Broken Mirror (32 page)

Elena wasn’t there. He decided to check the bathrooms. On his way down a narrow hallway, he passed retro music posters for space rock bands from the 1950s: the Planetoids, Twisted Funburst, and the Boob-Head Dickies.

Beyond shredded-tire-tread curtains, the small restroom reeked of so much bleach that Victor’s stomach climbed his ribs. A single stall flashed a red occupied symbol. Next to a hole in the wall where the urinal should have been, a handwritten sign read, “Water conservation at work.”

He noticed another smell, too, an unfamiliar bitter tang.

He waited, trying to breathe as little as possible. Shuffling and whispers came from the stall.

“Elena?” he asked. The whispering stopped, but the shuffling continued, and he heard trilling, feminine laughter. Victor banged on the door. “Elena, are you in there?”

The lock on the stall door clicked, and the light turned green. The door swung open, and the tallest woman Victor had ever seen emerged.

Two bloodshot eyes floated inside thick maroon eyeliner, and a triangular beard pointed toward pale half-moon breasts hoisted by a sequined and feathered corset. Glittering midnight-blue platform shoes clicked on the concrete floor as the creature approached Victor.

A deep molasses voice emerged from her silver-lipped mouth, “You really ought not to interrupt. Sebastian, get out here.”

A thin, gangling, and awkward boy stepped out of the stall. He wore only a pair of small lime-green shorts made of furry fabric. His protruding ribs tented the skin of his small chest. Looking at his face, Victor saw he had been wrong: not a boy, Sebastian was around his own age, but the complete lack of fat and musculature made him look very young. His eyes, crisscrossed with bloody capillaries, sat deep within bruised eyelids, signs of an acute stimsmoke addiction.

“Tell me what you see, Sebastian,” the woman said.

Sebastian slinked a few steps forward and fixed a shattered stare on Victor. In a voice like a rake being dragged over asphalt, Sebastian said, “Mmmm . . . Can’t. Too much noise in the signal.”

Victor moved to step around the freaky couple, but the tall one shifted to block his way and leaned closer. “We were having a lovely encounter,” she said, taking the boy’s hand and cupping it to her breast. Sebastian nuzzled her side. “I was teaching him the most wonderful things. You could learn too.”

Her teeth reflected the bright neon lightstrip encircling the bathroom’s ceiling. She easily outmassed Victor three to one, not counting the waif. Though he wasn’t looking for a fight, he also didn’t want to be pushed around by a pervy couple in a public restroom.

Victor said, “Toilets are for people who need to go, not for whatever you were doing together.”

The tall woman ran her fingernails through a frizzy fringe of hair. “You don’t instruct Theodora Tamarindo how to use a bathroom.”

“Biiirddeeeee!” Sebastian’s long-wailed vowels echoed in the tiled bathroom.

“Victor?” Elena’s voice called from outside. “Are you in there?”

Theodora chuckled.

Elena stepped into the room and stopped short, gaping. “Uhhh, Victor?”

“Your name is Victor?” Sebastian asked. The young man gripped Victor’s shoulders. “That’s not a bird name.”

“I’m not a bird,” Victor said, shaking off the other’s hands, “obviously.”

“Either you both get pleasant real fast, or you get out faster,” Theodora threatened.

Victor didn’t understand. It felt like urine was leaking into his bloodstream and flooding his brain. He should take another dose of his herbs. “Fine, we’ll be friendly,” Victor said. “I do have to go to the toilet.”

Elena said, “No, Victor, that’s not what friendly means. Friendly means sharing
—
Never mind. Let’s go. Now, Victor!” She pushed through the rubber curtain.

Theodora smiled and straightened to an unnatural height. “Guard yourself, sweet cheeks. There’s plenty worse out there than us, and, with that face, you’re just begging to be violated.” She winked and put her arm around Sebastian.

Victor joined Elena in the hallway, and they hurried outside together. His bladder had reached a painfully pressurized state.

He left Elena behind and went to the edge of the parking lot, unbuttoning his pants and peeing as soon as his dick bounced out. It felt like an electrical current. He looked up. Thousands of stars filled the sky, and pulses of drums and other sounds echoed across the dusky lot, background music to the thrilling sensation of relief.

From closer than expected, Elena asked incredulously, “Are you
hard
?”

