Future on Fire Read online

  He knocked. The door opened, security slides stopping it at a two-inch slice of girl-face. “Yeah?”

  “You’re going to think this is stolen.” He passed the programmer from hand to hand. “I mean because it’s new, a virtual cherry, and the bar code’s still on it. But listen, I’m not gonna argue the point. No. I’m gonna let you have it for only like half of what you’d pay anywhere else.”

  “Hey, wow, really, no kidding?” The visible fraction of mouth twisted into a strange smile. She extended her hand, palm up, a loose fist. Level with his chin. “Lookahere!”

  There was a hole in her hand, a black tunnel that ran right up her arm. Two small, red lights. Rat’s eyes. They scurried toward him—growing, gleaming. Something gray streaked forward and leaped for his face.

  He screamed, throwing his hands up to ward it off. Legs twisting, he fell, the programmer shattered under him.

  Silicate shards skittered as he thrashed, clutching his head. Where it hurt, it hurt—it hurt very badly indeed.

  “Oh my God!” Slides unsnapped, and the girl was hovering over him. “Here, listen, come on.” She dangled a blue hand towel. “Grab onto this and I’ll pull you up.”

  He looked at her through a wash of tears. Student. That fed look, the oversized sweatshirt, teeth so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference. A thin gold chain around one ankle (fuzzed, he saw with baby-fine hair). Choppy Japanese haircut. Money. “That sucker was gonna be my dinner,” he said ruefully. He took hold of the towel and let her pull him up.

  She smiled but skittishly backed away from him. “Let me make it up to you,” she said. “You want some food? It was only a projection, okay?”

  He followed her in, wary as an animal entering a trap.

  “Holy shit,” Deke said, “this is real cheese…” He was sitting on a gutsprung sofa, wedged between a four-foot teddy bear and a loose stack of floppies. The room was ankle deep in books and clothes and papers. But the food she magicked up…Gouda cheese and tinned beef and honest-to-God greenhouse wheat wafers…was straight out of the Arabian Nights.

  “Hey,” she said. “We know how to treat a proleboy right, huh?” Her name was Nance Bettendorf. She was seventeen. Both her parents had jobs—greedy buggers—and she was an engineering major at William and Mary. She got top marks except in English. “I guess you must really have a thing about rats. You got some kind of phobia about rats?”

  He glanced sidelong at her bed. You couldn’t see it, really, it was just a swell in the ground cover. “It’s not like that. It just reminded me of something else, is all.”

  “Like what?” She squatted in front of him, the big shirt riding high up one smooth thigh.

  “Well…did you ever see the—” his voice involuntarily rose and rushed past the words—“Washington Monument? Like at night? It’s got these two little…red lights on top, aviation markers or something, and I, and I…” He started to shake.

  “You’re afraid of the Washington Monument?” Nance whooped and rolled over with laughter, long tanned legs kicking. She was wearing crimson bikini panties.

  “I would rather die than look at it again,” he said levelly.

  She stopped laughing then, sat up, studied his face. White, even teeth worried at her lower lip, like she was dragging up something she didn’t want to think about. At last she ventured, “Brainlock?”

  “Yeah,” he said bitterly. “They told me I’d never go back to DC. And then the fuckers laughed.”

  “What did they get you for?”

  “I’m a thief.” He wasn’t about to tell her that the actual charge was career shoplifting.

  “Lotta old computer hacks spent their lives programming machines. And you know what? The human brain is not a goddamn bit like a machine, no way. They just don’t program the same.” Deke knew this shrill desperate rap, this long, circular jive that the lonely string out to the rare listener; knew it from a hundred cold and empty nights spent in the company of strangers. Nance was lost in it, and Deke, nodding and yawning, wondered if he’d even be able to stay awake when they finally hit that bed of hers.

  “I built that projection I hit you with myself,” she said, hugging her knees up beneath her chin. “It’s for muggers, you know? I just happened to have it on me, and I threw it at you ’cause I thought it was so funny, you trying to sell me that shit little Indojavanese programmer.” She hunched forward and held out her hand again. “Look here.” Deke cringed. “No, no, it’s okay, I swear it, this is different.” She opened her hand.

