Upgraded

by Peter Watts

  Lisa showed Detective Perez a half smile. “Only urbies get to grow up,” she said.

  “If you say so.” Perez grabbed his stylus and scrawled a quick note on the tablet. “Were you blind from birth?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Perez gave her a heavy sigh. He tapped his tablet. “Let’s start with the easy stuff. This is strictly for statistical purposes and has nothing to do with the investigation. Okay?”

  “Why not?”

  “Race?”

  “Call me ish.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m told my father was Chinese-ish. I had a grandmother who was Korean-ish and a grandfather who was a black-ish Irish man. You tell me.”

  “What do you identify as?”

  “Is there a box for ‘mutt’?”

  The detective gave her another sigh and turned the tablet face down. He frowned at the bright blue ForGen logo on the back of it before casually covering it up with his hand. “The recorder’s off,” he said.

  “I never knew it was on.”

  “Ms. Wei, do you know why we’re here?”

  “Sure,” Lisa said. “So the police can say they tried to solve my brother’s murder.”

  “They said that a week ago.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I’m with the NetCrimes division. Actually, for this and twelve other precincts, I am the NetCrimes division.”

  She leaned forward, too, matching his conspiratorial tone. “I’m pretty sure the knife didn’t have Wi-Fi.”

  “I’m investigating your brother, Eddie Wei.”

  Lisa sat back and carefully kept her face blank. She’d suspected something like that when the detective had asked her to come in to the station. She stayed silent.

  “Someone hacked your eye feed,” Perez went on. “They used the ad stream to map the thing you saw over the killer’s real appearance. That’s pretty sophisticated stuff.”

  “I know that.”

  “It’s not the kind of thing you do for a simple robbery.”

  “Simple.” She sneered at him. “Thanks for your sympathy.”

  He gave her another of those heavy sighs and turned the tablet back over. “Have you ever heard the nickname ‘Easyway’?”

  “As in Eddie Zen Wei?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I live in the Ex,” she said. “There is no easy way.”

  “That’s a ‘no,’ then?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s a ‘no.’ So who’s this Easyway person?”

  “Just a name,” he said. “Eddie worked part-time at an electronics store for a while. That right?”

  “Before it closed down,” Lisa said. “No more city stores in the Ex. And no exurbs working in the city stores, either.”

  “So he was good with computers, then?”

  Lisa was nine when Eddie took her to Xavier Park, three blocks from their apartment. It wasn’t a real park, like they had in the city, just an empty lot the neighborhood had adopted and named. Whatever plans the owner had had for it fell through before Lisa was born. It was just another frayed spot in the city’s ragged collar.

  He took her to the middle of the lot and put on these funny glasses. Wires trailed from the earpiece to a box he held in one hand.

  “You don’t wear glasses,” she said. “They look dumb.”

  He leaned down, looking directly into her brand-new eyes. She’d only had them a month and still wasn’t used to how bright and clear everything was. He said, “These are magic glasses. They let me see what you see.”

  “GhotiBurgers!”

  He smiled. “Those, too,” he said. “But mostly, I wanted to see this.”

  “See what?”

  “Look up there.”

  Across the street stood a five-story building with a fire escape that only reached down to the third floor. Ugly plaster scars pocked the front, exposing the building’s brick bones. Something flashed above the roof. At first, Lisa thought it was a bird, but it was too big. It flew right at them.

  The winged horse swooped over the roof and dived down over the street. Its coat was brilliant white and iridescent rainbows raced across its rippling muscles. Its broad wings spread out, grabbing the air as it tilted back, seeming to hover for a moment before setting down just a few feet away.

  Lisa stared at it, afraid to look away. It needed her to see it, needed her to believe. She watched it fold its wings over its back and bow to her. It was just steps away. She had to touch it.

  “No, no,” Eddie said, holding her hand tightly. “It’s magic. If you touch it, it’ll disappear.”

  “But it’s so beautiful.”

