by Jaym Gates
The chimpanzee put his hand on the young human’s shoulder. “I don’t know what happened on this world,” he said softly, turning to look up into Iftikhar’s eyes. “But whatever the future holds, if we stand together, I believe transhumanity can face it.”
And somehow, calling upon some strange power he possessed but did not understand, Iftikhar knew the chimpanzee was right.
The young man was glad for Firewall’s existence. Transhumanity was at the center of a strange political struggle whose rules it couldn’t begin to even guess. There would be great danger.
But perhaps also great opportunity.
Iftikhar Quraini looked up, past the trees, past the beach, even past the broad ocean, his gaze settling finally on an infinite horizon.
Stray Thoughts
F. Wesley Schneider
“Kindly get out of my son.” That usually worked. No one ever really got over the fear of someone’s mother walking in on them.
Not this time, though. Skinny ass-dimples stared obstinately, twitching unevenly.
“I got eight minutes left.” He only glanced at me in the mirrored headboard, the focus in his voice repeating through furrowed brows. I could almost hear his anxious self-coaching, “Aww, don’t lose it.”
Beyond those scrawny shoulders, Keilani’s painstakingly shaped brows skewed. He was as still as a board of koa wood, and beneath his pale—practically transparent—client his skin had nearly the same shade.
One flick and my pistol silently powered off. Another and the warm-up hum whirred—I’d replaced the Ridley 4C’s friendly starting noise with the growl of the larger 8A, recognizable from nearly every gangster XP released in the last five years.
The gyrating froze. Now I had those dimples’ full attention. My soles slapped against the motel room’s fake marble floor.
“Time’s up.” I jammed the 4C’s muzzle into his tailbone. “Get up and get dressed, your father’s waiting.”
“The fuck you talking about, crazy—” I ground the gun against bone. “Shit! Damn lady!”
“Move!” Using the gun grip like a handle, I steered him sidelong. He flopped across a bed too small to comfortably sleep a full night in.
Keilani’s knees fell and folded with practiced modesty. With a fluid move a laminated sheet corner covered him, doing little to hide cat-like curves. “Trouble finding us?”
I kept eyes and pistol trained as Slim fished to find his clothes in the right order. “Just that you went to the wrong floor. I had to threaten that junkie at the desk to get the number.”
“It’s the same room—I always use 303.”
“It was on the second last time.”
“I always use—”
Antheun MacSijs the Younger looked up from his laundry. Realization turned his expression mean. “You know this shitlord?! What is this?”
“One more word and see if I don’t march you out of here like that—let the whole aerostat see why Skinthetic morphs are so cheap.” I kicked the bed frame for good measure.
Losing his balance, MacSijs toppled back, legs flailing. He landed in a heap of clothes better than he deserved. A series of fumbles later he was on his knees, shoving some street-bought handgun toward me. “There’s exactly no way some skytrash cop is dragging me back to Octavia.”
The pistol wasn’t a good enough knock-off to pass for an authentic nSIG, but I bet it could still punch a hole. It wasn’t a matter of who could shoot first, though. I only got paid for dragging Cheeks here back unharmed. From the nervous look of the barrel, he was bound to twitch the trigger. Even worse, this was taking far too long.
I sighed, my eye-roll ending on Keilani. He mimicked the look—whether mocking me or because he’d honestly picked up the habit, I was never sure. A tawny leg shot from beneath the sheet. Reinforced keratin nails extended like claws, sheering across the stray heir’s jaw. More than the slash, MacSijs’s shocked shriek sent him sprawling across the scuffed laminate.
I brought my heel down on rich boy’s hand. He squealed and something in the cheap pistol snapped.
“Nice.” I shot Keilani a wink.
Thin brows bobbed. “You laughed when I got the Sex Kitten implants, but dishing out scars does wonders for more than just my tips.”
A headshake and raised palm fended off the need for details. “Your business is your business. I’m just glad you know how to use protection.”
