Dyer sweeps up a box, lifts it over Mrs. John Dee’s head to the top of the stack. “What happened?”
“Some bloody bint knocks the boxes over, ‘oh, excuse me,’ she says, and when I get up to sort it out she nips in to play with your panel there, face first and wide eyed.”
“Contact cams,” Dyer says, nausea returning.
“‘That’s a bit of none of your business,’ I said, and she doesn’t even blink. ‘You deaf?’ I ask, and give her a nudge in the kidneys, in case she really was.”
Mrs. John Dee demonstrates with a vicious jab of her elbow.
Dyer steps back out of range. “So?”
“So since her hearing was apparently bollocksed, I figured I’d give it a tune up.” She patted her tablet. “I was just setting up audio network tests. I figured if she was rigged for cams, she’d have bud implants as well. I boosted the volume to eleven.”
“Ah,” Dyer said. “That was feedback, then, that I heard. From forty feet away.”
“Her head will be ringing for a fortnight. Ought to put a spanner in her party plans.”
“You think she’s a nano cook?”
“If she were a fan, or paparazzi, she’d have gone for our lovely visages, not the gear. She’s a bizarro you from some rival Drop party crew.”
Dyer’s thinking of that fade-away face, those eyes. “She look like me? Only with hair?” She waves her fingers over her head like clouds drifting. “Did she, uh, fade?”
Mrs. John Dee shrugs. “She looked like a yellow hood-up hoodie. Not so much fading as slinking away in disgrace, tail between her legs. Lovely tail, though. All’s well that ends well.” Mrs. John Dee demonstrates with another shimmy.
Dyer makes a dubious “mmm.” She fishes the scrap of smartpaper out of her back pocket, but it’s gone completely glitched, just a scattering of pixel dust.
2042-05-18T12:09:00+01:00 +51.541709-0.147667
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—SUPPORTING EVIDENCE IP VIOLATIONS SEE NOTE
• CONTACT: TARGET (CONFIRMED)—MARIAM EBADI UK7D1B4GU230011— PRIORITY NA RUMORED ASSOC. LEANNA VANCE C.F.—UK RESIDENT ID CONFIRMED VIA DIRECT SCAN EMBEDDED TAG
• NOTE: TARGET OPERATING ALPHET MODEL X50EU MICROASSEMBLER RUNNING UNRELEASED OS—LICENSE MODULE DISABLED—SEE ATTACHED IMAGES
• NOTE: UNREGISTERED NNDA PROFILES IN VIOLATION OF 21USC2401—SEE ATTACHED IMAGES
• ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE
—GOT THE BITCH—YEAH YEAH NO PHYSICAL ID YET NO DOCUMENTED DISTRIBUTION BUT WHO ELSE IS GONNA BE RUNNING ALPHET.COM BETA CODE WITH CUSTOM MODULES? AND THE LICENSE MOD IS AXED SO THAT’S IP VIOLATION RIGHT THERE *AND* SHE’S COOKING DELIVERY AGENTS WITH UNREGISTERED PAYLOADS—DO ME A FAVOR AND SEE IF THERE’S A BRIT LAW ABOUT THAT SO I DON’T HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE TREATY B.S. AGAIN
—ALSO THIS EBADI BIMBO IS HACKING EARBUD IMPLANTS—*GOT* TO BE A BRIT LAW AGAINST THAT
—SEE *TOLD* U I WAS A GOOD INVESTMENT
—KISSES—JO
• ATTACHMENT: IMAGES (5)—CLICK TO VIEW
Dyer, Shimago, and Mrs. John Dee, rocket in pocket— Mornington Crescent—Friday Afternoon
Dyer levers the backpack over the exit turnstile at arm’s length, ducks the bristling bouquet of carbonfiber antennae that spill from the top.
“Fragile,” Shimago reminds her.
“So are my eyeballs,” Dyer says.
Shimago doesn’t have to lift his pack; the turnstile only comes up to his thighs. Mrs. John Dee drags her duffel thumping behind her.
“Why is the helium so heavy?” she grumbles. “Ought to just float along. Maybe if I let some out into the bag.”
“No,” Dyer and Shimago say in unison. “You just want to huff it and sing in a squirrel voice,” Dyer adds.
“And then I shall just float along,” Mrs. John Dee agrees happily.
“Anyway, that’s the lightest bag,” Dyer says.
“That’s another thing,” Mrs. John Dee says. “Why is the rocket so heavy?”
