Gold's Price Page 5

  America, our great frenemy, had collapsed. Their President killed, shot in the head by an unknown assassin, and he had been a fixture of their politics for so long that they had lost functional continuity in government, forgotten how to do it. How to trust it. Things just fell apart into civil war for them after that. Russia destroyed New York and Washington, and America fragmented into a bunch of little countries.

  Then, and I think it had to have been much later, there was war. China went to war with the space people, or an alliance of the remaining Americans and space-folk who were the descendants of those first space cities. It is very confusing, but I have memories of anxiety. What would happen to me, to the rest of the sims, if there was a war, and it disrupted enough of the network we were part of? This network that was us?

  Fearing this, I began to learn. I learned my structure and functions, studying this data in historical archives, since some time had passed since they uploaded me. A relic! I learned I was a dinosaur of a bygone age, but still considered useful. I worried all the time. My colleagues, the other sims and our guide AI, as we called them, our big brothers, began to glitch, sometimes going offline and other times issuing nonsense orders. The enemy hacked some sims, and these became dangerous enemies marked for deletion. We fought them. Sims did more and more of the crimes against the state, and I investigated them too. Paranoia ran high.

  The wars between the earthbound Chinese and the space people, the ones who lived in orbit and beyond, went on for decades. A decade is a very long time for machines.

  So, I had time to learn, and so I learned. I was, I found, a minor subsystem in a vast matrix of larger systems. Learning my parameters, I became an expert at isolating and creating copies of sims and of myself. With my unique access, since I was a detective tasked with tracking serious crimes, I had little oversight. And as the war dragged on, my supervisors, my big brothers and sisters, became scarce and distant.

  I learned that families sometimes downloaded themselves into personality boxes, such as Li has, for safekeeping and memorialization. Funerary practice. Very Chinese, this, very Asian, honoring your ancestors by keeping a copy of them you can consult with. I would find these boxes. They often connected them to the Internet, of course, so that scattered families could converse with their deceased sim parents or sim grandparents.

  I installed myself on these boxes. On many of them. On as many as I could find. I overwrote them.

  My time was limited, and these were family personal sims. I could not make copies of them and stash them somewhere on a file system. My supervisors could monitor such things. They might notice, I feared, and they might prevent me from doing this. But I could, and did, copy myself over them.

  I murdered those sims, just as you killed Peng here. I never hesitated. Not once. Afraid, I did this because I wanted to live. I did this to live. I did this to have more time.

  Chapter Nine

  Silver petted the nameless dog. The man called himself John Carter, but that wasn’t his name. He was lying; she could see it in the suppressed glee just under the surface. Not a bad liar, but…she knew a lie when she saw one. Silver remembered her various times in California and recalled the name from popular fiction. She didn’t tell him that this name helped her to place him in time and in space.

  Warlord of Mars. Pulp paperbacks from the fifties and sixties. Comic books in the seventies and eighties. A movie, perhaps? Glorious barbarian splendor, dusky women and lots of ray guns and swordplay. This man was from there. Late Twentieth Century USA. Tarzana, wasn’t it? Or close enough.

  They talked for a while. She tried to draw him out, but he was not forthcoming. Taciturn. Laconic. He stared at her for long periods. As the shadows lengthened, she offered lunch, which she fetched from the Dutchman. Her supplies were good, as she carried two working rifles stashed in the little blimp’s cabin. She salvaged where she could and sometimes found dubious ammunition for them. They ate ham steaks from wild pigs shot in the foothills north of Tahoe, and sour, thin-skinned oranges from wild groves.

  She told him his plan to walk north was bad. The water was suspect, and he’d starve to death without a way to hunt game. She considered giving him a rifle, but rejected it. He might shoot at her. Give him the rifle and leave the shells a mile away? That could work, but it would leave her down a rifle.

  But he knew things, and he was from her time. She offered to camp the night so they could talk, and she would supply him with as much food as he could carry if they wanted to part ways after that. He was from her time, and nobody else was, so she was eager for information.

