Beyond Binary

by Brit Mandelo

  I snorted. “Funny. Look, neither one of us has enough time to screw around. Either you want to make a deal or you don’t.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  The amount I asked for wasn’t very high—just enough to throw her off, make her think that I was in it for the money after all. Low enough to make me seem like a small fish, as if jobs like picking her up were normal to me. The more she under-estimated me, the better.

  I half-heartedly watched her online movements with one of my external monitors, figuring that she’d get too suspicious if she didn’t see me watching her. I saw her pull apart her empire and parcel it off to those of her acquaintances that weren’t important enough to keep secret. Public aliases.

  It was kind of funny, how behind she was. She deleted every account she accessed, once she was done with it, assuming I’d have her passwords. That’s not how I find people. Any kid with enough time on his hands can crack passwords. For me, it’s about correlating behavior, the kinds of personal information that people don’t really think about giving out. We all have our unique patterns of thought and activity. Given enough data and some processor time, I can find the alter-accounts of anybody.

  Knowing where she’d had her accounts just told me who to bribe.

  When the hour was up, I sent her through the short disconnect routine.

  She didn’t thank me.

  ∞

  In retrospect, I’d say my biggest mistake was that I didn’t tell anybody in the company what I was after when I requested all of deVries’ records.

  The advantage of being quiet about what I was up to was obvious—nobody to share the money with. The disadvantage was just as obvious—nobody to go in with me. I’d been in a few suspicious situations, bonehouses with wardens that outweighed me by thirty or forty kilos, wardens who didn’t care that projectile weapons were definitely against the law, and once in the middle of what might as well have been a war zone. All this, despite being required by law to remain unarmed. Still, Trexell was worth enough in cash and notoriety that going in without backup like I did was stupid. A tenth of the cut would’ve been enough to get me what I wanted.

  I crossed back out of Canada, and then drove a bit, looking for a place where I got a decent signal without being under too much surveillance. I finally found the right spot on I-5 after it leaves the Chuckanuts but before it turns into a series of bridges over Skagit Bay. Skagit was worse off than Vancouver—the economy had been such that the farmhouses in the area had been left behind, strip-salvaged and left to rot. The bay is full of islands that used to be roofs, covered in bird crap, sinking lower year by year.

  I set my timer first. Plugging in is like falling asleep into a perfect dream. No—it’s like waking up into one. No—

  Your senses go away entirely if you’ve got the right connection. There’s no touch, no smell, no sound unless you want it. Turn on all the senses before you’re acclimated and you’ll go crazy, touch and sight and smell all advertising different products at once.

  The numbers say that most of bonehouse dreamers plug in for a 24-7 life of porn or games. By most, I mean a good 99%. This is what we’re doing with technology that makes immersive language learning almost foolproof, that makes searching a couple of exabytes of data as easy as thinking.

  Laura’s files. Most of her time was spent in games. She’d been making money to keep herself plugged in by playing. I hadn’t expected the search to be as easy as looking through her records to see if any of them had Trexell written all over them, but it would have been nice. I was just mining for pertinent data, dumping it into the computer.

  My timer went off, distant, I pulled myself out of the ’Net long enough to slap it off, and then fell back in, for just another few minutes. I kept digging, found out everything I could about Laura’s actions—which were easy enough to track, honestly. She’d had five alter-egos, some of whom were into sex acts that I’m sure her standard persona would have pretended to be scandalized just hearing about.

  Funny thing about living online that way, everybody who does eventually ends up with some kind of multiple personality going on. Unavoidable, really. That’s the thing about being a creature of data, humanity made in the image of artificial intelligence. Data is malleable, flesh is less so.

  Intuition.

  Every topic has a cloud associated, a set of linked concepts, linked accounts, linked people. Two choices. Either let the computer run through all of the possibilities, or figure it out yourself. I preferred doing the latter.

