Brave New Love (42 page)

“We can’t, in fact, get the signal out here,” he admitted as they sat on the bench. He gestured at the weeds starting to creep over the edges of the protectively high courtyard
walls, and the rusted pieces of pipe stacked against some flaking bricks. “So we only use the area for emergency assemblies.”

“How often do those happen?” she wondered, looking at a broken table propped on its short end against a crumbling pile of cement blocks. She noticed how warped and bloated the table
appeared, like a rolled-out corpse made of flimsy wood, or like a dead puppet run over by a cartoon tank.

“Officially, they can’t happen,” Mizter Swift replied promptly, but he was smiling a little again. He knew it wasn’t credible. “Emergency procedures are activated
only due to unpredictable fluctuations in the weather, or large-scale disturbances due to planetary instability which would, obviously, eliminate the possibility of meeting outside.”

She figured this out after a moment of trying to think like he did. “You mean like the earthquakes?”

“That wouldn’t be an incorrect term,” he said, even more carefully, and she knew he was trying to tell her something without saying it.

There was a pause while they both thought about this, and why he might decide to do it now—here and now, where they could admittedly see the sun, but only just, because of how thick and
high the walls enclosing the courtyard had to be.

Then he seemed to change his mind, or maybe realized what he’d implied, because what he said next seemed unconnected. “Sometimes I come out here to work when I can’t
sleep.”

This sudden offer of personality was interesting, and again she saw him differently—more focused—the way his nose tilted a little to the left, the stray hair pointing up from one
eyebrow. He was old, probably at least twenty-five, and he was boring, but he was nice, and she could see he needed someone like who she was pretending to be, to get anywhere in his career.

“Without it?” she asked.

“You sound surprised,” he said with what he probably thought was a cunning tone. “I’d think you would understand.”

“I don’t know much about the shows, despite the . . . incident,” she said, glad for a chance to pry. “I didn’t know you could get anything done without
signal.”

“They do still teach us how to use a pencil,” he replied drily, and she had to smile at him, and he had to smile back. “I keep a little notebook in case of outage . .
.”

“Don’t worry, Mizter Swift, I get it,” she said. She felt the size of the space around them, the too-bright sky crouching like a big dog over them. She wanted to go inside and
rez something, but this had turned into a new kind of situation and she just had to deal with it, that was all.

Magic words again. “My—some people call me Asher,” he offered shyly, and she knew she had an agent now, all right. He might be a stiff collar but he wasn’t so bad.

“Asher Swift,” she echoed. “That’s catchy. Have you ever tried hosting?”

Asher laughed openly, not at her but at her daring—delighted by it. “Oh, come now,” he said with real modesty.

“Why not?” she wondered. It was like the lottery, or the slots—just a switch thrown, off or on, mostly off. If the rezmods were there, and he wouldn’t have the job if
they weren’t, however he came by them.

“I wouldn’t want to embarrass myself,” he admitted, and she sensed that just acknowledging the
existence
of embarrassment was uncomfortable for him. He would melt on
live rez, all right, just shake himself to pieces. “I’m happy in my work. Finding talent.”

She could tell this was true, though something was off again; some hesitation seemed to be wrapped around his tone.

He pushed past it, snapping shut on her. “We should finish the paperwork inside,” he said firmly, brandishing his fancy pen. “The rain could start again any time.”

She looked up again at the clear blue sky but said nothing.

•  •  •

Ibo did once believe in a series of gods, but none of them made themselves manifest when he’d died. Instead, a shaky little monster with an air of urgent efficiency was
pumping his hand the moment he landed in rebirth, or whatever this strange little nowhere room might be called.

The creature was purple, sort of, with a metallic sheen that would be pretty if it didn’t look a lot like something rotten. But then, for all Ibo knew, it was sick or old or something. It
was bent, awkward—it seemed taller and older than him, but it slumped in such a way—such a cartilage-heavy way—that it gave the impression of being shorter.

