For an introduction to the literary experiment going on here, check out this post .
Pedro popped a nic-cartridge into his inhaler and took in a rush of stimulation, his consciousness rocking back and forth just a bit as his brain took the blow. It kept him sated, and he hadn't eaten in a few days. He'd had a soybrick in his hot little hands the day before yesterday, and was getting ready to pinch off a chunk to ball up and squeeze down his desperate throat when a hollow eyed little girl looked sad and played with the hem of her skirt. Things were mean, but nobody could be that mean. The girl's daddy had probably been skyfucked, her mama stooped over in a comm-farm somewhere in the Plain Zone. Hungry refugees make for bitter friends, but Pedro couldn't keep it—he gave her the brick, cussing in his mouth.
He wasn't quite sure how long one could go without food. Pedro was unlucky enough to live almost all 23 of his long years as a ward of the Western Production Territories so he had conducted something of a two decade experiment in answering that question. In the Plain Zone you could glean during the right months of the year, and that kept you awake at the very least. And soybricks, cornballs and Pigz were all made right there in the Labor Annex. Living here in the KC Burbs you sometimes went without rations if the train got skyfucked or ambushed by freedom fighters, but in the Plain Zone you were close to the source of things. He'd heard the grinding rip of a skyfuck in the distance the other night, so he guessed the OcTech was to blame for his aching belly. \
For all he knew you could go almost a week without food and you'll just wish you were dead. Water was different, though. He saw a couple of ninos get real thirsty and die wracked with dry heaves and itchy groans when he was a little one himself. The Plain Zone you were worried about water. Here in KC signs on the river declared in five languages that “water thieves would be instantly liquidated”, but they didn't mind people collecting rain and they got just enough here. Plus the river being so near kept fees low.
At least the game kept him in nic and yeyo. The West Olathe People's Army was as good a gang as any—better than the barefooted KlanKickers and White Front that had been whipping the shit out of backsliders with fencing wire back in the Peez. He'd been in the burbs for a while now—maybe a year or two, he wasn't quite sure the dates. Olathe was as shitty as they came, grass muscling up through degraded streets, forests of fetid toppling squats lit up by gunplay. The Trees didn't give a damn if they killed each other—saved them processing capacity—so they let all the gangs and militias survive the invasion. Its not like there was much any of them could do to effectively resist satellite-mounted rail guns turning them into an unholy mess. And the Trees knew that the nic, the yeyo, the speed, addies, pump and hotwire kept people producing, and these are the Production Territories, after all. Long as they got theirs, the gangs could have their's. They always talked nice about how it was a sign of respect for Western culture, and of course it was. But the Trees killed anything that wasn't in their plan, Western Culture or no.
“When the fuck they getting here, ese?” Xiu was pissed. They had been huddled down on the sweaty concrete for two days now, waiting for their cargo. The ceilings soared where they hadn't collapsed in some long-forgotten fire. The once polite padding on the pews was stiff and foul, stained with aged mold. The nic never lasted, so Pedro took a bump before he answered.
“If you keep asking stupid questions, I'm going to kick the shit out of you. They are rolling incog. It takes a while. Shut up and zone, baby.” Pedro was zoning himself—his eyeglasses casting new worlds across his field of vision, transforming the desecrated cathedral into the double-octofinal round of the Asian Trio Cup—the first of three legs between Kolkata FC and Dynamo Moscow, the neutral leg being played in Hong Kong's SemanTeque Stadium. Kolkata had a midfielder who had been born in the Western Production Territories and adopted from an orphanage by a middle class Bengali family. A strawberry blonde number, real nice chest and legs, named something uppity like Sriman Rajagopalan or something.
The game was 4-6, a slow one. Xiu groaned. “You won't mind if I...”
“Course not. May come help it along.”
“Why not.” He slid down his pants—Kevmesh guaranteed to last five years or it was your ass, elastic drawstring waist, choice of colors. Ejercito Westy rolled in green. “Oy, cunado, there's a hot zone over here.”
The match was a snooze job—everybody was gunshy of throwing elbows or taking out knees at this point in the thing. Pedro reached out and seemed to grab the top left edge of the whole world (as far as he could see, others would see a man moving with no sense) and ripping it away in a single smooth motion, a curtain of experience being rent to reveal a whole new place. He was now standing in a well-stocked, shimmering clean and pillow talk quiet shopping mall, a variety of avatars leaving various chills and zones. “Where you at?”
“Level 41, SlickZone.” Xiu hummed a bit in approval. “I don't want to ruin it. Right up your alley,
ese.”
Pedro's av galloped to the elevator, pushed “41” and he saw the floor of the mall fall fast beneath him. He actually crouched a bit and his heart skipped in spite of himself. In a matter of seconds he was there—if they got anything but the decade old castoffs of all the fat kicked-back Chinks it would have taken less time than clicking an old remote control between channels. “It's on sunside or nightside?” It made no sense to speak of cardinal directions in a virtual world, so the Western Production Territories Hub was a 512 story hotel with 64 ports in each—chills, zones and churches—lined up 32 to a side of a single corridor that was divided into sunside and nightside.
