Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

Untouched and utterly boring.

Default triple-checked to be sure Schorr was still meeting him. Schorr had been his most staticky friend for as long as he remembered. He’d have him party-synched in no time.

When the dilating doors spilled him out on mainstreet, Default resisted cranking up the brightness in his optic implants. To do the nocturns right you had to do them dark. Flyby lights poured grainy orange on streets still wet from a pheromone-laced rainshower. Swirling neon advertisements tugged his gaze in all directions, icy blues, radiation yellows.

If it wasn’t for the socialite tag, Default wouldn’t have even recognized Schorr upon arrival. For one thing, Schorr had changed sex and was now very much a fem, and an attractive one to boot. She was fashionably naked apart from a flock of flutterdroids that swathed her skin in shifting patterns. Default saw a tentative follow-cam bobbing along in her wake and realized that Schorr had been one busy unit. He could feel his social stock skyrocketing just from being in her proximity.

“Default, you steady satellite,” Schorr said aloud, chatting it simultaneously. “How long has it been? What have you been doing up there with the serious folk?” She embraced him and the flutterdroids whirred around them like a cloak.

“Half an orbit?” Default grinned weakly. “Longer. Last time I saw you, you, ah…”

“Trying new things,” Schorr said, languid. She raised one pale arm and Default saw something bumpy and pink underneath it.

Before he could remark, her fingers had encircled his wrist and she was tugging him into the crush. Skin sliding on skin, static starching his hair. Default tried to enjoy the sensations.

“In a hurry?” he asked.

“Slipping the cam,” Schorr said, wagging a hand back toward the spherical cyclops. It was drifting over the crowd, trying to pinpoint them. “Bit of privacy is better for where we’re heading.”

Default craned his neck. The cam carved a dancing red laserlight through the throng of revelers. Schorr started to run, and Default, fixing the grin to his face, followed.

They pelted through the neon-swatched streets and Default felt lactic acids licking muscles that hadn’t burned in ages. They dashed down a row of flashing dream machines, in and then out of a slick-floored purging booth, past fleshfacs vending extra limbs. Schorr’s laugh danced ahead of them like phantom code. Default’s lungs were tight by the time they slipped into a dopamine bar, but it was a good feeling.

Schorr shed her flutterdroid swarm at the door and, gauging the dresscode, Default pulled off his thermal but kept his footwraps. They made their way to the bar, still laughing, and it wasn’t until they were seated with the plastic plugs snaking into their brain stems that Schorr asked about Memmi, about the breakup. Default exhaled long.

“She joined a fucking polymind,” he said. “Right after things ended. She uploaded to one of those polymind probes so she can spend the next few centuries chasing comets and contemplating entropy.”

“That’s a crippler,” Schorr remarked. A lopsided frown made her look exactly like his old self for a moment. “But you’ll find someone else,” she said. “You always do.”

“I do,” Default admitted.

Schorr shivered as the next chemical wave hit them, one arm trailing over her head. Default saw the bubbling pink protrusions again, and more he hadn’t noticed spreading across her collarbone, up her neck. He remembered, through the dopamine mist, that he’d meant to ask about it.

He pointed his chin. “What’s this, then?”

“This?” Schorr smiled and Default knew she’d been waiting for the question. “Just a little virus.” She leaned forward, conspiratorial. “You know how cosmetic viruses are the big spit now, yeah? Everyone’s got one. Everyone synched, anyway.”

“I noticed,” Default said. “Thanks.”

“Well, there’s this unit down here who makes the absolute rawest bugs,” Schorr continued. “He does viral, bacterial, everything. His stuff is going to go absolute nova. It’s really only a matter of time.” She traced the shiny pink bumps with pride, then looked up slyly. “Do you want to meet him?”

Default thought of thumping underground scenes, a meteoric rise in social stock, roaming the nocturns with Schorr nursing matching infections, and, for just an instant, he thought of holding her clammy hand in his own and the two of them exchanging chapped smiles.

“What’s he called?” Default asked.

“He has a slew of tags,” Schorr said. “Lately, most commonly, people call him the Plagueman.” She tugged the dopamine plug free with a soft plop and let it retract back into the bar. “He’s waiting for us in the basement.”

Still reeling from the dopamine, they threaded their way to the back of the bar and down a concrete gullet. Schorr stroked them past a touch-door and Default found himself blinking as his optic implants recalibrated. The lights were bright and antiseptic white.

A sort of bubblefab had been grown, still fresh enough to stick underfoot, and its membrane formed crude walls and a ceiling. Default saw red tubes snaked behind frosty glass, a mix-and-match genekit hijacked from some funlab, a small thinker core that couldn’t be holding more than a semi-sentient AI.

“Plagueman?” Schorr’s breath was a crystallized cloud. “Where are you?”

“Hold on,” came a distorted voice. Someone in a worksuit ducked out from behind a row of growth tubes and set down a spindly instrument. “Is this Default, then? Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” Default returned, giving a polite fist bump.

The Plagueman pulled off his cowl. Default saw a weave of red muscle over gray bone. Packed yellow in the cheek. Lids with no lashes. Flaying was occasionally chic—every few orbits, denizens enjoyed replacing tiny swathes of moisture-treated skin with transparent polysilicate—but Default had never seen it done to this extent.

“Got sick of it one day,” the unit explained, seeing the curiosity. “Decided it all had to go.”

“It’s potent,” Default assured him.

Schorr slung an arm around the Plagueman’s shoulders. “Maybe a little gauche,” she said, and Default resisted the urge to run a quick pheromone scan to determine if the two of them were fucking. Schorr would probably detect it, and then she would wonder why he was scanning her, and Default wouldn’t have a good reason.

“I’ve never seen this one,” Default said instead, nodding to Schorr’s infection. “Custom?”

“It’s a recreation, actually,” the Plagueman said, smiling liplessly. “A mild pox. Something from Old Old Earth.”

“Retrovirus,” Schorr joked.

“Not droll,” Default chatted her. She stuck out her tongue.

“The blisters should spread soon,” the Plagueman said. “It’s a really eye-snatching effect.” He looked up at Default. “Want to try it before it goes open market?”

Default looked at the frozen virus samples. Memmi wouldn’t have liked this; she hated most bodymods. Not that it had stopped her from uploading into that junky probe for a century of space sailing.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Absolutely I do.”

The Plagueman beamed, teeth far whiter than the exposed sliver of his jawbone. “Raw.”

“Needle or oral?” Default asked, now determined.

“That’s the best part,” Schorr said. “Our unit here makes real viruses, not those piddly things that die off an eyeblink after you buy them. They’re self-propagating.”

“All you have to do is override your immunity buffer,” the Plagueman finished.

Default closed his eyes and reached as deep as he could into his hardware/wetware interface, down past the cobwebs, and he found the immunity buffer pulsing in a sequestered corner. As he went to shut it down, an archaic warning message in radioactive yellow scrolled the insides of his eyelids. Default overrode it.