THE SURFACE—WESTEURO
METRO LONDON/SAINT PANCRAS STATION
If I have to talk to Rubi Whiting’s luxury sidekick one more time, Gimlet Barnes thought, I’m going to ask the bloody thing on a date.
St. Pancras Station was busy this morning, pulsing with travelers streaming toward or away from the Chunnel trains. Tourists and wanderers in newly printed clothes strode with varying degrees of purpose past Paul Day’s gigantic statue of a pair of lovers, a historical relic from the days of binary marriage. They presented a powerful image of days gone by: man and woman, in bronze, entirely focused on each other. There was no doubt, from their postures and expressions, of their deep, obsessive attachment.
Maybe that was the nature of one-on-one relationships, Gimlet mused. No ambiguity.
No. That was grass-is-greener thinking, wasn’t it? Monogamous marriages and friendships had been just as prone to failure in the bad old days.
Whether it was the sculpture’s execution or its sheer size, a gratifying number of passersby did at least give the lovers a cursory glance. Gimlet always felt insulted, on behalf of artists, when everyone was too deep in Sensorium to simply look.
“Maybe Frankie would like to go to a gallery later—which one’s open?”
The family sidekick, Headmistress, tooned in. A household-management app specializing in families with young children, she was a grave-looking queen bee in Regency dress, with big glasses over her faceted eyes. “It’s the Portrait Gallery today, but Mer Frances has been.”
“Not in the flesh.”
“She might prefer the London Eye.”
The object of this speculation, nine years old and radiating misery, was locked in a white-knuckle hug with the undisputed favorite of her four parents, Sangria.
No tears. No scene now. Baby Girl would put on a brave face for the farewells. She’d save the meltdown for later, when it was just her and Gimlet. Why should Sangria have to suffer for abandoning them?
The thought felt small. Gimlet momentarily flirted with loading Happ or Contenta on a three-month trial basis. Maybe a priority rundown would ease this hot-acid mix of anger and fatalism. Desolation over Sangria’s sudden need for distance, sheer weariness with the demands of parenting, partnering, and crisis management …
But Happ would surely burble out a lengthy and well-researched treatise (which it would render in moji, undermining, in Gimlet’s opinion, the point of its PhD-level academic references) on why it was heart heart happyface flower totes appropriate for Gimlet to indulge in the occasional petty thought or burst of self-pity.
Gimlet didn’t want to be validated, or told it was permissible to feel the feels, or offered an in-app purchase on processing romantic rejection. What Gimlet wanted was to hit someone. Preferably in the face, with the simulated wood stock of a 1789 musket. Catharsis would mend this ongoing sense of being among the walking wounded.
Still: one couldn’t put parental duty on pause. Frankie and Sangria’s goodbyes were wrapping up. Gimlet took one last rueful look at the statue.
“I will be back, Gimmles,” Sang subbed. Frankie marched back, stiff as a prisoner submitting to detention.
“Even if that were true—” Gimlet always knew when Sang was lying. It was the last vestige of their once-total understanding. Sweet harmony, some called it, that ability to know someone so well, they didn’t have to share their thoughts aloud, on the record. “It does as much good as breaking wind in a maelstrom.”
“I’m not having this conversation. Take care, love—”
“Love still plays into it, then?”
The vestige of a wave became an outthrust hand, an unambiguous STOP gesture. Sangria erected a twenty-four-hour comms block, which Gimlet’s implants manifested as a sparkling force field. Then she scuttled off to her gate.
Beat that dishonorable retreat, by all means. Gimlet said, aloud, “All right, Franks?”
She had seen the gesture. “You guys fighting?”
Her fragility did nothing to take the violent edge off Gimlet’s mood.
How dare you abandon us, abandon her, Sang, how dare you?
“No, love. Sang’s off to Tampico. You and I have time to flesh around central London. There’s no point catching a train until we know where Rollsy’s going to be admitted.”
This got a wide-eyed, tearless nod. “Did Cherub Whiting get back to you?”
Mada’s little executive. Trying so hard to be grown up. Or maybe it was just that she’d enjoy seeing Gimlet hit someone, too. “No word yet. What do you want to do today?”
Frankie shrugged. “Work?”
Headmistress let out a disapproving hum. “You’ve put in your allowed hours, Mer Frances.”
