World In Progress

by Lori Ann White

And in The Far Corner, Wearing a
Too-Tight Jock Strap and a Crown of Thorns–

CLOSE UP on a face.  Calm, pale, waves of black hair brushed back from a broad forehead.  Retro Guy.  Grade A, 100% Pure Professional Athlete.  No drugs, no mods, no tweaks, no prods.  Just like the old farts ordered.

He’s staring at the wall above the mirror through eyes blue as an Artic bay.  Pan to the wall, to the framed honest-to-god newsprint, photo of a thick-necked thug in too-tight jacket.  He’s small, like Retro Guy, like they all used to be, but the smug grin and his squinty eyes radiate “big guy” waves.  He’s got one arm around a sad brunette.

The caption: “Bruisin’ Brawler Gene O’Connor: ‘No God-Damned Upgrades!  My Boy Will be a Real Boxer, Just Like His Old Man.’”

The camera pans back to Retro Guy’s face.

“Hey, Old Man,” he whispers.  “This fight’s for you.”

Bar Fight

The foyer door swings open and Retro Guy pops through, pale and frail in the crush of muscle mods, beauty mods, fetish mods.  No mods at all, no armor, no taller than two meters, with pale face and plain white shirt glowing in the UVs, but he’s a solid little motherfucker pushing through, headed for the bar.

He bumps a tank, a bouncer–Angel McCay, says the nametag–and squeezes past, moving faster, time running out, because sure as snot, law and order is now in hot pursuit.

He’s pushing, shoving, doesn’t give a shit who he pisses off, so he does–a Muscle mod dressed in armored cod piece over chain mail boxers and mood tats from waist to chin, who swats at him like he’s some gnat.

Retro Guy swats back.

The bar mood-shifts fast, patrons twigging trouble.  He feels it.  Muscle Boy laughs down at him, surrounded by buddies equally amused, none taking his bared teeth and hard glare seriously. A small space opens up and Retro Guy works it, fists up, light on his feet.

Muscle Boy stands there, flat-footed and grinning.

So Retro Guy dances in, plants a needle-sharp jab on the tip of his nose, dances out.

Muscle Boy roars in pain, his mood tats flaring hot red, and his boyz unzombie.  Retro Boy ducks and dodges flailing fists to make a beeline for the bar.

He vaults effortlessly to the smooth countertop and turns to the sea of faces.  It’s soapbox time, ready to rant, but he spots a wake in the sea, Bouncer Babe tossing patrons aside, closing fast.  He slaps at his waist, and feedback screams through the club.  Everyone, including the bouncer, just–stops.  Silence.  Except for Muscle Boy still pissing and moaning, mood tats strobing between red and a bilious yellow-green.

“I’m Clean Gene O’Connor,” Retro Guy blasts, “the heavy-weight champion of the world.  Any of you bio-blobs of fake physical perfection think you’re human enough to take me?”

The pocket amp gives a last squeal of feedback as O’Connor switches off.  He glares at the sea of stunned faces, and it’s Muscle Boy who answers, howling and surging forward, his boyz fanning out behind.  Tumblers, bottles, inhalers sail through the air, jetting intoxicants that the dance-floor lasers refract into a million stabbing lances like some vomiting rainbow.  Retro Boy feels a spatter of droplets, inhales the sweet stench of booze, and dances among silicon missiles like a fighter jet through chaff.  Patrons duck and run, the bartender cowers to stab at panic buttons, and a few fools dare snatch at his ankles, hoping to play spoiler, only to get their pinkies stomped.

Then Retro Guy stops, smiling at his fate as Muscle Boy tosses two last impediments aside to confront him.

Too late he sees Bouncer Babe bellyflop onto the bar, skidding toward him like one big cocktail on the rocks, bowling him down for the K-fucking-O.

Voyeur Poll: So What’s Gene’s Problem, Anyway?

• Some chick blew him off
• Succumbed to existential despair
• Thought he could win
• This is all a publicity stunt
• What else is there for a modless has-been?

Deal With the Devil

O’Connor wakes to a scram-cam floating overhead.  “Not heaven,” he mutters.  He squints at it and hears a faint whine as it focuses.  Shit.  He’s not even dead.  Doesn’t mean he’s not in hell.

Wherever he is, he’s alone, he’s hurting and he wants that damned camera out of his face. He blinks at it, trying to clear his vision enough to make out a logo, but after staring at it so long that the pounding in his head threatens to pop out his eyeballs, he closes his eyes in defeat.

The nausea is real and it surprises him.  A concussion–an honest-to-god concussion.  He hasn’t been KOed like this since his days training with the Old Man.  He manages to stiff-arm his way up without his elbows giving, the camera whirring faintly as it gains altitude.  O’Connor looks around.

Tiny apartment, bare-bones.  The only obvious bit of ostentation is a top-of-the-line wallscreen opposite the couch he’s been dumped on.  For ornamentation, there’s a set of body armor in a nook that might once have held bookshelves.  That’s it.  The couch, the wall screen, the armor–and probably a hidden cache of peripherals and a house AI.  Who the hell lives here, anyway?

And why is he here?

“He’s awake, Miss Angel, and sitting up,” says the default voice of the same base House AI O’Connor owns in calm, genderless tones.

“Oh!”  The voice comes from another room.  Not bland, not default.  Pleasantly husky.  Angel?  O’Connor didn’t even have time to get himself killed at the bar.  How did he manage to pick up some girl?  The shower shuts off–he didn’t recognize it as such until it stops.  Rattling rings.  A shower curtain?  How quaint.  Then he sits up straighter as Angel steps into the room.  Wrapped in a towel and dripping on the hardwood floor, she’s built like a refrigerator with tits.

“My name is Angel,” she says, appearing as uncomfortable as he is.

She’s got a mass of hair like exploding fireworks, startling green eyes, and the ugliest face he has ever seen.  And just like that, he knows her.  The bouncer from the bar.

A soft chime, and the AI says calmly, “Miss Angel, two people are at the door.  One identifies herself as Renata Steinhardt, and her biometrics check.”

O’Connor’s head throbs worse.  Just what he needs, to deal with his manager right now.

“Hey, litt–um–Mr. O’Connor?  You up to meeting people, or should I tell them to get lost?”

O’Connor watches her speak, fascinated by the interplay of facial muscles with mouth.  Her diction is clear, but her face looks so odd while she’s doing it that he has trouble understanding her.  Then he cradles his head.  “Might as well get it over with.”

“Okay.”  She hesitates.  “Uh, if you could get the door, I’ll throw some clothes on and be right back.”

Stumbling to the door, he sees an old-fashioned door knob that House has kindly illuminated.  I remember those, he thinks.  With some reluctance he turns it and pulls the door open.

“Gene,” Renata says with a smile, her blonde hair flipped just so, her expression a model of concern, her conservative charcoal gray suit looking even more sprayed on than usual.  She flows through the door and lays cool, dry palms against his cheeks, which leaves her shiny, pointy, blood-red fingernails uncomfortably close to his eyes.  “Gene, how are you?  You took quite a hit.  If I’m not mistaken, Angel left something for your head in the kitchen–”

“Who’s that?” O’Connor interrupts her, looking beyond.  The man is tall and slender, but tall is always in and slender doesn’t necessarily require a mod, so that tells O’Connor nothing.  What’s more informative–or frightening–is that he’s studying O’Connor with an odd mix of appraisal and barely-repressed excitement, like a black lab that sells insurance.

“This,” says Renata, ushering him forward, “is Ethan Barlow, from Voyeuristics.”  She smiles, the one that says, “My shit tastes like sugar and honey, you are going to like it.”  Suddenly O’Connor’s head hurts a lot more.

“Well,” he says with feigned cordiality, “Renata and Ethan Barlow from Voyeuristics.  Please come in and have a seat.  The lady of the house–”

“Would like to know what you want.”  Angel has reappeared from the back of the apartment.  She’s wearing something shapeless that de-emphasizes the muscles and the tits, but unfortunately accentuates her features.  She deposits two ratty canvas camp chairs on the floor and then drops onto the couch.  Angel is apparently unaccustomed to guests.

Renata and Barlow exchange a glance and gingerly seat themselves.  The chairs are old enough to have been built for a shorter populace; Barlow’s knees nearly bump his chin.

O’Connor decides to stand.

“Well,” says Renata, tapping a perfect dagger of a nail once against her knee.  She turns to Gene.  “You’ve probably noticed by now that you’re not dead.  But don’t think of it as a botched suicide.  Think of it as an opportunity.”  She pauses and leans forward, her hair falling fetchingly over one eye.  Once upon a time O’Connor had thought to offer his services for brushing it back–among other things–but Renata has her own mods, and it all gets sublimated to the Big O of the Deal.

“An opportunity to do what?”

Her smile locks in place and his gut tightens.  “I got us a WIP.”

“A what?”

Barlow unleashes his inner labrador.  “A WIP, Gene–you don’t mind if I call you Gene, do you?  A World in Progress, hosted by the top producers in the business–Voyeuristics.  We see a lot of potential in you two.  You working out your suicidal angst with your sweet Angel’s tender care.  And assistance from an audience of helpful Voyeurs, of course.  We’ve got the initial installment ready to upload.  All you need to do is eyeball the Yes box and we’ll bring in the rest of the scram cams– ”

Maybe it’s time to sit.  O’Connor wobbles to the couch and sinks down beside Angel.  “Back up.  A World in Progress?”

“They want to turn our lives into virtual reality-based programming,” explains Angel, less than thrilled.

O’Connor turns to her, realizes he can handle the eyes without too much trouble, nods.  He turns back to Barlow.  “How can you have the first installment?  All you’ve got is a little bit of scram cam footage.”

“No, we’ve got some great security footage from Mod World,” says Barlow.  “And believe me, our editors are top-notch–”

“Security footage?  That’s illegal.”

Metaphorically speaking, Barlow retreats to the corner and slaps Renata’s palm.  “Don’t be ridiculous.  It’s perfectly legal.  We all have a right to personal surveillance that isn’t being used in a criminal or a terrorist case.”

“Yes, we.  Me.  Angel and I.”

“No, Gene.  You, or your properly authorized representative.  Me.  Angel, or the establishment by which she is employed.  Mod World.  We’ve got some kick-ass footage.”

“No.”

“You don’t have a choice, Gene.”  Renata keeps smiling, but her voice is cold.

“The hell I don’t.”

“You didn’t make it to hell, Gene.  You’re still in my world.”

Barlow and Angel both look like somewhere else would be a damned fine place to be.

“Mod World,” says Renata.  “Eleven million dollars damage.  Fifteen patrons and workers of same hospitalized, their bills racking up.  Twenty-two separate lawsuits filed, asking over three hundred million in punitive–”

“Do I give a shit?  You’re my executor.  I’ll just finish what I started and you pay them off.”  If he can’t, Renata can book another fight.  His current notoriety should pull in enough viewers to make it worthwhile.

“Not with claims against the estate.  Your permit is hereby suspended.”

“Permit?” says Angel.  “Wait–”

“It’s not just you the club is after,” Renata continues.  There’s Angel.  She hauled your ass out of there.  That’s aiding and abetting, good for some jail time.”  Her voice has gone shrill and she stops, sucks in a breath.  “Really, Gene, you’re both in a very untenable position right now.  It would be best for you and Angel to sign.”

O’Connor wouldn’t have minded dragging Muscle Boy into the soup, but–he’s surprised to discover–not Angel.  Damn.  First time Renata’s ever nailed him on a moral issue.  “If I sign–”  He jerks a thumb at Angel.  “–she’s okay?”

Renata nods.  “Everything goes away.  Just so long as you hold up your end of the deal.”

He nods, eyeballs the contract, hears the ping as his ID is confirmed, leans back, blinking.

Angel grabs his arm and pulls him around.  She’s very strong, her fingertips digging into his biceps.  She studies him, and he forces himself to meet her eyes.  “You had a permit?”

O’Connor nods.

“What happens to you if I don’t sign?”

O’Connor shrugs.

“You bastard.  Give me that.”  She eyeballs the contract, then holds it out for Renata to take, only she doesn’t let go.  “This WIP of yours will not drag on forever.”

“Don’t worry.  Tastes are fickle.” Renata’s wry smile broadens dramatically when Angel lets go.

Barlow claps his hands.  “Excellent.  We need to get you two prepped for the first Shared Scene™–”

“What language is he speaking?”

Renata laughs.  She’s relaxed now, playful.  “There’s a reason this is called ‘virtual’ reality programming.  The Shared Scenes™ are scenarios you and Angel act out while Voyeuristics techs do some mo- and emo-capture.  That way your devoted Voyeurs can share in the experience.”

“Are we going to be doing that all the time?”

Barlow shakes his head.  “Too expensive.  We also offer Real Life™–”

“Basic footage of you and Angel.  Appropriately edited of course,” says Renata.

Angel’s been quiet since she signed, but now she clears her throat.  “There’s already a scenario?”

Renata grins.  “You two are going to bond over a common interest.  Gene is going to teach you to box.”

Almost–almost–O’Connor reaches for the contract, or, failing that, Renata’s throat.  But really, what else does he have to offer?  What else does he have?  “Fuck bonding,” he mutters.  “They just want to see a fight.”

“Well, sparring is uniquely suited to Shared Scenes™,” says Barlow.  “A lot of sensory input.  It’s as good as food.  Or sex,” he adds thoughtfully.

There’s an agonized silence.

“Then we’ll give them a fight,” says Angel.  All three turn to look at her.  She’s blushing a furious red, but her smile is fierce.

Bouncer Babe vs. Boxing Bomber

“Why’d you sign?  You know you don’t want to be here.”

O’Connor, and every voyeur on the O’Connor channel, steps back and sighs.  We are stripped to the waist and covered with sweat, our hands encased in thick focus pads.  His lips move, and through the magic of Shared Scenes™ we each say, “Fuck this shit,” we feel the blocky pads immobilizing our hands, we’re maddened by the itch of sweat. We look at Angel, who is also stripped down, but not to the waist.  That wild flame-red mane hangs limp in a sweat-soaked pony-tail, sweat highlights the exquisite balance of her musculature, sweat drips into her blazing green eyes, sweat puddles and pools in the misshapen lumps of her pudding-bowl face.  “No, I don’t want to be here.”

Angel flushes, and we Angels feel our cheeks burn.  “Don’t tell me you’re doing it for me.”

O’Connor shrugs.  “Do you want to lose everything?”

“Don’t you?”

Our O’Connor eyes narrow.  “Again. Keep your guard up this time.  Cover your face.”

A choir of Angels stand flat-footed on the gym floor (workout space courtesy of Technical Knock Out, Silicon Valley’s premier boxing gym), hands, encased in bulky bag gloves, dead at our sides. We began this session in a buoyant mood, but O’Connor’s incessant pounding, his small cruelties, his anger have taken their toll.  “I know how to fight.  It’s my job.”

“You don’t know how to box,” O’Connor snaps.  He whips up the focus pads and smacks them together.  The slap rings through the gym.  Angel’s head jerks as though he hit her with a cattle prod, while we members of her hovering flock need no subsonics or needle stims to feel the shock.  “Hands up.  Hands up!  Chin down, shoulders down, elbows in.  You must erect an impenetrable defense for your most important weapon–your mind.”  He smacks the pads together again and pulls the left one away.  The right stays up in front of his face.  Angel jabs at it half-heartedly.

“Faster,” O’Connor says.  Smack–left pad up.  Angel jabs.  Smack–right pad angled down.  Angel pivots into an uppercut.  “Waist, waist,” says O’Connor.  “Power comes from the waist.”  Smack–left pad angled down.  Angel shifts weight and punches again.  “On your toes.  Pivot on your toes.  Relax your shoulders.  Drop your elbows.  Keep moving.  Keep moving.”

Smack–punch, smack–punch, and O’Connor circles around, making Angel follow.  Her breath comes hoarse and harsh, her guard slowly drops, the punches come slower, but he doesn’t let up.  We Angels feel a hint of breathlessness, a tiny thread of fire in our arms, our chests, but this is a WIP™ and the Shared Scene™ has been edited for all fitness levels.  There’s just enough pain for us to convince ourselves we share it, while leaving us smug–we’d be stronger, we’d be faster, we’d last longer.  Poor Angel.  We can sympathize.  How dare O’Connor treat her like this?  Maybe Muscle Boy deserves another shot….

Until we switch to O’Connor.  He’s modless, remember?  He doesn’t have Angel’s effortless muscles, Angel’s bottomless lungs.  He’s hurting, too, but he’s not letting on.  There might be something to this Pro Athlete stuff after all.  We can afford O’Connor grudging respect.

Then he reaches out over Angel’s dropped guard and slaps her with the focus pad.  The pain of the slap is a sweet shock and our heads rock with it.  “Guard up,” he barks.  She stumbles back two steps, shakes her head, and comes at him again.  Only now her punches aren’t aimed at the focus pads.  They’re snapping out towards O’Connor’s face and we Angels are digging it, thinking, closer, closer.  He drops his hands and O’Connors the world over laugh at her, bobbing, weaving, face never quite at the point of her fist.

“You say you can fight,” he jeers at her.  “Jesus, how can you fight when you’re so damned slow?”  A wild swing leaves her open and he slaps her with the pad again.  “Keep your guard up.  Gotta protect that pretty face–your mama must have loved you soooo much to give you such a pretty face–”

Angel covers the ground between them with a wicked-fast back step and launches a side thrust kick straight at O’Connor’s mid-section that the editors don’t even try to leave in and we O’Connors are left to watch as he staggers back, struggles to suck in air.  Slowly he straightens, his eyes–our eyes–fixed on Angel’s red face, and there’s no need to feed us his rage.

Even as he’s stripping off the pads O’Connor’s eyes are on Angel’s face.  He doesn’t see or doesn’t want to see her look of horror, he can’t feel the cold that’s seized her and her choir; he throws the pads to the floor and stalks towards her, hands coming up, weight going forward, and then he’s shuffling, he’s dancing, he’s raining a flurry of bare-fisted punches that Angel doesn’t return until finally she drops to her knees with her arms over her head and huddles there, and only her Angels know she’s crying.

O’Connor backs off.  The blank face of O’Connor the boxer turns slack and his eyes grow wide and wild. He turns away, hands on his hips, blowing out quick breaths, not looking.

Angel’s ragged gasps fade into sniffles and hiccups, then coughs and silence.  Then a cleared throat.  “I guess we gave them their fight,” she whispers.  At her words, all the Angels, all the O’Connors–we’re suddenly ourselves, and some of us are peeved.  What poor form.

Finally, O’Connor looks around.  Angel is climbing slowly, stiffly to her feet.  “Why did you?” he asks hoarsely.

“What?  Sign the contract?”

“Why did you have to fucking interfere?”

Angel’s fists, trapped in blocky gloves, flap helplessly before her.  “I didn’t want you to–you were so graceful, standing there.  Up on the bar.  You were so beautiful–”  She stops.  We’re back with them as Angel lifts her chin and looks O’Connor square in the face. “Yes, my mama did love me,” she says, and countless Angel hearts break, countless O’Connors look away in shame.

O’Connor goes to her, pulls her gloves down, forces her chin up, studies her face.  Stops when he reaches her eyes, tries to look away, can’t.  “I’m sure she did,” he says, and means it.

It’s time to Have Your Say!  Is Gene just a big meanie?  Does he deserve a rematch with Muscle Boy?  Or should Angel get the chance to go a few rounds with Gene’s demons?

• Give him to Muscle Boy already!
• Let Angel decide!

Vote now for a chance to win the latest in VR ModWare.  Tired of clunky earbuds and itchy PodPatches?  Get a PodPlant and vocalize!  Don’t just listen to the music!  Be the music….

#

Just what does Angel see in a modless mini-male?  And why does Clean Gene want to leave the scene? Watch close for clues!

Where do you want to go?

• Real Life™: Does She or Doesn’t She?
• Voyeur Poll: What Makes an Angel Do the Things She Does?
• Shared Scene™: Party Time!
• Have Your Say!

Does She or Doesn’t She?

A Voyeuristics security detail whisks O’Connor and Angel from the gym and into a waiting limo.  The muscle’s been chosen for height as well as breadth and completely encloses the pair in a ring of armor; the limo’s shielded.  The curious who want to see our sullen stars must ante up.  Those of us with chips in the pot wait in breathless anticipation.

Angel throws herself into the back seat and plasters herself against the door, as far from O’Connor as she can manage.  She stares at the shiny black window and comes face to face with her own reflection.  She closes her eyes.

O’Connor, ill at ease, steals glances at Angel.  “Stop looking at me,” says Angel.

O’Connor pauses to consider his words, and bets flash through the fiber.  What was your mother thinking? is odds-on favorite; few credit O’Connor with the tact not to say it.  You have a wonderful personality is a far distant second.

“I’ll bet a lot of that could be fixed.”

Silent appreciation from voyeurs everywhere; silence from Angel.  She doesn’t move, but her reflection shows her eyes snap open.  “At least I can be fixed,” she says.  “I don’t think the mods exist that could fix you.”

“There’s nothing left to fix,” he mutters.

“Give me a break.”  Angel snorts in derision.  “Explain to me why you can’t have mods.”

“Aside from some fifty-year-old laws still on the books and a sadistic old man who wanted me to be a rerun of his own life, there’s nothing to explain.”

“Then get some tinkering done after you retire,” she says, but it’s not the same, and they both know it.

As if on cue, the limo pulls over and coasts to a stop.  The doors slide open, letting in harsh sunlight.  The two climb out of the limo and into their cage of muscle with its roof of cameras, ducking their heads and hunching their shoulders against the sun’s onslaught.  The city truly comes alive at night; no matter what the season, only at night is the air cool enough for the mostly muscle-bound club-crawling throngs to radiate away the heat they generate themselves.

But someone else is out.  Someone waits for them at the security entrance to Angel’s shabby, genteel apartment complex.  Two scram-cams shoot forward to claim better angles.  The muscle at the front peels off to the side, while the rest urge O’Connor and Angel up the steps.  And there he stands, no armor but a lot of attitude.

Muscle Boy.

O’Connor and Angel stop and squint upward.  Muscle Boy glares down at them, his two-and-a-half meters made taller by his vantage point at the top of the stairs.  His arms are crossed, showing off biceps and triceps, and his skin-tight short-shorts display his quads to best advantage.  His sheer, sleeveless tank reveals the mood tats roiling across his stomach and chest.  He also sports two black eyes–the mark of a broken nose.  O’Connor smiles.

“Give him to me, Angel,” growls Muscle Boy.

O’Connor starts past Angel, fist clenched.  “Sure, give me to him,” he says.

Angel nearly clotheslines the boxer with a casually-outthrust arm.  “What are you talking about–you’re Mark, aren’t you?  You’re a regular.”

Muscle Boy’s tats shift to a delicate, blushing pink and he squirms.  “Not any more.  Got it legally changed to Muscle Boy.”

“Working a few deals on the side?”  Angel smiles.  “Be happy with those, Mark.”

“No.  The Voyeuristics geek said I had to ask you, but I’m telling you.  Give him to me.”

“No.”

Muscle Boy drops his arms to his sides, fists like rocks at the end of thick chain, but the Voyeuristics goons are right there.  Scram-cams whirl and hum.  “He registered intent.  I’ll just help him along.”

“I don’t care.”

“You don’t care what he did?  You saw it!”

Angel’s outstretched arm folds into an elbow in O’Connor’s chest and he staggers back two steps while Angel climbs.  “Yes, Mark, I saw what he did.  He used you.  Just like Voyeuristics is using you now.  Go home.  I like you too much to say yes.”

“You’re officially on my shit list with this, Angel.”

Angel shrugs.  The Voyeuristics goons crowd Muscle Boy back as Angel and O’Connor ascend the stairs and Angel peers into the lock.  The door snicks open.  Angel turns that wide green eye on O’Connor.  “Besides, I just got my hands on you myself.”

