by Kaleb Schad
Tyler began stripping out of his bloody and burned SLS uniform.
“They’re the only way,” the doctor said. He handed Tyler the pants out of his backpack.
“Not an option. What about this new group? A skull and syringes coming out of its head. I saw it outside the Gate.”
“The Silent Uprising? Stay away from them. If there’s a public enemy number one, they’re it.”
“That might be alright. I’m looking to take over that spot myself.”
The doctor was holding Tyler’s shirt, but didn’t hand it to him. Tyler snapped his fingers to get the doctor to focus, then took the shirt.
“They’re some kind of revolution, protesting the Cullings and the Resource Gap. Definitely a mix of High Laners and Skimmers and they’re able to move between the Veil, it seems, but either way, the only way I can think of to reach them would be the Red Lithiums.”
Tyler finished buckling his drop-leg rig together and shoved the MK-9 into its holster. He took the backpack from the doctor.
“I’ll be damned if I ever go back to those snakes. Still letting the Lithiums kick you in the nuts?”
“Is stopping an option?”
Tyler finished pulling the backpack on and then guided the kid to the door. “Same deal as last time,” Tyler said. “Mute on me being here and you have nothing to fear.”
“Don’t worry,” the doctor said. “I have a feeling this really is the last time I’ll see you alive.”
The sound the trains made as they flurried in, stopped and settled on their rails, was not unlike a sigh, a release of tension. Tyler and the boy hid in an alley, clear firing lanes ahead, no ambush threats behind. He’d pulled over a Trash Zapper just large enough for the boy to squeeze behind and Tyler had covered himself and his weapons with his thermal blanket. It didn’t take much for him to look dead or, at the least, like someone else’s problem. Grey clad LCP employees alighted from the train, typing on the sleeves of their jackets, subconsciously weaving like salmon around those heading home for the evening. Tyler had the feeling they were weaving into a net. Out of a net? They were the only ones who had authorization—dared—to travel by train through the Veil between the High Lanes and the Lower Skims.
Look at those ‘netics, Tyler thought. He could barely see the seams where flesh touched silicone. If he’d thought his Sakanaya metal was the cat’s meow, it was clear they’d held back on the best. Figures. One more middle finger he’d gotten in this life. Nothing but the best, for the best, they’d said. God, Tyler was sick of being lied to.
How to get on that train? “Me and this boy are on our way into town to kill one of the Big Seven CEOs” probably wouldn’t cut it. What, then? How does the Devil sneak into Heaven?
A solid-food vendor rumbled up to the train’s platform on his motorized kitchen, cubes of cupboards and ovens stacked and bolted together, a marvel of gyroscopes and balance on two wheels. Smoked meats and sausages swung on strings from the awning and small fans spread smells that sawed at Tyler’s stomach. That venison was the last thing he’d eaten. Since then he’d been in a hell of a fight and his JACKK had devoured everything he had to keep him alive.
“I’m hungry,” the kid said.
The Silent Uprising? Were they the only way in? Tyler had never heard of a revolution before, had never imagined the possibility. No Skimmer would dare revolt. Why should they? And the idea that High Laners could bring themselves to care about Skimmers…Tyler felt ridiculous even thinking it. But maybe? And if so, that meant they moved through the Veil.
Reaching them, though, was the real problem. Connections. In a world where Skimmers live and die without ever seeing the person in the cubit next to them, how do you find someone who knows someone who knows about a revolution? And fast. Even now the kid was sending signals that someone somewhere was tracking. He had hours, maybe minutes.
A man with dark skin and a grey beard, wearing a vinyl coat without a shirt underneath ambled up the stairs onto the train platform. Rusted cables hung from the man’s synports like Medusa’s snakes. The solids vendor waved the man away before he’d even reached the top of the platform, then shoved him when he didn’t stop. The man lost his balance and fell backwards, not trying or not able to stop himself.
“What’s wrong with him?” the boy asked.
“He’s cold-hacked. Happens if you refuse to come up for mandatory relapses.”
