Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (12 page)

"Okay, honey, don't worry."

As he comforted her, her brain unclouded, and she started to feel ashamed of her weakness. She could take care of herself, always had. She recalled her earlier vow to herself and repeated it in a whisper to Bill. "I won't let them. I'll go to prison first."
Kill or be killed.
That didn't sound like something she wanted to say out loud to him. He was soft. And even in a dumb building, it wasn't smart to say something that could be interpreted as premeditating a felony. "I'd die first," she said instead.

From then on, Shona began to wish that Billy and Fari had left well enough alone and let her go to prison. They had a wing at Chowchilla where mothers could have a cell with their babies. Elaine said it would have probably been one year, maybe two max. R.J. wouldn't have even known what was going on.

Being on the outside was like walking across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope, when you didn't know how the fuck to walk on a tightrope and had never tried it before. Of course you were going to fall off. You took three steps and fell off, and then some asshole put you back on and told you to walk the rest of the way. She wanted to explain all this to Billy and Fari, but the explanation called for words like "fuck" and "asshole," and whenever she tried to say those words, a C-clamp started squeezing her head, and the only way to make it stop was to keep mentally reciting the Lord's prayer or the pledge of allegiance.

She was miserable, but misery had company. She was a bird in a tree, and the other two birds looked down along with her at the cat dancing around below. The detective AI never got bored or frustrated, never ran out of hours in the day to pursue a case in which there was seemingly no progress. "Cold case" was not in its vocabulary. It was always polite and forthright. All the cards were on the table. It
did
hope that it hadn't called during dinner. It was
so
sorry to have had to call Billy's boss—should it send her a follow-up message explaining that Billy had certainly
not
been named as a person of interest in any criminal IP violation? It was
so
sorry if Fari had gotten the impression that it might have raised any issues with the state bar.

Shona could work in Moshi just as well as in Bridgeport—just as well or just as badly, because now she hated everything she did. Oil paints and linen canvas were commoditized. She made a piece-of-... piece-of-garbage painting, fed it into the recycler, and extruded fresh materials from the printer without paying any royalty to whoever had invented Prussian blue. Whenever she needed money, she held back a randomly chosen canvas instead of 'cyling it, showed it to Andy, and he sold it.

What made her teeth grind was that after the cogmod she could somehow no longer consciously split her output between her two old styles, the commercial one that she was cynical about and the noncommercial one she believed in. The distinction had required an attitude of larceny, which was something that her head disapproved of these days. She painted a rock hyrax that Billy had run over in his crawlie, and Andy sold it for an embarrassing sum. She painted R.J.'s throw-up rag, and Andy showed it to a Saudi prince. The prince called Andy five times in two days. Shona felt remorseful. She wrote the prince a text message explaining the origin of the piece. The prince responded with an earnest letter—She must have many potential buyers, but if she sold it to him he promised not to stick it in some gray vault in the Geneva Ports Francs. He would display it in the lobby of his brother-in-law's suite on the hundredth floor of the Burj Khalifa, where the public could appreciate it. She sold it to him for enough E.A.F. shillings that she was able to stop renting her apartment and buy it.

Her probation officer turned out to have been an art history major in college. He made a speech to the New Haven Rotary Club comparing her to Gauguin in Tahiti.

Andy got her a one-woman show at A/Z-Space in Chelsea. She begged off attending without giving a specific reason—it was really because of a combination of sleep deprivation, breast feeding, and the feeling that she'd chosen a clumsy and inappropriate mode of selling out—but a story started circulating on the net that she was some kind of mashup of Sylvia Plath and Emma Goldman, cogmodded and exiled to the "jungles" of Tanzania. Once the story got around, the show was mobbed, and they held it over for two more weeks.

She tracked down one of the people who had spread the rumor, a critic in Hong Kong named Hua Jane, and had a talk with her to try to set her straight.

"People are really misunderstanding what a cogmod is."

"I know darling, is not imagine for us. They have your mind chain. Barbarian."

