Up The Tower Page 5

  His words still trailed from one end of her stunned mind to the other.

  You're too small-time for my game, honey. Really, I just don't think you'll fit with my life.

  That she didn't fit was the whole point—where Ana did fit was being a pretty face at a nowhere university that was putting her family into a steady stream of debt at the tune of six figures a year. If she was lucky, she would pay the debt off by the time she was fifty—just long enough to make her wonder whether she would be able to retire at eighty-six.

  But the real whole point, really, what it really was, the true point, was that she wasn't lucky, not anymore. Not without Raj.

  And what if nothing fit? Had Raj considered that? Had he considered about what part of her would no longer fit without him? If she didn’t fit him, then he didn’t fit her, that was only common sense. Like inflatable puzzle pieces, pushed out to their capacity when one piece was removed.

  Yes. When something didn’t fit and had to be removed, then the remaining pieces had to be exaggerated to let themselves fit better in this new definition of the puzzle. Someone could live like that. Exaggerated into normalcy.

  If she were to look up—and she spent most of her time not looking at anything besides the streets and alleys all around her, trying to keep her bearings and her wits about her—she would see the Gateway Tower. “The Tower,” as they called it. All broken and spiraling upward, like the finger of some gaunt, decrepit giant. Air ducts and piping spread like vines all along its outer-edges. Probably just the cost of building one floor of that place could have paid for her entire education. Built more than twenty years ago, it had never been finished, and so never used as a haven for business like the industry leaders had intended.

  Someone tapped her on the shoulder from behind. Immediately, all her adrenaline spiked—mugging! Rape! Death!

  Gary?

  “Hi, Ana.” He smiled, reassuring. “You look upset. Can I help you? Where are your bodyguards?”

  She slipped her hand out of her pocket, where it had been resting on the long knife that her mother made her promise to carry with her when she was in the city—armed guard with her or no.

  Gary didn’t know it, but Ana had been ready to slice him from pelvis to shoulder. Well...sort of. She had never done that sort of thing before, but her whole life her parents had been telling her how pretty she was and how she would have to fight for her life one day when someone tried to rape her. It was not a question of “if” for them, but “when.” And Ana, even though she tried to fight their neurosis, often couldn't find the holes in their logic. She was pretty. She probably was going to get raped someday. Sometimes she even wished it would hurry up and happen so that she could view it as something in the past. And why wouldn't she? The alternative to being raped was owning up to the fact that she wasn't pretty enough to be raped—and that was unfathomable for Ana. It would mean every opportunity she held would be gone.

  She knew Gary as a sort of stare-heavy creep from some class a year or two before. There had been a study group he organized that she stopped attending when it had just been him and a trio of other such stare-heavy types staring down her shirt.

  The problem was that he—and the rest of his study group—weren’t rich or anywhere near it. No connections to Citizens. Otherwise, Ana would have been much more forthcoming. Her first mistake was going to an actual study group. The good study groups, the ones she was now a part of, were more about socializing. They paid others to do their homework, to take their tests. Anyone that actually needed to study for success was too blue-collar for Ana’s needs.

  To keep up appearances, she had hired her own small team of homeworkers and testers. They had graduated from college already—in fact, working as a homeworker and tester was the number one job opportunity for a degree in Liberal Arts. As such, Ana didn’t have the budget for a regular guard to follow her around—and anyway less than twenty minutes ago she had been with Raj anyway, who lived his whole life under guard.

  Everything was unexpected. Gary was unexpected.

  “I—I don't know. I'm just walking. Going home. It’s not all that far.”

  He looked surprised. “You don't have a ride?”

  “I did. I just—no, no ride. Not anymore. He offered one, but I didn't take it.”

  Had she imagined it, or did Gary’s eyes light up just then?

  “He?”

  “Don't worry about it.” She looked around at the broken, shelled-out buildings nearby, the masses of spurious overgrowth brought on by the Mississippi's constant swell through the Dam. Behind her, an oak had lifted a house up off its foundation. The top of the tree was a bare stump, chopped short for firewood.

