Idolon

by Mark Budz

  As soon as the pressure let up, Jhon thrashed, struggling to free his arms. The desk lurched forward, exposing an open fly and a glimpse of pale freckled white, shriveled in folds of denim and tawny hair. "Asshole!" Jhon started to stand. "You're gonna pay for this."

  Pelayo kicked the chair out from under him and Jhon went down hard. His head slammed against the wall, then the floor. He lay on his side, groaning, the floor tiles under his face bright with blood where he'd bitten through his tongue.

  _______

  On his way out of the cosmetique, Pelayo messaged Atossa. "Have you got a few minutes?"

  "Where are you?" she asked over his earfeed.

  "The Get Reel."

  "What are you doing there?"

  "I'll explain in a second."

  The counter girl was busy with two young tramps, discussing the merits of scented skin bacteria. The yamps, fifteen or sixteen, were dressed as grade-school kids in pleated skirts, knee-high stockings, and Mary Janes.

  Hanging on to their lost youth, he thought. Pretty soon they'd be wearing designer diapers.

  "Thank you for your patronage," the door said on his way out. "Please come back reel soon."

  "What's going on?" Atossa asked when he was on the sidewalk.

  "Do you know of any TV centers near downtown?" She might have heard something through friends or coworkers if a Model Behavior client had approached the agency about selling to the TVs.

  "What do you want with them?" Tossa said.

  "Marta."

  "What about her? What are you talking about?"

  "I think she's in trouble."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  Across the street, the main door to the Get Reel opened and the two young tramps stepped out, blithely preening and chattering, oblivious to the world.

  "I'm not sure. But I think she might be at a TV center. One that's recruiting only women."

  "Serious?"

  "That's what I'm trying to find out."

  "I think there might be one up on West Cliff," Tossa said. "We're not supposed to ad mask up there. It's a no-fly zone."

  Pelayo watched the yamps prattle down the sidewalk, forcing other people to step out of the way.

  "I have an idea," he said. "But I need your help."

  30

  Zhenyu al-Fayoumi discovered the surveillance nanocams by accident. The tiny photoreceptors had been designed to accumulate in the eyes of insects. One of the bugs happened to be a mosquito. When he'd squashed the mosquito on his arm, a few hundred thousand cams had found their way into his bloodstream, where they had been detected by a linked antigen array on the lookout for toxins, nanomals, and other free-radical hazards to his health.

  He stared at the smear of blood, short of breath and angry. He'd hoped Yukawa wouldn't feel the need to watch him. The cams demonstrated a lack of trust that was hard to excuse.

  But it got him thinking. With the addition of the nanocams, the mosquito's phenotype had been altered. It had acquired a new trait that modified its basic function in the environment. Not unlike the Lamarckian inheritance of habits.

  Except that it wasn't really inheritance. Behavior wasn't being passed down from one generation to the next. It was being passed from one environment to another. From one program mode to another.

  Excited, al-Fayoumi set to work in the shuttered gloom of his lab. Yukawa, or whoever he was, had provided him with a schematic of the quantum processor that would be used in the new 'skin. The processor had many different possible modes, or structures. These structures existed in a state of quantum superposition. They weren't fixed, but overlapped in a phased array of many possible processors that formed a single unified processor. The result was a distributed resonant state of software and hardware, a shared holographic domain where each processor contained information about the larger processor.

  Over his eyefeed d-splay, this processor resembled a complex organic molecule made of artificial atoms... clouds of trapped electrons that functioned as transistors. The molecule had been flattened— pressed onto a programmable graphene layer— where the superposed configurations existed in phased simultaneity.

  A utility provided with the quantum chip allowed him to switch between different possible states, modalities of behavior as he had begun to think of them. When the q-chip was collapsed into one modality, it resembled a standard biochip.

  He plugged the q-chip into a virtual computer, tweaked the operating system to accept the new processor, and ran one of the simplest behavior programs he'd developed to explain the transmission of idolons in flies. He logged the results, reran the program using different input, then repeated the process again.