Tyler could feel the reality of the situation settling around him like concrete. Heavy and immovable. Snip was right. He had no choice. Could one option be called a choice? Once again with having no choices. The Red Lithiums. It had been eight years. Maybe they wouldn’t recognize him? He knew he looked different now, the JACKK swelling him, filling his chest and arms with murder. Either way, this time would be different.
The cold-hacked man sat looking at the cart. Then, while the solids vendor was helping a young High Laner woman, he stood up and tried to pull a swinging sausage. It didn’t come loose, instead tipping the cart off balance. The gyroscopes whined to stabilize and the vendor dropped the box of pickled mushrooms and olives he’d mixed for the woman and wedged himself under the cart to keep it from falling.
“Oh no,” the boy said.
The man stopped pulling at the sausage and started to back away, but too late. The vendor came at him and hammered his fist into the man’s chin, then, when the man was on the ground, landed two kicks to his stomach and one to his face.
“Stop him,” the boy said, looking at Tyler.
The vendor crouched over the man and said something Tyler couldn’t hear. The High Laner woman walked away.
“Let’s go,” Tyler said.
“Why doesn’t anybody help him?”
The cold-hacked man huddled against the gate at the top of the stairs.
Tyler had almost finished folding up his thermal blanket when he realized the boy was running across the platform. He started to chase the kid, but stopped when he felt his sidearm bounce against his thigh. He couldn’t be seen like this. He retreated back into the alley, fury thrumming through him.
When the boy spoke to the vendor, it was as if they were old friends, remembering each other, laughing at a shared history, and then the vendor pulled down a sausage and gave it to the boy. They hugged. The boy jogged to the cold-hacked man still huddled on the ground, broke off part of the sausage and gave the man the larger piece. Something was said between them that pained the boy as he ran back to Tyler.
The kid took a bite of the sausage, the salty, smoky smells from the vendor sticking to him. He didn’t look at Tyler while he chewed.
Seconds passed before Tyler was calm enough to speak. “Why?”
“He was hungry.”
“How did you convince him?”
“I asked. People do things when I ask. You should try.”
Tyler hauled the kid down the alley by the collar. He looked behind them as they walked away, down the alley to the sunlit platform. The cold-hacked man chewed slowly, almost not chewing at all, as if the meat were a sucker to be savored, his eyes closed.
“Pointless,” Tyler said. “You know that, right? He’s still going to die and nobody anywhere ever will give a shit.”
The kid fought out from Tyler’s grip.
“I do.”
By the time they had made their way out of the Ottawa Ward and into Red Lithium territory, night had settled. And still no further pursuit from Staern. Tyler didn’t know what to make of that. Part of him suspected they were trying to figure out why a JACKK would be involved in this and how to retrieve the kid before Tyler could react or kill him. Another part worried they were biding time. Time, the one thing Tyler couldn’t beat.
Elia was a dark city. An upside down abyss where the stars in the sky took on the look of hope and warmth while the windows of the world were inky caverns, hiding sleeping inhabitants. Dreaming. Living polymer lives, seamed and crafted.
Tyler hadn’t spent much of his life under the synmaps like everyone else. Illus
ions held little for him. Now, crossing this city, coming home, to a second home he’d fled, he had to wonder if a life of real suffering had at all been better than one of synthetic pleasures.
Blood soaked Tyler’s belt and waistband. The injuries in his side and leg had yet to regurgitate the bullets and close, almost twenty-four hours after the fight at Cerebus Gate, as sure a sign of his impending death and the failure of his nanocellotics as any.
He’d had to carry the kid the last couple of hours through Elia, exhaustion ruining him. At first he’d begrudged the burden, but then there’d been something disturbingly comforting about the child’s head resting on Tyler’s shoulder, the boy’s warm breath on his neck. Now the boy was awake, his head swiveling, tense.
The elevator clawed its way skyward, seeking the forty-fourth floor of a residence tower. Inside, Tyler and Ben stared at the closed doors. A massive pill had been stenciled on them, half red, half black, so that when the doors closed they formed a full pill.
“Where are we going?” the kid asked.
