Roo'd (6 page)

Cass skipped lightly over to the scooter, followed in two heavy steps by the monstrosity. Fede was sure the street shuddered as he walked.

"Fed, this is Marcus. Marcus was winner of the Australian Triples last year. He's a good friend of your brother's."

Fede nodded dumbly. Marcus smiled, the tight hole where his mouth was splitting like a tear in a steak to spread over sharp metallic teeth.

"Marcus was wondering if you could help him. He's having trouble with his computer." said Cass. "I was told you were good with computers."

"Have you tried rebooting?" asked Fed. He couldn't imagine what this beast would use a computer for.

"I don't want to lose my data" explained Marcus. His voice was deep, but not unusually so, and the slight lisp his lack of lips gave him was hardly noticeable. "I'm running a metabolic simulation over some new work I'd like your brother to do, and I think I may be suffering from insufficient RAM."

Fede stared upwards at Marcus. Something in the back of his head reminded him that time was passing. "You what?" he asked, dumbly.

Marcus glanced at Cass, then back at Fed. "A metabolic simulation. Most of my mods involve increased mass, and the metabolism required to support it requires some pretty tricky calculations. If I put on too much weight I could overload my heart. It's Swiss, but it's still just a heart."

Fede realized he was acting like an idiot. "Can I see your machine?" he asked.

"Sure" said Marcus. "Come on in. Park your bike on the sidewalk and we'll secure it from inside."

They walked into the house through the doorway, Marcus stepping sideways to get through the frame. Inside was a large living room lined with couches, a series of colorful throw rugs giving the place the feel of an Afghani restaurant. Marcus yelled upstairs to someone, and a man's voice called back that the bike was taken care of. Marcus led them through the living room past a dining room whose walls were covered in posters of transhumanists and bodmodders of all stripes. One of the posters prominently placed at the head of the table was of Marcus, his arms held aloft in the middle of a huge metal cage. His head and upper body were coated in blood. The picture was foreshortened and Fede couldn't make out what was lying on the mat behind him. "I still say I owe that one to you guys" Marcus said to Cass, seeing the poster catch Fed's eye.

"Don't be silly" replied Cass. "You trained hard for that and you deserved it. I'm just glad we got to take part."

"Your brother designed the tetrahydroxide combines which allowed me to survive that fight" said Marcus to Fed. He led them into a cozy kitchen and gestured at the oversized bar stools which surrounded the raised table.

"Please excuse the furniture" he said. "Tea or coffee?"

Fede began to get the feeling that he should be asking about a rabbit hole. "What's tetrahedroxide?" he asked.

"Tea please, Marcus" said Cass as she looked demurely at the wallpaper.

"Tetrahedroxide is an amine that can only be processed in combination with an over-oxygenated blood supply. My particular physiology allows me to metabolize a large amount of it quickly without having to worry about toxic shock." He thumped his oversized chest and leaned his head conspiratorially towards Fed. "Oversized lungs. More of your brother's work."

He leaned back. "Cassandra here authored the theory and worked with your brother to create an implant that would allow me to ingest it in a fight without having to worry about my liver falling out. They designed it to respond to the anaerobic wastes accumulated when fatigue sets in. Most fighters' mixers aren't so clever by half, and end up wasted mid-way through the second round. Because of them I was able to stage a massive comeback in the third round and tear Tichowsky apart!"

Fede had no doubt. Marcus turned and began to pull tiny teacups from the cupboard and place them on a battered black wooden tray.

"Cassandra?" he whispered at Cass across the table.

"Say it again and I'll pull your guts out your navel" she whispered back sweetly.

He was about to say more when Marcus placed the tray on the table. He followed it with milk and sugar in slightly chipped cups before going back to the stove. Instead he turned to Cass and asked, "Why'd you call me Feed?"

"That's what Mil calls you" said Cass "and I think it's cute."

"That doesn't make any sense" Fede said. "My name sounds more like 'fed' than 'feed.' It's stupid."

She shrugged, unconcerned.

"How is Mil?" asked Marcus as he returned to the table. He cradled a steaming teapot in one hand and carefully enfolded the top of the stool with the other as he squeezed into the remaining seat.

"Still asking when you're going to come back and play" Cass said with a smile. Marcus laughed loudly, his chest creaking loudly.

"Not a chance, my dear. Mil is too far my superior for me to want such a lesson again any time soon." Marcus raised his giant paws and pointed his palms at them both. "These were expensive, and I'll thank him not to break them."

"You fought Mil?" gaped Fede as Marcus poured him his tea with one thick digit carefully plastered over the teapot's lid. Marcus smiled broadly.

"I wouldn't call it a fight" he said. "I put a few holes in the wall and made a lot of noise, and he danced around and gave me two sprained wrists." He chuckled again, leaning back in his chair, remembering.

