How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobucar Read online

  Yinka cocks his head to one side, still not looking up. “Eighteen hours straight, we’re all gonna be podsick. For guaran.”

  I don’t get podsick myself, but I know how to counter it. “I’ve got the pharma to balance you out,” I say. “There’s no other way. We hit the safe room tomorrow night.”

  He finally meets my eyes, and for a second I see the nervous kid hidden under the I’m a cold pro act, out here in a foreign country trying to hustle and not sure what he’s getting into. Reminds me of me, but I had a better game face even back then.

  “Okay, man,” he says, gaze back to the phone screen. “But if I don’t like the feeling, I don’t go.”

  His thumb slides the volume back up and I let the tinny clash of kuduro play me out.

  * * *

  Shiptown’s best quality virtual is in Xavi’s sex house, so that’s where three clean pods are waiting for us. It’s a lurid little place, scab-red carpeting and black-and-white pornography stills coating every inch of the walls, with a lingering scent of bodily fluids that the air freshener can’t quite mask.

  I go in to check the pods—Yinka’s is modified with the old-school electrodes—and shake hands with Xavi, who owes me one for getting a bug out of his biofeedback interface and doesn’t know I put it in there in the first place. Then I come back out to share a vape with my just-arrived Fleischgeist while we wait for Nat to show up.

  “Never been to Lagos,” I say. “There’s a lagoon, yeah? Must be nice.”

  Yinka grudgingly turns his volume down, I imagine only because I’m smoking him up. “Hazy, man. Dirty.” He puffs out a blue-tinged cloud. “Shanties all around.”

  “That where you came up?” I ask.

  He passes the vape back. “Nah nah. I was born in a hospital.” He pauses, looking over my head. “My ma could afford the imps. She just didn’t want me to have them.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He shrugs his bony shoulders. “She was in a death cult.”

  “Ah.”

  Nat arrives fashionably late, just as the sun’s turning smelter orange and I’m turning antsy. She comes striding up the walkway with her immaculate black coat slicing open on long stockinged legs, and I can see Yinka get lovestruck in realtime, which is a perk of working with Nat and might be useful later.

  “The bioprinter wanted to haggle,” she says, raking a strand of hair off her face. “Doesn’t usually run the thing overnight. We’ll be good for the pickup time, though.”

  “Good,” I say. “Nat, Yinka. Yinka, Nat.”

  “Pleasure,” says Nat. She looks him up and down. “Nice jacket.”

  Yinka’s eyes don’t make it to hers, but they stick briefly on her bee-stung lips before they flit away. “Thanks. New.”

  “You two are going to really hit it off,” I say. “Let’s get started.”

  I usher them into the back, where the pods are levered open and Xavi’s setting up our extra hydration packs. Eighteen hours is a long go, and for all he knows we’re doing a marathon ménage à trois with the biofeedback on. I go over to my pod and poke my finger into the conduction gel.

  “It’s clean,” Xavi says, sounding wounded. “I drained and refilled.”

  My finger implant runs a little scan and agrees with him—no nasty bacterial surprises. We get Yinka set up first, helping him into the sensor suit that will compensate for his lack of implants and hooking it into a glinting spiderweb of electrodes. He lies back in the pod, head bobbing slightly in the gel, and shuts his eyes. Xavi shuts the lid.

  Nat takes the pod beside mine, strips down, and climbs in. She’s run enough sex scams in virtual that the whole thing is automatic. I’m worried about Yinka getting podsick, not her. “You tell him?” she asks. “About fooling the bioscanner?”

  “Broad strokes,” I say.

  “Okay,” she says, and closes the lid herself.

  That leaves me and Xavi, and I tell him to go watch the front. I wait until I hear him settle into his orthochair before I strip. Even then I keep an eye on the other pods, as if Yinka or Nat might pop up and start gaping at me. There’s a reason I only pulled my shirt up to my ribs in the restaurant, no higher. I don’t care about showing off the bruises Quini left me, but I’m a bit self-conscious about the work the hormone implant’s done in the past few months. Nat doesn’t know, and now’s not the time.

  I fold my clothes and stick them on the flimsy plastic shelf, then climb inside my pod. As soon as the conduction gel hits my bare skin, my implants start to sing.

