Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 51, page 2
They got to one of the better buildings in the slough, meaning that most of the windows were still in place and none of the footholds on the walls were cracking and ready to give way. Culin looked up, the climb slotting into his mind without him needing to think about it. “You, stay down,” he said. “I’ll ask what’s been happening.”
“I can climb,” Jace said, digging in her hip pouch for gloves. Culin shook his head.
“Not what I’m worried about. You come up, we get nothing.”
“And why’s that?”
Culin looked down from the wall, up into Jace’s face. “Because they trust us,” he said. “You couldn’t pass for a LEMR if we had uniforms. You look like someone who’d care if they had an illegal lectric link or hacked data.”
Jace huffed, and gave the wall a cursory look-over, eyes skipping from one link to another. “All right; I’ll sit this one out.”
“You sit them all out,” Culin said. Then, when she didn’t seem to comprehend, he said “Everyone who’s not in Upcity has an illegal something. Why do you think we don’t like Upcity cops?”
She looked like she was swallowing something bitter there, but she relented. “Gimme your smart,” she said. “I’ll load it with what you need to know.”
• • • •
Like most of the node managers in the district, Lisp had barred windows and reinforced walls, most of which weren’t actually necessary because no one in their right mind would risk breaking a node if people could find out about it. That was fouling the nest in the most spectacular way.
Lisp actually opened the window when Culin came up and knocked, letting him into the flat with only a little extra distance between them. Then, Lisp knew about being a contage—he’d been one, yellow-band, for most of his life until noding got him the money to go Upcity for treatment. He didn’t talk about it, much, but you could see it in his attitude and the set of his shoulders.
“Not the equipment I’m having trouble with today,” he mumbled, and ushered Culin back toward the bedroom. Or what had probably been intended as a bedroom, once upon a time—now, it looked like a data center had exploded in there, and Culin suspected that Lisp slept on the pile of old cushions in the room with the barred windows. His privacy was one thing, but the transit of the district’s data was entirely another. “You seeing this?”
Culin nodded. “Got a white flag on it,” he said. “And I know someone who says it’s clogging lines all over the city.”
On one of the stationary terminals bolted to the wall, a message popped up: 1,1.
Lisp glanced at it and, without much thought, typed in 2,3. It was one of the ubiquitous call-and-response codes, a little ping, pong to let the person on the other end know that someone had picked up the connection, that a real person was typing. “It’s coming through me. And Py’s node, and Erich’s, and every node I’ve talked to.” He scratched at the thinning hair at his temple. Lisp didn’t actually lisp, but he did mutter, and Culin wished he could lean in to listen closer. “I try to scrub, but soon as I get a pattern set up for the encryption, it changes. No use tracing the origin, neither. Comes from everywhere. I try to block it, I just end up shutting the whole network down.”
“Do you know how it started?” Culin asked.
“Know how it did here, yeah.” Another message popped up on Lisp’s terminal, and he typed something back in keyboard shorthand, one-handed. “Ask any other node and it started different. But I can give you all the records I’ve took, if it helps ya. Origins, patterns, volumes, all it.”
“Might,” Culin said. Or it might help Jace, who seemed to have more resources for dealing with data like that. Lisp nodded absently, then wandered across the room to another terminal attached to a large bank. A few more commands, and a burner on the floor spat out a thin finger of smartfilm, which Lisp picked up and tossed in Culin’s direction.
“That’s all I have,” Lisp said. “Hope it does you more good than it did me.”
• • • •
By the time Culin got down to the alley again, Jace had made herself a seat out of an abandoned water drum and had her feet up on the wall across the path. Culin had to fight off a stab of disgust; sure, no one had probably come down this way, but there were things you didn’t do if you weren’t an asshole. Taking up the entire alley was one of them.
“I wanted to ask you something,” Jace said, without bothering to get up. Culin made an acknowledging noise, and Jace waved a hand up at the walls. “You fix all of this?”
“Electric Maintenance and Repair,” Culin said.
“You’re licensed, though.”
He grunted. “That’s what the L stands for.”
“And it doesn’t bother you?” Jace asked. “You go around and fix all their illegal hacks just like you fix the legal ones?”
“Not like they don’t pay me for the illegal stuff.” He crossed his arms. “Got a question for you, though.”
She motioned him to go ahead.
“You’re Upcity. But it doesn’t bother you?”
She hesitated on that just long enough to tell him she’d be lying. “Arresting the entire district is outside my pay grade. I just want this thing solved. What did you get?”
He pulled the smartfilm out of his pocket. Down here, the light was too muddy to see the smudges of burned data, but Jace took it from him and fed it into her smartscreen without a second look. He heard the beep of it making access, and Jace’s eyes flicked over the data. He watched her. It was hard to believe someone could know what they were doing without knowing about things like district nodes, but she looked like she understood what she was seeing. Straight through to the point where something caught her eye, and she grinned.
