Transreal Cyberpunk (35 page)

“Where do you get that idea? Of course he’s dead. I saw his brains come out of his eye sockets.”

“I need facts,” insisted Becka. “Not your interpretations.”

“Oooh,” said Gordo. “The dragon lady. Okay, as soon as we stepped outside the safehouse, Waverly started babbling. He said, ‘I’m going everywhere.’ He was slobbering. Then he lost his muscle tone. His hands pulled up into his sleeves, and he went all boneless. And then—wham! That steamroller comes out of nowhere and runs him over.”

“Just like that?” said Becka skeptically.

“That’s how I saw it. That’s the machine that killed him, still tooling around out there. It’s like a remote-controlled drone.” Gordo peeped out the window. “Look, it keeps backing in and out of our garage. That’s where I dragged Waverly. It’s still running over him. Again and again.”

Bathed in the warm green light of the leech aquarium, Becka stared at Gordo. She looked cute and serious with her short dark hair. Pitiable shadows of rage and despair played across her face. As long as Dr Waverly had been in charge, Becka, ever the faithful post-doc, had been full of hope. But now, with Waverly flattened, her illusions were crushed like so many asphalt pebbles.

“Where do steamrollers come from?” she mused. “Oh. The city construction yard.”

“I guess,” said Gordo, still peering out the window. “But I can tell you it didn’t drive here. Someone got hold of our loco and teleported it in. Take a close look, it’s cruising right by our house again.”

Becka hastened to the window.

“It’s motor isn’t on at all,” Gordo pointed out. “It’s drone control isn’t active. You can tell from the lights on top. They’re all off. The things running on pure loco. Someone’s teleporting it all around!”

“Translocating, not teleporting,” snapped Becka. “Can’t you get that one thing straight? Loco applies affine transformations to the subdimensional pregeometry that underlies the spacetime foam. Loco edits our reality from the outside. Loco is nothing like ‘teleportation’.”

“Sure it is,” said Gordo, baiting her. “It’s like on Star Trek.”

“Christ, you’re a moron.”

“Maybe so, baby. But this moron has what you want.” Gordo attempted a leer.

“As if,” said Becka, looking away.

“Anyway,” said Gordo, beginning to enjoy himself. “The steamroller spread out fat Waverly like pizza dough.”

Becka scowled, “I told you that Waverly should never leave our safehouse.”

Gordo picked absently at the masking tape on an office cartoon, taped to the side of an upended desk. An archaic folk-xerox of some guy unscrewing his belly-button and having his ass drop off.

Becka rooted in the debris that braced the safehouse walls. She found a federally-approved orange and silver pilot survival blanket. It was sixty years old and rattled like burnt parchment, but she wrapped it around her sloping shoulders.

“Don’t get that look on your face again,” said Gordo, adjusting the buttons of his overcoat. “None of this is my fault. Waverly insisted on taking a walk today. You know he was stir-crazy. He said an outing might reduce his bloat. We snuck out while you were sleeping.”

Becka wrung her blue-knuckled hands. “God damn it! We’ve been stuck here for weeks in this crappy, nameless, unheated, dead-end, foreclosed house, playing Dad and Junior and Sis. We shattered every limit of space and time and stuck our software into leeches, and after all our fine work, what do we get?”

“We get a steamroller popped out of thin air,” said Gordo practically.

“With the Pentagon waiting for us to turn our beautiful invention into a killing machine.”

Gordo grunted.

“Or for some sleazy web-biz morons to productize us commercially. I’m talking about Yellco. They hired a bunch of our disgruntled staffers. Yellco and their stupid cloud.”

“The cloud’s ubiquitous,” said Gordo cozily. “The cloud is everywhere, all the time. That’s what’s good about the Yellco cloud.”

“The cloud spies on everybody,” said Becka. “How come the cloud is bigger than the government? This is all so unfair!”

Silently, Gordo blew on his hands, then rubbed his right shoulder. He opened a desk, revealing half a crate of army-surplus beef stew.

“How can you possibly eat at a time like this?”

“When’s a man supposed to eat?” retorted Gordo, searching through a tangle of cable-dripping debris. He produced one stained, misshapen plastic container and pulled a tab at its base. The stew began to hum and rattle.

