The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (13 page)

In the end, he had to help me into the t-shirt, which was snug and electric blue. It gradually tightened itself around me, like a full-body hug. He showed me how to get it to loosen up for later when I wanted to take it off. I slumped onto my bed.

“What have you done to yourself?” he said.

“You’re the second person to ask me that today.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“You’ve been following me, huh?”

He pointed to the sky. “Midges,” he said. “My familiars. I have millions of them, all around these parts. They keep me filled in on all the doings on my territory.”

“Your territory.”

“I’m the shaman of the southland, son. You should be honored. Most people don’t even know I exist. I’ve come to you twice.”

“You said you could reverse this,” I said, gesturing with my skeletal, liver-spotted arm.

“I said that. It’s not hard, really. Just need to send a kill signal to Chandrasekhar’s bots and your cells’ natural robustness will kick in, lengthening your mitochondria. Once it reaches critical length, bam, you’ll just grow back into the boy we programmed you to be.”

“I want to stop at eighteen,” I said. “That was a good age.”

He nodded sagely. “Might take the last couple thousand years off your life, you know.”

“How many will that leave me with, though?”

“Oh,
lots
,” he said. “I mean, not into the stelliferrous period when the stars grow cold, but put it this way: plate tectonics will have rendered the Earth’s continents unrecognizable.”

“I thought you said that it took a long time to judge the success of immortality?”

“I’ve got really good models. Lots of compute power these days, if you know where to look.”

“All right then, do it. Make me young.”

“Ah, there’s a little matter of payment, see? Always pay for what you get. There’s no other way to run a world.” His smile curled in and in, the dimples multiplying.

“I have half an old tire I could let you have,” I said, shrugging and slumping back into my bed. “I guess you could have the mecha, once I’d recovered.”

He nodded. “Mighty generous of you. But I had something else in mind: a favor.”

I closed my eyes, knowing that this was going to be bad.

“It’s those kids. You heard what the one you caught said to you. He’s not himself anymore. The Midwich virus turns kids into harvesters for a vast upload-space where models of the consciousness of billions of humans exist in a hive-mind.”

“They do what now?”

“They steal your mind and put it in a big computer.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re programmed to. Whoever designed the Midwich virus wants them to. The second wumpus war was the same thing. Those human-attacking wumpuses were scanning and copying the humans they ate. I think that the Midwich hive-mind has assimilated the wumpus-mind, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe they’re rivals.”

“But
why?
”

He shrugged. “You know the answer. We both do. They do it because someone thought it would be cool. The line between thought and deed is pretty fine these days.”

“And why me?”

“Jimmy,” he said, sounding disappointed. “You know the answer. You’re not stupid. You’re our superhuman. Start acting like one. Why you?”

“Because the youth gangs have no effect on me?”

“Yes. And?”

“Because they’re derived from me, somehow?”

“Yes. And?”

“Because my father is in there, somehow?”

“Yes. That’s a weird one, isn’t it? We all assumed he was dead. Maybe he was in cold storage, awaiting scanning. Maybe they scanned him right away.”

“What do you want of me?”

“That part’s easy,” he said.

- - -

I’d spent so much time ducking youth gangs, but now I was actively seeking them out. Perversely, I couldn’t find them. I stuck to the main roads, ranging up and down the keys, letting the mecha drive itself while I kept my eye out for them.

It was one of those perfect days on the keys, when the sky was a cloudless blue to forever, the air scented with delicious, wet jungle smells. I took a break and did a little fishing, using the mecha’s radar to spot and plot the fish, then diving forward and snapping up a big grouper and cupping it in the mecha’s hands while it thrashed. I put it in a refrigerated compartment on one thigh for later. I loved to pack them in mud, build a fire and put them among the coals. It had been a long time since I’d had fish. But I’d have something to celebrate tonight.

I jogged up and down the keys some more. I came to the place where I’d run into the youth gang the day before and checked to see if the mecha had still buffered the route it took chasing down my little friend. It had. I set the inertial tracker to rerun it, letting the shaman’s brace do the work.

I came to it, an unimpressive hill covered in scrub, the entrance to the cave hidden by branches. I dug at the hill with the mecha’s huge hands. It was slow going.

