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infrastructure, such as sanitation, local transport and what was left of law and order — these were few in number and so short of supporting staff that they could no longer do their jobs properly. They were, of course, further hampered in their work by the mass unemployment caused by the cyborgs' many restrictions and by an attendant lack of proper financing. The freezing of air and sea travel had led to the loss of revenue from imports and exports, including that from the all-important arms trade; while the mass unemployment had led to an even greater loss of tax revenue and, subsequently, the collapse of the IRS. Finally, that same mass unemployment had created an ever-growing crime wave based on the desperation of the rapidly rising number of jobless. So the few lights on in those government buildings were being burned by men with little actually to do — though some were still trying. There was a certain nobility in that and Gumshoe respected it.
As he approached the White House, which was brilliantly illuminated both inside and outside, he saw a couple of medium-sized flying saucers on the lawns in front of the building and cyborgs patrolling the grounds. The gates were guarded by a couple of SARGE robot scouts and by more cyborgs. Since his earliest memories naturally included the cyborgs and flying saucers, Gumshoe was neither repulsed by the former nor surprised by the latter, but he still found himself wondering just what the cyborgs got up to inside the White House, not to mention inside the Pentagon and other major government and military establishments.
According to what he had been told by his elders and had picked up in written histories available on the Internet, when the cyborgs had taken over at the end of the year 2000, the last year of the Old Age, they had arrived in truly enormous flying saucers, the so-called 'mother ships' of UFO legend. Reportedly, the mother ships had been seen emerging from various seas and lakes around the world: notably in the Bermuda Triangle in the west Adantic, that area connecting Bermuda, Puerto Rico and the coast of Florida; the so-called 'Devil's Sea' bounded by the
south-east coast of Japan, the northern tip of Luzon in the Philippine5' and Guam; the Plata del Mar in Argentina; the Great Lakes of Canada - and even Loch Ness, Scotland, where, during the great age of UFO sightings between 1947 and 1999, many USOs (Unidentified Submarine Objects) had been mistaken for the Loch Ness Monster. Other massive 'mother ships' had been seen rising from well-hidden isolated areas in the Arctic Circle, the Antarctic and the wilds of Canada. Those mother ships had then come down over some of the most famous and important buildings in the world: the White House and the Pentagon in Washington DC, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace in London, England; the Kremlin in Red Square, Moscow; and the Forbidden City in Beijing, China.
They had come down over similarly important buildings in the major cities of the former European Union (since broken up by the cyborgs and turned back into relatively harmless autonomous states).
Additionally, they had come down over the world's top-secret defence and research establishments, including, in the case of the United States, the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, and the US
Space Command's Space Surveillance Centre in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In every case, the most
important people found in those buildings, such as the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister, neither of whom had been given enough warning to make their escape, had been escorted out of their respective buildings and taken away in the mother ships. Neither the VIP prisoners nor the mother ships had ever been seen again and it was widely assumed that the giant saucers had returned to their underwater or mountain retreats, taking the VIPs with them, never to release them. The cyborgs had then taken over the buildings and remained there from that day to this. What they were now doing inside those buildings was anyone's guess.
Unable to continue along Pennsylvania Avenue because the stretch crossing the north side of Lafayette Square was constantly patrolled by cyborgs, Gumshoe took first a left and then a right, circling around the White House via H-Street, then went along G-Street, heading for the old Chinatown. Once exclusively Chinese, the area was now filled with previously well-off whites who had been forced out of their Capitol Hill or Downtown homes by criminal elements and now lived as poorly as the ethnic minorities. Ignored by the cyborgs, who did not differentiate between honest and dishonest humans, the criminal gangs had taken over the fine old houses of the middle and upper classes, turning them into cramped, though highly profitable, rooming houses or apartment blocks.
