Upgraded

by Peter Watts

  Danny folded. Cheng raised the bet by fifty, then the dark-eyed woman raised it another fifty.

  I agonized for five long seconds. My rule was never to win more than a thousand a night, and this would push me over the limit. But if I folded now, I would have spent eight hours in this dispiriting place for the sake of just three hundred dollars.

  I slid my chips forward, matching the bet. Cheng shot an irritated glance my way, and folded.

  The dark-eyed woman raised, again. Her face was so impassive that I began to doubt, if not the evidence of my own eyes, that of my memory. I didn’t dare glance down at the backs of her cards again, but I was certain that one bore the twisted-hour-glass stain in the lacquer that I’d noticed on the five of clubs in the showdown-before-last, while the other had a florid tint to half its royal blue ink that had been unmissable when the six of hearts had come my way much earlier in the night. In this back-alley game they did not change the decks between every hand, and even if I could have missed the dealer feeding a fresh pack into the shuffling machine, no two decks ever featured identical flaws. So either I’d grown confused as to the significance of the blemishes I’d seen, or my opponent was very good at bluffing.

  “I’ll match,” I said, offering up the chips.

  The dark-eyed woman allowed herself a triumphant smile as she showed her cards: five of clubs, six of hearts. With the seven, eight and nine of diamonds in the flop she had a straight, but nothing better.

  The relief on my own face wasn’t feigned. I turned up my three and six of diamonds. The woman’s lingering smile made me wonder if the loss had even registered before the dealer raked the pot and sent the rest in my direction, but perhaps the secret to her bluff had been a kind of self-hypnotic conviction that her hand was unbeatable, and it took a few seconds to snap out of it and allow the truth to sink in.

  I scooped up my winnings and rose from the table.

  “Hey, Jake!” Danny was scowling at me. “Give me a chance to win it back!” He was drunk, and he hadn’t done well all night. I checked my watch and shook my head apologetically. “Next week, I promise.”

  I took my chips to the cashier, and glanced back at the table. Danny was staying put, to try his luck with the late crowd.

  As I walked to my car, I skirted three glistening patches on the ground. The street lights were sparse here, but the neon fronts of the nightclubs in the adjoining strip were enough to illuminate the residual blood stains that spring rain seemed merely to rearrange, and no tri felt compelled to scrub away.

  It was almost 4 a.m. when I got home, but Lucy was still up. “How’d it go?” she asked.

  I showed her my winnings, fanning out the notes so she could count them at a glance.

  Lucy had had her misgivings from the start, but now she seemed more anxious than ever. “I don’t want you ending up in prison. Or worse.”

  “It wouldn’t come to that. There’s nothing they could prove; they’d just ban me.” I slumped onto the couch. “You should be in bed,” I chided her. Unless I’d become so confused by the card room’s time-distorting ambience that I’d lost a day, she was due at work in less than five hours.

  “And what if you do get banned?” she persisted.

  “I never win enough to look suspicious.” Heps were far too rare to pose much of a threat, and even the high-end casinos could hardly scan everyone’s skulls with MRI machines. The small games I joined were run by people who were very far from amateurs, but so long as I could retain enough self-discipline not to overplay my advantage, I felt sure that I could hide in the statistical shadows of the merely lucky.

  Lucy said, “The gallery’s letting me go at the end of the month.”

  That shook me. Whatever fate I was courting, her own use of her talents could not have been more honest. “What are they going to replace you with—a mass spectrometer?”

  “Not quite,” she replied. “But there’s some new software that pretty much does what I do, with a multispectral camera and brushstroke analysis. They can lease the whole thing for a tenth of my salary.”

  The gallery had only given her three days a week since she’d come back from maternity leave, but she still earned about as much as I dared acquire by my own methods.

  “We’re such fuck-ups,” she said angrily.

  “That’s not true.”

  She turned away from me and gazed with loathing at one of her own paintings: a city threatened by fire, the skyscrapers scintillating through the smoke haze, every blistering current of air as palpable as the freeways below. “I kept kidding myself that I had a foot in the door—but I might as well have been a kitchen-hand, pretending that I was on some fast-track to chef just because I could sniff out bad produce a little sooner than anyone else.”

  “So they’ve found some machine to help them assess provenance,” I said. “That doesn’t take anything away from your paintings.”

  Lucy laughed bitterly. “If I couldn’t sell anything even when I had connections, what do you think my chances are going to be now?”

  “What are you saying?” I pressed her, aiming for a gently skeptical tone. “It’s all down to nepotism?”

  “No,” she admitted. “The work does matter. But it’s going to be harder than ever to get it seen.”

  I was trying to be the voice of reason, calmly talking her back from the edge—but the trouble was, she understood the problems she was facing far better than I did. “For an art dealer to look at a painting is some kind of special favor?”

  “Yes,” Lucy declared bluntly. “For a tri to look carefully enough to see a tenth of what’s there takes something special. That doesn’t happen as a matter of course.”

  I spread my arms in resignation, and went to take a shower.

