And to his relief, he found the shifting silhouette of a street growing more definite before his eyes, spaces opening up to carve out shapes in the flow. Though every passing thing continued to blend and blur by so that he couldn’t tell where one ended and another began, outlines were beginning to trace themselves around the loci of distinct swirls. At the same time, he started to catch spikes in volume and pitch as his ears learned to discern peaks and valleys in the mish-mashed soundscape.
Heartened by the apparent improvement in his senses, Amon shifted his will and attention to embarking on his search. Unsure of what lay ahead, he continued to waver at the threshold of the alley, hunching over with his hands on his thighs and watching the rush of the city. Could what his dysfunctional eyes and ears took for the sidewalk in fact be the road? Could it all be one big hallucination? Only one way to find out! Courage, Amon, courage! he rallied himself, and tentatively stuck out his arm. Immediately a passing lump in the flow knocked it aside and kept on going. Relatively soft and warm and covered in fabric, Amon had no doubt it had been a person, for touch didn’t lie. But how much had the collision cost? Nothing, you idiot. Nothing.
His heart thumping in his chest, Amon took the first step. As he slipped into the rush going left, he was bumped from behind and heard a shrill, granulated whine radiating from that direction like microphone feedback through a cheese grater. A person’s voice? Who could say for sure? All he could do now was walk onwards, following the direction of the current, and was surprised to find himself carried along smoothly, without any further collisions. Though he couldn’t consciously see the obstacles he negotiated, some deeper part of him seemed to, guiding his feet with raw instinct so that he weaved fluidly along his course. Awed by the wisdom of his own body, he looked down at it and saw that he too was a splotch of molten nethercolor. His absorption into this mass of inscrutable beings was unnerving, like becoming a drop that could not quite dissolve in an ocean. But unlike everything else in his visual field, he could confidently sense where he ended and the surround began, feeling the air on his face and hands, the fabric of his suit brushing his skin, the pressure of his shoe-swaddled feet against the ground. With visceral rhythm, he matched the pace of the pulsating jagged blots around him, dodging and sidestepping oncoming forces until suddenly he bumped hard into the person in front of him. The entire crowd had come to a stop and Amon guessed the light must have turned red, though he could see no signal up ahead, just a square gap where movement had momentarily ceased. An intersection surely … leading to another block?
Suddenly Amon thought of the alley—the only place he knew in this vague baffling metropolis, the last link to his former life—and the idea of crossing when the signal changed was terrifying. For in his present state, he would likely be unable to find his way back and so would leave the alley behind forever. But was he ready to do that? Since any block was just as likely to have a vending machine as this one, shouldn’t he stick close to his lone sanctuary until there was good reason to abandon it?
The crowd started forward but Amon carved his way left to a wall and began to follow it back the way he had come. Now the gray forms pouring past him were beginning to take on the contours of humans, though their forms were murky. Three-dimensional upright shades with four limbs, a torso, a head, and even a hat or hairdo on some of them, their faces still a frizzling blank, the digits of their hands webbed together like the blade of a spade or large spoon. VREEEEEEr. He heard the unmistakable whine of a motorbike accelerating, and looking to his left saw vehicles—cars, trucks, even a few bicycles—rolling and roaring by, one after the other. He was glad for this returning acuity, but as the intermerged liquid continuity of the city resolved into sharper focus, Amon began to feel ever more thirsty and light-headed. With a new burst of urgency, he trotted ahead, his right hand on the wall brushing across glass, then concrete, then glass, before reaching a gap. Looking to his right he saw two walls hung with rows of balconies bordering a narrow walkway. An alley to be sure, but was it the alley he’d started in? Either way, Amon wasted only a heartbeat before stepping into it and away from the crowd.