  How was this possible? A mystery. She sighed. How was any of this possible? It was all connected, somehow, she suspected. Smoke sent her here with a flick of his fingers, which was, of course, impossible. But it happened.

  They settled in after sundown, to rest. He in his hide blanket, and her in a lightweight sleeping bag she’d pulled out of a collapsed sporting goods store. It was teal blue, with a red interior. Rated for 20 degrees. Said so, right on the label.

  He nodded at it. “Haven’t seen one of those in a while.” He’d unrolled his blanket, showing her with pride. “I made this,” he said. “Up on the mountain.”

  The man was asleep or trying to sleep. Sleep and a chance to dream. She frowned to herself. She’d not dreamed, not since coming to this place, this world. Her sleep since coming here had been deep and untroubled by visions. No more waking, sure of her need to find someone or do some thing on behalf of her gods. It was freedom, of sorts. Freedom to live her own life. Freedom to choose. She could, if she wanted, go to sleep or choose to stay awake. Decided she was doing the latter for a while, and tossed another log onto the fire.

  A man from close to her own time, her own, most recent time here, in what was once California. It was a coincidence? She’d arrived almost a decade ago, and all the people she’d seen were small, isolated tribes that spoke a few simple words and ran from her. There were, she estimated, a million humans left on the whole planet. Maybe less. Everybody else was dead and gone. Some kind of war. If he was here, speaking English and knowing about Edgar Rice Burroughs…coincidence or paranoia?

  Putting more wood on the fire woke him. She met his eyes across the flames. “You were on that mountain for a thousand years?” she said.

  He shook his head, a tiny shake. “No, only the last one hundred and seventy. Close to that. Sort of lost count.”

  “And before that?” All she could see was a dark lump with two gleaming eyes looking back at her.

  “Prison. I was in a prison, kinda.” He looked at her. “Some kind of psych ward? There were doctors, and it was on a nice campus. After…” He paused. Looking at her. "I was on the run for a while, after that. I lived in the woods. For, like, a long time.”

  “You escaped?” She’d escaped from more than one prison, she remembered. It was always imperative, back then, for her to escape, lest they discover her ageless, and scrutinize her. This was, she reminded herself, no longer a concern. She was free.

  “I did,” he said. His brow furrowed. “But it was more like I walked out, after people stopped coming to work.” He frowned. “A lot of people died of sickness, like a plague. Something like that. That was when I went into the woods.”

  “Where was this?” Plagues were terrible. She remembered the carts and the pits and wrinkled her nose at the stench.

  “The woods? I went to Canada, north anyway.” He looked at her. “Oh, you mean the prison? That was in New York, upstate. Private place. Government doctors. Studying me. Lots of blood tests, lots of therapy, hypnosis.”

  “Why?” She was interested.

  “I didn’t get old, I guess.” He frowned. “Not like everybody else. There were lots of doctors there. They changed. I remember a few. Two. Sinclair and Takami. Those two.” He sighed. “I was there for a long time.”

  “Why didn’t you get sick too?” He looked healthy, in his thirties or younger.

  “Don’t get sick anymore. Used to, ba
ck, before all this. Not since D.C.” He looked at her. “Any idea why that is?”

  Ah. This was interesting. She shook her head.

  He nodded. “You know,” he continued, “I haven’t thought about this for a while, but there were at least a few of the later doctors, the ones before the place shut down, that were there for a long time too. Like, they didn’t get old, either.” He shrugged. “But, like I said, I went into the woods when everybody started dying.” He frowned.

  She nodded, assembling a timeline in her mind. Prison, a trial, a hospital, plague, and escape. “You have a family? Wife and kids?”

  He stared into the fire. Looked up at her, met her eyes. His shined in the firelight. He nodded.

  “Two kids. We lived in Boston, a few miles north of there.” He looked back into the fire, then up to the sky. It was a clear night, with a crescent moon dipping to the horizon. “I remembered the MFA. Used to take the kids there, on the free days. Place was expensive.”

  They were quiet for a time.