  He was tall, paunchy, and with a horrible curled hairstyle that he took from singers back in the twentieth. A jazzkid, though not with the sort of original flair that sometimes made them cute. He was doing it because he wanted to be noticed, because he wanted to get laid. He took it on because it was a personality to have that didn't ruffle over his own basic template, not because he felt it.

  He was a poser. Ana tried not to hold it against him. She was one as well—or so Raj had informed her. Her thoughts regressed again. Was her poverty, her lack of status, really that transparent?

  If only she had gotten those height-restricting implants when she was seven. Then, none of this mess would have happened. Short girls had everything they wanted. That was what a man wanted, a shorter girl to own. Now Raj had three of them. Ana should have insisted. She should have started biting her mother’s wrists until she got them. It had been cowardice to stop at just standard tantrums and starting fires with their furniture.

  It was well-known that the only real way to gain some elevation in the world was either through talent or beauty, and even then you had to be noticed. And Ana had been noticed...and found wanting. Shorter girls got her job.

  Change the subject.

  “What are you doing down here?” she asked. “This doesn't seem like your place. Don't you live near the university?”

  “Don't you?”

  “Yeah.” She shook her head.

  Home. That would be a dream right now. There was nothing better she would like than to be back in her apartment. A spacious four hundred feet, loaded with amenities. If there was anything the university provided, it was nice, ample living space.

  At times, she suspected it was only so good to keep her in a lull about the price, about the lack of choice in the classes available. Why would she ever need particle physics for an Arts degree? Pointless. So long as she was comfortable, so long as she could just escape from this ragged chunk of hell she walked through and glide into her bed, turn up the nozzle on her good dream gas and buzz out with a tab or two of vodka, this could end up being a reasonable day.

  Gary was staring at her, waiting for an answer. Who knew? Maybe he was just staring to stare. He was the type.

  “Sorry,” she said. “My boyfriend, my...I was here with a guy. He's buying out a building down here for his choice consultant firm. The property is so cheap, you know.”

  “Choice consultant?”

  “Yeah. You know these people, they've got so much going on that they get choice paralysis? A friend of mine, Alijah? She told me was doing a paper on all that. The paralysis, I mean. Anyway, my boyf—my ex, he's setting up a firm that offers choices to people. There's bulk packages, and they split them up between types of decisions—entertainment, food—though they even go up to marrying and which corp to choose.”

  His eyes widened. “Wild.”

  Buildings leaned into each other, groaning under their own weight. In the past, some had fallen on top of one another, and the Junktowners simply strung down the sagging stony carcasses with ropes and cables, building on top and over and around. A kind of urban pueblo town, all around them.

  She nodded. “So, what are you doing here?”

  To be nice, to obey society’s rules of conversation, was the only reason she asked. She did not actually care. He was,
she was fairly certain, crushing rather hard on her—and this was why running into him “by chance” in the middle of Junktown, where no one in their right mind would go, was more than a bit unsettling.

  Gary flustered for a moment, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  “Well, it's a bit of a story. I'm sort of embarrassed, actually. I was on my way to see my mother—she's sick—”

  “Hold up,” said Ana. Anything to stop him from talking. “Do you see that?”

  A small, compact black woman in tight dark criss-crossing rags rushed at them from across the street. There was something dangerous and intense about the way she moved. She had a teched-up hand and the ragged mess of her hair hung to one side of her head, partly covering her eye patch.

  The woman moved at them like a wrecking ball, like a thundercloud, like an unhinged cannon. All movement, all loaded with horrible potential. Ana's stomach straightened out and twisted, all of a sudden a wet rag.

  “Move,” she said.

  Gary and Ana moved. The woman walked past them to the building beyond. A squat thing with kind of an arched overhang above the door, patched together from metal and branches. It had chains on the doors. Tech hand whining, whirring, the woman tore the chains off.

