Proxy (13 page)

Knox looked over at Syd, who was looking out the window. He studied the strange mark behind the proxy’s ear, four discolored shapes visible even on his dark skin. They looked almost like a word, like a tattoo, but in no language he recognized.

Syd caught him looking and brought his fingers up to the spot, covering the mark and turning his head so Knox couldn’t see.

“Just a birthmark,” he said.

Knox shrugged and looked back out the window.

When they pulled through the gate into the driveway of Knox’s house and drove up, Syd gaped at the view over the park.

Knox hopped out of the car to get inside quickly, but Syd stood gazing out over the driveway to the city below, his mouth hanging open. The transport pulled off to go back to its owner and they were alone. Syd listened to the night. He’d never heard such quiet before. The Valve was always loud with advos and holos and coughing and cursing and shouting and screaming and the everyday noises of living. The residential part of Upper City sounded to him like a paradise. Or a graveyard.

“We need to get inside,” Knox said.

“This is your house?” Syd asked in disbelief.

“Yeah.” Knox had never seen it through anyone else’s eyes before. The staff was robotic, and low-level employees of his father’s company never came over. Knox’s friends all went to his school. All their houses looked like this.

Seeing Syd see his house made Knox notice things he’d forgotten about, like the way the lights lit the long glass wall on the side or how the infinity pool reflected the image of the house back at itself upside down.

He remembered when he was a kid standing out here looking at the pool and imagining that it was a gateway to a duplicate world, a world almost exactly like this one, except in that world it was his father who had died and he and his mother who lived in the big house.

“Get inside before some drone picks up your signal.”

“What about your parents?” Syd asked.

“It’s just me and my dad,” Knox told him. “And my dad won’t be home.” Knox didn’t elaborate. Syd didn’t need to know his life story, how his father rarely came home during the week, how he slept in his office, how he rarely came home at all.

They made their way up the steps to the heavy steel front door and slipped inside. Lights came on automatically.

“Welcome, Knox,” the house said. “Please identify your friend.”

“Disengage activity assistant,” Knox said. “Delete entry file.”

“Deletion confirmed. Good-bye,” the house said cheerfully.

“We’ll be okay now.” He led Syd through the living room with its vintage furniture and contemporary art that some consultant picked for his dad. Antiques from his great-grandmother’s collection sat in cases around the room. He noticed Syd looking at every clay tablet with more than casual interest.

“Those are, like, two thousand years old,” Knox explained, but Syd didn’t respond. He didn’t care how old they were. He was curious to see the one that had cracked when he was a kid.

“It’s that one.” Knox pointed. He understood what Syd wanted. “They restored it. I barely left a mark.”

“On the tablet,” Syd added.

They passed by a case of old books. One of them was displayed open, filled with detailed illustration and tiny writing in some weird ancient language. Knox didn’t remember which one.

“Looks kind of like your birthmark,” he said, thinking maybe he’d find something to talk to this swampcat about.

Syd didn’t say anything. Knox guessed his proxy wasn’t much for small talk. He brushed some hair out of his face, just to have something to do with his hands, and he led Syd upstairs to his room.

The lights came on dimly as Syd followed him in. There were at least a dozen projectors and a few pairs of networked glasses and a half-dozen little cases for biofeed-enabled contact lenses lying around. Knox had a momentary pang of embarrassment, like he was showing off.

Syd was not impressed.

Ayn Rand glowered at them from a projection on the wall. The Dying Fish with their original drummer glowered from a projection opposite. There was another of the supermodel Nadia holding an egret at the zoo. Hers was the only image not glowering. Her projection blew a kiss over and over.

Syd raised his eyebrows at the decorations.

Knox waved his hand and brought up a control holo, hovering in front of him. Another tap on it and his decorations disappeared. His proxy didn’t need to critique his taste in interior design.

Knox opened a drawer filled with tiny patches for installing biotech through the skin.

“We can do this two ways,” he told Syd. “We can trick you out with some biodes that will fool most any machine looking at you and will scan manually as somebody else. There’s always a chance it’ll fail, though, if they can see through it. It’s basically just sending a stronger signal, like a layer of fog to mess with their ID coding. It works against most systems, except the really high-end stuff.”