  I followed links, cached search string lists, finding a way around every time I hit up on something password protected. I winced every so often when an ad wormed through my blocker, addressed me by my birth name, and tried to sell me something.

  Then I found Samuel.

  I followed Laura and Sammy Gauge, their entire lives unfolding to me all at once. Here’s where they first met, in a voice chat on American secessionist politics. There was the simulator where they got married, with Gauge under a new name. There was the imaginary home life they’d set up, perfectly normal until I dug back through the links, finding old ones, dead links with less than benign file names attached to them.

  And then the glorious and bizarre moment when I called in a favor on the anonymous proxy he’d been using and found out that he was based here, too. Here, as in Seattle, a bonehouse junky’s dream.

  The connection dropped suddenly, shunting me out into glaring daylight, dry-mouthed, in the back seat of my car. Slammed straight out of a connection like that, I always feel groggy, like I’ve been jerked out of sleep and I’m only half awake. The ’Net ghosted in my head, like the afterimage of a thought, burned into my neurons. I reached for water, drank, fought back nausea as I checked my clock.

  Five hours?

  My timer hadn’t initiated shut-down…or had it? I vaguely remembered over-riding the shut-down order. Just a few more minutes. And a few more. And a few more. I took a shaky breath.

  Physical limitations.

  I fought the impulse to hook myself back in, embarrassed by it, even though there was nobody around to see my relapse.

  ∞

  David wasn’t happy to see me. He lived in what used to be north Seattle, and he didn’t approve of my career path.

  However, I needed somewhere to charge the car, and I still had the key to his house and to the electrical box outside. I’d just plugged the car in when he came to the door and crossed his arms. I wondered belatedly if he’d set up a perimeter alarm system. All the other houses on this street had been looted, long abandoned by people who didn’t like living isolated in empty suburban sprawl. I’d crawled in through a few of the back windows for David, when I still lived with him. We’d liked living in an abandoned city.

  “I’m close to him now,” I said. “Found him.”

  He shook his head at me. “You know what I think about that.”

  “Relax,” I said, my enthusiasm already fading. “You’ll probably get lucky again and he’ll be gone before I get there, and then you can continue to feel smug.” I followed him into the house, an old single-level wooden structure. I plugged in my phone—which was also the computer that ran my car, did my all my statistical searches, and was otherwise far too important to charge in its normal location.

  The house was still filled with photographs. For a while, David had talked about setting up an old-style dark room, but he’d changed his mind when he saw how much it would cost to get the permits for the chemicals.

  Not that anybody would come out here to check him.

  “You’re just using this as a new way to act out your obsession,” he said. He poured me a glass of water and put it on the cracked laminate countertop next to my arm.

  I shrugged. “Does it matter? What I’m doing is important.”

  He, of all people, couldn’t argue with me. He pulled out one of the chairs and sat. “Why did you come here?”

  “Low on power.”

  A pause.

  “And I mi
ssed you,” I admitted. “You never come up to Canada.”

  He avoided the obvious argument, about why he stayed here. We’d had that argument too many times over the years, both in person and online. Online, he’d end the conversation by accusing me of using immersive, and I’d log off. He used immersive. I used immersive and I set the timer. Not a problem.

  “I’m not sure that the person I miss is the person you are now,” he said. “I’m less than certain she ever came back.”

  “He,” I corrected.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  I sighed. “That’s not fair.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said, reasonably. “I just think you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. You were beautiful before you changed.”

  “I didn’t change,” I said. “I just figured out who I am.”

  The silence of a remembered argument sat between us, souring the air.

  He stood up. “I’m taking more pictures of the Nisqually Lahar tomorrow….”

  “Don’t fall in,” I said, even though the mudflow had solidified before either of us were born.

  “And I don’t want to see you when I’m done. You shouldn’t have come back,” he said.

  I looked down at the screen of my phone, sifting search results. He’d started for the door to his bedroom before I said, “I thought things might be different after I’ve turned him in.”

