Shine

by Jetse de Vries

  “A well-documented side effect among soldiers of your generation.”

  Brandon wondered if this was true. He only knew that he couldn’t pick up the controller like he used to, anymore. The same games just weren’t as fun. The shooter comms, which had once sounded like cheerful pubs in his headset, now sounded like louder, monosyllabic versions of the room where he worked. Even RPG’s had gone sour for him: all that inventorying and fetch-questing looked too much like a camel-bot’s work order. Now he played games intended for sheltered, gifted children, the kind only purchased by well-meaning but tragically un-cool parents.

  “I’d take the job,” Brandon heard himself say.

  “Even if it meant your re-locating here for a prolonged period?” Singer’s head tilted. “I heard they flew you in for a consult. Are you missing Provo?”

  Brandon snorted. “There’s no love lost between me and Provo.” He shrugged. “It’s safer than it used to be around here, right?”

  The dimple appeared again in Singer’s face. He nodded once more, shoved his hands in his pockets, and descended the broad, white steps of the hotel’s entrance. He crossed past a dry fountain filled with desiccated palm fronds.

  “Uh, sir,” Brandon said, instantly wondering why he had felt so compelled to address him as such, “you’re headed outside the green zone.”

  “I want to smoke, and the hookah here tastes like candy.” Singer made a half turn, khaki overcoat swirling with his abrupt motion. “Well? Are you coming?”

  DURING THEIR RUN, they speak very little. Brandon hears only Singer’s breathing and the occasional Pashto phrase pushing past his lips when he encounters children or women on their way to market. Singer is out in the suburbs where things are quiet. Here in the city, Brandon runs into more and more Westerners, often joggers, huffing to each other in German or French or English. There are more Western women, too, the kind that have collected too many rape kits, their shoulders cut like gems. They move in packs for safety. Brandon always makes room for them on the street.

  His earbud only comes out in the shower. As with the run, Brandon’s body and Singer’s move in perfect concert. He imagines that they perform the same rituals in the same order, foot to scalp. It is this way immediately after the run, too, when they throw themselves into Singer’s callisthenics routine. Singer says it’s the same one he learned in a burn ward on a base in Okinawa, when all he had was early morning television and a cheerful woman in a leotard. Brandon once asked about the burn, but a moment later Singer re-set the comm line and pretended like he hadn’t heard the previous message.

  Most days Singer moves locations, living in the charred husks of bombed-out buildings under the shadows of mountains blunt as molars. They have met in the flesh only a handful of times. But already Brandon knows him as though the tunic and its secret golden threads and its broadcast pulses were really Singer’s skin, and not an approximation necessitated by distance.

  IN BRANDON’S ROOM, Tink patiently awaits her dismissal. Her batteries have drawn fresh charge from his laptop. She feels faintly warm when Brandon invites her onto his shoulder. As he reviews the night’s data, another feed pops open on his screen and Brandon sees himself in miniature, face blue with mechanical light. Tink moves and the camera follows: Singer, having fun.

  “Stop hacking our drone,” Brandon says.

  “I’m patching her security as I go. Don’t worry; she’ll look intact when the next fellow comes along.” Onscreen, the camera focuses sharply. “And don’t roll your eyes when I’m watching you.”

  Brandon covers Tink’s eye with the flat of his palm; the screen shows a blur of skin and creases. In his ear, Singer smothers a snort and Brandon feels the softest squeeze across his ribs, the vibration of suppressed laughter across miles and miles of broken city. When he looks, the camera’s gaze has shifted to his mouth, the focus just as tight as before, so that out of context his smile looks like it belongs on a different person—someone who isn’t paid to tag coordinates with information about pot grow-ops where community gardens are supposed to be, or regularly index the facial recognition criteria of men who linger too long outside new playgrounds built with charity money. Through Singer and Tink’s shared eye he looks younger, newer, normal.

  He watches himself speak: “I’ll take the south quadrant’s tags, okay?”

  “Sure,” Singer says. “Meet you in the middle.”

