by Kaleb Schad
A REVOLUTION
He remembered her being beautiful. Even then, at seven, he knew she was beautiful. She had long brown hair that was almost black. It swept around the cables and reflected the lights of the synmap deck and the neon HDK logo hanging on the building outside their cubit’s window. He’d sit on his cradle and watch the blinking lights, scarlet and violet and azure. Words he’d learned in a syncast, he was sure. She was under, of course. She always was, but not him. It had stopped working for him and she kept taking his Seven Ten, but that was okay because he didn’t really like the ‘casts and without the Seven Ten it made his tummy feel yucky, but she liked it so she should have it. He wanted her to have it.
He wondered if she remembered his name.
For the Lower Skims, the hospital bay was beyond anything Tyler had ever seen. Six beds, each with a white backing wall that curved up and over the patient, lined one side of the room looking towards a wall of windows on the other. The smart surfaces could display images during surgery or convert to lights or heat lamps as needed. There was enough room between each for a separate cradle connected to synmaps and blood bots and a number of other machines Tyler didn’t recognize. The blood bot was good news. He’d be able to run a cycle of dialysis and maybe win back a couple of hours. Maybe help his body recover. His leg had stopped bleeding, but the bullets hadn’t yet come out of either his leg or his abdomen.
The boy was in the farthest bed from the door, laying on his side with his back to Tyler. A window looked into the hallway across from him and the wall over the kid was lit up with ticking and waving biometrics, a life defined, but not understood.
“Hey,” he said.
The boy didn’t move.
Tyler walked around the foot of the bed and saw that the boy’s eyes were open. He looked at Tyler, then rolled the other way so his back was to him again. The boy winced when he moved his amputated arm. They had wrapped a Hopkins Numball gel casing around the end of it for cushion and to kill any pain, but they hadn’t bothered with acceleration strips. After all, if the house is going to burn down, you don’t fix the windows.
“I brought you a Nangnang Bar,” Tyler held the candy bar out to the kid. “They have solids here. Lots of them.”
The kid didn’t move.
“The gel helping the pain?”
Silence. How many times had Tyler told the kid to shut up on the drive to Cerebus? Careful what you wish for, his mom would have said. He was pretty sure she had never learned the rest of the idiom.
“Alright,” Tyler said. He started to walk away.
“You’re right,” the boy said. “They are.”
Tyler turned to him.
“People. They really are mean.”
“Yeah, kid. They are.”
“So is the fat woman.”
“Sara. Yeah.”
“When you get into Mr. Staern’s tower,” the boy said, “once you get what you need, you’ll kill her, right? When you get what you need.”
Tyler inhaled and held a deep breath. This wasn’t a question the boy would have asked four hours ago.
“You don’t mean that.”
“You’ll kill her, right?” The kid was staring at him. Hard. “You’ll have to. She’ll ruin everything if you don’t.”
Where did this come from? Tyler thought about the violence the child had seen in the last two days.
His eye hurt. The lights felt too bright, too honest.
“Yeah. I guess.”
“You promise?”
He was dizzy and his thoughts wobbled. He wanted to sit down.
“Yeah, kid,” he said. “I promise.”
“On your life,” the kid said and rolled over. Tyler’s head started
to clear.
Tyler looked at his watch again. -01:08:20:08. How had he lost so much time? He’d only been talking to the boy for ten minutes, but his watch was saying he’d lost a half hour.
He was standing on a mezzanine watching Silent Uprising soldiers drill incursion tactics. Blue, circuited tape had been used to grid out the walls and doorways of Staern Tower on the floor. Tyler knew it was interacting with the soldiers’ synmaps right now, simulating the walls and interiors for the soldiers just as real as being in the space.
And what the fuck is the dizziness about? He’d almost lost his shit and fallen over in by the kid. Was this early denouement? He needed to try dialysis again and they needed to fucking hurry with this plan.
As he turned to leave, he noticed Sara approaching.
“Have a minute?” She smiled and touched him on his arm.
