was my own personal find. I discovered her five years ago, toiling in a discount health church in Kotzebue. No one goes there anymore since the hot Alaskan currents drove that sludge up the coastline. But back then, Kotzebue advertised the best health-care bargains on the Bering Strait. And I’ve always liked saving money.
Picture Sheeba striding out to meet me in the tacky health church lobby. I’d booked a session, expecting the usual muscular nurse in whites and thick shoes. Instead, I got Sheeba, tall, wide-shouldered, regal as a goddess, poured into a leotard and dipped head to toe in gold paint. The church was running some kind of promotion. She took my voice away.
“Mr. Deepr
a?” she cooed, accenting the wrong syllable.
“Call me Nasir,” I finally managed to croak.
“Nasir. You look like you could use a good squeeze.” When she saw my reaction, she tossed her head back and laughed like a minx, a trill of high bubbly notes spilling upward. That carefree laugh got to me—that and the way the gold paint rippled when she moved.
“I mean your latissimus dorsi, beau. Deep massage. We’ll start with a shiatsu, then we’ll do some chromatherapy. Cool calming colors to tune your energy field. Indigo and jade would be right.”
Under the cheesy gold paint, Sheeba appeared like all young girls of the executive class, cheerful and vapid, with no distinguishing traits beyond loveliness. But oh how lovely she was. Just eighteen, fresh out of school, away from home for the first time, with nothing to hide and everything to learn. God, I wanted to trade places with her for just one day.
She had dimples in her cheeks, in net elbows, in the backs of her glittering gold hands. Wide mouth. Wide hips and shoulders. Long vigorous legs. Delectable breasts and a tight round belly. Not fashionable, that little belly, but arousing.
She also had preter-natural skills with her hands. Her first session took ISO years off my stress load, and when she put my right leg through a range-of-motion routine, she immediately diagnosed my hip joint malfunction and looked up the part number I needed. With charming nai’vete, she explained how much commission she would earn if I took her advice. What I took was her email address.
I brought her to Nordvik, set her up in private practice and coaxed my friends into booking her sessions. For the last five years, I’d been imbibing her therapy, doting on her splendors and hauling my heart around like a thick clay begging bowl.
That fateful afternoon when Grunze pulled me from the wreckage of the Copia.Com factory, Sheeba was already plunging toward me in a rented aircar, bringing blood plasma, trauma meds and polarizing magnets. While Grunze broadblasted my photo around the Net with tags like NASIR EXTRA CRISPY and DEEPRA-FRIED, Shee cradled my head in her lap and stroked my temples with an ankh.
