Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (17 page)

“Hello, Vasily. Sorry for the inconvenience. Give me a moment, and I’ll explain.” He edged carefully past Vasily’s floating fields to the middle of the room. It was mostly bare; there was a heap of cushions and quilts in one corner, a built-in dresser-like repository for resonators and clothing materials, a few shelves for books and knick-knacks. There was the mirror on the wall, and a standing-height desk with a screen (dark now) and soft silver touchpad. Ammon crouched in the middle of the floor and opened his bag, taking out a little spindle and stand. He stroked it to life and it threw a shower of amber lights across floor, walls, and ceiling, like a star-projector. “That should give us some time. Half an hour or so, if the rest of the team do their part. We can speak without being overheard.”

“What is that? What did you do to my building?” Vasily floated nearer the field projector and felt his implants hum with a gentle heat.

“This?” Ammon gestured at the spindle. “Think of it like a sort of Faraday cage, maybe, or like sound-absorption panels, whichever is more familiar to you. It just keeps any signals from being sent out of here to anyone who might want to be listening in. As to your building, and the rest of your block,” he shrugged, apologetically, “I really am sorry for the inconvenience, but it’s vital no one know I was here. The generator didn’t kick on, by the way, because it can’t tell the power is out. My team are good at their work. Now. What would you like to know?”

Where to begin? The thousand-thousand questions of the last two hours, and the week prior, bubbled up at once and Vasily struggled for words.

“Are you a body-runner?” Well. Not the most elegant beginning.

“Depends. What do you think a body-runner is?”

“Someone who does… augment stuff, on the black market?”

“Yeah, then, arguably yes. Nothing exploitative, though; we try to liberate, not to trap.”

“Who’s we? Are there more of you? Who are you, really?”

“Well, those are complex questions… let’s do the easy one first: yes, there are more of us. We’re mostly called shifters. What that means, who we are, that’s the complicated part. We’re only sort of an ‘us’. It’s loose. Like I said, we’re into liberation, bodily liberation. Some of us are androgynes, some just have unusual aesthetics, some are into augmentation—adaptive or superhuman or both. It’s a little different for everyone. But we help each other when we can.”

Vasily paused, digesting. “Am I in danger? Because of you?”

“You? No. No one should know this has happened, unless you decide to tell them, which I’m trusting you won’t.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I saw the look in your eye—call it a gut feeling, a hunch, if you like. Fleshed out by your search strings. I thought you could use someone like us. And, hey, you passed your background check.”

“My searches?! Background check? You read my stuff!”

“Of course. Basic safety precaution.” They sat with that for a moment, a dense silence.

“How do you keep from being arrested, anyway? With all this out-license gear! Where does it come from?”

“The ‘black market’, as you so astutely surmised. We also make a lot of it. The starfield damper is one of mine. DIY helps keep us under the radar, and we’re also just careful. Background checks, sensors, that kind of thing. We’re taking a risk on you, actually.”

“Why? I don’t—why are you here? Why me?”

“A hunch. I trust my gut.” Ammon smiled, and his eyes softened. “If you’re not interested, I can go. No hard feelings.”

“No! No. I am, I always wondered… I don’t even know where to begin. I always wondered if there were… other ways. To be different.”

“Yes. There are. Ways and means.”

“How do I start?” Vasily tried not to sound eager; failed.

“We clean you. That’s why this,” he waved his right arm through the image of his left, “isn’t here. We hacked my original biomech arm years ago, cleaned it, so it’s probably safe, but I didn’t want to risk being wrong. It’s at home in its cage. All licensed tech tracks and broadcasts, and that won’t do at all.”

More information to digest. Vasily hadn’t thought about what his implants might be telling the world; he knew morphic point usage was aggregated, but it was supposed to be anonymous. There had been a licensure agreement, of course, but he’d signed it so many years ago. “They track me.”

“Constantly. And monitor how you use what you have.”

“Shit.” He rocked back in the air, skin crawling. “Shit, shit. Okay. But. I can get out?”

“Yes. We can scrub you; I have the tools with me. It doesn’t take that long for just a cerebellar-sacral ’skip clean—that’s what you have, right?” Vasily nodded. “You’ll have to power down, I’m afraid, but from there it’s simple. Just open and patch.”

Vasily chewed his lip, as his stomach churned. With the resonators out of commission, if he powered down the g-skip he’d be utterly helpless, ground-bound and weak. Alone, with a body-runner.

