Cyberpunk (12 page)

the first place. If I was wrong, and we really
were
running some

variation on Game Scenario #1...

I decided to block this part of the plan to another folder and rethink

it some more later.

Once I’d reduced the algorithm to
Escape!
, everything else was

sudden hardwired clear. Geez, it was sharp and simple! I kicked it over a

few more times, and each time it looked more and more like a truly great

plan.
Escape!
Find a node. Jack into the local cyberpunk scene. Go

underground. Maybe I could even hang around Seattle a few extra

weeks, to get Mom real pissed at Dad. I started to feel truly derzky,

thinking about all the great tricks and treats I’d show my new Seattle

friends. If I played this right I could be NetMaster to a whole
city
of

cyberpunks! I was feeling so derzky I could hardly stand it!

Trouble was, there was just one little bug in the program. It was all

hanging on the hope that my keepers would give me a chance.

Soon as we landed, we taxied over to a great big green quonset

hangar a good half mile from the terminal building. With a little
skritch

of brakes we jerked to a stop alongside a creaky old wreck of a propengined

airbus, and then the turbines whined down to silence and my

keepers were up and moving. Grim, wordless, one grabbed hold of my

collar and upper arm and pinned me rigid, while the other one reached

across and popped my seatbelt latch. Then, like I weighed almost

nothing at all, the guy on my arm hoisted me rough to my feet, while

someone outside the plane unsealed the hatch and cracked the lock. The

hatch opened with a slow, lazy, gas-strut kind of hiss.

The gestapos pinned my arms to my sides, dragged me out of the

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lear, and marched me straight up the boarding ramp at the nose of the

prop plane. There was a guy waiting for us at the top of the ramp; he

looked like a cross between a small tank and a real
ugly
pit bull, and

even ten feet away he smelled like a river of sweat. Short, muscle-tight,

his face a gritty hash of old acne scars—in other words, a classic

secondary symptoms
roidal
, an old steroid addict—

Correction: An old
ex
-addict. There’s no such as an old
active

roidal.

I looked at this guy at the top of the ramp, and my heart hit my shoes

and I just about gagged. I’d met his kind plenty of times before, both on

video and in the analog. Ever since third grade they’d been warning us

about them. The roidals who don’t die fighting to compensate for their

micropenises wind up as public school gym teachers, usual, checking

out the teenage boys in the locker room and looking for new deltoids to

pump up. That’s how roidals reproduce, I’m told.

The human vise holding my left arm turned to the Incredible Living

Steroid and said, “Thanks for waiting.”

“No problems,” Roidan the Flying Monster growled in answer. “I’d

rather hold the plane than get ‘em after you’ve been sitting on ‘em for a

week.”

“The parents contracted for an off-the-street grab,” the vise on my

right said. “This one’s still pretty disoriented.”

“I prefer ‘em that way.”

Wrong, bozo, I wasn’t disoriented, I was in Total Shock mode.

Parents? You mean like
both
parents?

“Here’s his suitcase,” a third gestapo—probably the pilot of the

lear—added, as he came up the ramp and threw Mom’s old green

tourister through the hatch. “And here’s his paperwork.” He handed over

a thick brown envelope. Roidan looked down as he took the envelope,

and for just a mo a little snicker ran across his face. “What’s so funny?”

the gestapo on my right asked.

“Look at his
shoes
,” Captain Steroid whispered. The gestapo looked

at my blitz yellow hightops and started to smirk, but then Roidan cleared

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his throat and the gestapo snapped to rigid attention.

Satisfied that no one was having a good time, the roidal pulled some

papers out of the brown envelope and, for surprisers, started reading. (I

half expected him to just chew them up.) While he was looking over the

paperwork I took a good long minute to look
him
over. Then I scrapped

every last hope I had of breaking loose in Seattle.

The guys on the lear had looked sour and hard. The Incredible

Living Steroid was short—about two inches taller’n me, which is short

for an Older, but another typical secondary symptom—and total toughlooking.

Shaved head. No neck I could see. Shoulders just crawly with

muscles. Muscles that bulged and popped when he nodded his head;

muscles that stood out angular when he tried to form any other

expression on his angry red face. Each one of his biceps was about as

big around as my waist.

As the image bits clicked in and the total picture formed, I flagged

he was wearing a different uniform, too, from the guys on the lear:

Green suede ‘n’ goretex boots, and a camo jumpsuit with big sweat

stains around the armpits and the name
Payne
black-stenciled on a green

strip over his right breast pocket. Another minute of watching him read,

and I decided he had the sleeves of his jumpsuit rolled up. All those

tattoos made it hard to tell.

Oh, great. They were throwing me on a plane with Attila the Scout

Troop Leader. Just fritzing great.

