Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 120

by Neil Clarke

  She yanked the pin out and pinched her arm shut until the polymer resealed. Flexed her fingers, pulled on her black driving gloves. Gritted her teeth as whoever it was kept on hammering at her opaqued window.

  Eris switched it transparent and sound porous. The man on the other side was wearing a charcoal gray suit with haute couture slashes through the fabric, and he was running one finger along the wriggling green vines some shitty graffiti artist had sprayed onto her side door earlier that week.

  “Cunt, don’t touch my cab,” she said.

  He looked up, showing a gaunt symmetrical face with icy blue eyes that glowed a bit, meaning Optiks. He grinned unnervingly white teeth.

  “I need a ride,” he said, probably thinking he could jerk her around because she was young and he was handsome. The haircut was the only thing that didn’t match up—buzzed down to stubble all over, instead of the long prehensile locks so in style for well-monied assholes.

  “The little orange light means busy,” Eris said. “Try the ones with little green lights. I know it’s confusing if you’ve never used a cab before, or if you’re a shithead.”

  In response, the man held up his sleek black tab and a non-refundable five hundred credit transfer marched across his screen onto the cab’s onboard. The digital chime sent dopamine down Eris’s spinal column. About ten times the going rate for even a cross-quadrant ride. Maybe when you were rich enough you lost track of that kind of thing. That much money, she could get some fresh artinerves for her arm and maybe even get the ugly green graffiti scrubbed off her side door.

  Eris grudgingly switched her busy light off. “Where to, sir?” she asked, as the man climbed into the back seat.

  “Lower streets,” he said, adjusting his lapels. “I’ll direct as we go.”

  “I’d prefer a sataddress, sir,” Eris said, slipping her hands into the cab’s modified control sleeves. The engine hummed in response.

  “Also, there will be a few people trying to follow us,” the man continued, ignoring her. “I hope that’s not a problem.”

  “You clowning?” Eris demanded. She checked her cams. Back along Pier 17, through the file of waiting black-and-yellow cabs, she saw the hulking shape of a silver-colored private upcar drifting towards them. It didn’t have any distinguishing holos.

  “They’re not sweepers,” the man in her back seat said. “Just overly curious individuals. Nothing unwholesome is happening here. All I need is for you to drive quickly and skillfully. I assumed from the customized chassis you can do that.”

  Eris tongued the gap in her molars. The feedback spikes in her bad arm were getting more painful and coming more often, and turning it off left her clumsy as shit. New artinerves would make things a lot better.

  Also she hadn’t done anything stupid in a long time, and it had been building under her skin like an itch.

  “Dump another five hundred on me, I can drive better than anyone you’ve ever seen,” she said, shooting for the moon.

  “Another five hundred,” the man said, winking one electric blue eye, “when we get there.”

  She pulled them up off the pier, climbing into the dull yellow sky. The City stretched around them in all directions. Up, especially. Behemoth technicolored towers, rotating apartment blocks, sky tunnels that scythed and retracted in accordance with traffic patterns. Eris rose leisurely through a swarm of drones. In her underbelly cam, she watched the silver upcar follow suit.

  “Lower streets, I said.” The man’s voice had a hint of annoyance now. His eyes were scrolling code. There was a lick of sweat on his hairline.

  “I heard,” Eris said, letting the silver upcar close the gap a bit more. “Don’t toss up back there, alright?”

  Before the man could reply, she dove.

  Down. Eris felt the G-force all the way up her arms, singing through the artinerves, and she felt it in her gut. They plunged past the silver upcar; through the blur she saw a startled silhouette recoiling. The drones and anything with avoidance AI scattered. Eris dealt with the others herself, slaloming between two unwary drivers, swooping under a freighter. She had her own proximity alert silenced, but the other vehicles made angry wails as she hurtled past.

  The silver upcar was only caught off-guard for a moment, then it dropped hard after them, a dive so steep Eris knew it had to be manual. She gunned the engine. A sky tunnel was extending below them, flexing into the air like a gigantic worm. A dock slid out from the adjacent building to meet it. There wasn’t going to be much of a gap.

