Ultraviolet (21 page)

They really are just rounding up anyone and everyone. They’re that desperate.

With everyone free, the crowd seemed to just get angrier and wilder. They started throwing bottles and cans, and then every random thing in their pockets. Pens and phones and lipstick and pocket knives all went hurling through the air, falling like hail stones on the Cygnus security team.

For a second, the goons looked like they were going to charge the crowd using their shock-clubs, but I pointed my sword at them and they stopped, and then they turned and started jogging back down Pratt Street toward the Cygnus building where I gave myself up to Frost that one night last week.

It felt like months ago.

Suddenly the crowd was all around me, yelling and cheering, and I realized they were all trying to touch me, so I switched down to the regular military armor with the rounded corners so no one would get a finger burned off. I tried to shake some hands and say hello, but I couldn’t hear anything over the shouting and all I could see was this sea of faces and hands lunging at me.

My heart started racing as I backed away, but they were all around me now, all grabbing at me and thumping me on the back and calling my name. And only half of them looked happy to see me. The other half… they scared me. They were angry, probably just as angry at me as they were at Cygnus. And they looked scared.

And so was I.

I shoved through the crowd, letting the armor knock a few people aside so I could get free and as soon as I had some space I called up my bike and raced away again. As soon as I was out on the empty city streets, I turned east going the wrong way on a one-way road and headed for Little Italy, and Fells Point, and Canton.

Every time I saw a Cygnus logo, I pulled over and smashed a van and made sure the people inside got away. And every time, a man in a black suit would point a gun at me, and fire, and I would flinch, but nothing ever touched me.

I kept moving.

Everywhere I went, I told people to go home and keep their families safe and I told the men in black to go back to Cygnus. Most of them listened. But some of them stayed out, picking fights, smashing windows. As I rode through the streets, I felt like I was in a dream or another universe, a universe gone crazy. Everyone was so angry.

I rode over broken glass and half-eaten food dropped in the road. I went into a burning house, only to discover that my armor did nothing to protect me from smoke or heat and I had to make a quick exit once I was sure no one was inside the house.

All afternoon I rode through the city, from the east side all the way back around the harbor to the south side. I didn’t see any more black vans or armed men, or even police, but I saw plenty of people standing outside their homes, most of them carrying baseball bats and pipes and knives. I told them all to stay in their homes, to not answer the doors, to not talk to Cygnus or the police. I promised them I would handle it. I said I would fix it.

And many of them actually listened, and went inside.

By the time the sun was going down, the city was quiet again. I checked the news feeds on my phone and saw things were mostly back to normal. It seemed that, at least for the moment, Cygnus had retreated. So I guess I won.

But it didn’t feel like winning. It felt like I’d just gotten a glimpse of how bad things were going to get, maybe not any time soon but one day, years in the future, when the whole system finally collapsed. When the workers were too exhausted and too poor, when everyone was too sick, when the city was truly crumbling all around us… this is what it would be like. Anger. Fear. Violence. Suffering.

And death.

But only for us. Everyone who could afford to leave would go, and that would be the end of everything.

I sat down on a bench by the harbor and watched the water turn black as the sun vanished and the street lights came on behind me.

“You’re her, aren’t you?” a voice said.

I looked up and saw a middle-aged man in a dark uniform pointing a flashlight at me. A cop.

“Yeah, I’m her.” I tensed a little, but I was too tired to be really scared, and the truth is that he didn’t scare me that much. Just a little.

 He nodded and glanced up and down the plaza. There was no one else around. He looked back at me and lowered his flashlight. “Are you okay?”

I almost didn’t know how to answer him. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Hell of a day.”

“Yeah.”

He took a few steps closer. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Why?” I slid to the edge of the bench, ready to stand, ready to make a big black motorcycle appear to whisk me away.

“Just…” He shrugged. “I have a daughter about your age. I can’t imagine her doing the things you’re doing. I’ve seen all the video. I read the reports. They keep telling us that you’re dangerous. Public enemy number one.”