  David shook his head. “Getting the object of your obsession isn’t going to fix you. You’ll just find something else to obsess over and I’m still not willing to go through it again.”

  ∞

  There’s a famous photograph of me using immersive, plugged in, switched off, artfully arranged on a queen-size mattress, blood-red sheets covering just enough of my body to lower the disgust factor. The floor is tilted fifteen percent off horizontal, the mattress shoved all the way up against the cracked and peeling wall. I’m in focus, but in the distance, you can still see the shards of broken glass that used to be floor-to-ceiling windows.

  I could be a corpse, discarded with the other debris in a condemned building, in a condemned city, and the picture would be no different.

  ∞

  I didn’t really believe I’d find Trexell until I was looking up at the building that held his bonehouse.

  Gray dust blew past. It was a few minutes after noon, and the sun glared off everything around me, so bright that it hurt. The sidewalk under my feet had the brown-black stained color that concrete got in places where it rarely if ever rained. Faded “For Lease” signs flapped in the breeze, still tied against the side of the building. There’d been nobody to lease these buildings for at least ten years, maybe longer.

  A man walked up while I stood there, hands in his pockets, hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth. His face looked weathered, like he’d spent way too many days outside. He had a handgun tucked into his belt, even if it was illegal. I wished that I wasn’t so completely unarmed. “You looking for something?” He squinted at me.

  I was a damn good actor. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, scuffed my foot on the sidewalk. Looked ashamed to even be asking. “Angelina’s,” I said.

  He looked me over. “Bonehouses ain’t free. Got money?”

  “Access to it,” I said.

  “What’s a guy like you looking for Angelina’s for? Don’t look at me like that, I can hear in your accent that you’re from up north.”

  “Tired of having my life run for me,” I said, as truthful as I could be.

  He folded his arms one over the other. Even though I could tell that he was trying to be discrete about it, he tilted his head to the side slightly, listening to a voice in his earpiece. I suddenly felt naked, not knowing how advanced their surveillance was, and how well it was working. “All right, Jordan,” he said, giving me the name on my fake identification and my fake ID chip. “Come on.”

  I followed him down the broken escalator into the fetid darkness under the city, into the tunnels that used to let busses travel downtown without getting caught in above-ground traffic. Back when there was traffic. Back when it was smart to drive a car through the maze of skyscrapers.

  “Ever been in a bonehouse before?”

  “Not long-term,” I lied. There were dim lights overhead, up in the big arching ceiling. Only about a third of them were on, and one of them was flickering, making the debris filling out the tunnel roadway jump and jiggle. “This kind of thing is more policed up in Canada.” And thank God for that.

  He hopped down from the station platform. I followed him, careful not to snag my leg on the bent and broken post that used to mark the bus stop. I followed him through the narrower tunnels, surprised, since the proxy information I had suggested that Angelina’s was in the mall.

  This far underground they’d have to be running a wired network. Interesting.

  “Not very secure, is it?” I asked. The signs on either side of the wall told how far we were from various platforms. I hadn’t seen any security at all, which made me nervous.

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” he said. “People in this city know to stay out of the tunnels.”

  I narrowly avoided snorting at him. Anybody with even a passing understanding of human nature knows that people will cheerfully go exactly where they’re least safe.

  Two steps further.

  He grabbed my shoulder, twisted, and slammed me up against the wall. It was too quick, I’d let myself be too lulled into complacency, and so I didn’t react. Just slammed into the wall and felt the air whistle out of me, hands snapping up to show they were empty, eyes wide, adrenaline making the dim tunnel clearer than it should have been. Empty but for us.

  Cold metal dug into the soft underside of my jaw so hard that I thought I might gag. A click.

  “Cocky, stupid, bastard Canadian,” he said.

  I was afraid to swallow. Afraid to talk. Breathe.

