Topsight
Hannu Rajaniemi
Short story
She waited for the others on one of the Lily’s landing stages. At 4.30 in the morning, it was so quiet she could hear the repurposed oil platform singing. Metal clanged on metal amongst its struts and legs, a rhythm that mixed with the rapid-fire whispers of windmills and the distant cries of the marsh birds. The floating city of the Estuary was still dark, apart from a few winking windows in the Lego-like living modules, piled precariously on top of the decommissioned platforms and ships moored on the mudflats off Canvey Island.
Kuovi tucked her fingers inside her sleeves against the cold breeze. Her mouth tasted of sleep and her eyes stung. In the dark, the jagged outlines of the platforms and the curving hulls of the ships looked more like what they actually were, she thought. The builders had covered the Lily with colourful housing units and a garden and clotheslines flapping erratically in the wind, but underneath it was still a thing of ugly rusty metal and concrete, made to suck oil from the ground until there was no more left. No matter how hard it tried to sing. It had cheated Kuovi when she first saw it, all bright colours and reflections in the water; now she knew better.
It didn’t matter any more. Today, she would go home. But there was one last thing left to do.
The low whine of an engine broke the silence. A small boat approached, a low shape against the lights of the Island. Kuovi waited until it slid to a stop by the landing stage. She held up her phone to cast dim light over the three figures on board.
"Hi," she said quietly.
Branjo sat at the back, hands in his lap, steering with a cheap halo – a clear plastic headband with brain-computer interface circuitry printed into it. He squinted at the light, chunky kick-boxer’s shoulders hunched, and gave Kuovi a barely perceptible nod. But Aoko got up, almost fell when the boat swayed beneath her, offered Kuovi a soft hand and pulled her in.
"Sorry for being late. Chris couldn’t get up. Lazy sod."
The bearded, heavyset man wearing a padded vest waved a hand at Kuovi. Aoko grinned, white teeth flashing in the dark.
"Sorry, buddy, but we need to do it early, before the sorcerers wake up. Did you bring it?"
Kuovi held up the small soul bottle she had run off from Mum’s fabber the day before. It was blue glass and had a delicate, arced neck.
Aoko took it between her hands and looked at it critically. "It’s a bit small," she said. "It’s not going to hold very much."
A thick gob of anger rose into Kuovi’s throat. She should have been be sleeping. She had one day left with her mum before going home. She had already said goodbye to Bibi. The whole home-bringing ritual thing had been Aoko’s idea. Some African tradition she had no idea Bibi’s people even cared about. To make sure her spirit was at rest. To make sure she would look after them all. To keep her ghost from being used for evil ends by sorcerers that were supposedly everywhere, just waiting for people to die.
"I thought Bibi would like it." She reached across the boat and grabbed the bottle.
"I think it’s nice," Chris said. He sniffed and started rolling a cigarette with thick fingers. "Like a bird."
Branjo said nothing.
Aoko sniffed. "All right, sweetie. Let’s get going. We don’t want to keep her waiting."
Branjo frowned: the boat started moving across the dark water, picking up speed.
Kuovi looked away. She hadn’t used the app for a month. Whenever she did, she would see Bibi’s thread, her digital ghost, automatically liking things she would like, even after the police had found her in the water, floating, face down. It took such a long time to die properly. It wasn’t fair.
When they approached the spot – in the middle of the estuary, far from the shore – there was the first hint of purple light in the sky. A small swarm of quadrotor drones followed the boat at a respectful distance: the silver discs of their blades caught the first rays of the sun. Bibi’s other friends, watching through Threads.
When Kuovi scooped up the water from the river, there was a leaden feeling in her gut. Her father had told her about funerals in old multiplayer games and the griefers who would raid them, diving down from the sky on dragons and flying mounts, raining spells on the mourners. But nothing happened. The water was cold. Her sleeve got wet. The bottle filled with a gurgle. Aoko laughed when Kuovi held it up, blue and wet and filled to the brim.
