by Julia Keller
It was, she knew, a tricky conversation to be having with Kendall, because he had invented the Intercept. Years ago, in his ramshackle lab back on Old Earth, he had discovered the precise neurobiological formula that turned feelings into Wi-Fi signals that could be picked up, stored, and then sent back into the source—the very brain that had generated the emotions. In one daring, brilliant stroke, his invention had changed civilization.
“No.” He said it with quiet sadness. And Violet knew the origin of that sadness. With his words, he was turning his back on his own creation. “As much trouble as we have right now,” he added, “we’re better off this way, as messy as it makes things. We’re better off with imperfect freedom instead of perfect security. We’re better off without the Intercept. You and I both know it.”
She didn’t need to answer out loud. The expression on her face did all her talking.
If that’s true, Kendall, then why didn’t we destroy it completely? Why did we let a piece of it survive?
13
Redshift
In the moonlight, New Earth glowed with a ghostly blue-white shimmer.
Violet had just reached the bottom step of the entrance to her apartment building. It was a cool night. She wished she’d thrown on a jacket. Doesn’t matter, she reminded herself, with a little shiver of happiness. I’ll be dancing in a few minutes, anyway. And that always makes me sweat. In a good way.
She’d spent the evening reviewing, yet again, all the public information that was available about the lives of the four victims. Any similarities, any odd overlaps? If there were, she’d find them. Eventually. She was fighting Kendall’s randomness theory as hard as she could.
Finally, a little after midnight, she had unstrapped her console and let it drop onto her kitchen table, where she had been working. She massaged her wrist.
She was tired of questions. She wanted to go out. And she deserved to, right?
So she’d pulled on a white lacey top and black jeans and headed for the stairwell, reattaching her console as she raced down the stairs. She was too impatient to wait for the elevator.
Now she surveyed the silent, misty street in front of her.
Should she call for a Uni? The single-wheeled, driverless vehicles were the easiest means of transport around New Earth. They weren’t expensive, but they still cost money. Taking a tram would be cheaper, but slower. And she was eager to get there.
Violet tapped the Uni app on her console. Less than a minute later, the round yellow plastic vehicle with the big wheel in the center rounded the corner and bobbed to a stop. Violet climbed in, causing the globe to quiver and lean precariously in her direction, but it never tipped over. Violet punched in the coordinates of her destination on the bright red dashboard and clicked the seat harness into place across her shoulders. To her relief, this was an older model of Uni; it did not feature the annoyingly perky audio track that started out with Good evening! How are you? This Uni was blessedly silent.
The silence ended when Violet reached Redshift. Cars were stacked three and four deep at the curb, and the gap between the curb and the golden double doors was packed with people. Each time someone activated those doors—and someone was always activating them, going in or coming out—the pounding racket from the band inside sprang forth like a million jack-in-the-boxes flying open all at once, an explosion of bass beats and ear-mashing guitar riffs. Strobe lights pulsed and wheeled from the roof of the club, draping the street in crisscrossing stripes of red and blue and purple and green, a perpetually melting rainbow of shrieking colors.
Violet had known perfectly well that Redshift would be cataclysmically crowded tonight because it was cataclysmically crowded every night. In fact, she had counted on it. Craved it, even.
Violet slid out of the tilting Uni. It righted itself the moment she stood up on the sidewalk and, with a mincing chirp, wobbled off in response to a summons from somebody else’s console.
She approached the doors. The bouncer, his arms crossed tightly in front of his massive chest, held up a meaty palm to stop her progress. He gave her a long, squinty-eyed appraisal, interspersed with a series of slow insinuating blinks. Then he waved her over next to him so that three women trying to exit the club could get past.
The bouncer was a short, mean-looking man about Violet’s age with a shaved head and sharp blue eyes that shifted around constantly, watching everything. There was an Old Earth feel about him; it simmered in his shabby black tunic and ragged-hemmed trousers and in his surly, defensive stance. A small silver hoop glinted from his right earlobe. Both arms bristled with tattoos.
