THE SURFACE—WESTEURO
METRO PARIS, CENTRE POMPIDOU
Rubi fought the urge to ping her client again as she led Agent Javier out onto Rue Beaubourg, into air redolent of fresh-mown lawn, flowers, and an undercurrent of fertilizer, the familiar aromas of vertical farming. Nagging Luce wouldn’t help him. Finding out what @Interpol wanted, on the other hand, just might.
A bumblebee circled her head; she waved it away, watching it continue to a dangling stand of royal purple lobelia. It was good to be out among people; she couldn’t say exactly why the sight of the sniperbot had disturbed her so much, but she couldn’t have stayed up there, in its sights, for another minute.
The Rue Beaubourg she remembered from games had been burned during Setback riots in the late twenty-first. After the ashes had been raked and the strippers recycled what they could, WestEuro rationing had repurposed the remnants. Printed multiuse towers now rose around them, a human-built canyon of greenwall.
French reconstruction specs followed similar principles to those in the Great Lakes: densification, mixed-use development, low-impact food production, and lots of on-site carbon fixing.
Happ, Rubi’s contentment-management app, generated illusory footprints on the path ahead, breadcrumbing the route past Centre Pompidou to the Paris Historical Preserve. If there were bots tracking her, they were keeping their distance.
As for Anselmo Javier … she assessed him as she would competing legal counsel or an opponent in a gaming sim.
Aside from fidgeting with his protective vest, he appeared at ease. The vest overlaid his primer, which was configured to jeans and a black shirt. He wore a genuine vintage police badge at his hip; the antique was tagged #tequilayuen, #serpico, #starsky, and #cowboycopclub. His mash-up of fandoms included the old rebellious police memes, then.
Drow would hate everything about this guy.
Greenwalls rose on either side of them, bordered by rows of flowers, yellow and saffron stripes separating cobbled ground-level walkways from low-friction bike paths. Side-mounted garden pallets created striations of color on the artificial canyon walls. Some pallets held meadow flowers: flax and poppies, buttercups, tufts of grass, and the occasional dandelion. Others were tasked to perishable crops: root vegetables, lettuce. The pattern was broken, here and there, by beeswax-yellow apiaries, and brown boxes housing bats.
Beyond the boundary of the towering farms, the street widened into a plaza with an old marble fountain. A glass structure, squat and gleaming, broke the green urban vista.
“Historic,” Anselmo said, momentarily adopting the role of tour guide.
Rubi nodded. She’d fought sims in this building, too: it was the Rogers and Piano–built Centre Pompidou. She took it in now, admiring its gawky, inorganic lines. The online version of the museum had hosted the final battle of a 1980s sim, Slugfest.
It was a superhero game, less gritty than the war scenarios. Gimlet won by blasting her way through Pompidou’s windows with a flame bolt.
Postmodern paintings and rugburn. Flailing and tumbling, out of control, she had slammed through three interior walls and a Picasso canvas before falling to simulated death on the other side.
What had her alias been in that one? WaterNymph?
That was the scenario where we kissed …
“Shall you keep to your plan to walk to Notre Dame?” Crane dragged her back to mostly unfiltered reality.
“Why not?” she subvocalized.
Happ took this as a question, using her visual implants to lay infographic on the side of the Centre Pompidou, streaming mojis over the glass walls. Rubi’s view of the building abruptly lit up with a scale, representing balance, a healthy mash-up of paid work, volunteerism, and self-care.
“I fully intend to continue the tour, Happ.”
The scale morphed into a fireworks-burst and aural moji of a cheering crowd, literally applauding her choice.
Anselmo was waiting. Rubi wiped Happ’s graphical validations and took over that part of her display, again transforming the glass wall of Pompidou, but this time into a shareboard. Luciano Pox, she titled it, offering access.
“Accept.” Anselmo pinned up Rubi’s travel records: flight times, pop-in boardroom booking, carbon spend. Cloudsight had filed permits for the trip as soon as Luce accepted Rubi’s offer of advocacy. They rated the flight to Europe as necessity, work-perk rather than luxury.
“All true?” Anselmo asked.
Rubi nodded. A bead of sweat, high on her scalp, trickled through her dreadlocks and into the cluster of ornamental beads—faux gold, arrayed in a hexagon—that she wore in the short braids near her left temple.
“Hasn’t Pox rescheduled?”
