The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow by Cory Doctorow

Author:Cory Doctorow [Doctorow, Cory]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-10-14T16:51:04+00:00

Part 3: There’ll Always Be the Good Guys Shootin’ It Out With the Bad Guys

I used to drive mechas for joyriding. Now it’s a medical necessity.

I piloted my suit down the Keys, going amphibious and sinking to the ocean-bottom rather than risk the bridges. The bridges were where the youth gangs hung out, eyes luminous and hard. You never knew when they’d swarm you and mindrape you.

I hated the little bastards.

The Second Wumpus Devastation had destroyed—or preserved, if you preferred—every hominid in the Keys, and taken down every human-made structure. Today, we survivors lived in treehouses and ate breadberries.

Looking at old maps, I can see that my treehouse is right in the middle of the site of the old KOA Campground on Sugarloaf key. I like it for the proximity to Haiti, where an aggressive military culture kept the island wumpus-free and hence in possession of several generations of functional mechas. There were a few years there, after I escaped from the wireheads and the wumpuses, when I grew into a strapping buck and was able to earn one of these lethal little bastards by serving in an antiwumpus militia.

“Earn” is probably the wrong word. The youth gangs wiped out the militias a few years into my stint. You’d be out on patrol and then a group of these kids would glide out of the bush so silent it was like they were on rails. They’d surround you, hypnotizing you with those eyes of theirs, with those antennae of theirs, and you’d be frozen like a mouse pinned by a cobra’s gaze. They’d SQUID you right through your armor, dropping the superconducting quantum field around your head, ripping through your life, your deep structures, your secrets and habits, making a record for the cloud, or wherever it was all the data went to.

After a thorough mindraping, hard militiamen would be reduced to shell-shocked existential whiners, useless for combat. They’d abandon their powered suits and wander off into the bush, end up in some taproom, drinking to forget the void they faced as their brains were spooled out like an archival tape being transferred to modern media.

I’d been caught out one day, the air-conditioner wheezing to keep my naked flesh cool in the form-fitting cradle of the mecha. The mecha was only twice as tall as me, practically child-sized compared to the big ones we’d had in Detroit, and it was cranky and balky. I could pick up an egg with Dad’s mecha and not break the shell. The force-feedback manipulators in this actually clicked through a series of defined settings, click-click-click, the mecha’s hands opening and closing in a clittery clatter like a puppet’s.

I waded through the swampy bush, navigating by the wumpusplume on the horizon. Somewhere, a couple clicks away, something was converting one of Florida’s precious remaining human-made structures into soil—and taking the humans along with it. No one knew if the wumpuses and the youth gangs were on the same side. No one knew if there were “sides.

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