Cyberpunk, page 7
Waiting was hard, and Pico had the hiccups. He leaned heavily on his tharpoon and stared at his mismatched boots. They waited another ten minutes for the main dump to clear of nackers, then they trickled into its expanse.
Mouse headed for the great wall and he followed at a distance. He wasn't sure what she'd find there, so far out. Crazy chica always did stuff her own way, he said to himself, trying it out dismissively, but his throat ached with longing. She probably knew he was following along, but he kept hidden all the same. She'd probably shoo him off.
They were maybe a couple kilometers out when a nacker picked up Mouse's trail. It skittered along behind her, stalking her, waiting for her to make some find. Pico swore. This nacker looked different from the others. Some kind of new model with carbon or plastic joints that didn't make noise. Why was it so far from the trucks? Pico crouched low and ran behind as quietly as he could, taking cover in the uneven trash heaps.
Mouse stopped and dug at a swell with her tharpoon. She took her cowboy hat off and worked at the mound and he could tell it was something good by the way she dug. Loosed by one of the recent earthquakes maybe. She had the luck. The nacker paused at a distance to see what she would find, and he paused too. When the nacker sat on its haunches, it was hard to distinguish from the trash around it. The way she dug was something to watch, a perfect sort of movement. If only he hadn't messed it all up between them. He would have liked to watch for a while but he had no time.
Pico crouched down out of sight and breathed hard in fear. Maybe her find was crap and the nacker would move on. He'd kamikaze the pinche waste bot, he would! He psyched himself up and began to shiver uncontrollably.
After a few minutes, Mouse pulled up a full-on car door from the ground, worth plenty at the market with its metal and embedded electronics. The nacker would want it. Pico gripped his tharpoon and ran toward them. The smog heat was getting to him and he sweated, the sweetwine buzz now a disorienting spin. The nacker was too far ahead of him and much faster. Its six legs traversed the dump obstacles, the tentacle gripper raised in front, assisting when it needed to, poised to strike.
It got her at 10 meters—a charged electric bolt that knocked her flat out. She only just saw it, and the look on her face before it got her crushed him. Pico stopped where he was. He couldn't see where Mouse had fallen, she was downed behind trash.
For a moment, breathing ragged and hot like some ancient machine, he considered what to do. He wanted to run away but he couldn't leave her. Rumor was nackers lifted organs off fallen pepenadores. An indignant rage filled him and he pounded his thigh with his fist. Why was a nacker out here and not at the trucks anyway? Why did pinche nacker trouble always find him. If it weren't for them, Suto might be alive. And Mouse might—no it was too much to hope for.
This nacker had better range than the last model.
He inspected his tool belt for something that would help. He plugged his GPS jammer into the battery pack at his belt—28 percent charge. It was janky, but it should keep the thing from tattling its location. Among the other tools: a light, a few circuit boards he carried hoping to find parts to make something whole, a mirror. There wasn't much else.
He ran in a crouch, maneuvered along the ground with his hands and feet like one of them, his ratty cloth gloves tearing on the ground. The bot was in the process of laser-sawing the metal and other recyclables off the door—processing in place. Once its middle compartment was full it would go back to Basucorp and empty. Mouse was face-down next to it.
The terrain allowed him to get within range. An awful smell of rot pervaded the air. His grip on the tharpoon kept slipping. He knew he couldn't hope for much. He crawled quietly toward the nacker and then let the tharpoon fly. It was a bad, glancing blow. The tharpoon ricocheted off the top of the nacker's dome where its vulture eye was encased in hardglass, but a bit of plastic the size of a nose jounced off. That was the lousy best he could do. He shrugged his shoulders to his ears, bracing for shock, and turned and ran hard, hating himself, tripping over debris. His foot caught in the carcass of some animal and he went down hard to the ground. He paused there, the breath knocked out of him, and listened for its approach. When his breath came back he stood and saw it was still where he'd left it.
