Machina Obscura

Chapter two

Chapter twoXyl was jerked out of her uneasy doze by the drag of deceleration as the maglev commuter train began to slow. The lighting inside the train began to brighten and the synthesized bot voice recited departure instructions in Arabic, then in Mandarin, then in German. Disoriented from the sudden transition from dream to waking, she glanced up at the scrolling LCD screen near the ceiling and tried to figure out where she was.

North Atlantica, Old Manhattan. The blue alphanumerics scrolling smoothly across the bottom of her visual field indicated World Trade Center Station. The tiny tumbling green pyramid in the lower left corner of her vision was not blinking, so she had no NetMail or CallBacks waiting. She nodded unconsciously and reached up to retrieve her backpack and her long black leather coat from the luggage rack above her head, waiting as other more eager passengers got to their feet chattering and laughing.

Thirty-six hours of doing nothing but sleeping and staring up at a hotel room ceiling had partially erased the more obvious signs of exhaustion. A quick shopping run via her nanos’ Mid-Mode had brought the hotel’s bot to her door three hours later with two changes of clothes, the leather longcoat and tickets for the maglev commuter express to Old Manhattan leaving that afternoon. She’d downed two liters of vitamin broth but hadn’t been able to keep down the vegetable soup she’d forced herself to eat. She didn’t care. Vitamin broth had enough calories to sustain human life, that was its intended purpose. In a few days it wouldn’t matter anyway.

World Trade Center Station was the main maglev commuter station for North Atlantica with more than two hundred trains arriving every hour from East Canada Metro, Mid-Atlantica/Old DC and South Atlantica. Elevated and underground tracks all over Old Manhattan were managed and controlled by North Atlantica Port Authority through a collective of advanced Artificial Intelligences. The human contingent of the Port Authority had realized decades ago that human operators simply could not handle the thousands of decisions that had to be made every hour when a single error could send hundreds of people to their deaths and bring traffic to a halt for days. The system now ran itself with the AIs at the controls, and there had been only two accidents in seventy-six years. Both of those accidents had been due to human error.

The main concourse of the Station was a hollow cube of a building reaching ten stories to the roof. Arrival and departure concourses lined the four walls at every level, baggage-handling bots trundling along on small fat balloon tires and beeping stridently to clear people from their path. The first floor was all shops, ticket counters, food vendors, and an indoor greenspace with playground equipment. The roof was gridded off in landing squares for aircraft. An expensive hotel took up most of the east wing of the Station past the concourses, catering mostly to the corporate class. The north wing was devoted to accessways to the local subway maglevs radiating out to North Atlantica Metro itself.

As she turned toward the elevators she was caught by the view of Old Manhattan visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the corner of the concourse. A drizzling rain was blowing through the city. High above Security rotorbuses thunked across the sky, shining their spotlights down into the streets thousands of feet below. The sky was an opaque mahogany brown, raincloud and smog and light pollution building a dome over the city. The buildings were massive dark outlines speckled with lights, the lines of local subway maglevs snaking along between them. Far off across the water was the dark half-shattered form of the Statue of Liberty, which had been partially destroyed by terrorists a hundred fifty years before Xyl’s birth. A fire somewhere in Hoboken was shooting orange flame up toward the clouds, sending up an orange glow. As she watched a line of bot-controlled barges began to approach the docks across the Bay.

She felt as much an outsider as she always had in real-time. While she was well aware that fully ninety percent of the people around her had nanobots infesting their brains and nervous systems, she felt as if she moved inside some invisible shell, unseen, unnoticed. Mothers with children, corporates chattering at their WorkMates or LifeMates as they walked to the elevators, Security at every boarding platform, a group of schoolkids from East Canada giving their teachers a hard time as they tried to find their luggage.

Xyl wondered if she was the only one who noticed the panhandlers at the top of the subway station stairs.

It was cold underground, the constant rush of low-pressure air drawing the heat from the walls. She settled her backpack on her shoulder and descended into the sepulchral flickering half-dark of the subway station.

