Rood | Page 2

computers, Fed" his Mom said. "How about we just enjoy each
others' company?"
Fed's jawbone tightened, slowly recognizing the signs that Mom's
antidepressants were hitting the half-life wall and that another round of
emotional trauma was coming due. "Enjoying each other's company"
was practically a code word for months of repressed guilt and anxiety
sloshing heavily against the floodgates, held back by carefully-wrought
"producivity" subliminals at work and the crufty remains of his
mother's neuro-reuptake inhibitors. Fed flicked back the other cup of
his goggles and let the scattered light show flicker out and across their
faces, tiny glimmers of blue and red and green laser light pulsing softly
against their cheeks as it tried to resolve on a cornea, any cornea. He
keyed in a locking sequence and pocketed the chord, bending over the
soy patty to industrially cut it into easily-stackable bite-sized chunks.

"My muscleman loves this shit" Bark said "Gave me a total discount on
the ab work I was showing you." He followed this with a wink to Fed's
mom. Bark paid precious money to have his sedentary lifestyle
painstakingly smoothed away through an injected cocktails of
hormones and the electolytic equivelant of a battery charge, individual
muscle groups drugged and brainwashed into thinking they'd been
working very hard for weeks. As a result Bark's body had the look of
someone who worked out very regularly on only one muscle group at a
time. It probably also meant he could maintain an erection for hours, a
fact that was a sure selling point with Fed's mother. Fed didn't mind; a
well known side affect was an inability to ejaculate.
"You ought to come down to the shop sometime and take a look, Fed"
Bark said. "My muscleman, he kinda looks like you. Name's Tony."
Something inside Fed did a convulsive somersault around half a soy
patty.
"Tony?" asked Fed's Mom, wonderingly, "Tony Farkeren?"
"Yeah! Old Farker! You know him somehow?" said Bark, delighted in
a dull, dog-like way that he had managed to get everyone's attention.
"We know him" said Fed, steadily. He shoved the remains of his soy
patty into his mouth, his cheeks bulging, and went back to his code.

-----
It took two weeks for Fed to find the time and work up the courage to
see Tony. After he'd bailed from MIT Fed'd pretty much written him
off; he had never come back home, just emailed Fed's Mom that he was
done with MIT and was exploring better horizons. Fed knew they'd
spoken at least once afterwards, mostly because of the four six-packs of
Red Stripe strewn sticky and empty across the living-room floor one
Sunday afternoon, but never found out where Tony had ended up. After
bringing it up once with his Mom (and regretting it) he'd decided not to
think about it anymore - Tony'd never been around much anyway, and

this meant Fed could put the bottom bunk to good use by mounting his
database cluster of salvaged hardware somewhere that the danger of
overheating wasn't such an issue. A few months later Fed took down
one of Tony's old The Cure posters to make room for a sheaf of
printouts on new chording key combinations and realized he'd
cancelled his brother out of his life in exchange for more time focused
on coding. The ensuing twenty-four hour scripting binge had resulted
in a render-farm plugin he'd traded for a new rig out of midland China,
and Fed had never looked back. Until now.
The shuttle from his housing park was late as usual, and he ended up
stuck at the rail station with a half hour between trains. While he was
there he logged in on the local net and double-checked his mail,
spawning a couple newsbots to try to dig up anything new on Tony's
shop while he waited. Nothing interesting turned up - Greener Pastures
was just a regular tattoo / body-shop, pretty much like any other,
although the online pics showed some pretty flash stuff with muscle
therapies and bone implants. Made sense; Tony had been checked as
one of the top candidates in his class in the biosciences at MIT before
he'd bailed. And he'd always loved the bodmod scene even if he was
too clean-cut to be part of it. Now that he wasn't in school anymore it
figured that he'd get involved there.
The train pulled up and he got on, rolling his eyes inwardly at the solid
wall of low-level corporates lined up neat and tidy in their uniforms.
Interspersed between them like peacocks among pigions were the
contractors - flashy clothes and spiky hair and expensive corneal
replacements set in deep-set, sleep-deprived eyes. The difference, in
Fed's mind, was in the corporate contract. Most people that wore
uniforms didn't know how