“Not many,” Tyler said.
She leaned over the railing and watched the silent dance of the soldiers. All of their guns’ sound effects and communications were handled through the synmaps, so that the only physical sounds they made were the squeaks of boots on the polished floor.
“Skimmers. Every one,” she said.
“They’re disciplined.”
“Get someone off Seven Ten and the smack they sling in those sacs and you’ll be surprised what they can do.”
“What are we waiting for?”
“Our ride through the Veil is on its way down the Little Marek. Couple hours yet. Not long.”
Sara turned around and leaned back against the railing. Tyler couldn’t help but notice the shape of her breasts under her jacket. She wasn’t so fat, just soft. Even with the greying hair. It had been a while since he’d seen a woman up close not counting the vet tech back in Wisconsin.
“We need to talk about your plan,” she said.
“Pretty simple. You get me into SLS, I do the killing your soldiers can’t, we get the boy’s recombinant, I take him from there to get his overclock key and you guys do…whatever it is you’re planning to do.”
“And you blow up the kid and Malcolm Staern?”
Does he blow up the kid and Malcolm Staern? Was that still his plan? Tyler saw the boy’s face, saw him laying on the van’s floor, his amputated arm bouncing against his small body.
“Doesn’t matter to you what happens from there,” Tyler said.
“But it does. Very much. You’re thinking too small Tyler the JACKK. That boy could be invaluable to us.”
“Get one of the other Culls they’re making.”
“We don’t know there are others. We think maybe that’s why Staern is so desperate.”
“The boy goes with me.”
Sara smiled and touched his arm again, this time on his forearm, just above the watch. On his skin.
“Hear me out. We are at a crossroads, Tyler. For generations, ever since the Great Divestment and the start of the Resource Gap, Skimmers have been turned into drugged out zombies and kept alive out of some sense of duty. Just enough moral anguish to keep the LCP from wholesale slaughter of two-hundred million people, but not enough moral anguish to avoid selective slaughter of a couple hundred thousand every ten years or so.”
“Lady, I’ve heard all the arguments. Saving us from extinction, from the biologists. Cathartic release, from the psychs. Virtually eliminated crime, from the pigs. But I’ll tell you what, ask the seven-year-old me if he felt it was cathartic or if he felt stopping petty theft was worth getting torched to ashes for and you probably would’ve gotten the middle finger.”
“Exactly my point. What do the Skimmers say? Even that name. Skimmers. Dehumanize them just enough so you can tell yourself it’s okay.”
“Sure. Now ask the twenty-seven-year-old me if he gives a shit about any of that and you’ll probably get this.” Tyler flipped her the bird.
Sara held up her hand. “Charming. My point is, all of that is changing. The Big Seven corporate sponsors of the LCP are afraid. They know they’ve taken too much power from the government, basically are the government. And they can sense the people rising up. Not Skimmers, but High Laners. The actual doers of society. Tyler, the boy could be the thing that pushes it all over the edge. First, his existence will undermine SLS’s claim that the Cullings can be ende
d. And second, we can use him to kill off the families of the Big Seven. Topple them from the top down.”
“Listen,” Tyler said. “Half of what you said is old news, the other half is someone else’s fucking problem. I don’t give two shits about you and your crusade or Skimmers. As far as I care, when I die the rest of the world can die, too. The boy is my way out of here and my way of taking the one fucking man who deserves it the most with me.”
“You’re doing right for all of the wrong reasons,” Sara said.
“You’re not listening. I don’t care about your right and wrong.”
“Have you ever seen what happens in a Culling?” Sara asked. “Not the sanitized LCP version, but what really happens?”
The flash of the personal incinerators. Tyler’s skin on his face tightening from the heat, fake feeling, like a mask. A mask to hide behind. Hiding. “Oh.” Her half-hearted whisper as the flames tornadoed around her.
“Tyler,” Sara said.
He stepped back from her, finding himself on the mezzanine again. “We’re done here,” he said.
