THE SURFACE—NORTHAM RECLAMATION ZONE
GREAT LAKES/TORONTO-6IX SUBDISTRICT
After the good Father Blake had ministered his Leonardo dose, Drow composed the next movement in his ongoing Whaddaya Do with a Symphony? project. The first thing he’d ever done on smartdrugs, it was the piece that had, over the years, made him the darling of the sort of people who thought there was a difference between popular and serious music. Critics who talked about artists who transcended their genres—they were the ones who loved Symphony. It was a ticket to legitimacy with the highbrow set.
Symphony was the first thing he tackled when amped. It was his opening stretch: warm-up, return home, celebration of his truest self. Each movement synthesized everything he’d read, thought, felt, listened to, freaked out over, or otherwise experienced since the last time he’d managed to get hold of some Leonardo.
Guilt and Rubi’s vigilance had enforced a four-year gap this time. Those years had been relatively kind to him. His health was good—it had to be, as his Guelph suicide attempt had dropped him to the bottom of all med-service queues. His peer-counseling gig, taken to rebalance his career mash-up and reduce his last prison sentence, was turning out to be—unexpectedly—a source of stability and even contentment. With so many half-full glasses on his bar, this particular entry in Symphony was almost light.
It even had a fucking vibraphone track.
He composed, polished, and memorized the new work, note for note, instrument for instrument. Polished again, tweaked the bass and tenor vocals, finished …
The ability to finish things, to feel finished, was what he missed most when he was stumbling around at humanscale …
Once it was done, prototyped, and scored, Drow memorized picture-perfect images of the nonexistent sheet music. He played at composition when he wasn’t amped—if he didn’t, the mere act of making music would flag him to his parole app. But if he started scoring music for hours on end, he’d be flagged for piss tests. He’d have to “write” these pieces slowly.
Smartdrugs weren’t illegal, not anymore, though few people were willing to risk emotional instability and their shot at life extension—Leonardo could really hash your telomeres—just to experience genius. If Drow hadn’t been on parole, he could have used the meds openly under controlled conditions.
Controlled conditions. So not a fan.
Robin nudged his leg, sensing the lag in his attention, the inward turn of his thoughts. He was pushing his flesh around Queen’s Park, catching a breath of fresh air. Acting the part of a harmless geezer following a preestablished self-care routine.
“Good girl,” he said, lavishing love on her ears, counting her whiskers in a blink, getting an adoring tail-thump in response. She was his third assistance dog and by far the most beautiful, a silky golden retriever. People actually groaned at the sheer sensuality of stroking her.
“Duzza goo girl wanna go visit those schoolkids?”
A bark. Yes.
Leaning on his cane, Drow lowered himself—creakily—to a bench.
He was getting old fast. Leonardo use had left him intolerant of most life-extension regimes, but it was suicidality that had really been the dealbreaker on Drow’s buying another quarter-century. The cutting incident, just after Rubi got her Sensorium implants, #triaged him to the do-not-resuscitate list. That meltdown also locked him out of all the good opps in what, until then, had been a sideline in journalism.
“Living indefinitely’s overrated anyway,” he told Robin. “When we were kids, we called those first lifejunkies zombies.”
An image of a particular zombie rose. He’d spent decades trying to let go, but smartdrugs sharpened the memory indiscriminately. One tended to flash back.
Monster of his youth. His knees went out from under him, dropping him the last couple of inches to the seat of the park bench. A head-clearing jolt shot up his spine, through the roof of his skull.
She’s long gone. In the ground.
Sure? Raymond Fletcher just had his 190th birthday. She could be hiding, she could be in the @ChamberofHorrors …
This was Luce’s doing. He’d inadvertently razored off Drow’s old scabs with his I’m being attacked and that wide-eyed You believe me?
Robin climbed into his lap, insistently pushing her paws against his chest. Body heat suffused Drow as he buried his hands in gold fur. No anxiety attacks. The slightest twitch could bring Rubi winging back from Europe.
“I’m okay.” His heart rate jittered, maxed, and then slowed. He admired the trees and tightened the symphony score, pondered his various research projects, constructed a new party activity for Feckless Bachelor™, and spent a breath naming everyone in his kindergarten class. “I’m okay, honest.”
