Asimov's Science Fiction

by Penny Publications

  “Higher and higher,” Way says. And then, “Spooky,” because the cameras are glitching, flashes of images from elsewhere, bits of broadcast—a listing overloaded boat, a red-faced crowd in Parliament Square—snips of skewed text, feeds from street drones, what looks like Shimago, Dee, and Dyer standing in a sea of crawling people; but that doesn’t make sense because Dyer’s here, somewhere. Saw her just now, Way thinks, or was that in the camera feed?

  Over by the wall, he hears Dyer say.

  “Right,” Way says. “The spooky wall.” Spooky in the way that wall had developed, like an photographic print, the image emerging point by point, line by line out of the blank brick, a series of random acts teasing pattern, purpose. He’d been taking snapshots of it over the last week, a time-lapse to work into the performance stream tonight, layered over the real wall. Layers of reality, that’s the “Higher” in HigherWorks, Way thinks.

  The wall is not quite ready, he hears Dyer say.

  “Ready for her closeup,” Way says. “Gotta get some closeup textures for the vid-ayoh stream.” He gets up and wobbles across the bricks to the far side of the warehouse. A flock of microdrones spiral over his head like an exclamation point. Even though it’s underground, the warehouse has headroom; iron beams hold brick vaults forty feet overhead.

  “Over my head,” Way says, head tilted up to look up at the wall. A diagonal splash of paint and paper runs from the floor almost up to the ceiling. Last week Mrs. John Dee chased a spraycan-armed drone around the warehouse with a broom, the rest of them doubled over laughing, though Dyer pointed out it was hardly their place to complain: They didn’t belong there either, no one did.

  Every place belongs to no one, he hears Dyer say.

  “Just movin’ through,” Way agrees. He takes a snapshot, a poster pasted over the uneven brick, realizes it’s an ad for an anti-migrant protest, tears the poster down leaving a jagged edge that reads “migrant pro,” and takes a photo of that instead.

  “That’s us, Dyer. Migrant pros,” he says.

  Refugee act, he hears Dyer say.

  “Yeah, I mean refugees, but what did you say the other day? Everyone on the move is running from something and running to something. Just the flow, yeah? I ever play you The Wayward? The music, I mean. Harry Partch, he was a hobo. Like you, now I think of it. He had degrees, research grants, just like you, just like you he left it behind to ride the rails in the Depression. The first one, I mean, the black-andwhite one. Left the mainstream behind after that, made his own musical instruments, his own scales, his own kind of performances. Just like us.”

  Way scoops a glittery blob of something off the brick, looks for a spot, finally peels up a sticker and re-sticks it a foot higher, smears the blob in its place.

  “Anyway, seemed like a good name to take on, yeah? Way-ward, like where I’m headed is the way itself.”

  That thought makes him want to take another hit, but he doesn’t know where the spliff has gone, can’t actually remember rolling one, but man, he’s rolling on something. He reaches up on tiptoes to peel away the bottom half of another poster.

  “He was from Oakland like you, too, Dyer. Harry Partch was. But he grew up down near me in LA. Man, I miss that place sometimes. Not the bits where I was sleeping on the beach and eating out of, well, you know. But, hey, all this...”

  Way waves vaguely at the wall, squints, pulls a piece of gum from down around his knees and sticks it at eye level.

  “I mean HigherWorks, you guys, like you always say, worth running to, even if I started with the running from.”

  The future is displacement, he hears Dyer say.

  “Right on. HigherWorks, displacing the future.” Which doesn’t sound quite right.

  He pulls a stickum camera out of his pocket, flies it across the surface of the wall, saying “displace, displace, displace,” but the word doesn’t sound any more right with repetition. He lands the camera on a brick, just a few feet above the floor and pointing down. “Dis place,” he says. “Hey, Dyer, get it?”

  But Dyer isn’t here at all, she’s over there, coming in from the tunnels with Shimago and Mrs. John Dee, lugging what has got to be Shimago’s new rocket.

  “Huh,” The Wayward says.

  “Hey, Way,” Dyer says. “Everything ready?”

  He looks up at the wall. “Yeah,” he says.