The polite, freshly-scrubbed veneer of prosperity and wealth fell away at the first subway stop as a half-dozen wireheads shoved their way aboard the maglev train before the doors had opened completely. The group of Asian corporates who were lined up to leave the train automatically fell back to the car’s rear exit, not even slowing down their animated conversation as the young thugs laughingly shoved them down the aisleway before they threw themselves into the handicapped-reserved seats at the front of the car. Xyl kept her head down, knowing that if she made eye contact they’d be on her in a heartbeat.

Not that she particularly wanted to. Young, loud, muscles artificially enhanced through a combination of drugs and nanobot surgery, bald like Xyl herself, each sporting a jagged triskele tattoo on the back of the head and a bristling array of ROMchips behind and above their right ears. She pulled her coat around herself and tried to be as small and inconspicuous as possible, but grinned slightly when she saw a smartly-dressed woman across the aisleway gather her WorkMate and her sleeping child closer.

Apparently she’d been spotted anyway.

“Hey! Input!”

Xyl looked up to see one of the young thugs standing a few feet away, hanging like a monkey from one of the grab-bars near the ceiling, looking down at her with a grin. He had an almost elfin face, thin and pale like most NetRunners and wireheads, one side of his head dotted with chipjacks and the ear on the other side decorated with at least a dozen silver rings. His eyes were a strange electric green, undoubtedly nano-enhanced. He wore ripped and faded jeans and a battered leather jacket and combat boots, the typical gang uniform that rarely changed. His friends in the seats behind him were chuckling and jabbing each other playfully in the ribs and nodding at their compatriot hanging from the grab-bar. The boy glanced back at them for a moment, laughed, then turned back to face her. “You got a place to crash tonight, input?”

Xyl blinked and laughed shortly. “You wouldn’t be able to handle me, Gilligan. Some spiders eat their mates.”

The boy blinked, obviously thinking. Then he grinned again. “That sounds like fun, would it hurt?”

Two of the other toughs jumped up and tugged their friend from the grab-bar. “C’mon, coproc, leave the input alone. Drop line.”

“Drop line? Why? It’s just an—”

The others hustled the boy down the aisleway, promising to explain it later. Xyl tried very hard not to grin as they fled to the next car.

* * * *

“Azim! Azim, c’mon, you know it’s me. Answer the damned comm!”

Xyl throttled down her annoyance and glanced around, triggering the VoiceComm signal to drop line. The tumbling purple dodecahedron morphed back into the green pyramid, minimized from Mid-Mode to StandBy and zipped down to its place at the lower left corner of her vision. She glanced up and down the alleyway and back to the blank steel door in front of her. She shrugged her backpack a little higher on her shoulder and looked up the crumbling brick wall, trying to see if there were any lights in the building above the junk shop.

Little Cairo was too dark. Two and a half years before, the night she and her lover Auriel had left with their friends to raid the research and development division of GelTech Industries, Little Cairo had been alive with light and the wild strains of Moroccan dance music. The last call for prayer had been quavering from the windows of the mosque down the street and Elinda had been dancing in a whirl of nano-enhanced reflexes and purple synthsilk and silver chains, showing off for Pepper and Azim’s son Jamal.

Now, there was only darkness and the crunch of broken glass underfoot. The windows of the pastry shop were boarded up with sheet metal. The “public” face of Azim’s operation, a ROMware shop, seemed to be cleaned out and deserted. She could see a layer of dust on the windowsill through the metal slats of the security bars. The only place with any lights on was the coffee shop and the brothel on the second floor above it. And there was no one in the coffee shop, just the ancient serving bot motionless in the corner.

No voices. She triggered her chrono display and the green pyramid morphed into green alphanumerics. It was just after dawn, there should be some sort of activity, at the mosque if nowhere else.

She shook her head and pounded on the steel door. “Azim! Jamal!”

The door abruptly jerked open and a small brown hand reached out, caught the edge of her leather longcoat and yanked her forward into the doorway.

