The Body Scout: A Novel Read online

  I was trapped under the jagged mound for hours. It felt like years. I couldn’t see anything. Could barely breathe. And I couldn’t get out. My arm was pinned down by steel and concrete in the dark. My own body keeping me trapped. When I screamed, dirt rained down my throat.

  I cried out for my parents. They weren’t around to cry back. Their bedroom had completely caved in. Everything inside, everyone, crushed. Eaten by the dirt.

  All I could think about was trying to escape my own body. How my own flesh was killing me, pinning me there. How I’d never let myself be that helpless again.

  Eventually rescue workers dug me out, but my right arm was mangled. Deep scars snaked around my arm, trenches through the muscle down to the bone. The surgeons snapped off three of the fingers as easily as dead twigs on a broken branch. They left the rest of the limb in place. Not that there was much I could do with it anymore.

  The city tried to find a relative for me to live with. There weren’t any around. When they threated to put me in the Rikers group home, Zunz’s family took me in. Gave me a bunk in JJ’s room, said I could stay there until I graduated high school.

  I was angry and depressed for a long time. Could barely sleep. But Zunz kept me sane. He distracted me with video games and shows. This was when he really got me into baseball. We used disposable phones to trade the latest Topps player sims, trying to build the full rosters of our favorite teams. We’d project them on the table and battle each other for imaginary pennants.

  I had a hard time being underground, so when we got older Zunz and I would go lounge around Reunion Square with the skate rats or sneak into bars to watch the games on holofeeds.

  Whenever the air quality was good enough, we’d run to the park with our gloves, bats, and balls. I couldn’t do much with my injured arm. But I was desperate to get out of the ground and into the open park where my claustrophobia would fade into the fields. I loved running through the wet grass to catch that arcing white ball. Loved drinking sodas on the damp benches and yelling at the tourists. Days passed that way. Summers. Years.

  There was a whole group of us who played together out there. Friends of Zunz’s who became friends of mine. Big Clarice, Jamal, the Boyle brothers, Hot Pete, Ugly Pete, Aizat, Barack, Yamamoto the Motor, Bug Eye, and Okafor.

  It’s a cliché to say the New York you grew up in is the last real New York. People have been saying the city’s dying for two hundred years. Still, I think we really did live in the last New York. At least the last where all kinds of people mingled together, breathing the same air without filter masks or lung grafts.

  Prospect Park is now a theme park, and the burrows have all been repurposed for the rich, rebranded as meditation caves and upscale nostalgia hotels. All the green of the city has wilted in the yellow smog. The island shrank as the waters rose. But back then, we could smell the grass, hide from the police in the trees, and whack leather balls until the sun dipped behind the scrapers and the whole sky shone red as blood.

  5

  THE HARD MORNING

  All these years later, and I’d still wake up in the middle of the night at the sound of any rumble—washing machine, a neighbor moving furniture, the muffled rattle of a supraway line—panicked the ground was tumbling down on me. That there had been an earthquake or a targeted nuke and I’d been buried alive. Again. I still couldn’t sleep with any blankets on me, not even a sheet. I needed to wake up without the feeling of weight on my skin.

  The day after Zunz died, I woke to that sensation. Trapped. Hidden under miles of dirt, rocks, and detritus. I opened my eyes, gasping, unable to move. There was a sound boring down on me. Drilling right toward my skull.

  I looked around, realized where I was. My apartment. Tenth floor. My screen was ringing.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Kobo, can you tell me the number one quality we look for in a Future League Baseball scout?”

  I yawned. Offered, “Knowledge of the game?”

  “Very funny. You hear me laughing. Ha ha.” Steinbrenner paused. “I’m not laughing. That was an imitation laugh. Mockery. An insult.”

  “I understood, sir.”

  “Discretion, Kobo. Discretion is the number one trait we look for. Prudence. Discipline.” Steinbrenner had a repetitive way of talking. Like he couldn’t remember what he’d said one second before.

  “That was my next guess.”

  “We’ve been very fair to you. We’ve kept you on although you haven’t brought us a top prospect in years. The last in the pipeline is Maxine Frisch. She’s still in a Double-A lab doing centrifuge work. A scrub. Bench player. Mickey Mouse shit.”

