The Wellstone

by Wil McCarthy

  You could of course stay in the Children’s Cities as long as you liked—some people stayed on as teaching assistants or administrative assistants or whatever, and a few remained as passive consumers, either to make up for a childhood spent someplace less raw, or because they’d frozen somehow in the latter stages of larval development, unable to pupate, to grow wings and fly away. Calcutta, for example, was famous for its “Peter Pan” ghettos. But there were better places for people like that, where stronger intoxicants were available and everyone was above the age of consent. This place was what they called a “kiddie café”—no identification required for admittance. Whatever bona fide grownups you found here were probably up to no good. Which Conrad supposed was the whole point.

  The name of the establishment appeared to be “1551,” although maybe that was its street address, or possibly even the year it was built. Here, a flock of dirt-faced teenage boys was apparently considered less alarming than it was downtown. Only a few people looked up at their arrival, and any surprise they showed probably had more to do with dorky camp uniforms than anything else.

  Bascal seemed to take this nonreaction personally; his easy stride broke into a trot, and he uttered a quiet, ululating sort of war cry and made an overhand “follow me” gesture to the boys behind him. They were officially taking this place by storm, and yeah, that did get a bit more of a reaction. A young man who’d been leaning against the doorway now shrank away from it, not caring to test his luck.

  The place was a lot warmer inside than the cool breeze flowing down along the river. Poorly ventilated, Conrad thought, and with a wood face instead of a wellstone one, it couldn’t pump the heat out electrically, either. Very rustic. Hell, it was almost like being back at the camp. The walls were an egalitarian mix of wood and plaster and brick, with wellstone surfaces only at the serving counters, of which there were several. A few animated posters hung on the walls, but there was also a lot of static graffiti done up in plain ink, and the reason for this was quickly apparent: each table had a big feather pen stuck prominently into a built-in inkwell. You could even see a few kids in the act of scribbling out their pent-up wisdom.

  “They must wash these walls every week,” he said to Feck.

  Feck just nodded vaguely, his eyes on everything but Conrad.

  A sign said PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF, but there was also a staircase leading upward, and although the place was crowded with plastic tables and chairs and the people sitting at them, Bascal still had his momentum. A few zigs and zags through the crowd, a couple of bumped chairs, and he was on his way up, with Steve and Ho and Conrad right behind him, and all the other boys streaming after in a long line. People looked up at this, yeah. Looked annoyed, maybe a little worried.

  The second floor was smaller, hotter, less crowded and less decorated. There was enough room for the boys to settle in at a corner clustered with round tables, but the doorway out to a balcony seemed much more inviting, and that was where they went. And if Bascal was looking for trouble, here was the perfect opportunity, because the balcony had seating for twenty or maybe twenty-five people, but was two-thirds full already, and the empty seats weren’t in a block, but scattered all over.

  Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui was full of surprises, though; as the boys piled up behind him in the doorway, he could actually have cut a fairly menacing figure. But instead he just stood up straight, clapped his hands twice for attention, and called out, “Excuse me! I’m afraid you’re all going to have to move inside. The balcony is reserved for a private party.”

  The quality of his voice was something Conrad really was going to have to study: self-assured, vaguely apologetic, and entirely official. There was no question that you were going to comply, and if for some reason you didn’t, well, there’d be all sorts of hassle for everyone involved, and in the end you’d still be vacating your chair, thank you very much. It took barely thirty seconds to clear the crowd and settle in at all the good seats along the rail.

  The last to leave was a girl of about nineteen, and Bascal, still stationed by the exit, grabbed her elbow as she passed. She was wrapped in a loose-fitting dress of glossy black fabric. Her hair and eyelids and irises had been done up in a matching shade, while her lips and fingernails matched her shoes with a seething red-black glow, like bits of iron sitting at the bottom of a campfire.

  “You lovely thing,” Bascal said, “can you answer me a question?”

  “Get processed,” she replied calmly, jerking her arm away. Then she paused, taking a good look at his face, and made a visible effort to hide her surprise. “Oh, whatever. What do you need?”

