THE SURFACE—WESTEURO
DOVER FERRY TERMINAL
As the superstorm raged through the Atlantic, Rubi volunteered to do an impromptu hangout with the best and brightest student group, quizzing them about emergent AI and the boogeyman that was the Singularity. She tried to turn the conversation to oxygen security, all while deflecting their questions about the terrorist attack in Paris, Bastille, and Gimlet, Gimlet, Gimlet.
It felt like being a zoo exhibit.
Anselmo kept his distance, so that if Luce popped in to chat, he wouldn’t wonder how she’d picked up a police chum.
Drow tooned in for a visit as she was boarding a transport out of the terminal, catching her just as she was configuring some of her primer into a proper cushion—the bus seat was so old, it had cracks in it.
“What’s this?” He was wearing the white suit again; he must have thought it made him look extra sane.
Rubi gestured at two fragile centenarians across the aisle. “Their life-extension regimes are too specialized for Dover infirmary.”
“And how did you rate a seat on the first limo out?”
She shifted her hips, testing the cushion config. The nanosilk she’d deployed under her backside had come from her tights and sleeves, and her arms and legs were already feeling the draft. “I’m legit famous now; haven’t you heard?”
“You fast-tracked out of lockdown? Diva stuff, kid.”
She raised a hand and her new PR app, Debutante, flashed an alert—rubbing her thumb over her temple beads was, apparently, a stress tell. She turned the move into a vague wave. “Logistics claimed I was drawing attention. My presence forced Dover to allocate resources from passenger care into crowd management.”
“I thought you’d pooched your chance to fade out of my limelight when you started winning sim premieres,” Drow said. “Now—”
“Now I’m jumping terrorists and making newscycle.”
“Hey!” Concern in his voice ran on her nerves like sandpaper.
“I have almost as many people crawling my transcripts as you.”
“I’ll try to draw some fire. I am touring.”
Pulse of alarm. “Where?”
“A few pubs across the Lakes. Whiskey’s with me.”
It had been five years since he’d done a live gig outside their neighborhood comfort zone.
Wind slapped the bus as it groaned out onto the road. “And our client?”
“He’s invited me to Macbeth. Should be a good show. I tuned up their overture and sound effects, just to pack the house.”
“Why?”
“For fun, mostly,” he said. “Relax, honey. Everything’ll work out.”
She mojied disbelief.
“I promise,” he said, turning the conversation to other topics. In the end he stayed to chat throughout the ride, really delivering on the performance of health and stability. He didn’t ghost until she got to London.
Her first view was underwhelming: miserable, fog-shrouded greentowers, lashed by rain. If this was what the real world had to offer, there was no point spending time in it. “Crane, set me up with a power-fast until this clears.”
“I’ve prebooked a pod near Hammersmith, Miss.”
Twenty minutes later, the bus pulled up in front of a boarded-up building with thick walls, warehouse space for up to five hundred people in hibernation mode.
Rubi jumped off her cracked seat and sprinted through the deluge to the door. She grabbed a heated chugger, lightly sweetened milk in a shortbread-flavored bottle, and hit the showers to wash off the chill before choosing a pod.
Crane augmented the warehouse with arrows. “This one’s free, Miss Cherub.”
She lifted the pod hood, inspecting the couch beneath. Spotless.
Satisfied, Rubi put her primer into a nanosilk refresher and stashed her worldlies in the locker before settling, nude, onto the smartfoam mattress. The foam would periodically cycle, massaging her muscles and adjusting her position so she didn’t emerge feeling stiff. She installed a sterile mouthpiece for the feeding tube, clipping it inside her cheek. Then she unwrapped the autobidet, rocking into place until everything was comfortably settled against her groin.
Rubi’s temp and humidity prefs were already loaded into the pod as she leaned into the couch’s foam embrace. “Ping me as soon as the weather clears. I want a look at London.”
“Of course.” Crane brought up a carbon savings monitor. A quarter of the resources she didn’t spend, while fasting, would be added to her luxury budget. The rest would be kicked back into a fund for her bet with Gimlet.
She halved her own cut, offsetting some of the flight across the Atlantic. Work-related or not, the environmental cost of the voyage nagged at her conscience.
“There’s such a thing as too much virtue, miss.”
“Bounce back, baby. All for one, one for all.” She yanked the pod lid shut. Green telltale lights confirmed the locks were engaged, the feeder was good to go, and her Sensorium connection was robust. Lemon-flavored mist, laced with nutrients and a dose of buy-in drugs, warmed the back of her throat.
She went home first, booting her sunlit bedroom, with its Versailles-influenced wallpaper and gold-framed portraits.
“Clothing reset—business casual.” Her simulated silk pajamas morphed into a mustard blouse and black slacks.
