Proxy

by Alex London

  Tom watched him carefully, stepping up on tiptoes to see what Syd was doing, as if he’d understand.

  It amazed Syd how much people relied on these little devices for their datastreams, without having the slightest idea how they worked. The biodata everyone had installed when they were born (or in the case of the refugees, when they were rescued) linked everybody to the network so that creditors and advertisers could track you, but if you wanted to use the datastream yourself, you needed your own projector. Knowing how they worked, Syd felt more like a shaman than a repairman, a keeper of wisdom and mystery. He liked the feeling. It was good to be admired for something. Everyone should feel that way sometimes, he thought. He wondered if Tom ever had.

  He doubted it.

  The kid’s device was glitched beyond belief. It looked like he’d dropped it into sewage more than a few times. “I gotta look in the storage for a second, okay?” Syd stood. “I’ll be right back. Don’t . . . touch anything.”

  Tom nodded and Syd went down the concrete stairs next to his bench. They kept most of the parts in the basement storage room. When the hatch was closed over the stairs you could barely see it was there, which kept things difficult for thieves or anyone else who felt like looking around. When they were in the shop, they left it open. Syd almost tumbled down it by accident every other day.

  Once he was down the stairs, motion sensors flicked on the LEDs, so the room didn’t feel like a creepy, cluttered cellar. It was a mess, but a brightly lit mess. There were holos on the wall where he could watch the shop from down there. He saw Mr. Baram back on his stool again, although he was slightly tilted toward the door to the workshop, keeping his eye on Syd and Tom.

  As if.

  Tom stood where Syd had left him, shoving his hands into his pockets and pulling them out again. He didn’t know what to do with his limbs. He picked his nose. He clearly had no idea anyone could see him.

  “Glitched.” Syd shook his head.

  He rummaged through bins of glass fronts and outdated monitors, antique keyboards, some of them going back two hundred years or more, before the melt, before the storms, before the resource wars. They were probably worth a lot to collectors in Upper City. Baram should have an expert do an inventory sometime. Syd found robot wheel treads and cracked motherboards and leaking jars of who-knew-what. He found all kinds of drives and discs and cords for mismatched machines.

  He knew that he wouldn’t find anything to save Tom’s projector. It was burned out. He could probably get it to project again, but it wouldn’t pick up Tom’s interface very clearly. It’d never get him through testing. Syd could always give the kid a new one, something cobbled together from all these parts.

  A gift, an act of kindness.

  What did Tom Sawyer do to deserve a gift?

  Syd stood in front of one bin of half-assembled transmitters and exhaled slowly, wondering how he always got himself into this kind of mess. Why did he wear his kindness in his hair where any schnorrer could smell it?

  And what the hell was a schnorrer supposed to be?

  He laughed at himself for thinking about Mr. Baram’s weird saying and picked up an ancient plastic pen that had rolled out of one of the bins. He mindlessly clicked the back of it to make the little tip go in and out with a satisfying sound. Why did they even have this antique? Who knew how to write by hand anymore?

  He dropped the pen into his pocket out of solidarity with the total pointlessness of its survival and he rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t believe he’d agreed to go to an all-night Upper City party tonight. He just wanted to sleep and forget that today had ever happened.

  He lowered his hands from his face, let out a long breath.

  And then he froze.

  On the monitors, he saw Mr. Baram talking with two of the most beautiful people in the world. Their features were perfect. The woman’s hair was blond and pulled back into a tight ponytail. The man had a neat wisp of brown hair. Both had bright blue eyes like pieces of a perfect sky. They were dressed in simple custom-made gray suits. They projected authority and inspired longing at the same time, which is exactly what they were designed to do.

  They were Guardians.

  And they had come for Syd.

  [6]

  SOUNDS OF SUCTION AND electronic pulses, beeping, blipping, clicking. Lights danced. He tried to push himself up, but thick straps pressed him to a cushioned table. His knees itched, but he couldn’t scratch them. His side ached, but he couldn’t touch it. He heard a screech, metal scraping metal.

