Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  Warren is reassembling parts of the pump, ready to run his tests, and will be busy for a while. Cowboy leaves the pool of light and walks into the blackness of the hangar. The deltas loom above him, poised and ready, lacking only a pilot to make them living things. His hands reach up to touch a smooth underbelly, an epoxide canard, the fairing of a downward-gazing radar. Like stroking a matte-black animal, a half-wild thing too dangerous to be called a pet. It lacks only a pilot, and a purpose.

  He moves a ladder from an engine access panel to a cockpit and climbs into the seat that was, years ago, molded to his body. The familiar metal and rubber smells warm up to him. He closes his eyes and remembers the night splattered with brightness, the sudden flare of erupting fuel, the mad chase as, supersonic, he bobbed and weaved among the hills and valleys of the Ozarks, the laws on his tail as he burned for home…

  His first delta was called Midnight Sun, but he changed the name after he’d figured out what was really going on. He and the other deltajocks were not an abstract response to market conditions but a continuation of some kind of mythology. Delivering the mail across the high dome of night, despite all the oppressors’ efforts to the contrary. Keeping a light burning in the darkness, hope in the shape of an afterburner flame. The last free Americans, on the last high road…

  So he’d begun to live what he suddenly knew. Accepting the half-scornful, condescending nickname they’d given him, living it, becoming Cowboy, the airjock. Answering to nothing else. Becoming the best, living in realms higher than any of the competition. He called his next delta Pony Express. And in it he delivered the mail as long as they’d let him. Till times changed, and modes of delivery changed. Till he had to become a boy instead of a jock. The eyes that could focus into the night blackness, straining to spot the infrared signature of the laws riding combat air patrol over the prairie, were now shut in a small armored cabin, all the visuals coming in through remotes. He is still the best, still delivering the mail. He shifts in his seat. The country swing fades and all Cowboy can hear in the echoing silence is the whirr of Warren’s lathe. And sense the restlessness in himself, wanting only a name…

  Chapter Two

  TODAY/YES

  Bodies and parts of bodies flare and die in laserlight, here the translucent sheen of eyes rimmed in kohl or turned up to a heaven masked by the starry-glitter ceiling, here electric hair flaring with fashionable static discharges, here a blue-white glow of teeth rimmed in darkglow fire and pierced by mute extended tongue. It is zonedance. Though the band is loud and sweat-hot, many of the zoned are tuned to their own music through crystal wired delicately to the auditory nerves, or dancing to the headsets through which they can pick up any of the bar’s twelve channels... They seethe in arrhythmic patterns, heedless of one another. Perfect control is sought, but there are accidents–– impacts, a flurry of fists and elbows–– and someone crawls out of the zone, whimpering through a bloodstreaked hand, unnoticed by the pack. To Sarah the dancers at the Aujourd’Oui seem a twitching mass of dying flesh, bloody, insensate, mortal. Bound by the mud of earth. They are meat. She is hunting, and Weasel is the name of her friend.

  MODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODER

  Need a Modern Body?

  All Electric-Replaceable-In the Mode!

  Get One Now!

  NBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODY

  The body designer had eyes of glittering violet above cheekbones of sculptured ivory. Her hair was a streaky blond that swept to an architecturally perfect dorsal fin behind her nape. Her muscles were catlike and her mouth was a cruel flower.

  “Hair shorter, yes,” she said. “One doesn’t wear it long in freefall. ” Her fingers lashed out and seized Sarah by the chin, tilting her head to the cold north light. Her fingernails were violet, to match her eyes, and sharp. Sarah glared at her, sullen. The body designer smiled. “A little pad in the chin, yes,” she says. “You need a stronger chin. The tip of the nose can be altered; you’re a bit too retrousse. The curve of the jawbone needs a little flattening– I’ll bring my paring knife tomorrow. And, of course, we’ll remove the scars. Those scars have got to go.” Sarah curled her lip under the pressure of the violet-tipped fingers.

  The designer dropped Sarah’s chin and whirled. “Must we use this girl, Cunningham?” she asked. “She has no style at all. She can’t walk gracefully. Her body’s too big, too awkward. She’s nothing. She’s dirt. Common.”

