FKA USA by Reed King

Author:Reed King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

* * *

We were crisp and we all knew it. We would die here in the Dust Bowl formerly known as Arizona: miles and miles of a world turned bone-white, and wind that hissed through the emptiness.

We crawled through bombed-out craters and scrolled through shopping malls reduced to rubble by homemade IEDs. Toppled water tanks looked like cracked eggs in the dust. Old Texas militia tanks still sat corroding in the weather and hacked-up Halloran-Chyung aid crates blinded the windows of the squats that survived, stained over decades to the deep maroon dust that settled everywhere. Ruined tent cities studded the horizon. Cars with dust-choked engines and their rubber tires long puddled to the asphalt sat on cracked ribbons of highway: monuments to a last, desperate exodus.

I escaped to the Yellow Brick Road when I could, for a few minutes at a time, trying to squeeze every bit of juice from my battery pack. I stood in front of the simulated fountains, passing a hand through the pixelated water. Or I scrolled shaded VR halls, imagining I could leave my real body behind, molt it like an old shell.

When I still had the energy to talk, I talked to Bad Kitty. Even through an interface in a simulated landscape filled with druggies and pedos, I could forget all about being locked out of Crunch, United, and tagged for an armed terrorist. I could forget about Jared and Annalee, forget about my mom, forget about what I’d lost or been forced to leave behind.

I learned her real name was Evaline, and she lived on the east side of Mount Hood in New Los Angeles, with two younger brothers, her mom, and three CARRIEs,2 the android models who had raised her. Her parents divorced after her dad fell in love with a long-legged avatar in a virtual-reality hotspot and spent half the family’s fortune on new plug-ins and flash skins for her. He was in recovery now, she told me, but she wasn’t sure she could ever trust him again.

Her favorite smell was silicone.

I learned when she was twelve she got fixed on the idea of tracking down the specific carrier who’d birthed her in one of the ground-level clinics, but had only gotten as far as a number: 224w. I learned her mom was pissed that the gene modulation they’d spent a fortune on couldn’t do a thing about Evaline’s sarcasm, or her habit of biting her nails.

I learned her brothers looked like their dad, and she like her mom, but somehow the chins got scrambled and she got the cleft. Her mom wanted to razor it down but quit needling her about it when Evaline threatened to shave her head in protest.

I learned that once she got lost in one of the poverty reservations on the other side of the 405, and she’d been swarmed by rats. Some of the slummers had come to her rescue to fight them off; there, she told me, they all bred cats as big as oxygen filters to keep the vermin out of their camps.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.