Proxy

by Alex London

  PROXY

  Alex London

  Philomel Books

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  For Tim, who inspired, Robert, who believed, and Jill, who elevated

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group. Published by The Penguin Group.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, USA.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd).

  Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd).

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India.

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd).

  Penguin Books South Africa, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa.

  Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China.

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Copyright © 2013 by Charles Alexander London.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission in writing from the publisher, Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Philomel Books, Reg. U.S. Pat & Tm. Off. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Published simultaneously in Canada. Printed in the United States of America.

  Edited by Jill Santopolo. Design by Semadar Megged. Text set in 11.5-point Aldus.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data London, Alex. Proxy / Alex London. pages cm Summary: “Privileged Syd and and his proxy, Knox, are thrown together to overthrow the system”—Provided by publisher. [1. Science fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.L84188Pr 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012039704

  ISBN 978-1-101-62585-9

  Both were being denied their childhoods: the prince by a smothering excess of privilege, [the whipping boy] by none at all.

  —Sid Fleischman

  In the . . . landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software.

  —Douglas Rushkoff

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  [1]

  [2]

  [3]

  [4]

  [5]

  [6]

  [7]

  [8]

  [9]

  [10]

  [11]

  [12]

  [13]

  [14]

  [15]

  [16]

  [17]

  [18]

  [19]

  [20]

  [21]

  [22]

  [23]

  [24]

  [25]

  [26]

  [27]

  [28]

  [29]

  [30]

  [31]

  [32]

  [33]

  [34]

  [35]

  [36]

  [37]

  [38]

  [39]

  [40]

  [41]

  [42]

  [43]

  [44]

  [45]

  [46]

  [47]

  [48]

  [1]

  EVEN A PERFECT MACHINE wasn’t built to go this fast.

  Knox knew it, but still he pressed harder on the accelerator. Ripples of heat blurred the air around the car, and the girl in the passenger seat squealed.

  Terror? Delight? Did it matter?

  He took a turn too sharply, felt the stabilizer engine straining. His windshield lit up with warnings: lane markers flashing red, speed indicators blinking. Sweat beaded on his upper lip, but the car held the road.

  R U glitched? popped up in his datastream in translucent green letters. He could see through them to the pavement, but they were impossible to ignore.

  He glanced at the girl, giggling to cover her nerves.

  They curved up the speedway, slicing like heat lightning over the slums of the Lower City, past the blast barriers and security fences, rising higher and higher. There were parts of the Mountain City you just didn’t go to if you were lux, parts you didn’t even see. The city below them blurred. The city beside them gleamed. Knox accelerated.

  srsly?! blinked double sized in front of Knox, each letter wiggling and changing colors. The font was chunky; the y swished like a cat’s tail. Very retro. Probably custom-made for her by some trendy for-hire coder. Her hands waved in the air in front of the windshield, swiping out another text. she added.

  Suddenly, her smiley face vanished.

  Reduce Speed . . . Reduce Speed . . . Reduce Speed . . . scrolled in front of Knox in an unfriendly industrial font. All the road signs and advertisements now said the same thing: DANGER DANGER DANGER.

  Knox waved off the augmented-reality hookup. You weren’t supposed to be able to turn it off, but Knox had yet to find a security system he couldn’t hack. AR driving was for amateurs and accountants anyway. He gunned the car forward. The speed pressed him against the auto-cooled leather seats.

  “You even know how to drive?” the girl cried out loud, her voice shrill and excited.

  Knox didn’t say a word. He liked to let the growl of the engine do the talking.

  He also couldn’t remember the girl’s name.

  Amy? Pam?

  Something old-fashioned. He shot her another glance, his emerald eyes flashing mischief. He smirked.

  That usually did the trick.

  She was new in Mr. Kumar’s History of Robotics class, a transfer from homeschooling. She liked the animations Knox hacked onto the public display on top of their teacher’s scowling face. Sometimes Knox gave Mr. Kumar devil horns or a top hat or made it look like he was lecturing them from a seedy strip club in the Lower City. The girl had complimented Knox’s work on her first day at school.

  Mr. Kumar never had any idea his image had been hacked. He just talked away from his wood-paneled office at EduCorp. He couldn’t figure out why the kids always laughed so hard at his lectures. Not that he could do anything about it. They were all paying customers and could laugh all they wanted. That was a perk of going to a top-tier patron school. The customer was always right.

  Knox had a knack for hacking datastreams, but school wasn’t really his thing. He could do the work when he wanted, when he had the right motivation, but grades weren’t it. A girl—any girl really—now that was good motivation.

  Curvy, skinny, smart, dumb, Retroprep or NeoBuddhist, Causegirl or Partygirl, it didn’t matter to him. They all had something beautiful in them. He loved finding out what it was. And they loved letting him.

