After the revolution, p.21
After the Revolution, page 21
“Ayep,” said Skullfucker Mike. “She’s the one who found Topaz and me. After the Boss went missing, we were pretty lost. Doing a lot of freelance violence but not making anything. Not building a damn thing. Marigold told us her vision for this big stupid city, got us hooked on the idea.”
Manny noticed tears at the corner of Skullfucker Mike’s eyes. That felt somehow wrong to him. Someone so powerful and inhuman shouldn’t be able to cry and make it look so normal. But there he was, crying.
And then, for the first time in the trip, the thing Manny had most feared happened: he thought about Oscar. He remembered a picnic he’d taken with the stringer, his wife Aisha, and their two kids. It had been a lovely spring day, one of the dozen-ish days a year in Austin where the air felt good on your skin. They’d drank cheap beer and eaten hot dogs and watched the kayakers roll along the Colorado River.
I sent him out there. I sent him there and now he’s probably dead.
“Y’know, there’s something we share,” Mike said, his voice low and somber. “We’ve both spent way too much of our lives feeling helpless.”
Manny cocked a disbelieving eyebrow up at Skullfucker Mike.
“Yeah,” the chromed man chuckled, “I know what you’re thinking. But you’d be surprised how often the fancy hardware doesn’t matter.”
Mike’s face twitched, and more tears poured down his face. He took a deep breath, fixed Manny with bloodshot, puffy eyes, and spoke again.
“We all spend a lot of life helpless. So when you actually have a chance to do something, to make a difference for someone… Personally, I recommend you fuckin’ take it.”
Manny woke up the next day feeling out of place and vaguely unstuck from time. He could hear Reggie snoring on the other bed. The room was very dark and it was impossible to tell what time it might be. Manny thought about activating his deck, but decided against it. There was something almost nauseating about the thought of being flooded with the outside world right now.
He stood up and went outside to wander the spindles and gantrys of Rolling Fuck for a while. At one point a man walked by with a plate full of breakfast burritos, and so Manny had breakfast. A little later he found a self-serve coffeehouse stationed next to one of the Fondleboats, and so he had coffee. He was just starting to think about turning on his deck and welcoming in the world when Donald Farris found him.
“Manny, my boy! I hope your acid hangover’s not too bad.”
Manny shrugged, “I actually feel alright. It was a…it was good. It helped me sort some things out.”
The older man smiled, “I’m genuinely happy to hear that. There’s nothing like a head full of acid to help you see what’s important. Now listen, I hate to interrupt your morning, but there’ve been some developments. Nana Yazzie and I need to talk to you.”
Manny went with him, back down into the main roller and that weird conference room where they’d met on his first day in the city. There were more people there now. Nana Yazzie sat in the same spot at the end of the table. Reggie was there, fiddling with one of his screens. Skullfucker Mike sat next to him. And then, at the other end of the table, was a large Black dude Manny had never seen before.
He was muscular, but in the lean wiry way of a construction worker or a particularly swole hobo. He had a long, gaunt face with prominent cheekbones and an oft-broken nose. His hands were big. There was something menacing about them. But his face was the least threatening thing in the world. His eyes were lidded, half-focused, and dreamy. His jaw was just a little slack. He had short hair, stubble really, and a patchy six-day beard. He looked stoned.
“Welcome Manny,” said Nana Yazzie. She gestured toward the big man, “This is Roland. If you choose to help us rescue our people, he’ll be your escort into the Heavenly Kingdom. And your escape plan.”
Donald shut the door behind them, walked around to the other side of the table, and sat down next to Nana Yazzie.
“We’ve tried to give you time and space on this,” he said, “but I’m afraid both of those things are running out. All our intelligence suggests the Heavenly Kingdom is very close to another all-out assault. They’ll move on Waco in four or five days. They could be outside Austin in a week’s time.”
“You are free to make whatever call you want. Our offer to fly you to Austin still stands, mijo,” said Nana Yazzie. “But I am afraid we need you to make a decision now.”
“I’ll do it,” Manny said.
