Chapter 27: On the Road

I could see again. Inside the tiny crisis pod with its curved walls and dim red light, Gloss was asleep.

Somewhere overhead I could hear the wind blowing, the electric whirr of the blade turning. In small, fabric-lined compartments built into the walls, I found something to eat, some kind of sweet bar. As I moved I felt something sticky stretch on my skin at each shoulder, felt it on my cheek. Gloss must have cleaned my injuries and bandaged them.

Eventually, Gloss woke and sat up, his hands on his knees.

“Everything has gone to hell,” he said.

I handed him the water. “I’m sorry,” I said.

We sat together in the crisis pod, breathing recycled air, listening for movement above. All we heard was wind and now rain.

I kept as still as possible, not wanting to stretch the bandages on my shoulders or face.

Gloss thought that we had killed the Cy-otes, cyborg coyotes, at least that first pack. But there would be others. If we were lucky, the rain would wash away our scent.

While we passed the time, Gloss went scholar-mode, told me stories from the deep lore of the runner community. These crisis pods came from Blooming Prairie Arcology, which had been the birthplace of the first runners. Well, it wasn’t exactly Blooming Prairie, but Roseville, Minnesota to some extent, the skyways of downtown Minneapolis, and then, finally, Blooming Prairie.

But there had been hackers forever, since before there had been computers, even. Runners were distinct from hackers, crackers, black hats, whatever you wanted to call them. To run was to put your biology on the line, to put your whole body into the hack. Runners bypassed all the reasonable filters that ordinary people used to mediate their experience of the net.

In some ways runners simply acknowledged what most people didn’t want to know: that our whole bodies were always involved when we accessed the net. An ordinary person, whose gaze turned to a screen the very instant they had nothing else to do, was putting their brain at the mercy of the corps, just as a runner who jacked in via their spine. The only difference was that a runner’s braindeath was faster.

When Gloss’s history lesson fizzled, I continued apologizing. “All I wanted to do was impress you. I thought that if you knew about my eyes you wouldn’t think I was talented enough to keep around.”

Gloss nodded and closed his eyes. “I hear what you’re saying, but you’ve got it all wrong. Talent is a commodity like anything else. You can train it, you can code it, you can implant it surgically. Enrique wouldn’t have cared where your skill came from, whether it had been spliced into you or whether you developed it out of pure stubborness.”

I felt ashamed. I hung my head and laced my fingers behind my neck. “If I had told you about the eyes, maybe we could have planned around them.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Gloss said. “Don’t feel too bad. We all mess up. Remind me some other time to show you the scars I picked up after my first run. For now, what do you want to do, little bro?”

Gloss leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his fingers laced together in front of his mouth. Until now, it always seemed like he was someone who had a plan. Now, he appeared to be waiting for me to tell him what to do.

“Are you sure you want me to be calling the shots?”

“I have faith in you. I know you’ll be extra cautious now that you feel like you made a mistake.” Gloss smiled.

“Before we do anything,” I said, lifting my head, “I want to know what the hell is going on.”

“You know as much as I do,” Gloss said, “but we can try to figure some things out. What do you want to talk about?”

I sipped some water, tried to think. I felt uncomfortable, like Gloss was testing me. I didn’t want to be tested. I just wanted out of here.

I moved to a dusty touchscreen on the wall. Found the beverage selection. I ordered some tea for Gloss, some coffee for myself. The system responded: SANITARY CYCLE RUNNING.

“What do you think happened to Enrique?” I said, returning to my bunk.

“They snatched him. I saw it. They bundled him into a helicopter and lifted off.”

“Was the helicopter marked?”

“No branding, which says freelance corporate security to me.”

“Where do you think he is?”

“Could be a corporate rendition facility. Could be county jail, though I doubt it. Could be a Treasury Department black site.”

“Could White Tree have hired them?”

“Sure, but we only breached White Tree a few hours before the attack. We were running from a new space, through proxies in Accra, Ciudad del Este, and Manila, and Enrique had confirmed with his contact that White Tree had no idea about your earlier run. I’m not convinced it was them.”

“Unless it was some other corporate unit tracking us through my eyes for longer. Some unit that Enrique’s contact didn’t know about.”

Gloss’s expression showed that he accepted the possibility. But he said nothing, not wanting to delve into it. The touchscreen dinged and a clear acrylic window slid open. Inside were two thick plastic mugs, steaming. I handed one to Gloss and let the other warm my hands.

“So we have no idea who attacked us,” I said.

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“That’s not entirely true. The Cy-otes are a name-brand product. Only FUTUR Design uses them.”

“Didn’t you say they were relatively safe to run against?”

“I did, and they are. Relatively. But we seem to have attracted some bad attention. And Cy-otes are FUTUR Design’s way of warning a runner off. And I’ve never heard of Cy-otes licensed to freelancers. Cy-otes are not usually lethal, but highly painful.”

My shoulders still hurt where the claws had dug into me.

“That reminds me,” I said. “When I was asleep, I saw Freya again. I don’t think it was a dream, more like a continuation of the experiential data we accessed in the clinical trial server.”

“Afterimage,” Gloss said. “You must have keyed in on her stream specifically when you hit that server. Somehow, you knew what to look for.”

“Maybe because of my eyes?”

Gloss shrugged. He was bathing his face in the steam from the mug. “Hard to say.”

“Anyway, I saw more of what happened to her. After she left the White Tree trial, she went to Bull City, then to Research Triangle Arcology. She was walking into the recruiting booth of one of the corps, but I couldn’t tell which one. It’s just that the color and the font on the signage was familiar.”

He moved the mug away from his face so that I could see his lopsided grin. “Purple, thick, block capitals? Kind of slanted forward?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Because the Cy-otes reminded you of it. That sounds like a FUTUR Design facility.”