“To see some old friends,” Tyler said. He could see his reflection in the chrome doors; squared head and neck that sloped into a bear’s shoulders. He looked nothing like he did eight years ago. And even if they did recognize him, he was nowhere near as weak. It wouldn’t be like last time. So why the fear?
After a minute, the boy said, “I thought all your friends tried to kill you.”
The forty-fourth floor of the residence tower was rotting. Carpeting was torn and missing, zig zag strips of glue glaring like tears in a worn skirt. The doors to the rooms were off their rails and inside people laid on floors or slumped against walls while plugged into synmaps. Small fires burned in ceramic bowls. Ceiling tiles were missing and cables hung like vines. But it was the smell that told Tyler he had found the right tower.
The boy gripped Tyler’s sleeve and said, “I want to go back.”
At the end of the hallway, they walked onto a balcony. There, sprawled between this tower and the next was a fort of suspended shipping containers and tarps, a colony built against gravity, hidden under a skypass highway. The wind screeched, intense and constant, harmonizing with the traffic overhead. The boy gasped when he saw how high up they were.
Big S1m was a psycho, but a psycho with a vision, Tyler would give him that. In a world where the government rules every waking minute, literally telling you when to sleep and when to wake, who stands on a street corner, looks up and says, there, that empty space between those two buildings right there, that’s the place I’ll build my empire? Yet, that’s exactly what the man had done. A cobweb of containers, flatbed trailers and rope ladders. A nest for the ones who didn’t want to go to bed when Big Brother said it was time to sleep. For years, it had been Tyler’s nest. Until they’d kicked him out, at least.
Tyler’d never learned the whole story of how Big S1m built his empire — and an empire it was—but it had started very much like Tyler’s own. Awake on relapse, parent (parents?) back under, not giving too many shits if their son plugged in on time or not, and out of the house. Well, cubit. They didn’t have houses in the Lower Skims. Those were in the syncasts. Anyway, maybe S1m runs into another kid up and about. Maybe they spot one of those Hamatino drones zipping through the hall delivering narc sacs and he decides to snag one. This is a capital offense, of course, the kind of thing that gets you a special narc sac all your own that you don’t ever relapse from. These two kids, on second thought, maybe not kids, old enough to know something about the world, so let’s say twelve or thirteen, they take these narc sacs to a train depot like the one Tyler was at earlier today — and this is the part where you see just how big those steel balls of S1m’s are—he walks up to the first High Laner he sees and he offers to sell the sac for a bite of real food. Two capital offenses, but whose counting, right? Can’t kill you twice. Somehow, in the dice rolls of dice rolls, Big S1m, had found the one fucking tweaker coming off that train that day. Tyler wondered if that High Laner was still alive and if he knew he’d started what would go on to be the only known human encampment outside of the High Lanes where people actually lived next to each other, awake, making conversation? Where the only body they ever had was the one they were in. The only encampment where men lived as men.
“Stay close,” Tyler said to the boy. “Don’t look at, touch or speak to anyone. These people will eat you. Got it?”
The kid nodded. There was white all the way around his eyes. He maybe thought Tyler meant they would literally eat him. If so, good. Terror was the only appropriate emotion for these people.
Climbing with the boy on his back, Tyler could feel the bullets chewing away inside him. He was stopped at the first level by three guards. The leader had a skin-mocked throat, the muscles and tendons made visible through translucent skin, so that as he demanded Tyler hand over his weapons, Tyler could see those muscles stretch and pull. He didn’t recognize the other two, but the skin-mocked thug looked familiar. As he dredged for the man’s name, a part of him understood the thug might be doing the same with Tyler, trying to remember the last time he’d seen him, remembering the last time he’d tried to kill this stranger.
A few seconds later the name came to Tyler. Crupps. The dumb fucking names. That was one thing Tyler was glad to be rid of when he’d left (ran for his fucking life, truth be told). They’d even given Tyler his own stupid name: Squeak. So, Crupps was the muscle now? Got a skin job on his throat and wanted to be a tough guy?
Crupps had been there the day they’d ganked him. He’d only kicked Tyler once he was down, though. The memories blended a slurp of anger and terror behind Tyler’s eyes.
