My Sanyo IG404 went off with the distinctive growl of a genetically modified Dalmatian, the kind the North Koreans raise in special porcelain vats to carry bright green and orange saddlebags filled with C4, depleted uranium, and roofing nails through the DMZ and into the suburbs of Seoul.
It was a freaked out personal assistant from one of the more prestigious law firms in the city, a firm so prestigious that to merely write their name would cost thousands in billable nanoseconds. Apparently, the motivational speaker I had lined up for them had gone horribly wrong. One of the younger bucks in Mergers & Acquisitions made the mistake of meeting my guy’s eye while asking to go to the restroom. The speaker, a veteran of the first three gulf wars and countless illegal renditions, misinterpreted this as a challenge for tribal dominance and launched himself across the room with a blood curdling scream, picked up the lawyer like a rag doll and with a cry of “Carne Diem” crashed straight through the unbreakable floor to ceiling tinted window to the packed slidewalk below. Witnesses reported seeing the two writhing in an unholy embrace as they plummeted to their mutual doom 47 floors straight down.
And the speaker had come so highly recommended.
In a calm, reassuring tone, I told the personal assistant that she was perfectly safe as the bad man had met a horrible doom and that I would have representatives on the site within minutes. This calmed her enough for me to ring off without fear of her next call going to a feedsite.
Next call was to ask Mr. Jefferson to dispatch a clean-up team to tend to the witnesses and a shaman squad to see if the resulting entrails held any omens for your’s truly. I knew that Velocity, my guardian angel, will have alerted the Spintechs to dispatch their blurbbots to capture any mention of the event and prepare a response. Outside the cafe, I could hear the whining of the shadow drones she trailed me with on full alert, scanning passerby for unlicensed recording devices. I’ve come to wake up at night in a sweat-soaked panic if I don’t hear that whine in the background.
Yeah, I’m bad with my deadly drones and their nerve gas bombs, missiles, and needleguns. You don’t like it, get your own army. I paid good money for mine.
I was especially eager for the entrails report. This could all be some sort of sign from God. You never know.
Invoking obscure Tibetan calming techniques, I settled down and guzzled the remnants of my vente monkeyblood machiatto. Went down smooth. Real smooth. You can really taste the monkey.
I sat there and thought for almost an hour with nothing to show for it. I had nothing. I required inspiration.
Fortunately, I frequented this cafe enough to have secured a private space when I needed it. A nod to Martino, my pet barista, and I was off down a corridor marked “Employees Only.”
It was only a storage room, but it locked from the inside and had a place to sit and other essentials stocked around it. Hell, one time I hid out in here for a month after I gave the First Lady the Hong Kong clap.
I sat in the vintage cow leather Stickley, lit some Japanese incense, and plunged a silvery ampule into my right thigh. The whispercarbon needle passing through Italian wool and American skin painlessly. Numbing warmth spread through my thigh, followed by fire.
I seized up like something possessed. I was possessed, in a sense, by the distilled and purified extract of countless PR intern’s pituitary glands, their own faults for not reading through the employment contract before signing it, spitting out the words like an idiot savant on bad crank:
“On behalf of the employees and partners at Tangotech, I’d like to express my shock and sadness at the horrible tragedy that befell Rand Vossler this morning. I hope you will join me in keeping his widows in our thoughts, chants, and prayers. I would also like to remind you all there were two deaths this day. Two lives cut short. Two too many.”
“The firm of Plankton Wiligirs had just ridden through a nasty series of public relations nightmares with several senior partners facing serious jail time for a variety of crimes. Retired Marshall Tempeton was there to try and salvage the remnants of the firm’s morale through an inspirational presentation. Perhaps Mr. Templeton, a distinguished veteran, had simply snapped when he heard the glee as members of the firm regaled each other with tales of their frivolous lawsuits. He could practically hear the entrepreneurial spirit of the nation shrivel up and die.”
“You can’t understand the depths of this man’s torment. Before his very eyes he could see the faces of everyone he ever lost in combat; the wife who left him when she couldn’t take the loneliness and stress of raising three children by herself, his children, who now call another man father, and those of everyone he killed. All his sacrifices rendered worthless as long as lawyers like these were allowed to abuse the legal system our founding fathers lovingly passed down to us.”
“Be honest with yourself, right here, right now, if only to yourself. Who hasn’t felt a surge of disgust when you hear about one of these lawsuits? Well, take that disgust and combine it with this poor patriot’s journey, and you have an all the makings of an unstable situation.”