“Can’t we browse for a new gig?”
“You’ll have hours tomorrow.” Gimlet braced for shouting, but the storm didn’t break. Still building, then? Cheers to that.
“Can we run an adventure sim?”
“Of course.” A subdued pulse of pride. Frankie had just pulled off a classic negotiation technique with something rather like élan. Lead with something you know they’ll refuse, the strategy went, then trot out a request for what you do want.
Between rage, guilt, and the impotent desire to somehow make a terrible situation okay, Gimlet had walked right into the snare. “Find us a pop-in apartment, Headmistress, in a tower with a family-rated playground.”
The governess threw up a timer, estimating that it would take seven minutes to find a building optimized for their physical needs, social cap, and the play request.
Time to burn. They set out in an amble, circling the old British Library. The Goliath statue caught Frankie’s eye, but she showed no interest in going inside. Gloomy silence settled over them. Finally, the sidekick imposed breadcrumbs on the sidewalk, yellow brick road marking the route home.
Their building was halfway through its conversion to greentower, in transition from old-style condominiums to a fully plug-and-play apartment block. Gimlet registered them with the building helix, taking the elevator to the fifth floor. It being just the two of them, their floorspace allocation had been reduced to a two-bedroom apartment.
“Augments off.” Gimlet gave the place one look, sans Sensorium illusions, in the unlikely event that it wasn’t up to spec. There weren’t any clanking pipes, weird smells, or rat droppings. No disturbing stains on the floor, no holes in the walls, no abandoned possessions. Just a clean and dry apartment, recently drone-scrubbed, ready for occupation, with lettuce and violets growing in its window boxes. Component furniture within was configured in a family-room layout. The light blue couches and a cushy rug awaited customization, as did the double beds and furnishings in the two bedrooms.
Gimlet accepted the suite, letting their implants write the family defaults onto the walls and furnishings. They got into the linen cupboard, digging for a chameleon blanket. A few linens in every apartment were made of the same nanosilk as their primers: by the time they unfolded it, this one had transformed from a compressed mat of foam into a fuzzy, tiger-striped quilt. They snapped it with a flourish and it draped over the bed, settling.
Frankie threw her backpack atop the stripes, saying hello to her room with a disturbingly world-weary sigh.
The rest of the furniture used standard VR augments: Gimlet’s implants and Frankie’s helmet provided the black-and-gray plaid for the couch. It had always seemed to Gimlet more fitting to a noir sim than a happy home. They’d reset that. Maybe they could replace the Georgia O’Keeffe prints tooning in on the kitchen walls, too.
Not right away, though; it’d upset Franks.
Did this urge to scour all Sangria’s preferences mean it really was over?
That Happ service would have an opinion about that, no doubt. Not to mention advice on gracefully managing romantic breakups and impending loss.
I don’t bloody need management!
Pop-in apartments generally came with a radiator, enclosed in a surround that could be overlaid with the illusion of fireplace and hearth. Family defaults had augmented this, too, into a slab of rose marble. It was covered in family pictures that unfurled like flowers, cycling through the family album, before misting away to make room for other images. One shot of the whole family was pinned to the center of the installation: Sangria, Gimlet, Rollsy, and Bella, captured just after Sang had seduced Gimlet and brought them into her pack. Delirious on honeymoon endorphins, all four parents gathered around three-year-old Frankie, sepals around a rosebud. In the outer ring, holding hands, encircling them, were the elders. Rollsy’s grandma Marie—eighty-six now, seven years after the picture was taken—looked about fifty. For the role of grandpa, they’d married a brilliant ecosystems engineer named John Codger.
Codge. That had been the first blast against the ramparts of their happiness. Life extension had failed there: unlike Marie, Codge failed to make the leap to sustainable elderhood. He hadn’t lived to see Frankie’s seventh birthday.
The pack had been looking for a suitable oldfeller to replace him, someone who fit in. Instead …
“You said we’d play, Mada,” Frankie said.
“Ready when you are, love.”
She dusted her hands off—another incongruously adult gesture, to Gimlet’s eye—and headed down the building corridor, to stores and prints. Headmistress would have reserved workout gear when they accepted the pop-in.
“We need fuel, too,” Gimlet sent. “Whatever’s in the machine, unless you want to wait for delivery.”
“I know.”
“Protein and carbs, and MethodAct for me.”
