I walked out, back to the Lady. “No stove.”
“Stove?” she said, blinking.
I ran one hand down a suspender. “I cook,” I said.
“You cook?”
I felt my jaw and shoulders tense — I’m sick of being told Nines don’t cook — but then I saw her eyes. They were sparkling with delight. Indulgent delight. It reminded me of my own mother, oohing and aahing over brick-hard cookies I’d baked her one winter morning in the slums of Maryland, back when my aetial age was still tied to Nature’s clock. My mother holding up the wedding dress she’d planned to give me away in, its lacy waist brushing my chin. One evening in college, when I’d looked up at the dinner table, halfway through a sentence — I’d been telling her about The Hat on the Cat, my distributed documentary (a firebrand polemic for Under-Five Emancipation; how cybernetics would liberate the Toddlers from lives of dependence) — and saw in her eyes how long ago she’d stopped listening. Saw that I wasn’t Nine to her, but nine. Saw that she wasn’t looking at me, but through me, a long way off — toward another now, another me: a Woman. Big globes of fatty breasts dangling from that other-me’s chest; tall as a doorway, man-crazy, marriageable; a great sexualized monster like herself, a walking womb, a proto-Mommy. She was waiting for that Susan, Woman-Susan, who would never show up.
“I cook,” I said, looking away from the Lady’s eyes. Putting my hands in my pants pockets. I could have used a hug, but Max was underwater and Tommy and Shiri were trying to knock each other off the trampoline. I went outside.
“We could bring in a stove module,” the Lady called.
Outside, a pigeon was poking through the lawn. It was mangy and nervous enough to be real. I stood for a while watching it, then my earring buzzed. I made the Accept mudra.
“Suze?” Travis said.
“Why are you asking, Travis? Who do you think is wearing my earring?”
“Suze, Abby’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“She’s not picking up. Her locator’s off. I can’t find her anywhere.” When Travis was nervous, his voice squeaked. Now he sounded like a mouse caught in a trap.
I looked at the active tattoo readout on my left palm. Travis was home. I made the mudra for Abby. No location listed. “Stay there, Travis. We’re on our way.”
I ran up the plank. Max was dressed again, rubbing his dreadlocks with a towel from the poolside toweltree. Tommy and Shiri were sitting at a table with the Real Estate Lady, looking over paperwork in the tabletop display.
“We’ve got to go. A personal emergency has come up,” I said. Max was at my side instantly.
“Listen, we want this place,” Shiri said.
“Shiri, we all have to talk about it,” I said.
“What’s to talk about?” Tommy said. “It’s awesome.”
“This is the first place we’ve looked at,” I said.
“So?”
The Real Estate Lady was watching us with a guarded expression. I didn’t want to say that Abby was missing. Not in front of her. Not in front of that can-you-really-be-trusted-to-look-after-yourselves-all-on-your-own-without-any-grownups attitude that came off her like a stink. I took my hands out of my pockets and balled them into fists. “You’re being totally stupid!” I said.
“What’s the emergency?” Max said quietly.
“I know what Travis and Abby would say,” Tommy said. “They totally want a place like this. Let’s just get it and we’ll have the rest of the day free.”
“We can go windgliding,” Shiri said.
“Travis and Abby didn’t even agree to getting a house yet, never mind this house,” I said. I felt Max’s hand on my shoulder.
“That’s because they haven’t seen it,” Tommy said.
“What’s the emergency?” Max said.
“There’s probably been a train wreck and Suze has to make sure she’s the first ghoul at her flatscreen,” Shiri said.
“Screw you,” I said and walked out of the house. I was shaking a little with adrenaline. I got in our clowncar and clicked on the engine. Max hurried out the door behind me. I slid over to the passenger seat and he got in to drive.
“We can pick them up later,” he said. “Or they can take a cab. What’s up?”
I made the Abby mudra and showed him my palm. “Abby’s missing. Travis hasn’t seen her, and she’s not picking up.”
Max pulled out into the street. “She left the house this morning early, with that old black-and-white camera you got her. She was going to shoot some pictures.”
