Idempotency (13 page)

Finding the darkNets had been child’s play, but gaining access to darkVirts—where the most powerful lurked in secluded perpetuity, virtTripping from virtual Mars to Marioland—was much more difficult and required knowing someone. That, and a new set of illegal digital eyeballs.

It hadn’t taken Sindhu long to make friends on the darkVirts. Though she had gained a reputation among the tech elite from being headhunted by all of the top corps in the world, this did nothing for her on the darkNets, which prized secrecy above all else. To gain the trust of anyone, Sindhu began contributing to several online open-source darkNet projects, it didn’t take long for her skills to become obvious to all online. Using the moniker SinTh3t!c, Sindhu had quickly established a stellar darkNet reputation. However, gaining access to a darkVirt was far trickier and would take—at least—a conversation with someone in person, off the darkNets. In realWorld. Yuck.

The person Sindhu was searching out was one of the leads on the open-source user interface project that powered the majority of darkTech ocular implants: The Bilateral Ocular Implant Interface project; otherwise known as BOIInt, pronounced “buoyant” and referred to as the Buoyant project. Sindhu had initially helped the Buoyant project team with a particularly tricky memory-recollection algorithm, which she had solved with a simple concurrent hash table. Child’s play. After helping on a few more similarly difficult (but trivial for Sindhu) problems, the team lead, a person known by the online moniker of El-Dap, agreed to meet her in person for a discussion, the subject of which did not need to be shared even on a darkNet, since the topic was obvious to both parties: how to procure a new pair of eyes.

Sindhu didn’t know who she was searching for, but this was part of the game: security through obscurity. Sindhu would have to find El-Dap or all bets were off. She, of course, didn’t know El-Dap’s real name and had no idea of what El-Dap looked like, but she knew his mannerisms, and that was where she focused her observations. She was searching out a joker, a smiler, a laugher. A man with a wit that could cut through the solid transducers that were shaking the floors. Sindhu was confident this wouldn’t take long.

Four hours later, the sun was getting anxious. Five a.m. was creeping up on her, and though the club was still bouncing as if it had just found a new trampoline, Sindhu was about to give up. She had chatted up every jocular-looking type-A in the building. She’d been hit on by at least 80 percent of the men she had talked to, and the other 20 percent had been gay. She stank of sweat, and her hair—at the night’s start, perfectly styled like a flowing, wispy cirrus cloud on a crisp, fall, noon-skied day—was beginning to resemble a slimy bunching of washed-up seaweed on an oil-stained beach.

Sindhu slumped down upon a couch on the top floor. Above her, a windowed roof was displaying the first light of day. She let her head rest on the back of the couch, and her large eyelids dipped down, barely closing her large, natural brown eyeballs.

“There is so much faux-status going on here, I’m not sure the socialNets can handle all the status updates.”

Sindhu started—she had almost nodded off—and glanced to her right. A smaller woman with cropped hair at the ears had plopped down next to her on the couch. The woman wore simple black pants and a purple top. She appeared to be in her midthirties, curvy, with thickly rimmed glasses. She was slightly intoxicated, intelligent, and she smiled (with what Sindhu guessed correctly to be a wide smile saved only for friends) as she looked out at the crowd. Sindhu knew immediately that this woman was her destination: She was El-Dap.

“I’m so stupid,” Sindhu said, shaking her head.

“How could you not consider that I’d be a woman—you of all people?” El-Dap admonished her.

“It’s not that I didn’t consider it . . . it’s just that—”

“You didn’t consider it.”

“I’m so stupid.” Sindhu slapped her own forehead and then rubbed her temples, attempting to rub some of the late-night fog away.

“It’s okay, don’t sweat it. I remember thinking I was the only girl in the industry when I was your age, too. I kept my eye on you tonight. It was fun watching you struggle. I think you flirted with every guy here. I should have grabbed you earlier, but I got caught in an engaging conversation about this new virtTrip tech that everyone is talking about on the darkVirts. Apparently, this tech can stretch virt time—elasticTime, they call it. And there are even rumors about some type of idempotent virtual experience. I don’t buy it, personally—probably just another stupid darkNet rumor. Like that one about the superhero flying tech that made the rounds last year. What was it—nanoMagFlight superPower? Ridiculous.”

