War Surf

by M M Buckner

  “Give me your signet,” I told her. “We’ll leave it here, just to be molto certain the cops can’t read your ID.”

  The barest trace of irritation passed across her features, then vanished behind her cheerful smile. She slipped off her modest silver ring with its plain glass smart chip. The humbleness of her signet touched me. I locked it in my safe.

  Winston and I jockeyed for a place next to Shee in the car, but to no avail. She bounced into the front seat beside Verinne. Luckily, the high-speed flight from Nordvik to Bengal Bay took only two hours. Crammed in back with Winston, I listened with half an ear while he brayed about his new quasi-organic wetware. Good old Win, did he suppose he could captivate Sheeba with his memory sticks? He even pulled back his hair to show us the new ports behind his ears. The scars were still puffy and red. Win claimed these new organic sticks operated more like native memory and that his Alzheimer’s problems were a thing of the past. I still had the old silicon type, so I secretly made note of his brand.

  Up front, Verinne was speaking to Sheeba sotto voce. I leaned forward to eavesdrop.

  “…and you must preserve your eyes, dear. Have an extra pair of corneas cloned now, while you’re still young. You have such lovely clean tears.” When Verinne patted Sheeba’s cheek, I gawked Verinne never displayed affection. Imagine my dismay as I watched her chalky old fingers dwell on Sheeba’s lemon-colored eyelids.

  We landed in Nepal, where, thanks to the rising sea levels, the coastal mountains cut straight down into the thick yellow waters of Bengal Bay. A vast mat of floating debris clogged the harbor near the airport. Empty cargo containers, rusting barrets, plastic. In the hazy morning sun, the trash glistened like beaded tapestry.

  Verinne spent a long time helping Sheeba undo her seat belt, and men Winston lifted her out of the car with both arms. Sheeba giggled and made raucous jokes. No doubt, their excessive attentions embarrassed her. As soon as possible, I claimed her hand.

  The tepid bay lapped under a veil of surly ochre smog. India brought back no memories. My childhood. My little brother Raju. Prashka, the first love of my youth. All buried. Calcutta lay under the swampy ocean now. Only a few of its old skyscrapers still protruded above the waves, rotted by sun and salt. I had trained myself to forget the mass evacuation. That was long ago, another lifetime—those recollections were edited, erased, shunted to deep storage. I stood gazing at the foam that sloshed around the pier and thought of nothing.

  Winston asked the local guides for a weather forecast, and while I was distracted paying for the rented jet skis, Verinne pointed out the special features of Sheeba’s new pink surfsuit.

  “Satellite earphone. Metavision. And here’s your water recycler.” Verinne patted the device on Sheeba’s breast. “It captures and purifies your waste body moisture. This tube connects to a nozzle in your helmet.”

  “Sleek. Do I suck it?” Sheeba twirled the helmet and giggled.

  “Yes, but first you need to put moisture in. There’s a gel pad here.” When Verinne touched the place between Sheeba’s legs, I dropped my cash card. Her white hand lingered, cupping Sheeba’s crotch. “You can urinate now if you like. The pad will soak up everything. Try it?”

  Sheeba must have blushed. I could imagine her color rising under the lemon skin dye.

  Get away from Shee, you dried-up old bat. That’s what I wanted to shout at the tall willowy woman I had once adored. Instead, I cranked one of the jet skis. Its throaty roar startled Verinne and made her drop her hand. Then I revved it up to drown further conversation. Storm clouds gathered overhead. I felt a dark mood coming on.

  As the temperature rose over Bengal Bay, we zeroed our clocks and began timing Sheeba’s virgin surf. My mood improved as we glided out through the harbor flotsam. Good old Win couldn’t remember the local forecast. So much for his new memory sticks. Win suffered from a mutated strain of Alzheimer’s that failed to respond to traditional antibody therapies. No matter how often he upgraded his implants, synaptic plaques kept fouling his interface.

  But we weren’t concerned about a forecast. After our global climate reeled through those first cataclysmic years, things settled down—as they always do—in predictable routines. Since the early 2200s, Bengal Bay’s weather had followed a clockwork pattern: Morning calm. Afternoon cyclones. Evening heat.

