That wasn't right, he thought. They spent billions of reais buying carbon. It was as if Haiti, Angola, or another developing country wanted to compensate their whole footprint in a single financial year. Inácio turned the haptics on. He had to be faster. He moved blocks of data with eyes and hands, building diagrams and going through even deeper into the cloud. But no matter where in the web he went he couldn't find who the people behind Gear5 were and who was paying for their carbon trade. Not to mention that damn product. For all he knew it didn't exist.
He felt that unease again marching over his spine up to his neck, crossing his brain and into his eyeballs. But he kept his focus on a spreadsheet conjured to list all the reported trades Gear5 made in the past few months. The numbers would never match. There wouldn't be enough companies or individual carbon sellers available and with sufficient margins left in their footprints to feed that stock. No, there wouldn't.
And this meant they were buying from the black market.
Pressure from within his eyes forced him to press his palms against his face in an attempt to release the pain, to keep his mind from going out. He was so tired. He wanted to sleep.
When he opened his eyes again he noticed a man who seemed to be watching him, half-hidden under a curtain of smoke and red stroboscopic light at the far end of the cabaret. The figure had a familiar silhouette but Inácio didn't recognize him. He felt a rush of adrenaline in his blood and quickly packed the sheets and docs and messages in a cloudlock. But the man was already gone, vanished behind the swinging bodies of two live performers. He definitely needed some rest. But it was time to leave.
On the way to the bathroom, Inácio stumbled over three customers and a chair, and almost fell twice. The place looked odd, stretched and oblong. It seemed bigger inside than it actually was. If he'd had any alcohol, he'd say he was feeling hung over, dizzy and suddenly sick. He stumbled at the white door of the bathroom, curved as if seen through a peephole, and brightly colored by too many opened eydgets. Inácio tried to shut up the blabbers feeding their voice messages with news and comments and rants and flames, but found he was unable to close any of the transmissions.
Tens, hundreds or thousands of voices talked to him simultaneously, making his head a new Babel, too heavy a mind, unsustainable. Under the cacophony a single sound, constant yet barely distinguishable, drew his attention. He finally leaned over the sink with eyes closed, but even so he'd see an augmented reality version of his inner cavities, filled with interfaces and white noise.
And then it stopped.
Both his hands were shaking uncontrollably and his shirt was damp with sweat. Slowly, he moved his palms into the sink and cupped them under the water. He kept the tap running, not giving a damn about water resources or the new stories being built in the counter's black bar.
Two voices entered the bathroom talking about yesterday's futebol game. They were followed by men visible from the bottom of the large mirror. Inácio felt spam coming and instinctively blocked their sports network's invitation and the game footage hovering over their heads. The two men walked past him and carried on their dialogue at the urinal, their voices going lower and lower, finally engulfed by the sound of a hum, a murmur from the past causing an itch deep inside his eardrums.
"I need your help," whispered the voice under the buzz.
In the mirror Inácio saw a third man standing right behind him. He turned, startled, ready for a fist fight. He fell backwards when his dead lover spoke.
"I'm dying," said Lúcio and the lights, the web and the world went black.
Inácio threw up his dinner and passed out.
"Will you be long? I've got a fever." The video with Lúcio speaking lay open in the corner of his vision. In the recording, showing the very European face of his deceased partner, Inácio was just a voice actor, answering his plea with a hurried 'in a moment' and then shutting down the call. That was their last conversation. Two years ago Lúcio was diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease, treatable in most cases. Nine months later he was dead. Fuck! He misses him so much. Not for a single moment did the man he fell in love with give up living. He never surrendered. He loved the simple fun of being alive. Be it a walk in the park, a hotly disputed videogame home championship or a kiss after slow, contemplative sex.
