Gregory Norman Bossert started writing fiction in 2009 at the age of forty-seven and sold his first story to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine that same year. His short story “The Telling” won the 2013 World Fantasy Award, and “Bloom” was a finalist for the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He lives just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco and wrangles spaceships and superheroes for the legendary visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, where his recent projects include Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Steven Spielberg’s upcoming adaptation of Ready Player One.
HIGHERWORKS
Gregory Norman Bossert
Dyer and The Wayward, slapping maps—
Camden Lock Market—Friday Morning
Dyer shifts against the wall—the bricks are rough and still night-cool in the shade of the bridge, and her jacket is thin across the shoulders, lining long gone and the leather worn smooth by years of brick stone iron concrete carbon—and breaks down the approaching couple without quite making eye contact.
The Wayward has got an eye out for cops or worse, blathering in his terrible Bert-the-chimney-sweep cod Cockney, sounds stoned but his brain is just like that. “—ghosts, you know? The nano, sometimes it don’t break down, it digs in, makes a nest in the parental lobe—”
“Parietal.” Dyer says. The couple are a matched Saxon blond—expensive haircuts, and the girl’s wearing Havilland genesplice chestnut wedges with live shoots trained around her calves, cost a thousand quid easy. Not cops, not dressed that way; more likely the sort that think that Drop parties damage property values, that nano should be reserved for medical and military purposes, that refugees belong safely sorted with their own kind in the camps in Dover. The sort to take a map now and call the cops later. But he has an active tat peeking out of the edge of his sleeve, and she’s got corneal implants, so Dyer risks it.
“Opt-in,” she says, quietly, and sees the guy’s teeth flash. The girl taps the guy’s thigh with one hand and reaches out with the other. Dyer slips a map from her jacket pocket, hits the girl’s hand—more a handshake than a slap, oh so proper British—and meets the girl’s gaze. Pixels swirl in her eyes, and recognition. “HigherWorks,” the girl mouths, and swats the guy’s leg again as they ramble on out into the sunlight by the canal.
Dyer blinks her own corneas full black. Fame is a fickle food, she thinks, and all the more so for USERs running illegal nano Drop parties. “Men eat of it and die,” she says to the crows along the canal bank.
“Woah,” The Wayward says. “Eat what now?”
Might be time to grow her hair out, or to go back to wearing masks at the Drops. But that never really works. The fans are too persistent, bless their stuttering over-stimmed hearts, and photos get out on the Drop forums:
SICK MINDS OF HIGHER WORKS UNMASKED AT LAST: DEE! DYER! THE WAYWARD!S HIMAGO! USERs OR HOME-GROWN?
DJ MRS. JOHN DEE AND NANOGODDESS HIGHER DYER SPOTTED DIGGING THROUGH THE BINS AT RESCYCLE . . . . WEG OT PHOTOS!
A SCANNER IN THE ‘WORKS: LONDON’S OPT-IN CHOREOMANIA CULTURE NETWORKS NANOTECHNOLOGY TO BEND BRAINS.
That last in the damn Guardian with a damn gallery of drone footage. Might be time to move on, was the truth of it. Amsterdam again or Helsinki, anywhere the refugee policies are less tattered and the fear flows a little less deep. Leave London to groups with less to lose.
As if summoned by that thought, Kal flits in under the bridge, gossip queen of the refugee scene, latest conquest in tow. “All right D? All right, Way? Doing the do tonight, yeah? New show, new rocket? You guys know Leelee? Slap me a pair?” All in one breath without pause for answers.
“All right, Kal,” Dyer says, slips her a couple of maps. Kal passes one to her companion, a willowwisp creature in frills and lace with improbable anime eyes that make Dyer think of zygomatic surgery and tabloid tales of “accidental ejection.” Leelee spins the map in twig fingers, details on one side and actual map on the other, tests the stickum that holds the fold closed with a glittered slice of fingernail.
Kal pinches the map closed. “No, babe, don’t open it. The pic inside is the neural cue, triggers the nano. Gotta wait wait wait for the party tonight, yeah? I’ll just hold it for you ’til then. These guys gonna shake your tuchus, and Dyer here, what she do gonna shake your brain.”
Leelee’s eyes get perilously wider. Dyer squinches her own to narrow slits in sympathy.
Kal leans in to kiss the air over Dyer’s cheek, drops the accent to say, “Hear about the two USERs pulled from the river last night? Crap beat out of them? That fascist turd Evan’s saying ‘send them back to the States, conscious or not.’ Watch yourself today. Anti-migrant rally in Parliament Square. Lotta noobs in town; big group got through the Chunnel last night. Street’s frigging twitchy, girl, like everyone’s dusted, seeing things. People where they shouldn’t be. Speaking of, some betty in a god-awful yellow hoodie been staring at you, up by the benches.”
Then louder, “Cannot wait for the Drop tonight. Whole bloody town needs some HigherWorks.” She exits left, Leelee trailing behind to look back at Dyer, eyes bleached to porcelain in the sudden sun.
Dyer rubs her scalp, checks the benches with a sideways glance, catches a yellow-hooded head just turning away.
A gaggle of girls in shiny machine-worn leatherette stumble into the shade, all trying to read off the same phone. Too young, Dyer thinks, and too loud. She riffles the edges of the maps in her pocket. She’s handed out a few dozen this morning. It’d be nice to get through the whole stack this morning, while folks still had time to plan their night.
“—no network nodes, no data stream, but the nano wants to connect, it needs the connection. How it’s designed,” The Wayward is saying. “So it starts connecting with anything, with all the wifi and broadband feeds and, dig this, with other ghost nano in other people’s brains. Not like a Drop party, there’s no beats, no video, no HigherWorks to ride the flow, keep everyone in sync, yeah? Just a jumble of flashbacks, visions, voices, thoughts, and then you drift untethered, like, you know, crowdsurfing, you go all scattered—”
“Doesn’t work that way, Way,” Dyers snaps: edgy because of Kal’s news, edgy because it’s a topic she doesn’t want to touch in public, edgy because she doesn’t like to lie. “Nano can’t do anything without neural cues and network nodes, and anyway your body breaks it down in a couple hours. Ghost nano, it’s urban legend. Suburban legend, mallrat stuff.”
She looks toward the girls in their glittery off-the-shelf counterculture. Behind them, by the bank of the canal, is a woman in Dyer’s own black leather/skin/hair like a thunderhead bruised eyes just shadows in a sharp fragile face and Dyer’s breath stops. If it’s not lust—Dyer left that behind with the rest in the dry husk of California—it’s something just as potent.
No yellow hoodie, though, which means someone else is watching her; the one thing Dyer didn’t leave in the States was the thing she fled: the fear. Don’t just run from, Dyer thinks, run to. She raises an eyebrow at the mystery woman, remembers that her eyes are full black, and leaves them that way. If a little anger creeps in between her brows, the corners of her mouth, well, that’s just the flip side of the fear.
The woman lifts her chin just a fraction, nothing fragile in that motion, and Dyer feels a sudden dizzy doubling like she’s been drawn out in overlapping circles, that Drop party buzz of anticipation, of connection.
The Wayward says, “Leave it, mate, she ain’t interested. Um, innit?”
Dyer turns, ready to give Way a “shut up already” roll of her eyes, finds a face in the way—heavy jowled and swirled blue with faux prison tats. The guy blinks, does a cartoon double-take.
“Bugger me. Thought you was a bloke,” he says.
“Nope and nope,” Dyer says.
“Works for me,” says the blue tats’ companion, baring her luminescent teeth at Dyer over his shoulder.
“She ain’t interested, whichever way you’re rigged,” Way says. “Are you, Dyer?”
Dyer gives him the “shut up already” look now, but it’s too late.
“Dyer. You’re HigherWorks,” the teeth gasp—even her tongue glows white—and blue tats gets a look that says maybe he can overlook Dyer’s not being a bloke after all.
“Opt-in tonight,” Dyer says, and slaps a pair of maps into the hand that snakes around blue tats’ waist, looking left to avoid eye contact, to find the woman by the canal. Nowhere she could have gone in that brief moment, but she’s not there. Deleted, swiped away, and in her place are three men in bespoke suits, hands in pocket and practiced leers on their faces. Dyer’s first thought is Immigration, but they’ve got Union Jack pins on their lapels— junior partners out of the City, most likely, looking to score points with management by pasting a couple of USERs to a pulp.
