James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

Weaseling his way through the merrymakers, Bash was brought up short a block away from the Paramount by an oncoming parade. Heading the procession was a huge multiperson Chinese dragon. In lieu of dumb paint, its proteopape skin sheathed it in glittery scales and animated smoke-snorting head.

People were pointing to the sky. Bash looked up.

One of the famous TimWarDisVia aerostats cruised serenely overhead, obviously dispatched to provide an overhead view of the parade. Its proteopape skin featured Bash’s face larger than God’s. Scrolling text reflected poorly on Bash’s parentage and morals.

“God damn!” Bash turned away from the sight, only to confront the dragon. Its head now mirrored Bash’s, but its body was a snake’s.

Small strings of firecrackers began to explode, causing shrieks, and Bash utilized the diversion to bull onward toward the shuttered Paramount Theater. He darted down the narrow alley separating the deserted building from its neighbors.

“Tito! Any tips on getting inside?”

“One of our webcams on the first floor shows something funky with one of the windows around the back.”

The rear exterior wall of the theater presented a row of weather-distressed plywood sheets nailed over windows. The only service door was tightly secured. No obvious entrance manifested itself.

But then Bash noticed with his trained eye that one plywood facade failed close-up inspection as he walked slowly past it.

Dagny had stretched an expanse of proteopape across an open frame, then set the pape to display a plywood texture.

Bash set his phone on the ground. “Tito, I’m going in alone. Call the cops if I’m not out in half an hour.”

“Uptaken and bound, fizz!”

Rather vengefully, Bash smashed his fist through the disguising pape, then scrambled inside.

Dagny had hotwired electricity from somewhere. The Paramount was well lit, although the illumination did nothing to dispel a moldy atmosphere from years of inoccupancy. Bash moved cautiously from the debris-strewn backstage area out into the general seating.

A flying disc whizzed past his ear like a suicidal mirror-finished bat. It hit a wall and shattered.

Dagny stood above him at the rail of the mezzanine with an armful of antique DVDS. The platters for the digital projectors must have been left behind when the Paramount ceased operations. The writing on a shard at Bash’s feet read: The Silmarillion .

Dagny frisbee’d another old movie at Bash. He ducked just in time to avoid getting decapitated.

“Quit it, Dagny! Act like an adult, for Christ’s sake! We have to talk!”

Dagny pushed her clunky eyeglasses back up her nose. “We’ve got nothing to talk about! You’ve proven you’re a narrow-minded slave to old hierarchies, without an ounce of imagination left in your shriveled brainpan. And you insulted my art!”

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to, honest. Jesus, even you said that the Woodies were a big joke.”

“Don’t try putting words in my mouth! Anyway, that was before I won one.”

Bash stepped forward into an aisle. “I’m coming up there, Dagny, and you can’t stop me.”

A withering fusillade of discs forced Bash to eat his words and run for cover into an alcove.

Frustrated beyond endurance, Bash racked his wits for some means of overcoming the demented auteur.

A decade of neglect had begun to have its effects on the very structure of the theater. The alcove where Bash stood was littered with fragments of concrete. Bash snatched up one as big as his fist. From his pocket he dug the sheet of proteopape that had blinded him, and wrapped it around the heavy chunk. He stepped forward.

“Dagny, let’s call a truce. I’ve got something here you need to read. It puts everything into a new light.” Bash came within a few meters of the lower edge of the balcony before Dagny motioned him to stop. He offered the ball of pape on his upturned palm.

“I don’t see what could possibly change things — ”

“Just take a look, okay?”

“All right. Toss it up here.”

Dagny set her ammunition down to free both hands and leaned over the railing to receive the supposedly featherweight pape.

Bash concentrated all his anger and resolve into his right arm. He made a motion as if to toss underhand. But at the last minute he swiftly wound up and unleashed a mighty overhand pitch.

Dagny did not react swiftly enough to the deceit. The missile conked her on the head and she went over backwards into the mezzanine seats.

Never before had Bash moved so fast. He found Dagny hovering murmurously on the interface between consciousness and oblivion. Reassured that she wasn’t seriously injured, Bash arrowed toward her nest of pillows. He snatched up the sheet of proteopape that displayed his familiar toolkit for accessing the trapdoor features of his invention. With a few commands he had long ago memorized as a vital failsafe, he initiated the shutdown of the hidden override aspects of proteopape.

From one interlinked sheet of proteopape to the next the commands raced, propagating exponentially around the globe like history’s most efficient cyber-worm, a spark that extinguished its very means of propagation as it raced along. Within mere minutes, the world was made safe and secure again for Immanent Information.

Bash returned to Dagny, who was struggling to sit up.

“You — you haven’t beaten me. I’ll find some way to show you — ”

The joyful noises from the continuing parade outside insinuated themselves into Bash’s relieved mind. He felt happy and inspired. Looking down at Dagny, he knew just what to say.

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Is there a way to reverse the Singularity? In Christopher Rowe’s bizarre future Tennessee, an AI has created a mind-merged police state, whose citizens are permitted but a few shreds of individuality and just a taste of free will. A raiding party of autonomous humans from Kentucky attempts to hack the digital tyranny.

Yet from the inside, this polity feels like a giddy Utopia. The technology here is so advanced that it often as not presents as magical, with flowers that sing the national anthem and cars that pine for their owners. Stylistically, this is one of the most crammed — and playful — PCP stories in the collection.

Soma had parked his car in the trailhead lot above Governor’s Beach. A safe place, usually, checked regularly by the Tennessee Highway Patrol and surrounded on three sides by the limestone cliffs that plunged down into the Gulf of Mexico.

But today, after his struggle up the trail from the beach, he saw that his car had been attacked. The driver’s side window had been kicked in.

Soma dropped his pack and rushed to his car’s side. The car shied away from him, backed to the limit of its tether before it recognized him and turned, let out a low, pitiful moan.

“Oh, car,” said Soma, stroking the roof and opening the passenger door, “Oh, car, you’re hurt.” Then Soma was rummaging through the emergency kit, tossing aside flares and bandages, finally, finally finding the glass salve. Only after he’d spread the ointment over the shattered window and brushed the glass shards out onto the gravel, only after he’d sprayed the whole door down with analgesic aero, only then did he close his eyes, access call signs, drop shields. He opened his head and used it to call the police.

In the scant minutes before he saw the cadre of blue and white bicycles angling in from sunward, their bubblewings pumping furiously, he gazed down the beach at Nashville. The cranes the Governor had ordered grown to dredge the harbor would go dormant for the winter soon — already their acres-broad leaves were tinged with orange and gold.