“You think I bother, with dat little amount? Get real!”
“Easy to do. You a cool gent, oui?”
Dirk chuckled. “Dat thirty year old Swiss mark, as you well know. You think I fake dat? How? With Swiss computer?”
The old man frowned. “Okay. I just check, ami. So… you want ship to Sardinia, oui?”
Dirk nodded.
“Not back?”
Dirk shook his head.
“You a madman,” the old man remarked. “You won’t last a month.”
“I got Europe sussed,” Dirk replied. “You just get me dere.”
The yacht turned out to be a remodelled solboat with a Moroccan engine – a modern, clean engine, Dirk was surprised to notice.
As they stepped into the surf and headed for the boat, he put his hand on the old man’s arm. “Dat never your engine. You stole it. Who are you?”
The old man smiled. “A cousin of Moroccan king, mon ami, recently escaped.”
Dirk stopped, watching him clamber into the boat. The remark had been made without hesitation, and with sincerity – and it was insane enough to be true. Dirk shrugged. A deal was a deal. He carried an ace card anyway, a concealed inflatable ring, bought on the ferry from Gozo to Linosa. He did not care for open water.
But the old man was genuine. All he wanted was his selenium. During the 250 kilometre journey they spoke about events in various Moroccan lands, events in lands of the former Libya, and the state of the African solar energy business. Supper and white wine were complimentary.
“Tunis suburb twenty,” said the old man, “and free of glycerol.”
Dirk slept well during the night, more relaxed than he had been for some time. On a sandy beach near Cagliari the old man dropped him off: they embraced man-style, with faux kisses a few centimetres off the cheeks. Then it was “Au revoir!” and Dirk was on his way.
He walked into Cagliari undisguised. The advantage of hiding in Europe was also its disadvantage – most of it was a hinterland of gun-toting communities desperate to scratch a self-sufficient living from the land. Almost no eyes in the sky watched Europe.
Here, permaculture experts were more valuable than gold: often kidnapped and forced to give advice year after year, on pain of death if they refused. You did not advertise that you were a permaculture expert in Europe. Dirk observed hundreds of tree-shrouded plots as he walked into the urban mess that was Cagliari, all of them defended by kids with guns, or ancient automatic laser systems powered by the sun. He carried a white handkerchief, prominently displayed.
The nexus in Cagliari was not entirely defunct. Proximity to Africa meant a low level of sophistication. Now wearing spex and a wristband, Dirk found a chianti bar, sitting down to reactivate a few of his nexus accounts.
Not good. Two had been hacked some months back: empty. But his Tokyo account held good, as did his Singapore account. He still owned funds.
In his spex a whirl of rainbow mist span into view, as the nexus, reacquainting itself with him following the cash transfers, updated his data incarnation. He smiled to himself. Lacking Hound’s sophistication, his nexus doppelgänger was almost ninety eight percent true. Sure, he was known the world over as an interface specialist, but his disappearance into the AIteam had left a void that no journos seemed concerned enough about to investigate. Nonetheless, he did a self-search. Always wise to. An hour later he had all the articles labelled and summarised. Seemed his enigmatic departure into “obscurity” was not deemed important enough to scrutinise.
Good. For the nexus was heavy. It bore down on humanity, never sleeping, spying into every crevice – no respecter of privacy, which was a ridiculous, old-fashioned concept anyway. But Dirk liked privacy. Privacy allowed him the space and time to remind himself who he really was. And that was one of the attractions of shattered Europe now he was no longer with Leonora.
And so… where next? How to close in on his new goal?
He decided to treat himself to a small cash infusion. Outside the chianti bar, the young woman at a mobile credo peered over the armed brutes standing around her when he proffered a duocard with his photo on it.
“Real?” she asked.
“Retinascan me,” Dirk responded with a shrug.
She did. The credo soft beeped, “True.”
The young woman sneered, as if disappointed with this result. Probably she had hoped for a crim, and some bloody action. Instead Dirk reached over the rifles to take his cash with an orange grin and a, “Thank you lady.”
