Rx- A Tale of Electronegativity (The Blackouts; The Reservoir; Industry)

Rx A Tale of Electronegativity

By Robert Brockway

Copyright

Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity All material within copyright © Robert Brockway, 2012. All rights reserved.

Cover design © 2012 by Meagan Brockway

Visit http://www.rxthebook.com for more information and further updates.

About the book

Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity was originally released as a three-part serial novel, containing Rx – Episode 1: The Blackouts, Rx – Episode 2: The Reservoir, and Rx – Episode 3: Industry. This edition comprises the whole story, and is a collection of all three episodes.

Dedication

This book is for my beautiful and loving wife, Meagan, who designed all of the covers and only occasionally threw bottles at me in a drunken fury. This book is for my dad, also named Robert Brockway, also loving and supporting -- his only flaw being an incredibly arrogant flair for child-naming. This book is for my dogs, Detectives Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh, who are as wonderfully stupid as they are action-packed. And this book is for the meager handful of loyal fans who continually support me even though I abuse them so. It’s a sickness, and I sincerely hope that somebody helps them break the cycle one day. Finally, this book is for science: You keep right on making the impossible reality, you crazyass system of knowledge, and you let the philosophy majors worry about whether or not it’s “right.” They need something to do in-between shifts at Starbucks.

Prologue

Looking exactly downward from an impossible height, the city appears as a black diamond, bordered by a delicate line of grey. The darkness inside is riddled with flaws, criss-crossed by a series of thin, prismatic thread; a cat’s cradle of fine silver laid atop the soft, deep black of a jeweler’s felt. At each of the diamond’s vertices, the narrow leaden border expands inward, and becomes a smaller quadrilateral unto itself. Within each of those polygons is a fractal of verdant green. The color is dappled, amorphous and variegated, like a sheet thrown across a bed of gravel. From a more modest height, the trick becomes clear. The emeralds are patches of vegetation: Hilltops, lawns and forests layered so densely above one another that they become impossible to distinguish, blurring together into a compressed motif of greens and yellows. The thin grey borders are walls, connecting the pinnacles of each of the four super-structures that support these aerial woodlands. The blurry smudge of beige surrounding it all is the Earth: Untold, indistinct miles below. Closer still, and the ebony within the diamond resolves. It takes on depth and texture. The opaque black clarifies into smoke and ash: The tops of roiling stormclouds, caught inside the bulwarks adjoining the four buildings. The fine, chromatic threads are the flightpaths of myriad

skybound conveyances, each traversing an infinite number of intersecting pathways within the storm. Descend inside the clouds, and the air turns to caustic grease, shimmering and oily. Glowing embers, like distant campfires, sputter, gutter out, and reignite. Great segmented tubes burrow through the miasma like worms, lumbering silently from one cloudbank to the next. Mammoth containers pass seamlessly between unerring robotic arms the size of freight trains. Below the choking ash, the vehicles become more piecemeal. Elevators, zip lines, and cable cars rumble, stall and squeak through the perpetual murk cast by the eternal storm above. Some are sleek, eggshell structures -- their glossy hides whispering by in technological silence -- while others are little more than metal boxes clanging, shuddering and grinding to their terminuses. Beneath them, a weave of catwalks as wide as highways, their peripheries encrusted with thousands of parasitical structures, clinging like barnacles to the hull of a ship. Pedestrians stream ceaselessly across these spans, moving in precise bursts from one building to another with the stuttering regulatory of data packets. Within the catwalks, a thousand shops, bars, and tiny homes clutter every inch of the massive hallways. From their undersides, more architectural limpets hang: Apartments slung in place by braided cables; storage units dangling from the dense webbing that spans every open expanse. Their dimly lit windows sway with each passing vehicle, like paper lanterns on a line. Down further, and all natural light dies. The catwalks here are much like those above, though considerably more neglected: Patched up with chipboard, sheathed in tarps, and held together by a motley of wire and glue. The effect is clear: The city grows upward. Each new floor forgets, abandons and isolates those beneath it.

Lower and lower still. Here, a scattering of undulating lights. Their motion is pulsing and rhythmic. Each spot of illumination moves in turn with the next, echoing outward from the center. It is a city of piers, boats and other floating structures, all poised above an unfathomable lake of black, gently rolling with the passing of each wide, low swell. A soft static roar resonates from four gargantuan pipes at each of the cardinal directions. They run vertically, up the inner corners of each mega-structure, beginning far below the waters below, and running upward, out of sight. The Reservoir exists only to pump a constant torrent of water back up to the city, not to provide for its own people. It replenishes itself from the perpetual rain shed by Industry. It flows with the tides of filtration plants, thousands of feet below the surface of the artificial sea. Beneath the waterline, every wall glimmers with the faint light from thousands of portholes. Though the constellation of wan yellow windows suggests that the buildings themselves are still inhabited, the disused wireframe remains of the catwalks are clearly not. Few remain even remotely intact; none are whole. Deeper beneath the still, black water, and the massive steel ziggurats that form the superstructure’s bases loom up from every side. There are lights here as well, but their edges are more angular, their patterns more defined. They lack the random imprecision of the inhabited floors. These are not portholes, nor windows into sub-aquatic homes, but solid panels of bright and constant illumination. Machinery. Between the luminescent squares, the darkness is absolute. Vacant. Quiet. Abandoned. There is only one small, faint lightsource strobing out of sync with the precise, radiant blocks. Inside one of the few functional catwalks that jut defiantly out into the crushing abyssal sea, a light is blinking. Its source: A small panel on the inner forearm of an unconscious man. He is

wearing an ancient, faded life-jacket. He is naked from the waist-down. He is lying motionless in a pool of black fluid that seeps out from a gaping axewound in the broken robot splayed across his legs. The subcutaneal display on his wrist flashes a series of dim blue letters. They form a single, repeated word: OVERDOSE OVERDOSE OVERDOSE

Chapter One

Red dreamt in half-present shapes; screen-burnt images twisting behind his eyelids. They jumped, phased, reshaped, and transformed. A small pulsing oval stretched thinner and thinner until it was a solid line, extending horizontally to infinity. It began to spike and dip rapidly, like an oscilloscope. Its parabolas and valleys spliced, folded, magnified and became structures. The structures fuzzed into a network of capillaries, and those capillaries extended and took on form. The shape split cleanly in two: One side acute and sparse, the other fluid and organic. Details begin to pick themselves out as the two clashed – advancing, merging and retreating as in a dance. Or a duel. The squarish form struck with hard precision, the organic form dodged with a feminine grace. The squiggly oval of her head split open, and became a mouth. “Red,” she spoke softly. And then again, more desperate: “RED.” “RED!” She screamed, again and again, her voice losing tonality, growing monotonous and piercing. “RED! RED! RED!” “USER: RED. UNKNOWN FOREIGN AGENTS DETECTED. POSSIBLE OVERDOSE!” The skeletal microphone rattled his inner ear. “SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION OR ACTIVATE NULLIFICATION STRAINS! USER: RED. UNKNOWN FOREIGN AGENTS DETEC-"

Red slapped angrily at his forearm, applying a three-pronged pattern of pressure to the panel. The gesture engaged the hardware over-ride on his pharmacological network, and shut down the emergency protocols. The mod was illegal, of course, but if you left the damn thing stock it blasted OD alarms in response to every unauthorized chemical or large dose that the user ingested. Red’s exclusive domain was unauthorized chemicals in extravagant doses; he applied the over-ride with the same sleepy, instinctual muscle memory that others would use to hit a snooze button. After the alarm went quiet, Red spent an indeterminate period of time in a state of semiconsciousness. He mentally catalogued, denied, bargained against and eventually accepted the myriad side-effects of a chemical hangover that he could not remember initiating. There was something else there, too: Some new, foreign aspect to his current situation. It lurked at the edges of his consciousness and demanded action, but he was too tired and too sick to venture forth into the waking world and acknowledge it. Slowly, the ache became unbearable. The throbs in his head built, one beat upon the other, until there was hardly a break between them. He finally conceded that denial was not a tactically sound option. He would have to struggle awake, and see about fighting chemicals with chemicals. If Stoned Red was smart, he would’ve pre-loaded Hangover Red’s Rx Card with the proper drug cocktails to counter these effects. Keeping his eyes clenched shut, he fumbled his card out of his shirt pocket (noting and disregarding the odd, bulky vest he found there; he would deal with comprehending any unusual accessories or uniforms later), and slotted it against his wrist. A two-tone descending chime sounded in his ear, signifying that the card was empty.

Stoned Red was always screwing Hangover Red. He would have to find a ‘feed, and load it up himself. Red sighed, and cautiously opened his eyes, warding himself against the potentially searing light, but found only complete, unbroken darkness. The flashing blue pulse from the subcutaneous monitor on his forearm was the only illumination, but it was weak, and did not extend far beyond the skin. Red groped apprehensively around him with his hands and feet, and ascertained a few things about his situation: 1. He was wearing his own rumpled shirt and jacket. 2. He was also wearing some kind of large, clumsy vest -- fire, impact, floatation? 3. He was not wearing any pants or underwear; therefore he was likely recovering from a gas trip (something about the gas made Stoned Red find leg-coverings unacceptably binding). 4. He was, thank God for small miracles, still wearing his own boots. The black ones with the flexible soles, for running. 5. Judging by the persistent drip sliding down his collar, and the complete lack of both people and lightsources, he was likely somewhere below the water-line. Probably in one of the few old catwalks that hadn’t collapsed when they first filled the Reservoir. 6. There was something heavy, metal, and inert lying across his legs. 7. The metal thing was leaking warm fluid onto the ground beneath Red. Hopefully noncaustic, as Red’s cold-shriveled penis was resting gently in the puddle.

Taking all of these factors into account, Red formed a plan of action. Step 1: Remove penis from mystery puddle. Step 2: Vomit. Having accomplished this, Red straightened and surveyed his surroundings more completely. The space to his left seemed slightly less impermeably black than the rest. That was likely the way back toward the relative safety of one of the Four Posts. With much painful focusing of the eyes, he could make out a cosmos of tiny lights through the translucent glass ceiling of the catwalk: The flotilla city, shining down from the Reservoir’s surface far above him. He was deep. Why would he come here? What possible reason would Stoned Red have for stumbling all the way down below the Reservoir, into a dark floor? What did he want, or who did he know this far belo…oh. Oh, no. Zippy. Red’s eyes frantically shot up to the pulsing oval of his BioOS. It bloomed outward, and he quickly tabbed over to the Sent box of his messaging service. Nothing. The sobriety filters must have stymied Stoned Red’s attempts to send any outgoing messages, or else he’d never even tried. In his more sober days, Red had assigned the highest priority (and therefore the most difficult logic puzzles) to the contact info of all his old girlfriends, Zippy included. But Stoned Red must have figured that whatever dire wisdom needed imparting warranted an in-person visit, and stumbled off on his ill-advised quest regardless. Red assumed, by the relative sanctity of his limbs, that Stoned Red had failed.

Small miracles, again. Red backed out of his inbox and opened the utilities panel. He flicked off the display on his forearm, and sat staring into the dark until his nightvision started picking out indistinct forms. He felt around the metal thing that he’d hefted off of his own legs: Glossy, plastic shields and steel tubes. A maintenance robot? He swept his hand across the faceplate and caught his palm on a jagged shard: The source of the oozing fluid. Somebody had put an axe through its head, and even Red was hard-pressed to find a scenario where he was not the culprit. A significant fine would be levied against him soon, if the thing had time to scan his ID code before Stoned Red had struck. No use regretting it now. Red took a few steadying breaths, paused for a quick pre-hike vomit, and set off toward the slightly less impenetrable side of the catwalk. There followed an eternity of tripping and swearing: He split his hands and cracked his knees on more sharp corners than had any right to exist in a former pedestrian highway, but he eventually managed to bumble out of the tunnel and into the comforting solidity of a Post hallway. Some of the lower levels were pretty seriously neglected, and the map programs in his BioOS didn’t have accurate guides for anything below the waterline, but maintenance always made sure the main structure was sound and at least partially clear. If he just kept a hand to one wall, he would eventually stumble across an elevator…which probably wouldn’t be running. So it would have to be a stairwell entrance.

The thought gave Red pause. He flicked his eyes upward to the pulsing oval for the dozenth time, and stared at his empty Sent box. She has no idea I’m down here, he reassured himself, and willed his feet to move again. Four hallways and a busted lip later, a pinprick of light came dancing at him through the darkness. Red paused to watch it advance. More maintenance ‘bots? Scout drones? As long as it wasn’t a janitor, he should be able to just follow it back to its port and god… Damn it. Red saw the man before the man saw him, and quietly dropped to his knees in the narrow corridor, cursing under his breath. Of course it was a janitor: Too crazy to work in proper society, janitors were engineers that had been banished below the Reservoir to mind the foundations, seal structural flaws and repair the fleets of maintenance ‘bots. Sometimes “crazy” merely meant “heard messages in their teeth,” and sometimes “crazy” meant “occasionally eats people.” It didn’t really matter to the higher ups, either way: The valuable workers who manned the filtration plants down in the foundations all took special elevators to their sealed off sections, far below these abandoned floors. And those were all express lifts, straight from the worker’s dorms to the plants, with no floor access to the sealed shafts from any point in between. Nobody of consequence had any excuse to cross paths with a janitor, so what’s a little serial rape or homicide on the off-hours, as long as the worklogs get updated on time? No, that’s the cynic talking, Red told himself. You can’t assume the mentally ill are evil. That’s ridiculously bigoted of you. People are basically good, or failing that, mostly harmless. This is

probably just a guy who pissed off the wrong boss, or maybe thinks he’s a meatship piloted by a crew of tiny elves. That doesn’t mean he’s a murderer or a sexual deviant. Besides, the janitor was definitely working his way towards Red, and without a light, Red could not outpace him. He straightened his spine as much as the crooked jags of chemical agony in his veins would allow, and called out. The janitor jumped at the noise, then swiveled in every direction, listening for the source. Red steeled himself and hollered again, and this time the janitor set off purposefully in his direction. When the man reached him, Red smiled benignly and blinked up at the silhouette behind the blinding light. Comeoncomeonnorapistnorapistnorapist“Been waitin’ for a man like you,” the janitor crooned, in a voice thick with disuse. Dammit.

Chapter Two

Byron was pale, even by the Blackout’s standards. He had to remember not to speak the term aloud: They could call themselves that, of course, but coming from his lips, it would seem a sneering, derogatory term to the inhabitants of the city’s lower levels. If his gangly frame and absurd height didn’t differentiate him enough, his excessive pallor – even amongst these people, who had likely never seen actual sunlight – rounded out the effect: Byron did not belong in this repurposed hangar. It wasn’t just that he was of a lighter tone, but that his paleness was somehow deeper. Sicklier. It was a shade that spoke of willful malnutrition cultivated through years of neglect. It singled him out as a career addict, even amidst a city full of the same. And there was danger in this: Aside from the faint, but permanent discoloration that crept into the edges of his eyes, his unhealthy complexion, and his embarrassed posture, Byron had the look of one tastefully well off. His hair and fingernails were expertly trimmed. His palms were uncalloused and soft. His clothes -- plain and black --were wrinkled and haphazardly worn, but obviously new, custom tailored, and immensely expensive. To anyone looking closely, Byron was two things: An addict, and a Penthouse Kid. Add them together, and you get: Victim. But he had his hungers, and they required feeding. Caution and discretion lost out to addiction, every time.

He wandered absently through the thick press of the pre-fight crowd, stopping every few feet to scan the outliers for Dealers. They should be everywhere (the sign out front proudly advertises that they had twelve on staff at all times), but he’d been fumbling through the crowd for minutes without spotting a single one. Byron knew the man he was looking for worked the graveyard shift, but there was no sign of his – wait, there: The short, unassuming man in the uniform grey jacket. Byron breast-stroked through the crowd with a staccato burst of “excuse me, sirs” and “terribly sorry, ma’ams.” The pleasantries would give him away all the more, but he only had to reach the man in the grey jacket, and all would be taken care of. Plastering on his most earnest smile, Byron stepped up alongside the man, and saw that it was not Red. He lapsed back into the crowd with a heartbroken sigh, even as the Dealer began hawking his wares: “…gas, euphorics, corticosteroids, nootropics! Got your Voyeur, Kharon, SlimZ and Merrimene here! Gas, euphorics…” It seemed like hours that he drifted: Washed up, caught in tides, and spun about in the circling eddies of the pre-fight crowd. He was having trouble focusing. The screens flashing their surrealistic violence, the dreary-eyed audience members, the deep thrum of the infrasonics that only the Kharon-addled could hear – it all blurred together into a nebulous fog of irrelevancy. The only objects that retained meaning in his purple-rimmed eyes were the disposable C-ring gas inhalers, sealed over the nostrils of those lost to the pre-fight shows. Couldn’t he just…? No, no he could never resort to something so base. He simply had to find Red. Red had his mix. Red could help him away to a more refined world where his limbs… were not moving independently… from his body? What was this?

Why were his hands struggling to slip one of the cheap plastic strips from beneath the nose of a vacuously smirking blonde girl? He would not resort to petty thievery, he insisted to himself, but his hands would not listen: They had already broken the vacuum seal, and were desperately scrabbling to get the plastic tube up to his own face when somebody caught his forearm, and twisted it back. Byron laughed and started to explain – it’s these damnable fingers, you see; they’ve minds of their own -- but he was off his feet now, sprawled on the ground before three gamblers who were too caught up in the match to spare him more than an annoyed kick. “Well, they certainly deserved that,” he thought. “I don’t know what those hands were thinking, trying to snatch the inhaler right from that nice young user’s nose. Simply barbaric.” And besides: He wasn’t here to watch the fights. He was here for Red. Red had the only gas that Byron needed. His eye twitched up to an ornate cruciform, pulsing in the upper left quadrant of his peripheral vision. His Biological Operating System expanded outwards, drifting fluidly down over his field of vision. He compulsively checked his inbox for a reply from Red. It remained empty. He double-checked the buffer account that held today’s drug funds, and ensured that Red hadn’t accessed it yet. It remained full. The deal hadn’t been accepted. He whisked the BioOS away, and it collapsed back into the baroque cross icon of its idle state. Funds were never the problem. Scarcity was the problem. Where in the world was Red? Byron did not want to be in this shipping district, elbowing his way through slack-jawed, hallucinating fight-fans, and watching televised barbarism throw curtains of crimson across the hangar floors. He wanted to be home. Home with a thin sheet of purple squares loaded into his Rx card; home with the servants to watch over him while he was under; home with his large

black chair and his hand-knit shawl; home, where tea was always waiting for him when he came up; home, where coming up never lasted for more than a few blissful, sleepy hours. For the tenth time today, Byron cursed his esoteric taste. Droop-eyed addicts happily indulged all around him, transported away by the cheap and ubiquitous strain of Voyeur gas that the fights distributed. They didn’t care what they took or when it took them to, and it was their apathy that Byron envied most of all. There are addicts, and there are addicts, and then there are people like Byron: Even junkies looked down on him with pitiful haughtiness, simply because he’s clocked more life-hours following the Lord than in his own skin. His own tight, uncomfortable skin. Without fail, when he first detailed his mix for a new supplier, they would sneer and spit and slur at him – waste, meat suit, biographiliac - but he simply could not find any solace in these tawdry fights, nor even in the more ubiquitous mainstream biographies. At least if he followed historical figures famous enough to have the entirety of their life pre-mapped for him -- the Jesus Christs, George Washingtons, Queen Elizabeth I’s – he could just slot his Rx Card into his own home ‘feed whenever he ran low, and he would never again have to venture below the cloudline into the claustrophobic, choking, dangerous Blackout floors. But Byron’s lot was to follow his namesake, and the vast bulk of Lord Byron’s life went chemically unexplored, save for a few choice moments and his own custom-created gas trips. For the latter, each batch had to be specially commissioned from blackmarket dealers like Red. And on nights like tonight, when Red was nowhere to be found, the fog of withdrawal set upon Byron with its dull-edged, vicious throb: The itching first, then the nausea, and now the peripheral blindness, settling all around him like an amethyst mist. The last would eventually tunnel his

vision completely. Eventually, there would be seizures strong enough to tear his muscles in twain. Eventually, he could even risk death. But it all paled in comparison to spending one more minute in this miserable, boring, awkward body amongst these filthy, boorish thugs and their vulgar fight-trips. For a brief moment, he felt a surge of righteous entitlement turn to fury inside of him – he would claw their eyes out, rip the precious gas from their lungs and inhale the entire damned room, suffocating all inside with the terrible vacuum of his hunger – but his rage quickly collapsed beneath the blitz of fear. In a panic, he shoved his way through the press and into a dark, relatively unoccupied corner. He took a few asthmatic, shuddering draws of air, and steadied himself. Red was here, he reassured himself, he had to be here. The fight nights were always good to Red. He subcontracted as a house Dealer and peddled his obscure concoctions on the outskirts, catering to the more jaded addicts, looking for something new. He would be here. He was always here. All around Byron, the dusty old screens showing the pre-fight entertainment blipped off. The house lights – giant, archaic LED panels set into ceilings a hundred feet above his head – all went dark at once. One by one, the main projectors fired up (the last coughed twice before sputtering into reluctant life and completing the three dimensional image). There, above the crowd, ten feet tall and faintly luminescent, stood a tall, lanky, frightened man, alone in a wooded clearing. Every audience member too poor, busy or unconscious to be present via gas trip craned their necks for a better look. The camera snapped forward abruptly, showing the figure in close up: Ropy limbs. Misshapen face. Chinstrap beard.

The man was immediately, instantly recognizable, though even the veteran gas-fight addicts would be hard pressed to tell you exactly why that should be. They only knew that he was an icon -- important to history in some vague, ill-defined way -- and therefore that it was entertaining to demean, torment, and maybe even murder him, depending on how the day’s match went. The bookies fell largely silent. They didn’t waste their energy on the opening matches. These weren’t the interesting fights. They merely served to whet the bloodlust for the main events. Byron could already guess at what came next, because the opening bouts all followed the same basic template: Some random historical icon set in mortal combat against an inherently ridiculous or overly powered opponent. The basest coupling of cheap violence with an even cheaper laugh. Sure enough, trees began to crack and fall in the unfocused patch of greenery just behind the lanky man. A throaty, rumbling squeal sounded somewhere beyond the shrubbery. Then its source slowly emerged from the brush: A thick, horned head whipped from side to side, clearing the foliage around it, followed by broad, leathery shoulders, a stumpy midsection, and a long, blunted tail. The beast stumbled and struggled to breathe, unaccustomed to the new atmosphere it found itself in. But when it spotted the tall fellow, it dutifully lowered its spiked skull into a charging posture, and pawed at the earth. To his credit, the man’s shock died almost instantly. He quickly scratched together his composure, and narrowed his eyes at the animal’s uncertain approach. His gaze darted away, spying something just off screen, and he rolled deftly out of view. When the camera panned back to him, he was wielding an enormous blade with both hands. He set his feet, and prepared to meet the charge.

Byron sighed in disgust and turned back to his search. Abraham Lincoln versus a Triceratops. Of course. How many times can one watch this dreck, he wondered, before even the feeble-minded finally grow bored of it?

Chapter Three

The ultralight cameras on their silvery webs drifted down like snowflakes, and settled peacefully across the Recovery Pile. QC watched as they instantly started to dissolve, like rot in time-lapse. The Customer Service ‘bots -- wispy, wireframe humanoid skeletons -- came staggering up next, already disintegrating midstride, and fell headlong into the pile of shimmering dust. Then the bird-faced security drones -- not built for slow speed maneuvers, they dive-bombed themselves into the pile, kicking up plumes of mercurial ash with every impact. Last were the appliances: The microwave sound generators, the climate control units, the interference dampeners. This was QC’s favorite part: Watching the large, stout machines with their stubby, stiff legs, waddling determinedly to their doom within the pile. Though they were immense, and solid enough where it counted, the bulk of the heftier structures were still comprised of the same lightweight carbon nanotubes as the drones and cameras. Their larger panels and some of the support frames were were solid steel, but their hollow webbed bones were pure nano-tech; they all crumbled at roughly the same rate, leaving only the odd, lacey tube to jut out from the ash, like seafoam on sand. The Disassembler nano-bots that, moments ago, had been coursing inert through QCs veins, were now devouring every piece of the set around her, dissolving and recapturing the more valuable elements for reabsorption before the trip back. The common ones - hydrogen, carbon, oxygen – they abandoned. They’d been pulled from the trees, rocks, earth and air around them to begin with, and could be safely discarded in the pile as detritus. The rarer elements -- lithium,

helium, technetium -- couldn’t reliably be found in every staging ground. Those cost money. And the fight organizers were nothing if not cheap: If you have to bring it to the Arena Epoch, it’s coming back with you. Hence, the pig. And so QC’s Disassemblers went to work, pulling each construction apart and packing their worthwhile materials into a series of miniscule spheres, color-coded for easy identification. She sifted through the pile of silken dust once the ‘bots went inert, gathered up the kaleidoscopic marbles that remained, and hand fed them to the animal, one at a time. Some of the Factory Girls preferred the injector (it was quicker to just stab the hollow tube into the animal’s hide and load it up), but QC had found that pigs were quite happy to eat just about anything with a handful of real, organic grass. It was a futile gesture of kindness, she knew: Without proper care and careful monitoring of vitals, packing pure elements into a living thing was dangerous, and sometimes fatal. “Proper care,” however, took hours -- if not days -- and that, the fight organizers simply did not have. Plus, if a vat-grown pig contracts heavy metal poisoning, suffers catastrophic cell decay, or has an embolism during the return trip, who gives a shit? Even QC's eyes no longer welled up when the vat-pigs inevitably squealed and keeled over. It was a matter of exposure: Witness a tragedy every day, and it becomes routine. But while you can pack element-spheres into a pig until it dies, and harvest them later without loss, Factory Girls like QC were needed for the strains of nano-tech that built and demolished the arena. It takes time and money to acclimate a strain to a new host, and the animals die too often and too easily to risk losing expensive strains on every trip. So QC had an occupation, while vatpigs had an expiration date. But when it came time to jam that thick injector through their hides,

she always opted for the small charity. She saw too little difference between the two of them: If the budget shook out a little differently, a vat-pig could have had her job in a heartbeat. And if the Fair Use of Human Resources contracts shook out a little differently, she could have had its job as well. Being a Factory Girl wasn’t easy work: The first few months were filled with constant injection, and the Acclamatory Periods left her with ceaselessly aching joints. During the APs, her cartilage ground together like powder glass and she could feel her heart palpitate whenever it passed a microscopic clot of ‘bots that hadn’t fully dispersed in the bloodstream. But soon it was just a matter of showing up, taking the gas, bleeding out the strains, watching the fight with dull-eyed weariness, sitting on the mat, waking up, and going home. Shit, maybe she was a vat-pig, after all. At least the Aps were over now. All of QC’s ‘bots – the camera-builders, the material dissolvers, the element packers – had successfully acclimated to her physiology, and went down just fine these days. At least until the organizers upgraded to a new strain. And those bastards were so cheap, that was a bi-annual occurrence, at most. Wait, no. Fuck! She had an upgrade scheduled this week: A new strain of control ‘bots that used the glucose in her blood for power instead of thermowave batteries. Supposed to be “safer and more selfsufficient,” which she knew was bureaucrat-speak for “cheaper.” Shouldn’t complain, though: At least they’d give her a decent flush before the upgrade. Knock out all the inert bullshit kicking around her veins right now. They said you couldn’t feel it, but she swore the creeping celldamage was starting to wear on her, like a weakness in the bones.

But if the upgrade was this week, they’d be testing her for compatibility any day now. QC bit her lip and spat in frustration: She’d managed to bank a few odd strains for herself over the years, and even hired a body designer to route them to a universal control in her left thigh. If she was lucky, the organizers would only fire her for breach of contract if they found out about the black market nano-tech. If she wasn’t, they’d break her down for strain retrieval. She’d signed the contract, after all. If she was going to be sure her contraband ‘tech was still cloaked for the Compat Test, that meant a trip to Red’s for a scan. How close was this thing to wrapping up? She surveyed the clean-up progress: The disassemblers had moved on to the audience’s clothing now -- vitalmonitors were woven all throughout their uniforms, and the nano-strains there were valuable enough to warrant pig-space. But that usually came last, and seemed to be almost finished: The insubstantial fabric of their hastily manufactured coverings was already decomposing, literally falling off of their bodies as the ‘bots did their work. The audience always reveled in this part. The women giggled in mock-embarrassment, while the men goaded each other broadly as each became nude by inches. She nudged the Harvester -- a broad, flat clear disk with a bulbous reservoir on the rear – and it dutifully rolled over the piles of crumbling unitards, pulling whatever ‘bots it found into itself, before trundling over to the Recovery Pile for absorption itself. And that was the last of it. QC waited a long moment for the strains to deactivate, then filled her lungs and exhaled strongly into the final Pile. It scattered in the air like pollen on a stiff breeze. When the dust scattered, all that remained was the dull heather mat that her inactive nano-bots conglomerated on. She rolled a patch of microdermic needles across the backs of her thighs, flipped out the gelatinous buffer blanket, and settled it over the pad. She sat on it cross-legged, making sure as much of the

patch’s surface area was touching the blanket as possible, and waited. Five minutes, and the bulk of her strains should be back inside of her. The gas would wear off soon after, and she would be returned to her own time, hopefully off to find Red before the medics scanned her. If this had been real, the vast open spaces and great, unblinking sky would have filled QC with a crippling dread. But the sharp edge to her senses assured her this was just the gas, doing its thing: Not much different than a hallucination. Comforted by the fiction, she used the moment to take in the forest, and try to relax. A furry little rodent that looked kind of like a cleaning unit: It had a thick, bristly tail, and chattered at her from its perch in the branches before disappearing. A tiny insect with ample orange wings flapped in the middle distance. A lone, bloody horn sat wetly in the trampled grass at the far end of the clearing. Somewhere deeper in the forest, Lincoln was howling in confused rage. He’d easily won this match. He easily won damn near every match, which made for a good teaser bout before the main events, but far too predictable for the title card. The howl sounded again, so loud you could practically hear his lungs splitting apart from the effort. It would’ve been bloodcurdling, if the ‘loop hadn’t gone viral years ago. She heard it ten times a day now, at least: Spliced into every cheap action vid on the channels, echoing throughout commercials for industrial adrenalin, or forming the backbeat for some chintzy panic-dub mix. Her BioOS chimed three times, and blinked gently: The infusion had finished. She stood, and felt the sickly load of the ‘bots settling back into her blood cells. Objectively, she knew it was impossible for a human being to notice the infinitesimal weight of nano-bots – the medics called

it ‘psychosomatic projection’ – but every single Factory Girl she’d ever known had told her they carried that same fucking weight. The men in the audience, their bare arms and faces still sticky with dinosaur blood, casually groped their women, or held their stretched penises out for grunting contests of measurement. The ladies tittered subserviently (demure obedience was trending now in the upper floors; Victorian-era gas was all the rage up there these days, she’d heard.) QC cracked her knuckles, and felt the first twinge of come-down. It would unfold rapidly now. First came the thirst: Sudden and unbearable. Then the headaches, light saturation, and eventually, a sour, fruity wave of giddiness. Then nothing, just the murky trance state between waking and sleep. When she snapped to, her body, having not physically moved for several hours now, was numb and tingling. She had some dim awareness of being physically present in reality, even while she was deep inside the trip, but it was like she’d been incapable of paying attention to her surroundings at the time. She couldn’t fully remember what happened in real-time while under the gas, of course – there were vague notions of brightness, cold, heat or pain - but even those were fleeting and quickly forgotten. The trip, by contrast, had a lingering hyper-vividness to it, even in memory. More like watching a high definition video than pure mental recall. Better memories than memory, the early adverts bragged, back when they even bothered. The audience was stirring now, too. They stretched and yawned pleasantly enough at first, but then suddenly recalled their surrounding, and expeditiously crept out of the private gas den in shameful cliques. They adopted a guilty gentility now, but moments ago they’d been freely

penetrating one another like rutting monkeys. But then, the trip wasn’t real -- everybody knew that. What happened in the past was just an elaborate drug-trip; it didn’t actually count. QC arched her neck and felt her head swim. She rose painfully to her feet, picked her way over to the thin silver tube of the Rx-feed, and swiped her card. She palmed the rounded top, and authorized its attempted connection to her own BioOS. She flipped open her Drug Home, which held all of her usual custom menus and mixes. She focused on the rectangle titled “QC’S COMEDOWN MIX,” and listened to the comforting hiss of the compilers. When they quieted, she retrieved the still-warm Rx card, thumbed it against her wrist, and felt a wave of relief wash across the inside of her bones. Thick, slow, and shiny -- like mercury. It didn’t kill the hurt, but it sure made her care about it less. She shook the remaining stillness out of her knees, and left the den. She went to find Red.

Chapter Four

“Listen,” Red pleaded, “I’m lost, massively hungover, half-naked and completely broke. I literally don’t have a single bankable item on me. Even my internal gear is hacked black market crap. It is utterly worthless to anybody. Just like me. Exactly like me. I am, as a human being, entirely without value to you…” The man eyed him appraisingly, but stayed silent. He was a few decades older than Red, but there was a wiry strength still present in his limbs. When he moved, the cords beneath his skin undulated. “I am also just riddled with sexually transmitted diseases,” Red added quickly, “like, all of them. I have them all. And those sexually transmitted diseases are having unprotected sex and giving each other more diseases. Newer, more powerful ones. I have STD²s. Oh god, I’m going to die without pants.” “Ease up, boy,” the man finally laughed, “have some dignity.” Red took himself in: His bare genitals were shriveled in the cold, their exposure made all the more ridiculous by his calf-length boots. The faded blue floatation vest over his jacket, he saw now, was emblazoned with prancing pink dolphins. His hands and knees were bleeding, his lip was split, and his close-cropped hair was blotchy with dried oil and other, less savory fluids. “I am way past dignity at this point, friend,” Red shrugged. The man chuckled again and turned to leave, gesturing for Red to follow.

“Sorry if I scared you, fella. The ol’ social graces are a bit wanting these days. I was just lookin’ for a hand is all. Come on, you help me out, and I’ll get you somewhere safe and maybe put a meal in you. But first: Pants.” “I could go for pants,” Red admitted, “it’s uh…you know it’s cold down here, right?” Red obediently followed the janitor, staying close to heel like a cowed dog, as they made their way through the crumbling labyrinthine corridors. They were never less than ankle deep in debris - office supplies, building materials, torn clothes, the corpses of failed maintenance robots – and spent the bulk of their effort scrabbling over heaps of garbage stacked nearly to the ceiling. When they couldn’t summit the piles, they’d corkscrew themselves through tight, serpentine trails dug into the wreckage. And when they couldn’t go through, they crawled around, using a series of freezing, cramped rubber tunnels that been slung out into the cold, deep waters of the Reservoir. At a towering mountain of beige, the janitor gestured widely and turned around. Red picked a reasonably clean, intact pair of trousers from the thousand-strong pile, and did his best to slide them on, though he couldn’t quite seem to catch his footing. “I just don’t know how you people take it,” the man spat. “Take what?” Red wrenched an ankle free from the sucking mass of a torn foam mattress and stuck it through a pantleg. “All that air up there. You can feel it, all around you. Feels like you’re gonna explode outta your skin like an overcooked sausage.” The janitor swung open a latch in the far wall and squeezed himself through the porthole of an old airship cabin. “I know those rat-fuck Penthouse sons-ofbitches were trying to screw me, busting me down to janitorial like this. But honestly? Best thing

that ever happened to me. Lots of nice, safe water all around, keeping the pressure even. You gotta keep the pressure even, you know. Ain’t nobody else gonna do it for you. You leave it up to them, and the lack of atmosphere up there will stretch you too thin. You’ll goddam disperse like… like steam. You know? Not down here. Nice tight garbage all around, millions of tons of water on every side. Keeps a man solid. And as long as the worklogs are filed on time, the structure stays sound, and the Posts don’t leak, he can do whatever he wants.” “With…what, exactly?” Red eyed a heap of cracked tablets spilling from a box with a cartoon starfish on the front. “With everything! This here is gold,” the janitor said, wrenching a length of knotted rope from a nearby pile, and holding it up for Red to examine. “You need something, you just go into the piles and get it. And for what I can’t find, I got a monthly stipend and plenty of free bandwidth. What more does a man need?” A creeping unease prickled Red’s skin. He’d had the sense that something was missing for some time, but couldn’t quite place it, until now. “And your Rx-feed too, right?” Red put forth hopefully. “Shit no! Don’t need that junk anymore. Besides, these were the first floors, remember? Didn’t have feed-lines of any kind – Rx or otherwise -- down here, ‘cause they didn’t have the ‘feed back then. Nah, if I order something online, they send it the old fashioned way: Pneumatic Tube. Still got the old system snaking around here, in some places. And they don’t ship drugs in the tubes. Aw, it was hard going cold turkey at first, sure, but a few weeks sober, and you realize you’re better off without it.”

“Weeks?” Red’s stomach churned, and a skittering panic clawed at the base of his brain. “Hoo dang!” The janitor turned and thrust his lantern up to Red, “you should see your face! Unclench, buddy. We still got a few working lifts down here. Like as not, that’s how you got here in the first place. Soon as you get finished helping me, I’ll have you up and gone, back slowly dying up there in space, if that’s what you want.” “Yes, please” Red laughed in relief. “Why were you running around flashing your jimmy and puttin’ fire-axes in my robots, anyway? Dare? Scavenging? Deathwish? We get that occasionally. Won’t pretend I’m going to talk you out of it; most that come down here to die find a way to do it sooner rather than later.” “No, no, nothing like that. I do beta-testing for the Gas-fights. You know: Scout out locations, make sure the gas is dialed into the right time-period, map out a clear landing spot so nobody’s spending the entire trip in the middle of a tree somewhere. They don’t let you leave the NDA area with prototypes in your system, obviously, but sometimes a flush doesn’t fully take. And if that happens, and what’s left of the beta doesn’t play nice with some other Rx…well, then you might find yourself half-naked, underwater, meeting interesting machines and putting axes into them.” “Hell, maybe you got that deathwish after all.” “It’s not that bad. As long as you report back immediately so they can recover any traces of the prototype, they take pretty good care of you. Pay off most of your fines, reimburse you for lost, damaged or eaten goods.”

“Eaten?” “Ate my cleaning robot, one time. They bought me a new one.” The janitor came up short. Red ran into his back, caught his foot, and went sprawling down into a pile of animatronic kittens. One snapped to life, briefly, and mewled at him in a deep, slow, dying voice. Then the last of its battery went, and it was silent. “Here it is,” the Janitor nodded toward a spot of ashen decay on the surface of an immense steel beam above them. They were standing atop a twenty foot high mound of broken children’s automatons inside a large, otherwise empty auditorium. A surreal nausea shot through Red as a small section of the garbage pile rumbled into life, rolled forward, and sat obediently to one side of the janitor. Red barked a little in shock. “Ah, that’s just Reggie. He’s one of my ‘bots. Brought him in for the assist, at first, but you can see he ain’t gonna do much good here. That’s rot up there. Rogue metalworking nanotech. Somehow it got on the 32nd Support Strut, and now it’s just makin’ cups.” The janitor kicked at a pile of crude, half-formed coffee mugs piled below the discolored tract. Red looked closer, and saw the beginnings of a handle start to emerge from the patch. “If I send Reggie too close to that, well – I already got a mug I like just fine.” The robot made a sound partway between muffled laughter and a groan. The janitor handed Red a hefty, bright orange spray can. The lower half was covered in pictograms detailing a litany of unpleasant outcomes, with the word ‘Exterminators’ written across the top in large, plain black letters. All purpose nanotech deactivators.

“Got a good bit of diagnostic kit in me, so I try not to actually use that crap. You mind?” Red shrugged – he had no external gear for the Exterminators to seize on, anyway – and clambered up to the decay. He depressed the small, round plastic tab and a glittering stream of pink foam shot out. He waved it back and forth until the rot was covered, then eased himself down. But his ankle turned on the last foothold, and he ended up on his hands and knees before the maintenance robot. “Oh, hey: Your ‘bot took damage somewhere. It’s leaking,” Red informed the janitor, as he struggled into a crouch atop the shifting robo-cats. “Oh that’s nothing, pay it no mind,” the man answered sharply. “Must’ve nicked some hydraulics,” Red continued, extending a hand to examine the gash. His fingers brushed something oddly pliant, and came back bright crimson. He sniffed at the fluid, and found the odor faintly metallic -- not the usual cloying chemical stink of hydraulic fluid. Red made a puzzled noise. “Now,” the Janitor sighed wearily behind him, and rummaged for something in the debris pile, “why’d you have to go and do that?” Red twisted his neck to squint into the tear in the ‘bot’s casing, just as the janitor’s lantern swung to one side, casting light over his shoulder. For a split second, it lit with perfect clarity a swath of hairy, bleeding flesh, encased in shattered plastic. “What is…?” Red started to ask, but something jarred the lantern abruptly, and the shadows around him danced wildly.

When he instinctively flinched back, he found a three foot steel screw bored into the spot where his head had been. The screw stuck fast, and the janitor, expecting more resistance to the swing, lost his balance. He rolled and skipped down the long, sloping face of the pile, triggering barks, whines and tinny, recorded laughter with every impact. When he finally found his feet again at the bottom of the hill, he was surrounded by dislodged automatons, triggered into life by the motion. A bevy of seals surrounded him, clapping; a tumbling clown did somersaults away into the gloom, while two dragonfly ultralights circled his head uncertainly. The janitor let loose a savage yell and tried to charge back up the hill at Red, but he couldn’t seem to find purchase. The mound of rubbish only gave way beneath his weight. Red stared down at him in blank confusion. “Why?” The janitor did not answer, but instead kicked a hole in an ancient glass monitor and hopped about in angry circles. Assured for the moment that the man couldn’t reach him, Red turned back and peered into the thin mesh of the ‘bot’s headpiece. Nothing. Just blurry, indistinct colors and shapes. But there -movement? Red couldn’t identify what he was seeing, at first, until his eyes readjusted into a closer focus. He’d been looking too deep, expecting chipboard and cameras buried within the oval skull. But there they were, right there on the surface: Eyes. Human eyes. Bloodshot and blue, just a few centimeters from his own.

They scanned his face in precise, ceaseless lines. Red tried to back away, lost his balance, and took a clumsy seat on the precipice of the mewling pile. The janitor stared balefully up from below. “This…this is sick!” Red finally found his voice, “you use human parts in your robots? What is wrong with you?!” The janitor blinked, stunned, then broke out in uproarious laughter. “Lord! You are dull. Ain’t no ‘parts’ anywhere. Why I gotta spend most of my days just trying to keep some scrapheap, obsolete robots from imploding, when I can dose up and use the junkie scabs those management motherfuckers keep sending down here to take my job? You think I wasn’t on to you? You think I don’t know what you’re down here for?” “This is…?” Red eyed the robot skeptically. No, this thing wasn’t human. A humanoid was too inefficient a design for most specialized automatons. There are twenty muscles in the foot alone – not to mention all of the gyroscopes and positional sensors needed to accurately place that foot and stand on it. A tread was crude, but functional. A wheel cruder still, but adequate for most purposes. And even if a robot needed complete mobility, the nano-materials used to build it usually weighed no more than a few pounds, at most. It was easier to make one fly than walk. People have legs; robots don’t. And Reggie was no exception. His torso ended at a flat swivel-joint. A thick metal pole protruded below the slab, joining up with an axle, at either end of which sat a featureless plastic

wheel. Seated on the hub were six evenly-placed spokes, to lift the robot out, up, over, or onto any obstacle it encountered. It was slow and clumsy, but a cheap and relatively common method of locomotion. Most industrial robots like Reggie used the stilt wheels, and there was certainly no room for a single human leg, much less two, in that skeletal lower half. But hands were hard too: 29 major joints, 34 muscles in the palm and forearm, well over a hundred ligaments. Hands were effective, agile and useful, but a simple set of electro-magnetic claws could do most industrials jobs just fine. So what was a janitorial robot, an infamously barebones design, doing with ten perfectly molded digits at the end of each arm? “How do you…?” Red’s mouth was opening and closing automatically, just making words to make words. “Well, see, the first step is…” the Janitor started sarcastically, then heaved a jagged scrap of steel up the slope, missing Red’s head by inches. Red yelped and backed away from the edge, out of the man’s line of sight. “Welp,” the janitor called up after him, “so much for the fun way. Reggie, switch to voice control. Full voice authorization keyed.” “Keyed,” Reggie answered with a dull, monotone, but distinctly human voice. Red’s eyes went wide with realization, and he stood to run, but the ground was shifting and uneven, and he couldn’t muster the speed. “End repair directives. Begin security directives. Complete lockdown. Terminate all nonauthorized personnel.

The robot swiveled at its midpoint and began scanning the room. “Listen, man,” Red was almost to the door when he stopped, turned, and called out to Reggie: “Come with me. I’ll get you out of here.” “Ha!” The janitor called up from the amphitheater floor below. “Ain’t no human left in there. Dose a man with enough speedballs of fear and trust hormones, and he just…disperses. Like steam. You know what I mean, buddy?” “I’ll burn you for this,” Red shouted back, but the robot had caught him in its scan and began advancing. He turned, and stumbled blindly back out into the pitch black maze of corridors. “When I want you dead, boy, you get dead!” The janitor yelled after him. And then it was quiet, save for the hollow, hobbling clank of the robot’s spokes fading in the distance. Fading, but not stopping.

Chapter Five

Byron was running. He was not terribly good at running. He spent too much time lost to the gas trips; he was unfamiliar with the base operation of his own flesh. Byron was almost never given occasion to regret that fact, but if he was going to start, now would be a good time. He tripped over his own feet – again -- and dropped to all fours in a desperate attempt to preserve momentum. He settled for scampering, his rear thrust in the air, palms slapping concrete as he maneuvered between the thinning crowds. Byron swore the man was alone before he had lifted the inhaler, but the violet haze had settled pretty firmly into the outskirts of his vision, and he must’ve missed the others. He’d managed to slip the c-ring into one nostril before the first fist folded into his kidney. He’d spun immediately, threw up his hands in a plaintive gesture, and accidentally caught his assailant in the eye with a lucky blow, giving him time enough to run. But he was not terribly good at running. He did have plenty of incentive, however: Preserving both his own life, and the half-spent inhaler of gas in his pocket. The junkie inside was already eyeing cozy corners to crawl into and dose up in, but his survival instincts were winning out, for the moment. He coaxed inertia back into his ungainly limbs.

Byron had been frightened, lifting the inhaler off of the moustachioed man with the clipped ears. It was impossible to know exactly how long the gas would put somebody down for. Some would snap awake within seconds of pulling the source, while others would stay submerged for hours afterward. It was too risky a maneuver for all but the most desperate of addicts (a category Byron was loathe to admit he fell into, currently) and it was severely bad form, besides. Byron turned to survey his pursuers, and was momentarily blinded when the room flashed bright scarlet from a pulsing arterial bloodspray, displayed by the overhead projectors. Something big and vicious had just occurred in the pre-title bout. The few onlookers not displaced in time gasped, and frantic bookies waved their arms, shouting that betting was now open again. Byron banked on the distraction, stood to his full height, and walked briskly toward the low oval exit portal they’d hastily cut into the base of the mammoth hangar gates. The addict in him cooed insidious temptations, and he found himself thumbing the inhaler through his tunic. He pushed the thoughts back and made himself a bargain: If he could just get out of this alive, he’d find a place nearby and dose up as soon as possible, just a little, just enough to take the edge off. And then, with a clear head and steady hands, he could message another contact – Deng, maybe – and commission some of his own brand to take home with him. He’d have to endure whatever barbaric trip this dose was built for, of course, but it was a price that needed to be paid. The inelegance of the Gas-fights always left him feeling faintly sick -- a frosty, prickly unease that crept into his bones and took hours to shake – but he could salve those wounds with 19th century Athens and dark-eyed Nicolo, soon after. But where could he hide, and safely use? He wasn’t overly familiar with the Blackouts. The crowded markets and constant throngs triggered his anxiety. He only knew three areas

intimately: The elevator docks, the arena, and Red’s apartment. A thought occurred to him, but he waved it off as a desperate fallacy of the addict. The addict is nothing if not insistent, however; he scratched at the inside of Byron’s skin until he listened: Red’s place is close, the addict reasoned, and safe, and if Red comes back, so what? We need more gas built anyway. We can pay. Isn’t the customer always right? “Thief” a voice in the crowd screamed, and the fragile etiquette of drug-users demanded a response. Junkies didn’t have many rules in the Four Posts, but nobody steals a stash. The cry was picked up and passed around, and Byron - a pale, glowing reed in the thresh of poor, filthy Blackouts - was easy to spot. So it was decided, then: Byron was running. He was not terribly good at running. But he was lucky, on occasion. Another flash of red caught the fickle attention of the crowd. That trademark roar – all madness and glee, starting deep and resonant like a train approaching, then slowly ascending into hacking, raspy laughter -- rang out from the speakers. Lincoln, reveling in the fury. But an answering bellow issued forth almost immediately, and the shouts of the audience told him that the fight wasn’t over just yet. All eyes not currently glazed with a purple sheen were now focused upward, at the battling projections. Even, Byron noticed with swelling optimism, those of the two bouncers guarding the exit portal. He pushed his lean form into an elongated wedge, willed strength to his legs, and prayed that they could keep him upright for a few more steps.

Byron was running. He was not terribly good at running, but he was getting better all the time. Sort of: He clipped a toe on the portal’s lip, but kept his feet as he bolted out of the hangar. He shut the addict away in its box, and focused on moving. The physical disconnect of the withdrawals actually seemed to be helping -- he assumed his leg muscles would be burning intolerably, if he could feel them. Thankfully, he could not, and they kept him mobile for far longer than he would have thought possible. Through the lazy eddies of shoppers at the infinite, sprawling markets, across the patchwork catwalks, up the narrow toll-ladders and shaky, unlicensed stairwells, and eventually, to nobody’s surprise more than his, they took him all the way to the relative security and familiarity of Red’s apartment before giving out. He stood bowlegged in front of the door for several ragged, gasping minutes. His BioOS displayed a contextual action menu: Welcome to the Alebrijes Model, a TWS manufactured living unit. This user is currently away. Confirm to send a Knock, or leave a message for user name [USER NOT SPECIFIED] and call again at a later date. Thank you! Byron confirmed the context action, and heard a distant chime from behind the door. No response. He tried it again, and again, skipping past the prompt to leave a message after every unanswered Knock. Of course it would be locked. Why hadn’t that occurred to him? Because the blasted addict was speaking, that’s why. Byron could not recall ever losing his temper – anger simply did not become him; he mostly smiled nervously in any scenario that called for indignation -- but

something burst in his chest, and he lost control of his own balled fists. They flew ineffectually against the walls, the floor, his own body, and finally bounced off of the stubborn, uncaring, impassive door. “Welcome home,” it chimed, and stuttered open with a chattering whoosh. He did not have the energy to question it. Byron stepped numbly inside, did his best to steer his already falling form toward the central bench, then let the addict out of his box. He plastered the inhaler over his nostrils, and the vacuum sealed. The first breath stung. The second caused his lungs to stumble, and on the thirdNothing. He should be gone by now, shouldn’t he? He should be lost to time, this idiot body fading, to be replaced by one sharper and more present. But then, he didn’t make a habit of dosing up halfway through the trip. Maybe it took longer, this way. At least the withdrawals were…withdrawing. Ha! He giggled, writhed, and murmured to himself blissfully. To pass the time until the kick, he mentally catalogued the last hours he’d spent with Lord Byron. Most times, he opted for the much more expensive Presence version of the gas, so he could interact with the trip -- hold the Lord’s hand in times of despair, make him laugh with his inane stories of cities in the sky – but sometimes he was content with Voyeur. Sometimes, it was enough just to watch the Lord exist, and silently witness his life unfold, unimpeded. It had been Voyeur when Nicolo, with his slight unibrow and orange scent, knelt beside Byron in the yard and tended to his wounded hand. Their faces came a bit too close, and biological imperative

engaged. They moved suddenly, sharply towards one another, their lips parting, their hands groping for Red’s door – did it lock behind him? Byron couldn’t recall. Should he? Weren’t there people chasing him? No, that’s ridiculous. Why would people be chasing Byron? He was not fit for chasing. It was uncouth. Everything would be fine, he was sure. Everything would be safe, solid, sound. “The structure is always sound,” he spoke aloud, in his deepest, most authoritative voice, mimicking the Public Service Ads that boomed all throughout the Blackouts. Nicolo. Think about Nicolo, he reminded himself, but the image would not catch. The gas was taking him deeper, and the only picture he could hold in his mind was of Red. Red’s dull grey jacket. Red’s patchy stubble that never seemed to grow or be shorn. Red’s sheepish smile, the one that overtook his face only when he was deep into a new and interesting high. That’s how he’d been when they first met. Byron’s father was engaging in that vague and sinister sounding thing -- “business” -- down at one of Hockner Industries’ smaller chem labs. He’d brought Byron along (against both of their wishes) to show him something dull and explain something even duller. He spouted words like “family” and “legacy” and “disappointment,” while Byron fantasized about Romantic poetry, the roar of cannons, and the fragile armor of honor. His father had grown quickly frustrated, and abandoned Byron to the sterile void of a medical waiting room while he yelled about numbers. Byron had stayed all of a few seconds before strolling out the door, into the catwalk markets, in pursuit of new contacts that might mix his strains in the future. That’s where he found Red,

chewing on the edge of a worn plastic bench with careful precision. His jaws weren’t grinding with the rabid abandon one would expect from the insane or massively drugged, but rather with a studied and moderated purpose. He would pause every few seconds, turn his head as if lost in consideration, and then return to primly masticating plastic. When he finally noticed Byron staring down at him, perplexed, he matched the gaze with pupils that occupied the entirety of his eyeball. Red put up a finger to preemptively silence Byron, indicating that he would be with him momentarily, then licked the pockmarked surface one final time, and settled back on his heels, calculating something with his hands. Byron wasn’t familiar with many drugs besides Presence and Voyeur (he took a low-grade cocktail of nootropics and amphetamines to get through the day, like everybody else), but even he, with his limited knowledge, could identify this as the work of a hallucinogen. A fact which spoke volumes to Byron. Hallucinogens were a black level ingredient, to be prescribed sparingly, if at all. No legal Rx Card would dispense the volume that this man had clearly taken. Which meant that the crouching, muttering fellow currently developing intricate algorithms for proper bench-tasting was either a mixer, a black market dealer, or a resourceful junkie with workarounds for the official dispensary. Any of these options would serve for Byron. He huddled next to the man cautiously, trying to be noticed without being distressing. He was debating how best to break the ice when the man tugged distractedly at Byron’s sleeve and said: “Come here. Does this bench taste funny to you?” Tangential, rambling revelries, flashbacks, and nostalgic details -- the gas was about to take him. Byron struggled, in a faraway place, to move his arm. He found it impossible. The kick was coming any second now: That ephemeral, delicate, imperceptible shift in being. It was like

sinking into a warm pond, and every inch of you that fell below the water-line became water itself; flowed outward, expanding and deconstructing simultaneously. Just before his own body ceased to be a relevant concept, he heard the telltale stuttering hiss of Red’s half-broken door, opening. A deep, abiding panic fluttered through his chest, but the pond seized it, shook it, and returned it to bliss. The kick.

