Hardwired

by Walter Jon Williams

  Cowboy rides the face south, the Heckler & Koch resting in his lap as he pushes the Packard to its limits on the high road, where the sky seems close enough to touch. Dawn graces the long eastern plains. Pine rises tall around him, young trees planted after a wholesale harvest a few years before, their growth boosted courtesy of Orbital chemicals.

  The Packard glides along the interface between mind and eye, sky and earth, dawn and the last cool touch of twilight. Cowboy’s eyes flicker to the windows of the rare cars and trucks, looking for familiar faces, surprised looks, cunning glances. Nothing but the faces of families heading to early mass in town.

  The Dodger’s gate features a pair of guards standing in camouflaged military armor, wearing bulky night vision and infra scanners over their eyes that give the same advantages as Cowboy’s implants. With his infrared sight Cowboy thinks he can see a pair of figures in a camouflaged trench nearby, with what looks from its profile to be a shoulder-fired rocket. Cowboy moves the machine pistol from his lap to the seat next to him.

  He parks in front of the gate and turns off the turbine. In the quiet of the dawn, the electric whine of his descending window seems loud. Cowboy looks into the protruding scanners of the approaching man.

  “I’d like to see the Dodger. Tell him it’s his old friend Tom Mix, from the Portales Rodeo.”

  “I’ll need that piece first.”

  “Just take care of it. I like the feel of the thing.” He hands out the Heckler & Koch, and the man tucks it under his elbow. Cowboy looks at the Flash Force patch over the man’s pocket, marking him as one of the best and most incorruptible mercenaries in the business. The merc reports Cowboy’s message through a throat mic and presses his helmet over his left ear to hear the answer. He looks at Cowboy and shakes his head. “You must be an Angel of the Lord, man,” he says. “I’m even supposed to give your gun back.”

  “Thank you kindly.”

  The turbine whimpers into life as the guard signals for the gate to rise. The Packard spits gravel, climbing the switchback ruts. There are some patrols he sees on infrared, but he’s not supposed to notice them, so he doesn’t. When he parks in front of the long log-walled house, he leaves the machine pistol in the front seat and tosses his wig on top of it.

  Jutz steps out of the door with a grin turned ruddy by the sunrise, then yowls and jumps forward, wrapping her arms and legs around Cowboy as he stands with a slow smile on the cindered path. “Bastard,” she says, ruffling his short fair hair. “We missed the hell out of you.” She peers at him with her lined blue eyes. “You been fed right? You look okay.”

  “I’m just fine. Had to walk across most of the country, but I had a bodyguard the whole time.”

  She drops to the ground and hooks a thumb in her concho belt. Cowboy puts an arm around her as they walk to the door. “How’s the Dodger?” Cowboy asks.

  “Getting better. He’s asleep right now, so let’s get you some siege posole and talk trash till he gets up.” They pass under the scanning lintel and no red lights blink, no hard tracking-laser voices command them to halt. This is the Dodger’s vacation place, not his working ranch: the place has the look of a building that is taking a lot more traffic than it’s used to.

  There’s a twenty-gallon pot of posole on the stove in the kitchen, available at any time for any of the Dodger’s people who are living on an irregular schedule, and a pile of foil-wrapped tortillas sitting in the warming oven. Cowboy collects some of each and plugs some quarters into the jukebox he’d bought Jutz and the Dodger for Christmas a couple years ago. The juke’s bubble tubes cycle in time to western lightjack as Jutz brings him up to date.

  Cowboy mops up the last of the posole with his tortilla. It sounds as if the troops are being worn away. The thirdmen need money to fight the war and so they’re shipping more product, and the northeasterners are stockpiling. The price is dropping in the Northeast at the same time as it’s rising in the West due to increased demand. Panzers are making the runs so frequently they’re beginning to show signs of wear: breakdowns, decoy panzers missing runs because they’re sitting in police impoundment. One of the Dodger’s people had to sit with his broken, shot-up panzer in a barn in Missouri for six days before his machine could be fixed and his escape run set up.

  “They’ve been trying data raids, coming in on the phone lines, even once by microwave from a plane out over Wagon Mound,” Jutz says. “But we keep our data in our heads, of course. That’s why they tried to kill the Dodger.”