The thing was all schizo, swinging its arms and tilting strangely to the side. He crouched low and watched it, trying to figure out what it was doing. It wasn't right. It was freaking out. He made a wide circle around it and then dashed in. He got a hold of Mouse's collar and dragged her out of range. The nacker's tentacle sent a few charged bolts at the ground around it in a spasmodic circle.
He sat next to her and watched it go. Mouse, he said, but she didn't stir. Mouse, come on güey, please get up.
It was weird to see her this close. There was a line of blood down her forehead from her scalp that cut the dirt on her face, and it startled him with how perfect and pure it was. Even her deformed ear had an angelic shapeliness to it. Mouse, he said again. He had imagined her countless nights, as he lay awake in his cot, and here she was in the flesh. This close. He wanted to cup her cheek with his hand, to stream energy from his body into hers, he wanted to cradle her, to say he was sorry, to make everything right. He couldn't believe he'd hit the pinche maricón.
The nacker would be trying to radio home and he felt a panic rising in him. Others would come. At least he'd jammed its location. He laid Mouse down and made his way around the nacker so that the vulture eye faced away from him, and the tentacle gripper was out of reach. With the tip of his tharpoon he hooked a bowl-shaped plastic piece of trash—the broken skin of a crashed cycle helmet, the rider long dead—and slowly lowered it over the top of the nacker's eyes, the digital and the meat. At least they wouldn't be recorded. The ground was scorched.
He jumped with each charge the nacker fired. There were dim outlines on the horizon, but so far this quadrant of the dump was dead. He stayed low and just out of sight all the same.
With the old model nackers, a bolt could put a pepenadora down for an hour or more. He lay down beside her and whispered in her good ear. It's okay, Mousita, I got it for you. Wake up now, pretty girl. He wondered if she liked to be called pretty girl.
The nacker had four pinchers on its tentacle arm and not five. They were always trying to save money, to make shit cheaper. Well, he thought, a pride rising in him for the first time. I got you this time, maricón. He was tiring of the thing's antics and spasms, and the itch to tease it started to overpower his fear. Seemed like the new nackers were more fragile than the old. He reached his tharpoon in and gave it a sharp jab to the middle. It jerked and turned, and then resumed its spasms. Completely roto, he thought, just like his nephew Sparto. Perhaps it's dying. He reached in with the claw hand of the tharpoon, got a grip on one leg and gave it a hard flip, then ducked. On its back it shot one last charge into the air and then went silent. The dump was eerily quiet then. Suddenly he saw himself as a hero, a nacker killer, and he looked about for some way to tie the bot up. He couldn't wait to take it back, though he knew the trouble this would cause. He found the plastic chunk he'd broken off with his tharpoon and pocketed it.
Mouse, he whispered, his mouth now a centimeter from her ear. Please. I'm so sorry, he said, meaning how she got hurt, that he couldn't stop it, but knowing when he apologized she'd think only of her little brother Suto. I didn't mean to, he added. He lay on the ground next to her in the dirt, the decomposition of generations of trash: toys and TV sets and bioware, gas jets and hair dryers, window shades and sweaty couches, yellow toys and pigs' hooves, and everywhere plastic.
It was late afternoon and soon the sun would go down and the nackers would crawl back to Basucorp, and the dogs and who knew what else would come out. He brushed away the flies that had descended on Mouse. He checked the charge on his battery pack: 18%. He thought of who might come looking for him and could think of no one. His parents would think he was high on sweetwine or shuttered on kek or plugged into some dirt port, lying against a shed wall somewhere. No one would believe he was here, guarding Mouse. Somebody might come looking for Mouse, he thought, and it was a hope he held onto.
He leaned over and put his ear tentatively against her chest, to listen to her heart, but the soft and shockingly pleasant give of her breast so tantalized and alarmed him that he jumped up and took a step away, afraid she'd wake with him pressed there. He thought he'd heard a heartbeat, but he couldn't be sure. His cheek and ear were on fire with the touch, buzzing. Red-faced, he turned away and spent a quarter hour in the trash, trying to do his job. He found a yellow rain slicker with holes in the elbows and put it on. He found a black bra and put it in the raincoat pocket and then took it out and threw it back on the ground. A minute later he re-pocketed it. He found an advertisement for a body-modification and live-tattoo clinic and he studied the photos intently, imagining how the tattoos would move.
