Bluescreen

by Dan Wells

  “A pool party at a mansion in Brentwood,” said Sahara with a smile. “That’ll play great on the feed.” She raised her eyebrows mischievously. “Let’s do it. Eight o’clock. Wear something revealing.”

  Marisa faked a smile. “Anything for eyeballs?”

  “Anything for eyeballs,” said Sahara. “See you tonight. Cherry Dogs forever.”

  “Cherry Dogs forever,” said Marisa. Sahara blinked away, and Marisa stared for a moment at the spot she used to be in.

  “I’ve got something great for the eyeballs,” said Anja. “You’re going to love it.”

  “It’s the internet, Anja; they’ve seen boobs before.”

  “Nothing that biological,” said Anja, and grinned wickedly. “See you tonight.”

  “Tonight,” said Marisa. Anja blinked away, and a few seconds later Marisa did the same. She opened her eyes in her bedroom, cluttered and cramped, lying flat on her bed. Above her on the ceiling was an Overworld poster, the limited edition she’d bought at last year’s regional championship; it made the transition easier, she thought, to see a piece of that world as she entered the real one. She rubbed her eyes and sat up, looking around at the unfolded laundry and scraps of half-built computer equipment scattered haphazardly around the room.

  Home.

  She reached back for the cord, lightly touching the jack where it plugged into her skull. She never felt anything physical when she disconnected it—not even a tug, now that she’d upgraded her djinni to the Ganika 7. The new cord only connected with a weak magnetic link, so it could pull away freely if someone knocked it.

  Even without a physical sensation, though, she always seemed to feel something else, something . . . psychological, she supposed. She yanked gently on the cord and it came away, severing her hard line to the net.

  The real world. She hadn’t been here in a while.

  The colors were so much duller.

  TWO

  Marisa Carneseca blinked, calling up her mail list. The djinni implanted in her head switched modes smoothly, projecting the words on her Ganika-brand corneas so that they seemed to float in the air in front of her, filling the room with dimly glowing letters. The icon for her spam folder was red and pulsing, and she dumped it without even bothering to look at what was inside. Her inbox showed two emails from her mother and five from Overworld—most of those probably ads, but there might be a few from Cherry Dog fans. She’d look through them later. Two emails from Olaya, the house computer; Marisa opened the folder and saw two repeats of the same passive demand for laundry access. She sighed and looked around; it had been a while, she had to admit. She saw a half bottle of Lift on the nightstand, and took a long drink.

  She’d met a cute boy at a club a couple of nights ago, but his djinni had been so filled with adware she hadn’t accepted his ID link; instead she’d written it down, like in the old days, and the paper was buried somewhere in this pile of clothes—she couldn’t let the drone in until she’d checked all her pockets.

  She blinked the house folder closed and scrolled down, rolling some of the stiffness out of her shoulders as she did. Her neck was pulling on the left again, where her natural muscles connected to her Jeon prosthetic. She lifted the artificial arm, splaying the fingers in front of her—it was her seventeenth birthday present, just a few months old. Obviously mechanical, but slender and elegant. Definitely a step up from the old SuperYu.

  At the bottom of the mail list was a message from Bao, reminding her to ping him when she finished practice. She blinked on his number—no ID, because he didn’t have a djinni, just an old-style handheld phone with an old-style number. It made her laugh every time, like he was her abuela. She kept the video turned off while she stood up and looked around for pants.

  Bao didn’t answer for almost thirty seconds. “Hey, Mari.”

  “Hey. You in school?”

  “Took me a minute to get out of class.”

  Marisa smiled, sifting through a pile of old clothes. “If you’d get a djinni like a normal person you wouldn’t have to get out of class.”

  “I need the break anyway. You’re done with practice already?”

  Marisa examined a shirt, but discarded it. Too wrinkly. “Sahara ended it early on account of me being a genius.”

  “I saw her post. Apparently you’ve broken the game again.”

  “She’s already posted?” Marisa smiled.

  “Just a sentence, says there’s a big video coming later. What’d you do, another costume exploit?”

