by M M Buckner
He sat up straighter and lowered his voice. “My estate’s worth a million times the value of this loan. Use my money to secure the deal. I’ll pay the interest up front.”
“Your estate? Your money?”
“It’s my legal property. My inheritance.”
“I gave you that money! Every cent. To hear you talking this way, speaking up for protes—it shames me, son.”
Dominic gripped the little Net node so hard, he nearly tore it off the Devi’s console, but he held his voice steady. “Let’s drop the father-son fiction.”
The NP howled with laughter. “Absolutely right. You’re nobody’s son. Richter manufactured us both. I’m intelligent code, whereas you, he jerked off in a dish.”
Dominic took deep breaths through his nose and counted ten.
“Sure, let’s drop the fantasy,” the NP went on. “I like facts better. We’re Richter’s proxies, and he put us here to guard ZahlenBank. But you screwed up the very first day. That’s always the problem with analog copies.”
Dominic lurched in his seat. “Say another word, and I—”
“You what? Quit?” The NP snickered. “You won’t quit. Richter gave you a motivation you can’t resist. I think the word was ‘honor.’”
Dominic put his fist through the screen.
“Well, that was smooth.” Qi brushed shards of plastic from her lap. “I don’t have another Net node. What’s your next move?”
“This.” Dominic grabbed Qi’s hand. He remembered which icon in her light matrix retracted the cockpit cover, so he forced her to prod it with one of her cybernails. Instantly, the Devi’s ceiling split across the middle and retracted. “I’m going for a swim,” he said. Then he lurched up onto the cockpit rim and dove.
He pulled long hard strokes, lengthening his spine and stretching his limbs. The Nord.Com uniform hampered his movement, but it felt good to plow through the oily ocean. What did he care about the brown foam lapping in his face every time he took a breath. He’d been exposed to sea fluid before, and seeds of cancer had already germinated in his flesh. So be it. He’d just lost the deal. He’d lost it!
Ahead lay a flat horizon. He was moving out to sea, not in toward the mountains of Norway. With only one eye, he had trouble gauging distances, but that didn’t matter. He never stood a chance negotiating with the digital genie. It was too much like arguing with his father. And he lost all those battles. If he was an exact duplicate of Richter, they must have shared the same innate gifts. Why couldn’t he stand up to his father like an equal? Why did he always feel like a lesser man? Several meters out, it occurred to him that opening the cockpit had probably revealed their position, and that bank guards would arrive any moment to arrest them. He pushed the thought away. Right now, he needed to swim.
After a while, he swung around and headed back to the Devi.
“Cooled down, are we? You wanna climb back in? I’m making lunch.” Qi swung a ladder over the Devi’s flank. As he pulled himself in and shook liquid from his hair, she said, “You blew our cover. Not to make a pun.”
“Stupid, I know. We should submerge.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Qi tossed him a sack of yellow goo and a straw. “Your dear old Da was bound to find us. The Devi’s stealth is way obsolete compared to your NP’s new add-ons.”
“I don’t want to be found yet. I have an idea.” Dominic sat in his dripping uniform and sucked the goo, remembering how much he liked the taste of Naomi’s pudding.
Qi slurped the last few drops through her straw. “So where to?”
“Trondheim,” he said, licking his lips.
She crushed her empty food sack between her hands. “Just like that? You’re going home? Giving up?”
He grinned. “I haven’t even started.”
They closed the cockpit and dove straight down, then crept along the seafloor, changing direction often, hoping to outwit the NP’s scans. Hidden in the murky depths, Dominic whispered the strategy he’d formulated. He’d been thinking it through during their long journey across the Arctic. The NP would never approve a loan to the miners. That was a given, he said, rubbing his hands together in nervous admission of defeat. But he owned personal assets. He’d inherited one of the richest estates in the northern hemisphere. He would simply make a withdrawal.
One billion deutschdollars should cover their immediate needs. He’d have to sell some stocks, but that was easy. Giving the miners access to the funds would be more difficult. He planned to set up a new dummy bank account under a fake ID. That would require hacking into ZahlenBank’s Ark, but he had a notion how to do that. He would call his young assistant, Karel Folger. Karel would be glad to help.
