Trouble and her Friends

by Melissa Scott

  “The real Trouble,” Trouble interjected. “The original. You can tell Jesse that I’m back, and I’m pissed. Nobody takes my name in vain.”

  The woman stared at her, her anger replaced by speculation, and Trouble heard one of the quartet whistle softly. She could see their reflection in one of the shiny metal boxes that held sterile components, a distorted image, but clear enough to see them all four staring, the notebook forgotten on the tabletop. She waited, willing to let the woman take her own time in deciding how to handle this apparition from Jesse’s past, and the curtain that covered the door into the back rooms was swept back abruptly.

  “Problems?” a familiar voice asked, and the woman turned toward her with ill-concealed relief.

  “This woman wants to talk to Jesse—”

  “Trouble?” Annie Elhibri sounded less than enthusiastic in her recognition, and Trouble allowed herself a slight, unpleasant smile.

  “Good to see you again, Annie.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Not yet,” Trouble murmured, and Elhibri rolled her eyes.

  “What the hell are you doing here? We heard you’d left the shadows.”

  “Someone’s taking my name in vain,” Trouble said again. “I’m—not best pleased.”

  “Right,” Elhibri said. “I guess you better talk to Jesse.”

  She held the curtain aside, and Trouble ducked under the faded fabric. The inner rooms had changed even less than the outer, the walls still painted with bold sweeps of color and stylized suns-and-moons from the last psychedelic revival. In one side room, a couple of crackers sprawled on mattresses laid out beside a strip of datanodes, cords snaking across the floorboards from their dollie-slots to disappear into the nodes. In the next room, a man and a woman leaned close over a viewlens, the woman pointing out features in its circle. Trouble looked, but couldn’t see what lay in the lens’s magnifying field. The surgery was empty, not usual in the old days, not on a Thursday night when most people had just gotten paid on their real jobs, and she glanced sharply at Elhibri.

  “Where’s Carlie?”

  Elhibri looked back at her, thin eyebrows rising. “Dead. Didn’t you hear? He died last winter.”

  “AIDS?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit.” Trouble closed her mouth over anything else she would have said, any apology for not having known. Carlie Held had installed her first dollie-slots and BOSRAM, had implanted her brainworm and rigged most of the later upgrades and improvements to the mixed system. It was hard to believe he could be dead—and someone might have told me, out of all the old gang. But she had walked away, not they.

  “We got a new girl doing installations,” Elhibri went on, “name of Karakhan. Carlie trained her—it was his idea to have her take over.”

  Trouble nodded, swallowing her grief and the regret that she hadn’t known sooner, and Elhibri stopped in front of the final door.

  “Wait here,” she said, and pushed through the beaded curtain before Trouble could say anything. There was a murmur of voices, and Elhibri reappeared, holding the curtain aside. “Jesse says come on in.”

  “Thanks,” Trouble said, and stepped under the draped beads.

  Nothing much had changed here, either, except for Jesse himself. He still sat behind the massive desklike shape of a salvaged miniframe, extra processing towers sprouting from its corners like buttresses, but his hair was grey, and the lines of his face had deepened. The eyes, however, were the same, brown and deceptively warm, and so was his expression, smiling and closed all at once.

  “So the prodigal returns,” he said, with the same heavy joviality that he had always used when he wanted to buy time. It was a familiar pose, and Trouble took a savage pleasure in the old routines.

  “Not exactly,” she said: “I just need to pick up a few items for my toolkit. You’re still the best, Jesse, or so they say.”

  Jesse lifted an eyebrow. “Still, Trouble?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “So it has,” Jesse agreed. “What is it precisely that you’re looking for?”

  “Just a couple of routines,” Trouble answered. “I need a set of icepicks and some tracers. And I want to buy a muzzle for a watchdog.”

  “You do realize,” Jesse said, “that all of this is illegal now?”

  Trouble smiled. “And I want an upgrade for my worm.”

  Jesse sighed. “All right, I can get you the icepicks, no problem, deliver as soon as you pay and I download. Tracers, hell, take your pick, I’ve got a pretty good selection. Now, for the muzzle—what kind of a watchdog is it, anyway?”

  “Treasury,” Trouble answered, and was pleased when Jesse winced.

