THE SURFACE—WESTEURO
METRO PARIS
Rubi said her farewells to Agent Javier before heading home to a bachelor-sized pop-in in a venerable hotel, converted greentower on a direct line between Pont Neuf and the Champs-Élysées.
Crane had stocked her essentials: food, shampoo, and other bathroom stuff waited in a McDiznazon crate by her front door, along with a print run from her wardrobe app.
She unpacked, treating herself to a protein cube-fridge pizza, bright with flavors of heirloom tomato and chilled pineapple. Then she grabbed a quick shower.
“Is Drow at Feckless Bachelor™, Crane?”
“Lunching with Father Blake.”
Time difference, right. “Everything to spec?”
“Absolutely fine. Leave your father be.”
“Bossy!”
“You’re one to talk, miss.” Crane painted one of her e-state tearooms around her as she munched. He proffered a silver tray balanced on one blue wingtip. It held a deck of greeting cards, pings from friends. Flipping through, she sent a round of replies decorated with a montage of Paris postcards.
Then she pulled up a magic-mirror app, running physical and mental self-assessments.
“Too tired to sleep, Miss Cherub?”
Happ bounded out of the mirror, running over to the window to wag suggestively at the view of Paris.
Primer, petals, protection: she opened the wardrobe package, shaking out a tunic and shawl. The outfit was conservative enough for a church, if one of the cathedrals happened to beckon.
“New pattern?” She examined its blue-and-white hammer-and-tongs motif.
“Trademark design. Sent by Juniper Chao.”
By now she had found the label. Keep banging away!
“Cheer-up gift?”
“All your friends know how much SeaJuve meant to you.”
Meant. Past tense. She pulled it over her head, increasing both panache and her sunscreen. “What can I get her for thanks?”
“Mer Juniper has been assembling a branded gallery within her e-state,” Crane said. “From the Tiffany collection.”
“Can I finish off the bid?”
“Hardly. You can afford to license a staircase, an alcove, or one thoroughly massive chandelier.” A dollhouse shimmered into being on a tearoom table: a catalog of intricate tilework in cream and green, vines and stained glass cascading through an opulent corral of parlors surrounding a great ballroom.
Rubi chose a corner alcove with a scalloped mother-of-pearl bench. “This one. Clip out a shot of me twirling, in the dress, to trigger when she first enters the room.”
“Shall I ping Mer Juniper?”
“Nah—surprise her.”
Happ barked at the Paris view again.
“Almost ready, Happ.” She weighed options for reaching out to Luce. He didn’t trust doctors: wouldn’t take psych meds. Med refusers were always unpredictable.
“Record voice message,” she said. “Luce, it’s Cherub Whiting. I’m calling to reschedule our meeting. Everything’s okay. There’s no additional censure coming.”
Just a big police surprise.
Pang of guilt there.
“Give me a call; let me know you’re okay.”
Transcript popped up on her whiteboard and she double-checked her phrasing. Yes, that would do.
“Send right away.”
“Treating Mer Pox like a skittish pony, are we?”
“He doesn’t like pressure.” She snagged another pizza cube and a Conviction-laced cherry chugger, opening her satchel.
As she packed the food, her eye landed, briefly, on her gaming baton. It was a deluxe model—a consolation prize, ironically enough, for losing the superhero sim Slugfest. Rabble Games had given it to her after Gimlet Barnes blasted her through the virtual version of Centre Pompidou.
Brand new, custom-made, in no way disposable, the baton was more than a reminder of past defeat. It was the only unrecycled item Rubi had ever owned. Its exterior was perfectly fitted to her hand, grown-to-measure bamboo pommel with grooves for finger grips. It telescoped to a length of one meter. An independent uplink, movement gyros, and a processor nestled within, adding heft to her coach app and strengthening in-game connections to gym equipment and other players. A carabiner on the business end allowed her to clip in to fixed lines or hang it from her belt.
As her gaze lingered on the baton, Crane said, “Gimlet Barnes—”
“I don’t like pressure either, Crane.”
“Noted.” No trace of emotion in the app’s voice … why did she feel guilty?
“Fine,” she said. “Make the call, you nag.”
