Cyberpunk

toys and TV sets and bioware, gas jets and hair dryers, window shades and sweaty couches, yellow toys and pigs’ hooves, and everywhere plastic.
    It was late afternoon and soon the sun would go down and the nackers would crawl back to Basucorp, and the dogs and who knew what else would come out. He brushed away the flies that had descended on Mouse. He checked the charge on his battery pack: 18%. He thought of who might come looking for him and could think of no one. His parents would think he was high on sweetwine or shuttered on kek or plugged into some dirt port, lying against a shed wall somewhere. No one would believe he was here, guarding Mouse. Somebody might come looking for Mouse, he thought, and it was a hope he held onto.
    He leaned over and put his ear tentatively against her chest, to listen to her heart, but the soft and shockingly pleasant give of her breast so tantalized and alarmed him that he jumped up and took a step away, afraid she’d wake with him pressed there. He thought he’d heard a heartbeat, but he couldn’t be sure. His cheek and ear were on fire with the touch, buzzing. Red-faced, he turned away and spent a quarter hour in the trash, trying to do his job. He found a yellow rain slicker with holes in the elbows and put it on. He found a black bra and put it in the raincoat pocket and then took it out and threw it back on the ground. A minute later he re-pocketed it. He found an advertisement for a body-modification and live-tattoo clinic and he studied the photos intently, imagining how the tattoos would move.
    After a while he recovered the car door Mouse had found and propped it so that it shielded her bare arm. He found a dead beach ball and folded it under her head. He was hungry. There was nothing new here. Any edible food-trash was kilometers away at the trucks.
    He sat cross-legged in front of the nacker and began to tinker in its belly, but without tools it was slow-going. The fuel cell was in a hardshell that needed wrenches to get at. With the tharpoon he got access to a circuit board that had a number of chips—including the GPS, but he couldn’t disable it without breaking the whole thing, and he couldn’t bring himself to do that. It was too pretty and new and he wanted it for his own. The last time he’d done that haunted him. Nackanigmo , they called him: nacker fucker, or: he who, armed with a nacker, fucks everything up.
    This time he was careful to check Mouse’s pulse at her wrist. He circled his fingers around it and thought it was the most wonderful wrist ever. He wondered at a charged bolt that strong. Maybe she’d wake and be something else, Sparto’s perma-drool on her chin.
    There was a sunset cast in the smoke of the distant city, and he braved standing on a rise to look for the others and to watch for a moment. The color stretched red deep across the sky and it made him feel grand and deeply afraid. What they called the wall was not far off, the cliff at the dump’s edge. Over that cliff down an immense slope was the old river canyon the city had filled long ago. There were rumors—stories the pepenadoras told their children—of what came up the wall at night. Pico shivered. Lepers. The dogs (Dog Organized Guard System) would come too. Any pepenador with half a smart would be out of the dump by nightfall. He knew there was hardly a fellow pepenador who considered him in this class of half smarts.
    He wished he had some sweetwine and checked every last pocket for some crumbs of kek to numb his brain.
    Pico combed through the nacker’s circuits and disconnected a few others. Some he knew what they did—a long-range network chip, which was probably dumping diagnostic data into the air—others that just looked like they might cause him trouble later on. These he wrapped carefully in whatever he could find and put in his belt pockets. He’d look at them later.
    The last nacker he’d opened was with his best friend Suto.
    Pico had installed a hacked instruction set into their captured bot and restarted it. The nacker booted into a ten-minute rampage, crashing through tin shacks, its tentacle bolting whatever was in its way, including not a few pepenadors . Suto and he chased it down until it turned and pinned Suto to the wall, frying him in a long, slow electrocution. Pico destroyed the machine with his father’s axe, but Suto was burnt inside and through, and Pico was to blame, and besides himself, no one blamed him more than Mouse, Suto’s