  * * *

  Quini’s villa on the edge of the city is, of course, a tasteless monstrosity. Basically he fed Park Güell and the Sagrada Família into an architectural AI and it spat out a cheap Gaudí imitation overrun with geometric lizards and fluted-bone buttresses. I’m floating in the sky above it with Nat on one side of me and a slightly blurry Yinka on the other.

  “You ever ask about his decorating?” I mutter.

  “He’s still trying to prove to himself he’s in Catalonia,” Nat says. “Still scared to wake up dirt poor back in the pueblo. But no. I didn’t ask.”

  “Fortunately he worked a little Andalusia in there too,” I say, and pivot the view so we’re in the copse of twisted olive trees that shades the back half of the villa. “That’s our cover. We’re coming in cross-country.”

  Yinka looks around. The motion of his head leaves pixelated traces in the air. “They got dogs?”

  “One dog,” I say, and pull up the schematics I took from Quini’s sacked security chief. The dog materializes with us in the woods, right in front of Nat, who flinches a little. I don’t blame her. It’s a vicious-looking thing, all angles, long whippet legs and a sensor bulb head with a disc of glinting teeth underneath.

  “That’s a power saw,” Yinka says. “He rigged a power saw to its head?”

  “He likes things messy,” I say, glancing over at Nat. “But in this case, it’s a good thing. We’ll hear it coming. And I’m writing a backdoor into its friend/foe mapper. Once we’re past the dog…”

  I glide us forward, out of the olive trees, toward the soft blue glow of the swimming pool. Tendrils of steam waft off it, frozen midair. The surrounding white tiles are etched with, I shit you not, lizards. There’s a walkway and glass door leading into the villa itself, and from there it’s only a short trip down a hallway to Quini’s bedroom.

  Its main feature is probably the bed itself, a massive black slab floating in the air above a magnet pad. Other contenders include the sparring dummy strutting back and forth by the mirrors and mats, the holo on the ceiling of naked faceless bodies writhing together, and the oversized print of Quini’s own scowling face on the wall.

  “That’s you,” I say, pointing it out to Yinka. “Or it will be. Here, have a better look.”

  Quini appears in the room with us, cobbled together from all the free-floating footage I could grab of him from the past two years plus the few unfortunate interactions I’ve had with him in person. Nat looks the composite up and down, frowning a little at his sinewy folded arms, but she doesn’t say anything so it must be accurate enough for her.

  Me and Yinka walk a circle around him. He’s not big, Quini, but even in virtual he radiates a kind of ferocity, like a cat with its hackles up. His eyes are pouchy and bloodshot and his buzzed hair is bleached reddish-orange. His sun-browned skin is feathered with white scar tissue here and there, but no tattoos. Quini hates needles.

  “We have the schema for the bioscanner,” I say. “It’s looking at height and weight first. We’re going to bulk you out a bit, add a couple centimeters to your shoes. It’s got some limited gait recognition, so you’ll have to get the hang of walking like him, too.”

  I wave my hand and Quini slouches forward, toward the sparring dummy. Yinka watches intently.

  “Nat has generously donated some of his genetic material,” I continue. “Which the printer is hard at work turning into a palmprint glove and a facemask. It won’t be a perfect match, but these thin
gs never get a perfect match. It’ll be enough so long as I’m spoofing his implant signal at the same time.”

  Quini turns and starts walking back, loping steps, one arm a little stiff. I hope Yinka’s a good mimic.

  “Safe room is through here,” Nat says, and I get the impression she doesn’t like hanging around with even the virtual version of her abusive ex. We follow her past the bathroom to a blank stone wall. The only sign of the bioscanner is a tiny blue light, blinking at eye level. Yinka goes up on tiptoes for a second to meet it. His hand pats at his pocket.

  “And we don’t know what it is,” he says. “Just that it’s Klobučar.”

  “We know it’s small enough to be transported in an incubator pod this size,” I say, holding up a clenched fist. “We know Quini didn’t even take it out of said incubator pod. So we don’t have to worry about dragging some kind of, I don’t know, giraffe-orca hybrid back to the car. You go in, you grab it, we leave the way we came. Five minutes in the safe room, tops. Twenty in the house, tops.”