“I know.” Edge in her voice, not quite shouting. Maybe she’d have a little cry in the storage room.
Gimlet took a long breath, held it for three, and let it out. “Headmistress, please get a full run of groceries. We’ll be here a few days.”
“Of course.”
“Maybe I could fly a drone shift after she’s asleep. Stacking topsoil?”
“Above-average childcare hours and a seriously ill primary partner are considered urgent gigs. Your optimal use of time—”
“I know it’s not expected. But running a forklift for a few hours would clear my head.”
Thrum in her voice, indicating disapproval. “I’ll see what’s available.”
There’d be messages if there was anything to know, but … “How’s Rollsy?”
“The pack is crunching surgery and rehab options. Marie has applied family funds to a consult with a specialist in Cornwall. Estimated resolution late tonight.”
Rollsy was fighting the opening skirmishes of what looked to be a difficult battle with uterine tumors and squamous cell anemia. Bella and Marie were on-site support. In the wake of Sangria’s sudden desertion, Gimlet had been tasked with easing Frankie through the separation.
Gimlet fished in their satchel, blinking against a momentary flood as they groped for the carved surface of their gaming baton. It wasn’t just Frankie who needed a good cry.
But their pride and joy was already back, with two sets of safety pads and two chuggers. She was wearing a sulky expression and holding her baton.
Gimlet reached for the drugged chugger and forced a smile: “What flavor you get?”
“It was lemon ricotta or cherry lime.” Yellow bottle: lemon, then.
They slumped on the prison-striped couch, knocked their drinks together in a cheerless toast, and drank in a silence that broke only when they started munching their bottles. Gimlet’s tasted, ever so faintly, of cornbread. It matched well with the ricotta. They sent a stroke of appreciation to the designer. Headmistress, seeing this, added two of the combo into the next food order.
“Reconfigure primers. Battlesuit mode.” Their base layers shifted, nanothreads thickening into sturdy cotton, secured at neck, ankles, and wrists, with reinforced seams that formed a climbing harness: straps on the seat, hard loops around the waist for clips. Frankie’s came with a padded skullcap that sheathed the full-immersion VR helmet that children wore before implantation surgery.
Fingerless gloves completed both ensembles; their shoes would grow nanocleats once they were in-game.
They headed down to the subbasement.
The building car park had been repurposed as a gym. Its open spaces were filled with basic activity pieces: ramps and stairs, climbing walls, foam obstacles of various shapes and sizes, ropes, mats, doors and windows. Equipment was painted with blue-on-blue grids so users’ implants could frost detailed game environments atop the infrastructure. Holes cut into the floors, here and there, allowed for multilevel climbs.
“Usual plan all right?” Gimlet asked. “I take point, you play ops?”
“No,” Frankie said. “You play antagonist.”
“I—” Then, off a sharp glance: “I don’t play the baddie during family time, Franks.”
“I’m not simming some deadweight hacker, standing around doing puzzles while you kill Extinctor ninjas.”
“Then you lead”—the sim would be boringly nonlethal, but that wasn’t the point—“and I play ops?”
A curt nod.
“Headmistress, launch Coach and have him bring up the next module of Rewilding Rescue.”
“Right away, Mer Barnes!” The sidekick complied, handing them off to the gaming controller, Coach, who directed them to a ramp next to a descent platform.
The antique car park faded from view. Rewilding Rescue credits ran in a window in their lower peripherals, set to the music of an old hit: a Frankie fave comped and recorded by Drow Whiting’s first band, Cadaver Dogs. A helicopter sketched itself around them, obscuring the ramp on which they stood.
By now, Gimlet’s lemon ricotta MethodAct dose was kicking in: they could feel the chopper’s vibrations in their jaw, and the weight of a parachute between the shoulders. The gaming baton had changed to the handle of a hefty briefcase. Frankie looked impossibly puffy in her own suit, rendered in a gray-on-gray camouflage pattern. Also, disturbingly: a gun belt?
“Sang, did you say Franks could play shooters? I—”
Brief, twinkling image—the force field representing Sang’s comms block.
What if I want to kill ninjas? What if I want anything at all? No, that’s self-pity. Shut it down, Gimmles.
The game began with a transmission from the chopper pilot. “Ark Project President Noalla is here with your mission specs.”
“Accept,” Frankie said.