“We quite adore you, of course,” it said, or seemed to say through some kind of eardrum-tingling vibration. “We’re all large on your package.” Not precise, but the
sentiment, even beamed into his skull by mystic rays, was reassuring. “Yet we cannot help but feel that mistakes have been made. At your earliest convenience . . .” It hopped around,
unsettled and hopeful.

Ibo felt himself cringing back from its rawness. “Are you asking me for some kind of help?” he tried. The monster wasn’t trying to eat him or probe him, and it seemed friendly,
so maybe this was a cosmic test or some Nguze thing like that.

“Most appreciated,” the monster said, teeth akimbo. “Your enduring patience. Please come and meet my homeys, and I will leave you to your training.”

Ibo found himself led through an enclosed place with stale air and strange people, and wondered. He could do that now, just like Nguze said—ideas pushing together, imagination made linear
and fixed by time. But he didn’t worry, just wondered where all this would lead him. He knew now that even if it were a direct line to death, for him it could only become another transition,
perhaps even a return home, like what had happened when Nguze died in the place he went after death.

•  •  •

Back again in Mizter Asher’s office, Omika reassembled her spine and hands and waited for him to guide her through the sea of forms—clearly his calling and possible
destiny. Later, she would try to remember what parts had been real or true, and find herself unsure. But then she would compare the memories of his office with those of the courtyard and, like a
dream that seems real until you wake up, she could tell the difference again.

At the end of the endless meeting, he told her he’d take her to see the rezboard room, or one of them, anyway.

“There’s someone to whom I must introduce you,” he said. “She’s called Betty, and she runs the CRZ. Don’t worry about all the metal. She’s perfectly
decent.”

Omika thought about this particular choice of words as she followed Asher through mildewed but otherwise mostly intact miles of cubicle walls—status symbols in this day and age. Once they
would have been donated or trashed, worth so little you might have had to pay someone to come get them. She could remember that time, but just barely. The Big One hit when she was only three, and
twelve years later the shocks hadn’t stopped.
Any
standing wall was a sign of power, success—in other words, a sign you had some connection to the Corp.

So if you didn’t want the implants, you could forget the sturdy walls. Or the job, for that matter. The signal needed receivers, and the Signal Corporation had its standards. But it also
had plenty of available implantees, despite the risks and the permanent loss of privacy, because the workers’ main concern was whether they ate old cans of baked beans, or each other.

Of course it was always cheaper to make your own, which was why Omika was scruffing around the place at all, let alone in the company of someone as firmly mid-level as Swift. If she’d been
too dumb or weird-looking, even the potential free labor might be worthless to them. But she’d never been born, she’d been engineered, atom by atom—so she wasn’t any of
that. And she wouldn’t need the implants, or any of the rigs and wires. If they could get her to talk on cue, they could rez her all night long, no loss, no decay.

There was a line at the entrance to the CRZ station, and they all had to pass one by one through the sterile security chamber. First Mizter Swift, then an odd lizard-boy introduced by the agent
as Eee-bow or something like that—“Don’t worry about him, he’s just a recruit,” Asher barely explained—and Omika went last, so she could watch what they did and
copy it without having to ask.

Inside, she and the lizard-boy both stood transfixed for a moment: a field of diamond filaments, defining the space as they wrapped around each other throughout it, surrounded the row of
workerbeings of all sizes and configurations, wired in various ways to their stations. Each visible string fluxed with the pressure of countless transactions in endless chains of assembly. Standing
shyly beside each other, watching the flashes of workers keeping the signal alive, Ibo and Omika felt an intuitive connection to the organic configuration of this place, despite how new it was for
both of them. It was all unknown, yet somehow familiar.

Asher led Omika and the lizard-boy to a station where names and handshakes were quickly exchanged, and she could tell right away—unlike herself, Betty
had
probably been born,
according to her papers, but Omika bet most people doubted it when they met her. Her gleaming skull, almost obscene in its exposed metallic state, was unsettling as it winked out segments of the
signal into the air—even more unsettling because Betty’s round, rough-edged eye-sockets never blinked, so the sparks from her rezplants reflected in them constantly, which made the
experience of looking in her eyes stroboscopic.

