by Dan Wells
“Where’s the bathroom?” she asked.
Alain was rooting through a duffel bag. “It’s outside. Do you need one?”
“Why is it outside?”
Alain shrugged, gesturing around at the tiny space. “Where would we put one in here?”
Marisa frowned. “How big is this place?”
“You’ve seen it all,” said Alain, turning back to the duffel bag. “Two rooms, one door, no windows—though honestly we consider that last one a feature, not a bug. Extra privacy. Here you go.” He stood up and turned toward her, holding out a pair of canvas cargo pants. “They’ll be big, but we can cut up what’s left of your old pants to make a cord and tie up the waist.”
“You can’t even offer me a belt?” asked Marisa.
“Look,” said Alain, gesturing again at the tiny living space. “Where do you think you are? Where’s the giant dresser full of free clothes that you seem to assume I have? I don’t even have a bathroom, let alone enough belts to just give them away to people. Even giving you these pants means I’m down to two pairs, including the overalls I’m wearing, and buying a replacement will mean skipping at least one meal.”
Marisa felt suddenly guilty but didn’t want to admit it, so her words turned sour instead, shooting out like an accusation. “I thought you stole your food hunting nulis?”
“And you think ammunition is free, too?” asked Alain.
Marisa glowered, feeling stupid and furious but saying nothing.
“You think you’re poor because you look up at the people above you and see how much more they have than you do,” said Alain. “Try looking down sometime, at the people looking up at you, and see how much less they have. People whose neighborhoods were destroyed by corporate rezoning, or who lost their jobs to nulis, or who still have a job but pay so much for food and living space and everything else that they can’t pull the ends close enough to make them all meet. You’re not scared, Heartbeat, I’ll grant you that.” He held out the pants again. “But that might be because you don’t have much of an idea what’s really going on.”
She tried to form a response, but her brain was such a jumble of anger and guilt that she couldn’t get anything out. She took the pants mutely, and was saved from the awkward silence when the door burst open and Renata came in, the rifle in one hand and a cluster of white takeout boxes in the other.
“Find your own, güey!” Renata shouted back over her shoulder. Marisa heard an indistinct yell from somewhere in the street, and Renata lunged back out with a snarl. “Oh, verdad? Vente pa’ca y dime otra vez a la cara! Sale? Culo.” She came in again, locking the door behind her and setting the boxes on the table with a flourish. “We’re in luck: there was Chinese food in the second nuli I found.”
Marisa looked at the white boxes warily. “You literally just . . . shot one down?”
“No—I shot two,” said Renata with pride, and pulled a brick-sized bundle from the pocket of her hoodie. “The first had a waifu.” She threw the bundle to Marisa, who caught it one-handed. The shipping label proclaimed the contents to be a TamaYama body pillow, size L, stain-resistant.
“Gross,” said Marisa.
“Don’t open it,” said Renata. “We can trade that for something in the Hole tomorrow.”
“The Hole is a secondhand market,” said Alain, seeing the look of discomfort on Marisa’s face.
“That’s good to know,” she said.
“More like fifthhand,” said Renata, clearing the rounds from her rifle before stowing it back in the corner. “Still, though, we can get something out of it. Enough bullets to replace the three it took me to hunt these nulis.”
“Three?” asked Alain, and Marisa could see that slight smile creeping into the corner of his mouth again. “You only shot two nulis.” His jokes were rare and dry, but he did seem to enjoy the occasional tease.
“This Chinese restaurant must have sprung for some kind of evasive tech,” said Renata, sitting down. She unwrapped the first box and looked at the logo on the lid. “What is it, Noble House Chen? Well: I salute you, Noble House Chen, you were a worthy adversary.” She opened the box and breathed deeply. “Egg foo yong. Guess that’ll depend on how good the gravy is.” She opened another box full of General Tso’s mystery meat, saw that neither Alain nor Marisa was sitting, and nodded impatiently toward the seats. “What, you need a written invitation? Siéntense.”