  A single, blue flame danced there, perfect and everchanging. “Look at that,” she marveled. “Just look. I programmed that. It’s not some diddly little seven-image job either. It’s a continuous two-hour look, seven thousand two hundred seconds, never the same twice, each instant as individual as a fucking snowflake!”

  The flame’s core was glacial crystal, shards and facets flashing up, twisting and gone, leaving behind near-subliminal images so bright and sharp that they cut the eye. Deke winced. People mostly. Pretty little naked people, fucking. “How the hell did you do that?”

  She rose, bare feet slipping on slick magazines, and melodramatically swept folds of loose printout from a raw plywood shelf. He saw a neat row of small consoles, austere and expensive looking. Custom work. “This is the real stuff I got here. Image facilitator. Here’s my fast-wipe module. This is a brain-map one-to-one function analyzer.” She sang off the names like a litany. “Quantum flicker stabilizer. Program splicer. An image assembler…”

  “You need all that to make one little flame?”

  “You betcha. This is all state of the art, professional projective wetware gear. It’s years ahead of anything you’ve seen.”

  “Hey,” he said. “you know anything about SPADS&FOKKERS?”

  She laughed. And then, because he sensed the time was right, he reached to take her hand.

  “Don’t you touch me, motherfuck, don’t you ever touch me!” Nance screamed, and her hand slammed against the wall as she recoiled, white and shaking with terror.

  “Okay!” He threw up his hands. “Okay! I’m nowhere near you. Okay?”

  She cowered from him. Her eyes were round and unblinking; tears built up at the corners, rolled down ashen cheeks. Finally, she shook her head. “Hey. Deke. Sorry. I should’ve told you.”

  “Told me what?” But he had a creepy feeling…already knew. The way she clutched her head. The weakly spasmodic way her hands opened and closed. “You got a brainlock, too.”

  “Yeah.” She closed her eyes. “It’s a chastity lock. My asshole parents paid for it. So I can’t stand to have anybody touch me or even stand too close.” Eyes opened in blind hate. “I didn’t even do anything. Not a fucking thing. But they’ve both got jobs and they’re so horny for me to have a career that they can’t piss straight. They’re afraid I’d neglect my studies if I got, you know, involved in sex and stuff. The day the brainlock comes off I am going to fuck the vilest, greasiest, hairiest…”

  She was clutching her head again. Deke jumped up and rummaged through the medicine cabinet. He found a jar of B-complex vitamins, pocketed a few against need, and brought two to Nance, with a glass of water. “Here.” He was careful to keep his distance. “This’ll take the edge off.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. Then, almost to herself. “You must really think I’m a jerk.”

  The games room in the Greyhound station was almost empty. A lone, long-jawed fourteen-year-old was bent over a console, maneuvering rainbow fleets of submarines in the murky grind of the North Atlantic.

  Deke sauntered in, wearing his new kicker drag, and leaned against a cinder-block wall made smooth by countless coats of green enamel. He’d washed the dye from his proleboy butch, boosted jeans and T-shirt from the Goodwill, and found a pair of stompers in the sauna locker of a highstack with cut-rate security.

  “Seen Tiny around, friend?”

  The subs darted like neon guppies. “Depends on who’s asking.”
/>   Deke touched the remote behind his left ear. The Spad snap-rolled over the console, swift and delicate as a dragonfly. It was beautiful; so perfect, so true it made the room seem an illusion. He buzzed the grid, millimeters from the glass, taking advantage of the programmed ground effect.

  The kid didn’t even bother to look up. “Jackman’s,” he said. “Down Richmond Road, over by the surplus.”

  Deke let the Spad fade in mid-climb.

  Jackman’s took up most of the third floor of an old brick building. Deke found Best Buy War Surplus first, then a broken neon sign over an unlit lobby. The sidewalk out front was littered with another kind of surplus—damaged vets, some of them dating back to Indochina. Old men who’d left their eyes under Asian suns squatted beside twitching boys who’d inhaled mycotoxins in Chile. Deke was glad to have the battered elevator doors sigh shut behind him.