“Ah. I’m afraid your archnemesis is currently unavailable.”
“See? It’s like we’re star-crossed.”
A run through a course, later, might be healthy. Meanwhile, there was nothing to do but keep banging away. She polished the hexagon of gold beads at her temple—literally shining up her #brand. She applied gold highlights to her eyes and glossed her lips.
Then she made for the Jardin du Luxembourg.
The terraforming fair had been scheduled before SeaJuve faltered, and the project’s backers in Paris still hoped, against all odds, for a reprieve. Rubi had been banging doors, seeking a lawyer qualified to file docs on SeaJuve’s behalf, before the appeals deadline expired. But the case was seen as a no-hoper; nobody wanted to risk their win stats. Global Oversight rarely changed its mind.
Rubi’s dad had been young during the Setback, back when wars, shortages, and high-impact climate disasters made human extinction seem imminent. As the planet warmed and the seas rose, epidemics ran wildfire through the population. He’d survived the Clawback, too, with all its resulting grim exigencies: martial law, extreme rationing, forced densification. Everyone had sacrificed in the battle to reverse atmospheric carbon levels and population growth, to preserve the Goldilocks conditions required for continued human survival.
Would the #commit falter before they piled into the next front? Addressing freshwater shortages, reclaiming land lost to ocean rise, deacidification, cooling, and above all, oceanic reoxygenation—these were the new redline challenges.
Some thought terraforming was essentially finished, that humanity should focus on rewilding and de-extinction, leaving the oceans to heal themselves. Oxygen security had immense traction within the Great Lakes, but the SeaJuve project needed to scale, proving it could reboot the dead zones of vaster, more complex marine ecosystems.
Rubi’s fists clenched as she approached the terraforming fair. She plastered on a smile.
Someone’s waving.
Probably just a sim fan.
If I’d spent less time gaming and more studying, I could have challenged the rationing protocols exam and filed the appeal myself.
SeaJuve had been a NorthAm pilot project, based in the Great Lakes with funding from Waterloo University’s R&D discretionary pool. Now it needed to level, but the all-important populations of the Asian megacities seemed to regard ocean rejuvenation as some kind of county-fair science project.
We’ll lose years if we have to #rebrand.
By now, Rubi had attracted a high-flying journo camera, a bot that kept pinging her with questions about the game scenario, Bastille. She blocked it, making for a display where engineers were running a demo on a device that fabricated fizzing depth charges out of a combination of recovered rock, conventional ice, and frozen liquid oxygen.
As she gave the demo her conspicuous, rapt attention, Luce Pox pinged, then spoke in her ear. “Too much waste heat.”
“Luce!” He wasn’t present in person, or even as a toon. Just an old-fashioned ghost, voice on the line.
“Refrigeration, gas compression, waste heat. Making ice? Trade-off’s not worth it even if you harvest passive solar to bootstrap the process. Stupid.”
The depth-charge engineers would have factored in heat recovery measures. Instead of saying so, she asked, “How are you?”
“Besides obstreperous?” Crane subbed.
No heckling, she toe-texted. What’d Luce ever do to you?
Luce said, “How am I what? How am I late? How am I dealing with the ads, ads, ads?”
“Once we’ve met, we can do something about your advertising-sponsored services—”
“I didn’t meet. There was no meet.”
“Don’t worry about our missed appointment.”
“Isn’t wasting your time antisocial? Aren’t you derelict in some public duty by failing to punish, strike—”
“You sound worn out,” she said, impulsively.
Silence. The depth-charge demo was over; she moved on to a booth where a team from Waterloo was assembling what looked like an IV stand on steroids.
The device, a water condenser, repurposed an antique wine bottle. The inventor painted its glass in a thin layer of nanomaterial as the crowd watched, then fitted its mouth to an upthrust chiller. It cooled, the surface of the glass capturing water beads, condensing moisture from ambient humidity. Gravity pulled the fluid into a reservoir below, reclaimed water that flowed through filters and an oxygenator before drizzling into a pallet of corn plants.
