Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [176]
“Soma Painter,” she said. “Your car is much better, though it has missed you terribly.”
The owner just looked at her glaze-eyed. The other one pulled himself back in through the window, a wild glee on his face. He rapped the helmet of the prone man and shouted, “Did you hear that? The unpredictable you prophesied! And it fell in our favor!”
Soma worried about his car’s suspension, not to mention the tires, when it slalomed through the legs of the last standing Commodore and bounced up the steeply cut steps of the Parthenon. He hadn’t had a direct hand in the subsystems design — by the time he’d begun to develop the cars, Athena was already beginning to take over a lot of the details. Not all of them, though; he couldn’t blame her for the guilt he felt over twisting his animal subjects into something like onboard components.
But the car made it onto the platform inside the outer set of columns, seemingly no worse for wear. The man next to him—Japheth, his name was Japheth and he was from Kentucky — jumped out of the car and ran to the vast, closed counterweighted bronze doors.
“It’s because of the crosses. We’re in an emergency vehicle according to their protocols.” That was the mechanic, Jenny, sitting in the front seat and trying to staunch a nosebleed with a greasy rag. “I can hear the Governor,” she said.
Soma could hear Japheth raging and cursing. He stretched the Owl out along the back seat and climbed out of the car. Japheth was pounding on the doors in futility, beating his fists bloody, spinning, spitting. He caught sight of Soma.
“These weren’t here before!” he said, pointing to two silver columns that angled up from the platform’s floor, ending in flanges on the doors themselves. “The doors aren’t locked, they’re just sealed by these fucking cylinders!” Japheth was shaking. “Caw!” he cried. “Caw!”
“What’s he trying to do?” asked the woman in the car.
Soma brushed his fingers against his temple, trying to remember.
“I think he’s trying to remake Tennessee,” he said.
The weight of a thousand cars on her skull, the hoofbeats of a thousand horses throbbing inside her eyes, Jenny was incapable of making any rational decision. So, irrationally, she left the car. She stumbled over to the base of one of the silver columns. When she tried to catch herself on it, her hand slid off.
“Oil,” she said. “These are just hydraulic cylinders.” She looked around the metal sheeting where the cylinder disappeared into the platform, saw the access plate. She pulled a screwdriver from her belt and used it to remove the plate.
The owner was whispering to his car, but the crazy man had come over to her. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, but she meant it only in the largest sense. Immediately, she was thrusting her wrists into the access plate, playing the licenses and government bonds at her wrists under a spray of light, murmuring a quick apology to the machinery. Then she opened a long vertical cut down as much of the length of the hydraulic hose as she could with her utility blade.
Fluid exploded out of the hole, coating Jenny in the slick, dirty green stuff. The cylinders collapsed.
The man next to Jenny looked at her. He turned and looked at Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley and at Soma’s car.
“We must have had a pretty bad plan,” he said, then rushed over to pull the helmeted figure from the backseat.
breached come home all you commodores come home cancel emergency designation on identified vehicle and downcycle now jump in jump in jump in
Jenny could not help Soma and his friend drag their burden through the doors of the temple, but she staggered through the doors. She had only seen Athena in tiny parts, in the mannequin shrines that contained tiny fractions of the Governor.
Here was