Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets

by Kate Moretti

  Navigating infinite flows of unlimited information was a difficult skill to learn, but Gracie had been surfing data ever since her implant was installed. She loved the sensation and swore the data streams had a physical dimension. She spoke about the waves as if her hair were soaking wet and she could smell ozone in the air. Gracie had been born on the Bagdasarian, and she would die there, too. Barring miracles, Gracie would never see a planetary ocean or even a mountain stream, so she made her own adventures where she could. Hacking the Bagdasarian was her extreme sport.

  Gracie was in two places at once. Her fingers twitched, grasping and releasing the hem of her skirt. Her hips, heels, and shoulders jerked against her bunk. Her thoughts raced along the eternal data current, making tiny adjustments at critical switches and gates. She began to hum, dancing between myriad housekeeping routines, citizen queries, and personal messages. She noticed a chained conversation between two of her neighbors. Another day, she might have stopped to investigate, but she had somewhere to be.

  The Mystery Club lived in a private room that would never be found at the same address twice, or so its members claimed. Gracie wasn’t a member—only citizens could be members—but she wasn’t worried. The rules were for everyone else. She could find the Mystery Room whenever she wanted. Agatha was one of the one hundred twenty-eight women and men who had donated elements of Gracie’s genetic code. One hundred ninety years old, Agatha lived behind the waterfall but spent most of her days serving as a game master for the Mystery Club. Gracie would recognize Agatha’s signature anywhere, and she knew exactly where to look.

  She found the game master’s thoughts streaming out through the waterfall portal and piggy-backed a ride straight into the hidden heart of the Mystery Club. Looking around, examining the data, she realized she’d arrived in the middle of a massively parallel role-playing game, set on what she recognized as an early twentieth-century steam train. The Mystery Club elders were very fond of their trains, and everybody loved a traditional mystery. Gracie had no idea why.

  Georgie? She inserted a simple query into the local stack. Georgie, are you here? And why are we all so obsessed with stories that were told three thousand years ago? And what, in the names of all the distant stars, is the big deal about trains?

  Yes, I’m here, Georgie replied, where else would I be? This is a classic game. And these were the greatest stories ever told. The golden age of murder, mystery, and suspense.

  Gracie laughed. She couldn’t help it. Her friend loved the ancient mysteries. Okay, Georgie, I’m sold. Now come on. Where are you? Give me a clue?

  Translucent footprints appeared in front of her. She followed them along the corridor, striding past compartments full of avatars dressed in a variety of outlandish costumes. Searching the Verse as she walked, she realized some were authentic for the period and setting. Others were preposterous, of course. Humans of that era had never had two heads or more than the usual number of breasts.

  Curious, Gracie looked down. Her in-game avatar used a default wardrobe module and had selected clothes according to her mood. She was wearing black again—a black dress, black tights, and simple black shoes. She didn’t look out of place. No one would look twice.

  Two older men were standing by an open window, smoking—that habit had died out within a century of the story first being told. She thought she remembered them both from a previous mystery game about an elderly lady who had vanished from yet another train.

  As she walked, she wondered how many millions of citizens were playing the game today. How many iterations was the Mystery Club running, all at the same time? Thousands, she was sure. Tens of thousands. Did none of the players have anything better to do? Gracie knew the answer was no. The citizens of the Bagdasarian had a simple mission: stay alive and maintain a steady population. Their existence was a critical part of the post-war master plan to preserve the human race by dispersing people so widely across the universe that they could never come so close to destroying themselves again. Gracie understood and approved of the plan, but still, she wished there could be more to life.

  The footprints led her to a first-class bathroom. Gracie smiled and pinged it with her network ID. Once, twice, three times. The third knock was the charm. The door swung slowly inward and then disappeared, shattering into a silvery mist of antiquated zeroes and ones. As she watched, the countless numbers reconfigured her surroundings, constructing a facsimile of Georgie’s hospital room. Her friend’s avatar sat cross-legged on the bed, surrounded by replicas of all the equipment needed to keep her body alive.

  Nice effect, Gracie said. It wasn’t that good. The view through the porthole behind the bed was wrong. No light. No stars. No planetesimals. Georgie’s standards were slipping.

  Thanks, I worked it up especially for you. So, Birthday Girl, what’s up?

  The usual. You know, nothing much.

  Is that bitch Darcy still being a bitch?

  As they gossiped, they worked together to weave an impromptu firewall strong enough to protect their real conversation from any prying eyes—even from Rostom, they hoped. The original design had sprung from Gracie’s imagination, but Georgie had debugged it and added a host of new features, including a randomized encryption algorithm that keyed off the distance to a particular star.

  So, Georgie repeated when their firewall was complete. What’s up, buttercup?

  I’ve come across a mystery of my own. Nothing to do with trains. Or planes. But it’s got me… I don’t know… I could use your help?

  Well, of course. You know I love a good mystery. Tell me more.

