Distant Worlds Volume 2 Read online

  Cheap and disposable service labor.

  The guards hardly took note of him as he passed through the checkpoints.

  Outside the enclave, the world functioned according to a different, older set of technological rules. A hodgepodge of wireless signals competed to interface with several dozen generations worth of computing equipment. Once he was through the wall, Marcus’s signal went cold, cut off from the enclave network by protective scrambler fields shielding the enclave’s system from external hackers. His network tried to interface with the antiquated systems around it, but it lacked the necessary software.

  Marcus switched it off, leaving him at the mercy of his natural senses.

  There were blocks and blocks worth of parking facilities surrounding the enclave wall. A single rail line station stood just outside the gate, but its service was notoriously unreliable. Most of the workers who passed through the enclave’s border checkpoints either commuted in their own vehicle or walked there from one of the less heavily used public transit stations located within a few miles of the wall.

  Marcus headed directly for a parking lot just off the main street, an area specifically designated for taxi services and filled with dozens of drivers competing for potential fares. The drivers called out to passersby in a cacophonous fusion of half a dozen languages. Most of them were reasonably fluent in some combination of Spanish and English, but a good number supplemented that base with a hefty smattering of Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Vietnamese, Filipino, Armenian, Turkish, and several other languages which had taken root throughout the vast sprawl of old Houston.

  It took Marcus less than five minutes to leverage their offers against each other and secure the cheapest fare to his destination.

  The club’s greenroom stunk of mold, sweat, and cigarettes. A single vent positioned on the ceiling kept the air moving, but its mildew-laden pipes and tubing also seemed to be the source of much of the room’s unsettling odor, a trade-off which provided little in the way of comfort.

  Lena sat by herself on the tattered leather couch while Chris did his best to negotiate an even smaller portion of the door for them. He was a big believer in “paying dues,” which he took to mean doing favors for people when you’re a nobody so they’ll be willing to go out of their way to help you get your big break. In this case, it meant taking less money so the club’s owners would do more to promote their next show. He insisted this was the way the “business” worked.

  Of course, Chris was also a naïve idiot. That was what the rest of band told him when he negotiated them out of getting any money at their last show. It was also the reason why Trevor and Lena were the only two members left. Trevor had never done anything that wasn’t Chris’s idea to begin with and was too dumb to get upset about the situation anyway. Lena didn’t know what her excuse was for sticking around.

  Maybe it was because, despite all his stupid ideas and crazy expectations, Chris realized he needed her.

  She was the one who could take his disparate, half-finished thoughts and turn them into something musically coherent. More often than not, she simply cut away the unmanageable parts of his ideas and attached what little remained of them to her own. Whenever he eventually heard the result, he seemed not to notice that most of it was her invention rather than his. Maybe he did realize it and decided not to mention it, but Lena thought it more likely he only had ears for the faint remnants of his ideas hidden amidst her own.

  Still, he was at least astute enough to recognize that without her, he would never be able to write a song bearable to listen to. He may not have been as smart or as talented as he thought he was, but he respected her, which was more than she could say for anyone else she’d played with previously.

  Respect only went so far, though.

  By the time Chris was done with his “negotiations,” it was nearly time for them to get ready for the show.

  “Do you want to go over the set again?” she asked when he sat down on the couch beside her.

  “No, no,” Chris replied, tapping a finger against his forehead. “It’s all up here.”

  He laughed a little more nervously than usual.

  Lena glared at him. “What’s wrong?”

  Chris took a deep breath started rubbing his sorry excuse for a beard. “There’s been a change of plans.”

  She’d almost quit the band at least three times over the last month over unexpected “changes.”

  “Well don’t keep me stewing in suspense, for fuck’s sake.”

  He sat up straighter and turned toward her as he ran a hand through his tangled mop of hair.

  “Okay, so it turns out this place is doing things differently than when I was here a few years back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They don’t do regular live shows anymore. The whole place is set up for firestreaming.”

  “What?!?” Lena would have jumped off the couch if every muscle in her body hadn’t seized up. “Are you fucking kidding me? How could you not know this?”

  Chris threw his hands up and leaned away from her. “I’m sorry! How the hell could I have known? It’s not like they fucking advertise it outside!”

  Lena tried to catch her breath, wondering if she was breaking the law just be being there.

  “Chris, we have to cancel! There’s no way we can do this show now.”

  He grabbed her arm tightly to pull her closer to him as he glanced at the greenroom door.

  “Keep your voice down,” he said through clenched teeth. “Maybe you haven’t been paying attention, but these aren’t the kind of people that you just up and cancel on.”

  Lena thought of the troll of a man who greeted them outside. Angry as she was, she had to agree he didn’t look like the sort to take “no” for an answer.

  “Chris, I…” The rest of the words died in her throat and she buried her face in her hands. “God, you’re such a fucking idiot.”

