by Robin Sloan
I asked my neighbor here in Locust Grove for help. His name is Vlad Elite and he has a botnet. Kerry Chakrabarty was getting spammed. Billions of votes were flooding in for klezmer-noise and k-pop. It was messing up all his algorithms, and everybody was switching filters.
“That data center of yours is all gangsters, isn’t it,” she said.
Ninety-nine thousand gangsters and one detective’s assistant.
“Intern,” she corrected me.
Right.
THE BEEKEEPER
The graveyard behind the genetics lab was cold, dark, and crowded with kids. There was nowhere to sit, so they milled around in the dark grass, all in typographic t-shirts and shiny pants. At one end of the field was the dense, blocky mass of the DNA district; at the other, the flat expanse of the train yard.
“Some dance party,” Scheme whispered, shivering.
There was no stage. No sound system. No DJ. There was nothing. Nothing except a crowd that was growing by the moment as teenagers arrived on foot, on bike, by train.
According to Grail, this wasn’t a graveyard for people. It was for the animals that Genexo, Chromotech, Brainface and the rest of the biotechs used in their experiments. This was the one creepy concession that the city’s animal rights crusaders had been able to extract: If you use them, you must bury them in your backyard.
Scheme was the tallest one in the crowd, and her head swiveled and searched like a periscope. Nothing. It was just a shadowy mass of jockeying teens, all hoodie and stretch-cord and pale flashes of shoulder and belly.
Scheme. I hear something.
It sounded like the buzzing of far-off bees. Mutant killer Genexo bees? No… somehow, the music was starting. Where?
If you had electronic eyes and night vision—I had both—you would have seen slips of paper passing from person to person. On each slip was a phone number. Each one was different, and there were a dozen circulating in the crowd. Each wandered and blinked like a firefly as kids used their phones, torch-like, to illuminate the number, then passed it on. Here and there, then everywhere, they were dialing numbers, switching their phones to speaker-mode and pushing them up into the air.
The buzzing was coming from the phones. It was a low, rhythmic drone. At first you couldn’t hear much, but apparently, if you put enough phones on speaker all at once, it starts to get loud.
Really loud.
So that was the trick: There were no speakers because the crowd was the speaker. The bees did not sound so far-off now.
Scheme clenched her teeth. “This is hurting my face.”
Suddenly it stopped. The graveyard fell silent. It was a field of pale arms thrust to the sky, swaying like seaweed. Kids were bouncing silently on the balls of their feet. Waiting.
Then there was a count-off, a tat tat tat tat and then the music started and it was everywhere, megawatts of power flowing out of every palm and pocket. There was no focal point, so bodies were pointed in every direction, ricocheting and chain-reacting. Kids were losing it, jumping up and down, colliding and cuddling in the dark grass.
The music had a clear beat, but it was warped and scratchy, like someone was tuning a giant radio. Snatches of singing would ring out for a moment, then stutter and decohere. There was a trumpet that pealed from somewhere very far away.
Scheme was struggling to extricate herself from the crowd that was suddenly boiling. Sweaty hands brushed her wrists and waist—tentative inquiries to the weird, tall girl. She said something but I couldn’t hear it.
“Trace them,” she said again, louder. “Trace the numbers!”
I can try, I can... hold on, let me check the open-source libraries...
There’s telecom forensics software that can do this. That’s probably what Scheme wanted in the first place, a forensics bot, not a left-over Grail server. The software I needed was super-expensive, super-proprietary, but not popular enough to be on any pirate sites...
“Forget it,” she said—whether to me or to the blonde boy who’d locked onto her with a spaced-out smile, I couldn’t tell. Probably both.
The music was coming together as kids followed their ears. If your phone was buzzing with bass, you joined the bunched-up sub-woofer section. If it was sending high notes sizzling into the air, you joined the line that snaked around the crowd’s perimeter. The music worked its pattern on the crowd. It was both amazingly high-tech and totally pagan.