"Funny thing was he kept telling me what he was going do before he did it. 'Marcus, you needs to be calming down now or I'm going to pop your other wrist. You won't fight again for a long time, its a big shame'"

Marcus's imitation of Mil was spot-on perfect, and both Fede and Cass were snortling tea and giggling as Marcus continued, his trunk-like arms swaying gently in imitation of the skinny little man's fluid movements.

"'There, see, I told you that was a bad idea. Now how longs you will be healing? Marcus, you are making a scene. You're embarrassing yourself Marcus.'"

Cass covered her mouth with one palm, her shoulders shaking with laughter as they imagined Mil casually breaking down the giant mod fighter. Marcus chuckled and sipped his tea. "Mil is a gentleman, don't get me wrong, but he most certainly does not fight fair."

Fede laughed again in disbelief at the thought of the no-holds barred mod fighter asking for a fair fight, but decided against asking any more about it. Marcus finished his tea, and eventually they got around to examining his computer. The interface was a six-foot square whiteboard with thick stubby pens Marcus could easily manipulate with his oversized hands. Fede found the problem almost immediately. A memory leak in one of the programs used in the simulations was accumulating in RAM and choking the system on memory swaps. Fede didn't want to mess with the program's code, so he ran a cleanup program, making a few performance tweaks to Marcus's system and generally cleaning house a little. Marcus politely asked questions along the way so Fede showed him a few ways to keep memory fragmentation down as well as running him through how to clean up after his simulation programs so the leak wouldn't get out of control.

"With a little luck that ought to solve your problem and keep things running more smoothly. I would get more RAM though, especially if you're going to be running complex models like that on a regular basis."

"Thank you, Feed. I appreciate the help" said Marcus politely. "I'd ask my brother to help, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease." He followed them to the entranceway and helped Cass with her coat. Outside the scooter was surrounded by a laser-painted red circle slowly pulsing clockwise around the perimeter of the bike. Looking up, Fede saw the black muzzle of something duct-taped to a bright yellow plastic Sony waldo. The thing had to have been designed for children, its joints encased in cheery pink plastic ducting.

"Cessus!" shouted Marcus into the doorway. The laser light blinked out. "I apologize for my roommate's lack of manners. He's deeply involved in something, I'm sure." said Marcus. "You should be able to mount your bike now."

They saddled up on the bike and waved goodbye to Marcus. This time Cass drove off slowly.

They drove a few dozen blocks back into Chinatown and pulled up to the back of the garage next to Greener Pastures. Cass leaned on the horn until the door next to the corrugated pull-down opened and a tiny little Asian man leaned out. He was wearing a filthy baseball cap on backwards, but his smile when he saw Cass on the bike was big and genuine. She revved the engine a few times before stabbing a thumb at the doorway. The little man nodded and disappeared, reappearing a moment later as the garage door pulled upwards. He was wearing filthy blue service overalls, and was shortly joined by three other, identical little men. Cass pushed the bike inside and shut it off, stepping back to admire it with the rest of them. Cass started swapping notes with them in language Fede didn't understand, but he could tell by the tone of their voices and the low soft whistles that they were impressed. After several rounds of laughing and pointing grimy fingers at various parts of the bike she grabbed a socket wrench and a screwdriver. With a few deft twists of her wrist she pulled open a side panel and started popping screws. Her fingers flew over the polished metal housing, sculpted pieces of aluminum-bonded carbon fiber panels neatly lining themselves up to reveal the bare metal skeleton of the bike. Cass suddenly stood up, her hands on her hips. Even Fede was impressed - revealed, the bike was a pure racing machine. He could see wield marks where extra struts had been put in to support additional stress, and at least two extra shock plates. The Japanese men whistled again, loud and low. Cass nodded.

"Who did that?" asked Fed. The men ignored him, pointing and murmuring among themselves.

"I did" said Cass. "Come on." She tossed the first guy the keys and gestured for Fede to follow her. They exited via the front door past the big plastic dragons and crossed over to enter Greener Pastures. Mil was working in the front room, this time setting up some muscle boxes. The square red plastic cases contained all the ingredients needed to shock muscle groups into sudden growth, and Mil was busily strapping them to a rangy redheaded man. The guy had a split tongue he was sucking on through his teeth as the muscle box stabbed and massaged the hormones into his chest. Having something cut into your muscle a thousand times a second wasn't fun, but Fede understood that the pain was part of the procedure. It was a rite of passage.

They nodded at Mil as they entered, Fede following Cass towards the back of the store.

"You made that bike?" Fede asked.

"I modded it. The design is good, but when you bore out the pistons and amp up the carburetor you have to put in extra supports and… " she paused, glanced back at Fed.

"You have to hack it a little" she summarized.

"Who were those guys?" asked Fed.

"They let me use their shop" said Cass. "I worked there originally until I started at Greener Pastures, after I came up from California. Just basic chop shop work."

"You speak Japanese with them?" asked Fed.

"They're Chinese. They speak Mandarin. Mandarin slang, really - folks around here come from a lot of places, so they drop a lot of weird verbiage in from other places" she said.

