Maybe there was some weird crap going on with Lyle and Frankie, but Jack was suddenly filled with certainty that she could deal with it. She didn’t want to lose another person she loved. Or another place. And Jack had to admit she wasn’t particularly worried about piracy.
Lyle was much happier after she quit her day job. Signal was flourishing, and she told Jack it was the first time she truly believed she wasn’t living out some twisted version of her mother’s dreams. For a few months, it felt like they were back in the Free Lab storage room again, madly in love with each other and the revolution.
Until one afternoon when Jack got a text from an unknown string of numbers, which usually meant Frankie. It read: We need to talk about Lyle. Meet me at the teahouse in an hour?
Frankie held court in a dim, red-curtained room at a teahouse in the biotechie ghetto. Sitting cross-legged at a low table surrounded by plump cushions, the pirate was playing with a handheld 3-D printer that was spitting out what looked like tiny chunks of cellulose.
She stood quickly when Jack arrived. “Thanks for coming.”
Frankie ordered another pot of tea and gave Jack a look that was entirely free of her usual sarcasm. “Have you talked to Lyle lately about her new project?”
“I thought she was working with you.” Jack felt a twist of the old jealousy; there were so many things she didn’t know about what Lyle was doing with Frankie.
Frankie settled her chin into her fist, and Jack noticed with surprise that the pirate had dyed her hair pink. “I haven’t hung out with her in weeks. She’s been working with a new group, run by this woman called FoxP2. I’m worried.”
“Well, now you know how I’ve been feeling for the past year,” Jack commented sardonically.
Frankie said nothing, and swirled tea in her cup. “FoxP2 is dangerous.”
“More dangerous than a pirate who sells illegal drugs to the highest bidder?” Jack felt like an asshole as soon as she said it, but Frankie was unfazed.
“We both care about Lyle, and I understand why you’re pissed at me. But I want you to understand that I am very careful about my work. I don’t want to get caught, and I spend a lot of time making sure of that. Hasn’t Lyle told you about my business?”
“You already told me you’re a pirate.”
“I told you that because I trust you. But I also run a legitimate business as a consultant, and all my money is funneled through that. I’ve worked with an attorney to make sure the IPC will never get anything on me.”
Maybe she was lying about that attorney. If so, at least her lies demonstrated that she understood the dangers of her job.
“I take it this other woman isn’t as careful as you are.”
FoxP2 and her collective wanted to disrupt the system, but their plans didn’t extend much beyond the disruption. Lyle was apparently helping them engineer muscles for pirated legs and arms, each replacement limb in violation of dozens of patents. Their work was excellent, but flashy. FoxP2 had a public text repo called Pirate Your Body, where she bragged about all the lives that she’d saved with her work. And all the greedy biotech corporations she’d screwed over.
As Frankie talked, Jack pulled out her mobile and found FoxP2’s journal on Memeland. The latest entry was just a series of pictures uploaded from a party. Lyle figured in a lot of them, dressed in armor, with her head half-shaved. Jack recognized a few people from Signal dancing with her. She thumbed back over to the pictures of Lyle again, trying to figure out what she’d been doing the night they were taken.
“Somebody is going to punish them. The Federation can’t afford to look like it’s harboring flagrantly subversive groups. It’s bad for trade. We’ve got to get Lyle to stop working with FoxP2.”
Jack had to admit that FoxP2’s project looked exactly like the kind of thing that got people detained by the IPC—and sometimes disappeared. It was too obvious they wanted to flout the law. Was it possible that Lyle genuinely didn’t understand the stakes here?
Frankie’s glasses were receiving data, and the pirate ducked out of the room for a moment. Jack played with one of the cellulose blobs that the 3-D printer was still extruding onto the table. It looked like it could be some kind of processed plant material, the kind of thing you might package a drug in.
She tried to imagine how she would bring up FoxP2 with Lyle—it wouldn’t be easy. But she never had a chance to have that conversation. Frankie ran back into the room, her lips thinned into a line, and yanked Jack up by the wrist. “FoxP2 is a bigger fuckup than I thought. We need to go.”
As they left the tea shop in a rush of panic, Frankie forgot the 3-D printer, even though it was the latest model and very hard to find in Casablanca.
Jack remembered the next twenty-four hours as a series of violent, black-and-white still photographs, like the slides archivists pasted into old movies where footage has been lost.
It was 9:00 a.m. when they arrived at Signal, and it had already been raided. A couple of hackers who had hidden under some pillows in the loft told them the story. Thugs from the IPC had waved something that looked like an international warrant, chased everyone out, and confiscated all of the equipment that they didn’t recognize, which was almost everything. Jack received an official mail from the IPC explaining that the equipment would be held until such a time as they could determine what it was being used for.
It was midnight, and FoxP2 was dead—or, at least, that’s what they assumed. Her lab had been blown up. The Federation news sites already had quotes from IPC officials saying a terrorist lab had exploded while manufacturing illegal drugs. FoxP2’s journal was gone from its usual server. Science chroniclers immediately mirrored it at a radical text repo archive in Anchorage.
It was 3:00 a.m. and Lyle’s body was a collapsed shadow blocking the bedroom door. Someone had dumped her in Jack and Lyle’s apartment, wrapped in latex polymer. She was not doing six things at once. She was not talking about changing the future. She was not dancing. She was not dying her hair, hacking molecules, leaving a mess in the kitchen, or giving Jack a kiss. She was not electroluminescent. Therefore she must be dead. Which made no sense, because it was only a few hours ago when Jack discovered that she might be in danger of being dead, in the unlikely event that Jack could not talk her out of being in a position to possibly be dead.
Jack was halfway down the stairs when the bomb went off. She couldn’t stop herself from turning around, looking back at everything she loved on Earth burning. A jagged piece of ceramic hurled itself out the door and burned its way through her jacket. Maybe through her heart.
It was 5:00 a.m.; somehow they were in Frankie’s truck, on the road to Fez. They had left Signal behind; they had left Lyle’s body behind. They had to get out of town, Frankie said. Jack was having a hard time responding to anything. A tissue repair bandage was sticky on her neck and chest. Arms wrapped around her bent legs, she pressed her closed eyes against her knees and felt tears running down the insides of her thighs.
“What am I going to do?” She rocked back and forth against the lumpy polymer seat.
Frankie shot a look at her, then faced the dusty road again. “You’re going to survive. That is what you’re going to do.”
Because she could not yet take in the full weight of Lyle’s death, Jack pondered the causalities: Why had Lyle chosen to start a project with FoxP2 instead of continuing to work with Frankie? Why hadn’t Lyle ever told her about it? Why had she put herself in that kind of danger?