Cyber Sparks

by Robert Appleton

  “ …absolutely the worst possible timing for this,” Farrough said over the noise of frenzied typing. “We’re closing stage two of the new colony contract next week…at least we were. I don’t know where this puts us, how far it sets us back. Maybe it’s gonna quash the whole thing. I mean, Jesus, what are the odds of this happening now?”

  “It’s not like it hasn’t happened before, Johnny.” Marks’s informal address surprised me. I’d always thought of Farrough as an old-school autocrat, his company as a rigid hierarchy of lickspittles. “We’ve had chances to bring this out in the open, but we chose to keep those incidents under wraps. It was bound to bite us on a bigger scale sooner or later.”

  “I just wish I knew how the fuck to fix it!”

  “Yeah, you and me both. First it’s smell, then it’s seizures, then it’s God-knows-what psychosomatic, and we solved all those. Now we’re being screwed over by the colors of the freaking rainbow. I’m telling you, I’d never even heard of that color before you mentioned it just now.”

  “Puce. It’s somewhere between purple and brown, I think. Combined with—” and Farrough read, “‘—the soropholic vapor used to clean arterial gas pipes, the color puce creates a dangerous neural schism. The vapor is odorless, and harmless in small amounts, but when a person inhales a significant dose, it crosses the blood-brain barrier and among other things affects the hypothalamus, rendering the user susceptible to sudden rises or drops in body temperature.’” He blurted a mirthless laugh. “I swear I’m not making this stuff up. Here’s more. ‘The omnipod’s substitution of yellow for puce triggers a synaptic relapse, wherein the user’s brain exacerbates a sudden desire to make the body warm. This starts a neural chain reaction culminating in a psychopathic fixation on the color puce, which the user unconsciously needs to return to its original yellow. The association of yellow with benign warmth, and the omnipod’s use of a color far removed, creates a schism. That is what gives the user the insane urge to throw himself into the fire.’”

  “Brother, I’m going loopy just hearing about it.”

  “And R & D has a hard drive full of this nonsense—all the obscure scenarios they’ve found for the pod to send users buggo, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. You just couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.”

  “I know, I’ve seen everything they’ve found so far,” Marks said. “We’ll just have to ride out these storms if and when they happen. Maybe now’s the perfect time to introduce that new warning on all Omni products.”

  “The yellow caution label? How ironic.”

  “Yes. And it makes us sixty-three percent less liable overall, should users start to blame us for their over-use.”

  “I’m thinking the same thing,” the president replied. “We should come clean about some of these risks—not all, but enough to show them we’re spending shitloads on R & D to minimize the risks. Tell them this color substitution risk is a recent discovery, that we had no way of knowing what the vapor would do.”

  “The general statement was drafted months ago.”

  “Yes, and it’s nicely worded. Add this new stuff about what happens to puce and we can see about cutting our losses for this quarter. We’ll have to write it off. But while we’re weathering this storm in D.C. for a few more weeks, I’ll break out the big guns and go after the colony contracts again. That way I’ll have an excuse to present them to the shareholders. Dangle that interstellar carrot in front of them. They’ll soon forget about the color puce. And that—” Farrough thumped a desktop, “—is Omni in a nutshell. Creating our own reality.”

  “Genius, Johnny. Defeat into victory.”

  “Survival, Ed. All business is survival. The ability to adapt to any situation and stay on top. That’s all any apex predator does. That’s all we’ve ever done. That’s what we’ll continue to do.”

  Satto interrupted the eavesdropping with a hollow ring in my ears. “Now you understand how dangerous the omnipod is. People have not heeded the warnings, and sooner or later an unforeseen glitch—much more serious than the color puce—will strike users on a global scale. The human brain is far too intricate for Omni’s crude interfacing. Millions could die or suffer irrevocable brain damage if something worse should happen.”