  “Frisch has drive. Give her a chance.”

  “Then you lose Julia Arocha. To our historic rival no less. Our enemy. Our crosstown competitor.”

  “I’ll get Arocha back.” Steinbrenner’s words had slapped me awake. I needed my job badly enough that, for a moment, I forgot my brother had just been murdered. “Hook me up with an extraction team. Two or three scouts with field experience. We’ll fix this.”

  “No, you won’t. Your badge has been deactivated. You’re done. Kaput.”

  I looked at the palm of my left hand. The badge was a silicon chip the size of a grain of rice somewhere in my thumb pad. Was I supposed to dig it out? Or did it float uselessly in the muscle for the rest of my life?

  “Can you deposit my last check today at least? I need the money.”

  “A last check. Now that’s funny. A joke. Humorous. That we can laugh to. Haha. Hahaha. Ha. Goodbye.”

  I sat up, rubbed my temples. I felt like I’d been drained of muscle and bones, my skin stuffed instead with cotton. My brain couldn’t quite process the information much less its implications. I knew it was bad news, but it was a mere drop in the bucket that was overflowing with Zunz’s blood.

  In the kitchen, I got a glass of water. Poured some in the aquarium for the shock slugs. They were the latest zootech. Genetically manipulated gastropods that could short-circuit security systems. I tapped on the tank a couple times. The gray slugs didn’t respond.

  After a couple weeks, most zootech died. Dissolved into yellow gunk. It was programmed into their DNA. Planned obsolesce to send you back to the store. As a Yanks freelancer, I’d been able to get the zootech at wholesale. That was over now. Which meant these gray lumps were my last five.

  I needed to take my mind off things, but no matter how fast I clicked through the channels I kept catching flashes of Zunz. His body glitching. “A tragedy.” His mouth screaming. “A dark time for the sport.” His face disappearing in a mask of red. “A sad, sad day for the country.”

  So I decided I needed to put my mind back on things.

  The news wasn’t any use. The talking heads were tossing out every possible scenario. A terrorist attack by the SoCal separatists. An act of war from Russia or One China maybe. Or an unhinged zealot from the Edenists or Anti-Maxxer cults that considered upgrading oneself a mortal sin. They issued death threats to star players all the time. Yet there was no evidence, just speculation. So far, video analysis couldn’t detect any projectile. Everyone agreed that whatever it was had been slipped inside him or his clothes, then activated as the game began.

  I knew one person who might have an actual clue. Sergeant Silvia Emmanuel Okafor. Back in the day, they were the closest friend Zunz and I had at school. Now, Sil was my best contact at the police. Or the only one who’d still return my calls.

  On-screen, Okafor appeared in their office, arms crossed against the bulky out-of-the-box regulation frame. The police force was one of the only industries that encouraged cybernetic applicants. Easier to get insurance on metal than flesh.

  “You ass leech,” they said. “I’ve called you five times. Where the hell have you been? What the hell is wrong with this world? And how are you?”

  “Not taking it well, Sil.”

  I’d never planned on getting cybernetics, not until I realized the Cyber League was my only chance to play professional ba
ll. But Sil had wanted them. They’d never been that comfortable in the limited options of flesh. Always said they wanted to remake themselves from scratch. I remembered when they were a tall dark kid with gangly grace holding down third base. Okafor was the first person I’d ever kissed, the first who took off my clothes and slid onto me, our parts locking into position with an awkward thrill. But that was years ago. Decades. After skin grafts, replacement parts, and plain old aging, nothing of our teenage bodies remained.

  “No shit, not taking it well. I can’t imagine how you’re feeling, Kobo. You should do what you need to do. Get drunk. Take a vacation. Beat up a boxing bot at the gym. Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  “What does that mean, Sil?”

  “Don’t get involved. I know he was basically your brother. But let the police handle it. We’ve got a whole team on it. When we find the fucker who fucking did this, I’ll yank out his guts for you and choke him with them. I don’t care who is listening. Hear that, B.O.B.?”

  “Who’s Bob?”

