Neurolink

by M M Buckner

  The NP grunted. “That’s what I call primitive.”

  Given their resources, Dominic was impressed that they even made the attempt. Aloud, he asked the woman where he could find water to drink.

  She motioned with her head. “Along that way.” She was already spritzing her next group of customers.

  The corridor in this section rumbled with foot traffic, and at one point, he had to press flat against the wall to let a heavy cart roll by. Two men struggled to pull it, while a woman and a child pushed from behind. Its wobbly load of electronic scrap still dripped seawater—fresh salvage from the underwater junk piles.

  At that moment, Benito came running toward him through the crowd. Dominic hadn’t even noticed when the boy slipped away. Benito carried his yellow pencil clamped between his teeth, the way Dominic often carried his laser torch, and the striped shorts ballooned around his legs like a clown’s pantaloons. He ran right in front of the overloaded cart, and just as he ducked under the wheel, a bulky metal case slipped off the load and fell. The boy dodged it by a hairsbreadth.

  “You little idiot!” Dominic scooped him up. “You could’ve been killed. Watch where you’re going.”

  Benito took the pencil out of his mouth and clasped his arms around Dominic’s neck. “Little idiot,” Dominic muttered again as he walked on through the dense pedestrian traffic, carrying the boy against his chest.

  “Let the brat take his chances. I call it population control.” The NP’s growl made a wheel of tiny sparks around Dominic’s peripheral vision. “Just tell me why you’re hauling this kid around.”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Dominic subvocalized. “Bit-brains lack human feeling.”

  The NP cackled. “Since when are you such a paragon of human feeling? You’re just like me, hard-nosed and clear-sighted, because that’s what it takes to run ZahlenBank. That’s one thing we always agreed about.”

  Dominic didn’t answer. By now, he was so dehydrated, all he could think about was finding water. They moved with the thickening traffic to the brink of an enormous pit that could only be a natural underground formation. Jury-rigged metal stairs spiraled down its inner walls, loaded with people, and the noise of so many voices and thumping feet reverberated in a steady roar. Dominic could see no other way to go.

  “Can you gauge the depth of this pit?” he subvocalized to the NP.

  “Hey, I’m a nanoquantronic array the size of a pinhead. You’re asking a lot,” the genie said. “Okay, yell something really loud, and I’ll time the echo.”

  “Ahoy!” Dominic shouted down the pit. His voice barely registered above the crowd noise.

  “Just over 15.4776 meters. Close enough for you?”

  “Splendid.” Dominic shook the metal rail, remembering Tooksook’s instructions to go straight up.

  The makeshift staircase looked severely overburdened. He checked the bolts attaching it to the stone wall, and they seemed undersized for the weight they were supporting. He wouldn’t even consider taking this route if he weren’t so thirsty. When he stepped onto the first tread, it gave under his weight, and he could feel the rail vibrate with the heavy tramp of the crowd. Benito jumped down and scampered ahead, darting through people’s legs. Dominic took another cautious step down, peering over the rail into the dimness below. He couldn’t see the bottom.

  “Going down, friend?” Someone behind him wanted to pass, so he had no choice but to enter the stream of traffic.

  The deeper he descended, the denser the noise grew, as if sound itself were condensing under its own weight. Movement on the stairs was sluggish. When he finally hopped off the last shuddering tread, he drew a relieved breath, then choked and started coughing. The air at the bottom of the pit was rank. He caught the familiar smell of braziers. People were cooking food, and smoke roiled through the flickering light of handheld lanterns. The odor was almost tactile. Human sweat, fried spore-bread, ozone.

  Someone stepped on his foot and apologized, and someone else jostled his elbow. People jammed the area near the bottom of the stairs, all hurrying in different directions. He moved aside.

  “This is the deepest level we’ve found yet,” the NP informed him. “I’m detecting three atmospheres of pressure.”

  “It’s some kind of junction,” Dominic said. Above people’s heads, he could make out the tops of several tall, arched openings on the other side of the pit. Pedestrians flooded in and out, carrying bundles and dragging carts. After studying the pit closer, he realized tunnels radiated from it in every direction, but which one led to the Dominic Jedes?

