by Curtis Hox
“My back is hurting more than normal. I may have to go get some help.” He snapped up at her. “Your father didn’t ask you to come back so soon, did he, and get on my case about growing old?”
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
He returned to splashing water on his arms. “If it has to do with the wonders of staying young, no. Anything else is fair game.”
She enjoyed how direct he was. Everyone else was always so guarded, as if God above was listening and judging. “What’s wrong with liking having an entity, or being a ghost?”
He stopped with his arms dipped up to his elbows. The water was muddy. This was his wash for the day. He’d make himself another tub tomorrow, but she wondered when the last time he’d soaked himself from head to toe.
“What’s wrong with it? Look at you.” He pulled his arms out and let them drip.
She raised her hands and looked at their digital likenesses. She was a bunch of ones and zeros somehow given life in Realspace. Her dad said he thought it was tied to her “genosoul,” whatever that was. He said, the fact she had her “geno-pheno” copied and stored in a Rejuv Facility meant she wasn’t dead. She existed. Her “essence” existed. The explanations were all too much for her. Besides, the philosophy was dull. She refused to listen to her father and uncle when they’d spend an hour or two together each night on the porch, arguing.
“I’m a ghost, so what?” she heard herself ask, knowing that there was a lot of what to the situation.
“Simone, I got me a good bunch of okra over there. When’s the last time you had fried okra?” He screwed up his old man face full of dirt and wrinkles and too much sun. “Oh, wait, most people don’t eat that anyway. Okay, when’s the last time you had watermelon? I had some last night, alone, on the porch. Didn’t offer any to you or your dad. Why? ‘cause you cain’t eat. Two things there that are important: the food we eat and the eating together. You don’t even miss either, do you?”
She did miss eating all her favorite foods like cream-filled chocolate éclairs, red velvet cupcakes, gourmet vanilla yogurt. Eating together was fun, too, but she often ate and read at the same time and usually had to be called to come to the dinner table. She also missed feeling a warm bed, or even getting a hug when you were down. But not sleeping? Hello, way cool. And being able to pass through walls and float where you wanted was even cooler.
“I guess,” she said.
He took a towel to his arms and regarded her as if she were as dumb as the post-hole digger hanging from the shed wall next to her.
“I told Skippard he always went too far,” he said. “He knows it, too. Your oldest brother, Jonen ...” He paused, as if he’d said too much.
Jonen had died before she was born. Her father, mother, and her dead brother had all joined the struggle when the first incursions happened. Her mother never talked about him now and neither did Rigon, who was old enough to remember him.
“Your family is so wrapped up in it, and I just don’t want to see you lost.”
“Am I lost, Uncle Pic?”
“Too early to tell.” He tossed the towel on a wall-peg, barely cleaner than he’d been before. “If you could get your body back right now, would you take it?”
“Sure!” she said, without thought.
Well ...
“Let’s see how you feel tomorrow, after it gets to do its thing.” He looked at her as if she’d farted and denied it. “You make sure it heads north up into those hills. That’s some empty national forest acreage. They keep people out these days, unless you got a license. Should be empty. The hills are steep with plenty of gullies and even some crags. That should keep it busy.” He looked around, maybe realizing he’d been talking and he’d met his quota for the day. “I got some vegetables to cut up.”
“See ya, Uncle Pic.”
But he was already rounding the back of the shed.
By now the cicadas were in full cacophonous play as late afternoon dwindled. The disappearing sun dipped behind slate-gray clouds that weighed heavy in the sky. A chill wind now blew that she couldn’t feel, but her memory was strong enough she imagined the bite.
Uncle Pic didn’t need much clothing, though. He’d said it was still warm enough to go swimming, but everyone at school was bringing coats already. The leaves kicking up in his front yard meant autumn was here. The trees were half-bare, but many were still colored a mottled bronze. It was enough of a beautiful wilderness you could get lost for days.
She hoped that didn’t happen. It wasn’t part of the deal.
Her father appeared out of dense foliage nearby. “Tonight’s the night?”
He looked as he always did, except he was muted, his usual choice of textured shades of crystal blue now a soft gray as if he had been blending in with the sky.
“Going to have some fun,” she said.
He stopped when he saw Uncle Pic at the chicken coop, working some wire back into place. “I guess you talked to your mother.”
“I did.”
“And your uncle.”
“I did.”
“You needed to hear them. I have too much enthusiasm sometimes.” He waved to her. “Walk with me.”
Walking, of course, consisted of floating just a few inches above the ground, but her father had so perfected moving his legs he looked normal.
At first, he said nothing. She let him lead her into the woods. The failing light meant it would be dark soon, which mattered little to them—a definite perk. She realized she’d been keeping a list of pros and cons. Seeing in the dark was a definite pro. Every so often a branch smacked her in the arm, and sparks emitted in resplendent puffs of light, and she realized she liked that, too—like a caress, but a charged one, something no embodied person could understand.
