The Harmony Paradox

by Matthew S. Cox

  Eve growled, her face beet-red as she struggled to complete her thirtieth pull-up. She flailed her legs as if trying to walk up steps that didn’t exist; her entire body shuddered with determination. Though she didn’t quite go all the way up, she got far enough to count it, and fell to dangle by her hands again. “Most of the people in charge at the facility where you found me were women.”

  “I thought Welker ran that place.” Katya scrolled up and down a list of ‘skills’ she could claim. She tapped a few: basic electronics, security systems, cybersecurity…

  Eve took a few quick breaths and hooked her legs over the bar. She let go with her hands and hung upside down. “Sitting behind a desk and reading emails isn’t being in charge.” The girl folded her arms over her chest and started doing inverted sit-ups. “Find anything yet?”

  Katya grumbled. “Not yet.” Her NetMini rang with an incoming call, from Alex Hunter. “12 Ovtetit’.”

  The shimmery face of a perpetually mid-twenties man with thick brown hair and a boyish, aristocratic charm appeared. After a second or two, the glowy effect of the hologram stabilized and he looked solid, albeit tiny. Light gleamed from his iridescent blue suit, a garment that probably cost forty thousand credits.

  “13 Bonjour, mon cher. J’espère que vous allez bien.” He tapped a finger to his eyebrow and flashed a rogue’s smile.

  “14 J’ai eu des jours meilleurs, mais je l’ai aussi eu bien pire.” She leaned back on the sofa and placed the NetMini on her thigh. “What’s the job? Must be good if you’re calling me on Sunday.”

  Eve let out a roar of victory after her fortieth sit up. She went limp again, arms outstretched over her head, her hands still well above the floor. “Who’s that?” She straightened her legs and slipped from the bar, landing into a somersault. “He’s kinda cute. I’d totally date him”

  Alex’s expression flickered to a grimace.

  Katya let off a genuine laugh. The same laugh that Joey once described as befitting a deranged noblewoman watching peasants suffer beheading for amusement.

  Alex gave her a momentary weary look before his smile returned. “I noticed you were trolling for work. It just so happens I have something you would be perfect for.”

  Katya sighed. “I can’t afford to skirt the law, Alex. You know that. Things are different now. They know about me… my background makes them suspicious. I am being watched.”

  He steepled his fingers before his face. “Yes, yes. All who defect from the ACC are watched for a time.”

  Eve padded over and sat at the edge of the couch. Sweat ran in trails over her face and chest, which rose and fell with rapid breathing. Katya couldn’t help but feel a little proud of her, even if the girl was more ‘mooching roommate who can’t work’ than a true child. Despite having the body of a skinny eight-year-old, she had muscle tone that would put some cops to shame. “So who is this guy?”

  “He’s an old associate.”

  “Not friend?” Alex feigned a wounded expression. “I am a man who puts people who have things in need of doing in touch with people who can do things.”

  “You’ve got ties to the Syndicate?” Eve gawked.

  “He’s not Syndicate. He’s his own little marketplace.” Katya picked at her nails.

  Alex examined his fingernails. “This job shouldn’t be a problem for your particular paranoia.”

  “He painted his nails,” said Eve. “Peach.”

  Alex thrust his arm down out of frame, a peevish glint in his eye.

  Eve grinned.

  Fuck it. We need money. “What is it?”

  “I’ve been approached by a senior design engineer from Laughlin-Reed Innovation. She is upset that her employer is giving all the credit for her work to her immediate superior, along with the bonus. I’ve located a buyer for the information. Your role in this is to get in to LRI’s facility and meet her for a physical exchange.”

  Eve stood, stretched, and headed into the kitchen.

  “Why not have Joey go in and get the files?” asked Katya.

  The clink of ice chips tumbling into a glass echoed from her right.

  “Well…” Alex smiled. “For one thing, his current employer might take issue with this sort of work. For another, the data resides on an island network inaccessible from the GlobeNet. He would have to go onsite to access it.”

  “Like that’s ever stopped him before… The Imperial?”

