Tails of the Apocalypse (36 page)

“I don’t deal contraband Q, Marty.”

“Hey… Woah!” Marty said. His hands went out flat and he pushed them up and down slowly. They, the hands, said, “shut up, man. Keep it down!” He fidgeted with some protein packets on the counter. “I’m just saying,
if
you know anyone.”

“I don’t.”

“Okay, then. Just thought I’d, you know, keep you up on what’s down, you know? I gotta communicate to make a living.”

“No need for Q,” I said.

Marty nodded and shrugged.

“Got any Brighton boxes?” I asked. I made eye contact with the man, gauging his reaction. Looking for any information he might be hiding behind his words.

Marty’s eyes widened. “Woah again, my friend.” A smile touched his face. “Now we’re talking. Yeah, in fact I… Why? You moving some stuff? Anything good? Anything I … might want to
know
about?”

Brighton boxes are ultra-heavy-duty transport boxes of all sizes, from egg-carton size up to shipping containers, designed with some high-tech liner material that could obscure the contents from prying eyes, scanning, x-ray, infrared, or just about any other invasive technology, including all signal transfers. Transport uses them in moving ammunition and war materiel to hide the contents from TRACE rebels. Likewise, TRACE uses contraband or commandeered Brighton boxes to hide their own war goods from TRACER drones and crowd scanners. It’s the way of war. When a war lasts long enough and enough money is involved, both sides end up with most of the same technologies at some point.

Brighton boxes are also used widely by noncombatants. Bootleggers, forgers, and dealers in any kind of illegal contraband love the boxes …
when they can get them
.

I reached in my pocket and pulled out three small, solid-gold buttons and held them for a moment while Marty’s eyes focused on them. Then I let them slide from my palm onto the counter.

“What the f—”

“Easy, Marty,” I said, “I’m dealing in real money today.”

“Holy mother of many sons!” Marty said as one of his hands scooped the gold off the counter and into the other hand. “I … I have some boxes, but not that many!” He brought one of the buttons to his mouth and bit down.

“Wow,” Marty said. “I don’t think I’ve had a customer pay in gold in … hell, I don’t even remember how long it’s been.”

“The boxes?” I said.

“What size you need?”

“Shoe-box size.”

“I have five that size,” Marty said as he shuffled through a curtain of hanging beads to retrieve the boxes. When he returned, he set five of them on the counter. One at a time, he opened the boxes to show me they were empty and that the special liners were intact. When he got to the fifth box, he slowed down, caught my eye, and smiled.

“I don’t have change for that much gold, partner,” Marty said, “and I know you said you don’t need Q. But Q is what I have.”

He opened the fifth box, and I saw it was filled with the little white pills of Quadrille, the drug used by almost 100 percent of the population to minimize the negative effect the direct-Internet BICE chips can have on brain function. Basically, Q exists to keep people passive and mind-surfing so they don’t go crazy from too much information assaulting them all the time.

“I don’t need the Q, man,” I said again.

“Take it,” Marty said and threw up his hands. “Like I said, I don’t have change and you already paid for it.”

I frowned and sucked in a deep breath.

“Listen,” Marty said, “I already told you this’s pure, off-grid stuff and untraceable. No tagents. But it’s in the box, so it can’t be tracked even if I’m lying, which I’m not. So just do me a favor and take it. Dump it off on a Q dealer or something. I know you run into a lot of people I can never get to. It’s good stuff, and when they come back to you for more because it’s that damn good, just point ’em my way. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

“I don’t like the stuff,” I said. “It’s off my radar, and it’s dangerous to deal in. They put you
under
the retraining camp if they catch you moving this stuff in quantity.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Kristy alert. No one else would have noticed it because she was an old master at this, but I saw her slide backward, pushing herself with her paws like she was stretching; then her hind end stood up so I could see her through the door.

In two steps I was at the door and had kicked it open before spinning on my heels and heading back to the counter in a hurry. Kristy calmly entered the store before the door slammed shut behind her, and in a single bound she was on my heel.

“Back door?” I said to Marty.

“What? What is it?”

“Back door! Now!”

