Kelley Eskridge by Solitaire

Author:Solitaire [Solitaire]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-09-11T05:42:27.548566+00:00

The guard pointed her to a processing area where a clerk gave her a plastic-wrapped parcel of the clothes and boots she'd worn for her transfer to VC. She was surprised to see them. They didn't seem like hers anymore.

The clerk pointed her to a changing cubicle and stared at her through the gaps in the curtain. It seemed to take a long time to get dressed. Back at the counter, she thumb-printed a handful of screens and signed her name electronically seven times. Then she waited until the clerk said dismissively, “You're done. There's the door.”

She began to turn and the man said, “Well, take this with you,” and pushed over her palmtop. “Bunch of fuckin' zombies,” he said, and someone else laughed, but she didn't care. She almost agreed with him. Sleep seemed a remote imagining, something she had perhaps done once a long time ago. She understood that her body would struggle on until it could not function anymore; then in the simple way of machines it would stop working, and she would tumble wherever she was into a heap of broken parts until someone came to repair or dismantle her.

She let the body-machine carry her through the heavy steelplated door that, without warning, dumped her onto the street and into a current of people that whirled her in a rush of color and noise and smell off to her left. For the first moments, she saw only an enormous blur; then the jumbled images coalesced into buildings streaked with grease and graffiti, people on crowded stoops, and more people in open windows, as far up as she could see, until their shapes were lost in the shadows that the giant structures cast on each other. It was cold: she'd worked out during the endless waiting of the day that it must be roughly late October, and she'd expected the weather to be warm, like home. But she wasn't home anymore.

Voices echoed in layers from the street to the sky; the noise spun around her as she stumbled along the edge of the crowd, close to the road that was packed with mass transport, commercial carriers, private cars, and even a few people on battery-powered scooters, small and vulnerable among the heavy traffic. The air was gray with industrial fumes, and many of the people on foot wore filter masks. The rest trudged barefaced through the smoke, gasping or wiping their eyes; many of them coughed openmouthed, as if it were such an habitual reflex that they no longer noticed they were spreading spit. Jackal thought of disease vectors, and tried to turn her face whenever someone passed close by.

She saw a young man and woman who even to her untrained eye were obviously misplaced tourists. Their clothes gave them away: much too trendy, the sort of thing that suburban people who read too many fashion magazines thought city people would wear. Jackal had seen others like these on the streets of Hong Kong, in the terraces of Mirabile, on the playas of Madrid.

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