Chapter 1. Seedy Connection

As I lay stretched out beside the river bank, words suddenly appeared in bright purple capitals inside my eye.

COME FIND ME

One moment they weren’t there. Then they were.

I blinked but the words didn’t go away. I closed my left eye. The words were suspended against the red-black background of my sunlit eyelid. I closed my right eye. The words hung in the air.

Before this moment, I had been wasting the day the way I had wasted every day since Freya had disappeared. Freya was my childhood best friend. I had looked for her, even hired a private detective, but she was gone.

When the words appeared, I tried looking at different things: the sky, a rock, the river, a tree, some grass, some dirt, my hand. Each time, superimposed and more or less faint depending on its background, were the words.

COME FIND ME

I felt guilty. There was no way this was Freya reaching out to me. My friend was gone, lost in the corporate medical system, and if she wanted to reach me she would simply message my phone like a normal person.

I’d done all I could to find her from our tiny town. There was nothing else I could do. Right?

Except for the government-mandated child-tracking chips and the credit chip in my wrist, I didn’t use the net much. Only to poke around, looking for Freya. I didn’t even watch streams anymore. All I wanted was to grow into a man in my small town, find some work, and spend my days hunting and fishing the way my great-granddad did. And I wanted for Freya to come back. But that wasn’t happening.

COME FIND ME

There was only one explanation: this was my personal sense of guilt manifesting as a hallucination. I should have done more to find her. I should have gotten over my reluctance to use the net.

Fine. If this was my guilt talking, then I was going to find a way to take care of it. I started walking home, reaching in my pocket for the only lead I had left: a scrap of paper, on which was written a name.

Hank Rio

World’s Greatest Thief

Carthage

###

I left the central Carthage BRUTE station and did as Dad told me: walked with my head down, my hands in my pockets, toward the place where I was supposed to meet Hank Rio. I tried not to make eye contact with anyone, tried not to let the cameras see my face. It felt impossible to be anonymous.

At least the words superimposed over my eye weren’t quite so visible anymore. Maybe my conscience was giving me a break.

Following the descending concrete walkways from the transit station, I found myself in a slow-moving crowd, everyone walking like they had to be somewhere five minutes ago but still making time to say hello to strangers in that Southern way. Everyone acknowledged each other, everyone but me, my head ducked, my shoulders hunched. I followed the crowd down a ramp and into the tight, bright grid of downtown Carthage.

The buildings near me were relatively small, four or five stories, some of them made of old brick. But those ahead rose up, up, up, two hundred stories or more, and glowed from within their cores. Somewhere on the street was the person I was supposed to meet.

Dad always told me that the megacity of Carthage was the most dangerous place in the country, its streets full of freaks zoned-out on AI-designed psychedelics or cartel-custom stimulants, ready to open up your wrist with a razor to yank out your credit chip.

And if it wasn’t them, it was the corps, looking to drain your accounts and get you signed to an indenture that would force you to work for them for the next 30 years. Dad had told me not to go.

But he didn’t understand. He had brothers and sisters growing up. I didn’t. All I had was Freya, and now she was gone. I had to know what happened to her. And if she were in trouble, I had to help her.

Freya and I were closer than friends, almost like siblings, especially because we were both only children. From preschool to senior year, we shared secrets, supported each other, laughed, fought, and always made up.

Then, a few weeks before we graduated high school, Freya told me she was going away. She’d been accepted to a university, one of those big, public midwestern institutions on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a place sealed into an enormous arcology.

My grades weren’t good enough for me to join her. I was mad, envious of her, and jealous of everyone who would get to spend time with her.

That final summer together, I stayed away from her. I still did not believe that Freya would create a great career out in the world while I would be stuck at home, unable to make it into college.

But then Freya came back in the middle of her first year. She was sick. She suffered fevers, weakness, headaches, and dizziness. The doctors in town referred her to one of the big hospitals in Asheville. Last I heard she had been enrolled in a clinical trial run by one of the megacorps in Carthage.