  Gracie would never meet Georgie in real time and space. Her friend lived in a custom hospital aboard a tiny remora-yacht moored toward the far end of the ship. Georgie was comatose. She had been since before her yacht had arrived in search of a cure and locked on to the Bagdasarian. Her consciousness only existed in the Verse. Gracie didn’t understand how that was possible but accepted it was true. Georgie’s mind could not communicate with her own body, but thanks to her implant and tailor-made routines coded by Rostom himself, she had become a creature of the dataverse.

  You don’t need my help, she told Gracie when she had heard the story. You can work this out for yourself.

  She was right, of course. Gracie knew she could find ways to access every data stream in her neighborhood, but that would be no fun. Anyway she needed someone to work with, talk to, and bounce her ideas off. Life had become very lonely and long since all her old friends had become citizens and upgraded their implants. They had discovered an infinite world that Gracie couldn’t even see unless she hacked in.

  Please? It’ll be fun. She thought Georgie must be lonely, too.

  Well, I’ve played this game a dozen times already, I suppose.

  Is this that one, you know, with that funny Frenchman? Where they all…

  Hush, Gracie, please. The canon says that Frenchman was a Belgian, you know that. And you know the rules.

  She did. The first rule of Mystery Club: no spoilers.

  Back on her bunk, Gracie put their plan into action. After sending out a host of local queries, she implemented two additional firewalls and a self-propagating intruder alert before invoking her apartment’s makeover module. Something serious might have been happening, but that was no reason they couldn’t have fun, as well. When the room was ready, she fired off a coded message to her partner in crime. As soon as Georgie arrived, Gracie locked down all three firewalls tightly.

  “I love what you’ve done with the place,” Georgie said.

  “Thanks. It’s ever so humble, but it’s home.”

  She grinned at Georgie’s avatar.

  Georgie grinned back at her. “Where did you get this from?”

  Created only minutes earlier, the furniture was old, well-used, and heavy looking. They each had a battered wooden desk and matching swiv
el chair. Scruffy metal cabinets lined the walls. Seen from the outside, the letters etched into the window would read Digger and Bowman. Sunlight cast the same message down onto the floor.

  “I searched for Verse for something suitable. Digger and Bowman were famous private eyes.”

  Georgie grinned. “Yes, I know. So what do you have?”

  Georgie’s avatar spoke with confidence. Her tone said she was perpetually amused. Gracie couldn’t help but wonder how the real Georgie had talked. To ease that uncomfortable thought out of her head, she pitched an imaginary ball toward one wall. The data appeared in midair and flew into the screen, creating the image of a middle-aged man with a mop of angry white hair and an expression to match.

  “Meet Thorwald Burks,” she said. “And this is the apartment he’s been using.” She threw a second image up onto the wall—the building on the opposite side of the courtyard. Thorwald’s balcony was highlighted.

  “That’s where this mysterious light came from?” Georgie asked.

  “Yep.” Gracie nodded. Georgie’s avatar seemed so real. Gracie knew it was only a manifestation of latent energy shaped and maintained by Georgie’s consciousness, but it seemed to have a depth and denseness far beyond the norm. Even the scuffs on her scruffy green canvas shoes looked authentic. “So what do you think?”

  “I think we need to raid your neighborhood’s surveillance systems and see exactly what was going on.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that. If I get caught, I could be evicted.”

  Georgie smiled. “You can always live with me. There’s plenty of room.”

  On a remora-yacht? Gracie shuddered at the thought. The thousands of tiny crafts were decried as sinks of lawless depravity by all respectable citizens of the Rostom Sipan Bagdasarian. Events on remora-yachts fell outside the vessel’s legal jurisdiction, by Rostom’s own decree, and they had become the home of anti-social behaviors—prostitution, gambling, and all kinds of nonsense. Gracie had heard about a small community of travelers from Sinti-Manouche who made a very good living down on the underside, telling fortunes and selling potions to the gullible.

  Gracie wasn’t sure whether she was thrilled or terrified by the prospect of living on a remora-yacht. Either way, she wasn’t about to let her emotions show. “Why didn’t you say so before?” she joked. “There’s nothing I’d like more.”

  “In that case,” Georgie said, “we should get to work.”

  Operating on the data layer, Gracie injected all but her most sensitive access codes into Georgie’s public locker. “You take the interiors, and I’ll tackle the courtyard?”

  “Sure. Yeah. Why not?”

  Gracie focused her gaze on the toes of her own pink shoes. Georgie’s were green but, otherwise, remarkably similar. Not the first coincidence where the two of them were concerned. They frequently wore similar clothes. They almost always thought the same way. And even the day they’d met…

  A week after Darcy’s birthday, Rostom had given Gracie a ticket to a Mystery Club game. He said she needed something to take her mind off things. She didn’t disagree. The murder mystery had been set on a tiny propeller-driven plane. There were several thousand iterations of the plane in the game, but Gracie found herself sitting next to Georgie, to Georgie’s consciousness. What did these coincidences mean? Anything at all?

  Pushing aside the question, she closed her eyes.

  Moments later, a dim light came on in her mind, and Gracie shaped it into a detailed image of her room. She and Georgie were sitting at their desks. Very well-dressed statues. Mannequins. Eyes firmly closed.