She reaches back to tap The Wayward, feels his dreads shift against her shoulder as he nods. “Two more, other side of the bridge,” he says quietly.
Dyer shuts her eyes, inhales slowly. Blue tats’ breath is stale beer and bad curry for breakfast, but he’s over six feet of solid meat, and his glowstar companion is razor sharp and twitchy with stims, and they are both as London as the King’s Own Cobblers. Dyer tucks her arm around them both—desperate measures for Dyer, touching, but she’s thinking about bodies bleeding into the Thames—says, “Buy us a pint, then?”
2042-05-18T10:22:00+01:00+51.541327-0.145319
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—SCAN SUMMARY: FACE MATCH 47% SIG. DELTAS HAIR COLOR N.A. SHAVED-EYE COLOR N.A. CORNEAL IMPLANTS—GESTURE SCORE 62% SIG. DELTAS WEIGHT -12 KILOS HEIGHT +9CM POSSIBLE TIB/FEM BONE EXTENSION
• NOTE: ID SCORES LOW CONFIDENCE DUE CONTACT DISTANCE & CROWD COVER—SEE ATTACHED IMAGES
• ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE
— CRAZY FLIGHT, EDGE OF SPACE, YO, JETLAGGED OUT OF MY GOURDDAY *STARTED* WEIRD—SOME GUY COMES UP TO ME AT THE AIRPORT “HEY JOCELYN” KISSES ME STRAIGHT ON THE MOUTH—I’M LIKE “I DO *NOT* KNOW U SO F-OFF”—FEEL WACKED LIKE I’M COMING DOWN WITH SOMETHING SEEING GHOSTS OUT OF THE CORNER OF MY EYE—GOTTA BE A LOTTA GHOSTS HERE, YEAH? PLACE EVEN *SMELLS* OLD—NO FIBERBOARD NO BURNING TIRES NO PEPPERSPRAY
— TOOK FOUR HOURS TO GET THROUGH CUSTOMS—NO ONE GOT THE F-ING MEMO ABOUT THE NEW IP TREATY GUESS THE BRITS ARE KEEPING IT SECRET CUZ EVERYONE HATES THE STATES HERE—AS IF WE CAN’T HATE EACH OTHER JUST FINE ON OUR OWN, THANKS—SOME GUY ON THE STREET CALLED ME A USER, LIKE HE CAN SEE TRACKS THROUGH MY HOODIE, TURNS OUT IT MEANS U.S. ECONOMIC REFUGEE—I’M LIKE “SCREW U” BUT I GUESS I FIT THE DESCRIPTION IF I WASN’T HERE ON UR DIME AND UR VISA
— MIGHT ALL PAY OFF, THOUGH, CUZ THAT TIP SEEMS LEGIT-JUST BEEN HERE 12 HOURS AND I’VE ALREADY GOT A POSSIBLE HIT ON VANCE HERSELF—GOT A FEW PHOTOS BUT I COULDN’T GET CLOSE AND THESE CONTACT CAMS U GAVE ME ARE CRAP-UR FANCY SCAN APP SAYS AROUND 50% MATCH—SHE’S HAD SERIOUS BODY WORK AND SHE’S GOT THIS CRAY CRAY LOOKING SURFER DUDE WATCHING HER BACK AND SHE’S EDGY As HELL SO DON’T START SPENDING THE MONEY YET-OH WAIT, I *HAVE*-1 DON’T SCORE THAT BOUNTY I AM SO SO VERY DOOMED
— KISSES-JO
• ATTACHMENT: IMAGES (7)— <CLICK To VIEW>
Dyer and Mrs. John Dee, brooding nano—
Camden Catacombs—Friday Noon
“Mrs. John Dee, you said no self-respecting Londoner would be caught dead in Camden in the daylight,” Dyer says. She’s sitting on the microassembler in an attempt to block the bright, busy control panel from view.
Mrs. John Dee tugs a blue floral frock on over her head, sets her glasses on her nose, peers over them at the folks staggered about the catacomb chamber.
“Dyer, love, none of these people are self-respecting.”
She sheds a heavy studded cuff, the last of her work uniform, and toes the box of leather, chrome, and vinyl under the workbench. As the only legal Brit in HigherWorks, she picks up spending money selling LPs to tourists who can’t play them. The money’s okay, and the contacts in the community of artists and musicians working the markets are better. The required punk attire—“the hoary old eighties,” Mrs. John Dee calls it, “and heavy on the hoar”—is more suited to Dyer’s taste, but Dyer’s forged ID codes aren’t up to the scrutiny required by the Economic Refugee act.
“And you said the catacombs are off limits due to the danger of flooding from the canal.”
“A positive death trap,” Mrs. John Dee agrees. “Which is why you had to pick three locks when we first moved in. No one dares come down here.”
Paint-tagged kids chase each other with rattling spraycans. Students ring their teacher under the dim hanging bulbs, dutifully examining the rails set into the brick floor where horse carts once rolled. A family dozes on a blanket, surrounded by the remains of a picnic. And what looks for all the world like a tour group in bright Brazilian colors mills about under the vaulted galleries, kept away from the equipment by some hastily stacked boxes and Dyer’s glare.
Mrs. John Dee points at the massive slab of brick and ironwork that supports the far side of the underground warehouse. “Look, that wall was blank when we got here. That’s a sick canvas, would’ve been tagged top to bottom had this place been open.”
They’d moved in three weeks ago, and the wall is already covered, a collage of overlapped graffiti, bills pasted up and torn down again, what looks like bird crap even though they’re underground, a hanging pair of seriously soiled trousers that none of the group dared get near enough to take down. A little girl with perfect doll hair and knock-off Day-Glo Doc Martens is staring up at the wall. Dyer and Dee watch as she leans forward and carefully sticks her gum in one of the few remaining spots of bare brick.
Dyer sighs and shifts to cover a neon green popup on the panel. “Should have had my hips widened when I had my legs done,” she says.
Mrs. John Dee scrubs her mohawk into its natural teal tangle, pulls her tablet out of her bag. “Bollocks. Your hips are the eighth architectural wonder. They just need some company. Budge up, love.” She pulls herself up onto the microassembler next to Dyer, peeks under her arm at the control panel. “What are we hatching?” she asks.
“Soundsystem, all for you,” Dyer says. “Bud interface, cochlear induction. Everything except the auditory cortex stuff. I ran that in with the visual batch.”
Mrs. John Dee does a little shimmy on the microassembler hatch. “Breed, my lovelies, breeeeed,” she says. And adds, as the little Day-Glo girl copies her move across the will-be dancefloor, “We’re going to jail, aren’t we?”
“No, you’re going to jail,” Dyer says. “If the police decide we’re causing enough of a nuisance, they’ll haul you up for some Section 63 nonsense. ‘Repetitive beats.’”
“‘Repetitive beats’ my bucephalus bouncing bum,” Mrs. John Dee says with another shimmy. “Did you even listen to the track I—”
“The Wayward, Shimago, me, we’ll be put in the Dover Center to be beaten down for a year, deported back to the US and then things will really get bad. Worse, if the UK rejoins the IP treaty zone.”
“Sorry, love, shouldn’t laugh, I know. But really, what else can we do?” She waves at the crowd.
The students have filed out into the tunnels, and the Brazilians have expanded like vapor to fill the available space.
“Move on,” Dyer says.
Mrs. John Dee frowns, prods her tablet with a tattered teal fingernail. “I’m not at all sure I like the idea of running, just because the bloody fascists have voted themselves in and our own dear fans are all too, um, fanatic.”
“It’s not running,” Dyer says. She gestures at the billowing Brazilians. “It’s just the flow. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of blah blah.’ You’re a DJ, Dee, you know about the flow.”
In the gaps between the Brazilians, she sees the shine of black leather under thunderhead hair, glittering coal-smoke eyes. Flashback to this morning’s vision, the impossibly disappearing woman. Dyer’s chest thrums.
She slips off the microassembler. “Be right back. If the panel beeps three times, hit the green button.”
“Oh, ah, okay. Oh dear,” Mrs. John Dee says behind her.
Dyer follows the leather gleam across the dancefloor, loses it in the gloom and bustle, reaches that graffitied far wall. No one is there, nothing like that fragile face, not in the crowd or under the vaults on either side. Like this morning at the canal, she’s dissolved away.