  “Are you in a hurry?”

  She chewed her glowing lip for a moment, then stopped. “I’m here with friends. We had a good table, which you just took, so yeah, I need to get inside and find something before they come back. We don’t get many nights out together.”

  “Ah,” Bascal said. “I won’t keep you, then.”

  She half turned to go inside, then checked it and faced him. “Are you ... ?”

  It hung unspoken: are you the Prince of Sol? Bascal didn’t answer. “Go on inside and get a seat for your friends. I’m sure that whatever ... transaction is keeping them from you must be very important. But when you’re settled, I hope you’ll come and see me. Us. I have a question.”

  A brown-smocked waitress materialized, looking annoyed. “Did you just kick everyone off this balcony?” For some reason, she directed the question at Steve Grush.

  “No,” he replied, with his usual sullen brilliance.

  “We’ll have fifteen glasses of beer,” Bascal said, jumping in. “And fifteen cups of coffee, plus some pitchers of ice water. To eat, we’ll take some sort of chips and dip thing, and a big plate of cheese and veggies. Does it come with olives? I love olives.”

  The waitress had a wellstone sketchplate in her hand, but didn’t write anything on it or speak to it. She was under thirty, or looked it, but her expression suggested she’d seen quite enough punk kids come swarming in here like they owned the place.

  “Who’s paying?” she wanted to know.

  Bascal held up a thumb. “That would be me.”

  “Uh-huh.” She presented him with the sketchplate, skeptically.

  “Authorized up to twenty thousand,” Bascal said to it, rolling his thumb across its surface in the accepted manner, rather than simply jamming it the way punk kids were supposed to. “Plus a hundred percent tip.”

  The slate chimed softly, acknowledging the transaction, and the young woman’s features softened a little. Bascal’s face and voice and thumbprint and DNA pattern all had to match against an account balance—he was good for the money. Still a punk kid, but apparently not a thief or mooch. That tip wasn’t going to change her life or anything; all the necessities of life and most of its luxuries were free for the faxing, or at least had downloadable free knockoffs. And everything else had a free waiting list (except of course for freedom itself), so no matter how poor you were, you knew your turn would eventually come. Penthouse apartment, whatever, just live to be a million. But a tip was a nice gesture—traditional, polite—and a big tip was nicer still. He didn’t have to do that.

  “I’ll see what we can do.”

  “Thanks so much,” Bascal agreed.

  The black-haired girl had slipped away during the exchange. Shrugging, Bascal sat down next to Conrad. But Conrad was worried and asked, “Can’t they track you now? The police, your parents? Spending money is always the giveaway.”

  “Oh, probably. But the account has ... certain security features that will slow down a search.”

  “Oh. That’s good, I guess. Thinking ahead.”

  “Such is my function.”

  The very last rays of sunset were visible over the mountains, between gaps in the apartment buildings on the river’s far bank. From what Conrad could see, the buildings themselves were in tasteful colors, not selling anything or trying to be anything in particular. These were the homes of ordinary Queen
dom citizens, with fax gates inside, possibly right there in the apartments themselves. Here ended the terrarium extravagance of the Children’s City, and there began the staid suburbs of the Queendom proper.

  The Green Mountain Spire was dark most of the way up now, the sunlight glinting redly off the top hundred meters or so, and inching upward with near-visible speed. The café balcony itself hung over a precipitous three-meter drop, with a small grassy bank beneath, and then the stony shallows of the Platte River, which wasn’t nearly as majestic as Conrad would have imagined. It was maybe twenty meters across, and shallow enough to wade in. To the north and south there were little sets of rapids where men and women in glowing green kayaks paddled down and, incredibly, back up again.

  Where the grass ended, the river’s banks were lined with a random jumble of stones, and sticking up here and there were the concrete stubs of what probably used to be bridges. Conrad couldn’t imagine why they’d never been removed, although they did lend an honest, unfinished sense to the area. Neither pristinely wild nor immaculately groomed, just here.

  “From an aesthetic standpoint,” Peter Kolb said self-importantly, “this place is fucking rich. The juxtaposition of elements is not as random as it looks.”