  “Stabilize the head,” a voice said, the sound muffled.

  “We have some bleeding,” another said.

  He felt a pinch in his stomach, a wave of nausea. Suddenly, a face loomed over his, a face in a holo projection, wavering in the air, translucent.

  “Knox? Knox?” the face said. Giant teeth. The voice bubbled, like it was underwater.

  Knox remembered seeing a giant fish tank once when he was little. Every few minutes a column of bubbles would roar up and rise to the surface, smashing on the water’s underside. He had pressed his ear to the tank to hear the bubbles roar. Prehistoric sharks, massive toothy creatures swam by his head, inches from his face. Just the glass between them, a tiny bit of plexi between life and death. He remembered his heart racing in his tiny chest.

  He could have stayed there for hours, listening to the bubbles, pressing his face near the shark faces swimming by, but his mother took his hand, led him to the children’s area. It was a party. He remembered laughter and the chatter of grown-ups; his mother’s warm hand on his back, sharks swimming around the room. The roar of bubbles echoing in his ears.

  “Knox? Can you hear me?” The toothy face on-screen was tiny next to a shark’s. Time was collapsing. The shark swam in front of the face. There was no shark. Just the face.

  Knox drifted into aching silence.

  Awake again.

  Staring straight up. He was lying on his back on that same soft table, still restrained. He was in a tube. Plexi all around him, just like the shark from his dream. Sharks can’t stop swimming or they’ll die. Knox couldn’t move, but he felt movement inside him. He wasn’t the shark, he was the bubbles crashing on the surface.

  He heard muffled voices on the other side of the plexi, his father’s voice.

  “Will he survive?”

  “He’s through the worst of it,” said that screen voice. Knox tried to turn his head to see, but his head wouldn’t turn. He was locked into some sort of brace. “We’ve closed the punctured lung; the ribs are mending. Some ligaments need to be reattached and muscles rebuilt. He lost a piece of intestine and one ear. We had the cells on file, so we could reattach most from his own. The liver was in sorry shape, causes beyond the accident I think. We had a healthy one from a donor. Replaced his, gratis.”

  “There was no need,” said his father. “We could have paid for the liver.”

  “You’ve been so generous with our institution. It’s the least we could do.”

  “I appreciate your assistance with this.”

  “Boys need a firm hand. He is lucky to have a father who cares so much.”

  Knox’s father grunted.

  “He should be stable to transfer in a few hours,” the other voice said. “We’re just waiting on a blood transfusion to arrive from the Lower City. That should get his strength up.”

  “Good,” his father replied. “Message me when he’s awake.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Knox managed to twist his head, to see his father, blurry through the plexi tube. Their eyes met and his father shook his head, just once, and put on his dark glasses. He turned his back and left the room without a word. Did he know Knox could see him, could hear him?

  Of course he knew.

  Knox closed his eyes, wishing he could press his face against the shark tank one more time. He saw himself, so young, on the other side of the plexi tube, his ear pressed against it, his mother’s hand on his back. His missed his mother.
r />   He tried to speak to himself, to ask himself what was happening. Where was he? Why was he in this tube, restrained? Why was his father so disgusted with him? Why did everything hurt?

  But his voice gurgled like a column of bubbles. He saw himself run off, felt his mother’s warm hand on his back as she led him through the grown-up party. Sharks swam around him, but she kept him safe with her touch.

  Knox slept and dreamed he was still awake.

  Then he woke.

  [7]

  KNOX WAS LOOKING AT a room someplace. It hovered in a holo at the end of his hospital bed, like a window hanging in thin air, a window into a dump.

  There was junk everywhere. Pieces of robots and computer parts, strange tools, bits of grime in the corners. There was an old guy, hairy. Talking. The volume wasn’t on yet. No sound. It didn’t matter. Knox didn’t want to hear what he was saying.

  He tried to focus past the holo projection at the wood-paneled wall behind it, but the double focus made his head spin. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. Everything ached. He felt himself drifting off to sleep again when a rush hit him.

