Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition (6 page)

“The cameras first pick up the assailant there. Just coming over the seawall. Once he drops down on this side, we lose him. It’s as though he disappeared.”

“All of this without any tremors on the sensors?” Carmen asks.

“Well, there’s nothing you would normally see, but if I augment our perception and integrate the vestigial indicia of the burned code you’ll get something.”

Nothing changes in my view of Cloud City, but there is suddenly a tingling in my gut. It’s intermittent and uncertain, like the feeling you get when you’re not sure if you’re stomach’s upset or not. That’s not how it should feel.

“The signal degradation I’m feeling, that’s the burn?”

“Yes,” Alan says.

“Can you visualize the intruder?”

“I can simulate the intruder using his movements as indicated by the gaps caused by the burned data.”

“Do it please.”

With that, a small masked figure dressed in black appears over the top of the west wall, lowers itself, hangs for a moment, and then drops. In a moment it is moving across the grass toward the house.

With a sense that has no human counterpart, I can feel the trail of the person’s movement in infinitesimal changes in temperature, air pressure, and electrical current, but the trail is spotty, like a wobbly distortion trailing behind the figure and materializing slightly ahead of it. Sometimes it winks out altogether, only to reappear a little ways further along.

“That’s the best I can do unfortunately,” Alan says. “I’ve reconstructed all the data I can from the randomized sequences they left behind, but there’s not much to work with. The rest I’ve extrapolated. It was a very efficient burn, I would say.”

“Yes,” I have to agree, “very efficient. Very smooth work.”

As the figure approaches the house, the dogs suddenly materialize, hundreds of them. Even though I understand in a basic way how they work, it still seems miraculous. Your brain can process the fact that this is a sim, but your gut can’t, and you clench, release adrenaline, feel the impulse to run. They are huge and intentionally ugly, but what they are doing—the chaos and madness of it—is the scariest thing of all. With a howl, one leaps onto the back of another, gripping it by the back of the neck and trying to bring it down, as a wild dog would its prey. In a flash the pair disappear, then reappear, grappling face to face, slashing at each other with teeth that are twenty centimeters long and sharp as hell. With the power in their jaws they could tear open an armored personnel carrier, and right now they’re doing their best to tear open each others’ faces. Their teeth meet and clash, and they let loose with outraged howls, sounding like metal tearing and thunder cracking all at once. Their frames are buckytube, but their “fur” is just an adornment made out of some polymer, and they tear it off each other in large, messy hanks.

They disappear again, but it doesn’t matter: the same thing is happening all across the grounds. The scene is repeated with minor variations hundreds of times, as far away as the lake, nearly as far as the eye can see. The din is horrific—it would almost be enough to make me believe in Hell if Tijuana hadn’t done that already. The worst sight is a lone dog near the house which jumps and twists in the air, snapping furiously behind itself, attacking itself. It vaporizes, then reconstitutes, still trying to break its own back.

All the while, the simulated figure that Alan has extrapolated from the burned data calmly crosses the grass, unnoticed by the dogs. If the sensors had been working and it was a real figure we were seeing, the mask would present no trouble at all. The infrared sensors are quite sensitive enough to have made out the contours of the assassin’s facial skin beneath any mask and Alan could have reconstructed the precise shape of the face from that data. Hair also has a specific heat diffusion pattern which would have told us the length of the hair on the head, whether or not there was facial hair, and similar details that could have been added to the reconstruction. The particular temperature of the hair as it dissipated the underlying body heat would even have told us the hair color, adding the final touch. In other words we would have had a photographically perfect portrait of the assassin—if the infrared had been working. Instead I watch a masked nobody cross the grass and enter the house as the dogs go mad, appearing and disappearing, attacking each other, the trees, the lawn furniture. Thank god it’s the middle of the night or they’d be tearing apart the groundskeepers and any other staff who were wandering around.

“This is a hell of a show, but we’re not really learning anything here,” I say, wondering if some part of my decision to leave isn’t based in fear. Maybe I’m feeling the exact visceral response that the dogs’ engineers intended. Still, it’s true. “Let’s get back.”

