SETH W. JAMES

With Nothing but Junk and Desire (To Walk pt 1)

September 15, 2022

By Seth W. James

Katiana Caprice, cyborg ninja, unstoppable one-woman army against the forces of Zorb, raced up the reflective exterior of the MOB megaplex, unfathomably large and super hi-res breasts bouncing to a rhythm unconnected to her evasive maneuvers.  Her clawed mechanized feet sent glowing fissures through the Onolexeen windows as she tore past, combat drones chasing her and blazing away with railguns fed by unlimited magazines.  Leaping into a somersault, an electric blue disc flared to life around her and swept out to destroy the closest drones.  A few quick pops from her thrice-upgraded sword gun and the last of the drone pursuers plummeted toward the distance-blurred waters below. Jeff pushed the camera out of first person and slowly circled Katiana Caprice’s heavily breathing form; it would look totally sweet for his recorded run through the Zorb War mission pack.

Sitting on his bed in a Jersey City pre-fab apartment, a couple blocks west of where Montgomery Street sank beneath the waters of The New York Archipelago, Jeff couldn’t see the stark yet unclean room around him, nor hear his parents’ increasingly heated conversation in the next room.  His eyes—both modded with cheap plug-and-play replacements—were connected via external wire to his appcon, as were his yet un-modded ears: he saw what the little computer rendered as if he was actually in the world of Katiana Caprice.  Omicron Simulation.  Two IntNods clung to his temples and read his motor cortex, translating its nerve pulses into avatar commands for Katiana Caprice.  Jeff moved his arm, Katiana moved hers.  Jeff took aim at an armed drone, squeezed his index finger, and Katiana blasted away with her sword gun.  His legs, though, were a different story.

Though the IntNods could read his motor cortex’s commands to his legs, Jeff’s father had disabled the usual input on the appcon and instead routed the commands through a different peripheral port.  The whole reason Jeff even had an appcon instead of a corporate-condoned IDac was so that he could link the small computer to the nerve interface jacks implanted in what remained of his legs.  At six-years old, Jeff had caught one of the dozen super bugs that roamed the north east like microscopic horsemen of the apocalypse.  The disease hadn’t killed him but had caused necrotizing fasciitis in his legs, requiring amputation above the knee.  There were no mod legs for six-year olds, not out in the fab.  A corpor in a corplex might have been able to run off a pair on the state-of-the-art medical printers they have in their closed communities but for a poor kid in the fab, or more specifically his un-credentialed father and mother, there were no cybernetic options. Always quick to improvise, a street genius who had clawed his way out of countless jams, Jeff’s father had sold almost everything they had to buy a nerve interface kit that the clinic docs at The Wilson were able to implant in Jeff’s legs.  The only thing they were good for was to keep the nerves in his legs from atrophying, as they waited for him to grow old enough for mechanized legs.

Jeff had exercised those nerves every day over the last ten years.  He couldn’t walk and the wheelchair he used to go from his bedroom to the common room of their tiny pre-fab had been printed from faulty blueprints, but when he connected to the Omicron world of Katiana Caprice or Jack Danger or Castle Combat, he was a warrior, a hero, a god.  It wasn’t much but it was enough.  The nerve interface jacks in his legs were even something of an advantage as he had much greater control and input speed compared to motor cortex interaction.  He wiped the floor with most PVP want-a-be’s.

At the moment, though, he had no time to ponder the unfairness of childhood trauma or again worry about the consequences of his turning sixteen, of his tapering off of physical growth.  The camera circling Katiana Caprice was quickly making the game unplayable for Jeff.  He swatted around in meat space, trying to find the crusty sock that he kept wedge between his printed mattress and the floor, as Katiana Caprice patted around inside the simulation in perfect mimicry.  He’d have to load the special save he kept for when watching Katiana Caprice finally pushed his sixteen-year old libido to the breaking point.

***

“Listen to me, Marcel, listen,” Yukie said, taking a hold of her husband’s shirt and pulling him close.  “We don’t have the credits.”

“I’m not leaving my son like that,” Marcel whisper-shouted, pointing at Jeff’s closed door.  “It’s been ten years!”

“Be quiet,” she hissed, a look of shame coloring her face.  “You think I don’t want my son to walk again?  We can’t afford it.  Babe, we can’t.  We don’t have enough to go into Ho Mart and buy a newly printed pair of mod legs.  And Ferrol, wait,” she said as Marcel twisted in her grasp, not trying to pull away but succumbing to his natural impatience.

