Bluescreen

by Dan Wells

  “Marisa,” said Saif, “you have to believe me—I had no idea about any of that. I didn’t follow you out of the club because I thought you were mad about whatsername, Francisca; I didn’t know Anja was on the freeway, or even sleepwalking again. Please tell me she’s okay now.”

  Marisa touched her broken Jeon arm again. “Anja’s home,” she said sharply. “And you’re not going to sell to her anymore, okay? There is no amount of defensive tech in your pinche Daimyo to protect you from me.” Marisa was home as well, locked in her room and grounded by her parents, but that wouldn’t stop her from hunting him down.

  “I promise you,” said Saif again, “I had no idea that Bluescreen could be dangerous. I’ve been using sensory interfaces for years—Synesthemes, Sensovids, even VR games—and I’ve never had a problem with any of them. My supplier swore to me that Bluescreen was the same thing. But after this . . . I don’t know. I’ve got a lot friends I have to warn.”

  “You have to stop selling it,” said Marisa.

  “Of course,” said Saif. “I just—” He paused, and his voice became softer. “I, um, I’m really glad you called me. I’m a little surprised, especially because we didn’t have time to exchange IDs, but . . . I’m glad.”

  Marisa smiled, just slightly, not because he’d wanted to talk to her—she was still furious at him—but because she’d impressed him. “I scanned your ID at the club,” she said, “and then when I decided to yell at you I . . .” She paused, debating whether or not to tell him, but decided that impressing him a little more couldn’t hurt. “You get your djinni service through Johara, so I cracked their network and got your full contact info, and your usage records, and your . . . current location.” He was in an apartment near USC. A surprisingly cheap one, in fact, which Marisa wasn’t sure how to interpret. Maybe he was spending the night with some cheap bimbo from the club? She ran a quick check; the apartment was in his name.

  “Whoa.” Saif laughed. “You can do that?”

  “In seconds,” said Marisa, turning her boast into a threat. “Hurt Anja again and you will not be able to hide from me.”

  Saif hesitated before speaking. “Listen, maybe you can help me, then.”

  “After this? Not fracking likely.”

  “If this stuff’s really this dangerous,” he said, “it’s not enough for just me to stop selling it. There are dealers all over the city. We have to get the word out to them as well.”

  Marisa’s scowl disappeared, and she sat up straighter in her chair. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious, I just don’t know how to start. I can talk to my supplier, but there’s no way he’s going to put me in touch with his people, and what are the odds he and his bosses shut down their operation because one person had a bad trip? Tatti. . . . I thought I was just selling another djinni app, but this is a legit drug.”

  “Of course it’s a drug.”

  “But you found me,” said Saif, ignoring the ice in her voice. “That means you can find the other dealers too, right?”

  Marisa said nothing, stunned by the plea for help. Was he serious? Did he really want to make this better? He had to be playing an angle—maybe he just wanted to learn her methods so he could teach the others how to hide better. There was no way he was sincere. She hesitated, torn between hanging up forever and actually saying yes, digging into the mystery to see what kind of trick he was trying to pull. After a moment she whispered, “Probably.”

  “Okay,” he said, his voice eager. “This is a big operation, with a lot of dealers. We’re going to have to find them one by one. Let’s get together and figure out—”

  “What’s your plan?” Marisa asked. “Find each one and just . . . talk them out of it? Appeal to the better nature of a city full of drug dealers?”

  “If I can change my mind, so can they.”

  “And if they don’t, what then? Scare them? Kill them? And if by some miracle they do change their minds, how do we stop the suppliers from just finding new dealers to replace them? How do we stop whoever’s making the drug from just finding new suppliers?”

