Brasyl (4 page)

This for a bag? With purple and pink flowers? Ana Luisa Montenegro de
Coelho can have another one before sunset. But there's a crackdown
on. There's always a crackdown on somewhere: tough on crime, tough on
the perpetrators of crime. Usually around the time for insurance
policy renewal. Brooklin Bandeira Securities has a corporate
reputation to restore, and its seguranças are dangerously
bored watching O Globo Futebol 1. In the garage two Suzukis rev up.
The riders fix location on their helmet HUDs. The pilllion riders
check weapons and buckle on. Game on.

In the gutter outside Ana Luisa's nice little enclave, the discarded
one-shot gun turns to black, putrid liquid and drips from the rungs
of the grating into the sewer. Over the next few days delirious,
poisoned rats will stagger and die across the lawns of Vila Mariana,
causing short-lived consternation among the residents.

Edson touches the first two fingers of his left hand gently to his
temple in a gesture he has evolved to show his older brother how
exasperated he is with him, even when Gerson cannot see him. He
sighs.

"What is it you're trying to tell me? They can't blank the
arfid?"

"It's some new thing they call an NP-chip."

Gerson had been sipping coffee and enjoying the good sweet morning
rolls, still warm from the oven, at Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles'
Chipperia. It was parked round the back of a bakery, which meant good
sweet morning rolls and pão de queijo for the chipperia's
clients while they made stolen things disappear from the sight of the
Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles worked out
of a thirdhand campervan so full of computers they lived outside in
tents and awnings. As all trails ended at the chipperia, mobility was
paramount. As Gerson understood it, it was all timing. It took ten
minutes average, twenty minutes tops to erase an arfid; the closest
the seguranças could get in that time was a five-kilometer
circle of confusion, and it would blow their budget to search that
large area. Most turned around and headed home as soon as they lost
the signal from the arfid.

"How much are you looking for that bag?" Hamilcar was half
reading the paper, half peeling the flakes of eczema from his cracked
feet.

"Three thousand reis."

"No, I mean seriously."

"That's what they're going for. You cannot get these bags for
love nor money nor bribery. I'm telling you."

"Give you eight hundred, and that's including what you owe us
for the dechipping."

"Two thousand five."

Hamilcar grimaced as he tore a particularly salty piece of dead white
skin a little too far, baring raw flesh.

"You are a man of no education. I was thinking maybe my
girlfriend might like it as a present—she likes that sort of
thing, all the names and that. Not at that price, though."

Then the door had opened. Mr. Smiles stepped out of the stinky
camper.

He was an IT graduate from the University of São Paulo, the
hacker of the outfit. He was a big skinny Cabo Verde with a great and
well-tended Afro and dentition that made him look as if he was always
smiling. The smile did nor sit naturally with the pump-action shotgun
in his hand.

"Hey hey hey ... " cried Gerson, spluttering flakes of
sweet roll.

"Gerson, nothing personal, but you have thirty seconds to get on
your bike and depart."

"What what what?" Gerson said, catching the Habbajabba as
Mr. Smiles lobbed it to him.

"It's NP-chipped. I can't touch that."

"NP what? What shit? You're the scientist; you should know about
these things."

"I'm an information technologist, majoring in database design.
This is quantum physics. Get a physicist. Or just go to the river and
throw the thing away. You choose, but I'm not facing off with the
Brooklin Bandeirantes. And I will shoot you."

And that was when Gerson called his smart kid brother. And Edson
says, "Go and throw the thing in a river."

"It's three thousand reis."

"Brother, it's a handbag."

"I need the money."

"Do you owe someone again? Jesus and Mary . . . "

Edson shoos kids away from his bike. It's a Yam X-Cross 250 dirt
bike, green and yellow, like a parrot, like a futebol shirt, and
Edson loves it beyond everything except his mother and his business
plan. It is all jeito, and you can ride it straight up a wall. "Let
me talk to Smiles."

"Okay," says Mr. Smiles after Edson explains that he really
can't let his dumb brother get killed even over a woman's handbag. "I
think you're all dead, but you could try the quantumeiros."

"Who are these? What-eiros?"

"Quantumeiros. You know, those new quantum computers? No? Codes
you can't break? They can. They're the physicists. I can give you
their code; they move around even more than we do. Careful with them,
though. Weird shit happens round these people."