After a while he recovered the car door Mouse had found and propped it so that it shielded her bare arm. He found a dead beach ball and folded it under her head. He was hungry. There was nothing new here. Any edible food-trash was kilometers away at the trucks.
He sat cross-legged in front of the nacker and began to tinker in its belly, but without tools it was slow-going. The fuel cell was in a hardshell that needed wrenches to get at. With the tharpoon he got access to a circuit board that had a number of chips—including the GPS, but he couldn't disable it without breaking the whole thing, and he couldn't bring himself to do that. It was too pretty and new and he wanted it for his own. The last time he'd done that haunted him. Nackanigmo, they called him: nacker fucker, or: he who, armed with a nacker, fucks everything up.
This time he was careful to check Mouse's pulse at her wrist. He circled his fingers around it and thought it was the most wonderful wrist ever. He wondered at a charged bolt that strong. Maybe she'd wake and be something else, Sparto's perma-drool on her chin.
There was a sunset cast in the smoke of the distant city, and he braved standing on a rise to look for the others and to watch for a moment. The color stretched red deep across the sky and it made him feel grand and deeply afraid. What they called the wall was not far off, the cliff at the dump's edge. Over that cliff down an immense slope was the old river canyon the city had filled long ago. There were rumors—stories the pepenadoras told their children—of what came up the wall at night. Pico shivered. Lepers. The dogs (Dog Organized Guard System) would come too. Any pepenador with half a smart would be out of the dump by nightfall. He knew there was hardly a fellow pepenador who considered him in this class of half smarts.
He wished he had some sweetwine and checked every last pocket for some crumbs of kek to numb his brain.
Pico combed through the nacker's circuits and disconnected a few others. Some he knew what they did—a long-range network chip, which was probably dumping diagnostic data into the air—others that just looked like they might cause him trouble later on. These he wrapped carefully in whatever he could find and put in his belt pockets. He'd look at them later.
The last nacker he'd opened was with his best friend Suto.
Pico had installed a hacked instruction set into their captured bot and restarted it. The nacker booted into a ten-minute rampage, crashing through tin shacks, its tentacle bolting whatever was in its way, including not a few pepenadors. Suto and he chased it down until it turned and pinned Suto to the wall, frying him in a long, slow electrocution. Pico destroyed the machine with his father's axe, but Suto was burnt inside and through, and Pico was to blame, and besides himself, no one blamed him more than Mouse, Suto's sister.
Still, they'd been close once. Almost a gang, the three of them. She was older and smarter and sassier than they were—not their leader, not exactly, but were she to lead they'd follow. Suto because she was his sister and she'd led the two of them through a history of rough times that Pico didn't know the half of. Pico followed because Mouse was the most interesting thing he'd ever come across.
Pico swallowed a foul-tasting half-sob and looked toward her downed body. He got up and paced between Mouse and the nacker, wishing he were on his way home, that he was at his parents'. He pulled on Mouse's arms and dragged her a short way but she was too heavy and too much a deadweight to carry more than a few yards. Besides, he wanted that nacker. He'd hide it away until he got it right this time.
At Mouse's side he stroked her black hair in the half-light and wondered if she'd be more comfortable in another position. He turned her on her side and then he saw the scar at the back of her neck. A thin, white line in the shape of a comic smile. Mouse had a wi.n, he realized. Implanted in her neck. Had to be. Only rich people had these. Chinga, there were probably two circuits spouting diagnostics into the net, the nacker's and Mouse's. Then he remembered he'd been jamming the GPS, at least. What was the chica doing with her own wi.n? He felt a quick stab of jealousy. He didn't have even one single mod.
