• they/them

Variously known as NotE0157h7 and Zero_Democracy elsewhere.


Bunny looks at the round they'd found inside their tech vest, which they'd apparently been walking around with all week. Shaped a little differently than the notorious 5.56mm rounds that the domestic massacres had made everyone learn too much about, it rolls across the booth's table and clicks against Mori's glass. 5.56 probably would have wound up at the same place, though. They weren't that different. She raises the drink. The stamping on the rim lingers in their vision for a second.

539

94

Headstamp.

They remember that the numbers actually indicate the plant and year of manufacture, not the caliber and company like on American ammunition. Mori had told them that, as she had loaded one of those flat-sided magazines that were same color of orange as the molded seats in the booths of some fast food places. The odd mount that curved around and over her Kalashnikov from the side was topped with a sensor package, which looked like it was made out of the same cast metal and enamel paint as the microscopes in Bunny's high school lab class. That paired with the headset that Mori called an octopus, which, in turn, mated with the little metallic contacts in her temples. A multi-pronged headband of anodized aluminum and smart fabric, which maintained contact with the scales that shimmered like the little, iridescent freshwater fish in a certain light.

They had followed her lead, and opened a box of the ammo she had bought at a gun store displaying a menacing rack of very modern rifles. Remember to slap the bottom when you're done, she had said, STANAG magazines are finnicky. It struck Bunny as a ritual more than a practicality. Kissing a medallion of the patron saint of rifles.

Mori downs the last half-inch of her whiskey. The round keeps rolling in the absence of the glass, dropping into her other hand. She tucks it into one of the multifaceted, asymmetrical pockets of the tight, gusseted work overalls she favors when she isn't going for high-femme.

“You really don't think it's possible here, do you? Russia, Cuba, arguably China... All those other places, yes, but not here.”

Bunny looks into the brackish prism of their own nearly-depleted rum and Coke, the branding on the coaster almost visible through the obscurity. “The mass clarity of revolution? For now we see through a glass darkly; but then shall we see face to face?”

“I admit to not being a biblical scholar, but it's a mirror, no? Dimly.”

“Not in the Geneva Bible. I looked that up because of Philip K. Dick.” They down the sugary darkness. “I think this is America. There are people who go into the grinder, and there are people who turn the crank.”

She raises an eyebrow at that.

When she'd driven them out to teach them to shoot, a further into the glades so as to not disturb the rest of the informal trailer park, they had asked what the differences were. She had explained that there were some small divergences in how the calibers performed, but that didn't matter to them, and to not get shot by either. That her Kalashnikov was long-stroke, while the ArmaLite she had borrowed from someone for practice, probably Casey, was short-stroke.

One of the watermelons that she'd bought for the instructive trip out to nowhere had exploded in a cone of bright red.

There's a trio of shitty-looking guys with those spiky, backswept side-shaves that would look good on anyone but a straight guy in a muscle tee. Shithead Prime is even a bottle blond. They're swaying a little, obviously drunk already, and on some sort of bar crawl.

Bunny grins. “You lost? This is the fag bar.”

Shithead Prime takes a swing, wide and with too much wind-up, and misses as Bunny pivots to their side. The guy stumbles, and grabs at the pigtail cable running to the back of Bunny's neck. The plug pops out of its socket, and they feel the exoskeleton suit switch to basic motion-assist mode without the connection to their rig.

Bunny mule-kicks the side of his knee as hard as they can. The guy yelps and falls on his ass.

One of the two left standing looks like he's reaching for a holster built into his shirt. Mori moves around him, somewhere between a smooth dance floor maneuver, and a particularly nasty form of mixed martial art. His arm moves in a way it isn't supposed to.

Bunny gets the plug back in, feels the suit tighten up around them, and kneels down over Shithead Prime. They flex their hand, open their fist, and cock their arm straight back.

“Enough, boys.”

Mori discards her guy, who collapses onto the sidewalk and curls around his fucked-up shoulder. The augmented muscles in his arms twitch weirdly, distorting the faux-ballistic patterns on the branding of military fantasism. Some of the guys Mori sometimes hangs around would call it “moto bullshit.”

“You, too, dear.”

