Men and Machines II

by Charlie Nash

A smile twists his mouth. Time to get serious.

  So Thumper strips his lead-foil suit and falls into the sweat-stinky chair. He curls his left pinkie around the jack-out trigger and lets the neck-hugger hijack his neural inputs. A moment later, he’s fizzed into the Webz, which the plebs all say is just like the real world, except for the brake glowing in his top-right vision. But Thumper is not a pleb. The Webz is for limited things, like shopping, holidays and finding information. He knows he can’t find out the whys here; whys are for philosophy. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this, only what must be known. Like who is this woman who followed him across a crumbling pedbridge?

  Tak’s body wakes her with the belated notice of a rough two days. It takes all the hot water her pad allows to get her standing straight, all the caffeine her heart can handle to snare thoughts together. Her fingers smart as she digs her own GFs out from beneath the bed-end and stuffs them in her sack; she feels better having them. But all this fighting—for physical and conscious competence—occurs in private, and by the time she hits the FarmCorp fifty-third, she’s got her mantle back on.

  She reports in to Southern Boss; there’s no real problem with the system, she says, they’ve had a saboteur.

  Southern Boss grunts in a satisfied way, like this news confirms the way he views the world: every fucker’s out to cheat you. So even if this news isn’t good for business, it’ll do for internal validation, and he’s a man who likes that. “So you’re done? Security takes over?” he asks, daring her to misstep, even at the end.

  “Absolutely not,” she says. “Got a shot of him.” She neglects the story of how. Tak’s spent much time thinking about whether to disclose the how: would it show commitment? Make her unique, the preferred fault-finder? But on balance, she thinks Southern Boss will see her as dangerously unconventional, even reckless, which she certainly is. And she realizes Southern Boss is too deep inside his own gravity well to know recklessness can exist with balancing traits. To him, she’s a one-track idea, and she wants that track to be competent, not crazy.

  “I want to run through it with Security, answer their questions, stay for the debrief.” Besides, she doesn’t mention, she wants to check that he didn’t do anything else. The roof holds lots of other gear. But the possibility things went further might put Southern Boss in a dangerously over-reactive state, which would only make things inefficient.

  Southern Boss leaves her to it, earning her the furtive eyes of all the control room jocks. She avoids them and makes for mid-floors.

  A woman behind the Sec-desk plays with her tab-phone. Tak glimpses cats; one of those vids where they make mistaken leaps and crash into walls. The woman looks cross when Tak clears her throat.

  “Yes?”

  “Have an image for a new case file. Southern Boss just called it down.”

  The woman doesn’t believe her; or at least, punishes her for interrupting the cats. Tak has her badge scrutinized, is made to wait. When she finally sees the Sec-head, her heart is seething. Sec-head takes a copy of the shot.

  “Can’t do much with this,” he says, sucking his teeth, which seem unnaturally white to Tak; probably just paid a bomb for new-falsies. “He’s a cleanskin. Useless in the databases. Cops’ll tell us the same thing.”

  “He’s not a cleanskin,” she protests. “He’s just wearing a lined suit.”

  Sec-head shrugs. Same diff.

  Tak almost says, what about a biomet database, one that matches his build, the breadth of his ankle bones, the nuances in his biometrics, but she stops herself. That stuff’s only for the Kingdom cops. Otherwise, its Webz territory, not exactly legal. And there’s no way she’s going there. She’s better than this guy; there’ll be a way.

  This enthusiasm lasts the fives minutes it takes for the lift to deliver her back to the fifty-third. She sinks into her hot-desk, trolls the old ’Net for half a clock-turn, turning up nothing but ill-maintained personal pages and rubbish from forty years ago. After all, what can she search for? Black-suited saboteur in Sydney-state?

  Later, she’s infiltrated with the sense of being watched. The other jocks are floating around her desk. One particularly nervous one tries a smile. “We’re going for a drink?” he says, cutting his sentence into a weird half-way house of statement and question, in case she throws the idea back like an incendiary device.

