Crashed (7 page)

That's what my father had always told me.

The residence cubes were identical and unmarked, leaving us no choice but to trust the cart when it deposited us at an entrance. Behind the transparent walls, thousands scurried back and forth through a multileveled atrium, denizens of an oversize ant farm. Towering above our heads were the hundreds of privacy-free residential units, cubes within cubes, complete with all the comforts of a 15' x 15' home.

Riley led us into the ground-level atrium, its carpet of artificial grass gleaming green in artificial sunlight that belied the dark gloom beyond its walls. Corp-towners worked on a three-shift system, one-third working while the other two-thirds slept or played, so even in the middle of the day, there were more orgs than I'd expected milling about the plaza, toting bags of food and clothes and whatever other crap they wasted their corp-credit on. Orgs everywhere, cozying up to one another on park benches, strolling hand in hand down paths lined with fake stepping stones, people crowding in and out of the elevators that would speed them up or down to their housing module. Maybe it wasn't more people than I'd ever seen in one place, but knowing that there were thirty levels above us and another twenty carved out of the ground below, all of them equally packed, made me want out.

Not that any of them came near us. As we walked down one of the curving paths, a vacuum opened in the crowd, as if an invisible force were clearing our way. And as they edged backward, they stared. And whispered. At least, some of them whispered--some insulted us in raised voices, unashamed.

"What are
they
doing here?"

"It's uglier than I thought."

"What do you think it's thinking?"

A laugh. "As if it thinks."

"Mom, it's looking at me." That was a whiny kid, pink hair, baggy overalls hanging over a matching pink hug shirt, the kind I'd loved when I was a kid. For a few blissfully simple months, trading hug shirts had been the perfect declaration of best friendship: You had only to wrap your arms across your chest and, no matter where she was, your best friend would feel the hug. We'd all dug them out again in junior high--boyfriends made the tech infinitely more entertaining. There was nothing like sitting through an intensely boring biotech lecture and suddenly feeling the warmth and pressure of invisible arms wrapping you in an invisible embrace.

Two men, not old, not young, scruff blotting their faces like a rash. One to the other. "Would you? For a thousand?"

The other. "
Ten
thousand. Maybe. But only the girl one."

"Hell, I'd slam it for free. Try anything once, right?"

An old woman, her tan, dry skin taut from one too many shoddy lift-tucks, the best you could get in a corp-town. "You shouldn't be here."

Not all the stares were hostile--there were plenty who watched us closely, neutrally, like little kids watching an ant-hill, placing bets on which insects would wander off and fry in the sun.

Riley deposited me on a bench just opposite a small fountain flickering with water and colored light. "This is where you meet him," he said. "I'll be watching from up there." He pointed to the level above us, where two girls a couple years younger than me were leaning against a railing, making a pathetic show of ignoring the boys goggling them from beneath. The floors, like nearly everything in the atrium, were made of glass; the girls were wearing skirts and had apparently decided to put on a little show.

I raised my eyebrows at Riley.

He scowled. "Over
there
," he said pointedly, nodding at an open spot on the railing, suitably far from the giggling exhibitionists. "If anything seems off, I'll VM you."

"How am I supposed to know who 'him' is?"

"He'll find you," Riley said. "Just take the package. Don't tell him I'm here. Don't ask any questions--and don't answer any."

Stay with me,
I almost said, watching the orgs watch me. But that would be paranoid and weak, and I was neither. "So get out of here before 'he' shows up."

With Riley gone, the whispers grew. It was like his silence had been loud enough to drown them out, but now they were all I could hear. Or maybe now that I was alone, the people were getting bolder. I waited for one of them to take the next step.

If something happened, would any of them try to stop it? None of the tech upgrades we'd gotten had made us any faster or stronger. No martial arts savvy downloaded directly to the motor cortex, no superhero skills whatsoever. Just a titanium head and some bones that were nearly impossible to break.

Nothing's going to happen.
No violence, that was rule number one in every corp-town, and violating it was the fastest way to get yourself ejected. One of the vidscreens flashing overhead made the point in stark terms, broadcasting a looped vid of two men wrestling, a knife flashing in each of their hands. As the background shifted from the corp-town plaza to a desolate city street, blood spurted and the men fell backward, still. The moral of the story scrolled across the screen--
Live like an animal, die like an animal
--and then the whole thing started again.