  I crept over to the window and drew back the steel blinds. A city of walking, talking time bombs droned on, unaroused by the terrible news they’d have no doubt read over the podnet by now. Same old, same old; if it didn’t affect you personally, it was just a minor distraction, something to chew on and spit out over coffee and bagels.

  “Satto, I’ll ask you one last time. Did you cause the fire? Did you rupture the gas pipe and release the vapor?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Satto, give me one good reason why I shouldn’t go straight to the cops with this.”

  “You won’t have to. They are coming to you. Right now.”

  “What?” I climbed onto the window sill and tried to see down to the street. Flashing red and blue lights reflected off the watery sheen left by a street cleaner on the road. I couldn’t see the police cruisers but they were there. An urge to dash out of the apartment and escape by the emergency stairwell almost got the better of me. “This is about you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. They’ve pinpointed our frequency. Quick, Allegra, you must get to the roof.”

  “Eat shit. I’m not leaving Lenore.”

  “Then take her with you. If you don’t both leave right now, they’ll arrest you in connection with everything they think I’ve done.”

  “They’d lock us up?” I scanned the floor for my trainers, couldn’t see them anywhere.

  “At the least. I told you this is bigger than you can possibly know.”

  God Almighty. “All right, all right, keep your hair on.” I tore into the bedroom and shook Lenore awake. “Come on, get up. We’ve got to go now. No, there’s no time for that.” After knocking her lace-up blouse out of her hands, I pulled her out of the apartment and up the nearest stairwell.

  “What’s the deal? Who’s after us?”

  “The cops. ISPA. Omni. Christ knows—all of them.” Barefoot, we bounded up the steps two at a time. Thank God we were both in terrific shape; no sooner had we cleared two flights than I heard the thumps on my apartment door.

  “Jeez, and you called me paranoid,” she said.

  “Just get to the roof and he’ll tell us what to do.”

  “Who will?”

  “The asshole in my ear hole. Jiminy goddamn Cricket. He’s running the show.”

  “An omniyer? You’re in cahoots with somebody? Allie, what are you into—”

  “Just…the roof. No more questions.”

  Once again my ears rang. “You can call me all the names you want, but I saved you from a wretched fate just now,” he intoned.

  The absolute nerve! “Fella, you’re responsible for all this. Let’s not be pretending you’re anything but a fucking killer, all right? Two of my best friends jumped into that fire.”

  “Allie, why are you trusting some strange omniyer like that?” Lenore caught up to me, her heart-shaped face almost purple with what I took for delayed shock and exhaustion. “We should be running to the police, not away from them.”

  “Agreed. But there’s a lot more to this than you know, than even I know. Satto’s on to something big, and it’d better be more than his oversized thumb up his oversized—”

  “As soon as you reach the roof, I need you to commandeer the sky market.” He spoke as coolly as ever, as though he were a home shopping service rep demonstrating DIY instructions by holo-phone.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me! With what? My underwire?”

  “Improvise. Your Selene aptitude tests scored highly in creative reasoning. You are also qualified to Diamond Level Two in Sexual Seduction. And you are an excellent pilot.”
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  “Enough with the school reports, jerk. I get the idea. You want me to slut my way aboard.”

  Lenore clamped a clammy hand on my shoulder. “Um, Allie, is this something I need to call my agent about?”

  Outside, a strong, icy wind raked our bare skin. Lenore had on a pair of my pajama pants and her tank top, while I still wore the short skirt for my interview and a thin T-shirt. Gravel from the greenhouse path had been kicked over the walkway, so we trod gingerly.

  Boris stopped reading his ebook when he saw me, then ducked behind a rack of potato chips and combed his parting with his fingers while he discreetly observed Lenore. The poor guy must have thought his prayers had been answered—two Semprica models, half-dressed and looking wild in the wind, coming to buy God-knows-what from his shop that could head for the mile-high at the press of a button. The stuff of bad pornos.

  “Hello again, Miss Mondebay.” He cleared his throat.

  “Hey, man—Boris,” I remembered in time. The least I could do was get that right.