Omika looked down at Betty’s hands instead, and the place where the polished ivory slats slid into her wrists. When she had a thirty-second break and
they
shook hands and exchanged
names, Betty casually let her sleeve fall down over the exposed apparatus, but this couldn’t conceal the underlying sensation of the hinging mechanism in her grip.

Still, they were better than normal hands, as far as Omika could tell. Especially in what appeared to be Betty’s line of work. She plugged away at tiny silver wires with diligence,
rezboarding so rapidly her hands became a metallic blur as she worked. Her ponytail swayed, swishing against her blouse and leaving bright rainbow splashes of slowly fading chromaterms over the
thin black fabric.

This too was information, Omika figured—spreading out over Betty’s skin and down her spine, into the chair, which quietly signaled the tower about her status, physiotech-wise, and
mood stress-management-wise.

“How would you like a job, Ibo of the Valley of the Chasm?” Betty didn’t stop working while she asked. “Your species seems particularly adaptable to the technology we use
here, and your, uh, cousin—Nguze, was it?—chose to break his contract, so we thought perhaps—”

Before he could answer, a number of terms and ideas had to be explained, but they all knew he would say yes. The implants, the hours, the whole bizarre experience of it wouldn’t put him
off at all. His whole scaly body tensed with excitement, and he was led away to the surgical area, because once they had a good rezboarder willing to work they wasted no time.

Omika—who could tell both Betty and the lizard-boy weren’t much older than she was, if at all—wasn’t sure it was a good deal for him. But he would take it, because what
else? Go back to some jungle and know all this was here, glittering out of reach? She let herself be led to a more boring place, wondering what it felt like to get the implants, to become such an
intimate part of the signal itself.

She, too, had a job offer to consider. Her own program—
Omika’s Empty Pocket
, or something catchy like that.

It was unusual, but not unprecedented, that was the point, Mr. Asher Swift made it absolutely clear. Technically, Omika was abandoned IP, though because she was also a citizen, she could legally
lay a claim to own her own existence. To her hidden amusement, he said this quite seriously, as if she might have slowly disappeared if they couldn’t get the proper signature on a piece of
paper that proved she had a right to exist.

It felt like a long time since she’d left her hovel armed with her plan, but it was working. It seemed.

•  •  •

Once his implants were complete and his routine solidified, over time (now real to him in a way never possible before), Ibo found Betty’s smile was not as complicated as
her hands. As she trained him in the job and guided him through the implant process at the same time, and then as they lived and worked together, her hands and smile—
her
, Betty, as a
whole—all became part of his life, and more. Their minds mingled and they shared synapses, including whole new ones they created together.

At 17:00 they finished their shifts. Betty flashed her uncomplicated smile brightly around the room as they hustled out, keeping it till she reached the curb where a workers’ cinq was
waiting on the track.

“Did you notice? Chit Nine ditched her shift again,” she told him, sinking her cool metal head against his scaly shoulder as she punched in code for home. “And she knows, she
just doesn’t care. Drafting, I bet. She thinks they need new bookers over at . . .” Through the matted pleats of hair in his face she saw his new luminous eyes unfocus. “Ibo? Can
you hear me, dear?”

He couldn’t. Through the tinted visor, she could see his eyes sparking wildly, and the reflective effect made his helmet a constellation of signal crash. Her mechanical wrists flipped and
turned, quickly bringing her hands to the soft leather straps holding him onto the cinq, and allowing them to fully rotate around the helix as her nimble fingers plucked the tags. The straps fell
slack and she caught Ibo, sliding off the seat with her arms firmly clasped around his chest from behind.

They were halfway between HQ and home, on a landed route Betty was pretty sure stretched from the coast to the edge of the Iron. Long white rails marked off the expanse of cinq grit they’d
been riding, and she couldn’t tell whether the dark wavy lines making abstract patterns over the road ahead in the distance were shadows or track marks. The jagged outlines of unknown trees
and the alien rustle of strange, dense undergrowth seemed to be creeping closer to the nearby rails every moment.