FUCK YOU TOO
The cigarillo smoke drifts though the haze that his memory gets over it after a few days, or a week, or a month. Ruby is sitting up in bed, holding the little roll of Thai tobacco like a dart. The geometric crosshatching of the dazzler camo crawls on the ceiling. The wall advertises kvass, lighting her with magentas.
“Mind of I ask you something?”
“Huh. That's not a habit of yours, Red.”
He feels like he's phased out of his body by a few inches, like in that old comic book where the guy gets trapped in the particle accelerator. The bioelectricity and thoughts are tethered to the actual meat and suit like a mass of entangled particles, a cloud of one-bit quantum interfaces.
But it's shaped a little different.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“The suit. How did you get it? Not, as in, what happened to you.” She looks away, and then at her right hand. “It's just that it's quite expensive along with that deck, I imagine.”
“Don't think I'll ever know the actual dollar amount. They can try to repo it if they want, I guess.”
Smoke falls out of her mouth, like she's upside-down and heavy dry ice vapor is tumbling from deep inside her. “You want to ask me?”
“Sounds like you want to tell me.”
Like a coin trick, she smoothly maneuvers the cigarillo into what he supposes is a more American grip, between the index and middle fingers. That same index runs a killer prosthetic nail along his thigh. “I don't get a lot of chances for pillow talk.”
Ruby tells him about the militia, and trying to establish an autonomous zone as the expansionist edges of the Russian Federation had started to come apart. About the CIA exploiting them with “support” while also pouring those same resources into the fascists next door. About getting a feel for working gray and black markets for food, medicine, and condoms because, as she says, you can only eat a bullet once. About being attacked with rocket artillery, and the private special operations group goon she took that pistol off of. About the Americans patching her up in Poland out of some vague sense of optics, and then promptly forgetting about her and her dead comrades.
“Just burned a lot of that trademark Red mistique, there.”
“This is all to say, my dear Lucas, that I am a harbinger.” She looks at a big map of the five boroughs that's wheat-pasted onto the wall, along with a riot of band posters and event fliers. “Politics of bio, neuro, and finally, necro. Everything they've done to others since the Cold War ended.”
“Shorthand of fascism and late-capitalism. Colonial violence in the imperial core. Or the metropol, however that's phrased.”
“I suspect it may be more existential than that. The beasts we call nations, or perhaps imperial cores, eat each other. After all the copper is pulled out of the walls, the cannibalism begins.”
Something about the way she says that makes the particle-self phase out of his body a few more inches, the signal breaking up and spiked with harsh noise.
“But before the beast eats itself...” She affectionately touches the back of his neck with her left hand, the swords tattooed along her metacarpals prickling the aura of dissociation as her fingertips brush the plugs. “It eats us.”
Lili is looking at the phone again. He can't tell which platform they're looking at, and in the end, it doesn't really matter. The people who do this bullshit to them all have multiple accounts everywhere, which is how they circumvent blocks in the places that still even have a block function.
“Fuck! Why does every fucking callout post about the fucking binder they tack on do twice the numbers as the shit I say in the first place?”
Lucas feels like he's looking at something radioactive. “Maybe the storm will fuckin' knock the power to the cell towers out.”
“Sorry.” They squirm against him self-consciously.
“Don't apologize to me, I'm not the one who's taking psy damage.”
“Fuck! Gah. I know.”
He sits up in bed and takes the phone, holding it with two fingers. He thinks about the metrics monetization schemes that make money off Lili, but seemingly never for them.
Zone rating.
He tosses it across the few feet between the bed and the opposite wall, into the plastic crate Lili uses as a hamper, and a pile of ratty tees and leggings. A menacing deer-headed woman screen-printed in yellow, white, purple, and black line art swallows the hideous rectangle up. He flops back down next to them. He can feel them loosen up a little now that they can't physically reach their ability to access the internet.
“It's not even a binder. It's a compression top.”
“I know, dear.”
“Think we'll lose power?” They're inventing new things to be anxious about.
“Maybe. Got the genny fixed though.”
“Did you actually fix it, or did you fix it by banging on it, Mister Speigel?”
“Well, Rho fixed it.”
The tropical storm isn't too bad, although it is an issue of degrees. The building creaks a little, and the power flickers on and off throughout the night. The sump gets enough intermittent electricity to keep the basement from flooding, maintaining the water level under the bottom foot of one-way waterproofing treatment that keeps the bricks from melting by letting water evaporate out, but not enter. Neither Lucas or Lili have ever been clear on how the treatment works, just that it involves some sort of nanoparticle matrix film that you aren't supposed to touch for a week after it's adhered on, and also need to strip off with a special solvent that breaks it down safely.
