Chapter 38: Borrowed Selves

Mr. Grid’s bar: for what I had in mind, it was the only place I could think to go. My head full of silicon, trauma, and hard-coded with most of a breaker suite, I was a wreck, but then again I carried a suitcase full of FUTUR Design’s secrets regarding their illegal simulant line. It was enough to make me rich if I could find the right buyer. But I was also broke, so broke I couldn’t even buy a beer.

At a cabaret table against the wall, Sunya and Ohm huddled in close conversation. They looked up at me as I came down the stairs, then turned their attention to their drinks. The message was clear: the kid’s toxic. I couldn’t blame them.

I approached the bar, hoping only for a glass of water. Mr. Grid had grown a mustache since the last time I’d seen him. He took one look at me, and said, “You look like you could use a beer.” He filled a mug and handed it to me. “On the house.”

I thanked him and turned to the Hi Scores on the grimy tablet propped against the post. I supposed I wasn’t trying to avoid seeing it. I was curious. It was unavoidable:

HI SCORES

NAME

SCORE

1

Cynosure

1,467,789

2

KT Thorn

1,450,024

3

EVE

1,308,514

4

Sunya Xiong

1,273,622

5

The CheRRy

1,192,670

6

Coilpath

969,387

7

Kent

952,568

8

Gloss

951,013

9

Ohm

940,926

10

Jasper Rawls

912,555

121

Val43rie

401,642

Cracking the top ten didn’t feel as good as I thought it would. There was no one with whom I could share the achievement. I was one of the top 10 runners in Carthage, and since Carthage was where the greatest number of runners in this region gathered—more than in New York or Miami or Atlanta or DC—there was a good chance I could claim to be among the best on the east coast. If Freya hadn’t vanished into Niflheim her score would have been higher than mine.

I brought my beer back to the table where Sunya and Ohm were talking. Sunya wore a tank top with the stylized image of a small mammal of some kind on it. Ohm wore a pinstripe suit, today looking less like an investment banker and more like a public defender straight from eight hours in court. Sunya looked at me and said nothing. I was afraid she was going to tell me to go away, but instead she said quietly, “They haven’t found Enrique yet, in case you’re wondering.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Yeah, I was.”

Sunya indicated my eyes. “Are they transmitting?”

“No,” I said. “Mesh contacts.”

She nodded. “You didn’t know.”

I shook my head. “Maybe I should have figured it out, but I didn’t know.”

“Don’t let these people fool you,” Sunya said, “most of us don’t know what we’re doing. Enrique and Gloss could have realized that your eyes were transmitting, and they didn’t.”

Ohm chuckled and sipped his cocktail. “You look lost,” he said.

“I feel lost. I found my friend but then this ice convinced her that she was a simulant, and now she’s gone back to FUTUR Design, I think. I mean, she was working for them already, but she’s gone away entirely.”

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Ohm nodded along. “They got into her head. They got into her head, didn’t they?”

“I just want to know what I can do.”

“Take care of yourself,” Ohm said. “Don’t worry about anyone else right now.” Implicit in what he said was a rebuke: everyone you try to help gets hurt.

“If you see Gloss,” I said, “tell him I can help him hire a lawyer.”

“He hired Enrique a lawyer,” Sunya said. “They just can’t find Enrique. That’s the problem. No facility has a record of him. And we’ve looked. All of us have. We have been inside every remote server FUTUR Design operates. We have looked through their trash. The CheRRy is upstairs looking right now.”

I must have perked up because Sunya held out a hand to stop me from saying anything. “That was not an invitation to help. You go get checked out by the doctor. And rest. No one blames you for what happened. But you’re going to get yourself killed if you keep pushing it.”

“Can I ask one favor?”

Sunya raised her eyebrows.

“Just a quick check on me. Let me know if I’m under surveillance. I can’t check myself without alerting the corps.” I gestured toward my eyes.

“Go across the street,” Sunya said. “There’s a digital billboard. Look for a sign.”

They turned back to each other. Message received: my company wasn’t welcome anymore. They didn’t mean it personally. I finished my beer and left the bar.

I waited outside the building that housed the church and Mr. Grid’s and watched the digital billboard. I saw ads for condo mortgages, amphetamines, implantable phones, payday loans, and nanobot contraceptives available on offshore rigs.

Then the screen flickered and a still image appeared, an ad for soap. The bottle bore a logo of some small mammal, a raccoon or mongoose or civet or something, just like the logo on the t-shirt that Sunya was wearing.

The tagline for the ad read, “You’re clean, kid!” There was Sunya’s sign.

Even though I knew what I was going to do next, I hesitated. Maybe taking care of myself was a good idea. I had to admit, I didn’t really feel like I deserved it. I didn’t feel like I was worth caring for. I thought about who might understand my beaten-down state.

Upstairs from Mr. Grid’s was the lobby of a storefront church. But it was one of those digital churches that believed God lived online, they weren’t big on prohibitions but they were way into surrendering worldly possessions and constructing a heaven in the net. They kept a row of terminals that anyone could use as long as they didn’t mind being pitched on joining the church at the beginning and end of their session.

