JT checked over his drones, tightening cabling and reloading spent magazines. Everyone was watching him in a long, uncomfortable silence because there was nothing else to do. Except Austin apparently decided every silence was made better by the sound of his voice filling it, so he started to talk. JT almost told him to shut the hell up, but for once Austin was saying something JT wanted to hear.
“Roan found the blue unicorn when we were kids. She wouldn’t let me touch it. She said only a virgin could touch a unicorn, and I wasn’t a virgin. That was bullshit, because everyone knows blowjobs don’t count. But I never did touch it.”
Austin took one of the empty curved plastic magazines and began to slot AP rounds into it. It was a make-up gesture. JT wasn’t sure if he wanted to make up, but getting any work out of Austin was rare enough, so let the elf load ammo if that’s what he wanted.
“A couple years later there was a disease outbreak in our settlement, so Grandfather Henry—he wasn’t our grandfather, but he taught us and looked after us, so we called him that—Grandfather Henry led a hunting party . . . and they killed it and took its horn for medicine.
“Roan, she was . . . Well, she didn’t understand. She and Grandfather argued, and Roan said she was leaving. She wouldn’t study under him anymore, not if magic meant killing something like that. I think it broke Grandfather’s heart, her saying that.
“I went with her, not because I thought she was right or Grandfather was wrong, but because I couldn’t leave her, so I went with her. We ended up in Seattle. And we . . . we got some money . . . and we found a guy who’d . . . she got the surgery done . . . cortical implants. I always thought . . .”
It wasn’t often JT heard Austin stumble when he talked. Had they ever actually talked about Roan after she’d died?
Austin snapped bullets into his magazine, all his attention on it, like there was no one else there. “I always thought she didn’t get the implants so she could jack the net. She got them so she couldn’t work magic anymore.”
JT looked for Victor the Wizard, expecting some response from him. Horror? Disgust? Pity? But Victor wasn’t even there. He was just coming out of the dingy restroom and hadn’t heard any of it. Probably for the best.
Austin laid his magazine down as JT finished his second. “So there you go: The Blue Unicorn Story.”
Back on I-80. This time Buzz rode the middle and Victor was at the passenger window. Austin was in the truck bed lounging amid the recharged, reloaded drones. JT was perfectly fine to have him back there and not in the cab. Outside, endless pine and fir trees blurred past as they drove higher into the Sierra Nevadas. JT kept working his jaw to pop his ears, and he kept ducking his head to look up through the windshield at the sky.
“You nervous?” Buzz said.
“Fuck yeah, I’m nervous. You would be too if you knew what was good for you.” He couldn’t get as good a look at the sky as he wanted. “Fuck this. Heads-up, Austin,” he said through an exterior speaker, and then didn’t really give Austin enough time to do anything before the four aerial drones unfolded like metal flowers and took to the air. They dispersed a few hundred meters in cardinal directions, then started a slow orbit around the truck.
JT’s mind slipped into three-hundred-sixty-degree vision as if he’d been born to see the world that way. He sighed, relieved, now able to watch everywhere at once. He’d leave the drones out there the rest of the drive to Tahoe; their batteries would last that long at least.
Buzz watched the drones fly off. “Feel better?”
“Maybe. You gonna tell me what happened in there?” JT hadn’t meant the question to sound as sharp as it had. Victor made a point of turning farther away from them, a show of offering privacy where there was none.
—I was there, Buzz sent through the truck’s net.
—I couldn’t feel you there.
—It had overloaded your input channels. It took me a moment to realize what it was doing, but once I figured it out—
—Why would it do that?
—Lashing out at whatever came near it? I don’t know. Maybe because it spent the last month imprisoned and poked at by gangsters?
—I want to see it again.
—That’s not safe.
—I have to see her again.
Once it had been Roan always next to him in cyberspace. The way Austin and Grayson had each other’s back out in the physical, JT and Roan had been like that too. Early on in their relationship when Bell Anderson had still been coordinating things and they’d flopped in some mansion with an owner gone on holiday, Roan had found JT sprawled out on the couch deep in the net, and she’d asked, “What are you doing?”
Hoping to embarrass her, he said, “Looking at porn.”
But of course it didn’t. “What kind of porn?”