Almost everyone looked surprised. Donald coughed. Nana Yazzie’s eyes went wide. Reggie did a double-take. Skullfucker Mike just smiled and nodded at Manny. Roland didn’t look as if he’d been affected in any way. In fact, Manny was pretty sure he was drumming along to some music only he could hear. It might’ve been Ronnie James Dio’s “Holy Diver.”
Chapter 14
Roland.
Once he’d been dismissed, Roland had made it his immediate business to get as high as post-humanly possible before he was needed. This was not a difficult task. Rolling Fuck had been built to keep buzzes going.
The main roller’s bar stocked an assortment of beers mixed with LSD, laudanum, dimethyltryptamine, and a half-dozen Shulgin chemicals. Roland started off by sampling them all. He drank until the fireworks show in his head was indistinguishable from the actual fireworks outside. Are those real, or am I just fuckin’ LIT? Roland decided that answering that question wouldn’t make him happier.
He lost himself for a while and drifted from one of the Fondleboats to a dance party in a field underneath the main gantry. After hours of that, Roland had his fill of rhythm, so he found his way to a coke binge in a weird purple house atop one of the spindles. The rest of the night he spent testing the limits of his toxin filters and his tolerance for human contact.
The latter came first. He abandoned the coke party and stumbled through Rolling Fuck until he reached a small booth with baggies of Umm Nylokh, a DMT-based hallucinogen made from synthetically grown giraffe liver.
Things got fuzzy after that. There was a fireworks fight on a spindle that caught a shack on fire. He downed a shitload of mescaline as the sun breached. And then, quite suddenly, it was afternoon and he was lying on his back across the baking hot metal of one of the spindles. Skullfucker Mike stood above him, naked as the day he was born and holding some sort of frosty, purple beverage in a large tiki cup.
“Hey, man,” Mike said as he took a sip. “Nana Yazzie told me to find you. You straight enough to talk to people?”
Roland nodded. He wasn’t, really, but he could sober up fast. Maybe “sober” wasn’t the right word. His brain could flood itself with focusing drugs to offset the hallucinogens. And he had a vial of liquid methamphetamine somewhere in his pack. That might do the trick. Roland sat up, grunted, and waved a hand at Mike. Then he dug around in his pack for the vial. He found it and drained half.
“Alright, let’s go,” he said. “Let’s go to the place and do the things.”
Mike helped him down the spindle. Roland’s unsteady legs were proof that he’d managed to find himself a worthy drug binge. The satisfaction he felt from that mixed well with the initial meth euphoria. By the time they reached the conference room he was wired as fuck and kinda wishing he’d picked a different drug to spin his mood.
Roland sat down and eased into his chair. A short young anglo fellow entered next and sat down on the opposite side of the conference table. He looked and smelled nervous. Roland paid him little mind. He was too jittery from the meth to want to talk. He decided a nice dose of some downers would help his situation and rooted around for his heroin kit.
At that moment, another young man entered the room. He was short, Hispanic, and about twenty-one years old. Nana Yazzie embraced the kid. Skullfucker Mike clapped him on the shoulder. They started talking, the kid said something that seemed to surprise most of the people in the room. Roland half paid attention to all that while he loaded up his syringe and tied off his arm. He stopped when he realized everyone else in the room was staring.
“Uh, hey. Something wrong?” he asked.
“Roland,” Nana Yazzie said in a warm voice as she gestured to the Hispanic kid, “this is Manny. He’s going to be your partner for the mission. He grew up in the Republic and he’s a skilled negotiator. He’ll help you blend in while you do your work.”
“Cool,” Roland grunted, and returned to his heroin.
“Roland, if you wouldn’t mind, Reggie was about to speak,” Nana Yazzie’s smile was as indulgent as ever. “He’s uncovered something important about the Heavenly Kingdom. It might be useful to you.”
Roland shrugged. “Unless he’s got a list of which bartenders in Plano make a passable whiskey sour, I can’t imagine caring. But if you let me finish this…” he jiggled the syringe in the air, “I might be able to at least pay attention. Right now I’m too meth’d out to focus.”