“Home,” Alan commands.

In that instant we are back in our reclining chairs, slowly sitting up, standing, and stretching. I feel the odd sense of dislocation that goes with exiting a sim no matter how many times you do it. On top of that is a powerful adrenal rush brought on by the dogs’ display of insane, mutinous aggression. Only Alan seems unaffected.

“Thanks for your help Alan. I’ll leave you and Carmen to follow up anything else you can think of. I have some other angles to pursue.”

“Certainly,” Alan says.

As I leave security, Carmen follows me a few steps into the hall.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“Damned mysterious.”

“What are these angles you’re following up?”

“I need some rest and some time away from this freakshow so I can think. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

My evasiveness catches her attention and one eyebrow rises for the second time in one day. A record.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll see what Alan and I can dig up.”

I don’t want to go back to my office, don’t want the distractions that could ambush me there: accounts; messages from clients past, present, and potential. It’s impossible to avoid, though, since the office is on the main floor of the building where I live on Jung Jing Road. Chinatown, like most areas of L.A. has changed considerably since Before—my term for my life pre-accident—not least due to earthquake damage. What is built is never exactly what was there before, and sometimes doesn’t resemble it at all. I never really explored this area Before, so I don’t know what it was like then, but now Jung Jing Road is a very short stretch of low-rise, supposedly earthquake-resistant, buildings. There are shops and businesses on the lower floors and residences extending four or five stories above them.

There are a number of reasons I decided to locate here. Some of them are small things, like my love of Chinese art and a good dim sum. Some run a little deeper. For instance, since China turned inward after the fall of the Empire, this area gives me the closest facsimile I can get to a part of the world I will never see for myself. The main reason, though, is that for me it’s a luxury to live in a neighborhood where I can’t understand what anyone’s talking about.

In my business I see so much of what’s evil in humanity, or simply what’s crass, cheap, and dreary, that it’s enough to sour you on people if you don’t get a break. It’s a relief not to understand what my fellow human beings are saying. People pass me on the street talking, sometimes arguing or upset, but I’m insulated from it. Music blares from businesses up and down the block, but if the lyrics are mundane or foolish it doesn’t matter—I have no idea what they mean. The neon signs may promise things they can’t deliver, as they do in any neighborhood, but I can’t read them. I find it easier to think well of people that way. Don’t get me wrong, I like people, it’s just that I’m in such close contact with their sins so much of the time that when I come home it’s nice to enter a zone of relative ignorance. The neighborhood is far from quiet, but for me coming here is like being shrouded in silence.

Even to get to that comfort zone, though, I have to take an indirect route. Several of the blocks south of my apartment have been quarantined with an outbreak of monkeypox C, an orthopox virus similar to smallpox. Unlike the original, unmutated monkeypox, it isn’t susceptible to the smallpox vaccine. With no effective vaccine, outbreaks aren’t uncommon, and though the mortality rate isn’t high, it’s high enough to warrant quarantine.

I woke up from death into a very changed world. Some changes I adapted to pretty much immediately, but this one took time, this constant drumbeat of emerging infectious diseases and the facility everyone has with the language, as though the general population had suddenly acquired M.D.s. The overuse of antibiotics rendered many antibiotics ineffective, as “superbugs” evolved which were invulnerable to them. The overuse of pesticides led to a similar phenomenon amongst insects. Insects don’t evolve and adapt as quickly as microorganisms, but they still do it damned quickly. Soon mosquitoes, tics, and fleas that were resistant to pesticides were carrying diseases resistant to antibiotics. Add to that the use of high-speed international travel during the Empire and the large-scale migrations of refugees during the Fall, and what resulted was a deadly combination.

Now people in cafés and at work rattle off phrases like “generalized pustular rash with lesions, fever, and minor toxemia” and “enlargement of the cervical and inguinal lymph nodes” as easily as they banter about baseball batting averages. It’s as common as talking about the latest war or what new sim came out this week. There are regular health alerts, sometimes for a building, sometimes for a neighborhood, sometimes for an entire city.

