Flash/blink/change.
Coiled up like a foetus, shivering and afraid. Clothes ripped. Air heavy with fear. Juno’s breath came in bolts, she forced it through her throat. There were invisible hands at her neck, twisting.
The girl pulled at her own hair and felt the way the flesh on her face moved. She felt wrong in this skin, the shape too tight, hung wrongly across angular bones. Juno watched the worms gather in the shadowed corners of the room. They didn’t know she could see them. In the dark places they were piecing together the mirrors she had broken, fixing them when her back was turned. They left the little pieces on the floor where she could stand on them. The fragments would slip beneath her skin, work their way to her heart.
Blood taste on her tongue. She remembered being inside the egg floating in the dark waters. She remembered the screaming people who loved her. There were the angels of pain overhead-and there was the dark-skinned man. Dark like blood. Dark like sky. She would never see him again.
She began to cry as the walls grew teeth and the worms marshalled their forces. At her feet there was the needle, shiny and long and candy-bright. It ended in a bulb of perfect blue, beckoning and glistening, calling to her. With shiver-tremble hands she probed to it and gathered it up. It almost fell into the sky, she could barely keep it in her clammy fingers. “Buh-bubble inna stream,”
Juno discharged the injector into her eye and went into quiet shock.
The cabin door sealed behind him and in the gloom Rope crossed to the desk and took his seat. The window blinds were open slightly, slow-lidded eyes peeking a faint sky glow into the compartment. He licked his lips and touched a hidden control in the desk; obediently, a silent panel yawned open to present him with a drawer lined in rich purple velvet. Nestled inside was a book made of rusted steel. As they always did, the edges of the pages cut him when he removed it. Rope clasped it in both hands and felt the thin streams of his blood pooling in the pockmarks and scored channels in the tome’s cover. His thumb was ripped gently as he stroked the meat of it over the spine of the book. Where the blood marked out the age-worn letters it was possible to see something of the title: The Path of Joseph.
Rope very much wanted to open the book, but that would have taken more of him than he wanted to give at this moment. There would be time, later. Time enough. A device in the desk chimed, and he bared his teeth. “I said not to disturb-”
Already a screen was erecting itself out of the desk’s featureless top, and blinking in the corner of the display was the oval logo of RWB. This was an incoming call, a live feed overriding all his personal lockouts. There were only a few people who could do that.
He had the book concealed and his hands knotting beneath a towel when Phoebe Hi’s face blinked into life before him. Rope always thought she resembled a misassembled Darbie doll, a perfect It-Girl head wrongly attached to a tubby little body. This he kept to himself, showing the required degree of deference to his superior.
“You spun that Popeldouris bitch well. The political opinion we could have done without, though.”
He shrugged. “It seemed right for the moment. It also allows RedWhiteBlue to distance itself from me. You know, ‘these views are the personal opinions of Mr Rope and not those of RWB, et cetera, et cetera.’ I’m providing plausible deniability.”
Hi shook her head. “Don’t build up your part, Heywood. Your job was to ensure that the consumers will accept the talent’s appearance at the Victoria Peak event as spontaneous on her part, an expression of free will.”
“I doubt she even understands the meaning of those words.”
“We want the consumers to feel unfettered, Heywood. You understand how important that is to the work.” She paused. “How have things progressed since we spoke last? Any improvement?”
Rope gave a dry chuckle. “If anything, she’s grown worse. I’d like to remind you that I was against the idea of an American excursion. Too far from safety, too many distractions, too much input too soon-”
“Those choices were not yours to make,” she broke in. “You would do well to remember that.”
“Of course,” he allowed. “Fix the problem, not the blame, neh?”
“Exactly.” Hi leaned into the screen, filling it with her face. “We have the remote feed here, Heywood, and Tang’s people concur with you. The instability you brought to our attention is of great concern, and I think at this stage we cannot proceed without instigating the more serious of options.”
Rope considered this for a moment. “You’re quite sure?”
“Quite,” repeated Hi. “A liability is not what we look for in our talent, Heywood. Can I trust you to deal with it personally?”
“And the…?”
“Preparations are being made,” she said, silencing the question before he asked it. “We’ve leaked the party to the press. Expect a significant presence there.”
“All right.”
Hi cut the link and left him in the dimness. Faint shafts of light crossed the walls as the aircraft began a languid turn toward the distant city.
Rope studied the ruins of his hands, watching the blood clot and scab over.
At SkyHarbour there was an advance guard of machines waiting to capture the first images of Juno Qwan’s triumphant return to the city of her birth. In the car park outside Chek Lap Kok, news mobiles from a dozen different networks sat in a ring, like circled wagons from the Old West. Troopers from the APRC, reluctant to look lazy on international television, patrolled around them. The go-gangers knew better than to show up tonight.
There were few human reporters in place at the arrival gateway. Only the nets at the very lowest end of the spectrum or the stringers clinging to their hopes of an exclusive, had bothered to send flesh-and-blood representatives. Stations like Wave-Net, ZeeBeeCee, Scramble News Network and CanalEuropa had posted squads of avatar drones, a gaggle of the brightly coloured remotes floating on ducted impellers or resting inverted on the ceiling. The insectoid machines deployed probes with wideband cameras and omni-directional microphones. Behind their unblinking glass eyes there were operators half a world away running them through goggles-and-glove interfaces.
SNN’s drone, fire engine red with a buzzing, counter-rotating heliblade, spotted the party first and it launched itself at them. The other remotes went after it in a string of chattering motors.
Juno was behind a pair of thick polycrys sunglasses by Minnuendo. Her hat was an Inverse Smile original, a wide-brimmed sunshade in the Loren style. She wore a Dior delta dress and her shoes were from Westlake. The clothes, the way she walked, the turn of her head-all of it was engineered to say “leave me alone”. Around the globe, automatic pattern scanners were taking the measure of her attire; the same outfit would be on sale in knock-off stores within less than a day.
Rope led the entourage, a couple of the more popular band members trailing behind and a circle of four men from RWB’s Overt Security Team surrounding Juno as she entered the glare of the floating cameras. One of the security men carried a handheld microwave field generator to discourage the drones from coming too close to the group. Wave-Net’s remote made the mistake of drifting near for a candid shot and it clattered out of the air, landing on its back, legs kicking feebly like a gassed cockroach.
In their respective virtual studios, anchors from the networks were matted in to the live footage, smart transfer programs making it appear to the viewers that the reporters were actually there at Chek Lap Kok with the singer. They called out questions to her, but Juno excised them from her world, never acknowledging them, never glancing their way. Her face was set and thin-lipped beneath the Minnuendo shades. Rope threw the armada of robots a clipped wave that signalled the end of this brief photo opportunity, as the security men ushered Juno into a waiting limobus. All the networks showed the same shot of the coach pulling away from the terminal with an escort of two APRC patrol cruisers. The flanks of the double-decker were a screen, and as the vehicle moved off a vid of Juno singing a cover of “Stage Fright” from her Malaysia tour rippled across it. Each station turned back to studio-bound talking heads who picked apart the brief flash of celebrity, examining every second of the footage and speculating on the singer’s mindset. Several new rumours about Juno’s love life were created spontaneously in the time it took the bus to emerge from the Western Harbour Tunnel on Hong Kong Island.