by Peter Watts
“No,” she says, “I don’t think you would have. Come on, they’ll be looking for us.”
They walk side by side through the party, waiting for a chance to go home.
Mercury in Retrograde
Erin Hoffman
The voices fell away from Mercury’s attention filters as she accepted the Samurai’s security protocols. It was a pretentious moniker, no doubt, but this “samurai” was aiming to be the Samurai, and he was willing to pay respectably for it. At least he didn’t look that high-profile: black jeans, tastefully worn; thermaprint jacket from an ambiguous season; spiked hair in the vicinity of blue and a refreshing lack of mirror-glass. Digit, are we offline?
Confirmed, the PDA replied, flashing a series of network failures across her optics. They elicited a feeling of falling in her gut, but a girl had to do what a girl had to do. She pulled a transparent card from her wrist-wrap and held it at eye level. A ghostly pattern pulsed light across a connection map with five highlighted names.
“The search results?” the Samurai asked. His eyes fogged with avarice. By reflex she checked his stuff against her corp tool yet again—and, as it had five minutes ago, it came back clean; his affiliations traced a corp-tree far away from Moderna Inc. and its partners. He was still outside her network, so technically this deal was breaking a Commandment, but she quashed the voice—this one internal, for once—that squealed superstitiously. Networks had to grow somehow.
“You got it,” she said, flipping the card and smiling to mask the oddity of having scanned him again, in case he had scan detection. “Talk to these five and you’ll be at the top of the rankings by Friday. I’d lay money on hitting Viscan top 20 by Tuesday, even.” He smiled back.
“And in return,” he pulled an envelope from his coat with admirable elegance and tipped it toward her outstretched hand. A jump drive slid out and onto her waiting palm, an older prism-type.
“Lupercalia’s new navigator.” Dangerous even to speak it, maybe, but she watched his eyes for any sign of deception. He only smiled, and she relaxed minutely, then popped the drive onto her wristband for transfer. It took but seconds, and then she passed the drive back to him while her analytics combed over the new app. Warning on line 755, Digit announced, Warning—Warning—Warning! and Mercury mirrored it over to the Samurai.
“That’s normal,” he said, and passed over a matching text of his own via local beam. “It uses a new type of tunnel that pisses off the current scrapers.” Bypassing existing tunnels wasn’t that uncommon, and it only wanted access to a port used by doctors to read health-data—uni-directional, strictly pull. She activated the app.
Bring us back up, she told Digit, who bleeped acknowledgment, and less than a second later voices were murmuring up from the network again, content magnifiers raising the volume on trending terms that bubbled to the top. The Lupercalia app went to work, sorting, seeking—it blazed a lovely trail through her network setup, lighting up an entirely new pattern of connections that quickened her pulse. From the implications of this single pattern alone, her own rankings were guaranteed to go up in solid double digits, securing a week of some very delicious top-ten lists, easy. “Pleasure doing business with you,” she said.
“And you,” the Samurai bowed, beaming a graphic in her direction. She authed and a grainy black-and-white face looped: “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
The next morning her Flock.ish groups were abuzz with speculation, slyly (or so they thought) sliding up to her with this or that trivial bit of fishing gossip. On a whim she’d sent three communities up fifty points on five different engines, each a different discipline and term set. Her regular clients were friendlier than usual, sending pokes or emoticons to her metasocial and asking if she had something new going on. To top it all off, the Samurai had hit top-20 on three bellwether-caliber engines well ahead of schedule, leaping up the rankings. He’d left a little clinking-champagne-glasses icon in her inbox at around 5 a.m. Gleefully she put all messages on hold, letting the network marinate for awhile.
Running on an adrenaline buzz, she decided to throw cash at a frivolous artificially sweetened consumable, and none would do but the best. After gearing up in tech finery and hand-selecting a brand new cache of icons to hang on her viz, she hied herself down to 57th and Ash, 35th floor, the icon-swag attracting satisfying sideways glances and even the occasional open stare.
