John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“We can’t let this go on anymore,” Roseland said.

Torrence nodded. “We’re risking it all, but…” He sighed. “There’s a way, maybe. We’ve got a man who thinks he can get into a Jægernaut. We could use it to block the reinforcements, give us a chance to move the others out…” He shrugged. “I dunno…”

A Jægernaut. Roseland’s heart revved at the thought. The justice of it. Go with it, sell Torrence on the idea. “ That’d work. It’d be a propaganda victory, too… the Jægernauts are a symbol. And hey, you got to understand, you’ll triple your recruits after this, at least,” Roseland pointed out.

“Most of those we rescue won’t be capable of fighting,” Torrence said. “They’ll need medical help. Getting them to safety once we break them out is a logistical nightmare. We’re gonna try to get them to the NATO hospital and hope they’re believed…”

“So what do we do at this end?”

“Get them at shift change. They do it all at once—so we’ll do it that way too. All but two are together, then. We get most of them at once, with armor piercers, and they don’t hole up anywhere. We can’t handle a siege situation; we’ve got to get in, fast.”

“What about the two upstairs?”

“Have to hit them with an RPG.”

“Blow the office from out here? That’ll take out maybe half the floor above them, kill some prisoners.”

“I don’t think it can be helped.” Torrence’s voice had no apology in it. “We haven’t got time to do it any other way. We’ve got all those people to move out…”

“They’re going to be scared,” Roseland said, “and an explosion’ll scare ’em worse.” He felt lame saying it. It sounded trivial, but it wasn’t. Only, it was hard to explain how it wasn’t. “They saw what happened to PC 12…”

“They’ll come with us; they won’t have a choice,” Torrence said.

Roseland nodded. None of us have a whole lot of choice, he thought.

He realized, then, that he was scared of being killed in this raid. Breaking out of PC 12, he hadn’t been scared of dying. That was living death. He’d seen people die every day. He’d seen people spiritually murdered, too. Death had seemed a strangely viable option.

Now he was ashamed to realize he wanted to live again; ashamed because of what had happened to Gabrielle; to the children he had seen dragged away, and beaten, or dying of cholera with not even an aspirin to soothe them.

His gut churned with the wrongness of his own survival. He thought about his mother, and remembered that she’d let herself die after his dad had gone. She’d been healthy, but then she mostly refused to eat, and wasted away. She had let pneumonia get her. She’d known what to do.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

“About what?” Torrence asked, glancing at him, his Hard-Eyes going into shadow when he turned.

“Never mind,” Roseland said. “Thinking aloud.”

He stared out the blind at the Processing Center…

Torrence stared at him for a few moments. “Let’s get out of here before they do heatseeker check. They send up those fucking birds sometimes, spot checking.”

“Let’s do it.”

They crawled out the back way, through a tunnel of trash.

Jerome-X was sick of being cooped up. This was almost as bad as the fucking jail.

Not that there was anything appealing outside the building. I mean, fuck it: Go ahead, go outside. He’d seen it, coming in on the plane. In the distance, maybe four miles from here, was the outskirts of Tijuana. Junkyards, abandoned resorts, shantytowns. Around “the ranch” was just desert—a tarantula-haunted, scorpion-infested, ugly brown dusty desert. Cactus and twisted little gray trees, and along the cracked, empty concrete highway the occasional rusty car pocked with bullet holes.

Not even a goddamn cantina around the ranch.

The ranch. An old therapeutic spa for bogus cancer cures, purchased by Witcher and converted for the NR.

Jerome-X sat in the air-conditioned, cinder-block lecture room in a wheelchair. That was what they had to sit in, old, motorless wheelchairs, with rusty spokes. They came with the ranch. “If you aren’t crippled before you sat in this thing,” he mumbled to Bones, “you will be afterward.”

Bones—gaunt, zombie-phlegmatic, ghetto-black Bones—shook his head at him once, smiling but reproachful. Meaning: Shut up and pay attention.

There were seven students, counting Jerome-X and the little girl, and there was the instructor, Bettina: a three-hundred-fifty-pound (Jerome’s chip calculated) black woman with Rasta’ed hair; she was close to six feet tall, sweating despite the air-conditioning, wearing a printout shift. It was a pink Tuffpaper dress, a cheap brand that used the same patterns for its line of paper towels. As the day wore on, her sweat would make the dress deteriorate, bit by bit, under her arms, crumbling its edges into little pink worms of synthetic paper-cloth.

The floor shuddered faintly as she strode back and forth in front of the holographic illustrator, tapping factors into place with her fingernail cursor, explicating the computer underground in her hoarse New Orleans drawl.

The holustrator had been an object of fascination for Jerome-X the first few days he was here. When it was turned on, it looked like an astrolabe of translucent neon lines, hovering in the air about six feet across. The 3D cursors moved about in the faintly reticulating globe like fireflies in geometric formation; formations that split into contrary asymmetries as luminous, floating numbers flickered by. “Computer viruses,” Bettina had explained that first day, “and yo’ so-called computer ‘tapeworms,’ were de pests of de end of de twentieth century…”

And despite advances in decryption and the use of hard partitioning write-protects, the only thing that reliably resisted the predatory viral programs was the cybernetic immune system provided by parallel programming. The “clean” system of the secondary and tertiary computers interlinked with the primary mainframe to watch over the primary programs. “But—dere are ways: A smart enough virus can redirect de code traffic to fool de guardian computer. And if we git ourselves parallel progammed—lotta brain chips working together—we stand a better chancea outsmartin’ de guardian. We use de holustrator to practice dat cooperation. We learna be awarea one another as on-line processing factors…”

They were here to improve their chip-to-chip communication for underground information dispersal. And for one other, more trenchant reason…

To learn to be human computer viruses…

It had all seemed very romantic at first, when Bones had pitched it at him. Bones, it turned out, was New Resistance. The NR was a brotherhood, Bones said, a brotherhood that transcended race and nationality. And it could be a refuge, too. After the jailbreak, Jerome needed a home. He was on the run. And even internally, Jerome felt homeless and fugitive. Seeing himself in cybernetic summary, with unwanted objectivity; seeing his own shallowness.

I’ve been jerking off all this time with video graf, he told himself. I’ve been playing with the toys of the ego.

The New Resistance was in line with his own political convictions, his mistrust of the Grid, the power structure. Like Bones, he was convinced that the Second Alliance’s attempt to take over the US wasn’t isolated. He’d heard too many stories through the hacker networks about the repression overseas. Like Bones, he believed that the New-Soviets had been pushed into their aggression, forced into World War Three, by the economic machinations of the multinationals. Big Business had wanted a conventional military confrontation and now it wanted a Fascist power structure in order to further roll back the threat of communism. Jerome was no enthusiast for communism, but he understood its provenance: the people at the bottom of the pyramid were tired of holding up the ones at the top. They wanted a fair share.