  He dug the gun in harder, shoving my head up. “What, you thought Trexell would hand himself to you? On a platter, maybe? With a little note that says, “Dear Christina, please turn me in, I’m tired of living, oh and while you’re at it, enjoy your reward.”

  “That’s not my name,” I snarled, surprised at what I clung to in the seconds before I died.

  “You hunt bones,” he said, his voice so reasonable. One arm across my chest, keeping me pressed against that earth-cold concrete wall, his face so close we could have kissed. “Bones don’t move. They don’t run. They’re usually so wrapped up that they don’t even try to hide themselves. Easy pickings for a hypocrite.”

  I kept my chin up, instinct pushing away from the gun. Looked up at him. “Either shoot me or let me go,” I said.

  “Who knows you’re here?”

  David. I thought about him clambering around on the lahar, cataloguing new plant growth, tsk-tsking at plants that should only grow at warmer climates. What would they do to him, uninvolved David, if I told them he knew I was in Seattle? “Nobody,” I said.

  He pulled back, like he meant to hit me over the head but I moved too quickly for him. I slammed my forehead into his nose, using the few seconds of disorientation to disarm him, send the gun skittering across the concrete floor.

  He didn’t waste time going after it and pulled a knife instead, dim light shining along the edge of the blade. I blocked his first mad slash with my forearm, the angle such that he didn’t cut through my thick canvas coat. My knee connected with his stomach.

  He shoved me back again, and I hit the wall. Before I could twist away, hot pain lanced down my side. I cussed, put my foot against the wall and used it to launch myself at him.

  Dust and dirt puffed into the air, and his head hit the floor with a sharp crack. Good luck on my part. I beat his hand against the floor until his fingers loosened, and then I sent the knife skittering across to where the gun was.

  Pain lanced up and down my left side, my shirt gone sticky from the blood. I told myself I’d had worse and flipped him onto his stomach. I planted my right knee in the
small of his back, pinned him while I caught my breath.

  “How many of you are there?” I asked when I could, having trouble keeping him pinned.

  Nothing.

  I leaned so close I was practically yelling in his ear. “How many of you are there? You got an army? Just a couple of you? Just you and Trexell?”

  “Enough of us.”

  “Enough of you for what?”

  He shook his head, laughing down at the concrete. I let him laugh, dug in my pocket for a tranquilizer, pulled it out of the box with one hand and uncapped it with my teeth. I gave him a full dose, listening to the laughter turn to curses when the needle went in.

  When he went limp, I picked up the gun and left him there.

  ∞

  I took the stairs into the mall. The broken escalator wasn’t even safe for climbing; pieces of it had been pulled off and sold for scrap. Every piece of glass in the entire place had been shattered, everything from doors to store windows. Spray-paint graffiti blanketed every surface, turning walls into scenes of dueling tags. The air held the thick smell of stale urine.

  Volcanic ash lay on the floor a good three inches deep. The place was never cleaned up after Rainier blew. The mall had already been closed, so when the ash filtered in through the broken windows, covering all four stories, there was no point.

  I had to stop too often, breathing in little gasps, alternately trying to encourage myself to walk on and cursing myself for not going back.

  The ash saved me some time, showing me a path up and down the broken escalators—these ones treacherous but still climbable—that was much more traveled than the side paths.

  My ragged breath was the only sound in the mall. I left a trail behind me, drops of blood on ash, like breadcrumbs to safety.

  At the top, more shattered glass. The remains of a food court to my right, the decommissioned remains of a monorail station to the left.

  And a man dressed all in gray. Behind him were skyscrapers in front of a sapphire blue sky, half of the windows broken out, gaping holes in their shining surfaces. “Flesh is over-rated, isn’t it?” he asked.

  I gripped the rubber escalator rail so hard that I felt my fingernails dig in. It’d been years since I’d even held a simulated handgun, but some muscle memories don’t go away. I took aim, resting my finger on the side of the trigger guard. Willing to let him talk. Glanced around, too late to save me if he’d had an ambush, but the floor was empty.