Pablo Ramirez ambled along the streets of East Los Angeles. He was looking for work, looking for love, looking for drugs, looking for whatever the hell he could find. He knew too well he didn’t have much now.
For that matter, neither did East L.A.—or any other part of the huge, sprawling city. Somebody online had called Los Angeles a town with a fine future behind it. Like so many jokes with too much truth in them, that one had spread virally. It must have, if a loser like Pablo had heard it.
He almost tripped on cracked concrete. Nobody’d fixed these sidewalks for a long, long time. A line of shopfronts were boarded up. The ones that weren’t had signs in Spanish, English, Chinese, Hindi, Korean. . . .
You could still find anybody from anywhere in Los Angeles. Anybody who was poor and didn’t have the sense to go someplace else, anyhow. No, Los Angeles wasn’t much different from anywhere else in the United States these days.
Swarms of bicycles and pedicabs executed intricate dances on the streets. The asphalt between the sidewalks was in crappy shape, too. A few hydrogen- and electric-powered cars tried to pick their way through the people-powered traffic. The drivers leaned on their horns. Not that it did them much good—bicyclists and pedicab operators grabbed horn tones off the Net the way everybody else grabbed ring tones. And little tiny speakers could make a hell of a lot of noise.
Speaking of noise . . . Pablo stared in mixed awe and horror. Damned if that wasn’t a genuine, no-shit, chrome-dripping Harley hog thundering up the road toward him. Hydrocarbon fumes belched from the monster’s tailpipe. School and the Net and TV and vidgames and priests and even most avatars declared adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere was a crime or a sin or both at once. But oh my God! Wasn’t that Harley awesome? Everybody on the sidewalks—whites, goldens, several shades of browns, blacks—stopped in her or his tracks to gape at the motorcycle. The black dude on it grinned from under his gleaming Fritz hat. Just to add to the general effect, he’d dyed his beard in red, white, and blue stripes. He’d also chromed the metalwork on the folding-stock AK slung on his back.
Two cops walked toward and then past Pablo. Their helmets gave much more serious protection than the cycle jockey’s brain bucket. They wore full body armor under their urban-camo tunics, too. And the minichain guns they carried could chew up that ancient AK and spit it out.
Cops were the enemy till proved otherwise. They knew it, too—why else travel in threes? Two of them were white. The power structure still worked the way it always had.
All the same, what the taller white guy said to his partners was exactly—exactly!—what Pablo was thinking: “Man, that is one fuckin’ amazing ride!”
“Bet your ass,” agreed the cop who wasn’t white. He was an Indian—brown variety, not red.
A woman screeched. A guy took off with her purse. He ran like an Olympic sprinter marinated in steroids. The woman pounded after him in hot but hopeless pursuit.
“Hold it right there, dipshit!” the Indian cop yelled, raising his piece.
If he opened up with that mother, he could depopulate a block’s worth of jam-packed sidewalk—with no guarantee he’d take out the purse snatcher. Nobody in his right mind would start shooting under conditions like that. Of course, who in his right mind wanted to be a cop?
Pablo wasn’t the only one making that street-smart calculation. Oh, no, baby—not even close! People of all different colors screamed and ducked and scattered and got the hell out of there. Pablo did his best to disappear like an avatar. He ducked around corners and ended up in a little maze of side streets he was liable to need GPS to escape from.
He looked around. Somebody sitting under a dying tree looked back—or, more likely, just looked through him—with dead eyes. A fat Hispanic woman and an even fatter red Indian gal passed a bottle of wine back and forth and giggled. It wasn’t even 1100 yet, but they’d already got the morning off to a hell of a start. A pack of brown Indian kids played field hockey in the street . . . or maybe they just got off on whaling one another with sticks.
And then an avatar appeared out of nowhere in front of Pablo, as avatars had a way of doing. This one was an improbably beautiful, impossibly stacked Hispanic girl—woman. Definitely woman. Her perfume promised everything, or whatever was bigger than everything.
Her smile . . . How could you not almost come in your jeans if a woman like that smiled at you that way? And her voice . . . A voice like that should’ve been illegal. It sure as hell was immoral.
“English?” she purred seductively. “¿O español?”
“Uh, either way.” Pablo’s voice was hoarse. The answer came out in English.
