Brandon felt Singer moving to stand a little bit behind him. "Relay armour?"
"Well, yes," the technician said. "I was trying to make something a little less bulky than what's already on the market. But for a full set of features, you really put on a lot of extra weight."
Again, Singer pulled out his reader. "Do you have a patent?"
"Pending, yes."
"Ah." Singer thumbed through various apps, selected one, opened a document, performed a Turing, and decisively punched a single button. "Done and done. You'll be receiving an invoice."
"Excuse me?"
"I just bought you out," Singer said. "Heiser. We're going."
"But... But it's my design!"
"Consider us beta-testers." Singer snapped his fingers at the UAS. She darted over to him and danced up his arm as he moved for the door. "You can buy it back after we de-bug it."
In the stairwell, their words were punctuated by the blink of lights that had attracted too many flies. "Do you have, like, a fuck-ton of money?" Brandon asked.
"I have access to a fuck-ton of money."
"Won't you have to explain the expense? I mean, he said it himself. There are already better models out there."
Singer pulled open the door. Through it, an air-conditioned breeze wafted in from the lobby. Brandon smelled chlorinated water and heard smooth-jazz re-mixes of Sufi chants. He was getting so sick of hotels.
"You wanted it, didn't you?" Singer asked. "It was all over your face."
"Well, yeah, I was curious, I wanted--"
"Then that's the explanation," he said, and handed Brandon the shirt. "Have at it. Rip it apart. Get your hands dirty."
They stepped out into the lobby with their drone in close pursuit. And as they walked past a gaggle of girls wearing lanyards and badges emblazoned with the logo of the latest NGO to visit the city, Singer said casually: "You know, they trained me in a hotel just like this one. A long time ago. It was abandoned, but the satellite still relayed this same terrible music. When they left us each night, it kept playing. I could hear it through the floor."
Brandon frowned. "What were you doing on the floor?"
Singer's hand came up, twitched in the air near Brandon's head, then darted back to his own scalp and scratched there. "Not much," he said. "Let's go get something to eat."
"Oh, dear."
Brandon pauses, his fingers suspended over the keys. "What?"
"Stoning in progress. Well, a pebbling. Some girls going home for lunch. Their route passes some labour pick-ups."
Brandon accesses Tink's feed. Onscreen, the girls have formed a defensive cluster, heads ducking slightly as they walk onward. As Brandon watches, one of them brandishes her mobile and starts snapping pictures. Tink's view is exceptional; he can see the defiant press of the girl's thumb and her quick, almost unfazed dodge when a rock whips past her ear. Another girl dashes backward and grabs her elbow, tugs her back into the group as it re-assembles itself.
"Can we get her phone number?" Brandon asks.
"Probably. If we break some laws." Through the earbud, Brandon hears Singer typing. "The mobile's old; she probably got it as a donation. Could take a while. Better if you just hijack Tink."
Brandon accesses Tink's command line and inputs his own hack: [up] [up] [down] [down] [left] [right] [left] [right] 573. Now she belongs to him entirely, priorities momentarily forgotten, processes un-logged, movements off the grid. He directs her with his finger. She swerves, hovers, waits as Brandon plots safe Euler paths between the school and the nearest teashop. She pounces on the girl's mobile, planting herself inside the phone, streaming the maps there. The girl nods as the first image pops up. Brandon watches through Tink's eye, sees the slightly worried faces of the other girls as they look back at the labour pool on the corner, watches their lips move with a mixture of frustration and fear. When Tink withdraws they escape.
The people here are already so used to the bots, Brandon realizes, that they barely recognize them as surveillance. They are part of the landscape. As in a fairy tale, they have come alive through prolonged use: real dragonflies, real camels, real birds of prey.
For the first time, he thinks that this might have been the plan all along.
When he releases her from the hack, Tink zings upward and into the sky. She homes in on the beacon from a predator above, first aligning herself with its wide, arcing flightpath, and then pinning herself to its white steel flank. It blinks at her rapidly, and she dives off and streaks away back into the city.