That was almost a year ago. Her parents had split up long ago, and never seemed to care what she did with her time. When I asked them where she was, they said she was probably still in the hospital.

That “probably” bothered me. Was she in the hospital or wasn’t she?

When Freya first went away, I did what anyone would do: searched the net for news of her. Entering her name, her handle, and her picture, I hoped something recent would surface. But I found nothing. It was like she had never existed.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

After that, I gathered what small amount of money I had and hired a private investigator. Dade was an old man who lived in a restored red-brick paper mill in downtown Canton, a mill that Freya once scaled hand-over-hand up the uneven brickwork when we were sixteen. Like most people, Dade did all his work via the net. He wore fitted white shirts with rainbow suspenders and he knew everyone in town. The second time we met, when I was to pay him and receive his report, he refused my money. Why? Because his search showed that Freya did not exist.

“She’s been scrubbed,” he said.

“Scrubbed?”

“What the corps do when they want someone to stop looking for a person. They hire people or use AIs to go over every mention, every picture, and erase it, or alter it.” He looked at me across his desk with sad eyes.

“But why would anyone want to scrub her?”

“I don’t know, kid. Why do the corps do anything?”

“Control and profit, my dad always said.”

“Your dad knows a thing or two.”

I waited and the silence in his office built. I wasn’t going to leave on my own. Eventually, he pulled a card from a stack on his desk. A real card made of heavy paper. On the back he wrote:

Hank Rio

World’s Greatest Thief

Carthage

“You want out of this town?” Dade said.

“I want to find Freya.”

Dade gestured toward the card with his ink pen. “Look him up,” he said. I read the card.

“What do I need a thief for?”

Dade shrugged.

“Can he find her?” I said.

Dade shrugged again. “I don’t know, but he’s always keeping an eye out.”

The strangeness of what Dade said didn’t really come to me until after I had messaged this Hank Rio and set a time and place to meet in Carthage. In fact, it wasn’t until after I had boarded the BRUTE at the stop next to the courthouse that I really began to think of how odd it was. Bus Rapid Urban Transit—Eastern was the only feasible way to get from city to city on the east coast if you didn’t own a car, and most here didn’t. As the bus rose up on its hydraulics and the engine made the smooth transition to highway mode, I thought: Hank Rio keeps an eye out, but for whom?

So far, Carthage didn’t seem that scary to me. The people seemed friendly, although preoccupied, but they left me alone. The men sitting on squares of cardboard, their wrists bared and lifted to beg for a small transfer of dollars, they didn’t say anything, didn’t bother anyone. Occasionally someone would kneel to transfer something into their accounts.

The streets grew narrower, the buildings taller, the crowds denser. From carts on the sidewalk and counters built into the towers, I smelled the most amazing food. I saw the flames of old-style hydrocarbon burners, heard the sizzle of meat on cast iron. It reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. Maybe Hank Rio could point me in the direction of a good meal, after he gave me the information I had come for.

I turned a corner downtown and suddenly found myself in a quiet alley lined with small tables, each hosting two chairs and a vase with a single lily.

Men in suit jackets and women in businesslike dresses spoke softly over glasses of wine and plates of olives. In the far back of the alley a man of my dad’s age sat alone, wearing a white suit and lifting a glass to his lips. I approached, suddenly feeling as stupid as a rabbit approaching a wolf.

The man was impossibly cool. Where the cuffs of his suit jacket and shirt ended, I saw the gleaming chrome finish of two mechanical hands. Plenty of people had them at home, veterans, farmers who had had an accident with an AI-driven combine, but these were the first I’d seen with such an intricate level of detail. There were gems studding the wrist bones, and spirals etched into the metal, inlaid with something like liquid mercury. His hands were works of art.

“Hank Rio?” I said. He gestured at the chair in front of me and took a long sip of his red wine.