“This is bullshit,” he muttered.

“Ferrol will only trade for some kind of grift,” she concluded.

“Ferrol doesn’t do grifts, Yukie,” Marcel said.  “He does biz.”

“Biz that will get you killed,” she said.  “He doesn’t have any other kind of biz for someone, um.”

“Someone what?” Marcel said.  “Someone like me?”

“Well, you aren’t a PharmaRock musician or a coder,” Yukie said.

Marcel pulled her hands off his shirt, the printed fabric whining in protest, and then stalked around the room.  “I’m not leaving him like this,” he said.  “Sitting in his room all day, playing fucking video games to keep his nerves from atrophying.  No.”

“Because he’d be better off outside?” Yukie said.  “In a filter mask, dodging crazies from the Jin Dao who will hunt him, Marcel, if he goes outside with a pair of mod legs.  They’ll kill him for them.”

“I’m not leaving him like that,” Marcel hissed, two clean lines dropping suddenly down his cheeks, washing thin streaks in the grime left by pollution and pollen.

Yukie walked over to him and placed her hands on his chest again, caressing instead of clutching.  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said softly. “You didn’t give him the disease.”

“I’m his father, Yukie,” he said.  “It’s my responsibility to protect him.”

“No one could protect him from a super bug,” she said.  “There aren’t even atmo protocols for the scrubber that will keep them out.”

“And it’s my responsibility to see that he is made whole again,” Marcel said, not hearing her and looking away.

“We don’t have the money,” she said helplessly.  She pressed her cheek to his chest and wrapped her arms around him.  More hopeless than argumentatively, she repeated, “We don’t have the money.”

***

To say Marcel had been born on the wrong side of the tracks was to suppose there were tracks.  The only trains left were on the monorail, that elevated private infrastructure that connected corplexes and megaplexes from the DC islands to Quebec City.  Anyone beneath them, anyone in the endless carpet of pre-fab emergency housing and poorly sealed pre-crisis relics—every day slipping closer to disintegration—was on the wrong side for proper food, healthcare, education, security, anything, everything.  But Marcel was also a street genius.  No education beyond the free vids found on local mesh networks, Marcel had a knack for finding resources where none seemed to exist, for anticipating a need before it arose and positioning himself to satisfy it.  The real reason Ferrol the Fixer wouldn’t throw more work to Marcel is that Ferrol recognized future competition.  He knew that it would only take a couple big scores, a few more years of hustling, for Marcel to build the kind of network that could take business from him.  He’d kill Marcel then.  Not openly, not with his own hand, but he would have to kill Marcel.

At the moment, Marcel had no interest in competing for fab-side market share.  All he wanted was a couple of mod legs for his son.  It had been a stroke of luck that he had scraped together enough money to get Yukie into The Wilson before she’d given birth.  Infant mortality was near 70% in the fab, and not much better for mothers.  He’d built another fortune in the six years that followed only to wipe it out again to keep Jeffrey alive and buy the slim hope that the nerve interfaces offered.  In the last ten years, he’d built two more fortunes and both had been wiped out: one to move them from a neighborhood that the Jin Dao were invading, and the other went to pay off a lunatic that he never should have gone into business with in the first place.  Man had threatened Yukie and Jeff, demanding that Marcel give him the full profits of their printer heist.  Marcel had agreed but on the condition that his half be used to send the lunatic to SemSub City, out in the Atlantic.  The lunatic had agreed. And Marcel had paid the money to the pugs who would swim him out to the waiting ship, only Marcel paid them to drown the lunatic.  Same cost either way.

Walking through the Polaski Squatburg, Marcel was trading small items, IDac batteries, blank credit swipes, and razor-sharp printer knives.  In return, he was amassing a formidable collection of wire.

“The fuck are you doing with all that shit, beau?” Sanford asked him, seeing what Marcel had in his haversack.

Marcel did not answer, stalking away with an eye on the surrounding crowd.

Marcel’s next stop was to a bar on the edge of The New York Archipelago. Walking up Montgomery Street, he could see down the length of deteriorating asphalt, over the spume of polluted water, toward a huge megaplex.  The world he lived in had been caused by someone, he knew, he felt.  And he knew and felt that whoever they were who had fabricated this world of misery and want, they must live there.

“Motherfuckers,” he whispered, tearing his eyes away and walking into Howl.

