Grantville Gazette, Volume 68

by Bjorn Hasseler

  "Gina's a character." Alex shook his head. "She's crazy for Chinese pop culture. Sometimes I think she only became a CelebriSee partner so she could meet the clients."

  Michael wanted to hear more, but the noise from the crowd surged suddenly as bright colors flashed into view down Raffles Avenue. The parade's front ranks were approaching. Michael felt the crowd press harder against his back as people packed into a solid wall of flesh.

  A troupe of lion dancers led the parade, their bulging green eyes fierce under fuzzy red eyebrows, their square-toothed mouths flapping open in mock roars. Under cascades of ruffles, their front and rear legs ducked and weaved in fluid sync. Close behind came the lion dancers' drummers in red robes with gold ribbon.

  Following the drummers came a float with revolving spotlights that swung across impossibly contorted human bodies in spangled gold suits. When the spotlights converged, the bodies unfolded, curling upward like a bean sprout, and twisted into a multi-sided scaffold. Chassis acrobats, their joints modified for flexibility.

  That was trickier than it looked, Michael knew, to integrate your neuroimage with the proprioception of an inhuman chassis. And then to revert back to your human body afterwards. People had gone mad in the early days of OTP, until Ozumi refined the synflesh chassis to a close approximation of the human body.

  Seven years since Michael had been in his real body, since his neuroimage had been uploaded and his body stashed in Biosupport. He didn't even remember what it felt like to wear real nerves and muscle instead of synflesh.

  The next float was a giant silver nanodragon prowling in slow motion on its platform, bearded head bobbing. On either side, stylized trees floated past. When they got closer, Michael saw the tree bearers were young children a few years older than Sam. No, wait—Sam was eight now, so around the same age.

  A commotion stirred the crowd, and one tree abruptly flailed and toppled. Two young men scuffled out into the road, shoving and yanking at each other, trampling the fallen tree cutout. A child's high shriek curdled the air. One of the musicians behind the float, a barrel-chested trumpet player, stepped out of line to haul the fighters apart.

  While the musician bent to retrieve the tree for the child, one young man leaped back over the barricade and plunged into the crowd. The other followed in hot pursuit. They both had the same haircut, buzzed short enough to see the round grey mark of a chassis port at the base of their skulls.

  "…one of clients." Xiùlán said, next to him.

  Michael snapped to attention. "What?"

  Hafizah nodded to the retreating back of the two chassis. "Xiùlán said she thinks that's one of our clients."

  Michael felt a chill. The chassis in the got Milq teaser had worn responsive synflesh faces like Michael's own, the molecules polarized to mirror the neuroimage map of facial sensation and muscle memory. But Façade would have told him if…no, he'd dialed the sensitivity back down at some point to cope with the crowd. A sick certainty gathered in his throat. "Which client?"

  "I don't remember name." Xiùlán's eyebrows crinkled. "Chinese pop star? Very popular in Hong Kong."

  "Oh, right." Hafizah snapped her fingers. "The rude one. Um, Jonathan? John?"

  "Jonny?"

  "That's it. Jonny Milq. Did he rent those chassis from us?"

  Michael didn't wait to hear Xiùlán's answer. He vaulted the parade barricade, just as a team of dancers in yellow swept up. Flaring daffodil skirts swirled in arcs around him, blocking his vision. The Façade scope flickered off the dancers' painted faces and told him they were a brand of popular dolls.

  He pushed through the dancers and fetched up against the barricade at the other side. There wasn't an inch of space along the rail; the crushing pressure of the crowd squeezed the front rank shoulder to shoulder.

  Logic kicked in, dampening his panic. He didn't need to follow the Milqs by sight. A few blocks away at the Floating Platform, the real Milq would take the stage in thirty minutes. That couldn't be a coincidence. The SSFs were going to crash his performance.

  He turned and sprinted down Raffles Avenue, outpacing the parade. Lights and music and faces blurred past him like a time-lapse video.

  As he ran, he dialed up Façade to maximum sensitivity. How could he have been so stupid? The Milqs would have walked right by him if Xiùlán hadn't recognized them.