He prepaid for a room at the chianti bar – formerly its attic. Ghosts of old pipework and electricity conduits marked the wall where nobody had bothered to paint over the rips and crumbling masonry. But it was cheap.
He lay back on the remains of the mattress, which had been stuffed with hay to make it useable. He decided to stay here for a week at least. Vanishing was a relative term. He could not vanish completely, but he could make himself so unremarkable to the nexus that it reduced his significance level in response. He was hoping for a z rating.
Reducing significance level was something of an art, and most modern youth could not do it, their lives so intertwined with the nexus that any lessening of attention from it was experienced by them as an insult to their name. The Japanese had initiated the takeover of the internet by the nexus in 2080 – any kid aged about fourteen or less was a child of augmented reality, half real, half virtual. But Dirk, almost forty, remembered what it was like to walk solo. Nakedness is a virtue, the wise ones used to say.
He checked his sig level: j. That was pretty high, and like as not due to his fame before vanishing into the AIteam. Well, that j needed to reduce to at least a t.
He looked at himself in a mirror. First he needed to amend his appearance.
He walked out into town. At a barbers he had his afro shaved off – this the first time ever. He had his stubble shaved too, but left a moustache and an under-lip tuft. He got his ears pierced and had a couple of red baubles put in – also a first. He smiled at his reflection. The nexus didn’t like it when you did things first time. It didn’t like novelty in human beings.
Above all, he needed to get his teeth cleaned. Giving up smokes was not an option, but maybe a dental once-over…
It turned out to be impossible. Teeth too far gone. On a whim he had them all taken out and pearly white falsies put in. Now he looked like some kinda last century soul warrior. All he needed was shiny silver trousers and a Fender Precision bass for the transformation to be complete. Hah! Maybe he’d do that.
~
He travelled easy all the way to Siniscóla on the east coast of Sardinia. There were no solcars, soltrucks or solbuses, but a few of the more enterprising locals had made battery powered rickshaws using old NATO army equipment, and these were on hire to those with money. Dirk had money – enough to spend on luxuries like travel. But he did not want to stand out as rich, so he packed his good clothes away, nabbed damaged garments from dumpsters, used basic needle skills to repair them, and wore those. He described himself as a beggar on his last pilgrimage.
“Where to, sir?” asked the ten year old girl driving the electric bike at the front of her rickshaw.
“Eventually, Livorno,” he replied.
“What’s there?”
Dirk had not considered the possibility of this question being asked. “Chocolate,” he said.
“Is it sacred chocolate, sir?”
“It better be, da price you charging me. Just get me safe to Siniscóla.”
From Siniscóla he gatecrashed a party ferry on its way to the Isle of Elba. The super-wealthy brats aboard were all off their faces on modded DMT, only the ferry captain alert, and it was easy enough to hide in the life-raft tied to the stern of the boat. From Elba he took a commercial fishing trawler on to Livorno, paying the ancient captain in real coins.
Livorno, however, was far too dangerous to enter. A large-scale crim war raged between two sides, the majority of the population hiding out in the country. Small
arms fire punctured the quiet of the night, and every so often ordnance would go off: an orange flash, then clouds of smoke turned milky grey by moonlight. Dirk walked forty kilometres around the city, returning to the coastal road at Viaréggio.
A kilometre outside Viaréggio he met up with a fellow hiker. At once suspicious, he appraised the fellow: Oriental, ragged, dirty. Well, the raggedness and the dirt was easily applied; he himself had used that trick. But if this was one of Aritomo Ichikawa’s team, no way would he display such a racial origin.
Dirk grunted, unhappy with the company – they were walking in the same direction. “Where you headed?” he asked.
“Monaco.”
Again Dirk grunted. He had considered travelling there. Monaco retained a hint of its previous glamour, like an anti-pimple on scarred, dying European skin. “Not me,” he said. “What’s your story?”
“Huh, married an Italian girl twenty years ago. Tried local business. Failed. Got a young woman pregnant. Bad shit.”
The man spoke with a slight Italian accent, but that too could be faked. Dirk cursed under his breath. Part of the lure of Europe was not having to worry about situations like this. “I dangerous,” he told the Oriental. “Thrown out for knife attacks. Da worst, you know?”