It was a long bus-rail to the Organ Grind, but it was the nearest source in town for true consumerist decadence, the duly advertised Not Even a Little Bit Good For You non-organic denatured coco-banana smoothie, and “banana” was intended as loose in its interpretation as possible. It was tasty, tasty sludge offering the No Reason At All to Drink This slogan. While not actively detrimental to one’s health, was about as close to the line as it got in this city; the day the wispy elite in West Hollywood got wind it was in the same county, the place would be finished. The flashing city-holos and electronically painted architecture sang along with her effervescence, and she set her augmentation channel to coat the insides of the railcar with industrial synthpunk videos that bumped her all the way downtown.
The only hitch in this marvelous Monday morning plan was the overzealous fellow patron at the Grind who scanned her three times and still felt the need to stare. When it began to seriously mar her enjoyment of the masquerading non-banana, she stopped pulling on the corn-plastic straw and said, “Look, it’s a public download, it’s not that big a deal,” flashing the metasocial patch on her viz. You did have to know where to get it . . .
“You’re that girl,” he said, becoming even more irritatingly unhelpful. “The one they’re looking for.”
Out of reflex, she +fingered him, some latent superstitious side winning control of her mind for a split second, which unfortunately was long enough for two other (it would turn out) highly unhelpful people to sidle up to the drink cart. The staring idiot came back clean of any mental health alerts.
“Jennifer,” the Samurai said, raising a hand quite obviously not in greeting, being that it contained a garish four-pointed LED throwing star. His accomplice, a blond kid with a heavy-duty terminal glove, twitched his fingers, and suddenly she couldn’t move her legs. She flailed with a free hand, but the terminal glove clamped around her arm, and a wave of weakness sent panic racing through her veins.
Digit, prep the new social override, she thought madly, and simultaneously said: “You’re not from Lupercalia.”
“She gets a prize!” the white dude said, on top of Digit’s Preparing, coupled with a dwindling of the net voices, even more ominous than yesterday’s.
“Who’s this, your pet gaijin?” she snapped.
“He works for my employer, one Candice Long.”
Mercury’s heart raced, and suddenly the headlines on the vidfeeds took on sinister connotations. Moderna Whiz-Kid in Critical Condition at Cedars-Sinai, Suffers Amnesia . . .
“She’s quite anxious to see you. Besides, that program in your system has an addiction process,” the Samurai said. “You won’t last twelve hours without the antidote.”
“Fuck you,” she said, and Digit—
The Samurai and gaijin dropped like lead weights, hands over their ears. Digit echoed back a muted stream of what they were experiencing—a sudden simultaneous audio subscription to every social channel within a five-mile radius—and Mercury smiled savagely, then threw the rest of her smoothie at the Samurai’s contorted face. He fell back, covered in off-yellow goop, and she leaped over him on her way out the door.
All programs offline, now! Cut everything off! Silence fell around her like a blanket of sudden snow, soft and cold. She ran two steps, sending a map pull command, then staggered under the realization of its absence.
The world pulsed around her, silent and angular and stupid. The walls of the 35th floor were a dusty tan she’d never noticed before under their custom overlays and holographic directional signs. She had no idea where in the hell she was.
&nb
sp; When the first jolt of panic subsided, down, I need to go down, she thought, and staggered toward the elevator, which, to her gasp of relief, worked without an uplink or pubID. The love she felt for ancient machines at that moment knew no horizon.
The doors opened on the lobby level, swarmed as usual with the human detritus of the evening commute. Heads turned as she stepped out of the elevator, glances lingered—were they scanning her? A passing cyclist swiveled his helmet toward her, and a mist of viz clouded over his left eye—what was he pulling up?
Heart pounding, she fled back into the building and shoved against a taped basement access door—visible to her naked eyes beneath the projected wall that usually covered it. It gave way, and the dank aroma of wet neglected concrete enveloped her. She spun, forced the door shut again (to the groan of its Paleolithic movement-slowing mechanism), and fled down the concrete steps, down into the lower city.
