“Who was his son representing, anyway?” Kurt asked, partly out of curiosity but partly to further wind Minter up.
“It’s not important.”
“Hmmm,” Kurt said, exaggerating his suspicion. “See, the way you say that kind of makes me feel like it is important.”
Minter sighed, his impatience most certainly not exaggerated. “Look, man, I’m trying to drive here. I’ve already told you way more than you need to know right now. Just you do your thing back there and I’ll concentrate on getting us where we need to be, okay?”
“My thing is done,” Kurt replied. He passed Minter’s newly hacked Lenses forward.
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” Kurt said. He leaned against the window.
“You should maybe get some sleep,” Minter suggested. “The pills must be making you pretty drowsy.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think I’ll need any more, anyway.” Kurt rolled up his sleeve to look at his hand. His palm didn’t feel very painful but talk of the painkillers brought his attention to the steady pulsing of his wrist.
With the benefit of his Lenses and their brightness control, Kurt saw that the veins in his left arm were much bluer and much more pronounced than those in his right. He lowered the Lenses’ brightness to normal and was concerned to see that his left wrist still looked blue.
“Does this look okay to you?” he asked Minter, holding out his arm.
Minter turned to look. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “I’m driving as fast as I can,” he eventually said. “The second we arrive, I’ll get someone to check that out.”
“What if it gets worse?” Kurt asked. For the first time, he was starting to worry. “We can’t exactly go to a hospital.”
“Ernesto’s people will have stuff,” Minter reassured him. “Antiseptic cream or something. I dunno. A proper dressing, at least. Just try to keep your hand flat and drink plenty of water.”
“I didn’t lose much blood,” Kurt said, thinking out loud in an effort to assuage his own concerns. “I’ll be fine.”
“Yeah,” Minter said.
In reality, they both knew that infection rather than blood loss was the main concern. Using a kitchen knife to remove the embedded Seed seemed more stupid the longer they thought about it, but it had been the only split-second option they had.
There were a few possible reasons why Kurt’s hand had worsened so much more than Minter’s. Chiefly, Minter hadn’t been very steady-handed when removing Kurt’s Seed. Minter put this down to the fact that he was dealing with the pain of his own Seed having just been removed, whereas Kurt had been working with two good hands. But there was also the fact that Kurt’s Seed — the first to ever be implanted — had been injected using a different procedure than Minter’s and everyone else’s. As such, it may have been in deeper or lodged at a slightly more awkward angle.
Whichever of these variables had caused Kurt greater initial discomfort than Minter, the pain was greatly exacerbated by the fully-immersed consumer who punched him squarely in the palm at the start of their walk to Stacy’s.
“I think maybe I will get some sleep,” Kurt said.
Minter nodded and left him to it.
Kurt gave up after around thirty seconds. “What did Stacy’s letter say apart from the thing about the mall?” he asked.
“It’s in my pocket,” Minter said. “Wait a second.”
Kurt held his hand out to receive the letter. As Minter had said at the time, there were only a few lines:
“Everything’s going well. Kurt is now totally on-side. He hates Amos as much as we do (you won’t believe why) but Amos trusts him like a son… even calls him hotshot. We are personally involved, not intentional but things happen. We will have won by the time you get this (we’re showing the footage on Friday) so I’m probably on the way to see you now.
I hope everything is okay at the mall. See you all soon.
P.S. Enjoy the candles!”
Kurt folded the letter and looked out of the window.
He was glad to read that Stacy hadn’t planned to become “personally involved” with him as this quashed the lingering thought that she got close to him purely to get dirt on Sycamore. Still, the message that he was “now totally on-side” hinted that his name had come up before.
The part that intrigued Kurt most was Stacy’s suggestion that Ernesto wouldn’t believe why Kurt hated Amos. He assumed that this referred to the multi-car collision which claimed the lives of his parents and sister-in-law. Stacy revealed to Kurt that her father had been driving the other car when a pop-up ad appeared in his UltraLenses and blocked his view of the road.