  “What can I get for you lovely ladies?”

  Satto chimed in, “You must be quick, Allegra. The police have sealed the building and are checking the stairwells now. Lift your T-shirt for him. Throw yourself at him. Just get on that vessel immediately.”

  Sick sleaze-heaver.

  I folded my arms, leaned over the desk, offering him a generous view of my cleavage. “So Boris, your shift finishes shortly. Can I ask you a huge favor?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Give us a lift off the building? My friend and I—we need to get to a photo shoot but the press is camped in the foyer. This is really important. We need to go…like now. I’ll give you fifty thousand clips if you’ll take us across town.”

  “Um, yeah, okay. I mean of course. Come on in. No need for a bribe, though. It’d be my…pleasure.” He flipped up the desk flap and invited us in, his gaze fixed on Lenore’s exposed midriff. “Hi, I’m Boris,” he said to her.

  “You’re sweet, Boris.” She trained her doe eyes on him, sucking out the last of his resistance. “I’m Lenore.”

  “Very clever,” said Satto.

  Bite me.

  I took Boris gently by the hand and ushered him to the pilot’s dash at the back of his store. “The ’razzi bots are probably heading upstairs right now.” I handed him his speckled pilot glove.

  After shaking Lenore’s spell from his head, he pressed one lever back to close the rear shutter—securing the merchandise—then put the glove on and roved his palm over the directional pad to start the thrusters. The higher he raised his palm, the higher the vessel lifted; likewise for every other direction. It was old tech but very responsive, just what our getaway needed. After all, who would expect two millionaire models to stow away in a flying grocery store?

  “Where are we headed?” Boris remained stoic, chivalrous in his own way, as he watched the sky lanes for oncoming traffic.

  “The giant vane on the commuter wheel,” Satto said. “Tell him to drop you on top of the spoke facing north-north-east.”

  I spun away, keeping my protestations to a whisper. “What do you mean, on top? How the hell does that get us out of D.C.? Are you smogged?”

  “Three shuttle cabs have been left there while engineers inspect the spoke’s structure for damage. The engineers are at the midsection, where the fire hit. You should have no trouble commandeering a shuttle.”

  It gets worse and worse.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “All in good time.”

  “Whatever.” There was nothing good about it.

  “Um, the vane on the commuter wheel, Boris.” I told him which spoke to aim for, at which both he and Lenore stared at me in disbelief.

  “With wind like this, and you two dressed the way you are, I’m thinking parachutes, not photo shoots.” Boris helped himself to a lusty look at my bare legs. “You ladies in some sort of trouble?”

  I silently shushed Lenore’s answer before it blackened her lips. “It’s a long story, man. We need to see someone urgently, and that’s where he is.”

  How the hell omniyers coped with the amount of podnet multi-tasking they did in an average session, I’ll never know. Just keeping up three dialogues at once was giving me a humdinger of a headache.

  “Well, there’s the vane—ten o’clock.” Boris put the brakes on at the skyway junction, scrubbed his face with his free hand. “It’s incredibly dangerous to go out on those spokes without a harness. These winds could whip you right off. How about I set you down at ground level, right next to the hub? It’d make me feel a whole lot easier.”

  “Absolutely not.” Satto didn’t hesitate, exactly as I’d guessed. The word compromise wasn’t in his cyber vocab. “Your profiles have been sent to every checkpoint in the city by now. You wouldn’t get to within fifty feet of the hub. Tell him to set you down atop the spoke or else you’ll inflict a serious injury on him.”

  “He’s twice my size,” I whispered to one side.

  “Yes, but Lenore can—”

  “No, it has to be the spoke roof,” I told Boris. For my sanity, interrupting Satto seemed my only option. His talk of inflicting injury at the drop of a hat chilled me to the core, not least because I knew he’d done far worse today in the market circle.

  “What’s on the spoke roof?” Boris tucked the fringe of his charcoal parting to one side and glanced at me from the corner of his eye. “I have three kids to support. If it’s something illegal, I have a right to know.”

