Up The Tower (17 page)

Ore looked with her. “What the hell.”

Somehow, Victor had ripped his ear off before tumbling off the stairs—and gave it to Ana. That was some kind of foresight.

“Hello? I can hear your voices. How many of you are there?”

“There’s three of us,” said Ana. “Who are you? Where are you?”

“Three of you, huh? Where’s Victor?”

“He’s dead. He fell down a lot of stairs.”

“Goddamn, I was afraid of that. His sensors are reading a lot of blunt force trauma, and he wasn’t responding very well to his reboots. All right, can’t be helped. What were you doing with Victor?”

“He took me with him,” said Ana.

Gary came close to Ana, glad for the excuse. “He said he'd get us out of here.”

“Did he? That's two of you. What about the third?”

“I'm here for my own reasons,” said Ore.

“Which are?”

“My brother's here, somewhere. I want to find him. And I want to kill somebody else.”

“Have you seen today? I think God's outpaced you with that last part.”

“Maybe. Better to know for certain, though.”

“A woman after my own heart! Okay, then. We've got about as much time as a shore-leaved sailor in a thousand dollar whore, you get me? You have to—”

“Who
are
you?” asked Gary. “What’s happening? Where are you?”

“My name is Mike. I’m far away from there, which is where you ought to be trying to get. There’s—”

Gary was getting frustrated. “Where is your voice coming from, man?”

“From the ear in your hands, obviously. Or her hands. Whoever’s. Any other brainburners? No? Okay. You gotta listen, then. Victor should have had a pack with him. Do you see it?”

“I got it, yeah.” Ore jangled the backpack she grabbed from the railing.

“Who’s that? The girl with the brother?”

“My name’s Ore.”

“Ore. Like metal?”

“If you like.”

“All right, Ore. Inside there should be some data slabs. Are there?” He chuckled. “Ore there? Get it? Just kidding. Lighten up folks, it's murder today. Seriously, though. Are there?”

“Yeah,” said Ore. “They here.”

“
Goddammit
, that’s good. Pass them around. Each of you gets one, okay? I trusted them all to Victor, but he’s...trained for this. You aren’t.”

Gary held up the thick slab Ore handed him. “These are big. I didn’t think they made them big like this anymore.”

“They don’t, unless they need a lot of data. Those three drives hold rather sensitive corporate information. Like, all of it, for this whole region. Every file stored on every computer, okay?”

That would be zettabytes of information. Maybe yottabytes.

“How much is all this worth to you?” Ore asked.

“How about a trip off that Tower? How much is that worth to you?”

“You gonna pick us up if we give you these things?”

“I will.”

“Us, and anybody we got with us?”

“Sure. Whoever you like. Just get to the top of The Tower.”

That sounded great to Gary. He was about to say so, but then Ana banged her hand down on the door.

“Citizenship,” Ana said coldly.

“What?” Mike sounded surprised.

“You want us to do this?” She leaned into the ear. “Citizenship. For all three of us. Four of us. Her brother, too. You make us Citizens and we’ll do it. Victor was a hitman, right? He worked for some corporation, then. A big one, too.”

Mike's tone revealed nothing. “Maybe he did.”

“Citizenship,” Ana said again. “You work on it now, too. I want us to be Citizens before you even pick us up. If we die, I want it logged in the annals.”

“Yeah,” said Ore, smiling and shaking her finger at Ana. “I like that. Otherwise, the hell with your data, and we’ll take our chances with our own way off. Ororo and Samson Castelle. You put us on that list.”

“Ana Konopolis.”

“Gary Ross.”

Mike sighed. “Let me see what I can do.”

“Shove it up your ass, see what you can do.” Ana banged the door again. “Either you can do it or you can’t. No seeing.”

Gary wished she would stop banging the door. The dogs were behind it. She was riling them up. Their barking was getting louder, angrier.

“Fine!” said Mike. “Fine. Okay. Citizens. You’re all Citizens. Tax cuts and all. I’ll put someone on it right now.”

Sudden, easy grins across everyone’s face. Citizenship. Easy living. Healthcare.

Gary’s mother—she would have Citizen healthcare, too, if she was still alive. Such a thing was possible, he expected. Maybe the hospital...maybe it wasn't all the way collapsed. Survivors happened, right? People survived.

And if she did, forget inner-city Junktown hospitals, forget shoddy slum medicine that only worked half the time. She'd be on the top of the pile and get the best treatment available in a hospital that was pure and white and didn’t have yellowed sheets or half-doctors with best guesses about how to treat her cancer.

And all they had to do was this one, crazy, impossible thing.

Ore had already started up the stairs again, shuffling to keep her feet in the strong lean, and Gary followed Ana—making sure to be behind her. He could cover her rear. She stuffed the ear in a pocket.

Beneath her, he could watch her all the more intently. Once, Ana turned and Gary averted his eyes—but still met hers, and felt that awkward quasi-telepathic pang of shame that let him know he had been caught.

They passed one floor and then another, and then another—the doors either locked or barricaded somehow. Boards and furniture hammered in, rubble piling over the opening.

In front, Ore stopped the ascent, banging against a door. The stairs again were blocked by caved-in rubble—the building in full disrepair. The collapse must have been recent. Dust and dirt still filled the air.  Gary could see why Ore was becoming so frustrated: the door had no knob, and was just a flat panel, shaking from the strikes of her weight.

“Locked,” she said, shaking her head and shoving her shoulder against it.

“Could you try your hand?” asked Ana.

Ore shook her head. “It crushes. Tears.” She opened and closed it, showing off. “Pears, apples, skulls, no problem. Maybe if I tried, I’d get inside and tear through, but what if it’s three feet thick? Too much time lost. We'll all die in the meantime.”

