I press the buttons and the biochemical rockets streak out ahead of me. Blam! I dive through the hole in the curtain of death-subs. Before me, below me, are the endothelial cell walls and the rigs, driving their way through, molecule by molecule. Once they’re into the cerebrospinal fluid, the death-subs can scatter through the hypothalamus’s many nuclei. Total control of the endocrine and autonomic nervous systems. We’ll never be able to flush them out of the deep, dark neural jungle.
I line up the first pair of drill rigs in my sights.
Missiles away.
Wham! They explode in slo-mo, sending plates and girders and gantry work fountaining upward.
And the next two.
Bam!
Proximity detectors shriek. I roll the drone, and death-sub torpedoes streak past me. I was a hair’s breadth from death. I drop micromines behind me and listen to the shrieks as the death-subs come apart.
To my right, Twyla is on a rig-busting run. They look mighty pretty, toppling like trees or factory chimneys as she takes them out.
"Miko! There’s one on your tail!" Twyla shouts. I flick to the rear cameras. The death-sub comes barreling through the twinkling wreckage. I drop mines. Flick flick flick. I can’t see what the death-sub does, but now my mines are gone. Every single one.
It’s gaining. It’s lean and mean, a steampunk shark, and fast fast fast. I load up torpedoes in the rear tubes. Fire one. Fire two. Death-shark rolls this way, that way. Easy. Easiest thing in the world. This is not good. This is exquisitely bad. This I have not seen before. This death-shark, it knows us. It’s new, it’s smart, it’s evolved. Its evil shark head unfolds a battery of grippers and claws and shredders and impalers. It’s like a death-crab-beetle killing-thing. Close-in defenses. I stab the shotgun button. Eat molecular death, evil shark-thing. And it shrugs me off. My blasts don’t even take the shine off its skin. And my haptics jolt me with a sudden deceleration. It’s got me. A giant hook is stabbed into my rear control surface and little by little it is hauling me in. I gun the flagella. Molecular motors scream.
And then I dive forward as the restraint is released, and when I can call up the rear camera I see the death-shark unraveling like ink dropped into water. Then Elis blasts through the squid-black ink and disperses it with her flagella.
"Got you, Miko!"
After that, it’s killing time. We burn, we blast, we wham and bam! The death-subs scatter, knowing their evil plan is thwarted, but Garret and Elis stalk the outer fringes of the sella turcica, covering the exits, while far below, the pituitary gland shines like a vast endocrinal moon. We sow death, we salt the fields. Wave upon wave of chemicals sterilize the survivors. Those evil death-subs will never reproduce and try to possess the President of the United States.
We won.
We won.
I hear Garret’s voice shouting "Victory! We have victory!" like that English actor at the Battle of Helm’s Deep.
We saved the President’s brain. Go Eagles of Screaming Death.
I blink out of sim and push up my goggles. I lift up my cross and kiss it. In the next chair, Elis, her own goggles up on her hair, grins in a way that is very ungroomed and non-glossy but totally honest and right.
"Now for the Pope!" she says. "But first, we just earned ourselves some serious R&R."
"So, no to Argentinian food?" I ask.
This is weird. This is unexpected. This is not in the script—not that I use a script, understand. But I come back from the men’s room—they have this little spritz of cologne, which is a nice touch, a nice extra freshness and confidence—and she is standing with her bag and her wrap. "How about Egyptian? Jamaican? I know a really good Greek Cypriot restaurant out in Bethesda—the owner comes from the next village, we have the same priest."
"No, I guess I’m not hungry. Those olives filled me up."
And I feel a little stunned. A little dazed. Woozy. Not four-martini woozy. World-woozy. What happened? It was flying right, on the glide path in, landing on autopilot. Now she is leaving without a word, an explanation, a mobile number.
"I’m sorry, I was talking about myself? Yadda yadda yadda? I know, it’s a terrible fault."
"Well, yes, it is," she says, which makes me feel worse. "But, you know, I have enjoyed talking to you, and thanks for all the drinks…"
"Half the drinks," I say. Modern. I feel like the room is telescoping away from me, like that shot in Jaws. This is crazy. It’s like every voice in the bar is in my head.
"Thank you for letting me do that, but, well, I do have work tomorrow." She turns away, turns back. "Miko, tell me. What you’re saying about the nanobots—the tiny death-subs. Is it always the rich? I mean, do ordinary people ever get them as well?"
"You’d need to be a lottery winner or some kind of mad day trader. Never happens."
"You sure?" she says. She taps the top of my martini glass. "Have you ever thought, maybe they have started to shoot back?" Tap tap tap. Then she throws her wrap around her and out she walks, heels tap tap tap.
(2014)
MASKED
Rich Larson
Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, studied in Rhode Island and worked in the south of Spain. He now lives in Ottawa, Canada. Since he began writing in 2011, he has sold over a hundred stories, most of them science fiction. Out of the genre, he has been nominated for both the Pushcart and Journey prizes and was a semifinalist for the 2013 Norman Mailer Poetry Prize. His debut collection, Tomorrow Factory: Collected Fiction, was published in 2018. His debut novel, Annex (2018), the start to his Violet Wars trilogy, follows a transgender girl who has discovered that an alien parasite has given her strange powers.
It’s been a whole month since anyone’s seen Vera, and the circumstances of us finally seeing her this weekend are going to be ultra grody-odd, so I deliberate forever doing my Face. In the end I decide to go subtle: an airbrushed conglom of three of my most flattering private snaps, plus Holly Rexroat-Carrow’s lips and Sofia Lawless’s cheekbones from that Vogue shoot she did on the Moon. Nothing too recent, nothing that’ll make Vera feel like she is way, way unsynched and missing out on all kinds of hot shit. Which she has been, obviously.
I do the rest of my Face the same way, kind of sous radar. I set my wardrobe to cycle four or five outfits, one of which includes the Chanel inside-out jacket Vera gifted me a week before the accident. It is now kind of gauche, so she better appreciate the gesture like whoa. Boob-wise I go small, because obviously Aline is going to be there, too, and she always goes chesty and is way way more than welcome to the unsolicited profile taps, thanks.
Lastly, I prune the digital cloud of updates shuffling around my shoulders. A few instant-regret purchases, plus the many many snaps of me and Aline and Estelle wearing our wetsuits in Venice, disappear in a drizzle of code. The result looks a little barren. But barren can also be construed as, like, minimalist, which may or may not be coming back now.
Either way, I am not going to be rubbing Vera’s nose in the fact that a viral strike took her Face offline and she is stuck hiding from the world for at least another week according to technicians. Aline probably will, but whatever.
Vera’s parents are really fucking rich, if I didn’t mention that. As in, rich enough to rent a reefhouse on some secluded beach for Vera’s first weekend out of neural recovery, and also send me and Aline there in a big black shiny autocab to spend it with her. When said cab pulls up outside my house, Aline leans out the open door with Curacao in a martini glass, because she likes to pretend she’s an alcoholic, and welcomes me to her chariot.