Ammon could see the hesitation. “It’s a lot to take in all at once, I know. I remember how afraid I was when I first handed Xerxes my arm. I can come back, someday, if you aren’t ready.” He spoke gently, respectfully.

Vasily shook his head. “No.” He summoned up his courage, the same courage that had taken him on high-speed maglevs late at night; he asked it to grow. “I want this. I want to know. If that means—I want to try.” He drifted to his jumbled nest of cushions, and lowered himself onto them. He forced himself to take a long, slow breath. “Ready when you are.”

He waited a few long seconds, watching Ammon rummage in his bag, before he sent the command to power down. He was so accustomed to the constant low hum of the ’skip that its absence felt like shaking. The cushions were angled strangely, pressing into his flanks. He sagged.

Ammon had got out something little and shining—a tuning fork, it looked like—and some even tinier electronic implement with little conduits and wires exposed below a rounded handle. “I’ll need to get to both your implants, at your neck and your sacrum. Can you move at all?”

“No, it’s—you’ll have to help me turn. And with my shirt, I guess.” Ammon slipped his broad arm behind Vasily’s back, working the hem of his shirt up past his shoulderblades with his fingers. Soft, deep green fabric slid up past his web of ink. Ammon’s hard-light fingers couldn’t grasp the delicate material, but with a combination of one warm hand, the resistance of the cushions, and Vasily’s little shivers, they freed him. Vasily shook from the effort as he fell back into Ammon’s shoulder. “I usually have the resonators for this… Sorry.”

“Hey, I’m the one who cut their power, I should apologise. Are you ready to roll? Need a minute?”

“No, go ahead—put me down. I can rest there.”

Ammon’s body weight pressed against Vasily’s shoulder, shifting him sideways. He wrapped his right arm—the solid one, warm and strong—around Vasily’s narrow chest and shoulders, and bent them both forward from his waist, to roll Vasily onto the cushions, belly-down. A combination of lifts and nudges, tucked against Ammon’s broad chest, got him settled comfortably, or at least as comfortable as he could be on solid ground, and Ammon released him. The spindle’s amber starlights played over Vasily’s back, glinting off the chromed surface of the exposed implants.

“Okay, Vasily. I have the frequency here to open your implants, and I’ll be sending them a bit of new information, physically and digitally. We’ll start with your sacrum.” He touched the shining metal there, curved and blood-hot. The implant itself had no sensory capacity; Vasily couldn’t feel the touch, though he could see Ammon’s movement from the corner of his eye.

There was a tiny metallic
ting
as Ammon struck the tuning fork. It didn’t ring audibly after that, but the pressure of the frequency could be felt, prickling in the eyes and the ears, tickling the back of the brain. Ammon set its base against the chrome of Vasily’s sacrum. It was answered by the quiet hum of tiny servos, different from the ones that operated the ’skip. Vasily could feel the thrumming and tickling through his hips and up his spine. Slowly, the metal split along an invisible crack, exposing its inner circuitry and data-stores. Ammon switched the fork for the little wiry interlocutor tool, and it began its work, scouring out report routines, soldering a few key points.

“I like your tattoos,” Ammon said. Vasily’s back was webbed with geometric lines and curves, circled with little egg-shaped nodes. Framed in the center, in an open oval like a cameo, was an exquisite little bird, hovering mid-flight. Its body was that of a shimmering, flamboyant hummingbird, in tones of emerald and sapphire and amethyst. Its head was that of a young woman, with a pale face and blue eyes reminiscent of Vasily’s own—but yet not him, not a true self-portrait. Her auburn hair drifted above her, wind-feathered, like a crest. “Is she someone you know? Family, maybe?”

He’d lied to the tattoo artist, told her the face was his sister’s, as a memorial. “You could say that. She is, after a fashion…” Not family; no one real. The design truly was a memorial, though. He continued a little too briskly, a little too brightly. “The bird though, that’s all myth, old as the hills. She’s a gamayun.” He told Ammon about the gamayun, the girl-faced bird of folklore, a creature of wisdom and beauty. “Usually she’s drawn as a bigger bird, but—I have a soft spot for hummingbirds, the way they shimmer and float. They do it better than I.”

The interlocutor tool had done its job. Ammon struck the tuning fork again, and closed the sacral implant. “There’s one done. The next one—won’t be as pleasant. It’s kept a lot deeper down, and opening it won’t be very nice.”

“O…kay.”

