I wandered around back and looked at the grated door there. I could do it. I could smash everything.
I shouldn’t. I told myself, Don’t. But I knew how that door worked. And there was no one around.
I forced myself to move on.
BREND’S: $23.99
Kel was smiling about the night’s work. It was a quick follow-up for an exclusive aftershave called Brend’s?. We had placed the actual product three nights before. Brend’s? had a very particular, complicated setup with a rotating, gimbaled platform that would keep the product faced toward the consumer at all times. Once the target had taken the bottle of aftershave, the expensive gear had to be extracted during a second visit.
“It will be easy,” Kel said lightly. “We’ll follow up with a half-dozen Moon Mints? Placements and be done early.”
Margot sighed. “What will I do with the extra time?” She looked at Henri. Henry kept his eyes on Kel, and his smirk under control.
“Maybe he will use his extra time to ask you out,” Margot whispered to me. Henri did not hear, or at least pretended not to. I looked at her, feeling suddenly awkward and out of place. “Let him down easy,” she whispered again and laughed, like it was a really funny joke.
“What?” Henri asked.
Now I pretended not to hear. I felt my cheeks flush and I looked away, as though the wall was extremely interesting.
Everything went smoothly until we reached the fourth home. Most people understood our gear had to come back. They left the platform and lighting out neatly for us to reclaim.
Kel knew something was wrong when the map showed the platform was right beside the Consumer’s bed. Even under her mask, I could see Kel’s brow knit. She gestured for us to peek inside.
A lonely, sad and creepy scene confronted us. Rupert McMorse had unnervingly glued a photograph frame with a 3-D-enhanced portrait of his ex-girlfriend to the platform. He’d placed it beside his bed, like he wanted her to watch over him in the dark. He shifted, and the portrait shifted slightly to face him.
Kel shivered and signaled us all to back carefully out. We retreated to a Squelch Kel had tagged a floor below.
This Squelch was small, lined in undulating gray foam shapes that dampened sound. We had to crowd inside. It had clearly been designed for two, with a foam pad on the floor like a makeshift bed. It smelled disgustingly of must and sweat.
Kel wrinkled her nose and took out her Pad. She flipped through a set of photos of Rupert and his girlfriend that had been stored in his profile, noting the time and location of each, cross-indexed with emotional analyses of their faces as she grew more and more terrified and then disappeared.
“We could go in the daytime,” Henri said. “When he is at work.”
“I’d rather buy a new platform myself,” Margot said.
Kel gritted her teeth. “No. It has to match the serial number. Policy. And it reflects poorly on us not to retrieve it.”
“It reflects poorly on him to keep it.” Margot pouted, looking up as though she could see him two stories above us and shaking her fist at the lonely fool.
“We didn’t lose it,” Henri insisted, his pale green eyes looking at the floor.
Kel typed Rupert McMorse into her Pad again to see if she had missed anything useful in his info.
“Let’s gas him,” Margot said, breathing in deep and closing her eyes.
“If we use sleep gas, you will stay outside,” Kel said.
Margot pouted. “It makes me relaxed,” she whispered to me. She took another deep breath, imagining it. The fingers on her left hand flicked near her chin. Margot did that sometimes when she got dreamy. I had no idea why.
Kel fretted over the idea.
“Why would we use sleep gas if he’s already sleeping?” Henri asked.
Margot reached up and patted him on the head. “Think of it as ‘no-wakey’ gas.”
She gave me a wink. Henri turned away, red-faced. I wondered how long the two of them had known each other. They had a comfortable routine where Margot teased him, and he pretended he didn’t know she had a crush on him. Or maybe he really didn’t know.
Kel hoisted her pack on her shoulder and held the Pad out to me. Margot frowned at being passed over. I took it, my heart suddenly pounding. The words Carol Amanda Harving seemed ready to burst out of my fingers, but I steadied my hands and pushed the thought aside.
“Do your research. Make a plan. I have to get a sleep gas canister.”
“We have to wait in here?” Henri asked.
“Is that a problem?” Kel was impatient at his question.
“It’s gross,” Henri said, looking at the foam bed in the middle of the room.
Kel rolled her eyes. “Speth, see what you can find.”
I hesitated.
Kel’s shoulders dropped. She put her bag down and knelt close to me. “I don’t know what your rationale is for this.” She did a quick, zippered lips. “Maybe you don’t want to communicate at all. Maybe you want to draw attention to the silence already created by zealous Intellectual Property Law.”
“Maybe she is just still thinking about what to say,” Margot offered.
“I think she—” Henri started to say.
“That doesn’t matter,” Kel cut across them. “Whatever it is, Speth, you should know this Pad records nothing. Your Cuff is jammed by it. It is impossible for any of it to be tracked or recorded or charged. It is self-contained. It is outside the system. No Ads. No Terms of Service. Nothing like that.”
Margot took a breath to make another comment, but then fell to watching Henri watch me.
“And if,” Kel continued, “you are concerned about the philosophical nature of communication, you should know that creating layouts and looking up Rupert McMorse, or anyone else, is part of this job. It is research, not communication. Do you understand?”
I looked at her. I understood.
“Why do you ask her that?” Henri said, like it was unfair. “How do you know if she understands or not?”
Kel stood and moved to the door. “I’ll know when I get back.”
With that, she slid the door open and shut and was gone.
Margot pulled in close, looked at the Pad, then at me, and then the Pad again.
I typed Rupert McMorse. His file came up. Margot sighed and rested her chin on her knees.
“What did you think she was going to look up?” Henri asked in a whisper.
“Something interesting,” Margot said in a long, slow voice.
The Pad brought up a long medical history, with several diagnoses for mental illness. I wondered, if he was so crazy, what did he do for a living?
The answer was nothing. He had inherited several words, including mellow, runny and obey. He bought things. He drove the ring. Brend’s? noted he shaved every day.
He’d also stalked his girlfriend until she moved to another dome and disappeared from the system.
“I hope she got away,” Margot said, pointing at that last fact on the screen. A chill ran down my spine as I thought of what the alternative might be.