  “Powerset exploit,” said Marisa, finding a pair of black jeans and pulling them on as she talked. “Though I’m not even sure it’s an exploit, just a lucky play. For all I know they wanted us to start throwing the sentry drones around.”

  “Throwing drones? This I’ve got to see.”

  Marisa split her vision, calling up the live feed from Sahara’s vidcast. Sahara was sitting at her immaculate desk, the camera nuli watching from over her shoulder as her fingers flew across the touch screen, editing and sculpting the replay into a highlight video. She was wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt, her thick hair pulled up in a ponytail—a far cry from her evening gown avatar, but still impossibly adorable. Marisa shook her head. “How does she always look so good? We’ve been plugged in and lying down for three hours, and asleep all night before that, and she looks like she just got her hair done.”

  “I’m sure you look great,” said Bao.

  Marisa looked down at her own oversized nightshirt, and glanced at the mirror with a pained grimace. “I look like I’m hiding from the government.” Her dark brown hair was a squirrel’s nest of knots and tangles; the tips were dyed red, about four inches deep, which looked pretty cool when it was straight, but now it only added to the wispy chaos. She ran her hand through it, trying to smooth it down, and winced as she hit a snarl. She gave up for the moment and started hunting for a clean shirt. “You know what I think it is?” she told Bao. “I think she does it all before we practice. Nobody gets that cute, just-rolled-out-of-bed look by just . . . rolling out of bed.”

  “You coming to school today?” asked Bao.

  Marisa shrugged. “Probably not. I can do most of it online, and the rest of it . . . technically also online.”

  “You can’t just hack all your grades.”

  “Sure I can,” said Marisa with a grin, “unless you’re saying I shouldn’t just hack all my grades, in which case you might have a point.” She found a black blouse, fancier than she needed but the only presentable thing in the room. She really needed to let the laundry nuli in here. “You hungry?”

  “I could eat.”

  Marisa blinked back to Olaya while she buttoned her shirt, looking at her family list: her parents were both at the restaurant, and her three younger siblings were all at school. Or at least they were checked in at school; Marisa had learned how to spoof the GPS on her djinni when she was thirteen, and her siblings might have figured out the same trick. None of them really seemed like the type, though. Sandro, maybe—he was a genius with hardware, but he’d never dare to actually do it.

  Marisa finished with her clothes and looked at the bottle of Lift. “I haven’t had anything today but a few sips of soda. Meet me for an early lunch?”

  “Give me twenty minutes,” said Bao.

  “I’ll need at least that long to wrestle with this hair before giving up and shaving it off.”

  “Your mom’d kill you.”

  “My dad’d kill me first.”

  “Thirty minutes, then,” said Bao. “Saint Johnny?”

  “Exactamente,” said Marisa. “See you there.” She ended the call and attacked her hair again, with a brush this time, grumbling curse words in three languages as she pulled on the knots. She slipped her feet into a pair of flats as she brushed, and took a last look at the room. Did she need anything else? The boy’s ID from the club was somewhere in this mess, if she could remember which pants she’d been wearing. Or had she been wearing a skirt? She tried to recall, and real
ized she couldn’t even think of the boy’s name. She shrugged and opened the door, laughing as the Arora laundry nuli burst in and started picking up clothes, rushing from pile to pile like an overstimulated robot puppy. She didn’t need the boy’s ID anyway. If he didn’t even know how to keep adware off his djinni, how interesting could he really be?

  The wheeled nuli almost looked like it could think for itself: picking up each shirt and bra and pair of tights, considering it, and sorting it efficiently into one of several onboard baskets. But it was all an illusion of efficient programming. Each piece of clothing in the house was marked with an RF chip, and it was these the drone was reading; they carried instructions on exactly how to wash the clothes, how to fold them, and where to put them away. It was a good system, when it worked. Last year their cat, Tigre, had clawed a sweater to pieces, getting the tiny RF chip stuck in her fur. They didn’t have a cat anymore.

