Shaky slapped Sid on the back. “You’re all right, mate!”
On the opposite wall of the cavern, directly ahead of Sid, two tunnel openings yawned open, like two giant eyes staring at him. Mesh netting held back loose rock near the entrances, while white tubes wormed their way around the mouths. Metal ribs lined the tunnels, flanked by fat packets of cabling that snaked into the distance and disappeared into the darkness. Clunking up through each of the tunnels were large construction mechanoids.
Bunky saw Sid looking at them. “No need to worry, just our better halves come to get us for work.”
Sid wasn’t worried. He was trying to crack into them. A construction mechanoid on the rampage would give these assholes something to think about.
“Afraid we can’t hack into those,” said Vicious, Sid’s proxxi. Only Sid could see and hear Vicious. Between them they were spinning out a range of escape scenarios—flooding the tunnels with water by opening a sewage drain, carbon monoxide poisoning from jamming exhausts, a blinding flash of floodlights followed by a power failure. A combination of these might give Sid just enough time.
Sibeal, the girl from the bar, sat down on a bench next to him. “Before you do anything you might regret, let’s have a chat.” She grabbed one of his phantom hands in synthetic space. “And no, I don’t want a beer.”
Sid readied his attack vectors. “So what’s this about, then?” It didn’t matter. Whatever the reason, he was about to unleash a very unpleasant learning experience on them.
This was a den of phrackers, ‘cutters, and underminers. Sid knew their kind. He was their kind. The underminers were really just construction workers, tied to whatever local mob affiliates they had to be, but the ‘cutters and phrackers mostly worked for the Asian gambling syndicates. They knocked out corporate AIs, shifted the future timeline to try and shift odds, struggling against the future regulators who were fighting a losing battle to make sure the future is what it was supposed to be.
Sibeal rolled her eyes, and in an overlaid display Sid was surprised to see a knot of phantom limbs spread out from her, uncoiling into the hyperspaces where he was readying his assault. One by one, his strings of control were cut.
“We’re friends,” she replied. Sibeal wrapped the cut strings around him, tying up his virtual hands. She smiled. “In fact, we’re fans.”
“That’s right, mate,” said Bunky, raising his beer.
Sid glanced at his proxxi. Vicious shrugged. There was nothing he could do, but this didn’t seem threatening either. Sid turned to Sibeal. “If we’re friends, then why the kidnapping routine?”
Sibeal shrugged in pssi-space. “There wasn’t time to explain. We had to get out of there. Your friend unloaded a massive synthetic charge in that bar.”
Who were they talking about? “My friend?”
Sibeal opened a channel and shared her mediaworld reports. “Over a thousand people lost their minds, Bob was right in the middle.”
“If we hadn’t gotten you out of there . . .” Shaky made small explosion gestures with his fingers, as if his mind was blowing. “You should choose your friends more carefully.”
Sid assimilated the mediaworlds and frowned. “There’s no way Bob had anything to do with this. I was with him the whole time.” Not the whole time. They must have snatched him too. “Where is he?”
“We thought you might know.” Sibeal watched for Sid’s reaction. “He’s gone off grid. There’s one heck of a bounty attached to him.” She paused. “And you, too, for that matter.”
In augmented space, Sid’s proxxi nodded. So that was what all this was about—bounty hunters. He could guess what they wanted. His friends. “I can’t help you.”
“If you help us, maybe we can help you.” Sibeal spun a new information packet into Sid’s networks—a data beacon. “We found something your friend left behind. Want to have a look?”
He was on dangerous ground here. They had kidnapped him, yet claimed to be friends, then admitted they were bounty hunters. Nothing in the logical chain made him think he should trust them, and yet his gut told him he could. He was the one that had contacted them in the first place, and he needed as much information as he could get. He could let this roll. Whatever happened, he was confident he could outsmart them if it came down to it, but it might be useful to give the impression that he was in it for the money as well. He nodded. “But we split any commission?”
