Proxy

by Alex London

  They’d been making some serious credit, although Nine claimed that wasn’t why he did it. He said he was “curating” the party, making sure it wasn’t just the same old Upper City bores. Knox couldn’t believe he was missing this scene.

  He swiped the holo to a bright beach, impossibly white sand, no sludge or washed-up flotsam, the sun burning white hot in a clear blue sky. He lay back on his pillow. He wasn’t tired. He didn’t want to lie here thinking all night.

  Thinking was the worst thing he could do.

  His door slid open and a tall medibot came rolling in, its white porcelain body glowing delicately in the dim room.

  “You are awake, Mr. Brindle,” the robot’s sweet female voice said. “You have one message from your father. Would you like me to play it?”

  “Where’s that nurse?” Knox asked. If he was stuck here, he might as well have some fun.

  “Nurse Bovary is no longer in the building.”

  Bovary, Knox snorted. An orphan. He wished she’d stuck around. He could have shown her what it was like to live like a patron, at least for an hour.

  “When does she come back?” Knox hoped it would be soon.

  “Nurse Bovary has resigned her position,” the bot informed him.

  Knox sighed. The workers just came and went like breezes.

  “Would you like to play the message from your father?”

  “He’s not here either?” Knox asked.

  “Your father left the hospital at eight forty-two p.m.,” the bot said.

  Of course. That must have been minutes after Knox fell asleep. Seconds. What did his father care? He was an “important man” with “real responsibilities.” Knox would “never understand the pressures his business entailed.” It was time for him to “grow up.”

  How many times had he heard that speech? His father didn’t need to work so much. Security was the perfect business. No one could ever have enough of it. He just liked working, liked avoiding Knox. Knox had his mother’s smirk and his mother’s laugh. All his happy expressions came from his mother. His father didn’t like the reminder.

  “Right back at ya, Dad,” Knox said aloud.

  Screw it, he thought. If my father doesn’t need to stick around for his only son, then his only son doesn’t need to stick around for him.

  “Delete message,” Knox told the machine.

  “You have not listened to the message. Please confirm.”

  “Confirmed. Delete the message. And bring my clothes.”

  “Your clothes were burned in the accident.”

  Knox rolled his eyes. The textbooks could ramble about the “benefits to efficiency” brought by robotics, and the “emancipation of the proletariat from menial labor,” but there was something irreplaceable about employees you could flirt with.

  “Access my profile and bring me some other clothes that I’d like,” he groaned. “Something for going out. Retro blue collar.”

  “I am unsure of the nature of this request,” the robot said.

  “Like Old Detroit.” Knox sighed. “Just scan my profile pics or something, okay? And bring me a some datastream glasses.”

  “Confirmed, Mr. Brindle.”

  The robot rolled back out of the room.

  “Retro glasses!” he called out after the bot. He didn’t want to show up to the party of the year accessing his datastream on glasses that didn’t fit the theme. He hoped the bot understood his needs.

  Knox put his hands behind his head and looked up at the false sun on his holo.

  Arcadia was just what he needed. Collect his cut from Nine, get some of whatever Cheyenne was holding. Clear his head out. Dance. Maybe find a Lower City chick to get crazy with. Or two. In a few hours he’d be normal again and he wouldn’t have to think about his proxy or that girl, whatever her name was.

  He let out a slow breath. He knew perfectly well what her name was.

  Marie.

  He saw her black hair, the purple shine of her eyes, the insouciant laugh. The scream as she died. He remembered it all.

  Tonight, he’d do his best to forget.

  [12]

  RRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE . . .

  The sound rang in Syd’s ears. The blast had worked. Cold hunks of metal littered the ground around him, still smoking. He lay in a small crater beneath the Arak9’s sizzling heat shield. It was all that remained of his machine. He checked himself for wounds. His shirt was slightly singed, but otherwise, he was unharmed.

  He’d probably exposed himself to all kinds of unhealthy waves and ions and whatever, but he didn’t have to worry about that for now. The whole Valve was a cancer cluster anyway, and Syd’s life expectancy was less than an hour if he didn’t find a way to get lost. And soon.

