Chapter 29: Overextended
“You must have been into some serious ice,” Dr. Adler said. “Those fabricytes and your FLUX Chip need to be replaced.”
“Can you do that?”
“Sorry, I don’t have the materials.”
“What about the leftovers?”
“Your body will excrete the fabricytes. The FLUX Chip should come out. I can help you with that. Otherwise, you need rest. No more jacking in for a while.”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Gotta jack, doc,” I said.
“Listen to yourself, tough guy.” She stood in front of me with her hands on her hips. “You might want to consider upgrading your nervous system if you feel the need to go downserver. Otherwise you’re looking at permanent damage if you keep this up.”
“I don’t suppose you can help me with an upgrade.”
Dr. Adler moved to the other side of the capsule and opened a drawer. She withdrew two vials of viscous, golden fluid. “Tell you what. If you promise not to jack in for the next 72 hours, I can give you the injections that will start the process. But you’ll need a fully-equipped cybernetics boutique to complete it.”
I thought about Dr. Rashida Qin’s office. It seemed so far away. “As long as you take cash, that’s fine with me.”
“It’s going to hurt a bit, even after I’ve turned down your pain receptors through your net port. I’m told it feels similar to when your legs grow as a kid. And let me get that FLUX chip out while we’re at it. Eleven K, all in.”
It struck me that I had no idea how much money I had left. But I figured that Gloss would be able to sell some of what we’d found over the last couple days, so I agreed without worrying too much about it. I could see how runners lost track of their wealth.
Dr. Adler screwed a needle onto the first of the vials. I had to look away from that monster. I stared at the curved, white expanse of the wall, and thought about Freya.
###
The cycle courier wore tight black leathers and kept their face hidden behind a black-visored helmet for the entire length of our transaction: about forty-five seconds, I thought.
The way they cocked their head at me as they handed over the parcel, I thought that maybe they could tell what I was. A runner, I meant. They glanced at me once before zipping away, the hydrogen cell of their Nissan Assassin emitting a gentle contrail of pure water vapor.
###
Gloss and I sipped cherry limeades in mycofoam cups that Gloss had snagged from an old-style burger stand across the highway while I was under. Now we sat on the running board of Renata’s rig under the sun. Renata and Dr. Adler were talking out in the cornfield where we couldn’t hear them.
“Where do you want to head?” Gloss said.
“You’re asking me?”
Gloss shrugged.
“They might be looking for us,” he said. “For multiple values of ‘they.’” I took a long pull of the sweet, tart fizzy drink. The cup was already starting to break down under the warmth of my fingertips. “Enrique. We’ve got to help him.”
“I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to help.”
“What do you mean?”
“They might have killed him. Prepare yourself for that reality.”
“That’s what you said about Freya.”
I sat in silence. It didn’t feel possible that Enrique was dead, not when I was learning so much, not when I felt certain I could crack whatever system knew his whereabouts. It wasn’t sporting. They had to give me a chance to fix my error, get him back. Especially now that my eyes were offline.
“You get to be too big a pain in the ass, corps will take your life and write the contract off as a business expense. Or take care of it in-house.”
“Maybe we should ask for assistance.”
“That’s a good idea. You’re thinking Sunya and the CheRRy?”
“Yeah. But I’ll make the run.”
“Little bro, don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you should leave going after Enrique to more experienced runners. If you have fantasies of staging some kind of prison break, it’s best to forget them. In my experience, no one comes out of corporate detention facilities except through the courts.”
I felt angry, and then I felt hurt, too. “I want to help.”
“You’ve overextended yourself. You’re hurt, and up until thirty minutes ago when you put those contacts in, they were tracking you. If you want to help, keep yourself alive. They’re looking for you. You need to stay away from them.”
“We have a rig again, right?”
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Gloss looked over his shoulder at the backup substrates in their case stacked on the seat. “We got some breakers, that’s true. Once we’re somewhere private, I’ll show you.”
“Tell me, Gloss, what can we do for Enrique?”
“Me, the CheRRy, and Sunya will take a look around. What we can do is find out if there’s a record of him being alive, somewhere, in some remote server. Video, a ledger, medical records, discipline, whatever. Something. If he is alive, we can file a lawsuit to get him back. The corps still listen to the courts. They should, they own them. I know some good lawyers.”
“Could we do that for Freya? A lawsuit?”
“I mean, sure. If you had some evidence she was alive and if you knew who might be detaining her.”
“I’m getting there.”
“Jasper,” Gloss said, and my name coming from him surprised me. “You’ve done great. Maybe you should have told us about your oculars, maybe you shouldn’t have made that run on HQ, but we all make mistakes. Enrique has, and so have I. So what I’m about to say isn’t a punishment. I think you and I need to go our separate ways once we reach Carthage. I’ll work on finding Enrique’s location. You rest up. But if you stick with me, you’re going to get flatlined. I know it.”
“You’re cutting me loose?”
“For your own protection.”
It felt like he was telling me that I was just a kid. I wanted us to be a team. First Freya left, then Linney, then Enrique, and now Gloss. It was like everyone wanted away from me.
“Aren’t you worried about me out there on my own?”
Gloss smiled and put a big arm around my shoulders. “No, kid, I’m not. I think you know how to handle yourself. Enrique getting grabbed wasn’t your fault. Let us find him. When you’re rested, you and I will hook up again, pull down some big scores.”
