The extra, p.7
The Extra, page 7
“Well, second, since I assume you care about the extras getting paid off efficiently, why not help me out? I’m a novice at payboating. Tell me things I need to know, techniques, dos and don’ts.”
“I sense, Katie, that you’ve got balls. I like balls on a rich bitch. Tell you what. Let’s see how big they are. You were checking out our gear . . . You know what this is?” Sandy indicated a touch pad on her belt that looked a little more complex than the APP scan next to it.
“Emergency override? That whaddayacallit . . . ?”
“The APP driver. It’s an override in a limited sense only. It’s more an interference tool. If you find yourself crashed, which does happen, and you’re on the ground facing an APP, this won’t change its basic program, which is to eat you. But it can override the APP’s movements, one body part at a time—as long as you hit the keys right. If you key it right, you can turn the thing around and walk it away from you. But if you stop keying, back it comes. And if you key wrong, then it’s right on you, munching away. And let me tell you, when you’re facing an APP on the ground, like one of the extras, then it’s easy to get the shakes and screw up your keying. I’ve seen it happen.”
“You mean you’ve seen a payraft go down?”
“Hey, that happens a lot more than they tell you, every other shoot, practically.” It seemed Sandra got more conversational the more frightening her topic might be to Kate. “See, the big problem, until they beefed up the rafts’ cooling systems, used to be overheating in the raft drive. Melt down even one of your anti-grav coils and bam, you drop like a rock. I saw that happen to a friend of mine. The crash tumbled her out on the street into heavy APP traffic. Well, she got her feet under her quick. It broke her pilot’s back and by the time she was up, he was lunched. The APPs were those things with the three-part jaws and needle teeth?”
“Right. Altair Invaders.”
“That was the vid! Well, my friend, she had another APP hopping right toward her, but had thirty yards clearance. She’d Maydayed, and Metro was rushing to her sector, and I scanned the APP after her onto my monitor. I saw her in detail through that APP’s eyes. There was my friend, a few yards off, keying her driver like mad. The APP stops short, it turns this way, turns that way, then it spins all the way around—and there she is again on cam, my friend, keying like crazy, obviously panicked, but she’s still got the APP coming straight for her. Then it launches, lands right on her. I watched her head bitten off as close as you are to me right now. She fumbled the keys, see? Lost the pattern, and brought it right on herself.”
A comfortable silence, Sandy gazing at Kate, taking in her reactions. All this had been by way of proposing some kind of challenge to Kate. Sandy was waiting for Kate to pick up the thread herself. “OK . . . so . . . you want to find out if I’ve got nerve.”
Sandy’s smile looked genuine. “Thanks—I lost my train of thought there, recalling old times.” (Right.) “So. One of Panoply’s thoughtful provisions for its payboat union’s safety is a driver run-through. They put you in a pen with a live APP, set the APP at three-quarters speed, and you get a chance to make sure you don’t succumb to the Sweaty Fingers Syndrome on your driver keyboard—in case you crash, I mean. It’s totally optional, this run-through. You have to request it, in fact, and sign a waiver too. There’s handlers watching with manual override, but a wrong touch on your driver can totally fake them out and beat them to the draw, and you can still get lunched. Well? Whaddaya say?”
Kate wanted to snap her answer back, but her throat clenched up and, to her fury, she had to swallow before answering. “I’ll do it if you will.”
“If I do it? Katie honey, I always do it, every fucking flick I raft, and I don’t do any of that candy-ass three-quarter speed shit either. Set it high and send it in, I tell ’em. Every single flick I raft.”
Kate had her hands on her lap now, afraid they might betray a tremor, though she thought that her face was OK, meeting Sandy’s stare. But what in Christ’s name had she just talked herself into? Damn this freckled bitch! She’d marked Kate out, moved in, and backed her into a corner, one-two-three, as easy as if Kate were a month-old kitten. The revenge of the Lower Orders. Kate was had, and had cold, because there was no way she was going to back out. No way she would let those malicious blue eyes gloat over her.
“OK. I’ll do it.”