The president was played by a sim actor named Sugar Valkyrie. Dressed in an orange sarong and her trademark necklace, she swaggered out of the cockpit and shook Frankie’s hand.
Beyond the chopper windows, the night sky twinkled with stars. Amber streetlamps blanketed the ground, a vast sea of light pollution, delineating the land-wasting terrain of a pre-Setback city. Chicago?
“Breach the secured area on the forty-second floor,” Sugar said, sounding bored. At the height of her career, she had been an unstoppable athletic force. In character roles, Gimlet found her unconvincing. “Recover ten stolen bio samples from megacapitalist Ferguson Bedwedder and replace them with surveillance decoys. Document his connection to the Extinctors.”
Gimlet raised the equipment case. “Decoys ready!”
“Win conditions,” the president said: “Get in, switch the samples, and reach the extraction point.”
“Accept,” Franks said.
Gimlet subbed, to Coach, “Will President Noalla face life-threatening danger later in the sim?”
“That is an in-app extra on the action tree in this scenario! Save the president for extra points and unlock a branded Sugar Valkyrie amber brooch!”
“Greenlight that episode, please, and invite Bella to join us later, if she’s available. I know she’s not much for action sims, but Frankie could use a reachout.” Not to mention a break from me.
Coach mojied confirmation. The mission was simple: parachute drop to the skyscraper roof, sneak down Bedwedder’s private elevator shaft to floor forty-two. Gimlet was tasked with deactivating security systems.
“From there, you go into the ducts.”
There’d be a bit of trap-dodging and manual safecracking: the usual action-adventure obstacle course. Challenges would be scaled to Frankie’s skill level—the higher she scored, the harder it got. Sidebars estimated caloric burn, highlighting the muscle groups receiving realworld stretch-and-strengthen XP from this episode.
The music faded. The scenario began, properly, with the chopper taking gunfire.
Gimlet fought instinct, waiting for Frankie to take the initiative, to draw them both up the ramp, triggering their jump out of the helicopter.
By now, thanks to MethodAct, the illusion was perfect: they leapt into biting night air. The gymnasium cables raising them in simulated free-fall were imperceptible. Gimlet felt the stomach-lurch of descent. Then a roar and a blast of hot air as their helicopter flamed out.
“The president!” Frankie shouted.
“She got away.” Gimlet pointed to the receding lights of a … What was that?
Prompter text popped up: experimental rocketpack.
“Rocketpack,” Gimlet said to Frankie. “Highly classified.”
She lit up. “That. Is. Beyond.”
They pulled their cords, felt the jerk of chutes deploying. Silk jumpsuits rippled noisily in the wind. A spotlight sought them from the roof.
Frankie shouted: “They know we’re coming!”
They touched down, knees absorbing the shock of landing. Frankie managed a creditable roll out of the chute for extra points.
Their daughter was not, by any stretch, a natural athlete. Sang said Frankie just moved too fast, without harmonizing body and mind. Gimlet feared she was out-and-out clumsy, better at flying drones than moving her own flesh.
Intellectually, Gimlet understood that not everyone unboxed with an innate, marrow-deep sense of their whole body, deep understanding of how to move without getting in their own way. Believing it, though …
Frankie assumed a combat stance. “Lock the elevator down!”
Gimlet, obedient second banana, opened the equipment case, booted its vintage laptop, and began a timed puzzle. Meanwhile, the elevator disgorged a single, pint-sized thug clad in the uniform of the villainous Extinctor Corps. Frankie dove into the simulated fight, protecting Gimlet.
Coach offered dialog prompts. “How will we get down, boss, if the elevator’s compromised?”
Frankie replied: “Rappel to the forty-second floor?”
Gimlet winced—that meant a run across the balance beam, an event Frankie would regularly #crashburn.
She saw it. Glowered. “Unlock the lift, Mada!”
“Almost there.” Gimlet’s forte was action—running, jumping, fighting—but nobody leveled on the amateur circuit if they couldn’t also beat brain-teasers. “Lift locked down!”
Frankie rolled her opponent across the rooftop and stunned him with her joy buzzer before snatching a knotted rope and using it to clamber to the virtual edge of the gleaming tower.
Slow down! Gimlet managed to keep both lips firmly buttoned over the caution.