She pushed through her front door, into a view of a mirror-smooth lake encircled by the homes of her @CloseFriends.
E-state back doors led to private and shared gardens. Front doors took users to their neighborhood metaphor. Drow’s Whine Manor loomed, directly across from her palace in the twelve o’clock position, its gothic lines casting spooky reflections on the surface of the lake. Beyond it were personal contacts: childhood friends, school friends, sports buddies, old lovers, and Gimlet Barnes. The commercial district, at three o’clock, teemed with trusted vendors: Team Rabble clubhouse, law school, her bank, customer service outlets for various apps.
Rubi strolled the lake’s perimeter, poking her nose into the law school. Its lounge was bustling. Everyone was burrowing, catching up assignments, finishing case work, and challenging exams while the Atlantic storm raged.
An anthropomorphized giraffe wearing lawyer tabs appeared beside her. “Congratulations, Mer Whiting, on the bump in your social cap.”
“Thanks.”
“The school is offering an opp to make a public service module about resisting emergent terrorism…”
“Accept. I’m using Debutante—can you send specs and a schedule to her?”
“Gladly. Would you like to examine your grades on the Support Ticket Advocacy exam?”
Marks unscrolled before her, confirming she’d made the class leaderboard. “Everything back on track since the one #examfail.”
“Yes. You must win five of nine social cap advocacies, including your current gig with Mer Luciano Pox, to unlock the next round of specialized study opps.”
“Remind me?”
“Drone-tampering, nepotism, and criminal negligence.” The beginning of the criminal law track, in other words, and a gateway to eventually challenging the #suicidality #triage laws. People like Drow had been her initial focus when she started law school. She’d never thought she might need environmental law; when she began, it hadn’t occurred to her that SeaJuve might one day need a lawyer.
“There is a qualifying maladjust advocacy gig in London,” the giraffe added.
Rubi hesitated. Drow couldn’t be on his own forever. Just because he’d ridden out one week of solitude didn’t mean he wouldn’t panic and attempt self-harm tomorrow.
Drow had only survived his mad slash at the tranq darts, back in Guelph, because Father Blake had been nearby, with paramedic training and the resources of Our Lady Immaculate.
She shoved the memory away. “New gigs can wait until I’m back in the Lakes.”
“Strike one. Declining three consecutive opps will move you down the priority queue for further offers.”
“I’ll appeal if necessary.”
The giraffe nodded, ghosting.
Happ bonked her shin. In his mouth was an invite to a lazy-river spin with her classmates. He barked up mojis of people hugging. “Healthy professional social connections—”
“I know. I’ll go, okay? But only for ninety.”
Her assent triggered a cascade of delirious barking and tail-wagging. The virtual elevator of the law market immediately opened out onto lush rainforest, jade foliage bursting extravagantly from the banks of a river in …
She walked through the portal, trying to guess. “Cambodia?”
“Laos,” corrected Fass as he too tooned in. Tags reminded her they had challenged User Agreements 1 & 2 together. A river barge awaited; Rubi took a seat.
“@BargeFourGuests: The camera run on the Mekong just got a hardware upgrade,” Fass said. He was a resident in Nairobi; why he was slumming in a Great Lakes law program was beyond her. His toon wore a formal-looking kimono and his long, neon-orange hair was in a topknot. “Higher definition, more detail.”
“I hadn’t heard about the upgrade.” Rubi relaxed as the jungle drifted past.
The Mekong sim showcased the kind of lush ecosystem that beguiled a person into thinking humanity had already stuck the so-called #SoftLanding, that the planet and its surviving post-plague billions were stabilized. The trees thronged with monkeys. Shore birds drilled the mud for digestible microfauna. The fact that the river had a real flow—that it wasn’t just a trickle in a half-dried mudpan—invited belief that the worst of the environmental crisis was over.
Fass let out a sigh. “This is why SeaJuve failed. Easier to relax when you’re winning.”
“Rationing fatigue,” someone countered. “It’s Bounceback needs a shot in the arm, not just the oceans.”
As if the oceans weren’t a big enough challenge.
“Anybody have the requisite courses for the Global Oversight appeal?” She posted specs, knowing that Crane would have told her if any of her friends or contacts were qualified.
They shook their heads.
“I could, maybe, in six months…” Fass said apologetically.
“Too late.”
“I’ll ask around home.”
“Thanks.” She sent a stroke to show her appreciation.
The barge rounded a bend, revealing a spectacular red-tiled historic temple, along with a hospital, a rewilding project for newts and a shrine centered around a downed United States warplane.
Her classmates doubled down on the conversation, crunching case law, carbon stats, and newscycle. Fast, energizing debate, achievers arguing about how to better the world and help its square pegs.
