Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  Kurt hadn’t actually seen a seeding taking place inside a Tasmart store. He had seen plenty in Sycamore’s flagship Liberty Street branch on launch day, but those were carried out with a level of regimented efficiency he didn’t expect to be matched by minimum-wage-earning teenage workers in a budget supermarket.

  “Do you know if they still do the 50 per cent discount when you trade in an old phone?” Kurt asked. “Because we have ten Systeloniks sitting in a box.”

  “The offer is still on,” Minter replied. “But it’ll be more straightforward if Mary just pays the full price and pretends she doesn’t know. Keep it as simple as we can.”

  “Yeah,” Kurt said.

  “You should tell her what kind of stuff Julian likes so she knows what to say in the welcome questionnaire, to make sure their compatibility index is really high,” Minter said. “Because if it’s high enough, she might be recommended to him in Forest. Or even if it’s just pretty high, he’ll still see it when she contacts him and he’ll be more likely to reply.”

  “He’s a 14-year-old boy,” Kurt said. “She’s pretending to be an 18-year-old girl. He’ll reply.”

  Minter grinned. “Yeah. Still, though.”

  “I’ll give her some tips,” Kurt agreed.

  Minter finished the birth certificate and saved it to the desktop. “There’s got to be more ways we can make this thing work for us,” he said. “I mean, we’ll have someone on our side who has a Seed. Like Mary said, someone who’s with us but not in here with us. This will change the whole game.”

  “It can’t hurt,” Kurt said. “It can’t hurt.”

  ~

  Mary prepared both lunch and dinner during what was a relatively calm afternoon in the mall. Minter talked her through the basics of his backstory idea and showed her the website of the most suitable guest house he had found, located around 35 minutes from the mall by car. She was happy with everything apart from the age issue. It wasn’t a moral objection to pretending to be five years younger than she was so she could talk to a still younger boy — the intent behind that was wholly innocent — but rather a pragmatic concern that she couldn’t pass for 18.

  Minter had a solution to this concern. He sent Mary to ask Harry and Joyce how old they thought she was, based solely on her appearance. Neither knew the correct answer, so their guesses weren’t influenced by anything other than the little they had gotten to know of Mary’s personality over the last few days.

  Harry guessed 19. Joyce guessed 18. Minter gloated.

  Minter then quizzed Mary about the details of her new identity, as he would continue to do until she left for her seeding. She showed strong aptitude for remembering new facts.

  Satisfied that Mary had done enough for one day, Minter sent her off to do whatever she wanted. This meant joining Ty, Lisa and Anthony for another games night.

  The next morning, just one day before Mary’s planned seeding, Lisa decided to give her a makeover.

  “It’s not about making you look better,” Lisa insisted when Mary initially objected, “it’s about making you look different.”

  Ty agreed that it would be a good idea. He sent Kurt a Chifi inviting him to come and watch. He did.

  The first thing Lisa did was colour Mary’s reddish hair a dark shade of brown. This alone transformed her appearance more than Kurt could have imagined. Next, Lisa worked on completely reshaping Mary’s eyebrows. Again, she reiterated that the goal was different, not better.

  Mary already looked like a different person, and Lisa had barely started.

  She moved on to makeup next, explaining that she didn’t want to waste too much on this practice run but that it would give them an idea of the final look. The makeup took a lot longer than the previous steps.

  “This would be a lot easier if I had RealU,” Mary joked. Lisa admonished her for laughing when she was supposed to be holding still.

  Kurt and Ty quickly got bored of watching layers of makeup being applied to Mary’s face and agreed to pass the time with some Four In A Row. Kurt was typically quite good at understanding things, but he failed to grasp how it was possible for Ty to show absolutely no signs of improvement even though he seemed to play the game for several hours every day. Ty shrugged it off. “I always go for four in a row,” he said, “but you always get there first.”

  “And we are… done,” Lisa said, applying the final touch to Mary’s new face.

  Mary sat up.