I flashed a tired smile. “Yeah, that’s me. Big bad numero uno.”

“Well… you should get home. It’s late. They’ll be starting more drone patrols tonight, as soon as the patrol routes are all plotted and synced.”

I nodded and stood up. “Okay. Thanks.” I paused, wondering how much I should be talking to him, trusting him. But I wanted to trust him, so I did. “Have you ever seen anything like today before?”

“Not here, no. But it happens in the bigger cities from time to time. I guess we’re one of those cities now. Riots. Curfews. National guard.” He shook his head.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Martin.”

“Hi, Martin. I’m Carmen.”

He smiled. He looked as tired as I felt.

I turned to go. “Listen, Martin. When you get a chance, you should download the specs for something called a recycler and print one out. Or two. Or ten. Tell your friends. Recyclers.”

“Is it legal?”

“Nope.” I started walking.

“So what’s it do?” he called after me.

“It sets you free,” I said. “It sets everyone free. Good night, Martin.”

I walked a little farther, and then I got on my bike and rode away. I wished the night could have just ended there, magically fading to black so I could sleep and just get away, but that’s not how the world works. I had to ride all the way back to the Cygnus delivery center to grab the printer I had hidden in the alley, and I had to spend half an hour in that alley getting my suit to project a cargo-carrier on the back of the motorcycle, and then I had to spend nearly an hour more driving back to the house out in the county where Felix was waiting for me.

He was standing in the driveway when I pulled up, and the second that the bike vanished he had his arms around me, and he held me, and I held him. I was so tired, and he held me up. He brought the printer and feedstock into the house, and he had some hot food waiting for me, and he rubbed my back, and he sang softly as I ate.

He sang badly, but it was still nice.

But the best part was that he didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t want all the details, he didn’t pester me for a replay of all the insanity I had seen that day. He just looked at me, and then took care of everything between the driveway and bed.

I fell asleep in his arms, and a part of me wanted to never wake up.

Chapter 15
Reset

The next day we took our time getting up and eating and getting dressed. Eventually Felix did ask what happened in the city, and I told him some of it. I told him about the crowds and the vans and the people in cuffs, and the fires and the fights and the broken windows.

He just shook his head and rubbed his eyes. Then he looked over at the printer in the corner. “So. Time to change the world?”

I checked my phone. No news about any more riots during the night. The world was still quiet and sane, for the moment. People were safe, or as safe as they could be. And the only real question was whether I wanted to go back again to play peacemaker in the warzone, and the truth was, I didn’t. I didn’t want to see that again. And even though I know I helped some people yesterday, fighting off men in suits with a giant sword didn’t seem like a good way to change things. And I wanted to really change things. So I said, “Yeah. Let’s go change the world.”

We loaded up all of our food and supplies along with the stolen printer onto my cargo trailer behind my bike, and we were off. We headed northwest, navigating by old satellite maps of the empty counties. Well, they weren’t completely empty. We drove past the farms, mile after mile of tilled fields full of little green and yellow shoots and leaves, all tended by huge machines rolling slowly down the rows, spraying who-knows-what on the food.

Eventually we found what we needed. It was a nice neighborhood. Big houses with big yards between them. But it wasn’t too far from the city, just a few miles straight out old Route 40. That was important. If anyone was ever going to get to us, they’d need it to be easy going on a bicycle, and this was about as easy as we could make it for them.

We picked a house, some huge place with thirty rooms with high arched ceilings and bathrooms full of glass walls and rocky fountains and kitchens that stretched forever past cabinet after sink after cabinet. The solar panels on the roof were in decent shape so we cleaned them off and checked the wiring as best we could, and turned the place on.

It wasn’t full power without the grid, of course, but it was good enough for us. We had lights, a stove, and a fridge, which made us royalty considering the circumstances. I was shocked to find that the faucets and toilets still worked, and Felix said they would probably keep working for weeks if there was enough water still in the old water towers to give us pressure, and only the two of us using any of that water up.

