Shine

by Jetse de Vries (ed)

  "He's alive," said the officer who bore most of his weight. "He fainted." Xiao, stricken, reached out to touch his father's face. I doubted he would have reacted differently if Papa were dead--tears ran down his flushed cheeks, and he squinted with the effort of holding tears back. Papa, for his part, looked peaceful. You might have mistaken the curl of his lips for a smile.

  "Xiao," I said. "Come on."

  "We almost killed him," said Xiaohao. "We almost. I never meant..."

  He trailed off. I touched his shoulder.

  "I know," I said softly. "But we stopped him from having to kill us."

  The sun bore down. The city watched us. Finally, I turned and began to march up the gravel road. After a moment, Xiao jogged to catch up. As we approached the hut, my wi-mo asked if I wished to link to device "XiXi." I declined. The door was locked, but Quonset hut doors were only so strong.

  "I think he wanted you to succeed," I said, activating the arc knife.

  Xiao wiped his eyes with his wrist. "Are you kidding?"

  "No. I think he followed every protocol, but secretly hoped that you would succeed."

  "What could possibly make you think that?"

  "He kept your wi-mo."

  Xiao's eyes moistened again. I slashed off the lock and kicked open the door. Cool air spilled out, and half a dozen smartfans twisted around to regard us. Behind us, hundreds of feet scratched the gravel path. Eager to join us, eager to walk on the earth of Yunhe.

  The new town wouldn't look like Xiao's sim--I knew that already. Parts of his fantasy would persist into the real world, maybe, but every single person who had saved us would have an idea about what the new Yunhe should look like, how it should work. I couldn't wait to hear what they had to say. I couldn't wait for the arguments, the compromises, the beautiful reality.

  We fell into our father's house and found the key.

  Ecclesia is social, networked. Borderless, we've currency. Weaponless, we've teeth. Metanation creed: union in the interstices. All welcome.

  --Eric Gregory--

  The Greenman Watches the Black Bar Go Up, Up, Up

  Jacques Barcia

  The moment Shine was announced, I received enthusiastic messages from around the world. Not just from the western world--although, make no mistake, these were very welcome, as well--but quite a lot from the world at large. For some unfathomable reason there were a lot of encouragements from the Philippines and Brazil.

  Unfortunately, while I did get quite a few good submissions from the Philippines, none of them made the final cut for Shine--although some came close. Blame your editor. Similarly, I did get quite a few from Brazil, as well, and while I had to turn several down, I'm quite happy to publish this one from Jacques Barcia.

  "The Greenman Watches the Black Bar Go Up, Up, Up" is very close to what I would consider an 'ideal' (if such a thing exists) story for Shine: it is complex yet recognisable, it is exotic yet familiar, it exhumes mystery while shedding new light on old tropes, and its progress is very hard fought, at every level.

  Yes, the world is--or may be--a better place, but not before we have worked and thought very hard to get there. And we need to keep thinking and working very hard to stay there, or take the next step.

  Yet we can, even in the gritty, dark and strange streets and cyber-alleys of Jacques Barcia's future Recife that's as intriguing as any Brasyl depicted in SF.

  He loved the wall barring the sea. It was his best kept secret, or else he believed it was. Inácio never told it to anyone. Not to his father, neither to his old comrades from the days and nights of war, and most certainly he would never tell it now to his clients. Though he knew Lúcio was aware of it, his partner never used that little contradiction to break his spirit and deliberately hurt him, as lovers do when a fight erupts on late Saturday nights fueled by jealousy, overdue bills and the fear of death.

  No, nobody knew, despite the fact that he had to stop by a cart on the top of the dam, about four stories above street level, and have some fresh coconut water before going home. Every night he'd stay an hour or so leaning over the parapet watching the waves pass the tidal farm and break against the outer side of the colossal shield. He'd feel the wind, moist and salty, wash his face and carry his breath into the air of Recife.