  A dusty Dr. Pepper clock at the far side of the long, spectral room told him it was a quarter to eight. Jackman’s had been embalmed twenty years before he was born, sealed away behind a yellowish film of nicotine, of polish and hair oil. Directly beneath the clock, the flat eyes of somebody’s grandpappy’s prize buck regarded Deke from a framed, blown-up snapshot gone the slick sepia of cockroach wings. There was the click and whisper of pool, the squeak of a workboot twisting on linoleum as a player leaned in for a shot. Somewhere high above the green-shaped lamps hung a string of crepe-paper Christmas bells faded to dead rose. Deke looked from one cluttered wall to the next. No facilitator.

  “Bring one in, should we need it,” someone said. He turned, meeting the mild eyes of a bald man with steel-rimmed glasses. “My name’s Cline, Bobby Earl. You don’t look like you shoot pool, mister.” But there was nothing threatening in Bobby Earl’s voice or stance. He pinched the steel frames from his nose and polished the thick lenses with a fold of tissue. He reminded Deke of a shop instructor who’d patiently tried to teach him retrograde biochip installation. “I’m a gambler,” he said, smiling. His teeth were white plastic. “I know I don’t much look it.”

  “I’m looking for Tiny,” Deke said.

  “Well,” replacing the glasses, “you’re not going to find him. He’s gone up to Bethesda to let the VA clean his plumbing for him. He wouldn’t fly against you anyhow.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, because you’re not on the circuit or I’d know your face. You any good?” When Deke nodded, Bobby Earl called down the length of Jackman’s, “Yo, Clarence! You bring out that facilitator. We got us a flyboy.”

  Twenty minutes later, having lost his remote and what cash he had left, Deke was striding past the broken soldiers of Best Buy.

  “Now you let me tell you, boy,” Bobby Earl had said in a fatherly tone as, hand on shoulder, he led Deke back to the elevator. “You’re not going to win against a combat vet—you listening to me? I’m not even especially good, just an old grunt who was on hype fifteen, maybe twenty times. Ol’ Tiny, he was a pilot. Spent his entire enlistment hyped to the gills. He’s got membrane attenuation real bad…you ain’t never going to beat him.”

  It was a cool night. But Deke burned with anger and humiliation.

  “Jesus, that’s crude,” Nance said as the Spad strafed mounds of pink underwear. Deke, hunched up on the couch, yanked her flashy little Braun remote from behind his ear.

  “Now don’t you get on my case too, Miss rich-bitch gonna-have-a-job—”

  “Hey, lighten up! It’s nothing to do with you—it’s just tech. That’s a really primitive wafer you got there. I mean, on the street maybe it’s fine. But compared to the work I do at school, it’s—hey. You ought to let me rewrite it for you.”

  “Say what?”

  “Lemme beef it up. These suckers are all written in hexadecimal, see, cause the industry programmers are all washed-out computer hacks. That’s how they think. But let me take it to the reader-analyzer at the department, run a few changes on it, translate it into a modern wetlanguage. Edit out all the redundant intermediaries. That’ll goose up your reaction time, cut the feedback loop in half. So you’ll fly faster and better. Turn you into a real pro, Ace!” She took a hit off her bong, then doubled over laughing and choking.

  “Is that legit?” Deke asked dubiously.

  “Hey, why do you think people buy gold-wire remotes? For the prestige? Shit. Conductivity’s better, cuts a few nanoseconds off the reaction time. And reaction time is the name of the game, kiddo.”

  “No,” Deke said. “If it were that easy, people’d already have it. Tiny Montgomery would have it. He’d have the best.”

  “Don’t you ever listen?” Nance set down the bong; brown water slopped onto the floor. “The stuff I’m working with is three years ahead of anything you’ll find on the street.”

  “No shit,” Deke said after a long pause. “I mean, you can do that?”

  It was like graduating from a Model T to a ninety-three Lotus. The Spad handled like a dream, responsive to Deke’s slightest thought. For weeks he played the arcades, with not a nibble. He flew against the local teens and by ones and threes shot down their planes. He took chances, played flash. And the planes tumbled…

  Until one day Deke was tucking his seed money away, and a lanky black straightened up from the wall. He eyed the laminateds in Deke’s hand and grinned. A ruby tooth gleamed. “You know,” the man said, “I heard there was a casper who could fly, going up against the kiddies.”

  “Jesus,” Deke said, spreading Danish butter on a kelp stick. “I wiped the floor with those spades. They were good, too.”

