Authors: Christopher McKitterick
And now Miru, burning with the anger and frustration he had learned in his childhood aboard Ryukyu Floating Island on Earth, felt a surge of happiness.
Happiness, why?
he wondered. Yet, even as he asked himself, the answer crystallized.
This moment was the pinnacle of his life. Every moment leading up to now, every person—friend or otherwise—every action he had taken, and every piece of data he had studied
. . .
all this led to now, to this place, to this gleaming crystal in time.
He smiled to himself, watching colored snowflakes drift down around him into shadows at his feet. He felt more than happy. He had earned this place, this moment, yes, but he had also been given the gift of being
aware
he was happy. He had walked beyond happiness into the pure emotional world of joy. Even fear of death did not diminish his joy; indeed, that fear spurred him. He possessed something more powerful than fear of death or war. He stood at the gate of a great discovery, was about to open the door to knowledge, joyous knowledge that promised . . . who knows? And that was the point of his work after all, the point of all scientific inquiry.
“
It’s time we told everyone in the Solar System about you,” he told the temple’s gleaming walls, patting the hard surface. This time, he disarmed the overhead electromagnetic shield and threw open his suit’s transmitter. He hoped President Dorei wouldn’t block retransmission of the stream of data he began to narrate for anyone who happened to be listening.
Miru thought of the approaching warship.
He might die.
But we all die
, he thought. Better to die at life’s summit with a panoramic view of one’s existence than at its pain-bouldered basin. He would die, if necessary, spreading knowledge . . . and hope.
He again set off in search of an entrance.
Around Jonathan, the city stands high and shadowed and quiet, seeming as empty of life as an automated factory at midnight. Afternoon sunlight filters down through the ever-present haze that smells of dust and ozone, falling in luminescent green columns onto the street. The sun offers no warmth, and his breath is a puff of fog before him.
Jonathan works hard not to notice any of this, instead concentrating on his splice, a virtual-reality subscription inserted into his field of view like a wedge splitting reality. Another channel he subscribes to plays the newest form of rock, revmetal, 24 hours a day. He has shut off the video so nothing but music penetrates. The notes are torn from the strains of engines and the bone-bass thumps of steam presses, human voices barely perceptible above their industrial accompaniment.
At the same time, he’s double-subscribed—naturally, he’s not paying the kind folks who, unwittingly, let him electronically feed from their home systems—into an adventure flick he never misses, entitled,
Lone Ship Bounty
. The center 30-degree wedge of his vision is spliced with the show, pushing reality 15 degrees to each side so this virtual world can take center stage.
Lone Ship Bounty
isn’t scheduled to begin for an hour, but the previews are sometimes as interesting as the show itself. Except when his captain is in real-time combat: That’s the best. Jonathan especially enjoys watching the Captain, his quick decision-making, his sure confidence in crisis. Secretly, he wishes he were the Captain. The Captain was from Minneapolis, too. Jonathan bets that no one ever got the best of
him
, when he lived here. Jonathan knows about being used.
Echoes of shrieks and laughter dash off the steel and concrete facings of the real buildings near him, so Jonathan kicks open his cloud of data-icons and begins to walk faster. A ground-car screeches around a corner. Jonathan rushes to the ragged sidewalk just before the wheeled vehicle roars past, spewing a cloud of exhaust from poorly burned methane. If it weren’t for the shrieks and this car, Jonathan might think Minneapolis abandoned.
“
Meat!” he cusses the driver using both his physical voice and the public:local comm channel. At the same time, he reaches down for a chunk of concrete. He throws it after the beetle-sleek car. But by the time his projectile falls, the target is far away, dodging charred hulks of other cars as well as shattered aluminum and glass panels fallen long ago from the old towers. He cusses again, mentally dashing through network channels to find this guy and tell him a thing or two. What kind of retro drives a ground car intheflesh anymore, anyway? The guy isn’t even transmitting a signal.
Then, embarrassed, Jonathan realizes he too is traveling intheflesh. He is on his way home from Minneapple Corrections, which just released him from feedrapture-addiction treatment, where he spent a damned long time, including his sixteenth birthday, ostensibly learning that a healthy boy needs to lead more than a purely electronic life. The car vanishes from his mind.
“‘
Feedrapture-addiction,’ phah!” He spits. He never felt enraptured while spliced into layer upon layer of the virtual world. Only relieved. Who wouldn’t? Who doesn’t? Anyhow, Jonathan spends more time in his physical world than many he knows.
He pulls his concentration from the spliced-in subscription—not needing to shut it off, so adept is he at this—and studies his physical surroundings as if they had just now sprouted from the street.
Unedited, clear of overlays, the city seems to crash down all around, ominous, heavy, impenetrable. Few objects display any info-icons, and those that do offer little in the way of comfort. His nostrils fill with the stench of decaying garbage and damp cement. The shrieks end with a final rising note, and the laughter ends with them.
Now silence, except for gravel and broken glass scuffling beneath his boots as he walks.
He is alone. No, alone isn’t a strong enough word for how he feels. Once upon a time he had been in love . . . what? only a year ago. Not with an individ—a subscription fantasy mate almost everyone enjoys at one time or another—no, that isn’t for Jonathan. His love was a real girl, someone he’d been with intheflesh. érase was her handle. As he begins to think of her, powerful need automatically brings an individ program to life, a program that his former—
goddammit,
former!
Jonathan thinks—gang leader had him download. Jonathan has to force himself to stop dreaming of érase to shut down the damned thing, beautiful girl or no.
“
Fucking government card,” he mutters, cursing his cybernetic implant for its utter lack of security against such downloads, and what a bitch it is to erase them without damaging the other data contained in memory.