  The horse bowed more deeply this time, one front hoof extended, the other knee touching the ground. Then it spread its great wings and flew away. Lisa watched until it disappeared in the distance.

  “Was it real?” she said.

  Eddie led her over to where the horse had stood. “Did it look real?”

  “Captain Sharp looks real.”

  “But Captain Sharp doesn’t leave hoof prints,” he said, pointing to deep, half-moon indentations in the dirt. “Or feathers.”

  She took the white feather from him. It was longer than her hand and tiny little rainbows ran along its edge as she tilted it in the sunlight.

  “It’s not all ugly out there, Little One,” Eddie said. “I just wanted you to know that.”

  “Ms. Wei?”

  Lisa found Detective Perez staring at her. “What? Oh. I was seven when everything finally went dark. Nine when I got the new eyes.”

  “Most people spend five years on the waiting list.”

  “I guess I got lucky,” Lisa said.

  “Maybe so,” Perez said, smiling, “but I asked if your brother was good with computers.”

  She shrugged. “I never saw him beat one.”

  His mouth squeezed into a tight little line as he looked away, shaking his head. After a moment, he looked back at her. “I’d like to think you’re cooperating with this investigation.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What?”

  “Go ahead and think that,” she said. “Nothing’s stopping you.”

  “Don’t you want to know the truth?”

  “You don’t want the truth,” she said. “You want Eddie to be a criminal. That way his death moves out of the ‘murder’ column and into the ‘incidental criminal activity’ column and your mayor gets to keep his crime stats pretty.”

  He watched her silently for a while. Finally, he said, “Is that a pigeon feather?”

  She hadn’t realized she’d been toying with the long white feather that dangled from a thin braid on the left side of her hair. “Why pigeon?” she asked.

  “It’s just what it looks like.”

  “Why not dove?”

  “It’s a dove feather, then?”

  “They’re basically white pigeons, with blue rings around their eyes. Quite pretty, really.”

  “I’ve never seen a dove.”

  “You’ve never noticed a dove,” Lisa said. “There’s a difference.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “That you might be an exurb after all.” She smiled, then. It was a genuine smile. “It’s not all ugly out there, Detective Perez.”

  On Lisa’s fourteenth birthday, Eddie took her over to the bazaar on 343rd Avenue. It was the neighborhood’s mall, not that Lisa had ever seen a real mall. This one was a riot of ramshackle carts and makeshift booths filling the street that stretched for two blocks. Smoke leaked from the trunk of the burned-out sedan where Yakky Yamato cooked his famous barbecued rat skewers just a few feet away from a filthy Captain Sharp’s food cart. The smell mingled with the scent of desperation as people sold or bartered whatever they could scrounge. Lisa kept her gaze on the street as she always did at the bazaar. The side of one crumbling building bore a fifty-foot-tall ad space. She didn’t know what it looked like to normal eyes, but to hers, the enormous figure of Captain Sharp always seemed menacing.

&n
bsp; Eddie led her to a rickety old booth and bought her an extravagant treat: Five chunks of pineapple on a toothpick. The empty black-and-white welfare can stared brazenly up from the trash next to the booth. Canned fruit was rare. It was mostly all lost or stolen before the trucks reached the Ex. Eddie handed the man nearly a week’s rent.

  “It’s your birthday,” Eddie said when she tried to stop him. “We can splurge.”

  “It won’t be tomorrow,” Lisa said, “and we’ll still need to eat.”

  He cupped her chin in his hand and kissed her on the forehead. “I did some work for some guys,” he said. “We’re okay.”

  “I worry, Eddie. All the time.”

  “I know, Little One. But not today.” He turned her head and tilted it up toward the monstrous Captain Sharp, but he wasn’t there.

  In ten-foot glittering letters, the sign read, “Happy Birthday Lisa.” Beneath that, a unicorn grew as it seemed to run toward them. Sparks shot from its horn and the letters exploded into a shower of confetti, leaving a quiet sunset beach. Waves rolled gently onto the shore, retreating before they could wash away the “Love, Eddie” someone had scrawled in the wet sand.