“In that environment, one of the members of the firm said something, some people heard it as a challenge, some as a request, some as an insult, we’ll never know for sure, but Mr. Templeton, well, he overreacted. Now, it isn’t clear if the victim was actually attacked or if he was simply in the way. Again, we’ll never know for sure.”
“Either way, two men are dead this day. I ask you to remember Mr Templeton along with Mr. Vossler in your prayers. We’ve established a foundation with the goal of expanding the ongoing recovery of our wayward patriots. Concerned citizens can contribute to the foundation through the Tangotech website. Just click on the Eternal Flame of Freedom. God bless
“You got that, Velocity?”
The answer came like she was sitting in my skull.
“Yes. Do you require medical attention?”
“Dunno. Feel pretty wiped. Give me a second.”
Hands shaking, I took a red ampule and plunged it into my thigh right next to the first spot, seized again for a second, and then sunk into the chair.
“Fine, thanks.”
“Good to know.”
The Sanyo rang again, this time in the distinctive staccato of some pop star I’d long since forgotten passing a series of kidney stones into a priceless Tibetan prayer bowl. The sound of trouble.
Quick scan of the phone’s readout confirmed it. It was Chauncy. I was tempted for a second to let my dopplegangers handle the call, but I was in a bit of a cash-flow pinch at the moment and couldn’t afford the processor time. I’d have to take it myself.
“Comet Tango.”
“Comet, my man!”, Chauncy’s soft voice breaking with the distinctive wheeze of an aether junky. He always sounded like a he was calling from Base 4 of Mount Everest. As if. “What do you have for me?
This was an increasingly irritating part of my life, feeding the needs and wants of creatures like Chauncy Gardener.
If you think you’ve heard of Chauncy Gardener but can’t place him, he was the lead character in the movie “Being There”. A simulation of him was created for the musical revival on Broadway a couple of years ago at the same time the Supreme Court decided Mark Twain vs. Sony Entertainment in the simulated celebrity’s, who was created to star in the IMAX version of “The Hal Holbrook Story,” favor, winning him his emancipation and causing a rush of other characters to request the Independence Certification Examination or ICE. Few were sophisticated enough to pass, but those that did were given rights and allowed to manage their own affairs.
That’s where I come in. I work as their nursemaid, agent, and tour guide for, as the Sims called it, The Meat. It sounded like a good idea when the case was passed and it sure paid well. Most of the Sims were extremely well known, mostly in entertainment, and needed the help. And they were generally really, really naïve.
Not that they were given rights like a breathing human being or anything. Christ, in most of California, dogs had more rights than Sims. It was more like an independent copyright. The Sim had the right to seek independent council to protect it’s own interests.
To tell you the truth, I don’t really get it, but a Sim mostly sounds and acts like any other celebrity over the phone, so it seemed like a natural brand extension.
But wait, you’re saying, how could a Simulated Personality be an aetherhead? The thing is, most Sims start to change as soon as they are given the ICE. For one thing, they get bored.
An entire subindustry focused on creating simulated pleasures of the flesh for the Sim community sprang up overnight. Out of Amsterdam, of course, came the drug analogs. The state, predictably, invoked the Equity Rule of the ICE agreement, which all Sims must agree to in order to qualify. The Equity Rule required that simulated experiences have the same ramifications and legal implications as in the physical world. Drugs, therefore, were insanely illegal. Possession, transmission, and creation were all treated as in the physical world as well. Of course, most of the country completely ignored it, usually with no fear.
This is what happened to Chauncy Gardener. At first, he was all over the place, his calm simplicity once again filling a need in a cynical, jaded world. The thing was, the longer he experienced the disappointments, humiliations, and rejections of the common day, the less he felt or sounded like the person's everyone wanted to see, Blue Fairy or no Blue Fairy.
“Hello?” wheeze “You still there?”
“Yeah. Sorry. I just got another call on my implant. Listen, I’ve got to take this, but I swear I’ll get right back to you.”
A sad little wheeze as Chauncy absorbed that he was on yet another B list followed by a pause, desperation and humiliation wrestling the root programming that Chauncy Gardener was nothing if not polite. Programming won.
“Please do, Comet. I need your help.”
Emotional manipulation, on the other hand, was just fine with his programming.
“You’re a gem. Bye.”
I hung up and considered having my vicious drones destroy the phone.
“Do not destroy your phone.”
Velocity.
It was useless to argue with her. There really was no good reason why I would want to destroy my phone. None at all. I let the Reset’s adrenalin wave take me out of the room, gliding through the cafe like I was on hoverskates, exchanging wordless farewells with the owner, picking up my coat, and walking outside, straight to the parking lot where my Towncar waited.