The rest of the vidscreens were flashing pop-ups for corp-produced goods and services to be bought with corp-credit-- corp-towners got paid in play money that was only good within the bounds of the corp-town, forming a neatly closed circle between corp and employee. Within the corp-town, everything went cheap; play money let the poor playact at being rich. You could trade in your corp-credit for real credit, but only if you wanted to sacrifice all your purchasing power, foregoing a corp-supplied wardrobe or a kitchen full of corp-supplied food in favor of one box of real chocolate or a slab of real organic beef. I never understood why any of them would have bothered trying to buy anything in the outside world--but then, I never understood why they would set foot in the outside world in the first place. And most of them didn't.

"It's easier that way," I'd told Auden once, cutting into one of his rants. "Why would they want to see what they can't have?"

"It's easier for
us
that way," Auden had replied. "We pen them up, like we pen up the city people, and then we don't have to think about them. Or see them. We can just forget they exist."

"No one's stopping them from leaving the corp-towns-- or the cities, for that matter. But why go where you don't belong?"

Leaving a corp-town was logistically almost as hard as leaving a city. Regulations restricted corp-towners to public transportation, and the last bus and train lines had died out years ago. What was the point, when the minority had cars of their own and the majority was better off staying put? There were a few jobs that required leaving the corp-town regularly on corp-transport--the shippers were always traveling back and forth, and the security-operations force were a regular presence, standing guard over the rest of us with their badges, their thermobaric grenades, their stunshots, and their don't-screw-with-me scowls that couldn't mask their boredom. Not to mention their bitterness at protecting a life they could never afford themselves. Small wonder that secops was as low on the desirability spectrum as wastewater management and human resources. At least the data-entry grunts got to stay hidden away in their glassy cubes--ignoring us, I'd always assumed, just as happily as we ignored them.

There was one recent exception to the stay-put rule--the Brotherhood of Man had begun sending buses to area corp-towns, offering residents a field trip to the newly completed Temple of Man. I wondered how many of the hostile faces surrounding me had witnessed Auden's little martyr show live and in person. How many looked at me and were afraid.

Twenty minutes passed, and Jude's mystery man didn't show. Another twenty, and still nothing.

I glanced up at Riley. He was resolutely ignoring the giggling girls--who were now taking turns boldly flashing their net-linked lingerie at
him.

"Is he usually this late?"
I VM'd.

"Never,"
came the answer.
"Stay put. I'll voice Jude."

Of course,
I thought in disgust.
Jude always knows what to do.
The all-knowing, all-powerful Jude had all the answers.

Then the sun went out.

Darkness, and then the world blazed red. I stood up as the alarm sang out, a single scream at the top of the octave. The crowds froze, faces tipped up toward the vidscreens, which all flashed the same useless message:
Alert. Biohazard. Alert.

The red strobe flashed on, off, on. Glowing faces burst from the darkness, then dropped into shadow. The fountain bled pink, the rippling pool of water at its base a bottomless red.

I was staring at the fountain when I realized the noise had stopped. Not the alarm, which was still singing, but the sounds beneath it, the rustling, mumbling, shrieking, crying chaos of the crowd. Gone.

Ring around the rosie, a pocketful of posies.

The inane rhyme whispered through my head as they began to drop. They fell silent and still, their eyes bulging and mouths convulsing, fishlike, open shut open. Soundless. The two men with their dirt-beards, the old woman. The giggle twins, their giggles silenced, their skirts askew. Down, hard and ugly, heads cracking against plastic stone, arms jutting at odd angles. Down went the little kid, fingers clawing at her pink shirt. And her mother, down without a fight, her back to the kid.

Ashes, ashes.

Someone told me once that the nursery rhyme was about the Black Plague. That the ring of roses referred to the disease's trademark red rash; the ashes to the burning bodies of the dead. But that was a lie: I looked it up. The words were nonsense; they meant nothing.

The red light pulsed rhythmically. I tried not to count the faces, hundreds of faces. Some of them twitched, chests heaving, sucking in air and whatever poison hid inside of it, whatever
biohazard
had touched off a useless, too late
alert
alert alert
.