Rubi was tempted to stay when the ninety-minute timer ran out.
Instead, she ported back to the office, requesting a confidential workroom with Cloudsight’s strongest hash provisions. She sent an invite to her own square peg.
Now. How to amass information about Luce without giving away anything Anselmo had told her?
A biography, first. Luce had #foundling tags. No known DOB or surviving biological relations. Very common.
She asked Polly Precedent, her new tutor, “Can we get Luce’s profile pictures?”
The app, rendered as a glorious orange parrot with spectacles, flapped its wings, bringing up a poster filled with facial recognition metrics. Head shots resolved: Luce as a young man on a bamboo-baling gig, dishwater eyes and mink-blond hair, looking freshly minted. He had a sunburned nose and a smile: no sign of the harried expression Rubi knew.
Recent shots were less charming—no sunburn, no smile. She found the profile pic used for everything from his drone pilot’s license to his soapbox posts. It was the last picture of him ever taken.
“Candids, Polly? Found footage?”
“Nothing,” Polly awwwked, shaking out her feathers. “Your client is a full-time pod person.”
“Then why has he been so hard to geolocate?”
“Unknown.”
“How long since he logged this profile photo?”
“Uncertain. The date tags run into the Clawback,” Polly said.
That would make him Drow’s age or older. “I just took a technosphere tutorial that said you can estimate the age of a hashed picture using a program called Tree Ring Formulation.”
Polly edged back and forth on her perch, processing. “Cloudsight will approve the app license for case-specific one-time use. Running. Tree Ring estimates that the final profile photo tagged to Luciano Pox originated sixty-five years ago.”
“This one? Where Luce looks … what, thirty?”
Polly flapped: yes.
“You’re telling me Luce is older than … he’s a zombie?”
“Autostrike!” Polly replied. “Use of discriminatory language.”
Rubi felt a pulse of mean-spirited joy. What did one strike matter to her current score?
Zombie, zombie, zombie. She imagined sticking out her tongue.
Luce didn’t seem vintage.
Her mind drifted to Anselmo’s suspicions. An AI posing as human might, theoretically, take over the Sensorium account of an agoraphobic pod person.
No! Nothing Rubi had learned about AI personalities tracked with Luce’s irrationality, panic, obsessive politicking, his bursts of terror and rage. Theoreticians agreed that the first surviving AIs would be able to pass for human online. They might occasionally seem odd, off in their reactions, but anything too weird—too alien-seeming—would be winnowed.
Couldn’t Luce just be a sick old man?
Just then, the object of all this activity skulked in, wearing his cartoon burglar outfit, sans mask. He examined the timeline. “Pics of … yes, of me. Why?”
“Background for your hearing.”
“Bio data.” He fisted his hands, bonking his knuckles together three times.
“I had no idea you were on life extension. Or that you were over a hundred.”
“I get strokes for being too stubborn to die?”
“Why should you die?”
He shrugged. “Everyone I ever knew is dead.”
That was #survivorguilt if ever she’d heard it. “This is a possible avenue of defense, Luce. If we prove you have age-related social impairments, or Setback trauma—”
“Trauma like Drow?”
“Um.”
“They won’t give me a dog, will they?” Disgust, there, in his voice.
She shook her head. “I’m saying that if there’s been chemical imbalance, or mismanagement of your life extension regime, it will help your case.”
He perked up. “Medical mismanagement?”
“You understand that it has to be true? Mismanagement means someone’s responsible.”
“Someone’s guilty. Someone pays.” He looked thoughtful.
“Do you think someone’s mismanaging your meds? Where are you accessing care?”
He turned from his picture, looking uncomfortable. “Drow says you won’t break our user agreements.”
She thought of @Interpol and Anselmo with a pang. “I want to help you.”
“There’s a London farm for zomb—”
“Eldercare facility,” Rubi corrected. Unlike her, he couldn’t afford the strike.
“Potato poh-tah-toe.”
This was another of Drow’s hacks: teaching clients to replace antisocial utterances with cute pop-culture refs. This one came from an ancient song about lovers with consensus-building problems.
“Can you say where your body is resident? Like, mine’s currently in a pod in Hammersmith.”
He crossed his arms. He was shaking.
“Okay, change of topic. What if we talk about what happened in Paris?”
“That pink-swaddled baby stealer?”
“You and I were talking remotely, right?”
“So?”
“You were here, though. London?”
“I’d lost track of my map coordinates.”
“Your body. Because you mostly live in Sensorium?”
“Obviously.”
She said, gently, “Most people don’t lose track, Luce.”
“The—” The knuckles again. Bonk, bonk, bonk. “I got delivered to a new facility. The Abruzzo home was for premium subscribers.”
