And with a swish she was off and flying like nothing had ever happened. Like a switch in her mind somehow turned the whole thing into a nothing. Why was it, Francesca wondered, that when crazy moments like this were over they became instantly unreal, like she had just been some kind of neurovid actress playing a scene or something?
As Francesca flew out from her station on what was basically a supercharged ski lift, she checked out the damage on her account. Buying that moron’s ticket had put quite a dent in her already dismal savings. Damn. She should have just sent him around the block, but he’d pissed her off that bad.
As her flyseat elevated up onto a high guide for a long run Francesca’s head started to spin and she could feel the sadness overcome her. The encampments along the SkyTran line below her began to blur and spill into each other as agonies of memory echoed up from below and rebounded in her heart.
I’m sorry, so sorry.
Francesca was still sobbing as she glided West along the 10 through the mountains towards LA. Many hours later a depleted mad woman stumbled down the stairs of a SkyTran node at the address of the recruitment centre. The Mirtopik Needle down the street pierced the clouds, cutting such a sharp contrast with the beaten down city spreading out to the horizon in all directions as to seem almost invisible in its impossibility. It took balls to make a building like that in this day and age. The materials they built it with, they said they would one day make an elevator into orbit with that stuff. That was August Bridges, the only guy with any plan left beyond trying to hang on.
And she couldn’t believe all the good-looking people. Everyone dressed in the latest styles, which for Francesca would mean anything not endlessly recycled. The colors. It was late afternoon and they looked so fresh, having spent the day in actual air conditioning. Imagine the expense. The only thing more out of place than this tower into heaven, but invisible for completely different reasons, was a muddy, smelly, sun-baked creature from the tree farms. No one seemed to look at her - as if she could not possibly exist looking this bad. The smell, they couldn’t ignore that, so they were pretending something nasty was floating from out of sight in on the wind.
Taking possession of as much dignity as she felt she could allow herself, giving the minimum indication of shame required for people not see her as also delusional, Francesca made her way through the crowds, which parted before her.
The centre was closed. According to the meme announcing her employment it was an hour before the closing time. Francesca pounded on the plexi-glass, but the people inside obviously felt they were happier with some barrier between them and her.
“Can I invite you to dine with me?”
Francesca was about to complain that what she deeply desired was for this person mocking her, among all the assholes on Earth, to drop dead first. But instead she turned and forgot everything because the asshole was one of the best-looking assholes she had ever met.
“Dine?” It was the best she could manage on short notice.
“Yeah.”
There was a pause during which Francesca imagined the guy without clothing.
“I would offer you some money, but I don’t want to contribute to any bad habit.”
“What?” It took a second to realise the depth of the unintended insult.
“Hey. Don’t worry about it. You looked like you needed some help.”
“Help? You want to help me? How about this. The only thing between me and the rest of my life is this door. If you can open it, we can both pretend we never met.”
“You’re ComSec?”
“In from the field.”
“No me digas. Ok, I’ve got the key.”
The guy’s name was Raoul. He was ComSec, a recruit trainer. It took some time before Francesca could look at him without wincing, and she thanked all the Saints and Orishas that he never was assigned her instructor. It was bad enough that passing him in the corridors made her horny as Hell. Ordinarily she would have jumped him. The biologic in any guy’s head would never say no to that, but Raoul never seemed to have anything going on that way, enough so that Francesca decided with despair that he had to be gay. Since the humiliation of being turned down, on top of the embarrassment of their meeting, might be too much to bear, she stayed her distance. Instead he knotted up in her brain as an obsession.
The days in training, the realisation of everything Francesca could have imagined for herself, was interrupted by this excruciatingly repetitive mental dysfunction. Still, she did better than anyone else, which wasn’t necessarily saying anything. Usually she tried to not draw attention to herself, but probably this time she was trying to. She could have slept with some other guys to get him out of her head, but the few times she did it felt weirdly like cheating.
So, from then on, during the whole time in training, the only regular conversation she let herself have with anyone went like this.
“When you gonna pay the rent?”
Every day the same response, “When you gonna deal with the rat?”
After a month her landlord stopped calling, and she actually missed it.
And then it was over. Some scrawny pimple face came in and called her, and Francesca followed him. The dude took her to another guy who had her wait to meet some other woman and then finally she was assigned to a job, Comms Monitoring, the one she’d decided that she needed to get for no reason other than that she decided to get it. Most of her life was like that, just following her intuition to wherever it would take her. Having purposely over and under performed in the right spots to get the placement, Francesca was not surprised when she did. It sounded good for her, stamping out Hax from the networks and snooping in on things she wasn’t supposed to. That and the assignment was out of the way in case she went nuts again. She hadn't thought this through before, but it just worked out to be good that way. Francesca was always discovering after the fact why she’d ended up somewhere. Sometimes it was good and sometimes messed up, but she tended to move on without worrying why, which was the only thing that made any sense when you thought about it. Why bother breathing if you wanted to get right down to it?
