James Corey: The Churn

Timmy’s eyes clicked over toward her without his head shifting at all, without any expression coming to his face. Lydia smiled a slow, languorous smile.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

The catastrophe began four days later. Quietly, and with near-military precision, the city opened a contract with Star Helix security. Soldiers from across the globe arrived in small groups and sat through debriefings. The plan to end the criminal networks operating in Baltimore would be announced after the fact, or at least after the first wave. The thought, widely lauded by the self-congratulatory minds in administration, was to take the criminal element by surprise. In catching them flat-footed, the security teams could cripple their networks, break their power, and restore peace and the rule of law. The several unexamined assumptions in the argument remained unexamined, and the body armor and riot control weapons were distributed in perfect confidence that the enforcers would arrive unanticipated.

In fact, what Burton and Lydia knew from experience, many, many others felt by instinct. There was a discomfort in the streets and alleys, on the rooftops, and behind the locked doors. The city knew that something was near. The only surprise would be in the details.

Erich felt it like an itch he couldn’t scratch. He sat on the rotting concrete curb, drumming the fingers of his good hand against his kneecap. The street around him was the usual mix of foot traffic, bicycles, and wide blue buses. The air stank. The sewage lines this near the water were prone to failures. A few doors to the east, a group of children were playing some kind of complex game with linked headsets, their arms and legs falling into and out of phase with each other. Timmy stood on the sidewalk, squinting up into the sky. Behind them was a squatter’s camp in an old ferrocrete apartment block. In a locked room at its center, Erich’s custom deck was set up and primed, connected to the network and prepared to create a new identity from birth records to DNA matching to backdated newsfeed activity for the client, as soon as she arrived. Assuming she arrived. She was fifteen minutes late and, though they had no way to to know it, already in custody.

Timmy grunted and pointed up. Erich followed the gesture. Far above, a star burned in the vast oceanic blue, a plume of fire pushing a ship out of the atmosphere. Near the horizon, the half moon glowed pale, a network of city lights crossing the shadowy meridian.

“Transport,” Erich said. “They use mass drivers for the stuff that can take the gees.”

“I know,” Timmy said.

“Ever want to go up there?”

“What for?”

“I don’t know,” Erich said, staring down the street for the client. He’d seen her picture: a tall Korean woman with blue hair. He didn’t know who she’d been before, and he didn’t much care. Burton wanted her made into someone new. “Piss out the window and make everyone down here think it was raining, maybe.”

Timmy’s chuckle sounded polite.

“It’s what I’d do, if I could,” Erich said, making a swooping gesture with his good hand. Zoom. “Get up the well and out of here. Go where no one cares about who you are so long as you’re good at what you do. Seriously, it’s the wild fucking west up there. You want nineteenth-century Tombstone, Arizona, it’s alive and well on Ceres Station. From what I heard, anyway.”

“Why don’t you go, then?” Timmy said. With a different intonation, it could have been dismissive. Instead it was only a mild kind of curiosity. It was part of what Erich liked about Timmy. There was almost nothing he seemed to feel deeply.

“Starting from here? I’d never make it. I’m not even a registered birth.”

“You could tell them,” Timmy said. “People get registered all the time.”

“And then they get tracked and monitored and wind up dying on basic,” Erich said. “Anyway, no one’s taking me for a vocational. Waiting lists for that are eight, ten years long. By the time I came up, I’d have aged out.”

“Could build one, couldn’t you?” Timmy asked. “Make a new identity and put it at the front of the list?”

“Maybe,” Erich said. “If you gave me a couple years to layer it all in like I did for Burton. He can go anywhere with docs I built for him.”

“So why don’t you go, then?” Timmy asked again, his inflection as much an echo as his words.

“Guess I don’t want it bad enough. Anyway, I’ve got real stuff to do, don’t I? I wish she’d fucking get here, right?” Erich said, unaware that he made everything a question when he wanted to change the subject. Unconsciously, he made a fist with the hand of his bad arm. Timmy nodded, squinting down the street for the client that wasn’t coming.

Most of their lives had been spent on streets like this. The trade that exploited prostitutes and their illegal children was the second largest source of unregistered births in the city. Only religious radicals accounted for more. It was impossible to know how many unregistered men and women were eking out lives on the margin of society in Baltimore or how many had lived and died unknown to the vast UN databases. Erich knew of perhaps a hundred scattered among the legitimate citizens like members of a secret society. They congregated in condemned buildings and squats, traded in the gray-market economy of unlicensed services, and used their peculiar anonymity where it was most helpful. Looking down the pocked asphalt street, Erich could count three or four people that he personally knew were ghosts in the great world machine. Counting him and Timmy, that was half a dozen all breathing the same air while the plume of the orbital transport marked the sky gold and black above them. There was old water in the gutters, black circles of gum and tar on the sidewalk, the combined smell of urine and decay, and ocean all around them. Erich looked up at the sky with a longing he resented.

He knew himself well enough to recognize that he was a man of desires and grudges, so well in fact that he’d come to peace with it. The blackness of space where merit counted more than the placement on a bureaucrat’s list, where the brothels were licensed and the prostitutes had a union, where freedom was a ship and a crew and enough work to pay for food and air. It called to him with a romance that made his heart ache. On Ceres or Tycho or Mars, the medical technology was available to regrow his crippled arm, to remake his shortened leg. The same technology could be found fewer than eight miles from the filthy curb where he sat, but with the triple barriers of being unregistered, basic medical care waiting lists, and his own ability to function despite his disabilities, space was closer. Out there, he could be the man he should have been. The thought was like the promise of sex to a teenager, rich and powerful and frightening. Erich had resolved a thousand times to make the effort, to build himself an escape identity and shrug off the chains of Earth, of Baltimore, of the life he’d lived. And a thousand and one times, he had postponed it.

“Get up,” Timmy said.

“You see her?” Erich said.

“Nope. Get up.”

Erich shifted, frowning. Timmy was looking east with an expression of mild curiosity, a casual witness at someone else’s wreck. Erich stood. At the intersection a block down, two armored vans had pulled to a stop. The logo on their sides was a four-pointed star. Erich couldn’t tell if the people getting out were men or women, only that they were wearing riot gear. Metallic fear flooded his mouth. Timmy put a strong hand on his shoulder and pushed him gently but implacably across the street. Two more vans came to a halt at the intersection to the north.

“What the fuck?” Erich said, his voice distant and shrill in his own ears.