  Knox knew his assets. With a few little hacks of a holo projection or two, a green-eyed wink, and a lopsided smirk, he could get most girls to do anything.

  Well, almost anything. Absolutely anything would take this drive in the borrowed silver CX-30 and an after-hours tour of the patrons’ zoo on the edge of the city. Girls loved extinct animals, didn’t they?

  Scare them with a few hairpin turns, show them a live polar bear and some real penguins, and then, cue t
he melting into his arms. This wasn’t his first time down this road.

  “You ready to meet a polar bear?” he asked her.

  She giggled again.

  “What’s so funny? Polar bears were deadly creatures. Carnivorous, fearless, and wild. You have to be careful around them.”

  “Sounds like someone I know.”

  “Me?” He feigned innocence. “I’m harmless as a puppy dog.”

  “Yeah, but are you housebroken?”

  Oh yes, Knox liked this one.

  Emily? Ann? Sue?

  He couldn’t ask her now. If they were at one of his father’s parties, he could introduce her to people, get her to say her name to the vice president of Birla Nanotech or something. But it was just the two of them in the car and it would be just the two of them at the zoo. What did names matter, anyway? Knox didn’t plan to do much talking.

  He swiped through his datastream, clutching the wheel with just his palms, and locked on to a holo of a long-faced puppy, its tail wagging and its little pink tongue hanging out. It bounded to her side of the windshield and licked her in 3-D. She laughed. It was an old stock pic; he’d used it a thousand times before, but it never failed him.

  She waved her fingers around the glowing projection in the air and tossed a text back to Knox.

  CUTE lit up on the windshield in front of him.

  She wasn’t just talking about the puppy. Knox half smiled and bit down on his lower lip.

  She noticed. He was watching the road, but he knew that she noticed.

  Alice? Debbie?

  Her mother was on one of those Benevolent Society volunteer committees. Saving the orphans or matching organ donors or something. Maybe both. They’d go well together. Her father was a mining executive for one of the big firms, data not dirtware. The real value was in data. He was a client of Knox’s father’s company, but that didn’t narrow it down much. Everyone was a client of Knox’s father’s company.

  Her father was bald, right? Knox thought he remembered a shiny bald head when he’d met the man. Must be nostalgia, like her old-fashioned name. No one with money needed to go bald. He was probably a history buff. Or was that the last girl’s father? It was hard to keep these fathers and their hobbies straight. Charming fathers was so much more work than charming their daughters, with so much less reward.

  The girl’s family must have some cred. You couldn’t get into their high school without paying for it, no outside sponsors allowed. And you couldn’t get eyes like hers without some serious biotech. They practically glowed purple. Her dark hair also had a hint of purple, probably designed to match. The DNA install for that kind of work must have been a nightmare for the coders who wrote it. Very lux.

  Knox eased on the straightaway. He was way above the suggested maximum speed, and he was way below the suggested minimum age. He’d stolen company property from his father’s private lot; he’d violated the restricted speedway, violated driving regulations. He planned to do some more violating before the night was over. In the end, someone would have to pay for it.

  Everything costs.

  But really, who would set the access code to a brand-new CX-30 Roadster as 1-2-3-4-5 and not expect his son to take it for spin? If anyone was to blame, it was his father. Knox was sixteen. He was just doing what came naturally.

  Like the polar bears.

  And look where that got them.

  “What’s so funny?” the girl asked, seeing Knox chuckle.

  “Just thinking about polar bears,” he said and he reached over to squeeze her thigh.

  That was his first mistake.

  The next two came in quick succession.

  The car swerved slightly toward the guardrail when he took his right hand off the wheel. At that speed, on manual drive, it took both hands to keep the vehicle straight. He’d have known that if he had ever taken a manual driving class.

  He hadn’t.

  He overcompensated for the swerve, jerking the wheel toward the center lane. That was his second mistake.

  His heart skipped a beat as he felt himself losing control. If he hadn’t shut off the augmented reality driving, it would have taken over right then. These cars drove themselves if you let them.

  Instead, he tried to brake.

  Mistake number three.

  An alarm sounded. The car jackknifed, spun sideways, and flipped over at 162 mph.

  Airborne.

  The stabilizer engine screeched helplessly at the sky.

  Or maybe that was the girl.

  He felt the car hit the ground and roll. The entire universe shattered into blinking lights and screaming metal. He heard a crunch, a snap of bone. He felt like he’d been punched in the throat.

  There was heat, an intense heat, and an invisible fist pulled the air out of his lungs and ripped the sound from his ears. He couldn’t hear anything now, no screaming, no screeching, just the blood rushing to his head. He thought he was upside down. Twisted metal pinned his arms to his sides. He felt the urge to laugh. There was a warm wetness on his face and he tasted something metallic.

