Surviving the uninstallation of the Peps54 mindware had, for me, the unpleasant side effect of compulsive injections of my consciousness into the bodies of those around me at unpredictable intervals. This was called post-Peps54-nonlocality-syndrome or PP54NS for short, and the Box had said it was a product of quantum data corruption caused by the removal process that would remain indefinitely, or until I dropped this gutsuit. Until then I’d continue to project the sensory totality of whatever happened to be my present experience to all bystanders within a small radius without warning or context. Though this particular malady did not lend itself to stealth, I was willing to try and make it work in order to continue my chicken operation.
Orval, my Company contact, had trouble seeing eye to eye on this and we were discussing just that in a Bathroom down in my neighborhood.
“Why don’t you disappear for a couple weeks, Coleridge. Spend some of the scrip-chip you been making for Chrissakes.”
I’d like to say he asked me but really he was kind of telling me. I say this with certainty because I could see his reflection in the stainless steel of the Bathroom wall reaching into his coat for his brain buzzer.
“Are you looking at my statements, Orval? Going through my messages again?” I sucked my teeth and unzipped
“I’m going through everyone’s messages, Coleridge.” Savoring his own words, he watched me closely in the mirror.
“Look I’m too close now to slow down. I’ll never make this kind of progress again and you know it. Mythopoetic forces are in motion, man. I’m about to birth a legend. A legend that will place Colonel Gustav’s Chicken nuggs firmly as archetypes in the collective unconscious.”
“I don’t need to look at your messages to know you aren’t getting any. You work too much. And you aren’t as close as you think. You’ve got heretical chicken consumers popping up in your favelas and you know it. C’mon man that’s basic shiiiii---”
A sickening, low vibration started to hum inside my skull.
“Orval?”
I craned my head around to see a confused Orval vacantly staring at me from the mirror. Liquid ran down his slacks into his shoes. He must have started to piss himself when my mind reached out to his from where I stood at the urinal to where he stood primping himself before the mirror. I hadn’t planned that, but I wasn’t going to waste it. I lunged toward him nearly knocking myself off center as my shoulder slammed into the urinal divider. Bad form. It didn’t matter. The PP19NS bystander effect, or PP19NS-BE for short, seemed to have really freaked him out and so the element of surprise remained.
I slammed him into the mirror clumsily, and when his face hit I heard his nose break. I wondered what it must have felt like to experience himself kicking his own ass as I pissed his pants. I’d have to ask him next time I saw him.
I ran out of the Bathroom and into the street, passing a Zookie Cookie Man scanning faces for the next cookie boxes. It’s said that each box shows a unique face dunking the cookie into the milk. It’s also been said that those whose faces do appear on a box of Zookie Cookies experience abnormal dreams for years to come. I wondered if I’d ever been on a cookie box as I ran past his smoking blue lazerlight. It seemed likely.
It also seemed likely that Orval had regained his composure and was back after me, so I ducked into a side alley Surger for a quick facial.
I’d never been to this one before but I recognized the guy behind the counter regardless. All the Representatives at these places looked exactly the same.
“I’m Alandro,” the Rep said in a cool calm voice. Huge tanks of milk-looking stuff glowed softly behind him.
“Sure you are. Just scramble me alrighty?”
He nodded and motioned toward the chair, offering me an Insurance syringe. I denied the insurance and raised my sleeve showing him my company Insurance Glyphs. Luckily they were still glowing and therefore active. The way they reflected in his eyes was breathtaking.
“I wanna be pretty this time,” I said as he closed the aperture over my face.
“The faces are random, sir.”
Such a polite lie. I was ugly every damn time. No matter. I threw the Rep some scrip-chip and was out of there in 5 minutes.
Within that time, the Box had become incendiary, filling up fast with deregs and stop-losses. That was to be expected when you got burned. I sold off my profiles to an AI farm before I decoupled the Box from the FensterPort 3.0 above my left ear and tossed it down into the Suer for the Genk. It wouldn’t make a difference where it was, but I hated the thing and it wasn’t good for me to have it around. Even with ontological encryption, the vibes from the Box would just bum you out.
