Bright's Light (8 page)

Yes, the obstacles he faced were many.

Then he remembered something about migrations among other species. Most involved mass movement of many individuals. He had seen millions of skakavech move across the yellow fields of GF12, coating the ground and filling the air with what seemed a solid mass. Now
that
was a migration! He’d seen images of the majestic kerbou thundering across the snowy plains of Q12 in search of their breeding grounds. What he needed to do was enlighten a critical number of ancestors at once. To do that, he couldn’t simply rely on Bright and Fon and a few other individuals to shine little lights on people. The ancestors were, like all sentient, communal species at an early stage in their development, easily influenced by each other. They did not have a guiding mind, but if one ancestor saw ten or fifty or a hundred others running toward something, that ancestor would follow the group. Look at how they would charge toward a new entertainment on the advice of a Partytainment Report, even if they had no idea how the new activity was any different from all the others.

To enlighten the ancestors all at once, he would have to reprogram all the lights in the Store, which were run through the main computer system. Unfortunately, whoever
had programmed the lights had dim-wittedly made it impossible to implement large-scale system changes without rebooting using the manual switch located somewhere inside the Headquarters, where the Board of Deciders lived, an area that could not be viewed on the feed surveillance system. That meant that, once he got the lights reprogrammed, he would have to turn them off for the changes to take effect, then someone in the Headquarters would have to turn all the lights back on.

Changing the lights would be a big job from a programming perspective, and if he got anything wrong, such as frequency or intensity, he could kill all of the ancestors. That would be embarrassing. He didn’t want any more of the bad feelings he’d experienced when the lure and the client were released in the Stimu Room. His Sending was on the line, which meant that his ability to mate and have offspring was at stake.

Grassly exhaled. Life is breath, he encouraged himself, echoing his Mother’s words. He would run some more tests on the prototypes, and if all went well and he was absolutely sure the lights were safe, he would start reprogramming the lights in the Store.

He logged on to his ship’s computer for his daily status check. He stared at the readout in disbelief. The last time he’d checked, only one day before, it had projected sixty-four days to seal failure. It now read forty-eight hours.

Forty-eight
hours
!

Grassly closed his eyes and listened to the panicked blood rushing through his body.

A minute passed. Two. With great reluctance, he accessed the feed and looked for the most recent update on the primary systems inside the Store, such as air scrubbers, skin integrity, backup power. They were barely adequate. The minute the seal between his ship and the skin failed, the biotoxins and pollutants that had poisoned everything on the planet would rush into the Store and the ancestors would be no more. He would have killed them all, or at least hastened their extinction. He might also have killed himself, which would be a grave disappointment.

He was going to have to change the plan. Speed things up. There was no time to waste. No time to test the lights. He would have to trust his ability to get rid of the flicker. At least he was tucked away safely in his workshop, where he could work undisturbed. Bright and Fon were busy with their leisure time, and he didn’t have to keep a close watch on them.

He would not allow this Sending to become a disaster of universe-sized proportions.

Grassly turned up his sleeves and rolled his shoulders, forward twice, backward twice. He dropped into the splits and shot back up.

He was ready.

But before he could sit down at his workbench and begin, a red light began to pulse insistently at the top left corner of the virtual visual field on his dataglasses.

All House of Gear personal support staff stand by for an important message from the commander.

Grassly stopped and his hands rose to his dataglasses. This was something new.

All House of Gear personal support staff report immediately to the muster station for an in-person briefing on a developing situation.

The message, written in red letters, rolled past several more times, obscuring all other images on the feed.

There hadn’t been an in-person meeting of PS officers stationed at the House of Gear since Grassly had arrived. PS staff followed instructions from the same information loops that directed everyone and everything else in the Store. That was partly why Grassly had found it such a simple matter to hack into the feed and make the changes he needed. His hacks allowed him to work perhaps one shift in twenty, to make specific favours and rooms invisible to anyone trying to conduct remote surveillance, to change credit scores, and to create new identities for himself as required. Things like in-person meetings would interfere with his ability to influence events. The last thing he wanted was his colleagues looking beyond their dataglasses.

He felt his shoulders sag. Tiredness swept through him. The persistent sluggishness he felt must be a result of the ancestor diet, which consisted of nothing more than manufactured nutritional powders taken in liquid or pill form. Even the air was largely manufactured. His research suggested that, somewhere along the line, the Board of Deciders had decided that food and its attendant rituals cut into productive time, so nutritional cocktails had replaced the traditional human diet.

He wished he could go back to his ship for a decent meal. But that would have to wait. Right now he had to get
himself to the muster station, a surveillance room located off the cart park below the House of Gear.

When Grassly reached the muster station, he saw that he needed to revise his conclusion that all PS officers were automatons directed by the feed, nearly inert with obedience. The officer at the front of the room seemed to vibrate with a hectic energy. Thanks to the small red badge over his heart, Grassly recognized him as the commander from the Stimu Room.

“There have been anomalies in the feed,” the commander was saying. “Serious anomalies. I have been tracking suspicious occurrences, and they appear to be centralized here in the House of Gear.”

The PS officers stood with their hands behind their backs and their feet shoulder-width apart. Grassly fell in line with the others who’d just arrived.

“As you know, we rely on the feed for our instructions and do not monitor each other’s actions or report to one another. This is going to change. We will keep each other informed about any suspicious activity, even that which we’ve only seen directly, with our own eyes. As your commanding officer, I believe that our powers of discretion must be expanded in times of danger, such as when the feed malfunctions. Such discernment is in keeping with our duty to the Store and to the Board of Deciders.”

The commander rocked back on his heels and jutted his chin.

