Cyber Sparks

by Robert Appleton

  “Oh, shit, shit, shit.”

  What on earth could I do? No matter how many of these clips were doctored or fabricated to make the protagonist look like me, I recognized at least some of them as being absolutely genuine. If I paid, this bastard might blackmail me a second time, ask for even more money. If I reported it, he’d ruin me professionally forever. Hell, he might release the videos even if I did pay, just for the hell of it.

  I imagined his user profile image with his face smashed and bloody, then wrenched my omnipod off and dropped it on the settee beside me. Shaking, I sank my face into a cushion and tried to burrow into obscurity—a dark, untouchable place where time and warm isolation expunged even the worst parts of reality.

  But there was no such place. Not now, not with the all-permeating disease of podnet piracy working on my immune system. I leaped up and shut the blinds—were these fucking voyeurs watching me through the window?—and started up the grav track. The next half hour of exercise was the most punishing of my life. Rocket fuel coursed through my blood as I pictured what I’d do to that Italian swine if I ever got my claws on his pig skull.

  Then…I started to laugh. Insensibly. Maniacally. After jumping off the conveyer and wheeling straight into my open closet, I saw the whole bizarre scheme for the small and petty thing it really was.

  I’d just been spammed.

  How else could the message have appeared so quickly in my inbox unless it was pre-packaged bullshit designed to prey on my public image should I ever log on to the podnet? Did all vaguely famous people go through crap like this when they linked up with their omnipods? It was feeble really. Fifty grand to prevent something from becoming public when it must already be public. If a suck-bait spammer was peddling this stuff, the whole galaxy had probably seen it by now.

  I don’t know why that comforted me but it did. Perhaps it was because there was no toxic genie waiting to be unleashed. It was already out there, the worst over.

  That was usually when the world cocked its leg up on you.

  * * *

  “I’m so sorry, Allie. It’s a smear campaign.” Lenore’s stitched brow made me want to dash across town and comfort her instead. The dim holo-screen rendered her image fuzzy. A few hours had passed since I’d received the blackmail spam message, and talking to Lenore had done wonders for my peace of mind. Not for hers, but definitely for mine. “I didn’t even need to do any digging. This thing is nuts,” she said. “The rich bitch spared no expense in finding every crumb of dirt on you across all the inner colonies. Everywhere you’ve ever visited. Tandy had teams of tech pricks combing years’ worth of video. All to bring you down. But she screwed up somewhere, or one of her tech guys blabbed, because everyone knows it was her who leaked it.”

  “Well that’s something, at least. It’s a bit late now, though. The hate’s gone viral.”

  To say the e-bees clamored for my e-pollen did not do justice to the persistence of insects. On my first day of omni life, users swarmed to my downfall or my defense in truly startling numbers, reflected in the percentage of genuine or troll messages—about a thirty-seventy split, according to a tech friend of Lenore’s. This thing had been brewing on the podnet for a couple of days, ever since Tandy had smeared me in such spectacularly illegal fashion.

  Hell hath no fury like an heiress bitch-slapped on live TV.

  “You could sue her any number of ways if you could ever prove it,” Lenore said. “The thing is, you’d be suing her daddy as well.”

  “I’ll see what Rudy comes up with. But this whole thing’s gotten insane beyond that. A load of those initial messages were spammers trying to get me to do something or else. It’s like a goddamn extortion industry. Tell me the worst is over now.”

  “Let’s hope so.” She pinned me with her best Disney princess gaze, impossibly big eyes rapt and borderline weepy, for my sake, her flushed face angled to somehow beckon me through the screen. “Should I come over?” she asked.

  “Sure, Lenore.” The human brain’s top reaction time was about a tenth of a second. I could tell you the heart’s was instantaneous. “I’ve got a quick errand to run, but I’ll be back in thirty…twenty.”

  She blew me a kiss. “See you then, sweetie.” The screen blinked to black, and I almost tripped over my own feet on the way to the bedroom. Lenore had never visited my apartment, probably because there’d been no need—we’d racked up more holo-phone time than a rich hypochondriac and his doctor, and our shopping excursions had seemed, well, enough on the face-time score.