Three floors down, she stopped, panting, on the landing, and listened. The unaugmented walls pressed in on her, and she closed her eyes, fighting down panic.
Digit, she thought. Do you have an archived map of the old city? From that cultural studies course?
Confirmed, Digit said after a moment, and her knees went wobbly with relief.
I need to find the Seamstress, she said, as Digit threw a projection of the map onto her lenses. The sight of the ghostly image calmed her down considerably, dead though it might be: a lifeline of data. Onto its low-fidelity surface Digit projected a blinking dot in red—her—and a blinking dot in blue—the Seamstress—and traced a dotted line between them. The PDA might be one of the simplest devices of its kind, but it was hard not to anthropomorphize a greater personality and intelligence into it right at that moment. Thank you, she thought, even though she’d never thanked it before, and it hadn’t comprehension to appreciate it.
“Okay,” she said aloud, and steeled herself. “Here we go.”
Three hours, by Digit’s internal clock (which had who-knew-what connection with live reality), and countless wrong turns later, she stopped wearily before the Seamstress’s door, and pressed first her palms and then her forehead against its pitted metal surface. For the cultural studies course she had had to navigate a portion of the old city without a link, but after that course she’d cheerfully dumped that education out her left ear as fundamentally obsolete, garbage knowledge.
The long walk through the tunnels had given her ample time to think. How could she have been so stupid? Staying in the lower city was not an option. There was no signal down here. It was a place of exiles, people moving from one hub to the other like digital hobos, the kind you only looked at with your peripheral vision. Everyone had an upside, and the upside was the downside. So here she was, surfing the lower city, dancing the edge of affiliation—searching for maybe the only decent person this close to sixerland.
A soft machine hum revved up behind the door, then calmed, then revved again. The Seamstress. The hum of servos took her back to the first time she’d been down this under-street, on the run from Mother’s goons for the first time—almost eleven years ago to the day. She’d been seventeen and stupid, or maybe (thought she, from the lofty vantage of twenty-eight) they were the same thing. Mercury knocked three times on the door, and the humming stopped, replaced with the scrape of an aluminum chair across concrete.
“Who is it?” the Seamstress called, and for once her antiquated phys-vocal visitor-checking method didn’t chafe.
“It’s Mercury,” she called back. “I need your help.”
A clank or four from the bolts and locks, and the door swung open, bringing with it the first warm light she’d seen in hours. The Seamstress, arms folded, the glittering fingertips of her right hand tapping thoughtfully on her opposite elbow, waved her inside with her unaugmented hand, and let the heavy door fall shut behind them.
“Thanks,” she said, pouring more feeling into that word than it seemed it could reasonably sustain.
The Seamstress scrutinized her with myopic dark eyes for a moment—her nearsightedness always made her seem older than her thirty-five years—then clucked her tongue and herded her into the kitchen workroom.
This tiny apartment had always been dead, but now, in the context of her disabled link, the quiet wallpaper and static furniture were comforting instead of tired. Besides the Seamstress herself, the only animated object was an orange pet goldfish in a glass bowl, and she was reasonably sure it didn’t have a link.
When she was nearly done coming down from the panic of the last three hours, the Seamstress jolted her with the press of a hot porcelain mug into her freezing hands, tsking and frowning as she jumped and splashed scalding herbal blend over her fingers.
“Those herbs are grown down here, they’re quite expensive,” she said, turning to her table for a scrap of fabric to blot the tea while Mercury blew ineffectually on her smarting skin. With a quick twitch of her left hand, the Seamstress sliced off a bit of muslin, retracting the implanted scissor as she passed the fabric across. “I’m not sure I want to know what kind of trouble you’re in.”
“I need a scan,” she said, blotting with one hand and raising the mug to her lips with the other. She blew across the hot liquid, fighting dizziness.