  “Quini’s where?” Yinka’s hand pats his pocket again, and I realize he’s feeling on muscle memory for his antique phone, which did not come to virtual with us. “While we’re doing all this shit. Where is he?”

  I understand the question. I understand that even looking at Quini, you know he’s not someone you want home during a home invasion.

  “It’s a Saturday night,” I say. “He’s busy at Flux. Nat will keep an eye on him while she sets up the spoof. So all we got for occupants is a skeleton security screw—four people, I got their files—and a cleaner.”

  Yinka gives a slow nod.

  “We’ll be good,” I say, trying to reassure both him and myself. “It’s time to start rehearsing.”

  * * *

  Seventeen hours later and we’re as ready as we can be. If you’ve ever done deep virtual, you know how time gets twisted. The longer you’re in the pod, the harder it is to tell if you’ve been in there for a week or ten minutes or your whole fucking life. Which is why I was a little worried for Yinka, but he seems to be holding up fine.

  He’s even smiling; Nat’s telling him a Ljubljana story, some naked businessman chasing her through the snowy street behind his hotel. She’s always been good at making shitty things sound funny, and I also feel like virtual helps you bond. When everything around you is artificial, you have to lean a little harder on the real people.

  I didn’t hear anything more about Yinka’s childhood, but he did confess he’s working on a few of his own kuduro tracks. That was sometime between the tenth and eleventh run on the house. I did some prep work alone while Yinka practiced being Quini under Nat’s tutelage, but mostly we ran the whole thing together. First with the patrols on their planned routes, then with minor randomization, then with disaster scenarios.

  Nat has a job all her own, planting the spoof at Flux, but she knows that place like the back of her hand.

  “All right,” I say, cutting her story short at the high point. “That last one felt good. Let’s run it one final time, then get out of here.”

  Nat stares at me and the grin drops off Yinka’s face.

  “We’re out, man,” he says. “We been out. You were the one who woke us up.”

  Shit.

  I take a closer look at my surroundings. We’re gliding still, but that’s because we’re in the back of a car heading up Avenida Diagonal through the synchronized swarm of black-and-yellow cabs retrieving and depositing revelers. Through the window I see dark sky splashed with holos. Nat and Yinka are across from me—Yinka’s not blurry at all—and the duffel bags are on the floor. We’ve already been to the bioprinter.

  “We’re on our way to Flux,” Nat says; then, on a private channel our Fleischgeist can’t hear: Up your dose.

  I look down and see the baggie of speed in my palm, the pharma Xavi slapped into our goodbye handshake. Reality warps and shivers around me. I don’t get podsick. I never get podsick.

  “You good?” Yinka says, voice pitching up, nerves creeping in.

  “I’m fucking with you,” I say. “Gallows humor, Yinka.”

  We drop Nat a block from Flux, and while Yinka’s looking away I dry-swallow as many pills as I can fit in my idiot mouth. A sweaty, skin-humming minute passes before things brighten. Sharpen.

  I never get podsick. It’s a bad omen and I can’t help but think it’s because of the hormone implant, the new chemical messengers in my body messing with my metabolism, with my brain.

  Don’t fuck this up, Nat chats me, and strides around the corner without looking back.

  * * *

  The copse of olive trees behind Quini’s villa isn’t more than a square kilometer, but at night, with a gut full of speed battling a podsick cerebellum, it seems big as a fairy-tale forest, a dark, dense thicket eating us whole. I’m trying real hard to keep my shit together.

  “We trip anything yet?” Yinka asks.

  “No tripping,” I say.

  The perimeter is sewn with sensors, but I own those already. As soon as we were in range I hit them with a maintenance shutdown, courtesy of some malware written by a ten-year-old in Laos who really knows her shit. That’s the thing about this line of work: There’s always some tiny genius coming up behind you doing it better.

  But the backdoor for the dog, that I had to do myself. The AI is a custom job, modified from a military prototype I’m not getting anywhere near without some serious social engineering, so I’m lucky the security chief had a vested interest in its inner workings. It only took one night of sifting source code to find a vulnerability. But we have to be in range.

