Exiting the swinging saloon doors of the bar, they were hit by a wave of sweetly-putrid humidity and an explosion of noise—Bourbon Street. Officially New Orleans might have been abandoned, but unofficially, it was a backwater playground. The surrounding ten-block area was one of the few that remained above the high tide line, the swollen Mississippi swallowing the rest. Masses of revelers thronged the street, thousands of matchsticks rubbing shoulder-to-shoulder in the powder keg of the ancient Latin Quarter. Pounding music poured out from the sense-shifting doorways of bars and nightclubs.
“I think we should just drop her and run,” said Hotstuff, materializing beside them in a halter top and shorts.
It was a thought Vince had wrestled with more than once, but whatever was chasing him was hunting Agent Connors now as well. When she tried to radio in, her credentials were revoked. She had no response at all. The enemy of your enemy could be a friend, and right now, after losing track of Bob and Sid, Vince needed all the friends he could get—and besides, he was confident he could ditch her pretty quick the moment he didn’t need her.
“I’m going to remind you again that you’re still my prisoner,” Agent Connors said. A hulking mandroid, more machine than human, stumbled into her and she swore, shoving it away. Turning, it laughed, reeking of alcohol, and spun back into the crowd.
“And maybe I should tell this crowd that you’re FBI.”
Drones hovered overhead, hawking the newest synthetic drugs, skinshops, and real-human-meat kebabs—delicacies left over from body mod surgeries. Human-animal chimeras—of course Grillas, but also frog-faced thugs and reptilian conmen—hung in doorways between the mechanoids and humanoids. Flashes of New Orleans’ past forced themselves into Vince’s sensory frames, reality skins that were being pumped out as hard and fast from the bars almost as furiously as the music, and all of it drenched in alternating stench-waves of sweat and urine.
Pain shot through Vince’s back. “Can we stop for a minute? Get a drink?”
Agent Connors nodded. She didn’t look any better than Vince felt.
That being said, Vince felt as comfortable here as Agent Connors was uncomfortable. Louisiana was where his family originated. He smiled. The world still needs lawless places. He always liked a good party. Even if the world burned down around this place, people would still be coming here to celebrate, and to hide. The world needed criminals just as much as it needed heroes—and anyway, the difference between a criminal and a hero was more often a matter of timing than moral compass.
At least, he hoped it was.
4
“SILICON GONE WRONG, ‘bad glass,’ get it?” Sibeal was trying to explain why her group was called the glasscutters. “We hunt down bad glass, errant digital organisms.” She looked at the ceiling. “But I wouldn’t call them criminals. Really they’re just misguided pieces of code.”
The White Horse was bustling at the end of a busy day for the undergrounders. The main bar, of curving polished mahogany, was packed two deep with people ordering pints, their arms high, waving at the bartender. The plush carpeting underfoot smoothed the hubbub of voices, and overhead lighting reflected from polished brass banisters and the mirror-lined walls.
Sid was running background simulations of escape routes, creating ever-more-elaborate systems and models of the networks around him. “Whatever works for you,” he replied to Sibeal, shrugging. Most of his attention was on a simulation where he was uncorking beer kegs to hide a dramatic escape. It’d become more of a game than a serious undertaking, and Sibeal was forcing him to maintain his primary presence with her. Really, he was sulking.
“Doesn’t matter what name you attach to a thing,” rumbled the Grilla, sitting across from Sibeal. It lifted a tankard of beer as big as Sid’s midsection to its lips. “If it’s done badly, it’s responsible.”
Sid looked at him. “So if a lion eats an antelope, we should book it for murder?”
The Grilla slammed its drink down. “Want to start into the Africa jokes?”
Sid almost fell out of his chair. The Grilla’s nostrils flared, and anger seemed to swell it double in size. “No . . . I didn’t mean . . .”
The Grilla’s hackles eased down. It turned to Sibeal. “Still need me?”