“It’s not—”
“A rocket. Yes, love, but that’s what I call it because the first one was such a lovely rockety shape.”
“—Not heavy,” Shimago continues. “Just big.”
“Sixteen times the network bandwidth of the last one,” Dyer says. “Twice as many nano dispersers.”
“And your subsonic driver,” Shimago says. “The entire carbon outer shell is the resonator. 120DbA at 20 Hertz.”
“Ace. Teeth shall be rattled,” Mrs. John Dee says, out of breath and a few steps behind. She’s turning circles as she walks, duffel swinging.
“Wait ’til you see it flying, with the spotlights and the screens running,” Dyer says. “It’s perfect, looks just like the film. Only thing we couldn’t find is a clean recording of the announcer. You’ll have to record Shimago when we get back to the catacombs.”
Shimago booms, “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.”
Mrs. John Dee is still spinning. Dyer turns around. “Dee, what are you—”
“USER freak. Fuck off home.”
Dyer turns back. Whoever’s speaking is hidden behind Shimago’s bulk. She leans left to see a dozen pimpled punklings in custom-printed carbon, active tats a riot of football logos and Union colors.
“Tha’s right, you heard ’im, you yank sket,” one of them said to Dyer.
Shimago sets a hand on the lead punkling’s shoulder. “Balderdash, my lad. Do I look like a economic refugee, American or otherwise?” he says, in his best King’s English.
Shimago looks like six-foot-four two hundred and fifty pounds of gear-pierced lcd-tattooed fully networked Tongan-Californian rugby-playing airship-piloting Drop-partying choreomaniac. His hyphens alone outweigh these punks, Dyer thinks and bares her teeth.
“Dunno, she fit though, innit?” one says, gaze dropping down under Dyer’s.
“Issit?” the lead one says, squinting. Shimago shifts his grip to the kid’s head, palms it like a ball and turns it upward.
“Since you seem so full of perceptions upon our character, perhaps you would like to present them to the authorities,” Shimago says.
“Wha?”
“He taking you to the po-po,” another explains.
“I’m just sayin’ I’d mash that,” the one staring at Dyer says.
Mrs. John Dee comes spinning past Dyer, takes the lead punkling out at the knees with the duffel; he dangles from Shimago’s hand like a doll. The other punklings step back from the swinging bag. “You want a mashing?” she asks the starer. “You cheeky little muppet. The lot of you in our ends, up from, what, Surrey? Think you’re hard because you spent the money Mummy gave you on tats you can turn off again before you get home? She’s hard.” That with a hand out toward Dyer. “She eats suburban white boys like you for breakfast.”
“Not hungry,” Dyer says. She steps up even with Dee. The starer only comes up to her chin; she looks straight over his head at the crowd pushing past in the too bright sunlight, all willfully or carelessly oblivious. But there’s a knot of anxious faces across the street that have noob USER written all over them, pinned in place like the sun’s a spotlight. Lucky the punklings hadn’t run into them instead.
“What are you doing here?” Dyer wonders under her breath. She means the USERs, stumbling through London on this unsettled day of days, but the punklings react with shrugs and awkward shuffles. “Dunno,” one says. “Heard this voice said check those three, they’s yanks.”
Shimago sets his captive punkling upright. “A case of mistaken identity,” he says. “Easily corrected by a conversation with the police about anti-social behavior.” Shimago gives the leader a gentle push, and the kid stumbles forward, trips over Dee’s duffel again, bumps shoulders with the starer. It’s not entirely a bluff; Dyer and Shimago’s forged IDs will hold up to a quick fingerprint or retinal scan. But they’re likely to fail the sort of fu
ll biometric series that Immigration runs, and it’s been one of those days.
A too-long moment as the punkling weighs the cost of confrontation versus the loss of face. Finally he mutters “freak” and shuffles down the sidewalk without looking back; his mates straggle behind him. The starer stays a beat longer, finally makes eye contact. Dyer blinks her corneas clear, looks down at him until he blushes and turns away.
“A new life awaits us in a golden land of opportunity and adventure,” Dyer says.
Shimago sighs, hefts his pack on his shoulder, heads off perpendicular to the punkling’s retreat.
“Mrs. John Dee, you are yourself from the lovely green lawns of Surrey, are you not?” he asks.
“I was,” she says. “But Mrs. John Dee is from here and now, Shimago.”
