Lucy A. Snyder - Sparks and Shadows Read online

  Wendy nodded, waiting for him to continue.

  “Unfortunately, due to the recent trouble with the terrorists, there have been an unusually large number of deaths of people with resurrection benefits. As a result, this hospital currently does not have any temporary bodies to download your husband into. Also—” the doctor took a deep breath “—we are out of the more modern quantum storage units, so we had to put his dynamic data into a Dirac drive.”

  Wendy stared at the unit in the doctor’s hands. The Dirac quantum drives were painfully obsolete and tended to lose data like a cat sheds hair.

  “The drive’s lead shielded to make it as resistant as possible to data loss from stray cosmic rays, but our cyberneurologist estimates you have 5 hours to get him to a downloadable body before his data starts getting corrupted. I called around, and there’s a replacement body available at St. Anne’s. Unfortunately, all our ambulances have been called to the scene of a suicide bombing out in Grandview. I’ve called you a cab; it should take less than an hour to get across town, so there should be plenty of time to get your husband taken care of.”

  Smythe pulled a mini-headset out of the pocket of his white lab coat and a small plastic zip bag containing a microchip. “The Dirac is always on, so your husband is conscious in a virtual reality environment inside it. To talk to him and hear him, plug in this headset. The drive also has standard input/output ports if you have a camera or digital device you want to hook up to communicate with him. And here’s his ID chip; they’ll need to scan it at St. Anne’s before he can be processed.”

  Wendy took the items and thanked the doctor — while inwardly cringing at the thought that they’d stored him in a medium slightly less durable than toilet paper — and he escorted her out to the front doors.

  While she waited for the cab, Wendy slipped the microchip into her pocket. She clipped on the headset’s earpiece and swiveled the matchstick-thin steel microphone arm into place above her lips. She plugged the cord into the Dirac unit.

  She heard a click. “Hello?”

  “Juan, is that you?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine…a little dizzy.” The voice was a flat, generic voice-synth, nothing like her husband’s warm baritone. “Where are you? I came to in this hospital room, but the door’s locked and the phone’s dead. Or it was, until you called just now. It feels like I’ve been in here for hours.”

  A green cab pulled up. Wendy pushed through the glass revolving doors. “I’m on my way to St. Anne’s,” she told her husband.

  The cabbie rolled down the passenger window. “Are you Wendy Banks?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  The cabbie smiled and nodded at the back seat. “Hop on in and we’ll get you to St. Anne’s in a jiffy.”

  “Who’s that I hear in the background,” Juan asked.

  “Just the cabbie,” Wendy said as she climbed into the car.

  “Am I at St. Anne’s?” Juan asked.

  “Uh…sort of…”

  “Sort of? What does that mean?” he asked, then paused. “Wait a minute. I remember you were with me in the ambulance, and I…oh God. I got shot, and I’m not shot anymore. Even if they’d used the fastgrow gel on me, I’d still be hurting right about now.”

  Another long pause. “Oh crap. I died, didn’t I? I’ve been boxlunched.”

  “It’s not so bad. Really,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “They got a full download in the ambulance. No detected memory loss. And there’s a new body waiting for you at St. Anne’s.”

  “The company will be pleased, I’m sure,” he replied dryly. “So what kind of a box did they put me in?”

  “Uh.” Wendy considered lying to her husband, but they’d long ago promised never to keep the truth from each other. “A Dirac 20 terrabyte.”

  “A D-dirac?” he stammered. “What, were they all out of papyrus and stone tablets?”

  “It’ll be okay,” she insisted, hugging the unit to her chest. “We have hours before the expected drive failure point.”

  “Hours! Woo! Be still my beating heart,” he said, his sick desperation clear even through the synth’s mechanical tones.

  “Is that your husband in there?” the cabbie asked.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Lucky man, gettin’ a second chance like this.”

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “But he’d have been luckier not to have gotten shot today.”

  “Was it a Libbie thing?” the cabbie asked. “Not to be pryin’ or nothin’.”