I flipped open the flatscreen in the passenger-side dash and logged in. “That’s no reason for her to turn off her locator. I hope she didn’t stay near the house—a Nine walking around alone in the ghetto, taking photographs—imagine how that looks.”
We hummed and whooshed out of Pirateland, up a ramp onto 1-90. “Abby wouldn’t be that dumb,” Max said. But he didn’t sound too sure. Abby’s impetuous, and she’d been melancholy lately. “Police?” he asked, after a moment.
I shot him a sharp look. The police are Geezers—height requirements keep Under Twelves out of their ranks, and the Teens are mostly too uneducated and unruly. I didn’t have any strings to pull with them, and neither did Max. “We wait until we have more data,” I said. “Now shut up and let me work. Head home.”
Most people have the notion that the public footage is this permanent, universal, easily searchable archive of everything that ever happens, clearly shot, from any angle. It’s the job of people in my profession to help perpetuate that illusion. Actually, the networks are surprisingly spotty. There are millions of swarmcams wandering around in any major urban area, but they have a high failure and bug rate, and their pictures are grainy and indistinct—only a lot of imaginative algorithmic reconstruction makes them viewable. There are plenty of larger cameras linked to the net, but often hidden in a byzantine maze of permissions and protocols. And there are billions of motion sensors, audio pickups, locator tags, and data traffic monitors added to the mix, but they’re not well correlated with each other. In a few hours on a Sunday morning, one square mile of downtown Billings generates enough data to fill all the computers of the twentieth century, plus all the paper libraries of the centuries before. It’s hell to search.
But I’m good. I had enough footage of Abby on file to construct a good bloodhound, and then I spawned a dozen of them and seeded them well. Pretty soon the hits started coming back. Abby had crossed the street in front of our house at 09:06, and turned her locator tag off—on purpose, I imagined, since there was no error log. She’d stopped for bagels and udon in a deli on Avenue C at 09:22; shot pictures in the park until 09:56. She’d talked to a couple of Fifteens there and taken something from them. I couldn’t see what, in the grainy gray swarmcam pictures, but it made the hair on the back of my neck rise.
From 10:03 I lost her; she’d gone up an elevator in a bank and disappeared. There’s a network of private walkways and an aerial tram in that part of Billings that are poorly monitored. I had a cold feeling in my gut; that was a great way to lose me, if you were trying to.
I searched all the exits to those walkways and the tramway for Abby, buying a bunch of extra processing power on the exchange to run it faster. Nothing.
Max had entered among the spires and alleys of Billings. Dappled shadows of metal and translucent plastics and ceramics rippled over the clowncar. I looked out at the people walking through the corridors around us, all ages and sizes and colors. An old woman was walking slowly on a slidewalk just above us—she must have been an aetial Ninety, which made her a hundred and twenty or so. Walking, slowly, under her own steam. You don’t see that every day.
I went back to some old footage I had of a birthday party and grabbed a sequence of Abby walking. I built an ergodynamic profile of her and fed that to my bloodhounds.
Bingo. At 10:42, Abby had left the aerial tramway in disguise. Platform shoes, trenchcoat, false breasts and hips and shoulders—she was imp
ersonating a Fourteen or so. It looked ridiculous, like Halloween. She’d consulted a piece of paper from her pocket.
By 10:54 she was in a bad area. “Head for 30th and Locust,” I told Max.
“Shit,” he said. “No police?”
“I don’t have anything yet that would warrant their attention. Nothing that proves she was coerced.”
“So we need other backup,” Max said grimly.
“Yeah.” I looked up. “Can you get it?”
“I think so,” he said. He made some Call mudras with one hand and started talking. “Hey, Dave, how you doing? Listen, man —” tuned him out as he made his calls.
My last shot of Abby was at 11:06. She was being hustled into a doorway by a gargantuan Fifteen. His hand was on her elbow. Biodynamic readouts from a few stray hospital swarmcams confirmed that her pulse was elevated. Should I send this to the police? Would it prove Abby was coerced? But what was she doing with the weird disguise and the sneaking around? Just slumming? Or would I get her in trouble?
