Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  Cowboy’s speculation seems particularly pointless right now. Sarah begins field-stripping the Heckler & Koch. She plans on taking it in her rucksack. Montana might turn out to be full of somebody’s army, and if it is, she wants all her parts in working order.

  NOON RAID ON ARKANSAS BORDER HIDEOUT

  Panzergirl Dies After Refusing Surrender

  Fortune in Electronics Confiscated

  M.B.I. Denies Use of Napalm

  Shining across a sky the color of wet slate are the constellations of control, the Orbital factories, satellites, and power stations. A few early stars offer feeble competition. Sarah is deep in her own interface, her body oiled with sweat. Kicks thrust out, sword hands and fists flicker like heat lightning in the moist summer air. She conjures faces in front of her, aids to concentration as she wills her strikes into the imagined heart of the phantoms. She spins, cocks a leg, looks over her shoulder, spears an enemy. Beaten-down timothy provides sure traction for her bare feet. She’s keeping Weasel hidden for the moment–– no sense in giving away a surprise. Cowboy watches from the shadow of an elm, its leaves brown with the blight. He’s tired from having walked most of the day, with a short ride or two to break the monotony. They’re still in Ohio, keeping to the back roads, where the heat can’t find them. They were hoping to find an old farmhouse to camp in but it appears that Ohio’s been tearing them down so as to discourage transients.

  “You’re really into that, aren’t you?” Cowboy offers. Sarah doesn’t answer, merely strikes with elbows and hands against enemies to either side. Fighting an army of ghosts that rise before her, faces without names, as devoid of identity as Cunningham, their voices a rattle of dead tree limbs in the sluggish wind. Power flows through her muscles like quicksilver, and she flings herself into a sunburst of motion, spinning, kicking, leaping, her arms a blur.

  And then stillness, poised in her stance, a hologram frozen in motion, while the army of ghosts fades. Sweat trickles the length of her brows. The heavy air seems thick as honey in her throat. On the decaying surface of the road, fifty yards away through some bushes, a truck bounces across some potholes. Sarah waits for the sound to fade entirely from the deepening night. She turns and faces Cowboy, gives him a smile. “Now I’ll eat,” she says.

  “Aren’t you supposed to bow or something?” He pulls a foil packet out of his ruck and tosses it to her. Her nerves are still in overdrive and she plucks the packet from the air as if it was in slow motion. She sits in front of Cowboy in a half-lotus and tears the packet open.

  Cowboy is looking at her with his dark artificial eyes. He’s taken off the cap and wig, and they lie on the grass beside him. “Do you have crystal for that?” he asks. “Or did you come up the hard way?”

  She grins wolfishly and tears at a strand of meat analog. “A little of each,” she says.

  “I’m not surprised.” His pupils seem to dilate. “That scar across your left eyebrow. Doesn’t look like a knife or razor.”

  Sarah swallows the dry soy strand, shakes her head. History, she thinks. “Bottle,” she says. “My father got drunk and cut me when I was little.”

  “The one on your cheek.”

  “Knifeboy in a street fight. Years ago.”

  “Under your lip.”

  For a moment she sees again the mad eyes reflecting the dim ruddy light, the dewy mouth repeating over and over the words chanted as incantation, “Bitch, bitch,” the razor held in the white-knuckled hand. Her own knowledge, deep in her spine, that she had lost control over this, that she had finally met one of those clients who had a particular name, a name that even the most hardened of her associates spoke of in husky, fearful voices: “Thatch.” And then her own reaction, her catalyzed reflexes sending the chair blurring through the air, the movement fanning her own blood across the room in a jeweled crescent, tracking in a scarlet spray across the blue pastel shirt of the madman, who in the next instant was dying at the foot of the bed with a broken skull. And, as she stood over the body and the broken chair, her blood running down her throat and breasts and arms, the sudden knowledge, as deep and disturbing as the earlier realization, that she had found out what she was.

  She looks up at him in feral anger. “What are we doing here, Cowboy?” she asks. “Writing history? Making a catalog of my mistakes?” She snarls and snatches the water bottle from the grass, wrenching off the top. “Each scar is a mistake, okay? A little misjudgment I made once upon a time. But I don’t make them anymore. The stakes are a little higher this time around, okay?” Sarah tilts back her head and swallows. The water is hot and tastes of plastic.

