As great as it is to have people submit work here, and as great as it is to see them get a wider readership as a result, what really pleases me is to see how people are getting on with their larger projects. Essays and posts are great of course, but it’s seeing people working on novels and films and full on Capital P projects that excites me.
So I’m thrilled to share with you all today an excerpt from
‘s novel in progress. An intriguing taste of what promises to be an excellent work, as I’m sure you’ll agree.Enjoy.
TJB.
This is an excerpt from a novel in progress, though it’s possible it’s just a bit of backstory I wrote that will never make it into the final cut. Set in the semi-near future largely in Boston, the novel presents a semi-cyberpunk version of the city, except instead of everything being cool it’s all pretty awful, actually. It has three narrators, plus a fourth third-person omniscient voice that intrudes from time to time. In this section, one of the narrators, Cid, tells the man interviewing him how he first met Terrah, one of the other narrators.
Just Drive
It was just a job. Jobs, I guess, would be more accurate. I’d been out of it for a while, the service. Whatever you call it these days. I was out of the killing business, is what I’m getting at. Just driving a cab in Boston, trying to keep ahead of the zillion other people trying to do the same thing.
I had a good thing going, though. Being a ‘borg has its benefits. People trust a driver that looks like a robot, for some reason. More than they would, I think, if I looked like a jarhead vet. It’s weird, because I know objectively I can also look pretty terrifying. All metal and menace, Eden used to say, though my face-screen helps soften that up a bit. Krysis said I looked like a Transformer.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Taxicab. Not even a fancy flying one, just the usual. Old school, like me. That’s another advantage I had, for a certain kind of customer. The military driving experience, too. You want to get from Back Bay to Roslindale in 15? No problem. I mean you might leave your stomach in the backseat, but I had affordances for that. Plus I can’t smell anymore, so I’ve got that going for me.
Upshot is, word got around, I had a network of people who’d call me directly besides street-side pickups, et cet. It was a good gig.
One night I picked up this woman. She had a look I recognized, like she was jumping into my cab to escape some immediate danger, and like she was used to that state of affairs. She didn’t hop in and slam the door yelling “go go go” or anything like that. She was slick about it. But I could tell as soon as she closed the door that it was time to pull away fast.
“Longwood,” she said. “I’ll tell you the street when we’re closer.”
I gave my usual metallic thumbs-up, a gesture I’ve found puts people at ease. Then she spoke again.
“Can you lose a tail?”
I’ll be honest with you: I don’t remember exactly who the tail was, how I lost it, what she was running from, that first time. I don’t even remember, frankly, if she told me. I just took care of it, and by the time we knew each other better, it didn’t seem important. The important bit was that we got to the Longwood area, tailless, and she told me where to pull over. I figured she’d pop out, pay me on the run, and keep moving. But instead she paused. I scoped the rearview, and saw something I didn’t expect. Fear.
You might think it’s strange I didn’t expect it. After all, I’d just screeched that car from the Port to Longwood in the space of about five minutes. There’d probably been a few near-misses back there. And she was being followed. Fear—followed by relief they survived the trip—is an expression I’m used to seeing in my cab. Something about her, though. Right from the beginning, she had that look, like somebody who’s not afraid of anything.
She was now, though. Afraid.
“Can you be back here in ten minutes?” she said, her eyes on the warehouse outside her window, scanning. I must have given her my equivalent of a strange look. “I’ll pay you,” she clarified.
“Yeah, I can do that. Or I can wait here.” I didn’t like the odds I saw playing over her face. I knew she wanted me out of sight for as long as she needed to do whatever fell errand she had in there, but it felt all wrong.
”Or you could just not go in there,” I added.
Her eyes shot to me then, narrowed, deep brown, the fear gone or buried. “Mind your business, ‘borg.”
“Yes’m,” I said, turning forward and gripping the wheel.
Yeah, I was concerned for her, even then. I don’t know why. Sometimes you just meet somebody and you know, you know? I clearly wasn’t going to stop whatever her mission was, though. Sometimes you just gotta let the fare go in there and get shot.
