by Curtis Hox
“Not time travel,” Hark said. “Something else entirely.”
“He a new principal?” she asked.
“Started his role today. Sidekick. You hoping to be?”
“I got my ticket for full immersion and applied for a principal role. But no luck. I’ve been living here with a body on a trust fund, enjoying myself, hoping for a chance to show my stuff.”
“Rend-V actress, eh?”
“They just have to give me a chance.”
“And today?”
“Message on my phone to be here at this time,” she said, finally relaxing enough to make herself a plate.
“From who?” Hark asked, suddenly very interested.
“I have no idea. But when I saw you, I knew who you were. Anyone would know you. From what I remember, you weren’t in the cast. You’re new in this V.”
“Immersed today,” Hark pushed a plate to Frankie, who wouldn’t even look at the food.
“I know who you are, Specialist Harken Cole,” Binda said. "You got something for me to do?”
Hark was annoyed as hell all of this was happening around him, and he had jack-spit intelligence. She was a definite player he could use, but how?
“I’ll come up with something.”
She winked again and ate a healthy fork full of glazed chicken.
Frankie looked up. “What are you guys talking about?”
“You’re dreaming and don’t know it,” Binda said flatly.
Hark drummed his fingers on the table. “Wake up time.”
“I love it when this happens,” Binda said.
“Frankie, pay attention,” Hark said. “Look around the room. Look closely. I want you to keep looking until you see something odd, something only you would find odd. When you see it, tell me what it is.”
Frankie took his time looking, as if he were scanning the room in hopes of recognizing someone. Hark and Binda ate their food. A few minutes later Hark saw Frankie staring at an empty table. Hark turned around. On it, a small action-figure toy lay, one of the plastic kinds that kids in this time enjoyed.
“That looks like a Han Solo,” Frankie said.
“Who?” Binda asked.
“Who?” Hark said. “What kind of a narrative junkie are you? They let you in as a potential Rend-V actress without knowing that?”
“I passed the tests, sir,” she said, obviously perturbed. “Just not into the weird sci-fi stuff.”
“Settle down. Just playing.”
Frankie stood. Hark grabbed his forearm, lodging him in place. “Remember the red pill … blue pill?”
Frankie nodded. “Red pill.”
“When you pick up that object, there’s no going back.”
Frankie walked forward, grabbed the toy, went rigid, and crumpled to the floor.
“I was hoping that wouldn’t happen,” Hark said and stood to go help.
8
Krista Cole’s eyes snapped open. A dim light overhead caused her field of vision to remain blurry. She breathed deep, tasting the scrubbed tang of hive air. If you asked her, Rend-V air had no taste, ever—an odd versim phenomenon the Sersavants hadn’t corrected. She waited, listening to the humming of immersion equipment around her, glad to be back in the mundane world.
She saw the vague form of her brother, Tripp, lying on a low, canvas cot next to her. The immersion technician, Sammy, stood over both of them.
“Feeling better?” Sammy asked, wiping hands on a white smock smudged with mustard stains.
Krista sat up. “Tripp returning?”
“He’ll be with us in a minute or two.”
Krista waited for … a pop, as if every cell in her body expanded and collapsed at the same time, resounded from deep inside her. She couldn’t explain how her in-V body, which was nothing more than an immaterial copy housed in the mind of their host, synched with her actual one. But according to the technomystics, they were really two sides of the same coin. One person; two bodies.
“You’re clear,” Sammy said, leaning into a monitor with Krista’s data. “All the cellular stamps synced with the ‘rendered you.’”
She stood. She was in a cramped room full of digital equipment that surrounded them in a horseshoe. Sammy stood near a display wall with incomprehensible data feeding from their tunneler-host. Thin plastic sheeting stretched from ceiling to floor separated their room from a smaller one. She glanced that way and saw a glass cylindrical immersion vat. A young man in a bodysuit and bio-support harness floated in the nano liquid.
“How’s he doing?” she asked.
“No one’ll catch Garce. He’s the best invisible host in the business.”