  Cunningham sat silently in his brown suit, his neutral, unmemorable face giving away nothing. His voice was whispery, calm, yet still authoritative. Sarah thought it could be a computer voice, so devoid was it of highlights. “Our Sarah has style, Firebud,” he said. “Style and discipline. You are to give it form, to fashion it. Her style must be a weapon, a shaped charge. You will make it, I will point it. And Sarah will punch a hole right where we intend she should.” He looked at Sarah with his steady brown eyes. “Won’t you, Sarah?” he asked. Sarah did not reply. Instead, she looked up at the body designer, drawing back her lips, showing teeth. “Let me hunt you some night, Firebud,” she said. “I’ll show you style.”

  The designer rolled her eyes. “Dirtgirl stuff,” she snorted, but she took a step back. Sarah grinned.

  “And, Firebud,” Cunningham said, “leave the scars alone. They will speak to our Princess. Of this cruel terrestrial reality that she helped create. That she dominates. With which she is already half in love.

  “Yes,” he said, “leave the scars alone.” For the first time he smiled, a brief tightening of the cheek muscles, cold as liquid nitrogen. “Our Princess will love the scars,” he said. “Love them till the very last.”

  WINNERS/YES LOSERS/YES

  The Aujourd’Oui is a jockey bar, and they are all here, moonjocks and rigjocks, holdjocks and powerjocks and rockjocks– the jocks condescending to share the floor with the mudboys and dirtgirls who surround them, those who hope to become them or love them or want simply to be near them, to touch them in the zonedance and absorb a piece of their radiance. The jocks wear their colors, vests, and jackets bearing the emblems of their blocs– Hughes, Pfizer, Toshiba, Tupolev, ARAMCO– the blazons of the Rock War-victors borne with careless pride by the jocks who had won them their place in the sky. Six feet three inches in height, Sarah stalks among them in a black satin jacket, blazoned on its back with a white crane that rises to the starry firmament amid a flock of chrome-bright Chinese characters. It is the badge of a small bloc that does most of its business out of Singapore, and is hardly ever seen here in the Florida Free Zone. Her face is unknown to the regulars, but it is hoped they won’t think it odd, not as odd as it would seem if she wore the badge of Tupolev or Kikuyu Optics I.G.

  Her sculpted face is pale, the Florida tan gone, her eyes dark-rimmed. Her almost-black hair is short on the sides and brushy on top, her nape hair falling in two thin braids down her back. Chrome-steel earrings brush her shoulders. Firebud has broadened her already-broad shoulders and pared down the width of her pelvis; her face is sharp and pointed beneath a widow’s peak, looking like a succession of arrowheads, the shaped charge that Cunningham demands. She wears black dancing slippers laced over the ankles and dark purple stretch overalls with suspenders that frame her breasts, stretching the fabric over the nipples that Firebud has made more prominent. Her shirt is gauze spangled with silver; her neck scarf, black silk. There is a receiver tagged to the optic centers of her forebrain, at the moment monitoring police broadcasts, a constant Times Square of an LED running amber, at will, above her expanded vision.

  Gifts from Cunningham. Her hardwired nerves are her own. So is Weasel.

  I LOVE MY KIKUYU EYES, SEZ PRIMO PORNOSTAR ROD MCLEISH, AND WITH THE INFRARED OPTION, I CAN TELL IF MY PARTNER’S REALLY EXCITED OR IF I’M JUST ON A SILICON RIDE…

  -Kikuyu Optics I.G.,

  A Division Of Mikoyan-Gurevich

  She first met Cunningham in another bar, the Blue Silk. Sarah ran Weasel as per contract, but the snagboy, a runner who had got more greed
y than he had the smarts to handle, had been altered himself–– she is nursing bruises. She recovered the goods, fortunately, and since the contract was with the thirdmen, she was paid in endorphins, handy since she needs a few of them herself.

  There is a bone bruise on the back of her thigh and she can’t sit; instead, she leans back against the padded bar and sips her rum and lime. The Blue Silk’s audio system plays island music and soothes her played-up nerves.

  The Blue Silk is run by an ex-cutterjock named Maurice, a West Indian with the old-model Zeiss eyes who was on the losing side in the Rock War. He’s got Chip sockets on his ankles and wrists, the way the military wore them then. There are pictures of his friends and heroes on the walls, all of them with the azure silk neck scarves of the elite space defense corps, most of them framed with black mourning ribbons turning purple with the long years.

  Sarah wonders what he has seen with those eyes. Did it include the burst of X rays that preceded the 10,000-ton rocks, launched from the orbital mass drivers, that tore through the atmosphere to crash on Earth’s cities? The artificial meteors, each with the force of a nuclear blast, had first fallen in the eastern hemisphere, over Mombasa and Calcutta, and by the time the planet had rotated and made the western hemisphere a target, the Earth had surrendered–– but the Orbital blocs felt they hadn’t made their point forcefully enough in the West, and so the rocks fell anyway. Communications foul-up, they said. Earth’s billions knew better.

  Sarah was ten. She was doing a tour in a Youth Reclamation Camp near Stone Mountain when three rocks obliterated Atlanta and killed her mother. Daud, who was eight, was trapped in the rubble, but the neighbors heard his screams and got him out. After that, Sarah and her brother bounced from one DP agency to another, then ended up in Tampa with her father, whom she hadn’t seen or heard of since she was three. The social worker held her hand all the way up the decaying apartment stairs, and Sarah held Daud’s. The halls stank of urine, and a dismembered doll lay strewn on the second-floor landing, broken apart like the nations of Earth, like the lives of the people here. When the apartment door opened she saw a man in a torn shirt with sweat stains in the armpits and watery alcoholic eyes. The eyes, uncomprehending, had moved from Sarah and Daud and then to the social worker as the papers were served, and the social worker said, “This is your father. He’ll take care of you,” before dropping Sarah’s hand. It turned out to be only half a lie.

  She looks at the fading photographs in their dusty frames, the dead men and women with their metallic Zeiss eyes. Maurice is looking at them, too. He is lost in his memories, and it looks as if he is trying to cry; but his eyes are lubricated with silicon and his tear ducts are gone, of course, along with his dreams, with the dreams of the billions who had hoped the Orbitals would improve their lives, who have no hope now but to get out somehow, out into the cold, perfect cobalt of the sky.

  Sarah wishes she herself could cry, for the dead hope framed in black on the walls, for herself and Daud, for the broken thing that is all earthly aspiration, even for the snagboy who had seen his chance to escape but had not been smart enough to play his way out of the game his hopes had dealt him into. But the tears are long gone and in their place is hardened steel desire– the desire shared by all the dirtgirls and mudboys. To achieve it she has to want it more than the others, and she has to be willing to do what is necessary– or to have it done to her, if it comes to that. Involuntarily her hand rises to her throat as she thinks of Weasel. No, there is no time for tears.

  “Looking for work, Sarah?” The voice comes from the quiet white man who has been sitting at the end of the bar. He has come closer, one hand on the back of the bar stool next to her. He is smiling as if he is unaccustomed to it.

  She narrows her eyes as she looks at him sidelong, and takes a deliberately long drink. “Not the kind of work you have in mind, collarboy,” she says.

  “You come recommended,” he says. His voice is sandpaper, the kind you never forget. Perhaps he’s never had to raise it in his life.

  She drinks again and looks at him. “By whom?” she says.

  The smile is gone now; the nondescript face looks at her warily. “The Hetman,” he says.

  “Michael?” she asks.

  He nods. “My name is Cunningham,” he says.

  “Do you mind if I call Michael and ask him?” she says. The Hetman controls the Bay thirdmen and sometimes she runs the Weasel for him. She doesn’t like the idea of his dropping her name to strangers.

  “If you like,” Cunningham says. “But I’d like to talk to you about work first.”

  “This isn’t the bar I go to for work,” she says. “See me in the Plastic Girl, at ten.”

  “This isn’t the sort of offer that can wait.”

  Sarah turns her back to him and looks into Maurice’s metal eyes. “This man,” she says, “is bothering me.”

  Maurice’s face does not change expression. “You best leave,” he says to Cunningham.

