Burning Chrome

  ‘You dumbshit or what?’ The man with the Peterbilt cap turned, catching Deke’s Indo proleboy denims, the brass chains at his wrists, for the first time. ‘Why don’t you get your ass lost, fucker. Nobody wants your kind in here.’ He turned back to the dogfight.

  Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff, liberty-headed dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stamp-and-coin stores, while more cautious bettors slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D VIIs. The room fell silent. The Fokkers banked majestically under the solar orb of a two-hundred-watt bulb.

  The blue Spad dove out of nowhere. Two more plunged from the shadowy ceiling, following closely. The kickers swore, and one chuckled. The formation broke wildly. One Fokker dove almost to the felt, without losing the Spad on its tail. Furiously, it zigged and zagged across the green flatlands but to no avail. At last it pulled up, the enemy hard after it, too steeply – and stalled, too low to pull out in time.

  A stack of silver dimes was scooped up.

  The Fokkers were outnumbered now. One had two Spads on its tail. A needle-spray of tracers tore past its cockpit. The Fokker slip-turned right, banked into an Immelmann, and was behind one of its pursuers. It fired, and the biplane fell, tumbling.

  ‘Way to go, Tiny!’ The kickers closed in around the table.

  Deke was frozen with wonder. It felt like being born all over again.

  Frank’s Truck Stop was two miles out of town on the Commercial Vehicles Only route. Deke had tagged it, out of idle habit, from the bus on the way in. Now he walked back between the traffic and the concrete crash guards. Articulated trucks went slamming past, big eight-segmented jobs, the wash of air each time threatening to blast him over. CVO stops were easy makes. When he sauntered into Frank’s, there was nobody to doubt that he’d come in off a big rig, and he was able to browse the gift shop as slowly as he liked. The wire rack with the projective wetware wafers was located between a stack of Korean cowboy shirts and a display for Fuzz Buster mudguards. A pair of Oriental dragons twisted in the air over the rack, either fighting or fucking, he couldn’t tell which. The game he wanted was there: a wafer labeled SPADS&FOKKERS. It took him three seconds to boost it and less time to slide the magnet – which the cops in D. C. hadn’t even bothered to confiscate – across the universal security strip.

  On the way out, he lifted two programming units and a little Batang facilitator-remote that looked like an antique hearing aid.

  He chose a highstack at random and fed the rental agent the line he’d used since his welfare rights were yanked. Nobody ever checked up; the state just counted occupied rooms and paid.

  The cubicle smelled faintly of urine, and someone had scrawled Hard Anarchy Liberation Front slogans across the walls. Deke kicked trash out of a corner, sat down, back to the wall, and ripped open the wafer pack.

  There was a folded instruction sheet with diagrams of loops, rolls, and Immelmanns, a tube of saline paste, and a computer list of operational specs. And the wafer itself, white plastic with a blue biplane and logo on one side, red on the other. He turned it over and over in his hand: SPADS&FOKKERS, FOKKERS&SPADS. Red or blue. He fitted the Batang behind his ear after coating the inductor surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer, and plugged the programmer into the wall current. Then he slid the wafer into the programmer. It was a cheap set, Indonesian, and the base of his skull buzzed uncomfortably as the program ran. But when it was done, a sky-blue Spad darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost glowed, it was so real. It had the strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade models often have, but it took all of his concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic blur.

  He practiced until the battery in the earset died, then slumped against the wall and fell asleep. He dreamed of flying, in a universe that consisted entirely of white clouds and blue sky, with no up and down, and never a green field to crash into.

  He woke to a rancid smell of frying krillcakes and winced with hunger. No cash, either. Well, there were plenty of student types in the stack. Bound to be one who’d like to score a programming unit. He hit the hall with the boosted spare. Not far down was a door with a poster on it: THERE’S A HELL OF A GOOD UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR. Under that was a starscape with a cluster of multicolored pills, torn from an ad for some pharmaceutical company, pasted over an inspirational shot of the ‘space colony’ that had been under construction since before he was born, LET’S GO, the poster said, beneath the collaged hypnotics.

