Annabel Scheme

by Robin Sloan

  The FALAFEL KING sign was dark. The sliding door was shut tight. Scheme knocked, then banged her palm on the glass.

  “Rule number twelve,” she said, “don’t break into a building without a client.”

  Scheme, you’re just making these up as you go along, aren’t you.

  “Hu, I’m trying to impart my hard-earned wisdom and—”

  A light came on inside the restaurant. Behind the counter, on the back wall. It was a thin column that widened into a rectangle, a doorway—the swinging doors. Framed in a dull orange glow from beyond was a tall, strange silhouette. The doors swung shut, and didn’t open again.

  “You saw that,” Scheme said.

  Yes, and I recognize that silhouette, Scheme. It’s the one I saw in the Beekeeper’s lab.

  “Re-ally,” Scheme said. “Rule twelve-A: If somebody else already broke in, you’re allowed to follow.”

  She pulled a ribbon of metal out of her pocket and slid it into the door’s mechanism. It rattled once, twice, then slid open. Inside, it was silence and shadows. The fog spilled in around Scheme’s feet.

  “Something’s rancid,” she sniffed, “or about to be.”

  She went step by step around the shop. The stools were tucked under the counter and the kitchen was tidy. The counter was gleaming in the gray glow. No violence. No inside-out bodies. I kept my eyes on those swinging doors.

  “Hello,” Scheme called out. “Fadi?”

  Nothing. She walked to the back and hovered closer to the swinging doors. Orange light peeked out from between and beneath them.

  Scheme swept a hand up across her ear and palmed an earring. I saw huge white fingers close around me, and then in a smooth motion she slid the earring across the floor, under the doors and into the back room. When it came to a halt, everything was upside-down and sideways.

  Scheme, you could have warned me.

  “What do you see?”

  A low CFL glow rose from a naked bulb stuck to the ceiling. The room was a storage area retrofitted, lightly, for living. There was an industrial wash basin, a low plastic table and a cot. I couldn’t see what was on the table but, above the cot, there was a small black cross hanging from a push-pin.

  There’s no one here, I said. I felt a little bit stupid lying on the floor.

  Scheme pushed through the doors and scooped me up again.

  “No exit,” she said, looking around. There was also a desk, with a wide flat monitor, a many-buttoned mouse and a headset that sprouted a tiny microphone. Wires snaked beneath the desk into the humming black mass of a computer.

  “That’s quite a rig,” Scheme said. “Another anomaly. Take a look.”

  She pulled a thin, black wifi transponder out of a pocket and slid it into one of the computer’s front ports. Again, before I had time to think, I was somewhere else, flying through Fadi’s files.

  His computer was as sparse as his living space. A free accounting program. A web history that included Grail, Grail-mail and a local restaurant review site. (He had logged in once, using his real name, and given Falafel King five stars.) And then, a game. Gigabytes upon gigabytes of code, art, music and maps. A whole world tucked into this black box. And it wasn’t just any world.

  Scheme, he plays World of Jesus. He plays it a lot.

  The game logs showed that Fadi was hard-core—sixty hours a week. He spent as much time in World of Jesus as he did here in Fog City.

  But there’s nothing out of the ordinary here. He hasn’t sent an email in over a week, and he played—

  Scheme cried out and leapt away from the desk. Back in Fadi’s room, there was a face peering out of the monitor—literally leaning out of it, poking out into the third dimension. It was the shape from the Beekeeper’s lab. It was also, I realized, the man we’d seen here in the falafel shop—the man with the droopy mustache. It was a railroad conductor’s hat that made that strange silhouette.

  “What the hell?” Scheme snapped. She looked like she was ready to give him, and the whole monitor, one of those elbows to the chin.

  He tried to speak, and his mouth moved, but nothing came out.

  But I had software for that:

  Scheme, I’m reading his lips. He’s saying ‘join me in Jerusalem.’

  The head and hat pulled back into the screen and disappeared. Scheme was silent, then dropped her hands back down to her sides.

  Maybe he’s our client, Scheme.

  “Rule number thirteen,” she said, “he’s not our client.”

  Well, what now?

  “It had occurred to me,” she said, “that we might want to dip into the game. I’ll bet Fadi has more friends in World of Jesus than in Fog City.”

