by Robin Sloan
Scheme stepped past his desk, through a short corridor, and out into the circle of the forty-seventh floor. It was wide-open but not that wide across; we were close to the Shard’s sharp peak. The walls were all glass, and weak silvery light pressed in from outside.
On the far side of the floor, there was a cluster of tables—just raw spans of shiny material pitched across sawhorses—each supporting two or three monitors that glowed in the gloom. Seated at one of the tables, there was a man. When Scheme stepped out of the elevator, he straightened, but didn’t turn.
“It’s been a while, Bel,” he said. His voice was raspy but it carried across the floor. He was silhouetted against the gray glow. His head was completely smooth, and his ears stuck out like antennae.
Scheme set out across the floor. Three steps in, the man raised a hand and said: “Stop.” It came like the crack of a whip—a whip with a bunch of rattling, dried-up old bones tied to the end of it. Then, more gently: “Don’t step there.”
The floor was marked with white chalk; spidery lines traced out a circular maze. Cables snaked into the maze, ran through the curving channels, and converged in the center, where there was a white plastic cylinder, about the size of a blender. The quantum computer. There were still traces of yellow foam.
“Come around.”
His given name was Sebastian Dexter, but the whole world called him something different. I knew the other name better than most, because it was all over my source code. Like a surgeon who stitches his name into your heart: Sebdex.
That had been his handle from the age of thirteen, ever since his first encounter with a BBS, discovered two area codes away in back-road Kentucky and dialed furtively in deepest night. (Every magazine profile started with that BBS. The phone call that transformed the kid with nothing into, eventually, the man with everything.) Sebdex was Grail. He wrote its first spider and set it loose on the web. He wrote the first algorithms that could sense subtle threads of authority in a document. And he wrote the code that allows me to write this. Grail’s ticker symbol wasn’t GRAIL. It was SBDX. For him, one name was enough, like Sting or Prince or Bono or Frodo. He was Sebdex, just Sebdex, only Sebdex.
But there was apparently at least one person in the world who refused to use his nom de net.
“Sebastian,” Scheme said. “What the hell is this?”
“Why are you here,” he asked, flatly. He didn’t look up.
“Why is that here,” Scheme said, poking her chin at the quantum computer in the center of the floor.
“It belongs to me. And it won’t be here long.” He was still absorbed in his screens. The data projected around Jad’s desk was displayed here, too. “My project is almost finished.”
“I’ve met that banana box before,” Scheme said. “I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now.”
Sebdex sighed and bowed his head a little. “Jennifer Halais was, obviously, not supposed to have it. She stole it, Bel, and I should have said this already. But. Thank you for finding it.”
I had a closer view of Sebdex’s profile now. Some features I recognized from pictures: Bright green eyes. Cheekbones that jutted out, sharp-edged, from his face. He could have been handsome. But he wasn’t bald in pictures. And the rest of him was— wrong. He sat in his chair at a strange angle, and his neck seemed squashed, as if he was missing vertebrae. Some of his joints didn’t line up exactly right—shoulders and wrists. Maybe he had a disease. (The magazine profiles didn’t say anything about a disease.)
“And Fadi,” Scheme said. She was unfazed by his appearance, and her arms were crossed tight. “What about him?”
Sebdex said nothing. A rattling sound came from his chest.
“You’re a nano-manager, Sebastian, and it means you get all the credit,” Scheme said, picking up steam, “but it also means you get all the blame. If a man named Fadi Azer came into this building and never walked out”—she was almost shouting now, stabbing a finger at him—“you know exactly what happened to him.”
“People go pop in the fog all the time,” Sebdex said evenly. “Anything could have happened to your friend. Anything or nothing. Trust me.” He turned to face us.
He was missing an eye.
Scheme’s hand went up in front of her mouth. “Sebastian,” she breathed. “You didn’t.”
I couldn’t look away. It was a gaping dark pit. My video software was screaming ANOMALY! ANOMALY! because it was so weird, and so asymmetrical, and so black.
