by Toby Weston
Other messages were more cryptic. Some seemingly genuine—or, at least her Companion thought so, adding metadata, noting that they had been composed by someone literate and apparently not drunk or high. These had been tagged as ‘With Sympathy’ or, more worryingly, ‘Condolences’. Bracing herself for more psychological trauma, Stella risked a swim in what she expected would be a stream of effluent. She skimmed across threads, trying to ignore, or at least un-read, the bile and graphic filth from trolls and haters.
She quickly caught up with events: earlier that morning, hearing of Stella’s shame, unable to accept the moral collapse of his belle, Jeno had thrown himself in a fit of melodramatic melancholy from the balcony of their hotel.
Stella stood frozen in a fugue state, staring at the closed door criss-crossed in yellow and black ribbon, imagining Jeno jumping to his death. Incompatible realities wrestled inside her head like a furious ball of wasps. Too much had happened. Too many layers. She pulled back, mentally shook herself and ripped the tape away…
Stop being stupid! Jeno wasn’t really dead—because Jeno had never really been real!
Half expecting to find the room trashed or full of paparazzi, she pushed the door open cautiously. It looked normal, familiar, except for the open balcony door framed by curtains flapping dramatically in the breeze. The Bee had followed her in. She ignored it. She resisted the strong voyeuristic urge to walk to the rail and look down. Would there be an outline in chalk? A growing pile of flowers? Candles? She refused to go any deeper into the make-believe rabbit hole of ghosts and lies.
She closed the balcony door the police had presumably left open, then had her Spex block all messages. She let herself collapse, face down, onto her bed.
She woke to the sound of a bell ringing.
It took her long seconds to orient herself. Groping from habit for her Spex and Companion, she realised it was the room phone—an anachronistic affectation. She was surprised it was even connected.
A man was on the other end.
“Hello, Stella. I am very sorry for your loss.”
“Who is this?”
“I represent your former employer.”
“TeenLife?”
“The same. We were not able to reach your Companion. The hotel was kind enough to provide this number.”
“Smart. You’re an Oid, right?”
“I am a synthetic legal advisor.”
“A Sage.”
“That is an accepted term. My employer considers the term Oid to be discriminatory.”
“Why do you care?”
“According to the law and in a spirit of honesty, I am saddened to tell you that I don’t care. But please do not let that affect our interaction. I will continue to behave as if I do.”
“Right, the Caliph’s fine print. He doesn’t want Oids running around pretending to be human, does he? So why do those dicks at TeenLife still care?” It felt weird to swear without immediately triggering a fine.
“They want to offer you a job.”
“Balls!”
“They would like to send someone to talk with you.”
“No! They can’t have their cake and eat it!”
“You will be compensated.”
“For what?”
“For talking to a representative of TeenLife. The exchange will be captured. TeenLife has already been offered footage from the Tele-Presence Bee, which was placed outside your room by an unaffiliated third party. They would like to use this footage and the footage of your meeting.”
“Somebody from TeenLife wants to come and talk to me for a flick?”
“This is correct.”
“How much?”
“Time or Coin?” the lawyerOid asked.
Stella waited, needling the thing. Oids didn’t like ambiguity.
“You mean Coin,” it asserted. “That is not specified. But it will not be an insignificant amount.”
“You won’t stream anything without clearing it with me first?”
“I was informed that this will be the case...”
“So, you acquired illegal footage of me from inside the hotel. Taken without my permission. And now you want to use it?”
“Not me. I currently represent TeenLife in this matter, but I am an employee of BHJ legal.”
“Employee!” Stella smirked. “Sure, okay, whatever. Send in your guy…”
“He will be a Sage himself.”
“Naturally. Well, whatever, let’s go for it. Looks like I need the money, anyhow.”
Stella considered changing for the meeting. However, all her clothes—kimonos, spangled trousers, shimmering silk frocks—looked like pantomime costumes now that she was no longer playing herself in the cheesy TeenLife™ version of her biography. She would have to go shopping; but for that, she would need money.
A short two minutes later, there was a knock. She opened the door. The man looked old, maybe fifty. Shocked, she recognised him as Jeno’s father. The anger and misery on his face looked too real. She took a step back.
He moved through the door, leading with his arm, finger pointing, like the tip of a sword, at Stella’s sternum.
“You killed my son!” he rasped, stepping towards her, his voice hoarse, presumably from hours of crying.
Stella recoiled, driven back by the insubstantial force of his hatred. He took another step into the room.
“Wait…” she tried to stammer.
“No! I waited years for him to come to his senses and realise what you are! He wouldn’t listen to me. But at the end, he understood! Only when it was too late, he saw you for what you really are! An opportunistic whore!” The man screamed, flecks of spit flying from his mouth.