“Hah!” The exclamation made him jump; it was too much noise for an alley like this, and it made him want to clear the area. “An hour on the job and you’re nabbing more leads than I did in three days; I knew you were a good idea! I can use this, trace it back—”
She plucked the film out from between his fingers, and then he couldn’t parse what was happening; she was moving closer to him, her hand was coming up toward his neck, and he flinched and stumbled sideways, ready to suffer the first blow, but her hand caught him, pulled him closer, and then her mouth was on his mouth, her breath hot in his.
Culin shouted into her, and threw himself away. Hit the wall. Jace stumbled back and Culin tried to say something but found he had no words—he was gasping.
“Sorry,” Jace said, sounding more surprised than sorry. It was hard for Culin to hear her anyway, over the rushing of blood through his ears, the heartbeat rattling through him. “That wasn’t because you were desperate,” she said, and her words seemed to have the tone of an apology. “I mean, I didn’t decide to go for you because I thought you’d be desperate.”
He stared at her, breathing hard, until it occurred to him that that, that was why she thought he’d jumped away, and then the fear got spiked with rage. She had his saliva on her lips, her sure-to-be-augmented Upcity lips, probably being preserved at that moment ready for any lab wanting to look at it. He pushed away from her, back up against a wall, and spat “You fucking Upcity whore!”
Jace blinked, at that. “For one kiss? Come on, I was happy.”
“For—” he said, and the words imploded. “I’m—” Implosion again. He was shaking, and the grit in the concrete wall rattled against his back as though his shirt was nothing. His hand went to his arm, nails digging in just under the contagion band, and his voice was tighter than his fist. “They can charge me,” he said. “They can fucking charge me!”
It took a moment, then her brow furrowed. “You’re worried about biological battery?”
Culin was breathing too hard to answer that.
“C’mon; I kissed you,” Jace said. “And whatever it is you’ve got, I’m immune.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Culin hissed.
“Law says—”
“I don’t fucking care what the law says!” The fear was kicking at his ribcage; it felt like his muscles would constrict him, grind out his breath. “I care about my mates who got banged up three years on when an old lay worked out they could get them back for something for the price of a Shunt Street traffic bribe.” I care that you’ve stolen my DNA, he couldn’t say. Spit was just one more thing to hold against people like him. If it came down to his word, the word of a gimp contage, a barely-legal LEMR scuttling around in the rain and the grime, his word against hers, he might as well just turn himself in as guilty and save the trouble.
He took in a breath to say something, anything, and discovered that the fear was turning into nausea, and the nausea was thrumming through his blood. He turned to put a hand on the wall, pitched forward, and vomited.
“Whoa,” Jace said, and stepped forward to help him. How she thought she was going to help, he didn’t know.
“Fuck off,” he snarled, and scrabbled for the wall. He could climb faster than she could, and he was sure of that; he could climb faster than any of these people who preferred the ground. He’d preferred the walls for a long time, where he was mostly whole instead of only half, where his crushed, hooked foot was an asset, not an injury.
Not that it stopped Jace from following him. She was half a story up by the time he’d cleared two.
“Culin,” she called. Then, louder, in that don’t-screw-with-me, I’m-the-law voice, “Culin!”
But he was as good as gone.
• • • •
Culin’s perch wasn’t even a flat; more like what a flat would be after the ceiling fell in on half of it and all the windows got busted out. But it was enough shelter from the rain that the important corner kept dry, and enough shelter from the wind that if he curled up with blankets in the dry corner he wasn’t too cold, and it was in such an awkward place that none of the landlords or roof gangs knew about it to come and collect rent. Lectric and data were both hacked, of course, but like Jace had said: He was licensed for maintenance and repair on these things. LEMRs didn’t pay for these unless they wanted to, and Culin didn’t want to.
His hands were shaking after the climb, but there wasn’t much he could do about it except try to push everything out of his mind until any shit on its way to the fan hit the blades. He hooked his smartscreen to the rat’s-nest of cables in the dry corner. Eighty-one new messages blinked into his notifs, and almost a thousand onto the common LEMR lines; he scanned the subjects, opened a sample handful, and skimmed them. All reports of flooded data lines, drowning in either encrypted signal or gibberish noise.
A burst of laughter caught Culin’s attention and he looked to see three kids clambering up the wall opposite his window, only to disappear into a balcony door. Two girls and a boy, he thought, though they were the age and dress and grime that made it difficult to tell. He froze, as though by moving he’d become noticeable and monstrous to them, like a troll under a bridge.
Never mind that there was another spectre in the district; a spectre of choking data lines and failing data net. Much more dangerous than a man with bad blood, skulking in a ruined flat. Give people a small, specific threat and a large one with no obvious solution and they’d spend their energy on the smaller one every time.
Though there was something to be said for the parallel there: him with the biological poison of his blood; the data lines with the algorithmic poison of their trash data. Mark the lines as contagious, he thought. And Upcity knows the next time it dips in for a kiss from our network, we’re both screwed.
He shook himself out of it.
