by Ian McDonald
‘BTW,’ he flicked back from the boardroom door. ‘Even though we haven’t, IMBWR it’s World Cup year.’
Thanks Adriano legal Adriano we’ll remember that Adriano.
Boba Fett still held Marcelina menacingly under his gun, but Yoda seemed to be smiling.
SEPTEMBER 22, 2032
The ball hangs motionless at the top of its arc. It frames Cidade de Luz, fifty hillside streets, its head adorned with the thorny crown of the favela, at its knees the rodovia heat-crazy with windows and wing mirrors. Beyond the highway the gated enclaves begin: red-roofed, blue-pooled, green-shaded. Through the sun-shiver the endless towers of São Paulo recede into half-believed spirits of architecture, their summits orbited by advertisements. Helicopters itch and fidget between rooftop landing pads; there are people up there who have never touched the ground. But higher still are the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. On any clear-sky day you may catch them, a flicker on the very edge of vision, like stray cells floating in the jelly of the eye, as they turn in their orbits and their vast, gossamer wings catch the light. Sixteen sky-drones, frail as prayers, circle constantly on the borders of the troposphere. Like angels, the robot planes fly endlessly; they need, and can, never touch the ground again; like angels, they see into the hearts and intentions of man. They monitor and track the two billion arfids - radio frequency identity chips - seeded through the cars, clothes, consumer electronics, cash, and cards of the City of Saint Paul’s twenty-two million inhabitants. Twenty kilometers above the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance, balloons the size of city blocks maneuver in the tropopause, holding position over their ground data-transfer stations. Exabits of information chatter between them, the seamless weave of communication that clothes not just Brasil but the planet. Higher still, beyond all sense and thought, and global positioning satellites tumble along their prescribed orbits, tracking movements down to a single footstep, logging every transaction, every real and centavo. Highest of all, God on his stool, looking on Brasil and its three hundred million souls, nostalgic for the days when his was the only omniscience.
All for an instant, frozen by the parabola of a World Cup 2030 soccer ball. And the ball falls. It drops onto the right foot of a girl in a tight little pair of spandex shorts with her name across her ass: Milena, yellow on green. She holds the ball on the flat upper surface of her Nike Raptor, then flips it up into the air again. The girl spins round to volley the ball from her left foot, spins under it and traps it on her chest. She wears her name there too, blue on the sun-gold of the belly-cropped futebol shirt. Castro. Blue and green and gold.
‘She could be a bit bigger up top,’ Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas says, sucking morning through his teeth. ‘But at least she’s blond. I mean, she is blond?’
‘What are you saying? This is my cousin.’ Two-Fags is a scraggy enxofrada with no style and less jeito, and if that girl out there turning pirouettes under the looping ball in her hot pants and belly-top is his cousin, then Edson is not the sixth son of a sixth son. They sit on folding military sling chairs at the edge of the futsal court, a dog-turd-infested concrete bunker in the overlooked space behind the Assembly of God. Milena Castro, Keepie-Uppie Queen of Cidade de Luz, heads the ball now one two three four five six seven. All good girls they go to heaven. Especially back of the Assembly of God. The ball makes a fine plasticy thwack against her upturned forehead. Seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty. Like the rich and the angels, the ball never touches the ground.
‘How long can she keep it up for?’
‘As long as you like.’
Heading and smiling. A grin and wink in Edson’s direction and Milena volleys the ball from knee to knee. She wears knee socks, in patriotic colors. Knee socks work for Edson.
‘I’ll take her on.’ Edson almost sees the reis tumble in Two-Fags’ eyes, like something from the cartoon channel. ‘Come round my office; we’ll talk.’ It’s a shotgun shack at the side of Dona Hortense’s house that smells of dog piss and mold, but it’s where De Freitas Global Talent does its business. Milena Keepie-Uppie Queen spins, strikes a pose, and the ball drops right sweet into the crook of her arm. ‘I’m impressed with what I see.’ Her lily skin isn’t even moist with sweat. ‘I think you have talent. Unfortunately, talent isn’t enough these days. This is where I can help. You need a USP. You know what is? Unique Selling Point. So, the pants are cute, but they have to go.’