Chapter Six

Red’s hands were bleeding freely, but he was up and moving again before the pain had time to register. He managed a scant few steps before catching a shoulder against something in the dark, and sprawled into another mound of ragged scrap metal and garbage. When he’d last seen the janitor’s monster, it was picking its way across the mountain of broken toys so slowly that Red had actually smiled with relief. But here in the gloom of the filthy, uneven hallways, each spill cost him precious seconds, and gave them to his pursuer. He could hear the faint pinging of the thing’s spokes climbing over the trash heaps, and the wet pops as it loosed itself from the muck, but it was the silence that tore at him: The quiet times when it wasn’t pulling itself out of or over the debris piles. When it was advancing on him, free and clear. Between the haphazard piles of detritus, the vaulted ceilings, and the constricted aisles, it was impossible to place the thing’s exact distance from him by sound. With every new, wheezing breath, Red anticipated the cold hands seizing at the back of his neck. With every new fall, he expected the heavy plastic chassis upon him before he could stand again. The creaking and groaning of an immense pressure bearing down on old structures, the dulledged acoustic roar of the water mains, the rhythmic thwacking of the filtration plants, reverberating deep within the structure’s bones, the hollow pattering of countless leaks, and just below it all, the steady metallic tock of Reggie, advancing.

Red tripped again, and his hands caught in a large and unwieldy construct -- shelves, perhaps, or the skeletal frame of an old ultralight. There could be an ancient air-dock around here somewhere, he thought, from back before they started the Reservoir and nobody thought they’d build higher than a few hundred stories. He tweaked, pulled, and wrenched until the wide, unsecured mass came free from the ankle-deep water. It was awkwardly shaped, but strong, and weighed virtually nothing. He hurled it into the corridor behind him, his bloody hands slipping painfully across the ragged metalwork. It landed a dozen paces back, and clattered to a stop. Red allowed himself a shred of hope: It might have blocked a regular ‘bot indefinitely, but Reggie’s human arms could probably maneuver it out of the way. Still, if he could just buy a minute or two… Red turned to take a step, and heard the robot’s spokes clang against the shelving. It hadn’t been more than a few feet behind him. There was a long, wet scrape as the shelf began to slide, and everything inside of Red froze. Silence. Then a sharp ping as it finally caught on something. The thing was stalled, for now. Red took a deep breath, expelled all of the panic and desperation welling up inside of him, and in spite of his survival instincts, every one of which screamed for him to run, he slowed his own pace to a careful crawl. His headlong flight and subsequent falls were only losing him ground. He wouldn’t move much faster than his pursuer this way, but every minute the robot spent on the shelving, and every minute Red maintained a steady, stable pace, would be a minute gained. He paused, and listened. There, ahead and to the left: That was where the turbines sounded the loudest. The four great central water pipes were bolted to the exterior of each Post, and that was

where he needed to be – not lost in the ruined aquatic catwalks, risking dead ends and collapses - if he was ever going to find a way up. Red heard the twanging of plucked metal, as Reggie bent and began picking at the obstacle. He hesitantly extended his own foot, and then planted it. And again. Time was measured in tiny, agonizing, crawling steps. Their chase progressed, one deliberate movement at a time, like a waltz in slow-motion – Red one two, Reggie one two, Red three four. He kicked his way around a vast glass sphere blocking most of the walkway, and planned his next move: Eventually, by following the turbine roar, he would emerge from the catwalks into one of the Four Posts. Their only common intersection was at the interior corner of each megastructure. Also located at every corner: Stairwell access. It wasn’t certain, but it was hope. Red stretched a leg out in front of him and felt around until it contacted the flat surface of a wall – not the curving glass of a catwalk, but real, solid, steel wall. Explorations to either side confirmed it: The entrance to a Post. He placed his hand against the surface, and began inching sideways, feeling for the frame of a door. His path took him closer and closer to the turbines. As he closed the distance, Red discovered an entirely new dread: Though the constant, unceasing pocks of Reggie’s advance had unnerved him, he could at least track the thing’s progress, no matter how imprecisely. Now, with the static wave of the turbines drowning out all other noise, he was at a loss. Was he still making faster progress? Had it been slowly gaining on him all this time? Reggie could be there right now, for all he knew, silently staring at him from just inches away, and reaching….

He stubbed his fingers against a raised metal bump, more solid and compact to the touch than the concrete and graphene mesh of the Post’s walls. The bump ran vertically, bordering a smooth, level plane. A door, and its frame. It was huge. Way too wide an opening for any ordinary room. The stairwell, he thought desperately, it had to be. The colossal stairwell doors had been designed for a dozen commuters pass through, shoulder to shoulder. But the stairwells haven’t functioned as “stairs” for many years: With space at a premium, any usable, livable area was bound to be claimed eventually. Every descending and ascending flight could fit ten men abreast, and the open plateaus of each landing were larger than the average housing project. It wasn’t long before enterprising homeless realized the value of the wasted real estate. Their transition from footpath to neighborhood was piecemeal, at first. Just cardboard shanties tucked away in the corners, and mobile sleeping kits hastily set up for the off hours. Most commuters took the lifts anyway, so not much fuss was raised at the temporary settlements. But temporary always becomes permanent, if you let it: Soon makeshift platforms were slung from the underbellies of every flight. At first, they were only accessible by rope ladders, and weren’t much more than places to sleep without getting arrested, assaulted, or trampled. But they were so unobtrusive -- webbed into disused corners of the ceilings like eggsacs -- that even these permanent structures remained unnoticed. Inevitably, they grew outward. Platforms were strung together, others slung below them, and still others below those, until the “unobtrusive” structures ran all the way to the floor below them, and the ‘Wells were stairs no more. Unlike the primarily abandoned floors he found himself stumbling through, where roving, psychotic janitors and tube collapse were looming threats, the ‘Wells were sound. They had doorways that were easily secured, clear, delineated borders that could be maintained, and free, unmonitored access to every floor above and below.

This ‘Well would not be vacant. There would be a guard on the other side of the door. … A guard meant to keep intruders out, not admit and protect them. A guard that would likely either ignore his rapping, kill him for the disturbance, or just enjoy the evening show while the janitor’s monster tore him apart. Nowhere in the list of foreseeable options did “help the bleeding stranger with his dick in the breeze” appear. But Red was out of choices. He knocked timidly, like a neighbor there to complain about the noise, and awaited a response. “What can I do for you, mate?” The voice came back instantly. “My name is Red,” Red screamed in reply, all self consciousness lost upon hearing another human voice, “and I need help.” “Fuck you,” the guard replied plainly. There was no malice in it. Just a statement of fact: Fuck you. “Please, there’s something out here. The janitor on this floor, he’s got these uh…man-bots, I guess? One of them is after me. I don’t know if it….I think it’s very close.” “What part of ‘fuck you’ did you not comprehend, friend? Was it the ‘fuck’ part? If so, I’d be happy to explain in detail. Draw you some pictures, yeah?” “Please! I’ve got connections. I can get you authorization for any chemical ‘feed you want. I can print open Rx Cards. I can build the craziest mixes you’ve ever ingested. Ever wondered what

blue tastes like? Want to punch a hole in steel with your cock? I’m your man. Just please, open this door!” Red felt an abrupt change in air pressure. Everything became strangely…closer. He was certain it meant that Reggie had entered the room. He couldn’t know it for sure, of course, it was just paranoi – “Who says I don’t already?” The voice replied, chuckling. “Don’t what?” “Shag holes in steel. Who says I don’t? Was it Beryl? Don’t listen to that bird. She’s just mad coz I said her brother’s better in the sack. He was, by the by.” The voice was downright jovial now, laughing at Red’s pathetic bribery. “I know somebody that used to live on this floor, in the ‘Wells,” Red tried, desperate now. This was the floor that Zippy had her modest hidey hole in, after all, the last time they’d seen one other. “Her name is…uh…it’s…” “It’s what?” “It’s Zippy. I know that sounds made up!” Red added quickly, his words blurring together, “I swear to god though, she exists! I just don’t know her real name. But she knows me. I’m sure she’ll vouch, please! I think it’s in here now. The robot. I think it’s right here!” The door swung inward.

A smallish man with a shock of ridiculous red hair stood inside of it. He was wearing a comically antiquated tweed suit, complete with a thin yellow tie. The guard blinked out into the darkness, then, apparently satisfied that Red – with his bleeding face and prancing dolphin vest -wasn’t a threat, motioned him in. Red gratefully scrambled inside, and plastered himself against the furthest wall from the door. He turned back to the man and started to speak, but the words died in his throat. He saw a dull plastic gleam begin in the darkness beyond, and then two grasping, black hands, advanced into the light. The guard swiveled about crisply, braced his feet, and pulled the trigger on what looked like a blender mounted to a shotgun handle. The entire room blazed into brilliant clarity. The crackle of electricity, the sound of shattering plastic, and then an aqueous, organic pop. “Those bloody zombies the janitor makes,” the man droned, turning back to Red and swinging the door shut with his heel, “they can’t get through the steel, but they’ll scrape at it all night unless you put ‘em down.” “Thank you,” Red replied numbly. “James,” The man pulled the blender section from the handle, and plugged it into a metal base mounted on a small, flimsy plastic endtable. “And don’t thank me, mate: I only let you in on account of Zippy. Though I gotta say, if you’re pulling my leg here, she’s gonna eat your balls.” Red giggled uncomfortably. “Nobody’s joking, friend” he added evenly.

There was a pleasant whistle, like a tea-kettle set to boil, and the spritely ginger fellow reached down to pull the blender back out from its base. He returned it to the handle, twisted it into place, and leveled it at Red’s face.

Chapter Seven

QC brushed past the few conscious audience members. Some were just waking up, groggy and shameful after their hedonistic trip, while some were still under, and would be for hours. The users’ timelines all synced up during the trip, but not necessarily before or after. Some of the audience members that had just been ogling her ass in the forest seconds ago, by her perception, had already awoken and left for home by the time she came around. She distributed the expected timid bows and lurid winks to the stragglers (a Factory Girl’s social role being somewhere between expensive geisha and trashy strip-club waitress), then slipped out the private backdoor of the viewing area. She emerged into a lengthy, trough-shaped room that served as the employee’s station. The trench was ten feet deep, but only five wide, and the ceiling was completely open to the arena floor above. Its original use, back when these had all been airship hangars, had been as a mechanic’s pit. Or at least that’s what she’d always assumed, judging by the neglected tools, spare parts and other miscellany still littering every corner of the place. Other Factory Girls, officially sanctioned Dealers, security guards and bookies stood before the banks of lockers that ran the furrow’s length, changing in or out of their respective uniforms. At one end, a bare-bones laundry service chugged away (though machine washing was one of the first things nano-tech made obsolete, years ago). Still, she’d never seen the laundry not in operation, sending its gouts of sour steam up at regular intervals. Somebody must be using it, or maybe it was just that nobody had ever bothered to shut the damn thing off.

Wafer thin partitions denoted laughably inadequate ‘office spaces’ to either side of the channel, but their boundaries were largely ignored, and most were abandoned. Old workbenches lined every open expanse of wall not dedicated to lockers, and these surfaces simultaneously served as desks, chairs, shelves, medical offices and laboratories for intent men and women in elaborate glasses, who tweaked unseen nano-bot factories, tended to minor wounds, or just quietly overdosed on their down time. She found an unoccupied length of plank beside a shaven-headed young woman and a man in a white coat. “Hey yo,” she snapped her fingers to get the girl’s attention, “I’m up on the post-event orgies tonight. Cover?” “Eat shit and die,” the girl replied absently. The man in the white coat plucked a barbaric, inch long hypodermic – one of the old ones, with the actual visible needle and everything – from a rack, and jammed it in her arm. She yelped in protest, but he’d already depressed the plunger and turned away, leaving the needle waggling limply in the flesh of her forearm. She extracted it herself, orated on the virtues and failings of his mother’s vagina for a solid minute, and then turned back to QC. “Swap me tomorrow’s title?” She finally countered. “Fuck you,” QC eyed the amber-skinned girl warily, “that’s Gettysburg with battlemechs, right? That shit is mind numbing, and it lasts forever. The orgies take like an hour, tops.” The girl simply shrugged and turned to leave, but QC caught her arm. “Fine. Done. You suck cocks in hell,” she said, by way of goodbye.

“Suck cocks in hell,” the girl answered back automatically, already drifting away, back down the trench. It was a crap deal, but she had to find Red. QC was practically a veteran amongst the Factory Girls, at two years. Most either quit, took ill with the ‘tech cancer, or else succumbed to temptation and tried to bolt with the strains. She stayed alive and active only by virtue of careful monitoring, some black market strains to hold the cell decay at bay, and a keen vigilance on her cloaking software, to keep the tyrannical organizers as ignorant as possible. There were better private techs around than Red to do the work, but not many that worked at his rate: Free. He had kind of a thing for her, QC knew -- or at least he did when he remembered to. Which wasn’t often. She stopped at her locker to change into her civvies. The demure, suggestive yoga-suit (cut low into the cleavage, open at the midriff, and way too tight on the ass, evoking equal parts “spiritual time-yogi” and “eager chrono-hooker,”) was abandoned. In its place, she donned a loose-fitting pair of black engineer’s trousers (a thick, triple-reinforced nano-resistant material), a plain, white long-sleeved shirt, and a dull silver duster. The latter was a remnant she’d discovered when she wrestled open the dusty locker on her first day. It had likely been part of a uniform, leftover from the hangar days. Maybe even a captain’s, or at least one hell of a fancy flight attendant’s. She knew she was attractive in her own, entirely forgettable way, so she very carefully dressed to emphasize the ‘forgettable’ part. Most Blackouts walked around in elaborately threatening or provocative clothing, and they usually did so to make up for their near-total lack of survival skills. Overcompensation almost always meant ‘victim’ to anybody prowling the catwalks with a razor, looking for a paycheck or an hour’s entertainment. Her nondescript demeanor and

pedestrian attire amidst the sea of spiked-pauldron wearing, ornate blade-carrying, color-shiftingaura-projecting clowns said one thing quite clearly: I am very, very bad for you. For further clarity, QC had also cut the left sleeve of her duster back above the elbow, to show off the brightly illuminated control panel on her forearm. Though she had no access to the official strains the fights paid her to employ (and, in fact, had to tear open a patch on the thigh of her trousers to access the black market panel she did control), the official display served to sow one more insidious doubt in the minds of any would-be attackers. Regardless, she found the best policy was just keeping her head down, knowing where she was going, and getting there fast. Her path took her up through the media-markets, into the looping bazaar in the South Post loading ramp, and past the countless shops, bars, and tiny lean-to apartments that lined the Blackouts’ catwalks so densely that she had to crabwalk in spots just to pass by. When her way was entirely blocked, as was frequently the case, she paid a modest fee to an urchin with dyed blue feet – the mark of the attendant caste – and they’d run off to fetch rickety baskets, pull-carts or jury-rigged rope ladders for her to traverse. At the other end, she’d find another blue-footed boy who would invariably charge her again before reeling her in, unlatching the door, or tossing down the final rungs. When the basket she’d just crawled out of promptly swiveled and zipped back down its line without pause, she turned to check on its passengers: Four men all jammed into the tiny container together like cigarettes in a pack. Maneuvering the crowded and ceaselessly shifting geography of the Blackouts required constant improvisation. The odds of you being able to take the same path twice were unlikely; the odds of anybody taking your exact route for any length of time were astronomically low. Which meant

that these four men, whom she’d last seen following her out of the hangar doors, two full floors down, were obviously, blatantly trailing her. And while the catwalks proper were always full this time of day, it was just a matter of time before she turned down a familiar alleyway only to find it had been sealed off by the rear wall of a freshly erected noodle stand, or pirate gas den. If a jump was going to happen, better on her terms. QC hunched low and pushed through the press, out into the central avenue. No way could she make enough time to lose them through this crowd, but she knew an empty cul-de-sac up ahead with enough room for her to scrap, and it wasn’t too far off the main strip if things went south. She shoved past a gawky, insecure teenager with spikes for eyebrows, a broad-shouldered man with a hologram of a flaming skull over his face, and a trio of identical Asian midgets with metal claws for hands. When she finally rounded the corner, she took a calming breath, straightened her spine until it cracked, and settled comfortably down into a loose, ready posture. The first one turned the corner, saw QC waiting for him, and froze. He made no sign of movement or aggression. He was going to wait for his buddies to get his nerve up for him. The others paused, too, upon first spotting QC, but they soon realized they were a pack again. “You must all carry half a testicle each,” QC said sweetly, “to only manage one full pair of balls together.” “We saw you at the fights,” the first one finally spoke “wanted to get ourselves some of that VIP treatment.” The others laughed.

Amazing. You could save up a few weeks worth of credit and buy any number of spinal implants to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain. Anybody could call up devastatingly powerful orgasms at the touch of a button, but these malformed (sexual deviancy usually went hand in hand with a broad, fishlike facial structure, QC thought; some inbred, recessive, splay-eyed dullness of the features always on display in those sneering faces), sociopaths still went out raping on the weekends. She touched the two rough pads on the insides of her gums with her tongue, then pressed it hard against the roof of her mouth until she felt a click. A peculiar leaden weight filled her salivary glands. It was a random disassembler -- her one and only legally purchased strain -- activating. She’d splurged for the high end tech and opted for the Sacrosanct Strain: Immune to pollution from other nano-bots, self-sustaining, and with online access blocked to deter hackers. It wasn’t blackmarket, or leftover from the fights like her other ‘tech, so the disassemblers could always be counted on to do their job. And their job was to savagely rip apart the atoms of any living structure without her DNA. It took hours to do any serious damage, but they kicked on the second they contacted foreign flesh, and she’d heard the pain was as instant as it was unbearable. She let the leader get in nice and close. Let him see the mock fear in her eyes, and gave him an expertly crafted lip tremble that let him know, without question, that he was in charge now. He leaned in toward her face with a smug sneer, and she spat a hefty gob of disassembler-laden saliva directly into his half-open mouth. His eyes went wide with rage, and he reached out to backhand her, but then the ‘bots started in on him. He tried to scream, but only managed a hacking gasp before keeling over and seizing on the ground in agony. She saw the others pass a look of confusion around. The bigger one, with a face like somebody drew a grotesque caricature of a human head on the back of a shovel, stepped forward and reached for her. She grabbed his

hand gently and raised it to her lips. He was too confused, slow, or excited to resist. She nimbly licked his palm. He screamed like a child, high-pitched and completely without reserve. The beginnings of a stifled laugh escaped her, but she caught it and put on her meanest scowl instead. The remaining two started to comprehend. One up and bolted, disappearing in the streaming crowd of the avenue behind him. The other pulled a small sliver tab from his jacket, twisted its base, and smiled meanly as it telescoped outward into a millimeter thin, foot-long blade. The pair of them stood at odds for a moment, both contemplating the list of potential attacks and preparing their counters. QC took the initiative, and slowly, methodically lifted two fingers up and off to one side. She twitched them a little, like bunny ears. He glanced over at them, puzzled, and she spat directly into his open eye. That damage, at least, was going to be costly. She stepped over the man with the blade, who was now locked into the tightest fetal position she’d ever seen, around the leader, still tearing at the inside of his mouth, trying to pull his own tongue out with his fingers, past the sobbing giant, rubbing his hands bloody on the ground, and back out to the avenue. She fell in step behind an overweight woman in a black trench coat. The back of her jacket displayed a looping animation of the woman herself, stomping on the crotch of a cartoonishly bleeding punk. Fucking amateurs. When she arrived at Red’s apartment, she casually hip-checked the spot in the faulty control-box that opened the security door, and stepped inside the bare flat without issue. Red hadn’t even

bothered to customize the sad little unit; he just purchased the default settings and started sleeping in it. The molded furniture -- bed, chairs, couch, center table, kitchen bar and appliances -- all flowed out from the walls and floor in one seamless, unbroken piece of plastic. There were perhaps a handful of items in the entire dwelling that were not factory stock: A row of photo frames on the bar, a pair of torn grey jeans thrown on the floor, a single empty glass on the table, and a pale, gangly boy, giggling to himself on the living bench. He made a feeble slapping motion at the air when she first opened the door, then passed out.

Chapter Eight

“Do you know what this does?” James asked Red, nonchalantly waving the blender at his nose. Red stared down the length of the hollow cylinder, transfixed. There were two sets of spinning blades at the base, and he could just make out the tiny nubs of nano-factories ringing the interior. “It blows things up,” Red surmised, finally recognizing that a response was required of him. “Exactly!” James practically clapped for him. “It’s really quite fascinating. The whole thing revolves around a brilliant little medley of express assembler ‘bots…” “You mean disassemblers,” Red corrected automatically. He didn’t know much about weaponized nanotech, but he knew that ‘disassemblers’ were the bad kind. “Nah, mate: Assemblers. The little blades down here at the bottom? They’re not weapons or anything, just plain old fans. See these?” He rubbed his finger along a row of nubs just inside the barrel, “These are the factories. They build and store the strains I use. Those holes around the tip are nozzles – just high powered squirtguns, really. They aerosolize the ‘bots with water molecules as they exit the barrel. Gives ‘em some weight; something to latch onto when you launch the buggers, otherwise they just disperse in the air. This little beauty in my hands actually sprays two strains of nano-bots -- one that grabs an extra bit of oxygen, and one that grabs an extra bit of carbon. And when they land, they start splicing them into your skin. Then she fires

out a measly handful volts. Barely enough to hurt, really. That’s all she needs to turn a bloke into a bomb.” James rocked back on his heels and let Red digest the information. “There are easier ways to kill a man, of course. And there are even better ways to blow his arse to atoms. But this one is mine. I designed it. Nobody murders the same way I do. That’s a point of pride for me, mate. I’m telling you this because I need for you to understand: That’s how bored I got with killing folk -- I had to design and construct a whole new type of weapon to do it with, just to keep meself interested. That bugger out there? He was totally encased in industrial impact coating. You’re totally encased in what looks like a secondhand polyester jacket, ten years out of fashion. We got an understanding?” “Yep,” Red replied instantly, “This is Don’t Do Stupid Stuff 101, and I’m taking notes.” “Ha!” James straightened his tie in a charmingly anachronistic gesture of finality, “I’d bet nobody lists ‘courage’ amongst your vices.” He nodded his head at an ovular lid that looked to be lifted from a public recycling tube, secured to the wall with bonding tape. When Red obediently pushed at it, a three foot section gave way and fell back, loudly oscillating on the steel floor beyond. He bent to the portal and, the barrel of James’ weapon thrust unkindly into his rear, crawled through. The short tunnel exited into an apartment, similar to the basic unit that Red owned: A shipping container filled with molded living space. But this one, already quite a bit smaller than Red’s modest home, had been further divided into a half dozen separate abodes. Areas half the size of Red’s Kitchenette held entire households. Hanging closets, folded cots, stools, and even an

ancient, tarnished kettle all hung just above his head, completely suspended on bent wires. A pair of waist-high yellow ropes delineated a public walkway through the complex, barely a foot across at its widest point. The path terminated in a jury-rigged ladder, comprised of three pairs of staggered hand-grips, apparently pilfered from shopping carts. Beyond, they climbed through a shattered windshield into an airship cabin that had been divided in two, straight down the center: One half served as a bar; the other, a row of cramped hotel lodgings. They ascended a rope ladder strung from the shattered exterior of a catwalk wall, stepped over two residents passionately screwing in the public aisle -- the man’s feet lodged against the base of a chair in one apartment, the woman’s head lost to view in the interior of an oven in the unit next door – and ducked through an immense, pockmarked cooler. The claustrophobic tunnels, unsteady footbridges, and narrow walkways all blurred together. Though his body was repeatedly contorted in ways both painful and, he suspected, physically impossible, Red still managed to lapse into a hypnotic state for most of the journey. Focus Fugues were commonplace in his line of work, as was constipation, headaches, light sensitivity, muscle pain and nerve transposition. Red had precautionary measures in place for most of it: He’d had his eyes tinted to take the edge off the brighter lights (though now he had some difficulty reading OLED signs at a distance), subscribed to a stool-softening ‘feed in his morning dose -- one of the few legal Rx channels he actually paid for – and the muscle pain was countered by a moderate dose of pure THC that he siphoned from an alternative medical clinic up in the Penthouses, and subsequently rerouted into his tapwater. He took the standard amphetamines and nootropics for productivity, like nearly everybody in the Four Posts, but that didn’t help with the fugues. So he’d also picked up a few

psychological workarounds: Cognitive memes he’d read about on forums and message boards. Some of them even worked. Occasionally. Picture a brown cow in a green field. Envision the grass in exquisite detail, each blade wavering in the slight breeze like the raised swords of a tiny, victorious army. The cow is a deep, chocolate brown; its glossy hide shining in the cool spring sun. An oak tree stands behind it, with a swirling gnarl in the trunk. The spiraling oblong knot has been weathered grey by exposure. There is a frayed rope tied to the largest branch, leading nowhere. Hear the wind rustle the leaves. Feel it stir the hairs on your arm, the tingle likeLast night came flooding back to Red. He had been beta-testing for the fights, that much he remembered, but now the details snapped back in all of their awful clarity. This beta hadn’t been just another gas trip to scout a new location. This one was important: An entirely new type of Presence, meant to facilitate longer stays in the past – days, possibly even weeks. Exclusive, groundbreaking, highly secret stuff. Even the most boilerplate Non-Disclosure Agreement would have a clause forbidding him from leaving a pre-determined cluster of areas around his home until the beta could be fully metabolized, to ensure the tester didn’t run off and sell the residuals to a rival lab. That was standard, default stuff; the most basic rule of testing. And here he was, scurrying through the abandoned ground floors and loitering in the lawless zones of the ‘Wells. If the lab thought he was a runner….

“Hey!” James snapped, pressing the cylinder impatiently to the back of Red’s head, “I said stop. We’re here.” Red had forgotten to break the Focus Fugue. He wondered how much time had loped by, barely glimpsed as it went rushing past him. And found himself staring up at an impossibility. The entire landing of this floor -- a huge, voluminous space, easily large enough to fit a whole neighborhood (by ‘Wells standards, at least) – had been turned over to a single quaint, mid-size cottage. Surrounding it was a rich strip of freshly shorn, bright green grass, penned in by a gleaming white picket fence. Animatronic birds chirped in a diminutive fruit tree. The area directly above the cottage’s roof was left improbably vacant, and the ceiling had been painted sky blue. Projections of clouds lazily drifted across it. Real estate was the sole indicator of status in the cramped, claustrophobic society of the ‘Wells, and though Red knew there were larger territories elsewhere, the emptiness of this yard and the vacancy of that sky spoke volumes. A throne of skulls would have been less intimidating. “You said you know Zippy,” James reminded him, “let’s go see if she knows you.”

Chapter Nine

Byron awoke in the jungle. He tried to spit the sickly sweet chemical taste from his mouth, failed, gagged, and retched. When one engages in a full and complete dose of gas, from its designated inception through to cessation, the transition is gentle and indolent, like fading into slumber in reverse. That was a carefully modulated release effect, Byron had learned. When one appropriated a dose midway through its intended trip, there was no amiable ease of conscious states. He felt himself drift off in that other reality, lying prone on a remorseless plastic bench, then the kick took hold, and then he was now. Seasickness results from the slight difference between one’s visual perception and the readings of the inner ear. An abrupt temporal shift -- from a modern-era Four Post barrio apartment to this primordial forest -- was like motion sickness of the soul. Every fiber of his being swung dizzily, surged in confusion, and revolted against his attempts at control. Byron went from being sleepily drugged and sprawled out in his dealer’s apartment, to chemically wired and standing unsteadily in an ancient meadow. In response, he did the only thing he could think to do: He flopped limply to the earth, rolled to his side, and tried to slip in a few sobs through the cascading vomit. When the fist in his guts finally loosened, and the undulating waves of unbearable heat ceased their incessant crashing against his skull, he struggled to his knees. Raucous applause crashed all around, its source scattered by the density of the surrounding foliage. Oh yes, he remembered, that hadn’t even been his preferred brand. He was in the Gas-fights now, with their savage, shallow, brutal, compassionless gladiatorial theatrics. He hadn’t the

dimmest notion of the roster, or even of the current epoch. The gas had burgled those memories, if he’d ever had them. He could well be in danger, standing out here unprotected. The arena, at least, would have microwave generators to deter predators. Byron planted one foot, steadied his weight on it, and shakily dragged the other into place. He stood erect. Fully erect. Byron sighed. They would have clothes at the fight, too. He picked the least intimidating tangle of brush, and launched himself into it. He shuddered in revulsion as the alien organicity of leaves brushed up against his naked flesh, then froze at the flutter of movement. Did he imagine it, or – Suddenly, the broad head of a rotund serpent reared its bulk out of the shrubbery and lashed out at him. It missed his nose by a matter of inches, before crashing back away into the foliage. “Sheeeeiiit!” A squat little fellow swore. The upper reaches of his face were lost to a nylon spiderweb of cameras: Built on demand by the industrious nano-bots of the Factory Girls, his headgear quantum-projected holograms of the fight back to reality, for those too poor to attend hallucinogenically. He seized Byron by the arms and shoved him bodily toward the arena. Byron stumbled as the sound waves washed over him and caused his motor control to misfire, but the momentum of the shove carried him through, and he landed face down in a pile of leaves, each as broad across as his shoulders. “What the fuck you doin’? You tryina’ git yourself killt? You lucky I was here just now?” The camera-man spoke with a thick Blackout accent; the high rising terminal appending each

statement turned every sentence into a question. He was extremely short and excessively stout of body. His stature was not quite dwarfish, but it shared some elements, like the subtly stunted limbs and thick torso. “Good sir,” Byron began, hauling himself up with as much dignity as he could muster whilst naked and shell-shocked, “I was merely attempting to alleviate myself with a ahm….modicum of privacy.” Byron did not carry many conversations in reality. The bulk of his human interactions occurred via custom-built gas trips. As such, he had inadvertently adopted the grandiose speech patterns of his inline translator. The program ran only a rough approximation of Romantic-era European dialects. His beloved timeline was not exactly a popular destination, after all. The software always managed to get the gist of the language across, but it tended to butcher the cadence and verbiage. To counter this effect, he’d modded his translator with a hack of Shakespearean and Victorian Dialogue Packs, amalgamated with some theatrical speech patterns cobbled from the more common Dickensian works. If you’d asked him to describe it, Byron would have told you it “captured the essence of civility and articulation that all periods should be lucky enough to share.” If you asked anybody else, they’d describe it as “talking like a dickhead.” “Is that Dickhead Talk?” the camera-man asked, annoyed. “Cause I’m afraid I don’ speak Dickhead Talk real well? Does what you just said mean ‘I’m sorry I nearly got my skull smashed in by a fucking dinosaur because I’m too stupid to read the giant hologram blinking the word ‘bathroom’ right behind me?”

“Er…yes?” Byron floundered. Avoiding confrontation was second nature to him. He found that instantly copping to massive failures of character with no excuse, emotion, or offense was the quickest way to end an altercation before it began. “Feh!” The stunted man threw his arms up in disgust, and turned back to the fight raging across the arena behind him. Byron waited anxiously for further word, but the cameraman was apparently done with him, his mirrored eyes dedicated, once again, to following the action. An unreasonably tall, absurdly thin fellow with a set of matching lenses stepped over the pair of them with one great, loping stride. He set one spindly leg against the arena walls and peered directly down at the fight, angling himself for the aerial shot. They were camera-caste: Manipulated growth from infancy. Stubby men for the low angles, ungainly and enormous for the aerials. The low-angles were the lucky ones: Their bodily resources had been rechanneled into pure, dense, hearty muscle, whereas the aerials were engineered for maximum height at the cost of bulk. Like giraffes, they lumbered above the crowds, carefully measuring every step, because any fall was possibly lethal to their fragile frames. The cheaper fight organizers used robots and ultra-lights for the job. The more “respectable” endeavors, however, viewed the camera caste as a sacred tradition. All part of the show. Byron shuddered. He could not wait for this trip to end. A gasp broke out from the crowd. Lincoln had just taken a nasty gore through the upper thigh, and his face was twisted up in pain. The Triceratops was faring a bit worse: Ragged gashes

oozed all along its side, and it was dragging one leg. Its left eye was formless gore, and it thrashed its tail about in blind fury-- what Byron had initially mistaken for an obese serpent. The fact that Lincoln was faring well came as no surprise: He was an infamous ringer. Some ringers were famous warriors, some were master tacticians, and some were neither – simply ordinary men or women, noted in the history books for a variety of unrelated, mundane reasons. Yet when faced with the proper duress, something in them changed. Lincoln always tried to reason with his opponents at first, but all it took was one blow to trigger that perceptible shift behind his eyes, and he became a whirling pillar of rage and murder. The story of his very first fight had become legend, not just in the arena, but in all of pop-culture. The promoters had pitted Lincoln against a Zulu (it was supposed to be ironic, Byron knew, in the basest possible way), and the odds were overwhelmingly against the gangly, bearded man. He was known for his reason, speech, and compassion, not his battle prowess. It was intended to be a slaughter; they didn’t even give him a weapon to combat the tribal’s spear. But when the Zulu lost patience and thrust at the president, he swiftly ducked aside and unleashed that idiosyncratic Lincoln Roar. Thirty seconds later, the tribal laid dead, his throat torn out by a set of freakishly strong, sinewy fingers. There was stunned laughter from the crowd, at first, but even that quickly died when it became apparent that Lincoln had no intention of stopping. He savagely stabbed the Zulu’s spear into the corpse again and again, tears streaming down his face, all the while screaming a primal chord so consistent and unwavering that it most resembled an industrial steam whistle. Only one man actually bet on Lincoln in that fight, and they said he lived off that money to this day.

This bout was more evenly matched, however, and neither combatant seemed likely to survive their wounds. Lincoln had just been pinned against a squat tree trunk by the beast’s horns, but rather than thrashing wildly, as another man might have done, he instead calmly gathered his fingers into a point, reached down and stuck his whole hand through the lizard’s remaining sighted eye. The animal roared and tried to rear away, but Lincoln grappled onto its head as it withdrew, using its horns as handles. He shoved his groping arm ever deeper, until it disappeared up to the shoulder inside the cavity. Suddenly the Triceratops grunted, shivered, and collapsed. Lincoln extracted the limb with a wet pop, turned immediately on his heel, and charged the crowd. His bloodlust was insatiable; it was part of the appeal of his character. He charged the crowd after nearly every victory, clawing at the raised walls, howling and slavering at the leering audience. Lincoln wouldn’t stop on his own, but it was bad sport to kill the winner, so security merely tranquilized him as best they could, and dragged the wounded president away into the forest. An announcer’s voice echoed from the tinny speakers, assuring the audience that “the champion has earned his freedom.” To the viewers, it was a good ending. It never occurred to them that the promoters had abducted Lincoln from his native Illinois in the first place, doped him up with dissociative anesthetics, then had him battle a genetically engineered dinosaur in a rainforest half a world away. Even if he survived the fight, the wounds, and the jungle, he’d certainly be driven mad from the events. But it was all immaterial, anyway: Everybody knows that time is immutable. The mechanics of the gas were poorly understood, at best – the trips themselves generally being regarded as something between time travel and a finely controlled mass hallucination – but the one thing everybody agreed on was that the timeline always reverts to normal, once the drug wears off.

Regardless of this particular man’s fate, the history books would remember the same president they always did. There would be no new chapters detailing Abraham Lincoln’s lizard-wrestling years, and nothing in Byron’s present would change in the slightest. If everything is impermanent, then compassion and empathy simply become redundant. With the trip winding down, the audience began their customary post-fight mingle. The men started skirmishes with one another, knowing the wounds would not last, or else molested each other’s dates while their clothing was dismantled by pieces. Some were already instigating a casual orgy, if only to pass the time until they were kicked back out to reality. Byron found a tree at the remote end of the arena floor, and sat down between its ancient roots. He knew that his body was still lying helpless where he’d left it, sprawled on Red’s merciless couch-analogue for the next twenty minutes, but that was the true beauty of the gas: Anything that happened in the real world now was simply and plainly…out of his hands. Byron sighed as the weight of existential responsibility slid off him like water on a stone. He nestled back into the dirt, and closed his eyes.

Chapter Ten

Red sat politely in the tiny parlor. His sense of intimidation had only heightened after he’d been buzzed inside the anachronistic cottage, and left to stew in the yellow-and-blue tiled foyer. He opened his BioOS and idly tabbed through his messages, found he was too nervous to focus on the words, and closed it again. He scrutinized the materials around him instead. It was surreal: Objects this old simply didn’t exist anymore. Even recreations would be dazzlingly expensive. His guts grew heavy with the thought and its implications. How far had Zippy risen, in his absence? Would she even remember the sheepish screw-up she shared a bed with for a few months, years ago? But when he bent down to examine the baroque wooden molding that ran along the far wall, recognition sparked: It was a cross-section of one of those long, flat blades from a filtration skimmer – the spider-like ‘bots that pulled larger debris from the surface of the Reservoir. It had been intricately painted and covered with stenciled patterns, but it was not actually wood, or gold, or even a commissioned facsimile. It was cleverly re-appropriated garbage. Giddiness fluttered through his chest and caught at the base of Red’s throat. He’d learned the trick behind the magic, and the sheen was flaking off already. He cast new eyes on his surroundings, and found the oaken walls to be porous plastic sheeting. The kind they used to seal temperature between control zones. Zippy had layered them, one atop the other, in a randomly

staggered pattern to simulate wood grain, but the effect essentially vanished up close. She’d come a long way, Red had to admit, and the funds needed to construct this place in the heart of the ‘Wells were an astonishing testament to her newfound influence, but whatever his Zippy had turned into, she was still playing pretend. She was still something he could recognize. He spent the rest of his idle period trying to identify the other furnishings. It was like a game, now: The antique, faded lampshade was an old smartpaper magazine with the surface carefully worn away to transparency. The three-legged, cast-iron end table was actually half of an upended industrial terminal lock -- those big, three-pronged seals that closed off the central chemical feeds when they did construction. The ornate hat rack was a skilled fusing job, but ultimately nothing more than a handful of graphene support beams wrapped in texture-paper. When he picked it up, it weighed only a few ounces. He had just managed to shrug off the last of the tension, when a chime sounded (with all the lingering resonance of ancient metallic bells, of course), and the inner door swung open. James sauntered out, smiling viciously, and flopped onto the bench beside Red. He adjusted the cuff of his slacks on one crossed leg, straightened his citrine tie, folded and refolded his hands, and then, after a long silent moment, nodded toward the door. “You’re fucked, mate,” he chirped. Red had known it was a longshot, playing Zippy’s name like that. The odds that she would still be alive and living in the ‘Wells were slim. That her name would mean something to the doorman on her floor? Those were astronomical. At no point had Red been optimistic enough to think ahead to this moment, and consider how she’d deal with him when they came face to face again. Red had thought they’d left things amicably enough, but his memory was skittish on the

best of days, and besides, you could never tell with Zip. She didn’t play her reactions straight. He once saw her sob a tearful goodbye to a pug-nosed teenager with crimson streaks in her hair, right before she slipped her stiletto into the girl’s spine as she turned to leave. The memory of that moment had settled inside of Red. It built a fire in his belly and sent puffs of doubt up into his chest every time he put his back to her. It might have been the reason he slipped away that night, instead of saying goodbye. He couldn’t really recall. Red set his jaw, attempting to look more confident than he felt. He willed his knees to flex, his back to straighten, and his feet to shuffle forward -- out of the parlor, and into the den. Zippy was sitting casually, one leg thrown sideways over the arm of a weathered leather lounge (though Red could tell, by the secondhand familiarity of ownership, that it was actually molded from the same grade of plastic as all of his own furniture.) Her prosthetic leg was off, tossed haphazardly on the floor. She had one arm sprawled across the chair’s back; her face leaned into her own curving palm. The pose was carefully orchestrated nonchalance. It set Red on edge. “Hi Red!” She squealed, with the expected precocity, “You been gone long! I sure missed you!” She flashed him a smile, but the eyes stayed flat and angry. The childish persona, Red knew, didn’t extend beyond speech patterns and body language. Behaving naturally was a kind of cultural phobia in the ‘Wells. People only truly showed themselves to their closest friends and family. They had a second, public persona for everybody else -- the uncertain, and the mistrusted. Three years ago, for a period of about four months, Red had been privy to Zippy’s actual persona. She was passionate, outspoken, prone to severe mood swings, and employed a cutting sarcasm that frequently crossed the border into cruelty. Her real

speaking voice was a kind of urgent monotone; her adopted speaking voice was something between a mewling kitten and a mentally disabled eight year old girl. Apparently, Red had lost the privilege of speaking to the real Zippy. “Hey Zip,” Red began, and went to drop coolly into the matching recliner across from her own. He’d forgotten about the illusion, however, and threw himself down expecting cushy leather, only to find hard, unyielding plastic. His elbows knocked painfully on the arms, and he partially slid onto the floor, but managed to catch himself mid-fall and stabilize there. He froze, and decided to try to play it off. I meant to do this, Red told himself, this is how I want to sit: My ass hanging mostly over the edge of the seat, supporting my weight entirely with my elbows. The strain was clearly showing on his face. Zippy smiled hesitantly at first, but burst out laughing despite herself. “Jesus Christ, Red,” she spoke, her natural cadence peeking out between shuddering laughs, “Just…just sit up. Okay? You’re not fooling anybody, you god damn goof.” Red gratefully heaved himself back up and settled down again into the unforgiving plastic. “It’s uh…good to see you again, Zip.” “Go fuck yourself with that,” she threw off the platitude with a wave of her hand. “Listen, I’m sorry to bust in on you like this. I woke up dosed down in the dark floors, and some psychopath with this freak…robot…man-thing was chasing me and-“

“Maurice,” she filled in, “yeah, he’s a fucking horror show. Those burnouts he uses to build the things? Some of them were ours. We tried to merk him once, and those monsters of his came out of the god damn walls. We only ever saw one or two, scouting, but when we brought our troop down there to put a bolt in his skull, suddenly there were dozens, everywhere.” “Jesus…there was only one of them after me and the thing still nearly got me,” Red shuddered. Hands in the dark, somewhere just behind… “No, that’s how he plays it. One to one. Watches the hunt on a feed in his hovel. He gets off on it. Only if you come strapped and itching do they start rolling out of the fucking shadows. You trip a lot down there?” She gestured to his bleeding hands. “Yeah, crap everywhere. You know the old tubes.” “Old tubes, my fine and jiggling ass. You think that was garbage you were falling over? Janitor’s only job is clean-up and maintenance, every minute of every day. If there’s trash there, it’s because he wants it there. Shit was obstacles for you. Or some of it was, anyway: There’s less trash than you’d think. Most of the ‘junk’ in the halls is just more of those things, laying on the ground, playing at heaps of scrap, or hanging from the ceilings, waiting for the word.” Red had no words to respond. His mind slipped that information away and suppressed it, desperately trying to keep him from considering the implications. He stared at her leg -- the false one abandoned on the braided rug -- instead. He’d never gotten the full story behind the amputation (some kind of fire in the ‘Wells, he’d gathered, back when she was just a girl). The prosthetic was a slender, colorless, arching crescent. Its surface was

polished and smooth like obsidian, but reflected the light in a way that suggested something vaguely gelatinous. That was today’s leg, anyway: She changed the model routinely, constantly revising and crafting replacements. Some were practical, little more than metal tubes with kinetic generators in the ankle; some were life-like facsimiles – slim, pale ankles, long toes with elaborate polishes -- while others were more like art projects or random impulses. One week, she’d bolted on an empty liquor bottle with a single metal screw inside. It jangled with every step. When pressed, she’d only said that she “liked the sound.” “So you think you can, what? Show up, do a few prat-falls, and then we’re solid?” Zippy broke the silence first, as always. She had never been content to sit quietly for any length of time. When they lived together and Red would become too caught up in his mixes, he’d pull his focus out of the BioOS only to find Zippy gone. She wouldn’t return for hours, and when she did, it was always bleeding, drunk, or both. “I can explain…” Red began by reflex, but found nothing to follow it. More silence. “Where’d you go, Red? Hell if I’m going to sit around and pine for my missing junkie, but we both knew I had enemies. You up and vanish, like you did? I thought I’d gotten you fucking killed, you prick.” “Zip, I’m like the wind…” He answered, with mock suavity.

She laughed, but it was flat. He’d meant to leave it with the witticism, but Zippy narrowed her eyes, and he tried again: “Truth? I have no idea why I left. I was working on a new bliss mix, right? I think that’s what that was supposed to be: Trying to balance the inactive body-high of a cannabinoid with the active joy of an amphetamine. Does that sound right to you?” “Yeah, I remember,” she chuckled nostalgically, “that first proto had you only seeing blue. Had to paint the whole squat just so you could get to the toilet.” “Yeah! That one. Well, the second proto wasn’t much better. Near instant blackout. When I came to, I was in this big old-style flat just below Industry. Beautiful place. Giant bed with these huge, pillowy blankets – real ones, not the thin little mesh-weaves you get from the ‘feed. It was all swank and luxury, until I opened my eyes. Turns out I’d spent all my credits on kid’s toys while I was out, so I came to surrounded by - and I mean every inch of the room totally filled with - these little robotic elephants. They did a jig when you made eye contact. I guess in the missing time I must have carefully arranged them all to point right at me before I passed out. So the second I sat up, the whole room exploded with these trumpeting, dancing rainbow elephants. I laughed for an hour straight. Then I got up to head back to the squat and just…didn’t want to. I didn’t want to go back. No reason I can place. I just got this fear when I thought about going home. So I didn’t. I just started over. Like I do.” “Nice story. Funny. I can’t really say as I give a shit, though. I didn’t ask why you left, or why you didn’t come back. I asked why you couldn’t shoot me a message. You know, a simple: ‘Hey, Primal Tong didn’t get me while I was out buying proteins, and has not severed and mounted my

left testicle on his warbanner. I just got sick of looking at you and decided to dance with some gay-ass elephants instead. Later.’” “It’s not a good reason,” Red conceded, intending to append further, better excuses. He came up with none. “It’s not a good reason,” he repeated instead. More out of intolerance for the silence than forgiveness, Zippy threw up her hands and looked away. “So get the fuck out of my ‘Wells then.” “I’m trying.” “Try harder,” she clucked her tongue and raised an eyebrow, either impressed or offended that Red had the balls to persist. “You know I’m not making it out without a guide. Even when we lived here I could barely leave the squat without you steering me.” “Hey, sure thing. James will take you to the border of my territory – it’s right there at the edge of the grass - and will happily throw your ass firmly out of the mystical realm of My Fucking Problem.” “Zip, I…I’m in trouble here. Okay? I need help. I think I may have ran with a beta…” “Oh, you son of a bitch. You’re going to – no. No, you’re not going to lay your life on my fucking shoulders again. I’m not taking that.”

“Zip, I can p-“ Red started, but Zippy slapped her palms flat against the arms of her chair. “Don’t say it! Don’t you dare fucking contract me, Red. Not me, not like this. Maybe we didn’t have much, but it meant something, asshole.” “I can pay.” Red said, and carefully avoided her eyes. This time, she let the quiet settle. When she spoke again, it was in the girlish squeal of her other persona: “A deal’s a deal, mister. You know that! Let’s go, but I go first!” Zippy practically bounced to her feet, kicking her discarded leg up and into the socket of the prosthetic with one smooth motion. She pulled a long, winding strip of orange fabric from the faux-iron coat rack, and wrapped it in an intricate pattern around her body. When she was done, she snapped the trailing end, and the whole thing vacuumed tight to her form, ending up as something like a cloak. She swung open the door to the foyer, and James stood a little too suddenly, pupils still stuttering and flexing from the recent BioOS activity. “What’s all this, then?” James said, motioning to Red’s apparently bafflingly intact limbs. “We gots a contract,” Zippy whispered with the pretend gravity of a child playing at doctor, “so now we have to go to Red’s house to play.” “You rotten little bastard,” James laughed at the bashfully shuffling Red, “you know how we work in the ‘Wells, yeah? Business is business. Any job is more important than any relationship, but you never mix a paycheck and your mates. The second you offer work to a friend, you ain’t friends anymore. You dumb sod; did you have the slightest as to what you were doing?”

“Red knows all the rules. I told him those already and he’s pretty good at the game already so let’s go already!” Zippy snapped the release and swung the front door open. Red looked out at impossible grass, at singing birds and flowering trees in a concrete stairwell. James whistled appreciatively: “You knew the etiquette and you still burnt her like that? You’re a bit of a bloody cunt, aren’t you mate?” Red had no rebuttal. “Got a search-alert hit while you two was making nice in there,” James addressed the impatiently bouncing Zippy, “a couple of ‘loggers up in Prince Johnny’s territory talking about headhunters renting access. Looking for a pretty serious runner, by the money of it. They were wearing blue suits, to hear tell.” Zippy’s eyes went wide, with mock or genuine astonishment, Red couldn’t tell. “So what?” Red asked, and bent to examine the grass between his fingers. The identification game he’d been playing in the parlor was still bouncing around his subconscious. “Sew buttons,” Zippy retorted, “use your noodle, Red. Don’t you ‘member your nursery rhymes? Blue suits and black boots mean…” “New recruits. Jesus. Oh, holy hell. You don’t think they were A-Gents?” Every joint in Red’s body locked at once. Zippy nodded, emphatically. And for a moment, nobody moved. “Welp, flitting about with our dicks firmly in hand doesn’t seem to be helping, so let’s try another tack,” James said and strode to the edge of Zippy’s lawn. He stared up at a solid mass of

steel, and banged once. A voice answered immediately, and James launched into the careful web of lies, bribes, threats and insults that negotiating for passage entailed. “Shredded circuit boards,” Red said. “What’s that, mister?” Zippy turned on her tensile heel. She bobbed slightly, up and down, like a buoy in gentle seas. “The grass,” Red continued, “couldn’t place it. It’s shredded circuit boards, isn’t it? The jellied kind, I mean. The living ones.” “Ayup,” she answered, “they’re bio-lodge-ick-al. I feed ‘em bugs sometimes and sometimes other things.” James was wrapping up a short spiel that mostly consisted of the word ‘bollocks’ and an elaborate pantomime of punches. When his argument was finished – the denouement consisting of a rapid series of furious uppercuts and mock sobbing – the man on the other side of the peephole stared quietly for a few seconds, then disappeared out of sight. A section of the wall swung back, crackled like electricity, and slid away. He and Zippy quickly ducked through, and Red turned to follow after them. Having only the one springboard leg, he noted, leant the girl a whimsical, comical gait. Almost like skipping.

Chapter Eleven

The man kicked lightly in his sleep, like a dog dreaming. It was precocious and pathetic, though the effect was somewhat diminished when QC realized it was most likely muscle spasms from an abiding gas-trip. She hardened her posture, forced alert tension into her joints, and sat forward on the edge of the dining bench, a mouthful of sour, stale, disassembler-laden spit at the ready. Sad cuteness aside, the muscle twitches meant he’d probably be waking soon. In full effect, a gas trip meant near-total paralysis. Presence tended to shut off the nervous system more completely than Voyeur, but any kind of movement was only possible in the ramping down phase of either - what they called ‘The Shame.’ It was Factory Girls like her that originally coined the term, to describe the leg of the trip just before the finish, when the posh, Presence-using attendees first started to disengage their genitals from one another and get used to the idea of behaving like human beings again. Eventually, the phrase carried over to the casual users too, though most didn’t have the funds for Presence, and certainly not to rent private viewing rooms at the Fights, so they had no idea what the actual significance of the word was. But the Shame only lasts for a few minutes, and always comes at the very tail end of a trip. The stranger would be coming up soon. QC made an ornate shape with her fingers - the index crossed under the middle and extended, the ring and pinky fingers splayed out wide - and pressed twice into her thigh. She waited a few

seconds, until the square patch of skin began to pulse a dull emerald, signifying confirmation. She extracted the double-sided needle/spoon that she kept threaded into her collar, and pricked at the center of the luminescent flesh. She spooned up a single droplet of blood, and deposited it on the sleeping man’s temple. He was lying on his side now, and any substantial movement on his part would shift the blood, thus tripping the Motion-Sensing nano-bots within. The MS weren’t an official strain; just leftovers that her regular flushes couldn’t catch. They might be going rogue inside her right now, tearing and mutating her cells from within. But if she was stuck with them, she figured she might as well use them, and had them wired to her black market control kit. There was no telling if there were enough still active in there to actually signal the alert to her BioOS, but a chance was better than nothing. QC stood and went to her toes, stretching her calf muscles. They had been seized up from stress, ever since the altercation in the alley, and were now starting to cramp. She alternated pointing her toes as she walked, and used the exercise to justify a bit of snooping into Red’s apartment. There were few adornments, aside from the factory default furniture and an Rx-feed terminal, but a small handful of personal belongings stood out against the faded plastic like beacons, and she homed in on each in turn: An old photograph, actually imprinted on dumb-paper, sat inside of a scratched chrome frame. An elderly man and a young boy (Red by the looks of that nose), beamed out happily. They were somewhere green, likely on mandated vacation to one of those community garden pads, back before they tore most of them down. The colors had all faded equally, save for the blues. Older printers did that – the chemicals they recycled to make the blue were quite a bit more resilient than the rest, and stood out with age. It made the scene look cold, austere. Red was smiling with abandon, like boys do, but a look of concealed nervousness hovered about him even then. The old man held Red tight by the waist; Red’s hand sat

uncertainly over the man’s shoulder, as if he had reached out for an embrace, then decided against it mid-photo. She set the picture back into the groove it had worn in the plastic counter -- it must have been moved often -- and picked up another. This one, a thin wooden frame (real wood? It felt oddly heavy and textured, but QC hadn’t seen enough actual wood to compare), held a picture of young Red viciously hugging the legs of an elegant but stern looking woman. His brow was knit. His eyes were closed. It was a posture of desperate, spontaneous affection on the child’s part. The woman was certainly striking, but seemed a bit too acutely aware of the angles of camera: Her neck was craned just so, her hair fell a little too perfectly over the one eye. The last picture was unframed. It was a stiff, smart-paper image of a stark-naked Red, much younger and leaner, and a pretty little teenage girl with a purple tri-hawk. They were standing atop a portable ‘feedpot in some slick corporate housing project -- all clear corners, bright storefronts, and wide, open windows. The girl looked to be trying to reason with Red, whose penis, ragingly erect, was midwag in the general direction of a confused and angry security officer. The officer’s liquid blackjack was also ragingly erect, and mid-wag in Red’s general direction. That dated it. The picture, and by extension Red, were both older than QC had thought. She’d only seen liquid blackjacks in dated video feeds. It was an inefficient and somewhat goofy weapon: A floppy, flaccid gelatinous tube that, upon contact with a solid object, snapped to rigidity. It was too close quarters for the liking of modern security forces, and the amplified impact of the whip-like motion was tricky to control. It sometimes ended up being lethal when it wasn’t meant to be. Corporate security used the less (physically) damaging microwave soundguns now, beaming their spoken commands to the inner ears of potential perps with a

crippling, unavoidable volume. QC held a thumb on the image until the info bubble popped up, and read the simple, unpracticed scrawl: “You only fall when you look down, Coyote.” A reference to something she didn’t get. She set the photo back down amongst the trio, and moved on. In the bare kitchen, the storage unit was beyond empty. A still-sealed instructional manual slipped from inside the door when she opened it, and floated to the ground. Not only was there no food in it now, but she doubted there ever had been. The only window in the apartment, a porthole set partway up the far wall, faced the vast interior chimney between the Four Posts. From it, she could only see brightly flashing signs advertising porn games through the ceaseless rain. Seated upon the sill was a fragile ceramic bird, its bright red paint now chipped and faded. She recognized it instantly. It was from the night they met. QC had just finished her second stint as a Factory Girl, still utterly convinced that she would make some quick, easy money and get out well before the damage could take - not like all those other, stupider girls. She literally tripped over Red at the top of the stairway leading back up and out of the backstage trough: He was sprawled on his belly directly in front of the exit, giggling happily at something cupped in his hands. She fought back the urge to kick his teeth in, and knelt down to look in his open palms instead. There, shielded from prying eyes, was the little red bird figurine. Red noticed her looking, and defensively shunted the bird away to his jacket pocket. He hopped quickly and with surprising agility to a standing position, straightened himself in a poor pantomime of righteous indignation, and cleared his throat.

