by Neil Clarke
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, IF I COULD STAY HERE
— KISSES—JO
• ATTACHMENT: IMAGEs (22)
(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.
“Higher and higher,” Way says. And then, “Spooky,” because the cameras are glitching, flashes of images from elsewhere, bits of broadcast—a listing overloaded boat, a red-faced crowd in Parliament Square—snips of skewed text, feeds from street drones, what looks like Shimago, Dee, and Dyer standing in a sea of crawling people; but that doesn’t make sense because Dyer’s here, somewhere. Saw her just now, Way thinks, or was that in the camera feed?
Over by the wall, he hears Dyer say.
“Right,” Way says. “The spooky wall.” Spooky in the way that wall had developed, like an photographic print, the image emerging point by point, line by line out of the blank brick, a series of random acts teasing pattern, purpose. He’d been taking snapshots of it over the last week, a time-lapse to work into the performance stream tonight, layered over the real wall. Layers of reality, that’s the “Higher” in HigherWorks, Way thinks.
The wall is not quite ready, he hears Dyer say.
“Ready
for her closeup,” Way says. “Gotta get some closeup textures for the vid-ay-oh stream.” He gets up and wobbles across the bricks to the far side of the warehouse. A flock of microdrones spiral over his head like an exclamation point. Even though it’s underground, the warehouse has headroom; iron beams hold brick vaults forty feet overhead.
“Over my head,” Way says, head tilted up to look up at the wall. A diagonal splash of paint and paper runs from the floor almost up to the ceiling. Last week Mrs. John Dee chased a spraycan-armed drone around the warehouse with a broom, the rest of them doubled over laughing, though Dyer pointed out it was hardly their place to complain: They didn’t belong there either, no one did.
Every place belongs to no one, he hears Dyer say.
“Just movin’ through,” Way agrees. He takes a snapshot, a poster pasted over the uneven brick, realizes it’s an ad for an anti-migrant protest, tears the poster down leaving a jagged edge that reads “migrant pro,” and takes a photo of that instead.
“That’s us, Dyer. Migrant pros,” he says.
Refugee act, he hears Dyer say.
“Yeah, I mean refugees, but what did you say the other day? Everyone on the move is running from something and running to something. Just the flow, yeah? I ever play you The Wayward? The music, I mean. Harry Partch, he was a hobo. Like you, now I think of it. He had degrees, research grants, just like you, just like you he left it behind to ride the rails in the Depression. The first one, I mean, the black-and-white one. Left the mainstream behind after that, made his own musical instruments, his own scales, his own kind of performances. Just like us.”
Way scoops a glittery blob of something off the brick, looks for a spot, finally peels up a sticker and re-sticks it a foot higher, smears the blob in its place.
“Anyway, seemed like a good name to take on, yeah? Way-ward, like where I’m headed is the way itself.”
That thought makes him want to take another hit, but he doesn’t know where the spliff has gone, can’t actually remember rolling one, but man, he’s rolling on something. He reaches up on tiptoes to peel away the bottom half of another poster.
“He was from Oakland like you, too, Dyer. Harry Partch was. But he grew up down near me in LA. Man, I miss that place sometimes. Not the bits where I was sleeping on the beach and eating out of, well, you know. But, hey, all this . . . ”
Way waves vaguely at the wall, squints, pulls a piece of gum from down around his knees and sticks it at eye level.
“I mean HigherWorks, you guys, like you always say, worth running to, even if I started with the running from.”
The future is displacement, he hears Dyer say.
“Right on. HigherWorks, displacing the future.” Which doesn’t sound quite right. He pulls a stickum camera out of his pocket, flies it across the surface of the wall, saying “displace, displace, displace,” but the word doesn’t sound any more right with repetition. He lands the camera on a brick, just a few feet above the floor and pointing down. “Dis place,” he says. “Hey, Dyer, get it?”
But Dyer isn’t here at all, she’s over there, coming in from the tunnels with Shimago and Mrs. John Dee, lugging what has got to be Shimago’s new rocket.
“Huh,” The Wayward says.
“Hey, Way,” Dyer says. “Everything ready?”
He looks up at the wall. “Yeah,” he says.
2042-05-18T16:29:00+01:00 +51.541709-0.147667
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—SUPPORTING EVIDENCE IP VIOLATIONS SEE NOTE
• NOTE: EVIDENCE INTENT TO DISTRIBUTE UNLICENSED NNDA SEE ATTACHED IMAGE ARCHIVE
• ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE-1 KNOW U R THINKING I’M GONNA BE WORKING OFF YOUR LOAN FOREVER BUT THINK AGAIN, LOOKS LIKE I’LL WRAP THIS UP MY FIRST DAY—THIS HIGHERWORKS GROUP WITH VANCE AND PUPUNU PLANNING SOME SORT OF RAVE TONIGHT-1 GOT A PIC OF THE FLYER IT HAS A MAP WITH AN X-MARKS-THE-SPOT-APPARENTLY THEY LITERALLY *SPRAY* THE NANO OVER THE AUDIENCE-ALL I GOTTA DOO IS sHOW UP WITH A sCANNER AND A CAMERA AND A PAIR oF CUFFS
— KISSES—JO
• ATTACHMENT: IMAGE (I)-
Dyer, cueing—Camden Catacombs—Friday Evening
Dyer tucks up her knees as The Wayward and Mrs. John Dee shove the last couple of cardboard boxes into place. She’s under the plastic folding table they use as a workbench, with the brick of the catacomb wall behind her, the humming microassembler to the right, and the boxes sealing off the other two sides. It doesn’t actually have to be dark and quiet for neural cue test, but it makes the measurements more accurate. Anyway, it’s part of the HigherWorks ritual, and not just for her; when Dyer emerges from her cave and declares the readings auspicious, that’s the cue for the entire group that the Drop is on.