  “Woah,” Kurt said.

  Mary searched for a mirror. “What? Is it bad?”

  “It’s… different,” Kurt said. He didn’t want to say better, because that wasn’t the right word. It was more conventional — more like everyone else — which was good for the task at hand but somehow made Kurt feel like something had been lost. Mary’s joke about RealU didn’t seem so funny now that Kurt saw how easily Lisa had managed to transform her into something resembling an airbrushed template.

  The closer Kurt looked, the more it looked like Mary’s face had actually changed. Her nose looked narrower — much narrower — and her lips were shorter but fuller.

  Mary looked in a mirror. “Oh my gosh.”

  “You like it?” Lisa said.

  “It’s amazing,” Mary said. “I don’t know if I “like it” like it, but it is amazing. It doesn’t even look like me.”

  “That’s the point,” Lisa smiled.

  “I know, but it literally doesn’t. It’s so weird.”

  Lisa closed her sizeable makeup box, proud of her work. She said she would shape and curl Mary’s hair the next day, right before Mary went to get seeded, since there was no point in doing it twice.

  After Mary’s makeover, Kurt walked to the workstation to see if anyone was using the internet computer. To his surprise he saw both Ernesto and Minter, Ernesto on the internet computer and Minter on the other laptop. It was enough of a surprise to see Minter and Ernesto alone together, but Minter was online.

  “What am I missing here?” Kurt asked.

  Minter pointed to the yellow RJ45 cable running between the two laptops.

  Kurt looked at Ernesto. “Does Michael know?”

  “Michael doesn’t make these decisions,” Ernesto said.

  “Since when?” Kurt asked. There had never been any doubt that Ernesto was in charge, but he had previously deferred to Michael’s judgement on matters relating to the computers.

  “Since Michael decided to put a keylogger on my computer without asking,” Ernesto said. “It’s not like I’m trying to hide what I’m looking at on here, but that doesn’t mean I want him poring through it all.”

  Kurt couldn’t have agreed any more with Ernesto’s position. Hollow lines parroted by surveillance apologists — lines like “if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to worry about” and “good things are done in the daylight” — angered Kurt to no end. He was glad to see that Ernesto felt the same. And with Minter involved, Kurt didn’t have to ask whether this second computer was secure.

  Minter was looking at the SycaNews. Kurt sat down next to him. One of the main stories was a piece summarising the reaction to yesterday’s funeral. Heads of government from around the world offered soundbites of support, expressing their sadness at Kurt’s death and making clear that they stood united against terror. There were quotes from others, too, including Trixilicious, the popular SycaStar Kurt had seen when he was online with Lisa.

  “Go to Star’s Eye View,” Kurt said.

  “I’m going to look at something else,” Minter said.

  Ernesto turned to Kurt and stood up. “You can use this one. I’m done. I was just looking through the news.”

  “Thanks,” Kurt said. He sat down in Ernesto’s place.

  Ernesto left.

  “Why are you so interested in Star’s Eye View?” Minter asked.

  Kurt told Minter about Lisa’s idea to target popular SycaStars. He explained that any leaked videos a SycaStar saw would also be seen by the millions of consumers who lived life through t
heir eyes. Minter was as amazed as Kurt had been to learn that top SycaStars like Trixilicious regularly notched up simultaneous viewing figures in the millions. He liked the idea. “And you’re telling me Lisa thought of this?” he said. “Lisa as in Ty-and-Lisa?”

  “Lisa’s smart,” Kurt said. “She fixed my hand, she made Mary look like a different person, and she told me about this. You shouldn’t write people off.”

  Minter shrugged. “Is she smart enough to speak French?” he asked, half seriously.

  “I’ll ask her,” Kurt said. There was always a chance.

  Kurt clicked into the limited-features web version of Star’s Eye View and watched Trixilicious’s vista for a few minutes. In the short time he was watching, Trixilicious finished painting her toenails and went to make a choconana smoothie in her kitchen. Though no one was physically with her, she talked the whole time, answering questions from fans and telling them her plans for the rest of the day. It was too weird for Kurt to handle. He closed the window and turned to Minter.