Stella knew at a conscious level that he was a media Oid created specifically for this scene. But his words hurt, as they were designed to. Jeno’s father raised his hand, palm open, as if he was about to deliver a slap. He only existed in the digital world that her Spex created inside her head, but her brain was confused; primitive reflexes and social conditioning didn’t understand the distinction. She flinched away.
He obviously didn’t hit her and, after holding the pose for a couple of seconds, he suddenly seemed to lose interest and turned to leave. The swarm of Bees that had arrived with him followed him back out, leaving Stella alone. The entire confrontation had taken perhaps thirty seconds. She could almost hear the director shouting “Cut!”
Simultaneous with the shutting of the room door, the phone began to ring again.
“Hello again, Miss Sagong. My clients were very happy with your performance.”
“Did I look suitably shamed?”
“Yes, the confrontation provided the material required for the piece. They would like to offer you twenty Mesh Coin for the use of the material and any other footage of you taken inside the Pasha hotel today.”
“Twenty Coins!” she laughed. “It’s going to take more than that. They are planning a special piece, aren’t they? Back story, guest appearances. I’m going to be cast as the villain, right? Some sort of set-up and introduction for the next poor girl who gets my gig. Wait—Jeno has a brother, doesn’t he?”
“Twenty Mesh Coin is a fair amount for less than a minute’s footage.”
“How about two thousand?”
“Don’t be ridiculous…”
“They just fined me two hundred.”
“We can say fifty.”
“Nope.”
“Miss Sagong, I…”
Stella cut him off. “No! I’ve had a busy night. I know they are planning a special, which will pull in a lot of views. They can afford to pay me properly. It’s the least they can do for kicking me out. Come back when you have a proper offer, but not today. I am tired.”
“Miss Sagong—”
Click.
It was the first time she had hung up on anybody with an old-school physical phone. It felt good.
Within the ancient barn, a tented room had been partitioned off using thick, plastic sheeting. Segi opened the
first zipper and entered the cramped antechamber. Once inside, he sealed the outer door, climbed into a paper suit and gloves, and unzipped an inner flap.
Pipes and cables lined the walls, or migrated in ropey tentacles across the floor. A workbench stood off to the side. The space served as a clean room, with ventilators running through filters that maintained a positive pressure inside. Surfaces were strewn with a psychedelic confusion of animal, vegetable and mineral. Many of the specimens seemed to be in the process of merging together in cybernetic synthesis.
On one wall, projecting through the heavy transparent sheeting like something from a 1930s science fiction flick, was a wall of valves and levers, cisterns and jars, tubes and mechanical wheels. The only thing missing was a writhing spark climbing between the polished rods of a Jacob’s Ladder. Amongst this mass of gleaming glass and stainless steel, electronic pumps blinked and whirred. The whole assemblage gurgled and burped obscenely.
The console of wheels and valves—a steam train driver’s idea of an interstellar starship’s control panel—received plumbing from outside the barn, the terminating ends of a zigzag of transparent tubes which coiled across the farm’s south-facing slope. The thick tubing hung on ladder-like racks, giving the field where it was draped the superficial impression of a vineyard. Inside the pipe’s transparent walls, gene-engineered microorganisms absorbed energy from the sun as they drifted along within a rich organic broth.
The fabulously complex plumbing in the clean room was a maze of reactions, reagents and retorts. It extracted useful products expressed in the bioreactor tubes by tweaked bacteria and synthetic cells: gasses were filtered and compressed; useful molecules precipitated and concentrated; residues flowing into more pipes, which left the barn to start another circuit. A firm slurry, stripped of nutrients and high-value compounds, was redirected out of the barn and dropped as a thick, endless turd—
Nothing was wasted. Even the unpleasant mock-faeces were regularly shovelled up and spread on their great-aunt’s garden plot.
Segi checked levels and tweaked valves. He spent several minutes inspecting the logs of a new bulky grey box, which he had recently plumbed in to separate deuterium—hydrogen’s overweight sister. The box was leased, but they would own it once their glider kites had delivered another two litres of heavy water to an anonymous—but-Klan trusted—buyer.
Segi finished his checks and satisfied himself that the setup would continue glugging along smoothly for the next few days.
He then got up and moved to another bench to check the progress of a genome that was halfway through printing.
Segi and his brother, Zaki, divided their time between helping their mother run a traditional smallholding of olive, orange and pistachio trees and their second, considerably more interesting, covert sideline of niche and, sometimes illicit, high-technology manufacturing. This second vocation had gone crazy lately as their Klan, Team Silicium, had reacted to escalating Razzia threats and commissioned defence upgrade projects for their members, including Zaki and Segi’s own small Fab.