“That can is seriously past its expiration date,” remarked Becka.

“Desperate times,” nodded Gordo.

“Did you set Waverly up?” asked Becka, slitting her eyes.

Taken aback by the wild accusation, Gordo was silent for a long moment. “Why are you always like this?” he said, his voice nearly a whine. “Everything’s always so complicated with you.”

“I’ll make it simple.” Becka stood up and poked him in the chest with her finger. “Our boss is a pancake. Who’s next?”

“You!” said Gordo, abruptly clamping her in an embrace.

Becka wriggled one hand free. She slapped Gordo so hard that the sound echoed from the clutter on the walls.

“Go ahead, hit me,” muttered Gordo, releasing her and gingerly feeling his inflamed cheek. “Because I’m a mole, all right? You might as well know—I’m a mole from Yellco. I’ve been wanting to tell you that for a long time.”

Becka gaped in amazement, still catching up. “You work for Yellco? All this time?”

“Yeah. When I spread the word about that Patel incident, your staffers scattered in all directions. You ended up exiled and alone, and I came along to pick up the intellectual property. That’s the pay-off, and that’s why I’m still here, all cozy with you.”

“Oh, it’s all so dark-side,” said Becka despairingly. “So sleazy. So sold-out.”

“You academics never have any street-smarts,” said Gordo, still rubbing his cheek. He looked at his reflection in the glass of the gleaming aquarium. “Me, I’m a street-hardened security op. That’s what Waverly asked for—after you guys vitrified Patel’s ashes into a glassy barrel of nuclear waste. Waverly figured a guy like me would know how to hush things up. That shows how much you losers knew about real-life federal security.”

“What were you doing before?” asked Becka, intrigued. “Where do people like you come from?”

“Oh, I was the top security man at Dulles airport. Humiliating passengers. It was great work, but I screwed up, and strip-searched a congressman’s son. You guys were my disgrace posting. Project Loco is my personal Siberia.”

“But you should have loved your new job!” Becka protested. “We got such superb results in unconventional physics! Sure, Patel turned into a leech and underwent spontaneous combustion—but that only happened one time! All the rest of those wiggling things locked in the penthouse, those were just animal subjects. Dogs, mostly. Leeches love dogs.”

Silently, Gordo thought this over. “What was Patel like?” he said at last. “I mean, before he got all flexible and tubular.”

“Patel was cute. He had a crush on me, actually. That’s why he volunteered to pioneer the science of translocation. The test went fine at first, but after the leech hit an artery, Patel started heating up inside. Like a runaway reactor. We locked him into the shower-room, hoping he’d damp down. But he crawled out through the keyhole and slithered upstairs to my office.”

“I never heard this part,” said Gordo.

“It was such a mess,” said Becka. She tightened her voice and pressed on. “That pathetic Patel was telling me that he’d done the test to show he loved me. With those leechy, toothy mouth-parts, I could barely understand him. Like bluh bluh bluh. And he was hot as a furnace. I was yelling and backing away from him. And then, oh God, he caught fire in my office. Men came in haz-mat suits, I never used that office again. That was the room we turned into your office, actually. After we hired you to keep things mum with your sleazy dark-side connections.”

“So you could turn more volunteers into giant leeches.”

“Not actual leeches!” exploded Becka. “Subdimensional pregeometric assemblages!”

“What’s the diff? They’re both boneless, wormy and wobbly.”

Becka put her hands on her hips. “That’s a typical ignorant layperson’s confusion.”

Right then Gordo’s can of self-heating beef-stew popped open. The putrid smell of spoiled meat wafted out.

“You can’t eat that rubbish,” said Becka impatiently. “Let me show you some real food.”

“Now you’re being nice,” said Gordo, wrapping a rag around the spoiled stew and sequestering it within a file cabinet. He walked back, gently smiling, his voice soft. “Show me what you’ve got for me, baby. People always eat a lot at wakes. And after that—they have sex. It’s life against death. Very human.”

“You wish,” said Becka, her cheeks pinkening.

“I didn’t mean you in particular were human,” said Gordo.