  Soon we encountered open sea and chop. Winds were coming out of the south, shearing froth from the crests of the lathery waves, and a dense morning smog closed in. Chad called with news about my Trandent holdings, and we decided to vote out the current CEO. He also reminded me of a hair appointment

  Since I was wearing a surfsuit and gloves, I couldn’t browse the IBiS screen, so I asked Chad to check it remotely. On his command, my implanted biosensor instantly pinged every NEM in my body, then beamed the data through the Net to my various doctors and monitoring agents, and finally relayed a status back to the processor in my thumb.

  Chad read the message aloud. “All systems normal, boss.” Those words always warmed my heart.

  Reassured, I spoke to Sheeba through my helmet sat phone. “Switch on your metavision, dear. It’ll help you see.”

  “Try this, Sheeba.” Winston accelerated to top speed, then stood up in his stirrups and nonchalantly crossed his arms. Breezes whipped at his surfsuit as he skimmed over the waves, steering the jet ski with his thighs. I’d seen him do this trick before.

  Immediately, Sheeba followed suit. “Weeee!” she squealed, cutting a wide figure eight. For a beginner, she caught on fast. “Para-physical!”

  Naturally, I had to prove I could do the trick as well. Verinne deployed her Bumblebee to take pictures, and we started bouncing over each other’s wakes and getting air, which is not as easy as it looks, standing up with your arms crossed.

  “Ooh! I see it!” Sheeba pointed south.

  We all slowed down and scanned the horizon. Metavision turned the muddy sea to iridescent purple, and the sky glowed gold. Yes, far to the south, there was one small speck of black.

  “Right.” “That’s it.” “I see it, top,” we chorused. The seafarm.

  The way Shee bounced in her saddle made us laugh. Surfing with an eager newbie gave our sport a fresh tang, and in high spirits, we raced each other across the dingy waves, then braked and coasted into the foamy lee of the giant seafarm. The solar still loomed much larger than the video had led me to expect, and the dome, coated in Gromic.Com’s gooey black paint, towered half a kilometer above sea level. We were supposed to climb that?

  “Hmm.” Verinne pointed to a patchy area halfway up the dome. “Should’ve brought my cameras.”

  I cued my visor for zoom, and when the image magnified, I saw the moving figures. Agitators. Twenty at least. They’d rigged flimsy rope ladders, and they were clinging to the dome’s exterior, scraping off a small swath of black paint.

  “They’re not wearing surfsuits,” said Sheeba. “They’re breathing atmosphere. Doesn’t that mean they’ll die?”

  True enough, they wore only their faded gray Gromic.Com uniforms. A few sported makeshift hoods, and most wore strips of cloth tied over their faces. Thin protection against poisonous atmosphere.

  “Surfsuits are not standard issue for workers.” Verinne flipped open the saddlebag to get her climbing gear.

  “Yeah, protes don’t go outside much,” said Winston.

  “But they’re just kids.” Sheeba gazed at the workers for a long time.

  I chewed my lip, wanting to advise her to look away. Negative images like that can stick in your mind for years. Like lychee nuts. Bright little red fruits. They get inside your dreams. Look away, Sheeba. I was on the verge of speaking, but Verinne beat me to it.

  “Ignore them, dear. Protes never live long anyway.”

  Sheeba said nothing.

  The choppy waves bounced us around, and the sea-farm’s collar rose and fell with mountainous slapping quakes. I tried to lasso a cleat on the collar, but the swells kept throwing off my aim. Heat was building up insi
de my suit, so I checked my watch again. Almost 11:00 a.m., local time. We were behind schedule. I boosted my suit’s coolants and studied that collar of machinery. Boarding in these heavy seas would not be simple.

  “I wanna talk to those kids.” Sheeba looped her tether line around her forearm and stood up in her saddle.

  “Crazy girl, you’ll overturn!” I shouted.

  Before any of us could react, she made a dazzling leap onto the collar, grabbed one of the oxygen mills and tied off her line. “Throw me your ropes. I’ll pull you in,” she said.

  “Hey, guys, I have an idea.” Winston had been goofing around, turning his jet ski in lazy donuts among the waves. Now he spurted twenty meters away from us, then did a tight U-turn, revved up and headed straight into the collar at ramming speed.

  “What is he doing?” Verinne rose in her stirrups, one gloved fist pressed to her helmeted mouth. “He minks he can jump his jet ski onto the collar.”

