by Eliot Peper
A waiter emerged from a side corridor holding a steaming tempura platter. Emily walked faster, following him. He pushed through a pair of batwing doors that swung back and forth on well-oiled hinges. She approached and peered beyond them.
Analog.
The crowd was thinner now. A few serious drinkers nursed cocktails at the bar and a couple of booths were occupied. Emily must be in the staff area. She had set off a grenade at the Commonwealth board meeting, ended up here, drank herself silly, and punched Nell in the face. Instead of tossing in a few punches of their own and then calling the cops, the bouncers had apparently deposited her in a spare room to sleep it off.
At the opposite end of the club, the red satin parted and Nell entered, a bandage over her nose. She was talking over her shoulder to someone coming in behind her. Fuck. Emily ducked back deeper into the hallway. Javier. Tall and gangly and worried. He and Nell conversed with quiet intensity, and she pointed back toward the batwings.
No. Not right now. Not ever.
Emily turned and ran. Her stomach sloshed and she almost threw up the baguette, so she slowed her sprint to a jog, passing the kitchen and the supply closet and the room they’d put her in. She made a turn, backtracked, tried again, pushed open a wide cargo door, and stepped out onto a loading dock.
Bass thrummed, synth bubbled, and lyrics piled on top of one another in a rapturous cascade. Emily sucked in a breath, looking up and back. She was standing in an alley behind Analog and the club’s feedlessness was limited by the walls of the converted warehouse. She must have been listening to her playlist on her headlong flight through the streets of San Francisco, beats and rhymes directing her feet while her mind drowned in itself.
The feed flooded back in all its confusion and glory, and with it came the realization that her dreams of finding a new Camiguin in which to vanish were a shallow, drunken fantasy.
When Emily had fled thirteen years ago, the only people who knew to miss her were her friends. Now a shortlist of the most powerful people on the planet would stop at nothing to hunt her down. She would be a permanent fugitive, and there were few enough places like Analog in which she could avoid the sticky strands of the feed, any of which might be the stray thread they needed to unravel her identity and location. Lowell himself was in the process of monopolizing the network of feedless fight clubs. The disaster at the Ranch had turned Emily into an enigmatic feed celebrity. She had been spinning a broken record, her life repeating in a scratchy loop.
But the record spinning in her feed wasn’t broken, and although she had heard Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” a thousand times before, it rang true in an entirely new way. Melle Mel’s rhymes were ornate and snarled, lyrics that played fast and loose with metaphor, confession, and simmering outrage. In that often-forgotten pre-internet era, the Bronx had been ravaged by poverty, ignored by the government, and plagued by austerity, violent crime, and police brutality. It was held hostage by a broken system. Flash himself scavenged parts from junkyards and abandoned cars to build his first stereo, and went on to invent new turntable techniques. But this anachronistic music that resonated with Emily so deeply, these poetic riffs that enflamed her revolutionary zeal, had been born from the ashes of the burning housing projects. Flash, Kool Herc, Bambaataa, and other early rappers hadn’t just pioneered a new genre, they had given a voice to the voiceless. With everyone and everything against them they had spoken up, spoken out, and made music that inspired a generation. In a society that cast them as criminals and victims, they redefined themselves and created something fresh, something that mattered, something that lasted, something that did so much more than fight back, something that forged the world anew.
Emily hopped off the loading dock and lost herself in the cramped alleys of the industrial district, letting the music carry her. The night was cold and the only light came from city glow reflecting off the clouds overhead. It smelled of urine. Graffiti looped and swirled across the high walls, the shadows muting all color to shades of gray. The screeches of a catfight echoed off concrete. This was another one of those liminal zones, strange places that cropped up even in the grandest megalopolises, thresholds between new and old, light and dark, ecstasy and paranoia.
Emily’s lips mouthed the verses falling through her head like sunshine through foliage. She moved in a half trot, half dance. Her headache flared, and she embraced the pain, riding it out of the maze of alleys and onto the street where the car she had summoned was waiting. She opened the door and slid inside, the chorus tearing itself from her throat as loud as she could possibly shout it.
