Cheat, page 8
Working so hard and everything.
It wasn’t until a few days later however, in which time he hadn’t left the apartment, or gotten in touch with anyone, other than to make a raw material order, or to send plans in for his job, that Sam and Lisa came to visit.
When he got to the door, he wasn’t certain it was them at first. His float had come with him, so he used his test program to read the biomarkers, just to make certain.
If it wasn’t Sam, then someone else had actually figured out how to fake all those life signs before he had. It was possible, but not very likely.
He pulled open the door, to see the two matching orange faces. The shorter one was scowling at him, which wasn’t normal.
“You were supposed to be in touch-”
Mason cut her off.
“Hey Sam. How are you doing, L? Come in. I have a present for you. Both of you.” Adding a bit about that being kept down his pants was a bit too much, so he stifled the urge. As far as the world knew these two in their matching black jumpers were non-sexual, and teasing that kind of person, while funny, was also considered really rude. “Come on in.”
He reached out and tugged at Sam’s sleeve, actually moving te’s body into the apartment. Lisa walked, under te’s own power. As soon as they were in, he put a finger to his lips and backed into the space, then led them both to his work room. It was a bit cluttered in there, but that was mainly due to the fact that he had a lot going on at the moment, not that he was messy.
Feeling fairly secure, he explained himself before anyone could ask about it.
“Sorry. A few days ago three people came here, claiming that you’d sent them. I played dumb, and suggested that the bio-markers that seemed like Lexi Horn that had been traced to my sofa were, in fact, my buddy Sam, who had a job as a decoy. Still has, as far as I know. Unless you got fired? Henry Stodermier, some woman named Lizzy, who used to be a guy I think, and some other guy.”
Before he could ask if the names meant anything, both of the pumpkin faced women made little frustrated sounds.
Lisa swore.
“Fucking leeches.”
Sam however just made a frustrated sound.
“Yeah. Those three, their entire network, keeps finding everyone, all the time. If they can get me dressed like this, no one is safe.”
Dramatically, Mason reached over to the bland cream colored work bench top, the composite supporting two containers of clear liquid that had sponge rollers on them. He picked one of them up, and held it high in the air.
“Ah, but you see, I have the answer right here. I was allowed to look at the data, so worked out how they’re doing it. With this imbed I can change you. Make you better. Able to walk where others cannot, and stand where all men fear to tread!” It was from one of the virts that Lexi Horn had been in. Only the opening lines though, that had been in the advertisements. More to the point it was close enough that she smiled.
“Sorry?”
Pointing at the imbed applicator, he spun the roller on the top with a single finger from his left hand.
“You have an inskin?” It was the kind of computer system link that most people had. Mason didn’t, having put together an imbedded data stream instead, of his own design. They worked about the same though. His just hadn’t cost a month’s salary, was faster and connected to more network options if he wanted them.
“Sure. Everyone does. And?”
“With that you’ll be able to select one of ten different bio-marker profiles. You can choose from Sam, Lexi, and a few other people that I made up. Obviously, there’s a fake Lexi, too, and you can just turn the thing off to be yourself. It will change how you look to infrared and ultraviolet, as well as alter the little sounds that your body makes. That might feel a little weird, since your whole body has to vibrate a bit for that to work. Not much though, so you might not notice it. That will let you come and go when you want. Not just here, but anywhere, if you use it right.”
There was a low and slow whistle from Lisa then.
“Okay. I can see it. Do you know how much this is worth? Most won’t need it, but half of Lexi’s friends, the famous ones, would be willing to pay a lot for it. Can you make more?”
“Hmm? Oh, yeah. It isn’t hard now that I have the design for it. I did register it, so, you know, Watch won’t be fooled by it. Just people that aren’t authorized to be following you around all the time. I mean, it probably could be used that way, to trick Watch, but that isn’t the point of it. I’m a good, law abiding citizen, after all.” He sounded like he was overselling the idea, and Sam snorted a little bit.
“This is incredible. How do we do this?” She waved at the vial with the roller. “And what color will it turn me?”
He tapped the clear plastic case at the bottom. It was about the size of a spray bottle, holding half a liter of fluid, but almost no color of its own.
“It should make you just ever so slightly darker than you are, in whatever shade you are at the moment. It has to go on to your skin though. So for you, with that imbed you have, you’ll be slightly more black. A darker gray? When you take that off, for your next role or whatever, then you’ll need a new application, because the standard stripping agent will remove this, too.” He looked at Lisa, and shrugged.
Then he pulled up her sleeve a little bit, and saw that she was well tanned, but didn’t look to have anything on her other than some normal skin coloration.
“You’ll probably be about the same. Is that an artificial dye?” He pointed, and she got what he meant, nodding.
“Yep. So, um, you know that I can’t afford this kind of thing, right?” She grinned a bit, and looked off to the side, like not having an extra million dollars lying around was a huge sin. Then, she hung around with Lexi Horn, who no doubt had rich friends, so maybe it was.
Sam shrugged, “I can cover you. No big thing.”
