Desperados of the Badlands

By Paul Di Filippo

When out on a field mission, Ruy Lambeth, cultural expert for UNESCO, relies heavily on his smart synthetic skinsuit, almost like a useful symbiont. But when he meets a passel of outlaws in one of the most forbidding regions of North America, and discovers that their skins are superior to his, he has to figure out how to overcome their superior numbers with his ingenuity and expertise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2021

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Table of Contents

DESPERADOS OF THE BADLANDS

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

CHAPTER 1.

CHAPTER 2.

CHAPTER 3.

CHAPTER 4.

CHAPTER 5.

DESPERADOS OF THE BADLANDS

PAUL DI FILIPPO

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2013 by Paul Di Filippo.

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2013.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

CHAPTER 1.

The Skin She’s Into

Now Ruy Lambeth had to shed his skin. Painless and quick, the monthly practice was mandated by his employer, UNESCO, for two reasons.

The skin, a ruggedized Nuvaderm-Allheal Utility model which remained the property of UNESCO, had to be regularly upgraded, downloaded and generally tweaked back at the Fraunhofer-Chesson factory in Durham. A complete turnaround took five business days, including FedEx overnight transit time each way.

But scheduled maintenance was not the total story. Going skinless for that short stint every month—reasserting his baseline humanity—was deemed necessary to stop Ruy from deserting civilization.

Such was the understated but generally acknowledged important second reason for molting.

Too many skinned individuals had gone dingo, vanishing into the remaining wilderness spaces: the jungles or deserts, mountains or forests or oceans of the world. The practice was called simaking.

Such desertion generally constituted grand theft at the very least, with the traitorous and selfish individual absconding with a piece of corporate a-life worth tens of thousands of dollars. And while there were no laws against an individual choosing to abandon civilization and all its duties, the authorities invested in the maintenance of same could not allow the bad example set by such selfish slackers to go viral.

And so Ruy Lambeth made ready to unzip.

The manufactured skin that covered him seamlessly from neck to wrists to ankles sported, with astonishing realism, the buff-and-fawn maculated pattern of giraffe hide. An exceptionally tall and skinny fellow, with long neck and prominent Adam’s apple that had been the bane of his high-school dating years, Ruy amused himself by programming the skin’s densely arrayed chromatophores to display such a self-mocking design. Threaded with epidermal electronics, the skin and its many living components communicated with its owner via a fine-meshed silver hairnet supporting pinpoint transcranial magnetic induction übertoothed into the skin’s squishy wireless card. Ruy’s thinking cap.