#

O’Connor moves into Angel’s apartment.  He protests; it’s too small.  Angel should move into his house.

No self-respecting voyeur would allow that.  O’Connor’s house is so big that Angel and O’Connor might never see each other.  “That’s the point,” mutters O’Connor.  Oh, say the voyeurs with their vote, but it’s not.

#

Angel likes to read.  Books.  O’Connor doesn’t even know where she gets them.

#

O’Connor surprises everyone, including himself, with a talent for cooking.  Angel tells him that when the WIP is over maybe he can take lessons.  O’Connor refuses to speak for the rest of the day.

#

Angel lets slip that she remembers her grandfather watching O’Connor’s father box.  O’Connor refuses to speak for the rest of the day.

#

O’Connor jokingly asks Angel if she has a sister.  Angel refuses to speak for the rest of the day.

#

“A call from Ms. Steinhardt,” House announces, as Renata’s face pops up on the big wall screen.  O’Connor’s manager has a new gig: she is Voyeuristic’s main mama, the go-to gal for keeping O’Connor and his lady-friend in line.  She gives them the news, the views, and their next assignments.  O’Connor looks forward to her calls; official WIP business stays off the grid.  For the short time Renata’s on-screen, the cameras vanish.

Renata seems to like the job too much.  ”How are my favorite kids?” she coos.

“Just waiting to get our chains yanked,” says O’Connor.

“Hah.  Well, first of all, you both need to stop looking at the scram-cams, and don’t refer to your voyeurs in the third person.  Throws them out of the scene.  That said, the numbers for the boxing match were great and the forum buzz was even better.  Gene, I’d advise you to keep acting like an asshole.”

O’Connor snorts.

“Has the next scenario been chosen?” asks Angel.  She sounds nervous and O’Connor can’t really blame her.

“As a matter of fact, yes.  You’re being rewarded for putting up with the asshole, Angel.  Gene is going to take you dancing at Mod World.  You’ll get to see all your friends.”

Whatever Angel expected to hear, that wasn’t it.  She flushes and starts to babble.  “I–I don’t really dance–I’m just a bouncer, and they’re not really my friends–”

“Oh, it’ll be fun,” says Renata, waving off her protests.  “At least, it’d better be.  Thirty-four million voyeurs are expecting it to be fun.”

The flush drains from Angel’s face.

“But no body armor.  Everyone wants a good look at their Beauty and their Beast.”  She looks at their blank faces, and her lips peel back from her teeth.  O’Connor half-expects to see blood, and not hers.  “Oh, that’s right.  You don’t have net access.  Beauty and the Beast is the name of the WIP.  But don’t worry, Gene.”  Renata’s smile fills the screen.  “You’re not the Beast.”  The screen goes blank.

Red lights blossom on the scram-cams in time to catch Angel sagging to the couch, O’Connor with her.  He waits for her, for whatever she gives him–anger, hurt, denial.  He just waits.  In a way, it feels good.

Finally she looks up from under her brows at the scram-cams and says, in a voice so quiet he has to strain to hear, “Do you think they understand we’re real people?”

O’Connor’s arm goes around her and she rests her head on his shoulder.  “I don’t know,” he says.  “Are we?”

Voyeur Poll: What Makes an Angel Do the Things She Does?

• Thinks O’Connor’s hot
• Identifies with his position as shunned outsider
• Got that Girl Scout oath to think about
• This is all a publicity stunt
• How else is she ever gonna get some?

Party Time!

The doorman opens the passenger door of the limo and offers a hand to bouncer and boxer alike.  We are ushered past a gauntlet of the mod-aly correct.  Some of us see friends, and not a few mods in the crowd get that fuzzy-eyed look that signals a message coming in.  The rest wave and babble, hailing Angel, eyeing O’Connor.  She ducks her head shyly (look up, look up!), but O’Connor eyes them right back.  He’s used to this.  It’s like making the long walk from the locker room to the ring.  He might not be strutting, but we are. This has to be the biggest Shared Scene™ ever captured.  Usually the producers want to keep a tight lid on the number of variables, but this night has possible permutations out the wazoo.

O’Connor grips the door handle and most of us flash back to the scram-cam footage of that first night.  Déjà vu all over again.  We usher Angel through the door, so polite, and she pauses on the threshold, peering in.  The Angels in our midst peer with her, hearts pounding, mouths dry.

Voyeuristics editors are toning down her emo-feed, but we can tell she’s miserable and we don’t know why.  She looks as good as we can make her; after beating back a last minute bid by some of the more psych-trippy among us to dress her in current baby mod fashions, we picked a pretty darned slash bit of fetish wear if we do say so ourselves: a black latex bodysuit that makes her muscles sleek instead of chunky, enough sharp, silvery, pointy objects to draw attention from her face, and barbed wire in her hair.  We see her people waiting for her, waving to her, ready to pull her into the noise, the heat, the bouncing bods.  She should be thrilled, but–she’s not.  A solid percentage of Angels get fed up with the freak-out and transfer to O’Connor.

Who is not thrilling, but neither is he freaking.  We slip into the club next to Angel and take her elbow.  Angels say “Oww.”  O’Connors don’t notice, just scan the club.

Which has been cleaned up, but major fixes are still on the way.  Most of the holo projectors got taken out and several of the antique mirrored balls are missing a few squares of glass.  Black angular shapes mar the sparkling orbs spinning overhead, like the anti-Tetris descending.  But management has improvised.  A cocktail waitress rushes up with two fiber-web tunics, and Angels and boxers note that many of the patrons are wearing them, spinning in the laser mini-spots scattered around the room, torsos sparkling like jewel dust.  A sudden intake of breath from Angel and her mood lightens.

“Thank you, Casey,” Angel yells at the cocktail waitress as she takes the offered drink.  O’Connor ignores them both and all the Angels shrug.  Guys are universal.

O’Connor is still scanning, still emo-free, and we O’Connors are starting to understand.  He’s looking for Muscle Boy.  And if Muscle Boy isn’t here, the next Muscle Boy in line will do.  Now that we know what to look for, we see muscle mods of all sexes and stripes eyeing us right back.  They wouldn’t mind a piece of what the original M.B. got, and they know how to get their own.  Anticipation grips us.  Fiber flashes; bets are placed. We start to enjoy the ride.

Casey the cocktail waitress is helping Angel with the sparkly tunic, but it keeps getting caught in the barbed wire and spikes.  They finally get it tugged down, and Casey ducks in to kiss Angel on the cheek.  Her lips are soft, and she smells like booze and hot bodies and excitement.  “We’ve missed you,” she says in Angel’s ear, and squeezes her hand.  We Angels feel it, feel how much Angel wants to keep hold.  Then Casey scoots for the bar.  Marty the bartender waves.

Angel rubs her cheek.  Angel is astonished.  We don’t even see O’Connor leave our side.  And when waving hands and laughter beckon from the dance floor, no one is there to hold us back.

O’Connors head for the bar.  He orders club soda (disappointing millions) and Marty eyes us as he slides the drink over the scratched surface.  O’Connor shrugs and shows his hands, palms up, as though to say, “What?  Li’l ole me?”  Then he turns and we resume scan mode.  The biggest bet burning the fiber: is O’Connor looking to stay out of trouble, or looking to start it?

The Angels are having a wonderful time.  We’re strutting our stuff, bubbly and breathless, and who would have thought the ugly girl could dance?

A tall woman, all wiry grace, joins us at the bar.  She’s an eclectic mix of mods; body and beauty, faddish and fetish.  She’s dressed in tats and a loincloth and heavy boots that end at the knee; across her face floats a butterfly tat all done in biolume ink.  The antennae are feathery implants replacing her eyebrows.

We check her out, but then O’Connor goes back to scanning the crowd.  Most of us want him to scan her some more.  She’s a hottie.  “You know those are more like moth antennae,” he says.

“Artistic license.”

He glances sideways and we see her smile.

“Looking for Muscle Boy?  He’s not here tonight.  Asking price was too high.”  Instead of yelling, she leans down to speak into his ear.  We can feel her breath tickle.

“Are you all extras?” he asks.

“Depends on what you mean by ‘extra.’”  She turns to the bartender.  “Marty, double Blood on the Wire, no ice.”  She turns back to scan the crowd with us.  “Not in our own lives.  Are you an extra?”

O’Connor laughs at that, full and hearty.  “Finally, somebody understands me.”

“Anyway, for what it’s worth, we extras have our orders.  You will not be molested tonight.”

O’Connor finally turns to look her full in the face.  Our eyes meet.  Hers are a vivid orange-gold, to match her hair.  Is that a hitch in O’Connor’s breathing?  “Unless I want to be molested, is that it?”

Just let him stay dead to the Butterfly Woman’s slow smile.

O’Connor nods.  Wait.  Is that anger he’s starting to bleed out into his emo-feed?  “So you can’t kill me, but you can fuck me.  Think that’ll get you as good a deal as Muscle Boy’s?”

Nooooooooo…….

Butterfly Woman’s smile remains.  “Maybe.  If I give a good performance.”  She leans closer.  “So, what do you say?  Shall we leave your little troll here to dance the night away?  We can just do it in the limo.  It’s gotta be wired, right?”

Yesyesyesyesyesyes–

A scream cuts towards us from the dance floor.

We Angels have been dancing, dancing, finally trying out all those moves she’s only watched for so long, and if we’re in a crowd instead of with that special someone, well, that’s okay.  We’re pretty good.  We’re surprised, but Angel’s not.  She probably practices at home.  Alone.  In the dark.  With a teddy bear.

But now all these friends we didn’t know she had are swinging us, twirling us, laughing, pushing drinks into our hand that we just spill onto the floor.  We’re dizzy and giddy and the music is thumping deep in our chest, and when we look up at the DJ, Sneeky Pete tonight, he waves.  Casey says they missed us.  Angel dances, Angel sparkles, Angel shines.

Hands spin Angel one more time and then stop us, hold us steady to face someone across the suddenly clear floor.  We look about, confused, uncertain, but the hands won’t let go until we look across the dance floor again.  The someone is a woman–tall, blonde, impossibly beautiful.  She waves.

Fear pours into us, and Angel screams.  Hands push her forward and she–we–fight and flail, struggling to bulldoze our way through the wall of hard bodies behind us.  The fear is so sudden, so complete, that some of us really flail.  There will be bruises when we come out of this, from chairs and tables and walls.  There will be bruises and civil suits that Voyeuristics has probably already budgeted for.

“Angel!  What’s wrong?  Let her go–let her go.”  O’Connor has somehow fought his way through the crowd.  Angel clings to his voice, and the blessed relief that pours into us is a heady brew.  She reaches for him but stops, huddled into herself in the widening space on the dance floor.  The fear has been washed away to leave shame.  Not many Angels stay with her now.

But O’Connor joins Angel in the center of quiet circle and we study the crowd, cold fury barely suppressed.  “What did you do to her?  Answer me.”

“Shit, it’s just Katrina in some temp mods,” says an Anger Junkie in the back.  “Tell her to stop over-reacting.  Ruins it for everybody.  Pisses me off.”

“My mommy makes me fweak,” lisps a Baby Doll to general laughter.  “Now I need changing!”

O’Connor studies Angel in surprise.  “Angel?”

“Home,” says Angel.  She’s shivering.  Too soon, too soon! “I want to go home.”

O’Connor hesitates.  His eyes find the woman with the butterfly face, but then he takes Angel’s hand.  As we escort her through the crowd, Butterfly Woman slides up to us and bends down.  “Ask your Voyeuristics bitch,” she breathes in our ear.  O’Connor looks up, startled.  We nod grudgingly.  “Look me up when you’re out,” says the woman, and slides back into the crowd.

It’s time to Have Your Say!  Both our kids have family issues aplenty, don’t they?  Clean Gene forced into the Old Man’s mold, and Angel–well, Angel’s mold broke itself, shall we say.  Maybe being more like Mama would do her good.  What do you think?

• Fix Angel’s face
• Who cares?  Just give O’Connor to Muscle Boy

Vote now and win an image capture session with Alternate Dimensions, Imagers to the stars!  Screw inner beauty!  Let them appreciate your outer beauty with a full portfolio of professional images…

#

We’ve seen a few tantalizing teasers about the whys and the wherefores of our kids.  But does past mean future?  Let’s find out!

Where do you want to go?

• Real Life™: Will She or Won’t She?
• Voyeur Poll Results: So What’s Gene’s Problem, Anyway?
• Shared Scene™: Skin Deep
• Have Your Say!

Will She or Won’t She?

“No.” O’Connor shakes his head.  His fists are clenched and he consciously relaxes them.  “I will not help you do this to her.”

“Oh, come on,” says Renata.  “I let your little girlfriend leave Mod World early, didn’t I?”  She’s had something done to her eyes and they look all pupil, with highlights like shiny glass windows over bottomless pits.  “That stunt cost us a lot of money.”

“You let us leave.  That’s rich.  And she’s not my little girlfriend.”  Thank god Angel has taken to vanishing into her room whenever Renata calls.

“Oh, right.  You’ve got Madame Butterfly waiting for you.  But first, I figure you owe me.”

“You owe her.”

Renata sighs.  “We need drama, Gene.  We need emotion.  Nicey-nice not good for numbers.”

“But torturing a kid is?”

“Christ.”  Renata closes those strange eyes.  “The whole ‘wounded bird’ gig is fine so far as it goes, but her voyeurs want Angel to be happy.  They want her to move on.  And, to be honest, they’re tired of looking at that face.  It’s time for her to get it fixed.”

A sharp cry rings out from the back of the apartment.  “No.  Take it off the list.  Take it off the list now.”  Her voice is getting louder.

“Convince her, Gene,” says Renata.  “The vote’s tonight and we don’t want any trouble.”  The screen goes dark just as Angel storms into the room.

“How the fuck did you know–”  He stops.  Poor, pathetic, modless male.  Just because he needs the screen doesn’t mean Angel does.  “Do you always eavesdrop?”

Angel glares at him.  Yes, she always eavesdrops, and Renata knows she does.  “She’s not my little girlfriend–”

His face burns.

She stops in front of him, shaking with anger.  She looks exhausted, her eyes shadowed, their hectic glitter caused by unshed tears.  “I will not get my face ‘fixed.’”

He takes a deep breath.  Maybe it’s time for a little bit of truth, after all.  “Angel, that’s stupid.”

He’s learned to read her face well enough to watch it dissolve from anger into anguish.  “Don’t you think I know what I look like?”

“Then change it.  For god’s sake, get something out of this farce.”

All her fire and fury doused, Angel wavers like smoke.  She looks around, at the empty room, the bare walls, and manages an ugly laugh.  “I love this.  Life lessons from a guy who wants to kill himself.”

“Don’t tell me you can’t use ‘em.  How long have you been living like you’re already dead?”

Angel sucks in a shallow breath.

“You don’t have to keep it,” says O’Connor.

“What?”

“After this is over, you could have your old face put back on.  I would pay for that, you know.  If that’s what you really want.”

Angel looks away.  She’s obviously never considered the possibility before.  The words frighten.  The words fascinate.  “I–I’ll have to think about it.”

He nods.

“They may not even vote for it, anyway.”

He nods again.

She stands motionless, still tense but no longer shaking with anger.  “Gene?”

“What?”

“Would I have to be beautiful?”

He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  “Well–no.  You could just look a little more–normal.”

Angel nods.  “Okay,” she says, as if tasting the word, savoring O’Connor’s expression as he hears it.  “Okay.”

Voyeur Poll Results: So What’s Gene’s Problem, Anyway?

• Some chick blew him off  – 6%
• Succumbed to existential despair  – 3%
• Thought he could win - 2%
• This is all a publicity stunt  – 13%
• What else is there for a modless has-been? - 76%

Skin Deep

It’s been a rough few weeks with no Real Life™, no Shared Scenes™, but we’re all here now with Angel and O’Connor, waiting to see the new face.  The process has been grueling; laser sculpting and bone grafts, sheets of vat-grown muscle and subcutaneous actuators, cartilage and collagen and gene-therapied skin.

We Angels sit rigid in a straight-backed chair, concentrating on the feel of bandages swathing our faces, the feel of O’Connor’s hand in ours.  We don’t want to concentrate on the pounding of our heart, our strangled breathing.  More than one Angel gets booted from the Shared Scene™, in danger of hyperventilating.

O’Connor is no fun, either.  He hasn’t been sleeping, he hasn’t been eating, we feel heavy and slow, yet at the same time hollow.  One arm is wrapped across our stomach because we could swear some rat is gnawing its way through our guts.

Right now we wish we could be Dr. Roberto Perez of the Bod Bodega.  Perez has performed all the major procedures himself and personally supervised Angel’s care.  He knows that Angel represents some of the best work he’s ever done and we’re all going to see it, we’re all going to be it.  We can see his pride in his cocky strut and in the way he unwraps Angel with care and precision, but with many a theatrical flourish.  We wouldn’t mind getting ourselves some of that.

What we don’t want is Angel or O’Connor right now.  Angel is about to pass out and O’Connor is about to throw up and this is not that kind of WIP, thank you very much.  All of us–every single last one of us–pull out and simply tap the scram cam feed.

As Perez snips away the last growth-hormone and anti-inflammatory-infused wrapping, we just about bust a gut.

Angel.  Is.  Gorgeous.

Not flashy, trashy, syntho-gorgeous, not artsy-fartsy, not Tribal or Retro or Analog–in fact, not like any style at all.  Just the Angel that we could all imagine was meant to be, with high cheekbones, a graceful chin, and pale skin as smooth and soft as a baby’s cheek.  In fact, if she wasn’t so perfect she would look unmod.  But somehow we know that if she looked too mod she would not look Angel.

The nurses and the orderlies and the physical therapist and the aesthetician and the esthetician and the cosmetologist and the hairdresser and the clothing designer (who of course has to see her face before he can even begin to design for her) all spontaneously applaud, and we do too, in our homes and our cars, our corners and cubes, wherever we’ve plugged in.  Perez does the honors, slowly lifting a mirror up to Angel, and we wait–we wait.  We wait for the tremulous smile, the look of gratitude cast toward her darling doctor, the meaningful gaze shared with O’Connor.  We wait for the joy, the wonder.  We wait.

For nothing.  Angel pushes the mirror away and sits silent.  Finally she looks up at O’Connor, who is staring at her with an expression that might be horror.  Or might be shame.

“You bastard,” she says.  And that’s all.

It’s time to Have Your Say!  Mysteries wrapped in enigmas–that’s our curious couple.  We try to help them, yes, we do.  Still, they’re never happy, never satisfied.  Should we try again?

• Give Angel to O’Connor
• Give O’Connor to Muscle Boy

Vote now for your chance to win your own new face, courtesy of The Bod Bodega, voted Best Resurfacing Shop in Silicon Valley for six years in a row….

#

With a beautiful Angel and an angry Muscle Boy both on the menu, no telling what exciting developments we’ve got for you. Remember: it all depends on what you voted for!

Where do you want to go?

• Real Life™: Should She or Shouldn’t She?
• Voyeur Poll Results: What Makes an Angel Do the Things She Does?
• Shared Scene™: Tender Moments
• Have Your Say!

Should She or Shouldn’t She?

Angel spends all her time locked in her room.

#

Renata chooses her words carefully.  “Actually, the numbers are fine,” she says.  “Better than ever, in some ways.”

“Then what are you complaining about?”

“It’s the pattern that worries us.  Our analysis shows that the voyeurs can’t comprehend Angel’s response.  She’s gorgeous.  For free!  And she hates it.  New ones plug in to see her bizarre behavior for themselves and die-hards plug in to see if she’s still acting like an idiot.  But they don’t stay, and repeat visits are farther and farther apart.”

“Give her a break.  That face wasn’t her choice.”  O’Connor can picture quite clearly the face Angel designed with Perez.  Not ugly, no.  Nice, in fact.  Rather pretty.  Not jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly gorgeous.  No, the voyeurs chose that one.

But on some level O’Connor has to agree.  Angel’s still built like a refrigerator with tits, but not only is her new face beautiful, it’s beautiful in a way that suits her–so well that O’Connor can no longer picture the old one.

Which doesn’t change the essential fact.  O’Connor sighs.  “Why can’t you just have Perez give her what she wants?”

Even with those eyes, Renata’s “are you nuts?” look is unmistakable.  “Not gonna happen.  Perez donated the face to the City of San Jose as a piece of public art. Any body shop that touches it would be nailed for defacing public property.”

“Renata, it’s her face.”

“Not according to Perez.  He owns his designs but signs away individual faces, and he says he never did that for Angel.”

A fuck-up with the contracts is Renata’s bailiwick.  He studies her and she stares back with those black marble eyes.  “Why should I help you?  When the numbers tank I’m outta here.”

Renata leans forward, blank black eyes fixed on O’Connor.  “Because this WIP is my baby and if you fuck it up you will regret it,” she says.  “Both you and Angel will regret it.  Trust me on that.”

Now he knows what those eyes remind him of. “You gonna have Perez do your gills?”

Renata smiles.

Voyeur Poll Results: What Makes an Angel Do the Things She Does?

• Thinks O’Connor’s hot  – 32%
• Identifies with O’Connor’s position as shunned outsider  – 5%
• Got that Girl Scout oath to think about  – 7%
• This is all a publicity stunt - 12%
• How else is she ever gonna get some? - 44%

Tender Moments

The v-sphere is buzzing tonight at the news of another ground-breaking Shared Scene™.  Angel and O’Connor just think she’s supposed to ‘fess up about why she hates the pretty, but Voyeuristics plans to pump a shitload of Phero-Moans into her apartment and let nature take its course.  That’s what we voted for.

The fibers burn with this one.  Polls, chats, boards, blogs are filled with it.  Eeeeeuuuuwwww, ick! is a big theme, but there are other voices.  Angel and O’Connor are both lonely.  They like each other.  Maybe we’re doing them a favor.

Besides, if it works, it could be fun.

Angel sits on the couch with something clutched in her hand, something small and rectangular that we can feel against her palm but that she picked up before we plugged in.  We don’t know what it is, but we know how it makes her feel to hold it–scared and sad and–resigned, somehow.

O’Connor sits in front of her in one of the ratty camp chairs, holding her other hand.  Angels and O’Connors are friends again–he told her he didn’t know Voyeuristics would swap faces on her and she believed him.  She trusts him.  She has no one else to trust.  With deep, shaky breaths we Angels feel bathe our fluttery hearts, she peels her fingers off the object on her palm, like the petals of a flower unfolding.

It’s a picture.  An old-fashioned photo, tiny, in a sweet little silver frame.  We recognize the woman instantly; every self-respecting voyeur has visited the site.  But O’Connor doesn’t know.  We rush to be him, to discover her again.

“Angel?”  We squeeze her free hand before taking the picture, before drawing in breath, before swallowing hard.  Even from such a tiny photo, certain aspects of Mama’s design work on him.  On us.  Or maybe it’s the Phero-Moans.

“It’s Mama,” Angel whispers.

“She’s beautiful.”

“I know.”  Such sadness sweeps through the choir of Angels.  We wish to pine away, and we don’t even know what the words mean.  “She was made that way.  When the first complete packages of mods were coming online, she got the Barbie package.”

We O’Connors wince.  We know what happened to the Barbies–the harassment, the rapes.  We look at Angel, our Angel, sweet Angel with downcast eyes.  Poor child!  No wonder she didn’t want to let go of her mother’s blessing, her mother’s curse.

Angels wait in silence for O’Connors to speak.  We feel breathless, a little dizzy, and very conscious of our beautiful boxer sitting so close.

“Where is she now?”

Ah, the question we hoped would not come.  Angel straightens, and Angels vow to be brave.  “She–is on permanent display at the Tech Museum.”

“What?”  O’Connor’s shock jolts us out of our subtle sense of excitement.  Damn.  Somebody should have told him before.

