by Sarah Lahey
She obliges, raises her glass; this is the time to enjoy a free drink, not to debate the future of humankind on Planet Earth. She moves to tap his glass, but at the last minute, he pulls away. She’s left holding her drink in midair. What the fuck? It was his idea.
He grins. It was a joke; he caught her out, and he thinks it’s funny.
People are weird.
“I’m sorry, just having a bit of fun,” he says and offers up his drink again, this time for real.
She considers his hand cupping the wine goblet. His nails are raw and bleeding, bitten to the quick. It looks painful. He raises his glass again but she has no faith. Her left hand takes her glass. As he moves to greet her, he repeats the joke and pulls away again, but she anticipates his move and their glasses clink. His joke has failed.
His grey eyes narrow, staring at her. Quinn spies a black dot fixed to the side of his head—an MRA, a Mind Reading Apparatus. He’s scanning her thoughts, tracking her mood and emotions. The device is a handy tool, designed to give the wearer an edge, a one-up on their opponent. Usually used in meetings—or on dates, hidden below a hat or under the hairline—the gadget detects brain activity, revealing the truth about human feelings. Humans don’t always say what they think, and sometimes they hide behind calm personas when they are actually freaking out inside. Brain waves reveal their frustrations. Wearing an MRA like this—so obvious, in public, at a bar—is social cringe.
Quinn smiles politely, slides off her stool. Their conversation is over.
***
Quinn wakes up this morning nauseous and hung over, again. If I drink more, my tolerance to alcohol will improve. She manages not to throw up, and she calls this progress.
Today, she’ll stay in Harmonia. She’ll drink green tea; she’ll vote; then she’ll drink more green tea, and maybe she’ll shit out a capsule containing . . . what? A code? A file? Who knows what Jin is up to, but she likes a bit of drama. Quinn hopes it holds something worthwhile, something important, information she can use, like Mori’s whereabouts, or stuff on eMpower’s special programs—something to blackmail Niels with, so she can get her data back and get out of here. She hopes it’s not a declaration of love, or a poem that Jin’s written for her or about her. Jin is fond of writing out her feelings, and Quinn suspects this is what it will be—something sentimental or funny, a declaration of friendship and love. Jin has one friend, and for the past two months she’s had little else to do but work and worry about her. It’s very possible that during this time she has also dedicated a few lines of poetry to her.
Twenty-Six
Quinn the Brave.
UNUS WAS THE FIRST region solidified by Hexad after the Religious Wars ended six years ago, and during this time it sheltered under part civil and part military rule. Now it will be the first of the megacities to vote. The ballot is pitched as a free election—scrupulously honest, violence free—and will take place over the next three days. The five other metropolises forming Hexad will follow, voting east to west across the planet. Unus has been labeled a test case, leading the way for a new, liberated, global way of life, firmly and finally freed from the shackles of war.
Quinn searches the Fourth Estate news feeds on her Band, scanning the sagacious contenders who’ve put their hands up as election candidates. There are three political parties with enough funds and support to rule. Her first option is to reinstate the caretaker government, New Federation. Her second is to vote Democratic Republic. The third party, Fundamental Atheists, just threw their ticket in with Democratic Republic as a united front against New Fed. Now she’s left with two choices.
New Federation was founded by the custodian government candidates installed after the RE Wars. All are ex-military. The Fourth Estate vociferously denounce them and their leader, Dirac Devine, claiming they’ve exploited public fears about violence and safety in an attempt to maintain a stronghold over Unus. Pecuniary interests gnaw at their foundations, and self-seeking bureaucrats have provided economic advantages to the big corporations.
Quinn studies the image of Dirac Devine, a small, serious man who believes the world is flat and climate change is god’s retribution. The Fourth Estate claims he is about to lose his quasi-fascist hold over the megacity.