  The nurse had her own holo projection up, off to the side. She tapped it and the patch on his arm glowed as it installed whatever biodata they were using to keep him awake. The patch made everything sharper, brighter. His veins tingled with the signal shift. It would have been fun if it didn’t also make his pain more vivid, like a thin knife blade stuck into his belly button. He groaned, mostly for effect. They’d hacked his biofeed and could keep him awake as long as they wanted. They could have made the pain go away too, but they didn’t. He groaned again.

  “This is for your own good,” Knox’s father said with that same tone he probably used to fire people.

  Knox looked over at him. His father sat in a mod chair next to the hospital bed. He wore a dark suit and hid his eyes behind dark glasses so no one could tell if he was looking at them or at his datastream or both. Even out of the office, he was never away from the office. Knox felt ridiculous wearing a hospital gown while his father was in a suit and dark glasses.

  It struck Knox that he wasn’t in a tube anymore. He was in some kind of lux hospital room. He didn’t recall being moved. Everything was hazy. A hose stretched from his arm to some sort of bag. Bright blood flowed into him from the bag. A transfusion. Why did he need a transfusion? And why were they keeping him awake to look at a holo of some dumpy room filled with junk?

  Knox gritted his teeth and looked around. Wood panels and brass fixtures. A 3-D holo on the wall looked like a window over snowy mountain peaks. Maybe the Rockies or Everest before the melt. What were those old European ones? The Alps. Hadn’t they been vaporized in the war? Knox never was good at history. Whatever. The projection was lux, whatever it was. He could smell the snow.

  Knox didn’t know why he was in this hospital room. Something about a car? A girl named Pam? Was that it? Emily? He couldn’t remember. Why was he in so much pain? He’d been having a dream about his mother and a shark tank.

  The nurse patted him sympathetically. She’d be pretty out of that uniform . . . nice legs and good curves just above them. He winked at her. His eyelids hurt. He didn’t dare try a smirk. Better to wince and get sympathy. He couldn’t pull off rakish from a hospital bed, especially when he didn’t know why he was there.

  “Watch the projection,” his father commanded without even turning to look at him. “This is all pointless if you don’t watch the projection.”

  So that’s what this was: proxy business. What a hassle.

  Knox wanted to be left alone to heal. He needed his rest. He was injured. He was in pain. His punishment could wait, couldn’t it? Not like his proxy was going anywhere.

  On the holo, two Guardians stepped closer to the old man and then one of them noticed a door cracked open in the back. They walked to it without asking permission and shoved it wide. Knox couldn’t take his eyes off them.

  Why Guardians?

  He’d done a lot crazy stuff over the years and his proxy never got picked up by Guardians. They usually just outsourced this sort of thing to a local security outfit. What had he done that called for Guardians? Guardians were barely even human; they’d had so much code written into their DNA, their bodies were basically hardware, networked and programmed, and they were the exclusive property of SecuriTech. They were developed to preserve the market from terrorists, to prevent the chaos of strife and anarchy from ever returning. They were never used for picking up a proxy. It wasn’t worth it. The program each one of them had installed when they were culled as children cost more than the entire economic output of the Lower City.

  “Kind of over the top, huh, Dad?” Knox glanced at his father.

  “Pay attention,” his father grumbled in reply.

  Knox felt his breath quicken as the Guardians stepped into the next room.

  There was his proxy now, sniveling and frightened in front of the Guardians. Knox didn’t remember the boy like this. The proxy he remembered was broad shouldered, wore his hair short, and had skin the color of a dark beer. Maybe that kid was gone. Maybe this was a replacement. Knox had no idea if that happened. Could they just replace a proxy without notifying you? He’d sort of grown used to that other kid. Not that it mattered. The proxy would never know Knox. Patron confidentiality was, like, a law.

  But this new kid, he almost demanded punishment. That kind of defeated the purpose, no? Even without the volume on, you could tell he was whining. Knox was grateful there was no sound. His head couldn’t take it. He imagined the kid’s voice like a squawking penguin.