Sweat dripping from his forehead and down the back of his neck, Amon was feeling weaker by the second. He put his palms against the right wall with his head down and leaned there for a moment to collect himself. Wondering how much his walk down the street had cost, he glanced into the bottom right corner of his eye to check his AT readout. But obviously it wasn’t there and this reminded him that he was no longer part of the market, that his actions had no value, that his existence—Best not to look at that area of his visual field anymore. What he needed to do now was find a vending machine quickly. And reluctant to waste any more of his waning energy venturing onto that busy sidewalk again, he wondered if there was some other way, not using the ImmaNet, to find what he was looking for.
For several minutes he leaned there, his hands on the plastic wall, drawing a blank on what to do next and frowning hard as if the force of his brow muscles would gestate a plan in his head. It was only when he sensed a headache coming on and gave up at last with a (somewhat guilty) sigh that he suddenly had another epiphany. What if I … ask someone for directions? He had never considered this wild idea before either, and now that he had, it seemed even stranger than searching for something without an engine—the navigational equivalent of rubbing sticks together to start a fire. Given the state of his hearing, he wasn’t sure if he could understand the answers of people he asked, but he seemed to be gradually recovering and it was worth a try anyway. As his strength drained rapidly away, he felt the urge to lie down and knew he had to do something before he let himself sink into oblivion again, maybe never to resurface.
When Amon took his hand off the wall, stood up straight, and looked back to the street, he was grateful to discover that the bodies in the crowd now had hands with separate fingers and wrists on the ends of arms, which now had sleeves! He could make out outfits (mostly suits as far as he could tell). And faces, their mouths and noses taking shape. And eyes too, though their pupils and irises were indistinguishable from the speckled, buzzing patina that danced over their bodies.
Excuse me, he tried to say to the passing streetwalkers, but all that seemed to come out was a chinkling whir as though he were gargling with a blade-sharpener throat, and not one head turned to acknowledge his utterance. Excuse me, he tried again, this time fatty-cartilage-chunks-ground-in-a-blender flute stutters, but again he was ignored. A dozen more times he tried, raising and then lowering his voice, attempting polite singsong or barking abruptly, unable to tell how any of it sounded to others because all that accompanied the sensation of air rushing out between his lips was incoherent noise.
By about the twentieth time though, he began to recognize his own words. “Awckskyuews nmee,” was all he could parse at first, the vowels and consonants bleeding into each other. But after repeating himself again and again, the syllables found their identity and cohered in relief against the background hum of the city. “Excuse me.”
At the same time, human voices began to stand out as reverberating grunts, and the twanging grumble of each passing car bobbed up from the traffic. Given hope by these improvements, Amon rapid-fired his phrase, “ExcusemeExcusemeExcusemeExcuseme,” and raised his hand over the sidewalk to wave for their attention. But while a few turned their heads to glance at him, no one stopped, and his mouth was so pasty now that forming speech with his tongue and lips was extremely uncomfortable.
Seized by a desperate impulse, Amon hopped into the middle of the sidewalk and spread his arms out to his sides to block the oncoming crowd. “Please!” he begged. “Can anyone tell me where to find a vending machine? I’m thirsty, you know?” But all he got from the passersby was a moment’s confused pause, where they bumped and bunched up in front of him, before resuming their walking, some ducking under his arms, others sidestepping him into the gutter or alley. A few turned back the way they’d come rather than bother with him, and one man in a bowler
’s cap proceeded straight into Amon’s right arm to shoulder past him. As if encouraged by this violence, several salarymen brushed by in the man’s wake, buffeting Amon from both sides until he nearly lost his balance and stumbled back into the alley.
It was as he stood there with head bowed, stewing in exasperation, that he suddenly felt a strange tingle in the back of his neck, as though someone was watching him. Struck with fear, Amon swept his gaze around the street, scanning the crowd carefully. He could now make out the darker circle at the center of their gray eyes well enough to tell that everyone seemed to be focused elsewhere, all gazes averted as they marched by. Could Sekido or one of the Birlas be hounding me? Amon thought, looking to the faces floating past in cars and on the far side of the street, glancing up to scope out the windows and balconies above, crooking his neck to check down the alley behind him …
Wait! There. In the alley. Not the lurking spy he sought, but something else. Protruding from the wall just short of the busy street on the other side.
