<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #2

It took two weeks for Fede to find the time and work up the courage to see Tony. After he’d bailed from MIT Fede’d pretty much written him off; he had never come back home, just emailed Fede’s Mom that he was done with MIT and was exploring better horizons. Fede knew they’d spoken at least once afterwards, mostly because of the four six-packs of Red Stripe strewn sticky and empty across the living-room floor one Sunday afternoon, but never found out where Tony had ended up. After bringing it up once with his Mom (and regretting it) he’d decided not to think about it anymore — Tony’d never been around much anyway, and this meant Fede could put the bottom bunk to good use by mounting his database cluster of salvaged hardware somewhere that the danger of overheating wasn’t such an issue. A few months later Fede took down one of Tony’s old The Cure posters to make room for a sheaf of printouts on new chording key combinations and realized he’d cancelled his brother out of his life in exchange for more time focused on coding. The ensuing twenty-four hour scripting binge had resulted in a render-farm plugin he’d traded for a new rig out of midland China, and Fede had never looked back. Until now.

The shuttle from his housing park was late as usual, and he ended up stuck at the rail station with a half hour between trains. While he was there he logged in on the local net and double-checked his mail, spawning a couple newsbots to try to dig up anything new on Tony’s shop while he waited. Nothing interesting turned up — Greener Pastures was just a regular tattoo / body-shop, pretty much like any other, although the online pics showed some pretty flash stuff with muscle therapies and bone implants. Made sense; Tony had been checked as one of the top candidates in his class in the biosciences at MIT before he’d bailed. And he’d always loved the bodmod scene even if he was too clean-cut to be part of it. Now that he wasn’t in school anymore it figured that he’d get involved there.

The train pulled up and he got on, rolling his eyes inwardly at the solid wall of low-level corporates lined up neat and tidy in their uniforms. Interspersed between them like peacocks among pigions were the contractors — flashy clothes and spiky hair and expensive corneal replacements set in deep-set, sleep-deprived eyes. The difference, in Fede’s mind, was in the corporate contract. Most people that wore uniforms didn’t know how to bargain, didn’t realize that they represented a value proposition to the corp. The contractors were even worse; living in a fantasy world from contract to contract, constantly scrabbling for the next job. When Fede got his chance he’d come into the market with a strong chip — big school cred — and would bargain like hell for his employment agreement. He didn’t want the constant worry of freelance. Instead he’d make a secure deal and keep his head down, hide under the waves of uniformed clueless and let the freelancers make their noise. He’d worked it out a while ago, after Tony had disappeared, and now he just had to get into a good school to make it a reality. That’s where Tony had screwed up; for some reason he couldn’t take it at MIT, and as a result he’d kissed his one good chance at happiness goodbye.

His Mom wore a uniform, Fede considered idly, and claimed to like how it looked.

Just as the train was pulling in Fede’s goggles pulsed a link from one of his bots showing a new post about Greener Pastures’ animal sex pics. Fede sighed and deleted the spam. The stuff was self-mutating now; a bot somewhere had obviously sniffed his query and modified it. The shit was making the net all but unusable these days, and only Fede’s aggressive filtering kept his inbox from getting glutted. He killed off the rest of the bots in case they’d been caught too and joined the mob stepping out into the ionized air surrounding the maglev depot. He liked the train; despite being unwilling to pay the per-use fees for its network access. Those same fees had almost killed it as a form of public access, especially since wireless access was free on buses and subways, but it also made it cheap and not quite so full of advertising, which was why Fede liked it.

The train pulled past him as he hobbled behind the crowd. It was cold in the old station, microclimates funneling a sharp wind from the high-rises over Africatown and out towards the suburbs. Fede shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and looked for a shwag vendor. Sure enough there was one in the far corner of the station. He wandered over to it, his legs making the old familiar hiss-shuffle as their hydraulics softened his steps. They’d need more oil soon, he reminded himself. Better models were available, and lots of people got amputated for the replacements alone, but Fede held on to his old hospital-issue legs as a sign that he wasn’t a mod. He hadn’t hacked off his legs to get a better jump shot, or faster sprint, or flashy chromium LED-studded cat-toes. Fede hadn’t had a choice, and mods weren’t his thing. Apparently they were Tony’s thing, he reminded himself, afterimages of hasty in-shop comm photos of toeless feet and coral-stud horns lingering in his mind. Fede had always talked shit about bodmod, about how he was going to go whole-hog one day and get roo’d. Fede snorted at the thought, his hips aching as they warmed up to his normal rolling gait. He’d been born without legs below his knees, a “genetic anomaly.” Some folks got webbed toes, Fede had got no legs. Tony used to say there was an equal exchange, that Fede had been given better brains instead. It was stupid, but his liked to think about it sometimes, usually when he was plugged in pulling overtime on coursework, trying to get an edge on upping his Prog-SAT scores.

As he came up to the vendor he fished around in his bag and pulled out a dirty slug of gelatinous plastic, transparent and light blue. The thing was about the size of his thumb and had been injection-molded into the shape of a Japanese-designed bug-eyed alien. It looked like it was wearing a Jewish kippah, an imprint over the back of its head circled in curdled plastic. It had originally been meant to fit over the end of a tablet’s stylus for kids, but now it had a John Doe fingerprint sealed on the back of its head. It was kind of old — the print had been pulled out of a vulnerable U.S. marriage certificate database over a week ago — but Fede was pretty confident it would still work. He’d traded it for a quick hack he’d put together for a kid at school, a modified version of the program he’d used once to loop his image on the video conference, and was glad to get to use it before it aged out.

He stuck the back of the alien’s head on the scanner and punched a selection on the touch screen. The vendor’s sides flashed, the telephone-box sized thing’s every inch suddenly dedicated to announcing the virtues of the Chrysler-Daimler product Fede had chosen a sample of. Thankfully someone had disabled the speakers on the thing so he didn’t have to listen to it. Let the John whose print he’d used get the advertising in his mailbox; that’s what the vendor really wanted. Pegged for big-business spam for the rest of his life by virtue of selling off his biometrics. Privacy for convenience. Idiot.

Fede palmed the tiny triangular package as it fell into the vending tray and found a quiet corner nearby. He gently pulled the tyvec jacket out of its pouch. It was silk-thin and silver and traced through with fiberoptics, making it look slightly veiny. Still, for something spun out of aerosoled carbohydrates it would cut the wind and hold in his body heat, and Fede had recently gotten a tip for dealing with the blinking ads that covered the jacket’s surface. They’d flashed to life as soon as he had pulled it out of its vacuumed-packed container, the Chrysler-Daimler name spinning and blinking around the arms and across its chest and back. Turning the thing over he found the collar, tracing the wire there until he found the discreet bulge near the left lapel. He didn’t have anything sturdy enough to bang it with in his bag, but looking around he found that the bolts on one end of the bench he was sitting on were loose. After a minute he’d wedged the bulge into the space between the bench and the floor. After sitting down heavily a couple of times he heard a satisfying crunch and the jacket went dim. By now the station was pretty quiet, and a vendor selling stir-fry across the empty hall yelled at him in Chinese. Fede ignored him and pulled on the jacket. It was stained and rusty around the collar, but Fede wasn’t wearing it for the fashion. Even so he thought it made a nice statement to be wearing an almost-new adjacket that wasn’t actually flashing anything. Kind of neo-punk. He slung his bag over his shoulder and headed out of the station.

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