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  The hunter wore a bioswitch around its neck that functioned as a kind of organic command center. From this, the resequencing protocol could be generated. The protocol was made simpler by the fact that the hunter’s tissue had already been processed—most of the skin was already in place as a response to the UV bombardment procedure on arrival. Everything else was available at the local drug store. Bandages, codeine, penicillin to stop infection from the relocated implantation device (the dentata). The hunter even managed to source, from a deregistered veterinarian-turned-mud wrestler, some equine estrogen to stabilize the transformation.

  The protocol was an unexpected agony. The hunter’s screams echoed up and down the lonely hallways, drowned out by the bassline that throbbed through the floor from the club below. She woke sprawled in a pool of matter beneath a starless sky visible through the hole in the ceiling. The walls around the mattress were smeared with bloody handprints. Her shoulder blades burned with an almost intolerable heat, a series of splintered protrusions had rent the skin. When she regained consciousness for the second time, nothing remained of these but an intermittent burning sensation and hard nodules tender to the touch. A remnant, or the memory of wings repressed in the initial program.

  And the formless shadow that rose from her arced and buckled form like steam from a kettle was a remnant also, or a memory of the being she could never be again and the hunter felt as though something in her had died. A part of herself from which she must flee but which could, she figured during the long days of her painful recovery, catch up with her in the end. If she let it.

  Because something had been born from the blood of the hunter—the horn had gone and in its place was something mysterious and whole. When Norma, as she was now, emerged from the building a week later she never felt more alive. Like she had it all under control for the first time since arrival. She had gotten dressed in her old clothes, the boys’ jeans and shirt she’d bought from a surplus store nearby, and they were more than a little small for her. The denim shirt buttoned tight over her breasts. That would take a little getting used to. Everything else seemed to fall into place. That night she picked up a young farmer at The Trap. He wasn’t the one Mommy wanted, and she didn’t care. This time it’s for me, she thought, astride him on a couch in Elmsfield, and the next time, too, a Consortium goon’s vast body pinning her to a waterbed and Norma sobbing as she came for the part of her that was born anew, and the part of her that was unendingly lost.

  3//: LA

  – Do you miss her? Norma asked.

  – Who? said Gene. He squirmed uncomfortably between the seat and the table, its plastic edge digging into his belly with every roll of the train. It squealed to a stop and out the window was the simmering mass of the Pacific behind the ruins of the 405. Norma had been so taken with the pale-eyed man that she hadn’t noticed how haggard Gene looked. In spite of his size, a tough and hungry look clung to him and to the tangled silk of his hair.

  – Your wolf, said Norma. You miss her?

  Gene’s answer was swallowed up by a tunnel and when the lights came back on the compartment was in commotion, people reaching for plastic bags of their belongings in the overhead shelves, two white men in Consortium drag—one wore chef’s pants; the other a red beret—were moving down the aisle. Both were armed.

  – City of Angels, said Gene.

  Norma was certain that the blond guy was getting out too, but when she found herself on the crowded platform, there was no sign of him. The train had begun to pull out, the doors already closed, and as Norma wheeled around she saw him still sitting in the compartment at the fold-out table, riding backwards. His gilded eyes burned at her through the window and he held up a piece of paper with some crude writing on it, but it was not until later, in the chaos of her dreams and when it was too late, that she worked out what it said.

  Spill City.

  Gene offered her his Chinatown couch for the night and she dreamt fitfully under the watchful leer of his Bop Bag collection—The Scream, Michael Jackson and Elvis. Finally, she stumbled into the bedroom and they groped roughly until dawn. Their mouths met and she could feel his teeth hard on her own, the tobacco and exhaustion on his breath and his horn hard against her belly.

  They spent the winter together, a confused and bitter season. The city was still awash in filth and rubble after the latest hurricane, and the airport closed permanently after the worst attack since Secession. And not even Purple Rain to blame, although of course some did. There was another exodus which depleted the already devastated city. Vigilante gangs scoped the empty streets for the rebels—anyone foolish enough not to have had their SLA ink removed from their faces had it removed for them, an ironic twist on the outlawed slogan: ‘Separate or Die Trying.’ Lynchings were not uncommon. Guerrillas swung from telephone poles and traffic lights, their wives and sons mutilated in mangled cars beneath the torn freeway.