“Okay, big boy.” The avatar used English, too. She definitely left you dissatisfied with the local talent. Hell, she made you think the local talent wasn’t talent. “Wanna get . . . Real?”
“Oh, man! Do I ever!” Pablo exclaimed.
She came up to him. She took his hand. The way she touched him . . . Jesus! He’d had lays he wouldn’t remember like this. He hoped she’d kiss him, too. Instead, she winked. And then she winked out, like a suddenly snuffed candle flame.
Pablo looked down at his astonished palm. The little green square of cardboardy stuff there was real. Better yet—it was Real.
He’d been waiting for a chance like this. Waiting? He’d been praying for a chance like this. In L.A., he was nothing. He was nobody, and he had zero chance of turning into somebody. Almost zero chance. He could have won the lottery. Or he could have got Real.
And now he had. His smile spread almost as wide as the avatar’s, even if he was nowhere near so pretty. He knew what to do. Who didn’t? He touched the cardboardy square to the side of his head, just above and in front of his right ear. Smiling still, he slowly crumpled to the sidewalk.
Lieutenant Shapur Razmara’s cell rang. He grabbed it off the desk. “Razmara. LAPD,” he said, and listened to an excited civilian, transferred to him from the front desk. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed when the civilian paused. He was a Shiite Muslim, but not what anybody would call devout. “What’s your address at that location, ma’am?”
“It’s 2527 Ganahl, Officer,” the woman answer. “There was one of those . . . those things, and then it went away again, and then he fell over.”
“Avatars,” Razmara said absently. He was a stocky, swarthy man with a thick pelt of black hair and an equally luxuriant black mustache, both just starting to show gray.
“Things,” the woman . . . agreed? “You people better hurry up, before something else happens to the poor, stupid yock.”
“We’re on our way, ma’am,” Razmara assured her, and rang off. He checked the big flatscreen monitor on his desk to find out where the devil 2527 Ganahl was exactly. Then he stuck a DNA kit in the inside pocket of his microfiber blazer. He caught the eye of the sergeant whose desk sat next to his. “Ready to roll, Stas? Sounds like another case of Real.”
“Wait one.” Anastasios Kyriades finished dictating a paragraph. Then he stood up. His mustache was even bushier than the lieutenant’s, but he had only a little hair fringing a shiny bald pate.
Razmara muttered to himself. Cell phones. Computers. DNA kits. That stuff was all very twenty-first-century. Which, in the year 2117 of the Common Era, did them how much good? Some, yeah. But not enough. Nowhere near enough.
They hurried out to the black-and-white. “How much of a charge does it have?” Kyriades asked, heading for the driver’s-side door.
“Enough to get us there,” Razmara said. “Probably enough to get us back.”
“Great.”
Before either one of them could slide into the cop car, an avatar popped up in front of them. Shapur Razmara hadn’t seen this one. He would have remembered her. If he’d ever had a wet dream about an Asian woman . . . He shook his head. His wet dreams were nowhere near this hot.
She looked from him to Sergeant Kyriades and back again. Then she shook her head in what might have been scorn or pity or both at once. “You poor sorry assholes,” she said in a voice like sin dipped in honey. A split second later, she was gone.
“Fuck,” Kyriades said wearily. “How do they do that shit, anyway?”
“If I knew . . .” Razmara shook his head and spread his hands. When you banged into avatars and Real and all that other stuff, banged into ’em headlong and full throttle, cell phones and computers and DNA kits started looking like mighty small potatoes.
“Well, we gotta try,” Stas said as he got in.
“Uh-huh.” Razmara buckled his seat belt. Away they went.
The dragon studied Pablo with topaz eyes full of ancient evil. “You shall not have my hoard,” it hissed, each word sounding individually scorched.
“That’s what you think, Charlie.” Pablo took a step forward. He could feel the way the soft leather of his boots gripped his feet and his calves. He could feel the slight scratchiness of his heavy wool breeches against his legs, and the soft smoothness of his sapphire silk tunic.
And he could feel the weight of the sword on his left hip. His hand dropped to the hilt. The dragonhide in which it was wrapped was rough against his fingers. His neck muscles tensed against the weight of his helmet.