  “I don’t know the answers to any of these questions,” said Saif. “But with my contacts and your skills, we can at least make a start—we can learn about them, and then come up with a plan from there.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Well,” he said, “if you really don’t care about this—”

  “Of course I care about this,” she snapped. “Do you?” Maybe he wasn’t as rich as she’d thought he was, but he obviously wanted to be. Selling Bluescreen had given him money, and instead of saving it he’d bought the most expensive car he could—he didn’t care about helping people, he wanted luxury and prestige. Maybe that was the difference Sahara had asked about, why Marisa could be friends with Anja but hate all of the others. Anja didn’t care about the wealth. Saif did. Bluescreen was his chance to get rich, and somehow he thought that lying to her was going to help it happen.

  “I know you’re still mad at me,” he said, “so you pick the place. Anywhere you feel comfortable meeting me.”

  She closed her eyes, asking herself what she was getting into, but she still she didn’t say no. Maybe she could play him, like he was playing her. Find out what he was trying to pull. He wouldn’t be hard to fool: he thought everybody loved him, so it wouldn’t be hard to convince him that she did, too. Another girl blinded by his charm. She thought about his face, his dark eyes, his devious smile. It wouldn’t be hard to pretend to fall for him.

  But it might be hard to stop.

  She blinked open the map on her djinni, searching through the USC area. “You said you play VR games?”

  “Now and then.”

  “There’s a VR parlor on Thirty-Fifth,” she said, finding one on the map. “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

  “I think I know it. You play?”

  Marisa grinned wickedly. “A little. Tomorrow night?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  She paused again, waiting for . . . she didn’t know. She felt mad and tired and guilty all at once, and so desperate for . . . a way out? Revenge? She wasn’t sure. Both, maybe. Someone had hurt her friend, and now she had the chance to not only protect Anja, but to hurt the bad guys back. She opened her mouth to speak again, but shook her head and closed the call without saying good-bye.

  She touched her arm again, running her fingers along the broken prosthetic. It was an elegant, curving surface, plastic and metal and ceramic, once smooth and comforting but now scratched and dented, beaten out of shape by the force of the speeding truck. She’d wanted a Jeon all her life, saving every cent, pulling extra shifts in San Juanito, and now it was all gone. Without the servos and motors to move it around, it hung on her shoulder like an anchor. She rapped it with her knuckles, listening to the useless thud, and finally stood up off her bed, letting the dead arm swing free as she walked to her closet. Most of her old computer parts were on her work desk—a thick, wooden table covered with screens and devices of every shape and size—but the one she needed was in the back of her closet, high on a back shelf, in a box she’d hoped to never open again. She stood on the tips of her toes, pulled it out, and opened it.

  Her old, crappy arm, a SuperYu 920. It was the only thing they could afford two years ago, but the stiff, robotic limb was so out-of-date today it made her wince just to look at it. Why did anyone ever think it would be cool to look like a Terminator in real life? She sighed. What other options did she have?

  She blinked her djinni and tapped into Olaya, pulling up the full list of family members. Everyone was in the house, with the doors locked at her father’s maximum security level—the outside doors, and her bedroom door. When they grounded someone, they meant it. Marisa blinked on Sandro’s name and started a private call.

  “Hey, Mari.” His voice was almost maddeningly calm—how did he do that?

  “Hey. Can you help me out with something?”

  “You want to become a Super You?” he asked, repeating the co
mpany’s sales slogan.

  Marisa rolled her eyes. “I’ve got the stupid thing right here, can you help me out?”

  “Not with your door locked.”

  “Come on, Lechuga, what do you think I am? Helpless?” She’d hacked Olaya’s AI three years ago, and kept a backdoor program hidden in the code for situations just like this. She blinked into it now, and prepared to pop the lock, but realized suddenly that she was still wearing her green dress from the club. Where before it had made her feel sexy and independent, now it just felt itchy and uncomfortable, tight and loose in all the wrong ways and places. Worse, its long sleeves would make switching the prosthetic impossible—not to mention, the sleeve over the damaged arm was pretty damaged itself. “Score one more point for the giant truck.”

  “What?” asked Sandro.

  “Just looking at my dress,” said Marisa. “Give me a second to change out of it.”

  “I need to gather my tools anyway,” said Sandro. “And don’t call me Lechuga.”

