Cyberpunk

The 360 looked unimpressive. But he was a journalist, and she hadn’t asked. The coralin plant could have survived. The legal status of pirated coralin wasn’t sewn up completely. There were ways, angles: there were lawyers on the side of the people. Johnny had genuinely been helping, getting them publicity. It wasn’t his fault that violence had then exploded, on prime-time news.
    It would have taken the police no time to get a precise fix. They were entitled to deal swift and hard with armed conspiracy involving information technology. They would be here very soon . . . No one should get hurt. They’d stun-gas the site and haul the bodies out before they burned the plant.
    “Okay.” She gripped the rim of the window. “Okay, fine. You faked your unionist rap. You took your pictures and sent them straight to the bastards in power. Okay, I was a fool. But you thought I’d come with you ? I don’t want to escape from here. I want ‘here’ to escape from being the way it is. I thought a guy who was in the union was someone I could trust. You were only interested in getting a story. Well fuck you, Mr. Eejay. Let them do their worst. You can’t shut us out forever. Shit —the arrogance. Any day now there’s going to be a revolution. And you’re going to find yourself sitting right in the middle, Mr. Fucking Neutral Observer.”
    “That’s where I belong,” said Johnny. “I’m a journalist.”
    Cambridge looked down at him, as from a great height. He saw the blighted skin, every mark picked out by the upward light. The contempt in smart, clear eyes. She would have liked to be an eejay. Maybe she had the makings, who could tell? Johnny did not go for the idea, though it was widely accepted, that there were no genes left out here worth worrying about.
    “Violence is never going to solve anything.”
    She curled her lip. “What kind of violence? The bureaucratic kind or the personal kind? I don’t make that distinction.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “No,” said the desk clerk. “No. You’re not sorry, Johnny.”
    She let go of the rim and walked away.
    Johnny drove around lumpy roads, helpless, until the computer suddenly recovered its bearings and he was on his way home. He thought about the cold fenland town that he had visited once. (It would be a mistake to let anyone out here know you’d actually left the continent, that would be too much.) He thought about the European solution to the big problem. No citadels there. The countryside was empty. Everyone lived in the cities, cheek by jowl. In England the wasted people were called the poor. You stepped over them as you went into your hotel. He didn’t believe it was any worse to let them have their own world, with its own rules. He thought about the phylloxera beetle. He hadn’t finished that story. How the plague came back in the next century and laid California’s vines to waste . . . because people forgot to take care. Because greed drowned the warnings. It isn’t the coralin, he thought. The technology is helpless to save the world. It’s what goes on between people that fucks things up.
    Johnny truly was in the union, which made him a radical and dangerous character, by many standards; inside. But you can be opposed to some of the laws, and still believe in law and order. You can be on the side of the Indians, and still think it’s a bad idea to sell them guns and firewater. He wished he could explain. One day the citadel of civilization would spread out the way it used to and cover the whole continent. But that would not get a chance to happen if you let the wolves into the sleigh. You couldn’t let yourself be distracted by the fact that the wolves had human faces. He couldn’t regret his decisions. But he was glad, as the road jolted away, that his mask had slipped at the end. It would have been worse to leave Cambridge believing that she’d met her urban-guerilla savior. He had given her something real after all: a creep to despise. Maybe it evened the balance, a little.
    He drove, and the pain eased. The boondocks episode began to fade in the accustomed, dreamlike way. Bella, asleep in the back, felt ever more like his talisman, his salvation, as he scurried for the sheltering walls.

THE LOST TECHNIQUE OF BLACKMAIL

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    By Mark Teppo

    RonTom St. John’s Liberty Prescott Four, President and CEO of InterCore Express, was not, as his CV would otherwise tell you, a graduate of the Las Vegas School of International Business, due to