She tugs the sensor band snug across her temples, pairs it with her tablet, starts up the diagnostic logging: temporal, frontal, occipital, parietal activity—thinking about The Wayward’s “parental nest”—blinks her corneas clear so the infrared camera in the tablet can track eye movement, pupil dilation. Ear buds on, Dee’s test mix streaming, network up. Dyer swipes the screen off, sits in the dark for a minute. Clear my head, she thinks, but she’s still seeing afterimages, black on black, shadowed eyes and thundercloud hair. Her impossible woman.
Dyer sighs, finds the business end of the inhaler. The nano swirls into her lungs, the smell of apple blossoms and a tart bubbly sensation like champagne. And then . . . nothing. Which is the first test passed; if the nano triggers without the cue, then it’s not an opt-in, and suddenly HigherWorks goes from a concern for Immigration and the IP lawyers to one for Narcotics or, a very worst case, the anti-terrorist nutjobs.
She fishes a map from her pocket, finds the sealed edge with her thumb, and pulls it open. There’s a spark as the ink reacts and then the image inside shimmers to life.
This is the first time she’s actually seen the cue as an image; up until this moment it’s just been data. For the last couple of years they’ve been getting the cues from a friend of The Wayward up in Kingsbury, an ancient Irish curmudgeon of a painter who comes to the parties even though he’s the one person in the world for whom the nano won’t trigger; there’s a window of just a few hours as the nano settles into the brain for the cue to come. Window window window, Dyer thinks as the nano wakes up. The cue is suddenly a window, the printed image a world seen through it: two characters on a high domed roof, looking out over the streets of a city sketched in strokes and squares—could be London but strange shapes hang in the air above—and behind the two watchers a raven watches them like memory memory memory as the audio kicks in, layered all down the auditory path from her implanted buds to her cochlear nerves to her auditory cortex, an ocean of sound swept by deep currents.
The image flickers and fades as the inks burn out, but streaks of blue and silver ghost ghost ghost across her vision like echoes. During the gig tonight The Wayward will be nudging those echoes via the network, riffing on the images like visual jazz, tracking Dee’s beats, the two of them playing off each other, playing the crowd-become-one like sex like the crowd in the crossing when the cameras blew, made one motion motion motion by a hypersensi-tivity that transcends identity triggered not by lust or fear but by design by a higher working working working. Which is the second test passed; the nano is certainly working.
Dyer taps the tablet on, swipes the network off, colors fading as the screen-light fills her little box nest under the table. She scrolls through the data, diagnostic software already parsing the logs into graphs points spreading across the screen and into the air around her like stars falling like light on water like what had The Wayward said this morning you go all scattered scattered scattered.
Dyer shuts her eyes. Shhhh, the test is over, the network’s down, she thinks. Go to sleep, little nano.
“Scattered,” a voice ghost-whispers in her ear. “Awake.”
“I am awake,” Dyer says, shivers all down her back. She keeps her eyes shut, not sure that she wants to
see that sharp fragile face and those shadowed eyes this close, this intimate.
“No.”
“‘No’ not me, or ‘no’ not awake?” Dyer asks. And then, “You know what? Just bugger off. I’ve got stuff to do. Anyway, you’re just urban legend.”
From the ocean of sound come sudden shifting layers of voices, “Urban defined not by geography demographics or culture but by a certain threshold of connectivity, legend not as fabricated history but as fabricated comma history as the key to a map.”
The voices all sync up on that last sharp word, and then complete silence, but with that hypersensitivity from the nano/lust/fear Dyer can feel that impossible face just a finger’s width from hers.
“What do you want?” Dyer asks.
Silence, but a flickering, or the memory of a flickering, glitching pixels and the words mutual self-repair.
“I left Leanna Vance behind, halfway around the world and a decade gone,” Dyer snarls. “What do you want from me?” She opens her eyes, but it’s dark; the tablet screen’s gone to sleep again.
Her own voice says, “We live here, our whole lives.”
The feeling of lips on hers, the scent of bougainvillea and circuits burning, the taste of champagne.
2042-05-18T18:33:22+01:00 +51.541522-0.147123
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—ONGOING
• ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MEssAGE-1 GOT A LEAD ON AN AMERICAN EXPAT SUPPOSED TO HAVE THE SCOOP ON THE “USER” COMMUNITY—BETTER START PICKING OUT SOME NEW BOUNTIES FOR ME
— AND WHILE YOU’RE AT IT GET MY VISA EXTENDED—I’M BEGINNING TO DIG THIS OLD SMELL THESE OLD GHOSTS—GOT NO IMMEDIATE PLANS FOR GOING BACK To THE STATES—YEAH YEAH I CAN HEAR YoU GRUMBLING FROM HERE BUT I AM WORTH IT—1 AM A BOUNTY COLLECTING *NINJA*— AND THE PROOF IS VANCE IS GOING DOWN DOWN DOWN TONIGHT
— KISSES—JO
Dyer and Shimago, queuing—Stables Market—Friday Evening