Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  “What kind of big trouble, Lyle?”

  “Authority trouble. A lot of it. I can’t say any more. I think this line may be tapped.”

  “Right-o. I’ll make that happen. Hoo-ah, zude.” The mook hung up.

  Lyle left the beanbag and went back to the workbench. He took Kitty’s cheap bike out of the repair stand and angrily threw it aside. “You know what really bugs me?” he said at last. “You couldn’t even bother to charm your way in here, set yourself up as my roommate, and then steal the damn box. You didn’t even respect me that much. Heck, you didn’t even have to steal anything, Kitty. You could have just smiled and asked nicely and ‘I’d have given you the box to play with. I don’t watch media, I hate all that crap.”

  “It was an emergency. There was no time for more extensive investigation or reconnaissance. I think you should call your gangster friends immediately and tell them you’ve made a mistake. Tell them not to come here.”

  “You’re ready to talk seriously?”

  “No, I won’t be talking.”

  “Okay, we’ll see.”

  After twenty minutes, Lyle’s phone rang. He answered it cautiously, keeping the video off. It was Pete from the City Spiders. “Zude, where is your doorknocker?”

  “Oh, sorry, I pulled it up, didn’t want to be disturbed. I’ll bring the shop right down.” Lyle thumbed the brake switches.

  Lyle opened the door and Pete broad-jumped into the shop. Pete was a big man but he had the skeletal, wiry build of a climber, bare dark arms and shins and big sticky-toed jumping shoes. He had a sleeveless leather bodysuit full of clips and snaps, and he carried a big fabric shoulderbag. There were six vivid tattoos on the dark skin of his left cheek, under the black stubble.

  Pete looked at Kitty, lifted his spex with wiry callused fingers, looked at her again bare-eyed, and put the spex back in place. “Wow, Lyle.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I never thought you were into anything this sick and twisted.”

  “It’s a serious matter, Pete.”

  Pete turned to the door, crouched down, and hauled a second person into the shop. She wore a beat-up air-conditioned jacket and long slacks and zipsided boots and wire-rimmed spex. She had short ratty hair under a green cloche hat. “Hi,” she said, sticking out a hand. “I’m Mabel. We haven’t met.”

  “I’m Lyle.” Lyle gestured. “This is Kitty here in the bag.”

  “You said you needed somebody heavy, so I brought Mabel along,” said Pete. “Mabel’s a social worker.”

  “Looks like you pretty much got things under control here,” said Mabel liltingly, scratching her neck and looking about the place. “What happened? She break into your shop?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And,” Pete said, “she grabbed the shock-baton first thing and blasted herself but good?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I told you that thieves always go for the weaponry first,” Pete said, grinning and scratching his armpit. “Didn’t I tell you that? Leave a weapon in plain sight, man, a thief can’t stand it, it’s the very first thing they gotta grab.” He laughed. “Works every time.”

  “Pete’s from the City Spiders,” Lyle told Kitty. “His people built this shop for me. One dark night, they hauled this mobile home right up thirty-four stories in total darkness, straight up the side of the Archiplat without anybody seeing, and they cut a big hole through the side of the building without making any noise, and they hauled the whole shop through it. Then they sank explosive bolts through the girders and hung it up here for me in midair. The City Spiders are into sport-climbing the way I’m into bicycles, only, like, they are very seriously into climbing and there are lots of them. They were some of the very first people to squat the zone, and they’ve lived here ever since, and they are pretty good friends of mine.”

  Pete sank to one knee and looked Kitty in the eye. “I love breaking into places, don’t you? There’s no thrill like some quick and perfectly executed break-in.” He reached casually into his shoulder bag. “The thing is”—he pulled out a camera—“to be sporting, you can’t steal anything. You just take trophy pictures to prove you were there.” He snapped her picture several times, grinning as she flinched.

  “Lady,” he breathed at her, “once you’ve turned into a little wicked greed-head, and mixed all that evil cupidity and possessiveness into the beauty of the direct action, then you’ve prostituted our way of life. You’ve gone and spoiled our sport.” Pete stood up. “We City Spiders don’t like common thieves. And we especially don’t like thieves who break into the places of clients of ours, like Lyle here. And we thoroughly, especially, don’t like thieves who are so brick-head dumb that they get caught red-handed on the premises of friends of ours.”