“Flee now, while you still have the chance,” the dragon warned. It smelled of brimstone and serpent and terror.
Pablo’s heart thuttered inside his chest; he could distinctly feel each beat. He looked around—quickly, so the dragon didn’t strike while he was distracted. No, no one else had come up the trail through the dark woods with him. A breeze blew fallen elm and oak leaves across the path.
He drew the sword. All the light in the neighborhood seemed to focus on the blade. “You’re the one who’d better run,” he growled. Brandishing that shining weapon was the most natural thing in the world. “I’ve got your number, man, and you know it.”
“Even fate yields to fire,” the dragon said. It opened its mouth wide. Its breath smelled like five sacks of groceries forgotten for two weeks in a locked car in the middle of August. And then the flame flowed forth. Whoever’d invented napalm back in the old days must have been thinking of dragons.
But nothing stopped napalm. When the sword with the dragonhide hilt smote the dragonfire, it magically transformed the flames to harmless mist. The dragon’s hoarse, guttural shriek of despair almost deafened Pablo.
He thrust home. He could feel the point piercing the hard scales of the dragon’s belly. He could feel it probing for the monster’s heart. And, as he’d felt his own heart pound, he felt the dragon’s stop. The creature tried to curse him, but died with the words still unspoken. That was good, because curses here were as Real as everything else.
Dragon blood steaming and smoking on the sword, Pablo pressed past the bend in the path to find out how big a hoard the great worm had had. Gold: coins and chains and rings and armlets. Silver: more coins, and bowls and spoons and a mighty drinking horn half as tall as a man. Jewels: some set into gold and silver, others simply sparkling alone, rubies and emeralds and sapphires and diamonds. A king’s ransom? It was the ransom of a continent full of kings. And it was Pablo’s, all Pablo’s.
He’d pretty much expected that kind of stuff. What he hadn’t expected was that the dragon’s hoard also included the most gorgeous redhead he’d ever seen. All she wore was her hair, which fell nearly to her waist.
“My hero!” she cried in a voice like bells, and cast herself into his arms.
From then on, matters proceeded rapidly. They lay down together. He thrust home. He could feel everything that happened after that, too. Oh, could he ever!
Shapur Razmara stared down in tired disgust at the guy lying on the sidewalk with a little square of green cardboard plastered to the side of his head and a shit-eating grin plastered all over his face. “Another one,” he said, in exactly the tone of voice he would have used to count cowflops at a fertilizer factory.
“Fuckin’ dingleberry,” Sergeant Kyriades agreed. “Let’s get Real.” He sounded about ready to york on his shoes.
“More and more of these stupid . . .” Razmara’s voice trailed off. Even though he was a cop with twenty years on the job, he couldn’t think of anything vile enough to call them. He wanted to spit into this unconscious punk’s face—not that that would have accomplished anything except to win him a disciplinary hearing, and not that the punk would even have noticed.
“We go through the motions?” Kyriades asked resignedly.
“Got a better idea, Stas?” Razmara said.
“They don’t pay me enough to have ideas,” his partner answered.
“Oh, yeah, like I’m so goddamn rich.” Razmara snorted. “Twenty million a month and all the acid-blockers I can pop. Hot damn!” Twenty million dollars a month and you could pick two out of three from child support, rent, and food. You couldn’t have ’em all—he’d found that out again and again, the hard way.
“More’n I bring in,” Kyriades said. Which was true, but he’d managed to stay married. Not for the first time, Lieutenant Razmara wondered how. Sure as hell wasn’t his looks.
That was a worry for another day. “Gather up the goods,” Razmara said.
“Right.” The sergeant nodded. Persians and Greeks—they’d only been fighting for 2,500 years. But Razmara and Kyriades got on fine. And, since they were both white men whose first language was English, they counted for Anglos in Los Angeles. A Muslim Anglo? An Orthodox one? Why not? There were plenty of Jewish “Anglos” in L.A., but mostly on the West Side.
Kyriades pulled a plastic evidence bag and a tweezer out of his jacket pocket. He used the tweezer to capture the green square—you didn’t want to touch it barehanded. The LAPD had found out about that—again, the hard way. Along with the rest of the United States, the LAPD was finding out about all kinds of things the hard way these days.