Krista edged aside the plastic. Garce was the trade name for their current host. He was a skinny, unenhanced young man floating peacefully in a fetal position, appearing to sleep in the golden stasis liquid. He also had a brain that scored off the charts in V-Theory aptitude. He charged huge sums to illegally immerse individuals into Rend-Vs. And he’d never been caught. Sammy stood behind her and smiled, obviously happy with the level of care he provided. Around Garce’s vat, pinwheels lodged in the wall hung at attention, each one twirling even though no wind was blowing.
“He’s on fire today. How was it inside? Bright and detailed?” Sammy asked.
“As real as it gets. His mind is a wonderful thing.”
“That’s Garce. Pure imagineer.” Sammy continued to smile as if he were the one psychically rendering objects in the Rend-V. “How much time until you need to return?”
“I’ll be back in a few hours. Frankie and Binda are in play. Hark’s pissed he knows so little.”
“Hark’ll have his full memory soon.” Sammy waited. He obviously wanted her to explain what she was planning to do. “As soon as it’s safe.”
Behind Garce hung another curtain of plastic. She walked to it and pushed it aside. Standing upright was another immersion vat. Her brother, Hark, floated peacefully inside the biotic fluid. He wore his official EA jumpsuit and a skullcap to keep his hair in check. Goggles protected his eyes. Tiny bubbles moved in and out of his mouth and nostrils as he breathed the oxygenated liquid. She was bothered by the tubes that ran from different parts of his body. He looked … half machine. But all of it could keep him alive indefinitely, without any harm to his body, while his rendered self lived in the mind of Garce, who, himself, had snuck into the mind of Celia Preston.
“See you in a little while.”
9
Krista sat behind the windscreen in an open shuttle as it sped her along a central axis corridor inside EA’s Upper Deck Headquarters. It dropped into a shaft, where it rode through a narrow tunnel on its way to the Voxyprog rendering fortress where all Rend-Vs were generated.
Since she was a bleedover investigator, no one gave her trouble. She had access as deep as she needed to go. The tiny apartment in which she’d left her brothers had been buried deep in the subterranean levels beneath a ghetto arcology a shuttle’s ride away. What she was doing now was waging war on the Voxyprog. If she were caught, more than her career would be in jeopardy.
In minutes she exited the shuttle at a disembarkation security checkpoint. She flashed her retinas at the security camera and walked through the double doors into the most lucrative organization on the planet.
She had changed into formal attire: an EA uniform singlet used for dignitaries on official business. Hers was navy blue with white stripping on the legs and arms. A zipper that ran to her neck closed a flap at her breast. EA’s logo was stamped in the middle. She wore her hair in a bun, a few locks hanging free. Otherwise, she was happy she looked like a woman born with an outstanding intellect package and a subtle but graceful aesthetic package: which meant men always looked twice.
She ignored everyone as she moved deeper into the fortress. She had dampened her AI, Atticus. She didn’t want the Voxyprog having any access to her by listening to him chat about what V-nerds the Sersavant hackers were.
When she emerged into a huge interior space,
she relaxed. Here the workers lived. It was a hollow pyramid-shaped structure with three-hundred floors. It housed over five million residents. The hive-city structures were a technomystic’s haven. She saw people strapped into pods traveling to the exclusive shops and restaurants on top. Transparent catwalks crossed the space as well, rows of pedestrians moving like ghosts through the air. Above her a cantilevered restaurant with a transparent floor extended overhead.
She waved at an automated pod of bubble chrome. The hovering vehicle emerged from a lower level and floated at the edge of a platform. She pulled open the gate and stepped in. She strapped herself into the harness, resting her arm on the side, preparing to enjoy the ride like any one of the thousand tourists who visited every day.
“The Collides shrine.”
“Yes, Inspector Cole,” the autopilot’s voice said.
The pod gently increased speed and elevation as it worked its way into a lane of ascending traffic. The cool air of the arcology smelled of scrubbed O2 and something else she imagined to be machine sweat.