  And then darkness.

  [2]

  DARKNESS.

  Nothing but darkness.

  What could be wrong?

  Syd swiped and twisted; he dragged and dropped.

  Still nothing.

  He tried resetting the power source, rebooting the software. When that failed, he tried the oldest repair trick he knew: whacking the thing with his palm.

  Nothing.

  He couldn’t get a holo to project. There was just a void hanging midair in the hallway.

  Syd shook his head and handed the kid back the beat-up piece of plastic he used as his datastream projector. “There’s no connection between the projector and your biofeed. No input. Broken beyond repair.”

  The boy didn’t deign to take the small device back, even though it belonged to him. “So, like, what? You’re saying you can’t fix it?”

  “I’m saying no one can fix it. It’s not picking up your signal anymore. Could be the receiver, could be that you aren’t transmitting anything to receive.” Syd looked down at the kid, some snot-nosed first-year, zit pocked and sneering, trying to look tough because he figured he was being scammed. Probably not a bad assumption to make, but Syd wasn’t scamming him. Life in the Valve was hard enough without everyone trying to get one over on everybody else all the time. Even in high school.

  EduCorp scammed the teachers, the teachers scammed the students, and the students scammed one another. Maybe somebody learned something along the way, maybe not. But everybody paid.

  Syd was just trying to get his certificate and get out without owing anybody else anything.

  The kid’s lip quivered.

  Exams were coming up for the first-years, the kid whined. How was he supposed to get through them with no datastream access? He couldn’t afford a new biofeed install. He already had eighteen years of debt, he said, and he’d just started high school. Blood work cost, what, another three years at least?

  “What am I supposed to do?” he pleaded. “I’ve already been volunteered for two weeks of swamp drainage because of a stupid prank my patron pulled.”

  He went on whining. He needed new malaria meds and sunblocker patches. Probably another six months of debt right there. He couldn’t pay for new software in his blood on top of all that. He’d have to repeat the whole year at full price if he didn’t make the tests.

  “Bribe the test proctor?” Syd suggested. Half the kids did that. Some of them didn’t even show up at all, just paid for their grades. Easy to do if you didn’t mind borrowing the credit. Credit was easy. Studying was hard.

  The kid made a face like he’d been hit in the stomach. No go on the bribe.

  Syd felt for the kid. He couldn’t afford to bribe the teachers either. Not without borrowing himself into oblivion or starving himself to death.

  The floodgates broke; the kid wept, standing in the green tiled hallways of Vocation High School IV. His shoulders shoo
k and he buried his face in his hands.

  Syd stared at the wet armpit circles on the kid’s shirt. The climate control was out again. Nothing smelled worse than three thousand sweating teenagers trapped in a concrete bunker of a building made for half that number. The Valve was at the lowest point in the Mountain City, where the wet heat lingered, unmoved by the breezes that kept the peaks of the Upper City comfortable. Breezes were for people who could afford them. All the Lower City kids got was the heat of nature’s indifference.

  Other kids stared at Syd as they passed, shaking their heads, rolling their eyes, whispering to one another. Shoulder bump after shoulder bump.

  Syd ran his hand through his short hair and his fingers tapped absently on the birthmark behind his ear. The mark was changing. He’d had it as long as he could remember, but in the last few month, it had been growing, little black dot by little black dot, like pixels. The dots had formed shapes, four of them, darkening day by day. He worried that maybe it wasn’t a birthmark. Maybe it was cancer. Or plague blemishes.

  Were those a thing?

  He didn’t know. But he couldn’t afford to have a cancer patch installed to correct it. Talk about debt. Medical installs cost a fortune; at least, medical installs that wouldn’t make you sicker than you already were.

  Syd had more to worry about than this crying first-year and his broken datastream.

  Advos based on the kid’s purchase profile flashed on the walls around them. Some off-brand acne care called PusPopper and three flavors of Fiberizer Diet Supplements from EpiCure Incorporated.

  “Hey, your advos are still working.” Syd pointed at the wall where the advertisements were displayed. “At least your biofeed is still broadcasting.”

  “Those aren’t mine.” The kid denied it. Of course he denied it.

  This was not helping Syd with his image. The advos were linked to your biofeed, read off the scanners that picked up everyone’s background radiation. If you had a biofeed installed in your blood—and everyone in the Mountain City did—then your advos belonged to you and you alone; your body was networked. If those advos weren’t the kid’s, that’d mean that they were Syd’s. Syd did not want everyone thinking he needed PusPoppers or Fiberizer Diet Supplements.