Maim Quate is an academic, a professor of history specializing in Mesopotamian art and culture, and has no political experience. She’s more comfortable in front of a lecture hall than a senate committee. She’s an atheist and an Earth Optimist, and she’s for science. She has a controversial plan to make 50 percent of the planet a restorative ecosystem, cornering off areas to fence out humans, for good. Drones will maintain the forests and plant thousands of seedlings every day. Strict rules will prevent further deforestation. She espouses egalitarian ideologies for a free and equal society, and she has the same haircut as Lise.
Quinn votes for her.
With an empty afternoon ahead of her, Quinn sips her third cup of green tea, hoping for a bowel movement, while browsing the unread volumes in her bookcase. She opens Realistic Weather in the Arts and scans the misty paintings of rain, fog, sleet, and snow. There are foreboding oil paintings of thunderstorms and dark, flat nimbostratus clouds and luminous images of sunsets, sunrises, blue skies, and fluffy, cumulous clouds. Quinn appreciates realism, she doesn’t understand the point of abstraction. Art is supposed to look like something. But there are a few vague and dreamy endeavors depicting air and light that she likes, and she grasps the skill involved in painting mist and rain.
She closes the book. This is what they have left: interpretations and misty memories. No more rain, snow flurries, rainbows, or sun showers. The weather room, Bacement9, beckons.
Simulated atmospheric experiences are no longer a novelty. Quinn has tried them before—enclosed areas where the temperature drops and snow and rain pelt participants from multiple directions. You can build a snowman, or throw snowballs, or stomp on an icy puddle. Her Raynaud’s syndrome leaves her cold. It takes time to recover, to bring the blood back, but this is not a deterrent to her; it is a joy to be cold and pelted with snow and rain. The experience sometimes leads to addiction; there are those who continually return for more ice and snow, day after day. Blue skies and heat can weigh you down, and the real-world reality of endless sunshine can be hard to bear.
Quinn searches the link on her Band. There is an opening this afternoon. She takes it.
***
The skylift drops Quinn at an automated reception with holo screens and instructions. There are several options. One is to retrieve a unique weather memory from the past, perhaps a birthday or graduation; select the date, time, year, and location, and the system will duplicate the weather for that day.
Memory is fickle. Combine it with unreliable emotions, and Quinn knows she might be disappointed by the memory option. She decides on a new, personalized experience: white, fluffy clouds and a sun shower, followed by a rainbow. She selects late spring, gentle bird song, and the scent of jasmine mixed with fresh-cut grass. Then she waits in the antechamber for her personalized experience to load.
When the walls of the chamber dissolve, she’s standing in a vast landscape, at the top of a gentle rise, surrounded by wiry grass and spinifex. The scope is epic: kilometers of horizon. She didn’t expect the limitless openness and broad arc of the sky. She turns a full circle, full of disbelief and shock; she knows this landscape. This is her father’s property outside of Hobart. This is Matt’s land. Have her thoughts been hacked? It’s possible, because it’s not a coincidence.
This sensation is unnerving. She catches her breath, and her fingers tingle. If Matt were here, she knows what he’d say: “All this space and nothing to think about. Perfect.” Despite the unsettling familiarity of the scene, she concedes that the scale is impressive and the idea clever, so inventive. Curious to see how the experience works, what’s real and what’s not, she runs her hand over the long grass. It feels like grass. In the distance is the outline of a forest—Must be virtual—but on the hill
where she stands, several dead ghost gums litter the landscape. Probably real. Two kangaroos hop into the scene, chew on some grass, then disappear into the gully and emerge on the far side of the hill. Maybe virtual.
The hills on either side fall away, sloping down to a small creek. She ambles down toward the shallow creek, where eddies of water swirl over rocks and boulders. This is real, and the place is cool and serene. Sitting on the bank, in the shade of a gum tree, her legs catching the sun, it’s warm but not hot. The ground is cool. She lies back on the thick grass, listening to the noise of the gurgling water mingling with the pip of bellbirds—the perfect pitch—but she sees no birds, not one. She watches a procession of ants carry leaf clippings in the direction of the gum tree, each one hoisting the leaves above their heads with their pincers. Surely, these can’t be real, but maybe not. Does it matter?