Five years he’d spent with them. Five years running some of the best gap-rackets ever run, making all of them rich and free. And together. Then one day it was “together, but without you.” In fact, without you alive at all. Well, you’d tried motherfuckers. You’d tried and failed and I wasn’t even JACKK’d yet, Tyler thought. That was eight years ago and Tyler’d be lying if he said he was over it. He’d also be lying if he said he wasn’t still a little afraid of Big S1m.
“In your dreams,” Tyler said when Crupps reached for his rifle.
“You ain’t LCP up here,” Crupps said. “Big S1m says no guns in his presents.” The “t” was distinct. Muscle, not brains.
“I’m the present,” Tyler said, but he didn’t move to offer his guns.
Crupps shrugged. “See how well you and the boy fly, then, when he throws you off.”
Four more levels and they were to Big S1m. God, Tyler hated that name, too. He’d always called the guy B.S. The double meaning hadn’t been lost on Big S1m.
As they approached Big S1m’s container, four barefooted children buzzed between them, playing a game of chase. They lured the kid’s attention, his head swiveling to follow the fun, and Tyler had to yank his arm to keep him close.
Dread sluiced through Tyler as they opened Big S1m’s shipping container. He could still feel the man’s hand on his shoulder that day. “Big run for a big man,” he’d said as he’d sent Tyler on that last delivery to Cerebus. A father sending his son to do a man’s work. They hadn’t waited more than a block or two before they’d started in on Tyler.
His first thought when the door opened was Big S1m had gained weight. He sat in a wooden chair — wood!—with a little girl on his lap which looked more like a table of purple veined flesh than legs. His left leg had been removed below the knee, a cybernetic foot shaped like a clydesdale’s hoof in its place and he’d replaced his lower jaw since Tyler saw him last. The new one was steel with jagged teeth like a bear trap and it was discolored where drool glistened on the edges. A DANGER sticker along the chin. He and the girl were plugged into a holodeck, controlling two robots fighting each other. Next to him sat a dark-haired woman. Evee. Her name came easier. Evee Malters. So she’d made her way to Big S1m himself. Tyler wasn’t surprised. She’d probably humped her way up the food chain. Not surprised, but more frightened than before. She’d
always been one for faces and names. His heart clawed at the inside of his ribs when her eyes lasered over him.
Big S1m unplugged the holodeck from his synport, then pushed the girl off of his legs. A cup of Nihonshu slopped when she kicked the table in front of them while climbing onto Evee’s lap.
Humming wind and traffic filled the silence while Big S1m and Tyler stared at each other. Evee hunted Tyler’s face, squinted. He could hear the kids’ playing feet drumming against the deck outside. Crupps stood behind him, the second and third guards, further back at the door.
“You let him keep his thumpers?” Big S1m said. He never took his eyes off of Tyler’s. “Nobody brings thumpers around my girls.”
The metal chompers hadn’t helped B.S.’s grammar any.
Crupps poked Tyler in the back and whispered, “Told you. Better grow some wings, flyboy.”
“I just need to talk.”
“Maybe I toss my crap-ass security, too.”
Tyler watched as Crupp’s naked throat muscles swallowed.
“How do I reach the Silent Uprising?” Tyler remembered how much Big S1m liked to talk. Nobody had time for that shit. Or for those rusted gears Evee called a brain to click into place.
Big S1m dabbed a cloth at the drool on his steel jaw. “He’s direct, at least,” he said. “That blood or piss?”
Everyone started to laugh and Tyler looked down to see his crotch soaked with blood from the bullet in his side. Crupps screeched his laugh, a dying rabbit sound, and Tyler noticed Evee shoot Crupps a disgusted look. Not on the food chain, then, it appeared.
“I heard a Twitcher banged up Cerebus Nort’ this morning.”
“Twitcher and a boy,” Crupps said.
“Somes of us wondered what a JACKK does fighting into the Lower Skims and not out. Somes of us wondered why he fights his boss-folk.”
“I just need to talk to them,” Tyler said. “And the boy didn’t bang up anything.”
