Roo'd (11 page)

Tonx landed in Austin and was the first one out of the plane, grinding his teeth through pat down after pat down until he hit the luggage claim and was able to switch on his comm. He breathed a deep sign of relief when he saw the spam for clitoris enlargement in his inbox. It was the prearranged signal for success in extracting Poulpe. He waited until he'd gotten into a cab to call Fed.

"Hey bro, how's the weather?" he asked.

"Shit. And who the hell did you stick me with here? Marcus is gone and Cessus is fucking around with bananas."

"Yeah he's crazy, but he's good. We get a clean report card?"

"No, man. He bought a shitload of bananas, says he's going to distill banananine through a decomposition of sugars from ice cream."

Tonx closed his eyes, smiled. "That's cool. Cessus is a little eccentric, but it's part of the charm. You could learn a thing or two from him, little man."

"Like how the perfect banana split will provide an avenue to nirvana?"

"Could do worse. He say we're all clear?"

There was the muffled blur of voices in the background as Fede and Cessus conversed.

"We're good. From what we saw during our checkup on the way home they hadn't found the switchover a half hour after the jump. Cessus says they'll either find it in modulo two hours or another twelve, but either way the logs should be cleared by now."

"Sweet" chuckled Tonx. "Listen, you guys did good. Thanks for the help, Fed."

There was momentary silence on the line, and the corner of Tonx's grin jumped as he imagined his little brother trying to cope with the praise.

"Whatever. Listen, what happens next? I've still got a bunch of work to do on the deployment, but we're going to need the data set here soon. Is your 'package' going to be available anytime in the near future?"

"We'll take care of it" Tonx said, his fingers reaching out to trace the wire reinforcing the glass of the cab's window. "Listen, Fed. Maybe you know where I'm at, maybe not, but for god's sakes don't come looking, okay? This end of the game isn't your space, right? Stay out of the meat and don't worry. I got it covered."

"No worries" said Fed. There was a silence, then, stretching out thin over the ones and zeros that filled the space between them, continental gaps of void stretching wide and empty, soundless.

"I'll keep an eye on Cass" said Fed. "You take care of you, okay?"

"You take care of you, too" echoed Tonx, and clicked off the line. Both brothers regarded their comms with the same sense of sad satisfaction, identical looks in their eyes held for exactly the same half second, thousands of miles apart.

Tonx sighed and leaned back into the grey polyplastic of the taxi, suddenly very tired. He should message Pharoe, set up some credits as a token thanks, hint at future services to be rendered. But he
was
tired. Now that he was able to act the action was done. A monumental sense of hubris filled the back of cab, sat thick and steaming over Tonx all the way to the hotel.

When he arrived he tossed his duffle on the cheap bed and took a shower first thing. Crawling out of the steam he decided against hitting the nightlife; he was too burnt to do any good. He sent out some mails to Pharoe and Cass, promised to contact them in the morning and slipped into clean, air-conditioned sheets.

When he woke up the light coming through the three-foot-wide porch windows was metallic and thin. After fumbling behind the curtains for a while he found the LCD tint control and slid it off entirely. Tiny, electrically controlled pixels embedded in transparent film in the glass turned sideways, the window became clear, and solar heat washed over Tonx's body. It was going to be a hot day.

His first order of business was to find someplace safe to hole up Poulpe, and maybe others. He didn't know if Pharoe's guys were going to want to hang with him - chances were good Pharoe would want to ensure his investment, and Tonx would have to provide some kind of push-back. Their bid wasn't a sure thing, but if it worked out he didn't need any "help" with artificial debts to pay off.

Tonx had been to Texas a few times. There were some serious hardcore mods developed out here, biological rejection therapies tested on backwater hicks in clandestine mountain cults, radiation tattoo gangs, trailer-park gene therapies, the works. Texas was a big place - big enough to hide just about anything.

Now Tonx had to find a place to hide himself and a few friends, some place clean and safe and with a solid comm feed they could access.