Sibeal glanced at Bunky and Shaky and they both nodded. “Sure,” she replied.
In the background their networks began handshaking the reputational matrix of the deal. Sid hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He was tracking the hundreds of identity tags that Bob left behind in his escape, multiplying these by the thousands of exit points and the dense transport network.
Bob could be almost anywhere in the world by now.
2
THE PRIEST WATCHED the young man in the next cell. So young, and yet he couldn’t ignore the signs. He looked out through the rusted bars of his own cell, shuffling his feet along the stone floors, looking for just the right angle. Yes, there it was, hanging in the blue sky, its tails spreading as it grew. There was not much time.
The young man groaned.
“Water?” asked the priest.
The heat inside the mud walls was oppressive under the relentless midday sun. The young man’s eyes fluttered then opened. His breathing was heavy and ragged. His lips were cracked. “Yes, water, please,” whispered the young man.
Reaching under the folds of his thobe, the priest produced a leather bladder. He extended his wiry arm between the bars of their adjoining cells.
STILL COMING TO his senses, Bob blinked. His meta-cognition systems were coming back online, but his neural load of smarticles was low. How long had he been out? He didn’t know, but he needed a refill. He didn’t have enough in his system to reach out to the satellite networks: he had no GPS or tracking information. Bob’s eyes darted around the room, collecting information.
His internal systems were busy mapping his immediate environment.
The man in the cell next to him smiled, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth, and he held up a leather pouch. Water sloshed within it. Bob studied the man: faded keffiyeh headdress, deeply creased face of battered leather, watery eyes laced with cataracts.
Bob’s pssi posited an origin for the man: Bedouin.
It was near zero humidity and over a hundred and thirty degrees. He had to be in the Sahara somewhere. It was within the range of the launch energy of the passenger cannon pod when he’d blacked out.
Taking the bladder from the Bedouin, Bob mumbled, “Thank you.”
He lifted himself up on one elbow and drank. He’d never been this dehydrated before. His biostats were all over the place. Heat stroke was setting in. Just raising himself up brought a wave of nausea.
“Slowly,” urged the Bedouin, his palms up. “Drink slowly.”
Bob looked at the bladder of water, then the dusty floor. The Weather Wars had wreaked havoc on this corner of the world. There were rivers of water in the sky just as there were rivers of water in the ground, and weather tech was enabling rich countries to divert all of it. He took another swig from the bladder.
His proxxi, Robert, was still locked out, and Bob flexed his phantoms into the empty hyperspaces around him. Barely anything for them to hold onto, just the faint chatter of a cellular voice network at the edges of his senses. He let loose a splinter to see if it could burrow through, but its cognitive strength, like his own, was thin at best.
“ ‘Where am I?’ ” the Bedouin said. “ ‘Who am I?’ ” He smiled. “Yes, very good questions.”
He seemed able to hear what Bob was thinking. Who was this old man? Or was he asking Bob to think about his own identity? He was certain he was in northern Africa, but then again, as the old man’s face swam in his visual fields, whether this was
“reality” was another question. His body might still be in the passenger pod, while his awareness secreted away in a virtual world.
The aches and pains felt real enough, but how to verify that he was in base reality—the identity world? The only sure-fire way would be to kill himself—if his awareness snapped into another time and place, back in his body, then this world and space wasn’t real. But if nothingness came afterward, then the world he was in, or rather had been in, was real—and there was no possibility of return. And of course, he didn’t really know if nothingness came after death, either.
It wasn’t an experiment he wanted to try quite yet.
Reaching inside his core with a phantom, he punched his Uncle Button, the hardwired fail-safe built into the deepest layer of the pssi operating system that snapped your consciousness back into your own body.
Nothing changed.
This must be it, then. Best to leave that final escape route for another day.