"What was that?" Brandon asks.
"A work order," Singer says.
Brandon completed his hack of the clothing just before his birthday. He remembered the date only when the automated portions of his various profiles alerted fellow users to the fact that they should send him cards and in-game money and heartfelt wishes for his safety. He answered the last with assurances of his protected status: I'm being looked after.
He only realized how literal this truth was on the night of his birthday, long after his host had fed him elephant ear pastry and a custard of rosewater and pistachios, long after he had answered the video chats from his parents and friends and their repeat questions (what time is it there, are you all right, do all the women wear veils, do you miss bacon), when he had finally drifted asleep and heard in his ear: "Come up here."
He thought he might be dreaming. That happened, sometimes, the way his television or his sound dock or his other devices used to weave their sounds into the narrative of his sleeping mind, back when he lived in places with stable electricity, before Singer. Now Singer's voice wove in and out, skipping from character to character in his dreams until Brandon became conscious of the coincidence and opened his eyes.
"I'm asleep," he said now.
"I'm on the roof," Singer said.
And he was. When Brandon leaned out of his window, clinging with one hand to the eaves, he saw gargoyle shape staring down at him. "You sleep too deeply," Singer said.
"What are you, the fucking Batman?"
"I'm not sure. Have you ever considered a career in the circus?"
"Huh?"
"Come up here."
"No." Brandon leaned back into his room and waited. Nothing happened. Finally he leaned out again. "I have something to show you."
It should not have surprised him when Singer unfolded himself into the room, feet first and then the rest of him, but it did. Now Singer stood surveying his room--lit solely by laptop glare the shadows were sharper, and the hour felt later.
"It's good," Singer said. "Plain."
"Why are you here? Is Tink okay?" At night their only worry was the occasional owl that might mistake her for food.
The laptop glare rendered Singer's spectacles momentarily opaque. "You have an hour left of your birthday."
Singer had let him off the earbud that day, so he could call his family and friends without a third party listening in. Now Brandon wondered if those calls had really been all that private. How long had Singer been on the roof? Brandon had heard nothing--no thumps or bumps or scrapes, not even stray dogs below barking at a strange man crawling the skyline. Tink had told him Singer was across town like always. But Tink could be hacked.
He grimaced. "With all due respect, sir, this is why you have no friends."
Singer peered over the top of his spectacles. "You think I have no friends?"
"I kinda doubt it, yeah."
"I have friends, Heiser." He pivoted lazily toward the window, gently pulling the shutters closed. "Just not the kind I enjoy spending any time with."
Brandon frowned. "Then those aren't real friends."
"Oh, they're real friends." Singer smiled thinly, still staring at the shutters as though he expected them to blow open. He turned back and the smile changed, became real. "You said you had something to show me."
Brandon took down two tunics from his makeshift closet--a wire strung between two walls that served as a rail. He held them up for Singer to see. "Finished."
"They're maps," Brandon said. "Like that game, 'Warmer, Colder.' There are buzzers inside, and you plug in the coordinates and use the wires like a compass, so even if you don't have a map, even if your phone dies or--"
"Let's try them."
"Oh. Okay." He held one out. Singer plucked it free of his hands and laid it on the bed before shrugging out of his coat and folding it in equal lengths--each fold precise, practised, ritual. He removed his glasses and placed them atop it, then tugged off his shirt--a single layer of what Brandon suspected was recycled bamboo or PET bottles or maybe both. Under the shirt Singer was thin, the kind of thin that hurt to look at, like carvings of Christ in a Mexican church.
Singer must have understood, because he paused and said: "Your eyes sting like an interrogator's cigarette, Heiser."
"Sir, are you, uh...healthy?"
"Of course I'm healthy."
"Because you don't look healthy."
"And you're getting to be quite the nag." He gestured. "Well, let's test them out."