The first order of business was getting a hold of John Tucker. John's Dad had pioneered the bodmod scene ages ago as an errant son to a medical equipment supply company maven. He'd decided to use his training to make real tools for hardcore bodmodders. Laser cutters, epidermal lifts, osseointegrated plug-nuts and more - securing patents for all of them, of course. John's dad had held rituals in his living room, implanting nails into break-point posts to make real spiked mohawks. He'd been the first to use lasers for scarification purposes (intentional, anyway) and developed the entire field of teflon-coating implants. He was on the wanted list in four different states, received permanent protected status from the Hell's Angels, and eventually fled to Texas. This was just after he discovered the use of coral as an implant medium for making horns, elbow spikes, and the like. There'd been an incident where he was trying to irradiate the coral to control its growth and accidentally turned his subject's frontal lobes to sludge. When the police arrived he provided the waivers and legal documents protecting him from all liability and was pronounced a danger to society on the spot. While his lawyers (who were many - lawyers always have kinks and always love favors) started heading for the supreme court with his case he fled straight to Austin. Your average Texan didn't much like the kind of people Phil Tucker serviced, but they sure as hell weren't going to put up with being told what they could and couldn't do with their own bodies. Besides, it was one short step from controlled-growth coral horns to tummy-tucks and the ubiquitous titanium mesh breast implants, and although nobody wanted to say it they sure as hell weren't going to do without them. It wasn't the easiest place for a pioneering bodmodder to be, but in a lot of ways it was the safest.

So John had grown up with a powerful sense of personal liberty and a nation of awed miscreants to back him up. Tonx and John had gotten on like a house on fire when they met at the Implant and Scarification Consortium in New York, and after a three-day bender had established a lifelong friendship. They'd always stayed in touch, and a lot of Tonx's work had been built on stuff John had come up with or scraped off his boots after tromping through the filthy nooks and crannies of the Texas plains.

He rummaged through his bag for some jeans, found an ancient Punky Brewster brand beer shirt and tugged it on. It was a tight fit; Tonx kept himself in good shape between the muscle work and his Aikido, but a tight shirt that emphasized your biceps was almost de rigueur down here. Next he pulled out the grayed leather kit with his toothbrush and tattoo needles (just in case) and sat down in front of the obligatory dressing-room makeup table. This was the part of being in Texas he didn't like; the constant need for makeup. First he slathered on a generous coating of sunscreen, covering his arms and face and the back of his neck. He was careful to get his ears; last time he was down here he'd forgotten them and they'd developed tiny white pustules that slowly secreted millimeter-long, waxy eggs of dead tissue. For weeks. Next he drew on dark eyeliner and thick red lipstick pulled out wide across his cheeks. Texas was a goth state, especially Austin, and if you wanted any credibility you had to play to the audience. Finally he pulled out a topical numbing agent and threaded microfilament needles through his cheeks along his jaw line, over the lipstick, white LED posts glowing like pearly teeth through a head-wide smile. It was a look he'd come up with just out of school, and it'd taken off big down south. He was over it now, had been for a long time, but knew it'd emphasize his cred.

Finally he gelled his hair into a hard shell of spikes and went to wash his hands. Too goddamn much product. That done he pulled on his glasses and thumbed his comm for a taxi, grabbed his jacket and went outside.

Fifteen minutes later he was standing in downtown Austin. The place was clean, pristine, and as angry as he remembered. Austin's government had gone for wind power as an alternative to oil once the reserves had started to tap out and been largely very successful. They'd also decided to go with the Gay theory, which said that in order for a city to grow and profit it needed a large population of educated, artistic young spenders. Homosexuals were pegged as a the benchmark for success along the metric, and the city planners had done everything they could to import them. They attracted a wildly diverse population, including a lot of educated people, a lot of artistic people, and a lot of young spenders. They also got a shitload of angry radicals and a furious split of opinions among the general populace. Between the emphasis on clean energy and environmentalism and the continually escalating tension between "locals", Austin had wound up a very angry place. Tonx didn't know anywhere else that bar fights were started with intentional littering. Now he was here in the thick of it, smelling the hot grease stink of the streets, taking in the feeling of the city, watching the body language and modeling his own to fit. Tonx didn't want any undue attention, he wanted to find John and get some results.