  “A monitoring program. Cop stuff. Don’t worry. I’m joking, B.O.B. Erase last eight seconds. Code T-S68.”

  “You’ve got a bot listening?”

  “Not for you. Backup recording for lawsuits. The kind we accidentally erase on purpose if we get sued. Erase those last five seconds too, B.O.B. The point is the police will get the person.”

  My stomach was grumbling like I hadn’t eaten in two days. And maybe I hadn’t. I poured whatever packs I had in the cabinet into my meal printer.

  “What makes you think it was a person?”

  Okafor sighed. Tapped their fingers on the desk. “I can’t talk to you about the case. Still. Explain?”

  “The other teams in the playoffs stand to gain the most.”

  “Murder is a pretty risky way to win a pennant.”

  “The pennant is just a flag. The big prize is customers, sales. Fans buying upgrades with the winning team’s logo. Plus, President Newman gives the World Series champ first bid on government contracts.”

  “Well, it’s a theory,” they said. Okafor chewed it over for a minute while I chewed on my printed spinach nodes with beef dust.

  “What leads do you have? Suspects?”

  “Look. You know how these corporations are. It occurred on Monsanto property. We don’t have jurisdiction. We can’t even examine the corpse. And you don’t have access either, so don’t get involved.”

  “I won’t,” I said, thinking about how the police might not be able to get inside a biopharm compound. But a scout could.

  “I’m serious, Kobo. I know you’re hurting. I am too. I knew him even longer than you. Did you know our mothers were pregnant at the same time? They used to share prenatal injections to save money. That’s why you should listen to me when I say leave this to the professionals.”

  I sat in my living room, where Zunz was looking down on me. A massive video poster of him hitting the walk-off home run in last year’s opening game. He grins as he swings, then flips his bat in his signature home run move. Even in poster form, Zunz was the big brother watching over me. Next to his was a smaller static poster of my rookie year in the now defunct Cyber League. They’d pasted me over an abstract pattern of wires and lights. I’m holding the glowing red baseball and smiling stupidly.

  Then I remembered the late-night call. How Zunz had been not just preoccupied but dislocated. Strange. There had been something wrong then, days before he died. I was furious at myself for not calling back and grilling him, getting him to spill all his secrets while they were still inside of him.

  But I did remember he called me someone’s else name. Kang. Jung Kang. At the time I’d figured he’d just dialed the wrong number, but why had he been dialing this Kang in the middle of the night? And right before a playoff game when he should have been resting? And why, when I looked Kang up, was he a player for a rival team?

  6

  THE SEEDY BAR

  I walked through the Midtown fog, purifier kissing my lips. Nothing in this part of town matched anything else. Prewar buildings sat beside post-crises skystabbers on streets patched up like a kindergartner’s art project. I ran my out-of-date bionic hand through my graying hair. I was a collage myself, flesh and machine, parts stuck together without any coherence. Maybe that’s why I still loved this city despite everything.

  The creepeasy rolled toward me. Its headlights were the eyes of a sea monster in the watery smog.

  Zunz and I had first sneaked into a creepeasy our senior year of high school. We saved up enough money to purchase fake ID chips and played hooky during the homecoming game. The drinks were strong, made our heads feel filled with light. “God, this is the best feeling ever,” Zunz had said before vomiting across the counter. We got booted, laughing, near Duracell Park.

  They were novelties back then. Now with the traffic mostly in the air the streets were free for these roving water holes. They were also about the only safe place for a scout to drink anymore, thanks to their comm blockers. And there was a specific scout I needed to see. My old teammate and ex-lover, Dolores Otero Zamora. She was a scout for the Pyramid Pharmaceuticals Sphinxes now. Jung Kang’s team.

  This one had a neon sign that glowed the words Pharaoh’s Dive. A mummy blinked a beer to its lipless mouth. The creepeasy slowed to a stop by the booth, and the doors opened with an old-fashioned mechanical wheeze.

  A robot dressed in the style of a 1920s flapper greeted me. “Don’t take any wooden nickels with a screen, dewdropper. This joint’s got an anti-comm field.” I made a show of turning off my screen. Handing it over.

  The robot gave me an anachronistic thumbs-up. “Swanky and swell. Go have a snort.”