  “Bueno,” said Marisa, and ended the call. She wriggled out of the dress, doing her best with only one good hand. The broken outer plates on the Jeon arm kept catching in the holes in the ripped sleeve, ripping it farther, until finally Marisa growled in frustration and tore the dress off in one long pull, tearing a gash down the sleeve from elbow to hem. She threw the dress at her closet with a grunt of rage and pulled on a Pinecone Neko T-shirt that was so long it hung past her knees. She kicked the dress into the corner, much harder than she had to, letting it stand in for everything else that had gone wrong all night. She waited a moment, wondering where Sandro was, and realized with a wince that she’d forgotten to unlock the door. She opened it with a blink, and collapsed facedown onto her bed.

  “Wow,” said Sandro. “You look worse than I expected.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I mean your arm,” he said. She felt the bed move as he sat next to her. “Did you really get hit by a truck in the middle of the freeway?”

  “You should see the truck,” said Marisa, trying to sound tougher than she felt. She kept her eyes buried in her pillow. “I gave as good as I got.”

  “Really?”

  “No.” Marisa sighed and peered out. “Sandro.” She paused. “Am I a bad person?”

  Sandro raised his eyebrow. He somehow looked just as tidy and professional in his pajamas as he did in his school clothes. “Do I actually get to say I told you so?”

  “No,” said Marisa. “Because I was trying to do the right thing—I wasn’t the one doing drugs, you know, I was saving Anja’s life.”

  “You were also the one who sneaked out and went to a place where people were doing drugs,” said Sandro. “What did you think was going to happen?”

  Marisa flopped back down on the pillow. “How do you make that sound so reasonable?” she asked. “I wanted to punch Dad when he said the same thing.” She peeked out again, sitting all the way up. “I ought to punch you for it,” she said, but she didn’t feel it. Her rage had all bled away, leaving nothing but guilt and sadness. And fear: just a centimeter more, and that broken arm could have been her entire body.

  “I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” said Sandro, examining the damaged arm more closely. Marisa could feel the movement in her shoulder, the only part of the arm that was still flesh and bone, but with the prosthetic’s sensors offline that was all she could feel. The arm was inert and useless, like a pirate’s peg leg. Marisa pulled up her floppy T-shirt sleeve, exposing the full arm and shoulder, and then sat still, letting him work.

  “I should be recording this,” said Sandro. “I could probably convince Ms. Threlkeld to give me extra credit in robotics.”

  “Don’t,” said Marisa.

  He nodded and grabbed his socket drill.

  Most cybernetic limbs came in two pieces, and Marisa’s were no different: the arm itself, which was removable, and the dock, which was grafted directly into her body and laced into her nervous system. Sandro worked silently on the point of attachment between the Jeon and the dock, undoing a series of precise bolts, until finally he unplugged it with a click and laid it on the bed. Marisa felt the sudden loss of weight, like someone had taken an iron chain from around her neck. She stretched her shoulders, the cone-shaped dock turning tiny circles in the air. It was barely three inches long. They wouldn’t be able to get all the SuperYu’s sensors and perks working with the Jeon dock—every company had its own proprietary hardware—but it would work well enough for the time being.

  “Anja made some modifications when I had it replaced,” said Marisa, handing Sandro the SuperYu. “The sensor ports aren’t in the same places, or even the same shape, so you’ll have to plug in some wires.”

  “Great,” said Sandro dryly, grimacing at the tangled connectors on the end of the arm. “An Anja project.”

  “She does good work,” Marisa protested.

  “She does great work,” said Sandro, shaking his head and diving into the process of hooking up the wires. “I just wish she wasn’t so messy about it. Half of these aren’t even labeled. Move your fingers.”

  Marisa flexed her fingers—or, more accurately, she thought about flexing the fingers she didn’t have—and watched as, instead of a finger, the SuperYu wrist rotated. It was bare chrome, smooth but weathered from use.

  “That’s not good,” said Sandro, and switched one of the tiny wires. “Try it again.”

