[Shadowrun 05] - Changeling Read online

  As far as that went, everyone Peter had met since he’d taken to the street was dead. Everyone except Fast Eddy. Street people seemed to have a habit of vanishing and never appearing again.

  He made his way out onto the snow-covered street, where he passed a few other pedestrians. Probably wage slaves who’d gone to sandwich shacks for lunch and were on their way back to their offices.

  Peter knew they paid too much money for their food. He’d seen the prices. And they paid simply for the convenience of someone else slicing the bread and spreading the soy paste for them. Even if Peter had had enough money for a sandwich at a Westside restaurant, he wouldn’t buy one. He’d go purchase the bread and the soy meat and the paste and make it himself. He could dine for days on the food.

  When he passed these wage slaves on the street, they looked away, pretending not to see him. He could tell because they worked so hard at it. They had to work at it because he was a huge, muscular, gray-green troll with large teeth and yellow eyes.

  Once they’d passed him by, Peter chuckled to himself at the strangeness of other people going to such lengths to ignore him. The change back to indifference had been slow. Immediately following the Night of Rage, which was the media’s tag for the wave of rioting that had begun in Seattle and spread to the rest of the world, people on the street used to regard him with fear. And then, slowly, the fear had shifted to an apparent total lack of awareness. If the metahumans couldn’t be killed off, then they just wouldn’t exist. Fine for the pure humans, drek for the metahumans. Peter had to live with nonexistence.

  He paused to look up and down the street for any sign of a patrol car. Nothing. He moved again. It was better to move when no cops were around.

  He’d be safer from them in another area. Somewhere like the Noose, which is what people had started calling the Loop ever since it went up in flames during the Night of Rage. Thousands of squatters had moved into the ruined buildings, and the city hadn’t lifted a finger to remove them. It looked like the local government was going to wait until all the real estate deals on the south side were in full swing before they turned to rebuilding the Loop.

  So the Noose was a great place to live if you didn’t have anywhere else to go and didn’t mind competing with the gangs for space and thought you could defend yourself against the ghouls that had moved into the Shattergraves, the four-square-block area destroyed when the IBM Tower had collapsed. But pickings were scarce in the Noose. Peter preferred to live where rich people were, because they could afford to waste, discard, or simply lose plenty of stuff for scavenging.

  That’s why Peter always had an eye out for the cops. Seeing a patrol car coming, he ducked into an alleyway. The street had taught him that it was smarter to stay put and try to act invisible rather than attract attention by running away. If he ran, they’d think he was guilty of something. If he didn’t run, they hardly ever suspected him of any wrongdoing. He didn’t get thrown in jail too much anymore, and when he did, he usually relished spending the night in a nice, warm cell. They chained him up, but that was all right. He never gave his name, and when they wanted to run a DNA ID check, Peter insisted he’d always been a troll and wasn’t a runaway. Invariably, they believed him. Nobody cared much what the trolls did, after all.

  Inside a cell he was safe from the pure human gangers who liked to hunt trolls to prove their coolness. On the street Peter wasn’t so afraid of the gangs. It was more a fear that a big group would catch him asleep some night, freaking Fast Eddy and leaving him dead.

  It was dark by the time he got back to the construction site they called home, which was good. The workers had left for the day, so he and Eddy were free to set up in a little alcove in the open basement. Down there they were safe from the cold and wind, and nobody could see their fire.

  Fast Eddy wasn’t in the alcove when Peter arrived. That meant his friend was either still scrounging for food or else was dead. Peter never knew which it would be.

  He took some wood from a pile he’d collected from an abandoned house a few weeks back, and dumped it into a large trash can. He lit the wood with some oil, and soon a lovely orange fire was burning. Deciding to wait until Eddy returned before cooking dinner, he put the meat aside. He sat down on the ground near the fire. The warmth spread over him, and for a moment he thought he was dreaming, back in his bed in his father’s house.