Lili grinds their teeth when they sleep, or at least they do when there's a storm beating on the windows while Jess isn't around.
Laying there, in the swampy heat, with a fan aimed at them to keep them both cool, he wonders about that. He's the one that Lili goes to in times of crisis, and this is an era of crises. Jess is the domestic one, in her own way. Jess is the one who knows how to fill paperwork out. Jess is the one who Lili kisses and touches when they're calm, instead of ripped on edibles and watching old body horror anime, or having some sort of breakdown. Is Jess the ballast point?
Or am I?
The sounds of biofeedback in Lili's mouth are deafening under the white noise of the fan and the rain.
It's over when he wakes up. He plugs the cell into his deck, and the E2E icon flashes in his peripheral vision. It's Rho's avatar, a grinning guy with a lizard head wearing an elaborate leather jacket.
srg is out in front of bloc party with a sanitation dpt dump truck. Looks like theyre bringing the fucking skulls in to sweep the place
Fuck, man. Time to bear witness I guess.
Bloc Party is a series of row houses that have been a tolerated squat for years, mostly as a crash pad for dispossessed queer kids, and twentysomethings who were chased out of home or section eights. It's a mess, and nobody ever really manages chores, but it's relatively clean, and fairly safe as long as noise complaints aren't an issue. Tolerated, in the past-tense, apparently. Lucas tries to get out of bed without disturbing Lili, but of course he can't. She feels him pulling himself up so he can strap into the exo.
That's when the power goes out, and a second later he gets a lost signal alert.
“Shit, looks like we lost it for real.” Lili retrieves their phone from the hamper. “Ah, fuck.”
“Yeah. They're jamming the block. Us to Bloc Party is the minimum radius, I guess. That's where the cops are.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
Block-jamming, something previously reserved for collective punishment during things like mass protests, is now standard operating procedure for police actions. No power, no cell service, radically-reduced ability to record and broadcast what's happening. The lack of air conditioning also keeps people from holing up and holding out. It's a bad sign, coupled with the possibility of the Skulls – the door-kickers with military exo frames and a “search and destroy” mentality – showing up.
“I don't think I can do it.” Lili's voice cracks a little.
“It's okay. Stay here. Fucking yourself up watching the cops attack anarchist kids isn't going to change anything. I don't want you getting busted for holding your phone out, anyway.”
“I can't do anything.” They curl up and wrap their arms around their legs. “Kool-Aid in my veins.”
“I'll be back soon, okay?”
“Yeah.”
He pulls a hoodie on so he can hide the back of his neck.
He walks out into the soupy weather. Every other house has a buzzing generator. Power being cut to the block means people have to run their sumps with whatever they have handy. A lot of cheap two-strokes are going, causing a deafening buzz over the lower chugging of RV-ready units running off propane tanks. He pulls his respirator on, if nothing else than because of the exhaust. The old squat where he'd landed when he moved to Park Slope had been a lot like Bloc Party – a lot of twentysomething punks arguing about whose turn it is to do the dishes, getting too drunk too often, several of them doing IV drugs. A disproportionate number of them had been trans, because some things never change, and it had showed in the fact that they hadn't had time to learn how to be actual people. Lucas could always sympathize with that. Ruby had saved their collective ass a few times by providing them with naloxone, and sterile syringes. He had suspected that she was doing that at a steep discount, and later had that confirmed to him. Whatever could be said of her, she always had an affection for a certain type who desperately needed the largess she's in a position to provide, and not in a controlling or judgmental way.
He had been the oldest one there, and he had gotten on his feet quickly thanks to Lili, which really meant thanks to Jess.
He's about a block away when some of the tags and elaborate murals on the derelicts start being crossed out with stripes of blue spray paint.