  “Which way?” he asked the NP. With the deafening noise, he no longer troubled to keep his voice down.

  The NP’s laughter throbbed through his temple. “Admit it, son. You need me.”

  “Which way?” Dominic shouted again.

  “Okay, okay. Checking compass memory. We want the passage directly across from this one.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure. If you want certainty, get me better source data.”

  Dominic studied the packed floor of the pit. He’d have to cross right through the center to reach that tunnel. Where was Benito? He’d lost sight of the boy. He circled back to the rickety staircase and climbed up for a better view.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the NP said. “You’re looking for that brat.”

  Dominic cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Benito, where are you?”

  He was squinting through the smoky air, searching for the boy, when he noticed the raised platform at the center of the pit. Something odd was going on there. He couldn’t see well, but it looked as if half a dozen protes in bright-colored jackets were standing on the platform, pointing into the crowd and writing on handheld slates. Around the platform, people below stood three meters deep and waved white cards in the air. Were they taking bets? Was it an auction? The scene entranced Dominic. He barely noticed when Benito shinned up his back and took a perch on his shoulders.

  “Yeah, I’m curious, too,” the NP said. “Let’s investigate.”

  As Dominic eased his way toward the platform, he realized the hall was much wider than he’d first imagined. Several race-car stadiums would fit inside this cavern. The thickest traffic clumped around the tunnel openings and staircase. Elsewhere, people stood in knots, talking and handing objects back and forth. What was going on? Dominic edged toward one of the smaller groups to eavesdrop. Three men and a woman were studying an object a fourth man held in his open palm. It was a small plastic mirror, the industrial type used in laser torches and holo displays.

  “I can deliver a thousand of these by Tuesday,” the man was saying. “My brother’s a diver. He found a barge full of these things.”

  “Sorry, we don’t need mirrors. Have you talked to anyone with antibiotics?”

  “No, but if you meet anyone who needs mirrors, I’ll be here.”

  The group drifted apart, and Dominic moved to another group. Three prim juvenile girls sat on the floor, counting out bundles of copper wire from a large basket. The wire had been done up in neat skeins like knitting yarn, and the girls laid them out in even rows. Several men and women bent over and touched the wire. One women hefted a bundle as if to judge its weight. Then she laid down a pair of scissors in its place.

  “Deal,” one of the girls said, grinning. The scissors disappeared into the girl’s basket, and the woman walked away with her wire.

  “This is a market,” Dominic said.

  The girls glanced up at him, and one of them giggled. He moved away.

  “How cute,” said the NP. “The protes have built themselves a little emporium. Find out what’s happening on that platform, son. It’s bound to be good for a laugh.”

  Dominic shifted Benito to a more comfortable position and marched toward the platform. “They rely on word of mouth,” he said. “That leaves so much to chance. And it’s straight barter. One item for another. They have no medium of exchange.”

  “N
o money,” the NP said.

  “How do they calculate value? It’s random guesswork.”

  “This is a perfect demonstration of why we don’t want protes running the world.”

  “Right,” Dominic said, but his mind was elsewhere. He could think of a dozen simple changes to make this trading floor more efficient. The challenge engaged his mind, and he forgot his thirst and walked about, glancing at the wares people were exchanging. Window glass. Lidded containers. Spools of waterlogged thread. He suspected each item had been painstakingly mined from the underwater junk heaps.

  His brain churned ideas. They could hang a large board listing goods for sale and goods wanted, in alpha order for quick reference. And they could paint a numbered grid on the floor so people could find each other. And they would certainly have to establish a currency. Metal coins stamped with numbers, some logical way to define value, and some way to keep track of it. What they really needed was a bank.

  As he worked closer toward the raised platform, he watched the people in the bright jackets writing on their slates, and he noticed the audience straining to hear their shouts over the echoing noise.

