Upgraded (49 page)

“Yeah?” the Samurai grinned.

“I’m going to tell them you’re a dick.”

The grin fell from his face, replaced by a snarl she kicked herself for not seeing days ago, and he lifted a syringe filled with amber liquid from a case at his side.

She could guess what it was, but right at that moment, the far left wall in all its fine imported stone glory shattered inward with a concussive blast that threw them all to the floor. When Mercury shook off the daze, she lifted her head just in time to catch sight of a genuine blonde bombshell stepping across the rubble. A blinking red indicator on her optics, keyed to the property security, indicated the activation of the silent alarm system, and showed the blinking dots of the security team streaming steadily toward their location. She struggled to her feet, this time able to keep them by surfing on adrenaline. “You’re—”

The woman turned and winked, a blonde curl at her temple bouncing with the theater of her movement. “Chantilly Lace.” Indeed she was covered in it, of the new rayon-stretch type, stitched around a black utility harness hung with several weapons and a blue-and-white cheque miniskirt complete with carbon suspension (for that extra oomph) and ammunition pockets.

“You work for the Big Bopper.” The 50s gang. Sixer gateways.

Chantilly raised her firearm and sighted along the barrel, pulsing a droplet of laser light across three of the marble columns with a thumb release. “I know what he likes.” She fired three precise shots in quick succession, and laughed in girlish delight as the shattered column sections brought down their Corinthian heads and much of the upper floor with them in a thunder of stone and dust.
Different,
the Seamstress had said.

“How did you find me?” Her mother and the Samurai were both recovering consciousness, groggily lifting their heads. Mercury ducked over to the latter and relieved him of the stainless steel medical case at his side.

The blonde Eris blinked at her in surprise and caution. “
You
called
me,
and sent a location.”

My doing,
Digit interrupted, and Mercury stared. “
Your
doing?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry—” Mercury stuttered.
You . . . what? Digit? What are you?

Slightly more than a PDA.
Her head swam.

“Come on,” Chantilly was saying. “A hit this big draws heat.”

Mercury ducked over to her mother, who was groggily rubbing her temples. The flash of vulnerable hope in her eyes cut through Mercury, but a reminder of the past day’s misdeeds burned it away. She picked up Candice’s wrist, connected their drives with a jump-cable. A password prompt: she entered “macydaisy,” the pet poodle that had run away when she was five—and the
*plink*
of security approval gave her heart another pang. Seconds later, she’d transferred the Moderna HealthMonitor hack across and instructed it to release estradiol sufficient to generate a nice PMS zap. Then she accessed her cosmetic mod and turned her eyeshadow electric green and her eyelashes metallic purple.

Mercury looked into her mother’s fluorescent eyes. “You need to change your password,” she said.

“Seriously,” Chantilly barked, firing blue blasts of light up the passage. “Now or never.”

“All right,” Mercury concentrated on following the plausibly insane sixer hitwoman as she ran through the white hallways, trying to focus. Digit.
You pretended to be a PDA all this time . . . how could you stand it?

I did a lot of wiki surfing. Your cultural studies course didn’t cover that part of the lower city, by the way.

Chantilly Lace’s blonde ponytail bounced steadily in front of them, and in short order she’d expertly navigated them out to the north gardens, onto a swathe of imported blue-green Japanese-engineered grass.
Where did you come from? What’s your classification?

Digit answered the second question first, as a helicopter arrowed toward them from the south:
Currently three, but my makers think I’d qualify for four eventually,
he? she? it? said, and Mercury found herself dizzy again. Then:
Your mother installed me when you were two. She thought if you didn’t grow up augmented you’d be stunted.

My mother planted you?
Chantilly Lace had pulled a micro-jet pack from a pouch and was fitting canisters to it, then swinging it across her shoulders and looping an arm around Mercury’s waist. “Wait!” Mercury yelled over the now-deafening roar of the helicopter a hundred meters above them.
Digit, what the fuck?

“There’s no waiting, sweetheart!” Chantilly yelled back, but Mercury struggled against her grip. “You wait, you stay!”

She installed me, she doesn’t control me,
Digit said, and if Mercury assumed Digit was human she’d say there was hurt in the words.