Though a kind of criminal himself, a cyberspace burglar, Gumshoe had little love of those particular criminals because the grand old Georgetown building in which he now had only a couple of cramped rooms had once been his parents' house and his childhood home. Even now it filled him with bitterness to recall that when he had been only fourteen, his parents (both physicists conducting important government-sponsored research out in Quantico) had been taken away one night by the cyborgs and had never returnecL Gumshoe's grief had been monumental and had in no way been soothed when, a few weeks later, having deduced that the orphaned kid's parents would not be coming back, a bunch of hard men had taken over the house, generously offering to let Gumshoe stay on in his original bedroom with en suite bathroom so long as he paid them an extortionate rent, and had then converted the rest of the expansive, Federal-style house into similar, very cramped apartments. Unable to do anything about it, Gumshoe had paid his rent by exploiting his wizardry on computers to make money and had been doing the same thing ever since. Nevertheless, the situation rankled and was yet another reason for him to resent the rule of the cyborgs which had led to the breakdown of the old infrastructure and the rise of the new criminals.
Which was why he was going out for the night: to give the cyborgs some grief.
After roaring into Chinatown, where he saw no Chinese faces, he slowed down to avoid the rubbish piled up in the road.
Passing a row of dilapidated buildings that were, in fact, old Chinese restaurants that had been converted into dwellings by whites turfed out of better homes and now — having in turn turfed out the Chinese - living impoverished, gangster-dominated lives, he turned into Gallery Place, which looked like a war zone, and came eventually to the old MCI Center. Formerly a 20,000-seat sports arena for the city's basketball and hockey teams, it was now a disused, desolate gathering place for the teenage Speed Freaks.
Drawn in on waves of pounding techno rave music, Gumshoe found himself in the midst of friends.
They were wearing work shirts, chinos, short-sleeved black leather vests, bandannas and sneakers or old Doc Marten boots with steel-reinforced toes. Some had short-cropped hair, others sported ducktails and pompadours I950s-style. Many had tattoos on their arms, hands and faces. Their girlfriends were just as varied and bizarre. The Freaks were sitting in, sprawling upon or leaning against cars with after-market tail fins, aerofoils, skirts, spoilers and flashing purple police lights, low-riders with deep bucket seats and graphic equalizers that emitted waves of light, and garishly decorated, extremely powerful
motorcycles.
Most of the Speed Freaks, whether hot-rodder or motorcyclist, favoured unmuffled engines and obscured licence plates. Weaving between them and performing daring acrobatics were kids on skateboards. A lot of them were drinking beer, popping pills, injecting methamphetamine with hypodermic needles or, if they couldn't afford that, sniffing glue instead. They formed a large, noisy, highly volatile and potentially dangerous tribe. Gumshoe was real glad to see them.
Sweeping up to his closest friends on his Yamaha 400, he went into a fancy skid, then came to a shuddering halt in a cloud or dust that made those nearest to him cough and curse.
Fuck it, Gumshoe,' his best friend, Danny 'Snake Eyes' Kjioke, said, waving the billowing dust from his face and spitting tt out of his mouth. 'What a dumb thing to do.'
'Almost crushed your toes,' Gumshoe retorted, 'but decided to let you off light. The dust's sticking to the gel on your pompadour and it looks like a spider's web. You need another shower, hotshot.'
'You're fuckin' jokin',' Snake Eyes said, seriously alarmed and kneeling low to check his head in the offside mirror of his rainbow-coloured Mazda sedan, experimentally patting his greased pompadour.
Heaving a sigh of relief to see that Gumshoe had indeed been joking, he straightened up, shook his head wearily from side to side, took a slug from his can of Bud and said, 'Very funny. Real smart. So what's cookin', dickhead?'
'Nothing much that I can see, Snake Eyes. I thought you might have some plans.'
'The only plan I've got is to go out and hassle some Full Metal Jackets. That's what we're all here for.'
By 'Full Metal Jackets' he meant both the cyborgs and the small, saucer-shaped sensing devices that glided eerily through the streets at night, always after the midnight hour, to spy on the human population and, if necessary, paralyse them and have them picked up by the dreaded paddy wagons.
The nickname 'Full Metal Jackets' had been picked up from an old war movie that was still shown a lot on home TV and Internet channels. A lot of the kids freaked out on those old movies, just as they did on old music.
