“What happened to my debt?”
“Oh.” The djinni shrugs. “She flogged that as soon as I started my counterattack. I figure she had the countermeasure prepped in advance. Must have been automated, happened as soon as I started to call her markers. I tried to trace where it went, but it went too fast, off to some zurichoid anonymizer utility. But you’re out of the woods for now, and I’ve got some mad money to play with. Why don’t we go and celebrate, huh?”
“I thought I couldn’t set foot out of your sim? Feral debt collectors and all that?”
The djinni waves his pie-plate hands dismissively. “Not anymore,” he says. “Your debts have gone off-books to some black exchange. I’ve got a lien on them, so if they peep their heads over the parapets, I’ll know and we’ll have plenty of time to get to cover so I can get the debt audited. I’m pretty sure that after it’s been laundered by that ham-fisted amateur, it’ll be invalidatable.” The djinni puts an arm around Huw’s shoulders. “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll do just fine.”
Huw feels a flutter way down in the pit of her not-stomach, something between not-nausea and not-arousal, and she swallows some not-spit. “Are we going anywhere fancy? Should I dress for it?”
“Oh,” the djinni says with a wag of his head and a flip of his topknot, “not to worry. The protocols’ll dude us up when we arrive—got to love these capabilities bars; they’re literally impossible to enter if you don’t belong, they won’t even execute.”
Getting from one sim to another involves a moment of hiatus, during which Huw’s consciousness flutters in and out of existence, without any subjective sense of time passing. Some internal clock tells her that for a moment, she hadn’t been anywhere. But then she is. It must have happened before—it has happened before—but Huw was so distracted that she didn’t notice the nonzero time it took for her processes to suspend, replicate, and restart. It leaves her reeling and filled with self-loathing: I am such a dupe, she thinks, so willing to believe that I’m me even though I’m clearly dead and this shambling thing is just a thin shade. The thought makes her want to lie down and wait for 639,219 to catch up with her and decompile her. But there is the whole Earth at stake, and all the meatpeople—the real people—crawling over its surface, and even if she is just a ghost, she has a duty to stop them from being slaughtered wholesale and turned into computational ghosts.
The existential crisis distracts Huw from the sim in which she has been instantiated, but now she takes stock of it. club capabilities is what the sign over the door declares, and this portal is flanked by a pair of scanner devices that crackle with intense energy. The djinni’s got one of her hands caught in his celestial one, and he tugs her toward the scanners.
“Come on,” he says, “let’s get a drink.” He releases her hand in order to pass through the scanner, and he shivers as he emerges from it. “Come on,” he says again, “you’ll love this.”
“What is it?” Huw says, hovering around the scanner’s entrance.
“Interpreter,” the djinni says. “Middleware layer. Turns you into an agent in the capabilities sim. Means that you can transact only noncoercively with other agents.”
“Gibberish,” Huw says.
“Once you’re in a capabilities environment, everything you do with someone else involves forming contractual protocols. If either party violates the contract, they cease to see one another. It’s a cheat-proof sim. Means that no one can harm you unless you agree to let them. It’s the kind of place you can really relax in. But first you need to get refactored to participate as a capabilities agent, which means going through the scanner. Let me assure you, it’s an entirely pleasant experience.”
Huw likes the sound of being in a safe-conduct zone, though she can’t escape the feeling that allowing a scanner to remodel her consciousness—or whatever she has that passes for a consciousness—is a frightening idea. Trepidatiously, she inches into the scanner.
It does feel good. Huw remembers when she was a man (or rather, she remembers when meat-Huw had been a man, and suffers from the delusion that those memories are hers), remembers the pee-gasms that would shiver up her spine after a particularly fine micturation. Either by design or by accident, the scanner replicates that feeling as it remaps her. Oh-ah, she thinks as she passes through, then takes stock of herself.
Club Capabilities is, typically, bigger on the inside than the outside. Architectural hubris is cheap as air in the cloud. Where a terrestrial establishment would have a central bar area and booths around the periphery, this establishment has a kilometers-wide expanse of glassy floor and a central bar that features such nifty magnification features that stools spring up like self-similar leather mushrooms as you approach any given spot: in the distance, near the walls, gales howl among the hyperspace gates leading to the private areas (which feature planetary themes, so that the subsurface oceanic caverns of Enceladus adjoin the fiery sands of long-dismantled Venus).
The dress code is similarly over the top, as Huw realizes when she notices the djinni is wearing an antique Armani suit. She’s no expert on haute couture: she realizes she probably ought to recognize the designer of the cocktail dress the scanner selected for her, but she’s too busy fighting with the insane footwear to care about such minor details. Mid-1980s: Greed is good. It seems a fitting context in which to discuss the identity of a person or persons who might be trying to steal a planet’s worth of computronium.
The whole thing is so massively, monstrously over the top—like a nuclear aircraft carrier tricked out as a private yacht—that it takes Huw a moment to realize that she and the djinni are alone.
“Where is everyone?” she asks, grabbing his arm for balance.
“Where—? Oh.” The djinni snaps his fingers. “Let me post a good-conduct deposit for you ... there.” And suddenly they are no longer alone: for Huw can see a couple of dozen figures scattered across the premises, from barstool to dance floor to snogging in a booth beneath the racing moons of Mars. He looks at her: “How about a cocktail, little lady?”
“I’d love one,” Huw says as the djinni leads her toward the bar. It zooms ever-larger, and a pair of red leather stools sprout from the floor, welcoming. Huw almost collapses onto hers, her legs screaming from the unaccustomed demands of balancing on stilettos. “Agh. I’ll have a—” A bland-featured bartender proffers a laminated menu above which visions of liquid excess hover like offers of chaos. “—bloody hell it’s you, you bitch!”
Huw’s eyes focus on another figure slumped across the bar to starboard, some football pitches distant: as she focuses, the distance between them collapses until she can almost smell the alcohol on 639,219’s breath. The djinni’s hand descends heavily on her arm, restraining her as she winds up to thump her mortal enemy. “You can’t do that in here!” he says. “You’d just render yourself unable to see her anymore. Besides, I think she’s the worse for wear.”