A low whistle put an end to his waking dream. The street printer in front of Inácio was old, expensive and prone to malfunction, but at least it used organic polymers and was able to embed processors in the fabric. It was two in the morning and printing himself a new shirt on the go was way faster than doing the same at home for free. Inácio had thrown his ruined button-down away at the first recycler and walked bare-chested, looking for the machine. After the blackout, as energy and communications came back online, the two men back in the bar's bathroom insisted on calling him an ambulance, but Inácio told them he was fine and that he only had a blood pressure peak. Tough day, he said. It was his dead husband's birthday and he thought he had seen him right there, before falling unconscious for a few seconds. Yeah, stress does that, they replied.
After checking if all the systems were functioning he put the brand-new shirt on and headed to the São José quarter, in the south side of downtown. He was going to the big Market enclosed in the maze of alleys in one of the city's oldest quarters. He was going to Recife's black market, where he believed some of Gear5's carbon smugglers could be found.
He was halfway to São José when the blinking icon of an incoming moIP call blossomed in his sight, automatically pausing the video's loop. He accepted the virtual meeting, slowing his pace to free the connection of time-lag. Preliminary conclusions were highlighted in the report, still in its infancy, minimized for quick access. He promptly opened the document knowing who might be the caller.
"We tried to contact you earlier. You went offline for almost an hour," asked his foreign client. Cloak-and-globe's AI made his avatar walk along with Inácio. "What happened?"
"An hour? I think I ate some rotten shrimp and passed out for a few minutes. Nothing serious. Oh, and there was a little energy shortage or something. Blabbers are saying lightning has struck a major power line, so communications might be a little messy."
Two parallel plasma lightnings, just like eyes inside the glass globe, turned to face the analyst. "Have you made any progress?"
With the haptics on, Inácio threw the report and some of the evidence in a collaborative space pocketed in the moIP connection. "Yes. I'm almost sure they're buying illegal carbon credits from the black market. See the numbers? They aren't real." Inácio had an animation running, with dozens of names cascading into the image of a plastic bucket floating between them. "Those are the names of companies Gear5 has claimed to have traded regularly in the past six months. All fake."
Cloak-and-globe picked a name and drew it closer to his face. He seemed to examine its typography. "And that means...?"
"That means Gear5's probably a carbon washer. It claims to be developing some high-impact product and starts buying cheap credits from a large number of sources. Since their product has a really large footprint, they naturally need many sources, right? So no one notices the fraud."
Inácio had just put together the pieces, forming an almost complete picture in the jigsaw. But that kind of illegal activity was uncommon, for carbon trade was conspicuously watched. And not only by national agencies, but also by non-government organizations, both private and voluntary, like CrediCarb, Carbon Watch and E-Missions, the latter founded by GreenWar veterans and allowed to conduct limited investigations if called. An activity absent from Inácio's curriculum.
"But in reality," he continued, "they're buying cheap credits like, say, carbon dioxide, and trading large chunks of it in the black market for heavier credits, mostly stolen, and sold at the lowliest of costs.
"Then they re-trade the heavy credit, probably chemical waste, to some still underdeveloped or developing nation. All that under a confidential agreement. The said nation pays the heavy carbon wit
h another large quantity of cheap carbon, which re-enters the cycle, but also with a lot of money.
"In the end, the buyer paid less for more credits, which legally lowers their footprint and enables them to do business with big traditional companies, wikindustries, and well-developed nations like us who are signatories of the Rio, Kyoto, Shenzhen and Tripoli protocols. On the other hand, the fraudulent company gets lots of money in the process. Much more than what was spent buying the first cheap credits. And yes, their old practices still prefer money."
Cloak spent most of the time silently staring at Inácio like a statue. When his voice came out it was smooth and determined. "You're wrong," he said.
"What?" Inacio stopped and pulled his client's illusory mantle. "Wrong how?"
"To begin with, they do have a real product."
He was a foreigner in this city-within-a-city.