  Marisa worked on her hair for another five minutes, linking her djinni to the bathroom mirror so she could read the Overworld forums in HD. People were already talking about the drone launch, including a video clip the Salted Batteries had posted, but it was still a relatively minor story. Much bigger news was the regional championship that had just wrapped in Oceana, with Xx_Scorcho_xX taking the cup. No surprise there. Apparently Flankers were ruling the meta, which Fang had been saying for a couple of weeks now, so that was something to think about. The American championships were coming up in just two weeks, but the Cherry Dogs weren’t on that level yet; someday, she told herself, but not yet. They had, however, landed a slot in the Jackrabbit Tourney, a kind of minor-league invitational showcase. If they did well there, they’d have a shot at a major tournament in the second half of the year. Marisa scanned through the Oceana tourney results until her hair was more or less fit for public display, and then blinked the forum back from the mirror to her djinni so she could read while she walked.

  The hallway smelled like fresh tortillas and cigarette smoke, a combination of fair and foul so familiar Marisa couldn’t help but smile. It was her abuela, who hadn’t appeared on the house computer because she didn’t have a djinni; that was just as well, Marisa supposed, because she never left the house. They always knew exactly where she was: cooking in the kitchen. Marisa longed to slip in and grab a hot tortilla, fresh off the griddle, but she knew her abue would slap her with a chore or three if she saw her. Marisa slid out the back door instead—the old woman could barely see, and her hearing was worse. Marisa got away clean and stepped outside.

  Los Angeles in 2050 was a hectic blend of past and future; it was one of the last great centers of business left in the US, and usually more interested in building new things than refurbishing old ones. The roads teemed with autocabs and rolling lounges, with a crisscross web of maglev trains and hypertubes bringing commuters in from all over the country. Steel and concrete and biowall buildings covered the hills and valleys like a carpet, bristling with solar trees that glittered green and black across the rooftops. Above them all the sky was thick with nulis, buzzing through the air in a million directions, so that the entire city looked like a hive of polymer bees in every possible shape and size.

  Marisa lived in El Mirador, a midsize barrio that baked in the hot sun just east of downtown—not rich like Anja’s neighborhood, but not destitute, either. Vast swaths of LA were practically shantytowns these days, but Mirador was holding on.

  One of the reasons for Mirador’s tenacity zoomed past on the road, a dark phantom in Marisa’s peripheral vision: the distinctive black outline of a Dynasty Falcon. Don Francisco Maldonado was the richest man in Mirador, and he helped keep the peace with his small army of private enforcers in Dynasty autocars. With most police work handled by remote drone, the Maldonado enforcers were almost as fast as, and certainly more attentive than, the actual law—though even the law was in Maldonado’s pocket, thanks to his eldest son working for the local precinct. The Falcon didn’t slow down as it passed Marisa, but she knew the man inside was giving her a long, hard look. There was no one in the world Don Francisco hated more than her father.

  Marisa rubbed her prosthetic arm and kept walking.

  Her family’s restaurant was barely a mile from their house, and an easy walk even in the scorching heat. Up until two years ago they’d lived behind the restaurant in a connected apartment, but her father had scrimped and saved and moved them to their new house the instant he could afford it. Sahara had moved in to the old apartment soon after; she’d never said why she left her parents’ place, and Marisa had never asked. Marisa’s parents hadn’t pried either, and Marisa figured they saw it as an opportunity to be a good influence on their daughter’s friend. Sahara paid her bills and kept her grades up, so it all worked out. Marisa didn’t imagine Sahara would make it to lunch, being too busy with the video and her various media contacts, but that was just as well. Sahara’s life was a twenty-four-hour vidcast, and Marisa wanted more time with her hair before the entire internet saw her in it.

  Marisa’s djinni pinged with a call from her mom; she blinked to answer. “Hey, Mami.”

  “Oye, chulita. Olaya told me you left; are you going to school?”

  “I’m about halfway to you, actually. You got chilaquiles?”

  “For breakfast? Ay, muchacha, this is why you don’t have a boyfriend. Who wants to kiss that breath?”

  Marisa rolled her eyes. “Ay, Mami . . .”