If anyone had been watching from the Surface, without augments, they’d see parent and child stepping out onto an adjustable balance beam, a crossbar bolted to the edge of the repurposed car-park wall. The beam extended over one of the gaps in the concrete, a pit encircled by climbing walls and ladders, items that would allow players to descend the wall or fall to a waiting crash mat.
Knowing the truth, though, didn’t undermine the sim experience. The view, as they edged out on a narrow parapet, was a dizzying drop. What they felt wasn’t a solid concrete wall at an unremarkable height but cold glass: unyielding skyscraper window pushing them at the abyss.
Old-fashioned cars on a thread of street, fifty floors down, tooted back and forth, honking. Pedestrians the size of pearls unfurled colorful umbrellas and dodged each other. Warm raindrops splashed Gimlet’s arm. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
“Safety lines, Franks.”
“I know!”
It’s not far. The vertical drop is only fifteen feet. Still, Gimlet watched closely as Frankie clipped in and gave the line a good yank.
“Let’s go!”
Working in tandem, they counterweighted themselves against the wall, stepping off the beam and descending steadily. She’d done the rappelling tutorial …
… with Sang …
… in an earlier level of the game.
They were nearly to the save point before a window directly above them blasted out. Pixels of glass tinkled and rained downward. A masked Extinctor burst from the gaping hole, grabbing Gimlet’s rope.
“Hurry!” Frankie urged.
“I’m all right. Slow and steady—”
But she had put a foot wrong in her excitement, losing her grip, and then banged into the side of the building. She bounced down a meter before the safeties caught her.
Gimlet’s opponent cut the rope.
The playground software ordered an invisible winch to release. All the slack went out of the support line. Gimlet’s fingers slid over concrete. They let themselves fall, for a second, then snagged a hold just below Frankie.
The better to catch you, my dear …
Dangling, Gimlet gave as convincing a distress yell as could be managed. Frankie, barely in control again, bared her teeth in something that might have been a grin. She joybuzzed their attacker, who dropped—
“Coach!” Gimlet objected. “Nonlethal settings!”
The gaming manager didn’t respond, but the Extinctor snagged Gimlet’s foot as he fell.
The glory of a hot dose of MethodAct was that your mind filled in everything your implants couldn’t simulate. Buy-in, if your imagination was good, was total. Gimlet’s body heaved, reflexively, yanked by the plunging weight of the falling man.
“Your samples!” Frankie reached for the mission case.
Gimlet stretched. Triceps and shoulders burned with the effort of holding all that weight, the imaginary, flailing thug and their own body.
Frankie snatched Gimlet’s case. She lost her balance again. Dropped another meter. Pinwheeled the arm and lost her grip entirely.
The less glorious thing about MethodAct, naturally, was that you might remember your precious child wasn’t falling to her death …
… but you couldn’t always believe it.
With a yell, Gimlet kicked their attacker free and let go of the wall, catching Frankie by the hand and lowering her, undamaged, to the next parapet.
“I’m fine!” Frankie jerked away, losing the case. It and she tumbled. Gimlet heard car horns and breaking glass.
Everything froze in midair.
“#Crashburn,” said Coach. “Scenario fail.”
Gimlet dropped the last few feet to the crash mat, where Frankie was dusting herself off … and rubbing a knee.
“Are you hurt?”
She shoved them. “I had point! I’m supposed to rescue you!”
“Frankie, love, partners have to—”
“Sang would’ve let me fall.”
“Perhaps—”
“Shut up! Just shut up! What do you know about partnering? We should be going to Florida, too!”
We’re not bloody wanted in Florida, are we? The words raked at the inside of Gimlet’s cheeks, with nasty, dirt-slimed claws. Didn’t quite make it past their locked jaw.
Parent and child glared at each other, panting.
“Restart from parachute drop?” Coach asked cheerily.
“I’m running the course alone!” Frankie bellowed, her voice echoing in the car park’s obstacle-ridden cavern. A trio of parents with toddler twins, over by a petting zoo installation, turned to take in the fight.
“Franks—”
“No!” She threw back the baton, or tried to; it bounced wide. Gimlet caught it automatically. “You want to play, you can just be Bedwedder and try to stop me.”
With that, Frankie stomped to the nearest ladder, ascending back to the starting point, moving fast and in a way that suggested, to Gimlet, that she was hiding a storm of tears.