Transcendence (20 page)

But what he saw were phantoms, no more real than what he had seen a moment prior, no more real than what he had expected to see. He rebooted again, this time scrutinizing not only his surroundings but also his expectations. This time, though the world flickered—as was to be expected when rebooting what was essentially part of his brain, linked to his neural milieu—he saw only lights, heard only the buzzing of stray current coursing through his synapses.

“
This is crazy,” he said, suddenly observing himself rationally. He was acting like a rapthead, trying to defeat his sense of reality, doubting the very evidence of his senses. He shook his head and turned to face the boys.

Jhishra and his guards stood before him. Nadir took a step back—he had nearly bumped into the little man.

“
What are you doing?” the Boss asked.

“
Rebooting my card,” Nadir asked, out of breath. “I’ve been having trouble with the damned thing.”

Jhishra squinted at him, then looked away. “We finally find something,” the Boss said. “You worried the Niks made off with their treasures, right? Well, we find them. Cases of ammo and tanks of rations. Even some components. Most compatible with our needs. Pleased?”

Nadir nodded, relieved that the raid had proven to be more than a tally-run. Relieved that the fortress actually bore tactical significance.

“
Have one of the techs run diagnostics on your card,” Jhishra said. Nadir could tell the man was still squinting. “We can’t have our Sub-boss crashing in the middle of a firefight, can we now?”

Nadir acknowledged the order and set off to find the tech he most trusted, a Ukrainian boy who was deft in directly accessing EarthCo’s best medical computers via satellite. He walked, watching the dance of death and life around him, listening to the monopera, listening to the animal cries of the boys, and felt himself at the center of a spectacular ballet. As he stepped over tagged marks, the old smile tried to creep back onto his face.

He’d been a fool to doubt himself, to question EarthCo even for a moment. He’d nearly snared himself in the trap two of his men had set for themselves . . . he couldn’t remember their names. But he saw them again now, lying on the sand, their faces tight with pleasure and horror, lost in feed. They had twitched a bit. Their arms and legs whipped around, making sand-angels on the desert. Then their faces fell slack, and they were dead.

Nadir strained to remember their names, but couldn’t. He couldn’t even picture
their faces, just the muscle spasms beneath the skin. Then he couldn’t remember anything about the past weeks crossing the desert, except fleeting images and music, and he began to panic. Had those two men been hit by electronic warfare, or had it been something else. . . ? His mind seemed to be hitting a block. But remembering wasn’t important. He didn’t need to remember, certainly didn’t want to. There was nothing in his past he needed to
remember, nothing he wanted to remember—not the lifeless years in Wolf Point, not the Marshalls, not any battle in the past.

No. All that mattered was now, this moment, because anything beyond now was dead. The past lay in the wormy vault of yesterday. A sniper could kill him two steps from now, killing every tomorrow to come. Now was all that mattered.

Nadir watched two of his boys drag a young woman out into the courtyard. Her body was wrapped in the purple beads that designated the local whores. She was naked except for the beads and strips of cloth. They began to do what boys do.

Nadir was about to speak, but then he averted his eyes and said nothing to stop them, whistling in time with the oboes of the monopera, loud enough to drown out the noises. This was the familiar. This was the now. All became right in his world. If not . . . who was he to question why? Why the perfect fort in the middle of nowhere? Why the hidden faces in the marks? Why the easy victories? But to ask why would mean having to report his observations to superiors like Jhishra. That could bring only trouble, or worse, and would help no one, least of all this whore.

Fresh screams painted a background static against which his thoughts couldn’t be reflected, in which they were muffled. And feed helped. The monopera roared like an ocean’s waves against his cranial shore. No, he would not question anything. He would not destroy his world, would not shatter the life he had finally achieved. He could never go back to a place like Wolf Point. He would rather be dead. Questions were for fools and those who had nothing to lose. It would take a lot more than a few quirks of the card to make Nadir abandon all that he had earned.

Spirits lifting as adrenaline unexpectedly pumped into his veins, Nadir began to sing along with the tenor in his head:

I’m alive,

Burned alive,

In the rising sun.

I am ev’ryone.

You’re me.

Jonathan Sombrio scuffs along the sidewalk, kicking the scattered rubble and shrapnel of a city consumed by the slow-motion war of entropy and habitation. Sporadic gunshots echo in the distance. A whitenoise buzz at the corner of his perception warns Jonathan a Zone is approaching.

Most of his attention is on the
Lone Ship Bounty
rerun. It is more than half way done. He’s able to feel a little excited about that, anxious to find out what’s going to happen to his Captain.

The serial is overlaid on a halftone splice of reality. The effect is that the teetering buildings around him radiate an eerie greater-than-real feeling, as if black and white is the proper color for Chicago Avenue, as if this place—almost continually under Mobile Hostile Zoning—deserves to appear composed of tiny dots. The street, if this mass of upended tar and rusting hulks can be called a street, finally ends at a high black wall of hicarb rising three stories and blocking the view of skyscrapers beyond. Up to about eye-height, it is graffitied so thick with a physical and 3VRD-interactive coating that the wall seems to rise from a shattered psychedelic eggshell.

“
Jonathan Sombrio,” a soft female voice blurts into his mind, “ID #SZ40168-dash-dash-ECo-dash, are you ready to return to your schooling?”

“
Go to hell,” he says.

“
My records show you have returned home from treatment, and have now been away from your home for a considerable period. Your downtime is over. Prepare for class.”

“
I thought I’d have a few days,” he says, feeling this is exactly what he doesn’t need right now. He still blocks the teacher-program’s 3VRD. “They told me—”

“
You have returned home from treatment, and are now well away—”

“
Shut up,” he says. “Fine. Let the edufeed begin.”