  Tink buzzes off, accidentally clipping Brandon’s ear in a warm and humming kiss before zipping out the window and into the bright day that lies waiting below.

  THE SECOND TIME Brandon met Singer was when they got Tink. She came in an armoured briefcase, nestled in layers of heat-dispersing foam. Brandon had re-located by now, his belongings confined to a duffel at his feet and a half-shell on his back that carried his more precious tools. Singer carried even less. The man lived out of his pockets: an Art Deco tie clip re-purposed to hold cash, a fab-ceramic multi-tool that could survive most checkpoints, and his mobile, a combination reader/phone/wallet/ camera that did all his heavy lifting. He had perhaps two outfits in his entire wardrobe, each thin enough to be rolled and stuffed down cargo pockets once intended for rifles.

  The technician opened the case in yet another hotel room, this one in Jalalabad, on an afternoon when the smog had settled evenly over the well of the city. Brandon could already taste the rain in the air; he imagined it coming down black and toxic enough to pit the paint on all the tiny little cars below.

  “I leave tomorrow morning,” the tech said. “So if you discover any issues between now and then—”

  “We won’t,” Singer said.

  “Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, but—”

  “It’s well-warranted. Why do you think you got the contract?” Singer bent and lifted Tink free of her foam. Standing across from him, Brandon could almost feel the technician’s blood pressure rising. Singer apparently had, too: “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of her.”

  “It’s very delicate,” the technician said, his voice ragged with jet-lag and worry and mild exasperation, the sort of things that Brandon now recognized as love.

  “I know.” Singer brought out his reader with his other hand and thumbed open an app; Brandon recognized the corporate logo from the technician’s soaked polo shirt. Singer tapped something, and the UAS hummed to life. LEDs lit up along the ridges of her body, and her wings prepped themselves for flight. Something on Singer’s reader chirped, and he smiled. “She just texted me,” he said. “We’re good to go.”

  He keyed in a command, and the UAS rose straight upward—and into a ceiling fan. Her pieces sheared away from one another, scattering across the room.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Brandon said, inserting himself between them. “He didn’t mean to, he—”

  “Heiser.” Singer’s hand pulled at Brandon’s shoulder. “Look.”

  From the bed, the UAS’ wing-parts blinked rapid-fire. The other pieces blinked back. The wings buzzed over. They alit on each piece in turn, wiggling until the pieces locked together before rising once again.

  “You see,” Singer said, “she can re-build herself.”

  The technician sighed and slumped, his shoulders sinking low as his head rolled forward. “Jesus Christ. I heard you were crazy, but damn. Don’t ever do that again, okay? At least, not where I can see it.”

  “I’ll be sure to erase all the pertinent records.” Singer keyed more commands into the reader. The UAS dipped and swerved around Brandon’s head. “Heiser. Walk around. Let her accumulate some data for recognition.”

  The UAS droned over Brandon’s head as he made a show of perusing the technician’s other luggage, picking things up and putting them down. Then one item genuinely attracted his attention, and he unzipped it fully to the sound of the tech’s protests. The UAS dove into the bag. She skittered over Brandon’s fingers. When Brandon pulled the fabric free, she had attached herself to it, a glowing insect on laundry. It was a black viscose undershirt. Gold wire spread ac
ross its surface, radiating from the heart outward across the stomach.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s nothing.” The tech took it from Brandon’s hands with light, careful fingers. “And it doesn’t work.”

  It was funny, how those last three words made Brandon almost physically hungry, how they crowded his brain with questions about how and why and what for. He looked at the shirt anew. He had never taken apart clothes before. Just the prospect made his fingers itch. As though having read his mind, the UAS crawled over the cloth, her lights blinking and blipping as she followed the paths made by each golden thread.

  Brandon felt Singer moving to stand a little bit behind him. “Relay armour?”

  “Well, yes,” the technician said. “I was trying to make something a little less bulky than what’s already on the market. But for a full set of features, you really put on a lot of extra weight.”

