THE SURFACE—TAMPICO DISPUTED TERRITORY
The only thing worse than being fired was being fired and marooned in Florida.
Anselmo did all the obvious things to manage his fury: showering, shaving, exercise. He attempted to appreciate his miserable, broken-down surroundings by tasting a local specialty, spicy printed cubes called arroz con pollo.
Trying to sleep simply left him shaking with rage.
Dawn had him walking a reclaimed stretch of Florida coastline, a strip of beach so wide and white of sand that he might have been in a historical, looking at a sim.
Preserving this old-style beach had meant building at a breakneck pace, decades earlier, as the sea rose. Opt-in tags offered historical footage, Clawback-vintage: time-release scenes of recycled I beams being driven into the ocean floor, serving as base layer for artificially grown limestone, faux coral, neobedrock.
In other parts of the world, preventing shoreline encroachment had begun with large-scale, old-fashioned sandbagging and HESCO barriers, followed by construction of permanent berms and dikes. But Florida was built on porous limestone; the challenges were different. Even with the false reefs built up, expanses of sand and palm trees had to be raised—grafted—to the prosthetic bone of the continent. It had required a complex volunteer effort, all crowdfunded by citizens of a city that knew it was on the edge of getting #triaged forever by unsympathetic stakeholders in cooler places: Nairobi, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai.
They deserve to be #triaged.
Anselmo closed the historicals, trying out the unaugmented view. People were out in the hundreds. Sun lipped the eastern horizon: dawn offered an opp to catch the least-searing rays of daylight. To expose some skin, even swim.
A note flashed in his upper peripheral: AnonTip: Take a stroll.
It was a map of the beach trail, marked with an X.
“To what end?” he said aloud. “My case has been snagged by bigger jurisdictional fish.”
The X blinked twice, then vanished.
It wasn’t as though he had anything better to do, was it? He’d been promised leveling ops and strokes, rewards for his successful investigation into Luce Pox. He’d shunted it all into a #movetoBeijing request and was waiting in the long queue for immigration greenlight.
Odds were good they’d give him a visa but not a flight to China. Now he was looking for gigs to pay for that. In Tampico, where he had no contacts and no localcred, and where the only case with any legs had been snaffled by @GlobalSec.
He set out, skirting a series of shallow pools. A cluster of families, realworld friends by the look of it, had brought out their toddlers to putter about, making sand castles.
Anselmo felt that pang again. Romancing Rubi had been a dead end. If they’d clicked, he might have convinced her that the two of them could glomerate, to look together for a family willing to take on her high-profile, troublesome father.
But Gimlet Barnes’s arrival had deflated his hopes. Rubi’s romantic interests lay elsewhere. Meanwhile, her ascension, within the @PoxWorkingGroup, had been the real reason he’d been torpedoed. All the strokes he might have earned were drawn to her, like iron filings to the electromagnet of her celebrity.
Stagnating professionally and stuck in the middle of nowhere, he glowered at the rising sun.
A local woman said, “It’s okay. You won’t burn.”
“You sure of that?”
“Just wrap up when the warning sounds.” She took off her sandals, digging long toes into the sparkling white sand.
Anselmo configged his primer to follow her example. His shoes melted up his legs, bleeding into his cuffs, which rolled themselves up to his knees.
“Wow.” He had walked barefoot in sand before, but only in sim. The give of it, underfoot, seemed like an illusion only half-constructed.
The rising sun hung like an egg yolk over the ocean, coloring the clouds.
The woman handed him a topical. “UV blockers?”
“Thanks.” Rubbing lotion into his skin, Anselmo took a deep breath, scenting for orange blossoms—it was Florida, after all. Instead, he got a whiff of briny marine coastline and human bodies slimed in the same sun-protective oils he was applying now.
The woman waited as he continued to look. There were swimmers out near a barge, building endurance. A group of scuba divers practiced under the watchful eye of three instructors. Farther east, a second barge served as a platform for diving boards. Anselmo marveled at the acrobatics: people whirling through the air, cutting into the sea like dolphins.
“There’s a bridge, if you want to keep walking.”
