Hexomancy (20 page)

“She was a good mom, until she was gone. And it’s a super-pleasant memory, so thanks for bringing it up. I’ll bring you all some water.”

“Hold on.” Eriko reached across the table and grabbed Ree’s wrist. Ree tensed, nearly ready to wrench the woman’s arm over and pull her into Shade. But he hadn’t done anything to deserve getting someone tossed on him, and the woman was drunk. Treat her like a drunk.

“I’ll just bring that water. . . .” she said, sliding out of Eriko’s grip. The older woman tightened her grip, clamping around Ree’s wrist.

“Wait a minute, spring chicken. You oughta know that Eastwood here has devoted his whole life to saving people. He and I are the reason regular people can even use the Internet anymore. We kept the digital frontier safe, kept the Neo-Luddites from using Trojans to send the country back to the 1850s.

“The EFF wasn’t just about keeping the Internet free from corporatist control. The shit we saw, the blood we shed, all for you kids to scream at each other on Tumblr and post cat videos. . . .” Eriko let Ree’s wrist go and slumped back, shrugging deep into her coat.

Shade jumped on the silence. “The Internet has always been a weird, wonderful place, it’s true. I wasn’t the same kind of active as these folks, but I’ve got some stories of my own. Did I ever tell you who Max Headroom is really based off of?”

“You haven’t,” Ree said, happy to spare a smile for Shade, who switched from slightly-sleazy-but-not-creepy salesman to lovable uncle very easily. “But I’ve got to make rounds again, or take a real break. And if I’m taking a real break, it’s going to be to snog that handsome Steampunk over there.” Ree pointed a gun-finger at Drake. He held court at the bar, speaking with expansive gestures.

“I’ll be back to hear the stories later. I do want to hear them, really. I’ve been using the Internet since BBS days, but Eastwood’s never been that forthcoming with his Wild Wild Web stories.”

That seemed to calm the suddenly-sullen Eriko, and Ree managed to escape back to the bar to pour a pitcher of ice water. Some H
2
O to dim the edge on Eriko’s drunk, then she could make rounds later for the war stories.

“Mind if I sit with Drake for a fifteen?” she asked Grognard, who had his own crowd gathered to hear about the Assault on Grognard’s, or the Tale of Grognard’s Heroes, whatever he was calling it now.

He gave her a vague nod of approval, which was more than enough to help her feel justified in de-aproning and sneaking over to plant a big one on Drake, inserting herself into the discussion.

“Hello, my dear! I was just regaling some new friends with the tale of the time that we conducted a dogfight across the skies of Pearson with the fiendish Aberrant Muse.”

Ree leaned against the bar and grabbed Drake’s stein, taking a drag on his Angry Orchard cider. Grognard didn’t brew cider, but he kept a good stock on hand (mostly for Drake). This varietal was a bit sweet for her taste, but it suited him.

Drake continued his story, and after a couple of minutes, Ree pulled him away into the office for some discreet snogging before heading back to work. She was a big PDA fan, but he was . . . not. So if she wanted to get her mack on when they were out in the world, they had to head off to the bathroom or office or whatever it was.

It had made for some hilarious memories, like being the first of two couples making time in the restroom, the second couple being
far
louder. It was just another part of their normally-abnormal relationship.

“Have you had the chance to speak with Eastwood’s companion? They appear to be quite old companions. I’d be fascinated—”

Ree placed a friendly hand on Drake’s shoulder. “I don’t really want to talk about Eriko and Eastwood right now, if that’s okay.”

“Perfectly fine. Shall I return to singing the praises of your versatility and creativity in all things, especially your kinesthetic intelligence?”

“I gotta admit, you’re better at grandiloquent dirty talk than all of the grad students I’ve known. But they were MFAs, so they were mostly worrying about impressing one another with how much they loved Jonathan Franzen.”

“I doubt that is truly all they spoke about.” Drake held her close, heads resting together as they sat on Grognard’s desk.

“Yeah, they also complained about whiny comp students. Understandably so.”

“Let us not speak of them, then. What would you like to do tomorrow? I imagine that things will start exploding any day now, so I was thinking we could have a dedicated day for pantsless reading.”

“I see my efforts to pull you into my habits of calculated laziness are having an effect.”

“There is great wisdom in measured, deliberate periods of repose.”

“Deal. We’ll be like firefighters in the firehouse. Though we’d need to install a pole in your apartment. Think the super will allow it?”