“Heartbeat is leaving,” said Alain.
Renata glanced up from the final box, which held rice and chopsticks and a little sealed cup full of gravy. She looked at Alain, then at Marisa, then back at Alain again. “Is Heartbeat a code name or did your relationship go up a few levels while I was gone?”
“Code name,” said Marisa. “Thanks for getting dinner, but I have to go.”
Renata shook her head, breaking apart a pair of wooden chopsticks and rubbing them together to scrape off the splinters. “Even the mighty Parkslayer can’t walk safely through Kirkland at night. Sit down, eat some food, and then I’ll take you somewhere safe where you can catch a cab or something.”
Marisa called up her clock again, imagining the yelling match she and her dad would have when she finally showed up, then sat down across from Renata. There were only two chairs, so Alain perched on the edge of the bed.
“For this food we are about to eat, we thank you Lord Cthulhu,” said Renata, and held up her chopsticks in a salute. “Provecho.” She poured the gravy over the egg foo yong, and dug in hungrily.
Marisa grabbed another pair of chopsticks and snapped them apart, looking at the food. The meal included four sets, and about four people’s worth of food, and she couldn’t help but wonder who was going to go hungry tonight so that she could eat. Somebody rich, like Anja? Somebody poor, like her own family? Or somebody completely destitute, a family who’d scraped together just enough money for a takeout meal on a special occasion? She imagined a single mother and three children, watching the skies for a delivery nuli that would never come. She put down the chopsticks.
“You need to eat,” said Alain. They had no plates, so he and Renata were digging into the same box of food.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat,” said Alain again. “At least the rice. You need the nourishment after everything we went through today.”
“I said I’m not hungry,” Marisa snapped back, a little more harshly than she’d intended, but she didn’t feel sorry for it.
“Then drink,” said Alain, and reached under the bed with his free hand. He pulled out a pack of colas, and handed her one.
“You’re poor and starving but you drink soda?” asked Marisa.
“They don’t have potable water in Kirkland,” said Alain. “We have catch basins on the roof, but these days even the rain isn’t very clean.” He set down his chopsticks, opened the can of soda, and set it in front of her on the table. “It’s not the healthiest, but it’s better than the alternative, and it has plenty of sugar to keep your energy up. Please drink it before you crash.”
“And while you’re doing that,” said Renata with her mouth full, “I want to know what’s going on.”
“You want to know what’s going on?” asked Marisa.
“Who are you?” asked Renata. “Why are you in my house? I know how you got here, but I don’t know why—Alain said you were inside the network when he trashed it, but that’s pretty much it. Start with your name.”
“My name is Heartbeat,” said Marisa firmly, “and I don’t like the balance of power here: I’m alone, I’m injured, and I’m not allowed to leave.”
“Oh, you’re allowed to leave,” said Renata. “It would just be stupid.”
“If you want my story, you tell me yours first,” said Marisa. “What were you trying to do back there at KT Sigan?”
“Fair enough,” said Alain. “If and only if you eat something first.”
Marisa stared at them, trying to decide once and for all how angry, or how scared, she should really be. It was starting to fee
l like a kidnapping, but it had started as a rescue, and she was the one who’d made the choice to get on the bike. They’d been nice to her, they’d helped her, and, like Renata said, they weren’t holding her captive. It was entirely possible that she was safe, and that they were good people. In spite of all the corporate sabotage and explosions.
Possible, she thought, but still very, very risky.
She grabbed the Coke, took a drink, and grimaced at the flavor. Too poor, apparently, to afford real Mexican Coke.
The thought made her feel guilty.
