Up The Tower (4 page)

“Hurry it up,” said Garrett, their leader. “We don’t have all day.”

“Yeah,” said Samson. “I know.”

Samson hoped for a little more courtesy from Garrett. He had, after all, been the one who installed that tech eyepiece on Garrett’s head. With that eyepiece, Garrett could monitor heartbeats of people around him, see through walls, and perhaps most valuable, he could mask his identity from eyebot scans. It was professional grade, that work; it was masterpiece level, just like anything Samson installed. He installed bits for all the Five Faces and for a great deal of the boys in the corps underneath them. That was part of his employment.

Samson’s tech, through Crash, got outsourced to the other Five Faces to help their business. To Harry Bones, Entertainment; to Punchee Wallop, Labor; to Nicolai Petrov, Enforcement. Not to Drugs, though. Samson didn’t make anything for Max Bones, and Max didn’t need Samson’s help anyway. Drugs sold themselves.

The copbot’s head was spherical. From a distance, it didn’t look like it was made of many pieces, but it was. You just had to tilt it until the light caught it correctly so that you could see them all.

“Come here,” he said to Garrett. “I need your help.”

Garrett hesitated, but not very long. Couldn’t show weakness to his whole Crowboy corporation, after all. He was the CEO. The Crowboys were a sub-corp, but a sub-corp to the Tower direct. Not one of those damn regular gangs running around like the Hooters or the Argentines—the Crowboys had a real bookkeeper and everything, were listed in the Five Faces directory of sub-corps.

The Five Faces weren’t a corporation, of course. They didn’t need to be. They were sort of like the Tri-American of Junktown, except that Tri-American was also the Tri-American of Junktown.

“Hold this here.” Samson handed Garrett a flashlight.

With the light, Samson could see easy now—line, line, another line, and each line a segment of the copbot’s skull.

It took some effort and elbow-grease to crack open the cranial compartment. He was cautious with it at first, so hesitant to break anything. It could kill him, and then who would protect Crash?

You won’t die, though? Right, Crash?

But as it always happened when working with tech, he found his rhythm and his pressure, intuitively knowing just how much to push and prod and pull. Most things were built, especially when built by mega-corp engineers, with a sort of proportion. The way the finger joints moved would not be all that different from how the head tilted, or the elbow ratcheted, and so forth. And as he explored the copbot, he found this to be true of its cranial parts as well. It was much as the same as the other two he had explored.

His fingers worked through the wires and liquid meshes layered in the head cavity. Wires, nanos, wires, nanos. Each with a color, each with a purpose. It was above Samson’s knowledge, still, but not beyond it.

Intuition guided him as it had the previous two times he made this happen, and without Samson knowing which of the little clicks and small tugs made it happen, the robot  began to hum slowly. The bot’s eyes and mouth opened, and the warm, off-green light of a scan washed over Samson.

Garrett, thrilled at the early success, let out a shout and clapped Samson on the back. From the force of that, though, Samson’s hand plunged deeper into the copbot’s cranium. Some hot goo spilled on his hand, wires clanged together. A brief shower of sparks erupted, burning Samson’s wrist.

“Attaboy, Smel—er—Samson!” Garrett coughed. “Nice one. Really.”

The other Crowboys clapped appreciatively. Samson pulled his hand out as quickly and as gently as he could. When he had done this before, the copbot’s eyes would go green, scanning for friendly interactions, and then wait for instructions. If no one said anything within a few minutes, it would power down to idle. But this one’s eyes had turned yellow, and now blue, now red. It stood up on the assembly line and fell backward like a drunk, its arms willowing about as it bumped hard into the assembly line, bending the steel.

Garrett let the flashlight follow the copbot around. “The hell is going on, Smellson?”

Samson sighed. Already back to that.

“I don’t know. When you hit me, my hand, it just—”

“Don’t blame this on me. What did you do?”

“I don’t know.”

The copbot’s eyes had turned bright red—it opened up its coconut-shell mouth and let out a long, piercing wail. It was calling for help.

“Oh no,” said Samson. “I can fix this.”