‘Ey! This is my cousin you’re talking about,’ shouts Two-Fags. Edson ignores him. Local kids are arriving by their three and fours at the futsal court, bouncing their small, heavy ball impatiently.
‘Futebol is a thong thing. At some point you will need a boob job as well. It doesn’t affect the act, anything like that?’
The Keepie-Uppie Queen shakes her head. The futsal boys are staring at her. Get used to it, Edson thinks. It will be forty thousand of them watching you at halftime at the Parque São Jorge keeping it up up up.
‘Good good good. Now, what I will do is try you on one of the Série C teams first. Atlético Sorocaba, Rio Branco, something like that. Build you up, get you a rep. Then we move on. But first of all, you have to come round to my office and make it all official.’
Milena nods matter-of-factly, slips on a silky Timão blouson, and pulls up team color legwarmers. At least she understands business, unlike Two-Fags, who is so dense Edson wonders how he made it to twenty-eight. But he is onto something with this one. De Freitas Global Talent’s first major signing - not counting the women’s foot-volley team and Petty Cash the pod-warrior, who were just practice. Edson slaps the military chairs just so, and they umbrella down into slender canes a man can sling across his back. Clever stuff, this new smart plastic. Two-Fags has his arm around the Keepie-Uppie Queen’s bare waist in a way that is not seemly for any blood relative. Pay him a finder’s fee and slip him out the back door.
‘I’ll be in after nine!’ Edson shouts after Two-Fags and Milena. The futsal kids push past, eager for their territory, stringing up their net, slipping off their Havaianas.
An ugly face flashes in the middle of Edson’s Chillibean I-shades: Gerson, fifth son of a sixth son and less favored in every way than Edson. Edson dabs finger to the frame to take the call.
‘Hey, unfortunate brother, I have to tell you, I just signed the sweetest deal . . .’
Edson can name a thousand stupidities Gerson has committed, but today he has excelled himself. The reason he’s calling is because he has forty minutes before Brooklin Bandeira’s private seguranças track him down and kill him.
A shower of cards coins keys tampons lippy makeup compact mag from an upturned handbag. Coins and keys bounce on the pavement, tampons roll and blow on the hot wind. The gossip mag - handbag-sized edition - falls like a broken-backed bird. The compact hits the concrete edge-on and explodes into clamshells, pressed powder, pad, mirror. The mirror wheels a little way.
Gerson João Oliveira de Freitas jumped the girl blindside of the enclave security systems. He picked her up outside Hugo Boss on Avenida Paulista: tailed the taxi back to Mummy and Daddy’s lower-middle-class enclave of colonial-style pseudofazendas with cool cool pools, tucked away behind the Vila Mariana Cemetery. Take her as she’s fiddling with her bags. He pulled the strip on the one-shot plastic gun. She just needed one look. Gerson tipped out the bag, threw away the gun - it began to decompose immediately - spun the little moto on its back wheel. In and out before she could even scream.
His back wheel shatters the mirror as he guns the engine. Bad luck for someone. He pulls the bandana with which he had covered his face down over his neck. Even a glimpse of one is a stop’n’search offense these days. Antisocial clothing. Her I-shades, her watch, her shirt, the taxi; some eye somewhere will have photographed him. He has the moto’s license plates in his backpack. When he gets to the chipperia, they’ll go back on. Twenty seconds with a screwdriver. The cards will already be blank. The key codes change every eight hours. The coin-tokens are worth less than the plastic they’re pressed fr
om. Makeup, tampons, girlie mags are not for a man. But the street value of a new season 2032 Giorelli Habbajabba, (which is beyond must have into by any means necessary) is three thousand reis. For a bag. Yes. Prize hooked over his arm, Gerson accelerates down the on-ramp into the great howl of Avenida Dr Francisco Mesquita.