  “Maybe. This crazy homeless guy had a machine pistol, and a National Guardsman got trigger-happy. I can’t think of many places the old guy could’ve picked up a gun like that unless the terrorists gave it to him.”

  “Sounds like a Libbie trick,” the cabbie agreed. “Heard they were doing shit like putting explosives in kids’ toys and stuff. And they still haven’t made any money demands or nothin’! They’re just fucking stuff up to fuck it up. They’re not even anarchists, they’re, like—” the cabbie snapped his fingers, seemingly trying to coax the word from his mind.

  “Nihilists?” she prompted.

  “Yeah! That! Fucked up fucks, ya ask me. I mean, if it was the Indians trying to reclaim California or something, that I could maybe understand, but this trying to destroy society stuff…totally wacko. And they’ve got a rich guy bankrolling them — what’s up with that?”

  “I heard he’s an extreme environmentalist,” Wendy replied. “He decided the only solution to save the rest of the Earth is to wipe out as much of the human race as possible. Funding the Libbies is just a local means to a global end for him.”

  The cabbie shook his head. “Buncha wackos.”

  “Well, human overpopulation and overconsumption has caused the extinction of 75% of the species on the planet,” her husband commented inside her left ear. “There is something to be said for reducing the population as quickly as possible.”

  Wendy frowned. “Are you saying you’d rather be dead? I mean, you’re population, too.”

  “No, no,” her husband said quickly. “I’m a man of enlightened self-interest, and I very much want to continue living, if for no other reason than to be able to make love to you every night for the next fifty years. At least.”

  She smiled and hugged the unit tighter. Nice save, honey, she thought. They’d had some of their worst arguments over ecopolitical issues. Wendy was all for trying to save the environment, but she couldn’t agree with the notion of killing people, even indirectly, to save animals. There had been a time when Juan would argue a point until they were both close to tears. They’d both learned a lot about agreeing to disagree in the two years they’d been married.

  He paused. “It’s gonna take them how long to get my clone up to size?”

  “Five years, the doctor said,” Wendy replied.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know what my ‘temporary’ body looks like, do you?” he asked. “I mean, what if it’s got buck teeth and no chin? Or massive amounts of body hair? Or a microscopic dick?”

  Wendy sighed. “Honey, what’s that they say about beggars and choosers?”

  “I know, I know,” he replied. “I suppose I should just be glad I’m still virtually alive.”

  They were on the city’s interior loop around downtown. Only a few cars besides theirs were on the road; well over half the city’s population had fled or been evacuated, and the rest had been officially discouraged from unnecessary travel. Abandoned and wrecked cars lined the sides of the freeway. Wendy could see that at least half of the big glass-and-steel high-rises showed some form of rocket or bomb damage. In the first few days of the siege, the terrorists had bombed buildings containing offices for credit card companies, banks, insurance agencies, utility companies, and the like. Collateral infrastructure damage, the Libbie spokesman had called it in his video to the news sites. Take out the financial underpinnings of society, and society will fall. We will destroy the corrupt and rebuild in the ashes
of the old.

  Wendy counted herself and her husband lucky that his company’s insurance was based in Canada.

  “Oh crap, what’s that?” she heard the cabbie say, craning his neck up at the sky.

  Then he was slamming on the brakes, tires shrieking, the car slewing sideways on the dry pavement. Wendy held onto the quantum drive for dear life as she was thrown sideways in her seatbelt. A car behind them honked frantically and Wendy heard the squeal of tires as it swerved to avoid a collision.

  Then the mortar hit not twenty yards in front of the cab. There was a tremendous boom and mushroom of orange fire. Hunks of concrete and asphalt rained down on the cab, cracking the windshield.

  “What was that? What’s happening?” her husband shouted in her ear.

  “M-mortar attack,” Wendy stammered. “W-we’re okay. I think.”

  “You okay back there, lady?” the cabbie asked.

  She could only nod in reply.

  The cabbie pulled a shotgun from beneath the front seat and got out of the car. Wendy fumbled with her seatbelt, got it unlatched, and pushed open the door to follow the cabbie.

