Geosynchron

  Nobody's forced to live in those inner rings, government officials said to justify their inaction. The people who indulge in those vices do so by their own choice.

  Technically speaking, they were correct.

  Rodrigo stumbled out of the bodega hard on the trail of Chomp. He tried and failed to remember the last time he had tasted something that hadn't emerged from a laboratory tank, something that had a place in the hierarchy of nature. Too long.

  Conventional wisdom said that the best marks could be found in the bodegas, but Rodrigo didn't believe it. The ones you picked up in the bodegas were usually the mean ones: businesspeople working off the shame of deals gone sour, black code pushers working up the ferocity to ensure that their deals didn't. Rodrigo had spent too many mornings huddled in the dark corners of inner-ring bodegas, trying to hold it together while his OCHREs patched up wounds from a night of one-sided passion. Too many encounters had begun with an overture of I guess you made it through after all, and too many had concluded with a coda of You'll live.

  Hard price to pay for an hour of Chomp. Ah, Chomp the magnificent, Chomp the trickster, Chomp the high of many colors and flavors.

  Rodrigo could see the line of hustlers in the avenue outside the bodegas now, slouching against the wall. They were all trying to find that optimal facial expression that showed a willingness to be picked up without showing desperation. Rodrigo knew many of these people by face, though their names had mostly been engulfed by the Chomp.

  The avenue itself, like all the streets in 49th Heaven, was a pure, smooth cylinder, with buildings propped up against its lower arcs. Such lighting as there was came from the half-shuttered windows of these buildings. In the heavily trafficked portions of the colony, the cylinder's walls were painted over with artistry that ranged from the exquisite to the psychedelic to the grotesque. Near the dock on Seventh Ring, tens of thousands of angels frolicked in a sky filled with five-pointed stars; outside the sex emporiums on Second Ring, a profusion of colors swirled in patterns that ventured near the profound. But here outside the bodegas of Sixth Ring, the old murals had long since chipped away into pointillist incoherence.

  Rodrigo strolled up to a dull-eyed boy he knew from Grub Town. They had shared the wall outside the bodegas many times before, but all Rodrigo could remember about him was that he was an ardent fan of the Patronell Lightning soccer team.

  "How's it going?" he greeted the boy, taking up a position alongside.

  "A little over, a little under," replied Patronell without looking up from his shoes. Rodrigo had never understood what the phrase meant, but he supposed he knew the gist of it well enough. "You shouldn't be out here," continued the dull-eyed boy. "Molloy looking for you, man."

  "Nothing new."

  "Says he gonna kill you this time."

  Rodrigo shrugged. "Been saying that for weeks. Let's see him get busy."

  The other abandoned this line of conversation with a shrug of his own. "New OrbiCo freighter just docked."

  "Tourists?" said Rodrigo hopefully.

  "Mostly freight, what Cisco says." Patronell snapped his head abruptly towards a slack-jawed teenager across the way. The boy had just hooked his arm into that of a middle-aged woman who was trying unsuccessfully to hide the purple and maroon lining of her coat. Royal purple and maroon, Creed Elan colors.

  "Gotta be some dockworkers though," said Rodrigo. OrbiCo dockworkers weren't nearly as generous as tourists-and not as plentiful as politicians-but if you caught them straight off a long shift to Furtoid with a nice bonus in their Vault account, they made easy marks.

  "Yeah, sure, dockworkers," said the other boy. "But not enough to go around."

  The conversation withered and died at that point, and the boy who was a fan of the Patronell Lightning wandered away without comment a few minutes later. Rodrigo was starting to really suffer from the pangs of Chomp withdrawal. Shaky hands, blurred vision, deep rumbles of hunger. He reached in his coat pocket for a slim silver canister, flipped open the cap with his thumb, and rubbed the moist tip on his wrists with a single practiced motion. Within seconds, the code-laden OCHREs had penetrated the skin and tweaked his neural systems into a frenzy. This was low-quality stuff, hardly worthy of the Chomp moniker, but it made a serviceable substitute in a pinch. Besides which, it was all he had left. Rodrigo closed his eyes and leaned back against the cool flexible glass wall.