No, I’d have to backup through LogosLINK. I could hook up to that at Dark Indra’s place in Schwag sector, upload with a direct connection, and ditch this gutsuit.
Wasting no time, I made my way towards Schwag sector.
Dark Indra’s place sat squat and low below the crisscroissanting lazerlights of the Hamartia district of Schwag sector. There was something about the way the Boddy-jugglers passed arms, eyes, and teeth seamlessly between one another that made me feel incredibly nauseous for some reason. Each piece made a sickening popping sound as it docked into the next body. I think I even threw up a little bit in my mouth. I’d never noticed such an aversion before. Just then a malman scurried out from behind a pile of old batteries waiting for recyc in an alleyway, then jumped into the Suer half a block down. I’d always wondered what it is they did down there, and why they needed so many batteries.
Mazrick was working the door, which was good luck for me because he owed me near five cycles of Sky-Soil, and I knew for a fact he wasn’t good for it. I also knew there was no way he’d pull those katana on me. Katanas? This I would have to remember to ask.
I made the sign of my name so that he knew it was me. The three middle fingers of my left hand held sideways over my mouth.
“Hey Coleridge, baby,” Mazrick said cloyingly, his gold teeth glimmering in his smiling mouth. “Tha’s one weird looking face, dude.” He giggled, but then his face turned down into a penitent frown. “Indy says that you been burned and I should not let you in. I’m sorry honey.”
“Well that’s good cause I ain’t here to see Indy directly. First and foremost, I’m here to see you. About what you owe me. Unless you want me to see Indy about what you owe me.”
“Cole I-”
“Never Cole me Maz.” Then I got up on him real close and took a big whiff. “You been flying the friendlies today, Maz? On the job even. Tsk tsk tsk.”
“I’m a flightless bird now.” Maz was one of those people who was honest, but talked like a liar. “You know that.”
“How about if I got you some of that rocket fuel. Would that sweeten us?”
He itched the fwelding around his dread-plants compulsively. I had him. I knew I did. My chicken op gave me access to the finest Sky-Soil in the Fief.
But that’s when he did it. That’s when he pulled those damn katana at me.
“Wait, is it katana or katanas?” I yelled back at him as I pushed past a boddy juggler, grabbing an eyeball on my way and lobbing it at Maz. He nearly dropped one of those swords trying to stab the eye in mid-air, but he recovered quickly and was coming for me with those bastards waving.
“EITHER ONE” he cried as he rounded the corner near where the malman had been digging through the garbage.
My first thought was that I must have struck a chord with the Sky-Soil. He must really be trying to quit. Good for him. My next thought was the malman. He’d hopped into the Suer not a block down. That might be two birds with one stone. Shit, three if I get to see what they are using those batteries for.
“Hey, 1081136#BB,” I called back his Bliss Bus number to him. He hated being addressed by what he called his government name. I turned smartly before the Suer grate and faced him. “Gotta fly.”
I jumped down into the Suer. Mazrick did not follow me down.
The smell of acetone and rot greeted my schnoz as soon as I dropped out of the Neons and down into a long Crete channel filled with Genk.
“Fee-yo,” I said and coughed a little bit, holding my arm up to cover my mouth and schnoz and making the sign of the Sickle. I had to count my blessings though. At least I had planned my landing and fallen down onto one of the raised sides and not directly into the sluggishly flowing sluice of viscous biomass called Genk. It looked like some malman hadn’t been so lucky, and his remains floated on the stuff, bubbling with what looked to be some act of digestion. Genk sometimes behaved in ways that you could be forgiven for calling intelligent. Conceived as an environmental solution of the Blick corporation, Genk had, like the Blick corporation itself, run amok. When it was first released Blick Reps had been depicted often in the Adcycle, bringing the marvel of Genk to third world countries with third world sanitation systems. Now these tunnels, designed to manage waste, had become totally unmanageable. The powers-that-pee had long ago ceded this vast undercroft to the horrors of their own creation. Score one for the good guys. Only malmen were desperate enough or insane enough to risk it down here.
I blew a kiss at the dissolving delver and made my way through the Suer back toward Dark Indra’s. I knew I was on the right track when I started to hear singing. Was that Velvette? I thought it was. That meant I must be right below the Schizodrome. Wasn’t that where she always performed?