“Go away! What are you doing?” He hunched over to hide himself.

“Did you get off on those two?”

“It’s my bladder’s fault.” The herbaceous smell of Victor’s urine faded. A different, fetid odor floated through the air, probably from the café’s water recycling plant. He zipped up and wiped his hands on his pant legs.

His explanation evaporated in the desert air, and Elena remained silent. Maybe she thought it wasn’t worth worrying about, or maybe it was something else. He might have seen her face flush while she watched him zip up. She had touched him a few times today. Nudges and hugs. Maybe she wanted more.

Almost as if she read his thoughts, she took Victor’s hand, and they walked to the lodge next door, remembering halfway that they needed their bags. They crunched through the gravel parking lot and retrieved their bags from the lockers. By the time they entered the lodge room, his vision flickered from exhaustion.

The room contained two twin beds, a chair and desk, and a vidscreen and MeshLine
—
a nice perk of staying in a brainhacker lodge. A shower stall, toilet, and sink were crammed in an adjoining bathroom.

Elena sent him to shower with such conviction that he didn’t protest.

When Victor was done, he cataloged his possessions while Elena showered. The data egg, his MeshBit, the herb book, his dreambook, one sachet of fumewort and one of bitter grass, a half liter of alcohol, two liters of distilled water, twenty empty vials and corks, three shirts, one jacket, three pairs of pants, ten pairs each of socks and underwear, and one pair of shoes.

Elena emerged from the shower with a puff of steam that carried the scent of musk and berries. She wore a white towel, the top of which clung to her chest and the bottom barely covering her rump. Victor watched her dry her hair with a second towel. Her clean, moist skin glistened, and pressure began to return to his groin. He jumped up and shoved his belongings back in his bag.

Elena asked, “What did you find out from Ozie? Did he ask you for money?”

Victor rubbed his eyes. He felt like he’d had more questions than answers. “It’s a long story. We can talk in the morning.”

She dried her arms and chewed her lip. Then she disappeared into the bathroom.

Victor stripped off a bedspread and crawled under the sheet and blanket. A few minutes later she returned, cut the lights, and lay down on the other bed.

After an hour of tossing and turning, trying every exercise he could to calm his mind and empty it of thoughts, he fell asleep. He dreamed of eggs cracking open and releasing dragons who razed the far-flung cities of the O.W.S. with their fiery breath.

When Victor woke up, it was after eight o’clock, and he had sweated through the sheets. He dressed and spent most of the morning making tinctures.

Around noon, he walked to Springboard Café. Elena claimed to have a headache, so he left her in the room, glad for the break from her nervous twitching. He smiled to himself
—
he was keeping his anxiety at bay more skillfully than she was.

He found a booth and ordered food. A half hour later Elena joined him.

Ozie found them and eased himself into their booth. He jerked his head toward Elena. “What have you told her?”

“Nothing,” Victor said.

Elena brushed her hair back. “It’s true. I barely got a word out of him.”

“Good,” Ozie said. “We can’t be too careful. Take this.” He slid a silver device toward Victor. It was the size of two hands side by side.

“What is it?” Victor asked.

“A MobileMesh unit, new standard model, with some of my own modifications to make it untraceable. I call it the Handy 1000. Most of these are limited to the common command interface, but I’ve done a little creative reorganization. This one also connects to the dark grid. I’ve got one too. We’ll use them to communicate. Don’t lose it. Also, you need to smash your MeshBit. Or I can neuter it for you.”

Victor handed Ozie his MeshBit and picked up the Handy 1000. He yelped when it folded itself into a spiraling cylindrical tube.

Ozie laughed. “You didn’t break it. That’s how I usually carry it around in my pocket. Be careful though. People will think you’re walking around with a huge erection.”

Elena rolled her eyes. “We should be making plans. What are you going to do with the tongue, for instance? We shouldn’t just sit here, playing with gadgets.”

They both ignored her. Ozie said, “You can put it around your wrist, too, but don’t do that in public. This isn’t Oakland & Bayshore. A lot of people here would kill for one of those.”

Victor found a square icon that caused the Handy 1000 to unroll itself into a sheet. He pressed it again and the flexible glass curled itself up.

“Neat,” he said.