Mason didn’t comment, since it was nice that they thought his work was worth that much. It was, but outside of certain circles most wouldn’t have gotten that part. Not until the bill came.
“Which would normally be a great idea, except that I don’t want a money trail between us yet. If those people can track bio-markers, they can probably follow where the large flows of digits are going, just as well. That’s illegal, but so is stalking, right?”
Sam nodded, and Lisa actually slapped him on the arm. She was so big and strong that it hurt a bit. It was, he figured, rather more than human strength, meaning some kind of augmentation. Probably genetic. He didn’t work in that field, but she wasn’t wearing powered armor, so it made sense to him.
“See, I knew signing on to be your cook would pay off.”
He snapped his fingers.
“Right! Speaking of which, I have some things for you two to try before you go. I hate to be a pain, but you both need to get the face paint off. Anything else that blocks your skin, too. Then we can get this into place. Sorry to be a pain that way, but it’s how it works.” Imbeds had to have skin contact, so that the compound that turned them into what were essentially tattoos could go to work.
Everyone knew that, so the women both nodded, and left the room.
Not wanting to waste his life on other people, Mason got back to work, and managed to finish the printing of one of the last pieces of the disassembly device. All he had left was a housing section. That and some kind of alternate power source that Watch wouldn’t be able to trace. Really, he could have set that up already, but he didn’t want to test the thing there, if he had a choice.
Using his float, which adjusted to be over his desk at the right height, he got the last bit going. It would probably be done before the two women had their makeup back on.
As it stood it was nearly finished, the machine drawing the whole thing upward as it was put together, when both ladies came back. They had their jumpsuits on, but their faces were both bare. Given that they were holding bundles of other clothes, it was kind of clear they were naked under that black top layer.
“Good. Okay, you both have had things like this before? You know how it’s done?”
Sam had, as her slightly charcoal colored skin attested, but Lisa shook her head.
Mason could see that. Even cheap imbeds were about the price of a new electric car.
“The trick is getting it all over your body. For this one it doesn’t have to be perfect, but you’ll want to prevent streaks, which will happen if you miss spots. Work it into your hair, put it on the soles of your feet and your palms. Everywhere.” He was about to feel shy, but then decided not to care. He wasn’t trying to bang either of them, so a lot of the pressure was gone that way. “I mean that too. Wet a finger and go up your behind with it, and do the front, too. The better the coverage the better it’s going to work. There are two of you, so you can get each other’s backs. These two bottles are the same, so don’t worry about that. Then we wait, and let it dry. Once you have it applied, that will take twenty minutes or so. Use the whole thing for each of you.” It probably wasn’t needed, but they were a lot more likely not to miss anything if they did it that way.
Then he left the room. The floor would be able to take the nano compounds and not be stained, but he wasn’t certain the bathroom floor could do the same.
Not having anything to do at that point, Mason moved to the little kitchen space, which was open to the whole room, and started a new batch of ice cream, then ran up some crackers, and peanut butter substitute. He did some jelly, too.
Then he shook his head, his eyes going to the ceiling in exasperation at the same time.
“Freaking great.” Jelly was fat free, but the sugars involved could be used a lot like the fat had been in the carbon cage. It would make it a little less sweet, but not enough to notice, he bet.
Calling his screen over, he worked on that while the ladies applied things to their naked flesh. He wasn’t exactly dead below the waist or anything, and understood that they probably wouldn’t have blinked much if he’d done the applications himself. Even the parts where things were put inside them. If they’d gone to a parlor for it, then that would have been expected.
The thing there was that if he had done that, it wouldn’t have been very professional. It would have turned sexual, and that wasn’t what he wanted. Sam was his friend, and Lisa was probably going to be, eventually, unless she turned out to be a jerk, or hated puppies. That was more important to him than getting a free feel or two.
He had VR for that anyway. When you could have any woman in the world, literally just by walking to the next room, it changed how you thought about things. A lot, really. There was a psychological explanation for it, actually.
For most of human history, regardless of how things were presented in given cultures, men had been enslaved to women. That didn’t always show, since in some places they’d responded by enslaving them right back, often with force, but in free cultures it hadn’t worked that way. Men were driven to have sex, which meant that for most of them, not being top specimens, exactly, that any woman that had been willing to flirt with the idea had a lot of influence over them.
VR and sexbots had changed that for a lot of men though.
Mason could see that one, too. He liked women all right, as people. They were often nice and could be friendly and polite.
The thing there was that when he monitored old movies and shows, the women in them were allowed to get away with insane levels of misbehavior. The men took it, too. Even the ones that would never have been allowed to have sex with the female leads acted like women were nearly sacred. They sacrificed their lives at times, just to save them. It was so pervasive that everything from more than forty years before had that idea worked deep into it. The people from back then probably hadn’t been able to see it, either.
Now, since men didn’t need women that way, they were treated equally. That had led to the baby crisis, but that wasn’t his problem. Not on a personal level. He was only responsible for what he, personally, did in life.
The crisis had started about fifteen years before, at about the same time that everyone could afford the best VR units, and they were finally really as good as reality.