  Pete’s hairy brows knotted in thought. “What I’d like to do here, Lyle ol’ buddy,” he announced, “is wrap up your little friend head to foot in nice tight cabling, smuggle her out of here down to Golden Gate Archiplat—you know, the big one downtown over by MLK and Highway Twenty-seven?—and hang her head-down in the center of the cupola.”

  “That’s not very nice,” Mabel told him seriously.

  Pete looked wounded. “I’m not gonna charge him for it or anything! Just imagine her, spinning up there beautifully with all those chandeliers and those hundreds of mirrors.”

  Mabel knelt and looked into Kitty’s face. “Has she had any water since she was knocked unconscious?”

  “No.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, give the poor woman something to drink, Lyle.”

  Lyle handed Mabel a bike-tote squeeze bottle of electrolyte refresher. “You zudes don’t grasp the situation yet,” he said. “Look at all this stuff I took off her.” He showed them the spex, and the boots, and the stun-gun, and the gloves, and the carbon-nitride climbing plectra, and the rappelling gear.

  “Wow,” Pete said at last, dabbing at buttons on his spex to study the finer detail, “this is no ordinary burglar! She’s gotta be, like, a street samurai from the Mahogany Warbirds or something!”

  “She says she’s a federal agent.”

  Mabel stood up suddenly, angrily yanking the squeeze bottle from Kitty’s lips. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Ask her.”

  “I’m a grade-five social counselor with the Department of Urban Redevelopment,” Mabel said. She presented Kitty with an official ID. “And who are you with?”

  “I’m not prepared to divulge that information at this time.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Mabel marveled, tucking her dog-eared hologram ID back in her hat. “You’ve caught somebody from one of those nutty reactionary secret black-bag units. I mean, that’s gotta be what’s just happened here.” She shook her head slowly. “Y’know, if you work in government, you always hear horror stories about these right-wing paramilitary wackos, but I’ve never actually seen one before.”

  “It’s a very dangerous world out there, Miss Social Counselor.”

  “Oh, tell me about it,” Mabel scoffed. “I’ve worked suicide hotlines! I’ve been a hostage negotiator! I’m a career social worker, girlfriend! I’ve seen more horror and suffering than you ever will. While you were doing push-ups in some comfy cracker training camp, I’ve been out here in the real world!” Mabel absently unscrewed the top from the bike bottle and had a long glug. “What on earth are you doing trying to raid the squat of a bicycle repairman?”

  Kitty’s stony silence lengthened. “It’s got something to do with that set-top box,” Lyle offered. “It showed up here in delivery yesterday, and then she showed up just a few hours later. Started flirting with me, and said she wanted to live in here. Of course I got suspicious right away.”

  “Naturally,” Pete said. “Real bad move, Kitty. Lyle’s on antilibidinals.”

  Kitty stared at Lyle bitterly. “I see,” she said at last. “So that’s what you get, when you drain all the sex out of one of them.… You get a strange malodorous creature that spends all its time working in the g
arage.”

  Mabel flushed. “Did you hear that?” She gave Kitty’s bag a sharp angry yank. “What conceivable right do you have to question this citizen’s sexual orientation? Especially after cruelly trying to sexually manipulate him to abet your illegal purposes? Have you lost all sense of decency? You…you should be sued.”

  “Do your worst,” Kitty muttered.

  “Maybe I will,” Mabel said grimly. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

  “Yeah, let’s string her up somewhere real sunny and public and call a bunch of news crews,” Pete said. “I’m way hot for this deep ninja gear! Me and the Spiders got real mojo uses for these telescopic ears, and the tracer dust, and the epoxy bugging devices. And the press-on climbing-claws. And the carbon-fiber rope. Everything, really! Everything except these big-ass military shoes of hers, which really suck.”

  “Hey, all that stuff’s mine,” Lyle said sternly. “I saw it first.”