  He was standing in front of the car, staring at the smoking hole in the highway. A ten-foot-diameter section had been knocked out, sending huge hunks of rebarred concrete crashing to the road below the highway. Fortunately, it didn’t look as if anyone had been crushed beneath the rubble.

  “I’m going to have to turn back,” the cabbie said. He nodded towards a section of the city outside the loop, beyond the downtown area. “St. Anne’s is to the southwest of here; I’d say it’s about four miles on foot.”

  “On foot?” Wendy could feel the blood draining from her face.

  “I’m real sorry, lady,” the cabbie said. “But I’ve got to go back. Company rules; a cab gets damaged like this, I gotta take it back to the garage. You could come with me and get another cab, but now that the loop’s trashed, it might take a real long time to get back down to the hospital. I think you can get there quicker on your own.”

  The man went back to his cab and opened up the trunk. He pulled out a big coil of rope and a pistol.

  “Here, take this,” he said, offering her the gun. “You should be out of Libbie territory where you’re going, but you never know. Go on, take it; I got lots more at home.”

  Wendy accepted the pistol, hefting it in her hand.

  “If you gotta shoot it, hold it with both hands, ‘cause it’s got a mother of a kick. You look like a pretty strong lady, so it shouldn’t be a problem. The clip holds nine rounds, and there’s a round in the chamber. Safety’s on.”

  The cabbie began to unwind the rope coil. Wendy tucked the pistol into the waistband of her jeans. The cabbie tossed her an end of the rope.

  “Tie this around your waist,” he said, “and I’ll tie the other to the bumper and help lower you down through the hole…”

  ***

  Once Wendy was on the ground and the cabbie had shouted his goodbye and disappeared, Wendy said to her husband, “Well, this is going well. I have no ride, you have no body, and we never did find any condoms.”

  “Though the whole condom problem is moot ‘til I get a new body,” he pointed out. “But, look on the bright side…you also have a gun.”

  “And I have the sense of direction of a donut,” she said, looking up and down the deserted streets. Off in the distance, she could hear someone firing a gun. “I have no idea how to get to the hospital. It looked kind of easy from up there, but now that I’m down here…”

  “You have your PDA, right? Just look the directions up on the ‘Net,” he said.

  She checked her back pocket; the slim, playing card-sized PDA was still there. She pulled it out and flipped it open, then began to unspool the thin uplink cable stored in the edge of its case. “I have a better idea,” she said, plugging the PDA cable into the Dirac and tucking the PDA into her shirt pocket. “Why don’t you look up the directions, and read them off to me? I hate trying to read detailed stuff on this little screen.”

  “But how do I—” he began, then paused. “Wait, there’s a video monitor over here in the corner. I tried it before and it didn’t work. Maybe…bingo! Works now. We have ‘Net. Where you at, honey?”

  Wendy glanced at the nearest street sign. “I’m at the corner of 33rd and Hudson.”

  “Looks like you just go left down 33rd for about a mile and a half, then hang a right onto Riverside until you reach the hospital.”

  “Sounds easy enough,” she replied. “Hey, could you find some dirty stories online and read to me while I walk? It’s awful quiet out here.”

  “Sure,” Juan replied. “Anything for my little nymphomaniac.”

  ***

  Wendy had been tromping down 33rd for a half hour when a National Guard truck rumbled onto the road toward her. She was in a commercial section of town; there was a Chinese restaurant, a small motel, an office supply store and an office strip nearby. All were boarded up and seemed entirely deserted.

  “Ooh, it’s the cavalry,” Wendy told her husband, readjusting the Dirac’s shoulder strap for the umpteenth time. The drive had seemed to double in weight since she’d been carrying it. “Maybe they’ll give me a ride to the hospital. These boots were not made for walking.”

  “Just be careful, honey…these guys do seem to be in the ‘shoot first, questions later’ mode.”

  “I’ll be careful.” Wendy began to wave her arms and jump up and down.

  The truck ground to a stop a dozen yards away. Wendy ran up to the driver’s window.

