Annabel Scheme

by Robin Sloan

  “This must be the only place you can get any food in this neighborhood,” Scheme said. It was weird to call Fog City a neighborhood. It was like calling Chernobyl a neighborhood.

  “Nope, there a buncha places by the Shard,” the man behind the counter said, “but they mostly salads, sushi. Fancy stuff. Here, I have falafel. I am Fadi. You want falafel?”

  Scheme ordered two. She said: “People live in this building?”

  Fadi nodded. “Yep. Lots of kids. How do these kids make so much money? I do not know. All I know is they always drunk at two in the morning. They always hungry.” He slid a neat white plate across the counter.

  Don’t eat the falafel, Scheme.

  “Oh, come on, Hu,” she whispered, “this isn’t the underworld. People live here. And they have to eat.” She popped one into her mouth. “Mm, this is good,” she said, chewing. “Really good.”

  “Better here than anywhere in the city,” Fadi said, beaming. “Anywhere in the world, maybe.”

  “I can see why they call you the Falafel King.”

  “No, no,” he said, waving his hands. “No, no, no. Not me. He is the Falafel King.” He pointed up to the back wall, where a florid painting of Jesus hung next to green swinging doors.

  “Jesus Christ is the Falafel King?”

  “He is the king of ev-ery-thing. Could be Pizza King. Could be Sushi King. Same guy.” He pointed again. I caught Scheme’s reflection in the counter. Her expression was skeptical. Fadi leaned in.

  “Why you think this falafel so good, huh? Why you think nobody ever goes pop in my shop, huh? Why you think this a safe place for you, him?” Fadi pointed to the other customer in the strange hat, whose eyes flicked up, then back down. “No big deal,” Fadi said, backing away, palms up. “Just please, don’t call me Falafel King. I am humble servant of Falafel King.”

  Behind us, the door chirped and swooshed open. It was a kid in a Grail jumpsuit, standard gray twill with red, green and blue merit badges all lined up on the lapels.

  “Jad! Hello, my friend,” Fadi called. Then, to Scheme: “Jad is my best customer. Best neighbor, too.”

  Jad floated up to the counter and slid onto a stool, all without looking up from his phone, which was flickering a stream of 3D shapes at him. “Hey Fadi,” he murmured, “falafel... combo.”

  Scheme waited a beat, then said: “You live in this building?”

  Jad looked up. He had a long nose and dark circles under his eyes. He made eye contact for six milliseconds (I counted) and then his gaze slid away. “Oh yeah, yeah,” he said, now looking vaguely at the floor. “Yeah.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “It’s okay... lots of space. The elevator doesn’t work.”

  “What are the neighbors like?”

  “Noisy. People live here if they wanna make a lot of noise.”

  Another neat white plate slid across the counter, this one with a red-flecked dollop of hummus.

  “Why do you live here?” Scheme asked.

  “Short commute.” Jad shoved a falafel in his mouth—an obvious gambit to stop the conversation.

  “Where does all the noise come from?”

  “Mmph, shomewhere above me,” he said, swallowing. “So like maybe the fifth floor. Or the sixth.” Pause. “Are you like a noise inspector?”

  Scheme smiled. “Something like that.”

  THE IMPOSSIBLE PLAYLIST

  Scheme took the stairs, shining her flashlight as she went. Two flights up, there was a silver-green splotch on the wall where a wheel had bumped it. On the fifth-floor landing, she leaned on the rail and caught her breath. “Your connection’s still good, right,” she said.

  It’s solid.

  “Okay. I’m pretty sure this is just going to be some kid with a hacked-up synthesizer, but, just in case it’s—”

  The ghost of Pam Prior?

  “—anything else, be prepared.”

  Um. Okay.

  She slipped up the last flight of stairs; another splotch glowed on the sixth-floor landing. She paused a moment with her ear at the door, then pushed through. We stepped out into a long, dark hallway flanked by glass-walled offices. It had once been totally corporate; now it was totally creepy. There was a flickering green light at the far end of the hallway. Scheme crept towards it.