  “You need to kill him before he gives you away.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Satto!”

  Boris frowned at me. “Who’s that talking to you? He’s giving you instructions, isn’t he. Making you do something illegal.” He looked at Lenore, who shrugged.

  “Don’t look at me.” She folded her arms. “I’m just along for the wacko ride.”

  “Okay, okay! You win. You’re both right—you deserve to know.” A deep sigh brought me no relief. “I’ve been in communication with a—”

  The sky market lurched to port amid a deafening screech of metal. Refrigerators tumbled down the starboard aisles, spilling their produce everywhere. The entire starboard side of the vessel appeared to have buckled inward. And again, another jolt, a further depression.

  “Something’s ramming us. Hang on!” Boris did his best to maintain a steady glove posture over the pad but the violent impacts had crippled his starboard engine. No matter what he tried, the ship veered to port. Headed directly for the copper vane.

  “God, we’re going to crash.” He drew me and Lenore into a crouch beside him, positioning himself in harm’s way for the final impact. Any moment now.

  Lenore clasped my hands in hers, her unblinking gaze not wandering from mine for an instant. There was steel inside the princess, a grace under pressure I hadn’t expected from her.

  “It’s too dangerous to stay on board. Open the rear port exit door right now. You have seconds to jump. Hold one of those boxes under you to break your fall.”

  “Right. We’re jumping.” I echoed Satto’s instructions, yanking both Lenore and Boris up from their cocoon. No point quibbling with a disembodied voice that seemed to somehow know everything. And we had no time—the dull copper structure loomed monumentally ahead, almost close enough to spit at.

  I pressed all my weight on the door’s magno-release bar and barged it open. The first blast of wind knocked me sideways into a stack of boxes labeled Sponges and Scourers.

  “Use these as cushions.” I demonstrated by holding one tightly against my knees, then dropped through the doorway to the giant, convex spoke roof below. The fall only lasted moments, yet the wind was so strong it swept me from the center of the spoke to its extreme left edge. The box took my weight but ripped open on landing, its segmented packets stream
ing out like kite ribbons in the ferocious gusts. Luckily, the engineers had threaded long safety lines through sequential carabiners on either edge of the roof while they worked. I clung to mine and wouldn’t let go.

  No sooner did Lenore and Boris wave to me from the opposite side than the sky market thundered against the vane to our right. The vessel crumpled as though it were tinfoil, then upended when one of its thrusters exploded. Sparks and thousands of clips’ worth of produce rained down on the hub tower.

  “Well done, Allegra.” Satto’s monotone inside the screech of falling wreckage anchored me a little.

  “Thanks.” I should hate the bastard’s guts, but being rescued from frying pan to fire and back again had a strange effect—you came to trust, to rely on the person pulling the strings, no matter what they’d done to get you in shit in the first place. “So what now?”

  “Can you see the shuttle cabs ahead? They’re moored to the roof.”

  “I see ’em.”

  “Good. Go now. Your friends will follow you.”

  “Right.”

  Inching along the curved roof at a crouch proved trickier than I’d imagined. If the wind had been constant, I might’ve been able to find a rhythm, a knack to compensating for it. But the gusts snatched at me like blows from a blind boxer: a strong updraft here, a straight jab there, a full-on hurricane roundhouse from out of nowhere. At least Lenore and Boris could support each other on the opposite cord; vertigo zinged me, alone, every time I moved or looked up.

  We reached over halfway to the cabs when the first siren penetrated the roar of the wind. A shrill, wailing note perched high up on my kill-me-now list. I glanced over my shoulder, then forward at the distance we still had to cover, and wilted. The three police cruisers and two Omni fliers would easily cut us off. No way could I traverse the roof any quicker in these winds, not without dancing a serious Latin beat with death. No, this stunt had run its course—time to call my lawyer instead.

  “Enough, Satto. I’m turning myself in. This isn’t worth it.”