Gemsigns

by Stephanie Saulter

  ‘I fix.’ His fingers were poised to get to work.

  ‘You can’t. It’s too big. Too many pieces of information are in too many places. There are too many people who would remember it differently. It’s not something we can take care of onstream.’ She sighed. ‘We’ve just got to hope we can keep on top of it at least until after the Conference. Will you monitor anything that’s said and searched about Gabe? I don’t want you to change anything, just watch. And let me know.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Her earset buzzed with an incoming message. She looked at her tablet and pushed herself up out of the chair. Herran turned to her, hands out, ignoring the sudden urgency of her movements.

  His face and voice were filled with wonder.

  ‘Callan might be Wenda’s baby?’

  *

  Across town from where police and paramedics swarmed over the employment centre, a community-service team moved through a warren of small plazas, the connecting passageways meandering between seating areas and around towering sculptures. Some guided mobile vacuum trolleys, the compactor units compressing the detritus of the city as they went. Others came behind on washers which scrubbed the pavements and laid down a coat of antifreeze. Flanking them were the wall and glass cleaners, men and women with backpack-mounted sprayers attached to long wands who tackled the vertical surfaces of the city canyons.

  One of them was a man of average height, but with extraordinarily long arms and a slightly stooped posture. His features were heavy and slack under a dirty thatch of glowing, shocking-pink hair, turning grey and dull at the temples. He hummed to himself as he worked, a faint atonal drone almost on the edge of hearing. The sound had a nails-on-blackboard quality that set the teeth of his fellow workers on edge.

  The gem worked quickly, leaving a gleaming strip almost three yards high behind him as he sidestepped along the building. When his rapid progress brought him closer to other members of the team they shifted away, noses wrinkling at an odour that contradicted the detergent freshness of the cleaning fluids. What with the smell and the droning, the man occupied a bubble several yards in diameter. He appeared not to notice, operating undisturbed within his own exclusion zone.

  Except for when another man walked behind him, which he seemed to find occasion to do every few minutes. He carried his wand low and flicked it at the back of the gem’s legs. A spray of liquid flashed across, taking a few seconds to soak through the greasy, heavy fabric of his overalls. The norm picked his moments: when the gem was angling into a difficult corner or reaching up for a particularly troublesome patch of grime, and everyone else was preoccupied with their own tasks. He would step quickly away, slipping behind one of the mobile units or addressing his attention to some other feature of the urban landscape, so that when the gem felt the cold and looked ponderously around he was neither the closest nor the most obvious suspect.

  The first couple of times it happened the gem was distracted for only a moment before returning to work. The third time he grunted angrily at his nearest neighbour, a woman who shook her head and shrugged in bafflement as he waved and mumbled. The fourth time the woman noticed the culprit as he slipped past her, but her attention was diverted by the gem’s offended roar as the water soaked quickly through already damp cloth. Others stopped and turned, moving to stand and stare and mutter to each other from the edge of the stench horizon as the gem gestured and growled.

  It took a minute or more for him to calm down and everyone to return to work. The anonymous taunter waited almost ten before applying another dose of freezing irritant. This time the woman saw him do it. She opened her mouth for a challenge, inhaling a lungful of stink as a hand on the end of an extraordinarily long arm closed around her throat.

  *

  Another newstream alert started flashing in the corner of his tablet. Eli killed it, scanned the latest on-the-scene report of a gem-norm flare-up that had ended badly, and disciplined himself back to work. There was nothing to be gained by obsessing over each new incident, or plotting the track of rising hysteria on the streams. He had assigned someone else to that. He was determined to spend the time before he departed for the Squats tackling problems that he might have some hope of solving.

