Cyberpunk

might disable one. You know? Then we can get more. They can protect us and help us make finds, Pico grinned, and thought: and I will be of them again.
    After that, it was quiet in the hut. There were strange murmurings from outside, from the other hovels in the odd village of outcasts. He thought he could hear something else. Like a mangy dump cat’s overeager purr. He stared toward the trash ceiling and listened. They’re out there, aren’t they, he said.
    Lucy nodded.
    He felt a charge of panic and for a moment, pictured himself running with Mouse in his arms, helicopters circling above him. Then he knew what he had to do.
    He hurriedly reassembled the nacker, but left its primary power disconnected. He hoped the module that he’d loosed on top with his tharpoon was not damaged.
    From his pocket he pulled Mouse’s wi.n and looked at it and his nacker with regret. He would have liked to have tinkered with them both. Would have liked to have known what it meant to have one. Instead he borrowed some wire from Lucy’s tool drawer and wired the wi.n firmly to the underside of the nacker. When he was finished, he picked up the bot and hauled it outside.
    He sat with it under the smog glow and felt an electricity of excitement and fear and disappointment.
    He thought of his time with Mouse before the dogs came. He touched the wound on his forearm and felt only a braille scar. In his hands the nacker was cold and still and he knew he must sacrifice it. Someday, perhaps, he’d get another chance.
    When he was ready, he reconnected the nacker and stood up. There was no chance to run, he knew. It powered up and rebooted and for half a moment did nothing, and this made him nearly laugh, to think of its confusion.
    The next instant it sensed him and reached out its tentacle, sending a searing bolt of electricity. He heard the short yelp his mouth made, and as he collapsed a wink of thought passed through him. How its machine instincts would call it home. How it would skitter along the trail at high speed. How a moment later it would exit the umbrella of the GPS jammer, carrying Mouse’s wi.n. It would go home, he thought, to be with its kind, and the soldiers would have to search that nest for her. And perhaps, he hoped, his nacker carried a touch of the disease.

DOWN AND OUT IN THE YEAR 2000

----
    By Kim Stanley Robinson

    It was going to be hot again. Summer in Washington, D.C. Lee Robinson woke and rolled on his mattress, broke into a sweat. That kind of a day. He got up and kneeled over the other mattress in the small room. Debra shifted as he shaded her from the sun angling in the open window. The corners of her mouth were caked white and her forehead was still hot and dry, but her breathing was regular and she appeared to be sleeping well. Quietly Lee slipped on his jeans and walked down the hall to the bathroom. Locked. He waited; Ramon came out wet and groggy. “Morning, Robbie.” Into the bathroom, where he hung his pants on the hook and did his morning ritual. One bloodshot eye, staring back at him from the splinter of mirror still in the frame. The dirt around the toilet base. The shower curtain blotched with black fungus, as if it had a fatal disease. That kind of morning.
    Out of the shower he dried off with his jeans and started to sweat again. Back in his room Debra was still sleeping. Worried, he watched her for a while, then filled his pockets and went into the hall to put on sneakers and tank top. Debra slept light these days, and the strangest things would rouse her. He jogged down the four flights of stairs to the street, and, sweating freely, stepped out into the steamy air.
    He walked down 16th Street, with its curious alternation of condo fortresses and abandoned buildings, to the Mall. There, big khaki tanks dominated the broad field of dirt and trash and tents and the odd patch of grass. Most of the protesters were still asleep in their scattered tent villages, but there was an active crowd around the Washington Monument, and Lee walked on over, ignoring the soldiers by the tanks.
    The crowd surrounded a slingshot as tall as a man, made of a forked tree branch. Inner tubes formed the sling, and the base was buried in the ground. Excited protesters placed balloons filled with red paint into the sling, and fired them up at the monument. If a balloon hit above the red that already covered the tower, splashing clean white—a rare event, as the monument was pure red up a good third of it—the