The Klans had built the Mesh, and evolved it into a platform for distributed enterprise, a substrate for secure computation and communication for the multitude denizens of the digital. To the Klans and their members, it was clear that the Razzia crackdowns were a knee-jerk reaction of the Former Western Democracy waking up one morning and realising that their cushy, fascist kleptocracy was under threat.
Segi carefully stripped off the paper suit. It was supposed to be disposable, but he had only worn it once and there was nothing in the tent that was really super-sensitive to dust and pollen, anyway, so he folded it for another time. A news alert arrived and he subconsciously let it play while he walked back across the courtyard.
It was from a flick stream that Segi subscribed to. A compilation of daily reports on Razzia operations. They had targeted another Fab in London, killing two and arresting eight. There had also been several detentions across Prussia and, more ominously for Segi and his family, a ZKF-Razzia joint operation had raided an unaffiliated Fab only a couple of hundred kilometres away. There had been an unprecedented spike in actions over the last few months; glider kites were being shot down, shops raided, hundreds of people detained and MeshNodes smashed and jammed. It was global. Raids were up 1800% on the previous year.
People were warning that things would be different this time. Somebody was tipping off the Forwards about locations.
Segi found his brother up on the flat roof of the Çiftlik house. In addition to their own preparations, the boys had requested whatever help Silicium could spare. Although everybody was in the same boat, sufficient begging and badgering had yielded the first care packages. Silvered delivery gliders, almost invisible as they dropped amongst the olive and orange trees, brought in useful payloads.
Once the kit was unloaded, the boys repacked the gliders with whatever they could contribute to the effort—rolls of nano-cloth; vials of box-jellyfish venom; rare earth elements, concentrated and separated by their toiling microscopic herds. The glider kites were loaded and launched, setting off towards their next anonymous rendezvous.
Two gliders were being left on permanent loiter at ten thousand metres, each holding two tungsten penetrators in case the Razzia rolled up in tanks…
When Segi arrived, Zaki was working through a read-me file, installing what looked like a black, stubby telescope on the roof. He had already drilled holes into the sandstone and was threading substantial bolts through the holes to secure the chunky device in place.
“Hey, Bro, how you getting on?” Segi said by way of greeting.
Zaki looked up briefly, and then back down to what he was doing, without speaking.
“Did you check the latest report? The Razzia are working with the ZKF,” Segi continued.
“Yeah, I saw. It’s not the Razzia. It’s the Forwards and the corporates. The Razzia are just the fist.”
“I know that,” Segi protested. “I was just saying it like that.”
“It’s not good,” said Zaki. “If they come here, we should just play dumb and hope they go away.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Me too!” Zaki smiled, aware that perhaps he had been too blunt. “Anything else going on?”
“Did you see the latest from Stella?” Segi asked cheerfully, welcoming the change of topic.
“No.”
“She’s broken up with Jeno, you know.” Segi watched closely to see how his brother would react.
Zaki’s head twitched up and his eyes darted to Segi’s with surprise and something else. Then they lost focus as he queried with his Spex.
“TeenLife’s had him kill himself,” Zaki mumbled incredulously.
“It’s so lame, but Stella seems to be going along with it,” Segi said, while Zaki continued to consume the information.
“She’s been kicked out of TeenLife!” Zaki said with surprise. Then, more sombrely, “Some sort of one-night stand with a local playboy who runs his own stream. Looks like he’s picked up a couple of million new subs.” The final sentence was loaded with malice.
“Yeah,” said Segi. “Bastard. But at least she’s out of that shit. You should give her a call. She could probably do with a friend at the moment.”
Zaki looked at him dubiously. “Why don’t you?”
“Huh, you know. Busy, busy, busy. Right? Got to get on. I’m going to check on the wasps. Have some antidote ready if I start screaming!” Segi forced a chortle. “See you downstairs. Oh, Granny says lunch will be ready in fifteen.”
Zaki watched suspiciously as his brother’s head disappeared down the stairwell.
The new offer arrived at one minute past midnight. Somebody had probably told a Sage to contact her ‘as early as possible the next day’, and the Sage, trying hard to parse the syntax correctly, but omitting to consider human diurnal rhythms, had come up with a compatible answer.
Stella hadn’t been asleep, anyway. The note was ostensibly a personal message and was wo
rded to imply that TeenLife™ was moved by compassion to offer her an opportunity to honour Jeno’s memory while, at the same time, wiping the slate clean with TeenLife™’s legal department. They were offering to waive all fines and, in addition, as a one-time token of their sympathy and regret, pay her two hundred Mesh Coin. All she had to do was agree to release the footage of her walking up to her hotel room door, tearing off the police tape, stumbling around her room and being chastised by Jeno’s father. They would pay an additional two hundred Mesh Coins if she also attended Jeno’s ‘funeral’.