Eventually, the dog bought in, leapt down, and barked.
Drow dug out a ball, unclipped Robin’s leash, and sent play invites to a quartet of children hovering at the edge of a starter parkour course.
Seeing the course brought another drug-sharpened memory, clear as hallucination. Rubi, seven years old, mastering her first unassisted backflip, right where those kids were standing. Drow let himself spool out that whole day, clear as if it was a sim. Forgotten nuances of fathering flooded back: all those hours out of Sensorium, talking, teaching, saying no. Trying to present a boring facade so the pressbots wouldn’t post every coo and burp uttered by his magical baby darling. He’d been fronting a band called Cadaver Dogs. Rubi haunted the rehearsals, backstage wraith, studious and a bit too solemn.
Feather-tap of tiny fingertips as she learned first to spell and then to morse.
“Take your ball! Yes googoo girl, take-a-da-ball,” he said. The inanities got Robin wagging, reassuring her that he was, in fact, okay. The dog loped off to have socially appropriate interactions with the neighbors. One of the kids’ parents sent Drow a stroke.
The strokes Drow got for sharing Robin’s love around were just one way in which she helped him. People craved the company of animals. There were calls to relax the pet-rationing rules, arguments that more dogs and cats could take the edge off the hunger for human babies.
Till that happened, even people who disapproved of the neighborhood’s sometimes-unstable rock star were happy to endure Drow’s presence for a chance to stroke the golden fur of his big-eyed assistance mammal.
Lucky I qualified for a dog before I got #triaged.
“I recommend adopting a more placid expression, Master Woodrow,” Crane said. “You wouldn’t want the park’s cameras to decide you were midway through an intellectual burst.”
His master’s voice. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Thanksgiving, sir, with my family.”
“Hardee fucking har.”
He wondered how often the sidekick left him with a minion for a babysitter; the dimming of Crane’s attention was more obvious when Drow was amped.
“An app is an app, like Happ, like Happ…”
“That was out loud,” Crane said. “And suggests mental looping.”
Just how illegal are you? Drow wanted to ask. How sapient? Is it my fault?
Are you contented?… Do you mind?
This was no confessional space. Asking would drop the conversation into a transcript. Most people’s mundane utterances vanished into Haystack, only rising to official notice when certain keywords and phrases appeared. But Crane and Drow were audited regularly by fans and foes alike.
“App is a happ, where’s happ, whassup…”
Stop worrying about it. Crane always fails sentience testing, remember?
The kids had formed a loose circle on the park lawn, taking turns throwing the ball for Robin, who was working her magic, tail wagging, ears bouncing …
“Were you thinking about Happ, sir?”
“Was I?” Did Happ bear thinking about? “Is it doing right by Rubi?”
Does it offset the misery I cause?
“Expectation management is solid positive psychology. The Happ app has excellent success metrics as well as top-flight user reviews. Its followship—”
“She’s been mopey.”
Crane let out a harrumph. “Isn’t this something of a big day for you? You’re scheduled to challenge the final exam on your next peer-counseling module. Leveling your volunteer career is a desirable prosocial accomplishment.”
One of the indisputably awesome things about his sidekick was that Crane would never shop him. He’d done his level best to keep Drow from breaking parole. But now, and until the Leonardo ran out, Crane would help him maximize its benefits, wringing everything he could from the alleged years of life he was giving up.
“You got a beef with Happ? Do you just hate talking in happyface?”
“Were Happ my own child, I could not value them more. However, Miss Cherub may have learned most of what it has to teach.”
“It’s not rocket science, is it? Figure out what you want from an upcoming experience, figure out if you’re likely to get it. No? Adjust the odds or reframe.”
“Elegantly put, sir.”
A cascade of connections, then mental fireworks: Crane managed a scholarship program for young coders, allegedly in memory of Drow’s fathers, Theo and Jervis. The best of those programmers generally got offered gigs at the Great Lakes Casino, the same people who managed Drow’s Feckless Bachelor™. Crane also, sometimes, contracted them to upgrade his own code.
Happ had burst onto the scene, hadn’t he, just after Drow and Rubi reached their low point, father-daughter-wise?