  “I wondered why you didn’t have them fixed,” Cowboy says. Standing his ground, refusing to get angry. “That’s all.”

  Sarah wipes her lips on the sleeve of her jersey. “Because it’s good for business, that’s why,” she says. “Some people wonder if a dirtgirl isn’t scared of making herself less pretty, or if she might be more frightened of getting hurt than a boy. So I prove my point, and prove it right out front. Satisfied?”

  Cowboy smiles and Sarah is reminded of Cunningham, that tight-lipped expression of cold, superior judgment. “Satisfied,” he says. “You don’t mind letting people know what you are. Neither do I.”

  She looks at the sockets implanted in his skull, almost invisible in the growing darkness.

  “I thought you were a buttonhead when I first met you. Thought I was going to have to nursemaid a lizard.”

  “Out west the face sockets mean something different. But if people here want to make that mistake, that’s okay. I can’t see myself worrying over their opinions.”

  Sarah finishes the packet of soy product and crumples it. Somewhere to the south of them they can hear the moaning of a train and feel the deep vibration of it coming up from the ground. Cowboy turns his head toward the sound.

  “In the old days we could have hitched a ride on the train,” he says. “Been out west in a couple days.”

  “Huh? It must have been a long time ago if it was before cars with automated nerve darts and laser detection mechanisms. ”

  “Not so long. In those days the only thing you had to watch out for were private cops called bulls. A friend of mine has some songs about it in his jukebox.”

  “A what box? Is that something else you have out west?”

  He looks at her thoughtfully. “I guess so,” he says.

  Sarah’s sweat is cooling on her skin. She takes another drink of water and wishes they hadn’t run out of Cowboy’s electrolyte replacement. Vitamin pills are all they have, that and the aspirin from Cowboy’s first aid kit. She leans forward and stretches out her arms, feeling the suppleness of the muscle. She will sleep well tonight on her grassy pillow.

  This, she thinks, might almost be a vacation. If it weren’t for what was waiting at the end of the trip.

  HOTTEST SUMMER IN HISTORY

  SIXTH RECORD IN NINE YEARS

  Record Heat Waves from Coast to Coast

  (Climatologists’ explanation.)

  The bikeboy is about seventeen, thin with a hollow naked chest, and his tan looks so inappropriate on his sickly body that it seems painted on. His matchstick arms are covered with tattoos that climb up across the yoke of his shoulders, blue circuit diagrams that at second glance form faces, devils, icons, women with slitted eyes and liquid-crystal tongues. His eyes are deep and more than a little mad. He’s wearing only a pair of jeans cut off raggedly above the knee and heavy boots with blunt bronze toe caps.

  “We’ll take you,” he says. His voice is almost buried beneath the sound of the turbine he’s straddling. “We’ll take you all the way to the big river.”

  They call themselves Silver Apaches, and their leader’s name is Ivan. He rides a turbine tricycle with a wirecutter fixed to the front, looping up in a silver bladed arc. Others, the men with the same kind of precise Escher tattooing, women with the same type of designs printed on scarves that wrap around their heads and breasts, are on trikes or gleaming dirtbikes w
ith thick welted tires. Most are riding the face but some steer manually. Sarah figures they don’t spend a lot of time on pavement.

  “Get on, linefoot,” Ivan says. “You can call us the Silvers for short.” He gives her an appreciative look. “That’s a nice piece of armor you’re wearing. Somebody looking for you?”

  “Not since he found me, no,” Sarah says. Ivan grins, brown teeth webbed with metal.

  Cowboy is talking to a black Silver whose dreads do not entirely conceal the two rows of sockets in his skull, most an extreme form of decoration since the five sockets Cowboy wears are enough to handle any traffic with the eye-face. Sarah looks at Cowboy, sees his shrug that means okay. She climbs into the little jump seat behind Ivan. His shoulder muscles flex under the tattoos as he digs into a pocket of his jeans. “Nervewash, linefoot?” he asks, and holds up a plated inhaler.