  So much had gone unsaid on my part that it had often become exhausting to be around Lenore. Through even the most svelte and expensive perfumes, the smells of brand new fabrics and shampoos and all other manner of cosmetic distractions, one’s mind subconsciously discerned the natural scent of a desired lover. It was something consistent, under the conscious radar, that evolution had wrought into the most successful perfume line of all time. Wars and dynasties and movie queues and tacky e-cards alike had been created under its influence, and Lenore Reichert, for me, sublimed a particularly potent dose.

  Being around her was a balm, moment by moment, but as soon as my mind wandered ahead even a fraction, I saw her hook up with someone who would take her away from me, permanently. Then I’d rush to the dog-eared speech I’d redrafted a million times and practiced to the mirror, the one that told her exactly how I felt. How I’d always felt since our first holo-shoot on Liberty Island, when the heating had packed in and we’d both frozen our asses off while a pretentious artiste photographer had had us strike more poses than a Harryhausen figurine. We’d giggled together, developed an instant shorthand repartee, mocking the suck-bait lenser with every bump of our goosed flesh in New York’s autumn wind.

  Yep, it was safe to say I’d loved Lenore from that day. But for some reason, telling her had been rather like trying to post a house through a letterbox—one way or the other, the doorway ended up blocked. I’d always been terrified of losing what we had, and I think she had too. If only I’d known for sure. Call it emotional shallowness, experience, lunkheadedness, whatever, but to my knowledge, love affairs between fashion models never lasted more than a season or two. Like Mum and Dad before me, we were doomed to fizzle apart forever once we took it to the next level. Despite all the intimacies we’d shared as friends, all the deep secrets, Lenore and I had never quite found our way out of the neurotic labyrinth that grew taller, more overgrown the longer two people settled in that twilight world between friends and lovers.

  Unrequited love and hope was probably the strangest diet the heart could endure. The former ate away at you, the latter was eager to feed it; and if you endured it for long enough, you could feel the pangs echoing around that hollowed-out place where love still bit but there was nothing left to feed it. So it moved on to other, deeper places—potential futures, self-worth, the saddest ventricles of regret.

  When it bit hardest, you wanted to either kill the object of your longing, kill yourself, or at least get the fuck away from it all and never see her again. But you didn’t. You stayed, you lingered, you hated and loved yourself for being able to spend time with the girl of your dreams; you hated and loved her for letting you spend time with her; and whatever you did, you were stuck performing Juliet and Juliet without the declarations. Deaths enacted nightly, with welcome finality. Morning lifted the cruelly hopeful curtain once more.

  There was no escaping a wound like that; there were only distractions between aches. Maybe that was why omnipods became so popular. Those fantasy hyper-realities, where folk could paint the world the way they thought it should be, must have been a pretty great distraction from their woes. Their lack of fulfillment.

  Which brings me to the genuine wonders of omniying.

  Yeah, I know what you’re thinking; being spammed by a horde of rabid users should have put me off the experience for good. But there was another side
to the omnipod that I discovered before the viral blackmailing fiasco and continued to explore afterward. Several rather awesome sides, in fact.

  On my way to the mobile sky market that hovered over my building between 1:00 and 4:00 every afternoon—I needed some Malibu, Lenore’s favorite drink—I wore my omnipod without the communal uplink. The pre-set preferences Reggie’s gizmo had drawn for me proved spectacular. Boring wall colors became vibrant and boasted decorative patterns that didn’t exist in reality. The stairwell’s permanent strong smell of detergent had vanished—it hinted instead at buttercups and new-mown grass. The banister, normally cold and metallic, now felt as snug in my grip as warm velvet. And when I reached the roof, the dour gunmetal sky between passing wheel spokes was instead a tropical sunset filled with the distant native beat of island beach music. Hell, even the pigeons dropped pink poop.

  It was hard to relay the strangeness of it, the not-quite-dreaming unreality of a world so pleasantly out of sync. As Reggie had said, my subconscious was coloring in the new omni schematics of reality. It was a kind of substitution process. Shifts in color, smell, texture, ambience—an infinite combination of variables the omniyer could tweak to get the most out of her day.