  He had decided, deliberately and purposefully, to ignore the possibility that every piece of information he accessed, crosschecked, ran statistical analyses on and sent to colleagues for expert opinions might have been manipulated to ensure that just the right conclusions were reached. He told himself it was impossible for there to be such widespread infiltration into all the various avenues of inquiry he was undertaking. Changes on that scale, however subtle, would have been noticed and reacted to. If the gemtechs had had such power at their disposal the revelations that had cost them so dearly would have been altered in the telling. Nevertheless the thought now lurked in the back of his mind every time he picked up his tablet.

  He had said nothing of the day’s events to his research team when they had conferenced in with results earlier. They had confirmed that, as Zavcka Klist had predicted, there were no other records of gems maiming, raping or killing norms or their children while under gemtech control. Towards the end, when public opinion had turned against the gemtechs to such a degree that gems could escape curfew by simply walking away from their keepers while out on assignment, more attention had begun to be paid to those held in secure quarters; stories of unauthorised visits by intrepid journalists on fact-finding missions formed part of the pre-Declaration mythology. Not all had escaped unscathed, but none had been killed or seriously injured. The stories of the twisted, terrified, terrifying creatures kept under lock and key that they had come back with had fuelled the demand for the modification of humans to stop.

  Eli had shared the report and embedded vidstreams with his team the day before. The salient facts had now been verified: the mother had occasionally taken her daughter to work, against all regulations and unbeknownst to her superiors, when unable to arrange child care. Her colleagues had turned a blind eye; having never had any real problems with their charges, they were untroubled by the breaking of rules which seemed to them excessively cautious. She had made the girl stay out of the vidcam fields, which was easy enough since they were programmed only to follow the movements of the gems. She had told her simply to stay away from them, and them to stay away from her, as the small group she was responsible for minding moved around their living area.

  The gem had attacked at a time when all the others had been removed, to work or for whatever other purpose the day’s rota decreed. While the mother was escorting the last of his companions away he had begun his assault on the child. The soundproof walls that had kept any conflict amongst their regular occupants from spreading, coupled with lacklustre vidcam security, meant that no one knew what was happening until the mother returned. He had casually incapacitated and tossed her aside and gone back to the girl, who by now was mercifully unconscious. But the woman’s scream before the door had been slammed shut was heard. It had taken ten minutes to determine what was going on, assemble and arm the security team, and get inside the dormitory flat. In the aftermath, the police had apparently agreed that the only thing that news coverage of the incident would achieve would be further trauma to the family by publicising the mother’s negligence.

  The review of incidents of unheralded violence – sexual, serial or otherwise – since the Declaration was rather less straightforward. The team had spent a lot of time discussing the findings, and the implications. Eli set out several very specific analyses that needed to be done in order to confirm their conclusions before the start of the Conference. It would require intensive work overnight. He thought the prospect had come as a welcome relief to them after the minutiae of the Bel’Natur report.

  He had uncovered some other interesting facts on his own. These he kept to himself.

  *

  A few hours and several new reports later, Zavcka Klist watched, jaw clenched, as Aryel Morningstar spoke live to an assemblage of jour
nalists from the major newstreams. The vidcams lingered over every detail of the small, terribly misshapen gem with the sweet face, unmistakable intelligence and unaccountable charisma. What she had to say was simple and eloquent. The gigantic lump on her back was a silent testament to the wrongs of which she spoke. Zavcka could see her own morning’s efforts being, if not wiped out, severely diminished.

  She wasted five furious minutes haranguing her covert sources for their continuing failure to find anything at all on Aryel Morningstar; even to determine the nature of the deformity she hid beneath her cloak. The garment continued to repel their most sophisticated scanners.

  Then she calmed herself down and sent another string of coded symbols to another comcode. At the meeting, standing side by side in front of the displays in an obscure art gallery, she issued new instructions.

  @l8ergenius Fckg gems on rampage killing folks in LDN.

  @frakkk gems kicking off all ovr twn, 12pple in hsptl.

  @s3gw8 @frakkk I heard 30 but govt trying to keep quiet

  @gogem dont beleve it! sumthing mustve happend, gems r gr8!

  @pli5t whats up with gem got beat up yestday?