Rho is at the intersection next to Bloc Party, cop-watching. There's six SRG goons decked out in tactical gear standing around in a perimeter, and a few unis milling around. SRG, the Special somethingorother Group, is the paramilitary flex squad that had slowly metastasized into being most of the NYPD over the years, in terms of budget if not bodies. They have some fancy new individual combat rifles, probably before the military has even gotten them. The modular rifles are studded with various sensors and aiming modules that pair to their hololenses and milspec decks, as well as underbarrel stinger guns. The caseless launchers look like a less-lethal version of the pepperbox flechette guns that spooky special ops types use, loaded with steel-cored plastic BBs that are coated in concentrated oleoresin capsicum, along with something refined from wasabi. The active camo on their body armor squirms around like a tank full of urban color-scheme mollusks, making it difficult to gauge their silhouettes. The unis have old pepperball guns stuck to the fronts of their ventilated tac vests, along with their assorted generations of assault carbine, but don't look interested in sniping at anyone for now. They already have someone cuffed in the back of one of the patrol SUVs, probably for trying to record. Nobody else has their phones up. Lucas has been deliberately keeping his gait a little awkward, hoping everyone will assume he's wearing an older motion-assist exo model.
The Sanitation Department employees in tyvek coveralls and respirators dangling from their necks are leaning against the dump truck, drinking coffee.
Rho takes a long drink out of a half-frozen water bottle. “Most of them rabbited when the pigs pulled up. A few must have been sleeping one off in there, but they're afraid to go outside now.”
“A bunch of the bombing was bluelined.”
“Yeah, the unis were out doing it a little earlier. Their JV Phoenix psy-op shit.”
“At least they aren't blasting Ride of the Valkyries.”
“Christ, man, don't give them any ideas.”
A black, armored van pulls up fast and hard, and four figures in even chunkier, more macho body armor jump out. The joints of the military exos show in the gaps of the thick sleeves built into the combat uniforms. SCP-CQT, Special Community Policing, Close-Quarter Tactics. What would have been called SWAT back in the day. The Skulls, the door-kickers. The namesake helmets have featureless, vaguely-skeletal faceplates studded with tiny cameras, like Ruby's visor. They performatively check their blocky, electrically-actuated shotguns. The weapons look like a cross between a hyper-tactical bullpup assault carbine, and a power nailer. The transparent magazines are full of white shells.
“Super socks.” Rho tenses up by a degree or two.
“They sure are going to show those nineteen year-old crusties who's boss.”
Lucas starts recording as they shoulder the shotguns. Two drone dogs trot out of the van, and run up to the doors of the two row houses on the outer-sides of Bloc Party. The Skulls split into two teams, and follow them. When they get the go signal, two of them mule-kick the doors in with those suped-up legs, holding their backs against the walls, while their counterparts smash the front windows with crowbars. They roll flashbangs in, and then charge in behind the dogs after the stunning concussions. Someone runs out the back of the building closest to the intersection, and is tackled by an SRG cop who zip-cuffs them on the pavement. There's a bangs inside, and the skulls force some occupants out the front in their own zip cuffs. Rho winces at the pops of the less-lethals. The Skulls repeat the process on the two inner buildings, and then one pair does the last in the middle, while the other two poke at the cuffed squatters with the toes of their boots. When they're done, there's four detainees along with the one who tried to run, plus whoever is in the SUV. Not for nothing are they mostly Black. One of the Unis claps a kid in the back of the head, knocking their bright-pink wig off.
Someone yells “fuck you too” while the Sanitation Department starts hauling stuff out of the buildings, and throwing it in the back of the truck to be trashed. Back packs, lighter furniture, and anything else that may be valuable is going to the dump. One of the SRGs raises a rifle at the cursing.
The crowd of a few dozen neighborhood onlookers start dispersing. It's over, anyway. There's no reason to hang around and watch a bunch of people's shit get stolen and destroyed by the city. Lucas can't shake the feeling that, inevitably, someone will whip a bottle at the cops during an eviction and the shooting will start.
But not today.
He stops recording, and walks with Rho until he gets a cell signal. He runs the recording through a metadata scrubber and posts it on a board with a burner account, hoping that the looping video platforms will pick it up. That's all anyone can do today.
Rho's fury is clawing its way through the controlled cool you affect when you're trying to handle a feral animal, someone on too much crank, or a law enforcement officer.
“I'm so fucking tired of watching them drag queers out into the street by their hair.”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck!” He kicks the side of a dumpster. “Goddammit!”
“They'd light us up if we tried to fight them, back there. Maybe just the riot guns, maybe live ammo.”
Rho kicks the dumpster again. “Maybe that's what needs to happen! There's more of us than them! There always has been!”
Rho's externalized rage and rawness makes Lucas feel that separation again, an arrangement of particles in an indescribably-different arrangement remotely tethered to the body standing there.
Kool-Aid in my veins.
He waits for Rho to run out of steam.
