John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Jerome stared. “Goddamn, their probes really are busted.”

Jessie frowned over the chip. There was a little blood on it. The jack unit was leaking. Cheap installation. “No, they ain’t busted, there’s a guy working on the probe, he’s paid off, he’s letting everyone through for a couple of days because of some Russian mob guys coming in, he don’t know which ones they are. Some of them Russian mob guys got the augments.”

“I thought sure they were going to find my unit,” Jerome said. “The strip search didn’t find it, but I thought the prison probes would and that’d be another year on my sentence. But they didn’t.”

Neither one of them thinking of throwing away the chips. It’d be like cutting out an eye.

“Same story here, bro. We both lucky.”

Jessie put the microprocessing chip in his mouth, the way people did with their contact lenses, to clean it, lubricate it. Of course, bacterially speaking, it came out dirtier than it went in.

“Does the jack hurt?” Jerome asked.

Jessie took the chip out, looked at it a moment on his fingertips. It was smaller than a contact lens, a sliver of silicon and non-osmotic gallium arsenide and transparent interface-membrane, with, probably, 800,000,000 nanotransistors of engineered protein molecules sunk into it, maybe more. “No, it don’t hurt yet. But if it’s leaking, it fuckin’ will hurt, man.” He said something else in Spanish, shaking his head. He slipped the chip back into his jack-in unit and tapped it with the thumbnail of his right hand. So that was where the activation mouse was: under the thumbnail. Jerome’s was in a knuckle.

Jessie rocked slightly, just once, sitting up on his bunk, which meant the chip had engaged and he was getting a readout. They tended to feed back into your nervous system a little at first, make you twitch once or twice; if they weren’t properly insulated, they could make you crap your pants.

“That’s okay,” Jessie said, relaxing. “That’s better.” The chip inducing his brain to secrete vasopressin, contract the veins, simulate the effect of nicotine. It worked for a while, till you could get cigarettes. High-grade chip could do some numbing if you were hung up on Sim, synthetic morphine, and couldn’t get any. But that was Big Scary. You could turn yourself off for good that way. You better be doing some damn fine adjusting.

Jerome thought about the hypothetical chip scanners. Maybe he should object to the guy using his chip here. But what the Chicano was doing wouldn’t make for much leakage.

“What you got?” Jerome asked.

“I got an Apple NanoMind II. Big gigas. What you got?”

“You got the Mercedes, I got the Toyota. I got a Seso Picante Mark I. One of those Argentine things.” (How had this guy scored an ANM II?)

“Yeah, what you got, they kinda basic, but they do most what you need. Hey, our names, they both start with J. And we both here for illegal augs. What else we got in common. What’s your sign?”

“Uh—” What was it, anyway? He always forgot. “Pisces, I think.”

“No shit! I can relate to Pisces. I ran an astrology program, figured out who I should hang with. Pisces is okay. But Aquarius is—I’m a Scorpio, like—Aquarius, qué bueno. ”

What did he mean exactly, hang with, Jerome wondered. Scoping me about am I a faggot, maybe that was something defensive.

But he meant something else. “You know somethin’, Jerome, you got your chip, too, we could do a link and maybe get over on that trashcan.”

Break out? Jerome felt a chilled thrill go through him. “Link with that thing? Control it? I don’t think the two of us would be enough.”

“We need some more guys maybe, but I got news, Jerome, there’s more comin’. Maybe their names all start with J. You know, I mean—in a way.”

In quick succession, the trashcan brought their cell three more guests; a fortyish beach bum named Eddie, a cadaverous black dude named Bones, a queen called Swish, whose real name according to the trashcan, was Paul Torino.

“This place smells like it’s comin’ apart,” Eddie said. He had a surfer’s greasy blond topknot and all the usual Surf Punk tattoos. Meaningless now, Jerome thought, the pollution-derived oxidation of the offshore had pretty much ended surfing. The anaerobics had taken over the surf, in North America, thriving in the toxic waters like a gelatinous Sargasso. If you surfed you did it with an antitoxin suit and a gas mask. “Smells in here like somethin’ died and didn’t go to heaven. Stinks worse’n Malibu.”

“It’s those landfill blocks,” Bones said. He was missing three front teeth, and his sunken face was like something out of a zombie video. But he was an energetic zombie, pacing back and forth as he spoke. “Compressed garbage,” he told Eddie. “Organic stuff mixed with the polymers, the plastics, whatever was in the trash heap, make ’em into bricks ’cause they run outta landfill, but after a while, if the contractor didn’t get ’em to set right, y’know, they start to rot. It’s hot outside is why you’re gettin’ it now. Use garbage to cage garbage, they say. Fucking assholes.”

The trashcan pushed a rack of trays up to the Plexiglas bars and whirred their lunch to them, tray-by-tray. The robot gave them an extra tray. It was screwing up.

They ate their chicken patties—the chicken was almost greaseless, gristleless, which meant it was vat chicken, genetically engineered fleshstuff—and between bites they bitched about the food and indulged the usual paranoid speculation about mind-control chemicals in the coffee.

Jerome looked around at the others, thinking: at least they’re not ass-kickers.

They were crammed here because of the illegal augs sweep, some political drive to clean up the clinics, maybe to see to it that the legal augmentation companies kept their pit-bull grip on the industry. So there wasn’t anybody in for homicide, for gang torture, or anything. No major psychopaths. Not a bad cell to be in.

“You Jerome-X, really?” Swish fluted. She (Jerome always thought of a queen as she and her, out of respect for the tilt of her consciousness) was probably Filipino; had her face girled up at a cheap clinic. Cheeks built up for a heart shape, eyes rounded, lips filled out, tits looking like there was a couple of tin funnels under her jammies. Some of the collagen they’d injected to fill out her lips had shifted its bulk so her lower lip was lopsided. One cheekbone was a little higher than the other. A karmic revenge on at least some of malekind, Jerome thought, for forcing women into girdles and footbinding and anorexia. What did this creature use her chip for, besides getting high?

“Oooh, Jerome-X! I saw your tag before on the TV. The one when your face kind of floated around the president’s head and some printout words came out of your mouth and blocked her face out. God, she’s such a cunt. ”

“What words did he block her out with?” Eddie asked.

“I think… ‘Would you know a liar if you heard one anymore?’ That’s what it was!” Swish said. “It was sooo perfect, because that cunt wanted that war to go on forever, you know she did. And she lies about it, ooh God she lies.”

“You just think she’s a cunt because you want one,” Eddie said, dropping his pants to use the toilet. He talked loudly to cover up the noise of it. “You want one and you can’t afford it. I think the Prez was right, the fucking Mexican People’s Republic is jammin’ our borders, sending commie agents in—”

Swish said, “Oh, God, he’s a Surf Nazi—But God yes, I want one—I want her cunt. That bitch doesn’t know how to use it anyway. Honey, I know how I’d use that thing—” Swish stopped abruptly and shivered, hugged herself. Using her long purple nails, she reached up and pried loose a flap of skin behind her ear, plucked out her chip. She wet it, adjusted its feed mode, put it back in, tapping it with the activation mouse under a nail. She pressed the flap shut. Her eyes glazed as she adjusted. She could get high on the chip-impulses for maybe twenty-four hours and then it’d kill her. She’d have to go cold turkey or die. Or get out. And maybe she’d been doing it for a while now…