  And every night he'd think people had took action too late and he'd ask why it took so long to make people care. It certainly helped stop the guns and the bombs and made people pay some respect to the air and the sea, but it was almost as big a crime to raise the barrage. But he loved the wall. Especially because it had an awesome view of the green farms sprawled over the terraces and rooftops. It gave him some peace and good memories.

  Inácio was way past the normal time of his nightly ritual, waiting for some last-minute contractor to call him. He felt drowsy, but the feed from the blabbers he followed and the data flooding from the passersby wouldn't let him doze. Meet me, share with me and the outdated, but inevitable, buy from me danced on his contacts like animated billboards and fought with his own eydgets for the faintest attention. You should be home by now, his carbon tracker also insisted. You should be home to reset your footprint or else I'll shut down your systems. But the contractor had convinced Inácio to moIP him--communicate with him via an internet protocol while he was on the move--for a conference in the after-hours of the emissions market. So he waited, nervously watching the tracker's black bar go up, up, up with every breath and every gigabyte generated flying to the datacenter in his living room.

  He and Lúcio used to live on the northern side of the city, just five minutes away by train. Now he counted the ninth or tenth metro slide amidst the old concrete buildings and into the much newer modular habitations, their reusable materials in constant flux, easily transferrable as the whims of the urban pulse saw fit. It would normally be a zen-like experience, to cross the city sliding at high speed, seeing the deep green crown of the trees dot the asphalt and the silver lakes and rivers, natural and artificial, free to run their courses but also tightly controlled not to rebel against their margins. But now, he knew, there'd be only the humming of the solar batteries pushing forward the monorail, causing that corrosive, maddening itch in his eardrums which reminded him of forests, bugs and bullets. And, what's worse, at the end of the line there'd be no one to talk to.

  It took less than a minute after the market's close down for the would-be client signal asking for a voice call. It was a local number for sure, but held no digital signature or embedded business card. Inácio let the messenger blink twice before he threw his second empty coconut into the public recycler. The thing chewed and swallowed and made mechanical noises while sending the biomass down into the city's entrails. After the third blink he eye-commanded the app open to see what this mystery was all about. What Inácio didn't expect was the voice of a kid on the other side of the line.

  "Mr. Lima?" said the voice, childish but confident.

  "Is this some kind of joke, boy? Don't you have anything more productive to do than play tricks on me?" Inácio felt anger rush in his veins and was about to close the connection when, after a second, the kid replied.

  "This is no trick. We'd like to know if you'd be interested in doing a little research for us. We pay well." The voice couldn't belong to anyone past fourteen. But the young man was very determined and eloquent.

  "What the hell are you doing, kid? I tell you I'm going to track that number and..."

  "I represent a group of investors interested in hiring you," the voice interrupted. The voice wasn't confident. It was rehearsed and foreign. Inácio was staring at the disconnect button, pressed by his gaze but not yet released. He couldn't believe he was giving the prankster this much time to perform. "We're curious about a certain wikindustry," the brat continued, "and we'd like your professional opinion about it."

  "You got it wrong. I'm not a business consultant."

  "We know. You're a self-employed sustainability analyst. A greenman, formerly working for CrediCarb and also a war veteran.
You're exactly the man we want."

  Shock and shivers ran over his skin. Long seconds may have passed before Inácio noticed he was scratching under his collarbone, right where the logo of the GreenWar militia was tattooed. It was a primitive reaction, an echo of his time being hunted in the countryside when people like him, who broke with peaceful protests and took arms to fight for the environment, had to come back home after peace was reestablished. Then, he thought, everybody had them as the good guys. He soon learned that not only industrialists, landowners and cattle farmers hated him. For many of those caught in the crossfire, especially those dependent on the rich employers, he was a terrorist and an assassin. And for many years after the wall was built, right here in the city, he felt like he needed to hide the mark. Who'd have guessed that almost two decades later it'd become a fashionable design, its history blurred by trends and blended with the new times?