  But Tak’s all out of the stuff inside her that makes ammunition. She’s aware of her status having slipped. Her problem has loose ends, she’s come down a level. And that makes her more accessible to these guys. Later, she knows this will make her angry again, but right now she does want a drink, and has no idea where to find one.

  The New Ship Inn is two ’scrapers over, several levels above what Tak assumes was the old inn, and perched on the once-Circular Quay, now overdomed to connect the tunnel portals to the hydrocraft terminal, and stuffed with city cops to keep the terminal to ground floor interface clean. The Inn itself is retro-styled: one long bar with gleaming chrome taps, gaming stations, pay-per-use Webz terminals corralled behind a partition in the back, and round tables crowded with a melancholic after-shift crowd. Speakers spill vintage dark rock that reflects off the discrete plexibarrier separating the bar from the clientele. Drinks are ordered from touch terminals in the table centers; very retro.

  The control room jocks are universally awful companions. Tak has five minutes’ patience for their talk, which is full of FarmCorp in-references and movies she hasn’t seen. One guy is particularly persistent, especially after he’s shot a few glasses and filled the other jocks with laugh-worthy jokes. Tak recognizes his type: king of the small social mountain, growing his entitlement with each ethanol molecule escaping his liver. She slips away to a corner table, where she faces the speaker point blank. The bass massages her headache. Maybe she should take one of those Webz terminals, lock in and find a Sven, or better, a dojo where she can smack someone in the face, and it feel mostly real.

  “Self-medicating?”

  A shadow slips into an empty chair beside her, facing the bar while she faces the pulsing wall. Tak goes to tell the jock to fuck off, but one glance tells her this isn’t him. This is foil-reflective aviators on a young man’s face. High forehead, real hair in a natural dark shade. Plain black shirt and pants. Tall and lean. Seen him before. She feels for her tab-phone through her pants.

  “Leave it there,” he says. “Just be a waste of effort.”

  “That’s what you think.” She glares at him, irises ringing poison. He’s given her a bad day, and two bad nights, and now he’s being cocky. She bets those glasses are lead-lined too. “I didn’t ID you,” she says, in case he’s a dangerous type, like this might dissuade him from whatever fiendish plan he has behind that smooth face.

  “I know,” he says. “But I got you.” He smiles. It’s a nice one.

  “Big deal,” she says, but it is. If he has her ID, he knows where she works, where she lives, how much she earns and where she stashes it. Enough to follow her here. And she has nothing on him. She needs to know if she’s in danger of harm, or just in danger of irritation. So she says, “What do you want?”

  “Buy you a drink?”

  Tak looks down at her still half-full glass of nameless buzz diluting in melted ice, and thinks about date rape. “No.”

  “Thought as much.”

  She wants to hate him, or be afraid of him, anything that will make him different and wrong. But he’s also a problem, which is intriguing. The music two-steps with her anger, but the image of him as an anonymous, black-clad saboteur is slipping. He seems too safe. She can’t maintain both views of him at once.

  “So, back to the start. Self-medicating?” he asks.

  “Obviously not,” she says, pushing the glass away. The speaker is silent a beat before the next track erupts, more up-tempo.

  “I don’t mean the drink. I mean the music,” he says, tipping his head back towards the speaker. “You had a bad day. They all”—he traces a finger through the air, capturing
the bar’s crowd—“had a bad day. So, you go for musical medication. Angry music for angry emotions. That’s why you don’t like the drink. It deadens what you’re feeling and, really, you want to feel it. More of it. The track gives you that. And when you feel validated, you can sleep.”

  Tak stares at him. Irritation flares like lit accelerant. But it’s as much towards the pulsing speaker as him. She wants to get away from the noise now, to test his theory, or avoid testing it. Wants to get into one of those Webz terminals.

  “Do you always spout such crap?” she asks. But she knows he’s seen her eyes working. He knows she thought about it.

  “I have a few theories,” he says.

  “Save it,” she growls. Because she sees him again on that FarmCorp rooftop, fucking with her valve. How easily he could have gotten away, but he’d taunted her. She can’t just leave. “You’re just as bad,” she shoots at him.

  He raises his eyebrows above the aviators. “Oh I am?”