  “Remember when I was in The Treehouse and I said that The Orwall was like the opposite of The Truman Show? Well, this app basically is The Truman Show, except Truman knows it’s happening and the cameras are in his eyes. Have you actually seen what it’s like? This girl is live-streaming her whole life from her own eyes, every single second of every single day. There are hundreds of other people doing this, too, and millions more watching them.”

  “First-person viewing is the future,” Minter said. “The news said that 20 million people watched your funeral through Amos’s vista and 10 million watched it through Randy’s. Everyone’s been waiting forever for a good first-person viewing app like this. It’s human nature. Who wouldn’t want to see the world through someone else’s eyes?”

  “Me.”

  “Shut up, man. Are you telling me you wouldn’t want to watch someone kick the game-winning field goal at the Super Bowl in first person?”

  “Obviously,” Kurt said. “But that’s one situation. I mean, I wouldn’t want to see that guy on the toilet, you know?”

  Minter laughed.

  They each did their own thing on the computers until Ty knocked on the workstation door to tell them dinner was almost ready.

  ~

  At night, after surprising the rest of the group with her new look, Mary asked Kurt if he would sleep on her bottom bunk again. Kurt was glad she asked. He had total confidence that both Mary’s seeding plan and the grander plan to take Amos down would work, but he didn’t know under what circumstances, if any, he might next see Mary. He had only known her for four or five days but they had grown close in the latter part of that period. It was entirely platonic for Kurt — which he thought went without saying given how recently and how horribly his time with Stacy had ended — but Mary meant a lot to him all the same.

  They talked for a while about what Mary could expect once she was seeded. The idea of seeing profile data floating beside people’s heads sounded totally alien to her.

  Kurt then took Minter’s advice and told her some things to say in the questionnaire to get a high compatibility score with Julian. He went for quality over quantity and gave her the names of some obscure bands and comic book series that Julian was into.

  He warned her that it was important that she bought things from the SycaStore which matched her answers, since Sycamore weighted actual purchasing behaviour much more heavily than expressed preferences. When Kurt had completed his own questionnaire, which was atypically after his seeding since his seeding had been before the public launch, the system detected that he had run through it without answering the questions properly.

  When the type of music he purchased through the SycaStore didn’t match what he had told the system he liked, a warning appeared in his vista: “Attention. Your given responses may be selected for detailed analysis by fraud prevention officers. It is a serious offence to falsify personal data and/or knowingly mislead Sycamore’s systems.”

  Kurt’s position placed him above such stupid procedures, of course, but the last thing Mary wanted to do was attract attention. She said that she understood and would answer the questionnaire properly and thoroughly, in character as Mary Glover.

  Kurt also suggested that Mary should look at Julian’s public profile and purchase content that he had purchased himself. It was a lot to take in, but Mary knew she could go over it all again in the morning.

  The conversation turned to what both hoped to be doing once all of this was over. Mary wanted to get a proper teaching placement, as she had said before. Kurt’s future was less clear. Even once he and Minter succeeded in crushing Sycamore and Amos, he doubted that his life could ever go back to anything resembling normality. He would always be Mr Sycamore. For a while that had been a pleasant novelty, what with the infinite SycaStore credit and the universal respect it brought him. But now that Kurt had dedicated himself to stopping the runaway train he had set in motion, he knew he was setting himself up for a rocky road. When the public saw how nefarious Sycamore’s activities had been, would they thank Kurt for putting an end to it all or lambast him for starting it?

  Kurt heard Mary’s breathing slip into a gentle sleeping rhythm and told his wandering mind to shut up.

  One thing at a time, he thought. One thing at a time.

  ~

  Mary was gone when Kurt woke up, busy preparing her final breakfast in La Plethora. After that it was straight to Lisa for the final hair and makeup procedures.