He rushed to the flailing copbot, grabbing on its back. He stuck his hand into its cranium again, pulling and tugging, slipping his fingers through every kind of wire. He pulled and pushed, hoping for change. Finally, the copbot seemed to power down—but then it collapsed on top of Samson.

“Help!”

No one came to help Samson. Outside, tires screeched. Shortly after that, the distinct metal clump of copbots could be heard. And not just copbots—voices. The voices of hacks. Cops in copbot armor. Triumphant music blared out from the speakers carried in their tech.

“You are goddamn kidding.” Garrett slammed his crowbar down. “We got to get out of here.”

The Crowboys all started to run. It was too late.

The hacks and the copbots busted through the walls, big metal hockey players layered in guns. Firing holograms filled the warehouse, readying all trajectories. Samson, trapped under the copbot, prayed it didn’t suddenly turn on and give away his position. Given enough time, he thought he could squirm free—but only if he had enough time.

The hacks and copbots fired bullets and force pops out at the Crowboys. Garrett splattered across the wall in a wet spray, body liquefied. The rest of his compatriots were gunned down in less than five seconds—torn in half by the firepower of the hacks.

And that was that. Stomping and whirring, the hacks and copbots swept back into the truck they arrived in, leaving the cargo behind. Samson heard them confer for a moment before leaving—they were worried about the rooftops, about being exposed. They had firepower but not numbers, and even a hack's force gun ran out of charges eventually. Samson knew this—had reverse-engineered one or two of the guns in his time working for Jackson Crash and the Five Faces. That was how Crash had one in his tech suit, now, the same suit that Samson had developed from the two copbots he had activated and then stripped down and reassembled. So long as he could, Samson would keep Crash safe.

You won’t die, though? Right, Crash?

The hacks pressed some kind of button and all the crates started beeping. Cold realization swept over Samson. Without time to load up the crates, the hacks were just going to blow them up.

Their truck squealed away over the sidewalk barricade, leaving Samson in the warehouse, alone with the beeps and the corpses of the Crowboys. He struggled and twisted under the copbot, but he couldn’t get free.

Faster and faster, the beeps approaching their end. This was it. Gone in a fire.

The only thing left that he could reach was the inside of the copbot’s open cranium. Maybe he could make it get off him. One wire angled around. Nano gel shoved into one edge. Circuits scratched, twisted. Maybe he could...

The copbot on top of Samson powered on. Green light scanned the whole warehouse, its head swiveling.

“Hey, Citizen-in-Peril!” Its voice warm, mechanical. “Stay still!”

And then it fell on top of Samson once more.

* * * * *

O
n her way to the old Baker Hotel, Ore stopped at a small shack half-buried in the mud. The patch over her empty eye socket, plain black leather, itched a little. Close to the Dam, the shack had nearly sunk into the ground completely from the wetness overflowing. Her tech hand was primed, whirring for action.

Maybe a dozen yards away, at the broken pavement of the street corner, three boys hit each other with sticks, yelping and growling.

Whack, whack.

In one motion, she busted through the roof of the shack. The tech on her hand was crude, pistons and gears, but it worked. She slipped inside, pushing through the mud. It came all the way up to her belly-button. A cold relief from the day, though the shack smelled old inside: old and hot. There was death in the mud, lingering from all the poor dead sods unburied in Junktown.

Her hands trailed from rafter to rafter, searching.

Somewhere. It was somewhere.

Finally, her hand caught on something small and metallic. The size of her big toe, just about. She held it up, letting the light from her holowrist show the small, metallic planetoid shape.

It was the acorn. It was his acorn, the one he gave her. It wasn’t an acorn really, of course, but the metal shape had the look of one, narrowing down at the bottom.

You couldn't bury anything you wanted to hide in Junktown. With how often the Dam overflowed or sprung leaks, the wet ground was awful as a hiding place. If it didn't push the buried objects up, then the muddy ground would shift and swirl and move, moving the object somewhere else entirely.

No, anything you wanted to keep hidden, you had to keep held out of the ground.