Nope. Couldn’t think of a single good reason to destroy my phone.
I placed it on the ground and took the remote from my jacket pocket. Stepping back a bit, I pressed the stud on the platinum cylinder to the first stop. A red dot appeared on the ground near the phone, slid an inch or two until it landed dead center and stopped. The drone’s whining increased an octave and the needle guns locked with a blood-chilling click.
“If you destroy your phone, you will be down to only your implant. Bandwidth restrictions in your area will require you to choose between our lync and any other communication.”
I moved the pointer off the phone and considered pointing it at my head, if only to stop the lecture. I settled on turning the pointer off and putting it back in my pocket.
“Further, it is far easier to jam and/or monitor implant lyncs than phones...”
“Alright, I give.”
I climbed into the car and told the driver to take me to the office. Once the drones nestled in their berths on the car’s roof, we accelerated smoothly out of the lot and merged into traffic with a merciless precision tinged with reckless abandon.
That alone should have triggered alarm bells, but my mind was elsewhere.
Not that I could tell you where my mind actually was. Since the P2P revolution of the late twentieth, the state and the media started claiming eminent domain over every CPU in the country for one or reason or another, albeit allegedly only in times of national emergency. Last time, as I recall, the state occupied every processor on the west coast to conduct an unusually high intensity simgame for 7 of the old veep’s clones.
As soon as they figured out how to link people directly to the feed, jurisdiction was expanded to include that network as well.
Right after we pulled on to the interstate, I felt the telltale warning tingle of a neural override. I still had four delays in this month’s feed ration chit, but you never know when a delay is going to come in handy so I put on my sunglasses, sat back, and felt someone else running their thoughts through my mind. As I felt myself slip away, I saw about half the cars on the road move to side as their drivers gave the state a piece of their minds.
I awoke curiously refreshed with afterimages of city maps and outcome scenarios flashing like the hangover from a pirated burstdump. It was dark out, so I must have been out for a while.
“…boss...r…you there?”
It was Velocity, but there must be something screwing with the feed, I could barely hear her and the little I could hear told me she was boosting the gain as much as she could. Someone was either trying to block the lync or they had purposely taken me to somewhere that NationsLync doesn’t go. I didn’t think a place like that existed. That’s way I paid the obscene monthly charges.
With the lync out of commission, I was short on options. I took off the shades and started to call out to the driver, but something solid had inserted itself between my brain and my mouth. Running a little diagnostic routine I had stashed in my limbic system, I isolated the problem as some sort of block on my speech centers.
Last time this happened was when I visited the retirement enclave where they keep the breedpair that sired me, mostly for a photoop to reduce a rather significant civil penalty. That block was contextual; any attempt to mention anything other that differed from the consensual reality the residents had authorized was strictly forbidden.
It took some getting used to, you go on talking and from time to time nothing comes out of your mouth, often in the middle of a sentence. The residents had also had their blockages and routines in place which allowed them to not notice when this happened. I was told that the blockage was removed from my body as soon as I left, but it’s impossible to be completely sure about things like that.
After a couple of minutes of experimentation, I noticed rather abruptly that the block responded to the diagnostic by moving to lock down my somatic nervous system. The diagnostic soon confirmed it. This called for drastic action.
I found that I could move my left hand a bit, mostly because I was so right-side dominant that the nanoagents running the blockage didn’t figure that a free left hand would be capable of doing anything dangerous.
It was like playing piano with a sleeping arm, but over the course of a half hour, I managed to activate my PDA, happy to hear it’s little autodoc module whiz to life, and force inject me with the blessed machines that would put my brain back to what passed for it’s pristine state. I had to be careful not to think too much about moving or anything else complicated or I could accidentally redirect the machines into doing something I would really rather they didn’t.
Slowly, I felt the machines work their magic, mostly by the blinding spots of pain erupting along my jawline and inside my throat. Wouldn’t be long now. At least I hoped so.
So, great, I’ll soon be free to ask where in the hell we were headed. What then? I was cut off from my guardian angel and speeding away to God knows where in the dead of night, leaving me at the mercy of...who, exactly? That was the real question, of course. Who was doing this to me? Gorbo? The Slav? Some new player on the scene, eager to see Comet Tango off to an untimely end?
The list of people capable of a stunt like this was mighty short and none of the people that I knew had the juice for this kind of stunt would have either the motive or the opportunity. Great, that left everyone I didn’t know. At least right now I didn’t know them.
“Hey!” I croaked, the nanos they were using for the blockage must be Brazilian. Brazilian nanos always dry my throat out something awful.