Angel cringes, her attraction overruled by fear.  Tears start.  Angels are astonished.  This is only the second time we’ve felt Angel cry.  Angel takes a deep breath and pushes back the tears.  Such a brave Angel!  “She left herself to the plasticizers.  She gave orders that she be displayed.  So she’ll always be a doll.”

Angel finally breaks down and collapses into O’Connor’s arms.  We hold and are held, cry and are comforted.  We wonder if anything more is even necessary.  “I can’t have this face,” Angel sobs.  “How will I know if I’m human?”

“Sweetheart, you are the most human person I know,” says O’Connor, brushing her hair back from her face.  So soft, O’Connors think.  So gentle, Angels think.  We gaze into each others’ eyes and then our own eyes slowly close….

Until a sudden start and a burst of rage floods from O’Connor.  “What the hell is going on here?” he cries.

In the instant before we are all forcibly unplugged, we Angels feel only a swift and bitter sorrow.

It’s time to Have Your Say!  In her room she sits, anguished, alone.  Like the story of the Greek sculptor who made his own marble Mod Girl come to life, only Angel has awakened to find her sculptor does not love her.

Is it time to shake things up?  What do you think?

• Give O’Connor to Muscle Boy
• Give Angel to Muscle Boy

Vote now for your chance to win–

#

There’s only one place to go.

Real Life™: Gotta Pay to Play

It’s after midnight when the Voyeuristics goons grab Angel.  They have to pull her from her room, but after her initial anger she goes quietly enough.

O’Connor is not quiet.  Two goons grip his arms–not gently–as three more escort Angel toward the door.  She smiles at him with that sweet, lovely face while he thunders and booms.

“Gene,” she says, “it’s all right.  I didn’t want this face anyway.”

He stops struggling.  He feels too sick to move.  The goons back away from him toward the door.  The last thing he sees is her calm, pale face floating in a cloud of scram-cams.

Count to five and he’s on the door, rattling the knob, shaking it, pounding, pounding, pounding.  One solitary scram cam buzzes behind him and he flails back at it, nearly connects.  “House,” he yells.  “Let me out!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. O’Connor.  I can’t do that.”

“Get Renata.”

The wall screen buzzes to life.  “What is it, Gene?  I’m busy.  We’ve got a Real Life™ to capture.”

“Let me out of here.”

She sighs.  “That’s not the way the vote went.”

“I don’t give a shit about the vote.  That’s a human being you’re sending off to get slaughtered.”

“Now, you don’t know that.”  She grimaces at him.  “Angel is a big girl, she can take care of herself.  In fact, I think that’s why the vote went the way it did.  Our voyeurs want to see a fight, and they don’t think you’d last long enough to give it to them.”
“Angel won’t fight him,” O’Connor mutters.  He sinks down on the couch, wondering how he knows this, but he does.

“What?”

“Please, Renata.  Let me out of here.”

She finally smiles, but it’s very cold.  “You are determined to piss away an opportunity that other people would kill for and you want me to help you.  You don’t know me very well, do you, Gene.”

“About as well as you know me.”  But eyeing Renata’s empty eyes and alien smile, O’Connor knows he’s wrong.  He no longer knows this woman–if he ever did.

The wall screen goes dark.

“Fuck.”  O’Connor bounces up, slams into the door, slams again.  The door doesn’t give, but his shoulder almost does.  He pictures Angel’s fierce kicks in his mind and lashes out.  The door shudders, but holds.

Wait.  Wait.  He’s made his way with his body, such as it is, for all his life.  This time he needs to think.

He prowls the apartment, searching for something he could use to break out.  Angel’s body armor–too big.  Angel’s boots and gauntlets–too small.  Nothing is just right.

O’Connor ends up in the back, in Angel’s bedroom, a territory that, until now, has been strictly off limits.

It’s very–utilitarian, which strikes him as sad.  If he had to guess, he’d say a robot sleeps here.  The only mark of her presence is the tiny photo of her mother on the nightstand.  O’Connor can see the golden yellow of her mother’s hair from the doorway.  And on the bedroom wall screen–

The wall screen in Angel’s bedroom shows the couch where O’Connor sleeps.

The scram cam is buzzing in his ears–O’Connor lunges for it, has its vibrating disk in his hands.  The buzz ratchets to a whine.

He peers into the lens.  “I know some of you assholes are still watching,” he says, his voice low and urgent.  “You may be so fucking plugged in you can convince yourselves you’re me, but you’re not.  You’re on the other side of that door.  And somewhere out there, one of you can use your fibers or wires or whatever the hell you have for guts to let me out.”

While he rants O’Connor navigates through the tiny apartment until he’s facing the door, all the while giving the lens the evil eye.  One hand snakes for the knob, rattles it–still locked.  He flings the scram cam hard enough to overpower its stabilizers and it slams into the far wall.  “Open the door, damn you.  Give-me-back-my-choice.”

The words ring, then drop into silence.

Into that silence, a faint click. “Sir, security breach–”

O’Connor is already out, the scram-cam wobbling after.

Mods own the streets at night.  O’Connor ignores the muggy, gritty heat, ignores the stench of urine and sweat and Phero-Moans and booze, but he can’t ignore them.  He looks straight forward instead of up into their eyes, ignores the gibes, the pats on the head, bounces off blocky arms that suddenly appear in his path, because he can’t be stopped.

Until he is.

A Mod plants himself right in O’Connor’s path.  Shuffle to the left, shuffle to the right, like a zombie pas de deux.  O’Connor has no choice.  He looks up.

Boar tusks and bristles, but not much else.  Not much else besides an evil grin, that is.  Two girls with fiber optic hair flank him.  They’re very pretty.  “You’re that O’Connor guy, aren’t you?” says Boar Tusk.

Not much point in denying it.  “Yeah, that’s me.  How’d you guess?”

If Boar Tusk hears the sarcasm, he doesn’t respond.  “News travels fast.”

“You going to rescue Angel?” asks Fiber Optics Girl on the Right in a breathless voice.

Boar Tusk laughs and O’Connor bristles.  Unbidden, the thought comes–Who needs Muscle Boy when I could piss off tusks like that?

He shakes himself and then meets their eyes, one mod at a time.  “Yeah, I’m going to rescue her.  Now if you’ll please step aside–”

Boar Tusk stops laughing when both girls tug on his arms.

“He’s smaller in person,” says one.

“I think it’s sweet,” says the other.

“Let him go,” they say in unison.

Boar Tusk looks at both girls and shrugs.  He steps aside with a flourish.  “After you.”

O’Connor eyes them for a moment, then nods once and hurries on.  When he realizes that Boar Tusk and the girls are running interference, he breaks into a run.

The front of Mod World is packed.  After all, tonight it’s the place to be, the place to see, the place to be seen.   Scram-cams after local color buzz the crowd, which buzzes back.  O’Connor pulls up, blowing.  He scans the façade.  How in the hell is he going to get in there?

He slowly begins to realize that he’s collected quite an entourage.  Butterfly Woman now stands beside Boar Tusk.  She leans down.  “Hi, again,” she says.

O’Connor pulls back.  “Still got a thing for freaks?”

She eyes him for a moment, as though considering his words.  “No, actually I’ve kinda got a thing for nice guys.”

O’Connor stares at her, speechless.  She laughs and grabs Boar Tusk, and the two mods break a path toward the door.  The Fiber Optics Twins take O’Connor’s elbows and hustle after.

Boar Tusk and Butterfly are arguing with the Mod World doorman as O’Connor arrives.  The brow ridge looks familiar and O’Connor squints at the nametag.  Rigo.  Rigo, who let him in the first night.  O’Connor grins.  Things are moving a bit fast for him, but in the right direction for once, and he feels like he’s riding a wave.  “I thought they’d fire you,” he says.

Rigo grins back and gestures at the crowd.  “It all worked out okay,” he says.  “She’s in there, you know.  So’s he.”

There’s a sudden rustle and outcry, and O’Connor looks over his shoulder.  Voyeuristics muscle is trying to cut through the crowd, but for some reason the crowd is no longer content to watch.  “Are you going to let me in this time?”

“Why should I?”

He looks over his shoulder at the goons, looks past Rigo at the door, pictures Angel in there facing Muscle Boy alone.

“She’s only human,” he says.

Rigo nods and steps aside as the Fiber Optics Twins cheer.  “Don’t know what difference you think you’re going to make.  You’re only human too.”

O’Connor smiles as he pushes past.  “You’ve got that right.”  He pulls open the door.

###

Lori Ann White is a SF Bay Area writer who recently escaped from technical writing as a day job and is now giddily exploring the SLAC National Accelerator Lab as a science writer.  Why, yes, that is a cool place to work, thank you.

Her work has appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, Polyphony, and other excellent periodicals, and is quite pleased to add Futurismic to that list.

Follow Futurismic on Twitter for more nuggets of near-future fun and weirdness!

Either which way, I’m super proud to have Stephen Gaskell return to the site with “Platform 17″. What would you do to cure your child’s nightmares? Would you go so far as to penetrate to their heart? And what might doing so make you become?

Enjoy!

Platform 17

by Stephen Gaskell

Orsi stroked her son’s head. He slept fitfully, his hair sweaty and matted. From time to time, he moaned, made a low, frightened noise like a cornered animal. She’d rocked him to sleep an hour earlier, then carried him to his bed with numb arms.

“Oh, kicsi,” she whispered, straightening the rumpled blankets. She thought about singing a lullaby, but immediately felt silly at the idea. Csaba was ten, not two.

He jerked his neck back, eyelids twitching. His whole body shuddered and his arm came up to his head as though he were about to shield himself from a blow. “No, no,” he muttered, frantic. The arm across his face trembled, then lurched downwards as if it were being moved against his will. Then, as the previous night and the five before, he began screaming. Not a hearty shriek, but a terrible, hoarse, broken wail like fingernails raking down a blackboard.

“Csaba!” Orsi gripped his shoulders, shook him. “Csaba, wake up! It’s only a dream.”

His eyes blinked open, but he kept screaming. His face was pale, horrified.

“What did he do to you?” Orsi said, hugging her son too hard. “What did your father do to you?”

His screams faded, became whimpers. He didn’t answer.

#

“I’m looking for László.”

It was the next day. Orsi, bleary-eyed, had brought Csaba into Budapest’s shattered Eighth District seeking the one man who might be able to help. Beneath cracked solar awnings and broken skylights they’d stumbled past abandoned vehicles, drifts of fallen masonry, and heaps of domestic detritus until they’d reached the subterranean bar.

Behind the barman, between the depleted stock of spirits, holographic ads blinked chaotically. He grinned, stretched his mouth wide. Orsi flinched. A reptilian tongue, long and forked, snaked out. The graft work was cheap. Bloody welts puckered his tongue. She’d heard of backstreet graft parlors in Bucharest and Sarajevo, but never seen the results. “In the corner,” he said, laughing. He flicked his head in the direction of one of the bar’s dark recesses.

The man sat alone, a vague silhouette nestled at the back of an alcove. When she got closer, Orsi saw he was rake thin, neck like a starved chicken, a pathetic straggle of hair hanging from the back of his head. His eyes were luminous though, enormous polished saucers as if he fed off light. A pair of spex sat on his table next to an untouched shot.

“What do you want?”

“This–” Orsi said with a fierce whisper, indicating Csaba “–is the eldest son of Zoltán Kiraly.”

#

Orsi had never met László, but she was well acquainted with his work nonetheless.  She’d learnt about his trade in fits and starts during her two awful years with Zoltán. For example:

One of Zoltán’s girls would come back to the house whimpering about a violent customer, face purpled like a bruised pear. Zoltán would rage then have her sent off to see László. She would come back woozy, muttering of an elaborate helmet and dark dreams. Or:

One of his girls would arrive back from a weekend on Lake Balaton at the pleasure of some high-ranking politician. She’d be ferried off to see László with Zoltán licking his lips and talking about insurance. Or:

A girl would throw a tantrum and refuse to visit a client. Zoltán would say, “Take her to László. Show her what happened to Anita.”

László was a memory peddler. With the right conditions, he could tease a memory out of a mind, then erase it or store it for others to see. For the boss of a prostitution ring that was a very useful skill.

Orsi had walked out of Zoltán’s house, if not his life, when she forced herself to see the full horror of his nasty little empire. The only reason she wasn’t beaten, wasn’t forced into a caged life like the rest of his women, was her swelling belly. She was with his child.

She was nineteen years old.

#

“If you’ve come for my services you’re out of luck. I’ve retired.”

“I know.”

“Then you also know that Viktor Orvath took over my duties.”

Orsi nodded. Viktor Orvath had been in Zoltán’s inner circle back when she still lived with him. He was utterly loyal and utterly amoral. “That’s why I’ve come to you.”

László held up his palms, distancing himself from whatever Orsi wanted. He shuffled along the bench as if he was about to leave. A sense of hopelessness pressed her. She’d been foolish to come here. Desperate, she lunged into his path, prevented him from getting up. “Zoltán made you witness a lot of ugly things, didn’t he?”

It was a gamble, but a calculated one. Some people went to the memory peddlers to sell exhilarating experiences–base jumping from the Eiffel Tower, hunting a Great White in the Indian Ocean, free climbing the Grand Canyon. Some went to preserve important events–their child’s birth, their wedding day, a family reunion. Zoltán went for altogether different purposes.

For any normal man it must’ve become a heavy burden.

László stared through her for a long time, but his eyes didn’t betray his thoughts. Eventually, he broke her gaze and turned his attention to her son. “So you’re Mr. Kiraly’s little boy?”

Csaba turned, buried his face in his mother’s side. He would outgrow his shyness soon. Zoltán would see to that.

“You have a beautiful son, Orsi.”

László’s use of her name stunned her. Maybe there was hope.

“Now, if you’ll excuse–”

“He has nightmares.”

“What?”

“Terrible nightmares. Every night. He keeps himself awake, only sleeping when he is absolutely exhausted. An hour later he wakes screaming.”

“What sort of nightmares?”

Orsi stroked her son’s hair. “He won’t tell me.”

László rummaged in a pocket, pulled out a holocard. “Hey, Csaba, this is for you.”

A small grainy figure grandstanded on the table. Orsi recognized him as Scavenger, poster boy for the post-apocalyptic craze. Csaba turned, became mesmerized by Scavenger’s demented words. “Disused factories are a goldmine!”

“Csaba,” László said, “you know Scavenger’s not real, don’t you?”

The boy nodded, not taking his eyes from his hero.

“Neither are the monsters in your dreams.”

If only it were that easy, Orsi thought.

László turned to her. “Nightmares are not like memories. They are capricious, phantom-like. They bind from threads of thought all over the brain; the amygdala, the cortex, the pons. Snaring a nightmare is like trying to tether mist.”

“It’s not the nightmare I want to see.”

László grimaced, pushed past her. Orsi could see that he wanted to get out before he heard her request. Before he had to make a choice.

“I want to see the memory that causes the nightmares.” She talked fast, snaking after the memory peddler, pulling Csaba along behind. “I want to see it, then wipe it.”

Csaba’s attention was still on the dancing hologram, head twisted. He stumbled, fell to the flagstones with a cold slap, began crying. The memory peddler reached the door, gripped the handle. Orsi glanced between the other patrons, her fallen boy, and László. “Please!” she shouted. “I want to see what his father–what Mr. Kiraly–does to him.”

Cold, rank air streamed into the bar from where László held the door ajar.

“Stay or go, shithead,” somebody near the door said.

“Please,” Orsi repeated, quieter this time.

László sighed and let go of the handle. The door closed, shutting out the cold.

#

“There are risks.”

László led Orsi and her son through the crumbling edifice that was Keleti station. The smell of overspent train engines, cooked chestnuts, and paprika-spiced sausages laced the chilly air. A smattering of people dribbled about. Commuters in neat though fraying clothes, beggars in rags, thieves in expensive clobber.

Memory peddling had never been illegal, but the expense of the kit had meant it had always been the province of the rich. Orsi was vaguely familiar with its dangers from some of Zoltán’s girls’ experiences. Persistent headaches. Flashing lights. Mild hallucinations.

“The risks are worth it,” she said.

They headed under a long row of screens, the Fidesz, RealHU, and other election candidates’ smiles protected by shatterproof plastic. Their eyes didn’t blink in their pudgy faces as they earnestly talked through their health and finance plans.

László ducked into a disused, dimly lit side alley. Half-way down the puddle-strewn passage he checked to see if anybody was watching from the station concourse, then hustled Orsi and her son through a rotten door.

Her eyes were still adjusting to the half-light when he came in after them and pulled the door closed, plunging them into darkness. Instinctively, Orsi reached for her son, dread blooming. “László–”

She felt him slide past her, take her hand. His skin felt like crêpe paper. “Come.”

#

“Welcome to Platform 17,” László announced over the hum of the petrol engine. The sweet smell of gasoline licked the air. “Twenty-five years ago the train to Bratislava left from this very spot.”

As the jury-rigged lighting system–a long chain of bare bulbs strung up like decorations–struggled to full brightness, Orsi took in the claustrophobic space. They stood in a tall brick-walled room. A curving bank of intricate glasswork stretched high on one side, while a medley of computing cores, scanners, and other instruments occupied a long makeshift desk on the other. In one corner, an ancient hairdresser’s chair, complete with blow-drying helmet, cast elongated shadows on the brickwork.

“What’s through there?” she asked, pointing at an archway with barricaded double-doors.

“That’s the backdoor.” László grinned. “For emergencies.”

She felt uneasy. Platform 17 wasn’t the pristine, high-tech suite she’d imagined.

László seemed to pick up on her anxiety. “Not what you expected?” he asked as he booted up the computers.

“Not quite.” She glanced at Csaba. He looked about with wide-eyed wonder, then clambered up on to the hairdresser’s chair. At least he’s enjoying it, she thought. She unbuttoned her coat, spun about looking for a place to hang it. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at a dusty sheet hanging from the wall above the hole.

“That’s where we watch the main feature.”

She glanced at her son again, wondering what they would witness.

László took her coat, flung it over the back of one of the two shabby office chairs that sat beside the desk. The coat’s momentum caused the chair to roll a little. “Let me show you something.”

He tapped out a command on a terminal pane, watched lines of text dance down the screen, then dimmed the lights from a wall dial. “Over here,” he said. He stepped between the slew of cables that snaked across the floor to the wall of glass. It loomed over him like a cascade of the clearest water.

He stood, mesmerized.

At first she couldn’t see what he was staring at, but when she got closer she noticed the odd sparkle of light within. As her eyes adjusted she began to follow the motes of light. They weaved in and out and up and down in delicate patterns.

“Beautiful,” she whispered.

“Look closer.” László said, not taking his eyes from the glass.

She focused harder, gasped. Within the patterns a rose bud bloomed, shed its petals. Had she imagined it? Next she caught a fleeting view of a swordfish tangled in nets. “What–”

“Fragments of memories. State-of-the-art photonic storage facility. At least it was. Of course, the memories aren’t stored in a visual format, but the algorithms can render them that way.”

She felt curious but ashamed, as if she’d caught her own reflection while spying on a neighbor. “Whose–”

“Nobody’s. When I retired Mr. Kiraly had me erase everything.” László bit his lip. “I was happy to oblige.”

She imagined him standing there for long hours, unable to turn his eye from what must have been such terrible beauty. Part of her wanted to know what awful sights he’d seen.

He said, “Right now the fragments you see are clip-art.”

“A glorified screensaver.”

“Exactly.”

They watched the light, the only noise the distant rumble of departing trains. Eventually, László said, “We should get started.”

Orsi nodded, but didn’t take her eyes from the glass.

#

“We’re going to go on a journey now, Csaba.”

Orsi crouched down beside her son who was sat in the mustard-upholstered hairdresser’s chair. A profusion of data, sensor, and power cables spewed from the blow-drying helmet that was securely fastened over his head, and she had to keep pulling his little hands away from the wires.

“Where are we going, Mama?”

Where, indeed? Orsi thought. Old doubts flitted through her mind. What if Csaba was too young to be a subject? What if it made the nightmares worse? What if they couldn’t retrieve the inciting memory? What if they could, but it didn’t help?

“We’re going into your past,” she said. “I want you to think about your last visit to Papa’s.” The nightmares had begun the same night.

Orsi felt Csaba’s arm tense at her words.

“Last Friday,” she went on. “It was raining when I dropped you off.”

Orsi glanced up at the viewing canvas that László had brushed down. The image from the gently whining projector was hazy, but it wasn’t hard to recognize the place. Behind the tall wrought-iron gates, Zoltán’s square-towered mansion loomed from the murk.

“That’s right, Csaba,” Orsi said, as the gates drew closer in a ragged, rushed fashion. “You ran to avoid getting wet.”

Csaba shook his head, as if he could hardly believe what he was seeing. Orsi carried on, half narrating what she saw and half guessing at what came next when the memory faltered.

“Did Papa come to meet you?” she asked, as the memory looped, the canvas repeatedly showing Csaba playing with one of Zoltán’s girls in a parlor room. The girl wore long scaled gloves that stretched well past her elbows. The scales were delicate, shimmering like dragonfly wings. Below her crop top,

slight stretch marks streaked her belly. The image flicked up and left as the door to the parlor room opened.

Orsi gasped.

Zoltán stood on the threshold, large and menacing. He wore an immaculate black suit with the top-button of his white shirt undone. Curls of hair spilled from his chest. To Orsi it was like looking at some dark and twisted caricature of the man. In her child’s imaginings he was more etched, more lean than the short, slightly pudgy man she knew. Low, mangled words came from his lips as if he wore an invisible gag.

Orsi twisted to László. “What did he say?”

“Decoding both the visual and audio streams in real-time is too great a load for the processors. You can listen later.”

On the canvas Zoltán led Csaba out of the parlor room and along a marble-floored hallway lined with Greco-Roman sculptures and paintings, all decadence and nudity. He’d always seen himself as a cut above the run-of-the-mill gangster. Orsi had heard he was taking English lessons.

Zoltán carried on speaking. His words were unrecognizable, but from the measured unbroken tone it was clear he was delivering some kind of monologue.

Orsi’s skin crawled.

They descended a minor staircase. In front of a rickety door, Zoltán stopped. He turned, stared down at his son, and placed a thick hand on Csaba’s shoulder. He spoke, then smiled chillingly. He pushed the door open and indicated for Csaba to go in first.

The memory slowed.

Orsi took in the rust on the door’s hinges, the three gouges–chest high, fingertips apart–in the frame, a crushed earring on the wooden floor. A corner of the room came into view: clean, empty–

The picture went crazy–kaleidoscopic lights accompanied by a cymbal-crashing din. László killed the feed, plunging the room into darkness, but the noise didn’t stop.

She realized it was Csaba, screaming. She reached for him. She wanted to pull him into her embrace, but he was still wired. All she could do was stroke his cheek and whisper kind words. It seemed like an age before he stopped screaming.

#

Csaba slept a restless sleep, curled in Orsi’s lap. László had dug out a musty, frayed blanket and placed it over the pair of them. The boy whimpered from time to time but didn’t wake.

While he’d slept they replayed the memory with the audio, but it had shed little light on what had happened. Zoltán’s monologue had been a rambling, potted history of his ascent from a petty thief to head of a major prostitution ring. At every stage of his life, he kept emphasizing how hard work, loyalty, and determination were the foundations of his success. He even believed his acts were moral ones. Stealing was redistribution of wealth. Prostitution was emancipation. Blackmail was social politics.

At the basement door he’d said, “This will be a test for you, son. You will talk about it to nobody.” The icy smile formed on his lips. “Nobody.”

#

Orsi had always known that the only reason she was taken care of was Csaba. She wasn’t stupid. She knew Zoltán would one day begin to groom him for a place in his nasty little empire. She hadn’t expected that day to come so soon though.