  For a second I can’t remember if we’re on the fifth run or the sixth. Then I look at Yinka, clear, not-blurry Yinka, and get a cold needle jabbed into my spinal column. Real. This is real, and we’re coming up on the dog. I can see its bobbing signal in my implant, and I can hear the soft whine of the saw. I tighten my grip on my duffel bag. Look over at Yinka again. He mostly trusts me now, mostly because he has no other options.

  “I’m starting,” I say, and sit down.

  The dog spots our heat through the trees. It comes running, loping along, the serrated saw humming. I’m in my implant loading the code, line after line of custom script. All I need is the handshake. Which is funny, because it’s a dog. Sit. Shake. Don’t maul us.

  Yinka catches sight of it as it ducks around a twisty trunk. I hear him suck in a breath.

  “My connection is slower than I thought,” I say, and I nearly say, Let’s try it again, before I remember that we can’t. This is real, and the dog is breaking into a run. The saw is a spinning blur. I can picture it ripping into my face, spraying the olive trees with bright red blood. My heart is a fist pounding at my ribcage; in another second it’ll bust right through.

  “Man, it’s coming right at us,” Yinka says. “Get up. Get up, it’s coming right at us.”

  He’s right. The dog hurtles toward us and I dimly feel Yinka yanking under my arms, trying to haul me to my feet. Client and server collide. The code shuttles across.

  “Shake, motherfucker,” I say.

  The dog skids to a stop in front of us and wags its plastic tail. The whine of the saw makes my teeth ache in my jaw. It didn’t do that in virtual. We sit tight for a second until it trots away, then both of us breathe. The fairy-tale forest swells and contracts around me. I pop another pill, not caring if Yinka sees it.

  “Well done, man,” he finally says, and gives me a hand up.

  My legs are shaking when we come out of the woods. I’m still waiting for the speed to kick my head clear. Real, real, real. We can’t run this again, and that means I have to be perfect. We pad across the bone-dry tiles, past the steamy swimming pool, and Yinka stands watch while I crack the door into the villa. I’ve done it so many times it feels like a dream.

  Not a dream. Real. I’m podsick, and I need to keep my shit together.

  “After you,” I say, as the door slides open. I’m in the house cameras. Three of t
he four guards are in the kitchen with a vape, one is fucking the cleaner in the guest bathroom, both of them muffling their grunts with soft white towels clenched in their teeth. I run my tongue around my mouth, thinking how much I’d hate that. Lint and whatnot.

  Yinka leads the way down the hall to Quini’s room, the way he’s done eight times at least. He’s a little jumpy. I want to tell him to relax. Tell him we could run down the hallway screaming. It’s only virtual.

  Podsick. Podsick. Podsick. I have to chant it in my head. The speed should be balancing me out. Maybe Xavi gave me some real stepped-on shit. It’s working for Yinka, though, and I hope to God it’s working for Nat. Maybe my tolerance is too high.

  The cleaner hasn’t made it to the bed yet; the sheets are a tangled mess hanging off one end. The sparring dummy sees us and starts shadowboxing, reminding me of the mannequins on La Rambla I hate so much. I flip it the finger as we walk past. The door to the safe room is still invisible, a thick stone plane, the scanner winking innocent blue at us.

  I set my duffel down; Yinka drops his.

  “Okay,” I say. “Time to check in with Nat.”

  * * *

  Nat is in the bathroom of Flux, and because she’s cutting me into her eyefeed there’s a blissy moment where I am her, where the reflection in the smart mirror is my reflection. The geometry of her dark hair hitting her perfect collarbone is so beautiful it hurts. She puts a pill between her puffy lips and washes it down with a slurp of water from the faucet.

  We’re at the safe room, I chat her.

  The rental timer on the stall behind her expires; the electronic bleating almost drowns out the sound of the occupant vomiting.

  He’s on the upper level, she chats me. Can you reach?

  She drops her defenseware, which we both know is a polite fiction—I installed that defenseware. Her body becomes an antenna, boosted by the graphene conduction pads she taped to her dress, and I can suddenly see every implant in the club. Quini’s are tagged a bright red, but I can’t touch them.