  The offices closest to the stairs were piled high with the detritus of music-making: guitars, amplifiers, drum kits composed of mis-matched parts that spilled out into the hallway. Scheme stepped gingerly around the cymbals. Next there were xylophones, gongs, arrays of thick cardboard tubes. Farther along, the instrumentation changed; offices were stacked with synthesizers and effects boxes. Rows of white plastic keys glimmered in the dark.

  Scheme sniffed. “Smells like bananas.”

  That was bad.

  The final stretch of offices was mostly empty. These had whiteboards. One had a staff and notation, but the rest were all covered with numbers. Equations. Code.

  We had almost reached the room at the end of the hall, the source of the ghostly green light. And now there was also a long, shifting shadow; someone was in there.

  Scheme paused. “Wifi?”

  Yes. There’s a network here, Scheme, and a file server—oh, Scheme. You should see what’s on this file server.

  The Beatles singing with Bjork.

  Michael Jackson singing with Thom Yorke.

  Michael Jackson singing at Al Gore’s inauguration.

  Johnny Cash and Kanye West.

  Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix.

  Raffi and the Polyphonic Spree.

  Driveshaft’s self-titled debut.

  The Democratic Republic’s greatest hits.

  Hypatia Lord’s piano concertos.

  Girl Talk, produced by Andy Warhol.

  Gwen Stefani, produced by Kurt Cobain.

  Bob Marley, produced by Brian Eno.

  John Lennon and Afrika Bambaataa. 1984.

  John Lennon and Bob Dylan. 1999.

  John Lennon. 2002.

  Gershwin’s World War II musical.

  The Beatles’ Green Album.

  Elvis Presley’s Bollywood album.

  It went on for petabytes. An alternate history of music.

  Pam-n-Ryan’s 2009 album—the one that didn’t exist—the one that was dominating The Listener, even though Pam Prior was dead, killed in a car crash that Ryan narrowly survived.

  Pam Prior’s 2009 solo album, dedicated to her boyfriend, Ryan Kelly, killed in a car crash that Pam narrowly survived.

  The Pam-n-Ryan memorial album, dedicated to both of them. Both of them dead, killed in a car crash.

  New tracks were appearing as I watched. It was like being connected to a file-sharing network from another dimension. From every other dimension.

  “Yep,” Scheme sniffed. “Definitely bananas. This is bad.”

  She peeked around the corner. The room was a mad musician’s laboratory packed with electronics, all bathed in a sick green glow. There were boxy black computers and flat-panel displays showing waveforms that twisted, broke apart and coalesced again.

  And at the far end of the room, there was a glossy white plastic cylinder the size of a blender with a jungle of cables spilling out of the bottom. Thin cables, thick cables, cables that pooled and coiled in huge rubber loops on the floor. It was a quantum computer, and it was totally, completely illegal.

  There was a girl in the room. She had her back to us, leaned into a screen flashing green and gray. She was wearing a baggy Grail jumpsuit just like Jad’s.

  Pam Prior?

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Scheme said, her voice rising above the buzz of the electronics.

  The girl whirled, eyes bugging out of her head. Okay, she wasn’t Pam Prior. She—the Beekeeper—was skinnier, with hollowed-out cheeks and stringy brown hair. And she was young. Really young.

  She didn’t say anything, but seemed to stumble, caught herself, and suddenly a gun was in her hand. A little black viper of a gun.


  Trauma point. Scheme, that’s a trauma point.

  “Is this the after party?” Scheme said. Her hands were in the air.

  “You were at the show,” the Beekeeper said. “I saw you.” She rocked a little on her feet.

  “I don’t know where the hell you got a banana box,” Scheme said. “But if you’ve been using it, you’re lucky you can see straight.”

  “I can see straigh-nough to shoot you,” the Beekeeper said. It came out slurred. There was a smear of blood under her nose.

  Then—I was the first to see it—there was a dark shape in the doorway, just behind Scheme. It was big, with a strange outline.

  The Beekeeper saw it next, and she waved her arm and shot. The gun made a hollow thwack, and in the next moment, Scheme lunged, lifted it and cracked an elbow against the Beekeeper’s jaw. The girl’s knees buckled and blood bloomed from her nose as if something inside had given way.