After a few months moving from gig to gig she ended up plugged in at the Deep Space network, which was okay even if a bit closed in and poorly lit and it was dead end nothing from a security standpoint. She was surrounded by nerds, whose pre-pube fascinations with far away long-ago lights in the sky she did not share. They were nice enough.
What Francesca didn’t let them in on were her comics, because geeks would be into them like a horde of pigs. The job was perfect for piling through her daily delivery of custom prints. She used to only be able to not pulp a few of the best ones, but on salary with nothing and no one to spend it on she thought she might focus on collecting. Most people wouldn’t understand actually reading when you could just storyline your body through the neuroview, but that had always felt limiting to her imagination.
Francesca slurped on a cup of java and cracked into a new indy character, Ante Laksmi, insurance actuary by day and super-heroine when the numbers added up. Her power was to know the actual risk of anything as opposed to something worse happening. Her baseline seemed to be 1 and 30,000 because that was the number of days a person could live, which were also the days she could die of any cause. So, she wouldn’t jump in a car, but she didn’t mind walking into dark alleys. She wouldn’t carry her own gun, but she wasn’t afraid of lightning or swimming with sharks.
Francesca wondered what the risk was with freezing people in her imagination and carrying them around in her head. Elena, this guy Raoul, others she had not invited in, but which could never take the hint and leave. Was the chance that this would kill her greater than or less than 1 in 30,000? On any given day.
After a few weeks Francesca had read as much as she could while justifying it as being work and found herself roaming around the cubicles just to keep her blood flowing. It didn’t make a difference since most of the security monitoring was done through her neurovisor and basically the sam
e nothing was happening today as happened yesterday.
“You’re new here?”
A geek in a rumpled tee-shirt with crusty unwashed hair and Silver Surfer custom cover on his neurovisor interrupted her as she was checking the encryption on staff mnemes. She would have ignored him, but she realised, since she was standing in his territory right next to his desk, that it would be more than ordinarily rude for her to do so. Also, the Silver Surfer cover was cool because even people who read comics mostly wouldn’t know stuff that old. She wasn’t a geek, so she didn’t mention it.
“Comes.”
“Yeah, I guessed that from the uniform and the stick. What’s your name?”
“Francesca.”
“I’m Wolf.” Francesca would have ordinarily been satisfied with that level of information, but she was bored out of her brain, so she decided to indulge him.
“Hi Wolf,” she decided to avoid any of the blah blah blah stuff and get straight to the point, “why do they want such a high level of security on you guys? I mean there are blocks and traces on all of your neurovisor feeds and encryption extending even into the mnemes in your brains.”
“They do?”
“Yeah. You wouldn’t see this much security on clandestine military units, but it’s not like anyone even tries to get in. I haven’t had any Hax since I got here, and the information is just a bunch of stuff on stars and planets. Everything is so nailed down.”
Wolf shrugged and answered with a mouth full of donut. “Must be the IP.”
“What’s up with that?”
“IP. Intellectual Property. Don’t you know this room is the whole reason Mirtopik Com exists?”
“Really?” The job suddenly became hugely more interesting.
“Yeah. This is the place where all the feeds on the aliens come through. We maintain the network. If anything comes through with high tech info Mirtopik will want to know about it.”
“Has anything like that ever happened? From what I heard most of the stuff is pretty general ‘Here We Are, We Come in Peace’ stuff. Everybody says Mirtopik has hardly made a dime out of any of it.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much true.”
“Who the hell would want to steal a bunch of useless alien chitter chatter?” Her sudden interest in the job was just as rapidly disappearing.
“I dunno. You want to see for yourself?” Wolf synched their neurovisors and directed her to a directory of mnemes. “They are all there.”
“What’s all that there?”
“The traffic to and from the Triton array. Everything we ever picked up or sent out. Check one out.”
Francesca focused on a mneme and opened it. Instead of any alien freaky stuff, she heard instead a well-played rendition of a classic Cuban jazz song that they used to play on the streets back home. Her hips began to sway with it. These aliens knew how to play.
“What are you doing?”
“I think you’re showing me the wrong place. Must be your music directory or something. Not bad taste though.”
“No, you are... Ah, you must have opened a C30.”
“A what?”
“C30. He’s a clone who works for Bridges. He comes around a lot, about as close as we ever get to the boss. Nice guy, not like you’d expect, you know? He likes to play music, he sends his material down the wire and broadcasts through the Triton array, says he’s sending the vibe out to the stars apparently.”
“He’s allowed to do that stuff? I thought there was some restriction of telling the little green guys about us instead of the other way around.”
Wolf blinked his eyes. “Well yeah, technically, except we put out a lot more at higher power just through regular radio traffic. Anything from Triton would have trouble showing up against the noise.”
“Really. But it’s still illegal?”
“I suppose so, maybe. Anyway, the big guy lets him do it so who am I to complain?”