The old man leaned forward and sighed. The kid looked horrified. He started working his mouth, in what Roland was sure must be the prelude to some sort of expression of shock or offense. Skullfucker Mike preempted him.
“Let Roland shoot up. Trust me, drugs aren’t going to make him more or less effective here.”
Roland grinned. Skullfucker Mike clearly knew him, even if he could only sorta remember Skullfucker Mike. He went back to tying off his arm and shooting up while the younger Brit stumbled into the start of his speech.
“Yes, well. I’ve, uh, been going over the last few days of successful vehicle-based bombings on checkpoints, from Galveston and Lake Houston and all across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In total, I’ve identified three-hundred-twenty-one bombings that appear to have been carried out as part of this overall offensive. Two-hundred-forty of those bombings involved autonomous vehicles hitting dedicated autonomous vehicle checkpoints.”
Right on queue, a projection map flickered to life on the wall behind him. Hundreds of red dots populated a map of the conflict-riddled regions of North/Central Texas. It looked like the pattern of attacks you’d want in order to funnel the SDF’s limited resources toward the least defensible chunks of their line. What was weird was that so many bomb-rigged autonomous vehicles had gotten through the scanners.
“So,” Roland asked, “how’d the fuckers do it? A bunch of zero-days?”
Reggie shook his head.
“That’s what I thought at first,” he said. “But these attacks actually started more than a month before this offensive. If they were relying on exploits, the SDF’s IT folks would’ve caught something by now. The most likely explanation is that the Martyrs found some way to make vehicles that aren’t autonomous seem that way.”
“Yeah,” Manny said. “The Martyrs have tried to hide drivers in ‘autonomous’ vehicles before. The SDF watches for it.”
“Which means the Martyrs have figured out something new,” said the journalist, “some way to hide a human driver that doesn’t register on conventional sensors.”
“And that way is?” Nana Yazzie asked.
Reggie’s face reddened. He grunted, swallowed, and then spoke. “I’ve got no idea. But I think I know where they’re putting these new vehicles together.”
He snapped his fingers, and the projected image changed to a map of a city called McKinney, in the Dallas suburbs. It zoomed into an aerial shot of one enormous factory building near the outskirts of the city.
“The BBC pays for access to a few independent satellites that overlook this part of North America. We also pay the SDF for limited access to some of their drone surveillance footage. From all that, I was able to trace out paths for seventy-eight of the vehicles used in these attacks. Every one of them started their journey here.”
The projection changed again, to what looked like a stock photograph of the front of a large white factory building. The Tesla logo was displayed prominently by the front door.
“It’s an old Tesla plant. They finished it about a year before the civil war. It’s been in and out of operation since then. As best as I can tell the last normal vehicle rolled off the line three years ago, before the Heavenly Kingdom started cocking things up. McKinney was one of the first parts of the old Metroplex to fall, so they’ve had plenty of time to fiddle with shit.”
Roland raised his arm and realized belatedly the needle was still dangling out of it. The old man sighed again, but Roland bravely ignored him.
“So what does this have to do with your captives?” he asked. “I didn’t sign on to help you guys spy, or to blow up a factory. Send this data to the SDF or Austin if you think it matters.”
Skullfucker Mike put a hand forward in a placating gesture. “We’re not asking you to do anything about this,” he said. “But you and Manny will be our only eyes and ears inside the Kingdom. If you get a hint of how they’ve accomplished all this, it’ll be valuable to us and the SDF. We’ll find a way to make it worth your while.”
“I mean, the drinks are free here right?” Roland asked. “I don’t know what else you’ve got that I might want.”
Mike smiled and gestured to Roland’s backpack of narcotics, which sat next to him on the big redwood table.
“By my count you’ve gone through about half your stash since coming out here. If you’re able to get us any worthwhile info, I’ll make sure the bag’s full before you leave.”
Roland narrowed his eyes. It would be a giant pain in the ass to find good Percocet between here and CamelToe. He sighed, “Alright, fucking fine. If we hear something, we’ll look into it. But don’t hold your breath.”