We cleaned up a few rooms, made sure no curious raccoons or bears could get inside, and then we went to work. We fired up the stolen printer, gave it the specs for the recycler, and waited.

“Nervous?” he asked.

“A little.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“Then nothing changes,” I said. “The better question is, what if it
does
work?”

He grinned. “Then everything changes.”

The finished recycler slid out of the printer about five hours later, looking almost identical to the printer itself, just a little smaller.

“Well, here goes nothing.” I put a handful of sticks inside the machine, closed the door, and hit Recycle.

It wasn’t as whisper-quiet as the printer, but the noise wasn’t awful either. It buzzed and whined for about five minutes and then clicked off. I opened the door. The inside bay was empty. Felix pointed to the tray at the back. On a printer, the tray was where you put the feedstock in, loading the cylinders into the round slots. On the recycler, the tray had been empty, but now there was a small brown cylinder in the left slot.

I touched it. “Wood pulp. It works!”

We spent the rest of the day putting all sorts of things into the recycler, anything we could find lying around the old house. Plastic toys, mildewed clothes, broken legs and arms of chairs. Wood, metal, plastic, rubber, cotton, wool. They all worked. Bit by bit, we cleaned out the entire house and yard and the three nearby houses, turning every random thing we could pull free into a tidy little cylinder, which we stacked up against the wall.

By supper time, we had a lot of stacks.

“Now what?” He grinned at me.

“Now?” I grinned back. “Now we start building.”

The next three days were amazing. Crazy. Busy. Quiet. Simple.

We would wake up whenever we wanted to, and then wander outside and work on whatever we wanted to. First we replaced the solar panels on the roof, upgraded to the latest designs by a pair of twin sisters in Portugal. Then we replaced all the windows, and the door knobs, and the switches, and the plumbing fixtures. It was so easy. Just tear out the old and screw in the new. Any time we got stuck, we just had to pull out a phone and search for a tutorial, and ten minutes later we were doing it ourselves like pros.

But we didn’t just make things decent, we made them wonderful. The door knobs were shaped like angel wings, and half the windows were stained glass with images from our favorite movies, and the old bathtub got replaced by a luxury hot tub with a dozen massage features.

We painted the walls with a digital polymer made by a father-son team in Thailand that basically turned every flat surface into a screen, so we could change the colors ten times a day with just a word, or add famous paintings in high definition in the bathroom, or just watch a show on the ceiling.

Then Felix printed out the parts for a greenhouse and while he was out building it in the back yard, I was in the bedroom assembling a set of furniture based on designs from the court of King Louis XIV. And after that I put together a dining room set from the old
Lord of the Rings
movies.

The carpets on the floors were all custom tapestries of whatever we wanted. Dragons in the living room, the periodic table in the guest room, spaceships in the back hall.

Of course, there were limits. We didn’t have the right feedstock to make just anything. We didn’t have any precious metals or modern plastics. But we made do. Especially with wood. There was plenty of wood.

So we filled up every room with beautiful things, and to be honest, the end result was pretty ridiculous. Nothing went together. Everything clashed. But everything was the best of everything, and it hadn’t cost a cent.

For three days we worked together, just for ourselves. No offices, no factories, no bosses, no paperwork, no schedules, no meetings, no nonsense. Just making things and building our home. Our very strange, very eclectic model home.

But there was one problem. A very large problem, one we didn’t talk about out loud because neither of us had any idea how to solve it.

Food.

The greenhouse would grow some food, eventually. But we needed food now, every day. It was the one area where the printer failed us. It couldn’t turn simple feedstock like wood pulp into complex organic objects like tomatoes and steaks. So after a long day of replacing appliances and assembling furniture, we would put a movie on the ceiling and scour the Internet (the real Internet, thanks to Dean’s magic hacking app) on our phones for any information at all about printing food.