In Extremis

by John Shirley

  He had just time to flickeringly wonder about the artillery emplacement—would there be one behind the other? Wouldn’t that have been his target? But the drone was targeting a building, and there it was. Not obviously a military target. Must be a shell, camouflage of some kind. He adjusted the angle of the missile, tightening on the windows to get the maximum penetration into the target and then the window was rushing at him, and he was crashing through and he had just a glimpse of terrified faces, some of them rather small faces, and then the screen went to the expected white pixilated shashing . . . .

  He slumped, shaking with the release of it, knowing the missile had detonated on exactly the target the drone had designated. He would get another commendation for another perfect hit.

  But then the monitor image came back on.

  That was impossible, wasn’t it? The camera and its transmitter unit were both inevitably destroyed on impact.

  And the image—he rocked back in his seat, staring . . . .

  The televised-image unit seemed to have somehow separated whole from the missile, and fallen to a corner of the shattered room, where it was lodged in the rubble, still transmitting. The angle was skewed, from down low, but the image was clear enough.

  There was a dark-eyed woman on fire, screaming, clawing at the air, and a man with a beard, who must be her husband, gouting blood from the stump of his arm as he knelt weeping near the body of a little girl, the child blown in half, convulsing as she died, her mouth bubbling blood—and there was someone else running around the smoking socket of the room in the background, an older woman. The woman was on fire, running back and forth. She fell so he could see only her feet jerking in a lower corner of the screen—and there was the remains of a young man splashed against the wall, and the screaming, the distinct, clearly amplified screaming—

  “Corporal ! Corporal Billingsgate! Yo!”

  Mercer was shouting in his ear, yanking the headset off, pulling the chair away from the station. The lieutenant reached over and switched the computer monitor off.

  “Billingsgate stop screaming! Snap out of it, goddammit!”

  Lionel looked at him. “I’m . . .” The screams! “. . . not screaming sir! They . . .” The screaming, the screaming! “They’re screaming, not me, they won’t stop screaming . . .”

  “Look, once in a while there’s a freak chance, the transmitter makes it through the blast, keeps transmitting for a minute . . . but there’s no sound dammit, it’s all in your mind!”

  “No sir, they’re . . .” Screaming, still screaming, “. . . they’re . . .” Screaming!

  “Billingsgate!” Mercer slapped him. “Stop it! Stop screaming!”

  But that wouldn’t make the screaming stop, since it wasn’t him screaming.

  RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU’RE DEAD

  Sometimes I think I’m dead. Sometimes I think I’m not dead. So far, I can’t figure it out, not definitely.

  I should tell you who’s sending this message to you. It’s me, Mercedes’ older brother, Whim. At least I think it’s me. And I’m sending this to you, Syke, so maybe you can figure out if I’m dead, and you can do something about it. If you can fix that—you’re my hodey. If you can’t, you can’t, and you’re still my hodey.

  Maybe I can figure it all out. This message, if that’s what it is, will take a while to get to you, if it gets to you at all. I’m still working out what the rules are in here. If I think it all through, maybe I’ll work out if I’m dead or not.

  Mercedes was the one I was with you know, harvesting suicides, the night we looked the Empties in the eyes . . .

  I was nervous, on my knees in the padded prow of the twelve-foot aluminum boat, as Mercedes piloted us up under the big supports for the Golden Gate Bridge. Dangerous out there anytime, sure, even when the seas aren’t running rough, because you can get a black wind, that toxin laden fog, just sweeps down on you quick, no time to get to shore—or you can ship too much water and you might dump over, find yourself thrashing in that cold, dirty water, with the bay leeches fastening on your ankles and the waves smacking you on jagged rocks around the support towers.

  But it was sheer superstition, really, making me nervous. I get superstitious about numbers. It has to do with my dad having been a gambler, between his subbing gigs; Dad rattling on about odds and numbers and how number patterns crop up in the cards. “You can feel that bad beat coming in the numbers,” he’d say. “If you pay attention. If you don’t feel the odds, the beat’ll smack you upside the head.”