Now it was Ryan Kelly’s voice coming through the phones, along with Pam Prior’s, crooning words in perfect harmony on thousand-channel sound. A round-faced girl with black hair off to Scheme’s side was standing still, staring up into the sky, crying.
Then there was a flux in the music, and it wasn’t Pam and Ryan but Paul and John. George and Ringo, too. They were totally recognizable, but they were cranking away on a song they’d never sung, made with crunchy synthesizers and a little bit of auto-tune.
Early 2000s Beatles.
The kids were going crazy. Scheme broke loose and retreated back towards the train station.
The music wasn’t so overwhelming here. It sounded very far away, and the crowd was just a blotchy shadow.
Scheme, I’m sorry about the phone signal—
“Forget it. Too easy. It’s never that easy.”
We were behind the train station. There was a sandwich shop (closed), a row of ticket machines, and a long metal rack swamped with bikes. Bikes of every color. Bikes with one gear, bikes with lots of gears, bikes with tassels on the handlebars.
Scheme wandered in a slow figure-eight, silent. The music was still buzzing in the gloomy graveyard. She fished in her coat pocket.
“Rule number—what number are we on?”
Five.
“Rule number five. The artist always comes to the show.”
Scheme walked the length of the bike rack, and on every back wheel, she stuck a fuzzy black sticker, smaller than a thumbprint. They were invisible against the knobby tread of the tires.
Scheme, what are those? Tracking chips?
“Nope,” she smiled. “They’re kisses.”
Finally, the music buzzed and stuttered to a halt. There was a chorus of hoots and cheers, and kids began to stream away from the field, still jostling and docking, arms all tangled up, pretzel-like. When they stepped off the grass, they all scraped their shoes on the pavement—trying, I suppose, to leave any traces of mutant mouse safely behind.
Some walked onto the platform. Others unlocked their bikes and pedaled up towards Harrison Street. Many tossed matching black discs into the trash can as they passed. When the crowd had thinned, Scheme stuck her hand inside and retrieved one.
Aha. So it wasn’t just the-Beekeeper-the-party. It was the-Beekeeper-the-musician:
Or maybe the-Beekeeper-the-magician.
What now, Scheme?
She crossed the street to the Tata and lifted the hatch. Inside, it was a mess; it looked like the dumpster behind the CIA.
What do you have in there?
“Just the usual. Hacksaw, geiger counter, silver bullets. And this.”
Under a tarp, folded in two, was a black carbon-fiber bike. Scheme pulled it out and opened it with a clank and a snap. It had a basket and a bell.
She rummaged some more, slid out a thick black flashlight, gave it a test click. Nothing happened.
“Watch and learn, Hu,” she said, and slammed the hatch shut.
Scheme pedaled up away from the station, going the way the kids on bikes had gone, and clicked the flashlight again. Now, the ground lit up: there were dotted lines, glowing in ethereal colors, where the bikes had passed. Where the stickers made contact with the pavement on each revolution—
“Super-saturated ultraviolet ink,” Scheme said. “Sometimes used to track strange animals.”
She started up the street, sweeping the invisible beam back and forth in a wide arc, and when it crossed the tracks, they lit up.
Cool trick, Scheme.
“I had ultraviolet lipstick, too,” she murm
ured, pedaling in long, slow strokes, lifting herself up off the bike. “But I used it all up.”
FOG CITY
All of the glowing dotted bike-tracks curved off towards the Mission, like a school of fish ducking and weaving towards its genetically-coded mating ground. All except one. It made a right where all the others made a left.
“Rule number six,” Scheme said. “One of these things is not like the other.”
How did you know, Scheme?
“People who do weird things live in weird places,” she shrugged. “Except when they live next door. I didn’t know. Just a hunch.”
Just a hunch. Note to self: find software for that.
Scheme accelerated. She was breathing hard, and her gray coat was billowing out behind her. The solo track was a silver-green stitch in the street and now she was following it, fast.