  “You don’t ask for much, do you? Come back into my life, without even so much as a hello, darling, and tell me you want sixteen varieties of naughtyware, including a new chip for the worm. What the hell are you up to—or, no, don’t tell me. Icepicks, tracers, muzzles, implants—Christ, you don’t want much from me.”

  Trouble waited until the spate of talk had run out, smiled again. “Hello, darling. It’s good to see you again.”

  There was a little silence, and then, reluctantly, Jesse smiled back at her. It was a real smile, acknowledging her attitude and skill, and it transformed the blank roundness of his face. “I didn’t think it could be you making all that trouble. Just not your style.”

  “It’s not,” Trouble said. “Which, of course, is why I’ve come shopping.”

  Jesse nodded, touched controls hidden somewhere behind the bulk of the miniframe. “I think I can fit you up, except maybe for the implant. Karakhan’s good, but she’s not up to the worms yet. I’d have to get somebody in.”

  “Who’s the best, now that Carlie’s dead?” Trouble asked.

  “Woman in the city,” Jesse answered. “Her name’s Huu, H-U-U—Dr. Huu, get it?”

  “Got it,” Trouble said, and wished she hadn’t.

  “She’s part of Butch van Liesvelt’s crowd, if you still talk to any of them,” Jesse went on. “I could get you an introduction, but you’d be better off going through the family.”

  “Yeah, you’re still a straight boy,” Trouble said. “I’ll talk to Butch. What about the rest of the stuff?”

  “I can get it for you,” Jesse answered. “At a price, of course.”

  “Jesse,” Trouble said, and let her voice go deep and teasing.

  “I mean it, Trouble. This stuff doesn’t come cheap anymore; and you want some pretty specialized routines.”

  “I don’t have time to waste,” Trouble said. “I’ll give you three thousand for the lot.”

  “Three thousand?” Jesse’s voice scaled up with mock-disbelief. “Three thousand for icepicks, tracers—my best tracers, which is what I know you’ll want—and a muzzle?”

  “That’s right.” Trouble waited, hooked her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans, knowing that all she really needed to do was wait.

  “I’m sorry,” Jesse said, and shook his head for emphasis. “I’m sorry, I can’t do it. I’ve got a business to maintain, expenses, employees to pay—we’ve got a pension plan and health care now, in case you didn’t know.”

  “Both of which are mandated by the government,” Trouble said. “Three thousand, Jesse. I told you, I don’t have time to waste.”

  There was a little silence, Jesse shaking his head, and then, still shaking his head, he spread his hands in surrender. “All right, three thousand. But you’ll have to take straight-off-the-net routines. I can’t afford to do any custom work at that price.”

  “I can make my own modifications,” Trouble said demurely.

  “All right,” Jesse said. “Let me start pulling things.”

  “Thanks,” Trouble said, and Jesse waved vaguely toward a chair that stood in the corner of the room. It was as much of an invitation as she was going to get, and Trouble dragged it over to the miniframe. Jesse leaned close over his multi-screen, hands busy on keyboard and shadowscreen, her presence already all but forgo
tten. He would be checking his inventory, Trouble knew, the legal and illegal storage spaces he had scattered in the house and across the nets, along the virtual chain that made up his network presence. If she closed her eyes, she could almost see the flare of lights as Jesse leapfrogged from node to node, muddying his trail.

  It took nearly an hour for him to locate the programs he wanted. He surfaced long enough to announce that fact, but it took another twenty minutes to extricate himself from the nets without leaving traces. Trouble waited patiently enough—someone less skilled could easily have taken three times as long, without producing what she needed—but when the data drives began to whir she pushed herself to her feet and went to watch them spin down.

  “I hope you like what I found you, after all that,” Jesse said, rather sourly, and Trouble looked over her shoulder to see him unplugging himself from the last system block.

  “I’ll let you know when I see them.”

  Jesse rolled his eyes heavenward. “There is gratitude for you.”

  “Can I run off your system?” Trouble asked. The green light came on, signaling copy-complete, and she triggered the release.