People on the street, if they wanted to be found as wise or smart or just knowing more than the other person, said that it wasn’t a proper dam at all—no electricity produced or anything like that—just a wall to block the water. The river used to be much lower, but now it was high, and likely to be higher and higher still as the years went on and the world continued to heat up. Put up in a month, that was the brag about the Dam. With as much water that seeped through, and as soggy as the ground around it had become, Ore could believe it. She spent the first four years of her life sleeping in one place and waking in another—the muck floor of her shack shifted in the night.

The muck of this shack. This is where her family had lived before moving to The Tower. Ore had never adjusted to Tower living. So many rules. They said do it their way, and be a success—but none of the Five Faces had ever followed the rules of anyone but themselves.

Ore hadn't checked on this acorn in a long time. Used to be, she checked it every few weeks. Then every few months. Then once a year, on the date her family died. Lately, she had even let that sag.

She had just started running the Haulers when her family was shot down. She had been out in the market, haggling over the price of a new gas lamp. A runner came to tell her that her family was dead. She abandoned the market, leaving all her money on the table. Fifteen minutes later, she had made it back home with her boys—Konnor and all the rest. Her family. They were fine. Cursing herself for a fool, she promised she would make the runner pay the next time she saw him. A con. She thought she had been conned.

Two days later, she did see him, and then she went to work on him. He had a busted lip and a bloody eye before he was able to let her know her family
had
died. Her family; her mother, her father, her brother. All three.

All she had left of them was that acorn. She kept in a safe spot in her home, at first, but then when she kept moving homes real sudden because of gang wars and switching corporate sponsorships and so on, she decided hiding it would be safer.

She had only met Punchee Wallop twice. Once, a couple of years ago, when he broke her arm and took her eye. And then earlier this morning, when he broke her gang apart. She did not know which was worse.

Ore lifted herself up out of the mud, her bottom half dripping wet. Down the street, those boys were still fighting each other with sticks.

Whack, whack, whack.

Punchee Wallop had been keeping the life of Ore's brother from her.

So she was going to find her lost brother Samson. And God willing, she would take from Wallop all the life that he had taken from her.

* * * * *

T
he hospital was no place for a person, and Gary’s mother—even though she had hardly been a person in Gary’s life—was no exception.

The inside of the hospital was largely automated, though most of the robots and processes were more than a decade old. Ten years was an eternity in the time line of medicine.

It was a fairly safe building despite its location firmly in the middle of Junktown. It was virtually the only building in Junktown supported by mega-corp money at all (or at least, traceable mega-corp money). As such, DNA scanners on the outside prevented anyone who was not an employee, a patient, or a patient’s family from entering. The outdated processes of the scanning system had caused quite a few deaths in the past—sometimes it took hours for the system to update itself and recognize new patients (who had to be entered as such in Tri-American’s global network, based in Brazil), all the while poor saps with head wounds or hemorrhaging or strokes slowly died on the concrete outside the impenetrable steel doors.

Hospitals—even the nice ones—were treated like airports, with almost no one getting in except the ones who were making the trip. Exceptions were made for the families of the critically ill, which is why Gary made it inside.

Of course, he wasn’t allowed in the room with his mother. Not even the doctor was allowed in there. When she had arrived, they had sealed her in, her room like some hermetic bag. Now the doctor and Gary stood outside the room, looking through a window. Gary’s mother could see him, her hand moving weakly in greeting. He waved back, trying to smile. Groove had the cure for her condition—some kind of blood disease, Gary hadn’t bothered to learn the name of it—and Tri-American didn’t, but what were you gonna do? The world was crap sometimes.

The doctor had a screen in his hand, moving lasers and balls of light around on its surface. It looked like a video game. There was a running point tally in one corner of the screen. But for every motion he made, the robots in the room responded and acted in kind—casting radiation over Gary’s mother, pushing hot circles of light on various parts of her, poking and prodding her with long, ungainly utensils that looked both flimsy and dangerous.

There had only been a few occasions that Gary could remember having his mother in his life. In a way, you could divide up his life into sections—there was everything up until his mother got promoted, when he was five. Then everything from that point until he went to college. To celebrate that, he had been required to spend two whole uncomfortable weeks with his mother, celebrating on the tropical beaches of Memphis. The whole time, he had been unsure of how to act around her. He didn’t even enjoy the nightly companions she bought for him that much. At least she knew well enough to buy him women, though.