All the Birds in the Sky (16 page)

“Laurence?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. And then his eyes grew. “Patricia?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, cool. It’s good to, uh, see you again. How have you been?”

“I’ve been good. How are you doing?”

“I’m good too.” Long pause. Laurence shuffled and kneaded a square napkin. “So. You violate any laws of physics lately?”

“Ha ha. No, not really.” Patricia needed to get out of this conversation before it crushed the life out of her. “Anyway. Good running into you again.”

“Yeah.” Laurence looked around. “I should introduce you to my girlfriend, Serafina. She was here a second ago. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll just, uh, just find her.”

Laurence turned and plowed into the throng, looking for his girlfriend. Patricia wanted to get out of there, but she felt like she’d promised Laurence she wouldn’t leave this spot. She was bound to this place, as sure as if she’d been imprisoned inside a rock. Minutes passed and Laurence did not come back, and Patricia got more antsy

Why had she thought it would be a good idea to say hi to Laurence? It just brought up a lot of weird, painful memories of puberty and nearly losing herself, and it wasn’t like she needed more awkwardness in her life right now. She’d been feeling invincible, partly because she had just “saved” this UFO party, but now she felt sour, maybe even depressed. Patricia wasn’t naturally manic-depressive, but a big part of the instruction at Eltisley Maze had involved keeping two very different, maybe incompatible, states of mind at once—and in some ways, it was like being taught to be bipolar on purpose. People had a rough time of it, and nobody should be surprised that you wound up with people like Diantha. But Patricia was trying not to think about Diantha.

Patricia’s mood was crashing fast. Promise or no promise, she had to get out of here.

“Hey.” A guy was standing in front of Patricia. He had on a ridiculous waistcoat with purple fleur-de-lis on it, and a watch chain, plus puffy white sleeves. Wide sideburns and shoulder-length dreadlocks framed his face, which had a nice jawline and an easy smile. “You’re Patricia, right? I heard you were indirectly responsible for the amelioration of the atrocious dubthrash music. I’m Kevin.”

He had an accent that she couldn’t place—sort of Mid-Atlantic. Anglophile. His handshake was soft and encompassing, but not grippy. He was an animal lover, she could tell, who had pets, plural.

Kevin and Patricia talked about music and the basic incompatibility between “cocktail party” and “dance party” (because a floor could be a dance floor or a sophisticated-mingling-with-shallow-glasses floor but not both: Floors were not infinitely subdividable or versatile).

Laurence came back with a cute waifish redhead with a pointy chin, wearing a sparkly scarf. “This is Serafina. She works with emotional robots,” Laurence said. “This is Patricia,” he told Serafina. “My friend from junior high. She saved my life.”

Hearing herself described that way made Patricia spit-take her cosmo. “She saved my life”—apparently, that was the anecdote that she’d been boiled down to, in Laurence’s mind.

“I never thanked you,” Laurence said. Then Serafina was clasping Patricia’s hand delicately and saying it was nice to meet her, and Patricia had to introduce Kevin to both of them. Kevin nodded and smiled. He was taller than Laurence, and you could have fit two of Serafina inside him.

Laurence gave Patricia his card and there was vague talk about getting lunch.

After Laurence and Serafina drifted away, Patricia told Kevin, “I didn’t really save his life. He was exaggerating.”

Kevin shrugged, causing his watch chain to jangle. “It’s his life. One tends to privilege personal insights in such matters.”

*   *   *

A LEXUS PULLED
up in front of Patricia’s apartment building just as she was getting her house keys out of her purse. It was three in the morning, and somehow Kawashima had known the exact moment that Patricia would get home. As usual, he wore a bespoke dark suit, with a thin black tie and a bright red pressed handkerchief providing one splash of color, even on this hot night. He got out of the car and gave Patricia a cheery smile, like he was pleased they’d happened to run into each other. Kawashima was one of the most powerful magicians Patricia knew, but everyone who met him thought he was a hedge-fund manager. His black hair was short except for one perfect swoosh, and he had the kind of boyish good looks that made people want to trust him even when he was scamming them out of millions.

“I didn’t tell him,” Patricia said without bothering to say hi first. “He already knew. He’s known since middle school.”

Kawashima nodded. “Sure. But still, talking to civilians about the things we do, and how we do them…” He leaned against the car and looked at his unscuffed shoes. Then he looked up at Patricia again, taking her measure. “What if we told you to kill him?”