Was Abby buying drugs?
“Parkhill and 32nd,” I said to Max. My fingers were still and I was just looking at that last picture, Abby and the giant, him pulling her into darkness.
“Can you meet us at Parkhill and 32nd?” Max was saying. “Damn, I know, man—that’s why we need you.”
When we got there, five of Max’s friends were waiting. Four were clearly from his gym. Two of them were probably Nines or Tens (one swarthy, one red-haired and freckled) and they were even musclier than Max, their heads perched like small walnuts on their blockbuster bodies. The other two were Pumped Up Teens—maybe Fifteen or Sixteen. Their blond, Slavic-boned faces sat on bodies like overstuffed family room sofas or industrial refrigerators: fingers the size of my forearm, thighs the size of my entire body. I wasn’t sure how we were going to get them in the building.
And then there was the fifth—an Augmented Three. She stood a little apart from the others, her tiny arms at her sides. They were clearly afraid of her. One soft brown eye scanned the clouds, and she had a beatific smile on her face. Her other eye was the glistening jewel of a laserlight connector, and there were other plugs and ports glistening in her brown scalp among her cornrows.
Max stopped the car.
“Who’s the Three?” I asked.
Max turned to me. He looked nervous, like he thought I was going to make fun of him. “That’s my sister, Carla.”
“Cool,” I said quickly. He got out before I could say anything yet stupider, like, “How nice that you’ve stayed close.”
I opened my door and froze—Carla was running toward us. “Max!” she warbled, and flung her arms around his waist, burying her face in his stomach.
“Hi, honey-girl,” he said, hugging her back.
I glanced at my palm readout. It had gone blank. So had the flatscreen in the car. It was a safe bet nothing near Carla would be recorded. You could sometimes tell where Augmented Threes and Twos were in the public footage by tracking the blank areas, the little blobs of inexplicable malfunction that followed them around. I once did an experimental documentary on Under-Five Augmentation using that blanked-out foot-age. It was called Be Careful What You Wish For—kind of a rueful, years-later followup to The Hat on the Cat.
“Carry me!” Carla said, and Max dutifully swung her tiny body onto his shoulders.
“Carla, this is Suze,” Max said.
“I don’t like her,” Carla announced. Max’s face went slack with fear, and my heart lurched. I grabbed the car door so hard my fingernails sank into the frame.
Carla exploded in giggles, then started to hiccup. “Just — kidding!” she choked out between hiccups. “You guys are so silly!”
I tried to smile. Max turned, slowly, toward the door. It was a formidable steel monstrosity, the kind with a biodynamic access plate governing its security system. Those things are supposed to be off-net, more or less invulnerable to cybernetic hacking. Carla waved at it and it popped open. The four muscleboys crowded their way inside—eager to get to Abby, and away from Carla—and the three of us brought up the rear, Carla still perched on Max’s shoulders.
The stairway was dark and rank—it smelled like Teenagers, all their glands and excretions, smeared and sour. Most of the wallglow was dead, and one malfunctioning patch at the top of the stairs was flashing green and red, so that the bodies of the muscleboys ascended the stairs in strobed staccato.
The freckled gymrat was first to the doorway at the top. As he reached for the doorknob, we heard a long moan, and then a series of grunts. Almost snarls. And then, softer, a whimper—a high, female whimper — like the sound of someone tortured, someone in despair.
Carla started to cry. “I don’t like it!”
“What is it, honey-baby?” Max said, his voice afraid. “What’s behind that door?”
“Don’t ask her that!” I barked. “Distract her, you idiot!”
“Max, should I make it go away?” Carla wailed. “Should I make them stop, Max?”
“No!” Max and I shouted at the same time.
“Max,” I said as pleasantly as I could manage, “why don’t you and Carla go play a nice game in the car?”
“But maybe I should —” Max said, looking at me from between Carla’s tiny, shaking knees.
