by M M Buckner
Children wailed and jabbered. He wasn’t used to their earsplitting squeals, and they made him nervous. Children never appeared in Trondheim’s financial district. Executives kept their young decently out of sight. As he shoved his way through the crowd, he saw people holding hands and leaning against each other. So much fleshy contact dismayed him. When a woman stuck her bare nipple into a child’s mouth, his stomach turned. What civilized person would do such a thing? It was bestial.
They don’t know any better, he reminded himself. Then a momentous sneeze burst through his head, and his nostrils sprayed moisture. He was appalled. He had no handkerchief—not even a shirttail, since he’d given his shirt to the little girl. He bent double, trying to wipe his nose with the hem of his shorts, and when that didn’t work, he used the back of his hand. A vision passed through his mind of white linen handkerchiefs pressed neatly in a drawer. How did protes live this way?
Resolutely, he moved clockwise along the wall, looking for an opening, a stairway, anything. But he didn’t even pass a window. Nothing but solid steel. The crowd thickened, and in his congested state, he felt time clicking by. Bodies bumped against him and got in his way. Over five thousand people? He could almost believe it. As he massaged his irritated left eye, he wondered how news of so many runaways would affect the markets. Before the hour was out, he had to kill that broadcast. When he rested his forehead against the wall, though, the headache closed around his skull like a pair of forceps.
“Achew! Achew!” The sneezing spasm left him dizzy, and he wiped his nose with his hand. Forget the linen handkerchief, just give me a scrap of cloth, he thought “Achew!”
Nearby, a woman was gently working a plastic comb through her hair, and Dominic got an idea. “Pardon me,” he said as he took the comb from her hand. Using its plastic teeth, he punched a hole through the hem of his silk shorts, then sawed at the fabric till it began to tear. The silk was tough, but he managed to rip a small squarish piece from the bottom of the right leg. A handkerchief! He patted his face as clean as possible and felt like a civilized man again.
Then he remembered the comb. He’d broken a third of its teeth, but it would still do well enough for this prote woman. He handed it back with a ceremonious bow. “Thank you, madam. You’ve saved my sanity.”
The woman mutely accepted the comb in her upturned hands, and Dominic saw her face. Hollow. Deeply shadowed. Worse than gaunt. Though she’d covered herself with a plastic sheet, her collarbones stood out in stark relief from her frail throat. He looked away. Then he dropped his extra chocolate bar in her lap and moved on quickly before she could react.
That burning itch kept worrying his left eye. He dabbed it with his new handkerchief and moved around the wall, trying not to touch the greasy, sweating steel again. No door. No window. Not even a service panel. There must be an exit, he thought, or am I well and truly damned?
Overhead, the lights flickered pale pink as the electrical current slowed to a trickle. People flowed past him with faces so much alike, they could have been one person, endlessly reflected in a chain of mirrors. He turned in circles and ground a fist in his stinging left eye socket. This was taking too much time. He felt incompetent. The blasted headache was slowing him down! Why did he keep falling short of his father’s expectations? He had Richter’s genes. What was he lacking? His father called him soft-headed, and maybe it was true. Right now, his brain felt like mush.
In a hazy funk, he stumbled into a chair, and the sight of a child with skin rash brought him up short. The sick people again! He’d wandered in a circle and doubled back to the very last place he wanted to be. Just the sight of the little boy’s blistered arms made him queasy.
“Push!” someone shouted.
Behind a table, a young woman lay on her back with her knees in the air. Drops of sweat trickled down her skin, and she let out a low shuddering moan. A young man gently stroked her forehead and blew cool air against her cheek, while a middle-aged women knelt between her legs. By all the principles of logic, what was that old witch doing? Pawing at the girl’s privates?
“Push!” the witch said. “He’s coming.”
Dominic saw blood on the floor. In terrible fascination, he watched the girl’s vulva stretch like a dark purple mouth and spit out a white ball, sticky with blood. The witch grasped the ball and yanked, and then a whole child slithered out, steaming red and white, trailing its cord. It shrieked, and Dominic reeled away.