  “Oh, go ahead. Why not?” Jesse waved toward a trio of nodes, and Trouble slipped her board from her bag and set it on the ledge, opening it just enough to give her access to her machines. She carried several versions of analysand in working memory, and ran the new programs through the most comprehensive of the group, barely watching the lines of code as they flickered past on the screen. An image formed behind her eyes, drifting hazily in unreal space, coupled with a cascade of sensation as the brainworm kicked in, translating the numbers into her personal codes. She flipped from the icepicks, elegant, lean programs, cold and hard as steel, to the baroque complexity of the tracers, and smiled in spite of herself, feeling a familiar touch, a routine of her own buried in the secondary structure. The program lolled in front of her, willing and eager and clearly skilled; fleetingly, she felt the sensation of glossy fur, and nodded to herself, accepting that the program was in good shape.

  “Good bones,” she said aloud, and Jesse grunted.

  “Good genes,” he answered. “You remember Max Helling? That’s about a third-generation variant of his old Toby.”

  Trouble nodded. She remembered Helling, all right, from the old days, a bony, hawk-faced man who specialized in tracers and virus killing, though Aledort—a cracker, as well as an eco-teur—had kept him away from the circle as much as possible. “Whatever happened to him, anyway?”

  “Went legit,” Jesse answered. “Or so I heard. I haven’t seen his work much, outside the marketplace.”

  And that was a pretty good indication that he was indeed legitimate: only the crackers could afford to give away their programs for nothing. “Who wrote the variant?” Trouble asked, and Jesse shrugged again.

  “Signs itself TG—which stands for Toujours Gai, or so I hear. The work’s reliable. TG doesn’t do much, and what there is tends to build on other people’s templates, rework flawed stuff, but what’s out there is choice. Word is, if you need something redesigned, TG’s the one to do it.”

  “Nice to know,” Trouble said, and touched keys to begin shutting down the system. “This is good stuff, Jess, thanks.”

  “Always a pleasure doing business,” Jesse answered, without conviction. “Three thousand, you said? Plus five hundred for my commission.”

  “Three thousand,” Trouble answered. “Nice try.”

  “Three thousand.”

  Trouble nodded, reached into her bag, came up with the folder of mixed cash. She found what she wanted and handed it to Jesse. He counted it, stacking it gravely into three piles, multicolor citiscrip foils, the dull silver of the bearer cards, the final, smaller grey-green wad of oldmoney. “All there,” he said at last, and swept the piles together, stuffed it all somewhere out of sight. “Anything else I can do for you?” His tone suggested that he hoped there wasn’t.

  “Two things,” Trouble answered, and grinned at the suddenly wary expression on the man’s face. “Nothing complicated—not even anything illegal.”

  “Right,” Jesse said, without conviction, and sank back into his chair.

  “First, I saw out there somebody had a trike for sale. Is it still available?”

  Jesse nodded warily. “Yeah.”

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  “No more than anybody,” Jesse said, and Trouble sighed theatrically. She was, she realized, enjoying herself.

  “It’s your fucking store, Jesse, you know every piece of string that goes through here, never mind the chips and the hardware. Don’t give me that.”

  “It’s pretty much as advertised,” Jesse said, stung. “Good condition, probably needs a tune-up, kid’s selling because he’s out of college and can’t afford the freight to get it home to wherever it is he comes from, São Paulo or someplace like that, and he doesn’t want to drive it.”

  Trouble nodded slowly. The machine—an OstEuro Star-rider, the notice had said—wasn’t particularly fancy, wouldn’t win races or carry extra armament, would probably get you killed if you tried outrunning police vans and flyers, but it was a good steady platform for the long haul, would carry a decent cargo. “I’m interested in it, Jesse. Will you broker for me?”

  “At fifteen percent, sure,” Jesse answered.

  “Used to be ten.”

  “Inflation,” Jesse said.

  Trouble considered, running the numbers in her head, but she already knew she could afford it, even with Jesse’s commission. “All right. But I won’t go above the asking price, no matter what he throws in.”

  Jesse started to leer, then thought better of it. Trouble said it for him, “No, not even his own hot body. Not my type.”

  “Agreed. I’ll need a deposit—earnest money.”

  “I’ll give you three hundred now,” Trouble said, “and another two hundred over the commission if you can make the deal before I leave.”