Senhora Ana Luisa Montenegro de Coelho taps her big ochre I-shades and sends an assalto report and photo through to Austral Insurance and Security. Bandana over face. For sure. No plates. Of course. But ten kilometers over São Paulo an Angel of Perpetual Surveillance turns on the back-loop of its eternal holding pattern and logs a stolen handbag. From the snow of ever-moving arfid signatures it identifies and locates the radio frequency identification chips that uniquely tagged the Anton Giorelli Habbajabba handbag recently registered to Senhora Ana Luisa Montenegro de Coelho. It calls up its neural-net map of São Paulo’s two thousand square kilometers and twenty-two million souls; searches through every burb, bairro, downtown, favela, mall, alley, park, soccer stadium, racetrack, and highway; and finds it swinging purple-and-pinkly from the elbow of Gerson João Oliveira de Freitas, hunched over the handlebars of his hand-me-down moped, buzzing like a neon through the home-run along Ibirapuera. A contract goes out. Automated bid systems in the dozen private security companies that can reach the target on budget submit tenders. Fifteen seconds later a contract is issued from Austral Insurance to Brooklin Bandeira Securities. It’s a well-established medium-size company that’s been losing recently to younger, meaner, more vicious competitors. After comprehensive retraining and financial restructuring, it’s back, with a new attitude.
This for a bag? With purple and pink flowers? Ana Luisa Montenegro de Coelho can have another one before sunset. But there’s a crackdown on. There’s always a crackdown on somewhere: tough on crime, tough on the perpetrators of crime. Usually around the time for insurance policy renewal. Brooklin Bandeira Securities has a corporate reputation to restore, and its seguranças are dangerously bored watching O Globo Futebol 1. In the garage two Suzukis rev up. The riders fix location on their helmet HUDs. The pillion riders check weapons and buckle on. Game on.
In the gutter outside Ana Luisa’s nice little enclave, the discarded one-shot gun turns to black, putrid liquid and drips from the rungs of the grating into the sewer. Over the next few days delirious, poisoned rats will stagger and die across the lawns of Vila Mariana, causing short-lived consternation among the residents.
Edson touches the first two fingers of his left hand gently to his temple in a gesture he has evolved to show his older brother how exasperated he is with him, even when Gerson cannot see him. He sighs.
‘What is it you’re trying to tell me? They can’t blank the arfid?’
‘It’s some new thing they call an NP-chip.’
Gerson had been sipping coffee and enjoying the good sweet morning rolls, still warm from the oven, at Hamilcar and Mr Smiles’ Chipperia. It was parked round the back of a bakery, which meant good sweet morning rolls and pão de queijo for the chipperia’s clients while they made stolen things disappear from the sight of the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. Hamilcar and Mr Smiles worked out of a third-hand campervan so full of computers they lived outside in tents and awnings. As all trails ended at the chipperia, mobility was paramount. As Gerson understood it, it was all timing. It took ten minutes average, twenty minutes tops to erase an arfid; the closest the seguranças could get in that time was a five-kilometer circle of confusion, and it would blow their budget to search that large area. Most turned around and headed home as soon as they lost the signal from the arfid.
‘How much are you looking for that bag?’ Hamilcar was half reading the paper, half peeling the flakes of eczema from his cracked feet.
‘Three thousand reis.’
‘No, I mean seriously.’
‘That’s what they’re going for. You cannot get these bags for love nor money nor bribery. I’m telling you.’
‘Give you eight hundred, and that’s including what you owe us for the dechipping.’
‘Two thousand five.’
Hamilcar grimaced as he tore a particularly salty piece of dead white skin a little too far, baring raw flesh.
‘You are a man of no education. I was thinking maybe my girlfriend might like it as a present - she likes that sort of thing, all the names and that. Not at that price, though.’
Then the door had opened. Mr Smiles stepped out of the stinky camper. He was an IT graduate from the University of São Paulo, the hacker of the outfit. He was a big skinny Cabo Verde with a great and well-tended Afro and dentition that made him look as if he was always smiling. The smile did not sit naturally with the pump-action shotgun in his hand.
‘Hey hey hey . . .’ cried Gerson, spluttering flakes of sweet roll.
‘Gerson, nothing personal, but you have thirty seconds to get on your bike and depart.’
‘What what what?’ Gerson said, catching the Habbajabba as Mr Smiles lobbed it to him.
