Heiresses of Russ 2014

by Melissa Scott

  Sophia smiles, and unscrews the small round container of eyeshadow.

  What seems like maybe twenty minutes of foundation, eyeshadow, eyeliner and lipstick later, she adds one last artistic flourish, then just sits there scrutinizing me for a few seconds, looking for flaws and apparently not finding any. Finally, she relaxes, her look turning into one of appreciation, admiration of her own work. “There, perfect. Go ahead, have a look.” She gestures towards the full length mirror beside the bed.

  I look at my reflection with fascination. The catsuit shows off my curves in a way I’d never feel comfortable doing, but with Sophia’s impeccable make-up artistry, I really look the part. The reflection’s mine, same brown eyes, same epicanthic folds, same short, spiky black hair, but she actually looks like someone else, some twisted sister of mine. Not a character I’m playing, but a whole other person with her own inimitable sense of style. She grins with me. “It’s perfect, thank you!”

  “You’re not going to go out dressed like that, are you? You’ll get mobbed.”

  I hadn’t even thought of that. “What do you suggest?”

  Sophia riffles through her rack of jackets and outfits, then pulls off an old trenchcoat and hands it to me. It’s a little big, but still serviceable. You can hardly tell what I’m wearing underneath now, at least. I transform yet again into someone else, someone less sexual and more simply…stylish. I smile, and my reflection smiles back at me, beaming with confidence. I take a swig of warm water from my bottle, half in disbelief at the more attractive woman in the mirror copying my every move and making it look better, purposeful. Suddenly I see a strange mark on my bottle, then relax a little when I realize it’s just lipstick. I make a mental note to refill it from a public tap on my way home, then remember that Sophia has running water in her kitchen. Such luxury. It’s the little things.

  “Hey, can I use some of your water?” I ask.

  “Go ahead.” Sophia gestures towards her gleaming metal sink, complete with both hot and cold taps.

  I walk over to the sink, and empty out the warm water from my bottle. Then I fill it back up again, with fresh, clear, cold water, until it’s overflowing like a beautiful statue that serves as the centerpiece of an ornate fountain. I take another swig from it, of deliciously cold water, then fill it up again.

  Sophia watches me, apparently amused at how something so simple can be so important to me.

  I smile back. She wouldn’t last a week in K block. It would eat her alive. I nod at one of her paintings. “You ever been to Cravache?”

  “Not my style.” Sophia’s curiosity sounds piqued.

  “Really?” I grin, unable to hide my dubiousness.

  “There’s more to a sexuality than your partner’s sex, or what you do with them. For my sexual encounters, like my artwork, everything has to be just right. The lighting. The outfits. The devices. The predicaments. There’s a certain class to what I do, and frankly, that place is just too trashy. No offense.”

  “What do you mean, no offense? I don’t go there either!”

  Sophia frowns. “So why are we talking about it?”

  “Because right now, I really need to go somewhere that’s not me. Somewhere that doesn’t fit my profile. You wanna come with me?”

  “That doesn’t even begin to make sense.”

  “You coming or not?”

  •

  Queueing outside the cloakroom, our hands freshly stamped, double doors protect us from the onslaught of noise deafening the crowd on the dancefloor. That is, aside from the brief moments when those doors swing open to let someone through, swallowing them whole, and ear splitting screeches threaten to give me a headache. The rest of the time, we’re protected from all but a dull murmur of throbbing basslines. Still dangerously loud, but more like physical movement, a vibration in my stomach, than noise. The place smells of stale sweat.

  I hand Sophia my coat—her coat, technically—and she passes it along to the woman behind the counter, who’s sporting black and purple ponytails and decked out in an impressive latex corset of her own, but looks utterly bored. Sophia then takes off her own jacket, revealing her outfit: a low-cut latex minidress that shows off her cleavage, putting my cheap PVC catsuit to shame. Heads turn. Sophia smiles, radiating a cool, nonchalant confidence. I’d consider feeling jealous if I wasn’t trying to blend in. Her boots are like mine, only they look almost new, they taper off to dangerous looking stiletto heels, and she knows how to walk in them. Together, we certainly look the part, our outfits so shiny you can almost count the lights on the ceiling just by looking at their stretched, warped reflections on our bodies. She must live for clubs like these, where she can have any woman she wants. If I look like I fit in here, I can’t imagine the upscale equivalent where Sophia fits in, a whole subculture of impeccably dressed playthings eager to do her bidding.