  Sarah, not looking at Cunningham, receives from the corner of her eye an impression of a spring uncoiling. Cunningham seems taller than he was a moment ago.

  “Do I get to finish my drink first?” he asks.

  Maurice, without looking down, reaches into the till and flicks bills onto the dark surface of the bar. “Drink’s on the house. Outta my place.”

  Cunningham says nothing, just gazes for a calm moment into the unblinking metal eyes.

  “Townsend,” Maurice says, a code word and the name of the general who had once led him up against the Orbitals and their burning defensive energies. The Blue Silk’s hardware voiceprints him and the defensive systems appear from where they are hidden above the bar mirror, locking down into place. Sarah glances up. Military lasers, she thinks, scrounged on the black market, or maybe from Maurice’s old cutter. She wonders if the bar has power enough to use them, or whether they are bluff.

  Cunningham stands still for another half second, then turns and leaves the Blue Silk. Sarah does not watch him go.

  “Thanks, Maurice,” she says.

  Maurice forces a sad smile. “Hell, lady,” he says, “you a regular customer. And that fella’s been Orbital.”

  Sarah contemplates her surprise. “He’s from the blocs?” she asks. “You’re sure?”

  “Innes,” Maurice says, another name from the past, and the lasers slot up into place. His hands flicker out to take the money from the bar. “I didn’t say he’s from the blocs, Sarah,” he says, “but he’s been there. Recently, too. You can tell from the way they walk, if you got the eyes.” He raises a gnarled finger to his head. “His ear, you know? Gravity created by centrifugal force is just a little bit different. It takes a while to adjust.”

  Sarah frowns. What kind of job is the man offering? Something important enough to bring him down through the atmosphere, to hire some dirtgirl and her Weasel? It doesn’t seem likely. Well. She’ll see him in the Plastic Girl, or not. She isn’t going to worry about it. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other, the muscles crackling with pain even through the endorphin haze. She holds out her glass. “Another, please, Maurice,” she says.

  With a slow grace that must have served him well in the high starry evernight, Maurice turns toward the mirror and reaches for the rum. Even in a gesture this simple; there is sadness.

  ¿VIVE EN LA CIUDAD DE DOLOR?

  ¡DEJENOS MANDARLE A HAPPYVILLE!

  – Pointsman Pharmaceuticals A.G.

  She takes a taxi home from the Blue Silk, trying to ignore Cunningham’s calm eyes on the back of her head as she gives the driver her address. He is across the street under an awning, pretending to read a display in a store window. How much is she throwing away here? She doesn’t turn to see if he registers dismay at her retreat, but somehow she doubts his expression has changed.

  With Daud she shares a two-room apartment that hums. There is the hum of the coolers and recyclers, more humming from the little glowing robots that move about randomly, doing the dusting
and polishing, devouring insects and arachnids, and cleaning the cobwebs out of corners. She has a modest comp deck in the front room and Daud has a vast audio system hooked to it, with a six-foot screen to show the vid. It’s on now, silently, showing computer-generated color patterns, broadcasting them with laser optics on the ceiling and walls. The computer is running the changes on red, and the walls burn with cold and silent fire.

  Sarah turns off the vid and looks down at the cooling comp deck, the reds fading slowly from her retinas. She empties the dirty ashtrays Daud has left behind and thinks about the man in brown, Cunningham. The endorphins are wearing off and the bone bruise on her thigh is hammering her with every step. It’s time for another dose.

  She checks her hiding place on a shelf, in a can of sugar, and sees that two of her twelve vials of endorphin are gone. Daud, of course. There aren’t enough places to hide even small amounts of stuff in an apartment this size. She sighs, then ties her tourniquet above the elbow. She slots a vial into her injector, dials the dose she wants, and presses the injector to her arm. The injector hums and she sees a bubble rise in the vial. Then there is a warning light on the injector and she feels a tug of flesh as the needle slides on its cool spray of anesthetic into her vein. She unties, watches the LED on the injector pulse ten times, and then she feels a veil slide between her and her pain. She takes a ragged breath, then stands. She leaves the injector on the sofa and walks back to the comp.