Amos succeeded in covering Sycamore’s tracks, and this was why Ernesto sought to take him down. Kurt had already decided to leak evidence of Sycamore’s wrongdoings before he learned the truth about the crash, but it added a further personal dimension to his brewing feud with Amos. That the two drivers involved in this freak accident were Kurt’s brother and Stacy’s father was an almost unfathomable coincidence. That Amos had kept the truth from Kurt even when they grew close was an unforgivable slight.
More than ever, Kurt looked forward to meeting Ernesto.
Reading Stacy’s handwriting gave Kurt an unshakeable urge to see her face again so he booted up her laptop and played the first few seconds of the clandestine footage from her tour of Sycamore HQ. The tiny camera was hidden on Stacy, so the only sight of her came when she looked in the mirror of Kurt’s car to check that it wasn’t visible. Kurt paused as soon as she came into view. He had no physical photos of Stacy and no ability to rewind to last week, so this three-second segment of wobbly footage was all he had. It wasn’t much, but he was glad to have it.
Minter heard the start of the video from the front of the car. “Are you planning to show that whole video to Ernesto?” he asked.
“Obviously,” Kurt said.
Minter sighed. “You’re going to have to edit out the parts that show me.”
“Why?”
“Because think about it, man: being there that day was what got Stacy killed. If he sees that I spoke to her, he’ll think it was me who broke her cover.”
“Was it?” Kurt asked. He hadn’t even considered this.
Minter made eye contact with him via the mirror. “No, it was the total opposite.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I knew her real name for weeks,” Minter said. “Ever since the day you met her. Remember how Amos asked the guys in Communications to block every mention of you pulling rank with the police officers and bus driver? Well, I looked over everything that was blocked and saw that a handful of people had recognised her and mentioned her name. So when she came into the Treehouse and Amos introduced her as Monica, I knew you were up to something.”
“So why didn’t you tell him?”
“Part of me thinks he already knew.”
“And what does the rest of you think?”
Minter flicked his eyes up to the mirror again to meet Kurt’s. “There was no need for that girl to get hurt, man. If you hadn’t called her Sta—”
“Watch the road!” Kurt yelled.
Minter slammed on the brakes and the car ground to a halt with little time to spare. Inexplicably, the car in front had stopped in the middle of the road.
Kurt looked out of his window and saw that several cars travelling in the other direction had stopped, too. The drivers all stepped out at once.
“Get down,” Minter said.
Kurt lay down as instructed. “What the hell is going on?” he asked quietly.
“They’re looking at the sky. It could just be the lottery, or it could be something else.”
“Like what?”
“Emergency news bulletin, maybe.”
“About what?” Kurt asked.
Minter slouched in his seat and whispered:
“Us.”
4
“What do you mean us?” Kurt asked. His voice was shaking. “W
e covered our tracks. There’s no way they could know. No way. Right?”
Minter reached into his pocket and pulled out an object that looked like a shiny pack of cigarettes.
“Right?” Kurt repeated.
“Quiet,” Minter said. He held the object to his ear and pressed a button so small that Kurt couldn’t see it. The volume of the message that emanated from the object caused Minter to drop it.
“And the final digit of our first winning number is 7. Congratulations to our winner, Jasmine Coulson! You have thirty seconds to claim your prize. Stay tuned for the next two winning numbers after these short placements.”
“False alarm,” Minter said. “It’s just the stupid Lotto.”
After the immediate wave of relief, Kurt’s attention turned to the object itself. “What the hell is that thing?” he asked, eyeing it with a mix of awe and suspicion. “How can it pick up Sycamore’s audio broadcasts?”
“It does more than that. We call it a Two-Way.”
“Why?”
