The Eternal Prison (49 page)

 

This shit wouldn’t last. The System was in chaos; the civil war had gotten savage and even in the cities that were still in one piece—according to the good citizens of Shitholes, America—the System Cops didn’t have much time for keeping order anymore. But someone was going to win the fucking war, and when they did, they’d start paying attention to the shitholes.

 

So, I’d stayed long enough to dry off and buy what I could, get some news (a few mobile Vid screens had made their way to the shitholes), ask my one question, and get some sleep. It was tiring, moving from place to place, baking in the day and freezing at night, but I wanted to get back to familiar surroundings. New York was, by all reports, an impact crater these days, but at least I knew something about it, and if anyone had hung on and survived in it through the Plague and the war, it was my people.

 

The sign outside this particular shithole had read englewood. I had no idea where I was, and it was fucking amusing that someone thought they knew where they were enough to give it a name. Or maybe, like with most of the shitholes, the place had already had a name, faded and forgotten, dusted off by refugees and adopted from the past. Why not? People liked to think that places had always had names, had always had a spot on the map.

 

Englewood was a neat little collection of sagging buildings arranged on either side of a wide, cracked memory of a street. Some of the structures had fallen into themselves, just sighing down into a comfortable doze, but some were still sturdy looking, and a few plumes of white smoke here and there attested to another population of grubby survivalists. I pushed my coat back to give me access to the Roons, my heartbeat speeding up as I took in the layout of the place, searching for the shadows and empty buildings that might be my only path of retreat if things turned ugly.

 

As I stepped from the brush onto the wide street, which just began as if someone had been building a road and then just decided to stop, the quiet brought the hairs on my arms up on end. My leg ached as I limped, squinting through the late-day twilight, my skin itching under my dirty, stiff clothes. The place was obviously inhabited by
someone
—aside from the neat smoke pumping out of some of the buildings, the street was packed and swept, and some of the buildings sported fresh repairs that stood out against the sun-cracked originals. I could hear the scrape of dry dirt under my pathetic boots, and I laid my right hand on the butt of one gun, a familiar sour rush of adrenaline flooding me.

 

Then I stopped. One of the repaired buildings, out of which a thin trickle of white smoke rose to the sky, had a new sign propped up against the rotted, dangerous-looking front steps. HOMMAAD BOOSE it read in bright red, streaky paint. Or blood, who the fuck knew?

 

I considered, mouth watering. If these assholes had something resembling liquor on hand, I was prepared to kill for it.

 

I walked over to the building, eyes everywhere. The interior was dark, with no door in the not-quite-square doorway. I had a sense that someone was inside, and I hesitated: I didn’t know the building, whether there was a back way out or if there were people who would crowd in behind me if I entered. I took the time to walk around the whole place, slowly, turning frequently, my hand still on the butt of the gun. I didn’t see anything threatening. There was a back door, hanging loose and useless on hinges that were more rust than metal at this point—the sort of door that satisfyingly turned to dust when you slammed into it—and as I circled back around to the front, I figured if I was willing to kill for a stiff drink, I might as well be willing to die for one. Slowly, trying to will my old eyes to adjust quickly, I stepped up and into the place.

 

It smelled like smoke and dust inside, dry and musty. I could see immediately that someone had been cleaning the place up—the floor was old and rotten but had been cleared of debris and swept sometime in the last century. Along the back wall was a makeshift bar—just a collection of barrels and crates with some planks set on top. All around the perimeter of the room was the junk that had once clogged the floor: piles of wood, glass, bits of metal here and there. None of it meant anything to me, and none of it looked at all recent.

 

Behind the “bar” was a tall, thin kid, half my age or less, awkward looking. He had shaggy brown hair that was hanging in his eyes and the largest Adam’s apple I’d ever seen. It bobbed up and down inside his throat like he was trying to swallow a mouse. His eyes were squinty, narrow and shifty looking, but the way he gripped the edge of his bar told me he was afraid. He worked his throat a bit, watching me approach, and finally managed a full-on swallow and cleared his throat.

 

“You real, mister?”

 

I frowned at him.

 

“Human?” Before I could reply, his eyes rolled up and down me, and he seemed to decide the answer for himself, nodding. “We ain’t got nothing to steal, mister,” he squeaked.