“I figured it out, Bel. I have a plan.”
“You promised you’d stop,” Scheme said.
“But I figured it out.”
“You lied.” Her voice was hard. “What are you doing? What are you doing here?”
Sebdex shook his head, and it turned on a crazy angle, more up-and-down than side-to-side. “It’s going to make everything worth it.” He looked at her evenly with his one bright green eye. “Everything, I promise.”
Scheme stepped quickly through the ground-floor lobby, but not too quickly for me to see one wall lit up with all the questions I’d just been flinging at Grail:
SEBDEX DISEASE NEWS
EYE (CANCER OR FUNGUS)
ANNABEL SCHEME GRAIL
ANNABEL SCHEME SEBASTIAN DEXTER
Note to self: use a different search engine. In another millisecond, the questions scrolled out of sight. There were no answers. Not yet.
“Fadi’s dead,” Scheme said, jogging back to where we’d parked, “and Sebastian did it. I can’t believe it—but he did. Sebastian. Sebastian!” A little growl rose in her throat, and she banged a parking meter with her palm as we passed it.
What are we doing now?
”You need to double-check, triple-check, every firewall you’ve got. Get more. Get something good from one of those gangsters.”
She found the car. I checked the time. Outside Fog City, the sun was on its way down.
Where are we going, Scheme?
“We’re going back to school.”
SUTRO'S SCEPTER
We came tearing up Market Street, buzzing and whining on the steep incline. I couldn’t pull myself away from the view out of Scheme’s left earring: all of San Francisco was laid out and lit up, sharp and vivid and three-dimensional. Fog City rose near the bay and the bridge, a big fuzzy bar of negative space.
Based on our vector up the hill, along with Scheme’s cryptic directive, I’d guessed where we were going:
Cal Sutro.
Satellite snapshots showed the University of California at Sutro’s Scepter as a cluster of concrete buildings clinging to the upper slope of the Hill of the Holy Spirit, the third-tallest peak in San Francisco. Open Britannica told me it began as an extension of the University of California at Berkeley in 1961 and became its own independent institution in 1979. Then it closed, suddenly, in 1997.
Looming over the campus, just beyond the soccer fields, was Sutro’s Scepter, the giant radio antenna and art project that was San Francisco’s icon and its eyesore. It was generally reviled, and when Grail built the Shard, people were relieved; at last, there was something new to put on souvenir mugs and commemorative tea kettles. But now, Sutro’s Scepter and Fog City rose like the two great tines of a city-sized tuning fork of weirdness. San Francisco just couldn’t catch a break.
We roared up a dark access road, rolled into an empty parking lot and came to a sparking halt. Scheme reached into the back seat for her messenger bag. She’d cooled down a little.
It was an ugly campus. An online photo gallery called it “Le Corbusier’s California Adventure.” The buildings were monochrome and featureless except for tall slotted windows. No two were on the same level; between buildings it was all steps and terraces.
“This is depressing,” Scheme said. She was hiking up away from the parking lot, plotting a steep course past the empty buildings. “They shut it down just after we graduated.”
I tried to imagine Scheme as an undergraduate. I couldn’t. We came to a wide terrace with a view o
f the entire campus.
“There,” she said, pointing a long finger towards one of the concrete blocks. “That was my dorm. Second floor. 206 Wozniak.” It was perched on a ledge, its back half pitched out into the air. It looked precarious.
Scheme, what does this have to do with Sebdex?
“Sebastian went here, too,” she said, back on the steps, breathing hard. “We were friends. Good friends.”
That wasn’t in the magazine profiles. In fact, education was a notable omission from his rags-to-riches story; nobody ever mentioned where Sebdex went to school. I assumed he didn’t. I assumed he taught himself combinatorics on the back of a shovel.
We came to the end of the steps but Scheme didn’t break her stride, wading straight into the hilltop scrub. And she wasn’t the first one to do it; I could see a faint track that wound up the hill, towards a dark tree line and, beyond, the tall twisted silhouette of Sutro’s Scepter.
