Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

“Lucky malfunction for her,” the old man said. “Lucky, lucky. Else she would be chopped up, yeah? For eurocash, not francs. Much money for a ghost.” He smiled. “A rocket could do in that imfizi . Or an EMP. You have one?”

“I will chop you up, Grandfather…” Daudi took a long pull at his drink. “… if you talk any more of muti . You live in a new time.”

“What, you don’t want to be rich?” The scavenger hacked up a laugh.

“Not for killing children,” Daudi said.

“Ah, but you were in the war.”

Daudi stood up.

“You were in the war,” the old man repeated. “You sowed the na-virus and burned the villages and used the big knife on the deserters. Didn’t you? Weren’t you in the war?”

Daudi wanted to wrap his fingers around the scavenger’s piped neck and squeeze until the esophagus buckled. Instead, he took his Coke and walked back up the junkpile to try again with the ghost girl.

The drone had been repairing itself, he could see it now. Swatches of hardfoam and crudely-welded panels covered its chassis. Spare cables hung like dead plants from its shoulders. It was hunched very still, only swiveling one camera to track Daudi’s approach.

Belise was sitting between its feet. “Dunna come any closer,” she said. “He might get mad at you.” Her brows shot up. “Is that fanta for me as well?”

“No,” Daudi said. He considered it. “Too much sugar is bad for you. You won’t grow.”

The imfizi shifted slightly and Daudi took a step back.

Belise laughed. “My dawe used to say that.”

“My mother used to say it,” Daudi said. “When I chewed too much sugarcane.” He watched the drone uneasily. It was hard to tell where it was looking. “Did you have a mama ?” he asked her.

“I don’t remember,” Belise said. She rubbed at her nose, smeared snot on her dress.

“And your dawe ?”

“He’s here.” Belise slapped the metal trunk behind her. “With me.”

“The imfizi keeps you safe, yes? Like a father.” Daudi maneuvered a rubber tire to sit on. Some of the scavengers down below were using a brazier for tea and the wind carried its bitter smoke. “But maybe it will not always be that way,” he said. “Drones are not so much like you and me, Belise. They can break.”

“They can fix,” Belise said, pointing to the patched carapace.

Daudi remembered much simpler jobs, where the men and women were frightened for their lives and wanted so badly to be tagged, to go to the safehouse, for the government to help them.

“If the drone decides its mission is over, it might leave,” Daudi said. “Or it might paint you.”

“Paint me?”

“Paint you as a target,” Daudi said. “So it can kill you.”

Belise shook her small white head, serene. “No, that won’t happen. He’s my dawe .”

Daudi sipped until his drink was gone. “I’ll take you to a place with so much food,” he said. “No more scrap-hunting. Nice beds and nice food. And other children.”

“I’ll stay.” Belise pointed and Daudi followed her finger. “Take those two. You can have them go with you. I don’t like them.”

Two small boys rummaging in the junk, insect-thin arms. One had a hernia peeking out from under his torn shirt. They cast nervous looks up every so often, for the leviathan drone and the albino girl and now for the policeman.

“They don’t need my help,” Daudi said. “My job is to help you. Many people would try to kill you. Cut off your limbs. The government is trying to make you safe.”

“Why?”

Daudi rubbed his forehead. “Because albino-killings are very publicized. President Habarugira is forging new Western relations, and the killings reflect badly, badly, badly on our country. And now that the war is over, and there are no more rebels to hunt, people who know only how to murder are finding the muti market.”

“Oh.”

“And the government cares for the good of all its people,” Daudi added. He looked at the empty glass bottle between his palms, then hurled it off into the growing dusk. The shatter noise came faint.

Belise had followed the trajectory, lips pursed. Now she looked up. “Not what my dawe said.” She paused. “About the government. He said other things.”

“Your dawe is dead, Belise.”

Belise nodded, and for a moment Daudi thought they were making progress. “He died with the bleeding,” she said. “With the sickness. But he told me not to worry, because he had a plan. He made his soul go softly into the imfizi .” She smiled upward, and the pity in Daudi’s gut sharpened into something else. He stared at the array of red sensors, the scattered spider eyes.

“Your daddy, Belise.” Daudi put a finger up to his temple and twisted. “Was he a jackman?”

Belise winced. She stared at the ground. When she looked up, her raw pink eyes were defiant. “He was a rebel,” she said.

Back in the birdshit-caked taxi, there was a memo on misuse of government funds. Daudi tugged it off the screen and punched in his address instead. Through the window, he saw scavengers taking in their equipment. Some were pitching nylon tents around the brazier. The old noseless man was tearing open a package of disposable phones, but he looked up when the ignition rumbled. He waved.

Daudi’s fingers buzzed as he typed the word into Google: softcopy . A slew of articles in English and German fluttered up. He struggled through half a paragraph before switching over to a translation service. Daudi was not a hacker, but he’d heard the term used. Always between jackmen, usually in a hot argument.

The taxi began to rattle over loose-packed gravel, and Daudi had it read aloud to him. Softcopy, a theoretical transfer of human consciousness into an artificial brain. Ramifications for artificial intelligence. Softcopy claim in NKorea revealed to be a hoax. Increased use of neural webbing has led to new questions. Evolution of the human mind.

The taxi sent him an exposé on corruption in the Burundi police forces as a kicker, but Daudi hardly registered it as he swung himself out of the vehicle. He scanned himself through the door in the jagged-glass-topped wall, scattered the pigeons on his apartment’s stoop. The stairs went by three at a time, and then he was in front of his work tablet, working the policense like a bludgeon.

He pulled up reports from three years ago. Death reports. The list was long, long, long. He scrolled through it and they came to him in flashes, so many Jonathans and then so many Josephs, good Christian names for godless rebels, and then he found him: Joseph Rufykiri, the Razor. Responsible for the longest sustained information attack of the war, for the interception of encrypted troop movements, for the malicious reprogramming of military drones, farm equipment, wind turbines, and once a vibrator belonging to the general’s wife.

He was dead by na-virus, but survived by a daughter. Daudi stared at the data and only half-believed it, but half was enough. He found a rumpled rain jacket under the bed and threw it on, and into the deepest pocket he dropped his old service handgun. Useless, unless he put it right up to the drone’s gut, right where the armor had fallen away.

Daudi thought of the bloodspray and his comrades jerking and falling like cut puppets as the hacked drone spun its barrels. He thought of Joseph Rufykiri between blood-soaked sheets, whispering to his daughter that he had a plan and that she did not have to worry.

He had to know, so Daudi stepped back out under the swelling sky and hailed a new taxi, one with less graffiti, as it began to storm.