“And FUTUR Design was the other manufacturer of my eyes.”

“Maybe that’s not a coincidence.” Gloss sipped his tea. “Thanks for this.”

“Maybe we could find out.”

“With what rig?”

It took me a moment to realize what Gloss was talking about. I found my console in the case that Gloss had managed to carry out of the farmhouse. The tiny display was cracked but it still powered up when I hit the switch. When I asked it to inventory itself I saw that I had lost Mask and Hungry Creek to that 7Wonders ice. Diamond, too. I touched my neck. I could feel something crinkle, like old aluminum foil, just under my skin.

I looked again at the console’s screen, found the trash. There it was: Hungry Creek.

“My FLUX chip saved Hungry Creek, but we have no other breakers.”

“You’ll need a new FLUX chip,” Gloss said. “You know, when we’re back in a city that has a reasonably competent installer.”

“What else do we have?”

“Precious little. I have the blank backup substrates that we were going to use when we cracked White Tree’s icebreaker archive. If they’ve been under power continuously, they may still be OK. We have your console, of course. But everything else is gone. And we can forget about getting the deposit back on Jiibay’s van.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “How do we get back to Carthage?”

“Quietly.” Gloss emphasized the word.

“The BRUTE?”

“Doesn’t run west of the Blue Ridge. There’s a makeshift network of private transport, some that asks for ID, some that doesn’t. We’ll have to be careful.”

“Seems like we could make our lives a lot easier if we could get some new identities,” I said. I was remembering all the names that Enrique used.

“That’s true, but where are we going to find them?”

“There must be some repository of identities somewhere.”

“What server are we going to run?”

“I still have the address of the icebreaker archive, and I still have Hungry Creek.”

“You can’t handle shooter or puzzle ice with that. You could be seriously hurt if you tried to run it.”

“Maybe that’s worth the risk right now.”

Gloss took a long pull of tea. “Drink your coffee,” he said. “If we’re going to talk stupid plans, let’s at least get caffeinated first.”

###

Later in the day, we were both feeling restless, eyeing the lever that would lift the crisis pod. We’d been in here for nearly twenty-four hours. While it had plenty of food, water, and it generated its own power from the wind, the pod made Gloss and I feel like we were going to die of boredom.

“Let’s make a run,” I said.

“On what? From where? With what rig?”

I threw my hands in the air. “I don’t know.”

“You’re right about one thing, little bro. We need to leave.”

Gloss pulled the lever that raised the crisis pod back to earth. We stood near the door, looked at each other, and then each took hold of one of the other levers: one to release the seal, the other to open the door.

The Kansas prairie stretched quiet and fragrant before us. In the distance was a road, just a single lane. Nothing moved but trees in the breeze, maybe a few small birds. Between us we carried one heavy case that we traded back and forth as we walked.

By evening we’d reached a town called Neodesha. At first I took it to be one of those places called Neo-this or Neo- that that had popped up at the end of the last century, but after a moment I realized it must have been an old Indian word.

“Osage,” Gloss said without further explanation.

Neodesha had once been a decent-sized town, judging by the faint traces of roads and the leftover rectangles of low brickwork that marked the sites of former houses. Now it was little more than a single intersection with a hydrogen pump, fabrication booth, and an automat. We ate some reheated sandwiches and Gloss grimaced through a cup of hot tea-leaf shavings. We didn’t see a single soul. We asked the AI running the automat if there was a hotel nearby. The answer was no. We asked about a bus station. The answer was also no. We asked about a ride of any sort.

“Tomorrow there’s a raw material delivery due at noon. Perhaps you could catch a ride with the driver,” the AI suggested colloquially.

“That’s uncommonly helpful for an AI,” Gloss muttered. I could see him unspooling a net cable underneath the counter, feeling around for a port.

Between the two of us we found some kind of power-data jack under the counter, probably for truckers to recharge their portable devices and update their news feeds while eating lunch. Gloss opened the heavy case and withdrew a zippered wallet that contained a bewildering array of adapters. Eventually we found one that connected to the port under the counter, and then Gloss jacked in while I kept watch. To tell the truth, I was grateful that he was jacking in and not me. I felt bruised an embarrassed by my recent forays into the net. Having lost a couple of priceless breakers, having drawn FUTUR Design right to us, I no longer felt like a hotshot runner.

The automat refilled my coffee while I watched over Gloss, still in netspace. The hours passed but no one passed us. The town was dead.

When Gloss came back up in the evening, he said, “I found us a ride. And a place to crash.”

I took the opportunity to use the restroom. When I came back, a truck was idling outside the automat: an old pickup, from the era where they built them giant and weaponized to run down protestors. This one had lost its Commie-crusher bars and its Molotov-resistant coating, but its bumper still stood at neck height. As the passenger-side door swung open I saw the driver was an old woman with her hair in a long, gray braid decorated with mylar butterflies. She wore a cutoff denim vest and cutoff denim shorts and smoked a cigarette, which was something that only the oldest of old-timers did where I’d grown up. I liked her instantly.

“I ain’t going to Carthage, boys,” she said. “But I can take you as far as Nashville, as long as you’re paying.”

“We’re paying,” Gloss said, throwing his bag up into the cab and shoving me forward after it. “And we have a place to stay in Nashville, so don’t worry about letting us off there.”

“I wasn’t worried about that, honey,” she said, putting the truck in gear even before Gloss got the door to the cab closed behind himself.

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store

Name

Amygdilar Clamp

Manufacturer

FUTUR Design

Legal status

Banned worldwide

Description

Like a staple from an old-fashioned office stapler

Cost

Surprisingly cheap

Function

Prevents a fear response. Now your boss can put you on cleanup detail in a radioactive wasteland and it won't scare you a bit. Sweet!