He looked around and above and wondered if they were being watched. From what he knew, wi.ns beaconed when there was trouble. It wasn't just an access node. He stood up and looked at Mouse from head to toe. The wi.n made him unsure if he knew her at all.
Darkness was coming on fast and he shook Mouse.
Oh, she said, a distant, quiet sound, as if from a voice box deep in her lungs.
You're awake! he said. A nacker got you, but I got the nacker. I killed it! I've been waiting here with you all day.
Mouse coughed and said nothing.
You got to wake up. Come on!
Pico? she said.
Yes, it's me, Pico, güey. It's getting dark! If you get up right now we can still go back.
You're on my arm.
Chinga! he leapt off her arm and for a brief moment was overcome with self-hate.
Mouse moved her arm to her chest. I don't feel good, she said.
I took it apart. After he said this he felt sick to his stomach. I mean disabled it.
She opened her eyes and looked at him and he had no idea what she might say next. He held his breath and stared back, more in love than he thought possible, more ready to be crushed by what she had to say. She was older than he was, nineteen to his seventeen, and as the look went on he realized he didn't stand a chance with her. They stayed like that for a few moments, and he didn't dare avert his eyes.
I can't see, she said finally.
Pico looked away and into the last of the reddened sky and had a terrible feeling. They would not make it out of the dump and back to the pepenadores tonight. If he ran, he could make it back now, but he could not leave her.
He found her hand and squeezed it and she held onto it tightly.
I'm scared, she said.
It's going to be alright, he said, though he did not believe it. Your eyes will come back.
Listen, Mouse said.
Pico listened and could hear the faraway howls of the dogs. He shuddered. The sun was gone and the light was being sucked from the sky fast. It'd be dark by the time Mouse could walk.
Dogs, she said.
I know, Pico said.
You shouldn't have stayed, Mouse said. Why are you even here?
He didn't know what she meant. He was so used to hearing get lost that he assumed it was that, and felt sorry for himself.
But you would have died, he said.
Now we'll both die.
Pico heard the rapid approach of a nacker close by, the skittering hydraulics in high gear, retreating toward where they lived at night, some recharging bunker at the far edge. The nacker wouldn't stop for them now. The dogs, better equipped to adapt with a higher proportion of biological material, had taken over the night. Grudges and spite were natural to native brains, and though both were created by Basucorp, the dogs held a species-wide grudge against the nackers. Found at night, a pack of dogs would tear a nacker limb from limb.
A moment later, the dump was immersed in darkness.
You move?
Mouse slowly sat up and rubbed the back of her neck. I feel rotten. The whole back of my head tingles. I can only see a dim light.
That's all there is, dim light.
Like I said, Mouse said.
Well you should be rested up for first watch.
Listen, I didn't mean like I sounded, Mouse said.
Pico sat down next to the disassembled nacker and felt around in the dark. He checked his battery pack and realized he still had it plugged into the jammer, and that the charge was down to only 6%. He swore.
You have any juice?
No, Mouse said. Must have got fried.
Chinga.
You hear me before?
I heard, he said.
Thanks, you know?
Sure.
There was another chilling howl beyond them somewhere.
It's cold, Mouse said.
Pico wrestled up the tentacle of the nacker from underneath. In theory, it was still connected into its battery pack. He plugged his light into his own pack for a moment and shielded it so that it wouldn't be seen beyond where he was working. The wires were encased in carbon fiber, but logic would have it there was a switch of sorts in there somewhere. That someone could power its lightning strike. But he did not have the tools or the light.
Mouse came and sat next to him and her warm leg rested against his.
What should we do?
She shrugged. You got something sharp?
He nodded, I guess. Tharpoon. Hand me yours, I'll sharpen it.
She passed him her tharpoon and he ran the tip of it over his whetstone shard until the edge caught at his thumb.
Now what, he said.
Then we stay quiet, she said. Stay warm and stay quiet. When morning comes we take your bot home. She huddled in closer and whispered that she did not feel right and touched the back of her neck.
