Amped (7 page)

“So … are we good?” I ask.

“We be all right,” says Cortez, never taking his eyes off the road. “Cuz,” he adds, breaking into a wide grin. He playfully shoves me in the shoulder. “You know I gotta shave my head now, right?”

After eight hours in the truck we pull in for gas outside Sallisaw, Oklahoma. I grab my pack, lean over, and shake hands with Cortez. When I crack open the hermetically sealed door, a razor’s edge of dusk sunlight briefly stripes his face.

“You pretty close to where you going. Motel is over there. Should be an okay one for you—guy who owns it is blind.”

His amused chuckle is lost in the low bass line and profanity-laced lyrics. I thank Cortez and leave him in his rolling den. Step around the gas station’s automatic fueler, avoiding the patterned light that it sprays as it blindly searches for a gas cap. Cortez never has to leave the truck, not even to fuel it.

Taking the blame is a full-time job.

Walking toward the motel, I hear a chime from the idling truck as it acknowledges the pump. I pretend to scratch my forehead, blocking the sight of my face from the two subtle lumps on that hulking hood as they twinkle with laser light, scanning the environment and matching the truck’s local map with what’s up there in the satellite. Even way out here, the world is thick with cameras.

Just another link in the supply chain of human civilization.

It used to be people who drove the trucks and airplanes and boats. Things still look the same from the outside, but the core is always changing, always being upgraded. And the role of technology is under constant renegotiation.

As the big rig hauls itself out of the parking lot, engine hissing, I keep my head down and wonder what would happen if we rolled everything back ten years. The computers would go a little slower, I guess. The factories would make a little less, and the farms wouldn’t produce as much. These seem like such small things, but we depend on each new advance.

Millions would die. Because once we have the tech, we can’t let it go.

Fwish, fwish, fwish
goes the implant in my head. It is inscrutable and mute and God knows what it does. But it doesn’t seem like a clock ticking down anymore. More like a heartbeat. Steady and dependable.

At least, I hope so.

I have seen
The old gods go
And the new gods come.

Day by day
And year by year
The idols fall
And the idols rise.

Today
I worship the hammer.

—CARL SANDBURG (1914)

Disbanded Echo Squad Vets Under Investigation

FORT COLLINS—This morning a spokesman for the US Army confirmed that members of the so-called Echo Squad, made up entirely of “amped” soldiers outfitted with prototype neural implants, were under federal investigation for plotting terrorist crimes. Four federal warrants were issued, although records indicate there were twelve original members.

Echo Squad was dissolved a decade ago in the wake of a scandal. Documents exposing the existence of the squad were leaked by an online coalition of hackers known as Archos, and published simultaneously by three collaborating newspapers.

An Army spokesman said, “In the interest of national security we cannot comment. These men are walking weapons. People’s lives are at stake here.”

Army officials have come under criticism for failing to track the soldiers after Echo Squad was decommissioned. Head of the Pure Human Citizen’s Council (PHCC) and U.S. senator from Pennsylvania Joseph Vaughn argued that the effort was bungled. “How could the U.S. Army allow dishonorably discharged veterans with militarized neural implants back into society? These members of our service personnel volunteered for an illegal and immoral program, and
there should have been a system of tracking put in place before these animals were discharged into the general public,” he said.

Jim Howard lives in the Eden trailer park in Eastern Oklahoma. About a four-mile walk from the motel. I can’t sleep, so I hoof it at first light. My legs are soaked by the time I arrive, lashed by the dewy grass that grows knee-high along the roadside. I’m shivering as the sun teases the horizon, a reluctant lump of warmth and light that seems to want to let me freeze in the dark a little bit longer.

Birds are starting to sing, and the list of questions in my head is growing.

I find the dirty white trailer on the edge of Eden. The trailer park is the size of a couple football fields, wrapped in a fence and strewn with trailers in loose rows connected by meandering dirt paths. The ground is carpeted with sticks and stems from a sprawling canopy of pecan trees. Jim’s trailer is up on concrete blocks, weeds sprouting under it. A haphazard wooden deck has been built alongside a small porch, with the remains of old paper lanterns strung
over the gaping carcass of a hot tub.

The porch light wavers in the dawn, powering through mildewed plastic and crusted layers of insect corpses. As I climb the steps, I hear creaking from over my head. It’s a stealthy, careful sound.

I step back until I can see the roof.

A dark figure stands on top, thin and crooked. It’s a man with his hands out, elbows bending as he takes an exaggerated slow-motion step. The roof of the trailer complains as he
moves through some kind of tai chi routine. Silhouetted fingers splay and his head turns toward me. He slows and then stops. Stands up straight.

“Howdy, kid,” says a firm voice.

“Jim?” I ask.

There’s a long pause. If this doesn’t work and Jim turns me away, well, I saw an overpass on my walk over here. I guess that’s where I’ll be living.

“Owen,” says the old man. “Your pop told me you might be coming.”

