Adam had hinted that he’d use an intermediary as the meetup courier, and Zeb worried about safety: the two of them had always been wary about trusting anyone except each other. True, Adam would be cautious. But he was methodical, and methodology could give you away. The only sure camouflage was unpredictability.
From his cramped chair Zeb eyed the entering customers, hoping to spot the courier. Was it this blond hermaphrodite in the halter top and sequined three-horned headdress? He hoped not. This plump, gum-chewing woman with the cream-coloured shorts and the wedgie and the retro cinch belt? She looked too vacuous, though vacuousness was a nearly foolproof disguise, at least for girls. Was it this mild, geeky-looking boy of the type that would some day machine-gun an auditorium full of his pimply fellow classmates? Nope, not him either.
But suddenly, surprise: there was Adam himself. It startled Zeb to see him materialize in the chair opposite, which had been empty just the moment before. Ectoplasmic, you could say.
Adam looked like a passport photo of himself, one that was already fading to light and shadow. It was as if he’d returned from the dead: he had that glowing-eyeball thing about him. His T-shirt was beige, his baseball cap sloganless. He’d bought himself a Happimocha to make it seem as if this was just two oddfellow buddies taking a break from their nerdwork, or else doing a meeting about some startup doomed to implode like a drowning blimp. Happimocha and Adam didn’t go together: Zeb was curious to see if he’d actually drink any of the stuff – something so impure.
“Don’t raise your voice,” were the first words Adam spoke. Not two seconds back in Zeb’s life and already he was giving orders.
“I was thinking of fucking yelling,” said Zeb. He waited to be told not to use profanity, but Adam didn’t take the bait. Zeb stared at him: there was something different. His eyes were just as round and blue, but his hair was paler. Could it be turning white? There was a new beard too, also pale. “Nice to see you too,” he added.
Adam smiled: a flicker of a smile. “You’ll be going into HelthWyzer West near San Francisco,” he said. “As a data inputter. I’ve fixed it up. When you leave here, pick up the shopping bag beside your left knee. Everything you’ll need is in there. You’ll have to get the scans and prints inserted in the ID – I’ve put the address for that. And you’ll need to scrap the old ID: delete anything online. But I don’t have to tell you that.”
“Where’ve you been, anyway?” said Zeb.
Adam smiled in that maddening, saintly way he had. Butter wouldn’t melt; it never had melted. “Classified,” he said. “Other lives involved.” That was the kind of thing that made Zeb long to put a toad in his bed.
“Right, slap my wrist. Okay, what’s this HelthWyzer West, and what’m I supposed to be doing in there?”
“It’s a Compound,” said Adam. “Research and innovation. Drugs, the medical kind; enriched vitamin supplements; materials for transgenic splices and gene enhancement, specifically the hormone blends and simulators. It’s a powerful Corp. There are a lot of top brains there.”
“How’d you get me in?” said Zeb.
“I have some new acquaintances,” said Adam, continuing his nonstop I-know-more-than-you smile. “They’ll watch out for you. You’ll be safe.” He looked past Zeb’s shoulder, then at his watch. Or he appeared to look at his watch. Zeb knew a good piece of misdirection when he saw it: Adam was scanning the room, checking for shadows.
“Cut the bullshit,” said Zeb. “You want me to do something for you.”
Adam held his smile. “You’ll be a blacklight headlamp,” he said. “Be extra careful checking in online, once you’re there. Oh, and there’s a new dropbox, and a new gateway into it. Don’t return to that zephyr site, it may have been compromised.”
“What’s a blacklight headlamp?” said Zeb. But Adam had already stood up and straightened his beige tee and was halfway to the door. He hadn’t drunk any of his Happimocha, so Zeb obligingly drank it for him. An unconsumed Happimocha might raise eyebrows in a pleeb like this, where only pimps had money to burn.
Zeb took his time getting back to Starburst. The back of his neck prickled all the way there, he was so sure he was being watched. But nobody tried to mug him. Once inside his door he looked up “blacklight headlamp” on his most recent cheap toss-at-will cellphone. “Blacklight” was a novelty item from the first decades of the century, he was told: it let you see in the dark, or it let you see some things in the dark. Eyeballs. Teeth. White bedsheets. Glo in the Dark Hair Gel. Fog. As for “headlamp,” it was what it said. Bicycle shops sold them, and camping suppliers. Not that anyone really went camping any more except inside derelict buildings.