  “He’ll kill himself,” I murmured, disbelieving.

  As he roared past, he yelled, “Watch this, Sheeba.”

  Winston impacted the collar just as it was rising on a massive wave. When the jet ski tumbled, Win flew over the handlebars. He whacked into the face of a solar collector, which luckily swiveled on its mount and spun with his weight. Win accelerated like a space probe looping around the sun, then rocketed off in a short parabolic arc, splashed down in the waves and sank.

  Sheeba dove into the water. I was staring dumbfounded at the empty place in the waves when I heard Verinne scream. Curiously, my first thought was how rarely Verinne raised her voice.

  “Stop her!” Verinne screamed again. “She’ll drown. I didn’t show her how to inflate her life vest.”

  Verinne’s words incited me to inflate my own life vest. Then the adrenaline of battle kicked in for both of us, and we settled into calm, swift action. In seconds, we secured our jet skis to Sheeba’s line, then plopped into the sea and began paddling around the surface like snorkelers, peering into the deeps. With metavision, we could see hundreds of meters down. And there was Sheeba, ten fathoms below, dodging among the clabbered spirals of sea trash, kicking her strong young legs toward the surface with Winston’s inert body in tow.

  When her helmet broke through the waves, Verinne grabbed her arm, and I yanked the ring to inflate her vest. She was safe. Then I felt for Win’s vest ring. His helmet appeared intact, but his body moved with the slack deadweight of unconsciousness.

  “Be gentle. His back is broken,” Sheeba said. “We should call an ambulance.”

  Verinne held tight to Sheeba’s arm. “This is a war zone. We’re here illegally. We never call outsiders.”

  While they were talking, I speed-called Chad and reported our situation. “Chad will have an ambulance waiting for us at the pier,” I told them.

  “Not good enough. We need help now!” Sheeba yelled.

  “We’ll call Kat,” I suggested.

  “She’s offworld test-driving her shuttle. And Grunze is having quadriceps surgery. He’s probably still under sedation.” Verinne struck the waves with her fist. “Damn. I’m not even uploading any video. Nobody watches a Class One surf.”

  I tried to think. “Who else could we trust to keep this quiet?

  Verinne wiped a spray of brown foam off her faceplate. “Maybe we could call someone from the Paladin crew.”

  “Those pinheads? They’ll never let us live it down,” I said.

  “Guys, he has a broken back.” Sheeba pushed away from us and hauled Winston toward her jet ski. “First, I’m going to stabilize him. Them I’m going to call an ambulance.”

  “No, Sheeba. We have rules. You can’t—-”

  A shadow passed over us, and we looked up to see the gleaming white underbelly of a World Trade Organization police cruiser. The loudspeaker blared, “Nasir Deepra, you are under arrest.”

  What? They knew my name? I slapped the side of my helmet. My earlobe. I’d forgotten the magnetic tape to seal my signet implant. Brilliant. The cops had scanned my identity.

  “Nass, you’re on your own. Come with me, Sheeba. Hurry!” Verinne mounted her jet ski, whipped out her knife and cut the tether line. “Sheeba, they don’t know who we are. We can still get away. What are you doing?”

  Amid the rolling waves, Sheeba was lashing Win’s broken body to the side of her jet ski. She’d improvised a neck brace out of the seat pad. Clever, I noted, even as a lump of bilious dread rotated in my gut. Me, Nasir Deepra, trillionaire, chairman emeritus, member of half a dozen Com boards, I was under arrest for trespassing! The war surfer’s deepest humiliation. And on a freaking Class One surf! I called Chad to mobilize my lawyers.

  “Sheeba. Come,” Verinne commanded.

  “I can’t.” Sheeba finished lashing Win’s body. “Go on. Find Winny an orthopedic surgeon. And get an Isis amulet. The best ones are made of jasper.”

  Verinne hesitated only a second. When she revved up her jet ski and took off, her wake splashed in our faces. Steam was rising from the ocean now, and grayish white-caps churned around the seafarm, pitching us like corks. One huge crasher drove me against Winston’s overturned jet ski. Something snapped in my shoulder, and my left thumb tingled with an IBiS alert. “Norphine!” I shouted to my suit. As the cop cruiser lowered its grappling hook, I watched Verinne disappear in the violent sea.