She let her mind wander as her pod rushed her out of the hive through a connecting artery into the fortress. Years of her work were now being jeopardized because Hark had let himself get played. Krista considered the unavoidable fact that her valuable archive in Collides was in jeopardy. Year after painstaking year, she had built up the repository to house every piece of narrative created inside a series of Rend-Vs. She’d been given a special place—a rendered New York Public Library—to house these unique pieces of art. Each one was proof that constructed persons were real persons. Each one was proof a world such as Collides shouldn’t be snuffed out with the blink of an eye.
Her pod broke off above a huge platform where a multitude of tourists waited to see the shrines of their favorite Rend-Vs. It then raced across a massive chamber large enough to contain its own small city.
Before passing into another tunnel to take her directly to the shrine, she glanced down at the people who fueled this new world. We’re all narrative’s children, she thought. And she wondered if she were making a mistake today. To send such a powerful request to a host of a Rend-V as large as Collides and to influence that Rend-V like Krista planned could get her disappeared—but she had to try.
The VIP entrance to the shrine consisted of a young man dressed in the signature robe and cowl of the Voxyprog: his was a finely-pressed gray garment, flaring at the wrists, with a zipper down the middle open to his navel. He wore regular clothes underneath.
“Busy today?” she asked.
He was watching a Rend-V on a holovid projected off his table. He swiped his hand through it, turning it off. “Packed.”
He was your typical low-level Sersavant wannabe: skinny, pale, without a hint of physical enhancement beyond intellect. Those blackheads on his nose and the greasy sheen of his brow were proof he thought the body was a flesh sack. She looked into his blood-shot eyes, wondering if he had the requisite intelligence to get promoted. The way he slowly scanned her, she imagined him already to be half-fried from attempting to advance into the more difficult ranks.
He waited for her data to appear on his screen.
“Bleedover investigator?” He smiled the kind of bent smile she imagined on his face while looking at some twisted V sludge. “You any good?”
“I can do in real life what your hackers do in here.” She tapped her head. The smile dripped from his face as if melted. He sat a little straighter. She leaned forward. “Open the door.”
The single door swished into the wall. And Krista Cole walked toward a shrine where a world lived in the mind of Celia Preston.
10
Tripp Cole shook his head once more to push away the remaining drowsiness from this morning’s immersion. He sat in a crowded pub buried beneath the Upper Deck, not far from Sammy’s illegal immersion apartment. This place hadn’t ever seen daylight, and most of the people who patronized it were the unlucky breed born to live and die underground.
Tripp nursed a steaming hive-brew that tasted like synthetic coffee spiked with whiskey swill.
He had changed out of his Upper Deck finery into a thick, workmen’s jacket with a high collar and plenty of pockets. He hid behind black wrap-around Mirrorshades to hide the golden oval flashes of his retinal lenses. He had even tousled his hair.
The booth’s upholstery was cracked. And the poured plastic wall was dented and scratched. He sat in the corner and watched patrons jockey for position at the bar. The din was a constant buzz that his AI, Sunni, muted for him. Behind the four bartenders scurrying for drinks, a wall that curved into the ceiling played several popular Rend-Vs.
All mind-candy, soap-opera types, he thought. I bet Collides will be up there at some point. Maybe I’ll get a peek at Hark.
Tripp sipped his drink, while Sunni scanned the room in the background for any threatening activity.
He chuckled to himself when he saw two troll-like women who probably worked as machinists wedged against the bar, staring at their favorite romance. They both took up two nearly stools each. They both had necks as big as a buffalo’s, wore grimy coveralls smeared in grease, and looked like they’d never seen a dress. Some men preferred their women to look like that, he reminded himself. Ah, the wickedness of the lower wards.
His target walked through the doorway, Sunni silently sending an alert. Tripp leaned toward the aisle to be seen. The man looked out of place in his Upper Deck business suit, although he’d loosened his tie, and stared around like someone about to drown. He spotted Tripp, waved, and hurried forward.