Thanks a pile, Adam, thought Zeb. That is so fucking instructive.
Then he opened Adam’s shopping bag. There was his new skin, all neatly laid out for him. What he had to do now was Truck-A-Pillar over to San Francisco, and then crawl into it.
Intestinal Parasites, the Game
Adam’s preparations had been thorough. There was a burn-this to-do list, and a big envelope stuffed with cash because Zeb would need some to pay off the grey marketeer designated to fake his passes. There was plastic as well, so Zeb could get himself the kind of wardrobe Adam thought he should have. He’d supplied descriptions: casual geekwear, with brown cord pants and neutral Ts and plaid shirts – brown and grey – and a pair of round-eyed glasses that didn’t magnify anything. As for the footgear, the recommendation was trainers with so much rubber cross-strapping Zeb would look like a gay Morris dancer or some fugitive from a session of Robin Hood cosplay. Hat, a steampunk bowler from the 2010s: those were back in style. Though how would Adam know that? He’d never appeared to take any interest in vestments, but no interest was of course an interest. He must’ve been noting what other people wore so he could not wear it himself.
Zeb’s assigned name was Seth. A little biblical joke of Adam’s: Seth meant “appointed,” as they were both aware, since they’d had the main biblical names and stories drilled into their skulls with a figurative screwdriver. Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve, deputized to take the place of the murdered Abel, who wasn’t entirely dead, however, because he still had talking blood that cried out from the ground. So “Seth” was replacing the departed and presumed dead Zeb. By appointment, courtesy of Adam. Very funny.
Adam requested that Zeb/Seth test the new chatroom before entering HelthWyzer, and then check in once a week to signal he was still walking the planet. So the next day, while making his circuitous way to the grey marketeer to get his prints and iris scans inserted into his fake docs, he chose a net café at random and followed the lilypad trail laid out for him by Adam. (Memorize, then destroy, said the note, as if Zeb was a fucking idiot.)
The main gateway was a biogeek challenge game called Extinctathon. Monitored by MaddAddam, it said: Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play? Zeb entered the codename supplied to him by Adam – Spirit Bear – and the password, which was shoelaces, and found himself inside the game.
It seemed to be a variant of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. Using obscure clues provided by your opponent, you had to guess the identities of various extirpated beetles, fish, plants, skinks, and so forth. A roll call of the already erased. It was a certified yawner: even the CorpSeCorps would be put to sleep by this one, plus they’d have no clue as to most of the answers. As – to be fair – Zeb himself did not, despite his time spent with the Bearlifters and their obscure forms of one-upmanship. You haven’t heard of Steller’s sea cow? Really? Tiny, self-satisfied smirk.
Five minutes inside Extinctathon and any self-respecting Corps-Man would run screaming in search of alcoholic beverages. A terminally boring game was almost as effective as a vacuous stare, disguise-wise; plus they’d never think there was anything hidden inside a location that was right out in the open and so obviously ecofreakish. Instead, they’d be combing through bimplant ads and sites where you could shoot exotic animals online without leaving y
our office chair. Full Points to Adam, thought Zeb.
Could it be that Adam had designed this game himself? A game with his own name embedded as the Monitor? But he’d never shown much interest in animals, as such. Though, come to think of it, he’d been known to view with mild contempt the Rev’s interpretation of Genesis, which was that God had made the animals for the sole pleasure and use of man, and you could therefore exterminate them at whim. Was Extinctathon a piece of anti-Rev counterinsurgency on the part of Adam? Had he somehow got mixed up with the ecofreaks? Maybe he’d had a conversion moment while smoking too much of some brain-damaging hallucinogenic and bonded with a plant fairy. Though that was unlikely: it was Zeb who’d been the chemicals risk-taker, not Adam. But Adam was mixed up with someone, for sure, because he’d never be able to pull off something like this on his own.