She shook her head, and the Grilla gulped down the remains of its beer and stormed off.
Sid eased back to the table. “Testy.”
Sibeal watched the retreating Grilla. “That’s Furball, by the way. He’s cuddly when you get to know him.” She looked back at Sid. “Only his friends call him Furball. Best for you to stick to his name—Zoraster.”
“Zoraster? Seriously?”
Sibeal nodded. “So is it a deal?”
She wanted Sid to get Willy to talk to her. Sibeal’s glasscutter guild had tracking information on Willy’s body—there was a huge bounty—and she was offering to share it if he’d introduce her to Willy, get his primary subjective down for a chat. This was the reason the glasscutters had initially contacted Sid. She figured that if she could talk to Willy directly, she might be able to figure out where his body was.
Sid doubted it, but didn’t see it doing any harm. Despite the massive resources they exhausted, the only thing Sid and his friends had managed to confirm was that it was Willy’s proxxi that stole his body. Hearing that the glasscutters had a lead was the first real bright spot.
Sid wasn’t even sure what the mission was anymore. Bob had disappeared, was maybe captured, maybe worse, and the same for Vince. Sid had a very thin list of options. Throwing in with bounty hunters seemed morally questionable, but then Sid based decisions on what made sense to get to the objective, and not on the shifting sands of morality. And he didn’t have other options. Something was better than nothing. “Sure,” he replied. “I’ll get Willy down here.”
“And I want to see what’s in that data beacon, just me, strictly private,” Sibeal added.
Sid and Vicious were having trouble unpacking the data beacon Bob left for them. Bob had been careful, wrapping it in layers of shared-memetic encryption only Sid could decode, and it was taking a long time to unwrap. And why would he share whatever he found with her? At the very least, this was more leverage he could use later. He picked his beer up. “I don’t think so—”
Two giant metal hands crashed through the walls of the bar, ripping through brick and mortar, tearing a hole. Sid and Sibeal barely flinched. Bunky’s face appeared in the gaping ruin. “This here’s a workingman’s pub, none of this fancy-dancy stuff . . .”
The reality skin Sibeal and Sid were sharing slipped away like paint dropped in water. The rusting corrugated tin roof of the real White Horse appeared over them. Bunky was standing on one of the hands of his construction mechanoid, back from work. Shaky, of course, was next to him, and smiling just as goofily.
A serving bot slapped two beers down in front of Bunky and Shaky, and they roared in laughter. Beers from Sid had become something of a ritual. “I do like this guy,” Shaky said to Bunky. They picked up their pints, and Sibeal walked over to greet them.
Sid leaned back and looked around the cavern floor from his view from the White Horse two stories up. He noticed there was an Eleutherous meeting hall to one side, and more Grillas had arrived, working on the diggers and constructors in the pits below.
Before being abducted by one, he’d never seen a Grilla up close and personal before.
Animal-human chimeras, bred for combat in the Weather Wars, Grillas were yet another ill-considered ambition with unintended consequences. Animal-human chimeras had been around for a long time, starting with pigs grown with human organs for transplants. It was only a short step for some researchers, less averse to chimeric tinkering, to experiment with human voice boxes and frontal lobes in male silverbacks.
The world had been in a moral uproar until the first reports of the raging silverback battalions, in full battle armor, ripping t
heir opposition to pieces in Weather War battles high in the Himalayas. After that, the moral tide turned into a debate about sending “our boys” into battle against them. Almost overnight, all sides had their own Grilla units.
Even unaided by an exoskeleton, a combat Grilla could dead lift two tons, scale forty-foot walls, and if all other weapons systems failed, rely on a fearsome set of fangs. They were famous for having bad tempers, but then again, if you sprang into existence to discover that your Creators were human assholes, you’d be pissed off, too.
In this high-speed-evolution world, after a few years robotics became cheaper than Grillas, especially when the larger costs—urban ghettos filled with creatures returned from the wars, half-accorded rights and civil unrest, long-term health and safety issues—became obvious. They’d now been banned from urban centers, an entire generation of a doomed race, and relegated to places like this.