  The instant he thought of his father, a sad feeling overcame him and chased away the dream. Peter didn’t want to see him or speak to him, only just to know he was around. Like a totem. Something he could focus on and hold close to himself.

  Then he thought of his mother, and she was wonderful because he’d never known her. “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom,” he said over and over. By the fiftieth time he’d worn the word out. It had lost its meaning, was just a syllable, a dollop of sound.

  The scraping sound of a shoe against cement broke his reverie. Maybe it was Fast Eddy, maybe somebody else. He never knew.

  He jumped up and flattened himself against the wall of the alcove, his right hand tightened into a fist. Eddy had taught him how to fight since the night he’d saved his life. Now Peter even liked it. “Just remember what the cops did to you,” Eddy had said over and over.

  The sound of footsteps slowed, then there was only silence before Eddy appeared around the corner.

  “I… I… didn’t know if it was you. Was you, was you,” he said. “Got some got some some some meat.”

  Peter smiled proudly and raised his plastic bag high. “Me, too.”

  Eddy smiled when Peter smiled.

  Peter pulled out his meat scraps and pierced them on an antenna he’d snapped off a car. Peter had quickly learned that his heat-sensitive vision made cooking easy. Soon they were eating, contented to feel their bellies full.

  “Tell me a story,” Eddy said, chewing off a piece of fat. “Tell me your stuff.”

  Peter sometimes remembered bits and pieces of his education, and Eddy loved to hear about it. They weren’t really stories, but Eddy always called them that.

  Peter searched his mind to find something new to talk about.

  “Did I tell you about atoms?”

  “Nope,” Eddy always said nope. Peter knew that either Eddy was lying, or he always forgot, and so he wondered why he bothered to check with Eddy anymore. But he did, and Eddy always said nope.

  “You and I are made of atoms.”

  “Uh-huh,” Eddy said, nodding his head up and down.

  “Atoms are the things that make up everything.” Peter said, scooping up some snow from the ground to show Eddy. “Everything is made of atoms. But sot everything is made up of the same atoms. And atoms can be combined in different ways. So it’s the kind of atoms and the combinations that make a thing what it is.”

  He picked a bit of meat out from between his large teeth, placed it on his tongue, and swallowed it.

  “When atoms get together, they’re called molecules. You and me, we’re made of …” Peter got stuck. He forget what he and Eddy were made of.

  Eddy said, “Proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, lipids. Lip… Lip… Lipids.”

  “I thought you said I didn’t tell you about this?”

  Eddy shrugged expressively.

  Peter went on anyway. “But you and I are very different.” Eddy laughed, laughed like a little boy. “Right. We’re very different. And what makes us different are acids.” No, that was wrong. “Nucleic acids. Nucleic acids. Little molecules.” Or were they big molecules? “The same molecules in each of us. The same… the same four acids, but it’s how they’re arranged in us that makes us different.”

  Eddy laughed again, this time as if he’d heard a tall tale he couldn’t believe.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “How could four of anything make you and me and everyone else?”

  “No. No. There are four kinds of nucleic acids. I can’t remember what they are, but there are four kinds. But there are… billions of combinations,” he guessed. “Billions
. And how they are arranged is what we are. It’s like a pass code. If you have ‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘three,’ ‘four,’ and the pass code has fifteen slots, then you get to arrange the numbers in those slots. That’s the combination for that lock. You and me, we’ve got these billions of slots, and how our four acids are arranged, those are our combinations. That’s who we are.”

  Peter remembered that the doctor in the hospital had told him this, and was disappointed suddenly that he hadn’t remembered it from when he was a pure human.

  Eddy’s jaw was slightly open and he looked at Peter with amazement. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “You’re telling the truth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re so smart. Why aren’t you a teacher or something?”

  “I was going to be a teacher. I think. I might have been a teacher. But I became a troll instead.”

  “Oh. I was a thief.”

  “Yes.”