“Good for you. The way I see it, it’s not just a precaution. It’s a kind of dues thing—face what the Zoo-meat’s facing before I go out and play god over them. ’Course, their lives aren’t nearly so significant as yours is, but they’re still human in a technical sense, belong to the same species and all.”
“Hey, bitch. Enough. I said I’d do it. And, besides, you’re living off their blood as much as I am.”
“Yes. I suck their blood for a little house in the lower Hills just as much as you suck it for your manse in the Heights. Whoa! What have we here? Behold, the gods walk among us.”
Kate followed her eyes. Val Margolian had come into the canteen with Rod. Val had a friendly hand on Rod’s shoulder, seemed to be chatting with him, at the same time turning a smile to the people staring at him, returning a wave here and there. Rod looked fully inflated, lofty, speaking earnestly to his mentor and ecstatic to be seen by all these drones as he did so. Look who he’d brought to his table! Was Val actually going to sit down with them?
“Hi, Kate. You look rarin’ to go.”
“Hi, Val.”
“Hi, Sandra!”
“Good morning, Mr. Margolian.”
Val was famous for his democratic touch, a real name-rememberer, but there was an undercurrent of something in his greeting to the pilot. And did Sandy’s reply have a touch of irony? Val was pulling out a chair . . . and pressing Rod down into it. Remained standing himself.
“Val? Aren’t you going to . . . ?” Rod—surprised.
“I have a million things to see to upstairs. Kate, you let Sandra show you the ropes. She’s an ace.”
“She’s taught me plenty already, Val.”
“Go get ’em girls, Rod.”
He went out easy and amiable, dispensing more waves, pausing at a table of APP techs for a brief exchange.
Rod looked disoriented, as if waking from a dream. It was dawning on him how his little entry scene had played. Val had brought him back downstairs . . . and sat him down at a canteen table. Put him in his place. He looked around him, and you could see how conspicuous he felt here, a guy in a kilo-clack sport coat, marooned in a sea of jumpsuits.
The man had actually thought Val Margolian was going to eat with him down here! Kate’s urge to laugh died. This man was going to be sharing her raft in less than two hours. And Kate knew instinctively the horror that now consumed him, and it had nothing to do with the real horror of today’s business. What galled Rod Richmond at this moment was that, just like all these people around him, he himself would shortly be wearing a blue jumpsuit.
It dawned on Kate that she was seeing Rod in this moment in much the same way that Sandy saw her.
“So!” Sandy brightly piped. “You’re gonna be a payboat pilot, Rod? I was just telling Katie here about our rafts’ coil meltdown problem—over twenty crashes in the last five years. I don’t think I mentioned to her, though, that they solved that little glitch just this year. They enlarged the suck-vents to cool the coils better, and we haven’t had a single meltdown since. We have had five more crashes though. Another pesky little glitch. It seems that the beefed-up vents will occasionally suck in airborne debris from explosions and such. Makes the engines seize up. You don’t just drop, you tend to flip. Well, come on, kids, let’s get you suited up.” Sprightly Sandy was on her feet now. “Sorry we don’t have any cashmere jumpsuits for you, Rod.”
“Why don’t you just fuck off?” Rod’s face was red beneath his tan, his shoulders swelling in his suit.
“Why don’t I fuck off, Rod? I’ll tell you. Because I’m the union rep, and the chief of your sector, and I’m your fucking boss today. I’m personally assigned to your case by the great god Margolian. If you don’t feel like doing your job, or perhaps just don’t have the balls for it, I’ll be happy to have security throw you off the set right now.”
Rod’s shoulders slumped. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, and Sandy, apparently, was above extorting a spoken surrender. She merely smiled and nodded, and led them out.
As they followed Sandra out of the canteen, Kate felt an unexpected gratitude to the woman. She might rough up Rod’s ego enough to focus him for the work ahead. “Hey, Rod,” Kate said. “Sandy has a great, like, warm-up activity for us, kind of a practice run with our APP drivers. Interested?”
“APP drivers?” Rod asked. “What are those?”