  He was an old school guy, born in Atlanta in 1970; he said things like “smack you upside the head.” And “old school.”

  The thing is, Syke, as we ran the boat out there, the engine chugging in the moonlight, it just hit me that today was 3-5-35. March fifth, 2035. Now, three and five is eight plus three is eleven, plus five is sixteen. You write sixteen, 1 and 6; add them, it makes seven. My unlucky number. Nine’s my lucky number, seven’s unlucky. Maybe because my old man died when I was fourteen, twice seven, on the fourteenth of June.

  On the night of 3-5-35 I looked up at the bridge, and thought: Each cable is made of 27,572 strands of wire. 80,000 miles of wire in the main cables. The bridge has more than 1,200,000 rivets . . . Now if you add two and seven to five and seven and two . . .

  “We shouldn’t be out here,” I said to Mercedes. My sis was back by the little engine, working the tiller. I was out front with the grabbers and the sniffer. She wore her long brown leather jacket, gloves, boots; I had my oversized army jacket, without the insignia, army boots, waterproof pants. You’ve never seen me in physical person, Syke. In the social space I wear some nicer shit—seeing as how CG clothing is gratis with the access fee. I muttered once more, “Really shouldn’t be out here.”

  “What?” she called. “Why? You cold? Told you to put on a slicker.”

  “It’s not that,” I said, though I was shivering, scanning the gray water with the sniffer. “It’s the numbers . . .” I had the sniffer—that’s for picking up human DNA fragments in the air—in my left hand. The mechanical grabber in my right.

  I figure I gotta explain this stuff to you, Syke, since it’s way, way far from your thing. You were always so indoors—you were the indoors of the indoors. Wandering around like an out of body experience in the social space and the subworlds with the likes of Pizzly and creeps like Mr. Dead Eyes hounding about in the background. Remember Mr. Dead Eyes, hodey, he’ll come up again. You recall that perv, Mr. DE, dogging Mercedes in the subworlds?

  “There’s my future girl,” he’d say to my sister. “All good things come to those who wait.”

  That night under the bridge I was thinking about Mr. Dead Eyes, and not knowing why and that spooked me too. I was just about to explain to little sis about the numbers, the date, and how we should go back, but then the sniffer tripped and I saw the first floater. He was floating face up in a patch of light from the lamp on the bridge support. His eyes were colorless—looked just like cocktail onions. So that told me he’d been dead a while, but not long as all that. Longer, and the gulls, or some adventurous crab would have gotten his eyes out.

  He wasn’t very waterlogged or bloated either. Which was good. It sucks when you got to handle them, even with a grabber and rubber gloves, when they’re, you know, coming apart from being out there a while.

  “Got one,” I called out to her. “At two o’clock. Not too soggy. But come up slow . . .”

  She cut the engine and we coasted toward the floater. He might’ve been about fifty when he took the plunge, with long brown hair like seaweed washing around his pudgy, onion-eyed face. We hadn’t found him soon enough to harvest his organs. A messy, nauseating job, anyhow, harvesting organs. I was always sort of relieved when I knew I wouldn’t have to do it.

  The guy in the suit might have some good pocket fruit. He had a decent suit on, and the one remaining shoe was pretty good quality leather. So maybe he had money, jewelry. The uneven light picked out a gold glint from a wristwatch;
I hoped it was waterproof. (I remember when we found an elderly black guy one time had one of those old fashioned grills on his teeth, installed in the first decade of the century—diamonds and gold all over it. Nasty, prying that grill off him. Paid good though.)

  I used the grabber on onion-eyes, then got the watch off with a quick movement of my rubber-gloved hand. Always afraid the body’s going to grab my wrist as I do it. I saw too many zombie movies as a kid. But they never do move. It’s almost disappointing.

  I tucked the gold watch in the scavenge duffel, then grabbed his tie and pulled his body up against the boat. He had a nice oxblood tie, seemed like silk.