The duffel nudges Dyer’s leg. Mrs. John Dee is walking backward, head swinging like a radar dish. “Dee, what the hell are you looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. John Dee says. “Whatever you’ve been looking for since this morning. Which is, judging from the look on your face, a much bigger deal than some sixth form twits a-twitting.”
“I don’t know what...” Dyer almost says “you’re talking about,” but that’s neither fair nor true. “What it is. Somebody following me. Some bodies. An IP bounty hunter. A parallel me from some other dimension. Maybe Way is right and it’s ghost nano.”
“Ghost nano is an urban legend,” Shimago says.
Dyer growls, strides five steps to the next road crossing, stops cold. Mrs. John Dee bumps into her from behind. Shimago stops next to Dyer. His look of gentle concern grows less gentle as he looks up from her to the street.
On the far side of the crossing are two uniformed officers of the UK Immigration Service, conspicuously not cops courtesy of their berets and their semi-automatics. The two are staring straight at them through the stream of crossing pedestrians.
Mrs. John Dee wedges herself between Dyer and Shimago. “You’re not seriously waiting for the walk light?” she says. Then she follows their gaze and adds, “Oh. Oh dear. But they can’t stop us unless they have cause.”
Shimago says, “Crossing against the light is cause.”
“And not crossing is suspicious behavior,” Dyer says.
As if summoned by her statement, the two UKIS officers step off the curb. Dyer fights the sudden urge to look over her shoulder; looking like she’s going to run could escalate a bad situation into a fatal one.
And then she looks anyway, because she knows what she’ll see: the fragile-faced woman, from the canal, from the catacomb wall, standing in carbon black relief against a white sunlit storefront. Not a woman, though, is it? Not a rival nano cook, not some patent-tracking bounty hunter in from the US. It’s something else entirely, that outline drawn flat against the concrete like an opening, like a door. With no conscious decision Dyer takes Mrs. John Dee’s hand, tugs her toward the figure even though it’s already fading to a shimmering afterimage. There’s a real door there, though, behind the figure’s promise, and Dyer grabs the handle, looks back to see if Shimago is following.
The impossible shape is now standing in the crossing, still no more than a silhouette: the gleam of leather below and eyes above, and as the UKIS officers step up behind her the bright sudden slash of a smile.
And as she smiles there’s a pop pop pop from overhead, loud enough to sting, smoke and a shower of glittering fragments. A beat of silence, then the crowd in the street rears up screaming and crashes down together like a wave. Another round of pops. Still on her feet, Dyer can see that it’s the street surveillance drones blowing out, one by one, but for the folks on the ground it’s cause for more panic. The UKIS officers struggle to keep their footing as they track Dyer through the scrum. One fails and takes the other down with him. The impossible woman’s hair fades with the smoke; the gleam of her smile fragments like the falling debris.
Mrs. John Dee tugs Dyer’s hand. She and Shimano are already through the door.
The shop is a maze of booths, one of the miniature markets that has spilled out from the fount of crass that is Camden. Dyer, Dee, and Shimago take turns leading each other, their packs bumping past jackets, studded belts, badge-bedecked bags, and the butt end of the twentieth century spelled out in T-shirts. A rear door leads to an alley that dead-ends in a covered court, another manufactured market. They take refuge in a coffee shop whose postered windows provide cover.
“No sign of them,” Mrs. John Dee says, and smooths back down the corner of a peeled-up poster with slightly shaky fingers. “Bloody hell, Dyer, bloody hell. What has the world come to, we can’t cross the damn street without being afraid?”
Shimago is back from the counter, steaming mugs in hand. “Ah, Mrs. John Dee, this—” he starts in his own gentle accent.
Dyer cuts in, still half-blind with afterimages, or maybe it’s anger flooding up like the crowd’s panic. “Mariam, damn it, this has always been our world, Jonah’s and mine, afraid to cross the damn street. You’re just coming to it, and you’re just a tourist. We live here, our whole lives.”
Shimago blinks at this use of real names, but sits and says nothing.
“Back in California, even before everything collapsed, even when Jonah and I worked at Alphet in the shiny heart of the goddamn shiny future, my own lab and a billion dollar budget, even then I was afraid to walk down the street alone.”
Dyer is thumping the table; coffee splashes, scalds her fingertips.
“And then the Crash and it all fell down, lawyers picking over what’s left and goddamn IP bounty hunters with a take-down notice in one hand and a taser in the other, people saying they were scared of losing everything, but they meant their 401k, their house, their car.