  “She can’t do that,” said Gary. “Hey!”

  He had a baton in his hands. Why in the hell did he have a baton in his hands?

  “Hey, you can’t do that! That’s not your property.”

  For some reason, he tapped the woman on her shoulder with the baton. The way you might take a stick to a snake. She turned at him, slow. She was shorter than him; in that moment, to Gary, there was no doubt she was a giant.

  “The hell did you say to me?”

  Roaring, Gary rushed at the woman, baton held high, and she shoved him hard to the ground, using his momentum. He sprang up swinging, the baton rat-tatting off her mechanical hand, and then they were grappling. Grunting. Shouting. Push and tug. Hands locked around one another, they stumbled through the rot of the doorway and into the abandoned building behind them.

  Ana moaned in surprise. What the hell was happening?

  * * * * *

  Samson and the copbot were on the sixteenth floor. He stopped on one step to take a rest, looking at the copbot. Expectant-like, it looked back at him, coconut-half-jaw agape.

  “So you called us partners, down there.”

  “Yes. You did it first. I agree with it.”

  "That's swell. So, P-L-Eight-Four-Five—"

  "That is my name."

  "Right. It's sort of a mouthful. Since we're partners and all, can I just call you Partner?"

  The copbot gave a little hop.

  "That is so great. Yes. Do that.”

  “Good. I have a question for you, Partner.”

  “Shoot!” The copbot laughed. It was a bouncing, eerie sound. “Don’t actually shoot, though. I would have to shoot you back.”

  “Okay. Well. You haven’t exploded.”

  “Not yet! It could happen whenever, though. Explosions abound! They are in the fabric of my understanding.”

  “...Okay. I just meant, well. Can you still self-destruct?”

  “Ah. Let me check.”

  The copbot stood ramrod straight for a moment, its eyes blinking and rotating through the color wheel. Then it stopped and shook its head.

  “I cannot. I’m afraid we’ll have to get that fixed. Can you fix it? You fixed me.”

  “I fixed you?”

  “Yes. Everything was scanning and colors and sirens, and you shouted that you would fix me, and I was fixed.”

  “...Right.”

  Samson, despite all his knowledge of the artificiality of the intelligence of the copbot, felt a little bad. As far as he knew, copbots were designed to kill on command. He had guessed already that somehow it relied on its communication with its headquarters to be directed around. Now it was following Samson in order to...

  “Why are you following me?”

  The copbot frowned. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, but you were caught in an explosion. I saved your life. It is my duty to ensure that you remain alive.”

  “But, I fixed you already, right? Doesn’t that make us square?”

  “To save a life is a great responsibility, Partner-Samson. It is not a game of tic-tac-toe.”

  That was enough resting. Samson stood up and they continued.

  Samson wouldn’t call himself any sort of an athlete, but he was in good shape. The first thirty floors of the Tower had no elevator. Samson lived on the hundred and forty-fifth floor. Anytime he wanted to go outside—which was several times a week, trying to scrounge up more tech for Jackson (and to a lesser extent, the other Five Faces) to use—he had to climb up and down those thirty floors, step by step. Sometimes the stairs got awful crowded with people. Over thirty thousand people lived in the Tower.

  More than twenty-nine thousand of these lived above the thirtieth floor. Almost all of them worked in The Tower as well. Some of them worked direct for the Five Faces, creating drugs and tech and lewd entertainment videos, or running finance and inventory. Everyone else had satellite offices with Tri-American.

  Everything beneath the thirtieth was a sort of slum, a sub-slum to the slum outside in Junktown. It was safer, maybe, than living on the streets, but there were no rules and no one was technically allowed to be there. Every few months, Petrov and Crash would organize a raid, usually using Petrov’s attack dogs, and flood out anyone they didn’t want around. Drug addicts, mostly, pushed back out on the streets. Over time, the addicts would land enough money to bribe Storey to let them back in, and they’d have a place to use in peace. Then they would run out of drugs, be unable to leave without having to bribe Storey again to return, and so they would resort to mugging the Tower residents for cash. Then, Petrov and Crash would organize another raid.