  Eve walked back in, nursing an enormous cup of ice water. She set it on the coffee table before doing a series of stretching exercises.

  Alex nodded. “Correct, but in this case, there is no need to steal the information as someone on the inside is prepared to hand it over.”

  “This woman is upset about not getting credit, but if she sells it to a rival company, they can’t put her name on it without exposing her.” Katya extended her arms out to the sides and rested them along the sofa back.

  “True. However, her work is already being stolen by her current employer in a manner of speaking. All you need to do is get into Laughlin-Reed, make contact with our woman, and collect a neural memory stick with the data.”

  That doesn’t sound too difficult or dangerous. Probably means it’s both. “What’s my compensation?”

  “A clean drop is worth five percent.” Katya started to roll her eyes. “Of thirteen million.”

  She blinked. “That’s…”

  “About 650,000 in your account.”

  Katya stared for a moment at the half-filled-out job search form. Six fifty for a couple hours of work… this can wait. She extended a leg and tapped the logout button with her toe. “I’ll do it.”

  “Excellent.” Alex’s body shifted as he pushed something across his desk. “I’m sending over the particulars. There is a time element involved here, so it would be ideal if you could handle this tomorrow.”

  The whirr of a treadmill started, accompanied by the soft thumps of Eve running.

  Katya glanced over the miniature holographic Alex at the small figure bouncing near the windows. Watching her is making me tired. The NetMini chimed with an arriving file. “Got it. Tomorrow. Right.”

  “Talk to you soon.”

  Alex smiled. “15 La fortune sourit aux audacieux, ou la belle.”

  “He’s trying too hard,” said Eve, at a full sprint.

  Katya chuckled, and muttered to herself, “16 Mozhet byt’ no priyatniy na vid.”

  He seemed hesitant. She caught a subtle glance to the side, likely at a translation. The rogue’s grin returned. Alex raised his hand in mock toast, and ended the call.

  Pity. I think Joey is correct in his opinion of the man. She batted around a short fantasy of an evening with Alex, a rare moment of regarding sex as pleasurable rather than a mechanical task sometimes necessary for whatever mission she had to complete.

  “Might as well get started.”

  Eve slowed to a light jog. “You’re going out?”

  “Not yet. I’ve got some setup to do first.” She stood and went to the master bedroom closet, from which she retrieved her net deck, a NinTek Phantom IV. It lacked some of the features of her old unit, but anyone logging in with a Vostochnaya Proizvodstva machine from inside the UCF territory would set off a pile of red flags.

  The NinTek at least supported ghost mode, a trick to mask the user’s presence from the pulse detection signal of the net. This approximated to the ability to hide while logged in. Without it, other people in cyberspace could find a user easily with basic utility programs, even in a dark room. The laws of reality took a backseat to the laws of man where money came in to play. Technically speaking, a ghost-enabled deck could get her in trouble with the law, though enough people played RPG style MMOs where ‘stealth’ became a factor that claiming to be a gamer would often work. The illegality of ghosting functioned more like frangible ammunition. Legal to own, legal to use in most situations, but extra penalties if they caught someone breaking the law with it.

  Katya carried the sleek, grey-silver
case back to the living room where Eve continued on the treadmill, though only at a walking pace while testing her pulse rate. She set the NinTek on the table, handed the girl her half-finished glass of ice water (earning a grateful smile) and flopped on the cushions once more. After settling into the most comfortable position she could manage, Katya pulled the retractable wire from the deck and slid the asterisk-shaped prong into the port behind her left ear.

  The bladed connector seated with a snap that rattled her skull. She tapped the silver N in the NinTek logo, and the deck emitted an orchestral chime as it powered up. Eve hopped off the treadmill and rounded the coffee table. She flopped on the couch, more lying down than sitting, and tapped her hands back and forth on her taut stomach while trying to catch her breath.

  “I’m going to look like I’m sleeping for a bit.”

  Eve gave her a-thumbs up. “I know. My team ran a few escort missions when Starpoint sent cyber-operators into hostile installations.”