Bunny lets her pull them to a standing position, and relaxes their hand.

“Fucking hate group.” The crumpled pack of cowboy killers was empty. “I'd have stayed in the ACP if I wanted to do struggle sessions.”

Mori had held out a cigarette case, dented-up and stickered. Two girls with blue and pink hair, smirking and licking each other with forked tongues. Their eyes were an eerie, bright purple. Bunny could smell the strong, dark tobacco through the thin metal.

The taste of unfiltered handrolls felt weirdly nostaglic, a cousin of the pipes that some guys smoked back in Louisiana. Mori didn't ask why Bunny wouldn’t just quit group. She would have known better than anyone that Bunny's coverage of their medical needs was predicated on dreadful “wellness” measures – submitting to dietary programs, group therapy, personal behavior modification courses, any woo-woo bullshit to keep the actuarial algorithms designed by body fascists and demonic accountants happy.

Being a cyborg just meant having even more of your sense of self litigated, never mind financialized.

That hadn't been the first time they had met Mori. She had come into the lab. The joints in her arm and knee needed to be replaced, since deburring wouldn't do the job anymore, and the synthetic myomere of her semi-organic musculature was also at the end of its service life. Extensive military-specification prostheses wore out, and had to be serviced.

The big bio-robotics fabricator had loaded her in like an MRI machine, and expanded into a multifaceted precision device. It reminded Bunny of a hyper-mutated crossbreed of helium-cooled medical equipment, and those new CNC machines that could turn a block of aluminum into a motorcycle helmet or Roman statue without having to change the workpiece around.

Bunny had transferred to that lab because the previous project they were on had been shelved. The task of realizing skintight space suits made out their own synthetic muscle and reinforcing smart polymers, specially laminated to withstand vacuum, had been over. The concept had been fascinating, a new body that astronauts could slide into and synthesize with, instead of the clunky old EVA designs. It felt as if someone had given up on something, and the thought of working on cybernetics for cops had made them want to die, so this was the job they had taken.

They had watched the machines remove the ballistic panels of her arm and leg. The manipulators carefully flensed the worn-out flesh off the alloy and composite bones, replaced the joints, and started laying new myomere down. It was then, watching the slick, biomechanical muscles and neural netting being produced by the little nozzles and curing lasers, that they had the intrusive thought of snapping a sterile glove on and touching them.

She had glanced at them without moving her head, and they had looked away, pushing the thought out of their mind in case she could read it.

Mori is looking at them out of the side of her eye as she rests her head on the cloudy plexiglass of the bus window. The amber glow from the passing streetlights goes through the little space between the crystal-clear ruby spheres, and the hardware suspended inside them. Then, a sickly green from the cheap florescence of a gas station. A pale cousin to the wireframes of her heads-up display, which had something to do with not causing the feeling of night-blindness in synthetic visual input. Bunny had first seen it in the diagnostic screen while checking her systems. Then, when she had shown them the live feed by snapping something that looked like a deliberately-mutated sensorium tape deck into them, which ran a lead into one of the dorsal interfaces in the tough-looking polygons along her spine.

“You know, I would prefer to not have a gun pulled on me, as a general rule.”

They think of the slim, nonstick pistol Mori had showed them, which seemed less brutish than the big bricks of metal and space-age plastics that cops used. American cops, at least. They had asked if it was the gun James Bond used, and she had said no, because she wasn’t a cunt.

She had removed the magazine and looked at Bunny intently, then worked the slide to clear the chamber, a term Bunny hadn't known until they met her. They had taken the little slice of her reality, turning it over in their hands. Its size and texture made if feel illicit, a grade of something that someone like Bunny wasn’t supposed to encounter.

“Why? You don’t have one?”

“You know what I mean. I appreciate your spirit, but you do not pick your battles.” She watches them fan themselves with their baseball cap. “Fucking humidity. Makes you Americans crazy.”

Bunny opens the little phone icon icon in the corner of their vision, and then the rolodex in the menu that sprouts from it. They don’t really “find” Casey, since it’s hard to lose someone in a rolodex of a dozen numbers.

“You know who you remind me of?”

