Chapter 41: Tenderized

Didn’t seem like my mother’s style to peel me off the side of the tower with a swarm of drones. Somehow I thought she would prefer that I be on the payroll rather than in the morgue.

The drones buzzed me again and again, and then I heard the sound of the rotors diminish as they moved away from me.

Taking the opportunity to make some progress, I began to move again but found that I couldn’t. This time it wasn’t fatigue. When the drones had buzzed me they had stretched a film across my back and my legs that kept me stuck to the super-tower. As if I were a piece of warehouse merchandise bound to a pallet. If I tried to break free of the film, I risked putting too much muscle into it and coming off the side.

So this was it. Out of energy and out of options, my muscles went slack and I let go, simply allowing the film to hold me against the building. The film itself had a little bit of give to it, and was warm and soft, and clung to my skin almost like a blanket. If I weren’t so high up, I could practically have gone to sleep. I wanted to.

My new life would begin shortly, I supposed.

FUTUR Design would give me a desk, a net interface, a salary, and a mother. They’d monitor every movement I made and every idle fantasy. They might allow me to see Linney, if she wanted to see me and if it didn’t create a conflict of interest.

I could climb the org chart. With my mother as a mentor, it might not even be that bad. What was even left for me on the street? A few friends who considered me more trouble than I was worth.

“Stop moping, Rawls.” A woman’s voice cut through the howling wind. More than cut through. It sounded like it was coming in on an amplified channel stitched directly into my brain. I looked around and couldn’t see the source. But I knew that voice.

“It’s a directional mic and receiver, dummy,” her voice said again. “I’m way above you.”

I looked up, and far away, could barely see a human figure. “Freya?”

“That’s me.”

“Are you a simulant?”

“Flesh and bone, dude,” she said. “There’s only a splash of silicon in my head courtesy of White Tree.”

“How did you find me?”

“Later. Right now, let’s get you down.”

I heard a whirring noise and the figure above me dropped. She kicked off the building once, twice, and then rappelled down to a place level with me.

Freya. Dressed in a thick, form-fitting sleeveless vest and shorts, even as cold as it was up here. The muscles in her strong arms and legs were defined against the wash of green and purple neon from the displays shining below.

I could hear the distant rotors of the drones become louder as they prepared to make a pass at Freya, but she unzipped a pocket and pulled out a handful of things that looked like oversized stainless ball bearings. As they were exposed to the chill air, tiny, parallel score marks appeared on the surface of each one, and those tiny score marks unfolded into tiny rotors, revealing them as even smaller drones that took off from her hand with the high whine of the little battery-powered fans they sold at sporting events.

I turned my head and saw the corporate drones incoming. Freya’s drones were so small that I couldn’t track their movements, not even with my aftermarket eyeballs. But I did see the small white pops and wisps of smoke that emitted from the undersides of the corporate drones in the moment before they fell from the sky, breaking up in the air on their way to the sidewalk below.

“Hold still,” Freya said, moving nearer to me on her rope.

“No choice,” I said.

She drew a razor from her vest and slashed through the film once, twice, three times. “Now hold me.”

I wrapped my arms around my friend, separated from her body by her vest pockets stuffed with gear. I could smell her sweat, and the familiar smell of her hair. I buried my face in the place where her neck met her shoulder.

And then I felt us falling.

Freya and I landed on the sidewalk soft as a tennis ball, the rope and her thick boots absorbing most of the impact. She let me go, flicked her wrist in such a way that the rope detached from the building and coiled itself in a neat spool on her shoulder. She secured it to her vest with an elaborate clip that looked like it was part of a space shuttle.

We were tucked against the side of the super-tall FUTUR Design tower, standing over a grate that sent warm steam up over our shivering bodies.

“I need to get back in,” I said. “Enrique’s location is in there. I know it.”

Freya put her hands on both my shoulders. “What you need is rest. You’re in no shape to go back inside, and I’m not extracting you again. Here’s our ride.”