Condensers had been deployed in desert regions for decades, but these were cheap and easy to make—any stripper could mine old bottles out of archived junk. They had been sprouting like weeds throughout the Lakes for the past two years, during the worst of the summer humidity. One massive betatest had taken the form of a contest, to see which region of the megacity—Toronto, Detroit, or Chicago—could post the best stats. Dormant Canada-US rivalries were drummed up to intensify competition; buy-in had been huge. Garlands of bottles had been hung from streetlights, dangled over flower arrangements, arrayed on balconies. The gutters filled with shallow running streams. As the streets cooled, the dense summer air had become less soupy. The drop in the humidity was barely measurable, but the psychological effect was enormous: people breathed more easily.
But every little bit helps didn’t cut it with Luce. He was a top-down guy, derisive of collective empowerment, indifferent to the emotional uplift people got from directly enacting change. The pinpoint effect of each gadget didn’t seem worthwhile, even when it accumulated into thousands of liters of water or millions of tons of carbon.
Humanity can’t channel its passion for trinkets into a renewed oxygen cycle, he had posted. Return to martial law, you dumbfucks, or Earth will suffocate.
Speech was free if your facts were verified, but name-calling got him strikes.
“This tech came from my backyard,” she told him now. “University of Waterloo. NorthAm Toronto district? Ever been?”
“SeaJuve’s defunded.” Luce’s disembodied voice made a disparaging noise. “You people call this flogging a dead horse.”
“Maybe meeting here was a bad idea.” Rubi made for a café at the edge of the park, taking a table with a classic red-checked tablecloth near a family: a pregnant woman, out with her spouses and one elder, a grandparent figure of indeterminate gender.
After a second, and with a few loading glitches …
… ads, ads, ads, Rubi thought …
… Luce sketched his toon into a chair across from her.
Manga skins made most people look good, but Luciano Pox was immune to the cosmetic effect. His flesh was pasty nearly to the point of albinism; he had the gawping, peeled look of a newborn seagull, and hair the color of dirty water. The toon wore a light blue jumpsuit, unadorned but for an ad in a patch on its shoulder.
There was a bunched look to his posture, as if he might spring up at any second.
Fight-or-flight mode. She’d seen it with Drow and other VTSD patients. Luce’s whole bearing screamed at risk.
“I got the day wrong,” he said. “Our appointment.”
“Nobody gets the day wrong, Luce.”
“I’m supposed to apologize, aren’t I? Je suis désolé.”
She found herself smiling. “You remember the idea behind apologizing is that you actually feel sorry?”
“That’s a lie.”
“Since when?”
“You apologize to even some kind of score. You’re down, and saying sorry’s supposed to restore balance. But you get forgiven, and somehow you’re down again…”
“Only if the other party is an asshole.”
“Now you sound like that Drow. Helper/counselor/therapist guy he/him/his—”
“We’re family. It’s natural.” How could she put him at ease? “You’ve never regretted inconveniencing someone, or hurting their feelings?”
“Why would I?”
“I’m not sure I believe that.”
He shrugged.
“I’ll reschedule our in-the-flesh meeting. You have to be there.”
“I didn’t skip for fun. I got attacked again.”
“Another seizure?”
“Attack. I lost twenty hours.”
A twinge of relief. She hadn’t misjudged him. “I’m sure it was awful.”
Hands curled, like claws, in front of his face. “I can’t—”
“It’s okay, Luce. You don’t have to get into it.”
“Really?”
“Really. Should we book the same boardroom as before?”
“Can’t we talk now?” His fingers raked at the advertising patch on his shoulder. “It’s like I’ve got fleas.”
“Sorry. Support-ticket meetings require in-the-flesh verification.”
“Why?”
“So you don’t feel you’re at the mercy of a faceless corporation.”
“But. Seizures! You said if I had medical issues, a remote was possible.”
Was he unwilling to meet? Maybe he knew about @Interpol. “For medical exclusions, you need to face a doctor.”
“Since when?” Then his face bunched. “You look like you think I know that.”
“I did tell you.”
Crane obligingly brought up the transcript. She shared it, using augments to produce a simulated file and lay it on the table, highlighting dates, who said what.
Luce descended into cursing, then slapped an animated briefcase over the file. He waited through an advertisement, then began pawing through papers. “Wrong, Luce, no…”
“Luce, where’s your sidekick?”
