by Alex London
“OMG. We heard about the accident? Are you okay? I mean, like, that must have been so . . . well . . . you know . . .” She was a brunette. A little horse-faced, but with a high-end makeup job. Her concern was touching. One of her friends shushed her.
“Thank you.” Knox reached out and touched her arm, nodding with appreciation. Her friends all dropped their jaws. Knox let the brunette stare into his eyes for a while. He made them look a little sad, a little pained. It wasn’t hard at the moment. No one moved. Knox knew he had them.
On the wall behind the girls, advertising holos flashed from their profiles, gene mods and diet patches, passion scents and romantic restaurants. A sports drink. A horror movie. On any other night he might have been intrigued, might have wanted to get to know these girls, at least for a few hours.
“What’s your name?” he whispered.
“Galafrain,” the girl answered. “Or just Gala.”
“Like a celebration,” Knox said. She nodded. Her friends looked back and forth between them. “Listen, Gala, you know my car got wrecked in the accident, and my friend and I need a ride home . . . you think you could help us out?”
“I don’t have . . . ,” she started, and looked mortified.
“Or just call us a ride, huh? I’d do it, but . . .” He looked meekly at his shoes, rubbed the back of his neck, gave an embarrassed smile, and let the unfinished sentence fade without explanation. Let them fill in their own reasons.
“I can call my mom’s transpo service,” one of the other girls piped in. Knox looked at her and let his smile blossom. He hugged her.
“You guys are my heroes,” he said to the girls as he started to back away. “All of you. For real.”
When Knox came back into the alley, Syd stood from behind the generator.
“You’re back,” he said.
Knox smirked. “You thought I’d ditch you, just like that?”
Syd didn’t answer. He’d had exactly that thought.
Knox had seen that look Syd was giving him a thousand times on holos over the years, like Syd thought he was better than everyone else just because he suffered. His arrogance was probably hiding some deeper issue, like he wet the bed or something.
Whatever, thought Knox. He didn’t need to analyze his proxy. He just needed to get him away from the city. He wondered what his father would do when the proxy vanished. What would he do when he heard Knox helped? He’d have to take notice, anyway. Maybe he’d want to negotiate for Syd, give Knox something in return.
Knox snorted to himself. It was a dumb idea. His father didn’t negotiate with terrorists. SecuriTech rule number one.
The transport pulled up to the mouth of the alley, and Knox motioned for Syd to get in.
“Is it safe?” Syd wanted to know. He didn’t like the idea of hopping into some Upper City vehicle.
Knox rolled his eyes and got in. Let Syd make his own choices. Syd didn’t know that these private transpo services were paid for their discretion. They ran on autodrive. There was no one to betray them and the program stored no data. Anonymity was a privilege worth paying for.
Syd got in, but he didn’t even look at Knox once they were on the way. Didn’t even compliment his brilliance at using those girls to get an untraceable ride home. Ungrateful proxy.
Knox leaned back on the cool leather seat and rested his head on the window, watching the glistening skyscrapers pass and thin out, revealing parks with trees and artificial lakes and the private mansions built on the old landfill bluffs. Knox had heard they didn’t have green space in the Valve.
It looked like an alien landscape to Syd. He’d never seen so much open space, so much green. He’d heard about it, and seen it in movies, but to drive through it on the restricted roads . . . it was not something he’d ever imagined doing. His senses were on high alert. He didn’t like being up here. At least in the Valve, he knew the rules, knew the dangers. Up here, he had no idea what to expect. But they drove without seeing so much as a security checkpoint.
The landscape was far from alien to Knox. There was the corner where Bao Lin’s Candies used to be, the park where he first kissed Cheyenne and she punched him, the trail by the lake where he and Nine first tried syntholene and ran around all afternoon singing at the Carebots with their strollers and pink, whining babies.
There was the intersection where his mother’s body was dumped.
There was the route to the restricted speedway where Marie died.
Amazing how those places looked just like other places.
They skirted Xelon Park along the side where the weeping willows grew. The trees were already dying, like they did every year. They were expensive, but the park’s subscribers insisted on them. New ones were generated and planted every summer, only to die by the next spring.
Knox looked over at Syd, who was looking out the window. He studied the strange mark behind the proxy’s ear, four discolored shapes visible even on his dark skin. They looked almost like a word, like a tattoo, but in no language he recognized.
Syd caught him looking and brought his fingers up to the spot, covering the mark and turning his head so Knox couldn’t see.
“Just a birthmark,” he said.
Knox shrugged and looked back out the window.
When they pulled through the gate into the driveway of Knox’s house and drove up, Syd gaped at the view over the park.
Knox hopped out of the car to get inside quickly, but Syd stood gazing out over the driveway to the city below, his mouth hanging open. The transport pulled off to go back to its owner and they were alone. Syd listened to the night. He’d never heard such quiet before. The Valve was always loud with advos and holos and coughing and cursing and shouting and screaming and the everyday noises of living. The residential part of Upper City sounded to him like a paradise. Or a graveyard.
“We need to get inside,” Knox said.
“This is your house?” Syd asked in disbelief.