  Lights danced. Molecules thrummed. Time twisted itself in knots around him, and while caught in those bonds, he wanted for nothing.

  When Rodrigo emerged back into sentience, he was alone on the wall. All the other hustlers had either found marks for the night or given up. Rodrigo discovered that he had slouched down onto his right knee during the black code high with his left arm folded painfully behind his back. He was in the process of straightening himself out when a figure slid in front of him.

  It was a dockworker with a downcast face, perhaps in his late twenties. Hair dark, body lean. Eyes a vivid sea green. "Interested in a drink?" muttered the man.

  Rodrigo studied the shadowed face for a moment, looking for signs of craziness. He desperately needed a real fix, but he didn't know if he would survive another night like last night. Hours clutching bruised thighs in a mirrored hotel room, and only a few miserable canisters to show for it. "You got Chomp?"

  The man reached into his canvas bag and withdrew a handful of thin silver canisters like the one Rodrigo had just tapped dry. "Of course."

  They started down the avenue towards the gate that led to the inner rings. Rodrigo knew a guard there who would let him through, in exchange for the occasional ... favor. "You don't look like a dockworker, man," said Rodrigo to the handsome stranger, trying to come up with friendly banter that would keep him from walking away.

  "Wasn't always one," replied the man laconically.

  Try as he might, Rodrigo couldn't keep his eyes off the stranger's canvas bag. "What'd you do before you sign up with OrbiCo?" he said after a few minutes. Rodrigo tried to summon a list of professions that respectable people engaged in, but he could only come up with two. "Capitalman? Drama producer?"

  The stranger shook his head. "Entrepreneur."

  23

  Natch has ceased to exist.

  The person who once inhabited that set of characteristics-the name, the apartment, the Vault account, the various holdings and relationships and defining traits-that person reached his terminus the instant Frederic Patel's decapitating sword stroke landed on his neck. Or perhaps his final moments evaporated in a haze of erased memory on the streets of Old Chicago. Whatever the instant of Natch's demise, he has indeed sloughed off his old identity like a snake's skin. The apartment and the Vault account: abandoned. The profile in the public directory: wiped clean. The obsessions with Primo's ratings and MultiReal, the fear of Brone and the Defense and Wellness Council: discarded.

  Yet if Natch cannot countenance a life in that old skin, neither can he contemplate taking up residence in a new one. Assuming a new identity means pointing himself in a new direction. It means taking on a whole new set of desires and anxieties, and Natch would rather hurl himself through an airlock than do that right now.

  But he can't have Len Borda or Magan Kai Lee tracking him down either. He can't have libertarians like Khann Frejohr hounding him for access to MultiReal or drudges pressing for exclusives. Most important, he can't have Brone locating him and trying to pick up where he left off.

  Keep moving, that is his imperative.

  So Natch finds himself walking into a small storefront that he knows in the twisted alleyways of Angelos. At the counter stands a ferrety man with a squint of suspicion for the entire world. The sign over his head reads simply Fix. No preceding article, no trailing object. Natch can't tell whether "Fix" is supposed to be the man's name, the name of his business, the service he provides, or perhaps all three.

  "Name?" grunts Fix after the short dance of solicitation and negotiation ends with a service to be provided and a fair price.


  Natch knows he is being asked for a new name. Nobody working in a place like this would be so gauche as to ask for his existing name. "Nohwan," replies Natch after a moment's reflection.

  "No One?" says Fix, slitting his eyes into a state of concentrated mistrust.

  "Nohwan," Natch corrects him. He spells it out as a single word without patronymic, in the style preferred by so many Westerners of his generation.

  Fix opens his eyes just wide enough to roll them. Spare me the pre- tention and self-importance of the young, his expression says. Then he reaches for his satchel of bio/logic programming bars and gets to work.

  Not three hours later, Natch emerges on the muggy streets of Angelos with a new profile in the public directory and a new Vault account. He has a new set of physical traits designed to make him unrecognizable to the casual observer, yet not so unrecognizable that a clever image-analysis routine can single him out. His hair is darker with a slightly closer cut, and his skin has taken on the bronzed pigment of a well-tanned beachgoer. His blue eyes have migrated to a deep green. A cocktail of biochemical programs will serve to confuse most common DNA-screening routines.