  Cowboy feels the unfamiliar touch of guilt. “I think it had a little something to do with me,” he says.

  Jutz looks at him with a quiet smile. “Yeah. We figured that out.”

  He feels uncomfortable under her gaze. “I’m sorry I started it,” he says.

  Jutz laughs and pats his hand. “Would have happened anyway. Maybe if you hadn’t scared them, they would have set things up better and aimed straighter.”

  Cowboy hears the sound of footsteps and turns to see the Dodger walking in. He’s wearing a sheepskin jacket over blue silk pajamas, and he looks frail, pale, and thinner than ever, his hair disordered with sleep, walking with care on the Navajo rugs. At the sight of him Cowboy feels an uplift of joy so overwhelming that he breaks into laughter.

  The Dodger scowls at him. “I know I look ridiculous,” he says, “but you don’t have to be so offensive about it.”

  Cowboy has already jumped out of his seat and run to shake his hand. He would have hugged him but he wasn’t sure whether he might be damaging his stitches.

  The Dodger’s eyes widen with pleasure. “Damn,” he says. “Good to have you back.”

  “I’ve got some ideas. And some news.”

  “Okay, I’ll listen. But let me drink some coffee first.”

  “Right.” Cowboy feels himself grinning like a buttonhead on his first charge of the day. He turns and follows the Dodger into the kitchen. As the Dodger draws his coffee, Cowboy puts more quarters into the jukebox. He feels like dancing.

  They return to the front room, and Cowboy explains his notions as the Dodger sits in his comfortable chair, his eyes narrowed as he listens hunched in his sheepskin jacket with his mug of coffee clasped in both hands. From time to time he nods or asks for clarification. The Dodger pours himself a refill, drinks it, leans back in his chair with his eyes closed. “Yeah,” he says. “We’ll try her.”

  “Crystaljock first,” Cowboy says.

  “Right. ”

  There’s a simultaneous bleat from a pair of radios, one on Jutz’s belt, the other in the Dodger’s pocket. The Dodger takes his and answers.

  The voice comes through distinctly. “This is Lockyer at the gate. There’s a Jimi Gutierrez to see you. Says he’s got news. ”

  A look of distaste crosses the Dodger’s face. “Okay. Clear him and send him up.”

  “Right.”

  The Dodger puts the radio back in his pocket. “Damn. I’m too old to deal with punks like him.”

  “He’s on our side, Dodger,” Cowboy says.

  “That’s what he keeps telling me. But he says it with that crazy smile, and I keep thinking he’s on my side the same way as a pet bobcat is on my side, till he gets my hand confused with his dinner.”

  Another security man appears to clear Jimi through the detector in the lintel, and then the panzerboy is shown into the room. He’s got a twitchy grin on his face, and his eyes are as dilated as the barrels of a twin gun. He’s wearing an armored jacket and cutoff jeans, blue tennis shoes over bare feet. He sees Cowboy sitting in the corner and he laughs in triumph. The metal braces flash between his lips.

  “Finally caught up with you, Cowboy,” he chatters. “Hey, I want to join. Remember that day on the Western Slope?”

  “Yeah. Sit down and tell us the news.”

  Jimi’s too excited to sit, and instead he jumps in place, a human pogo. Jutz watches his performance with tolerance. “I got ten thousand K’s worth of Arkady’s antibiotics sitting in the cargo bay of a panze
r a hundred miles north of here,” Jimi says. “D’you think you could use ’em, Dodger?” He spins in glee, his arms held high, his feet jittering in a hardwired victory dance. “And I got that bastard Chapel. Blew his ass halfway to Mexico.”

  Cowboy looks at Dodger with a widening smile. The Dodger turns his face away from Jimi and closes his eyes. “Sit down, Jimi, before you give me a heart attack,” he says. “And tell me what happened.”

  Jimi looks at the Dodger without any apparent loss of enthusiasm and perches himself on the edge of a chair, his rubber soles still beating little rhythms on the floor. The Sandman, one of Arkady’s allies, had hired him to run across the Line from eastern Colorado. Chapel had shown up at the loading and so Jimi knew that Arkady had at least a part interest in the run. Jimi started his panzer, turned his guns and rockets on his support crew, and blew up the Sandman, Chapel, and the fuel truck before running for the Rockies and someplace to hide.