He stepped out of the aisle and sat in the booth. “Madhouse down here.”
“Where the wild ones live. You look like a fool in those clothes.”
He glanced at his pinstriped suit made of a fine cotton blend that must have cost more credits than Tripp cared to imagine. It even glimmered in the multi-colored lights of the bar. “Should I?”
“Would be best.”
The man removed his jacket.
“I don’t have much time,” Tripp said. He doused his HUD to a dim rectangle. The target sat in the center, all of his vital stats scrolling in neat AR tiles. He ignored them while Sunni performed the heavy analytical lifting in the background. “I need to know a few things, and you’re going to tell me.”
The man knit his brow. “Wait a minute. I thought I was here to buy access to …”
“You can get your versim snuff somewhere else.”
The man bunched his face into a mask that probably worked wonders up in the financial corporation where he was some king shit. To Tripp it was an invitation to smack him in the mouth. “You have a client. You’ve been legally funneling monies for—”
“—I can’t talk about any client.”
“He just moved twenty million Consortium credits into a buried account.”
“How did you …?”
“The info was mine for the taking, buddy.”
The man melted into his seat, all his fire doused. He looked like he just realized he was in a world of steaming shit. “Who are you?”
“Repo Agent Tripp Cole.”
The man blanched, and even in the low light, Tripp could see he was about to panic.
Respiration increasing, sir. Heart rate, as well. You love telling them that, don’t you, sir? Sunni’s voice was a soft melody in his ear, like a lover’s, and it always made him smile.
Sunni, you know I do, and you love hearing me. Let me know if you think he’s going to bolt. He didn’t have to move his mouth to speak to Sunni. The conversation happened quicker than a real one.
Tripp didn’t actually enjoy telling people he was a repo agent. Everyone knew who they were. And everyone was screaming-scared shitless of them. It often ruined a conversation. Today it worked in his favor, though. He had a Consortium license to arrest whomever he wanted. He could also, with minimal authorization, execute someone on the spot. His job, officially, was to remand bleedover assets who escaped into reality. Krista worked them to her advanta
ge, claiming her Spinner methods were best to insure the continuation of a sane world. Tripp eliminated them just to be sure. Unofficially, he was one of the best EA hitmen in the agency.
“I need to know who sent that money and where it went. And you’re going to tell me.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Two reasons: that account is funding bleedover assets who are causing trouble in a major Rend-V and, if you don’t, you won’t walk out of this bar alive.”
“Bleedover? That’s real?” The man licked his lips and inhaled deeply.
A HUD alert registered the man’s vitals were spiking. Hark noted sweat welling on the man’s brow. Already, two lines dribbled down the sides of his face. His underarms were pumping out liquid as well.
He’s about to panic, sir. Since that doesn’t seem to matter, maybe show him your shield …
Sunni loved stating the obvious.
Trip withdrew his repo shield: a crystallized matte-black, alloy star in a black-leather folding wallet. All he had to do was flash that and the world was his. He set it on the table.
The target gulped, his eyes now glowing as if backlit.
Sir, that should do it.
I don’t have time to make him love me, do I?
“I … uh … the account … is …”
“I know: confidential.”
Tripp placed both his hands on the table and splayed his fingers. In the popular imagination, a repo possessed ingenious methods of dispatching his enemies. Specialists like Hark were human tanks. A repo was a bloodshed artist.
“Now,” Tripp said, “the names, before I get impatient.”
The man’s mouth hung open far enough Tripp saw his epiglottis shiver. He stumbled through two innocuous sounding names that had to be covers. The sender and receiver, for sure. Sunni began cross referencing them while Tripp sipped his beer and stared at the pathetic asshat who used his position as a financial magnet to help undermine the sanctity of the Rend-Vs.
Got them, sir, both major players. Sersavant intelligence officer, Pizer Dauk, is funding an up-and-coming director, Miesha Preston, the daughter of the host of Collides … . She’s rumored to be backing a principal antag who’s missing, Ervé Wrighter. He’s a—