“Is he …” I trail off, voice breaking.

Jim shakes his head, mouth in a line.

“How did you know him?” I ask.

“We worked together, a long time ago. Good man.”

“Oh,” is all I can say.

“I’m headed out to work about now. You can come along, I guess. Long as you ain’t scared of getting yelled at a little bit.”

“Pure trash,” snaps the old man. “That’s what I call ’em. Not Pure Pride. Joe Vaughn can kiss my wrinkled old ass.”

White hair sticking out from under a ball cap, Jim hooks a thumb at a group of young men standing across the street. The demonstrators watch us silently, heads cocked, squinted eyes swimming in shadows. One of them spits on the ground. Standing with crossed arms or perched on pickup truck tailgates, none of them reveals the slightest expression.

The old man takes off his cap, tosses it to me. “Put this on and don’t talk to anybody. Nobody should be out here looking for you, but better to play it safe.”

I shuffle ahead to keep up with Jim as the bent old man humps it across the street. With only a piece of toast in my belly and virtually no sleep, it’s a struggle to keep my footsteps in his
shadow. He’s got a heavy-looking duffel bag over one shoulder, but he hobbles quick and steady in the dry morning heat, like an old camel.

Jim has a strong chin and high, weathered cheekbones. On the drive over, he told me he’s a full-blood Cherokee but his hair went pale after his life hit a rough spot. I don’t have the gall to ask what that was. I imagine it involved a war.

“Fuckin’ gray hair,” calls one of the men from across the street as we reach the orange-ribbed fence of the construction zone. “Go home, ya scab amp!”

Jim doesn’t even look up, just leads me into the job site.

“Who are they?” I ask.

“Workers we replaced. They’re pure human. And young. But I tell you what, every man’s got a right to earn a living. Being young don’t earn you a damn thing in my book.”

A five-story, half-framed building crowds the work site. The rising sun flings skewers of light through its half-renovated steel skeleton. The frame straddles a deep, unfinished subbasement that makes a nauseating drop into crisp shadow. Jim tells me that, in a few months, this steep pit will be a claustrophobic parking garage for auto-driven cars. He says we don’t even have to run lighting down there—the cars won’t need it.

It’s still early. A crusty cement mixer filled with toolboxes swings overhead, lifted out of thieves’ reach by the site crane. A few elderly men mill around, drinking coffee. There’s hardly a worker here under sixty-five. Each has a maintenance nub, including Jim. Amps. When the old guys pass each other, they nod. Sometimes they give each other halfhearted little salutes. No smiles.

“Not a big talker, are you?” I ask Jim.

He shakes his head.

“My dad said I needed to find you. He said that you could explain why I’m here.”

Jim glances at me, eyes sharp and calculating. Chews on the
inside of his cheek, considering. Finally, he shrugs. “Maybe,” he says. “Probably not. Anyway, there’s work to do.”

The old man drops to one knee and fiddles the drawstring open on his canvas duffel bag. In a well-practiced motion, he rolls down the sides of the faded bag to reveal tangled columns of dust-coated metal. Under a frenzied pattern of scratches and dings, I see the thin tubes are light-gold colored. Titanium alloy.

An ID code, like a VIN, is stamped onto one tube.

“My ride,” says Jim. “Beats a wheelchair and it beats the living crap out of the goddamn scooters that civilians get.
Semper
fi,
kid.
Semper
friggin’
fidelis
.”

Jim grabs the lightweight frame, lifts it out of the bag, and shakes it like a dirty T-shirt. The tubes flop out onto the ground, connected like a skeleton, with legs and arms attached to a backpack-like trunk. Without a pause, Jim plants one boot onto a foot-shaped piece of plastic at the end of one tube. He steps in with the other foot and then shrugs on the backpack part. The skeletal arms hang loose, their unfastened straps lolling like tongues.

“You’re a vet?” I ask, reaching out and touching the loose metal wrist of the thing. Jim nods. A pair of dull pincers hang from just above the wrist joint, scarred with shining gashes. I lift the dead metal, and the arm bends, limp. An array of compact tools is folded underneath, ready to be deployed: screwdrivers, files, even a power saw.

The pincer clamps onto my wrist and I jump back. I reflexively wrench my arm away from the cold metal, shake it off like a spider. Jim lets out a hoarse giggle. As both robotic arms settle down to his sides, the old man taps the maintenance nub on his temple.

“Settle down, kid. The exoskeleton is linked to my amp. Works even for a guy with no arms and legs. Mind control. All a vet has to do is claim arthritis and the VA coughs these things up like nickels.”

He casually lowers his arms into the arm bars of the device, straps them in one at a time. “Makes us more employable,” he says.

Jim is in his late seventies. He says he retired from the military forty years ago and he retired from the workforce a decade ago. Now he’s standing in front of me wearing a government-issued medical exoskeleton and about to start another day of hard labor, and this is the reason that those young men across the street are huddled together giving us the evil eye.

The old folks have stolen all the jobs.