  “Got myself ten million bucks in cargo, a brand new panzer, and cleaned up a couple pieces of slime all at once,” Jimi says, and then jumps up from his chair and claps his hands over his head. “Do you figure that makes me a part of the team?”

  “I figure it does, Jimi,” Cowboy says.

  Cowboy watches as the Dodger capitulates to the inevitable. “Yeah, Jimi,” he says. “I reckon you did good.”

  Jutz stands and puts an arm around Jimi’s shoulders. “Thanks,” she says. “It’s good to know we made a few friends. ”

  Jimi grabs her and whirls her in the air. Jutz whoops with laughter, while the Dodger looks sourly out of one slitted eye.

  “I’ll go put some more quarters in the Wurlitzer,” Cowboy says. He looks over his shoulder as he walks toward the kitchen. “Hey, Jimi, you want some posole?”

  Jimi puts Jutz down and reaches in a pocket for a transparent flask of mescal. “Sure,” he says. “Glad to be aboard, you know.”

  “I know,” Cowboy says, and walks toward the bubbling jukebox light, his hands groping in his pockets.

  NEW UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT ELECTED

  WILL MAINTAIN NEUTRALITY IN ESTONIA-MUSCOVY CONFLICT

  Sarah walks into Daud’s room and sees a Russian priest standing by the bed of a new roommate, whose arms and legs are tied to the bright metal rack of the bed by leather straps. Viral Huntington’s, she thinks, mind and body both eroding. Past the contagious stage now. The priest doesn’t turn his eyes to her, just lowers his bearded head and gazes down at the dying man.

  Daud has two eyes now, one circled by the bruise made by the implant operation that he had only yesterday, paid for by the funds she’d wired from the Bullet station in New Kansas City. He looks at her as she passes the priest, and his face dissolves. “Sarah,” he says.

  “I’m here.”

  He reaches out a hand and she takes it, presses it to her.

  “Where have you been?”

  She looks at him, the way his face is warring with itself, gratitude mixed with resentment. “I had to run, Daud,” she says.

  “You left me alone.” She strokes his hand gently, the new pink flesh. “Damn you,” Daud says. “Why did you go? You said it would only be a couple of days.”

  “Things went wrong.”

  She tries to kiss him on the cheek. He twists his head away. She pulls back and holds onto his hand.

  “They’re cutting my dose,” he says. “It hurts. My legs, everything. I can’t do the exercises they give me.”

  Sarah looks down at him, seeing the outline of the thin new legs under the sheet. “They can’t let you out of here till you can walk right,” she says.

  “I can’t walk at all unless I get my dose.”

  “Daud,” she says, trying to keep her voice gentle. “I’m not bringing you anything. Not hormone maskers, not endorphins.”

  Daud pulls his hand away. Sarah tries to talk to him, but he refuses to answer. She watches his throat and cheek muscles working and feels her own anger and frustration rising. She reminds herself that these kinds of games are all that Daud has left, that he’s playing them because he wants to know she still cares enough to put up with them, but the anger rises too quickly, and before it explodes she turns and stalks away.

  The cool corridor air whispers to her, and this time she knows its message.

  The city is closing in, and there is no one to guard her back.

  TEMPEL PHARMACEUTICALS ANNOUNCES HUNTINGTON’S CURE

  TEMPEL STOCK GOES WILD IN MARKET

  Cure Described as “Search-and-Destroy Virus”

  Thibodaux is a crystaljock, an intense thin man who crouches over his deck in Cowboy’s car, deep in some inner trance as he frowns and taps at the keyboard in his lap. Cowboy knows him slightly from a few years ago, when Thibodaux had a panzerboy lover who’d later got himself blown away in some South Dakota wheat field. “Okay, man,” Thibodaux says. “That holding company in Montevideo has been alerted. We’re ready to move.”

  “Go,” Cowboy says. He takes a stud from the Cajun’s deck and faces in.

  The trick, Cowboy knows, is not moving the funds–– that’s easy, once he gives Thibodaux the codes. The trick is losing the tracers that the laws have put on his accounts in order to follow his every transaction and alert the police to his location.