“Yeah.” Knox had never seen it through anyone else’s eyes before. The staff was robotic, and low-level employees of his father’s company never came over. Knox’s friends all went to his school. All their houses looked like this.
Seeing Syd see his house made Knox notice things he’d forgotten about, like the way the lights lit the long glass wall on the side or how the infinity pool reflected the image of the house back at itself upside down.
He remembered when he was a kid standing out here looking at the pool and imagining that it was a gateway to a duplicate world, a world almost exactly like this one, except in that world it was his father who had died and he and his mother who lived in the big house.
“Get inside before some drone picks up your signal.”
“What about your parents?” Syd asked.
“It’s just me and my dad,” Knox told him. “And my dad won’t be home.” Knox didn’t elaborate. Syd didn’t need to know his life story, how his father rarely came home during the week, how he slept in his office, how he rarely came home at all.
They made their way up the steps to the heavy steel front door and slipped inside. Lights came on automatically.
“Welcome, Knox,” the house said. “Please identify your friend.”
“Disengage activity assistant,” Knox said. “Delete entry file.”
“Deletion confirmed. Good-bye,” the house said cheerfully.
“We’ll be okay now.” He led Syd through the living room with its vintage furniture and contemporary art that some consultant picked for his dad. Antiques from his great-grandmother’s collection sat in cases around the room. He noticed Syd looking at every clay tablet with more than casual interest.
“Those are, like, two thousand years old,” Knox explained, but Syd didn’t respond. He didn’t care how old they were. He was curious to see the one that had cracked when he was a kid.
“It’s that one.” Knox pointed. He understood what Syd wanted. “They restored it. I barely left a mark.”
“On the tablet,” Syd add
ed.
They passed by a case of old books. One of them was displayed open, filled with detailed illustration and tiny writing in some weird ancient language. Knox didn’t remember which one.
“Looks kind of like your birthmark,” he said, thinking maybe he’d find something to talk to this swampcat about.
Syd didn’t say anything. Knox guessed his proxy wasn’t much for small talk. He brushed some hair out of his face, just to have something to do with his hands, and he led Syd upstairs to his room.
The lights came on dimly as Syd followed him in. There were at least a dozen projectors and a few pairs of networked glasses and a half-dozen little cases for biofeed-enabled contact lenses lying around. Knox had a momentary pang of embarrassment, like he was showing off.
Syd was not impressed.
Ayn Rand glowered at them from a projection on the wall. The Dying Fish with their original drummer glowered from a projection opposite. There was another of the supermodel Nadia holding an egret at the zoo. Hers was the only image not glowering. Her projection blew a kiss over and over.
Syd raised his eyebrows at the decorations.
Knox waved his hand and brought up a control holo, hovering in front of him. Another tap on it and his decorations disappeared. His proxy didn’t need to critique his taste in interior design.
Knox opened a drawer filled with tiny patches for installing biotech through the skin.
“We can do this two ways,” he told Syd. “We can trick you out with some biodes that will fool most any machine looking at you and will scan manually as somebody else. There’s always a chance it’ll fail, though, if they can see through it. It’s basically just sending a stronger signal, like a layer of fog to mess with their ID coding. It works against most systems, except the really high-end stuff.”
“Knox, look around.” Syd waved his hand around the room. “I belong to your father. As far as anyone in that club knows, I kidnapped you. And you have no idea what I did to escape from the Guardians to get to that club. I think they’re looking for me with some ‘really high-end stuff.’”
“Okay,” Knox agreed. “So the other option is we go into the SecuriTech biometric files and change who it is they’re looking for. Then we have to do the same thing with the Xelon Insurance Division and any subcontractors we can find. It’ll take a few hours.”
“Will your dad be home?”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t seem worried.”
“He won’t even know we’re here on this end of the house.”
“What if he comes looking?”
“He won’t come looking.”
“Seriously?”
“You don’t know a lot about fathers, huh?”
“No.”
They stood in uncomfortable silence for a while. It was strange seeing Syd in his room. He’d seen him in holos so many times, but to have him here in the flesh . . .
“Look,” he said. “I do this better with some music on, so I can focus. Why don’t you take a shower and a nap or something? You can borrow some of my clothes to change out of that . . . outfit.”
“Thanks,” Syd said. He wasn’t saying much. He didn’t seem exactly comfortable in Knox’s house either. On that they were in sync.
“Oh,” Knox added, handing him a silver skin patch. “Put this on in the shower. It’ll lighten your skin a little. We don’t want to go through all this just to have you eyeballed by some low-rent security guard.”
Syd grabbed the patch. Knox got him a towel and some normal clothes and he disappeared into the bathroom, locking the door with a loud click.
Knox heard the shower start up and he turned on his randomizer. Tragic Harpie Bingo came on. He’d seen them live last winter. He actually hadn’t had tickets and he’d had to sneak in to the show. It was a blast.
When he got caught, Syd got four hours of volunteer work at the recycling plant. Knox changed the music. Wagner. Old Eurozone. That’d clear his head. He blasted it and got to work on his hack.