Ammon brushed Vasily’s hair away from his neck, carefully, meticulously. He struck the fork and set it to the base of Vasily’s skull, against the coin-sized disc of shining chrome visible there. It made Vasily’s teeth hum, and his sinuses felt like they were ringing. Then the disc began to move: the center slid free, sliding slowly from his neck, releasing a finger-long curving spike that had nestled inside his cerebellum for years. It felt
wrong.
It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it felt like someone had reached a finger up his nose and down his throat, somehow to wetly stroke his spinal column. He gagged. “Easy, easy, you’re doing well, just a moment longer now,” and it stopped, and Vasily could breathe properly again.

The interlocutor got to work. “You know,” said Ammon, with deliberate nonchalance, “we have all kinds, among the shifters. Licensure, for adaptive or androgynous or any other augmentation purposes, is one route. But it isn’t the only route.”

Vasily bit his lip, and said nothing. The interlocutor finished, and the spike slid back in, with agonising slowness; it left him coughing, wracked and goosebumped. Ammon got him sitting upright, till he could breathe again, and helped him with his shirt.

“One last thing,” Ammon said. “After a reset like this, the implants are designed to need a full re-charge. It’s designed as a ‘safety’ feature, so they can discern tampering as quickly as possible, keeping you locked down till the Hands can work out how to solve you, or collect you. Doesn’t work that well, though. Where do you keep your tail?”

“It’s just here. See the blue blanket? Beneath.” The plugless recharging cable for the ’skip was coiled up, half-hidden. Ammon fished it from the cushions, and brought out from his bag a little bit of perforated waxy paper, studded with tiny metallic circuitry. He popped the cover from the recharging surface—just held with magnets, like everything else these days—and slid the paper over the conduits before closing the unit back up.

“That’s all. Now your tail won’t rat on you, either.”

Vasily was too exhausted to be surprised any further; if his implants could track him, why couldn’t his cables as well? Maybe everything did. Of course. It made sense: dockpoints, transit, doorfobs, charging stations, augmented folks’ entries to restricted housing. Of course someone would be collecting all this data. Reading it. Shaping it. Ammon joined Vasily up to the tail cable, and the g-skip hummed back into life, buoying him up from the floor. His body settled, at last his face relaxed.

Ammon pulled another calling-card from his bag. “When you’re ready for the next step, you know how to be in touch.”

Vasily nodded, wearily.

“Anything else you need? Questions? Power should be up as soon as I clear the block.”

“How much of you is real?”

Ammon laughed, dark eyes sparkling, face creasing into well-worn laugh-lines. “Oh, all of me!”

“I meant… solid. I guess. Made of matter?”

“Ah, well, 80% at least. Hard light’s just this arm, I promise. Anything else?”

“No, I just—I need time to figure out what just happened, I think.”

He nodded. “It’s a lot to process, I know. I remember. Do you still have my previous card?”

“Yes, on the bookshelf…”

Ammon nosed around till he found it, and crushed it swiftly between finger and thumb. It crumbled surprisingly fine. “There. Traceless. Be in touch, Vasily.” He scooped up his spindle and stand, the amber lights fading from the walls, and was gone.

Vasily panicked.

He pretended he didn’t, of course, but he panicked nonetheless. He didn’t leave his room for two days straight, keeping the curtains drawn, the door locked tight. If anyone called, he was “just tired”, and he hung up as quickly as possible. He ignored his mail. He stared hard at his implants with mirrors, worrying: was there a crack there, or just a hairline shadow? Was this the way they used to feel? What kind of fool had faith in a slip of waxed paper in his electronics?

Eventually, he had to go out, if just to the kitchen. The building lobby felt like enemy territory; the open air beyond, outside, was too enormous to contemplate. He started at little sounds, eyes flicking back and forth and up and down. He crouched in the kitchen, zipped as quickly as possible along the halls. He avoided the windows and shivered passing the doors. The coat rack looked like someone lurking, skulking. The groceries his housemates had left in the kitchen were an obvious trap. He sweated and shook.

Over the following days, though, his paranoia gently ebbed. He wasn’t arrested. His implants still worked. No Teeth came for him in the night, save for in dreams, where the questions they grilled him with were nonsensical: how many feathers had he shed this year? Which star was he named after? How long had his sister been invisible? Where did the library go? The waking anxiety turned to chuckles (oh, silly me, spooked by a dream…).
He couldn’t shake the looming spectre of the omniscient government—after all, it certainly seemed true—but he remembered also the amber stars of silence, and the contrasts in touch between Ammon’s solid and hard-light hands. They were real, too.