Mori had sat up in bed. Bunny had looked at her tattoos, the chess pieces and other little symbols on her fingers, the nautical stars on her shoulder and in the crook of her elbow. The only one from before the collapse was an abstract figure swinging a hammer into the cringing face of a Tsarist, trailing fading cartoon silhouettes, which had been a sort of unit patch within the soviet hardliners. The rest, she had gotten in Thailand, after, while seeking comradarie in what Bunny understood to have essentially been a mafia of ex-spetznaz guys and disaffected communist blat artists.

“You remind me of a sailor I knew.”

There had been a coastal facility in northeastern Russia, she explained, tasked with storing spent nuke sub cores and other forms of waste. Big concrete and steel cells in icy water, into which the hot waste was dumped. The mismanaged facility had gotten worse and worse, clicking with radiation at points, a ramshackle patchwork of surface-level fixes, until it had finally needed to be cleared, decontaminated, and overhauled. The Navy had jurisdiction, and the liquidators were sailors.

“He fell into the water. Down into that well. Black as a coal mine without power. He said it was cold, but at the same time, hot in an alien way that he didn't understand. He said it tasted like old coins. Like the smell of wiring about to burn. Even in that icy, liquid darkness.”

She had leaned over Bunny, and they almost seen themselves in the wells that contained the various sensors behind the ersatz irises.

“He had to shave skin off the soles of his feet, and his fingertips, with a razor blade. To decontaminate. When the news started reporting on those activists, Act Up, I believe they were called... he said he felt like them. Untouchable, consigned to a short, hard life. Wanting nothing but to be taken care of for his trouble, and getting only misery in return.”

She had lit up. The smoke formed a coil around her head.

They supposed she had a point, there.

“I was rather fond of him. Another thing he was afraid of others knowing about. That I had seen something secret.” She looked at the cherry intently, having a brief staring contest with the captive embers. “He was very afraid of exposing other people to himself.”

Bunny had wondered if this was before she had gone through what she called “some changes” in Eastern-Germany, which had briefly been a hotbed of nascent sex and gender medicine before the fall. After the refabrication, Bunny had done the short battery of diagnostic tests – poking her fingertips and toes with little instruments, and running something that looked like a miniaturized riding spur on a handle across the sole of her foot and palm of her hand. She hadn't blinked the entire time, but had told them that she had full sensation. Those irises were that same olive color as the enamel paint on some expensive, new-old scientific instrumentation, or Russian military optics. Bunny had felt like she was looking straight through them, like she was one of the big body scanners that showed internal augmentations.

They had occasionally wanted to ask what color her original eyes were, but that seemed rude, and at any rate, they had belonged to a very different person.

Casey is waiting for them at the last stop. She's reading a paperback, leaning against her poison-green muscle car, with its two air scoops and bifurcated grille that make it look like an evil TV robot from the '70s.

Bunny likes Casey, even if she's one of the women who drifts in and out of Mori's bed, along with the odd guy, although that's been rare in the time that Bunny has known Mori. Bunny has always understood that Mori isn't monogamous, and it's no small relief that she isn't. Nobody can be all things to someone. That doesn't take the edge off how confident everyone else is, though. How good they are at dressing, at eye makeup, at comfortably occupying a sense of self. That has always twisted some sort of knife deep in Bunny, something that made them feel like a ghost as they watch these attractive people come and go. While Casey, at the very least, would almost certainly be game to invite them to join in as well, they had always kept their distance.

Except for the one time. That had, of course, involved drinking.

Mori had been on the other side of the bar, impressing some of Casey's biker friends. They whistled as she whipped darts into the bullseye by closing her eyes, and using the brief after-image of her built-in targeting ware.

Casey had asked about the systema, formerly the process. 19-gauge, 26.5-gauge, syringe, lined up in the half-peeled wrappers. Vial of solution, produced in sterile conditions. Alcohol wipe. Inject air, draw, clear bubbles, swap sharps, administer. Be patient. The organic oils in hormone solutions are thick. Nothing that mates or penetrates touches anything but their respective counterparts. Aseptic.

“You're good at that.”

“It's just intramuscular. I work in a lab.”