  @s3gw8 retard on dolework went crazy 5 hurt lifes tuff enuff

  @h8gems @pli5t deserved it

  @s3gw8 crazy letting them mix with us, need separation back!

  @ctybee @s3gw8 Did you see what happened after w/ hunchback?

  @frakkk @gogem ur crazy, theyre a menace

  @gmcuckoo @pli5t @h8gems heard it was all faked for conference.

  @l8ergenius fckg politicians let them out never shouldve happened

  @ldnlvr @gogem Heard gems WERE provoked, overeacted, no deaths tho.

  @gmcuckoo not surprised weve been beating gems up for decades now its war.

  @pli5t felt sorry for gems before, not any more, conf better come up w smthg

  @ctybee thought she was amazing: urbannews.ldn/headlines/current/morningstar

  @ldnlvr @gogem shudve just backed down, kept thr place

  @gogem gems r oppressd, not ther fault

  @ctybee shes awesome

  @gmevil10 this is just the beginning, 1 of them can take out 10 of us, need a plan

  @frakkk urbnews sayng gems thrtned kids on way to skl

  @notogems been saying 4 years ths wd happen! shoodve cxld them all.

  @h8gems @notogems @gemevil10 agree, are you of the Faith?

  @gogem gems need help not hate check out morningstar link

  @gmevil10 @gmcuckoo @pli5t no excuses for evil, gems shd not exist

  @s3gw8 @gmevil10 gems do lots of things we don’t want to / cant

  @ldnlvr @gogem @gemevil10 gems v useful but not same as us

  @frakkk @gogem so what FUCK OFF

  @gmevil10 @s3gw8 if humans cant do it then shudnt be done

  @notogems politishans need to no wont stand for bein wiped out

  @ldnlvr whtevr, cant go on like this, system needs to deal

  @notogems @h8gems yes, more evry day

  @gmcuckoo Another one! Gems robbed shop beat up woman.

  @h8gems @notogems Im NHT grp shd meet

  @gmevil10 GEMLOVERS DIE 2 NO MERCY

  @h8gems Im ready

  13

  The room was filling up. They were in a large hall located on the ground floor of the former leisure centre. It was the sort of space that had been intended to be multifunctional, accommodating everything from performances and parties to lessons and lectures, and as a result fulfilled many purposes adequately but none of them well. This evening it was set up for a meeting of the entire Squats community. Hundreds of chairs faced a raised stage, a little too high off the floor for comfort, not quite high enough to afford those at the back a clear view. The problem had been solved by a vidcam suspended from the ceiling, which Rob said would beam a closed link to gems unable to attend as well as to the tablets of those in the room.

  Eli had expected there to be several more chairs waiting on the stage, but it was empty except for a spindly metal lectern. He stood next to it with Rob, Commander Masoud of the Metropolitan Police, and Sally Trieve. He felt uncomfortable in the little cluster of norms, banked together at the front of the room as if to emphasise their distinction. Or rather their lack. Gems of every shape, size and colour crowded in through the two entry doors. Not all of the looks they sent his way were friendly. The room hummed with traded reports of the day’s events, updates from those who had been to the hospital, and from others who had been visited by the police.

  This had mostly been as part of the authorities’ attempts to investigate allegations circulating on the socialstreams. The supposed incidents had, as expected, proved largely fictitious, and the police had put out a statement to that effect. Still, he thought, it would not have endeared them to the gems to know that while they were being questioned in their homes over nonexistent offences, others were being set upon all over the city.

  Rob was getting a terse assessment of the situation out of the commander while they waited. There had been twelve known cases of physical assault on gems by norms over the past twenty-four hours, including the attack on Callan. Another gem had been accosted by a godgang during the day, but the attack had been interrupted before it got into full savage stride. The others were apparently random, and ranged from shoves to muggings to beatings. Two more gems had joined Callan in hospital.