When no guards appeared after half an hour, Qi decided it was safe to head for the Norwegian coast. They parked the Devi in an underwater cave and swam into a rocky inlet a few kilometers north of Trondheim. Standing on the beach, Dominic peered at the pallid midnight sky. They had one day left. Or maybe less, as Millard would be sure to say. The smog hovered like wool. Dominic heard no air-cars circling above, but still, he felt uneasy.
“Don’t look up!” Qi’s shout startled him. “The satellites might recognize your face. Keep your head down.” She drew a fresh dry Nord.Com uniform from her pack and slithered into it. In the shadows, her dark body was almost invisible.
“We’ll have to disable the logos on these uniforms,” she said. “Every surveillance camera in this hemisphere will be watching for Nord.Com insignia. Ugh, Nicky. You’re all wet.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll dry fast.” He turned away from her, stripped off his uniform and started wringing it out.
“Sweet,” she said, “moonshine.”
Dominic laughed. He’d discarded his filthy silk underwear, and the night wasn’t dark enough to hide his pale buttocks. As he slung the uniform in a circle over his head to spin the liquid out, he said, “How do we disable the logos?”
“We remove their chips so they can’t beam an AR readout,” she said. “I brought along some counterfeits. From now on, we’re middle managers at Lapp.Com. You’re Veltin in HR, and I’m Sanwalt in quality assurance.”
“Delightful.”
“Just remember our new names, okay?”
It took Qi only a minute to replace the chips and reconfigure the logos on their executive uniforms. Her pack held lots of tools. She’d obviously performed such a switch before. Under her hand, Nord.Com’s slanting silver N unraveled and re-formed as a quirky brown quadruped—a reindeer, Dominic recalled—the Lapp.Com logo. He dressed quickly in his damp uniform, while Qi hid her pack among the rocks. Then she slicked his beard down with her fingers.
“We need to find you an eye patch.” She started tying her hair in a knot.
“Don’t,” he said, touching her hand. “It looks better down.”
She shook her hair free. Then she touched his bare foot with her toes. “Sorry, Nick. The Nord.Com aristos didn’t leave us any shoes.”
She led off through the twilight, and he followed, picking his way barefoot through the sharp rocks. Wind whistled around them. Like every landmass that was still livable, Norway’s surface bristled with the domes, towers, rain mills and solar collectors of dense human habitation. Dominic saw it all for the first time, in true color, without the intervention of a windshield or face mask or metavision headband. How bleak the mountains looked, the soil blasted away by winds, the rocks bare and pitted. Black, gray, brown, these were the colors of his homeland. A clabbered dawn gathered in the east, increasing their exposure to the roving eyes of satellites. Qi tugged at his sleeve, and they started to run. Soon they found a dome with an airlock, and Qi knew a trick or two for getting it open.
Inside the dome, refrigerated air swallowed Dominic like a cold bath, and the fresh, sterile scent brought back a glut of memories. He stretched his arms and rolled his neck, relishing the ambient cool, until Qi yanked him behind a column. Their counterfeit chips offered thin protection, she warned him, and if the authorities checked their
palm prints, the NP would be on them in nanoseconds. Surveillance cameras scanned every tunnel, so they kept their heads down and slunk along with the steady stream of foot traffic.
Norway’s suburban levels weren’t as well appointed as the executive domes, but they were clean and uncluttered, freshly painted every week to hide the graffiti. Municipal employees grudgingly swept the floors and sprayed antiseptic, and though the halls smelled astringent, they were free of toxins. Dominic slapped his arms to warm up. His uniform wasn’t quite dry, and the chill air made him shiver. At last, they found a public air chute, and Qi fooled the mechanism into thinking she’d fed it a coin. Then they rode its pneumatic cushion down, inhaling the dry empty air.
