Rood | Page 3

to bargain, didn't realize that they
represented a value proposition to the corp. The contractors were even
worse; living in a fantasy world from contract to contract, constantly
scrabbling for the next job. When Fed got his chance he'd come into the
market with a strong chip - big school cred - and would bargain like
hell for his employment agreement. He didn't want the constant worry
of freelance. Instead he'd make a secure deal and keep his head down,
hide under the waves of uniformed clueless and let the freelancers

make their noise. He'd worked it out a while ago, after Tony had
disappeared, and now he just had to get into a good school to make it a
reality. That's where Tony had screwed up; for some reason he couldn't
take it at MIT, and as a result he'd kissed his one good chance at
happiness goodbye.
His Mom wore a uniform, Fed considered idly, and claimed to like how
it looked.
Just as the train was pulling in Fed's goggles pulsed a link from one of
his bots showing a new post about Greener Pastures' animal sex pics.
Fed sighed and deleted the spam. The stuff was self-mutating now; a
bot somewhere had obviously sniffed his query and modified it. The
shit was making the net all but unusable these days, and only Fed's
aggressive filtering kept his inbox from getting glutted. He killed off
the rest of the bots in case they'd been caught too and joined the mob
stepping out into the ionized air surrounding the maglev depot. He
liked the train; despite being unwilling to pay the per-use fees for its
network access. Those same fees had almost killed it as a form of
public access, especially since wireless access was free on buses and
subways, but it also made it cheap and not quite so full of advertising,
which was why Fed liked it.
The train pulled past him as he hobbled behind the crowd. It was cold
in the old station, microclimates funneling a sharp wind from the
high-rises over Africatown and out towards the suburbs. Fed shoved his
hands into the pockets of his jeans and looked for a shwag vendor. Sure
enough there was one in the far corner of the station. He wandered over
to it, his legs making the old familiar hiss-shuffle as their hydraulics
softened his steps. They'd need more oil soon, he reminded himself.
Better models were available, and lots of people got amputated for the
replacements alone, but Fed held on to his old hospital-issue legs as a
sign that he wasn't a mod. He hadn't hacked off his legs to get a better
jump shot, or faster sprint, or flashy chromium LED-studded cat-toes.
Fed hadn't had a choice, and mods weren't his thing. Apparently they
*were* Tony's thing, he reminded himself, afterimages of hasty in-shop
comm photos of toeless feet and coral-stud horns lingering in his mind.

Fed had always talked shit about bodmod, about how he was going to
go whole-hog one day and get roo'd. Fed snorted at the thought, his
hips aching as they warmed up to his normal rolling gait. He'd been
born without legs below his knees, a "genetic anomaly." Some folks got
webbed toes, Fed had got no legs. Tony used to say there was an equal
exchange, that Fed had been given better brains instead. It was stupid,
but his liked to think about it sometimes, usually when he was plugged
in pulling overtime on coursework, trying to get an edge on upping his
Prog-SAT scores.
As he came up to the vendor he fished around in his bag and pulled out
a dirty slug of gelatinous plastic, transparent and light blue. The thing
was about the size of his thumb and had been injection-molded into the
shape of a Japanese-designed bug-eyed alien. It looked like it was
wearing a Jewish kippah, an imprint over the back of its head circled in
curdled plastic. It had originally been meant to fit over the end of a
tablet's stylus for kids, but now it had a John Doe fingerprint sealed on
the back of its head. It was kind of old - the print had been pulled out of
a vulnerable U.S. marriage certificate database over a week ago - but
Fed was pretty confident it would still work. He'd traded it for a quick
hack he'd put together for a kid at school, a modified version of the
program he'd used once to loop his image on the video conference, and
was glad to get to use it before it aged out.
He stuck the back of the alien's head on the scanner and punched a
selection on the touch screen. The vendor's sides flashed, the
telephone-box sized thing's