by Rich Larson
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I want you to help me rip off Quini the Squid, I say, or at least that’s what I say in my head. It comes off my tongue as:
“Rebum lau kana’a chep fessum ninshi.”
Which would leave any linguist flabbergasted. But Nat understands exactly what I mean, judging from the disgusted look on her face. We’re speaking the same procedurally generated language, invented on the fly by blackmarket babelware in our implants.
“Yam switta b’lau bi,” she says, and the babelware feeds my language lobe an unequivocal Get fucked.
It’s for this reason I ordered her a steaming mountain of mussels in black pepper sauce. I know she won’t leave until she’s sucked every last quivering invertebrate from its shell into her small but agile mouth. Which gives me time to bring her around on the idea.
We’re in a wharfside resto on La Rambla, one of those polyplastic tents that springs up overnight like a mushroom and is almost fully automated, packed with sunburned tourists guzzling drone-delivered Heinekens and comparing their unhealthy Gaudí obsessions. It’s not the kind of place Quini’s thugs would hang around in, and if they did they would stick out like scowling, vantablack-clad sore thumbs.
But it pays to be paranoid in public in this day and age, what with the feds now legally able to hijack phones and implant mics. Ergo, the babelware. If I’m using ergo right.
“Dan tittacha djabu numna, numna ka’adai,” I say solemnly, which of course is Eat your seafood and let me explain.
“Yugga,” she says, which is actually a pretty good word for idiot.
I understand her reticence. Quini the Squid is everyone your mum ever told you not to get mixed up with mixed together, and also they used to bang. Nat and Quini, I mean. Not Quini and your mum—though he is in many ways a motherfucker.
He clawed his way out of some shithole town in Andalusia during the worst of the drought years, first pirating autotrucks transporting precious olive oil and later graduating to human traffic. God knows how he got Catalonia to let him in, but once they did he stretched his tentacle into pretty much everything: weapons, drugs, viruses, the lot.
Of course, me and Nat are transplants too. Catalonia’s secession triggered an economic boom that brought in all sorts of wealthy investors, and where wealthy investors go, thieves and scammers follow. Nat came all the way from a ghetto in Ljubljana. Her original hustle was small time but well polished: She picked up rich shitheads in classy bars with her Eastern Euro smolder and bone structure, got them somewhere private, then kissed them paralyzed before robbing them blind.
She showed me the biomod once, this tiny little needle under her tongue that delivers a muscle-melting dose of concentrated ketamine. I try to spot it as she slurps a mussel. She says the needle can also be loaded with party drugs just for fun, but I’d never trust her enough to risk it.
You hate him as much as I do, I say, and it turns into a series of clashing consonants in my mouth as our language evolves again.
Nat is stacking empty shells with blistering efficiency, but she pauses long enough to wipe her mouth with a napkin and give a clicking answer that becomes I hate salt water. Doesn’t mean I pick fights with the tide.
You’re really comparing him to the fucking ocean? I demand. He’s a puddle. At best a small pond.
“Shepakwat,” she says: He’s dangerous.
“Bu iztapti bu,” I say: No shit.
I stand to carefully peel my shirt up to my ribs, which draws a few stares. The violet bruises go from below my hips all the way up my side. Nat can’t quite disguise her wince, and I almost feel bad for darkening up the injuries with makeup. They were healing too fast for the effect I needed.
I heard about that, she says in two low syllables. The job in Murcia, right?
I sit back down. My jaw is starting to ache from making unfamiliar sounds. Yeah, I say. I was doing the hackwork for a break-and-enter. Owned all the cameras, all the doors. Then one of Quini’s clowns forgot to turn on his fucking faraday gear, and when he got pinged Quini put it on me. Did this right in front of everyone. Called me a maricona. Took my pay. I add the last one so she won’t know how bad the second-last one bothered me.
As soon as the bruises are out of sight, Nat attacks the mussels again. So this a revenge thing, she says, but pensive now, licking her fingers.
If that makes it more appealing to you, then sure. I want the money he owes me. I wrap my black scarf tighter around my neck. And some humiliation on the side would be a bonus.
Her ears go red, but also perk up. She and Quini didn’t split amicably. Humiliation is a soft word for what he did. You eating? she asks, and I know my foot’s in the door. You look skinny. Or something.
She can pretend zen, but I know she needs the money and wants the payback. And even though we’ve had our ups and downs over the years, I know she hates seeing me hurt.
Mine’s coming, I say. Now here’s the deal.
* * *
I lay it all out for her, all the blocks I’ve been stacking and rearranging in my head for the past three days, ever since I got wind of Quini’s little storage problem. Like I said before, he’s a well-rounded businessman: narcotics, guns, malware. Usually none of the product stays in Barcelona long, and while it’s here it’s circulating in a fleet of innocuous cars driving randomized routes.
But he recently got his suckers on something very rare, something he hasn’t been able to move yet, and it’s so valuable he’s keeping it in his own home. He even felt the need to get himself a new security chief to keep tabs on it. Which might have been a good idea, except his old security chief was awfully unhappy about her loss of employment.