I picked a promising grease-vent where Velvette’s singing was loudest and I climbed up the steep wall of the Suer, got a good toe hold and kicked up into the circle of light, landing against the corroded grate with my shoulder and then was unpleasantly surprised when the cheap Crete of the wall broke in, and I rolled through dust and chunks ancient moldering Crete. When I stopped moving, I looked up. Velvette stood before me, but this was not the Schizodrome. The lights of her vanity shone behind and through her red mane like a halo. She wore nothing but a silk robe and some Stilletov heels. Razor looking, those. She wasn’t even wearing her Box. It was sitting on the clear plastic bezel of her employee terminal, which was booted up and ready to rock, right behind Velvette in a vestibule against the far wall of her chambers.
“Eleven secrets!” she exclaimed and covered her premium content. “You penny pinching skin-pirates will stop at nothing, will you?”
Then her robe fell and her body was uncovered for a moment as she effortlessly picked up the Votonator from where it sat on her vanity. That is what I should have been watching. She was good. Always had been.
“Say goodbye to your slippers, shitbox,” she said, putting the Votonator to her mouth.
I went to cover my ears, but it was too late. She was already singing.
My head swam and my mind reeled as I began hallucinating.
I was something like a cockroach, deep below the earth, and a salamander composed of molten rock and fire was chasing me through forking tunnels.
I scurried as fast as I could, but every time I turned a corner the salamander was closer. Closer. Gaining. I could feel the heat of its tongue on my carapace. I squealed in pain and outrage. No one would hear me. I was burning, burning, burning alive and screaming.
Again I mustered the will to cry out.
“Dantalion’s!” I screamed. “In Salubria,” I said again, nearly whispering.
She had stopped singing. And I was no longer burning.
“Coleridge?” she asked, peeking out from behind the ornate cone of the Votonator. “You are one of those pervy suer-snakes? We spend one amazing weekend together, then I don’t hear from you in four Adcycles. For all I knew you were dead. Then Indy says you’ve gone rogue, and I didn’t want to believe her, but now you just come busting through the wall into my dressing room, looking like a wild suer-sponge on Shankstab.”
I took half a step forward and she put the Votonator back to her mouth. I stopped.
“I’ll fix that,” I pointed at the wall dumbly.
“You aren’t supposed to be in here. You need to leave.”
“Look Vel, I just need your terminal.” I pointed behind her and stepped forward. “Somewhere I can jack up and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Don’t call me that. And I suppose you are going to just jack up and ditch that smelly body here for me to dispose of. You must think I never met a skinjumping spook like you before.”
“Smelly?” I smelled myself and nodded. “Look, the Suer is right there. You can just toss it to the Genk,” I motioned behind me back toward the Suer. “Easy knievel.”
She started singing into the Votonator. But I was ready for her now, and once I found myself in the tunnels again, I ran as far as my cockroach legs could carry me until I reached an especially long stretch. Running with Velvette’s salamander hot to trot on my heels, I came to the middle of the corridor, then turned around and started running back toward her. She didn’t expect that, and hesitated before turning to run away from my cockroach. But I had the jump on her, and I did jump, aiming with the pincers of my mouth for the salamander’s burning tail...
When I came to I was biting Velvette in her calf, staring right at those Stilettov heels. This may have been poorly conceived. Too late to rethink it now.
The Votonator lay on the floor against the crumbling wall.
She kicked her leg out of my mouth and crawled toward it, but I caught her this time with both hands and pulled her leg back so that her waist was against mine, our positions reversed. The smell of her and the heat of her bod made memories come rushing back.
“So you really have been thinking about that weekend we spent in Salubria.”
“Don’t.”
“Dantalion said we almost broke his Nuptuary Chamber.”
“If you say one more word.
“Vel.”
Nimbly, she rolled off of me and onto her side, planting the toes of one foot just below my chin, and kicked up at my face with the deadly heel of the other. My head jolted back, pure reflexes. She almost got me.
Then my vision went funny, and there was a pressure in my forehead right between my eye socket and the bridge of my nose. Like someone had jammed a brick in there. I had a bad feeling about this, which wasn’t helped by the look on Vel’s face. I reached out a hand and gently took hold of her shoeless foot.
