Beautiful Red

by M. Darusha Wehm

  She lurked on the boards for a good fifteen or twenty minutes before asking a few questions about today's event. She got decent directions from the central train station and was told to ping a certain address when she reached a particular intersection. She logged out of the board and checked the time. She still had about half an hour before the train would arrive at its stop, so she brought up her museum interface and walked over the the main desk. She took a piece of stationery and began a message.

  Adrian,

  I've found some information about those things we were discussing earlier. I'm doing a little digging, but it's going to take awhile before I know for sure if I'm on the right track. I'll probably be out of touch until late tonight, but I'll talk to you tomorrow.

  Just wanted to keep you posted.

  J.

  Jack sent the message and refocussed on her physical surroundings. This train was more comfortably appointed than the intraurban lines she was accustomed to traveling on, but it wasn't quite comfortable enough to accommodate the hour and a half long trip. Jack felt some annoying numbness in her ass, which she hadn't noticed when she was online, but was now starting to make her feel restless. She shifted in her seat, trying not to jostle the people on either side of her. They were both still entirely online, though, judging from the vacant looks on their faces.

  Jack was now starting to become unnerved by that look, the "here in body but not in mind" stare. She remembered from her history classes in school that when the first implants were being done, many people were opposed to the whole concept. A lot of the arguments seemed completely ridiculous to Jack, as they now did to everyone who had grown up implanted at a young age. Looking around her now, though, Jack could imagine that for people who had never directly experienced the network, seeing this look on others would have been argument enough that the implants were a bad idea. She shook her head and shook these ideas out of her mind. There was a world of difference between reading messages, doing some work or playing a game while stuck on the train and the brainlessness that was the man in the streeters alley.

  The train began its negative acceleration, and most of the other passengers began to refocus to their surroundings. People began to shift, collect bags from beneath their seats and talk out loud to their traveling companions. Jack slung her small bag over her shoulders and cracked her neck. She got up and headed for the door, waiting there as the train stopped. Once the train had stopped moving, a chime sounded and the door dissolved. Jack stepped into the station, and immediately noticed that the air here smelled different. Jack had never physically left the city in which she had been born - physically traveling was not that big a deal when you could go anywhere in seconds just by closing your eyes and paging around a little.

  She never realized that things like the smell of the air or the way the roads curved would be any different anywhere else. For a moment she was frozen by the strangeness of this train station, its layout similar but different from the one she had at home. Then she got a hold of herself and realized that the physical world was still there, was still full of all those things that make places unique and her mood went from fear and confusion to happiness that there were still aspects of life that were natural and unexpected.

  She made her way through the station and out to the local train stop. She called up the directions she had been given and, as suggested, got on a train going to Northwinds. She was one of only a few other riders on this line, so was able to get a seat to herself. She looked out the windows as the train silently hovered above its magnetic track through the city. At a cursory glance, a person would be hard pressed to tell the difference between this place and Jack's home. Both cities were full of almost identical-looking tall buildings that housed apartments that were likely very similar to Jack's own room. In the city centre were even taller buildings owned by the firms.

  Every city had its ten or twenty firms, each firm having centres in up to fifteen cities worldwide. The companies agreed to certain terms, including providing law enforcement and funding minor civic upkeep like the pavement. The trains were run independently by a couple of firms, as were the utilities, schools and upgrade salons. But the most important utility, everywherenet, was controlled by a cartel of representatives of all the firms. Since they all needed it, none of the firms were willing to give up ownership to another, so they had to actually work together to keep it running, strong and free.

  It was raining and the light from inside the train shone on the drops that collected on the drab scene outside the train. It made the view look almost pretty, but Jack knew that in any city the most beautiful things were the bodies and faces of the fashionable people and the logos on the buildings' doors. It was no wonder everyone spent most of their time on the nets, in games, on the boards, interacting with other people they would never see in the flesh. Flesh that was mostly just a medium for enhancing a person's ability to interact on the nets, a conduit for implants, interfaces and inputs.

  Jack snapped out of her philosophical reverie and consulted her set of directions. Good thing, too, since her stop was coming up. She stepped to the door and, when it dissolved, she walked forward and turned left onto the street. The train slithered away, and Jack started walking toward her destination. It was still early in the afternoon, but the sun was not very strong here and it seemed dark even though there was more than enough visibility. The rain was still coming down, though lightly now, and as Jack walked along the street she wished she had paid the extra fee to bring her scooter on the train.

  She had the directions up and visible, as well as a connection to the underground boards. She was absently watching the conversations while checking the street signs as they flashed on as she approached the intersections. She reached the corner of Fifth and Summerdale, and dutifully pinged the address she had been given. Immediately she received a download of a map to the event. She put the map up in her vision and kept walking onward.

