For one, I see that I’ve got a bigger problem now. About seven feet and three hundred and fifty pounds of problem, looming with its hands out, breathing like a bull. Blocking the open fence and my way out.
The Brain.
The titan stands watching, as alien to me as a Cro-Magnon must have been to a Neanderthal. I know he’s human. But he used that diagnostic amp to sharpen his training, to push his body within millimeters of the breaking point, day after day. He used sheer willpower and pinpoint mental control to become the template for a new species.
I consider this as the Brain puts out his meaty arms. He shakes his great head at me slowly, tendons in his neck the size of my biceps. He’s only human, I remind myself. And he’s not a Zenith.
The body, no matter how bizarre, is just an extension of the mind. And my mind is bigger than his.
“Let me through, Brain. You know what I can do.”
His face splits into a pink smile. “And I know what you won’t do,” he says.
The dreamy look on his face reminds me of his fight with the Blade. The Brain was alone in his own mind then, according to Lyle, fighting in a smoky room. Focusing on his face, I dial out the writhing old men around us. Let the grayness seep in around the edges and absorb all distraction. I even banish the sadness and shock I feel for Jim, sensing it laced through my thoughts like venom.
My view of the world is purified.
I feint to the left and try to scramble around the Brain. My lunge doesn’t fool him. With a mauling grip he catches the back of my shirt, twists me up into the air. My shirt collar gags me and then rips, and I slip out of his grasp, hitting the concrete hard on all fours.
A black motorcycle boot lifts out of my vision and I roll, knowing that the boot is coming back down like a pneumatic hammer. I almost make it. The heel mashes the fingertips of my left hand. Grinding pain corkscrews into me and I gasp, remembering the time I caught my fingers in the hinge of a car door and wondering how this could be so much worse. Then I tune it out. Yank my hand from under his boot, leaving bloody finger paint on the street.
Grabbing the Brain’s trunk of a leg, I yank myself upright and keep going, climbing up his back. It’s like mounting an angry elephant, the smell of sweat and heat coming off his neck in waves. Muscles slither under his skin as he swings his arms at me.
The first blow sledgehammers into my shoulder blades, and I squeeze my arms tighter around his chest and suck wind. His fists are dense as a sack of ball bearings. I reach up and wrap a hand around his forehead where he can’t bite me. The next fist thuds into me and the light starts doing funny things in my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. With one hand I grip his forehead tight, and with the other I dig my thumb directly into his port. A dirty move. Dirty as sewage. Twisting, I cram my thumbnail into the puffy flesh of his temple. His head twists violently and that arm rises again, and I tense for impact. But something gives. The tip of my thumb sinks in a quarter inch. The arm wavers and then drops, hesitant. I let up.
The Brain coughs a couple times, the choke of an old car that won’t turn over on a cold morning. He stumbles, arms out for balance. Finally he collapses to his knees like a dynamited building.
I slide off the Brain’s back and quickly check his face. Even kneeling, he’s as tall as I am, staring vacantly ahead. He sneezes once, expelling a cannonball of air from his lungs.
“Brain?” I ask. “You okay?”
He takes a halfhearted swipe at me, eyes still unfocused. I take that as a yes and leave him, hurry across the empty street. Just after I cross, four police cars whiz by in a line behind me. Doppler-shifted sirens pushing and then pulling me along.
Toward the mayhem.
Running hard, I leap over cracked pavement, charge past roll-top doors and beige commercial warehouses. The thrum of several thousand people rolls toward me from somewhere up ahead, but the streets are oddly empty. Plastic bottles and discarded flyers stalk each other in the breeze. Locked doors and closed garages. Hazy clouds and the faint smell of smoke.
A half-fallen wooden roadblock slants across the street ahead.
I hear the shouts before I see anything. Sporadic gunshots and the edge of naked panic, unrestrained anger in the cries. Two women and a man appear and hobble past me. One of the women is holding a blood-soaked shirt against the man’s face. She shrinks away when she spots my temple.
