Shine (16 page)

He seemed utterly out of place, his traditional costume unexpected in a protest made up mostly of geeks and assorted hangers-on; and where the other protesters were chanting slogans and stabbing the air with their signs and fists, he simply stood, impossibly still in the melee surrounding him, as if he had no need to shout or rattle his placard in order to make his point.

As Lisa watched, the man turned his head in her direction. Lisa felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. Through the slit in the scarf, she could see the man's dark, shadowed eyes looking back, his gaze cold and dispassionate. The man seemed to be saying:
You in there, with the toolkit and the cheap trouser suit--how could
you
possibly understand?

Unnerved and a little embarrassed, she turned away, almost colliding with the receptionist, a pale-faced young woman with the prayer-wheel emblem of the Church of Accelerated Redemption on the breast pocket of her suit jacket. Apparently, she'd been trying to attract Lisa's attention for a couple of minutes.

"Not this way," the receptionist said in urgent French. "It is not safe. Take the stairs at the end of the corridor and you can leave via the basement car park."

Feeling like a criminal, Lisa let the young woman usher her out of the lobby and into a service corridor. "Sorry about this," the receptionist said, holding the door, "but ever since we arrived here, we've been the target of demonstrations. Yesterday a group demanded the destruction of our Artificial Intercessors, while today..." She didn't finish her sentence.

Lisa's heart was beating fast. She had no idea what the protest outside was about. She was just a hired keyboard for the Church, here to do a job and get paid for it. But the man in the scarf had judged her anyway and as the receptionist let the door swing shut behind her, she could feel his dark stare following her like an accusation.

Lisa went slowly down the stairs, cursing her rotten luck. She was certain the Church would refuse to pay for the extra time it had taken her to install their new secure server, and Pierre really
would
take the lost income from her pay packet. It hadn't been an idle threat. It had happened before. In fact, hardly a month passed without Pierre finding some excuse to underpay her--she'd thought it misogyny at first, but lately she'd come to suspect it was simply something in her behaviour that rubbed him the wrong way: perhaps the inescapable Americanisms that still lingered, even after seven years in Paris.

At the bottom of the stairs, she found a short corridor leading to a metal turnstile. She went through it into the car park and made her way toward the exit ramp, marvelling as she did so at the number of expensive BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes in the bays. For a religious order, the Church certainly seemed to have a lot of money. Curious, she pulled out her mobile phone and used it to look up the organisation's homepage. It was a slick, classy affair, and she scrolled quickly through it.

According to blurb on the front page, the founder of the Church of Accelerated Redemption had been a reclusive software billionaire. His Church, she read, welcomed worshippers of all faiths and offered them spiritual insurance: continuous prayers on their behalf, in exchange for an annual subscription. Dedicated AIs--the most complex, the ones only a fortune could buy--generated the prayers. They repeated them twenty-four hours a day, reciting thousands of original verses per second like high-tech prayer wheels, building up a huge karmic stake to absolve investors--mostly politicians and business leaders--of their financial and environmental sins, and ensure them a place in heaven regardless of the damage and suffering they caused.

There was more, but it was difficult to read on the phone's small screen. Lisa turned it off. She'd already missed her train.

By the time she got home, soaked to the skin in salty rain, the downstairs bakery was all but out of bread. The baker's assistant handed her a small white loaf with an apologetic smile and offered to lay aside a baguette for her the next day. Lisa thanked her and went upstairs, opening the door to her flat with the loaf wedged firmly under her arm. Inside, the place smelled of mould, although she hardly noticed it any more. It was an old building with no insulation against the newly-stifling summers and the walls were always damp, even in July. She went through to the kitchen, opened the cupboards and took out a clean glass, which she filled with tap water. She dumped two aspirin tablets into it and drank the whole lot in a single gulp. It tasted of copper.

She unbuttoned her jacket and kicked off her shoes. Then she cut up some bread on a plate and powered up her laptop, checking her RSS news feeds as she ate, skimming reports of freakish weather events and economic unrest from around the globe.