  Scopes flickered and popped, identifying faces in the shadows, the bushes at the side of the road, the fractal shape of the Floating Platform's petal stadium seats in the sky ahead. The petal seats rose in layered tiers, supported by lace-like nanosteel. They'd already revolved up and out into closed-petal configuration around the Float, tilting the VIP boxes forward to give them a premium view of the stage.

  There had to be an access path to one side of the stage. Michael took the path left, racing down the endless outer curve of the stadium. Finally he broke into a tiny park dwarfed by the looming nanosteel structure. Two unmanned barricades blocked the stadium access route.

  Michael vaulted the barricades and plunged out onto the apron of the Float, right into the blinding flash of stage lights. Instead of music, the air was filled with shouts from the spectators and stage.

  The spots cleared from Michael's vision. Four young men faced off on the stage. One screamed a long string of what had to be obscenities, because Michael's app refused to translate. Another stalked back and forth. A third let loose a burst of sneering laughter. The last was making faces at the crowd; he planted his feet and gave thousands of people the middle finger.

  The Façade scopes locked on: Jonny Milq, Milq, Milq, and Milq.

  "This is my performance! Get off the stage."

  "They're my fans, you imposter!"

  "You're both imposters; my chin doesn't look like that!"

  Michael couldn't tell which Milq was saying what; the translation app's captions overlapped over their heads. All four of them had buzzed hair, but he couldn't see the chassis neuroprinter port at this distance.

  "I'm going to call security!"

  "You do that, they'll throw you out on your—" The caption dropped out without punctuation, but translation was unnecessary.

  Even an SSF had to maintain the integrity of his memories and self-image. All of them thought they were the real Milq. How could Michael contain this?

  He looked out on the churning crowd. They were out of their seats, some with stunned expressions, others shouting in outrage. The spectators in the VIP boxes, only ten meters above, were leaning past the lip of the petals to gawk. The nearest box had three teenaged girls; their faces were full of horror and dismay.

  "You'll regret this!" a Milq howled behind Michael. The teenage girls flinched, and one started to cry.

  He couldn't contain this, Michael realized. The damage was already done to Milq's public persona, his charismatic image shattered in the eyes of thousands of fans.

  Michael saw a flash of pink hair in the next VIP box and squinted. Helpfully, Façade identified Lee and Gina Ngô. Lee's M-eyebrows were spiky points of fury.

  The fourth Milq withdrew his middle finger, turned his back to the crowd, and mooned them all.

  ****

  Anna called Michael as he sat on the edge of the Floating Platform in the wreckage of Milq set pieces, swinging his chassis legs. "I got the message from the Ngô twins."

  Michael stared through her translucent image at the lights gleaming off the dark water. How many miles of water lay between here and the U.S. west coast, if he leaped into the bay and just kept swimming? Out into the Singapore Strait, past the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines and into the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

  "I asked to set up a call in half an hour to talk it over," Anna said, "but I don't know what else I can tell them."

  "I know." Michael's face felt numb. "I blew it, Anna."

  Anna bit her lip. "You'll get another chance. Resource selection will pull you for another assignment, one where you're perfect for the job."

  "Will it?" The words we
re acid-sharp on Michael's tongue. "It pulled me for this one, and it couldn't have been more wrong. I was the worst choice—" The words swiveled into place like a petal seat; his jumbled mental scaffolding resolved into a coherent shape. He stopped dead.

  "You're not the worst choice. It just didn't work out. It happens."

  "No, I am." He sat up straight. "Anna, are there any other resources in the database with congenital neurological defects?"

  "Uh." Anna looked confused, but typed a query. "We have Wei Yau, who's dyslexic."

  "Is that a Chinese name?"

  "Looks like; both Mandarin and Cantonese are in her language list."

  "Too good then." Michael dismissed Wei with a wave. "No, on profile, I am the single worst resource for this job. That can't be coincidence. Do me a favor; check for an RSO."

  "RSO? I've never heard of that before."

  "Resource Selection Override. It should be under the summary tab."

  Anna frowned. "It says yes. What does that mean?"