She looked up and I followed her eye. A long, black limo was pulling up, the automatic door sliding open to reveal a leather-lined passenger compartment. She pushed me inside and then climbed in after me, the door gliding back into place. She moved to the bench seat facing the back and I took the one facing the front. She pressed a button on the console and a door slid down, revealing an espresso maker. I could hear water under pressure heating up within the console.

The driverless car began to move away from the curb, as smooth as a fingertip on a silk scarf. The thought reminded me of the simulant I had known as Freya.

I looked at Freya—the biological one. Her appearance was the same, but also different than her duplicate. No one would ever mistake them for the same person even though they shared genetics and bone structure. This Freya, my friend, appeared older, her face lined, her muscles stronger. In the time we’d been apart, it looked as though she’d lived an entire life.

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She was looking out the one-way windows of the limo, alert and cautious.

“You don’t strike me as a limo kind of girl,” I said.

“What’s a limo girl like?” she said absently, perhaps even automatically. Her mind and attention were somewhere else. She seemed to be in threat-scanning mode, looking out the rear window, then the side windows in turn.

“I don’t know, Freya. Never met any girls with limos. Why are we in one now?”

Not that I was complaining. I reclined across the seat, suddenly exhausted in body and mind. I slipped my shoes off, let the leather seat hold me.

“Limos come with privacy features unavailable on other rentals.”

“The rich don’t want people listening in.”

She cocked finger guns at me.

“This one of Jiibay’s?” I said.

She sat up straight. “How did you know that?”

“Just a guess,” I said. Although as I said it, my eyes fell on a laser-etched circle in the console, its area quadrisected by two lines crossing at right angles. I’d seen that logo at Jiibay’s garage before.

“You know Jiibay?” she said.

“A friend of mine knows him. I rode in one of his Dreamliners once.”

“Nice.” Freya reached forward and placed two saucers and two demitasses into the espresso maker and pressed a button. I heard coffee grinding, and then, a moment later, the thick squelching of hot water pushing through the pucks.

Rich, creamy coffee twirled into the cups. She handed me one, and without even getting up I accepted the hot ceramic in both hands with gratitude and care.

After what felt like an eternity in the cold, windblown sky, I was thankful to be on the road, resting on soft leather, and holding something warm.

I worked my way up so that my shoulders were on the arm rest and the coffee could sit in its saucer on my chest. I breathed in its sugary smell and downed the shot in one go. “Hell yes,” I said, as the cherry-sweet coffee sent liquid pleasure through every part of my body. I woke up just a little bit. The stimulant crash wasn’t going to feel good, but that was tomorrow’s problem.

Freya finished her coffee as well, and then set it on the console. “So,” she said.

“Listen.” I sat up and reached my hand out for her. “This is awkward, because I already apologized to the other Freya about not visiting you in the hospital.”

“Is that so?”

“But you didn’t hear that apology. I’m sorry I didn’t see you in the hospital. I tried, but then I had a panic attack.”

“Screw you, Rawls,” she said. A jolt went through me—that was the Freya I remembered. Definitely not how the other Freya had responded.

“You’re mad.”

“You’re goddamn right I’m mad. Do you have any idea how scared I was?”

As it happened I did have an idea. I remembered what the simulant Freya had told me about being frightened and alone in the NCD. And I’d experienced Freya’s memories of being inducted into the clinical trial, and then released alone with a soggy sandwich.

But it didn’t seem kind to mention those things. The important thing wasn’t that I knew. The important thing was that Freya—this Freya, the real one—had the opportunity to tell me.

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“In the hospital in Asheville, it was like everyone I had ever met had forgotten about me, except my parents, who saw me a little bit. But once I came to Carthage, I knew that I was on my own. I decided, right there, that I was the one who was going to keep myself safe. Then they hooked me into the grid.”

“The pools.”

“Yeah. You heard about that.”

“I did.”

“Rawls, I couldn’t protect myself in there.”