  Every lower window of every building around him was shattered. The Rebooters would no doubt take credit for this attack as soon as they found out about it. It’d give SecuriTech the perfect excuse for another roundup of undesirables. The farther he could get from the City before that happened, the better.

  He jumped to his feet and stumbled through the sanitized streets of commercial office towers, trying to stay close to the tall buildings and hoping their electrical output would hide his signal. Hulking broom trucks zipped past, programmed to clean away any evidence of human filth. He ducked behind the concrete blast barriers, just in case he fit that category.

  Syd crossed out of the commercial district and slid under a gap in the fence at the edge of the Valve. Glass and metal gave way to broken concrete strewn with garbage. The streets were narrow and twisting. Everything that could be used had been taken up, turned into a structure or a product. Wires crisscrossed over the lanes in huge jumbles, with hundreds of unlicensed branches tapping off the main lines. Shacks had been fashioned out of old packaging, heaps of projector parts, and solidified industrial runoff. It was a neighborhood where nothing was wasted.

  Starved kids rummaged through piles of refuse. They eyed Syd greedily as he passed by. Nothing wasted except the people, Syd thought.

  Puddles of postindustrial gel burned on the corners, turning to bricks. Syntholene dealers gestured back and forth to one another, passing patches hand to hand. Tweaked-out junkies sprawled on trash heaps, the code running through their blood, rattling their DNA. Hair fell out, tattoos appeared and vanished, all kinds of havoc wrought from the lowest-grade biopatches you could find. The sight was sickening. Willful mutation. The advertisements hovering around them quivered. Syd’s system was so messed up from the blast, every ad he passed was for gum. He’d never actually chewed gum in his life.

  Farther on, old gamers sat on piles of junk playing ancient handhelds across from one another, their networks so dodgy that their knees had to touch just to multiplayer like they did when they were kids.

  Tattoo-covered thugs from the Maes gang radiated threat from the doorways to the speakeasy bars and members-only clubs. They too eyed Syd as he passed. Rumor had it that to be part of the Maes gang, you had to kill a patron. No way that could be true. If patrons started getting murdered, they’d bulldoze the whole Valve, but still, Maes guys had a reputation for brutality and Syd picked up his pace, avoided eye contact.

  Double-wides with shades drawn and electropop blaring. Half-dressed women and outdated personal pleasure bots called out to Syd. Their lips moved but to him it was all pantomime. He couldn’t hear a word.

  RRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE . . .

  He staggered up to the cruciplex where Egan lived—a 150-story bunker of a building with four wings, like a giant plus sign. There were patches of concrete tucked into ground level at each corner, which the architects originally meant to be communal gathering places for the thousands of low-rent units, but people started throwing their trash down there and no one ever paid to have it picked up.

  Only the garbage pickers waded in to battle the sludge-hardened vermin that lived and died in the mountains of waste. Sometimes a picker caught one of the rodents and ate well that night. Sometimes it went the other way. The s
mell was awful.

  Egan had an abnormal pride in his basement unit, even though it was no bigger than Syd’s workroom off the back of Mr. Baram’s shop and didn’t have any way to get fresh air. It always smelled like feet.

  When Syd opened the door, Egan pulled a knife on him.

  It was a soldier’s antique blade that Egan had stolen from Mr. Baram’s when they were little kids. He’d learned to throw it and to spin it on his palm so that he could impress girls and older boys. He kept the blade sharp and shining and Syd really wished its tip wasn’t touching his throat.

  He made eye contact with Egan, who asked a question that Syd couldn’t make out through the ringing in his ears. Syd blinked. Egan smirked and pulled the knife away, looked up and down the hallway, and then yanked Syd inside.

  The narrow room had tin walls that Egan had covered with 3-D projections showing music holos, violent retro nature shows, and weird abstract images on a 24-7 loop. He said it calmed him. It didn’t hurt that the combination of signals and metal walls made low-end electronic surveillance difficult. Any private security firm that was after Egan for whatever his latest offense was would have to go door-to-door the old-fashioned way, and Egan knew that he wasn’t worth it. He was an expert at staying on the right side of a cost-benefit analysis.