“When I was a boy,” her father said, “growing up poor in these hills, my daddy used to beat me for reading too much. He was a tough man, Simone, but he loved me in his way. He died way too young. He missed the benefits of the Rupture.” She stuck close behind him. “I once read a book about a man who went to live in the woods by a pond. I think it was called Walden. It explained how to live a simplified life in nature. It spoke to my young mind. But I grew up and learned about engineering, and I realized creative man is natural man.” He stopped. “I’m boring you.”
She didn’t need this pep talk. “I get it, Dad. I agree with you. We’re better than we were.”
The gray disappeared, lines of blue swirling along his torso like living things. “I knew you would. But there are dangers.”
“I know.”
“No, Simone, I mean for us. The disembodied are vulnerable. It’s the body that makes us human. It’s the removal of the body that makes us—”
“—posthuman.”
“Yes!”
“Dad, I’m a teenager. I’m smarter than I look. But, what the heck?”
“When you let it loose tonight, you ... will become different. You may like it.”
“That’s a problem?”
“It could be when you return to—”
“—normal?”
He laughed, and she laughed. “Normal. You know, this is how I think of myself now.”
They began walking again. This time he listened as she talked about school and the other Alters and about what they were learning. He said it was all grand, what they were doing. He told her to listen to her mother’s instruction. He told her everything would be all right.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“You know how to get back, right? Just float into the air, think of the cabin, and wait until you see the creek. Hard to get lost once you know the hills.”
He left her in a moonlit glen with tall trees on either side that swayed in the wind. The skies had cleared into a purple twilight. But it was colder out.
She began to dance, and she recognized that what she did would have been condemned through generations of human history as witchery. She imagined her feet kicking up pebbles, but she disturbed nothing, until her entity appe
ared, and an inhuman roar echoed through the hills of Southern Appalachia.
SIX
AN UNASSUMING MIDDLE-AGED MAN in a business suit exited a private car at a dirt-road entrance. It led to a sprawling expanse of farmland in central Alabama. The day was cloudless and bright, the horizon nothing but fields under a beautiful blue dome. The man walked to a makeshift table by the side of the road and presented his ID.
The farmhand who read the scanner wasn’t much more than a young boy. He was big for his age.
“Pickle me pink,” the boy said, looking up in surprise. “You cain’t be Gramgadon. No way in a cold heller.”
Gramgadon accepted the fact that the boy saw someone who might teach middle-grade math. Gramgadon was now as natural as they come, looks-wise, appearing to be an older man without the sense to get hair replacement treatment or to get the gobbler hanging below his chin taken care of.
“I’m just interested in the good matches. When they start?”
The boy looked over his tablet. Gramgadon extended his back and groaned, playing the part of the feeble human. He coughed a bit, and spit in the dirt. The boy glanced at him, as if he might get sick from being so close. He returned to his tablet.
“We got a bunch of nobodies this afternoon. Could be good, as good as good goes. Later, the ones of interest are ... well, hell, looky here. We got some Consortium-tagged high-school kids. These are Tranz Alters I heard about, my guess.”
Gramgadon leaned forward to see. He wanted to snatch that tablet out of the dimwit’s hands, but he’d been told by his bosses—who didn’t get these things wrong—that these students were his persons of interest. Gramgadon was to keep a low profile. It was very serious business, as far as business went, and he intended to fulfill his duty.
“You gambling?” the boy asked.
“Just here to scout.”
“Well, anytime—”
“Where’s the villa?”
The boy tapped the tablet. “I got ya a ride.”
Gramgadon scanned the area again, smelled the distinct aroma of shucked corn stalks, the tall kind that were twice the size of a man and produced three times the yield as normal corn. He saw a sky of silky filaments floating in the wind. This was the new bio-engineered America that his bosses were invested in controlling. This was the world they wanted to live in.
He smiled as the boy stared at him as if he were a leper. Naturals were always so surprised when they learned he was Gramgadon. He liked it that way. The ostentatious display of augmented humanity that would arrive here to fight would never look twice at him if they saw him in public. In fact, most of the meatheads and hormonleeches who used drugs to emulate the Transhuman augments wouldn’t stop to help him if he were dying in the street. He liked the anonymity. He used it to his advantage almost every day of his life because he was not so helpless.
Right now his disguise was working wonders with the farmhand, who sneered at him. Gramgadon pretended to be amazed by the enhanced fields. In a way he was. To dedicate one’s life to feeding the world’s undesirables was admirable, although only ten or twenty percent of these acres went to edible foods. Most of the other materials fed other industries, like the ones that fueled his digital bosses.
For a second, the huge brands on his chest flared up like living things that might press through his shirt. He had been blessed to be marked by all three of the most powerful Rogues in Cyberspace, as well as by the real ruler: SWML.
He breathed deep, resisting the urge to pray for their intersession right now. He imagined he could feel all the tiny machines inside his body that allowed him to be their vessel agitating for attention. He bit his lip so that he didn’t start babbling his fidelity to them. He wanted to drop to his knees, raise his hands to the sky, and praise them for making him who he was.
I’m just here to watch, he told himself.
A shiny AUV arrived. He ducked inside the large, air-conditioned vehicle and dreamed of forced human servitude to his masters. He no longer had any interest in the fields, or in making conversation with the security personnel who rode with him. All of it, everything, was a prize for his masters. They didn’t discriminate between a field of corn or a field of gold. It was all physical matter to them—the same at the atomic level. But the human brain ...