  I’m always really careful when I pull the bodies close to the boat. It sucks ugly to fall in with them, hodey. You tend to grab the body to keep from sinking. They can fall apart when you grab them. It’s better not to fall in.

  I glanced back at Mercedes. Her curly black hair seemed like it was shining with an orange halo, in the light from the tower support behind her. Her big black eyes, her pale skin, her round face, those sound-wave face tattoos on her cheeks—you know how her face can come together and she seems so iconic. You’d know that better than anyone, Syke. She came to your little world in her real semblance. At twenty-one she’s a year younger, but she seems like she’s from a whole different race than me, not just a different family. Me being so dark-skinned and lean.

  “You want to take him to shore?” I asked. “Looks too spongy for organ harvesting.”

  “Then just do the pockets, Whim,” she said, like, It’s so obvious.

  I went through his pockets, came up with a wild-dog wallet which turned out to have a usable unicredit tab in it—and his ID, which we pitched, not being into identity theft.

  I checked this floater for a gold necklace; nope, so I clipped off his wedding ring finger. He was too sponged up to just pull the ring off. Had to use the clipper to cut right through his finger. Just a crunch, a little ooze of blackened blood, releasing the rankness of dead man. He was good and cold.

  He had a suicide note in a plastic sack in his pocket, as they often do. I took that too, in case it gave out any information I could sell to the family.

  I glanced at it in with my pen light. Didn’t see anything useful. Looked like the usual maudlin stuff. I caught the lines, “My wife got the treatment, now it’s like she’s dead to me, she’s all empty, and I went to see my dad, he was empty too, and they’re going to do it to me.”

  I gave up on all this ranting and tossed the note away. Guy’d been losing his mind at the end, I figured.

  I let him slide back into the water, and we went on toward the Marin side of the bridge, in case there was another floater. You might be surprised to hear we’ve found as many as four in one night, Syke. But now that the suicide nets are down again—and no, I wasn’t the one who vandalized them this time, or any of the other times—we get three or four jumpers a week, sometimes several a day. It’s been good and steady like that, since the desperation came into its own. The climate change thing peaking, all that shoreland sucked up, all those people misplaced, all that desertification, tropical pests and diseases swarming north, crops either drowned or charred or eaten away. Population of the world doubling. More and more jobs outsourced, automated. Two hundred million people who used to have food in North America, used to just assume food would be there—barely eating now, many of them starving. Countless people with no chance, no future; everyone failing at everything. Mass despair. “Collective emotional downwaves” is the latest psychology buzz; sociobiological impulses to self-destruction in an overpopulated world. The desperation . . . You’re so insular, in your little world, Syke. You never talked about this stuff. Maybe you took it for granted. Or maybe you were hardly aware of it—hell you were ten years living mostly in the virtual model, tripping your mind to the subworlds, sending your body on remote to exercise, all that stuff. The curse of being born with all those silver spoon annuities. And a touch of agoraphobia, I’d guess.

  So, after harvesting onion-eyes, me and Mercedes weren’t surprised to see another body come flying down off the bridge, within minutes. People travel from around the country, around the world to jump off the Big Orange Arc now, and the bridge crew makes a lot of extra money taking bribes from suicide jumpers. Truth is, though, about a fourth of the ‘suicides’ are murders. That’s what I hear. Lot of women from the sex slave brothels get pitched off for trying to escape. A lesson to the others.

  It was Mercedes who first spotted the woman coming down. We both heard the yell, getting higher pitched as the woman came down turning end over end, close to the northern tower.

  I thought I caught a flash of diamonds and I thought, That’s a good harvest, right there. And then she hit the water. Whack. We waited for her dead body to bob up, Mercedes piloting the boat a bit closer to the impact point, shipping some water in the rising waves from a barge passing five hundred yards away.

  I shivered with the cold as we waited. Daydreamed about hot toddies in front of the holo, in a snug corner of Siggy’s Allnighter.

  Then the woman came thrashing up and I heard Mercedes cussing. I was only thinking it: Shit—she’s alive.