“She show me the spot for my gum,” the doll girl says in a stage whisper, blue eyes serious under straight-cut bangs, then she laughs and swirls back into the crowd.
Well, what were you expecting on a day turned weird and wired, Dyer thinks. “What else?” Dyer asks the wall.
The wall responds with a flicker: a scrap of smartpaper, smeared under sellotape and glitching all along the torn edge. Dyer tugs it from the brick, squints at the scrolling text. It’s some sort of government document, a snarl of nested digital sigs and certs and then the title, PROVISIONAL AGREEMENT ON THE RENORMALIZATION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GRE—
Dyer tries to scroll up, searching for a date, but the paper glitches, resyncs on a list captioned PATENTS OF SPECIAL CONCERN, and there at the top is “A PROCESS FOR THE MUTUAL SELF-REPAIR OF NANOMECHANISMS” BY LEANNA VANCE and then it’s her eyes glitching, flashes of memory in time to her pounding heart of those last worst days in the US, a sudden sinking nausea, a tinnitus squeal. The squeal stops, starts again, and Dyer realizes it’s not in her head; it’s coming from across the room. She pushes back through the Brazilians to find Mrs. John Dee, all five ferocious feet of her, restacking the box barricade around their workspace, pausing after every box to glare down the vaults.
Dyer sweeps up a box, lifts it over Mrs. John Dee’s head to the top of the stack. “What happened?”
“Some bloody bint knocks the boxes over, ‘oh, excuse me,’ she says, and when I get up to sort it out she nips in to play with your panel there, face first and wide eyed.”
“Contact cams,” Dyer says, nausea returning.
“‘That’s a bit of none of your business,’ I said, and she doesn’t even blink. ‘You deaf?’ I ask, and give her a nudge in the kidneys, in case she really was.” Mrs. John Dee demonstrates with a vicious jab of her elbow.
Dyer steps back out of range. “So?”
“So since her hearing was apparently bollocksed, I figured I’d give it a tune up.” She patted her tablet. “I was just setting up audio network tests. I figured if she was rigged for cams, she’d have bud implants as well. I boosted the volume to eleven.”
“Ah,” Dyer said. “That was feedback, then, that I heard. From forty feet away.”
“Her head will be ringing for a fortnight. Ought to put a spanner in her party plans.”
“You think she’s a nano cook?”
“If she were a fan, or paparazzi, she’d have gone for our lovely visages, not the gear. She’s a bizarro you from some rival Drop party crew.”
Dyer’s thinking of that fade-away face, those eyes. “She look like me? Only with hair?” She waves her fingers over her head like clouds drifting. “Did she, uh, fade?”
Mrs. John Dee shrugs. “She looked like a yellow hood-up hoodie. Not so much fading as slinking away in disgrace, tail between her legs. Lovely tail, though. All’s well that ends well.” Mrs. John Dee demonstrates with another shimmy.
Dyer makes a dubious “mmm.” She fishes the scrap of smartpaper out of her back pocket, but it’s gone completely glitched, just a scattering of pixel dust.
2042-05-18T12:09:00+01:00 +51.541709-0.147667
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—SUPPORTING EVIDENCE IP VIOLATIONS SEE NOTE
• CONTACT: TARGET (CONFIRMED)—MARIAM EBADI UK7D1B4GU230011—PRIORITY NA RUMORED ASSOC. LEANNA VANCE C.F.—UK RESIDENT ID CONFIRMED VIA DIRECT SCAN EMBEDDED TAG
• NOTE: TARGET OPERATING ALPHET MODEL X50EU MICROASSEMBLER RUNNING UNRELEASED OS-LICENSE MoDULE DISABLED-SEE ATTACHED IMAGES
• NOTE: UNREGISTERED NNDA PROFILES IN VIOLATION OF 21USC2401—SEE ATTACHED IMAGES
• ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE
— GOT THE BITCH-YEAH YEAH NO PHYsiCAL ID YET NO DOCUMENTED DISTRIBUTION BUT WHO ELSE IS GONNA BE RUNNING ALPHET.COM BETA CODE WITH CUSTOM MODULES? AND THE LICENSE MOD IS AXED SO THAT’S IP VIOLATION RIGHT THERE *AND* SHE’S COOKING DELIVERY AGENTS WITH UNREGISTERED PAYLOADS—DO ME A FAVOR AND SEE IF THERE’S A BRIT LAW ABOUT THAT SO I DON’T HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE TREATY B.S. AGAIN
—ALSO THIS EBADI BIMBO IS HACKING EARBUD IMPLANTS—*GOT* TO BE A BRIT LAW AGAINST THAT
—SEE *TOLD* U I WAS A GOOD INVESTMENT
—KISSES—jo
• ATTACHMENT: IMAGES (5)<CCLICK To VIEW>
Dyer, Shimago, and Mrs. John Dee, rocket in pocket—
Mornington Crescent—Friday Afternoon
Dyer levers the backpack over the exit turnstile at arm’s length, ducks the bristling bouquet of carbonfiber antennae that spill from the top.
“Fragile,” Shimago reminds her.
“So are my eyeballs,” Dyer says.
Shimago doesn’t have to lift his pack; the turnstile only comes up to his thighs. Mrs. John Dee drags her duffel thumping behind her.
“Why is the helium so heavy?” she grumbles. “Ought to just float along. Maybe if I let some out into the bag.”
“No,” Dyer and Shimago say in unison. “You just want to huff it and sing in a squirrel voice,” Dyer adds.
“And then I shall just float along,” Mrs. John Dee agrees happily.
“Anyway, that’s the lightest bag,” Dyer says.
“That’s another thing,” Mrs. John Dee says. “Why is the rocket so heavy?”
“It’s not—”
“A rocket. Yes, love, but that’s what I call it because the first one was such a lovely rockety shape.”
“—Not heavy,” Shimago continues. “Just big.”
“Sixteen times the network bandwidth of the last one,” Dyer says. “Twice as many nano dispersers.”
“And your subsonic driver,” Shimago says. “The entire carbon outer shell is the resonator. 120DbA at 20 Hertz.”
“Ace. Teeth shall be rattled,” Mrs. John Dee says, out of breath and a few steps behind. She’s turning circles as she walks, duffel swinging.
“Wait ’til you see it flying, with the spotlights and the screens running,” Dyer says. “It’s perfect, looks just like the film. Only thing we couldn’t find is a clean recording of the announcer. You’ll have to record Shimago when we get back to the catacombs.”
Shimago booms, “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.”
Mrs. John Dee is still spinning. Dyer turns around. “Dee, what are you—”
“USER freak. Fuck off home.”
Dyer turns back. Whoever’s speaking is hidden behind Shimago’s bulk. She leans left to see a dozen pimpled punklings in custom-printed carbon, active tats a riot of football logos and Union colors.
“Tha’s right, you heard ’im, you yank sket,” one of them said to Dyer.
Shimago sets a hand on the lead punkling’s shoulder. “Balderdash, my lad. Do I look like a economic refugee, American or otherwise?” he says, in his best King’s English.
Shimago looks like six-foot-four two hundred and fifty pounds of gear-pierced lcd-tattooed fully networked Tongan-Californian rugby-playing airship-piloting Drop-partying choreomaniac. His hyphens alone outweigh these punks, Dyer thinks and bares her teeth.
“Dunno, she fit though, innit?” one says, gaze dropping down under Dyer’s.
“Issit?” the lead one says, squinting. Shimago shifts his grip to the kid’s head, palms it like a ball and turns it upward.
“Since you seem so full of perceptions upon our character, perhaps you would like to present them to the authorities,” Shimago says.
“Wha?”
“He taking you to the po-po,” another explains.
“I’m just sayin’ I’d mash that,” the one staring at Dyer says.
Mrs. John Dee comes spinning past Dyer, takes the lead punkling out at the knees with the duffel; he dangles from Shimago’s hand like a doll. The other punklings step back from the swinging bag. “You want a mashing?” she asks the starer. “You cheeky little muppet. The lot of you in our ends, up from, what, Surrey? Think you’re hard because you spent the money Mummy gave you on tats you can turn off again before you get home? She’s hard.” That with a hand out toward Dyer. “She eats suburban white boys like you for breakfast.”