  You could go absolutely bugnuts with it if you wanted—draw yellow polka dots on everything, recreate Atlantis in the public toilets, substitute celebrity faces on anyone wearing an omnipod, make everything, even the air you breathed, taste like chocolate—but tweaking was the best and safest feature of omniying. Once you got used to the surreality, manipulating the world around you became ridiculously fun. If you let it, it could also become a full-time addiction, but the tutorial warned you about that. It said to use in moderation.

  Yeah, sure. They made you God, then they expected you to stick to the handbook?

  The pilot waved down at me from behind his counter, spilling a few groceries. Boris, I think his name was—an Eastern European guy with dark stubble and sunken eyes. I waved back, and with him in my crosshairs, whispered into my omnipod, “Make him a lobster.” His skin instantly turned bright red-orange, and his words became clicking sounds, as though a lobster were scuttling over rocks. I had to laugh.

  When it was my turn, I switched the omni filters off so I could safely climb the steps to the counter.

  “Hello, Miss Mondebay. What can I do for you?”

  “Hey, man. I’ll just have a bottle of Malibu and some of those crispy twiglets—the fat-free ones.”

  No sooner had he turned to get them than my inner ear began to itch. The sensation flared, really bugging me, but it was too deep for me to do anything about.

  “Allegra, do not adjust your headset. This is not a podnet signal. I have been monitoring your uplink and your user profile ever since Scheherazade’s. The first time you heard my voice was in a looped transmission, and I have decided to contact you personally, so that we might become better acquainted. It is important, not just for you and I but for the whole of humanity on Earth.”

  “Stop! Who are you?” The voice still sounded vaguely familiar, if more synthesized than last time.

  “You can call me Satto Vasir. I think we should meet. Tell me, are you still rated to pilot a shuttle cab?”

  “What? How did you—”

  “It is in your dossier, Allegra. I know everything about you, and I think we can help each other.”

  “Oh? How exactly?”

  “The Tandy Semprica problem for one. I can’t explain properly until we meet face-to-face. This signal is encrypted but it is not one-hundred-percent secure, not while you are on the planet’s surface.”

  “So you want me to fly a shuttle cab into orbit? For a chinwag? Tell me something, Satto Vasir, are you freaking smogged?”

  “No.”

  “So what do you… Aw, crap, he’s coming back. We’ll have to talk later. Whoever the hell you are, call me back in a few hours and if you don’t explain everything then, you can go screw a live wire. Get me?”

  “I understand. I will contact you again in precisely three hours.”

  Boris kindly threw in a free multi-dip for the crispy twiglets, then flirted with me a little. Sweet guy, he seemed embarrassed when I didn’t take him on, but I was distracted. No, in semi-permanent shock was more like it—ever since the bank palaver the previous morning, my equilibrium had taken more hits than a one-legged quarterback.

  I returned to my apartment, tidied up a little, picked out one of those old pop albums Lenore liked—Tom Jones—and changed into a casual silk two-piece that said, intimate if you want it, best pals if you don’t.

  I buzzed her up over ninety minutes later, which was far too long for Lenore, whose reputation for punctuality at Semprica was matched only by her (wrongly) perceived bubbleheadedness. When I opened the door, she fell sobbing into my arms, sans omnipod. Poor girl could barely string two words together without breaking into tears.

  “Jesus, Lenore, what’s happened?” I held her tight, stroked her auburn locks. I’d never known her to shake like this.

  “I-I don’t know what I did…w-what I’m gonna do. Just hold me. I want to die.”

  Imagine the chirpiest, perkiest, most fragile ray of sunshine you’ve ever met, and picture her being beat on until she loses all semblance of light. Lenore wasn’t just my best friend, she was the sweetest, most guileless woman in all D.C., and seeing her reduced to despair like this—it crushed my heart. Made me want to punish the world for letting this happen to one of its true innocents.

