CHAPTER 4 - THEY WERE IN A POSITION TO PROVE IT
“This product is to be used topically. If the product gets into the eyes, flush with warm water. If the product is ingested in a quantity of one teaspoon or less, drink water and reed ash. If the product is ingested in a quantity of ½ cup, rub myrrh oil over the forehead and contact your Poison Control Center immediately. If the product is ingested in quantities exceeding ½ cup, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and hallucinations of the Land of the Dead may occur. If the entire bottle is ingested, induce vomiting, or face a final, spiritual death. If bodily death occurs due to the ingestion of large quantities of this product, the body is to be mummified according to Egyptian mummification standards; please contact your country’s Egyptian embassy for more information. DO NOT USE THE INTERNET.”
– Sekhu-Shampoo SWEET DATE FLAVOR warning label, circa 2045
Anjelly was a paradise of concrete canals and ruined pipelines. It stretched out below Mote as an asphalt wonderland, perfectly abandoned, waiting for the right girl with the right pair of skates to arrive.
“Mote,” said Mothy, “I can’t carry this by myself!”
“Look at it, Mothy,” said Mote, “a perfect morning, a perfect city…”
Mothy flopped against the stacked crates of medical supplies. “Mote, please help.”
Mote popped the hand-truck back up. “We should ask papaw if we can go down to the city!”
“What?!” Mothy kept the crate balanced as they rolled it back toward the parked convoy. “I don’t want to go down there, it’s creepy! Last night, I was watching the city under the moonlight, and do you know what I saw? I saw a flock of birds flying around, glowing like glowsticks and making geometric shapes in the sky.”
“You did not.”
“I did too! I saw it as clear as sunrise!”
“How come I didn’t see it then? How come nobody else mentioned it, huh?”
“Because everyone else was asleep,” said Mothy, “and you especially, you were snoring so loud I couldn’t think, let alone write anything!”
“Oh… Mothy, are you still trying to write?”
“A little…”
“Mothy, come on, nobody reads books!” Mote made a point of gagging dramatically.
“Well, Syndicate people do, and they like interesting things… I thought maybe when we see them at the next trading post, I could give them my manuscripts.”
“Mothy come on, Syndicate people don’t care about that kind of thing, they care about badasses doing badass stuff!”
“Oh, and I guess you’re the kind of badass they want around, huh? With your kong fu?”
Mote stopped the hand cart and glared at Mothy. “Yeah, I am! I do know kong fu and I bet you that if I found that Ghost hanging around here, I could show them my moves and they’d be like ‘wow, you should fight with us!’”
“Oh my gawd, you are such a baby.”
“NO! Check this out!”
Mote put the handcart down and Mothy groaned, flopping against it again. “Mote, please!”
“Really quick, I’ve been working on this one!” Mote went into an improvised martial arts floor routine, spinning in tight spins on her skates and throwing out whip-kicks, and the occasional ‘WAAAAAH-TAH!’ for gusto. She did some flips, some round-offs, a few sweeps, and even started pumping herself up to fight an imaginary gang of bad guys. But then one of her spinning kicks hit the hand-truck with enough force to knock over the stack of crates.
They cracked open across the ground, sending sterilized instruments and their packaging skidding through road dust. Mote dove into the dirt and gathered packaging into her arms, repeating “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, sorry…” over and over.
Mothy’s big, glowing eyes welled up with tears. “You’re always sorry. I don’t want you to be sorry, I want you to just think about other people sometimes!”
“Sorry! I mean… okay!”
“Just have ten percent more self-control, for goodness’ sake, Mote!”
Mote dumped the dusty packaging back into the crates and stacked them up on the hand-cart once more. She slapped the lids shut and gave her sister her biggest, nicest grin.
“No harm done!” Mote said.
“It’s all sealed up, so it’s not ruined… I guess. I still have to blow all the dust out later.”
“I’ll do that for you, don’t worry about it!”
Mothy’s antennae drooped. They hauled the goods the rest of the way back to the convoy, winding around cacti and prickly shrubs. When they got back to their camp at the head of the convoy, papaw was dead asleep in his lawn chair with a half-dozen Road Sodas spent on the ground around him.
“What time are we heading out?” Mote looked again to the beautiful ruins of Anjelly.
