Cyberpunk

metal and other recyclables off the door—processing in place. Once its middle compartment was full it would go back to Basucorp and empty. Mouse was face-down next to it.
    The terrain allowed him to get within range. An awful smell of rot pervaded the air. His grip on the tharpoon kept slipping. He knew he couldn’t hope for much. He crawled quietly toward the nacker and then let the tharpoon fly. It was a bad, glancing blow. The tharpoon ricocheted off the top of the nacker’s dome where its vulture eye was encased in hardglass, but a bit of plastic the size of a nose jounced off. That was the lousy best he could do. He shrugged his shoulders to his ears, bracing for shock, and turned and ran hard, hating himself, tripping over debris. His foot caught in the carcass of some animal and he went down hard to the ground. He paused there, the breath knocked out of him, and listened for its approach. When his breath came back he stood and saw it was still where he’d left it.
    The thing was all schizo, swinging its arms and tilting strangely to the side. He crouched low and watched it, trying to figure out what it was doing. It wasn’t right. It was freaking out. He made a wide circle around it and then dashed in. He got a hold of Mouse’s collar and dragged her out of range. The nacker’s tentacle sent a few charged bolts at the ground around it in a spasmodic circle.
    He sat next to her and watched it go. Mouse, he said, but she didn’t stir. Mouse, come on güey , please get up.
    It was weird to see her this close. There was a line of blood down her forehead from her scalp that cut the dirt on her face, and it startled him with how perfect and pure it was. Even her deformed ear had an angelic shapeliness to it. Mouse, he said again. He had imagined her countless nights, as he lay awake in his cot, and here she was in the flesh. This close. He wanted to cup her cheek with his hand, to stream energy from his body into hers, he wanted to cradle her, to say he was sorry, to make everything right. He couldn’t believe he’d hit the pinche maricón .
    The nacker would be trying to radio home and he felt a panic rising in him. Others would come. At least he’d jammed its location. He laid Mouse down and made his way around the nacker so that the vulture eye faced away from him, and the tentacle gripper was out of reach. With the tip of his tharpoon he hooked a bowl-shaped plastic piece of trash—the broken skin of a crashed cycle helmet, the rider long dead—and slowly lowered it over the top of the nacker’s eyes, the digital and the meat. At least they wouldn’t be recorded. The ground was scorched.
    He jumped with each charge the nacker fired. There were dim outlines on the horizon, but so far this quadrant of the dump was dead. He stayed low and just out of sight all the same.
    With the old model nackers, a bolt could put a pepenadora down for an hour or more. He lay down beside her and whispered in her good ear. It’s okay, Mousita, I got it for you. Wake up now, pretty girl. He wondered if she liked to be called pretty girl.
    The nacker had four pinchers on its tentacle arm and not five. They were always trying to save money, to make shit cheaper. Well, he thought, a pride rising in him for the first time. I got you this time, maricón . He was tiring of the thing’s antics and spasms, and the itch to tease it started to overpower his fear. Seemed like the new nackers were more fragile than the old. He reached his tharpoon in and gave it a sharp jab to the middle. It jerked and turned, and then resumed its spasms. Completely roto , he thought, just like his nephew Sparto. Perhaps it’s dying. He reached in with the claw hand of the tharpoon, got a grip on one leg and gave it a hard flip, then ducked. On its back it shot one last charge into the air and then went silent. The dump was eerily quiet then. Suddenly he saw himself as a hero, a nacker killer, and he looked about for some way to tie the bot up. He couldn’t wait to take it back, though he knew the trouble this would cause. He found the plastic chunk he’d broken off with his tharpoon and pocketed it.
    Mouse, he whispered, his mouth now a centimeter from her ear. Please. I’m so sorry, he said, meaning how she got hurt, that he couldn’t stop it, but knowing when he apologized she’d think only of her little brother Suto. I didn’t mean to, he added. He lay on the ground next to her in the dirt, the decomposition of generations of trash: