The Caryatids (24 page)

Lionel pointed his leather-gloved finger outside the gorgeously lit restaurant window and at the gray, lightless, derelict structures lining the shore of the Pacific. That endless mummified seaside slum was a sight to daunt the bravest real-estate developer: armored in chain-link fencing, wrapped in razor wire, with ancient vidcams and hand-lettered death-threat signs. Many of the buildings were swathed in tattered plas-tic shrink-wrap against the rising damp.

"Ever since I was born," said Lionel, "I've had to look at that mess. That giant monument to human stupidity. I want that all gone. And no, I don't mean some nice legal settlement. I don't mean forty more years of insurance cheats and litigation. These are abandoned, uninhabitable ruins, ruined by the climate crisis. They belong to morons who don't even live there now and will
never
live there again. While
my
people, my viewers, my core audience, the poor people, Glyn, the street kids without shirts and shoes—they are living heaped up in their Little For-eign Ghetto villages. They are piled on top of each other like used tires."

Lionel clenched his gloved fists dramatically. "So we have two basic moral choices here. Either we do nothing about that, and the poor peo-ple eventually riot and set fire to their own slums. That would be the tra-ditional Los Angeles method. Or else we provide some inspired civic leadership. My people charge out here and they just
set fireto all that.
Yes. My people just smash it. They blow it to pieces, and burn it to the ground. It's all abandoned anyway—so that takes my fans maybe a week." Glyn was nervously fiddling with the restaurant's gorgeous silver-ware. The silverware was tagged and interactive and came with a daz-zling panoply of oyster forks, butter knives, and two-tined olive piercers.

"You're really serious about this."

'Think it through, Glyn. Two years later, we've got a bunch of flood-friendly projects built on high pilings. We get a major construc-tion boom in LA. Sure, we get some legal trouble first—of course we get that—but the casualties,
very low,
and suddenly we are right into a brand-new era. Low-income housing—during a climate crisis—that's got to be within the shoreline areas. That's got to happen. It's the only urban policy that makes any sense. And if we had any guts, we'd just do it." Glyn glared at Radmila. ''Your political scripter wrote that for him. Lionel never used to talk like this. Never."

"No, no," Radmila said. "My scripter's not that good! I never heard that kind of talk before."

"Who's writing your set-speeches, Lionel? Who have you been link-ing to?"

"Admit it," said Lionel smugly, "my set-speech just now was fantastic. You don't have, like, one single good word to say against my awesome new set-speech."

"Your gangster fans are gonna shoot each other with rockets! It'll be a total bloodbath."

"Like you care about that!" scoffed Lionel. "All you want to do is write games that send them running the streets like bowling pins. You've got them where they can't tell immersive games from the LA street grid." Glyn shook her head. "I know that we can get away with some dem-olition work right after an earthquake. You're talking about smashing the oldest, biggest real-estate mess in all of California. We'd be held re-sponsible."

"Not you, Glyn:
me.
I'm the responsible party—and I am an under-age juvenile. That's why my plan works. We just give them a very classic set pitch: He's the troubled rebel star kid burning out on drugs!

That's a hundred-year-old Hollywood story, everybody knows it by heart. Sure, my fans become arsonists. My fans are juvenile delinquents, so they got in over their heads. So what? My fan base has got a lot to be arsonists about!"

Glyn was very troubled. "You actually
love
your fans, Lionel?"

"What else is a star for? Without them, we're nothing! Why else do I go through all this? I personify the blighted aspirations of my viewer-ship, that's why I do it! That's why my fans pay to watch me work! If I give them an awesome carnival like this—hey, I'd become the Voice of a Generation." Radmila leaned in over the table. "That was a very good monologue, Lionel. I feel proud of you. But that's extremely radical, and you're re-ally pushing it. You can't just abrogate the legal process and set fire to large urban areas! Acquis pundits would show up and they'd hit us over the nose with a broomstick. That's just not how our Family-Firm does business in this town."