Zeb continued along the pathway. He chose Yes to show readiness and was redirected. Welcome, Spirit Bear. Do you want to play a general game, or do you want to play a Grandmaster? The second was the choice to make, said Adam’s instructions, so Zeb clicked on it.
Good. Find your playroom. MaddAddam will meet you there.
The path to the playroom was complicated, zigzagging from one coordinate to another through pixels located here and there on innocuous sites: ads, for the most part, though some were lists: TOP TEN SCARY EASTER BUNNY PICS, TEN SCARIEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME, TEN SCARIEST SEA MONSTERS. Zeb found a portal through the buck teeth of a deranged purple plush rabbit with a terrorized infant perched on its knee, from there to a tombstone in a still from Night of the Living Dead, the original, and finally to the eye of a coelacanth. Then he was in the chatroom.
Welcome to MaddAddam’s playroom, Spirit Bear. You have a message.
Zeb clicked on Deliver message.
Hello, said the message. You see, it works. Here are the coordinates for next week’s chatroom. A.
Minimalist bugger, thought Zeb. He’s not going to tell me a thing.
He bought the suggested outfit, or most of it: the round glasses were too much to take, as were the shoes. He broke in the pants and the shirts – spilled food on them, frayed them a little, ran them through the wash a few times. Then he tossed his previous clothes into various dumpsters and wiped his biotraces off his cheesy Starburst room as much as he could.
After paying up at Starburst – no sense in having the skip-tracers on your tail, if avoidable – he made the cross-continent trek to San Francisco. Then he reported at HelthWyzer West as instructed, presented his fraudulent docs, and underwent the welcoming Hi, Buddy, Happy You’re Here, We’ll Help You Feel at Home minuet of the podge-faced greeter.
Nobody said boo. He was expected, he was accepted. Smooth as grease.
Inside HelthWyzer West he was assigned a bachelor condo unit in the residential tower. Nothing rundown about these facilities: nice landscaping around the entranceway, swimming pool on the roof, and the plumbing and electricals all worked, though the interior design was a little Spartan. There was a queen-sized bed, an optimistic signal. Bachelor did not mean celibate in the world of HelthWyzer West, it appeared.
The workspace high-rise had a cafeteria where he was issued a swipe card that would record his consumption: everyone had a points allowance, which they could use on anything on the menu. The food was real food, not spurious glop like the stuff he’d eaten at Bearlift. The drinks had alcohol in them, which was the least you could expect in a drink.
The HelthWyzer women were brisk, and had jobs to do and not much time for small talk, and – he guessed – no tolerance at all for cheap pickup lines, so he didn’t even bother; but though he’d vowed to be careful about personal involvements because of the kinds of questions they could generate, he wasn’t made of stone. Already a couple of the younger females had looked at his Seth name tag – name tags were a fashion statement at HelthWyzer – and one of them had asked him if he was new because she couldn’t recall seeing him before, but of course she was kind of new herself.
Was there a little twist of the shoulders, a giveaway flutter of the eyelids? Marjorie, he read, not lingering too long on her name tag, which was perched on a breast of no more than ordinary prominence: obvious bimplants were not common inside the HelthWyzer walls. Marjorie had a blunt-nosed, brown-eyed, acquiescent face, like a spaniel, and in ordinary circumstances he would have proceeded, but as it was he said he hoped he’d see her around. Such a hope was not the top hope on his list of hopes – that spot was reserved for not getting caught – but it was not the bottom hope either.
The job description for Seth was that of a routine low-level IT guy, dime a dozen. Data inputting, using a packet of snoreworthy but serviceable software designed to record and compare the various factoids and buckets o’data the HelthWyzer brainiacs were coming up with. Glorified digital secretary, that’s all he was supposed to be.
The duties weren’t challenging: he could do the job with two fingers of one hand in much less time than was allotted for it. The HelthWyzer project managers didn’t supervise much, they just wanted him to keep current with the inputting. Meanwhile he could ferret around in the HelthWyzer databank unimpeded. He ran a few IT security tests of his own to see whether any outside pirates were trying to hack in: if they were, it would be useful to know about it.