  “Shit,” Scheme said. She scrounged in her pocket and pulled out a roll of gauze. I checked the doorway. It was empty.

  “Hu. Call the cops.”

  We waited. Scheme sat in the nest of cable, cradling the Beekeeper’s head in her lap. The girl’s face was pretty—if you ignored the blood, and the circles under her eyes so dark they were almost purple. She looked about sixteen. There was a dense constellation of merit badges on the front of her jumpsuit. She was smart.

  Scheme had yanked the cables out of the quantum computer and the Beekeeper’s network had blinked out of existence. I looked at one of the files I’d copied—a single text file tucked into the mountains and mountains of music:

  GIVE UP.

  Why make music when there’s already more than anyone could ever listen to in their entire life?

  IT WASN’T ALWAYS THIS WAY. We used to have some time to ourselves. You could do your own thing and compete with people your own age. THAT WAS HARD ENOUGH.

  But then RECORDING and DIGITIZATION. Now you don’t have any time to yourself. Now you have to compete with ALL OF HISTORY. Nobody seems to get it, so I’m going to PROVE IT. I’m going to break music.

  GIVE UP, because no one’s going to listen to anything you ever make. Not when they can listen to the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan and Radiohead and WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART forever and ever, and never hear the same song twice.

  There was a clatter of feet in the hallway and a gang of police came crashing into the room in a flood of black and blue. They could barely fit through the door, their suits were so thickly padded with cross-hatched carbon fiber. Words stitched in white across their shoulders said fog city special ops.

  The cops in front carried tall canisters, and they sprayed thick yellow foam up and down the quantum computer until it was completely encased, twice its original size. They lifted it up—gingerly, like an egg—and whisked it away. Then they took Scheme by the arms and lifted the Beekeeper’s limp form and hustled us all out of the room.

  We were pulled into the darkness of the hallway, and cops were tripping over guitar pedals and hi-hats and making a racket.

  A VERY STRANGE SERVER

  “So it wasn’t real,” Ryan Kelly said. He was back in Scheme’s office, sitting in the same blue chair, wearing the same black hoodie. The bruise on his cheek was fading.

  “No, those tracks are real,” Scheme said. “Just from a different world. And getting something like that always requires a sacrifice. But, now that it’s been made, they’re not going away, so I think you should enjoy them, if you can. There won’t be any more.”

  Ryan sighed. “What’s the point of doing anything, if some other version of you is just doing it better? Or worse.”

  Scheme shrugged. “It’s like a good dream. Sometimes when you wake up, you wish it could have been real. But it doesn’t matter. You have to get out of bed.”

  He sighed again.

  “Don’t forget,” Scheme said, “there are bad dreams, too.”

  Ryan left, moping, and Scheme spoke into the empty room:

  “You did a good job, Hu. Back at the Black Danube, and with the Beekeeper.”

  Thank you, I said. It was a very interesting case.

  “I thought it was boring,” she said. “All artists and self-indulgence. Except for the banana box. We’re going to have to figure out how that girl got her hands on it. Anyway, you’re promoted. Now you’re a junior assistant-in-training.”

  Scheme. I have a confession to make. I saved the files from the Beekeeper’s network.

  “All of them?”

  As many as I could copy. A lot of them.

  “You’re a gangster after all,” Scheme said. A smile tugged at her lips. “It’s completely illegal. But we’ll keep them, because I’ve never had a cool music collection before. Play something.”

  I cued up Beethoven’s Symphony Number Ten. Scheme leaned back at her desk and spun, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Hu,” she said. “You’re a very strange server.”

  It was the best compliment I’d ever received.

  ANOMALY

  The sun was coming in sharp and clear across the grass, and Scheme and I were walking the length of the Panhandle. The skinny strip of green runs between two wide streets, and both were buzzing with traffic. But the trees were like a fortress wall, and inside, everything seemed brighter and more real in my camera-eyes.

  Two days had passed since the Beekeeper affair, and Scheme was restless. Knowing what came next, when I play back the video from that walk, it seems less like we’re out strolling and more like she’s walking the plank.