  The doors swing open again, and I ignore the sudden onslaught of noise to peek past them, scanning the room, looking for those glowing screens, and wow do I find them. I can’t even work out why such a place even has a seventy-two, but there they are, a whole row of tables with them, up against the far wall. A moment later and they’re gone again, obscured by the doors.

  “Let’s go over—” Before I can finish the sentence, I feel a tight grip around my neck. I turn around to see Sophia grinning at me, her arms stretched out, her hands fiddling around behind my neck. I must have a puzzled look on my face, as she grins at me, an evil, condescending grin, and pulls her hands away again, holding a key.

  I tentatively feel around my neck. Sure enough, she’s fastened a collar around it, with a metal D-shaped ring at the front and a padlock at the back. Even the woman behind the counter looks amused.

  “Very funny,” I say. “Are you going to give me the key?”

  “Sure.” Sophia is positively beaming. It seems to be all she can do not to laugh. The next thing I know, she’s reaching into her handbag and pulling out a dog leash, snapping the end onto my collar’s metal ring. Her voice has changed, and not just to speak up over the muffled music, if you can call it that. I’ve only heard her talk like this once before, when I paid her a visit while she had company. It feels weird suddenly having this tone of voice directed at me this time. “Once we leave, and not a second earlier.”

  I sigh. This isn’t exactly how I’d planned it, but I figure I can’t really fault her for blending in. It’s the perfect cover. “Fine. Let’s go over to a terminal at the far—”

  “Shh,” soothes Sophia, stroking my hair. She’s enjoying this more than I’m strictly comfortable with. Wanting her to notice me is one thing, but this is taking it a bit far. I make a mental note to get her back one day, assuming I make it that long. At any rate, I can’t entertain a revenge fantasy right now. I have to keep my mind focused on the task ahead.

  But Sophia has already gone. I feel a curious tugging sensation on my neck, pulling me sideways. I suddenly realize what’s happening, turning around in time to see the chain stretching taut all the way to her hand. She’s leading me—literally—through the double doors, across the dancefloor, to the far wall. The cacophony of noise, smells and sights envelops me. The dancefloor reeks of fresh sweat, latex, and even precum. People dance and lead each other astray in roughly equal measures. I try to play along, glancing at some of the other patrons and emulating the submissive ones. I keep my head down, trying not to focus on Sophia’s swinging hips as she takes me on a long tour of the place—too long—parading me around the dancefloor like a beloved pet she’s showing off to her peers.

  As masters and mistresses lead their slaves off the dancefloor and into the bathroom to perform sordid services for them, Sophia leads me off the dancefloor to an empty table, where she corners me in, and I finally got a chance to see what was worth killing a man over. Spark’s files. Schematics and machine code. Timestamped just after his death.

  “So that’s what this is about?” shouts Sophia, still affecting her dominant’s voice, looking over my shoulder at
the terminal’s display.

  “May I speak?” My own voice has only the merest hint of sarcasm. Mentally, I’m still in the world of raw data, not experiencing my immediate surroundings enough to work out whether I’m even joking or not.

  “You may,” decides Sophia.

  “I know they did it. I can’t prove it, but I know they got his files after his death, and the only way they would do that is if they were the ones who killed him.”

  “So that’s why we’re here? To prove it?”

  “No,” I said reflexively. “I just told you, I can’t prove it.” With a slight sigh, I mentally detach myself from the terminal and reattach myself to reality, the questionable smells, the intermittently blinding lights, the piercing music, my aching neck, and my friend.

  “But that is why we’re here, these files?”