“Watch and see,” Minter said. He turned a locking mechanism on the side of the Two-Way and removed the shiny white cover. Kurt looked on in amazement as Minter proceeded to make the Two-Way three times taller and three times wider simply by holding the bottom left corner in one hand and pulling the top right corner outwards with the other. It almost looked like he was enlarging a window on a computer, but in real life.
The material had the same sheen as a screen protector. “There is no way that’s a screen,” Kurt said.
“It’s really more of a filter,” Minter replied.
“What kind of filter?”
“An AR filter. If you look through this thing when you’re wearing Lenses, it shows you what the world is really like. They were made for Sycamore’s designers, to save them from having to take their Lenses out to see unaugmented reality.”
“Unaugmented reality is just reality,” Kurt said.
“Exactly. And this let’s them see it. But if you flip this little switch right here, you see the augmented world. Even without Lenses.”
Kurt paused. “So there’s a camera on the back?”
“Two cameras,” Minter answered.
“And this thing is connected to the servers? Are you out of your damn mind?”
“Relax, man. It’s totally safe. Just like your Lenses, ten thousand per cent.”
“Safe? How can it possibly be safe? It’s nothing like having hacked Lenses. That thing is talking to the servers!”
“Not in the same way,” Minter said. “Obviously the Two-Way talks to the server so that it knows what to relay where, but that’s it. These were made exclusively for staff use. No one at Sycamore sees the stream, because there is no stream. It’s kind of like looking at the world through a video camera without pressing record.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Kurt, I was head of Data Collection. My job was literally collecting data. I know better than anyone what passes through HQ.” Minter turned the Two-Away around and looked straight into one of the rear cameras. “Hello, Mr Amos,” he said. “Guess who’s not really dead? If you can see this stream and track this location, you’ll know where to find me.” Minter turned the camera to face Kurt. “Him, too,” he added.
Kurt laughed. “Why are you still calling him Mr Amos, you big creep?”
“Shut up,” Minter said. He was smiling, too. The drivers in front were all stepping back into their vehicles now that the SycaLotto had seemingly ended. Minter handed the Two-Way back to Kurt and drove off as soon as the other cars started moving.
“I would so buy one of these,” Kurt said. “Why can’t people buy these?”
“The whole ecosystem is built around keeping people in Sycamore’s version of reality,” Minter said. “If consumers could tune in and out, the whole thing would fall apart, man. That’s why so much effort goes into making sure people keep their Lenses in. Did you know that the SycaLotto is free now? If your consumer number is called, you have thirty seconds to claim the money. And if you happen to have taken your Lenses out for whatever reason, tough luck. On the first day that it was free they deliberately picked consumers who weren’t wearing their Lenses, just to make the point that it could happen to you. One of the guys killed himself.”
Kurt processed that. Nothing surprised him at this point, and the rationale behind keeping the Two-Way from public sale did sit neatly with Sycamore’s general strategy for the reasons Minter mentioned. He held the Two-Way in his hands and looked out of the window through it. He was pleased to see that the Two-Way could zoom, too. He looked at the last few stragglers outside and saw profile names and information beside their heads. It really did work.
He rubbed the thin edges of the screen. “What’s this made of?” he asked.
Minter shrugged. “I don’t know what it’s called, but I think it’s the same stuff as the SycaPhone’s two screens.”
“But it expands,” Kurt said. “How does it expand?”
“It doesn’t really expand, it extends. I think the screen just sort of folds out diagonally as you open it but I dunno, man. It’s basically the same stuff as those screens you used to see at Japanese tech shows. You know, the ones that could be rolled up and folded in half but would always remember their shape and snap back to it.”
Kurt was satisfied enough with the answer; Minter knew how the Two-Way operated, but Kurt couldn’t expect him to know how it physically worked. “Can you use it at any size or only when it’s fully extended?” he asked.
“The screen only works when it’s fully extended,” Minter replied. “But you can have it totally closed and still get audio broadcasts. The good thing is, it’ll keep us updated on whatever breaking news Amos wants the public to believe. Whatever he says about us, at least we’ll know.”
