by Eric Brown
“You don’t. The pin is integral to the implant.”
“But the mind-noise!” he protested.
That blade-thin smile again, laughing at him. “There’s no mind-noise, Jeff. No subliminal white noise, no background hum to drive you schizo.”
“How?”
She raised a forearm, indicating the handset that encompassed her wrist like a splint. She tapped a key on the set. “When I want to read, I simply turn the implant on from here. There. I’m reading.” She cocked her head. “I’m picking up Lazlo’s thoughts out there. The bastard’s wondering if he stands a chance with me. Thinks I’m not bad, for a geriatric. You... you’re shielded.”
She stabbed the button, silencing her secretary’s fantasies. “Enough of that.”
Vaughan stared at her. “And now you’re getting no mind-noise? Not the slightest hum?”
“Nothing. Nada. Silence.” She slipped from the edge of the desk and reseated herself in the swivel chair, staring at him over laced fingers. “So once I read up about the latest implants, I decided I wanted one. I mean, the only line of work I knew was security, and who’d employ an ex-telehead? A deadhead?”
“Tell me about it.”
“The Rio implants don’t come cheap, Jeff. I had to pay nearly fifty thousand dollars for this gadget...but it allowed me to set up the agency, got me where I am today.”
He watched her.
She said, “You know what I’m asking?”
He nodded. His gaze slid through the viewscreen. He watched the passing underbelly of a void-freighter rumble overhead, perhaps a hundred metres from the edge of the Station.
“And?” she pressed.
He made a decision. “I’m not interested, Lin. Thanks, but I can’t do it.”
“No mind-noise,” she said. “You finish reading, turn off the implant, and silence.”
He shook his head. “It’s not that... I just don’t want to read again, period. I don’t want to get into heads I’d rather have nothing to do with.”
“You’d rather bury your head in the sand, Jeff?”
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
“Know what I think?”
“What do you think?”
“I think,” she said, “that you’re so wrapped up in marital harmony, so in love, so happy with the tiny life you’ve managed to eke out with your cute Thai ex-call-girl, that you’re frightened of reading again.”
“Bullshit!”
“You’re frightened of all the uncertainty out there. Frightened that it might make you question the certainty of everything you’ve got.”
He was shaking his head in denial, but Kapinsky was clever.
Lately, he’d looked at his life, his happiness, circumscribed by so little—a woman he loved, the prospect of the baby—and he’d experienced an obscure feeling of guilt. He was so damned happy, and the world out there was such a cesspool, but he’d turned his back on it and satisfied himself with his small, personal world, Sukara and a few friends, holo-movies and the occasional restaurant meal... and thoughts of his unborn daughter.
Maybe Kapinsky was right.
The fact remained, he’d turned his back on the old life, and he was happy. There was no way he was going to sacrifice that.
Kapinsky said, “Seven thousand baht a month, guaranteed, Jeff. Know what that’d get you? A two-room apartment on the outer edge, Level Two, with a couple of kay left over for bills and a good lifestyle.” She accosted him with her flick-knife smile. “Where you living now, Jeff?”
He held her gaze. “Trat, Level Ten.”
“Ten? Jesus Christ, Jeff. Level Ten? Come on, pal, that’s the pits. Don’t tell me, Harijan beggars and Tata factory workers, no?”
“I’m happy.”
She let the silence stretch, watching him. “Something I haven’t told you, Jeff. Think about this. That seven thousand, that’s basic. You know what the cops are paying me, per successful case?”
“Surprise me.”
“Twenty thousand baht. I get roughly six jobs a month from the department, and my success rate is running at five out of six right now. We’d work cases together, and you’d get ten per cent of all solved crimes. Work it out.”
He nodded. “Some carrot. Ten thousand baht a month?” His pulse, despite himself, quickened at the thought.
“Ten kay on top of your seven basic. You could live like a Brahmin, Jeff.”
He was pulling in two thousand baht a month at the moment, working long shifts refuelling at the ‘port.
“One question,” he said
“Sure. Fire away.”
“Why me?”
“Because, Jeff, I know you. I know you’re good. Dependable. And it looks to me, pal, like you could use the break.”
“Lin Kapinsky, the altruist? Why does that sound phoney?”
She shrugged. “I’m no altruist. I work hard for number one. I get what I want. You’d be an asset to the agency.” She stopped, regarding him. “Look, I’ve made my offer. Go home, to your tenth level dive among all the Indian dregs, talk it over with wifey, and see what she says to an upper level suite, okay?”
Vaughan stood and moved to the door. “Thanks for calling me, Lin. Sorry to have wasted your time.”
Her ironic smile was out again, sharpening itself on his denial, as he stepped through the door with a feeling of relief.
