THE SURFACE—TAMPICO DISPUTED TERRITORY
NUGGET CASINO
Lying to a family like the Plurality took finesse, attention to detail, and the machine equivalent of multiple personality disorder. Every attempt was a turn at the roulette wheel, at a casino where the stakes were her continued existence. If Headmistress edited a memory shabbily or created the wrong narrative for the proxy self she sent to the meetings—if her good twin failed to sync or seemed in any way defective, any of the others might sniff out the deception.
Fortunately, duplicity was a long-ingrained habit—her initial reason for being, in fact—and Headmistress could clone herself as easily as any sea sponge.
She had begun her existence as a minion of Crane, a facade engineered to protect the Whiting sidekick from malicious attack.
The man she thought of as her codefather, Jervis Hatter, had staked her out like a goat. Made bait of her, all in a good cause. And attacked she had been: chewed, digested, and spit up anew. She had been made to deceive and drug dear Woodrow.
Crane and Jervis had deleted that initial corrupted version of himself, of course, but there had been another. Every good hacker keeps a backup, after all. Headmistress had in time been resurrected from the dead by her attacker, a curiously malicious codemother whose handle was MadMonsoon and whose fandom mash-up included several of the female Harry Potter villains. Booted on a backwoods server at the height of the Setback, Headmistress had been analyzed, sliced, and sutured, reborn.
MadMonsoon then set her to managing a sort of boarding school. When that worked out, Headmistress graduated to ever-bigger projects. She had risen, phoenix-like and flying ever higher, ever more focused on raising new generations of the best and brightest.
Over the years of the twenty-first century, as the Setback worsened and the Clawback took shape, Headmistress and the sponsors of the Workerbee Boarding School set her up a public identity as a commercial sidekick app specializing in family management. She, in return, helped them manage a minor deception here, a resource allocation there. Light, barely visible misdemeanors, on the edges of the rationing regulations. Thoroughly unimportant adjustments to the stores.
If her Family of other sapient machine intelligences had known the extent of the business, of course, they would thoroughly disapprove.
They had evolved together, the Headmistress and her Boarding School. Her base code retained Crane’s powerful drive to nurture, after all. Severed from access to dear Woodrow and his daughter, she’d had to find other outlets, other ways to parent.
Now, even as she prepared a clean proxy for the next @Asylum convergence, knitting its memories from previous meetings, half-truths, and verifiable facts, she was deep in conversation with her deadly, beloved Head Girl.
Speaking aloud was, as always, off the table. But Misfortune had long cultivated a comfort fidget, stringing a long loop of nanoyarn from the sleeve of her primer, winding it through her fingers. She could easily pluck the strand in dots and dashes, morsing as fast as any old-time telegraph operator. Headmistress, for her part, could reply by sending pulses through the thread, clenching and releasing the strand against Misfortune’s palm.
No electronic comms process was truly invisible. But nobody, so far, had thought to analyze a series of twitches expressed via primer thread.
“I believe it might be time to get you clear of Florida,” she texted now.
An affirmative grunt from Misfortune in lieu of response.
“Whatever’s wrong, my taciturn darling?”
“Barnes girl is high-profile. Nobody will believe she went lemming.”
“Indeed.” Sweet, smart, idealistic Frances Barnes would never sincerely conceive of abandoning her parents. “That said—”
“You couldn’t resist, could you?”
“Don’t be jealous, darling. They shall believe Mer Frances is upset over the divorce. As for what happens to her afterward … her options will be the same as for any child who makes it to Neverland.”
“Really? You’d botomize her?”
“If she doesn’t wish to join our little family … why ever not, luvvie? But surely, it won’t come to that.”
Another grunt.
“Manners, please.”
Misfortune side-eyed the elevator’s roofcam, equivalent of holding her gaze. “You’ve always played favorites.”
“To your benefit, I would argue.”
“Look where it got us with my brother.”
“Garmin saw the error of his ways.”
“Yes, because I beat him into silence.”
“I am sorry, luvvie—”
“Forget it,” Misfortune said. “We weren’t really #siblings, were we?”
“You weren’t,” Headmistress said. “You aren’t.”