  So far, in their ascent, none of the addicts or the tent-living tenants had bothered Samson and the copbot. They did not live in the stairwells, though, so avoiding them was not so much trouble.

  There had been a pulley system on the outside, once upon a time. It cut down on the travel time up the stairs by half. Petrov didn’t approve of it though—too big a security risk—and wanted to have it cut down. Jackson Crash agreed with him, as he often did, and in typical Jackson Crash fashion, he cut the pulley ferry down in the middle of a particularly busy day. Nineteen people fell to their death. Six more were crushed.

  Crash was big on supporting Petrov, and so he was big on security. The elevator at the top of the thirty floors—the gateway to the rest of The Tower, was guarded by his absolute elite. Samson was on good terms with them, as he had provided and installed all of their tech. They had no cyber-rejection, no slim-shingles, none of the normal and expected adverse consequences of getting street cuts. No skin loss, no muscles growing up over the skin around the edges of the tech. So, even if Petrov’s guards didn’t like Samson, they protected him.

  At the next floor, Partner pointed at a warning sign that said the structure of the stairwell was weak.

  “We must stop here.”

  “No,” said Samson. “Don’t sweat that. I went down them this morning.”

  “I can see them,” said Partner, scanning. “They will fail soon. My weight will be too much for them. We cannot go up this way.”

  Frowning, Samson looked at the door that opened into the seventeenth floor.

  But on the seventeenth floor, there were no squatters, no drug addicts, no muggers. There were just dogs.

  Petrov kept them starved. That way, anybody he needed torn apart would get torn apart.

  True to the crime lord’s intent, Samson feared Petrov. He was, unofficially, known as the Face of Fear. Why wouldn’t you fear him? Just last year, Samson had installed a brand new face mesh over the caved-in half of the horror of Petrov's head.

  In his time in Junktown and The Tower, Samson had witnessed many living nightmares. Petrov’s head, the way it was, the left eye all sunk into the
bridge, sitting on a sea of scar-tissue, was one such nightmare. Samson had installed the new face mesh with some trepidation, knowing Petrov would not hesitate to torture and then kill him if he made the slightest error with his tools. Nicolai Petrov was the only one of the Five to be named Face for life. All the rest had to regularly run for re-election. As such, he had little fear of making new enemies.

  Technically, he was the Face in charge of enforcement, but in Junktown, good enforcement came down to fear. You were not to call Petrov the Face of Fear, not in person. But even so, Samson had heard around the Tower that Petrov would get angry if people stopped referring to him like that when he was not around.

  Everyone was a contradiction.

  Samson didn’t like meeting the dogs, but he had done it plenty of times. He had read that dogs could be friendly, so long as you treated them right. And Samson was always at a loss for something that was friendly to him. He carried treats in his pockets. They would sniff at his hands and lick him sometimes. Even hungry, they weren’t so bad, just temperamental.

  He opened the door, slowly, and then stopped.

  “Listen,” he said to Partner. “There’s going to be dogs in here. You can’t kill them, okay? No shooting. No matter what.”

  “Do not shoot the dogs!” Partner boomed. “Okay!”

  Now the dogs were awake. Wonderful.

  As they entered, heads began to perk up, curious. The dogs wouldn’t attack straight off unless Petrov ordered it, or if they were bothered, or if they were really hungry. Samson had seen all three in his time—had seen the way the dogs worked together to take down grown men, tearing away their calves and ankles while weighing them down at the arms. Then teeth in the throat, and then the hot spray of blood everywhere. He was in Petrov’s presence often, fixing his tech and taking notes on ideas that Petrov wanted implemented. Being in front of Petrov for any amount of time usually meant watching someone die. He could be severely cruel when he wanted to, though there was never any pleasure in it. People respected cruelty, that was all.