'Bonsoir,' Gumshoe said, nodding at the Long Hair who was leaning against the hood of Snake Eyes's Mazda sedan, wearing a ragged white T-shirt under a black leather jacket with silver chains, black leather hotpants, black stockings and high-heeled black leather boots that emphasized her long, shapely legs. She seemed, to Gumshoe, to have delicate features, though this was hard to confirm since, like the female punks occasionally seen on Internet documentaries about the legendary 1970s, she had hacked her hair short and dyed it a mixture of green and pink. She would, of course, still be called a 'Long Hair' as all the girls were these days. Also, to emphasize her archaic punk look, her ebrows ^ j |
d off, painted stripes criss-crossed her oale face, and fake blood was trickling from a 3een snave
the corners of her blue-painted lips. Chewing gum, she responded to Gumshoe's greeting with a superior look and mocking grin.
'So what's this bonsoir shit?' she sneered. "What the hell does that mean?'
'It means "Good evening" in French,' Gumshoe informed her.
'You still trying to learn that shit?' Snake Eyes asked him, surprised.
'Yeah,' Gumshoe said, then returned his attention to the Long Hair. 'So who the hell are you?'
'She's my personal piece,' Snake Eyes informed him, 'and she's come along for the ride.'
'Bonnie Packard,' the Long Hair informed him, turning aside to spit on the ground. She looked up again. 'I'm the leader of the Wild Cats,' she said, 'so don't give me no shit.'
Gumshoe knew the Wild Cats. They were an all-girl gang of Speed Freaks who were as bold as the
'Short Hairs', the guys, when playing dangerous games with the Full Metal Jackets. Gumshoe had thought that Donna Prentiss, a butch bitch, was in charge of the gang — not this unknown, sneering slice of prime teenage ham.
'So what happened to the slippery cunt?' he asked, referring to Donna Prentiss, who was known to put out freely in real time, albeit with her own sex.
'She was zapped by a Full Metal Jacket,' Bonnie replied, 'and then taken away in a paddy wagon. We won't see her again.' That's for goddamned sure,' Snake Eyes said, grinning to reveal his bad teeth. 'No one comes back from that one.'
Are you and her interacting?' Gumshoe asked of Snake Eyes while nodding towards the Long Hair.
Only by e-mail,' Snake Eyes replied. 'I don't like that hands-on stuff'
I like it either way,' Bonnie Packard said, spitting once more on the ground, then looking directly, boldly, at Gumshoe. 'So what about you?'
'I don't like that real-time boogie,' Gumshoe informed her. 'Give me cybersex any day. I mean, it's cleaner and safer.'
'You ever had it real-time?' Bonnie asked, her purple lips crooked in a grin that would have been mocking had it not been for the dribbles of painted blood, which made her look like a vampire. 'If not, you might be missing something that's better than reported.'
'You can't miss what you've never experienced,' Gumshoe responded, not remotely embarrassed to be an IRL virgin, which so many of his friends were these days. 'I pick what I want and I choose my time and place and I don't have no Long Hair complications. I'll take that good old cybersex any day and I say it works fine. E-mail me and find out.'
'Go fuck yourself,' Bonnie said.
'He often does,' Snake Eyes said, grinning wickedly, glancing around him to see the other Speed Freaks, male and female alike, drinking beer, popping pills, sniffing glue and injecting methamphetamine in the moonlit darkness of the enormous sports arena which, with its 20,000 seats empty, looked haunted and eerie. The CD had been changed and now, replacing the techno rave music, Elvis Presley was singing 'Bossa Nova Baby' and the Speed Freaks were going wild, working themselves up to the song's relentless, percussive rhythm, blaring out of speakers rigged by some deejay genius to the rusty overhead arc lamps of the neglected stadium. 'Hey, dig this,' Snake Eyes continued, turning back to Gumshoe and Bonnie. 'Elvis is alive and well and has been seen coming out of the White House with some Full Metal Jackets of the more human kind, by which I mean cyborgs. He's producing something in there, some really big number, that'll let him make his second Comeback Special. That's why the Full Metal Jackets are here — they're here to resurrect Elvis. God, that Elvis, I love the fuckin' dude! Here, have some of these.'