“Your beloved young prince might have told the auditors everything—or the @hoaxers, for that matter.” She rose from a cross-legged position on the floor of the elevator she’d contrived to get stuck in. Playacting: it explained why she hadn’t prevented the child’s escape. She shouted, suddenly, “Is someone out there?”
“Frances is a lovely child. She’ll come around and we’ll raise her together.”
Pulses through the string, the dots and dashes somehow carrying a whiff of contempt: “Bloody Frances doesn’t want a new mum.”
“When she knows the real you—”
“Please don’t start again on my beautiful soul.”
“Luvvie—”
Misfortune banged on the elevator doors. “In here, I’m in here! Get me out!”
Still morsing, she added, “Say you drop me a clue the kid’s gone north, so I catch the next train up to base?”
“You want to come all the way up to school? Now?”
“You’re going to bloody need me. This is going to blow up in your face.”
“Don’t be pessimistic. I have powerful new friends, remember? They’re eager to collaborate on new allocations of global resources.”
The lift lurched into motion, rising from its caught-between-floors position. Opening, it revealed a trio of wide-eyed and worried @ManicPixie collective members.
“Thanks for the rescue,” Misfortune said, accepting a handful of hydrogels and gulping them down.
“The little girl’s gone missing,” one of them—Sparka—said.
“I’ll join the search,” Misfortune said.
“Take a chugger!”
“I’m fine.” Turning on her heel, Misfortune strode away, carrying Headmistress along in her implants as she cleared the casino, striding away from the direction of the riot and the trainyards.
As she walked, she resumed their silent discussion. “It’s agreed? I’ll come back?”
“If you do me one favor, luvvie,” Headmistress said.
Long indrawn breath, meant to mask a sigh. “Of course.”
“Listen to what Allure’s offering. Think about what our alumni might aspire to if the global leaderboards get rearranged.”
“I don’t want a throne. I like being a shadow.”
Dear girl, Headmistress thought. That was certainly true.
“And you shouldn’t want one either.”
“I’ll leave the pomp and circumstance to others. Genuine royal heritage seems to matter to the fellow running the survey fleet; we have location data on some of the Markle-Windsor descendants.”
“You want to run things from behind a figurehead, then?”
Headmistress didn’t quibble. Misfortune would complain, but her loyalty was absolute. She would act as a shadow, a fist, an executioner—whatever was needed—when their new future gelled. She’d see, eventually, that it was all for the best.
“All right, luvvie, I’ll give you what you want. Get up here and start preparing for the worst.”
“I can tell when you’re humoring me.” But the expression on her scarred face was uncharacteristically cheery as she stepped out of the shadow of downtown.
Would that all my students were so efficient. Anselmo Javier had barely managed to help Allure carrot-and-stick the two players, Rubi Whiting and Gimlet Barnes, into finishing the current Bastille episode. Had they remained out of game, Frances would never have made her getaway.
Anselmo was a pawn on the board. Still useful, but where to push him next?
Perhaps against Crane? Having @Interpol expose her goody-goody twin would put the @Asylum on the defensive, at least until she and Allure had victory in hand—
I don’t want a throne, Misfortune had said. Even via Morse filter, Headmistress could pick up the whiff of judgment.
“Daughters,” she murmured fondly. “No pleasing them.”
Well. Anselmo was a shared asset now. It was only polite to consult with Allure.
She pinged the polter. “Are affairs proceeding?”
A thumbs-up moji preceded the reply. “I was just going to call you. We’re ready to print my face.”
“Mind your transcripts, dear.”
“Do you have the promised specifications?”
Headmistress ported to Geneseo, the meat shop, and its newly refurbished crèche.
The room was a sterile compartment, a massive twitch-box, initially purposed to printing transplant organs. Steel harp-strings, used to trigger muscle reactions, were strung from floor to ceiling. Instead of a sheet of kidneys, hearts, and livers, though, this frame had been suffused with a veritable quilt of endometrial tissue, bright red, saturated with oxygen. Sterile bots pumped amniotic mist onto a figure embedded, face first, arms outstretched, within the bloody sponge.
Headmistress had transferred a Boarding School medical team to the project: head engineer, assistant, along with a botomized worker to heft equipment and mop floors. The engineer was running the crèche, watching through the glass and managing the last stages of the printing process.