“Hu, I need you to listen to me up here,” Scheme said. “Do exactly what I tell you, and don’t go exploring on your own. Don’t connect to anything unless I tell you to.”
Of course, Scheme, but—
“I’m serious. I don’t want to lose you. And if you disobey, I might.”
Of course.
The wind was whistling across the Hill of the Holy Spirit.
There was a wide, fenced-in disc of gravel and weedy grass, and in the center, Sutro’s Scepter rose out of the rocky ground. It was built from three massive steel pillars that twisted closer together as they reached higher, bound together along the way by a spider-webbing of catwalks and cross-beams. There were bright lights spaced along its length, all blinking blood-red. At the top of the Scepter, the pillars flared out again like three thorns, cradling an exploding bird’s-nest of antennas.
“Freezing up here,” Scheme said. “Always was.” Her hair was whipping like a red banner.
A triangular section of the fence had been cut and peeled back—years ago?—so she ducked down and stepped through. There, at the base of the Scepter, she bent over her bag and pulled out a thin black laptop, barely bigger than a sheet of paper. I was afraid it would blow away in the wind.
“My fingers are numb,” she said, fumbling with the keys. “Go ahead and give it a sniff, Hu.”
There was a wifi network here on the hilltop. Amazing. It was called UCSS-experimental. It was too weak to connect.
“Same here,” Scheme said. “Shit.” She craned her neck back. “We’ll go to the first landing.”
Up we went, rung by rung, Scheme’s hands almost blue against the dark steel of the Scepter. I couldn’t believe the view; I could see all the way from the Pacific across to the dark glittering bay. I could see the shrapnel of the Golden Gate Bridge. I could see Scheme’s house from here.
“Ugh,” she grunted, pulling herself up onto the first tiny landing, forty feet off the ground. It was just a flat, triangular platform, featureless except for the place where it met the pillar, where there was a tiny row of industrial-looking ports and outlets framed by scorch marks.
“We used to come here all the time,” Scheme said, sitting down. “Sebastian and me. To study.”
To study.
“Lots of studying. We discovered that the Scepter wasn’t just broadcasting radio stations. There were other signals, too. Signals from strange places. Try the network now.”
Success. I was now connected to the internet—or some other net—and Scheme was, too.
“So listen,” she said. “Seriously. Only go where I tell you.”
Where to, then?
Scheme sat back, bracing her spine against the dark bulk of the pillar. “Doctor Faustus.”
TRANSACTIONS
That was doctorfaust.us and it looked like something from 1999, with the logo spelled out in a bouncy cartoon font. It was an auction site, laid out like eBay, with rainbow-colored listings in different categories and little ticking clocks all over the place.
Except these were very strange listings.
MY LEFT ARM
MY RIGHT ARM
MY LEFT KIDNEY
At first I thought it might be a secret market for buying and selling body parts—and if that was the case, it was probably being run out of Locust Grove—but no, there was more:
THE MEMORY OF MY FIRST KISS
MY ABILITY TO ENJOY WINE
MY FIRST LANGUAGE
Scheme, what is this place?
“Pretty simple, Hu,” she said, typing into the search box. “It’s eBay for the good stuff. The sellers are stupid people. The buyers are demons. Old idea. New tool.” Her screen flashed and I saw a familiar handle. Sebdex.
“Jesus, Sebastian,” Scheme breathed. “No.” She was scrolling through his profile, his transaction history. It was a very long history. “You promised you’d stop.”
Scheme, what do sellers get in return here?
“Depends,” she murmured. “Sometimes money. Sometimes you get a better body. Get smarter. Or you get the guy you want. The job you want. Of course, you’ve got to be willing to give something up in return.”
I loaded the section of the site labeled KIDS.
MY FIRST-BORN CHILD
MY SECOND-BORN CHILD
ALL MY CHILDREN, AND MY CHILDREN'S CHILDREN
It went on and on.