Jacked face-first into one of the terminals was the CheRRy. She was eyes-only, not full sensorium, which made sense. No telling what was lurking in the net port cables looped on the side of the church terminal. Empty strawberry-flavored amphetamine-precursor cans littered the tile floor around her boots. I tapped her on the shoulder. No reaction.

I reached forward into the nest of dusty hardware and flicked the power supply to the terminal on and off.

She bolted away from the eyeball interface, shouting, “What the heck?” and pushing off with her boots so that her chair rolled backwards while one hand brought up a knife that had apparently been stored in her cutoff jeans. “Oh, it’s you, kid. What do you want?”

I recounted my conversation with Sunya and Ohm and explained an idea I had. She put away the knife and crossed her arms over her chest, clearly uncomfortable and deep in thought. “Not bad, kid, but you’re going to get killed.”

“Maybe.”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a spun aluminum vial and passed it over to me. It was warm from her pocket. “Here,” she said.

“What’s this?”

“Chemhack. One dose. For when you have to breach. It will permanently mess you up. That’s what the peer-reviewed longitudinal studies say, anyway. Me, I don’t believe in permanence. I live by the Buddhist principle of anicca.”

The smell of burning hair, seared brain came back to me. That word had been etched into the side of my console. I remembered feeling my cognition slip through my fingers when face to face with Freya 3.0. “I know something about that,” I said. “Thanks.”

I was angry. And maybe I was more than a little hurt. As I left the corner opposite Mr. Grid’s, I was thinking about one thing: hurting FUTUR Design.

I knew it was a corp but I wanted it to feel pain. I wanted the shareholders to clench as they watched the value of their shares plummet. I wanted the directors to fear for their jobs. I wanted to cause the executives at least a few sleepless nights for what they did to people I liked, and to Freya, who I loved, even if she were a simulant.

I caught the metro. Leaning back in the hard plastic seat, I watched the bright banner ads scroll down the car. I had never noticed before how advertising could be both cheery and dystopian. One moment it was like, “Everything is great! Buy our thing or service to celebrate!” And the next it was like, “Your life and family are in danger! Buy our thing or service to protect yourself!”

I took the metro to the NCD. I remembered how to get where I was going from one of the first times I went out with Gloss. My vision was somewhat blurry and I felt my heart pounding. Up the stairs and out of the metro station, I headed for FUTUR Design HQ, that twisting violet tower with the pulsing light in its core.

It was late afternoon and the lights inside the tower’s windows were just starting to be visible. I carried nothing but my implants, having stashed the flash memory full of illicit corporate data in a locker not far from Mr. Grid’s once I knew that I wasn’t under surveillance.

I walked straight up to the big machines staffed by guards in purple velvet blazers and silently dared them to refuse me entry. They had me walk through the scanners and then wait on a grippy circle decal on the floor while they carried on a hushed discussion. One hundred K said they knew exactly who I was and how many times I’d been in this building before, both in netspace and in the meat.

One of them looked up at me. “Know where you’re going?”

“I know where I’m going,” I said.

Was this guy really going to let me wander the building? Maybe the security staff wanted to see what I would do. Maybe that knowledge was more valuable to them than the damage I could do in here. When I turned away from him, I expected to feel a hand on my shoulder. But there was nothing. I approached the elevator bank and the door opened to admit me into the small, translucent capsule, like a violet cough drop suspended in a tube.

The problem was that there were no controls inside, no panel on which I could choose the floor, no digital directory to guide me to the person I wanted to see. Of course there weren’t these things. Why would there be? The public wasn’t invited here. This was FUTUR Design HQ, and they controlled everything here.

The elevator began moving. I stood straight, slipped the mesh contacts from my eyes, stashed them in their disinfecting carrying case. It felt like it had been a long time since I let my eyes loose.

The data came at me in waves. I could see the routers studding the interior of the building, the whorls and pulses of information exchanged among them. If I looked closely I could even make out individual packets, see into them, decrypt them on the fly. This was new.

Perhaps I had always been able to see these things, but I could filter now. Perhaps the thing I had learned in the last few weeks was how not to see the noise, to see only the signal.

Perhaps something else was going on.

The elevator door opened and I found myself looking Delilah Vyskocil in the eye. She wore the long teal and violet robes of a FUTUR Design security architect. She stood with her hands folded in front of her, in the way I associated with nuns. Her eyes were like mine, upgraded, focusing on the data pouring through me. Her expression felt warm and serious at the same time.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store

Name

Chemhack AKA Quickbreach AKA Easymark AKA Stamherk

Manufacturer

Any number of nameless desert laboratories

Legal status

Illegal (Schedule XII at the Federal level, Schedule X at the International level, Schedule II at the Orbital level), possession punishable by up to 25 years in prison

Description

A spun aluminum ampoule containing a combination of cybernetic nanomachines and finely-tuned central nervous system stimulants

Cost

Street price varies but you can probably afford the cost. The monetary cost, anyway.

Function

Developed for military hackers, Chemhack is a hybrid chemo-digital-semiconductor-based stimulant alters perception of time, risk, and skill. Quickbreach has been proven in study after study to improve apprehension and response to netspace threats. Side effects of Easymark include neurological trauma, anxiety, depression, short- and long-term memory loss, psychotic episodes, fever, vomiting, seizures. Talk to your medical installer before taking Stamherk.