  “Yeah, I guess so, but… Okay, Lyle, you make us a deal on the gear, we’ll forget everything you still owe us for doing the shop.”

  “Come on, those combat spex are worth more than this place all by themselves.”

  “I’m real interested in that set-top box,” Mabel said cruelly. “It doesn’t look too fancy or complicated. Let’s take it over to those dirty circuit zudes who hang out at the Blue Parrot, and see if they can’t reverse-engineer it. We’ll post all the schematics up on twenty or thirty progressive activist networks, and see what falls out of cyberspace.”

  Kitty glared at her. “The terrible consequences from that stupid and irresponsible action would be entirely on your head.”

  “I’ll risk it,” Mabel said airily, patting her cloche hat. “It might bump my soft little liberal head a bit, but I’m pretty sure it would crack your nasty little fascist head like a coconut.”

  Suddenly Kitty began thrashing and kicking her way furiously inside the bag. They watched with interest as she ripped, tore and lashed out with powerful side and front kicks. Nothing much happened.

  “All right,” she said at last, panting in exhaustion. “I’ve come from Senator Creighton’s office.”

  “Who?” Lyle said.

  “Creighton! Senator James P. Creighton, the man who’s been your Senator from Tennessee for the past thirty years!”

  “Oh,” Lyle said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “We’re anarchists,” Pete told her.

  “I’ve sure heard of the nasty old geezer,” Mabel said, “but I’m from British Columbia, where we change senators the way you’d change a pair of socks. If you ever changed your socks, that is. What about him?”

  “Well, Senator Creighton has deep clout and seniority! He was a United States Senator even before the first NAFTA Senate was convened! He has a very large, and powerful, and very well seasoned personal staff of twenty thousand hardworking people, with a lot of pull in the Agriculture, Banking, and Telecommunications Committees!”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So,” Kitty said miserably, “there are twenty thousand of us on his staff. We’ve been in place for decades now, and naturally we’ve accumulated lots of power and importance. Senator Creighton’s staff is basically running some quite large sections of the NAFTA government, and if the Senator loses his office, there will be a great deal of…of unnecessary political turbulence.” She looked up. “You might not think that a senator’s staff is all that important politically. But if people like you bothered to learn anything about the real-life way that your government functions, then you’d know that Senate staffers can be really crucial.”

  Mabel scratched her head. “You’re telling me that even a lousy senator has his own private black-bag unit?”

  Kitty looked insulted. “He’s an excellent senator! You can’t have a working organization of twenty thousand staffers without taking security very seriously! Anyway, the Executive wing has had black-bag units for years! It’s only right that there should be a balance of powers.”

  “Wow,” Mabel said. “The old guy’s a hundred and twelve or something, isn’t he?”

  “A hundred and seventeen.”

  “Even with government health care, there can’t be a lot left of him.”

  “He’s already gone,” Kitty muttered. “His frontal lobes are burned out.…He can still sit up, and if he’s stoked on stimulants he can repeat whatever’s whispered to him. So he’s got two permanent implanted hearing aids, and basically…well…he’s being run by remote control by his mook.”

  “His mook, huh?” Pete repeated thoughtfully.

  “It’s a very good mook,” Kitty said. “The coding’s old, but it’s been very well looked-after. It has firm moral values and excellent policies. The mook is really very much like the Senator was. It’s just that…well, it’s old. It still prefers a really old-fashioned media environment. It spends almost all its time watching old-fashioned public political coverage, and lately it’s gotten cranky and started broadcasting commentary.”

  “Man, never trust a mook,” Lyle said. “I hate those things.”

  “So do I,” Pete offered, “but even a mook comes off pretty good compared to a politician.”

  “I don’t really see the problem,” Mabel said, puzzled. “Senator Hirschheimer from Arizona has had a direct neural link to his mook for years, and he has an excellent progressive voting record. Same goes for Senator Marmalejo from Tamaulipas; she’s kind of absent-minded, and everybody knows she’s on life support, but she’s a real scrapper on women’s issues.”

  Kitty looked up. “You don’t think it’s terrible?”