If he believed in any of the old religions, or any of the new ones, he might start to think he was helping Syd out of some kind of guilt. But he wasn’t. He was helping Syd because it suited him to. It was that simple. He’d made a mistake, a huge, tragic mistake, and in order to settle it, he’d help Syd. The balance would be settled, no debt outstanding.
He turned the music up.
[18]
SYD HAD NEVER HAD a shower like this. The water came from six different showerheads from six different directions and he could control the temperature just by waving his hand. It changed instantly.
No filling up tanks and lighting flames. No timers for water usage or haggling with the shower monitors. No keeping a knife on you while you washed and going half blind from the toxic soap because you couldn’t close your eyes even for a second. Knox’s shower had a seal that trapped in the steam.
Finally relaxing, Syd felt all the pain coming back, from the EMD pulses, from the punches Knox rained on him, from the dull ache of fear. It reminded him of all the other beatings he’d ever taken, his memory filled with the echo of wounds.
He ran his fingers along the scar on his collarbone.
After they left the orphanage, he and Egan took up with a gang of other street kids, standing lookout while they raided Upper City construction sites. They crouched behind blast barriers and watched the traffic of Upper City transports racing along the restricted roads.
“I’m gonna live up there one day,” Egan had declared, pointing at the tallest skyscraper. “All the way on top. You’ll see.”
“That’s the Oosha Panang Chemical Supply Company HQ.” Syd laughed. “See the logo? You can’t live there! No one lives there!”
“I didn’t mean that building.” Egan blushed. “I meant . . . the other one.”
“What other one?” Syd cackled. “You want to be an office cleaner? You can sleep there when everyone else goes home? Clean the patrons’ toilets? Then you’ll live there! Toilet King of Upper City!” Syd was giggling uncontrollably.
“Shut up, swampcat,” Egan’d yelled. Syd stopped laughing and he punched Egan right in the chin. Egan went down and Syd jumped on him. Egan rolled him over and punched him in the nose. Blood gushed out and tears welled in his eyes. He tried to claw at Egan’s face.
Neither of them was strong enough to do any real damage to the other and the fight wound itself down into panting and half-hearted punches. By the end, they were lying on the ground, side by side, laughing about the patrons’ toilets.
“You think they shit like we do?” Egan wondered.
“Of course.” Syd laughed. “It all rolls right down into the Valve.”
“I guess they want us to pay them that back too.” Egan laughed.
“We should it bring it back to them!” Syd guffawed. “Dump it right on the top floor of the Oosha Panang Chemical Supply Company HQ.”
“Hey!” Egan got serious. “That’s my new house you’re shitting on!”
They both exploded in laughter.
While they laughed and joked on the ground, they didn’t notice the security bots raiding the site and nabbing all the other kids. They only heard the last of the shouting and they ran off. A few days later, when the others tracked them down, they had bruises and cuts and they brought broken glass and heavy old chains to share their wounds with their young lookouts.
At first, Egan and Syd fought them off, but there were too many and they were too angry. Egan lost a kidney and Syd got sliced straight across his collarbone. Mr. Baram had sewed him up in the back of his shop using old fiber-optic threads.
If Syd was being honest with himself, he had to admit that he took more beatings from other swampcats in the Valve than he ever did because of Knox’s Upper City shenanigans.
Shenanigans. Mr. Baram’s word.
He wondered if Mr. Baram was looking for him right now, pulling strings, worrying. Was he wrong not to go to Mr. Baram for help first?
No. He couldn’t drag his boss in
to his mess. Mr. Baram was the closest thing Syd had ever known to a father. Best to keep him out of it. He had enough worries running his business and feeding his kids. This mess was Knox’s doing and Knox would fix it.
Syd wished he could find out what had happened to Egan at the club. He hoped his friend was all right. He hoped the Guardians hadn’t picked him up.
As he washed, he wondered what happened after he disappeared. Would Knox just get a replacement proxy, some other kid to take the abuse for his mistakes? Was it right for Syd to inflict Knox on someone else just to avoid the work camp?
It was amazing how little Syd knew about the system, which he’d been a part of for as long as he could remember. No one in the Valve knew much about how it worked, not even the sales agents who worked for the credit companies. Information was too valuable to share with a bunch of slum-dwelling debtors. Information always flowed up. Only one thing flowed down into the Valve. Syd and Egan had pointed that out when they were just kids that night at the construction site.
After he showered, Syd dried off with the impossibly soft microfiber towel. He couldn’t believe these things really existed. Even the most lux people down in the Valve, the white collars, the scavenger bosses, the syntholene dealers, Maes’s top lieutenants—none of them had anything that could compare to these towels.
He held one up over his face, so the light was filtered through it and so all he could smell was its clean dampness. He stood there for a while with the towel against his face, just breathing with it. He could imagine that he was Knox and Knox was in his place, and that every day he got to ride in autotransports with leather seats or private cars with manual drive on restricted roads and come home to this house with these towels and wear these clothes that were soft and tough at the same time, that didn’t itch or chafe or fall apart after the first wash.
A trick of fate.
He got to have Knox’s perfect skin, protected from sun and heat and rash, where scars healed and vanished, where pain could be medicated and dissipated and erased. Where the future was his to make.