He unfolded it again and studied the screen. He saw several unfamiliar icons in addition to the standard set. He pressed one that looked like nine squares arranged in a grid, and a map appeared showing the area where SeCa met the O.W.S. A green dot pulsed where the Springboard Café was. There were also blue marks like upside-down
V
’s arranged in a hexagonal pattern that blanketed the entire map. He pressed his finger against one of the icons, and another screen of information swam up:

MT_OWS_904567.10

39.459033, -119.780910

64kbps, 34% adl

firmware update: Semaphore-38

Victor stared at the statistics, puzzling them out, fascinated by his first glimpse into the Mesh’s innards. The
V
’s must be MeshTowers, and the first line must be the identifier for the one he’d selected. The second line showed its geographic coordinates. The last two might be bandwidth and operating system. He assumed “adl” stood for “average daily load.”

None of this information was usually available to users. Ozie had somehow hacked the Mesh.

There was another icon labeled “Log.” Victor pressed it, and a long page scrolled by. He found a time-stamped command for a MeshID “handshake,” a code passed back and forth between devices to set up a secure communications link. Each handshake passed through dozens of MeshTowers, some more than one hundred kilometers away, if he was calculating longitude and latitude correctly. Dozens of handshakes filled the log. The device created a new false MeshID every few seconds and randomly rerouted requests and data through nearby MeshTowers in order to mask its location and activity
—
a genius technique.

Although it contained the same core functions as any Mesh interfacing device
—
messaging, data retrieval, and scheduling
—
the extra features rendered it much more powerful and secure.

Victor felt an elbow in his side and looked up. Elena was staring at him. “Earth to Victor,” she said. “Your friend here has been rocking in his chair like a nutcase, watching you
—
”

“Hey!” Ozie said. “I object to that term.”

Ozie glared at her, then turned his attention to Victor. “I think I’ve solved the processing problem. On the Mesh processing happens in linked clusters of devices. The clusters are called nodes. Las Vegas is a node. The Bayshore is a node. There are thousands of nodes all over Europe, connected by the low-orbiters and in some cases by physical cables. In the American Union the links are mostly low-bandwidth MeshTowers, so I can’t send much traffic through them. But if I move the satellites . . .”

A sudden fear gripped Victor. He pictured a thousand satellites crashing down and incinerating him at ground zero. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Ozie shrugged. “They’re mobile and autonomous. It just takes a little reprogramming. They usually cluster over important population centers. A simple bit of coding, and they’ll adjust their orbits, increasing coverage here so that we can link processing capacities across the A.U.’s western nations. We’ll churn through the data, and then everything will go back to normal.”

“What are you doing with the data exactly?” Elena asked.

Ozie smirked and waggled a finger for Victor stay silent.

Victor smiled apologetically at Elena and shrugged. He said, “Ozie, we need to be realistic. The amount of processor time is gargantuan. It would take years on the fastest computer.”

Ozie smiled. “How much processor time?”

Victor calculated hastily. “Somewhere between four to six billion exaflop-hours.”

Ozie’s eyes widened, and his thin lips parted. “Whoa! That’s enough to plot a round trip to Mars for an entire botfleet.”

“What are you planning?” Elena’s eyes searched Victor’s face. Before he could answer, Ozie shushed him.

Ozie said, “Let me think.” A slow grin spread across his face. His eyeglasses flashed, reflecting the bluish image from a vidscreen on the wall. “We could chain the low orbiters together and get global coverage.”

Two people in ultra-pliable synthleather tracksuits passed slowly toward the back of the room. Victor flinched. He looked again. They weren’t his pursuers. But they could sneak up at any moment. “We need to talk about the people following me.”

Ozie nodded. “We’ll get to that. Hear me out first. Chaining the nodes is possible but risky. This kind of stunt is uncomfortably public. The Mesh reports would cover it; most governments would notice; every cybersecurity firm in the world would know. Actually, I’m not sure I can do it, and I’m sure I can’t do it alone. I’d need your help.”

Here it comes,
Victor thought
. I’ll bet he wants money.
He leaned back and watched blobs of light in the ceiling chase each other, dozens of blue, green, and red trails flared in their wake. One blob caught the other in a spectacular crash that lit the entire room in a flame-yellow glow. Ozie had never had any qualms about asking Victor to pay for his tech schemes.