Twenty-Five to Life, page 20
“I don’t understand why we’re here, either,” Hitchcock said. “You made it perfectly clear you didn’t want to be on camera. It doesn’t make any sense to assign us to ride with you.”
“It’s probably a punishment,” Ranger said. “For me. And Runner.” She looked at Julie. “You don’t want to be famous, either, right?”
“No thanks.” Julie continued staring out the side window.
Ranger inspected the film crew via the rear-view mirror. “You twerps like musicals?” She reached for the entertainment center. “This is my favorite.”
Music and the bag of THC candies Hitchcock produced from somewhere mitigated the mood inside the van. Within an hour they were singing along to “Greta’s Braids.” An hour after that they were at a dead stop, feeling their highs fade and irritation set in. King walked back along the line of vehicles and rapped on Ranger’s door. “Fish Eye wants the vid guys to come up to the front.”
“What’s going on?” Julie said. “Why aren’t we moving?”
King cracked his neck. “Building collapsed up ahead. Blocked most of the road. We should have it clear in a couple of hours.”
Ranger pointed to the holomap hovering over the dash. “There’s a bypass less than half a mile back. We don’t even have to turn around. Just put everyone into reverse for a bit.”
“Fish says he wants to clear the road.”
F.F. climbed out of the van and slung her camera bag over her shoulder. “Duty calls, Hitch.”
Ranger sucked her teeth and watched the film crew struggle to keep up with King. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Back to the bypass?”
“And ruin my good reputation by deserting the caravan on the road?” Ranger’s laugh sounded wet. “No, we’re not there, yet. We’ll walk up to the front and see what’s happening.”
They each filled a bottle with water and left their coats in the van. The day was overcast but muggy, and sweat was trickling down Julie’s back before they reached Sarge’s truck, which was the next vehicle in line. “Think our fearless leader is up there directing traffic?”
“We really don’t see much of him, do we?” Ranger flipped the top off her bottle and took a long pull of water. “Wonder why that is.”
“Maybe he’s shy.”
As they walked they were joined by a few of the other drivers and passengers curious to see what the holdup was. About a half mile up, just beyond the bumper of King’s little scout car, Fire and Ice had stripped down to tank tops to clear debris. Fire had muscles like a gymnast. Ice’s arms were covered in tattoos.
“Get to work.” Fish Eye said when he saw them approach. He was standing off to one side with the Dame. “This will look great on camera. The caravan coming together to clear an obstacle.”
“That’s going to take at least an hour.” Ranger jabbed her thumb back the way they’d come. “There’s a bypass back there. We could be moving forward again in twenty minutes.”
“That’s not the plan.” Fish’s face reddened, but it might have been the heat. “We’re going through, not around.”
Ranger walked forward a few yards and shifted debris with the toe of her boot. “Doesn’t look like this came down on its own. See how it’s all spread out and how far it goes?”
“An explosion?” Julie said.
Ranger nodded. “And the wood’s not even weathered much. It came down pretty recently.” She stuck her thumbs into her utility belt. “Sarge worried at all that this might be a trap?”
The color in Fisheye’s face deepened. Definitely not the heat. “We know our jobs. We sent the drones out as soon as the scout reported in.”
Hitchcock’s tiny camera drones were in full force, too, buzzing around the work area as more members of the caravan joined in the efforts. The Dame’s manservant, Stevedore, was setting up a table of snacks and drinks.
Ranger smiled. “Guess we’d better get to work then. Runner?”
“Right behind you. Help me with this beam thing.”
When they bent to lift it, their heads were only a few inches apart. “Don’t forget to smile pretty for the camera,” Ranger whispered.
FORTY
“Twenty-five years ago, this trip would have taken forty hours,” Ranger said. “Not counting sleep stops and pee breaks.”
Julie yawned. Four days of following Sarge’s mobile-command center at the mandated two vehicle lengths had neither challenged her driving skills nor her mind. “We could have been already if we’d flown.”
