Idolon (19 page)

Pelayo loitered across the street from the Get Reel. He sat on a wooden bench and nursed a mocha while he watched the cosmetique, waiting for an opening.

It was busy. A fat white guy did the actual modwork—tats, philm edits, grafts, and appliques—while a girl worked the counter. She sold ware that didn't require professional installation and helped customers try on accessories in curtained-off fitting stalls. Most of the customers were teenage kids and chronic philmheads. Lowest-common-denominator clientele.

What the hell was Marta doing, working in a place like this? It didn't make a lot of sense. In some ways, she was even more of a stranger than Concetta.

Pelayo finished the mocha and tossed the plastine cup into the recycling bin next to the bench. Distracted, his gaze traveled to a nearby boutique called Third World Threads. Colorful dresses and blouses hung in the large display window. The designs were mostly African, and included a number of fashionable headdresses. Next he checked out the latest selection of surfware at a Hang Ten shop. Hang Ten sold surf and skate clothing with waterproof wetronics. They had a decent selection of loud Hawaiian shirts, tees, and shorts.

He selected a black-and-red-flowered shirt, a pair of smart-camo cargos, and rubber-soled shoes. In one of the tiny fitting rooms, he dephilmed. But when he tried to download The Hang Ten ware, the beta clothes refused to update. Uri hadn't authorized him to modify the default settings. He couldn't change the way he looked.

Ten minutes later, there was a sudden lull at the Get Reel. A smob had formed at a sidewalk display half a block down, sucking people out of the Get Reel.

Pelayo crossed the street and pushed open the glass door. It chimed in response to his DiNA signature and greeted him in a bright contralto. "Welcome to the Get Reel, your chance to get a life."

Pelayo made his way past racks of nanomated appliques, bacterial tinctures, and nanoFX sculpture paint to the sales counter. Shrill muzik plucked at him, whining for his attention.

"Can I help you?" The girl sported an uncomfortable-looking pair of face screens—gold Renaissance-carved picture frames attached to a red velvet mask that concealed the top half of her face and forehead. Below the mask, her lips sagged in a desultory pout, languid as half-melted wax.

"Your boss around?"

"You a rep?"

"Philmplants."

"What kind?"

Like she really cared. "Genital."

"Yeah?" She smacked her lips.

He stepped away from the counter and reached for his fly. "You wanna private demo?"

That did the trick. She rolled her eyes in exaggerated disgust and jerked her head in the direction of the privacy screen set up at the back of the store. "Jhon's in back."

"Thanks." He winked at her. It had the desired effect; her eyes glazed over with practiced stupor.

"Whatever." She yawned and rhinestones glittered on her tongue, chipping away at the enamel on her teeth.

Pelayo slipped behind the screen, through a curtained doorway into the edit room. The curtain was sound-absorbent. When he zip-locked it in place, the muzik retreated to a distant screech. The room was furnished with a recliner that flattened into a table. The overhead LEDs were surgically bright and recessed.

A door on the far side of the room stood partially open. Pelayo went over to it and peeked in through the narrow crack.

Jhon slouched behind a desk, a pair of wasp-sleek spex screwed tightly into his sockets. He wore a NASCAR pit cap over pale hair that hung in limp, stringy tangles. A faded black-and-white-checkered flag flapped on the front of his sweat-stained T-shirt. The 'skin he wore was philmed with stock-car racing decals as well as ads for various brands of motor oil, lite beer, and domestic cigarettes.

The man had attitude, Pelayo had to give him that. Jhon's hands were concealed below the back edge of the desk, fiddling with something in his lap.

Pelayo rapped on the door. "Excuse me."

The guy started. His hands jerked into view. "Who the hell are you?" He gaped, his mouth slack, his cheeks flushed pink.

"Jhon, right?"

Embarrassment turned to anger. "How'd you ge in here?"

"Your girl out there. She was real helpful. I give her high marks for customer support."

Jhon wet his lips and removed the spex, leaving two circular indentations around his eyes. "Who you with?"

"That's not your concern."

Jhon risked a glance at the door. Pelayo shut it behind him with a soft click. Now, it was just the two of them. He took a step forward.

"What the hell do you want?" Jhon set the spex on the desk and made a show of collapsing them into a medallion-thin disk.