“You must be Rawls,” Hank Rio said. “Dade knows talent when he sees it, but I have to say, you don’t look like much.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t like to repeat myself,” Rio said.

“It’s just that I didn’t meet you expecting you to evaluate me. I’m here to ask for your help.”

“Help doing what?” He spoke slowly, with an accent I couldn’t place. He may have come from New Orleans or from somewhere in South America. The skin on the back of my neck tingled. I glanced down the alley, thought about how to get out if I had to run.

I turned back to Rio. “Help finding my friend. Freya Alexander.”

His eyebrows rose. He nodded, as if committing the name to memory. “What happened to her?”

“I don’t know. She came to Carthage for a clinical trial.”

Rio couldn’t hide the sadness that passed across his face. I continued. “Dade said she was scrubbed.”

“So what?”

“So what? If she’s scrubbed that means all the information about her is gone. I’ll never find her.”

Rio leaned forward and held out one chrome hand. From the center of his palm, a polycarbonate lens opened and a fuzzy holo projection appeared. It was small, the size of a softball, and indistinct. But somewhere in there was a human figure. “Information can never be destroyed,” Rio said.

I was gazing at the hologram, trying to make out what it was, but it was fuzzy, the detail washed out in a swirl of blue and green light. Just when I thought I was beginning to make something out, Rio closed his fist and the projection flickered and died. The expression on his face was suddenly much less playful, much more focused. He wasn’t looking at me but at something overhead.

I followed his eyes and saw a small drone, its rotors almost silent. In a sickening flash, I realized that the tingling sensation on my neck wasn’t caused by Rio playing with me, but by this thing. Somehow I had known it was there.

The drone featured a single bug eye, multi-faceted like a fly’s, scanning over the assembled people in the alley. Rio seemed deeply concerned by its presence. I found I was, too, although I didn’t know why.

Rio was frozen to the spot, as if he didn’t want the drone to see him move. As it hovered just over his shoulder, I felt something bump my foot.

Looking down, I found a pair of glasses, a cheap eye-mounted rig, the kind we did our schoolwork on because the district couldn’t afford better haptics. Somehow Rio must have slid it to me with his foot. I reached down and then placed it over my eyes.

The lenses were not transparent but transmitted real-time video from outward-facing cameras. The view was also augmented, so that I could see a kind of electronic overlay. As I looked at the drone, I could see its components delineated in bright colors: rotors, motors, power supply, processor, photoelectric sensors, lenses.

I looked at the drone’s processor and somehow the glasses knew it. My view zoomed in, first to the housing of the drone and then even further until the black plastic body took up my entire vision. But within that blackness, the glasses showed me something glowing inside the drone, like a maze. In a flash, I got it: I was looking at the logic gates within the drone’s processor.

I’d always been good at mazes. It was like I didn’t even have to think about it. I traced my way through with my eyes, and found myself looking at something like a set of screws holding a panel in place. They must have been microscopic, or even smaller.

I lifted the glasses to glance at Rio. He remained immobile. I could see sweat beginning to form on his forehead, as if holding the position was difficult. The drone buzzed over him, its bug eye drawing closer and closer to his face, as if trying to determine whether he was of interest or not.

Lowering the glasses, I began working on the screws by focusing with my eyes. I found that as one screw backed out, another one tightened. It was a kind of puzzle. I paused to take a breath and look carefully. After a moment I understood the relationship between all of the screws, and within a few moments had removed them.

A red power button glowed up at me. I tapped it with a thought, and my view zoomed back out to show the drone falling from the air. It bounced off the table, spilling Rio’s red wine, and clattered onto the brick.

Rio wasted no time and swept the thing under the table with his foot. He brought out a silk handkerchief and wiped the sweat and wine from his face.

“Lesson one,” he said. “They can only recognize you if your face is in motion,” he said. Then he added, “Good work. I knew you were talented. Now come with me.”