gormon

The fog of the early morning was an anaesthetic, covering up my slight hangover and my much deeper exhaustion under a heavy blanket of white. Staying up all night and sleeping all day- it might sound romantic, but it messes you up, particularly when something gets in the way and you don't get to sleep. If I wanted to be in Boston for noon, I had to leave good and early, and the only way to do that was to ride with a convoy. They left every morning from the truck lot on St. John, bringing Boston the riches of our port- which didn't amount to much on a good day. On this occasion there were only three trucks, idling in the fog like grumbling monsters. There were also two crashcars with two firewalkers each, one car in front of us and one behind. They came up every single morning and drove back with the convoy, making sure the zoners and the highwaymen didn't get what was ours. They sat in their crashcars as silent as statues, ready for anything that happened. I kept my head down so they wouldn't see me, hoping to avoid being recognized by any of my former comrades. If they did see me they paid no attention, which shouldn't really have surprised me much. I was no one to them; just a coward, a "chucker" in the language of the trade. I'd seen my client die and I had survived. If we'd had anything like hara-kiri I'd have been expected to perform it, but you couldn't get out of it so easily. You just had to live with the shame and that was that.

I walked over to the rear truck and climbed in the back, nestling in between some boxes of cologne from Europe. The flowery stench of the boxes was overpowering, but not strong enough to cover up the fish smell. The trucks would haul anything and everything; it was luck of the draw.

You didn't have to pay anything to hitch a ride with the convoys, but you didn't get a seat either if the trucks were full. If there was any room it was always in the last truck, and the big sliding door was left open for hitchers until it was time to go. I made the spot I had chosen as secure as possible, wedging myself and the boxes against the wall so it was less likely anything would collapse on me. Then I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

I couldn't see anything of our journey because there were no windows, but I knew exactly what was out there so it didn't matter. The Wall ran south along the highway to Greater Boston, passing beside the Northern Sprawl between the barbed wire and the sea. Everything between the Peninsula and Greater Boston was inhabited; every inch of ground was paved and built on. Apartment buildings and strip malls and shapeless factories, lights gleaming and gray concrete and the ad stream flickering.

What used to be called Portsmouth was still fairly prosperous, as it was close enough to the real city to do a brisk enough trade. The Peninsula had never rebuilt from the Culture Wars, but that's only because it was barely in Greater Boston anyway. The closer you got to the city itself, the more wealth you saw, until you ended up under the shadow of the skyscrapers and found that they practically rained down money from above.

Now that the Celestial Empire was the dominant superpower, anything and everything Asian was de rigeur, even if your only access to the culture was old chop sockey movies and Japanese cartoons. But there were always people running afoul of the Emperor, so Chinatown had swelled and expanded with the influx of exiles, to the point where it now sprawled over the city like a giant octopus, its tentacles reaching down back alleys and up thoroughfares far from Kneeland Street. Chinese cartels like United Bamboo and the 14k, the Big Circle and Hung Men all had powerful branches in Greater Boston, competing with local cartels like SanFan and XanderCo. The Chinese cartels in town had all once been Triad gangs, but the world had moved on from that point and they were as legitimate as any other company. It certainly wasn't considered disreputable to carry a gun for them, any more than it was for SanFan or anyone else.

As we rolled along the highway I could practically see it- the increasingly terrifying size of the buildings, the steadily growing density of life, the disappearance of the sun. We were rolling down out of the hinterland into the heart of the world, or at least this little corner of the world. Where we were going there weren't any zoners, the buildings weren't scarred up with bullet holes, and the neuralnet and all of its riches weren't just a rumor of someone else's prosperity.

We were returning to civilization.

The trucks shuddered to a halt just north of the City, the hyper-dense glass and concrete beehive at the heart of it all. The sliding door slid open, and I found myself looking through the windshield of a crashcar at the faces of two silent firewalkers. They saw my hat and my coat; they knew what I was. But they didn't even smirk or glare at me. I might as well have been a box of cologne.

I hopped out and moved away from them as quickly as I could, walking across the parking lot and toward the train station nearby. The cityscape of Boston loomed above me like an angry god, and I suddenly felt a pain in my chest when I saw all the lights. Building after building and each trying to outdo the other, their edges sharp and angular to funnel bad chi at their enemy companies. Greater Boston was home to ten million people, and at least seven million of them lived and worked within twenty miles of here. I stared up at the cityscape as I walked to the station, knowing that another twenty minutes from now would see me swallowed up inside it.

Three or four circuitheads were lounging around the platform, linked up and listening to their impossible music. It sounded like white noise to the uninitiated, a high sonic whine with horrific distortion and what sounded like robots barking. These particular circuitheads were with the Cold Faction, a nihilistic crew of extortionists and kidnappers. Their primary interest was in destruction for its own sake; money was secondary. They were staring off into nothing from behind their dataglasses, riding the neuralnet to pass the time. They were all dressed impeccably in pinstripe suits, with identical gray fedoras or slicked-back hair. They didn't even notice me as I walked by.

The red train was just pulling in as I got on to the platform, and I stepped in through the doors without pausing and looked for a seat. There weren't any seats, of course. This was Boston. Low-rent salarymen shared space with street preachers, trying to talk loud enough to be heard amid the bustle and the chaos. Exhausted, bitter stock workers stared off into the darkness, and hustlers schemed and slipped wallets out of coats while perverts pinched and jostled.

I looked out the window into the tunnel, wondering if the rumors were true and there were people who actually lived down there. What a furtive and rat-like existence that would be. I didn't see anything in the tunnel except for concrete and steel, and it wasn't long before we were out in the light again, amid the neon and the noise. Faces blurred by like streaks of oil paint. I was actually in Boston again, but it didn't feel real. It felt like I was only visiting the place in a dream.

The doors of the train came open and closed, and people got on and off and I stood and watched. When the sign on the wall said Harvard Square, I slipped out the door.

It felt as if I was a ghost returning to earth, wandering around his old haunts and not being seen. Harvard Square was as familiar to me as any place could be, every brick and pebble in it, and yet I might as well be on another planet. Kelly and I used to get bubble tea and cold noodles in that place on the corner, laughing at the shared jokes we had, but I couldn't remember even one of them. I had been in a gunfight in the Square itself, defending a SanFan sales manager from an ambush during the Tritian War. That little booth was where I used to get my coffee.

A warm wind rose suddenly and with it the smell of burning paper. There was no point in brooding. I shook my head to clear my thoughts, then looked up into the sky. There was nothing but a sliver of gray and the glow of the adstream, though none of the images could be seen clearly from this angle. Had the buildings always been so immense? Floor after floor after floor of lights and glass, botguns and neon signs and huge bulletproof windows. I laughed at myself for my reaction and that calmed me down. I'd been away so long I had become provincial.

Looking down at the sidewalk to steady myself, I went in search of the Osake Lounge.