She pinched her nose. Her easy life had made her complacent. Now the time for a careful disentanglement from Zoltán’s world was gone. Now there was nothing to do but bolt, leave the country, scrape a living elsewhere. She shuddered. She’d always be looking over her shoulder.

Her son nestled against her. She kissed the top of his head, kept her lips pressed there. His hair was matted and sweaty, but she was certain nothing in the world tasted as good.

“We need an object,” László said.

Orsi looked over to the memory peddler. He sat cross-legged on his chair, focused on a terminal. “What?”

“An object from the house–from the room.”

She didn’t understand.

“Whatever happened in that room traumatized your son so badly that the flow of memory has been disrupted. If we can get hold of something–”

“No!” she interrupted, realizing he was still thinking about how to get the memory. “I won’t put him through this again.”

“He puts himself through it every time he sleeps.”

“No,” she said again, but less vehemently. In his unsettled sleep, Csaba trembled. The nightmares would go, wouldn’t they?

“Orsi,” László said, getting up from his chair and walking to the light bank. “I’ve spent six years turning away from what I saw in here. Six years in dingy drinking holes trying to live with the memories. It can’t be done.” He pressed a palm against the glass. “We have to grasp your son’s memory–grasp it and then crush it.”

She didn’t say anything.

He came back to where they were seated. He stroked back wisps of hair that covered Csaba’s face, drawing them behind the boy’s ear. “I know you want to run, Orsi. But if you do the memory will plant roots, fester in the dark corners of his mind, grow stronger. It will destroy the man you want him to become.”

She didn’t want to believe him, but in László’s eyes she saw the truth.

“Don’t make my mistake, Orsi,” he whispered, looking away, ashamed. “Help your son.”

She felt tears welling in her eyes. “What do I need to do?”

#

They drove down Andrássy út in silence, Orsi, biting her lip, Csaba playing with his hands. His nightmares had been even worse the night before. Outside, the cafes and fashion houses and tech parlors seemed surreal. As they got nearer to Hősök tere and the old diplomatic district–nearer to Zoltán’s residence, the former home of the French embassy–Csaba’s fidgeting grew.

“I don’t feel well, Mama.”

“You’ll be okay,” she said. “Just remember what I told you.”

The car swung into a side street, and thrummed over the cobbled surface. Near the gates to the mansion she instructed it over to the side of the road.

“Mama, why–”

“I’m coming in with you today,” she said, smartening his blazer.

A minute later they were passing through the gates. Hand-in-hand, they crunched down the gravel path, the wintry gardens stark but beautiful. By the time they arrived at the house, Zoltán was already on the stone steps that led to the main entrance. Cold arrogance radiated from the tips of his polished shoes to the top of his shaved head. Any feelings she’d once had for him had been utterly extinguished.

“Orsi, you aren’t–”

“I wanted to discuss schools,” she said with a trace of belligerence.

Zoltán pinched his neat goatee. He must’ve been suspicious of the timing of her visit. She had to tread carefully. “I have the brochures here.” She pulled out a stack of glossy papers from her handbag.

“How’s my son?” he asked, talking to her.

“More of a handful every day,” she said. “Just like his father.”

The appeal to the man’s vanity worked. He smiled, came down to them. “Go inside,” he said to Csaba.

Orsi released her son’s hand. He trotted up the steps, got swallowed by the house. Zoltán snatched the brochures from Orsi’s hand. He rifled through them, studying the covers while rubbing his thumb against the paper.

“This one,” he said, tapping the top brochure on the stack, fixing Orsi straight in the eye.

“I–”

He shoved the brochures back into her hands. “Now we’ve discussed schools.” He turned away, started up the steps.

“Zoltán–”

“What?” he shouted. He kept his back to her.

“Can I use your bathroom?”

As if he were brushing away a fly he made a irritated gesture to his right, before disappearing into the house.

When Orsi reached the grand reception hall–polished chessboard floor, two spiral staircases, a colorful reptile tank dominating the back wall–Zoltán and Csaba were nowhere to be seen. A girl lolled at the top of the stairs, leaning over the balustrade, probably high. From her scaly gloves Orsi recognized her as the same girl from Csaba’s aborted memory.

Orsi looked away, not wanting to make small talk. She headed down the hallway to the right, heels clacking on the stone. The place was sharper, more detailed than Csaba’s memory of it, but it still felt familiar. Vases of daffodils and hydrangeas gave the air a fragrant edge. Conversation and laughter sounded from behind a closed door.

At the servant’s staircase Orsi ducked into the stairwell, not pausing to see who was about. Swiftly, but neatly, she kicked off her heels, picked them up, and started down. The stone underfoot was cold. A chill seeped from the soles of her feet, climbed her ankles.

The passage at the foot of the stairs felt both narrower and more ordinary than the one she’d witnessed in Csaba’s memory. The dull grey walls pressed close, pushed her along as if she were a morsel of food in a digestive tract.

She came to the door.

It was exactly as she’d seen on the canvas–the round burnished-bronze doorknob, the old near-splintered panels, the scratch marks in the frame–and she experienced a giddy sense of déjà vu. The room beyond was silent.

She gripped the handle, turned it slowly, the mechanism creaking as she did so. She pushed. The room was dark. She took a deep breath, slipped inside, gently closed the door. The faintest whiff of antiseptic vied with a oiled, metallic smell. Vague shapes drifted, pulsing and coalescing in the pitch black. Terrified, keeping her back to the door, Orsi slapped for the light switch.

Fluorescent strip lighting blinked to life. The imagined horrors evaporated.

Denuded, the room was pathetically banal. Originally it must’ve functioned as a small kitchen. A row of iron pots–black and ponderous–hung from a wooden rail on one wall. Otherwise, save for a bucket and mop, the room was empty.

Get something specific, László had said. Get something unique to the place.

She gave a bitter laugh. She didn’t think he had pots in mind. And the bucket and mop–as well as being difficult to smuggle out–might not have even been in the room when Csaba was here. What had he seen?

She lifted the mop. Its scraggly head was still damp, and a fetid water sloshed in the bucket. Whatever had happened had been cleaned up. She pictured scenes of torture, sexual depravity, death.

She paced, cursed aloud.

Scuff marks on the flagstone floor indicated the presence of heavy fixtures in the past. She was debating grabbing the smallest pot, when she noticed a poster on the back of the door. The paper was faded and curled, but the image was still striking. It was a flyer for Sziget, the annual music festival that used to be held on Óbuda Island. The main image was the silhouette of a man smashing a guitar, 2014 stenciled on its neck.

Yes, that was the last one, she remembered.

The poster practically peeled itself from the wood. As Orsi carefully rolled it up, she heard somebody in the passage. She stuffed the poster into her handbag, stepped into her unfastened heels.

The door jerked open.

It was the girl with the scaly gloves.

“Naughty, naughty, naughty,” she chirped, wagging a slender finger, “prying into Mr. Kiraly’s affairs.”

“I was looking for the bathroom,” Orsi blurted. She made to brush past the girl, but her way was blocked. Her gaze lingered on the girl’s gloves. Orsi wondered if she ever took them off, before realizing with a start that they weren’t gloves at all. They were part of her skin, grafted on, each scale alive. “Your arms,” Orsi whispered.

“A present from Mr. Kiraly,” the girl said coldly. “You’re Csaba’s mother, aren’t you?”

Orsi’s mind raced. If Zoltán found out she was here, he’d think Csaba had talked. It might precipitate something disastrous. “Yes,” she said, cautiously. She remembered the girl’s stretch marks. “Do you have children?”

“No,” she snapped. “Mr. Kiraly doesn’t like his girls to get knocked up.”

“Oh my God, he made you . . .” Orsi trailed off, unable to say the words.

“Yes. I was twenty-six weeks.”

“I’m so sorry.” Orsi searched for something useful to say, but found nothing. “I should go now, you won’t–”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell on you.” The girl pirouetted in an ungainly fashion, almost tripping. She snaked her hands about, a poor imitation of Indian dancing. “I know, I’ll tell you a little secret so we’re even.” She leaned close, a sweet cloying smell about her. “The Minister of the Interior likes it kinky. Very kinky.” The girl side-stepped out of the way.

Orsi didn’t wait for a second chance, slipping past and off down the passage. The girl’s voice chased her as she fled. “If you want the kinky stuff ask for Monika!”

#

Back in the car, Orsi called László. “Where are you?”

“On my way to the fucking baths. Why? Did you–”

“Yes.” She glanced down the street. “The room was empty, but there was an old poster on the wall.”

“That’s good. Come to the place tomorrow. Come at four.”

“No. We have to do it today. I was seen snooping.”

László stayed silent. She could hear the grind of a passing tram in the background.

“It was just one of his girls. Off her head on something. There’s nothing to connect you.”

“Mr. Kiraly’s a real piece of shit but he’s not stupid. Somebody might’ve seen you at the bar.”

“Please. This afternoon. Then you never see us again.”

She held her breath, a childhood superstition.

László sighed. “Give me an hour.”

#

She switched off the auto-nav, drove herself, tracing ever increasing circles around the house. She had to keep moving. Usually she would park in one of the underground lots while Csaba was with his father. She’d spend an hour or two shopping or having coffee with a friend on Váci út.

Today she circled.

Csaba raced out of the gates right on time.

“Did you enjoy yourself, darling?” Orsi asked, as he slid into the backseat. He clutched a handful of toys. A cap embroided with the Scavenger sat askew on his head.

“Papa took me to the fair!”

She’d spied the Ferris wheel across from Széchenyi Baths during her drive. The visit must’ve been Csaba’s reward for passing the test. “Did he ask what you’ve been up to?”

Csaba had discarded most of the toys, but he still held a plastic gun. He aimed it at her reflection in the mirror. “He wanted to know if I’d been anywhere special.”

Orsi snapped her head around, pushed the pointed gun down. “And?”

“I did what you said. I didn’t mention the weird man or the wall of light or the memory machine that hurt my head. I didn’t mention nothing.”

The strain of deceit, not to mention the nightmares, were breaking him. She felt a surge of love towards him, a doubling of her resolve that he would not come to any harm.

“You did good, you did real good,” Orsi said as she flicked on the auto-nav. “One more stop and this’ll all be over.”

She hoped her doubts were hidden from her voice.

#

“You’re late,” László barked.

In the memory peddler’s lair the lights were bright, the smell of petrol strong.

“We’re here now.” Orsi wasn’t in the mood to placate him with apologetic words. She’d had to half drag her son through the crowded station.

László thought the better of saying anything, busied himself at a terminal.

Orsi kneeled down beside her son. “What you saw–it’s like a poison inside you. We’re going to get rid of that poison.”

He nodded, petrified.

She led him to the hairdresser’s chair. He clambered up, righted himself in the seat. She lifted off his cap, placed it on the long desk, before swinging the helmet across and down.

László glanced at her. “You have the poster?”

She reached for her handbag–

“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “We only get one chance.”

“What do you mean?”

“The memory is guarded deep in his psyche. Any sign that it is coming up to conscious level–” he slapped his hand against the desk “–bang, it is shutdown. But . . . we reveal the poster fast and the mind can’t help itself.”

Out of sight, Orsi unfurled the poster and tacked it to a small board. She held it tight to her chest, picture facing her, and positioned herself in front of her son.

“Okay, Csaba,” he said, “just relax for me. On the count of three your mother’s going to show you something. One, two–”

Orsi spun the board.

Csaba’s eyes went wide.

László raised a shaking hand, pointed it at the canvas. “Turn around!”

The light was different, the room illuminated by a central beam rather than the fluorescent strips that she’d encountered. Through the shadows she noticed that the row of iron pots was still there, except the second largest one was missing. Dark, coppery shadows marked the flagstones. Clinical fixtures occupied the spaces where she’d spied the scuff lines: a shoulder-high metal cabinet; a side trolley laden with shiny implements; a sophisticated monitoring station, all drips and electronics. In the middle sat a medical gurney, complete with unconscious passenger.

To call the woman a patient would be obscene. Orsi could think of better words: subject, victim, abomination.

Splayed out on the surgical bed, two, four, six, eight limbs emerged from her torso. They were all arms; two originals, six imported. Her legs had been amputated, two of the arms grafted onto the ugly stumps, while the remaining four were spread equidistant along the midriff, two on each side. A fine down covered her whole body like chimpanzee’s hair. Two pairs of fangs had been crudely added to the top and bottom of her mouth. Her eyes were black, insectoid. One of the two surgeons was dissecting a palm-sized spider on a side table, alternating between micro-scalpel and micro-tweezers, while the other was making incisions in the woman’s cheeks. Both kept consulting flickering holo-libraries.

This wasn’t some twisted joke. This was business. Sick fucks in London and Riyadh and Tokyo would pay outrageous sums for an arachnid whore.

She wanted to cry out enough, but she knew the whole episode had to be played out for it to be erased. They watched in rapt silence. The woman’s limbs twitched as the surgeons worked, and Orsi couldn’t help but wonder what the woman was feeling–what she would feel when she awoke.

A minute later László killed the feed. “It’s gone.”

But it wasn’t really, not in her mind. Now it was more real than ever. She moved to her son’s side. The room was still, dim. Csaba whimpered while Orsi caressed him. “Shh, shh–”

Crash! Noise from next door. A muffled curse.

László paled. “Q-q-quick, help me,” he stuttered. He begun unfastening Csaba’s helmet, releasing clamps and unjacking wires in furious swipes. “Now, help me push.”

László leant into the chair. Orsi did likewise, heaving with all her weight. The chair moved with an ear-splitting grind.

“Down there,” he said, raising a heavy iron grate that had been hidden beneath the chair. The smell of rank water wafted up.

Shouting. Closer.

Orsi lowered herself down. Horizontal, chilly water soaked into her clothes, trickled between her legs. Csaba joined her, flattened himself, before László dropped the grate back in place. He didn’t have time to move the chair back before somebody else was in the room.

“Samu,” László whispered.

Orsi couldn’t see the new party, her view limited, but she saw László’s hands fold over one another as if he were washing them in a sink. Samu. She knew him too. He was one of Zoltán’s sidekicks. She’d passed him in the gardens on her way back to the car that very afternoon. Oh, holy mother of Jesus. He must’ve followed her and Csaba to Keleti then lost them in the throng. He would’ve called–

“Mr. Kiraly,” László spluttered.

Samu bounded past. Thunk of wood against stone. Scraping. He was opening the barricaded door. His footsteps pattered away. Closer, finely-tailored shoes clacked on the stone. The memory peddler shuffled back.

“László,” Zoltán said in a low voice, “I thought you had retired.” He stood directly above her, dark and ominous. She could make out the stubble on his chin, smell his expensive aftershave. Csaba’s elbow dug into her ribs but she didn’t dare move.

“I have. But I still like to potter.”

Craning her neck, Orsi could just make out the memory peddler. His face was ashen but jovial. He was pressed back against his desk, Csaba’s cap poking over its lip near his left hand–

Csaba’s cap!

Zoltán did a one-eighty, went out of eyeshot. Orsi thought about whistling, whispering–anything to direct László’s attention to the cap. Too afraid, she did nothing.

“How’ve you been keeping?” Zoltán asked. “You don’t look so well.”

“The palinka hasn’t been kind to me.”

Orsi watched his fingers play over the rim of the cap, oblivious.

“Maybe you should see my doctor.”

Finally, László cottoned on to the presence of the cap. He grabbed the incriminating item and shoved it down the back of his trousers. “That’s very kind of you.”

He stepped out of Orsi’s line of sight. Any words they exchanged were beyond her hearing. Was László betraying them? Pointing at the grate, right now? Samu returned, breathing hard. “No sign, boss.”

The next instant László hit the ground with a sickening crunch, twitching. Bloody drool seeped from the corner of his mouth, dripped down through the grate. His eyes locked onto hers.

Zoltán crouched down beside him, pulled his head up with a ragged fistful of hair. “I saw the cap, you stupid fuck! I saw the memory in the tank as well!” He had a stun-gun pressed against László’s neck. “Tell me where they went and I might not kill you.”

Please don’t, Orsi begged with all her heart, please don’t.

László stammered the words–his face still rippling, his body jerking–but they couldn’t be mistaken: “F-f-fuck you.”

#

They remained in their fetid hiding-hole for a long time, trembling and silent. László’s dead fingers gripped the grate. Bloodied, foamy spittle mottled his chin. Yet beyond the pain in his wide eyes, Orsi thought she detected some measure of peace.

Zoltán had strode around exasperated, smashed something, called a couple of people, and left. From his angry words she’d learnt two things. One, Viktor Orvath–the man who’d taken over László’s duties–would come by the next morning to clean up the mess. Two, they were now being hunted.

She wriggled her arms free, pushed on the side of the grate opposite to László’s slumped head, but the grating wouldn’t budge. “Help me, Csaba.”

Her son didn’t respond, his arms tucked against his chest like an Egyptian mummy.

“Csaba! Help your mother.”

He raised his arms, pushed upwards. The edge of the grate tottered up and over the lip, pitching the other side down. Together they heaved the grating to one side and hauled themselves out, trying not to touch László’s lolling head.

Orsi kneeled on the floor, taking in Zoltán’s destruction. The light bank was shattered, a jagged skyline of glass. A heap of shards lay at its base, along with the chair that had caused the damage. The rest of the equipment was untouched. Orsi kneaded her thighs, anxious. Where should they go?

They had to leave Budapest, that was clear. Zoltán would have eyes in the country though. Flying out would be too risky. She realized she would never feel safe while he was still around. They needed a safehouse, somewhere to regroup, think clearly. She glanced at her son.

He’d picked up a couple of instruments from the desk and was playing with them on the floor. It must’ve been his coping mechanism, his way of distancing himself from everything he’d seen and heard and felt. The scene was reminiscent of something she’d seen on the canvas–the time Csaba had been playing with one of Zoltán’s girls–

Monika!

“Csaba, we’re leaving.”

He looked at her, got to his feet without a word.

Before they fled–before they slipped through the arched doorway, down the dark musty tunnels, and out into the last of the day’s waning light–Csaba approached László’s prone body, bent down, and picked up his cap.

#

They kept to the backstreets, staying in the shadows, hustling through deserted squares populated only by sleeping drunks and the skeleton-like frameworks of market stalls. They followed the line of the main körút–a sweeping thoroughfare that encircled the inner districts of the city–making a protracted route to the Buda side.

On the way, Orsi ducked into a claustrophobic tech shop. She picked up a cheap pair of spex, a hundred tera cube, and a shock baton. A one-eyed man in a trade bazaar gave her half a million Forints for the jewelry she wore. It was a desultory sum, less than a tenth of the items’ true worth, but it would be enough to pay for a room at Hotel Gellért.

From the first floor of the abandoned old market that overlooked the Danube, Orsi studied the imposing, turreted building on the other side of the river. Two avenues of emerald light lanced up either side of the hotel’s grand entrance, lit by powerful beams embedded in the small gardens. Most of the windows were dark. A lone tram of ancient stock trundled over Szabadság Bridge.

Zoltán and his vast network of pimps, informers, and crooked officials were out there looking for them. Every person was a threat, every place a risk. He wouldn’t anticipate her next move though, she was sure of that.

Outside, the whetstone grind of metal on metal hailed the arrival of a Buda-bound tram. She grabbed Csaba’s hand and ran down the rusted escalator and out into the street, hopping aboard before the doors closed with their usual ugly drone.

#

A quiet double-tap at the door.

“Go into the bedroom,” Orsi whispered at her son. “And stay there.”

Getting the room hadn’t been difficult. The receptionist hadn’t blinked when Orsi had pulled out the crumpled bunch of fifty-thousand Forint notes–four for the room, one for no questions asked–and signed the documentation with a man’s name. She’d taken a penthouse suite. She’d thought that best.

Another knock at the door, louder this time.

Orsi pulled her makeshift headscarf tighter, then answered.

“Somebody call for Monika?” the girl asked through the small gap that Orsi had allowed. She looked different to when Orsi had seen her earlier in the day. More made-up, prettier in the way most men would like. She looked tired, but didn’t seem to care. Behind her a stocky man loomed.

Orsi opened the door further, keeping herself hidden. Monika entered, and Orsi closed the door, noticing the stocky man positioning himself in front of it as she did so.

“What are we talking about?” Monika asked, sliding off her thick winter coat. “Girl on girl? Threesome? You want to watch?”

Orsi chained the door as quietly as she could, peeked through the spy hole. The stocky man stood motionless, the scalloped, bristled back of his head visible. She hadn’t been expecting the girl to be chaperoned so closely. She should’ve known better.

“Don’t worry, honey, he won’t be disturbing us.”

Orsi turned, took a deep breath. She pulled off her headscarf.

The girl did a double-take. “You?”

“Hello, Monika.”

She shook her head, disbelieving. “You’ve kicked up quite a shitstorm.”

“I know.”

“Zoltán’s furious. Anyone–” Something across the room caught her attention. “Csaba? Is that you?”

Her son wandered out, grinning as if he’d been caught doing something naughty.

“Your Papa’s looking for you, Csaba.”

The smile disappeared from his face.

“It would only take one little word,” Monika said, turning to Orsi. “One little word.”

“He killed your child, Monika. And he mutilated you.”

Monika hid her arms, ashamed. “He might let me go if I bring him his son.”

“He won’t. You know he won’t.”

The girl clutched her hair. “Don’t say that.”

Orsi thought the girl might scream. “Monika, I can help you.”

“Don’t bullshit me!”

Orsi could see hope was the last thing the girl wanted. “It’s not bullshit.”

“How?”

Orsi led the girl to the pearl chaise-longue in the corner. They sat, knees touching. “You said one of your clients was Tibor Nagy, the Minister of the Interior.”

“Don’t remind me. Crusty old man with fucked up tastes.”

Orsi smiled. “So you remember your time with him.” She’d been worried the drugs might’ve left Monika with patchy memories.

The girl nodded.

“The elections are in less than a month. I know–” she was going to correct herself, say knew, but thought the better of it “–I know a memory peddler. We can retrieve the memory, blackmail the Minister.”

Monika looked at Orsi incredulously. “I can barely take a pee without permission. How’d you–”

“We go now.” Orsi nodded at the doors that led to the suite’s balcony. “We go now and you never have to come back to this.”

“I don’t know.”

Orsi gripped the girl’s thin wrists. The scales felt weird and sticky, but Orsi tried to hide her distaste. “Listen to me. Zoltán doesn’t care about you. A few more months you’ll be dead from the drugs–or on the operating table being changed into God knows what. You want that?”

Monika shook her head, on the verge of tears.

“So come–” Orsi got to her feet, pulled the girl to hers “–come with me now.”

She didn’t give any sign of assent, but neither did she resist when Orsi slipped the girl into her coat, led her and Csaba through the balcony doors, and out into the biting wind.

#

“Shit, shit, shit!” Orsi almost threw the keyboard across the room in her frustration.

They’d scrambled across lit balconies, run over icy rooftops, hurtled down creaking fire escapes, grabbed an illegal, real-person driven cab which had dropped them at Keleti for a small fortune only to discover that they couldn’t work the equipment.

Monika sat in the hairdresser’s chair, hands scrabbling at the medley of wires that sprouted from the helmet. She echoed Orsi curses, except hers were more colorful, more desperate. “Why did you bring me here?”

The girl’s hysteria helped Orsi control her own. “Calm down. I can fix this.”

But could she? She’d spent hours tinkering to no avail. She wished she’d paid more attention. Had she missed a connection? A command script? Was she not getting Monika to focus enough?

Beside the glassy rubble that was once the light bank, Csaba was delving into the shards, sorting them into piles.

“Come away from there,” she ordered, but not too harshly.

Maybe the light bank was more than just storage, maybe it was essential to the memory retrieval? There was one way to be sure. One person who knew how it all worked.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” she told Monika. She outlined her plan, refusing to hear any arguments. Then she switched off the lights.