“You can’t have red-hot funeral sex with just anybody,” said Becka, deciding to flirt. She lowered her head, placing a delicate finger on a small bump on the base of her neck, up by the hairline. “As for the food, I made Waverly fit me with a loco leech. Call me crazy.”

“I’ll volunteer too,” said Gordo reflexively.

“You might morph into a pregeometric assemblage that resembles a slimy bloodsucker,” Becka warned him, a flicker of a smile on her face.

Gordo shook his head. “I’m thinking that when Waverly morphed this morning, he willed it to happen. The guy was so cornered and stir-crazy, he wanted to morph. Right before the big change, Waverly said, ‘I’m going everywhere.’ Well, I’m going where’s right for me. Fish one of those little bastards out of the tank for me. I’ll take my own chances.”

“I just wish I could pry my own leech loose and give it to you,” said Becka uneasily. “But check out my awesome food demo first. It’ll blow your mind.”

Becka pulled two chairs over the flimsy card-table that Waverly used as a desk. Improbably yet deftly, she extracted a loaf of bread from a meager pencil-holder. The bread puffed up as she pulled it upwards, like toothpaste oozing from a tube.

“Now watch,” crowed Becka. “No keyboards, no commands, not even a gestural interface.” She cocked her head, staring at the crisp loaf of flaky bread on the table. The baguette spontaneously opened up with a laser-sliced precision. It rapidly bedecked itself with thin, slot-like wafers of colorful ham and brie.

Becka blinked her sharply focused eyes, and the spatial substance of the sandwich rotated upon itself, like the slats of a Venetian blind. A tidy row of colorful ham and cheese canapés sat on the wobbling table in the chilly room.

“I always wondered how you fed the boss behind my back,” exclaimed Gordo.

Becka proudly nibbled a shred of the gourmet ham.

“That came out of nowhere, like the steamroller?” nodded Gordo. Outside their walls, the machine was still busily clanking around. “Here, but not really here?”

“Where is anything?” said Becka. “An object is just a mesh of pregeometric locative architectures—instantiated via a spatial transform. This food started as a baguette sandwich in Fort Meade, over where we used to work. I edited the baguette loco myself.”

Gordo scarfed up the little treats as fast as his cold-stiffened fingers could pluck them from the table.

“You’re eating eight sextillion affine transformations for every canapé,” Becka told him, delicately choosing a few for herself. “Loco tech is super processing-intensive. Each of these tasty morsels is a zettaflop of cloud crunch.”

“A zettaflop?”

“That’s one higher than exaflop. So don’t get all greedy. The cloud-load for this snack creates info lag all up and down the Eastern Seaboard.”

“A secret chow-line through the cloud’s back door,” mused Gordo. “That’s some kinda management perk.”

“That’s how life has to be nowadays,” Becka shrugged. “Looks great, tastes yummy. It’s provisionally real. Of course if the loco crashes before you’ve metabolized your lunch—tough! You’ve got a bellyful of subdimensional quantum foam.”

Gordo looked up hopefully, licking translocated mayonnaise from his fingers. “So we can glom free lunches from random delis forever, whenever we want?”

“Burn Before Thinking, is what Dr. Waverly said about that idea. We were supposed to feed Special Forces paratroops with this. And then there was our death-ray app. We were supposed to translocate raw energy from the core of the sun. And blast it out in a beam.”

“Awesome,” said Gordo. “How did that work out?”

“It’s technically feasible. But we kept having problems getting the coordinates right. Hassles with the gravitational warp—it’s very chaotic at the center of a star, what with general relativity coming into play. Very unstable. We tested the process on dogs, taking them outside to bark at the sun. And of course that body-morphing issue was a big problem with the dogs. Quite a few caught fire.”

“Burning dog-shaped giant leeches with death-ray eyes,” said Gordo.

Becka plucked at her full lower lip. “I really wouldn’t put it that way.”

“You and Waverly were a pair of loose cannons.”

“We wanted to hit some goddamn development milestones, okay?” said Becka. “We were finally turning the corner. Waverly found a superior West Virginia leech that was free of the morph effect! He’d been wearing his leech with no trouble for two full months. I’ve had my own leech for just a few days less than him, and I feel perfectly fine.”