“What do you think?” That meant nightside. The av galloped down without needing food to fuel his exertions, reaching the seething entrance to SlickZone. He stepped in and as his eyes seemed to be adjusting he realized what was going on and his prick stirred. Two thick girls with sagging breasts, fecund bellies and rattling asses along with three muscle bound boys were in a knotted pile of fornication. A Subsaharan fellow, rather light-skinned like the ones he'd heard they once had in the Western Production Territories, with toned legs and a taut rubbery chest was using his mouth on a ripped Chinese man, one of the plumpers gobbling down alongside. These girls were as hot as they got—he was aroused to the point of hurt—with their sweaty flapping, these boys as mouthfuckable as any chum he'd ever had. Save maybe that one thresher he'd done trades with in the break room at the soybrick vats. But that'd been since he was a kid and these boys here were men. “Oh man...”
“I know.” Xiu's av was involved in a game of you-show-me-yours... with an impossibly heavy blonde, her fat curls a lie. In primary life you were far more likely to be able to count this girl's ribs, but the Hub was a place where things could be like they used to be. Pedro's av, and Pedro himself moved closer to Xiu and began to work him over. It always made zoning fun to have a meat friend there with you to play along with the home game. It could have gone on for hours—nothing made cumming harder than starving to death—but it was interrupted when the curtain ripped itself down and both men's instantly clothed avs stood in a security control room—gray with a variety of surveillance screens floating about them. The images were simulated—only a select caste of Research and Analysis Wing analysts and a couple of Russian metaprocessors saw any recon video, but it flattered them to let producers play spy—they served as a proximity warning for their cargo. “Off to work, old boy.”
They each shook their heads and the glasses went transparent. Each gripped his AR-15 and duckwalked to one of the windows where they could see the approach of Therese. “Who the fuck is that with her?” Xiu was jumpy—he'd been doing meth all morning and his pupils were the size of cigar burns down the middle of his sweaty eyes. “It's just supposed to be Therese.”
“Shut up. Don't do nothing.” Therese was skirting the bowed-out wire fence, rusted and choked with invasive plants. The grass was chest high, but the late evening light came in sideways at Therese's head: short, neat hair with a razor sharp part, ghost white highlighted with flickering fiber optics, wrap around shades that made it so she could see in the dark, the WOPA spirit guide (a copperhead snake) tattooed across her neck and the left side of her face. Her clothes were not billowy and colorful like the fashion, just ejercito Westy green, not-quite-form fitting Kevmesh. Behind her followed a bent woman older than almost any left nowadays. If they didn't get buried under the rubble of a Trio cruise missile or liquidated by a skyfuck, they starved. Had to be a tough old chica to make it this far. She had to have been an old woman already when the missles flew, after the Federation collapsed and the Trio threw down the occupation. Surprised she didn't piss her old ass self to death those first 40 days and nights, when a quarter of the continent got blown up, cut down, suicidal and infanticidal with the madness of an unmanned barrage of military violence. But here she is, keeping up with Therese. Maybe it's Drag Your Emaciated Grandma to Work Day in Westy.
Pedro yelled out the window. “The next step falls in the grave, females.”
“Grave? Your hungry ass would turn us into barbacoa. Make some cardboard tortillas to wrap it up with,” Therese said.
“Even still,” he said, leveling the barrel at the still distant women, down a gentle but strategic slope from the window he braced on, “until I know who this abuelita is, moving is fatal.”
The old woman stood erect, swinging her broad shoulders into place. “I'm Molly Teachout.”
“Who the fuck is that, Pedro?” Xiu was getting nervous, a heavy film of perspiration coating his shaved, densely tatted head. “I swear to god, I'll fucking kill them man. Oh Jesus, I knew it shouldn't be taking this long.”
“Chill out,” he gritted through his teeth at his whimpering comrade. He annunciated the next words with formal intensity. “You are becoming a liability.”
Xiu popped his mouth shut in absurd, drug-perverted fear. Pedro yelled back out the window. “I got a terabit sizzle kid up here. He's armed heavier'n a bus driver in the Caliphate. Strangers spook him, Molly. What are we supposed to do?”
“This is your cargo,” Therese said.
“Keep your voice down, don't say anything else, and don't fucking move.” At this moment a drone with cham-mat framing was blending into the blue of the sky, hovering above the clouds and drawing power off the sun. It was listening to everything in a 50 mile radius, seeking suspicious phrases and passing them off to a metaprocessor in Moscow or St. Petersburg to make a determination about whether or not this chatty number should be a target. In a matter of milliseconds it has decided if the person speaking is a liability to production and harmony, alerting a clerk in Bangalore, Mumbai or Kolkata to take a peep with the same drone's visual surveillance. It does not matter if you hide underground or move at night or keep moving—Full Spectrum Occupation Tech saw all. If the OcTech decided that “This is your cargo” being spoken at a church mere miles outside the KC green zone was too dangerous to countenance, the skyfuck would fire a custom-carbon spear from 3,000 miles above them. The spear started out up there as a five foot long, four inch thick 50 pound rod and ended up driving through the meaty part of your innards as slightly larger than a bullet less than a fifth of a second later. Nothing but the acrid stench of plasma behind it, a scattered corpse oozing alongside it. If the skyfuck didn't like what Therese had to say, they would have been dead before Pedro finished his next sentence. “Xiu, go search them. I'll cover you here.”