  She took it, twisting to fit, feeling the magnets of the dock sizzle through the cab’s onboard, up her arm. The sky tunnel slammed into its dock and sheared the air where her bumper had been a microsecond before, but they were through.

  The silver upcar braked, angling to get around the tunnel. But by then Eris was away, spiraling into the traffic again, her heart pounding against her ribs. She checked the mirror. The passenger was flung back in his seat, howling. No—laughing. Somehow it made her like him a little more.

  She headed for the lower streets.

  “This is it?” Eris squinted down the alleyway.

  They’d gone about as low as she ever did, into the City’s underbelly, and now were facing a grimy quickcrete alley splashed with animated graffiti. She couldn’t make out the words, but the lime green color was familiar. She had some countermeasures keyed up and ready to go in case a bunch of hoodlums suddenly spilled out to vivisect her cab.

  “This is it,” her passenger confirmed. Once they’d shaken off the upcar, he’d gone back to his Optiks, muttering sub-vocals and blinking owlishly like any other boring businessman. It was sort of comforting, considering their strange destination.

  When he unrolled his tab and sent another five hundred across, the money made Eris feel momentarily affectionate.

  “Maybe dim those eyes of yours,” she suggested, triggering the door open. “Around here, they’ll take them out with a spoon.”

  “Around here, maybe, but not here,” the man said, flashing all his white teeth again. He made to climb out, then paused. His sleeve whirred, and a custom calling card, wafer-thin, spat out into his hand. “You’re a good driver,” he said. “I might need that again.” He set the filigreed black card down delicately on the cushion. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Then he was off into the alley, disappearing into the shadows. The graffiti wriggled the other way, startled, and Eris could finally read it. The green man cometh. Whatever the fuck that meant.

  She looked at her screen again, at the easiest gee of credit she’d ever made, and grinned. She could take the rest of the day off if she wanted.

  She wanted. Eris switched her orange light on, then lifted off and headed for home, which was a low slot in a grease-yellow honeycomb of converted storage units—and not the chic faux-po’ variety. But it had a good dock for her cab, and it was cheap. And compared to how she’d grown up, it was luxury.

  Eris did the math in her head as she drove, slicing the Guild fees off the top and figuring out how much she would put away. She only remembered the calling card in her back seat as her cab snicked gently into its moorings. If he overpaid like that every time, it was worth holding onto. She dropped the partition and plucked it off the cushion, careful not to crush it.

  She swung herself over the whistling gap in the dock’s metal floor and pushed her thumb to the apartment door. It tasted her genes and shuttered open, but the lights didn’t turn on as she stepped inside. She whistled a low activation note. Still nothing.

  Something was wrong. Her heart leapt up her throat. The apartment was small enough that she could tell there were extra bodies inside, she could hear weight shifting, breath in and breath out. She felt an angry buzz through her prosthetics, biofeedback from the adrenaline. The left one spasmed; she had to grab and hold it with her right until it stilled.

  Feeling the polymer muscle reminded her she had a little canister of stunspray tucked inside it. Eris moved slowly around the corner of the divider tha
t separated the bathroom out from the rest of the apartment, her heart pounding.

  Two people were waiting in the gloom, one of them draped on the side of the couch without laundry all over it, the other perched awkwardly on her orthochair, which was shifting all around trying to accommodate the unfamiliar body.

  “What the fuck are you doing in my house?” she demanded.

  The lights finally snapped on in response to her voice, and she got a good look at the intruders. The woman on the couch was tall and vaguely leonine, with heavy-lidded eyes and blocky cheekbones. Her black jacket was cut in a way that displayed both her long sinewy arms.

  The man on the orthochair was smaller, also wearing black, and he didn’t have a face. Instead, the space above his neck was a rippling wash of pixels that hurt Eris’s eyes to stare at directly.

  “We got a scan on your cab before you shook us,” the man said, in a voice stripped electronically of any identifying characteristics. “We’ve been waiting. Agents Ndirangu and Kit of the OCI. Arms out, please, Eris.”

