Phosporescent hexadecimal scrolls through Ashlock’s dreams.
When she wakes, the chronometer pulses 3:44. Cold water on her face, her boots, her jacket. She’s out pacing the mist-wreathed docks by a sliver of moon.
Nobody nice is out at this hour, but they don’t hassle Ashlock (she does kung fu). Down a wharf, she kicks splinters into jetsam.
This was an easy job: they should have come out with cash, not data. They’re lazy sometimes, arrogant, but not stupid.
Somebody dumbed it up for them.
Styrofoam hunks bob around the pylon, striped with broken barcodes. Hexadecimal teases Ashlock, just out of reach.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Zoe’s got the graveyard watch, which means the rest of them should be sleeping. Malcolm comes to check on her anyway.
“Any movement?”
“Some to the northwest, around four,” she says. “Sentry guns didn’t have too much trouble.” She hands him the field glasses; through them, faint protrusions resolve into zombie limbs chewed by chaingun.
Malcolm peers at gray flesh, black blood. “You’ve been skipping rations, Zo.”
“I’m fine. The kid can use a little extra.”
“You need to eat. Keep your strength up. One day the guns may not hold.”
“I’ll eat,” Zoe says with grim relish, “when I’m dead.”
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Everything is hot and slippery. Zach’s eyes sting. This is a stupid thing to notice.
Unsilenced gunshots have done what their screaming couldn’t, and summoned the cavalry. The doctors and techs and security guy look scared, but they’re working fast. It’s okay, Zach wants to tell them. The bad man’s gone.
Sarah’s trying to control the situation even as they haul her off to surgery; that’s what Sarah does. The little girl is crying. They’ve injected his face and it’s all rubbery, but as they wheel him out Zach touches her shoulder.
“Zach,” he mumbles.
“Mirna,” she manages.
Fade to white.
“Who can name the central conflict of the story?” asks Ms. Celotte. “Anyone? No? Jennifer?”
Jennifer Goggles pulls a string on her robot without looking up. “MAN VERSUS MAN,” it wheezes.
“Jennifer,” the teacher warns.
“Isn’t that the right answer?” Jennifer frowns, popping the robot’s back hatch. “I was careful with the soldering–”
“That’s not the point!”
“SYLLEPSIS,” says the robot.
“No offense, Ma’am,” says Jennifer, “but I’m only here because they wouldn’t let me register for four periods of metal shop.” Classmates mutter.
“A balanced education requires–”
“BLITHERING INANITY.”
Ms. Celotte fumes.
“See,” beams Jennifer, “I knew he was working.”
Rumors about the Spaniard propagate through the juice bar: he’s a new trainer at the gym–no!–he’s shooting a pilot in town. Or he’s Tricia’s sugar daddy, exposed at last. Someone heard he’s a black belt. Is that really his hair? Well then whose is it?
Art draws the short straw and brings out his order; he pays in dollar coins and, says Art, is redolent of Gold Bond. The girls demand he grab a cell-phone shot of his tightpants areas. They crowd the edge of the swinging door, trying to read his mind.
Yo soy… Manchego, thinks Manchego.
Tach’s iPod is smoking.
“It looks,” says their fence Celesque dryly, “a little too hot for me to move.”
“Hey, nobody’s coming after this one,” says Ashlock, which is technically true. “Just put out some feelers or whatever.”
“There are practically feelers coming out of that thing already,” says Celesque.
“It’s good math. Powerful. It’ll sell.”
“Then sell it yourself, sweetie.” Celesque shrugs. “I’m not touching it. If that’s what I think it is, do yourself a favor. Hit it with a hammer, toss it in a lake.”
But information, Ashlock knows to her dismay, can be neither created nor destroyed.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Mindsurfing Suteki in their jet-and-neon simulator suits, Eamon and Cohn lean into the synaptic wind and plunge down toward the root of his hippocampus.
“If he ever knew it, it’s here,” crackles Eamon over the comm.
“Damn well better be!” says Cohn. “We’ve looked everywhere, and the multiplier’s dying!” Over his shoulder, a power pack blinks orange.
Eamon soft-lands on the obsidian vault, an abstract of Suteki’s deepest secrets. Cohn fires up the torch. They heave away a glowing-edged disc, and within–
“This is a Post-It,” says Eamon slowly.
“In email (?!)” says the note.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Instead, Hidebound steps forward and picks up Zach by the throat. Sara scrambles to her feet. Hidebound shoots her in the knee. She goes down again, screaming between her teeth, but no one in the hospital wants to hear. Shouldn’t the nurses handle that?
Hidebound grinds Zach’s face into shattered fruit bowl on the floor. It’s glass. Zach’s screaming too, until Hidebound finally pulls him upright with the silencer to his cheek.
“Vode, molim,” mumbles Zach through bloody lips.
“What?” says Hidebound.
The little girl sweeps aside the curtain, snarling Croatian curses, and pulls Zach’s stolen gun from between her pillows.
There are a few tricks museum exhibit constructors use that are both cheap and unfailingly effective: faint conversations repeating in the background, matte paintings, soft scoop lights from underneath. They transport Eoin every time. Magic, but less in a sparkling Disney sense than in sympathy, similarity and correspondence. The kind of magic people write graduate theses about.
They tempt him, the artifacts placed carefully-carelessly on the other side of railings and velvet ropes. What would happen if he stepped over? Magic fails so often, under examination. Eoin leans over and cocks his head, listening for the hiccup of the loop.