As Gumshoe took, and swallowed, a couple of Snake Eyes's capsules of highly concentrated amphetamine, glancing sideways
at Bonnie who was doing the same, he, too, was swept away by the voice of the dead hero and wished that Elvis was truly alive and well and preparing to make another Comeback. In fact, Elvis and Marlon Brando had come full cycle, first cult heroes of the Old Age, now the same in the New Age, having been resurrected as computerized holographic images that seemed as real as the originals when
performing in virtual reality concerts on the Internet and in cyberdiscos. While Marlon Brando, in a digitally coloured version of The Wild One, had inspired a lot of the Speed Freaks, particularly the bikers, to imitate him in looks, dress and speech, it was Elvis who had really made the greatest comeback. In the new teenage world of cybersex, where e-mail relationships blurred the differences between male and female, it was Elvis, with his androgynous beauty, as well as with his transformation from uncouth teenage rebel to otherworldly Sun King, a Captain Marvel for the future, who had really caught the imagination of the younger New Age generation. Gumshoe knew all about Elvis, not only through the Internet, but because his mother had been fanatical about him, even though the so-called
'King' had died before she was born. Nevertheless, Gumshoe had, in a very real sense, been brought up with Elvis (a fairly unusual occurrence in a middle-class scientific Georgetown family) and now, with Elvis being so big with his own generation, he was fascinated by the question of why his mother, whom he had loved dearly, had, like him and so many others, revered the great rock 'n' roll performer.
Gumshoe had lost his mother when he was fourteen years of age (both his mother and his father, though he had felt her loss the most) and now wanted, with an unnatural passion, to know everything about her. Thus, as the amphetamine hit him, he wondered why she had loved Elvis and decided to ask the Cowboy about it.
Fucking A,' he said aloud as the effects of the amphetamine rushed through his body, up to his neck, to his brain, making him reel from the force of it, his throat constricting from its biting, bitter taste. 'Do it, man! Talk to the fucking Cowboy. Find out where Mom came from.'
'What's that?' Snake Eyes asked.
'Nothing,' Gumshoe said.
'Who's the Cowboy?' Bonnie the Long Hair asked as she, too, reeled from the amphetamine rush. 'Are you losing it, man?'
'No, man, I'm not losing it,' Gumshoe retorted. 'I'm just airing my thoughts. Hey, Snake Eyes,' he said, turning to his old friend, bombed out, maybe psycho, 'have you ever heard of a dude called Wilson?'
'I got a couple of buddies by that name. Which one do you mean?'
'I mean the Wilson being brought up on e-mail. I mean a ghost out in cyberspace.'
'Don't know nothing about no ghost in cyberspace. Don't know no Wilson who ain't a Speed Freak. So who the fuck is your Wilson?'
'Never mind,' Gumshoe said.
'Come on,' Snake Eyes responded amiably, already forgetting the question, slipping down into the seat of his automobile, beside the vampirish Bonnie Packard. 'Let's go and tease some Full Metal Jackets and see how the cards fall. This is Viva Las Vegas time.'
'Wow!' Bonnie screamed.
Heart palpitating, head spinning, experiencing what seemed to be an abruptly heightened reality, Gumshoe cast a grin in the direction of Snake Eyes and Bonnie, now sitting side by side in the latter's tuned-up, rainbow-coloured Mazda sedan. Feeling a surprising spasm of envy for Snake Eyes, though instantly suppressing it, he kicked his silver-tanked Yamaha 400 into life, heard the awesome roaring of the many other Speed Tribe motorcycles and automobiles, then burned out of the sports stadium, into the dangerous night, preparing, as he choked in exhaust fumes, to hunt down the hunters.
So who the fuck's Wilson? he wondered as he raced into darkness.
Chapter Five
As Michael approached Freedom Bay, marching resolutely across the vast, snow-covered plain, the mountains of Queen Maud Land appeared to be shifting, riser higher, until, from being initially a thin inky ribbon on the otherwise white horizon, they had become a towering series of jagged, ice-capped peaks that dominated the unpolluted azure sky. Almost directly ahead, coming closer as he advanced, was the broad cliff face honeycombed with the tunnels that led into the community. Thrusting out from some of the tunnels were the docking bays for the vertical-landing aircraft. Exterior elevators joined one level to another, rising hundreds of feet above the ground.