Rounding the corner, I stumble into a full-blown melee.
I’m too late. Way too goddamn late. Every one of Lyle’s amps is here and they are attacking Pure Priders with anything on hand: rebar from the construction site, two-by-fours, rocks, and fists. Some have guns and some carry scavenged riot shields. The amps are charging in from the side streets, trapping reggies in the intersection. Other reggies are making a run for it. It’s a slaughter.
In seconds, I see an overweight amp smash another man’s cheekbone with one fist and keep on running, catching another guy in a sternum-crushing bear hug. A group of four reggies have got another amp by the arms, his shirt ripped mostly off; he slithers out of their grasp and sets about taking them apart with his fists and elbows.
Other people are lying facedown, not moving.
A burning car throws smoke over a cluster of reggies in front of the stage, back-to-back against the onslaught. These people are bloody, scared to death. Their signs are forgotten on the ground, trampled underfoot along with those who are hurt. Homemade T-shirts with angry slogans have been ripped into strips, turned to bandages.
Black uniforms intermingle with the group. Police separated from one another. On their own, defending the demonstrators and themselves with nightsticks and Tasers and sidearms.
And then there’s Lyle.
For just an instant, I spot the cowboy standing on the stage itself, above the scrum. He takes in the havoc with his knuckles resting on his hips, fingers curled up like feathers. Scans the crowd, eyes flickering past me without settling, and turns. Speaks to someone behind him, neck tensing with a shout.
Lyle leaps off the back end of the stage.
I fall forward into the fray, and the Zenith guides me as I shove and dodge my way toward the cowboy. The fighters batter my body back and forth. Rolling off sweaty backs and ducking fists, I skirt the defensive line of reggies and mount the stage two steps at a time.
Craning, I spot Lyle sprinting down a backstreet, away from the fight.
I cross the stage and leap down, follow Lyle as fast as I can. Flatten my palms and let my knees pump like pistons. Behind me, the concussion of multiple gunshots boomerangs around the intersection. I press onward, accelerating even as my lungs ignite with pain. The cowboy is so goddamn fast and everything is on the line and I can’t help sliding backward, going deeper into myself.
Level three just isn’t cutting it anymore.
Level four. Man-portable weapon systems. Small arms. Infantry support. Lethal organic fire support. Obstacle breaching. Do you consent? Do you consent?
Yes.
Ears trained on the plock-plock of Lyle’s boots, I let my vision collapse. Feel my eyes go dead around the edges even as every follicle and nerve ending of my body buzzes with life. My movements smooth out and gain a liquid flow. Running silent and smooth and swift as a tsunami on the open sea.
When I come upon Lyle, it’s all I can do to stop.
In a blind alley, the cowboy is leaning against a black town car with its door open, talking to a guy in a business suit. Lyle sees me and winces and at that moment I realize who he’s chatting with.
Senator Joseph Vaughn.
The leader of the Pure Human Citizen’s Council is taller than he appears from a distance—an athlete. Under his expensive suit, he’s muscular. The politician stands next to the car, relaxed and disheveled. He’s sweated through his suit. Tie half on. His hair is mussed and his cheeks are flushed.
“No, Lyle,” I say. “No.”
The laughing cowboy grins at me, shrugs his crow-bitten shoulders.
Ly
le is standing here in this alley, chatting with Vaughn like they were old friends. These two should be worst enemies and they’re not at all and the meaning of that puts a sag into my knees. Who’s paying for all this?
The boss, man, who do you think?
“You’re working for the Priders?” I ask Lyle, my voice flat with blank disbelief. “You did this for them?”
Lyle stands up off the car, sighs.
“The Brain still alive?” he asks.
I nod.
“Thanks,” he says, then turns and I see his eyes have gone dark and blank. My body leaps away before I’m aware of it. Lyle hits the space where I was standing like a torpedo, fists stuttering in the air. His boots scrabble over the gravelly pavement as he gets his balance. He turns back, eyes half closed.