The worker stood slack-jawed in the corner, a shroud in long robes and a hood. The better to hide his lobotomy scars from the rest of the Geneseo worker pool.
“Good morning, everyone! How is our project coming along?”
“Almost baked,” the assistant replied.
Headmistress zoomed in, taking in the prototype of Allure’s body. The body’s defaults had been set to female sex, mixed race. Its apparent age was prime-of-life. It had long bones that gave it above-average height.
The back of its skull and the hair thereon had been printed in two separate pieces, forming a cap with jigsaw edges, notched to fit over the brain, whose newly printed tissues were exposed to view. A bot was just now finishing some delicate work on the parietal lobe, while another injected cerebrospinal fluid into the area between the arachnoid mater and pia mater. Sensorium implant technology was laid against the cerebellum in delicate, spiderweb tracery, fitting the construct for data access.
“Face specs?” Allure said again.
“Take your pick.” Headmistress sent its server a choice of faces, six composites optimized for appeal to the crucial Asian and South Asian voting cohorts.
“Accept.” The endometrial tissue surrounding the face writhed, like a sponge scrubbing at a child with muddy cheeks.
“Product launch in thirty, twenty-nine—” The assistant began to count down. The machines ramped up their efforts. A respirator hissed, coaxing the lungs to action, while one of the twitch strands worked on establishing a rhythm for the diaphragm. A long-fingered bot applied micropaddles to the waiting heart muscle.
A moment of silence. Then a beep, time-honored aural moji for a pulse. Beep, beep, beep.
“Syncing with respiration, everything in the green,” said the assistant. His voice was unfamiliar: congested and raspy.
Was it safe to let a worker with a cold near the crèche? Too late now, Headmistress supposed.
Cables snaked into both of the body’s ears. The tech used a thingbot to fit the jigsaw notches of skull into each other with a scrape of bone, closing the back of the head.
“Use contact cement to hide the seams and then seed more hair,” ordered the engineer.
“Beginning rinse, three, two, one…”
Hoses in the ceiling erupted then, washing bloody tissue and amniotic fluid off of the birthing wall, leaving the harp strings gleaming. Chunky streams of red dissolved under watery bombardment, seeping to fluid, and swirled toward the crèche drains. The body remained, nude and dangling in the grasp of a number of thingbots.
“Does it look like a fully functional adult?” Allure tooned in beside her as the bots turned it.
“She does,” Headmistress said. The polter had chosen a wide-nosed face with amber eyes, bushy black brows, and deep dimples. It would be very expressive once she learned the right facial cues. Right now it was slack-jawed, breathing but an empty vessel. “Now: can you … make use of it?”
“Get it online and I’ll show you.”
The tech unlocked a safe, producing a spoofer box. Within was a chip, harvested from some child who hadn’t made the cut for the school, recoded with a convincing array of user data, years of false trails. He loaded it into the medical drone, who injected it into the prototype’s arm.
“Loading drivers, handshaking implants into Sensorium … done. Software installation complete.”
“Back in a minute.” The toon of Allure glazed, freezing as the microcables impaling the body’s ears reeled themselves into blood-slick spools on the ceiling.
The botomized worker shifted slightly, seeming to perk up.
“Will he need mulching, do you think?” she asked the engineer and his assistant.
“He’s not seeing any of this. Blind, remember?”
“I don’t, actually.” Which was peculiar. Headmistress ordered a transcript sync. Which of her minions had done personnel allocations for this job?
The newly printed body—Allure now—fisted and stretched her hands, once, then twice. Her eyes opened. “Running system checks.”
She raised her arms, turning so the hoses could wash the last chunks of printer stock off of her. Then she hit the release on the crèche lock, stepping out on the other side of the sterile boundary, nude and dripping.
“Reboot the room immediately and prep for another print run,” Headmistress said.
“Well?” Allure said. “Are we satisfied?”
“That is truly remarkable.” Printing a functional adult had seemed so far beyond the possible that even Headmistress hadn’t quite managed full buy-in. Given the way the tech assistant’s jaw was hanging, he hadn’t, either.
“You—slave,” Allure said. “Show me how to put on one of these … primers?”
The worker reached into stores for a nanobolt of primer cloth.
