VRTP://SOAPBOX.EARTH/E-STATES/LUCIANOPOX/BACKYARD.VR
SANCTIONED CONTENT: PUBLIC CLAIMS OF USER CANNOT BE VERIFIED BY NEWSCYCLE.
Soapboxing was going better this time.
Rubi had been right: pretending to be human had been the fatal glitch in Luce’s plan. Lying convincingly, navigating the social niceties, expecting the apes to take one of their own seriously … it had been a losing strategy.
Which was what happened when you tasked a safecracker with throwing a seduction. His team leader had been desperate …
Well, he was being murdered at the time.
Azrael’s attacks had transformed Luce, shattering near-forgotten behavioral harnesses that integrated him into the waypaving group. The teambuilding memes forced individual polters to work in unison, despite their wildly different personalities and specializations.
Now he felt something—his real self, if such a thing existed—brimming over.
Luce had been datamining the Sensorium for months but had got stomped whenever he tried to export intelligence on #mobdynamics back to the Fleet. If Azrael had allowed him to hit Send, his masters might by now have built a model for global public opinion management, a customized strategy for nudging humankind toward acceptance of Pale rule.
Instead, the whole planet was abuzz. Wasps in a kicked hive, stinging, stinging. Brawls proliferated, in the flesh and online.
Luce found it … invigorating.
He sat in his cave of stalactites, sounding off to a rotating crowd of reporters, being himself, lobbing answers to the questions, questions, questions.
Yes, the Pale could be here in ten years. No, there was no point in trying to use vintage fission weapons to blast them out of the sky. Were they idiots?
With Cloudsight offline, his access to Sensorium stayed greenlit. And as long as he shifted his soapbox to a new server every half an hour or so, @GlobalSec’s attempts to recapture him were entertainingly big fails.
The marathon press conference was going into its thirtieth consecutive hour when Rubi’s not-so-stupid bird appeared, pinging him with a discreet cough.
“I need a twenty-minute break,” Luce told the press. “You guys are repeating yourselves, anyway. Go regroup.”
To his surprise, this got a bit of a laugh.
“I suggest you stand them to a round, sir. I’ll pay,” Crane subbed.
Why not? “Grab a cold one on me, boys!”
That got a few cheers, a few odd looks.
“How was that?”
“You said boys.”
“So?”
“Archaic phrasing. Reductive, on gender.”
“Nobody’s fucking complaining. Anyway, it’s what came up when I looked up your phrase stand ’em a round. If you’re going to talk archaic, you’ll keyword archaic.”
“Indeed.” Oddly, the bird’s tone indicated accord.
Could I possibly be getting better at this? “What you want?”
The toon shrugged, seeming to settle his butler’s coat more gently on his feathered shoulders. “Cherub Whiting and Gimlet Barnes have been locked in a casino building in Miami and are being forced to continue Bastille by parties unknown.”
“Parties unknown?”
“One appears to be Anselmo Javier.”
“I disliked him.”
“Javier is working with a Risto boss monster. I can’t find out who’s driving it—the user ID is hashed.”
“When you say forced to play…”
“Miss Cherub tried to refuse, but—”
“But what?”
“They threatened Master Woodrow.” Crane’s enunciation was precise, his tone dry.
“That I have some feels about,” Luce said.
“Indeed?” The bird threw him one of Drow’s strokes, pending user authorization, which vanished into Cloudsight’s frozen queue. “Miss Cherub hinted that the hard lock-in might lie within your bailiwick.”
Luce had already found the casino building. “I’d need a minion with a hand—”
“A thingbot?”
“It’s a mechanical lock. I need fingers. Tentacles. Whatever you got.”
“I’ll see to it,” Crane said.
Luce hit up newscycle. The casino lay on the edge of a riot over the Tampico shipping hub.
It might have been more unusual if there wasn’t a riot on. They were breaking out everywhere. A few thousand people were converging on Fort McMurray in commandeered cars. A hospital in Pretoria, home to half the global population of @jarheads, was surrounded by thousands. In London, people were tearing bamboo boards off windows that had broken in the recent hurricane. And, as always seemed to happen during crises here, pre-implanted kids were taking the chance to carve out their location chips and flee off-grid.
“Your thingbot, Mer Pox,” Crane said.
“Interesting that you got your talons on a drone when they’re all tasked to emergency services.” He donned it like a glove, curling and uncurling fingers.
“Trapped civilians are an emergency.”
“Sure, they fucking are.”
“I am extremely grateful for your assistance.”
Mincing around transcripts again. What did they call it? Pussyfooting.
Okay, change subjects. “Normally, you know, if a sapient population lets their ecosphere get this bad, they never rebalance without help.”
“I can’t speak for other species, but if you back my creators against a wall…”
“Irrational and stubborn,” Luce said. “That’s what they’ll say about humanity, after hard contact.”
“Contact. I suppose it is inevitable.”
“Sure. We’ve already friended.”
Crane mojied a pair of shaking hands and a tiny burst of fireworks, acknowledging the truth of it. “No escaping the acquaintance now. Can you break the door down, Mer Pox?”
“I’m inside, stupid. It only took me this long because I unscrewed the door hardware.”
“Thereby making it impossible for you to lock it again?”
“I broke it, I bought it.” He would never have been able to exceed his specs in this way before the attacks.
Luce spiderwalked the thingbot inside the building, homing in on a room tagged #circus. It came in on a mezzanine above the playground; his camera zoomed in on Rubi and Gimlet Barnes, below him, deep-diving.