“Hey, Violet,” he said. His face broke open into a smile, and the nastiness vanished. “Didn’t think you were coming by tonight.” He flicked his head at two couples who had approached the door behind Violet, signaling them that it was okay to enter.
“Last-minute decision,” she replied.
“Sometimes those are the best kind.”
Violet gave him a playful punch on his bicep. It felt like she’d struck a wrought iron railing.
“Hey,” he went on, “my mom said she got roped into attending your trial. Did she seriously call the judge an idiot?”
“Of course she did. Hey, I gotta get in there. See you around, Tin Man.”
That was the nickname he’d had on Old Earth, the one his little sister, Molly, had given him.
“You be careful,” he called out to her back. “And don’t stay too late, girl.” He grinned to make it seem as if he was kidding, but Violet knew that he really wasn’t. He was as bad as Delia when it came to the whole controlling thing. Why couldn’t they just leave her alone? She was young. She was single. The Intercept was gone. Nobody was keeping track of her except her. She could do whatever the hell she wanted to. Feel what she wanted to feel. Be where she wanted to be.
And where she wanted to be right now was right here.
* * *
A kaleidoscope of wild colors and riotous, full-throttle music swept her up as she entered the club. It was like being smashed in the face—in a good way—by two tornadoes, one right after the other, and then scooped up by a hurricane and dumped in a vat of sweat-sticky ecstasy.
Tightly packed bodies jumped and writhed on the dance floor. People weren’t really paired off; instead they broke in and out of vague, ever-shifting orbits of other people, creating one hot, mashed-up creature with arms and legs everywhere and thousands of faces. Violet slipped easily in between two people she was pretty sure she’d danced with before, a man and a woman. She closed her eyes and joined the massive surge that pulsed in time with the music. Up on the stage, a band she liked—she couldn’t remember the name—rocked hard. The lead singer was dressed in a long, red velvet coat trimmed in frilly lace and a high black stovepipe hat; she spat out long bristling strings of indecipherable lyrics. Her body mic turned the words into pure snarling bliss.
And Violet loved every bit of it. She loved the rampaging lights. She loved the amplified growls and the gyrating bodies She loved the livid mix of people and flying hair and pure sensation.
The best part was this: For the next few hours, she didn’t have to think. She didn’t have to think about anything. She didn’t have to think about her failing business, or about her father, whom she hadn’t visited in weeks, or about Kendall and about how she felt—or didn’t feel—about him, or about Charlotte Bainbridge’s grief and pain. Or about how she didn’t know if the other three people had killed themselves or been murdered. And if they had been murdered, why and by whom?
Wait. Dammit. Suddenly she was thinking again. She tried to dance harder, hoping the questions would go away, but no luck.
She needed a drink.
Violet turned sideways and slipped between two couples. The bar was a high copper counter that kinked and twisted its way, snakelike, across the entire length of the back wall. Behind it, a dozen tuxedoed bartenders, female and male, flipped bottles and glasses into the air in a perpetual frenzy of dazzling balance and gasp-indu
cing dexterity; the end of every performance was a magnificent and faintly ironic bow—and the presentation of a fantastically complicated drink.
“Hey, Violet.” The bartender with the short purple dreads and two nose rings grinned and pointed at her. “Looking good.”
“Casey. Hey. How’s it going?”
“It’s going.” They both laughed. “One Neptunia Node,” the bartender added. “Coming up.”
Violet grabbed a stool, ready for the show.
Casey flipped two bottles in the air. In the midst of the third pair of alternating somersaults, a tall glass whose inner rim had been rubbed with salt somehow was whisked into place at the exact spot it needed to be in order to receive the arcing crystalline waterfall of a Neptunia Node. Not a single drop spilled.
