Cybernation

“What did you do, Alex?”

“Me? I didn’t do anything. I never saw that before.”

She grinned and picked up the package. Shook it.

“What’s it for?”

“You’ve forgotten what today’s date is?”

“January 15th, isn’t it?”

“Toni.”

She grinned wider. “And they say women are romantic. No, I haven’t forgotten. It’s the day you bought the Miata.”

“And…?”

“Isn’t that all?”

“You’re scum.”

She laughed. “Our first date, first kiss, and the first time you were able to admit what I had known for a long time before that. You didn’t need to buy me anything.”

“No, I didn’t need to, I wanted to. Go on, open it.”

She did, ripping the paper off with abandon.

“Wow. Where did you find this?”

“You like it?”

“You’re an idiot. Of course I like it.”

“It’s a first generation,” he said. “A collector’s item.”

She turned the old VHS videotape box in her hands, and he smiled at her happiness.

The tape was an introduction to Pukulan Pentjak Silat Serak, techniques from djuru one, as taught by Maha Guru Stevan Plinck. There was a web address and a picture.

According to what Michaels had learned, the vid had been shot in a borrowed kung fu school in Longview, Washington, ten or eleven years ago, the first one of a series, about the time Americans started realizing there were such things as Indonesian martial arts. Toni had another tape by Plinck, an intro to Bukti Negara shot a couple of years earlier, also in the old VHS format. The serak tapes were harder to find, since they were self-marketed by Plinck in the backs of martial arts magazines, and from a single web page on the net. Most of the commercial producers had gone to DVD or super SQD formats years ago, and the old magnetic tapes were harder and harder to come by. The instructional video consisted of Plinck, who looked to be in his early forties, lecturing on laws and principles of serak, then demonstrating them on various students, along with the students punching, kicking and bouncing each other off the floor and walls. The players all wore T-shirts, sweatpants, and sarongs, most of them men, a couple of women. One of the women was even smaller than Toni.

From his web research, Michaels had found that Plinck, a former Special Forces soldier, was one of the senior students of Paul de Thouars, a Dutch-Indonesian who, with his brothers Maurice, Willem, and Victor, had been among the first to bring the nasty and violent Javanese martial arts to the west. Probably the brothers all knew Toni’s teacher, the old lady Toni just called “Guru.”

Toni could slaughter most men with what she knew, size notwithstanding.

She hugged him. “Thank you, sweetie. This is terrific.”

He smiled. Since Toni had been teaching him — he was up to djuru eight of eighteen — he had gotten more than a little interested in the art’s history in the U.S. One of the brothers — the youngest one, Victor — had apparently written some books on serak, and Michaels had a web search going to find those for Toni’s birthday.

“Okay, sit right there, I’ll be right back.”

“Going to slip into something more comfortable?”

“No, goat-boy. I’m going to get your present. You really thought I forgot, didn’t you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Liar.”

He smiled, and she was back in less than a minute. “I had this hidden at the bottom of the spare Huggies pack. I knew you’d never find it there.”

“Hey, come on! I change diapers all the time!”

“Here.” She handed him a rectangular wooden box, hinged on one side, about the size and shape of a small hardback book.

He undid the brass latch and opened it.

“Whoa!”

Inside, nestled into recesses carved out for them, were two small knives. They were kerambits, all steel, no handle scales, a quarter-inch thick, each with a short, sickle- shaped blade on one end, and a finger ring on the other. The edges were smoothed and scalloped with fancy filework. Toni had a pair — he’d used them once, against a drugged-to-the-gills psycho who’d wanted to kill him — and these looked almost identical, a little fancier with the filework. He took them out and without thinking, automatically slipped his index fingers through the rings, holding them in a reverse grip with the points curved forward and extending from the little finger edges of his hands. He regularly practiced his forms with her knives, so they felt comfortable.

“I couldn’t find the knife maker who did Guru’s,” she said, excited for him. “But there’s this guy down in Baton Rouge, name of Shiva Ki, who specializes in custom-made stuff for martial artists, an old warrior himself. I sent him a picture and a tracing of mine, and he made these. They are nickel Damascus, almost like traditional kerises, too. I figured you should have your own.”

He put the knives back into their case, and hugged her. “Thank you. They are beautiful.”

“So maybe now I’ll go slip into something more comfortable,” she said.

“Yeah, hurry, before the monster child from hell wakes up.”

Toni left, and Michaels leaned back on the couch and looked at the little kerambits. He wondered what normal couples gave each other for anniversaries. Surely not a tape of how to stomp attackers into hamburger, or a pair of custom knives designed to fillet muggers? He laughed. What you got when you fell in love with a serious martial artist who converted you.

“What are you laughing at in there?”

“Nothing. Hurry up, I miss you.”

Already his day was a thousand percent better.

5

On the Bon Chance

Chance strolled through the casino, listening to the background sounds: the rumble of conversation from people playing cards, the musical tones of slot machines, the big, old-style roulette wheel with its clattering marble. Yeah, you could gamble on the web, do virtual games that looked and felt almost perfect, but there was always going to be a market for the high-end experience. Anybody could plug in and go on the web for VR; that didn’t get you bragging rights:

“So, how was your weekend?”

“Pretty good. Went to the Caribbean, played a little blackjack.”

“Yeah? What program?”

“Nah, man, no program — real world.”

Except for the staff, none of the gamblers here had a clue as to what this ship’s main purpose was. Oh, sure, there was money to be made, and it did that, a handsome profit every month that got plowed back into the cause.

What went on below the casino and cabins, in the electronic heart of the vessel, that was the important thing.

This was one of the three main mobile loci for CyberNation. From here and from the other mobile and