“A front for what, exactly?” he asks. She freeze-frames his expression—false smile on the lips, eyes narrowed in fear, hostility.
She remembers the high city and the girl—eurasian, probably a teenager, how her car’s windshield was webbed with cracks and looked like it was last washed a thousand miles ago. She’s on the verge of explaining, or trying to, as in duty bound, but she doesn’t like him, and in the absence of sympathy it’s hard to communicate subtle things, and she thinks he’d relish the chance to play interrogator. “It’s hard to say just what it was hiding,” she says, as neutrally as she can.
“And why is that?”
“Well, I suppose it’s because the AI was hiding it,” she says. She remembers the AI’s vastness, and shivers as its echoes press at her.
“That’s a very strong claim,” Martin says, looking up, fingers poised over his tablet. “I assume you can support it with evidence?” He’s in his late twenties, and has that slightly fussy programmer diction—his sense of his manhood will be tied up with his technical skills, and this must be his first job, so he’ll be more invested than he needs to be. She urges herself to meet his hostility with compassion. Fails utterly.
“It’s too complicated for me to try to convey the details,” she says. “My job is to provide an outline of what’s the case, not to convince you of anything.”
He half-sneers, half-laughs, but before he can speak she says, “I have another appointment,” and rises. She hasn’t read her contract with W&P, but knows that in it, as in all of her contracts, there will be a clause capping the debrief at half an hour—she reserves the right to answer further questions over email—it’s something she usually uses to fend off clients who become fascinated, and want to linger.
She’s already turned away when she hears his phone get a text and he says, “Wait. Please don’t go.” His tone is different, supplicating. She turns back, finds him looking alarmed. “We’d really like you to stay. I’m authorized to offer new and favorable terms.”
She wonders what could have changed so suddenly. Not that it matters, as in her heart she’s already gone.
She says, “You’ve got my agent’s number.”
*
Afterwards she always needs to be alone.
She squats by the wall outside the hangar, pulling her jacket close against the cold wind from the Bay, wishing she still smoked, letting herself attend to the echoes of the machines.
Her mind is aglow with power grids, the ley lines of the freeways, water in free fall in the dark. She reminds herself that these are the machine’s thoughts, not her own, and that she must let them go, but still they whirl in her memory. She inhales the sharp salt reek of the wetlands, watches the planes’ choreography in the airspace over SFO; the fugue stirs, not far from the surface, and she has a sense that planes and bay are shadows and symbols whose true significance is hidden but that revelation is close. Her hand finds a stone on the asphalt, grips it—she grinds her fingers into its surface, savoring its texture, reminding herself that she is here, in this morning, in the world, not lost in the pages of some vast and secret book. She thinks of coffee, its heat and bitterness. Breathe, she reminds herself, staring blankly at the Bay’s glitter.
14
Ghost
The favela’s rooftops are slick with rain but Kern runs flat out, lost in his velocity. The mark’s phone is in his pocket, and Lares’ place is close, but he wishes it were farther so he’d have reason to maintain his reckless forward motion.
A gap in the fabric of the rooftops before him, and as he accelerates toward the jump his foot slips. Momentary free fall, and through it an awareness of the approaching abyss, but he catches himself, jarring his shoulder, and stumbles off the last of his momentum before reaching the edge.
At the gap’s edge, he looks down into emptiness, sees how it’s full of rain, the strangers passing far below. He crouches there, panting, the humidity such that his sweat stays on his skin. His shoulder aches but all he regrets is the loss of his sense of flow.
At least now I’ll have money, he thinks, touching the phone in his pocket, listening to the buzz of the drones flying by. One is close, coming closer; he can’t see it clearly—it’s a shadow on the grey sky—but it lacks the red fore and aft lights of the SFPD ones, so he hesitates, though now it’s practically on top of him, and then there’s a spotlight in his eyes and a muffled squawking—“SFPD sit the fuck down and stay where you are!”—but it’s a lie, it’s obviously a lie, and once again he’s off and running.
He thought he knew the rooftops and the secret ways across them but the construction drones must have been hard at work because it’s like a nightmare where familiar things have turned perilous and strange, and he almost misses his footing when a berm of wet concrete rises before him where nothing ought to be. The buzz of the drone is close behind him, and if he twists an ankle it’s over, but now atop the berm he sees the city glowing through the fog and there across the rooftops are figures running toward him—they are many, but their hesitations tell him that they don’t really know the way. There’s a stairwell nearby, or was, so he breaks for it, as though he knows for a fact that it isn’t built over, and then he’s in the air over the stairs and then the shock as he hits the landing.
The stairs descend into the darkness of the favela’s interior, which is good, because flying drones won’t go into confined spaces, and as he runs down flight after flight he’s wondering who he attacked last night and thinking that he’s always known it would end like this, that he’d offend the wrong person and resources would be brought to bear against him such that all his hardness and his will and his incessant training would be meaningless, and leave him without defenses, and he’d thought he was invincible but in fact he’s just a nobody and no one important has ever cared enough to put him down.
He comes out onto a street full of stalls where they’re just putting up awnings against the rain. Peripheral flashes of lurid video game posters and glowing neon signage and hand-drawn menus over the food carts. It feels better to be around people though he knows they won’t help him but if he’s going to die at least he won’t be alone. He slows his pace and makes himself breathe through his nose, though his lungs are burning, and he takes out his phone to give himself a countenance. A man with a shaved head and a cheap shiny leather coat is coming toward him, in a hurry to get somewhere, and he realizes he’s holding the mark’s phone when from it a girl’s urgent voice says, “He’s one of them.”