Violet picked up the bright blue drink and polished it off in one quick, nifty swallow. She felt a spike of glorious, thought-killing dizziness. She gave the stool a twirl, specifically to keep the dizziness going. Her gaze swiveled around the room. Hey—was somebody waving at her from the dance floor?
Yeah. She knew that guy. Didn’t she? Maybe. Maybe not.
Didn’t matter. The band’s beat was getting faster and louder, faster and louder. Deliciously hypnotic. She wasn’t sure what time it was, but she knew one thing for sure: It was way too soon to go home.
14
Pattern Recognition
“So I thought about this all night, Vi, and I think I’ve figured it out.”
Jonetta stood in front of Violet’s desk, practically levitating with excitement.
“I mean,” she added, “it’s just a theory and all, but I really … well, anyway, tell me how this sounds to you. Everybody who’s died has been relatively young, right? And we’re going on the assumption that they didn’t do this to themselves, right? Because it doesn’t make sense that so many people in a row would take their own lives, right? And so,” Jonetta said, leaning across the desk with a dramatic flourish, “maybe that’s the key.”
Violet stared at her. Her eyeballs felt like somebody had tried to polish them with sandpaper. The Headache had returned, only right now it was THE HEADACHE.
She felt utterly and completely dreadful.
“What’s the key?” Violet said, her voice low and slow.
She had stumbled back home from Redshift just before dawn. It didn’t seem worth it to untangle her sheets and fall back into bed; she would only have nabbed an hour or so of sleep before her alarm went off. So she’d poured herself a glass of orange juice and waited for the sun to rise.
It turned out that she couldn’t drink the juice, after all. Just lifting the glass and thinking about swallowing it caused a massive wave of nausea to burble and thrash in her stomach. She gave up, took a shower, got dressed.
Now she was here. If she was going to suffer, she might as well suffer while doing paperwork.
“The key is my theory,” Jonetta said. She was still leaning, but the close-up look at Violet’s bloated face caused her to back off and stand up straight again. “Okay, so because the victims have all been young, maybe it means that somebody old is doing this—killing people and making it look like suicide. Somebody who thinks young people are ruining New Earth.”
“What would make somebody think that?”
“Don’t know.” She pondered. “Because we’re too noisy?”
“Right. And we talk funny. And we don’t keep our rooms clean. Come on.” Violet rolled her eyes. That was a mistake: She felt another steep black wave of nausea. She would have been more than happy to blame Jonetta for it, but she knew the truth: The sloshing in her belly had nothing to do with her annoying assistant and everything to do with too many Neptunia Nodes. She swallowed hard, trying to push the sick feeling back down.
“We can speculate all day long, Jonetta,” Violet added, “but we need proof. As in facts. As in something beyond wild theories.” And I need a big glass of water and some aspirin.
“I’ve been collecting all the information I can,” Jonetta said, ignoring Violet’s disdainful tone and rattling right on. “I made a lot of calls about the Wilton twins. Their dad and mom both work at the metallurgy lab.” She checked the notes on her wrist console. “Amy Wilton was in the engineering department. Charles Wilton had been a sailor on Old Earth, but up here he got the only job he could find. So he was head of maintenance there.”
“That lab’s had a ton of layoffs.”
“Right. So the metallurgy division has a lot fewer employees than it used to. The Wiltons were lucky to hang on to their jobs.”
Violet nodded. Occupations that were once crucial for constructing a new world had become less important as New Earth matured. People now switched out their jobs two or three—sometimes four or five—times a year.
Like somebody who starts out in a comfortable position at Protocol Hall monitoring Intercept feeds and then becomes a broke detective with an endless hangover. Violet often missed the stability of her old job. And she was only eighteen. For families, the shifts and dislocations must be even harder.
“Anything more on Wendell Prokop?”
Jonetta checked her console again. “He was the only person who still worked at the transport origination point. There used to be thousands.”
“Is he related to Arianna Prokop?”
