The Seven Markets (21 page)

“Headset?”

“God, no. Those things kill me. No, I should be used to this by now.” Bo rubbed the back of her head. Ellie knew there was an uplink port there, disguised as a birthmark. Bo’d often complained about how queasy needling into the headnet made her. “Do it.”

Ellie killed the feed and took a millisecond to tidy up, pulling herself together for company. The world flashed red three times, indicating a new user was logging in. When Bo appeared, she was in mid-sentence.

“—remember to close my eyes.”

“Did you forget again, Bo?” Ellie soared past, flapping her arms as if they had anything to do with her weightlessness. Most users would close their eyes when needling in. Bo, somehow, always forgot.

“Every time. How’re you today?”

“Antsy. Excited. Delirious.”

“I’m sorry you can’t be with them. You know we tried.”

Ellie backstroked past, flipping in midair and pushing off a wall that wasn’t there. Doing laps. Bodiless exercise.

“Are they live?”

“Can’t you see? Oh, sorry—had them on private. Here.”

The landscape erupted with color. Screens appeared all around them, hanging unsupported in the nothing. The images were startlingly three-dimensional, though the screens themselves occupied only two dimensions, height and width. Viewed from the side, they would vanish entirely. Or they would have, if the UI—the User Interface—allowed viewing from that angle.

Bo surveyed screen after screen of nearly identical images. A man dressed in black combat gear riding in a truck. Another one. Another ten. A view of the road from the truck’s window. The rear of the lead truck by way of the second truck’s driver. Ellie piggybacked as Bo selected a screen. The others faded as it zoomed to fill her entire world. Bo became the soldier riding in the truck, holding a folded map of the Market in one hand and a spare power-pack in the other.

He turned the power-pack over and over with his fingers, flipping it over the back of his hand with practiced ease. He opened the map and studied it before closing it again. Cramming in the final moments before the exam.

“Zoom out,” Ellie said, sending the feed away. Normal users couldn’t do stuff like that, manipulating another user’s UI. But Ellie had her own set of admin preferences. There wasn’t much she couldn’t do, here in the nothing.

“Who were you peeping?”

“Didn’t look.” Bo shrugged. Ellie gave up her laps and hung upside-down, her face lined up with Bo’s. When the doctor shrugged, it was eerie and unnatural; some body language only works right side up.

“When are they going in?”

“Any minute now. Are you going to stay and watch?”

“I can. I did have some things—”

Ellie cut her off. “Later. Whatever it is, it can wait, no?”

“I suppose. But—”

Bo disappeared. Everything disappeared. Ellie felt a tingling in the back of her head was she was disconnected and reconnected in rapid succession.

“Ah!”

Her world returned; she crumpled to the ground in a boneless ball. “Ground” being a relative term. Bo was standing at a ninety-degree angle from her. As Ellie struggled to stand, Bo rotated her UI by one quarter, orienting herself to Ellie to help her up.

“Still?”

“Always,” Ellie said. “At least, ‘always’ so far. What do you think?”

Bo fell silent. She was activating her doctor subroutine, summoning her examination tools. With Ellie’s hardline, examining her avatar would serve the same purpose, essentially, as examining her physical body. In Ellie’s case, examining her avatar was actually more effective. Safer too, by far.

“Heart failure. Again. Ellie, do you know you’re the only person on the planet to die of heart failure in probably fifty years?”

“You’ve told me.” She thumped her chest twice with her fist. “I’m old-fashioned that way.”

“Don’t joke. What if they . . . what if they get him?”

“If we get him then it doesn’t matter. I’ve told you before, we’re a package deal. No tears from me.”

Ellie waited as Bo called up a screen of her own. The UI was touchless, but Ellie knew her doctor preferred the tactile experience of gestures. Bo’s fingers danced across the virtual keyboard.

Ellie’s body appeared on the screen. Blackened bones rose up through fissures of ashen skin ready to split at the slightest touch. Veins and arteries stood out as a network of plump, dark lines pulsing with machine-driven superblood. Empty eye sockets, their residents long since dissolved, were sheathed in a clear, rose-tinted gelatin. This last was to protect the shriveled stew that was all that remained of Ellie’s brain.

