All the Birds in the sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,47

THROUGH the lesions on his arms, trying to find a pristine spot along a vein, when he looked up to see a woman’s hand suspending a ten-dollar bill over his box lid. “I’m worried about you, Jake,” the woman said, though he couldn’t see her face. “You seem worse than last week. Listen, if I give you ten bucks, will you swear never to do recreational drugs again?” He said yes and took the money. He soon discovered that hypodermic needles broke against his skin, every. Single. Time. Jake could still carve his skin with knives or nails, but even then the needle would snap against his vein. He was getting the frozen sweats already.

* * *

PHYLLIS AND ZULEIKHA skipped down the street in Hayes Valley talking soberly about the global economic crisis, the ocean rising faster than anyone had predicted, ever since the Chukchi disaster, and the links between malnutrition and the new pandemics—but also singing silly girltrash songs and laughing too loud, because they were young, crazy in love, and about to be meaningfully naked together in Zuleikha’s bed. They didn’t even notice a big man in a trench coat, smelling of chewing tobacco, coming up behind them with a military-grade neural decapacitator. Until he swung it and got first one, then the other, in the neck. Pacifying them. They were down on the sidewalk, eyes rolling up and mouths spouting drool, as the man reached for his zip ties.

Then the man heard a voice at his ear as he bent over the two prone women. Someone was right behind him, looking over his shoulder. A woman, all in black, with sharp green eyes. “You’re about to get caught,” she whispered. “They’re coming for you.” He pulled back, suddenly breathless. Sure enough, sirens rang in the distance. “If I let you forget this happened, what else will you forget?” she asked.

The shaggy-haired man had tears in his eyes and a tremor in his free hand. “Anything,” he said. “Whatever. Anything.”

“Then run,” she commanded. “Run, and forget.”

He ran. Limbs flailing, head whipping with his own panicked galloping strides. By the time he was a block down the street, he’d forgotten his own name. A few more blocks, where he lived and where he came from. The farther he ran, the less he remembered. But he couldn’t stop running.

* * *

FRANCIS AND CARRIE were screwed. Their lives were over, and you could hear their cries of despair from the street outside the UFO-shaped house. This was supposed to be the geek party to end all geek parties, where the A-listers met the thought-leaders, and visionary investors would supercollide with the best and brightest. Every detail was meticulous, from the three DJs to the fountain of exotic liquor to the organic slow-food hors d’oeuvres. They were even able to host it at Rod Birch’s place in Twin Peaks, with the living room that converted to a planetarium where the constellations changed shape to reflect the mood of the crowd.

But everything had gone to shit. The DJs had launched a turf war, and the mashup DJ was trying to colonize the dubthrash DJ’s set with some kind of meta-mashup. The Caddy engineers had gotten into a fistfight with the open-source Artichoke BSD developers on the balcony. Everybody felt guilty about drinking soju after what happened in Korea. The A-listers didn’t show up, and somehow the party invite on MeeYu had gotten cluttered with wannabes, bloggers, and local nutcases. The slow-food hors d’oeuvres made everybody sick to their stomachs, and soon there was an endless line to throw up in the hyperbaric bathroom. The dubthrash DJ won the DJ war and proceeded to make everybody’s eardrums bleed with the most dreary shit imaginable. The smoke machine belched horrible candy-floss-scented smog, while the lights lurched into epilepsy-inducing configurations. The line to vomit in the bathroom was starting to resemble that famous photo of the bedraggled masses evacuating Seoul on foot. The constellations on the ceiling became a supermassive black hole, a Sagittarius A of party foulness. This was the worst disaster in human history.

Just when Francis and Carrie resigned themselves to changing their names and leaving town, that weird girl showed up. The girl whom nobody would cop to having added to the party invite, the hippie who (Carrie had heard) let birds nest in her hair and rats live in her purse. Paula? Petra? No, Patricia. There had been a time—a happier, more innocent time—when Francis and Carrie had believed that Patricia showing