“Oh, yeah.” Jonetta rolled her eyes. “That’s his mom. She’s the reason he kept his job. Threw her weight around so he didn’t get fired, even though he was pretty much a loser. I talked to some of his friends and got the lowdown.”
“Some friends.”
“They weren’t being mean. I got the sense they’d been hoping he would pull himself together one day. Get motivated.” Jonetta shrugged. “People talk, Violet. And as detectives, we oughta be glad they do.”
The we wasn’t lost on Violet, but she was too tired to react. By now she’d downed three glasses of water in a row. She stood by the window, listening intently as Jonetta continued.
“Anyway, I know Arianna Prokop’s a pretty big deal. Do you know her?”
“Not really. When I was a kid, I met her once or twice in my dad’s office. That was it,” Violet replied. “But my dad talked about her a lot. He admired her. Depended on her. She was part of the team that built New Earth’s platform. She’s a geological physicist. In fact, she’s the one who figured out how to suspend the weight of New Earth over Old Earth.” Violet realized that she’d become so involved in her conversation with Jonetta that she’d forgotten all about THE HEADACHE. As a consequence, she could now officially downgrade it to merely the Headache. With any luck, it would soon shrink back to just a regular old headache again. “She never mentioned having a son.”
“From what I heard, Wendell wasn’t the kind of kid you bragged about,” Jonetta said.
The elongated beeping sound startled both of them. It came from the communication console on Jonetta’s desk in the outer office.
“I’ll get it,” Jonetta said.
Violet started to reply with something along the lines of “How nice of you to do your job” but she stopped herself. Jonetta had been doing her job. And Violet’s job, too, while she was at it.
“Hey, Vi—it’s Rez.”
* * *
Violet touched her console. A bright orange dot ascended, displaying Rez’s serious, scowling face. The image wasn’t cluttered with wavy lines. It must be a rare clear day down on Old Earth, she surmised, when the toxic clouds were momentarily pried apart by a determined wind, and the signal was managing to slip through without interference.
She noticed the gray ridge of rock that rose in the distance behind Rez’s head. And above that, a darker gray sky shot through with short broken threads of reddish-brown clouds, spreading over the mountaintop. It was a dingy, uninspiring scene. Old Earth looked different, Violet thought, when you were viewing it through the haze of a hangover. Even one that was now on the run.
On the screen, Rez squinted at her. “You look terrible. Are you sick or something?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay, good,” Rez said, moving on. “Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I got the word this morning. Official permission to fire up the quantum computers. Kendall got it done.”
“So you’re calling to thank me.”
“Um, sure. Sure, yeah.” The idea of thanking her had never occurred to him, Violet knew. She was teasing him. But he did have something on his mind. He looked down and then back up at the console again. “But the thing is—”
“What’s going on, Rez?”
“Look, I can design the rides myself. Really cool ones. Fast, stomach-dropping, spiraling ones. And I can build them; I know where to scavenge the materials, and I’ve been building things my whole life. And I can do the energy schematics and the topographical charts and the logistical calculations. But I’m having trouble with the … the human part.”
“The human part,” Violet said. “You lost me.”
“Yeah. Like knowing what sorts of rides will appeal to people. Figuring out what they like to do with their free time. How do they decide that? What sort of algorithm do they use?”
“It’s not about algorithms, Rez.”
“It’s not?”
“No, it’s not.”
“Then what’s it about?”
“Joy.”
“Huh?”
“People make decisions based on what brings them joy. You know—happiness, pleasure, euphoria. The works.” Violet saw by his face—he was squinting, and the frown bit deep—that he still wasn’t with her. “Okay. Let’s try this. You need to discover what makes people feel the way you feel when … let’s see. How about when you’re first sitting down at your computer? When you’ve got a really hard problem to solve?”
He nodded. The light of comprehension slowly came into his eyes, relaxing his features. “That’s it. You get what I’m talking about.”