Hey, Ma! he thought and waved. But she was dead. And that wasn’t funny.
Eagle rode to the elevator bank, hopped the glass diving bell down to the lobby. Sheets of illuminated crystal dangled overhead, an indoor aurora borealis that looked awesome when stoned, which he was, waving bye to his friends and neighbors as he hit the domed streets of New San Francisco.
Everybody knew Eagle. That was the great thing. Beneath the sheer poison-and-shatterproof plastic that encased the twenty-block bubble of the Green Zone, roughly 8,000 still moved and breathed, and he saw them all each and every night as he made his rounds through the former financial district, spreading joy with whole-wheat crust, fresh tomatoes and veggies, prewar sausage and pepperoni.
Half the open spaces in the Green Zone were vertical farms now, hydroponically providing for the needs of the city; and thank God they understood that quality weed was every bit as fundamental as rice and beans, in this new economy.
Eagle wheeled around the Embarcadero, past tribal art galleries and acid jazz bars where third-shifters decompressed, downed shots of sketchy bathtub liquor and hoped for the best.
Outside the bubble, the world was still dead. And you could still see it, if you wanted to look. The black ash fields that used to be parks. The ferry terminal mausoleum. The south side of Market Street, where the lights were still off. All just a window away.
But just a stone’s throw from the edge––one block from the Transamerica Pyramid, on the corner of Front and Clay––was Pizza Orgasmica: the only surviving 24-hour gourmet pizza emporium.
“Couple of outcalls, if you want ’em,” said Bud, as he entered for refills. “One code red, and one from somewhere out in the Black. I told him fuck no, but the guy said he knows you.”
“Really?” Eagle said, grinning.
Sometimes it was fun to go outside.
V.
Death Machine #24 stood at attention in the outer courtyard of the defeated enemy objective. He had orders not to move.
#24 followed orders.
Sweep and clear, hold and defend, seek and destroy. #24 had survived eighteen engagements because he hardly needed the voices in his ear to do what he had to do.
He could follow orders almost before they were given.
His armorers and handlers were sure he was a professional athlete or a vet, probably a Marine. Tully Forbes, the machinist who rigged the steel beartrap replacement for his missing mandible, swore that once, when he shouted, “Gimme ten!” #24 assumed the position and did pushups until Tully made him stop with a sleep spike.
But that wasn’t true. #24 could count to ten, and sometimes even higher, when his medpak was working overtime.
Over and over, he tried to count the bodies laid out in front of him. After ten, things got foggy, but he didn’t have to use his fingers. If he used his fingers, he’d only be able to count up to seven.
The bodies were covered in sheets. The cleanup crew dropped color-coded tags on them. Green, red, or black. Hardly any green ones; the sheets over them were only spotted with blood. Lots of red and black. The red ones were a mess, but the black ones were yard sales of loose and charred body parts.
A couple of men and a woman walked down the line. They wore white pressurized biohazard suits, but #24 smelled the bracing stink of their breath and sweat venting out of their gas masks. Even as his medpak kicked down a bolus of tryptophan to make him drowsy, he ached to have them.
The woman was different. She smelled dead, but she walked and talked and the others listened to her angry orders.
The dead-smelling lady came over to review the surviving Raiders offensive line. Her skin was a dull gray-green behind her mask, shot through with black capillaries. He could ignore the itching hunger aroused by her assistants, but her rank aroma screamed at #24 to shoot, burn and behead her, sweep and clear.
But the order never came.
As she inspected them, she snapped over her shoulder, “Who runs these fucking rodeo clowns?”
A flunky checked his PDA. “A civilian contractor, Sherman Laliotitis. He was a professional gamer prewar, the best in the world at squad-based combat simulations.”
“Reliable?”
“He’s a sociopathic little prick, ma’am, but he’d do the work for free. Loves his toys.”
“Get him on the phone. If he still can’t deliver viable candidates, then he’s either incompetent or he’s a saboteur.”
She stopped and looked into the eyes of #24. Her eyes were the color of bile. She never blinked. “Check the headset on this one.”
“We did, ma’am. It sustained no cranial damage during the engagement.”
“Check it again, and double its downers. They’re supposed to be in a coma, and this one’s looking at me.”