The after-work crowd began to flow into the pathways of the medina, disgorged from air-conditioned jitneys that ran every five minutes from Biotech Park. It was easy to spot their business-ready fashions among the locals. Some wore spotless white thawbs or embroidered caftans flowing over their khakis; some had colorful hijabs over their hair or the tails of saris over their shoulders; some sported Zone jeans and button shirts; some went retro in western suits of linen and seersucker; some bared their upper thighs and chests with transparent fabrics that suggested their skills were too important for employers to worry about modesty. All chattered with each other or the network via ear clips, goggles, perimeters, implants, and specialized, invisible devices.
Many of them would be stopping at one of the dozens of Prague-style secret teahouses that had sprung up here over the sixty years since the late twenty-first century Collapse, which left populations and farms ravaged by plagues. Afterwards, the newly formed African Federation hatched a ten-year plan from their headquarters in Johannesburg. They promised the Federation’s three hundred million surviving citizens that they would build the most high-tech agricultural economy in the world.
A sweeping reform bill allowed the Federation government to transform virtually the entire continent into a special economic zone with no regulations on research into anything that could make farming lucrative again. Eurozone and Asian Union companies flocked to the cosmopolitan Federation cities to research transgenic animals that secreted drugs; synthetic fast-growing organisms; metagenetic topsoil engineering; and exo-agriculture that could thrive offworld for export to the Moon and Mars colonies. Recent advances in molecular engineering had been ruled unsafe and ethically questionable in other economic coalitions. But not in the African Federation.
Among the most successful businesses to come out of that regulatory free-for-all were outfits founded by engineers from Prague, Budapest, and Tallinn. Those companies attracted more people from the central Eurozone, and with them came a secret teahouse culture: cool, dark little rooms with unmarked doors where the customers had to know the bouncer, or to whisper a password. Usually the “secret” was just a meaningless formality. You could get loosely guarded passwords on the net, or come to know the bouncer by beaming him a little crypto cash. These Eurozone quirks were easily merged into the casual teahouse culture that had existed for centuries in the medina.
Still, a few teahouses took their secrets seriously. Like the nameless one where Paladin stood, analyzing highly diffuse airborne chemicals produced by dozens of varieties of tea leaf, dried and steeped in precisely heated water. One of the Federation’s covert operatives from the IPC had given them the secret password. The place was known to attract hackers and pirates. To Paladin, however, the customers were indistinguishable from the business class deluge outside. That’s probably why Eliasz had given him a HUMINT exercise to work on for the next few hours. The bot needed to hone his social skills, and there was no better place to do it than in a teahouse where they were trying to meet as many people as possible.
Eliasz poked Paladin, gesturing almost imperceptibly at the man next to him. After ordering tea, the man slouched so far over the bar that Paladin could see a pale stripe of skin showing above the waistband of his pants. It was time to try his opening gambit. Offer a piece of personal information, and humans will be sure to offer some of their own.
“I have never been here before, and it is not what I expected,” Paladin vocalized, turning his torso and face toward the man, who looked up with an expression of vague surprise. He hadn’t expected anyone to talk to him, least of all a giant robot.
“Yeah? Did you expect there would be hydrocarbons to drink?”
Through his back sensors, Paladin could see Eliasz rolling his eyes. The joke about bots looking for hydrocarbons to drink in bars was stale forty years ago, and came across as extremely condescending now. But the man was just old enough to have grown a tiny mustache that looked like two dark hyphens in the middle of his face.
Paladin powered on, vowing to succeed somehow with this interaction. “I’m Pack, and this is Aleksy.” He gestured to Eliasz. Pack was a very common name for lab assistant bots.
“I’m Slavoj.” The man extended his hand, grasping the light alloy of Paladin’s in his fingers. Blood samples revealed high levels of caffeine. That was a good sign. It could lead to an infodump with minimal prompting.
Paladin chose a conversational gambit that always seemed to yield results.
“Where are you from?”
Slavoj spilled his whole story out to them, virtually unbidden, in a stimulant-enabled rush. He’d come from somewhere in the central Eurozone to work with his friends at a tissue engineering startup, but they ran out of money. Now he was doing QA on muscle trellises for meat factories. Slavoj shook his head mournfully at Paladin and Eliasz. “I guess what I’m saying is that this place is no happy hunting ground for jobs right now. They tell you it’s easy to get rich here, but what that really means is that it’s not as hard to be poor.”
Paladin tilted his head to indicate sympathy and extemporized. “We keep hearing the same thing from other people.”
This was enough to elicit another diatribe from Slavoj about various jobs he’d tried to get but hadn’t, through no fault of his own.
Eliasz pressed a warm hand against Paladin’s lower back. The bot had actually succeeded in making a connection with Slavoj. For an instant, Paladin felt a flash of something that went beyond the usual programmed pleasure at completing a task and pleasing Eliasz. He was having fun. Impulsively, he sent a smiley emoji to Eliasz’ perimeter. When the man received it, he tapped his thumb lightly on the bot’s back with a kind of aimless, amiable rhythm.
Behind the bar, the teaman poured steaming water into a tall, stamped silver pot packed with mint leaves. He snapped his fingers at a boy in starched white, who placed the pot on a tray with two glasses, while the teaman put another dish of sugary cardamom biscuits on the counter in front of Slavoj. After the boy delivered the tray to a table of men in the corner, he sat down on a low stool behind the bar and peeked surreptitiously at Paladin’s dark bulk.
A large group of people poured into the shop, arguing animatedly about a story that was making its way around the science text repos.
“There’s no way the dipshits at Smaxo are smart enough to do that,” snorted one.
“I know people doing R&D there who are not stupid,” replied a man who had injected bone grafts under his scalp, remolding his skull to create an odd bas-relief phrenology map whose regions were tattooed with labels like “sex” and “whiskey.” He continued: “Why wouldn’t they backdoor their drugs? Half the world takes them. It’s the perfect social control mechanism.”
A woman whose face was partly hidden by a bulky gamer rig nodded. “Totally,” she said, twitching her sensor-beaded hands. It was unclear whether she was talking to somebody remote or responding to the thread of teahouse conversation.