“Barbara, you did it,” he heard the young man say. “We have a son.”
At that, Dominic paused and looked back. Natural childbirth. Painful, degrading, sometimes lethal. He knew protes still practiced it, ignoring safer alternatives. As he watched the young father kiss the bloody infant, a cold shiver whipped through his chest.
The lights buzzed and popped, then went out completely. Total darkness. For a moment, a frightening hush fell as unseen pumps and blowers cut off. The only sound was nervous breathing. Seconds passed. Ten centimeters from Dominic’s head, a sodium bulb flashed like lightning, and he flinched away. A second later, the light level rose to a pale flicker again, and he nearly stumbled over someone on the floor.
He had to strain to see the group of people kneeling in a circle. When he heard the soft murmurs of a chant, he grew curious. Inside their ring lay a wad of old plastic sheeting. He edged closer. Was it a primitive ritual? The object didn’t resemble any religious artifact he knew. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he made out the rigid human form. It was a corpse! These people were worshipping a dead body. They should be calling a disposal team.
He bent for a closer look. Only once before had he seen a corpse, and now the sight of his father came back to him. The steel brace. The bruised skin. The hideous indignity of a body separated from its mind. That day in the conference room, his father’s blood had pooled on the U-shaped table, and the wide-open eyes stared up at him, no longer beseeching anything. All Dominic could do was cry out helplessly, “Someone, please! Close his eyes!”
But he wasn’t in the conference room now. Furiously, he tore away from the ring of mourners and grabbed for a column, which turned out to be a tall dark Ethiope man in a poncho.
“Whoa, friend. You don’t look so good,” the Ethiope said.
He caught Dominic under the armpits and helped him walk. As they wound through the crowd, an awful jerking spasm seized Dominic’s left eye, and he couldn’t make it stop. After what seemed like a death march through the milling throng, he and the Ethiope came face-to-face with old Tooksook. He was back at the bathysphere dock again! He began to feel trapped in some repeating time-loop nightmare. The soup urns still steamed, and a fresh line of haggard newcomers waited just as patiently as ever to be served. Tooksook dropped his ladle and touched Dominic’s face.
“Fever. He didn’t take soup. Put him here.”
Dominic saw bare feet shuffling to make room as the tall man in the poncho lowered him to the floor. Tooksook ladled hot broth into his mouth.
“Swallow,” said the soup man. “Mmm-mmm good.”
The brew tasted sweet, and when he swallowed, it seemed to numb the pain in his throat. He knew it was unsanitary. He knew he should spit it out. But he was confused and tired, and he wanted comfort. His left eye throbbed brutally. He took another mouthful, and its warmth soothed his throat. One by one, his muscles relaxed, and his spine settled into the deck. Foreign accents babbled around him like music. He felt himself drifting.
Lovely white sparks shimmered across his field of view, and he heard a strange lulling wind. Was he dreaming, or was that noise coming from inside his eye? It swelled louder, then rose to an agonizing high-pitched screech. He couldn’t move or speak. Was he asleep? Why couldn’t he move? Mercifully, the sound sank to a low bass rumble. Then with startling abruptness, it transformed into a human voice.
“Hello, son.”
“Father?” Dominic tried to reason. Were his eyes still closed? Wasn’t his father dead? In his dreamy daze, that voice sounded so fa
miliar. “Who are you?”
Veins of radiance shot across his vision. “Don’t speak aloud, son. They may be listening. I’m in your optic nerve.”
SOMETIME later, Dominic came awake coughing. How long had he slept? He rolled over and coughed steadily until he could breathe again. Then he pressed his thumbs against the aching place above his left eyebrow. His skin felt hot, and his left eye burned like gaseous plasma.
It took a moment to locate himself. He lay on the bare steel deck with his head propped against a crate that had once held chocolate bars. He couldn’t begin to guess how much time had passed. Time lost meaning in this place because nothing changed. Above him, the apron-draped workers steadily filled plastic cups of soup, and the hands reaching for it made a spectrum of flesh tones from blanched yellow to deep cola brown. He glanced at his own pale skin. Dirt streaked his chest, and his hands and feet were grubby. He lifted his shoulder and discreetly sniffed his armpit. Disgusting! He smelled as bad as the protes. Gingerly, he touched the swollen flesh around his left eye. It felt glazed.