“My kind of porn.”
“You mean guys?”
He opened his eyes and looked at her slyly. “I’m not telling.”
“Let me see.”
“Uh-uh. You wouldn’t like it anyway.”
“I like watching guys getting it on with each other.”
“Why? They’re not interested in you.”
“They would be if they met me.” Now she was teasing him.
He laughed. “I’ve met you. I’m still not interested.”
“Yeah, well my brother keeps cockblocking me.”
JT blushed so furiously it hurt.
“I’m joking, JT.”
Well yes, he’d known that, but it made him blush more. “Fine, you wanna look, come on.”
She shoved him over to make room for herself on the couch, and he shared the files with her, and they closed their eyes together.
She said, “These are cars.”
JT shrugged. He rotated the 3-D images in his head. He flipped through engineering schematics. He reviewed energy transfer efficiency ratios on transmissions. They were all muscle cars, mostly—Corvettes, Chargers, Mustangs—but some exotic performance cars too. He lingered over a 2048 McLaren. It had been Roan’s glamour that had gently turned his mind toward the vintage models. What it was about cars, JT never understood. The lines of their bodies, angles, and curves; the way the paint reflected and absorbed the light; the contrast of glass and plastic—JT could never explain to anyone, not even himself, why cars got him hard, but they did. More than once, unthinking, he’d reach out to touch whatever he was looking at, but they were just images and there was nothing to touch.
Roan didn’t say anything. JT felt more and more embarrassed, like Roan was watching him jack off.
“Austin teases me about it,” he said. “You can too if you want. I don’t mind.”
“Yes, you do. And Austin’s an asshole most of the time.”
“Let me show you something.” Suddenly excited and confident, he had shown her the design for his truck, the beginning fantasies of the one he drove now. He gave her the grand tour of it, and she asked him to show her its computer, so he created a virtual machine in their shared space.
“May I?” she said when she saw something she thought was off, and he said yes with that hesitant thrill you feel when you finally find someone with whom you can share what you’ve always wanted to share, but are still terrified they might break it or laugh.
She didn’t break it, of course. And she didn’t laugh. They worked on his dream side by side for a while, like two friends playing “Heart and Soul” on an old upright piano.
“When someone finally whacks me, I want to come back as a car.”
“I don’t think it works that way. When I’m whacked, I want to come back as—”
Now what had she said? She hadn’t said unicorn; she’d said something else. What did it mean that he couldn’t remember the important things anymore? Was it just that he hadn’t known then to pay attention? Or did it mean that JT had been a shitty friend?
Now it was Buzz next to him in the electric gray nothing. The Blue Unicorn stood in the nondistance. Sometimes the ghost looked like Roan. Sometimes it looked like a pale-blue unicorn with a silver horn. There were always butterflies.
—Hello, JT sent to her.
—Who are you?
—Roan? It’s JT. He felt foolish, like a kid playing with a Ouija board.
—I should know you.
He shivered, like the same kid when the planchette moved to yes and everyone swore it wasn’t them that did it. —It’s JT, Roan.
—There’s something about you.
It was the same damn thing she’d said before. Some kind of loop. What had he hoped? That she’d be something more? Roan was dead.
To Buzz he sent, —Forget the glamour for now, what is it?
—I told you, an AI fragment.
—Roan wasn’t an AI.
—No, but somewhere there’s an AI that was created using Roan’s memories as seeds.
—You’re saying that someone stole her memories to make an AI? Someone stole her glamour? How is that even possible? The idea of it made him feel vaguely ill. Stealing Roan’s glamour seemed too much like stealing her soul.
—No one stole anything. She built this. Roan figured out how to code a glamour.
—Roan didn’t do AI research.
—Apparently she did. Her style is all over this code.
—You can fake coding style.
—I can, yes. But it’s not easy, JT. Authorship identification heuristics look for things you don’t think to fake: frequency of comments, how data type declarations are organized, frequency of capital letters in variable names, even line spacing. It’s the same kind of Bayesian analysis lit historians use to tell whether it was Octavia Butler or N.K. Jemisin who wrote some unsigned story. Roan’s style is all over this thing. And if you don’t believe that, then believe her glamour. Because you know that’s her glamour, JT.