  2042-05-18T16:29:00+01:00 +51.541709-0.147667

  • CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—SUPPORTING EVIDENCE IP VIOLATIONS SEE NOTE

  • NOTE: EVIDENCE INTENT TO DISTRIBUTE UNLICENSED NNDA SEE ATTACHED IMAGE ARCHIVE

  • ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE—I KNOW U R THINKING I’M GONNA BE WORKING OFF YOUR LOAN FOREVER BUT THINK AGAIN, LOOKS LIKE I’LL WRAP THIS UP MY FIRST DAY—THIS HIGHERWORKS GROUP WITH VANCE AND PUPUNU PLANNING SOME SORT OF RAVE TONIGHT—I GOT A PIC OF THE FLYER IT HAS A MAP WITH AN X-MARKS-THE-SPOT—APPARENTLY THEY LITERALLY *SPRAY* THE NANO OVER THE AUDIENCE—ALL I GOTTA DO IS SHOW UP WITH A SCANNER AND A CAMERA AND A PAIR OF CUFFS

  —KISSES—JO

  • ATTACHMENT: IMAGE (1)—CLICK TO VIEW

  Dyer, cueing—Camden Catacombs—Friday Evening

  Dyer tucks up her knees as The Wayward and Mrs. John Dee shove the last couple of cardboard boxes into place. She’s under the plastic folding table they use as a workbench, with the brick of the catacomb wall behind her, the humming microassembler to the right, and the boxes sealing off the other two sides. It doesn’t actually have to be dark and quiet for neural cue test, but it makes the measurements more accurate. Anyway, it’s part of the HigherWorks ritual, and not just for her; when Dyer emerges from her cave and declares the readings auspicious, that’s the cue for the entire group that the Drop is on.

  She tugs the sensor band snug across her temples, pairs it with her tablet, starts up the diagnostic logging: temporal, frontal, occipital, parietal activity—thinking about The Wayward’s “parental nest”—blinks her corneas clear so the infrared camera in the tablet can track eye movement, pupil dilation. Ear buds on, Dee’s test mix streaming, network up. Dyer swipes the screen off, sits in the dark for a minute. Clear my head, she thinks, but she’s still seeing afterimages, black on black, shadowed eyes and thundercloud hair. Her impossible woman.

  Dyer sighs, finds the business end of the inhaler. The nano swirls into her lungs, the smell of apple blossoms and a tart bubbly sensation like champagne. And then... nothing. Which is the first test passed; if the nano triggers without the cue, then it’s not an opt-in, and suddenly HigherWorks goes from a concern for Immigration and the IP lawyers to one for Narcotics or, a very worst case, the anti-terrorist nutjobs.

  She fishes a map from her pocket, finds the sealed edge with her thumb, and pulls it open. There’s a spark as the ink reacts and then the image inside shimmers to life.

  This is the first time she’s actually seen the cue as an image; up until this moment it’s just been data. For the last couple of years they’ve been getting the cues from a friend of The Wayward up in Kingsbury, an ancient Irish curmudgeon of a painter who comes to the parties even though he’s the one person in the world for whom the nano won’t trigger; there’s a window of just a few hours as the nano settles into the brain for the cue to come. Window window window, Dyer thinks as the nano wakes up. The cue is suddenly a window, the printed image a world seen through it: two characters on a high domed roof, looking out over the streets of a city sketched in strokes and squares—could be London but strange shapes hang in the air above— and behind the two watchers a raven watches them like memory memory memory as the audio kicks in, layered all down the auditory path from her implanted buds to her cochlear nerves to her auditory cortex, an ocean of sound swept by deep currents.

  The image flickers and fades as the inks burn out, but streaks of blue and silver ghost ghost ghost across her vision like echoes. During the gig tonight The Wayward will be nudging those echoes via the network, riffing on the images like visual jazz, trackin
g Dee’s beats, the two of them playing off each other, playing the crowd-become-one like sex like the crowd in the crossing when the cameras blew, made one motion motion motion by a hypersensitivity that transcends identity triggered not by lust or fear but by design by a higher working working working. Which is the second test passed; the nano is certainly working.

  Dyer taps the tablet on, swipes the network off, colors fading as the screenlight fills her little box nest under the table. She scrolls through the data, diagnostic software already parsing the logs into graphs points spreading across the screen and into the air around her like stars falling like light on water like what had The Wayward said this morning you go all scattered scattered scattered.

  Dyer shuts her eyes. Shhhh, the test is over, the network’s down, she thinks. Go to sleep, little nano.

  “Scattered,” a voice ghost-whispers in her ear. “Awake.”

  “I am awake,” Dyer says, shivers all down her back. She keeps her eyes shut, not sure that she wants to see that sharp fragile face and those shadowed eyes this close, this intimate.