In the darkness they waited for Viktor Orvath.

#

He ducked through the hole three hours later, muttering and smelly. Orsi whacked him on the back of the head with the shock baton on full strength. The man gave a brief cry and crumpled with a dull thud. The steaming black liquid of his espresso trickled out from under his fat body like diseased blood.

“Quick, help me move him.”

They needn’t have rushed.

Although it took all their might, he was still dead weight by the time they had him secured in one of the office chairs, electrical flex wrapped tight over his rumpled suit.

Torture wasn’t her game, but she needed to look the part. She slapped him. With bleary, bloodshot eyes Viktor mumbled into wakefulness. His face was puffed. Days-old stubble dappled his jaw line. He reeked. He wasn’t a handsome man at the best of times, but this morning he looked real ugly. He mumbled again.

“Shut up,” Orsi said.

“Christ, my bloody head.” He strained to move his hands, moaned when he found them tied.

“I said shut the fuck up.” Orsi poked the baton against his chubby cheek. “Or you’ll get more of this. You’re going to tell me how to get something out of her head and onto that,” she said indicating the data cube on the desk. “And you’re going to tell me right now.”

Viktor Orvath chuckled.

His laughter didn’t last long.

#

The election rally was held on a blustery spring day, bright but cold. Hősök tere was packed, a heaving mass of support and disgruntlement. Placards and holo-recorders jostled above the crowd’s heads. Cheers and jeers echoed off the museums and curved friezes that bordered the plaza.

Orsi, Csaba, and Monika had kept their heads down for a few days after that frantic twenty-four hours–holed themselves up in a shabby hotel near to Moszkva tér and left the Do-Not-Disturb on the door.

Csaba had slept better. Orsi hadn’t.

She shoved her way through the throng, an anonymous speck in the body of humanity. She reached the barrier that kept the crowd back, hot and sweaty despite the brisk weather. The spex were kept in her right pocket, clutched protectively in her gloved hand.

The Minister gave his speech, earned a rather generous applause for a by-the-numbers piece of rhetoric. He came down from the platform, made his way along the barrier, chuckling and glad-handing. He was five feet from Orsi when he broke away from the crowd.

“Minister Nagy,” she called, desperate.

Perhaps a more experienced politician would’ve detected the danger in the tone of those two words. Not Tibor Nagy though. He turned back.

“Minister.” She leaned forward, reached out with her hand. “Something for old times.”

Two of his security detail moved closer, but he gestured them away and took the spex. “Nothing illegal, I hope,” he said with a grin. He donned the glasses.

Orsi didn’t wait to see his reaction, pushing backwards and merging into the crowd.

#

Their demands had been clear.

Zoltán Kiraly’s shady empire had to be dismantled or Minister Nagy’s indiscretions would be wired to every newsfeed, TV network, and media agency in the country. They gave him three days to act. He took two. The dawn raids were spun in the media as the end of a long undercover operation to crack one of Budapest’s largest prostitution rings which had links to terrorist cells in Yemen and Turkey.

After mandatory counseling, or more likely memory-wiping, most of the girls and house staff were released. All the others arrested, including Viktor Orvath, were formally charged under national security legislation and vanished into the labyrinth, suspected-terrorist branch of the criminal-justice system. No official announcement was made regarding Zoltán Kiraly. Rumors had it he was killed in the operation or sent straight to a secret detention facility on the Hortobágy Plains.

The arachnid girl remained a horrifying spectacle in Orsi’s memory, but whatever happened to her stayed out of the media. Orsi prayed she’d found some peace, whether in life or death.

#

The day was crisp, the smell of rain fresh. The winding road up into the Buda hills was littered with colored ticker-tape and plastic whistles. The parade had skirted through the affluent district the day before. Tibor Nagy’s incumbent party had cantered to victory, the analysts attributing the sensational raids three weeks earlier as a key factor.

“Will we see Papa today?” Csaba asked, trailing behind Orsi as she strode up the street’s steep incline.

“We’ll see,” Orsi replied, trying not to dwell on the confusing emotions that her son’s words elicited. How do you tell your son that he would probably never see his father again? And that perhaps that wasn’t a bad thing? Later. She’d deal with these matters later.

They’d come into the capital that morning, a lone pair on the bus from Sopron where they’d been staying with distant relatives. They would settle there. Orsi needed to find work. Csaba a school.

“In and out,” Orsi said as they crossed their old block’s communal gardens, the season’s first daffodils budding in the earth. “We’re not staying long.” She would collect some valuables to sell; Csaba could take a few choice toys.

Before she’d fully opened the door to the apartment, Csaba scampered ahead and ducked into his room, first door on the right. She closed the front door with a soft click, not wanting to alert the neighbors. The air smelt stale. She placed her handbag on the hallway table, made her way to her old bedroom on the left.

Even though it had only been a matter of weeks, the room had a somber feel–like the cordoned off spaces of open-house stately homes. As she crossed to her dresser, dust churning in the few thin shafts of light that the drawn curtains admitted, she felt like an intruder. She half expected some suited attendant to seep out of the shadows and ask her what she was doing. The feeling only grew as she opened her silver filigreed jewelry box, delved through the bracelets and necklaces. Most were worthless trinkets, bought from hawkers or cheap high-street chains, and she had to hold the diamond ring up to the light to be sure she had the real thing and not one of the cheap knock-offs.

It was as she examined the faceted crystal that she caught a glance of the photo wedged in the top-right corner of the mirror beyond. It was of herself and Csaba happily sharing an ice-cream on the beach at Siófok. Or at least it should’ve been. Csaba’s face was still beaming, a small dollop of ice-cream on his nose, but where her face should’ve been, there was only a dark, bubble-edged hole. She pulled the photo down with trembling hand, brushed her fingertips over the rippled surface, sniffed the singed glossy paper.

It was a cigarette burn.

She bolted out the room, crossed the hallway. Csaba was no longer in his bedroom. While her eyes lingered on the rumpled blankets of her child’s bed (hadn’t it been made when they left?), she felt a slight breeze from the living room. “Csaba?”

He’d opened the sliding doors to the balcony, stepped outside. As Orsi moved closer she couldn’t help but notice more signs of the invader’s presence littering the glass coffee table; a empty pack of Camels, a tumbler, a recent edition of the newspaper, Magyar Hírlap. A few paces from the window she caught sight of what held Csaba’s attention in the communal gardens.

It was Zoltán. Back to the building, he stood over an old man who was on his knees tending to the rose bushes with a pair of secateurs.

“Come inside, Csaba,” Orsi whispered. She daren’t move closer to the balcony for fear of drawing attention to themselves.

He looked in her direction, eyes narrowed, fists clenched, his whole body quivering. After a long while he looked back towards his father.

With all the turmoil, the running, the many shades of violence, witnessed and endured–everything that she’d been party to–Orsi realized she’d become as monstrous as Zoltán in her son’s eyes.

She pleaded for him to come in again, more softly this time.

###

Stephen Gaskell used to teach English to disaffected youths at a utilitarian state school on the outskirts of Budapest. On his commute out from the heart of the city he would shiver in empty trains, watch alcoholics dance in front of cardboard digs, pass the marbled luxury of the newly built National Concert Hall. Coupled with the seething invention of the metropolis he couldn’t have hoped for a better schooling in a proto-cyberpunk world. His fiction has appeared in Writers of the Future XXIII, Interzone, and Clarkesworld, amongst other venues. He is currently working on his first novel, a near-future SF thriller set in Lagos, Nigeria. He blogs at www.stephengaskell.com.

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Are you ready? Then begin!

In Pacmandu

by Lavie Tidhar

• GoA universe, Sigma Quadrant, Berezhinsky Planetoid, sys-ops command module

It has been two weeks since the disappearance of the Wu expedition.

We are gathered at the sys-ops command module of the Berezhinsky Planetoid, Sigma Quadrant of the Guilds of Ashkelon universe. The light is soft. Music plays unobtrusively in the background. Outside the windows it is snowing lines of code.

Present in the command module: myself, CodeDolphin, Sergei and Hong.

Our task –

‘Find out the fuck happened.’

The Wu expedition: led by Commander Wu, High Admiral of the Nestled Fleet of the Guilds universe, battle-hardened survivor of a thousand previous engagements. Accompanied by: Black Rose, Gideon Battle-Axe, Harrison Code-Breaker, Jeremiah Smash-It. The best of the best: a cross-universe team of code-surfers, reality-tweakers, fighters, explorers. Fearless motherfuckers, the lot.

The sole survivor: Battle-Axe, demented beyond recall. What’s left of the expedition: four flat-lined bodies, cooling rapidly. Cause: unknown.

Supposition: Battle-Axe – the only Mars-based player on the team – survived due to time-lag. The others were fried right there and then.

#

• Transcript: interview with Jonathan Stapledon, AKA Gideon Battle-Axe, Level 5 Survivalist (Survivalist: The Middle Ages universe).

Q: Can you tell us what you saw?

A: (indistinct).

Q: Try and relax. What do you remember? What happened?

A: Mouths.

Q: What was that?

A: Mouths. Beings made of mouths. They came for us… they took Black Rose. Mouths… the monkeys did it. Had to escape the monkeys. Ball of white light, moving. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to –

— Interview terminated at this point —

#

The command module: the Berezhinsky Planetoid (named after discoverer, Peter Berezhinsky, Stormare Guild (Independents)), last known location of Wu Expedition.

Their objective: singularity on planetoid surface, first detected two hundred years ago. Number of unsuccessful penetration attempts: too many to list. The singularity (one of over 300 known in the GoA universe) appears as a smooth black three-dimensional sphere.

Our objective: to follow Wu.

‘This is no longer a matter for in-universe policing,’ Commissar Gordon says. We sit around the table, listening to him. We’re avatar-ed up, CodeDolphin in the blue retro-manga dolphin shape, three-dimensional graffiti floating in space; Hong in universe-one, basic human; Sergei in a three-piece suit minus a body inside. Like Hong, I’m in true-form representation. Commissar Gordon says, ‘Four people are dead back in universe-1. A fifth needs constant medication… this is now a universe-1 police matter.’

‘I would like to officially protest the interference.’ The new voice belongs to an angel, a shining incorporeal being descending down from the ceiling – a PM from the system-God itself.

Gordon says, ‘Noted, and overruled.’

I say, ‘Do we know what they were looking for?’

The system-God’s avatar says, ‘Something they shouldn’t have. Something that doesn’t exist.’

But of course, we all already know.

#

• GoA universe, Sigma Quadrant, Berezhinsky Planetoid – surface

Four of us, to follow Wu’s five. The planetoid’s surface spreads out before us, a dark and featureless plane. Discovered by the long-gone Stormare Guild, a group of independents swallowed up over a hundred years ago by one of the bigger guilds. Nothing of value discovered – no tokens, ancient artefacts, bonus points, doomsday devices or other things of interest – beside the singularity, of course. The guild charged explorers for access rights. For two hundred years the anomaly withstood scrutiny.

Until now.

We are quiet when we leave the command module. Now, under the two distant moons in the night sky, we begin to move, talking in low voices. Conversation’s encrypted. No one trusts a God.

CodeDolphin: ‘Word is Black Rose had a new piece of code.’

Sergei: ‘What sort?’

‘A disruptor-field generator.’

‘That’s impossible. And would be illegal if it were.’

They argue. I stay quiet – thinking. You hear rumours… system ghosts, super-admins, guys with impossible cheat codes – gremlins, goblins, wizards. Never more than a rumour. Still – Wu had considerable power within the GoA, and in-universe money’s as good as first world’s. Could they have cracked the singularity?

Could we?

#

• GoA universe, Sigma Quadrant, Berezhinsky Planetoid – approaching singularity

It comes on you suddenly, a black mass growing in the distance. There is no sound. Visuals are reduced, the singularity is end-of-palette black, the surface around it shining faintly in startling monochrome. Back in first world the couch feeds me, empties me, cleans me, exercises me – fail-safes built in to ensure nothing bad ever happens – only something did. I think of Wu and the others, and wonder how long it’s been before they were discovered. I think of Stapledon’s interview then try not to. We do not know what to expect. We are the opposite of Wu’s crew – analysts, not hackers, visitors after-the-fact, not bold explorers. We fan out when we reach the singularity. Wordlessly, we begin to run a Mercator spell.

#

Singularities. To understand them you have to understand the universe itself, and of course, you can’t, not really. You think you do, we all think we do, or we wouldn’t be here, living here, they way humanity had done for hundreds of years – exploring the worlds and the spaces in between. Trading, fighting, making love… each of us comes from a different universe. We are not native to the GoA, and it feels suddenly like a hostile environment. We are not wanted here. I surreptitiously turn my head, scanning – but what do I expect to see? The system-God does not need avatars to follow us. It sees. It sees more than we do.

And yet it pleads ignorance of the death of four people.

#

The Mercator routines run like children across the perimeter of the singularity, and our silent chants rise in the air. Footsteps in the planetoid’s dust… we are tracking, trying to find traces of Wu’s own magic in this place.

What did they do? How had they – ?

‘Sys-boss,’ Hong says. ‘I found something.’

He’s in basic human. I watch him, a tiny figure against the singularity. He puts his palm against the black surface. ‘There are traces of –‘

There is a shudder in the air. There is a – a split. I say, ‘What the –‘ but before I can finish Hong has disappeared.

#

• HawkinsHead, Chair, cross-universe regulatory body, in interview:

What is a singularity? You may as well ask, what is a universe? How are they formed? What are they made of? Life is a combination of chance and order. Human or digital, the random element provides evolution. Laws and numbers govern every universe, even universe-1. But mutations, Fortean factors and singularities make it more than an equation, more than a set of fundamental constants. They provide… the element of life.

#

‘Hong? Hong!’ the black sphere shudders, begins to split open. White light pours out, a storm of code, the underlying structure of the ur-universe itself. I scream but there is no more sound. Hong had found the pressure point Wu’s team had created, and by finding he activated it. I watch, helpless, as we are sucked into the light, avatars melting, consciousness fleeing, thinking, It shouldn’t happen this way.

#

‘Where are we?’ Sergei says.

We’re standing on a battle-field. The dead are everywhere. Flies circle the corpses. The stench of blood makes me gag. Soldiers walk between the corpses, bloodied swords raised – checking for survivors.

CodeDolphin: ‘Survivalist: The Middle Ages.’

Sergei: ‘I hate this fucking universe.’

I shake my head. ‘Hong?’

‘Here, sys-boss.’

‘What happened?’

He merely shakes his head. CodeDolphin’s dolphin avatar is gone, replaced with a human female form, but it is insubstantial. Hong and I are still in basic human, but we, also, seem less well-defined than the soldiers or the corpses or the flies. Sergei’s black empty suit fills up with his true-form representation, with an added red beard and old scars.

‘What the fuck are we doing in the SMA?’

‘We universe-hopped,’ Hong says. ‘We went through a singularity –‘

‘No fucking way.’

‘Look for yourself.’

I’m looking, we all are, and something is bothering me. Then I realise what it is. The soldiers pay us no mind. I approach one of them as she comes closer, reach out for her. She never notices me. I try to tap her on the shoulder and my fingers pass through her.

#

• Battle for Dorlia, SMA Universe, on the border of Meera and and the Skeleton Mountains.

Something has happened to make us into ghosts. We cannot interact with the SMA. Joining in prayer, we try to call up the system-God, but our prayers go unanswered. I try to pull off-universe. Nothing happens. We’re stuck.

‘Well,’ Sergei says, ‘at least we know we’re on the right track.’

‘We need to abort,’ I say. ‘Recall the mission.’

But how?

‘There’s no way but onwards, now,’ CodeDolphin says – and she sounds happy.

I sigh, but she is right. There is no way back, now. Where had the Wu team gone? How far did they penetrate? I order a new Mercator, which in this universe takes the form of a magic circle. We link hands, hum code. The Mercator is part of our own toolklit, and it at least seems to work. Traces of Wu’s disruptor field, leading away from the field of death. ‘Another singularity?’ Hong says. I shake my head. No. Or at least, I don’t think so… something else.

‘Let’s move,’ I say.

#

How does a universe evolve? Imagine the sys-gods, vast digital entities evolving in the Breeding Grounds of universes, in the ancient core of all worlds, buried deep inside the Earth’s crust, running down for miles. Imagine worlds being born, evolving, mutating, becoming solid, becoming real. We come to them, to visit and to live in, to colonize and to explore. They are made for us, but they are not of us. they belong to the gods, but the gods’ own physical world belongs to us.

We are partners, in the greatest undertaking since life itself, both organic and digital, evolved. We share worlds.

#

The sea is smooth and black like obsidian. If I put my fingers into it, it changes, however. I can see deep into the water, but it is no longer water. It is lines and lines of code.

Hong says it first. ‘Deep magic.’

Where code becomes… something else. Code no human could ever create, mutated, bred, evolved code. Wu and his magicians had penetrated through one level of magic into another. Deep magic. The water tries to repel us, but as I run a scan across this lake I find the hole. Wu’s team had blasted a shaft down through the water. Down to… where?

Or what?

We are ghosts. There’s no way back. I try again – to pull out, to summon the sys-God, to get hold of Commissar Gordon – the system locks us out.

‘It’s not possible –‘

‘What?’

‘The system must be able to recognise us,’ I say.

‘So how come we’re trapped?’

You hear the stories… broken cheat codes, leading the unwary to endless wanderings through ghost-like worlds while the human body slowly decays and finally flatlines, back in universe-1… but that’s all they are, or were, until now, at least. Just stories.

‘We go on,’ CodeDolphin says, and the excitement in her voice is unmistakable. ‘We go deeper. We follow Wu.’

‘We follow him where?’ I say, but I already know.

‘To Pacmandu.’

#

To Pacmandu. The end of me, the end of you.

We descend into the lake. We go deep. We go to the place that isn’t there, a legend just like ghosts.

We go into deep magic. Beyond code…

And through the other side.

#

A singularity is a hole in the universe. The place where the laws don’t work. There are thousands across the known universes. What are they? Birthplaces of new worlds, perhaps. Gateways into strange, new places. Death. An inscrutable joke. Or all of the above.

#

The world is strange. The world is two dimensional. The palette is all wrong.

‘It’s two-dee made to look like three-dee,’ Sergei says.

‘Freaky –‘ from Hong.

We look at each other. Our avatars look like dolls. We move jerkily. We are in an abandoned street. There are signs for products I have never heard of. Avatar corpses litter the street. The dead are everywhere, silent, motionless, frozen in the act of life. We are beyond the known worlds or – the thought strikes me hard. I know this place. I saw pictures, images in old textbooks, a lost world – impossible. We are not beyond the universe, I think, we are too deep inside it. Approaching the core. This is – can only be –

‘Is this hell?’ Segei says.

‘No,’ CodeDolphin says, and the excitement in her voice tells me she, too, knows where we are, now. ‘It’s Second –‘

#

There’s an explosion up ahead – another remnant of the Wu field? We run towards it and see another rift in the universe. Steps lead down…

We follow them, anxious to move forward, get out of this dead place.

#

But it is worse down below. True two-dimensionality awaits us down there. No more the dead silent street with its expired avatars. We are reduced to comical homunculus figures. No more steps. We descend the ladders, down, always down. There are locked doors. We grab keys to open them, jewels to keep us going. Snakes and spiders attack us. We lose Hong to a pit –

‘No!’ but it’s already too late. We can only keep moving, down, down –

#

A barrel thrown by a giant monkey just took out CodeDolphin.

#

Some sort of maze. There is no more sensation – no smell, no touch, nothing but sight and the world is reduced to four colours. My only consolation is that CodeDolphin and Hong couldn’t have suffered.

Sergei and I are running through the maze. Then they come. They chase us. they are all mouth. They follow us, and the sound they make is terrifying. I try to scream, but no sound comes.

Sergei is eaten, and just like that he’s gone.

#

I am trying to pull out. I am trying to summon a sys-God. What is this place? No more colour, now. Nowhere else to go.

Ball of white light, moving. Not a ball. A circle. It travels slowly between two moving lines. When it hits one of the lines it bounces back, towards the other one.

I am caught between the lines. I am a circle of white light. A voice says, ‘This is the first place, the secret place, the sacred place. You cannot come here. And once you do, you must never leave.’

It is a sys-God speaking. Perhaps all of the sys-gods, speaking as one.

‘We have sealed the breach. None shall follow.’

They speak the ancient, forbidden words. Words not heard for centuries, and I feel so cold, impossibly cold, there in the white and the black. ‘Game over,’ they say, ‘game over, game over, game over.’

I am a ball of white light, moving, always moving. But soon one of the moving lines will miss, and I will not bounce back.

#

The first place. The stories were all true. The past is here, still, buried in the ancient code. A place of gods. A holy place, a tomb, and we’ve disturbed it, and earned its curse.

There’s no redo.

We were foolish to try and find it. Poor Wu, poor Sergei, poor all of us who came to Pacmandu.

###

Lavie Tidhar is the author of linked-story collection HebrewPunk (2007), novellas An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2009) and Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God (2010) and, with Nir Yaniv, of The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009). His first novel, The Bookman, will be published by HarperCollins’ new Angry Robot imprint in spring 2010, and will be followed by two more. Lavie also edited the Apex Book of World SF (2009) and maintains the World SF News Blog.

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Or We Will All Hang Separately

By Nancy Jane Moore

Marty Shendo knew both the truck and the roads best, so she drove. Ooljee Yzaguirre rode shotgun – literally: She kept a rifle in her lap. Tomas Perez sat in the back, his gun also in easy reach. Within most communities – or at least the ones Ooljee knew – no one went armed. Traveling between them, everyone did.

The dust blowing in the open windows made it difficult to talk. Both Marty and Ooljee had covered their mouths and noses with kerchiefs, like old fashioned bandits, and Tomas had pulled his cap down over his face to block the worst of it. It was too hot to close the windows.

Ooljee stared out at the parched southern New Mexico landscape. Even before the extended droughts brought on by climate change, this had been harsh country to live in. Now, though, most people had given up trying to make a living out here. Even goats, who can survive on land incompatible with any other domesticated animal, need water.

She wondered what they would find up at Los Alamos — the enclave of scientists they were hoping for or just another group of people trying to survive in a world in which few things worked any more. Or maybe bandits, or, even worse, nothing at all. It was a long way to travel if it turned out to be nothing, especially in a jerry-rigged solar-powered truck that hit its high of 25 miles per hour only on downhill stretches.

“Please don’t let it be for nothing,” Ooljee thought. It might have been a prayer, if she’d known of any gods to pray to.

#

Their trip had started in the high desert country of Texas, at a meeting of the Fort Davis/McDonald Observatory communities. Marty had been there because she had tagged along with the regular delivery person from the Las Cruces Dairy Co-op to interview older people in the high desert country. The Rio Grande and some artesian wells had kept the dairy farmers in Las Cruces going, and they delivered to a wide swath of country from Silver City in the west to Ruidoso in the north, and over into the western corner of Texas, skirting El Paso/Juarez.

The idea that Los Alamos hadn’t disappeared in the general collapse had come from outer space — more specifically, from the people living on the Amity Space Station. Amity had noticed a significant heat signature from the Los Alamos area, enough to indicate not just a human presence, but a technological one. They’d tried to make contact, with no result.

“They aren’t sure why they never noticed it before,” Matt Garcia told the community. Matt was their oldest resident – getting close to eighty now – and their unofficial leader. “It could be as simple as equipment glitch. Their computers are as old as ours. They lost touch with Los Alamos about twenty-five years ago, same as we did. At the time, we speculated that a gang of bandits blew through there – that happened a lot in the Twenties – but maybe the folks just holed up. Or literally went underground. And now they feel safe enough to come out.”

“But not safe enough to contact anyone,” someone said.

“Or maybe it’s some new people entirely who moved in and took over the space.”