Kurt didn’t want to think about that. As far as he was concerned, the only good news was no news. If Amos truly believed that Kurt and Minter were dead, he would keep it quiet for as long as possible. “I guess,” he said.
Minter continued to drive as quickly as he could without attracting any attention. Kurt looked out of the window through his new toy. The lack of augmentation surprised him. Other than the occasional floating Lexington placement, the highway looked almost exactly as it had in the days before Sycamore.
“I thought there would be more ads,” Kurt said.
“Yeah. When you live in the city, you think the whole world is like that. But it’s not. The city is a bubble. Seeding rates were 90% in the city before they broke 50% overall. Obviously we’re way past 90% everywhere now, but it shows the difference.”
“I guess.”
“But you also have to remember that Two-Ways only show universal placements and features,” Minter added. “Because they’re for staff, so there’s no individual consumer to target.”
That explained a lot. Kurt knew that the vast majority of placements the average consumer saw were carefully targeted to them. Universal placements were a luxury affordable only to corporations who didn’t really need to advertise, anyway.
Minter drew Kurt’s attention to an old static billboard up ahead. The billboard was ripped and had been defaced. A giant yellow smiley face was spray-painted on, with the words “PLUG IN, TUNE OUT” curved around it in a circle. “Check if the Two-Way shows that,” Minter said.
Kurt held the Two-Way up and pointed it at the billboard. He saw a blank billboard. He flicked the switch to unaugmented. The graffiti was there. “They hid it,” Kurt said. “One stupid little piece of graffiti, and they hid it.”
“They’re nothing if not thorough,” Minter said.
“Yeah,” Kurt acknowledged, “but why didn’t they just paint over it? Like, with actual paint?”
Minter shrugged. “Ease, I guess. They would have had to send someone out here and pay for the paint and everything. It’s so much easier to have someone in the Studio press a few buttons.”
“Yeah,” Kurt said again. He felt his eyes closing. The surprise existe
nce of the Two-Way had comforted him somewhat, providing as it did a means to see the world as experienced by the rest of the population. It was bound to come in handy at some point.
“You sound like you’re about to go to sleep for a week,” Minter said.
Kurt shuffled until he found a comfortable position. “Hopefully,” he replied. “Wake me when we run out of gas, though. I need to make sure you don’t do anything stupid.”
“Okay,” Minter said. “And speaking of not doing anything stupid, don’t fall asleep on your hand.”
Kurt didn’t reply.
~
“Kurt.”
…
“Kurt!”
He shuffled lazily and rubbed his eyes with his good hand. “What?”
“We’re here,” Minter said. “This is the place.”
A boost of energy helped Kurt raise his head to the window. “Any sign of Ernesto?”
Minter eyed him with concern. “How long do you think you’ve been out?”
“I dunno. Twelve hours?”
“Not even five,” Minter said. “How could it be twelve? It’s still dark. And I’ve already told you that we won’t arrive until tomorrow morning if we’re lucky. This is just the gas station.”
“So stop talking and get the gas,” Kurt mumbled. He lay back down.
“The plan has changed,” Minter said. “We need to talk it through.”
“Okay. I agree with the new plan.”
Minter was rapidly losing patience. “Wake up and listen,” he said.
“Just do whatever you think. I need to… just… sleep.”
“Kurt, if you don’t get up right now, I will pour water on your face.”
“Shut up.”
Minter slapped Kurt lightly on the cheek. “That’s a hand. Next time it’s the water.”
“What do you want from me?” Kurt asked. He sat up slowly, eyes barely open. “Just tell me what you want.”
“Look at the door,” Minter said.
Kurt surveyed the area around the car. They were parked in the middle of nowhere. All he could see was a run-down gas station with a single light barely illuminating its two ageing pumps. “This is the best gas station nearby? This?”
Sycamore 2 Page 5
