James Decker - Fallout

“Alexei, say thank-you to Dao-Ming and Jin,” I told him.

“Thanks Dao-Ming,” he said. “Thanks Jin.”

“You are very welcome,” Dao-Ming told him. She approached him and knelt to tuck the gonzo robe back into his pack. “Remember what we talked about.”

He nodded, and then Vamp and I led him out into the hallway, where he ran ahead of us around the corner toward the elevators.

“Should be fun getting him settled in for the night,” Vamp said.

“That’s Dragan’s problem tonight. I’ve got him tomorrow.”

The elevator lobby had been covered in posters I hadn’t noticed when I got out of the car on the way in. All of them had faces on them, faces of men, women, girls, and boys. I took a look at the closest one, which had a picture of a young man on it.

MISSING, it said. JUN BAO WEN.

They all had the same theme. People had always gone missing in Hangfei, thanks to the scrapcake trade. Meat farmers turned them into a valuable commodity, but never in numbers like this.

No one said anything as we climbed into the car. Alexei hadn’t asked about it, and I didn’t want to talk about it in front of him. He knew not to wander around in Hangfei by himself, he knew it wasn’t safe. I didn’t want to have that talk with him. Dragan could do that.

“Don’t miss out on the latest phase six haan technology,” the A.I. spouted from the ad box. I took a deep breath and punched the ground floor.

“I won’t.”

“Which phase six technology would you like to hear about?” it asked. “Graviton suits, or Escher Housing?”

“Neither.”

“What would you like to hear about?”

“I want to hear about the missing people,” Alexei said, out of the blue.

The A.I. logo bobbed on the screen for a moment.

“Government investigations show there are no mass disappearances,” it said.

“Who said anything about mass disappearances?” I asked.

The A.I. clicked a few times.

“Graviton suits, however, are expected to be one of our most popular choices for future fun and travel.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I could talk to you about hand lotion,” it said. I elbowed Vamp.

“I think it’s talking to you.”

“Ha-ha.”

“I am talking to you, Sam Shao,” it said. “New advances in RNA retroviral skin cream can literally reverse skin damage. There’s no need to endure the embarrassment of scaly, unattractive hands.”

I looked at my hand and its chewed nails.

“My hands aren’t scaly.”

“Perhaps,” the A.I. said, uncertainly. “Still, I think even you would have to admit that…”

The elevator doors opened and we headed out through the lobby to the city streets.

Hangfei buzzed in the summer’s night heat. In the district of Ping Xi every scrap of sidewalk had been claimed by street vendors whose carts had merged into continuous rows, where pedestrians and bicycles flowed past in either direction. People broke from the flow like stray stones tumbling downstream to join the masses huddled under signs of flashing lights and flapping canvas flags. In between it all, four lanes of street traffic inched past, vehicles tricked out in light paint that depicted rows of colorful images and stylized hanzi. Above, through the canopy of street signs, rows of aircars flitted past between the buildings.

Through it all, swarms of scaleflies drifted across the sidewalks and streets. They’d gotten much worse over the past six months, and even though the air still stank faintly of biocide they just kept coming.

I caught Vamp kind of looking my way, and I knew he wanted to hold my hand. It had been months since the incident in Shiliuyuán, which meant months since our little grope session in the bed at Wei’s hotel. We’d kind of started to go all the way more than once, but each time I’d panicked and we ended up back where we’d started, with me tied up in knots and him waiting. He’d been playing it cool, waiting for me to give him some kind of signal, but so far all I’d given was the occasional kiss so I wouldn’t lose him completely. He’d gotten pretty frustrated. Even I knew it wasn’t fair.

I reached over and took his hand, taking a little solace in the way the hard look disappeared from his face and his smile returned.

“You ready for this?” he asked, nodding at the flash stick. I’d been turning it over and over in my free hand.

“I’m ready,” I said. “You?”

“A walk in the park.”

“Uh-huh.”

He tapped at his phone and then angled the screen toward me so I could see.

“I can tap into the Xinzhongzi screens from here,” he said. “Give me the flash and I’ll upload the video now.”

“I want to go over it first, one more time.”

“No problem. Just bring it when we head to the protest, I’ll upload it there.”

“Will do.”

“You know, we don’t even have to be there.”

“I want to be there.”

I felt a tickle on the back of my right hand and saw a scalefly had landed there. I went to shoo it away, but instead of flying off it just crawled across my hand, down into my palm.

“Stupid thing…”

I clenched my fist, expecting to squish it but I never felt the crunch. I opened my hand, and the fly was gone.

“What the—”

The world tilted under my feet as a strange, but somehow familiar feeling overcame me. I was dizzy, like I’d stood too quickly, and then darkness rushed in and the city around me faded. My foot came down on the pavement in front of me but my whole leg felt numb and crumpled out from under me. I felt myself fall, stumbling sideways into a streetlamp pole. I hooked one arm around it and managed to hold on as I slid down to the ground.

“Sam? What’s wrong?” Vamp’s voice sounded far away.

I saw a flicker in the darkness, then. It grew brighter and brighter until an image filled the void all at once. In an instant I found myself somewhere else, still in Hangfei, but somewhere else, and the eyes I looked through were not my own. The body I inhabited belonged to someone, or something, else.

It’s a haan, I realized. I’d experienced this before. Haan were able to share memories with each other, and those memories were transferred by the scaleflies. Twice before the haan had managed to share their memories with me—Sillith had done it by accident, and Nix had done it on purpose—but they’d used the surrogate mite cluster to do it. I hadn’t sensed any signal at all this time. I still didn’t, and yet the memory felt very clear. So clear it had shunted out the world, almost shunted out my own sense of self as I moved down the unfamiliar alley somewhere out there in the maze of Hangfei.

The streets and buildings around me were almost unrecognizable. I could see several feet through each building wall, through layers of wiring and pipes into the rooms on the other side. I could sense vibrations in the pipe-work and rapid pulses of electricity coursing through each wire. The street ahead revealed a sewer tunnel below, so that I appeared to float through it all. Around me, the air swirled with particles, hundreds and thousands of them. Pheromones danced there from humans, haan, and scaleflies. All of it flowed into my consciousness, all of it information pouring into the haan’s brain even though I could perceive only a little bit of it.

…Eat.

That one drive formed in the core of my thoughts, and I felt the hunger then, a hole that yawned inside me, threatening to pull everything else inside. I needed to eat. I needed to eat soon.

I moved down the street, not able to make sense of the movements my body made as I went. I felt secure that I appeared as a human, but my body image, my human body image, didn’t fit with this memory. Arms, legs, feet, and hands were not part of this body. Unfamiliar movements, hundreds of them, all worked in harmony to carry me forward with almost no effort at all.