Old thoughts arose, old scents, half-forgotten. Melancholy, that’s what the Blue Unicorn’s glamour was. That was Roan’s glamour: melancholy. Not like Austin’s glamour at all, all war-lust and fucking. Was that why JT had remembered that time he’d confessed his car fetish and she hadn’t laughed at him?
And other things JT remembered now: plastic trays on recycled plastic tables, no ham in the macaroni and cheese. Didn’t they know that orcs needed meat? Older orc kids spooning food for younger orcs, tusks not come in yet. Melancholy like the rows of adult orcs that had filed by, all in identical laboratory clothes, and nameless JT-1138 (they were all nameless then, only letters and numbers) had stopped eating. All of them stopped eating or talking, forks half raised, and turned to watch the adults in their line, wondering which of them might be Ma or Da, because just one single glance from any of those adults—any acknowledgment at all—would mean something to a six-year-old born and raised in a lab. But the adults wouldn’t look at them, not for nothing.
JT shook it off. It was Roan’s glamour. He couldn’t deny it.
Buzz sent, —Somewhere out there is an AI that Roan created out of her own memories and glamour. Hiding maybe. But two years ago, someone found out it existed, so they set you all up, and they killed her for it. That’s what me and Austin think.
—Fuck what Austin thinks.
—What about me, then? Fuck what Buzz thinks too? It may be hypothetical, but it’s not crazy, JT. Look at what the Electric Dragon has thrown at us, and that was just to recover that ghost. Imagine what they would do to actually get hold of an AI with a glamour?
The Blue Unicorn flickered between its forms. —Who is it you’re talking to? Is that Austin?
—No, it’s Buzz. Damn Austin. And now Buzz had caught Austin’s crazy too. JT was the only one left sane enough to see how much bullshit it all was. There was no fucking conspiracy, just one big fucking mistake.
—This entity Buzz does not fit your edges. Austin belongs there. Austin is what fits. That is how I know you. You are Austin’s edges.
If it kept asking for Austin, then fine, he’d give her Austin. —Austin’s here.
—What are you doing? Buzz sent. —JT, I don’t think that’s a good idea.
JT didn’t care. He flipped a camera so that half of the gray nothing became an image of the truck bed. Austin lay there dozing.
—Austin? The Blue Unicorn’s sending felt odd. The timbre was off. It echoed through the tiny cyberspace of the truck.
—It’s pushing at ports, Buzz sent. —I’m closing them. You shouldn’t have done that.
—Austin! the Blue Unicorn sent.
JT activated security protocols. —Shut her down, Buzz.
—I’m working on it. Goddamn it, you shouldn’t have done that!
—Austin! The wave of data slammed into him. Blue static. Blue lightning. Butterflies sparking digital. JT closed ports and shut down processes, anything he could do to stop her attack without stopping the truck and drones cold. It wasn’t enough.
—She’s transmitting.
—Transmitting what?
—Our location.
—Shut everything down. Everything! Suddenly JT couldn’t see. Suddenly he was shoved back into himself, eyes blinking, heart pounding, and he had no control over anything, not anything. The truck skewed, no longer following the road. He reached out to the system. It was dead. The tires growled on the gravel curb. The truck bounced crazily and caught air and dipped toward an embankment. Victor shouted. Pine trees rushed them at two hundred kilometers per hour.
And JT was back in. Just as fast as he’d been kicked out, he was back in and the truck’s wheels and the truck’s transmission were part of him again. They might as well have been his feet or his legs. He slowed and skipped over broken stones and pine needles and angled his way back toward the road. He didn’t slide on the gravel shoulder or fishtail. Smooth asphalt back under him, JT reconnected with a GPSat and refigured his course.
He opened his eyes and remembered to breathe. See? Nothing to it.
Buzz and Victor were staring at him wide-eyed. Austin was still deep in his elf-sleep in the truck bed.
“Should have warned you,” JT said.
“You think?”
“Did her transmission go through?”
“Did you crash your truck and kill us all? I’m not incompetent.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“No, actually, you didn’t.”
“Sorry.”
Buzz shook his head. “I’m starting to understand Austin a lot more.”
“Do you know who she was contacting?”
Buzz shook his head. “All nodes multicast,” meaning the Blue Unicorn was just trying to blast their location every-damn-where.
