“Mom will want help with dinner. Will she be mad with us for being out so late?”
“Not this time, I think.” Kurt checked himself. “But we should still go, before the curfew.” Police and Department of Homeland Security operatives would be on high alert tonight, as on all seasonal holidays. A revenge strike for the previous year’s nuclear attack seemed long overdue, so tensions would be high. And for Kurt, a curfew violation and subsequent investigation would invite risky attention. “Just remember the truth about Grandma. And remember to keep it to yourself, or there could be bad consequences.”
“Grandma was an illegal,” Rita whispered under her breath, so quietly that Kurt failed to hear her as they headed back toward the graveyard gate. And again, with her lips barely moving as she tested the fit of the idea: “Grandma was a spy…”
Hurrying to keep up with Kurt’s lengthening stride, Rita smiled in delight.
Trade Show
SEATTLE, MARCH 2020
Rita awakened to the eerie warble of her phone’s alarm, followed by NPR cutting in with the morning newscast. (Oil hitting a thirty-year low, $25 a barrel: a Republican senator calling for a tax on imports from other time lines, to prevent global warming.) She rolled over on the sofa bed and grabbed for it, suppressing a moan. It was five o’clock in the morning, pitch black but for the faint glow of parking lot floodlights leaking into the motel room. Today was Friday: last day of the trade show. Tomorrow they were due to pack everything up and head home. But today—
Today was their last day on stage demoing HaptoTech’s hardware while their boss, Clive, worked the audience for contacts and (eventually) sales. Last day of mandatory stage makeup and smiles, last day of booth-bunny manners, last day performing their canned routines under the spotlights. Last fucking day. Hoo-rah. The end couldn’t come soon enough for her. HaptoTech sold motion capture gear for the animation industry: kits for digitizing body movements so they could be replayed in cartoons and computer games. Unlike most MoCap rigs, which were suits you wore or pods you strapped on, HaptoTech’s consisted of tiny implants, injected under the performer’s skin. Supposedly this gave more precision and better inputs on musculature. What the brochure didn’t say was that the implants itched.
Rita sat up and stretched, trying not to scratch. Her muscles ached from yesterday’s workout. She’d taken the folding bed in the motel suite’s day room, happy not to arm-wrestle with Deborah and Julie over the twin beds next door. Deborah snored when she slept (and complained when she was awake), and Julie talked too much, oversharing her religion enthusiastically. Rita had agreed to double up with them only because it was that or no contract for the trade show gig, which paid just well enough to make it worthwhile. Clive was a cheapskate, but even a cheapskate paying her by the hour was better than no contract (and no money). But by day 4 of a week of twelve-hour shifts, she was well past second thoughts and into thirds, if not fourths.
She wove her way past the wreckage of last night’s rushed takeout and padded into the bathroom. She’d been too tired to scrub off every last bit of greasepaint the night before: now she made good. By the time she finished fixing the oversight, someone else was banging on the bathroom door with steadily increasing desperation.
Rita opened the door and found herself nose to nose with Julie. “Hey,” Julie squeaked angrily: “gangway!”
Rita sidestepped and the bathroom door slammed behind her. Sharing three to a suite was one thing, but three to a bathroom was something else.
“Sleep well?” Rita asked, trying to keep her tone light. Deb paused her brushing long enough to glare and shake her head, then went back to untangling. Rita turned to the coffeepot: she’d refilled the water jug last night before hitting the sack, a preparation that stood her in good stead this morning.
While the coffeemaker was burbling, she laid out her costume for inspection. There were no catastrophic stains: good. The nanotech fabric treatment might keep it smelling fresh for weeks, but couldn’t work miracles. All it would take was one drunk conference delegate with a glass of red wine to ruin her costume and put her out of a job. “One more day,” she muttered to herself. “Just one more day.” The implants in her right arm itched momentarily, making a muscle twitch.
“Looking forward to getting home?” Julie asked behind her.
Rita tensed. “Yeah,” she admitted. “And to getting these fucking things out.”
“They itch like scabies,” Julie said thoughtlessly, and a moment later: “A kid brought that to the summer camp I was at one year. Didn’t go there again.”
Rita gave in to the impulse to rub furiously at the inside of her left arm, then made herself stop. If she’d known what this gig would come with she wouldn’t have bothered. Clive had worked them like dogs all week; she hadn’t even had time to check Facebook, much less go for a walk and log some geocaches—her hobby. It was wake, eat, work, sleep all the time.
“I think Clive said he closed a five-implant deal with a German games company yesterday. That’s a five-grand commission between us, right? If he gets the export licenses.”
You needed an export license to send any kind of high-tech kit out of Fortress USA these days: it was optimistic to expect to be allowed to sell the implants to Germany. Julie invariably looked on the bright side of things. It probably explained why she’d tried to become an archaeologist, before the bottom fell out of the profession. Not that Rita was in any position to throw stones. She nodded, not wanting to burst Julie’s bubble. Just over twelve hundred bucks would vanish into her student loan account like a bucket of water into a polluted reservoir. She made herself smile: “Let’s go break a leg. Maybe Clive can sell another bunch?”
Through the bathroom door, the sound of a toilet flushing.
“Like, yeah. Whatevs. Wire me up.”
They drank coffee in the predawn gloom, three mid-twenties acting temps sharing a cheap motel suite just off I-5. Then they helped each other into their demo outfits, first strapping on the battery packs and inductive chargers, then testing their implants before pulling on their costumes and taking turns applying their makeup. Finally they were ready to head to the Waterfront trade center. Rita drove, an Indian princess in sari and coronet, her passengers a sixties schoolmarm in beehive and butterfly glasses and a time-traveling Martian debutante in silver boots and shoulder pads.
She didn’t know it yet, but it would be the last normal workday of her career.
*