  Peter was big on aesthetics, which as far as Conrad could tell was a mathematical pursuit, having almost zero overlap with anything real, like architecture or matter programming, or even feng shui. The worst of it was, he couldn’t tell if Peter was being agreeable or sarcastic, so he refrained from commenting. Everyone else was ignoring Peter anyway, so that was all right.

  It only took a minute for the waitress to return, first with their drinks, and then again with platters of nacho chips, smothered in melted cheese and surrounded by battlements of carrot and celery, zucchini and olive.

  “Here you go, hon,” she said, dropping off the final tray in front of Bascal and Steve and Ho and Conrad. “If you need anything, my name is Bernice. Just rap on the wall, or the railing.”

  “My grandmother’s name was Bernice,” Bascal mused, when she was gone.

  “Nice lady?” Ho Ng asked.

  Bascal shrugged. “Never met her. She died, like, two hundred years ago, in Catalonia. Mayor of a city. Fucking historical figure.”

  “Jesus H. Bloodfuck,” Ho cursed, in a show of solidarity. He was always saying things like that: “donkey fuckbrain vomit” and “diarrhea blood angel,” and Conrad’s personal favorite, “mother-Christing piece of dammit.” Ho seemed to take some weird pleasure in mixing his cusswords up that way, or maybe it was a subtle organic defect in his neural wiring, that the fax filters dismissed as a mere character flaw.

  In the Queendom of Sol, character flaws were considered your own damned responsibility. You had to identify them yourself and then formally authorize a medical doctor to repair them for you. Or better yet, you could treat it yourself through personal experience and growth. And either way, if there were side effects in your overall personality, well, those were your own problem as well.

  But Ho was only sixteen, so really it was his parents who should be worrying about these things. And Conrad supposed they had, in their own special way: by sending the boy off to summer camp. Very therapeutic, oh yes. Nothing cut down on cusswords like having to shit in a goddamned outhouse.

  A sour mood threatened briefly to come on, but the watery beer was really good somehow, and the nachos were even better, and anyway Bascal seemed determined that all his men should be cheerful tonight. Who could argue with that?

  And then, before they’d even finished off their first glass, Bascal’s black-haired girlfriend showed up again, pulling up a plastic chair and inserting herself between the prince and Conrad.

  “Hi,” she said, matter-of-factly. How much was unspoken in that one syllable! Hi, Prince. I know who you are, Prince, but I don’t care. I’m here to check you out as one human being to another, Prince.

  Which was fine, sure, except that it was Bascal she’d sat down with, not some ordinary puke two years younger than her. And she hadn’t brought her friends, either. Probably hadn’t even told them, for fear of having to share.

  “Hi,” Bascal said back, in imitation of her tone.

  “Hello,” Conrad added, with no particular inflection, figuring he might as well at least try.

  The girl nodded, sparing him half a glance before focusing her attention on Bascal once again. She asked, with mock indifference, “You wanted something?”

  Bascal leaned back and smiled. “Seeing you, my dear, I can think of a lot of things to want. But I doubt we have much time, so I’ll get right to the point: I need access to a taboo fax machine. I’m carrying contraband. What’s your name, by the way?”

  Her eyes widened. “I’m Xmary. You need acc—”

  “Eksmerry? Is that a nickname? Short for what, Christina Marie?”

  “Xiomara Li Weng,” she answered distractedly. “You want what, now?”

  “A fax machine. A simple, ordinary fax machine that will copy ta’e fakalao. Forbidden objects and substances. My men are here are on a mission, for which they have certain material requirements. Clothes, for one thing,” he said, pinching his Camp Friendly shirt for emphasis.

  And truly, that was one of the camp’s worst indignities: natural cloth. The shirts and culottes not only looked silly, they would not change their color or cut or permeability. They didn’t regulate temperature or dissipate sweat. They didn’t obey commands, or even hear them. They didn’t do anything.

  “And what else?” the girl demanded, clearly concerned that this was a setup, that she was the focus of some sort of royal joke or sting operation.