“It’s impolite to stare,” she said, killing Bo’s screen.

“You can’t be alive. You know that, don’t you?”

“So my body keeps insisting. And yet here we are. I look pretty good for a dead woman, don’t I?” Ellie tilted her hips and pushed out her chest as if posing in front of a mirror.

In here, she had the body of an eighteen-year-old. Her hair flowed in a gravity-free, nut-brown starburst around her face. Her arms were bare, her skin soft with hints of muscle beneath its smooth surface. Her face was ageless and unlined, and her eyes, oh, her eyes. They sparkled with all the colors of the shifting waters of a rough sea.

“I’m serious, Ellie.”

“You’re
always
serious, Bo. Can’t you give me just today? Do you have any appreciation for how long I’ve been waiting for this?”

“Of course I do. But do
you
appreciate how hard we’ve been working to free you from this . . . place? And I think we did it, Ellie. I think we cracked it.”

Depending on UI and settings, a user could convey as much or as little emotional response, in terms of facial expression, tone of voice, and body language, as they liked. Ellie adjusted her response slider to its lowest setting. Her arms and legs became stiff, her back straight as a board. Her face was as blank as a sheet of paper.

“Are you okay? Ellie? Ellie? Did you . . . freeze up again?” Bo tried to move closer, but Ellie ordered the system to hold her in place.

“I can’t right now, Bo. I’m sorry. I know how hard everyone is working, but this is an important day for me. When it’s over—one way or the other—when it’s over, then we can talk about this.”

“Ellie—”

“Please!”

Ellie summoned a menu no other user had access to and ejected Bo from the system. The nothing flashed three times and she was alone.

Bo didn’t understand. How could she? It wasn’t the sort of thing you could explain. The Market. The Prince. Four centuries of life. Two of them spent in a haze made unbearable by how impossibly pleasant it had been. Two more spent in a state of constant, rabid hatred.

Ellie spread out to occupy her nothing. She couldn’t do this when guests came calling. Alone, she could abandon her pretense of physicality and stretch her legs, so to speak. She scrolled through the feeds, searching for the one she wanted. These systems, this network, they’d been built to her exacting specifications. Who knew the eighteenth-century girl had a knack for computers? When she found the feed she wanted, she brought it up, full sensory data, and let it carry her away.

Ellie stepped off the carrier, straightening her body armor. It was lightweight, felt no thicker or heavier than ordinary fabric, and was nearly skintight. Her goggles dangled from around her neck; her hood was split down the middle and hanging against her back.

Her vantage point was off; she was taller in this body than in her own. She moved differently, too. Her limbs felt heavier, her footfalls plodding. But the strength this body held was intoxicating. Even as an observer, this was better than her bodiless life in the system.

A soldier in matching gear approached from along the carrier’s side. “Commander Hart.”

“Yes, private?” she heard Hart say, his voice stuffy in her head.

“The men are ready for your inspection, sir.”

“Very good, private.”

The military honorifics were for show, nothing more. Ellie had found over the years that military men needed their titles and their ranks. It gave them a sense of order. A sense of purpose, in some funny way.

She inspected the men, tightening a strap here, a buckle there. Like the ranks, this inspection was also for show. Their armor was foolproof, conforming to the wearer’s body, fitting itself to each one’s height and weight. Once activated, the light, pliable fabric became stronger than steel. Only the holsters and scabbards required any adjusting, and that, she knew, Hart left to the men themselves.

Still, one must maintain appearances.

He was her third Hart, his body cloned, his consciousness ported over from one to the next. Raw technology the first time they’d tried it. Now, she mused, there was nothing to it, though renewal technology was getting good enough it might soon put the cloners out of business.

Hart instructed his troops to pull up their hoods and don their goggles. “Examine the man next to you and the man next to him. Even one millimeter of exposed skin can be deadly. No exceptions!”

He watched them prepare. When each man had stepped back into formation, Hart ordered weapons distributed. Pistols were slotted into holsters, blades into scabbards. She knew he was disappointed with their armaments—the man was a fool for big, noisy shotguns—but the Market came when the Market came. There had only been time for the pistols and the blades, so that’s what they were going in with.

