signal three
Old Man Gum and I slushed through briny water. We followed the hump of a rusted maglev rail between us that twisted out like a huge dead snake. Posters for old tech and merch hung in yellowed plastic frames. Faded graffiti and glitchy screens lined the walls.
Midjourney recreated Gum’s and my flavorful walk for your guys.
I kicked the rail with my boot, half expecting it to move. “Never actually been down here. Did you ever take the train?”
Gum snorted. “I’m not that old, damn. These are pre-coalition, your abuelitos used them, maybe? Not positive they lived here then, though.”
“Heard it was the diamond of the post-war unification bill.”
“People sure wanted it to be. Fast as hell, too. Could get from Chicago to New Orleans in a couple hours.”
“Before they flooded.”
“Yeah.”
I tried to imagine what it must’ve been like to sit on a bullet train and watch the country zip by, but felt like I couldn’t get it right somehow. I’d never even been on a plane before.
“People mostly just looked at their phones,” Gum said a little while later, in shallower water. “I remember that pretty clearly.”
“So nothing’s changed,” I said.
Gum shrugged. “Now’s better, I think. In a lot of ways.”
We stood in silence for a moments at the bottom of a long stairwell. I debated asking him what was better about now, but seconds ticked by and it just sort of felt too long after that.
Wooden boards were nailed over the entranceways, meant to keep people out, but that obviously hadn’t worked over the years and now sunlight streamed through the large cracks and highlighted the dust floating around us.
Gum took off his NV frames and tucked them away. He slapped a Velcro patch on his arm for the UZPB. “When do you meet Lunchbox?”
“I dunno.” I pulled a pair of sunglasses and my respirator from my pack. “Wants me to buzz him when I’m back.”
Gum slipped on his own respirator. An electronic click sounded before he spoke, amplifying his voice a little, “Keep me looped in.”
“That’s a tender.”
“It’s ‘ten-four’. How do you not know that, yet?”
“Yeah, well, I’m hungry. Taking the old noodle a little while to warm up.” We walked up the steps and into the daylight, the heat already blistering. I held out a fist for him and he knocked it. “I’ll be at Selene’s later.”
Gum’s respirator clicked. “You gotta ride?”
“Van is a couple blocks down.”
“Talk later,” he said, then gestured to the building tops, “Be careful around here. Not a lot of privacy.”
A bus slowed across the street. Gum jogged over to it and vanished behind the black out windows.
I watched the bus leave and stood alone in that mostly forgotten part of UZ, some weird corner in an old business district that led to a subway station. At some point it had to have been busy; and even back then the old world had already died. That place, it seemed, had died twice. I was surprised there was even bus to pick up Gum.
Down the road a bell rung. An old woman stood in a small food stand. She waved at me and called out in Mandarin, “Breakfast!”
My stomach growled. “Oh, jianbing!”
I hurried across the street and pointed at my order from the pictures on the counter. The old lady nodded, talking to Mandarin, and poured batter from a plastic pitcher onto the large hot plate. She scrambled an egg and vegetables in a separate burner.
I’m always impressed by how smoothly some people worked: their movements and their ticks, the mise en place dance of familiarity.
The old woman smashed a cracker, folded the jianbing, slipped it on a paper plate and handed it over. I transferred some dollar-bucks.
I ate in the shadow of some faceless megabuilding and enjoyed the unusually quiet morning in UZ. Even out there in the borderlands, people were dedicated to making the concrete and metal bearable: potted plants grew on almost every balcony, small trees or hanging ferns. Some residents seemed to have big plastic boxes and grew their own vegetables. I was always mildly surprised no one had stolen them, but I guess that’s just part of UZ; people are pretty generous in spite of the rest of the continent. Or world for that matter.
A couple kids kicked a ball around a courtyard. A security camera rotated above them. It stopped, the lens focused in my direction. I waited for it to continue, but it didn’t. I looked around, the sensation of paranoia creeping into my chest, until I noticed another security camera, frozen, lens facing me.
Not paranoia then. Reality.
Not a lot of privacy, like Gum said.
I grabbed my backpack and continued on, dumped my plate in an overfilled trashcan. The cameras turned with me, cascading in a digital waterfall until I rounded a corner where the cameras seemed not to care as much. Or were at least a little more discreet.
Down the street on the left was the parking garage. I hoofed up and around the stairwell until the floor where my van, my beauty, looked as good as I had left her. I set my palm on the reader panel and the sliding door popped open.