  “No.”

  “‘No’ not me, or ‘no’ not awake?” Dyer asks. And then, “You know what? Just bugger off. I’ve got stuff to do. Anyway, you’re just urban legend.”

  From the ocean of sound come sudden shifting layers of voices, “Urban defined not by geography demographics or culture but by a certain threshold of connectivity, legend not as fabricated history but as fabricated comma history as the key to a map.”

  The voices all sync up on that last sharp word, and then complete silence, but with that hypersensitivity from the nano/lust/fear Dyer can feel that impossible face just a finger’s width from hers.

  “What do you want?” Dyer asks.

  Silence, but a flickering, or the memory of a flickering, glitching pixels and the words mutual self-repair.

  “I left Leanna Vance behind, halfway around the world and a decade gone,” Dyer snarls. “What do you want from me?” She opens her eyes, but it’s dark; the tablet screen’s gone to sleep again.

  Her own voice says, “We live here, our whole lives.”

  The feeling of lips on hers, the scent of bougainvillea and circuits burning, the taste of champagne.

  2042-05-18T18:33:22+01:00 +51.541522-0.147123

  • CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—ONGOING

  • ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE—I GOT A LEAD ON AN AMERICAN EXPAT SUPPOSED TO HAVE THE SCOOP ON THE “USER” COMMUNITY—BETTER START PICKING OUT SOME NEW BOUNTIES FOR ME

  —AND WHILE YOU’RE AT IT GET MY VISA EXTENDED—I’M BEGINNING TO DIG THIS OLD SMELL THESE OLD GHOSTS—GOT NO IMMEDIATE PLANS FOR GOING BACK TO THE STATES—YEAH YEAH I CAN HEAR YOU GRUMBLING FROM HERE BUT I AM WORTH IT—I AM A BOUNTY COLLECTING *NINJA*—AND THE PROOF IS VANCE IS GOING DOWN DOWN DOWN TONIGHT

  —KISSES—JO

  Dyer and Shimago, queuing—Stables Market—Friday Evening

  Dyer is in line at the kebab stand for Mrs. John Dee’s shawarma, and someone is too close behind her: a caress of convection currents, a static tickle.

  Shimago back with the curry, Dyer thinks. Blue Tats and Glowstar Girl from this morning, ready for another pint. The staring pimple-faced punkling still hot to mash it. A yellow-hoodied bounty hunter with a take-down notice ready to tag and drag her back to California. Anyone, Dyer thinks as she turns, please, anyone but the shadowed thundercloud shape that is, nano or not, the ghost of Leanna Vance.

  It’s Kal’s friend, xe of the twig fingers and anime eyes.

  Dyer says, “Leelee, yeah? All right?”

  But those fingers are shaking, those eyes even wider than Dyer remembered. Leelee gulps a breath, another, manages to gasp, “Kal.”

  “Ah, damn it,” Dyer says. “UKIS?”

  Leelee’s confused alarm is baffling until Dyer realizes xe might not be a USER.

  “The Immigration Services?” Dyer says, miming a beret.

  Leelee shakes xyr head, mimes a hood instead. “A yank,” xe says, “Some hard sket with a taser,” in a lilting East End Jamaican accent. “Hard as can be in a yellow hoodie, which ain’t. Kal say ‘go tell Dyer’ so I go. Went down there,” xe points at the floor—the catacombs run under the market—then points up, “but they say you up here.”

  “Shit,” Dyer says. “Where are they? Kal and the hoodie woman? We’ll grab Shimago and go find them.”

  “Allow that,” Leelee says. “Kal take care of herself. She tell me to tell you this yank asking about HigherWorks, asking about Dyer. Sounds like the sket bringin’ a beef your way. I run here to warn you. Manz didn’t build this body for running, innit?” Xe shakes xyr head, tugs the lace around xyr sleeves straight.

  “Someone bringing a beef to HigherWorks?” Shimago asks, walking up with takeaway bags in each hand. “Let them. They will discover that we are...” He swings the bags like nunchacku, leans in for effect: “... vegetarian.”

  Leelee blinks, a remarkable effect with those huge eyes, swings a long tapered thumb at the kebab stand. “Got some bad news den about the shawarma, arms.”

  “The shawarma is for Mrs. John Dee, and she is, as she reminded me this afternoon, from London.”

  “Safe,” Leelee says, satisfied, and starts in on the frills around her collar.