“Tonight, after sundown,” said Mothy. “It’s a red-eye run to the San Wocky Valley – do you even pay attention when they make announcements?”
“Nah I never hear what they’re saying – let’s go down into Anjelly!”
“Mote, no! There’s nothing down there but cement and creepy old buildings!”
“Exactly… check it out, come here.”
Mote pulled her sister into a conspiratorial shoulder-hug and laid out her plan. Mote would ride the old water pipeline down the hill and into the canals. Then she could blitz around the canals while Mothy scavenged for cool relics and old stuff.
At first, Mothy was against the idea. But Mote had a secret weapon:
“Mothy,” said Mote, “how are you gonna write cool stories if you don’t do cool stuff?”
“My stories are about happy families and road life… and they have recipes.”
“Mothy, okay, fair enough, that’s nice! But you’ve got to zazz things up a little! What if you found a cool old book down there that no one has ever seen before? You could use it to inspire your books, or even sell it to the Synners!”
“I guess that’s true…”
Mote went to get Mothy’s medic bag and even shoved her writing book into it. “Come on,” Mote offered the pack to Mothy with a grin, “I’ll protect you from birds, anyways.”
“I guess I am being a little cowardly. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything living down there except some migratory birds.”
“Exactly, nobody lives in dead cities, what would they even eat?”
“The birds…?”
“Yeah, but who can live off birds forever? There’s no water, either!”
“True… alright. Okay, but we’re coming back after an hour!”
“Deal!”
And with that Mote slid down the hill toward the pipeline. Mothy put her pack on, unfurled her big fuzzy wings, and took to the air to glide down after Mote.
Nearby, a mirage in an old, dead tree spoke into his comms using his thoughts:
Get me Neon Vox on a call while I reposition. The fairies are going on… an adventure.
He slid down from the tree and calculated their speed and trajectory with his snoopers.
Ugh. Why do they have to be so cute? It makes this so much harder!
The mirage, a junior Ghost named Trip Tanaka, racked his sniper rifle, then attached it to the magnetized holster behind the shoulder of his exosuit. There was a plume of dust kicked up when he slid down the hill after them, but from a distance it could be mistaken for a tumbling rock.
His outgoing call to Neon Vox pinged and pinged for precious seconds.
Come on, come on…
Finally, the call connected. In the upper-right corner of his vision, Tanaka saw darkness where a visual rendering of the call’s recipient should have been.
Are you there, Vox? I don’t see you.
“Talk fast – you need advisement on the fairy situation, correct?”
Yes ma’am.
“Kill them both and be done with it, we have way bigger entrees to plate right now.”
I heard about Cascadia, yeah. But how do I kill them?
There was a long silence. Finally, Envy answered: “You shoot them, Trip.”
… right. Thanks. I meant psychologically. Have you seen these things, they’re like fuzzy little… harmless rainbow muppets.
“Trip, I’m not going to micromanage your emotions for you. We all have to do things that make us sick to our stomach in this line of work, and anybody that’s got any kind of education in Syndicate knows that Taipei was a mistake. Do you want to live in a world where sapient designer entities can be spat out of a street corner vending machine? Are you ready for the ethical and biological consequences of that level of unchecked hyper-capitalism?”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
But that was eighty years ago, and these two are just living their lives.
“You were born in a GYOTA Corporate phyle, right?”
I don’t see how this is relevant.
“Your genetic sequencing was determined by your parents and a standard gene-therapy regimen when you were born, to prevent disease, nothing else. Meanwhile…”
Tanaka had to summon a cloaked recon drone to give him a boost. He hooked onto it and flew up into the sky so he could keep up with and keep an eye on Mote and Mothy as they dove further into the asphalt labyrinth that was Anjelly.
Meanwhile what?
“… shut up.”
. . .
The connection glitched out momentarily. Trip felt skull-splitting tinnitus and a sense of overwhelming doom bleeding through the call itself. But to his credit, he kept his brain quiet.
“. . .”
. . .
“… okay, we’re good.”
What the heck is going on up there? Are you still being pursued?
“Trip, I’m tired and I’m old and I’ve been traveling via the ocean floor all night. I want you and everyone else tuning in to hear me when I say this: Taipei fairies were genetically customizable with zero regulation or oversight. Some idiot could mash buttons on a vending machine and program a clone child for maximum psychopathy and aggression and it’d just be another notch in a Horse Eyes social experiment.”