  As she neared the street where the event was taking place, she saw the board she had been monitoring flicker and then all conversations stopped, some in mid-thought. Jack had never seen that before, and she stopped, too. She brought the board up in full focus and tried to comment. Nothing. She paged to another board, which wouldn't even come up at all. She tried to bring up one of the other nets, and nothing happened there either. She pinged the address she had been given and waited. Waited. She had never waited for the answer to a ping. Finally after what seemed like an eternity she got back an error message she had never encountered before.

  "No route to host. Please check network connection."

  What the fuck is this? Jack had a bad feeling. She thought she knew what this meant, but that was impossible. She tried connecting again. Nothing. She brought up her emergency beacon, took a deep breath, and sent it out. She sent a message to every connected device within five kilometers indicating that she had an emergency. Everyone in the vicinity should be looking to see what was going on, out of curiosity or annoyance at the interruption at the very least. But there was nothing. She checked her logs, and saw that the beacon was not sent. She was offline. Really offline, though, not just taking a break. There was no network.

  She felt herself beginning to panic, and forced her breathing to slow down. She stood stock still and tried to make sense of this. She pulled up Network Monitor, a program that showed the strength of everywherenet. People who worked underground or in remote locations used it to make sure there was enough strength for high bandwidth transfers, but no one needed that sort of thing in a city. At least, Jack had never heard of anyone needing it before.

  She kept her focus on the monitor and started walking backwards very slowly. She saw a slow rise in the graph until it was at a constant high level. She had moved back about a metre. She quickly pinged a well known host and had no trouble. She brought up the monitor again and started walking slowly forward. She watched in dismay as the network connection decreased until it was gone completely. She kept walking and it stayed down. She crosse
d the street laterally and saw the network spike up again, but as soon as she returned to the other side, it flatlined back down.

  She brought up the map next to the monitor, and continued along its path. Still no network. She was starting to think that the coincidence was too unlikely, and wondered what she was getting herself in to. She had come too far to turn back, but without the backup of the nets, she wasn't sure that she had the courage to continue. She closed her eyes, turned off the visuals, and opened them again. She saw the street, uncovered by the ubiquitous information in her vision. She saw the cracks in the sidewalk, the discolouration of the metal in the walls. She looked up and saw the infinite varieties of grey making up the colour of the sky. She blinked a few times, took a deep breath and kept on moving.

  She had studied the map enough that she could almost still see it before her, even though her visuals were off. She knew that the door she wanted was one block up, on the left. A red door, with the number 17 above the transom. She heard music pulsing as she approached the area, and knew the door even before she saw its colour and number. She steeled her nerves, walked up to the door, and pushed.

  Chapter 13

  Jack found herself in a small vestibule before a locked metal grating at the bottom of a long, narrow, straight stairwell. A voice crackled from a speaker in the ceiling.

  "There's network here. Upload the map you were given so we can confirm the checksum."

  Jack drew a deep breath and turned her system on. She was, indeed, online, though the signal was weak. She found that an address had been sent to her, and she replied with a copy of the map. The upload seemed to take forever, but almost immediately as soon as it was done a buzzer sounded and the grating in front of her swung open. Jack walked up the stairs, jumping as the grate behind her clanged shut. She checked the monitor to discover the already weak signal getting weaker with each step she took. By the time she reached the top of the staircase, she was offline again.

  She turned left at the top of the stairs, and was first greeted by a large image showing herself from a few minutes ago when she was standing at the bottom of the stairs. The quality of the imagery couldn't touch what she got from her micro recorders but its graininess only served to make the situation more unnerving. Jack looked around and noticed the recorder near the speaker. The image on the viewer jumped to show the now empty stairwell.

  Jack walked into the main entrance, and saw a room to her left with a few people milling around several viewers and whole lot of cables. On her right was a table with snacks and drinks, a couple of people sitting behind the table talking to the guests, and a couple of viewers behind them. Jack moved to the room to her right and noticed that the viewers in this room were showing images of the goings on in the other room.

  She walked up to the table, and took a beer. She wasn't taking any chances, and made sure it was unopened. "Hi," she said to the two people behind the table, "I'm b0xenjester." She gave the identity she had been using on the outlaw boards. It felt strange to say the word aloud; it had been many years since she had said that name.

  "Nice to meet you," the man on the left said. "They call me mojo, and this is lafayette," he said, turning to the woman on his right. lafayette smiled, and said, "The stuff is all free," pointing to the drinks and snacks, "but we'll be taking donations for the work later on." She grinned disarmingly, and Jack smiled back.

  "But, uh," Jack said, not wanting to seem stupid, but legitimately unsure, "how?"

  The two at the table laughed, and mojo said to the woman next to him, "We really ought to put up signs or something at these events."

  lafayette nodded, and turned to Jack saying, "You know how you uploaded the map in the stairwell?" Jack nodded. "Well, we have nodes that can create a localized wireless access point to our network. We'll turn one on when it's time to hit everyone up for money." She winked and Jack found herself smiling in spite of herself. The pair seemed friendly enough, and Jack knew that they almost certainly were not the people responsible for Estella Rowan and the man from streeters' alley. But, she needed to remain focussed on why she was here. It wasn't to meet new and interesting people. It was to find her way to the people who were responsible for that atrocity.