“Harris?” he said soft, not looking up. Tiny beads of sweat sparkled

on his tan, nubbly scalp. I didn’t answer. Maybe I couldn’t fight what

was happening right at the mo, but I was damned and determined not to

cooperate
with it.

“Harris?” he asked again.

“Whadayawant?” I said, in my best sullen punkspeak.

“You will address me as sir,” he said, looking up at last.

“Sir Payne?” I said, sarcastic to the max.

“Oh,” he said gentle, “so we’re a smartass, are we?”

“Well,
sir
-- “

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“
DID I GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO SPEAK?
” Spit flew when he

bellowed, and his face turned three shades of darker red. My sullen

routine was blown away, of course. By the time I got the cringe out of

my neck I didn’t know whether to answer, shake my head, keep silent, or

just crap in my pants.

Payne tucked my papers under his left arm, started cracking his

knuckles and making experimental fists, and looked my face over like he

was trying to pick the exact best spot to hit me. Then he gave me a look

that said I was the most disgusting thing he’d ever smelled in his entire

life, and growled, “Get inside. Sit down. Shut up.” The gestapo on my

left popped the cablecuffs off, and the one on the right turned me loose

with a shove. Payne helped me into the plane with his boot. While I was

picking myself up from off my suitcase, all three gestapos from the lear

skittered down the ramp, and Payne lifted the ramp and pulled it inside.

With one hand.

Inside the plane it was dark, but after a few seconds my eyes started

to adjust and I began picking out faces. Good, at least I wasn’t going

into this alone. There were thirty-five, maybe forty other people in the

cabin; as my eyes adjusted even better I started to flag they were all guys

about my age, and none of them were there by choice, either. ‘Cause,

well...

Row One: We had a stringy-haired chemhead sitting next to a fossil

gearhead greaser, across the aisle from two McPunks in standard-issue

electric blue mohawks. Row Two: Three vidiots gone Tommy (deaf,

dumb, and blind) with their earcorks in, videoshades on, and beltclip

vidplayers going, next to a comikaze with his nose buried in a

DynaBook. (The guy who figured out how to make half-animated comic

book ROMs play on standard school DynaBooks must have made a

fortune
.)

Row Three: One very squeamly looking Style Statement wimp with

perfect hair, surrounded by a bunch of horse-maned slammers in studs

and black leather. Row Four: Two Little Hitlers exchanging hot glares

with two Butthole Skinheads, because the Hitlers had only jackboots on

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their feet and swastikas tattooed on their foreheads, while the Buttholes

had genuine Doc Marten “Clydesdale” boots and little blue
totenkopf

tattoos they’d carved in themselves. Row Five ...

Get the idea? Put that mix on the transys and you get Instant Gang

Fight. But here on the plane they were all sitting quiet, hands in their

laps, looking so depressed I wondered if the chemhead was treating

everyone to megahits of Blotter Suicide. Even the McPunks were quiet

(hard to believe, I know). One hugged his boombox like it was a baby

doll; the other did a little furtive tapping on the drumpads of his Casio

keyboard. But what made it weird was their gear was turned off. Not just

down;
off
. I started working up the nerve to open a commline and then

felt hot breath on the back of my neck.

“Move back!” Payne yelled, giving me a friendly kick to indicate

direction. “Find a seat!” he added, giving me a cheerful kick to indicate

what I should put in the seat when I found it. I picked up Mom’s green

tourister suitcase and started stumbling down the aisle. About the sixth

row, it hit me. Cold and sudden, I knew why the punks and flakes were

observing a truce. I knew soon’s I saw the haircuts.

Or rather, soon’s I saw all those white scalps showing through all

those flattops.

The back half of the plane was packed with smiling, nauseatingly

confident young guys dressed in camo. Camo shirts, camo pants, camo

jackets—I bet they had camo underwear. From the feet sticking out in

the aisle I could see they had camo boots. There I was, standing at the

front of their section in my blue spatterzag jumpsuit, blitz yellow hightop

tennies, and horsemane hair, feeling like a fatal error flag, and they

all just
looked
at me.

Then one of them started to giggle. Then another, and another, and

just about the time I was starting to really wonder what was so God

Damned Funny one of them finally spoke to me. He drawled, “Hey boy,

where’d y’all get them
shoes
?”

For a long minute I wished I could just melt and ooze out through

the floor. But the last couple empty seats were in their section, so I

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finally gritted my teeth, picked up my suitcase, and started walking.

Soon as I started moving again my shoes must have turned invisible,

‘cause all the jarheads very deliberately Didn’t Look at me. They went

back to whatever it was they were doing, and I got down the aisle

without too much trouble. But the crap about my shoes had me burning,

so I just kept staring at their heads.
Flattops
. Geez, every single one of

them had the fritzin’ Lance Stallone cut! I was stuck on a plane with a