  They sat silently for a moment before resuming their meal. Then Eddy said, “I thought you said you were gonna cure yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “It’s going.”

  Eddy looked Peter up and down. “You don’t look much different.”

  They laughed.

  “I’m not working on it right now. I need research chips. I need to be able to read about the stuff. Biology.”

  “Oh.” Eddy looked at Peter, waiting for him to go on. “And…?”

  “And I don’t have them.”

  “When are you going to get them?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t able to get a job. How would I get the money to buy them?”

  “What about libraries? Don’t they have the chips?”

  “Yeah, but they cost money, too. My father told me that when the continent was the U.S.A., libraries were free. But now they cost money. Everything costs money.”

  “Why not steal steal steal them?”

  “I can’t steal them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Peter began firmly, then faltered. Why not? He’d stolen food. He’d stolen a winter coat (which someone had later stolen from him). Why not chips?

  There was something about chips, though. You don’t steal knowledge.

  “You don’t steal knowledge,” he said gravely, feeling a moral fortitude that he hadn’t experienced in some time.

  “Yeah, you do. If you know what’s worth stealing stealing stealing. You steal knowledge. Data.”

  “What?”

  “What do… do… do… you think is on the black market? Market. Data. That’s what you steal. In North America, America you steal steal steal data. Jewels is for babies.”

  “Oh. I don’t want to talk about it…”

  “You wouldn’t even have to do nothing tough. You don’t have to find the stuff. It’s there there there waiting for you. You just want chips, right?” Eddy didn’t wait for an answer. “Sure. This’d be simple. We could do this, Profezzur!”

  “What?”

  “We just hit a bookstore. For crying.” Eddy took a bite of food, looked around for a moment, swallowed, and then, as if he hadn’t interrupted himself, said, “Crying out. Loud.”

  “I don’t know, Eddy. I mean. You know. You’re pretty messed up.”

  Eddy looked away. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Pretty messed, messed up. But, you know, I could still do it. With you, I mean, I mean, you and me. We could.”

  He looked up at Peter, a hint of slyness in his eyes. Was Eddy scamming him? Had he planned this all along, waiting for the right moment to suggest that he and Peter enter the biz together.

  “You want those chips? Well? Do you want them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Okay. Okay. Tomorrow we’ll case case case out a bookstore.”

  “Case out a bookstore?”

  “Yeah. Unless you want to hit Northwestern or the U. of, U. of, U. of C.”

  The thought of knocking over a university appalled Peter. “No. I think a bookstore will be a good warm-up.”

  “Great. Great. Great.”

  They stood on a roof looking down and across the street onto Hirshfield’s Science Unlimited. The wind whipped the snow around them, Eddy, as usual, jerked spasmodically every so often, his shoulders twitching and his head snapping a few degrees to the right.

  “So, what do we do? How do you ‘case’ a place?”

  “We watch it. See when they lock up. Go inside and take take take what you need.”

  “That’s casing it?”

  “It’s only a bookstore, Profezzur. You want to hit Aztechnology, you have to put in a bit more more more work.”

  “We could have just walked by the door and read the hours on the display.”

  Eddy turned to Peter and gave him a fixed, annoyed stared.

  “O.K., O.K.,” Peter said placatingly. “I’m new to this. I’m sorry. I trust you.”

  Eddy shrugged his shoulders and looked back toward the bookstore, squinting slightly. His features took on the appearance of a rat waiting for a smaller rat to poke its nose out of a hole.

  An old man and a young woman were standing by a small plate at the front door of the store. The man tapped some buttons on the plate, and, one by one, steel slats slid down the tops of the windows and snapped into place.

  “This looks tough.”

  Eddy sighed, but continued to watch the man.

  “It does!” Peter whispered harshly.

  “Relax, relax, relax, relax, relax, relax, relax, relax, relax—” Peter gave Eddy a sharp knock on the shoulder. “Thanks,” his friend said after a moment. “All right. As soon as they’re gone, we’ll sneak around to the back.”