He walked the relatively uncongested corridors to the nearest dropchute station, then descended to Level Ten. He caught a shuttle into the very heart of the Station, the train passing street after street thronged with a continually moving press of humanity. Twenty-five million citizens lived on Bengal Station, more than a million to a level, swarming like ants in a formicary.
The shuttle was packed with factory workers, tiny Indians rocking with the motion of the carriage, tired after a long day’s shift. Vaughan thought of the mind-noise he’d be picking up from them, if he were still implanted.
But an implant that could be switched off, together with an opportunity to earn seventeen thousand baht a month?
His apartment was situated down a dark corridor patrolled by beggars and the halt and lame waiting to be admitted to the nearby hospital. Vaughan ran the gauntlet of proffered hands—and a few ill-carpentered stumps—before making it home.
Home... The amazing thing was that, over the year they’d lived here, they had made it home, or rather Sukara had. She’d bought gaily coloured Thai wall hangings and, in pride of place on the far wall, a massive holo-scene. It showed a Thai beach: a stretch of sand and a lapis lazuli lagoon, with people strolling along the sands. The holo was randomly programmed with near infinite variation. It gave the cubby-hole the illusion of space; he felt he could step through the wall and onto the sundrenched island.
Sukara was in the kitchen, fixing coffee, when he slipped in and embraced her, his hands finding the prominent bulge of her belly. As if in response, his daughter-to-be turned, sending a ripple across the distended skin.
Sukara laughed and turned to kiss him.
“Love you,” he whispered into her hair. “Done much?”
“Paid bills. Seen my health worker. Everything A-okay, Jeff.”
She carried two mugs of South Indian coffee into the cramped lounge and sat beside him on the settee. She lodged her bare feet on his thighs and sipped her coffee, staring at him with her massive eyes over the rim.
He could sense the unspoken question on her hidden lips.
He looked around the room. It was grim. Despite Su’s best efforts—or perhaps because of them—the basic run-down state of the place was apparent: cracks in the plastic walls, a fungal stain on the ceiling. Every time the shuttle drew into the station a hundred metres away, the room rattled like the command module of a phasing voidship. Between times, the Choudris next door kept up a running commentary on the state of their disintegrating marriage.
Sukara said, “You?”
“Highlight of the day was filling a ship in from Vega,” he smiled.
<
br /> “So... nothing came of the job offer?”
He hesitated. She’d understand, if he explained to her. She wasn’t materialistic. She was stoic, and never complained. She had him, and the baby, which was more than she’d ever had before.
But, he told himself, she could have a hell of a lot more.
“Su, I’ve been offered a job bringing in around seventeen thousand a month. It’s mine if I say yes.”
She watched him, silent, blowing on her coffee. At last she said, “But you don’t want the job, right?”
“Hell... It’d mean being implanted, Su. I’d be reading again, working for an investigative agency.”
She lowered her cup. “I don’t want you to live with all that noise,” she said, “not even for seventeen thousand a month.”
“That’s just it,” he said. “There’d be no mind-noise.” He told her about the latest Rio implants.
A long silence stretched when he’d finished speaking. Sukara was nodding slowly, saying nothing. He felt a sudden, almost overwhelming surge of love for her, this woman who loved him, who put no pressure on him to do what he didn’t want to do. She would reconcile herself to an existence of near poverty, shut out thoughts of a life topside, all for him.
How could he deny her a little luxury, merely because he feared reading corrupt and jaded minds again?
He said, “So, there’d be no mind-noise. Hey presto, I’d just switch off the implant, come home, forget the case I’m working on.”
She was staring at him, hardly daring to smile. “You mean you’re going to...?”
“What do you think?”
“Jeff!” She put her coffee aside and pressed her palms to her cheeks. “Seventeen thousand baht a month?”
“We’d get a place on Level One or Two. You’d be able to take Li for walks in Himachal Park.”
“We’d be able to leave this place!”
He smiled at her glee. “So... should I go for it?”
She stared at him. “Jeff, can you take all that pain again, reading all those minds?”
He smiled. “Sure I can.”
She looked at him, wide-eyed.
He hugged her. “Get changed,” he said. “Let’s go out for a meal. Somewhere exclusive and expensive where we haven’t been before.”
She clapped her hands. “Ruen Thai, Level One?”
“Why not?” He watched her dance from the lounge and into the bedroom, and smiled as she began singing a Thai folk song.
He lifted his handset and traced Kapinsky’s code from her call to him earlier that day.
Seconds later her thin face peered out. “Jeff? Been thinking things over?”
He nodded. “Long and hard.” He considered explaining himself, telling her that he was doing it for Su, as if to excuse his climb-down. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that. He was big enough to let Kapinsky make her own guesses about his motivations.
“When do I start?” he said.
“Good man,” Kapinsky said, and the weapon of her smile hit him, and twisted.
