Dead Man's Resolution (2 page)

“You’re crowding me.”

“Sorry.”

Tibor paced around the room as if he were an expectant father.

After a few minutes, William said, “I got the chip out. You wouldn’t believe the architecture. I think it’s a zetta-byte. A rocket ship compared to our scooters.”

“I told you it would be worth it. Now we need to figure out what’s on it,” Tibor said.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Why else would you take it apart?”

“I wanted to see if I could do it. Good thing I actually pay attention in class.”

Tibor slid the extra ARNet he’d brought across the table. “Now we need to hook it up. Think you can do that, too?”

“Why are you so determined to see what’s on this chip?” William asked.

“Dunno. Bored, I guess. School is meaningless. They only teach us how to access information in the Sea. So what’s the point? I don’t need to waste my time sitting in school if there are better things to learn. Maybe this chip will have his underwear schedule on it, or it won’t. I just want to see what’s on it.”

William stared hard at his friend, and then shook his head. “Let me see if I can get it to work.”

Tibor sat nearby watching William meticulously install the zetta-byte chip. After an hour, he announced the job was complete and connected Tibor to an auxiliary cable.

“Let’s give this bad boy a whirl,” Tibor said as he turned it on. Names of mods scrolled past as they ran through the boot cycle: Mr. Plow, Portal, BlackTome, Carbonite, Somania, Bang, 345Nodice, A5Files…

The list, in order of memory usage, totaled about twenty mods, of which Tibor recognized only a handful. Mr. Plow, which had immediately gone active, ate a few hundred petabytes which was more than Tibor’s whole system.

“Anything?” William asked.

“Got some heavies in here. Real blade work. Not sure what they do.”

“Well you shouldn’t mess with them. Now that you’ve seen it, you ought to turn it off. We’ve been here too long.”

“Don’t worry. I just want to look at a few. Portal looks interesting.”

Before his friend could talk him out of it, he triggered the mod. A globe appeared at his fingertips. He spun it, putting his finger out to land in China near Shanghai.

Suddenly, the view screen on his goggles went black and a brilliant swirling tunnel formed, sucking him down. The transition graphics made him lurch against the table next to him. He wished he’d been sitting.

The world drew in around him, and though he could still feel the table under his hand, he also stood on a wide street. Tibor cringed as a car sped through his projection. He nearly lost his balance back in the lab.

He tried to take a step forward, but realized he’d moved his legs back in Michigan while his projection had stayed in the same place. Another car burst through him as he searched his HUI. A small cross with arrows on each end blinked in the bottom left corner of his vision. Tibor concentrated on the top one and his projection walked forward to the sidewalk.

The streets teemed with a crowd looking like a cross between a costume party and a comic book. Back in northern Michigan, no one strayed far from the accepted norm. Shanghai embraced the possibilities of the Digital Sea with a fervor. A woman with peacock frills extending out of her rear strutted past him. Capes, cloaks, halos, wings, fur, light and any imagined accessory—and some were things he’d never imagined—adorned the people on the street. They didn’t just wear their skins, they were moving art ensembles. A lady covered in leopard fur walked through him as she searched her handbag.

Tibor moved to the edge of the sidewalk. The translucent body beneath him moved in a life-like manner.

The center of his movement pad blinked rapidly, so he activated it. He thought nothing had happened until a few people turned their heads toward him. His body had lost its ethereal quality and now seemed substantial in appearance.

He wasn’t completely sure, so he lunged at a group of Indian women in their colorful saris. They swerved around him, but kept their heads focused forward as they tittered like birds on private channels.

As he paused at an intersection, a giant woman appeared, flooding his vision as an ad-tag.