On Scheme’s screen, Sebdex’s transaction history read like an anatomy textbook cross-faded with a curriculum vitae. Fourteen years ago, the first listing:
MY LEFT PINKIE TOENAIL
In return, he aced his thermodynamics final.
“I can confirm,” Scheme said, “that nothing ever grew on that toe again. He’d show it off like a trophy. Fucking Sebastian.”
Twelve years ago:
MY MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD
“He wanted to get rid of those anyway,” Scheme said. “They weren’t good memories.”
In return he—oh. Wow. In return he got Grail.
You knew him then, Scheme?
“I was looking over his shoulder when he posted it,” she said, and sighed. The wind was blowing harder now. The list continued:
MY HAIR
MY T-CELLS
MY SENSE OF HUMOR
What did Sebdex get in exchange for his laughter?
Quantum computation.
So the great breakthrough—Grail’s great magic, the thing that scarred San Francisco, created Fog City, almost killed the Beekeeper—was a reward from a demon called Thrall, whose user icon was a horned goat-head with nuclear hazard symbols for eyes.
“That’s when I left,” Scheme said. “When he did that. I told him not to. I screamed at him.”
Recently, Sebdex’s seller ratings had been getting worse. For most of his history, it was all five stars—“A+ would do business again” from a whole host of different demons—but starting six years ago, complaints had been cropping up.
“Too slow with payment,” wrote KingSorrow. Three stars.
“Memories not as rich as promised,” wrote Asura83. Two stars.
“Misrepresented health of soul,” wrote CocytusKid. One star.
A week ago, Sebdex offered:
MY RIGHT EYE
“Demons love eyes for some reason,” Scheme sighed.
Maybe they’re preternaturally delicious. Like Fadi’s falafels.
She made a little heh sound. “I’m glad you’re able to find some levity in the single saddest website that anyone has ever created.”
Who did create this, Scheme?
“I have no idea,” she said. “And trust me, we tried to cook up an interdimensional whois. Well, Sebastian did. He used to have a whole server set up here”—she patted her palm on the landing—“and a cable that ran through the woods. But Ethernet didn’t go that far, so he had to build little repeater stations every so often, and squirrels would always turn them into nests and chew through—” She caught herself. The smile that had been growing on her face vanished. “The point is, I have no idea. But I feel sorry for every single person who’s
ever found it.”
In exchange for his eye, Sebdex had stated simply: “I want my quantum computer back.”
“No,” Scheme said. “No, no, no.”
Scheme, were we part of this?
“No. Just a coincidence. Fucking. Sebastian.”
Finally, we came to Sebdex’s most recent offer. It was brand new, posted last night. The offer:
THE SOUL OF FADI AZER
Sebdex had come a long way from his left pinkie toenail. There was a little animated fire icon next to the listing; apparently, Fadi’s soul was a hot commodity. The reward was simple. Sebdex wrote: “I want to live in the best of all possible worlds.” A demon named AngelusNovus had agreed to the trade. Its icon was a cartoon face with curly hair.
Scheme didn’t speak. She was scowling, and her lips curled up as if she’d smelled something terrible.
Scheme, can he do that? Sell Fadi’s soul?
“You can offer whatever you want, if you can get your hands on it,” she said. She slammed her laptop shut. “Let’s go.”
Far below, the streets were sparkling in the deepening blue of dusk. Here on the hilltop, the dark trees were bending in the wind.
There was a man in the woods.
Scheme—
Beyond the fence, just at the edge of the treeline. A dark outline, just barely darker than the scratchy darkness surrounding it. An outline with the suggestion of a jacket and a strange hat.
Scheme. Jack Zapp is here.
“What?”
He’s on the path. Just inside the trees.
“I don’t see anything,” she said, squinting. I turned my eyes up, all the way to maximum sensitivity, until San Francisco was burning like the surface of the sun and the woods were a field of blue-green fuzz—and I could see him clearly. He was walking out in the open, coming towards the Scepter.