  Her first instinct was to call bullshit and feed them the whole canister of stunspray. People told stories about Operative City Intelligence the way they told stories about the bogeyman. But facial blurs weren’t something you could just pick up at the fabshop, and there was something else, too. Something the passenger had said. Not sweepers, just Overly Curious Individuals.

  “That asshole,” she breathed, raising her arms.

  Eris gritted her teeth while the woman called Kit searched her, first by scan—there was a familiar tingle as it noticed the first prosthetic, a bit of surprise on Kit’s face when it found the second—and then by hand. Eris hadn’t been frisked for a long time. Turned out she still hated it.

  Kit slipped the calling card from Eris’s pocket, held it pinched between two sharp-looking fingernails for a closer look, then slid it into a Faraday pouch.

  “You can keep the stunner,” she said, in a slightly gravelly voice that was younger than Eris had been expecting. “Just don’t do anything stupid with it.”

  She stepped backward with a languid smile, which Eris did not return. The man, Ndirangu, had given up on the orthochair and was standing now as well. Eris knew she was in huge shit. Had to be. She’d probably just abetted an organ smuggler or contract killer or some such.

  “First question,” Ndirangu said tonelessly. “What do you know about the Green Man?”

  “Fuck all?” she said back. “Look, I just drove him. I didn’t know who he was, didn’t know who you were. He said you weren’t sweepers.”

  “Technically correct, although our work does occasionally overlap with City Law Enforcement,” Ndirangu said. “Second question. What do you know about Ferris Carrow?”

  He raised one smartgloved hand, and a holo bloomed to life on the wall, showing an image of an unsmiling woman with a surgically-ageless face, her silver-blonde hair sheared to professional spikes. Eris folded her arms, and in her peripheral she noticed Kit mirror the motion.

  “Don’t know her,” Eris said. “Should I?”

  “Ferris Carrow owned half the filtration plants in the City, and a quarter of its fabbing industry,” Ndirangu said. “Very wealthy, quite influential. She was murdered three days ago.”

  Eris felt her knees go weak and watery. “You think I had something to do with a murder?” she demanded.

  “We think the man you helped evade us did.” The holo shifted, and now it showed Eris’s mysterious passenger, high-angle, stepping into her cab. “Arno Schorr,” Ndirangu said. “A philanthropist, businessman, and one of the founders of a doomsday cult. The Church of the Green Man.”

  “Never heard of it,” Eris said, trying to figure out where his eyes were so she could meet them, so he would know she meant it.

  “They’ve been trying to get religion licensing for the past couple months.” Ndirangu gave a stiff shrug that might have been annoyance. “Before her death, Ferris Carrow appeared to have taken an interest. Basic doctrine is rejection of personal technology. Nature worship centered on a singular deity. A mishmash of Pagan and Luddite with ties to the Neoprimitive movement.”

  The penultimate word made Eris’s eyes narrow. Her City basic had no trace of colony accent left, and she told anyone who asked that she’d been born in the lower streets. But this was the OCI. The OCI knew things.

  “I didn’t pick where I was born,” she said shakily. “They shipped me out of the Neoprim colony when I was a kid. I’ve never gone back. I don’t have any fucking ties to it anymore.”

  “I’m aware,” Ndirangu said calmly. “And there’s really only one tenet of the Church of the Green Man we find worrisome. They’re extinctionist.”

  “Extinctionist?” Eris tried to make her voice even again. She didn’t like being reminded about the colony. Those were memories she kept in cold storage.

  “They think it would be best for the planet if we all died off,” Kit said darkly.

  Eris crinkled an eyebrow. “Does anyone not think that?”

  “The difference is, they’d like to do something about it,” Ndirangu said. He waved his hand and the holo shifted to a sprawling green graffiti on corroded metal wall. He read it aloud. “Humans are a virus, City is its last bastion. The Calamities were not enough to clean the world. But fear not, the Green Man cometh.” He paused. “At first we didn’t take it particularly seriously. Criminal mischief, nothing more. Then Ferris Carrow was found like this.”