  She struggles over the music. “I’m guessing you fuck up other people’s stuff for a living, but you’re not content with that. No, you have to pose. Something deep inside you recognizes your occupation is useless and valueless, so you need someone to validate you, even a nobody like me.”

  His smile is genuine now. Tak gets the urge to slug him, bypass the whole going-to-the-Webz shit and just get it done right here. And then get sprung by the cops for battery. With great effort, she pulls the tab-phone from her pocket and pointedly strides for the door.

  Thumper knows what he’s doing right now is pretty stupid, even when he’s protected from ID. Or thinks he’s protected. But he doesn’t care. He’s interested. She’s leaning on the wall outside the bar now, waiting for the lift.

  “You’re wrong about that,” he tells her.

  “What?” she snaps.

  “The last thing you said. But it was interesting. I think it says more about you, Takeshi.”

  Her mouth tightens, her arms bunch like she wants to hit him. He expects her anger; she’s scared of him now, a little, and maybe he’s even made her job hard. The lift opens, empty and bright.

  “Don’t you use my name. I don’t know yours,” she grinds at him.

  “Thumper,” he offers.

  “That’s not a real name,” she says.

  “Real enough.” Then, before she can leave, he says, “Come out tomorrow night?” He wants to pursue this conversation. It’s been a long time since Thumper spoke to anyone who could keep him interested.

  But she gives him a look that defines loathing, one that says how stupid is it for him to ask? She’s leaving his sorry ass where it belongs. And soon, she’s inside the lift.

  “You should be afraid of me,” she says, as the doors close. And Thumper has to wonder then if she isn’t right.

  Three hours pass and Thumper’s already late, which he’s done on purpose. He slinks through the back Webz, a mean part of the non-endorsed sectors, feigning alarm as best he can. The people he works for appreciate scruples more than punctuality, and he needs to play them that way, which is either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid, and probably both.

  To get inside the gentleman’s club, he steps over discarded programming junk, broken parts of shoes and fried chicken dinners. In the endorsed parts of the Webz, cleaner worms eat this kind of thing for fat government fees. But no one in the non-endorsed servers pays for that shit. So, as Thumper boots the pile aside, he executes a little code that protects his digital self from contamination; you never know what other programmers might shove in rotting detritus. He’d heard that once, in the endorsed Webz, a parasitic worm in a junk pile had hijacked a cleaner-worm and overwritten its subroutines with something elegant and destructive. Then the parasitized super-worm had escaped its bounds and eaten out two blocks of endorsed Webz shopping mall before they’d even found a coder with the balls to take it on. Thumper thinks about this. He detects elements of untruth in his memory of just ‘hearing’ about this story. Clearly, he still has some mental work to do before his recollections are changed enough to convince others, such as the men he works for.

  The gentleman’s club, a den of old-school wood and green felt with sodium-yellow shaded lights, is populated with a mix of straight and twisted types from all over the real world, drawn to 1890s frontier amusements in the form of corseted wenches and the tinkling of a saloon piano. Thumper slides around the lounge floor, aiming for the telecoms terminal he knows is in the hall, and playing with his stubble, which never feels quite right in the Webz.

  A man in a flight suit stands by a hideously rendered and anachronous floor-to-ceiling fish tank, studded with exotic coral and fish with trailing fins. Thumper perceives the ripple of interference; blocking any eavesdropping. For this is José.

  “Why is this here?” says José “Did they have fish in the old west?”

  Thumper puts his hand to the telecoms terminal, as if José is someone he’s just accidentally met here. “Written by a junk coder,” he says, shrugging. “Maybe the owner’s kid, who knows. Sentiment endorses all kinds of bad taste.”

  José laughs. His teeth flash like a dental restoration ad. His blond, sculpted hair is from the catalogue entry Pitt, Brad circa 1996. Thumper tries not to notice these things, but it’s like trying not to notice how the fish-tank coder used a time-expensive routine to render any curves, so they pixelate whenever a fish passes by. José’s like that too; every time they meet, he distorts Thumper’s reality for a while, when Thumper wonders if the global powers so much bigger than him—aka José’s terrapilot bosses—are really playing him at levels where his consciousness can’t even go.