“Not hungry,” Dyer says. She steps up even with Dee. The starer only comes up to her chin; she looks straight over his head at the crowd pushing past in the too bright sunlight, all willfully or carelessly oblivious. But there’s a knot of anxious faces across the street that have noob USER written all over them, pinned in place like the sun’s a spotlight. Lucky the punklings hadn’t run into them instead.
“What are you doing here?” Dyer wonders under her breath. She means the USERs, stumbling through London on this unsettled day of days, but the punklings react with shrugs and awkward shuffles. “Dunno,” one says. “Heard this voice said check those three, they’s yanks.”
Shimago sets his captive punkling upright. “A case of mistaken identity,” he says. “Easily corrected by a conversation with the police about anti-social behavior.” Shimago gives the leader a gentle push, and the kid stumbles forward, trips over Dee’s duffel again, bumps shoulders with the starer. It’s not entirely a bluff; Dyer and Shimago’s forged IDs will hold up to a quick fingerprint or retinal scan. But they’re likely to fail the sort of full biometric series that Immigration runs, and it’s been one of those days.
A too-long moment as the punkling weighs the cost of confrontation versus the loss of face. Finally he mutters “freak” and shuffles down the sidewalk without looking back; his mates straggle behind him. The starer stays a beat longer, finally makes eye contact. Dyer blinks her corneas clear, looks down at him until he blushes and turns away.
“A new life awaits us in a golden land of opportunity and adventure,” Dyer says.
Shimago sighs, hefts his pack on his shoulder, heads off perpendicular to the punkling’s retreat.
“Mrs. John Dee, you are yourself from the lovely green lawns of Surrey, are you not?” he asks.
“I was,” she says. “But Mrs. John Dee is from here and now, Shimago.”
The duffel nudges Dyer’s leg. Mrs. John Dee is walking backward, head swinging like a radar dish. “Dee, what the hell are you looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. John Dee says. “Whatever you’ve been looking for since this morning. Which is, judging from the look on your face, a much bigger deal than some sixth form twits a-twitting.”
“I don’t know what . . . ” Dyer almost says “you’re talking about,” but that’s neither fair nor true. “What it is. Somebody following me. Somebodies. An IP bounty hunter. A parallel me from some other dimension. Maybe Way is right and it’s ghost nano.”
“Ghost nano is an urban legend,” Shimago says.
Dyer growls, strides five steps to the next road crossing, stops cold. Mrs. John Dee bumps into her from behind. Shimago stops next to Dyer. His look of gentle concern grows less gentle as he looks up from her to the street.
On the far side of the crossing are two uniformed officers of the UK Immigration Service, conspicuously not cops courtesy of their berets and their semi-automatics. The two are staring straight at them through the stream of crossing pedestrians.
Mrs. John Dee wedges herself between Dyer and Shimago. “You’re not seriously waiting for the walk light?” she says. Then she follows their gaze and adds, “Oh. Oh dear. But they can’t stop us unless they have cause.”
Shimago says, “Crossing against the light is cause.”
“And not crossing is suspicious behavior,” Dyer says.
As if summoned by her statement, the two UKIS officers step off the curb. Dyer fights the sudden urge to look over her shoulder; looking like she’s going to run could escalate a bad situation into a fatal one.
And then she looks anyway, because she knows what she’ll see: the fragile-faced woman, from the canal, from the catacomb wall, standing in carbon black relief against a white sunlit storefront. Not a woman, though, is it? Not a rival nano cook, not some patent-tracking bounty hunter in from the US. It’s something else entirely, that outline drawn flat against the concrete like an opening, like a door. With no conscious decision Dyer takes Mrs. John Dee’s hand, tugs her toward the figure even though it’s already fading to a shimmering afterimage. There’s a real door there, though, behind the figure’s promise, and Dyer grabs the handle, looks back to see if Shimago is following.
The impossible shape is now standing in the crossing, still no more than a silhouette: the gleam of leather below and eyes above, and as the UKIS officers step up behind her the bright sudden slash of a smile.
And as she smiles there’s a pop pop pop from overhead, loud enough to sting, smoke and a shower of glittering fragments. A beat of silence, then the crowd in the street rears up screaming and crashes down together like a wave. Another round of pops. Still on her feet, Dyer can see that it’s the street surveillance drones blowing out, one by one, but for the folks on the ground it’s cause for more panic. The UKIS officers struggle to keep their footing as they track Dyer through the scrum. One fails and takes the other down with him. The impossible woman’s hair fades with the smoke; the gleam of her smile fragments like the falling debris.
Mrs. John Dee tugs Dyer’s hand. She and Shimano are already through the door.
The shop is a maze of booths, one of the miniature markets that has spilled out from the fount of crass that is Camden. Dyer, Dee, and Shimago take turns leading each other, their packs bumping past jackets, studded belts, badge-bedecked bags, and the butt end of the twentieth century spelled out in T-shirts. A rear door leads to an alley that dead-ends in a covered court, another manufactured market. They take refuge in a coffee shop whose postered windows provide cover.
“No sign of them,” Mrs. John Dee says, and smooths back down the corner of a peeled-up poster with slightly shaky fingers. “Bloody hell, Dyer, bloody hell. What has the world come to, we can’t cross the damn street without being afraid?”
Shimago is back from the counter, steaming mugs in hand. “Ah, Mrs. John Dee, this—” he starts in his own gentle accent.
Dyer cuts in, still half-blind with afterimages, or maybe it’s anger flooding up like the crowd’s panic. “Mariam, damn it, this has always been our world, Jonah’s and mine, afraid to cross the damn street. You’re just coming to it, and you’re just a tourist. We live here, our whole lives.”
Shimago blinks at this use of real names, but sits and says nothing.
“Back in California, even before everything collapsed, even when Jonah and I worked at Alphet in the shiny heart of the goddamn shiny future, my own lab and a billion dollar budget, even then I was afraid to walk down the street alone.”
Dyer is thumping the table; coffee splashes, scalds her fingertips.
“And then the Crash and it all fell down, lawyers picking over what’s left and goddamn IP bounty hunters with a take-down notice in one hand and a taser in the other, people saying they were scared of losing everything, but they meant their 401k, their house, their car.
“The day of the Wall Street hack, police car following me fifteen blocks from the BART to my house even though there’s fucking fascist militia burning houses right down the street, in Berkeley, for fuck sake, finally stops me fifty feet from my front door—for jay-walking is what they said, meaning I crossed the neighbor’s driveway while being black, never mind I’m in a business suit and five hundred dollar shoes. Savings, house, car, those shoes, I was way past that. I was scared of losing my life. Every damn day.
“And now it’s happening here in your face and yes, you’re scared. You should be, with government caving in to the thugs and bigots. But you can always get on the train back to Surrey. We don’t have that option. All we can do is move on.”
Mrs. John Dee is pale, and the shaking has traveled up her arms to her shoulders. Shimago gives a small nod, blots up the spilled coffee with his napkin, and with that, Dyer’s anger, which is never gone, loses its focus. She puts her hand on Dee’s.
“The hell, Mariam, I know this is nothing you haven’t heard from your own grandparents. Look, having left all that bullshit behind, having come here with nothing but myself and that self so changed I barely recognize it, I found refuge. I’m not talking about the EU and their half-ass US Economic Refugee act, I mean you, Mrs. John Dee, hottest damn DJ in London, you and Shimago and The Wayward.”
Dyer snorts, rubs her scalp.
“If I could send my ghost back to appear to myself on the sidewalk that day, tell myself that I was going to end up cooking nano for some damn crazy underground psychedelic performance art rave heaven-help-me Drop party, and that, not developing corporate patents, was the way to the goddamn shiny future . . . ”
Shimago holds up his mug. “HigherWorks,” he says.
Mrs. John Dee and Dyer clink their cups against his. “HigherWorks.”
Mrs. John Dee slurps her tea, sighs and shuts her eyes, opens them again, and says, “Dyer, love, sorry but I have to ask. How did you get away from the cops? On the sidewalk that day, I mean.”
Now Dyer is getting the shakes, as the adrenaline drains. She sets her cup down before it splashes again. “I stood there, hands on hips, and said ‘Seriously? One of the biggest days in American history, and you want to spend it hassling me?’”
Mrs. John Dee hugs her mug to her chest and says, “Bad. Ass.”
Shimago nods again.
But Dyer shakes her head, thinking of that knot of noob USERs in the sunlight. “Lucky,” she says.