  The button-down straightened automatically as Inácio withdrew his shaking hand. The tattoo, just a bit darker than his own skin, had turned the color of diluted wine, hot and prickly. The train was nowhere to be seen.

  "Besides," the client continued, "we knew Lúcio. And he told us to look for you if we needed that kind of job."

  The prickling under his shirt had stopped. They talked in a dedicated moIP connection for no more than ten minutes, with only one of those spent on discussing the many zeroes being offered to Inácio as a reward and how they'd known his lover. Lúcio met them at the Shigeru Awards and apparently gave them Inácio's contact details.

  The three clients wore encrypted avatars that masked their features, appearing as nothing but dark cloaks with plasma globes for heads. But out of recklessness or sheer confidence their voices weren't jumbled. They were all teens.

  "And that's it, Inácio. We want you to find everything you can about Gear5's policies." The taller avatar had an older but more casual tone. Advanced physics algorithms made the illusion dodge waiters, tourists and other rich media floating in the augmented reality.

  In the real world, Inácio sat at a round stone table close to the escalator leading to the avenue down below. Rush hour had passed, but the traffic systems were still operating. The street drove the cars so close to each other they looked like a single line of black bars and yellow spots. "You understand that what you're asking is extremely unusual, don't you?" The analyst already had three search engines running in his field of vision, along with dozens of other eydgets, including some custom market research apps, blabber feeds and text clients, sending private messages to trustworthy contacts and opening anonymous topics in professional social networks' forums. "And your deadline is impossible to meet. I just can't provide you a full report about this Gear5 in less than eight hours."

  "I told you," said the third plasma globe. It had the sweet voice of a girl, but naturally distorted like a bad death metal guitar plug-in. "We should have contacted him much earlier."

  The youngest avatar seemed to turn to the angry girl and back to face Inácio. "Unfortunately, Mr. Lima, it's a very tight window of opportunity. But we know you're probably asking questions to your acquaintances by now and they'll certainly ask their own in the following minutes. We couldn't let an avalanche of gossip be spread before the markets were closed. Besides, we decided to make our move just a few hours ago when word has reached us that the company will open part of their codes tomorrow morning." The globe's innards were filled with a storm of pink lightning. The avatar leaned closer to Inácio. "But I don't think you really find the task all that unusual, do you?"

  He didn't. There was this indigent startup wikindustry operating for eleven months now with an ever rising stock of carbon credits and these kids, whoever they were, wanted to know whether the thing Gear5 had under development, besides the occasional crowdvertising for rising mobbands they claimed to do, was sustainable or not. That all meant he had to find out everything about the company and their product using, he'd say, unconventional methods. "Like I said, the deadline is impossible," he said.

  "Just give it a try. We trust you."

  Rich teenage wallets were not uncommon, especially in the tech business. But this group was different. They were too young and seemed to have a different focus, too new for him to clearly identify. So his only option was to treat them as a common group of aggressive investors, the kind of people he had a history of hating. "Look, I know you know exactly what that company has been developing. You won't tell me for competitive reasons, of course, but if you are considering the investment then you've already measured how much money you can get from that. So why bother with carbon market regulations they're certainly meeting? Just go there and put your cash on it."

  The young foreigner put his cloak-and-globe body back straight and raised, for the first time, a pair of ghostly hands. "You're not getting it, Mr. Lima." He looked like he was giving a lecture. "Money has meaning only to those old enough to remember it. No, Mr. Lima, we don't want to put a single penny on it. We want to find out if this project conforms to our working ethics. We want to invest our brains and bandwidth on it."

  "They've been buying lots of carbon," yelled the fat man, his suit flashing back the lights of the cabaret, "and not just from companies. They paid a great number of civilians too. Some kind of sponsorship. You know, they pay you an advance so you minimize your footprint and pay again to get whatever credits you have left. Not very cost-effective, but some companies do it to raise their public images. Publicity."