  “Hi, guys, I was wondering if you could…” Her voice failed and her heart dropped to the bottom of her stomach when she saw that the two men inside the cab were unshaven and wore ragged Army surplus combat fatigues re-dyed an off-gray and plain black baseball caps. Libbies. She stepped away from the truck, her pulse pounding in her ears.

  “Say, that’s a real nice quantum drive you got there. Think I want me one of those for target practice,” the driver drawled.

  Wendy shook her head. “This one’s not for sale,” she said, voice shaking, still backing up.

  “I didn’t ask if it was for sale, now did I, bitch?”

  Wendy pulled the pistol out of her waistband and pointed it at the driver. “Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson say back the fuck off!”

  The Libbie in the passenger seat raised a machine gun. “And Mr. Tommy here says hand us your stuff, and we’ll consider not wasting your ass.”

  Wendy fired two wild shots into the cab, nearly dropping the gun from the force of its recoil. She sprinted for the cover of the boarded-up motel across the street. She heard an angry yell from the men in the cab, then the rattle of the machine gun. Bullets whanged into the pavement near her feet. She pelted into the nearest breezeway, stumbled rounding the corner, and took refuge in the doorway of one of the courtyard-facing rooms.

  “I’m guessing they weren’t Guard,” Juan said. “How much trouble are we in?”

  “Tons,” Wendy squeaked, getting a better grip on the pistol. “Dial out on my PDA and call the Guard. Maybe they can do something,” she whispered.

  Wendy heard the truck’s doors slam and then the sound of booted feet hitting pavement.

  “Ah, just let it go, bro. We gotta get the stuff back to camp,” one man said.

  “Fuck that,” the other said. “She shot me! Her fuckin’ head’s gonna be my new hood ornament.”

  “She grazed you. This is a waste of time.”

  “Shuddup. She could be anywhere around here.”

  Wendy held her breath. She heard their footsteps come through the breezway, then turn in her direction—

  Anger and panic got the better of her. She jumped out of the doorway, firing the pistol. The men jumped back, surprised, weapons falling from their hands as Wendy’s bullets slammed into their chests and bellies.

  In seconds it was over. Wendy’s pistol was empty and the men lay dead on the motel sidewalk. A wide pool of dark blood was spreading beneath the
ir bodies.

  “What’s going on? What’s going on?” Juan was hollering.

  “Oh…oh God,” Wendy said, her whole body quivering. “I killed them. There’s blood everywhere. I think I’m gonna be sick.”

  “Deep breaths, honey, deep breaths,” Juan said. “You better make sure there aren’t any more.”

  “Right. Make sure there aren’t any more,” she repeated numbly. She dropped the spent pistol and picked up one of the automatic rifles, grimacing at the sticky blood on the barrel and stock.

  Holding the gun at the ready, she crept back out of the courtyard through the breezeway toward the truck. The men had left it running. No one else seemed to be in the cab. She circled around back, raising the rifle, expecting a half-dozen terrorists to come leaping out from beneath the camouflage canopy—

  —but the back of the truck was empty.

  Except for several dozen cases of ammunition and what looked like long crates of rockets and rifles.

  Wendy stared at the idling vehicle and its valuable contents. A smile crept across her face. “Honey, do you have the Guard on the phone?”

  “They put me on hold,” he replied grumpily.

  “When you do get through to them, please inform them that I have liberated one of their missing vehicles and have retrieved a nontrivial quantity of munitions. They can pick up said munitions and truck at St. Anne’s hospital. Whenever they can get around to it, of course.

  “In the meantime, honey, we’ve got a ride!”

  ***

  Wendy spent three hours in St. Anne’s fifth floor waiting room, alternately dozing and reading magazines until Penny came down from the nurses’ station on her break. The two women chatted for a while, and then Penny sneaked Wendy into an unused hospital room so she could catch a proper nap while she waited for the doctors to finish downloading and neurologically imprinting Juan into his new body.

  Four hours later, Penny gently shook Wendy awake.

  “Wha—?” Wendy groggily asked.

  “Husband is served!” Penny’s broad smile stood out a stark white against her dark face in the dimness. “Juan’s D&I went smooth as butter. He’s awake, and ready to see you now.”