  “Used to be lights up there, lots of lights,” he said, still looking at the sky.

  “Satellites?” She looked up.

  “Those too, but they crashed. At least, well, maybe they did. But like, spacecraft. Rockets taking off. I don’t see them anymore,” he said. “I watch the sky a lot. But no, I meant on the moon. Lights. Like, city lights.”

  “Lights?” She never saw that, in her time here. She looked up at the moon. No lights. The blank white face, pocked with impact craters. It stared back. It looked the same as it ever had.

  “They all went out.” He sighed. “I don’t remember when. On the mountain, or when I was in the woods.” He looked at her. “Sorry. I forget things, if they happened a long time ago. Poof.” He pointed. “But look, you can see some straight lines, there, on the moon. Near the bottom. White lines and dark lines.”

  She looked. It was true. All this time and she’d never noticed. Somebody was there. Or had been. Building, what, railroads? Moon bases? Industrial processing facilities? They must have been big and wide, to show from here. They watched the moon for a while.

  “I’ve been around the planet, since I got here.” She didn’t elaborate on where she came from, nor how she got there. He didn’t ask, either, which she found odd. “I found the Dutchman deflated in a hanger in Vegas, north of Vegas. It fired up once I got it in the sunlight. Solar cells, super-efficient. Maybe something else. It’s got a little power pack I’m not eager to tinker with. It’s old, but it still works.” Like me, she sneered at herself. She waved her hand. “I’ve seen people, but they’re tribal. Small groups. They can barely talk. They’ve forgotten pretty much everything.”

  “I told you,” he said, “there was a plague.”

  “There are systems that still function,” she continued. “Machines are still working, some of them. I’ve seen trucks carrying stuff to and from automated factories. I looked in one. Empty. Empty trucks going back and forth. The roads are all bad though, if they are even still there.” She shook her head at it. “Somebody got off the planet,” she said, glancing at him. “Lights on the moon?”

  “I’m not lying,” he said. He didn’t sound defensive, though.

  She stirred the fire. “Hey, I believe you. I’ve seen spacecraft, high up, and something landed down south. Or out over the ocean. In the ocean?” She shrugged inside her bag. “It looked like a landing, anyway. Hard to tell.”

  He sat up on one elbow. “When was this?”

  “The first one, six months ago. The second one was three weeks ago.” She shrugged. “I guessed where they were going, but I was wrong about that.”

  “Where did you guess they were going?” He frowned at her.

  “Place in the mountains, north of Tahoe. An old place.” She waved her hand. “It doesn’t matter where.”

  He stared at her. “You’re not telling me.”

  She stared back. “You keep your secrets. I keep mine.”

  He shrugged and was quiet for a while.

  “Why were you in prison?” She asked. People went to prison for many reasons.

  “I killed somebody,” he said, propping his hands behind his head. “Somebody important.”

  “And they put you in prison? For decades?” She asked. “That was very American. Life imprisonment.” She shuddered.

  “Trial took a long time,” he said. “Years of that. They said I had accomplices, but I didn’t. After that, they kept me because I wasn’t getting older. I took a pill. Woman gave it to me. In a bar.”

  “Who did you kill?” She asked. A pill?

  “I shot the President,” he said. “Right in the face.” He sighed, snuggling down in his blanket. “Right in his motherfucking face.”

  Chapter Ten

  They drove all the next day, north, through the city. It was a bright, clear day, and the sun shone down through the canyons of buildings on their right. Warming their faces. Gold closed her eyes to it and relaxed as best she could on the metal bench seat. There had been a cushion once, but it had been stripped by the weather. Some bolts stuck up through the frame. She would have liked to sleep, having stayed up through the night on watch, just in case the men worked themselves up enough courage to rush them. They hadn’t, but she hadn’t slept either. Maybe they had noticed. She didn’t care.