“I might need to fix the water heaters a few times before she would permit such a substantial change, but I will make the proper inquiries.”

Ree grinned. “Liar.”

“Touché. Should you get back to your rounds?” he asked.

Ree craned her head around to check the clock. “Yeah. Walk me home tonight?”

“As always. I think I will go to join Eastwood, Shade, and their fellow technophile, perhaps trade some tall tales, as you call them.”

Ree pulled Drake into one more kiss for good measure. Then she put her server face back on, heading out to the crowd.

Chapter Twenty

Tall Tales

The hours whirred by with drinks, food, and chatter about games and films and more. By 1 AM, most of the crowd had cleared out, leaving Eastwood, Drake, and Eriko in the corner, Uncle Joe sorting and re-sorting his cards, and a trio of regulars around a table playing
Doomtown
.

Eriko waved Ree over to their corner booth. “Take a seat. Hanging out with us, you’re serving half of the patrons here. I’m sure Grognard won’t mind.”

And +2 points for using social pressure via my job to make me hang. Well played, cowgirl.

Years of working retail had prepared her for interacting pleasantly with people she’d rather bite her nails off for her dinner than deal with, and this would at least give her a chance to find out more about Eriko and Eastwood’s Console Cowboy past.

Ree poured herself some Adamantine Ale and took a seat next to Drake, settling in, squared up to talk to Eriko, ignoring Eastwood as much as she could manage.

Which didn’t turn out to be much, as Eriko and Eastwood spent the next hour trading stories of their adventuring days together, fighting domain rustlers, tech bubble robber barons, demon bandits, and more.

Eriko had pulled back from her drunkest state, her words coming out smooth. “So there we are, backed up against the cliff, squared off against a half-dozen hired guns from Boo.com, slick city boys with top-of-the-line astral rides but not a lick of sense among them.”

Then Eastwood chimed in, spirits raised by his companion. “And then their leader, this prim British-Indian woman, says, ‘You’ve got nowhere to go. This part of the web is ours. You Console Cowboys have had your time. You can’t stand in the way of progress.’ ”

They laughed. Drake jumped in, his tie metaphorically loosened after several hours of ciders. “When a person’s dialogue sounds stilted to me, it is at that time that one knows that one has truly entered the land of the cartoonish.”

Eriko clapped, lapping it all up. “Too true. She was at most twenty-three, some hotshot marketing exec straight out of an MBA program and plugged straight into the secret IP address wars that mirrored the dot-com bubble, and what does she do? She goes full-on black hat, reading lines straight out of spaghetti Westerns with aetheric winds blowing digital tumbleweeds in front of her.”

“We got used to it,” Eastwood said. “But that whole era was more than a little ridiculous, looking back on it now.”

Eriko shrugged. “That’s the nineties for you. Y2K just around the bend, seemed like the world was either going to implode or crank on toward infinite profits. It’s a damned good thing I had some money in Apple, or the bust would have cleaned me out.”

“Nice! Enough that you’re rolling in it, or what?” Ree asked, tromping right over the ‘Oh, we don’t talk about money’ norm that dominated in the U.S., more because she was genuinely curious than out of any sense of being anarchic or jealous.

“I wish. Had to liquidate all but three shares when the rest of my portfolio evaporated. But I kept a hand in, and even though the landscape’s a complete one eighty from what it was like in Eastwood’s and my time, the net is still full of plenty of adventure. It’s just way more William Gibson than Louis L’Amour these days. The spirits adapted right quick, though. Our conception of the world changes, they change right along with it.”

“Their world is a shadow of ours; they can’t help but change,” Eastwood said. “Especially after we colonized the space so intensely. There’s too much human emotion caught up in the net. It’s nothing but communication, people reaching out to one another.”

“Sometimes to throttle one another,” Ree added.

“Well, yes,” Eastwood said.

“He gets all nostalgic and utopian talking about the net,” Eriko said, lending him a wistful look.

There was a whole lot of
there
there, after all
, Ree thought.

“But what happened with the Boo.com chick and her thugs?” Ree asked.

“Yes, go on,” Drake said.

Eriko and Eastwood traded looks, jockeying to see who should continue the story.

“You do it,” Eastwood said. “You do her voice better than I do.”