For a moment, his ephemeral brain-fingers almost touch his black-market card, almost power it up, almost nudge him back onto the road that led to feedrapture and those idiotically concerned nurses at the Center. Because he was still unenfranchised—and won’t be franchised with EarthCo until he turns twenty-one and proves himself worthy of becoming a full, shareholding citizen—they hadn’t probed his head. In the old days before the politi-corps, the unenfranchised used to be called “minors” or “homeless.” Because the Center staff hadn’t probed him, they hadn’t noticed the blackcard implanted in his scalp. Had he been a few years older, they would have looked for and found it, and he could have been sentenced to five years of virtual lockup. Simple as that. He’s seen it happen to other kids, others from the gang. Their slack faces attested to the claim that virtual lockup is more secure than the physical prisons of history.
Something in the distance
booms
, followed by a shockwave that rattles the metal grate protecting a chipboard window beside him. Jonathan stops and turns to see what’s happening while resuming the city’s default overlay, bristling with information and ads.
A chorus of whistles slashes the air, whistles followed by howls of pain. Cracks and sharp bangs answer the chorus, and this orchestra rivals the music in Jonathan’s revmetal subscription. He realizes the booms come from sonic grenades, the cracks and bangs from antique guns, the whistles from police rifles.
A pair of young men round a building and run toward Jonathan.
“
Zone behind us!” one of them shouts at Jonathan via a line-of-sight personal-comm channel, his self-projection appearing for a moment overlaid atop Jonathan’s splice, then disappearing just as quickly. Though the words shouted in the air are hard to discern amid the noise, those fed direct to Jonathan’s neural receivers are as clear as the man’s calm, smiling 3VRD image, his concept of himself.
“
Beatcoats heading this way, stupid,” the other man says, also flashing in front of Jonathan with tailored perfection, then winking out.
Jonathan finds his legs, turns, and begins to run. He’s been inside a mobile hostile zone before and feels no urge to repeat the experience. Beatcoat cops don’t have the same restrictions as regular police.
Thunder rattles in his skull. He hasn’t gotten far enough away. Thunder for three seconds, then a booming voice and a disorienting 90-degree grey-out splice that pushes reality far into his peripheral vision:
“
ATTENTION ALL CITIZENS IN RANGE OF THIS FEED. DO NOT BE ALARMED. DO NOT TRY TO RUN OR YOU WILL BE TARGETED. DO NOT BLOCK THIS POLICE OPERATION, AUTHORIZATION ZIGFIELD-PP107. WE ARE SEEKING THESE MEN—”
Several men of varying skin color appear in front of Jonathan, who—since he is a master of splices and overlays—is still running, keeping his attention on the fuzzy periphery. Statistics, names, and credit IDs roll across the sizzling grey background of the splice while 3VRD images of the men slowly spin, sprouting beards and changing hairstyles. Dozens of info-icons glitter above them, awaiting Jonathan’s mental attention to click them open.
“
IF YOU ARE ON THIS LIST, SURRENDER. DO NOT RESIST. IF YOU RECOGNIZE ANY OF THESE MEN, CONTACT US NOW ON ANY BANDWIDTH. DO NOT HESITATE OR YOU COULD BE CHARGED WITH OBSTRUCTION, MOBILE HOSTILE ZONE CODE 97, PARAGRAPH 19. . .”
Jonathan recognizes one of the men as the first one who had warned him of the approaching Zone. He doesn’t even consider telling the cops. He runs, dodging a man lying prone across the sidewalk.
Where did all these people come from?
Like insects, they spill out of every crevice where they had lain quiet, alive only in their skulls and virtual lives. I bet none of them had to endure feedrapture treatment, Jonathan thinks. He grows angrier.
The invasion of his brain continues, but now he can’t tell whether the thunder he’s hearing is grenades or the beatcoat cop splice.
As he rounds the ragged edge of a brick building, Jonathan collides with a young woman. He rebounds from her, tumbling to the rubble at the base of a wall while she falls backward against a heap of molding garbage.
“
. . .AUTHORIZATION TO USE LETHAL MEASURES. . .”
“
You okay?” he asks, communicating via personal-comm channel rather than talking, as usual. When she doesn’t answer, he realizes the beatcoat splice is blocking all electronic feed but theirs. Of course. While rising to his feet, he repeats the question using his meat-speech equipment: throat and mouth.
“
I’m afraid,” she says. Her voice is barely audible above the high-volume greyout voice-over and electronic hum. “I can’t see anything but those horrible men.”
Jonathan studies her as best he can in the unfocusable corners of his vision. She seems so small against the backdrop of trash and abandoned stuff. She weeps quietly. The memory of the Captain gives him strength to make a decision.
“
C’mon,” he says, taking her hand without faltering. “Hurry.” He pulls her to her feet and begins to run, tugging her along. She follows, stumbling over every obstacle.
“
. . .DO NOT RESIST. . .”
On the street Jonathan leaves behind, a sonic grenade falls and pulses, blasting him nearly off his feet, battering his back with debris thrown before the shockwave. The girl trips and he has to drag her for several steps until she regains her footing. He will not stop running now, not for anything.
“
. . .DO NOT RUN. . .”
Gunpowder-type automatic-weapons fire bursts to life from a broken window in the building across the street, pounding the air with a sustained drum-roll. The girl screams. Jonathan grips her hand tighter as the cops’ particle-accelerator rifles whine and snap. Too close. Jonathan grits his teeth, breath hot in his throat as he runs.
A new cross-street slides into view, and Jonathan pulls the girl onto its sidewalk. Something about the building’s construction shields a great deal of the greyout and, suddenly, Jonathan’s adventure-series splice flickers back into view like an overlay in the middle 30 degrees. The calm, authoritarian voice of the beatcoats becomes muffled and staticky. He realizes the revmetal is still screaming and pounding at the back of his skull, so he shuts it off.