But cost was only half the story.
The human mimicry of synthetics and bots was one thing, but looking into a Grilla’s eyes, you couldn’t help but feel like you were peering into your own soul—and humans reserved a special hatred for things that reminded them of themselves.
5
“JUST BE CAREFUL of him,” said one of the men.
Must be the one the old man called Toothface.
Cranial gene-mod therapy tended to induce hyperdontia when done badly. The man’s head was grotesquely mushroomed on one side and a second and third set of teeth had grown in over his first. He wiped drool from his mouth with the back of one hand. Making it worse, he had a shabby reality filter fixed over top of it all, a transparent overlay showing off the large brain that had grown inside the shell of his expanded skull.
Then again, part of what Bob was seeing might be an artifact of the sensory mapping.
He was struggling to make sense of the scarab beetle’s neural pathways, trying to wrest control of its six legs from the still-skittish owner. The beetle tried to scurry back under the door, but Bob held it firm, edging it forward.
Bob had a splinter working to correlate the view from the thousands of lens in its compound eye into something understandable to his own visual cortex, but the experience was unnerving. The image of the men in the room ballooned, as if he was looking into a carnival mirror, slowly coming into focus but then distorting again, the men glowing in the infrared-shifted spectrum of the insect’s vision.
“When is . . .” one of the other men said. His lips kept moving but the audio feed slipped into garbled static. Bob tunneled down into the tibiae of the beetle, the thin cuticle ear drum located on its front legs. Instead of trying to interpret nerve packets at the end of the trachea, it might be better to go straight to the timpani. It worked, and the sound information normalized. “. . . so will be here the day after tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Toothface replied. “The kid’s neural load is bleeding out fast. The priest is dangerous, he knows—”
The priest, Bob thought, looking at the old man in the cell beside his. So the old man was a priest.
The terrified beetle managed to override Bob for a second and shifted under the doorway, garbling the sound again. Bob steadied it, sending soothing impressions into its primitive awareness, trying to match his brain’s gamma frequency waves to those of the insect’s optic lobes.
Not for the first time, Bob wished he had his proxxi there to help him. Robert was still locked out. Something happened in the event under New York that warped his pssi interface.
“—just stay out of that room,” continued Toothface’s voice after a second or two. “Keep him isolated. Is that clear?”
The other men nodded. Bob noticed a clutch of keys on one of their belts. Toothface sat down at a wooden table in the middle of the room while one of the men went to fill a kettle from the well outside.
“The forty-year war is nearing its end,” said the Bedouin to Bob. “They’re getting desperate.”
Bob held the beetle steady, shifting his primary awareness back into his body. He’d ghosted into insects before, but beetles had undergone an explosion of radial evolution that resulted in a bewildering array of sensory systems. He had never inhabited a scarab beetle before, but he was getting the hang of it.
“The Weather Wars, you mean?” Bob replied to the Bedouin.
Depending on what you defined as the starting point, the Weather Wars had been going on about that long. But how would capturing Bob have anything to do with that long-drawn-out conflict? Bob looked at the old priest more carefully. They said he was dangerous. How?
The priest shrugged. “Attach what names you like.”
There were no digital or network systems in here, no listening devices, so nobody could hear them. This was more to protect them than me, thought Bob. No way for him to escape digitally. Everything about this place was as primitive as possible, including the physical locks. He had to get those keys.
“The star with two tails is rising in the morning sky again,” the Bedouin added. “Gog and Magog are unshackled.”
Bob stared at him. The main danger this guy seemed to be was to himself. He played along. “So this is it, then, the end of the world?” In an overlaid display, his insect-mind watched the men in the other room pouring tea.