  By contrast, there had been only three confirmed assaults on norms by gems. One of these, the fight in the employment office, could be construed as self-defence: security vids and the eyewitness accounts of the staff confirmed that the norms had landed the first blow. The manager had been at pains to explain to the police how the gem woman had acted to ensure she was not harmed, and noted that several of the norm applicants had, in the course of their interviews, appeared surprisingly unfamiliar with some of the basic requirements of the post. Four were in hospital awaiting police questioning. The gems involved did not reside in the Squats, and had not been seen since. The police were appealing to them to come forward. Eli thought this unlikely given the prevailing mood, but the commander muttered something about Miss Morningstar maybe being able to help.

  Vid footage had been retrieved which suggested that another fight, which had resulted in two more norms being hospitalised, had been deliberately provoked. The full details of what had taken place seemed always to be just out of frame, but a member of the cleaning crew said that a fellow worker had whispered, in the minutes before it kicked off, that she thought one of their number might be teasing their gem coworker, and wasn’t it just another reason why community-service teams should be segregated. The woman was comatose and had therefore been unable to expand on her views and suspicions; the man thought responsible had not been on the welfare office’s roster, and had since disappeared; and so, initially, had the gem.

  It had been Aryel Morningstar, arriving into the boil of press, police and paramedics, who had managed first to find him and then to coax him into custody. She had tracked him to the mouth of a drain culvert, and made the officers who trailed grumbling behind her shut up long enough for them all to hear the grunted sobs coming from somewhere within. While their leader was busy describing search-or-siege options to a dozen armed commandos she had had a quiet word with the medics, picked up an emergency blanket, and walked in alone. When she emerged twenty minutes later it was with the pink-haired, blanket-wrapped gem. He limped along beside her, weeping quietly and apparently passive.

  The vidcams caught all of it, following them as she warned the officers off with a look and guided him instead to the medical van where she held a cup to his lips and persuaded him to drink. The sedative took hold a minute later, and he sank back onto the gurney. While the paramedics fastened the restraints and the police shuffled their feet and looked sheepish, the press scrambled for an interview. Despite his tone of official disapproval, Commander Masoud was clearly impressed.

  ‘The third incident,’ he said now, ‘was, as far as we can tell, completely unprovoked. Three young ge
ms went into a shop and started destroying goods and roughing up staff. They haven’t offered any explanation, beyond telling us that the business had it coming.’ He shrugged. ‘We’d heard anecdotal reports that the shop owner wasn’t very friendly to gem patrons or job applicants. No formal complaints though.’

  ‘Did they live here?’ Eli interjected.

  ‘No. In a gem hostel south of the river, close to where it happened.’

  So none of the gems who had taken the fight to the norms were resident in the Squats. He wondered if that was significant, and turned his attention back to the gathering audience. A large group of gillungs had come in together and commandeered a bank of several dozen seats. He used to think that the distinctive physique of the water-breathers was such obvious gemsign that it made their lime-green hair a bit redundant, until an interviewee had explained to him how they used it to keep track of each other in murky waters. Now a field of phosphorescent heads nodded and tossed like seaweed over to his left.

  He noticed several gems he thought must be autistics dotted throughout the crowd, distinguishable less by appearance than manner. They were the ones who came in alone, finding seats straight away and burying themselves in tablets. They responded to the noise and movement that surrounded them little or not at all.

  There would, he knew, be many savants in the room – gems with prodigious powers of memory and calculation, sensory perception and cognitive processing. He wondered if whoever was responsible for changing the datastreams was among them. Most of those old enough to be here still paid for their gifts with impairments to social intuition and emotional intelligence. The gemtechs had not initially considered this a problem worth solving. However, as the market for their abilities had expanded, clients had requested gems who could integrate more seamlessly with the rest of the workforce. Sally Trieve had spoken the simple truth – there was far less disability among the youngsters. The reports from the now government-run crèches where the new generations of genius children were being raised glowed with the health of their charges.