"Where did you learn that? Are you Chinese?" he asked.

"Swiss" she said without turning. Her voice was flat, a studious neutral. "Swiss French. From Sion." She stopped and turned to look at him. "You know where that is?"

He'd kept his goggles on after the bike ride, not in small part because he felt nervous about not understanding what the guys at the garage were saying. His buffer had caught her comment, and now he keyed against the text string, chose a visual representation of the data. Suddenly he was staring at a map of Switzerland. "Yeah. About… two hours from Zurich?" No, four hours - his fingers fluttered against the chord in his pocket, saw a swarm of train schedules fly by, an agent resolve an answer. "No, sorry. Two hours twenty-five minutes by train from Zurich. Looks like they're not using the maglev there yet, huh?" Fede smirked.

She smiled out of one corner of her mouth, turned and continued down the hallway.

"We marked off part of the dojo for you. It's not very respectful to Sansei" - she jabbed a thumb towards the front of the store - "but he agreed that if we were doing it to fund a full dojo it was worth impinging a little. Just remember to take your shoes off, okay? You don't have to bow."

She stepped into the Dojo, which was dark, and bent to take off her shoes. Fede was reminded again that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in person. There was something about the way she moved, her long limbs, the arc of her neck, the way she bent her arms. She stood and clapped her hands. A light went on inside a blue bubble out in the far corner of the room. "Shoes" she reminded him over her shoulder, and walked towards the light.

He slipped out of his canvas converse - black, retro - and followed. The light soon resolved into a one-person camp tent, an OLED panel lashed inside the top of its arced roof. A thick yellow power cord fed from the shadows of the Dojo's edge to under the tent's. An ethernet cable was wrapped neatly around it, secured every couple feet with black electrical tape. It was tidy work, definitely not Tonx's. Cass kneeled and tightened a zip-tie securing the cord to a tent strut before crawling in, her slim figure turning to blue-tinged shadows. A moment later her head appeared.

"You coming?" she asked.

Inside the power cord was connecting to a translucent blue chest. The chest was empty other than a UPS (in case of power surges, Fede noted approvingly) and a power strip. One slot in the strip snaked up and out of the chest through a wire-clip mounting in a hole on the back of the chest, connecting to the OLED. The ethernet cable fed into a splitter, one lead feeding the OLED and the other taped against the side of the chest with several feet coiled loosely through the handle. The floor of the dojo was covered in thick soft mats, and as Fede sat back he saw that Cass was sitting on a tightly rolled sleeping bag in brilliant orange cameo.

"Thought of everything" he said.

"The cable's connected to the main server rack in Tonx's room" Cass said. "It's limited, but Tonx said you'd hack into it easy enough. I try to keep things neat around here, despite Tonx's best efforts."

They sat quietly for a moment. Fede pushed his bag up next to the chest, looked around his new blue bubble.

"Why do you like it dark?" Cass asked.

"What?"

"Tonx said you'd like the rest of the Dojo to be dark. Said that's how you liked to program. How come?"

Fede thought a moment. "It helps me see what I'm doing" he said. "When I program, it's like I'm seeing the shape of the code, of the program. It's easier to do when I can't see anything else."

Cass nodded, smiled slightly. Fede wondered if she thought he was crazy.

"He thinks you're pretty good" she said. Her eyes reflected the glow of the OLED panel overhead. "Are you?"

"I guess so" he said. "What's it to you?"

"It's my ass on the line. Maybe Tonx didn't tell you, but this is a big fucking deal. He's pulling in a lot of favors to make this one go through. There's a lot of risk involved. Tonx has every confidence in you, but I don't know you from shit."

She tilted her head and leaned forward, suddenly threatening, the muscles in her neck tight. "You going to let us down, Feed?"

Fede didn't say anything. Cass watched him. When he'd been a kid Fed's Dad had held him by the chin for the better part of twenty minutes, yelling at him that he wasn't anything if he couldn't look him in the eye. Fede had almost pissed himself on the cheap carpeting of their second-rate flat, but he had ended up staring his Dad down, looking into where his Dad really was, looking there and not flinching. Fede and Tonx had talked about it later, agreed that it was important somehow. Fede didn't know where his Dad was now, but he knew he could keep his eyes pegged on this girl when it mattered. It mattered now.

"I'll do it" he said.

She smiled that same half-smile again. "We'll see. Just don't get us killed, okay?" Cass leaned forward to crawl past Fed.

"Where is he?" he asked.

"Who, Tonx? He's out making arrangements. Our man is coming in through Florida and Tonx's asked some colleagues to make the pickup. Tonx's pretty well known in the body-mod scene down there. He's done a lot of work, mostly on the Cuban edgers. They got some real hardcore shit. Tonx helped pioneer a lot of it." She stopped, half-in, half-out of the tent. "You don't know much about him, do you?"

Fede pulled out some drives and a hub and started cabling them together. Cass was gone a moment later.