“There are a lot of possibilities,” Matt said, “and even the least useful ones are long shots. But if some kind of community managed to survive up there, and kept up an education system, there’s a chance they preserved some knowledge we can all use. We need to find out what’s going on. Someone needs to go check things out.”

Ooljee nodded in agreement, but the woman sitting next to her said, “It’s got to be 500 miles up to Los Alamos, maybe more. And we don’t know anybody up that way.”

“This isn’t just important to us,” Matt went on. “The people on Amity and the Moon are just barely hanging on. Their hydroponic gardens don’t produce enough to feed them. They’ve got enough water from mining comet ice, but their seed stock is very limited. If we could find a way to travel back and forth to the station, we could exchange food for water.”

The word “water” lingered in the air. Fort Davis never had enough water. No one in the southwest did.

“I’ve never understood how Amity could get to the comets but can’t fly down here,” someone said.

“Because,” said Matt, patiently, as if he hadn’t explained this many times before, “they’ve only got tiny vessels that would burn up on re-entry to our atmosphere.” Enough satellites had survived the collapse that they had regular conversations with both the station and the smaller lunar community.

“Even if someone at Los Alamos knows how to build a space shuttle, how will we ever put the resources together to do it? Look at how much effort and money it took the first time.” Nods and approving murmurs echoed the speaker’s sentiments.

That was when Marty jumped in. “You don’t need to build a ship. You just need to retrofit one. The old spaceport at Upham has a couple of perfectly good ships. They weren’t designed to go as far as the space station, but someone who understood spaceship construction could probably figure out a fix. They’re big enough. Of course, we’d also need someone who knows how to fly the things.”

“The spaceport survived, then,” Matt said. “I’d assumed it hadn’t made it.”

“I guess it wasn’t on anybody’s bombing list,” Marty said. “Unlike Cape Canaveral or the Baikonuer Cosmodrome. And the people of Upham decided it was worth protecting from bandits. The co-op delivers over there. It’s a tiny community, but they’re proud of those ships. You could send some people back to Las Cruces with us, and we could hook you up with Upham. Los Alamos is just a straight shot north from there.”

“I’ll go,” Ooljee said. She’d wanted to go when she’d first heard the news. “I’ve got enough training to talk with any scientists I might find at Los Alamos. And you know I can take care of myself.”

Although Ooljee’s official job was as an engineer at the observatory, she’d  begun training with the militia when she turned fifteen. At twenty-seven, she now led a squad.

Matt nodded. “A good choice.” He didn’t call for more volunteers. Ooljee hadn’t expected him to. This was a gamble, and their community had not survived by risking too much on any one gamble.

Marty sought Ooljee out after the meeting. “This mission needs more than one person.”

Ooljee said, “Well, I guess we can’t spare anyone else.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Her tone suggested that she thought the community was not contributing as much as it could. “Anyway, if you’re willing, I’ll go with you.”

Ooljee nodded. She’d barely met this woman, but she liked what she’d seen.

“In fact, I think we might be able to get a vehicle in Las Cruces. It won’t be much — nothing like as good as the co-op delivery trucks — but it will beat walking.”

“A vehicle — you mean a car or truck of some kind? I was thinking I could stick my bicycle on the dairy truck, and ride it north.”

“Well, the truck I think we can get isn’t a lot faster than a bike, but it will carry more stuff and protect us from the sun. And I can probably be of some help to you. Most of the people in the area around Los Alamos are Pueblo, like me. They’ll be more likely to talk to a Navajo like you if I come along.”

Ooljee, embarrassed, muttered something about not being much of a Navajo. “It’s only on my mother’s side. And I’ve never traveled out to Arizona to meet any of her relatives.”

“Maybe after this trip, you can find a way to track them down. I’ve heard a lot of communities are thriving over that way, though their water problems are even worse than ours. I’m sure they’d like to know you.”

Ooljee doubted that. Her mother hadn’t cut all ties, and had tried to teach Ooljee something about the Navajo Way, but since her mother’s death she hadn’t found any reason to keep it up. She had a picture of her shimasani – her grandmother – but it had been taken before Ooljee was born. The address she had was probably out of date, too. Besides, she didn’t even know how Navajos acted in their daily lives, if it was really any different from anyone else, especially since the collapse. Most of the people she knew in Fort Davis were either Anglo or Chicano; the few others with Native American background were Apache.

Marty was older than Ooljee – in her late forties – but her hair was still coal black. She wore it coiled into two buns on the sides of her head. Ooljee’s own hair was just as black, what there was of it: she kept it cropped very short. She was taller than the Pueblo woman, but despite her militia experience, Ooljee felt a little in awe of Marty, whose powerful presence radiated from her even when she was doing something as simple as sipping a cup of tea. Natural born leader, Ooljee thought.

Tomas had joined them at Upham. He was nineteen, and one of the few young people in that community. His desire to go up in the ships was palpable from the way he showed Ooljee around, not neglecting the smallest detail of their design. Once he heard they hoped to find someone at Los Alamos who might know how to get them operational, he begged them to take him along. His mother cried and insisted he wear a San Cristobal medal around his neck – to keep him safe – but she let the young man go.

They made it to the edge of the Sevilleta Refuge the first day out from Upham, suffering nothing worse than one flat tire and hours of bumpy ride. No community existed in that region and most of the trees were scrubby mesquites that gave little shade. They camped behind an abandoned barn.

They were headed first to Jemez Pueblo, where they hoped to find someone who knew Los Alamos. Marty had grown up in Jemez, but she hadn’t been back in years. “It’s a long trip, and there’s not much up there. People are barely getting by. Of course, life was always like that in the pueblo – climate change didn’t make a lot of difference and it was isolated from most of the rest of the collapse. I wanted something more. I heard the university was still functioning in Las Cruces, so I took off. And I just stayed.” She taught literature, history, anthropology – culture. During school breaks she collected stories from people in the region.

“My mother left her family behind for education, too,” Ooljee said. “She wanted to study the stars, so she ended up at the observatory. She met my father and stayed.”

“Are you an astronomer, too?”

“No. I spend some time looking through the telescopes for fun, but I’m an engineer. I like making things work. Of course, no one specializes too much. I can give a pretty good star tour.”

“Tell me something,” Tomas said. He’d been staring at the sky ever since it got dark.

“Well, you probably know the North Star.”

He nodded. Celestial navigation had made a comeback.

“In a few thousand years, that star over there” – she pointed at Vega – “will become the North Star. The Earth’s axis wobbles, and it will eventually shift.”

“Wow. If we could get the ships to run, could we travel there?”

“It’s too far. But we could get up to the station, at least. See it over there.”

Tomas was still sitting there watching the stars when Ooljee and Marty climbed into sleeping bags for the night.

They stopped near Escabosa the next night, having gone to the east even though it was out of their way. “I don’t want to camp too close to Albuquerque,” Marty said. “I’ve heard things are improving, but I’d rather avoid it. We’re outside their zone of influence here, and we should be able to make it to Placitas tomorrow.”

Ooljee nodded. Cities had fallen harder than the small towns, perhaps just because there were too many people there when resources started to fail, perhaps because city people didn’t know their neighbors well and hadn’t been able to create the small cooperative communities that had made survival possible.

Marty seemed more tense the next day. “Too much traffic.” They had passed a couple of vehicles after not seeing anyone at all for two days. The first was a slow moving small car plastered over with solar panels not unlike their own. Two people were visible in the front seat. They didn’t stop, but gave a friendly wave, after the custom of the region. Marty waved back, but pushed the accelerator to the floor in an effort to get maximum speed out of their truck.

The second one was a van, much larger and faster, with no side windows. “It must run on gas or maybe cooking oil,” Tomas said, obviously thrilled to see such a powerful machine. The man driving waved and Marty waved back, but her jaw tightened.

“Where would they get fuel?” Ooljee asked.

Tomas shrugged, but Marty said, “There’s a refinery in Artesia.”

“That’s pretty far south. Do you think they pipe gas up this way?”

“I don’t know. We don’t do business with them.”

Ooljee got the hint: In Las Cruces they considered the refinery community to be at least a variation on bandits.

An hour later, they heard an engine in the distance. Ooljee looked back through binoculars. “Could be that same van.”

“A return trip,” Tomas said.

“We’ve changed roads twice since we saw them,” Marty said.

They went over a small rise and spotted  a weatherbeaten farmhouse near the road. No cars, no animals – clearly abandoned. Marty pulled behind it. A minute later the van shot by.

“Well, they’re gone,” Tomas said. But Marty didn’t start the engine and Ooljee was still looking through the binoculars.

“If they’re looking for us,” Ooljee said, “they’ll come back to find where we left the road.”

“And it won’t be hard to find,” Marty added, in the grim voice of one who’d seen her share of fights.

Ooljee nodded. She slung the binoculars around her neck, picked up her rifle, and got out of the truck. Marty went around to the back and opened the locked crate, where several more rifles were stored. She handed one to Ooljee and took one herself, checking to make sure it was loaded.

Tomas crawled out of the truck, looked at Ooljee, then at Marty, and said, “Oh.” Marty handed him a gun. Now they each had two weapons. He followed her lead in checking it. Clearly he knew how to handle a weapon. Just as clearly he’d never been in a real battle.

The house they were hiding behind was frame construction, and the roof had long since caved in. “This building doesn’t give us much protection,” Ooljee said. “If they’ve got any firepower at all, one good round will come right through that wall.”

A three-foot-high cement block wall that intersected the side of the house looked like a better bet, though it was crumbling. A propane tank stood just beyond where it petered out. “That tank would provide a solid cover,” Marty said.

“If,” Ooljee said, “there’s no propane left in it.”

Tomas dropped down to the ground and peered underneath. “It’s rusted out down here. I don’t smell any gas and it’s bone dry. What was left probably leaked out and evaporated.”

“If we’re lucky,” Marty said. And then they all heard the whine of a vehicle. Marty dropped down behind the wall and Tomas stayed on the ground near the tank.

Ooljee stood at the corner of the house next to where the block wall met it, so she could watch the van through the binoculars. It was driving slower now. Marty had parked their truck practically inside the house – the back wall was gone – so it shouldn’t be visible. But it wouldn’t take a genius tracker to figure out where they’d left the road, if the van slowed down enough to look.

It went past. Tomas stood up, as if the threat were gone, but Marty stayed put behind the cement block wall. Ooljee realized she’d been holding her breath, and deliberately breathed all the way down to her diaphragm.

A couple of minutes passed. Then they heard the engine. Ooljee watched through the binoculars, holding them with her left hand. Her right held one of her rifles, her index finger on the trigger. The van came into view, moving much more slowly. “Get down,” Marty hissed at Tomas, and he crouched behind the propane tank. The van stopped within twenty feet of where they had left the road. Three men got out. Each carried a gun.

Three and three, Ooljee thought. Good odds, assuming they don’t have a flamethrower or grenades. She could hear them talking now.

“That shack over there is the only shelter around. They gotta be around here somewhere.”

“Oh, hell. It was just a old beater. They probably ain’t got nothing of value.”

“It was a woman driving, asshole. When was the last time you had a woman?”

Ooljee’s index finger tightened on the trigger. She let the binoculars drop and put both hands on the gun, ready to aim and point. She heard a sharp intake of breath from Tomas and out of the corner of her eye caught sight of Marty raising her gun.

“Hey, here’s where they left the road,” the third man yelled. Now all three stared at the house.

Ooljee’s shot hit the man who’d mentioned women in the center of his chest. She dropped to the ground beside Marty, not even looking to see if he fell. Assault rifle fire peppered the house and the wall and bounced off the propane tank, which didn’t blow.

There was a brief lull, in which someone said, “I think Ben’s dead.” Tomas stood up behind the propane tank and let rip with a volley of his own, though his semi-automatic didn’t provide the same volume of attack. The men responded with another round, and Tomas suddenly cried out and hit the ground.

Marty was firing over the far end of the wall without looking and the attackers were aiming at that spot and at the propane tank. Ooljee crawled back to the side of the house and stood up to shoot. One of the men was limping. She dropped him and was back on the ground before the third man could change his line of fire.

Marty had shifted to the propane tank and leaned over it to shoot the last man. She hit his shoulder, and he dropped his gun. Ooljee stood, and saw him get to his feet and start running for the van, his gun forgotten. She shot him in the back.

Marty looked at her. Ooljee said, “I didn’t want him to get reinforcements.” Marty nodded, though Ooljee caught the reservation on her face. They both turned to take care of Tomas.

He’d taken a bullet in his left shoulder. Marty got the first aid kit from the truck and pulled out a syringe preloaded with morphine. “I can’t put you out,” she told the boy, “but I can give you this to ease the pain a little.” He nodded.

She took out a surgical knife and expertly cut the skin open enough to see the bullet. It was lodged in muscle; the bone seemed intact. Tomas yelled once as she pulled it out. She began cleaning and bandaging the wound.

Ooljee said, “That’s a professional job. You’re more than a teacher.”

“You’re more than an engineer. That was sniper work.”

“My mother died when I was fifteen, not from disease. I dealt with my rage by learning to fight.”

“I see why your community thought you could handle things alone,” Marty said.

Both praised Tomas for his bravery. He had opened fire at just the right moment – not bad at all for someone new to a firefight. He looked a little pale – and not just from his injury – as they gathered the dead men’s weapons. “Are we going to bury them?”

“Buzzards need to eat, too,” Marty said.

Maybe Marty didn’t disapprove of her tactics at that, Ooljee thought.

Tomas wanted to take the van. “It’s way faster than our truck.”

But Marty refused. “I’m not touching that thing. Let it rot out here, too.” Ooljee agreed, though she did raid it for supplies and disabled the engine, just in case.

They made it most of the way to Placitas before stopping for the night.

#

The dust was blowing as they drove into Jemez Pueblo. None of the creeks they’d crossed between Placitas and the pueblo held water and the trees on the rocky hillsides looked parched. A building on the edge of town advertised “slots, slots, slots,” though the windows were boarded up and the front door swung open.

Several men came out to meet them as they parked near the town center. Marty spoke to them in the Jemez version of the Pueblo language. They recognized her, and tension subsided. “You’re just in time for the corn dance,” one man told them. Someone brought them water.

Tomas and Ooljee sat on the porch of what had been a post office, while Marty went off to meet her family in one of the old adobe pueblos built around the central square. They talked about weather and farming with people who gathered around, curious about visitors.

Marty came back an hour later. “I’ve got you two a place to sleep. I need to stay with my family. We’ll get with several families for dinner. People are very touchy about Los Alamos, but I think we’ll be able to get some information. My brother knows someone who knows someone. And we’ll have to stay for the corn dance tomorrow.”

“But that’s another whole day,” Tomas said. “We need to get there.”

“Not if they won’t let us in when we arrive,” Ooljee said, controlling her own impatience as she answered the boy’s. “If the people of Los Alamos weren’t skittish about others, they’d have responded to Amity or my people. We need an introduction, and people here want to be sure of us before they say anything. The chance of more connections is worth the wait.”

Their place to stay was a tent in a field on the edge of town – one of many set up for visitors coming for the dance. The place grew busy as more people arrived.

People packed into Marty’s family’s house for dinner: Mutton stew spiced with a variety of peppers. They were curious about life in other places and asked Ooljee and Tomas lots of questions.

As it grew dark, one of the old men said, “The people in Los Alamos lived too much in the future. They forgot to live in the present.”

Ooljee felt Tomas stir next to her. She laid a hand on his knee, and bit her own tongue.

“They destroyed much. The land is still ruined down near where you live.” He nodded toward Marty.

He is thinking of the Twentieth Century, Ooljee thought, when they developed the atomic bomb out there. Ancient history. But she didn’t interrupt.

“There are people living there now, but who knows what new disasters they may be bringing on us. Once we had water here. Once it was easier to live.”

Judging from the murmurs in the room, others seemed to agree. “They haunt the land,” someone said.

Well, Ooljee thought, at least that confirms someone is up there, even if no one trusts them.

Sometime later, Marty’s brother sat beside her. “There is a man from up near Jemez Springs, a sheepherder. Navajo, I think.” He grinned. “He usually comes to the dances to sell mutton. He may already be at the campground. I have heard he sells meat to Los Alamos. Tomorrow I will make sure you meet him. Perhaps he can help you.”

The corn dance was an all day affair, a ritual dating back centuries. Ooljee, Marty, and Tomas sat on the porch of Marty’s family’s home – her mother and brothers were all taking part – and watched. Ooljee made herself relax into the slow time of ancient tradition.

The men appeared first, some with skin painted gray – “Squash people,” Marty whispered – and some painted blue – “Turquoise folks.” Then the women came, with tablets on their heads.

Ooljee heard a sound beside her. Marty was crying. “I danced for the first time the year before I left,” she said. “I would like to dance again. I always loved this time.”

“Why don’t you come back?”

“I want to help rebuild civilization, not just survive. Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe so much collapsed because it wasn’t the way humans were supposed to live. That’s what my mother would say. Certainly tradition is wonderful and should not be lost, but the Pueblo people aren’t the only ones with a worthy history. Look at the many wonderful things – not just terrible things – human beings have invented. I think people are capable of more than living like their ancestors.”

Ooljee had never thought about things that way before, but she liked how Marty explained it. Still, watching the dance made her wonder what Navajo rituals were like. Maybe, after this was done, she would try to find her shimasani. She thought about the men she had killed two days before – killed without thinking. Now she shivered slightly, hot as it was. Had she become a stone cold killer? She wondered if her mother’s people could help her. Like Marty said, the future was important, but the old ways were important too. A balance. She wanted to find that balance.

Tomas had wiggled impatiently through the early part of the dancing. His shoulder was probably hurting. But Ooljee had caught him looking at one of the young women dancers. A little later, she noticed the young woman looking back at him. Hormones would keep him from being too impatient.

When people settled for dinner, Marty’s brother took Ooljee to meet Mr. Begay, the sheepherder. He was an old man, probably as old as Matt Garcia back in Fort Davis.

“It’s nice to see another Navajo at these affairs,” Begay said. “My people are from Shiprock.”

“My mother came from Chinle, but my father was not Navajo.”

“I thought not. You do not live in these parts?”

“I live in Texas, in the mountains.”

“Ah, so far from home. But it is like a Navajo to live away from people.”

Ooljee decided not to explain that the people at the observatory, at least, lived more like the Pueblo than the Navajo. “I hear you sell your sheep to many communities.”

“Yes. Life in the open is very good, but one must trade to survive.”

“Do you trade to the east as well?”

“I trade with whoever wants wool or mutton. And yes, I trade with the people of Los Alamos. I understand you are interested in them.”

Ooljee’s face must have betrayed her surprise that he mentioned it so openly, because he added, “I may be a simple sheepherder, but I am not a superstitious man. Things may be different in Los Alamos, but people live there, decent people, and they need to eat same as you or me. I am supposed to meet one of them the day after tomorrow.” He paused, obviously expecting something.

“We can offer you a ride,” Ooljee said.

“That will be very kind. I will take you to meet that man.” He turned to go. “Of course, there are others in Los Alamos, not just people.”

“Ghosts?”

“Not exactly.”

#

They took Begay to his hogan, and made camp for the night nearby. Next morning they loaded up his supplies and took off for the last leg. Tomas was in high spirits – he was convinced they would find a coven of engineers and pilots. Marty seemed more pensive and Ooljee was trying to restrain her own feelings of enthusiasm.

They traveled into taller mountains, where the trees shot up higher and the air cooled a little. As they reached the outskirts of the old town, Begay said, “I think only Ooljee should come with me. Too many people may scare my customer, but he will not be so surprised to see another person who looks like me. ”

Even Tomas could see the logic in that, though he worried: “What if they attack you?”

Begay seemed to find that amusing. Ooljee said, “Well, then, it’s better if you are back here to warn others.”

They met the man at an empty house on the edge of town. It was obvious to Ooljee that no one lived nearby. She thought of how her community welcomed the regular visits from the dairy co-op and the cattle ranchers from north of them in Texas, then remembered that when she was a child they had been much more careful, and had still lost people. We have made progress, she thought.

The man from Los Alamos was anglo, tall, probably mid-forties, though with his sun-weathered skin it was hard to tell. “Dr. Barnes,” said Begay, “this is my friend Ooljee Yzaguirre.”

Barnes relaxed slightly. Navajo face, Navajo name. Perhaps he considered Navajos more trustworthy than other people, or maybe it was just because it was logical for her to be with Begay.

They exchanged goods. Barnes had brought a battery and several solar panels. “The battery is a new design. It will hold power for a longer period.”

Begay was pleased. “I think this will work on that old motorcycle I found. That will make it easier to make deliveries.”

Ooljee looked at the battery. It was the kind that used the separation of water into hydrogen and oxygen to store power, but had been adapted to require much less water than the original model. “I see how you did that. Would you mind if I tried out this design?”

“Ooljee is a scientist like you,” Begay said.

Barnes looked surprised. “A scientist, out in that country.” He waved a hand toward the west.

“Actually, I come from south and east. West Texas. We have a community there, built around the observatory.”

“My God,” Barnes said. “Do the telescopes still work?”

“Oh, yes. We classify stars and study nebulae.”

“You’re an astronomer?”

“An amateur. I’m more of an engineer than a scientist. I work with things like that battery. But we have astronomers and physicists, and programs in biology and chemistry.”

“Not just survived, but kept an observatory going. I didn’t think it was happening anywhere else.” Barnes was trembling.

Careful, Ooljee thought. Don’t scare him. “You’ve obviously kept studying things, if you can improve on a solar battery.”

“Well, there are some others …” His voice trailed off.

“We’re not alone, you know. There are people on the space station …”

“That can’t be possible. They must have died.”

“Human beings seem to be made of stronger stuff than we might have thought. Though things are tough for them.”

“Hydroponics, of course,” he said, when she had described how they lived. “They must be mining comets for water. But how do you know?”

“There are still satellites. The people of our community made a point of keeping in touch with anyone they could, even when things were at their worst. Pretty much every observatory kept going – they were isolated enough.”

Barnes looked as if he might cry, but his survival skills kicked in. He asked one question, then another, testing Ooljee’s knowledge. He paused occasionally, as if he was thinking about what she said. Her explanation of how they altered the blades on wind turbines so they worked in the slightest wind, and the various methods they used to increase their power capacity – running the telescopes sucked a lot of juice – seemed to convince him that she was, in fact, what she said she was. “You must come meet the others. Can you come with me now?”

Ooljee hesitated. She wanted to go get Marty and Tomas, to bring them along. But the way Barnes was fidgeting told her he was nervous. It might scare him off if she mentioned others. And she might be walking into something dangerous, in which case it would be better if he didn’t know about her friends.

Barnes had taken her hesitation for fear, because he said, “We can bring you back out to this meeting place after we’ve had time to talk, so that you can get back to Mr. Begay’s.”

She decided to let him keep his assumption. “Yes, that would be good.”

Begay smiled at her, and she knew he would tell Marty and Tomas. Tomas would be furious, but Marty would understand. She shook his hand formally, and he whispered, “Don’t forget there are others there, not just people.”

She puzzled over that comment as she helped Barnes carry the meat and wool, and followed him up a paved road past vacant houses. Each house was topped with solar panels. They were gathering vast quantities of power.

He saw her looking. “On the other side we have quite a few turbines, though we haven’t improved them much. Perhaps we can try your idea.”

Ooljee also noticed a region with no buildings, no trees, even no scrubby bushes. A bomb crater, perhaps? These people had reason to hide out, she thought. No wonder we hadn’t found them before.

They came over a rise and Ooljee saw a number of large buildings scattered about in a campuslike setting. One of the buildings was a complete ruin — another bomb? — but the others looked intact. Several people walked out to meet them, all carrying guns and binoculars. Obviously they had been watching out for Barnes. Ooljee tensed at the sight of weapons – she had left her own behind, on purpose – but made herself relax. If they killed her, so be it.