Unfortunately John didn't own a comm. It was a complete pain in the ass but Tonx had to admit it ensured both his safety and his rep. If you wanted to talk to John Tucker, you had to ask for him, and the person you asked had to decide to tell you. This meant that you never found him until he knew you were coming - and you both knew a half a dozen people knew also. John had plenty of theories on the social dynamic he claimed he was using, such as the idea that it went both ways. John thought that by requiring word of mouth and local social networking he was enabling a six-degree rule - that he knew everybody in the world by a string of relationships through no more than six people. His name was widely known, and continued to be known by constant reinforcement, even if only as "the crazy bodmodder from Texas who has no comm." It was true John did exceedingly well at contacting folks and finding that one right person for a job, but Tonx wasn't convinced it didn't have more to do with his fame. John, for example, was fully Roo'd.

Being Roo'd was the quintessential bodmod, being exceedingly dangerous and risky as well as dramatic and beautiful. It was developed out of nowhere by a team of Icelandic prostheticists working in conjunction with a team of Israeli surgeons, and the number of people in the world who were fully Roo'd could be counted on both hands. The number of people who had tried but failed numbered considerably more. Those people spent their lives, if they lived, in wheelchairs.

To get Roo'd you had to have your legs effectively amputated below the knees. The first person to be Roo'd, Haldor Haldorsson, had had his legs run over by a semi-autonomous rock-crusher in the arctic deserts of Iceland's highlands. This was not an entirely new occurrence; what was new in his case was the salinated cold packs they stuck his lower body in when it happened. That's where his luck started. Then he was rushed to a hospital that happened to be right in the middle of a convention on new prosthetic technologies coming out of Iceland, and had attracted the attention of fifteen world specialists on leg surgeries including the group from Israel. Haldor was a very lucky man.

It turned out that the nerve tissue and much of the muscles in his legs were salvageable, but most of his bones were absolutely ruined. A big chunk of his tibia had snapped straight out of his right shin, and in the rush to get him to a hospital was now missing. (It turned up later, stuck in the tire of the rock-crusher). The scientists in residence conceived of a radical and bizarre suggestion for saving his legs. It was later reported that they were all drunk when they had come up with it, but nevertheless when Haldor regained consciousness he was presented with twenty-three cocktail napkins detailing a radical experimental surgery. Haldor was a typical Icelander, blue-collar and fluent in three languages. His hobbies included competition-level team handball and translating Latin texts to Icelandic. In his own words, broadcast across the world in dozens of languages, he said: "having my legs reshaped like a kangaroo's sounds fine. Very fine."

Very fine. The scientists shredded the muscles in his calves, microscopically separating fast-twitch fibers from slow-twitch. They replaced his lower leg bones with shortened carbon-fiber titanium amalgam plates; stronger, more flexible, and twenty times lighter than bone. His Achilles tendon was stretched, reinforced with cloned tissue, and re-strung. His feet were completely restructured, the last two toes removed. They fused the two toes next to his big toe, giving him two fat pads to stand on, and replaced his heel with a compound amalgam joint. The fine bones in his feet were replaced with one long grooved plate. The ball of his foot was reinforced, artificial muscle grafted along his entire leg, his skin stretched on metal frames in a saline bath while still attached at the thigh. He stayed in the bath for two weeks, drunk on morphine analogs, surrounded by floating bits of his own muscle and skin. When the skin had grown long enough and the muscle grafts fully took, they sewed him back together. One month after the accident Haldor Haldorsson walked out of the hospital a man like no other man had ever been, his blond face ruddy in the sharp wind.

He stood a full seven feet, his thighs canted at a 45-degree angle towards the ground and bulging with hormonally exaggerated muscle. His feet were as long as his thighs, his shins substantially shorter. His toes had been microscopically grated to create thick calluses, and the nail beds had grown together and thickened to provide traction for the extra musculature. They'd implanted a thick sheen of hair over his thighs, and tanned the skin overall for a healthy glow. When reporters had asked him what it had been like to be flayed in a saline tub for two weeks he'd simply said "Yah, yah. No problem. It's very fine."