He couldn’t even read.
There were rules here. Stupid rules, meant to contain and confine. Ray had enough of confinement.
So much anger.
He raged at Mubarak for helping him live and he raged at Cedric for dying.
And he smashed things. So many things, they had to send him away.
He remembered Mubarak’s sad face at the window.
~
Cold again — a deep, down-in-the marrow cold — and uncontrollable shivering.
Ray remembered bouncing from shelter to shelter in his fury until none of them would take him anymore and then freezing on the flows.
Maybe it had been the cold that put out the fire in his chest at last. But he found calm. Clarity.
He remembered swiping clothes from backyard lines. Ducking into the many gyms and fitness centres, making like he belonged there until someone figured out he didn’t, watching how it was done, pouring his anger into beating down a pad or lifting chunks of iron. The reek of sweat. And showers. Soap. There was never enough soap.
Summer yard sales were great for nicking what he needed. Go early enough in the morning, and there were lots of crowds and no one paying attention. A pilfered antique primer on phonics. Teaching himself to read, slowly, painfully. A backpack. Memorising the recycling bot routes to rummage through everyone’s bins the night before. He would have bought things if he could, but without access to the thingweb, there was no way to earn, and nothing he could do to pay. He’d learnt in the old days that they’d used physical currency, stuff you could hold in your hands. He wondered what it was like.
Peering through windows to see what the children were watching, to learn, until he became so absorbed he bumped the glass or made some other sound and freaked someone out. He learnt if he visited a restaurant and just asked for water, and it wasn’t busy enough that they needed the space, they’d mostly let him hang around. Why wouldn’t they? He wasn’t causing trouble.
Yet there were the police, always watching, suspicious of his lack of ID, trying to herd him back into J-District. Or if they caught him, just dumping him there.
No way. Never again. He did not want to go back.
Had it really been that cold? He couldn’t stop shivering.
KEL
The weights of the lat pull-down machine clanged down too hard, echoing inside the workout booth, nearly deafening her. She sat for a few minutes, breathing fast from the set she’d just completed.
It had been too long since she’d done any weight training. Or any serious workouts at all, really. She cursed having to exercise as a waste of time. Heck, she cursed sleep as a waste too. But lately, she’d been getting too little of either and her mood had been suffering for it.
Yesterday hadn’t helped. They’d had their third meeting on the potential budget cuts and gotten no further ahead on how to deal with them. The meeting had devolved, again, into a shouting match over whose projects to prioritise and protect. Then she’d spent most of the afternoon being pulled into discussions dissecting the gathering and listening to speculation on silly things, like whether the herpetologists had a private protection agreement with Robert, or if the botanists would form a coalition against the ornithologists. It was as though all of them had forgotten it was an ecosystem and that one group couldn’t do without the other to both maintain and study it. Kel had come home with a splitting headache, with nothing to show for the day, and gone straight to bed. This morning, she’d decided she couldn’t face another day of squabbling, used one of her personal time allowances, and went to her gym instead. And anyway, her DPA had been scolding her about poor self-care for weeks. It was time to shut it up.
Someone banged on her booth. “Hey, are you done in there? Some of us want to work out.”
She opened the door and stepped out. It closed automatically behind her and started its ten-second sterilisation cycle. The man waiting his turn threw up his hands dramatically at the additional delay. He was enormous. He obviously used muscle augs; his chest was unnaturally broad and his lat and trap muscles bulged against his shirt. Kel watched with amusement as he squeezed into the booth. He didn’t close the door, instead making a big deal out of manually changing the weight stack so she could note it was at the highest setting. He then groaned loudly with every rep. She rolled her eyes and looked for her next station. She pegged him for a superhero fanman and idly wondered which character he was sculpting for. Hulk, maybe? No, she was sure Hulk was green, and this man wasn’t tinted. Yet, at least. What had the other big one been called? Juggernaut?
She found the rowing machine booth and stepped in, making herself comfortable while her DPA interfaced with it, adjusted the tension, and set the timer automatically.
“What locale and time period would you like?” the DPA asked her.
Nothing with people in it, she thought. “Random location. Cambrian era.”
The booth walls flickered and then vanished as they were replaced by a virtual reality simulation of a body of water. The rowing machine itself went into soft suspension mode, allowing it to bounce and bob like a boat would when she shifted her weight. She couldn’t see land anywhere; when she looked down where the floor had been, the clear water teemed with life. The booth cooled.
She started rowing and got into a rhythm, doing long, slow strokes, and letting the motion ease her mind. She rowed off the arguments over money, the stress over her macaques, the paper that just wasn’t coming together and the comment from her mother about a person not being able to make a difference; that one was still stuck in her craw. Kel had never wanted her own epitaph to read: I led a comfy life and contributed nothing.
The movement felt so good that she kept going after the timer beeped. The peaceful sensation reminded her of the time when she’d written a ten-thousand-word chunk of her dissertation in a single day because everything just flowed, and it had seemed like her brain actually felt warm afterwards. She thought about how amazing it would be if she could do that at will—
Kel let go of the rower handle so suddenly it arced away and thumped against the booth and she almost fell off the machine. A group of trilobites scattered at the sudden movement.