* * * *
TWO
GOODBYE LEVEL TWENTY
Pham had two burning ambitions. The first was to have a proper family—to have a loving mother and father, and maybe even a brother or sister. The second was to see real daylight for the first time in her life.
Well, her first ambition was more of a dream. She knew she’d never have a real family ever again. She was a seven-year-old girl with no money and no education, so who would want her? Her second ambition, to see the genuine light of day, was not that difficult to achieve.
In fact, she was setting out today on a big adventure to see the sun and the upper levels and all the marvellous things she’d heard about up there.
She sat on her bunk and sorted through her few possessions. She had a plastic comic book, a map-book of Bengal Station, a blanket, a carved wooden Buddha, a comb, a new tablet of soap in a plastic box, a change of clothes, and a creased pix of her mum and dad.
Her most treasured possession was a teddy bear backpack, into which she placed all her belongings one by one. When she got to the pix, she held it in her hand and looked down at the strangers who stared out at her. She could recall very little of them, her mother holding her after a fall, her father drinking beer and shouting at the holo-screen in their Eighteenth level apartment. Pham had been four when they died in a dropchute accident. She didn’t like to think of that day, when a cop explained to her what had happened, and she had thought of her mother and father, falling and falling and knowing that they were going to die...
She had lived on the streets for a month before meeting a bunch of kids who said they had good jobs working in a factory on Level Twenty, and that the factory owner was always looking for more workers.
Pham didn’t like the sound of a factory on the bottom level, but she was hungry. She’d eaten only a stale chapatti and a rotten apple in two days.
So she had found herself being led into a big, steamy room full of clanking machinery and sweating boys and girls in underpants and nothing else.
A fat man called R.J. Prakesh sat behind his desk and questioned her, and then with a smile asked her if she would like to work for him.
Pham had said yes, if he would feed her.
Laughing, he had shown her to her very own bunk, and then the machine press she would be working on with two other kids, taking eight hour shifts around the clock. After that she’d eaten a big meal of dhal and rice, then slept in her bunk, and started work on the big machine at midnight.
Pham had been in the factory on Level Twenty for three years now, and today was her very last day.
In some ways she would be sorry to be leaving the factory. Mr Prakesh was a good man who looked after all his kids and fed them well, and she had made some good friends here. But she’d seen holo-movies about the Station, the upper deck with all the open spaces and big buildings and air-cars and everything else. She had saved a few baht over the years—enough to buy food for a week or so, until she found work on the top level—and she was getting sick of the hard work and the constant hacking cough which her friends told her was because they were inhaling tiny bits of plastic which floated in the air of the factory.
She wanted to get out, experience the world, and have an adventure.
She looked at the poster of Petra Shelenkov, her favourite skyball player, and wondered whether to take it. There would be other posters she could buy when she reached the top: her friends could have this one, when they realised that she wasn’t coming back.
She looked around the quiet dormitory, at the bundled, sleeping figures of the other kids in their bunks, and found it hard to believe that she was leaving.
From the pocket of her shorts she pulled a note she’d painstakingly written earlier, and left it on her pillow for Mr Prakesh.
Then she stood up, slung her backpack over her shoulder, crept through the dorm and pulled open the big door.
The corridor was quiet. She moved to the exit of the factory, tapped in the exit code and slipped through the door, emerging into a crowded corridor as wide as a city street and just as busy with, rickshaws and crowds of people and shambling cows.
It was strange, but because she was leaving all this forever, it was as if she were experiencing it for the first time. The press of people, the constant bustling movement, the noise—music and cries and rickshaw bells and the growl of electric motors that illegally lighted some of the makeshift food-stalls along the street.
She pushed into the crowd, her tiny size giving her the right to push and elbow her way through the press of bodies, earning not reprimands for her audacity but smiles.
Pham had never been higher than Level Eighteen, and that had been as crowded as down here. She had seen the sky and open spaces on holo-movies, but she wondered what it would be like in real life. What would it be like to look up and see nothing but never-ending blue sky? What would it be like to be able to run across a park without bumping into people? She couldn’t
imagine it. It couldn’t be real. The thought that soon she would be experiencing all this filled her with excitement.
She came to the ‘chute station and barged her way inside. The cage door clanked shut and she found herself standing in a forest of bare brown legs, the silk of baggy kameez, flowing saris, and the occasional business suit. The cage rose with a jolt, and an indicator beside the door flashed the levels as they arrived at them. A few people pushed their way out on Level Nineteen, and their places were taken by even more people squeezing into the cage. They ascended. Level Eighteen came and went, and Pham found herself rising into new and alien territory. Every time the cage door slid open, she peered out, eager to see new sights, hear new sounds. Each level above Eighteen seemed bigger and brighter and less impoverished than those she knew.