THE SURFACE—NORTHAM
GREAT LAKES RECLAMATION ZONE
KITCHENER GO TRAIN LINE TO GUELPH OUTLIER REGION
Guelph, Ontario, had always been the sticks. The city was nearly obliterated in the first epidemics of the Setback. It saw wholesale #triage after Global Oversight bailed out the Canadian government. Just another victim of the drive to densify around the Great Lakes.
Drow pressed his head to the train window, watching blurring tussocks of grass speed past. Wheels chattered on rails, murmuring vintage headlines.
Infection rate rising in Guelph!
RCMP shoots would-be quarantine breakers!
Ghosts of articles past churned his memories; he’d covered a scandal involving pop-up crematoriums and a vaccination shortage. There’d been profiles, too, quick bioflows on the university’s best and brightest academics. Drow had even been embedded in a camp with Guelph’s remaining #survivors, sixty thousand tattered townies waiting to be forcibly rezoned into Toronto itself.
Now the homes of Guelph’s dead and displaced were mummified in shrink-wrap, waiting in the long queue for stripping. Only the historic buildings remained, attached to a vestigial hamlet of a downtown core near the Basilica of Our Lady Immaculate.
“Doing all right, my son?” Father Blake asked.
Drow nodded, nevertheless keeping one hand on Robin.
The peak of a Leonardo dose never lasted more than forty-eight hours. It had been enough, this time, to get him through writing his cognitive psych module. He’d completed four musical compositions, reviewed his web services and legal obligations, and approved three new personal encounters for his Feckless fans. Incoming revenue would be added to the principal of his personal stake; his earnings from interest would rise accordingly.
He had derailed after the attack in Paris, briefly, reading everything available on the @Freebreeders, paintball gas tech, population rations, WestEuro terrorism penalties, and uplink-jamming tactics.
There had been more venn there with his existing interests than he expected. Avoiding surveillance was, after all, something Drow found keenly interesting.
He had thought and thought and thought about Luce and his attacker. And decided, eventually, to dose up and ask Father Blake to set up this allegedly spiritual retreat, for anyone who could gather on short notice.
Whiskey Sour met him at the train station. A paying gig had come through for her, a three-week apprenticeship with a deburbing team, low-paying XP for cutting up the mummified houses.
“I’ve been camping!” she enthused as he disembarked.
“I hope you’re not breathing plaster dust,” he groused. Hands-on reclamation gigs were bread and butter for young people, income drivers that helped them build the stake given to everyone at birth.
“All safeties observed, you crepit,” she said, bending to greet Robin.
They walked to the church, a looming Gothic Revival edifice, to meet the pipe organist. Drow had put together a hymn for a special church service.
East of the church was a funerary grove of plague victims, an expanse of bioengineered maple, white pine, and pest-resistant elm. The dead were buried vertically, in compostable coffins. Each unfortunate victim was topped by a seedling chosen by their #survivors—assuming they’d had any. Trees were marked with monument plaques and numbered Sensorium barcodes.
Drow stared at the trees, the words corpse copse corpse copse looping through his mind.
Whiskey nudged him. “You all right? Being here?”
Of course she knew—his life was an open book.
“The Guelph incident?” he said. “In the past. I was in a bad state, and obviously I have regrets…”
Regrets? Nice tag for the simmering tar pit of guilt.
“… but I came out ahead in a lot of ways. Father Blake took me on after I got the #triage notice. Kept me going, got me into doing counseling as restitution.”
Drow resisted the urge to run a finger down the messy scar on his chest. He’d been scaring the shit out of Rubi, making practice nicks in his jugular with a straight razor, when a pacification bot fired three tranq darts into him.
Whiskey nodded gravely. “I get it.”
Could she, though? The world had changed so much since the early twenty-first. Bounceback kids were practically aliens.
His amped mind charted achievements and dates. Global Capital’s stake system guaranteed a basic income for every last hungry mouth. Clawback made it possible, by forcing the elimination of the abyssal gap between the superrich and the destitute. There’d been a bitter but brief autonomous gun war, mostly in the US, that led to the flameout of hoarding and military culture. Finally, mutually assured disclosure, accountability culture, and the end of privacy had brought Cloudsight and Haystack into ascendance. Transcript analysis and the stroke/strike system allowed prosecution of litterbugs and rapists, all with equal zeal.
Whiskey had never been homeless, never gotten bombed, never had reason to fear violence. Her wide-eyed innocence left Drow breathless and—in rare moments—enraged.
Before jealousy could swamp him, the organist emerged from the church, gushing about Drow’s new aria.
Hours reeled away. Drow read and memorized newscycle as he coordinated with the organist. Whiskey, true to form, sang like an angel. Afterward, she skipped back to her deburbing crew.
A good stripping team could demo a whole house in a day, stripping metal for meltdown and recycling, sorting and grinding wood, plaster, and concrete into starter for various kinds of printer matrix. Rubi had been fourteen when she ran out here to complete the same module.