  Natch's next step is to find a bio/logic workbench for rent. He needs a bench that does not log its transactions, a bench that will allow him to flit in and out of his own systems without leaving a trace. He finds this not half a kilometer away from Fix, in a similarly disreputable shop on a similarly disreputable street. He tries to recall Petrucio Patel's instructions for taming the black code tremors, half expecting the memory to be gone. But it's not. Soon Natch is executing Petrucio's instructions with a pair of greasy rented bio/logic programming bars. He sweats away in a MindSpace bubble for three hours until the shaking from Margaret's code has almost completely subsided.

  Two or three months of tremor-free existence, this is what Petrucio has promised him.

  Finally, Natch recalls Patel's commands for disabling the MultiReal-D code inside his OCHREs. It's a simple process, really, the virtual equivalent of flipping a switch. He hesitates for a moment with programming bars held aloft, the parabolic shape of the MultiReal-D trigger floating before him. Does he really want to disable such a potent defense mechanism? Does he really want to give up that sixty-second advantage and make himself vulnerable to the world's caprices?

  Yes, he decides firmly. I don't need trickery. I don't need random memory erasure. I need my feet on solid ground. I need control.

  Natch disables the MultiReal-D code. He waits for some visceral signal that he has resumed life in real time, that he is no longer a minute ahead of the world. There is none. Time seems to flow around and through him the same as it always has.

  He throws down the bio/logic programming bars, shuts down the MindSpace workbench. The transformation is complete. Natch is gone; he does not exist. In his place there is only Nohwan.

  Keep moving.

  Seventy-two hours later, "Nohwan" has accepted an engineering position aboard the OrbiCo ship Practical, bound for the lonely orbital colony of Furtoid.

  Natch's job is insanely simple. He wanders the labyrinths of machinery, performing rote maintenance chores that could easily be handled by mechanicals. But out here between planets, the economics are topsy-turvy; the bottom line is that it's much cheaper for OrbiCo to use human labor than to waste precious ship's power. Natch feels like he's back on the assembly-line programming floor in Texas terri tory, watching a herd of his peers bang away on repetitive tasks with bio/logic programming bars.

  But such a job suits him now. He wants quiet. He wants to be out of the way. He wants to be a ghost.

  It's in one of these quiet moments, on his bunk after a long day of adjusting valves and balancing chemical ratios, when Natch wants nothing more than to lie still and let the universe pass around and through him, that he notices.

  There is a presence within him.

  The presence is infinitely subtle, like an itch in a blanketed corner of his mind. As Natch studies the feeling, he realizes that this presence is not new. He's felt it many times before, but it's always been shunted into the background by the incessant tremors of Margaret's backdoor MultiReal access, or the time-shattering MultiReal-D code Petrucio put inside him-or the mere adrenaline of running from the Defense and Wellness Council.

  He knows what this presence is. It's the illicit code that the Thasselians infected him with in Shenandoah months ago. Quiescent, in a state of hibernation, perhaps-but still there.

  Natch wants to leap up from his bunk and run for a MindSpace workbench. He wants to grab his bio/logic programming bars and tear this thing out of him, no matter what it takes, no matter the consequences. How does he know that Brone's not using the code to track him? But of course, he will find no MindSpace workbench aboard the Practical. And if he does find one in the remote colony of Furtoid, he won't have enough shore leave to make effective use of it. No, Natch realizes that he must be patient. Whatever nefarious duty Brone has assigned to this code, the entrepreneur will have to put up with it for a while.

  Mind awhirl with the evil possibilities and looking for a distraction, Natch dives into his work.

  He knew precious little about the mechanics of space freighters when he first climbed aboard the Practical with the chemical vats and chunks of raw ore. Meandering around reading gauges has taught him almost nothing. But now he is eager to learn. He spends all his free time reading engineering manuals. He disassembles machinery and pores through access panels when his supervisor's not looking, which is most of the time.