  “Speaking of bad taste ...” says José. He hands across something that looks like a rolled-up magazine, a pair of breasts bulging from the glossy outer curve. Thumper knows what it is: a private protocol written to resemble a titty-mag. He takes it, and from then on, hears José’s voice only in his head.

  What do you need? José says.

  Thumper says, This isn’t secure, you know.

  It’s as secure as things get here. Need to be as good as you to break this thing.

  Thumper grunts. There aren’t many like him. I need a tracking trace.

  José groans. Let me guess. That agri fault-finder you asked me about last time?

  Thumper’s silence answers that one.

  What are you doing, T?

  Thumper lays it out quick. Might have put her in some harm. She’s trying to ID me and she’s going to keep at it. But my job’s still open and these guys don’t play nice. I just want to keep an eye on her.

  José winces; terrapilots are straight as arrows, and Thumper knows this talk of a ‘job’ will punch José’s conflicted buttons. I don’t want to know. You know you can do better than this.

  There’s a moment like this in every one of their conversations, where José becomes the fatherly voice of concern. Thumper always wonders if the guy isn’t a sixty-something ex-marine in a neck-hugger in some government office, on a covert convert mission targeting the stray-but-talented coders of the world.

  He pushes. Just need to know if she enters the Webz. Don’t need anything real world.

  José thinks a beat, then pulls the magazine back and stuffs it in one Tardis-like pocket. “Just a minute.” He disappears into a door marked Men’s. Five minutes later, when he’s made a good show of watching the pixelated angelfish, Thumper pushes through the same door. Inside, the coders haven’t bothered with render at all. The room is a white box, with four curtained spaces. Three are open, a simple bar-style stool inside, where a long-jacked Webz user can use their sophisticated jack-in system for relief, or where such sophistication is not in their budget, jack-out with a tagged return point to use the real-world facilities. Thumper throws open the fourth curtain. On the stool is a thumb-sized token of soft condensed matter, its substance dim but for a slowly blinking red circle.

  Thumper seizes the tracker and makes for the exit. Time to see the men who hired him for the FarmC
orp job. He sequences his arguments, practicing as he goes, correcting the words until he believes them as truth. No, I can’t execute the next phase, not yet. They found the first fault, so care is needed. No, this is not confident. They found the first fault as expected. No, they don’t need to know that. That will make them nervous. All is in order. Two more days. Wait for the fault-finder to be gone; then the target is easy. Just as planned.

  Thumper keeps on with this, refining, buffing, but in deep truth he knows. He could do the job tonight; he could finish it. So why is he pushing out the timetable? The argument to have Tak gone is a good one, it will work on the men who hired him, because it sounds logical. But Thumper knows she won’t leave. Not with that look in her eye; that fire that wants him beaten. He feels like the first time he played chess against someone good, someone good enough to challenge him. Waiting for the next move.

  The rest of Tak’s night is not a good one. She storms back to Security to point her finger, point it hard. She’s been followed, she tells them, shaking the pic of Thumper in his giddy, fuck-you black. Their alarm is initial relief, until she finds out what it means. Here, the desk girl says, fill this out. She passes over a tab-form. Tak takes in two things: that the form is a hundred tab screens, and that once she fills it, she’ll be in lock-down. No more on-the-job, not until this was resolved. Tak sees her career evaporate into administrative wait-space. She leaves so fast the Sec girl spins in her chair.

  Back in her tiny, one-window living box, she racks another few hours trolling the networks for legal access to biometrics. Nada. This stuff is off-limits, the realm of Kingdom agency privacy laws, which means she has to interest the cops. Tak pauses, hands over keyboard keys like a raptor’s kill strike on pause. She could go to the cops direct, but that bypasses Security, a breach of FarmCorp protocol. She imagines the glittery fire-your-ass hard-on in Southern Boss’s eyes at that one.

  Midnight passes like a missed highway sign, then the threshold for sleeping too. Tak rubs her eyes, imagines facing Southern Boss in the morning. Imagines other options.