"Yes, I know that I'd be a scandal—but think in the long term. I'd just go into a dry-out clinic. That's all that would happen to me. Be-cause I'm a kid! So I take a year off . . . over in . . . what the hell's that stupid island . . . in Mljet! Mljet would be perfect for the story. It's, like, wall-to-wall Acquis rehabilitation geeks over there. So: I go put on their neural helmet, their exoskeleton, their whole nine meters . . . That doesn't scare me! That's all very newsworthy. We just feed the people my ongoing personal scandal, we blow that spectacle up as big as it needs to get. They get obsessed with me—me, the star—and they just
forget
about the massive urban fires and the rocket explosions. I personally overshadow all of that. And my adventure costs our Family, what? The fare for my cruise ship? My reputation as a sweet-tempered kid? It costs us
nothing!
And in return—we'd liberate a huge, booming acreage of real estate in the world's most dynamic city!"

"Mila, you talk some sense into him."

"Glyn, he
is
talking sense. Pure Dispensation sense. That could really be made to pay."

"He wants to provoke a huge urban riot! He's going to burn down the slums in Los Angeles with an armed mob!"

"He's even smarter than his big brother. I didn't know that. Our Family-Firm has some true depth-of-talent."

Glyn was furious. "You're taking his side to annoy me! You know that isn't a reasonable policy! You're giving me all kinds of grief just because I'm not a star like you and him!" Lionel smirked at her. "Glyn, you're always claiming that you want to produce, and not be a star. Okay, great, fine: Take my proposal to the Family-Firm. Go on, I dare you to put my plan onto their agenda!

Those old-school folks have got some guts! You're a geek and a bean counter." Defeated, Glyn turned angrily on Radmila. "You don't have any more sense than he does! I thought at least I could trust
you
to stay within your budget."

Radmila blinked. "What do you mean—you mean my space sum-mit? 'The Theodora Montgomery Memorial Forum'? I know that's not some easy weekend in Bohemian Grove, but that'll pay off for us ten times over in the long run. Didn't you see how happy Buffy got when I tasked her to plan that? Buffy always wanted to be a political hostess."

Glyn scowled. "No, Mila, I didn't mean your Family duties. I meant your extravagances."

"My what? What extravagances? My hair? My skin? My mitochon-drial upgrades? I'm totally pacing myself! You're making me have a baby."

"I mean your shopping sprees, Mila!"

Lionel was immediately interested. "What stuff did you buy? Was it nice?"

"I don't even know what Glyn's talking about."

"I've never interfered in your private purchases," Glyn said primly, "but the budget flagged me when you started going crazy . . . and with
what?
A hundred pairs of couture shoes, perfumes, lingerie, whole crates of bad Napa Valley champagne?"

Radmila was appalled. ''When did that ever happen?"

"Two weeks. Three weeks. Since you took over the Family. You lost control: what happened to you?" Lionel was agog. "Wow! John likes perfumes and lingerie?"

"What, is your brother crazy? John's a political activist, he likes girls who are weird refugees! Look: I don't have any time to shop for myself! I'm always in the gym or on the set! If I have one spare minute, I sleep!"

"Mila, if you didn't buy those things, who did?"

"It wasn't me. The last thing I personally bought was . . . I think I bought cousin Rishi some garden tools for a birthday present."

Glyn was intelligent, so it didn't take her long to defeat her false as-sumptions. "I was really stupid. I should have known that some idiot embezzled all that stuff. Someone is pretending to be Mila Montalban."

"Wow, that's identity theft!" said Lionel. "I thought that was impossi-ble! I mean, they've got all kinds of secure biometrics and stuff."

Glyn and Radmila said nothing.

Lionel bulled on. "You know, I mean biometric security for your credit purchases—like, they measure your body so they know it can only be you."

Radmila put her fork aside and rubbed at her aching eyes.

"Okay, now I get it," said Lionel. "There is someone here who is just like you. There's a clone loose here in Los Angeles."

Glyn and Radmila glared at him silently.

"I mean, another clone besides both of you two gals. A clone who's like an evil-twin identity." The two of them exchanged glances.

"Wow!" said Lionel. "That is dynamite! This is a hot entertainment property, all of a sudden! Because we're living in a real-life crime! How many suspects are there? Wait a minute, wait a minute—I already know that! There's Sonja . . . There's Vera from Mljet . . . Hey wait, there's your mom!" Glyn leaned forward and slapped him.

??????????