  The metal thumb moved, and Marisa smirked. “That was supposed to be my pointer finger.” Sandro switched a few more plugs, sorting out which wire corresponded with which rotor, and they set about the process of lining them all up correctly. They were almost done when Marisa spoke again.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said.

  “I asked you to move your thumb.”

  “I mean I don’t understand how you think,” said Marisa. “How are you happy all the time?”

  Sandro looked at her with his typically simple pragmatism. “What’s not to be happy about? The restaurant is successful, we have food and a place to live, we all get along—occasional fights between you and Dad excepted.”

  “Is that how you define happiness?” asked Marisa. “Just . . . existing? In a situation that makes existence easy?”

  Sandro plugged the last wire into place, and looked at her with a frown. “I’ve never thought about it, but I guess I define happiness as having the right opportunities. To be able to achieve things.”

  “To get what you want,” said Marisa.

  “That’s the worst possible characterization of what I said,” said Sandro. “It’s not the getting, it’s the doing. Achieving things makes people happy.”

  “It figures you’d pick work as something that makes you happy.”

  Sandro fit one of the bolts into place and secured it with his socket drill. “What about you?”

  “Honestly?” asked Marisa. “The same as you, really. I like doing things—achieving things, like you said. But I like choosing what I want to achieve. I don’t think I could ever be happy dedicating my life to someone else’s ideas—to making somebody else’s product, or telling someone else’s story. You’re going to grow up and get a job with Ganika or Zhang or whoever, and you’re going to make a zillion dollars, and that’s what everyone does, I guess—everyone who can get a job. They work for someone else. Even if you have your own business, like Mom and Dad, you still end up slaving away for people like the Maldonados. I don’t know how you can do it.”

  “Unless you’re planning to be homeless, your options are pretty similar,” said Sandro. “Try the elbow.”

  Marisa flexed her mental elbow, and the SuperYu moved in perfect sync. Sandro nodded, obviously pleased but too serious to smile. He finished bolting the arm to her shoulder dock, and when he was done she flexed it, testing the feel and the weight. It wasn’t as smooth as the Jeon, but it worked. She smiled.

  “Thanks, Lechuga.”

  He rolled his eyes, shaking his head as if she were a child. She grinne
d and stood up, hugging him tightly. “You’re brilliant, Sandro, but don’t forget I’m a whole year older than you.”

  “Ten years ago that meant something,” he said solemnly. “The difference between six and seven was everything in the world. Ten years from now, though, the difference between twenty-six and twenty-seven isn’t going to matter at all.” He stepped toward the door, but paused and looked back. “Promise me you’ll live that long.”

  Marisa froze, shocked by the plea. It was the same sentiment, the same tone of voice, that she’d used on Chuy the night before. But Chuy was selling drugs and running guns and who knew what else. He was a gangbanger in thrall to an organized crime boss. She wasn’t anything like that.

  Was she?

  Sandro left, and Marisa relocked the door, altering the log to make it look like it had never been opened. Her father might ask some questions when he saw her replaced arm, but he’d almost certainly leave the house before she even woke up in the morning, so she’d have plenty of room to concoct an excuse. She sat at her desk, tapping her clunky metal fingers on the plastic, thinking. She got why her family was upset, but they were wrong. She wasn’t Chuy, and going to a club wasn’t the same thing as running with a gang. Helping a friend who’d taken a drug wasn’t the same as taking one.

  She found her purse, discarded on the floor, and dug inside of it for the tiny plastic drive: the second dose of Bluescreen Saif had sold Anja at the club. Marisa had taken it from Anja on the freeway, waiting for the emergency nulis, because she didn’t trust Anja not to use it, even after everything that had happened—she was the one Sandro should be worried about, not her. Now that Marisa had it, she couldn’t help but think: what was it, really? How did it work? The blackouts were an intentional effect of the code, obviously, but what about the sleepwalking? Was that an unintended error, like Saif insisted, or was it something they had written into the program? Saif didn’t know anything about the code, he was just a dealer. Who made these things, and how? Were they just in it for the money, or was something else going on here?