Some of them--one of the men, the girl, three women with chunky ankles and identical rings on their stubby fingers--prostrate, frozen. Askew. Their eyes open, their chests still.

Faces red, then pale, shadowy,
non,
then red again.

"We have to get out of here!" Riley's voice in my ear. Riley's shirt absurdly pulled over his face as if he had anything to fear from the poisoned air. Riley's hands on my shoulders. Riley, there, but seeming very far away. Riley alive and in motion, seeming wrong in the still, empty room. Empty until you looked down.

"Lia!"
Riley grabbing me. Dragging me out of the plaza.

Running, stumbling over something lumpy and large that didn't make a sound as our feet sank into its chest.

Running without looking down, just step over them like stones, just go, Riley said, don't stop don't look just go.

Running and standing still, leaving a piece of myself in the empty atrium, still watching the red light pool in the whites of their eyes.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

TOGETHER ALONE

"We're all better off now."

The red light turned to tears, trickled down pale, still faces. Their eyes were bleeding.

Alert! Biohazard! Alert!
screamed the vidscreens, although there was no one left to warn.

"Get it together!" Riley's hands were rough on my arm and back, pushing me forward. "We have to get
out
."

What's the hurry?
I thought, a mad giggle rising in me.
No bio equals no hazard. Safe and sound.

But I shook him off and I ran with him, down the dead, empty hall, the corp-town in lockdown, its residents hiding or evacuated. Or neither. Steel shutters had dropped to shield the glass walls, trapping us inside, in the dark. The biohazard protocol had locked even the glowing emergency exits, sealing the corp-town tight--no nasty microorganisms would escape to the outside world. And no mechs.

Riley went straight for the control panel to the right of the nearest exit and ripped off the cover. He began messing with the wires, stripping two of them with his teeth and winding them together, then touching them to a third, and before I could ask what the hell he was doing, the steel slid up toward the ceiling, and he pushed through the door. His hand gripped mine, tugged hard, and I followed.

We cut across the matted astroturf surrounding the residential cubes, ignoring the solar-powered cart that had carried us here--even if it wasn't on lockdown with the rest of the compound, it was too slow and too easily tracked by the secops. Alarms were blaring across the campus, and steel shutters had dropped across all the residence cubes, turning them into bunkers, a fitting accessory to the corp-cum-war zone. The air split with distant sirens. Thunder shook the sky. Except it wasn't thunder; it was a squadron of helicopters dropping toward the glass cube as the emergency vehicles, the fire trucks and ambulances, appeared on the horizon. Next would come the secops looking for someone to blame. I suspected we'd do.

"We didn't have to run," I said, my brain finally starting to work again, though I was still running, because he seemed so sure and I was so not. We passed the wastewater ponds and trampled through deserted soy fields. The workers had presumably all been hustled away to the underground safe houses dotting the perimeter, and only the reaping and spraying machines remained to witness us tearing through the knee-high fronds of sallow green. "We could have stayed--maybe we could have helped."

Riley sped up. "We're helping ourselves."

* * *

We ran for miles, quickly crossing the boundaries of the corp-town into open country. Security at the borders was light--in most spots nonexistent--and it would probably take at least an hour before the secops had a chance to cover the grounds. In the meantime, the more distance we could put between us and them, the better. Mech bodies didn't tire, so we just kept going. Through industrial wastelands and past smokestacks puffing purified clouds into foggy sky, beyond the boundaries of the corp-town, away from the sirens, through flat fields and more fields, staying off the road, feet tramping through the high grass, another mile and another stretching between us and the corp-town. I'd been a runner, before, and I knew my stride. Counting paces was easier than thinking, so I focused on the wet thump of our shoes on the soggy ground, marking off five miles, then ten, then twenty. Until a cloud of green mushroomed on the horizon, resolving itself, as we drew nearer and nearer, into a wide, dense grove of trees. We'd reached the border of a Sanctuary, twenty square miles of unspoiled wilderness, off-limits to orgs. Which meant, except for the birds and squirrels and deer, we were alone.

"Here," Riley said, letting himself slam into a thick trunk, wrapping his arms around the tree and pressing his cheek to the bark. "This is good enough."