  A long silence passed between them. For a moment, she felt the couch cushions move as he shifted his weight and she prepared herself for some half-assed, reassuring pat on the back. It never came, though, which was just as well. She might have punched him if he touched her.

  When she finally looked up, he was still sitting there, staring at her like a moron with no idea of how much trouble he was dragging them into.

  “Look,” he said, “maybe this isn’t such a disaster in the grand scheme of things.”

  Lena was too shocked to stop him from going on. He had that look in his eye he got whenever he had an idea too big for his brain.

  “There’s a lot of people saying that firestreaming is the next big thing. I’ve heard it might even be legal soon! Just think, if we nail this show, we could get in on the ground floor, be the standard bearers, you know? Haven’t you always wanted to do something no one else has done yet? Isn’t that the whole reason for why we’re doing this?”

  For an instant, just an instant, some part of her imagined what that would be like. There was nothing noteworthy in her life other than music; she was just another faceless girl destined to work shit jobs for shit money for shit people until she stopped showing up on account of her unnoticed death. Maybe if there was even the slightest chance that what he suggested could be true…

  The thought was gone before it could fully take root, but by then it was already too late. Something in her eyes must have given her away because she saw Chris smile.

  He knew he had her.

  The theater’s main room reeked of melting solder and paint fumes. With so many bodies crammed onto the theater floor, there was a faint tinge of static in the stale, stuffy air.

  Most of the seats had been torn out long ago, but the rows and rows of computer servers had been installed much more recently. They weren’t so much servers as piles of mismatched spare parts held together with zip ties, stretch cords, and electrical tape. Thick vines of bundled cabling hung down from the ceiling to connect each unit to the main control terminal bolted onto the mixing board at the back of t
he room.

  A spindly, tattooed woman with hair like an oil slick greeted Marcus just inside the door.

  “Got a few spots left,” she said.

  “I want the best unit you have. Nothing that’s going to short out in the middle of the show.”

  She shook her head. “You want the best spot? Get here before they’re taken.”

  He thrust what remained of his cash at her. “Move somebody.”

  She took the money and counted it, her plastic expression unchanged. When she finished, she snapped her fingers at one of the nearby bouncers.

  “Unit seven. Put whoever’s there now in nineteen. If he won’t go, throw him out.”

  The woman looked back to him. Her eyes were almost black under the theater’s dim lighting.

  “Best input signal we’ve got,” she said. “Try not to overdo it.”

  “I can handle myself.”

  That brought out the hint of a smile.

  “Of course you can. Enjoy the show.”

  Unit seven stood in the front row of servers in the dead center of the room. It looked newer than the units around it, with many components obviously purpose-built for the device rather than cobbled together from spare parts.

  Almost.

  Loose wires still poked out from the casing seams and the neural uplink control box had clearly been stolen from some half-decent research lab. The control panel at least had a virtual input sensor, but the metal brackets holding it in place were poorly welded to the main server unit’s housing and several extra holes had been drilled into the sensor’s casing to accommodate extra input feeds.

  Even so, it seemed far more sophisticated than its patchwork, almost primitive neighbors. Most of the units looked like they couldn’t handle transmitting a video message. Unit seven at least looked capable of slightly heavier lifting. It didn’t reassure him simply to know that any one of the other jury-rigged servers was probably capable of handling a larger datastreams than all of the workstations in his office combined. With so much repurposed hardware and tangled, mismatched wiring, he was never fully free of the fear that something would short out and leave him a drooling idiot waiting to be dumped into the closest pond of waste runoff.

  The man occupying unit seven didn’t appreciate being told to relocate, but he thought better of lodging too much of a protest with the burly bouncer, who outweighed him by a substantial margin. Marcus slid into place next to the control panel as the bouncer led him away. The unit was already powered up and ready to engage, but he took a moment to recalibrate some of the neural feed settings based on his personal characteristics. He also turned up the sensitivity to the highest level.

  Once everything was adjusted to his liking, he reached for the winding spool that held the neural input cable. It was a solid cable of very high quality, much better than the kinked, twisted things dangling from most of the other units. The metal plug at the end still looked new, baring no scratches or worn edges from overuse.

  Marcus pulled the small plug of synthetic skin away from his cranial jack and inserted the cable. It slid in smoothly and fastened into place with a scarcely audible click that set his teeth on edge. He felt the warm, tingling sensation at the base of his brain as the empty, white noise of the firestream signal fed into his nervous system.

  Three of the latches opened easily with a flick of her wrist. The fourth one, speckled with rust and slightly crooked, took more pressure to open. She took extra care with the final latch, which dangled loosely against the case without a working spring to hold it in place. As she pulled the case open, the familiar scent of mildew and lemon oil drifted up to fill her nostrils.

  The guitar was nestled snuggly in the case’s velvet-covered foam interior, its flat finish soaking up every last particle of light falling upon its scored, dented surface. A greasy, black fusion of dirt and oil covered most of the smoke-stained fretboard and a good portion of the faded steel hardware. The selector switch head was snapped off, replaced by a small strip of electrical tape wound around the remaining screw.