  Why was he thinking about penguins? Did he steal a penguin? Was that what this was about? He remembered something about the zoo. He tried to remember flapping wings, those tuxedo birds, anything at all, but there was just blankness, a hole in time.

  Suddenly, another figure was in the room on the screen, a boy he recognized. He rose right out of the floor. That was the boy, Knox’s proxy. The kid must have a rough time of it living in the Valve, if this was his house. Had he come out of a basement? Was that where the old man kept him?

  “Can we get some sound, please?” Knox’s father snapped at the nurse. “This is hardly a useful exercise without sound.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the nurse. She brought the sound on with a swipe of her finger. She’d been sparing Knox the volume up to that point. He’d have to get her ID before he checked out. Her hair had this amazing copper shine against her pale neck. It wasn’t the fanciest gene-job he’d ever seen—the color profile was just a little off—but that made it even more endearing. Of course, she worked for his father, which was a point against her.

  “I’m Sydney Carton,” the boy on the screen said. “You’re looking for me.” The female Guardian checked a projection to get a match on his biofeed. She nodded at her partner. They had the right kid.

  “What is it this time?” Sydney asked.

  “Please come with us,” the female Guardian said. Talk about nice curves. The Guardian was amazing.

  The theory was that people followed the orders of an attractive person more readily than an ugly person, so all the Guardians were hot; they were chosen for their attractiveness. “Genetically sourced” was the official line. Everything else could be programmed in. Biomanipulation was a booming business, especially in the security sector. There was no shortage of threats to guard against—smugglers, hackers, Nigerian-backed saboteurs, debt-crazed Rebooters trying to overthrow the system. Some people didn’t want to pay their fair share. Some people hated the prosperity of others.

  Knox tried to pay attention to the holo, but his mind kept wandering. He found himself thinking about a polar bear. What did that have to do with anything?

  “I already gave him my blood today. What else do you want?” Sydney sighed. He didn’t look alarmed. He looked bored.

  Knox glanced at the bag of blood pouring into him and the scruffy dark-skinned kid on the holo. He felt suddenly itchy, like the poverty of that boy was flowing thr
ough his veins now. His stomach turned.

  “Is that hygienic?” he asked his father.

  “We test the blood, Knox.” His father sounded bored too.

  “Aren’t you supposed to tell me what I’m being punished for?” Sydney on the holo said. Knox pushed himself up to lean his lower back against the headboard.

  “Did my patron hack another diet supplement pill? Make the steak taste like sewage? Foot-sweat crème brûlée?” the proxy grumbled.

  The sniveling kid stared at the Guardians, unblinking. Knox wondered what sketchy scene they’d wandered in on. Codesnappers? IP thieves? Cut-rate gene rippers? Anything goes in the Valve. You get the laws you can pay for, and no more. The Guardians weren’t there to enforce some petty Valve crimes. The sniveling kid looked like he had never even seen Guardians before. Probably hadn’t, if he was lucky.

  The old man was suddenly back in the room, coming toward them, wagging his finger in the air.

  “Sydney is a good kid,” he was saying. “He follows the rules. You have to tell him what this is about.”

  The Guardians turned to the old man and stared him down, stopping him in his tracks with their eyes.

  “These are your rules,” the old man added, much more quietly, almost to himself. “I have a terms of proxy agreement statement here somewhere.” His eyes twitched as he scanned the datastream in his glasses, projections flashing in the air in front of him, but the female Guardian grabbed his wrist and bent his arm back like a mischievous child with someone else’s doll. The projections vanished. The old man’s eyes focused.

  “Sir,” the Guardian spoke calmly, but with a tone that left no doubt as to who was in charge. Knox leaned forward. At least now he’d find out what he’d done. Stealing a penguin wouldn’t land him in this hospital. Stealing a penguin wouldn’t hurt this much. Although he’d never actually stolen a penguin that he remembered. Maybe it could. Or maybe a polar bear? Had he been that tweaked? What kind of punishment did stealing extinct animals from the zoo require of his proxy?