I reached out my hands again, and this time she took them. She squeezed them tight, and I could feel how muscular her hands had become. She’d always been a climber but it felt like she’d developed new strength in the time since I’d seen he last.

“I’m so sorry, Freya. What happened?”

“After I left, I met some people. The Prophet Ezra, for instance, who said he knows you. I tried getting back into netspace, getting control of myself there. I thought it would be like therapy but it wasn’t. All I saw were the traumas.”

“The traumas?”

“While I was in the pools, they made us process pain. Emotional, physical, existential, it was all the same. We taught White Tree’s AIs to feel pain so that the AIs could inflict pain. I did that for a whole year. I couldn’t stop it from happening while I was connected. And they paid me with a cure for my illness. Once I was out of the pools, I could sometimes almost forget what I felt there. But when I tried to get back on the net, it all came back. I can’t run anymore. Not that way.”

“So you became a freerunner.”

“It helps,” she said.

“The other Freya said exactly the opposite. That running the net helped her.”

Freya nodded. “My sister.”

“You consider her a sister?”

“Of course. She tipped me off to you, once she remembered who she was.”

“What do you mean?”

“After I met The Prophet Ezra, I went to Research Triangle looking for work. I rented an apartment in Bull City and found a job with FUTUR Design. Met your mom. I didn’t last long there because connecting to the net triggered my PTSD, but I lasted long enough for your mother to make a copy of me. Thing was, the copy didn’t know she was a copy. After I quit, I would see her around, living my life. I approached her once, tried to explain the situation, but she didn’t understand. Then—”

“Then she met me,” I said. “She has a lot of your memories.”

“I bet,” Freya said. “Partly that’s due to FUTUR Design’s simulant creation process, and partly due to the Prophet Ezra encoding my memories on flash wafers. I’d left them behind when I vacated the apartment, which gave the simulant Freya access to all of me. But for a good long while, she didn’t understand that she wasn’t me.”

“That changed when she ran into another copy of you in the net, a piece of simulant ice.”

“Ah,” Freya said. “A different sister. And then she found me and said that she had met you. So I located you.”

I remembered Sunya Xiong running countersurveillance, declaring me clean. Freya must have read the expression on my face because she said, “I didn’t trace you through the net. I worked through the freerunner community. We rely on our eyeballs and situational awareness, not algorithms. Someone found you heading into FUTUR Design HQ.”

“And you knew what that meant.”

“You were going to talk to your mom about me. Except it wasn’t me. I figured I’d better be on hand in case things got sticky.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m not sure if I said that yet.”

“You didn’t. You’re welcome.”

Suddenly the silence felt heavy, almost impossible to fill.

“What now?”

“We still have a few minutes of privacy left, so if there are any secret plans you have, I recommend you share them. You don’t have that many other people looking out for you.”

“I don’t have any secret plans except finding the location of my friend and mentor, Enrique, so his lawyer can habeas him.”

“The other runners are working on it?”

“That’s right.”

“But they’re not getting very far.”

“That’s also what I hear.”

“It sounds like you feel you owe him.”

“He’s in a corporate prison because of me.”

“Heavy. Are you sure about that?”

It was a good question. I thought about what happened in Kansas. Sure, I hadn’t told Enrique and Gloss about my eyes, but I’d only been out there with them because Enrique wanted me to. But logic was no match for feeling. I still felt responsible.

“I’m not sure.”

“What’s your plan for afterward?”

“Once I free him? Most of the runners think I’m trouble.”

“From what I hear, they’re trouble themselves.”

“Do the freerunners and runners ever work together?”

“Not as much as they should.”

“Maybe you and I could set a better example.”

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store

Name

Wirejack (Epiflex)

Manufacturer

Wave Synaptics, a wholly-owned subsidiary of FUTUR Design

Legal status

Legal

Description

An injection of artificial nerve cells and supporting hardware

Cost

More than ten K, less for generic

Function

Primes a body’s nervous system for a complete upgrade. Excellent for runners preparing to encounter big ice, dancers, professional athletes, assassins, and full-service sex workers.