“
I am reading anomalous feedback from your card. Are you blocking my 3-verd feed? Your educational vixperience will be severely limited if you—”

“
Fine,” he says, shutting down the block. “Are you happy?”

“
I do not have feelings,” an attractive, middle-aged woman says, flickering overlaid across Jonathan’s pov. “But giving you a good education is very important to me.”

She picks up exactly where they left off last session, a few weeks prior, when Jonathan was admitted to Minneapple Corrections. She begins by pulling up behind her a map of North America, then slowly advancing it toward Jonathan so he can interact with her lecture. At the center, the United States grows larger as it approaches, a thousand twinkling lights indicating information-exchange centers—mostly cities. A network of pink 3D highways joins the centers, some arching hundreds of kilometers above the surface, others diving undersea, still others stretching like old-time roads across the land. Actually, Jonathan is intrigued with netography; he programmed his studies for a concentration in information networking and geographics.

But, for fear of becoming too distracted by school when he is about to reunite with his old gang—his last hope, besides Charity, and his greatest fear—he engages a blackcard program that slowly shifts the splice to one side where it merely becomes a curious muffle at the edge of his perception. His body grows stiff with expectation, and his mouth goes dry, but he must contact them now or they’ll tear him apart. Anyhow, he needs their software and massively firewalled servers to immerse himself in what he does best.

Now the street and barrier wall stand naked before him, starkly real, solid and corroded; the 3VRD graffiti is gone, so the wall becomes merely a barrier smeared by inartistic hands. The eggshell is gone. He draws a deep sigh to relax and opens a shielded comm BW to call the Malfits. Though his hope is tiny, though his capacity for it is limited, he dreams for a better . . . something. But, then, he’s not sure if hope or fear that had had the stronger hand in bringing him here.

The instant he taps into the city’s local net, Lucas is waiting—centered in Jonathan’s pov, revealing that he’s projecting via blackcard, since Jonathan has shifted his regular card’s splice to the left. The boy’s smile is twice as wide as a human’s mouth could be, lined with shark teeth; his body undulates slowly, as if suspended in liquid stirred by a light current. His skin is blacker than any pigment, only visible against the background of garbage and rubble. His eyes stand out like beacons, and the teeth gleam pearlescent. Seeing him again makes Jonathan seethe with hatred.

“
Blackjack was wondering when you’d call,” Lucas says, his 3VRD voice like a sawblade across stone.

Jonathan winces: Behind that virtual sound is a true threat. He had witnessed what Lucas could do to people’s meat—people who weren’t ready for the likes of that boy.

“
Blackjack doesn’t like it when his drones stay away so long.” The nightmare figure grows agitated. “Better come into the ’board right away while he still has the patience to deal nicely with you.” And he’s gone.

Jonathan turns to his left, knowing where the entrance would appear once the gang’s security had cleared him. A sheer wall of chipped and graffitied brick fades to an underlying layer of concrete, then a riveted steel door stands as the last of a succession of virtually real defenses. Jonathan steps forward, places his right hand against a reader-plate beside the door, and it, too, vanishes, leaving only a hicarb wall standing in front of him. They had carefully quarried two feet out of the old tenement-house’s wall to be able to emplace 3VRD defenses—using projectors, so anyone with a headcard at all would see them, whether or not the card was on—defenses that would hold up against close scrutiny, and which would physically block anyone with even the simplest card. Blackjack had chosen this site to house the Malfits’ ’board, at the end of the road between Zones and nice downtown. Jonathan assumed it was a psychologically sound decision: The beatcoats would never think to look for a gang hangout at the point where they’d most likely be trapped during Zone.

The hicarb door slides aside and an anemic-looking girl stands in the entry hall. Her eyes are defocused, staring right through him. A corner of her mouth quirks as her voice sings in his head. Her avatar is a barely visible glimmer of light. Jonathan’s chest tightens as he wonders what has so ruined her card. Then his stomach tightens as he guesses why. It had nearly happened to him, and someone very close. . . .

“
Hey, Lucy,” he says, projecting a smiling avatar to cover his sadness, “what’s on?”

“
What’s on?” she repeats. “Come on board. . .” Pause. “Jonathan.”

Jonathan steps into the small entryway and squeezes her hand. Her real eyebrows rise briefly, and the other corner of her mouth rises to a full smile which vanishes just as quickly. Jonathan can’t think of a thing to say.

The door behind him slides shut and the other one a few meters along the hall slides open, releasing the strong odor of hot electronics. The shark-boy waits at the other end.

“
Time to see Blackjack,” Lucas says, turning away and already starting to walk.

Jonathan follows Lucas through the ’board; gangs like this call their hangouts “motherboards” because they house heavy servers and shielded and encrypted net-tapping equipment for their members’ use. The old house has been renovated to resist grenades and sniper fire: Windows are bulletproof ultraglas, walls are steel and hicarb-reinforced. The inner walls of the structure look dull grey to Jonathan with his splice off-center, only occasionally punctuated by livid projectors, both static art pieces and subscription-relays. Lucas leads Jonathan down a flight of creaking wooden steps and stops before another nondescript hicarb door.

“
You’ve kept Blackjack waiting long enough,” Lucas says, and passes a webbed hand before the door. It slides open and Lucas abruptly disappears.

“
Jonny boy,” a ragged, high-pitched voice calls, “come in.”

Jonathan crosses the threshold and hears the door grind shut behind him. The room is drowned in darkness, making Jonathan’s edufeed glow at the corner of his vision like a dream glimpsed in waking: indistinct yet unforgettable.