  Gradually, he began to see what Yukawa and Sigilint were trying to do.

  The phased-array processor gave rise to a distributed metaprogram that ran across all instances of the quantum-coupled 'skin. People wouldn't be waring different 'skin, but a single distributed 'skin that was essentially holographic. Each piece might appear to be separate, independent, but it contained information about the whole and was influenced by the whole.

  From what he had read about Lamarckian social inheritance, specific sets of habits tended to lead to a certain type of behavior. Plug in a set of initial attitudes and behavioral tendencies, and in theory you could predict how a closed population would evolve—if the community would become functional or dysfunctional, supportive or divisive, apathetic or energized, peaceful or violent.

  Useful information. He could see where it might have applications when it came to setting up and managing mass-mediated casts that needed to integrate people from a wide variety of cultural, political, social, and economic backgrounds.

  Assuming the equations that described the exchange and expression of images in flies could be applied to people. Ten years ago, electronic skin and philm had been illegal, available only on the black-market. Now that it was regulated, most people wanted to be philmed. It had become a means of self-expression and tribal identification with a certain group. That was why Yukawa had approached him: Siglint believed its quantum-coupled 'skin would become the new paradigm for personal and group behavior. If Sigilint succeeded, the biological manipulation of social structure would be replaced by digital manipulation. People would be connected in a way that had never before been possible.

  It raised a lot of questions. Would the new system preserve diversity or eliminate it? What about ethnicity or cultural values? Would people with the same morals all look the same? More important, whose morals would they have?

  Hard questions, questions he wasn't prepared to answer.

  His mind burned, feverish. Glare from the bright light outside his window wells seemed to set the dingy yellow curtains on fire. He could feel himself slowly turning to ash in the blaze, growing lighter with each passing minute.

  He needed to take a break. Eat. Get some rest so he could think clearly... decide what to do.

  But he wasn't hungry, or tired. He paced the kitchen. His head ached with a dry, septic heat that left him agitated and confused.

  After several minutes, he found himself staring at the flies in their terrariums. The damselfly was gone. He didn't see it anywhere. He blinked, pressed his fingers into his eyes, but his vision remained blurred.

  Fresh air, he decided. That was what he needed.

  _______

  He took the stairs. The elevator was faster, but the exertion would do him good—loosen muscles, get the blood flowing.

  By the time he reached the roof, he was breathing heavily and his calves ached. A fine sheen of sweat glistened on him. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face and the back of his neck. A fetid inversion layer had settled over San Jose, trapping the stink of brine and hydrogen from leaky fuel cells.

  A tall Kevlex fence encircled the roof, preventing anyone from leaping to the street below. Debris clung to the netting, dead palm fronds and windblown scraps of paper that had somehow escaped biodegradation and reclamation bots.

  He shut the door
to the stairwell behind him. The roof was studded with circular exhaust vents and fans. A pile of old plastine window frames lay in one corner. A pigeon-spattered roll of photo-tunable cellophane, partly unrolled, lay in skeins on the bituminous, gravel-covered roof.

  At some point in the past a makeshift greenhouse had been built against the waist-high cinder-block wall that supported the Kevlex fence. Three plastine frames, spaced two meters apart, stuck out from the wall to create four stalls. The stalls, covered by a rectangle of cellophane, were about a meter deep and three meters long. A single row of chipped gray cinder block, stacked three high, formed a low retaining wall for the potting soil that had been hauled up and tamped into the stalls. The cellophane was dual purpose. It trapped heat and provided electrical power to the full-spectrum LEDs glued to the wall. Most of the lights were burned out or broken, dulled by dust.

  Faded Jackson Pollock tangles of graffiti covered the pocked and weathered wall. Before the building had been renovated by the city, the roof had been home to an itinerant homeless community.

  Gravel crunched under his boots as al-Fayoumi made his way to the endmost stall, tucked into one corner of the roof.

  He pulled aside a curtain of dull plastic, ducked his head, and stepped over the cinder-block threshold.