“No fun in that.” Ranger’s feet were propped up on the dash, and she was changing the color of her toenails again, this time to something like safety orange. The color was covering a glow-in-the-dark green that had flickered like fireflies in the back of the van the night before. She had traded four bars of soap for a sampler pack of polish.
“Not a tremendous amount of fun in this.” Julie forced her shoulders down and glanced at the speedometer. Twenty miles per hour on the button. Suck it, cruise control!
Ranger inspected her work, curling and spreading her long toes. “Imagine crossing the country two hundred years ago. No music. No A/C. Dysentery. Months staring at a horse’s ass.”
Julie gestured at the vehicle ahead. “Asses or assholes. How is this any different?”
“We get snacks delivered.”
The Dame only emerged from her yacht for dinners and to “supervise” repair stops or road clearing, but she sent Stevedore out with trays of canapés every time the caravan came to a halt. The little gray man walked up and down the line presenting his tray at every window, his carry-all stalking on four spindly legs behind him. He offered little human interaction to go with his canapés, and he had no sense of humor that Julie could ferret out.
“Hey, I had a Sarge sighting this morning,” Julie said. “I forgot to tell you. He was out on the porch of his HQ, just kind of staring at the sky. I waved. He turned and went back inside.”
“That makes two appearances since we got joined up.” Ranger tapped her forehead. “I don’t think he’s all there. I met one of the early augments, years ago. Doped to the gills all day, every day. Sarge looks the right age to have been in the last batch. The big success story.”
The augmented Marine program had failed spectacularly a decade before – a super-soldier program that resulted in enhanced muscles, reflexes, mental focus, and off-the-charts rage issues. Julie dimly remembered learning something about it in high school. There’d been a propaganda video for the Mark V program, a squad of buzzcuts crushing Olympic records, throwing motorcycles around, and lifting pianos. The Mark V augments made a single deployment to the Panama Canal. The lucky ones had ended up dead. The others were flown home as war criminals, declared criminally insane, and locked up for their own safety.
Ranger frowned when Julie recounted the memory. “The Dame must have called in a few chips to get a superman sprung for her personal-security detail.”
“Where are we stopping tonight?” Julie said.
“Officially, I have no idea. I am quote outside the security loop unquote. Unofficially, Gretchen hacked into Fish’s itinerary and sent it to me this morning. Willow Springs. There’s a park in Mark Twain National Forest.”
“I wonder how you get a forest named after you.”
“Maybe he planted it. Either way, we’re going to be stopping there in about four hours.” She coughed into the crook of her arm.
“How are you holding up?”
“Fair.” Ranger probably had less to do in the Dame’s outfit than any other caravan she’d ridden with. The rest should have been doing her good, but all it seemed to be doing was making her tense. “Little bored. Starting to wish something would happen, even though I know that’s a really bad idea out here.”
The population had always been spread thin between the Mississippi River and California. The Green Laws and other legislation to move people out of areas continually ravaged by drought, storm, earthquake, and fire had virtually emptied it. Trading a mighty piece of it to China in return for trillions in debt relief and cash had been a no-brainer. Now, past a certain point, caravans were completely on their own. Emergency services were scarce and responded at a crawl.
“Entertain yourself by coming up with more bullshit to share with the kids tonight,” Julie said.
Once the younger members of the outfit had figured out how long Ranger had been on the road, she’d become a folk hero. At night, around the fire, they begged her to share war stories. Ranger usually complied. Most of her stories started with, “It wasn’t that big a deal, but one time…”
“All my stories are one-hundred percent true,” Ranger said.
Julie lifted an eyebrow. “You snuck into the Chinese States to rescue a political dissident?”
“Absolutely.”
“Held off a squad of Texas Free-State Rangers until a caravan of refugees made it over the border?”
“It was more of a distraction than a stand-off, but sure.”
“Drove Juniper into a tornado to rescue a family that had taken shelter under an overpass?”