“Not yet.” In theory, the Sensorium was full-access and open to everyone. In practice, a person could barely function when their social capital fell below 18 percent. Vendors, enabling apps, and most services required solid citizen ratings from their subscribers. “The capped spend more time on the surface. They have to watch ads to access anything beyond subsistence services.”
To be capped, in the true sense of the word, meant more than mere social death. You fell to the back of the queue for services: food delivery became next to impossible, and forget about getting a table in a good kitchen. A capped adult with a cracked tooth might wait days to see a dentist. They could write off any prospect of catching a taxi, winning decent work-for-pay, or getting a well-located pop-in.
A few weeks in the penalty box was enough to make Rubi’s clients ready, so ready, for their in-flesh meeting.
Why had he skipped? The obvious answer was right there. “Maybe he stood me up because @Interpol’s chasing him around, in full armor, no less.”
“Question is,” Anselmo said, thumbing the flak jacket, “did Pox know I was coming?”
Rubi shook her head. When this got her an owlish look, she said, “You know I didn’t tell him.”
“Do I?”
It was the sort of comment, as much accusation as question, that Drow would cite as proof that no policeman could be trusted.
Nice smile or not, this guy was slippery. A rulebreaker? She’d have to read up on #cowboycop fandom.
“Are you claiming, Agent Javier, that I won’t find your name among the people who’ve accessed my Haystack transcripts?”
“Of course I’m auditing you, Mer Whiting.”
Irked, Rubi made for the plaza alongside Centre Pompidou, skirting a carbon-fixing crew, teenagers bundling bamboo canes thinned from the rooftops.
The bakery was on the corner.
She could smell the place from a hundred feet away. Hot butter and fragrant pastry wafted on the morning air, realworld siren song, temptation unchanged since the development of the baker’s craft. Tourists clumped around the display window, weighing the goods against the tiered luxury pricing, checking reviews, and running satisfaction-assessment apps on whether a macaron or eclair would genuinely boost their overall state of contentment.
Rubi had done that math back at the airport in Detroit. As she approached, the bakery’s sidekick diverted her to a pickup window. Preordered treasure awaited: one croissant and one pain au chocolat, both oven-warm.
“Have something.”
Anselmo shook his head regretfully, snagging a protein chugger from a public rack. “I need my goodwill for coffee.”
“I thought old-school cops were all about nicotine and good scotch.”
“Sometimes, sure.”
She could almost hear Happ building Venn diagrams, charting their mutual interests.
“So, Mer Pox. Why does he rate a NorthAm advocate?”
Rubi slid the pastries into the satchel containing her worldlies. “I’ve been logging hours as a specialist in difficult adjudications.”
“Within the Great Lakes, oui? Paris is far from home.”
“Luce told his Euro advocates to fuck off. He got cited for bullying. As you must know.”
Anselmo took a swig from the chugger and added Cloudsight’s transcript of antisocial offenses to their shareboard. Luce had called his Paris advocate an encephalitic pinhead in need of slapping. The reference to violence got him sentenced to a social-interaction seminar.
Rubi built a timeline into the shareboard. Its image—their notes—transferred to an old-style billboard farther along on their route. The rest of Paris remained pleasingly without augment. She could smell the river.
Anselmo said, “Social remediation wasn’t an in-the-flesh class.”
“So? It refreshed Luce on the basics. He passed a drone-piloting module and got a food-delivery gig—volunteer—to earn strokes.”
“He kept trolling in his free time.”
“It’s soapboxing, not trolling.”
“Not everyone sees it that way.”
“The law does.” Rubi pulled up her client’s favorite talking points: ecosphere rehab wasn’t working, densification wasn’t strict enough. People were kicking back against population controls. “He’s quoting verified newscycle. No lies.”
“He said Oversight’s rationing and carbon-fixing targets are lazy.” Anselmo let out a cough, eloquent echo of the Sensorium outrage Luce triggered with that outburst. People hated being told they were underachieving, after decades of self-denial. “He’s opposed to both SeaJuve and Project Rewild and says rapid-response democracy is an invalid form of government. Basically, he’s a negger.”
“Antisocial language doesn’t rate criminal intervention. That’s what crowdscoring’s for.”
“Why him?” Anselmo tipped back the last of his chugger. She caught a faint whiff of raspberry.
“Pardon?”