Horse Eyes… wait, Horse Eyes was a real person?
“Mother of OtherTech and CTO of PRISMA Corporation. She’s not so much into turning island populations into gene blenders anymore, after the Trine Accord – does everyone under thirty just skip their education feeds? How did you even get this job?!”
Simulation performance and psychological profiling. I was the top 0.1% of the GhostSim leaderboards for five years running.
“Well, have fun with the chaos of reality, kid – there’s more to this job than killing.”
I’m well aware, you can tone down the condescension.
Envy’s tone could cut glass: “You want to say that again, Junior Agent?”
. . . ma’am, no ma’am.
“Kill the hecking fairies.”
Copy that.
The connection broke. Tanaka spoke into the dead Anjelly air where no one could hear him: “If I ever get that jaded, I think I’ll tie a cinderblock to my neck and jump off a sea rig.”
The old suburb was a series of dried-out swimming pools, and Mote had the time of her life vaulting from yard to yard, basin to basin. Anjelly was in glorious condition, despite being abandoned for well over three and a half centuries. The extreme heat and dryness kept all but the hardiest cacti and shrubs from growing through the concrete.
Mothy followed Mote from house to house, usually crawling in through an old open window and rifling through dusty drawers or office spaces. Everything was just as it had been centuries before, with pots and pans still on stoves full of dried out biomass, and doors left unlocked and open. The exodus of Anjelly wasn’t a great mystery to historians: they ran out of water because they built a giant city in a desert, like morons.
“Mote!” Mothy called out from a window.
Mote kept on shredding through the pool she was in, rising up and out of it in tight spins, only to realign with the concrete slope and blast through to the other side for a series of flips. “What?!” She called out, mid-spin.
“I found something interesting!”
“What is it?!”
“I think it’s food!”
Mote’s tummy gurgled and she landed her latest jump, then slid down to the shallow end of the pool to look up past the afternoon sun toward the window Mothy hung out of. Mothy hopped out of the window and glided down to meet her sister. They sat in the shade of the pool wall and went through Mothy’s bag of treasures.
“Check it out,” said Mothy, pulling out an old book. “This one is called The Body Keeps the Score and it’s about traumatic experiences and how they’re remembered by the body.”
“That doesn’t sound like food to me,” said Mote.
“Ugh, fine. Here…” Mothy dug through the bag and pulled out a golden bottle with a plastic seal still intact around the nozzle. She slapped it into Mote’s hand.
Mote squinted at the text on the bottle. “Sekhu-Shampoo… sweet date flavor. For healthy and vibrant hair in the Egg-ip-tee-an style… uhhhh, okay.”
“It’s for healthy hair.”
“So, I eat it and it makes my hair healthy?” Mote patted the thick, crusty green dreadlocks sticking out of her head.
“It says for topical use only.”
“Tropical use? Like it tastes like tropical flavor?”
“No, topical means you put it on your skin.”
Mote wrinkled her nose. She peeled the plastic seal off, then unscrewed the cap and sniffed at the contents. Her pupils dilated and her mouth watered. “It smells like the sweetest fruity candy… Mothy, smell it!”
Mothy did smell it and her antennae unfurled with excitement. “That smells amazing! But, it doesn’t say you should eat it… it looks like there’s a warning label on the – MOTE NO!!”
Mote had the bottle tipped upside-down and draining down into her mouth. She gulped and gulped and gulped, swatting Mothy away every time her sister tried to interrupt. Within ten seconds, Mote had guzzled down the entire bottle.
Mothy stared at her. Mote stared back.
…
“See?” Mote said. “I’m fine. I feel… tingly. Is my hair shiny?”
“Mote…” Mothy was already digging into her medic bag. “This label says… final spiritual death?! WHAT?!”
“My soul is going to die? This is soul-killer food?!”
“SHIT! MOTE! THROW UP!”
But it was too late. Mote collapsed onto her side and foamed fruity, glittery suds from her mouth. Her body spasmed and her legs kicked.
“Mote!” Mothy screamed. “Why are you so stupid?! MOTE!”
A mirage shimmered in the afternoon heat. It lingered over the edge of the dry pool and stared at the two girls in their peril. Trip Tanaka had a decision to make: He could let nature take its course or seal the deal himself.