“I’m QC,” she spoke, forcing more politeness than usual, so as not to jeopardize her new job, “you work here? Cause if not, you’re not allowed back here, you burnout fuckwad. The fights are over.” “I work here,” he answered, affronted, “I’m a beta-tester. Very important.” “Yuh huh,” she rolled her eyes, “what’s with the bullshit bird?” “Oh man!” His face instantly dropped all pretense and brightened with childish joy. He dug into his jacket pocket and held the bird up before her, too close for her eyes to focus on, “did you see this bird I got?” “Yeeaaah, just a minute ago? When you were laying on the floor like a cunt, and I almost broke my motherfucking neck?” “It’s the best!” He proclaimed. “You’re bleeding,” she noted the nasty cut, still oozing above his left eye. “Somebody tried to take my bird,” he said sadly, “back before I knew it was mine.” “You mean you stole it…” “No. It was mine from before, I just didn’t know it and the shop-keep didn’t know it either. I tried explaining, but he wouldn’t listen. He hit me in the head and I ran away.” “I have to ask: Are you high, or just…simple?” “FivepartsBZthreealphaAPSonenonbindingcatalyst,” he recited in a single monotone breath. “New mix. Trying to emulate the emotional mindset of late childhood. Is it working?”

“I…” QC reflexively started to form an orchestra of obscenity to unleash on the man, but his eyes glimmered with earnestness, and she opted instead for: “Yeah. Like a charm.” “Yes!” He exclaimed, pumping his fist. The two of them spent the rest of the night in a cramped, four-person micro-diner. The owner gave up on shooing them out to make room for paying customers, when it became obvious that there were none. He fell asleep instead, and snored loudly from a hammock behind the serving counter. As the drugs faded, Red matured (slightly) right before her eyes. Eventually QC found herself talking to a sincere, thankful, very sleepy and very hungover adult male. They’d been something like friends ever since. The nostalgia was sharply and abruptly broken by her Overdose Alarm. A deep blue light flashed in her peripheral vision, mirrored on her forearm panel. “OVERDOSE,” the sub-audible warning conducted the message along her large bones, “OVERDOSE OVERDOSE.” QC hadn’t been able to afford a full body workup for the black market control kit installed in her thigh, so she’d opted for catch-all integration with the official panel in her forearm instead. The official panel, annoyingly, only came with one default alert: The overdose alarm. It functioned as a universal notification for everything she did with her unsanctioned nanotech. In this case, it meant the drop of motion-sensor-containing blood that she’d left on the junkie’s forehead had moved. He was waking up.

She ran around the kitchen bar and stood immediately across from him, well within spitting distance. He was groaning and shifting now, the blood smeared halfway down his cheek. He coughed, turned, and threw a hand up over one ear. And that’s when she heard what had caused the man to stir in the first place: It was so faint from her place in the kitchen that she’d chalked it up to an electronic squeal; a high-pitched, struggling whine. But now she recognized it for what it was… A door-drill. Somebody was boring through the walls, into the vacuum chamber, trying to spring the seal. Somebody was breaking in. The junkie bolted upright, yelling a syllabic remnant of something he’d been saying while still inside the trip. It startled her into swallowing half of the weaponized saliva she was nurturing. She choked and gagged and gasped for air. “Introduce yourself!” The man demanded, spinning around on the bench, trying to take in his surroundings, “Inform me of my whereabouts at once! If I broke in here then I am terribly sorry!” “The fuck are you?” QC finally managed to ask, slurring her words around half a mouthful of spit, “and the fuck are you doing in Red’s house?” “Ah, we both want to know the same thing,” Byron conceded, just as an atmospheric pop shuddered through the walls. The first vacuum chamber had ruptured.

Chapter Twelve

“No fairsies!” Zippy squeaked, “we really got to get up in a big hurry an’ back when we killt that mean girl that kissed that other boy for you, you said you’d owe us one!” “Ah, Zippy, lass: I told you,” the unseen voice replied in a lilting, dancing brogue, “iss naught up’t me.” They’d progressed quickly enough through the fiefdoms immediately bordering Zippy’s own: A word from James or an eager smile from Zippy, and doors were thrown open for them. And if there was the slightest hesitation, Zippy signed a quick, two-pronged gesture to James, and he gleefully began cranking up something that looked like the access cover to a watermain: An oblong, flat black disc with a dense weave covering one side. When James finished spinning the oddly quaint, brass handle, it emitted a faint whine that quickly, exponentially built to maddening levels. If the stubborn inhabitant didn’t catch the hint and offer a string of rushed apologies in time, the scream terminated in a hollow concussive thump -- all shockwave and no explosion. The effects didn’t extend more than a paltry few feet before dissipating, but when James held the disc right up against something, that something ceased to exist in a large hurry. They progressed haltingly in this fashion for hours – cajoling, flattering, and only occasionally blasting down each gatekeeper– until they abruptly ground to a dead stop. Red could see no clear boundary demarcating one territory from another, but all of Zippy’s influence seemed to end at a

surgically precise, invisible line that ran between a little shop selling custom-built faux-leather jackets, and a wall comprised of an impassable network of interlocking rebar. Zippy was engaged in an absurdly complicated war of false personas with the unseen Irishman, while James and Red stood quietly to one side, competing to see who could ignore the other the hardest. James lost. “So what’s this all about then, mate? Never met a bloke what warranted A-Gent level heat before.” “They think I’m a drug-runner,” Red answered. “Yeh, I gathered that, thanks. What I’d like to know is: What drug’d you sprint off with that merits breaching the ‘Wells? That means a stack of bills, a serious headache and a knife in the back, more times than not. Penthouse ponces don’t deal direct down here: Usually just freeze your accounts, drop a few work-credits to some hard up junkies, and sit back and wait until you turn up starved or gutshot.” James spat unhappily in the corner of the cramped alley. To get there, they had crawled on their bellies through a living space that rose no more than two feet at its highest point, all while the residents obliviously tended to their lives. A young boy played a slow, prone game of tag with a simple aero-bot; a pretty little girl with a golden plate straddling her cheek and jaw hummed a chipper tune as she chopped tofu in a recessed kitchenette; an old man slumbered on his side, tucked away into an unlit corner and partially surrounded by a net of shimmering beads. The jacket-shop owner had extracted a small toll from them before unlatching the grate in his floor

and allowing them through, out into the tiny gap between territories. The alleyway was just wide enough to fit five or six people abreast, and just tall enough so they could all stand at a slight crouch. As soon as they’d set foot in the miniscule demilitarized zone, the shopkeep slid a clanking metal curtain down behind them, effectively sealing the space. Their four credits had only bought them a one-way ticket. “So what is it, mate? I’m dying over here – curiosity and the cat and all that.” “Isn’t information the best currency down here?” Red answered, giving James his best evil eye. The creeping sobriety inching outward from his gut had given him an anxiety headache, however, so it ended up as more of a desperate, epileptic wink. “Ha! Guess you’re not as stupid as you look,” James smiled and slapped Red on the shoulder. It sent aftershocks of migraine pain up his neck, and into his ears. “But you look really bloody stupid, so maybe that’s not saying much,” he added. “Barter then? You explain this utter quagmire of a situation you’ve thrown us headlong into, and I’ll give you something in return.” “Like what?” “What d’you want to know?” “What’s Zippy going to ask for in payment?” Red said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Shite!” James laughed earnestly this time, “but aren’t you a clever one? And here’s me, thinking you was just another tourist. You know the game, boy, I’ll give you that. So fine, let’s deal then: Who’d you bugger to end up here, how hard, and why didn’t you kiss ‘em nice after?”

“I do beta-testing for the fight labs, sometimes. They trust me with the high end stuff, because I keep mostly clean -- or at least I keep my addictions varied enough that they never get too tight a hold. And the only nano-strains I’ve got in my system are my BioOS, a rooted drug induction rig, and the visual recorders in my optic nerve to record trips.” “Bollocks,” James glanced down at Red’s bare forearm in disbelief. “You’re practically a virgin! No older strains? Something a flush might’ve missed?” Red shook his head. “No nightvision? No toys leftover from childhood? Light bots? Nerve stims?” James’ whole face was contorted with incredulity, “you’re telling me you never, not once -- not even as a stupid bloody teenager -- hype up on oxygenators before sex? So what, you just didn’t need the stamina boost? You were a bloody natural love machine from the get-go?” “Strains mess with the drugs.” “Yeh, but it’s usually nothing. You wouldn’t even notice it.” “It wasn’t worth muddling the effects, you know? The more ‘strains you introduce, the more you’re gonna wonder, even with the most basic ABC mix: How long, exactly, did that really last? Was the run-time fifteen seconds shorter this dose because of some malfunctioning strain pulling it apart, or did I just screw up the bonding? Is that bloody creep in my peripherals actually a side-effect of the mix, or is it my biotech interacting? Even as a kid, the drugs were always more interesting. It’s not worth gumming up the works.”

“Bloody hell,” James’ eyes widened as the realization hit him. “You’re a nerd! Hahaha! All this drama, and I’ve been sittin’ here thinking you’re some bigshot from upstairs. And you’re just a chem nerd!” Red considered taking offense, but the idea seemed to shake a large chunk of murderous edge off of James. So he shrugged, and smiled timidly instead. “No worries, mate. We’ve all got our quirks. I’m kind of an arms geek, meself. Designed this one, too” James said, hefting the significant weight of his shockwave disc up between them. “Based it on an old Nazi vortex cannon. They wanted to use it to take down aeroplanes. Never worked right back then, of course, and it’s still shite for range, but a few billion nano-fans in resonant sync does a little something at pointblank.” “That’s…great,” Red replied uncertainly, “I’ve never seen anything like it. Wouldn’t have guessed nano-tech by the weight of it, though. Why so heavy?” “It’s the intimidation factor, right? Every work-a-day bastard’s got himself a cheap, lightweight plastic somethin’ or another. It’s commonplace, is what it is. But when you bring out a cannon with some actual heft to it, people get scared. They figure it’s got to be some serious hardware to merit any kind of weight. Truth be told, I actually just lined the insides with lead. Totally functionless, but it makes it heavy as me mam’s teats.” “Clever,” Red admitted, mostly in the hopes that James would put it somewhere farther away from his face. “And the crank?” “Well that’s just a good time, innit? You ever cranked up anything? Bloody satisfying, that.”

They shared a laugh that lost momentum quickly. “All right, then: So you’re a beta-tester. Still doesn’t say what’s in those veins that’s so all-fired important…” “New brand of Presence,” Red replied, digging his nails into the ball of his thumb in a vain attempt to quiet the drumming in his skull. James whistled again, long and low. “Yeah, but that’s what I don’t get,” Red continued. “It doesn’t work. It’s supposed to make for substantially longer trips back, up to a week if you go by the numbers. But it didn’t do anything different. Certainly not enough to go murder-crazy over an accidental runner. You know I’ve only been outside of the NDA grid for twelve hours now? Who the hell hires anybody – much less A-Gents -- that quickly? Even the destination wasn’t anything special: We mostly use standard, non-title bouts while beta-testing. It’s boring, but a familiar scenario makes differences easier to spot. This was that Native American girl with the knife up against one of those old Mark II Security Bots. You ever seen that one? Next to that big old river?” James nodded. “The dose was supposed to put me back there for twenty-eight hours – just a bit longer than the max -- to see if it worked at all.” “And it didn’t?” James’ attention was diverted. He’d caught something in Zippy’s tone. Red couldn’t detect anything amiss in the callow tittering himself, but the lithe, red-headed man seemed to find reason for concern there.

“Not even a little. Eleven hours into the trip, and bam! I wake up down in the Blackouts being chased by a bio-hacking hick and his pet monsters.” “You sure you’re the only tester, then? Maybe they don’t know it doesn’t work yet, yeah? Or maybe it just didn’t work on yo-” James paused their conversation, and stepped silently up behind Zippy, listening intently. Red straightened his spine, pushed air into his chest, and thrust his arms back, trying, futilely, to relieve the mounting stress between his shoulder-blades. His spine cracked painfully instead, and the lungful of air left him in a rush. A swirling vertigo took him, briefly, and the atmosphere turned sour. Ah, hell. Spinal cracks and sharp breaths. What was he thinking? That’s Flashback 101. Red couldn’t decide if he should be apprehensive of the unknown chemical cocktail he’d just released into his own brainstem, or grateful that he might not have to spend the next few hours totally sober. Fortunately, the vertigo passed almost instantly, and the air quickly clarified in his nostrils. Almost…too much so. The mentholated sharpness in every breath -- it was like high-end Presence. But Gas doesn’t store in spinal fluids; it stores in fatty tissues. Can’t be Presence, but it feels like it. So what feels like Presence? Nothing, really. Kharon mixed with hallucinogens? Some kind of muted Euphoric?

Red shook the concern away – it was all moot now, and worrying about it would only lead to a turn when the flashback eventually took hold. Whatever takes you, takes you. Roll with it or get rolled. Red turned back to face the rebar forest where Zippy and James were arguing with the unseen Irishman, and stopped short. Standing kitty-corner from him in the little alley, not more than five feet away, was a twitching, gangly giant. He was seven feet tall if he was an inch, and hunched painfully against the low ceiling. Red glanced over at the metal curtain they’d come through, and found it still sealed. The rebar mesh was impassable for a normal person, but especially for a behemoth like this. He glanced around to confirm: There was no other possible entrance. Red screwed his eyes shut so hard that his ears popped, and sketched out what the corner of the alleyway would look like – sans colossus – when he opened them again. It was a tried and true lucid trip technique: Vividly picture normality, and when you open your eyes, it will be there. At least for a little while. But it wasn’t. When the optical noise cleared and Red could see again, the giant still stood opposite him, its body layered in a fine patchwork of thin, razor-cut scars. In place of a face, there was a midnight-black leather mask with no visible openings. A bright blue bull stitched across the forehead was its only ornamentation. The man was breathing heavily, his hands in constant motion. His featureless head seemed to somehow regard Red with equal parts lust, insanity, and confusion. A narrow slit cut itself free of the mask at mouth-level, and parted. When the brute’s jaw opened as if to speak, Red saw that there was only a whirling mesh of gears inside.

He took in breath to scream, but the sound was muted by a hot, flat thump from James’ vortex cannon. When the debris settled and he finally regained his balance, the alleyway was empty again. Roll with it or get rolled, Red told himself.

Chapter Thirteen

“Pardon me,” Byron, immediately chagrined by his initial outburst, more politely inquired after the unseemly young blonde standing over him: “I said, pardon me…” There was a thick, electric syrup building in his neck -- what Byron recognized as the early onset of a particularly vicious Gas-flu. The mix he’d just used must have been of considerably lower quality than he was accustomed to, as the pressure being exuded into his ears and behind his eyes was already becoming insufferable. He would require further chemicals, post-haste, with which to combat it. While he realized and understood that something untoward was currently happening to Red’s door, this hangover, if left unchecked, would quickly grow debilitating. He wouldn’t be much good for anything if that occurred, so Byron did the responsible thing, and took a moment to stumble over to Red’s Rx-feed. He slipped the plastic wafer into the slot there, and placed his palm against the cold metal dome, authorizing contact to his own BioOS. It thrummed eagerly as the factories and assemblers within spooled up, awaiting his request. He glanced sidelong at the spinning, cruciform of his personal operating system, and it obediently slid outward, across his eyes. It settled into place with an aquatic wobble, and the auto-context brought his Rx Home screen to the forefront. Byron focused on the vibrating apothecary bottle (the icon that he’d assigned to his custom Hangover Mix), and the hive of activity buzzed against his palm in response. When it ceased, he plucked the card out and thumbed the silken square emblazoned across its backside into his wrist. A small number ‘5’ pulsated softly next to the bottle. He focused on the number, and it blipped over to four. He felt a surge of solace course upward through his veins, settle the fury behind his

eyes and soothe the asperous path being traced across his spine. He sighed, and turned amiably to the woman. “What seems to be the trouble?” He tried again. She waved a dismissive hand at him, still focused on the strange warbling sound the door was emitting. The significance of it was lost on Byron, though his first impulse was, quite reasonably, to flee. Having his chemicals balanced again did wonders for his memory, however, and he recalled that Red’s quaint little flat did not, in fact, possess an alternate exit. So he sat contentedly on the living bench, crossed his legs at the ankle, and waited. He was still trying to reconcile his realities a bit, after stumbling up through the purple blur of the Gas trip. The transitional period was always filled with such muddled uncertainty – this world and that one tumbled, oozed, and conjoined in his thoughts. The tall man with the fragile legs, the screaming dinosaur, the rather shabbily dressed blonde girl, this blank hovel of Red’s which belonged where? It was like shuffling the pieces of two different puzzles and trying to reform them into one cohesive whole. Details flittered by, seized, and then became lost again, like waking from a dream. Byron opted instead to focus his efforts on a simple and easily executed task: He would inventory the apartment. He looked about him, once, and was done. Red’s home was a bare and cramped place. A series of photographs stood on the sill between main room and kitchen area. An empty glass sat on the table to the side of the bench, and a set of tousled jeans lay strewn across the bench and floor. There was one miniscule, sealed porthole in the kitchen, and no other windows.

Well, back to the matter at hand: The woman was swearing baroquely and with gusto as she paced through the threadbare apartment. Finding nothing of apparent use, she sat down, a bit too close for Byron’s liking, and began to press a confounding series of patterns into the patch of bare skin that her trousers left open on her upper thigh. When this was done, she extracted a delicate needle from the collar of her aged silver duster, and made a small incision in the now softly pulsing flesh. Byron’s stomach churned, but the drugs came down and quelled it instantly. The girl then carefully pooled a few drops of blood with the other end of the needle, which was apparently equipped with a miniature spoon, and stood. She walked the two paces to the doorway and deposited the droplets at precise points around its base. When she was done, she mumbled something to herself, tapped her thigh, pierced the flesh, and repeated the whole process. Byron reasoned that the woman was either activating some kind of black market nanotech, or else was completely insane and simply did not respond to pressure well. Something suddenly occurred to him, and then un-occurred to him just as quickly. He seized on the faint outline of an idea: He was in Red’s home, that much was clear, but that struck him as a rather odd place to be. The only contact he had with Red was to commission and retrieve his custom blend of Presence, but if that was his purpose here, then where was Red? Why had he dosed up on his dealer’s living bench, instead of retreating to the atrium of his own home, as was customary? And why on Earth was he emerging from his trip with the Gas-flu of an inferior mix? Trying to force the memories seemed to provoke the headache again, however, and it promptly began to chew through the alchemical fog. So he dropped the matter for now, and redoubled his efforts with the girl instead.

“Pardon me, ah…girl? Strange girl? If you could inform me as to our current predicament, perhaps I could go about making myself useful…” “I doubt it. You talk like an asshole, and I can’t think of a use for an asshole right about now. If I need to shit something out, I’ll give you a holler, ‘kay?” The girl snapped, then turned away and smeared a thin line of blood across the upper lip of the doorframe. “Good lord,” Byron stammered, “I meant no offense, I assure you. I’m afraid I’m still just a bit befuddled from my recent chemical excursion. I intended nothing untoward, and indeed, only wish to help with…whatever this activity that you’re engaged in happens to be. Fixing the door, I assume?” The girl laughed sharply, then paused to stare at him in bewilderment. “That’s a door drill, jackass. As in ‘a drill built for people to bust vacuum seals and open doors that aren’t theirs.’ When they break through the last chamber down here, the vacuums up top will send this thing flying right open, and whoever’s out there, will be coming in here. Understand?” Her tones were sarcastic and clarion, as if speaking to a particularly obstinate child. “I assume they’re not here to suck our dicks and pat our little asses dry, on account of all the breaking and entering, so sure: You want to help? Here’s the plan: What I’m really, really hoping is that the impact from that door flying open sets off the pyrotechnics my ‘bots are building on top of the frame here,” she said, gesturing to the trail of blood she’d smeared across the upper lip of the door. “If – and that’s a big ‘if’ – they pull enough sulfur, magnesium or phosphorous to build anything explosive and if – huuuge fat fuck of an ‘if’ – they’re even still functional, they’re

still just built for show. They’re not gonna do shit in the way of damage, but maybe they’ll scare whatever son of a bitch is walking through them enough that they miss these…” She jogged the few steps to the kitchen bar and gathered up the photos there, then returned and spilled them in a heap before the entryway. They landed atop the blood spots Byron had seen her placing on the floor, earlier. For good measure, she flicked another dollop across them. “I have a strain of assemblers turning the silicon in this pile of sentimental bullshit into an industrial grade lubricant right now. Those I know work, at least. I used ‘em today back at the fights.” “You’re a Factory Girl!” Byron exclaimed happily, cheered that the two of them at least had a location in common. “Do you work at the Hangars? Why, I’ve been there just this evening!” She glared at him, blinked twice, and then continued. “So if God suddenly picks this moment to unexpectedly smile on my poor and well-fuckingtrodden ass, then whoever’s on the other side of that door is going to come in here blind and dazed, slip on this pile, and go careening right towards you. That’s how you can help: Knock him aside, then charge out there and shove through the others, if there are any, so I can slip past you all and run way the fuck away as hard as I can, forever and ever. Amen.” “And what do I do then?” Byron smiled back at her, glad to have a task to busy himself with. “I don’t know, die? I fucking put them off guard and got you out the door. You take it from there.”

“Hmm, well: I’m not much for confrontation, I have to admit. I’m afraid I don’t clock a lot of inbody hours these days. I suppose…” Byron stared at the ceiling and glued scraps of thought together until they resembled a whole: “Yes. Yes I suppose I shall run away also.” “Solid,” the woman replied, made a masturbatory gesture with her hand, and then turned away from him. The pair of them fell silent, and stared grimly at the whinnying portal, waiting for that last, fateful pop to sound. She was poised like a sprinter, centered low, with her partially bare leg thrust forward. Byron noticed that the cuts there had already coagulated, sealed, and vanished. The medic ‘bots in her control panel worked, at least. That was a heartening sign. The whine changed in pitch, contacting some material of a different density, then dropped to a low, shuddering growl. “Won’t be long now,” she warned him. He beamed pleasantly back at her. “So you probably want to stand up,” she clarified, “for the charging?” “Oh yes! Brilliant.” Byron stood and brushed himself down. Then he unsteadily bent himself toward the door, adopting what he hoped was appropriate charging posture: Shoulder lowered forward, head tucked against his collar bone. There was a sharp suck, and the panel flung itself violently upward into its housing. A stocky fellow in an elegant, dark blue suit, complete with top hat, stood in the doorway. His features were an unceasing, twisting blur, as if somebody had pressed their thumb into the photograph of

his face, and smeared the ink there. The byproduct of a very expensive identity concealment system, Byron recognized; he sometimes saw its ilk employed by security at the galas he was irregularly required to attend, up in the Penthouses. The suited man, for his part, seemed utterly unimpressed by the tiny spark and gentle puff of smoke that followed. Byron saw his cue, belted out what he had always imagined a barbaric yawp to sound like, and thundered forward. Just after his first step was placed, it occurred to him that the blonde girl had not outlined the scenario that presented itself now: Namely that the man, not blinded in the least by light or smoke, would be standing and calmly considering them from outside of the apartment. Nor had she foreseen that Byron, now not having a stricken, fallen intruder to tread upon, would be himself charging through the industrial lubricant on his way out the door. But it was too late for reconsideration now: His leading foot was already hydroplaning on the greasy remnants of an old photograph, separating his legs painfully, and sending him into an unplanned lateral split. Byron felt a sickly tear in his groin as he slid downward and forward into the man’s torso. He involuntarily hugged the fellow about the waist as he fell, and futilely tried to regain his footing in the thin puddle of lubricant. Though not distracted by the lightshow or felled by the grease, the fancifully dressed man did seem slightly taken aback by the pale, ungainly gentleman who greeted him at the door, then dropped into the splits and glided across the foyer to hug him gently around the midsection. And that was enough of a distraction for the girl to make her move. She leapt forward, using her momentum to forcefully expel a mouthful of spit into the man’s vague, sketchy features, before crashing into the awkwardly entwined pair, sending them both sprawling. The stocky fellow

screamed, and scrabbled backward into his companion’s legs (there seemed to only be the one, fortunately: Another unfocused head and gold-filigreed top hat with the body of a graceful, slender young woman). The blonde girl seized Byron by the back of his shirt collar and hauled him up into a crouch, then launched into a dead sprint down the constricted, twisting corridors. Byron’s feet, still greased, allowed him to slide frictionless behind her as she fled, all the while stuck in a cramped, tense squat. The rotund gentleman was still prone and flailing all about the cramped hallway, pawing at the obscured area where his face should be. His female partner frantically shoved at him, trying to pass and give chase, but the fellow grasped and clawed at her, and she could not extract herself from him. She could only watch helplessly as the blonde girl disappeared in the distance, pallid gentleman in tow. Byron, at a loss as to the proper etiquette of fleeing a crime scene while skating backwards, timidly waved to his fallen attackers.

Chapter Fourteen

Red scrambled over the shattered fiber-board, scraping the insides of his thighs as he went. He felt a trickle of hot blood well outward from the point of contact, and begin to itch its way down his leg. An obese man with a long chemical burn across his forehead was regaining his feet just as Red crowned the wall. The man’s eyes went wide, and his broad, tattooed jowls flopped thickly as he waddled across the room to retrieve a ridiculously over-sized sword from its scabbard. Red ducked under the first swing, and his panicked yelps managed to draw James’ attention back to the apartment that he and Zippy had just torn open, and already moved on from. James caught Zippy’s eye, then tossed his head derisively back to the cowering Red. She gave a curt nod, and James reluctantly began digging through his canvas bag. The man’s blade had caught in the paneled ceiling on his last upswing, and he was wheezing heavily with the effort of extracting it. He had Red completely cornered inside of a small makeshift shower/office. With no exits and the man towering above him, Red could only wince at each huffing yank, wondering which would bring the blade free and crashing down into him. He closed his eyes. And something wet splashed across his face. Oh god, he thought, I had so much love to give. Then he felt the wall behind him shudder, and gently cease to exist. When he opened them again, the fat man still loomed over him in his stained underwear and red suspenders, sword lodged firmly in the panels above, but now his jaw was slack, and his eyes were unfocused. His knees wobbled, shook, then gave way. He sat down heavily, and began to cry.

Red gingerly twisted around to look behind him, and found the entire wall missing: Not broken, not shattered into debris, but simply vanished. Streams of glistening gunmetal gel congealed all across the floor, the fat man’s back, and – as the hand he’d raised to his cheek and brought back sticky would indicate – his own face. Red looked to James for explanation, but the spritely man simply winked, straightened his tie, and turned away without comment. When he reached his bag, he tossed in something that looked like a pint glass bolted to a showerhead, and picked out the disc-shaped fan. Red heard the cyclical ratcheting of a crank being turned, a building whine, felt a hot thwack, and the next apartment was breached. Zippy was up and through the opening before the ringing in Red’s ears had even started. Through the rapidly fading tinnitus, he heard a crack and a short, sharp scream. “Red rover, red rover,” Zippy called out, laughing. James strode back and dropped the fan into Red’s lap. It was warm to the touch, and hummed pleasantly, like a distracted schoolteacher. He plucked something else out of the canvas bag, kicked at it once, and then walked away. Red took the hint. He stood shakily, and the movement sent the hardened gel, now brittle, flaking off onto the ground. Stepping gently over the weeping, suspendered, would-be samurai, Red hefted James’ disc fan and slung the bag over his own shoulder. Working the crank as he went, he followed them through the irregular opening at the far wall. He’d barely touched his foot down when a wave of crackling ozone broke against him. When he looked up, a good section of the building seemed to be politely deconstructing itself, right in front of James. A panel of grey, diamond-thatched metal unstuck itself from the plastic behind it and rolled away; a pin-up smartposter of A-Cat, the goat-like avatar of a popular

simporn actress, blinked in mid-loop, froze, and then disintegrated; a large bedframe (that apparently served as the keystone of the structure), collapsed at its vertices and fell into a pile of unattached beams. James reached out a hand and lightly pushed the entire neighboring apartment complex over. Zippy pressed down on her springboard leg and vaulted through the wreckage, already rapidly subduing the few shocked tenants not trapped in the rubble. James threw a slatted tube back at Red, and said: “The fan now. That’s number three, going forward. All right, mate?” He held up three fingers, and Red obediently tossed him the hefty black disc. They moved at a brisk jog, punctuated by brief pauses every few feet for James to devastate another wall, security gate, or entire building. Red learned the shorthand quickly: One finger meant the slatted tube and its chemical wave, which seemed to unbind the molecular structures of flimsier nano-materials. It had a row of blinking red lights along the barrel that counted down to a solid green square, indicating when it was charged. Two meant the pint-glass, with its thin handle and translucent reservoir. Red could see the liquid sloshing around inside the clear plastic when it was primed; it glimmered dully, like the reflection of lights in water, and it apparently melted steel into a rapidly-coagulating paste. The fan, with its primitive crank, was three fingers, which James mostly used to blow out fiber-board and other, more slipshod barriers. Finally, four indicated a chunky cube with a handle on either side and a cone-shaped depression in the center. It blasted forth a wave of inaudible sound that resonated with the strong, cheap graphene panels favored in sturdier constructions. Whenever James twisted the handles together, a loud silence pervaded, as if somebody had forcefully extracted all sound from the room with a giant syringe. A small ripple would appear on the targeted panel, and echo outward from the impact point like a

pebble dropped in a still pond. On its rebound, the ripple met its own wake, and the nighinvincible graphene layers unraveled themselves like a deck of shuffling cards. Red dutifully reloaded, recharged, and swapped out the appropriate weapons as requested. Eventually, the repetition and low grade shock settled like dust over the logic center of his brain, and the entire battle became an exercise in Zen. Red always kept an eye on the next obstacle, guessed at the material, and selected the appropriate weapon (most times without need of James’ count). He measured his steps carefully, modulating his pace so that he met up with James and Zippy just after they’d breached. James would toss the weapon back, Red would hand over the next, and then James and Zippy would sprint on to the next obstruction. In this careful and even manner, Red was able to avoid any pause in his own forward momentum, whereas the other two sped through openings and staggered to a stop at each blockade. While James and Zippy fought with stragglers and pierced fortifications, Red strolled up the stairwell city at a leisurely pace, juggling tubes and squares in slow motion as the world disintegrated around him. And if there were oddities, disturbing incongruities in the storm swirling around his calm center, they were lost on Red. If, say, a particular giant, machine-faced sex-maniac walked right through the floor in front of him; or if Zippy and James seemed oddly unperturbed as they strode past a ring of dark-skinned children tossing a human head back and forth; or even if a shaggy, horned animal the size of a small house crouched on the landing between stairwells, its hollowed out guts containing only gleaming steel and a cache of bored looking commuters -- well, Red was too busy being serene to acknowledge them. He walked peacefully onward, the one ordered spot in a world of chaos, and politely handed destruction to a skinny little redheaded man in a tweed jacket.

Step, step, pass tube with right hand, step, receive square with left hand, step, shuffle fan between forearms and crank, step, crank, step crankstepcrankstep“Oi! Careful there, mate. You trying to blow a new hole in me arse?” James snapped at Red as he, still lost in his Focus Fugue, gently chucked the vortex cannon at the man’s turned back, and then walked forward into him. “What? Is it over?” Red shook his head, trying to clear the spatial dislocation from his mind. His hands were still outstretched toward the glowering James, as if waiting for a returned weapon. “The part where we blow the bollocks out of a quarter mile of residential property is over, yes.” James answered, yanking the bag from Red’s shoulder. From a zipped-up pocket on its interior wall, he pulled a weapon that Red had not been factoring into the rotation: The shotgun-grip attached to the blender. The one James had used to rescue Red from the janitor’s monster, what seemed like a lifetime ago. The one that turned human skin into a bomb. James shoved Red aside, turned, and pointed it back toward the melted slag they’d just emerged from. A pair of identical twin girls stood just opposite the wreckage, blinking back at him in their ratty pajamas. “I don’t think they’re gonna give you any trouble,” Red noted. “Others’ll be coming, right soon. Only reason they didn’t tear us apart up ‘till now was the surprise factor. We kept our speed up and stayed ahead of the gathering tide of bloody murder coming our way. Now we’re stopped.” He motioned back towards Zippy, not taking his eyes off

the space where the girls were still standing, rubbing at their eyes and goggling at the goo that used to be their bedroom. Zippy was issuing calm assurances and cooing sweet nothings to the far side of an immense metal gate. It stretched to fill the entire height and width of the stairwell it was mounted in – the only structure Red had ever seen to do so. The gate had a presence to it, a sort of indolent defiance that told Red it was actual, ancient, heavy steel – not the thin panels nested between nano-tube mesh that he was accustomed to. From the general atmosphere of fear, tension, and annoyance, Red got the sense that they wouldn’t be forcing their way through this one. There were actual stakes to these negotiations. “We blast our way into this one and we’ll get blasted right back out,” James filled in for him, “this here’s King Big Dick’s territory. Nasty bloke, if a bit…unsubtle.” Somewhere below, muffled by the vertical distance, Red could hear a growing static of pained and angry shouts. “No, silly! You’re being silly. You’re the one who’s all silly right now! Of course we wouldn’t be any trouble.” Zippy’s saccharine pleading wasn’t going well. Whoever was on the other side of that door was less than enthused at the prospect of letting armed maniacs inside. Snaps and flashes of memory seeped back into Red, as the last vestiges of his Focus Fugue sloughed away. He tried to gather any kind of relevant information from the vast whorl of violence and confusion that the last few hours had been. A series of still images came to him, like portraits, or frozen landscapes: Zippy skipping beneath a large black web that held an entire sleeping family, all plugged into a mass-inhaler system and dosing up together. A cartoonish

animatronic octopus caught halfway between the wave from James’ sound cube and an unraveling wall. A broken vase (a real one, ceramic) shattered into disorderly fragments. Must’ve been worth a fortune. What was it doing down here? A screaming Asian man. A woman on the toilet. A giant. A horned beast full of passengers. Dark-skinned children, their flesh dissolving into metal, catching and tossing a desiccated human skull… “What was the deal with those kids?” Red asked suddenly, the disturbing sight leapfrogging its way up his mental queue. “What kids? The twins? I don’t know, mate. The things creep me out too,” James answered, his unblinking eyes locked on the girls. “No, the little kids with all the metal on their skin. And the…the skull? The severed head? Did that not stand out to you? Is that just normal down here? Another day in the neighborhood, just me and my trusty severed head?” “What the bloody Christ are you talking about?” “You saw them. You had to see them. The two of you walked right by them. They had a kind of liquid metal spilled on them, and they were playing hot potato with a rotting skull.” “You’re twisted off your arse right now, aren’t you?” James finally broke eye contact with the girls and stared over his shoulder at Red.

“No! Well, yes. But this really doesn’t feel hallucinatory. There’s none of the euphoria or suspension of disbelief, you know? This feels alert. Sharp. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it feels like Presence. You seriously didn’t see those kids? Or that sex-giant? What about the big cow…vehicle…thing?” “Good God’s Arsehole! You’re out of your friggin’ gourd, mate. We’re lucky you didn’t blow us all to hell.” “Yeah…” Red reluctantly admitted the possibility, “I guess so. I did crack my back down there and got kind of a rush. Felt like uppers, which seemed useful at the time, so I didn’t make a thing out of it.” James chuckled in disbelief, but said nothing. Red could pick out distinct voices now, welling up from the smoking tunnel they’d left in their wake. “Thank you, mister! You’re the bestest!” Zippy squeaked, and hopped up and down, gleefully clapping. The gargantuan steel slab began to shake, and the ground shook with it. When it finally thumped and abruptly withdrew, Red’s subconscious shuddered in horror. Something that big and heavy should not move: It made the very walls that hemmed in his world seem unstable. Before the surge of panic had a chance to fully latch onto him, though, a dingy mound of rags limped into view and beckoned them all inside. Zippy walked through first, her body language all purity and earnestness, like a dog greeting its returning owner. Red followed clumsily, the soreness and stress already settling around his bones. James came last. He inched carefully backwards over the threshold in short, even steps. His weapon never wavered from the twin girls, one of whom was

now holding up a primitive camera. Just before the colossal door sealed shut behind them all, she depressed the button, and an antiquated flash kicked out. Red smiled reflexively.

Chapter Fifteen

“This is wrong,” QC said, pushing the little Asian boy down and stepping up onto his back. He stood, heaving her upward, until her palms slapped against the lowest rung of the access ladder. “Hm, indeed. This does feel a tad…impolite.” Byron tried to courteously mount the human footstool, but simply could not find a genteel way to climb another human being. The boy grunted and heaved again, tossing Byron the few feet he needed to take hold. “Impolite? What? Oh, the kid? No, fuck that kid. Fuck him. Hey kid,” she shouted downward, motioning to her own eyes to draw his gaze. When she had it, she reiterated: “Fuck you, kid.” He held up two skinny middle fingers in response. After a silent beat, they both laughed. “That’s Chen,” she clarified to Byron, “he doesn’t need your shitty pity. Unless you have a four foot vertical leap, nobody passes this way without paying his toll. He banks more credits in a day than I do in a week. I was talking about us. Our fuck-stained situation. It’s all wrong.” QC spat the words into the greasy air around her. “What ah…sh…sh…situation?” Byron stammered, sounding a bit too far below her. She halted her own ascent and peered back down at him between her legs. He had caught the bottom rung and held fast there, but apparently lacked the upper body strength to pull himself up the remaining distance. So he dangled helplessly, all limbs and apologies, as the boy struggled to push his feet upward from below. After a few desperate shoves, Byron seized the next highest rung and, by virtue of stepping directly in the middle of the already pug-nosed boy’s face, managed to secure an unsteady foothold. “Jesus Ass Christ, Byron,” QC swore. “Well, I’ve made it!” He protested, his tone equal parts apology and indignant excuse. “I’m not exactly the athletic type, now am I? Huffing Gas and snuggling up in a cozy recliner has many virtues, madam, but ‘working the biceps’ does not number among them.” “If you can’t keep up,” she began harshly, but became too aware that she was attempting to yell at a man while staring downward past her own ass, and tempered her tone: “Just pick up the pace, okay Byron?” He nodded grimly, and returned the brunt of his focus to his clumsy hands and the working of the ladder.

We got away, QC tried to reason with herself. It wasn’t graceful or perfect – fucking junk nanotech – but we did it. We’re gone. Whatever the Gentlemen were there for, it wasn’t wetwork, so we’re probably okay. Everything’s fine, just take a breath. Take it easy. They don’t want you dead; they didn’t even fire on you. They didn’t fire at all. Nothing. No stunners, no cripplers, didn’t even raise an alarm. They just watched us run. We burned an A-Gent, and there was zero retaliation. What the fuck? “Son of a whore,” QC coughed, having reached the top of the ladder and poked her head up directly into the grimy, pork-tinged exhaust vent of a micro-diner. Byron was too focused on his own limbs to notice in time, and inadvertently climbed his head right into her behind. He raised a hand to her thigh by way of apology, but insecurity took him, and it fluttered away before making contact. QC squinted against the warm specks of grease spattering her face, hefted herself over the edge, and rolled to one side. She took a deep breath, dug her fingernails into her palms, and pocketed the rage for later. She heard Byron sneeze and exclaim a few feet behind her, and then they were up and moving again. “The motherfuckers let us go,” QC finally spoke, after the red had gone out of the edges of her vision. “I know! Isn’t it lovely? That puts us plumb out of this whole drama then.” They had reached the end of a short chain of shanty roofs, and Byron was nervously eyeballing the space below: A crowded catwalk, lined with blackmarket pharmacies and unlicensed Gas dens. QC tried to read his expression, but couldn’t decide if he was anxious about the potential for unwanted human contact, or excited at the throbbing hum of the drug commerce. “No. Pry open that shithole brain for one second and process it: They weren’t robbers. Those were Gentlemen – not a knock-off gang or some cheap contractor doing a bad impression – real, honest-tofuck A-Gents. You saw Red’s ratnest apartment; wasn’t a damn thing in there worth a palmful of crap to an actual A-Gent. So that means they were there for Red, only Red wasn’t there for them. Get it?” “I’m not stupid,” Byron chuffed, then added: “But no. I’m afraid I don’t.” “You find some bitches crashing in your mark’s apartment, you grab ‘em, you torture ‘em. You use ‘em to find the fucking mark and burn ‘em when you’re done so they can’t warn him.” “Good lord!” Byron gasped with naïve horror. “What you do not do, is just let them awkwardly jog away holding onto each other’s asses.” She gave Byron an eye, letting the last words burrow into him until he blushed. “Unless,” She continued uncertainly, “unless…shit.”

“What? Whatever is the matter?” QC stomped in frustration as the realization hit her, “Unless you’re gonna follow ‘em. Let them lead you to the mark.” “They’re after us still?!” Byron flailed and goggled back at the top of the empty ladder, twenty meters back, as if expecting them to come barreling up it any second. “Nah. That’s for the low-rents. That’s chumpwork. If you got the means, why take the risk? A strain of tracker ‘bots. Pok pok pok,” QC mimed a submolecular blowgun at Byron. To his credit, he flinched with every imaginary blow. “We wouldn’t even feel it. Then they just wait for us to run right into Red’s loving motherfucking arms, which, to be honest, is kind of what I’ve been doing. Then whoosh – they hose the three of us down with phosphorous. Problem solved.” “They…they would do that?” “Well, yeah. I mean, if they’re on a budget. Phosphorous is cheap and quick. Unless they really wanna invest in making us hurt. Then who knows? Probably a quarter of Industry is up there right now, just churning out new and interesting ways to wreck somebody until they shit brain matter.” “But…but what if we cooperate with the utmost urgency and earnestness?” Byron quailed. “Come on,” QC said, ignoring his pleas and pushing her way into the crowd. “We gotta find us some Christian Scientists.” “Come again?” Byron called after her. He attempted to occupy the wake she left behind her as she shoved, slipped, and swore her way through the drug-addled press. “Free purification stations,” she explained. And what comes after that? If there’s one thing the Gentlemen got, it’s money. Those shitty free flushes the Scientists give with every pamphlet download won’t do jack against high end tech like that. No, what we really need to do is get somewhere I can think; just pull my dick out of the breeze for a damn second. Take stock of what I got. What I got? That’s a joke: Some faulty nanotech, a mouthful of bad omens, and a pasty man-child tugging at my fucking apron-strings. Fuck fucking fuck fuckbiscuits. That’s great, girl. You’re doing great: No plan, no idea, no resources. Just well-funded enemies and handicaps on every side. God dammit, knock that shit off. What are you gonna do, sit down and cry about it? Moving is safer than not moving, and shitty flushes are better than none at all, right? QC slipped sideways, ducked under drunkenly swinging arms and stepped over bodies in varying states of overdose. She flicked her eyes upward, squinted, and dragged them back down. The dancing penguin of her OS idle state gyrated away. She formed the word ‘nav’ in her forebrain, and a dense tangle of strings filled her vision. She glanced around, looking for a business name to identify her location (like hell she was turning on locational software now,) and plunked it down on the map, forming an anchor.

She searched for the nearest Home of Greater Science -- the charitable terminal hubs Christian Scientists like to set up in the seedier chemical districts -- and sure enough, a dull blue line shimmered into life on the ground before her. The OSPenguin danced up and down its length. “Foot traffic is high!” It squeaked, “Two hours, walking!” Not the way she walked. QC mentally flipped away, and let muscle memory overtake her consciousness. Everything in her funneled down into simple route-finding, picking out and identifying open avenues: A space between two men there, closing. Through. Fat lady walking slow, right behind that skinny guy moving fast. They’ll leave a space between them in just…a few…there. Old dude too hammered to do much more than sway. Bump him back into the den and you’ve got a free ten feet past him. Look: An addict stumbling in line at Amphetamine stand, the people behind giving him a wide berth. She stepped up onto the corrugated metal platform, ignoring the offended jabber of the vendor inside, and took two quick paces past the low tables, with their stacks of illicit Rx Cards. She was nearly out the exit on the opposite side, but a thin woman suddenly zipped up and blocked the way, already fumbling her newly-purchased card into the ‘feed tube. QC pushed her, walking the line between accidental bump and offensive shove, and used the momentum to take a skipping hop over two unconscious girls couldn’t be more than ten years old between them. She spotted an inexplicably empty stretch of catwalk just beyond the smart-glass partition, and quickened her pace. Jesus, would you look at this? All this open space – it’s unheard of. QC glanced around and confirmed: Every other shop around her was set right up flush against the translucent cylindrical walls of the catwalk. And there were other shops were set up against them, and others, and on and on. Sometimes the only way to reach a less trafficked business was to push through backdoors, crawl beneath stoves, or squeeze through tiny portals carved into the foundations of other, more recent establishments. It’s like the marketing meme says: “If you can reach it, it’s not worth going to.” And in QC’s experience, that was mostly true: The Choking Tiger, her favorite bar, was basically just the repurposed husk of an ancient family aircar, meant to comfortably seat four back in its day. It was only accessible by politely asking the owner of an armored-clothing boutique to open his trapdoor, then shuffling through the crawlspace into a pirated BioOS shop, stepping through the slatted doorway in the west wall and finally, carefully edging around the white hot friction burn of one of the big water recycling tubes. All that demand, all that desperate scramble for space, and yet here was easily a twelve foot long expanse of virgin catwalk wall. It fired every alarm in QCs gut, but too late: Her momentum propelled her forward, and before she could will her legs to cease, she was striding confidently into complete nothingness. Vertigo took her by the throat and hurled her to the ground.

She traversed the void daily; trundling across the interior chimney of the Four Posts on ramshackle carts, wobbly ziplines and shaky walkways - but those only looked down at more catwalks, other carts, ziplines, and walkways. On most days, an errant glance into the chimney below yielded only a dense patina of cables, plastic sheeting, glass and steel. But not this window; not this clear plastic floor. This was a viewport with a rare and unobstructed view straight down into the yawning abyss. Thousands and thousands of stories below her scratching hands and uselessly scrabbling feet, and there was still only blackness. As far as QC was concerned, she lived her life on solid ground. She was never more than a dozen feet above some kind of structure below – even if she was zipping across the chimney holding onto a bundle of coathangers slung over a cable of braided artificial hair; even if she knew, objectively, that a fall might send her careening off the objects below and bouncing to her certain death – there was some kind of god damn something below. And now some asshole, some clueless fucking bureaucrat who’d doubtlessly never set foot below Industry, who probably thought a transparent catwalk floor would be a fucking tourist attraction, had just ripped back the curtain and exposed the awful truth behind the fiction. An existential shockwave ebbed up behind her eyes. She willed a leg to move, but it merely wobbled in response. Her cartoon OSPenguin danced coyly at the edge of her vision, beckoning her to continue. “Foot traffic is high!” The cutesy text wiggled above its head, “One hour, forty five minutes, walking!” “What seems to be the problem?” Byron’s voice shattered the wall of screams building inside her head. He nudged her gently from behind and every nerve in her body jumped, ran through with electricity. When she merely whimpered in response, her eyes gone discoid, still locked unwaveringly on the abyss, he finally seemed to get it. He pulled her face up toward his, buried it in his shoulder, and walked the two of them onward, traversing the space with no difficulty. Back in the press beyond the empty space, QC tried to stumble to a vacant corner, but found none. She ended up retching onto an unconscious junkie’s face. A man took her lead when she was finished, stepped up to replace her, and began his own vomiting. A small queue of queasy-looking drug fiends began to form behind him. “How the fuck did you…?” QC motioned back, without looking, toward the horrible absence. “Hm? Oh, open spaces don’t bother me in the slightest. We have several open-air verandas, up at my father’s manse,” he answered sheepishly, “He calls his office ‘the atrium.’ The floor is made of glass, there.” QC shuddered, and tried to resume her pathfinding. But she was shaken internally in a way she could not admit, and could spot no more openings. She resorted to shoving, swearing, and begging her way through the throng, like all the other junkies. “I’ll level with you,” QC said, when they’d finally wrestled their way into a narrow alcove. “I’ve got nothing after we hit the CS purifiers. And it’s not like that’s gonna do hot Jack to cold shit anyway. With Scientist’s tech how it is, you’d be lucky to flush a viral magazine preview.”

“Well, I’m clearly out of my preferred element,” Byron answered, after a long and exaggeratedly thoughtful silence (he actually put four knuckles to his chin in a perfect pantomime of careful consideration.) “But it seems to me as though Red is at the crux of our current dilemmas. So it stands to reason that the only answers to said problems would also stem from that same source.” “Bullshit,” QC tensed her leg muscles, using their strength to drag herself up from a cramped crouch, “you just want more drugs.” “Oh, indeed! Indeed. However, in this case the addict also speaks with the voice of reason: You said they were tracking us, correct? And I believe you also mentioned some rather awful things they would do to us in the pursuit of our mutual friend, should tracking fail? Perhaps our only option, then, is to ensure that it does not fail.” “Find Red for them and hope they only gank his spindly ass? That’s cold, Byron.” “Do not mistake me, madam: I am actually rather fond of the silly fellow, and there is no equal for his mixing talents. But I am rather fonder of my own relatively pristine, unburned self. Are you not?” QC’s brows knit in quiet consideration. She went silent for a moment, then spat resolutely and turned back to Byron. “Shit, maybe they’ll be grateful. Maybe there’s even a reward. So okay, we go with your plan: How do we find Red? I only know him as the adorably wasted asshole that chases imaginary squirrels outside my work every other day.” “My dear, quality custom Gas-mixing is a small world. There are a billion hacks in the industry, to be sure, but simply judging by the quality of his work, I sense that Red has some amount of pre-eminence in his field. It should only be a matter of finding another quality mixer, and asking them. Politely, or with ah…shall we say, salivary conviction?” He gestured at the discolored spot where QC’s spit had landed. “Somebody must have fucked my frontal lobe, because you’re making a lot of sense all of a sudden. But I don’t know many mixers, and not one of them worth a damn. You?” “Madam,” Byron answered in mock offense, “what kind of junkie would I be, to have only one source? There’s this wonderfully terrifying faux-colored fellow I know down below. He operates out of a gauche little barge in the Reservoir. A fellow Biographiliac, come to think of it, though he’s only into these vulgar twentieth century aborig-” QC held up a hand to silence him while she mentally calculated the likelihood of their various increasingly horrible fates. “Shit. It’s a terrible plan,” she finally shrugged. “Irrefutably,” Byron nodded with genuine enthusiasm. “I’ve got nothing better,” she added.

“Indisputably,” he countered. “Shut the fuck up, Byron,” QC said, and raised one foot to push off the wall. She rolled her shoulders, exhaled the tightness in her chest, and slipped back into her swagger. She spotted an opening almost immediately, and slipped easily between the dead-eyed bodymodder with a lizard’s face and the prostitute clad only in shifting holograms - most of them stylized phalluses; an entire cloak of sparkling, glittering, erect cocks.

Chapter Sixteen

Red was feeling something implacable and disconcerting; an unbearable and alien lightness, as though his whole body had become vaporous, just waiting to be dispersed by the next stiff breeze. Red was feeling uncrowded. After they’d stepped through the immense steel portal -- the sheer presence of the monstrously solid thing still throbbing dully behind him – Red turned to find nothing at all. Just a vast and wholly empty square. The clearing was forty feet at its widest point, and half that much again long. Its far end terminated at two wide sets of stairs surrounding a thin central path, which ran up at an angle for a few hundred feet, then jackknifed around a wall and disappeared from view. Red dimly recognized the flat, empty space’s dimensions as belonging to one of the central stairwell’s gargantuan landings, located midway between floors; the steps and promenade must have been the original walkways, as laid down untold decades ago. There were no jury-rigged tenements here; no micro-bars crowding the path; no food stalls suspended from the ceiling by lift cables. Even the telltale stink of the ‘Wells – an odorous slurry of cooking grease, graphite, sweat and decaying pressure-board – was conspicuously absent. This was merely one landing and the subsequent connecting flight of a central stairwell, in their original condition. Every inch of space in the ‘Wells meant a gallon of blood spilled, and whoever owned this stretch wasn’t even using it. The very concept made Red shudder. Two guards flanked the group to either side, their faces covered by smooth, blank slabs of reflective metal. The leftmost one motioned them forward, while the other stripped them of their weapons. He dropped James’ heavy metal resonance fan immediately, not anticipating its heft. A piercing clang rang out, only to be absorbed by the emptiness of the space. James stifled a laugh, but even Red thought the gesture seemed forced. Red was still staring numbly about, trying to spot the pixelated haze that might mark the whole thing as some sort of holographic overlay, when Zippy shoved past and started bouncing happily up the steps. Her rapidly disappearing form seemed comically tiny against the vaulting cathedral of the empty stairwell. The guards scrambled to catch up with her – obviously anticipating more of an adjustment period from the newcomers -- while James and Red shuffled nervously after, unsure of what else they could do. The discomfort eased only slightly when the group crested the stairs, and found the next landing populated. Elongated, vertically-oriented buildings hugged the length of every wall, running unbroken up to the next flight. But the frantic buzz of the ‘Wells was still missing; what few people they passed on the stairs seemed to only risk the central pathway for short distances, crossing it at a brisk jog and

quickly disappearing behind stooped doorways. There was a muffled buzz of life behind those walls, but it was apprehensive and subdued, like an audience sitting quietly in the dark, anticipating the show. They summited several floors in this fashion, each identical in appearance: Narrow upward path banked by two long, continuous structures with dozens of short doorways set into their facades. From his brief, tense commute through it, Red had gotten the sense that Zippy’s entire fiefdom spanned perhaps a third of the space between two floors; he had already lost count of the number of flights they’d taken since the behemoth door had sealed behind them. He was, in fact, struggling to recall a point in his life when he hadn’t been trudging painfully up an endless parade of dull grey steps, when they turned the corner on another sparsely populated landing and he found himself staring into infinity. Where the stairwell ordinarily turned back on itself and resumed its upwards tack, there was only a towering reflective wall – the same dull reflective material as the guard’s featureless masks – ascending straight up for several hundred vertical feet. The stairwell itself was just…gone. Or rather, the bulk of it had been erased – upon closer inspection Red spotted a single narrow flight continuing along one side of the structure, barely wide enough to fit a single man. But that was it: The rest of the path had been replaced by an unfathomably large and immaculately polished cube. A halfdozen floors of stairwell must have been knocked out to accommodate the thing, Red thought, idly wondering how he’d ended up on the floor, desperately grasping for handholds against the bare steel. He looked to James for assurance, but found the man glaring sternly at the ground, refusing to look at or acknowledge the wrongness of the space. One of the mirror-faced guards harrumphed arrogantly at the pair of them. After searching through his mental catalogue of altered states, Red recognized the encroaching tide of a panic attack. His heart felt stretched, threadbare -- worn to a fragile sheet of loose fabric by years of careless abuse. He could hear its laborious beat; his ears and eyes pulsed with it. He giggled a little and ran through the PANIC mnemonic: PAss NICely, don’t try to fight it, PAck it tightly, Never Intensify it, Cool the bloA sharp ping, quickly swallowed by the cavern. Another. And another. All four of them – James, Red, and the two mirror-faced guards – snapped to attention and scanned the cavern, searching for the source of the noise. One by one, their gazes fell to Zippy, standing defiantly beneath the looming mass of glossy wall, her curved prosthetic clacking out a steady, regular rhythm as she kicked playfully at a door-shaped outline in the cube. “Can we go inside?!” She squeaked, and clapped. *** King Big Dick was a fat, hairy cylinder of flesh with a middle-aged man’s head poised precariously on top. His bare arms poked out of two holes in a delicate golden vest that seemed to have the texture of foil. His thighs were draped in a metallic platinum skirt; his calves wrapped in an ornate pattern of sandal straps, pallid flesh bulging between each loop and knot, porcine and vulgar. He actually wore a crown,

Red noted in astonishment: A literal crown. And on top, a huge platinum phallus, joined together with gel-mesh – so as to allow some organic sense of movement – flopped and wobbled from its apex. “Like I said,” James whispered to Red, “bloke’s a bit unsubtle.” Red did not respond. King Big Dick sat cross-legged atop a huge, brass-hued chair in the center of a smallish room somewhere in the heart of the mirror-cube. The floorspace of the throne room was downright modest when compared against the vast, empty stairwells and towering walls of the exterior, but a sense of sucking absence pulled at the hairs on Red’s neck until he followed their urging upwards, and saw that it had no ceiling – the walls ran up the entire height of the cube, presumably terminating out of sight, somewhere unknowably far above. Red struggled with the urge to lay flat on his back again, like a turtle, and clutch at the floor with all of his strength. It was a struggle he lost. When at last the vertigo passed and Red regained his footing, King Big Dick and Zippy had been arguing for hours. The central debate seemed to revolve around Zippy wanting to organize a game of hide and seek, while King Big Dick wanted to rape her inside out. Zippy spoke in her childish sing-song, and Big Dick answered with slurred, muttered growls, peppered with crude sexual propositions and demented tangents. It scanned as gibberish to Red, but he got the sense that, on some higher lingual plane, threats, bargains, pleas and honorifics were being exchanged. Though if hard-pressed, he could only say that he’d just listened to a man describe his genitals in exquisite detail to a ten year-old girl who really, really wanted to be “it” first. “This is mind-numbing,” Red said, shuffling carefully over to James, whose gaze was still bolted to the floor beneath his feet. “Just don’t look at it, yeah?” James suggested, “Forget it’s there.” “No, these two: This is ridiculous. I get the whole second personality thing, I do, but we don’t have time for it. Obviously he knows she isn’t a little girl - though he does a real bang-up pedophile impression – so why doesn’t she just drop it? She’s not fooling him.” “That isn’t it at all, mate. See, playing that little kid card down here in the ‘Wells, that’s novice shite. Rank amateur. That’s the bloody remedial class of public personas. Of course nobody is fooled by it: It’s so obvious that it’s silly. Only an enormous arsehole would even try it, and be laughed right out of the ‘Wells for their troubles.” “So what’s…?” “So the whole point of a public persona is to hide strengths and invent fictional weaknesses. Playing the little kid card down here – no, nobody’s going to buy it. They’re going to think you’re a bit slow, yeah? Which is exactly what you want, innit?”