Marty popped to attention and pushed the beads back with one hand while indicating with the other. “Through here, man.”

I snatched up the boxes, including the box with the Q, and rushed around the counter with Kristy hard on my heels. Through the back door and left down the alley. We picked up speed without running, and in ten steps we were turning right down a darkened narrow street, staying in the shadows.

“I need a hide,” I told Kristy, who immediately bolted ahead of me.

We were fast-walking along a frontage of New Detroit’s endless blocks of mostly empty condos and apartments. The streets were deliberately narrow, designed to make sure there would never be ground transport traffic on them. The city was made to be walker friendly. Designed to avoid the mistakes of the old world. What resulted was a maze of dark roads walled by uninhabited buildings, like cliffs stretching up to the sky.

Two, three, four entryways and then Kristy bolted into one of the alcoves and bounced her front paws off the door.

“Good girl,” I said as I set the boxes down and pulled a code card and thin scramble box from my pocket. I slid the card into the reader, then clipped two small alligator clips from the scramble to the metallic leads and pressed my thumb to the reader on the box. The door buzz-clicked and popped open half an inch. I snatched up the boxes before propping the door with my foot just as Kristy jumped ahead of me and cleared the first flight of stairs before waiting for me on the landing.

There was a maintenance bin near the bottom of the stairs and as I approached it, I snapped open the fifth box, the one with the Q in it, and dumped the contents into the container before kicking the bin back into the shadows.

Thousands of Unis worth of Q, but I didn’t need it, and no way was I going to get pinched moving contraband Q loaded with tagents that could lead Transport directly to me.

That’s
if
Marty was trying to screw me.

I couldn’t know if he was or not, and I wasn’t going to gamble and find out.

I took the stairs two at a time. Kristy bolted upward again, clearing each flight on her way up, watching for eyes in the night, sensing any danger. She knew what she was doing, and I let her work. In this part of the job I’m merely dumb hands, carrying contraband or working doors. She’s the brains of the operation.

She keeps me from getting caught.

On the seventh floor she waited at the fire door leading to a hallway, so I pushed through it and watched as she jetted to the left, sprinting toward the end of the hall. She stopped at an apartment, 794, and bounced both front paws off the door.

Scramble box and card out. The click as the lock retracted, and we were in the abandoned apartment. Not abandoned. Never inhabited. I pushed the door closed again behind us, and for the moment, we were safe.

She’d found just the right hide. Just enough walls to keep us from showing up on drone infrared or other scanning device.

Who knows how Kristy does it? I don’t. I just know she keeps me safe.

I try to do the same for her.

I sing an old song to her when she’s done a good job, and she loves it as much as she loves cheese sandwiches and canned meat. Dog food is impossible to find because there aren’t that many dogs up on the Shelf. Maybe there are a lot out in the wild, but in the cities they’re a luxury, I think.

Her tail wags and it’s almost like she smiles when I sing her song. At least that’s how it seems to me. I can’t tell you why or what this song might mean to her. It’s just an old song my mom used to sing to me back when I was young and before Dad died in the war and we made the move from New Pennsylvania up to the Shelf. To the Promised Land. Or promised city. New Detroit. One of the big cities built by Transport’s Central Planning Unit back when they thought the masses from Old Earth would be migrating here by the millions. Before the war came here too.

I press my back against a wall in the apartment’s back bedroom and slide down until I’m seated. Kristy sits in front of me and listens to her song.

Nobody came. To New Detroit, that is.

Almost nobody.

A city built for half a million colonists inhabited by a couple dozen thousand. Maybe fewer.

And here I am in a never-inhabited apartment in New Detroit singing Kristy’s song to her because I’m fresh out of cheese sandwiches and canned meat on this trip. She’s happy nonetheless. She’s always confident we’ll get home.

Home
.

Funny word for a dissident camp where untagged refuseniks like me wait around to get raided and rounded up for lacking implanted ID.

Even as I think these thoughts, I sing for Kristy because I can sing that song without concentrating on it. My mouth knows it by heart and my voice knows it by feel, so my mind can drift.

So I sing and consider. Multitasking.