  He knocked. The door opened, security slides stopping it at a two-inch slice of girlface. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You’re going to think this is stolen.’ He passed the programmer from hand to hand. ‘I mean because it’s new, virtual cherry, and the bar code’s still on it. But listen, I’m not gonna argue the point. No. I’m gonna let you have it for only like half what you’d pay anywhere else.’

  ‘Hey, wow, really, no kidding?’ The visible fraction of mouth twisted into a strange smile. She extended her hand, palm up, a loose fist. Level with his chin. ‘Lookahere!’

  There was a hole in her hand, a black tunnel that ran right up her arm. Two small red lights. Rat’s eyes. They scurried toward him – growing, gleaming. Something gray streaked forward and leaped for his face.

  He screamed throwing hands up to ward it off. Legs twisting, he fell, the programmer shattering under him. Silicate shards skittered as he thrashed, clutching his head. Where it hurt, it hurt – it hurt very badly indeed.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Slides unsnapped, and the girl was hovering over him. ‘Here, listen, come on.’ She dangled a blue hand towel. ‘Grab on to this and I’ll pull you up.’

  He looked at her through a wash of tears. Student. That fed look, the oversize sweatshirt, teeth so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference. A thin gold chain around one ankle (fuzzed, he saw, with baby-fine hair). Choppy Japanese haircut. Money. ‘That sucker was gonna be my dinner,’ he said ruefully. He took hold of the towel and let her pull him up.

  She smiled but skittishly backed away from him. ‘Let me make it up to you,’ she said. ‘You want some food? It was only a projection, okay?’

  He followed her in, wary as an animal entering a trap. ‘Holy shit,’ Deke said, ‘this is real cheese…’ He was sitting on a gutsprung sofa, wedged between a four-foot teddy bear and a loose stack of floppies. The room was ankle-deep in books and clothes and papers. But the food she magicked up – Gouda cheese and tinned beef and honest-to-God greenhouse wheat wafers – was straight out of the Arabian Nights.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘We know how to treat a proleboy right, huh?’ Her name was Nance Bettendorf. She was seventeen. Both her parents had jobs – greedy buggers – and she was an engineering major at William and Mary. She got top marks except in English, ‘I guess you must really have a thing about rats. You got some kind of phobia about rats?’

  He glanced sidelong at her bed. You couldn’t see it, really; it was just a swell in the ground cover. ‘It’s not like that. It just reminded me of something else, is all.’

  ‘Like what?’ She squatted in front of him, the big shirt riding high up one smooth thigh.

  ‘Well…did you ever see the –’ his voice involuntarily rose and rushed past the words – ‘Washington Monument? Like at night? It’s got these two little…red lights on top, aviation markers or something, and I, and I…’ He started to shake.

  ‘You’re afraid of the Washington Monument?’ Nance whooped and rolled over with laughter, long tanned legs kicking. She was wearing crimson bikini panties.

  ‘I would die rather than look at it again,’ he said levelly.

  She stopped laughing then, sat up, studied his face. White, even teeth worried at her lower lip, like she was dragging up something she didn’t want to think about. At last s
he ventured, ‘Brainlock?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said bitterly. ‘They told me I’d never go back to DC. And then the fuckers laughed.’

  ‘What did they get you for?’

  ‘I’m a thief.’ He wasn’t about tell her that the actual charge was career shoplifting.

  ‘Lotta old computer hacks spent their lives programming machines. And you know what? The human brain is not a goddamn bit like a machine, no way. They just don’t program the same.’ Deke knew this shrill, desperate rap, this long, circular jive that the lonely string out to the rare listener; knew it from a hundred cold and empty nights spent in the company of strangers. Nance was lost in it, and Deke, nodding and yawning, wondered if he’d even be able to stay awake when they finally hit that bed of hers.