I made a quick glance around the back: bed and tech all seemed good, still a nice little home away from home when I need to let some heat cool. I kicked off my boots, peeled off my socks, and checked my phone.
Lunchbox had already texted asking about the job. Abundant iron work did not give him patience apparently. I texted him the job was done, I had the thing they wanted, he could come get it whenever.
He responded immediately: Coming.
Shit.
I stepped out of my pants (because home is not a place for pants), and made sure everything with the lunchbox for Lunchbox was in order. Gum’s distaste for the big metal idiot was not lost on me, like at all, but I still felt like there were some things the old man didn’t get, the least of which being me, in that place, in that time, doing what I do, trying to the live the life I was living.
And that moment, sitting on my van bed in my underwear, was the first time I think I ever really thought about it: What life am I really living anyway?
signal two
Old Man Gum recorded this image in the year 2100 with Midjourney.
Thinking about it now (not always my strong suit), the beginning was farther back than I realized:
I just remember staring at the Johnny, all slabbed-up, his skin peeled back and bones exposed, the pinkish rainbow of organs. Beneath the blood smears was the dyed-yellow-fleshy lettering of a barcode and serial number.
“Gross.” I flicked through the layer options on my headset and scanned the code. It made a sort of frustrated tone: dung, dung.
“Really gross.” I pushed something aside (intestines maybe?) and shoved my hand deeper. I was not doctor, for sure. There were more yellow letters, another barcode. “This really isn’t my thing.” I scanned the organ.
Dung, dung.
“Dammit, like, what’s it even look like?”
Old Man Gum stood a few feet away, hands resting on the grip of his long gun, eyes on a pair of security screens in the far corner. “Change the settings on the visor.”
“I did that. Piece of shit is like forty years old.” (Hey now) “Keeps saying everything is a pancreas, but Lunchbox said kidney.”
I squished farther into the Johnny. “Poor dude.”
“Nothing poor about it. Chode here knew what he was getting into.”
“Still. Shit way to get done, like this.”
Gum dragged a finger backward across one of the screens, scrubbed the feed in reverse. “Don’t take the job next time.”
“I owed Freddy one.” I flinched when I said it, felt Gum’s exasperation from across the room, knew I’d let too much info slip.
“For what?”
My backpack was on the floor beside me, I tapped it with my boot. “They hooked me up with a new stemlink. Straight off the truck from OneTech.”
“You gotta ditch those fucks, Lo. Lunchbox is an dumbass. A dumbass working for an idiot. They’re like the Russian dolls of fucking morons.”
I glanced at him though the headset. “The hell is a Russian doll?”
“Fuck off.”
“That what you call your ex?”
“I call her a lot of things,” he said, played the image on the security camera forward a bit. Slowed. Paused. The dark blob of a cat froze on screen in the motion light outside. He flicked back to live view.
“Job wasn’t supposed to be so hands in. I’m not a hands in kind of person. I miss my deck.” I glanced over to Gum, “See anything?”
He shook his head. “No factor.”
I squished father in, as if people were actually deeper on the inside than the outside. More letters emerged beneath the blood, part of another barcode. Its lines curved into a fleshy knot. I zoomed in with the visor.
“Shit. This barcode is glitched. The printer screwed up.”
I scanned it anyway: dung, dung.
“Try the other one.”
“What?”
“Did Lunchbox say which one they needed?”
I picked at the fleshy knot with her fingertip. “No. Either one could be golden.”
Gum leaned closer to the screen, mumbled quietly to himself then said,“We have a visitor.”
“Can you tell who?”
He moved his long-gun aside and smoothly pulled a small pistol from its holster. “Looks like one of the Punch Bunch.”
I struggled not to roll my eyes. “Fiending probably. Out for ghosts.”
“Either way, just cut this fucker loose. Get the thing they need. Then you can get back to your more meaningful work.”
“Yeah, sure.” I thumbed the knot on the printed organ, probably spit-out of the back of a truck some where. “Never touched a Johnny in school, but here I am elbows deep in this fucking chode.” I put my hands back between the organs and stretched the flesh, scanned the code.
Dung, dung.
“Dammit.”
“Just take both,” the Old Man whispered fiercely.
Glass shattered in the room next-door. A square-outline on my visor appeared, labeled with UNKNOWN on the little name line. A circle-outline on indicated GUM had already moved into the same room.