  Peter wondered again why the “casing” was such an important part of the process, but he was no expert on stealing and decided to let the matter drop.

  They went down the fire escape at the back of their lookout building, walked down to the corner, went around the block, crossed the street, and then headed into the alley behind the bookstore.

  The back door of Hirshfield’s was blanketed with a sheet of thick metal slats.

  “I suppose you’ll want me to rip the metal apart, or something,” Peter said wearily. “People will hear.”

  “Nothing, nothing so crude. Or so loud.” Eddy walked up to the door and leaned down to examine a plate with nine buttons on it, just like the one in the front. He began to press the buttons. Peter was certain he was making random guesses, that the area was about to be surrounded by cops called in by a silent alarm of some sort. “Most people use one combination for all locks,” Eddy said under his breath, “even though the corps that sell them the locks say they shouldn’t.”

  He stepped away from the plate and the slats began to rise. Peter looked down at him, his mouth agape. Eddy put his right hand up to his face and placed a finger under each eye. “Binoculars.” Peter peered into Eddy’s eyes. They looked real, yet Eddy had obviously gotten the combination while the man was locking up.

  “You never told me about them.”

  “Surprise is the thief’s greatest asset.”

  Eddy stepped up to the door and tried the handle.

  He turned it, but it was locked. “If you would?” He stepped back to let Peter into the doorway.

  Peter grabbed the handle and crushed it in his grip. Then he turned his wrist. The lock cracked in half, the handle snapped off.

  It was dark inside the store, the only light coming from the exit signs, which spilled onto the shelves.

  Peter thought the place looked like a treasure trove. The dim light glinted off thousands of plastic cases containing optical chips.

  “Let’s get get get inside.”

  Peter wandered in and Eddy pulled the door shut behind them. He grabbed a few chip cases off a shelf and jammed then under the door to keep it shut.

  “Hey,” said Peter, shocked.

  “What?”

  “Why are you ruining the chips?” />
  “What’s it it it matter?”

  Peter wasn’t certain he could explain the nearly mystical awe in which he held recorded information. “Well…” he began. Then he knew he couldn’t express mystical awe. So he said, “The chips. They’re valuable.”

  “And you’re about to steal them. What’s it matter if we just take them or we crush them?”

  “I’m going to use them!”

  A spasm shot down Eddy’s body from his head to his feet, then he flung his hands toward the base of the door and said, “I’m using these!”

  Peter’s big eyes blinked twice. “Never mind.” He realized he could be arguing with Eddy until long after the store opened the next morning.

  He strode down the aisle, looking for the biology section while Eddy went off toward the hardware section. Peter heard a crash, but decided to ignore it.

  It didn’t take long to find the chips he needed. It wasn’t everything he’d left home with, but it would be enough to let him recapture the basics of biology.

  He grabbed Hodgeson’s Correlative Neuroanatomy, Perkins’ Functional Neurology of Metahumans, Louer’s Chaos Theory and the Brain: A Critique. He stuffed his pockets with them. He was trying to find chips he’d already read, figuring that would be the best way to begin.

  Eddy appeared next to him carrying a case of portable computers in each arm.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You’re going to need a portable to read them, right?”

  He’d forgotten about that. “Yes. Yes I will.”

  “Well, one of these is for you.”

  “What are you doing with two cases?”

  “We’re robbing this place, aren’t we?”

  “We came in here to get my chips.”

  “No, you came in here to get your chips. I came in here to get enough stuff so I could eat well for a while.”

  “You’re not going to share the food with me?”

  “Sure I will. Will. Will. You helped me get the stuff, right?”

  “So this is robbing?”

  “This is it, kid. What do you think?”

  Peter looked around the dark empty store. There was something very comforting about the situation. Something right. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but all in all, it was a far cry from digging food out of garbage cans in cold back alleys.