Now I’m between him and the senator.
Lyle smiles, dead eyed. He’s given himself up to the implant. Gone all the way into his deep place and put himself on autopilot.
“Whole fuckin’ hog, Gray. Level five. World opens up to you in ways you can’t imagine.”
Lyle throws himself at me like a predator. Like something that our ancestors might have drawn on cave walls by firelight. My body is trying to move, trying to save my life, but I’m tangled up in Vaughn. The politician has grabbed my arms from behind. I twist around to look at him, and he stares back at me with this look on his face like I just shit my pants in church.
“Moron,” he says.
Then I’m on the ground. Lyle is on me like a barbed-wire blanket. The pavement gobbles up chunks of my skin as I struggle. But Lyle is too fast, each move part of a series. The cowboy torques a bony elbow across my jaw, and for a moment my mouth doesn’t close quite like it should anymore.
Lyle’s got me pinned and he’s dropping fists on me mechanically. My bruised forearms are up, fending off the bombardment with equally mechanical precision.
“We coulda gone to the stars,” he says. “You could have been my brother.”
As I start to lose consciousness I catch his face in glimpses, twisted with hate.
“Stop!” shouts Vaughn. “Stop it, Lyle.”
It’s like shouting at a locomotive. Lyle stops punching and digs his thumbs into my windpipe. Now my arms are so much useless rubber. I’m retreating back to my inside room whether I want to or not. My eyes rolling up, and now I’m looking at the inside of my own skull.
“… dammit, you animal …”
“… need him …”
“… the fucking plan …”
Silence.
I feel something like ants on my face. Stinging and tickling, running around in a blind confusion. It’s the blood returning. My vision blooms from tiny pinpricks, expands until I see the buildings looming over me, wavering and dancing.
I’m lying on my back, head bouncing as I cough uncontrollably. Specks of white foam arc away from my lips into the sunlight. The pavement is cool and gritty on my head. Level four is gone, not even a memory. I feel like I’ve been out for days, but it was just seconds.
Lyle sits a few feet away, arms on his knees. He picks a dandelion from a crack in the cement and twirls it, fingernails rimmed in my blood. He smiles at the flower, considers it. Like nothing happened. But I can still feel his phantom grasp around my throat.
Vaughn isn’t calm, though.
The politician wheels around and screams at the cowboy. Walks over to the car and leans on it, catching his breath. Somehow, the sounds don’t register in my ears. All I hear is the sluggish pounding of my heart, the crinkled-plastic rasp of my lungs.
“How could you do it?” I croak to Lyle.
He wipes his nose with one swollen fist. Sniffs. “What do you want me to say? Everything’s part of a plan,” he says. “This is happening all over the country. Right now, today. You could have owned it. But it’s all over for you. For me, it’s just beginning.”
“Why?” I ask, voice breaking.
The pain and hurt I feel are embedded in the question like a needle. Lyle winces at the sting of it, says nothing.
Vaughn kicks an empty can, sends it rattling down the alley. “Get this amp on his way. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Lyle’s eyes never leave mine. “Whatever you say, boss,” he says.
The laughing cowboy drags me onto my feet. I try to swallow through a half-collapsed throat and choke on it. I’m seeing the world through gauze as Lyle shoves me out of the alley. I stand there, swaying on my feet.
“You’re letting me go?” I ask, incredulous.
The tang of far-off smoke stings my nostrils.
“Sorta,” says Lyle, shrugging. He opens the car door and gets in. Slams it shut on my disbelief.
“You smell that?” Vaughn asks, leaning over the hood of the car. His voice seems to come from far away. “You better run home, my friend. Eden is burning.”
The White House Office of the Press Secretary
United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, I come to this house of the people to speak to you and all Americans at a defining moment—as the impact of a volatile new technology rends at our union and tears at the bonds of human kinship—as our nation stands on the very precipice of civil war.