And for whatever reason, it had been the sight of Austin that had triggered it.
JT’s 360° panorama view: Lake Tahoe was its uncanny blue again. The druids had done that. On the other side of the blue: mountains. Pine and fir everywhere. There was a strong wind. White caps on the lake, white caps on mountaintops.
Through a camera looking back into the truck bed, he saw Austin staring off into the forest and the glimpses of a lake through the trees. Austin was talking to himself and waving his hand slowly like he was working out some muscle kink. The wind staticked up the microphone back there, and JT could barely pick out Austin’s words. “Down to two. If you think . . . go ahead go . . . where . . . meet us? Yeah, yeah, . . . can’t get lost.”
“Who are you talking to?” JT said through a speaker.
“You know that’s fucking rude, right?” Austin said to the air.
JT sulked and left him alone.
The entrance to the Crossed Pines Resort was marked by a small shack and a sign. JT slowed, but there was no one there in the shack. He kept on going. “Fuck, where are they?”
“They won’t come till I give the signal,” Buzz said.
“Not 3djinn. The Electric Dragon.”
“JT, I’ve been planting a lot of bad data as we’ve been going. There ain’t a cop or a government agent in Pacifica who could find us unless they actually saw us drive by. The Electric Dragon ain’t gonna find us either. We’ve made it.”
“We haven’t made it. Where the fuck are they?”
They drove another five K down a single-lane road that twisted through pine trees. Tucked amid the woods, the resort’s lodge house stood some thirty meters up a shallow incline from the lake’s rocky beach. It was a three-story log home layered with broad, terraced porches and blocked with large dark windows. Behind the house on top of a small, rocky outcropping partly hidden behind trees stood a circle of standing stones with a sacrificial altar slab in their center. A path connected the outcropping to the lodge house.
There were no other cars in the gravel lot—no people, no one down on the beach, and no one at the wide dock or its small fleet of sailboats. One kilometer out, JT’s eyes-in-the-air tracked only crows, probably the druids’ eyes watching them. No sign of any other people for kilometers around. The place looked mothballed even in June.
JT parked the truck in the lodge house’s gravel lot. Buzz disconnected the Blue Unicorn’s crystal data block and tucked it in his overshirt pocket, and they all piled out to the ground.
There was something eerie about this place, and it wasn’t just invisible druids. There was a quiet here that JT had felt only once or twice in his life, but he couldn’t place what was missing. Bird whistles, insect chirps, the splash of fish, those were all there. “There’s no network here,” he finally realized. Nearly everywhere in the world, JT heard the background hiss of the net, the hum of electricity in wires, or the sleek clicking of optical cables and switches. Here, there was barely any of that. There were no wireless towers.
“Nope,” Buzz said with a proud little smirk. “The only perfect security for a paranoid hacker is a place with no net. And the druids keep it that way.”
Buzz walked down the sidewalk that led past the enormous wooden deck of the lodge and stood near the docks. The wind tossed his hair around and tangled his overshirt around his waist. He had his hands buried in his pockets and was looking out over the water. Sailboats tethered to the dock swayed behind him and knocked against foam bumpers. Anyone would look dramatic and heroic standing with a backdrop like that. The sun burned Buzz’s hair rich copper, and the sight of it struck a chord in JT, deep and old like Roan’s glamour had touched him.
JT caught up to Buzz. “You shouldn’t be by yourself.” They walked together out onto the dock. JT’s clunky work boots thudded on the wooden planking. Water lapped at the dock’s pylons, and sailboats creaked. The air smelled of pine and water, cleaner than anything JT had ever smelled, even in the desert. “So where they gonna take you?”
Buzz shrugged. “Dunno. High Castle, probably.” He didn’t sound enthused.
High Castle was 3djinn’s net. JT hadn’t known it was also a real place. On impulse, he said, “You could come with me.”
“With you?”
“Back to Greentown. You’ll like it. It’s quiet there.”
“Quiet?” Buzz said like he didn’t know what the word meant.
“You need a place to hide out for a while. I’m just saying: my place is open. Or you could get an apartment if you decided to stay.”
Buzz gave him a funny look, like he was trying to figure JT out but couldn’t. “Thanks.” It wasn’t a yes.