  Katya blinked. “They used you kids for real missions?”

  “Only a few times… and all out in the Badlands. I think they wanted to make sure we were ‘fully operationally capable’ or some bullshit like that. It was kinda boring actually. They never told us which companies ran the three sites we hit, but their onsite forces sucked. It was like sending in Special Forces to ambush mall security guards.”

  “That’s beyond evil.” Katya wiggled deeper into the cushions. If she could avoid a cramp from being immobile for an hour or two, all the better.

  “We weren’t kids then… well not by time anyway. We’d been out of the growth tank for at least sixteen years at that point.”

  “Wait, so you didn’t age up to eight?”

  Eve shook her head. “No. I’ve always been this size.”

  “So you’re really twelve, not twenty?”

  “No… I’ve been out of the tank for twenty years four months and change.” She stared at herself. “What’s it like to have a period?”

  Katya coughed. “Uhh. How much did those nanobots hurt?”

  Eve stared at her. For a few seconds, any trace of adulthood fled from her expression.

  “Sorry.” Katya’s vision blurred as the deck invaded her vision with its front menu. Spinning silver icons made to look like the inner workings of something like a starship engine gleamed before her mind’s eye. “It’s different for everyone.”

  “Sucks that bad?” Eve traced a finger around her abdomen. “I don’t even know if everything’s gonna work right after so long.”

  Katya reached over and squeezed the girl’s shoulder. “The doctor said everything looked fine. Don’t worry about it. Enjoy not having any responsibilities. Sometimes I wish I could do things over again with someone looking out for me.”

  “That’s escapism,” said Eve.

  “Maybe for me. But you never had a childhood to begin with.”

  Eve’s smile turned wistful. “Neither did you… is that why you wanted to look out for me?”

  Katya stared at the little one beside her. It seemed none of the parts of having kids she dreaded, the whining, tantrums, arguing, carelessness, like trying to contain a drunken wolverine desperate to destroy everything it came into contact with, applied here. This tiny person had all the physical characteristics of a child but few of the mental ones. Okay, borderline psychopathic, but we all have our flaws. In truth, she wanted to save the girl from a life like the one that had been forced on her almost twenty years ago. Her mind found it easy to discard the illogical truth of Eve being chronologically old enough to drink, drive, and vote, and focus on the innocent creature she appeared to be.

  “Yeah. Let me get this done and we can do something fun.”

  “Okay.” Eve patted herself on the stomach for a few seconds more before lifting the seam of her stretchy shorts up, peering in, and pointing at her crotch. “If you betray me, I will wound you.” She released her grip on the fabric. Snap.

  Katya laughed. She stared at the login option, green text floating within a darker green window on the side of a giant silver wheel. As soon as she wanted to ‘push’ it, reality melted away.

  Her consciousness seemed to peel forward out of her body and fly face-first down a long spiraling tunnel with black walls. Small boxes of color streaked by, individual at first, they soon became a torrent of rainbow. Two seconds later, with a white flash, Katya found herself standing in a virtual recreation of her apartment, devoid of furniture.

  Some people took the time to buy digital replicas of everything they owned in real life. Many opted for more extravagant versions since the cyberspace ones cost a mere fraction of what the genuine items cost. People like Joey sometimes made their own; after all, everything from a simple chair to a motorized, wheeled recliner with built-in massage and coffee maker consisted of program code.

  Katya hadn’t the inclination or the time to worry about what her virtual apartment looked like. Some part of her, perhaps the Russian mother she never knew, had an itch to collect fine things and decorate the place… but with no regular source of income, comfort had to wait.

  She activated a mirror soft and looked at herself. After a few minutes of thought, she reached forward and poked at a series of control icons to the right of the ‘reflection.’ Her skin darkened to a rich brown. She left her hair black, but made it fluffier. Brown eyes became green, and she tweaked and adjusted her face until she looked nothing like Katya Volkov, or ‘Wolf’ as the UCF identity file called her. Something like eighty-five percent of the population of UCF Earth had some variation of brownish skin. Most who retained a Caucasian appearance either purchased it from Reinventions or had been born somewhere in Europe… or came from Mars. Then again, Marsborn went beyond Caucasian. They took ‘white’ as literally as snow. Less chance to stand out looking like the majority. No one would bat an eyelash at her. If everything went according to plan, she’d spend less than half an hour in the Laughlin-Reed building.