She got out of the car slowly, looking around, her posture and bearing and caution not military, but nearly—familiar in that way. She ran one hand over her close-cropped hair, black on the sides, bleached to pale yellow on top. The other patted down her left hip, where she was probably keeping whatever she was here to deliver.
She took one more deliberate, shoulder-squaring breath, and then she moved.
I knew that breath. I hoped I’d see her again. I took one more look toward her, then pulled off, not too fast this time, staying inconspicuous. I turned as soon as I was able, and slid into mid-day, mid-town traffic.
I’d gotten a couple stealth upgrades when I first got the cab. Not sure why. Guess I was paranoid, wanted to have it just in case. (Of what? Back then I didn’t think about it too hard.) I didn’t have full-blend or anything like that, but I had the refractor paint so I could change colors with a button-touch. Pretty slick. Didn’t hide your plate, but if someone was looking from a distance and wondered if that was the same cab they just saw, say, ten minutes ago, then the cab being blue instead of yellow probably would cover me. I made the change right after I turned the next corner into an alley, nobody behind me, then sped out the other end quick as I could.
Out on the Riverway I melded with the scenery, the tick-tock flash of cars weaving through the three lanes, alive with malice and rush and not seeing me at all. Friendly sideswipes nobody notices anymore since all Boston cars got side bumpers and driving became an even more competitive sport than it was back in the day when they sort of fixed the potholes sometimes. Nudges and love taps. Sliding around the curves like hovercraft, schooling like fish, a breathing collective metal organism snaking through concrete. I made a game of it: could I set the traffic’s pace, lead the charge, be the head of this dragon? How much could I slide in and among, around, how fast, could I make them all follow me?
I took five minutes to sink into the blur, to be one with it. Nothing did so much to calm me.
I took a sharp left out of my reverie and started to loop back toward the building where I’d left her, hoping, almost praying now. Not for the fare; don’t imagine it’s like that. I wanted to know that she was okay. For all the people I’d lost in my day, I’d never lost a passenger.
I screeched up to the curb where I’d left her, just in time to see her pelting out of the building, carrying a small case. Wait no: a cooler. I saw her jerk back for a microsecond, not recognizing the car, but then she saw me and hauled the back door open again.
This time she said it: “Go, go, go, go!”
I went.
There’s a breathlessness to speed, a silence I cherish. In the thick of danger, silence is the only balm. It takes every ounce of concentration to be at top speed, to escape, and to stay safe doing it. There’s a peace in that. The cab roared at the edge of its engine’s capacity. My mind buzzed quietly. The woman in my back seat looked behind us, breathed hard, but said nothing.
We floated in lightning suspension for a minute or two.
At last, she turned forward, slumping down into the seat. Glancing at the rearview I saw her eyes squeeze shut, her chest rise and fall as she worked to calm herself down. I looked back at the road in time to swerve around an ill-advised pedestrian and keep going.
“Where to?” She kept her eyes closed, breathing slower now.
“Cambridge,” she said. “The Gee.”
“You got it.” I had been speeding in the absolute opposite direction, down into old JP, but I whipped around as soon as the winding weirdness of the roads down there gave me a chance, and sped back toward the river wall.
I have a memory, though I don’t know if it’s really a memory or just a photo I saw. I just know it’s a vivid image in my mind: the Charles, flowing along a sunlit bank, young men seated single-file in a long boat, rowing strong in formation as a man at the front yelled. Great trees along the side of the road, their leaves rustling. It can’t have been a picture if there were leaves rustling, men rowing.
The Charles River isn’t visible now, of course, just the long high canal, deep and dark behind stone walls they built when the storms came. The walls aren’t really walls but tunnels, concrete enclosures for the old Storrow and Memorial Drives. The old Harvard brick along the Cambridge side stands steadfast, protected, but there’s no more crew team. Hasn’t been, not for at least—
“Turn here,” the woman barked, and I shot the cab down a side street and behind one of those beautiful buildings, the crumbling brick and the brown ivy pulling it down.
“This isn’t the way,” I said.
“Don’t worry about your fare, Megaman,” she said.
If I could have grinned, I would have.
I settled for zipping through the side streets, brick flashing past, too fast to see the places they’d put barbed wire on top. Then we were out, and the Gee was looming ahead.