An hour later, I had barely made a dent in the hill, and I still hadn’t found any of the kids. The tunnel twisted and dipped around the tree roots.

Fuck it. Once upon a time, my mecha had an enormous supply of short-range missiles, not nearly so smart as the ones on my original beast, back in Detroit, but still able to get the job done. When I walked out of the militia, I had the good sense to fill up my frame, the dozen-by-dozen grid that held a gross of explosives.

Over the years, they’d been depleted. The last couple I’d fired hadn’t detonated on contact, but had gone up a few minutes later—luckily I’d had the good sense to keep back of the unexploded munitions.

I backed off from the hill and sighted down the tunnel. The flavors of missile I had left were really antipersonnel, low on heat, high on concussion. I figured that if I could get the missile deep enough into the hillside, the concussion wave would crack it open like an egg.

I fired. And missed. The missile tried valiantly to steer itself into the hole that I’d told it to aim for, but it just wasn’t up to it. It screamed into the top of the hill and blew, most of the concussion going up and out into the sky, making an incredible roar that the mecha’s cowling did little to dampen. I waited for my head to stop ringing and fired another missile, correcting a little.

This one went true, right down into the tunnel, down and down. I counted one hippo, two hippo, and whoom, there was a deep
crump
from down below the mecha and the hill disintegrated into the sky.

It sploded like an anthill in a hurricane, turning into gobs of mud that arced in all directions in a rapidly expanding sphere. Caught in it were flinders of tree-root that stuck to my cowl and slid down slowly. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of the crater I’d made, then two huge trees—something derived from cypresses—topped into it, followed by a great inrush of water from the surrounding water table.

I waded in as the water rushed and swirled and scooped my arms through the soup, looking for evidence of the youth gang that had burrowed there, but whatever evidence there had been was now gone. I’d had visions of the hill opening like a stone, splitting dryly and revealing a neat cross-section of the tunnels inside. I hadn’t really thought about the water table.

The mud was sucking dangerously at the mecha’s legs. If I got it stuck here and had to abandon it, I’d never be able to walk out of the swamp on my own. I levered myself out of the sinkhole and stepped out into the world. I was covered in mud. The skin of the mecha would shed the dirt eventually, but for now, my shiny metal carapace was covered in disgusting, reeking glop.

I was clearly not going about this right.

I moved back out onto the road and headed for the Sugarloaf Key Bridge. The wumpuses had left the bridges intact—otherwise how would they make their way up and down the keys?—and they were the most conspicuous remaining example of human life in the good old days. It was the bridges that the youth gangs staked out most avidly.

It was there I’d find them.

- - -

Being covered in mud had its advantages. I crouched under the bridge amid the rocks and made myself invisible. I set the mecha to estivate and recharge its batteries, leaving only its various ears and eyes open.

Before shutting down, I primed my whole remaining missile battery, getting them aimed for fast launch, and recorded a macro for getting myself out of there when the time came, before the bridge could come down around my ears. It would be quite a bounce, but I was prepared to give up a rib or two if that’s what it took.

Now it was just a matter of staying alert. I kept thinking about my mouth-watering fish and the feast I’d cook that night, drifting off into mouth-watering reverie. Then I’d snap back to my surroundings, looking back at my screens.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Then: something.

Gliding out of the wilderness at both ends of the bridge like they were on casters. Silent. Eerie. I waited for them to converge on the center of the bridge before I hit it and quit it.

Ker-
blam!
I barely had time to take satisfaction in the incredible, synchronized splosion of the struts at both ends of the bridge giving way, tossing lumps of reinforced concrete high into the sky. I was in the belly of the mecha as it sprang away, leaping nearly as high, landing with coiled legs, pushing off, somersaulting in mid-air, coming down blam-blam, one foot, two foot, on the remaining section of bridge, snatching out with both hands, seizing a wriggling child in each hand, knocking their heads together and leaping away.

I let the mecha pilot itself for a while as I kept an eye out for pursuit. They’d all scattered when I’d chased them before, but that didn’t mean they’d do the same when I
caught
a couple of them.