  “Divers? Any scuba divers? We need anyone who can swim.” A woman in a cobalt blue coat waved her arm over the crowd like a conductor’s baton, but no one answered. She frowned at her slate and chewed a thumbnail. Dominic saw that her slate was not the usual electronic tablet, but a wafer-thin piece of dull black metal. And her fingers were dusty with chalk. She was writing by hand.

  “Okay,” the woman said, “any young people willing to learn to swim?”

  Arms shot up all around. People were waving white cards, shouting for the woman’s attention. Dominic saw the cards were marked with names. O’Toole. Duong. Almirez. Vrtiak.

  “You, Vrtiak, how many?” the woman shouted.

  Vrtiak’s broad smile showed the gaps of many missing teeth. “Four. All women. Ages fourteen, seventeen, twenty-nine, forty-one.”

  “I’ll take ’em. Report to deck nine.” The woman wrote something on her slate. “You, Duong, how many?”

  “Six boys, two girls,” Duong answered. “And me. I’m sixty-six. I can learn.”

  Dominic watched people slapping the man named Vrtiak on the back as he eased out of the crowd. “This is a labor market,” Dominic whispered.

  The NP laughed. “They’re trading work contracts. Can you believe it?”

  Vrtiak was heading toward one of the tunnels, so Dominic followed and grabbed his shoulder. “Excuse me. I’m new here. Can you tell me how things work?”

  The man looked Dominic up and down, and winked at Benito, who had clenched his little arms around Dominic’s forehead. Vrtiak was pale-skinned, muscular and balding. He flashed his gap-toothed smile. “You’ve been to college, eh? I hear it in your voice.”

  “Tell me,” Dominic said, “did you just sell your daughters’ labor contracts?”

  The man’s smile vanished, and his pasty face grew dark. “Sell my daughters? You think I’m a devil? How can you use that aristo talk here?”

  “But I thought—” Dominic didn’t get to finish. The man shoved him away and stomped off.

  Frowning, Dominic moved back toward the platform. Prote behavior continued to baffle him. He saw a small white-haired man standing a little apart, counting on his fingers. In his hand was a card with the name, Duong, printed in block letters. Dominic tried again.

  “Hello, sir. I’m new here. This thing with the white cards, what’s going on?”

  Duong grinned shyly. He smoothed his card and showed it to Dominic, then waved at the people onstage. “This is the matching hall,” he said in a thick American accent. “You come here with something you need or something to give, and with luck, you find a match.”

  “So you ‘gave’ your family’s work contacts, is that right?” Dominic chose his words with caution. He didn’t want to blunder again.

  “No contracts. No, we just work.”

  “But who pays you? The council?”

  “Payment, no no. You’re thinking in the old way. We live here. We do what needs to be done, that’s all.”

  “Utopian bullshit,” the NP grunted.

  Dominic thanked the man and turned away. Again, his mind was filling up with ideas. The matching hall. Fascinating concept. He was witnessing the emergence of a nascent market—only instead of information packets traveling on carrier waves, these people were milling around like molecules in Brownian motion, knocking into each other and chaotically making deals. The poetry of it appealed to his imagination. “This might work,” he said aloud.

  “Socialism fell on its ass two centuries ago,” the NP said. “It’s stupid.”

  “It’s simpleminded, I agree. But for a small group, this manual exchange is the spontaneous first stage of commerce. Naturally, it will evolve. Values will mass together and create imbalances. Eventually, they’ll see the need for private wealth and centralized accounting. But for now, with so much to be done in such a short time—”

  “Dominic, you sound like you wanna see these lunatics win!”

  He barely heard the NP. He was watching the people on the platform call out job openings and write on their slates. “The matching hall,” he said to himself, “of course.”

  Colored lights exploded across his retina. “Remember which side you’re on! These protes wanna destroy ZahlenBank.”

  “No, the Orgs want that,” Dominic said. “They’re using these protes as game pieces.”

  “Game pieces? They’re fucking runaways. Son, your mind’s turning to mush!”

  Dominic didn’t bother to answer. Benito was fidgeting, so he set the boy down on the stone floor. “Stay close, Benito. Come when I call.”