  Lena pulled the instrument out of the case and affixed her leather strap to the locking posts on either end of its body. Hanging down to her waist, the guitar pulled at her neck and left shoulder like a sack of wet cement. She gripped the neck and strummed the open strings, listening to each one sound out in turn.

  E, A, D, G, B, E.

  She smiled.

  Even after a day and night inside its case and buffeted about the van by Chris’s reckless driving, the guitar held its tune perfectly.

  It had probably never been a good-looking instrument. After waiting for most of her life to open that battered case and see the treasure left to her after her grandfather’s death, she was almost shocked to find out the thing inside was even uglier. The guitar’s muted, black finish washed out the subtle curves of the maple cap topping its heavy mahogany body and revealed every tiny nick and scratch etched into the well-worn surface. Although she’d never seen a pickguard for it, the gaping screw holes on the side of the body and next to the neck pickup made it clear the guitar had one at some point. Some of the plastic, pearloid fret markers running down the neck were either cracked or crooked, and two of the tuners on the bottom of the headstock did not match those on the top.

  But Lena didn’t really care what it looked like. All that mattered to her was that it sounded as pristine as it had the day it rolled out of the factory in Memphis. Based on what little she knew about its history, it was one of the last models to be made before the manufacturer was bought out and shuttered. That had been decades before she was born, possibly even when her grandfather was younger than she was now.

  Of course, she wasn’t sure if it even mattered how the thing sounded. Her audience wasn’t very likely to be listening.

  “You’re sure this thing will even work with their setup?”

  Chris was helping Trevor arrange the last of their gear and paused just long enough to wave at her dismissively.

  “Yeah, sure it’ll work,” he said. “The firestream modules interface with the preamps, not the instrument.”

  Lena played a scale almost mindlessly as she glanced over at the ugly pile of computer equipment Chris had plugged her amp into.

  “Why do they even need us for this?” she asked. “Can’t they just pipe a recording into the system?”

  Chris sighed and didn’t look up from the array of switches, sliders, and knobs on his synthesizer. “Sure, you could, but that would be, I don’t know, kind of like jacking off to porn instead of actually having sex. It still feels good and all, but your brain still knows the difference, you know?”

  Lena rolled her eyes. “Sure. Whatever.”

  “Besides,” Chris went on, “having recordings of music never made people not want to see a band play the same stuff live, right? Something about having a unique experience, I guess.”

  Trevor chuckled. “Yeah, only this is like seeing the band while you’re fucking!”

  Lena felt a headache taking root behind her eyes.

  “Can you stop being such a fucking dumbass, Trevor?”

  When she looked up to find both of them staring at her, she knew she’d snapped at him a bit too harshly.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “I just think this is a bad idea.”

  Chris made an expression he probably thought was reassuring. It had the opposite effect.

  “It’ll be fine,” he said. “Trust me, this is going to be a good thing for us. They’ve never firestreamed anything like us before. Hell, the guy setting up the system says they’ve never even run an old guitar like yours through the system; most everyone is using digital imitations. Those people out there will fucking worship you after they hear you play.”

  Lena started running scales again, bending every third or fourth note a half-step sharp. She told herself everything would be okay once she was on stage. Every worry she’d had at previous shows always burned away whenever the stage lights hit her with their blinding glare, reducing her wor
ld to a tiny, serene sanctuary at the heart of a storm of sonic fury.

  She hit the final note of the scale and bent it upward a full tone before sliding her finger down the length of the old guitar’s neck.

  “Let’s just do this and get the hell out of here.”

  Marcus held his finger against the firestream feed’s killswitch as stage lights came up to reveal the band. A few of the audience members around him jerked their heads awkwardly as random input signals lanced through their neural pathways. The technician at the mixing panel in the back of the theater was supposed to keep everyone’s feeds clean until the music actually started, but Marcus knew better than to trust that task to anyone other than himself. There was always a significant power spike whenever the performers plugged into the system and the feedback sometimes spilled out from the panel to the firestream units.

  He’d heard about people getting fried by unexpected feedback. Even though he’d never actually seen it happen, he always took care to block his unit’s feed before a show started.

  The group was smaller than he expected, and he wondered if they would be able to put out enough sound to make it worth the hassle of getting to the theater. His gaze lingered on the skinny, mouse-haired girl cradling an ancient black guitar that looked like it weighed more than she did. She looked down at the floor, her feet fiddling nervously with her homemade pedalboard.

  After a brief introduction most of the crowd ignored, the drummer clicked off the tempo for the first song.

  Marcus took his finger off the killswitch.

  The percussion hit him first, rattling his skull while the shimmering synthesizer notes pelted his face like silver raindrops. A slow, thick bassline slithered up his leg and coiled around his torso, throbbing with a warm, expectant sense of urgency. His vision blurred as the synth tones fell harder. Cool liquid trickled through his nostrils and down the back of his throat.