“Might have exaggerated that one. Call it fifty-one percent true.” She considered. “Maybe forty-nine. Forty on the outside.” She pushed back her seat. “I’m taking a nap. Wake me up when you want to trade seats.”
* * *
Ranger wrapped her jacket more tightly around herself and stretched her feet toward the fire. “I don’t have any stories tonight,” she said. “It’s your turn.”
Fire and Ice glanced at each other. A scruffy guy named Stoner shuffled his feet and poked at the fire. Julie used a mug of tea to cover her smile.
“Nothing?” Ranger said.
Stoner’s partner, a model-pretty, long-limbed girl named Grass, looked flustered. “What do you want us to say? None of us have been at this very long.”
“Just be interesting,” Ranger said. “You can do that, can’t you?”
It’s like poking kittens with a stick. “How’d you two get hooked up?” Julie said.
Grass smiled. “We bought into the same weed-share. I was cubed up in Boston. He was paying his way with deliveries.”
“Love at first toke?” Julie laughed.
Stoner colored. “Something like that.”
“So, you were already tramping when you met her.” Julie reached to refill her mug from the pot steaming by the fire.
“Not really. It was a company car. A full auto. I just rode along for security.” Stoner pushed a shock of tangled hair out of his eyes. “I was squatting mostly. Abandoned buildings. Storage units. I, uh, liberated some of the stock, and got fired.”
“He showed up at my door with his backpack over his shoulder,” Grass said. “I let him in. My cube felt too small for two, so this seemed like a good thing to do for awhile.”
Ranger whistled. “Serious commitment to give up your place like that.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “Oh, I didn’t give it up. It’s still there waiting for me.”
Ranger’s eyes narrowed. “How much pot did you guys ‘liberate’? That little camper of yours didn’t come cheap.”
“It’s the Dame’s,” Stoner said. “We can use it as long as we are part of her caravan.”
Julie looked at Fire and Ice. “You guys said you were paying her off by working security for this trip.”
“Everyone has their own thing going on with her, I guess,” Fire said. “The Dame put most of this outfit on the road herself.”
“I don’t remember seeing anything about this on the volksnet,” Ranger said.
Stoner snorted. “That antique? We were recruited directly. Well, Grass was. She got a message in ThirdEye.”
“Just like that?” Ranger said. “Come join a tramp caravan to the Pacific?”
“Her people said I fit the profile,” Grass said. “My agent took care of the rest.”
“Your agent?” Ranger said.
Grass flushed. “It’s only a bot. I don’t get enough work to afford a real person.”
Ranger stabbed a finger at her. “You’re an actress.” Her finger moved to Ice. “What about you two?”
“Not me. Fire’s done some modeling.”
“I did a commercial, too. Melo-Tonic.” Fire glanced at Ice. “Before we met.”
“Anyone else here a secret vid star?” Ranger said.
“Not me,” Stoner said, “but King’s done some motion-capture work and one of the other guys has a game stream.” He looked at Grass for help.
“I think most of us worked in the biz at some point or other. King and I are represented by the same agency.”
Conversation changed to work and the entertainment business.
Julie leaned close to Ranger. “You got your wish. You are not the center of attention.”
“Yeah, but what the hell kind of party documentary hires actors?” Ranger said.
Alright, fine. “I have an idea how we can find out,” Julie said.
FORTY-ONE
“Are you eating?” Carson S Riley said. “Your avatar is so pixelated you might as well be a tossed salad.”
“I’m fine, Mom. Healthy. Well-fed,” Julie said. “Doing yoga. I even learned to drive. Real driving, not just poke and proceed.”
“Where are you staying? I don’t want specifics. I gave you my word that I wouldn’t look for you, but I am not immune to temptation.”
“We’re on the road a lot. All the time really. Right now, we’re part of a caravan heading west.”
“Living in a van by the river,” Carson snorted, “and talking to me with smoke signals and lantern flashes. Truly the American Dream. What’s next? A drum circle?”