“So we’ll take it back to the lab, right?” Kyriades said, carefully stashing the little square in the evidence bag.
“Sure.” Razmara nodded. “What else? Gotta follow procedures.” His great-granddad would have talked the same way about following the Koran. Stas’ great-grandfather, no doubt, would have yattered about the Bible the same way. To them in the old days, and to the lieutenant now, Holy Writ was Holy Writ. If you didn’t follow procedures (or the Koran, or the Bible—check one), Bad Things Would Happen.
Well, Bad Things were already happening. Getting Real, for instance.
“So we’ll take the fucking thing back to the lab,” Kyriades repeated. “And the gals in the white coats will do whatever the hell they do, right? And then they’ll tell us the same thing those sorry suckers tell us every goddamn time.” His baritone rasp—he sounded like a three-pack-a-day guy, though he wasn’t—went falsetto: “ ‘We can’t analyze what’s in it. We’ve got no clue how it fucks up the assholes who use it.’ Shit.” The last word was in his usual tones again.
“Yeah, yeah.” Shapur Razmara had heard it all before. Hell, he’d said it all before. It was all true. Saying it didn’t do a thousand dollars’ worth of good. The LAPD was screwed. The whole country was screwed, and had been for years. Just the same . . . “You have a better idea, Sherlock?”
“I already told you, they don’t pay me enough for that.”
“You tell me all kinds of crap,” Razmara said. “You expect me to keep it sorted out, too?”
“Ahh, your mama,” Kyriades retorted. They grinned at each other. You had to get on with your partner pretty well to be able to give him that kind of grief. Kyriades stirred the Realie with his toe. “We oughta call the meat wagon for this guy.”
“What we oughta do is let him lay there, let his little pals rifle his pockets and maybe smash in his dumb fuckin’ head.” But duty won. Razmara went over to the car and called for an ambulance. “There. Happy now?”
“If I am, how come my face don’t know it?”
Kyriades might have gone on singing that song for some time. He might have, but he didn’t, because a different avatar appeared in front of him and Razmara. Razmara’s service revolver was in his hand before he quite knew how it got there. The avatar—a bare-chested guy, definitely hunky—threw back his head and laughed. Then he threw his arms wide in invitation. “Go ahead, man. Shoot me. Stun me. Whatever gets you off.”
“Bite me,” Razmara said. Talking back to avatars went against doctrine, but sometimes they pissed you off so much you couldn’t help yourself. If he did shoot this one, the bullet would go on through as if the thing were so much air. If he yanked out his stun gun instead, he would be stunning nothing.
But an avatar could touch him. An avatar could hand out things if he wanted to . . . things like little cardboard squares, for instance.
How? The cop didn’t know. The LAPD crime lab sure as hell didn’t. Nobody in the USA did.
“Wanna . . . get Real?” the avatar asked, holding out a little blue square and a little yellow one.
“No,” Razmara said stonily.
“Fuck off and die,” Kyriades explained.
The avatar only laughed some more. “Shoveling shit against the tide,” he said, and winked out of existence. Shapur wished he would have thought the thing was wrong.
Hu Zhiaoxing dressed with meticulous care for his conference with the American diplomats. As befitted a country living in the past, the United States preferred—indeed, insisted on—formalwear of long-outmoded style. And so Third Minister Hu had had to learn such archaic skills as tying shoelaces and knotting a cravat. That wasn’t quite a hangman’s knot, even if it felt like one with the pale blue shirt’s collar button buttoned. He wondered why people in bygone days had insisted on such uncomfortable clothes.
“Ready, Minister?” his aide asked. Wang Zemin didn’t have to worry about putting on a silly outfit before he went and explained the facts of life to the Americans. He was wearing a pullover with a sensibly loose neckline, elasticated pants, and memory-foam slip-on shoes.
“I suppose so,” Hu said resignedly. The jacket with lapels he shrugged on wasn’t particularly bad to wear. It just looked stupid. Well, no help for it. He grabbed his briefcase—one more bit of flummery. “Yes, let’s go.”
From the harbor at Avalon, Minister Hu could see the American mainland on the eastern horizon. China had taken Catalina and the other Channel Islands a generation earlier, after the USA—again!—found itself unable to pay its bills. Avalon had been a pretty little town before the transfer of sovereignty: Hu had seen old pictures. In his admittedly biased opinion, it was prettier now.