There they were, giving chase, leaping over obstacles, skittering through the dirt. And ahead—more of them, a dozen of them, gliding out of the bush. A couple hours ago, I hadn’t been able to find any of them, now they were boiling out of the underbrush.

I wasn’t sure what they could do to my mecha, but I didn’t want to find out.

The mecha’s arms pumped for balance, flailing the kids’ bodies back and forth like ragdolls. I tried to get a look at them. I’d snatched up my little friend and one of his buddies, darker skinned, with longer hair. Both had blood on their faces. Either the missile concussion had done that, or I had, when I’d banged their heads together. Like I said, there’s not a lot of fine motor control in those mecha suits.

I was breathing hard and it hurt like hell. Felt like another rib had cracked. Aging was coming on pretty quick.

Here’s the thing: the mecha has some pretty heavy guns, regular, old-fashioned projectile weapons. I hadn’t fired them much in the line of duty, because wumpuses are missile jobs unless you want to chip away at them all day on full auto. So my clips were full.

I could have sprayed those kids as they came out of the jungle, short, auto-targeted bursts. I’m pretty sure that however immortal the little bastards were, they weren’t immortal enough to survive ten or twenty explosive slugs in the chest and head.

Why didn’t I shoot the kids? Maybe it’s because I knew they were my brothers. Maybe I just couldn’t shoot kids, even if they weren’t kids. Maybe I could plan a neat little explosion and kidnapping, but not gun down my enemies face to face.

The shaman said he needed the kids brought to him at old Finds Bight in the Saddlebunch Keys. That was pretty rough terrain, jungle and swamp the whole way. But the mecha knew how to get there.

One of the kids was thrashing now, trying to get free. The mecha’s gyros groaned and creaked as it tried to compensate for the thrashing and the weird terrain.

I dropped the kid. I only needed one.

I watched him fall in the rear-view as the mecha leapt a hillock and went over double, using its free hand as a stabilizing leg, running like a three-legged dog.

That was when one of the kids came down on my mecha’s back, clinging to it. I could see the kid through the cowl, its face completely expressionless as its eyes bored into me.

The youth gang’s SQUID needs more than one node to be fully effective—they can’t own your mind on their own. But that doesn’t mean that one kid is helpless. Far from it.

It felt like my head was slowly filling with blood, crushing my brain and making my eyes bug out. Red mist crept around the edges of my vision and blood roared in my ears like the ocean. I couldn’t move anything.

I almost smiled. Idiot child. If I couldn’t move, I couldn’t divert the mecha, and it knew where it was going.

- - -

“You’re the only one that can run this mission,” the shaman had said, sitting in my treehouse. “You’re the only one they can’t just think to death. You might have spoiled your immortality, but that’s still intact. You and them, you’re all on the same footing. Bring one to me. I’m going to get a login to their little hobby-world. I’m going to blow it wide open. We’ll be able to go there—without having our minds raped by those little pin-dicks.”

I didn’t exactly black out. My vision contracted to a hazy disc ringed by red-black pulses timed to my heartbeat, and I could barely hear, but I hadn’t blacked out. I was still conscious.

So I saw more kids drop onto the mecha’s canopy as we galloped toward Saddlebunch. Some slid off when we leapt and jumped, but most stayed on. They had ropes. They lashed themselves down. They did something under the mecha too. Lassoing the legs, it seemed, from the little I could see. Working without any facial expression. Again. Again.

Leaping free, holding onto the ropes. I felt the mecha jerk as the ropes went taut, skidding and tumbling. Then it was up again, running again, on its feet again. Ropes! Inside, I smiled. Idiot kids.

Over the surf-roar of blood in my ears, I heard something else, new sounds. Clattering. The ropes. Something tied to the ends of the ropes.

The mecha jerked again, caught up short.

Anchors, that’s what it was. The mecha twisted from side to side, incidentally dislodging the child who stared at me through the carapace. The red haze receded, my muscles came back to me, and I leapt to my controls.

I swung the mecha back upright to give me more maneuverability and put my fingers on the triggers of all four guns. I rotated around to target the anchors behind me. A couple rounds severed the tight ropes. The kid who’d ridden my carapace was just getting to his feet beside the mecha. Another rattle of the guns took care of him, and he burst open.