  “Yes. What, did you think I was trying to seduce you in a moment of vulnerability?”

  “Honey, I still think you’re trying to seduce me.”

  “So, what, you’re happy to just go along with that and take advantage of me?”

  Now Sophia looks downright offended. Angry. She yanks on the leash, pulling it uncomfortably taut, forcing my face closer to hers. “Maybe I’m keeping an eye on you to make sure you won’t do anything you’ll later regret. You’re not the only one who’s emotionally vulnerable right now, you know. I lost a good friend too. And on top of that, in the last fourteen hours, I’ve sheltered you, I’ve engaged in industrial espionage with you, and I’ve even indulged your little fantasy or whatever the hell this is, even though it hurts to be teased like this, knowing nothing will ever come of it, and I didn’t want to round the day off by having you running back to my apartment again, this time with tears streaming down those pretty little cheeks of yours while you tell me all about how you went to a place like this without someone who cared about you watching over you, and how someone here took advantage of you. So yes, I’m playing with you, but no, I don’t take our friendship lightly, at least not as lightly as you seem to. If I must look after you like a pet, I’m going to keep you leashed like one, and not let you out of my sight. Okay?”

  I swallow hard, looking up at her impassioned eyes, and nod solemnly. When I next speak, it’s barely more than a squeak. “Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted.” She nods at the terminal. “Now do what you do.”

  I nod compliantly, and Sophia gives the metal chain some slack. I face the terminal again, and begin to focus once more.

  Compared to getting the files, copying them from one compromised account to another is easy. Personal accounts have lax security. No one cares if someone logs in twice at once. I copy the files from one of the accounts to another, log in as that person, and copy them from there to another, and so on, from Steve to Jane to Sarah to Michael to Paul. Eventually, I settle on Evelyn Chung, and from there e-mail them to a printing service. I copy Chung’s private key to someone else, and repeat the five-hop ritual.

  “How much do you want to be a part of this?” I ask Sophia.

  “Do you have to ask?”

  “It’s risky. I’d like to store someone’s private key on your account.”

  “Whose?”

  “No one in particular. Just a random person on my list of compromised accounts.”

  “Why not store it on your account?”

  “That’s what I was going to do, and physically grab it from work. But I can’t, it’s not safe.” I sigh, deflating slightly. It’s time to come clean and tell Sophia the whole truth. “I’ve already been shot at today.”

  For the second time today, Sophia searches my face for any kind of indication that I’m joking. When she doesn’t see one, she closes her eyes and takes in a deep breath, coinciding with a momentary lapse of the music’s caustic, heavy rhythm, a calm little moment of bass, chatter, and the occasional distant slapping and cheering. She lets the breath of air out again, slowly, finally opening her eyes once more. “Well, that explains the ear.”

  I lean in slightly, loosening the chain a bit. “You knew about that?”

  Sophia frowns again, although not as severely this time. She gestures wildly with her hands, almost accidentally snapping my neck off in the process. “Who do you think put the blanket over you? You have any other watchful guardians I should know about?”

  I look down at the chain, taut again, unable to meet her gaze. She’s right to be angry at me. I didn’t realize how much she had to be angry about until now. “I’m sorry. They traced him to me, but you’re clean. You’re my safehaven.”

  Sophia stares down at me, and this time I can’t escape her gaze. She looks right through my body and into my soul. I must have looked pitiful in that moment. Finally, she gives me her decree. “I’m in. Store her key on my account.”

  “Thank you.” I’m not sure if I look appropriately apologetic or merely grovelling. I face the terminal again, Sophia giving the leash a bit more slack, and I copy Evelyn Chung’s private key one last time.

  “You want to explain your plan now?” asks Sophia.

  “Sure.” I log out of the terminal.

  “You done?”