What should happen next? Flat-bottomed cumulous clouds appear. Excellent examples—voluminous, perfectly formed, and backlit by the late-afternoon sun—and the contrast between the snowy whiteness of the clouds and the azure sky is breathtaking. After two rounds drift past, they begin to merge, forming animal shapes. An elephant, a dolphin, and a bird float across the sky. There is a pirate ship and a transporter. Then the face of a man appears, and he’s familiar—it’s Dirac Devine, the leader of New Fed. A sponsored cloud placement. Her weather event is closing in on her.
A fresh set of clouds rolls in, and Quinn knows the sun shower and rainbow will soon follow. The bird noise lifts a notch. Dark clouds build at the edge of the dome. The temperature drops and the light fades. CBs—cumulonimbus clouds, thunderstorm clouds—roll into the sky.
She jumps up. No, not what I selected.
Lightning strikes the tree next to her, and it explodes into a fireball. Definitely real. The fire quickly spreads, catching the tops of the adjacent gums, and a fire vortex forms, exploding and disappearing into the sky. She is in the wrong weather event. This is someone else’s idea of a memorable experience. The sky turns purple. The wind whips up and lightning strikes a line of trees along the ridge; one after the other they combust, then cleave open and implode. The purple sky opens, and rain begins to fall. Soon, she’s drenched. Water’s running off her nose and eyelashes, her hair is plastered to her head, and her shoes are squishing. It’s a relentless downpour, interspersed with wallops of thunder and venomous lightning strikes that hit the ground in a perfect ring around her. Her nerves crumble but she rallies, telling herself it’s just a simulation, VR with a perceptible overlay. She won’t be hit by lightning. Not today. It’s VR, very good VR. Very hot and smoky VR.
Shit, it’s not VR; it’s very, very real.
The lightning catches the dry gums on the hillside; first the center group goes up, then the others follow, like a symphony with orchestrated timing. The lightning takes them out one by one, burning pyres across the hillside. She needs to get out of here.
In the next flash of lightning, she sees something moving on the hillside—the outline of a person making their way down the hill toward her. Someone is coming to help. He signals, waving his arms about, and she leaps over the ring of smoldering fire and plods through the downpour toward the greyish figure. He points to the top of the hill, then methodically retraces his steps back up the slope. She follows.
They trudge through the rain and blackened mud, past the burnt trees and grasses, in the direction of a low, rectangular building—a viewing station—nestled into the top of the hillside.
The station has no door, the walls are seamless glass. They step right through a section of wall to the interior of the station, and she’s finally safe from the lightning and rain. She’s also dripping wet; a large puddle forms on the floor around her. She notices that her savior is dry, completely dry and unaffected by the rain. His hair, clothes, shoes, all repel water. He’s immersed in a hydroscopic coating.
He hands her a towel, and she wipes her face and gets a good look at him. It’s the guy from the bar last night. What’s he doing here?
“Thanks. I’m Quinn.”
“Aaroon,” he says.
Standing up, not settled on a bar stool beside her, he’s over two meters tall and his eyes are now cerulean, the color of the ocean on a clear day. He’s sequenced; that accounts for the obsessive fingernail biting.
“Don’t know what happened, ordered a sun shower, ha.” Quinn feigns a laugh.
“We don’t always get what we want.”
“I suppose not.”
He steps toward her. “What I want is that diamond.”
She touches the stone around her neck.
“You should hand it over.” He holds out an open palm, the size of a bear paw. She wishes he wasn’t so tall, and then she looks past him, scanning the rectangular space around her. It’s ten meters by twenty. The walls present as solid glass, but at least one section is a simulation. The exit is behind him, where they entered.
Aaroon cocks his head. He’s still wearing the MRA. Her fight-and-flight will be obvious, he’ll know if she decides to run.
Whatever is happening to her arm, she needs it to work right now. She needs the action to be intuitive and occur without conscious thought. She relaxes, she breathes, she steps toward him, staring into his liquid blue eyes—and her left hand punches him hard in the teeth. Shit that hurt, I’ve broken my bloody fingers.
She ducks under his arm and presses a panel of glass. It’s solid.
