So once I’d cleared out the fog the deep dreamer had left behind, I linked in, determined not to fall back into an obsessive loop of corp-town attack vids. I would just dip in, see what I’d missed, then cut the link and start living my life again.
The flaw in that plan: Like I said, my zone was flooded. The list of suspects in the attack had been leaked, complete with my name, and in came the hate mail. The standard trash from Savona’s brainwashed ex-Faithers calling me an abomination in the eyes of God, plus a few death threats from randoms too stupid to understand the “can’t” in “can’t die.” And plenty of generic mass texts that looked like they’d been sprayed out to every mech on the network, warning that we were all the same, we were all dangerous, and soon they hoped to see us all in the same landfill, shut down, rusted, and busted beside heaps of burned-out cars and broken-down ViMs.
I wasn’t about to go weeding through the venomous junk, but a few messages were red-flagged as req texts, meaning that they wouldn’t archive until they’d been read. Only the government and a few of the most powerful corp consortiums had that kind of authority:
From Corps United in Regulating Borders, my passport had been revoked. Explicit permission from CURB was required if I wanted to leave the country.
From the Associated Union of Credit Corps, my credit—what little of it I had after leaving home—was frozen.
From the Conglomeration of Transportation Corps, mechs were forbidden to drive without at least one person in the car. There was an asterisk beside “person” and a note at the bottom that clarified, “qualifications for categorization as a ‘person’ to be at the discretion of the CTC.”
And from the Department of Justice—which, despite outsourcing the majority of its portfolio to the private sector and neutering itself in the process, refused to follow its fellow governmental departments into the great blue yonder and instead stubbornly clung to life, no matter how toothless or obscure—notification of congressional hearings to be conducted on a new definition of the word “person,” for general legal and regulatory purposes. Buried in the bureaucratic blizzard of words, the heart of the proposed definition: “Resolved: A ‘person’ will be defined as an organic entity, its brain and body conforming to the biological criteria of the species Homo sapiens, its defining qualities including but not limited to birth, aging, and death.”
A lot could happen while you were dreaming. It was tempting to just go back to sleep.
Instead, I went to find Riley. Not because I thought he would know what to do, since there obviously wasn’t anything to do. Not because I needed him to explain the world to me; I had the network and the vids and, even without watching them, I had a pretty good idea of the whole trajectory, mech attacks orgs, orgs attack mechs, what could be more logical than that? I didn’t need him for anything.
But I went looking for him anyway.
The smarthouse was smart enough to tell me that Riley was in the vidroom. It just wasn’t smart enough to inform me that he wasn’t alone.
“Bastard!” Jude shouted as I opened the door. He was in full VR gear, whacking an invisible hockey stick against an invisible puck. Not that the herky-jerky motion bore any resemblance to an actual hockey play, but I’d spent enough tedious hours watching Walker’s virtual reality stick work to recognize the body language.
“Suck it,” Riley shot back, grinning and jerking to his right. From Jude’s grunt, I figured he must have blocked the shot.
You could play VR sports the couch potato way, lying around and steering the action with your fingers and eye twitches—but most guys I knew preferred the full action, full contact method, cramming a little reality into their virtual.
“Give up yet?” Riley taunted, muscling past Jude with a sharp elbow to the shoulder.
Jude whipped around, raising the invisible stick above his head. “Do I look like that kind of loser?”
“There’s more than one kind of loser?”
Jude sent a shot careening past Riley, who lurched for it, then swore under his breath when he missed. “You’re the expert,” Jude drawled, “you tell me.”
Riley ducked, swiping an invisible puck away from his head. “Watch the face!”
“Was that your face?” Jude asked, all innocence. “I get confused—your face, your ass, so tough to tell them apart…”
“Staring at my ass now?” Riley sputtered through his laughter, slapping a shot to the left. He raised his hands in triumph. “He shoots, he scores! He’s beaten the all-time record! He’s—”
“Even more obnoxious when he wins than when he loses,” Jude said, grinning. “Even though he gets zero practice.”
I realized I’d never seen Jude laugh for the fun of it rather than at someone else’s expense; I’d never seen Riley laugh at all. But here they were, no different from Walker and his brainburner football buddies, assing around like a couple of idiots with nothing more to worry about than whether they could finish the bottle of chillers before their girlfriends showed up for date night.
Riley kept telling me that I didn’t know Jude, not the way he did. So was this what he meant? The real Jude, the astonishingly normal, orglike Jude, who dropped the all-knowing guru act as soon as he was alone? Or was it just a mask, designed to fool Riley into thinking that his faith and loyalty were well-founded, even though they were miles and bodies away from whatever ties bound them together.
Or maybe he was both at once; maybe he was neither.
“See something you like?” Jude suddenly asked, taking the VR mask off his face, staring at me like he’d known I was there the whole time. I suddenly felt like I’d been spying on more than just a game. Riley jerked around toward the doorway and pulled off his own mask, wearing that bleary-eyed expression of someone yanked into reality before he was ready.
“I’m just, uh, looking for Ani,” I stammered, backing away.
“She’s out,” Riley said. “Another rally, I think.”
Jude glared at him.
“What rally?” I asked.
Riley opened his mouth, then, with a wary glance at Jude, closed it again.
Obedient like a dog, I thought in disgust. Not attractive.
It wasn’t the kind of thought I wanted to be having about Riley, or any of the mechs. Attractive, not attractive—not my problem, either way. Not that I was oblivious to his broad shoulders or sinewy muscles. And not that he wasn’t exactly my type, not just the tall, dark, and monosyllabic thing, but the way he could say all he needed to with a touch or a look or—even though I didn’t technically have proof of this, I had no doubt—his biceps tightening around you, curling you into his chest, into that body-shaped hollow created by his open embrace—
No. That was exactly the kind of thinking I didn’t need. One disastrous night with Walker had been enough to prove that when it came to mechs, anatomically correct was necessary but not sufficient. I could do anything I wanted—it was the wanting that was the problem. There was a reason we had to jump out of planes and dive off cliffs to get a high, to break through the wall separating us from the ability to experience something real. I’d wanted Walker all right, just as much as before the download—but when I had him, his body tangled up in mine, it had been cold and awkward and empty. It had been—why not just say it?—mechanical.
Walker wasn’t the only one. That was the renegade voice in my mind, the one that insisted on reminding me of everything I’d prefer to forget, like that afternoon by the waterfall with Jude. But that didn’t count. That hadn’t been real. Just a moment of desperation. It didn’t prove anything other than the fact that I was right about staying away.