“I’d say the same thing I said to that guy ten years ago,” Patricia responded without hesitation. “I’d say no. Actually, I’d say ‘fuck you,’ followed by ‘no.’”

“We figured.” Kawashima laughed and clapped his hands a couple times. “And of course, we would never ask you to do that. Not unless it was absolutely necessary. But we want to meet him. If you trust him, then we trust him, too. But we’d like to meet him for ourselves.”

“Okay,” Patricia said. “We only had one short conversation. But sure, I’ll try.”

“That’s actually not why I came to see you,” Kawashima said. “Although thanks for bringing it up.” He held up a tablet computer, like a Caddy but less fancy, and showed her a map of San Francisco with some places marked with little dots. The North Beach café with the poet-stabbing, the Hayes Valley assault, the junkie, a few other odds and ends. And the party in Twin Peaks. “You were busy tonight.”

“Nobody saw anything.” Patricia was burning up. “I was careful.”

“This is what you do every night lately. You go out and throw your weight around, for hours. It’s great that you want to alleviate suffering, it’s praiseworthy, but the world is a balance. Much like nature itself. And you have to be careful you don’t cause more suffering than you prevent,” Kawashima said. “We don’t want you to burn out. Or get carried away. Just remember, Aggrandizement comes in many forms.”

Patricia wanted to protest—she was being surgical here, she had trained a decade for this—but there was no point. She should be glad she was having this conversation with Kawashima instead of Ernesto.

“You, of all people, should understand the need for great care,” Kawashima said, because of course he was going to bring
that
incident up. It would follow her around for the rest of her life. No matter how much she did to atone.

“Okay,” Patricia said. “I’ll be more careful.” She left it vague on purpose.

“Good enough,” Kawashima said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an early-morning brunch date with five Abercrombie models tomorrow.” He saluted and got into his Lexus, which glided down the hill toward Dolores Park. Patricia watched it shrink into the night and marveled at the internal contradiction of telling someone that the most powerful magicians in town are watching her every move, but she shouldn’t get a swelled head. But she was too exhausted to dwell on that, and all of the day’s minor miracles were catching up with her at once. She slipped inside the apartment, where her roommates had fallen asleep watching TV again. She tucked them in.

17

LAURENCE FIRST MET
his girlfriend, Serafina, at a robot fashion show, with robots modeling human clothing and human models wearing robot fashions, like mechanical lingerie. The event happened at a garagey artspace somewhere south of South of Market, with a gunmetal trough full of artisanal vodka. Laurence had come
this
close to mistaking Serafina for one of the models—her cheekbones and oval face, her lustrous skin and shiny red/black hair were that amazing—but he’d realized just in time that she was one of the robot makers instead. Serafina’s “model” was a steel sylph, with ball-and-socket joints that let it strike a pose, pivot, talk with its delicate hands. Laurence had helped to build battle bots in college, but never artificial supermodels, and he’d managed to say something witty enough about the difference between the two that Serafina had friended him on MeeYu.

They met for coffee a few days after that, and the coffee date morphed into a dinner date, and the third time they hung out it was tacitly a sleepover; Serafina had a toothbrush and condoms in a pouch of her vinyl shoulder bag, which was Twiki from
Buck Rogers
. Pro tip: Do not think of “beedi beedi beedi
”
while you’re having sex for the first time with the most beautiful woman alive, or you will have some explaining to do (even if your motion, rocking the bed frame, does have a sort of “beedi beedi” rhythm). After that, they hung out every other day, held hands on the street, skipped through traffic, whispered in each other’s ears in public, clung together skin to skin every moment in private, swapped gene prints, traded odd little gifts, and wondered how soon was too soon to say “I love you.”

Laurence had soon found that letting people know he was part of Milton Dirth’s Ten Percent Project was a superfast ticket to getting laid. Among the crowd who worshiped Milton, Laurence was a rock star. About fucking time, really. And yet there was still no way he was in Serafina’s league. She was perfect. He was damaged goods. He never forgot this disparity for a second.

About a month after they started dating, Serafina took Laurence into her sanctum. She had to sign him in, and he had to surrender his ID to the man at the desk, who printed a badge with Laurence’s fresh photo on it. She led him down an elevator, along a sloping hallway, through two keypad-secured doors, and on into the lab. Inside, eyes watched Laurence from every wall and flat surface. Two of them belonged to bearded humans, who said “Yo,” and then looked back down at their workstations, but the rest all belonged to robots in various states of assembly. Serafina barely introduced Laurence to the two humans but took her time showing him the robots, who were animatronic cartoon characters or animals or a few mannequin heads. “This is Frank, he laughs a lot. Watch out for Barbara, she flirts but she’s got a mean streak.” The robots seemed to like Laurence, especially Donald the Cactus.