Brandon struggled out of his shirt. He felt flabby and indulgent next to Singer, who stared with folded arms. He tried to get into the tunic as quickly as possible. He heard a seam pop in protest. When he had finished, he avoided Singer's eyes and reached over to the laptop, commanded the clothes to wake up. Instantly they buzzed, hard, like wasp's nest humming around his ribs. He bent double, at once tickled and discomfited, and dialled down the pressure.
"You keyed them to each other," Singer said. He was clutching the nearest wall.
"I thought... I mean, if we had to find each other... If there was a bombing..."
"Oh, the intent is noble. But the result..." Singer took two strides across the room. Their clothes thrummed. It was hard for Brandon not to writhe, not to laugh, not to scream, with the wires dancing over his spine. But Singer was standing there straight as ever, like this weird half-tickle half-shock was just something he dealt with, like they'd covered it in some manual or some secret training camp or some other situation Brandon shuddered to imagine. Only Singer's fists told the truth: stiff but shaky, thumbs held down like they were itching for an eject button.
"You see, this is just untenable," he said. "The closer we get, the more it hurts."
Brandon reached over and shut the clothes off. "Sorry, sir--"
"Call me that again, Heiser, and I'll put you in a fucking chokehold."
"Brandon," he said. "My name is Brandon."
"Well, Brandon, you can lie down now. Let the big boys have a turn." He grabbed the laptop. Brandon settled for watching, and crawled up onto his bed to look over Singer's shoulder.
"Your eyes. I still feel them. Shut them now."
"Yes, s--"
With unerring accuracy, Singer's hand snapped backward and reached for Brandon's throat. Brandon dodged at the last second and Singer got his eyes, instead, and he pressed them closed, palm smooth as Bible paper, until Brandon quit trying to open them.
"I'm really sorry," Brandon said, when his hand withdrew. "I didn't know it--the shirt, I mean--would feel like that. I just wanted to try something new." Something difficult, he wanted to say. Something impressive.
He heard the sound of fingers on keys. "Just because it didn't work this time doesn't mean it was a bad idea, Heiser," Singer said. "Good ideas are poorly executed on a regular basis. The point is to keep trying. If that were not true, we would be out of a job."
When Brandon woke up, Singer had re-set the clothes back to their default mirror relay position.
"It won't help with proximity," Singer said the next morning, "but once we figure out how to load things like heartbeat and pressure detection, it'll have its own uses. I can know exactly how much rubble you're buried under, should the occasion arise."
"Why am I wearing your coat?"
"Oh, that," Singer said. He lit a cigarette. "You looked cold."
"Tink's been gone awhile," Brandon says, when they had finished tagging her most recent sweep of the city. Singer had put in an odd image search request: he wanted to know how many food stalls also sold cigarettes on the side. Offhand, he said, he knew most of them, but he wanted to test Tink's ability to sort two images together in order to create a meaningful answer.
"She's fine," Singer says. "You know, these people are breaking about five different laws regarding resale. I think there might even be copyright infringement on this sign." He forwards Brandon the picture.
"Definitely," Brandon says. "Where is she?"
"A hammam," Singer says. Brandon knows the word from somewhere, but doesn't bother looking it up. "Some men are meeting there. Don't worry, I'll delete the footage. Look at that! They also sell condoms!"
"Halal condoms?"
"No such thing. Condoms aren't haram. They're like birth control for elderly Catholics."
"Elderly Catholics still need birth control?"
Real laughter buzzes down into his ear, sharp and unexpected, and Brandon thinks he can hear the length of Singer's neck in the depth of that single sound.
By the date of Tink's first review, the clothes were perfect. The tweaking had been the most fun--across town, Brandon felt Singer rip himself apart and sew himself together, felt each clumsy stitch and heard the other man's almost-laugh when his fingers slipped.
"Next time we'll get arms," Singer had said. "Then you can guide me."