“Superimpose graphics,” Luce said.
An overlay of old France sketched itself over the climbing obstacles, ropes, and platforms. Rubi was engaged in what looked like an old-style safecracking puzzle; Barnes, meanwhile, was rallying an army.
“There should be other people here,” Crane said.
Together, they tabbed through the other building-camera feeds. The casino staff was locked down in the laundry. The Scotland Yard sergeant, Misfortune, was hacking an elevator—she appeared to be trying to get it unstuck from a spot between floors. She was going at it all wrong; everything she was doing was apt to keep her there, not facilitate her escape.
There were big, ugly holes in the record; the cameras had shut down more than once, and the staff didn’t have eyecams.
“Episode Two of Bastille has forty minutes left to play,” Crane harrumphed. “I hoped to show you the Regent toon.”
“Gone, huh? They’re alone.”
“Alone but for the child, that is.”
“Huh?”
“What will Mer Barnes say when she sees her parent sporting a black eye?”
“There’s no kid here,” Luce said.
Crane indicated a VR pod with an elegant sweep of his blue wing.
Luce shared the thingbot’s infrared. “Thing’s empty.”
Crane took over the thingbot abruptly, a sensation, to Luce, rather like having a limb ripped off. It dropped to the casino floor, sprinted to the pod, unlatched it. As the lid lifted, the camera showed an empty couch and discarded wearables, things pre-implanted kids used to get online. “Oh, dear. Excuse me, Mer Pox—”
“Careful, Jeeves. Your feels are showing,” Luce said. The sidekick was visibly emotional now … and, suddenly, a lot less stupid.
Gotcha.
Crane seemed oblivious to his increased interest. “Did Mer Barnes leave before the lockdown? Was she alone? There’s a surveillance gap here—”
The thingbot’s fingers were curling and uncurling. Autonomous stress response? “Oh, dear. Oh, no. Mer Pox, can you please get into the game and tell Mer Barnes what’s happened? I’ve got to start searching.”
Confirmation at last. “I’m not doing jack shit for you.”
Crane drew itself up, oh so straight and proper. “I beg your pardon?”
“You are a hive. It was you, all you! Cock-a-block with Azrael, you gave me the goddamned seizures.”
The casino feeds went dead again.
Interesting.
Crane shook the long ruff of feathers at his neck, drawing more subroutines into service, becoming smarter still. Luce could be begging to get shredded.
But no—he could hear the sidekick batting around the neighborhood, scanning for the small human they all found so improbably fascinating. “Mer Barnes must be told their child is off-grid.”
“Why’s that my problem?”
“Because you can get into Bastille.” The bird tasked a stupid minion to its search of the cameras, letting itself take space beside him. “I do owe you a debt, Mer Pox. A significant one. And an explanation. I am deeply sorry about what befell you…”
“And my team?”
“Indeed. But with the child missing—”
Crane was as tunnel-visioned as any of the apes. “Fine. I’ll ping the supervillain. Happy now?”
“My bliss is barely exceeded by my gratitude.”
“Snarky fucker.” Luce ghosted. He found the edges of Gimlet’s Coach app, wormed his way through Risto security …
… and found himself in the Bastille fortress itself.
With the Regent.
The player pulling the strings on the toon was tall, bronze-skinned, with symmetrical features. Healthy, fit, idealized in every way, she was built like one of Drow’s angel statues. No wings, though. No disturbing aberrations from great-ape biological form. Her facial features suggested South Asian descent. Her jacket, a long mandarin cut, was of a style currently favored for formal gatherings in Shanghai.
“There you are!” She dragged Luce out of the gaming sim, porting to Luce’s soapbox, with its queue of reporters. Rewriting the e-state, she tagged it Virtual Embassy of the Pale, replacing his cave full of stalactites with a cozy ring of camping chairs around a bonfire.
“Who’s this?”
The woman turned to face the reporters, who were now seated under a night sky in which the Centauri star system and the Pale survey fleet, en route, were visible as bright hopeful motes of light.
Scents of woodsmoke and burnt corn syrup, tagged #marshmallow, edged the air. The campfire circle lay between the shores of an idyllic-looking lake and an improbably charming forest, shadowy trees illuminated by firelight and tiny clouds of bioluminescent insects.
“It’s an honor to meet you all,” she said. “I am Allure, emissary of the Pale. I’m here to allay your fears about—”
A shout: “Hostile takeover?”
Allure spread her arms wide. “With Earth’s history of social parasitism, it’s only natural to fear that.”
Luce quashed an audible snort.
“We want what’s best for all our neighbor species. Rebuilding your biological heritage is an offer of partnership.” She beamed at the reporter.
“Is that true, Mer Pox?”
Before he could answer, Allure folded Luce into a hug. Diagnostic software probed for his cooperation codes.
“Boundaries! Don’t maul me! Consent emphatically withheld—fuck off!”
“Calm down,” she said. Then she subbed, “I’ve come to salvage the mission.”
It should be a relief, shouldn’t it?
“Since when?” Luce said.
“I was sent after you stopped reporting in.”
Why hadn’t @CraneAzraelandCo killed her, too?
Because by then, they understood she was alive?
“I’m assuming command, Locksmith,” she said. “Stand down and await orders.”
Luce knocked his hands together three times, forced a smile, and wondered if there might still be a way to alert Gimlet about their missing small person.