The Hammer Falls Read online

  “Back in my twenties, we did a lot of great work, dragging some of the megacorp filth into the light of day. It was a constant struggle, like watching some dinosaur eating everything in sight and then crapping all over the world because it thought it had a right to, because isn’t that what capitalism is for, making money? Then there’s me and other people like me trying to help clean it up. That was us, trying to clean up dinosaur crap with teaspoons.” Her face was grim. “I have six hundred thousand terabytes of stolen data in a secret server only I can access, enough criminal evidence to bring down three megacorps and half the U.S. government, so much that even I don’t know the extent of what’s in there, except that it’s damning as heck for a lot of powerful people. But I can’t get to it because my AI has a lock on him for my parole.”

  The thermolator dinged; she took out the teapot and placed the tea ball into it.

  “Your computer’s a him?”

  “Yeah, I programmed him to sound like Jimmy Stewart in my head. And he gets a little miffed at being called a computer. That’s like calling a twentieth-century computer an abacus. He prefers to be called an artificial person.”

  “Okay, artificial person then.”

  “Growing up with my grandmother, she was a fan, so I saw a bunch of his old movies. It’s just comforting hearing the voice, reminds me of my nan. But things are different now, right? From when we were kids? Back then, the civilian government at least pretended to function, instead of being a rubber stamp for the megacorps and the military. They called me the White Rabbit, because anytime anyone got close to catching me, I just threw up a cloud of trippy chaff and disappeared down the rabbit hole. But then I screwed up, just once. I got caught.

  “The prison guards, such clever souls, started calling me Bunny. I did my time. And when I got out, everything was different. Nothing that I knew, nothing that my AI used to have down to a science was useful anymore. Everything I knew was caveman tech. It’s taken me a long time to catch up, plus having to work around and around the locks that they put on. All these young hotshots just tear up the quantum matrices. Half the time, it’s like they’re speaking a different language. Then there’s the whole getting-old debacle.”

  He laughed wryly and raised his cup. “Hear hear, sister.”

  “My brain used to be able to keep up with Jimmy. Now Jimmy has to wait on me most of the time. I used to be able to go days without sleep, completely immersed in whatever gallant crusade I was on. Nowadays I’m happy to be in bed at nine p.m.”

  “Are they ever going to take the locks off?”

  She wiped a tear. “Not until I give over the data. I refused to, so they put the lock on me. It’s like kneecapping a runner intentionally. Why would I give up something I worked so hard for? They won’t open up the lock until I do. My case gets reviewed every two years, but it’s a farce. But I haven’t been the same since prison. Prison is not good for cyberpaths.”

  “Cyberpaths...”

  “People who connect directly, wirelessly. Like telepathy, but this is real. For instance, I can sense your netlink right there, its connections to the networks around us. It’s like a little rainbow dot that I can reach out and touch with my mind. Prisons shut down cyberpaths. Our AIs are nullified, our connections squelched.” She swallowed a hard memory. “The only way I can describe it to you is suddenly being struck blind and deaf all at once. Or having ninety-eight percent of your memories suddenly turned off, and you’re left feeling like an honest-to-Isis idiot, like most of who you are just suddenly went dark. Even though less than one percent of what comes into an uplinked brain is your own experience, it all still touches you, sits out there waiting, like a hundred billion lives you’ve already led, and all you have to do is reach for them.”

  She wiped her eyes again, poured two cups of amber-brown liquid, unleashing scents both unfamiliar and delicious, spicy and subtle. “Every day I was in there, I wished they had just killed me. It would have been more humane.” She cleared her throat and swallowed again. “And then I got out.” She offered him the cup.

  “Thanks,” he said, and took a sip. The teacup looked like a thimble in his hand. Subtleties swam over his tongue, across his palate, and when he breathed, they filled his nose as well. His hand started shaking. He put the cup down and clasped them between his knees.

  Her gaze had gone distant, lost in some vast universe of memory. “And that’s what it’s like. It made losing my kids feel like a walk in the park.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Losing my kids was like losing all my fingernails and toenails, but losing my mind...”

  “What happened to your kids?”

  “The things I was doing cost those corps a lot of money. They indentured my kids to help pay it off, and I went to prison. I had never even heard of such a thing, but when the corps got to write their own legal codes with the rubber stamp from the Supreme Court, everything changed.” Her gaze went distant again. “They’re in their twenties now, got high-paying jobs with full medical, but they have to pay most of their salaries back to the company, and they’re utterly brainwashed that their mom is the most heinous criminal who ever lived, since it’s because of me that they live in servitude.”

  “So you don’t see them?”

  “I keep tabs sometimes, but they’ve made it clear that I should never contact them. Their owners told them that if they try to contact me, they’ll lose their ‘jobs.’ They’ll never be free.”

  They sat in silence for a while, each sipping their tea.

  When the silence grew too taut, Horace said, “That’s fucked up.” It sounded lame even as it came out of his mouth, but it was all he could manage.

  Then she blinked and said, “My friend got my message. He’s going to go through the video pixel by pixel, looking for anomalies.” She dabbed at her nose and her voice lost its wind, dwindling to a whisper. “Come back in an hour.”