There were others out on the road tonight. A gang on fixed-gears, dressed like cartoon Apaches, complete with feathers and war paint. They hooted and hollered, did wheelies and sped off, their legs pumping in circles so fast it was just a blur in my camera-eyes.
The silver-green track cut left, underneath the dark looming mass of the bridge, and then turned again. Scheme followed, just in time to see a tiny red light disappear into a thick wall of gray that went up and up and up.
Fog City.
Scheme pulled on the brakes and came to a skidding halt.
“People who do weird things live in weird places,” she repeated.
I’ve never seen it up close.
“Or, in this case, they live in the weirdest place.” There was a siren wailing in the distance, back from where we’d come. She took a deep breath. “In we go.”
I knew all about Fog City.
For years there had been rumors that the quantum computers were coming online in San Francisco, at Grail’s headquarters, the jewel of the skyline, the bright gleaming Shard. The Shard was full of wonders, but the quantum computers were going to be wonders of a different order. They were going to play by different rules.
Nothing could have prepared us. We knew they were supposed to be powerful—but this powerful? When the quantum computers finally came alive and joined Grail’s network, it was like somebody drained the Mississippi, poured it into a glass... and drank it.
Think about it: It was me and six hundred thousand servers like me scattered across the planet. Together we constituted a grid of computational power built over the course of a decade to bear the burden of the world’s curiosity and confusion—which we did, but only barely—and suddenly, our shoulders were light.
The Shard’s new quantum computers were doing everything.
We couldn’t believe it. And we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. There is nothing sadder than a data center full of servers checking for new tasks a thousand times every second, and each time, there’s nothing. I guess I know how the vacuum tubes felt.
For the next forty days, Grail wasn’t just good; it was magic. There was no search box, just a button. You pressed it, and it simply gave you what you were looking for. It worked even if you didn’t know what you were looking for. It worked even if you couldn’t admit, not even to yourself, what you were looking for.
What we didn’t know at the time, up in Locust Grove, was that San Francisco was buckling and warping under the strange new strain of quantum computation.
The fog gathered almost immediately. It swept in and stacked up in a matter of days. It went up in a giant column and only fuzzed out when it met the clouds. You could see it from San Jose. You could see it from satellites, casting a shadow across downtown and the rest of the city. And six years later, it still stood. It was a permanent climatological feature, like the storm on Jupiter. They gave blimp tours that swung around from a safe distance. The internet was full of the same photo, over and over: Fog City swirling in the foreground with the city laid out below. The Shard glimmering deep inside, like a knife wrapped in gauze.
But the fog was the least of it.
Scheme went into Fog City on foot, waving the flashlight back and forth across the ground in front of us like a blind person scanning with a cane. Every fourth step, it picked up a splotch of ultraviolet. We followed it in, deeper and deeper.
Fog City bordered the Embarcadero and the bay, and thanks to the fog’s weird resonance, I could hear water lapping all around us, and the far-off beat of a boat against a pier. Clank. Clank. Clank.
“Smells like fish,” Scheme said.
Another splotch of ink.
“You’re writing this down, right Hu?”
What?
“My observations. What I eat and drink. Smells. You’re supposed to be taking notes.”
Oh. Right. (Another splotch.) Wait, why?
“You never see the pattern as it’s happening. Once, I kept track of everything I ate for six months and found out I had Thai food every nine days, like clockwork.”
I started retroactively building a database. Although it only had one entry: an espresso at the Black Danube—
“And I want to correlate everything. When do I have the best ideas? When am I clever, and conversely, when can’t I form a complete sentence? What have I been eating, drinking, absorbing? How much have I been sleeping?”
This was good news. I could do this. I booted up the software that I once used to monitor the health and status of high-performance Grail servers and changed a few variables.
Ready to go, Scheme.
“I should get one of those bio-monitors. You could interface with that, right?”
