Getting Real

The massive white guy scowled at Pablo from two of the coldest, nastiest gray eyes ever. The LEDs in the ceiling lights gleamed off the dude’s shaved head. “So—you’re awake, huh?” he rumbled in a voice like boulders crashing together.

If this was real, Pablo wanted Real. Oh, man, he really wanted Real. He wished that sweet-talking avatar would show up so he could forget all about this. Hey, it could happen, even in jail. The cops wished they could stop avatars. Wishing didn’t do them any good, either.

And Pablo still had to answer the mountain of toned meat. “No, man,” he said, “but I figure I’ll wake up pretty soon, you know?”

“Huh?” The white guy blinked. Pablo hadn’t been a hundred percent sure he could—snakes never did. Then he decided it was funny. His laugh sounded like kettledrums. “Comedian, are you?”

Right. And then you wake up, Pablo thought. But that was the trouble. Pablo had woken up. What a bringdown. He reminded himself he needed to answer again. “Sure, man. Me and the dragon.”

He threw it out at random. Besides, the dragon was dead, and this dude hadn’t got Real with him anyway. With that carcass, the white guy looked more likely to be into something like HGH 3.0 than avatars and everything that went with them. The more fool him. That redhead ... Remembering her made you want to forget all the genuine local girls.

You couldn’t always tell by looks. The hard-muscled white guy proved that. When the fingers on his right hand twisted a particular way, Pablo damn near fell over. “Dude!” he said. “You got some? You got some here? How’d you do that?”

“Talent, man,” the other guy answered smugly. He turned out to have it stashed in the waistband of his jeans. It wasn’t the kind of shit mechanical bloodhounds could find, the way they sniffed out crank or Superoxy or coke nuevo. Pablo happily pressed a little cardboardy square to his temple. Even more happily, he forgot real and got Real.

* * * *

The only way the jailer could have been more bored would have been to die day before yesterday. He stopped in front of the holding tank. “Ramirez, Pablo!” he sang out. “Come forward for your hearing.”

Nobody came forward. One of the men in the cell pointed to a guy who was lying there not looking at anything under this sun. “I think that is him,” the prisoner said in a singsong Indian accent.

Ramirez wasn’t the only one who’d ridden the express away from the material world, either. The bastard who looked like an murderball frontman was down for the count, too.

“Well, fuck me.” The jailer wasn’t bored any more—he was pissed off instead. “How’d they get the shit? Where’d it come from?”

Nobody said a word. The conscious assholes in the holding tank all radiated ignorance and innocence. As far as they were concerned, the mothers who’d got Real must’ve picked up their shit a mile beyond the moon. The jailer swore in weary resignation. Maybe the surveillance video would show something.

“You sorry suckers,” the jailer told the conscious prisoners. “It could be you next time.”

He knew that was a mistake as soon as he said it. Too late, of course. You always realized shit like that too late. None of the losers in the cell let out a peep, even now. But every goddamn one of them looked like he wanted it to be him next time.

Pounding the crap out of Catalina and the other Channel Islands should have been a piece of cake. After all, the islands were within artillery range of the American mainland. By rights, even cruise missiles should have been overkill. Manned fighters should have been ridiculously over the top.

“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” Major Dmitri Gomez muttered as he climbed into the cockpit of his F-27 at Edwards Air Force base, up in the high-desert country north of L.A. Things had a way of going wrong when the United States tangled with China. If that weren’t true, the damned Chinese wouldn’t hold the Channel Islands in the first place. Their casinos in Avalon wouldn’t be draining trillions of dollars out of an American economy that couldn’t begin to afford it. Vampires, that’s what they were, sucking what little was left of the USA’s blood right on out of it.

As for getting Real ... Major Gomez muttered to himself. He hoped the armorers and techs who serviced the Strike Peregrine didn’t waste their off-duty time with little squares of brightly colored cardboardy stuff. He hoped, yeah, but he wouldn’t have bet more than a grand on it. And you couldn’t buy a cup of coffee for a thousand bucks.

One of the noncoms on the ground gave him a thumbs-up. Gomez returned the gesture from the cockpit. Hagopian was a good guy. The Air Force needed more like him. What it needed and what it had were two different critters.