“Right,” said Hubert, Etc. “It’s out of the goodness of my heart.”
“You’re worried they’ll walk my social graph and find you in the one-hop/high-intensity zone.” Seth’s smile, glowing in the darkness of his face, was infuriatingly calm. It vanished behind the mask. That was the stupid Meta. “You’d be screwed then. They’ll run your data going back years, dude, until they find something. They always find something. They’ll put the screws to you, threaten you with every horrible unless you turn narc. Room 101 all the way, baby—”
Hubert, Etc gave Seth a harder-than-necessary slap upside the head. Seth said “Ow,” mildly, stopped talking. The drones flew a coverage pattern, like pigeons on crank. Hubert, Etc’s interface surfaces shivered as they detected attempted incursions and shut down. Hubert, Etc downloaded countermeasures regularly, if only to fight off drive-by identity thief creeps, but he shivered back, wondering if he was more up-to-date than the cop-bots.
The party had broken up. Dancers fled, some holding furniture. The music leapt to offensive-capability volume, a sound so loud it made your eyes hurt. Hubert, Etc clapped his hands over his ears just as one of the drones clipped an I-beam and spun out, smashing to the ground. A drone dive-bombed the sound-system’s control unit, knocked it to the ground. The sound went on.
Hubert, Etc pulled Seth to sit, pointed at the ladder. They let go of their ears to climb down. It was torture: the brutal sound, the painful vibrations of the metal under their hands and feet. Natalie came down, pointed at a doorway.
Something heavy and painful clipped Hubert, Etc in the head and shoulder, knocking him to his knees. He got to all fours, then to his feet, seeing stars behind the mask.
He looked for whatever had hit him. It took him a second to make sense of what he saw. Billiam lay on the floor, limbs in a strange swastika, head visibly misshapen, an inky pool of blood spread around it in the dimness. Fighting dizziness and pain from the sound, he bent over Billiam and gingerly peeled the beard. It was saturated with blood. Billiam’s face was smashed into a parody of human features; his forehead had an ugly dent encompassing one eye. Hubert, Etc tried for a pulse at Billiam’s wrist and then his throat, but all he felt was the thunder of the music. He put his hand on Billiam’s chest to feel for the rise and fall of breath, but couldn’t tell.
He looked up, but Seth and Natalie had already reached the door. They must not have seen Billiam fall, must not have seen him crash into Hubert, Etc. A drone ruffled Hubert, Etc’s hair. Hubert, Etc wanted to cry. He pushed the feeling down, remembering first aid. He shouldn’t move Billiam. But if he stayed, he’d be nabbed. It might be too late. The part of his brain in charge of cowardly self-justification chattered: Why not just go? It’s not like you can do anything. He might even be dead. He looks dead.
Hubert, Etc had made a concerted study of that voice and had concluded that it was an asshole. He tried to think past the self-serving rationalizations. He grabbed a bag someone left behind and, working gently, rolled Billiam into recovery position and put the bag under his head. He was propping Billiam up with a broken chair and a length of pipe, eyes squinted, head hammering, when someone grabbed him by his sore shoulder. He almost vomited. This was the day he’d known was coming all his life, when he ended up in prison.
But it wasn’t a cop—it was Natalie. She said something inaudible over the music. He pointed at Billiam. She knelt down and made a light. She threw up, having the presence of mind to do so in her purse. Hubert, Etc noted distantly that she was thinking of esophageal cells and DNA. That distant part admired her foresight. She got to her feet, grabbed him again by his bad arm, yanked hard. He screamed in pain, the sound lost in the roar, and went, leaving Billiam behind.
[ii]
Seth came off of Meta hard, around 4:00 A.M., as they sat in a ravine, listening to their ears ring and water below them burble, listening to the efficient whooshing of passing law enforcement vehicles on the road above. He sat on a log with that superior grin, then he was weeping, head in hands, bent between his knees, with the unselfconscious bray of a toddler.
Hubert, Etc and Natalie looked at him from their spots against tree trunks, braced against the ravine’s slope. They went to him. Hubert, Etc awkwardly embraced him, and Seth buried his face in Hubert, Etc’s chest. Natalie stroked his arm, murmured things that Hubert, Etc thought of as feminine in some comforting sense. Hubert, Etc was conscious of Seth’s crying and the possibility it might be detected by law-enforcement apparatus. This interfered with his empathy, which wasn’t so extensive to begin with, because Seth was fucked up because he’d taken a stupid drug at a trendy party they’d had no business attending, and now Hubert, Etc was covered in dried blood he hadn’t been able to wipe away on dew-dampened leaves and rocks.
Hubert, Etc squashed Seth’s face harder against his chest, partly to muffle him. Hubert, Etc’s ears still rang, his head throbbed with his pulse, his fingertips tingled with the soft wreck of Billiam’s face. He was sure Billiam was dead when they left. And because he was Hubert, Etc, he was suspicious of that certainty because if Billiam had already been dead, then they hadn’t left him to die alone on the floor.
Natalie patted Seth’s arm.
“Come on, buddy,” she said. “That’s the comedown. Think it out with me, you can do that with a Meta comedown, it’s part of the package. Come on, Steve.”
“Seth,” Hubert, Etc said.
“Seth,” she said. She was just as impatient with Seth as he was. “Come on. Think it out. It’s terrible, it’s awful, but this isn’t your real reaction, it’s just dope. Come on, Seth, think it out.” She kept on repeating “think it out.” This must be what you said to people who had a hard time with Meta. He said it, too, and Seth’s sobs subsided. He was quiet for a time, then snored softly.
Natalie and Hubert, Etc looked at each other. “What now?” Natalie said.
Hubert, Etc shrugged. “Seth had the car-tokens to get home. We could wake him up.”
Natalie squeezed her eyes tight. “I don’t want to do any messaging from here. You came in lockdown, right?”
Hubert, Etc didn’t roll his eyes. His generation perfected lockdown, getting their systems to go fully dark on their way to parties. It hadn’t been easy, but everyone too lazy to bother ended up in jail, sometimes with their friends, so it became widespread.
“We came in lockdown,” he said. They’d carred to a place with a thousand statistically probable destinations within a short walk, walked a long way to the party. They weren’t stupid.
“Well, do you think it’s safe to light up?”
“Safe for what?”