  Michael felt laughter swell into his chest, a bubble of exuberance. "It means resource selection didn't pick me. A human did. A human went in, overrode the algorithms' resource selection, and purposefully picked the worst resource in the database."

  Anna's eyes widened when she made the connection. "I'll check the audit logs for a user." Her fingers flew over the touchpad. "Got it. Gina Ngô."

  "Gina?" Michael's thoughts jerked and swirled. "That doesn't make sense. She kept trying to get me recalled."

  "Maybe you were better than she hoped?" Anna suggested. "If she needed the resource to botch the job?"

  "Gina has to be the leak then. But she's a partner. Why would she sabotage her own company?"

  "Can you figure it out in half an hour?"

  Michael took a breath. "I'll try."

  "I'll conference you into the call. Good luck." Anna hung up.

  Wrecking CelebriSee's reputation was obviously not a business strategy, unless the twins were more devious than they'd shown. That meant a personal vendetta. Did Gina have a romantic relationship with Milq? They were about the same age. Had she known him before he became a CelebriSee client?

  Gina's myTV channel. Xiùlán said she interviewed celebrities and gave them the CelebriSee sales pitch. Was that how she'd met Jonny Milq?

  Façade had linked to Gina's myTV page when Michael first met her. He activated the UI and scrolled through recent identifications to the previous night. Gina's pink hair popped up, and he followed the link to her myTV channel. The page skin was a pink-and-black confection of hearts and skulls. She had ninety-eight videos. Michael tried searching Milq but got nothing.

  He could dig through the different videos for a clue. Or try to crack her account to access the raw footage. But that was a Geek's method. This job needed a Hero, had needed a Hero the entire time. What would Renner do?

  A door slammed behind him and a voice rose angrily. Michael twisted to look over his shoulder. Milq crossed the stage, gesticulating to the fruit stains and cracked set pieces. This was the real one—the police had taken the three chassis into custody after they dispersed the mob. Beside him, a girl with gold-streaked hair and glasses nodded and typed something furiously on a tablet.

  Before he could think twice, Michael climbed to his feet.

  As he approached Milq, the pop star turned snapping black eyes on him. "Another man-made man?" he asked in Chinese. "Are you associated with CelebriSee?"

  Michael couldn't tell for sure, but he thought the app had dropped a few words from Milq's translation. Cautiously, he said in English, "Yes, I'm an investigator for CelebriSee. Do you have a moment to talk?"

  Milq's nostrils flared, and he spat something. No translation. Michael was getting annoyed by the application's refusal to translate obscenities. If there was anything a foreigner needed translated, it was insults. If…when he discharged his Ozumi contract, maybe he should develop an app to translate obscenities in different languages.

  Then he imagined Sam leaning over his shoulder while he compiled the database of vocabulary. Maybe not.

  Milq switched over to English. "What do you want?"

  Think like Renner. Renner was an old-school private investigator. And he didn't have prosopagnosia. Michael dug the tablet out of his pocket, activated the display, and pulled up Gina's myTV profile picture. "Do you know this girl?"

  Milq pursed his lips and studied the photo. "Familiar. I don't remember name. Reporter?"

  Strike out a romantic relationship, unless they'd had a brief fling and Milq had too many women to remember. In that case, Milq's assistant might have kept track, for legal reasons. Michael tilted the tablet so they could both see the profile picture. "Did she interview you?"

  The assistant peered at the display, and nodded. "MyTV channel girl," she said in Mandarin to Milq.

  "Her?" Milq squinted at Gina's face. "Oh, yes. She wanted to do the interview in Chinese. I couldn't understand half of what she was saying."

  The assistant switched to English for Michael. "She kept calling to do another interview. Very persistent."

  Not a spurned lover, then, but a spurned fan. Alex had said Gina was crazy about Chinese pop culture and celebrities. Crazy enough to sabotage her own company?

  "So you weren't aware that she's a CelebriSee partner?" Michael asked.

  Milq frowned. "Lee is CelebriSee CEO."

  Michael nodded to Gina's image. "She's his business partner. And his twin."

  "What? Twin?" Milq blinked, stunned.