  They’re operating from Cowboy’s car with Thibodaux’s deck studded into a public phone standing on its aluminum post on West Alameda in Santa Fe. The laws might be good enough to trace the series of commands, and Cowboy doesn’t want to use any of the lines to which he has regular access.

  There’s already a close smell in the car, nerves beginning to spark with adrenaline.

  Thibodaux clicks into the eye-face and calls Cowboy’s robobroker. Cowboy releases the first code from his crystal and within a period of two seconds all of Cowboy’s stock holdings are dumped in acomplicated and seemingly random way onto the markets of Singapore, London, and Mombasa Nova.

  Approximately three seconds later they have all been traded for other stocks. While the sales are being completed, Thibodaux gives Cowboy a signal and Cowboy gives the second code from his chips. Cowboy’s titles to various deposits of precious metal, actually held in deep Bastille security in various banks throughout the western U.S., are shuttled onto the commodities markets inTobago.

  The data strings representing Cowboy’s new stock holdings, bought in three different places, are encoded and bounced off geosynchronous Earth satellites owned by Mikoyan-Gurevich, Toshiba, and the Gold Coast Maximum Law Corporation I.G. Then they are sold at three more different exchanges for Mexican pesos, CFA francs from Bangui, and Icelandic kronur.

  Meanwhile, Cowboy’s gold and silver have been traded for Ugandan shillings, shillings that are shuttled to Manila, where they are deposited in a face bank disguised as something called the Greater Asian Trade Company. The shillings are used as collateral for a loan, the loan being taken on something like 99.999 percent of the value of the shillings. The duration of the loan is ten seconds.

  Cowboy gives Thibodaux a third code, and his shares in luxury apartment buildings in the Lightside Development on the Mitsubishi Permanent Orbital Environment at Lagrange Point Four are sold, at a moderate profit, to an investor living in Zurich. The payment, in Swiss francs, is shuttled to a face bank in Melbourne, where again it is used as collateral for a loan of ten seconds’ duration.

  While the codes representing the Swiss francs are received in Melbourne, the three separate strings of information representing Cowboy’s, stock sales are bouncing at the speed of light off a series of satellites and ground stations. The program Thibodaux has created is self-contained, traveling with the data, and needs no instructions at this point; but this is not necessarily the case with the tracer programs the laws have placed on them–– with each bounce from Earth to satellite and back again, another fraction of a second is added to the lag time between the instant the program sees a transfer and the time the main tracer program, sitting in the cold crystal heart of a large computer on the gr
ound, is able to perceive the transfer and act on it.

  During the course of its leaps from Earth to space and back again, each data string passes through a receiving station sitting on a former oil-drilling platform off Big Sur. Thibodaux waits on a separate direct line to the drilling rig, and as each data string passes through, Thibodaux adds a new program, a string of new data that attaches itself to the first message, mimicking it in shape and form... The new program is called, in the trade, a caboose.

  Cowboy’s loans are shuttled in separate movements to the Singapore and Mombasa Nova exchanges, where they are used to purchase stock in the Greater Asian Trade Company. This stock is then shuffled to Manila, where it is sold at face value back to the Trade Company, all for Ukrainian konings, which are moved to Patagonia to buy cattle futures.

  The pesos, CFA francs, and kronur burn at the speed of light to a receiving station on the island of Ascension, where another message from Thibodaux is waiting. Each string of data breaks in half, the caboose, by now mimicking the original program, peeling off and blazing a trail high into the late evening sky, with any luck taking the tracers with them. The data representing the money, meanwhile, is bounced off a Korolev-owned satellite and burns straight for Montevideo and an interface post box labeled “Holding Company No. 384673. ” The holding company computer counts the money, deducts Thibodaux’s fee as well as its own, and alerts a human operator, a middle-aged and bored woman sitting next to an old computer deck in a battered one-room office overlooking the dike built to hold back the combined waters of the Atlantic and Rio de la Plata. The human operator opens another phone line and begins tapping in code.

  While the woman bends over her keyboard and taps, the Greater Asian Trading Company’s main computer realizes that the ten-second loan has not been repaid, and forecloses. It is hoped that in addition to Ugandan shillings the face bank has collected an Orbital tracer that was unable to follow the loan transfer.