I helped her get shit-faced last night at a wine bar and when the Dozr kicked in I dragged her to the bathroom and cracked into her cranial implant. She had some decently feisty defenseware, but I got what I needed—specs and layouts for the house, patrol maps, intrusion countermeasures—then wiped a few hours of data from her aurals and optics to cover my tracks. I also got confirmation on what exactly Quini was storing.
You heard what it is? I ask Nat. What he’s got in the safe room?
She picks over the last of the mussels. I know the rumor. People are saying it’s a Klobučar.
I’m not much for gene art, not much for sophisticated shit in general, but even I know Klobučar, the Croatian genius who struck the scene like a meteor and produced a brief torrent of masterpieces before carving out her brain with a mining laser on a live feed.
Anything with a verified Klobučar gene signature is worth a fortune, especially since she entwined all her works with a
killswitch parasite to prevent them being sequenced and copied. But Quini is the furthest thing from an art fence, which makes the acquisition a bit of a mystery and explains him seeming slightly panicked about the whole thing.
Damn right it’s a Klobučar, I tell her. And we’re stealing it.
That’s not my area of expertise, Nat says. Like, not even close.
It’s mine, I agree. But you know Quini. You know his habits. And because you’re a clever one, I think you must have some of his helix bottled up somewhere.
She gives a low laugh in her throat. You think I keep a DNA catalog of everyone I fuck?
Probably only the ones that might be valuable later, I say. “Bazza?”
“Gazza,” she admits.
The safe room is coded to Quini himself, nobody else, I say. I can spoof the signature from his implants, but for fooling the bioscanner we need to get creative.
Nat takes a small sip of water and swishes it around her mouth. You know what he’ll do if he catches us, she says.
I know, I say. I’m not a yugga.
She frowns—maybe the babelware can’t handle that kind of callback. So long as you know, she mutters. I’m in.
Under the table, I pump my fist. Then I finally ping the kitchen, which has been faithfully keeping my order warm, and the squid paella arrives in all its steamy glory, dismembered tentacles arranged in a beautiful reddish-orange wheel.
Then Quini is cooked, I say, raising my Estrella cider. Here’s to payback.
Nat raises her water glass but also her eyebrow. You don’t even like seafood, she says. You only ordered that to be dramatic. Didn’t you.
I shrug; we clink drinks. Nat eyes the dish for a second. Sniffs the spices wafting off it. She does her own shrug, then pulls the plate across to her side of the table as the little server purrs off with her mountain of empty mussel shells.
So, she says. You going to explain this new look you have going on?
No, I say, self-consciously adjusting my scarf again.
Okay. She spears the first piece of squid and stuffs it into her mouth. Her eyes flutter shut in momentary ecstasy. You always did find good places to eat, she says, reopening her eyes. Now. How soon do you need the helix?
“Andidana,” I tell her: Yesterday.
There’s a tight clock on this one.
* * *
Two bottles of cider later, I wobble out into the sunshine feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Even with the tourist quota imposed, La Rambla is fucking chaos, an elbow-to-elbow crush of holidayers sprinkled with resigned locals and eager scammers. I pick out the hustles as I walk:
The apologetic woman helping clean some kind of muck off a man’s trousers while she slides the gleaming bracelet off his wrist.
The smiling couple peddling genies, those little blue-furred splices that come in a cheap incubator pod and die a few days later.
The elderly lady groaning from the mossy pavement where a rented electricycle supposedly sent her sprawling.
One gent’s got something I’ve never seen before, a tiny prehensile limb that flexes out from under his jacket like a monkey tail and slips into every open handbag he passes.
It’s beautiful, really, this whole little ecosystem where the apex predator is a blue-black Mossos police drone that swoops in and sends everyone scattering.
Since I’m in the neighborhood I do a bit of window shopping, sliding past a storefront to see some new prints in from Mombasa. The mannequins track my eyes and start posing—I hate that. As soon as I get off La Rambla onto Passeig de Colom, I’m all business again. Nat is essential, and talented, but she’s not the only helping hand I’ll need for this job. It’s that final bioscanner that makes things so tricky.
Having Quini’s helix is only half the battle: We also need a body, and neither mine nor Nat’s fits the bill, in large part because we’ve got implants that are definitely not Quini’s. Masking or turning off tech built right into the nervous system is actually a lot harder than simply hiring what our German friends call a Fleischgeist.
It’s not as snappy in English: meat ghost. But it gives you the idea—someone with no implants. None. No hand chip, no cranial, no optics or aurals. Nothing with an electronic signature. In our day and age, they might as well be invisible. Ergo, the ghost part.
There are basically two ways to find yourself a Fleischgeist in Barcelona. You can go to an eco-convent slash Luddite commune, which doesn’t really lend itself to the skills I need, or you can go to Poble del Vaixell, which is where I’m going now, sticking to the long shadow of the Mirador.