GRIM STATISTICS
In the detector frame, Jool arched her arms above her head, and did a slow pirouette—even as alarms sounded everywhere in the dozens of detectors to either side of her, people being disarmed left and right.
Inwardly, she was sweating bullets—hell, she was carrying bullets, or shells, at least. Two wads of double-ought in the grip of her tiny sawed-off, up her rectum, and one in the chamber-barrel in her vagina. She felt that she visibly bulged with the divided weapon. Even if this detector didn’t go off, but they backed it up with a strip search, she was still cooked, because she couldn’t even bend over without something peeking out.
She did a second pirouette, reverse direction . . . and the studio tech impatiently waved her through. Bless the inventor of hard-carbon firearms! Ahead, beyond further chutes and arrays of booths, she could see the set wall, and within it, the jumbled architecture of the place designed to kill her. “Up yours,” she muttered. “Loom as large as you want—I’m goin’ in you, and I’m comin’ outta you.” She was armed against three tight spots. Had the means for three kills, if her aim was true. Three tags, 525 K. Just hold on to that thought.
At the contract stations, a fleshy, heavily made-up woman sat at the console of Jool’s. “Can you read the contract on the display?”
“Damn straight I can.”
The woman kept talking as if Jool hadn’t answered, her spiel dropping out of her mouth without inflection, a verbal leakage she had nothing to do with. Jool understood the fat and the makeup: insulation, a sheath to hide in. “You are contracting to participate as an extra in the filming of Alien Hunger if you default on this agreement at any point subsequent to entering it you will immediately begin serving a ten-year prison term for fraud you will immediately receive a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars cash for each Anti-Personnel Property you disable or destroy and whose paytag you remove and render to one of the payrafts you will receive a survival bonus of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on exiting the set at the conclusion of the filming any and all monies on your person at that time will be legally yours and tax-exempt do you accept these terms.”
“I’m sorry, my mind wandered—would you repeat that please?”
The woman’s eyes had never left her console, and did not now. “You are allowed one repetition you are contracting to participate as an extra in the filming of—”
“That was what they call a joke. I accept the terms.”
“Please place your left hand palm-down on the hand-shaped depression in the console in front of you doing so will legally constitute your binding entry into this contract with Panoply Studios Incorporated.”
“You mean this hand-shaped depression here?” The woman’s eyes remained fixed on her screen. Jool pressed her palm down.
“Thank you please follow the green line to Makeup and Costume.”
At Makeup, hundreds of chairs were manned by techs in smocks and work aprons, all bulging with pockets. They wore bandoliers of pencils, brushes, combs, and scissors, and wielded little latex spray guns. The skinny guy at Jool’s chair wore plenty of makeup himself, and was definitely not the impersonal type. “No tats?” he enthused. “Real unprocessed hair? Gracious, sweetie, are you a ’Riser?”
“Naw, I’m rich, got a house in the Hills—I’m just addicted to thrills.”
“Chin up, please.” He was lipsticking her, applying mascara and eyeshadow. Quick deft strokes on her lips and eyelids felt like affection, those gentle, unaccustomed touches.
“What’s my look?” she asked. “Feels like you hoin’ me up.”
“No, you’re a dish, sweetie, in lavender sweats and Nikes, out jogging—an uptown babe who dolls up for her workout.”
“Hey. Thanks.” She meant it. All the extras’ footgear, whatever the apparent style, was supposed to be good running gear in disguise, but he was typing her for the real thing.
“And of course you’ll have a fanny pack.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see. Let’s put some rhinestone studs on your little elfin ears.” As he leaned close to apply the studs, he murmured, his voice covered by the whine of a latex spray gun masking the barbed-wire neck tat of a bruiser in the next chair, “You’ll have just enough time to get it out of you and slip it into the pack in the changing booth.”
Jool’s startled eyes met the tech’s smiling green ones. He kissed her cheek and grinned. “I’m an expert observer of all the nuances of a woman’s walk, dear. You’ve got balls, honey. Godspeed.”
Jool’s eyes filled with tears—actual tears again! He patted her shoulder, pointed out the booth, and called, “Next!”