  Gene was tough and sad and didn’t ask too many questions, turned out they’d been more or less following each other down the coast, although she would not know the full truth of that until much later. After the landing outside of Barstow, Norma had hustled her way west to San Miguel—two hundred and fifty miles of muddy road, give or take. She didn’t like what she’d heard about the new settlers in the Temblos and didn’t like the look of all that dirty snow. So she’d stuck to the shadows of the ruined Interstate between Lamont and Lost Hills. Power poles uprooted and asphalt split down the middle, isolated roadhouses adrift on islands in the liquefacted ooze. Beside the road marched ghostly rows of charred saplings—apple, pear. At the roadhouses, the games were fixed and the men all smelled the same after a while. After a short rest at the Mission San Miguel, she worked her way south. Her hustle was left-handed snooker mainly, arm wrestling, and odd jobs. She even worked for a while as a bouncer at a casino outside of Nipoma.

  – Doesn’t everybody? Mommy had said, and stifled a yawn.

  The bioswitch palpitated on the cord around her neck, and deep within Norma, the VIPr pulsed in reply. Viewpoint Insertion Protocol, or dentata by another name, its signal became more urgent in the presence of a suitable male horn, which Mommy likened to an antennae, a universal receptor through which to send and receive information about the One Who Fled.

  So that was the mission as Norma understood it—to find the best horn through which to unlock the secrets of humanity, although she was still a little fuzzy on its finer points.

  – The perfect horn? How will I know?

  – You’ll know it when you see it, said Mommy.

  When she saw it, the perfect horn, or what appeared to be, it was on the train guy and it was mainly his golden eyes and hair, the dealer’s touch, lean and hungry. But she let him go. So now, even when she was with Gene, Norma couldn’t get the one she’d lost out of her mind, her ragged form diminished in his indifferent gaze. And although she accepted Gene’s love in the Chinatown room amidst the barrio jive and lurid, bruised sunsets, it was but peripherally, her heart burning for what she had lost. It was with Gene a life half-lived, a part of her already gone, the rest not where it should be. In Spill City. Beneath the deceased reek of LA her nostrils quivered with longing for white sage and creosote, the salt and sand she went to in her dreams. Gene got fed up one drunken dawn outside the Viper Room, and left. Others came to her on the mattress on the floor, and moved on, dealers and journeymen, soldiers and spies, their rut grunts and sighs beating a ragged rhythm to the turning of the planet.

  Sometime after New Year she decided Gene wasn’t coming back. She sat on the edge of the couch, got out a broken console, and called Mommy. Told it how the guy was down in Spill City. So that’s where she was heading.

  – You sure it’s him?

  – I’m sure, said Norma.

  – What’s that?

  Norma waited for the arcing lights of the drone outside the window to fade, its roar to recede.

  – He’s the Guy, she said. The one on the train. So pretty.

  The console c
rackled and the transmission broke up. She’d found it in the apartment drowned in bong water. The Bop Bags giggled, hehe, and drew closer.

  – What’s that you say? City? What city?

  The Bop Bags moved in another inch or two. Elvis the Pelvis and Betty Boop dressed to kill. Norma tensed and felt her shoulders knife. She shook out her hair and dropped the console. Picked it up again.

  – No. Pretty. He’s—

  – I’m losing you, said Mommy. Norma?

  Norma sighed and tossed the console out the window.

  – Pretty, she said to Betty Boop. She grabbed the Bop Bag by its shiny plastic hair and ripped its head off.

  Pretty like a wolf.