—
Keilani met me in the plaza beneath the office, sauntering out of the fog of flashing neon and holographic paper lanterns.
I’d dropped off Mister the Younger with one of his too-important father’s flunkies. Disappearing into a sea of buzz and freelance sex workers seemed to be a common occurrence with Skinny—so much so that his baggy-eyed handler hadn’t even asked what happened to his clothes. I left the babysitter my card and told him repeat customers got discounts.
I waited on steps leading up to a battered portal—the word “Ambassador” slashed the door in ever-lurid pulse-paint. My distant hope of finding warm rice at the top of those steps evaporated. “And where have you been?”
“Just ran into a few friends—had to show off my new Aldrins.” Keilani bounded up the stairs, making a show of bouncing in shoes MacSijs had owned this morning.
I hadn’t meant for my hand to settle on my hip. Maybe it was a mom-thing. Maybe it was just closer to my gun. Keilani purposefully didn’t notice. The door hummed open and he swaggered through. I sighed and followed.
Three floors up, on the side of the hall where the quarters didn’t have plaza-view balconies, stark sans serif marked my door: “Valerie,” then below, in smaller lettering, “Discretion Bought and Sold.”
Once a client pointed out that the quotation marks around the lower line were uneven. I’d never noticed before that. Now I saw it every time I came home. Keilani held the door and I pushed past, trying to ignore the skewed slashes. Fuck that guy.
“Motashaker, shab bekhair.” Ruid said, and with two descending tones his terminal ended the call. Behind his podium, perpetually bored-looking eyes raised. “You’re late.”
“Can’t be late when I never said when I’d be back.” I returned my coat to the empty, faux-antique hat rack. Like all modern Venusian aerostats, Parvarti was never far from a comfortable 22 degrees. So no one ever actually needed a coat, unless they were hiding something. Hence, the local prevalence of coats.
Keilani dropped onto the hard waiting room couch. He didn’t wear a coat—hell, his hooded, button-down tank top and knee-cut pants barely qualified as clothes. That was his uniform, though, especially when he was working for me.
His only slightly scuffed Luna-made shoes hit the couch arm, one over the other. “Mom threw in a bonus this time.”
“Nope. I’m just taking those out of your cut.”
Ruid’s diplomatic nod passed from Keilani to me, in favor of both our windfalls.
“Any messages?” I crossed to the podium, a terminal that served as my operation’s hub. Rather than accepting contacts, payments, and other info directly via my personal hardware, I routed everything through there. It didn’t look like much, a plasticy standing desk with a concave screen, but it was a fortress of the best firewalls and sentinel AIs I could cobble together. Behind it, Ruid also didn’t look like much—a slight splicer with a checkered scarf arranged as professionally as a necktie—but he was the guard on my fortress walls. The terminal light brought out the coppery sheen of his skin, as though he were part of the machine.
“You’ve got clients waiting.” Eyes so dark they almost appeared to be all pupil gestured to the door.
This late? So much for dinner. “Clients?” I stressed the “s.”
“Well …” Ruid’s brow creased. He didn’t continue.
That didn’t make me more enthusiastic for late-callers.
I glanced at Keilani, sprawled across horrible, over
-inflated cushions. The boy could doze anywhere. “Get started on dinner and maybe those shoes are an early birthday present.”
The little shit smiled without even opening his eyes.
“And nothing that takes all night to make. I won’t be long.”
I turned back to Ruid, adjusting my bare hip holster. Honest clients liked to know I worked with a real gun. Dishonest clients worried I might use it on them. Win-win. “What’s the name?”
Ruid’s lips knotted, as though they didn’t know how to start. “I asked. All she said was ‘the Octavian Neo-Synergists.’”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? I gave a nod like I knew and walked into my office to find out.