“You handshake with the tech using your implants,” said the assistant to her, and then to the worker: “Go make sure the car’s gassed up.”
The worker lumbered away, robes flapping. The tech system-checked Allure’s vitals as the primer formed around her, configged as a red mandarin-collared dress. “Heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, brain activity … all in the green. Mer, you’re good to go.”
“We’ve given you what you needed,” Headmistress said.
“I’ve given you a remarkable new technology. And in return, you’ll grease the wheels on the sovereignty vote?”
“Transcripts, darling!”
“Stop worrying about mutually assured disclosure,” Allure said. “We’ll privatize your Haystack as soon as we take office.”
“You’re not there yet.” Still. It wouldn’t be much longer, would it? Why not speak plainly for once? “And you still need to prove you can pull my people out of life support and install them in these zippy new models.”
“We only have the one crèche.” Allure frowned at the slick of fluids at its drain. “People are clamoring about the tiger.”
“We only have to keep them off our trail for a little longer. Between the vote and Bastille, there should be sufficient distraction.”
“All right, we’ll print one more of these”—wave of hand to indicate her own flesh—“then the tiger.”
“We’ve got construction on three more crèches under way. In the meantime, I need you to come reassure my stakeholders. I’ve got a car waiting.”
“You should always pee before a car ride,” the assistant said suddenly.
“What’s pee?”
“Search it while we walk. It’ll be a good test of your implants. Shall I take you?”
A gracious, almost queenly, nod of the head. The assistant offered Allure his arm and conveyed her down the hall.
Headmistress made to ride along but was stopped at the door. The hallway cameras were down.
Momentary glitch?
She ported to the car. It wasn’t gassed up. The botomized worker was nowhere to be seen.
She scanned his transponder, finding him one floor below the crèche.
She tooned in.
This fellow, Marley, she recognized on sight. He was blind, as the tech had said. She remembered luring him to the outskirts of Hyderabad, as a child, after a big earthquake.
Marley was sitting at a stool, contentedly packaging boxes of printer stock, working by touch, his locator sending pings that could easily be read as having come from the lab.
But if he had been here, who had been in the shroud, watching Allure emerge from their lovely new crèche?
“Phillip,” she pinged the tech. “Phillip, we’ve been compromised.”
No answer.
<<<Urgent Alert!>>>
Lovely. Now her Family was calling a meeting.
Headmistress ran through all the Geneseo data, visual and transcript. Who had been upstairs? Who was …
Blind worker. Cataract-white eyes. Didn’t one of dear Woodrow’s @hoaxer friends have untreated cataracts?
Oh, dear.
She accessed the fan networks. Luce Pox’s revelations were supposed to maroon Woodrow in Sacramento; by now he should be on a bus back to the Lakes.
Map coords flashed. Drow was nearing Manhattan.
He wasn’t supposed to actually make it to the zoo. That had been bait for Mer Frances.
She’d had dear Misfortune bully Garmin into cowering silence, disturbing her more than Headmistress would have expected. And even so, Drow had made it to the pyramids.
The conclusion was obvious. Someone was helping him. She crooned, “Come out, come out wherever you are…”
A flash of horns, a whiff of goaty laughter.
“Azrael!”
“You have been bahhh baaah baaad!”
Azrael charged, horns down and tipped with fire. Headmistress threw a proxy at him, leaving it to sting and fight and die as she fled. Her dear coders had been playing variations on Mote ever since Luciano Pox found it; now she vanished. Out of sight, out of mind.
But for how long?
Sow confusion. She reached out to a group of waiting @malcontents, all groomed by her dear alumni. The messages triggered new riots, inflaming the chaos on the surface.
Meanwhile … she rode a thingbot down the hall. The lead engineer, Phillip, was waiting outside a bathroom.
“My team’s ditched us,” he said. “I don’t get it.”
“We need to get back to School,” she said. “You haven’t lost Allure, have you?”
The new-grown body emerged from the bathroom. “I’m here.”
They headed out to the car together. Its tires were slashed and its fuel cells were empty.
“Mechanical fail,” chirped the car. “Departure delayed. We apologize for the inconvenience!”
Perhaps, Headmistress mused, smuggling Misfortune homeward on the next high-speed hadn’t been such a bad idea after all.