"That’s our girl," she said. "Now, let’s take her home."
On the way back, Kuovi huddled behind Chris’s back against the wind, and held the bottle close to her chest.
Inside, there was a cramped living room, a cupboard that served as the kitchen, and a small bedroom. A roughly fabbed low table. Mixed clothes Bibi brought from her charity-shop job. A gutted dragonfly drone sat on a foldable desk. The watercolour painting Kuovi had given Bibi was still there, the one with the godwits in flight. Later during the day, Amazon would come and pack everything up. Kuovi wondered if Branjo would keep the painting.
"Welcome home," Aoko said solemnly and set the bottle in the middle of the table.
Chris clapped Branjo on the back. "Did you hear that? Let’s get the party started." He took out his phone and started playing music on it, booming, heavy drum and bass. Branjo put his backpack on the table and took out plastic cups and three screw-topped bottles of vodka, poured for four. Chris lit a scented candle that sat on the table next to the soul bottle.
They all drank. Kuovi only tasted a little: it was sour and cheap. She pushed her hands into her armpits and sat as far away from the table as she could, under her painting, her back against the wall. The music made it easy to stay away from the conversation. She kept looking at the soul bottle, the blue hue she got from Bibi’s eyes, but Bibi wasn’t there.
"It was crazy," Chris was saying. "She just came to the office one day, asked me if I wanted to buy a city in Mongolia. I thought she was crazy, but it turned out there was a whole ghost city there, all wired and ready to go, control systems, ubicomp, you name it. Built for a supply-chain war somebody lost. They rented it out for testing city apps. I own it now. I was there last week. You haven’t played Pacman until you’ve played it with trams. I’m going to open-source the whole thing, give it to city hackers. Tiritror, it’s called."
"She was from somewhere called that," Branjo said. His voice sounded rough.
"Well, I don’t know where she was from," Aoko said, "but I know she was homesick. We worked at the Nero at the airport, see, and whenever we’d have a break, she’d go and look at the planes. I thought she liked them, but you see them all the time there, get used to them, you know? But she would always look. So I asked her. You know what she said? 'I look at the big snakes in the sky, fighting.'"
Branjo tossed back the contents of his cup, looked down, eyes dark. Aoko squeezed his knee. "She’s here with us, you know. Don’t be sad." Then she turned to Kuovi. "What about you, Finnish girl? Do you have a story about Bibi?"
Kuovi looked at their faces. Her head felt heavy. She stumbled up, hit her knee on the table; the soul bottle wobbled. Her heart jumped. "I need to go to the loo," she muttered, went to the bedroom and closed the door behind her. She bit down tears and lay down on the bed. The sheets were crumpled where Bibi had slept on the last day. She hugged the pillow to keep the sound of her crying down, wrapped her arms around it. It smelled of Bibi’s coconut shampoo, mixed with dust.
There was something under it, a soft, knitted thing, with a hard band inside it.
Bibi’s halo.
The door opened. Music and light poured in.
"You shouldn’t be here." Branjo looked at her, holding a bottle in one limp hand, and closed the door on them. "She never liked people looking at her things. I guess you don’t understand that," he said.
"I understand," Kuovi said quietly. But not why she was with you, she thought.
Branjo took a step forward, swaying. "Did you ever run? Really run? So hard that you can’t breathe, but if you stop, they catch you." He grabbed Kuovi’s shoulder with his free hand, suddenly. She let out a little shriek. Then Branjo let go and made a sound that was somewhere between a cough and a laugh. "Of course you didn’t."
Kuovi got up, a cold knot in her stomach, fingers around the phone in her pocket. She took a step towards the door, but Branjo made no move to follow. He sat down on the bed. It creaked under his weight.