  ‘I built that projection I hit you with myself,’ she said, hugging her knees up beneath her chin. ‘It’s for muggers, you know? I just happened to have it on me, and I threw it at you ’cause I thought it was so funny, you trying to sell me that shit little Indojavanese programmer.’ She hunched forward and held out her hand again. ‘Look here.’ Deke cringed. ‘No, no, it’s okay, I swear it, this is different.’ She opened her hand.

  A single blue flame danced there, perfect and ever-changing. ‘Look at that,’ she marveled. ‘Just look. I programmed that. It’s not some diddly little seven-image job either. It’s a continuous two-hour loop, seven thousand, two hundred seconds, never the same twice, each instant as individual as a fucking snowflake!’

  The flame’s core was glacial crystal, shards and facets flashing up, twisting and gone, leaving behind near-subliminal images so bright and sharp that they cut the eye. Deke winced. People mostly. Pretty little naked people, fucking. ‘How the hell did you do that?’

  She rose, bare feet slipping on slick magazines, and melodramatically swept folds of loose printout from a new plywood shelf. He saw a neat row of small consoles, austere and expensive-looking. Custom work. ‘This is the real stuff I got here. Image facilitator. Here’s my fast-wipe module. This is a brain-map one-to-one function analyzer.’ She sang off the names like a litany. ‘Quantum flicker stabilizer. Program splicer. An image assembler…’

  ‘You need all that to make one little flame?’

  ‘You betcha. This is all state of the art, professional projective wetware gear. It’s years ahead of anything you’ve seen.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you know anything about SPADS&FOKKERS?’

  She laughed. And then, because he sensed the time was right, he reached out to take her hand.

  ‘Don’t you touch me, motherfuck, don’t you ever touch me!’ Nance screamed, and her head slammed against the wall as she recoiled, white and shaking with terror.

  ‘Okay!’ He threw up his hands. ‘Okay! I’m nowhere near you. Okay?’

  She cowered from him. Her eyes were round and unblinking; tears built up at the corners, rolled down ashen cheeks. Finally, she shook her head. ‘Hey. Deke. Sorry. I should’ve told you.’

  ‘Told me what?’ But he had a creepy feeling…already knew. The way she clutched her head. The weakly spasmodic way her hands opened and closed. ‘You got a brainlock, too.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She closed her eyes. ‘It’s a chastity lock. My asshole parents paid for it. So I can’t stand to have anybody touch me or even stand too close.’ Eyes opened in blind hate. ‘I didn’t even do anything. Not a fucking thing. But they’ve both got jobs and they’re so horny for me to have a career that they can’t piss straight. They’re afraid I’d neglect my studies if I got, you know, involved in sex and stuff. The day the brainlock comes off I am going to fuck the vilest, greasiest, hairiest…’

  She was clutching her head again. Deke jumped up and rummaged through the medicine cabinet. He found a jar of B-complex vitamins, pocketed a few against need, and brought two to Nance, with a glass of water. ‘Here.’ He was careful to keep his distance. ‘This’ll take the edge off.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said. Then, almost to herself, ‘You must really think I’m a jerk.’

  The games room in the Greyhound station was almost empty. A lone, long-jawed fourteen-year-old was bent over a console, maneuvering rainbow fleets of submarines in the murky grid of the North Atlantic.

  Deke sauntered in, wearing his new kicker drag, and leaned against a cinder-block wall made smooth by countless coats of green enamel. He’d washed the dye from his proleboy butch, boosted jeans and T-shirt from the Goodwill, and found a pair of stompers in the sauna locker of a highstack with cut-rate security.

  ‘Seen Tiny around, friend?’

  The subs darted like neon guppies. ‘Depends on who’s asking.’

  Deke tuched the remote behind his left ear. The Spad snap-rolled over the console, swift and delicate as a dragonfly. It was beautiful; so perfect, so true it made the room seem an illusion. He buzzed the grid, millimeters from the glass, taking advantage of the programmed ground effect.

  The kid didn’t even bother to look up. ‘Jackman’s,’ he said. ‘Down Richmond Road, over by the surplus.’

  Deke let the Spade fade in midclimb.