Over half of men stopped having sex with women, and while most of those that did were considered less than perfect, it left half of all women realizing that they still had a biological clock ticking, and that they needed men to make a baby.
Which wasn’t totally true, but it had been what most women had done at the time. Go and find some random guy, normally a rather dumb and good looking one. Then get him drunk enough that he didn’t realize he was having unprotected sex with the women. That meant that one guy was often the father of children with five or six different mothers.
Of course the government demanded that the poor dope pay for each of his kids, which left those guys either going to prison, for failure to pay, or working at great jobs, and living like they were incredibly poor anyway.
That phenomenon had pushed the good looking guys to VR, too. It had made the whole thing even worse, since women were still having kids, but the pool of men that were being used for it was shrinking fast. Thankfully the smarter women were going in for IVF, and having their kids genetically modified, so diversity was being maintained.
In a way it was a bit funny. Mason had grown up in a world where women were just slightly different, but truly equal, people. They were treated about the same as men, in most cases. His father though had told him about how things used to be, back when women controlled things, and pretended they had no power at all.
Oddly, his mother saw that one differently. To her, those were the good old days when people jumped to open doors for her, and the natural order was in play.
In a way, Mason had opted out of the system. He liked sex, but didn’t want the baggage that went with it. He got enough of it that he wasn’t driven to make a fool of himself with the women around him. Then again, he didn’t go out very often, or do much that was accomplished in the real world. Most of the people he met were on the network and probably not real anyway. Not even on the other end of the line.
They were all just programs.
Predictable and easy to deal with, compared to real people.
The two ladies, his friends, came out about half an hour later, both wearing their clothing again. The faces were bare and the hair wet, but the proteins there wouldn’t grab the nanos of the imbed. The nails on the hands and feet wouldn’t either.
He glanced at Sam’s face and nodded.
“Good. It looks almost the same, more or less. Have you tried to bring it up yet? The file should be under altbioset.” Both of the women looked up and slightly left, as he brought his float screen up.
The app used to read the markers worked pretty well, so he noticed as they changed the signals coming from them.
Lisa moved forward, as if standing in front of the monitor would help him get a clear reading. It was funny, actually, but showed that she didn’t really understand what was going on.
“I have it set to Mark O. Is that right?” She spoke the name of the persona as if she were giving a file name.
“Try Kerry.” That one was designed with her in mind. At least when she wasn’t in costume. “If you’re dressed like a regular person, and need to vanish, use that one. If you can’t be you, safely. Sam, try, um, Sam.”
That reading was more manly than she actually was, being built off of Mason’s. The screen shifted after about ten seconds, and held steady.
“Good. You can see the one marked Fake Lexi? That’s for when Sam is making money as a decoy. If you use this right people should be pretty darned confused in short order. You can do the same, Lisa. Pretending to be fake Sam too. That will put Lexi Horn all over town, looking different each time. How does it feel?” He was a bit worried that the low frequency flexing their skin was doing would be annoying, but Sam closed her eyes and made little head motions.
“Not bad. I think I can feel what you mean. Like a heartbeat, a little? It isn’t strong. Can I see your screen?”
“Sure.” He sent it toward her with a thought, letting it rest in front of her face, if a bit down. That was where most people read comfortably.
For about ten minutes she and Lisa crowded around the thing, making changes to their bio-markers. Eventually they got bored though, so he fed them ice cream, crackers with butter spread, peanut butter and some jelly.
After the first few bites, Sam understood the idea and lit up.
“The supplement fat? I can’t taste it as anything other than, well, food. It’s not bad!”
“You thought it would be?”
There was no answer then, but after a moment, Lisa nodded.
“Sure. Printed food sucks. If you hadn’t told me this was fake, I wouldn’t have known. What’s it for?”
He was about to explain the idea, how the nutrients could be added to low end printed foods, but Sam waved her hand a little first, taking the floor.
“It’s part of that cover operation we have going on. We’re going into business, and using that to hide behind, we will take over the world!”
Which was the plan, but it sounded so different, when you said it out loud like that.
Kind of stupid, really.
Chapter six
It took a while to get the two women back into disguise, dressed in their shapeless clothing and made up to look like pumpkins again. Not that they really were, lacking the cool vertical lines they needed for that, or tiny green things on top of their silly hats. Mason was about to suggest it, since watching them paint each other and adhere bits of plastic to their faces wasn’t exactly exciting.
Instead he assembled the new machine, and brought it out, carrying the prototype lengthwise, so he could get the thing through the door. It was nearly as big as the dining table, and almost three feet high, so it took some work to move the black composite structure around. The thing wasn’t exactly light, either.
The girls, if he wanted to denigrate them that much, since they were both adults, had taken the chairs. Sam was standing, putting the finishing touches on Lisa’s face. She really did look wrong, being that color. The idea was simple enough though. The heavy face paint hid the prosthetics, which in turn were used to prevent the bio-metric machines from working. The cameras that Watch used would be able to find them anywhere, otherwise. So would almost anyone that had a private tap into the system. A system at least. There was more than one, after a fashion. Watch had almost everything hooked up to it, but there was also the merchant series, and probably more than that.