"No, that's not it at all. It's like, how many middle-aged men do you know who stand on a street corner with a gun looking for someone from a different gang to kill? None, right? It's not like they can't, but they don't have so much testosterone raging anymore, and they just don't. There's no little fairy inside my head controlling me like a puppet. It's more crude than that. It's just a predisposition, an inclination. It's random stuff like, if I try to spit on the sidewalk, I get a feeling inside that I'm a bad person."

"Yes, crude, barbarian! Your
Throw-Up Rag 1
show it. Despairing. Anguishing."

She later found out that Hua Jane had grown up in the San Fernando Valley, and the fractured English was a cultivated part of her online persona. Just as carefully cultivated was her dramatic rendering of Shona as a victim of mind-rape, the Tortured Artist. Hua Jane needed that tired cliché as an eyeball-grabber for her net feed. But even with people who didn't have a financial stake in not understanding, explaining the cogmod was like trying to explain an orgasm to someone who'd never had one. The one example that probably would have made them understand was the one she didn't dare use.

I got caught loaning a book to my friend Binti. It was part of a big library of books that my great-grandpa had on an old phone. When the cops started drawing the noose tight, I gave the phone to my art dealer to hang on to. When I copped a plea to copying all those books, I said that I'd thrown the phone off the Staten Island Ferry. After that, they cogmodded me. If I'd tried to tell the lie after the cogmod, I'd have probably vomited a little and had to swallow it back down—some little physical telltale that they'd have picked up on. But afterward, the cogmod just made it easier for me to hide the phone's existence. The mod made it so that it hurt my head to think about the phone, so I avoided thinking about it. The easiest secret to keep is one that you don't even
think about yourself. Then, later, when I got the phone back from him, I just had him put it in a sock so I wouldn't have to look at it. I still had to go in his bathroom and cry, but I could handle it. Having the sock around it was like picking up your dog's poop in the park with a plastic bag. It took the edge off my disgust.

Bill and Fari didn't work in fields where notoriety meant a career boost. While they were still in Africa, they were laid off and blacklisted, their bank accounts frozen for "suspicious activity patterns." By the time the dust had settled, they realized that going home and paying the cost of living in L.A. Republic would just accelerate the drain on their almost nonexistent resources. They decided to stay in Moshi until they could "straighten things out," a phrase that Bill started to feel more and more unsure he could define.

It was the second day since he'd eaten, and he loitered on a sidewalk by an outdoor coffee shop. On the other side of a low hedge, two tourists, a middle-aged French couple, hand-manipulated their interfaces between sips of espresso and nibbles of
mandazi.
Every so often they took a bite and licked their fingers before using them again to gesture in the air above the table, as if not wanting to soil cyberspace with grease and sugar. The couple paid and left, and before the busboy could come to clear their table, Bill nonchalantly stepped over the hedge, scooped the remaining bite-sized pastries into his pockets, and walked inside the cafe as if he were going to use the bathroom.

Emerging into the tube plaza, he wolfed down half the pastries and saved the other half for Fari. Karume and Terence were working the ring-toss game on their blue tarp spread with beer bottles. Bill's stomach didn't seem to know what to do with the food, and for a moment he was afraid he was going to be sick. He doubled over, and someone walked into his head.

"Uh"—"Oh, are you all right?"

It was a woman whose skin tone, shoes, and accent instantly marked her as an American.

"Sorry," he managed to say.

"No, no, don't worry. I totally understand. I ate some food from a street vendor in Arusha last week. Oh. My. God. I was
so
sick."

She was from Huntington Beach, was looking for a wildlife safari, and had been hounded by touts from the instant she came up the lift from the platform. Bill walked her to the booking office of the service he and Shona had used five weeks ago. The woman bought a tour on the spot, and the agent at the desk double-charged her for the national park fee, shorting her by eighty thousand E.A.F. shillings. She left looking happy, and the agent winked and slipped Bill a 50K card. Bill went out onto the street to give it to the woman, but she was already gone. The chip would pay for dinner in a fancy restaurant for him and Fari, but it felt dirty in his hands. He handed it to a legless beggar.

But even if it wasn't food for his belly, it was food for thought. The touts swarmed like flies around anyone who looked like a tourist. The foreigners rapidly learned to ignore any overly friendly young male with dark skin, but Bill didn't fall in that category.