The woman was talking fast, and Sindhu’s brain was having a tough time keeping up. Rather than respond, she simply nodded and smiled wanly. At last, she came to the point: “So, Sin, I bet you need some new eyes?”

“Yes, badly. Will it hurt?”

“It shouldn’t hurt much.” The woman stood up, handed Sindhu a small card, began to walk away, then turned around and yelled, “It should hurt a lot!”

Sindhu couldn’t help but chuckle. She twirled the card between her fingers, stuck it in her pocket, then left the club with as much haste as her tired legs could muster.

After deliberating on destinations, Dylan had ended up back inside the casino. He proceeded to dump several thousand SoliplstiCorp credits, then managed to swerve up to a room he had ordered just a few minutes earlier. At 9:55 the next morning an unwelcome knock rapped at the door of his room. He could hear Simeon’s gruff voice on the other side sounding decidedly jubilant—far too jubilant for someone who was still a little drunk and preparing to be very hungover.

After a few rounds of inexorable door knocking, Dylan managed to shout that he would be driving the Porsche, alone, to Seattle, and that he would meet Simeon there. This must have appeased Simeon, as the knocking suddenly halted.

The remainder of Dylan’s travel to Seattle was fairly uneventful (aside from a constant battle to avoid throwing up). He hadn’t bothered trying to communicate with Simeon further; he was certain Simeon knew exactly where he was and that he would contact him when the time was right. This theory proved accurate when he received a notification in his ear around noon as he rolled into Seattle proper. Dylan squinted, raised his hand to his ear, and his BUI display popped up with Simeon’s mug grinning back at him.

“Long night, partner?” Simeon grunted.

“Where am I heading,
partner
?” Dylan replied, emotionless, until the final word.

“There’s a transPark ahead; sent you the coordinates already. Let’s meet up there.”

Ten minutes later Simeon was knocking on the Boxster’s passenger’s-side window. Dylan had drifted into a hangover-induced nap after parking two minutes earlier—the knocking sent a bolt of adrenaline up his spine. Simeon motioned to the door, but Dylan shook his head.

Simeon shouted, “Transport, unlock passenger door.”

The door unlocked and Simeon slid right in.

“Transport: destination Discovery Park,” ordered Simeon.

Dozens of lights lit up within the car and on the windshield, then the car began to silently roll.

“What the hell? It’s not programmed to listen to you." Dylan was incredulous.

“It is now.”

“Well, then, change it back!”

“Nope.”

Dylan tried to squint away his headache. “I’m guessing that debating this point will be a fruitless waste of time and energy?”

“Yup.” Simeon smiled.

“Fine. I’m going back to sleep. Wake me when we get there." Dylan drifted back to unconsciousness with ease.

“We walk from here." Simeon spoke softly; Dylan registered the comment as he slowly came to from a groggy nap.

The car was at rest in a decrepit, multilevel parking structure, surrounded by older transports and even some automobiles. The structure would not have been able to accommodate a modern transport, as the ceilings were too low. In many areas it appeared that someone had tried to test this theory, causing many chunks of concrete to be missing from the various I-beams lining the structure’s ceiling.

They got out of the car and began walking toward the stairs. Simeon glanced toward Dylan, grinned, then said, “You look like shit, Boxster. You’ll fit right in.”

Dylan was wearing the T-shirt he had slept in the night before and some tattered black jeans. His hair was at best disheveled, he hadn’t shaved in a few days, and his complexion didn’t bother hiding his hangover. Simeon, on the other hand, had taken intentional care to look similar. He wore a large, long-sleeved black shirt, torn in several places, but carefully placed to conceal his flame aniToo underneath. A blue rain hat sat lazily askew atop his head, and he, too, had avoided shaving.

A pattering of rain could be heard outside the building, and the rainwater was leaking through the ceiling in many places. The cold air had begun to snap Dylan into a much more alert state. He began taking note of several oddities: the older, often dilapidated transports, the lack of a lift, no marketing to be found anywhere in sight. He was getting an uneasy feeling about their surroundings.

“Is the Porsche going to be okay parked here?” Dylan asked.

“Nope,” Simeon replied and shot Dylan a mischievous smile.