  Trask slid back from his desk full of papers. “Sit down, Hammer, take a load off. You look like you need it. Whiskey?”

  “The crack of eight a.m. seems like the perfect time.” Horace sat across the desk from Trask’s chair. The shades were open and the countryside whooshed past outside, brown fields and struggling forests. The last couple of years had seen a drought in western New York, which, with the proximity of the Great Lakes, had not seen a drought in living memory. Endless fields of AgriMax corn looked brown and curled, hypnotic rows sweeping past, cast into shadow by the low-lying sun.

  While Trask poured him a finger of whiskey from a decanter, Horace said, “Mr. Trask, I’m here to thank you for what you did. You already stuck your neck out for me, just letting me get onboard. And I certainly didn’t intend to get into anything with any of your boys. And I sure as hell wasn’t expecting anybody to pitch in for this thing.” He rapped the box on his chest with a knuckle.

  “The fact you didn’t expect it is exactly why everybody pitched in. It wasn’t so bad when we spread out the cost a little.”

  “Whose idea was it?”

  “Tina’s.”

  Surprise clamped Horace into silence momentarily. Then he remembered her sleeping in the chair in his room. The wooziness of the experience had let that fact whisper past him.

  “She’s a good kid,” Trask said. “And handy with the gauze and blood-stop.”

  “Where did you find her?”

  “Her dad trained a lot of guys. He was good. Word gets around. I knew of him but hadn’t met him. When he got killed, a lot of people in the Business mourned him. And there’s this poor little sixteen-year-old girl. Too mouthy by a mile, a weird, little nerd. She disappeared for a while. God knows what she got herself into, poor kid. But we were in Little Rock and there came this kid, god knows what she was doing there, all growed up, asking me for a job. I was a little worried that a cute little thing like her might not be able to hack it among all these knuckle-draggers, but her dad was one of the best.”

  “She is awfully easy on the eyes.”

  Trask’s eyes fixed and narrowed
on Horace. “And fucking smart. She’s read more books than both of us put together.”

  “How was it for her, among these cavemen?”

  “Well, on the second day, we were setting up for a promo gig in Tulsa. Ricky Khan started putting the moves on her, being a little too pushy about it, and she just takes him down, right there. And all she used was his finger.” Trask stuck up his index finger. “Never seen anything like it. He tried to get up again, which was his second mistake. Never was too bright, that guy. Anyway, he’s dead now. Dumb son of a bitch got himself killed in a bar fight. So she’s been with me four years. They still get drunk on occasion and think they can get into her pants, but she seems fine with reminding them otherwise. Gets along with most everybody.”

  “Except Jocie.”

  Trask snorted. “About the time I get ready to fire Lex just to get rid of her, he wins a big bout and makes me a stack of money, so I don’t. But she’s a poison pill, that one.”

  “Mr. Trask, when we get to the next promo stop, I’d like to sign some autographs. Whatever your standard rate is. And you and everyone who contributed get to keep all the money.” He rapped the box again.

  “You sure about that?”

  He thought about the video. “I don’t know I got any reason to hide anymore. If they find me, it might be high time to settle up with them.”

  Trask leaned back in his chair. “It’s your skin.”

  Horace’s netlink chime woke him from a nap in his compartment. Between Trask’s whiskey and the lack of sleep the night before, he had crashed hard.

  He answered it. “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Harkness, it’s Bunny. Your video.”

  He tried to gauge the result from the sound of her voice, but got nothing. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Are you all right? I’ve been trying to reach you for half an hour.”

  “Naw, I’m raring to go.” At least he had woken up.

  In the driver’s compartment, she sat him down with another cup of tea and faced him squarely. Her face was tight and serious.

  “So what’s the verdict?”

  “The verdict is inconclusive.”

  “What the hell does that mean? Is that her or isn’t it?”

  “It’s not that simple. I’m going to let you talk to Bobcat directly. He can explain it better than I can. Just a second while we sync.” Her eyelids fluttered, her head twitched to the side, her jaw cranked open and closed. Then she straightened up and stared straight ahead.

  “Sir, you can call me Bobcat.” It was still her voice, but it had taken on an Australian accent.

  “Pleased to meet you, Bobcat.”

  “So, to business, mate. Has the video been doctored or constructed in some way? Yes, it has. The images of the location and the men standing around her have been modified. Data debris everywhere. That is a very slapdash job, that is. The image of the woman as well has been altered. Her face has been shadowed, but because of the angles, the shadows, and her hair, it is impossible to discern if that is indeed her real face. There is evidence that the shadows there were deepened—”

  “What about the moles on her back? Were those real? Were they painted in somehow?”

  The reply came with about a one-second delay. “No, they were real. The woman in the video is not computer generated, and the moles were real.”

  “Fuck.” Horace said it slowly, a sibilant exhalation trailing off to a painful clack of the tongue.

  Again the one-second delay. “She was indeed tied up that way. I checked the data integrity of every frame. The ropes were real. She was naked.”

  Nausea washed through him.