  Syd threw himself down on the black synthetic fur couch that Egan said he won playing dominoes. He rubbed his eyes. Was it still Friday?

  The Guardians were after him, and aerial drones were no doubt cruising above the Valve with all kinds of sensors. Their equipment was designed to find people no matter where they were hiding, even in the massive cruciplexes below. They couldn’t have a proxy breaking contract. Others might get ideas. And if contracts couldn’t be enforced, the system would collapse. Contractual agreements, they all learned from the first day of school, were all that stood between civilization and a return to the age of chaos. Trying to delete a debt was like trying to destroy the world.

  Syd was screwed.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Syd finally made out Egan’s voice through the buzz in his head. Egan handed him a bottle of water. “You look like a truck ran over you. And you’re late. I went to all the trouble of making this awesome retro outfit for you, and what thanks do I get? None. Punctuality. Punctuality, my friend, is the hallmark of civilization!” He gestured too broadly for the small space, laughing. He was tweaked on something. “What do you think?”

  He pointed to the shiny black jumpsuit with all kinds of straps and buckles hanging off it. It had a patch glued on to it that said, “Ed’s Auto Repair.” The name kept changing colors through the entire rainbow.

  “I thought the rainbow was a nice touch. Took me an hour to get it right,” he added.

  “It’s fine, listen, E, I need—” Syd started.

  “Fine? Fine!” Egan leaned down on the couch towering over Syd. “Fine? I am an artist! There are three different kinds of synthetic pheromones in that outfit! Hell, I’m almost turned on! And you didn’t even see the vintage baseball cap to go with it!” He held up a black baseball cap with a white D on it. It looked like it had been rolled over by an armored assault vehicle.

  “That’s an authentic hat! The Detroit Tigers. They’re more extinct than real tigers. Don’t ask how I got it. And all you’ve got is ‘it’s fine’? Unacceptable! Unbelievable! Un . . . um . . . whateverable! You are a terrible sidekick!” Egan started laughing again. His mood was swinging under the drug and Syd had to try to keep up. Between swells of laughter, Egan moved Syd over so he could sit on the couch next to him.

  “Seriously, okay.” His friend cleared his throat. “What the hell is going on?”

  Syd told him everything that had happened from the moment he was arrested at Mr. Baram’s. Egan nodded and smirked a bit when Syd described blowing up the combat robot to make his getaway. Egan’s eyes darted from holo to holo behind Syd’s head, but otherwise he was still.

  “So,” Syd finished. “I need something to fake out the scanners. New ID. And I need it, like, now.”

  “Intense,” Egan whispered. “I mean, like, they really branded you?”

  Syd showed him the metal letters embedded in his forearm. The swelling had gone down and his skin was healing over the edges. Egan swallowed. He reached out to touch the girl’s name. Syd pulled his arm away and rolled his sleeve back down.

  “So,” he asked. “Can you help or what?”

  Egan put his fingers on his lips. “Hush. Uncle E will make it all better.” He laughed again.

  Syd sighed. It would be an epic effort to get Egan focused enough to help him, but what choice did he have? He couldn’t go back to Mr. Baram’s. He didn’t want to involve the old man, put his whole business in danger. No way. He’d always been good to Syd. He didn’t deserve that. Syd’s tweaked friend with the sketchy connections was his only hope.

  “I can get you anything you need,” Egan told him.

  “Okay . . . ,” Syd urged him. “So let’s have it.”

  “Oh, my brother, my foolish, dumb brother.” Egan patted Syd on the back, still laughing. “The party. We have to go to the party.”

  “Look, E, I really don’t have time for this. I need to get the hell out of this city as fast as I can. Did you not hear me? I’m marked. Sterling Work Colony. I have to get away.”