  Seems likely.

  “But I just want to be clear,” she said, sliding into Fadi’s desk, “that we are not doing this because a screen-saver with a strange hat told us to.”

  Got it. Definitely not.

  She logged into the game portal. Wow: Scheme had accounts for every game on the planet—maxed-out characters in Ultimate Apocalypse, Dragon Planet, Yakuza Wars, all the way down the list to Happy Puppy Dog Park.

  Where did you get these, Scheme?

  “I pay some kids in Guangdong to play all day,” she said. “They’re overachievers.”

  There were plenty of options for World of Jesus. The monitor showed a small parade: centurion, fisher, farmer, priest. There was a woman in silk. There was a merchant with cartoony bags of gold.

  “Pick one,” Scheme said. “See you in Jerusalem.”

  IN JERUSALEM

  The first thing I noticed was the light.

  My eyes opened in a small, simple house with wooden shutters, and the light was peeking in through the cracks, picking up motes of dust in the air. I’d never seen anything like it. Are there motes in the real world? Scheme’s earrings didn’t show motes.

  In World of Jesus, you could choose between looking over your character’s shoulder or through its eyes. First, I saw myself from behind, then spun around: I’d chosen the girl in silk. Then I switched to see through my own eyes. All I ever did was look over Scheme’s shoulder. I wanted a new perspective.

  The door opened automatically. Outside, the sun beamed in blue-gold through a scrim of tall cedars and fell in wide bars on a dusty, stone-paved street. Everything looked... mildly medieval. I had a feeling that this Jerusalem was not historically accurate.

  I lifted my eyes to the sky, and it felt like my heart was going to jump out of my chest. It was probably just my eight processors all seizing up at once; I wasn’t built for this. Grail servers are optimized to process gobs of text, not 3D graphics, so the carefully-crafted World of Jesus was a new exertion.

  I didn’t care. That sky. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. White curls and wisps dotted the glowing blue bowl. I couldn’t do anything except stand and stare.

  A voice crackled: “Hu, is that you?”

  I turned. It was a woman in a simple gray tunic, with red hair just like Scheme’s.

  “Yes, it’s me,” I said—and realized that I spoke like everyone else.

  Someone was striding across the street to meet us. It was the man in the conductor’s hat—and he was wearing it here in World of Jesus, too. In fact, head to toe, he looked exactly the same as he had in the falafel shop. That was not a Jerusalem-issue suit.

  “Please, allow me to introduce myself at last,” he said. His voice was deep and resonant; it didn’t crackle at all. “I am Jack Zapp, and I am delighted to meet you.”

  “I am Annabel Scheme,” Scheme said.

  “Miss Scheme,” he said, giving a short bow. “And you, madam?”

  “Hugin Nineteen,” I said. I hated that name, but I was feeling formal for some reason.

  “Miss Nineteen,” he nodded. “Allow me to apologize for my rudeness. It is an unfortunate feature of my circumstances that, in the fog outside, I am rendered mute. But here!” He spread his arms wide. “This is almost like being alive.”

  Tell me a
bout it, Jack Zapp. I couldn’t stop swiveling my head just to watch the perspective change when I wanted it to.

  “Now, if my guess is correct—and they usually are—you are investigating the disappearance of Fadi Azer, purveyor of Fog City’s finest falafel.”

  “We are,” Scheme said. Static washed through her voice.

  “Then I believe I can be of service to you. And I believe that you, in turn, might be able to assist me. You see, I’m pursuing an investigation of my own.”

  Jack Zapp looked so strange standing in the storybook Jerusalem street—the gold buttons on his jacket shining, his conductor’s hat set perfectly straight on his head. I liked him.

  “There is a place here that I think might be of great interest to you, and I can explain myself as we walk. Shall we?”

  “Yes,” Scheme said.

  Jack Zapp grinned. “Wonderful!”

  We set off down the street. It was crowded with morning commerce; players were doing the most banal things and paying a monthly subscription fee to do them. Sweeping floors. Making breakfast. Gutting fish. Someone actually coded a fish-gutting simulation. The scales glistened in the light, all individually modeled.

  Fadi’s game logs revealed that, although he was a hard-core player, he was no escapist. In World of Jesus, he inhabited a character named… Fadi.