By now, they’d been dating five months. And lately, every time Serafina looked at her phone while they were hanging out, or stared into space, or bit her thick lower lip in the middle of a conversation, Laurence braced himself. This was it. She was going to dump him. Then the moment would pass. Laurence was sure she was just waiting for the right moment, or the ideal pretext. Every time he woke up next to her, he wondered if this was the last time her breath would warm the back of his neck and her breasts would graze either side of his spine.

He was not going to lose her. He had aced bigger challenges than this. He was going to think of something, take extreme measures, even deploy the Nuclear Option early if he had to. He was going to find a way to hold on to this amazing girl.

*   *   *

LAURENCE’S FACE BEAMED
from the front of Anya’s Caddy as he prepared to jump out of the autocopter, onto the roof deck 172 feet below. That same image of Laurence would be leering from computers all over town right now, thanks to a big article about him in Computron Newsly, which had just gone live twenty minutes ago and was now being aggregated and repackaged by every other Silicon Valley outlet. Between MeeYu and Caddies and all the CySpec-wearing geeks, Laurence’s shit-eating grin would be on everybody’s retinas. The gist of the article was “Laurence Armstead, Wunderkind,” and it was all about his awesome quest to Save the World, and how he had harnessed Milton Dirth’s unlimited cash to gather the world’s smartest people (people like Anya, in fact). The text of the article could be “lorem ipsum” as far as Laurence was concerned; the main point was harnessing the echo chamber in his favor, at the exact moment that he was about to abseil down to that roof deck.

Milton Dirth’s Ninth Maxim:
Avoid publicity, except when you can wield it like a sledgehammer.

Anya was giggling at the picture of Laurence, in her throaty midwestern-girl voice. “God. Could they have made your chin look any bigger? It looks like the heel of someone’s foot, growing out of your face.”

“This picture looks like you got a bad chin implant!” shouted Tanaa from the pilot seat of the autocopter, where she was wearing big headphones over her afro, along with a pair of aviator goggles. She had her “operating delicate machinery” frown on her narrow mouth, even as she laughed.

“A chinplant!” Anya laughed, creating unaccustomed dimples in her normally dour face. “Actually, it looks like you’re overcompensating for being unable to grow a beard, by just adding more chin.”

“Shut up shut up!” Laurence said. “I’m a wunderkind, okay?” He took a moment to look at the two women, reflected on how lucky he was to have such clever weirdos working with him, and vowed yet again that he was not going to let this project fail. He wasn’t going to let Milton, or any of them, down. He was going to do better, somehow.

Then Laurence jumped out of the autocopter, trusting the steel-cord-and-pulley mechanism to lower him at a fast—but not too fast—clip. He wanted to land on his feet. For a moment, there was nothing but sky all around him, and then the Dogpatch was rising up, and the brand-new brutalist tower blocks grew in proportion to the ancient warehouses and docks around them. The air was searing hot, even with the wind.

Laurence’s face was on every computer screen in town right now—except the screens of the company whose roof deck Laurence was dropping onto right now, MatherTec. MatherTec’s computer screens were spewing gibberish, thanks to a clownware-injection attack that Laurence had unleashed on the company’s servers ten minutes earlier.

From the standpoint of the MatherTec founders and angel investors, here’s what happened: They were on their roof deck giving a presentation to a set of VCs in a frantic effort to secure second-round funding for their technology, which wasn’t just another app but rather a way to create stable openings in space-time, with a million possible long-term uses if they could just get some investment. And then, just as their slide presentation was reaching the crucial moment, their screens went staticky and showed the stars-and-snakes logo of the Symbiotic Liberation Army, the world’s most obnoxious hacker group, and nothing they could do would get the presentation back. The investors fidgeted and started to badger the gothy waitress from the catering company for more macaroons, and Earnest Mather was tearing his frizzy reddish-brown hair out. And just then, the wunderkind—that guy whose long, corn-fed face had been everywhere today—dropped out of the sky and handed Earnest Mather a check, already signed by Milton Dirth, for $10 million. “We’re not investing,” Laurence told Earnest before the company founder could even count the zeroes. “We’re buying you out. We want your technology, and a few of your people.”