“Work with me, Tyler. I usually get what I want.”
“You sound like the kid. Every time I don’t do what he demands he throws a fit.”
“Tyler,” Sara said, an edge on her voice. “It’ll be easier if I can trust you.”
Tyler grunted and doubled over, gripping Sara’s shoulders for support. It felt like an animal was clawing its way out of his side where he’d been shot. He lifted his shirt and caught the 9mm slug as it squeezed out of his body. That had taken hours longer than normal, but he was glad it was out.
Sara took his hand in hers and turned it so she could see the bullet. “That’s amazing,” she said. “Did that just come out of you?”
Tyler felt frozen, his hand being held by hers.
She looked up at his face, going from his Sakanaya to his flesh eye. “I’ve read time moves slower for Twitchers. That the amphetamines and other drugs they have you on make you intensely aware.”
She stepped closer and gently, slowly pulled his shirt up to see his wound. It was a pink, puckered scar, already closed by the nanocellotics, like the end of a tied balloon. Dried blood crusted around it. Sara traced her fingertips around the wound, then up over his belly.
“You’re strong,” she whispered. “Hard.”
“Stop.”
“We have time. I wonder what a Twitcher would be like. Too fast? Too slow?” Her face came within centimeters of his, her lips open. “Too big?”
Tyler pushed her away. “I only want one thing from you,” he said. “You’re getting me past the Veil and into SLS. From there the boy and Malcolm Staern are mine. At that point, you can go fuck yourself for all I care.”
Sara snatched her hand away from him. “None of this would be happening without me and I know what it’s going to take to get to the next level. What the sacrifices will be. That Kibashi girl? She didn’t just wake up one day and decide to set herself on fire. That took months of work. I have worked too hard, waited too long for this opportunity to see some Twitcher toss it all away in meaningless revenge.”
“It means everything to me.” Tyler walked away.
“Nobody will care,” Sara shouted. “Nobody will even notice you’re dead.”
The thing that held soldiers back for centuries was their humanity. They needed things like food and rest and objectives. Purpose. The JACKK was developed to satisfy almost all of their physical needs, all but eliminating the need for sleep and food to only a couple times a week. Amphetamines, analgesics, steroids; these things trickled through Tyler’s system every second of every day for the last six years. However, it wasn’t the amphetamines keeping him awake now as he lay on a cot they’d given him. It wasn’t the noise of the soldiers moving through the hallway outside or the clatter in the pipes running up the wall next to him. It was the image of the boy with half of an arm.
Tyler hurt everywhere. He couldn’t remember ever hurting this bad. He looked at his watch. -01:07:57:21 Less than thirty-two hours until he would die. Leave the world behind forever. Tyler had read about religion, knew there were still some people, maybe in the High Lanes, that believed that stuff. Part of Tyler wished he could. He wanted to know there was something, anything, after he died, that these twenty-seven years he had weren’t all of it. If they were and this is what he had done with them, what would that say about him as a person? Look at the shit he’d done. The lives he’d ended or ruined. From what he understood, that next step, if it existed, was a doozy, with some rigid requirements on how you treated others for getting in. If that were the case, Tyler figured he’d have a better chance of getting into Heaven simply because Hell would be too full.
The boy only had thirty-two hours, also. Less, in fact. Pisser of it was, he didn’t know it. Not exactly. Not to the second, like Tyler. Tyler had spent the last six years getting used to the idea of dying, watching his time literally tick away. The boy, through no fault of his own, was also on that clock now, but hadn’t been given ample warning. What was that like, Tyler wondered. How mad would Tyler be if someone was doing this to him? He wouldn’t forgive it, Tyler knew. If he were in the kid’s spot, he’d do whatever he could to get revenge on the people who put him there, including Malcolm Staern.
Staern. There’s a man Tyler wished he could send a watch to that was counting down and say, “time is running short.” Let that asshole sweat the bullet that can’t be stopped. Or, in this case, the Culling.