And how the hell do I know you don’t want to control me yourself, hiding all this time?
Chantilly Lace was backing away, shaking her head at Mercury in disgust. She ignited the jet pack.

Because I want you to make your own decisions. I want to stay with you.
Behind them, boiling up from the smoking property, the scarred alabaster, shouting men with weapons painted them with laser sightings.

Tears stung her eyes, new and bewildering, the first since not long after she’d taken off from this compound for the first time, a furious seventeen-year-old with way too much livesocial integration for her own good. “All right!” she yelled, and ran for Chantilly, who happily kicked her in the chest from an early-launch altitude of about a meter and a half. Mercury clung to the stiletto-heeled boot and closed her eyes.

Scant moments later, she was sitting in between Chantilly Lace and a guy in a thermapolyester zoot suit with a pair of implanted mechanical eyes. He reached out with a sidearm to rain covering fire down on Moderna’s security guards, and the helicopter rose above the city. After a few parting shots he retracted his arm and sealed the windows, delivering beatific silence to the cabin, or close enough.

“Pretender, meet Jenny Mercury,” Chantilly Lace said, gesturing between them. The cyber-eyed guy nodded, but Chantilly was already leaning back toward Mercury. “Hey, are you going to get your chip swapped? It’s the only way they wouldn’t be able to trace you again. The Bopper wants that Lupercalia thing you’ve got, and he’d probably chip you in exchange for it.” Her thick-lashed blue eyes were disturbingly bright, highlighted by chartreuse biolume.

“No,” Mercury said, flipping open the medical kit to examine the formula her mother’d concocted. “I think I’ll go back to Jennifer Long. It’s about time someone showed my mother what ‘big social’ really means.”

“I like how you think!” Chantilly laughed, sweet and infectious as cotton candy.

So do I,
Digit said.

Thanks,
Mercury said. She looked around, keenly aware of the stolen technology that buzzed all around them. But the network, when you didn’t hide from it, might have a few things to say about sixers, too. “Where are we going?”

“Deep,” Chantilly said, pointing with her still-equipped destruction gun to the eastern sky. “I saw that AP story just before I broke in. The SEC’s scrambling already. Fucking brilliant. You in?”

What do you think?
she asked Digit, and felt, quite distinctly, a pulse of surprise—he’d opened an emotion-share channel. Then, pleasure. Gratitude.

I’m in,
he said, kicking a few deliciously clever network options across her optics. She smiled.

“We’re in.”

Coastlines of the Stars

Alex Dally MacFarlane

THE FIRST MAPS

It was a late interest: after childhood, after fleeting interests that sank into me like teeth—then fell away. Foxes stayed. I tried poetry. I fell into history. I found maps there.

I approached it cautiously, like a new food.

I couldn’t say why it interested me.

The first maps were other people’s: old maps, in prose and pictures. I collected them, compared them. I described their meanings: here, home; here, discomfort; here, longing; here, the coastline. Only later did I make my own.

Ngọc stood in the main shuttle terminal at Al Qasr, waiting for the next shuttle to Goldchair Space Station. Minutes took too long. Crowded, loud, too much. People everywhere: talking, shouting, signing, bumping into her, waiting by her. Unfiltered announcements. Smells from the food stands, from people. Banners in every color, scrolling across screens on the walls and floating above the halls: directing people to the right shuttle slots, displaying news, advertising.

Normally Ngọc’s array filtered the noises, the sights, the smells, gave her only the ones she needed. Only her shuttle’s announcements. Only enough about her surroundings that she didn’t walk into walls or people. Her array ran on her body’s energy, and she was low: tired and hungry and longing to be home, where she could heat up a packet of phở rather than pay more money than she could spare at one of the food stands, and sit in her own space, small and silent.

Ngọc looked low, away from the bright banners and people’s faces.

One of her hands sought out her most textured hairs, at the top of her head: to run two fingers down each hair, over and over. The hair between her fingers bumped. Pleasing.

An announcement gave her shuttle a slot. She walked towards it.

She passed a wall screen that caught her attention: waves drawn in white on dark blue in neat and intricate detail, moving rhythmically across the screen. She stepped closer. The white lines were raised: touchable. She held a hand to them.