“That's not what I mean.” She dropped the shot into the beer, and glanced at the scar from the one time Bunny had gotten an abscess, and had to lance it. “You don't have to bare your soul or anything, but you ever been tested-”

And, so, in their own clipped way, Bunny had explained San Francisco. About being a functional addict for years on end without anyone knowing, or at least without anyone mentioning it. About the combination of expertise, class, and access that allowed them to avoid exposure to the typical dangers as best they could. About feeling like every corner had a sniper watching other side of it, a counterintelligence agent hunting spies, something crawling out of the spaces between the stars to eat their nervous system, the dull buzzing in the back of their skull. About how having some sort of routine that wasn't a job was the only thing that took the edge off it. About feeling like they were trudging through wet, stinking blood and bad air every day, bearing witness to the immense mourning ritual.

“People don't usually admit to having shot up. At least, not without being made into some goddamned morality tale about it.”

“People don't admit to a lot of things.”

Casey marks her place and stands up. The big Dodge shifts on its suspension in the absence of her mass.

“Someone order car service?”

Mori leans in and bites her ear. “We should get you a little uniform and hat.”

“Hah! You should tip better.”

The wind rushing through the open windows feels good, like a cool shower after a long day. Casey rummages around in the console, and slaps an M-DAT cassette with a handwritten label into the IBM tablet mounted on the dashboard. She taps the screen with her fingernail and they all start singing along to mean, hopeful songs about making a world spit you back out after it chews you up, all the way home. Home, to the place they had built out of blood, sweat, tears, and whatever single-wides and Airstreams they could scrounge together over the last year. At first, Bunny had felt like it was a tactical error to concentrate so many queers and other social outcasts in one place, but they had quickly realized that people looking to prey on others want soft targets, and shy away from real danger. Bunny had always wondered what the interface between the squid and the unit on top of the AK looked like, in that electric green.

If a shitbird falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, did it really happen?

Mori pours herself into the couch, and starts looking through the DVT cassettes piled in the lower shelf of the coffee table made of slotted sheets of particleboard. “Anything new?”

Bunny looks at the American Communist Party sticker on the refrigerator door, which they had never bothered to scrape off. At the WTO protests, someone had said that the ACP is great, if you like writing open letters about why you're leaving it. Bunny had thought he was just being a bitchy anarchist at the time, but here they were, with Bunny playing the part of bitchy anarchist themselves.

The battery in the upper right-of their vision blinks red. It's down to 10%.

They plug the suit into the big power brick on the end of the long, orange extension cord, so they can move around the trailer while it charges, and retrieve a pair of glasses from the freezer compartment. Inexplicably, Mori prefers Tennessee whiskey to vodka and schnapps, which is waiting for them both in the cabinet above the fridge. Bunny has had some good schnapps, despite the foul, sugary imitations floating around America. Sometimes, they go to a specialty shop and buy it when they wonder what it would have been like to have been in the GDR, in that one moment that Mori was. It’s a nostalgia trip, but a relatively benign one. Benign, Mori will often note, as long as you don’t get too lost in the futures that were supposed to happen. It was an odd thing to say, for someone whose bedroom featured big a poster of cosmonauts and Cosmist iconography, driving and unifying humanity towards wheat fields on Mars, but everyone has their little patron saints.

The guys who worked on the oil derricks and chemical plants in Louisiana used to kiss the tips of their fingers and press them to the union stickers on their hardhats, before going to the jobs that paid hazard for a reason. If it had spared them immediate injury, it hadn’t saved them or anyone else from the cancer and the asthma. The invisible monsters inside everyone were all still waiting for them a decade or two, or three, down the line.

“Eisenstein.” Mori holds a cassette up.

“Want to put that on?”

“Perhaps a bit on the nose.” She grabs another one, and looks at the cover splashed with a lurid graffiti of oxygenated blood and heavily-stroked shinjitai. “What's this?”

BULLET GIRL

“Biopunk. Meat as a weapon.”

“Fuck him,” Mori had spat at the mention of the last chairman and/or president, depending on how you define things right before the fall. “Fuck him, fuck his revisionism, and fuck his Pizza Hut commercial. Fuck Louis Vuitton, too. And I'm Estonian, not Russian.”

“Whatever, Boris.” The rest of the bar had backed away from the guy as he kept going.