The Oriental laughed. “Me too, brother.”
Dirk shrugged. “What your name?”
“Luigi.”
“No. Your real name.”
“My real name is Luigi. I was born in Turin.”
Dirk nodded again, dissatisfied. “I Giovanni,” he said.
Luigi chuckled. “Sure you are!”
“What dat mean?”
“Don’t care what your real name is, bro’, so long as we protect each other on the road. You don’t hike Italy without risk, huh?”
Dirk nodded. “Dat da truth, I guess.”
They walked on in silence. Dirk began to relax. It was unlikely that already agents of his enemies had located him.
At La Spézia they halted for a day. The town was depopulated to the extent that its central urbs were ivy-covered, the demesne of goats and wild dogs, a small number of local residents living within stockades in which they had built new dwellings. Cats sat atop poles, as if guarding the place. One, Dirk noticed, was a Nippandroid go-to, made with polymers and fake fur. A real guard cat.
“Move on?” he asked Luigi.
The Oriental hesitated, then shrugged. “Hungry,” he said. “We’ve not got much food left, have we? What d’you think?”
“Move on,” Dirk replied. “Genoa a hundred kilometre away.”
“Huh, but that could be a nasty place.”
“Could be. Worth investigating though.”
Luigi shrugged. “Okay. You win.”
They continued walking the ruined, car-free road. They spoke of their pasts, their loves and their families, their careers. Luigi told Dirk he had been in the olives business, ruined only by the desperate push to permaculture initiated by the post-oil economic decline of the Western world. When people started growing their own, he was out of a job. That was when his troubles began, he said. His wife left him.
Dirk shrugged. No small number of women had left him over the years.
When they reached Genoa they found a confused situation. A small number of enlightened authorities had tried to reboot the city from one of its coastside suburbs, but they were fighting a losing battle. People wanted the old world back, but they were too traumatised to realise it had gone forever, so talk of new dreams and new principles fell on deaf ears.
The two men took a pair of rooms in the barn of a local wine merchant. It was quite cosy. A local prostitute and two peripatetic tech-dealers occupied the other rooms. Dirk ignored the pro and refused to deal with the metal merchants.
Luigi took his leave next morning. The pair shook hands English style. Luigi gave Dirk a bottle of mezcal, con gusano, while in return Dirk gave Luigi a book about gardening with herbs.
The coastal towns to the west of Genoa were in a comparatively good state; little looting, few private domains, a modicum of gunfire after dusk. Savona had even managed to sustain a small police force.
In San Remo the pleasures of the flesh became too tempting. In a local hostelry, with a dark-eyed local pro, he shared the bottle of mezcal, handing over half her fee with a grin. “Other half after I test da quality of da goods,” he said.
The pro shrugged, then smiled.
As dawn broke, Dirk woke up. The pro lay at his side, drool escaping from the side of her mouth. He tapped her chin so her mouth closed, then got up to make coffee and think about breakfast calories; he felt sure he wasn’t eating enough. The pro woke up a few minutes later.
They smiled at one another. Dirk felt he had a hint now of what life might be like for solos. Carefree, albeit dark and dangerous.
The pro clasped her head between her delicate hands.
“Hangover?” Dirk asked.
She nodded, then glanced at the empty bottle. Then she pointed at it. “Where’s the worm?”
Dirk looked. The bottle was empty. No moth larva.
At once his skin went cold. He stared, then leaped over to the table on which the bottle stood. No worm!
The pro stared at him. “What’s the matter?”
Dirk raised the bottle. “Dis a gift from… aagh! Who?”
The pro frowned. “A friend?”
Dirk ignored her. He might have only seconds remaining. He dropped to his knees and scoured the floor around the table; then, seeing nothing, he took a mirror, in order to shine orange sunlight over the dusty floorboards. There – a hint of a trail, like those made by slugs. That larva had not been dead. It had not been organic.
He followed the trail. It led to a cobweb-strewn corner. Beneath dusty old webs and clumps of human hair he found the larva.