  Minter had been up early, too, working with Anthony in the workstation on planning the best route to the Tasmart store Mary would be going to. Kurt arrived to this sight and was delighted that the wider group was finally functioning as a team.

  Val had delayed her regular mail collection by a few hours to give Mary time to get ready, but she wanted to leave soon to avoid any chance of having to drive back to La Plethora in the dark, which was a risk to be avoided at all costs. Kurt spent the time showing Val how to operate the basic functions of his computer that would be needed for receiving and recording the video from Mary’s hidden camera. The camera was designed to function at a decent range; as long as Val was in the parking lot and the seeding station wasn’t at the very back of the store, it would be fine.

  Mary knew where she was going, she knew what she was going to say, and she knew what she was going to do next. Kurt had written a lot of things down for her on a sheet of paper as a backup and made sure that she understood how paramount it was that she didn’t misplace it.

  When Mary returned with Lisa, her look was even more different than it had been the previous day. Kurt genuinely might not have recognised her. Whatever he thought of the makeup, it certainly made her look different and it certainly made her look younger, which was, after all, the whole point.

  “Maybe you should take your cross off,” Ernesto said, thinking purely pragmatically.

  “No,” Minter said. “Leave it on. It’s part of the story.”

  Ernesto didn’t argue. He gave Mary an envelope which he said contained more money than she would need. Minter instructed her to deposit half of what she had left after her seeding into the SycaStore account which would be created at the time. The rest was for paying for her room in the guest house.

  When the subject of money came up and Ernesto casually said that he had “plenty more if you think you’ll need it,” Kurt made an important decision. In front of everyone, he asked Minter a simple question: “How many pairs of UltraLenses could she buy without them getting suspicious?”

  Ernesto inevitably asked what use UltraLenses would be. Kurt explained that he could hack them with the sphere, which amused Michael, but he stopped carefully short of revealing that he and Minter already had functioning pairs. Ty and Lisa, to their credit, pretended to be as surprised as everyone else.

  “As many as she wants,” Minter said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, man. If she says her family are generally opposed to Sycamore but might accept Lenses as gift
s from her, they’ll be glad to hear it. Not that they’ll ask. Seriously, she’ll be dealing with Tasmart, not Sycamore. They just want to sell stuff. The only thing that could possibly raise suspicion is that she’s able to pay for them all at once, but the 18th birthday story covers that.”

  Ernesto looked around the room and counted everyone apart from Mary. “So ten pairs?” he said.

  “Nine,” Harry said.

  “Eight,” Joyce said.

  “Seven,” Michael said.

  No one else said anything. Kurt and Minter didn’t need Lenses, obviously, but they didn’t want to reveal a lie that didn’t have to be revealed, and there was little real difference between buying five pairs and buying seven.

  “Seven it is,” Ernesto said. “How much are they?”

  Minter told him the cost, which was a big number on its own let alone multiplied by seven, and Ernesto didn’t even balk. Not for the first time, Kurt wondered just how much money Ernesto had. Financing the group couldn’t have come cheap; not with the initial outlay for the generators and fuel. During a discussion about the generators after Ernesto showed them to Harry, who was curious about such things, Anthony had flippantly said that “cost isn’t really an issue,” so Kurt considered the possibility that perhaps he was providing funds from his successful lawsuit against Sycamore.

  “Just remember what we talked about,” Minter said to Mary. “Play dumb and buy what they’re selling. The other main thing is to act like it’s not a big deal for you and that you don’t mind coming back tomorrow. That way they won’t think anything is weird and they’ll be determined to make sure that they get the commission, not whoever is working tomorrow. The accessory kits and everything don’t cost much, but the staff have to push them. Keep the staff on your side and they won’t ask any difficult questions.”

  “Okay,” Mary said. “So I guess this is it.”

  Everyone was in the food court, sitting in the section nearest the central walkway. Mary and Val had a long walk to the mall’s south entrance, but Mary had insisted that she wanted to say goodbye here.