My drink empty, the cup was turning to wet dust in my hands. I tossed it aside, watched it crumble to feed the grass. “I don’t feel good about this,” I said.
“I know. But it would be irresponsible of me to let you get yourself killed. Just take a week off, man, enjoy the city, be young. Don’t be in such a rush to grow up.”
I couldn’t look at him after he said that.
###
We said our goodbyes to Dr. Adler and then drove into town with Renata. Gloss had found a motel room with two queen beds off the interstate and we ate fried chicken sandwiches from the same place that made the cherry limeades. It wasn’t real chicken, of course, but it was crispy and juicy and spicy and topped with pickled onions.
Renata told us stories of runs she used to make on a defunct corp, something that had been swallowed up by 7Wonders at some point. She worked more on logistics now than running but still liked to keep her hand in. She was as foul-mouthed as her daughter and reminded me of my grandma. I liked her a lot. After dinner Gloss and I slept long and deep in the motel while Renata slept in her rig.
But when I woke, he was gone. I had thought we would travel back to Carthage together based on what he had said, but if we were trying to be stealthy, it made more sense to travel separately. He’d left the case with the backup substrates behind. It occurred to me that he had never shown me what was in there. Without him, I didn’t know what to do.
Renata had been paid to drive me to Nashville and so that’s what she did. We rode for hours in silence, me huddled in my jacket, feeling hurt, watching the fields go by, the little towns. Renata respected my silence. She seemed to have an intuition about what I needed and didn’t try to make me talk.
As we were entering the Tennessee foothills she asked me how I was doing. I had to admit that I didn’t feel great.
“Your friend is just trying to protect you. Clearly he trusts you to look after yourself.”
“It seems all I do these days is mess up.”
“Then you need to make smart runs, that’s all.”
“What do you mean?”
“You need to know the capabilities of your target, and know your own capabilities. You have to know why you’re running and what they can do to hurt you after you’ve jacked out. Gloss trusts you to figure those things out.”
“But he told me not to run.”
Renata laughed. “Honey, do you really think he expects you not to run?”
“No.”
She patted my knee. “You know, and I know, and Gloss knows that you are going to jack in just as soon as your nervous system can handle it. Now Jenny—Dr. Adler to you—told me that you needed to stay strictly in meatspace for 72 hours after her injections. By my clock, that means you have 50 hours left. This is your chance to stop being a reckless kid. Follow Jenny’s instructions, follow Gloss’s guidance, and listen to me.”
The rig was pulling to a stop outside the BRUTE station in Nashville. It was getting into the late afternoon.
Renata turned to me. “You’ll run again. I know it. I expect to see your name on the scoreboard next time I’m in the big city.”
“I thought that was just at Mr. Grid’s.”
“Hell no, that’s citywide. And most of the best runners in the world live in Carthage. Low latency, you know.”
I gave her a hug across the cab and then grabbed the backup substrates and my other things, and stepped down.
On the BRUTE, I was alone with my thoughts for the first time in quite a while. I no longer saw the words in my eyes, and perhaps hadn’t seen them in quite some time, although it was hard to say how long. Maybe they had vanished when I put in the contacts, maybe it had been before. I no longer knew.
I slept on the bus, the backup substrates stored under my seat. I ate a granola bar and drank a can of coffee that I found in my bag.
When the bus left me in Carthage, it was morning. I walked along the city streets in Old Winston, workers just waking up and moving toward their jobs, everyone carrying a cup of coffee. People in softly-lit city buses ate biscuits from paper wrappers. I walked along the street, felt my aching muscles warm and stop hurting so much after moving around a bit. It struck me that I’d spent much of the last several days either being driven around or totally stationary.
I found the co-op that Wren and I had gone shopping in once upon a time. They kept a counter in back where I could drink a cup of coffee and look through Gloss’s laptop. Thinking about the afterimage of the Level IV clinical data I had stolen from White Tree, I knew that Freya had traveled to Bull City, on the other side of northern Carthage, after leaving the pools.
There she had made her way to Research Triangle Arcology and went to work for FUTUR Design: the same corp that had likely kidnapped Enrique in Kansas. All my attention had been focused on White Tree, but I was starting to suspect I had a new adversary.
When I had finished my coffee, I found my way to the metro and traveled to Bull City. I had an idea, something I couldn’t quite articulate, but it excited me. I felt like I was going to make everyone proud. That was all I wanted, for the people I knew to be proud of me.
As I left the metro, I walked down to the tent city below the Private Highway station. Just beyond the tent city was the brick dormitory that I remembered from Freya’s uploaded memories. I figured that someone here would be able to direct me. I looked at my watch. Twenty-eight hours until I could jack in again. I was determined to do it right this time.
Among the children and dogs running around, I saw a man who looked familiar, sitting with a long, polished staff on a plastic milk crate outside a tent.
“The Prophet Ezra?” I said.
He nodded.
“I’m a friend of Freya’s.”
He cocked his head, looked me up and down. “You’re a hexrunner.”
The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store
Name
Faraday Mesh Contacts
Manufacturer
Any optical shop
Legal status
Legal
Description
A contact lens made of non-conductive mesh
Cost
A few hundred, maybe
Function
Stops eyes from sending or receiving any data except for that contained on the good old visual spectrum, which is plenty when you think about it. Lot of ocular narcotics around these days, kids. Stay in drugs, don’t do school.