"For what?"

"For keeping our heads down." He sank to the ground, hands plunged into the layer of dead leaves swimming beneath the trees.

"You act like we did something wrong."
And maybe we did,
I thought, remembering the faces. Eyes open, watching me, watching nothing.
We could have stayed. We ran.

"Wake up, Lia," he snapped. "You think it was an accident, that happening when we were there?"

"I don't think anything. I don't even know what
that
was."

"It was a setup."

"You think that was about
us
?"
Because
of us, is what I meant to say. Is what I didn't want to say.

He shrugged. "If not, we have some pretty shit luck."

"What else is new?"

"I'm staying," he said with sullen finality. "Do what you want. I don't care."

As if he would leave me behind. It didn't matter how much he sulked, I could tell: He wasn't the type. "If you don't care, how come you didn't just leave me there?"

"Wasn't thinking," he said. "Now I am."

I sat down next to him. The ground was spongy. Dry leaves crunched beneath my weight. "Those orgs," I said, quiet. "People. You think they . . ."

"Yeah." Riley looked down at his hands, still hidden in the leaves. "Some of them, at least. I don't know."

Some of them what? Died, or lived?

"I never--" I stopped, about to say I'd never seen a dead body, but that was wishful thinking. I'd seen my own, burned and broken, brain scooped out for slicing and dicing and scanning.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Sometimes it was useful being a mech, staying blank and keeping things inside. The problem came when you wanted to get them out. If I'd been trembling, if I'd been sweating or pale and cold or shivering uncontrollably, if I'd puked until there was nothing left but bile, if I'd felt anything in my body, then maybe my brain could have taken a break. Of course, if I was in a position to do any of those things, I wouldn't have been sitting in the dark, rain beginning to patter against the leaves. I probably would have been dead.

Riley wouldn't let me link in to the network. "They could use it to track us."

"We don't even know if 'they' are looking for us," I argued. "And even if they are, you can't track people through the network."

He gave me a weird look. "Who told you that?"

"No one had to
tell
me. Everyone just knows."

"You want to link in, you do it somewhere else," he said. "Away from me."

I didn't want to go anywhere. "How long you think we need to wait?"

"Couple days maybe. To be safe."

"Here?"

He almost smiled. "You got somewhere to be?"

Nowhere to be, no need to eat or sleep, nothing to do except find a way to stop seeing what I'd seen. And I had to admit, he'd picked a good hiding spot. All Sanctuaries had periodic ranger sweeps to make sure the orgs stayed out, but the odds of anyone finding us in the next day or two were pretty minuscule.

"You can shut down if you want," Riley suggested. "I'll keep watch."

And lie there unconscious, trusting him to make decisions for the both of us? "I don't think so."

He tipped his head up, as if there were anything to see but dead branches. "Whatever."

We sat there silently for a while. I almost laughed, remembering how much I'd dreaded having to spend a few hours in a car with him. Now here we were, playing at being alone in the world. But I didn't laugh--thinking I'd been right not wanting to come.

Weird how tiny, stupid decisions make all the difference.

"You want to talk about it?" Riley said suddenly.

"What?"

"You know. What happened."

Now I did laugh.

"What?" he asked, looking almost hurt.

"Since when do
you
want to
talk
?" I asked, still laughing, but only in my head, where I couldn't stop.
This is hysteria,
I thought, my mental voice wracked with giggles, my body still and calm. Riley rested a hand on my upper arm, like he knew, and somehow it quieted the noise. He pulled his hand away.

"I didn't say I wanted to talk," he said. "I asked if
you
wanted to."

"Fine," I said. "But not about that."

He nodded.

"Tell me something," I ordered him. It felt good to boss a guy around. Normal, almost.

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Anything."

He looked more blank than usual.

"Like, tell me how you did that back there with the door," I suggested. I didn't particularly care, but it was something to say.

"I used to do a lot of that stuff," he said. "It came in handy."

I didn't have to ask him
when.
It was the same nebulous
before
we all had and never talked about. Jude's law.
And Jude knows best, right?

"
Okay, but
how
did you do it? Who taught you?"

He shrugged. "I just figured it out."

"Fine." I crossed my arms. "Great."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Why do you always look at me like that?" he asked.