The air chute dumped them into an employee residential area, and Dominic peered around with curiosity. He’d never seen one before. Traffic was sparse at this hour, midway through a shift. The short straight halls crisscrossed in a logical grid, and uniform metal doors lined the walls, bearing sequential numerals. He knew that behind each door lay a standard living cube, four meters deep and wide and high, equipped with graceless built-in furniture, mass-produced in molded plastic. He’s seen the items in catalogs.
As they passed a commissary, he paused to study the green-and-orange laser advertisements painted in the air, and he stood listening with one ear cocked to the lyrics of the promotional jingles. This commissary was the cheeriest place he’d seen. Here at all hours, employees could purchase everything life required—snacks, clothing, digital entertainment—at low, subsidized prices. There was no crime. No loud noise. No litter. All these blessings were the perks of Com protection. This was what the runaways gave up, and as Dominic gazed at a display of pizza-flavored powder in sealed foil packets, he began to understand why. This place had no living smells. Even the passing minutes seemed to have been sanitized, dehydrated and sealed in foil.
A few executives strolled among the employees, wearing badges and carrying notebooks. He watched one of them, a woman, stop a couple of juveniles and check their chips with her scanner wand. She was tall and narrow, with champagne-colored hair, and when she asked a question, she didn’t wait for the answer. In a pompous tone, she ordered the boys to go home. Home? Dominic watched their faces. With his one good eye, he saw their cagey mock respect. The woman strolled on, oblivious, but from the way they glared at her back, Dominic knew they hated her. He could almost hear the violence building behind their sullen young eyes. All at once, his executive blues bound too tight, like a skin he wanted to shed.
A little way down the corridor, Qi hooted softly and pointed to a recess in the wall. When Dominic moved closer, he came face-to-face with an automated teller machine. It was programmed to dispense the round copper coins used by employees, and high on its front panel gleamed the elegant gold Z of ZahlenBank. Its marble veneer reflected an image of a man Dominic barely recognized, lean and grizzled, with a twelve-day beard, a face half covered in scars, and one hungry, sea gray eye. He turned away.
A woman was hurrying past, and he brushed against her. She spun, red-faced, and started apologizing, and when one of her many tote bags slipped off her shoulder, three cans of synthetic meat rolled across the floor. Dominic scooped them up, and the woman opened her mouth in silent fear. She gazed at the cans as if he meant to confiscate them. Execs did that sometimes. She almost reached for the cans, then timidly drew back her hand. Dominic winced for her. He dropped the cans in her bag and laughed to cover the awkwardness. The woman backed away, and he laughed again, imagining what he must look like with his beard and bruises and ravaged eye.
Qi butted his chest with her shoulder. She nodded toward a camera swiveling on its mount, and they stepped behind another column to avoid its gaze.
“We’ll wait here till the shift changes,” she whispered. “When the halls fill up, we’ll move.”
“We have one day left. Can we afford the time?”
She elbowed him farmer into the recess. “We can’t afford to get caught.”
“Is there enough room to sit down?”
“No. Keep still.”
They were jammed tight together in the small space, and Dominic put an arm around Qi’s shoulder. “Cozy.”
“Yeah, too bad your girlfriend Gervasia isn’t here.”
He grinned and drew her closer. “You’ll do in a pinch.”
She kneed him in the groin. Her attack didn’t really hurt him, but he sprang back in reflex. “That was mean.”
She yanked him back behind the column. “The camera, remember? It picks up audio. Think of it as your Da’s eyes and ears.”
Dominic squeezed against her again, and when she turned her back, he smelled her hair. She had a wholesome smell, like a child. He’d noticed it before.
He whispered, “One minute you’re friendly. The next, you’re a bad-tempered pest.”
“Shush.” She pointed in the direction of the camera.
He put his lips to her ear. “Which one’s the real you?”
She pushed his face away with her hand.