  “That’s nice, honey,” Nance mumbled. She was working on her finals project, sweating data into a machine.

  “You know, I think what’s happening is I got real talent for this kind of shit. You know? I mean, the program gives me an edge, but I got the stuff to take advantage of it. I’m really getting a rep out there, you know?” Impulsively, he snapped on the radio. Scratchy Dixieland brass blared.

  “Hey,” Nance said. “Do you mind?”

  “No, I’m just—” He fiddled with the knobs, came up with some slow, romantic bullshit. “There. Come on; stand up. Let’s dance.”

  “Hey, you know I can’t—”

  “Sure you can, sugarcakes.” He threw her the huge teddy bear and snatched up a patchwork cotton dress from the floor. He held it by the waist and sleeve, tucking the collar under his chin. It smelled of patchouli, more faintly of sweat, “See, I stand over here, you stand over there. We dance. Get it?”

  Blinking softly, Nance stood and clutched the bear tightly. They danced then, slowly, staring into each other’s eyes. After a while, she began to cry. But still, she was smiling.

  Deke was daydreaming, imagining he was Tiny Montgomery wired into his jumpjet. Imagined the machine responding to his slightest neural twitch, reflexes cranked way up, hype flowing steadily into his veins.

  Nance’s floor became jungle, her bed a plateau in the Andean foothills, and Deke flew his Spad at forced speed, as if it were a full-wired interactive combat machine. Computerized hypos fed a slow trickle of high-performance enhancement melange into his bloodstream. Sensors were wired directly into his skull—pulling a supersonic snapturn in the green-blue bowl of sky over Bolivian rain forest. Tiny would have felt the airflow over control surfaces.

  Below, grunts hacked through the jungle with hype-pumps strapped above elbows to give them that little extra death-dance fury in combat, a shot of liquid hell in a blue plastic vial. Maybe they got ten minutes worth in a week. But coming in at treetop level, reflexes cranked to the max, flying so low the ground troops never spotted you until you were on them, phosgene agents released, away and gone before they could draw a bead…it took a constant trickle of hype just to maintain. And the direct neuron interface with the jumpjet was a two-way street. The onboard computers monitored biochemistry and decided when to open the sluice gates and give the human component a killer jolt of combat edge.

  Dosages like that ate you up. Ate you good and slow and
constant, etching the brain surfaces, eroding away the brain-cell membranes. If you weren’t yanked from the air promptly enough, you ended up with brain-cell attenuation—with reflexes too fast for your body to handle and your fight-or-flight reflexes fucked real good….

  “I aced it, proleboy!”

  “Hah?” Deke looked up, startled, as Nance slammed in, tossing books and bag onto the nearest heap.

  “My finals project—I got exempted from exams. The prof said he’d never seen anything like it. Uh, hey, dim the lights, wouldja? The colors are weird on my eyes.”

  He obliged. “So show me. Show me this wunnerful thing.”

  “Yeah, okay.” She snatched up his remote, kicked clear standing space atop the bed, and struck a pose. A spark flared into flame in her hand. It spread in a quicksilver line up her arm, around her neck, and it was a snake, with triangular head and flickering tongue. Molten colors, oranges and reds. It slithered between her breasts. “I call it a firesnake,” she said proudly.

  Deke leaned close, and she jerked back.

  “Sorry. It’s like your flame, huh? I mean, I can see these tiny little fuckers in it.”

  ‘’Sort of.” The firesnake flowed down her stomach. “Next month I’m going to splice two hundred separate flame programs together with meld justification in between to get the visuals. Then I’ll tap the mind’s body image to make it self-orienting. So it can crawl all over your body without your having to mind it. You could wear it dancing.”

  “Maybe I’m dumb. But if you haven’t done the work yet, how come I can see it?”

  Nance giggled. “That’s the best part—half the work isn’t done yet. Didn’t have the time to assemble the pieces into a unified program. Turn on that radio, huh? I want to dance.” She kicked off her shoes. Deke tuned in something gutsy. Then, at Nance’s urging, turned it down, almost to a whisper.

  “I scored two hits of hype, see.” She was bouncing on the bed, weaving her hands like a Balinese dancer. “Ever try the stuff? In-credible. Gives you like absolute concentration. Look here.” She stood en pointe. “Never done that before.”