"It wasn’t my fault," he said. "I set her up with some drone jobs, nothing bad. She was really good. Never anything dangerous. Never anything with the Jamaicans. It was just an accident." He dropped the bottle and squeezed his temples with his wrists. "Just a bloody stupid accident."
Kuovi ran. The aluminium of the walkways rang under her feet, long legs, long steps. The air cleared her head. She felt cold and light. The platforms and the ships were putting their morning faces on. The buses to the city roared past, white foam in their wake. Everything looked sharp and clear. It’s the last morning, that’s why, she thought.
She was breathing hard and sweating when she got to the Lily. It was not until she was taking the elevator up to Mum’s flat that she noticed she was still clutching the halo. She put it in her coat pocket. Her phone was buzzing as well, apologies from Branjo, a request to come back from Aoko, calls from Mum. She ignored them, walked through the rooftop garden and went inside.
Mörkö greeted her and rubbed its spiky spine against her legs.
Mum worked for BAE and the other big ones as a consultant. She liked to show pictures of Scooby Doo, the old remote-controlled anti-IED bot that soldiers had sacrificed themselves for: just a piece of metal with camera eyes. People saw themselves in everything, she said. She tried to make things that were purely Other.
Mörkö was one of her failures. It rolled onto its back to show its plastic belly, waved its six legs in the air. The rat brain emulation inside its ugly head was smart enough to know something was wrong.
"Kuovi?"
Mum turned on the lights. She had a cup of tea in her hand and she wore her Marimekko night shirt. Her golden hair was thin and wild. Mörkö ran to her, claws scrabbling on the floor.
"Kuovi, you should have said it was going to go on so late. Early. I was worried."
"I guess the sorcerers woke up," Kuovi said wearily. "I’m sorry. I’m going to go to bed."
"Well, it sounded like a nice ceremony," Mum said. "Did I ever tell you about a friend of mine who got his ashes made into memory diamonds, and then they entangled them at Caltech—"
"Mum." Kuovi closed her eyes.
"All right, all right. Sorry. Too late for stories." Mum took her hand. "Goodness. You’re cold. Have a shower, go to bed. But don’t sleep too late. I’ll make breakfast. I was hoping we could do something together before you go. I should have bought you clothes as well. And we never talked about trying again next year for the schools, I never spoke to Maggie at RCA, we could…"
Kuovi’s shoulders shook. Mum’s hand was rough and warm. She allowed herself to be hugged, just for a moment.
"Ssh, it’s going to be okay," Mum said.
Kuovi took a deep, shuddering breath. "I’ll need different clothes in Finland, Mum," she said weakly. "It’ll be winter there." Grey slush and rain and wind.
"It’s winter here too," Mum said.
"Good night," Kuovi said gently. She bent down and kissed her mother’s forehead. There was a faint 3D printer feedstock smell in her hair that never seemed to wash away.
Before Mum hugged her again, Kuovi pulled away, kicked off her shoes, went to her room and closed the door to stop Mörkö from getting in.
It was hard to get to sleep. The room looked empty without her things in it: everything was in clamshell suitcases, and the BeadBrick walls were bare. Maybe she would sleep on the plane. Maybe she would sleep when she was dead, face down in the water. Or in snow, if she was lucky. Snow would be better, cold and powdery. She missed snow.
She wished she could talk to Bibi about going home.
It was nice that Mum had waited. When she remembered to, she tried very hard. That’s why Kuovi had chosen to spend the gap year with her in the UK, that and the half-hearted attempts she had made to get into art schools. Dad would never say it, but he would be pleased that it hadn’t worked out.
One time, Mum had even asked Bibi to join them for dinner. Bibi showed up early and brought a present, an old paper book on the Canvey Island Monster from the charity shop where she worked on Sundays. Mum turned it in her hands, delighted. She clearly wanted to go away and make sketches of the strange, gilled, web-footed creature that had supposedly washed ashore eighty years before. But she made an effort and stayed. It was the perfect gift. Bibi had always known what to do, always what to give and say—
Kuovi sat up. Suddenly, she was completely awake. She picked up her coat from the floor and took out Bibi’s halo.
