Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #220 Read online

  Near the parked-up building, the mystery got bigger, because in addition to the high-buck cars, there were also some medium-buck Chevies and Toyotas. Nothing really old or ratty, though, not like you'd expect at a bootheel meeting. It looked a bit like parking lot pics of old, back when everyone came to work in one place instead of doing it in virtuality. Which was weird. People didn't gather for business in person unless it was something damn important.

  I skirted the cars and went to the far side, where big steel louvers faced skyward, starting about twelve feet off the ground. A strange smell wafted out from them, like hot metal. Back here, the building was cinderblock, not tilt-up.

  Chasing my first piece of ass served me well, cause she'd been a freeclimber, and shitting bricks scampering up buildings had been my way into her drawers. As well as a few good views. I kicked off my shoes, dug in and pulled myself up, peeling fingernails in the process. I grabbed onto the louvers as I heard voices footsteps crunching on concrete, and muffled voices coming from around the corner of the building.

  Ah, shit.

  Well, I'd gotten there, and I wasn't just gonna let it go. Hot air flowed out of the louvers, carrying the burned-metal smell. I looked down into the building. It was dim-lit, like an old-time factory, but I was able to see glints of light off a pile of shiny high-dollar eyesets, haphazardly stacked in a bin. Then my eyes adjusted, and I saw: a row of plastic tanks stretching to the opposite side of the building; several men looking down at the churning surface of one of the tanks, sweating and talking in low tones. Another stood over the last tank, picking eyesets like the ones in the bin off plastic track that emerged from the tank. I followed the line of plastic track, which dipped into every tank in turn. At the beginning of the line, there was nothing on the track. In the middle, a spindly multicolored thing. At the end, eyesets.

  "There he is!” from the far side of the building. There was the slap of feet on concrete, running.

  I tore my eyes away from the factory and looked. Two men wearing security uniforms and binocular eyesets ran towards me. I dropped to the ground and ran.

  Fucksticks. I should've known. As soon as the realtime sats and their own cameras saw me, I was cooked. Whatever they were doing, they weren't playing. I was surprised my eyeset hadn't blurted out an alarm.

  "Stop!” one of the men yelled. I ran faster, threw myself at the rusted chainlink, scampered over the top. It was only another half block to the car. If they didn't have someone there waiting for me.

  I expected to hear bodies hit the fence, and the fence itself sing that rattly chainlink tune, but their footsteps slapped to a stop. A glance back showed them looking at each other and nodding, like they were getting new instructions via their eyesets.

  Which meant they were probably at the car. I ran faster, preparing to jog at the first sign of security.

  But there was nobody there. I got in the car, signed the disclaimers as fast as I could, and floorboarded it out of there.

  You are driving illegally and erratically. If you continue to do so, I will have to inform the Greater Los Angeles Police Department.

  "Shut up!” I said, but I backed off the throttle. In the rearcam, there was nothing. I shook my head. They should've chased me. But Vernon was as quiet as when I first arrived.

  After a few minutes, I let the car drive itself. I eyeballed my eyeset back through the last ten minutes of my life, but there was nothing there. No video. No audio. Not hashed, but simply wiped clean. The log showed it going offline right before I pulled up in front of the warehouse. Clean stuff too, not even a trace of hash. Something had gotten into the eyeset and convinced me it was running, while I'd been as alone as someone from the twentieth century back there. Slick. And a bit scary. I didn't want to know what kind of system could reach out, find my eyeset type, talk to its system, and co-opt it so smoothly. It made my mom's little hashy tricks look like something out of the Web 1.0 days.

  Then my eyeset did its little shiver and dance thing that said someone I didn't know was plucking at my attention. The preview text showed: Fernando Padilla, President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board, Padilla Enterprises.