A loud chime sounded the shift change, and the noise level rose. Up and down the corridor, protected employees emerged from their residences and trudged toward the east. Dominic watched their faces. Now that he’d really begun to see them, he realized there were no children. And no old people. Did dependents stay shut up all day in their monotonous cubes—or were they sent to group care areas? It embarrassed him not to know something as basic as that. These workers ranged in age from thirteen to about sixty. No one was smiling. Not a single smile in the whole crowd. Most had a sleepy look, as if they’d just gotten out of bed and thrown on their work clothes. Some carried sacks of cola and food, and they ate as they walked. He saw a man stumbling along, holding something in front of his face. A book! Like the one Djuju had. The man was mumbling, pressing his nose into the page, running his finger along the lines of text.
“Let’s go.” Qi’s voice snapped Dominic out of his reverie. They merged into the traffic and let it carry them to the train station. An hour later, they were standing outside his condo park in Trondheim, wondering how to get in.
“It’s my apartment. I should go,” Dominic insisted.
“You’ll walk straight into a trap,” Qi said. “I’ve been trained to break and enter. I’ll do it.” She kicked her bare foot against the curb and studied the building’s service entrance with a practiced eye. “What do you need in there?”
“Shoes for a start. Also, my personal node. It holds the passwords to my bank accounts. I need those passwords to get my money.”
“You don’t have them memorized?”
He made a face.
“Okay, wait here,” she said. “Hide under this green thing. What is this, a plastic bush?”
They huddled under the artificial leaves of the rose bower surrounding the condos, and amid the phony floral fumes, Dominic described the layout of his apartment. He gave her the password to his back door and told her precisely where to find his Net node. He also reminded her about shoes. “Get a pair for yourself. Your feet aren’t much bigger than mine.”
“Funny,” she said.
In perfect silence, she stole around the corner and disappeared from sight. Then he immediately regretted letting her go alone. To mark time, he watched the cleaning robots making their regular rounds. The robots had little to do in this rose garden because executives didn’t drop litter. Occasionally a bot would stretch out its arm and vacuum a bit of lint. Dominic had forgotten the vacant stillness of these lanes around his condo. Perhaps he’d never noticed. Every day, just like all his neighbors, he drove his car straight in and out of the garage. Had anyone ever walked here among the plastic roses? This area was secure. No workers were allowed here, only residents and guests. He waited half an hour, and not a soul passed by.
Distracted, he broke off a pink blossom and twirled it between his fingers. The petals looked genuine, but they were stiff and hard, not fragile like a living flower. He’d seen real roses, expensive hothouse clon
es valued as gifts. This bud had a stronger fragrance. At its heart, a tiny engine pumped waves of artificial scent, with a battery designed to last for generations. A century from now, buried deep in an urban landfill, this rose would still smell as sweet. He crushed it against his chest and ground the sharp petals into his uniform. Maybe it would mask his body odor.
Changing shadows told him too much time had passed, and he grew anxious about the major. He should have gone with her. True, she was trained for prowling in shadows and violating locked doors, but still he felt guilty. She was an odd one, Major Qi Raoshu. Moody, oh yes. Outwardly tough. Attractive in an erratic sort of way. He remembered how her lips moved when she was sleeping. Yes, attractive. But he knew her secret. Underneath that hard mask, she was as soft as any child. He was just darting around the corner to find her when they collided head-on.
“I got it,” she said, out of breath. She was clutching a pillowcase crammed full of bulky contents. “Let’s go. I tripped an alarm.”
They raced through the rosebushes, found the service entrance they’d used before, and took the stairs three at a time. At the landing, he lifted the pillowcase from her arms but didn’t have time to see what she’d packed. They shot out into the public corridor and melted into the crowd of weary employees. Hunched down to conceal their executive height, they kept glancing over their shoulders.
“Remember the cameras,” Qi whispered.
She grabbed his hand and pulled him into a denser group of workers, and he noticed she was wearing his best patent leather evening shoes.
“We’ve got exec insignia,” he whispered back. “Won’t this look strange, two execs slouching along with employees, one of them carrying a pillowcase?”
“Yeah, we gotta lose these logos. Your condo read my ID. You didn’t tell me you had a security camera in the toilet.”
“Oh.” Dominic’s forehead wrinkled. “I forgot that one.”