Down the alley he hurried and soon saw it clearly. A tall block. A vending machine!
The machine standing against the wall had a rectangular frame with a groove running down the middle. This divided it into two equal halves, each embedded with a bin enclosed by an opaque plastic flap around knee height. The frame was just slightly shorter than Amon, and as he went closer, he could see dust and grime accumulated on the flat top. If this was the alley in which he’d awoken, it had only been a few paces away, but he’d gone in the wrong direction. And Amon reflected momentarily on how an arbitrary choice, between say left or right, could transform a life, perhaps the future of a whole corporation or empire.
He was unsettled to find that no logos or vending attendants appeared upon his approach, as this left him no way of determining what the machine sold. For all he knew, it could be beer or corned beef or umbrellas. The left-to-right mirroring design did remind him of the all-purpose feeding machines he’d often used that provided beverages on the left side and food on the right, but he couldn’t be sure. And as he stared at the vending machine, wondering how he might figure this out, the full severity of the even worse problem he’d been putting off began to dawn on him. While he’d meant to find some way to buy goods without money or the ImmaNet when he found a vending machine, now that he faced one directly—its hard, impenetrable shell seeming to confront him defiantly—he couldn’t imagine what that might be. Promise to build its CPU a human body in exchange for freebies? Propitiate its algorithms with a song and dance?
Aw ssshiiit … he groaned with resignation and put his face in his hands, leaning the top of his head and elbows against the machine. How the hell am I going to get something to eat and drink? Vending machines were where food and drinks came from. If you were hungry or thirsty, you spent money and out came edibles and drinkables. Sure, he’d been to restaurants before, but most of them cooked with vending machines in the back or at least got their ingredients from them. About the only dish he’d ever had that tasted different than all the machine-printed ones was the sushi the Birla sister had treated him to, but that was gourmet cuisine reserved for the world’s wealthiest. Regular people had to eat regular food and that meant vending machines. The idea that his access might be cut off had been impossible to entertain seriously. But by committing identity suicide, it seemed, he had unwittingly condemned himself to desiccate and die. With his head against the machine, he could feel it vibrating, the cooling mechanisms keeping (what was probably) his sustenance fresh, so close and yet unreachable.
“FUUCK!” he howled, jerking his head up from the hard plastic and slamming the surface of the left segment with his right palm. To his small satisfaction, a little dent appeared in the surface, but he immediately heard a strange hum emanating from inside, like a wine glass being rubbed around its rim, yet sharper, more strident. Warily he took one step back, but when the sound quickly faded his helpless anger surged again and he kicked the right side as hard as he could with the sole of his dress shoe.
Shwew, chrinkle. Without warning a cloud of tiny particulate enveloped Amon’s face before instantly dissipating. He frowned at the machine in surprised horror, when suddenly the mere sight of it made him extremely nauseous. It was as though he were watching someone eat their boogers or lick infected wounds, but he endured the awful feeling, staring stubbornly at the dent left by his kick. It was deeper than the last, and he mustered his will to deliver another, to smash his way into this stockpile of wonderful refreshment as though cracking an egg filled with golden ambrosia, until he began to dry retch convulsively and had to look away.
What did that thing do to me? He tried glancing back and then away, hoping the nausea might fade, but it seemed to get progressively stronger each time and he gave up, resting his eyes on the wall. It must have been revulsion dust, he realized: nanobots that stimulated the precise areas of their target’s brain to form an association between intense disgust and the first thing they beheld. Their liquidation coaches had gone over it briefly during training when covering the different types of psychosomatic security systems they might encounter.