“Not Boris.” She had made a finger gun and screwed it into his forehead. “Morrigan, now.”

She decked the guy in one shot, when he made his move. A furious boxer's slug to the solar plexus, devoid of the tactical seriousness of something like MMA. She just fucked him up.

A little later, after Bunny had let her think she had pinned them to the bed, they had seen it. The low-profile grip of that pistol, as she started peeling both of their clothes off. The holster was clipped to the inside of the battered biker jacket.

“Ah.” She had looked a little embarrassed - an astonishingly-rare thing for her, in retrospect. “I should have asked you if that was a problem.”

Bunny had looked at the flag above the bed. Vertical stripes of pastel and bright blue, electric purple, and then pinks fading opposite.

“But not that? Aren't you know... worried? Someone could freak out.”

“Someone? Like you?”

She had just laughed, either at the idea that she could be threatened by them, or the idea that they'd be queasy about this sort of thing.

Mori had said that the flag was funny, because it was often mistaken for the bisexual one. She said that worked for her, anyway. Bunny had said that flying flags was for suckers. Mori said that it may be true for nations, but she didn't have a nation anymore, just being a transsexual.

They supposed she had a point, there.

Bunny wakes up as the second act concludes. The Yakuza guy with the bad dye job and eyebrow piercings stands, unable to move, finger on the trigger of his big revolver while he stares his target down. The “man” he's been chasing through the underworld peels the skin of a battered salaryman off. Slick with blood, her arm opens up into chitinous segments and produces a gun made of bone and tendons. The process has an eerie, feverish ripple over it, which Bunny knows was produced by putting a heat lamp over the camera's lens, a trick the director had learned from an old sentai show.

Mori is out cold. They slide out from under her lap, no easy task with the suit, and replace their thigh with a pillow.

Her Vostok watch with the little submarine on its face says it's late. Bunny had learned that meant Navy, that Vostoks were sort of the Soviet equivalent to the fussy dive watches that guys who want you to think they're operators buy. They had also learned that only officers were entitled to buy them.

Bunny had intensely researched Soviet military culture, economics, cybernetics. The structures of formerly-Soviet organized crime in Southeast Asia. The meanings of tattoos in Eastern-European undergrounds. All, Mori would say, “obsessively.” Any time she brought up a thread to pull on, Bunny learned as much as they could, which often meant ordering obscure books and academic papers related to the Cold War, as well as rifling microfiche archives at libraries. The hardest stuff to find wasn't spooky material about espionage and statecraft. That was all declassified with the dissolution of the tepid, reformist social democracy that had kept the receding union stumbling along through the mid-90s. It had been material on queer culture and transsexuality in the GDR, Eastern-Germany, from the late-80s to early-90s.

The little library exists under Bunny's bed, in a box labeled “TAX/INSURANCE INFO,” which had made them feel like a teenager hiding illicit porn. Occasionally, Bunny wondered if it would be better for Mori to find it, to catch them.

When they had asked Mori if the Vostok meant that she had been an officer in the Navy, she had said no, but she had beaten one in a card game.

Bunny takes the bottle, and wanders over to Mori's trailer. It's one of those smooth, shiny Airstreams, from before they started styling them like stealth bombers by making them dark, matte, and polygonal. Past the cable reel covered in books and gun-cleaning stuff, the wood-paneled kitchenette, the bulk-purchased syringes and color-coded needles. They pull the top drawer of her dresser open. It occurs to Bunny that the term “underwear drawer” is contextual, not strictly locational. In the voids of the foam, there's that pistol, which isn't a PPK like that cunt James Bond uses, edges a little shiny from being carried around. A box of rounds that look like a sawn-off version of what the rifles use. A box of .357 magnum that advertises proprietary serrated hollowpoints. The Ruger GP100, which someone had given Bunny out of concern for their safety at the height of homophobic violence over AIDS, and Mori had insisted on storing for them. A few assorted devices of indeterminate, but definitely specialized and tactical, function.