‘It’s NP-chipped. I can’t touch that.’
‘NP what? What shit? You’re the scientist; you should know about these things.’
‘I’m an information technologist, majoring in database design. This is quantum physics. Get a physicist. Or just go to the river and throw the thing away. You choose, but I’m not facing off with the Brooklin Bandeirantes. And I will shoot you.’
And that was when Gerson called his smart kid brother. And Edson says, ‘Go and throw the thing in a river.’
‘It’s three thousand reis.’
‘Brother, it’s a handbag.’
‘I need the money.’
‘Do you owe someone again? Jesus and Mary . . .’
Edson shoos kids away from his bike. It’s a Yam X-Cross 250 dirt bike, green and yellow, like a parrot, like a futebol shirt and Edson loves it beyond everything except his mother and his business plan. It is all jeito, and you can ride it straight up a wall. ‘Let me talk to Smiles.’
‘Okay,’ says Mr Smiles after Edson explains that he really can’t let his dumb brother get killed even over a woman’s handbag. ‘I think you’re all dead, but you could try the quantumeiros.’
‘Who are these? What-eiros?’
‘Quantumeiros. You know, those new quantum computers? No? Codes you can’t break? They can. They’re the physicists. I can give you their code; they move around even more than we do. Careful with them, though. Weird shit happens round these people.’
A map of the São Caetano rodovia network appears on Edson’s Chillibeans; a license plate is flagged, heading north on R118. Edson wonders how many chippers and crackers and quantumeiros are nomadic on the highways of great Sampa at any instant.
‘I shall try them.’
‘What did Gerson ever do he should have a brother like you?’ says Mr Smiles. ‘All the same, I wouldn’t hang around too long.’
The Yamaha starts to Edson’s thumbprint. He slips a concentration enhancer from his travel pack, pops it, and as the world sharpens and clarifies around him, rides slow through the alleys back of the crente church. He doesn’t want mud splashes from the lingering night’s rain on his white flares.
The brothers de Freitas meet twenty-three minutes later on the on-ramp at Intersection 7. Twenty-three minutes for the Brooklin Bandeira to close in, to narrow the circle of possibility down to machine-pistol range. Edson’s been checking his custom-fit rearview cameras for oil-slick-black segurança hunting bikes. He could get away from them on the Yam, take it places their big bulky machines could not, but not Gerson, flogging the alco engine on that shitty little putt-putt. Edson can hardly believe he once rode that thing. Gantry cameras read his license plate; hurtling satellites debit his account. They don’t make it easy for legitimate men of business.
And there it is, looming out of the traffic, the barquentine of the quantumeiros: a big forty-tonner standing at a steady hundred in the outside lane. The cab is pimped with Fleshbeck Crew-style cherubim and a battery of airhorns on the roof chromed and s
weet as the trumpets of archangels. Cook/Chill Meal Solutions, says the trail. Fine cover. No cop is ever going to stop and search bad cuisine. Edson weaves Gerson into the truck’s slipstream. A touch on the I-shades calls up the address Mr Smiles gave him. The truck flashes its hazard lights in acknowledgment and sways into the slow lane, drops to seventy sixty fifty forty. The back shutter rolls up, a middle-aged guy in a Black Metal muscle top swings from a chain and manages to smoke at the same time. He beckons them close, closer. The loading ramp extends, lowers. Steel hits road. Sparks shower around the brothers Oliveira. Black Metal beckons them again: Come on, come on, on the ramp. Sparks peel away round Edson as he lines up the run. He’s a businessman, not a stunt-rider. Edson edges forward: the concentration pill gives him micro-accelerations and relative velocities. Wheel on wheel off wheel on wheel off, wheel on; then Edson throttles hard, surges forward, and brakes and declutches simultaneously.
Smoking metalhead applauds.
Thirty seconds later Gerson skids to a halt on the platform, pale and shaking. Edson tries to imagine what the commuters on the São Caetano rodovia make of a male with a pink handbag around his neck driving onto the back of a moving truck. Probably reckons it’s the telenovelas and are looking round for the flittercams : Hey! We’re on A World Somewhere, we really are!