The Chinese woman wore a traditional red silk dress and a flower in her hair. “Greetings traveler. The magnificent company Ecoverse would like to offer you, our most valued customer, this special deal as you wait for the 1337 bus. Are you worried about the effect your pet is having on the environment? Can you not afford Fluffy’s food anymore? Is your favorite pet dead? ForeverPet can solve all of these problems and more. A ForeverPet will never get on the furniture or chew your favorite shoes, unless you want it too. Take this marker if you would like to learn more about ForeverPet or any other Ecoverse products. Remember the Ecoverse motto,
Conservation through Digitization
.”

Tibor left Shanghai when he felt a hand on his shoulder back in Michigan. He released the mod and the vision faded away to the school lab. The sudden change gave him vertigo.

“What did you see? You just stood there with a blank look on your face, swaying against the table.”

“I got projected to Shanghai.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Yeah, but no one noticed.”

William looked back to the door. “Can we leave yet?”

“Just one more mod, then we’ll leave. This Mr. Plow is so big it's got to be something totally blade.”

William’s face sunk into his hands and a sigh trailed from his lips like a dying balloon.

Tibor switched Mr. Plow to standby mode and the projection of a man appeared in the middle of the lab table.

The man had a thick round head like a bowling ball on top of powerful shoulders. He wore a white shirt with no sleeves, displaying muscular arms with dozens of cut scars along the forearms.

“Bloody hell. Who you nub? As sure as pajamas, you’d better tell me? The Unseen don’t play games,” the man said.

William fell off his stool, scrambling to get away. Tibor reactivated Mr. Plow and the man disappeared.

“Did you see those scars on his arms?” William got to his feet with a look of horror on his face.

William rubbed his forearms.

“Let’s get out of here.”

They cleaned the table and slipped out of the room after Tibor checked for a clear exit. He kept the new computer connected in case it revealed anything else.

They made it to their electrobikes and as they prepared to leave, William grabbed Tibor’s bike handle.

“Get rid of that thing. I didn’t like the look of that man…the Cutter.”

Tibor was about to give him a big smile and tell him not to worry, but William’s heavy stare made him hesitate.

“I’m serious, Ti. I know you. Don’t be a vag and mess with that thing anymore. Go throw it in a lake or something.”

Tibor hesitated, then sighed. “Okay. I’ll throw it in a lake.”

William tilted his head as if he could detect whether or not Tibor was serious. Eventually William nodded and let go of his friend.

“Ping me tomorrow. If my mom doesn’t have me busy in her garden, we can design a new skin to sabotage the Plastics,” William said.

“Sounds good.”

Tibor smiled and waved as William left. For a moment he’d almost believed himself that he would throw it into a lake, but the visit to Shanghai and the man’s curious speech had sparked something in him. If he threw it away, he might as well resign himself to living in back-ass Michigan for the rest of his life.

#

On Saturday, Tibor pinged his friend, but the status returned busy. He figured his mom had him working in the garden and she could spot him mindtexting from a mile away. So he spent his weekend lying on the bed, scrolling through the mods in the dead man’s ARNet. A sniffer revealed tantalizing clues to their purpose, but he dared not activate them. The only mod he couldn’t penetrate was Carbonite, which required a pass-symbol to enter. Accessing it would require Tibor to generate a unique symbol in his mind.

Tibor pinged his friend a few more times, but the busy message remained. It was strange not to pass a single message all weekend. They’d grown up together and spent their childhoods tunneling messages through their parents’ firewalls so they could talk late into the night when they were supposed to be asleep.

Tibor didn’t have class with William until the third period, but he could see his bubble across the school.

He sent him a mindtext,

The response was slow coming, but eventually the digitized voice returned.

Tibor was so excited to hear his friend’s response that he almost told him about his investigation into the dead man’s computer.

What the hell is he talking about?

Maybe the experience with the dead man had made William more adventurous.

A map marker appeared in Tibor’s vision showing a meeting location in Old Detroit. As he transferred the location into his memory, William’s bubble floated out of school. Then he realized why William had been quiet all weekend. Probably planning a new hack to escape.

Tibor’s own escape would take longer and the extra time would give William an advantage in the game. Rushed, he used an old hack, which he knew was foolish in case they’d fixed the loophole, but he hated that William had out-maneuvered him.