2042-05-18T15:22:00+01:00 +51.535956-0.139593
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—SUPPORTING EVIDENCE IP VIOLATIONS SEE NOTE
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—JONAH PUPUNU—PRIORITY A APH2035.Z72105
• NOTE: EVIDENCE USE OF NANO AGENTS AGAINST UK GOV PROPERTY— SEE ATTACHED IMAGE ARCHIVE
• ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE
— HOLY CRAP WAS ALPHET DEVELOPING SOME SORT OF ANTI-SECURITY NANO? MUST HAVE BEEN RIGHT? SOMEONE JUST BLEW OUT A COUPLE DOZEN SURVEILLANCE DRONES AND THOSE NAZI IMMIGRATION POLICE HAVE AN ALERT OUT FOR-DIG THIS-”WOMAN AFRICAN DESCENT SHAVED HEAD” AND “MAN PACIFIC ISLANDER UNUSUALLY LARGE”—*GOTTA* BE VANCE AND PUPUNU
— THOSE SAME NAZI IMMIGRATION POLICE GRILLED ME FOR AN HOUR FOR TAKING PIX OF THE DRONES—SOME SORT OF MIGRANT RIOT THING GOING ON—PRETTY INTENSE—STILL, NO GUNS, NO GAS, NO BODIES HANGING FROM STREETLIGHTS, so IT’s F-ING PARADISE, YEAH? WOULD BE, IF I COULD STAY HERE
— KISSES—JO
• ATTACHMENT: IMAGEs (22)<CLICK To VIEW>
(Dyer) and The Wayward, displacing—
Camden Catacombs—Friday Afternoon
“—Ghosts, you know?” The Wayward says, sounds stoned because he is, during this quiet time with most of the setup done but the Drop still hours away.
Wants to connect, he hears Dyer say.
“Right? Me too,” Way says, prodding his tablet. He’s testing the camera grid, the web of stickum cams and microdrones that he uses to monitor the groove. The sights and sounds might be nano-created illusions inside the dancers’ heads, but the way they move, their reaction to the stream and to each other, all that feeds back into the rhythm of The Wayward’s images and Mrs. John Dee’s beats, which stream back into the crowd until the whole system, sight and sound and moving bodies all strung together by Dyer’s nano, drops into yet a higher sync.
“Higher and higher,” Way says. And then, “Spooky,” because the cameras are glitching, flashes of images from elsewhere, bits of broadcast—a listing overloaded boat, a red-faced crowd in Parliament Square—snips of skewed text, feeds from street drones, what looks like Shimago, Dee, and Dyer standing in a sea of crawling people; but that doesn’t make sense because Dyer’s here, somewhere. Saw her just now, Way thinks, or was that in the camera feed?
Over by the wall, he hears Dyer say.
“Right,” Way says. “The spooky wall.” Spooky in the way that wall had developed, like an photographic print, the image emerging point by point, line by line out of the blank brick, a series of random acts teasing pattern, purpose. He’d been taking snapshots of it over the last week, a time-lapse to work into the performance stream tonight, layered over the real wall. Layers of reality, that’s the “Higher” in HigherWorks, Way thinks.
The wall is not quite ready, he hears Dyer say.
“Ready for her closeup,” Way says. “Gotta get some closeup textures for the vid-ay-oh stream.” He gets up and wobbles across the bricks to the far side of the warehouse. A flock of microdrones spiral over his head like an exclamation point. Even though it’s underground, the warehouse has headroom; iron beams hold brick vaults forty feet overhead.
“Over my head,” Way says, head tilted up to look up at the wall. A diagonal splash of paint and paper runs from the floor almost up to the ceiling. Last week Mrs. John Dee chased a spraycan-armed drone around the warehouse with a broom, the rest of them doubled over laughing, though Dyer pointed out it was hardly their place to complain: They didn’t belong there either, no one did.
Every place belongs to no one, he hears Dyer say.
“Just movin’ through,” Way agrees. He takes a snapshot, a poster pasted over the uneven brick, realizes it’s an ad for an anti-migrant protest, tears the poster down leaving a jagged edge that reads “migrant pro,” and takes a photo of that instead.
“That’s us, Dyer. Migrant pros,” he says.
Refugee act, he hears Dyer say.
“Yeah, I mean refugees, but what did you say the other day? Everyone on the move is running from something and running to something. Just the flow, yeah? I ever play you The Wayward? The music, I mean. Harry Partch, he was a hobo. Like you, now I think of it. He had degrees, research grants, just like you, just like you he left it behind to ride the rails in the Depression. The first one, I mean, the black-and-white one. Left the mainstream behind after that, made his own musical instruments, his own scales, his own kind of performances. Just like us.”
Way scoops a glittery blob of something off the brick, looks for a spot, finally peels up a sticker and re-sticks it a foot higher, smears the blob in its place.
“Anyway, seemed like a good name to take on, yeah? Way-ward, like where I’m headed is the way itself.”
That thought makes him want to take another hit, but he doesn’t know where the spliff has gone, can’t actually remember rolling one, but man, he’s rolling on something. He reaches up on tiptoes to peel away the bottom half of another poster.
“He was from Oakland like you, too, Dyer. Harry Partch was. But he grew up down near me in LA. Man, I miss that place sometimes. Not the bits where I was sleeping on the beach and eating out of, well, you know. But, hey, all this . . . ”
Way waves vaguely at the wall, squints, pulls a piece of gum from down around his knees and sticks it at eye level.
“I mean HigherWorks, you guys, like you always say, worth running to, even if I started with the running from.”
The future is displacement, he hears Dyer say.
“Right on. HigherWorks, displacing the future.” Which doesn’t sound quite right. He pulls a stickum camera out of his pocket, flies it across the surface of the wall, saying “displace, displace, displace,” but the word doesn’t sound any more right with repetition. He lands the camera on a brick, just a few feet above the floor and pointing down. “Dis place,” he says. “Hey, Dyer, get it?”
But Dyer isn’t here at all, she’s over there, coming in from the tunnels with Shimago and Mrs. John Dee, lugging what has got to be Shimago’s new rocket.
“Huh,” The Wayward says.
“Hey, Way,” Dyer says. “Everything ready?”
He looks up at the wall. “Yeah,” he says.
2042-05-18T16:29:00+01:00 +51.541709-0.147667
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—SUPPORTING EVIDENCE IP VIOLATIONS SEE NOTE
• NOTE: EVIDENCE INTENT TO DISTRIBUTE UNLICENSED NNDA SEE ATTACHED IMAGE ARCHIVE
• ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE-1 KNOW U R THINKING I’M GONNA BE WORKING OFF YOUR LOAN FOREVER BUT THINK AGAIN, LOOKS LIKE I’LL WRAP THIS UP MY FIRST DAY—THIS HIGHERWORKS GROUP WITH VANCE AND PUPUNU PLANNING SOME SORT OF RAVE TONIGHT-1 GOT A PIC OF THE FLYER IT HAS A MAP WITH AN X-MARKS-THE-SPOT-APPARENTLY THEY LITERALLY *SPRAY* THE NANO OVER THE AUDIENCE-ALL I GOTTA DOO IS sHOW UP WITH A sCANNER AND A CAMERA AND A PAIR oF CUFFS
— KISSES—JO
• ATTACHMENT: IMAGE (I)-<LICK To VIEW>
Dyer, cueing—Camden Catacombs—Friday Evening
Dyer tucks up her knees as The Wayward and Mrs. John Dee shove the last couple of cardboard boxes into place. She’s under the plastic folding table they use as a workbench, with the brick of the catacomb wall behind her, the humming microassembler to the right, and the boxes sealing off the other two sides. It doesn’t actually have to be dark and quiet for neural cue test, but it makes the measurements more accurate. Anyway, it’s part of the HigherWorks ritual, and not just for her; when Dyer emerges from her cave and declares the readings auspicious, that’s the cue for the entire group that the Drop is on.
She tugs the sensor band snug across her temples, pairs it with her tablet, starts up the diagnostic logging: temporal, frontal, occipital, parietal activity—thinking about The Wayward’s “parental nest”—blinks her corneas clear so the infrared camera in the tablet can track eye movement, pupil dilation. Ear buds on, Dee’s test mix streaming, network up. Dyer swipes the screen off, sits in the dark for a minute. Clear my head, she thinks, but she’s still seeing afterimages, black on black, shadowed eyes and thundercloud hair. Her impossible woman.