“Now!” I barked, and pushed past them.
Panting came from under the door, panting and groans. The muscleboys looked at me nervously. I heard Max’s shoes clumping down the stairs behind me, and he started singing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.”
“In!” I hissed, pointing at the door. The two overmuscled Nines threw their shoulders against it. It strained and buckled, but held. From inside the door came a strangled scream. The two Pumped-Up Teens braced themselves against the wall and each other, bent their knees, and crouched down with their shoulders under the Nines’ butts. “Ready—now!” called the biggest, and all four of them pushed. The door shot open, and the muscleboys tumbled and collapsed through it. I sprinted over their bodies, springing from a buttock to a shoulder to a back to another shoulder, and I was through.
On a tiger-skin throwrug in the midst of a pile of trash, two huge naked Fifteens looked up. The male’s skin was a mass of pimples and grease; shaggy hair fell over his shoulders and muscles. The female was pinned under him, her gigantic breasts flopping to either side of her thin ribcage, her knees pinioned around his hips. Between the wiry forests of their pubic hair, a portion of the male’s penis ran like a swollen purple bridge.
“Ewww!” I shouted, as they flopped down, pulling the tigerskin over themselves. “Where’s Abby??”
“Hi, Suze,” said Abby dryly from an overstuffed chair to my left. She was wearing a white jumpsuit, and holding a pen and a paper notebook.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted.
“I might ask you the same.” She motioned to the pile of muscleboys, who were struggling to their feet with dazed expressions.
“Abby! You disappeared!” I was waving my arms around like a Macromuppet. “Locator — bad area — disguise — scary — aargh!”
“Are you going to follow me around with a small army every time I turn off mv locator?”
“Yes!!”
She sighed and put down her pencil and paper. “I’m really sorry,” she called to the Fifteens. “My time was almost up anyway. Um, do you mind if we talk in here for a few minutes?”
“Yes!” gurgled the female.
“Abby, come on,” I said. “They can’t just stop in the middle. They have to, you know, finish what they were — doing. Until it’s finished their brains won’t work properly.”
“Okay,” Abby said. “All right, ah — thanks.”
In the stairway, I said, “You couldn’t just watch a porn channel?”
“It’s not the same,” she said. “That’s all packaged and commercial. I wanted to interview them before and after. I have to know — what it’s like.”
“Why?”
She paused on the stair
s, and I stopped too. The muscleboys, muttering, went out onto the street, and we were alone in the flashing green and red light.
“Suze, I’m going to start the clock.”
Like she’d poured a bucket of ice water down my spine. “You’re what?”
“I’m going to take the treatments.” She spoke quickly, as if afraid I’d interrupt her. “They’ve gotten much better in the past couple of years; there are basically no side effects. They’re even making headway with infants. In five years, it looks like most babies won’t have any arrestation effects at all, and—”
Tears had sprung to my eyes. “What are you talking about?” I cried. “Why are you talking like them? Why are you talking like being like us is something to be cured?” I punched the wall, which hurt my hand. I sat down on the step and cried.
“Suze,” Abby said. She sat down next to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “I love being like us — but I want—”
“That?” I shouted, pointing up to the top of the stairs, where they were grunting again. “That’s what you want? You’d rather have that than us?”
“I want everything, Suze. I want every stage of life—”
“Oh, every stupid stage, as designed by stupid God, who also gave us death and cancer, and—”
She grabbed my shoulders. “Suze, listen. I want to know what that up there is like. Maybe I won’t like it, and then I won’t do it. But Suze, I want to have babies.”
“Babies? Abby, your eggs are forty years old —”
“Exactly! Exactly, my eggs are only forty years old, and most of them are still good. Who do you want to have the babies, Suze? The Geezers? The world is starting again, Suze, and I—”
“The world was fine!” I pulled away from her. “The world was just fine!” Snot and tears were running down my nose into my mouth, salty and gooey. I wiped my face on the sleeve of my stockbroker’s suit, leaving a slick trail like a slug. “We were fine—”
The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004 Page 5