Bibi never did anything without a purpose.
She put the halo on. It was a little tight and got stuck in her long hair. For a moment nothing happened. Then there was a brief faint headache, like from being upside down. Was that supposed to happen? She had only tried a halo a couple of times, long ago, to play a silly sword-fighting game. Halos were illegal in Finland, after the Kokkola shooting.
The headache faded. It was pointless. There had to be a password, or some specific pattern you had to think about. She grabbed her phone and opened a sherlock app. "How do I unlock the halo of a… dead person?" she asked.
A lot of the answer was geekspeak, in the soft, hesitant voice of the app. It sounded like Kuovi would have to do something like open up Mörkö’s head, plug it into the halo and write a program that would search through the space of all possible thoughts. The police could do it. She quizzed the app further, asked about how to guess halo passcodes. Her stomach tightened up when she did; that sort of thing could be picked up by the cops. She shook herself. She would be out of the country in a few hours. She told the app to go on.
Halo passcodes could be anything. Memories. Dirty images. Old-fashioned passwords, typed out on a mental typewriter. Usually something strong you could summon up quickly. The sherlock said it wasn’t necessary to get it perfectly right. The halos were based on machine-learning algorithms. They had to be trained by their wearer, but the matching was fuzzy. Getting close might be enough.
Kuovi closed her eyes. It had always been so hard to see what was going on behind Bibi’s constant smile. She had no idea what Bibi would consider important. But if Bibi had wanted her or somebody else to have the halo, it had to be something obvious. She thought about the faces of Branjo, Aoko and Chris in succession. Nothing. What did Bibi have in her flat?
A painting, with a flock of godwits, taking to the air.
Kuovi thought about the birds, about the day she had met Bibi.
It was difficult to get close to the birds, and mostly she ended up with blurry shots of wings. She thought about using the phone in full lifelogging mode, and then just finding attractive frames that would work, but that would have been cheating.
People didn’t care much about that now, she thought: the ability to catch just the right moment, the right light and angle, with intuition and instinct. You could get apps trained off the brains of professional photographers to do it for you. But they couldn’t see for you.
That didn’t mean she could do it either. She looked at the latest sequence of shots. "Paska
," she swore. Rubbish again: just things, no pattern. A bunch of birds running around while marsh water sloshed inside her boots.
Somebody laughed. Kuovi’s cheeks burned. She stepped out of the water onto a small grassy clump of earth. She felt like a stork. She righted herself with some effort and tried to ignore the sound.
The clump crumpled under her feet and forced her to take several stumbling steps. Her boots took another deep slurp of marsh water. Kuovi almost collided with the person who had laughed. She was small – although everybody her age was small compared to Kuovi. Angular dark face, an old Afghan coat and a white knitted hat. She looked at Kuovi intently, her eyes two blue points that seemed to swallow the world.
"I’m sorry," the girl said. "But you do it wrong."
Kuovi sniffed. "I know," she said. She bit her tongue. Kuovi, master of snappy comebacks. Perhaps she should have a sherlock for that, like some people at school back in Finland. Only, once you all did that, you were left with nothing: a chorus of nonsense. She could do nonsense on her own.
Kuovi pushed past the girl – what point was there in living in the Estuary if you could not get away from annoying people when you wanted to?
"No, no," the girl said. "I will show you."
Kuovi stopped. The girl’s smile was warm. Kuovi snuck a peek at her phone. No trust-tingle in her palm revealed a Threads connection. It was a bit rude to have such a long googleblink, but the girl had been rude first.
"All right," Kuovi said finally. "Show me."
"You have to look up," the girl said.
Then she ran right at the flock of birds, waving her hands and shouting, coo-ee, coo-ee
. The birds took off in a cloud of fluttering wings and cries and beaks. Their shadows played on the water. Kuovi looked up. The flock made a beautiful arc above her, and there was a pattern in it, sudden like a smile. She lifted her phone.