  “You’ll get your homework done online?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll tell Papi to start some chilaquiles. What does Bao want?”

  “How’d you know Bao was coming?”

  “I’m your mother, Marisita. I know everything.”

  “Then you know better than I do what he wants,” said Marisa with a laugh. “See you in a few.” She closed the call and waited at a busy corner, watching the autocars weave through traffic in their intricate hive mind dance.

  Each storefront she passed read Marisa’s ID from her djinni, checked it against her commerce profile, and filled its window with personalized ads. Most people would be getting pop-ups directly to their djinni, but Marisa had firewalled those out years ago. The last thing she needed was a two-for-one hairstyling coupon blocking her vision. The wide front window of a clothing store pulled a picture of Marisa from somewhere on the net, shopped their latest sundress onto her, and displayed it in HD for the entire street to see: On Sale! Only ¥20/$123! She stopped to look and the 3D image rotated; Marisa was pretty sure the automated photo alteration had slimmed her waist a bit as well, just to make the dress look more appealing. Clever, but rude. She considered hacking in through their Wi-Fi and displaying some incendiary political figure in the same dress, just for revenge, but laughed and walked away. It wasn’t worth the time.

  The family’s restaurant was called San Juanito, named for the Mexican logging town where her father had lived as a boy. It was still early for lunch, not quite eleven, but the lights were on and the ad board was already grabbing the IDs of passersby to offer them the daily specials. It read Marisa’s as soon as she got close, identified her as a regular, and greeted her by name.

  “Welcome back to San Juanito, Marisa Carneseca! Would you like a free horchata today?”

  She walked inside, and caught her mother halfway to a table, a tray of waters balanced carefully on her hand. “Buenos días, Mami.” She kissed her on the cheek. “Is Bao here yet?”

  “Table twelve.” Guadalupe de Carneseca was a tall, broad woman, fair-skinned, and with her hair dyed a faint reddish blond. “How was practice?”

  “Better every game. Just you today?”

  “Everyone else is in school,” said her mother, “unless you want to put on an apron and help wait tables.”

  Marisa stuck out her tongue and made a gagging noise. Her mom used the kids as cheap waitstaff when she could, and Marisa hated it. “Just buy a nuli already—you’re, like, the only restaurant in the world that still uses live waiters.”

  “And our custom
ers appreciate the personal touch,” said her mother. “Go sit down. I’ll be there in a bit.” She bustled off, delivering waters to a table in the back, and Marisa tried to remember which was table twelve. Even this early, the restaurant was filling up, and Bao was just skilled enough—and just mischievous enough—to be impossible to find in a crowd. A handy skill when you fed your family by picking tourists’ pockets in downtown Hollywood. After a moment she gave up, checked the diagram on the restaurant computer, and walked straight to him.

  “Well done,” said Bao with a grin. He was half-Chinese and half-Russian, and looked just enough like each to blend perfectly into either crowd. He was wearing all black, like Marisa, but whereas her clothes were designed to be noticed, his were designed to disappear. If he didn’t catch you with his deep, piercing eyes, you might never notice him at all.

  “I cheated,” said Marisa.

  “I’m shocked.”

  She took a drink of water, the ice so cold that the glass was drenched in condensation. The shock in her mouth made her shiver. “You didn’t get caught leaving school?”

  “You insult me.”

  “I never understand how you do that. Security’s so tight in that place; it’s like a prison.”

  “Their digital security is tight,” said Bao. “Try to walk through any door in that building with an implant and fifty different security guards will know about it instantly. But when you’re the only kid in school without a djinni, they tend to forget that sometimes plain old eyes are better.”

  Marisa nodded, taking another sip of ice water. How many times had they had this conversation? “Seriously: what kind of weirdo doesn’t have a djinni? That’s like not having . . . feet.”

  “Some people don’t have feet.”

  “Not by choice. A djinni is a phone, a computer, a scanner, a credit card, it’s my . . . key to my house. It’s everything. You and my abue are the only ones left in LA without one.”

  “I’ve never felt the lack.”

  “It will change your life, Bao, I’m serious.”