  Again, Singer pulled out his reader. “Do you have a patent?”

  “Pending, yes.”

  “Ah.” Singer thumbed through various apps, selected one, opened a document, performed a Turing, and decisively punched a single button. “Done and done. You’ll be receiving an invoice.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I just bought you out,” Singer said. “Heiser. We’re going.”

  “But… But it’s my design!”

  “Consider us beta-testers.” Singer snapped his fingers at the UAS. She darted over to him and danced up his arm as he moved for the door. “You can buy it back after we de-bug it.”

  In the stairwell, their words were punctuated by the blink of lights that had attracted too many flies. “Do you have, like, a fuck-ton of money?” Brandon asked.

  “I have access to a fuck-ton of money.”

  “Won’t you have to explain the expense? I mean, he said it himself. There are already better models out there.”

  Singer pulled open the door. Through it, an air-conditioned breeze wafted in from the lobby. Brandon smelled chlorinated water and heard smooth-jazz re-mixes of Sufi chants. He was getting so sick of hotels.

  “You wanted it, didn’t you?” Singer asked. “It was all over your face.”

  “Well, yeah, I was curious, I wanted—”

  “Then that’s the explanation,” he said, and handed Brandon the shirt. “Have at it. Rip it apart. Get your hands dirty.”

  They stepped out into the lobby with their drone in close pursuit. And as they walked past a gaggle of girls wearing lanyards and badges emblazoned with the logo of the latest NGO to visit the city, Singer said casually: “You know, they trained me in a hotel just like this one. A long time ago. It was abandoned, but the satellite still relayed this same terrible music. When they left us each night, it kept playing. I could hear it through the floor.”

  Brandon frowned. “What were you doing on the floor?”

  Singer’s hand came up, twitched in the air near Brandon’s head, then darted back to his own scalp and scratched there. “Not much,” he said. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

  “OH, DEAR.”

  Brandon pauses, his fingers suspended over the keys. “What?”

  “Stoning in progress. Well, a pebbling. Some girls going home for lunch. Their route passes some labour pick-ups.”

  Brandon accesses Tink’s feed. Onscreen, the girls have formed a defensive cluster, heads ducking slightly as they walk onward. As Brandon watches, one of them brandishes her mobile and starts snapping pictures. Tink’s view is exceptional; he can see the defiant press of the girl’s thumb and her quick, almost unfazed dodge when a rock whips past her ear. Another girl dashes backward and grabs her elbow, tugs her back into the group as it re-assembles itself.

  “Can we get her phone number?” Brandon asks.

  “Probably. If we break some laws.” Through the earbud, Brandon hears Singer typing. “The mobile’s old; she probably got it as a donation. Could take a while. Better if you just hijack Tink.”

  Brandon accesses Tink’s command line and inputs his own hack: ↑↑↓↓←→←→573. Now she belongs to him entirely, priorities momentarily forgotten, processes un-logged, movements off the grid. He directs her with his finger. She swerves, hovers, waits as Brandon plots safe Euler paths between the school and the nearest teashop. She pounces on the girl’s mobile, planting herself inside the phone, streaming the maps there. The girl nods as the first image pops up. Brandon watches through Tink’s eye, sees the slightly worried faces of the other girls as they look back at the labour pool on the corner, watches their lips move with a mixture of frustration and fear. When Tink withdraws they escape.

  The people here are already so used to the bots, Brandon realizes, that they barely recognize them as surveillance. They are part of the landscape. As in a fairy tale, they have come alive through prolonged use: real dragonflies, real camels, real birds of prey.

  For the first time, he thinks that this might have been the plan all along.

  When he releases her from the hack, Tink zings upward and into the sky. She homes in on the beacon from a predator above, first aligning herself with its wide, arcing flightpath, and then pinning herself to its white steel flank. It blinks at her rapidly, and she dives off and streaks away back into the city.

  “What was that?” Brandon asks.

  “A work order,” Singer says.