  I thought for a minute about fucking him off. Then I sighed and eyeballed the connection open. The King of Brentwood was standing there, looking at me. Probably real, too, cause they never got the avatars quite fractal enough to be real. And the background was a chaos of generic Expensive House, not cool virtual stuff that showed you had a lot of sim-money. And nobody would design an avatar without any hint of a neck, would they? His left cheek tic'd slightly, as if he was very, very mad.

  "It's good to see that Mary Palmetto's son can show some initiative,” he said.

  "What do you want?"

  The King pursed his lips, as if this was a question for the ages, like what the real contents of the Library of Alexandria were. “Me? I want nothing. I am, in fact, extremely uninterested in having you be part of any venture. But your mother is persuasive."

  "So take your own advice."

  You missed a chance to suggest Happi Mind psychological services, which provide the top satisfaction improvement rating without drugs, MakeMoMoola said.

  "Ah, but she would be so unhappy. And I sincerely want our union to continue.” A broad smile transmitted thoughts I didn't want to analyze. “It may be better if the three of us met now, rather than waiting until the evening."

  "I'm not interested."

  "At this point, I don't think that matters."

  "What if I let the police know what I saw?"

  Greater Los Angeles Enforcement is offering a 10% referral incentive for successfully prosecuted cases, MakeMoMoola said.

  A laugh. “And what did you see? You certainly have no record of it. Unsubstantiated rants are rather less than compelling, Mr Palmetto."

  I cursed. It was a goddamn Chinese finger puzzle, a fucking career in the mafia. I could dream about getting out, but it just wasntgonnahappen.com.

  But. Wait.

  I did the think-and-blink trick and ran my retinal cam back through the last few minutes. Blurred, pixellated video and echoey audio showed the interior of the factory once again. If that really was what it was. So I had something. Even if I didn't really know what it was.

  It was my turn to grin. “I'll think about it,” I said. “But I'm busy right now, and I'm already booked for tonight."

  You missed a chance to be in two places at once with WeRU, the only service where We Are You!

  The King's expression went stormy. I eyeballed him onto a notify-and-hold list, and cut the connection.

  Another glance behind me. Still no cars. I felt good about tweaking the King, but there were still way too many questions. Like what I'd gotten myself into.

  And what, exactly, had I seen?

  * * * *

  I used a tracer and found Nana in Santa Monica, so I let the Lexus find the 10 and hoof us out there. It lingered next to cheap cars for a while, slowing the drive. I went through its menu and found a form for Revenue Abstention (Experimental or Religious Economies Contract), and signed it off. After that, the drive went faster.

  Halfway to Santa Monica, my eyeset opaqued itself. It showed no image, no sound, no video, no friend info, just a short text message:

  For you, information about the King is now worth five hundred thousand new dollars.

  Truth = Money

  And one of those synthetic reply-to addresses, those ones that look like an old-fashioned password. Nothing else.

  Shit. Shit shit. What was this? They'd barged into my eyeset like one of my bestest friends. A quick digger search showed no correlation with the King.

  Whoever it was, they'd co-opted my eyeset enough to let them just barge in. That was scary. It meant I was being targeted, not as an impersonal number in the dance of propagation and transaction, but as a person.

  Which wasn't supposed to happen. The financial nets didn't talk to the media nets, the referral and monetization nets were separate, and the academic nets were
a whole nother thing, and on and on. Which was good. If they all talked, what a clusterfuck. Some geek god with too much time on his hands could know anything and everything, and find a way to get enough power to screw everyone.

  My eyeset display changed:

  Specific information may be worth up to seven hundred fifty thousand new dollars, Mr Palmetto.

  Truth = Money

  Oh, that was bad. That was ugly. For the first time, I felt my stomach roll over in fear.

  And I still had no idea what I'd seen. I thought about transferring the video from my internal network to the eyeset for enhancement, but it'd probably be best to leave it in the relative obscurity of outdated networking protocols for the moment.

  But I needed to see it. I needed somewhere secure, where I could run it through all the latest routines, pull some voices out of the mumbles, get it cleaned and polished so I could figure out just what the heck I'd actually seen.