  Tears on her cheeks, Lisa smiled, softly touching the feather in her hair. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “What do you think it means?” Detective Perez said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The phrase ‘Uri sent him a bunny tail.’ ”

  “That’s what the Yeti said, right before . . . ”

  “I’ve read the report. I’m asking you what you think it means.”

  Lisa looked over at the Captain Sharp’s ad that only she could see. GhotiNuggets. Half off. “I feel sorry for the bunny.”

  “The killer almost certainly wore a mask,” he said. He held up his hands to keep her from responding. “The real killer. The one you couldn’t see behind the Yeti pixels.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It could have muffled his voice.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I ran it through a speech processor,” Perez said, “looking for variations.”

  “You must be good with computers,” she said. “Is that the easy way?”

  He smiled, then. “You’re very clever.”

  “Maybe I should be a detective.”

  “Anyway, it came up with some alternatives.”

  “There are always alternatives. Someone famous said that.”

  “How about this? ‘You’re the end of the money trail.’ ”

  “Or ‘furry end of the monkey jail,’ ” she said. “This is fun.”

  “Mine makes more sense.”

  “Unless you’ve actually been in a monkey jail.”

  “Let’s suppose your brother really was this ‘Easyway’ character.”

  “You said it was just a name.”

  “It is,” Perez said. He leaned toward her as he spoke. “It’s the name of the go-to hacker for a lot of local criminals. Rumor has it he can go anywhere the net goes. Make it do whatever he wants it to.”

  “Sounds smart,” she said. “Wouldn’t a guy like that be rich?”

  “You’d think so.”

  “My brother? Rich?”

  “He’d be good at hiding things, too.”

  “Search our apartment,” she said. “It won’t take long. You probably have closets that are bigger.”

  “We already have,” Perez said. “And no, I don’t.”

  “That brings us back to the monkey jail.”

  “Did your brother have a place he liked to go? A getaway, maybe?”

  Eddie had only been dead a week when Lisa answered the door to find Yusef standing there looking uncomfortable in his torn khakis and a t-shirt that might once have been white. Lisa was never sure if Yusef owned the building or just worked there as the super. All she knew was that he fixed what he could, which wasn’t much, and showed up at the door when the rent was due.

  “It’s paid already,” Lisa said.

  “No, no,” Yusef said. His fingers looked like they were trying to knot his hands together and he wouldn’t look her in the eye. “I just heard about . . . anyway, I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you,” Lisa said.

  She waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. He didn’t leave, either.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I just wanted to make sure—I know this is a bad time, but . . . ”

  “It’s okay, Yusef.”

  “The basement,” he said. “I kind of really need the extra welfare chits and I wanted to make—with what happened and everything—we’re still good with that, right?”

  Lisa had no idea what the man was talking about, but she knew her brother. “Any deals you had with Eddie stand,” she said.

  “Thank you!” He finally looked her right in the C-sharps. “If you need anything, just tell me. And I’m so sorry. He was a good man.”

  “There’s one thing,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “Would you happen to have an extra basement key?”

  She barely waited for the man to leave before heading downstairs with Yusef’s own key in her hand. She crept down the chipped concrete steps to the basement door. Beyond it, she found a maze of pipes and rooms. It smelled damp and rotten. Overhead, light strips barely made dents in the gloom. If it hadn’t been for the glowing unicorn, she never would have found the room.

  It seemed to be playing on a loop, trotting from the entrance and through the twists and turns. She knew it was there for her eyes alone. It led her to a door with a cheerful sign on it that read, “Hi, Lisa. Press here and here.” Arrows pointed to the spots she was supposed to press. When she touched them, the door popped open.

  Inside, the tiny room was crammed with computers and displays. Cables hung like vines in an electronic jungle. One screen lit up and flashed her name along with the words “It’s your ninth birthday.”