A HOLE IN A SENSOR WEBwas called a "blackspot." The laws of physics decreed that there were always blackspots in the world. Com-puter science could assume perfectly smooth connections, but the Earth had hills and valleys and earthquakes and giant volcanoes. The sky had lightning storms, and even the sun had sunspots. Wireless con-nections were not magic fogs. Real-world wireless connections were waves, particles, bits: real things in real places.

So: If you didn't want to be seen, or heard, or known in a world of ubiquitous sensorwebs, there were options. You could find a blackspot. Or create a blackspot. Some blackspots were made by organized crime or official corruption. Other blackspots just grew in their natural black-ness. Maybe there was nobody home to plug things in, or to reboot sys-tems. Enterprises went broke, buildings fell down or went derelict.

The unsustainable could not be sustained. There were climate--crisis disaster areas—China, Australia, India, central Asia—where the blackspots were colossal.

When the seas rose, when hurricanes blew through, Earth tremors shook the land. Plague, famine, and pestilence . . . Stuff just got lost. Even in the modern world. Even in Los Angeles. There were always places in any major city where crime was visible, and yet tolerated. Red-light districts, narcotic shooting galleries, corporate boardrooms, city halls . . . There were thousands of tiny blackspots. Steel elevators. Brick basements. Narrow alleyways between two metal barns.

Or the black, stuffy, terrifying innards of a car trunk.

Sometimes people had mental blackspots hidden inside themselves.

People forgot that they lived in a dangerous world. They prospered for a while, they got used to being privileged, they got fatally complacent. People forgot to see straight, they overlooked things, they stubbornly ig-nored the obvious.

You could try to obscure that human limitation, deputize it to sur-veillance systems, conceal all the seams, try to make the system perfect, perfect, superperfect, secure, secure, supersecure . . . but any simple breakdown in sanitation was enough to chase people away. Any place with no running water and no toilets was halfway to a blackspot already.

And you might end up in a place like that. Tied up. Abducted. Alone. Hungry. Thirsty. Humiliated. Reeking of your own urine.

Derelict buildings, dreadful places, worse even than the car trunk from which you had just been dragged

. . . Even a little kid could set fire to a wrecked building. How many kids were you willing to wound, or in-jure, or kill with an automatic antitheft "armed response"? After all, the kids were just kids . . . kids were always trying to look around . . . explore. . .do some graffiti . . . throw some bricks through the glass windows . . .steal some furniture . . . vandalize the building and burn everything to the ground. Teenagers were energetic and had poor impulse control. Teenage kids were stigmergic, they learned and acted like termites — they had no grand master plan, but they learned fast and easily from their peers, whatever they saw other kids doing.

So many places like that in Los Angeles . . . in every big town really . . . where security cameras had stored months of perfectly shot and focused video of a steadily gathering mayhem. The mere fact that a machine "saw" things happening didn't mean that a machine could ap-prehend the crime, prosecute it, convict it, put an end to it . . .

What if the surveillance itself was the victim of the crime? They called that "sousveillance" — when angry people countersurveilled the surveillance. Some bold souls made it their business to spy out all the surveillance spies, map them, track them, spot them, shoot them, steal them, hack them, tap them, hold the machines to ransom . . .

Radmila rolled around on the grimy, derelict, unlit floor, testing the plastic wires that bound her arms. Her wrists were cinched, her arms were trapped behind her back, her ankle was snagged to a piece of fur-niture. Wire had no knots. She couldn't break wire or pick wire or chew wire. Nobody would ever find her in here. Not in this blackspot. She was as good as dead. That fast, that simple.

Radmila was strong and her body was flexible. Given a week, she might have shrugged and wriggled her way out of the wires. But when-ever she worked hard to escape her bindings, she needed some air, and the duct tape over her mouth was there to deny her that air.

It was extremely dangerous to have her mouth duct-taped shut in this way. She could die easily from that, because she might begin to weep in here, from her fear and despair and shame, and then her nose would clog from the weeping, and she would black out, and smother to death in her own snot. That simple, that quick, that dead.

She had vanished from her world in twenty seconds. She had left the set, carrying the heavy hem of her costume, and naturally followed a friendly, beckoning ninja security staffer, then suddenly, instantly, with no warning,
wham,
her elaborate costume went stone-dead all around her. Then she was body-blocked straight into the open trunk of a car.