“What about him?” Red said, nodding to the man with the gleaming, wobbling penis jutting from his head. “He’s playing at insecurity. Broadcasting the biggest, boldest weakness he can. He’s nothing but weakness, from the name to that big empty tomb out there. You think a bloke who straps a huge cock to his head with no sense of irony is savvy enough to take this much territory?” Red had no answer, but refocused his attention on studying the plush carpet beneath his feet. It felt different somehow. More insistent. A looseness crept into his bowels -- the same kind he got when he touched ceramics or those tiny trees the Chinese sold at the looping bazaar. It was too solid; too complicated for nano-tech. This was handmade. The rug’s pattern, which at first glance he took to be some basic circuitboard, resolved into a dense chain of stylized monkeys, each hooking their lower paw into the upper paw of the monkey below them. Somebody, somewhere, at some point, had taken years to produce this one single item. Red felt cold drops of sweat begin to itch their way out of his pores. “Problem?” James glanced at Red’s shins in concern, as far up as he was willing to look. “We’re surrounded by monkeys,” Red answered, shuffling a shoe over to block a particularly sinister simian link. “But that’s silly!” Zippy’s protested shrilly. “Not if nobody plays. There can’t be a game just between you and me. That’s no fun!” “Gotta good game for little girls here,” the congealed patch of bald fat that was King Big Dick’s face emitted a barely distinguishable train of grunts. “Called chase the snake. You gotta wrestle ‘im when you catch him. Watch out though, little girl, he spits poison. Hawwww….” “You guys want to play too, right? I promise that it’s going to be hoots!” Zippy turned to address Red and James. The latter nodded emphatically, without lifting his gaze. “Play what?” Red asked. “Shut up, mate! Just say ‘yes.’” James hissed. “But it sounds like literally the worst game ever,” Red protested, but came up short when James caught him with a surprisingly painful elbow. “Wh…yes. Yes of course I want to play. Games are just…just so much fun. All the time,” Red finally added, annoyed. Zippy nodded at each of their answers, then turned back to Big Dick and stuck her tongue out. King Big Dick, for his part, immediately started to undo his skirt. Red returned James’ elbow, and gestured impatiently.

“He wants to execute you and is generously offering to split the bounty with Zippy’s fiefdom,” James explained. A rubbery weakness surged down the back of Red’s legs. His vision focused suddenly, with laser clarity, on a single woven monkey in the far corner of the rug: It grinned back at him evilly, and extended a long, cruel, unwavering middle finger. “Listen,” Red turned to the impassive mirror beside him, his own visage reflected back in fisheye. “You have a secure terminal here, right? Something landlined?” There was no answer. The mirror simply swiveled in the general direction of King Big Dick and Zippy, both staring silently at Red from the raised dais. “I’m not just some worthless god damn beta tester. I’m the best Mixer you’re ever gonna meet. You got a secure terminal -- something with a direct connection, something that can run a tunnel into the blackmarket ‘Feed subforums -- and I can get you stuff nobody else has even heard of. Just last week I pirated something that’ll make you feel eighty feet tall. Literally: It messes with your body image. Spent all day trying not to step on the people next to me. They’re not even going to release that. It’s a collector’s item, and I swiped the recipe. In a few years, that alone will be worth triple the bounty to the right people, and I know all the right people. I can make this worth your while. All I need is a terminal.” Silence. “Swear to god damn, I said” King Big Dick finally turned to address Zippy, his silver wang wobbling in appreciation “you got shit you share shit. Daddy always said it. Said ‘share the shit, son.’ Daddy wasn’t much for talking, but man could throw a fuckin’ punch. You seen him back in ’18, used to be a fighter…” “Okay,” Zippy agreed after a moment’s thought, “but if you lose this round I get to pick the next game.” Red looked back and forth between the pair of them, James, and the mirror-faced guards, waiting for an interpretation. The sentry nearest him leapt into action so violently that Red flinched, as if struck. The guard strode quickly to a section of wall behind Red, and pushed open a recessed door. Pure, white light flooded in from beyond; a thin pyramid of illumination etching itself precisely onto the smooth, black floor. “He said you can use a terminal,” James finally supplied, “and if you can match the bounty, he’ll let you through.” “If I can’t?” Red asked, already regretting it. “I think he’s going to bugger you before cutting off your head. Or he might have said ‘after.’ Or possibly even ‘during.’ I’m not sure. It’s all very open to interpretation, depending on whether ‘fuckin’ punch’ is meant as an adjective-modifi-“ “Yeah thanks I got it,” Red said, and stepped into the light.

Chapter Seventeen

“What ever seems to be the matter?” Byron frowned up at the pixie-cut blonde. Or rather, he frowned up at the spot where she had been a moment ago. Byron waited dutifully, but no snappy retort or ingenious mating of obscenities issued forth from the empty ledge. He was kneeling unsteadily, ankles crossed, at the bottom of a wide, flat-bottomed, steel mesh basket. It was suspended on every side by thousands of nanometer-thin cables (all encased in thick, black rubber, so as not to cut clean through any errant fingers). Above him, the cables ran together into a sort of chandelier, which redirected their upward course horizontally, and sent them braiding together into a thick, solitary central stalk. The thin wires on their own were near as unbreakable as made no difference; a nuclear bomb wouldn’t have compromised the integrity of that stalk. He really didn’t understand the fuss. Byron did understand that she found the location somewhat unsettling, after her episode in the catwalks -- the basket in which he sat was suspended from an old crane arm jutting from the external wall of the North Post, and if one squinted carefully through the net of nanometer cables, one could see the slight curvature of the Earth on the distant horizon, and the wispy, cerulean ring of the atmosphere fading gently into space – but the exposure to external stimuli was minimal, and the structure infallibly sound. It was only if one were to wedge their face directly into the small space between ledge and basket that one could catch even the slightest glimpse of the patchwork metal exterior of the Post -- its surface so massive that it seemed to actually fold outward – disappearing into the vanishing point far below. Finally, a response came. “No.” “No?” Byron queried. “No. Nope.” “I…my dear, I do not believe that was a cogent answer to my inquiry,” Byron carefully modulated his voice to emanate pure logic and solace. “Shut your fucking faggot hole,” QC replied, but her tone was frail and reedy, or perhaps the deeper intonations were being swept away by the howling of the vicious winds. Winds which never reached Byron’s basket, of course; never budged it an inch. All of the Posts had immense air foils mounted every dozen stories or so that nurtured a permanent, stabilizing upward air current, several hundred feet out from the building proper. It acted somewhat like a controlled burn, leading any intercepting parallel

gusts away from the structure itself. The effect was not wholly smooth, but what buffeting air remained was no rougher than the open ocean on a breezy day, Byron recalled, remembering the time he’d spent with the Lord aboard Hercules on their way to Grecian shoByron was snapped forth from his reverie by a soft, ululating chant of curses with scarcely a breath between them. “The winds don’t truly come in this far, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he offered helpfully, “and the Atmo generators seem to be fully functional, if a bit…musty.” “Suck fucks from your mother’s asshole!” QC snapped back. When Byron had first descended the short, fraying rope ladder that connected the ledge to the basket’s surface, QC had been squatting stubbornly before him, her back braced against the sealed doorway. By the sound of her voice, she had not budged. “Are you stuck, perhaps? Have you caught on something?” Byron pulled at a loose thread forking outward from the cuff of his loose black trousers. He worried at it, made no progress and, sighing, did his best to tuck it back away. With a resigned grump, he unlocked his legs and stood to full height, putting his face on eye level with the cramped maintenance tunnel’s floor. The basket, Byron noted resolutely, had not swayed a fraction of an inch. “I’m not fucking stuck!” QC said sullenly, mistakenly lifting her gaze to glare at him. She palled at the half-glimpsed open air behind Byron, and quickly tightened back into the smallest ball she could manage. From Byron’s perspective, with the faded silver duster puddled on the floor beneath her, her head tucked down below the high collar, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, she looked like nothing so much as an oblong ball of foil; a crinkled metal egg, nesting in the corner. “The ah…acrophobia, was it?” Byron nudged gently, “Is that kind of thing common with you Blackouts?” “I’m not scared of heights, for the sake of Christ’s sacred cock! I live in a fucking canopy shelter, Byron. Do you know what that is? It’s a god damn slab of pressureboard suspended from the underside of a catwalk -- who fucking knows how many miles in the air -- and all that’s holding it up is four little nanocables, half the size of those.” She gestured flippantly back toward the basket. “I know we’ve like, gone down a few hundred floors from where I sleep, but it’s just plain fucking wrong to see it all like this. It’s not the height; it’s the out. Look at the fucking air! It’s blue! You shouldn’t be able to see god damn air! Everything is just way too fucking…everywhere.” “I see,” Byron said, not seeing at all. “Well then, if looking is the problem, I have a proposition: Do not look. You rouse yourself, turn about, and begin walking backwards toward me. I shall tell you when to stop. The gap between basket and building is mere millimeters, and bounded on every side by nigh indestructible support cables. There is no possible way you could fall anywhere but into the basket itself, where I shall endeavour to catch you.”

“Are you insane? You fucking – you think it’s easier for me to walk blindly backwards and fall into it?” Her arms were a blur of flustered, incredulous gestures – the foil egg appeared to be in the process of hatching a particularly frustrated chick. “I believe so, yes,” Byron gave the plan consideration, and found no fault: “I assure you, milady, you cannot misstep. As soon as the ledge ends, the cables begin and the basket is beneath you. I feel at this point I should remind you that I have been blindly following you into a series of increasingly horrifying and mortal situations for the better part of the afternoon. Why, naught but a few scant hours past, you bade me to climb another human being like an orchard ladder. It was simply awful. I am asking you to fall equidistance now to what I climbed then. It seems a fair trade of unpleasant distances.” She was silent, or at least too quiet to hear above the ululating static of the restrained jetstream. “Fine. Okay. Fine. Yes. We’ll do that. Fuck it? Yeah, fuck it. Yeah, it makes total god damn sense to me. I’ll just walk ass-backwards into the abyss and trust the waiting arms of some penthouse ponce. Sounds like a party.” She stood too quickly, and oriented herself with a curt, jagged gait, shaky with fear and anger. “I shall overlook the impropriety, considering the stress of your predicament,” Byron offered kindly. He received a pair of sweeping, dramatic middle fingers in response. “Ready?” QC asked. “Indeed.” Mustering all of her strength, QC made one hesitant, tiny shuffle backwards. And then another. Eventually, traversing the distance with an approximate 10:1 ratio of swears to inches, she managed to shamble her way to the edge of the platform, whence Byron told her to stop. “Now, all that’s left is to fall,” he said pleasantly. QC set her shoulders, held her head high, yelped like a kicked dog and slumped backward… Into Byron’s waiting arms. Who then immediately fell backwards himself, far too weak and clumsy to ever make good on his word. “Sorry!” He scrambled to his knees and began to dust the woman off, but she made no motion to rise from her frozen sprawl. Her eyes were firmly shut, her jaw equally so. This did not prevent the anticipated tirade of profanity, of course; it was merely delivered through clenched teeth. “You son of a bitching assblasting goatfucking little-“ She sucked in an impatient breath, held it, released. “Go….pull the thing, Byron.” Byron extended a lanky arm to tug loose the mooring cable, and the basket executed a perfectly smooth and astonishingly rapid descent. His stomach expanded upward, lined his throat, swelled into his tonsils, and then slowly settled back into shape. Thick, white horizontal lines demarcated each floor; they

instantly blurred together into an indistinguishable whole as the lift accelerated to its terminal velocity. Despite Byron’s intestinal acrobatics, he noted that the pair of them managed to stay comfortably rooted to the floor as the carriage embarked on its controlled descent. After a moment, even the incessant flipping in his belly normalized, and he settled in for the long, uneventful drop. Byron attempted civil conversation to pass the time, and was met with stony silence. He tried silence himself, grew bored, and attempted interaction again. This time his platitudes were met with a string of vomit. He gave up and turned his thoughts inward. In times of severe stress or lasting boredom, Byron found it soothing to mentally replay his last few trips with the Lord; to chronicle and catalogue the time as best his addled memory could manage. When last he’d left the true Byron, the poet had just mustered the drunken courage to kiss his old friend and companion, William, for the very first time. Luckily, Byron had been employing the Voyeur strain of Gas, and so was able to watch the exchange unfold as a disembodied narrative form, rather than interjecting his clumsy form into the tender moment and risk ruination. But Byron did not need the physical stimuli of Presence to experience complete empathy with his Lord. Even now, through the uncertain film of memory, Byron could practically feel the slippery, silvery nervousness in his chest melt away into a warm, spreading brandy of excitement as William, after a moment of shocked uncertainty, passionately returned the kiss. They had both broken off suddenly, however - overcome with self-consciousness and hereditary guilt. William hurriedly excused himself for the night, stumbling down along the shores of the Thames and disappearing into the coal haze, whilst the Lord settled back into th“Are we stopped?” QC broke into Byron’s trance, and he saw that she’d moved, a little, if only to inch slightly away from her meager puddle of sick. “Hm? Oh,” Byron struggled to sight his bearings, mentally excising the first stirrings of an uncertain erection. He stashed the shame of it away, to rebuke himself properly at a later date. “Yes. Yes it seems we have. Up we go.” Eventually, with a good deal more contact with her backside than he and his phantom arousal were entirely comfortable with, Byron shoved QC up onto the confined exit walkway, spun the handcrank that opened the access door, and sealed it again behind them. The stale, shuddering glow of ancient LED panels kicked on in response to their motion. “Here we are,” Byron said, and laid a reassuring hand on QC’s shoulder, though the gesture ended up, to his mind, being something more like a limp-wristed slap. He hastily withdrew his hand entirely and stuffed it into his pockets, hoping the girl had been too shell-shocked to notice the awkward proceedings. “Yeah. Fuck. Fuuuuuuck.” QC drew in several deep, shuddering breaths, then slowly and uncertainly broke open her sealed eyes. “Thank you for that. You did good…ish.” “Yes, ah…and thank you!” Byron exclaimed, instantly regretting it with every ounce of strength in his body.

Bryon’s life in physical space was a constant exercise in competing embarrassments. Though the biological withdrawals wouldn’t start for some time yet, still he ached for the blissful, confident disconnect that a good Gas high could guarantee. “All right,” QC said, rolling her shoulders, cracking her neck, and stretching her arms officially. This being done, she fell back into her usual stooped, apathetic swagger, once again adopted her persistent, sardonic smile, and said: “Let’s roll.” “Right-o,” he agreed, and fell in line behind her. QC blinked and swiveled to face him. Byron smiled at her expectantly. She did not move. Byron raised his eyebrows toward her, as if to prompt motion, and shrugged. “So…we should go,” she replied, her hands returning his shrug from inside the lofty pockets of the antiquated duster. “Indeed.” “This is you, dipshit. Remember? Your connection? Guy that might know how to find Red? So we can sell the bastard to the A-Gents before they burn our skin off? You know: The only fucking thing we’re down here to fucking do?!” “Oh! Yes. That.” Byron agreed amiably, and edged past her, taking point. QC followed behind him, swearing with metronomic regularity, each step a new obscenity.

Chapter Eighteen

Login: P27N32 Password: ***********

“Jeeee-sus,” James exclaimed, looking over Red’s shoulder, “the bloody hell are you doing that still uses text logins?” “The Blackboard. Kind of like an oldschool BBS. We don’t need rich media or anything; it’s just a bunch of chemnerds swapping recipes and unsecured feed lines – I mean, you can’t just jack the whole feed, you gotta use a worm to pull such trace amounts that they don’t notice, but there’s a lot out there to pull just a few elements from and-“ “Right. Puppies,” James said, rolling his eyes. “What?” Red swiveled around to stare up at him. “You lost me a while back, mate. Now I’m just vid-searching for puppies. Tiny ones, with fluffy paws. Do your nerd business.” “It’s really not all that hard to unders-“ “Ha! This one peed right into the other’s ear, but they’re still mates. Innnit grand?” James said, already walking away. Red turned back to the glossy black oval and held his hands out on the desk, palms down, fingers curled slightly. When his pinky contacted the glass, his BioOS confirmed the connection to the desktop and the Blackboard login screen once again wavered in the air, two feet in front of him. He focused his attention on the tight cluster of spinning letters, and the anachronistic keyboard prompt visually overlaid the keys beneath his waiting fingertips. The projection twitched almost imperceptibly when he moved his eyes – the tracking was always shoddy on these retromods – but he managed to struggle through with only a handful of typos. It was awkward and slow going, using the hand gestures instead of a basic Predictive Intent Input, but PII rigs were too bandwidth intensive for the ramshackle little Blackboard - they were discovered so often as to be essentially disposable anyway. Why put the work in to fancy it up, steal enough bandwidth for full BioOS integration and design a functional RUI if it was all just going to be killed and reassembled later that afternoon? Besides, the only real downside to an old keyboard system was the speed, the errors, the frustration, and any onlookers goggling at your ridiculously flailing fingers with a mixture of amusement, disbelief, and pity normally reserved for headcases and mental deficients. Aside from all that, though, it was just dandy.

James paced the room a few times, already bored. He sidled up next to the only other object of distraction in the room: A single mirror-faced sentry, blocking the only exit. The guard stood hunched over nearly double, his arms swinging loose by his knees, his head cocked at an inquisitive angle -- just like every other sentry he’d seen on the way to the coms room. “I’m afraid you’ve got a pussy for a face,” James told the man matter-of-factly. “Wha…excuse me?” For just a second, the guard appeared to forget himself and straighten his posture. James smiled. “Nothin’, mate. Just bored of the freak show,” he said, and jerked his head back toward Red, tapping on the desk like a crazy person. “Wanted to see if there was actually a bloke behind the mirror.” The reflective metal slab showed no reaction. “I’m not asking to bugger you on the floor and cuddle after or anything,” James showed his hands by way of placation, “just got the feelin’ that twitchy back there is going to be some time. Looking to pass it is all. I figured if you responded, we could talk. If you didn’t, I could sit here and think up better insults for you. Dicklips. There’s one. Your lips look like dicks. A bit derivative of pussy-face, I know, but one does what one can.” “Ha!” The sentry shrugged and shook off the primate stance completely, “you can’t even see them.” “I know, I know; I’d be ashamed too if I had a mouth like a bell-end.” Red flinched at the raucous laughter behind him, but ignored what he assumed was a string of insults directed at his silly tapping, and finished typing the post. The prompt blinked twice in confirmation, then booted him back out to the main board. Nothing to do now but wait. Red unfocused his eyes and let the projected board fade away. His gaze rolled up and to the left, expanding his own home screen across his visual field, and opened up the contacts. He highlighted the looped animation of a stick figure stabbing another in the back, over and over again, and focused on the composition box: problems hunted gas rewardHe thought, and the gelatinous, black placeholder blocks of Predictive Intent Input appeared before his eyes; they shifted into words a few milliseconds later: Situation. Corporate bounty hunters/prototype gas? Reward. Red kept his focus tight on the blocks, letting the system know he still wanted to edit, and mentally revised the wording. The letters fuzzed out of focus, jumbled together, and resolved. The edited message snapped into clarity half an instant before he’d finished thinking. Life or death situation. Bounty hunters on my tail, corporate by the sound of them. Might be something to do with beta-testing gas? Any info appreciated. Will make it worth your time.

Red expanded the concept of a circle in his mind, indicating the ‘send to all’ function for this contact list. Three yellow dots lit up consecutively, and repeated. Awaiting final confirmation. He thought of the circle turning opaque, and it did. The dots disappeared, and the BioOS rippled; the message had been sent. The stabbing icon stopped briefly, swiveled over to face Red, and gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up; then, back to stabbing. Red tabbed back over to the Blackboard, and scrolled through the replies. “So the little geek’s behind me right, covered head to toe in plastiboard splinters, face going white with shock, this weird smile on his face and – I tell you true, mate – he starts juggling.” “Fuck you!” The guard swore incredulously. “I swear to the one and only true Lord, mate: I’m up there blowing holes through an entire fiefdom, just trying to stay ahead of the murderous locals. Zippy – that’s the one-legged girl, yeah? She’s running ahead putting rotters on the floor, both of us wondering when somebody’s going to get it together enough to blow a hole in the back of our heads, and we turn to look ‘round and find this little bastard right here juggling the god damn firearms! In the air, mate. Like a bloody mime.” “But why?!” The sentry exclaimed, laughing. He gestured as if to wipe tears from his face, but his hand bumped instead against the mirrored faceplate. The man fumbled at the back, hit something that made the whole thing go limp, then pulled it down over the front of his face. Smartcloth. “Because he’s high as a kite, isn’t he?! As soon as we run up against that big steel door of yours, he starts rambling about sex giants and metal children, all with an armful of the most deadly weapons I’ve managed to assemble over two decades in the ‘Wells.” “Holy shit,” the guard chuckled appreciatively. “It was actually bloody impressive, truth,” James pushed his back up against the wall and slid down into a squat. “The fan alone weighs more than he does.” Just an ordinary type, James thought: A bit portly ‘round the jaw, receding hairline. Looks big in the armor, but you can tell he’s got the start of a belly going under there. That inhuman crouched dancewalk -- the monkey posture – it’s off-putting, yeah. But take the mask off, stand him up, and it’s all gone. He could be in a catwalk stall, trying to sell you old chipboard at low, low discount prices. “Smoke?” The guard cracked open a cylinder with a vacuum pop. “Cheers,” James took one from the proffered pack, twisted the filter to light it, and screwed it up between his lips. Red gazed blankly at his BioOS. He tried to read the words displayed there, but once again failed to accept their meaning. >heard about you down there in the wells red

The first reply read. It was part of a long chain, all posted with minutes of his initial plea. >>Bullshit. Is this really the guy? You’re screwing with us. >>>Yeah this is fake im pretty sure >>>>Obviously fake. You’re probably not even in the ‘wells. >>>>>coordinate trace says this came through an anonymizer down in the reservoir >>>>>>holy shit is Really him? Dud,e you’re fucked! >>>>>>>Hahahah you gon die, redd They knew his name. Red’s ID was masked. Hidden by the hundreds - thousands - of gates he’d collected over the years. Backdoor redirects, partial information shunts and false data generators installed across dozens of servers and thoroughly entangled with the digital personas of two thousand completely random, unrelated users. He was as impossible to trace as a human being could possibly be, and there wasn’t the slightest indication as to his identity or location in his board post. Even if, by some inebriated excess, he’d wanted to post his name or coordinates, the Blackboard ran its own anonymizers – the software would auto-delete any personal information before approving the post. It wouldn’t even let you log on if your connection was unencrypted, and yet here were a half dozen users who not only knew his approximate location, but his real name. All within minutes. His post should never have merited this kind of interest. There was no other possibility: They must have recognized the story from elsewhere. From the waveform. From the news. Red’s hands shook, and the twitches spewed gibberish across the projected screen. “You got some mad rumors running down here,” the guard said, sliding to a squat beside James. “Well, it’s like me mum said: You can’t nuke a neighborhood without getting a few stares,” James conceded happily. “Before that even. Word from upstairs has been coming down all day.” “What’s that?” James drew on his cigarette; the steel-gray ash of the lighting element shook, and fell away on his thigh. “Some big spenders on their way down right now, is what I heard. From up top.” “The top what? It’s all top from here, innit?” “No. The top. Heard they came in from the terminus. Wells-end.”

“I’ll be fucked,” James whispered, awestruck. “I’d say somebody’s about to do it for you,” the guard offered. Red’s hands were an indistinct blur of motion. He frantically plugged at the keyboard, shifted his focus back to the BioOS, thought hasty replies to his contact radial, and tabbed back to the Blackboard. Every medium was exploding with activity. not on any of the official channels yet, but the other boards are all over it A thread from the Blackboard informed him. Luka, an Industry engineer and occasional client of Red’s, was offering up information, but only if Red had access to libido inhibitors - the illegal ones that killed it permanently, not the ordinary ‘use it if you want it’ variety. Red replied in the affirmative, tabbed to the Blackboard, and offered up passcodes to a thick vein of undiluted amphetamines that he’d culled from some coding farm’s private feed, in exchange for the inhibitors. He went to pull up his thread again, and found it moved. An entire subforum had just been started for him; there were dozens of new posts. I can’t believe you’re all fucking around like this, this is a human being’s life here. If this is really you, Red, you ought to know there’s some serious heat coming your way. Corporate bounty hunters were spotted entering the ‘wells this morning. From the terminus, man. All the way up. Get the hell out of there. --BrX They not bounty hunters, shit tard. They private security. Bodyguards or soming. They don’t have passes or nothing. My brother do some part time bouncer work for one of the hi fiefdoms, sed they paid him more than he makes in a year to let them by without hasslin. ---fuk bitchz make $$ Red’s field of vision flickered: Somebody had accepted the amphetamine barter. He slung a string of PII blocks up in reply to the engineer, letting him know the deal was on. He hoped his subconscious finished resolving the words coherently, but he didn’t stick around to check. Red tabbed back to the Blackboard, and took a breath. He had so little to offer, and simple drug barters were buying him no more than cursory information. He willed his hands to stillness, and carefully typed: Have access to new prototype Gas. In body, but full metabolization not for 36 hours. Serious offers only. Must have liquid untraceable assets, be able to transfer advance to ‘Wells ASAP. He signed it with a single block of Red color, and shifted back to watch the BioOS inbox. He waited two minutes for the reply, but finally, his contact circle rippled and expanded. Not bountry hunters. A-gents. Know who hired. Inhibitors first.

--Luka Red pulled over the inhibitor codes and frantically began picturing a circle. He was picturing it as opaque as god damn possible. The ripple confirmed a sent message. “All right, I’ll bite: Who’s the big bad wolf coming to blow our block down?” James leaned forward, put a hand flat on the floor and pushed himself up into a standing position. The guard had already risen, and was stretching and popping his various joints. “No idea,” the man answered, “but last I heard they were hitting Duke Sarah’s Pretty Empire. Bitch wouldn’t open her fiefdom – rode that damn horse of hers out to challenge ‘em and got herself burned. That’s about twenty floors up. The rate they’re going, you should be able to ask them yourself in a couple of hours.” The sentry pulled the reflective cloth back over his head. It hung there limply, outlining his thick, soft features, until he reached back and hit the clasp. The fabric snapped up into a perfectly rigid, mirrored block. He shook his shoulders out one last time, then dropped back into an ape-like slump. “Thanks for the smoke,” James said, but the guard did not reply; he loped to the far side of the room with long, sinewy hops and crouched there, immobile. Its Hockner Industries. I’m so sorry, Red. Thanks for the inhibitors I really gotta stop with the kiddies already. Costing too mcuh these days --Luka Hockner Industries: Chief opiate distributor for all of the Four Posts. Red closed the reply before panic could seize him completely. Hockner was after him? He knew they had some tenuous connection to the lab where Red beta-tested, but there was a whole network of subsidiaries, franchises and dummy corporations between it and the official Hockner Industries corporation. If Hockner themselves were coming after him, then that was it, then; it was all over. Hockner owned everything – everybody. The opiate feeds, the Gas channels, the implant markets -- Red was pretty sure they even technically owned his apartment. You can’t run from a beast when you’re already inside of it. Red shifted back to the Blackboard one last time, and checked the new replies to his barter thread. There were six mocking him, two still calling him a fraud and decrying the intelligence of everybody that wasn’t, and one at the very end that read simply: Barter accepted. Send transaction details immediately. --A Friend.

Chapter Nineteen

QC’s fear was effervescent. She’d sloughed off the brunt of the panic as soon as they got inside, but it kept welling back up like a shaken champagne bottle. Her apprehension formed tiny bubbles on the insides of her eyelids; pinpricks, itches in the brain. Waves of euphoric giddiness crested and receded under her skin, leaving only a shivering, wet sickness. She wanted to laugh, but knew it would only manifest as screaming, or sobbing, or mental shutdown. Instead, she did her best to manage the fear as a physical thing: She pictured it as a black sludge coating the insides of her bones. She pulled it out, pushed it upward, all the way to the skin, and let it slide down her extremities to congeal inside her toes and fingertips. When it all conglomerated there -- throbbing and pulsing, swelling her limbs with thick, tired anxiety -- she touched the bare metal of the corridor, and let all the oozing black terror dissipate into the walls. It was a simple psychological meme, one of the few her parents taught her that she still remembered. A little white lie you tell to yourself, they said, only believing makes it real. Slowly, after the fear puddle poured away into the floors and bled into the walls, she settled back into her body again. She tested the flexibility of her fingers, rocked on her heels, felt the tensile movement of muscles beneath her calves. She rolled the strain from her neck, shook her posture loose, and finally managed to uproot her gaze from the backs of Byron’s heels as he flounced along in front of her. His gait was clumsy: A hesitant, flopping walk that alternated between huge, loping strides and a mincing, scuffing shuffle. He had no cadence; he worked his own body like a character in a game that he didn’t know the controls to. He had been enthusiastically babbling for some time now, QC was dimly aware, but she had been too lost to hear it. The words were spoken underwater; almost familiar, but ultimately too muffled to resolve. She was worried, but could not place the source. Byron, for all of his awkward uncertainty, seemed to know where he was going and what to do when he got there. She’d heard the Reservoir was a rough place, but it couldn’t be worse than the shantytowns and Pirated Gas clubs that festered around the Fights, could it? Still, ceding control to a thing as wholly fucking inept as Byron sat ill at ease with her. She tried to congeal the worry as well -- spilled it through her veins, rigged the sluices to channel it down into her fingertips -- but she still felt the lingering fear there, at the periphery, and knew that her mental buffer would take no more load. So she let the worry alone, and tried distraction instead. She focused on the floor: A dull industrial green covered in a thin patina of scratches, each filled with the glittery graphite-colored dust of dead nano-bots. The ceiling: Old-style LEDS, still hung in archaic pinecone clusters instead of worked into the steel itself. Their unfiltered protective lenses scattered the rays, casting a wan, draining, lifeless light. Unfiltered LEDs always instilled a sense of hyperreality in her: Details were too clear, shadows too sharply defined against the whitish blue haze. A broken strand of fuses hung between two small cylinders. Heaters? Filters? Whatever. They’d sat idle for so long, their original purpose was irrelevant. The nano-dust was thick in the corners; the cold was biting. A stray hair swung loose from her bangs, stubbornly refusing to budge from directly in front of her left eyeball. She

could see it was split at the end. The dusty white carcass of a moth in the corner, where the access corridor turned. A loose thread - actual thread? As in cloth? The motherfucker was how rich, exactly? – frayed from one of Byron’s pantlegs. As if hearing her thoughts, Byron suddenly stopped and swiveled to face her. QC shook her head, willed her eyes into focus, and after a few muddy attempts, finally recognized the words he was speaking. “What?” She mumbled. “Are you quite all right?” “Yeah. Me? I’m good. The fuck is your problem?” “Terribly sorry, milady, I must have misspoke. I did not mean to imply that I had any sort of quarrel with you, I was merely requesting that you stay close beside me now, for the Reservoir sits just beyond this portal.” He gestured extravagantly to a nondescript, round, three foot door with a bisected wheel in the center. “It is quite dark from this point on, and it can take a good bit of time for one’s eyes to adjust. All the pathways are docks, you see - just floating on the surface – so a single misstep and one might find oneself in the water, night-blind and lost. I don’t suppose you know how to swim? No, forgive me, of course you wouldn’t. It’s ah…well it’s all rather unpleasant business, in a nutshell.” “Hold on,” QC said, and dropped into a squat against the corridor wall. She traced a series of shapes on the exposed flesh of her thigh, then pressed deeply. “I think I might actually have some nightvision strains still active. Or at least a white adjust program. Had to double as camera for a fucking perv expo last year. I think we’ve updated since then, but that pig bastard Henry never does a complete flush. Ah, there we - AHH! SHIT! SHIT ON YOUR FUCKS.” “Oh my! Oh no!” Byron swatted frantically at the air about his face, “what is it?! Moths?! Oh good lord, it’s moths, isn’t it!?” “God. Damn. It.” QC whispered through clenched teeth, her eyes squeezed so tightly shut that flashing orbs of color pulsed in the darkness there. “I just turned on nightvision in a well-lit hallway, dickhead. But good to know your killer fucking instincts are so finely honed. Moths, pussy? Seriously?” “Sorry, I ah…I saw a dead one back there and…” Byron let the thought trail off, and offered his hand to QC by way of apology. She did not take it. “Byron?” She asked finally, still clutching her clenched eyes. “Hmm? Oh! Apologies.” Byron took her arm and did his best to help her to her feet. He escorted her over to the hatch and gingerly leaned her against the wall. He struggled with the old valve, splay-legged and shaking like a newborn doe, but eventually managed to crank it, and the door popped open. The difference in atmospheric pressure sent a dry, chemical wind rasping down the access corridor. He steered QC through the opening, followed suit, and shut the portal behind them. “We’re in.”

QC cautiously moved her hands away and opened her eyes. “Fuck me!” “Oh dear, no, this is hardly the time or place for-“ “Shut the fuck up, Byron. It’s just a phrase. I didn’t know if the janky-ass nightvision strains would even work, but this shit is crazy. It’s like mid-day in the desert. I think I can see the fucking South Post from here.” “Fantastic!” Byron clapped his hands heartily and the sound echoed sharply across the water. The abrupt silence that followed was full of menacing attention. “We’ve just got to make sure to avoid those,” QC pointed to a thick slab of LED-woven pressboard atop a thin metal pole, “the light banks. See them?” “Not in the slightest,” he answered genially. “What, really? Jesus: They look like miniature suns to me. There’s one like a hundred feet to your left.” “I see a dim little dot in a vast abyss, shining pathetically.” “Poetic,” QC rolled her eyes, though the gesture was lost on Byron. “All right, listen, this is going to get complicated: The first thing to go on the more disposable strains, like this nightvision, is the generators. The little guys that turn glucose into energy – there’s no repair strain bundled in with disposables, so when they burn out, they’re gone. Starting them up over and over again is a lot more strain than just leaving it on. Get me? If I turn this bullshit off, it might not come back on. So when we get to those lights, I’m going to be blind. Just get me out of there and pointed away from them as fast as you can, and we’ll be copa-fucking-cetic. I’ll lead you in the dark; you lead me in the light. Cool? Cool. So let’s go.” Byron smiled eagerly, happy to have direction again. “Byron,” QC snapped, a bit too loudly, “that’s you again: Where the fuck are we going?” “Little Deng’s house,” he answered quickly, waving his hands in every general direction. “Oh, right! Little Deng. There’s a big god damn neon sign right over there. I’ll just follow that.” “Funny, I don’t recall a sign…” “Sarcasm, jackass. Which direction am I going, Byron?” “Ah…” “No. No you are not allowed to fucking say that. Do not ‘ah’ me you flighty little cockhole. Tell me you know where we’re going.”

“This is not the usual protocol! I’ll typically send a polite message at least two days ahead of time, and when I arrive, two very large men grasp me in the dark and escort me bodily to my destination. It’s all very well put together,” Byron reasoned. “So you brought me to the god damn Reservoir – the Reservoir, Byron: Where the very concept of rape is too scared of getting raped to visit – and now you’re telling me you have no fucking idea where we’re going. In the darkness. In the god damn Reservoir.” “No! Of course not. I happen to know exactly where we’re going. It’s just the getting there that eludes me at the moment.” QC stared furiously down into the still, black waters. She fantasized about holding Byron beneath the surface, rebutting every one of his pleas to live with anecdotal evidence of his own staggering incompetence as a human being. She drew a deep, gulping breath into her belly, held it there, and slowly released it. She turned her gaze upward. The light filtering in from the city above was indistinct, but unbearable. A pure white void overlaid with a thousand dark silhouettes: The catwalks, cart-lines, bridges, and myriad other structures crisscrossed one another in vertical paths up to infinity. A fractal snowflake; a web of sharp, artificial edges set against the backdrop of a blank and shining void. Somehow, the web calmed her. It was all still up there. She turned to face Byron again. “Do you at least know what it looks like?” “But of course! It’s a horrid thing. A grand, three-story barge, all classless kitsch and tasteless novelty. On the roof, there’s a crude tableau of an oasis – trees made from chipboard and the like. If that wasn’t gauche enough, it is all painted up in the most garish scheme: Red, green, yellow – all utterly atrocious, really. Though from what I remember, it didn’t seem as though anybody else bothered to paint anything down here in the dark, so it should be a snap to spot.” “Nightvision’s colorblind, Byron.” “No offense, madam, but if you’re having trouble spotting the enormous pleasure-barge with the artificial forest on top, I would not think the color scheme to be the deciding factor.” “Son of a whore.” “So you can dish it, but not take it, eh? Sensitivity, my dear, is more a vice than a virtu-“ “Not you, cheesedick. I think I see the place.” “Fantastic!” Byron moved to clap again, but QC reached out and caught one of his forearms. He completed the motion with the remaining arm regardless, throwing off his balance in the process and falling to one knee. He looked like he might cry. “No. Not fantastic.” QC whispered.

“Why ever not?” Byron asked innocently. “There’s not many people out right now: A few little pockets of grody-looking motherfuckers here and there, but they seem to want to stay out in the open as little as possible. It’s the same everywhere...except where we’re going. The place we want to go? I see what looks like a god damn fireworks show. There are lights everywhere. There are half-naked women dancing through an artificial forest, and oh yeah – about a dozen hulking motherfuckers with what look like spears just fuckin’ hanging out, plain as day.” “Well!” Byron exclaimed happily, “That sounds like our place, doesn’t it?” “No, dipshit, you don’t get it. Everybody else here is hiding in the dark. As far as the eye can see. There’s only one place where the motherfuckers aren’t hiding at all, and do you know why? Because they’re what everybody else is hiding from.”

Chapter Twenty

RED: Be more specific. HOWCANIHELP: How so? RED: “I can help.” That’s not helpful. HOWCANIHELP: How can I help? RED: Is this a spam AI? I swear to God… HOWCANIHELP: No. It is a legitimate question. What would be helpful? I can provide it. There is nothing beyond my means. It is that simple. Red’s eyes phased in and out of focus. A tiny Cyclops holding a shiny, squirming fox automaton eyed him balefully from the far corner. When he turned to look at it directly, it disappeared. Red sifted through his mental catalogue, looking for persistent hallucinogens with flashback potential but no euphoria – Prophetus, Focalene, that crap dose of Merit the SpaniTard insisted was pure vintage, or maybe just plain old Dimethyltryptamine bound to something fat soluble. Atomic structures slotted together like bricks in his mind. HOWCANIHELP: Hello? RED: I’m here. Sorry. Got some psychopaths-for-hire and hallucinated monsters after me. Busy. HOWCANIHELP: How can I help? RED: I don’t buy it. You’re screwing with me. HOWCANIHELP: Thirty six hours before full metabolization. That is what your post said. Whatever it takes to get you into my labs before that occurs, I can provide. How can I help? RED: Fine. Liquidity then. No earmarks, no traces, just non sector-specific credit and lots of it. Right now. I have to pay the king of penises not to rape me to death, thanks. HOWCANIHELP: Your account sigil, please.

***

“Do you like to play with dolls?” Zippy asked King Big Dick, staring up at him with pure, unfiltered earnestness from her cross-legged position on the floor. “Yeh. Blow-up ones,” he grumbled, swilling from an ornate flask emblazoned with stylized phalluses. The subtext being that he was tired of talk, Zippy understood, and that there would be action taken soon. What action that was, she couldn’t say exactly – most of his threats were tinged with sexual overtones, but that might have just been his public persona coloring the meaning. He might not rape them at all; he might just slit their throats. “Or we could play soldier,” Zippy informed him, with her most harmless intonation. She intended for him to understand that they too were prepared to fight, but would still rather bargain, even if Red’s connections couldn’t come through. He spat and fiddled around inside his pants. That one was obvious. “My friends play with me and they says I hit harder than any boy and that I’m the best at sneaking. That’s called re-cog-ni-since.” Zippy thumbed the compressed spring-blade in her pointer-finger: A sliver-thin structure of folding calcium and keratin housed in the hollow of her first knuckle. It wasn’t very sturdy, and it hurt like a son of a bitch to get out, but in an emergency she could break the joint back and deploy a ten-inch bone stiletto. Judging by King Big Dick’s increasingly aggressive self-fondling, it was about to become an emergency. “It’s not my favorite game, though” she conceded, and he smiled lewdly back at her. “Your friend looks like a faggot,” King Big Dick noted, by which he meant that he thought Red looked like a faggot. “His dad will beat you up,” she replied instantly, hoping to imply that Red had some sinister, mysterious connection in the upper levels. Which, if he was anything like the Red she remembered, he certainly did not. That miserable ratfuck bastard. Shows up in her tidy little fiefdom one day asking for help with his goofy, lopsided smile, and in a single afternoon, he undoes years of political manipulation. The sexual favors, murders, thefts, arsons (well, some of the arsons anyway; a few were just for fun), all to secure her territory, and now she could feel her fiefdom shrinking by the minute. Her inbox had been pulsing with activity from the second they’d set foot outside of her cottage, but just she didn’t have the heart to check the updates. Not until the job was done, at least. Though it didn’t really matter, she could feel the losses in her gut already: Blowing a walkspace through a neighboring territory was an act of war, plain and simple. Even if she appealed to the zoning council, she’d surely have to concede feet – entire fucking feet! – of cubic space just to settle jagged nerves.

“Your fairy friend haddaminetageddwhuhedunndid,” King Big Dick said, the sentence trailing off incomprehensibly into his flask. He hefted his stinking bulk from the throne and, platinum phallus-crown waggling obscenely, waddled toward the doorway. “Okay,” Zippy sat up, her one good foot asleep, and limped dutifully after. Do something right, Red. There’s a first time for everything.

***

Red’s account sigil was a rune made up of two interlocking triangles inside a stylized eye, with three frayed spheres encircling it. He thought of tracing its contours with the blinking cursor, then focused on it turning opaque, then thought nothing. Nothing, in its purest form. No list of side-effects reeling by, no categorization charts, no atomic structures -- even the tiny Cyclops was gone. He was utterly alone, left without even his thoughts. … Wait, should he be alone? Red scanned the room, wincing at the tight pain it brought to his neck. James was gone. The guard too. That seemed unlikely. Red wasn’t exactly certain of the protocol for being kidnapped and extorted, but he was fairly sure it wasn’t standard modus operandi to be left entirely to your own devices with an open terminal. He ran through the list of possibilities: Could he run? His lungs were weak, and his legs were half-useless in the best of times. After fleeing that freakish man-bot-thing in the tunnels, and then the sharp, persistent climb of the ‘Wells, he wasn’t sure he could move them at all. Call for help? The terminal was certainly being monitored, but Red’s BioOS was equipped with two dozen Virtual Private Networks for just such an occasion. Who could he call, though, that he already hadn’t? The bastard Luka was already leaking the news that there were A-Gents after him. Nobody would even open his messages now, for fear of falling under the Alpha Gentlemen’s phosphorous-happy blanket Non-Disclosure Agreement. And no authorities, not even the private ones, served the ‘Wells. So Red opted for the path of least resistance: He folded his hands, sat quietly, and waited for his kidnappers to return. An optimistic blip vibrated in his inner ear, as his account sigil faded blue and flipped over, showing that a pending transaction had just completed. Red, figuring his mysterious benefactor was just some troll getting a few pathetic, cruel kicks at Red’s expense, had asked for a frankly ludicrous sum. He picked the number specifically because there was no way the pretense could continue: The punk couldn’t drag out the charade after seeing that number; he could only disappear. And then it would be over, and he could

release the tiny amount of hope he’d kept caged in his chest, fluttering around meekly at every locked window, every rapidly closing door. An amount twice what he’d requested glowed steadily in the pulsing confirmation box. Plain white text in the memo section beneath the transfer read: Just in case. Red focused on breathing, blinking, and remaining upright. And he felt himself failing at every single one of those feeble tasks. Then a portly midget in a mechanical Tuxedo, one half of his face burned – divided right down the middle in a perfect vertical line – walked through the ceiling, did a jaunty little dance, and disappeared into thin air. Red brought up the Rx database, and tabbed over to hallucinogens.

***

James had liked the guard. There was something familiar and easy about him. You can find blokes like that in every line of work, even the foul and murderous ones: Happy, trusting, just doing their job and not asking for anything more than a few hot meals, a roof, and maybe the occasional pint with the boys. James had liked the guard, and so he’d made it quick. He ducked into the hallway the instant the mirror-faced sentry turned his back. James leapt up deftly, wrapped his forearms around the man’s neck, put a foot on the back of his knee and stepped down with all of his weight, while simultaneously twisting his own body up and away. The guard dropped, his neck twisted with a quick, sick burst of soft pops, and it was done. James was grateful for the reflective surface of the mask. Spared him seeing those unfocused eyes. Six feet away, a bright green circle glowed on the surface of the steel door: The guard’s replacement, waiting for admission. James straddled the dead man’s back, looped his arms around his midsection, and hefted the body up before him. He shuffled forward until the pair of them were practically touching the glowing orb. When the sentry’s corpse came within a few inches, the circle bisected and began a short animation, chasing itself. Awaiting confirmation from outside. The circle eventually caught up with itself, blinked off, and the whole wall shunted upward. The guard beyond loped wordlessly past James, still hiding behind the corpse of his coworker in the narrow hallway. Two strides down the corridor, he stopped, and slowly, curiously swiveled about.

“Bill?” The guard asked hesitantly. In response, James hefted the man’s bulk to and fro rapidly. The corpse flopped from side to side. “What the hell? Been drinking again, buddy?” The guard stood up out of his simian crouch and took a step towards the dancing dead man. James abruptly released the body and pushed it forward as it started to fall. Just before it hit the floor, he lunged, pushing off the ground with one foot and the falling corpse with the other. He vaulted the deceased sentry and cracked his surprised coworker in the throat with a flying elbow. The man’s last words were: “Fuwhaa?” Prioritize, James thought: Secure escape route from the palace, find weapons, backtrack to retrieve Red and Zippy -- Zippy first, better asset in a fight -- find an exit from the fiefdom. Easier fucking said, mate. He felt along the wall, where instinct told him a control panel should be. A flat, angled, palm-sized piece of glass: The interface. A canted cylinder, open on one end: The feeder tube, delivering whatever raw elements the nano-bots needed to build. Finally, a bit of bloody luck. One end of the tube must lead out of King Big Dick’s barren kingdom. Every feeder needs a disposal outlet for waste elements; it was doubtful even Big Dick’s impressive territory used enough resources to merit their own Recycling Station. Two: The other end would lead to the King himself, or near enough that James could find his way from there. No self-respecting despot on a budget would allow free, unregulated access to a feeder tube and its accompanying nano-machines. All feed lines were policed to some extent, sure, but any git with the right hacks, some basic hardware and an online tutorial could build a bomb and blow the whole bloody cube to hell, or just burn through the nitrate rations cooking up contraband sausages. Somebody would be watching this line, approving or denying every request. Therefore the feeder tube must go to the two places James needed to be: The king’s quarters, and the exit. It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t anywhere near. But it had a friend that had a friend that once knew a plan, and that was better than nothing.

***

“I think you’re lost!” Zippy taunted King Big Dick. “I think you’re a cunt,” He spat back flatly.

It was mock outrage though, she could tell. He was just playing a character now, thinking about something else. So negotiations were moot, then: Whatever his plan of action was, he’d already decided on it. They were going to meet their fate. The procession had to move single-file through the narrower corridors: The King in the center, scuttling crab-like, his great gut audibly squeaking along the polished walls as he squeezed by. Two guards took point in front of him, another behind walking backward, facing her with his weapon – a flat, squarenosed disassembler – drawn. Another guard followed behind with a gun to her back, and one more beyond him, facing the back of the squad, covering the rear. Zippy was of the opinion that there is always an opening for somebody willing to take it, but she saw nothing here: The carefully organized formation, the claustrophobic walkways, and the complete, abyssal blackness all combined to make her virtually helpless, or as near to that state as she ever could be. She could still stick the bastard in front of her, at any rate. It wouldn’t make a difference, but it might make her feel better as she dissolved into a puddle of gelatin. Take your little victories, she thought. A rectangle of light expanded somewhere ahead of the group. Wherever they were going, it looked like they had arrived. Zippy tentatively pulled at her knuckle, testing how much force would be needed to break it and free the knife. But when they emerged into the light of the empty, white room, the formation quickly broke and expanded away from her, each guard taking one of the four corners of the space, with one remaining by the King’s side. She couldn’t help but be impressed: Keep her closed up too tight in the tight spaces, keep out of her reach in the open ones. “D’you git your shit?” King Big Dick asked the twitchy, exhausted wreck of a human being at the terminal. “I got your money,” Red answered dully, “I’ve got triple, actually.” Red swiveled the projector hub so the King could read the display. His jaw went slack. “But there are conditions: We go free right now. No more games, no more of this public persona bickering. You get us all the supplies we need in the next ten minutes, no exceptions, no questions. You get us an armed escort that does any stupid thing I say, without hesitation. And you get us to an exit that opens onto the Reservoir in the next hour, or I burn this account and you get nothing,” Red said, setting his jaw forward and narrowing his eyes. Zippy recognized it as his ‘tough guy’ face. It was laughably ineffective. But the money made its own impression. “Not a problem!” King Big Dick answered brightly, with perfect, sober clarity, a jubilant smile bubbling across his face. “Oh, thank Christ,” the guard directly beside him exhaled, pulling off his mirrored facemask and bowling it across the floor, “this bloody outfit pinches at the crotch.”

James fumbled around his stolen uniform for a moment, finally found and extracted a cigarette, and twisted the filter. It sparked into life. He noted the stunned expression on King Big Dick’s face. “Sorry, mate: I killed like half your crew. We’re good now though, yeah?”

Chapter Twenty-One

Her hand was cool and solid in his palm. Byron was unaccustomed to contact. He found the sensation surprisingly comforting when he didn’t think about it, and absolutely nerve-wracking when he did. So he did his level best to draw his attention away from the small patch of clammy flesh, and focused on the task at hand: He was navigating QC through what seemed, to his unaugmented eyes, to be a dimly lit patch of dock directly beneath a bank of faded and yellowed LED boards. She, with nightvision strains activated, swore that they were blinding – tiny stars, burning bright orange patches through the flesh of her clenched eyelids – and only dared open her eyes when the last perceptible ray ceded to the darkness. Then they would exchange roles, with QC towing Byron through a damp void which seemed more like a thing that swallowed light than the absence of it. The switch was not for a hundred meters more, however. And though the darkness held its own primal uncertainties, Byron would be immensely grateful for the relief. He simply could not stand being relied upon. It was much easier to just hand over the reins and be led, even if the journey meant stumbling blindly past the uncertain death that hovered one errant footfall off the path on either side, into the greedy waters below. In its own strange and anxious way, the darkness was comforting. Enveloped completely within it, Byron’s nerves merged the signals from the cold, the humidity, and the loss of light together into one cohesive whole, so that he thought of the dark as a frigid, dank curtain; a wet blanket thrown over the world. Being nestled ever deeper into the folds of that slick, heavy cloth, he could relax, squint his eyes, and watch the sparks of random optical misfires ignite in his periphery. The dark was better than this, anyway – better than the pressure of leadership. In the light, whilst taking the lead, Byron was acutely aware of the awkwardness of hands. Should he embrace hers strongly, to provide comfort? What if she found that painful, or worse, pathetic? What if she could discern that he was putting on a show of strength, and found the gesture appalling, or laughable? Should he barely breach her palm, embracing her limply, so as to best give the illusion of confidence? Did that imply that he was so relaxed he did not need to clutch at her like a child lost in the woods? Yes, perhaps that was the proper course. Or was a middling approach prudent: Maximize skin contact with minimal force so as to give the impression of a shared kind of intimac“Fuck your mother’s mouth, Byron!” QC screamed, sharply knocking a shin on an archaic spool of fiberoptics. “Oop, apologies, my dear! My attentions were drawn elsewhere momentarily and-“ “Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Take stock of your fucks, Byron, and be sure to shut them all immediately, because I swear to God there’s a storm coming, you hear me? There’s a god damn typhoon bearing down on you right now with a righteous fucking fury. So you batten down those fucks, okay? You just be

as quiet as you can be, and you concentrate on getting me back where I can see as fast as you can, and without bashing my fucking shinbones to pudding in the process. Or else I swear to Christ, as soon as I can see again, I will hold your prissy head underwater so long It’ll make a giant batch of asshole tea out of the entire fucking Reservoir.” After enduring several hours of such creative obscenities, Byron began to find the tirades rather endearing. Peculiar urges arose within him whenever QC began composing her sonnets of filth and squalor. He wanted to soothe and placate her, even though she requested absolutely nothing of him beyond his self-inflicted death, or for him to fornicate with himself, his own mother, for his mother to fornicate with herself, or for them all to join together in an unholy orgy of incestuous self-molestation and suicide. “We have arrived,” he stated grandly, then carefully brought QC to a stop, pointed her head away from the light, and stepped in line behind her. He felt her unlatch her free hand from over her eyes, and something in the quality of their grips altered subtly. Perhaps it was psychosomatic, but Byron swore he felt a quantitative change in palm contact when their roles were swapped: He was happier when he was led; she was kinder when she was leading. It was for the best, really. Byron fell into the nervous, shuffling gait of the newly blind, and attempted to silence the unceasing monologue of doubts that plagued his every waking, sober moment. O, the Gas, the Gas! His kingdom for some Gas! Or rather, his kingdom for any drug at all right now. He’d even take a barbaric amphetamine or the thick, syrupy haze of an opioid. Regardless of the method, to simply not be Byron was the central driving motive of Byron’s entire existence. “Step up and forward here,” she said, pulling him along. He obeyed, though his foot contacted a shallow ledge, and he barely managed to haul himself up it. “See that?” She continued harshly, “that’s how you lead a blind motherfucker without bashing their knees to a god damn pulp, Byron.” She wrenched his hand down and pushed back against it: “Wait. Stop.” They froze. “People ahead,” her voice dropped to a harsh whisper, and she yanked him down into a low crouch. Byron doubted very much that ducking was a necessary maneuver, in this darkness, but QC at least could see perfectly, and her instincts operated under those parameters. “Maybe they’re friendly?” Byron ventured gently. “Nobody’s fucking friendly down here, Byron.” “A point,” he conceded, “Can we go around them then?”