“The day of the Wall Street hack, police car following me fifteen blocks from the BART to my house even though there’s fucking fascist militia burning houses right down the street, in Berkeley, for fuck sake, finally stops me fifty feet from my front door—for jay-walking is what they said, meaning I crossed the neighbor’s driveway while being black, never mind I’m in a business suit and five hundred dollar shoes. Savings, house, car, those shoes, I was way past that. I was scared of losing my life. Every damn day.
“And now it’s happening here in your face and yes, you’re scared. You should be, with government caving in to the thugs and bigots. But you can always get on the train back to Surrey. We don’t have that option. All we can do is move on.”
Mrs. John Dee is pale, and the shaking has traveled up her arms to her shoulders. Shimago gives a small nod, blots up the spilled coffee with his napkin, and with that, Dyer’s anger, which is never gone, loses its focus. She puts her hand on Dee’s.
“The hell, Mariam, I know this is nothing you haven’t heard from your own grandparents. Look, having left all that bullshit behind, having come here with nothing but myself and that self so changed I barely recognize it, I found refuge. I’m not talking about the EU and their half-ass US Economic Refugee act, I mean you, Mrs. John Dee, hottest damn DJ in London, you and Shimago and The Wayward.”
Dyer snorts, rubs her scalp.
“If I could send my ghost back to appear to myself on the sidewalk that day, tell myself that I was going to end up cooking nano for some damn crazy underground psychedelic performance art rave heaven-help-me Drop party, and that, not developing corporate patents, was the way to the goddamn shiny future...”
Shimago holds up his mug. “HigherWorks,” he says.
Mrs. John Dee and Dyer clink their cups against his. “HigherWorks.”
Mrs. John Dee slurps her tea, sighs and shuts her eyes, opens them again and says, “Dyer, love, sorry but I have to ask. How did you get away from the cops? On the sidewalk that day, I mean.”
Now Dyer is getting the shakes, as the adrenaline drains. She sets her cup down before it splashes again. “I stood there, hands on hips, and said ‘Seriously? One of the biggest days in American history, and you want to spend it hassling me?’”
Mrs. John Dee hugs her mug to her chest and says, “Bad. Ass.”
Shimago nods again.
But Dyer shakes her head, thinking of that knot of noob USERs in the sunlight.
“Lucky,” she says.
2042-05-18T15:22:00+01:00 +51.535956-0.139593
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—SUPPORTING EVIDENCE IP VIOLATIONS SEE NOTE
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—JONAH PUPUNU—PRIORITY A APH2035.Z72105
• NOTE: EVIDENCE USE OF NANO AGENTS AGAINST UK GOV PROPERTY—SEE ATTACHED IMAGE ARCHIVE
• ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE
—HOLY CRAP WAS ALPHET DEVELOPING SOME SORT OF ANTI-SECURITY NANO? MUST HAVE BEEN RIGHT? SOMEONE JUST BLEW OUT A COUPLE DOZEN SURVEILLANCE DRONES AND THOSE NAZI IMMIGRATION POLICE HAVE AN ALERT OUT FOR—DIG THIS—“WOMAN AFRICAN DESCENT SHAVED HEAD” AND “MAN PACIFIC ISLANDER UNUSUALLY LARGE”—*GOTTA* BE VANCE AND PUPUNU
—THOSE SAME NAZI IMMIGRATION POLICE GRILLED ME FOR AN HOUR FOR TAKING PIX OF THE DRONES—SOME SORT OF MIGRANT RIOT THING GOING ON— PRETTY INTENSE—STILL, NO GUNS, NO GAS, NO BODIES HANGING FROM STREETLIGHTS, SO IT’S F-ING PARADISE, YEAH? WOULD BE, IFICOULDSTAY HERE
—KISSES—JO
• ATTACHMENT: IMAGES (22)—CLICK TO VIEW
(Dyer) and The Wayward, displacing— Camden Catacombs—Friday Afternoon
“–Ghosts, you know?” The Wayward says, sounds stoned because he is, during this quiet time with most of the setup done but the Drop still hours away.
Wants to connect, he hears Dyer say.
“Right? Me too,” Way says, prodding his tablet. He’s testing the camera grid, the web of stickum cams and microdrones that he uses to monitor the groove. The sights and sounds might be nano-created illusions inside the dancers’ heads, but the way they move, their reaction to the stream and to each other, all that feeds back into the rhythm of The Wayward’s images and Mrs. John Dee’s beats, which stream back into the crowd until the whole system, sight and sound and moving bodies all strung together by Dyer’s nano, drops into yet a higher sync.
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