Pelayo leaned heavily on the desk, resting his palms on the front edge. "I'm looking for Marta."

"She's not here."

It came out quickly, too quickly. "Yeah, I already got that. Now tell me something I don't know."

Jhon fidgeted with the spex. "I don't know where Marta is. She never showed up for work."

Pelayo watched Jhon's pudgy hands twist and untwist, fumbling to get a firm handle on the lie. "I don't believe you."

"Fuck you. It's the—"

Pelayo shoved the desk. Hard. It caught Jhon in his doughy paunch, doubling him over with a half-congealed grunt. The spex dribbled out of his grasp, skittered across the table, and dropped to the floor.

The guy might be soft, but he was heavy, deadweight. It took everything Pelayo had to push him into the wall and pin him there, gasping for air, spittle drooling down his chin.

"You're starting to piss me off," Pelayo said.

"—the truth," Jhon finished, coughing up the words in a phlegmatic gurgle.
"I
swear."

Pelayo cupped a hand to his ear. "What's that?"

"She quit this morning."

"When?"

"First thing." Jhon wheezed several times in quick succession, panting. "She gave notice. Walked out."

Pelayo kept the pressure on, his weight against the table. "She say why?"

A hasty shake of the head. "There was a fucking TV with her. The two of them left together."

"She converted?"

"What do you think?"

"I think you're lying." Marta would never convert, not willingly. Would she? The Marta he knew, or thought he knew, didn't believe in anything—not even herself most of the time.

Pelayo lifted the table a few centimeters off the floor and heaved his weight into it, jamming Jhon's ribs and cutting off a sharp yelp of pain. "You got one more chance," he said.

Jhon's eyes lolled. Saliva glistened on his chin and a sour stench bubbled up from his throat. Pelayo eased off enough for the guy to draw in a breath. Jhon grimaced as he sucked air through his clenched teeth.

"Turned her in," Jhon grated. "The TVs. They pay me. To recruit."

"You sell customers to them?" Sweatshops. Indentured help. Pelayo knew that shit happened all the time. But religion. Christ.

"Most of 'em are worthless fuckheads, anyway," Jhon said by way of justification. "Street trash."

"That what Marta was?"

"Naw. Marta was a knocked-up cunt. What the TVs are looking for now. Paying extra for them. Triple, if they're between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five."

"Why?"

"How the hell should I know? Maybe the only quim they got these days is old and dried up."

"How do you know she was pregnant?"

Jhon snorted. "Sick all the time. Plus, no tampons in the garbage for the past few months. I don't know who dirty-dicked her. I didn't think there was a key in the world that would open that box."

Pelayo tightened his grip on the edge of the desk. "Where'd he take her?"

"Beats me."

Pelayo lifted the desk a few centimeters off the floor, threatening to give it another shove.

"I didn't ask," Jhon said quickly. "None of my business." Sweat streamed down his face. His cap was flaccid, drenched with sweat. Greasy hair coiled out from under the rim. His eyes were jaundiced under the LEDs. "What're you gonna do?"

Pelayo breathed heavily, from anger as much as exertion. He eased away from the desk, taking a step toward the door.

As soon as the pressure let up, Jhon thrashed, struggling to free his arms. The desk lurched forward, exposing an open fly and a glimpse of pale freckled white, shriveled in folds of denim and tawny hair. "Asshole!" Jhon started to stand. "You're gonna pay for this."

Pelayo kicked the chair out from under him and Jhon went down hard. His head slammed against the wall, then the floor. He lay on his side, groaning, the floor tiles under his face bright with blood where he'd bitten through his tongue.

_______

On his way out of the cosmetique, Pelayo messaged Atossa. "Have you got a few minutes?"

"Where are you?" she asked over his earfeed.

"The Get Reel."

"What are you doing there?"

"I'll explain in a second."

The counter girl was busy with two young tramps, discussing the merits of scented skin bacteria. The yamps, fifteen or sixteen, were dressed as grade-school kids in pleated skirts, knee-high stockings, and Mary Janes.

Hanging on to their lost youth, he thought. Pretty soon they'd be wearing designer diapers.

"Thank you for your patronage," the door said on his way out. "Please come back reel soon."

"What's going on?" Atossa asked when he was on the sidewalk.