  The guy was called Josué Bispo, an old friend. Inácio got his reply still in the pier, disembarking from a late boat in the Sol Street. The stock broker was not the only one--not even the first--to answer Inácio's queries about Gear5, but the man told him he was around, in a brothel on the uppermost floor of the Sete de Setembro building, just a couple of blocks away. The place had a vintage feel, with loud technobrega music and hapticless soft porn playing on every table. Behind him, penciled on the remnants of a sheet of paper on the wall, the next inspection remained scheduled and three years late. "But what are they developing?" asked Inácio. "And how many people are involved?" Shouting over the music made his throat tired and sore.

  Bispo nodded and balanced his weight with an elbow on the table. He finally took advantage of a gap between songs and spoke in a more normal tone. "Nobody knows for sure. What I've heard is that it's some really disruptive shit. But whatever it is, it's something that leaves lots of residues and raises too much controversy. So much they couldn't possibly be competitive. Otherwise they wouldn't be stocking." Bispo took his last shrimp tempura from a bowl full of soy sauce, and ate it whole. "Do you remember those shrimp farms up north? I must confess I miss the big, big shrimps they had there. Much bigger, and much cheaper."

  Inácio grinned and raised a cup of iced tea. He remembers the long-gone farms, the first to be raided years ago. Hundreds of square miles of mangue, a whole ecosystem, turned into tanks for shrimps and oysters and then to fields of blood. He remembers the battle. "That's the price to be paid, old friend. Come on! Eat your expensive shrimp and be thankful that water isn't overpriced. We made our choice, pal, and I do believe it was the best option available." Though I feel sorry for turning myself into a killer.

  "Yeah. I guess so." Bispo stared at his beer glass. The data input was blank except for its temperature. A sign it had been smuggled. "So, are you fine?"

  "About what?" The sudden change of subject took him by surprise.

  "Lúcio. He'd have turned forty yesterday. But you know that."

  He did, but it hadn't occurred to him. Until now. He completely missed his lover's birthday. Maybe he had put too much effort into forgetting Lúcio's death. He'd spent the whole year running from detailed memories, especially those which would take him by surprise and, for the briefest of times, make him believe Lúcio was alive somehow. Instead he concentrated on general, safe memories like the place they first met, their wedding, the sex. But their secret names, their songs and birthdays, caused him too much pain. He couldn't let that hap
pen. He had to protect himself from suffering in the waking hours. And an empty house, an empty bed and an empty heart from dusk till dawn was pain enough. But yeah, he forgot Lúcio's birthday. And no, he wasn't fine.

  "I'll live," Inácio said and sipped some tea, now barely cold. "Have to." He met Bispo's gaze, ready to offer a friendly shoulder, but Inácio refused, slightly shaking his head. "Gotta pee. And then go." It was his turn to change subjects. "They want the whole story by morning, you know." But he didn't move. Bispo nodded once more and was gone before Inácio could stand and shake his hand. As real good friends usually do, he let Inácio pay the bill, so he eye-commanded the payment and asked for a copy of his footprint. It took the bar's AI systems some time to arrange things, as their usual costumers rarely asked for a carbon sync. Meanwhile, he summoned his tracker and was partly relieved to see it was still under the established mark, but uncomfortably close. Could be worse, he thought.

  As he turned his contacts on, the stream of incoming replies filled his inner screen. Silver discs linked by gossamer lines formed a cloud of social networks, as his best data miner started doing its magic. He was a spider, a vulture looking for something worthy in a herd of captured information. He assembled all the data his miner got from the cloud and started digging.

  He quickly found bits and pieces about Gear5. A rather new wikindustry, but older than what he and his contractors believed. It was about three years old, but was previously registered as Gear4, an entertainment company focused on ARGs and multimedia packs for mobbands. They were doing well in the long tail chart but for some reason, eleven months ago, they killed their assets, changed their name and started buying carbon like crazy, both from small businesses and citizens alike.

  Something uncomfortable was rising in the back of his mind.