A map of the São Caetano rodovia network appears on Edson's
Chilllibeans; a license plate is flagged, heading north on R118.
Edson wonders how many chippers and crackers and quantumeiros are
nomadic on the highways of great Sampa at any instant.

"I shall try them."

"What did Gerson ever do he should have a brother like you?"
says Mr. Smiles. "All the same, I wouldn't hang around too
long."

The Yamaha starts to Edson's thumbprint. He slips a concentration
enhancer from his travel pack, pops it, and as the world sharpens and
clariifies around him, rides slow through the alleys back of the
crente church. He doesn't want mud splashes from the lingering
night's rain on his white flares.

The brothers de Freitas meet twenty-three minutes later on the
on-ramp at Intersection 7. Twenty-three minutes for the Brooklin
Bandeira to close in, to narrow the circle of possibility down to
machine-pistol range. Edson's been checking his custom-fit rearview
cameras for oil-slick-black segurança hunting bikes. He could
get away from them on the Yam, take it places their big bulky
machines could not, but not Gerson, flogging the ako engine on that
shitty little putt-putt. Edson can hardly believe he once rode that
thing. Gantry cameras read his license plate; hurtling satellites
debit his account. They don't make it easy for legitimate men of
business.

And there it is, looming out of the traffic, the barquentine of the
quantumeiros: a big forty-tonner standing at a steady hundred in the
outside lane. The cab is pimped with Fleshbeck Crew—style
cherubim and a battery of airhorns on the roof chromed and sweet as
the trumpets of archangels.
Cook/Chill Meal Solutions
, says
the trail. Fine cover. No cop is ever going to stop and search bad
cuisine. Edson weaves Gerson into the truck's slipstream. A touch on
the I-shades calls up the address Mr. Smiles gave him. The truck
flashes its hazard lights in acknowledgment and sways into the slow
lane, drops to seventy sixty fifty forty. The back shutter rolls up,
a middle-aged guy in a Black Metal muscle top swings from a chain and
manages to smoke at the same time. He beckons them close, closer. The
loading ramp extends, lowers. Steel hits road. Sparks shower around
the brothers Oliveira. Black Metal beckons them again: Come on, come
on, on the ramp. Sparks peel away round Edson as he lines up the run.
He's a businessman, not a stunt-rider. Edson edges forward: the
concentration pill gives him micro-accelerations and relative
velocities. Wheel on wheel off wheel on wheel off, wheel on; then
Edson throttles hard, surges forward, and brakes and declutches
simultaneously.

Smoking metalhead applauds.

Thirty seconds later Gerson skids to a halt on the platform, pale and
shaking. Edson tries to imagine what the commuters on the São
Caetano rodovia make of a male with a pink handbag around his neck
driving onto the back of a moving truck. Probably reckons it's the
telenovelas and are looking round for the flittercams:
Hey! We're
on
A World Somewhere,
we really are!

Death Metal raises the ramp and pulls the shutter down with a
clatter.

Recessed mood-lights flood on. Edson feels his eyes widen behind his
wraparound I-shades: The rear of the container is docking space; the
forward twothirds is split-level business accommodation. The lower
floor-reception-is Karma Cafe kitsch, all shag rugs, leather
beanbags, inflatable chairs, and zebra-skin sofas on spindly legs.
There a battery of rollscreens tuned to sports and news channels, a
complex coffee engine with attendant barista and lowlaid bossa nova.
Upstairs is the office, a transparent cube of plastic, harshly
neon-lit to the downbeat downlighting of the club below. The cube is
stacked ceiling-high with server farms, wiring alleys, and tanks
conspicuuously marked liquid nitrogen. Edson makes out a figure
moving among the racked boxes, a glimpse of swinging red hair. Heaven
and clubland are connected by a spiral staircase of glowing blue
plastic.

A floppy-haired queen in a good suit and shiny shirt unfolds from a
sofa.

He has pointy pirate shoes, immaculately polished.

"So this is the handbag?" The bicha turns it over in his
hands. "I suppose it was going to happen sooner or later as
quantum technology gets cheaper. It would have been a lot simpler
just to have thrown it away."

"My brother can make money out of this."

The truck accelerates; the seguranças have a fix on the arfid
and are runnning them out of road.