  Jesse nodded, and typed something into his desktop. A chime sounded faintly. Trouble reached into her pocket, pulled out a second folder of bearer cards. She found one that rated two hundred and fifty, then paged through a half-empty book of foils until she came up with the remaining fifty, and passed them together across the desktop.

  “I’m trying to contact him now,” Jesse said, and made the money vanish into a pocket without looking up from his screens. “You said there was more?”

  “Second thing,” Trouble said. “I need to go to Seahaven, Jesse. Can I walk out through your nodes?”

  There was a little silence, Jesse busying himself with the desktop. “Seahaven’s changed some,” he said at last.

  When he didn’t say anything more, Trouble lifted an eyebrow at him. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s changed.” Jesse grimaced, looked annoyed with himself for having betrayed anything like uncertainty. “The Mayor—he’s gotten a little more autocratic these days, and the interface is a lot slicker, a lot more IC(E) in it, nasty IC(E). There was an incident last year that caused a lot of talk. The Mayor turned in somebody who was working out of Seahaven—he said the guy was cracking without good sense, screwing around where he couldn’t possibly make a profit, but a lot of people thought it was personal.”

  “I heard some of that,” Trouble said. There had been a rumor last year that someone, not a cracker, had been shopped to the cops for screwing around with someone else’s pillow-friend. If that was from Seahaven—well, it had to have been a nasty quarrel, and wide-ranging, for its echoes to have reached her in the bright lights.

  “So a lot of people are off Seahaven these days,” Jesse went on, “or at least they’re watching their step.”

  Trouble shrugged, only partly out of bravado. Whatever truth was behind the rumors, Seahaven was still the only place left that you could do certain kinds of business, the only place that had successfully defended itself against the various agencies whose job it had become to police the nets. “I need to get a messag
e out,” she said, and Jesse sighed.

  “Then you want to go to Seahaven,” he agreed. “Try through Eleven’s Moon. You’re welcome to use a node, any room you want. But—be careful, Trouble.”

  “Thanks,” Trouble said. “Is there someplace I can be private? Not just for me,” she added, seeing Jesse’s mouth curl into a grin, “but to keep you people out of it.”

  Jesse sobered instantly. “Yeah.” He touched more controls, and Trouble heard a chime sound in some distant part of the building. “You can have the little room upstairs.”

  That brought back memories, all right—she had worked there before, done some of her best work in that little, blue-walled space, both when she was starting out and then later, when she and Cerise had needed to do a job on the fly—but she said nothing.

  “Ah,” Jesse said, and looked down at his screens. “I found the kid.”

  “Offer him two-thirds,” Trouble said.

  “Don’t you trust me?” Jesse asked, rhetorically, and his fingers danced over the keyboard. There was a little pause, and then he smiled. “Done deal. That’s another fifteen hundred, Trouble.”

  “Rounded up?” Trouble asked, but reached for her money.

  “Rounded down. I’m wounded.”

  Trouble slid a short stack of bearer cards across the table, added a booklet of citiscrip. “Where is the trike?”

  “Out back,” Jesse answered. “You can have it whenever you want it—” He broke off as the curtain slid back and Elhibri appeared in the doorway.

  “Annie. Trouble’s going to be working upstairs.”

  Elhibri nodded, and Trouble followed the other woman out of the room and up the narrow back stairway to the blue-painted room. It was empty except for the node, its box mounted in the center of the floor like an inside-out drain, and a patched foam-core armchair.

  “You want coffee?” Elhibri said, grudgingly, and Trouble nodded.

  “Yeah, I’d appreciate it.”

  “I’ll bring you a pot,” Elhibri answered, and disappeared, closing the door behind her. Left to herself, Trouble began setting up her system, main box, data drives, the specialized add-ons that interpreted the net, then plugged the cord into her dollie-slot, careful to keep the power low for now. She loaded the new programs, ran the installation routines, and sat back to run a quick diagnostic scan. Elhibri reappeared halfway through, a small, two-cup thermos and a mug on a tray, and Trouble thanked her abstractedly, barely aware of her presence or her departure. The scan showed green, a multibranched tree of indicators; more than that, she could feel the system in tune, a gentle harmony, and she shut down the scan.