Sometimes the only way out was in.
CHAPTER 39
Emily could see all of downtown San Francisco from this recessed stairwell. It was here in the Bay Area that the feed had been conceived, had grown from an embryonic startup into a global monopoly, cannibalizing so many of the institutions that had accelerated its meteoric rise. But the city was home to so much more than the graphene talons of Commonwealth’s regional headquarters. Teachers and artists and firefighters and social workers and baristas and bodybuilders and poets and chefs and geeks and freaks lived in the shadow of the superstructures, more people than Emily could ever hope to meet, with more fears and dreams and ideas than anyone could capture. It was that richness, that vibrancy, those contradictions that had fueled Commonwealth’s growth, a particularly nutritious culture that enabled cells to multiply until they dominated the petri dish.
Multiply they had. This skyline was mirrored in Addis, Taipei, Amsterdam, and all the other coequal, sovereign Commonwealth headquarters that had sprung up as if they shared a single giant root system that flourished in the planet’s mantle. The feed had displaced so much, and yet every ending was a new beginning.
Emily could only hope that this particular new beginning didn’t lead to a violent end. Even as Commonwealth was laying the foundations for a new world order, its brain trust was falling apart. For what felt like the thousandth time, she summoned her feed, but there was no news of Rachel’s condition. Diana must have done a good job keeping the hospital visit under wraps.
Instead, the feed seethed with controversy over what had gone down in Idaho. Squadrons of drones exploded like fireworks on infinite loops. Rumors churned about the mysterious woman riding Lowell through the party with the wakizashi to his throat, drenched in blood and covered in glitter. Journalists demanded details about the reasons for the abduction and Lowell’s current status. Socialite guests traded accounts, the gossip growing wilder with every telling. Senators called the dogfight an act of private war on American soil. White House officials issued contradictory proclamations, and foreign-policy experts debated the implications of Commonwealth’s dramatic action. Conspiracy theorists delightedly used the event as a jumping-off point into all manner of paranoid fantasies. Pundits one-upped each other with outraged hot takes, and think tanks published white papers like Vegas dealers dishing out cards. Zeppelin. Emily’s fingers clenched involuntarily. She had made it out alive, only to sabotage her own success.
Emily dismissed the feed, tried to slow her heart.
Let this not be a taste of what was to come.
Across the water, dawn stretched gray fingers over the hills behind Berkeley and Oakland, and Emily remembered Diana and Dag’s verdant greenhouse. You look like you got stuck in a BDSM dungeon and forgot the safe word. Emily repressed a grin. She had remembered the safe word, but whatever she had looked like when she visited their cottage, she must look ten times worse now.
Forward. Only forward.
Emily hugged herself to ward off the chill. Lights illuminated the hanging gardens of the Bay Bridge. Bamboo leaves whispered above her. The concrete step dug into her ass. The back of her neck prickled, but there was no one else in sight, and she pushed the feeling away.
Always forward.
Two cars pulled up across the street. Three security guards emerged from one, and Rachel’s husbands, Leon and Omar, and her nurse got
out of the other. The nurse waved back the two older men, leaned down, and tenderly scooped Rachel up from the back seat. They climbed the stairs to the modest Edwardian sandwiched between a small apartment building and a pedestrian byway. The lights came on, and Emily could see the open-plan first floor through the bay windows. The nurse deposited Rachel in a wheelchair, hooked her up to IVs, and fussed over her. Omar knelt beside them, holding Rachel’s hand, and Leon went to fetch water from the kitchen.
Relief flooded through Emily with anxiety following close in its wake. That Rachel was alive meant that there was still some possibility of righting the boat before it sank, and even the faintest glimmer of hope precluded the possibility of resignation, demanding action instead.
Emily hugged herself tighter, willing herself to be up to the task.