It was empty, but that wasn’t a surprise. With less than an eye twitch, familiar entopics cascaded through my vision. I joined the private VR simulspace and the room barely changed—same uncomfortable looking furniture, same wall of licenses. The crooked picture of a tropical coast was the only significant change. Adrift on a blank wall in reality, here the animated photo expanded into a bay of plantation shutters, the turquoise surf crashing only a short walk beyond.
A woman, desperately in need of some sun, took in the view.
“Kauai.” Thin veins budged beneath a colorless scalp, as if the faint channels themselves were reporting.
“What’s that?”
This was getting better by the second. She hadn’t turned, but I’d dealt with the sort who sleeved mentons before. Brain-hacked morphs with more head-tech than gray matter, most mentons talked like they had all the answers, but usually couldn’t tell the difference between people and lab recorders. A rainbow of smears on her pill-blue lab coat suggested this one wasn’t any more self-aware. Regardless, I’d never had a menton come to the office. Why would a braincase need an investigator? Unless she was mistaking me for just some hired gun.
Half-mistaking me.
She started to repeat herself, but I cut her off. “No, Niihau. The north shore—before Barb Robinson turned it into Casino Island.”
Turning, she cast a double pair of beady optics over me. Tiny lens shifted. She should have nodded politely and introduced herself, but didn’t.
I gestured to a cushionless chair and slipped around my blank desk. I preferred to talk across it. Not only did it keep things professional, but the wall of licenses, subtly blast-scorched trophies, and a frowning portrait of my father added a productive touch of gravitas. They weren’t just simulspace effects, either, the reality of each hung in my actual office.
Although my chair was plenty comfortable I didn’t sit. “I’ll save us some time. I don’t work for corps.”
Lenses adjusted, widening quizzically. Her bald head—like a subterranean thing’s—shifted a degree, almost making a nod. She didn’t answer, though.
“We have anything else to discuss here?”
She took a seat. “You think we work for a corporation.” Her airy voice made her sound like a stage hypnotist’s assistant repeating facts. “We do not.”
“Octavian Neo-Synergists. Sounds like some high-minded start-up to me.”
“High-minded.” The words floated from lips tinged the color of lab gloves. “Yes. But not a hypercorp.”
She rested her hands on her thighs, a distinctly awkward looking posture. I was starting to wonder if I’d misidentified her morph. Even for a menton, she seemed weirdly detached—synthetic.
“I represent the Neo-Synergists, a collective-intelligence community currently dwelling on Octavia. We are a community of individuals who elect to share our minds with one another, facilitating mutual understanding and development.”
Still sounded like a corp—or worse, corp advertising. “So, some commune.”
Her head twitched another degree. “A not uncommon perspective, but no. Our members share a more intimate connection. Our mesh implants unite us as a single shared intelligence. We are still ourselves, but we are also more.”
More wasn’t looking too impressive to me. “Sounds crowded.”
“Not at all, in fact—”
I swatted what was sure to be a lengthy explanation out of the air. “What can I help you with, Miss Synergist?”
“One of our number, a farcasting researcher named Harliss Vine, came to this aerostat.” She didn’t seem rankled by my directness. “We don’t know why.”
I’d never heard anyone in a menton say that before.
“We have lost our connection to Vine and wish to know why. To learn that, we must find him—a task I have thus far been unsuccessful in.” Her reporting remained even, it didn’t sound like she had any personal stake in this. “As such, I have been authorized to retain the service of a local. Your record of accomplishments compared to your low number of criminal convictions makes you a favorable choice.”
“Flattered. Let me save you some credits, though,” I nodded toward a wall-mounted screen shifting through scenes from Parvarti security cams. “Go find a cozy spot, catch up on your XPs, and keep your mesh feed on. No one like your lost tech comes to Parvarti to stay. He’s probably just shacked up with a bottle of Old Sky and some pretty mimi. Give him another night, maybe two, and one more to dry out, then he’ll come home. You can try dragging him off early, but I guarantee, the waiting game’s far less messy.”