“Not the end, a rebirth.” The Bedouin looked out his window at the sky. “But yes, it will be the end of this world.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
The Bedouin sat down on his cot. “I am not excited, not afraid, but embracing, accepting.” He took a deep breath. “The world must be cleansed. Our suffering must be brought to an end.”
Despite his disdain, a part of Bob could understand what the priest meant. He’d been sheltered on Atopia, but much of the world was a horrible place, plagued by war, disaster, famine. The pattern was repeating. After enslaving the natural world, humans were now enslaving the endless virtual worlds and creatures they were creating. It wasn’t something Bob thought about much, protected and isolated on Atopia, but coming out into the world was changing his perspective.
The men in the next room laughed, and Bob sharpened his awareness in the beetle.
“No more dirty desert after this,” Toothface said. “With the money we get for this kid.”
“If he’s so dangerous, maybe we should just cut him up into pieces,” laughed one of the men, pulling a cruelly curved knife from his belt. “Just to be sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”
Toothface liked that and slapped the table, all of them joining in laughter. “Maybe we should,” he said gruffly, and the laughing stopped.
Letting the beetle slip back under the doorway, Bob looked at the priest through the bars of the jail. “Is there anything bigger than a beetle I could get my hands on out here?”
6
THE MAN IN front of Vince held onto the bars of the balcony railing as if they were the bars of a cell. “Buddy, you got some smarties? Just a little,” he begged, “just a taste.”
Not a man, realized Vince, staring into the desperate face, but a boy, emaciated with that same hollow look all junkies shared. “Sorry—”
“Please, I know you have some, I can sense them.” The boy reached through the bars and grabbed Vince’s arm.
“Hey!” Vince pulled away, and the boy jumped back, rubbing the fingers he’d touched Vince with into the back of his neck. He’d swiped a few of Vince’s smarticles onto his fingers, and was rubbing them into the spot closest to his pleasure centers, trying to eke out a tiny jolt of endorphins in a fantasy world.
“Should just give the kid what he wants.” Agent Connors yawned.
Smarticles, the tiny neuro-reactive engines that powered commercial pssi, were a controlled substance internationally. In the big cities, Cognix was giving it away for free, hooking a populace that would pay for it later. This place, however, was outside any legal-licensed jurisdiction, which meant having real smarticles w
as illegal—though that didn’t mean everyone wasn’t copying them.
And they definitely weren’t free.
“Not going to happen,” Vince replied.
Money wasn’t the problem. Sid had created their own private smarticle stash for their gang, to shield them from prying eyes. Vince swallowed his in a time-release capsule that had attached itself to the inside of his small intestine. He didn’t want them getting around. They could be used to track him.
“So what’s our next step?” Vince asked Connors.
Two bloodied and ragged people leaning on each other blended perfectly into the melee of Bourbon Street, lending them a cloak of invisibility, but everywhere they went for a room, they were turned away. Of course the bars were open twenty-four hours, so they still had somewhere to go.
“We wait.” Agent Connors settled herself into a corner beside Vince.
Vince leaned back and closed his eyes. She might not have any connections here, but he did. He sent out some bots to test the local underground. Hotstuff was feeding him threat reports, his mind cycling through images and situational reports.
He watched a pack of pickpockets, a gang of neurally-fused teenagers that were circling through the crowd, prowling. Even in the short time they’d been there, Vince had watched a breathtaking progression of trending memes moving through the crowd, evolving hourly, new forms morphing from old; an influx of new machines, neural formations, virtual worlds, reality skins.
True mind-uploading was beyond current technology. Research into it was banned in many places—mostly on moral and legal grounds, and on religious ones in America—but the distinction was blurring. The meta-cognition frameworks of most “people” were outweighing their meat brains. The logic behind the original bans, clear just years and months ago, was becoming irrelevant as pssi permeated the population.
When the turbofan went down, he’d assumed he was going to die. They were too high, it was too fast, they had no protection from his networks. The survivability matrix was nil. In the flames and noise he’d closed his eyes, waiting.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 10