I paused, watched the circle slowly approach the square followed by two bright flashes of light. The square tumbled down. The circle moved back toward me and Gum reappeared.
He holstered his pistol, spun his long-gun back around. “We need to go.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I scanned the twisted organ again.
Dung, dung.
“Seriously, Lo. They never fiend alone.”
Dung, dung.
“I’m not going to just dump this Johnny on a slab because some hack fucked his print job.”
Gum flicked the safety off his long-gun. “We’re going to be slabbed-up if you don’t.”
“Dammit. Stupid Punch Bunch. Fine.” I ripped off my gloves and dug around my backpack for a laser scalpel. It was down at the bottom under all the other stuff I’d thought I’d need, but didn’t. After a couple clicks the scalpel ignited.
I dragged the laser over the dotted lines. Flesh pulled apart, sort of like an organic zipper, and I stuck my finger inside.
Nothing.
“It’s empty.”
“Shit.”
I hustled around the table. More glass broke. Gum grunted in the irritable way old men seem to on the reg, and disappeared into the other room again. More sounds of a scuffle; a couple more flashes.
I squished with an intensity I’d never squished before and found the other kidney. This time, I skipped the barcode and went straight to the scalpel. The flesh split apart with a fine sizzle line and I bagged the kidney, put it on dry ice in an old lunchbox I’d brought special for the job.
I gave Gum an all-good thumbs up.
He nodded. “Let’s move.”
“I need to staple the guy up.”
“We need to move. Punch Bunch are like roaches. Look.” He pointed to the security monitor.
About twenty Punch Bunch twitched and glitched their way across the screen, a shadowy mass of bug-eyed men marching in black hats, looking to fight anything for the sake of...I wasn’t really sure, but it felt like probably drugs or some sort of abstract or unidentifiable fear.
“Typical.” I rummaged through some shelves and found the staple gun and an adrenaline injectable.
Metal pinged from the other room and Gum switched the suppressor from his pistol to his rifle, scoped up and clack clack clack.
Outside, one of the Punch Bunch screamed for the rest to follow. “Georgie B got sprayed! Fiend! Fiend!”
Gum moved toward their planned exit. “Ditch it, Lo.”
Clack clack clack.
I dumped the adrenaline and stapler in front of the Johnny. Set the visor to Triage: A Step-by-step Guide and slipped it on the Johnny’s head.
“Best of luck, dude.” I grabbed the lunchbox and my backpack and caught up to Gum at the end of a long hallway. He knelt down, flicked out a blade.
“This is not the backdoor,” I said.
He ignored me, tuned into the task at hand, stuck the knife into a gap in the floor and levered up a panel. He wedged his fingers beneath it and pried it up. “No shit.” Beneath the panel, a ladder stretched down into darkness.
“This is pretty elaborate for a couple kidney thieves.”
“Get in the hole, Lo.”
I did, clanking down the ladder while holding the lunchbox in one hand, my pack strapped tight to her back. Above, Gum closed the hatch and sealed us in darkness.
I splashed down in shallow water. Gum twisted the dial on a detonator and then followed suit.
“For the record,” he said, “You’re the kidney thief.”
“What’s that make you, then?”
He put put on a pair of NV frames and clicked them ON. His eyes glowed green. “I’m just an old man, out for a walk. Stretching my legs.”
“With a tiny arsenal.”
“Can’t be too careful these days. Your generation’s ruined everything.”
I frowned. “Get to walking, old man.”
signal one
the old world is dead long live the new world
It happened once before, back when my parents were kids. Those words flashed across a few screens here and there. Nothing that people even really noticed. No one knew it then but the words meant something.
Just like they do now, because they flashed again a few days ago, on even fewer screens this time because even fewer people care now.
But I saw them. And I care. And these are my messages to you to do something about it before it’s too late. Again?
Honestly, it shouldn’t even be me. It should be someone worthwhile, with power and responsibility; but those things seem not to come in the same deck anymore. They’re definitely not in my deck. I just dive in skins a hunt for secrets, memories, forgotten passwords. I nickel and dime my way to a mostly honest living.
But I’ve got a couple friends I managed to con into helping me. We’ll fill you in on what’s already happened so maybe you’ve got a chance to reset the clock before we all get slabbed.
Oh, and the thing about seeing those words showing up again? I put them there.