After the meeting, Skullfucker Mike took Roland down to the city’s makeshift morgue so he could steal a dead man’s face. Rolling Fuck’s militia had found the fresh corpse of some guy Roland’s rough height and build. He’d fled Dallas and made it almost as far as Waco before getting hit by a drone attack. The poor fucker’d been gutted by shrapnel, but his face was intact enough for his Chameleon implant. Roland hadn’t used the thing in so long he worried it might not work.
He stared down at the man’s face and took in his features. The fellow was white, but his skin was burnt a deep reddish brown. He’d clearly spent a lot of time under the Texan sun. He appeared to be in his early forties and clearly hadn’t taken many JuvEn treatments. His hairline was fine, but the man’s eyes and the edges of his lips were creased with wrinkles. His dead, staring eyes were blue. There were deep, dark bags beneath them. Plenty of time to sleep now, buddy, Roland thought.
He closed his eyes, focused on the dead man’s face, and felt his facial bones start to tear themselves apart and then reform. He felt the pigments in his skin shift too, which was always strange. The sensation of his pigments opening up and taking in more light felt a little like stripping off a thin layer of clothing.
While Roland did this, Skullfucker Mike ran a scanner over the corpse and located the ID card in its right forearm. Mike used a tool that looked like a long metal straw to suck the ID free and then shoot the tag into Roland’s arm. It took a second for Roland’s body to pull the data.
His name was Aaron Weathers. He was single. He worked as a mechanic in Arlington for most of his life. He had a clean criminal record, save for a drunk driving arrest in his early thirties.
Roland, now Aaron, left the morgue with Skullfucker Mike and headed for the ride that would take him into the Heavenly Kingdom. He used the walk as an opportunity to smoke a couple grams of fine Afghan opium. He was still smoking when they reached the battered old pick-up truck on the outskirts of Rolling Fuck’s campground. The kid, Manny, was in the driver’s seat.
“Hey,” Manny said, and stared wide-eyed at him. “You look different,” he added with a forced smile.
“Yeah,” Roland replied and pulled himself into the passenger’s seat. Mike tapped him on the shoulder.
“What?” Roland asked.
“I’m gonna need your bag, man. And that,” he pointed to the still-smoking opium pipe in Roland’s hand. “The Heavenly Kingdom’s got a pretty strict policy on intoxicants. You’re not gonna get a backpack full of narcotics through their checkpoints.”
Roland growled at Mike. He couldn’t fault the other post-human’s logic, but he’d be damned if he was going to spend several days surrounded by a bunch of religious nuts AND do it sober. Roland locked eyes with Skullfucker Mike, opened his bag and grabbed a heavy handful of drugs. He swallowed them all, one by one; pill bottles and baggies of hallucinogens and vials of amphetamines. He ordered his gut to reduce its acidity, so he could store the drugs for later regurgitation and consumption. Then he took one last deep hit from his opium pipe and handed it, and the bag, to Mike.
Manny popped the car into drive and they rolled off into the night.
They drove in silence for a while. Roland’s hindbrain would’ve marked the time if he hadn’t done such a successful job of pickling it with opium before they left. The quiet got awkward and boring pretty quick, though. He considered putting on music but, of course, his headware was severed from all outside networks. He couldn’t connect to the car anymore than he could blink-send an email. He decided to ask Manny to put something on.
“Hey guy? Music? Can you music?” Roland realized he was slurring. And his words were not coming out the way he’d intended. The kid—Manny—looked irritated.
“How fucked up are you right now?”
Roland gave a shrug that meant “very.”
“You know, my ass is on the line here too. I’m not made of whatever fucked up science you’ve got in your veins. I’d appreciate if you took this seriously.”
On an objective level, the kid’s request was fair. This must be a big moment for him, going off on a dangerous mission to enemy territory, etc. But to Roland this was Tuesday. Or whatever day it actually was. He’d disabled his clock and calendar years ago, because fuck that noise.