  The sagging cellophane had pulled loose at the wall, torn down by rain and the puddles of dust that had accumulated in the creases. The potting soil had washed away from the window frame on that side, leaving a furrow where the runoff had drained. He crab-walked to the wall and stood up in the gap between the cellophane and the window frame. He loved the view from here, south to the minarets, onion domes, and pagodas of the Coyote valley e-cologies and r-cologies. The philmscape shimmered with heat, rippling residential Monet gardens, purple and orange Wolf Kahn trees, and monochrome Hong-Oai mountains, shrouded in chemical-white mist and industrial black shadows.

  Cirrus clouds streaked the afternoon sky. A loose corner of cellophane flapped as a breeze stirred his short-sleeved shirt and the hair on his arms. When the gust died down the tickle remained. Al-Fayoumi brushed his left forearm, and felt wings flutter under his fingertips where an image of the damselfly had appeared on his 'skin.

  No, not an image. Like a tattoo brought to life, the damselfly emerged. First one wing, then another. As the body thickened into a bas-relief and started to wriggle free, it became fishlike.

  Al-Fayoumi gripped the edge of the wall and stumbled back, his arm outstretched. The area immediately around the image itched. But there was no blood as the synthapse connections between the electronic skin and the underlying tissue ripped, then pulled loose.

  The damsel drifted idly for a moment, its wings testing invisible currents, then, with a quick flick of its body, angled toward him. In addition to the head and mouth of a fish, the nanomated creature had acquired a tail and dorsal fins.

  "Who are you?" al-Fayoumi asked.

  The nanomal circled slowly. It seemed to float rather than fly, fragile, lighter than air.

  Yukawa, al-Fayoumi decided. He couldn't think of anyone else who might want to hack into his 'skin.

  "I'm not what you think," the idolon said. The voice over his earfeed was soft and flutelike. The lips synchronized perfectly with the words. It looked and sounded as if the fish were actually speaking. "Neither is Yukawa."

  31

  "I can't go through with this," Nadice said. She paced in front of her reflection in the window. Below the hotel, under late-afternoon clouds, yellow LED lights on the pier marched out to sea and an advancing fogbank.

  "You have to," Marta said.

  "Why?"

  "What choice do you have?"

  Nadice swallowed. Her cheeks flushed, blazing with anger and determination.

  Marta's gaze hardened. "What are you going to do?"

  Nadice stripped off her yellow dress and, tipping her chin up, knotted the flimsy cloth thin and tight around her neck.

  Marta shook her head. "It will never work. They'll stop you. Whatever you do, it will only make things worse."

  Nadice stared at Marta, defiant, her breasts rising and falling between the trailing ends of the dress, the pulse on the side of her neck panting against the twisted makeshift noose.

  Marta's pulse throbbed in her chest. Sweat trickled between her breasts. After a moment she stepped forward and coaxed open Nadice's clenched fingers, clasping them in her own so she could loosen the knot.

  _______

  "You really want to die?" Marta asked, watching the shadows of the day lengthen into late afternoon. "What do you think?"

  "Everybody wonders what it would be like to kill themselves."

  They lay facing each other on the bed closest to the window, whispering softly so they might not be heard. Each time Marta spoke, the centimeters between them stretched to kilometers and the air felt bruised and pulpy.

  "The job you quit," Marta said. "Was it really that terrible? There was no way to make it work?"

  "The man I was working for threatened me," Nadice said. "He already tried to kill me once."

  "I can't go back either," Marta said.

  "Why? Does someone want to kill you?" Nadice spoke lightly, joking to ease the tension.

  "I made a deal with someone," Marta said. "A promise. If I don't keep it, I'll die, too."

  Nadice narrowed her eyes to luminous white slits. "You're serious."

  "Dead," Marta said.

  _______

  Marta lay perfectly still, listening to their breathing. After a time, their inhalations and exhalations synchronized, becoming one breath.