  Grigory.

  Of course. Grigory Gavrilov. He worked customer service for some new happypill, and health stuff was the last frontier of security. If academics were apart, the pharmas were on Pluto. Every politician that had tried to open the health data, even anonymized, had committed career suicide.

  I cleared the scary message and logged onto Pfizer's virtuality, where dancing red smartpills promised me a 2.0-level mind. I waited for the commercial and affiliate offers to end, and requested Grigory by name.

  I got shuttled into someone's idea of the perfect waiting space, a happy little park where kids played on the grass, and beautifully aged grandmothers and grandfathers fed pigeons from park benches. I almost didn't notice when the clouds rearranged themselves into skywriting that indicated I could step through into Grigory's office.

  And it was a nice office. They had Grigory sitting in a burgundy tuck-and-roll leather office chair, complete with shiny little brass buttons. His desk was a huge expanse of dark wood. Behind him were old-fashioned medical tomes, and from his neck hung (of course) a stethoscope. The full cliché, but probably what people wanted to see when they were mortgaging a percentage of their total lifetime value to a drug that promised true happiness in all the ways humans could measure.

  "How may I help you, Mr—” Grigory said. Then he saw my avatar. His mouth fell open. “Mike! What are you doing here?"

  "Looking for relief from the woes of my life,” I said.

  "Mike—"

  "No, seriously. Look, these convos are secure, right?"

  "Tight as a gnat's butt."

  I laughed. “Are you speaking Russian?"

  "Yeah, why?"

  "The translations are getting better."

  "Oh. But Mike, you gotta have a real reason to be here. I can get in trouble."

  "I thought you said it was secure."

  "Yeah, but they context-sweep it, just to make sure we aren't signing up eight-year-olds for happypills."

  "I'm thinking of using YouBetta, and I'm afraid it might conflict with the software and wetware mods I have."

  "Wetware mods?"

  "A retinal cam my mom installed, years back."

  Grigory just looked blank. “I—"

  "I'd like to ensure the quality of capture. If you'd take a look at some current video, you can see what I mean."

  Grigory's eyes widened, and he nodded. I knew somewhere halfway around the world, Grigory sat in his home office, connected up with five hundred other sacks who consented to have their interpersonal relations mediated to improve office interaction, but he could have been real. “Show me."

  "How secure is your connection?"

  "I'll set it for maximum encryption."

  "How secure is that?"

  "We could run the president's orgy videos through here, and nobody'd twitch."

  I sighed. I had to take a chance. I wrapped up the video and shot it down to him, together with a quick text summary of what led up to it, and my questions.

  "I'll contact you back,” Grigory said, and signed off.

  When I got to Santa Monica, I ditched the Lexus in a 2nd Street parking structure and went up to the 3rd Street Promenade. The sky was canopied with aerostat movies, from big-dollar releases to pirate home-brew stuff, all fishing for eyeballs. Shops carrying authentic hand-made today stuff never before propagated vied for customers with screens and displays and lightshows of their own. MakeMoMoola chanted revenue opportunities breathlessly until it decided there were too many offers to deliver via voice, and switched to a text scroll at the edge of my field of vision.

  "Great day for a noovie,” said a random guy wearing an animated shirt for Gingham Shorts, a Mischival. I eyeballed my standard fuck-off script, showing my transaction record. He frowned and steered away.

  The shops were hopping with high-Attention Index talent. Apple was showing its new dynamic stereo eyeset that you could wear all the time, or use in overlay or immersive mode. They had a big smartfog projection out in front of their store showing a kid interacting with the ghosts of a popular netshow sitcom. Not a new idea, but with good stereoptic overlay the remains of the entertainment networks might keep people in their worlds for a few more years. I'd never seen the appeal of talking to imaginary friends in real life, even if your conversation did end up influencing the character arc. Of course, there were also hangers-on wearing their new Apple eyesets, hoping to get counted as part of the show-stream revenue, and griefers with competing products, trying to get in the way of the most visible personal and public cameras.