  Still, she knew that if she was going to get any information from this event, she had to get along with the group here. She grinned at the duo and said, "I guess that's pretty obvious now that I think of it. So, where's a good place to start?"

  "We've got examples of some of our more recent actions hanging in the gallery," mojo said, and gestured with a flick of his head, "that's the next room."

  "And later we'll be screening some work from other chapters," lafayette added, "and talking a little bit about the philosophy of the group. It's always great to see new people interested in our work." She sounded genuinely interested in sharing her vision, whatever that might be. Jack thanked them, helped herself to a beer and suggested that they might talk later. She moved on as a couple of new arrivals took her place at the table.

  She sipped her beer and wandered around the room she was in. It appeared to be a working space for the group, some kind of art studio or machine shop. There were piles of random electronics, the kind you would find on a streeter's sidewalk rug, and cables snaked over the floor, up the walls and through the ceiling. There was what appeared to be a half-built drone, though it did not seem to have any disk or silicon built in yet. Perhaps it was supposed to be a statue. Jack was having a hard time deciding if the group thought of itself as a low-tech engineering cult or an artistic collective.

  She made her way down the only corridor in the place, and found her way to the washroom. She sat on the toilet, put her head in her hands, and tried to figure out what she was doing there. After a moment or two, she used the facilities, ran some cool water over her face, and returned to the main room. Along her way she noticed blankets, pillows and stacks of dishes in discrete piles in that back area of the studio. She couldn't tell for sure how many people must be living there, but it was more than two or three. As she moved into the main room, she wondered what that was like, living off-network and in such close quarters with other people.

  By now a few more guests had joined the gathering and were milling around the room. She was going to have to interact with the others at some point but she wasn't sure how to strike up a conversation with the other people in attendance. A very pretty androgynous looking person in a glowing green overcoat solved that problem by clutching at Jack's sleeve and gushing, "It's such interesting work, don't you think?"

  Jack answered that it was, and asked her new friend what was it about the work that was most fascinating. "Oh, for me it has the be the interplay between the complexity of technology and the simplicity of the performance," the critic said, clutching Jack's sleeve more desperately, "what is it for you?"

  "I, uh, I'm not as… familiar with the work," Jack fumbled, "I really only heard about the group recently from a friend who suggested it might be something I would enjoy."

  "Really?" Jack's companion said, leaning in toward her. Jack could smell a light dusting of perfume that she was sure was laced with pheromones coming from beneath the overcoat. Jack would have to watch herself around someone so obviously into attraction. "Oh, you'll love the work. Let me show you the gallery."

  "Thank you" Jack said, deftly removing the hand from her sleeve. "I'm called b0xenjester."

  "Oh, silly me," her guide said, "call me Phoenix." It came out as if the word had extra syllables somehow, the breath expelled directly toward Jack's ear. She was being played, and she knew it. Still, a source of information was a source of information. And Phoenix was terribly attractive, even if it was disturbingly obvious that the attraction was a creation of a clever salon. Jack let Phoenix guide her into the other room, the "gallery".

  There were more people in here, talking and looking at the exhibits. There were several viewers showing examples of "the work" as well as still images framed on the walls and hanging from the high ceiling. Behind
the exhibits, the walls had been painted in several colours with slogans and tags, the painting happening over time and in layers. Every square millimetre of wall had been graffitied several times over. It made an interesting and appropriate backdrop to the work on display.

  "This is one of my absolute favourites," Phoenix breathily said, steering Jack to a still image on the wall. It showed several members of what Jack assumed was a Red chapter, half of them wearing gear that entirely covered their heads, made of goggles, cables and microphones, the other half looking like normal members of the public. The normal looking ones wore shirts reading BEFORE, the mechanized people wore shirts reading AFTER. They were all arranged outside a prominent upgrade salon, smiling for the image as if they were in some firm's news story.

  "It was one of the first pieces," Phoenix explained, "and the salon tried to arrest the group. Of course, they couldn't pay any fine at all, so they had nothing to lose," Phoenix laughed, the sound like a feather up and down Jack's spine. "But they didn't get anywhere anyway. Artistic expression still counts for something, god damn it." Jack smiled, recognizing a common political discussion on some of the boards - where does art fit into modern society, what business value does it bring and who pays for it? Jack usually stayed away from such obvious political discussion, but she suspected that this type of question was at the core of this group's work.

  "I know," she vaguely agreed. "That's some piece." Phoenix smiled, and led Jack to the next installation. This was an action piece on a viewer, and Jack took the seat Phoenix found for the two of them. Phoenix's right hand strayed over to Jack's left knee, and stayed where it landed. Jack let it be for the time being.