“So what?” Ana kicked the door in frustration. “Do we go back? Back to the dogs?”

“Maybe we could fight them. You fight okay?”

“Do I
look
like I fight okay?” Ana was incensed. “You think because I'm tall that I fight things? Is that what you think?”

Ore looked unimpressed. Gary stepped between them.

“Look, look, okay? This door—I mean you can’t just have a door and not have a way to open it, okay? That doesn’t make any sense. This is a residential building...you know. Sort of. And she said the elevators don’t work for another, what, ten floors or something? Let’s just have a look around.”

Ana, frowning, backed off. “Fine. Everybody take a wall.”

They began to search. It didn't take long now that they tried. Next to the door, he saw it—a camouflaged panel, loosened a bit already by all the banging.

“Here,” he said, popping it open. Inside was an old-timey card scanner and a number pad. Relief spread through the tenseness in his shoulders. If it had been a retinal scan, that would have been all for them.

“I know these, okay?” He pulled out the small toolkit from his pants, setting his data slab on the ground. “I know these panels. I’ve studied them. Just give me a minute.”

The toolkit had been a gift from his mother. By habit alone, he caught each screw as it unscrewed from the panel.

Ana clapped him on the shoulder. “Hell yeah, Gary.”

Pride swelled up through him. He’d show his worth with this, right? They’d get through it fine—he
had
to get through it fine. And then they’d spend time afterward someplace nice, someplace tropical like Memphis or Charleston, and of course they’d have sex and not just that but
make love
, oh man, and she’d call out his name and beg him not to leave her...

Distantly, there was a sharp bang and then a series of more hard bangs, followed by loud, angry barking.

“Are you goddamn kidding?” Ore leaned over the stairwell, looking down. “Goddamn.”

The barks became louder, echoing up toward them in the stairs.

Next to him, Ana bit her nails. “Whatever you’re doing, Gary, you gotta hurry.”

Finally, he brought out the last screw. The panel banged down to the floor. His slipped his hands into the loose spaghetti of wires revealed, searching and probing. Small electric shocks pricked through his system, but he kept going. Ana was right there, watching. She watched him. She needed him to succeed. Trails of smoke slid up through the mess of wires, originating from he didn’t know where. The dogs were getting closer—he could hear their paws slapping the stone steps now. Tug, pull, rearrange, try and make it click—

With a low tone, the door sprang open.

The three rushed inside as one, pushing each other over and scattering themselves through the opening. Gary lunged to the door and smashed the panel next to it. It was only then that he saw he had left the data slab outside. Too late to grab it now.

One dog, leading the pack, zoomed through the opening, claws skidding as it turned. Slobber trailed out behind it.

Toning once more, the door slammed down on the next dog, locking the rest of them out.

Bad luck for the dog that got in, it chose to go after Ore first. Leaping high, it aimed for her neck. They tumbled down, the sharp clanging whine of Ore’s tech hand easy to hear. Gary looked away. Ripping sounds, crunching sounds.

Ore stood up, and the dog’s head was emptied out on the floor.

“What I tell you,” she said. “Skulls, no problem.”

Gary looked back at the other dog, the one that had been trapped under the door. The poor creature was still alive. The door had come down in a way that pushed through its head and trapped its suddenly broken neck. Whimpering. Snot trails everywhere. Blood from its mouth. The snouts of the other dogs tried pushed beside it, snarling, teeth gnashing.

“Jesus,” said Gary, sliding backward. “Jesus, Jesus.”

Ore walked over to the dog, studied it for a second. First she bent over, as if to grab it, but the reaching mouths of the others gave her pause. Frowning, she raised her foot high and stomped it down hard on its skull—and then again a few more times.

“I don’t like that,” she said. “Suffering. Not at all.”

* * * * *

I
think it is worth the time to discuss the nature of the power structure in Junktown. Obviously, the Five Faces ran everything. As the only force capable of instituting anything like order in the area, this had become their right.

It was a point of pride among some of the Five Faces that their power had been obtained through legitimate means—by which of course, I mean democratic means. However, like most democratic means in a land without oversight, corruption thrived. Corruption, indeed, became its own form of economy (they would say “hustle”) in Junktown. There were specialized runners who delivered bribes from place to place and other sorts of runners, known as “catchers,” who intercepted these runners; there were loan sharks dedicated solely to funding the process of bribery; there were “sequesters” whose job it was to hold onto bribes until an election result was satisfactorily given.

It was a complex process which required quite a bit of political and financial acumen to stay on top of. Elections were once every three years. This was seen largely—through reports of several different sources all over the poverty spectrum—as, “a pain in the ass.”

A great many records indicate Jackson Crash had several discussions with figures from Tri-American and Groove about setting up the Five Faces as a sovereign corporation, each with their own Corporate Share.

We can safely assume that neither of the Bones brothers or Wallop knew about this dealing. These three were stout supporters of democracy, for all their myriad flaws, and despised the notion of corporate control—even their own. If they had known of Crash's plan, they would have murdered him in his sleep.

Petrov is another matter. He is a subtle man, as no doubt you have already learned in school or through other records such as this. One interesting tidbit that I was not able to find too much evidence to support—but which is a theory I endorse and find fascinating as can be—is that it was Petrov who had been Oscar's nefarious third-party, the party to whom the clone was dealing stolen information.

From Petrov's own writings:

Now, doesn't that sound a bit like someone who would endorse a powerful third-party opposition to a bicameral corpocracy?

In any case, he had no time in which to pursue his real goals. Many records have devoted themselves to the Junktown hypothesis—whether Petrov would have been able to create a real revolution in the arena of the slum to the corporate world which stymied all independence, in his mind. He talked often of a “terrific event” which would
have
to serve as the catalyst for change, and always was on the lookout for anything he could take advantage of in this regard.