His lip curled. “It tried to sell me an app. A fucking app.”
“Meaning porn?”
“Yes. It’s fired.”
Interesting that his reaction to that seemed to be revulsion. “Are you religious? Or asexual?”
He stiffened, a rabbit sensing a hawk overhead.
“What is it?”
“Troub—yes, trouble.”
“Your … attacker?”
“It’s insulting that you sound so dubious. Every goddamned time I show my face—”
Signs of paranoia. More ammunition for a disability argument. This was Anselmo’s master criminal? “If you believe you’re being stalked—”
“The trouble’s at your location, stupid!” Luce hissed, jaw clenched. “Cameras going dead. Action … imminent.”
She said, “Where are you? I’ll send police.”
“Remotes, I said. It’s not—” He jabbed a finger at her, mouthing something her speakers didn’t catch. Then he vanished.
More trouble from his bottom-barrel services?
Sipping half-cooled tea, Rubi scanned the fair. The expectant mother she’d seen earlier was seated, with her pack, around a picnic of food cubes and a shared mirage—they were looking at the same something and laughing, in sync. Tourists side-eyed her belly as they passed.
Luce reappeared. “It’s not me, Rubi; it’s you.”
“I don’t under—”
“Uplinks, cameras. Someone’s in le Jardin, darking all the eyes, clogging all the ears.”
“You are talking about terrorism.”
“Miss Cherub,” Crane said.
“Not now, Crane.”
“Priority interruption! Mer Pox has established an illegal redtooth connection with your baton—”
“She’s in danger, you stupid stupid stupid bot! I’m warning her.”
Danger. Rubi stood, placing her back to a wall. Her hand found the baton automatically.
This was the surface, she reminded herself. Best she might do was jab the business end of the stick in someone’s eye.
Deeply antisocial thought, that.
Her grip tightened. “Crane, alert the cops.”
No answer.
“Luce, where are you?”
“If I knew where the fuck I was—”
“That isn’t helpful.”
By now, it was apparent that everyone was surfacing. The picnicking family had stopped chasing butterflies. They looked to and fro, visibly puzzled. People called to disconnected friends and apps.
Flying cameras, delivery bots, and traffic monitors lowered themselves from above, in startling numbers. As they landed, self-driving cars and delivery carts also slowed and stopped. A pedestrian with leg braces had frozen in mid-step and was cursing his way through a checklist so he could operate the walker manually.
The fountains in the waterpark ran dry.
Danger, Luce said.
Rubi jumped up to a café chair. The added height let her see the western edge of the blackout zone. Five hundred meters out, people turned away from the park as traffic control diverted pedestrians.
On reflex, she tried zooming in.
No response. All cameras dead, just as Luce had said. She was looking with baseline eyesight.
@Luddies would have made the drones #crashburn. If it’s @Freebreeders—
Oh!
She searched the crowd. The pack with the pregnant woman was making for the Waterloo display tent.
“Reproduction is a right, not a luxury!” One shout in English kicked off an accompanying chorus of slogans in French. People in printed pink-and-blue jumpsuits ran into the crowd, pulling goggle-eyed masks over their faces, chanting:
“Donnez-nous nos enfants!” The masks amplified and distorted the voices. “Nos enfants! Nos enfants!”
“What new stupidity is this?” Luce asked.
I thought we were offline. “Luce, are you—”
Something hit the top of the Waterloo tent with a liquid splat. Its fabric began to smoke. Bystanders cried out, alarmed. A second missile blurred through the air, striking one of the parents-to-be on the temple. Mist billowed. The whole group began to cough.
“Modified paintball gun. Gas payloads,” Luce said. The next pop came from nearby; she saw the ball blurring past.
Rubi’s eyes stung.
She collapsed her baton as she made her leap from the chair. Catching the support of the café awning, she got a toehold on the building pediments and used it to hurl herself to a statue of horse and rider. The upraised brass arm of a Dauphin, sun-warmed and triumphant, was enough support to get her to a not-very-solid stance atop the horse’s rump. She caught her breath, steadying herself.
My primer’s offline; no nanocleats. She held the position through leg strength and sheer force of will.