“You look like you need carbohydrates.” Turning, the Seamstress lifted a thick slice of brown bread studded with grain from the plate she’d brought with the tea, and pressed it on Mercury, who gobbled gracelessly. Then she sat down at her aluminum table, almost disappearing behind its piled stacks of colorful fabric. She lifted a pair of gold sewing glasses from a stack of watered silk and delicately fit them to her face, antiqued metal incongruous against her youthful skin. Her eyes rose to Mercury, pupils narrowing, and remained that way for several moments while pale lights swam across her lenses.
Finally the images stopped, and she removed the glasses, folding them carefully and polishing an invisible smudge from the rim of one lens. “This is pretty serious,” she said.
“I know,” Mercury began, brushing crumbs from her lips, but the Seamstress shook her head.
“I’m not sure you do,” the Seamstress said, her pale eyes pinched. “This is bigger than you or me, sweetie. You need Chantilly Lace.”
Mercury coughed around a mouthful of tea. “A sixer? No way.” Moderna was bad enough, but at least it was legit. Mostly.
“The program has bound itself to your chip,” the Seamstress said. “And it’s been using your HealthMonitor to release insulin into your blood for the last eight hours. A sixer can hack it, maybe even re-chip you, if necessary.” Compassion softened her voice, but couldn’t take the hammer out of her words. “I give you another four hours before you fall into a diabetic coma if you can’t get something to reverse whatever it’s doing.” Which was exactly what the Samurai had said. Goddamn it.
“I still can’t work with a sixer. I stay unaffiliated,” Mercury said, closing her eyes as a headache set in, and realizing with dread the source of her giddiness and sweet tooth that morning. No Reason At All to Drink This.
“Chantilly is—different,” the Seamstress said. “She’ll help you. And unless you can work with the people who did this to you, I just don’t think you have a choice.”
Mercury couldn’t close her eyes again, so she just set down her mug by feel and squeezed her eyelids tighter together, fighting down a wave of hate and fury—at herself, at the goddamn Samurai, and most of all at insulin-induced brain-eating mood swings, wrapping in whatever hack that had cooked up this worm and his whole extended family for good measure.
“Jenny,” the Seamstress said, a rustle of fabric indicating her raised hand. Mercury opened her eyes and took it, wrapping both her hands around it, feeling warmth and skin and the faint tingle of activated servos beneath. “Take this one seriously,” the Seamstress said. “It’s too big.”
“Thanks for your help,” Mercury said, squeezing the hand before stepping back and taking a deep breath.
The Seamstress nodded, then again passed h
er left hand over the nearest flat piece of fabric, separating out a precise square with slices of her scissor blade. She flipped the square, folded it in half, and traced its edges with her right fingertip, which hummed and left a trail of neat stitches where it passed. Into this double-thick rectangle she folded a security card, then stitched the whole thing closed, this time running three fingers across it and leaving a full set of stitch patterns across the fabric in a signature.
“Give that to the doorman at the Imperial, he’ll know what to do. And take care of yourself.”
Mercury ripped open the Seamstress’s pouch and removed the sec card three blocks away, then ditched the fabric remains—if it came to it, one less thing to trace her to anyone she cared about. She stored the card’s UID on her wrist drive, then tucked it away.
She lost an hour getting to the Imperial, and by the time she stood before its plate glass doors her vision was swimming. The old hotel, relegated underground in a bid to preserve its architecture half a decade ago, was on Digit’s map, in a rare stroke of luck—she hadn’t remembered it there before, but memory wasn’t her strong suit right at the moment.
The doorman wore an antique bellhop suit, dowdy red wool and gold piping, that made his already pale skin look sickly. She went right for him, pretending to be lost, looking up and down the decaying streets.
“I’ve just been to see a seamstress,” she said, “and she sent me here for some directions.” Holding out her wrist, she turned the drive toward him, inviting a link.
“I know a seamstress, but she doesn’t do digital,” he said suspiciously, not touching her.
“I had some of her work.” Mercury traced the signature pattern on her palm with a fingertip. “But I don’t like physical evidence. I put her card key in my drive.”
He looked at her for a long moment, then took an old-style card-reader from his belt. It had a data jack built into the side, and he linked it to her wrist drive. After a moment, he nodded.