  On my way to bed, I looked in on Zelda. She’d slept through all the talking, and I resisted the urge to lean down and kiss her lest she wake and start bawling.

  Zelda was almost six months old—so we only had six more to decide whether or not to give her the gene therapy vector. After that point, the quality of the repaired retinal cells would start to fall off with time. If she was going to be a tri at all I wanted her at least to have the sharpest vision that state could entail.

  Five years before, when I’d moved in with Lucy, we’d sworn that we’d never sentence our children to live in the flat, cartoonish world that we’d escaped. But while Sean was still winning titles as a pro surfer, most of us had ended up struggling, thwarted or resentful. When I could count the number of heps I’d grown up with who had truly flourished on the fingers of one hand, how could I bequeath the same prospects to my daughter?

  “I’ll see that, and I’ll raise you fifty,” Marcus announced. I’d folded a few rounds ago, after forcing myself to stay in and lose a little for appearances’ sake. Now there were only two players left, and they seemed to be intent on a game of chicken.

  “I’ll match,” Danny replied. His hand was terrible, but at some point he must have convinced himself that he could bluff his way to victory, and having chosen that strategy he was too stubborn to veer off course.

  Marcus raised another fifty.

  “Fuck you,” Danny whispered, and matched the bet.

  I watched them with a growing sense of dread, willing Marcus to back down. I hadn’t set eyes on him before that night, so I could still imagine that it was possible. Danny would just keep charging ahead like a freight train.

  “I guess I’ll have to raise you again,” Marcus taunted him.

  Danny slid the last of his chips forward. “Matched.”

  Marcus hesitated. “I’m good,” he decided.

  Danny laid down his pair of nines, which made two pairs beside the kings in the flop. Marcus had a king and queen in the hole, giving him trips; I could have made the same, but only with sevens. Everyone else had had rubbish.

  The dealer took the house cut and slid the rest toward Marcus.

  “Cheat,” Danny said softly.

  “Excuse me?” Marcus smiled and l
ooked around the table; no one was backing Danny. “You should call it a night. Come back when your luck’s better.”

  Danny leaned forward. “Risk all that on a trip? I don’t think so.”

  The dealer said, “Sir, please.”

  Marcus gave an indignant bark of a laugh. “And look at what you risked the same on!”

  “But you didn’t need to,” Danny countered. “If you’d raised again, you knew I couldn’t match it.”

  “I didn’t know what was in your wallet!” Marcus blustered. “You could have borrowed from someone—I’m not a mind reader!” I could see the blood draining from his face, and I understood: somehow, he really had known Danny’s hand all along. And he’d betrayed himself, just so he could twist the knife.

  Danny reached across the table and plucked Marcus’s glasses from his face, like some curiously gentlemanly preamble to a pounding. The dealer raised his hand to summon a bouncer, but Danny didn’t hit anyone, he simply perched the glasses on his own nose and looked down at the table.

  “I knew it!” he declared triumphantly. He removed the glasses and offered them to the dealer. “Every card has a number in green!”

  The dealer hesitated, then tried on the glasses for himself. “OK,” he said nervously. “Everyone stay seated. The game’s annulled, and you’re all getting your bets returned.”

  Two bouncers and the manager joined us as the eye-in-the-sky vision was replayed and the chips were redistributed. Marcus sat in silence, his face blotched with fear. I knew the cards weren’t marked with any kind of dye: his glasses had to be finding the same pre-existing subtleties as I was, then making the job easier for him by numbering the patterns in an overlay laser-painted on his retinas. I’d noticed the small dark circle in the center of the bridge, but I hadn’t given it much thought—molded plastic always came with all kinds of odd impressions that its makers fancied were invisible. It was clear now, though, exactly what it was: a tiny multispectral camera, with sensors exactly like the ones in my own eyes.

  When I got home the apartment was in darkness, so I took off my shoes and sat in the living room, planning to sleep on the couch. I was only twenty-nine; my life was hardly over. Thousands of people slacked off in high school, dropped out of university, quit their first few jobs . . . and still found a way to succeed in the end. If I’d wanted the one thing that lifted me above the crowd to be part of the answer, too bad. No one was going to pay me to see the world more clearly than they did—let alone stand by and let me use that talent to fleece them. Lucy could paint her paintings for our tiny circle of hep friends, and we could walk side by side marveling at the beauty of the sea and the sky and the squalor of the city. But in the end our powers of vision would die with us, outsourced entirely to unthinking machines.

  “The ship is going down, and you only have time to grab one item and take it with you to the lifeboat: a sheet of plastic, a mirror, and a compass. Which do you choose?”

  My interviewer leaned forward expectantly, his hand paused above his notepad.

  I said, “This is a shelf-stacking job. I’m not applying to the ocean cruise department.”

  “Just say, ‘plastic, to collect rainwater,’” he replied wearily. “Didn’t you Google the answers before you came?”

  “Plastic, to collect rainwater.”

  He tapped the final box, and I heard a somber chime.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You didn’t make the cut.”

  “Why not?”

  He glanced down at the screen. “No stability in your employment history. And honestly, you’re too old.”