Contacting her mother using her new ID and Ranger’s arcane system had required a number of patches, bypasses, emulators, and reach-arounds. There was no telling how the final product looked on ThirdEye’s quantum servers. Her mother’s image, created by top-of-line gear in her new tower digs, had been reduced to a fuzzy, doll-sized holo-projection on the van’s dashboard, recognizable mostly by her posture. “How’s Mark?” Julie said.
Holo-Carson pushed back her hair. “I’m getting a cat. Dr Bevins wrote me a prescription. They say I need something to exercise my maternal instincts on now that my child has become a criminal.”
Julie whistled. “That’s expen–”
“My health insurance is covering most of it. I put an order into the clone bank a month ago. Male, short-haired Tabby, loving disposition, congenitally testicle-free. Probably what I should have done years ago, but your father convinced me that children would be fun.”
“I was fun,” Julie said.
“Maybe until you turned eleven or so, and a little bit between seventeen to twenty. All that hope and promise. The rest of the time you were a pain in the ass.”
Julie took a long pull on the THC rig she’d loaded up in preparation for the call.
“What’s that?” Carson said sharply. “What’s that you just did? It looks like your head caught fire.”
More smoke slipped from Julie’s mouth and rolled around the van’s ceiling. “I am consuming marijuana so that we might have a more enjoyable conversation.”
Carson tsked. “You’re gone for four months, and you’re already doing illegal drugs.”
“Pot’s been legal since before you were born, Mother.” And I know damn well you have a healthy supply of trans-dermal THC in your medicine cabinet. Distance or time had made the banter easier. Less personal. Below the nagging, Julie could hear fondness, even love. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“This connection is so bad, you sound like a recycle unit breaking down a piano. I’m not even sure it’s you.”
“It’s me, Mother.”
“Are you coming back?”
“You said, and I quote, ‘Don’t you dare come crawling back.’”
“So don’t crawl. Come back with your head held high. Are you seeing anyone these days?”
“Like a shrink or–”
“L.O.V.E.,” Holo-Carson spelled carefully. “Or at least fucking. One of us should be.”
“Not really.” Julie had enjoyed a brief flirtation with King the week before, and while he was pretty it wasn’t enough to make up for his narcissism. He was also dumb as a dead battery and not nearly sweet enough to make excuses for it. “Did you find the information I asked for?”
“Who says I even looked?”
“You can’t help yourself. There’s always the possibility you’ll find a story in it. I’m just surprised it took you so long to dig something up.”
“Two weeks.” Carson sniffed. “I put Dallas on it. You remember Dallas?”
Dallas was Carson S Riley’s 32-year-old intern. He’d been working for her for seven years, holding out a vain hope that a permanent position would open up at the network. “Yes. How is he?”
“Redundant. The network replaced him and all the other interns with an AI last week. A real one, not a toy. My instance is named Taylor. It’s an idiot, but the network expects it’ll take over my job in five or six years. Can you imagine?”
“How did Dallas handle being fired?”
“He overrode the safeties on his balcony and jumped off.”
“Damn, Mom, I’m really sorry.” Julie took a longer pull on the rig.
Holo-Carson broke into static and reformed. “He was technosexual. Did you know that? He was living with a sexbot, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but who am I supposed to send flowers to? Or a card, even? He hated his parents. The sexbot had been customized to look like me, so I suppose I should be flattered but–”
“Where is it now?”
“The bot? It’s in my spare bedroom. It didn’t seem right to let them recycle it with the rest of his stuff. It’s a surprisingly good conversationalist. I think I’ll keep it around to pet the cat when I’m away.”
“How do you feel about being replaced by an AI?”
Holo-Carson picked something up and held it to her mouth. A cocktail? A cup of tea? “I’ll be retired by then. The fuck do I care?”
Definitely a cocktail. “Are you, like, training it?”
“Training sounds like I had a choice. Motion capture. It’s been linked to my emplant. Probably listening to every word we say. Part of my latest contract renewal. I’m being paid to make myself – my entire profession – obsolete.”