And the goggles, which are more appropriately referred to as an optical system. More of that old-but-advanced, metallic construction. Like the Kalashnikov's sensor and the octopus, it's slightly bulbous in some places, spider eyes full of mysterious apertures. Two units, made out of more of that heavy-feeling cast metal and attached to a geared binocular hinge, so they stay level with the eyes as they're adjusted for width with a big, knurled knob. Each half has three lenses, of distinctly different form and function, which channel into some sort of black box mechanism that blends them into the lenses in the molded eyepieces, like the viewer on an old handycam.

Bunny runs the battery cable to the side of the goggles, fits the fussy webbing onto their head, and wanders out to the docks at the edge of the swamp. This part of Florida has always reminded them of that stretch of Louisiana. Damp and hot, although less polluted than Cancer Alley, but for the seasonal floods of fertilizers that were mostly phosphate. Mostly phosphate, but something else nobody was sure of, that caused even more aggressive algae blooms. They stand on the old wood and look into the water, black in the moonlight, which still has things growing in it despite the indifference and relentless abuse.

They clear their vision by minimizing everything. Open the ratchet on the crane, and snap the goggles down. Moving that part automatically powers them up. The eye-tracking software in them moves a little reticle around, which would allow Bunny to operate the menus in the peripheral vision if they could read the blocky, monospaced Cyrillic. The Swamp is high-contrast green, a little blurry at the edges with motion, but sharper than people think of night vision as being. There's a jaggy red icon, not softened by the way game sprites are rendered on CRTs or in direct visual input, where the more pedestrian stuff would be in a consumer rig. A scoped Kalashnikov, abstracted and with compressed proportions in the style of the clear pictograms on warning labels, slashed out and with an alert under it.

ИНТЕРФЕЙС ВИНТОВКИ ОТКЛЮЧЕН

An amber ghost flits through the woods, which means it's warmer than ambient. It must be a deer. The green whites out for a second when they look up at the full moon, and then corrects for brightness.

They aim a finger gun across the water, thinking about the Ruger, which had been brand-new and probably pretty expensive when it had been given to them. A gift, from someone who worked in one of the first successful internet startups, and who had moved it from the silicon prairie to San Francisco to be close to more of his own kind. That's how he had thought of it, anyway. Bunny wonders if he's still up there, in that cavernous apartment, looking over the city. Maybe not. Maybe he's dead. Maybe he landed on the loaded chamber that Bunny had missed, when things were bad enough that even America's movie cowboys were going out ugly.

Not that it wasn't all still happening. It just got a little quieter. It's just background noise, now.

Bunny had never learned to use the gun. It was just another heavy thing, sitting under their bed.

They press the pad of their thumb to the knuckle of their extended index.

Bang.

The heel of their work boot catches on a gap between the planks as they lean down to grab the bottle, and they feel feel themselves pitching towards the water. Something grabs them before they tumble over the edge, and pulls them back.

“Sometimes, I forget how fucking weird you are.”

Mori lets go of the skeletal bar that links the suit's shoulder actuators. Bunny feels their face get hot, which she can see if she has her thermals switched on.

Bunny flips the goggles up, and they walk back together.

The first time they had both hooked up, Bunny had felt like they were both sweating the poison out. All the accumulated petrochemicals, and PCBs, the nauseating prophylactic anti-retrovirals, and paranoia. Those, and whatever Mori had clinging to her bones, deep in her system. Tallin, whatever parts of Russia, Berlin, an unnamed port city in Thailand. Bunny had felt the venom being strained out of their blood, dripping off their face along with the sweat and whatever else.

Most people were creeped out by the necessity of the suit for serious activity, but not Mori.

She had leaned over and lit their handroll off hers.

“Thanks for not being weird about it.” It would probably have sounded sarcastic, or at least a little sardonic, coming from anyone but her.

“About what?”

“Whatever.”

She had peeled the black wax off her lips, jaw, and neck. It had reminded Bunny of the refabrication, but Mori wasn't the one who had just been taken apart and put back together.

Mori releases the buckles on the shoulder straps, and flays open the big zippers on her thighs. “I'm going to bed.”

She walks towards the back of the single-wide. The stretch she does over her head makes them think of the reinforced fixtures that hold some of the high-strength musculature to her bones.

“You coming?”

Bunny realizes that they're still wearing the goggles, and their face gets hot again.

Does she have her thermals switched on?

“Yeah. Bed.”


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