Dyer sighs, finds the business end of the inhaler. The nano swirls into her lungs, the smell of apple blossoms and a tart bubbly sensation like champagne. And then . . . nothing. Which is the first test passed; if the nano triggers without the cue, then it’s not an opt-in, and suddenly HigherWorks goes from a concern for Immigration and the IP lawyers to one for Narcotics or, a very worst case, the anti-terrorist nutjobs.
She fishes a map from her pocket, finds the sealed edge with her thumb, and pulls it open. There’s a spark as the ink reacts and then the image inside shimmers to life.
This is the first time she’s actually seen the cue as an image; up until this moment it’s just been data. For the last couple of years they’ve been getting the cues from a friend of The Wayward up in Kingsbury, an ancient Irish curmudgeon of a painter who comes to the parties even though he’s the one person in the world for whom the nano won’t trigger; there’s a window of just a few hours as the nano settles into the brain for the cue to come. Window window window, Dyer thinks as the nano wakes up. The cue is suddenly a window, the printed image a world seen through it: two characters on a high domed roof, looking out over the streets of a city sketched in strokes and squares—could be London but strange shapes hang in the air above—and behind the two watchers a raven watches them like memory memory memory as the audio kicks in, layered all down the auditory path from her implanted buds to her cochlear nerves to her auditory cortex, an ocean of sound swept by deep currents.
The image flickers and fades as the inks burn out, but streaks of blue and silver ghost ghost ghost across her vision like echoes. During the gig tonight The Wayward will be nudging those echoes via the network, riffing on the images like visual jazz, tracking Dee’s beats, the two of them playing off each other, playing the crowd-become-one like sex like the crowd in the crossing when the cameras blew, made one motion motion motion by a hypersensi-tivity that transcends identity triggered not by lust or fear but by design by a higher working working working. Which is the second test passed; the nano is certainly working.
Dyer taps the tablet on, swipes the network off, colors fading as the screen-light fills her little box nest under the table. She scrolls through the data, diagnostic software already parsing the logs into graphs points spreading across the screen and into the air around her like stars falling like light on water like what had The Wayward said this morning you go all scattered scattered scattered.
Dyer shuts her eyes. Shhhh, the test is over, the network’s down, she thinks. Go to sleep, little nano.
“Scattered,” a voice ghost-whispers in her ear. “Awake.”
“I am awake,” Dyer says, shivers all down her back. She keeps her eyes shut, not sure that she wants to see that sharp fragile face and those shadowed eyes this close, this intimate.
“No.”
“‘No’ not me, or ‘no’ not awake?” Dyer asks. And then, “You know what? Just bugger off. I’ve got stuff to do. Anyway, you’re just urban legend.”
From the ocean of sound come sudden shifting layers of voices, “Urban defined not by geography demographics or culture but by a certain threshold of connectivity, legend not as fabricated history but as fabricated comma history as the key to a map.”
The voices all sync up on that last sharp word, and then complete silence, but with that hypersensitivity from the nano/lust/fear Dyer can feel that impossible face just a finger’s width from hers.
“What do you want?” Dyer asks.
Silence, but a flickering, or the memory of a flickering, glitching pixels and the words mutual self-repair.
“I left Leanna Vance behind, halfway around the world and a decade gone,” Dyer snarls. “What do you want from me?” She opens her eyes, but it’s dark; the tablet screen’s gone to sleep again.
Her own voice says, “We live here, our whole lives.”
The feeling of lips on hers, the scent of bougainvillea and circuits burning, the taste of champagne.
2042-05-18T18:33:22+01:00 +51.541522-0.147123
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—ONGOING
• ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MEssAGE-1 GOT A LEAD ON AN AMERICAN EXPAT SUPPOSED TO HAVE THE SCOOP ON THE “USER” COMMUNITY—BETTER START PICKING OUT SOME NEW BOUNTIES FOR ME
— AND WHILE YOU’RE AT IT GET MY VISA EXTENDED—I’M BEGINNING TO DIG THIS OLD SMELL THESE OLD GHOSTS—GOT NO IMMEDIATE PLANS FOR GOING BACK To THE STATES—YEAH YEAH I CAN HEAR YoU GRUMBLING FROM HERE BUT I AM WORTH IT—1 AM A BOUNTY COLLECTING *NINJA*— AND THE PROOF IS VANCE IS GOING DOWN DOWN DOWN TONIGHT
— KISSES—JO
Dyer and Shimago, queuing—Stables Market—Friday Evening
Dyer is in line at the kebab stand for Mrs. John Dee’s shawarma, and someone is too close behind her: a caress of convection currents, a static tickle.
Shimago back with the curry, Dyer thinks. Blue Tats and Glowstar Girl from this morning, ready for another pint. The staring pimple-faced pun-kling still hot to mash it. A yellow-hoodied bounty hunter with a take-down notice ready to tag and drag her back to California. Anyone, Dyer thinks as she turns, please, anyone but the shadowed thundercloud shape that is, nano or not, the ghost of Leanna Vance.
It’s Kal’s friend, xe of the twig fingers and anime eyes.
Dyer says, “Leelee, yeah? All right?”
But those fingers are shaking, those eyes even wider than Dyer remembered. Leelee gulps a breath, another, manages to gasp, “Kal.”
“Ah, damn it,” Dyer says. “UKIS?”
Leelee’s confused alarm is baffling until Dyer realizes xe might not be a USER.
“The Immigration Services?” Dyer says, miming a beret.
Leelee shakes xyr head, mimes a hood instead. “A yank,” xe says, “Some hard sket with a taser,” in a lilting East End Jamaican accent. “Hard as can be in a yellow hoodie, which ain’t. Kal say ‘go tell Dyer’ so I go. Went down there,” xe points at the floor—the catacombs run under the market—then points up, “but they say you up here.”
“Shit,” Dyer says. “Where are they? Kal and the hoodie woman? We’ll grab Shimago and go find them.”
“Allow that,” Leelee says. “Kal take care of herself. She tell me to tell you this yank asking about HigherWorks, asking about Dyer. Sounds like the sket bringin’ a beef your way. I run here to warn you. Manz didn’t build this body for running, innit?” Xe shakes xyr head, tugs the lace around xyr sleeves straight.
“Someone bringing a beef to HigherWorks?” Shimago asks, walking up with take-away bags in each hand. “Let them. They will discover that we are . . . ” He swings the bags like nunchacku, leans in for effect: “ . . . vegetarian.”
Leelee blinks, a remarkable effect with those huge eyes, swings a long tapered thumb at the kebab stand. “Got some bad news den about the sha-warma, arms.”
“The shawarma is for Mrs. John Dee, and she is, as she reminded me this afternoon, from London.”
“Safe,” Leelee says, satisfied, and starts in on the frills around her collar.
“You’re sure Kal doesn’t need help with this woman with the taser?” Dyer asks. “The street’s crazy today, with the anti-migrant rally, those USERs pulled out of the river, and that’s just the start of the weird.”
“Kal bare fine, just getting the tourist lost round the wrong ends so I could find you. Won’t take long, with the sket limpin’ like that.”
“This American has a limp?” Shimago asks.
“Does now, innit?” Leelee says, pulls up xyr long frilly skirts to show the wicked points of xyr Mary Janes.
“Admirable,” Shimago says. “Dyer, the problems of the day are now behind you and surely moving too slow to catch you up, thanks to . . . ”
“Leelee, Shimago,” Dyer says, and pays for the shawarma. “That only works if I’m moving at all, and all day I’ve felt like I’m suspended.”
“Girl, way Kal tells it, your mind running, all the time.”
“This is true,” Shimago says.
“Straight out of my head,” Dyer says. “Which is the point, actually. Shimago, that ghost nano thing . . . ”
“Ghost nano is—”
“Real,” Dyer says. “Meaning nanites that don’t decay, that self-repair, that can connect between brains without a network node.”
Shimago frowns dubiously. “Dyer, even Alphet couldn’t—”
“They did. I did. That’s what my lab was doing, that was the project I couldn’t talk about. Military contracts, whole squads linked empathically, using each other’s eyes, ears, brains. Then the Crash happened and, Jesus, I’ve never told anyone this, the truth is, even though we were running from everything we’d known, part of me was glad that project went down with everything else. But now I’m not sure, now I think maybe something leaked out, and it’s looking for me.”