As they got into the boat, Wang Zemin said, “A pity you can’t do this by avatar, and spare the annoyance of real travel.”
“If I’m not there in the flesh, the Americans will think we’re insulting them.” Minister Hu rephrased that for greater precision: “Looking down our noses at them.”
“Well, so what? We do look down our noses at them,” Wang said. “If they want to think so, fine. As for insulting them . . . The trouble with them is, they still think these are the old days, when they knew everything worth knowing and could throw their weight around as much as they pleased. It’s not like that any more.”
“No. It’s not,” Hu Zhiaoxing agreed. “But they still have their pride.”
“They have more of it than they know what to do with,” his aide said. “Why else would you have to go see them in person? Why else would you have to speak English when you do? The whole world uses Mandarin these days. The whole world—except for them. They need to get Real.”
He touched a button. The boat sprang away from the pier. It would cross the forty-odd kilometers—twenty-six miles, an ancient song called the distance, and the Americans still clung to their cumbersome old measurements—in little more than half an hour.
Seabirds squawked in the sky, though they soon fell behind the boat. Unless you were a birder, which Hu wasn’t, the gulls and cormorants and pelicans on this side of the Pacific looked pretty much like the ones far to the west.
An honor guard awaited the minister and his aide when they got to the harbor at San Pedro. The men looked tough and capable. Their uniforms and weapons . . . As charitably as he could, Hu thought, China has better.
A white man in a suit much like his came forward and held out his hand. “How do you do, sir?” he said in English. “I’m Brett Hill, the protocol chief.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Minister Hu said. He shook hands—one more old-fashioned ritual you had to endure with Americans. “But I understood I was to meet with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of the DEA?”
“Oh, yes, sir!” Hill had a broad, eager, friendly smile of the sort the minister instinctively distrusted. “They’re waiting for you not far from here. We have a car to take you to the hotel.”
He gestured. The large, muscular car was an American model. Hu Zhiaoxing sighed to himself. If the officials weren’t far away, the machine would probably get him there without breaking down. Wang Zemin’s expression was eloquent. He didn’t say anything. Neither did Hu. He just nodded. The things I do for my country, he thought.
Smiling still, the protocol chief led them to the Saturn. The honor guard presented arms when the Chinese walked past. One man’s hand twisted for a moment as he gripped the stock of his minichain. Only a Realie would have used that gesture. Hu’s face betrayed nothing. Neither did Wang’s. The aide didn’t mind showing what he thought of the American government. Getting an ordinary soldier in trouble was a different story.
The car idled roughly. Its shocks left something to be desired. Brett Hill plainly thought it was state of the art. Minister Hu didn’t waste time educating him. Life was too short. Hill also plainly took potholes for granted. A raised eyebrow from Hu passed a message to his aide. He’s only an American. He doesn’t know any better. Wang gave back an almost imperceptible nod of his own.
They’d cleaned up the Marriott—it was indeed near the harbor—so it almost came up to Chinese standards. That only made the neighborhood around the place seem more blighted by comparison.
In the conference room where the American dignitaries waited, Hu declined ice water. He accepted tea. Drug residues in a small cup wouldn’t be too bad, and boiling ought to kill the germs. Wang Zemin drank nothing at all.
Secretary of State Jackson was short and plump and black. Secretary of Defense Berkowitz was short and thin and white. Secretary of the DEA Kojima was short and potbellied (but not really plump) and, by his looks, no more than a quarter Asian. Both Hu and Wang were five or six centimeters taller than any of them—and taller than Brett Hill, too, for that matter. Better nutrition when we were growing up, Hu thought.
But that had nothing to do with the price of rice. “As you requested, gentlemen, I am here,” he said. “What can I do for you today?”
“You’ve got to stop selling your poison in our towns!” Kojima burst out.
“It isn’t poison,” Hu said. “Besides, very often we don’t sell it. We give it away. How can anyone possibly object to that?”
“Pushers have been saying ‘The first one’s free’ as long as there’ve been drugs.” Contempt dripped from the DEA chief’s voice. “ ‘Wanna . . . get Real?’ ” He contrived to make the question sound obscene.