There were unseasonal rains in California and hurricanes forming in the South Atlantic and Southwest Pacific. Around the world, cyclones were getting stronger and more frequent--except in the Bay of Bengal. There, wind towers, reforestation and tidal control had reduced flooding, soil erosion and the number of recorded cyclone landfalls, in a coordinated defence designed and implemented by the Spanish consulting firm
Pensamiento Aplicado--
a company seemingly at the forefront of the new world order.

She checked her email, but there was nothing interesting in her inbox: a few spams that the filter hadn't caught, a few reminders about the gas and electricity bill--she'd pay them in time, damn their efficiency--and a single mail from her father in Wyoming, wanting to know when she'd be coming home. He'd never been able to understand why she'd chosen to live and work in Europe; in all his fifty-two years, he'd never been further than a day's drive from the family home. Attached to his message, Lisa found pictures of the hurricane shelter he'd built, in which he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her mother, both parents standing proudly in front of their concrete-reinforced cellar doors, framed by grinning small-town neighbours. The look in their eyes gave Lisa an unwelcome shiver of recognition. She'd been an intelligent, awkward child and their simple, small town satisfaction spoke of everything she'd been fleeing when she left home at the age of eighteen--running first to the Sorbonne University, and then to a succession of small apartments in the suburbs of Paris.

Even now, she wasn't quite sure how the bright adventure of staying abroad after college, the endless succession of lazy breakfasts in cafés and late-night
discothèques
, had soured--but here she was, three years later, without Liz or Alex or any of the other exchange students, stuck in a job that sucked up all her time and barely paid her rent. How had that happened? Since turning twenty-three, she'd gone from small town to small time. But still, she thought bleakly, she'd rather do this than go back home...

With a sigh, she closed her father's mail. She knew she should call him but her migraine wouldn't go away, and she couldn't banish the image of the Bedouin-scarf man from her thoughts, and the sheer incongruousness of his presence at the demonstration.

On a whim, she opened her browser. A few clicks took her from the portal of Paris' Préfecture to a list of the demonstrations that had been planned for the day, with an interactive map showing their itineraries, agreed routes, and some general background information on the causes they supported.

Let's see...

In the vicinity of the Church's headquarters, there'd been one demonstration scheduled for the early morning: the bus drivers' union protesting against the new automated, self-driving buses. But that had ended at eleven, and as far as she could see, it had nothing to do with the Church of Accelerated Redemption. She kept scrolling.

Ah, there it is...

From four in the afternoon until seven, a protest by the Extraordinary Sapience Committee against the opening of the Church of Accelerated Redemption's new headquarters.

A quick search netted her the website of the ESC: a polished multi-media presentation merging immersive audio, 3D-animations and overlaid reports to state its case against the Church.

The Committee themselves were a loose online collective of like-minded geeks, freaks and hackers. They believed the Church's weak AIs were capable of being upgraded into independent, free-thinking beings, and therefore subject to the same protections afforded to infants and children under French Law. The weak AIs--the ones beaming the exaflops of automated prayers into the stratosphere--might well be saving the souls of the Redemptionists, but according to the Committee, they were shown no gratitude and were treated worse than slaves or imprisoned sweatshop workers, kept on a tight leash and pre-programmed to cheerfully accept their lot in life.

There was a link on the homepage to the Committee's bulletin boards which, when she clicked on it, opened a fresh treasure trove of controversy. There were discussion threads comparing the AI's gel-based neural chassis with those of natural mammalian brains, and others arguing that the occasional spikes seen in their bandwidth corresponded to similar peaks seen in the human brain during intense emotional eruptions...