  Configuration Sharing Protocol (CSP); or the Whole. (n) Also known as Cogshare. One of the two-port communication systems between the Viewpoint (V) (see below) and the neural host. The first connection, (sonic), is by way of obsolete microwave technology (see above). The Whole is the second connection (control), and can only be opened by the host via the external bioswitch. It is a total perceptual connection, informed by Gestalt coding, and notoriously unreliable. The control connection is a vital option for use when sonic connection fails or is at risk from interference or decryption, or when the host is immobilized by the Feer. As such, the external bioswitch can be overridden by the Viewpoint under extreme circumstances in control connection mode. But this is rarely used as the risks of corruption are equally high for both the Viewpoint and the host.

  (Saurum Nilea, AQ., trans. L.Shay 2656)

  4//: hole

  – Mommy?

  Norma banged the side of the payphone with her hand. The mist hung in low drifts, the pavement crunched with broken glass. She regretted being barefoot.

  – Mommy? Are you there?

  – Norma?

  Mommy’s voice through the crackles. Day workers were unloading next door at the House of Pancakes—boxes of egg powder, frozen links and chicken feet. Norma watched a drone cruise in over the upswept roof of the restaurant and take off south. In the wake of the aircraft’s vicious buzz there followed an abrupt silence, disturbed only by the need-coffee drag and mutter of the loading crew. Norma shivered in her jacket. Gene had found it on a stool at the Viper Room up in LA, left there by an ordinance technician from China Lake who never came back. It was made of some black material that ate up all the light, caught bullets in its arachno-weave and spat them out like watermelon seeds. Smart-armor patches cushioned her elbows and with a touch of a finger, the powder-coated titanium zip snaked down over the salsa stain on her tank top.

  – Is everything all right? Mommy said faintly.

  Norma had discovered that the zipped-up combat jacket interfered with the transmission somehow but she didn’t know why and the morning was still too cold to take it off. She lowered the zip and edged in closer to the busted payphone.

  – Everything’s fine, said Norma. I just want to go home is all.

  It had been a month in Spill City and still no sign of the Guy. The surf was a muffled roar and the truck unloading next door belched exhaust that made her head hurt. She could hear faint strains of Muzak on the line to Mommy, footsteps approaching and retreating, the chime of a fake elevator. The encryption effects were impressive and, to Norma’s relief, a huge improvement over the early days when Mommy’s idea of Earth ambience was limited to canned laughter and coyote howls.

  – Where are you? Mommy said.

  Mommy knew, but it liked to ask. Although it couldn’t see what Norma saw, it absorbed information from her both aurally—via the bioswitch at her breast—and virally. Mommy said it liked the way Norma described things.

  – Spill City, said Norma, or thought it, squinting up at the curdled sky. Like I told you. Since January. Nothing’s changed.

  Morning nailed her eyes. She breathed in the smell of the slick. Sulphur and nitrates and a sad kelpy taste in the back of her throat. The surf pounded and Norma took that as the sound of her failure.

  – Tell me again, said Mommy over the ocean roar, the meep-meep of the truck backing in farther.

  – Outside a pharmacy on the coast. It’s almost dawn and I’m barefoot.

  – Barefoot? In a rare lapse, Mommy’s voice, which wasn’t really a voice, grew feet. Strangely taloned, quickly submerged in static before reassembling itself into Earth English, like a recording momentarily on the wrong speed. Where are your shoes?

  Norma bent down to pick a piece of glass from between her varnished toenails.

  – I slept with a drag queen called Bunny and—

  – Again? I thought we were finished with all that.

  Redundant music swelled on the line to scramble the code—strings and woodwinds. Mommy’s imagined self was a classical music buff. Baroque mainly. Corelli and Bach. A jazz collection that was not to be equaled. It would take its espresso long with a dash and drive an iD. It wouldn’t be living in Spill City.

  – We are, said Norma. I am.

  She felt guilty about Bunny. She shivered, swallowing panic along with the gluey remains of Bunny’s fluids.

  –What it is is I don’t know if he’s the Guy.

  She did and he wasn’t.

  –Who dear?

  Norma shifted her weight to her other hip. Her hair felt barbed against her face and her shoulders had begun to throb.

  – The tranny. I’m not feeling it.

  – Well maybe you should go back up to find out. A horn in the hand is after all worth two in the bush.