When an alert is issued, the affected area is surrounded by a nanobot membrane. The barrier is one-way permeable, allowing air and supplies to enter, but preventing infected people, or the pathogen itself, from escaping. At first it seemed absurd to me that, with all the medical applications of nanotechnology, society still suffered periodically from these new diseases. As it turns out, though, the highly mutagenic nature of emerging infections makes them difficult targets to hit, even for nanobots, so the most prudent way to deal with a new disease is to use a quarantine until either the outbreak burns itself out or a particular, identifiable pathogen can be targeted.

So far this quarantine has been up for three weeks and there’s no sign that it’s going away any time soon. It shows up as a light green rectangular structure extending from the ground to the top of the tallest building, encasing the entire affected area. The coloring isn’t functional, but it lets people see where the barrier is.

So a lot has changed in the world since I died. On the other hand, it’s sometimes jarring how much things have remained the same. In some ways science fiction didn’t go far enough to predict this world, which even after years still sometimes seems foreign and futuristic to me. In other ways, though, there are so many things that were predicted to appear—or disappear—that have stubbornly refused to do so: I travel home on my motorcycle.

The hovering aircars that inhabited the “future” L.A. of my youth are technically possible, just impractical, expensive, and dangerous. Humans, who evolved on the flat plane of the earth, have a hard enough time navigating there without zipping around in the sky. At the same time, the fact that large areas of civilization disappeared into the black hole of the Grey Zones, where extreme lotek is the rule and cars aren’t used, means that fossil fuels, which should have run out long ago, are still available.

So ground travel remains the norm within the cities. The L.A. Freeway looks much like it always has, as does the L.A. skyline—when you can see it. Because traffic remains a serious problem, I opted for the cycle when choosing a means of personal transport. It allows me to take short cuts cars can’t, and to maneuver illegally past traffic jams.

It’s nearing the end of the afternoon now, and as I follow a circuitous route to Chinatown the sun is a huge orange ball sinking toward the horizon, bathing everything in a tangerine light that discolors people’s skin and reflects sharply off the glass of the office towers. All around me workers are heading home, while people who have no home to go to are in ample evidence.

The fall of the Empire had an international effect, but it fractured Cali internally as well, sending a lucky few spiraling up into the stratosphere of wealth while millions plummeted into the sinkhole of inescapable poverty. Sandwiched in between is a slim layer of people like me, the remains of the middle class.

I pass scores of homeless people, who hunch on the sidewalks and in the alleyways and parkettes—lingering, loitering, begging, drinking, getting high, raising their children, arguing, sleeping, and fucking. They are heaped up in a steaming, funky hive of humanity, with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to help them. Some of them are old enough to remember having jobs and even owning houses, computers, holos, cars—all the good stuff that makes for painful memories. To others that world is nothing but a story passed down by their parents or grandparents. The street, illegal squats, begging, and dumpster diving are the only life they know.

Neighborhood patrols used to try to chase the homeless away, but they would just end up in someone else’s backyard and get chased right back, so eventually everyone gave up. Now we just ensure that our buildings have decent security so that once inside we’re safe from crime, from pleading faces, from emaciated children and bad smells. I can’t say I’m better than anyone else. I pass several hundred of them in the space of a few blocks—indistinct figures fidgeting about in their rags and choking on the city’s exhaust—but I don’t really notice any particular one of them except for a young girl who almost steps in front of my bike and forces me to brake.

Despite the old-world traffic and the new-world quarantine, I eventually make it home. I park the bike underground, then check in quickly at the office. Burroughs Oversight operates around the clock, and as I enter Rollie is just relieving Jessie at the main counter. The office is spare—it could be a car rental counter or an escort agency. Everything that matters—all the cool stuff, all the scary stuff—is hidden in a warren of work spaces in the back where the customers won’t see it. The carpeting is high quality, to project success, but khaki-colored, to remind people of our military pedigree. The counter is made of aged wood that I salvaged from a demolished building. It has a rich, golden color, and gives a sense of history and permanence, making the place look a little less fly-by-night.