Taking another swig from the leather bladder, Bob leaned higher against the wall of his cell, feeling the straw embedded in the mud bricks prickling his back. He leaned over and inspected a wound on the side of his leg. Whoever snatched him had cut out his subcutaneous patch of smarticle reserves.
He had been in this area of the world once before, on a family holiday. His father hired a guide to take a sensor-scanner out into the Western Desert between Egypt and Libya. Some of the earliest Christian churches, from the first century, were in the ancient oasis towns that dotted the basins of the Sahara. There wasn’t much detail in this area in the standard wikiworld, and hiring a guide to physically visit with the sensor enabled his family to flit in and “be there” from Atopia. The trip had been a gift from his father to his mother. She was a devout member of the Atopian Christian society, the Eleutherous.
Bob messed the whole trip up by missing the outings, and if he did make them, by heaping scorn on the idea of religion and poking holes in any stories the guide told. He ended the whole project by jamming the sensor with his dimstim traffic. It was an accident, but his mother had been quietly crushed by his thoughtlessness.
Thinking of his family, his stomach knotted.
He always found a way to mess things up. Barely two days after leaving the security of Deanna’s place, and already everything had fallen apart. Why had Patricia put this on him, trusted him?
Then he remembered that he gave Nancy a copy of Patricia’s data cube. Now he wanted to take it back. Maybe she hadn’t found it yet.
“Life is suffering, young man,” said the old man, watching him.
Bob looked at him. Life is suffering. “What do you mean?” He handed the water pouch back, letting his hand touch the old man’s, just enough for a few smarticles to transfer from Bob’s skin.
“It is obvious you are suffering.” The old man tucked the pouch back in his thobe.
With a sweep of his phantoms across virtual workspace controls, Bob logged into the dusting of smarticles on the man’s skin. Measuring skin potential was an old method of lie detection.
“I’m stuck in a jail, shouldn’t I be suffering?”
“But suffering isn’t necessary.”
It was working. Bob was getting a baseline measurement of the man’s skin tension. He switched tracks. “How did I get here? Were you here when I arrived?”
The old man looked up, opening the palm of his hand to the ceiling. “You dropped from the sky in a flaming chariot, as it was prophesied.”
Bob groaned internally. Not another doomsdayer. “How did I get in the cell? Who put me here?”
Nodding, the old man narrowed his eyes. “Four men, one of them old Toothface.”
His skin potential remained steady. He was telling the truth. Bob studied his face. “Are you with them?”
“No.”
No reaction. Nothing that Bob could infer from the man’s body language or facial markers or skin potential indicated he was lying. Bob relaxed slightly.
“And where are we?”
“Near Siwah, the town is several miles away. Just the four men are here, and us.”
Bob decided the old man was telling the truth. “And why are you here?”
The old man laughed. “For seeking the truth.”
Without an outside connection, Bob had to rely on his internal wikiworld maps. He did a quick flyover of the models of the maps and terrain he had, but there wasn’t much resolution. He stood on his bunk and pressed his face against the metal bars of the window. Looking back and forth through the window, he reconstructed as much of a three-dimensional map of the area as he could, trying to correlate this with his internal maps.
He needed more information.
Bob looked around the sandy floor, searching, and there, in a corner, he saw a scarab beetle. Walking over he picked it up, blowing the dust off it, lifting it up to his mouth.
The old man watched, his eyes growing wide.
Spitting on the beetle, Bob gently began rubbing it. The old man frowned as he watched Bob massage the insect. Slowly, over several minutes, some of the smarticles in his saliva worked their way into the creature and suffused into its nervous system. Bob made a connection, opening up a sensory space that morphed into the beetle’s. Looking up, he could see his own grotesquely large face peering down, could feel the beetle’s terror. Calm down, he told it as he took control of its motor neurons, I’m a friend.
Bob’s body put the beetle back on the ground, and his mind began scuttling off in it.