Data fed knowledge to the schools and freelance teachers. It told the fire climbers where to go when fires broke out, it requested doctors and delivery of groceries and missing-persons bounty trackers. Data ran the electricity failovers that kept the coldest parts of the city from going dark when the plants failed. Data let kids who’d never be taken by the factories or the Upcity offices or trusted as couriers or anything else run security on the streets of the district. Without data, the district went blind and dumb and deaf. It might not die—Culin knew a few things about surviving while crippled—but the balance of de-facto cooperation would swing back toward free-for-all, and the people who could manage without the distributed net of helping one another here and there in hopes of getting help off yonder would be the only ones to thrive.
They’d be criminals, mostly. And bullies. Culin had dealt with both breeds, and didn’t much want to again.
He looked at the smartscreen. The encrypted stuff clogging the lines had the usual headers, the routes the data took, but a cursory look told him mostly that it was going around in a knot through all the relay points in the district. He took an origin at random and plugged it in as an address, just to see what would happened.
1,1,2,3, he wrote.
And an answer came back: 5,8,13,21.
Odd. He’d been expecting a diagnostic error, not an answer pattern.
ping, he sent.
pong, it replied.
He considered that for a moment, then typed district?
The reply came back, far too fast: distributed.
He furrowed his brow.
Where can I get locust flour?
Again, instantly: Gage Dade Exotic Market 31.5c/kilo Market Bulk 35c/kilo Vista Anton’s 39.9c/kilo, on and on, like a search listing. For Upcity. Places no one in the district would frequent, ask about, know about. He scrolled six or seven screens down and found a few listings for ag district shops, their flour at hundreds of credits a kilo; there weren’t any barter houses, any old grandmothers in thirteenth-floor flats with locust tanks, anywhere a real district person might direct him to.
But search listings didn’t answer pings with pongs.
He typed in 1721,1722,a17,a18,a19 and got a20,2122,2123, the street crossings from the district’s transit stop to the undermarket. That was a district-specific shibboleth.
With nothing else for it, he typed in Who are you?
No one in the districts would answer that for someone they didn’t know. And it might have been his imagination, but he thought there was a pause before it spat out a chain of gibberish: I am not going to the market was busy at four hundred credits a kilo is a lot to carry up twenty flights of stairs.
Culin killed the data connection and pulled the smartscreen away. He stared at the words for a moment longer, then killed the display. Then he got out of his flat and into the more-open air.
• • • •
Culin crept through seven back alleys, passing more and more LEMR flags he didn’t know what to do with. Eventually he dropped back down to street level to clear his head, and ordered a meal at a dumplings-and-noodles cart staffed by someone with grey in his hair. Culin stayed away from the ones staffed by children, because he’d seen the way parents pulled their children close when he came by. He didn’t want the kids to go home and talk about the contage who’d handed them money.
The noodles were yellower than usual, which meant there was more millet or durum or something in the cheap mixed flower these days. The broth had a hydroponics-cabbage tang, the salt tasted like more minerals than usual, and the blobs of protein could have been bean curd or anything. There was an entire news report about the current production in the ag districts, there in his bowl, if only he knew how to decipher it.
There were too many things he didn’t know how to decipher.
The sky looked grey, like it might let loose again, and he moved into a doorway and bent his head over his bowl. He could have looked up the chance of rain, but he didn’t want to get on data lines that were already slowed to a crawl.
He’d almost finished his noodles when his vision was interrupted by a steaming bowl of dumplings, a pale hand holding them. Jace. “Peace?”
He swallowed back a sudden taste of bile. Upcity dog—she probably had tech to track him, or had planted something on him. Probably saw no problem with that, either. “Did someone tell you the best way to work down here was to buy people with food?”
Jace blinked. “I keep torquing you off, and I don’t mean to. I just thought these had to be better than what you’re eating now.”
They probably were, but Culin wasn’t about to admit that, and they weren’t that much better in any case. The menu said the dumplings were pork, but he suspected they were cooked filler with slightly more expensive seasonings than the noodles got. “I’m not hungry,” he said, and downed the last of the noodle broth so he could throw the bowl back at the dirty-bowl bin. He glanced down the street until he caught a telltale heap of fabric and limbs hidden in a crevice between two shifted-together buildings, trying hard to be invisible. “She’s probably hungrier than I’ve ever been.”
Jace followed his gaze, gave him an odd look, then turned to take the bowl over to the street kid. The kid’s eyes went wide, flicking around for avenues of escape, and Jace knelt down and offered the bowl out as though trying to lure a wild animal. Culin couldn’t hear what she said, from there, but the kid darted out of her hiding place, grabbed the bowl, and darted back to stuff the dumplings into her mouth without taking her eyes of Jace.
Jace got up and came back, spreading her hands. “Peace now?”
Culin just glared at her. She dropped her hands.
“I’m not going to charge you,” she said.
Culin growled, pushed away from the wall, and limped up the street away from the street kid Jace had fed. “I don’t care if you’re not going to,” he said. I care that you could.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Jace said. “Peace?”
He really wasn’t being given a choice in the matter.
He gave in, slumped back, crossed his arms tight over his chest. “Why the hell are you down here?”
“I want to solve this,” she said.
“Yeah, but why?”
“I’ve seen something like this in a district before,” she said. “Two districts. Got so bad that they just cut off the links to those districts; no data in or out. I don’t want that to happen here.”