  She tapped out “Pegasus” on the screen and was rewarded with a letter from her brother. It told her that he loved her and he hoped she never had to read it, but if she did, she should always remember to look for the beauty in the world and know that he would always watch over her. It told her where to find a battered, blue gym bag and about the thousands of dollars in cash it held. It told her about the very real passports in the names of Eddie and Lisa Sharp and about the matching chip cards for the well-protected bank account with two hundred thousand more.

  Finally, the letter warned her to never, ever look behind the Yeti.

  “You’re a lousy witness,” Detective Perez said.

  Lisa shrugged. “I told you everything I saw.”

  “That’s what makes it lousy. You can be perfectly honest and still not give me a thing. You know, the investigating officer subpoenaed your 48-hour witness buffer. All FedMed eyes have one. It confirms exactly what you say you saw.”

  “Too bad,” Lisa said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That it’s the only thing you’ve seen through my eyes.” She gently brushed the edge of the feather in her hair. “You’ve been hunting pigeons, Detective. Maybe you should be looking for doves.”

  He looked down, pausing to rub a dark smudge from the palm of his hand. “I can’t imagine they’d stay white for very long around here.”

  “Try to.”

  “What? Imagine it?”

  “Yes,” Lisa said. “Imagine something so achingly beautiful that it makes everything else fade into the blurred edges of a vignette.”

  He laughed. “And then what?”

  “And then hold on to it.” Lisa leaned her arm on the edge of the desk, not quite reaching for the detective’s hand. “Hold on tight. Imagine it’s the mast you tie yourself to when the storm hits, or the lamp that swallows the shadows where the bad things live. Imagine it’s your shield. Your shelter. Your talisman.”

  He looked at her, and for a moment it seemed as if he might reach across those few inches of desk between their hands, but he
sat back suddenly, as if afraid of what might happen if he touched her. He folded his hands in his lap, instead. “I’ll try that sometime.”

  “No, you won’t,” Lisa said. “You’ll just keep doing what you do, climbing your ladder and hoping like hell you don’t get washed out onto the rocks by the wave of urbies crashing into your neighborhood.”

  “You’re not the only one who’s had it rough,” Perez said.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to say, Detective. Maybe there is no easy way.” She took her arm off the desk, eyeing the space that had grown between them. “Maybe there never was.”

  “Oh, there is.”

  “And maybe,” Lisa went on, edging forward in her seat, “it’s not as easy as you think.”

  He smiled, then, but it was a tiny thing, without much joy in it. “They might still come after you, you know.”

  Lisa stood up, retrieving her purse and the battered gym bag. She slipped her hand into her jacket pocket, pressing the button on Eddie’s magic box, and winked at the detective. “I’ll keep a sharp eye out.”

  Perez stood up, too, but made no move to stop her. “As a cooperating witness, you’d be protected.”

  She looked back at the Captain Sharp ad and smiled. Her brother stared out from the poster. “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  Perez carefully turned his tablet face down before shoving his hands into his pockets. “I have more questions, Ms. Sharp.”

  Lisa stopped and turned slowly toward the detective, clutching the gym bag’s handles a little more tightly. The man still hadn’t moved to stop her from leaving. “Don’t let the eyes fool you, Detective. My name is Wei.”

  “My mistake,” Perez said, glancing at the blue bag in her hand.

  “You know, I think you’re very clever, too, Detective Perez.”

  The detective shook his head. “I’m afraid my Lieutenant won’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He shrugged. “I still have no idea who Easyway is.”

  She spoke slowly, wary of a trap. “So you don’t think it was my brother anymore?”

  He looked pointedly at the tablet on his desk and its brave, blue ForGen logo. “Nothing in the record points to it,” he said.

  “Then I’m free?”

  “You are.” He smiled. This time there was a warmth to it that reminded Lisa a little of her brother’s smile.