Patiently, Hu Zhiaoxing said, “You seem to be laboring under a mistaken impression. Getting Real has nothing to do with drugs. It’s a matter of metastimulation of specific brain regions.”
“Sounds like bullshit to me,” the Secretary of Defense whispered to the Secretary of State. Hu knew he wasn’t supposed to hear that, but he did. China had technical leads in more areas than the Americans realized, and those leads were wider than the Americans thought.
“How do you produce this, uh, metastimulation?” Jackson asked.
“We have ways,” Hu answered. “I could not tell you myself. I am not an artisan shaping that particular form of knowledge.”
“It’s got to stop,” Kojima said. “Do you have any idea how much productivity we’re losing because people would rather get Real than work or do anything else?”
“Don’t you think that should be a warning to you, Mr. Secretary?” Hu said.
“Huh? What do you mean?” Kojima didn’t impress the Chinese as being either very polite or very bright.
“If your citizens had lives that were more worth living, getting Real would not seem so enjoyable to them,” Hu Zhiaoxing replied.
All three American Cabinet officials glared at him. “It’s your fault that we don’t,” Secretary of State Jackson said bitterly.
“My fault?” Minister Hu pointed at his own chest, then shook his head. “I am sorry, sir, but I must reject the imputation.”
“Not your fault personally. I didn’t mean that,” Jackson said. “Your country’s fault.”
“What did China do?” Hu answered his own question before any of the Americans could: “China collected the debts the United States owed her. No one forced the United States to contract those debts—and many others. You did it of your own free will.”
“And then you broke us. And you left us broke,” Jackson said.
Hu couldn’t help shrugging. “I would say you did it to yourselves. I would also say you resent us for going on to discover new fields of knowledge after you could no longer stay in that game yourselves.”
“Damn right we do,” Berkowitz muttered. Again, Hu wasn’t supposed to hear. Again, he did. This time, though, the Secretary of Defense went on to speak directly to the Chinese minister: “We’re sick and tired of you pushing us around, and we aren’t going to take it any more. You say you won’t stop ramming getting Real down our throat?”
“Our position is that we are merely supplying a demand,” Hu replied. “Only your unfortunate inability to offer your consumers anything nearly so interesting and exciting causes your resentment of it. Jealousy, I must say, is not an appropriate motive for foreign policy.”
Berkowitz breathed hard through his nose. And a long, ugly nose it was, too, at least to someone with Hu’s standards. “This is not a matter of jealousy. This is a matter of national security. Security, nothing—this is a matter of national survival. If you think you can make people in this country not give a damn about anything except getting Real—”
You’re right, Hu Zhiaoxing thought irreverently.
But that wasn’t where the American Secretary of Defense was going. “If that’s what you think, you’ve got another think coming.”
An old song had lyrics something like that, a song from the days when the United States really was the world power it still imagined itself to be. “What precisely are you driving at, sir?” Hu asked.
The Secretary of State responded before the Secretary of Defense could: “If you don’t quit pushing Real in the USA, that can only mean war between your country and mine.”
All three Americans looked stern and determined, as if they were playing parts in a thriller from a director who didn’t know what the devil he was doing. Wang Zemin . . . giggled. The Americans gaped at him. Minister Hu sent him a reproachful glance—that wasn’t how you were supposed to play the game. Which didn’t mean the Third Minister didn’t feel like giggling himself.
“I must tell you, Mr. Jackson, that that would be . . . inadvisable,” he said.
“You think you can do whatever you please here, and it doesn’t come with a price,” Jackson said. “But that’s not the way things work. We can protect our borders.”
“You can try . . . sir,” Minister Hu said coolly.
“We can—and we will,” Secretary of State Jackson said.
“You have been warned,” Secretary of Defense Berkowitz added.
“If you think you can go on corrupting us and humiliating us, we just have to show you how totally wrong you are,” Secretary of the DEA Kojima declared. “And I mean totally.”
After that, nobody on either side seemed to see much point to saying anything else. The Chinese diplomat and his aide went back to the Saturn. It carried them to the harbor without falling apart. They boarded their little boat. Wang Zemin steered it back to Avalon. He laughed most of the way there.
Pablo opened his eyes. He closed them again as fast as he could. But when he opened them a second time, nothing had changed. This wasn’t Real. This, goddammit to hell, was real. And it was that particularly depressing part of reality called jail.