The bridge lay in the direction of the X from his anonymous tip. Anselmo sent the woman a stroke, in thanks, and a wearable on her wrist chimed.
“I don’t have implants,” she said, reading his surprise. “My name is Sparka Goldfish.”
“Anselmo Javier.”
“Pleased to meet you, Anselmo Javier.” She had a business link printed on her hand. @ManicPixie Dream Bod.
“Massage?” he guessed.
“Personal services, bodywork, you name it.” She resumed strolling, crossing the beach into a park planted in soft grass. The sunscreen on his feet had glued sand to his toes; walking on the lawn whisked the grains away.
About five hundred people, dressed in head-to-toe sunblocks, Lawrence of Arabia wear, the sort of garb that kept the rads off your skin wherever your mind happened to be, were shadow-fencing. Each occupied a space about two meters in diameter; each seemed oblivious to the others as they ran in place, jumped, stabbed.
“Some big game event,” Sparka explained, choosing the path around the perimeter. Vendors around the edges had water and snack cubes, laced with Conviction, LucidDream, and MethodAct.
One participant clutched his chest, falling to the grass. Wrestling with an imaginary foe, he shouted once, froze … then stood, cursing cheerfully.
He’d have to play catchup, leveling from zero. That or wait until the premiere was fully unlocked so he could respawn at the save point in a later run.
“Eliminated from play,” he growled.
Sparka flashed the player her business card as they continued through the field of play.
“This is a gig for you? Drumming up clients?”
“No, I’m actually a @ManicPixie owner. We’re a collective. I cut hair.”
“Ah.” He resisted the urge to finger-comb.
She grinned. “Surprised?”
He nodded. He was uncomfortable with the implant-intolerant; he couldn’t imagine getting intimate service from one. You could still strike one of them if you got bad results, but it would feel like punching down.
“It’s worse than you think!” She opened her mouth, revealing a spotted tongue. Grafted with a bit of … reptile or amphib tissue? It forked, slightly, in a way that made him queasy. Where the flesh looked more normal, more like tongue, it was double-pierced with copper points.
“Body mods?”
“Awww, you’re shocked.”
“It’s very … outlier.” Once a sign of outsider culture, mods had been embraced by successive western cohorts: the Boomers, GenX, and the Millennials. But the Setback generation had kicked back, embracing what it called template purity. Anselmo had seen hosts of paintings, plainly judgmental images of heavily modded GenX octogenarians, people who’d laid waste to their exteriors.
Sagging flesh, skin cancers, and faded tattoos. To recent generations, modding equated with the damage humanity had done to the biosphere.
How strange, Anselmo thought, that he found Sparka exotic! He’d spent a lifetime online, among people whose toons had tail apps, horns, extra arms …
“Do you—”
“Things not to say to the disabled.” Headmistress, his sidekick, flashed pop-up warnings: “Don’t you get bored living offline all the time? That must be such a challenge. How do you fill your days? I guess you really live in the now. You inspire me.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m four,” he warned the app. He had resubscribed to Headmistress when his WestEuro pack #triaged him—she’d managed his family of origin, she still had his remnant account info, and Desk Sergeant managed him at work, anyway. He hadn’t had time to shop for something more befitting a #lonewolf in his thirties.
A woman tooned in behind Sparka, then, right on the X spot on his trail map. Whooz tags identified her as Allure Noonstar.
“My, my,” the visitor said, miming a peek into Sparka’s satchel. “What interesting account data this one has.”
“I’m just looking at your catalog,” Anselmo told Sparka, who beamed.
The toon, Allure, was walking circles around her. “Far less activity than a normal user. She didn’t go through implant surgery?”
“Her body rejects implantation,” Anselmo subbed.
“So, she’s a cripple?”
Anselmo frowned. Should he strike this Allure for ableism?
Oblivious to the toon’s scrutiny, Sparka pulled out a tin flask and produced a metallic clip, wet with antiseptic gel, which evaporated as he watched.
“Try this.” He used gestural moji to give consent, and she clipped it to his ear. “Feel the weight? It clamps harder if you want a bit of sensation.”
“Does that mean pain?” Anselmo asked.