The São José quarter, unlike the rest of Recife's downtown, was pretty much alive now at three in the morning. Street vendors, food carts and electric trucks, packing and delivering cargoes of recyclable materials, conferred on the place a cosmopolitan atmosphere. And there were people; too many people. Seven or eight young adults ran past him chasing a ball, blackened after years of use. They were having a break from the deep night school, a way to keep the area's high literacy rates. They dodged passersby running errands and almost ran over a tall man in a black suit turning the corner. The man stopped to let them pass, and calmly re-entered the crowd.
The neighborhood was one of the two surviving permanent autonomous zones created in the 'twenties after years of civil unrest. Reconstruction, urbanization, and ultimately a decent life began after the government accepted the fact that the people could administrate the bairro better than the white-collars ever would. But after some time, independence demanded the necessity to be carbon-free, which made São José a center of excellence for recycling and sustainable design, but also home to some of the fiercest Brazilian carbon smugglers.
So the streets were chaotic, yes, but cleaner than those in the outer city. There were fewer rich media oozing from the walls and the people, and only the dangling jury-rigged cables connecting new apartments in the upper floors hurt the landscape. There wasn't a single public recycler around, but Inácio knew that a great number of men and women made a living out of collecting, separating and selling garbage in online auctions, both for reuse in energetic processing and for manufacturing things the printers weren't able to make.
The leader of one of the biggest collectors' cooperatives was precisely the man the soldier-turned-analyst was looking for. His name, or the name he was known by, was Capitão. He had fought with Inácio in the war and was directly responsible for him joining the fight. Inácio soon became his superior in the militia, but the commander never dared to make a move without consulting the elder.
On the billboard spinning before his eyes, Inácio could see the name, municipal subscription number and other general information of the São José PAZ's Garbage Collectors Association. The building was an eighteenth century warehouse but its frontispiece was richly enhanced by augmented reality inputs, a fluid animation constantly displaying different stages of a recycling facility. Capitão stood by the old, big cedar door smoking a cigarette, observing the tide of human beings.
"If you won't quit this shit by yourself, lung cancer will do it for you," said Inácio. There was some passive-aggressiveness in his tone, but a half-smile belied his anger. It was good to meet the old man. "Last time we met you said you'd stopped."
"We all have our sins, don't we? And our secrets," the gray-haired man replied with a grin. "You could have moIPed me, you know. Instead of visiting me live."
They gave each other a tight hug. Perhaps three years had passed since the last time they met face to face. Capitão didn't attend Lúcio's funeral, of course, but not because he had anything against Inácio or his partner. On the contrary, he and Lúcio were great friends. Truth is that the old man, who had killed many men and as many more die in the field, couldn't stand the sight of his only child grieving for his dead lover. "Come in, son," said Capitão. "Tell me what brings you here."
"That's why I didn't moIP you. I was coming anyway." They were both leaning over the mezzanine's wood parapet. On the ground floor several tall garbage piles were negotiated, each one by a different associate wearing home-made Augmented Reality glasses. Many were young, some were well-dressed, but some looked little better than mendicants. The cooperative supplied the hardware and hosted the entire commercial infrastructure for a notional fee. In his contacts, Inácio could see the giant screen showing today's rates for aluminum, glass, rubber and other non-biodegradable materials. And the hot deal today was antimony.
"They must be paying well," said Capitão.
"It's not about..."
"I remember you quit E-Missions because you had to do this exact same job in the US."
"Don't start."
"And then you joined that bastards at CrediCarb, got rich and then quit again to get even richer." Capitão stared at Inácio, but didn't seem to be angry either. Only bitter.
"I'm not rich. And I'm not with CrediCarb because they're fucking corrupt." Inácio was on the verge of yelling at his father, but lacked the energy for a fight. Two hours from now the sun would rise and he had absolutely no idea what Gear5 was about to release. His forehead felt hot, hotter than the air inside the warehouse.