His Chat, AKA his personal following, had other ideas.
Chat: “Help her! Help the poor thing!”
As Mote gagged and thrashed on the ground, with her sister crying over her, all of Syndicate observed the humanity of the Taipei Fairies. They were no longer myth or legend, but intelligent, sensitive creatures worthy of sympathy. Trip took comfort in knowing that a significant portion of his followers didn’t want him to kill them.
Trip hopped down into the pool and decloaked. When Mothy saw him materialize from thin air she screamed. His exosuit made him look like a gangly insect, with its segmented layers and pressure bands designed to endure the depths of the sea and the vacuum of space. The helmet didn’t help, either – its eyes were round, red lenses, and the gillmask built into the faceplate resembled the dangling pedipalps of a spider.
“She needs to vomit,” said Trip, his voice filtered through the mask. He saw the medic bag around Mothy’s shoulders and pointed at it. “Give me that.”
Mothy pulled off her bag and threw it at Trip.
Trip dug into it, past the gummi worms and duct tape, through the layer of assorted notepads, and found a neatly packed Syndicate medicine pouch. Inside there was a bottle of Ipecac syrup.
Trip grabbed Mote by the hair, broke the tip off the bottle, and shove it past her lips to squeeze the contents as far back into her throat as possible. Within seconds, Mote rolled over, pushed herself up on shaky arms, and puked a stream of pinkish-blue, glittery gel across the cement.
“Is she gonna be ok…?” Mothy crawled across the cement to rub Mote’s back.
“I have no idea,” said Trip, as he picked up the empty shampoo bottle to read it. “No ingredients list… soul death? What…”
Chat can you get me an analysis of this thing?
SynCon took images of the bottle, synthesized the text, and scoured the entirety of its collected human wisdom. While that cooked, Trip put a little distance between himself and the two mutants.
“I saw a gate…” Mote coughed. “A big black gate in the desert… and burning trees…”
“Mote, just relax,” said Mothy. “It’s gonna be ok, this nice… person is here.”
Mothy looked up at Trip with a hopeful, frightened face. Trip paced back and forth in the empty pool basin and didn’t really confirm or deny. Then the SynCon report came in and he laughed.
Mote flopped onto her butt and leaned back against the pool wall. As she rolled back into full consciousness, she began to register what was standing in front of her: a Ghost. A proper Syndicate agent, in a full exosuit, with a cool-ass rifle and who knew how many gadgets on hand.
“Oh man,” Mote whimpered, “I finally meet a Ghost and I look like a plumb fool. Mothy… tell them… tell them I’m cool, that I know kong fu.”
Mothy looked straight at Trip, in her most serious voice, and said: “She knows kong fu. And you know what? She is cool. She just… sometimes she’s so brave. Maybe too brave.”
Chat: “They’re so cute we can’t stand it. Adopt them. Protect them at all costs.”
Trip knew that his Chat was far from a proper SynCon. He knew that very well and he knew defying the SynCon and a senior Ghost like Envy would be entirely at his peril. Court martial and public humiliation would just be the start of a lifetime of shame, of being targeted, mocked, dragged, and held up as a cautionary tale. He would be expected to live out his long days in a permanent state of mea culpa for the amusement of millions.
This was a fate he’d seen happen too many times, and it invariably ended in suicide, total psychological reset, or exile. So, Trip went against all earthly empathy, all his primal instincts toward protecting the vulnerable and preserving the beautiful, and drew his sidearm.
Mothy’s eyes turned cup-wide. She hugged Mote’s arm and shed big, glistening tears.
Trip raised his arm and pointed his pistol straight at Mothy’s head. There were a few good strides between them. Mote coughed up another pink-blue glob of garbage and spat it at Trip’s feet. It sizzled on the afternoon concrete. Mote wiped her lips and stood up on shaky legs.
“Put that gun down,” said Mote, as her eyes got hard, “or I’ll fucking kill you, dude.”
Trip didn’t respond. He didn’t squeeze the trigger, either, but he fingered it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You two aren’t supposed to… uh, exist.”
Mote put herself between him and Mothy. “Says who?!” Mote stomped her skate onto the cement. “You don’t know who we are! You don’t know what I am! I don’t even know what I am! If I am here, I belong here! And I will kick your ass if you don’t put the gun down!”