With expert care he lifted it on a sheet of paper, then carried it to the window sill. The pro, scared, sat beside him, stroking his arm and saying, “Mezcal make you paranoid?”
He shook his head. “I not nobody,” he said. “Luigi not Italian.”
“Who’s Luigi?”
“Scum liar from Japan.”
The pro yawned. “Ooh, baby. You’ve got a bad head on you this morning.”
Dirk grimaced. “On contrary,” he said. “I got lucky. Thank you.”
From his pack he took out a stereoscopic magnifying glass, that he used for large scale interface analysis. At once he saw that the larva was a dense polymer sheath for the real mezcal worm, which was some kind of nexus bug. That bug was gone: sheath empty. It would be tiny: it could be anywhere on him.
“See you,” he said, handing over the second half of the payment. “Nice time.”
“Tonight, yes?”
“Off to Monaco. Got to hurry.”
The pro shrugged, smiled, then blew him a kiss. “Bye.”
Dirk returned to surveying his room. With the exception of his duocard, metal coins and anything else that could not be burrowed into, every single item he owned would now have to be jettisoned. He glanced outside. It was warm already. In his pack there lay a pair of sterilised swimming trunks sealed in a heavy duty plastic vac-pack. The worm could not be in there.
But first he had to shower. Thank goodness he’d shaved off the Afro! That would have been destination number one for the nexus bug. They loved big hair – they were the e-lice of the modern world, very hard to spot.
He showered, cleaned every orifice, shaved off his pubes and armpit hair, then hurried out into the room again. On an empty sideboard lay his duocard and coins. He took them in one hand. In the other hand he picked up the vac-pack, which he washed, just in case the bug was super-disguised on its surface. He took a deep breath. Everything else was potentially a bug carrier, not least his clothes. But all being well he could now certify himself and everything he carried bugfree. But he was naked. Could be tricky.
Luckily his room was on the ground floor of the hostelry. He jumped out through a window, landing in a border
of rosemary and wild flowers. Unpacking the trunks, he put them on, then ran around to the hostelry owner’s chalet, hammering on the door.
The old man frowned at him, half asleep. “Swimming?” he asked.
Dirk handed over the night’s fee. “In a hurry,” he said. “Low tide.”
“Foreign psycho! Get outa my place!”
Dirk ran off, the path behind him hung heavy with dust his feet kicked up. Then he was on the main road: safe, much poorer, barefoot and in his trunks. But safe.
Monaco called. He would need proper security while he attended to his goal.
~
Monte Carlo was a fairground of hallucination. There were no borders – Dirk walked into Monaco unmolested, dressed in the simple cloth suit and leather loafers he bought at a fishing village back along the main road. The place was alive with cams however, because the pseudo-Grimaldi family that owned the principality were obsessed with keeping the past as the past had been. Monaco was both cash machine and open-air museum.
Dirk checked his funds. It was deemed unwise to amalgamate accounts – nexus hackers were ten a euro – but he was tempted. He had kept his Tokyo and Singapore accounts hack free over the years, but his other thirteen accounts were less secure. Now he was back in the semi-civilised world again he needed to plug all loopholes, all hack points, all weaknesses. If he wanted to get in with a new crowd he had to take security seriously.
In the end he amalgamated ten of the accounts into one new Japanese account, that he paid cyber-security to protect. The account contained half his savings, and would act as funds for a rainy day.
But now he needed time and space to research. In a back alley he found a cheap boarding house. He checked it out through the nexus. The resident reports were genuine, the reviews modest, some good, some bad, but there was no hint of criminality. The owner had pets – always a bonus. Nobody could afford to bother with fripperies like pets if they were bent or in hock to organised crims. Least of all in Monaco.
He used cash to pay for a week’s lodging. He took the time and trouble to befriend the Senegalese owner, discovering a shared love of soca music and the mellifluous ripple of the Malian kora. He relaxed. The place was okay. Genuine. A bug-run around his room showed only the standard corridor cam running anthropo-software and a kid’s long-distance spy microphone, that, judging by its condition, had been accidentally left behind in the shower cubicle years ago. He stamped it beneath his shoe heel anyway, just in case.
Beautiful Intelligence Page 17