“If Eldercare downgraded your subscription, they would’ve informed you.”
“They did. But the ads, ads, ads…” he said. “They told me the meat was getting moved to another freezer, but I’d stopped reading.”
Rubi brought up a tabletop model of the Palais du Luxembourg grounds, creating a tiny sim of herself and Luce at the café. She drew the police line around the area where the cameras, mics, and uplinks had been offlined. “You sensed the @Freebreed blackout coming. You warned me.”
“I was scanning for goats in the machine—”
“Ghosts?”
“Goats. Whatever’s attacking me.”
Like the goat that had tricked the smarttruck? Did that imply an entity other than Luce?
What if the goat was the terrorist AI, the unicorn Anselmo was hunting? “Your scan revealed the cameras going down?”
Luce nodded.
She darkened the shadow to represent the actual blackout. “You were remote. When my uplink got jammed, you should’ve been booted out of our conversation.”
A blank expression.
“Instead, you were yammering in my ear throughout the attack. Crane said you formed a redtooth link to my gaming baton. That’s serious hacker stuff, Luce. Difficult and criminal. Your biotags say you’re a retired winemaker.”
He blanched. “Who knows this?”
She picked her words with care. “You should assume the police audited everyone who saw the attack.”
“Will they sanction me?”
“Depending on your medical status.”
“Limiting Sensorium access?”
That was the key, wasn’t it? Access. All he cared about was soapboxing for martial law.
She brought up the parameters for managed care, letting him look for himself. His VR access would be limited to quality of life and rehab simulations. Visitations from outside would be limited, and there’d be no more scope for political speeching.
He let out a mournful sigh. “I just wanted you to know there was danger. Wrong again, Luce.”
The regret in his voice, the self-recrimination, went straight to her heart. This couldn’t possibly be a computer intelligence. Anselmo was wrong. He’d see that, once the two of them met.
A weight came off her shoulders. She wasn’t setting up Luce for the police—she was speeding up the process of clearing him.
She met his eyes, telegraphing movement so he could step back or block consent to contact. When he didn’t, she laid a hand on his bony, old-man shoulder. “If it comes to a criminal complaint, you might have to be prepared to ’fess up and show how you linked to my baton—so they can close up whatever loophole you exploited.”
“Locking, locking,” he muttered. “Locking all the doors.”
Whatever that meant. “You were protecting me from terrorists, or trying to.”
“Stupid terrorists.”
“Agreed. Could you do that, Luce?”
“Confess I crawled into your joystick?” He seemed to consider. Finally, a nod. “Demonstrate the redtooth hack, apologize-désolé…”
“And help the authorities figure out how the @Freebreeders jammed le Jardin?”
“Why should I chew their food?”
“To be prosocial. Remember prosocial?”
He banged his knuckles against each other—one, two, three. Another Drow hack, a replacement for his stupid, stupid, stupid mantra, she realized. “If I had to.”
“You would.”
“And then I don’t end up hashed?”
“Hashed? Never.” Her jaw dropped. “Luce, did you think these were capital offenses?”
“Why would they let me live?”
“Nobody’s going to kill you.” She gestured at the managed-care infographic. “That’s as bad as it gets.”
Luce let out a dismissive snort.
“Nothing worse is going to happen to you, promise. Whatever you may have experienced, before the Clawback, it’s history. Nobody does that now.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” She swallowed. “Have you talked over these fears of … punishment?”
“Torture?”
“Torture.” The word felt like darts, slamming into her throat. “Did you talk about this with Drow?”
“Should I?”
“Tell him. He can help.”
A hesitant smile. “Okay.”
Rubi’s sense of being on the edge of a whirlpool receded. “Now. About our meeting. You’ll be there? In the flesh?”
Luce manifested a playbill, for a showing of Macbeth at the Piccadilly Theatre. “Zombie farmers are taking us to see this.”
“I remember.” Rubi shared a booking for a pop-in meeting room, near the theater, timed for right after the show. “You’ll wheel from the theater to the meeting?”
“Meat on display, as required.”
That would take care of Anselmo.
Luce was too disordered, too fragmentary, too random to be a constructed personality. He was going to turn out to be a hacker with a seizure disorder or VTSD. A Setback-damaged, badly medicated elder with paranoid fantasies.
Fantasies about murder goats.
It couldn’t all be fantasy, could it? That truck had seen one, too.
Never mind. Just prove her client was a real person, and then set @Interpol on the goat.
Meanwhile, Luce had support tickets to clear and Cloudsight to answer to. She pulled up the social penalties and they set to work, the two of them working up answers to each charge, laying out a plan to restore him to—if not model-citizen status—at least to get him out of the penalty box.