Attendance-bots tracked their location in school verifying attendance and punctuality. To keep the alarms from going off every time a student loitered in a doorway before class, the bots didn’t notify the teacher of a missing student for thirty seconds. The worm he dropped into the system would cycle his location through all the doorways in the school. And as long as his “presence” cycled between the classes, he would officially be in school and not subject to calls to his father.

Having escaped before the next period, Tibor left for Old Detroit. When he neared their meeting location, he switched on Project Gandaymede.

The three moons in the sky comforted him. He hadn’t wanted to stare at the broken buildings any longer than he had to. The program turned them to adobe huts with clay roof tiles in shades of ochre. Simulacrums of townsfolk in layered wrap-arounds lingered in their doorways beating dust from rugs or throwing dirty water from second story windows.

He left his electrobike behind a crumbled wall and headed in on foot. His bastard sword appeared in his hand. If it were real, he’d stagger under its weight, but thankfully he didn’t have to actually carry it.

He neared the collection of old warehouses that would serve as their combat zone. They’d fought here before. Project Gandaymede drew in a deserted blacksmith shop and other artisan crafts in the spaces of the warehouse. Only the faint smells of long discarded oils intruded into the illusion.

Creeping along the wall, he kept checking for signs of movement. As he turned the corner, a wash of vertigo hit him. He steadied himself against the wall.

What was that?

Was William messing with him? An odd sense of dread sunk into his shoulders. The urge to turn on the bubble locator and find William nearly overwhelmed his sense of fairness to the game, but he didn’t.

Tibor entered the blacksmith’s shop. A roaring fire stoked by invisible bellows crackled. He sidestepped the forge in the middle of the room, avoiding the fake flames.

The overcast pallor had faded the shadows to an imperceptible haze. The crackling fire and slow wheezing of the bellows hid his slow shuffle to the far doorway. The orange glow of flames reflected in his bastard sword, highlighting the runes etched down the middle of the blade. Using the dead man’s computer with the zetta-chip, his sword glimmered artificially real. The other details of the blacksmith shop glazed away as he studied the sword.

The soft crunch of a footfall in the gritty soil somewhere outside the building stopped him. Two doorways and a rusted stairway were the only exits from the building. Sneaking around was unlike William. That was Tibor’s style. William preferred to stand in the middle of the street, keeping a good line of sight on all sides.

They’d occasionally encountered vagrants in the maze of warehouses, but they were usually emaciated and posed little threat. An animal like an old guard dog would be more worrisome. William had once claimed to have seen a panther creeping along a roof-line, but Tibor told him it was his imagination.

A vagrant or an animal would have made more noise so he decided it was either William or someone else. Tibor touched the dead man’s ARNet in his pocket.

“Nerds rule the world…” He called out, hoping to hear his friend answer. "but not until after high school."

Tibor counted the heartbeats that thundered in his ears. As the third one faded, he burst toward the rusted stairway. His caution saved him when, from the far doorway, a man cut around the corner, his form blocking all the light from the outside, firing a weapon.

A projectile burst on the wall next to him and his elbow and upper arm went completely numb. He raced up the stairs, the iron structure rattling and swaying under his feet.

When the man hit the stairs, he heard a support snap somewhere below him, but the heavy echo of his steps continued. Puffs of iron dust broke free showering filings onto the stairs. Tibor didn’t want to get trapped on the roof so he entered a door halfway up.

The floor had once been an office with old cubicle walls tipped over dust covered desks like scattered dominos. He ran down the main pathway as far as he dared before ducking into a side office.

Tibor tried to control his breathing, but his chest labored loudly. He probed the numbness around his upper arm and found the area coated with an oily liquid. His fingertips numbed immediately from their tentative exploration, but it didn’t spread beyond the first knuckle. The numbness had an ethereal quality, as if his arm didn’t even exist. Thankfully, he hadn’t been hit in the legs.