Aaroon spins around, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his massive paw. His cerulean eyes turn turquoise, and in two giant lunges he’s on her. But she side steps, then elbows him hard in the side of the face. He buckles. She’s hurt him. She follows with an elbow to the back of the neck and a punch to the side of the face. Then another. And one more.
He’s down and moaning. He’s big, but he’s not a fighter.
She needs to find the exit.
She presses the adjacent panel of glass and half her arm disappears. She’s found the exit point. She steps through, into the antechamber. The skylift is open. Without delay, she’s straight in and ascending to ground level.
Back in her apartment Pod her heart pounds, but she’s exhilarated. She won the fight, and she escaped. Her fingers are purple and swollen, her elbow is bruised, and her hand throbs, but she can fight. She’s bold and fearless. She’s Quinn the Brave, she’s Quinn the Strong. I am fucking Superwoman.
An hour passes. The adrenaline wears off, and her breathing returns to normal. Her arm throbs and her hand stings, a headache looms, and it’s possible she has fractured three fingers. Her emotional state switches from Superwoman to super scared woman, and tears catch in the back of her throat. What was she thinking? She should have just given him the stone.
She logs into the building management system, fills out an incident report, and is issued with a case number. There are no painkillers in the Pod. She eats something dry out of a packet and falls into bed.
Twenty-Seven
I am here to ease your Loneliness.
NO HANGOVER THIS MORNING. Quinn congratulates herself on the good work, but if there were grain alcohol on the premises, she would skull a shot right now. Lying in bed, she gently wiggles her fingers. She bends her wrist and elbow, back and forth, and everything works, so she’ll survive. But her arm hurts like hell.
Regular as clockwork, at eight fifteen, she fishes out Jin’s capsule from her morning crap. After lathering it with cleanser, she takes it to the food prep and pours boiling water over it. The capsule unscrews and inside is a tiny battery—a power source, an activation device. It’s not what she expected, but she knows what it is. The point of the power source is AI. This is Jin’s field, her life and her passion, but what a risky way to deliver the device; if the capsule had split open inside her, she’d be dead.
Quinn’s curiosity is piqued. Her hunt begins. The food prep is empty, and so is the living zone. She moves to the sleep zone: the cupboards are bare, but there’s storage under the bed. The drawer flips open, and s
he sees it: a long, rectangular sack stashed at the back of the drawer, less than a meter long and labeled Assisted Living Android. She carries it into the food prep, places it on the bench, and steps back.
In her daily life, Quinn avoids contact with AI. She’s curious, though; she wants to see what is in the sack. She wants to see what her friend was working on, losing sleep on, while she was away. So she pulls the seal and slips off the cover.
It has hairy feet, short legs, a slender tail, and a tiny, upright body with a small, black and grey face. It’s a meerkat. The AI is a meerkat. You must be kidding. Quinn strokes its downy fur, squeezes its hard, smooth paws, and smiles; she has to admit, it’s cute. Jin knows exactly what she’s doing. Quinn loves meerkats; they’re her animal.
The power source is a magnetic coded key that kick-starts the AI’s system, waking it from sleep mode. The AI’s mouth is open, so she slips the key inside. It is promptly swallowed.
“Hello, Quinn.” It moves its head to one side, “I am an assisted living companion. I have been custom made especially for you.” It walks to the edge of the bench and leaps towards Quinn, believing it will be caught, but Quinn steps back, and it crash lands onto the floor.
It rights itself. “I am programmed to learn.”
“Just as well. Do you have a name?”
“My name is Mori.”
No way! “That’s a mistake.”
“It’s ironic. I am programmed for irony. You can talk to me, like it is him, when you get lonely. I am here to ease your loneliness.”
Oh for fuck’s sake.
The meerkat takes off. Scurrying clumsily around the Pod, it climbs the furniture and falls off; it peeks under chairs and bumps its head; it picks up a bowl, examines it, replaces it; it then moves on to investigate the fringe on a cushion. Like a new puppy, it processes information from its environment, creating sensory experiences and memories.