  Benito immediately dashed off to watch a young man painting pictures on scraps of sheet metal. Dominic observed from a distance as the painter sketched a quick caricature of the boy with a few brushstrokes. At once, Benito squatted on the floor and began to draw with his pencil, but the young man gave him a piece of metal instead.

  “Let the kid go. He’s found his mentor,” said the NP. “We have barely seventeen hours, and our tunnel’s straight ahead.”

  Dominic still didn’t answer. He watched Benito and the painter exchange drawings and solemnly admire each other’s work. Turning around, he saw the same exchange enacted in a dozen more scenes, people trading handmade items and raw materials in plain barter. Without the expertise of bankers or attorneys or regulatory agencies, this matching hall had bloomed like a beautiful life-form. Too bad ZahlenBank’s surveillance web didn’t reach into this place. This would make a rich data source for the Ark. Dominic knew this embryonic marketplace would continue to grow in a multitude of unforeseeable directions, and he wished he had the time to stay and witness it, perhaps offer a suggestion here and there, a gentle tweak.

  “You look lost,” someone said.

  A trim, middle-aged man with iron-colored hair was standing at his side. The man wore a neat mustache, and he stood with a stiff, military bearing. Like most protes, he was shorter than Dominic. “Maybe you’re lost in thought,” he said with a quick smile. “What happened to your eye? You got a real shiner there.”

  Dominic touched the swollen tissue where Benito had hit him earlier. He’d almost forgotten the black eye, not to mention the whack on his jaw and the lump on his head. His face roust be several shades of purple by now.

  “I’m Massoud. Ship’s bursar. I think I know who you are.”

  “You’re in charge here?” Dominic shook the bursar’s outstretched hand. “I have some questions.”

  “You’re the coin dispenser. Nick. Am I right?” Massoud pinched his mustache and rocked on his heels. His eyebrows rose and fell three times in quick succession. He seemed to pulsate with energy. “You like coins? I’ve got a ton of ’em. I’ve got all the copper scrip Nord.Com left behind.”

  “Coins? Excellent. Why aren’t they in circulation?”

  “You’re joking.” Massoud thumped him in the arm har
d enough to leave a bruise, and Dominic tried not to flinch. “You of all people should know why. Because every one of them carries a miserable ZahlenBank logo.”

  With some effort, Dominic kept himself from reacting.

  Massoud made a rude gesture. “As soon as we build a furnace, we’ll melt ’em down and make toilet bowls.”

  “Fucking prote,” said the NP.

  Dominic clamped his jaw and held himself very still, thinking how glad he was to be traveling incognito.

  Massoud smiled roguishly. “Step into my office, Nick. We’ll talk.”

  The NP sputtered sparks. “Seventeen hours, zero minutes, six seconds. Forget this jerk. Son, you’ve got other business.”

  “You’re not even sure which way we should go,” Dominic subvocalized. “I want to hear about this market.”

  “Do I have to remind you what’ll happen if you fail? It won’t just be the ruin of ZahlenBank, son.”

  “I’m not your son.” Dominic ignored the splinters of light chasing each other across his left eye.

  Massoud led him to a tall narrow tent made of green plastic tarps wrapped around three stacked sections of metal scaffolding. With rapid gestures, Massoud ushered him inside and pointed to a strip of cloth on the floor—apparently a place to sit. Dominic moved in cautiously. Overhead, caches of strange objects dangled in plastic bags tied with string and bungee cords. Massoud’s office looked like the inner workings of some bizarre plastic grandfather clock. Scattered on the floor were warped and rusted appliances, apparently rescued from the junk heaps. Dominic sat down, and was startled to see an old flat-screen computer flashing a Japanese animation. He noticed a bedroll stuffed in one corner.

  “You sleep here?”

  “I like to be close to the action.” Massoud folded himself into the remaining floor space and gestured again. Apparently, he couldn’t talk without waving his hands. “Nick, you’re an educated man. So am I. Nord.Com trained me as an accountant.”

  Dominic leaned forward. “Then you know the practical uses of currency.”