  As the days pass, Natch begins to get a command of the ship's systems-and what he finds there frightens him. Grav modules, engine components, and oxygen generators in a woeful state of neglect, caught in the tide of dismal economics. OrbiCo has not made a profit in fifty years. The company only stays afloat because of the billions of credits the Prime Committee pumps into it every year. (Surely the august members of the Committee don't want their constituents on Furtoid to starve? cry the orbital colony representatives in budget sessions quarter after quarter. Who's going to supply than if OrbiCo doesn't?) But government money only goes so far, and it's the freighter's innards that suffer for it.

  Nobody has asked Natch to fix faulty equipment, but he has no intention of asking for permission. The ethics of engineering are refreshingly simple: increasing efficiency is good. So Natch goes to work tinkering in the bowels of the ship, jiggering the programming, rewiring entire sections of machinery, adjusting valves and joints. Where he lacks the permission to make modifications, he either finds a workaround or hacks his way through.

  Most of the improvements he makes are pro forma and unlikely to impact the bottom line. But he finds one major hiccup in the gravity generators that is wasting vast amounts of power. And it's a trifling problem too, one that any gravitational engineer could diagnose if OrbiCo could afford to pay her. Natch smuggles some spare parts on board when they hit Furtoid to replace the malfunctioning ones, and cleans up the code to save processing cycles.

  And all the time, Natch is asking himself: Why do you care? Why not just do your job like the rest of the crew and then catch up on your sleep?

  It feels like a vital question that Natch must answer before he can slip into a new skin. Why would he do a job he is not being paid to do? This might have started as mental calisthenics to keep his skills sharp and his attention away from Brone's black code, but it's not just an exercise anymore. Why can't Natch walk past a frayed wire or a leaking valve without feeling an inexorable urge to fix it? It's not a conscious thought, but more like a visceral impulse. Where does that urge come from? Is it a desire to restore the universe to some hypothetical state of perfection? And if so, why is the universe constantly working to undermine him?

  The entrepreneur tweaks the OrbiCo ship to greater efficiency all the way from Furtoid to 49th Heaven, its next destination. Once they dock and the unloading of goods is nearly complete, Natch sidles close enough to the officers' deck to hear their stunned discovery of an un
expected energy surplus. Enough to tip the ledger for the voyage ever so slightly into positive territory. The bonus he and the other ship's engineers receive is substantial.

  Natch is intrigued.

  He is a ghost. He has ceased to exist. And yet he has singlehandedly created a change that will ripple through the local economy long after he has ceased to be involved. Engineers will bring small gifts home to their families, or pad their Vault accounts, or order that extra drink in the bodega. Something he has done will have tangible effects and lasting permanence in the world, and it has cost him next to nothing to do it. The balance sheet of the universe will have slid just that infinitesimal amount from the red to the black.

  It is a kind of immortality.

  Natch disembarks from the Practical and steps into the Seventh Ring of 49th Heaven. He's got a week of shore leave before his next voyage-should he decide to sign up for it-and there is little to do here except explore.

  Keep moving, he exhorts himself.

  He finds an entirely different kind of economy at work here in 49th Heaven. The Vault's credits are (virtually) untraceable and (practically) unforgeable, and yet Vault credits are not trusted currency just about anywhere but the Seventh Ring tourist traps. In 49th Heaven, vials of black code-laden OCHREs are the preferred form of exchange. Merge, Chomp, Suffr-G, Suffr-N, Chill Polly. Programs that shatter the will; programs that insert the user into an endless loop of wanton need and insufficient fulfillment. Programs that warp the human mind in ways the Prime Committee has deemed unacceptable.

  But Natch doesn't mind. In fact, he feels an affinity for the underground market; after all, Natch himself has been deemed unacceptable by the Prime Committee. So he quickly locates a dealer and spends a chunk of his OrbiCo wages acquiring a small stockpile. Then he goes scouting for ways to spend it. He walks through gambling dens, wanders past galleries devoted to decadent forms of art, skirts the roughand-tumble sex emporiums.