Her opposition was apparent from this vantage. Clad in a pink jumpsuit, she stood on a first-floor balcony, narrow slot of wrought iron just above Rubi’s head. She had a rifle trained on the pregnant woman’s pack.
Just a paintball gun, Luce said.
“Donnez-nous nos enfants!” The shouts continued.
“Tous pour l’un, l’un pour tous!”
“This is what I don’t understand.”
“Not now, Luce!”
Jumpsuit saw her.
Rubi threw the gaming baton, hard as she could, at the fuzzy pink gut. It hit square, but the woman got off a shot. Something smacked Rubi square between the breasts.
Drow screaming, cutting at tranq darts, all that blood …
Pain spread, and a burn.
Smells like pepper …
She’d already jumped to the balcony, using forward momentum to offset the impact of the paint load. Vaulting to the rail, she made an angry, half-blind grab with both hands. She got the barrel of the rifle in her left hand and a fistful of pink nanosilk jumpsuit in the right.
“What do they think they can do with the woman? Carry her off? Hatch her?”
“Not now, Luce.” Habanero fire burned her throat, nose, and eyes, making her want to sip the air rather than breathe. Her breastbone hurt, oh, it hurt …
Since all she had on her side was forward thrust, Rubi pushed against the balcony rail, driving the disguised terrorist across the narrow Juliet balcony. They slammed against the wrought-iron rail. The whole structure shook.
Groan from behind the mask. Jumpsuit’s gun pop-pop-popped, gas loads blasting past Rubi’s ear. They broke on a nearby wall, thickening the air further.
Her eyes streamed. Every breath burned. She felt lightheaded.
Inside. There had to be an inside. Rubi hauled bodily, slamming herself toward the building wall, hoping to find a wide-open door.
No such luck. Her butt bounced off window glass with a crunch.
Her opponent had by now recovered from the surprise of being tackled by a chronic gamer with appalling impulse control. She twisted away, ripping free of Rubi’s grip on the chest of her jumpsuit, taking fingernails along for the ride.
Tear gas, it turned out, hurt the raw skin of ripped-to-the-quick fingertips, too.
“This public-opinion bullshit you all go on and on about. Cloudsight and respectable facades and reputation scores. Polls, polls, polls. Winning over hearts and minds—”
In lieu of repeating “Not now, Luce,” Rubi croaked. She fisted her throbbing hand, pictured Gimlet Barnes, and punched hard for what she hoped was Jumpsuit’s face.
The blow landed more by luck than design. She felt the woman’s mask tearing off. Pain shot up her wrist.
If I’d known, I’d have taped and gloved my hands back at the apartment.
Still, the sweet sound of coughing penetrated the inferno in her head.
And suddenly Crane was back. “Miss Cherub! Miss Cherub, you must get out of there! Why is your social capital rising … Oh, saints preserve, she’s mauling a terrorist. Young lady—”
How is this my fault?
“Calm down. She’s just wheezy,” Luce said. “Cameras are rebooting. Terrorists scuttling for shadows, before they get Whoozed.”
Jumpsuit lunged away, abandoning gun and mask. Rubi caught her foot as she made for the edge of the balcony to a waiting …
… a something. Rubi’s vision was too smeared to pick out details.
She fought to hang on to the woman. Pain rippled through her right rotator cuff, and she almost got her face kicked.
She let go. Now cameras were up, someone would get a shot of Jumpsuit’s face.
“Mer Pox, I insist that you break connection with Miss Cherub’s peripherals.”
“Or what?”
There was a weird, dangerous pause.
When Crane spoke again, his voice was extraordinarily gentle. “Cherub. Are you all right, love?”
She wheezed. She couldn’t see past the tears. What had he said about her social cap? Instead of speaking, she toe-texted @LuceCrane: Anyone hurt? They targeted a mother …
“Brood mare’s wheezy, too,” Luce said. “Six of them tried to cut out her RFID and drag her to a stupid car. Everyone’s fussing.”
“The kidnapping failed,” Crane said. “I should like to tell you that your intervention made a difference. However, I wouldn’t wish to encourage self-destructive tendencies.”
“Of course she affected the outcome!”
