John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

None of them would be allowed to post bail. They’d each get the two years mandatory minimum sentence. Illegal augs, the feds thought, were getting out of hand. Black-market chip implants were good for playing havoc with the state database lottery; used by bookies of all kinds; used to keep accounts where the IRS couldn’t find them unless they cornered you physically and broke your code; the aug chips were used to out-think banking computers, and for spiking cash machines; used to milk the body, prod the brain into authorizing the secretion of betaendorphins and ACTH and adrenaline and testosterone and other biochemical toys; used to figure the odds at casinos; used to compute the specs for homemade designer drugs; used by the mob’s street dons to play strategy and tactics; used by the kid gangs for the same reasons; used for illegal congregations on the Plateau.

It was the Plateau, Jerome thought, that really scared the shit out of the feds. It had possibilities.

It was way beyond the fucking Internet. It was even beyond the Grid.

The trashcan dragged in a cot for the extra man, shoved it folded under the door, and blared, “Lights out, all inmates are required to be i-i-in their bu-unks-s-s…” Its voice was failing.

After the trashcan and the light had gone, they climbed off their bunks and sat hunkered in a circle on the floor.

They were on chips, but not transmission-linked to one another. Jacked-up on the chips, they communicated in a spoken shorthand.

“Bull,” Bones was saying. “Door.” He was a voice in the darkness; a scarecrow of shadow.

“Time,” Jessie said.

“Compatibility? Know?” Eddie said.

Jerome said, “Noshee!” Snorts of laughter from the others.

“Link check,” Bones said.

“Models?” Jessie said.

Then they joined in an incantation of numbers.

It was a fifteen-minute conversation in less than a minute.

Translated, the foregoing conversation went: “It’s bullshit, you get past the trash can, there’s human guards, you can’t reprogram them.”

“But at certain hours,” Jessie told him, “there’s only one on duty. They’re used to seeing the can bring people in and out. They won’t question it till they try to confirm it. By then we’ll be on their ass.”

“We might not be compatible,” Eddie had pointed out. “You understand, compatible?”

“Oh, hey, man, I think we can comprehend that,” Jerome said, making the others snort with laughter. Eddie wasn’t liked much.

Then Bones had said, “The only way to see if we’re compatible is to do a systems link. We got the links, we got the thinks, like the man says. It’s either the chain that holds us in, or it’s the chain that pulls us out.”

Jerome’s scalp tightened. A systems link. A mini-Plateau. Sharing minds. Brutal intimacy. Maybe some fallout from the Plateau. He wasn’t ready for it.

If it went sour, he could get time tacked onto his sentence for attempted jailbreak. And somebody might get dusted. They might have to kill a human guard. Jerome had once punched a dealer in the nose, and the spurt of blood had made him sick. He couldn’t kill anyone. But… he had shit for alternatives. He knew he wouldn’t make it through two years anyway, when they sent him up to the Big One.

The Big One’d grind him up for sure. They’d find his chip there, and it’d piss them off. They’d let the bulls rape him and give him the New Virus; he’d flip out from being locked in and chipless, and they’d put him under Aversion Rehab and burn him out.

Jerome savaged a thumbnail with his incisors. Sent to the Big One.

He’d been trying not to think about it. Making himself take it one day at a time. But now he had to look at the alternatives. His stomach twisted itself to punish him for being so stupid. For getting into dealing augments so he could finance a big transer. Why? A transer didn’t get him anything but his face pirated onto local TV for maybe twenty seconds. He’d thrown himself away trying to get it…

Why was it so fucking important? his stomach demanded, wringing itself vindictively.

“Thing is,” Bones said, “we could all be cruisin’ into a set-up. Some kind of sting thing. Maybe it’s a little too weird how the police prober let us all through.”

(Someone listening would have heard him say, “Sting, funny luck.”)

Jessie snorted. “I tol’ you, man. The prober is paid off. They letting them all through because some of them are mob. I know that, because I’m part of the thing. We deal wid the Russians. Okay?”

(“Probe greased, fa-me.”)

“You with the mob?” Bones asked.

(“You’m?”)

“You got it. Just a dealer. But I know where a half million nfootageewbux wortha augshit is, so they going to get me out if I do my part. The way the system is set up, the prober had to let everyone through. His boss thinks we got our chips taken out when they arraigned us; sometimes they do it that way. This time it was supposed to be the jail surgeon. By the time they catch up their own red tape, we get outta here. Now listen—we can’t do the trashcan without we all get into it, because we haven’t got enough K otherwise. So who’s in, for fuck’s sake?”

He’d said, “Low, half mill, bluff surgeon, there here, twip, all-none, who yuh fucks?”

Something in his voice skittered with claws behind smoked glass: he was getting testy, irritable from the chip adjustments for his nicotine habit, maybe other adjustments: the side effects of liberal cerebral self-modulating burning through a threadbare nervous system.

The rest of the meeting, translated…

“I dunno,” Eddie said. “I thought I’d do my time, cause if it goes sour—”

“Hey, man,” Jessie said, “I can take your fuckin’ chip. And be out before they notice your ass don’t move no more.”

“The man’s right,” Swish said. Her pain-suppression system was unraveling, axon by axon, and she was running out of adjust. “Let’s just do it, okay? Please? Okay? I gotta get out. I feel like I wish I was dogshit so I could be something better.”

“I can’t handle two years in the Big, Eddie, and I’ll do what I gotta, hodey,” Jerome heard himself say, realizing he was helping Jessie threaten Eddie. Amazed at himself. Not his style.

“It’s all of us or nobody, Eddie,” Bones said.

Eddie was quiet for a while.

Jerome had turned off his chip, because it was thinking endlessly about Jessie’s plan, and all it came up with was an ugly model of the risks. You had to know when to go with intuition.

Jerome was committed. And he was standing on the brink of link. The time was now, starting with Jessie.

Jessie was operator. He picked the order. First Eddie, to make sure about him. Then Jerome. Maybe because he had Jerome scoped for a refugee from the middle class, an anomaly here, and Jerome might try and raise the Heat on his chip, make a deal. Once they had him linked in, he was locked up.

After Jerome, it’d be Bones and then Swish.

They held hands, so that the link signal, transmitted from the chip using the electric field generated by the brain, would be carried with the optimum fidelity.

He heard them exchange frequency designates, numbers strung like beads in the darkness, and heard the hiss of suddenly indrawn breaths as Jessie and Eddie linked in. And he heard, “Let’s go, Jerome.”

Jerome’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, the night giving up some of its buried light, and Jerome could just make a crude outline of Jessie’s features like a charcoal rubbing from an Aztec carving.

Jerome reached to the back of his own head, found the glue-tufted hairs that marked his flap, and pulled the skin away from the chip’s jack unit. He tapped the chip. It didn’t take. He tapped it again, and this time he felt the shift in his bioelectricity; felt it hum between his teeth.