The scene inside the house was so intimate that Emily struggled to resolve its domesticity with the pivotal role Rachel had come to play in world affairs. This was a home, not an estate, and even in the aftermath of a medical emergency, it was obviously a familiar and comfortable place for Rachel and her family. Emily remembered her parents’ garage, how her mom had kept her tools so clean and organized, the faint smell of oil and sawdust.
“Can I help you?”
A woman stood at the bottom of the narrow public stairway. Her tone was friendly, but her eyes were hard. Emily’s stomach sank. It was one of the bodyguards.
Emily felt compelled to make excuses, to fabricate some flimsy story about how she climbed up Telegraph Hill every morning to watch the sunrise from Coit Tower, or that she was trying out a new fitness routine. But the woman had caught her sitting here staring through the gap in the bamboo straight into Rachel’s living room and, despite Emily’s lifelong habit of flaunting authority, there was no reason to lie.
“I’m here to see your boss,” said Emily.
The bodyguard stared at her evenly. “Well, isn’t that nice for you? Unfortunately, my boss is quite particular about her appointments, and about Peeping Toms.”
“She’ll want to see me,” said Emily, hoping it was true.
“How about you take a walk with me,” said the bodyguard. “I’ll buy you a coffee down at Herbert’s, and you can go on home. No need to make this harder than it needs to be.”
Emily walked down the stairs and looked the woman straight in the eye.
“Tell her it’s Emily Kim,” she said.
The bodyguard held her gaze for a moment and then shrugged, withdrawing into her feed.
Emily glanced up at the house. Inside, Rachel frowned and said something. Leon stood up in disbelief. Omar stepped toward the windows. The nurse made a conciliatory gesture. Whatever conversation they were having turned into an argument, Leon throwing up his hands and Omar staring daggers down at Emily and her escort. Emily could imagine their consternation. The woman whose revelation had landed Rachel in the hospital wanted a second act a few scant hours later, this time right in the middle of their home. Rachel held up a thin hand, and both men marched upstairs, leaving her alone with the nurse.
The bodyguard cocked her head, listening to something in her feed.
“Fuckin’ A,” she said, surprised. “Never seen this happen with a stalker before.” She extended a hand toward the house. “Ms. Kim, if you’ll follow me.”
CHAPTER 40
Emily sat on a low couch, unable to meet Rachel’s eye as if their gazes were magnets repelling each other. The old woman was in her wheelchair, tubes and sensors connecting her frail body to a compact trolley of medical equipment. A cutting board with a knife, two blood oranges, and a small turquoise ceramic jar rested on the coffee table that separated them.
Books filled the shelves behind Rachel, spines creased and worn. William Gibson, Ada Palmer, Isaac Asimov, Samara Amupanda, Richard Feynman, Malka Older, Jorge Luis Borges, Olivia Fernel, and many more authors that Emily did not recognize. The floor-to-ceiling shelves covered the entire wall, wrapping around the back of the house to create a cozy, L-shaped library complete with reading nooks. Emily imagined Rachel curled up on one of the chairs, immersed in a novel. Rosa had once remarked to Emily that all of literature was just a single extended conversation, and Emily had responded that hip-hop was too. Perhaps everything was, at the end of the day. What inspiration did Rachel find in these dog-eared pages? What strange force drew the author of the feed to such an antique form of physical media? Emily wondered how large a record collection she might have if she replicated her feed playlist in vinyl.
Rachel’s hands rested in her lap, gnarled fingers laced. The wrinkles on her face were as dense and intricate as the fractals Emily had so often painted on her own. Rachel’s poise only jacked up Emily’s own nervousness. This was a bad idea, a dangerous idea. Emily was as much a fool as the knight walking straight up to the dragon, only this wasn’t a fairytale. If history was a guide, she would only make a bad situation worse. But how could she live with herself if she didn’t try?
Emily steeled herself, conjuring the flow state she entered when stepping into the ring, and met Rachel’s eye.