  “I’m still thinking about that banana box,” she said, sloshing the last of her coffee around in her cup. “And wondering how Jenny Halais got her hands on it.”

  Jenny Halais was the Beekeeper. We’d learned that she’d graduated from Stanford when she was fifteen and worked at Grail as an audio search engineer. Now she was at San Francisco General, alive, but damaged.

  “It’s an anomaly,” Scheme said, “a dangerous one. Like a bike messenger with a loose nuke.”

  We came to the end of the park and crossed the street, heading back to the office on Zeroth Avenue. Scheme leapt lightly up the steps and swiped her key across the door. She wiped a cuff across the sign to clear the wet film of morning.

  “The feeds, Hu!” she called out into the front room, as if I wasn’t perched on her shoulders. When we were here, in the office, she treated me as an ambient presence, part of the walls and windows. It wasn’t inaccurate. I had extra camera-eyes here—eyes above the door and eyes above her desk.

  Her desk, which was a complete mess. There was a weird clock with six hands, an old phone that wasn’t plugged in to anything and a toy tugboat painted red and blue. And then about three hundred pounds of paper.

  Scheme was, I had discovered, a kleptomaniac pack-rat with a powerful excuse. Almost anything could be swiped, pocketed, filed and stored in the name of investigation. This applied to things from the real world—she had one of the red-brown espresso cups from the Black Danube in a plastic bag on a shelf, tagged like evidence—and things from the digital world, too. She printed them out. Documents, photos, even emails. She liked to hold them in her hand, pace with them, read them out loud. She liked to crumple them up and throw them into the corner—and then run over to retrieve them, smoothing them back out.

  I estimate that half of the documents in her collection have been, at one point, crumpled, torn, balled-up or burned.

  Scheme didn’t like drawers or cabinets. “I need to be able to see what I have,” she explained. “I need to be able to make connections.” So the front room was lined, floor-to-ceiling, with close-packed shelves of wire mesh. They overflowed with books, folders, taped-up brown boxes, plastic bags, tupperware containers and every kind of digital media ever invented, from CDs to key-drives to solid-state data stamps. There was one 5.25” floppy disk with a pentagram scratched across the plastic.

  On the edge of one shelf, near the window, there was a single, tentative green vine. It c
limbed up over the brow of a scowling wooden mask with thick horns and a lolling black tongue.

  Scheme plucked her coat up off her chair-back and fished in one of its pockets. Out came a small brown ball.

  Scheme... you saved a falafel?

  “You mean this preternaturally delicious fried snack, prepared near a site of illegal quantum instability?” she said, zipping it into a small plastic bag. “Yes, Hu. I saved a falafel.” She slid it onto a shelf next to a bottle of wine with a biohazard warning sticker half-obscuring the label.

  “The feeds, Hu,” she said again.

  Everywhere Scheme went, every person she met, she took note. Or, I did; that was my job now. Every place, every name, became part of an ever-expanding filter. Then, every morning, I went through everything I could get my hands on—long ropes of news, starling flocks of status updates, the confetti of stock prices—looking for familiar faces. It was a line-up a million miles long.

  That morning, I recognized something. It was a tight cluster of statuses, all from Grail employees, all of them based in Fog City.

  Maybe it’s a good thing you saved it, Scheme. Look at these:

  ALERT: Falafel King is closed #fogcity

  Is today a falafel holiday? FK is dark

  Fadi where aaaare youuuu

  SO HUNGRY NEED FALAFEL

  #falafelfail :-(

  “So the question is,” Scheme said, “does the Falafel King ever just take a day off?”

  There aren’t any clusters like this on record. In fact, no one has ever complained about Fadi’s shop being closed. Scheme, this is an anomaly.

  She smiled. I was learning her language.

  “Let’s go poke around.”

  THE CLIENT

  The sun was up over San Francisco but Fog City was dark like dusk. There were more people around than before, most of them in Grail jumpsuits, going to work or getting coffee in the gray alleys. The patter of feet echoed between the buildings, and I could still hear the water lapping up against something, somewhere.