Nothing. “Okay.” It was quiet enough for Pedro to hear Xiu's teeth grinding all the way out. He stopped the clacking to order the women around. “Alright, Tess, let's put the weaponry on the ground.” Tess laid out her AR and then removed two side arms-one from her belt, the other from her ankle. She also tossed a SleepLight onto the ground. “I assume you're unarmed, abuelita?”
Molly bore a look of disgusted insult upon her face. “I've killed more men than you've screwed, you strung out little fuckup.”
The drugs drove Xiu into grave breach of protocol, reaching back to slap the old lady. Before his hand finished drawing back he was grinding his face into the dirt, on the ground with a smashed instep. As he fell following Molly's stomp to the top of his foot, her elbow connected with the bridge of his nose, popping cartilidge and shooting blood.
Pedro laughed. “You are okay, Molly. Put your arms on the ground or I'll have to kill my new best friend.”
“Much as you talk about it, I'll bet you've never killed.” She was looking right up into the window with sunburned intensity. “I'd almost be willing to die just so you can finally bust your cherry, ese.” She put an ancient Glock on the ground, and then a Caliph-Uzi and a butterfly knife. “Almost.” She giggled an aged note of superiority.
“Keep your hands out and come on in, slowlike.” The women walked as if in an old marriage rite they had seen in some period piece they'd played at in a zone. They stepped through the tall windows that had shot sheets of light into the church when people did such nasty things in public where all the neighbors could see. They kept it locked in their bedrooms now, quietly zoning into one of the hub churches, having thoroughly proved up their age. They stood in the comfortable moisture of the empty space, the late hour casting uncertain shadows and cooling the humidity to a tolerable level. “Now how the fuck do you mean?”
Therese responded with finger signs—the OcTech could see through the roof, but its resolution wasn't that good. She recited the latest pop hit—a shrieky Russian bit with lots of three-quarter tones—while her hands spelled her message. “She needs to go to the green zone.”
Pedro recited the Western Production Territories Operating Edicts, required to be memorized by four years—“...and will cheerfully submit to the protection and generosity of our noble guests...” and on—while his fingers replied. “How?”
“You can move 1500 kilos of pump but not a 40 kilo woman?”
“Pump don't sneeze.”
“Neither will she.”
“OcTech will let tubes of gel slide, but it'll bite on an animal.”
“You just don't want to.”
“She is a liability.”
“You saw what she can do. She is less a liability than Xiu.”
Pedro's fingers twitched without meaning while he rolled it over. “Who is she, anyways?”
“Molly Teachout.” Pedro shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in response. “Your parents didn't teach you history.”
“My parents didn't teach me to walk.” His eyes expressed nothing, his mouth still babbling about “...punctuality, diligence, obedience and security.” He was too small to remember the chaos after the Bolivaran Federation of American People's came a clattering down, but he wasn't sure the skyfucks kept him any more secure than rioting anarchy would have. And nobody gave a shit about punctuality, diligence or obedience when there wasn't a government back then.
“She is the last Bolie.”
Pedro whistled. “They are all dead.”
“All but one.”
He fairly trembled. “She is skyfuck bait.”
“She hasn't been stewed yet.”
“Her luck runs out when she gets smuggled into the greez.”
Therese held her hands up and bowed her head without breaking eye contact, a gesture of warning that she was to be making a suspicious move. She reached into her green optic-studded Kevmesh jacket and pulled out a soybrick with 6 months scrip taped to the outside. Pedro's honor prevented him from indulging his first impulse: to tear into the brick with his teeth, barely gumming it before swallowing, forcing it all into his gut in a matter of seconds. “That's three times your usual fee.”
“Wish I could add it to my will.”
“What's a will?”
“Old saying.” He paused to calmly break off a piece. He'd have to save half for Xiu, who'd need a FirstAidTech fix pretty shortly. “Why do I need to get her to the greez in the first place?”
“A well-placed customer wants her.”
“For what?”
“What do Bolies do?”
“Kill labor organizers? Fuck everything up? Give long-winded speeches?”
“Revolution.”
Pedro laughed out loud. He cackled gratuitously at the shamelessness of it all. “Overthrow satellites, supercomputers and drones?”
“This is more than you need to know.”
“I don't like risking my guts for a pipe dream.”
“You are risking it because the commandante orders it.” Pedro was stuck now. “So any more questions?”
Pedro shook his head. Molly smiled and spoke up. “Suppose we move tonight, or wait til morning? Either way, let's eat.” Her calm was either hubris or prophecy—Pedro was perturbed to learn that he'd have a pitch-side seat to the verdict.
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