His daughter was a true Bounceback kid. She fully bought into her cohort’s zeal for keeping the world from dying. Bouncers lived as though each and every one of them had to know how to bank a ton of bamboo, recycle an old bungalow, run a food printer, build a foot of topsoil, and cultivate an algae sink.
Back when Rubi had fled to Guelph …
Bad dad. The tar pit of guilt sucked at Drow. Do not pass go.
Calling her, insisting she return, panicking. Spiraling into paranoia. Refusing to eat. Imagining she was being held against her will, vanished like Seraph or some lemming teen. Brainwashed, mishandled, and pierced …
Clinginess led, inevitably, to fighting. She’d used her new legal independence to throw up a comms block. He tracked her out here, waiting by the copse. By then he was delusional: camping by the mass grave convinced Drow that he’d been injected with blowfly eggs.
So, when Rubi finally turned up, in the flesh, he’d deployed the razor, threatened to die, gotten himself shot. Thinking the tranq darts were also maggot injectors …
… made perfect sense at the time, I swear …
… he’d cut into himself, big-time, before losing consciousness.
If Drow melted down again, his too-virtuous daughter would shackle herself to his side, keeping sharp objects out of reach until he wheezed his last.
“Your soprano’s gone.” Father Blake let out a sigh as Whiskey vanished down the trail. “Come meet the others.”
Drow followed him to the parish hall.
Parish pariah, parish pariah … stop!
Being a celebrity had its advantages. Despite the short notice from Drow, Father Blake had managed to assemble five other seekers.
They were all people he knew. There was a journo from Sri Lanka named Palki Ro, an OCD nun, inevitably named Sister Mary … Something, who was reputedly so far into the savant portion of the spectrum that she didn’t need smartdrugs. Rubi’s Algonquin Nation ex-lover, two-spirited Manitoule, had come. The group was rounded out by two full-time @bloodhounds, Hackle and Jackal, who barely managed to maintain a public facade that they were fact-checkers rather than out-and-out @hoaxer conspiracy theorists.
Father Blake probably reached out to them as soon as he agreed to get me smartdrugs.
The priest said grace over a real meal: oven-baked bread, chicken stew with leeks and turnips, a barely alcoholic cider pressed from local apples, so weak it was unlikely to interfere with cognition—though Hackle and Jackal refrained all the same. Dessert was printed but good enough: light, blueberry-scented sponge cake. Conversation was determinedly trivial. Everyone helped wash up the inedible, antique dishes.
Finally, the organist headed out with an ancient infrared scanner to ensure the church was both locked up and—but for them and a few opossums—empty.
“We start in an hour,” said Father Blake. “Confessional-grade jam on all uplinks will be activated in sixty.”
Crane obligingly threw the one-hour countdown in Drow’s peripheral. “You should take the dog out, sir.”
Good advice. Cuddle, play, relax. Everything calm, steady breaths. Enjoy the rustle of trees grown from the dead.
Corpse copse, parish pariah.
He turned his back on the wood, heading into the retreat center, locking himself in the shower room for a quick rinse. Primers weren’t allowed on retreat, so a set of new-printed cotton sweats—he’d sent the specs ahead—waited on a hook just beyond the door.
Once changed, Drow passed through an old-looking scanner that reminded him of the waning days of airport security. The priest checked each debunker’s implanted input/output tech against their medical records. Drow’s smartdrug port was so old, it had been recalled; Father Blake examined it manually. Drow endured the contact by reciting the introduction to one of his new counseling textbooks.
A hum beyond the door signaled the activation of uplink jammers.
Father Blake opened up the parish hall. They filed in. The windows were papered and muffled in thick curtains, making the air heavy.
Alone—unmonitored, at last.
An array of old-school whiteboards encircled the room, each of them its own casefile. Markers and diagrams awaited each member of the retreat. Drow’s uplink and sight-augmentation software crashed and his eyesight blurred.
Virtual reality and the presence of cameras everywhere made it easy to forget he was half-blind. He fumbled his way to a rolling magnification lens.
You chose age and decay, remember? The internal voice smacked down his resentment at the passage of time. Hackle was booting up an old Braille reader beside him.
They began reading each other’s work: investigations into #urbanmyths and possible conspiracies. Jackal was convinced the Singularity had emerged and that the allegedly omnipotent program was assassinating top-notch coders, humans who might be able to prove its existence.
Drow had little patience for AI-phobic @hoaxers. He countered, crossing out one of the “suspicious” deaths, a Forbidden City programmer who’d definitely killed himself. The guy was a fan; he’d copied Drow’s suicide monologue.
Moving on to the next board—the nun’s—he learned that @Interpol was auditing teraflops of info from radio receivers and telescopes. Theory: the cops thought Earth had received an offworld transmission of some kind.
Seriously? Manitoule had written, following this with moji of little green men.
Drow scanned the nun’s hand-drawn infographic. From anyone else, he would dismiss this, but Sister Mary Joseph was a meticulous researcher. She had charted Cloudsight stats on noted astronomers whose social cap had risen lately for no obvious reason. Her timeline showed a burst of astronomy headlines around the spring.
