The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (19 page)

“Nothing is fixed,”
he said. “But some futures are more likely than others. The election is a close
thing and could go either way, but it doesn’t really matter.”

On the screens,
images drawn from his mind were distilled to a meaningful sequence. He turned
the screens so the Senator could see them.

“If the Democrats
win, war will arrive seven months after the President is sworn in.” On the
screens, ships and airplanes loaded with troops steam for distant borders.
America and her allies engage in a pitched battle in the ruins of an ancient
city. Then a blinding flash. “The bombs fall, overseas first, on our soil hours
later.”

“And the
Republicans?”

“Little better,” he
said. “The war will start later, a year and a half after the election. The
bombs another year after that, though in some streams they’ll arrive a few
months earlier.

“There must be some
futures where we avoid this madness,” she said.

That dark place
beyond the bombs was not a place Calais strayed often. Only a few silver
threads of possibility flowed past the nuclear winter, and those were less
likely than the Mariners winning the World Series. Then, as he watched, a new
stream trickled into the future, a stream he’d never seen before, but it was
overwhelmed by the tsunami of war and destruction following behind it.

“Those futures are
rarer than a wise politician,” Calais said. He stood. “This foretelling is on
the house, Senator. I can’t charge you for such bad news.”

She remained seated.

“What if I run
against the other candidates?” she said.

The silver trickle
thickened into a creek. A new future, born here in his mini-mall office. Calais
sat and followed the flow, tweaked the amplification array, and turned the
screens to the Senator.

“You could win,” he
said. “The chances are slim, but not insurmountable.”

The stream widened
as if swollen by a flash flood. Images filled the screens: the Senator at a
music festival, the stage filled with musicians singing her praise; an
abandoned air force base, the runway packed with supporters; the Senator, no
longer Senator, in front of the White House, answering questions for the press.

“What about the
war?” she said.

He turned the
screens back to face him.

The creek was a
river now, and the war and the mushroom clouds washed ahead of the clear
current of hope. “There are eddies, forks, where the war and the megadeaths
find us but, for the most part, the stream runs clear. You can prevent the
war.”

Then he found it. A
flash at first: the Senator, now President, in an interview at her lake home,
then a small explosion and the home disappears. But assassinations were in
every President’s future. Then Calais found another: she’s shot, as she throws
the first pitch at a Mariners game. And another: her motorcade is destroyed by
explosive-filled laundry trucks.

“What is it? What do
you see?”

Calais kept the
screens turned to him. The College of Professional Precognitives prohibited
showing a client their own death, but the Senator would learn of it from
someone else if not from him. She offered the only hope he’d foreseen in years.
Would he dam that hope by showing her? It wasn’t for him to decide. He turned
the screens that showed her probable deaths.

“Do I survive
anywhere?”

“Nothing is fixed.”

“But some futures
are more likely than others,” she said. “I see why wise politicians don’t use
your services.”

She unfolded the
glasses and put them back on. She walked to the door. The stream they’d set
flowing, although beset on all sides by darkness and war, still rushed toward a
future unmarred by nuclear winter.

“What’s your name?”
she said.

“Calais. After the
town in which I was conceived.”

“Can I count on your
vote, Calais?”

He waited for the
pizza to arrive after she left, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to eat.
Something else filled his belly, part awe, part dread, and neither left room
for hunger.

Plebiscite AV3X

Jason Fischer

1. Cast your primary
party-preferred vote for the next President of the United Australasian Republic:

A)
Sharon Nicholson, National Party, Australia

B)
Kade Suharto,
Muhammadiyah,
Indonesia

C)
Gavin Pollard, Labour Party, New Zealand

D)
Ghera Wanganeen, Indigenous Forum, Australia

2. Do you support the proposed amendment to the
Lunar Settlement Act?

A)
Yes

B)
No

C)
Amendment to be re-read in the Senate

3. What is your most
frequent online purchase?

A)
Medicine

B)
Weapons

C)
Sex/Cybersex

D)
Regulated Criminal Services

4. Do you support
the joint invasion of Antarctica?

A)
Declaration of War by UAR

B)
Cessation of Hostilities

C)
Await final reports from U.N. Xenotech Inspectors

Civic duties giving
you a burning thirst?

Enjoy Cannie,

the drink of Olympic
athletes!

5. How do you find
the defendant in State vs Becker?

A)
Guilty—Death

B)
Guilty—Custodial sentence (please specify):

C)
Not Guilty

D)
Mistrial

E)
Trial by combat

6. What is your
preferred datacom?

A)
Telstra

B)
GapComm

C)
Jakarta Kreatif

D)
None of the above (Neo-Luddites Only)

7. How happy are
you? (please indicate %):

8. Who do you want
to vote out of “Starvation Cage!”

A)
Jerry the plumber

B)
Brenda the model

C)
Bradley and Trevor, the platonic life-mates

D)
Hank the sensitive trucker

Depressed? Can’t
carry on?

Why not call
Euthentikit

and we’ll take care
of everything

9. How much money should be allocated to Education
this financial year?

A)
$UAR 5 billion

B)
$UAR 7.5 billion

C)
$UAR 1.3 billion (user-pays model)

10.
Should aid be continued to the Pederast colony on Titan?

A) Yes

B)
No— Bring the sex offenders back to Earth for custodial resettlement.