Being able to access the state of flow at will. How much more would she get done if she could focus like that again? How much could anyone accomplish? Her mind soared at the possibilities, the problems people could tackle if they could work well whenever they pleased.
Because of course, that physical and emotional state was simply the result of a specific set of physiological conditions: some neurons stimulated, others inhibited. Heart rate decelerated, theta waves midline, alpha waves over the temporoparietal region of the brain. Tibetan monks could achieve certain brain states at will, but it took years of practice because they were working from the outside in. Trying to shut out the hundreds of mental and physical distractions bombarding you was incredibly difficult, Kel knew. And there were billions of neurons to coordinate. But if you could record a few moments of the exact state of a brain and body that was experiencing flow, and then ‘play’ it back into the brain when you wanted it, on a loop… She could modify the implant she was using for the macaques; she’d already seen evidence of being able to send inputs…
Kel frowned. “Computer,” she said. She’d never named her DPA, thinking it a silly habit to personify a program. “Why hasn’t there been more work done in cognitive amplification?” Surely if she’d thought of this, someone else had? She described what she was thinking about.
Her DPA paused. “There may be at least two factors to account for a lack of progress in this area. In the late teens, several US-based start-ups selling products involving concepts like trans-cranial direct-current stimulation, binaural inputs, brainwave entrainment and the so-called quantified mind went bankrupt when it was revealed they had falsified data on the benefits of the products. There was also at least one major crowdfunding campaign for a home-use functional near-infrared spectroscopy device that was also a scam. Research gra
nt applications for work in this field declined significantly during this period, as academics did not wish to tarnish their reputations.”
“And the second factor?” Kel prompted.
“Concurrent with this was a crackdown by several drug enforcement agencies, in the last major campaigns of the so-called war on drugs, on a group of pharmaceuticals collectively known as nootropics. These were pharmaceuticals intended for other therapies but were also taken for off-label uses such as alertness, memory retention, focus and wakefulness. They became very trendy in the early twenties, particularly as concerns over artificial intelligences like myself rose. A rash of overdoses in South Korean college students brought the drugs to the attention of the media; subsequently, an unbeaten team in a high-level League of Legends e-sports tournament in China and several underage children in national spelling bee competitions were discovered ‘brain doping’ to win.”
That was all Kel needed to hear; she wasn’t planning to use any drugs. She burst out of her workout booth and headed for her lab.
MEIKE
It was late. Meike walked quietly to the lab door to look in. Kel was there again, working and muttering to herself. There was a schematic of what seemed to be an implant on the screen; it looked like Kel was changing it.
Satisfied she wouldn’t be noticed, Meike moved on to the rear of the building, where the pharmacy was located. The locked door opened for her automatically, and the lights came on. The door closed softly behind her.
A woman who’d bought her a drink at Smashers, one of Fa’s many strange friends, had found out where Meike worked. She had said she was in the market for ‘whatever looked interesting at her lab.’ Meike had a good idea what that meant.
The first and most obvious stop was the medicine cabinet, the contents of which she was now examining. There was plenty of high-grade ketamine, which would get a decent price. It was expensive to license to fabricate, so the stolen stuff could be bought at a hefty discount and still be profitable. She had taken some before, and no one had noticed. Fa would want to try some, too. And the gabapentin… yes, that could be worth trying to sell, depending on who the woman’s contacts were. She searched through the remaining shelves. The only other thing they had significant quantities of was acepromazine. She doubted it would fetch quite the same amount as the other two, but some was better than none. She took a few minutes to access the inventory database to change some numbers.
Meike then had a look at the locked drawers under the workbench. There were controlled chemicals, but she had no interest in selling chemicals to make things explode. Because they weren’t meant for human or animal consumption, they also probably had added tracers to identify the point of origin, and there were very few people who had access to this room. If she sold any of that material, it would mean police interest.
She surveyed the room. Most of the expensive-looking lab equipment had been open-sourced years ago or could be fabbed, so wouldn’t have much value. They would also be missed. Her eyes lit on the lab fabber itself. Fab recipes? She didn’t know how to crack the rights management on them, but she knew she had rights to transfer them once. Perhaps she’d offer to do that and let her contact work out the details later.
She heard movement somewhere, so she quickly tidied up and ordered the lights off. The door locked behind her as she went back up the hallway.
Kel was still working away in the semi-gloom. Meike watched her thoughtfully for a while and then went home.
HAROON
Subhan kicked him awake. “We go, five minutes,” he said while Haroon scrambled around for his clothes, blinking. “I show you place for job.”
His father was waiting for him at the front door of their apartment. Haroon shrugged into his ragged winter coat, one he’d accepted from Yoshi that was almost a size too small. His tuque and gloves were still damp from when he had come home in the blizzard last night, but he put them on anyway. They left their small apartment without saying another word.
It was so, so cold outside. The tiny hairs on the inside of his nose froze and prickled, and the wind knifed at his face. He hunched forward, jammed his hands deep into his coat pockets and hustled. It wasn’t long before the tops of his thighs went numb underneath the thin fabric of his trousers.
