A party, she realized, that most of the city’s residents couldn’t even afford to attend.
“This house was bought with nuli money,” she said softly. “Abendroth makes industrial nulis—shipping, manufacturing, construction. If you’ve lost your job to a nuli in the last five years, you’ve probably lost it to an Abendroth. Maybe a Zhang.” She twirled her finger in a spiral, encompassing the entire property in one abstract gesture. “So not only is this house worth, what, twenty lights? Forty? It’s personally responsible for putting half of them out of work.”
“And here we sit,” said Bao. She waited for more, but he only watched the city.
Marisa tried to pick out the tiny light of her parents’ restaurant. She couldn’t be sure she could even see it from here.
“There you are,” said Anja. Marisa put on her happiest face, hoping her friends could work their magic and raise her out of this sudden emotional slump. Anja sat down on the grass in front of her, heedless of stains on her designer pants; Marisa could just barely see a tattoo on her back, peeking above the hem of her shirt—a wing of some kind, but Marisa couldn’t tell what exactly. Anja changed it almost every day. Dangling past it was a djinni cable, a slim white cord plugged into her headjack and braided in with her hair. Most people kept their djinni port empty and discreet, only inserting a cable when they needed to, but Anja liked the statement. She peeled open a box of noodles. “You want to see the new toys?”
“Is this the eye-catching mystery you promised me?” asked Marisa.
“Part one of two,” said Anja, “though eye-catching is not necessarily the best word.” Anja held up her right hand, displaying a flexible metal mesh across her palm, like a fingerless glove. “It’s an EM field calibrated to interface with the sensory feeds on a Ganika 4 djinni. The settings are controlled on the back: one click for vision signals, one more for hearing, one more to turn it off.” She demonstrated by pressing a touch sensor on the back of the glove, though it made no visible change. “I made it yesterday.”
“How can you tell it’s on?”
“I can feel when the field goes on and off, it’s like a tingle in my hand. I might add a light, but I like the look now—very stealthy, no one knows that it can do anything.”
“So it interfaces with the sensory feeds and . . . ?”
“Turns them off,” said Anja with a smile. “If they have a Ganika 4, and if they haven’t changed the factory settings. I had to sacrifice variability for speed, but I’m still refining it. Check this out . . . Omar!”
Bao cast a sidelong glance at Marisa. “Omar has a Ganika 4.”
Omar arrived with a drink in hand. “I am at your command, Anyita.”
Anja set down her noodles, jumped up, and put her right hand on Omar’s cheek. “Boom.”
“What?” asked Omar.
“He can’t hear a thing,” said Anja, grinning wildly at the others. “Djinnis tap into your brain’s sensory centers, which is how they can do things like the VR in Overworld—they tell you you’re seeing a city, hearing gunfire, or whatever. This little beauty simply tells you that you’re not hearing anything.”
“Damn it, Anja, what did you do to me?” Omar was roaring now, and Marisa couldn’t help but laugh. “Mari, are you in on this too? What’s going on?”
Anja looked over Marisa’s shoulder, back at the house, and Marisa turned to see Sahara still talking to Anja’s father, giving Cameron and Camilla a lengthy tour of the house. Even a dramatic bikini reveal could wait, it seemed, in the face of such a poshly furnished home.
“No word about this when Sahara comes out,” said Anja. “Not that I want to hide it from her or anything. I just don’t want the whole internet to know, you know?”
“Smart,” said Marisa. Anja spent a lot of time on darknets, delving into body hacks most people knew nothing about. Getting an idea like this perception-denier into the mainstream could be dangerous, and a showcase appearance on Sahara’s vidcast would be the first step to a potentially massive audience.
“Anja,” said Omar, his voice impassive. “I want you to fix this now, please.” Marisa wondered if his anger was really gone, or if he was simply very good at hiding it.
“Lie down,” said Anja, clicking off her EM glove and guiding Omar to a nearby chaise. “There you go, this’ll just take me a minute.”
“You can’t reverse it with another touch?” asked Bao.
“Turning the settings back on is way more complicated,” said Anja, trying to wrangle Omar into the chair. “I can do a full reboot of the sensory package, which takes forever, or I can just tweak the settings if he’ll freaking hold still.” She finally got him down, then reached up into her hair and pulled out one end of her cord, plugging it into the headjack on the back of Omar’s skull. Anja’s eyes began moving across an interface only she could see, and Marisa leaned forward.