“Why this particular maladjust?” He chomped the neck off the bottle. Like most food packaging, it was protein-matrix, textured like a cracker. Post-fuel crunchiness with a whiff of fluoride. Digestible garbage, the go-to anti-waste hack for a culture that ran, largely, on printed food. “You were pro-SeaJuve, weren’t you?”
Weren’t you? Past tense. Something in her wrenched.
“He’s anti, non?”
“Luce’s politics are irrelevant.” She kept her voice cool. “He needs help. Maybe you see a naysayer—”
“A @hoaxer. Troublemaker.”
“If anyone’s in trouble, it’s him.”
“You really believe that, don’t you?”
Oh, you smug bastard!
“We’re long past the age of master criminals,” she said. “Luce is harmless.”
“Why did you come all this way, then?”
“Cloudsight’s WestEuro office widecast a call for proposals when the locals lost patience. Lots of advocates applied for a chance to throw Luce a lifeline. I’m not special. I’m just holding the rope he managed to grab.”
“Did he pick you because of your notoriety? Or your father’s?”
“I’m here as a lawyer, not a gamer.” She had reached Pont Neuf. Rubi opened her thermal, slid out the pain au chocolat, and leaned against the stone of the bridge, taking in the view.
She had been here dozens of times, but only in computer-generated dreams. Now she inhaled slowly, taking in the real deal as the pastry warmed her hands.
A bite. The chocolate was everything Drow had said it would be. And the thing about fresh, real Parisienne baked goods was, as also promised, the aroma. Delicately sweetened steam expanded across her palate.
Happ lost it, momentarily going nuts with the mojis, capturing vid. “Enjoy every moment! Optimization of merged priorities—”
She muted the commentary.
Happ threw one last soap-bubble graphic, jammed with twenty different versions of the word LOOK!, at the view off the bridge. Rubi looked. A smile broke across her face. She couldn’t say how being there, in the flesh, was different. A thrill ran through her anyway.
The bubble popped; Happ shut up. Rubi captured some stills, sent some postcards.
Anselmo let her enjoy two more bites of pastry. Then: “You notice there are no in-person strikes on Pox’s record?”
She crunched the question, fact-checking. Had he ever been cited face-to-face? For littering, spitting, disturbing the peace, playing obnoxious music, emitting offensive vapes? No, no, no, no, and no.
So, he was socially neutral in person? Drow had days when he could barely walk to Lake Ontario without someone taking issue with his scowl, or his tendency to skitter into traffic when something lit up his trauma triggers.
“I assume Luce is mostly a pod person.”
“Will you make another appointment?” Anselmo asked.
“So you can … what? Ambush and drag him off to managed care?”
The accusation was confrontational, a test of his maverick-cop sensibilities. He could strike her if he wanted.
Instead, he grinned. “You’d rather I got to him when he didn’t have an advocate?”
“Fair point.” She finished the pain au chocolat, licked her fingers, and continued her traverse of the bridge. Her feet knew the way to Notre Dame as if she’d been there a hundred times. The old church was where the final levels of Ghosts of Paris 1818 played out.
Once again, simhabits took hold, as they had when Anselmo first burst in on her. She caught herself scanning for the palm reader on the far end of the bridge, a waifish specter coughing blood into a hanky.
Stop! Time to put all that behind you.
“Gargoyles took me out, there.” Anselmo pointed east. “Had to backtrack to Montmartre for some kind of talisman…”
“Magic bullet. From that brothel.”
“Oui, a bullet. And you—I saw you defeat Gimlet Barnes in the premiere of the final battle.”
It might have been something he’d looked up, to stroke her ego. Still, it was hard not to smile in response. It had been her first unequivocal victory over Gimlet, the one that evened their score.
“I’m tough to play.”
“Barnes beat you in Slugfest.”
“In the air. I’ve got my feet on the ground now.” She contemplated the ethics of laying traps for her client. “Tell me what Luce is supposed to have done?”
“I’ll show you, but we’d need to datadive,” Anselmo said. “Assuming you’re done exploring.”
“I’ll put my tour on pause,” Rubi said.
Happ threw out aural moji—whining puppy noises—but she minimized them. Luce was obviously in deeper trouble than his support ticket showed. She had to know whether Anselmo really was one of Drow’s possibly apocryphal bad cops, looking to railroad a mentally ill maladjust.
Time for some quid pro and quo.
Accord reached, they perched on a park bench together, diving into the Sensorium.