  Jackman’s took up most of the third floor of an old brick bidding. Deke found Best Buy War Surplus first, then a broken neon sign over an unlit lobby. The sidewalk out front was littered with another kind of surplus – damaged vets, some of them dating back to Indochina. Old men who’d left their eyes under Asian suns squatted beside twitching boys who’d inhaled mycotoxins in Chile. Deke was glad to have the battered elevator doors sigh shut behind him.

  A dusty Dr Pepper clock at the far side of the long, spectral room told him it was a quarter to eight. Jackman’s had been embalmed twenty years before he was born, sealed away behind a yellowish film of nicotine, of polish and hair oil. Directly beneath the clock, the flat eyes of somebody’s grandpappy’s prize buck regarded Deke from a framed, blown-up snapshot gone the slick sepia of cockroach wings. There was the click and whisper of pool, the squeak of a work boot twisting on linoleum as a player leaned in for a shot. Somewhere high above the green-shaded lamps hung a string of crepe-paper Christmas bells faded to dead rose. Deke looked from one cluttered wall to the next. No facilitator.

  ‘Bring one in, should we need it,’ someone said. He turned, meeting the mild eyes of a bald mad with steel-rimmed glasses. ‘My name’s Cline. Bobby Earl. You don’t look like you shoot pool, mister.’ But there was nothing threatening in Bobby Earl’s voice or stance. He pinched the steel frames from his nose and polished the thick lenses with a fold of tissue. He reminded Deke of a shop instructor who’d patiently tried to teach him retrograde biochip installation. ‘I’m a gambler,’ he said, smiling. His teeth were white plastic. ‘I know I don’t much look it.’

  ‘I’m looking for Tiny,’ Deke said.

  ‘Well,’ replacing the glasses, ‘you’re not going to find him. He’s gone up to Bethesda to let the VA clean his plumbing for him. He wouldn’t fly against you anyhow.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, because you’re not on the circuit or I’d know your face. You any good?’ When Deke nodded, Bobby Earl called down the length of Jackman’s, ‘Yo, Clarence! You bring out that facilitator. We got us a flyboy.’

  Twenty minutes later, having lost his remote and what cash he had left, Deke was striding past the broken soldiers of Best Buy.

  ‘Now you let me tell you, boy,’ Bobby Earl had said in a fatherly tone as, hand on shoulder, he led Deke back to the elevator, ‘You’re not going to win against a combat vet – you listening to me? I’m not even especially good, just an old grunt who was on hype fifteen, maybe twenty times. Ol’ Tiny, he was a pilot. Spent his entire enlistment hyped to the gills. He’s got membrane attenuation real bad…you ain’t never going to beat him.’

  It was a cool night. But Deke burned with anger and humiliation.

  ‘Jesus, that’s crude,’ Nance said as the Spad strafed mounds of pink underwear. Deke, hunched up on the couch, yanked her flashy little Braun remote from behind his ear.

&nbs
p; ‘Now don’t you get on my case too, Miss rich-bitch gonna-have-a-job –’

  ‘Hey, lighten up! It’s nothing to do with you – it’s just tech. That’s a really primitive wafer you got there. I mean, on the street maybe it’s fine. But compared to the work I do at school, it’s – hey. You ought to let me rewrite it for you.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Lemme beef it up. These suckers are all written in hexadecimal, see, ’cause the industry programmers are all washed-out computer hacks. That’s how they think. But let me take it to the reader-analyzer at the department, run a few changes on it, translate it into a modern wetlanguage. Edit out all the redundant intermediaries. That’ll goose up your reaction time, cut the feedback loop in half. So you’ll fly faster and better. Turn you into a real pro, Ace!’ She took a hit off her bong, then doubled over laughing and choking.

  ‘Is that legit?’ Deke asked dubiously.

  ‘Hey, why do you think people buy gold-wire remotes? For the prestige? Shit. Conductivity’s better, cuts a few nanoseconds off the reaction time. And reaction time is the name of the game, kiddo.’