"Do you know of any TV centers near downtown?" She might have heard something through friends or coworkers if a Model Behavior client had approached the agency about selling to the TVs.

"What do you want with them?" Tossa said.

"Marta."

"What about her? What are you talking about?"

"I think she's in trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

Across the street, the main door to the Get Reel opened and the two young tramps stepped out, blithely preening and chattering, oblivious to the world.

"I'm not sure. But I think she might be at a TV center. One that's recruiting only women."

"Serious?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out."

"I think there might be one up on West Cliff," Tossa said. "We're not supposed to ad mask up there. It's a no-fly zone."

Pelayo watched the yamps prattle down the sidewalk, forcing other people to step out of the way.

"I have an idea," he said. "But I need your help."

Zhenyu al-Fayoumi discovered the surveillance nanocams by accident. The tiny photoreceptors had been designed to accumulate in the eyes of insects. One of the bugs happened to be a mosquito. When he'd squashed the mosquito on his arm, a few hundred thousand cams had found their way into his bloodstream, where they had been detected by a linked antigen array on the lookout for toxins, nanomals, and other free-radical hazards to his health.

He stared at the smear of blood, short of breath and angry. He'd hoped Yukawa wouldn't feel the need to watch him. The cams demonstrated a lack of trust that was hard to excuse.

But it got him thinking. With the addition of the nanocams, the mosquito's phenotype had been altered. It had acquired a new trait that modified its basic function in the environment. Not unlike the Lamarckian inheritance of habits.

Except that it wasn't really inheritance. Behavior wasn't being passed down from one generation to the next. It was being passed from one environment to another. From one program mode to another.

Excited, al-Fayoumi set to work in the shuttered gloom of his lab. Yukawa, or whoever he was, had provided him with a schematic of the quantum processor that would be used in the new 'skin. The processor had many different possible modes, or structures. These structures existed in a state of quantum superposition. They weren't fixed, but overlapped in a phased array of many possible processors that formed a single unified processor. The result was a distributed resonant state of software and hardware, a shared holographic domain where each processor contained information about the larger processor.

Over his eyefeed d-splay, this processor resembled a complex organic molecule made of artificial atoms... clouds of trapped electrons that functioned as transistors. The molecule had been flattened— pressed onto a programmable graphene layer— where the superposed configurations existed in phased simultaneity.

A utility provided with the quantum chip allowed him to switch between different possible states, modalities of behavior as he had begun to think of them. When the q-chip was collapsed into one modality, it resembled a standard biochip.

He plugged the q-chip into a virtual computer, tweaked the operating system to accept the new processor, and ran one of the simplest behavior programs he'd developed to explain the transmission of idolons in flies. He logged the results, reran the program using different input, then repeated the process again.

Gradually, he began to see what Yukawa and Sigilint were trying to do.

The phased-array processor gave rise to a distributed metaprogram that ran across all instances of the quantum-coupled 'skin. People wouldn't be waring different 'skin, but a single distributed 'skin that was essentially holographic. Each piece might appear to be separate, independent, but it contained information about the whole and was influenced by the whole.

From what he had read about Lamarckian social inheritance, specific sets of habits tended to lead to a certain type of behavior. Plug in a set of initial attitudes and behavioral tendencies, and in theory you could predict how a closed population would evolve—if the community would become functional or dysfunctional, supportive or divisive, apathetic or energized, peaceful or violent.

Useful information. He could see where it might have applications when it came to setting up and managing mass-mediated casts that needed to integrate people from a wide variety of cultural, political, social, and economic backgrounds.

Assuming the equations that described the exchange and expression of images in flies could be applied to people. Ten years ago, electronic skin and philm had been illegal, available only on the black-market. Now that it was regulated, most people wanted to be philmed. It had become a means of self-expression and tribal identification with a certain group. That was why Yukawa had approached him: Siglint believed its quantum-coupled 'skin would become the new paradigm for personal and group behavior. If Sigilint succeeded, the biological manipulation of social structure would be replaced by digital manipulation. People would be connected in a way that had never before been possible.

It raised a lot of questions. Would the new system preserve diversity or eliminate it? What about ethnicity or cultural values? Would people with the same morals all look the same? More important, whose morals would they have?

Hard questions, questions he wasn't prepared to answer.

