Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

The moon was a shard of scoured bone. Solomon’s small chest was hollowed out with night. He let the sea breezes slap his face while his father booted up the tablet. His young ears picked up the hum first, and he tried not to shout when the Cloud crested over their heads.

The flock of machines dipped and slid like quicksilver, aloft on synchronized rotors. Some were caked in birdshit and others scarred black by the deaths of their comrades to LAMS, but the Cloud had slipped border successfully once more. As Solomon watched, carmine eyes began to blink in the blue-black sky and the tablet on his father’s knees came awash with light.

Solomon tried to listen as his father explained the link-up, the web, but he couldn’t. He was mesmerized by the torrent of sounds and images pouring across the screen. Flesh slapping flesh, crowds of foreigners burning cars, bristles sliding across bright white teeth. Music and voices came in clipped spurts through a disused speaker.

The screen said it was downloading, downloading, downloading. Solomon’s father said there was a message from his uncle, the one who had faked his papers and shipped out on a rusty schooner.

The deluge went on and on, and Solomon could see badly-concealed lights down in the village, shadows rushing from door to door to share the invisible rain as they caught, collected. But slowly, inexorably, the red pinpricks began to blink out. The machines drifted east.

Solomon watched the tablet until it froze and his father swore, but not so angrily. Then both of them sat and rubbed their eyes and watched the Cloud disperse, until the moor sky was empty but tinged rawpink with dawn.

So the semester’s wickest wildest party, bar none, is happening at the straight-up palatial house of Hamza Hamidi, AKA Spitt4style, whose way-too-trusting parents are currently scuba-diving in Venice. And I’m not only going to be there, I’m going to Be There, as in, running shit, because I just dropped all my savings pirating the baddest Socialight personality module on the market: the freshly-leaked Maestro 2.0.

This thing is like, borderline AI, the kind of mod billionaires and celebrities are going to be running. I never would have found it by myself, but my uncle is a huge data-criminal sparkhead who caught the leak and agreed to ship me a stick copy in exchange for every last bit of my blood-sweat-and-shears summer landscaping income, and also me not telling my mom.

Not that I would. She would want to know why I was wasting my savings on digital charisma, because she read on ZenFeed that those new mods are way too invasive, and besides, she didn’t have a Socialight or a personality module in high school, everybody ran freestyle 24/7, and they all turned out just deadly. I love her and all, but Christ.

She’s got a late one at the hospital, so she’s not around when the little yellow Amazombie careens off the backyard trampoline and scares the piss out of our cat. I’m picking the package out of the dandelions when Dyl shows up all sweaty from a skate sesh.

He always forgets to ping when he’s coming over; I think maybe because he got his Socialight so late. Before fifth grade he actually hung with the freestylers, the religious wackos or kids too poor to get even the basic-basic. He’s still my best friend since forever, so whatever.

“What’s good, Shad?” Dyl says, snatching up his board with one lanky hand and raking through his orange hair with the other. He spots the data stick in my fist. “Yo, you ordered the Buttafly trial on stick? I thought we were going to download it on the way to the party.”

“This is no Buttafly,” I say. “Something heaps better, bru.”

Dyl shrugs. “Raw, raw. Can I use your bathroom?”

I lead the way down to my basement and flop on the couch, rolling the two Maestro sticks over and over in my fingers, while Dyl takes his sweet fucking time in the shower. After fifteen minutes I start pinging him, but sometimes the old ways are best, right, so finally I haul off the couch, bang my hand on the door and politely shout:

“Yo, Dildo, hurry the fuck up.”

The shower squeaks off and Dyl comes out with the guest towel around his waist and his middle finger raised. “Antsy, boy,” he says. “You been spamming Wendee like that?”

Dyl’s got one of those slack sort of faces and he freestyle laughs like a hyena, but he’s no shitwit. I am antsy. And it is because of Wendee.

I start cleaning out my Socialight port with compressed air, getting ready for the upload, while Dyl takes his frayed backpack into my room to get ready. He comes out dressed and holding the Vancouver Whitecaps hat I borrowed from him and never returned.

“Fucking bandit,” he says, settling it on his head.

I’m too antsy to feel guilty. My leg is like, jumping. I hold up the stick drives to the crooked solar lamp, checking the contact points one last time.

“Yo.” Dyl frowns, flopping down on the couch beside me. “What exactly are we running here, Shad?”

“Maestro two-point-fucking-oh,” I say, grinning way wide. “Leaked.”

Dyl looks suitably impressed, but the tips of his ears go lava red how they do when he’s nervous. “Bru, that’s some serious black market shit.”

“It’s safe as houses,” I say, not actually knowing, and hand him his stick. “Got it from my uncle. You ready?”

I hold up my Maestro, solemn-like, and he does the same, still looking a little sketched. We clack the plastic together.

“Uh, cheers,” he says.

“See you flipside.” Then I touch it to my Socialight port, sliding it into the cheekbone under my eye, until it gives a thick click.

Holyfuckingshit.

Imagine dumping a 2-liter of fizzy shook-up pop into a birthday balloon, and that’s your brain implant downloading Maestro: this huge rush of crackly code tsunamiing your skull, swelling and sparking and feeling like it’s about to spew out your fucking ear canals. When it settles I’m just keeled back on the couch, totally boneless, blinking code, and I see Dyl beside me looking equally skull-pulped.

Then it turns on, and all that fizzy pop crystallizes all at once into cold sweet ice. It feels like, whoa. You know how your average personality mod, it’s a little niggle in the back of your mind? Like, hey, bru, maybe don’t wear that shirt again. Maybe don’t tell that joke until you have the punchline down. Someone mopped the gym hallway, maybe don’t slip and fall like an idiot.

Maestro 2.0 is like: I’m the You you always wanted to be, and now you’re Me. And this is How We Do.

I swivel to Dyl, who’s swiveling right in synch, and we give each other the slickest quickest finger-twisting handshake I’ve never seen in my life, along with hugely shit-eating grins.

“Yo,” I say. “This is going to be good.”

And for the first time, I think I absolutely have a chance with Wendee, who is basically the whole reason for why I’m going to the party, and also for why the universe exists.

Let me back up.

Wendee Rosch is ungodly beautiful, ambidextrous, and in my design class, where she mostly sits there looking bored (I’m guessing she runs a basic ChillGirl module on her Socialight–no need to upgrade with bone structure like that) and spins her stylus equal good with either hand.

It took a whole week of scoping out the glossy black back of her head for me to build up the courage with my old UnderTheRadar personality module to ping her non-anonymously. I flipped her an animated image-capture of Mr. Pacquette digging around in his nose, but edited so he pulls out something different every time. I sent it, then sat tight and sweaty and trying to guess by her posture if she thought my shit was tolerably funny.