  “I heard you, princess.” Egan’s voice changed. All the tweaked humor drained out of it. “And I am trying to tell you. I can’t help you here. My friend at the party, he’s the hookup. Well, his friend. Upper City kid, his father is some SecuriTech executive. He’ll take care of you.”

  “I can’t go to some Upper City party right now. My patron killed a girl and I just assaulted like a dozen Guardians.”

  “Oh, Sydney, you childish Chapter Eleven chicklet”—the crazy was back in Egan’s voice—“would your old partner in crime ever let you go down without a fight? The Arctic will freeze over first.” He chuckled, then suddenly stood from the couch with a leap. “Now, put on your outfit and let’s go play with the rich kids. I swear, my guy there will hook you up. To quote the ancient prophet of your people: A DJ’s gonna save your life tonight.”

  [13]

  ARCADIA WAS MADNESS. THE young and the beautiful and the wish-they-were young and the medically beautiful writhed and slithered all over one another, bathed in the fume-pixilated light of the old warehouse. Images of the ruins of Old Detroit flashed on the walls all around, a jungle of steel overgrown with actual jungle.

  Et in Arcadia Ego glowed in neon letters on an antique sign suspended from the ceiling. Knox wondered if it was in some lost language of Detroit.

  Nine and Simi rushed over to him.

  “I got a WhosWho alert on you and I couldn’t believe it!” Nine shouted over the rumbling engines, the drum of feet stomping on metal, and the auto-tuned warble of some remixed tween pop star from a century and a half ago. “I can’t believe you’re here!”

  “Very lux.” Simi nodded, tapping Knox’s glasses. They were heavy black plastic, meant to look like something from the days of Moon Travel, before people stopped wasting money on that kind of thing. Mission Control, the style was. Knox liked the sound of that. He was in control, on a mission. “We’re so happy you have the use of your higher faculties again,” Simi blathered on. “They say there is no greater capacity in man than that of reason and liberty and property as its birthright.”

  Knox raised his eyebrows at Nine, who just shrugged. Simi wasn’t dressed in the right era for the party. He was doing this whole yellow-vest-and-breeches thing, with a powdered wig and a riding crop. He thought historical reenactment was going to be the next big thing and he wanted to be on the cutting edge of it. The white powder on his wig shimmered radioactive under the party’s effect lighting. It dusted his shoulders like fallout.

  “Whatever, Simi,” Knox said. “So, Niner, how we rolling?”

  “Oh, it’s tight, my friend. We’ve got this place frozen! Half the kids here paid us to get in one way or anothe
r. Those codes you hacked from your dad . . . unreal.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s hope they hold out long enough. They’ll cycle out of the bloodstream eventually. Tell our customers to avoid peeing too much.”

  “Peeing?”

  Knox just shrugged. “Where’s Cheyenne?”

  “Oh, she is tweaking beyond the beyond,” Simi chirped. “I left her in a red convertible carriage somewhere. A Mustang! I believe that was a kind of horse! The cart has become the horse and the natural order has been mastered by the craft of man! Verily!”

  The craft of man? Verily?

  Simi was seriously glitched. He used to be captain of their lax team. Now he thought the sport was below his “station in life.” He called it “savage.” Knox couldn’t wait until his whole NeoColonial fad passed.

  “I’m gonna go find Chey,” Knox said. “I need some of what she’s holding.”

  “I hear you.” Nine smirked. “Be free, young man! Fly like a whatever!”

  “Master the intellect! When in the course of human events!” Simi called.

  Knox tapped his glasses and accessed his friend menu. He scanned the list for Cheyenne, tapped his fingers over it in the air, and the augmented reality display lit up with a bright arrow over where Cheyenne was sitting. Knox climbed up onto the hood of the first car and started weaving his way through the party toward the arrow. Text holos flashed in the air around him like a light show as people without lenses communicated over the noise of the party.

  It was tacky. Knox believed you shouldn’t text at a party unless you had private feed. He didn’t want to see all these cut-rate fonts crowding his view.

  “Chey, what’re you holding?” Knox flopped down next to his friend in the cracked leather seats of the ancient Mustang. The arrow vanished.