 

I shook my head. “I’m not a thief, kid.”

 

Squeaky blinked at me several times rapidly. “Oh,” he said, as if I’d just spoken gibberish he couldn’t possibly understand.

 

I nodded. “You sell liquor here?” He stared at me for a few moments, so I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “The sign outside?”

 

He blinked again, and once he’d started it seemed difficult for him to stop. “Oh! Yes, uh, that is, I make some pretty good stuff in the back. Trade for it, mostly.”

 

I nodded again, stepping forward. “I’ve got yen.”

 

He watched me approaching with some alarm. “Yen? Uh, we don’t, uh… well, I guess.” His eyes lighted on my hand resting on the gun for a second and then whipped back up to me. “Uh, I guess we can take yen. Hiller makes his way north to the city sometimes, and yen still means something there.” He squinted a little, suddenly getting some pluck. “It would take, uh, a
lot
of yen, though.”

 

I nodded a third time, turning to scan behind me briefly. Yen was only worth anything by the fucking metric ton these days. “How much? Do you get many folks through here?”

 

He shook his head. “Some. One or two a month maybe, usually comin’ from Vegas. They fucking melted Vegas into the desert, you know? Not a fucking building standing.” He considered as I leaned against the bar, my coat pushed aside to keep one gun clear. “I’d say two million yen a glass,” he finally said and then started blinking again. He was tense, and I figured if I made any sudden moves he’d probably jump six feet into the air.

 

“Fine,” I said, fishing in a pocket. I’d gotten a new credit dongle from a corpse I’d stumbled across in the first week of wandering, black and bloated and sheltered in a little copse of brush. Dongles were easy enough to wipe and reprogram—all you needed was your fingerprint and your code, and I was surprised to find out how much of the fortune given to me by Dick Marin himself in exchange for destroying the Electric Church was still there. Worth much, much less, but still there. I handed the dongle over to him, and he stared at it for a moment, as if he couldn’t remember what it was.

 

“Oh! Right. Hold on. I’ve got a reader here somewhere. I’ll get your drink first.”

 

He dashed into the back, and for a second I wondered if I’d just been robbed by the worst thief to ever walk the earth. A moment later he returned, though, juggling a dirty-looking jar filled with cloudy liquid, an even dirtier-looking glass, and an old, battered credit reader. He slapped the glass onto the bar and placed the jar next to it, indicating with a jerk of his head that I should help myself. I unscrewed the greasy cap and gave the stuff an experimental sniff, burning off a few nose hairs in the process. I poured the thick stuff into the glass, half expecting it to dissolve, and felt a stab of joy.
This
was almost like old times. If it turned me blind, it would be
exactly
like old times.

 

“What’s your name, then?” the kid said, scurrying back to return my credit dongle. I’d bought a drink and failed to murder him in the first three minutes, so now he was friendly and relaxed. “You looking for a place to settle in?” He looked at my guns again. “Be warned: we got some trouble here, you know?” He looked back at me. “Fucking Monks and avatars. Fucking Droids with brains, harassing us.”

 

I nodded. I’d heard tales—just like some people had hit the wilderness trying to stay one step ahead of the war, there were old, broken-down Monks and your occasional damaged cop avatar wandering around, too, generally murdering people and burning shit down. “Cates,” I said. “Avery Cates. Not from around here. Not staying, either.” I swallowed the stuff in the glass and had to stand still for a moment fighting my gag reflex. It tasted like the kid had made it from his old underwear, just squeezing out the juice into a jar. But it burned nicely and settled into a terrible, sour ball in my stomach, lighting up fires that had been dormant for too long. I gave him a smile and poured myself a second glass.

 

The kid held out his hand suddenly. It had been so long since anyone had been polite to me; I just stared at it for a moment before taking it carefully. He pumped it up and down exactly three times.

 

“Glad to meet you, then, Cates. You sure about not staying? We could use a… a… cop, I guess. A sheriff or something. Someone who knows how to handle one of those.”

