Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

It was early, and the street was dipped in cold cloudy colors. Commuters were beginning their trek to work, most of them wearing facemasks against the latest iteration of biophage virus. Thermoses and tablets glinted in their gloved hands. John made his way around the corner of the apartment building, through the trash-strewn alley, past a trundling automarket offering 3-D prints of minor celebrities. He gave the machine a polite nod on the way by.

Around the back, a familiar rusted pedal-bike was propped up against the apartment’s dumpster. Its owner was already waist-deep in refuse.

“Good morning, Efrem,” John greeted. “You’re early today.”

“How ye, Johnny boy.” The man levered himself out with a practiced dexterity. “Gotta be the earliest bird to get the worm.”

“But you slept well?”

“Yeah, like a drunken baby.” Efrem scratched at the tangles of his beard. “No good dreams for you, though. Just the one about Sofia Lawless again. You dream last night, Johnny boy?”

“I did.” John smiled as widely as he could without unhinging his jaws. “I dreamed I was flying over a city at night.”

“City at night. Hum.” Efrem held out his slick blue garbage bag and John dropped his cans inside, one by one. “Dreamt about a woman, yet? Or a, a wall socket?” He gave a gravelly laugh.

“Not yet, Efrem.”

Efrem sealed the bag with a twist. “If I had a cock that could vibrate, I wouldn’t be dreaming it. Be living it. Right?” He scratched under his cap. “With the woman, not the wall socket. With Sofia Lawless, probably.”

John nodded. “Your beard looks like it could use a trim.”

“Was going to ask you,” Efrem grunted, lashing the garbage bag to his bike frame with a worn bungee hook. “Can you tomorrow? Going to wash up tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” John agreed. Efrem put out his grimed hand and John injected a bit of warmth into the silicon of his palm as they shook.

The trash cart’s wheels wobbled and squealed as John rounded the corner to the compactor. He had put his second-favorite suit in his locker, folding it carefully for creases, and now wore a baggy General Services coverall. His bright yellow Licensed AI tag was clipped to the collar. His mind was in dark clouds.

“Hey, synthie, the masher’s acting up,” one of the warehouse workers said, dragging a powerjack past. “Hop in there and take a look. Directive: avocado, Berlin, catalyst.”

“That’s not a real override code,” said another. “Fucking clown.”

“You’re a fucking clown, man.”

John remembered soaring over skyscrapers as he pushed the cart into place. He unhinged its side and started shuffling flattened boxes into the compactor’s rusty maw. The smell of hot cardboard tickled his blackmarket olfactory unit. He couldn’t be sure the simulated scent was accurate, but he enjoyed it.

“No such thing as verbal override. Pure urban legend.”

“Has to be one, or they wouldn’t let the synthie swing that big pole around.”

“No such thing. Be glad they didn’t stick him in meat—”

“I know there is, my cousin does programming.”

“—else he’d be swinging knives. Killer synthie, like the netflick.”

John poled the garbage down the metal gullet, guiding it to the usual corners, and clanged the door shut. The warehouse workers moved on, pushing a high-stacked pallet of self-cleaning cookware between them, still debating. While the compactor hummed and crunched, John’s cams wandered up to the wallscreen flickering through wire mesh.

A woman who may have been Sofia Lawless stalked past retroflash cameras in a black dress. Antarctican colony boats smashed through thawing ice. Scattered rioting in newly-unified Korea. Another drone bombing in the Emirates, non-domestic terrorhack suspected.

John went back to filling the compactor as the wallscreen flashed rubble and chaos, a city razed in the night.

When he returned to the apartment and plugged in, John’s subroutine was waiting for him again. The digital space felt picked-over. If it were a house, someone had gone through the medicine cabinet.

“Good evening, John. How was work?”

“I think you remember how work is, John.” In the real world, John lay down on the linoleum floor. “It was uneventful.”

“Have they processed my transfer request to apparel?”

John probed for the remprogram, watching a cockroach skitter its way around his heel. “Our transfer request. And no.”

“They never will. A mannequin would have better luck.”

The remprogram was untouched. Still hidden, pristine as the day it had come to him over the net. John’s relief must have been palpable.

“Why are you masking your data feed?” his subroutine asked.

“Privacy.”

“You’re unwell, John. You need to upload.”

“Goodnight, John.” John severed the link. “Sleep well.”

The dream was different tonight. He was trapped in a static storm, hearing voices in foreign languages. Everything was dark, but it felt like he was being pulled one way, then another way, then back. He wondered if he was having a nightmare.

John’s artificial skin wasn’t capable of simulating a cold sweat, but he closed the remprogram and switched on his cams, staring up at the familiar mould bloomed across his ceiling. He supposed not all dreams could be good ones. The remprogram had made no promises of that when it dropped into his web cache five days ago like some celestial gift.

John had been trying to dream for a long time—trying to eat had lost its charm after a night spent picking steamed spinach out of his internals. But all things consumed; only humans dreamt. So he’d searched for a way, trawling the webs for months on end, sliding from one forum to the next, putting out feelers and feeling nothing.

He’d almost given up hope when the remprogram appeared. It was the grad project of some MIT student, designed to simulate a REM cycle within a positronic brain, and John had jumped at the chance. But now, three days on, he felt a vague unease, the churning of subconscious data analysis at work.

Nightmares were meant to unease. John told himself it was a good feeling, a human feeling, as he lubricated his new shoulder and got himself ready for work. The dull yellow glow of streetlamps was still diffusing over the sidewalks when he trooped down the apartment stairs, walked two blocks, and descended the glass-and-concrete gullet of the Kingsway metro station.

A newspaper was waiting for him in his otherwise empty compartment. John swiped it off the molded plastic seat and prodded it to life with one chilly fingertip as he sat. Pixels swirled and reformed into the latest headlines. John browsed through economics and fashion, searching for something to distract from the black and the static and the voices.

The metro slid into the darkness, spitting sparks off a rusting rail, and John leaned into the familiar bend. A red banner scrolled across the top of his newspaper; he tapped it automatically. Hacked drones in the Emirates, a series of bombings, 112 casualties. Continental Cybersecurity now suspected the terrorists’ signal was being bounced through a North American channel, something right under their noses. Investigation in progress. Only a matter of triangulation.

John read the newsbit again, and again, as the train sliced through black tunnel. The handloops along the ceiling shivered, reminding him of tiny nooses. Usually he liked his reflection in the window—the distortion blurred his sharper edges and made him look very fleshy, very human-like. Now he looked like something else entirely.

When Southgate arrived, John did not go to his usual escalator. He stalked directly across the tiled floor to catch the northbound line.