“I need to supplement my musculature,” Paladin said in Darija. “Unfortunately, my master knows nothing about robots, and only speaks English. But you look like you might have what we’re looking for. This is a nice selection.”
The man glanced up at Paladin, and then darted a quick side-eye at Eliasz. “Eurozone?” he asked. “Where? East?”
“He doesn’t tell me anything. Somewhere they don’t learn Darija.”
That got a wry grin. “OK, friend. What length and tuning do you need?”
Through his rear sensors, Paladin could see that Eliasz was trying to hide a matching grin of his own.
As the bot and the muscle man haggled over grades of fiber, Paladin tried to turn their connection into something useful.
“Is there anywhere to buy off-brand biotech?” “Off-brand” was local slang for pirated goods. “My master wants something cheap for himself.”
“I don’t know anything about off-brands.” The vendor barely looked up from the table, where he was gently wrapping Paladin’s newly purchased muscle strands in an oil-infused membrane. “But, cheap stuff? You want to go down by the docks.”
When Paladin told Eliasz about his failure, the man raised his eyebrows.
“That wasn’t a fail, buddy. You got great intel. Nobody is going to tell you directly how to find illegal shit. That was genius, asking for something cheap. He was able to tell you everything without admitting that he knew anything.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
Eliasz shrugged. “That’s the thing about humans. People always think they’re being so clever with codes and euphemisms. But they’re desperate to say what they know. As soon as you establish trust, people want to infodump. You’re a natural at this. I bet it’s even easier for you because they don’t suspect a bot would be sneaky like a human.”
Paladin considered this information carefully. Were there actually ways that he could be better than Eliasz at HUMINT?
“While you’re getting all fancy with your Darija, why don’t you buy me some dinner before we head to the docks?” Eliasz gestured at a vendor unrolling a swatch of meat to put over a spit. At the next stall, they supplemented the charred lamb with sesame bread from a stack of fresh breads baked into fat circles.
Evening piled the streets with shadows and the walls began to glow. Walking and eating at the same time, Eliasz bumped into the bot with companionable aimlessness. He tossed a shred of meat to a kitten padding hopefully alongside them, and Paladin wondered if this was how Eliasz acted when he wasn’t on a mission. As Paladin read Eliasz’ biosigns through his shoulder sensors, he caught the man gazing at him intently. Paladin pointed his face at the man’s face, so Eliasz would know he was gazing back. For a period of two full seconds, Paladin’s visual sensors locked with Eliasz’ eyes for reasons that Paladin could not decipher. Or maybe, as Eliasz would probably say, the reason was obvious. Maybe they just liked each other.
Paladin thought about what this might mean as they walked to the docks in search of his next target for HUMINT practice.
At midnight, Eliasz and Paladin arrived at the downtown address Slavoj had given them for a sub-basement lab three stories below the Twin Center towers. Once a gleaming mall, it was now a warren of live-work spaces.
“This may turn out to be a dead end,” Eliasz warned. “Just biopunk scenesters. But Frankie is somebody to watch—she’s been arrested before, for possession of unlicensed lab equipment. Keep watch on who she’s talking to, OK, buddy?”
“I will.”
“And make some friends.” Eliasz poked him in the side with a grin, and Paladin poked him back carefully. Human flesh was flimsy compared to a bot carapace. He still wasn’t used to it.
They stepped out of the evening’s moist heat and into a climate-conditioned foyer. Over a century ago, this building had been the gem of Casablanca, a monument to its wealth and Westernization at a time when most of the Federation was unbalanced by plagues, protests, and warfare. Now it was dwarfed by the luxury skyscrapers ringing the roundabout at United Nations Place. Its boutiques and luxury condos had been transformed into crowded homes for artists, drifters, and radicals.
Two people were sharing some 420 near the elevator doors. They wore black caftans threaded with fiery red electrofilaments, and their dark faces shimmered faintly with temporary glitter polish.
“Going to the party?” asked one, as Eliasz pressed the down button.
“Yeah.”
“You’re just in time for the orgy.” The two giggled and waved delicate fingers as the doors closed.
Paladin and Eliasz emerged into a room whose atmospheric controllers could not keep up with the amount of heat and sweat emitted by the overcapacity crowd. A dance floor had been cleared in one corner, and a few dozen people were writhing and bouncing beneath strobes. To the right, plumbing for a wet lab had been converted temporarily into a drink-mixing area. The man with WTF tattooed on his head was behind the bar, concocting a variety of drinks and handing them out in transparent foam cups to a line of sweating people. Overhead was a loft with mirrored windows and a huge “CAUTION!” sign on its door.
At the edges of the dance floor and the bar, knots of people argued about code or showed off new mods and gadgets. A shirtless man with lightly furred wings growing from his shoulder blades was surrounded by a group that included Mecha and Slavoj, both swaying slightly with intoxication. He flexed the wings, modeled on a bat’s, and Mecha stroked one appreciatively.
Suddenly Frankie came rushing down the loft staircase, her face set purposefully as she brushed past a few people who tried to say hello. She headed right to WTF, pushing easily through the throng, and whispered in his ear. He checked a readout in his wrist and nodded. Paladin tried to pick up what they were saying, but there was too much ambient noise. The bot settled for watching them from the sensors in the back of his head while he and Eliasz joined the group with Mecha and Slavoj.
“Pretty bot!” Mecha squealed, throwing her arms around his torso, smearing him with the sugars manufactured by her drunkenness. She aimed the black lozenges of her eyes at Eliasz. “Is he yours? What’s his name?”
“Why do you assume he belongs to anybody?” Eliasz took a cagey, teasing tone. He had picked up the tenor of the group and was blending, using his gift for conformity to accumulate trust quickly. Somebody had given him a cup of glowing orange liquid whose molecular signature said vodka, and he nodded his head to the beat that emerged from amplifiers strung along the ceiling. Mecha laughed and sent a message through her game rig, which Paladin easily tuned, decrypted, and forwarded to Eliasz.
Room for one more up there? This boy is hot.
She had messaged somebody in the loft, a person who was using a throwaway device with no useful ID data attached. The throwaway responded:
Yeah, one more is fine, but that’s it. We’re almost ready.
Behind them, Frankie was rushing back up the stairs, tailed by a man dressed in a cape that flickered with LEDs. As the door to the loft opened, Paladin caught a glimpse of a room padded with foam cushions and swarming with minute projectors that filled the walls with oozing, abstract designs.
A faster beat spurred the dancers on the floor to start wiggling, and Frankie slammed the door to the loft. Mecha stood on tiptoes to yell-whisper in Eliasz’ ear: “Do you want to come upstairs and play with me and Frankie?”