“Morning, son. I’m still here.” The voice in his eye erupted as raw color.
Dominic froze.
“It’s me, boy. Like I said, I’m in your optic nerve.”
“NP?” Dominic tried to moisten his lips. “How?”
The voice snickered loud enough to vibrate Dominic’s teeth. “Self-assembling nanoquans. I hid among the little mites in your eyelashes. Even the damned Orgs couldn’t detect that!”
Dominic almost lost his grip on the floor. Nanoquans? He knew that term. Nanoquans were microscopic computer elements, part code, part artificial life-form, smart enough to replicate and link together as a quantum computer a hundred molecules in size. But—in his eye? His mind wavered around the concept. The NP hid itself in his eyelashes? This had to be some hallucination brought on by fever. He tried to stand.
“Don’t worry, son. You may see a few lights, nothing catastrophic. I had to sink a tap in your optic nerve for power.”
Dominic shook his head hard to clear the sound away. People moved by, faceless, fuzzy, like a bleary gray frieze carved in fog. He sneezed and wiped his nose, and for a moment, the lights dimmed almost to blackness again, then flickered and brightened.
“Was that a power failure? Son, I need an update. I’ve been outta touch.”
You’re delirious, Dominic told himself. There are no nanoquans in your eye. His brain seemed to slosh back and forth inside his skull. Maybe he’d picked up some infection from that vile soup.
With hands stretched out to feel the way, he stumbled toward what he hoped was the nearest wall. But the shocking image of nanoquans stayed with him. Infinitesimal robots, he could almost feel them itching through his optical nerve like a column of soldiers in tiny hobnailed boots. He tripped over a crate, and bright flashes shot through his left temple. As the walls spun in slow circles, he covered his swollen eye and fought for composure.
“Move your hand. I want a view,” said the voice in his eye.
“You can see?” Dominic spoke in reflex, but he still didn’t believe the voice was real.
“I scan and record everything you look at,” the voice answered. “So turn around. Give me a 360.”
Dominic tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. “I’m not hearing this.”
“Actually, you’re half right. You only think you hear me. I’m sending electrical pulses straight to your brain.”
Dominic went rigid. The growl seemed to oscillate through his skull.
“Son, I’m a thousand cubic nanometers of pure standalone intelligence, and my resident memory holds all the pertinent Benthica files. I’ll be with you every minute, just like I promised. Think of me as your internal guidance system.”
“Leave me alone!” Dominic said.
“Keep your voice down. I told you, somebody might hear. That bastard Gig, for instance.”
Dominic shouted at the top of his voice, “GET OUT OF MY HEAD!”
“Quiet! It’s a temporary fix. When our business is over, my little quans’ll disintegrate like they were never there.”
Dominic wanted to tear his eye out. That voice, that perfect imitation of his father, it was too real to ignore. Even the snickering laugh sounded just like Richter. “If you’re really there, call the guards and get me out of this place!”
“It’s not that simple,” the NP said. “I’m not my whole self. I’m a partial backup. You know, an agent program. Sorry to say, I’m not linked to the Net.”
Tears streamed from Dominic’s left eye as he tried to make sense of the words. “Partial backup? You can’t call the guards?”
“You got it, son. But rest assured, my greater self is searching for you everywhere.”
“You’re not linked to the Net?”
Pinpoints of white light flashed briefly across his retina as the voice laughed. “Yeah, but you know me. I always plan for contingencies. Just find the Net link, and I’ll transmit our location. After that, you’ll smash it, and we’re home free.”
“Guide me there now,” Dominic said in a low, dangerous whisper. He felt nauseous. The NP had actually planted a copy of itself in his eye. It was grotesque.
“Okay, son. Orient me. What deck are we on? Port or starboard? Bow or stern? Give me a point of reference.”