  Along the edges of the crowd were the fringies, people who'd given up even on the new products lotteries and the see-and-be-seen free-for-all parties. Probably down from the hills, where a foodplant and a trailer and a few solar panels kept them in better-than-20th-Century comfort. They wore boring clothes in plain colors, jeans that had never seen a designer's input or a distresser's touch, T-shirts from product launches months old. Some of them held signs: restore the social currency! conversation, not conversion! personality, not propagation!

  The locator showed Nana somewhere nearby, but I didn't see her in the crowd. I hung back at the edges, not yet ready to call her.

  So I paced, and waited for Grigory. A bunch of Midwesterners were doing old-style attention things, wearing costumes and performing a skit my eyeset identified as a variation on A Streetcar Named Desire. Old-style Hollywood stuff, from the days when obscurity was your only enemy. Now it was just seamlessly weighed, rated, and rejected before ever reaching a host dumb enough to propagate it. I wondered how bad their bots were. If they didn't stop them from doing stupid stunts like that, they must be very out of date.

  Your current Attention Index is very high, MakeMoMoola said. There are a number of hand-made today offers that would pay five to seven times the clothing investment over the course of a day, based on your AI.

  I started. I'd always had a high AI, being the Son of the Mogul and all, but I'd never had an AI high enough to pay back major purchases from simple exposure. That was serious celeb territory.

  I looked at the charts in the eyeset, and whistled. Three of the big six social intermediaries had hooked my real-time feed. Over seventy major lifecasters, commentators, and bloggers were following my movements. There was speculation about missing time in my personal video file (the damn factory) and a conversation they sniffed as fake (Mom), a recent trip to the Pfizer virtuality (shit), and the rumored tender of large monetized offers (shit, shit, shit!).

  I resisted the urge to duck into a dark shop; the social intermediaries would know I knew, and the game would be over. My story would either flame up or flame out. I wouldn't have any control over it. Until I figured it out, better to have them watching. Just in case.

  "Mike?” Nana's voice, beside me.

  I jumped and whirled to look. I'd almost walked right past her. She was standing with two other men in trying-too-hard clothes, who looked me up and down in that universal competitive once-over. They held big wireless-controlled planes and wore VR goggles pushed up on their heads, with contr
ollers slung at their sides. An old trick, teaching the tourists to fly the planes and look around as if they were the pilots. Old but fun. Except there weren't any tourists around.

  And Nana was looking at me with a funny expression on her face, as if she was surprised to see me.

  "What's going on?” Nana asked. “Your AI is—"

  I took her hand and dragged her out of voice-reconstruction range. “Everything's been weird since Mom came by this morning."

  "Your mom came to the house?"

  "Yeah. She has an offer I can't refuse. Except—"

  "Refuse it!” Nana said. Then her face crumpled into a mask of confusion. “I mean, you aren't going to take it, are you? I know you have other offers. It's all over the intermediaries."

  Fuck. My whole life laid out. I shook my head.

  "Now you have a choice, don't you?"

  I felt my face grow hot. “But ... I went to this factory, and I ... ah, shit, everything's just out of whack."

  Nana's face did that eye-squinting, frown-pulling trick I knew all too well. I'd seen it before. Every time a girlfriend figured me out. Every time I had to look her in the eye and say, Yes, that's right. I'm not a rebel. Not really.

  But she didn't explode. She didn't tell me to fuck off. She just looked at me with those big gray-blue eyes, like she was waiting. Like she had a bet. Which wasn't impossible. Bookies'll put odds on anything.

  "Are you trying to profit off me?” I asked.

  Nana's mouth fell open, and her eyes widened. She shook her head. “No, not that, not that at all! I wouldn't!"

  Yeah, right. Today was the day everybody wanted a piece of me.