At this hour, the winding streets of the medina were quiet and dark. The yellow glow of the Hassan II minaret divided the horizon over low roofs. For a moment, Paladin considered that, from a human perspective, the streets would look even murkier when contrasted with that perfectly architected shaft of light. Maybe that was the point.
The ancient port was filled with tugs and fishing boats, and the water was held still by a long, curling jetty made from enormous, interlocking cement jacks. Here and there on the docks, Paladin could see people sleeping under stained blankets of waterproof cotton, but if they noticed Eliasz and the bot, they showed no sign of it. At last a helicopter skimmed over the mosque toward them, its engines noise-cancelled to the point where all they could hear was the air being beaten with such regularity that it became a long, unending sigh.
The two settled into the cabin. Soon Casablanca was little more than a shining crescent at the edge of a vast continent. Eliasz finally spoke. “I’ve suggested to the project head that we split up to follow the two leads Frankie gave us. I’m going down to Vegas to see if I can dig up something on this escaped slave, and you can follow up on that Vancouver lab. Thanks to your research on The Bilious Pills, I think you’ll know where to start.” He paused, and took Paladin’s hand. The helicopter was unpiloted, and there would be no video capture here, either. “Vancouver also has a large community of autonomous bots, so that’s your cover: You’re a newly autonomous lab bot looking for work. When we get to base, your botadmin can set you up with a simulated autonomy key.”
“What is the difference between a simulated autonomy key and a real one?”
“A simulated key expires,” Eliasz said, his hand gripping hers as they dropped down over the jet field.
15
PIRATE YOUR BODY
JULY 13, 2144
Moose Jaw hadn’t changed much in the past thirty years. As Jack’s truck entered the tiny city, she passed the giant moose statue looming to the left of the highway and drove down narrow roads lined with refurbished wooden houses covered in the frills of another era’s architectural fashion.
Downtown were a few casinos and a mineral spa where Jack’s family had come for the Christmas holidays. Built over two centuries ago, the spa was a landmark, its ancient pools an attraction for the daring in winter, because you could swim under a low arch and find yourself in a steaming public bath out of doors. As a little girl, Jack had delighted endlessly in that outdoor pool. She would dip under to wet her whole head, then bob in the odd-tasting water up to her neck until her hair became a fine white net of frost around her face and crackled under her hands.
Aside from the casino, Moose Jaw’s main attraction was a series of tunnels that ran under the city. Local legend held that they had been home to the city’s immigrant Chinese labor force in the early twentieth century. These anonymous men and women lived and worked in dark underground hovels doing laundry for the white prairie folk. After Jack went on a tour of the musty, underground rooms, she started telling the kids in elementary school that she had a great-great-great-grandparent who once lived below the city.
Her father was appalled when he found out. It was the first time he connected her mobile to the family server and let her explore on her own, showing her how to find the photographs proving the Chens had come from Hong Kong to Vancouver long after the tunnels had been abandoned, settling in Saskatchewan in the early 2000s.
Jack’s interest in the tunnels continued even after she reluctantly accepted her father’s version of the family history. She returned to Moose Jaw as an adult in the summer between her first and second year of college, tagging along with a group of friends who were volunteering with an archaeological dig. For months, they carefully excavated the area beneath a condemned warehouse off Main Street.
The principal investigator had a grant to investigate whether the tunnels had actually belonged to bootlegger Al Capone during the twentieth-century Prohibition era. Since most of the tunnels had been blocked off over two centuries ago, finding the answer involved a lot of careful digging, 3-D imaging of each layer, and stringing wire everywhere so that the site eventually looked like a massive grid.
It was ultimately never clear whether the additional tunnels they excavated actually belonged to Al Capone or just a random gangster. Large and ventilated, the space they found still contained bootlegger gear and a few antique guns. When the grant ran out, Jack helped seal up the entrance, which was now in the basement of a new apartment building. The archaeologists, ever hopeful that one day their grant might be renewed, left one entrance to the excavation open, accessible via a small trapdoor.
After her experiences with research grants, Jack knew that nobody would ever be visiting that tunnel again. Except her. She was keeping the tradition of the tunnels alive by using them for smuggling. Over the past two decades, she’d tricked them out with an air purification system, a covert hookup to the network and power grids, sleeping quarters, and a hidden safe where she could stash a secure mobile and several bags of drugs.
Sometimes Jack stayed here for weeks, letting her trail go cold. Maybe her ancestors had never lived in these tunnels, but they felt like a legitimate inheritance.
Slipping into an old routine calmed her down. She paid untraceable cash for a month’s rent on a parking spot at one of the spas, shrugging a faraday bag over her truck. It also contained a perimeter alarm. If anybody tried to get into the vehicle, it would alert her and start a video feed that she could pick up in her tunnel. Then she bought a little fresh fruit and pepperoni—she kept a cooker down there, but she had a craving for comfort food.
At last she arrived at the service entrance to the now-aging apartment building. Jack blasted the surveillance cameras with an infrared beam, creating what looked like a few seconds of glitch while she eased down through the basement hatch.
“Light,” she said to the dusty air, waiting for the old fluorescents to turn heaps of wood and shattered solar cells into more than piles of shadow. This dirty room was another way of covering her tracks. Anyone who managed to find the nearly invisible hatch would be met with what looked like a pile of last century’s trash.
Her safe house was in the main portion of the tunnel, but she’d blocked access to it with a thick spray of concrete foam, leaving only a small hole near the floor that could be plugged with a perfectly shaped hunk of the same stuff the wall was made of. She pulled this plug in behind her, worming backward into the main tunnel, scraping her arms, belly, and back on the rough material as she passed through.
“Light and air,” she coughed. The bootleggers’ haven began to glow with yellow light, and a fan hummed.
The tunnel had a low, curved roof reinforced with thermoplastic beams and strung with LED wires. Shallow nooks carved into the walls had once held smugglers’ weapons and loot, but might actually date back to the immigrants who needed to stow household items. Down the center of the tunnel was a lab bench she’d cobbled together from a cheap door made of processed seed hulls, nailed to polymer stumps discarded from a printer factory. That bench contained her whole life: a fabber, a sequencer, and a projector, all built from generic, nougat-colored parts. These were networked to an antenna that snaked up into the walls of the apartment building above, sending signals that hopped between frequencies, masquerading as a variety of devices.
At the far end of the room, under the air purifier box, was her futon. Atop the chilly floor, she’d unrolled a soft, colorful carpet from Fez, a city south of Casablanca. This place was like her sub, hidden below the surface but wired to the outside world.