  “Jewelry,” Bascal said, with an inscrutable little smile.

  “That’s all?” Her eyes flicked downward, then settled on the only jewelry Bascal was wearing: the wellgold signet ring on the middle finger of his left hand.

  “Pretty, eh?”

  “It’s not an ordinary ring.”

  Now there was an edge to Bascal’s voice. “Of course it’s not an ordinary ring. I’m the prince of the fucking solar system. What do I wear, gold? Tin? It’s information, darling—quadrillions of terabytes in quantum storage. It wants out.”

  With a shiver of excitement and dread, Conrad realized that they weren’t just playing at being bad here. They were being bad; they were going to be bad. Bascal was really pissed off about something. Hell, they all were. As fugitives from adult supervision, they had a fucking point to make.

  This girl Xmary, hearing the tone of Bascal’s voice, huffed once and then said, “I know some people. I can ask for you. It sounds pretty serious, though.”

  “It is.”

  Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Finally, the girl got up again. Before turning to go she asked, “Am I going to get in trouble?”

  “Yes,” Bascal replied. “We all are. The question is whether anything useful is accomplished beforehand.”

  “Great.”

  She disappeared. Doing as she was told, choosing to go along with Bascal and against her own better judgment.

  “So what’s in the ring?” Steve Grush asked.

  “Garbage,” Bascal said.

  “Garbage?”

  “Garbage. Reorganization of matter at the atomic level. Into garbage.”

  “You mean programmable matter, right?” Conrad asked, because otherwise that made no sense at all.

  “Duh. Any wellstone surface. But that’s everything, right?”

  Well, sort of. There were still an awful lot of natural materials around, especially in Denver. But Conrad remained confused, because wellstone was fundamentally a form of silicon. Woven nanofiber, right? Quantum dots to confine electrons in atomlike structures. In raw form the stuff looked and felt like some heavy, impermeable, beetle-shiny plastic, but by sending the right signals through it you could fill it with artificial pseudoatoms of any type. Silicon and gold, silicon and sulfur, silicon and plaster of fucking Paris. Then there were the transuranic pseudoatoms, and the asymm
etric ones, and the ones that incorporated exotic particles. You could alter wellstone’s apparent composition in so many ways that even after three hundred years, a Queendom full of pseudo-chemists and hypercomputer search algorithms had barely cataloged even the fundamentals.

  But pseudoatoms weren’t real, and silicon was.

  Bascal was looking smug. “It’s Garbage Day in Denver, me boyos. If we each have one of these, and we spread out, we can make a lot of frigging garbage. We can even threaten infrastructure, which after all is the thing that separates us from the animals. If our demands aren’t met, they will at least be remembered.”

  “Raw!” Steve said approvingly, and a number of the boys echoed him.

  “Where did this software come from?” Conrad couldn’t help asking.

  “Wrote it myself. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”

  Conrad proceeded warily, not wanting to sound negative. “How does it work?”

  “I archived a year’s worth of patterns from the palace waste chutes, and fit them together with a tesselationtiler. Any surface is mapped with the best possible fit in stored garbage, and the boundaries between garbage objects are heated and acoustically shocked to cut them away from the parent body. Slap it on a wall, and you get a pile of steaming garbage.”

  “Except that it wouldn’t steam,” Conrad said. “It wouldn’t stink. It might look like shit, or half-eaten food, or whatever. Probably even feel like it. But pseudoatoms don’t have a smell. They can’t leak out into the air, like real atoms and molecules do.”

  “Oh,” Bascal said, suddenly uncertain. It wasn’t a look that fit his face.

  “Still, that’s pretty amazing that you thought of that. You’ve got power for the separated objects, right? They’re photovoltaic enough to maintain their own memory and programming? And composition?”

  “Um. I don’t know.”

  “Oh,” Conrad said. “Probably not, then. You’ll just wind up with garbage-shaped chunks of nanofiber silicon. It’s probably dangerous, too. I mean, there’s more wellstone in a building than just the facade, right? You’d better be real careful what you touch with that thing, or you’re going to hurt somebody.”