But now Brandon was alone. Really alone. Alone in a way that he hadn't been in a long time--no phone, no bud, no lifestyle prosthetics of any sort. He had even shut the shirt off. The higher-ups liked you to be bereft when you were talking to them. No cheat-sheets, no devices, the review was an intellectual all-meat special. The guard had ticked off every device and piece of equipment as he surrendered it. He watched them take everything--his phone, the bud, his wallet, his documentation, his whole life--and pour it into a plastic dish.
Right now they were probably ransacking his inbox. He'd done nothing wrong--hadn't gone too far off-mission, hadn't even circumvented the company firewalls that siphoned his communications home through tapped lines. They wouldn't find anything. But they liked to be sure.
Scary, how well he could rationalize it.
Now he sat in a room in yet another hotel--this one more like a hacienda, perhaps once the home of someone from the former ruling party--in a wooden chair with one short leg. It rattled gently as his right knee jigged up and down. He watched the superiors peer over their glasses as they looked at sheaves of paper.
Paper, he thought. No wonder we're losing.
"What is your opinion of the Ishin program, so far?"
The woman was obviously tired. She sat hunched like a turtle over the table. Her face had that odd blankness that too much authority gives after a while, like she really didn't care about the content of the answer so much as the way he delivered it.
"Well, it's all in the written portion of my report," he said. "Ishin's a great idea. It could be better deployed, though."
She blinked. "Oh?"
"I'd like to see it hooked up to more stuff. Like farm-bots. And the pipelines. So we could find out about shortages."
"Shortages?"
"In water. Or oil. There are pressure monitors in each pipeline; we could tell when one went low and investigate."
"There are already whole teams devoted to that very purpose."
"No, I mean--" And here he knew that the whole thing was getting away from him, because the whole panel had frozen, cat-like, while he bleated on. But he was nervous--more nervous that he'd thought he'd be--and when he was nervous he speculated, wildly. "I mean we could use it to predict things."
They blinked, like predator drones signalling each other high above their target.
"I mean surveillance is this gr
eat tool. It really is. But watching what's happening only goes so far. We should be looking at what's going to happen, instead. We could be taking measurements. We could be predicting the problems before they happen."
He leaned forward in the chair. It pitched forward and he had to correct, quickly grabbing the chair before it toppled over and slamming himself back in it. The others on the panel continued watching him. "It's just that there's a whole other level to this conflict," he said. "And it has to do with things like people starving. It has to do with lack. I mean, stability's hard to fight for when it's just a pipedream, you know? But we could turn this place into something functional. Self-sustaining. That's what Ishin should be for, not just watching which tanks go where, or who's growing poppies or whatever."
His inquisitor's bristling eyebrows rose. "You think our concern with drug trafficking is misplaced?"
"No! I mean, no. Of course it's serious. But we should look at why the drugs sell in the first place. I mean, it's our guys who are taking them, you know? Not just our guys globally, but our people on the ground. Why do you think we started busting more grow-ops after we arrived? It wasn't just sharper eyes; it was a market that sprang up the moment we got here. We brought that market. We brought that problem."
Throats were cleared. Papers were shuffled. He'd blown it.
And then, like a ghost, a hand stole across his stomach and up over his heart to his shoulder and squeezed. And he knew instantly why he was nervous, why he was babbling. He was filling a silence. They had cut him off from more than his technology. They had cut him off from Singer.
But Singer had fixed that.
"What about your partner?" a man asked, as he made the papers fit into neat right angles before tucking them between pristine folds of cardstock.
"Singer?" He hated his voice for cracking.
"Yes. Your partner."
Through their clothes his partner was insistent. Anyone watching Singer now might think he was mid-heart attack, the way he must have been gripping his left shoulder. "My partner..."
Brandon let his own hand trail up to his left shoulder, to where he felt Singer's hand translated into tiny wires and servos. He kneaded, tried to make it look normal, like a sore joint and not communication, not I'm here, I'm listening, I'm with you.
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