C) No – Grant the Pederast colony unconditional
autonomy

D) No – Detonate the embedded warhead

11.
Do you support Defence-UAR’s proposal to cleanse all Class 5 suburbs? (lower
socio-economic, high crime, high fertility)

A)
Yes (complete destruction of life)

B)
No (continue aid and relief work)

C)
Yes —Senator Walker’s proposed selective cull

12.
Nominate a suspicious character, as defined by the Good Neighbours Act. (Note:
a failure to complete this section will result in your automatic nomination, under
the above Act)

Submit this week’s
Plebiscite
here
. Your Will be Done!

A Splash of Color

William T. Vandemark

The average human body holds
six liters of blood.

I should have known Travis
would need more. He always needed more.

Twenty years old, Anna arrived
at his studio unannounced, chin upraised, eyes of cornflower blue. Assorted
piercings bellied her innocence, as did the holographic tattoo in the small of
her back. Each registered as she stepped through the doorway. The studio’s
security system provided audio to my cochlear implants; chips in my contacts
cast readouts to my retinas. As I processed the data, the scan hiccupped. Her
tat, a Celtic knot, had discharged a fractal trap, jacking security into a
worthless whorl of minutiae. I bit my tongue and forced a re-task. Then,
despite indications that this girl had plated her wares, I directed security to
run an iris tickle.

Protocol warnings tinted my
vision amber.
Anna Chenko, daughter of Alexander Chenko.

Shit. I reset with a hard
blink, my eyes watering from the effort. T-minus one hour till one mother of a
migraine would lay me out.

Travis turned to his canvas. He
loaded up a painting knife and spread a daub of ultramarine along an arc.

Don’t be an ass, I thought.
Acknowledge her at least. His implants had received the same info as mine.
Instead, he made her wait, setting the ground rules.

Anna folded her arms and
surveyed the studio. Her gaze swept over the furnishings, which amounted to a
few folding chairs, a stainless steel table, and an old church pew, where rags,
jars of pigments, and crumpled tubes of oil paints lay strewn. Then she turned
her attention to Travis’s floor-to-ceiling canvases, which canted against the
brick walls. The works included abstracts painted with handmade pigments, cellular
mosaics tiled with scales from butterfly wings, and etched aerogels, the scrim
lines lit by plasma. All resided in varying states of completion.

My work was on display in the
raftered ceiling, five meters above, where a magnetic bore hung from a spaghetti
of conduits, ductwork, and cables. Brow raised, Anna took it in. She glanced at
me and nodded once, in what I took to be tacit acknowledgment of my role here.

“We weren’t expecting
visitors,” I said. I knocked over a canister of brushes, as I stood to greet
her.

“My father would like Mr.
Bonsanti to paint a portrait of my family. A surprise for my mother on their
anniversary.”

Travis stabbed his canvas and
turned. The painting knife dangled from the rent. “I don’t take commissions,”
he said.

Anna’s eyes widened, but she
spoke with a measured calm. “You answer as if I made a request. Access your
data snatch. I gave you a two-second deep search.”

“We don’t snatch,” I said.
“That’d be illegal.” By the time I’d finished my denial, her dossier was back in
my brainpan or, more precisely, in a wedge of qRAM splined to my occipital
lobe. As I initiated a wet-sync, Travis jigged the juice and left me a sludge
of public records. Not a day went by when I didn’t regret giving him access to
Ops.

“Six million,” Travis said.
“Euro.” The price was exorbitant; he was trying to send her packing.

“Done.” She pointed at me, her
fingernail tipped in iridium. “You the piggy?”

Bitch. I wiped my hand on my
pants and held out my palm. She drew her fingernail along my lifeline and
zipped the terms, payment, and assurances into a New Delhi bitfold.

“It’s going to be a pleasure
working with you,” she said. Then she glanced at my pants and smiled. “I see
you feel the same way.”

Goddamn. A bio-script, woven
into the transfer, had burrowed past my security and was giving me a hard-on.
Cute. Real cute. Everyone was setting ground rules but me.

“Combs and hairbrushes,” I
said. “Get them to us within a week. One from each member of the family. Label
them, and don’t mix them up. Underwear works too. Dirty of course.”

“You want mine now?” she asked.

She was not being helpful. I
turned for a modicum of privacy, reached into my pants, and made adjustments.

Bio-scripted worms aside,
something about her piqued my curiosity. Clearly, she wasn’t just some nouveau
riche walk-in looking to snag a Bonsanti for the guesthouse. Perhaps it was her
air of assurance. Perhaps her damned fine glam-tech. Still, I couldn’t pinpoint
my interest. She was cute in an off-the-shelf kind of way, but not close to the
body-modded beauties Travis employed for nudes. I made eye contact with a
sensor across the room and scratched my nose.

Ops ran a syn-pheromone check.
Nominal.

“Mr. Bonsanti, your studio boy
has nice manners. Not a single attempt at body mapping. But he likes to sniff
me.”

“Don’t get your panties in a
bunch,” I said. I fished a vial from my satchel, snapped plastic, and slid out
a swab. I took her by the chin. “Open up, Sunshine.” Angling her mouth, I
worked the swab around the inside of her cheek, resisting the urge to flick her
uvula.

Head
shaved, coiled filaments drooping from his scalp like silver dreadlocks, Travis
finished a figure study. He was at the end of a ten-minute creativity boost,
transcranial magnetism manipulating his brain activity.

He had rendered an abstract of
Anna. The piece captured her form, spirit, and yes, with a smudge of red,
arcing from her mons pubis to the negative space of the canvas, he’d captured
the tension of her presence. I’d exhaled a short, sharp breath the first time I
saw the work.