  She was drawing the image from her own apartment’s monitors, interpreting and rendering the data. Although they were always assured otherwise, most people believed Rostom had access to the feeds. Most people believed Rostom watched everything—everywhere—all the time.

  As quiet as the mythical mouse, Gracie made her thoughts as small as the two-dimensional strings that bound the universe and eased herself with infinite care into the shielded conduits that served the closed-circuit monitoring system. Once she was in, she stopped. She played dead, waiting to see if any of the systems’ anti-virals would notice her micro-incursion. She readied her masking routines.

  After three full cycles of the Bagdasarian’s master cores, Gracie decided she was safe and snaked the merest shadow of the simplest idea deep into the security systems’ central data cache. It confirmed what she had expected: Rostom did have access to the feed. She didn’t dare interfere with the operational system but followed a thread that shouldn’t have existed from the heart of the cache into the outside Verse and all the way to the infinitely redundant data array that propagated itself throughout the vessel’s structure and transmitted constant updates to neighboring stars and craft. Humming to herself again, she spoofed an omni-query and retrieved a backup of all the data the neighborhood systems had recorded from the courtyard that afternoon.

  As she chased the stolen data out of the array, she sensed—or imagined—something watching her. An anti-viral? Another hacker? A ghost in the machine?

  When she opened her eyes, Georgie was waiting for her. “You got everything?”

  “I think so.”

  “Any problems?”

  “No… only…”

  “Yes?”

  “I thought there might be something there in the array…”

  Georgie’s avatar nodded. Gracie didn’t usually think about such things, but this avatar’s use of body language was exceptional. Of course, the interface had been developed by Rostom, and he was a master of every form of human communication, but the quality was uncanny, all the same.

  “You mean you felt it, too?”

  “I think so. A lurking? Like it’s always there, just beyond the corner of your eye?”

  Gracie felt a jolt of recognition. “Yes, exactly that.”

  “I felt it, too,” Georgie said. “Rostom, I’m sure.”

  “I know that’s the obvious answer. But if it was him, why didn’t he stop me?”

  “Who knows what an entity that powerful will do?”

  Gracie recalled a late night talk with Darcy. “You know,” her friend had said, “we laugh at the religious cults today—and fear the real crazies—but thousands of years ago, all human civilization was built upon the concept of true divinity, and they all prayed to something they called God.”

  “Yes, of course I know. I sat next to you in that class.”

  Darcy had laughed. “Yes, you did. I remember. But get this: most people today laugh at the concept of God, but really, what is Rostom if he isn’t ours?”

  Darcy had a point. Generations of citizens would be born and would die on the Bagdasarian before the civilization reached its destination. Rostom was the only constant.

  Gracie stared at Georgie’s avatar. “Seriously, you think he was there?”

  “I think he’s everywhere. Sees everything. I think he gives us chances to break his rules, then watches to see if we will. Laughs when we tell ourselves we’re outwitting him.”

  “You think we’re a game to the ship?”

  “Game? Experiment?” The avatar shrugged. “Lesser beings to be nurtured and protected? I can’t possibly know. How can anyone?”

  Georgie also had a point. Rostom was beyond all understanding.

  “Then what do we do?” Gracie asked.

  “Easy.” Georgie smiled. “We play to win.”

  Working as a team, they merged the stolen files into a streaming three-dimensional representation of Gracie’s afternoon. Georgie zoomed in hard on the balcony and froze the action at the first flash of light.

  “Look,” she said, “it’s coming from up there.” The avatar waved a hand, and a bright red dotted line traced the inbound beam back to a maintenance tender working high above the building on
a damaged mast. “And I don’t think that was deliberate. Whatever he was doing, Thorwald wasn’t signaling. There was no way he could control that light.”

  “You’re right,” Gracie agreed. “But what is he doing, and why?”

  “Let’s take a look inside,” Georgie said and spun the 3-D model. When it came to rest, they were looking at Thorwald from somewhere inside the apartment. “That isn’t a mirror. What is it?”

  Gracie seized the image of the tool in Thorwald’s hands and dispatched her favorite search engine routine. “Binoculars,” she said. “Also known as field glasses. Binocular telescopes.”

  Georgie nodded. She called up a definition: “A pair of identical or mirror-symmetrical telescopes mounted side-by-side and aligned to point accurately in the same direction, allowing the viewer to use both eyes when viewing distant objects.”

  “He was spying,” Gracie said. “Which doesn’t make any sense. He could have used any of the courtyard’s monitors.”

  “Unless,” Georgie continued, “he didn’t want anyone to know. Which”—she smiled—“is kind of implied by spying.”

  Gracie nodded. It was the only solution that made sense. She fired off two more queries while she thought about it.

  A pair of ancient binoculars had been stolen from the Reservoir Museum a week before.

  Thorwald Burks was a passenger, not a citizen. He had boarded two hundred days ago to lecture for a year in ancient Sandmoon history, legend, and lore. Mining all available sources of data, Gracie learned he was almost three hundred years old and a direct descendant of the man who’d led the uprising against the Holy Sandmoon dynasty. His lectures were payment for passage to the planet where his ancestor was rumored to have died.