3
IN THE RECESSES of the shelves behind the bar, Vince watched cockroaches dart between dirt-encrusted bottles, their antennae waving in the darkness as they waited. He could only imagine what it must be like upstairs. “Could we get a room?” he asked, wishing he hadn’t.
The bartender leered at them. “I could get you a fresh one.”
“Yeah, that would be . . .” For a second Vince thought he was offering a clean room, until the jab in his ribs from Agent Connors. Ah, he meant a fresh girl. “No, this one’s fine.” He turned, winking at Agent Connors, taking in the scowl on her mud-and-blood splattered face. “Just the room.”
There were a few regulars sitting at the bar, eyes staring straight ahead, their thoughts not on the future but the past. Vince wished he was one of them.
Two days ago they crash landed in the bayous of Louisiana. Spinning on impact, Vince’s turbofan bounced off Agent Connor’s aircraft, lessening the blow. Within seconds Vince extricated himself, amazed to be alive, and was running off through knee-deep water when his conscience hit him. He returned to pull the unconscious Agent Connors out of her cockpit, then splinted her broken leg before she came around. Slogging through the muck, he managed to find a small patch of dry ground.
For two days they struggled to stay alive out there. Once Connors regained consciousness, she made attempts to get in touch with her support teams, but they weren’t responsive. This area of Louisiana was on the fringe of government control. Vince didn’t stop her trying. He figured whatever the charges were, he was better off fighting them in court than fighting off whatever was in the swamp.
Connors tried to establish her control over the situation, but Vince had tossed her weapons into the swamp when she was unconscious. Vince didn’t like guns. That turned out to be a bad idea. Their arrival brought scavengers of all kinds—garbage drones, swamp people, animals. While the machines and humans gave them a wide berth as Connors hurled verbal threats at them, the alligators weren’t as easily dissuaded. Neither were the cottonmouths, deadly poisonous snakes that crawled everywhere.
Even with all that, the biggest problem became water. The standard-issue med kits in the turbofans didn’t contain water purification tablets, and drinking the raw bayou water would bring on diarrhea or worse. As the day waned on the second night, battered and thirsty, with hope of rescue evaporating and the gators getting braver, Connors g
ave in. Vince managed to flag down some good old boys out hunting, and they’d hitched a ride into New Orleans.
The bartender in front of Vince curled his lip. “No rooms available, mister.”
Vince frowned—the hologram outside said vacancy, as well as the online feed. “But your—”
“Did I stutter?”
New Orleans had been abandoned for a generation, at least officially. Doubly doomed, it was sinking while the oceans were rising, battered by wave after wave of monster hurricanes. Ninety percent of what used to be the city was below sea level, swamped, the old levees having long given up. Without the finances of New York to hold back the oceans, what remained of New Orleans had long gone feral.
Vince was about to argue when he felt another jab. Agent Connors flicked her chin toward the media hologram floating behind the bar. Vince looked up to stare into his own eyes. An image of his face was floating in the middle of the broadcast. “The former founder of Phuture News, Vince Indigo, indicted in federal courts today on conspiracy charges, is reported dead in a crash—”
The bartender glanced at the hologram. “Like I said, no rooms. Don’t want my place wrecked in a raid.”
“—New Orleans has been quarantined by DAD in a reported viral outbreak—”
“Should just throw you to them,” growled a man hunched over his beer beside them. Black goggles covered most of his face, a sharp metal spike protruding from one eye. His leather vest was open to the waist, revealing skin laced in red welts of scars.
“Mind your tongue, Sledge,” barked the bartender. “We don’t give anyone up to the farmers, but that”—the bartender looked Vince square in the eyes—“don’t mean I want you here.” He rubbed stubble atop his head, then reached under the bar and threw something at Vince. “Now get out.”
Vince recoiled, half expecting a grenade, but it was a first aid kit. “Thanks,” he mumbled. He followed Agent Connors to the door. She was limping on her broken leg—well secured in a fast-cast—but their infected wounds were more of a problem.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 9