“Get out of her feeds, Mer Pox!”
Rubi laughed, sort of, before succumbing to a coughing fit.
“Is she suffocating?” Luce’s voice rose. “Is it anaphylaxis?”
“’M’okay,” she croaked.
Crowd noise filled the air. Mixed sobs, excited babbles, and shouts. She heard the whirring of drones taking flight again, a wail of sirens.
Gigs aplenty. Everyone who’d passed the local beat-cop module would be mustering for crowd control.
“What are you scowling about, bird?” Luce broke in on her reverie.
“Word choice. Brood mare,” Crane said.
“A mammal, with a uterus, having a parasite—”
“That is highly offensive.”
“Fine, désolé, whatever—”
The last thing she needed was Crane trying to unlock misogyny 101 for Luce. “Stop,” Rubi rasped. “Bickering.”
“I beg you, Miss Cherub, speak with your toes. Paramedics and police are incoming.”
Cops coming. She needed to send Luce away before Anselmo turned up and blew her delicate two-way balance of confidentiality.
Luce. Answer me. Are you outside the police tape?
“I’m right here.”
Where? The food court? A display tent? Give me coordinates.
“Just your head.”
Where’s your flesh? Your bonerack?
“Why is bonerack and meat puppet okay and yet we’re offended by brood mare—”
“Meat puppet is certainly not okay—”
Rubi coughed, and Crane took the hint.
Are you in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Luce? she texted. Yes or no?
“Dunno. Told you, I lost a day. I woke in that virtual lecture, and then I went to counseling.”
Drow’s remote too, Luce.
Annoyed noise. “I got attacked. Geotags jumbled.”
Look around.
“Don’t boss me! Signs are en anglais. I think I’ve gone … far.”
“Paramedic ETA three minutes,” Crane said. “They’ll flush your eyes and throat.”
As the sidekick drew her attention back to her face, her eyes and nose burned hotter. Beyond the pound of her pulse in hot sinus tissue and the throbbing of her fist—the ripped nails stung more than the finger she had, she suspected, sprained—her mind was churning furiously.
Luce had connected with her baton while uplinks were being jammed. That was supposed to be impossible. Just like truck hacking.
Anselmo wanted to catch a unicorn and jump the @Interpol promotion queue.
“Paramedics incoming,” Crane said. “And a call from—ah, from Mer Javier.”
She reached a decision. Luce, clear out. Can you call me in … three hours?
“Fine, whatever. Bye.”
Steps, to her left, and a new voice. “Mademoiselle Whiting?”
Rubi nodded. The voice was high and light, with a French accent. Not Anselmo.
“I’m a paramedic. My name is Alienne Choquette.”
Rubi croaked: “What’s French for I got pepper-sprayed?”
“Tilt your head back, mademoiselle. Merci.” A moistened something unrolled over her face, cooling the sense of sunburn and chafing. Rubi heard a hiss—an aerosolized spray? The canals of her ears stopped throbbing. Her nose, too. The paramedic did something to the pack on her face and it began to inflate, filling with chilled moisture. It was like breathing aloe vera.
“When you’re ready, open your eyes.”
Step one was simply unclenching. Rubi cracked her lids, felt the burn and a flood of tears, and clamped them shut again.
“Okay. One breath in. Out. All the time in the world.”
She blinked furiously, until the singing nerves around her eyelids relaxed.
“Better.” Milky thickness spread outward from her burnt-feeling lips.
“Easy, breathe deep, slow.” The medic adjusted the spray. By now, Rubi’s head was in a plastic balloon, a makeshift respiratory tent. She drew the moisturizing mist in and out until all of the burn, ears, eyes, nose, throat, had ramped back to the roar of a mildly spicy meal.
“Can you activate your implants and run diagnostics?”
“Crane?”
“Handshaking with medical analysis,” the sidekick said, sounding disgruntled. “Your baton locked and requires thumbprint verification. I’m rebooting everything to clear nonresident feeds.”
“You sound like Drow.”
“It isn’t paranoia, Miss Cherub, if everyone is out to get you.” Ancient expression, a favorite of Dad’s. Was Crane trying to tell her something?