Howl was one of the ubiquitous converted pre-fab stacks that operated as a bar, brothel, mod shop, and anything else that people might need.  In one corner by the back wall, a table was littered with dissected computers.  A couple of heavies with military-grad mechanized arms and legs—and the integral skeletal supports to use them—stood nearby brandishing railguns.  Marcel ignored them and approached the table.  Behind it sat two boys; boys to Marcel, anyway.  Young and talented, into anything that amused them but never without a profit, Hank and Murray were a couple of assholes but they got shit done.

“My man Marcel, what it is,” Hank said, sitting back from the bit of circuitry he and Murray were working on and putting a long-stemmed vaper to his mouth.

“Still trying to get some legs for your kid, Marcel?” Murray asked, disguising his snicker.  “No credits yet?”

“Man that’s tough,” Hank said sadly.  “Anything we can do, Marcel, you let us know.”

Marcel wanted to jump across the table and strangle both of them.  He knew it showed on his face and that it was exactly what those two assholes wanted.  He also knew that they were the closest people he knew to true Data Punks.  And he needed certain data.

“I need a broadband transmission protocol and the software to run it,” Marcel said, standing very still.

“What? Okay,” Murray said.  He fiddled with an appcon on the table, searching for the data.  “What do you need it for?”

“What do you care?” Marcel said.  “I also need half-a-dozen songs; good stuff, corpor quality.”

“For the same client?” Murray said.  “I mean, you can’t transmit this stuff; it’s a copyright violation.  The corp that owns these songs will drop a frag on your ass if you do.”  Marcel didn’t answer. “Okay, tough guy.  Here.  Aht-aht-aht!  What you got in trade, cabrón?”

Marcel reached into his jacket and pulled out a small plastic bag.  Inside were two K10-50 eye mods, top of the line.  The bag and the mods were smeared with blood.

“Whoa, fuck you, man,” Hank said, pushing back from the table.

“That’s some sick shit, beau,” Murray said, the smirk gone from his face. “You join the Jin Dao or something?”

“Give,” Marcel said, holding out his hand.  Murray, not touching the eye mods on his table, tossed the data swipe to Marcel.  Marcel left without a word.

***

Of all the resources Marcel had discovered while crawling around Jersey City looking for hidden opportunities, the collapsed automobile lube shop was the most frustrating.  Buried under a couple tons of melted plastic, where pre-fab stacks had burned down, and collapsed from a hurricane sixty years ago, the lube shop was full of old tech.  The problem was that there was no easy way to get it out.  Slipping a small man inside was possible but the equipment was too big to extract.  Looking at the condition of his mask filters after the last time he’d snuck into the lube shop, Marcel was sure there were some pretty nasty fluids lurking beneath the floor, too, giving off plenty of fumes.

He strung the wire he’d collected to what remained of the pre-fab’s staircase, using an electric torch to melt poles into the plastic to give the wire shape.  He’d ripped a small tutorial about antenna theory from a local mesh; needed it to look good.  With the antenna set up, Marcel ran the wire down into the lube shop’s lowest accessible space and connected it to a cheap IDac he’d stolen from someone in the crowd at the bazaar.  Inserting the data swipe from Murray, Marcel began transmitting the copyrighted songs for any and all to hear.  And ran the fuck out of the lube shop as fast as he could.

It didn’t take long.  A mass-media license violation was serious business when it reached ten million people.  A V-68 VTOL from KJI swooped in on the remains of the melted pre-fab, disgorging a platoon of Security Soldiers.  They dropped to the ground using QBDs (Quick Burn Descenders), kicked off their rocket boots, and stormed the lube shop through as many holes as they could fit.

“That’s right, cabróns,” Marcel whispered from a nearby alley.  “Come and get it.”

When most of the SS were inside, Marcel triggered the electric torch remotely.  On the table next to the stolen IDac, the torch ignited the fume soup beneath the lube shop and the entire mass of concrete, plastic, and SS blew into the sky.

The V-68 retreated, screaming for reinforcements no doubt.  Dazed and burnt, having underestimated the size of the explosion, Marcel stumbled out into the crater and rushed to the SS corpses.  With a machete in hand, he searched for any mechanized legs that had survived the explosion.

“Here’s a right,” he said, casually chopping off a twisted but still functional mod leg.  “And over there is a left.”

He had to be quick, because scavs would soon pour into the place and they wouldn’t hesitate to kill Marcel for his find.  But he’d done it.  With nothing but junk to trade and desire in his heart, he’d gathered what he needed to make his son walk again.