CHAPTER ONE
Bador descends on the public square, jumping off a second-floor ledge and landing lightly on a tile in the outermost row. He strikes a vaguely heroic landing pose, but none of the people around him acknowledge his presence. He waits a few seconds, but then shuffles and rises to his feet.
He makes his way to the center of Dekho Plaza, toward the statue of the Sage-Poet, Shantiport’s greatest cultural icon. His face shines in a riot of colors, reflecting the videos running on giant screens on buildings all around the square, mostly advertising off-world utopian real estate projects. As he walks past a group of flashmob dancers, and a circle of young humans embarrassing themselves performing stunts for a bodytech dating service, he remembers to start his breathing simulations. His small body rises and falls slightly every few steps, alert but relaxed. From behind, he looks exactly like a flesh monkey, incredibly detailed muscle, skin, and hairwork: people only know what he is when they see his flat metal face with its large, restless digiscreen eyes, or perhaps the lights that appear in his joints as he adjusts to uneven surfaces. A child runs up to him, gaping, hoping he’s an animal: he eyemoji-winks at her, and she rolls her eyes and runs back to her mother.
He looks around the square, and locates the shop where he’s supposed to meet Lina. As he lopes toward it, the first raindrops of the evening plink gently on his face: the rain, unlike Lina, is on time. In a few minutes, the raindrops will get fat, and then there should be heavy rain for a few hours at least. The buildings around Dekho Plaza will rise as their flood reservoirs fill, and the clevastone slabs of the square will fill to capacity, and then Dekho Plaza will suddenly turn into a sparkling, shallow lake. And the humans of central Shantiport will shop through it all, which Bador can respect. He stares through the storefront glass at the people inside, his eyemojis now goldfish bowls.
A young woman approaches the storefront, rain-shielded in a bright green hooded clevasuit. She hovers near Bador, who shoots a glare at her and shuffles away. He wonders where Lina found this one, and why she hadn’t briefed her properly: the whole point of this charade is that Tiger Clan surveillance doesn’t see them together more than strictly necessary. Well, not the whole point, or even the point at all, but a desirable side effect. The green-suited woman doesn’t follow Bador: she wanders near the shop entrance uncertainly for a moment, and then goes in. Bador swears in messages to himself: Lina’s really late. He can’t call her: calls are unsafe; rogue intelligences left over from a Peacock-era cyberwar still lurk in Shantiport’s voicecomm networks, waiting to destroy private callers’ bodytech with spam and viruses. He sends her a series of angry cryptic messages, but as usual she doesn’t respond. He suspects she has her comm-links off, or worse, has him muted.
Inside the shop, partitions rise and swivel and store-bots scurry about, beginning their hourly rearrangement of display sections to follow the evening’s shopping trends. Lights go off or change color. Storecams and surveillance-bots go on standby, waiting for the store’s new settings before resuming their vigilance. As they fall asleep, an orange-hooded woman runs toward the store, and bumps into Bador near the entrance: Lina’s here. She falls down. Bador grabs her hand and pulls her up, apologizing. Lina ignores him and runs into the store, adjusting her clevasuit, and Bador walks away as well, his emotions mixed. He’s pleased with the smoothness with which he passed her the location pin, but he’s annoyed at having to play this game of Where’s Lina every time they have to set up a workmeet. He can see why Lina enjoys it, but he’s going to have to wait by himself at the location, as usual, while she switches clevasuits with her friend, wanders off on her own, reads the location pin, and then makes her slow and ponderous human way there. As usual, there’s no recognition of the fact that his time is extremely valuable.
Half an hour later, Bador’s mood has only grown worse. He waits for Lina again, now sitting cross-legged on the sloping greenroof of a bungalow on the outer ring of Historio Heights, just to the north of the central zone. Historio Heights is mostly a ghost town, an ambitious cultural construction project abandoned after the Tiger Clan’s invasion of Shantiport: there are no lights here except the glow of the central zone across a dividing canal. Bador looks down, beyond the greenroof’s edge into the canal’s dark waters overflowing across the street and lapping at the Historio walls as the rain gets serious, a drumbeat on his face and exposed feet. His tail rises behind him, twisting and swiveling, sensors recalibrating his movement algorithms for stormy weather.
He jumps to his feet as he sees Lina on a vroomba hoverscooter speeding toward the bungalow, and clambers down and inside through a broken window just as she pushes the door open. Bador extracts a glowstick from his stomach-pouch: it lights up a large living room full of mud-streaked Anchor Clan–era furniture. There are paintings on the walls, mostly covered in fungus, and a range of dead and broken gadgets. A small table sits in the center of an elaborate and mostly rotten sofa set. On the table is an unlocked metal box.
Lina opens up the green clevasuit and tosses it aside. Underneath it, she’s in a form-fitting coolant-lined sleeveless kurta and multipocketed trousers. And big insect-eye goggles, which she removes. The only visible Tiger marks on her are the black techstripes on her left arm. Despite the efforts of her clevasuits through the evening, she’s glowing with sweat and her long hair is wholly wet. Her eyes shine as they adjust to the dim glowstick light, and her gaze drifts past the monkey-bot and settles on the box. She breaks into a dazzling smile.
“Brother,” she says.
“You’re late,” Bador says, flashing frowning eyemojis.
“It’s lovely to see you too. What have you got?”
Bador struggles, torn between the urges to sulk further and make a big revelation. Drama wins.
“So I spent last night and all of this morning at the bottom of the river with a couple of nasty croc-bots because your marker was out of date,” he says. “And then I spent this afternoon getting myself and the treasure foam-cleaned. Croc-bots tried to eat me after, by the way.”
“Amazing work. What have you got?”
“Well, the big container was ruined, river took almost everything. But we got deep inside it and found this box. Three treasures,” Bador says with a flourish. “Do you want them in increasing or decreasing order of value?”
“Just tell me.”
“Well, first of all, meet Moku,” Bador says.
He looks directly at me.
I’m confused. What does he want me to do?
This is wrong.
“Meet what?” Lina asks, looking in my general direction, but of course she can’t see me, and not because it’s low light. My shimmer’s on, she couldn’t have seen me in daylight either.
“Come on, Moku,” Bador says. “Show yourself.”
This is not how it’s supposed to go. I am synced to Bador, he is my user. Did he not understand when I explained it to him?
“Bador, if this is some kind of joke…”
I scan Lina’s body mods, find her optic augs, and grant her eyes permission to see past my shimmer. Lina sees me, hovering above and between her and Bador, just a floating disc a little larger than her head. She actually leaps back with a startled shout.
“What is it? A drone?”
Copyright © 2023 by Samit Basu
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