All through the queasy calisthenics of extracting and assembling her weapon and stowing it in the fanny pack, Jool felt that light, feathery kiss on her cheek. A tingly little spot of luck. She kept resisting the impulse to touch it, because she was afraid of rubbing it off. And it was the second kiss, the second kiss-out-of-nowhere that she’d received in the last twelve hours. That funny boy Curtis, last night . . . What was going on?
Jool had, especially at moments of great risk, a sort of cosmic turn of mind, because where else would luck be, if not in the great starry gears of the universe? So. Was the universe trying to tell her that today some major luck was on her way? Or was the universe kissing her good-bye, because today, her ass was toast?
Beyond Makeup, a high fence crowned with razor wire. Through a gate in this, she emerged into the perimeter of the set wall. Arrayed here were banks of bleachers facing that gray barrier. These bleachers stretched at least a quarter-mile. Climbing to a seat in one of the upper tiers, Jool felt ridiculously gaudy and flamboyant in her purple sweats and makeup. It went against all her instincts to go into danger so brightly flagged. The other extras seemed to feel the same, looking a little stunned in their new identities, tat-less and wigged, stripped of the selves they’d evolved for survival in the Zoo. Their insignias, scars, and badges of toughness all latexed and tinted and glad-ragged away.
The scale of this whole operation made it more frightening. The set was a city, nothing less. Heavy traffic ran along outside the wall: tech crews in electric carts, tractors hauling flatbeds heaped with props, maintenance trucks with booms or cherry-pickers or painters’ spray tanks tentacled with multicolored hoses—all streamed in and out of ports in the vast set basement. Along the front of the bleachers, four little platforms, and beside each platform was a tractor coupled to a big cage shrouded in tarps—an arrangement that doubtless had to do with the demonstration of the APPs they would be facing during the shoot.
Big prison vans were parked at either end of the bleachers, flanked by squadrons of heavily armed Metro. Once the APPs were revealed, defectors from the contract were to be expected.
“That there’s one humongous hellhole to be goin’ into wit’ no one to stand your back, babe.” This from the guy beside her in a suit and a blow-dried head of black hair. She had to squint to recognize the goon who’d sat in the makeup chair next to hers, getting his neck tat latexed over. “I mean I’m bad,” he said, “but even I would’n’ mind havin a’ ally in there.”
Had this guy caught the makeup man’s murmur, or read Jool’s walk in the same way?
“Really?” She batted mascaraed eyelashes innocently. “So why you wanna team up with someone small like me?”
“Hey. You look sharp, quick. It’s about speed in there, alertness.”
“Oh! And here I was thinking it was about havin’ someone handy you could throw to an APP to get yourself out of a tight spot. Or havin’ someone team with you for a bonus that you could rob for her share.”
“Hey, you a real cynical nasty ho, you know that?”
“Whatever. Just run your scam on someone else an’ stop talkin’ to me, fuckhead—I’m tryin’ to concentrate here.”
“Hey, dude, I’ll take you for an ally.” Something familiar about that voice. It was a guy on the other side of the goon, another white guy of about the same size, but even stronger looking. She blinked when he winked at her, and then recognized him. Under the green spike hair and earring of an early punk, it was one of those ’Risers from last night—Japh.
“First, though,” he was telling the goon, “you gotta show me you know somethin’ besides shit. See those big metal armatures mounted on that set wall every hundred yards or so?”
“Metal what?”
“Like big metal plates with bulges on them?”
“Yeah. So?”
“You know what they are?”
“Damn if I know, an’ damn if you know either.”
“I do know, ’cause I read. See, reading is this thing where you run your eyes across printed words and get information from them.”
“Hey, listen you fuggin’ sissy—”
The goon had lifted his fist, but suddenly it was bent high up between his shoulder blades, and his torqued joints were emitting grinding sounds. “Whaddaya think,” Japh asked conversationally, “should I cripple this for you?”
“No.” A muffled groan.
“You sure?” A slight increase in the grinding noises.
“Yes!” Much shriller.
“OK, but since you insulted me, find a different seat when I let you go.”