“You misunderstand. Our neural implants aren’t simple mesh inserts.” She turned and touched a porcelain nodule at the base of her neck. Her vein-network seemed somehow deepest there. “Once installed, they cannot merely be shut down or removed without risking significant psychological damage. This has happened to Vine. We fear for his well-being.”
“Awful sisterly of you, but we both know how much I charge,” I took a seat on the desk corner. It was hard to read in those lenses whether or not she actually thought I was born yesterday. “What else did he take? Empty out the group account? Run off with some patent? Find a hotter bunch of brains to join up with?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Have you ever lost one of your morph’s limbs and had to live without for any period of time?”
“No.”
“You can likely imagine the inconvenience. Studies show that most never truly acclimate to missing an appendage being gone. It is unpleasant.”
I shrugged.
“Imagine if that missing limb was part of your mind—your memory of a place perhaps.” Without looking, she gestured to the lapping waves over her shoulder. The pointed fingers then aimed at my holster, “Or your familiarity with a weapon. That’s what Vine’s absence is to us.”
My brows climbed. That was a new one on me. “You’re really in a rush over this, huh?”
“Repairing our collective mind is of the utmost urgency for our community.”
She sat straight backed, hands settling back on her thighs. There wasn’t anything there to read. I supposed I could understand her interest in finding this Vine guy, though. Whatever she wasn’t sharing and whether or not he wanted to be found didn’t really bother me that much.
“I can find him. Dragging him back costs more—a lot more if he needs to go all the way to Octavia.”
“Our airship is docked on the lower ring. I can beam you directions along with Vine’s records and other details.”
“Good. My secretary will set you up with my schedule of fees and contracting costs—rates for non-disclosure, indemnity, the usual. You two figure out the paperwork and we’ll take things from there.”
I stood and she—finally acknowledging a cue—did the same.
“Thank you for your time, Miss Valerie.”
She disconnected from the simulspace before I even nodded.
—
I hadn’t been aware of Keilani’s purr-like snoring until it stopped. A mosaic of aerostat security feeds crumbled from my augmented reality display. Some people relaxed with predictable XPs. I found the flow of stock characters through Parvarti’
s neon-drowned plazas not just calming but, often, surprisingly useful.
My office-adjoined apartment wavered back into view—freshly cluttered with rice and pork-smeared dinner plates.
On the floor, Ruid looked uncomfortable, sitting straight-backed against my tabby colored couch. The arm lock my son had on his thigh didn’t seem to be helping. Keilani would have charged anyone else a small fortune for that kind of casual intimacy. My secretary doubtlessly knew that, but still had the look of a houseguest suffering his host’s untrainable pet. I wasn’t sure when Keilani got so clingy with him—must have been a gradual thing.
Ruid noticed my eyes shift back to the real. “That synergist woman just returned the contracts. Looks like she’s buying …” he nodded appreciatively at files scrolling invisibly though his entopics, “… everything.”
“Even the extended privacy insurance?” I failed at keeping the smirk out of my voice.
He nodded. “Even the extended privacy insurance.”
Keilani gave a sleepy growl at the noise. We both ignored him.
“Guess she really does want this guy bad.” And certainly not just out of sororal concern if she was buying up this much confidentiality.
“Who’s she after?”
“Some scientist type from Octavia—probably here on a binge. He’s another one of those Neo-Synergists.”
“Looked into them yet?”
“A little. All the reports talk about some special mesh inserts they use to share thoughts—like some constant group feed. I thought they sounded like a corp, but the hypermesh buzz makes them sound more like a cult. A bunch of them just put down stakes on Octavia and not everyone there’s excited.”
“Yeah. It took some digging to get past the tabloid stuff, but if you do it gets pretty interesting.” His gaze remained on the middle distance, hypnotized by whatever info swirled through his AR. “They’ve essentially hacked their consciousness, networking their minds to share lifetimes worth of thoughts. Some people are calling it an obvious next step for t-human intelligence. Instead of the muses we’re using now, you’ve got everyone you know right in your head.”