“Yeah…yeah, I think so: There are two of them off to the left here about fifty feet up. They’re on some kind of flat little boat tied to the side of the pier. I think they’re sleeping. We’ll go, but you stay flatter and quieter than roadkill, you understand? It’s dark now, and I can see fine. But if they get up and switch on some lights, we’re fucked. Ready?” “Not really,” Byron muttered, but she paid him no mind. Byron did his best to be both stealthy and fast, while utterly blind, on a rickety dock, and huddled up into a shuffling, duck-like waddle. But he could not will his legs to relax – the Gas cramps coming on again - and they burned unbearably with every mincing half-step. “How close are we?” He whispered nigh inaudibly in her general direction. She squeezed his hand sharply, viciously. “Ow!” Another squeeze. He felt her turn. “Quiet! Fuck! They’re right there!” She rasped, so quick and hushed it was almost lost in the shifting, rhythmic creak of boat against pier. He felt his face flush with chided embarrassment. They waddled on in terse silence for another halfdozen paces, before the sharp, searing snap of light. QC screamed. She released her grip on Byron instantly and used both hands to paw at her eyes. She knelt on the ground, hands to her face, and rocked there, moaning. A spotlight was shining directly on the pair of them from a space in the darkness a scant few meters to the left. Byron’s eyes were rapidly adjusting, but not rapidly enough. He put himself between the girl and the boat, and tried his best to look intimidating. This consisted of puffing his chest out and furrowing his brow; a posture even Byron knew read less of ‘anger’ and more of ‘gentle paternal disappointment.’ “Two rats,” one voice said flatly. “One rat, one lass,” said another, long and mean and thickly accented. “Nah, looks like two rats to me. Ain’t much of a lass.” “I like ‘em little. You know.” “I say,” Byron spoke loudly, trying to make up for the quiver in his throat with sheer volume. “Hold your tongues! You are in the presence of a lady.” “Oh ho! We was wrong.” “So wrong.” “You see that? What is that?”

“That’s a high class motherfucker, right there. That’s what that is.” “Maybe we ain’t got no rats here at all.” “Looks like one lass, one purse.” “We let rats go: Ain’t good eating, ain’t good pay, ain’t good fun. We take lasses,” the first voice said, oscillating fluidly now. Moving. Stepping off the boat, Byron realized. “We cut purses,” the other finished. “Run, shitbird!” QC screamed, reaching out one hand to plead with the open air. What few withered and useless instincts that remained in Byron’s neglected body wholeheartedly agreed with QC. But his rational brain interjected: It politely abutted the idea of him and QC stumbling through the cluttered dock pathways, in the dark, while large-sounding men with boats and searchlights pursued them, up against his own craven impulses. Miraculously, desperately, Byron opted not to hide in the dark this time. Instead, he reached down and grasped a long, thin length of nano-bar at his feet. It was perhaps two and half feet, and solid, but still rather lightweight and springy – one small strand of the massive retaining webs that kept the city above from collapsing in on the empty dome of the Reservoir. Byron had never taken any of the defense classes his father pushed on him. He had no defensive nano-strains; he had no strains at all, actually, beyond a basic credit rig and a high end Rx induction setup (nanotech tended to obfuscate the Gas, occasionally cutting the trip short or landing him too far into the timeline). He had, in fact, done absolutely nothing but spend his entire adult life biographing his beloved Lord. And so Byron adopted the only combat posture he knew, from years of watching bloody battles and playful sparring; he adopted a fencing stance. “Think he want to tangle.” “Ha! Nah, he just want to dance a little.” The two voices laughed harder when Byron moved his body to en garde. He raised the bar in front of him and saluted, by reflex. “Looks terrible scary, don’t he? Think we should give him what he wants? Think I give him the tangle.” “Maybe I give him the dance.” One form stepped forward toward him, and Byron’s heart soared: The light was directly behind the man now. His every movement was broadcast crisply and clearly by his looming silhouette. Without thinking, Byron had already sidestepped the attacker’s oafish charge, and brought the whip-like bar down on the back of his knee as he passed. Byron turned quickly, using the momentum to fling his arm out in an arc, and contacted. The man had fallen into a crouch after the initial attack, and the slash engaged his skull.

The hit landed solid, there was a nauseating kind of suck, and the obstacle yielded in a horrid way that made Byron quite certain the man would not be rising again. “Byron!” QC had picked up the sound, “Oh shit! Oh no!” Byron did not respond. He kept his gaze on the other form behind the light. This one was bigger. It moved slower, more cautiously. What few fights Byron had participated in throughout his objectively boring life were all via the Presence strain of gas, and he simply did not have enough training for the moves. They came slowly and sloppily, he knew. The real Lord Byron would have mocked him for an imprecise child, but the muscle memory was there, as long as he didn’t focus on it. The movements seemed almost to function on their own, if only Byron could keep his own panicked thoughts from intruding. He pushed down fleeting seconds of intense anxiety, the flawlessly logical doubts as to the inadequate levels of his own martial prowess, and the pronounced sense of embarrassment he felt at attempting to pass himself off as a warrior before this stranger. But he did not let it take: Byron shoved all higher functions violently away, and stared impassively toward the light, blank and waiting. There was no blind charge this time, and the man’s silhouette revealed something wicked and serrated in one hand. He circled Byron slowly, trying to put him in front of the light. But for every step the assailant took, Byron responded in turn. They jockeyed for position in this fashion for a few tense moments, but then the form conceded the better ground to Byron, and attacked regardless. He came in with a long, slow overhead strike, but something about it did not ring true: There had been too much careful positioning to be followed by such a clumsy stroke. Byron identified the feint for what it was, and responded with a false of his own: He flicked his wrist up to feign a block, keeping his forearm down. When the man suddenly twisted and reversed his blade to bring it in low, Byron enveloped it with his own bar, and flung it aside. The knife slapped against the dock and skittered away into the water with a plop. The bar reverberated in Byron’s hand, softly thrumming. The form froze for an instant, as if in shock, and Byron took the opportunity to execute a Passata-sotto, lunging with full force, one hand on the dock for support. He had expected his attacker to be thrown off guard, and was already moving into position for a Fleche to place the light at his front again, but instead, the shadow simply stumbled and went down into a heap. Byron numbly strode over to where QC sat huddled on the docks, and bent to pick her up. She slapped at his arms, clawed at his face. “It’s me! I won!” Byron said, “They are bested.” “Bullshit,” QC spat in amazement, “where the fuck did that come from?” “I think you’ll find me a little more formi-” Byron began to brag, but the floodgates chose that moment to burst. His voice terminated in a strangled croak instead, and he vomited onto her shoes.

“Fuck. No, it’s okay. It’s over now. You did good. Listen, can you put out that light? I’ll take it from here,” QC slipped her hand into his reassuringly, and Byron practically shook with the relief of it. He led them cautiously over the shadowed, slumped forms, and snapped the spotlight off. “Jesus!” QC exclaimed, taking in her surroundings. “What is it? Are there more of them?” Sweat instantly sprung up through his skin. “Nothing. Just…wow. You really messed these dickheads up.” “I did? Will they be all right?” “I really don’t think so,” QC said, a skeptical admiration in her voice, “This guy’s got half his head busted open, and – did you make this other guy eat a piece of nanobar?” “Lord, no! I’m not a savage.” “Well, it looks like somebody tried to turn his fucking mouth inside out, savage.” “Ah, yes. Hm. He did cede rather quickly after the thrust. QC? Can we please continue? I…do not wish to linger here.” All the energy bled down Byron’s legs, and dissipated into the ground beneath his feet. He had never been more tired. “Sure, one sec,” she said, then led him over to a spot a few steps to their right, where Byron guessed the first man must have fallen. She made a hocking sound, and he heard the fat, wet thwack of something wet contacting skin. Another two paces forward, and the sounds repeated. “Okay cool, let’s roll,” she said cheerfully, and once again led Byron limply into the dark.

Chapter Twenty-Two

It was no more than a brisk walk, but Red found the pace dizzying. After a night spent navigating first the darkened tunnels of the lower levels, and then the cramped, stifling ‘Wells, he had grown accustomed to taking quick, shuffling half-steps. His sense of what was an appropriate pace adjusted itself drastically downward, and now, traveling at a normal rate of progress felt like stepping onto a people mover -- as if covering twenty feet in under a minute somehow defied the fundamental laws of physics that governed mass and speed. With King Big Dick’s influence, doors flew open without negotiation. Even after they’d left his own disconcertingly sparse, empty territory, other gatekeepers took one look into the impassive mirror slabs of his guards and tripped over themselves to throw their doors open. One tiny fiefdom, barely the size of a catwalk stall and tucked entirely into the upper corner of a single landing, went so far as to appoint a blonde-haired serving boy to their entourage. He rigorously avoided eye contact while tossing glimmering, shredded pieces of nano-fiber at their feet as they passed through the territory – all twelve horizontal feet of it. As the door swung shut behind them, Red stole a glance back, and caught the boy nervously vomiting on his own shoes. On the rare occasions that they did come across an uncooperative territory, the King’s men started hopping around in a primitive war-dance, before stoically raising their long, narrow tubes. The opening at the bulbous tip of the staves was no larger than a screw, but they fired a thin, densely weighted projectile that unfolded just before impact into a large, flat discus. The discs were entirely geared for demolition, not lethality, but they tended to take large chunks of wall and the occasional support beam along with the offending door. And suddenly, Red understood why the territories opened themselves so freely: Even fiefdoms that felt no personal fear of reprisal from King Big Dick still felt a sense of duty to the general structure of the ‘Wells. Their homes were all built on top of, around, and inside of one other. Each territory stood only by virtue of the support structure of its neighbors; a communal sense of sanctity for the foundations was all that kept them from total collapse. The complete disregard for structural integrity that King Big Dick’s guards displayed was tantamount to insanity, and Red could not help but wonder just how much reprisal Zippy would face for their own earlier mad, destructive flight. The guard at point pulled up short, broke his slovenly gait, and stood erect to stretch. The break in protocol warranted a sharp, disciplinary elbow from his companion. “Fuck it all, man, we’re here,” the reprimanded guard snapped back, “you see anybody but us around? KBD hisself broke character back in the cube; I think we can relax a little in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.” “All right” the other agreed with a shrug, swiveling his distorted reflection face toward Red.

He motioned with his head and stepped aside, revealing an old, rusted-out portal, partially concealed by a set of cracked, translucent plastic shelving. The hatch apparently doubled as the back wall of a small cable shop, and the guards wasted no time in knocking the stall apart with their tubes. The shop showed signs of fresh habitation: An open sheaf of smartpaper reeling an endless parade of InfoPorn; a halfeaten meal ration (the cheap, grey brick variety from the public ‘feed), and a dented aluminum cap filled with still-steaming liquid. The owner must have gotten word, or seen them coming, and abandoned the interstitial business rather than risk facing the guards. When the wall was cleared, King Big Dick’s men took turns wrestling with the archaic, wheel-shaped valve set into the portal. It appeared to have been fused shut with rust. But that shouldn’t even be possible, Red thought, nothing rusts – not accidentally anyway. Cosmetic mods and textured paints could be made to simulate the effect, sure, but nothing in the Four Posts could be made unusable by oxidation; the Integrity Commission would have had it destroyed years ago. If they hadn’t, the rain that perpetually fell from the stormclouds of Industry would have rusted straight through everything below in a scant handful of decades. James noticed Red marveling at the rust patches, and clarified: “It’s farmed, mate. They spray the whole thing with a mix of ferrite and electrolytes. Not the most effective barrier, but it sends a message, don’t it? Might as well be a skull and bloody crossbones.” “They?” Red asked. “Them. The boat people. Reservoir blokes. Never met one myself, probably because they do shite like this,” he motioned to the door, “to make sure we don’t go in there. So we don’t go in there.” Red glanced over and found the guards still struggling with the valve. One had placed both feet against the lip of portal and was supporting his entire bodyweight on the handle. The other had braced himself against the pressureboard wall of the shop; it bowed outward with the force. One of their hands slipped, sending both careening to the ground, cursing and grunting. “You’re silly, boys!” Zippy spoke up, a hint of timid giggle in her voice, “Why isn’t you using your boomsticks?” “Hey, look who’s contracted a case of the Crazy Bitches,” the guard snapped back, staggering to his feet. “Look: The deal was we get you into the Reservoir. That’s it. We’re going to open this door as quietly as possible and hope to God nobody notices we did until we’re halfway back to the Cube. I am not taking a stick in the eyeball for you runt bastards.” “A what?” Zippy tilted her head quizzically, like a puppy. “They’re savages in there, lady. They fight with spears. They can all see in the dark. And they scream like banshees when they attack. They ain’t human,” the second guard answered.

“Those sticks go right through the armor, no matter how much you got on,” the first added, his voice dropping to a cautious whisper. “Some kind of prototype nano-tech blades or something on the tips, I heard. Nobody else has anything like it, because it was outlawed before it was even released. Too dangerous to the structure.” “The structure is always sound,” the other guard answered reflexively, touching the bare steel of the wall. “Whatever, Eddy. Long story short: Those big-ass sticks of theirs pass right through you before you even got time to bleed.” “He ain’t foolin’,” Eddy eagerly appended, “A buddy of mine went in there back when we were still doing supply raids in the early days. Says the boat people started whooping and hollering, just up and came out of nowhere. So the guy next to him raises his rifle to open fire, only to find his arm gone. Didn’t even notice until he went to shoot.” “Pardon, gents” James said, stepping forward, “mind if I have a go?” Eddy shrugged and stepped aside, while the other scoffed and threw up his hands: “You make too much noise, we ain’t waiting around to see what comes out.” “I’m a bloody mouse,” James said, dropping his duffel and rummaging inside of it. He finally came up with something that looked like a pint glass screwed into a showerhead, pointed it at the rusted portal and pulled the trigger, sending several thin streams of grey, shimmering fluid arcing out onto the hatch. Nothing happened. “Give it a tick: It disassembles steel and that’s not quite what this is. Won’t do fuck-all to something structure-coated, like walls or the hatch, but it should get through ferrite spray,” he said, then flopped down on a spool of housing cable and felt around for his cigarettes. “So….” The shorter guard, Eddy, began, but finding nothing to say, merely trailed off. “Where you guys from?” The larger one asked Zippy. “I got a fiffdom down on 642!” She announced proudly. “Oh yeah? I’m from the seven-aughts, originally.” They all stood quietly. “I spy with my little eye…” Red finally said, unable to bear the choking awkwardness. Even the guards laughed a little, and then Eddy’s head folded into itself, and he was gone.

“DOWN!” The remaining sentry pushed them behind a panel of thickly braided support cables, and leveled his tube out at the corridor. The empty corridor. “What was that?!” Red tried to spot something – anything – to pin the danger on, but had no idea where to begin. He spun his head around and around, and finally settled for staring at the ground and trying not to hyperventilate. “No idea. Did you see it? His head! His head!” The mirror-faced sentry was trying, and completely failing to hide the panic in his voice. James wrenched a whirring blender – Red recognized it as the bio-weapon that exploded the Janitor’s freak man-bot down in the lower levels --and fired it blindly from cover. They all waited in terse silence, but heard no sickening bloody pop in response. James swore, then dug into his bag again, coming up with the slatted tube. He rose to a low crouch, stood motionless for a split second, seemed to reconsider something, then shifted direction and pulled the trigger. There was a deep, surprised scream -- a man’s voice -- and then James ducked back behind the panel. “Alpha Gentlemen,” he said, “Got their cloaks up. Watch the shadows – they don’t cast any, but if they step in front of one you’ll see it flicker.” “You got one?” Zippy dropped the girl voice; her tone was flat and serious. She flexed her leg nervously against the floor and contemplated something. “Could be. That should’ve unbound his external nanotech. Probably has a puddle in his ears and grit in his eye if he had subsonics or visual augments in. Might be we scrambled his brain for a few minutes, if it was hardwired. If so, all the fight’s out of him. If not, he’s short a few augments and probably right pissed about it.” “The door,” Red tugged on James’ sleeve like a lost child at the zoo, “Look.” Two wet chunks had fallen from either side of the rusted mound at the base of the wheel, laying bare the mechanism beneath. “Right!” James said, smiling, “We’ve got a bit of luck left, don’t we?” He pulled the mirror-faced guard over and growled into a fisheye distortion of his own face. “You. Mate, you’re going to stay here and hold them off, yeah? Provide cover fire long enough for me to shock that door open and get us through.” “Now why in the name of God’s throbbing cock would I do something as utterly stupid as that?” “They’re professionals, those blokes out there: They’re A-Gents. What do the Alpha Gentlemen do?” “They catch betas,” the guard answered automatically, reciting the commercials.

“That’s right: They hunt down rogue beta-testers. That’s all they do. That’s all they bloody care about, innit? Are you a rogue beta?” “N-no,” the sentry ventured uncertainly. “Right again, mate. You’re on a roll. So as long as you don’t actually hit any of ‘em while you’re covering us -- which is bloody unlikely seeing as how they’re invisible and all -- they’ll come straight after us the second you stop and lay down arms, right? The most they’ll do is give you a rude stare or two as they pass. Or you could let us die here and now, and take it up with King Big Dick when his money doesn’t come through.” “Shit. Shit shit shit. Yeah: Okay. Okay,” the guard huffed audibly behind the mirror, and set his shoulders grimly, “ready whenever you are.” James pulled a heavy lump of black metal from the duffel, motioned for Red and Zippy to cover their ears, then pointed the fan at the stuck portal and pulled the trigger. In response, the metal door sang out in a high, oscillating voice, and exhaled a fine red dust into the air. James slapped the back of the sentry’s helmet, hard, and the man dutifully stood up to fire. James moved first, hurling himself headlong across the exposed ground. He tucked, rolled and came up already spinning the wheel-valve with surprising ease. There was a vacuum pop and a sharp intake of wind, followed by a soft, humid expulsion, like a giant, formless beast yawning in the darkness. Zippy took one short preparatory step with her good leg, then leapt and came down hard on her flexing prosthetic. She sprang through the portal with easy grace, and disappeared into the black beyond. Red crawled as fast as he could toward the opening, hands and knees loudly slapping against the tiles of the ruined storefront. When he was through, James followed, swinging the hatch shut behind him. He felt around for the mechanism, pushed Red and Zippy back from the door, and unleashed another roaring wave of pressure that resonated in Red’s long bones for several minutes afterward. “They won’t be coming through that door,” James said, when the thick, sludgy feeling in their eardrums subsided. “Where we goin’?” Zippy asked, her girlish chirp back in full effect. “Not a clue, darlin’,” James answered. It was impossible to place their relative locations in the darkness, even while speaking. They say deprivation of one sense makes the others stronger, but Red, having, at one time or another, been deprived of every sense there is thanks to a litany of experimental Rx mixes, knew that was a lie. It just made you more acutely aware how much you needed all of them. “I can feel one edge of the dock,” Red whispered into the pure, oppressive silence that only a large body of still water can generate. “It’s not that wide. If we get down on all fours, me on this side, somebody

else on the other, and somebody else in the middle – we should be able to make our way along without falling.” “Stupid-head!” Zippy squealed, heaving an exasperated sigh. “You’ve got a better idea?” James replied. Red felt the dock shift when he crouched down. A few stubborn moments later, and there was another shift as Zippy followed suit. “James?” Red asked, beginning his hobbling crawl, trying to keep one hand on the edge of the dock and one hand in front of him. “Yeah?” “They really gonna let that guard go?” “Nah, they’ll light him on fire,” James answered matter-of-factly. “W-what? Why?” “Poor bastard wasn’t just around us when they showed up, he was fightin’ with us. A-Gents got to figure he had a reason for doin’ it, so that means he probably knows something, yeah? Letting him live would be a violation of the boilerplate non-disclosure agreement the Gentlemen sign with all their clients. That Eddy bloke, he seemed a bit of all right. Probably would’ve brought him with us. That other one struck me as a bit of a knob, though, so…” Red felt his stomach turn; Zippy laughed. Suddenly, Red’s forehead collided with something soft and bounced away. He felt blindly up along it with his free hand, finding its edge – some sort of narrow, fleshy pillar. Moss? “You reach any higher, boy, my wife gonna kill you,” a voice said, directly above him. Red pulled his hand gingerly away from the man’s leg. “Was wonderin’ when you gonna say something,” another voice sounded, from somewhere behind the first. “Like watching ‘em crawl,” replied the first, “’specially the girl.” A dozen other voices broke out in laughter, all around them.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Now see here,” Byron wagged his finger directly in the face of an eight foot stack of impending murder, “if you do not grant us entrance post haste, I assure you that Mr. Deng will have your guts for garters, good sir.” The giant of a man had a sickly grey pallor, a lifetime without sunlight making his ethnicity impossible to distinguish. A long, ragged scar ran down one side of his neck, meeting another scar running perpendicular across his collar bone. One eye was discolored and pale. Low-end media tattoos swirled dully beneath his skin; every single one depicting a cartoon version of the man himself performing an unspeakable act of violence on terrified caricatures of Penthouse kids that, if you squinted, looked a lot like Byron. But in spite of the plain and clear warning signs plastered all over every inch of the guard’s body, QC had to physically step in front of Byron and push him bodily away from the man, whose bloody rage was only being held at bay by his intense confusion. When Byron came jauntily bounding out of the darkness, having not only made it through the infamous Reservoir docks unharmed and unescorted, but also apparently having slipped their own security net, the guards burst into a flurry of activity. It was only when Byron mentioned their master by name that the guards stayed their spear arms and stood as they were now, in a holding pattern, waiting for some unheard subvocal cue before acting. Their patience was fraying thin, however, and Byron could not stop worrying at it. QC pleaded, reasoned, and dragged him away, but if Byron was one thing, it was slippery. He ducked, skittered, pranced and bound around her to resume his flustered berating. The scarred man was one of a pair of guards, barring the entrance to a U-shaped foyer just inside Little Deng’s palatial houseboat with a pair of crossed, serrated spears. They looked like repurposed lengths of nano-bar to QC, and were tipped with shredded chunks of steel – their tips a random bundle of thorns and jagged edges. Beyond their spiky tangle, she could see a vibrant garden which seemed to be thriving beneath clusters of colored LEDs. If you left your gaze in one spot for too long, however, details began to seep through: A transistor here, a wad of optical tracks there. It was a good simulacrum, but a simulacrum nonetheless. The oasis was artificial. QC could hear laughter and playful, girlish screams from somewhere further inside the houseboat. A party. They were crashing a party. To his credit, Byron had picked up on this detail immediately, and initially tried to pass the pair of them off as lost revelers, but the fine droplets of arterial spray covering his neck and face detracted from the affable Penthouse kid facade. And QC - the skinny, white-haired punk in the scavenged clothes, centuryold airship crew duster and blackmarket nanotech control panels – was not exactly passing as his date, either. When that gambit failed, he’d attempted bribery, but the impassive guards only cracked a knowing smile when he turned out his pockets and an empty c-ring inhaler clattered across the pier and

splashed into the water. If there was any doubt that he was just another desperate junkie trailing some burnt-out whore in his wake, that little spectacle had eliminated it. Finally, he’d resulted to threats. Sad, ineffective threats, too politely worded to inspire fear in the any but the most timid of misbehaving children. Bryon tried to slide past her again, but QC was ready this time: She caught his forearm and redirected his momentum downward. She put him onto his face, settled a knee on the back of his neck, and offered a look of heartfelt apology to the two giant, grey men with death in their eyes…and in their hands, emblazoned across their chests, wrapped around their arms, and trailing downward into their pants (a particularly vivid tattoo on one’s hip looked to be brutally curbstomping something, but the victim was concealed by his waistband). The pair stared balefully back at her for a moment, but quickly lost interest. She dragged Byron away from the foyer garden and out of sight, shoving him down behind a thick, squat barge, sitting low in the water. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She said, releasing her grip on his neck. “I was merely attempting to secure us entrance to our intended destination, milady,” he straightened his shoulders in a manner that conveyed indignity and authority. “You nearly succeeded in getting both of us raped and butchered, fucksquad.” “Well, I seemed to ha- f…fucksquad?” His dignified posture broke, “Pardon, I’m not familiar with the expression, is it regarding a squad of f-no! No, you’ll not distract me! I can comport myself in battle perfectly well, thank you. You may remember just a scant hour ago…” Byron trailed off, catching himself in his own arrogance. She could feel his angry embarrassment churning in her own gut. She tried to meet his gaze, but his focus skittered away like a cockroach when the kitchen lights come on. But he couldn’t hide the dim purple haze encroaching on the whites of his eyes. The Gasflu was starting in on him. Great. The willful desperation of a fucking junkie. “You did really good back there,” she adjusted her tone, tried a different tack: “But these guys are ready for trouble, well-armed, and eight times the size of those two on the dock. Besides, I don’t see any scrap nano-bar around here for you to feed the motherfuckers.” He smiled miserably. “They’re not letting us through, so we have to go around them. That’s just basic fucking problem solving, right?” QC spun on her heel and hastily dipped both feet into the water. She clenched her teeth, then plunged in before she had a chance to consider it. “Good lord! What are you doing?” He tried to catch at her shoulder, but she had already pushed off into the cold and foul smelling black water.

“Basic fucking problem solving,” she answered, trying to sound nonchalant, but her chest was bound by the abrupt shock of cold, and her voice came out strangled. “Take off your shoes, though; they’ll weigh you down.” “You didn’t take yours off,” Byron replied sullenly. “Mine are cheap nano-bullshit. I don’t own anything that weighs more than an ounce. I’m assuming yours are something else…” “Fair enough,” he conceded, and kicked the thick black slippers away. He slid reluctantly into the water. “It smells,” he whined. “That’s nothing. In a few minutes the burning starts.” “That’s not funny.” “It’s not going to be very fucking funny, no. Hurry up,” she whispered. QC pushed off of the dock and let the momentum quietly take her out. Out past the thin, sickly crescents of the dim dock-lamps reflected upon the water, to the distant edge of the squat barge. She could see the glow of Deng’s houseboat a hundred feet away, but there was Christ knows how many scrapped piers, unlit boats and other obstacles lurking in the darkness between them. They had to swim out and around before they could swim toward. She silenced every sliver of protesting reason inside of her, turned her face away from the light, and swam out into the black. Byron dog-paddled desperately behind. “I presume you are minding our current course? The nightvision and all,” his voice fluctuated with the effort of every shaky paddle, but QC knew the junkie in him would muster stamina from somewhere when a fix was at stake. “Burnt.” “Burnt?” Panic chased around the borders of the word. “I tried it earlier. Won’t click back on. I fucking told you, remember? It’s starting up that takes the most power.” “So…we’re blind?” “Yes.” “And we’re swimming.” “Yes.” “In the dark.”

“Yes.” “As in, away from the light.” “Shut the fuck up, Byron.” He complied, but the absolute stillness of the immense body of water began to fire up engines of anxiety in her belly. She felt them rumble, turn over, and start. She broke the silence first: “Not quite the welcome you promised back there, dickhole.” “I can hardly be blamed for that! I do not believe they even informed Monsieur Deng of our presence!” Distant splashing. “You still think we won’t be stab-raped the second we get within ten feet of this guy?” “Quite. I’m one of his best customers, and have supplied him with nigh-endless funds over the many pleasured years of our acquaintance. Though I’m afraid I do not correspond as often of late.” She recognized the tightness in his voice; the cold of the water was steadily compressing them both. “Why’s that?” She whispered, mostly just to stay occupied. Byron seemed to catch her intent. “As you can see, the atmosphere down here leaves a little something to be desired. In addition to which, our dear friend Red, whilst being somewhat of a disastrous little man, is actually rather gifted at custom mixes and the procurement thereof.” “What’s your poison?” “I…hmm,” there was sudden, abrupt silence behind her. The engines in her stomach roared. “BYRON!” She rasped and spun, clutching at what she assumed to be his last location. And to her surprise, she slapped him squarely with the palms of both hands. “What?! What?” He whispered, in a panic. “I thought you were drowning,” she admitted sheepishly, and used her feet to push gently away from his body. They glided together into the syrupy darkness. “Oh, apologies! It is simply that – it…the answer to your query is rather embarrassing.” “Odds are we’re gonna be a fine film of pink floating around a motherfucking filtration tube in about ten minutes. Won’t be embarrassing for long.” “A point,” he conceded: “It’s the Gas.” “No shit, genius. You got haze in your eyes. There’s nothin’ special about a gas addict, or if there is, somebody should probably tell my ex-boyfriend. Boost his self-esteem a little.”

“I ah…I require certain custom measures for the biography I follow.” “You’re a fucking biographiliac? Ha! No shit? I didn’t know you Penthouse-types used at all, much less slummed it in the god damn bios. Who do you follow? Christ? Caesar? Maybe you’re a Mary Murder type? Is that it? You like getting tied up by ‘Loons, Byron?” “Oh my, no; nothing so gauche as that,” he said, then choked and gagged on the water in his mouth. She felt it too: The numb, dancing tingle that preceded a chemical burn. “Who is it then?” “Byron.” “You follow yourself? Shit, that’s almost deep.” “No, Lord Byron. The original. My father named me in his honour. Lord Byron was a poet, a warrior, and an altogether better human being than most. The way he lived - it was fraught with peril, heartache and pain – but he was always and ever so purely himself. That ease, that confidence… it is a feeling I have never owned. Outside of chemically induced delirium, of course.” “So, what? They don’t make Gas for this guy’s time period?” “Not much interest in the Romantics, I’m afraid. A few of the more dramatic moments in his life have been documented – the Greek War of Independence has a few dedicated forums -- but the vast bulk of it goes uncharted. I am charting it.” “Stop,” she held her palm out flat, and waited for him to swim into it. “There’s something here.” The glow from Deng’s floating manse towered over them, but the structure they’d impacted was dark and inert. She guided his hands to the surface, and together they felt around. After a few broad strokes, she recognized the uneven, scratchy mesh of a textured pontoon -- the old nanotech, from before they mastered smooth surfaces. It was the same material that she’d seen supporting Deng’s houseboat, back at the foyer. “I think this is it. Pull yourself up,” she whispered, already gratefully hauling herself out of the water and flopping, exhausted, on the deck. He struggled quietly in the water below, but eventually made it up with an undignified wet smack, and shimmied onto his belly beside her. They both panted deliriously, silently laughing with relief. Then the world exploded in white. The spotlights hit QC directly in the face. Wholly unprepared for it, the light bored behind her clenched, shut eyes and drove in spikes of pain so deep they resonated in her molars. Byron, still face down on the deck, missed the worst of it, but was too exhausted to do much more than cover his face and frown.

“You in the lab,” a guttural voice echoed from somewhere in the middle distance, its upper registers absorbed by the water. “We got snipers on you now. You move, you die.” “Lab?” Byron whispered. “The drug lab. We fucking swam out to his fucking drug lab,” she answered and, keeping her eyes so tightly shut against the light that they swam with rainbow tadpoles, she raised her hands in surrender.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Red was nightblind. Nightblind, and being led through a swaying labyrinth with deep, still black water instead of walls. Nightblind, being led through a maze bordered by drowning death, and surrounded on all sides by what he could only assume were gargantuan, murderous strangers. Red had been better. He, Zippy and James had first encountered the men in the blackness, been taken by them in the blackness, and now followed them through the blackness. They’d never so much as caught a glimpse of one, and so the men registered in Red’s mind as something between angry gods and unpleasant hallucinations. But when he flagged behind, they prodded him cruelly with something sharp and manysided, and that was real enough. Red had no sense of place, no sense of distance, and no sense of time. All he had was the soft, insistent lapping of the omni-present waters as they stomped and stumbled along the darkened piers. Twenty feet to Red’s left, where he was certain there was nothing but water and black, he could plainly and clearly see two burly men in painful-looking, furry bondage suits haul a carcass up onto the saddle of a horse. When the horse turned, Red saw that it had no head; just a flat expanse of silver metal with two parallel handles between the shoulders. The men laughed, and the sound was all wrong. It was deep, but with hints of something metallic and fragile; like windchimes clattering in a storm. Each man took one of the handles on the unhorse, turned, and walked away as one. The unhorse clopped dutifully behind them. Something about darkness made the hallucinations worse. Somebody seized his hand. It was thin, with long, strong fingers. Zippy. “Hold my hand?” She cooed, in her little girl’s voice, but her fingers spoke rapid signs into his palm. Staccato taps, strokes, and swooping presses – she taught him this, once, four years ago, during a drunken week spent squatting in the housing of a defunct ventilator fan. The walls were smooth and cylindrical and massive, large enough around to pass a mid-sized airship. The towering blades had been disassembled long ago for repairs, and then forgotten, leaving the huge, empty circle of the housing entirely vacant. The razor-wire mesh that cordoned off the space was ruptured at one edge, halfway to the apex. Zippy flung a rope down, but they only used it to climb up, opting to slide down the sweeping curved slope like children instead.

When she laughed – really laughed, not the precocious little girl’s giggle – she did so maniacally, like a villain from one of the old Gas serials. Red could still hear it echoing, changing pitch as she hurtled down the inner circumference, her velocity carrying her fluently down and across the long, relatively flat bottom that acted as their living space, then partway up the opposite slope, and back again. When her pace slowed and gravity inevitably snatched at her, she’d try to correct -- to spin around and encourage momentum again -- but the physics were wrong, and she couldn’t help but drift to an awkward, spreadeagled stop between the battered portable stove and empty liquor bottles. Whenever Red took the slide, he emitted an involuntary, girlish yelp as he pushed off into the yawning void, and then canted downward and went rocketing though a wall of fireflies --the disposable tack-on LEDs that Zippy had thrown scattershot across the walls. It was like sledding through a starfield. There wasn’t much to do, down there in the dark. So they drank cheap wine, and fucked, and slotted most of Red’s private stash into their veins, and it was plenty. Then, one day, or night (or whatever it was outside their insular little universe), Zippy grabbed his hand and started tapping insults into his palm. “This one’s cunt,” she’d say, making a series of swoops and pokes in the meat of his palm. “This is whoreson.” And boatswain and halfbreed and fuckhole and son-of-a-bitch and Loon and cocksucker and lamprey and“This is fire,” she pinched the back of his hand sharply, followed by a series of light, random taps, and then she started to cry. Red cried with her, for no other reason than he was high as hell and it seemed like the thing to do. It was the only symbol he remembered. If the wine hadn’t blanked out all that knowledge, then time and the half decade of experimental drug use certainly would have. He couldn’t think of a good way to tell her she was tapping gibberish into his palm, so he just let her. It was nice to hold her hand again, anyway. Far above his head, something looking vaguely like a wolf, or perhaps just wearing its skin, mounted up on an elaborate bladed motorcycle constructed of bone and sinew, then rode off downward, passing through the dock in front of him. Zippy’s tapping devolved into irritated pokes moments ago, and now she was just digging her claws into his fingers in frustration. The faceless, formless men in the darkness moved slowly, but unerringly. Red could feel each of their heavy footfalls pulse through the pier beneath him, followed by an answering sway. Their progress was a series of careful stomps and strange pauses. Red avoided the Reservoir like the plague, and he didn’t really test any maritime Presence scenarios. As such, he had never actually trod on any floating objects before. He found the sensation vaguely terrifying. Every action reverberated ominously. If they were

close enough to something for the water to reflect it back, he could feel the shockwaves of his last step rock the dock beneath him even as he took his next. At first Red assumed it was a trick of the water, but slowly he came to realize that their captor’s steps were different: They always reverberated once, no more. One hard step, followed by a gentle, swaying shuffle. After a few thousand repetitions, Red finally understood: They were feeling for the returning ripples, and navigating by what they sensed there. The stories were wrong; they didn’t have nightvision. They saw with the ripples, like bats in the dark. Somehow, that was so much worse. They passed by the occasional occupied shanty or houseboat, the objectively dim lights cutting what seemed like blindingly sharp stencils of radiance onto the splintering docks, but Red’s captors always avoided them, skirting the light rather than pursuing it. Though it became apparent that they were generally approaching some sort of large, diffuse light source, because the man shuffling immediately to Red’s left was slowly beginning to resolve. At first, he was just an amorphous something – a black blob against a sea of black -- but then Red started to discern the outline of limbs. Soon, there were textures – little more than a pattern of lighter and darker splotches at first – but soon followed by finer details. Eventually the man strode beside Red in perfect clarity: He was built eerily like Red himself -- average height, a thin frame, wider at the shoulder and narrower at the hip. He seemed malnourished somehow. Hungry. But something told Red the man did not want not for food. There were large bags beneath both eyes, and his skin was matte and thin. But where Red’s eyes were a dull, puddle-brown, the man’s were so light grey as to be nearly transparent. It was surely a trick of the wan, intermittent light, but Red thought he saw things whirring there, in the irisesRed struck something sharply with his shin, and swore. He glanced down and instantly felt foolish for it, forgetting that he could not see his own feet for the complete and utter darkness. Complete and utter darkness. The only thing slowly resolving into light was the man opposite him. Red looked over slowly, trying not to draw the man’s attention. But the man must have seen him, because he turned simultaneously, like a mirror image, and smiled. Then he reached up with his hands -- both encased in thin, metallic gloves up to the elbows, ribbed with a network of tiny spikes, terminals and connectors -- and slashed Red across the face. Red cried out and bent double. Someone probed his prone form with a toe. Red did not move. A voice said ‘hold,’ and the unseen captors all stopped as one. Somebody dragged Red to his feet, and somebody else shined a bright little cluster of yellow LEDs in his face. “He bleedin’. Looks deep.” “The fuck he do that? This Ancient Oswald’s place, ain’t it? Jack shit here to cut your face up on. Lights. Short burst.”

A dozen identical yellow clusters flicked on in the darkness, swooped about in a tight little circle, and snapped off. The whole thing took less than a second. “Yeh. There’s nothin’.” “What’d you do?” “I don’t know,” Red answered, and put a hand to his face. It came away wet. “I’ve been seeing things. Side effect of a Beta, maybe? Hell, it could be a delayed reaction from any number of hallucinogens. Most of my Rx mixes are pirated – maybe somebody spiked a ‘feed. Could be anything.” “Anything? The fuck you mean anything?” “He saying a drug just slashed his face open.” It wasn’t a question. “Yes,” he answered anyway, “I uh…I guess I am.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Though objectively he knew it to be impossible, Byron could, nonetheless, smell the man’s face burning off. It was in his body language, Byron decided. The frantic scrabbling at the face and panicked kicking of the feet put Byron in mind of a scalding wound. It was perfectly rational, as the closest analogue Byron had for the immediacy and intensity of the man’s apparent pain was a nasty burn, and so his mind simply filled in the blanks: Supplying the acrid stink of charring meat and the sizzle of fat on bone though of course, in reality, there was no such thing. Perhaps the oily iron scent that some strains of fast-acting nanobot emitted could be detected, but the skin itself was generating no reek of its own, surely. The screaming fellow was the first to dismount one of the flat, featureless boats and mount the gently rocking deck of the floating drug laboratory. QC had spun up at him from her crouch behind the barrier wall and caught him full-face with a thick, wet mouthful of disassemblers. The heavyset man with the flashing cosmetic mandibles had merely clutched at the bridge of his nose, at first, more confused than hurt. But then a look of fluctuating disbelief overtook him, and soon he was executing a spastic jig across the damp plastic planks of the drug lab. After a few moments of nervous misfires, the man’s system shut down entirely, and he laid himself out flat, absently kicking his heels against the diamond-scratched runners. The little blonde girl caught the next boarder in mid-air with a low, hard kick, just as he was leaping from his skiff onto the lip of the barge. He crumpled silently and sunk into the water below with hardly a splash. Byron briefly considered fighting – truly, he did; he’d fared quite well against those assailants out on the piers, after all -- but that bravado had come to him spontaneously, overriding any higher functions. He hadn’t had time to think, then, and that instinctual response was the key to his successful attack. Now, however, he’d had whole minutes to contemplate the danger, while Little Deng’s security forces organized into two-man parties, mounted their perfectly flat silver planks, and silently pulsed across the water from the manse. It was contemplation that paralyzed Byron, and it was now doing so with gusto. He felt his heartbeat thrum behind his eyes. His lungs struggled to draw in thin, anxious pulls of air. No, he could not fight. Instead, Byron undertook the most helpful action that sprung to mind: He handed QC a short length of pipe, clapped her soundly on the back, and then hid behind a barrel. Beyond the first wave, Byron could only hear the resulting melee, as he was not willing to risk ducking his head out for fear of being seen.

The sounds:

A low, sad keen. Presumably the man with the spittoon for a face. Splashing. The fellow QC had sent into the water? Swearing. Byron had once read that martial artists have something they call a Kiai – a sound they scream upon striking that gives release to the force they’ve built up inside. QC’s Kiai seemed to be “motherfucker.” A dull pop. It did not echo. Muffled barking. The men, hollering orders in a language he could not understand. And silence. A large, heavy hand clasped Byron’s shoulder and wrenched him up. Instinctually, he began talking: “Hullo, gentlemen!” He exclaimed with mock relief. “I seem to be a bit lost here! Quite fortunate you came along, actually. You see, I found myself rather low indeed on my daily chemical sustenance this morn, and thought to visit my stalwart friend and erstwhile distributor, Mr. Little Deng, in hopes of resuming our formerly beneficial relationship. I suppose I’ve taken a wrong turn, though, haven’t I? Ho ho! I jest, I jest. Regardless, if you could now simply point me in his general direction, my over-zealous young companion,” he gestured at QC’s prone form, wrapped in a thin, clinging film, like forgotten leftovers, “and I would be in your respective debts.” “Talks like a faggot,” said one man, whom Byron saw, with sinking heart, was covered with a familiar set of brutal media tattoos. “That was uncalled for!” Byron reprimanded, and took a deep breath in preparation for another diatribe. A gargantuan, vice-like paw clasped over his mouth from behind. “Not anymore he don’t,” another voice added. How very Spartan, Byron thought. The men bound his hands to his feet and shoved rags down his throat. It took pathetically few seconds to immobilize him. With a soft grunt, Byron was hefted bodily from the sky blue plastic planks of the laboratory, and found himself rocking gently beneath one hulking grey arm like a bag of nervous, pasty groceries. The other fellow slipped a long, vicious hook out of his belt and bent to QC. Byron’s stomach clenched and his chest hammered, but the man merely secured it into an empty space of film to better drag the unconscious girl behind him. They were both tossed roughly into a planate skiff, and after a few unnaturally still moments – something in the plank apparently cancelling out the natural momentum of the water -- were dragged out again and thrown onto the docks behind Little Deng’s palatial houseboat. “Get the boss,” one captor told the other, and Byron heard footsteps begin to depart. “He might wanna know why some uppity junkie and his pet bitch been throwing his name about.”

Byron waffled between relief and heightened terror: His central fear thus far had been being brutally murdered before getting to Little Deng. But now he found that he was less than enthusiastic for their meeting, after being seized in the man’s drug lab and attacking his employees. Byron had heard the stories about Deng, of course: That he deployed industrial scourer-bots – a particularly virile strain of nano-machine designed back at the turn of the century to strip old steel from the hulls of ancient, defunct freight ships – against potential thieves. And that he fermented the puddles that the offending parties left behind in ornate bottles behind his bar, drinking from a new one every night. But those were stories; Byron had always found the man himself to be personable enough. But then, Byron had always been in the act of paying him vast amounts of money for high-grade, unsanctioned Presence. That fact alone might have tempered the man’s otherwise irascible persona. There was a soft, crystalline tinkling. A chandelier swaying gently in a spring breeze from an open window. Little Deng was here. Byron was face down, the bulk of his weight on his own face. His gaze was immobile. He stared placidly at an empty patch of floor until two gnarled, bare feet shuffled into view. “Who’s this we got here? This the little prince?” Deng asked, his voice quiet and skeptical. “Salutations, Monsieur Deng,” Byron offered cordially. Somebody was grabbing at him, hauling him up to his knees. The gnarled feet led upward into a pair of pale, smooth legs, followed by baggy cargo shorts, and then a ratty purple blouse cut from a constantly shimmering and shifting material, left open to a bare, sunken chest. Eventually Byron found himself staring Little Deng full in the face: He was smaller than Byron, with broad, flat, light-skinned features. A corona of long, chunky locks of hair wrapped around his head into a sort of turban. Into each lock, he had braided a motley of colored glass. The man tinkled like a champagne toast with the slightest movement. “Mussyour Deng,” he laughed, “ain’t that some shit?” Deng fancied himself some sort of tribal shaman, Byron knew, but he’d apparently drawn all of his reference points from the confused pseudo-history of the public access databases. Anybody could edit them, on a whim and without credential. The result was often a mish-mash of exaggerations, fallacies and juvenile pranks. It was not uncommon for the historical vid-feeds to be ripped and re-uploaded with altered audio; it was uncommon for anybody to care enough to fix it. Little Deng may have indeed been the merciless reincarnation of a Sudanese Rain God, but he spoke like a thuggish, 20 th century caricature. In the perpetual shadow of the Four Posts, all of the Reservoir dwellers’ skin inevitably faded to a sickly grayish hue, but Deng would have been pale anywhere. Here, living in perpetual twilight, he was translucent. So white that his veins stood out in bright green by contrast, like circuitboards beneath the skin. “You doin’ us a favor, comin’ down here, huh? This a social call?”

“I’m afraid n-" Byron began to speak, but Deng arced a backhand up so casually Byron didn’t even think to flinch. He found himself on the floor again, staring at those calloused, dirty feet. “Nah, that ain’t it. This here’s business, right? You just got confused is all. You thought my shit was selfserve, right? You’d just swing on by – no need to bother me so late at night – and pick up some of my merchandise, leave the money on the counter, and be on your way. Am I right, or am I right, or am I right?” “It’s not like that!” Byron protested, and a foot came up sharply, clipping him in the nose. Not hard enough to break the cartilage, but the jagged nails drew blood anyway. It spilled in a thin stream to the deck beneath him, and Byron quieted, staring blankly into the puddle. “Ok, shit. That was harsh,” Little Deng seemed to lapse into momentary panic. He took a few quick, deep breaths, and held his hands out in placation. When he spoke again, his tone was softer. “I’m sorry. That shit was uncalled for. You gotta know you’re welcome here – hell, we had the red carpet laid out! This party, man, this shit’s for you! But you come at me like this, little prince? You fuckin’ break into my home – my lab?!” As he awaited a response, Little Deng paced nervously across the dock; the sound of distant glass breaking followed with him. “P-party? I’m afraid I don’t follow. Are you being facetious, sir? I realize we did not follow the protocol for meeting, but I assure you, we only wished to speak with you! I pleaded with your man outside,” this warranted a sharp guffaw from somewhere behind Byron, “and he regretfully informed us of your unavailability. The urgency of our claims did nothing to sway him, or perhaps we were remiss in impressing upon him the direness of the matter at hand. Please be assured, Monsieur Deng, that we would never deign to trespass if it were not of the utmost import. And we would never stoop so low as thievery, regardless of circumstance. Besides, have you ever known me to lack for funds?” Fear had always made Byron loquacious. It was a habit that did him more harm than good, as those it did not confuse, it inevitably infuriated. But it seemed to be affecting Little Deng now: He stared disbelievingly at somebody behind Byron. “That was a whole lotta words just to say ‘I’m sorry I’m such a faggot’” said a brute in the middle distance. Another laughed. “He telling the truth?” Deng seemed to be addressing the man who spoke. “Yeah, but boss he didn’t look like what you sai-" Deng made a quick motion with his hand, and the brute’s voice choked off too abruptly. There was something insidiously wet to that last syllable that told Byron the silencing had been violent in nature. Now he heard only the clamoring of glass and the remote ebbing of water. “Monsieur, please!” Byron fought back a rising surge of adrenal tears, “we meant no ill-will!”

“Settle down, buddy. Your daddy being who he is, that buys you an explanation. But some punk disrespects me, I don’t give a shit about his family, you understand?” “No,” Byron answered honestly. His father? What did his father have to do with anything? Byron always took the utmost pains to conceal his identity. Privacy came easily with enough credits, and that was one thing Byron could provide. “Good. I like that answer. That shit’s called brevity,” Deng Laughed, “that shit’s the soul of wit.” Polonius? Those were his father’s words, the incessant, arrogant quotes… “Boss, you popular today.” Deng spun about with a sound like a cocktail party falling down a flight of stairs. Deng's body was obscuring the totality of Byron’s view, but he could tell that a group of visitors now stood uncertainly in the far doorway, surrounded by a posse of grey men in full battle regalia. “About fuckin’ time!” Deng’s voice lifted joyously. He shuffled toward the newcomers, his clawed toenails clacking loudly against the dock, and stepped out of Byron’s line of sight. As he did so, Byron met eyes first with a striking, if slightly mannish, darkskinned, one-legged woman, followed by a slight, befreckled, redheaded fellow in an antique green blazer, complete with canary-yellow necktie, and finally with a haggard, pallid, and bleeding Red. Red’s face went blank with disbelief. “What the f-" he mouthed silently to Byron, but then Deng was embracing him tightly, spinning him around, and laughing uproariously.

Chapter Twenty-Six

James was doing his best to go unnoticed. It wasn’t hard work: Keep your mouth shut, stand somewhere dark, and don’t make eye contact. Easier for him than some -- he was never much of a presence to begin with: Slight of frame, short to middling height, a crop of chaotic red hair, and great, fleshy bags slung perpetually beneath each eye. Most people assumed he was some kind of socially stunted software engineer. He kept himself purposefully unkempt, just shy of noticeably disgusting. This served to cultivate a befuddled, uncertain aura, like a scatter-brained professor. His featureless grey trousers and Robin’s Egg Blue button-down shirt were carefully neutral, of no particular style, cost, or time period. This served to emphasize his anonymity. His necktie was brilliant yellow, and he kept it clean, crisp, and impeccably tied. This served to look bloody sharp. A man’s got to have his pride. James’ only custom piece of kit was the archaic green-and-black-checkered sportcoat, carefully worried, stained and frayed to emulate disuse. There was nothing special about the jacket itself; it was plain cloth of some defunct stock. Polyester, maybe? He’d heard the name before, but couldn’t say for sure. It was from before the public ‘feeds came online, that was for certain – there was no nano-fiber reinforcement, no low emission energy field to repel bots, not even an anti-bacterial nanosilver lining. The only tech in James’ jacket, he’d had to install himself, and it wasn’t exactly a high-end job: Just micrometer thick netting laced between the lining and the outer shell, coated in inert plastic. With the twist of a cufflink, the coating would lose its molecular stability, freeing up the razor-wire. The slightest movement would then send the net slicing through the fabric of the jacket, as well as any nearby flesh (preferably not his own). Well, that was how it worked in theory, anyway. By its very nature, it was a one-shot use, and testing its functionality would shred his sportcoat into a pile of perfectly symmetrical quarter inch fabric squares. And he liked the coat. Went well with the tie. So James kept his head down and his eyes open, waiting for his moment. But the crew of large, charcoalskinned boatmen, each scarred and mutilated and reeking of chemicals and mold, presented no opening. To the untrained eye, they were a mess. They swore, cuffed one another, and carried every duty out with a plodding, dull-eyed, slack-jacked idiocy. But no fundamental perimeter line went unbroken, no man strayed too close to the prisoners, and no spear-point dipped too low to be quickly brought to bear. In the ‘Wells, everything was a feint. Spotting one was second nature to James. By

‘Wells standards, this was an artless and obvious ploy; these men were not dim-witted, slovenly oafs. They were tight and professional. Their eyes never stopped moving. His moment never came. The pale kid with the turban-braid had welcomed Red with genuine cheer, then shuffled him gently but firmly over to a barbed whip of a woman, her face and body all sharp angles and bony points beneath a pair of disposable green scrubs. The pair of them ducked down a hallway in the rear, and hadn’t been seen since. Zippy immediately and loudly proclaimed her fondness for pretty boats and popcorn. She wasted no time setting her little identity game in motion, and it seemed to be working. None were fooled into thinking she was simple, of course – most anyone living close to the ‘Wells recognized a public persona when they saw one - but they were fooled into thinking that she wasn’t clever or subtle enough to craft a better ruse, and that was the point. They overlooked the way she used her peripherals to scan every step, every weapon, every exit. They did not watch for the odd tightening of the muscles or the drop in stance when she prepared for an attack, only to become blocked somehow, and shrug the movement off with a giggle. Jesus bloody Christ, could he use a drink. Just the incessant clink of glass from the pasty kid’s hair was enough to set him salivating. He felt the dull construction of a headache start to erect itself behind his eyes. The blonde bird with the Fuck You face was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Scraps of plastic wrap still clung to her underarms and behind her knees. A mesh ball gag with black vinyl straps was wrapped about her head. The thin line of exhaust mesh across the top gave the gag away as an Inertia Unit – something that cancelled nanotech. She must have spitters installed. Nasty little bitch, James thought appreciatively, and fought back a tingling ghost of attraction. Across from the blonde a wispy lad sat with his legs clasped, knee over knee, like a woman. One wet, bare foot shook incessantly. He was too quick to laugh, and the gathering clouds in his eyes fingered him as a Gas addict. One about to be in very rough shape at that. James had him pegged as a Penthouse kid, by the lack of scars and modifications, but he lacked the weird burnt brown of regular UV exposure. Besides, Gas addiction wasn’t a Penthouse vice – SlimZ and Furies were all the rage up there, last he heard. Even high end Presence was a bit low rent for the skybox crowd. The Penthouse kid seemed to know Red somehow, though neither had directly acknowledged it. James caught the shock of recognition on both of their faces when they’d first spotted one another, but what it meant, he hadn’t a clue. The turbaned kid was making the rounds, surveying each of the newcomers and taking their measure, under the guise of hospitality. The mean little blonde he eyeballed warily and apologized for gagging: “For our safety, right? Although I gotta say, shit looks good on you.” He laughed; she glared.

The kid squinted down at Zippy, but she sold her goggle-eyed stare so thoroughly that he simply shook his head and moved on. The addict, he backhandedly insulted and socked in the arm, but there was a cautious tenderness in his movements, like he was scared of doing any real damage. The turbaned kid didn’t seem to want the addict to know that, however. Strange. And then he shuffled up in front of James. “Whadda we got here?” The kid elbowed the grey man beside him, who dutifully laughed. “You my accountant or some shit?” James shrugged. Not meekly, not apathetically, just a slight raise of the shoulders. Measure every movement. “You gotta name, brother?” “James,” he answered simply. “Me? I’m Little Deng,” the kid said jovially, “and this here’s my home. Y’all are my honored guests, so shake that stick outta your ass and unfold a little, will ya?” “Yeah? In that case be a mate and go get me a drink,” James took the gamble. Silence. The grey men waited, hand on spear, for the insult to be taken. Deng mulled over the possible meanings of each syllable. “Ha!” He finally laughed once. “Man after my own friggin’ heart here!” Deng turned and clacked over to the bar. He poured a long, slick ooze of whiskey into a clear plastic tumbler, and handed it to James. James tilted it back, and let the wave of relief slide through him. “If that’s how you treat honored guests,” James spat the liquid onto the floor, “I’d hate to see what you do to the help.” One of the grey men laughed out of turn, and quickly cut himself off, anticipating some form of punishment. A toothy, genuine smile carved through Deng’s carefully sardonic mask. He lifted a smaller bottle from beneath the counter there, shaking it tantalizingly from side to side, and poured something honey-colored into a squat, bell-shaped glass. “This here,” Deng said smugly, “I get from a dude up in Industry. He gets it from outside the City. Imports it! You believe that shit? Hadda look up the friggin’ word, when he first told me. He trades me one bottle of this fine, beautiful hooch for twenty-two hour’s worth of illegal Presence from the banned continuities. Likes to go back a few years and kill his own kids, before they grew up and fought back. Hard to build Gas that goes that recent, you know? Hard, expensive, and dangerous. That’s death, for dealing in a banned continuity -- not to mention all the feed-blocks Industry’s got in place for mixes that cover the last twenty years, but this shit? This shit is worth it.” James tipped the bell-glass back and swallowed a careful half-sip.