  So Gina wasn't a visible part of CelebriSee's operations. Michael ducked his head to Milq and the assistant. "Thank you for your help; I have what I need. We'll be in touch."

  He stepped away across the platform, turning all the pieces over in his head. Alex had said Gina was only a partner so that she could meet celebrities. In Michael's briefing session with the twins, Lee had relayed all the information about licensing and distribution contracts. Gina had only shown enthusiasm for the viral popularity of the got milq teaser video.

  The teaser video. He'd checked the CelebriSee infrastructure for technical clues like encryption and watermarking, but he'd never checked the video of the leaked SSFs.

  He ran a search and located the video on the Splash video hosting site under username gotmilq. Splash offered a download option; the download counter flicked steadily upward through the upper range of five million. Michael added himself to the stream, choosing direct download of the original video file. Then he navigated back to Gina's myTV channel and chose her About Me video. He had to circumvent the user interface to get the original video file, but soon both downloads were in progress to his tablet.

  An incoming call buzzed in his ear. Anna. The conference call.

  The downloads were only half finished, but he was out of time. He'd have to wing it.

  "…unacceptable," Lee was saying in a clipped voice when Michael joined the conference call. From the image reflected from the dark window behind the Ngô twins' heads, they were back in Lee's office at CelebriSee.

  Anna's video showed that she was still at her desk in the Ozumi bullpen. Her eyes gleamed with anticipation, but she kept her tone respectful. "I'm very sorry you had to experience such an unpleasant scene."

  "And he's handicapped!" Gina broke in. "We looked at his profile. He has prosopagnosia! Face-blindness!"

  "So I do," Michael agreed mildly. "But you knew that when you selected me."

  Gina jerked back in her chair, pink hair fluttering like a panicked flamingo. A flush crept up her neck to her cheeks.

  Lee looked between them, M-eyebrows crinkling in confusion. "What are you talking about? The Ozumi database selected you."

  "A resource selection override was activated for this order," Anna explained. "During an RSO, a user can bypass the database algorithms and hand-pick a human resource."

  "User?" Lee stared at his twin. "Gina?"

  "I…didn't know he had prosopagnosia!" Gina burst out. "I didn't see that part. I thought he'd be
good for encryption."

  "Unfortunately," Anna said smoothly, "an RSO voids our satisfaction guarantee. We'll be happy to deliver Mr. Renner, but you'll need to place a new, billable order."

  "Why didn't you let the resource selection run itself?" Lee asked Gina, exasperated.

  He didn't see the full picture yet, Michael realized. He still didn't suspect Gina was the leak.

  What would a Hero do?

  A Hero didn't need evidence; a Hero leaped to conclusions and brazened it out.

  "You needed me, but not for encryption," Michael told Gina. "You needed me because I was the worst person for the job, but the best person to embarrass Milq, who humiliated you during your myTV interview." He angled the tablet so that they could see past his shoulder to the distant figures of Milq and his assistant. "He said your Chinese was awful."

  Gina's mouth dropped open. "My Chinese is excellent! He's an obnoxious prat!" She saw Lee's expression. "But I wouldn't sabotage CelebriSee for some spoiled little pop star."

  Lee's eyes flickered uncertainly between Gina and Michael. "Michael, what's the basis of this conclusion?"

  Michael gave up on trying to be a Hero. He wasn't good at it. If he was going to win this case, he'd win it as a Geek. He checked his download status: both videos were complete.

  "Gina was right on one thing," he said. "I am good for encryption. So I'd like to show you something." He shared his screen, so that the twins and Anna could see the two video files.

  "I have here the got milq video and a video from Gina's myTV channel." He located the video info plugin on his tablet and scanned the two files. "This is information embedded in the two videos." He scrolled down and found what he'd hoped to see; a surge of triumph swelled in his chest.

  With effort, he kept his voice calm and pedantic. "See how they both have the same writing library? Both these videos were edited in myStudio."

  "That doesn't mean anything," Gina said. "Millions of people use myStudio."

  "Yes, and every one of those millions has a myStudio license with a unique watermark."

  "Watermark?" Lee squinted at the videos on Michael's screen. "I don't see any watermark."