Francesca walked to her office with a new something to think about. The alien stuff didn’t interest her that much. Like many people she didn’t see the point. There were mouths to feed and cities being drowned by rising seas. Who the hell cared what was being said on the other side of the galaxy? It was all pretty indulgent as far as she was concerned, but the geek had given her a mystery to ponder. Who was this guy C30 and why did he get away with this? And why was a guy as high up the food chain as August Bridges even interested?
She found a bunch of his stuff - he was sending out almost every day. Pretty eclectic mix but with enough repetition that was suspicious in itself. Why send the same song out across the universe more than once? No more Cuban tracks either, which sealed the deal. What were the chances she’s picked just the one that had connected to her? Signs like that were meant to be followed.
She put a burrito in the microwave and laid back to enjoy the first track she’d tripped over and flip open today’s funny pages. The track turned out to be surprisingly long, a montage tribute to her childhood. Those songs took her back across the Caribbean to plastic strewn beaches and sprawling lantanas and tiny birds the size of bees. It reminded her of the good stuff that, together with all the dark, had helped make her what she was.
In her office, closed off from the world, Francesca danced.
Chapter 6 - Calvin30
The mathematics of our existence is trivial. First principles, collections of maxims, a few rules of thumb, and the wide world all the same. All there is to it. When the million trillion things overflow our spongy brains, draw a line around them and call it done. Keep it simple stupid. Cows can round to perfect spheres, latitudes lurk with gnomes beneath the mushrooms, notes stand petrified on the scale afraid to swing, and two dollars and three make five of anything. Fairy tales for children. Here’s a good one.
Once upon a time, it doesn’t much matter when, some naked apes begat and begat and with some magic words tried to remake the world as they saw it. The place was soon full to overflowing with all manner of contrivances and associated packaging, imaginary money, and inadequate parking. All the animals, two by two and painted with the same spots, lined up straight to make it easier for the naked apes to eat them. Forests and fields stood the same height in tidy square plots free from pesky wild things, which might catch in the blades. Seasons, continents, any old time of day, all just a naked ape finger walk away. Even the magic words seemed to settle down into predictable formulae - steady like a pulse before a heart attack.
One day the naked apes, not content with their success in reducing the whole of their planet to standardized and dysfunctional pieces, turned their attention on themselves. Soon they worked out a way to reproduce themselves as exact copies. Now, it was hoped, not only would the world be the same as they’d known all along, but there’d be no new faces to tell them any different.
The naked apes tried to live happily ever after but, like all good fairy tales, this one ends badly.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
There can be no surprises for someone with a thousand eyes.
Hiding anywhere, on a plant, on a fly, in your mind, someone is watching always. In this case, from the vantage of a flat white circle of paint identical in shade to that surrounding, a million retinal molecular chips transmitting a bug-sight prism view down onto a desk so nondescript that it could belong to anyone. Projected into his mind’s eye through his neurovisor, Calvin30 spied on a Plain Man whom he, painfully, despised.
The Plain Man grimaced distastefully at the late time. He squeezed a sheet of paper from his desk up into a tight ball and tossed it into a waste bin where it joined some thirty of its fellows. A tremor of agitation was absorbed by the suspension of a chair that was slightly too big for its occupant.
The Plain Man stared along the unadorned walls of his office, where the shadows had long ago bled out to tint every surface the same shade of monotony. His thin brown fingers drummed an agitated tempo on the peeling veneer of his second-hand executive desk. The moron muttered.
“Ah, w-where
the hell is C30? The little bastard thinks he can fool me, does he? Ah shit. Why do I have to put up with this? Who does he think he is? Does he think I am going to take the fall on this? Ha. I’ve got him. I’ve got him this time. Uppity recopy. Ah, where the hell is he?”
The Plain Man vigorously scratched the back of his neck leaving long welts from his shoulder to his ears. The pain resulting from this habitual action seemed to provide some relief to his anxiety and he dug his fingernails in with greater ferocity on each pass.
Then, with renewed determination, the Plain Man focused his attention into his neurovisor. “Bonita,” he yelled into the over-conditioned air of his office, “Bonita.”
There was no response.
“Damn thing.” He tore away his neurovisor, breaking blood vessels and adding another layer of bruising to his forehead. “Ouch.”
The Plain Man regarded the wiggling tendrils of his visor with distaste as he twisted the stalks of the eye tracking axion back into place. A sparkle of laser light indicated that the device was once again operational, and the neurovisor roots again scrambled about looking for undamaged micro pores in the Plain Man’s skull. A succession of complicated contortions, accompanied by copious profanities, occurred as the Plain Man wrestled with the angry squid copulating his forehead. He struggled to gain the right angle to counteract by gravity the damage done to his machine, draping his corpulent carcass crossways across his desk and hanging his head down over the edge. From the bird's eye view the scene unfolded like a pantomime of shame.
Then, through triggering a cerebral toggle the Plain Man’s neurovisor allowed Calvin30 to dig beneath skin deep and take a more intimate peek into his quarries state of mind. With his synaptic connections finally renewed, the Plain Man composed himself, unaware that his neuroview now had room for two. A middle-aged, harsh faced woman with saffron and green dyed hair appeared floating in the view field.
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