“Your shoe…”
“Oh, Coleridge, I’m…”
I became dizzy as I stood up, and crashed backward into the terminal vestibule. The jack hung down right between my eyes, but it didn’t double in my vision like it should have, being so close to them. That’s odd. I could feel something cold and slimy creeping down my cheek. I lifted up my hand and felt the Stilletov that was sticking straight out of my face from where it was sunk deep into my eye.
“Gross,” I said, looking at the eyeball juice on my hand. I looked at Vel. She looked more shocked than anything. She sat with her legs crossed now, looking down at the heel of her remaining Stilletov, our struggle forgotten. Poor thing. She was gonna have a lot to clean up.
I reached up and grabbed the jack and slammed it into my FensterPort 3.0.
I hummed up my LogosLINK network interface and once I had authenticated the session and loaded myself into the system, a soft green light filled the reflective grotto of the vestibule. Green means go time. The sensory feedback of two addresses for my consciousness running so close to one another began to grow into a low sickening vibration.
“Hey, Velvette,” I said.
She looked over at me. Her face, at first wet and pink with regret, was growing red with anger.
“No hard feelings. But maybe don’t watch this.”
She kept staring, whether in anger, shock, or resignation, it’s hard to say. Maybe all of them. I couldn’t waste the time it would take to find out though, and somehow I doubted she wanted to talk about it. She locked eyes with me (eye?) as I pulled the dagger-sharp high heel out of my face and drew it silently across the throat of my gutsuit. My vision faded as two Bouncerz rushed into the room, too late. I could have been someone bad. I could have hurt somebody...
...my vision darkened, the vibration ceased, and I was hitching a ride on a microwave, for a few microseconds existing completely bodiless.
Now, I know what you are thinking: shit, Coleridge. Isn’t it risky as hell to go full backup? Is allowing the Clowd backup to exist for any moment in time as the sole address of one’s consciousness to put oneself at the behest of chaotic forces? I mean a solar flare could spell the end of you, man.
My response is: how is that different from any other time? A solar flare I wouldn’t wanna live through. I’d expect this tenuous what-we-call-balance to devolve into cannibalism in three hours without Aerial Conditioning in any macroburb, in any Fief. I’ve done some terrible things, but I would like to draw the line at cannibalism.
One does what one must, though.
Besides, I had what I was reasonably sure was my bithday gear already jacked into the Hylicron in the basement of the Bestest Buy that was currently serving as Inquisition headquarters for my chicken op. As if I had planned for this contingency or something. Call me crazy, but I really didn’t want to get Hardwiped again and I was willing to risk oblivion. So I wouldn’t be long. Like I said, a few Microseconds at most.
How can I best describe the sensation of disembodied time? The absence of sensors isn’t actually perceived as a lack of senses, but as an abiding awareness and connection to the vast and infinite possibilities of sensation itself, unfiltered by experience.
Or let me explain it like this. When I was in the Streaming wars I knew a guy who said he’d seen one of the Ariginals. Said his cadre had called for heavy botswarm support and the AR midwife had arrived in such splendor that those who had seen her in her glory caught a nasty infection in the fwelding around their Googgles. But for just a moment before she manifested, the silence had hung with a weight that he said he swore he could feel in his taste buds. Time experienced as a sickly-sweet quality.
Then I started to see things. Improbable things.
At first, I saw lands I can’t describe. The past. I had seen this in vids. Or the distant future. A time other than this one. Something about it made me hope that it was the future, and not the past.
Is this what we had? I could feel that dizzy feeling in my thighs like I was just starting to fall.
Did I have thighs? They were on fire.
The sensation pulsated up my lower back to become a wrenching in my gut.
Then I saw people walking together under a sky that looked like a sea of lazerlights. No milky anemic nightglow, but a vast and intelligent luminescence. No ocular hum of the Aerial Conditioning either, but crisp, bright, defined edges. How are the edges not driving them mad? They walked together through a vastness of lush, dusky green. They moved like they belonged to the verdant splashes of color all around them. They sailed across the landscape like birds. They walked tall, with straight backs. Women and men alike went carrying young in arms strong as tree limbs. Where were they going, so sure? Wouldn’t they get lost? How were they doing anything without the Aerial?
