Nanowhere | Page 4

backroar of the engines, deep with round tones and a slight Minnesota lilt, curiously pointing out the Mass Pike to one of his squadmates. I-90 ran east-west across Massachusetts, dipped south a bit in the middle before it headed into Boston. The ex-Minnesotan was on Straff's left, so they must be just north of the Pike, heading west. Nothing but cold Atlantic east. If the pilot kept a fairly straight heading they'd cross into New York south of the capital toward the Catskill's.
Straff caught all of this in the space of a few seconds. As soon as the trooper started speaking, he stopped, having seen another of his team give him a finger drawn across the throat.
This left another few hundred seconds for Dr. Straff to blindly think over his fate. The black fabric bag rubbed his nose and ears. The gunship's engines threw off a steady high-throttled chainsaw whine with an accompanying fuselage-vibrating rumble, and his ears hurt trying to listen for distinguishable sounds out of the dense storm of noise.

#

The noetic surgeon stepped back from his scope, rubbing the arched pink grooves in the skin around his eyes. "Nicely healed, sir. She's ready to go."
Dr. Greenleigh looked up from the whitepaper his tech staff had worked up for the procedure. He pocketed his reading glasses. "Enough in place to get into her memory flow?"
"Yes, sir."
The mechs embedded in June Trimony's brain were next-gen neural retiforms, far more intrusive and real-driving than gCognitivs, SoulYoke stabs or the deeper versions of these developed in the military's labs.
"How long before her body rejects them?"
The surgeon's lips curled in to hide his mouth behind a stiff doughy line. His lips popped out after a pause. "I'd guess a month."
The Chairman of the Rost Institute tilted his head a little, not quite smiling, not much of a guesser. "That long?"
"Guessing, but keeping it cautious, sir. There are physiologicals to consider, but I'll stand by a month," he said, nodding.
"And after rejection?"
"They won't come out easy. Probably kill her."
Greenleigh straightened, pausing half a second over the question of how much sympathy he needed to show, and nodded at his surgeon without showing anything that looked sympathetic. "Very well. Keep her on nutrition. I need her healthy."
"Yes, Dr. Greenleigh."
The chairman studied the surgeon a moment, and then showed all of his teeth in a broad grin. "Well done, Mitch. I'm off to pick up an old friend at the landing. Let me know when Miss Trimony wakes."

#

Kaffia Lang jumped the curb at 30 k's, ground the handrail against the earth's gravity in a sideways scoot, and dropped three feet into a concrete plain at the edge of the North Hampton skate park.
She swung her backpack around, charcoal black against smooth brown skin and a flare of tight neon green clothing. She lowered it to the ground as she rolled up to another skater, Alexander Shoaler, a tall red head her own age, fifteen.
Plywood ramps and half pipes ringed the central concrete basin like bygone-era shipyard scraps. The park was clean, walled with sixty-foot pines, and set back twenty meters off Atlantic Avenue, prime real estate that the owner had been obliged to give up in some cloudy property tax exchange deal with the New Hampshire town.
A single lane dirt track ran alongside the laser-leveled concrete pad, weed-choked and pot-holed. It headed into the forest, lost in overgrowth thirty meters beyond the padlocked gate.
The forest was haunted. Everyone knew that, but the tax deal apparently included a do-not-bother-the-skaters clause, and so as long as you stayed this side of the gate you weren't likely to run into any of the rumored specters, alleged oversized arachnids, poisonous fog or any of the other blood-drinking, mind-emptying, acidic-saliva-spitting denizens of the wood.
Kaffia didn't notice the haunted forest. She smiled at Alex because she felt their world blaze into existence and expand around them, widening to encompass the real world, but with special properties like the ability to tune out the real world while they were together. When her parents sighed, "Off in your own little world, Kaffia?" she would say, "Actually, it's quite large, as large as I want it to be."
The private world she shared with Alex always appeared when they met. They'd been friends about a year but it felt like five times that, and they'd taken it so far, that for fun and the delight of annoying others, they pretended to be married. That was the act they usually put on while in their world, a comfortably married couple with loud staged greetings and grotesquely sweet nicknames. It threw everyone around them into uncomfortable amusement or sickness, sometimes both.
Alex waved off another boarder, turned to Kaffia, puckering up.
"Lips," she said shortly in mock reproach, followed his lip-scrunching expression, but turned her head at just the right