  “You’re sure Kal doesn’t need help with this woman with the taser?” Dyer asks. “The street’s crazy today, with the anti-migrant rally, those USERs pulled out of the river, and that’s just the start of the weird.”

  “Kal bare fine, just getting the tourist lost round the wrong ends so I could find you. Won’t take long, with the sket limpin’ like that.”

  “This American has a limp?” Shimago asks.

  “Does now, innit?” Leelee says, pulls up xyr long frilly skirts to show the wicked points of xyr Mary Janes.

  “Admirable,” Shimago says. “Dyer, the problems of the day are now behind you and surely moving too slow to catch you up, thanks to...”

  “Leelee, Shimago,” Dyer says, and pays for the shawarma. “That only works if I’m moving at all, and all day I’ve felt like I’m suspended.”

  “Girl, way Kal tells it, your mind running, all the time.”

  “This is true,” Shimago says.

  “Straight out of my head,” Dyer says. “Which is the point, actually. Shimago, that ghost nano thing...”

  “Ghost nano is—”

  “Real,” Dyer says. “Meaning nanites that don’t decay, that self-repair, that can connect between brains without a network node.”

  Shimago frowns dubiously. “Dyer, even Alphet couldn’t—”

  “They did. I did. That’s what my lab was doing, that was the project I couldn’t talk about. Military contracts, whole squads linked empathically, using each other’s eyes, ears, brains. Then the Crash happened and, Jesus, I’ve never told anyone this, the truth is, even though we were running from everything we’d known, part of me was glad that project went down with everything else. But now I’m not sure, now I think maybe something leaked out, and it’s looking for me.”

  In the patient tone he reserves for The Wayward’s most unlikely theories, Shimago says, “Persistent or not, I find it unlikely that nano could create a complex enough network for consciousness to emerge.”

  “I’m not talking AI, I’m talking about a pathway for consciousness to travel.

  Mental migrants.” Dyer’s accent was slipping. She looked around at the crowd in the market, London in its motley, two thousand years of migration, Camden in its shoddy sham glam even more of a refuge because no one pretended to be who they seemed.

  “Literally out of your head, in a strange body?” Shimago asks.

  “Don’t knock it ’til you try it, arms,” Leelee replies.

  2042-05-18T19:31:53+01:00 +51.539044-0.135225

  • CONTACT: TARGET (UNCONFIRMED)—LEANNA VANCE—PRIORITY AA APH2035.Z980023—ONGOING

  • ATTACHMENT: PERSONAL MESSAGE

  —WE GOT A
NY DIRT ON AN AMERICAN IN LONDON GOING BY “KAL”? THAT’S THE EXPAT I MENTIONED BEFORE—PIX ATTACHED BUT IT WAS DARK—SHE AND HER BITCH OF A WHATEVERFRIEND JUST GOT IN MY FACE BIG-TIME—F-ING TYPICAL—*SHE* COMES HERE FROM THE STATES BUT HERE I AM JUST TRYING TO GET A F-ING HANDHOLD SO I CAN STAY AND SHE “DON’T LIKE MY ATTITUDE”—I’LL SHOW HER ATTITUDE I’M BRINGING THE TASER TONIGHT DON’T CARE IF THE TREATY ALLOWS IT OR NOT I’M DONE FOOLING AROUND

  —KISSES—JO

  • ATTACHMENT: IMAGES (3)—CLICK TO OPEN

  Dyer, Shimago, The Wayward, and Mrs. John Dee, the Drop— Camden Catacombs—Friday Night

  Dyer knows the Drop is coming but that makes no difference. A skittering cicada orchestra over the drums cut by a crackle like a chord unplugged, jagged blue lines like the afterimage of lightning, and there they hang in darkness, silence: four hundred indrawn breaths, four hundred hearts hitting the beat together. Dyer watches Mrs. John Dee and The Wayward watch each other in the glow of their tablets, pushing the break as long as they can. With the heightened sensitivity of the nano sync Dyer can hear all four hundred heartbeats count it out, can feel the muscles burning to take a breath, can smell the sync start to fray and curl at the edges—circuits burning, Dyer remembers—and just as their suspended state teeters on the edge of impossibility, she sees the upbeat like a spark between Dee and Way and then the Drop like the thunder arriving: crashing drums, shimmering gamelan gongs, a thick golden glow like a flood of honey, four hundred breaths released, and through it all the bass a presence as physical as the brick and iron of the catacombs, as the bodies of the dancers.