“Knox, look around.” Syd waved his hand around the room. “I belong to your father. As far as anyone in that club knows, I kidnapped you. And you have no idea what I did to escape from the Guardians to get to that club. I think they’re looking for me with some ‘really high-end stuff.’”

“Okay,” Knox agreed. “So the other option is we go into the SecuriTech biometric files and change who it is they’re looking for. Then we have to do the same thing with the Xelon Insurance Division and any subcontractors we can find. It’ll take a few hours.”

“Will your dad be home?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t seem worried.”

“He won’t even know we’re here on this end of the house.”

“What if he comes looking?”

“He won’t come looking.”

“Seriously?”

“You don’t know a lot about fathers, huh?”

“No.”

They stood in uncomfortable silence for a while. It was strange seeing Syd in his room. He’d seen him in holos so many times, but to have him here in the flesh . . .

“Look,” he said. “I do this better with some music on, so I can focus. Why don’t you take a shower and a nap or something? You can borrow some of my clothes to change out of that . . . outfit.”

“Thanks,” Syd said. He wasn’t saying much. He didn’t seem exactly comfortable in Knox’s house either. On that they were in sync.

“Oh,” Knox added, handing him a silver skin patch. “Put this on in the shower. It’ll lighten your skin a little. We don’t want to go through all this just to have you eyeballed by some low-rent security guard.”

Syd grabbed the patch. Knox got him a towel and some normal clothes and he disappeared into the bathroom, locking the door with a loud click.

Knox heard the shower start up and he turned on his randomizer. Tragic Harpie Bingo came on. He’d seen them live last winter. He actually hadn’t had tickets and he’d had to sneak in to the show. It was a blast.

When he got caught, Syd got four hours of volunteer work at the recycling plant. Knox changed the music. Wagner. Old Eurozone. That’d clear his head. He blasted it and got to work on his hack.

If he believed in any of the old religions, or any of the new ones, he might start to think he was helping Syd out of some kind of guilt. But he wasn’t. He was helping Syd because it suited him to. It was that simple. He’d made a mistake, a huge, tragic mistake, and in order to settle it, he’d help Syd. The balance would be settled, no debt outstanding.

He turned the music up.

[18]

SYD HAD NEVER HAD a shower like this. The water came from six different showerheads from six different directions and he could control the temperature just by waving his hand. It changed instantly.

No filling up tanks and lighting flames. No timers for water usage or haggling with the shower monitors. No keeping a knife on you while you washed and going half blind from the toxic soap because you couldn’t close your eyes even for a second. Knox’s shower had a seal that trapped in the steam.

Finally relaxing, Syd felt all the pain coming back, from the EMD pulses, from the punches Knox rained on him, from the dull ache of fear. It reminded him of all the other beatings he’d ever taken, his memory filled with the echo of wounds.

He ran his fingers along the scar on his collarbone.

After they left the orphanage, he and Egan took up with a gang of other street kids, standing lookout while they raided Upper City construction sites. They crouched behind blast barriers and watched the traffic of Upper City transports racing along the restricted roads.

“I’m gonna live up there one day,” Egan had declared, pointing at the tallest skyscraper. “All the way on top. You’ll see.”

“That’s the Oosha Panang Chemical Supply Company HQ.” Syd laughed. “See the logo? You can’t live there! No one lives there!”

“I didn’t mean that building.” Egan blushed. “I meant . . . the other one.”

“What other one?” Syd cackled. “You want to be an office cleaner? You can sleep there when everyone else goes home? Clean the patrons’ toilets? Then you’ll live there! Toilet King of Upper City!” Syd was giggling uncontrollably.

“Shut up, swampcat,” Egan’d yelled. Syd stopped laughing and he punched Egan right in the chin. Egan went down and Syd jumped on him. Egan rolled him over and punched him in the nose. Blood gushed out and tears welled in his eyes. He tried to claw at Egan’s face.

Neither of them was strong enough to do any real damage to the other and the fight wound itself down into panting and half-hearted punches. By the end, they were lying on the ground, side by side, laughing about the patrons’ toilets.

