Idempotency (52 page)

“No.” Searle piped up. “Sindhu can leave, but I retain Dylan. You don’t get to keep every piece on the chessboard.”

“No deal. Not a chance—”

“Done,” Dylan stated loudly. “Sim, it’s fine—I can stay under NRS’s purview. They have the medical facilities I’m going to need. My terms, however, are also clear: I leave Titus and stay on the Bellevue NRS campus, under the care of Dr. Okafor and Kristina Hollerith. I think Dr. Okafor seeing my issues will ensure some empathy for my plight and the dangers of this technology. And as for Kristina, I trust her with my life and my heart. She has to be there.”

“That’s acceptable,” Searle responded monotonously.

“I don’t like it, Boxster. I don’t like this at all,” Simeon muttered.

“Simeon, come on, postpone the war. We will remain in contact. It’s one discussion. Hell can always break loose later.”

Simeon hesitated, began to speak, then stopped himself. He brushed his hair back. Every fiber in Simeon’s gut went against the response he knew he was about to utter, but Dylan was right: A discussion never hurt anyone.

“Fine. I want Sindhu back here now. And I get to speak to you, Dylan, daily, during your recovery.”

Dylan glanced questioningly at Searle, and Searle nodded his approval.

“Okay, it’s settled, we have an agreement. Thank God. Now, can I negotiate a hospital bed to lay down on for a few weeks?”

Nimbus closed the door behind her and watched as Simeon shook his head vigorously. His eyes were red, which meant that he was in a private ocImp holoVid chat. “Nope, Boxster, you know that’s a nonstarter. We’ve talked about this a million—” Simeon paused and pursed his lips while considering Dylan’s interrupting response.

Nimbus badly wanted to hear the other side of the conversation, but her hands were full of supplies for SOP’s recently acquired new home—and a home it was, in the literal sense. After the Laughlin Incident, as it was becoming infamously known on the darkNets, Simeon decided it was time for a change. The Laughlin Incident had raised a lot of questions on the darkNets, but SOP was still negotiating in good faith with NRS and could not directly corroborate any of the events. At present, they had claimed nothing but ignorance. As such, it was necessary for them to move on, yet again—a fact no one on the team was excited about.

Therefore, in an effort to make the transition smoother, when it came to choosing a location for their new base of operations, the team—all of them, Simeon too—had hoped to find a situation with a bit more permanence and comfort. And so they had acquired a simple two-story house in the East Palo Alto area. The neighborhood was publicly owned and low-income, but was not a slum. Proper sanitation no longer required solar energy coupled with boxes of potable solute cubes. Even more, they now had actual beds to sleep in, and both Mitlee and Chicklet got their own room, a fact that had not gone unmentioned a single day since their arrival at the house.

The home was built in the 1920s and the charm was abundant, if not detrimental to their specific technical needs. The lathe and plaster walls had to be repainted with radio-signal deafening paint. The windows too had to be replaced for the same reason. The wiring inside the house required lightPipe retrofitting for new standards in quantum cryptography. All in all, it had taken several weeks to do the work, and the kids were exhausted.

For her part, Sindhu had welcomed the monotony. Her first week in the new house was spent mostly in bed, recovering from her various wounds. Once Simeon allowed her to help (something she felt she could have done days earlier), Sindhu became the resident van Gogh. She painted the hell out of the house. The plaster soaked up the iron-oxide-based paint, and Sindhu was okay with that. After three coats did the trick, she was downtrodden; she had hoped to apply a fourth. She didn’t know what was next for her, but she knew she had found a home, in the figurative sense.

In her hands, Nimbus held several cloth bags, overflowing with household items obtained from a local market: food, toilet paper, beer, cleaning supplies. One bag, however, contained something a bit different: decorations. Two paintings by local artists, handcrafted candles, a few plants, and antique books, items that would turn a house into a home. After setting the bags down on the floor, Nimbus removed her jacket, displaying a tight-fitting green sweater underneath. She was still acclimating to the damp Bay Area fog—it was a far cry from the Nevada desert. She came over and sat in a large reclining brown chair next to a fluffy sofa, and she raised her eyebrows in a greeting when she caught Simeon’s red eyes.