  Scheme and Jack Zapp were talking—well, Jack Zapp was doing most of the talking—and I trailed behind, just enjoying the street. The sound was so clear. No static, no hiss. My footfalls rang on the stone in perfect stereo, and I heard the clink of coins when a thick-set merchant jostled past me.

  Jack Zapp announced, to no one in particular: “Why, I’ll wager this is the finest deductive trio that Jerusalem has ever seen! Miss Scheme, Miss Nineteen and Jack Zapp… the Electric Detective!”

  I shot Scheme a skeptical glance—I could shoot glances!—but she was staring off into space.

  THE ELECTRIC DETECTIVE

  I hadn’t forgotten my duties entirely, and I took notes as Jack Zapp talked. And talked, and talked, and talked.

  “I was a conductor,” he said. “St. Louis to San Francisco on the Pacific Railroad for three years. Back and forth. Never stepped foot off the train! It was exciting, you know. The train was a magnet; it attracted interesting people. Some famous. Some without a penny to their name, just that one magic ticket west. I kept a jar of nickels on the train, and I gave them to men in need. I liked the idea of giving a man the first nickel of his new life. The boys on the train used to call them Jackman’s second chances.

  “Jack Zapp wasn’t my name then. It was Sherringford Jackman.”

  Scheme was quiet and attentive. I couldn’t believe it.

  “One day, a man boards my train named Aloysius Neri. I remember it like yesterday. Long face, long arms. Came aboard carrying great rolls of paper—blueprints—and he crossed half the United States bent over them. He’d draw and draw until it was time for dinner, then he’d gobble down his grub—speaking not a word—and go back to drawing.”

  “I asked Neri what he was up to, and he said he’d been sent to supervise the electrification of San Francisco.”

  Here, Jack Zapp stopped for effect, and threw his arms wide: “Electrification! The word gave me chills. So, I’d stop by, every trip up and down the train, and learn a little bit from Neri. He explained conduction, resistance, generation. The magic of the dynamo. He had a map of San Francisco, and he showed me the streets they were going to light up.”

  I thought this was fascinating. I tend to assume nothing existed before 1998. Imagine learning that, a hundred years ago, the earth had no air and was entirely inhospitable to life. That’s what it was like to hear about a time before electricity.

  “Well, I can’t explain it,” Jack Zapp said, “but it stuck in my head. We made it to California and Neri walked off the train carrying those blueprints like sacred scrolls. I headed back to St. Louis, but the thrill of it was gone. It was like Neri moved the magnet, and now I was the one being drawn.

  “So I stepped off the train—it was August 8, 1879—and I shook the hand of the Pacific Railroad’s man in Alameda, collected my pay, and hopped a ferry to San Francisco. It was the first time my feet had touched ground in three years.”

  This was the first time my feet had ever touched ground. Sure, simulated feet, simulated ground, but I’d take it.

  “In the city, I asked a man to point me to Russian Hill, and I headed straight for it. Couldn’t stop for anything; I was like a man possessed. Finally, I took a cable car up into the fog—it was summertime—and when I got to the top, oh, you should have seen it.”

  Jack Zapp stopped again, and stretched his arms even wider, as if presenting a panorama: “The lights were floating like a crown. Neri had done his work. Electric streetlights, all in a ring. It felt like the promised land. In that moment I knew I’d never return to the train. This was a new life. So I took out a nickel, the last of Jackman’s second chances, gave it a toss”—he pantomimed this—“and chose a new name for myself. Jack Zapp.”

  There was a commotion in the street. The crowd ahead was stirring and seething; another moment, and I saw the reason. A middle-aged woman was crossing the plaza.

  It was Mary.

  I knew this because she looked like every painting of Mary ever made, all mashed-up and multiplied. Huge concentric halos radiated out from her face at perpendicular angles. Swirls of lights swept the street clear in front of her, and her footprints glowed gold behind her. An honor guard of half-transparent angels hovered around her in a box formation, hoisting harps and flaming swords.

  At first she was just gazing beatifically forward, but then her head rocked slowly to one side, and her eyes swept across the crowd, and caught mine.