He looked around the holding tank. A couple of Hispanic guys like him. Three or four brown Indian guys. A couple of black guys. A couple of skinny but dangerous-looking Asian guys—if they didn’t have shanks stashed somewhere, he would have been amazed. And a couple of white guys: one who seemed scared shitless, the other looking as if he’d been carved from granite—a fuck of a lot of granite. Regardless of how buff he was, he wouldn’t last long if he acted stupid. If enough guys jumped on you, you could really be made of granite and you’d break anyway.
One of the Indians lit a cigarette. Most of the time, Pablo thought tobacco smoke was gross. Piled on top of all the other stinks here, it didn’t seem so bad.
The massive white guy scowled at Pablo from two of the coldest, nastiest gray eyes ever. The LEDs in the ceiling lights gleamed off the dude’s shaved head. “So—you’re awake, huh?” he rumbled in a voice like boulders crashing together.
If this was real, Pablo wanted Real. Oh, man, he really wanted Real. He wished that sweet-talking avatar would show up so he could forget all about this. Hey, it could happen, even in jail. The cops wished they could stop avatars. Wishing didn’t do them any good, either.
And Pablo still had to answer the mountain of toned meat. “No, man,” he said, “but I figure I’ll wake up pretty soon, you know?”
“Huh?” The white guy blinked. Pablo hadn’t been a hundred percent sure he could—snakes never did. Then he decided it was funny. His laugh sounded like kettledrums. “Comedian, are you?”
Right. And then you wake up, Pablo thought. But that was the trouble. Pablo had woken up. What a bringdown. He reminded himself he needed to answer again. “Sure, man. Me and the dragon.”
He threw it out at random. Besides, the dragon was dead, and this dude hadn’t got Real with him anyway. With that carcass, the white guy looked more likely to be into something like HGH 3.0 than avatars and everything that went with them. The more fool him. That redhead . . . Remembering her made you want to forget all the genuine local girls.
You couldn’t always tell by looks. The hard-muscled white guy proved that. When the fingers on his right hand twisted a particular way, Pablo damn near fell over. “Dude!” he said. “You got some? You got some here? How’d you do that?”
“Talent, man,” the other guy answered smugly. He turned out to have it stashed in the waistband of his jeans. It wasn’t the kind of shit mechanical bloodhounds could find, the way they sniffed out crank or Superoxy or coke nuevo. Pablo happily pressed a little cardboardy square to his temple. Even more happily, he forgot real and got Real.
The only way the jailer could have been more bored would have been to die day before yesterday. He stopped in front of the holding tank. “Ramirez, Pablo!” he sang out. “Come forward for your hearing.”
Nobody came forward. One of the men in the cell pointed to a guy who was lying there not looking at anything under this sun. “I think that is him,” the prisoner said in a singsong Indian accent.
Ramirez wasn’t the only one who’d ridden the express away from the material world, either. The bastard who looked like an murderball frontman was down for the count, too.
“Well, fuck me.” The jailer wasn’t bored any more—he was pissed off instead. “How’d they get the shit? Where’d it come from?”
Nobody said a word. The conscious assholes in the holding tank all radiated ignorance and innocence. As far as they were concerned, the mothers who’d got Real must’ve picked up their shit a mile beyond the moon. The jailer swore in weary resignation. Maybe the surveillance video would show something.
“You sorry suckers,” the jailer told the conscious prisoners. “It could be you next time.”
He knew that was a mistake as soon as he said it. Too late, of course. You always realized shit like that too late. None of the losers in the cell let out a peep, even now. But every goddamn one of them looked like he wanted it to be him next time.
Pounding the crap out of Catalina and the other Channel Islands should have been a piece of cake. After all, the islands were within artillery range of the American mainland. By rights, even cruise missiles should have been overkill. Manned fighters should have been ridiculously over the top.
“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” Major Dmitri Gomez muttered as he climbed into the cockpit of his F-27 at Edwards Air Force base, up in the high-desert country north of L.A. Things had a way of going wrong when the United States tangled with China. If that weren’t true, the damned Chinese wouldn’t hold the Channel Islands in the first place. Their casinos in Avalon wouldn’t be draining trillions of dollars out of an American economy that couldn’t begin to afford it. Vampires, that’s what they were, sucking what little was left of the USA’s blood right on out of it.