“Who are you and what do you want? We’ve already paid up our bribes for the month!”

Xyl winced and put up a hand to block the red pinpoint of a targeting spot shining in her eyes. “Jamal?! Have you lost whatever passes for your mind? It’s me! Xyl!”

“Merciful Allah!”

Movement, and abruptly the targeting spot vanished. Xyl blinked as she tried to clear her eyes, followed the small skinny figure and the hands pulling her forward into the crowded confines of the junk shop. And voices, at last, familiar voices hissing angry questions at each other in Arabic, and Xyl was pressed down onto an ancient packing crate and a warm mug of spiced coffee was suddenly in her hands.

“You should not have come back.”

Xyl looked up at last and tried to grin at the dark Egyptian face peering down at her. Azim al’Nair had aged in the two and a half years she’d been gone. The weathered lean face was lined with fatigue and deep worry lines, and his long jet-black hair was showing much more gray than she remembered. And there was much more wariness and suspicion in the gray eyes. They were surrounded by the irregular miniature skyline of crates and shelves that held the true merchandise of Azim’s trade: weapons, electronics, molecular synthesizers, controlled chemicals, remote sensing equipment. And more than that, information, which usually was kept in the gray matter of Azim’s own brain, accessible only by his nanobots.

“I came to get my WorkMate,” Xyl said after a long drink of the coffee. “Where’s Pepper?”

Azim gave a long sigh and looked away. “I don’t know. He disappeared — was taken, I should say — soon after you and Auriel were captured.”

Xyl clenched her hands on the mug and closed her eyes. The little green pyramid continued its ceaseless silent tumbling in her own private darkness. “What use would anyone have for a crazy old Marine with post-traumatic stress? Why’d they take him? Was it Security?”

“No. The Walking Dead. And that is why you should not have come back.” As he spoke Azim left the circle of light cast by the tensor light on the wide table where she sat, moved to the locked bins along the wall. Xyl heard one of the locks disengage with a beep and the dealer rummaging in the contents. “He gave me your WorkMate just after you were captured, for safe keeping. And because he feared his faulty memory would fail him and he would forget who it belonged to and sell it or wipe the memory. He knew you would come back for it someday.” A moment later the dealer came back to the table and put the small handheld device down in front of her. Xyl quirked a grin at the battered hard plastic casing decorated with the same whimsical blue monster that matched the tattoo on her arm.

“What’s this about the Walking Dead?” Xyl asked after a moment. “Who are they?”

“A gang. A very powerful, very large gang.” Azim nodded toward the front rooms of his store, indicating the streets outside. “I’m sure you saw the state of things outside. Before, when you were here, there were many of your kind, many different groups, small or large. Sometimes you worked together, sometimes you fought. But this new gang, the Dead, they are like an amoeba. They’ve absorbed all the smaller gangs, and if they refused to join the Dead they were killed. Hunted down like dogs, on the Net or IRL. The Utopians, the Chaos, the Sharks, the Analemma Collective, they’re all gone or dead.” The dealer shook his head sadly. “And it is all of Atlantica, not just here in North. They are beginning to take over Pacifica too, or so my brother in San Fran tells me.”

“And you’re still here?” Xyl asked incredulously.

“I pay them bribes and don’t question when they come to raid my shop!” Azim said angrily. “I am not the only black market dealer in North Atlantica. I am useful to them, so long as I keep my head down and don’t ask questions.”

Xyl put the coffee mug down on the table and rubbed her eyes wearily. “Well, it’s nice to know who I need to keep clear of, at least.”

“I do not think you will be able to,” Azim said tensely, shaking his head. He looked up and gestured to his son, visible through the darkened doorway into the front of the shop, gun in hand as he kept watch of the street. “I think they will be coming for Jamal soon. After that, I will leave.”

* * * *

Pepper –

I used to wonder if you’d tell me what it was like to see all this from the Orbitals or if you’d just go on one of your riffs about how we’re all living like rats down here. Of course you were usually saying that stuff after a hefty snootful of that Russian rocket fuel you sucked down like water, so Saint Darpa only knows what the hell you were thinking.