Rubi patted the wrought-iron grate beneath her. Now her head was clear, she could feel the uncomfortable pressure of the grid in the flesh of her backside and hips. Her hand found her baton and closed over it. Suddenly grateful for her luxury loser’s trophy, she pulled herself upright.
“The bag can come off now, if you like.” Without waiting for a response, the paramedic slipped the respiratory bubble off her head.
Rubi took in the tear-smeared view beyond the curtains, squinting at the apartment beyond the balcony. This was no pop-in. The furnishings were real, old-looking. A hand-braided rug and a printed pair of slippers were just beyond the now-open sliding door. Spiderweb cracks in the glass showed the impact point, where she had tried to drag Jumpsuit inside.
Permahome. For the café operator?
She closed her throbbing eyes, using the park cameras to take in augmented views of the square.
Beyond the horse statue, panic was easing. Police had gathered people into groups, moving them toward transports that would take them out of the crime scene.
She zoomed in on the family the @Freebreeds had targeted. One of the pregnant woman’s partners had a lacerated shoulder. The elder looked gas-burned.
Their gaze locked on Rubi.
She raised a hand, throwing them a smile moji.
The spouses, collectively, replied with five strokes.
She almost yanked the hand down. Five was a huge expenditure of the pack’s social capital. A single stroke or strike cost three of your own. Two cost ten, and three cost fifty. Five cost five hundred.
And … this family wasn’t the only one boosting her, she suddenly realized. Rubi’s cap was climbing steadily on a wave of strokes from strangers.
“We made the news, Crane?”
“Indeed. Your profile is snowballing.”
“So much for keeping Drow in the dark about this.”
“I’d worry more about Agent Javier.”
Light emphasis, there, on worry. He was trying to tell her something about the #cowboycop.
By now the medic had hmmmed over the spreading bruise on Rubi’s sternum and moved on to running a small baton of her own over Rubi’s hand and wrist.
“Can we be done?” Rubi said.
“Checking for breaks. Give us deux minutes … ah, two more minutes,” the paramedic said. “I’m uploading diagnostics to a fracture specialist in case you need X-rays. Can you squeeze this?”
“Yep.”
More hmmming. “You’ve got rotator cuff problems?”
“It’s minor.”
“Legacy of high-performance gaming, non? Wear and tear?”
“Yeah.” Enough that Coach had tried to convince her to buy into stage-one life extension. Her eyes flooded again.
“Doctor suggests adding anti-inflammatories to your food order,” the paramedic said. “Accept or cancel?”
“Accept.”
“They’ll send an inhaler to your home. You can jog again as early as tomorrow night.” She shared medical instructions and Rubi accepted them, approving the drug order and giving the paramedic two strokes. “Certain sports activities are contraindicated for your hand and shoulder.”
“Contraindicated for how long?”
“Peut-être … a week?”
Not enough to get her off the hook. She’d still have to tell Gimlet and Rabble Games she wasn’t doing the Bastille sim. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“De rien.”
Rubi looked past the paramedic to the @Interpol agent just stepping into the apartment. The bulletproof vest was gone; over his primer was a simleather jacket.
Worry about Anselmo, Crane said.
The career stuff Crane had whiteboarded, from his transcript, showed that the agent had more or less the same problem as SeaJuve—he needed to level or accept that he’d plateaued. Competition for prestige investigations was fierce: if he didn’t get a big win, soon, more successful cops would push him down the policing equivalent of a leaderboard.
Subvocalizing made her throat hurt, so she texted: You don’t think my client is an actual person, do you?
He replied with gestural moji: “It’s complicated.”
“Bend your fingers this way, like so,” the paramedic said. Rubi obeyed.
What kind of a unicorn are you chasing?
Anselmo subbed, “Mer Pox may be a strong AI.”
Built by whom?
“Terrorists. That theory’s gaining traction now.” He let his hand sweep the calming fairground, the clusters of police and witnesses.
My client didn’t initiate this, Rubi texted. He warned me.
“How did he know?”
How strong an AI? Rubi demanded.
Anselmo frowned.
Just say it, she said. You’re trying to land a permajob in Sapience Assessment. You think Luce is the Singularity.