The girl grinned at her and waved. "See?" she shouted.
A forest of apps opened in front of her, little icons like faces. She did not recognise any of them, except Threads, of course. The most used one was called Topsight. The icon was a bright blue eye. She tried to open it, but the halo fumbled, did not recognise the commands her brain was trying to give. There was feedback, too. It felt like the hangover she’d had after the night she and Bibi walked along the Canvey sea wall with a bottle of white rum. The halo was smart enough to open a calibration screen, made her move a ball around with her mind, flashed shapes and colours at her until the feeling subsided. She opened Topsight.
At first there was just a slight dizziness. The edges of her vision blurred. She felt strangely light, like in a dream sometimes when you decided to float up and look at things from above. Everything looked the same – except that there was a faint green outline around her suitcases. She looked at them.
Suddenly they became serpents of green light, flowing out of the door and beyond: highways of ghost suitcases that extended all the way to the horizon. She followed them with her gaze and was swept up: a bodiless viewpoint looking down a green line drawn across Britain and the North Sea, crisscrossed by a moving, shifting spiderweb of airplane routes. She blinked and was back in her body. Her legs trembled.
She sat back down on the bed and pulled on her trousers – and another winding light snake stretched across the earth, more complex this time: supply chains and logistics and manufacturing. She shook her head and the vision vanished again.
She pulled on dirty socks, staying focused on her room, and nothing moved this time, except for a vague awareness in the back of her head of a city in China that made all the socks in the world.
Light-headed, she opened her door. Mörkö had been sleeping behind it and scrambled up, did its morning dance around her. She could barely look at it: the little drone was an explosion of lines and facts and connections. Was this how Bibi had seen the world? Overlaid with all the invisible things everybody had forgotten about? There had to be more to it than that.
She went outside, to the neat flower rows and trees of the garden: interconnected boxes of metabolism and ecology, entwined with the sea and the sun and the sky.
Then she climbed up to the observation deck of the Lily. She looked at the hulls of the ships, and saw the shapes of their journeys, overlaid as a spiderweb over the earth. She saw the shifting of supply chains that were everywhere like living things: Bibi’s snakes dying and being born. She saw network links being severed, converging on the Estuary like snapped rubber bands, leaping back to their origin.
London, a great blaze in the mouth of the river. Emotion maps made of halo data spread over the city. Little stars where people were having sex. Great blue swathes of sleep. Early-morning commuters were tangled together in a network of yellow stress and anxiety. Financial markets crashed over them like waves. With a thought, she could go back and forth in time, like in Threads, except it wasn’t just a timeline of people; it was a timeline of everything. It showed how everything fitted together. But Threads were there too, social networks forming and dissolving. She saw how they fitted with the locations and the economics and the transportation and the great snakes of economy that swallowed all the little serpents of light that made the world work.
She saw everything, and it all made sense. It had to be more than just the app, there had to be a community out there, people who saw meaning in data and shared it with others. Suddenly, she had a vague awareness of others out there in the app. She wanted to talk to them, ask questions.
And then she saw Bibi.
She was there, in the weave of Topsight, a little thing that moved between big things, making connections, pushing, nudging. The app was not just for seeing, but for changing. The realisation was a tingle across Kuovi’s back. There were shifts in the picture in Bibi’s wake, like birds taking wing from the marsh, like a sudden smile.
Kuovi smiled back and waved.
"Kuovi?"
Mum, behind her. What would she see if she looked at her with Topsight?
But that wasn’t the right question.
Kuovi took off the halo and turned around. The world spun. Mum was there, holding her up. Kuovi blinked at the bright sunlight and cried.
"Sweetie, what’s wrong?"
"Nothing," Kuovi said, wiping her eyes. "What would you like to do today?"