Azim says it’s not safe in North anymore. He told me to leave, go down to Old DC, or better yet South. Somewhere where the local biz isn’t as lucrative for the Walking Dead. He thinks they’ll leave me alone down in DC if I act like a CorpRunner since they’ve got most of the Corps down there pretty much under their control. Maybe, I dunno. There’s nothing left for me in North anymore anyway.

But I’ll be damned if I play CorpRunner. And I’ll be damned if I hide like some silly Gilligan.

* * * *

Xyl swung her backpack off her aching shoulder and dropped it on the bed, her eyes sweeping the neutral colors of the hotel room’s interior. The commsignal booster on the bedside table, the bulletproof and polarized window opposite the door, the large round table and two chairs in the corner. The view through the window showed the rainslick armored side of the hotel’s other tower some three hundred yards away and beyond it the brownish-gray gloom of early afternoon.

She shrugged out of the longcoat and sat down on the bed, tugging open the velcro closures of her boots and kicking them away. She sighed and flopped back on the bed, put her arm over her eyes and contemplated sleeping. But biz was biz and the sooner the run was done the better. The little green pyramid had been blinking pink for the last fifteen minutes as she made her way from Little Cairo back toward the old financial district.

Knowing that delaying wouldn’t make things any easier, she focused on the tiny tumbling green pyramid and triggered it. It zipped to the middle of her visual field and expanded to show the VoiceComm mid-mode, the virtual representation of a communications package — buttons for placing and receiving voice calls and messages. She rotated it to the side of the pyramid that handled messages and triggered the CallBack button. She heard a quiet beep as the call was initiated.

“Kid? That you?”

Searles’ voice was routed via her auditory nerves, audible only inside her own head. “Who else would it be?”

“Right, right. You ready to go?”

“Maybe. Depends on the run.” She triggered the VoiceComm back to Minimized mode and it contracted to a tumbling purple dodecahedron at the bottom left of her visual field. “I’m at a Wall Street corporate crackerbox.”

A pause, and then Searles said, “That’s not good enough. Find somewhere more secure.”

“And hold up a sign that says ‘I’m a Runner, Security free for all in the hot tub at ten, tag and bag at midnight’? I don’t think so.” She pulled the pillow over her head and silently wondered if Searles had ever tried to hire a Runner before or if he was doing this for the glamour and excitement. “You worry about your open expense accounts, I’ll worry about Security. What’s the run?”

“That can wait for the moment. You shouldn’t have gone back to North; you’ve picked up a tail. Possibly more than one.”

Xyl sat up abruptly and tossed the pillow away. “What in the sacred hard drives of Saint Darpa are you blathering about, Corp?”

“I’m ‘blathering’ about that little side trip you made to Little Cairo. That’s right in the middle of Walking Dead territory. You’re an untagged Runner on their turf, dealing with a black market dealer who, I might add, deals almost exclusively in banned weaponry and electronics.”

Xyl didn’t wait to hear more. She dropped line on the call, tugged her boots on as quickly as she could, and shrugged into her longcoat halfway to the elevators.

The rain was coming down in sheets as she took the stairs up from the subway maglev two at a time and burst out into the middle of Little Cairo’s four square block territory. It stung her eyes and left tracks of grit down her face and scrawled black streaks across the skin of her head and neck, made the slime of the old alleyways slick and treacherous under her boots. There were people on the streets now, women wrapped in black moving silently under the wide awnings of the butcher shop, in the lights of the fish market, hurrying home huddled under the reinforced plastic of rain parkas. Somewhere, faintly, she could hear someone playing a sitar with drums keeping time, and laughter and voices arguing in Arabic.

She skidded around the pastry shop’s inert bulk and into the alleyway leading to the back door of Azim’s shop ...

... a door that was hanging open, torn halfway off its hinges. And a small, brown, blood-streaked hand was flung across the threshold.

Security sirens were approaching in the distance. She turned and fled.