Yesterday, a coalition of extremists known as Astra, their bodies implanted with advanced technology, launched a series of coordinated, premeditated attacks on three American cities.
The attack yesterday posed a direct challenge to the constitutional rights of Americans to assemble and freely express their beliefs. Many innocent lives were lost to fanaticism. By choosing to reject rational discourse and to take the lives of their fellow citizens, these extremists have abandoned everything except for the will to power, and they have therefore abandoned their own cause.
I want to speak tonight directly to the hundreds of thousands of implanted individuals who are peaceful and who bear no ill will toward our union. We respect your decision to undergo medical implantation. We understand that over the last tumultuous months, tensions have run high between implanted and nonimplanted citizens. Debates have raged in our courts, our halls of Congress, and in our churches and homes. We ask that you be patient. Peace will come in time.
Tonight, however, we must seek to maintain the compact of our union that was sealed in the flames of a catastrophic civil war that took place more than a century and a half ago.
As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for the defense of the American people from the extremists who are in our midst. We will use every resource to hunt these extremists down, turn them against one another, and drive them from safe shelter and into the arms of the law. Likewise, we will not hesitate to use any means necessary to protect innocent individuals with implants.
A great task awaits us—a rectification of human nature itself. The continued existence of our union depends upon our success in this endeavor.
We must seek the unity of natural man with the artificial world that he has built—with the technology that can save or destroy him, with new capabilities that can bring about great good or great harm, and with the technological devices that can nourish or starve his spirit.
We must seek and find an ultimate harmony between body and machine, a common ground from which every citizen is free to contribute toward improving the quality of our entire civilization.
This is the search that we begin tonight.
Smoke is rising from Eden—thin black ribbons braiding themselves in the sky. I stumble and try to run harder. I’m sucking air in ragged breaths, my throat and ribs and fingers bruised and hurting. The breeze carries the sharp chemical smell of a whole lot of unnatural, man-made shit burning up fast.
Cancer on the wind.
The war has really started now. Jim told me it was coming. They’re just waiting for an excuse, he said. Maybe my dad even saw a twinkle of it on the horizon fifteen years ago when he healed me and gave me something extra while he was at it. D
eep down, they must have feared that one day it would come to this: the new against the old.
Even Samantha saw it.
In my imagination, I envisioned a heroic battle. Guns and guts and glory. Instead, I’m sneaking into a burning trailer park to find a goofy kid and a woman who may have pretended to like me as a favor to her psychopath brother.
I hesitate a moment at the tree line, watching the glint of sun off Eden’s unwanted chain-link fence. No movement. Then I sprint across the muddied field, keeping my eyes on the swivel. The spotlighter brawl has left its mark here: wadded-up shirts that got ripped from Priders’ backs; glinting debris from smashed-up folding chairs; and that rusted, bullet-riddled generator slumped over like bloated roadkill.
But clear so far.
I climb over the rattling chain-link fence and stop on the other side, leaning against it. At least one trailer is burning for real. I don’t remember who lives there. But an honest-to-God blaze is going, with feral tongues of fire roaring up the sides of the yellowed old box. Waves of ash-specked wind surge off the flames, oven hot, tossing the branches of the pecan trees around. The plastic is withering, softening and falling in on itself.
I notice the paint blackening and curling away on the outside of the boxes next door. These trailers are too damn close to each other. At this rate, the whole trailer park will go up.
And there are no police. I don’t see or hear any fire trucks. Nobody is around. The authorities must be busy with the riots. The amps must have all run away.
Someone hoots loudly. A familiar-sounding “yee-haw.” I curl my fingers into the fence behind me, tense up, and freeze in place.
Three men stomp together through an intersection between trailers. The one in front has a gasoline can and a cap pulled low over his eyes. The other two follow, slouching along with sunken chests and shotguns low and leveled. All their faces are red and sweaty as if sunburned. But it’s from the fire. These men have gotten too close to the blaze, and it sure hasn’t bothered them any. I can see their feverish grins as they pass by.