He stared at the back of the driver’s head. A simple tap of a hammer could break open his skull and reveal the spongy, gray matter. It was a complex world, the human brain and the mind it produced, and for his masters it was their ultimate goal: to make a synthetic brain, and to live in Realspace not as ghosts but as embodied persons. That’s what they wanted. To do that, they needed a way to manifest themselves, a way to project their essences into Realspace. They needed the Ghosting Protocols that Skippard Wellborn possessed.
The vehicle stopped outside a walled villa. Off to the side was an old farmhouse that looked like it had stood there for two hundred years or more. It sat on a small hill surrounded by huge oaks that provided plenty of shade. The villa spread out behind it, a low-walled compound with security at the front. He walked past them through tall double doors. Inside, he saw a well-manicured rock garden and a path lined in manicured shrubbery. A few privileged guests sat in niches, talking in hushed tones.
He chose an empty table.
A young man in formal livery approached, carrying a dinner towel on his arm. “Something to drink, sir?”
“Water, please.”
Gramgadon the Rogueslave and former glad-fighter surveyed the other patrons who were sponsoring this illegal event. They were all potential brothers and sisters in serving his masters, every one of them, because they understood how frail humanity was and how strong his masters were. Whether they liked it or not, they would be part of the Great Game tonight that pitted humanity against is betters.
He gazed at each of their faces and let the machines inside of him take note. He was looking for one, in particular, the newest prize in Cyberspace: Simone Lord, the daughter of the Skippard Wellborn, the ultimate enemy. She would be coming to compete. She and the thing inside her. He wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
* * *
Simone sat in the back of a Consortium helicopter with the other Alters on her way to compete in an illegal gladiatorial contest. She understood very little about this world in which people often died, she admitted, and that scared her.
As she sat across from Hutto—who had fallen asleep—she distracted herself by staring at him as if she had the power to turn him to stone with her eyes. The bright sunshine of a clear day shown on his face. It was the sort of face that demanded you linger there. She kept looking away, then looking back, perturbed she couldn’t stop. Beasley stared out the window. Wally did as well. Kimberlee read a tablet, as did Joss. The adults were in their own helicopter. Simone had taken the ride because she had no idea how to get there. Here she was pretending to sit as if she were normal, gazing at a boy who should have been her boyfriend by now.
But isn’t, she thought. He’s still pissed I left him hanging in his dorm room with only a kiss and the hint of something more.
Getting used to inertia had been harder than she’d thought. The slight pressure from her seat had caused plenty of amusement for everyone when the helicopter first took off. For the first few minutes, enough fireworks erupted from the contact with her seat that Hutto offered several juvenile comments about a possible mid-air explosion. After they leveled out, though, she was able to sit without concentration—or sparks.
Soon after, as everyone’s thoughts became their own and a quiet had settled on them, here she was staring at Hutto, torn between the thought she’d like to kiss him again and what it would be like tonight in the arena.
Everyone but her had eaten a hearty lunch before preparing for the quick ride to central Alabama. Ever since that night a few days ago when she’d let her entity run free, Simone had struggled with the fact everyone was giving her advice: her father, Uncle Pic, her mother, her brother—even Coach Buzz. Everyone seemed to
care what happened to her. She, though, had her own problems. Her father understood. No one else.
Her mother guessed.
Simone had given her entity its first full run. She had let a full transformation occur, with no binding. This was different from the other times, like when she’d been with Hutto, when she’d battled her double, or when she’d sparred with Nisson. With Hutto the slow transformation had been an amazing experience of incremental fullness. She’d had a body and her entity had been controllable. But during the time as a ghost, her entities had been cheated.
When Simone completed the final step in the woods, the presence pushed through her into Realspace. The roar that followed must have scared every living thing within a half-mile radius. Its splayed feet ate into the ground. Even though it wasn’t fully corporeal, it relished the contact.
She couldn’t describe the experience beyond thinking she was taking a ride.
Have you chosen a name?
Its voice was in her head.
She hadn’t chosen, but she could hear the eagerness in the entity’s voice
No. Silence followed as it waited. Oh, all right, she said. I’ll call you Supertrans, for now.
Thank you, Simone Lord.
It began to run, and she shut her eyes. She imagined she rode a horse, or even sat on a buggy pulled by one. Its gait was strong and forceful. It didn’t tire. The wind whistled through its many teeth and its breath was silent and unlabored. When it reached out with a taloned hand and struck a rotting tree stump, shattering it, she winced. But there was no pain. The impact was ... pleasurable.
She finally opened her eyes. She leaned forward like an eager jockey, imagining horse hair in her face, wind rushing by her. After it leapt over a creek, she urged it to jump again. To her amazement, it listened and did.
Supertrans caught a musky scent. Simone imagined she smelled a delicious roast in an oven. She imagined her mouth watering. She imagined sitting at a dinner table, fork and knife in hand, waiting for a steaming dish to appear. She saw a twelve-point buck across a fallow field, leaping away. Every particle of who she was wanted it.