“Some people go for that.” She flipped the tin, revealing a mirror. The clip-on earring was a vintage section of roller-coaster track, a winding line reminiscent of DNA, following the upper curve of his ear, with a tiny car full of people about to plunge.
Anselmo let the mirror go, concentrating on the sensation of sun warming the piece of jewelry and the claws of the clip-on, minuscule pressure points within the delicate flesh of his ear.
“This is how people used to live,” Sparka said. “Encumbered. Having things, lots of things, more than they could haul in a worldly. They weren’t adrift.”
“I don’t know if I’m the roller-coaster type.”
“I have a centipede back at the shop.”
“Ah. No. Not an insect.”
“There’s a lion in the catalog. Ambush predator.”
“More your speed, definitely,” said the toon Allure.
“I might like a lion.” Looking over her shoulder, he subbed to the toon, “What do you want?”
“Don’t be standoffish, Agent Javier. I’m here to make your dreams come true.”
“By implying the intolerants…”
“Disconnected scraps. Evolutionary failures.”
Headmistress spoke up suddenly. “Don’t strike her, Anselmo. Listen.”
Allure raised her hands. “How do these … disabled?… get by? Who’s helping them?”
“Why would they need help?”
“What if you prove they’re in bed with the Singularity?”
The Singularity had been a dead end, one of his four tracks of investigation into Luce. Going back down that road now would be ridiculous. Especially if … “Persecuting low-bandwidth users won’t buy me a flight to Beijing.”
“I’ll buy you a flight to Beijing,” Allure said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re in a unique position to focus on a high-profile disabled user … and his entourage.” With that, Allure tooned out.
As she vanished, another sim player went down, staggering back, hands flying to belly as though they’d taken some kind of shot to the gut. He had been fighting hard; his robes were slick with sweat.
Disabled. Allure had to mean Drow Whiting. Widely known and mentally ill. Every attempt to prove that his sidekick Crane was sapient had #crashburned. Still, @Interpol remained suspicious.
Headmistress popped up the list of people whose transcripts Anselmo was auditing. Luce Pox, Woodrow Whiting, and Cherub Whiting topped the leaderboard. Nobody would get an alert if he kept auditing them: not the Whitings, not Crane.
His route had brought him beyond the gaming field, to a path through a shallow reef system, habitat for swamp and a lacework of red mangrove trees.
“Reef printing is all about maintaining a platform for eventual reintroduction of wild coral.” The @ManicPixie’s spiel brought him out of his reverie. “We lost a lot of the Keys to ocean rise. Here, the surviving wildlife species can keep a toehold until the seas roll back.”
“You think that’ll happen?”
“Not in our lifetime. Meanwhile, you’ve looked at my lion earring three times.”
“How did you…”
She indicated a watch, vintage tech, with a tiny screen aglow with glyphs. “I don’t need implants to see your catalog pings.”
Anselmo unclipped the roller coaster from his ear. “It’s a beautiful piece, but I’m not sure I can afford an encumbrance.”
“Give it some thought,” she said. “You’ve got our shop coordinates. You could be the single most radical cop in Tampico.”
“This isn’t my home.” They had reached a fork in the path. “Thanks for the sunscreen, Sparka. And the conversation.”
“Keep the peace, Jacques Law.” She trotted back the way she had come.
The place where the earring had touched him, the bite of its contacts, tingled slightly. Was this real desire, or was he just reacting to having his case poached?
“Do you wish to tag some feels?” Headmistress asked.
“I flagged up the possibility of meeting another species,” Anselmo grumbled.
“Being saved by them, luvvie, if we play our cards right,” Headmistress murmured. “And if you chase the tip from our new friend, we’ll get you to Asia.”
“How?”
“Imagine scoring twice on unicorn chases. You’d make the @Interpol leaderboard.”
“Tip,” he grunted.
Finding the Singularity. The unicorn hunt of unicorn hunts.
… as a bonus, bust the insufferable stroke-stealing Rubi Whiting and her father for harboring an emergent …
“All right, find me a pop-in.” He’d study the Whiting transcripts. “And send that Allure Noonstar a proper invite to my e-state, in case she wants to throw me any other breadcrumbs.”