“You can’t tell the bow from the stern? What good are you? I didn’t agree to this—monstrous invasion. This is—illegal.”
“Son, don’t speak aloud. Just form the words in the back of your throat. You know, articulate subvocally. I can sense your muscle movements. I’ll hear you, but other people won’t.”
Dominic curled his fingernails into his palms. “As soon as we get back to Trondheim, I’ll have you surgically removed.”
“Sure, son. First, find the Net Link.”
Dominic literally gripped his short hair by the roots. When he let go, he felt better. He chewed the inside of his cheek and tried to think. A nano-sized NP was living in his eye. Right. He had to stay very severely composed in order to deal with this new information. He drew a deep, calming breath, then stood up and stretched till his vertebrae popped. Next, he scrubbed his face with his bare hands. Finally, he smoothed his hair, brushed dirt from his silk shorts, and knotted the drawstring tighter around his empty stomach. He was ready. He could do this.
“Talk to me, son. My only interface is live chat.”
“Don’t start the father-son business.” Dominic shouldered his way to the wall.
“I dote on you, boy. I remember every day of your life. Who knows you better than me?”
Ignoring the voice, Dominic studied the solid steel. He was more desperate than ever to find the way out, but all he encountered were welded seams and layers of thick gray paint. Still no opening.
Not far away, he noticed women sorting a pile of rags. It was almost comical how much pleasure that sight brought him. He had to smile at the irony as he reached his long arm between their bodies and clutched a few pieces, whatever was closest. He got fraying orange polyester, a strip of white plasticene and one square meter of textrose, stained an uneven dirty gray. First, he used the polyester to thoroughly blow and wipe his nose. Then he tore the other rags with his teeth, ripped them into strips, and sat on the deck to wind them around his bare feet. His new footwear made a poor fit, but it was better than nothing.
“Richter left us here for a reason,” the NP ranted.
“To make ZahlenBank richer.” Dominic got up and started moving clockwise around the wall again.
“To keep the markets alive, boy. The markets feed everyone.”
Dominic sidestepped along the wall, sliding his hands over the steel to search for hidden switches or concealed sliding panels. He didn’t want to think about his father just then. He didn’t want to remember their last bitter year, the tedious quarrels over deals. Money. Always how much money. Every argument seemed so crucial. Now, what did it matter? The only thing he cared about was finding that stairway up to the bridge.
“According to my sensors, that’s an exterior wall you’re fondling,” the genie announced. “Nothing on the other side but ocean. You won’t find a door.”
Dominic pressed his aching temples. “You’re saying the perimeter search is futile.”
“Big news. What is this, your third time around?”
Dominic stood on tiptoes to see across the dim, muggy deck. He could make out several new partition walls, but if this deck had a stairway, it was invisible. Protes squeezed against him on every side, and when he elbowed their bodies away, they ricocheted right back. The heat. The stink. What was he doing in this place?
“To hell with it. I’ll hijack that bathysphere and get out,” he said.
“You can’t leave!” The NP’s voice radiated through his eye like a solar flare. “You have to find the Net link!”
Dominic tried to shove his way back toward the bathysphere dock, but the crowd had a natural spiraling current that pulled him along with its own gravity. He tried to fight it, but the mob had grown too thick. Its circling tide carried him around like a piece of lightweight flotsam. Finally, he gave up resisting, and in no time, the crowd’s random orbit brought him to the brink of a wide stairwell opening down into the floor. This was so unexpected, he almost tripped and fell in. How had he missed the opening before? Bewildered, he peered down into the lighted steel shaft, where a young woman sat on the stairs, humming a tune and braiding her blue-black hair.
She glanced up and winked. “Hi ya, Nick-O.”
CHAPTER 7
* * *
COST OF LIVING
“YOU finally showed up. I’ve been waiting all morning.” Qi lounged on the steep, ladderlike stairs with one ankle crossed over the other, flashing her merry smile. With her hair pulled back in a short untidy braid, the dark, slanting planes of her cheeks stood out, and Dominic thought she looked more alien than ever.
“Who is this person?” the NP demanded. “My files need an update.”