Hart was the only one with bare skin still exposed. Ellie lost interest in his unending inspections of the men. She minimized his screen and brought up several others at random. Each man—and her soldiers were all men, a condition Ellie would not budge on, no matter how qualified the woman—kept his eyes on Hart as he made his way down the line.

In appearance, at least, he was much the same as when they’d first met. Sadder, perhaps, and driven by more than a desire for money, an urge to prove himself indomitable. More than anyone save Ellie herself, Hart had been waiting for this day, for the Market’s return.

She switched back to him when the inspections were over.

“Here it is: the last time I walked through those gates I lost my entire squad. Period. That is because we were unprepared, and frankly, because we thought the whole thing a giant, ridiculous joke.

“Not today.

“I’ve given you every scrap of information I can. I have spoken to each and every one of you personally, at length, and you are only here because I believe in my heart of hearts that
you
understand what you’re getting into.

“You know your jobs. I expect you to do them. Period. These suits”—he patted his chest with both hands—“will protect you inside. More than that, however, they will protect you from yourself. We will let nothing deter us from our objective today. You hear me?”

Their response was a lion’s roar. “WE HEAR YOU, SIR!”

Hart pulled on his hood, fixed his goggles over his eyes, collected his pistol and blade, and faced his men once more.

“Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t touch anything. They won’t see us if we don’t want them to. We do this by the numbers and we all come home. All of us.”

It was a short walk to the Market’s gates. Ellie marched with them in Hart’s shoes, anticipation mounting with every step he took. There was the great stone wall enclosing the Market. There were the twin stone pillars bordering the gateway. There was the Market, just beyond.

He stepped through the gate without hesitating, setting a proper example for his men.

The feed went dead; Ellie was alone, once again, in her nothing.

If she’d been flesh at that moment, Ellie would have slammed her fist down on the console, kicked over a chair, found herself someone to scream at. She would have demanded they bring the feeds back
immediately.
She would have sent a dozen technicians to crawl over every inch of line to search for breaks, ordered diagnostics up the wazoo. And she would have fumed—literally, thanks to the Prince’s wedding present—as she waited for them to come scurrying back and tell her what she already knew.

The problem wasn’t on their end.

She briefly considered coalescing back into her Ellie-shape, conjuring a chair out of the nothing and venting her frustrations by kicking it around a bit. That seemed counter-productive, however, so she tabled the idea for later.

What, then?

Through her hardline, she could order those same diagnostics. She did. A little rejiggering of the monitors and she could check the lines by running a burp of power through them. This she did as well. Screaming at someone might have helped her mood, but it wouldn’t have brought back the feeds, or told her anything about what was happening at the Market.

Her UI blinked red three times. Someone was trying to come in.

She was tempted by the request. It would be someone to scream at. For the moment she let it go unanswered. Whoever it was, they could wait.

She skimmed the feeds, searching for some residual signal, some remnant image which might be sneaking through. Hart’s feed had gone silent the instant he entered the Market. Was it possible his hostile intentions had been noticed and dealt with so swiftly? She forced herself to remember how his men had died a hundred years past and decided, no, his death would not have come so quickly.

The Market liked to play with its food.

With instantaneous death ruled out in the absence of more data, Ellie moved on to the next likely suspect: the sub-net feeds themselves. The sub-net was checked out, according to the literature, “up to five star systems away.” She’d seen the math but it had made her head hurt, even with the full processing power of the system at her disposal. The Market was in Great Los Angeles, well within the sub-net’s realtime transmission range, which meant the Market must be keeping the signal from getting out.

She breathed a sigh of relief. Hart and his men were transmitting, but no signal could get through. It was obvious, actually. She’d witnessed firsthand how the Market had its own weather—its own suns, for heaven’s sake! They’d been so wowed by the fancy new sub-net tech that they’d neglected to apply a little common sense to the problem.

Still, their implants would be recording. She could watch the feeds to her heart’s content as soon as Hart and his men returned.