  She was a computer program. She had to be. They wouldn’t let anyone play Mary. In World of Jesus, you were a baker or a fish-monger, not John or Judas. But that was a powerful gaze for a computer program. There were more polygons in Mary’s eyes than the rest of the plaza combined. I felt my processors burning. I glanced to the ground, and when I looked back, she had moved on, and the crowd was filling in the space she’d left behind.

  “Don’t dawdle, Miss Nineteen,” Jack Zapp called back to me. “The Pool of Siloam awaits!”

  We’d been walking for what felt like miles when I remembered that I could speak.

  “Mr. Zapp,” I said—making my voice soft and trying to hold the computery modulation at bay—“what did you do after that?”

  “Why, Miss Nineteen, I found a job,” he said. “Many jobs. I drove a milk cart. I ran a cable car. But I had my eye on electrification. Now, I knew I didn’t have it in me to be an engineer like Neri. I drank with him every Tuesday at the White Fang. Picked his brain, but there was just too much brain to pick.

  “Then, one night, Neri told me a story. An old widow living up on Russian Hill, she’d had the electric lights installed, and when she turned them on, she heard her dead husband whispering:

  “Elaine. Elaiiine.

  “Sometimes you settle for a profession. Sometimes you reach for a profession. And sometimes, Miss Nineteen, you create a profession where none existed before.”

  “I know just what you mean,” I said. “So what did you do?”

  It was Jack Zapp and me walking in front now, with Scheme trailing behind; the three of us made an increasingly acute triangle.

  “Why, I became the world’s first Electric Detective!”

  I laughed. Jack Zapp’s enthusiasm was infectious. This had all happened more than a hundred years ago, and he was still so proud of himself.

  “I found Elaine Fitzgerald’s house—it was dark, as she’d grown weary of the moaning and groaning—and I knocked on her front door and offered my services. By way of demonstration, she lit those electric lights, and sure enough, I heard it, too. A far-off voice saying: Elaine. Elaine. Elaine.

  “I might add that Elaine Fitzgerald was not as old a widow as I had imagined. She was a lovely woman. And I
gave her my pledge that I would not rest until her case was solved.”

  “What then?”

  “Well, I thought I should pay old Mr. Fitzgerald a visit. He was buried in a cemetery not far from the house, just down the slope of the hill. And do you know what I saw there?”

  “Fresh earth above his grave?” I said. Just a guess.

  “No, Miss Nineteen. The transmission line. It ran right up alongside the cemetery. Mr. Fitzgerald saw a way home, and he hopped aboard.”

  Wow. The first internet.

  “So, Elaine—Mrs. Fitzgerald—dug him up and moved him to the new graveyard over in the Presidio, and she heard not a peep thereafter. That was my first case.”

  “Did you have many after that?”

  “Dozens!” Jack Zapp said. “Hundreds. I developed a theory, Jack Zapp’s Theory of Electro-Phanto-Dynamics, backed it up with Jack Zapp’s Restless Pledge, and offered my services to clients in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and once, New York City.”

  “How did you—” I trailed off. I didn’t know how to say it.

  “How did I end up like this, you mean to ask,” Jack Zapp said. He frowned, and his mustache drooped lower. “Miss Nineteen, I will speak plainly.” He paused. “I bit off more than I could chew.”

  The streets were all sloping down in the same direction now, dropping towards the corner of the city and, I imagined, the Pool of Siloam. For a moment, as Jack Zapp was telling his graveyard tale, I had the sense we were being followed. But I couldn’t see everywhere at once anymore, and when I turned my head, there was nothing.

  “It was a demon in a dynamo,” Jack Zapp said. “One of Tesla’s new machines on Mission Street. Absolutely remarkable. Big as a house. Except it wouldn’t run. So naturally, the chairman of the board of Pacific Gas and Electric called on Jack Zapp, the Electric Detective, and I gave him my pledge...” His voice softened a bit. “And I failed. I crept into the station with my bifocal phanto-glass, and I saw it there—a dark shadowed thing with long arms and a face like a man. It was cradling the machine like a lover. But that’s about all I can tell you, because as soon as we locked eyes, I was cooked. Electrocuted—though wether by Tesla's forces or some darker cousin, I can't say. It was all dark fog for a long time, and then a lighter fog—and next I knew, I was walking the Embarcadero again. And now,” he said, “I intend to resume my investigation.”