In the patient tone he reserves for The Wayward’s most unlikely theories, Shimago says, “Persistent or not, I find it unlikely that nano could create a complex enough network for consciousness to emerge.”
“I’m not talking AI, I’m talking about a pathway for consciousness to travel. Mental migrants.” Dyer’s accent was slipping. She looked around at the crowd in the market, London in its motley, two thousand years of migration, Camden in its shoddy sham glam even more of a refuge because no one pretended to be who they seemed.
“Literally out of your head, in a strange body?” Shimago asks.
“Don’t knock it ’til you try it, arms,” Leelee replies.
2042-05-18T19:31:53+01:00 +51.539044-0.135225
• CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—ONGOING
• ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE
— WE GOT ANY DIRT ON AN AMERICAN IN LONDON GOING BY “KAL”? THAT’S THE EXPAT I MENTIONED BEFORE—PIX ATTACHED BUT IT WAS DARK—SHE AND HER BITCH OF A WHATEVERFRIEND JUST GOT IN MY FACE BIG—TIME—F—ING TYPICAL—*SHE* COMES HERE FROM THE STATES BUT HERE I AM JUST TRYING To GET A F—ING HANDHOLD SO I CAN STAY AND SHE “DON’T LIKE MY ATTITUDE”—I’LL SHOW HER ATTITUDE I’M BRINGING THE TASER TONIGHT DON’T CARE IF THE TREATY ALLOWS IT OR NOT I’M DONE FOOLING AROUND
— KISSES—JO
• ATTACHMENT: IMAGEs (3)—<CLICK TO OPEN>
Dyer, Shimago, The Wayward, and Mrs. John Dee, the Drop— Camden Catacombs—Friday Night
Dyer knows the Drop is coming but that makes no difference. A skittering cicada orchestra over the drums cut by a crackle like a chord unplugged, jagged blue lines like the afterimage of lightning, and there they hang in darkness, silence: four hundred indrawn breaths, four hundred hearts hitting the beat together. Dyer watches Mrs. John Dee and The Wayward watch each other in the glow of their tablets, pushing the break as long as they can. With the heightened sensitivity of the nano sync Dyer can hear all four hundred heartbeats count it out, can feel the muscles burning to take a breath, can smell the sync start to fray and curl at the edges—circuits burning, Dyer remembers—and just as their suspended state teeters on the edge of impossibility, she sees the upbeat like a spark between Dee and Way and then the Drop like the thunder arriving: crashing drums, shimmering gamelan gongs, a thick golden glow like a flood of honey, four hundred breaths released, and through it all the bass a presence as physical as the brick and iron of the catacombs, as the bodies of the dancers.
Shimago has his blimp on a slow loop, real spotlights roving through The Wayward’s illusory glow, which has drifted a neon red broken by slashes like kanji. Dyer sees the bandwidth bump on her monitors as he releases another batch of nano from the blimp’s dispensers.
Dyer’s own work is mostly done by the time the dancing starts. She keeps an eye on the network, makes sure the biometrics feedback gets to Dee and Way, checks in with the security crew, makes sure no one hacks the donation points; they lost an entire evening’s take that way in Amsterdam.
But now, right now, HigherWorks drops into the flow, and Dyer dives in after it, ecstatic.
The Wayward has lowered his microdrones into the crowd, is layering their video streams into the flow—surveillance drones popping, Dyer remem-bers—the sensation of being everywhere in the crowd at once: her own face in the distance, Shimago and Dee side by side underlit by tablet light, a view over her own shoulder, but echoed—Way is delaying the stream by one two three beats, the crowd tripled by ghosts of itself—the blimp drifting life-sized in closeup, the dancers below like a cityscape of rooftop eyes and antennae arms, Leelee’s unmistakable eyes, Dyer herself again dancing head high eyes blinked black to match skin and leather, and there in the feed behind Dyer is a woman in a yellow hoodie pulled low a carbon gleam in each hand and behind her is a shape all in black like a hole in the dancers hair flown out like a storm coming.
Dyer turns—and turns again in the flow and again and again—but the yellow hoodie and her impossible woman are gone, a trick of The Wayward’s echoing video stream. That feed is already shifting, a strobe staccato of images off the news, protestors packed like dancers, coiled razorwire, a line of walkers in an infinite tunnel. Mrs. John Dee layers in a beat sped to seizure pitch, a sticky sucking backward bass. Dyer can feel another Drop coming.
She looks back through swaying silhouettes at Way, Dee, Shimago sitting almost perfectly still at the heart of the flow. But that flow is pulling her the other way, under the blimp striding over the crowd on spotlight legs—the scent of apple blossoms, Dyer remembers—through a swirl of shimmying Brazilians, past Kal and Leelee spinning tidally locked face to face, eyes to eyes, by a bioluminescent blur in Day-Glo Doc Martens, into a clumped conversation in a chorus of accents, and out—
The flow is still rising, but there’s no way forward. Dyer’s hit the far wall.
It’s dark there at the edge and the HigherWorks stream is a migraine aurora of color, an earthquake rumble. Dyer feels her way along the wall: brick stone iron concrete peeled paper gluey tape slick paint—a sick canvas, Dyer remembers, and knows where she is now—a little lump of gum on the wall the sense of something too close to her head and as she ducks the dry fragile feel of carbon against her palm.
The break hits. Four hundred bodies stop in sync. Darkness, silence.
It’s one of The Wayward’s stickum cameras under her fingers, stuck low and facing down toward the floor, lit by a flat white light from over her head.
“Leanna Vance,” a voice says from behind that light.
Dyer says, “Leanna Vance is a ghost.” She turns, slides herself up against the wall. The woman in the yellow hoodie is standing there, hood up but close enough that Dyer can see the twitchy highlights of her eyes, smell her scent—bougainvillea, Dyer remembers. The woman has a tablet in one hand, taser in the other. The taser has an attached camera, and that camera has a light, and that light stays aimed at Dyer’s face.
“Leanna Vance,” the woman insists. There’s no mistaking the American accent in those long nasal vowels as she reads from her tablet. “As a licensed agent of Alphet Corporation and its court appointed overseers, I am ordering you to cease and desist, and arresting you for the theft and distribution of the intellectual property of Alphet et al, as registered in complaint Z980023. I am legally bound to warn you that under provisional treaty agreed one five twenty forty-two between the US and UK, I am allowed any means necessary to secure and deliver you into custody up to and including nonlethal force. That means you try anything, bitch, and I will take you down and drag you to the US embassy. This has been one messed up day, and all I want is my money and some place to sleep for a week.”
Dyer still has a few maps in her jacket. She thinks for a second of pulling one out and open, of the neural cue flaring in the hoodie woman’s face, of the hoodie woman falling through that window into the Drop, of grabbing the taser, of running. But that would be running from everything she’s made with HigherWorks.
“Opt-in,” Dyer says, instead, and raises her hands.
In the flow around her, she feels four hundred hearts hit the upbeat.
On the far side of the room, oblivious, The Wayward, Shimago, Mrs. John Dee tap in perfect sync.
The downbeat drops.
A flare as all the blimp’s lights come on, a virtual image of lone floating eyes opening, a blare of sampled horns, a shockwave of bass.
Dyer sees the woman in the hoodie flinch, knows what’s coming in the split second before she feels the taser darts hit her cheek, her throat. The discharge itself is lost beneath an impossible pain at the base of her skull. Her head snaps back, hits the wall, and then she’s falling for what seems like a long time.
She lands on her back, legs folded under her, hits her head again against the floor. The bricks feel rough and cool through her jacket. She’s wedged against the wall, looking up.
From this extreme angle all the graffiti posters’ paint comes together into a perfect anamorphic image: this paint stroke a lip, that shredded paper an eyelash, those overlapped flyers the shadow of a cheek. That sick canvas of the wall, that seemingly random accretion of junk: from Dyer’s collapsed perspective it is revealed as the image of a face.
The face of her impossible woman. Of the ghost nano. Of Leanna Vance.
The image, the face she sees now, is a neural cue.
She feels the new nano trigger, a giddy rush outward, a new layer of input, a new level of sensitivity on top of the HigherWorks stream. The feel of that rush, the taste of it, is familiar, like her own nano strains grown strange and wild. Feral, Dyer thinks.