He had no work permit, but he had enough knowledge of mountaineering to give the impression that that was why he was in East Africa. By the end of the day he had an illegal and tax-free job bringing in tourists to a guide service.

II.

As soon as R.J. knew how to read, his mother made sure that he knew about great-great-grandpa's old phone. He grew up knowing both that she didn't want to talk about it and that she was desperately anxious for him to use it. It wasn't hard to convince him, since he didn't have an interface implant for entertainment. "Honey," she would say when she pulled the phone out of its hiding place, "remember this is something we don't talk to other people about, okay?"

For a long time, his favorite books were the Tarzan series, because there were lots of them and they were easy to understand. It wasn't that she wanted to make him into a bookworm, and he wasn't, really, but she obviously didn't understand how she'd limited his choices. His only options besides the old phone were to play by himself or to play with some of the kids from the orphans' school who also didn't have interfaces. She always told him to go out and play what the American expats still called "soccer," but there were never enough uninterfaced boys for a regulation game, and it was a completely different sport as played by kids with interfaces. If an uninterfaced kid tried to play in one of those games, there'd be blood or broken bones before the first half was over. It wasn't that they wanted to hurt you—the hurt kid was as likely to be someone interfaced as the one playing blind—but the players moved as a unit like schools of fish, and if you zigged when they zagged, there was sure to be a smashup.

The first time the phone broke was when he was still little and didn't know how to fix it. He was scared to ask his mother, because it might be his fault for not taking good care of it, and even if it wasn't, it was one of the things that, if he talked to her about it, might make her cry for a long time. Finally he risked showing Eliphas, who was at the orphans' school because his mother had died of Hep G and his grandparents were afraid they'd catch it from him, even though you couldn't catch it because of the blue pills that El took before dinner. El banged the phone on the sidewalk a couple of times, so hard that R.J. was afraid it would crack the case, and it started working again. "Loose connection," he said knowledgeably. R.J. was going to make him promise not to tell anyone, but El didn't seem to realize that the phone was anything special.

R.J. was ten years old when it broke for the second time, and this time nothing he tried would fix it. Uncle Bill noticed him moping around and took him to Mount Kenya. They went top-roping on Point Lenana above the glacier, and Uncle Bill let him rappel by himself without a backup rope. When they got back to where the crawlie was parked next to Simba Tarn, they ate PB&J sandwiches and ugali and spicy Korean crisps. They drank cold water straight from the tarn.

"Has something been bugging you, R.J.?"

R.J. stalled by pretending not to know what "bugging" meant. (It was another of those American words.) Uncle Bill instantly backed off and started trying to show how he was willing to tell R.J. all about his own life, man to man. He talked about how his new job running his mountain guide service was way more fun than his old off ice job in America, and about his relationships with his employees.

"When we first came here, we didn't have money to eat."

"It's a real Horatio Alger story," R.J. said, with some bitterness. He was going to be stuck in Moshi for the rest of his life, without an interface to give him even a virtual window into the rest of the world.

"Horatio who?"

"Or Tarzan. Dumped in Africa, becomes lord of the jungle."

"Well, things were looser here than in America. It's a better place for a young guy, or it was then, maybe not now. The E.A.F.'s getting as tight as L.A. these days. If I was your age, I'd be thinking about the L5 colony. Up there—"

The heart-to-heart was embarrassing. It sounded like any minute Bill was about to start talking about his sex life.

"What's bugging me is about this old phone that Mom has, with a bunch of books on it."

Uncle Bill got a look on his face like he was dangling from an overhang and had just noticed a squirrel chewing through his rope. He opened his mouth and closed it, then went through the cycle again.

For the first time, R.J. learned how the phone had shaped his life since before he was born. He found out about his mother's cogmod, which explained why it made her so upset to talk about the illegal phone. He surmised the true reason that he didn't have an interface when his mother could so easily afford the surgery: if he didn't remember to turn it off when he read, it would see the things that he saw, which would cause its copy-protection alarms to go off when he read a book.