“I’ll grant you this nuance is slightly changed, but I still don’t think I can accept it as-is.” Simeon was saying to Dylan. “We need root access to logs, I’m going to put my foot down on this point. I can grant you that they need a higher order of security in terms of financials, but I don’t give a damn whether they’re making a profit or not. Leave that to WallStreetCorp!”

Another long pause ensued, coupled with some subtle head-nodding.

“Okay, well, I’m eager to hear the response. And I’ll be up there on Friday for our next realWorld meeting, as planned.” A short pause this time. “Yep, okay, you too, Boxster. Take care and say hi to Kristina for us . . . and good work, as usual.”

Simeon waved the holoVid off within his BOI, and his eyes changed from a full red to his standard lightly wavering flames. He pushed the sleeves up on the skull-and-crossbones sweatshirt he was wearing and said hello to his wife.

“Everything okay?” asked Nimbus.

He hesitated before answering. “Yeah, I guess. I just . . . when it comes down to it, I just don’t trust them, and I’m not sure I ever will.”

“You shouldn’t trust them, that’s why we’re negotiating to have unilateral observational access, down to the least significant bit, and full transparency across both corpNets and darkNets.”

“Yeah, I suppose. This just isn’t our normal modus operandi. I guess I’m just not used to it.”

Nimbus smiled and leaned forward. Her bleach-blonde hair tick-tocked to and fro as she reached out and touched Simeon’s knee compassionately. “Honey, if we had followed our MO you probably wouldn’t be here right now, and a digital war would be unleashed. Isn’t this—” she gestured around the house “—a better alternative?”

He smiled. “I just can’t shake the feeling that we’re kicking the can down the road, putting off the inevitable.”

“Maybe so, but if we are, it won’t hurt to try it this way first.”

Mitlee and Chicklet both walked into the room and immediately went nuts over the contents in the bags. Nimbus had picked up a new augmented-reality game, and like a pair of dogs sniffing out a treat, the kids found this item first.

With the love of parents, Nimbus and Simeon watched the kids argue over who would get to shoot the apple off the other’s forehead. They had been overseeing the twins’ care for years now, and given their newfound lease on an aboveground public life, the couple were considering adopting them officially.

“Nim,” Mitlee whined. “Chick won’t let me shoot the arrow. He always shoots first. It’s not fair!”

“Guys, you don’t need me to figure this out. If you need to choose first archer, play rock, paper, scissors to pick a shooter.”

Nimbus looked back at Simeon. “It’s amazing how soon they become kids again. If we’re going to—you know—we need to commit to not starting any digital wars. Agreed?”

He chuckled, but didn’t reply definitively. She would have pressed the issue, but Sindhu walked into the room and distracted her. She sat down on the couch, next to Simeon.

“What’s up, boss? What’s next on the Sindhu-do list?”

“You already finished installing the induction countertops?” he asked, somewhat stunned.

“Yep. What’s the needful?”

“Uh . . .” Simeon was speechless. “Have you fixed your bed?”

“My bed? What’s wrong with my bed?”

“Well, it’s just that I figured it must be broken since you always end up sleeping down here on the couch.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” she replied drily. “It’s too quiet in my own room. I need more noise.”

“How about we start setting up the ops center in the basement. We’ve been putting it off, and we—”

“On it!” Sindhu hopped up and started toward the basement. Her dark hair wanted to swing behind her, but couldn’t; it just wasn’t long enough quite yet. Try as she might to make a ponytail, she didn’t have the length.

Grepman had been napping on a long couch under a large window. The kids had woken him up, and after Sindhu bounded in, he also jumped up.

“I’ll help you, Sin.”

He walked over and grabbed her by the hand.

“For the record, I don’t need your help,” she responded, “but if you really want to help, I can find something for you to do.”

The couple walked hand in hand to the basement downstairs.

Simeon looked back toward Nimbus. “She doesn’t even have a clue how amazing she is.”

“Grep does, though,” Nimbus replied.

Nimbus and Simeon decided to make dinner for lack of anything else to do; a fried tofu and vegetable quiche with sweet potatoes on the side. Sindhu worked into the early morning, swearing often, but often happy. The children acted as such, playing games all night.

And the only war that broke out was between Simeon and a bottle of scotch.

“Frank, over here!”