Trip turned the safety off. “Just stay where you are. I need to think.”
Could really use a little help, Chat.
The analysis of the shampoo bottle came back. Trip heard it transcribed in his head:
“Sekhu-Shampoo is a rare find. It was one of the first legal psychotropic gag products released in the wake of the Great Dying era of consumer culture. Its contents were mostly flavored glucose gel laced with a cocktail of psychotropic substances, chiefly DMT. Do keep the bottle and the trace samples secure.”
Mothy peeked at Trip between Mote’s legs. “Sir,” said Mothy, “or, um… ma’am? Synner person? If you don’t murder us, we promise to be at your service.”
“That’s a very nice offer, but I have a duty to –”
“BIRDS!” Mothy screamed.
“AAAAAAAHHHHH!” Mote helped Mothy up and together they scrambled toward the edge of the pool. Trip laughed and kept his gun trained on them.
“Nice bluff,” he said, “but that isn’t going to—”
He was interrupted by an impact to his back sending him tumbling forward on the concrete. His reflexes kicked on and his biomon shot readiness chemicals into his bloodstream. As he rolled over, he found himself trapped in a flapping morass of shimmering black feathers.
Trip fired his pistol into the mass, tagging a few of the creatures, but hardly making a dent in the flock. He felt them pecking, clawing, and pulling on the joints and seams of his exosuit, like they knew the device and knew they needed to puncture it to get at him. In abject, blood-thumping terror he ran toward the nearby doors of a backyard shed, right after Mote and Mothy.
He heard the door slam shut and he ran into it with a thud. He banged on it.
“LET ME IN, FOR GOD’S SAKE!”
“NO WAY!”
He heard something rip.
MAIN SYSTEM . . . multiple suit breaches detected.
“PLEASE LET ME IN I’M SORRY I WON’T SHOOT ANYONE!”
“YOU PROMISE?!”
“YES, YES I PROMISE, I PROMISE!”
The door cracked open, and Trip shoved himself through, peeling off a few squirming birds with their beaks embedded in his exosuit as he did. One managed to pop inside just before he closed the door. Mote stomped it to death with her skate, Mothy slammed her manuscript bag over its head. Trip pointed his pistol at the twitching thing and unloaded round after round into its horrible little body.
His pistol click-click-clicked. On the floor of the garden shed, there was a crow, stomped and shot to feathery bits. It didn’t bleed proper blood, though. It bled some kind of brackish, glittering ooze that resembled motor oil.
“I told you!” Mothy shrieked, as she cowered in the corner. “I told you about the birds!”
“I know, I know,” Mote paced and raked at her hair, “you were right, okay?!”
“I have no idea what this is,” said Trip, as he reloaded his pistol and barricaded the shed doors with an old shovel. “There aren’t supposed to be birds this far south. Looks like a… a crow? Those are Pacific Northwest.”
“I don’t like any of this,” Mothy cried big, fresh tears.
Mote rifled through the shelves of the old garden shed, tossing aside spades, rakes, bottles of weed killer, string, tape… and then she found an old barbecue and a bottle of lighter fluid.
“Whoa,” said Trip, “what are you doing?”
“Killing it with fire,” Mote grinned.
“This is an enclosed space, that doesn’t seem like a –”
The bird carcass squirmed, squelched, and crunched itself back into a hideous sculpture of bone and claw. Its black blood turned upward, like fingers from the soil.
“I have a lighter,” Trip said, as he pulled a lighter from his belt. Mote squirted the squirming bird monster with lighter fluid and Trip crouched down to graze it with the tip of the lighter. It went up shrieking in flames, as black smoke filled the unventilated shed. Mote and Mothy, who didn’t have a respiration mask like Trip, coughed in fits.
Trip grabbed a long screwdriver from a toolbox counter and jammed holes in the low ceiling. The smoke drifted outward as the fire died down and they were spared suffocation. But then, dozens of beady bird eyes peered through the sunny holes.
The three of them sank down onto the ground. All around them, tiny claws and hungry beaks scratched and pecked. But that wasn’t what was truly unsettling about the crows; what was unsettling was that they never squawked or called out. They worked in silence, like a flock of hungry beaks driven by nothing but premeditated malice.