She was sitting there on the boy’s cot talking when Tyler came into the medical bay. The Silent Uprising woman and the boy. Laughing even. Tyler had never seen the boy laugh before. That look on his face as he was laughing, searching Sara’s face for signs that she was sharing his joy. That word alone, joy. Tyler couldn’t think of a time he’d ever spoken or even thought that word until now.
Everything in him was miserable and sore after sleeping, so it was part hurt feelings and part simply just hurt that bumped along under the words when he said, “Look at you suck-bunkies. Getting along now?”
“We were just talking about you,” Sara said.
“Funny, I wasn’t even thinking about you.”
“Ben was talking about the woods you lived in. I wonder, whose manners were affected more out there, yours or the animals?” She stood and straightened the blankets she had been sitting on, then patted the boy’s leg and said, “You don’t need to worry about anything.”
She didn’t look at Tyler as she left.
Tyler rolled the blood bot over and sat in the cradle next to the boy. He snapped the coupler to the port in his left arm.
“You guys looked chummy,” Tyler said. “You still want what we talked about?”
A quick sequence on the bot’s screen and he could feel the blood pulled out of him. He looked out the window as a male nurse with freckles walked past. The nurse glanced in at them, then jerked his gaze away when he saw Tyler.
“What are you doing?” the boy asked.
“Dialysis.”
“Dal-sis?”
“Die-al-i-sis,” Tyler enunciated. “I figured out that if I did this every couple of days, I’d buy back some time. It cleans the blood of some of the toxins from the JACKK.”
“You get time back?”
“Not much anymore, but maybe some.”
The kid watched the blood moving up the clear tube into the machine, then said, “Yes.”
Tyler looked at the boy.
“She’s mean. You all are.”
Tyler’s forced chuckle came out as a grunt. “Committed, kid. Just committed.”
The freckled nurse shuffled in carrying bandages and tape to change the boy’s dressing. Tyler noticed he was sweating and three times while cutting away the Numball gel he dropped the scissors, stuttering a cymbal staccato on the steel floor. Tyler had to look away when the bandages were finally removed and that savaged flesh glared its accusations at the world.
When the nurse was finished and left Tyler said,
“Thought he was going to stab you with those scissors.”
“I’ve never seen him before,” the boy said.
They listened to the beep of the blood bot and the whispering of the pumps for a while.
“Is Mr. Staern mean? Is that why you hate him?” the boy asked.
Reasons matter. Tyler knew this. Understanding why we do something before we do it changes how well we do that thing. Would telling the boy why he was going to die help the kid to die better? Was it maybe the least Tyler could do?
“You ever cast Bambi?”
“Maybe? It’s old, right? About the deer and his mom getting killed?”
“Yeah. Only instead of nice bunnies and skunks taking care of the fawn, imagine drugged-out wolves who are as happy eating each other as anything else. Then imagine, when the wolves finally decide they’re going to eat Bambi because the damn fawn is also now drugged-out and useless, the fawn finds the strength to kill a few wolves and run away, but where does he end up? Right back in the arms of the hunter that shot his mom. Only now, the hunter puts a collar on the fawn and shoots him up with more, different narcotics and cybernetics and the fawn turns into a buck and grows giant fucking antlers to stab people with. One catch, Big Buck has to stab who the hunter wants stabbed, isn’t going to see his thirtieth birthday and, anyway, he never really wanted the antlers and he never really wanted his mom shot. He just wanted to be left alone.”
“Mr. Staern killed your mom?”
The blond nurse walked past the window again, looking at the boy, then Tyler.
“He Culled her.” It was only partly a lie.
“Is that when she said that thing to you? About being brave?”
“I didn’t think you’d remember.”
“How’d you get away?”
“We were in the kitchens when the doors were locked down.” When do partial lies add up to a whole lie? “She shoved me into an oven. The insulated walls protected me from the incinerators they used. Dumb luck that we were up and in the kitchens. Everyone else was under the synmap.”