It was like sticking her head into a wind tunnel. Rachel’s purple gaze stripped away Emily’s preconceptions and self-deceptions like so much chaff, leaving her feeling naked and raw. In some unseen dimension, the air between them crackled and sparked with energy. As difficult as it had been to look into Rachel’s eye, Emily found that it was now impossible to look away. The other woman had been so reliably prescient by being so ferociously present, and her palpable immediacy sharpened Emily’s own focus on this place, this moment, this person.
Emily realized that in a strange way she and Rachel had been revolving around each other their entire lives. They hadn’t met until last week, but each had exerted an invisible pull on the other, their dreams mutually empowering and constraining as if the ripples they set off in the fabric of the universe were inverse waves. What would Emily have achieved without subverting the feed? Where would Rachel be today if Commonwealth hadn’t entered geopolitics with the carbon tax? Their masterpieces were codependent.
Emily remembered holding a socket wrench as her mom showed her how to fix her bike while savory smells emanated from the kitchen where her dad was preparing gaeran tost-u, her favorite breakfast. The world was a vast machine with cogs and axles and motors and maintenance requirements and out-of-date documentation. Emily had used that knowledge to find points of leverage. Rachel had decided to build a new engine, keeping the original one interoperable while she replaced part after part until the whole machine had transformed into something new and different. Both of them were trying to affect change, to steer society in the direction their personal codes demanded.
“I’m not here to apologize,” said Emily. “Although I owe you an apology. And I’m not here to convince you to implement Javier’s plan, although I think he’s right.”
She paused, forcing herself not to rush. “Have you ever tasted teh tarik? It’s this delicious Malaysian milk tea. But what makes it special is how airy it is, almost like the steamed milk on a latte. Street vendors make it on every corner, but they don’t have espresso machines. Instead, they throw the hot tea between two steel cups to froth it up.” Emily mimed the motion with her hands, remembering taking the first creamy sip en route to fight Niko. “It’s half food prep, half street performance, and some vendors are true showmen. They turn the whole process into a mesmerizing dance, throwing the tea from all heights and angles without ever spilling a single drop. They make juggling boiling liquid look easy. That’s the thing that fascinates me about it, the perfection of their control.”
Emily remembered the beige walls of the principal’s office, his visceral discomfort at being forced to deliver the news of her parents’ death. “It’s not easy to admit, but control is something I’ve always aspired to,” she said. “The pursuit of control gave me a mission, established a base for my independence. But it’s more than that. It’s like . . . If only I were in charge, I could make things better, protect people,
unravel otherwise intractable problems. And I did. I built a home for people society had cast off, gave them a chance. And once Javi opened a backdoor into the feed, we scaled our efforts right along with Commonwealth. There was so much tragedy in the world that we could help avert, so much suffering we could assuage.” She smiled sadly. “When you know you’re right, there’s no reason to solicit input from others. If they disagree, they’re either ignorant, stupid, or malicious. And if you’re in control, why would you ever let ignorance, stupidity, or maliciousness poison the well? I was so used to being in control, so convinced of my own righteousness, that it blinded me to the fact that sometimes efficiency and efficacy are not ends in themselves. I forgot that people don’t just want solutions. We want to be heard. We want to participate. The lack of opportunities to participate in the system was what inspired me to subvert it in the first place.”
And you never even thought to ask us first? You never considered whether a decision this important was one we would need to make together? Javier had asked her that right after Dag broke the news that Emily had blackmailed him to get her way. That was the worst moment of her entire life, the day Emily lost her friends, her old life, the day she fled to Camiguin. It was worse than the fights that had earned her these scars. Worse even than the day her parents died, when she had been too young to fully wrap her head around the implications.
Strange to hear a grander version of Javier’s sentiment echoed by a man like Lowell. The feed connected everyone. Then Commonwealth leveraged its utility to disenfranchise everyone. Now just a handful of people hold the keys to all of civilization, and everyone else fucking hates you for it. Emily hadn’t wanted to listen as she bled out under the exploding sky. She still didn’t. But she also couldn’t deny the kernel of truth in his words.