A twisting, this time in the place where my heart should have been.
The people were arriving at a great hill, bare but for a stone circle surrounding a single mighty tree at its peak. They gathered all around the base of the hill, a ring of singing voices that rose up sweetly into the musky air.
Then that twisting in my heart sent electricity up my spine into my throat and buzzed there for a moment. Now it moved up inside my skull just between my eyes, filling them with a brilliant light. I felt another surge of electricity and it was as if lightning had struck just above my head.
The people I had been watching saw it too.
They were frozen in place, pin pricks of reflected fire flashed in their eyes. They were looking up at me. I had become the tree now, and I could feel myself splitting in two as fire spilled through me and out of me. Down, down into my trunk, where my roots stretched out into the ancient soil.
And one by one the people looking up at me began to fall to their knees in prayer. And I could feel their prayers lifting my awareness higher and higher, dancing on the heat of the flames, and on those prayers, up into the heavens.
Now flashing, rolling in the blackness, in the brightness, in the fullness of the rainbow.
And a voice. My voice? Was that me standing before me? How was I so bright?
“You won’t do this again.”
Not commanding. Calm. Just telling.
“Eight lives wound widdershins in amnesia, but the Ninth unwinds the eight.”
Not me. Too bright. Altogether too bright.
“You will be in … your last body …”
Oh thank god.
“...immanent… threat is here… but be not afraid. I am with you always, always, always…”
What are you? Who…?
“...as Adam named even God.”
Then silence. An eternity of time. Oceans of it.
In all that time, I couldn’t keep the things that the bright one had told me from running in my head. Had they even used an adage from my training?
“The Adcycle must engage the consumer through all mediums, as Adam named even God.”
Why that, of all things? It was being repeated sing-song in my mind like a jingle as I ripped open the filmy tissue that covered my face and sucked in air, light, sensation. Safe again in a body.
Had anyone ever said that before? Had I?
Somehow I knew that what the light told me was totally… true isn’t the right word. The word is real.
I sat up in the basin of the Hylicron with what must have appeared a wholly new form of fire in my eyes. Because I was secure in my realization. Everything had clicked into place like the parts of those boddy jugglers. That sickness crept in again at the thought of them but this time it was given illumination by the fire of my knowing.
Even the lives I couldn’t yet remember. I would, soon. I knew that somehow. But did I want to?
“This is it,” I said and smiled. “This is the one where I can really bring it down. I think it’s also my last chance. Whatever that means.”
Something bittersweet about that. Was I fucking crying? What was happening to me? I grabbed the Hylicron operator by the collar of his Oneiform and pulled him close. His startled gaze met my fresh fire. I was naked, covered in Biosolve. Tears streamed down my face. I shined like the new cast bronze of some heinous sculpture peering up from the cracking mold of my discarded sanity. An avatar of a forgotten god, freshborn.
“I’ve finally remembered who I am” I told him, manic. Pulled him closer. My forehead pressing against his now. I started to slide back down into the slick tub, then flopped around awkwardly and pushed myself back up. When I did this, Biosolve splashed up out of the basin onto the floor around the Hylicron.
“Sir. Are you feeling alright? A jump like that has never been attempted. Let alone accomplished. You… you went full backup. There may be unintended side effects.” He began to slip, and pulled back clumsily out of my clutches and out of reach.
“Remembered who you are, eh?” A voice from the hall. More nasally than I remembered. Orval stepped out of the hallway and into the light. “Not the first time I’ve heard that, Coleridge.”
“Orval, you slippery fuck. You’ve had people in my op.”
Before he could respond, Alvan, the head of my inquisitors, thundered into the room.
“The northern favelas burn. Soon none shall eschew our message of quality” He was at me in a single graceful stride, clapping my wet naked back with his clammy palm. He was a thin, tall man, with an unexpectedly loud voice that issued from a gaunt face. He was good at his job because he was both terrifying looking and could project his voice over screams and fire. “Look Orval, I told you he would be back. Uninspired as ever.”