“Welcome, Ooljee,” a tall woman said. Barnes looked shamefaced, and showed her his small radio. Obviously others had been listening to their conversation; he’d probably been getting instructions from others when he’d asked her questions. Ooljee smiled, to let him know she understood security, though it made her uncomfortable that all these people knew more about her than she knew about them. Too bad she didn’t have radio contact with Tomas and Marty.

“We have let everyone know,” the woman said to Barnes. Ooljee thought she emphasized everyone. “We agreed with your suggestion to meet with this woman.”

That sounded even more unsettling, but Ooljee walked on with them. They entered a large, featureless building – concrete block construction, no windows – and took an elevator down several stories to a large conference room, where about twenty people were waiting for them: men and women of a variety of ethnic backgrounds, with more people of Asian and African descent than the other communities she knew.

A man brought her water – the ultimate gift – and she sat. Questions began immediately, as if people had stored them up, waiting for someone like her. She talked for what seemed like hours about what they were doing at the observatory, what they knew of the space dwellers, the old space ships at the spaceport. Even the dairy co-op and the corn dancers fascinated them, and they were particularly excited to hear of contact with Arecibo and the Keck observatory in Hawai’i.

“Goddard, Cape Canaveral, the Houston space center – they all went down so fast,” someone said. “We thought no other science centers survived but us. So we hid out, to protect what we had.”

People from the various high tech groups in Northern New Mexico — the Santa Fe Institute, the clumps of transhumanists, the enclaves of multidisciplinary thinkers — had gravitated to Los Alamos because of its superior protection. Even after the federal government pulled out of Los Alamos at the height of the crash, taking their security personnel with them, the construction of the building and the location made it far easier to defend from bandits and freelance militias than the open buildings in Santa Fe and other towns.

Ooljee was stunned to think how much knowledge this group might actually have stored in computer files or even in old fashioned file cabinets. Some of the oldtimers at MacDonald Observatory had told her about the eclectic research that had been centered around Santa Fe in the early part of the century, but it hadn’t occurred to anyone that those people might have been able to move into the Los Alamos complex.

“When things hit the worst point, we moved everything we could underground. We’re fortunate that the people who tried to attack us over the years mostly weren’t smart enough to aim for the solar and wind arrays, or we wouldn’t have been able to create enough power to survive. But it’s just amazing to think that so many other communities are going strong. And you say they’ve even saved the spaceport at Upham?”

Ooljee nodded. “There are still many dangers out there, but a lot of communities have built solid foundations. If we all work together, we can start the process of reclaiming civilization.”

Some looked skeptical, some nodded, and a new round of questions began. As Barnes had done when they first met, people asked questions that probed at Ooljee’s level of knowledge. Was she really the engineer she claimed to be? Did she really know enough about the workings of the observatory to be from Fort Davis? Was she making up what she said about the space station? Ooljee answered the questions as best she could – saying she didn’t know when she didn’t know – and replied with ones of her own.

Even with what she had been told about the different groups that had moved out to Los Alamos, the diversity of disciplines surprised her. Those in the room represented everything from physicists to biologists to linguists. And they were not the whole community, not by a long shot. They were raising children, educating people. Despite their ghostly reputation, they had brought in others who stumbled upon them – their method of vetting visitors was practiced.

They were comparing notes on how the different communities had dealt with a particularly virulent virus outbreak when a voice spoke through a speaker. “Ooljee, you are welcome here. We would like to know you better.” The voice had no inflection, no accent – it seemed almost mechanical.

“What was that?”

Barnes looked embarrassed. “That was Avi.”

“Some kind of artificial intelligence?”

“Kind of. Avi was once many people, but now their brains are combined.”

Ooljee shuddered. It sounded like something from a horror novel. A bad horror novel. She looked around the room, but no one else seemed disturbed. Had she wandered into some kind of transhumanist cult?

“Oh, don’t worry. No one was forced into it. It was a way to save their knowledge.” Barnes produced a small device. “It will be easier to understand if you communicate with them directly. This electrode hooks into your brain and picks up your thoughts. The connection to Avi is wireless. It doesn’t really hurt much to install it. We all have them, see?” He turned his head and pulled up his hair so she could see a tiny piece of black plastic.

Ooljee fought down an urge to snatch the device from his hand and toss it across the room. Were they all controlled by this computer, this AI or whatever it was?

One of the others said, “You don’t have to do it. Avi, you can just talk with her for now. This is too new.”

Avi said, “All right.”

Barnes laid down the device.

Avi said, “Please ask any question you wish.”

I have come all this way to find something like this, Ooljee thought. We need to know what these people have done. If they intend to harm me, we need to know that, too. Though perhaps they will make me into some kind of zombie, send me back to kill everyone. No, that was completely ridiculous. These people were not evil; she had tested them as they had tested her. But they might be misguided, might do harm while thinking they were doing good. A reasonable thing to fear; just jumping in would not be wise. “Explain to me how this thing works.”

“It turns your brainwaves into signals the Avi mainframe can read, brings your knowledge and information into the mix, so that everyone can share it. And it lets you see all the information available from Avi and the rest of us here. It makes research much faster, because we can quickly find out what is already known about any given subject.”

“It reads minds?” Ooljee thought of all the things she hadn’t told these people, all the things she wouldn’t want to share.

Barnes said, “Not really. It does tap into your knowledge, but not your emotions, not your personal self. It will show us things you are thinking about, but it will also show you what is going on with us. And you will be able to pull answers to your own questions directly from Avi’s multitude of databases.”

“We are not the singularity,” Avi said in that flat voice. “We are just a more advanced form of computing and communication.”

Ooljee was far from convinced, but she found herself thinking back to what Marty had said about the ability of humans to create new things. This could be one of those steps toward human progress, one way to build a healthy new civilization on the ashes of the old one. It could also be something like the bombs that had left the crater she’d seen. But there was no real way to find out without trying it. You are a warrior, she told herself. You must take risks. She sipped the last of her water, took a deep breath, and said, “No. I will do it your way.”

They shaved the hair from a small space at the back of her skull – “not enough to be noticeable” – and stuck the electrode through her scalp. It hurt briefly, like an injection from a hypodermic, but the pain vanished quickly, replaced by a wave of information.

Certainly the Virgin ships could be retrofitted to reach the space station. A set of details on how to do it went by, constantly upgraded and corrected as it came. Bringing spent comets back to Earth would be trickier: Another set of details on how to build a cargo vessel to carry comets, a general consensus that it would be easier to build such things in space, where dust would not be a problem.

The history of human civilization flew by – Chinese emperors succeeded by Roman caesars proceeding to western democracies. Genes came together to create life. Ants foraged for food, horses ran on open plains, elephants tramped through a savanna. Pages of mathematical formulae scrolled by.

“It’s like an encyclopedia,” Ooljee thought/said. And the response came back, “No, a wiki.”

Of course. Because all this information was constantly being updated, corrected, revised. Nothing was set in stone. She tried to control the flow – she knew that others were able to do this, but she could not quite get the hang of it. Impatience, again: She wanted to know everything, and everything seemed to be here. The device must be picking up some of her thoughts, because here came information on Navajo religion and the kind of ceremony that might be performed for a warrior after battle. She reached for more information, more, even more, and finally passed out.

She woke a few minutes later to silence in her mind. She was lying on a couch, and a young man was squatting by her side. “She’ll be fine,” he said. “It was just Avi overload.”

Ooljee sat up carefully, and accepted another glass of water. “What was that?”

“In 2009,” Barnes began like a professor giving a lecture, “a core of people came together – some computer scientists, medical researchers, engineers, high tech billionaires. Research indicated brain functions could be translated into electrical signals and read by a computer, and these people wanted to make that happen – without the government’s involvement. If you’ve read history, you know that the U.S. government was foundering even back then, despite an heroic effort to salvage it.”

Ooljee nodded.

“It was kind of like the private space travel businesses that gave rise to those spaceships down south – amazing they haven’t been destroyed. The high tech business made wealthy the kind of people who were more interested in ‘what’s next’ than in building vast estates and dropping thousands on flights to Paris for dinner.

“It took five years to get the system to work, and by then things were really starting to collapse. But they were able to find more people to join in – quietly, privately. People agreed to upload their brains when they were on the verge of death. A vast bank of mainframes were connected to each other. A hospice was set up nearby. The whole thing was set up to run on alternative fuels from the beginning.

“There were news reports marveling at how many certified geniuses decided to spend their last years out here, but it was put down to an intellectual community and the mild climate.  Let me let Avi give you the rest. They can do it more gently than before.”

Thousands of minds – great minds, creative thinkers, multiple disciplines – all working together to solve problems. Ego seemed to be missing. It wasn’t so much a collection of individual people as it was of information they had, combined together in a way that let the facts held by one person affect the research done by another. People had come to join them for ten years, until the outside world deteriorated so badly that Los Alamos decided to close off outside contact. By then a sizeable community of supporters had been built up, and thousands of minds uploaded.

Some in the community kept the power running – the wild storms of the Thirties had threatened to bring them down, though they never lacked for sunshine. Others made sure the mainframes remained functional. Most took turns as guards. All planned to become part of Avi – Advanced Variable Interface – when they died. Avi could talk, but it was easiest to access their information directly. Besides, Avi could take in information from people, and work it into their vast store of information.

Avi felt alive, but the people who made it up were not. This was not quite the transhumanist dream. Or perhaps it was — perhaps the transhumanists had dreamed of knowledge without individual personalities. But that was the weakness of Avi: it — they — could not act on their own. Without living people, not just for protection and energy, but also for new knowledge about the ever changing world, Avi would just be a fabulous encyclopedia.

“Someone should go get Ooljee’s friends.” This time, because she was connected, it was simply a thought in Ooljee’s mind, not spoken words. She felt the others join in, noted their surprise — even their fear — that she had told them nothing of the others, “heard” Avi reassure them that Tomas and Marty were people that Ooljee trusted, that they would bring more knowledge into the mix.

#

By the next morning, Tomas had already hooked into Avi, but Marty had chosen to communicate solely through conversation for the time being. The impetuousness of the young, the caution of one who had been around long enough to see disasters.

Ooljee herself was growing comfortable with Avi now, learning to control things so that she could find information without being overwhelmed, getting the feel of how to share information while still protecting those things she felt were no one else’s business.

Not only knowledge, Ooljee thought. But ongoing learning. Working with Avi they wouldn’t just recreate what humans had discovered before; they would be able to go forward to the next steps. Avi, or at least part of Avi, could be copied and downloaded into a spaceship computer, sent off to explore other galaxies.

But Avi needed people, to protect them, to bring them new information. They had been excited by the news of all the communities that had survived, even thrived; Ooljee had watched that information work into the brain. Cooperation. Avi was based on cooperation. Humanity had survived because of cooperation.

Ooljee’s heart soared, to think of all that could now come together. They could set up communications networks among all the communities they could find. Possibly versions of Avi could be moved to other places; perhaps they could all be networked.

Once more she reminded herself to rein in her enthusiasm. Avi was vulnerable. They – she found herself using the plural pronoun as the others had done – were not aware of much that was happening in the world. Not ultimate salvation, but another tool, another community, another building block toward a civilized future. She let herself hope she would live to see it.

She checked in with the others. Marty was talking with Avi, still resisting the link. Tomas was deeply immersed in researching space travel.

“May I take the truck?” Ooljee asked.

“Sure,” Marty said. “But why?”

“I want to go out and talk with Mr. Begay.”

Marty looked puzzled, but she passed over the key.

Ooljee hadn’t explained. She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do herself, except that she thought Begay might be able to help her find her mother’s family, or perhaps a Navajo healer who could help her come to grips with the violence she had seen, the lives she had taken. Begay, a man who lived a traditional life, and yet was not frightened by what he found in Los Alamos: He would understand what she needed.

She was done with killing, or at least, she was done with the rage that had made her learn to kill. She wanted to clear out that part of her soul, to provide herself with a clean slate so that she could become more builder than warrior.

The time for warriors wasn’t gone, and Ooljee harbored no illusion that she would ever be completely free of the role. But she needed to make her peace with it. For that, she thought, the old ways would probably be best.

Old ideas and new, coming together. Perhaps the world had a future after all.

###

Nancy Jane Moore jumps around within the speculative fiction genre, varying both form and content. Her work ranges from straightforward science fiction to fantasy both traditional and urban to slipstream and varies as much in length as it does in subject matter. Her work has been published in a variety of venues, print and online, including Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Farrago’s Wainscot; she is also a regular contributor to the Book View Cafe fiction community. After many years in Washington, D.C., she now lives in Austin where she reports on Texas developments for a national legal publisher.

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Though I believe he started writing it before then, we received Charlie’s story not long after the announcement that the House and Senate of the State of Utah had passed a bill that would criminalise miscarriage. A dark serendipity, perhaps, but it makes “Your Life Sentence” one of the most timely stories we’ve ever published here. I hope you enjoy it.

Your Life Sentence

by C C Finlay

You sit in the bathroom, pants puddled at your ankles, and stare at the vase of orchids on the marble counter: the blossoms curl like purple teardrops.

Brandon, your husband, raps on the door.  “Hey!  Did you fall in?”

“Out in a second,” you answer.  For added verisimilitude you rattle the toilet paper roll.

“Well, call me if you need a lifeguard.”

You hate the joke.  “Sure thing,” you answer with saccharine cheer.

You live in a world that requires the bravado of false cheer.  For the past several days you’ve suffered from the too-familiar cramps, but you’ve been in denial, blaming the iffy paella valenciana at the restaurant two nights ago.  No more.  Only the deep breathing techniques you learned in Lamaze class the first time you were pregnant ease your panic.

“Honey!”  Brandon pounds at the door.  “We don’t want to be late.”

No, you don’t: the weekly doctor visits are a condition of your parole, after the second pregnancy.  Even you think that’s only fair.

“Almost done,” you answer.  A shudder runs down your spine, like a finger dragged across a keyboard badly out of tune.  You rise and pull your pants up.  The bowl flushes automatically, but you refuse to look back.  You tuck in your blouse, yank open the door.

Brandon stands there with a shoe in one hand and a big dumb grin on his square face.  “Know what week it is?”

“No,” you lie.  He leans over for a kiss and you dodge him.

“Week nine,” he says, laughing as if it’s a game.  “We’ll have the doctor fill out the Certificate of Conception, then call your parole officer.  Then if we have to check you into the hospital for the next thirty weeks–”

“Thirty weeks in the hospital — that’s almost like prison.”  You grab your keys and purse from the dresser.

“We’ve just got to stick to the plan,” he says earnestly.

Brandon has a plan, an answer, for everything.  It’s why you married him, and you liked that about him for a long time, even after you realized most of his answers don’t work for you.  “I think I left my ring in the bathroom,” you say, because you left it in the bathroom.  “Can you get it for me?”

“Sure!”

As soon as he turns away, you go to the garage.  You’re already driving down the street when he dashes out the front door.  He hops after you on one foot, still holding the shoe, shrinking in the rearview mirror as you speed out of the cul-de-sac.

Your name is Nicole Palmer, and this is the world you wanted, one where every unborn child is safe, protected by the law from the moment he or she is conceived.  You practice what you believe. Through three pregnancies, you didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and didn’t touch coffee or chocolate or anything else with caffeine or any other possible miscarrigens.  And as of this morning, you’ve had three miscarriages.

You’ve reported every conception.  You turned yourself in after the first two… accidents.  You’re a good person and you do everything right.  That’s why the courts gave you suspended sentences on manslaughter charges and released you to the custody of your husband.  And none of it makes any difference.  Under California law, you’re now a three-time felon facing a mandatory life sentence.

Your cell phone rings.

You throw it out the window and watch it shatter on the road.  You pound the steering wheel and scream.  It’s not fair!  You’ve accepted that you’ll go to prison, but it’s not fair.  It’s not fair that all your babies died.  It has to be somebody’s fault — the courts, your neighbors, your own mother, they all say it has to be somebody’s fault.  You just don’t understand why it’s your fault. You don’t know what you did wrong.

“Oh, Barbara,” you whisper.  Your mother’s name, the name you picked for the baby girl you just left behind.  The word tightens like a noose around your throat.

All you’ve ever wanted is to be a mother.

You jerk the wheel toward an exit, shifting lanes without checking your blind spots.

#

Long before you reach the Arizona border checkpoint you expect to be stopped, but when you get there the bored troopers wave you through.  Peace makes everyone relax.  You speed to the outskirts of Kingman, where your older sister Stevie lives.  Except for your mother’s funeral, you haven’t seen Stevie in eight years.

Stevie is a cop.  She’ll talk you into turning yourself in.

The convenience-store phonecard trembles in your hand when you call Stevie for directions to the trailer park.  When you get there, “trailer park” proves to be an euphemism for “rows of shipping containers in the desert outside town,” the cheapest temporary housing.  The rooftops are covered with contact-paper photovoltaic cells and solar water heaters; the yards are filled with composting toilets and old junk.  You turn at the sign Stevie told you to look for — Police Estates – although someone has painted slashes through the first E and the second S of Estates.  Stevie’s place is neater than most.  Only two cars out front, a jeep and something sporty, neither one on blocks.

Stevie waits in the yard, one fist planted on her hip, arm cocked like the hammer on a revolver.  She wears gray camouflage combat pants and a sleeveless retro RiceBoy t-shirt, with checkered flags on chopsticks.  It shows off the Airborne insignia and sergeant’s chevrons tattooed on her right arm.

You get out, legs stiff from hours in the car.  Stevie’s half-smile verges on a smirk.  She hesitates for a second and then embraces you.  You hesitate too, then hug her back hard.  “God, it’s good to see you,” blurts out of your mouth.

“You’re lucky you caught me at home,” Stevie says.  “The patrol has us working so much overtime.  What’s up?”

It pours out, not the way you intended at all, everything from the first day you suspected you were pregnant up to the miscarriage that morning.  You’re babbling about Brandon standing in the road with one bare foot when Stevie cuts you off.

“You bring any stuff with you?”

“No, I left everything behind.”  You didn’t realize, until you say it, that’s what you’ve done.

“Smart.  Come with me.”

You enter the double doors, squeeze past a couple loungers and a cherry-veneer entertainment center.  Muted light filters through a window made with plastic wrap and duct tape, falling on a pair of handcuffs atop a little fridge.  When she stops by the fridge, you hold out your hands so she can cuff you.

She opens the door.  “Want some Crank?”

Your hands twitch back.  “Uh… do you have any Diet Crank?”

“Like you need the diet stuff.”  But she tosses you a can, and while you stand there, feeling the cold sweat run down your palms, she stuffs a backpack with clothes, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and rolls of cash in ziploc bags.

You pop the lid and sip the soda to hide your confusion.  “Are you coming with me to jail?”

“Fuck that!  You aren’t going to jail.”

Hope kicks its tiny foot in your chest.  “What?”

“But we’ve got to get you back on the road quick so I don’t end up going to jail for you.  Here, carry this.”

You take the backpack.  Stevie shoves wires and tools into her back pockets, then picks up a little machine that looks like the heart monitor in the doctor’s office.  When you step outside again, the blinding sunlight startles the question out of you.  “Where am I going to go?”

“I don’t know, Nikki, I don’t want to know.”  Stevie walks over to the battered jeep.  “Your best choices are Mexico, Canada.  Maybe Massachusetts.  The wall makes it hard to cross into Sonora, and baby-killing’s a capital crime there too.  But it’s close and there’s no extradition right now because of the Tijuana security zone dispute.  Gimme that.”  She grabs the backpack and flings it into the back seat.

“I figured the other car was yours,” you say.  “It’s kinda like Dad’s.”

Stevie snorts and pats the hood like a hunter stroking a favorite dog.  “Yeah, he wishes.  This is a turbo-charged Freon with upgraded heads — the classic American ricemobile.”  Her grin curves into a frown.  “But it’s got a busted suspension.  The jeep belongs to Dave, but he’s working overtime today, so he took the patrol car in.”  She pops the jeep’s hood.

“I don’t want to get you in trouble with anyone–”

“Shit, Dave was recon, he’ll understand.  I’ll tell him I needed it.  He won’t even ask.”  She locates the antenna, traces the wire under the hood.  “I gotta kill the tracking chip in the GPS so they can’t trace you.  The first time we dropped into Seattle — did I ever tell you about that?”

“No.”  All that has happened since the last time you talked.

“No shit, this is what happened.  We dropped in, hit the target, and were supposed to make our way out toward Portland with the other refugees.  So we stole a classic Land Rover, a beaut with the rhino package, and thought we were home free.”  She works while she talks, stripping the wire, connecting the alligator clips, plugging them into the monitor.  “Fucking OneStar thought we were car thieves — which, technically, we were — and dropped the local private forces on us.  Man, that sucked.  More for them than us, as it turned out.  Okay, here we go.”

She flips a switch and the screen flickers into existence: a green line laid over a grid — spikes, like a static heartbeat, with a fork, like a choice between two roads.

“When we went back the second time,” she says, comparing lines on the screen to what she sees under the hood, “I took one of these with me, state of the art, size of a wristwatch, not like this piece of shit.  But that time, we– damn.  Cheapass bastards.”

Your head swirls, barely able to follow her.  “What’s wrong?”

“They’ve got the receiver and transmitter in one unit.”  She rubs her hand across her buzzcut, their father’s gesture, Stevie’s legacy.  “You good to go with no mapping?”

“Sure.”  You have that legacy from your dad at least; you know how to follow road signs.

“Good girl.”  Stevie grabs the needle nose pliers, twists something under the hood, and checks her watch.  “Two minutes, twenty-seven seconds.  It doesn’t count though, ’cause I stopped to talk.”  She slams the hood shut.  “Give me your keys.  I’ll have to drive your car somewhere else before I strip it.”

You start to take the car key off the ring, then hand them all to her when you realize you are never going home again.  “I can’t go to Mexico, Stevie.  I don’t speak Spanish.  And the north, I, I hate the cold, I–”

“Don’t tell me.  Just pick a place.  You’ll have to listen to the news, wait for one of the borders to open, then go for it.”  She looks in your eyes.  “You can do this, okay?”

“I don’t know if I can do this.  I don’t know.”

Stevie looks either way, reaches under her shirt and retrieves a small gun from the back of her pants.  It lays in her hand like a clot of blood.  Her eyebrows rise questioningly.  You inhale sharply, shake your head once, then a second time.  That’s not you.  Will never be you.

With a simple nod, Stevie slips the gun into her waistband again.  She scribbles a name and number on a slip of paper.  “Here’s a guy in Fort Worth who can fix you up with a new ID.  Just mention my name.”  She hands it over, pauses.  “I liked what you said at Mom’s funeral.”

It’s the last thing you ever expected to hear.  “It’s how I felt, that’s all.”

“Mom fucked me up,” Stevie says.  “Hell, she fucked us all up with her crazy religious bullshit, all that hellfire and punishment.  But what you said at her funeral, it made me see the good in her.”

You bristle a little.  “There was a lot of good in her.  She always did what she thought was right.”

“Yeah, even when she was totally wrong.”  Stevie hugs you again, releases.  “You gotta hit the road, sis, or they’ll catch you.  That’s my professional opinion.”

The Diet Crank is warm in your hand.  You’ve barely touched it.  You put it in the cup-holder, climb into the driver’s seat, and wave goodbye as you pull out of the rut that serves as a road.  You steer onto the highway and reach automatically to punch in your destination, only to remember that the mapping is dead and, besides, you don’t know your destination.  You see a sign for Fort Worth and turn that way.

Halfway there you hear your name on the radio.

“The search continues for California fugitive Nicole Palmer, wanted for manslaughter in the miscarriage of her third child.  Husband Brandon Palmer is worried for her safety.”

Brandon’s shaky voice:  “She’s crazy with grief. If I don’t find her, she could do something to hurt herself.”

Something in you hardens at the sound of him.  You aren’t crazy and you’ll never hurt yourself.  You don’t need his plans or his help.

