James Decker - The Burn Zone

30:12:04 BC

The elevator rattled its way up toward my floor as I leaned back, eyes closed, only half-aware of the world around me. The bitter aftertaste of Zen oil lingered on my tongue, and while it still had me pleasantly disconnected my thoughts buzzed around in circles beneath the haze. I felt like I should be upset, or afraid… like I should be freaking out or something, but I wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t know how to feel anymore, about anything.

“To anyone receiving this transmission …”

The voice, a foreign man speaking butchered Mandarin, sounded distant, rising through a faint static whine from over the ad box maybe? Somewhere nearby.

“… the race you call the haan are not …” More static. “… this is not a dream… ”

I snorted as the elevator jostled me out of my trance, and shook my head to clear it. I rubbed my eyes, and as I took a wobbly step forward I saw the ad box screen mounted inside the door flicker to display a panel of cool electric gray.

“Xiao-Xing?” a female voice asked, issuing from the speaker underneath. When I didn’t answer, it tried again. “Sam?”

“Not now,” I said, chewing my lip.

“Sorry, but elevators cost money, you know. I have two names on record matching your ID. Which do you prefer?”

“Sam, I guess.” The box screen flickered, updating info. “Was that you talking, before?”

“Sorry?”

“Something about a transmission? The haan? I thought I heard something.”

“It wasn’t me. Since you have a moment, though, I would like to talk to you about—”

“Do you have any news?” I asked it. “About the bombing? Do you know anything?”

The A.I. paused, then tried another tack.

“Would you like to be sexy?” it asked.

I laughed a little at that, a giggle that sounded a little more unhinged the longer it went on.

“I am sexy,” I breathed.

“Well, maybe,” the A.I. responded, sounding a bit skeptical.

The screen dissolved the standby gray, and splashed the Sultrex logo while saxophone music began to pipe softly through.

“Look, do you know anything about the bomb?” I asked again.

“No, Sam,” it said, “but I do know this; as you’re probably aware, given your calorie allotment, it is impossible for you to naturally develop the kinds of curves all women want and all men desire, but why be a victim of circumstances beyond your control?”

The elevator shook to a stop, and I hoisted my gear as the screen displayed two images of me. On the left, under the word before, was a shot it had taken of me when I first got on, standing there with my gear and covered in sweat. On the right, under the word after, was the exact same shot manipulated so that in place of my more-or-less flat chest was a big set of computer-generated tits. They strained against the material of my tank top, while a drop of sweat did a slow roll down into the crevice between them. I laughed again, a little.

“Nice touch.”

“It came out of the latest eye-tracking study,” the A.I. admitted.

“Uh-huh.”

“For a very reasonable fee, you could be one of the most desirable young women in Hangfei—”

“Who says I’m not?”

“More people than you might think.”

“I gotta go.”

“Don’t forget, there is a scheduled demolition along the Impact rim tonight,” it said. “Curfew will be in—”

The A.I. was still yammering as the elevator door squealed open and carried the screen away with it into the wall. I stepped out under the buzzing overhead in the hallway and dug into one pocket to find my last loose cigarillo, bent but not broken. I stuck it in the corner of my mouth and crunched down on the end with my teeth as I cracked my back. With the heat wave, washing windows up on Ginzho Tower was brutal, and a day of squeegeeing biocide and smog resin off hot glass had left my brain cooked. The cool air felt like water trickling down over my burned face, chest, and shoulders.

As I started down the hall, I crooked my neck, a motor cortex key that brought up the 3i front end. The braided lanyard from my wet drive implant brushed my shoulder as the holographic display appeared in front of my face with its candy pink neon borders, and immediately social taps from friends, notifications, and ads sprinkled into the foreground. The word cloud that formed in the corner of one eye was ugly, full of variations on bomb, suicide, attack, and dead. That last one flashed on headline tickers, the feeds a fever of rising death counts while laying bets on what horrible thing might come next. I glanced left to screen out the static, and most of the little icons scattered. I tapped friends back to let them know I was okay, and then tuned out the tide of chatter as I headed down the hall toward home.

The other apartment doors were all showing red locks, and I clomped past them, searching my pockets for a light. When I turned the corner I heard my surrogate haan, Tānchi, crying, and his low, shuddering keen snapped me out of it a little as it carried down the hallway. Already I could sense him, a faint haze of anxiety, fear, and hunger—always hunger.

I sent him a single ping and immediately the wailing stopped. His mood turned on a dime, and the cluster of haan brain-band mites tingled deep in my forehead as he reached out to make contact. Requests started trickling in and getting rejected by the 3i’s junk call filter as he picked at any and every open socket, trying to say hi. When I got a little closer the mites locked in fully on his signals and he was there, like a tickle at the edges of my mind. An excited signal spiked through and nicked my visual cortex, causing two ghostly scaleflies, their single compound eyes flashing, to jitter through the air in front of me along with a brief, flickering image of a surrogate formula bottle that quickly faded.

“Mommy’s home,” I singsonged around the cigarillo.

He heard me and I felt a surge, a happy bubbling that always made me smile no matter how bad my day had been.

It faltered as I approached the front door, though. I could see the spray paint from down the hall. Tānchi was my third surrogate so far since we moved here, and I’d thought the people in our building were starting to get used to it. As I got closer I could make out the sloppy squiggles of hanzi that had dribbled before drying.

They eat—we starve.

I abandoned the cigarillo, tucking it behind one ear and spitting out a fleck of tobacco. My mood soured, and pulled me from Tānchi’s happy little wave, but I tried to shake it off. It was just paint. I didn’t want to get Tānchi upset with a bunch of bad bleed-back, and it wasn’t like there wasn’t any truth to it. With the world population at just under fifteen billion, food scarcity was a problem even before the haan showed up. Even our country had been affected, and now there was no getting around the fact that the haan took the majority of the food we produced just to survive. The gamble would pay off in the long run, or so they said, but it was easy to forget how much they did for us when you went to bed hungry every night like some lost worlder.

I took a deep breath and let it out slow. It wasn’t worth scaring Tānchi over. It wasn’t a bomb, say, or something even worse. It was just paint.

I used my badge to trigger the lock and then pushed open the door, feeling the anticipation rise from the direction of the junkyard crib across the room where a single scalefly buzzed in a lazy circle around a hanging mobile. It lit down on the edge of the crib’s backboard, scraping its wings together as it used its hooklike forelegs to preen its stinging proboscis and its black marble eye. The shadows of Tānchi’s spindly, delicate little webbed fingers danced on the wall next to it.