The tower’s old gray stone is now skinned in the same green carbon-sink moss as everywhere else; the top has been taken over by a whole flock of squawking white seagulls. Beyond it, the Mediterranean is the bright rippled blue of travel holos. I order a rotorboat and it’s waiting for me when I get to the docks, jostling for space with an old man fishing plastic out of the water. The salt-crusted screen blinks me a smiley face.
“Bon dia,” the rotorboat burbles. “On anem avui?”
“Just take me out to the buoys,” I say, because technically Poble del Vaixell doesn’t exist.
The smiley face on the screen winks as if it knows. Then I climb in and we push off hard at the perfect angle to drench the fisherman with our spray. He sputters. I give him the apologetic hand shrug as we sling out into the harbor.
* * *
The waves are a bit choppy today but the rotorboat is up to it, dicing precisely through the traffic of yachts and sails and autobarges. We peel away from the coastline and head straight out to sea. The salt wind blows my hair all around, which I hate, and even with the gyroscopes I manage to slam my tailbone against the boat bench hard enough to smart. Fortunately it’s not a long ride out to the border buoys, a long line of gray columns blinking authoritative yellow hazard lights.
And just beyond them, Poble del Vaixell, a massive floating labyrinth that sometimes looks bigger than Barcelona itself. It actually is a little snappier in English: Shiptown. Originally composed of all the south-up migrants who couldn’t get through Catalonia’s vetting system, in the past decade it’s become a force unto itself. Plastic fishing, plankton farming, solar storage, you name it.
For a lot of people it’s the final jumping off point to Europe, but for a lot more people it’s home. I’ve done a couple month-long stints here myself when I needed to lie low. The rotorboat nuzzles up as close as it can to the border. I cover my face on muscle memory, even though the buoy cams were hit with a virus barrage last year and still haven’t recovered, then take a flying leap onto the polyplastic pier.
It judges my athleticism in mid-air and shoots out to meet me; I still nearly eat shit when my boots hit the algae-slimed surface. But I’m over the border, in Shiptown proper, and the rotorboat burbles goodbye before it skids away on a blade of foam. I wave, compose myself, and head for the downtown.
Shiptown’s original skeleton was a flotilla of migrant boats, some huge, most tiny, lashed or welded together in solidarity against the 3-D printed seawalls and aggressive border drones preventing them from reaching the coast. Since then it’s sprawled outward in all directions, an enormous maze that seems to grow by the hour, its web of walkways crammed with pedestrians and cyclists.
I go right through the market, where there are tarps heaped with dried beans and grasshoppers beside tarps with secondhand implants, some so fresh you can practically see the spinal fluid dripping off them. You can get by with a few different currencies in the market, but barter is still the go-to. I traded a designer jacket I didn’t want anymore for my Fleischgeist’s contact information.
His name is Yinka, and he’s waiting in a bar called Perrito that used to be a fishing boat called Perrito—the bit of the hull that had the name painted on is now welded to struts over the door. The interior smells like fish guts when I walk in and the biolamp lighting shows a few pinkish stains on the floor.
“Bones, com va?” I try.
P
errito’s bartender glances at me from behind a repurposed slice of nanocarbon barricade, then goes back to rearranging her bottles of mezcal and rotgut vodka. She doesn’t pull out a scattergun or anything, though, so I head toward the back. The only Nigerian in the place is posted up in the corner with an untouched glass of what looks like bog water but is probably bacteria beer.
I measure him as I sit down. Retro white buds in his ears are blaring some kuduro hit and he’s wearing a sleeveless windbreaker with a shifting green-black pattern meant to fool basic facial recognition ware. He’s even younger than I expected. Small, which is typical for a break-in artist, with wiry arms and chalky elbows resting on the table. Fashionably half-buzzed head, blank and angular face, hooded eyes fixed on the fresh-printed slab of a phone in his hands. Which I guess isn’t an affectation, since he’s got no implants.
“Yinka?”
He doesn’t look up, but his thumb twitches on the phone and the music volume drops slightly. “Yes.”
“You do good work,” I say, which is a bit of an exaggeration—he does work. “A few real slick jobs in Lagos. That one in Dakar. You ready to try something a bit harder?”
“I’m ready to hear about the money, man,” Yinka says. “We’re pinching art? My auntie did that once. Fence took everything but the crumbs.”
“We’ll be getting some very big crumbs,” I say. “Klobučar-sized crumbs.”
I put my hand out; he grunts and slides the fresh phone across. I tap it with one finger and my implant sends the rest of the job info, the stuff I didn’t want floating through Barcelona air, including the estimated value of Klobučar’s currently verified works.
He peers at the screen, then blinks. His eyes bulge for a split second. “Oh. Yeah. I’m in, then.”
“Good,” I say. “How are you with virtual?”
“Depends how much virtual. I get a little sick.”
“I already got pods rented here in Shiptown,” I say. “We’re cramming about a week of prep into eighteen hours.”