  “I am Rosalie Hernandez.” Katya fiddled with her face a little more until she looked closer to twenty than twenty-eight. “Newly hired lab tech…” She adjusted a little more, making her cyberspace avatar look even younger. “No… Intern. University first year student.”

  With her appearance done, she traced a box in midair while thinking about her NetMini. A connection opened on a holo-panel, and she accessed the data tile that Alex had sent her. It contained the LRI badge photo of one Tamara Crowley, PhD, a thirty-six-year-old nano-engineer. The woman had a confident smile, frizzy hair, and darker skin. She looked younger in the photo, her poise likely borne from her inexperience with corporate bullshit.

  She marked the geo-tag for the LRI building in the deck’s navigation client and walked to the patio door. Outside, West City sprawled in its digital glory. Aside from the lack of endless streams of hovercars, it looked little different from reality, even down to the weather and time of day. A faint shiver ran down her spine at the same idle worry she had every time she logged into the GlobeNet. If someone snuck up on her while she slept and plugged her in, she wouldn’t know if she existed in the real world or a virtual one. Sometimes she even wondered if what she thought was the real world existed on a computer somewhere in the catacombs below Moscow, her body suspended in a tank of nutrient gel and tended by nanobots.

  What if I’m still ten and the past eighteen years have been the dream?

  She pinched the bridge of her nose.

  Ugh. I’ve been hanging around Joey too much.

  Katya moved to the edge of the patio deck and climbed up on the railing, peering down sixty-some-odd stories to the road below. At a mental impulse, her NinTek ran a soft called ‘Raven,’ and a pair of large, feathery wings expanded outward from her back in glowing violet wireframe. Once they reached their full span, twelve feet to either side of her, they filled in solid with black feathers, and stopped glowing.

  Perched like a gargoyle, Katya closed her eyes and savored the nonexistent wind across her face. The GlobeNet―especially with
these wings―offered a kind of freedom she could never know in the real world. A little girl once plucked from the streets of a commoners’ slum had no escape from her corporate masters until she’d tasted flight.

  One’s sense of location in this world relied on a network of computers all agreeing on where you stood, which in turn caused the interface deck to create the environment it showed to the brain. Going from one place to another could be as simple as changing a pointer in a file, but those who ran the GlobeNet restricted ‘teleportation’ out of security concerns. Travel within the net took a wide variety of forms from walking to simulations of vehicles to fantastical things like her wings or even ‘riding dragons’ for people into that sort of thing. Whatever a software engineer could dream up could exist in the net, as long as it didn’t break the Sages’ rules.

  She stretched her wings to their limit and let gravity pull her forward. On some conscious level, Katya knew the human body shouldn’t fly. She had no tail to steer with, no proper musculature in the chest to support the tremendous strain of wings, yet in a world of ones and zeroes, that didn’t matter.

  I understand how some consider tech a religion. Logic and reason have no place here.

  The Laughlin-Reed Innovation office was located in Sector 13650, almost three hundred miles away from her residential district within Sector 10722. The waypoint indicator she’d previously set floated in the shape of a blue sphere in the distance, about the size of a person’s head. She angled toward it. Her desire for speed manifested in a coating of violet energy that sheathed her wings and left glowing trails behind her in midair.

  West City raced along below and around her. Wind blasted her hair back, but not nearly with the strength it should have given her simulated speed. The Raven soft had a top speed of 500 mph, making it essentially an aesthetically-altered ‘hovercar’ program that couldn’t support passengers. She banked and swerved among skyscrapers, dodged a handful of advert-bots, and continued pursuing the blue navigation marker ball for a little more than half an hour. The light faded as she slowed back to a speed more believable for a woman with giant raven’s wings.