“You think they shit like we do?” Egan wondered.

“Of course.” Syd laughed. “It all rolls right down into the Valve.”

“I guess they want us to pay them that back too.” Egan laughed.

“We should it bring it back to them!” Syd guffawed. “Dump it right on the top floor of the Oosha Panang Chemical Supply Company HQ.”

“Hey!” Egan got serious. “That’s my new house you’re shitting on!”

They both exploded in laughter.

While they laughed and joked on the ground, they didn’t notice the security bots raiding the site and nabbing all the other kids. They only heard the last of the shouting and they ran off. A few days later, when the others tracked them down, they had bruises and cuts and they brought broken glass and heavy old chains to share their wounds with their young lookouts.

At first, Egan and Syd fought them off, but there were too many and they were too angry. Egan lost a kidney and Syd got sliced straight across his collarbone. Mr. Baram had sewed him up in the back of his shop using old fiber-optic threads.

If Syd was being honest with himself, he had to admit that he took more beatings from other swampcats in the Valve than he ever did because of Knox’s Upper City shenanigans.

Shenanigans. Mr. Baram’s word.

He wondered if Mr. Baram was looking for him right now, pulling strings, worrying. Was he wrong not to go to Mr. Baram for help first?

No. He couldn’t drag his boss into his mess. Mr. Baram was the closest thing Syd had ever known to a father. Best to keep him out of it. He had enough worries running his business and feeding his kids. This mess was Knox’s doing and Knox would fix it.

Syd wished he could find out what had happened to Egan at the club. He hoped his friend was all right. He hoped the Guardians hadn’t picked him up.

As he washed, he wondered what happened after he disappeared. Would Knox just get a replacement proxy, some other kid to take the abuse for his mistakes? Was it right for Syd to inflict Knox on someone else just to avoid the work camp?

It was amazing how little Syd knew about the system, which he’d been a part of for as long as he could remember. No one in the Valve knew much about how it worked, not even the sales agents who worked for the credit companies. Information was too valuable to share with a bunch of slum-dwelling debtors. Information always flowed up. Only one thing flowed down into the Valve. Syd and Egan had pointed that out when they were just kids that night at the construction site.

After he showered, Syd dried off with the impossibly soft microfiber towel. He couldn’t believe these things really existed. Even the most lux people down in the Valve, the white collars, the scavenger bosses, the syntholene dealers, Maes’s top lieutenants—none of them had anything that could compare to these towels.

He held one up over his face, so the light was filtered through it and so all he could smell was its clean dampness. He stood there for a while with the towel against his face, just breathing with it. He could imagine that he was Knox and Knox was in his place, and that every day he got to ride in autotransports with leather seats or private cars with manual drive on restricted roads and come home to this house with these towels and wear these clothes that were soft and tough at the same time, that didn’t itch or chafe or fall apart after the first wash.

A trick of fate.

He got to have Knox’s perfect skin, protected from sun and heat and rash, where scars healed and vanished, where pain could be medicated and dissipated and erased. Where the future was his to make.

He looked at himself in the mirror. His face, his skin, his scars. He dropped the patch Knox had given him onto the marble counter unused. He wasn’t going to change his skin, even if it was a risk. He was done giving that away. It was his and his alone, from now on.

He dressed in the shiny pants and the undershirt Knox had given him—no more retro queercore, sorry, Egan—and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked almost like an Upper City kid, the heir to some data mining fortune. Except for the metal writing on his arm. He grabbed the gray pullover, covered his arms, and opened the bathroom door.

A wall of sound slammed into him. At first he thought it was a massive engine roaring to life, and then a swell of thunder, a storm rising, a sonic hurricane. The music rose and fell, searching out harmony and then sweeping it away almost as soon as it had been found. What instruments could make these noises? There was nothing electronic about it, nothing processed. The only organic music he knew came from the fiddlers and drummers around the Valve, cheap music, unlicensed, so always short-lived. But this . . . he’d never heard anything like it. It was alive, and, at the same time, seemed to steal the life out of him, absorb him, consume him. He couldn’t tell where the music was even coming from. It was everywhere; it had become the world.