  The interior of the bar was dimly lit with hologram torches. The bartender was modeled after Anubis with a layer of furry plastiflesh over the metal. The lab-grown fur looked wrong. Mangy. They got the smell right though. The jackal head woofed in pleasure as I flicked him a two-dollar tip and took my whiskey to the back.

  The bar was filled with the usual sorts lying low from prying eyes. Young lovers, old adulterers, crooks, thugs, and my fellow scouts. Some of us worked for the sports teams, others for cosmetic manufacturers or military contractors. Everyone was shrouded in their own private cloud of eraser smoke.

  This was a Sphinxes bar. Filled with loudmouth Jersey fans, tube and tunnel types. The booths ringed the edge of the bar and in the middle sat a large holopad illuminated with the playoffs.

  The Sphinxes were up three games to two on the BodyMore Inc. Orioles, looking to nab the Patriot League pennant. Everyone had been expecting the winner to face the Mets in the World Series, before Zunz was killed.

  A reporter was interviewing the Sphinxes’ starting pitcher, “Throwback” Bobak Nazari. A lean, tall pitcher with a braided beard that reached halfway down his sternum. He spat golden globs of eraser juice and waved to his mom at home with a left arm notably larger than his right. “What happened to Zunz was a tragedy,” he said. He pointed at the black ribbon on his hat. “We all mourn him. But today the Pharm Fam is focused on taking down the Orioles.”

  The opening ceremony proceeded with painful normalcy. Drone mascots danced around the sidelines. The crowd stuffed their faces with overpriced burgers and beer. No one was acting as if anything was wrong. Not as if a star player had died on-screen a couple days before.

  Money talks, but it silences a whole lot more.

  “Hey. Aren’t you Kobo the Killer?”

  An old man with a metal mask hanging from his neck swiveled around on his barstool. He had a can of preserver on his back, tube hooked to the mask. He wore a blue and yellow Sphinxes jersey.

  I nodded.

  “Thought I recognized you. Saw you pitch a shutout against the Cathode Rays. You had a hell of an arm,” he said. He took a sip of beer, then lifted the mask to his lips and huffed.

  “That was a long time ago.”

  The old man let the mask drop again. He reached out and touched my right arm.
Squeezed the metal through the sleeve.

  “Do you mind?” he said, lip curled. He looked disgusted, like he’d slid his fingers into the belly of a rotting fish. “How much did that robot arm cost you, huh?”

  “Too much,” I said. Although technically the arm had been free.

  The Cyber League had started when Major League attendance was plummeting and tech tycoons set out to disrupt the sport. Other sports had banned all upgrades, then got bogged down in trying to enforce hormone levels and genetic codes. The tycoons knew cybernetics, genomods, and steroids weren’t going away. They created a spin-off league. Needed players fast and they had the VC cash to build them. Schmucks like me were the perfect candidates. Turning poor burrow kids into stars was good marketing. I was drafted by the Boston Red Sockets with my cybernetic arm as the signing bonus.

  It’s hard to describe what it’s like to upgrade the first time. To really upgrade. Not to tweak yourself or take a course of steroids over months. Not to diet or exercise. But to change yourself in a day. To suck in the anesthesia and wake up a new person. You don’t simply have a new limb or implant. You have new senses. New vibrations. I woke up that day on the surgical table, a gleaming new arm sutured to my shoulder, and I was expanded.

  Other people didn’t necessarily see it that way though, like this old man in the bar. They wanted players they could imagine themselves as while they watched from the couch. Pretend it could have been them on the field if they hadn’t had that knee injury in high school or hadn’t knocked up their college sweetheart. Even if they’d never have the money to upgrade like Zunz, it was an easier delusion than imagining themselves with cybernetic parts. So when the biopharms started the Future League, all cybernetics were banned.

  The FLB and CLB duked it out a bit, but the FLB was destined to win. After all, the biopharm vaccines had brought sports back after the Apex Zika pandemic. And then again with wolf flu and the green sweats and a dozen other diseases until people rooted for Pfizer or GenSlice as passionately as any sports team. So when the companies started a professional league, the public was already primed to follow, cheer, and buy.