And Kristy smiles.

Another trip and, as I figure it, one day closer to getting caught. Everyone without some form of implanted identification eventually gets disappeared, and me with no BICE implanted in the back of my head, and no TRID in my arm … it’s always been just a matter of time.

I’ve said that to myself every day for the last three years. And if it weren’t for Kristy, any one of those days could have been my last as a free man. Would have been my last, for sure. She’s saved me from being captured—jailed or killed as a rebel—at least once or twice a week since I first made the decision to have my BICE removed. That was three years ago. Young and dumb and impetuous, I was then. Still am, but I was worse then. Not that I regret getting the BICE removed. I’d do it again. But I do wish I’d studied up on it more.

BICE. The Beta Internet Chip Enhancement. The ultimate means of control. It married Transport’s central monetary control system with a mandated personal biometric identification utility. The BICE is an all-in-one, easily implanted system that gives every user access to the Internet in their heads; and, of course, it makes sure every user needs regular doses of the drug Quadrille … Q … to help them assimilate all the information they’re bombarded with without frying their brains. All in one fell swoop, the geniuses at Transport had given people what they really wanted—round-the-clock information and entertainment—while ensuring that they’d remain passive and obedient and easily trackable.

I had to laugh to myself. It’d all worked so well for the ruling Transport Authority; that is, until TRACE said
no
to all of that. Even here on New Pennsylvania.

I had the chip removed at a hack shop with no understanding at all what it meant to be on New Pennsylvania untagged. The hack shop sure didn’t tell me I’d be lucky to last two days out there with no chip. Especially up on the Shelf. They didn’t tell me the odds. Maybe because the word
odds
implies there’s a chance to win. A chance to escape. The probabilities were so miniscule, they just chose not to disclose that to the young and dumb and impetuous.

They weren’t in the business of warning away customers. They were in the business of slicing open heads and pulling out BICE chips in exchange for gold.

They talked about keeping the wound clean and how to avoid infection.

They talked about getting off Q and how to ease the withdrawals.

What they did
not
talk about is the fact that the whole system was designed to ferret out rebels and refuseniks. To arrest them and remove them from society. They didn’t tell me that I could no longer use Unis … Unilets … the system of money used on New Pennsylvania. They didn’t tell me that Transport’s TRACER drones could scan for BICE or TRID data on people as they fly by. They didn’t tell me that by removing my BICE, I’d basically declared war on Transport. No … those things they forgot to tell me. Most of their customers disappeared in a day or two, so no one else told me either.

Maybe I’m making it sound totally hopeless.

There are refuseniks. And the salvagers who come in from the flats and deadlands. The brave ones who make their way up from off the Shelf. Some of them are smart and they survive. The refusenik camps are always around, even if the men and women who live there are usually caught; the population rotated. Replaced by someone else young and dumb and impetuous like me.

And I’ve been out here three years now. Making runs and trips without a BICE or TRID into New Detroit on a weekly basis. And I haven’t been caught. Yet.

But that’s only because of Kristy.

Kristy finally sensed that song time was over and she curled up at my feet. She didn’t even ask for a cheese sandwich by sniffing at my pockets. She knew the song was her only payment for now.

I stacked the Brighton boxes against the wall next to me and then closed my eyes, pressing my head against the wall. When I did that … pushing my head firmly like that … the lack of the BICE there reminded me that I’m not safe. I’m never safe.

Don’t get too comfortable, Kevin.
That’s what I’d say to myself whenever I had time on a trip to close my eyes.
They are coming for you.

My eyes are closed now, and I reach over and touch the boxes again with my right hand. I don’t know why the strangers need the Brighton boxes, but they’re paying well and paying in gold, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know why they want them. Some voice around a fire back at the refusenik camp speculated that the newly arrived strangers wanted the boxes in order to acquire and move okcillium. That was
always
the rumor, though. I wondered if it was true this time. The strangers had TRACE rebels written all over them, and I wondered what they would do with the okcillium if it were true. Five Brighton boxes of okcillium was a
ton
of the stuff. Enough to blow up the planet a few times over, if that’s what they wanted it for.