Haroon glanced at his father, stomping along beside him. His red and puffy eyes were streaming. His nose, thick, lumpy, and crimson, leaked into his stiff, grey moustache. He didn’t know why his father didn’t let either of them grow a proper beard to cut the cold.
As they neared the edge of the District, an insistent beeping noise behind them made Subhan curse, and he stepped aside. A small snowbot wobbled merrily past, its large front blade scraping the sidewalk and funnelling last night’s snow into a belly lined with heating strips. It reached the end of the flow, paused, and then urinated meltwater into a storm drain, before turning back for another pass of the other half of the sidewalk. Subhan looked as though he might kick it but thought better of it. Police vehicles always circulated this part of the city; you never knew, with their tinted windows, whether an officer was actually in one, ready to dash out and pick you up.
They walked for about half an hour before they arrived, thoroughly frozen, at the pickup point. His father grunted a greeting at the other workers who were already there waiting. Mercifully, a mass transit pod pulled up promptly, and Subhan shoved his way to the front of the line to get on, stamping his feet as much to warm them as to get the snow off. Haroon sat beside him, blowing into his hands. His fingers ached.
The pod accelerated the moment the door closed, slowly at first, to allow everyone to get a seat, and then quickly, pressing them all back into their chairs. The display at the front said it would take them into Vaughn, and the waste-transfer station at the site of the old Keele Valley landfill, in about ten minutes. Haroon sighed. He was too young for the work here; he knew from the odd time his father had spoken to him about his job that they only took workers aged twenty-one and up. Haroon had hoped he’d be able to escape the district before being brought here; he hadn’t counted on his father lying about his age.
A short, muscular man with a glossy black ponytail bumped past Haroon and rather forcibly pushed Subhan over to take a seat next to him. He glanced over his shoulder, noticed Haroon, and stuck out a hand. His grin was feral. “Tomasso,” he said, in a thick Sicilian accent. He had a scar through his right eyebrow.
“Haroon.”
“Subhan, my friend. Your boy? Don’t deny, I can see you look the same. You been holding out. Tsk, tsk. I didna know you had family. When you gonna get into that mech suit? You’ve gotta provide.”
Haroon was amazed to see his father tense up. “Who let you here?” Subhan growled. “I do not want mech suit. I know how goes.”
“You’ve seen how it works, then you know how useful it can be, yes?” Tomasso replied, his accent drawing the word yes into two syllables. “Getting borebots unclogged and shoring up tunnel walls is hot and dangerous, no? How long you wanna stay a charity case?”
Subhan clenched his fists, and Haroon suppressed a gasp. Tomasso wasn’t the first person to suggest the workers at the Keele landfill mining and reclamation project were only there because manual labourers were pitied. Nor would he be the first to say the workers were there simply because they were cheaper than the specialist bots required for the job. The words burned Haroon even so.
“I do not want mech suit,” Subhan said. “The rent starts cheap and stays cheap until I fat and happy. Then it going up and up and up. Soon? You have half my packet. No, no, no. I know how goes.”
Tomasso shook his head. “Nonsense. Rumours. Lies.”
“Yeah, well, Bob Kennedy,” Subhan said, and then, to Haroon’s horror, he went pale.
The smile on Tomasso face froze. “And just what you think you know about my friend Bob, eh?”
There was a long, tense silence. “Bob… he uh, killed self,” his father said at last, “because he no pay his bills.”
To
masso relaxed just a little. “Yes, he did. But Bob, so he no manage his money right? Should no prevent you from making a smart decision. In fact, is good reminder that tragedy can strike anyone at any time.” He patted Subhan’s shoulder firmly and then glanced back at Haroon. “For any reason. You think it over, yes?” Tomasso left to go have a chat with someone else on the pod.
Haroon shrank back into his seat and pretended like he’d been staring out the window the whole time. But it was too late. He could see, when Subhan turned to look at him, the humiliation, and the fury in his eyes.
KEL
Kel let out a loud whoop of glee and danced around the lab. Aadi hooted back at her and shook the bars of the enclosure.
She laughed at him and handed him a new toy. “That’s my good boy. I’ll let you out of there soon, I promise.”
The macaque hooted again as she went to her desk to look at her data. For the first time in a long while, she felt excited about what she was doing.
She had designed some simple proof-of-concept tests. After spending several days tweaking an implant, she had taken Aadi — a macaque who was not yet part of her original study but a resident of the habitat — and installed it in him. She observed Aadi in the habitat for two days to make sure there were no issues with the installation, and then she returned him to the hospital area and kept him in the spot usually reserved for injured and recuperating wildlife. She let him be for another couple of days to establish a new baseline. Then, earlier this week, she’d fed him a substantial meal and recorded a few seconds of the brain and body signals for satiation as he sat around looking full.
For her first test, Kel set the brain patterns to play back on a continuous loop and observed him for several hours. Aadi continued to act as though he was full, lounging more than swinging and playing, and ignoring the food she had left out for him. She stopped the implant replay and watched him become more animated and then devour the food he had only just passed up.
Echoes of Another Page 9