"Like what?"

"Like I'm saying something wrong. Usually when I'm not even saying anything."

"You're
never
saying anything," I pointed out.

"I am right now," he said. "You've still got the look."

"Maybe because you're still not actually saying anything. Not really."

"You're strange," he said. "Anyone ever told you that?"

"Not really, no," I said coolly. Strange meant not fitting in; I defined
in
. "I saw a pic of you," I added, turning it back on him. "You and Jude and Ani. From before."

Jude had freaked out when he'd heard that, when I threw in his face that I knew what he'd been,
before
. Riley didn't react.

"It was a long time ago," he said tonelessly.

"Less than two years. Not so long."

"Long enough."

"So you and Jude, you were friends?" I asked, even though that much I knew. "Before?"

Riley smiled, a real smile, one of the first I could remember seeing on him. Sometimes, with mechs, a smile could transform the face into something even less human--the expression somehow incongruous on the synthetic lips, a quaint and unsettling party trick, like a dog propped at the dinner table with a fork and spoon. But Riley's smile was natural enough, and it made the rest of him seem more real. "You know Jude hates talking about the past."

I glanced over my shoulder as if making sure. "Yeah, Jude's definitely not here," I said. "So?"

"So nice try," he said, then grimaced like he couldn't stand
not
to answer. "But yeah, we were. Best friends."

"Funny that he didn't ditch you along with the rest of his past," I said. "All part of embracing our bright new mech future, right?"

But Jude's friendship with Riley apparently fit into the same category as our org names, one of the few things we weren't obligated to dump in the garbage as a testament to our new lives. In its own way, continuity was as important as discontinuity, Jude maintained. The radical break from our past, from our old families and old values, could only have meaning if we kept some core piece of ourselves intact--and then, of course, there was the small practical matter that keeping at least a tenuous grasp on our old identities was necessary if we wanted access to our zones and credit. And so the past was irrelevant . . . except when it suited him. When he needed it to pay the bills or to guarantee loyalty. Or to throw it in my face, remind me how I'd ended up with him and why. That was the thing about Jude. He spoke with conviction, but sometimes the distinctions he drew seemed arbitrary, invented ad hoc to serve his own purposes. Then he turned preference into principle, and his particular conveniences became our general rule.

Though Jude would just say I wasn't seeing the big picture, and that's why I needed him.

I gathered Riley would agree. He raised his eyebrows. "You don't buy it. That we're all better off now."

"So what if I don't?"

"Let me guess . . ." He tapped a finger against his lips as if he were choosing his words carefully, but the pause was too studied to be natural. He knew exactly what he wanted to say. "You go along with it, and you don't talk about what you miss, because no one else seems to miss anything, and you figure that's the way to go. It works for them, so it should work for you. Or it will. Till then, you keep your mouth shut."

"What makes you think that?"

Because that was less of an admission than
How'd you know?

He didn't bother to answer either question. "Ever think they don't miss anything because they don't have anything to miss?"

"Well, obviously," I spit out. And at the beginning, I'd taken refuge in that.
I wasn't like you
, I'd told Quinn.
I was whole.
"I'm not saying I don't have anything to miss, I'm just saying it's pointless. It's better to just forget."

"That doesn't make it easy," he said.

It was getting dark. And probably colder too, but temperature wasn't something I noticed anymore. I registered it--or, at least, the body registered it--but I didn't even feel it in the dim, distant way that I "felt" the ground was soft and wet, the bark rough against my back. It was a fact, an irrelevant one I'd learned to dismiss.

"In the pic, you were . . . you looked healthy," I said, not really expecting him to do much more than nod. He did. "But I thought all the volunteers--" I cut off the word. "The early test subjects," I corrected myself. "I thought you were all . . ."

"Defective?" he asked wryly. "Injured or diseased, without any options? Desperate?" He pressed his lips together in a thin, tight line. "Some of us had options," he said after a moment. "Just not good ones."

It was so irritating, all this ridiculous secrecy. "What's the big deal?" I said, frustrated. "Like I really care about where you or Jude came from."

That smile was playing on his lips again. "Could've fooled me."

"You don't want to talk about it, don't. Whatever. I just don't get the big deal about saying what happened."