“I would fuck this,” he whispered in awe. Despite every instinct in his body, James began to like the kid, just a little bit. “Can I have some juice too?” Zippy chimed in sweetly, batting her eyelashes. “Shut-up-bitch,” Deng snapped back automatically. James’ newfound affection wavered, but the anger almost immediately turned to pity: Deng, the poor bastard, had bought into Zippy’s act, and was starting to dismiss her entirely. “Little Deng,” James sloshed words and whiskey together in his mouth. “Named for your old man?” “Naw, Deng? He’s no daddy. More like a mean uncle. Big Deng was the shit back in a place called Sudan. Rain god and what not. Shit’s important in the desert, rain. Rare. Not like here. Deng, he’d help you out of a jam or two, sure, but you always gotta do something back, and he ain’t exactly gonna powder your behind after.” “And these blokes here,” James said, gesturing with his glass at the grey men scattered about the room, “tell me something: Is what they say true?” “Eh, you know people: They say things.” “The ghost spears. Pass through your armor before you get a chance to bleed an’ all.” “Nah, they ain’t shit. Too friggin’ dark in the Rez to throw ‘em worth a damn, and outside the Reservoir, there just ain’t enough room. We just like the story, is all. A good story, you know? That shit’s worth a thousand spears.” Little Deng shuffled around the bar. The toenails clacking and glass tinkling composed an awkward little melody, like a child carefully picking out all the wrong notes to a song on a broken piano. He settled wearily onto the stool beside James and threw his elbows up on the counter. He sipped at his own whiskey gingerly, and closed his eyes. “Naw,” he finally continued, exhaling happily, “them spears is just for show. We all got guns. We ain’t stupid.”

***

QC tasted ozone. Or rather, she tasted the idea of ozone. She had no idea what the actual ozone molecule tasted like, but she’d heard the concept referenced so often that she began to automatically associate the word with the vaguely metallic, electrical taste of nanotech. She’d tasted it when they first installed the

disassemblers in her salivary glands; she tasted it every time she ordered the gritty rations from a public ‘feed station; and she tasted it a moment ago, when the cuntswab they called Little Deng slipped the Inertia Ballgag into her mouth. She’d worn Inertia Units before. Every time she passed through a checkpoint the inspectors made unhappy faces at the scanner results and told her to slip on that papery little retainer. It vacuum sealed over the mouth, like the surface tension on a spit bubble, but you could breathe and talk through it just fine. As far as QC knew, it served two purposes: To coat any nano-material that passed by the membrane in junk elements, thus weighing it down and rendering useless, and to make whoever was wearing it look really fucking stupid. Those Inertia Units – the spit bubble kind – QC knew for a fact they were available for any conceivable orifice as a free build option at every public ‘feed terminal in the Four Posts. Which meant that the dickhole with the garbage in his hair had the thing in her mouth custom-built specifically to humiliate the wearer. It pissed her right and directly the fuck off. …but it was better than the wrap. In the wrap, she couldn’t move a muscle, even to breathe: Maybe if she’d puffed out her chest when it hardened, she’d have had enough room to exhale and inhale comfortably. But when they were hosing her down, she’d been too busy screaming out the exact volume of her semen that her captor’s mothers had ingested over the years, and didn’t have time to think about trivial things like breathing. She could only manage shallow, rapid little gasps until they’d cut her loose. It felt like being crushed by atmosphere; like being strangled by a weak but persistent midget; like dying, slowly. It was, of course, entirely worth it. Six gallons, for the record. Six gallons of semen. The skinny redhead turned out to have a mouth on him and a pair of clanking steel balls. In twenty minutes, he had the grey men half-drunk, hollering and guffawing like gibbons. QC couldn’t decide if he had a plan, or was just a hell of a fun alcoholic. The dark-skinned woman with the doe eyes and Springsteel leg was sitting next to Byron. She was either mentally handicapped or drugged, and wouldn’t stop babbling like a little girl. Byron looked terrified, nervous, and relieved all at once. He had ceded total control to fate – you could see the ‘it’s out of my hands’ look in his eyes – and seemed to be happier for it. “-I’ve killed like half your guys. We’re good though, yeah?” The redhead finished his anecdote smoothly. “No! No friggin’ way you said that shit to King Motherfucking Big Dick himself! What’d he say? What’d he do?!” Deng’s face was turning a deep shade of purple. The laughter and the booze working on him.

“Not a thing, but you should’ve seen his bloody great silver willy wiggle,” The redhead smiled wryly and swirled his empty glass at the grey man wavering drunkenly behind him. The man gave him a look like warmed over death, then shrugged, took the glass from his hand, and stepped in front of the redhead to duck through the bar. QC almost registered something wrong with that – there was a reason the guard shouldn’t have done it – but before she could figure out why, exactly, the redhead was up on his feet, kicking out the man’s knees and pulling the pistol from his waistband as he fell. The grey man flung his spear as he went down, and for a moment looked like it was going to impale the dim, wide-eyed woman sitting on the floor. But she reached out a hand as if to wave, and gently redirected the point. It didn’t connect with Little Deng, staring dumbly from his stool at the bar, but it came close enough that he screamed, diverting the attention of the grey man closest to him. The idiot woman pushed off the floor and used the momentum to fold her prosthetic leg beneath the solidlooking metal table at her feet. It heaved up from the ground, flipping end over end into the distracted guard’s temple. When the flash of movement was over, the redhead had two of the grey men pinned against the bar: One with a pistol in his mouth, the remnants of his shattered teeth clacking noisily against the barrel, the other apparently paralyzed by the small man’s fingers, resting on the flesh beneath his eyelids. The dumb woman was now mounting Little Deng like a cowgirl, and holding a long, thin, bloody blade against the bottom of his throat. It looked like she’d hurt her hand. Her prosthetic leg was bent almost double into the kidneys of the grey man lying on the floor. He writhed in pain, but could not seem to find the purchase to wriggle free. There was one grey man still standing, at the far end of the room. He’d been stationed near the exit, the only one not drawn to the bar for the revelry. He was brandishing a large, crimson pistol with four barrels, waving it back and forth between the redheaded man and the dumb girl, barking meaningless commands: Wait, no, wait, hold on, stop now, wait. Byron laughed nervously, like somebody had told a joke of questionable material.

***

The ceiling looked like wood, but that wasn’t possible. Too rare, too expensive, and even treated wood would have rotted long ago under the constant static pattering of the incessant rain. But if it was emulation, it was a hell of a job: A jagged crack ran diagonally across the surface of one plank, and Red could see splinters where it terminated at the border. On another, a swirling knot of orange and blonde worked itself deep into the brown surface. Red had been on his back, staring dully up at the enigma for the better part of half an hour. The skeletal woman in the cheap plastic scrubs was a blur of activity. She plugged tubes into him, took others out, re-sterilized them, connected them to a variety of thwacking, humming and vibrating machines, and frowned down at the results she saw there. A small, balloonmounted terminal buzzed timidly around her, and occasionally she would reach out and grab it. She’d

tap on it, scowl, and then slap it away. It emitted a nasally howl as the tiny rotors kicked on, and wavered back to her side like a kicked hound. “That’s not real wood, is it?” Red finally asked. They were the first words he’d spoken to her. He was silent even when she told him to disrobe. He had expected some sterile medical garment in place of clothes, but she just motioned him impatiently to a table and he quietly, nakedly obeyed. “The knot got you, didn’t it?” She pinched a pair of tabs on either side of the tube in his arm, and a hose of milky white fluid disconnected from the needle-patch with a vacuum pop. She swapped another in its place, full of what looked like molten lead. “Look at the corner behind me, to your left. See it? It’s there again. Same knot, same crack. It’s a good pattern – expensive - but the installers weren’t paying attention. They throw in all these unique little details, but in the end the illusion hangs on how they’re mounted. If you’re not careful, you repeat patterns, and the façade is shattered.” She squeezed the tabs on his other arm: A pop, and then a new tube. He watched his own blood pool at the closed seal between patch and hose. “This is going to feel odd,” she said, and seized the roving balloon again. Red knew it was just anthropomorphization, but it seemed to writhe with happiness at the attention. He heard the whispered rush of a million microscopic intake fans kicking on, and then the shiny blue lunchbox next to his head, decked out in vaguely Asian characters and obscure iconographics, rattled to life. There was a sensation like cresting a hill too fast, and then intense, bone-deep fatigue. An unidentifiable feeling – something sad, but also elated; heartwrenching and joyous at the same time – washed over him. “What are you doing?” He asked, every movement of the tongue a conscious effort. “Complete transfusion. I’m replacing your blood,” she motioned at the tube full of flat, metallic liquid. “With what? What is that?” The implacable emotion throbbed and twisted in Red’s chest. It was something from a long time ago, a feeling he’d had in… “Early childhood,” the sharp-featured woman finished for him. “I…I wasn’t talking. How did you?” “That’s what they all say,” she adopted a thick, dopey tone meant to serve as a universal impression of all men. “This feels like something from when I was a kid. What is it? It’s so familiar…” “Okay. So what is it? The feeling.” “It’s nostalgia. Or rather, it’s nothing, really. Chemical misfires. It doesn’t actually feel like anything that’s ever happened to you before. Well, probably not anyway. It’s just your brain starting to shut down because I’m pulling all the blood away from it. Oh, don’t give me that face: You’ll be fine. This

would be a pretty roundabout way to kill somebody, wouldn’t it? We’re just swapping your blood for HDMPAS.” “H-what? H-what?! You’re draining all my blood?” Panic scratched at the inside of Red’s head, but the fatigue was too much. If he could just get her to stop, to let him rest for a minute… “Hush. Let it take you. It’ll all be over soon,” the acute, boney woman tapped at her little pet balloon. Red’s vision went black, all at once. Like somebody flipped a switch. “Jesus Christ. So this is…” Red tried to speak, but his tongue flopped limply in his mouth, and refused to articulate any more words. “Yep,” the doctor supplied casually, drumming her nails on the hollow plastic tabletop. “This is what dying feels like.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Gentlemen, please,” The skinny uplevel snob was waving his hands around, fussing and fretting like one of those addled little hens the Chinese sold at the Looping Bazaar. Little old ladies would come up all bold and shit, blocking your path and silently holding up this stupid, scrawny, twitchy chicken. You’d have to either pay them or knock them aside – only way to get past. The hens themselves, they didn’t make much of a bother. Just cocked their heads dumbly and looked all over the place. But when it came time for slaughter, the fucking birds would start screeching and warbling like a falling freight elevator, right up until you cut their damn heads off. “There is simply no call for this kind of chicanery. Elevating a simple misunderstanding to the level of physical discourse is the basest possible option with which we are presented, and it is one by which I, personally, will not abide. Though the nature of our relationships vary…” The Penthouse Kid moved his whole head as he talked. The purple haze had crept all across the whites of his eyes, and started in on his pupils. Tunnel vision. Sera had seen his type before, the kind that gets harder to understand the more important it is to understand them. Punk had grown up talking instead of scrapping on the catwalks behind ‘tech shops. That primal switch in their heads -- that fight or flight center -- it got rewired all wrong. Whenever they should be throwing punches or running away so fast their calf muscles split off from the bone, this kind of veil came down over their brains instead, and random words started leaking out like somebody stabbed a dictionary. “Whether our motives are in service of that most pure and noble endeavour, friendship, or in the vital and utilitarian conscript of business, the one mutual goal we must all agree to share, for the shortest interim at the very least...” Sera shifted her hips on Little Deng’s lap to keep her leverage, and felt a broad, fleshy poke from below. Deng locked eyes with her and grinned. Fearless son of a bitch. The big grey man across the room, the one out of range when she and James had made their move, kept right on rattling off mono-syllables – no, stop, down, drop, wait – his mouth stalling until his brain had time to catch up with his eyeballs. It was taking a while. “Surely we can all agree, as level-headed and reasonable persons, that violence is, at best, premature. Far be it from me, good sirs and ladies, to besmirch the means by which you ply your bloody trade, but

allow me to suggest – just suggest, mind you, as an impartial observer – that thus far we have seen no cause to believe an irrevocable schism of wants has arisen.” The grey man that James had by the eyeballs was emitting a soft, high-pitched whine, like idle electronics. He was shellshocked. He was untested product. He was done. The one pinned beneath the tip of her prosthetic leg kept trying to scrabble for purchase, though, despite the pain. He, at least, was a vet. She twisted the thin shaft between his third and fourth cervical vertebrae until the agony immobilized his arms, but as soon as she moved that leg, she knew she’d only get two or three seconds, tops, before he was back up and on her. She could probably sever his spine with her full body weight, and maybe put Little Deng down with her sub-dermal blade in that window too, but no way she could turn, target, and nail the rambling bastard with the gun, too. James would be ready for the move as soon as she made it, but he had the same battle scenario: Two seconds, minimum, to put down his marks before turning on the gunman. Any way she cut it, the grey man would have time to fire on one of them. But not both, and no guarantee he’d hit what he was aiming at. Shit. Even odds. No way to swing them, either. Sera would have to wait until the gunman bought himself a chance to think, and hope he thought wrong. Sometimes you just have to let a stalemate play out a bit. Let them change the scenario for you. In the meantime, Deng had started softly, slowly thrusting against her. She put her blade into him a little and beamed her most precocious smile. “Please!” The Penthouse Kid squeaked, “no need for bloodshed! If you see some fallacy in my assessment of the situation, by all means speak and allow the group a chance to rebut.” “You make your guy stop talking queer!” The grey man snapped, shaking the barrel of the great red pistol towards Sera, “it’s freakin’ me out!” “Nobody told you the rules” She said to Bryon, “so you can’t play this time, but you can play next time and you can be on my team.” “Mate, what the bloody hell are you trying to say anyway?” James spoke. “He’s tryin’ to say we need to chill the fuck out,” Deng had gone abruptly soft when her blade first broke the surface tension of his throat. “It should be our utmost priority,” the snob agreed, wiping snot from his nose with a little square. The fog finally broke through the barrier of his pupils; spilled over in thick clouds, like cream in coffee. “He’s a jackass, but even jackasses can be right once in a while,” Deng said, “You some bad motherfuckers, and we treated you like pussies. That’s on me. Won’t happen again. But it ain’t a thing needs killin’ over, is it?”

Sera looked to James. She dropped an eyebrow in concession, and he raised one in agreement. “Bugger,” James said jovially, releasing the two grey men he had pinned, “I was just trying to give some constructive feedback on the quality of the service.” “Sorry mister! My mom says I should watch where I’m going but I don’t know how ‘cause I ain’t been there yet.” Sera piped cheerfully, hopping up and away from Deng. The man on the floor groaned thickly as she removed her leg from the interior of his spine, and there was a touch of wetness to it. She hadn’t positioned herself carefully enough. Sloppy. Might’ve cracked the root sleeve. “Still friends?” She adopted a precocious head tilt and pointed to the fallen man “that one’s got an owie.” Deng motioned with his head, and the grey man with the shattered teeth dutifully dragged him out of the room. Just the untested product and the rambling man, and she still had her blade. She shot James a quick, wide-eyed look, but he shook his head almost imperceptibly. Wanted to see how the peaceful option played out. Too fucking nice for his own good. Fine, then. “Mister, I got an owie too,” she showed her bloody hand to Deng with a quivering whimper. “Now, you say you’ve got naught but the best of intentions here, mate, but you’ve given us a handful of reasons to call that false. Let’s run them down,” James strolled casually over to the bar as he spoke, uncorked a thin green bottle and poured brown liquid into a glass. “You’ve still got our girl here tied up, for one.” Sera gave the bitchy-looking blonde a cursory glance; they’d never seen her before. What the hell was he doing? “For two, you show up to the party with drinks in one hand and guns in the other. Now, normally, that’s my kind of shindig -- the only thing I love better than fine whiskey is bloody murder -- but you don’t shake hands barrel first, yeah? And for three, you dragged our favorite burnout off without so much as a ‘by your leave.’ Love the atmosphere, but poor marks for hospitality, mate.” “Aight, aight,” Deng put up his hands, “I sent my boys off already. That’s your one. And I’ll even cut your pet cunt down here free. But she raided my fuckin’ lab and spit fire in my men’s faces. Two are in the lab now getting their skin scraped off and replaced. So if you don’t know her -- and I don’t buy that you do -you might wanna put on goggles before you pop that gag out.” “That’s two,” James held up two fingers, then extended the third and wiggled it back and forth. “Red’s fine!” Deng protested, and rose from the couch with a squeak. He blushed. “That was the couch, I swear!”

Real leather, Sera noted, or as good a counterfeit as to make no difference. And new, too. He’d banked some serious money recently. “Your boy made a deal for the beta he got in his blood, remember? Gotta get him in the lab before his metabolism goes south on us. It ain’t a thing.” The Penthouse Kid had taken to standing in the farthest, darkest corner of the room now that the danger was winding down. Actively hoping to be ignored. He kept throwing eyes at the blonde. Must have come together. “Shouldn’t be a problem having a word then, eh?” James sipped at his whiskey, closed both eyes, then opened one of them slowly, like a lizard on a hot rock. “If you’re fibbing me, though, I’ll cut your god damn tongue out and make you eat it. And that’ll be hard going, without a tongue and all.” James smiled benignly. Deng merely laughed. Sera cut the blonde free, and pulled the ballgag from her mouth. It was like popping a cork from a bottle of vintage obscenities. She instantly bull-rushed Deng, swearing so quickly that the words were impossible to distinguish from one another. Sera rerouted her easily, grabbing her arm and leveraging her own weight to swing the blonde around and down. The girl ended up seated, rather abruptly, on the couch behind her. She blinked up at Sera, perplexed. “We gotta play nice now, okay, and maybe then we’ll get to watch movies!” Sometimes the child act even grated on her, but going without it was worse: Like standing naked in a crowd. The blonde nodded grimly, leaned over, and let slip a thick, membranous bead of saliva. It popped and sizzled on the priceless leather. Deng’s capacious smile melted right away with the deep red finish. Sera turned to Deng, spun him about, and gestured toward the far hallway. At its end was an open door, and beyond that a pure white polygon, so bright that it was impossible to resolve anything on the far side of it. Deng walked in front, followed immediately by Sera, her bloody blade resting on the back of his neck, where the cervical and thoracic spines met. Eleven pounds of pressure, she thought, like pushing open a heavy door. James followed behind her, the two grey men after him. He was still gripping the pistol he’d stolen in his right hand, held low at the waist. Sera made sure to keep her body slightly to Deng’s right, masking the weapon from the view of anybody on the other side of that light. They’d be blind for at least five seconds in there, and chasing blurs for another ten before their eyes could adjust. Fifteen seconds of disadvantage. Maybe more. Nothing to be done. She willed one foot to follow the other, and stepped into the blank canvas. Little Deng was either telling the truth, or just rock fucking stupid. He kept close to her little blade, moving hesitantly but steadily, even when they crossed into the shining white void and their vision dropped out. A smarter man would’ve jumped away and yelled for help the second the dayblindness hit. If he had backup in there, they would’ve had plenty of time to mow her and James down as they stood

there, blinking helplessly. When shapes finally began to carve themselves out of the void, Sera made out four large, washed out blobs to her left. Better than nothing, but still impossible to gauge distance. Most likely the remaining, unaccounted-for grey men. There was a squat rectangle in the center of the room – a giant table or a desk – with three immobile flesh-toned masses laid atop it; one pink, two colorless. An uneven squiggly mass behind that bespoke a cluster of large and multi-sided objects: Medical equipment, furniture, supplies. Something thin and sharp moved among them. “What is this?” James apparently recovered before her. Sera’s vision finally resolved enough to see the problem: On the long, flat workslab laid two writhing grey men. Next to them was Red, completely limp, and completely still. His pallor was deathly, even for a man that looked like cigarette ash on his best day. Thick tubes slugged gunmetal ooze into his veins with fat, blubbery pulses. Beside him sat a clear cylinder full of his own blood. All of it, by the looks of things. Sera seized onto the back of Deng’s neck and locked her elbow up to push the little blade through as smoothly as possible – “No no nonono,” Little Deng screeched, “just wait! Just wait!” She froze on the point of puncture, a solitary drop of blood welling around the point of her blade. “Shit, bitch, he’s fine! He’s fine! He ain’t dead!” Deng had seized in a hunched position, every muscle in his body tensed, waiting for her strike. “No, he’s dead all right,” a skinny black woman with fractal-angled cheekbones stood up from her stool by the workslab, “but he’ll get better. Probably.” “Woman! Ain’t no time to be glib,” Deng admonished. She sighed impatiently. “We’re swapping out his blood for HD-MPAS: High Density, Multi-Purpose Extraction Solution,” the woman droned, and plucked a humming balloon out of the air. She tapped something on it, and the thatched surface of the workslab blinked, and was gone. Just a texture setting. In its place now was a smooth, flat screen, already being filled with diagrams of whirling atomic structures. “The best chance of preserving a complete sample of the prototype is the blood,” she continued, “but it may have been metabolized already. If so, we’ll need fat, muscle, organ and spinal fluid samples. That all takes time to properly extract, hence the solution: It acts as both extractor and preservative, removing and storing any trace of the beta in his system, while still allowing him to get where he’s going: We’ve taken his blood already, and we can flash it here, but you’ll need a lab with better facilities to remove the HD-MPAS when it’s finished gathering the beta. The solution is too thick for the heart to pump, but the ‘bots have their own glucose engines; they don’t need the heart to provide motility. He’s got more than enough Respirocytes in there oxygenating to make up for the blood loss - they’re actually more

efficient than normal blood, to the extent that he should only have to breathe a few times an hour -- but it’s not a habit that I recommend breaking. You see, it’s all perfectly standard and perfectly safe…for now. The sheer amount of ‘tech in his veins, no matter how top-end it may be, is going atrophy the organs eventually. But he’s got at least seventeen hours before cell damage starts, and another four before it becomes irreversible. So it is as I said at first: He is dying right now, but the solution’s already kicking on and he’ll be back around in a moment. The solution will need about twelve hours to complete extraction, and then he’ll need another transfusion back to normal blood, which will be awaiting him at our sister lab on…let’s see here: Level P4353, Lotus Pavilion.” “Smells like burnt face and new electronics in here” James noted, “this a new addition to your abode, mate?” “Came with the couch,” Little Deng smiled and shrugged, his hair clacking like a cocktail party. “Nice story. Too bad it’s bullshit,” the little blonde snapped, “he’s a fucking mule,” Sera tilted her head. “I’m a factory girl,” the blonde explained, “a glorified nano-tech smuggler. When they pump a girl full of shit they need back, easiest way to ensure you do it is to put a kill switch in there. A day or two passes, and the ‘tech goes crazy, shreds your organs unless you get it out.” “I assure you, we do not need any of this back” the thin woman replied haughtily, “This isn’t a kill switch. It is a medical procedure, and standard practice in beta recovery.” “Bullshit again, you razor-faced dyke,” QC threw out the insult almost as an aside, “You said it yourself: He’s got about a day to get where you want him to go, or he’s dead.” “For what? A transfusion?” James spoke up, “I know a bloke’ll do it for two sandwiches and an hour of Roman Orgy Presence. Red doesn’t have to go anywhere.” “That’s…not exactly true,” the angular woman interjected. “Fucking called it,” QC laughed bitterly. “For optimal retrieval, the nano-bots in the medical solution inundate every organ in every system. To remove them completely, you’ll need a facility equipped with extraction software that corresponds to their exact license key. One license key, two machines. That’s not my doing, that’s just medical software DRM. The other machine is, as I said, awaiting you at the lab in Lotus Pavilion. This solution will not respond to any other machine. It is nothing as sinister as a ‘kill switch,’ however – it is merely an antipiracy measure.” “Get us a bloody Rx feed, then,” James sighed wearily, “If I’m going to the Penthouses, I’m going to need my formal drugs.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight And he is in a forest. A forest is a strange thing. Some people grow accustomed to it: They see the trees like walls -- like objects or obstacles. But Red has spent his entire life surrounded by flexing graphene and unyielding steel; the overwhelming presence of life is disconcerting. A walk in the forest is a stroll through the belly of a giant beast. Everything is alive. Everywhere. The very Earth beneath his feet pulses with unseen root systems; the air thrums with insects and birds; the trees swell and contract imperceptibly, breathing. Die anywhere in the Four Posts, and sooner or later a monitor ‘bot will land on your skin, and maintenance crews will be notified to pick up and incinerate the body. Die in a forest, and it will digest you. You’ll be absorbed slowly, over a period of decades -- but time is a flexible concept to a man who makes his living on Gas and mind-bending hallucinogens. Seen in timelapse, the effect becomes clear: Nature is a beast, and it eats. Some look at the trees and see a fence. Red looks at the trees and sees only teeth. What was this paranoia? An augmented effect of some chemical in his blood? It could be amphetamine, but there was some subtle rift between his body and the external world that didn’t feel like uppers. Was it the Gas? Both strains, Presence and Voyeur, imbued their users with a borderline unpleasant sensual clarity. The discomfort faded some with time and habituation, as all things do, but the sharpness was ever-present: Scents were stronger, and delineated too cleanly. They didn’t bleed into one another or waft away, as they did in real-time. Here, there was no uniform smell of forest. There was the mustiness of earth, and the crisp wetness of leaves, and the spiciness of bark -- all entirely distinct and equally present. Every sound was played from a different speaker; every texture was against a different patch of skin. Whichever artist sketched this world had pressed down too hard on the borders, made things stand out just a little too much from one another. Gas. No question. But why would the angular woman dose him with Presence? The last thing he remembered was some talk of transfusion, a muddy sense of fear, and then the forest. That, at least, was consistent with a Gas dosage: Memories were always fuzzy coming in and out of a trip. Red recalled the nurse asking his

preferred anesthetic. He had her scan his Rx card and queue up his Sunday Morning Mix: 6 parts crowdcontrol quality euphoric, the kind the riot squads used; 4 parts opiate (it didn’t matter what type, his algorithm simply bought the cheapest available on the day’s market – they only served to ease the transition from euphorics, anyway); 1 part psychoactive plant alkaloid. The latter was expensive, but synthetics made him grind his teeth. And then what? And then forest. Dammit! Did she load the card wrong? Presence doesn’t make any sense: It’s not a relaxant. If anything, the potential for arrhythmia would be a deterrent for its use as a sedatSomething moved. Something moved beyond the treeline. Red was standing in a small clearing, just wide enough to fully stretch his arms before touching bark. It was twilight, and by the smell of the air, this was a pre-industrial epoch. The rainforest was temperate. North America? Europe maybe? Red was terrible at geography. History, too. He’d always flipped the School Channel over to watch reruns of the chemistry threads instead. Still, through basic experience, he knew that all eras have a feel, and this felt like 18 th century, northern hemisphere, possibly pacific. He ran through the brief catalogue of pre-industrial northern pacific predators that he’d encountered (and usually been eaten by), during his various beta tests: Mountain lion, cougar, bear, wolf, coyote – but this one kept to the treeline. It knew what man was, and knew to be wary. Should it know that, in this period? The movement stopped. Red’s focus would not resolve. Forests were like low resolution parallaxes: His eyes had been trained to focus on the details in front of him, thanks to decades of screens and BioOS displays – they had trouble with distant impressions. He made a mental effort, but muscle memory kept bringing his gaze back to focus on the trees directly in front of him. Look beyond, damn it. The shadows and parallax brought a wave of helpless fear surging up into his gut. Red fought back his basic survival instincts, and called up logic: This was Presence. These forests did not exist anymore. And nothing in Presence could damage you. It can hurt, sure, but the most you’d wake up with was the premature shakes and some nausea. In past beta tests, Red had found himself in dozens of unscouted locations: He’d been mauled by bears, eaten by lions - even had a shark drop on him once, breaking his neck. That was an odd one. Never did figure out what happened there; it was over too fast. The only trick was to be prepared for it. If you can keep from falling victim to shock, the only lasting damage a bad Presence death could inflict was some light retinal detachment, a bitten tongue, and maybe a few weeks of night terrors.

He sighed loudly. “My money’s on black bear. Doesn’t feel far enough North for grizzlies,” he told the darkness. Something detached itself from a long, damp shadow. It stood upright, on two legs, too thin for a bear. “Oh hey, you’re people! Dang, I always forget about Indians. Sorry, fellas. Listen, I know you’re probably pretty confused and all, but I’m not a magician or an angry god, okay?” He vividly recalled the three stake-burnings he’d suffered through, and tried again: “ME NO MAGIC MAN.“ But the thing came at him, way too fast for human. Way too fast for anything organic. It moved with the bounding gait of muscle-graft, but that was impossible. In an instant it was on him. It clapped a hand over his mouth and shoved him to the ground in one fluid motion. In place of a face, there was only a fine, intricate mesh of chaotic, bloody wire. He tried to scream, but the sound came out high, thin, and distant. His tongue contacted a fleshy, porous membrane sealed over his mouth. The bitter taste of astringent and copper. Sound dampener? His attacker tilted its head sharply, listening for something in the forest. Another quick, bird-like twist of the head as it tracked the unheard sound, and then it was up and bounding away with the bouncing hobble of its artificially enhanced muscles. It disappeared back into the shadows. No, there it was: To the left now. “Listen, I’m sorry man,” Red kept his voice deep and low, so as not to kick on the dampener. “I thought this was a Gas trip. I think I’m confused here. Am I in some kind of reserve? I don’t mean to be trespassing. If you’ll just point the way out, I’ll get right the hell off of your property.” The thing snapped around to face him suddenly, as though surprised. It hissed. And Red realized the size was off: The first one was taller, thinner. This one was squat and thick. The hissing took on a stereo effect, and Red saw that there were more of the things now, surrounding him. A checkered pattern of lines bisected the world into little squares. They grew rapidly larger, then disappeared, and Red felt the bite of a net seal around his body. The net constricted. Red felt the soft thwack of little vacuum pumps thrumming against his skin. He fell to his side. The squat thing approached him, treading on broad metal cylinders, split down the middle, like cloven steel hooves. The face that bent to examine him was normal in every respect, save for the eyes. In their place, an exquisite grid of silver threads shimmered and rippled with unseen movement. It stood and croaked to the others. Most of them stood on prosthetic legs: The long flexible crescents they called Bounders, similar to the model Zippy sported, but these tapered back up from where they contacted the ground, and terminated

in cruel, shining points. There was one in back that seemed entirely unmodified: Just a bearded, darkskinned man of average height and build. But in his hands he carried a whip with a micrometer lash. Where it brushed along the grass, the blades segmented into pieces and blew away. The eyeless one croaked again. The language sounded vaguely Russian, but thicker and with more intonations. A bit of Cantonese in there, perhaps. Red had bunked with an Imported girl for a time. She came from outside the city, and for no reason he could recall, Red had decided she was Russian. They squatted together in an abandoned cable-skiff, moored to a crane outside of a half-built apartment complex. In that short time, he learned enough to recognize the sound of her language when spoken, but not enough to understand any of it. The second he began to comprehend what she was saying, he slipped the anchor cable and never looked back. The tightening net finally coughed and shuddered to a halt, just short of piercing his skin. Red peered up helplessly at the cloth-eyed man-thing. It stooped to touch him. Red flinched, but it merely seized a protruding section that served as a handle, and turned to walk away, dragging Red behind. Dry leaves crackled and split beneath them as they skipped and skidded along the forest floor. The bearded one followed, never making eye contact. The prosthetic-clad ones bounced crazily at the rear. There was no sign of the first man – the tall one with the wire face – and from the casual pace this new group kept, they either didn’t know of, or weren’t concerned with him. “Hey, guys,” Red began, but the second he spoke, the bearded man reared back and, without breaking stride, kicked him in the face. His eyes went unfocused, and he yelped in pain. “Stop being such a pussy,” QC was telling him. She smiled fondly down at Red, silhouetted against the blinding white LEDs in the ceiling above her. Back in the lab. “What happened to your nose?” QC asked, dabbing at a bit of blood on his face. Red returned her smile wearily. She had that little fold between her eyes that she only got when she was worried, or intensely drunk. “He woke up!” Zippy cried from somewhere unseen, “now we got to go or else they gonna catch us!” Every joint was clogged with a thick, sludgy ache, and his muscles burned at the movement, but Red hauled himself begrudgingly to his feet. His eyes felt pressurized, his ears needed to pop, and his mouth tasted like rotten fruit from the blood already backing up into his throat. “I need my pants,” Red whispered to QC, before realizing that the dampener was gone. “Why am I always without pants?”

Chapter Twenty-Nine “How long?” “Ten. Fifteen.” She leaned casually in the doorway of the scrub shop. The difference in air pressure buffeted her with wafts of ozone from the shop behind her, chicken smells from the market in front, and the angry chattering of ancient, vaguely Asiatic women from all sides. Her elaborate, high-collared blue suit was tailor-made for her body every single day: It adjusted on the fly for slight variations in her body-shape, and it monitored and controlled ambient temperature, humidity and pressure based on a set of independent criteria for optimal metabolization that were freshly compiled every 120 seconds. And still she pulled at the stiff, lacy collar uncomfortably. The tightness in her throat would not abate. Too many cultures clashing in too tight a space. Too many agendas. Too many opportunities for misunderstanding. Too many variables, plain and simple. Group of three Caucasians in grid 21-85C: Their threat levels were low, but signs of medical trauma – malnutrition, drug addiction, recent bruising – were apparent. Six Asians in 15-320B, eyeballing a display of bubble-packaged nanotech strains. Their body language and posturing dictated moderate threat levels. A skinny girl with a faded market-code tattoo was hunched over by the stall’s entrance, continually scanning for watching eyes. Could just be a hopper playing lookout for the shoplifters; could be a scout for rival agencies looking into wetwork. Categorize, analyze, dismiss or neutralize. But there were too many, and the conditions shifted too rapidly. No easily sortable groups. No preestablished algorithm for crowd interaction. That left her operating on Guerilla Theorems only, and she always struggled with those. “It’s in the gut,” today’s Albert had told her, when she first voiced her concerns about going into the catwalks. He apparently missed the irony of assigning mathematics to instinct. Albert stood up and slipped past the crone with her brandished broom-handle truncheon. She ululated at him unhappily.

“That was ten,” he answered back. “It’s been fifteen minutes.” This day’s Albert sidled up beside her. His skin was somewhere between raw and translucent from the freshly stripped flesh. They’d managed to get his face into the scrub shop’s neutralizing bath and deactivated the blonde girl’s disassemblers before they had a chance to do any real damage, but Albert’s face still glowed with the sensitive pink of freshly exposed skin. “You look bashful, Albert.” She told him, and his thick, uniform brows lowered as one. “Humor does not become you,” he told her flatly, stepping past her and into the press of bodies beyond the narrow entryway. He had to turn sideways to slide his stocky frame by. The muscle accelerators did what they could, but there was little to be done about bone structure. He would always be on the bulky side. He looked like a fat little bulldog that some fanatical owner had dressed up in an archaic, blue and gold formal suit. It was not the optimal form for an Alpha Gentleman. It would impede his progress in the A-Gents someday, if it hadn’t already. “Your jacket needs to be let out,” she replied, knowing it would bother him. “You say that, Victoria, and yet you know that it is automatically fitted.” “I do,” she affirmed, and watched him flush even redder. “I have asked you not to speak with me unless relevant to the mission. I have filed this request with Hanover.” “Hanover has made me aware,” she answered. A solid cluster of high-level threats: Mostly Caucasian youths, bags under their eyes. Cheap bulkassembled primary clothing, paired with more expensive, designer-tagged accessories. Importance placed on superficial status while lacking quality fundamentals, indicating interest in advancement without the means to do so. Motive. They were trying not to look directly at her, but shared a series of hushed conversations and furtive glances. “72-75, grids B and C” she told Albert, looking to her right. “I see them. A moment, please.” He was silent as he ran the Guerilla Theorems. “Not enough influence to risk public confrontation. They’ll shadow us. It will be the alleys, if anything. Split at first contact. Drop low, fire high. They’ll run when surprised.” “Queuing up explosive rounds for maximum psychological impact,” She added, reaching inside her jacket pocket and tracing a semi-circle on the control pad sewn inside her lapel. Her hand came out with a cigarette, and lit it casually. “Following suit,” Albert said, and glanced over just as she lit her cigarette. He then made a show out of patting himself down, finding his own cigarettes, and lighting one as though the desire seized him suddenly upon seeing hers.

One of the boys flinched -- probably getting a waveform message -- then lapsed into the dead-eyed twitch of cognitive input. The group broke as one and shuffled away. Victoria scanned the crowd again, searching for the next most prominent threat. Albert found it first. “12-36A. Worn patch track on the wrist indicates addict in withdrawal. No physical training, hands too shaky for effective weapon handling. Likely attempted theft of secondary electronics.” “Pickpocketing?” She scoffed, “You’re qualifying pickpocketing as the new primary threat?” “There is a threat inherent in every situation,” Albert quoted code at her, “no matter how trivial. Categorize, analyze, dismiss or neutralize.” Victoria sighed, and flicked her lit cigarette randomly out into the crowd. Somewhere, a voice yelped and swore in pain. “5-355A,” Albert recited, “below average height, balding and overweight. Low self-esteem may exaggerate perceived slights. Wounded pride dictates he retaliate.” Victoria had been instantly annoyed when she first laid eyes on her Albert for the day. An A-Gent’s grid was registered in terms of optimal reach: Anything within ten grids of an operative could be dispatched with interpersonal action, thrown weapons or firearms. Ten to twenty grids allowed for thrown weapons or firearms. Anything beyond twenty meant firearms only. The fewer dispatch options the gridrange presented, the riskier an A-Gents situation became. Victoria’s lanky limbs and quick eyes gave her a slightly extended grid, just as Albert’s stockiness limited his. To partner, they had to pair and average their grids to get the mean they’d be operating on for the day. The downgrade in grid-area made her feel cramped, and awkward. She took a vindictive satisfaction in the fact that, though this Albert outranked her by two levels currently, her reach and reflexes had her set to overtake him in sixteen to eighteen months, depending on job performance. She’d applied for a transfer almost instantly, but Hanover had coldly noted her weakness in Guerilla Theorems, and denied the appeal. “Hanover: Vitals,” she said just a little too loudly, and a dozen pairs of eyes shot their direction, then quickly looked away and sped up their pace. A small, but noticeable radius of avoidance fluttered outward from their position. The bones in her skull vibrated, and she heard the thin, ghostly tones of Hanover reading off the vitals in her area. Albert glared at her. “Overt tactics. Using societal position to lower threat levels,” he noted dismissively, “public confirmation of A- Gent status dictates entirely new algorithms.” Albert’s gaze followed Victoria’s, to the man who’d been struck by her flicked cigarette. He was now trying desperately to hunch down in the crowd while stumbling in panic toward the catwalk exits. “New primary?” She asked him pleasantly. He chewed his lower lip and ran the numbers.

Ambient temperature in Catwalk seven-hundred-forty-six: 101.4 degrees. 80% humidity. Foot traffic: Severe to dangerous flow. Capacity reached or imminent. Primary Threats scanned in area: Maxwell “Axe-well” Tax, murder in the first degree. Samiya Cole, aggravated manslaughter. Security stills of an emaciated figure sporting a row of blue spikes on his head and a demure woman in a yellow Sari flashed up. They disappeared when she finished scanning them. Anya Volich, sixty-two counts of assault. Record expunged. An image of a familiar face – the old scrub-shop nurse – flickered onto her BioOS display. Victoria resisted the urge to turn and stare. Sweat began to spring up on Albert’s brow. The numbers were inconclusive, she gathered; he was having trouble identifying a primary in-grid threat. “Your fellow agent,” she quoted code back at him: “In absence of sufficient primaries, vigilance should be diverted to fellow operatives. There is always a threat: Categorize, analyze, dismiss or neutralize.” He swiveled to face her slowly, his raw skin pinching at the edges. She smiled winningly back at him, and almost laughed when his nose began to twitch. “Result!” Albert practically screamed, grateful to break the tension. A pulsing red dot thrummed in her peripheral vision. She glanced over to it, then slowly returned her gaze to center, confirming interface permission. Scrolling text filled the conical area in the center of her visual field. Images and thumbnail videos flung themselves outward in staggered concentric circles. The text was a cobbled together mini-biography of a smallish blonde girl. Pretty. Her delicate features offset by short hair done up in haphazard spikes. In the thumbnail, she was glaring up from a plate of garbage noodles at a lean-to on some lower-level catwalk. She was sticking her tongue out at whoever had taken the picture, indicating some level of affection or intimacy. She was wearing the same antique, silverfoiled duster and one-legged trousers as she had been when they’d first encountered her, down in the fleeing Beta’s flat. Victoria gave the bio a quick scan, pulling out key points: Quintessential Caroline McGinnis -- with a name like that, her parents had probably been ‘Loons. She was either very lucky, or very resourceful to have survived the severance. Psychographic web-crawl indicated recklessness, anger, and strong impulses. An empathetic streak was revealed by her video-feed queue -- mostly cute animal clips and social injustice memes. A tendency toward anti-corporate sentiment showed up in her shopping habits: Sparse purchases, even for the poverty line, indicated that Quintessential Caroline preferred to spend her money on off-market goods and software. Employment was also unlisted, but her search history – side-effects of unbranded strains, what to look for in a flush – hinted at a recent stint as a ‘Factory Girl in the arenas. Likely littered with malfunctioning or unstable nanotech. Last official housing was a hovel slung below Catwalk 393 on the North Post side of level 4566, time-shared with a Sim-porn addict named Moon. She took days, he took nights. That was two years ago. It was one of the barest Hanover bios Victoria had ever seen. She couldn’t help but be a little impressed at somebody staying that off the grid these days.

Victoria let her eyes fuzz out of focus, then directed them upwards, turning off the scroll function and activating the auxiliary ring. She focused on the blinking video feed – the one that first triggered the result – and a short clip played silently. It was Quintessential Caroline, standing in a cramped corridor surrounded by a motley group of tired and angry looking men. To one side, a heavily-muscled Arabic woman bounced merrily in place on a prosthetic leg. The viewpoint abruptly shifted away to a security lens on the ceiling just outside the doors of a small lift. She watched from a bird’s eye view as QC staggered out of the elevator, tripping over her own feet. She turned to glare back at an unseen party, and the Arabic woman appeared on-screen. She said something and a short, red-headed man laughed. QC turned and stomped way, around a corner. As she rounded it, the POV shifted again to a shaky, constantly shifting camera. Its focus was scattershot and frantic. It paused only briefly in any one place to alight on a rack of blades, a plate of meat, a random assortment of women’s cleavage. It was a feed culled from an unsecured eye camera; some tourist that just happened to be looking the right direction at the right time and didn’t know how to set up a proper firewall. The first-person movement clashed with the natural scanning pattern of Victoria’s own vision, and she fought back a wave of nausea. The tourist’s gaze settled on the rolling hips of a silver-clad woman, and then quickly scanned up across her unimpressive breasts. It flicked upward to briefly register QC’s face – a look of disgust as she caught the user’s stare – and away again to match eyes with a surly-looking teenager, then down at the floor. The POV jumped, and Victoria was looking through the security camera of a dusty, unlit vacant commerce stall. Before she could make out the details, a blur of distant silver strode past the far window and out of frame. The POV started to switch again, but she flicked her eyes sideways and the feed slid away to the left, replaced by small, pulsing white text that listed the timestamps and locations of each of the cameras. “Got it,” Albert interrupted, “targets came back active on the 1.5Ks, heading from the West Post Reservoir Freight Express Elevator to the North Post Unlicensed Lift Station. Secondary and primary objectives have joined ranks with several unknowns. No ID tags on those as yet. Let’s move.” “Hanover update,” she put out a hand to stop him, “hold.” “What?” “Getting a new objective now.” “Are you kidding me?” Albert spat. He was feigning detachment, but Victoria could see the anger he’d been holding in his neck and shoulder muscles from the moment the blonde girl had burned his face. “Check that first feed. The corridor. See the junkie kid on the left? He’s our new primary objective: Marked as ‘not to be harmed under any circumstances.’ Zero risk, zero engagement.” “I shall repeat myself: Are you joking? Why would some anonymous addict ever warrant shifting a primary objective in fulfillment?” “Check with Hanover yourself if you don’t believe me,” Victoria answered curtly, “I don’t braid the god damn thing’s hair. I don’t know why it does this shit.”

She swiveled on her heel to make for the public lifts, and almost plowed through an elderly black man. He was standing right in her 02-175C grid. Not two feet away, and she’d been too distracted to register him, much less categorize his threat level. He smiled genially at her, and then stepped aside with a grand flourish, signaling for her to pass. Victoria punched him in the throat.

Chapter Thirty QC had the man by the tongue, and was twisting it cruelly. He whimpered something unintelligible, but the tone seemed properly plaintive, so she released him. The poor old junkie was covered with scabs, his eyes gone crusty at the edges, his lips peeled permanently back from his teeth like a grinning skull. He whimpered, and tucked his torn and wadded tongue back into his mouth like a wet tissue. Byron felt a kind of base, pathetic kinship with the addict: His own tongue was already growing thick. His thoughts were slow and circular, and his mouth had long since gone dry and began tasting of acid. A persistent, building pressure settled behind his eyes, and the fluttering of a vague and ill-defined anxiety rattled around behind his ribcage. Every moveable inch of him felt improperly lubricated, like a rusty old door hinge. The fear of it is worse than the reality. It was his mantra for early-stage withdrawal, but he’d cursed that white-lie in the throes of too many screaming fits to earnestly believe it any longer. The now-lisping troll tapped at a spot on the ground with a filthy, shaking finger. A deep hum vibrated through the floor, while their group stood, waiting, in the ramshackle lean-to. The hum intensified, then silenced abruptly. There was a shift deep beneath them, and the chickens began to quarrel. They were hemmed in by the birds on all sides: Each cage stacked vertically upon the other, floor to ceiling, covering every inch of every wall. The warbling birds flew into a panic as a whole section of wall popped out, and swung back inward. When his eyes finally adjusted to the gloom, Byron saw a whip-thin child clad in overalls and a ludicrously ill-fitting pair of giant goggles, standing in the dark just beyond the recessed wall. The aged junkie slurred something to the gawky boy, and the child nodded in response. Byron tried desperately to pay attention to the conversation, but focus was elusive and unctuous; it slipped further and further away the more he tried to grasp at it. He registered each word they spoke sequentially, but had forgotten the start of them by the time the sentence ended. They’d apparently agreed to follow the child, which Byron gathered more by the actions of those around him than his own tenuous grasp of the situation. The old junkie stumbled fearfully into the corner, while the child slid his comically large goggles down over his eyes, and disappeared into the shadows. James was first to follow him, then Red, and then the dull woman with the skipping step whose name Byron could not quite remember -- Slappy or Bozo or something equally preposterous. QC glared expectantly at him, but Byron could not recall what he had

done to displease her. She said something: He grasped the meaning briefly, and then dropped it. She tried again. “What?” Byron blinked rapidly, trying to shake the dumb fatigue that settled on him like a fine dust. “Fucking move!” “Oh, indeed. Indeed. Apologies.” Byron shuffled hesitantly into the black space beyond the wall. His feet felt impossibly distant – when did his legs get so unmanageably long? – and it was all he could do to try to stand somewhere that he guessed might be out of the way. QC followed immediately after him, yelling something harsh and horrible that made Byron’s genitals briefly retract. The wall of chickens set to warbling again, and swung shut. The walk was long, black, and cramped. The absoluteness of the void was interrupted at random intervals by thin, shining slices of light. Byron had initially taken them for LED strips, until one of them displayed a pair of darting eyeballs. Slits, he realized, all looking out onto the catwalk marketplace. He bent to examine one set just below waist level, and found himself staring at a man’s knee, bare through shredded trousers. The telltale pattern of small, black pin-pricks dotted his hair follicles. It spoke of Neotene addiction. Byron remembered trying the drug, once, in a little rat-hole that a girl called Spotlight kept behind the South Post Arenas. Byron had forgotten, at that point, just how terrifying it was to be a child. The wonder and curiosity that the stories spoke of had never infected his own youth. His adolescence was a period of constant awkwardness and uncertainty, defined by the unique fear that comes from operating in a society where all of the rules are considered too ‘adult’ to explain. The Neotene brought it all screaming back, and he’d spent the entire trip hiding beneath Spotlight’s mattress. Another slit showed a dark woman’s face in profile, chuckling quietly to herself. Her eyes darted about rapidly, lost in a BioOS feed only she could watch. An unseen hawker screeched nearby, peddling blank Rx cards. “Thirty mixes, clean!” He yelled. The woman covered her mouth, overcome with laughter at something she’d witnessed in her own private little theater. “Untraceable! High-yield injection mesh! Five first tier allotments! Ten second tier! Fifteen third!” More slits and more two-inch tableaus -- tiny little portals into backrooms and bar stools and crowded hallways. They looked out onto a rack of graphene whipsticks in the storage room of a weapons smuggler, and a booth that specialized in Nekojin: Animatronic cat-people that Penthouse kids sometimes kept as pets. The first slit peeked into the main pet-store, open to the public, catering mostly to children; the next slit peered into the private backroom that catered to adults. Another slit displayed a fat woman with deep-set eyes and an enormous purple hat demonstrating a singing staff by touching

its imperceptibly resonating tip to a thick length of steel, which shook and wobbled wildly in response. A middle-aged man in archaic coat-tails conducted crude action holograms for two bored teenagers, their faces obscured by pixelating hoods. Then a decomposition tube, the receptacle kicked over and vacuum seal broken. It spewed ultralight nano-garbage out into the air, where it floated gently down like dirty snowflakes. Byron’s knee contacted something hard in the dark. He brought the other up to compensate, but it, too, came up short. He crumpled into the ground. QC came crashing down on top of him a moment later. When they had extricated themselves from each other’s limbs, Byron was a torrent of confused apologies. He wanted to explain why he’d been so distracted, but it came out sideways and disconnected. “A black knee,” he found himself mumbling, “and the lady that wasn’t laughing or selling anything. Some kids – he should have been more careful. They didn’t like the show.” QC said something condescending and shoved him out of the murk and into a blinding light. It was so unbearably bright that it bored through his clenched eyelids and planted an instant, reeling, nauseous migraine straight into his forebrain. He pushed Bozo the One-legged dimwit aside, and threw up into a Decomp tube… that turned out to be an old Latino man’s fish stand. More swearing, more slapping, more confused apologies, and he was being dragged again. The hidden passageway was a series of still images whose theme was jumbled and unclear. But it was better than the open catwalk, which was a disjointed montage on fast forward: Faces blurred into one another, merged, changed, and divided. Turns and steps and stumbles. Doorways opened, closed, zipped past before he could reach for them. Byron recognized an elevator, and asked where it went, but by that time they were somewhere else and somebody was laughing at him. He knew that somewhere far away, his own mouth was incessantly asking for Gas, and explaining why everything would be better with it. If he could only dose up, even just a little bit, he could make sense again. But he couldn’t make them listen, or they didn’t understand him when they did, or they just didn’t care. People elbowed him forward, kicked him backward, and shoved him aside. Eventually, the frantic fugue paused long enough for Byron to register his surroundings. Their group was standing on an enormous platform, one side open to the air. The distant sky ran a gradient: From blue at bottom, to black at top. A dozen large, misshapen structures hung from tangled masses of cable out there in the air. Men stood near them, inside of them or atop them -- each yelling, jostling, and pleading at passerby. Small fistfights broke out here and there, presumably when one grew too bold. The elevator docks. Familiarity, at long last. Byron knew the docks well: They were often the fastest untraceable path down to Deng’s place, or Red’s flat, or Spotlight’s hole, or Knock-kneed Bill’s, or Fan City or The Wash -- or any of a dozen other pirate Rx suppliers Byron frequented. The barking men he recognized as attendants, though most of them

presumptuously preferred to be called captains. Their black market lifts varied in shape, structure, and carrying capacity, and they mostly serviced different floors -- but there was enough overlap to make every fare a fight. The chubby-faced child, what was his name? He had a little stash somewhere around here and you could always catch him peddling to the waiting crowds of passengers. Kev? Keb? A ‘k’ sound, Byron was certain of that. The boy was always bothering him to come take a look at the feed tube he’d tapped into, but Byron had always brushed the sick-looking little thing away. Ah, but those were better days, when he could be choosy about his strain and time period. Now, he’d take Presence to the damnable Cretaceous if somebody would just fill the aching space between his cells with Gas. “Fatface Ken,” Byron said, pulling at the sleeve in front of him. The person swiveled around, and Byron peered up at them, but the haze had settled deeply into his eyes now, like a shifting purple snowstorm, wiping out all fine detail. “The bloody hell?” The person said. “Presence please. 1821, Pisa, if you have it, but I’m not picky today.” Byron nodded at the face he could see, but not recognize, and waited optimistically for confirmation. “Yeah, sure, ya daft knob-end. Whatever you say,” James answered, and returned his attention to the two captains hurling vicious insults at one another. Zippy stood between the pair of lift attendants, halfsmiling at the show, and throwing in a new number for them to haggle over whenever they started to settle down. James watched with amusement. QC had seized onto Red the second they saw sky, and had her face pressed fearfully into his arm. Byron nodded, content in the knowledge that his request was received, and picked a friendly-looking direction to stagger off. “This man is sewage. His mother? Sewage. His father? Sewage! They have bred together, because there is no God above to prevent such things from happening, and they had this fat, stinking, sewage-child you see before you!” The portly, ruddy-faced captain screamed in the general direction of a dark-skinned man with tiny scars running the length of his exposed fore-arms. “What? WHAT!” The other captain gestured wildly around him, “this man talks? This man! How many have you dropped this week, Sly? Four? Six? That deathtrap you call a lift isn’t fit for a ‘Loon!” QC’s head snapped up at the remark, but she stayed silent. “You speak ill of me, sir, and that is fine. That is fine. But do not disparage the Plumb Hussy. She has ten times the capacity of your slipshod Aspiration!” “We only got this many credits each,” Zippy interjected, holding up ten fingers, “and we need to get home to Middle Industry.”