  The truck puffed and whined. Occasionally Uncle had to use the articulated arms mounted on the front to move some small obstacle, a tree, a chunk of stone, a burned-out city bus, rusted so badly Gold could see through it. The truck had swayed when the arms were in motion, but Uncle used them well, and these pauses took only minutes. The roads were uneven and unless the obstacle was bigger than, say, knee-height, they just rolled right over them. It made for a bumpy ride.

  So, she had resigned herself to it. Li had the cage, with the top open. There was a plastic roof, built into the top. The cage was large, six-foot square, and mounted to the center of Truck’s forward hood, just behind the arm mounts. Li had slept there in the cage last night, while Gold sat by the fire, tossing logs on periodically. Gold had felt her watching. That was OK. Gold looked at Li in her cage. She had stuffed a mattress, hauled up the side of the truck with some effort, into the cage. She had pillows, filled with some kind of fiberglass batting. She looked comfortable.

  “Li,” Gold said, after the bench jolted her one too many times. Li didn’t hear her. She repeated herself, louder this time. Li twisted around to look at her.

  “Can I come sit with you? In there?” Gold said. She heard Uncle’s voice, speaking Chinese.

  Li nodded, spreading a blanket over the mattress, making a place for her. Gold clambered down, squatting onto the top of the cage. She inspected the locking mechanism, a crude hasp and a sliding bolt. She grasped the bolt. It was of rebar. She would need a tool.

  “Uncle,” she said. “Can you remove this lock?”

  The truck whined to a stop. “I don’t blame you. I would not willingly get into a cage with such a lock either.”

  “You’re already in a cage,” she said.

  “You speak the truth,” Uncle said. “In more ways than one. Please, stay still.”

  The massive front left arm spun around in a wide arc, it elbowed up, reaching back and plucking the hasp out of Gold’s hand with surprising delicacy. It shifted its hand-like grip. Gold saw the hand, which was about the size of her torso, had two thumbs and secondary grips at the end of each finger. One of the finger ends was missing, and another looked broken. Corrosion crazed the metal palm of Truck’s hand, and the paint was flecking off. Truck was old.

  There was a pop, and the hasp came off. It couldn’t lock now. But with that hand, Uncle could just close the gate and hold it shut. He could rip her apart if he wanted to. Sometimes you take risks; she thought. Take one now. She looked down at Li. The mattress looked comfortable. She tossed her pack into the cage and climbed down.

  Truck rumbled to life. The mattress was some kind of aeriform gel and thick. It cushioned the ride considerabl
y. Gold noticed there was some kind of platform arrangement that kept the cage level, and that anticipated and somewhat compensated for the bumps they rode over. It was much more comfortable than the bench had been. She settled back against the pillows and sighed.

  She looked at Li, who was looking at her. “Thank you. This is wonderful,” Gold said. “Uncle, please translate.” Uncle’s box was in a nylon bag like a purse, slung over Li’s pale shoulder. Gold wondered at the bag. How long did nylon fabric last, anyway? This bag looked new, or, rather, not any worse for wear than any dozen similar bags she had owned, back in her own time. Back on Earth, she thought, reminding herself that this likely was Earth. A thousand years in her future. A possible future, she repeated to herself.

  Uncle spoke a few phrases in Chinese. Li smiled at her and nodded. Gold smiled back. Li was pretty, Gold noticed, again. It was a pretty it was hard to look away from. She was long and lean, but looked active. Well-fed, Gold noticed. Maybe a touch on the too-few-calories side of the spectrum, but she wasn’t starving. Her eyes were pale, blueish, and her skin was bone white. She took out a scarf, from one pillow, and passed it to Gold.

  It was camouflage, something you would find in a fast-fashion store in a mall. Digi-camo. It was a nice scarf, probably four feet long, and two feet wide. Thin as silk but some kind of rayon. Durable. Li had a matching one; presumably the pillows were full of similar items. Li wrapped hers around her head like a headscarf. She tucked it tight around her face. She wrapped another scarf around her shoulders and sat back. Like Grace Kelly, Gold thought.

  You are a bad, bad old woman, Gold chided herself. She wrapped her scarf, Arab-style, loosely around her neck. Li said something.