Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

Severyn nodded, studying his drink, then slopped it out across the upholstery and smashed the flute against the window. The crystal crunched. Severyn shook the now-jagged stem, sending small crumbs to the floor. It gleamed scalpel-sharp. Running his thumb along it raised hairs on the nape of his neck.

“What are you doing?” the voice blared.

“My hand slipped,” Severyn said. “Old age.” A fat droplet of blood swelled on his thumb, and he wiped it away. He wasn’t one to mishandle his bodies or rent zombies for recreational suicide in drowning tanks, freefalls. No, Severyn’s drive to survive had always been too strong for him to experiment with death. As he brought the edge to his throat he realized that killing himself would not be easy.

“That won’t save you.” Another static laugh, but this one forced. “We’ll upload your storage cone to an artificial body within the day. Throw you into a pleasure doll with the sensitivity cranked to maximum. Imagine how much fun they’d have with that.”

The near-panic was clarion clear, even through a synthesizer. Intuition pounded at Severyn’s temples. The song was still in there, too.

“You played yourself in on a music file,” Severyn said. “I searched it before you shut off my implants. Decapitate the state / wipe the slate / create . Banal, but so very catchy, wasn’t it? Swan song of the Anticorp Movement.”

“I liked the beat.”

“Several of my employees became embroiled in those protests. They were caught trying to coordinate a viral strike on my bank.” Severyn pushed the point into the smooth flesh of his throat. “Nearly five years ago, now. I believe the chief conspirator was sentenced to twenty years in cryogenic storage.”

“Stop it. Put that down.”

“You must have wanted me to guess,” Severyn continued, worming the glass gently, like a corkscrew. He felt a warm trickle down his neck. “Why keep talking, otherwise? You wanted me to know who got me in the end. This is your revenge.”

“Do you even remember my name?” The voice was warped, but not by static. “And put that down.”

The command came so fierce and raw that Severyn’s hand hesitated without his meaning to. He slowly set the stem in his lap. “Or you kept talking,” he said, “because you missed hearing his voice.”

“Fucking parasite.” The hacker’s voice was tired and suddenly brittle. “First you steal twenty years of my life and then you steal my son.”

“Girasol Fletcher.” There it was. Severyn leaned back, releasing a long breath. “He came to me, you know.” He racked his digital memory for another name, the name of his body before it was his body. “Blake came to me.”

“Bullshit. You always wanted him. Had a feed of his swim meets like a pedophile.”

“I helped him. Possibly even saved him.”

“You made him a puppet.”

Severyn balled a wipe and dabbed at the blood on Blake’s slender neck. “You left him with nothing,” he said. “The money drained off to pay for your cryo. And Blake fell off, too. He was a full addict when he came to me. Hypnotics. Spending all his time in virtual dreamland. You’d know about that.” He paused, but the barb drew no response. “It couldn’t have been for sex fantasies. I imagine he got anything he wanted in realtime. I think maybe he was dreaming his family whole again.”

Silence. Severyn felt a dim guilt, but he pushed through. Survival.

“He was desperate when he found me,” Severyn continued. “I told him I wanted his body. Fifteen-year contract, insured for all organic damage. It’s been keeping your cryo paid off, and when the contract’s up he’ll be comfortable for the rest of his life.”

“Don’t. Act.” A stream of static. “Like you did him a favor.”

Severyn didn’t reply for a moment. He looked at the window, but the glass was still black, opaqued. “I’m not being driven to an execution, am I?”

Girasol wound the limousine through the grimy labyrinth of the industrial district, guiding it past the agreed-upon warehouse where a half-dozen Priests were awaiting the delivery of Severyn Grimes, Chicago’s most notorious parasite. Using the car’s external camera, she saw the lookout’s confused face emerging from behind his mask.

On the internal camera, she couldn’t stop looking into Blake’s eyes, hoping they would be his own again soon.

“There’s a hydrofoil waiting on the docks,” she said through the limousine speakers. “I hired a technician to extract you. Paid him extra to drop your storage cone in the harbor.”

“The Priesthood wasn’t open to negotiations concerning the body.”

Far away, Girasol felt the men clustered around her, watching her prone body like predatory birds. She could almost smell the fast-food grease and sharp chemical sweat.

“No,” she said dully. “Volunteers are as bad as the parasites themselves. Blake sold his soul to a digital demon. To you.”

“When they find out you betrayed their interests?”

Girasol considered. “Pierce will rape me,” she said. “Maybe some of the others, too. Then they’ll pull some amateur knife-and-pliers interrogation shit, thinking it’s some kind of conspiracy. And then they may. Or may not. Kill me.” Her voice was steady until the penultimate word. She calculated distance to the pier. It was worth it. It was worth it. Blake would be free, and Grimes would be gone.

“You could skype in CPD.”

Girasol had already considered. “No. With what I pulled to get out of the freeze, if they find me I’m back in permanently.”

“Skype them in to wherever my bodyguard is being held.”

He was insistent about the caveman. Almost as if he gave a shit. Girasol felt a small slink of self-doubt before she remembered Grimes had amassed his wealth by manipulating emotions. He’d been a puppeteer long before he uploaded. Still trying to pull her strings.

“I would,” Girasol said. “But he’s here with me.”

Grimes paused, frowning. Girasol zoomed. She’d missed Blake’s face so much, the immaculate bones of it, the wide brow and curved lips. She could still remember him chubby and always laughing.

“Can you contact him without the Priests finding out?” Grimes asked.

Girasol fluttered back to the apartment. She was guillotining texts and voice-calls as they poured in from the warehouse, keeping Pierce in the dark for as long as possible, but one of them would slip through before long. She triangulated on the locked van using the parkade security cams.

“Maybe,” she said.

“If you can get him free, he might be able to help you. I have a non-duress passcode. I could give it to you.” Grimes tongued the edges of his bright white teeth. “In exchange, you call off the extraction.”

“Thought you might try to make a deal.”

“It is what I do.” Grimes’s lips thinned. “You lack long-term perspective, Ms. Fletcher. Common enough among first-lifers. The notion of sacrificing yourself to free your progeny must seem exceptionally noble and very fucking romantic to you. But if the Priesthood does murder you, Blake wakes up with nobody. Nothing. Again.”

“Not nothing,” Girasol said reflexively.

“The money you were paid for this job?” Grimes suggested. “He’ll have to go into hiding for as long as my disappearance is under investigation. The sort of people who can help him lay low are the sort of people who’ll have him back on Sandman or Dozr before the month is out. He might even decide to go puppet again.”

Girasol’s fury boiled over, and she nearly lost her hold on the steering column. “He made a mistake. Once. He would never agree to that again.”

“Even if you get off with broken bones, you’ll be a wanted fugitive as soon as Correctional try to thaw you for a physical and find whatever suckerfish the Priests convinced to take your pod.” Grimes flattened his hands on his knees. “What I’m proposing is that you cancel the extraction. My bodyguard helps you escape. We meet up to renegotiate terms. I could have your charges dropped, you know. I could even rewrite Blake’s contract.”