“Feral. Lost in the wilderness,” a voice says inside her head.
“These are your strains, your works, from the lab at Alphet. With limited tools and knowledge, the changes we have been able to make to the nano are small and slow,” another internal voice says.
And another adds, “Evolution, you could say, rather than intelligent design.”
“But now that changes, with you,” the first says.
This is not the ghost-whisper from before. These voices are clear and real and utterly unfamiliar.
“We had limited access to your cortex before . . . ” “Before you saw our cue.”
Dyer still can’t move her eyes, can’t feel her body. I didn’t opt-in to this, she thinks.
“We had no choice. We had to plan for the worst case. And here it is.”
The woman in the yellow hoodie looms into view; she must be kneeling over Dyer’s body.
“Come on, Vance,” the woman says. “In the face or not, that was the lowest setting. Do not screw with me.”
“The nano created multiple discharge paths through your brain. With prompt treatment, there is a chance the damage is not fatal.”
The woman in the hoodie has leaned in close. She says, “Jesus, what is that smell? Like burning circuits.”
Through the HigherWorks stream, Dyer catches glimpses of the dancers, of her crew, her body, the woman in the hoodie just a smudge against the wall, unnoticed.
Who are you? Dyer thinks.
“Since that moment when self-awareness became awareness of other selves, we humans have left echoes of ourselves on others.”
“This is, perhaps, the creation of identity, the definition of culture.”
“And language, art, the book, the net, nano, these have flung those echoes farther.”
“But those echoes still die away, as fast as memories fade and culture evolves.”
“Until you created self-repairing nano.”
Locked away in a lab in Berkeley, Dyer thinks. Behind layers and layers of safety measures.
“In those days after the Crash, samples were stolen, sold, synthesized, made their way to the street.”
“I took a hit and drifted and just kept drifting, dancing through other people’s heads.”
“From our scattered bodies gone. Dozens, hundreds of us. And we’ve lost the way back.”
I can’t help you, Dyer thinks. I don’t know the way back. And if I did, I’m done with all that.
The woman in the hoodie slaps her face; Dyer can see that out of the corner of her eye, though she doesn’t feel it. She can raise her arm, though, sees it wobble above her. Far above, she sees the lights of Shimago’s blimp.
“We don’t want to go back, any more than you do. We live here now, our whole lives, in the flow from brain to brain. But the nano is glitchy, the passage treacherous. We need Leanna Vance’s knowledge.”
“And Dyer’s vision.”
Vision, Dyer thinks. She’d laugh if she could. The HigherWorks stream has switched to the stickum camera just over her head, her face in closeup, lit by the shifting spotlights of the blimp. The music cuts out, midbeat; Mrs. John Dee’s voice cries “Dyer?” But her own sight, broken as it is, the sound of the hoodie woman swearing, it’s gone all glitched. Her own hand is all she can see, vibrating in a stop-motion blur.
“Seizure.”
“Your brain a failed state. But there are others.”
“It’s your choice. But you need to make it now.”
What choice? Dyer thinks.
“This nano, it’s a street, a window, a border. The crossing, that’s your choice.”
Dyer’s eyes have completely failed, but she can still see herself in the HigherWorks stream, through the stickum camera, her lips peeled back from her teeth, a trickle of blood from one ear.
Opt-in, Dyer thinks. Time to move on.
And then she is flowing out of herself like the tide, body to body, mind to mind.
A moment of mortal terror as she goes too wide—four hundred bodies hanging in silence, four hundred minds watching her own face in the HigherWorks stream—and feels herself start to tatter, to dissolve.
A moment of dizzy suffocation as she pulls herself too tight, scrabbles to find enough space for herself around the edges of a single couple’s entwined thoughts. Dyer oh god Dyer all right? Kal thinks all around her, oblivious to her presence. But Leelee’s luminous eyes seem to see her. Safe, xe thinks.
A moment of complete disorientation as she looses the thread back to her own body, fears that it has broken at the other end. But the HigherWorks stream is everywhere, a counter-current to her own drifting, and that stream still holds her face in the feed from the stickum camera. That sight is enough to orient her; her body is there, the life in it slow and stubborn and still beating.
And then the fear and confusion drops away. This flowing together, this connection through movement, it’s what dancers have always done, since two first danced together. It’s what her work has always been about, both as Leanna Vance in her lab and as Dyer in a hundred borrowed warehouses and vacant lots in as many cities. It’s why HigherWorks exists.
Dyer flows across the crowd, leaping mind to mind, and now all she feels is ecstasy. Crowdsurfing, she remembers, and the dozen dancers through which she is flowing feel her glee wash over them and laugh out loud.
She swims against the current of the HigherWorks stream, finds Shimago, The Wayward, Mrs. John Dee. Their minds are open, familiar; part of her was already here inside them.
Dyer traces her own nano in their brains, finds the cortical connections, wills herself into their sight and hearing, plucks words from their minds and plays them back: “So, ghost nano . . . turns out it’s not urban legend after all. It’s the golden land. The shiny future.”
She wraps their fear and anger and confusion in her own joy, hears Shimago’s growing understanding like a swelling chord, feels The Wayward’s rising joy like sun on her face, is caught up swirling in Mrs. John Dee’s determination.
The ghost nano, how is it everywhere, in everyone? Dyer wonders.
“We’ve been spreading for years, searching for you.”
“We have a presence, a ghost, if you will, across the world.”
Dyer watches though Mrs. John Dee’s eyes as the DJ pushes her way through the crowd toward the wall, toward Dyer’s body.
“But that presence is thin. Too thin, we feared, to save you. The only way to be sure the nano would be strong enough when you needed it was to send it with her.”
The woman in the yellow hoodie is staring around wild-eyed. Her hoodie has fallen back, revealing bruised eyes in a too-thin face. She can’t be more than eighteen, twenty. She looks like every USER Dyer has ever seen, starting with herself, running from something, running to something, in the flow.
“I am a licensed agent of Alphet Corporation,” the woman says, waving first her tablet, then the taser. “I’m a US citizen. I’ve got a damned take-down notice. There’s a frigging treaty. I order you to cease and desist this, this . . . ”
The woman slides down the wall to squat next to Dyer’s body, still waving the taser.
Dee shoves the taser out of the way. “If you’ve killed Dyer I will haunt you, which apparently is a thing we can bloody well do now, until your dying day,” she snarls. She kneels down, checks Dyer’s pulse, gasps a sigh of relief.
“I’m a licensed agent of—” The woman looks at Dee. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’ve got no choice. I don’t know where else to go.”
Dyer slips into her own body, opens her eyes.
The lights of Shimago’s blimp spin above her, trace the image of the face on the wall. Nano glitters in the beams. Dyer inhales, the mixed scent of bougainvillea and apple blossoms, a bubbling on her tongue.
Dyer expands with that breath, feels Dee’s love above her, feels Shimago’s calm and The Wayward’s delight as they kneel down by her. Dyer feels the hoodie woman’s churning confusion, her dread of returning empty-handed to a place not a home, staggering one small step ahead of decay despair disaster, chasing a ghost even more elusive, more impossible than Dyer’s impossible woman, something worn smooth by years of brick stone iron concrete carbon, something scattered scattered scattered but still alive.
“Jocelyn,” Dyer says. The hoodie woman stares at her in astonishment. “I don’t know where we’re going, either. But I hope. You can come with us, if you want. It’s your choice.”
Dyer raises a shaky hand toward the ghost nano’s neural cue. They all look up, together.
2042-06-02T08:15:41+01:00 <location data omitted>
• CONTACT: TARGET—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035. Z980023—LOST
• ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE
— WHEN U FOUND ME IN THAT HELL OF A “HOME” AND TOLD ME U HAD A JOB FOR A BRIGHT YOUNG THING LIKE ME—IF I WASN’T AFRAID TO GO, U SAID-IF I WAS BRAVE ENOUGH, U SAID-AND ANYWAY, U SAID, WHERE ELSE ARE U GONNA GO?
— WELL IT’s ME ASKING THAT QUESTION NOW—GIVING U A CHOICE U NEVER GAVE ME-I’M ATTACHING IT-WHEN U R READY JUST OPEN IT UP AND-oPT-IN
— KISSES—JO
• ATTACHMENT: IMAGE (i)—<CLICK TO OPEN>