 

He nodded his chin at the Roon at my side. I shook my head and picked up the glass. “Fuck, kid, I’m not a
cop.
” I studied the cloudy liquor for a moment and then looked back at him. “I’m just passing through. Actually, I’m looking for someone; maybe you saw someone like him. Short guy, almost a fucking midget. Old. Older than me, if you can believe it. Has kind of a funny accent sometimes. Sometimes goes by the name Michaleen Garda. Sometimes”—I toasted my glass —“he goes by the name Cainnic Orel.”

 

 

 

 

APPENDIX

Final Audio Diary Entry of Lieutenant Thomas Kittinger-98, retrieved from Site ID CH-099-U7 (Chengara Penitentiary, North American Department)

Joint Council File #904TY9

 

Reviewed by: T. Greene, Joint Council Undersecretary

 

 

Background: Despite its widespread and involuntary use within the System Security Force, evidence indicates that a balance is sought between servitude—programmed limitations and hardwired prohibitions—and free will within the avatars being created by the SSF. Reports indicate that Director Marin, himself now fully digital, fears that some indefinable aspect of humanity is lost when the brain is digitized and that this “uncanny lapse” will result in a loss of creativity and inspiration-type thought. As a result efforts are made to leave avatars within the SSF—and now, as the program expands, within the general population—as much freedom of thought and action as possible while still maintaining the control coding required by Director Marin.

 

This audio diary was retrieved from level four of the Chengara installation while army forces held it briefly earlier this year. A records search indicates that Lieutenant Kittinger was a model officer in the SSF, once posted to New York and fast-tracked for promotion. Subsequent to involuntary processing into a digital intelligence housed inside an Augmented self-powered HUDAUG-9 unit, however, his performance has become erratic and his failure rate abnormally high, eventually leading to all of his units in active service being posted to guard duty at Chengara.

 

He is the only digitized officer of the SSF known to have kept a diary. This is the final entry made; other entries are still classified T-1 and can only be accessed by Undersecretary Ruberto.

 

 

I wanted to go into medical. I’m not sure why or if I’d ever have had the fucking brains for it, but when I was a kid I always wanted to get into surgery or something. Cut things out of people, see how things work. I wanted to peel open some guy’s chest and yank out the ribs and
see
all that shit inflating and whirring, moving. I liked the idea that we were all just parts, like a hover—you could pull a displacement blade out of one hover and jam it into another. I wanted to make a person from spare parts.

 

I knew I wasn’t going to test into medical, though. The sciences in general were tough; everyone knew that. No one could tell you why or what you were supposed to be good at, but everyone knew the things you had to be good at to muster into anything were unexpected. There were stories. Like a kid who could draw anything, just glance at something and sketch it perfectly, like a human digital recorder, testing into CS8, government services, so he could sit behind a desk all fucking day hating life. Or a girl who could run marathons, just hours a day on the treads without even breaking a sweat, testing into PO9, media, and becoming one of those lame talking heads on the Vids. Everyone knew it made no fucking sense, or it made sense in a brilliant way you had to be a genius to comprehend. This was the conventional wisdom
.

 

No one could tell me what I had to test out on in order to get into medical, but whatever it was I was pretty sure I didn’t have it.

 

I didn’t have anything. I lay on my cot in the UA dorm the night before my testing week and stared at the ceiling, heart pounding. Some kids tried to prepare. They studied and practiced. If they were good at something, they practiced that. If they
wanted
to be good at something, they practiced
that.
The other wisdom was, since you never knew what would muster you into something, the best you could do was be really good at
something
so at least if you mustered into an unexpected kind of field, you would muster in at a high level. Even making it into medical would suck if I was only rated thirteen or fourteen. That meant mopping up blood and doing injections all fucking day.

 

Everyone knew how to game the tests, but you sort of knew no one really knew.

 

I can’t remember anyone’s name. That’s weird, but they fucking cooked my brain making me into this fucking piece of tech, so who knows. Who knows if any of my memories are real. Or if they’re correct. For all I fucking know it’s all bullshit. Maybe they just create memories for you; maybe we all have the same fucking memory of testing week, planted in there. I’ll never know. But I can’t remember anyone’s name from the dorms. Lived there for twelve years, with mostly the same kids, and I can remember most of them physically but not their names. I don’t know if that’s because of the processing or not. I’d never tried to remember them before, not for twenty years.