  Now and then it happens. Sure it’s a long ways down from the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge, and people almost invariably die right off, because when they hit that water at that speed, with that much momentum, it’s almost like hitting solid ground.

  But a few live. They’re always busted up; most tend to die in a few minutes. Once in a while a jumper gets pulled out of the water alive, tells his weepy story about how he knew he wanted to live the moment he let go, and how people should hang in there—though of course, with the Coast Guard no longer doing rescue, anywhere, survivors don’t get pulled out much.

  I remember the only other survivor we found. That guy, he was a short chunky Asian guy—maybe his fat saved him from being busted up too much. He begged us to help him. But he had a lot of jewelry on him and I could tell he wasn’t going to make it to the shore alive no matter what we did. Mercedes said, “You want to help him on his way, or me?” I didn’t want her to have to do it. I held his head under the water for a while—he hardly thrashed at all.

  I imagine you being all judgmental about that, Syke. Easy for you to raise your eyebrows. You inherited your mom’s software income, never had to live off the streets. Anyway, I’d have pulled him out if I thought he’d live. I guess.

  This woman, now, bobbing up, all sputtering, she was muscular, wearing some kind of tights. I could see she had a broken right arm, blood bubbling from her mouth. But something about her—maybe those high cheekbones, those cutting blue eyes, the really short-cut brown hair—made me think she was tough. She just might live.

  I couldn’t bring myself to drown her. I thought we ought to shove on out of there and let the broken woman do her dying, and then come back for the harvest. Just leave before she started asking for help.

  She didn’t ask for help, though—she ordered some up. She had us sized up pretty good.

  “I’ll pay you,” she rasped. “You get me to shore.”

  I was figuring she was maybe not a suicide. Didn’t seem the type. More likely someone thought they’d done her in.

  “How much?” Mercedes asked her. “And how do we get it?”

  “Ten thousand WD,” the woman said, sputtering. “Transfer soon as we get to a hospital.” She coughed up more blood, paddling a little with her good arm. “But you better hurry . . .”

  Mercedes was against it. “We don’t have any way to make her pay, Whim, once we get her there.”

  But I was kind of fascinated by this woman. And maybe drowning that fat Asian guy bothered me more than I like to admit.

  So I said, “Let’s take a chance.”

  We got her into the boat—that had to hurt like hell, with her broken arm and legs. I was impressed at how she didn’t scream. She sucked air through her clenched teeth when the pain got bad, and squeezed her eyes tight shut, but she didn’t s
cream.

  We hauled her to shore—had to go all the way back to the south shore, where our truck was, and from there we could drive to the nearest ER. When we pulled her out of the boat she went all shivery with the pain, and she gasped—and then she went limp. I had to check to see she wasn’t dead. Just out cold.

  “I really, really don’t know if we should risk this, Whim,” Mercedes said as I tugged the woman, my arms under hers, into the back of the battered old Toyota hybrid pickup. “This woman—she didn’t jump. Someone tossed her off that bridge. So maybe they’re gonna wanna make sure . . . And we’ll be in the way.”

  “She’s giving us ten thousand WD,” I pointed out.

  “And I really, really think she could be fulla shit about that,” Mercedes said. “I told you before, I’m telling you now.” She sighed. “But I guess we’re this far . . .” She banged the tailgate up on the truck.

  “We could leave her right here. But we’ll always wonder—it might be enough to start over in Canada . . .”

  That was our dad’s dream. He was a writer, sometimes, when he wasn’t teaching or throwing money away on cards. Made most of a half-assed living substitute teaching. He raised us after our mom died in the first wave of the pigeon flu. He wanted to get us to Canada, where the weather is more predictable and there’s fewer tropical diseases and there’s some kind of health care, but then one of the kid gangs caught him outside, and busted him up pretty bad. He died a few months later.

  Mercedes just nodded, when I brought up the Canadian thing. I remember getting a rush of hope, thinking maybe I’d added up the numbers wrong and this time they were coming out to nines, somehow, and we were going to win.