“Bon appétit,” said Alain, pushing the box of rice toward her across the table. She dumped some of it in with the General Tso’s, and he started talking while she ate. “KT Sigan isn’t the largest telecom in the world, but it’s the fastest growing, mostly because it’s the most predatory. Their standard operating procedure is to move in to a new region, buy up all the hardware—fiber-optic cable, data towers, all of that—and then throttle the speeds of their network at the same time they increase prices on ‘faster’ internet service. The rich people with the most advanced djinnis are using fifty percent of the data, but they’re only a small percentage of the customer base, and they don’t care about their monthly bill. It’s the rest of the customers who Sigan is asking to pay more than they can afford just to get a baseline usable connection. Bad connections means nulis get glitchy, autocars move more slowly, online retailers start losing work and missing payments. People can’t hold down some jobs or apply for others; deliveries get missed; businesses start failing. Internet service is considered a natural resource by most people, and our society needs it every bit as much as it needs clean water—maybe more so, because there is no bottled alternative to pick up the slack.” He jiggled his Coke bottle for emphasis. “Bad net connections mean bad neighborhoods, so concerned citizens try to pay for the good stuff they already couldn’t afford. Then Sigan just moves in again with some subsidiary companies offering cheap loans and refinancing packages to help people maintain their overpriced connections.”
“My parents are looking at one of those right now, trying not to lose our . . . house,” said Marisa, stopping herself before saying restaurant. No sense giving up more information than she had to. “I had no idea the companies were connected.”
“Almost guaranteed,” said Alain. “They’ve done the same thing at home in Korea, in their big markets in China and Japan and India, and now they’re moving into the Americas. Over the last two years they’ve purchased huge tracts of communications infrastructure in the US, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. An internet connection is the most valuable resource in the world right now, and they’re cornering the market.”
“All of this boring garbage,” said Renata, “is Alain’s inefficient way of telling you that they’re evil, and they need to be destroyed.”
“It’s only boring if you don’t understand it,” said Alain.
“Which is his extremely efficient way of saying that people who don’t agree with him are dumb,” said Renata.
“He does have that habit,” said Marisa.
“Here’s what you need to know,” said Renata. “Alain hates KT Sigan, he wants to take them down, and you stumbled onto the battlefield at a very dangerous time. Done.”
“Your family stands to lose their house, you said,” said Alain, looking at Marisa intently. “You’re not the only ones, and you’re definitely not the first. Sigan will bleed you dry, and then charge your neighbors to get rid of your corpse.”
“Wait a minute,” said Marisa, looking at Renata. “You said Alain hates them. You don’t?”
Renata smiled wickedly. “I’m just in it for the money.”
Marisa’s eyebrows went up, and she looked at Alain. He took a slow breath, as if psyching himself up for something, and nodded. “I’m an idealist; Renata’s a mercenary.”
“Go ahead and say it,” said Renata with a grin. “I’m hired muscle.” She put a hand by her mouth theatrically and whispered to Marisa, “I love that phrase—I want it on my business cards.”
“So wait,” said Marisa, “you two aren’t . . .”
Renata frowned, waiting for the second half of the sentence, then caught the meaning suddenly and guffawed, filling the room with laughter and flecks of gravy. “What? No me venga. Alain and me?” She laughed again. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“But I just thought . . . ,” said Marisa, gesturing around at the house. “I mean, I just assumed. There’s only one bed.”
“I sleep in a hammock in the workshop,” said Alain, pointing to the back room.
“Okay, then,” said Marisa, speaking slowly as she reorganized her mental assessment of the situation. “If you’re hired muscle, who’s paying you? Is there like an . . . army of you guys out there? Is this a whaddayacallit? A terrorist cell?”
“We’re freedom fighters,” said Alain, “and no, we’re not a cell. Not in the way you’re thinking.”
“He has a network of contacts that supply us with stuff,” said Renata. “Mostly weapons and equipment, which is why I have a spare cybernetic hand but I sleep on a used mattress in a Kirkland rathole.”
“Her pay will come when Sigan falls,” said Alain, and tapped his head—the universal symbol for “it’s all in the djinni.” “Every time we hurt them their stock price goes down, and the stock price of their competitors goes up. It’s enough to keep us in business.”