The first thing that surprised Dylan was the sheer amount of people. As they left the halls of the transPark stairwell, they came out onto a street corner that was filled with people moving like cattle, nearly shoulder to shoulder. They seemed to be in the heart of a market.

“This is some park,” Dylan noted.

“It used to be a five-hundred-acre nature preserve. People would hike, picnic, enjoy the trees. That changed fifty years ago with the popularity of private parks on corpSoil. Nowadays, where else can the poor make a home but on public land? It’s manifest destiny for the poor.”

The parking structure sat atop a hill. To the west was a greenbelt that served as the park’s border, sloping downward toward the water. In every other direction stood hundred-plus-year-old buildings in various states of decay. Animated-graffiti-tagged walls were abundant, the colors of which shifted dynamically. Many buildings had crumbled; where walls still stood, makeshift structures were patched together. Humans were ubiquitous. Every nook had a vendor selling tech of some sort, every cranny offered a person buying something else. In the middle of the sea of bodies, a stream of solar-powered single-person transports rolled chaotically in both directions. A steady stream of honks and buzzes sounded as drivers, both sitting and standing upright, navigated at startling rates of speed melding with circuitous routes.

The pair stood motionless for several minutes within the carapace of the transPark. Simeon blatantly watched Dylan’s reaction before finally shouting, “And this is the
nice
part of town!”

Simeon then motioned Dylan to follow him, and didn’t wait around to notice if he had. They dove into the river of souls and floated about a block. It had been a cool day, but the body heat radiating off of the crowd was making Dylan sweat. He ached to throw up the alcohol from the night before. He felt dizzy and claustrophobic. The people swirled around him, wearing tattered secondhand clothing that had been popular a generation ago. The material was a cheap fabric with low-resolution media capability—it was largely considered out of style in the upper class—but here, it was commonplace. Colors danced everywhere. Advertisements seized and jittered across people’s chests, arms, legs, heads in the form of hats, and even on their shoes. Some of the younger crowd even had their hair dynamically colored (and erratically styled).

Just as Dylan was certain he was going to throw up, Simeon grabbed him by the arm and led him down a cross street that headed toward the park. An old reuse canister (which did not appear to reuse anything anymore) stood on what was once a clearly marked sidewalk, but was now just part of a cobbled road. Dylan flung himself toward the circle, but missed his mark. He coughed, laughed at the absurdity, and wondered if his vomit constituted reuse.

“Nice! Get it all out, Boxster. Expel last night’s demons!” Simeon preached while patting him on the back.

After collecting himself, Dylan followed Simeon, walking west. The buildings stopped rather abruptly at the edge of the park, but the amount of people dissipated a little less slowly. The road turned into more of a gravel path, which rambled through a canopy of evergreens. A steady stream of people were walking both directions on the path, a few sporting older single-person transports just large enough to allow the passenger to stand within it. Dylan noticed the quality of clothing adorned by these folks seemed more impoverished; most of it was strewn with dirt, and there was far less media-enabled material. Many of what appeared to be elderly people seemed to favor large, hooded jackets, their faces drawn deep within.

After a five-minute walk, the path twisted a sharp left and opened out onto an expansive promontory that overlooked the sound—fifty feet below. Various huts and hovels covered every inch of the opening, and they stretched north and south along the coast as far as Dylan could see. He had seen media of similar lowCaste encampments (usually from political activist groups), but to be standing within one provided a much different sensation. For starters, a bitter-smelling air seemed to swirl about the camp.

Simeon charged ahead, and they were quickly surrounded by the dilapidated huts. Blank faces stared past Dylan as they made their way through the crowd. It was slightly less crowded within the slum than it had been in the market, but the narrow paths between shacks made Dylan feel even more claustrophobic. His stomach churned and he swallowed hard—and the crisis was temporarily abated.

Their pace slowed, and Dylan felt eyes boring into him. He turned his head quickly in both directions. Groups of people mulled in front of ramshackle huts. The stream of traffic around them slowed to the point where Dylan and Simeon found themselves navigating through a reposed crowd.

“CorpSlave!” The shout came from the gravelly voice of a hooded figure standing behind a row of men to his right; the shove came from an old man who was clearly hopped up on age-defying drugs. Dylan stumbled forcefully to his knees and immediately threw up. The group backed off slightly.