As he swaggered over to Dylan’s table, Dylan became surprised by Frank Cunningham’s serious demeanor. Frank had passed at least ten gorgeous people while crossing the room and didn’t do so much as a double take, let alone slobber in anyone’s general direction. He weaved his way around the dark, crowded, early-twentieth-century club, similar to how the ubiquitous holographic smoke weaved its way to the ceiling: inconspicuously.

“Dylan, it’s fantastic to see you, my man, fucking fantastic.” Frank spoke as he removed his microMetallic jacket and placed it haphazardly on the back of his high-backed, plush burgundy seat. Acting like a king coming home to his throne, he quickly knighted Dylan with an awkward handshake, due to Dylan offering his left hand while keeping his right hand in the pocket of his suede jacket.

“Franklin, I thought you didn’t like handshakes?” Dylan asked.

“Fuck it, I’ve turned over a new leaf.” Frank plopped down in the towering seat and gestured open a holoMenu. Two dozen different drinks appeared floating in front of them. He motioned toward an opaque, greenish-glowing highball, then gestured for a second one. The highball enacted a clever animation, spun around a few times, and was then replaced by a message reading:
BRB!

“Double-fisting it tonight? Are you in a hurry to get drunk?” Dylan asked.

“Hey—first of all, I only drink when I’m sober. Secondly, I don’t have a drinking problem. I have a drinking
solution
. And third-wise, the other drink is for you—you’re almost done with that one.”

“I’ve barely even taken a sip!” Dylan protested.

“Exactly; almost done. What’s with the cropped haircut? Was the perm too hard to keep up with?”

“Guess I’ve also turned over a new leaf.” Dylan laughed and bobbed his head. “It’s good to see you too, Frank. So I hear we’re coworkers again. When did you get in to Seattle?”

“This morning. NRS flew us up via private graviCopter, and in one of the new blended-wing versions. It was a thirty-minute flight, not a single fucking bump.”

“Nice. If there’s one thing NRS does well, it’s transport folks in style. How’s the merger going?”

“Merger? Are you kidding me?” Frank responded incredulously. “When a corp with a market cap of over a trillion corpCreds purchases you—I don’t care how big your company is—it’s called an acquisition.”

Dylan laughed. “How are the folks back at SolipstiCorp taking it?”

“Eh, I think most SC employees knew it was coming. At some point some corp was going to buy us, and there were only two or three corps out there who would realistically be in the market for a SolipstiCorp-type of product. In the end, it came down to NanoRegenSoft or EarthwideGamingCorp. I hear the EGC folks are pretty pissed off. But who gives a fuck? Pay up or shut up, right? NRS bid higher, that’s how the water falls. But we’re not here to talk shop. I want to know what the hell happened to you. I’ve heard some crazy rumors.”

Dylan shook his head as he took a drink. “No, no, no, first things first: you”—Dylan dramatically pointed an accusatory finger at his friend—“didn’t check out one girl on your way over to this table, and you haven’t made one misogynistic comment yet. What the hell happened to you?”

A wide smile took Frank’s long face hostage; even the wrinkles on his balding forehead seemed to be smiling. “Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, are you familiar with the flower known as the . . . rose?”

Dylan hadn’t planned on answering what he thought was a rhetorical question, but Frank refused to proceed and nodded his head toward Dylan, begging for a response. Dylan finally complied, “Yes, Frank, I have heard of the elusive rose.”

Two drinks appeared on the table, care of an autonomous waiter, and Frank gracefully grabbed them both. He took a drink from one, then the other, then placed the first in front of Dylan.

“Well, I have been studying one particular rose for nearly five months.” Frank’s hands began to rise in the air melodramatically. “When it first came to me, it was freshly cut, desiring of water. And I fed that rose water, Dylan—God help me, I fed that damn rose until it couldn’t slurp up another drop. But you know what, Dylan? You know what?”

Dylan raised his eyebrows in response.

“Dylan, do you know what happened next?”

“Jesus, Frank, what the hell happened next?”

“The rose thirsted for more. More! So much so that her thorns wilted away to mere stubs, allowing me to caress her stem, and yet her petals flowered still—”

“Frank! Damn, enough already, I’m assuming this isn’t a plant we’re talking about?”

“I’m in love, Dylan. Big, fat, wet, sloppy love.” Frank’s hands fell to his lap and he slumped back in his chair in contentment.

“Congrats my man. Love’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it?” Dylan was genuinely happy for his friend and former boss.