“Hitting their payment database probably made for a nice payday, then.”
“Trashing their payment database was Plan C, at best,” said Alain. “I was looking for their financial records—that’s the only way to destroy them for good.”
Marisa leaned forward but was careful not to look too interested. “How do the financials destroy them?” she asked. The financial records were surely behind the airgap, just like the client records. Did he have a way in? She wanted to keep him talking, to see if he spilled any info she could use.
“International trade violations,” said Alain.
Marisa sat back, frowning. “Trade violations?” That was way more boring than she’d hoped it would be.
“I know it doesn’t sound like much,” said Alain, “but it’s just like we were saying before—these megacorps are so big the law can’t touch them.” His voice was eager now, like he’d finally arrived at the core of his whole plan. “They’re practically empires, and in most cases they’re more powerful than actual empires. Two rebels in an LA slum can’t bring down an empire—but if we can pit two empires against each other, the one with the bigger army wins.”
“Who has the bigger army?” asked Marisa.
“Johara,” said Alain. “The government looks the other way for almost everything a megacorp does—insider trading, unfair competition, predatory pricing, you name it—because the megacorps pay them off. It all comes down to money. But international trade laws are established and enforced by the megacorps themselves—they keep each other in check economically, because the alternative is unbridled competition. Outright war. If we can prove that one megacorp is actively undercutting another, in violation of their own agreements, the peace ends and the companies destroy each other.”
“So you expose one, and damage two,” said Marisa, nodding. It made sense now. “That’s brilliant.”
“If we can find and publish Sigan’s full financial data, it will go beyond damage. Johara can use that data to hit Sigan where it hurts the most, carving them up like a roast duck.”
“And leaving Johara stronger,” said Marisa. “You’re killing one monster but feeding another.”
“We’re hoping the fight will damage Johara enough to balance it out,” said Alain.
“Hoping?”
“No plan is perfect,” said Alain. “Whatever happens, we move on to Johara next. Eventually we’ll break enough megacorps and monopolies to put power back in the hands of the people.”
Marisa nodded again, and glanced at Renata. It sounded noble, but was it? She looked back at Alain. “Plus yo
u’ll get rich,” she said. “So, bonus.”
“I don’t know how to convince you that I’m one of the good guys,” said Alain. “Sigan is a monster—all the megacorps are monsters. I slay them, and any money I make in the process goes straight into the next job.” He looked around at the filthy hovel they lived in. “I’m obviously not doing this for the lifestyle.”
“So why do you care so much?” asked Marisa. “Renata wants money, which I don’t agree with, but at least I understand it.”
“Gracias,” said Renata.
“So what do you get out of it?” asked Marisa, fixing Alain with her glare. “I don’t buy this altruistic freedom fighter stuff. Is it revenge? Did Sigan hurt someone close to you? Did they destroy the neighborhood you grew up in? Or maybe you’re after the glory, blowing up databases and roaring around on your motorcycle trying to pick up chicks. Just to show that you can do it.”
“Maybe,” said Alain, and Marisa stopped short. She’d never expected him to admit it. He watched her for a moment before continuing. “Maybe I just need to prove that I matter—not to anyone else, but to myself.”
“He must like you, Heartbeat,” said Renata. “I’ve never heard this speech before.”
“There are two kinds of people in the world,” said Alain, “and please let me finish, because I know you think you know where this is going and I know you’re going to think it’s rude, but that’s not what I’m trying to say. There are people who matter, and people who don’t. There are people who act, and people who react; people who change things, and people who get changed. The most important thing in the entire world, in the entirety of human experience, is that you can choose which kind of person you are. I want to be the kind that makes a change.”
Marisa stared at him for a long time, trying to decide what she thought of his answer. After a moment she asked another question. “So where does it all end for you? What does the world look like, after everything you’ve done to change it?”