"We can certainly blank this for you. It's not the most
up-to-date model. Fia." You can fall in love with someone for
their shoes. These are gold jacaré-skin wedge heels, strappy
at the ankle. They descend the top rum of the spiral staircase. Above
them, slim ankles, good calves not too full, Capri-cut tapered
pant-bottoms with a little dart in the side and white piping running
up to a matching jacaré belt. The pants belong to a black
jumpsuit, confrontationally retro in its cut, shoulder pads, trim and
kitschy tit-zips. All this detail gleams in Edson's edged perception.
Then the head descends from the suite upstairs. Third-generation
Japonesa cheekbones and nose—she's had the eyes done, round
anime doe-eyes. Hair that super-silky straightness that all aspire to
but only the Japanese have the DNA to achieve. Bobbed so severely it
might have been measured with a spirit level. Red is the color again,
this year. She wears top-marque Blu Mann I-shades pushed up on it.

"Good bag," she comments.

Edson opens his mouth and nothing comes out. It's not love. It's not
even lust. The closest emotion to it he can recognize is
glamour
. If he had a religious cell in his body, he might know it as
worship, in that word's oldest, truesr sense:
worth-ship
. She
fascinates him. She is all the things he hopes to be. He wants to
orbit in her gravity, circle her thrilling world and thrilling
clothes and thrilling friends and thrilling places to go and do and
be and see. She takes the jeito he thinks he has earned and spreads
it all over the road behind her like a mashed cat. She makes him feel
like favela scum. That's all right. Compared to her he is, he is.

"They're about two minutes out," chides the bicha. "You
want to give me that bag?"

"Um, can I watch?"

"There's nothing to see. You'll be disappointed."

"I don't think I will. I'd like to see."

"You will. Everybody is."

"About a minute and a half," says bicha-boy. Gerson is
having a cafezinho.

She lets him carry the bag upstairs.

"Fia? Fia what'"

There's barely space for the two swivel chairs among the technology.
The cubicle is swagged with enough cable to rig a suspension bridge.

"Kishida." She says it fast, with Japanese emphases though
her accent is pure Paulistana. Fia sets the Giorelli on an
illuminated white plastic tray under a set of micromanipulator arms.
She sweeps her Blu Manns down over her face. Her hands dance in air;
the robot arms gavotte over the handbag, seeking the arfid chip.
Edson sees ghosts and circuitry in increasing magnifications flicker
across Fia's shades.

"I know this tune, I really like it. Do you like baile'"
Edson says, twitching his muscles to the house beat. "There's a
gafieira on Friday; I've a client doing a set."

"Could you just shut up for thirty seconds while I try and do
some work?"

The arms locate and lock. Icons appear on Fia's glasses: her pupils
dance across the display, issuing commands. Edson finds his attention
hooked by a glowing object beneath the glass surface of the desk. He
cups his hands around his face and presses it to the desktop. The
glass is cool enough for his breath to dew. Far below, seemingly
farther than the architecture of the trailer allows—below the
floor of the lab, below the club lounge, below the truck chassis and
the surface of the road—is a shifting, morphing glow.

"What's that?" He lowers his brow until it touches the cool
glass. "Reality," says Fia. "Quantum dots in
superposition. The light is vacuum fluctuation photons leaking
through from some of the parallel states in which the computation is
being made."

"Ah, you're the physicist," Edson says, and bites his
tongue: is it the pill that is making this muscle that has never let
him down before speak only stupid? She looks at him as if he has shit
on her glass desktop. She reaches across Edson to hit a key. The
robot probes move in a fraction of a hair, then withdraw to their
standby position.

"Okay, that's it. Safe and anonymous."

"What, you mean, that quick?"

"I told you you would be disappointed."

"But nothing happened."

"I ran through possible
combinations in ten to the eight hundred universes. That's not
exactly nothing."

"Of course," says Edson unconvincingly.

"There's always an answer out there somewhere."

Edson has heard a little about this—he makes it his business to
know something about everything that occupies adjacent niches to him
in the twilight economy—and he has seen with his own eyes now
what it can achieve, but it still feels like witchcraft to him.
Quantum dots in superwhateverpositions. Ten to the eight hundred
universes. That is not reality. Reality is Brooklin Bandeiras running
back to the office, out of funding and out of quarry. Reality is
people stupid enough to pay three thousand reis for a handbag, and
people stupid enough to steal one. Reality is the necessity of
getting with this magnetic, strict creature.