  Sarah shakes her head. “No. Thanks.” The combination of speed and her hardwired nerves is too unpredictable.

  Ivan shrugs. “Best way to appreciate a run. But it’s up to you, linefoot. ” He fires a torpedo up each nostril and throws his head back, laughs. And the turbine cycles up.

  The Silver Apaches move at full speed, on more or less a straight line, leaping ditches and slicing across fields of corn or soy, changing course only for towns or occupied houses, the chrome trikes with their wirecutters moving in front when a fence crosses their path. “We’re trying to bring back the open range, see.” Ivan laughs as the trike slices through an eight-foot fence, the whiplashing wire gouging his arms, drawing blood. Cattle scatter in lowing terror. Sarah looks for handgrips as the trike crosses ditches and creekbeds, sometimes rearing upon two wheels. She can tell that the Silvers’s style is supposed to be languid, lying back in their seats and riding the eye-face, no more concerned than if they were watching the vid--- even the Silvers who are driving manually try to move easily, without apparent effort--- but Ivan’s nervewash spoils the effect; he keeps tapping out rhythms on his bare knees, on the chrome keys of the computer deck sitting across the useless handlebars.

  In late afternoon Ivan cuts a fence into a pasture, but instead of entering, the Silvers park their bikes and watch as the black Silver steps off his bike with a short-handled sledge, and with a single stroke drops a heifer in her tracks. “Fresh veal, hey.” Ivan grins. The Silvers draw skinning knives and close in.

  Bungees are holding bloody packets of beef to the bikes as the Silvers rumble into a brush-strewn declivity on the east bank of the Wabash. Two migrant families scatter for cover before a chorus of jeers, the white legs of the children flashing in the sun like the tails of startled deer. “Our river! Our beach!” Ivan howls over the whine of his turbine as his wirecutter slices apart a shelter made of canvas and driftwood. He jumps off the trike to loot the blanket rolls the migrants left behind.

  “Fucking losers!” His voice is an engine scream. “Think I’m gonna sleep in your flea-ridden blankets?” He tears a blanket in half with his skinning knife, crushes a corn doll under his foot. “Outta my sight!” The others laugh or join in.

  The Silver Apaches light driftwood fires and burn the last of the migrants’ scattered belongings before beginning their barbecue. A few Silvers roll in the silty water, splashing away travel dust. Sarah looks at the cool water, feels the weight of the Heckler & Koch in her ruck, decides not to.

  “Go ahead,” Cowboy says. She’s surprised that he’s stepped up behind her without her hearing. “I’ll sit on the gun for a while. ”

  Sarah shrugs off the rucksack, pulls off the armored jacket and her sneakers, steps into the warm water. Silvers howl and splash nearby, but as soon as she submerges, the noise fades, and it seems she can hear for miles through the water. The river buoys her up. She turns on her back and drifts, letting the Wabash hold up the weight of the world.

  Later Sarah sits on the bank, leaning back with her ruck as a pillow, while Cowboy takes his turn in the water. The westering sun turns the river to quicksilver. The aroma of food is in the air. She watches Ivan as he marches up and down the beach, giving quick glances left and right like a general inspecting his troops. Laughing, every so often, for no apparent reason. Then Ivan sees her in the shade and grins to himself, walking to her.

  “You got something nice in your little pack, linefoot?” he asks. “You running drugs across the Line?”

  “If I were running, I’d be in a panzer from west to east,” Sarah says, “Not hitchhiking in the wrong direction. ”

  Ivan shrugs. “Not always, linefoot. We run the Line sometimes. We can only bring small quantities, but it pays for the upkeep of our bikes. Plenty of other amateurs in the business, too, some on foot. And it’s kind of funny that you’re wearing armor.”

  “The man who sold me this armor said it couldn’t be told from regular cloth. And I’m not running drugs.”

  Ivan gives a little giggle. “Whatever you say. We all got secrets. ”

  She looks up at him. “Is it a secret why you hate the migrants?”