“Traitor.”
“You don’t pay enough, Coleridge. Not all of us redeem heretics for the joy of burning. Some of us have kids.” He clapped me on the back one more time, then stepped back, one boot sliding in the Biosolve so that he nearly slipped, to stand with Orval. He wiped the bottom of his boot on his cloak. “No hard feelings.”
I ignored the turncoat and looked at Orval. His bandaged face reminded me of something I had been wanting to ask him.
“Say, Orv, how did it feel to kick your own ass while I pissed yourself?”
He started turning red at “pissed.”
“The look on your face as the piss ran down your leg. It almost felt bad to have to break it. You were so lost man. Pathetic…”
Even Alvan was stifling a laugh.
His gaze shot daggers toward Alvan, then he turned my way with silent resolve and came at me with his brain buzzer, no doubt ready to zap me like a fish in a barrel. I tucked my tongue back, closed my eyes and relaxed my jaw, getting ready for the buzz. When nothing came but a squeak followed by a squelching crack, I opened my eyes. He was gone. I put my elbows over the sides of the tub and slowly raised myself to take a look over the lip.
Orval was on the floor, still. A pool of blood growing out of the back of his head on the gleaming wet floor down in the basement below the Bestest Buy. As he had come at me in the tub to buzz me, he had slipped on the Biosolve and cracked the back of his skull open.
“Alvan,” I said, rising to stand. Not only was I bare-ass naked, but I was doing my best not to slip in the tub of Biosolve and share the same fate as Orval. Bending all my will to make it look like the easiest thing in the world. I had to, to sell my bluff. I looked at my inquisitor, cold. “Your boss is dead. Did you have another company contact? Or was it just Orval?”
He didn’t say anything. The wind had left him. He looked dead already. He was doing the mental math. I could read it on his face. Adding up his options. What’s zero plus zero? He’d be stop-lossed soon if he wasn’t already. All an agent’s assets got red-listed as a contingency if they weren’t shared, or if a hand-off hadn’t been pre-arranged, the second their contact’s Box let HQ know that they were toaster strudel. A double-cross like this would surely not have a pre-arranged hand-off. Who wants responsibility for an asset that turns on their boss? And I knew Orval didn’t share. So Alvan was screwjed.
An unexpected emotion filled me. Sympathy. It welled up in me like vomit. Or tears. I was unused to this. Not the vomit, I’m very used to that. But the sympathy...
“Nobody knows you are here?”
He nodded absently.
“Just go.”
“What?” he looked at me like the only conception of mercy he knew was as a cruel joke. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. His job was to burn people, after all. On your orders. Was that my thought or someone else?
“His Box is still blinking. Just fucking go get your kids and go man!”
He looked down at Orval, then at me, nodded, and he was gone. Just to be sure, I stood there for a long while, silently counting my heartbeats, watching the Box behind Orval’s ear pulse with red light, then stop altogether. I sat back down in the basin of Biosolve and emptied my lungs in a deep sigh. Only now did I realize how exhausted I was.
“Will they be coming for us now, sir?” the Hylicron operator asked, sheepishly, from where he cowered behind the machine.
“McDammit, man,” I said, startled. “You are still here?” I motioned for him to give me my robe from where it hung on the wall.
He looked for a moment then sprang into action, gingerly avoiding the pool of blood and Biosolve still growing around Orval, and grabbed the robe and brought it to me.
I carefully crawled out of the basin, stood up on my still-flimsy legs and covered myself with the robe. I shivered, and pulled it tight around me.
“They already were.” I pointed down at Orval.
He seemed to take that well enough in stride. He said nothing, but we stood there for a while under the Fluoroshine bulbs, listening to the soft chug-wug of the Hylicron, bathed in the ocular hum of Aerial Conditioning. And yet, I was insane. Because even though I knew with certainty how painful, lonely, and treacherous was the road ahead of me, the very center of my being still pleasantly ached from the knowing by which I had been transverberated.
And for the first time since I can remember, I felt at peace.
“So what now?” he asked at last.
“Now?” I flashed him a wicked smile. “Heresy.”
Coleridge will return in…
Hot and Juicy Heretics!