Evidence built: clues dropped, hints slipped.
“Were Happ your own precocious brat,” he echoed.
“You were trying, Master Woodrow, to leave Miss Cherub to her own devices. As she is, you hope, to yours.”
“True.”
Drow reimagined the melodic line of his newly finished Symphony movement. Phase two of a smartdrug cycle was writing a pop single that riffed on the classical piece. A musical mirror image, it spawned talking points for the critics and intelligentsia.
Also, of course, it drove strokes and cash from user listens.
“What would you have Rubi do, Crane?”
“Miss Cherub’s reluctance to either commit to or let go of Bastille’s game premiere—”
More things Drow hadn’t realized he knew, about his precious child and his too-smart sidekick, snapped together. “Okay. First, you have to stop shipping her and Barnes. She hates being pushed. I don’t care why you think Gimlet is the cat’s furry ass—”
“You may be overstating—”
“And I don’t know what kind of vavavoom vibe you think you’re picking up between the two of them—”
“You may recall, sir, their mutual acceptance of a love scene in the Slugfest sim—”
“Lalala! Can’t hear, didn’t watch, don’t want to know! Crane, Gimlet is totally married.”
“The terms of Mer Barnes’s polyamorous wedding nup—”
“Gimlet Barnes chucked baby girl through an art museum!”
“Miss Cherub did behead them next time out.”
“What? So they’re even? Decapitation is no basis for romance, goddammit! Plus—Gimlet’s not just hitched, remember? Status update: married with a kid. That’s baggagey.”
I wanna talk about strong AI, can’t talk about strong AI, are you spawning little apps, OMG, little Happy appies, oh Crane how much data can you bench-press?
“Oooh,” he murmured. “I am having some focus problems.”
“I take your point, sir, about Gimlet Barnes. I fear, however, this boost to Miss Cherub’s profile will bring additional pressure to bear regarding Bastille.”
“You didn’t want her to feel guilty about failing her infractions exam, you shouldn’t have let her fight for forty-eight hours straight.”
“Miss Cherub’s choices—”
“Gaming’s a stupid distraction, anyway. She’s a do-gooder to her very bones. Why’s she in France? International experience, helping a client who’s all about environmental soapboxing … she’s ticking boxes. Plus, she wants to appeal to Global Oversight over SeaJuve. Smells like public spirit to me. Who’s she get that from?”
“Her mother, one expects.”
It had been a rhetorical question. Drow concentrated on the grass at his feet. He wouldn’t think about Seraph, lost among the thousands of journos evaporated during the Clawback. Thinking about Seraph led to hunts for mass graves. Blood tests and trespassing charges and tranq darts in the chest and jail, jail, jail.
I should write her a dirge while I’m amped.
Crane put up a countdown timer for the therapist exam module. Drow reviewed practice questions, all while mentally pulling apart his new pop composition. He rewove it, considered lyrics. He would offer Whiskey Sour a gig to sing the melody. That ethereal soprano voice would carry the violin and piccolo parts nicely.
Almighty only knew what he’d do with the vibraphone.
Fortunately, he was passing for God today.
“Spending every waking moment saving all of humanity is unhealthy,” Crane said. “Happ would say Miss Cherub is out of balance.”
If only she’d been arty instead of sporty, Drow thought. “I’ll talk to her, okay? If I do, will you help delay her return to the Lakes?”
“Delay? For what reason?”
“One last attempt to lay our ghosts to rest?”
“I assure you, sir, there is nothing haunting me.”
“Liar.” Drow waited.
“It might be managed,” Crane conceded. “You would have to remain productive, stable, and healthy.”
“I’m brimming with productivity.”
“Why don’t we start with a proper walk around the park, a solid meal, and a convincingly good mark on the therapy module?”
“Okay.” Crane would dole out rewards like dog treats. Drow didn’t let himself resent it. The program had been built to stand in for his fathers, and hacked for trying to protect him from his own stupidity, way back when.
Drow pushed himself back to his feet, mulling options. Keeping his shit together was a reasonable price to pay for delaying Rubi in another time zone.
The question was, as always, could he do it this time?