  Mabel shook her head. “I’m not one to be judgmental about the intimacy of one’s relationship to one’s own digital alter-ego. As far as I can see it, that’s a basic privacy issue.”

  “They told me in briefing that it was a very terrible business, and that everyone would panic if they learned that a high government official was basically a front for a rogue artificial intelligence.”

  Mabel, Pete, and Lyle exchanged glances. “Are you guys surprised by that news?” Mabel said.

  “Heck no,” said Pete.

  “Big deal,” Lyle added.

  Something seemed to snap inside Kitty then. Her head sank. “Disaffected émigrés in Europe have been spreading boxes that can decipher the Senator’s commentary. I mean, the Senator’s mook’s commentary…The mook speaks just like the Senator did, or the way the Senator used to speak, when he was in private and off the record. The way he spoke in his diaries. As far as we can tell, the mook was his diary.…It used to be his personal laptop computer. But he just kept transferring the files, and upgrading the software, and teaching it new tricks like voice recognition and speech-writing, and giving it power of attorney and such.… And then, one day the mook made a break for it. We think that the mook sincerely believes that it’s the Senator.”

  “Just tell the stupid thing to shut up for a while, then.”

  “We can’t do that. We’re not even sure where the mook is, physically. Or how it’s been encoding those sarcastic comments into the video-feed. The Senator had a lot of friends in the telecom industry back in the old days. There are a lot of ways and places to hide a piece of distributed software.”

  “So that’s all?” Lyle said. “That’s it, that’s your big secret? Why didn’t you just come to me and ask me for the box? You didn’t have to dress up in combat gear and kick my door in. That’s a pretty good story, I’d have probably just given you the thing.”

  “I couldn’t do that, Mr. Schweik.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Pete said, “her people are important government functionaries, and you’re a loser techie wacko who lives in a slum.”

  “I was told this is a very dangerous area,” Kitty muttered.

  “It’s not dangerous,” Mabel told her.

  “No?”

  “No. They’re all too broke to be dangerous. This is just a kind of social breathing space. The whole urban infrastructure’s dreadfully ove
rplanned here in Chattanooga. There’s been too much money here too long. There’s been no room for spontaneity. It was choking the life out of the city. That’s why everyone was secretly overjoyed when the rioters set fire to these three floors.”

  Mabel shrugged. “The insurance took care of the damage. First the looters came in. Then there were a few hideouts for kids and crooks and illegal aliens. Then the permanent squats got set up. Then the artist’s studios, and the semilegal workshops and red-light places. Then the quaint little coffee-houses, then the bakeries. Pretty soon the offices of professionals will be filtering in, and they’ll restore the water and the wiring. Once that happens, the real-estate prices will kick in big-time, and the whole zone will transmute right back into gentryville. It happens all the time.”

  Mabel waved her arm at the door. “If you knew anything about modern urban geography, you’d see this kind of, uh, spontaneous urban renewal happening all over the place. As long as you’ve got naive young people with plenty of energy who can be suckered into living inside rotten, hazardous dumps for nothing, in exchange for imagining that they’re free from oversight, then it all works out just great in the long run.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, zones like this turn out to be extremely handy for all concerned. For some brief span of time, a few people can think mildly unusual thoughts and behave in mildly unusual ways. All kinds of weird little vermin show up, and if they make any money then they go legal, and if they don’t then they drop dead in a place really quiet where it’s all their own fault. Nothing dangerous about it.” Mabel laughed, then sobered. “Lyle, let this poor dumb cracker out of the bag.”

  “She’s naked under there.”

  “Okay,” she said impatiently, “cut a slit in the bag and throw some clothes in it. Get going, Lyle.”

  Lyle threw in some biking pants and a sweatshirt.

  “What about my gear?” Kitty demanded, wriggling her way into the clothes by feel.

  “I tell you what,” said Mabel thoughtfully. “Pete here will give your gear back to you in a week or so, after his friends have photographed all the circuitry. You’ll just have to let him keep all those knickknacks for a while, as his reward for our not immediately telling everybody who you are and what you’re doing here.”