  I nod. “I figure KT killed Spark, and tried to kill me, because of these files. I don’t know what they are yet, but clearly they’re important. Can’t read them here, though. The schematics are vector files. Can’t view them on a catty. I have to print them out to know what they are. The rest are machine code, M sixty-four by the looks of it. I’ve just run them through a disassembler but it’ll take me a good few weeks to reverse engineer this much undocumented source code. I’d rather do that in private, with a pen and paper, so I’m gonna print those too. There’s a printer’s not too far from here, over on the other side of J block, so I’m sending the job there. Given how today’s turned out so far, however, I’m not just going to waltz in there using my real name. So I figure we go back to your place, change back into our regular clothes, I use your interface to rig up my transponder with Evelyn Chung’s private key, then I head off to the print store posing as her and collect the printouts.”

  Sophia stands up, looming far above me, and tugs on the leash. “Isn’t that dangerous? Can’t they trace what you’re doing and just wait for you at the store?”

  “Theoretically, yes.” I take the cue and shuffle along to the edge of the seat, then stand up, only wobbling slightly. “But they don’t know about Chung. And they don’t seem to know about you yet.”

  “Yet?” Sophia turns around and walks back onto the dancefloor, with me in tow.

  I stumble after her. “It’s just a matter of time until they mine our social network, regardless of whether I store anything on your account or not. I’m not going to lie to you. They’re probably going to come after you regardless of what I do. But if we do this first, it should give us just enough of an edge to outmaneuver them.”

  Sophia leads me straight through the middle of the dancefloor, pushing the doors on the other side wide open. “So…some assassin’s probably going to turn up at my door, but don’t worry about it, we should have a printout by then?”

  I follow her lead as best I can, trying not to fall over in the combination of impossibly high heels and being led by my neck. Once we’re past the doors, at least I can think properly once more. “In essence, yes. Look, I’m sorry about this, but I’m not bringing it on you any more than Spark brought it on me. Just by knowing each other, we’re already involved regardless of what we do.”

  Sophia unclips the leash and throws a key at me. It bounces off my clumsy hands and onto the suspiciously sticky floor. She gives two tickets to the woman behind the counter. “So how’s this printout going to make everything better?”

  I pick up the key without thinking, getting a few appreciative stares from passers-by before I realize I should have bent my knees more. “I don’t know yet. Leverage, maybe. I’ll figure that out later. Right now, we just need to get it and see what it is, because until we do that, we don’t have anything. Even someone of your status, a
citizen of the city proper, they can still just get rid of us all and make it look like a series of unconnected robberies and muggings.” Finally, I manage to unlock the padlock and give it back to Sophia, along with the collar. I rub my sore neck. “Still with me?”

  Sophia puts on her jacket, then throws her old trenchcoat at me. “It doesn’t look like I have much of a choice, does it?”

  •

  In the dimly lit hallway outside Sophia’s apartment, my ears are still ringing. I can barely hear what she’s saying.

  “OK, now I’m going to teach you how to use a welcome mat,” she teases as she gets her keyring out of her handbag, finds the right key, and unlocks the door.

  It swings wide open to reveal a man in a suit, older than us, maybe in his late thirties, looking like a ghost white salaryman, pointing a silver colored pistol right at Sophia’s face, standing right there next to us. The man glances at us both and smirks. He probably wasn’t expecting to get both of us at once. We made it easy for him.

  Before I can think what to do, Sophia has kicked him in the crotch with the full force of a stiletto heel and is grabbing my wrist, pulling me back down the corridor, down the stairs, away from the echoes of the concrete walls exploding with bullets and into the relative safety of the bustling crowd outside. It’s all I can do not to stumble in my block heels. I suddenly have a newfound respect for femmes.

  “I think,” says Sophia as she pulls me through the crowd, “that we just ran out of time. New plan?”

  “One second.” I struggle to think of something. The crowd’s a blur, and I just ignore the sea of faces, letting them wash over me as Sophia leads me as far away from her apartment block as she can, as unpredictably as she can. “You’re right, we’re out of time.”

  “So what’s your plan?” Sophia sounds serious and urgent.

  Running out of options, I suggest the impossible. “We’ve got nothing to lose. I say we be ourselves for a little while.”