  The WTO cops rescued us just before the afternoon twisters touched down. Climbing through the smog in their cruiser, we caught glimpses of monstrous waterspouts, and I visualized Verinne dodging through the gale. Strange providence. Our exit came just in time, but we could hardly view the World Trade Org as a savior.

  The cops took the three of us to a detention center in Kobe, Japan, and by the time we got there, Chad had arranged a teleconference with my lawyers. I liked Kobe, nice restaurants, but we didn’t see much of it on that trip. Nor did we see a doctor, not even a cyberdoc. Following my cue, Sheeba steadily refused to give her identity—she giggled and played coy with the cops, treating the whole experience like a game—but that didn’t prevent them from sampling her DNA and tagging her with a trespass violation. Poor Win logged an arrest record, too, though he didn’t know it till later, when he woke up in a Nordvik health church with six spanking new artificial vertebrae.

  Chad paid the fines, they let us go, and for nine days, I became the laughingstock of war surfers. Nasir Deepra jokes suffused the airwaves. Lame. Stupido. But much worse than that, the Agonist crew slipped into second place in the northern hemisphere—and that jerkwad Paladin crew took first rank!

  Back home in the privacy of my condo, I tore out the signet with my fingernails. If I’d been flexible enough, I would have kicked myself in the skull. Instead, I called Shee for a therapy session. Deep-tissue massage, that’s’ what I needed. As she straddled my back on the floor mat in my observatory, I whimpered softly.

  “Surfing didn’t used to be this hard. What’s wrong with me? How could I go so limp on a freaking Class One?”

  “It doesn’t matter, beau. We saved Winston’s life.” Since our return, Sheeba had grown distracted and subdued, probably worried about the arrest.

  “I’ll clear your record, Shee, no matter what it costs.”

  She dug her thumbs into my trapezius muscles. “Do you think those kids knew they were going to die?”

  “They think I’m an idiot,” I mumbled into my pillow—meaning of course my fans and rivals, not the pathetic Gromic.Com kids. I felt too chagrined to meet Sheeba’s eyes. After all the bragging I’d done about my surfer skills, what must she think of me? That arrest had wounded me in the tenderest part of my makeup.

  “They were so small,” Sheeba said. “I’ve heard employees tend to be stunted because of their diet, but why don’t they eat better? Their food’s free.” She leaned on my back and crushed the air out of my lungs. My spine popped in three places. “And why did they go outside without gear? That was askew.”

  “We’ll have to do a gnarly bold surf to get back into
first place.” I chewed my pillow and brooded. “Something huge and unexpected. Maybe the Lorelei”

  Sheeba’s fingers traced circles in my hair. “Kat mentioned a zone called Heaven.”

  “Kat should keep her mouth shut.”

  I twisted the pillow. Kat kept harping on the one zone we could never go near. Still, we needed to pull off a mega-mother of a war surf—and soon. What would Sheeba think if we settled for second place?

  “Forget what’s past. Focus on what’s next,” I muttered, my personal motto.

  “Because the future is certain, but the past can change,” Sheeba replied. Then she blew a raspberry against my neck. “It’s true, Nass. We revise our memories all the time. It’s how we stay happy. Like making up fairy tales.”

  More mystical effervescence. At least she sounded more cheerful. I rolled to face her. How bewitching she looked straddling me on the mat. “Well, our future certainly has to include one huge, hairy war surf to take back the top rank.”

  She grinned. “Heaven?”

  “Not Heaven. You can be certain of that.”

  5

  YOU CAN AFFORD IT

  “Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?”

  -WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  “Ne-ver. Do I have to spell it?”

  “But your lamebrain arrest doesn’t leave us any choice.”

  “Katherine, that’s absurd.”

  Kat and I circled each other practically nose to nose in the center of my observatory. The key to her heart bounced on its silver chain and caught the light every time she moved.

  “We have to surf Heaven,” she ranted.

  “No. We can surf the Lorelei. It’s a major Class Nine, and it’ll earn us more than enough points to take back first rank.”

  The others watched from the sidelines, probably hoping for action. In our long, eventful relationship, Kat and I had more than once come to blows.

  “They’re calling us dinosaurs.” Kat’s front teeth protruded dangerously over her lower lip. “They say we’re obsolete. Nasir, they’re laughing at us.”