Grassly couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Here
was the only PS officer in the whole Store sharp enough to notice glitches in the feed, and he happened to be in charge of the party favours?

The commander, who seemed to have expanded an eighth of an inch in all directions, continued. “I believe that we are dealing with a multi-pronged attack by unknown enemies. I suspect we are looking at a computer virus that is also infecting people, specifically the favour and client populations. We don’t know who is behind this virus, but we aim to find out.”

Pressure built behind Grassly’s eyes. The man was insane! He wasn’t just offline in terms of ambition. He had remnants of an unfettered imagination, and he was putting it to work.

“We have had multiple occurrences of favours displaying highly unproductive behaviour. These incidents are often followed by untraceable changes to their feeds.”

The commander must be referring to the favours on whom Grassly had tested the first versions of the lights. He’d tried to shield them by taking their room feeds offline, but their behaviour had been so extreme that they’d quickly been spotted and reported.

“More recently, I believe that the credit scores of certain favours have been tampered with.”

At this there was a sharp collective intake of breath. Tampering with credit scores was a serious offence, right up there with touching private property.

“We have been unable to track down the source of the
viral outbreak, because critical data is missing from the feed. With the help of some key members of my team, I have narrowed down the field of current potential problem areas to the forty-three favours who worked the third shift in the House of Gear today.”

Grassly had to restrain himself from scrolling through the feed so he could double-check that he’d hidden Fon’s and Bright’s data streams. He also wanted to make sure that they weren’t using the light and calling attention to themselves.

“Two or more favours from the third shift may be infected with the virus, and they may have passed it along to at least one of their clients and a lure.”

A PS officer standing in the front row put up his hand. “Sir, should we release the entire shift, just to be on the safe side?”

The commander stared at the questioner, his mirrored glasses and eerily symmetrical face betraying nothing. “That is an excellent question. It shows the sort of initiative we are going to need to do our jobs while the feed is compromised and until we get to the bottom of this situation. I encourage all of you to begin asking questions out loud. Consult me. Keep in touch with each other. It’s the only way we can contain the threat.”

All the PS officers seemed to stand a little straighter after this speech. Grassly could hear their hearts begin to beat in unison.

Worse and worse and worse.

“The continued productivity of Citizens United Inside the Store is of paramount importance. We will not release the third shift unless it becomes apparent that they are all infected. Instead, we will track down and interview each favour and client who took part in the shift. At the same time, we will aggressively pursue our investigation of who would have means, motive, and opportunity to interfere with the feed. I have printed out a master list, with photos of each favour. You must locate them
in person, using this printed image.
Do not rely on surveillance footage or profile photos from the feed. That data could be compromised. If you see any unusual behaviour in a suspect, you have my explicit permission to release them. Discretion is now your byword. I expect you to use it.”

With that, the commander began to hand out sheets printed with the photos and most recent statistics of forty-three favours. Grassly joined the lineup, hoping beyond hope that he would be assigned a sheet with Fon’s or Bright’s picture on it. No such luck. He received the sheet for a favour called Blink. He barely glanced at it.

“I’d like you to work in teams of two, please,” said the commander.

Grassly looked over and saw another PS officer staring at him. He nodded.

He had only a minute before the PS staff who’d been given Fon’s and Bright’s names checked on their location and discover that their feed reading wasn’t accurate. Grassly asked his new partner to wait for him.

“Just had a big nutri,” he said. “I need to visit the relief centre.”

He walked swiftly down the hall. As soon as the door of the relief centre closed after him, his hand began to work furiously at his temple to program Bright and Fon back onto the grid.

Bright’s cart was plain—a mid-credit model—but it still had metallic trim and flashing side panels advertising the House of Gear. It had no top because there was no weather in the Store, and what was the point of being a favour if people couldn’t see you? But Bright didn’t like to draw attention to her cart and its mid-levelness, so she’d chosen the plain brown sand finish, which, everyone knew, should be driven while wearing an extremely small Military Bikini and Matching Rifle look.

“Oh my job! I forgot that you have a sand cart! I love it!” shrieked Fon. She screamed the exact same words each time she saw Bright’s cart. It was as though the entire world was new to Fon every time she stepped outside the house. Fon’s own cart, a top-of-the-line, first-release glitter model, was usually in cart repair because Fon’s driving was severely impaired by her halo, her hair fangles and her inability to focus on the road.

While Bright waited in the cart, Fon turned on her heel and headed back toward the house. “Wait,” she called. “I’ll go get my military bikini and rifle!” Fon had on a beaded
curtain dress with flashers throughout that made clicking noises when she walked and that blinked and flashed erratically. The dress had no straps, so she’d taped the halo to her shoulders. It was a look only Fon could have pulled off.

“You don’t need to change,” Bright said. “You look fine.”

Fon wrenched her head and shoulders around so she could look at Bright. “Fine?” she said. It wasn’t a word that was often applied to her appearance.

“I’m not wearing Military either,” Bright pointed out. She was still wearing Parachutist because it went well with the parachute pack.

“Oh!” said Fon, slowing. “I don’t know what to do. I hate not wearing the right thing in the right cart. You know. It’s a real point of pride with me.”

Bright wondered if she should feel bad that it wasn’t a point of pride with her.

“I think the halo’s enough,” said Bright. “Plus the awesome hair and the flasher beads and everything. No one is going to
not
notice you.”

“That’s true,” said Fon, with a happy little laugh.

She walked reluctantly back to the cart, opened the passenger door and struggled to get in. Her halo caught on the edge of the plastic windscreen, and she squirmed to dislodge it.

The pink helmet, stuffed in the parachute pack, was wedged between the two seats. Bright felt the presence of the helmet and its light behind her like a stranger’s pulse.