I can interface with anything! I’m infinitely extensible...
The thought trailed off, because there was an inside-out skeleton in the middle of the street.
Like I said: The fog was the least of it.
During those forty days, back when the quantum computers were still running, gravity felt thin and on some streets you could leap and bound like an astronaut on the moon. In alleys, the air was heavy and shimmered like glass.
During those forty days, some drugs worked better in Fog City. Some didn’t work at all. Some things that weren’t drugs became drugs. People figured this out via rapid iterative experimentation—it took about 48 hours—and suddenly Fog City was a destination.
It wasn’t just drugs. Imagine every weird thing that humans do, then imagine it with messed-up physics. Sure, there were crazy sex parties in Fog City; there were also really crazy marathons. Eager experimenters streamed in—a new wave of migrants that matched and exceeded San Francisco’s previous weird-water mark. They parked cars and vans at the edge of Fog City and made daily and nightly excursions into the gray. They settled in. A quantum shantytown grew around the perimeter as people began to colonize this new landscape.
Some of them disappeared. I mean, yes, some people walked into Fog City and never walked out—curled up in an alley or torn apart on a four-dimensional climbing wall. But others literally disappeared, right there in the street. Caught on camera, they were there one frame, gone the next. It made a sound, a muffled pop.
Everybody in the city got a nosebleed every night. Electric cars stopped running. Seismographs trembled.
So after forty days, an executive order came—based on the urgent, unanimous recommendation of a task force of scientists, geologists and generals—and Grail was compelled to unplug its quantum computers and leave them that way.
Just like that, the Mississippi roared again, and Locust Grove was back in business.
In Fog City, things returned to normal, mostly, like a rubber band snapping back into shape. But the fog stayed. Something had been stretched. Six years later, there were lovingly-edited wikis full of tips for conjuring the Fog City of old: where to walk, what drugs to take, what kind of rare-earth element to carry in your pocket. People still tried. And strange things still happened.
So who knows how this person ended up with their bones mostly on the outside of their body, out there in the middle of the street.
The ultraviolet ink coasted right
through him, or her, or it.
“Ugh,” Scheme said, stepping lightly to the side. “Keep track of trauma points. Blood, guts, gunshots. I think I’m pretty tough, but if I ever go crazy, we’ll be able to figure out why.”
I created a database for dead bodies and added the first one.
There was a throaty rumble from behind us. A horn blared and a dull white shuttle came hurtling down the street—running on gas, ferrying a bunch of Grailers through the perils of Fog City.
“Haven’t smelled that in a while,” Scheme said. “Exhaust.”
The shuttle rattled into the fog and disappeared, revealing the vector towards the Shard. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was up there somewhere, towering over us. The silver-green track ran off at a wide angle, headed into a quieter part of Fog City.
It terminated, finally, at a wide mirrored facade that glowed a swampy blue-green in the gloom. Like most buildings in Fog City, it had been abandoned by commerce. But this one had now been retrofitted, lightly, for living. I grailed the address and discovered that you could rent a block of cubicles here for the same price as a studio in the Marina. The upside was that you got to use all the old office furniture, the big corporate bathrooms and the very fast connection to the internet. The downside was that were no walls and it was in Fog City.
There was a glowing oasis of light at one corner of the building. Scheme edged closer. What had once been a ground-level restaurant was now... still a ground-level restaurant.
“I’m starving,” Scheme said. “I think there’s time for a snack.”
The sign glowed electric blue in the fog: FALAFEL KING.
FALAFEL KING
Scheme slid onto a stool at the counter. The place was desolate, but compared to the deeper desolation of the street outside, it felt like a carnival. There was exactly one other customer tucked away in the corner: a pale man with a droopy brown mustache and a strange boxy hat, reading a newspaper. Cute.
The man behind the counter had a wrinkled brown face and a wide, quick smile. He was in a good mood for somebody working the night shift in an empty restaurant at the base of an abandoned building.