"Of course they don't have any fixed address." He told Capitão. "They're a fucking wikindustry." And of course he could throw shit at the fan and watch it spread and stink so much Gear5 would be forced to postpone whatever plan they had, so he'd win some more time and could dig a little deeper. His eyelids closed against his will, his head leaned to one side. There was a buzz behind his ears. It sounded like chaos playing the enchanters' flute. "It doesn't matter. I need your help."
"Sure. What can I do for you?" Capitão turned and lit another cigarette.
Sweat was beginning to exude from his body. The sound was rising in pitch. "I need to know who their supplier is. And don't look at me like that. I'm sure you know." Inácio grabbed the wooden parapet as his hands began to shake.
"Even if I knew, it would be stupid to go there and actually talk to them. They don't talk. They're people from before the wall. They kill."
Inácio guessed he was right, but it was so hard to concentrate on anything. His skull was pounding. "Come on, you know everything that happens in São José. I know it's in the Market, but I have to know who the man is."
Capitão took a deep, smoky breath. "Sorry, son. I can't help you. I don't know who he is."
"You're lying." He didn't look up.
"Maybe. If so, it's for your own protection."
"But I'll go anyway. That's what I have to do." The icon of an incoming video message worsened his headache. It was from Bispo.
"And this is the part where you ask me for a gun."
"And this is the part where you give me one." Capitão was probably the last man in town, except for the military, to have a lethal weapon. Below them, the associates were in frenzy. Electronic waste suddenly became the top priority.
There was a man in a black suit standing at the center of the waste piles. He was looking up in Inácio's direction.
"And this is the part I change the script," Capitão told him. "Write your report anyway you can. But don't mess with the carbon smugglers. They'll kill you."
In a tiny window, Bispo looked nervous, but that could be the result of the video's low resolution or Inácio's own weariness. "Hey, Inácio! Tried to moIP you, but it seems you're offline," said Bispo in the recording. "Look, I found something that might be useful. I decided to nose into Gear4's deals record and there were some contracts with volunteers for research into a new direct control interface for their videogames. And Lúcio was in." Inácio felt the buzz rise to an almost unbearable volume. The man in the black suit waved him an invitation to follow and before Inácio thought about it, he was on the move, goi
ng down the stairs, leaving his father and their argument with no further ado.
The lights started to fail. Lúcio waited at the door.
"Am I hallucinating?" Inácio was feeling feverish and completely worn out. He was an arm's distance from a ghost wearing his lover's shell.
"Sort of." Lúcio's voice was most tired, yet his appearance couldn't be more jovial. "Come. There's no time. I can't keep the connection. Come to the market. No one will harm you. They'll bring you to my presence. You must help me die."
And for the third time since they met, he vanished.
A young soldier led Inácio down corridors through the boxes in the very heart of São José's Market. Inside the nineteenth century building, anything could be found. Electronics and herbs, software and food. Live animals, healthcare and personal data centers. But in its center there was a tent, like a circus, where the many types of carbon credits, from sulfates to oxides and dangerous wastes, were sold under the counter. Inácio walked fast, almost faster than his armed guide. The boy picked him up in the market's main entrance. Neither of them spoke. The boy knew, Inácio knew.
Fabric walls divided the space inside the tent, a business center made of cotton and organic polymers. Inácio could see through half-opened curtains some of the businessmen gesticulating over invisible, encrypted AR screens, buying and selling hacked or forged credits. When deals were set, one would slide a hard drive, a physical, wireless cube where data was locked.
The scene repeated itself until the guide stopped in front of a nondescript door-curtain and told Inácio to go in.
"I thought you wouldn't come." Lúcio stood alone in the room, wearing the same suit and the same worn out features. But he smiled, and that made Inácio's heart thump. He felt tears rolling from his eyes. He was confused and tired and probably mad, but hell, was he happy.
"I don't understand," said Inácio still at a safe distance, but willing to ignore his survival instincts and grab Lúcio in his arms. "Are you alive? How?"
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