At first he didn’t uncover any telltale signs; but during one of his deep dives he pinpointed something that looked as if it might be a cryptic tunnel. He wiggled through it, found himself outside the HelthWyzer burning ring of firewalls, then lilypadded his way into the Extinctathon chatroom. A message was waiting for him: Use only when needed. Don’t spend long. Wipe all prints. A. He logged out quickly, then erased his trail. He’d need to build another portal, because whoever was using this tunnel might work out that someone else had been through it.
He decided Seth needed to be known as a guy who did a lot of gaming so that checking into Extinctathon wouldn’t stand out should anyone be snooping. That was the operational reason; but also he just wanted to test out the games, and to see how easy it was to fool around during work hours without being reprimanded – staff weren’t supposed to waste time in this way, or not too much time – and also how easy it was to cheat. He thought of it as keeping his hand in.
Some of the games on recreational offer were standard – weapons, explosions, and so on – but others were posted by the staff at HelthWyzer West: biogeeks were just as geeky as other geeks, so naturally they designed games of their own. Spandrel was one of the better ones: it let you devise extra, functionally useless features for a bioform, then link them to sexual selection and fast-forward to see what the evolution machine would churn out. Cats with rooster-like wattles on their foreheads, lizards with big red lipstick-kiss lips, men with enormous left eyes – whatever the females chose was favoured, and you could manipulate their bad taste in male attributes, just like real life. Then you played predators against prey. Would the supersexy spandrels impede hunting skills or slow down escape? If your guy wasn’t sexy enough, he wouldn’t get laid and you’d go extinct; if he was too sexy, he’d get eaten and you’d go extinct. Sex versus dinner: it was a fine balance. Packets of random mutations could be purchased for a small sum.
Weather Monsters wasn’t bad either: the game threw extreme weather events at your player – a puny human avatar of either gender – and you tried to see how long your player could survive them. With points won, you could purchase tools for your avatar: boots that allowed it to run faster and jump higher, lightning-proof clothing, floating planks for floods and tsunamis, wet handkerchiefs for covering its nose during brush fires, Joltbars for when it was trapped under a thick wad of snow due to an avalanche. A shovel, some matches, an axe. If your avatar survived the giant mudslide – a killer event – you’d get a whole toolbox and a thousand extra points for your next game.
The one Zeb played the most was called Intestinal Parasites – a nasty gucklunch the biogeeks thought was hilarious. The parasites were truly ugly, with rebarbed hooks all around t
heir mouths and no eyes, and you had to nuke them with toxic pills or deploy an arsenal of nanobots or moteins before they could lay thousands of eggs in you or creep through your brain and out your tear ducts, or split themselves into regenerating segments and turn the inside of your body into a festering patty-melt. Were they real, or had the biogeeks made them up? Worse, were they gene-splicing them right now as part of a bio-weaponry project? Impossible to know.
Play Intestinal Parasites too much and you’d get nightmares, guaranteed, said the game’s running slogan. So, never one to do as he was told, Zeb did play it too much, and he did get nightmares.
Which didn’t stop him from creating an alias of the game, then reworking one of the hideous mouths so that it functioned as a gateway. He stashed his code in a triple-locked thumbdrive for safekeeping, then parked it at the back of his supervisor’s desk drawer in a nest of rubber bands, used nosewipes, and orphaned cough drops. No one would ever look there.
Bone Cave
Cursive
Toby is at work on her journal. She doesn’t really have the energy for it, but Zeb went to all that trouble to bring her the materials and he’s bound to notice if she doesn’t use them. She’s writing in one of the cheap schooltime drugstore notebooks. The cover has a bright yellow sun, several pink daisies, and a boy and a girl, rudimentary figures of the kind children used to draw. Back when there were human children – how long ago? It seems like centuries since the plague swept through. Though it’s less than half a year.
The boy has blue shorts, a blue cap, and a red shirt; the girl has pigtails, a triangular skirt, red, and a blue top. They both have smudgy black blob eyes and thick red upcurved mouths; they’re laughing fit to kill.
Fit to die. They are only paper children, but they seem dead now anyway, like all the real children. She can’t look at this notebook cover too much because it hurts.
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