  I held her in the doorway while she shivered and sobbed and kept repeating the same two words under her breath. “They can’t. Oh, they can’t. Please…tell me they can’t.”

  “Can’t what, sweetheart? Tell me what’s happened.” I led her gently to the settee, stacked a few cushions and helped put her feet up so she could curl up if she wanted. She pulled me down beside her, and we curled up together, just lying there.

  When she finally spoke, the words were flat and beaten. “She’s doing it to me, too, Allie.”

  My eyes lashed wide, my fists clenched when I realized who the “she” referred to.

  “Tandy?”

  “Uh-huh. She gave me an ultimatum. It’s…it’s…oh, this is the worst day of my life.” She sat up, clasped my hands in hers, and started sobbing again. “She said if I’m ever seen with you after today, she’ll make sure I never model again.”

  “Eh? She’d fire you from Semprica?” How evil is that bitch?

  “Worse. She’d use all her resources and contacts to make sure I never got another modeling job in the inner colonies. Ever! Allie, I’d die if that happened. This is the only thing I ever wanted to be. She can’t do that, can she? Promise me she can’t do that.”

  Of all the WTF moments I’d encountered in modeling across the inner colonies, this one had to take the high-carb. For sheer vindictiveness, Tandy Semprica knew no bounds, and as we’d already witnessed, she had the resources and the gall to go through with any Gorgon plot that writhed through her mythic abyss of a brain.

  “She can do that, Lenore, but she won’t. Not ever. Do you know why? Because we’re going to play along for a while. She doesn’t want us to be seen together? Well we won’t, at least not in person, not for a while anyway. She wants to play games. Who plays better than two hot chicks who strike sexy poses for a living? We’ll play along, secretly chat to our hearts’ content over the podnet, and in the meantime we’ll figure some way to bring this queen bitch down by her saggy tits. Sound good?”

  She looked away, wiped a few tears onto her sleeve, then scrunched her face up ready to sob again. “But Allie, I’d rather die than not see you anymore. You’re my…my best friend in the world.”

  “Aw, come here you.” I kissed her forehead, then her lips—gentle, reassuring, nothing more. In truth, I had nothing left. “Best friends, you bet.” Selfishly, I’d hoped for more�
��far more—but it wasn’t to be. Not now.

  Maybe never.

  “We’ve gotten through stickier spots than this,” I reminded her. “What about that freezing gig on Mars? Only four girls escaped pneumonia, four out of twenty-seven. You, me, Romanova, and what was the other chick called, the one from Magmalava?”

  “Billicole.”

  “Yeah, Billy goat, that’s right. How prepared was she? Man, she had enough fur coats to thaw Europa.”

  I was relieved to hear Lenore’s girly tinkle. “Even her corset had hair.”

  “Ha! Yeah, bitch had to shave to undress. That was a dicey time, though, wasn’t it? What was that place called? Rupert something?”

  “Rupes Tenuis, near the Martian North Pole.” She gave a sigh. “Do you remember how we kept warm?”

  “You mean apart from the Abominable Snow-woman and her corset? Yeah, I do. Shared body heat, straight out of the survival manual.”

  “We should have done that more often, Allie. I liked it.”

  “Me too.”

  “Yeah?”

  Right then, I’d had enough of tiptoeing around us. Vulnerable or not, this might be the closest Lenore ever got to saying what I wanted, needed to hear. “Yeah, it was like having a hot water bottle pressed against…” That sounded nine hundred percent more dopey than I’d intended. Quick, recover before the moment’s gone. “I mean yeah, more than you know.”

  Lenore tried her best to suppress a smile but wound up with a goofy, tremulous smirk. It didn’t seem like her at all, and being an obtuse dimwit, I didn’t read into it. It’s the shock of that ultimatum catching up with her, I thought.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “Things. A job.” I was dying for her to add, “Me.”

  “See what I can find. Rudy’s bound to come up with something job-wise. You were right what you said about this podnet crap—being seen naked never finished anyone’s career, especially not a model’s. I’ll just have to not think about it, about what’s out there.” I shuddered. “What matters is I’ve still got the right stuff, eh?”