  I looked around his office, desperate for an idea. A poster showed a celebrity chef reaching down into a carton of plump apricots—though even a tri couldn’t have missed the bizarre retouching of the fruits’ appearance. “Can I show you something?” I offered. “In the produce aisles?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I could save the company thousands of dollars a month,” I boasted. “If something’s on the verge of going rotten, or infested with insects—”

  My interviewer was smiling. He shook his head in disbelief, or perhaps a trace of admiration at my chutzpah.

  He said, “Sorry, we already have that app.”

  I looked up the app. It wouldn’t work on older phones, like my own, but the very latest models now carried reconfigurable quantum dot cameras as standard. It was not just art galleries and DIY-card-sharks who could access the whole spectrum; early adopters could do it already, and in five years it would be ubiquitous. Phones, notepads, glasses—every small, cheap camera would soon be seeing more of the world than its human owner.

  After Lucy’s last day at the gallery, her colleagues took us out to dinner. I sat watching them, feigning bonhomie, laughing when everyone else laughed. One man took a photograph of his steak to assess its rareness and quantify the risk of food poisoning. A woman looked around furtively then snapped the dessert, in the hope of recreating it at home. These people would never learn to see the world for themselves—but they were already accustomed to asking their gadgets to advise them every few minutes.

  Lucy glared at me as if I was someone’s mad uncle at a wake.

  My mother had watched Zelda for us. When Lucy and I were alone, I said, “Remember the treasure hunts?”

  She groaned. “Oh, please—not the good old days!”

  I said, “Do you still have the recipes? For the inks you used?”

  “Why?” Then she understood. “It would only be a fad,” she said. “A novelty. We’d be lucky if it lasted a year.”

  “A fad can make a lot of money in a year. Software, posters, spray-cans, marker pens, clothing, tattoos. A whole secret world that’s hidden from ordinary eyes—but not some virtual reality overlay: solid objects you can touch with your bare hands.”

  Lucy was skeptical. “And whose kidney are you going to sell to fund this empire?”

  I said, “We’re going to need a backer. Someone who’ll understand the idea. So let’s hope my cousin hasn’t blown all his prize money.”

  3

  Zelda stretched her arms above her head and waved her hands at me impatiently. “Lift me, Daddy!” She wouldn’t let me carry her comfortably on my hip, or even riding on my shoulders: she had to be gripped under the arms and held up at chest height, half a meter ahead of me, like a kind of advanced scout, seeing everything moments before I did.

  “You’re getting too old for this,” I told her, as I staggered through the gallery’s automatic doors.

  “No, you are!”

  “That’s true as well.”

  I put her down and she ran toward Lucy, stopping shyly at the sight of the two strangers talking with her mother. Lucy smiled at her, and so did the customers, but then they all turned back to the painting.

  “You’ve captured the river perfectly!” the woman marveled, making a sliding gesture beside her glasses to shift between false-color renderings. “Whatever wavelengths I map . . . the natural detail’s there.”

  “That’s what I was aiming for,” Lucy replied.

  “How long did it take you?” the woman’s partner asked.

  “About a year.” Lucy glanced at me, but I kept a poker face.

  “I can believe that.”

  I stood back and waited for her to clinch the sale.

  Tris can never really join us in the wider world, but having learned to peek out through the keyhole of their prison and take in the view incrementally, they’re no longer willing to spend their whole lives staring at the blank stone walls. The individual gimmicks come and go: the TV shows with points of view mimicking multispectral glasses, the plays where the actors have trained to emote with their capillaries for suitably equipped audiences, the advertising signs with secret messages that seem more profound and persuasive after the five-second hunt across the rainbow that it takes to reveal them. And the need—among the sufficiently wealthy—to hang a picture on the wall that actually resembles the thing it portrays.
/>   When the customers had left with their painting, Lucy took off her shoes and sat down wearily on the gallery’s fashionably white bench. It was covered with her buttock-prints—and mine—but we varied the location to form a tasteful pattern.

  “I want to do some drawings,” Zelda demanded.

  Lucy sighed, feigning reluctance, but then she fetched a stack of paper and the bucket of pencils she kept out in the back. Zelda sat on the floor, carefully choosing among the six hundred hues on offer. She drew a garden of striped flowers, three stick figures with wildly mottled faces, and then above it all began meticulously shading in the bands of an eleven o’clock sky.

  About the Authors

  Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer, speaker, and strategic foresight consultant living in Toronto. Currently, she works developing user stories for provisional patents related to brainwave-sensing wearable technology. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty series of novels from Angry Robot Books. “Come From Away” is a chapter in her new novel Company Town, available in the autumn of 2014. Her short fiction has appeared at Escape Pod, FLURB, The Tomorrow Project, and multiple anthologies. Her essays have appeared at BoingBoing, io9.com, and Tor.com. You can find her at madelineashby.com, or on Twitter @MadelineAshby.

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of twenty-five novels and over a hundred short stories. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.

  Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times bestselling author. His novels and over fifty stories have been translated into seventeen languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio. He can be found online at www.TobiasBuckell.com