“So the suit’s all, ‘You can’t stand in the way of progress,’ while Eastwood and I are signaling each other with shifts in weight. We took the range of nervous movements and flexing, all of that stuff you see when people are getting ready to draw down in shootouts, turned it into shorthand. So when she finished up her monologue, I’d started a DDoS attack on Boo’s server, which ripped half of her goons right out of Spirit, their tethers too weak to hold on to. The others were good enough to reroute on the fly, but all of a sudden, six on one becomes three on one. . . .” Eriko said, shrugging with practiced ease.

Eastwood brought the story home. “And we sent them running. The suit was all bark, no bite. Her gun didn’t even clear the holster before Eriko put one between her eyes, de-rezzed her avatar, sending her screaming back into her cushy leather chair back in start-up country.”

“I’m still a little rough on the details. This is in Spirit, but you’re using tech to hack one another’s connections and crap?”

Eriko nodded. “Technomancy. Cowboy here did all of his through his geeky bits, consoles and game books and all; I came at it from the techie side. Drake was saying he gets to Spirit with a . . . What did you call it?”

“Breakthrough Actuator. It works based on Braga’s theory of space folding, with a sympathetic alignment system that equates its surroundings with that of an equivalent space in Spirit.”

Eriko waved him off. “Yeah, that. There’re a million ways to get to Spirit. When folks started buying up space on the World Wide Web, a few of us got together to make sure there was enough space for the everyone else, for regular folks to make a living, set up their own space, get their packets across the wilderness. A lot of money started pouring in all at once, a digital gold rush. We were almost always outgunned, but our crew? Some of the best techies you’ve ever seen behind a keyboard.”

“We were at the keyboard and in Spirit at the same time, our spirits moving around while our bodies stay grounded in the physical plane. It meant that if we got smoked in Spirit, we popped back home with a migraine but got to live to fight another day,” Eastwood said.

“Sweet. Why don’t you do that now?” Ree asked.

“My tech’s outdated. Plus, I can’t do Geekomancy as a projection. Props and the like don’t work; I just have to use spiritual armaments.”

“So you shot people with spiritual pistols?”

“You envision your reality there and make it so. When the dominant meme was the frontier, it was all cowboys and six-shooters. Now it’s chrome and glass and monoblades.”

“I’ve got to check this place out sometime,” Ree said.

“Anytime, kid. There’s not much left of the frontier. A friend of ours maintains a saloon called The Gulch. It used to be the Last Homely House of the Wild Wild Web. Now it’s a curiosity, a throwback, surrounded by high-rises, Google and Apple and Facebook, so on and so forth.”

“So all of these countries are set up in Spirit?” Ree asked.

“Some more than others. But everyone’s got a presence, if only to be able to protect it. Otherwise folks like us,” Eastwood said, gesturing to Eriko and himself, “could pop in and waltz out with all of their data. Spirit hacking’s big business these days. Identity theft, big data harvesting, all that jazz.”

“Why is the world so made of crazy?” Ree asked.

“There are more possibilities and permutations of imagination and wonder than a single mind, even a group, could imagine. The multiverse is as expansive as the factorial sum of all human imagination,” Drake said.

Ree cocked her head to the side, struck with surprise.

“Oh, homeboy’s getting philosophical. You better take him home,” Eriko said, all toothy grin. It was very hard to dislike this woman. She treated everyone like an old friend and was confident in her badassery without stepping on anyone’s back to get there. She could see what Eastwood had been into. And she was in damned good shape—yoga or martial arts or whatever she did to stay fit. It was certainly more than Ree’s urban fantasista cross-training regimen. Where Ree kept in decent shape, Eriko was toned as all hell.

Ree checked the clock. They weren’t due to close up for another half hour. “Not quite yet. I’ve got to help Grognard close up shop. Will you folks take care of him in the meantime?”

“If by ‘take care of’ you mean ‘extract gossip from,’ then you got it, kid.”

Ree didn’t know if Eastwood had picked up the
kid
appellation from Eriko, or vice versa, but it still rankled. Where it always sounded dismissive coming from Eastwood, from Eriko, it came off more sisterly. Some serious Charisma score on that one.

She grabbed a round of empty glasses and headed back to the bar. Dishes, cleanup, and a drawer countdown later and it was 2:30. Uncle Joe had been ushered off on his merry way, and the few, the proud, the tipsy joined Ree and Grognard as they scaled back up into the city.

Grognard shook Eriko’s hand, then grabbed Eastwood to give him a bear hug. “Glad to have you back. Don’t make a habit of doing that, okay?”