  BRANDON COMPLETED HIS hack of the clothing just before his birthday. He remembered the date only when the automated portions of his various profiles alerted fellow users to the fact that they should send him cards and in-game money and heartfelt wishes for his safety. He answered the last with assurances of his protected status: I’m being looked after.

  He only realized how literal this truth was on the night of his birthday, long after his host had fed him elephant ear pastry and a custard of rosewater and pistachios, long after he had answered the video chats from his parents and friends and their repeat questions (what time is it there, are you all right, do all the women wear veils, do you miss bacon), when he had finally drifted asleep and heard in his ear: “Come up here.”

  He thought he might be dreaming. That happened, sometimes, the way his television or his sound dock or his other devices used to weave their sounds into the narrative of his sleeping mind, back when he lived in places with stable electricity, before Singer. Now Singer’s voice wove in and out, skipping from character to character in his dreams until Brandon became conscious of the coincidence and opened his eyes.

  “I’m asleep,” he said now.

  “I’m on the roof,” Singer said.

  And he was. When Brandon leaned out of his window, clinging with one hand to the eaves, he saw gargoyle shape staring down at him. “You sleep too deeply,” Singer said.

  “What are you, the fucking Batman?”

  “I’m not sure. Have you ever considered a career in the circus?”

  “Huh?”

  “Come up here.”

  “No.” Brandon leaned back into his room and waited. Nothing happened. Finally he leaned out again. “I have something to show you.”

  It should not have surprised him when Singer unfolded himself into the room, feet first and then the rest of him, but it did. Now Singer stood surveying his room—lit solely by laptop glare the shadows were sharper, and the hour felt later.

  “It’s good,” Singer said. “Plain.”

  “Why are you here? Is Tink okay?” At night their only worry was the occasional owl that might mistake her for food.

  The laptop glare rendered Singer’s spectacles momentarily opaque. “You have an hour left of your birthday.”

  Singer had let him off the earbud that day, so he could call his family and friends without a third party listening in. Now Brandon wondered if those calls had really been all that private. How long had Singer been on the roof? Brandon had heard nothing—no thumps or bumps or scrapes, not even stray dogs below barking at a strange man crawling the skyline. Tink had told him Singer was across town like always. But Tink could be hacked
.

  He grimaced. “With all due respect, sir, this is why you have no friends.”

  Singer peered over the top of his spectacles. “You think I have no friends?”

  “I kinda doubt it, yeah.”

  “I have friends, Heiser.” He pivoted lazily toward the window, gently pulling the shutters closed. “Just not the kind I enjoy spending any time with.”

  Brandon frowned. “Then those aren’t real friends.”

  “Oh, they’re real friends.” Singer smiled thinly, still staring at the shutters as though he expected them to blow open. He turned back and the smile changed, became real. “You said you had something to show me.”

  Brandon took down two tunics from his makeshift closet—a wire strung between two walls that served as a rail. He held them up for Singer to see. “Finished.”

  Singer’s gaze played over the fabric: the copy was almost exact. Brandon had found a tailor who knew about these kinds of things, a man used to repairing body armour. He had made it comfortable, distributed the weight of the wires so the sensors stopped dragging and pouching.

  “They’re maps,” Brandon said. “Like that game, ‘Warmer, Colder.’ There are buzzers inside, and you plug in the coordinates and use the wires like a compass, so even if you don’t have a map, even if your phone dies or—”

  “Let’s try them.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He held one out. Singer plucked it free of his hands and laid it on the bed before shrugging out of his coat and folding it in equal lengths—each fold precise, practised, ritual. He removed his glasses and placed them atop it, then tugged off his shirt—a single layer of what Brandon suspected was recycled bamboo or PET bottles or maybe both. Under the shirt Singer was thin, the kind of thin that hurt to look at, like carvings of Christ in a Mexican church.

  Singer must have understood, because he paused and said: “Your eyes sting like an interrogator’s cigarette, Heiser.”

  “Sir, are you, uh… healthy?”