  Bunny’s eyes watched him as if they were the only thing in her head that she controlled. The sadness and concern in her eyes did not correlate with the matter-of-fact, analytical tone of her voice.

  “You said the location was modified?” Horace said.

  “Yes, the dungeon-like appearance was enhanced, shall we say, although I cannot say what it may have looked like otherwise. It cannot have been too different, or the shadows would have been completely wrong, and those would have left more evidence of tampering. I’m sorry I cannot be more conclusive. I’ll send a complete report to Bunny for you to read at your leisure. This has been the executive summary.”

  “Thanks, brother. Anything I can do to repay you?”

  “An action figure. We could never get those Down Under.”

  “You got it.”

  “Relinquishing vocal control back to Bunny. Cheers, mate.”

  Bunny blinked twice, shuddered, and rubbed her face. “Oh, Mr. Harkness, I’m so sorry.”

  The nausea passed, however, replaced by the heat of anger. “They’re playing games with me. It doesn’t matter if that’s really Lilly, the effect on me is what they want.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Start playing their game myself.”

  ROUND 2

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The train pulled into Buffalo, New York, barely in time for the promotional event. The grass-peppered parking lot outside Ralph Wilson Stadium was already starting to fill up with people camped out, waiting.

  The ancient football stadium had seen better days. The Buffalo Blazers had played there for more than eighty years, had even gone through a couple of name changes along the way, but now it had been abandoned for a newer, bigger, flashier facility about ten years ago, a place with real-time holographic capability on the field itself. This old stadium was now being used by a conglomerate of area high schools and the State University of Buffalo.

  Horace felt the old gridiron history seeping through the concrete under his feet as he stepped off the train. Gone were the days of pads and helmets from when he was a kid. Regenecorp and the availability of regeneration technology had evolved American football into a game more resembling rugby on Krok. Injuries were commonplace, including broken necks, shattered ribs, and splintered joints. What would have been career-ending injuries when he was a kid were now just another day at work for modern-day football players.

  With fans already gathering here for the event, Trask and the fighters hustled through the setup process, deploying the tables and flashing lights, setting up the chairs, signing in the local models hired to be their own kind of attraction. If there was anything that went with brawny, hard-knuckled fighters in the minds of the public, it was breasts, booty, and brilliant smiles. It was not an association that Horace cared to do away with. Buffalo was a much larger market than the last promo event. Trask was pulling out all the stops. Each fighter would have a spokesmodel beside him at the table, ushering the fans along, being generous with collagen kisses and saline squeezes.

  Trask even wheeled out the half-scale replica of a Civil War-era cannon, loaded it with paper packets of black powder and blank wadding, and used it to signal the commencement of the event. A thunderclap and a cloud of blue-gray smoke, and the few hundred fans cheered. On the heels of the cannon report, music pulsed from the speakers, echoing across the expanse of parking lot.

  Horace would stay out of sight until Trask’s special entrance for him, planned for the height of the crowd’s attendance.

  In his compartment, Horace dressed himself in the only show suit he had brought with him and tried desperately to forget that every impulse told him to get to Vegas, hitchhike if he had to. But there was no way he could be there in time.

  The show suit was a sequined explosion of holographic flames on black elastane. The neckline was V-cut to his sternum, meant to show off his massive pectorals; however, it would now reveal the box over his heart. The best concealment he could manage was a black t-shirt under the show suit. The t-shirt ruined some of the effect, but that was preferable to answering a thousand unpleasant questions.

  Every ten minutes or so, a female voice, slick and sultry, came over the PA system outside, extolling the fans to “Stick around for a very special guest.” The lines stretched out to scores waiting their turn for autographs and photos with the
fighters and models.

  About hour into the event, Tina knocked on his door. “Two minutes, Methuselah.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He took out his injector and a bottle of Go Juice. Something in him wanted to give these people a real show, even if all he was going to do was walk down to the pavement. More than any time he could remember, this felt like it might be his last appearance ever in front of a crowd. He shot himself in the arm and sighed at the rush throbbing through him, the way his heart sped up, the way his muscles felt like electrodes in a lightning storm, the way his tattoos blazed to life.

  Opening the door, he found Tina waiting in the hallway.

  Her eyes bulged for a moment. “By the power of graybeards, you do clean up. When you’re not mostly dead, that is.”

  “Glad you noticed, Short Round. Take me to your leader.”

  And then of course, following her, he felt like a dirty old man again as he simply could not take his eyes off the way she moved, the way her orange-and-yellow polka-dot tights hugged her legs and buttocks. She had that grace that real martial artists possessed; it was simply inherent in who she was, like a dancer’s grace mixed with a restrained explosion. Her ponytail stuck out from the back of her head like the tail of a feisty young filly, erect and bushy.

  She led him to the central ramp that led down among the tables. The hubbub of the throng, numbering perhaps a thousand people, came through the door: laughter, conversation. In the air above the crowd, hovering at the periphery, was a drone about the size of a trashcan lid, probably from the local media. Horace immediately ducked back, but then chided himself for foolishness. He was done hiding. In less than a minute, the entire world would know exactly where he was.