The announcer’s voice continues: “Meanwhile, in Valley State Prison, Mary MacLean enters day forty of her hunger strike.  MacLean, convicted three years ago of manslaughter by miscarriage, is fasting to protest the Supreme Court decision that declared all laws applicable to the preborn–”

You punch the radio off.  You’ll keep running for a short while longer, just until you’re strong enough to face what you have to face.  Until you’re more like your mother.  Strong enough to do the right thing, no matter what.

#

In Fort Worth you become someone else.  New name, new ID.  Remembering the depression, the two summers your family spent fruit-picking when you were a kid, you drive through farm country and small towns looking for work off-the-books.  When you pass the rundown carnival with its Help Wanted sign, you slow down.

The owner shakes her head, but she hires you.

Spring becomes summer becomes fall: one small town becomes another small town becomes another, until you’re somewhere in Kentucky at yet another streetfair, this one for Halloween.  The air smells like leaf mold and wood smoke, and all the pumpkins on the porches wear evil grins.

Your ride’s the roller coaster box, because there’s more to running it than hitting an on/off switch.  You stand by the simulator box while long lines of children wait for their turns inside.  The box ceases bucking on its hydraulic pumps and you open the door.  Four girls climb out, still screaming.

“How was it?” squeaks a perky friend behind the rope.

“Ohmygod! It was so scary!”

“It’s not real.”

“It is too!”

“It’s real as you let it be,” you say, and chivvy them along.  The next girls rush inside.  You take their ten dollars, buckle them in, and glance over the slate at the coaster ride they designed.  You tweak it quickly–lowering one hill, raising another, adding an extra loop near the end, losing yourself in the little details.

“Jessica!” says a voice that sounds like a boot scuffing gravel.

The voice calls the name a second time before you realize she means you and jump.  It’s Boss, the old woman who owns the carnival.  At first you thought her name was Bess.  It took you a week to figure out she doesn’t have a name: she’s just Boss.

“What can I do you for, Boss?” you ask, trying to sound like the other carnies.

“You ain’t supposed to be holding up the line,” Boss says.  A cigarette bobs in her tight lips, its flame a little orange buoy on a sea of smoke.

You press the slate into its slot and pass the other one to the next kids in line.  The box creaks on its worn hydraulics, rears back, and starts the brief ride.

Boss stares at you for a moment, until your skin starts to twitch.  You smile nervously.  Finally, she says, “Come see me tonight after lock up.”  The ash flies off her cigarette and falls into the dust as she walks away.

You watch her wander down to the whirlygig to talk to the Dixon brothers.  The Dixons joined up a couple weeks after you, just out of prison for dealing meth.  The taller one leers at you sideways, shaggy mustache flopping as he laughs.

You snap back to work.  Most of your co-workers have criminal records like the Dixon brothers.  Like you, you remind yourself.  So you’ll go see Boss tonight and apologize for screwing up.  Then you’ll work harder to fit in.

The machine stops and you yank the door open.  “Next,” you growl at the girls inside.  “Let’s move.”

The next kids designed a crappy ride.  You slam it in the slot without changing a thing.

The simulator shudders into motion.

#

The stench of stale grease and fireworks fills the air after dark as you walk through the deserted rides and booths.  You tap on the door of Boss’s trailer.

“It won’t open itself,” she croaks.

Inside, everything is coated with a nicotine patina.  Even the plastic roses have turned from red to brown, blood to scab.  Boss sits behind a built-in table, cigarette in her mouth, counting and wrapping the day’s cash.  A bottle of Jim Beam whiskey rests in front of her, a revolver sits at her right hand.

“Boss, I know I’m not supposed to, well, change the rides designed by the kids,” you sputter.  “But they enjoy it more when I do.  And, and they come back–”

“Naw, that ain’t it, you gotta real touch with the kids,” she interrupts, never looking up as her thumb flicks through the bills.  “And the parents ain’t scared a you, so that’s bonus, ninety-seven, hold on, ninety-nine, a hunderd.”  She wraps it up and tosses it on the pile with others.  “Why dontcha go back to him?”

You catch your breath.  “Go back to who?”

She snorts so hard it blows the ash off the end of her cigarette.  “Your husband, somebody else’s husband, whoever he is.”

You sort through your words carefully like pieces of fruit, trying to find the good ones amid the bad and unripe.  “There isn’t anybody.”

“If you say so, honey.  What I’m telling you is you think there ain’t anybody like that now but maybe there was, see what I’m saying.  I been around, y’know.”

The thought of Boss getting around momentarily stymies you.  You hear yourself say, “Sure, I’ll think about it.”

“Good for you, sugarcup.  It’s easier to change yourself than it is to change the world.  But you think about it quick — we don’t have any more contracts lined up for the season, so I’m gonna start letting folks go tomorrow.”  She counts out your wages, then peels a hundred dollar bill off one of the rolls and slides it across the table.  “It’s not much, but you go on and take that for luck.  You earned it.”

You mumble thanks, pocket the bill, and leave.  After the door closes, the weight of the darkness hits you like a truck.  You don’t know where to go next.

“Hey, bitch.”

The Dixon brothers squeeze up on either side, smelling like weed and cheap beer.  You clench up so tight you can’t move.  The shorter one waves a knife at your throat.

“Thinks she’s too good for us,” he says.

The one with the raggy mustache grinds his crotch on your hip.  “You know those good girls — they like to get bad.”

“We know who you are, baby killer,” shorty says.  “We saw you on America’s Most Hunted.  Those contact lenses, the haircut, that’s bullshit.  It doesn’t fool us.”

“Hey, guys.”  Your voice cracks.  “Don’t do this, okay.”

“Who you gonna call for help?” mustache asks.  “We’ll just tell ‘em who you are.”

You’re blind with fear because you know they’re right.  Nobody will help you.  A little voice in your head whispers survive. They laugh at you so you laugh back, then they shove you toward your camper, and you go through the motions, saying the things they tell you to say, pretending the things they want you to pretend, until shorty puts his knife away and both of them are done.  When they invite you to come over to their van for drinks, you hear yourself say that sounds like a hell of a lot of fun, you’ll be right over, and you start making other promises, any promises, until finally they go on ahead without you.

Once they’re gone, you unhook the jeep, set the camper on fire, and smash the valve on the propane tank.  You do it fast enough that you know Stevie would be impressed, even though you know she’d never let them do what they did, and she’d never run.

As you speed toward the nearest highway, you keep looking back over your shoulder.  The propane tank explodes when you’re just over the horizon, ripping a pumpkin-colored wound across the black sky.

By the middle of the night you’re passing through the rolling hills outside Lexington.  The white lines in the road blur together with the miles of white rail fence.  Horses run behind those fences.  Just like you, no matter how fast or far they run they’re never free.

#

You circle through the same few states for several weeks, sleeping in the car, not knowing whether you should be afraid that you’re pregnant or hope that you are.  You realize you’ve let go of everything except that dream of being a mother.  A dozen times you enter a drugstore, pick up a pregnancy test, put it down, and walk away.

In a bathroom in a McDonald’s outside South Bend, Indiana, you finally start to bleed.  You squat in the stall so long one of the workers comes in to ask if everything is okay.

“No,” you snap, choking on the words.  “No, it’s not.”

The girl returns a few minutes later with her manager, who tells you that they’ll call the police if you don’t leave immediately.  You leave.

The gyre of your travels widens, falls apart.

When the painful burning doesn’t stop, you find a doctor’s sign outside a flea market at an old mall in Milwaukee.  One of the anchor stores, looming as large as your conscience, has been converted to a Missionary Reform Church just like the one your mother attended.  Inflatable pilgrims, decorations for the holiday, flank the entrance.  You run between them.

Inside the mall, a narrow storefront is crowded with the other uninsured sick.  The doctor — an elderly, gray-haired black woman in a trim, clean suit — walks among them, keying their complaints into an old-style PDA before she sends them to various rooms in back.  When she comes to you, you describe your symptoms.  You’re too ashamed to mention the rape.  The doctor grumbles, then sends you to the very rear, past two women asleep on air mattresses while they receive IV meds.  Their breast implants protrude lush and grotesque from emaciated, sore-covered bodies.  You guess it’s one of the mutated forms of AIDS.  The doctor follows you, has you drop your pants, and takes a quick swab.

You dress again and wait on one of the plastic lawn chairs.  A poster on the wall reads “Miscarriage of Justice” and shows a picture of the hunger striker, Mary MacLean, as emaciated as the two women at your feet, just before she died.

The doctor sees you staring at it.  “You know,” she says, “Change isn’t always change for the better.  Sometimes we take one step forward then two steps back.”  She holds the sniffer with the swab up to the light to read it.  “You have chlamydia.  You’re lucky this time,” she says, tilting her head at the two women with IVs.  “It could be a lot worse.  Have you ever heard of using condoms?”

“Yes–”

“Well, next time listen.  Do you know anything about Civil War history?”

“No–”

“After the Civil War all the slaves were set free, and black people had opportunities they never had before.  They could get an education, vote and get elected to office, be full citizens.”  While she talks, she rummages through a box of plastic bottles, examining several in turn.  “Then white folks started passing Jim Crow laws.  They took away the vote.  Black people had to use separate schools, separate bathrooms, even separate drinking fountains.  Separate and not equal.  It took another sixty years of fighting to get back the rights we lost.  Well, when I was your age, things looked better for women.  Now it’s two steps backwards.  A bunch of angry old men stuffed the Constitution in a paper shredder and now an eight-celled blastocyst is a person and has rights but you and I don’t own our own bodies.”  She nods toward the poster of Mary McLean, the one you have been deliberately ignoring. “Is something the matter?”

You swallow.  “But babies are people — if something happens to a baby before it’s born, then someone has to pay.  Women have to be strong because babies aren’t.”

The doctor glances at you, as if she just noticed you, then makes some notes on your chart.  You feel more naked than when you were naked.

“A woman can be many different kinds of strong,” she says finally.  “Guess you have to decide what kind of strong you want to be.”  She scribbles a note on the bottle.  “Ignore that expiration date.  Just take them all like it says right there, and come back if it doesn’t clear up.”

“I will,” you promise, but you flee her office after you pay, knowing you’ll never come back.  You choose the exit farthest from the church and its watchful Pilgrims.  The doctor’s visit cost almost the last of your cash.  All you have left is the hundred dollar bill Boss gave you for luck.  You spend it on fuel and head for the plains.

The jeep dies in Iowa, right after you pass the last town and a few minutes before you could find a tree or rock or wall to crash into.  You sit shivering in the cold, waiting for the inevitable trooper to come by so you can turn yourself in.  You’ve run out of gas inside too.

When the trooper comes, he zips past at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, his lights flashing.  Trouble up ahead, you guess.  But then there’s always trouble up ahead.

A silver Airstream glides by on the other side of the divide, speeding the opposite direction, but a few minutes later it’s pulling off the road behind you.  They saw you and did a U-turn.  An older couple steps out, husband and wife, the type of people who’ve been together so long they’ve started to look like each other — thick in the waist, the same short white hair, matching purple sweatsuits.

“What’s the problem?” the husband asks.

“Battery dead and out of gas,” you say, getting out to greet them.  “But I don’t have any money to buy more.”

“That’s okay, we don’t have any to sell,” he says with a laugh.

And his laughter is so genuine and warm, that you laugh too.  It’s all so stupid.  The wife leans forward, asks, “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” you say honestly.

The wife smiles.  “Neither do we.  Modern day gypsies, that’s what we are.”

Everybody laughs again, and afterward a sigh bubbles out of you.  “Thanks so much for stopping.  It’s very kind of you.  I don’t have a phone, so if you could call the state police–”

“Why don’t I just hitch your jeep up and we’ll tow it behind us?” the husband offers.  He glances at his wife.  “Just into the next town.”

“That’s a great idea,” she says.  Then to you, “If that’s okay?”

You’re tired of making decisions.  You don’t even ask where the next town is.  “If you really don’t mind.”

“No, we don’t mind,” the couple says together, voices matching like their jackets.

“On Thanksgiving it’s the least we can do,” the wife adds, all rosy cheeks and smiles.

#

Winter, and after winter, spring.

The couple’s names are Jake and Emily.  They’re retired, but they don’t say from what.  You don’t talk about yourself much either.  But you all talk, all the time, about nothing in particular, and you laugh at everything.  At night you play video games together, online or console.  The roads roll away beneath you, through Utah to the Moab valley, to New Mexico and Santa Fe, then back north again chasing the flowers as they bloom.

Jake and Emily are nomads.  The roads are filled with nomads just like them: from little campers like the one you’d burned, to the sleek old Airstreams, to the massive land yachts, to dirty pillows and wadded blankets in the back of rusty minivans.  The nomads are people living without fixed addresses even though they have some fixed ideas.  Because they despise the government and the way it wants to keep track of them, they take it for granted that you want no part of the law and never ask you why.  The nomads all know each other too, like residents of some sprawling, mobile small town.  Someone at every campground recognizes Jake and Emily, or knows someone who knows Jake and Emily.

You become a nomad without even trying.  Jake and Emily miss their children and adopt you as an unofficial, honorary daughter.  On their word alone, you’re accepted everywhere they go.  The phrase “Jake and Emily’s girl” becomes your new passport.  You never know why they trust you, and you don’t ask, because you don’t want to jinx it, but you work hard to be worthy of their trust.  You sell the jeep to a campground owner in Oklahoma and offer to pay your own way.  Jake and Emily let you treat them to one dinner, although they hardly order anything and Jake insists on leaving the tip.

In June you’re passing through Lincoln, Nebraska.  Just another town, until you see the streets downtown blocked by crowds of protesters.  Helicopters fill the air, film crews and gunships both.

“What’s going on?” you ask.

Jake taps the internet screen on the dashboard.  “It’s the anniversary of that Supreme Court decision for the rights of the preborn, the one, uh,” — he hunches forward to read the tiny print — “Nebraska vs. MacClean.”

Emily points at three effigies nailed to crosses, carried by the marchers toward the statehouse.  “They shouldn’t be allowed to do that.  Why are they doing that?”

“It’s for those three women that starved themselves to death in protest,” Jake says, glancing back and forth from the pictures on the screen to the scene in front of them.

Emily’s mouth curves down like a sickle.  “Baby killers who got what they deserved, if you ask me.  I had six children and I took care of my body every time.  You didn’t see any of my babies dying before they could be born, did you?”

“Nope,” Jake says.  He never disagrees with Emily when she rants.

They remind you of your mom and dad during their better days, a memory more sweet than bitter for once.  That’s when Brandon’s face appears on the screen.  You jab the off button before the reporter can interview him.  Emily doesn’t seem to notice, but Jake regards you with a suddenly neutral expression.

One of the government hovercams floats along the road, turning its lens toward the Airstream.  You feel exposed, like a rabbit when the shadow of a hawk passes over.  Like the rabbit, you stay very, very still.

As soon as the hovercam swivels away, Jake raises his hands like he’s aiming a rifle.  “Ought to get my NorCal Nighthawk out and,” he squeezes the mock trigger, “pow!”

Emily frowns.  “Can’t you find some quick way out of this mess?”

He points to a spot on the map.  “No.  Once we started down this road, this is the only place we could end up.  We’ll have to just work through it.”

You watch the skies, waiting for the shadow to return.

#

On July fourth, Independence Day, the nomads gather in the Black Hills of South Dakota to shoot off fireworks and celebrate their freedom.  You help Emily sell tee-shirts, and one couple mistakes you for Emily’s daughter.  When you start to correct them, Emily shushes you.  Other customers know just the right fellow for you.  There’s lots of talk about marriage, but there always is around married folks.

“What’s wrong?” Emily asks, sitting in the lawn chair and sipping iced tea as the night falls.  The air is so clear out here, it feels like your head is clear for the first time too.  The way the stars glitter, it makes you think of souls on their way to heaven.

“I’m kinda tired,” you say.

“Tomorrow morning, some folks are thinking about driving up to see the Crazy Horse statue,” Jake says.  “You interested?”  As if doing something will help you rest.

“I don’t know,” you answer, still playing the role of the compliant daughter.  “Do you two want to go?”

“It’s been years since I saw it,” Emily says.  “That was back before those terrorists blew up Mount Rushmore, because we went there too.  Remember that, Jakey?”

“Been a long time,” he answers.  Then to you, “It’s worth seeing, if you’ve never been there before.  Have you ever been there before?”

“No,” you admit.

“That settles it,” Emily says.  “That’s what we’ll all do then.”

That night you lay in your fold-out bed, springs prodding your back, listening to Jake and Emily cuddle.  They whisper to each other for a long time before they fall asleep.  You can’t make out their words, but you know they’re talking about you.  You wish you knew what they really think.  You’re sure Jake has figured out who you are.  He’s no dummy.

The next morning you make the instant coffee and tell them how happy you are to go see Crazy Horse.  At the park gate, you meet a whole crowd of nomads.  While Jake and some of the other men negotiate a group rate, people have their pictures taken with the Homeland Guards.  The nomads like soldiers as a rule, saving their disdain for laws and politicians.

You hang back from the crowd, trying to shrink out of view when you notice two soldiers staring at you.  They shift the rifles on their shoulders and walk over to Emily, who glances at you, and then shakes her head vigorously.  When she sees you watching, she turns her face away and holds her hand to her mouth to hide what she says to them.  One guardsman speaks into his headset, and then they walk over to you with grim expressions on their faces.

“You’ll have to come with us, ma’am,” the first one says.  “We’re afraid you’re under arrest.”

You can’t quite find any air to breathe, but in a way you’re glad it’s over.  “Oh?” you whisper.

The second one’s stern expression cracks into a grin.  “Yes, ma’am.  It’s against the law to be as pretty as you are and single.”

They stand on either side of you while Emily takes some snapshots and introduces them as Ian and Javier.  You blush, wishing you were dead or very far away.  Jake comes back to say the group rates are settled.  The bored soldiers tell you goodbye and go back to circulating among the other visitors.

Inside the park, while everyone else browses in the gift shop, you slip out and head for one of the hiking trails.  Your legs still feel like jello from your first reaction to the soldiers, so you’re panting by the time you reach the first overlook.  You sit on the bench to rest.

The doomed Lakota leader points his massive stone arm out over the arid hills.  His enemies had superior numbers and better technology, but he still fought against them.  You aren’t sure, but you guess he must have won some battles before the end or else no one would tell stories about him.

You’re thinking that you’re not a hero.  You can’t do all the scary stuff your sister Stevie does, you don’t know how to run things like Boss, you don’t even have the education or the strong opinions that doctor in Milwaukee had.  You could never do what those hunger strikers did, and starve to death to protest the law.  You just want to be with people who love you, with your family.  You want to have a family.  You’re not brave, and you never have been.

Someone vaguely familiar saunters along, one of the men from the nomad party the night before.  You cringe, expecting another game of matchmaker.  Your flight instinct kicks in for a second and then evaporates like a drop of water.  You didn’t run away from the soldiers, so you’re not going to run away from this.  Maybe you’re done running away.

The man hesitates when he sees you notice him.  His face has a worn look to it, like his denim jacket.  His fingers are stuck in the front pockets of his jeans, and his shoulders kind of fold forward, like wings he’s trying to wrap around himself.  He scuffs his cowboy boots in the dirt.  You don’t remember his name.

“Uh, hey,” he says.  He shuffles forward a step, stares off at the mountain.  “I mean, I was just wondering if you, uh, would mind if I, you know, sit down?”

“It’s a long hike up, help yourself.”  You slide to the far edge of the bench to make more room.

He sits on the opposite end, leaving a person-sized gap between you.  His long legs are half-crooked, like he’s ready to run.  “You’re Jake and Emily’s girl, aren’t you?” he says.  “Cassandra.”

“Yeah,” you answer, remembering him now.  “It’s Lyle, right?  You’re a friend of Mike and Ruth, just came up from the Sun Dance.”

“That’s right.”

Neither of you say anything for a long time.  A young couple comes along the trail, pausing long enough to film their three kids against the backdrop of the mountain.  The children run ahead, pretending to shoot each other with imaginary bows and arrows.

“Which way do you think he’s pointing?” you ask, tilting your head at the statue.

“Oh, I don’t know.  Canada, I reckon.  Land of the free, home of his braves.”  He has a wry little laugh that you find attractive.  “Why’re you asking?”

You shrug.  “Just asking.”

“I heard there’s good jobs up in Regina.  It’s a boomtown.”

“Is that so?”

“Been thinking about heading that way later if they open up the border again.  Maybe even if they don’t.  Was just talking to Jake about it.  He thought you might be going that way too.”  Lyle stares into the far distance, as if he’s trying to see something over the rim of the horizon.  His hands stay folded on his lap.  “Jake and Emily,” he says, after working up his courage, “they’re good people.”

“The best, both of them.”  You mean it too.  They probably saved your life.  “Mike and Ruth, they’re salt of the earth.”

He nods.  “Oh yeah, that they are.”

The silence after is a comfort that you share.  The hills are covered with wildflowers, ragged things with rough edges and washed-out colors in thick clusters.  Beyond the hills and the statue, a dry wind chases pristine clouds across the vast blue sky, making it appear that Crazy Horse is running.  With his hand outstretched, his finger pointing, you realized he is running toward someplace and not away.

And you understand for the first time, that you can be like your mother and do the right thing without doing the thing your mother would have considered right.

#

It is the last week of December.  You grip the door of the ancient pick-up truck as it four-wheels across the plains that bridge the northern states and southern provinces.  Without a road in sight, you and Lyle make your way through a swirling snowstorm that keeps the military planes out of the air and covers up your tracks behind you as you go.

The faint smell of gasoline churns your stomach.  Several milk jugs of it are stored under the cab in back, along with your sleeping bags, which is pretty much everything that both of you own in the world.  You play with the radio dial, but only static comes from the tinny speakers, the sound equivalent of the snow outside.

Lyle clutches the steering wheel with both hands, leaning forward to look through the windshield.  He can be so gentle and clumsy at the same time, full of old hurts, still searching for himself and looking everywhere but in his own heart.  You won’t say that you love him, but he’s a good man.

“You feeling better now?” he asks.  He reaches for your leg and you flinch.  He pretends not to notice, rests his hand on the seat between you instead.

You spread your fingers on your stomach.  It’s been twelve weeks and your morning sickness is getting worse.  You can barely keep down your peanut butter sandwich.  “Much better.”

The truck jolts up and down, struggles out of a ditch, and climbs the next long, low hill.  You glance over at the side mirror to see how far you’ve gone but it’s turned so you can’t see the reflection.

“Shit,” Lyle says.  Worry strains his voice.  “We’re in deep trouble if we get stuck out here, Cassie.  I’m sorry for getting you into this.  I’d understand if you hated me–”

“No.”  You rest one hand on top of his.  Summertime and butterflies stir in your stomach.  “We’re going to be fine.”

You can tell he doesn’t believe you.

That’s when you have a sudden vision of a sunny morning five, ten, fifteen years down the road: you’ll be standing in the kitchen beside the pictures on the refrigerator, breathing in the scent of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, when there’s a knock on the door.  It’ll be men with guns and warrants.  You’ll ignore the cams hovering over their shoulders and ask if you can call Lyle to have him pick up the kids from school, and then you’ll go off in handcuffs with your head held high.  Maybe you can’t be a hero, maybe you can’t change the world, but you’ll have changed your own life.  Lyle and the kids will cry and be numb for a time, but they’ll find some way to cope while you go off to prison.

You squeeze his rough hand.

“It won’t be easy,” you promise.  This is your life sentence.  “It won’t be easy, but everything will turn out fine.”

###

C.C. Finlay is the author of four novels and a short story collection.  His work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Sidewise, and Sturgeon awards and he was a John W. Campbell Award finalist in 2003.  He lives with his wife, novelist Rae Carson, and two sons.

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