<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #28

Later that evening they drove through a small town Cessus had scanned and found a Red Cross drop-off point. They pulled out a couple of old futon couches and some wiring Cessus said he could use. Fede slept in the back, the giant freight container empty and rattling as they roared down the highway. Around midnight Cessus woke him up and made him hold a little led flashlight for him while he wired a power plug and tiny faux-Chinese lamp to the truck’s batteries. They’d pulled a bunch of fleeces and a torn sleeping bag from the Red Cross, so Fede was warm enough, and now he had a chance to recharge his comm.

When Cessus was gone he couldn’t sleep anymore so he propped the lamp up next to him and logged in. There were a few messages from Tonx, mostly from the night before asking for info about what was going on. He deleted those and found himself staring at his empty email buffer. He liked to keep things clean, to answer his mail and shunt out the replied-to messages elsewhere. He used to feel proud to see his inbox empty, like he’d achieved something. Tonight he just felt empty.

Without an uplink he couldn’t very well get the news, or check his ’groups or join a chatroom. His relationships were cut off as firmly as a light with the switch off. He didn’t even know where they were going. Instead he pulled up the code he’d written under Cessus’s ‘guidance’ a night ago. He found himself wishing he had some more of whatever Cessus had helped him put up his nose, but that just made him angrier. He’d written this shit, he should be able to figure out what it did.

Eventually he discovered that he’d taken a new approach to the distribution methodologies that relied on the anachronisms of the older architectures used in China. At first he’d thought he would just use the networks they had that were like the ones in the U.S. because they were more robust, but looking back he sort of remembered deciding to do it this way. As he teased out the processes of his code it started coming back to him, loose, fuzzy. He found some custom objects he’d written and discovered some clever genetic algorithms, code that would evolve around a given set of parameters to meet predesignated objectives. He ran some in a closed environment and found that the loops they produced worked very well. He hadn’t tested them when he wrote them, he remembered, despite having done only minimal genetic programming in the past. He’d just known it would work.

And it did. But there were problems, too — objects that didn’t do any processing at all, just notes about what they should do fleshed with a few lines of code. It was like he had sketched out the whole app at once and then filled in the main parts, one sweep at a time. Details were left out, there was no order to it. It was sloppy. It wasn’t like him.

It wasn’t like him. The thought kept running around in his head and Fede slumped back further on the futon. The Chinese lamp bobbed and bounced on the other couch, the truck dancing as it went down the road. What was he doing? He needed to produce code that worked, not dick around on spiritual tangents some dread-headed stoner thought would improve his coding.

But the code was there.

Eventually Fede found himself putting in pieces that were missing, running precompiles. He’d been writing code for years, and not doing it went against intense, intentional habit. As he wrote he found the outlines of the program coming back to him, filling itself in, becoming more tangible. The image of the red line came to him, and he chuckled absently.

“What?” said a voice, over-loud over the noise of the truck. Fede almost jumped out of his skin.

“Christ” said Cass, her hands up in mock defense. “Jesus, you really do get into it, don’t you?”

He remembered faintly that the truck had stopped, she and Cessus had come in and fucked with the wiring some more. He guessed she had just stayed. He lowered himself into his seat again, spread his arms out and breathed. The code was gone again. No, not gone, just — out there. A little bit beyond his ability to see it. He reached for his chord again. The red line came to center, he tabbed through the code, found the shape of it again. There was a function missing — there. It ran well in the precompile, but the other objects were unfinished. The whole was not yet complete. He wrote.

It was like that for a long time.

When he woke up he was covered in an unzipped sleeping bag and the truck was stopped. He yawned, sat up to see dim light filtering through the translucent paneling of the cargo container roof, the big square shapes of solar panels dotting its length.

“G’morning” said Marcus, the big man rummaging through his bag on the other couch. The dent in his skull stood out with a dark shadow.

“Morning” said Fede, guardedly.

“I think Cessus’s got some food out there. We pulled off the highway for a stretch and found a nice spot.”

Fede got up, stretched out his knees in his tired jeans. He’d left his legs on again, could feel the chafing where the bruise was. How long had it been since he’d showered? he thought, searching around for his jacket. He pulled it on and wobbled down the length of the container, fumbling a bit with the door before pulling it open.

The morning rushed in like a wet kiss, moist and clammy. Watery sunlight stabbed his eyes over the misty lines of some kind of forestland. The truck was in a small clearing along a service road, a big rock ring littered with aluminum beer cans charred black from use. Cessus and Cass were sitting on thick chunks of tree pulled close to a small fire, a set of white paper bags advertised some kind of fast food. When Fede opened the door Cessus called out;

“Welcome to the land of the living! Come and get some cold and greasy.”

Fede eased himself off the back of the truck and to the ground, his legs unsure. As he sat down next to them he found himself eager to be near, missing their companionship. Cass offered him a white bag folded shut, and he opened it to find the ubiquitous silver-wrapped burger and fries combo. He shoveled them into his mouth, unthinking. Cessus handed him a matching white soda cup and he became aware of them both looking at him. He stopped, mouth full of fries.

“What?” he mumbled.

The both looked away, eyes on the ground.

“Nothing, man” said Cessus. “Just making sure you’re okay, you know?”

He kept eating. Cass went up to the cab and Cessus began rolling a joint, carefully sprinkling crumbled bits of plant over the length of the thin white paper.

“Where’d you get that?” Fede asked.

“Previous occupant. Thoughtful of him, you ask me” said Cessus calmly. He twisted off the end in a neat roll, held up his work for inspection.

“You been coding?” he asked, touching his tongue to a loose flap in the paper.

Fede regarded him, his eyes flat, pale disks.

“Why?”

“Wondering how it’s going after I hooked you up with your meta-mind, that’s all.”

Fede looked out into the forest, noisily sucked the last of his drink through the straw. Cessus put the joint in his mouth and produced a bic, flicked it to life. Birds chirped in the distance.

“You got any more of that powder?” asked Fede.

“Wouldn’t matter if I did. You’re inoculated” said Cessus.

Fede stared at Cessus.

“I’m what?” he asked.

“Inoculated. That shit’s dangerous, Feed. I told you I wasn’t suggesting a habit. It was a one-time offer only. When you crashed out I gave you a shot off an inhaler. Customized cholera virus, contains the same fingerprint as the drug you took. Your body will recognize it as an invader, now, chew it right out of you before you ever get a high.”

He smiled, broadly, took a deep toke. He spread his arms wide and coughed, smiling, grey smoke pouring gently over his lips and up his face.

“You couldn’t think I’d get my man Tonx’s little brother hooked, now would you?” he gurgled.

Fede stood and tossed the cup into the fire. Cessus choked and spat, jumping for it.

“Hey, that shit’s recyclable!” he said.

Fede walked out towards the forest, stumbling on the uneven ground, his legs whining. He’d been to the forest a couple times, with his dad when he was younger, but had never gotten used to it. He only made it a short ways off through the clearing before he sat down on the far side of a tree. In a moment he realized the ground was wet, stood up and stared angrily at the moss. He stomped around the tree, seeing nowhere else to go, stopped and peed on the wet pine leaves. As he zipped up he looked back and saw Marcus stretching his huge arms in front of the fire, Cessus gesturing with the half-burnt cup. He looked again. Cass was sitting in the front seat of the cab, watching him.

He considered going back there, considered stomping off into the forest. He did neither. Instead he kicked together a pile of dead brush on the roots of the tree, sat down and thumbed on his comm. Fine. If he had nowhere else to go at least he could be useful. The strange sounds of the forest faded away, and he coded.

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