As for getting Real . . . Major Gomez muttered to himself. He hoped the armorers and techs who serviced the Strike Peregrine didn’t waste their off-duty time with little squares of brightly colored cardboardy stuff. He hoped, yeah, but he wouldn’t have bet more than a grand on it. And you couldn’t buy a cup of coffee for a thousand bucks.
One of the noncoms on the ground gave him a thumbs-up. Gomez returned the gesture from the cockpit. Hagopian was a good guy. The Air Force needed more like him. What it needed and what it had were two different critters.
Methodically, Gomez went over the preflight checklist with the F-27’s AI. The USA’s latest air-superiority fighter had started coming off the assembly line back in the 2050s. It had been a worldbeater back then. Ever since, it had got upgrades to the weaponry and the avionics and to its stealthiness. It was a much more capable warplane now than it had been when it was new.
But was it capable enough to go up against all the goodies the Chinese could throw at it? The last time American fighter-bombers tried to plaster the Channel Islands, hardly any of them came back. Gomez’s Strike Peregrine carried some Ukrainian biocores the USA hadn’t known about during the last skirmish. Now if only China had stood still . . .
“Check completed. All systems green. Aircraft ready for takeoff,” the AI told Dmitri. The voice was female and highly competent—it was as if you were getting a clean bill of health from a doctor.
“Another stupid mission. You know you’re toast.” That was a female voice, too—a female voice right out of a porn vid. The F-27’s cockpit emphatically did not have room for two. It barely had room for one. The avatar that materialized there solved the problem by sitting on Gomez’s lap and wiggling. He could feel her, too. It was like . . . having a girl sit on your lap and wiggle. It was distracting as hell, or maybe a skosh worse than that.
Dmitri didn’t understand how avatars worked. Nobody on the American mainland—except maybe a few Chinese spies—did. They violated most of the known laws of physics. Which proved . . . what, exactly? That Americans didn’t know enough laws of physics, it looked like, and some of the ones they thought they did know weren’t so.
“Get lost,” Gomez told the avatar.
“You’re cute,” she answered. “Wanna get . . . Real?”
“No! Jesus Christ, no!” Wouldn’t that be just what he needed?—getting doped out of his skull when he was supposed to be flying a combat mission. Even the hottest Ukrainian biocores couldn’t save a plane from a fucked-up pilot.
The avatar pouted. “Spoilsport,” she said, and winked out. Dmitri breathed an enormous sigh of relief. It wasn’t just that he could see the HUD again, though that sure didn’t hurt. But if avatars could show up in fighter cockpits, where couldn’t they?
Anywhere?
A dozen F-27s roared down the airstrip. They sprang into the cool night sky one after another. With afterburner and strap-on rocket packs, a Strike Peregrine could climb to the edge of space. They’d be making this attack run at treetop height, maybe lower. That would keep Chinese radar from picking them up.
Of course, their updated stealth materials were supposed to do the same thing. Engineers claimed an F-27 had a radar profile about the size of a starling’s. Dmitri wasn’t sure he believed that—how many starlings could break Mach 1 in low-level flight? Still, the profile had to be pretty goddamn small. In that case, why was everybody so tight-assed about staying low, low, low?
Or maybe the question should have been, why didn’t the F-27s that hit the Channel Islands the last time come back to Edwards? Maybe the Chinese weren’t using radar. If they weren’t, whatever they used instead worked even better.
Dmitri tried to shove that cheery thought out of his mind. He’d just about succeeded when the avatar appeared in the cockpit again.
It had to be impossible, even though it was happening. He knew that made no sense. But nothing made any sense. He was doing umpty-hundred knots and jinking like a butterfly with turbofans. No projection could get in here, let alone stay in here. No way, nohow.
Except the avatar did. “Wanna . . . get Real?”
“No!” he yelled again. Laughing one hell of a sexy laugh, the avatar reached under his flight helmet—which should have been impossible squared—and put
something on his right temple. “No!” he screamed one more time. He couldn’t
see the little cardboard square, but you didn’t need to see
everything, did you? Nope. Some things, you could take on faith…