  "I overheard one of the girls talking right after the service," Nadice said when the sky had gone black. Bubonic. "One they brought in just this afternoon."

  "And?"

  "She said it's all over the newzines, how women are getting pregnant for no reason. A lot are getting abortions, before their boyfriends and husbands find out. What's weird is the babies are farther along than they should be, just like Dr. Kwan said, except that some of them are smaller than normal."

  "Do they know why?"

  "Not yet. The problem is, a lot of women don't know if the babies are legit or not. Some women have even been killed because their boyfriends thought they were cheating. The accelerated development makes it look like conception was at a different time than it really was."

  It figured. Fear. Jealousy. Superstition. People came up against something they didn't understand, and they panicked—or used it to justify a prejudice or policy they wanted to impose.

  "There's another solution," Nadice said, long after Marta thought she had drifted off.

  Marta didn't answer immediately. She wasn't sure she wanted to know. "What's that?"

  "Miscarriage."

  Marta grimaced. She didn't think she could go through with it—physically injure herself or Nadice.

  "The TVs wouldn't want us anymore," Nadice said. "That's the only reason we're here. Take that away and they'll let us go. There won't be any reason to keep us. Kwan told me there are a lot of miscarriages after the first trimester. So if we did it right, it could look like an accident."

  "Could you do it?" Marta asked.

  Nadice shrugged. "I'm not saying it would be easy. But if we had to, if we didn't have a choice, it's an option. That's all."

  "I hope it doesn't come to that."

  "Me, too." Nadice moistened her lips. "I just don't know what's inside me? It's creepy, especially il we're farther along than we think and it's going to grow even faster now. You know?"

  The corners of Marta's mouth tightened. "I know." She found Nadice's hand on the bed next to her and squeezed it. "I'm scared, too."

  32

  The South San Francisco address for the damselfly, and hopefully Lisette, turned out to be a budget r-cology not far from SFO International Airport.

  The modular housing stack was a twenty-story steel frame with track-guided forklift arms that raised/lowered portable housing units into slots in the structure. On
ce in place, the PHUs tapped into public service lines built into the frame. Most of the vacant spaces on the exterior of the building were covered with ad d-splays for fast-food franchises, or architectural facade panels philmed to resemble Renaissance balconies, garden terraces, or Italianesque frescoes.

  Kasuo van Dijk parked his sedan at the corner of Seventh and Walnut. He stepped out of the car and mentally conjured a HUD over his eyefeed.

  "Location map," he instructed the SFPD datician. "Satellite and street image overlay."

  "Resolution?"

  "Standard."

  An overhead view of the building and several surrounding streets appeared on the heads-up d-splay. A red dot identified the location of the damselfly. A green dot marked his position even though he could see himself moving real-time in the image, dodging an electric robo-lorry as he crossed the street and made his way to the side of the building.

  The neighborhood, zoned mainly for travel and airport support services, was bustling. One of the rail lorklifts was lowering a PHU to the ground, leaving a gap-tooth hole where it had been removed. Exposedwires and pipes dangled in the opening. Van Dijk couldn't see out the back end. His view was blocked by another PHU that had been slotted into anabutting hole from the frame's interior courtyard.

  Rent in this type of r-cology was cheap. The target demographic was tourists and temporary/contract workers who moved from job to job or city to city, and lived out of a PHU, which was significantly larger and more comfortably equipped than the coffin-sized sleepods found in a typical Japanese racktel.

  "Three-d building schematic," van Dijk said. "Display a cutaway of the site and each of the adjoining PHU slots."

  The slot was ground-level, outside-wall, and currently unoccupied. Ground-level slots, especially those on the exterior, were usually allotted to short-timers. For security purposes, long-term residents preferred interior, upper-level spaces. The slots immediately above and behind the target slot were filled. So was one of the slots next to it, leaving only one adjoining slot empty. The facade panels along the bottom depicted a colonnade made out of white marble. The sealed panels doubled as security doors. They were bomb- and bulletproof. But they could still be hacked.