  The holo churned and Eris’s stomach churned with it. The same woman, but lying on her back, now, with dark congealed cuts laddered up her legs and her stomach blown open. Someone had packed the exit wound with dirt, and out of the middle a little red flower was blooming.

  Eris swallowed back bile. “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck, switch that off. You think I had anything to do with that, you’re insane.”

  “We know you didn’t, Eris,” Ndirangu said tonelessly, turning his glove’s holo off. Eris felt a wave of relief that cut short at his next words. “We just want you to have an understanding of the gravity of the situation before you sign this waiver.”

  “What kind of waiver?” she asked. Kit was staring at her again, her arms, her legs. She had a bad feeling in her gut.

  “Schorr is going to need to transport something soon,” Ndirangu said. “Something we believe he smuggled out of the colonies on his most recent visit. We don’t know what, exactly. But it’s possible he’ll call on your services. You were impressive.”

  “I’ve done better,” she said on automatic.

  Another snort from Kit. Ndirangu didn’t react. Or maybe he did. Who knew?

  “We’re going to use you to get to Schorr. Gain his trust.”

  Eris blinked. “What, so I’m a spy now? I drive a cab. I’m not up on espionage. And I don’t want anything to do with a fucking murder cult, anyways, thanks.”

  “We wouldn’t dream of using an untrained citizen,” Ndirangu said. “No, you’ll simply be along for the ride. Agent Kit will be doing all the work.” He held up his left hand and the smartglove’s palm turned white, with minute black text scrolling across it. “This is a basic waiver for use of your body in the event of an OCI operation. All it needs is your geneprint.”

  Kit moved a thick strand of hair away from her temple and Eris saw the glinting neural link clinging there like a beetle. The way she’d been staring, the way she’d been mimicking, made sense all of a sudden.

  “No way,” Eris said. “I don’t do that brainshare shit. I don’t want anyone in my head but me.”

  “Brainshare is a bit of a misnomer,” Ndirangu said. “The waiver states clearly that we’ll have control of your central nervous system, but no access to your thoughts or memories. That all remains quite safe, and quite private.”

  “I don’t want her in my body, either,” Eris snapped, giving Kit a side-eye. “I don’t want anything to do with this. Just bill me for the traffic violations, okay? Just go.”

  “I’m afraid this is more important than
what you do or do not want,” Ndirangu said. “If you sign the waiver, you’ll be fully insured for any injuries occurring to your body. And once the OCI operation is deemed complete, you’ll be compensated for your time, as well.” He reached underneath the orthochair and pulled out a sleek black carry-case Eris hadn’t noticed before. “If you don’t sign, we may have to . . . investigate you.”

  “For what?” Eris demanded.

  “Schorr chose your cab because it had the Green Man tag on it,” Kit said coolly.

  “Someone did those vines last week while I was docking,” Eris protested. “I’d never paint up my own cab.”

  “Maybe the OCI is willing to chalk that up to coincidence,” Ndirangu said. “But the fact that you were born in a Neoprim colony may be one coincidence too many. It might warrant surveillance. Which might have a negative impact on your livelihood.”

  Eris’s mind whirred in circles. She should never have let that asshole into her cab. If she didn’t sign the waiver, she would be trying to drive through a swarm of follow-cams for the rest of her life, or worse. In the stories, people who pissed off the OCI eventually just disappeared. Kit could have definitely disappeared a few people, judging from the stare on her.

  And that was who she was supposed to brainshare with. Eris tongued the gap between her molars. The stupid decisions were piling up now, but it wasn’t like she had much of a choice.

  “I want to get ghosted on all traffic cams,” she said. “No violation notices for the rest of my life.”

  “I think we could arrange something like that,” Ndirangu said. “This is, after all, rather important.” He put out his left hand. Eris figured he was lying about the traffic cams, but she’d mostly said it to save some dignity, which he was letting her have. She could bet Kit wouldn’t have.

  Eris spat on her hand to ensure a DNA reading, then shook. The smartglove rasped against her skin like a cat’s tongue, then chimed an affirmative.

  “Excellent,” Ndirangu said. “We’ll get right to inserting the implant.”