Cyberpunk

and fear kept him from organizing them into words.
    Instead he listened to the sounds around him. There were others they passed, low structures with low voices inside, the smells of cooking which made his stomach ache. They were in a camp of some sort. Twice he heard a voice call out to Lucy and then there was silence after. He held hard onto the rope.
    They turned and he followed the rope into a dwelling of some sort.
    Mouse? he said.
    Here, she said from in front of him.
    The rope went slack in his hands and the darkness was absolute and he stood where he was. Around him he could feel there were objects, the place close and dense with things.
    Give me your GPS jammer, Lucy said.
    Why?
    Give it now!
    Pico unhooked it from his belt and handed it to Lucy. A moment later he saw the faint purple glow of the jammer’s light.
    Well, Lucy said. We get to work.
    No please, not yet, Mouse said.
    Dearheart, Lucy said.
    Can’t we turn on the pinche light? Pico said. I want answers.
    To what, love, Lucy said.
    Pico wasn’t sure to what. Who are you? he said finally.
    I already told you my name. You mean, Señor , what am I? Am I a pinche leper?
    There was silence, until Pico said quietly, yes.
    Yes, I am what they call a leper.
    Pico no longer knew in which direction the door was. He resisted the urge to crouch to his knees and put his arms over his head. He’d grown up hearing about the lepers, the cyborgs.
    For a while, Lucy said into the dark room, cyborgs were made. Or rather, humans evolved into cyborgs. I like to think of it that way. These humans feared death, and thinking that machines do not die, became half-machine. After a while, it became a challenge to name them: Were they more machine or more human? At some point, a line was crossed. You know this story?
    Yes, Mouse said.
    I don’t know, Pico said. Kind of.
    I will tell you, Lucy said.
    In the dark? Pico said.
    After, if you wish to see, we may have light.
    There were the rich and old, Lucy continued, desperate for a taste of immortality, who fought the body’s desire to change. Replace a heart and an eye, an ear and a knee, a parietal lobe, a face. Replace it all. There were government experiments. Androids with flesh, with heartbeats, who subsisted on food. The call of augmentation is strong. Who does not wish for improvement, for immortality?
    No one knows where the disease came from. Perhaps there is such a thing as an evolutionary memory, a sense of wholeness. Perhaps the very skin and flesh rejected the system it had become a part of, the hard impassive elements that bound them. Perhaps God did not like his creations so tinkered with. In the end, we began to fall apart, become undone. Our flesh peeled from the metal and plastic implants, and vice versa. To stay alive, I employ a swarm of Senti to keep me whole. Listen.
    She was silent a moment until Pico realized he could hear a soft sound, like a fleet of cockroaches pattering lightly along tin. She meant these things covered her, the Senti she had given him earlier.
    Does our species’ history, our very evolution, contain a binding principle? Is there a soul that fetters us? Maybe the sustenance we eat, of the earth and returned to earth, locks us into something we do not yet understand. I don’t know. But we became sick, and the disease was infectious, even for the less augmented. So we were outcasted.
    I have an implant, Mouse said.
    Of course you do, dearheart, Lucy said. But since we will remove it tonight, you need not fear the disease.
    Turn on the light, Pico said.
    There was a click, and with a whir a glow bloomed into the room. The place was absolutely full of things. Strollers and dish racks and hubcaps and toasters and robotany strapped to the wall and ceiling, layers upon layers of scavenged dump junk.
    Lucy sat straight-spined on a plush red chair, one leg of which was bound and fixed with wire. On her nearly bald head a swarm of centipede-like insects feverishly worked a wide swath of skinless area encrusted with blood. She had no lower lip, and Pico could see the skeletal roots of her teeth. Her eyes were dull and inhuman, and surrounded with bruising, swollen blue and yellow stretches across her face. Lucy’s hands were crossed over her knees, and they were beyond age, crackled and parched, some fingers with long ragged nails, others missing nails entirely, in their place a sort of pus. She wore a worn black velvet suit.
    Mouse let out a sob and covered her face.
    Shall I turn out