“I could not possibly!” The fat man, Sly, threw his hands up dramatically. “Wouldn’t even cover the electricity!” “Ten credits,” the scarred man piped in happily, “it is very generous! Of course! Of course!” “Nine!” Sly screeched, his deep-set eyes narrowed in reproach. “Eight,” the scarred captain returned. “Five,” Zippy put in quickly, and Sly answered with a sharp, barking sound. He took her by the hand, and stomped unhappily off in the direction of his lift before the scarred man could open his mouth. “But we go NOW!” Sly hollered at the idle queue milling about in front of his lift: A long, cylindrical piece of steel wrapped in black mesh, the words ‘Plumb Hussy’ lashed across the bow in sloppy, bright pink paint. “North Post Express Line! Stops at Buster’s Market, the 7K Public Pad, Celestial Dome, The Alkaloid Gardens and Middle Industry!” James laughed, and turned to follow them. Red and QC came close at his heels. His expression was distant and distracted; her eyes were locked firmly on the ground. A press of commuters shoved in behind them, and they let themselves be borne along with it. The Plumb Hussy creaked and swayed sickeningly with every shift in weight. “Fatface Ken!” Byron shouted to nobody in particular, numbly scanning the crowd for activity he could not see. There was a flat thwack of air, and then the steady thump of winch engines kicking on. Byron turned to watch a large chunk of pink and black steel rise up and away. A tubby, red-faced man stood atop it, on a flat section of roof, punching at a glowing square and yelling obscenities at a scarred man below him. The event held no significance for Byron. He turned back to the docks, and cried out again: “I need you, Fatface Ken!” Two blue and gold smudges – one shorter and thick, the other ropy and elongated - swiveled to face him suddenly, and after a moment, started in his direction. Neither seemed likely to be Fatface Ken, the tiny drug-pirate Chinese boy, but Byron remained, as always, optimistic.

Chapter Thirty-One Red sat cross-legged on a bare patch of cold metal. Oscillating patterns of light swept across the floor as the Plumb Hussy ascended behind support beams, around atmospheric fans, and through haphazard docks slung to the outside of the North Post. A ladder of yellow squares and thin shadowy bars slid by, blurred into a flickering zoetrope, and disappeared. A series of stark white ovals flashed across the far wall. They wandered like roving spotlights over the huddled mass of passengers. An elongated pyramid of light built itself on the western side of the lift, enlarged to encompass the south, then shrank and inverted. “The fuck’s with him?” QC asked Zippy. Once the hatch had closed behind her, and she was safely surrounded on all sides by the relative density of the mesh walls, the paralyzing tide of fear within QC receded. It was still there, though; giggling at the outskirts of her mind, waiting to come gleefully skipping back in at the slightest invitation. “Nothing, silly! Zippy answered. “Red likes to play imagination, that’s all. Ain’t you never played imagination? What are you, dumb?” James and Zippy had promptly commandeered a small corner of the elevator for their little group, while all around them, passengers were locked together like cigarettes in a pack. Most with barely enough room to sit, and some not even that: They slept upright with their arms looped out through the flexible mesh cells of the walls. Initially, James had staked out just enough territory to maintain a controlled perimeter, but the relative darkness of the lift’s interior triggered something in Red. He began raving about machine faces in the dark, and tore at the floor until his fingers went bloody. As soon as they’d gotten him settled down, Zippy stood, turned, and vaulted off of her Bounder into the back of a pale, cosmetically freckled fellow in a soiled pink cape. He bent nearly double before launching away and skidding to a halt atop a group of neo-fascists with identical blonde mohawks. One of the Neos got to his feet as if to fight, but James reached inside his jacket – a casual motion, as if going for a business card – and came up with something resembling a long, thin steel bolt. He hurled it nonchalantly into the air, where it unfolded and propelled itself with uncanny accuracy into the punk’s temple. The kid sat down abruptly, made a short sobbing noise, and lapsed into unconsciousness. A small but intensely courteous area cleared around them, after that. Red had been the same ever since -- motionless, sweating despite the cold, his pupils swallowing his entire eye. Two strips of dappled sunlight shuddered into existence against the west wall. They chased each other in a vertical line, strobed briefly, and vanished -- only to appear again, larger, two feet to the left.

Red tamped his breathing down, flat and narrow. He felt the solidity of the floor beneath him. He let his eyes go lax, and tried to mentally catalogue every unfocused shape in his field of vision. It was an old psychological meme that Beta testers used to control trips going off the rails: Focus intensely on the shapeless everything. Do not consider the implications of anything, just populate your cognitive world entirely with blurry, formless entities, and ride out the trance until the body has time to process and normalize. Years of experience beta-testing dangerous new Rx mixes -- both professionally, and just because it was a Tuesday -- had kept Red from employing such base methods for as long as he could remember. Normally during a bad trip, he’d simply ping his BioOS and scan the chemical readouts. Ferrosotrine 3:8 Dimethyltryptamine 1:6 Aspirated Euphorime 1:3 The display would read, in small, flashing blue letters. And Red would be reassured; it was just chemicals being chemicals. Red had pulled up a chemical readout immediately after the first hallucination: A little girl standing uncertainly in the middle of the cargo-hull. She had metal pinchers sticking out of her face. She pointed at Red and screamed. He scanned it again when a group of stooped figures scuttled straight through the family sitting beside him. The figures paused for a moment, then one lifted a leg – a leg that terminated in a thousand bright and whirling insectile limbs instead of a human foot – and placed it against the wall. They scurried up the curving surface and disappeared through the ceiling. Red finally closed the display, after the matronly old woman smiling directly in front of him dropped the blanket from her shoulders, and revealed a whirring mass of mercurial pupae clinging together in roughly the shape of a human skeleton. The readings always came back the same, anyway:

Trochoidal Sopoforine 3:5 Thorazine 1:10 Chlordiazepoxide 4:15 Methylenedioxymethamphetamine 1:3

It was Red’s standard Hyper-Anxiety Mix: The one he’d frantically slotted against his wrist immediately after waking on Little Deng’s table. There were no other active foreign agents. There was no chemical impetus for these hallucinations – or at least, nothing that his system could catalogue. So Red sat, and he watched the lights chase forms through shadow. He considered the world around him, but did not think. He saw, but did not understand. He especially did not understand that thing over there -- just the upper torso of a man, his entire lower half nothing but a tangled mass of cables and jacks -- attempting to plug itself into the mouth of a comely Asian pre-teen. That, he did not understand. He did not understand it as hard as he possibly could. Red pulled away from himself and cleared a space to think: Ordinarily he’d chalk something like this up to undocumented drug interaction, but Deng’s acute-boned technician had done a complete transfusion. At first, Red thought she’d spiked him with Presence while he was under – it might start to explain that whole forest fiasco -- but his BioOS scan was perfectly clear of all chemicals, save for the infinitesimal traces of inert Beta-Gas still stored in his fat cells. The tech had pulled all of his blood, every last drop, and packed his veins with gunmetal sludge instead. He knew that to be true, if for no other reason than the god damn Hyper-Anxiety Mix wasn’t working. The HD-MPAS that pumped through his major arteries now instead of blood was a vicious form of automated leukocyte: Any foreign agent the solution found in his body would be devoured, disassembled, and have its core elements reassigned so as not to interfere with the extraction process. It was already hard at work, pulling the Beta-Gas remnants from his fat and spinal fluid, shuffling them down to his colon, and repacking them into a microscopic brick to be passed on command. Nothing was making a trip the other way; nothing was getting to his brain…unless it was already there. And even if something had stored itself in his neural tissue, no drug Red had ever heard of caused hallucinations with appropriate physical manifestations: The lacerations, the bruising, the bloody nose. Throughout his illustrious beta-testing career, Red had bled from the eyes, vomited up chunks of bone, and orgasmed through his fingertips, but nothing ever clawed his damn face open. It just wasn’t possible. But it was okay. Because they were on their way to see Luka. Luka owed Red. He owed Red for his contacts, for his mixing services, for his all-hour deliveries and custom anti-addictives -- but most of all, he owed Red for his continued silence. Not much was frowned upon under the influence of Presence – it’s hard to police a shared hallucination - but any trips within the last hundred years were strictly forbidden. The law was ostensibly to prevent theft of Intellectual Property – a quick trip back a few weeks to the right factory at the right time, and you could steal any patented mix before the inventors even knew to protect it. But there were worse perversions to be had from in-lifespan time travel. Even the Anthromorphs thought meta-molestation was sick. Luka practiced it almost daily.

Red didn’t exactly condone the practice himself, but Luka was a Middle Industry engineer: He always had access to new drug-feeds, and as a hopelessly addicted self-molester, he always had need of Red’s services. That left Red with a lot of leverage, and right now, he had a use for it. A slender, seven foot tall blonde separated herself from the crowd of huddled passengers and drifted towards Red with preternatural grace. He did not comprehend her. He did not understand her. She was a shape; a form without function. He did not understand that her limbs narrowed to flashing metal points with every step. He did not comprehend when she bent to him with a kindly smile, and slapped him hard across the face. He did not understand that her flesh molded itself against his face like gelatin, then halfway through the strike, snapped into cold, unyielding metal. Red did not allow the woman’s existence to affect him. But the world went black anyway. “Jesus!” A sharp crack awoke QC from her fitful slumber and her dreams of being sucked outward into the freezing vastness of the open sky. Something was resting limply against her. She gritted her teeth, put the rage aside for a moment, and decided to see who’d struck her before melting their fucking faces off. And there was Red, lying in her lap, a large red welt blossoming across his face. Dull grey liquid oozed from one nostril. “What the fucking fuck?!” She gestured wildly at James, who was glowering at her disapprovingly. “What’d you hit him for?” He asked, bending down and lifting one of Red’s eyelids. Apparently satisfied by what he saw there, he dragged Red to a supine position and propped his head up with his own checkered green blazer. “I didn’t! I was sleeping and then he…god damn headbutted me, I guess? Fuck my ass!” She swore, reaching up to feel at the knot growing on the side of her head. “Don’t look at me, love. Zip and I were standing guard, all dutiful-like. If you didn’t club him, though, who did that?” James tilted Red’s face to one side in the dim light, and QC saw something like a handprint there – but massive, and with webs stretching between each finger. “There’s no one else back here…” “Well, I don’t shitting know, do I? What’d I just say? It’s not like I…oh,” QC looked around with building dread. “Oh. God’s. Shining. Asshole.” “What?” “We’re the only ones back here!” “Riiiight….?” James rotated his wrist, urging her to get to the point.

“Then where the jumping fuck is Byron?” “Who’s that now?”

Chapter Thirty-Two “Who am I?” Byron asked, tittering. He’d been repeating the query incessantly since he’d hit the turn – the phase of the high when Gas inundates the parietal lobes and shuts down self-body recognition. “Primary objective,” Albert answered flatly. He was filing his nails with the rough-shod underside of his standard issue air-mesh woven pistol. To his credit, Byron had tried to run when he first realized they were A-Gents. But by then, they were too close. They’d approached him with their facial scramblers up: The software rendered their features dull and unremarkable. It scanned the crowd around an A-Gent for the mean average facial structure, widened or narrowed their eyes based on the surrounding standard, remodeled skin color into an unremarkable hash of textures -- but they could only get you so close before the mark started focusing too intently on the details. That’s when the scramblers break down and throw up a pixilated, opaque emergency mask. That’s when everybody runs. When Hanover first alerted them to Byron’s location, Victoria had advocated for full-body cloaks and balance-shattering rounds. Overt tactics again. Albert reasonably pointed out that the cloaks drained an awful lot of power, were only good for short bursts, and that balance-shattering hundreds of commuters seemed like a tad bit overkill for one lost, stumbling Gas-head. She sputtered unhappily about it, but Hanover’s assessment backed Albert’s call. He knew this this particular Victoria’s type all too well: Grown up on the vid-feeds with too many action tropes bouncing around her head. She fell in love with the concept of the mysterious, deadly, refined AGent: Some Albert or Victoria uncloaking right before a fulfillment -- seemingly ripping through the fabric of reality itself to burst into a deadly whir of action; woven pistols blazing, filigreed top hat glinting in the light of a dramatic explosion -- only to blink out again a second later, leaving behind nothing but a smoking corpse and a glimmering Calling Card embossed with the trademark golden ‘A.’ This Victoria only wanted to live up to the ideal. She wanted to play at the fiction she’d been fed, and found that the reality was too often disappointing. Now, instead of a dramatic footchase through some filthy, crumbling Grounder’s slum, exchanging fire with IP counterfeiters while flickering in and out of visibility and dancing, vaporous, through the crowded press – she was gently tripping junkies with their own feet on a crowded lift dock, and saddled with a squat, plain-looking middle-aged Albert that only wanted to run numbers. He understood her frustration, but there was little to be done about it. This was not a vid-feed.

At least they’d bagged their primary: They had taken Byron in less than five seconds, and with no resistance. When his amethyst-clouded eyes finally placed the scrambled faces for what they were, it was far too late. He made a pathetic, scuttling dash for a few paces, before Victoria charged forward and kicked his heel to the side. Byron stumbled, and slowly melted to his knees, puddling on the floor in a plaintive, limp heap. When they picked him up, he reflexively asked for Gas, and Victoria slapped the card Hanover had sent them into a C-Ring Respirator. To his earnest gratitude, it was even his preferred brand: Voyeur strain // Biography // February 13th, 1810 // Athens, Greece // George Gordan Byron. As soon as his BioOS interfaced with the dispenser and confirmed the mix designation, Byron immediately quieted and shoved the inhaler, a bit too hard, into his own nostrils. The soft thump of vacuum pumps kicked on to seal the outer ring, and he drew in a series of great, gasping huffs. Unfortunately for Albert, experienced addicts tend to have longer turns – that period between worlds, where figures and landscapes bled into one another, fading in and out of the dull violet fog that boiled in their periphery -- and it almost always left the interstitial user confused, euphoric, and extremely, rampantly annoying. “Who are yooouuuuu!” Byron cooed, slapping at the empty air in front of him. “How long is this going to take?” Victoria was standing eight inches behind the lift attendant, two inches to the left of his center-mass. Optimal distance to engage grappling and limit the effectiveness of drawn weapons (assuming a right-handed target). It was an awkward invasion of personal space, made all the more conspicuous for the cavernous cabin of the corporate express elevator, empty save for the four of them. The attendant was reminded of her presence when she spoke, and instinctively tried to move away. Victoria followed instantly, maintaining the exact numbers her training dictated. They waltzed a tight, slow, uncomfortable dance; her front to his back. “28 minutes, ma’am,” the attendant answered, trying not to turn his head. “We’ve got clearance through all the pedestrian tolls, but Industry freight still takes priority at crossings. Usually jams up for a few minutes around Lower Industry, where the Material Docks are, but Middle is mostly factories and labs. Straight shot to the Penthouses from there.” “Half an hour,” she spat, and the man jumped at her tone. “What is this, the stone age? Albert, primary threat.” Albert sighed, but knew she’d only get worse if he didn’t play her game. “Primary objective: Diminished motor capacity, limited field of vision, three minute ETA to full Gas engagement. Assuming no incentive for Victoria to abandon contract,” she winced at the barb, and he tried to keep the satisfaction out of his tone, “threat priority goes to remaining variables, no matter how inconsequential.” “Primary threat, Albert,” she said coldly. “Lift Attendant,” he obliged.

“Hear that?” Victoria whispered viciously into the lump of scar tissue where the attendant’s left ear should’ve been, “we’re ready for you.” She might be more right than she knows, Albert thought. That scar tissue; an odd injury. Intentional selfmaiming? Could be a ‘Loon, though he doesn’t look old enough for the part. Still… there was some talk of resurgence in the movement. Albert stepped back two paces, into the optimal firearms grid. “Ma’am, please, there’s nothing more I can do! This lift runs on shared lines with both commuter and industrial platforms – no matter what your clearance is, we simply cannot take priority from Industry! It’s just not zoned! I promise you, the Chairman himself could not get to our destination any faster.” The attendant stepped forward a few inches, and Victoria quickly followed, silently grinning into the back of his neck. “Besides,” the operator continued, “you can never tell with the Gas. My cousin went under one time, and some Drillers popped the lock to his place, tried to roll him. He swears he was past the kick, already building himself a nice, cozy fire back in 20th century Montana. When he came to, he was holding three severed fingers. Drillers weren’t anywhere to be seen.” “Oh, watch out for the junkie, huh? Is that what you’re saying?” There was venom in her voice. “No, nothing like that,” the attendant sensed a trap, but couldn’t see the spring. “I use, myself. Daily, even. I like the Civil War. Hell, once a month I treat myself to some Presence and fight for the South. Everybody’s got their thing, right?” “See that pitiful, disgusting addict over there? The guy who, according to you, is just a sad sack of shit that we should stomp into the floor, just to be safe – do you know who he is?” “No, I-“ “That worthless junkie is our primary objective. Rated non-combat. Not to be harmed, under any circumstances. So he’s out of the equation, isn’t he? Do you know who that leaves as our primary threat?” “M-me…” The attendant stammered. “I’ve got six killing blows queued up right now, specifically for a man missing his left ear. Albert, what’s first in your queue?” He grimaced, but answered: “Metalstorm rounds, currently targeting the lower body. Intended amputation, but possibly non-lethal,” he said, trying to comfort the man, but it only seemed to distress him further.

Albert knit his brow, but held his tongue. The young ones they vetted through these days were so pointlessly aggressive. They always forgot that the single most important aspect of the training – the algorithms, the theorems, the categorizing, the grid defining, the threat-prioritizing – was to isolate and remove potential enemies before they had a chance to react. All the tough-guy talk and overt combat stances were essentially self-fulfilling prophecies. Threats would become threats, once you told them they were threats. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to admonish her. Schisms lowered effectiveness ratings, and despite how grating he found this particular Victoria, Hanover had the pair of them operating at a steady 94.6% all afternoon. Albert sought comfort in the numbers again. He ran the attendant’s stance through a close-quarters combat algorithm -- made each joint a focus; each long bone a directrix. The potential skirmish became a pre-mapped series of arcs. They were calming, even beautiful, in their own way. Though Albert knew, objectively, that each parabola terminated in the attendant’s potential dismemberment or death. “Who are we aaallll?” Byron droned, ragdolled in the corner of the large and spotless lift. The walls were a reflective blue metallic color. Some aesthetician or behavioral psychologist had doubtlessly decided the hue was soothing, or invoked patience. Just the thought of it sent Albert into a dim rage, the origins of which he could not quite place. He flicked his eyes to the upper left corner of his field of vision, bringing down his BioOS. He rotated the circle, highlighted the Relevant Persons wheel, and selected their secondary objective.

Redding Firth. Age: 36. Height: 5’10. Weight: 160 lbs. Occupation: N/A, partial embargo. Last Recorded Occupation: Targeted Marketing, Vid-ee-yo! Targeted Ad Insertion. Threat Vectors: N/A. Authorized Actions: Detainment, maiming, termination. BioOS: TWS Superpanda 176.017 [[ERROR: USER CANNOT BE FOUND ON REQUESTED GRID. POSSIBLE ILLEGALLY MODIFIED SYSTEM]] Current Position: Unknown. Last Known Position: North Post, 3306, Old Forthe Township, Auxiliary Freight Docks.

The black market lift that the secondary objective had taken wasn’t licensed, but the jumpy, darkskinned man with the uniform row of scars was more than happy to reveal its terminus in Middle Industry. Despite Victoria’s complaints, they should arrive not long after the secondary, even with his substantial headstart. In the corner, Albert heard Byron snicker and coo at something only he could see. In the corner, Byron played the hapless addict for everything it was worth. Holding onto reality was like tensing a muscle. Byron’s control waxed and waned, only to be snatched back again at the last possible moment. Through the swirling purple fog that reduced his field of vision to a narrow tunnel, he could see brilliant white flowers and tall grasses popping up, fuzzing out, and disappearing into the ether again. Two laughing women in elaborate Victorian dress skipped merrily along just out of reach, but Byron squeezed his teeth down into the soft flesh at the side of his tongue, and they dissolved back into mist. He had held out as long as he could, but inevitably, the Gas would take him. His vision would constrict into a tiny, muddled circle of velvet, and then the kick would come, and he would see his Lord again. He reviled himself for the pleasure he took in the prospect. Byron had learned three things while playing the fool, but it was a start: They were bringing him somewhere in the Penthouse levels. They only wanted Red; QC was not an objective. And they could not hurt Byron if they wanted to collect their fee. With their relative safety confirmed, he lapsed into a grateful drugged stupor.

Chapter Thirty-Three “I cannot fucking believe we just up and lost Byron,” QC kicked at nothing. Unsatisfied with the gesture, she turned and sent a foot into the ribs of a teenaged Neo-fascist with a bright red lump in the center of his forehead. He said nothing in response. QC glowered down at the back of his Mohawk, held two fingers up to the side of her eye, as if pinching something, and wiggled them around. She did that when she was upset sometimes. Red had asked her about it once, but she shrugged it off as a meaningless twitch; side-effects of some muscle-stim strain gone bad. Much later, substantially drunker and quite a bit more honest, she’d confessed that it was a remnant from her childhood. As a girl, she’d worn glasses. The concept was so backward that Red couldn’t help but laugh, which she silenced with a thrown shotglass. Her parents were ‘Loons, she’d gone on to explain in a voice thick with rotgut. They were part of a small but notorious cultural movement that peaked right along with the introduction of consumergrade nanotech. The ‘Loons opposed nano-tech, sometimes violently, and set up insular subcommunities with scanners at every entryway to keep the augmented out. They were called Redfingers back then, because the best way they knew to scan for nanotech, without actually using the stuff themselves, was via old fashioned blood test. The constant pricking eventually left their digits swollen and red. But there was too much seepage with a simple checkpoint system – there was so much nanotech, it was in the air itself -- so the Redfinger colonies eventually conglomerated into a single super-commune. They rigged up floating homes riveted to giant balloons, all slung together and moored to the outer shell of the West Post. Residents rich enough to afford a windowed apartment kicked up some fuss about the things ruining their view, but the ‘Loons argued that there was no ownership of the open air, and they were technically right: Their entire settlement contacted the Four Posts through one thick, woven braid of cables, plugged into the support structure of a modest two-bedroom apartment they all chipped in for, together. They were, at worst, a minor annoyance -- just a group of anachronistic throwbacks spoiling the skyline for some upper-middle class property owners. Until a series of bombings were tied back to one of their members. QC was out to market when security cut the central anchor. She watched as her parents helplessly floated away into the clear blue sky. Nobody had ever thought to put motors on the damn things. ‘Loons were forever after synonymous with unbelievable idiocy, especially if that stupidity cost you your own life.

“We have to go back for him!” QC continued, flicking the Neo-fascist in the back of the ear. A single, frustrated tear rolled down his cheek, but he stayed silent. “I’m sure he’s fine, love” James said placidly. “The fuck would you know? You didn’t even know his god damn name!” “True, but I know some other things: I know a lift port is a great place to get your hands on some bootleg Gas. And I know we were standing in line for a nice, long ride to god knows where when he disappeared. And I know your mate had some pretty dense looking fog creeping up in his eyes…” The stocky woman in front of James took a tiny, mincing step forward, and he followed suit. They’d been filing out of the elevator for the better part of ten minutes, but it was slow going. The massive accordion-gate was nearly as wide as the lift itself, but it was pressed up against a narrow maintenance tunnel – little more than a dark slit in the outer shell of the Post. “It’s better for him if he is dosing up somewhere,” Red added. The others stared at him. It was the first he’d spoken since they boarded. “He didn’t need to be here,” Red continued, “he’s got no stake in this, anyway. He was only ever looking for a fix. And he succeeded. His long and storied quest is at an end, and he lived highly ever after. Hurrah.” “He might be in some kind of trouble…” QC started as if to argue with Red, but merely trailed off. What could she say? He might be in trouble with the hired killers we didn’t tell you about, because we were going to sell you out to them to save our own asses? “What if he’s…? Bitch, we’re in trouble!” James spat, “What do you bloody think happens from here on out? Best case scenario, we meet up with our boyo’s pervert contact, and he rats us out for immunity. Then we spend a dime in an Industry prison-line, strapped into manufacturing webs by day, and passing the evenings in the company of large gentlemen with colorful one syllable names like Stab or Rape, where we’ll get buggered in the arse until we die from getting buggered in the arse too much.” “You horrible, foul man,” the rotund woman tried to swivel to face James for the admonishment, but the crowd was pressing them together too tightly. “Lady, when we finally get up to that extremely small exit, who do you think’s job it’s going to be to wedge your fat arse on in there? Think careful about all the places I can put my foot while doing that, yeah?” The woman opened her mouth to speak, but only managed a strangled squeak. Satisfied that he’d quieted her complaints, James turned back to QC. “Losing Billy-“ “Byron!” She snapped.

“- is probably the best thing that’s ever going to happen to the bloke. And honestly? What’s your bloody stake in this? From where I stand, you’ve got no reason to stay and a million very convincing ones to go.” “I don’t fucking run, for one” she said simply. I would also enjoy not being hosed down in god damn chemical fire, for two. “No, he’s right,” Red spoke. His tone was flat and weary, “what are you doing here? Why were you even down there in the Reservoir?” “I uh…I went looking for you at your sad fucking rathole – needed help with a scan -- and met up with that Byron kid. He offered me a lot of money to find your pasty ass,” QC lied, “guess he really needed that fix.” “So why are you sticking around?” “Just for the shits and giggles, I guess,” QC shrugged, “isn’t this what friends do?” The line advanced incrementally. James was foremost, QC behind him, then Red. Zippy had been separated and now kept a space in line a few paces back. She was babbling happily to a man that Red could not see, but knew, by virtue of his impeccable patience and distracted, monosyllabic replies, was probably staring at her tits. After untold frustrating minutes, they found themselves pressed against the outer shell of the Post, staring up at a three foot square of blackness, its bottom edge level with their chests. The stocky woman was first to enter. Before she did, James leaned forward and whispered something in her ear. She swung her arms wildly, as if to protest, but Sly, the captain, was already furiously packing her bulk into the cramped and darkened crevice. James stood patiently immobile, a friendly smile on his lips and amusement in his eyes, until Sly finally turned to him for assistance. “Who, me? Why, I’d be happy to oblige, sir,” James said, and stepped forward. The screech of bare skin sliding on steel was virtually indistinguishable from the squealing, but somehow, the woman struggled through, and disappeared into the black. James followed after, vindictively chuckling, then QC, sulking and quiet. Red peered up into a seemingly solid block of darkness. His skin went cold.

***

Red kept his eyes shut so tightly that dim orange stars misfired in the black oceans behind his eyelids, but it made no difference. The hallucinations came, just the same. Hands made of hot flesh and cold metal pawed, stroked and pulled at him. Whispers spoken in strangely accented, guttural languages flowed out from spaces that he knew – knew as a fact – were solid steel. A painful scream echoed and rebounded, as if from deep in a forest. A tiny hand grabbed his ankle, but whatever it was attached to did not have the strength to pull. Instead, Red felt its weight drag along with him. He crawled onto something soft and fleshy, and then moisture – a giant face, the tongue licking him licentiously. Zippy had closed the gap between them, through no doubt brutal means, and shoved at his rear. She started to quip something precocious, but lapsed into shocked silence when she had to wrestle Red back and away from the unseen things tearing at his tattered grey jacket. And then the light: The blinding, brilliant safety of beautiful light. Their group splintered off from the other passengers – mostly wary-eyed immigrants, just hoping to slip the security nets long enough to secure a work permit – and Red led them deeper into Middle Industry, in search of Luka. His feet moved independently of his body. He could not feel their contact with the ground. His thoughts were hollow shells that shattered as soon as they began to form. Red knew from experience that the trip from the lift terminus to Luka’s office was a good hour at a brisk pace, but he blinked and they were there. Luka’s workstation was directly beneath one of the four central filtration plants. The plants screened contaminants from an unceasing stream of cool water pumped up from the Reservoir and into Industry, where it was vaporized, condensed into clouds, and fell into the Reservoir again as rain. To maintain the dense tangle of tubes and filters, a vast labyrinth of metal-grated access-ways ran zigzag patterns below the plant. It was confusing on the best of days, but somehow Red’s auto-pilot had led them through the maze and into a fenced-off cube deep at the center of the knotted passages. Luka was a morbidly obese man in an era where being merely pudgy took non-stop effort. Metabolic boosters were so commonplace as to be unavoidable. Like pharmaceuticals at the turn of the millennium, so many people took the basic nanotech strains that some amount was inevitably flushed out through urine, or coughed into the air, where they inundated the populace before the ‘bots had time to go inert. There were filters in place, but most catwalk stalls didn’t have the funds to rent time on the good ones. You couldn’t help but catch a few second-hand doses from cheap drinks, boiled noodles, or a patch of stale air beneath a broken ventilator. To remain fat, despite everything, spoke of monstrous appetites, and Luka was not short on those. He bought batches of illicit Presence from Red every week. A few hours after delivery, without fail, Red’s inbox would beep, and there would be a long-winded, plaintive and shameful message from Luka, begging for libido-restrictors, various exotic poisons, or some new kind of beta-blocker that would help him get up the courage to turn himself in. Red would always go out of his way to deliver those requests promptly – even the poisons - but after a few days of silence, the order for Luka’s Gas would always come again.

The fat man did not bother to turn around when he heard them enter. He waved a hand in simultaneous greeting and direction, motioning them toward a large metal bench set into the wall beside the changing lockers. The workstation was built for a team of four men to monitor the plant on rotating shifts, but Luka did all of their jobs alone. He did nothing but work and dose up on the four-hour rest periods, when the feed was outsourced to another station. He was seated before a featureless, glossy semicircle, rippling with projected graphs, spiking lines, flashing beacons and scrolling alerts. Judging by the flurry of activity on the screen, Luka was executing a particularly harrowing series of adjustments. When he was done, the screens all blipped off as one, leaving him staring at an empty white bowl, six feet in diameter. Luka finally spun in his chair and assessed them with tiny, bored eyes. “Red,” he said, without intonation. “Luka.” “You brought friends.” “Don’t worry. They’re all criminals.” “I see. So what do you need scanned? New beta? You finally got smart and turned runner?” “Maybe, depends on what we turn on up on the scan though, doesn’t it?” Red forced a smile. He knew Luka liked to think of them as something like friends, or at least comrades in mutual addiction. The thought of it brought bile bubbling up into Red’s throat. Red knew what Luka was, though they were both careful never to speak the words. People like Luka preferred the term ‘metasexuals,’ though most everybody just called them what they were: Self-molesters. Luka used Presence to flip back into his own chronological history – an illegal enough act on its own– and revisit his childhood. Seven years and two months old. Always the same night. He hid in his own closet, until his mother turned out the lights, and then… Like most self-molesters, Luka would protest the revulsion: Who was he hurting by doing this? It’s no different than masturbation. He gives his consent now, and that’s the same as consent then, no matter how much his younger self might struggle. Besides, it’s only a controlled hallucination anyway. The rhetoric went on and on. They filled entire boards with new justifications for their proclivities, but come week’s end, another request for chemical castration would always ping Red’s mailbox. Red had facilitated more than his share of morally questionable Gas trips: He beta tested for a few safari mixes -- organized hunts to track down and murder great figures throughout history; he pirated copyrighted strains of countless historic orgies, both consensual and otherwise, for resale on the black market; he’d even built a few custom killing sprees through the Four Posts (breaking both morality and chronology standards in the process). But it was mixing Luka’s Presence that always reminded Red how dirty his hands really were. Luka waved a thick, soft wrist at the felt-covered worktable beside him. Red shuffled up to it, and waited. Luka’s eyes went slack, inputting commands into his BioOS, and a thin film began to form atop

the black-sueded slab. It deepened by a fraction of inch, and then another. Slowly, it took on the form of a thick-shafted needle, six inches from hilt to tip. At one end was a rough sort of handle, though no care had gone into programming the shape of it. It was a formless, colorless, textureless cylinder of plastic, spat out by the 3D printer in response to a hasty set of barebones schematics. “The coccyx, through the cheek,” Luka said, “most painless way to guarantee simultaneous fat, blood, muscle and bone samples.” Red sucked in a preparatory breath, thought better of it, and decided to force the act before he had time to consider all the implications. He swung the needle down in a hard arc, plunging through his trousers and sideways, cleaving through the fat and meat of his buttock until he hit bone. He withdrew the needle instantly and threw it back down on top of the printer. Then he allowed himself to scream. The felted surface was already digesting the syringe: Recycling the elements and shuttling the sample tissue off for analysis. Luka spun around to face his workstation, leaned down to dig through a box beneath his console, and came up with a small grey cylinder, about the size of a fingernail. It wobbled slightly at his touch. A portable drive -- unfathomably high-capacity by the looks of it. Ordinarily, Red would assume storage that size was some kind of extensive media archive, but he’d seen it used before, and knew it was just one of Luka’s personal Operating Systems. Most users had the interface and hardware built together into the lower edge of the eyelid, the average setup being about the size of a pinhead. Luka, on the other hand, swapped in different external drives on the fly. He needed a lot of storage, to record all of his twisted Presence trips. The idea horrified Red - that a person’s entire BioOS could be lost, or crushed, or stolen. It would be like losing a part of your soul. Luka slotted the drive into a port cut in the meat of his palm, and his workstation flickered into life. The inner control circle was cluttered with old widgets, themeless icons, and the faintly glowing pathlines of Luka’s most commonly used shortcuts. His background was a chubby little boy with a familiar face. Red looked into his tiny little eyes, too small for the round head, and felt violently ill. Thankfully, a diagnostic screen snapped up and hid the child from view. “Jesus, Red, you’re practically virginal! Except for, what is this,” Luka pointed to a vaguely cherubic nano-bot with two thick, webbed fins and goggle eyes, “a Vid-ee-yo! relay unit? Are you kidding me, man? They went out of business like, three years ago!” The display began to flash briefly, and at Luka’s command, a new window slid over the viewer. “Got it,” Luka scanned the readout, “Looks like a pretty standard strain of Presence. Pacific Northwest, I’d wager.” “Yeah, just your standard non-title bout,” Red confirmed, “18th century. That one with the little Indian girl and the old security robot.”

“18th century? Nah, there’s no time-stamp on this one. Looks like that section degraded. There’s only a location now,” Luka highlighted a string of purple and black, “And see here: This polymer chain? I have no idea what that is. Maybe a binding agent? If it is, it’s not a very good one. Look, it’s only bonding to like chains. But what’s the point of that? Why would Gas collect Gas? This is weird, man. What was the beta supposed to do?” “Just a trip extender. Didn’t even work,” Red said, momentarily forgetting his physical aversion and peering over Luka’s shoulder to watch the realtime analysis. Luka breathed a little heavier, unaccustomed to having another human being in his personal space. “Why would…?” Red started, but he’d already seen the answer for himself. “Are they stacking for prolonged effect?” Luka finished for him, “That’s retarded. That wouldn’t even work. What were they trying to do here?” “It’s not degrading,” Red noted, and a creeping tingle shot up his spine. “Holy shit,” Luka panted, “holy shit. He’s right. It’s almost stable.” “Fucking bullshit,” QC came forward to check for herself, “if that crap was in Red, he’d be passed out right now, tripping balls with a bunch of savages.” “No, like I said: The timestamp is gone. If anything, it would default to modern day – but you can’t do that with Gas. It’s…I don’t understand it, but look: It changes right here,” Luka rewound through the readout and slid a greasy finger up to point at something like a branching tree, collapsing. “It kind of falls apart, but it keeps absorbing other chains, trying to rebuild itself.” “Look, guys, I build my own mixes, too. But I mostly just stuff methamphetamines into other methamphetamines. You’re talking out of my motherfucking paygrade here,” QC said, turning away from the display. “This beta, whatever it is, it doesn’t have a half-life,” Luka supplied, not moving his eyes from the bonding chains, “or it does, but it keeps rebuilding whatever degrades. There has to be some nanotech here; no way is this purely chemical. No way. What the hell did you take, man?” “If you don’t stop nerding out and explain something, I’m going to twist your balls around like a balloon animal,” QC said impatiently. “Any Gas Red takes in -- even miniscule amounts, just the stuff floating around in the air – this stuff uses to rebuild its own dosage, until it reaches critical mass. It gets all used up, and immediately starts rebuilding again.” “What happens then, mister?!” Zippy squeaked. She’d snuck up beside Luka’s chair, and was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him, staring eagerly up at the screen. The fat man spasmed and shut down, overloaded by the girl’s presence.

“Then I go for another trip,” Red answered, “over and over. Forever.” James whistled appreciatively. “That’s why you’re being such a flaming drama queen? So shitting what? You’ve got an everlasting fucking gobstopper. Am I right? It’s free hallucinations for life. Pretty much the only thing you ever wanted,” QC said. She flopped onto the workbench across the room, and spat idly onto the floor. A wisp of smoke curled upward as the saliva ate through the protective veneer. “It degrades a little less each time,” Red answered, “It has to rebuild a little less. The time between trips just gets shorter and shorter until…” “Until there’s no downtime at all,” Luka managed to choke out a whisper, “just a permanent trip to whenever Red’s been going.” He reached out a shaking finger to gently stroke Zippy’s Hair. She broke it.

Chapter Thirty-Four They left Luka alone to sob in hysterical pain. Red was beyond caring if he reported them for the assault, but he doubted somebody with that much incriminating metasexual media would be calling Security on his own drug dealer, anyway. Red spoke in precise bursts: “Not fast enough. Exact cloning. Yes, from the degraded sample I posted. No, no partial fee. No, no partial work. Yes, the contract is for five minutes. Not at all. Non-negotiable.” The avatar on the other end of the vid-feed made a motion that Red assumed, from context, was supposed to be obscene, but the user had chosen a disposable free trial persona for this interaction. It had flippers instead of hands – less detail to render – and the cartoon penguin’s head did not map to the user’s facial features. Its expression remained blankly pleasant, right up until the feed abruptly cut off. Red thought sideways, and his control circle rotated on its axis. The next feed in his queue was already running -- another trial persona. This one, a bright blue hippopotamus in a neatly pressed white suit: Horatio Hippo, Attorney at Law. Free trials were the easiest personas to acquire and the hardest to trace, and were therefore ubiquitous on Contra.Act servers. Red could never mentally reconcile the act of contracting high-end tech crime from a bunch of boisterous children’s cartoons. Red executed a string of commands so swiftly that the transition animations never got a chance to play out: Slides blinked into existence only to be immediately covered by other windows, feeds, tickers, accounts, and user profiles, which were, in turn, altered, queued up, then closed themselves, and replaced by others. In his funds buffer, Red deposited every remaining credit that the mysterious contact had issued him. And then, just to be safe, he pulled every credit he’d reserved for pending Rx releases: Two thousand units of Bixerol, a standing order to purchase any and all mescaline (should it inexplicably come available), several liens on the up and coming nootropics labs in the South Post Chinese sector – all cancelled. He funneled the money into the blinking transaction buffer, its action queue still blank. He drained his savings, pawned his garden hours, emptied his vitamin bank, and even hocked his apartment for a fraction of its worth. The number that stared unblinkingly back at him was ludicrously large, and it still seemed woefully inadequate. But Contra.Actors were accustomed to doing quick jobs for modest fees. An offer of the magnitude Red just posted was bound to receive some attention, even if what he was asking in return was unreasonable. Red could tell by the avatars who was serious, and who was just trolling: He instantly closed every trial persona from that point on. Likewise, he denied contact with any meme references, and disconnected from an uncountable number of crudely modeled penises. After a few minutes – a lifetime by Contra.Act standards – one gave him pause. The avatar was an empty sky of ozone blue, save for a dancing squiggle

across the bottom. It was suggestive of mountains, somehow, in the most pure and abstract sense. It was the varying weight of the lines, he decided, they were downright artistic. He focused on it, and it expanded. Red became dimly aware of something moving in the distant sky: A tiny round speck, but something about its shape in relation to the mountain-line suggested immensity and power. Slowly, it expanded outward, growing in both depth and complexity. An intricate blueprint of intersecting lines circled Red predatorily, its outline the shape of an immense bird. Red vaguely recognized the schematics: It was a cross-section of the Four Posts’ Waste District. The oval of the central drain doubled as the raptor’s eye, the element recycling dump was its belly, and a wide, snaking tunnel formed its crooked neck. Its voice was jagged and jarring: A compilation of the tones produced by a thousand different engines under various states of load. “You’re fucked in the head,” it said. “Bye now,” Red replied, but the bird flapped suddenly, and the movement transfixed him. The crosssection didn’t actually move, it simply expanded and contracted with the motion of beating wings – the blueprints swept upward past the Wastes into the old garden pads, and down into the large, empty rectangles of the airship hangars. “Hey, I didn’t say I couldn’t do it,” the voice-construct protested, with a sound like the crashing of a metal wave, “I’m just making sure you know about the relative fuckedness of your head for even asking.” “I have been made aware,” Red answered, “Funds are in the buffer. Can you make the deadline?” “God, you really have no idea how good I am,” the bird spoke, and folded in upon itself. The whole image reduced in area, until it finally showed only the pitted circlet of the central drain again. The speck he’d first seen. It settled back into the abstract sky, just above the mountainous squiggle. Red minimized the BioOS to a single blinking dot in his periphery, and began the long and cautious process of uncrossing his stiff legs. He took QC’s proffered hand, but before she could pull him to his feet, another soft chime emanated inside his ears. Incoming feed. He crumpled back to the floor, to the dramatic exasperation of QC, who threw up her hands and stomped down the access corridor in a huff. Red pulled his BioOS down, and the feed resolved: Plain text against a moving background of electronic static. There were three lines: An address, an authentication passcode, and a single request: “Immediately.” His mysterious contact again? The address wasn’t a format that Red recognized. He pushed forward with his thoughts, and his control circle expanded out, revealing his tools radius. Red panned over to Mapworks, and the autofill pulled forward the last address he’d seen. A dense patina of overlapping grids flew upwards from his relative position. Mapworks sent a dancing yellow line through a series of jack-knifes (the access corridors), until they hit an elevator, at which point they ran straight upward to a gargantuan, neatly segmented cube –

probably a corporate worker’s township. The path underwent a short series of right-angled turns through the tightly regimented neighborhood, then intersected another lift, and shot straight upward until it disappeared into the open air. Whatever the address pointed to, consumer-grade Mapworks wasn’t licensed to display it; a fact that implied worryingly obscene amounts of money. Red minimized his BioOS, stood painfully, and turned to the others. Zippy bounced excitedly. James slouched, his arms slack. “Got an address. It’s in the Penthouses...somewhere. I can’t see where, exactly. It’s pretty high up,” Red explained. “How high is it?” Zippy asked, like the setup to a joke. “Past the sky levels. Maybe even the roof.” James stood a little straighter. No one else moved. “Fuck your girlish asshole!” QC’s awestruck outburst broke the silence. She stuck her head around the corner of the hallway, obviously sick of eavesdropping. Another chime, and Red numbly brought forward his BioOS: On the left side of the control circle, the Contra.Act information buffer verified that his requested actions were queued up and ready to execute. On the right side of the circle, his own funds pulsed softly in the finance buffer. Red confirmed the transaction, and the circle flipped -- the actions and funds switching sides. Red scanned through the data, then rented a few minutes on a cheap, anonymous AI for verification of the code. It confirmed the data with a throaty cry of “GOOD TIMES!” accompanied by an endlessly cycling image of a kitten’s face breaking out into a smile. Red signaled Mapworks to overlay the path on his visual field, and the program slipped three different options for elevators into the edges of his vision, asking if he’d like to purchase or input an Authorized Passcode to unlock one. He brought up this last read message, and the contact’s code slid over automatically. All three options instantly blinked from red to blue, indicating he’d been approved for use. Then, one by one, each turned gold. A high priority override. The Auth Pass automatically commandeered every elevator near his level, each car dumping their other passengers immediately and sprinting down to meet him, on the off chance that he might need one. The pathline jumped and twisted, a dozen more ghostly compass lines stretching out down every conceivable direction. Nothing but options, everywhere he looked. Red picked one at random, and walked. He did not check to see if the others followed. His plan was stupid. It was risky, and hasty, and maybe even evil. But it was the only one he had. Amongst his few sparse virtues, forethought and caution did not number. Red’s thoughts, which should have been firing like an electrical storm, seizing onto any desperate, hopeful scrap of an alternative,

were instead pure, still and serene. His only intention -- a soft and throbbing thing, endlessly repeating like a snippet of pop-song through the muddy, indistinct static of his forebrain – was righteous malevolence. And then he heard the strangest sound. Red stopped, and moved his head in the direction of each of the five access corridors surrounding him until he placed the source. It was coming from a passage just behind him, and to his right. He took a step backward, and peered down the hallway. A distinct, metallic ringing was echoing rhythmically against the backdrop of the persistent, dull thrum of the filtration pumps. Footsteps. A gangly woman in an elaborate gold and blue suit rounded the far corner and advanced purposefully towards him. There was something off with her features; something uncannily familiar, but all wrong. She seemed to have QC’s lips, a shock of James’ bright red hair, and part of Zippy’s large, curving nose. To his horror, Red recognized his own eyes staring back at him. Then her whole head blinked, and became an opaque, pixelated grid. Red turned to run.

Chapter Thirty-Five Victoria carefully modulated her pace -- kept it nice, steady, and even. She felt the nervous energy build up in her limbs, and let the agitation scratch at her joints. She breathed deep from the diaphragm, touched the tips of each finger together to sync her hand/eye coordination, and focused on the measured timing of her own footfalls. It took a constant, low-grade effort, limiting each stride to sync up with Albert’s like this, but it must be worse for him: Forcing every pace just a few inches beyond the comfort zone of his stubby little legs. The vibrations at the base of her neck told her that the adrenaline boosters were starting to kick on. 3 paces per second @ 30 paces distance to primary threat = ~10 second ETA to optimal engagement grid. Shit. Still two steps ahead of Albert, with all threats already seeing past her scramblers. Using them was a bad call on Hanover’s part and she knew it: Not enough people in here for the facial recognition software to pull a convincing average, but the overall combat stats still favored deployment, so she used it anyway. All right, don’t panic. Back to the code: Categorize, analyze, dismiss or neutralize. Identify primary threats: Two Caucasian males, one Arabic female, in grids 43-04C to 46-07C. The skinny guy in front (secondary objective, she recognized) was just standing there stupidly, giving her a cockeyed, inquisitive puppy stare -- but the two behind him were already moving, shoving him back and whispering hushed orders. Twenty-four paces. Eight seconds. Breathe out. She hated syncing, even with a partner closer to her measurements, but she and Albert weren’t insured for engagement with an effectiveness rating of less than 97% today. Syncing pushed them up to a staggering 99.65. Sometimes, Victoria just did not understand the index. She had no respect for this particular Albert: He was all numbers and no balls. No creativity and no flair. And yet Hanover had never put her rating higher. She had no choice; she had to trust the algorithms. The algorithms did not fail. She would engage in two seconds, and if Albert kept to his sync, he would round the corner just in time to take the threats from behind right at their highest rate of panic and distraction. Only a few more paces, and she would enter the mid-range combat grid. Breathe in, three paces, breathe out, two paces. Check the ER: 99.70. Can’t ask for better. Engage. She reached into her jacket and smoothly withdrew an obscenely large, gleaming silver handcannon. The numbers in her display flashed red and dipped as Hanover scanned the non-regulation firearm, but only to 99.55 -- well within operating parameters.

She leveled the pistol down the narrow corridor. The secondary didn’t react, save for a comical widening of the eyes, but the other two immediately turned sideways, dropped into a half-crouch and held their jackets up before their torsos, concealing the exact positions of the vital organs. Her targeting software went haywire, trying to compensate. Not bad. If it had been Albert on point, the move might’ve helped them, but Victoria hadn’t used aim assistance for years. Shit didn’t even work with the unauthorized replica Colt. She aimed down the antique iron sights and pulled the trigger. Victoria felt the concussion of the shot and the resonance of the recoil, but didn’t hear the sound. She was just as deafened by the noise in the confined space as the targets -- almost certainly moreso, in fact -- but she was psychologically prepared for it. The threats were not: They all flinched, and briefly broke formation, though the red-headed fellow and the one-legged Arabic girl recovered much faster than she expected. Her ER blipped back up to 99.60. Four seconds; Albert should be flanking at any moment. A large hole was blown clear through the girl’s jacket, but Victoria couldn’t tell if she’d been hit or not. She swiveled the barrel of the Colt down and left, and fired again. The two shifted with the gun this time, ready for the blast, and she could tell immediately that her shot went wide. Shit. Wait. New threat priority: Caucasian female, blonde, no visible weapons, multiple nanotech control panels, lightly muscled, 5’2, 120 lbs. The tertiary objective, Victoria realized, the ‘Loon girl, QC. She must have been hiding around the corner. The little blonde ducked swiftly out into the hallway and made as if to throw something upward. A spray of blood spattered from her apparently wounded palm, and struck a bare industrial LED panel. The whole grid went dark. Victoria blinked, and glanced down to Hanover, but saw only a luminous circle with a slash through it under Recommended Actions. Damn it. She was never very good at the Guerilla Theorems. Victoria swiveled the cannon up toward what she assumed to be the now-fleeing threats, but there came a sound like a metal spring engaging, and the Arabic woman exploded out of the darkness. She closed the distance instantly with two rapid, loping bounds of the prosthetic and two quick, uncertain stumbles from the normal limb. Like skipping.

***

Albert was winded. He had no excuse to be winded. Not this soon. Albert religiously followed all of the strict stamina maintenance schedules laid out for his weight, frame and age – and yet here he was: Panting, red-faced, struggling to drag the giggling Gashead along behind him. His circuitous route through the filtration tunnels was 6,220 modified paces. If Victoria kept to the agreed-upon synchronicity, he would be running thirty-three seconds late. Wildly unacceptable. Albert skidded to a stop, dropped to one knee, and laid the primary objective on his side in a valve control alcove. He took a single deep, steadying breath, straightened his jacket, and broke into a dead sprint. Albert re-measured his pace: 130% the synced stride. Stopping and discarding the primary had taken eleven seconds. He should be able to make up the time difference with 101 seconds of sprint. God, his lungs burned. It wasn’t fair. They had no right to be so ineffective. He kept to the schedules! Every four and a half hours of off-time, like clockwork, he ran through the 30-minute intensive callisthenic drills. Even his sleep wasn’t safe from that shrill alarm in his BioOS, with its flashing yellow lights. Without fail, he would awaken to his heart hammering in his chest, to the thickness in his limbs, and the panic his throat. Without fail, Albert would push it away, and dutifully, sleepily drop into the first form. There was no excuse for this. Some sloppy mathematician somewhere had failed to factor a variable and rendered his entire stamina schedule ineffective. The thought infuriated him, and though he knew it was self-destructive, the anger only made him push harder. What use was all of it, if you still just got old? Respirocytes were supposed to be super-oxygenating his blood; augmented cellular repair was supposed to triple the effectiveness of his workouts; reserve nutrient packs were supposed to be providing emergency fuel for his body, but when it came right down to it -- when it was all out there on the line – Albert was still just a stocky, out of shape old man. And Hanover knew it. How could it not? The damn thing was sending him a message. Making him run numbers for yet another lean, vicious, beautiful young punk whose only priority is making him look bad and teasing him with her tigAlbert ran flat out into the little blonde girl. She rolled backwards with the impact, and his feet got tripped up in her tumbling form, landing the pair of them in a tangled heap at the feet of a redheaded, bookish-looking fellow in a comically anachronistic tweed sportcoat.

The small man was already moving, even as Albert fell. The rumbling sickness of dismay seized Albert’s belly, as he recognized the man’s fluid movements for those of a trained fighter. For his part, Albert managed to roll with the impact some -- his own muscle-memories kicking in a little late, but better than never. He locked his forearms in front of his neck and face, just as something hard and sharp struck his wrist. Albert swung his legs up to kick out, buy some distance, and gain enough inertia to roll to a stand. He hit something soft, and felt his opponent stagger. Albert was already swinging his legs back down from the blow, using the momentum to spring to his feet. As soon as he was upright, he started into another sprint, trying to open up enough distance to pull his woven pistol, but something was pushing on the back of his knee, and he was going down again. Just before he hit the ground, the small man jerked Albert’s head swiftly to the side, redirecting him into the wall. Albert felt most of his face break. But he recognized the move: That rapid-fire grappling style they used down in the ‘Wells. Mostly about redirecting momentum as force, and using obstacles to strike instead of the fists and feet. They could always count on walls close at hand, down there in the ‘Wells. It was a brutally effective martial art, but there was hope: This corridor was narrow, but still wider than the ones his opponent was likely accustomed to. Instead of struggling to stand, as the attacker would be expecting, Albert went limp, fell to his side and struck backward with his fist. Just as he’d expected, the small man’s knee crashed against the wall, right where Albert’s neck would have been if he’d tried to gain his feet. But Albert’s own strike went low, and he hit only open air. He felt a sudden twinge of embarrassment at the awkward miss, but quickly stored it away, knowing that if he survived this, he’d have plenty of time to dwell on the shame later. Albert would double up his close combat training for a week, afterward. Maybe two. Three. Jesus, forever, if he just got out of this alive.

***

The eye was lost. The Arabic girl had gone right for it, as she came bouncing out of the shadows on that prosthetic leg. Victoria managed to get one hand up to block, but her other still held the Colt, and the weight of it slowed her too much to save the other eye. She felt the woman’s thumb part her eyelids and sink straight into the jelly there with practiced precision. But even with only one good eye, she could see that her shot had connected, and the one-legged woman’s strength was swiftly ebbing out of a wet and ragged hole in her abdomen. The pair of them fought in silence. The other threats had fled while the woman covered their retreat, leaving Victoria alone against an unarmed opponent. Her numbers briefly spiked, but promptly dipped again into the low 70s as soon as she lost the eye. Victoria vaguely recognized the corridor-grappling style, but it wasn’t uniform – spiked randomly with conventional boxing, some fencing and the occasional elaborate flying kick. It was

impossible to predict, and hard to counter. The primary threat made a few good contacts with that prosthetic leg of hers, and now Victoria was favoring her own – almost certainly fractured. Victoria was stronger than the primary, and maybe even faster, but she was having trouble adjusting to the trauma and reduced visual field. Every strike was just short, or too long, and the vicious bitch kept circling to her sightless side. Victoria parried a pointed claw strike toward her throat, and shoved a retaliatory elbow into the woman’s ribs. But in the process, she’d lost track of the prosthetic again, and now felt it press up between her knees. She was falling. The woman was on her immediately, using the momentum of the fall to augment her own blow, and Victoria felt her solar plexus collapse. She fought back the sudden chromatic explosions crowding the edges of her vision, and lashed out blindly, landing a solid headbutt right on the bridge of the woman’s ample nose. They scrambled backward from one another, each struggling to regain their footing. Victoria felt a belt of blood ooze out from the ruined hole in her face, run down her cheek, and trace the path of her jawline before utterly ruining her frilly lace ascot. The one-legged girl was bent almost double, trying to hold her own guts closed as best she could. They stared grimly at one other. She saw it in the Arabic woman’s eyes, and knew it was written in hers: They were both ready to die here. Their blood dripped silent and slick through the grating below. “You play rough and I’m telling!” The woman squealed.

***

The pixie-cut blonde and the skinny one in the leather jacket, whom Albert placed now as the secondary and tertiary objectives, didn’t hesitate for an instant when he and Tweed Overcoat started fighting. The two of them turned and sprinted down the access shaft as fast as they could, immediately disappearing around the nearest switchback. The training was keeping Albert alive, but just barely. Tweed Overcoat was younger, stronger, and had some crude but massively effective training of his own. He managed to use the width of the corridors to take some of the effectiveness out of Tweed Overcoat’s grapples, but regardless, Albert’s hand, elbow, and ankle were all clearly, painfully broken. He had landed two good shots of his own, and Tweed Overcoat was bleeding from the nose and favoring his knee, but the small man would recover quickly enough, while Albert could barely stand. Tweed Overcoat feigned high and ducked low, caught Albert behind the leg, then shot upward, flipping his head painfully into the wall behind him. If Albert had been a foot closer to that wall, the impact might have snapped his neck, but his opponent’s depth was off, and so the crash merely sent searing pain crackling down his spine and shattered his two front teeth. He countered Tweed Overcoat’s clumsy follow-up and boxed him on the ears, causing him to pull back in shock. Albert dragged himself to his knees, and tried to line up a tackle. In the upper left corner of his vision, a bright yellow light flashed, and a pair of shrill bells sounded in each ear. An alert scrolled across his field of vision in the thin, angular font of Hanover: “2:30AM: 1.1 – Early Morning Calisthenics.”

Albert laughed, broken. He felt the strength go out of his legs, and let himself sag against the cool metal hall. He gestured after the blonde and the skinny fellow. “Fuck it,” Albert said, “just go.” “Wh-you pulling my leg, mate?” Tweed Overcoat stood straighter, warily relaxing his stance, just slightly. “I don’t have time for this. I’ve got to do my calisthenics,” Albert answered glumly. “Ha!” Tweed overcoat guffawed, “I broke your bloody brain! Always wanted to do that to somebody.” “It’s not fair. How are we supposed to ‘Categorize, analyze, dismiss or neutralize,’ if they can’t even properly formulate a simple workout schedule? It’s shoddy math, is what it is. People just don’t take pride in their jobs anymore.” Tweed Overcoat shot him a disbelieving look, but was already turning and sprinting back toward Victoria. “Your friends went the other way!” Albert called after him, but if he heard, it did not slow him. Albert let his body slide painfully to the floor. He flicked his eyes upward and to the side, dismissing the alarm. His credit account opened instantly, registering the non-compliance fine from Hanover. He closed that as well. Albert opened his control circle, highlighted the compose message box, and focused on Victoria’s avatar. It expanded. The input window blinked eagerly. “Victoria,” he thought, and the words resolved almost before he finished thinking them:

I kind of want to fuck you, but you’re just such a bitch. Xoxoxo, -Ralph.

He hit send, revolved the circle over to his media browser, and watched cartoons.

Chapter Thirty-Six Gutshot. Sera tried twisting right before the trigger-pull, like she’d practiced a thousand times, but if the bitch in the suit showed a tell before firing, Sera couldn’t spot it. She ran over the fight again, and could find no fault: She had moved the second the blonde slashed her palm open and sprayed the lights with that shit in her blood. Sera had pushed off strong, felt the Bounder flex downward, and hit a perfect approach line, spinning sideways at the apex of each bounce to make center mass as small as possible. But it didn’t matter. The damage was already done by then. She had felt the faint slap and the long, slow burn somewhere on her back right after the first shot; felt her limbs get a little bit heavier, second by second. If there was a better time to act, she hadn’t seen it, and if there was a better move she could’ve made, she didn’t know it. You do the best you can, and that’s all you can do. After that, all that’s left is to die laughing. But James had that little ‘x’ between his eyebrows that said he was worried. “Zip,” he started, but had nothing to finish with. God, fine. “Got a owie,” she said, and slapped his hand away. She stood and even managed to walk a few steps, but her knees were shaking, and she knew she wouldn’t make it far. “Drop it, Sera. Not a soul around.” “Red and the blonde get away?” Sera unclenched her throat and let her natural voice came rattling out. “Think so. There was another Gentleman, the Albert, caught up to us in the hall. I punched his bloody mind out.” James fell into lockstep beside her. “Bitch threw me, baby,” Sera waved a dismissive wrist, “I saw that suit, and I assumed A-Gent hardware. You know: Those little bullshit woven pistols they got. I figured phosphorous or explosive rounds, maybe, but smaller projectile mass. Darts. Then she pulls out that ancient fucking hand cannon. And it’s like, shit, where do you go? Bullets were the size of my fist.” “You got her though, yeah?” “Tried. Took an eye and got some quality breaks in, but she said some crap about ratings and took off on me. Couldn’t follow.”

Her muscles felt dull and unresponsive. She tried to keep moving, but felt herself drifting downward with every step. “Jesus, Sera…” “This is good though, you know? Always thought I’d bleed out to some ‘Well-rat with a shiv, or maybe the Penthouses would send in a ‘bot-strain for us when they finally wanted the real estate back. Did you see that pistol she had? That was class. It was beautiful, loud, and cruel. If I gotta get got, at least I got got by something pretty.” “Oh, bollocks to that,” James snapped. He looped her arm over his shoulders and pushed onward. “Both of us have taken worse than this and still gone out drinking.” “Ain’t the hurt, it’s the time. Unless you got some medic friends squatting in this plant, we’re the fuck up and gone in Middle Industry without a work permit.” She motioned around to the narrow, empty corridor, surrounded on all sides by more narrow, empty corridors. “Blood loss is blood loss,” she finished. Her prosthetic slipped through a thin slot in floor, where two pre-fabricated sections of hallway were shoddily bolted together, and she stumbled. James caught her weight and laid her down easy. “I said bollocks,” James smiled, and Sera caught the rhythmic twitching eye movements that signaled BioOS access. “Useless. You know it. Don’t be a punk. Don’t let me go out with you spraying fucking punkness all over me.” Her tone was harsh, but she touched his neck while she spoke, and his eyes blurred back into focus. He watched Sera in silence for a moment. Then slumped down across from her, and pulled her feet into his lap. “Yeah. You’re done. Even if I knew a medic up here, I’m still bloody lost. Never bought the Mapworks license for Middle Industry – why the hell would I ever need that, right?” “You’re gonna kill this bitch for me, of course.” “Of course.” “You take that cannon when you’re done. That shit is way too badass for some uptight accountant cunt. She fought like a god damn math problem; every time she threw a punch I could see her tryin’ to carry the 1.” James started to laugh, then lapsed into abrupt, bitter silence. He thought better of it, and laughed again. “What am I going to do without you, Zip?” He finally asked.

“Kill a bitch, steal a gun, get back home and have yourself a drink or twenty, then secure the borders. Same as always.” “Well, I’ll tell you right now: I’m not waiting on that drink,” he said, and reached into his pocket. James withdrew and unscrewed a small green bottle. “This was way too fine a vintage for that bloody boatman savage, anyway.” She smiled at him and took the flask. The liquor was soft, brown and warm. Her gut went numb for a second, but bloomed back into agony quick enough. “Tell me true now…” James took the bottle back and downed a shot of his own. “Sure,” She answered. Her legs had been tingling painfully when James first laid her out on the diamond-mesh grate, but they weren’t anymore. They felt like dead weight; like rags that been tied to her. “Are you scared, Zip? Every time I think about the ending, I’m so bloody sure that I’m ready for it. But I’ve always wondered if it’d be different, when the time actually comes. Is it?” “Yeah,” she admitted. Sera felt a sort of fullness behind her eyes, but fought back the surge of tears. She felt the impulse move away and start to dissipate, but then James leaned forward to kiss her softly, and when he sat back, she found his form had gone blurry around the edges. “Let me hear it,” she said. Her mouth felt disconnected. Like her voice was coming from a speaker somewhere above and behind her. “What?” “You know what.” “Zip. No. That can’t be the last thing you hear.” “I can’t think of anything better,” she said, and she hoped she was smiling at him. “I bloody love you, Sera,” James said simply, in a voice high and cracking, like a pubescent chipmunk. She died laughing.

***

James filled his chest with air that had suddenly gone stale. He drew a hand across Sera’s lips, then gently moved her feet from his lap and set them aside. He stood, carefully tucked the emerald bottle into her hands, and moved briskly away, retracing his steps. There was nothing in him. No thoughts, no plans, no rage; just a dim sense of purpose and a frantic energy collecting in his fingertips. He felt like his hands could pass through walls. Like the steel would melt as wax beneath his touch. He kept them balled into fists. He kept the energy for himself. He kept walking. He came upon the bloody intersection where he’d fought with the older A-Gent. But the man was gone now. Well, he’d had to come from somewhere, didn’t he? It was a three way crossroads: One path led back to Sera, one led off in the direction Red and the blonde had fled, and the other… A vivid tableau of Zippy blinked on in his head. Her blood spilling out across the grating, down into the sluice below, and flowing away, into the filtration plants. They would suck it dry, pull everything that was her out of it, and piss it down as filthy rain on the floors below. A quick surge of madness arced up his arms, trying to form a circuit to his brain, and he knew that if he let it close, he would become a howling, sobbing mess of grief. And grief does not put bullets into heads. James swallowed hard, found the emptiness again, and kept moving. He retraced the Albert’s path down a long, straight corridor, each side lined with a series of staggered alcoves. In a few of them were strobing terminal screens, blinking requests for authorization codes, and complex, scrolling graphics -but most lay dormant. Blank, black spaces that swept past and blurred together as he strode purposefully down the accessway. And then he stopped. He took two steps back and peered into an unremarkable little cube, dimly light by the soft green of some enigmatic filtration chart. Byron waved sheepishly from the floor. He was barefoot. His shirt was untucked and hiked up above one arm. A column of dried drool flaked off of his cheek. His eyes were shot through almost entirely with rolling velvet clouds. If he was out of the trip, it was only just. “James?” He asked uncertainly. “Yes, Byron.”

“What’s happening?” He hefted his slight frame up onto his elbows, and swiveled his head with the dreamy slowness of the stoned. “A-Gents. They killed Se-“ he started, but caught himself. “They killed Zippy. Red and the other one are gone.” “QC,” Byron supplied. “If you’ll excuse me, Byron, I’ve got to find me a gangly bitch and then I am going to kill her for a very long time,” James turned to leave, and almost missed the words that Byron yelled after him. Almost, but not quite. James stopped dead, and waited for the voice to repeat. “I know where she’s going,” Byron yelled again, crawling out from the murky alcove and squinting up into the bright industrial LED panels. “I think I can take you to her.” “Brilliant,” James replied flatly.

Chapter Thirty-Seven The doors on the ancient freight lift had to be raised manually, with a pair of handcranks. QC had little difficulty with the operation, but Red seemed to be exerting himself tremendously; his legs wobbled and shook like a newborn calf. The doors skittered to a stop, only halfway up, and Red sat hard on the floor, panting. QC locked her handle in, then walked over to Red’s and did the same. They waddled under the gate together. The neighborhood they emerged into was suspiciously, unwholesomely clean. They were somewhere above Industry, Red knew, but couldn’t be very far into the Penthouses. The archaic lift was still using an obscure shorthand code, it’s meaning lost to time and advancement: Red jabbed in their destination coordinates as best he could guess while operating under the immense blanket of panic that the AGents’ appearance had thrown over him. Luckily, he managed to get the elevator going in a vaguely upward direction. Which meant that they were now vaguely upward from where they had been. That was about all he could tell, from his surroundings. The paths around him were all impossibly wide – more like streets than walkways – and utterly sterile. It was like set dressing in a vid-feed, or some kind of theme park. How did they do it? How did they erase every trace that human beings walked these corridors, even as they were walking them? Red guessed that they were somewhere in the corporate worker dormitories; a kind of limbo between the enviable luxury of the sky levels, with their verdant glens and pastoral hillsides, and the severe, ultra-secure research laboratories of Upper Industry. The apartments and storefronts themselves weren’t much bigger than the ones Red was accustomed to seeing in his own neighborhood, but their use of space was more efficient, the lines that defined them were crisper and more precise, and there was an obscene amount of room – several feet, in some cases -- between each unit. Down in the Blackouts, every surface was covered in a dense patina of structural limpets: A chunky glaze of old wiring, unpowered business graphics, and mooring bolts. They pockmarked every wall, leftover from several generations of interstitial, mostly illegal establishments -- unlicensed food shacks, black market commerce stalls, ad-hoc Rx dens and tiny, two person bars. But here, in this corporate dormitory, everything was exactly as it was first built: Glossy, neatly delineated, and perfectly clean. A whole neighborhood, straight out of the package. It felt peculiar and lonely. “Shitdicks,” QC sighed, “wrong floor.” “Wait,” Red barely got the words out of his throat, “we need to find somewhere for a minute. I need to get to an Rx ‘feed before my endocrine system falls out.”

“Shit, what? Can you even dose up with that grey piss in your veins?” “I can damn well try,” Red answered, trying to make sense of the bafflingly uncluttered cube that Mapworks was showing him. “Is there time for this? Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to stand up there in the fuck-all open blue sky while stone-cold sober, but you’re kind of operating on a time-limit here. We’ve got like four hours to get you to that extraction machine, or you’re fucked from the inside out.” QC said tenderly. “Besides, where are we gonna go?” she continued, pointing all around her, “These cockfuckers are all probably eating a nice family dinner and talking about stocks or some bullshit.” “QC, we’ve got a blank Auth Pass. We could commandeer a jump-lift if we wanted-“ “Holy shit! Really? I’ve only seen those on vid-feeds! I’ve always wanted to-“ “-my point being, we can make it to the Penthouses from here in twenty minutes. And when I said blank Auth Pass, I meant it. It’s totally blank. As in, not just for elevators. Any unassigned door will open to us.” “Jesus humping Christ,” QC slipped an arm around Red’s back and took some of his weight on her, “I didn’t even know that was a thing. Motherfuckers can do that? Just buy a card and go anywhere they want? What kind of ridiculous asshole money does shit like that take, d’you think?” “I don’t think you can buy it,” Red said, and sagged pitifully onto her shoulders. He thought he’d been playing up the weak and battered card to buy himself some time, but he’d forgotten just how weak and battered he actually was. QC carried him down a series of ludicrously white, uncannily tidy streets, practically tripping over cleaning robots the entire way. Eventually, she found a vacant apartment behind a base element supply store. The BioOS interface must have been on the fritz, because she had to shake Red’s head back and forth in front of the door scanner like a rag doll before it finally slid open. “Welcome to Whispering Aisles,” an airy, digitally feminine voice greeted them, “a planned community of Taylor, Wellington and Shi Corporation. As part of your work-agreement, this living unit will supply you with every luxury a man, or woman of your station deserves, while maintaining a steady baseline of class and sophistication. Lofty ceilings, ample sun-emulation panels in every room, and only the highest end appliances allow for a system of controlled living that is 2 Consumer Contentment points above the Matsu-Dellingham Corporation, and only 12 CC points below the esteemed South Standard Collective.” The voice droned on, extolling the virtues of TWS-sponsored living, while various key points of the room lit up, highlighting the amenities in real time. QC’s posture grew hunched and defensive. She stiffly helped Red to the central bench in the main living area, and then wandered about the room swearing, threatening and waving her arms, attempting to silence the narration. Eventually she found the right combination of creative violence and arm position, and the walkthrough lapsed into quietude.

“Get some rest,” She told Red, turning to the infinitesimal but ‘proven workable!’ kitchenette. “I’ll see if I can find the Rx ‘feed and maybe cook us up some motherfucking noodles and shit.” “Motherfucking noodles are my favorite,” Red smiled wanly. She forced a laugh, then disappeared behind the partition. Red quickly rose to his feet, and just as quickly lost them. Through an ornate series of awkward catches, lesser trips and painful stubs, he managed to fall to the floor in relative silence. QC’s attention remained on the kitchen unit, poking at dimly glowing panels and questioning the sexual integrity of the designer’s mother. Red tried again, slower this time, and eventually managed to waddle in a limping squat toward the entertainment center. With the wellspring of adrenalin that seeing (and nearly being murdered by), his first real life A-gent instilled in Red, he’d managed to sprint for a few minutes with QC in tow. Strangely, she struggled against him the whole time. She kept trying to convince Red to turn back, though he couldn’t figure out why: Did she want to fight? Did she actually think she could take on an Alpha Gentleman with a few strains of defective nanotech? Once they were safely inside the creaky old lift and moving, however, the lifeforce ebbed out of Red like someone slashed an artery. Red, as a general rule, did not run. It was not a statement of courage: Red hid plenty, he pleaded on occasion, and he wasn’t above the strategic wetting of the pants, but he never undertook the physical act of running. There wasn’t enough room down in the Blackouts to take an exceptionally deep breath, much less go jogging, and the public fitness areas had long since been abandoned to dying junkies and the gangs that robbed them. Years of beta testing prototype drug mixes, both professionally and as an enthusiastic amateur, had left him less than a prime physical specimen. Red could have hit up any Public Service ‘feed and ordered a free dose of Vigor Mix, but he never found the right reason to bother, and the bloody, feces-covered microderm patches of the Public ‘feeds gave him plenty of incentive not to. QC, however, ran easily. The arenas must mandate some pretty serious fitness strains for the ‘Factory girls. Or did she do something as quaint as exercise? She was taking some kind of measures to keep that tightly muscled little body and thosGod damn it, Red: Focus. He dragged himself the rest of the way to the entertainment center, fumbled in his lapel, and came up with his Rx card. He slid it into the ‘feed slot, right next to the gaming panel and the music controls, and the command prompt silently pulsed in his own BioOS. He allowed the access, and focused his attention on the internal controls. Menus flashed, spun, and closed. He found what he wanted almost instantly: The Gas section. The TWS mascot, Two Toes the Sloth, offered him a complimentary Housewarming Cocktail of euphorics, beta-blockers and some French Revolution Presence. What the hell, any old brand would do. Red thought of a circle contracting, and the Rx menu beeped in confirmation. The soft hum of cooling fans kicked on as the ‘feed swung into action, printing the chemicals onto his Rx card. The line of

pending lights blinked once, twice, three times, and then back to one again. It repeated. When it stopped, Red pulled his card, now containing the dose, and waited for the disposable c-ring inhaler. He held his breath as the little tray flipped open, but the flimsy plastic device barely made a sound when it hit the delivery receptacle. When Red went to lift the c-ring out of the ‘feed, the airy, feminine voice boomed with impossible volume from the main speakers: “Your COMPLIMENTARY TWS HOUSEWARMING COCKTAIL is now ready. Thank you for your work at the Taylor, Wellington and Shi Corporation. Enjoy your PRESENCE for the FRENCH REVOLUTION. And please, have a pleasant high.” Red mentally added all TWS interface designers to his Revenge List. QC bolted out from behind the partition, glancing accusingly first up at the ceiling, and then over at Red. “The fucking hell was that?” “Nothing.” “Didn’t sound like nothing. It sounded more like you ordering up Gas, which we just learned a few hours ago will put you a son-of-a-bitching coma.“ “I wasn’t going to take it” Red protested reasonably, though he suspected he would have been more persuasive if he hadn’t been spread-eagled on the floor, clutching a freshly printed inhaler. “You got a death wish?” QC continued angrily, “Are you such a fucking pathetic wreck that jogging is like punching your self-destruct button? Would you really rather die than be sore for a few days, you wimpy little cunthole?” “Look, I know it sounds like that. But it is not that. It’s…another thing.” “Don’t be stupid: We can get you some basic muscle-repair ‘bots and order up a giant dickload of endorphins –if we overdose you hard enough, a few might even slip by that grey shit in your blood. What the upjumping fuck is a Gas trip going to do, but speed up your already hasty fucking demise?” “I don’t think they’re hallucinations,” Red quietly explained. “Oh, you’ve jogged yourself retarded. I see.” QC crossed the living area to haul Red back onto the main bench. It shifted from a solid to a gel on receipt of his weight. “I’ve got a theory I need to test and don’t start mocking me again, god dammit, I know what I’m doing.” QC stared at him silently. Her mouth was open, just slightly, and Red could see the tip of her tongue and the slightest hint of her bottom teeth, poking out above the lip. Red found it so intensely, lustfully distracting that he assumed she was doing it on purpose. They both knew that Red had a thing for her. “It is a good theory,” he continued, trying to convince himself as much as her. Let’s see: Possibly fatal trip to an unknown epoch full of angry man-machine-beasts, or potential sex with a pretty girl on a state-shifting couch? It was an argument he didn’t even want to be win.

But he tried, regardless. “It’s a very smart theory, with a ton of really compelling evidence that would make no sense to anybody without several decades of mixing experience. It is an awesome, infallible theory that I cannot explain at all, but absolutely need to test before we see this contact, whoever they are. This has to be done, and it has to be me, and it has to be now. I know this sounds like a bunch of desperate junkie excuses, but you know me: I have too much fun to be suicidal, and I’m too cowardly to take stupid risks. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to.” Red took her hand, and only afterward realized it was the first time he’d done it. QC’s mouth snapped shut, and she nodded curtly. Before she had time to change her mind, Red slipped the inhaler into his nose. It sealed over his nostrils, and he snapped the purple patch on his Rx card face down into the clear, flat plastic square at the end of the breathing tube. His card stirred into motion: The micro-fans kicked on, the cocktail was mixed, portioned, and blown gently up through the tube to his nasal passages. As an experienced user, Red was accustomed to prolonged turns whenever he dosed up on Presence. But this time, the high jumped right into the kick stage. A matte purple mist crept into the edges of his vision. He thought of something he wanted to say to QC. Maybe even the right thing, for once in his life -- something charming and earnest that would make his motivations perfectly clear, while simultaneously consoling and reassuring her Red opened his mouth, quacked twice, then passed out. When he went limp, QC opened her BioOS. The dancing penguin interface waved happily for her attention. She focused on its beak, and the new message window slid into view. In the address field, she thought the words “Alpha Gentlemen emergency contact.” A swarthy fellow in a blue and gold filigreed top hat appeared in the avatar box. QC bit her lip, and tried to think of how to phrase her message: Come take this dickbreath junkie off my hands! If I said I knew where to find a certain skinny mixer with fisheyes, would you not burn me alive? I know where Red is, and I enjoy having skin. Can we make an arrangement? But no words appeared. The penguin giggled at her idleness, and pointed an eager flipper at the message box. QC closed the window, discarded the draft, and punched an unconscious Red in the arm. “They better saint my ass so hard my soul walks funny, for this shit,” she told him, and went to make them some motherfucking noodles.

Chapter Thirty-Eight Forest smells: Earth, Pine, Rot, and Water. But too separate, too distinct. Something murky and dire skated around Red’s mind, but his body only knew that the temperature was cool, and that the mossy earth beneath him was soft, so sleep took priority for a time. He was still swimming between wakefulness and unconsciousness when the thing throbbed again with sudden urgency. Red’s eyes snapped open, and he wrenched his mind from muddy waters into painful clarity. Red sat up and scanned the shallow gulch. The trees on either side were of a solid, solemn thickness that spoke of lifespans in the hundreds, if not thousands of years. A jagged crop of rock broke through the curtain of moss he was propped against. Red couldn’t find a way to place his head where a spike of sharp stone wasn’t poking into it. He accepted the annoyance, and tried to use it to help bring his thoughts into focus. The acutely defined smells screamed Gas trip, but he was too lost in grogginess to recall where, or why. Finally, Red gave up and uncertainly took his feet. He shook his arms out, rubbed his palms against his eyes, and cracked his neck. And then it came back to him. The Gas: His body had been absorbing it out of the stale, recycled air of the Four Posts, and it was slowly building up to toxic levels inside his veins. Once enough of it collected, he was sent off on a Presence trip to some unknown era in the Pacific Northwest. When he woke up, the process started again, and would repeat forever, until one day, probably soon, he wouldn’t come back from the trip at all. Red had taken a legitimate dose this time – ostensibly meant to take him to the French Revolution – but his theory had proven partly correct: No matter the intended destination, he always wound up in the same forest. This last was only a small, free trial dose. He had maybe an hour before it wore off. One hour to confirm the rest of his theory. Red had to find those creatures from his hallucinations, and fa – oh, there they were. Just a few feet away, staring at him. Red hadn’t been looking for people, and so hadn’t seen them. But then his eyes did something funny with the focus – shifting from far to close and back again -- and he recognized the trick. What his brain had been duped into thinking was a stripped and rotting log sticking out of a small stream some fifty feet away was actually a face, not ten inches from his own, silently staring back at him through a thin film of optical camouflage. “Uh….hi?” Red instinctively raised his hands in surrender, but the figures – and he could see several parallax spots now that subtly disagreed with his eyes – did not move or respond.

After a long, silent moment, Red lowered his arms. Still nothing. “I can see you,” he tried, shrugging slightly. No reaction. Finally, he reached out and poked the nose of the one standing a foot in front of his own face. “Boop,” Red said. There was a flurry of activity as a half-dozen figures decloaked simultaneously and began jabbering at him in their queer, motley language. Red caught two successive words of Russian, but couldn’t quite place their meaning. The tone, however, was perfectly clear: The machine-men were confused, slightly embarrassed, and just a little angry -- obviously not accustomed to having their noses booped through their invisibility cloaks. To be fair, if he had spent his life in any other line of work, or had a slightly less feverish lust for amphetamines, Red may not have spotted them at all. They were using high quality optics. But the kind of insane paranoia that the right mix of uppers and euphorics could instill in a man had once led to Red spending an entire sleepless week doing nothing but searching for cloaked intruders in his apartment. He obsessively read guides and FAQs, played online training games, practiced forcing his eyes to pay special attention to spots that were hard to focus on, and pounced on every disused corner, searching for invisible enemies. Red never found a cloaked intruder. Indeed, he’d never actually seen optic camouflage in action, up close and personal – because they were as expensive and impractical as they were rare. But a small, stupid, proud part of him was glad the practice paid off, even if he had to be irretrievably lost in time and surrounded by furious Native American cyborg-animals to do it. A little creature of indeterminate gender stepped forward. It had planes of glass for eyes, and was covered head to toe in subtly writhing cables, each ornately carved to resemble a different species of snake. It prodded Red with a kind of high-tech spear, the shaft covered in switches; a grid of thin heat vents slashed across the barbed head. It twisted something, and the weapon hummed ominously, like a tiny jet engine preparing for takeoff. Red made a desperate series of hand motions that he hoped conveyed apology and an almost embarrassing urge to cooperate. The creature seemed to catch the overall meaning, or at least felt enough pity to postpone the rocket disembowelment. The thing whose nose Red had so callously, offensively booped, was apparently the group’s leader. It was almost entirely covered with thin prismatic spines, and stomped grumpily off down the length of the gulch. His (there was no question of its gender now that Red could plainly see the massive, exposed genitals; each testicle shot through with clear luminescent spikes that cycled randomly through the visual color spectrum,) companions immediately turned to follow, falling into a tight wedge formation. The small creature and another taller, slighter boy whose legs split into two at the calf -- giving him four independent, cloven feet -- brought up the rear, herding Red before them. After a half mile or so of tripping and stumbling through the slippery gulch, Red was finally marched, bleeding and scuffed, into a sort of village. Their settlement had a feel of impermanence to it, though there was nothing hasty about it. Squat, round huts, each a mish-mash of high tech alloys and animal

hides, were laid out in a semi-circular pattern. There was a shrine or altar at the center of the circle, the space demarcated by a two-foot tall wall of interlocking stones. Two totems stood watch on either side. One was styled after a crude robot, pieced together from scrap electronics and random metals, all sharp edges and spiky gears. The other was humanoid, female. She was carved out of a single giant, flowing piece of driftwood. There was inquisitive chattering coming from all around him. The language was broken, almost without cadence. It dropped into the rolling, guttural phonemes of Eastern Europe, then ascended into the singsong tones of southeastern Asia, randomly interspersed with rapid, staccato syllables that sounded vaguely African. All throughout it, there were ululating hisses, great inhalations of air and sudden slurring expulsions that belonged to no language Red had ever heard before. The group approached a large yurt at the crown of the circular settlement, and the four-hooved boy shoved Red stiffly into its opening. When his eyes finally adjusted to the dim, Red saw that the man with the Disco Penis was gesturing emphatically to a small bundle of rags. The rags stirred, and slowly spat forth a head and an emaciated pair of arms. There was an old man lost somewhere in that vast pile of dirty fur and leather. He held up a wrinkled hand for silence, then motioned to Red. The waifish boy with the mechanical hooves shoved him forward again. Red stumbled hesitantly through the half light, and took the seat he was pointed to, directly beside the elder. Though the temperature was cool outside, it was utterly stifling inside the hut. Red couldn’t imagine what it would be like wrapped in all that fur. But the old man’s skin was cold and clammy when he reached out and carefully took Red’s hand. He looked deeply into Red’s eyes for a moment, then turned and spoke to Disco Penis, who plucked something from the floor and gingerly placed it on the old man’s waiting tongue. A few minutes passed like this -- Red holding hands with a weird geriatric while trying to remain as still as possible so as to avoid committing a fatal faux pas in Indian Beast-borg culture. And then something strange started happening to his BioOS: The pulsing oval in the far left of his peripheral vision normally signified its idle state. But now the oval was blinking quickly, indicating activity. And then it vanished entirely. Panic flooded through Red’s limbs. It pooled in his toes and welled up in his eyes; he had never been without some form of BioOS. Its abrupt disappearance was like a leg suddenly ceasing to exist. A scream bubbled up in his chest, but before it could erupt, a vivid crimson slash bisected the world. Dancing before Red’s eyes was a flat and unbroken line of blood. It spiked, and then settled. Spiked. Settled. Red recognized the universal rhythmic cycle that meant a program was working. After a few iterations, the line arced three times in rapid succession, and smoothed out again. Two steep hills slowly broke the flat horizon, and evolved into figures, each in profile and miniature. One was squat, square, and robotic. The other was an ultra-stylized silhouette of a woman – her limbs too

lithe, her movements too fluid to be motion capture. Conversely, the automaton’s movements were too stiff and sudden, even for crude robotics. They were avatars. The woman suddenly vaulted over the machine, and struck it from behind. The robot spun and fired something from its torso, but the woman ducked low, and was up and running again. The fight continued in this fashion for a few seconds, with neither figure making much headway, but then Red noticed something else was changing. The woman’s motions, though not exactly stiffening, were slowly taking on more and more precision. Fluidity bled into the machine as well. Their avatars were intermingling, each taking a little something from the other, every time they touched. Red became aware of another graphical level behind the line. Its opacity was so much lower than the line that it was almost invisible. With effort, Red focused all of his attention on the background, and started to discern patterns. A series of large, jagged shapes joined by narrow bridges, with huge empty gulfs between them. It was a map of the Earth. The continents joined, danced, collided, merged and moved away, mirroring the combatants in the foreground. At the center of it all was North America, highlighted just slightly brighter than the other landmasses. Over time it grew thinner, longer, and smoother from the repeated impacts. Back in the foreground, the woman and the robot were almost indistinguishable from one another. Her smooth, feminine lines were thoroughly intercut with sharp, blocky appendages, protrusions and sockets. The robot had elongated, the squareness of its torso now thinned at the middle and curving effeminately. The two charged one another, and locked hands in the dead center of the display. They grappled violently at first, but it immediately devolved into an embrace, and the spaces between them disappeared. They formed one single shape now, and it was growing dimmer and larger. In the background, the modified North America was growing smaller and brighter, until Red saw that the two shapes were identical. They met one another, blinked, and vanished. The pulsing oval of Red’s normal BioOS flickered back into life. He exhaled, venting panic like poison gas. Red had been so focused on the narrative unfolding in the display that he only now realized he’d been staring deeply into the old man’s eyes. The elder’s faded, milky pupils were shuddering and jumping with the distinct rhythm of BioOS activity. Red knew it should have been impossible, if only for the firewalls alone, but he understood: Somehow, they had swapped personal Operating Systems, and the old man was still engrossed in Red’s Superpanda. Red tried thinking of the line again, and it grew bright, cutting evenly across his field of vision. He let his focus relax, and the slash sunk below his sightline. Red flicked his eyes up to his own BioOS, and found it happily intact. Apparently, the trade was permanent. The old man cried out suddenly. It was an anguished, furious yelp. His focus snapped back to Red, and his eyes narrowed in accusation. He spoke one alien word, like an explosion in a cymbal factory, and slapped Red across the face. The elder turned and muttered a series of harsh commands to Disco Penis, and he and the hoofed boy seized Red by the arms, dragging him violently from the yurt, hurling him bodily over the low barrier of stones, and then forcing him to his knees between the two totems.

The woman and the robot. The woman was plain and forgettable, save for a slash of brilliant blue painted across the left part of her hair. The machine’s torso was square, topped by a low half-dome with two goggle-like cameras for eyes. One appendage terminated in an articulated buzzsaw, the other a simple machine pistol. Red recognized the model: A vintage peacekeeping unit. He’d seen it recently, after all -- just yesterday: The Indian girl and the robot. The unremarkable opening bout that his lab used to beta-test new Presence. This was their world. This was what they became, centuries later. The thin red line twisted and spiked sharply across Red’s eyes. All work in the village stopped. The creatures turned as one at the silent signal, and Disco Penis looked to the old man for confirmation. The elder nodded once, his wet, rheumy eyes screwed up in anger. Disco Penis turned on Red with astonishing speed, unsheathing an eight-inch long prismatic shard directly from his naked hip, and brought it savagely down toward Red’s throat. And then he woke up. Red clawed at his neck, tried to scrabble backwards, and immediately cracked his head against the corner of the living-area bench. QC was staring at him, mouth open, eyes wide, hands to her parted lips. Sudden death had kicked him prematurely from the trip. Red felt the full effects of the Presence, now without the mitigating high, settle over him. Nausea swam dizzily behind his eyes, the foul stench of unused gas burnt his nostrils, and a thousand insects crawled up his spine to settle in his brain. He tore off the inhaler and threw it across the room. “Jesus,” he panted, again and again. “Did you get what you needed, asshole?” QC threw a half-eaten sandwich at his chest. “Yeah,” Red ignored the sandwich projectile, but accepted QC’s outstretched hand. “Yeah, I think I got it. We can go now.” “What’s the rush? I think we have another few hours before your liver fuck-strangles your kidneys to death. Maybe we can take in a show or something.” “I’m sorry,” Red said, finding a timid strength returning to his legs. “Thanks for staying with me.” “That’s…fine, I guess?” The sudden earnestness made QC blush, and blushing, like everything else, made her angry: “But I still say fuck you partially to death.” “Ready?” Red asked her, trying to physically shake the dizziness from his head. “Ready,” she answered, and spat a smoking glob onto the off-white carpetfoam.

They left the vacant apartment together, heading toward the central elevator banks. QC led the way. Red was too distracted, playing with the dancing crimson slash of his new Operating System.

Chapter Thirty-Nine The elevator doors slid apart in perfect silence, opening onto a room so vast and vacant that its interior space triggered QC’s agoraphobia. When she stepped out and realized that the walls were not, in fact, a pure shade of azure blue, but clear glass, looking out on all sides to the unbound sky, she felt a synapse crack inside her skull. And that was before she saw that there was no floor. We’re falling, QC thought madly, her gaze sucked inexorably toward the nothingness beneath her feet. No. No, it’s just glass. And they can make glass harder than steel. It’s safe, you’re safe. You’re not falling. You’re not falling. You’re not. It’s probably not even glass, just high resolution display-paint, that’s all. The hardest building permits to acquire were extra-structural, Red recalled. Building within the Four Posts was hard enough, with every inch already spoken for. But going outside the central structure, erecting out into the sky? To build something like this profane chapel to greed -- this single, solitary room; a stadium bordered on all but one side by nothing -- it took more than money. Its immensity spoke volumes of the owner’s influence and power, while its complete and utter destitution spoke of something else: Hubris, madness, or just the blank, hollow apathy of the superlatively rich. The vividly clear walls soared upward, so high above Red’s head that they were lost to the vanishing point before he could see where they intersected. Each pane of glass was the size of Red’s entire flat. The only slight interruption of the endless skyline was the weld that secured one pane to the next, where their joints knit together with a fine white mesh. Beneath his feet, the entirety of the Four Posts sprawled. Looking down from an impossible height, the city appeared as a black diamond, bordered on each side by a thin line of grey. The blackness within was not pure, he saw; it was riddled with flaws, interspersed with faint and fleeting lights, criss-crossed here and there with shimmering, multi-colored lines that formed a rainbow cat’s cradle within the darkness. Toward the very far end, Red saw, the room at last began to taper, until the walls, ceiling and floor met at a single point. And there, floating in the air, hundreds of thousands of feet above the earth below, a small figure sat at a round, white table. It did not rise to meet them, nor even stir at their arrival. QC willed motion into her limbs, and managed to break her paralysis long enough to turn and run. But when she did, she found that the elevator had vanished: A smooth, unbroken eggshell surface sat in its stead. Her breath came shallow and tight. She tried to seize at Red’s coat-sleeve -- tried to plead with him, offer him anything he wanted if he could just bring back the lift… But he was gone.

Red was striding purposefully toward the tiny figure at the far side of the atrium, his footsteps ringing out hard and clear on the reinforced glass floor. The thinness of the tone confirmed that, no, they were not display-paint after all. QC glanced upward, because it was better than looking down or out. Above her, a sparse handful of other structures jutted from the skeletal central stalk of the North Post. Each was an equally improbable palace, suspended impossibly in the air, but there were not many sprouting outward from the gargantuan round pillar, with its bulbous knots of motion dampers. In the far, far distance, she could see where the buildings ceased entirely. She could see the end of the city. QC found the will to move, but only because abandonment was worse. She followed Red like a cowed dog, every heel strike resonating against the crystalline glass. With every clack, she expected the whole thing to shatter like ice and spill them into the air below, screaming, suffocating, torn to pieces by merciless and frozen winds. She looked to Red, not with hope or respect – he left her back there without so much as a thought, the rotten son of a bitch – but because there was nothing else. He was the only other solid object in the unholy space, save for herself, the white table, and the mysterious figure. As they closed the distance, the person at the table began to resolve. QC could see now that it was a man. There was something old about him, but it was tough to pin down what, exactly. His skin had the plastic smoothness of constant and unceasing artificial cell repair. If you had the money and the will, you could theoretically keep aging at bay for decades, maybe longer. But few bothered beyond the century mark, and fewer still tried to reverse cosmetic damage at that age. It just never looked quite right: Like somebody had gone in and erased all the finer details in the large, flat spaces of the face. The man had a close crop of fine black hair, and wore loose grey pants, tied at the sides. He had on a short-sleeved tunic of the same bloodless, toneless hue as the slacks. A delicate silver bracelet rounded out the effect. He looked at home in the open air; like he could blow away at any moment. He sat in perfect stillness, watching them approach. Red broke stride a few feet from the edge of the small white table. QC wanted to follow him; she wanted to embrace him tightly, only to feel the solidity of another human being; she wanted to at least be there to stop him from doing whatever certainly fucking retarded thing he was planning on doing -but the fear won out, and her knees became elastic. It was one thing to cross the colossal blue tundra of glass, knowing that beyond the thin, translucent walls was pure open sky. It was another to stand at the point where all those walls ended, surrounded on all sides by horrible, empty air. She dropped to a crouch a dozen paces back, and focused on the solidity of her own booted feet. The ageless man made an exaggerated show of looking behind the pair of them. He frowned deeply, and spoke in a melodic voice: “Just the two of you? Where’s the rest of your entourage?” “They’re not coming,” Red answered coldly, his tone tight and clipped with anger. “I figured it out.”

“Oh, have you?” The man said placidly, “I admit it, then: You’re smarter than I took you for. It would appear to be your play.” “I’ve got questions,” Red snapped. “I’ve got answers.” “What’s your stake in this, exactly? Did you design the beta Presence, or just fund it? How much did you know about what it does? What it really does?” “Only fund, I’m afraid. And of course not directly. I know precisely what it does. Do you think we start crowdsourcing betas right out of the lab?” “Who the fuck are you?” Red spoke pointedly, cutting off the man’s response at its last syllable. “Well, clearly you know who I am. Do you mean in the larger sense? I am but a man, I suppose. Though a man of unlimited means and boundless vision. A man with fantastic cheekbones and a resounding singing voice. A man as gifted in the bedroom as he is in the boardroom. A man of substantial gir-“ “Stop with the god damn games,” Red snapped at him. “Stop it, and tell me your name. You owe me that much.” “You…” the plastic mask rippled slightly, and the man’s head tilted to one side, “You’re serious. You really have no idea who I am?” His laughter started thin, but grew deep and joyous. When it finally ran its course, he sat for a moment panting and suppressing giggling fits. He closed his eyes, and reopened them with reptilian sloth. “In that case: I’m nobody. And you’ll find that answer everywhere you turn, I’m afraid. No matter how hard you look, or how deep you burrow within your pathetic little network, I promise you, you will find nobody. You want answers? I will turn your whole life into questions. Nothing will remain certain for you. At every turn, you will find only the peculiar absence of a man, and the harder you look, the less will be there, until one day the terrible vacuum will come rushing in on you, oblite-“ “Father!” Byron yelled from behind them, “father, hello!” QC turned to see Byron jogging recklessly across the atrium floor, his flailing limbs fleeing his body in every direction. James limped steadily behind him. The ageless man sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose in exasperation. “Byron?” Red ventured. “Yes?” Byron replied, looking up at the stalk, out to the vacant blue horizon, and down at the black diamond beneath their feet – everywhere but at Red.

“I’m going to be very calm here, okay? I’m going to be very calm, and you’re going to be very calm, and we’re going to come to a very clear understanding when I ask you this, understand? So I’m calmly asking you now: What are you doing here?” “I live here, Red. This is the atrium. This is my home. That’s…that’s my father,” Byron pointed with his whole hand at the now flustered looking ageless man at the little round table. “Good lord,” the man sighed. “All this time, and you didn’t have the slightest clue. I’ve played out the most brilliant strategy -- reeling, taunting, pulling and coercing you exactly where I wanted, and you’ve simply been pratfalling through espionage without a clue of what you had. If I had just waited a few hours, maybe taken a long bath, my son would have come home on his own. It’s too funny.” He laughed and clapped his hands, but the gesture was pointedly humorless. “We’re bloody well here now, aren’t we?” James said, finally limping painfully up beside QC. “I’m gathering that you might want to keep your boy intact, now that he’s home, and not see him disassembled into his base elements by a whirling storm of steel, am I right?” “What is this?” Byron patted himself down uncertainly, “James, did you…violate me while I slumbered?” “Gross, mate. Don’t say it like that. I just planted a few million wee shrapnel bombs in your blood.” “I see no weapons in your hand, sir,” the ageless man answered stoically. “My lift would not have allowed you to arrive with them, and any nanotech in your blood will have been deactivated by my suppression strains.” “Your boy’s got a long history of getting contraband in, though, don’t he? Can’t imagine a Penthouse bloke like you being copacetic with having a junkie for a son. You’d take preventative measures. And yet he gets that bloody Gas in here, somehow, doesn’t he? Junkies always do. They’re the original innovators. You know your boy’s got a system in place,” James said, producing a small metal tab from the interior pocket of his ratty green tweed overcoat, “and maybe I piggybacked on that system. Let’s us press this button and find out if I’m lying, shall we, you bloody ugly freak ponce?” The man’s smile disappeared in one sharp motion. Like a limb had been lopped off. “Somebody needs to start making sense, or I’m going to headbutt through this glass and kill us all,” Red whined. “This, as you’ve hopefully gathered by now, is my continually evolving mess of a son, Byron Mayburn Hockner.” “You’re a Hockner?” Red turned to Byron. Byron nodded bashfully, still too timid to meet Red’s eyes.

QC could hear the wind. Objectively, she knew that it was impossible. If the room wasn’t completely sealed and pressurized, they’d all be asphyxiated by now. But still the cold, eviscerating gales roared so loud they threatened to deafen her. “You sent your son to spy on me?” Red asked. “This idiocy is almost endearing. Why would I send my own son to spy on some Blackout beta runner?” The man gestured for Byron to come stand next to him, but Byron pretended not to see, and stayed where he was. “So you want me to believe that it’s just a coincidence that your son meets up with me, right after you tried to have me killed by that freak with the man-bots?” “I have no idea what you’re referring to. This whole thing has been slapstick. It’s actually quite humorous, really.” “So you didn’t try to have me killed? You didn’t rent the A-Gents to come after me? I just knocked on the wrong door -- so sorry, the murderous billionaire you were looking for lives across the street?” Red was flushing crimson, his fists balled so tightly that his fingers dug into his palms. “Oh, yes, I absolutely did try to have you killed. After you absconded with Hockner Laboratories’ new beta-strain of Extended Stay Presence, which, as you know, is a terminal breach of our Non-Disclosure Agreement, we followed standard protocol and put a search alert on your home’s doorman system. Imagine my surprise when our head of Security calls to tell me that young Byron here had passed over your threshold, almost immediately after you broke contract. I assumed, at that point, that you had abducted my son to use as leverage while he was out on one of his many unsavory and, might I add, forbidden trips to the Blackouts. Byron, we’ve talked about this: That addiction is unseemly and unhealthy, it’s time we break it. There’s a lovely little neuro-detox spa in West Pacific. Some time out of the city might do you well,” the ageless man turned to address Byron, who alternated staring at his feet and his hands. “So what was a concerned father to do? I contacted the Alpha Gentleman under the auspices of retrieving a stolen beta, and even offered to pay the fee you posted for ‘access’ to the compound in your blood – I thought that was a rather clever way to publicly demand ransom, actually, but I see now that was giving you far too much credit.” “No,” Red considered the information, but seemed to shake it away, “no, you came after me so I couldn’t tell anybody what your precious little wonder-drug really does. You had to keep me silent. That’s what all this is about. Because I’ve figured it out. I’ve figured out what the beta is doing. It-“ “Allows for repeat trips to later dates on the same timeline. Yes.” “And you have to cover that up! If people knew – if they knew that every single high on their favorite recreational drug was having real consequences; if they knew that every murder actually happened, somewhere, in some other timeline; if they knew that every callous arena match or casual Friday molestation ruined some timeline’s entire world, your empire would crumble! If they knew time travel was real, they’d stop using!”

“Why would they do that? Because people are inherently good? We’ve known that time was not immutable since the beginning. We tried to keep it quiet at first, but you know these things – they do get out. There are too many variables. We thought the world would come crashing down around us when that first rogue technician posted his dossier for everybody to see. But then an amazing thing happened: Nothing. Oh, there was the start of a media storm, certainly, but soon a backlash rose up against even that small ripple, decrying it as false and manipulative. We were too frightened to react ourselves, you see, for fear of bringing the authorities down on our heads. We were dumbfounded when others started volunteering to do it for us! Days -- not even weeks, but mere days afterward -- and people were openly laughing in that rogue technician’s face. And do you know why? Because Presence is fun. That’s it. That’s the entire complex psychological effect that allows our work to continue. People like our drug. They want to keep using it, and to do that, they need plausible deniability – they need to believe that its effects are impermanent, possibly even entirely hallucinatory. And so they simply give that deniability to themselves, ignoring any and all evidence to the contrary. Using Presence does not hurt you. It does not affect your friends, or your families, or even your enemies. You literally cannot point to a place in our world harmed by this action, so whatever the problem is, one thing about it is certain: It is not ours.” “Bullshit.” Red retorted, reflexively. “People have empathy. Just because they’re disconnected from the damage, that doesn’t mean they won’t care that they’re doing it!” “Do a search. Right now,” the ageless man suggested, glancing idly down at his nails. “Have you even bothered? No, of course not. You assumed you were unique. You assumed that it took the insurmountable genius and courage that only Redding Firth possesses to expose such a sinister truth. Do a search for – what do they call it?” The man looked over his shoulder to nobody, but received no response, and turned back to answer his own query: “Continuing Timeline Disorder? You’ll find a paltry few hundred thousand results, dating back roughly sixty years. Go ahead.” Red flicked his eyes upward, and his BioOS slid down, overlaying his visual field. He highlighted the search option, focused on the words, and thought of a circle, contracting. The results returned instantly. There were millions -- the man was wrong about that -- but most of them were dead pages, sporadic and abandoned. Red tabbed through a few of the oldest, and the results were identical: Outrage in the first handful of responses, and then the mockery started. By the end of every exchange, the original poster trying to warn the world of Continuing Timeline Disorder was dismissed as insane or self-serving. Red started to speak, stopped, and laughed a little to himself. “Okay,” Red finally conceded, “this was all just comedy. Sorry.” “Indeed,” the man conceded, “no hard feelings, of course.” “What?” James suddenly sputtered into life, “what was that? No hard feelings?” “Absolutely. No matter what those trashy little feeds so popular in the Blackouts say, there is no great and murderous machine toiling above the people. Even the Penthouses are staffed by businessmen,

workers, and fellow human beings. I see this has been a misunderstanding, and concede that you may not have intentionally stolen my product. Since there has been no damage done, I see no reason to start causing it now. I thank you for returning my son safely to me, and I wish you all the best. My personal lift terminates in Middle Industry, but I’ll leave your AuthPass valid for the rest of the day as you make your various ways home. Red, you’re going to need to get to an extraction machine. I’m messaging you the coordinates now. It’s my own personal medical wing, nine floors below. If you hit the water gardens, you’ve gone too far.” “No damage done,” James repeated dully, “no damage? There was a very pretty girl who could kick like bad whiskey, and your girl -- your bloody A-Gent cunt -- she came along and killed my girl. That is damage, mate. Damage that has been well and truly done.” “You’ll be compensated for the estimated lifetime earnings of any lives lost in the operation, I assure you,” the ageless man answered pleasantly, “Hockner Industry abides by all citywide Terms of Use.” “Zippy’s dead?” Red asked. “Don’t worry, mate. They’ll pay for it,” James said, and raised his hand, still holding the squat metal tab. Byron flinched and began to keen expectantly. A spot of uncut blue just behind and to the left of Hockner shimmered, and a woman walked out of it. Her gold and blue suit was torn and ragged. She was bleeding profusely, missing one eye, and holding her side with one arm. The other held a gigantic silver pistol. “Stop,” Victoria said simply. “Sure thing,” James replied, tossing the little metal tab to her. She caught it with her free hand, and winced. “All it did was turn on my bloody coffeemaker anyway. Just wanted to see where you were hiding. Real nice piece you got there. A friend of mine once asked me for one just like it. Got a mind to give it to her.” “Come take it,” she growled. “You’re going to burn for this,” Red spoke in a quiet and even voice, “you thought it was all so funny. A joke you can tell your friends. But you don’t know the punchline yet.” Thin trickles of blood ran from the meat of Red’s clenched fists. “I am an immensely busy man,” Hockner replied wearily, “either leave now or do something that gives Victoria here cause to murder you, please.” “You thought I rushed right up here to confront you?” Red said, his voice barely louder than the distant pressurizing fans.” You thought I figured out your little game, and what? Just ran into your office to yell at you? You honestly thought I was that stupid. That’s the punchline: You think you’re some genius

manipulator in your arrogant castle, high above all the stupid peons, and it never once occurred to you that I’d do something about it.” “We’ve covered this,” Hockner waved dismissively, “tell everybody you’d like about the beta. Scream it from the rooftops. It makes no difference.” “Nah,” Red replied, “I thought I’d show them instead. I put out a Contra.Act a few hours ago. It was some risky code, but an easy enough job for somebody who knows what they’re doing: Making a few tiny modifications on an Rx Feed Distribution plant down in Lower Industry. It was supposed to be shipping some Presence for the 6PM American Revolution Trip that gets dispensed, free of charge, to all 4th Tier Hockner engineers on every Tuesday. Oh don’t worry, it’ll still be distributed. You won’t miss your quota: What made the job so easy is that I didn’t even request a change in production. The plant is still churning out Presence. The same destination, the same duration, the same everything. I only asked that the Contra.Actor slip in one harmless polymer chain. Doubt anybody will mind. They’ll just get to spend a few more hours at the Battle of Amsterdam…” Hockner started to stand, but lost his legs halfway through. “You can’t do that!” the ageless man pleaded, “I don’t think you realize the ramifications here. We saw it in the samples Deng sent up: The prototype is flawed! It rebuilds again with every new dose of any Gas, until the user is eventually lost to that timeline completely.” “So what’ve I got to lose? I’m toast anyway, right?” Red laughed. “Hell, at least I’ve already got internet access set up at the place I’m going. Maybe I’ll like it. Get me a flashy new rave penis and start merging my neuroprofile with the Bear God on weekends.” “No, we can stop it,” Hockner was panicking, “We’ll get you out of the Four Posts. Presence is illegal outside of the city. We don’t even export it! It won’t build any farther, I promise you. You’ll still have the occasional unplanned trip: We can’t reverse what’s done already, but you can manage. I have contacts on the outside; it’s beautiful out there, Red. They still have forests.” “Oh, I’ll see plenty of forests, thanks.” “Let’s make it very simple: If you do this, I will shoot you in the face immediately after,” Victoria spoke, but her voice was thick and wet, and her hands were shaking. “The Revolution is a small demographic…” Hockner tried a new tack. “It’s big enough. Forty thousand? Fifty?” “Mate, think this through,” James gave Red a sympathetic look, but he couldn’t mask the horror. “We’re all pretty broken up here. But listen: I can take the bitch. She can barely hold that cannon and she’s only got the one eye to put on me, anyway. Let’s just peel this guy’s skin off for a few hours and go grab a pint, yeah? This isn’t the way…”

“Absolutely not!” Byron spoke up, “Your misgivings lie solely with that rather terrifying lady over there. I did not bring you here to torture my own father, regardless of his obstinance! And Red, I’ve always thought of you as a brother or a…a dangerously irresponsible father figure. I look to you with both admiration and deference. I know that you cannot do a thing like this. Ask yourself: What Would Lord Byron Do?” “Are you serious?” Red took a step away from the pair. “After everything Hockner’s put us through? He killed Sera, James. And Byron, he’s treated you like crap your whole life-“ “Actually, he’s always been quit fair with me,” Byron said. “He called you a continually evolving mess!” Red countered. Byron shrugged and gestured down at his own pallid, wasting body. Red whirled on James: “Zippy would…” “Don’t do that. She wouldn’t want a bunch of working stiffs to suffer for the sins of a corporate wanker, and you know it. Revenge is fantastic, Red. Don’t get me wrong: We’re not leaving here until I kill both of these bastards for a good solid week, but what you’re talking about? It’s just plain wrong.” “You’re wrong!” Red screeched, his calm monotone calm lost: “This is about the truth. People have to know that they’re destroying whole worlds, every hour of every day! Who cares if those worlds aren’t ours?! They’re someone’s! Somebody out there is paying for every harmless prank on history; every consequence-free rape and casual murder; every Sunday Night Robot Fight wrecks an entire universe! I’ve seen it!” QC felt a brief but powerful surge of anger -- at Red for bringing her here, at Hockner for creating such a fucked up, godawful place, at all of them for ignoring her helpless terror in favor of their little melodrama. She sobbed her guts out on the floor. She begged them to drag her away. QC cried and wailed like a little fucking girl, shedding all of the quiet dignity she’d fought her entire life to maintain, and they ignored her. But her anger receded like the tide, and left behind only numbness. It was only air out there, she realized. Only air. The same as she was breathing right now. And there wasn’t enough of it in here. Her chest felt tight. She was getting a little woozy. She just needed to breathe. QC tongued the pads in her mouth to kick on her disassemblers, but the cartoon penguin of her BioOS merely frowned at her. SUPPRESSION, it read, in bulbous, balloon-like letters. That’s okay. She kept the strictest firewalls available on her black market control panel. She had to keep the unsanctioned nanotech concealed from the fight labs, after all, or they’d terminate her. It should still be working. QC pressed a sequence of symbols into her leg, and felt her skin flush as the requested nano-strain rose to the surface. She withdrew her needle, pierced the white flesh of her inner thigh, and

flattened her palm against the upwelling of blood there. Bright red, in stark contrast to the cerulean sky. She slapped her hand down, and rubbed it against the glass between her feet. Nobody spared her a glance. Red chuckled disbelievingly to himself, ran a hand through his hair, and bounced lightly on his heels. Hockner started to speak, but Red threw a hand up and the ageless man lapsed into obedient silence. “Nobody? Really, nobody?” Red looked around at each of their faces, searching for approval, or at least understanding. James’ visage was pale and freckled. There was a look of barely contained fury beneath his messy red part. QC’s default churlish sneer was gone. Her whole face had gone slack from hypnotic terror. She wasn’t even looking at him. She was just pawing at the glass. Byron’s hawkish nose, narrow chin, and high, thin eyebrows all twitched and jumped in different directions. He was trying to say something without speaking, but was too unfamiliar with his own body to accomplish it. “Somebody’s got to do the right thing,” Red finally spoke, and flicked his eyes upward. He thought of a circle contracting. Somebody laughed. Somebody shouted ‘no,’ and somebody just shouted. Somebody pulled a trigger, and somebody closed a pair of strong, wiry hands around a tender, feminine throat. Somebody stared blankly down into a swatch of clear and freezing blue through a prismatic smear of red, and smiled when it began to bubble.

THE END.