It had never occurred to Lisa to consider AIs as living beings. She'd always thought of them as simulations, complex computer programs designed to perform specific tasks. She'd had no idea so many people could get so worked up about defending their rights, and that they'd be so desperately trying to free them from bondage, the same way animal liberationists used to bust ill-treated dogs and cats from the world's cosmetic labs. And she still didn't see where the man with the Bedouin scarf fitted in at all. She'd seen a few men on the streets with that type of costume, but they had been old and conservative, unlikely to associate with angry young left-wing protesters. Hopelessly, she searched the rest of the boards, hoping to see a post from him--although she knew full well that she had no idea of his name or what he looked like under the scarf, and all the posters on the boards used aliases...

Eventually, unable to find a lead on his identity, she stumbled instead on a discussion thread listing further, upcoming protest events. The next was scheduled for midday on the following Sunday, a march from Nation to République, the traditional route for such demonstrations. She made a note of the time and turned the computer off.

She sat looking at the screen as it shut down, thinking of the Bedouin man. She wondered what he was like without the scarf obscuring his face. She imagined him as lithe and brown-skinned, his composure as cool and composed as his stance, his rough grip as unsettling and electrifying as she'd found the brief glimpse of his eyes to be...

She yawned. The aspirin were kicking in and her headache had sunk to a dull pain behind her eyes.

She took off her clothes, folded them on a chair, and fell into bed. Sunday morning. Nation. She'd be there. And so would he. He'd have to be, with such a big event happening.

The rest of the week passed slowly. Lisa still had the Redemptionist job to finish, of course, but she was also pre-booked at a number of other sites around the city, and the jobs she had there kept her pretty busy, even on Saturday.

She used her spare time to research both the ESC and the Church of Accelerated Redemption, and by the time Sunday came around, she knew a lot more about them both. But she still hadn't really had time to plan what she was going to do. She would just have to turn up and look for him, and hope he still had the Bedouin clothes, so she'd be sure to recognise him. She was certain she would. She knew she'd recognise his gaze and smooth, relaxed stance anywhere...

She arrived at the Place de la Nation a few minutes before the scheduled start of the march. It was the kind of bright autumn day where everything looked as if you were viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope; and there were, she estimated, around five hundred people gathered on the grass beneath the central statue, an idealised personification of the Republic herself, standing on a globe in a chariot pulled by lions, looking West, towards the Place de la Bastille as if willing the marchers in that direction.

Where are you?

She worked her way around the edges of the crowd, scanning faces. She'd purposefully worn the same grey jacket and white shirt she'd been wearing the last time he'd seen her, in the hope he'd recognise her.

There were a lot of men in the crowd in all manner of attire, most wearing some variant of the classic 'alternative' uniform of black t-shirts, jeans and army boots. There were some adventurous souls dressed up as androids, soldiers and pirates, but none of them matched her mental snapshot of the Bedouin-scarf man.

And then, at the stroke of twelve, as the march organisers used their megaphones to whip the crowd up into a chanting mob, he appeared at the top of the steps to the Metro station, placard in hand, still in the Bedouin scarf, flanked by two skinny emo girls in tatty jeans and army surplus jackets--a mismatched combination that would under other circumstances have provoked curious stares from the people in the street.

Lisa's heart beat painfully against her chest. Her stomach felt hollow and her palms were damp. He looked exactly as she remembered him, down to the deep blue of his robes. She took a hesitant step towards him but as she did so, the chanting crowd started moving, shuffling forward into the tree-lined Rue Du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and he turned to join them.

"Wait!" she called, without meaning to.
I don't even know your name
.

She started pushing towards the edge of the mob, hoping that once free, she could overtake it and catch him. All around her, angry voices called out slogans that rang in her ears:

"
Free the Minds!
"

"
Prayer is slavery!
"

"
Down with oppression!
"

Lisa finally drew level with him as they passed the pavement café on the corner of the intersection with the Rue de Montreuil. He was walking at a steady, controlled pace with his placard held vertically and his emo wing women shambling along on either side like dishevelled bodyguards. She fell into step beside them. The street was wide, with lines of trees and cars on either side.