Eastwood grunted assent, slightly blue in the face with Grognard’s grip.

Ree and Grognard bid farewell with their three-stage handshake, ending in a fist bump, then Grognard wandered off to wherever it was he lived. She’d asked three times and had never gotten an answer. After that, she’d stopped asking.

Eriko and Eastwood yelled and rambled like college kids as they made their way home, the weather crisp but not cutting. The freak winter had disappeared as soon as Lachesis did. Weather control was apparently not outside the control of Hexomancy, either.

Looking at the older pair, Ree told herself in Yoda voice,
When forty-five years old I am, rock that much I will not.

By the time they got to the Dorkcave, Eastwood was draped over Eriko’s shoulders, the woman keeping him upright with impressive drunk-management skills.

“We need to get into the door, Tony,” Eriko said in a soft voice, the quartet waiting at the door.

“Tony,” Ree whispered to Drake, noting her use of his given name.

Eastwood got the door open, and Eriko turned, the door open into the cavernous warehouse/den/man cave.

“A pleasure meeting both of you. Thanks for humoring an old cowgirl.”

“The pleasure was ours,” Drake responded.

“Good night,” Ree said. “I don’t know what he liked when you were together, but he’s partial to Cap’n Crunch and bacon last I checked.”

Eriko nodded. “It used to be Froot Loops, but it’s always been bacon.”

“You staying in town long?” Ree asked.

“Just a few days, I think. He asked for some backup this week.”

“Good call. Give me a ring if any shit goes down,” Ree said.

Eriko nodded. She hauled Eastwood up, and said, “Come on, hero. Let’s get you to bed.”

As the heavy door swung closed, Ree turned to Drake. “So, your place or mine?”

“Given that your abode is better appointed for breakfast and received our last allotment of groceries, it would seem the wise choice, if acceptable.”

“Yep,” Ree said, and so they went. Ree’s inquiries about rounding second base had all been waved off, but waking up gracelessly and unself-consciously intertwined was good enough, for now.

A leisurely waking
at ten, breakfast until noon, and then by two, Ree and Drake were out and about, on “patrol” that was 80 percent walking date, 20 percent actual vigilance. They ran into trouble one time in ten but never stopped gearing up. Ree went for a media power-up only about half of the time, rocking some Buffy mojo that afternoon, having just finished watching “Faith, Hope, and Trick.”

Which is why when the lights went out a block away on Stephenson, she was ready.

“That block just lost power,” Ree said, turning on like a light switch.

Drake looked around. “It stops on this side of the street. Perhaps just an outage.”

“Let’s go take a look, just in case,” Ree said, power-walking down the street toward the Dorkcave.

Past the divide of Stephenson, everything was out. Drake held his not-a-cane rifle over his shoulder, ready to sling down and fire from the hip in a single motion she’d seen him use a dozen times.

A woman walked down onto the street, holding her phone up for signal. Lights were off across the whole block.

Cars were still in the street, the drivers getting out of their cars. Behind them, drivers in functioning cars honked at the stopped traffic.

“What’s going on?”

“My car’s dead.”

“Is anyone else’s phone working?”

The street, empty of the buzz of machinery or automobiles, grew loud again with voices, slivers of worry working their way in at the edges.

“It appears that all machinery has been affected,” Drake said.

Ree checked her phone, which was still working, charge holding steady at 82%. She picked up her pace. “There’s not a whole lot that would take out lights, power, and cars. And it’s not ongoing. It was a one-time thing.”

“An electromagnetic pulse, or similar effect.”

“If I was going to come after Eastwood, an EMP would be a pretty fantastic opening play,” Ree said.

“And you’ve considered this before?”

“I take my lessons from Batman. I even made plans on how I’d fight you if you went evil.”

“Really?” Drake asked.

“Don’t be surprised. I have plans of how I’d fight Anya if she went evil. By-product of a lifetime of devotion to the Dark Knight and watching mind-controlled-hero plots on TV.”

They reached the block with Eastwood’s Dorkcave, which was as dead as the ones around it. People had abandoned their cars and stood and sat in clusters, most staring at their phones.

With the power out, Ree and Drake had to force the door but didn’t have to deal with any of the countermeasures. Ree held her phone out on flashlight mode, other hand resting on the hilt of her lightsaber.

“Eastwood? You there?”

No answer. Drake flipped on his shoulder-mounted light, more than doubling the available light.