  Mommy gave a lewd snicker but it came out as a lip fart. Another thing about Mommy was the way it collected clichés. It had them on virtual shelves, stored in boxes, all labeled in categories. It studied Slashes (an obsolete ontological slur from the Before, based on a character in the outmoded protocol from which Norm/a also got her name), obsessed over them. Mommy joined in the cosmic conversations that belittled them—so inferior to the First Beings who fled—but Norma knew it wanted them. As a consolation prize, maybe, but still. To replace the one it had lost.

  – When you find the horn, said Mommy, trying to make it sound casual but there was a hard chip to its voice now. And implant it, you can come home.

  –You mean implant it with the VIPr slash dentata? And what? Then it can come out? Because it hurts Mommy. It’s beginning to burn.

  – The horn. Find it.

  – Thing is, said Norma. Not too many higher life forms have horns on their heads here is part of the problem.

  Not that Mommy cared where the human horn was. But the other part of the problem for Norma was time. She felt it against her somehow. They both did.

  Norma said, The longer I’m here, the more—

  —it hurts? said Mommy brightly. You said. So, implant, already. I like the sound of this rabbit.

  Norma did too. She liked Bunny. But he wasn’t the Guy. He was a cab driver by day and Wonder Whoa-Man by night at a drag bar down at the border. Norma had never seen his act. Another thing to feel guilty about.

  – It’s just that we dropped I don’t know how many pills. And booze and lines. Bunny knows the guys from Violent Fez, Mommy. You heard of them? (Imagine: the frantic retrieval mechanisms in overdrive—was that violet or violate?) We were up all night and there was another SLA raid.

  The Consortium weeding out the last of the rebels, claimed the news reports.

  – A raid? What was it like?

  – If I told you, would you know?

  It was an old and encoded joke between them, that line. Norma had picked it up from a Jewish bounty hunter up in San Jose, but Mommy wasn’t laughing now.

  – Try me, she said.

  Norma sighed. The ocean was a narrow slice of slick between the cracked and fallen facades. She fiddled with the zipper on her jacket, lowered it until she could feel the heat of the bioswitch against the cold tips of her fingers. The bioswitch would enable Mommy to enter the configuration, which basically was their joined consciousnesses, through a cog-share protocol (CSP) useful in situations where either complianc
e or privacy demanded it. Norma looked up and down the street. This didn’t seem like one of those situations. The day workers—Armenian refugees, Welsh drug smugglers, starving Somali programmers—moved silently in the mist, the disembodied beads of their cigarettes jumped in the ferrous haze. A few hookers clustered around the door of the pharmacy, sharp notes of laughter muffled in fake fur. No one to care about the tall woman leaning into the broken payphone, the one they called crazy. She hunched against the dial box and Gene came to mind, the way he’d presented the jacket to her with a hammy flourish. But then he left and Norma was free. Dangerously free. She tried to keep Mommy out for a moment longer so she could hold the memory in her thoughts—the way Gene was taller even than Norma and twice as wide, his high cheekbones flashing on and off in the strobe light forever and ever, the last time they were happy together. Like Gene always said, what happens in LA stays in LA.

  Norma manipulated the bioswitch to activate the CSP and gasped. Mommy swam into her head like a marine animal, trying to access the information it sought—the raid, with the putt-putt of the Tech Zens and the vicious whisper of drones overhead, her night with Bunny. Norma’s knees buckled, her head pounded, she tried to look out to sea, bright blades of foam. She thumbed away her tears, controlling the urge to pee.

  – Find it, said the voice in her head. Find the horn of the One Who Fled me and we can all go home.

  A faint hiss and gurgle, the sound of Mommy withdrawing. It couldn’t stay in Norma’s head for long or it would drown in the synaptic swill that had been forming over the last few months of the mission. Norma felt increasingly violated by the procedure, a little exposed. She shook out her damp hair and angled her head out to either side of the payphone, embarrassed. Weary clubbers peddled between the cracks of the Boulevard, dodging smugglers chugging back down to TJ in complaining recombos.