  He sneers, shrugs, twitches his shoulders. “Hey,” he says. “They lost it, okay? Lost their jobs, their houses, cars. Everything.” He leans close to her, grins with his brown metaled teeth. “But the stupid fuckers want it all back. They just got given their freedom, and they don’t want it– they just want their house and a job with the company and a little patch of green for their kids to run in.” He laughs and waves his arms. “When they could have this! Freedom!” He fumbles for a pocket, pulls out his inhaler, fires a pair of torpedoes. “Blew my septum right into my hand the other week,” he says. “Gotta switch to pills one of these days.”

  Ivan shambles off, his fingers moving in front of him as if he were tapping a computer console. Sarah looks in the ruck for the water bottle. There is another set of footsteps coming and she sees one of the Silver women walking toward her, carrying two bottles of beer. The bottles seem to be mismatched.

  Her genes seem to be a graceful blend of black and Oriental, her kinky hair cropped close to allow access to the sockets, and she’s a little older than the rest. Her nipples are standing out under the wet scarf she’s tied around her small breasts. She holds out a beer.

  “My name is Sloe. As in gin.”

  “Thanks.” Sarah takes the bottle and looks at it. “Where do you get beer in bottles made out of petroleum plastic?”

  “One of our part-time members brews the stuff. The bottles must be eighty years old.”

  “They’re worth a fortune.”

  “We know. We just don’t care.”

  Sarah tips her head back and swallows. The beer is dark and just a little sweet. She nods her approval and wipes her lips. One of Ivan’s laughs floats up from the barbecue. Sloe turns her long eyes in his direction. “Ivan’s going to die,” she says. “That’s why we follow him.” She turns back to Sarah with a Mona Lisa smile. “We always follow the doomed ones. The ones who show us the way.”

  “Ethical Nihilists?”

  Sloe nods. “You’ve heard. Good.”

  “Sometimes they come down to where I live in Florida and set fire to themselves or something. It fucks up the nightly totals. Die with style, and hope the world follows, right?”

  Sloe’s voice is soft, gentle in its certitude. “The world will follow, no matter what. We just want them to accept that. Go with a little dignity, a little forethought.”

  “You’re a little old for this, aren’t you?” Putting the blades in her voice.

  Sloe shakes her head. Shining through the tree leaves behind her, the sunlight is printing moving data on her face like a memory of Ivan’s tattoos. “No. Just a little uncertain of how I want to go. I can only do it once, and I don’t have Ivan’s feeling for it.”

  “Go down fighting, I’d say.”

  Sloe looks at Sarah with her gentle smile. “That’s not my style,” she says. She reaches out and takes Sarah’s hand. “Maybe I want to go out in the arms of a stranger. With scars and a suit of armor and my scarf knotted in her hands.” Sloe t
akes Sarah’s hand and places it over her jugular. Sarah can feel the pulse in Sloe’s throat before she takes her hand back.

  “No,” she says.

  “That’s all right,” Sloe says. “If you don’t want to.” She gives a sudden ferocious giggle. The lights of sunset dance in her eyes. “Don’t think I ask every stranger, either.”

  “I know.” Snarling, “It was love at first sight.”

  Sloe’s answer is soft. Her eyes are suddenly uncertain. “Maybe it was.” She rises, her glance drifting over the encampment. Ivan is pouring beer down his throat. The overflow runs in brown streams down his chest.

  “His family were migrants,” she says. “Lost their farm between the erosion and the blocs. Walked all the way across the country and back looking for work. Died, eventually. Of bad luck, I guess.”

  Sarah says nothing, stares stonily at the river. Cowboy, shirtless, walks purposefully out of the water, his jeans plastered to his long legs. His tan is deep and uniform over whatever parts of his body she can see. She thinks about tanning lamps and wonders if Cowboy has one, buried with his treasure trove in Montana. She sips her beer.

  Sloe wanders away, trying to look as if she has a destination in mind. Cowboy collects his shirt from a bush and walks toward her.

  “I’m getting good and sick of these people,” she says, and offers him her beer. Cowboy doesn’t ask her why.

  “I’ve been trying to talk to them about the war,” he says. “Tempel and Arkady and everything. Thought they could do us some good.” He sighs and brushes droplets of water from his arms.

  “But they won’t,” Sarah says. “They’re Buzzard Cult, right?”

  “Ethical Nihilists. That’s their story.”

  “Has one of their girls asked you to kill her yet?”