Buzz took a small spray can out of his pocket and shook it. A mixing ball rattled inside it. “UV paint. Nontoxic, water soluble, druid approved.” He knelt on the dock and started painting what might have been the 3djinn logo of three crossed scimitars but turned out more like a wobbly asterisk. Or that’s the way it would have looked if the paint had been visible.
“What? So they shine a black light on it?”
Buzz pointed up to the sky. “Crows. Crows can see into the UV.”
“The druids are allied with 3djinn?”
“‘Ally’ is a strong word.”
One of the crows flying overhead changed course and flew south over the water. And who knew whether that had anything to do with the symbol Buzz had painted or whether it was just random bird behavior. That was probably the point.
They headed back for the truck. Austin was coming down the path to meet them. He had his bow and a handful of arrows in one hand and was striking a rock across their tips to transfer the rock’s power to the broadheads, charging them for his magic.
“You feel it too,” JT said.
Austin joined them. “Oh yeah. Something’s coming.”
Buzz looked around, but there wasn’t anything to see. “You got some elf sixth sense going?”
“Yeah, it’s called experience.”
“Guys, we made it,” Buzz said. “3djinn’s—”
Austin shushed him. He cocked his head like he heard something. He looked at JT. JT shook his head no, he saw nothing 360°.
They stood there, unmoving. Buzz tried to say something, but JT hissed him quiet again. A fish splashed beneath the dock.
Austin looked off into the trees to the west. He smiled an evil smile. “Really? You’re going to fight an elf in the woods? Well, that’s just goddamn stupid.” He glanced back to JT. “They’re coming in on foot.”
And finally JT saw them in the air. “And two Nightshrikes.”
The three of them sprinted up the walk toward JT’s truck.
“Keep her safe,” Austin said to JT, and with a glance to Buzz added, “Him too, I guess.” Then he veered off toward the woods, whispering spells, bow in one hand, six arrows in the other. A moment later, he was hidden from view behind trees, and JT slid to a stop across gravel, one arm out to stop Buzz too.
Near JT’s truck, Victor glided around like he was ballroom dancing or something, but what he was doing was tracing patterns in the gravel with his foot. There were circles and sigils drawn everywhere, and JT had stopped just short of crossing one of Victor’s lines.
Victor the Wizard saw them and froze in place with one foot extended, bathrobe and pajama pants flapping in the wind, and gave JT a crazy look, and it wasn’t just the mismatched eyes. “I’m sorry, JT. It’s nothing personal. But you have shitty taste in friends.” He glared at Buzz. “You betrayed me. It’s your fault my apartment was destroyed and my life ruined. And Austin shouldn’t have lied.”
JT dove for one of the sigils, hoping to break it, but Victor swept his foot and closed off his last diagram, and JT was too late. Sheets of yellow light flashed and rocketed around the air. The wind went wild. Lights strobed across the elaborate pattern as if they were bullets ricocheting off invisible walls.
Buzz ducked. JT scrambled away from the lights, not wanting to know what would happen if one of them touched him.
Victor shook his fists in the air. “You shouldn’t have lied to Victor the Transmuter!” Then the lights all vanished into the truck as if it were a black hole sucking in everything. Profound silence, not even birds.
And, just for a moment, JT thought Victor’s spell hadn’t worked. “What was that supposed to—”
Pop!—like a balloon bursting. Pain lanced through JT’s head, and his vision suddenly contracted to what he could see with his own two spot-filled eyes. He lost contact with his airborne drones. He lost contact with the truck. In a split second of pure panic, he rattled through a dozen protocols to access his truck, but none of them got any response. The truck was utterly dead and his communications hub with it. The airborne drones were out of range, as dead as his truck. “What have you done?”
“I turned all the gold in your truck into lead,” Victor the Transmuter said. “It never hurts to know a little science.”
JT roared. “You broke my truck!” His vision tunneled down to one scrawny wizard in a godsdamned bathrobe, and he charged. He would tear the fucker limb from limb. He would eat the wizard’s fucking heart while it was still fucking beating. He would—
A hand wave from Victor and the ground fell out from beneath JT. JT dropped jaw-snappingly hard into a pit that hadn’t been there a moment before, stunned senseless.