Amon was stunned to find such an expensive weapon installed in a mere vending machine, as the AT market was supposed to make defensive measures like these superfluous. Anyone who broke into a vendor would be fined enough to at least fully compensate the company that owned it for any damage, loss of merchandise, or other associated expenses, a legal arrangement that discouraged such illicit behavior. So the companies that maintained the machines had no reason to invest in additional preventatives, since they made profits whether the crime succeeded or not. Unless vending machines were specifically designed to keep out bankdead, who could not be fined and therefore needed to be deterred by force, which made sense now that Amon thought about it … though it was still a difficult idea for him to swallow, after all these years believing their sole purpose was convenience.
Whatever the justification for keeping him out, Amon had to find a way to get in. From what he remembered, the neurological link between the visual stimuli and the reaction could last for hours. The trouble was that his thirst wasn’t going to wait that long.
Staring at a point on the wall, Amon kept the vending machine in his peripheral vision, eliciting only the slightest edge of his nausea, and tried to guess where the deeper dent had been so he could deliver another kick. He hesitated, fearing another dusting. Then walls would disgust him, seriously compromising his ability to find his way through the city afterwards. He wanted to charge in with his eyes squeezed shut and blindly pummel the mechanical monster with the flat of his hands and shoes and elbows and forehead. But what if the sight of his own eyelids became revolting and every blink made him want to vomit? This prospect was too awful to even contemplate. And so Amon froze, his eyes twitching as his stomach churned, clueless as to what he should do next.
Though his body burned with wooziness after his violent exertion, Amon wasn’t sweating at all, which was seriously scary—a warning that he really had to drink something and fast. While he might try to search for a different machine, it seemed reasonable to assume that they would all be just as well defended. If he couldn’t bust in here, most likely he couldn’t bust in anywhere.
If only I’d made it across the Sanzu River before crashing, he thought. If not for the flash inflation that took out the last of his funds, he might have already been enjoying the generous supplies doled out by the venture charities—the capriciousness of the market condemning him to the mortal choice he now confronted. Should he gamble it all on one last effort, flailing desperately against a booby-trapped box to remain in this vague, insipid world when he didn’t even know for sure if there was anything to drink inside? Or should he lie down right there and give in to the downward spiral of broken dreams he knew awaited him the moment he closed his eyes? Were there any other choices than these, to either go down fighting or go down dreaming … ?
It was as Amon dithered over this question that he felt more st
rongly than ever that someone was watching him and looked in the direction he had come—to the far mouth of the alley. There he saw a man, static amidst the gray crowds and traffic streaming behind him, his charcoal pupils fixated unflinchingly on Amon. Startled by the man’s intense stare, Amon unconsciously went to pat the nerve duster strapped to his belt for reassurance when he realized for the first time since waking up that it wasn’t there.
His pulse throbbing rapidly, Amon stood up tall to face the man. His vision seemed to have improved considerably, for the man’s features and attire came into clear resolution, if still without color.
A head shorter than Amon, he was exceedingly fat—mostly around the waist—with a great round belly and thick love handles, but also flabby biceps, hefty thighs, and hanging jowls. He had a broad forehead, made broader by a receding hairline that ate an S-shaped patch from the mat of curly frizz covering his pate, a wide flat nose, and the somewhat weathered skin of someone around their late forties. Amon found his outfit peculiar, a jumpsuit that seemed to be stitched entirely of pockets made from a dark fabric similar to that of a sports coat. From ankle to neck and all down his sleeves were openings of different sizes in the cloth, some thin slits the width of a playing card, others gaping circles able to accommodate a softball. The man stood there at the threshold to the street with his arms hanging at his bulging sides, his big eyes studying Amon intently, and Amon wondered how long he’d been watching him. Had he just stepped into the alley now? Had he witnessed Amon’s struggle with the machine? Had he heard Amon’s pleas on the sidewalk? Or had he been following him since even before that? And what did he want now?
The Naked World Page 3
