Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

another and were landing terrible blows. Soma saw a tiny figure clinging to one of the giants’ shoulders, saw it lose its grip, fall, and disappear beneath an ironshod boot the size of a bundle bug.

Then Soma slipped and fell himself, sending all three of them to the glowing ground and sending a cloud of the biting crystal salt into the air. One of his sandaled feet, he saw, was coated in gold slime. They’d been trying to outflank one Legislator only to stumble on the trail of another.

Japheth picked up the Owl, now limp as a rag doll, and with a grunt heaved the man across his shoulders. “Soma, you should come on. We might make it.” It’s not a hard decision to make at all. How can you not make it? At first he’d needed convincing, but then he’d been one of those who’d gone out into the world to convince others. It’s not just history; it’s after history.

“Soma!”

Japheth ran directly at the unmoving painter, the deadweight of the Owl across his shoulders slowing him. He barreled into Soma, knocking him to the ground again, all of them just missing the unknowing Legislator as it slid slowly past.

“Up, up!” said Japheth. “Stay behind it, so long as it’s moving in the right direction. I think my boys missed a Commodore.” His voice was very sad.

The Legislator stopped and let out a bellowing noise. Fetid steam began rising from it. Japheth took Soma by the hand and pulled him along, through chaos. One of the Commodores, the first to fall, was motionless on the ground, two or three Legislators making their way along its length. The two who’d fought lay locked in one another’s grasp, barely moving and glowing hotter and hotter. The only standing Commodore, eyes like red suns, seemed to be staring just behind them.

As it began to sweep its gaze closer, Soma heard Japheth say, “We got closer than I would have bet.”

Then Soma’s car, mysteriously covered with red crosses and wailing at the top of its voice, came to a sliding, crunching stop in the salt in front of them.

Soma didn’t hesitate, but threw open the closest rear door and pulled Japheth in behind him. When the three of them — painter, Crow, Owl — were stuffed into the rear door, Soma shouted, “Up those stairs, car!”

In the front seat, there was a woman whose eyes seemed as large as saucers.

commodores faulting headless people in the lick protocols compel reeling in, strengthening, temporarily abandoning telepresence locate an asset with a head asset with a head located

Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails was trying not to go crazy. Something was pounding at her head, even though she hadn’t tried to open it herself. Yesterday, she had been working a remote repair job on the beach, fixing a smashed window. Tonight, she was hurtling across the Great Salt Lick, Legislators and bears and Commodores acting in ways she’d never seen or heard of.

Jenny herself acting in ways she’d never heard of. Why didn’t she just pull the emergency brake, roll out of the car, wait for the THP? Why did she just hold on tighter and pull down the sunscreen so she could use the mirror to look into the backseat?

It was three men. She hadn’t been sure at first. One appeared to be unconscious and was dressed in some strange getup, a helmet of some kind completely encasing his head. She didn’t know the man in the capacitor jacket, who was craning his head out the window, trying to see something above them. The other one though, she recognized.

“Soma Painter,” she said. “Your car is much better, though it has missed you terribly.”

The owner just looked at her glaze-eyed. The other one pulled himself back in through the window, a wild glee on his face. He rapped the helmet of the prone man and shouted, “Did you hear that? The unpredictable you prophesied! And it fell in our favor!”

Soma worried about his car’s suspension, not to mention the tires, when it slalomed through the legs of the last standing Commodore and bounced up the steeply cut steps of the Parthenon. He hadn’t had a direct hand in the subsystems design — by the time he’d begun to develop the cars, Athena was already beginning to take over a lot of the details. Not all of them, though; he couldn’t blame her for the guilt he felt over twisting his animal subjects into something like onboard components.

But the car made it onto the platform inside the outer set of columns, seemingly no worse for wear. The man next to him — Japheth, his name was Japheth and he was from Kentucky — jumped out of the car and ran to the vast, closed counterweighted bronze doors.

“It’s because of the crosses. We’re in an emergency vehicle according to their protocols.” That was the mechanic, Jenny, sitting in the front seat and trying to staunch a nosebleed with a greasy rag. “I can hear the Governor,” she said.

Soma could hear Japheth raging and cursing. He stretched the Owl out along the back seat and climbed out of the car. Japheth was pounding on the doors in futility, beating his fists bloody, spinning, spitting. He caught sight of Soma.

“These weren’t here before!” he said, pointing to two silver columns that angled up from the platform’s floor, ending in flanges on the doors themselves. “The doors aren’t locked, they’re just sealed by these fucking cylinders!” Japheth was shaking. “Caw!” he cried. “Caw!”

“What’s he trying to do?” asked the woman in the car.

Soma brushed his fingers against his temple, trying to remember.

“I think he’s trying to remake Tennessee,” he said.

The weight of a thousand cars on her skull, the hoofbeats of a thousand horses throbbing inside her eyes, Jenny was incapable of making any rational decision. So, irrationally, she left the car. She stumbled over to the base of one of the silver columns. When she tried to catch herself on it, her hand slid off.

“Oil,” she said. “These are just hydraulic cylinders.” She looked around the metal sheeting where the cylinder disappeared into the platform, saw the access plate. She pulled a screwdriver from her belt and used it to remove the plate.

The owner was whispering to his car, but the crazy man had come over to her. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, but she meant it only in the largest sense. Immediately, she was thrusting her wrists into the access plate, playing the licenses and government bonds at her wrists under a spray of light, murmuring a quick apology to the machinery. Then she opened a long vertical cut down as much of the length of the hydraulic hose as she could with her utility blade.

Fluid exploded out of the hole, coating Jenny in the slick, dirty green stuff. The cylinders collapsed.

The man next to Jenny looked at her. He turned and looked at Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley and at Soma’s car.

“We must have had a pretty bad plan,” he said, then rushed over to pull the helmeted figure from the backseat.

breached come home all you commodores come home cancel emergency designation on identified vehicle and downcycle now jump in jump in jump in

Jenny could not help Soma and his friend drag their burden through the doors of the temple, but she staggered through the doors. She had only seen Athena in tiny parts, in the mannequin shrines that contained tiny fractions of the Governor.

Here was the true and awesome thing, here was the forty-foot-tall sculpture — armed and armored — attended by the broken remains of her frozen marble enemies. Jenny managed to lift her head and look past sandaled feet, up cold golden raiment, past tart painted cheeks to the lapis lazuli eyes.

Athena looked back at her. Athena leapt.

Inside Jenny’s head, inside so small an architecture, there was no more room for Jenny-With-Grease- Beneath-Her-Fingernails. Jenny fled.

Soma saw the mechanic, the woman who’d been so kind to his car, fall to her knees, blood gushing from her