His mind burned, feverish. Glare from the bright light outside his window wells seemed to set the dingy yellow curtains on fire. He could feel himself slowly turning to ash in the blaze, growing lighter with each passing minute.

He needed to take a break. Eat. Get some rest so he could think clearly... decide what to do.

But he wasn't hungry, or tired. He paced the kitchen. His head ached with a dry, septic heat that left him agitated and confused.

After several minutes, he found himself staring at the flies in their terrariums. The damselfly was gone. He didn't see it anywhere. He blinked, pressed his fingers into his eyes, but his vision remained blurred.

Fresh air, he decided. That was what he needed.

_______

He took the stairs. The elevator was faster, but the exertion would do him good—loosen muscles, get the blood flowing.

By the time he reached the roof, he was breathing heavily and his calves ached. A fine sheen of sweat glistened on him. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face and the back of his neck. A fetid inversion layer had settled over San Jose, trapping the stink of brine and hydrogen from leaky fuel cells.

A tall Kevlex fence encircled the roof, preventing anyone from leaping to the street below. Debris clung to the netting, dead palm fronds and windblown scraps of paper that had somehow escaped biodegradation and reclamation bots.

He shut the door to the stairwell behind him. The roof was studded with circular exhaust vents and fans. A pile of old plastine window frames lay in one corner. A pigeon-spattered roll of photo-tunable cellophane, partly unrolled, lay in skeins on the bituminous, gravel-covered roof.

At some point in the past a makeshift greenhouse had been built against the waist-high cinder-block wall that supported the Kevlex fence. Three plastine frames, spaced two meters apart, stuck out from the wall to create four stalls. The stalls, covered by a rectangle of cellophane, were about a meter deep and three meters long. A single row of chipped gray cinder block, stacked three high, formed a low retaining wall for the potting soil that had been hauled up and tamped into the stalls. The cellophane was dual purpose. It trapped heat and provided electrical power to the full-spectrum LEDs glued to the wall. Most of the lights were burned out or broken, dulled by dust.

Faded Jackson Pollock tangles of graffiti covered the pocked and weathered wall. Before the building had been renovated by the city, the roof had been home to an itinerant homeless community.

Gravel crunched under his boots as al-Fayoumi made his way to the endmost stall, tucked into one corner of the roof.

He pulled aside a curtain of dull plastic, ducked his head, and stepped over the cinder-block threshold.

The sagging cellophane had pulled loose at the wall, torn down by rain and the puddles of dust that had accumulated in the creases. The potting soil had washed away from the window frame on that side, leaving a furrow where the runoff had drained. He crab-walked to the wall and stood up in the gap between the cellophane and the window frame. He loved the view from here, south to the minarets, onion domes, and pagodas of the Coyote valley e-cologies and r-cologies. The philmscape shimmered with heat, rippling residential Monet gardens, purple and orange Wolf Kahn trees, and monochrome Hong-Oai mountains, shrouded in chemical-white mist and industrial black shadows.

Cirrus clouds streaked the afternoon sky. A loose corner of cellophane flapped as a breeze stirred his short-sleeved shirt and the hair on his arms. When the gust died down the tickle remained. Al-Fayoumi brushed his left forearm, and felt wings flutter under his fingertips where an image of the damselfly had appeared on his 'skin.

No, not an image. Like a tattoo brought to life, the damselfly emerged. First one wing, then another. As the body thickened into a bas-relief and started to wriggle free, it became fishlike.

Al-Fayoumi gripped the edge of the wall and stumbled back, his arm outstretched. The area immediately around the image itched. But there was no blood as the synthapse connections between the electronic skin and the underlying tissue ripped, then pulled loose.

The damsel drifted idly for a moment, its wings testing invisible currents, then, with a quick flick of its body, angled toward him. In addition to the head and mouth of a fish, the nanomated creature had acquired a tail and dorsal fins.

"Who are you?" al-Fayoumi asked.

The nanomal circled slowly. It seemed to float rather than fly, fragile, lighter than air.

Yukawa, al-Fayoumi decided. He couldn't think of anyone else who might want to hack into his 'skin.

"I'm not what you think," the idolon said. The voice over his earfeed was soft and flutelike. The lips synchronized perfectly with the words. It looked and sounded as if the fish were actually speaking. "Neither is Yukawa."