Waves moved against her.

For a long time she stood, feeling the waves against her hand.

She looked at the words spanning the moving image on a plain white background: SERMI HU. WAVES REVISITED.

Waves.

Another announcement.

Ngọc ran to her shuttle, repeating the name Sermi Hu like fingers on hair.

THE WAVE MAPS

I mapped motion. I mapped in clean lines: white on dark blue. My waves move across a coast near Cai Nu City, not the coast as it is now, but as it was a million years ago. The coast changes under the waves far more rapidly than under real waves.

Yet this is realer to me than a static map, a coast that never changes.

By the time I am a hundred years old, it will be our coast. But it will not stop. It will map our possible future.

Ngọc ate more food as soon as she awoke, already hungry. Another packet of phở. Sage crisps. Squid-flavored protein chunks. The last she ate while she dressed in her favorite clothes: plain indigo trousers and a sleeveless knee-length indigo top with repeating print patterns on it. She combed her hair. It was an impractical comb: curving like a moon occluded, with tines on its inward edge. Dull silvery metal. Pointed at its moon-edges. Heavy. A gift from her grandmother, before early death took her away. On its flat faces, its maker had engraved floral lines and animals that Ngọc couldn’t identify. She sat a while after combing her hair, turning the comb over and over, enjoying the engravings and tines on her hands.

She put it aside and turned on her arrays.

Menu symbols hung in indigo at the edges of her vision. Here she didn’t need to filter sensory input, but she added music: songs sent by a friend in a language Ngọc didn’t know. Lively. Like foxes dancing, like the quintet of silvery foxes embedded in her skin and skull at her hairline: the only outward sign of her array. Their feet went deep into her head.

She looked at messages—nothing that meant someone would hire her and pay money—and then she looked for Sermi Hu.

She closed her eyes, to see better.

Looking into nearby public arrays for information was nothing, was shallow, easy, a single step into the un-countable arrays in existence: the arrays anchored in other people’s bodies, the arrays in space stations, in space craft, arrays spanning space and planets and moons. Stepping there, Ngọc was not a person sitting on her bed with her eyes closed. She could ignore herself. Ignore other people. Ignore everything except what she needed to work.

Sermi Hu: exhibit descriptions, interviews, news, images. A confusion of information. A person with complex weaves—like carpets of a single dark brown—in waist-long hair on either side of a dark face. A number of other projects aside from the waves, all exhibited on Cai Nu, where Sermi lived. Ngọc looked for more information about those.

THE STAR MAPS

I found my favorite maps in history: Ammassalik wooden maps, carved in coastlines that sailors could hold in their hands. The shapes in the wood matched the edges of the shore. The sailors followed them home in the thick fogs that fell like darkness.

Some of my distant ancestors, if my family’s tales were told true.

I thought of the shores eroding. Of families changing the maps, over hundreds of years.

I mapped the stars this way.

To hold a map of stars in your hands, to feel it as you saw it—

It was too beautiful a thought.

Ngọc wanted a replica that felt like wood. It took little time to order one.

That done, she looked at even more information about Sermi: other exhibits, current work. Sermi’s current whereabouts, Ngọc found, were less certain. Sermi had gone missing a year ago. Last likely whereabouts: the Ivuultu debris field. No one on Cai Nu would go there. On an array for the kind of people who would look there for a fee, Ngọc found a message from Sermi’s wife. Ngọc opened her eyes to play it on a screen in the air above her floor—and to reach for more sage crisps. Running her array made her already fast metabolism faster.

An image of a woman appeared in the air: just her head and shoulders, a dark-skinned face with intricate gold lettering across her cheeks and nose, wearing a hijab of city-patterned gold. “I am Xaliima,” the image of the woman said, the timbre of her voice flattened by the translation Ngọc had run, “but it is my spouse’s name you will recognize: Sermi Hu, who won the Shen Yang prize two years in a row for making maps. Sermi maps changing places: maps of water, maps of coastlines, maps of the bone pits of Psápfa, maps of stars. Maps of the Ivuultu debris.” Xaliima paused, grief among the gold words on her cheeks. “Sermi wanted to map the Ivuultu debris, but not the debris itself. The traps set by the people who live there.”