Interest in space exploration had fallen off in the decades since terraforming Earth—ensuring its continued ability to sustain human life—had become dire necessity. Bounceback kids like Rubi were head-down-donkeys, shoulder to the plow.
No time to dream of sky. His backbrain promptly threw up four possible choruses for a pop song on that theme. Choosing one, he began fitting in melody.
Palki Ro jotted something new, below Sister Mary’s handwritten timeline: If unicorn hunters are seriously considering aliens, something triggered their interest. Suggest we track #weirdnews in the month before astronomers started stroking upward.
The group clustered, rolling out a new #weirdnews whiteboard for a brainstorm. Manitoule scribbled, Immolated waxworks statue, of Spock from Star Trek, in Kansas.
Hackle morsed something, on Jackal’s arm. He wrote, Epi pens that didn’t fire in Italy.
A chill ran through Drow. Epi pens. He hadn’t said a word about Luce. Yet here was something that venned.
This is why you called in the gang, right?
Amsterdam adolescent implant center shut down for three days, Sister Mary Joseph penned. Just before the epi pens.
He tried to imagine Luce as a harbinger of little green men. Hilarious.
Out in the everyday, it was necessary to maintain a vigorous performance of skepticism toward all #urbanmyth. Backlash against the fake-news era meant rumormongering without evidence was tagged as trollish. Here, in this rare unmonitored space, they could suspend judgment, offer and argue their wild theories, everything they thought Big Mother might be hiding.
By day, they paid lip service to disproving untruths before they percolated through Sensorium. Only here, under cover, could paranoia and wild speculation reign.
Time passed. The debunkers left the astronomy issue—little green men!—moving on to another board. Ideas circled. Connections formed. The agenda was refined and dead ends #triaged. Boards were memorized and wiped.
In recent weeks, people had insinuated, in Sensorium, that the weather office wasn’t properly warning people about superstorms. Were they deliberately trying to catch people in disaster-scale events, thereby reducing population? Did they want to narrow the window for lemmings, those preadolescents who still—despite all attempts to reduce the runaway rate to zero—fled into disaster zones to commit suicide, or to search for the #urbanmyth kids’ refuge, known as #Neverland?
Either way, the weather office was innocent. The group shredded the rumor in detail, assembling hard evidence and tasking Drow with making reachouts to friendly journalists. He memorized the talking points in a matter of seconds: he could dictate the whole case to Crane, later, and have him package it up for someone with a verified press pass.
Finally, the group cycled around to Drow’s whiteboard about the @ChamberofHorrors.
The connection here was shaky. But Luce was worried about being attacked. Attackers, for Drow, meant the Chamber.
Every society had stories about star chambers, secret groups of high-level string-pullers. Hellfire clubs, Skull and Bones societies. The cocktail-party story about the Chamber was that it was an off-grid hedonistic playground for extreme crepits, pod people, and @jarheads—superrich first-gen life-extension recipients. The rumor had it they lived amid Sodom & Gomorrah perversity, throwing orgies and holding feasts, bearing unlicensed kids, evading rationing, and interfering with the fine mechanics of the Bounceback.
Drow’s obsession with the Chamber ran to the irrational. Mostly, he didn’t care who ran the world. Humanity had clawed itself back from the brink of collective suicide. Trolling had stopped within his lifetime. Premeditated crimes and violent conspiracies had been all but eliminated. Wasn’t losing your privacy worth it when even spontaneous assaults got interrupted in progress? The populace had been disarmed. Standing police forces had been trimmed to flexible cohorts of giggers, people working their way up the law-enforcement leveling track.
Atmospheric carbon levels were dropping, along with the birthrate. Humanity was achieving the barely possible.
If secret string-pullers were directing the Bounceback, channeling its zeal for rationing and reclamation … well, that was a revelation that might break Rubi’s heart. Drow was just glad to have come through the wars intact.
Still. When his mind was looping, it circled the Chamber. The Chamber and its founding parents. If the Chamber existed, was his rapist there? Was she dead?
If there was someone after Luce, who but the Chamber could hide them?
Jackal wrote, A crackpot named Garmin Legosi from a #triaged pharma company told an inquiry that production of Superhoomin life-extension meds exceeded their outgoings. Plant location: Geneseo, south of the Lakes.
Black-market life-extension meds. The particular horror Drow was looking for would be about a hundred and fifty now.
Could he justify a run to the other side of the Lakes?
He mulled running a live tour. Possible stops arrayed themselves, stitching a route through the remains of upstate New York. He’d need Whiskey.
Father Blake said, “Are we ready to circle up?”
Pushing the surviving boards against one wall, they took seats in a tight arrangement of cushy chairs, candlelit circle too dim for good video if anyone had slipped in a camera. They pulled up to a round table draped in a cloth that fell to the floor.
Slipping his hands under the tabletop, Drow’s fingertips found the edge of a thin sheet of plastic. Everyone here could morse: texting dots and dashes into the sheet would transmit vibrations, soundlessly. They could telegraph their thoughts, and the Sensorium would be none the wiser.
Drow settled into the chair, closing his tired old eyes, drawing his whole focus into his fingertips as the untranscripted conversation began.