“Where?” I shot back as we got closer. Wasn’t like the Gee was just one place; you could walk around it for hours. It was as good as saying “Drop me off at the Smithsonian,” or “Just take me as far as Central Park.”
“West,” she said. “Old entrance, Vassar Street.”
“Got it.” I buzzed down into the Broadway tunnel, aimed for MIT. I popped out at street level right next to the old train tracks, the rage warehouse, ireproof, that they’d never taken down. Turns out Metropolitan Storage Warehouse was futureproof, too.
When they first built the Stata Center at MIT back in the turn of the century, it was a joke all over town. It looked like a cartoon building, a Tim Burton movie. Christopher Alexander would’ve shat himself. The front of it, the original entrance, should have housed Willy Wonka’s damn chocolate factory, except nothing so delightful could possibly be happening inside. MIT sued Frank Gehry, that architectural megalomaniac, three years after it was completed, because mold was growing in the weird acute angles, ice was building up and falling on people’s heads from crooked roofs.
What. Architectural history, it’s like, a hobby.
Anyway, so naturally this monster had to form the basis for the MIT Arcology. I swear, Boston can’t get its head out of its own ass long enough to recognize that some things do not warrant historical preservation. But it’s tradition, and if there’s one thing Boston has held onto over the years, it’s that. You can’t spit anywhere in the greater area without hitting something protected by arcane laws 200 years old. Remember, this is the city that kept a gigantic eyesore Citgo sign for a century because it was “historic.”
So when the new corps wanted to build an arcology around MIT and the whole east Kendall area by Lechmere, it wasn’t as if they could just knock down all the old biotech blocks and warehouses and start from scratch. The preservation people have it on lockdown around here, no matter how much money you’re throwing around. So that’s how it went: the main entrance to the arcology was the original Gehry building, its wild angles finally stabilized by other architecture that actually made a lick of sense (and kept it from leaking at last). I don’t know what they did to the rest of the building, but then again, I don’t really care. It was a nightmare.
These days we just call it the Gee, and it’s even more of a monstrosity than it was before they enclosed the entire East Cambridge area in an ecopark. I don’t know what the hell goes on in there, but it seems to be for rich people in the tech industry.
“So what’s at the Gee?” I asked, thinking to make some conversation. I’ve never been great at making conversation.
Just my luck, she wasn’t, either. It was something I’d grow to like about her.
“Listen ‘borg,” she said.
“I don’t appreciate that slur.” She rolled her eyes. Fair enough.
“What do you prefer? Bot? Tin man? Optimus?”
She had a million of ‘em, as I’d learn.
“It’s Cid, actually,” I said, a little haughtily. “And it’s cool. You don’t have to tell me. I’m just the driver. I get it. We all do what we have to, out here.”
She shot her eyes to the rearview as if to say something back, but then seemed to realize I wasn’t being sarcastic, and sighed and looked toward the side, where the Gee was looming closer. The massive, reflective glass structure almost disappeared in the white-gray of the sky, but it still shadowed the whole rest of the neighborhood. Guess they didn’t figure that building an ecologically sound, totally enclosed neighborhood would mean the trees they planted in the sidewalk back in the teens would die from lack of sunlight. Well, that and the air quality.
“Alright then, Cid,” she said after a few seconds. “You seem like a good enough guy, and you’re quick, so I’ll let you in on a little secret.”
“I don’t like secrets. They have this annoying tendency to make people try and kill me.”
She actually cracked a smile. “No shit, right? Alright, no secrets. Just pull up here, I gotta go in and deliver this. Weird scientist shit I did not ask for, but you wouldn’t believe the money.”
“I think I could be brought to the faith,” I said. I pulled over in front of the bank of glass doors, glinting in a line beneath the crooked teeth of the Gehry’s eaves. “Keep the meter going?”
She paused a second, looking behind us again. Nothing. “Yeah, same as before, okay? Pick me up around the corner.”
“Red this time,” I said.
“Okay. Thanks.” She opened the door, then hesitated, looking up into the rearview again. I waited.
“I’m Terrah,” she said, and hustled out.
I can see why you would want to stay on your fiction. Because it's good.
Intriguing taste of adventure to come.