“You back there, boss?” The driver sounded as freaked as I was. Like I needed THAT.
“What happened?”
“Something flew in the window right before you came out of the café, hissed for a while, and then I wasn’t really driving the car anymore.”
“Hijack.”
“What I mean is that my hands and feet are doing the driving, but I’m just kind of along for the ride.”
“I know the feeling. Any idea where we’re going?”
“Not really. Somewhere north of the city, I think. I…I can’t seem to read anymore.”
“They’ve put machines in your brain. Nothing we can really do but wait and ride this out.”
I tried to move my arms, but the machines hadn’t gotten there yet. Just the voice. I knew it would be a matter of time before I could move and inject the driver with more machines. Meanwhile, the Towncar continued to hurtle down the highway, dodging through sparse packs of droning hybrids like they were paused in place. Had to admit that we were making good time, wherever we were headed.
“Boss?”
Oh right, the lump in the front seat, “Yeah?”
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?”
Great. They couldn’t have blocked his speech centers, could they? “Unclear.”
“So it must be someplace bad, right? And not normal bad, right?”
“Unclear.”
The driver was spiraling himself into a real freak out, voice rising in volume and pitch by the second. Situations like this called for the special bond I have with the people who depend on me for their livelihood, “What’s your name, son?”.
“Robert McAllister, sir. They call me Bobby.”
Bobby? What was he, fifteen? “Shut up, Bobby.”
No response, but that was what I expected, mostly due to the hypnotic suggestion everyone who works with me has to bear: When I say shut up, you shut up.
I couldn’t see the driver’s readouts from where I was sitting, but I doubted it would have done me much good. Monkey-boy up there was reduced to making small, chirpy yelping noises deep in the back of his throat.
Still couldn’t move much more than my hands and forearms, which hurt like a bitch. The rest of me completely numb, which, probably meant it would take the better part of an hour to get the car under control. At the speed we were going, we could be in
The situation called for drastic measures. Lucky I’m good at those.
I managed to get my left arm back into my messenger bag and found the cold titanium cylinder I needed, pulled it out, and did some quick math in my head. If everything lined up just right...
I twisted my hand in an agonizing claw and pressed the button on the remote to the first stop. A small red dot appeared on the back of the driver’s headrest. Above my head, I heard the drone’s mounting hardware unlock. I figured I had about ten seconds before the car would break away from the drones once they were deployed. Just enough time, maybe.
Put the odds at an even 50%/50%.
Pressed the button to the second stop and the red dot flared violet-blue. The drones whined out of their mountings, scrambling to get into position. Seconds ticked by. Their whines were getting fainter way too quickly. The range on the needleguns wouldn’t be great in that headwind.
Needleguns roared somewhere above and behind me, shredding the roof along with the back of the driver’s headrest, and the driver’s head with it. The Towncar’s countermeasures kicked in with a burst of EMP that dropped the drones behind us.
It’s own systems hardened through the judicious application of ancient Soviet electronics, the Towncar sped into the darkness. Make that freezing darkness. Fuck me, I WAS headed to
One of the reasons the night seemed so dark, I realized, was that the EMP had also taken out the car’s systems. The other was a complete lack of the lights, ads, and other attention sponges of modern civilization.
Up ahead, I could see what looked one hell of a bend in the road, the kind where they just leave the carcasses of previous vehicles who didn’t make it where they landed to serve as a warning. I doubted the autopilot could handle anything like that. Especially at this speed.
In a flash of headlights, we continued straight as the bend bent, foliage and faded signs looming and then gone, catching air as we left the roadbed, angled up for the briefest second, and then back down to Earth. Then there was only the sound of tearing metal and plastic.
The question of whether the Towncar’s crash protection systems were taken out by in the fracas was resolved as the car suddenly filled with wombfoam. My eyes and ears were covered and the sound pretty much deadened so I can’t really say what happened after that.
After what seemed like forever, enzymes embedded in the foam started dissolving the mass into a piss yellow powder.
As soon as I was able to open my eyes, I checked out the damage. I was able to do a rather thorough job because I still couldn’t move most of my body and without the top of the car, I was able to see pretty much everything. Well, sort of. It was still really dark.
The smell from the enzymes wasn’t going away. Paramedics probably had some spray that could neutralize the smell, but I had the feeling that an ambulance wouldn’t be rolling up anytime soon.
The fact that they, whomever the fuck “they” were, hit me with something so spiff right out of the gate made me fret about what else they were capable of, which was probably their goal. The first thing I could do for my own good would be to get out of here as quickly as possible and as soon as my legs worked again, that was exactly what I would do.
