“Don’t care. Let me at her.” Huw says through bloodily rouged lips. 639,219 is vulnerable, clearly drunk: her head lolls across her arms as she drools on the bar, her hair a mess and her dress-code-mandated cocktail number askew.
“Turn the aggro down,” says the djinni , and to her great surprise, Huw finds herself manipulating her emo-box sliders until the red haze of rage fades to gray. “Remember who’s fronting your security deposit? She can’t hurt you in here, remember?”
639,219 chooses this moment to open one eye and raise her head a few degrees, then focus on Huw. “Bleargh,” she says, then bends over and vomits, copiously and noisily. Small, brightly colored machine parts cascade down her chin and across her skirt, tumbling across the floor before they fade from view. “Aaagh. Urgh. You.”
“You’re drunk, sister.” The djinni is on his feet and between them, a warning hand upraised, before Huw can respond. “Get it out of your system and go, or forfeit your deposit. We don’t have to talk to you.”
“’F it wasn’t for you meddling kids,” says 639,219, staring woozily at the djinni , “I’d ha’ gotten awa’ wi’it!” A stray purple wing nut dribbles from the side of her mouth. “Bastid!”
Huw feels uncomfortable. Watching her rival come apart at the seams as the result of the djinni’s financial machinations is disturbing: a certain sense of there but for random luck go I springs to mind. Looking at their argument, it suddenly occurs to her that the real winner is the guy in the Armani suit: she’s more or less bankrupt, her debts parceled out to a shady out-shard investment entity, and as for 639,219, she’s been smacked down hard, despite spending years working to achieve a proficiency with cloud systems that Huw can barely comprehend.
639,219 might be a vindictive bitch and a body-denying Apollonian Traitor to the Real, but seeing her brought this low is a sharp reminder that no instance of Huw is actually up to paddling safely in this virtual shark pool.
“What exactly were you trying to get away with?” Huw asks, trying to keep her smile from melting into a smirk of uneasy satisfaction. “Would you mind satisfying my curiosity?”
“Pish off, you unctuous’n’self-righteous prig.”
Huw is about to speak, when the djinni catches her eye. He shakes his head, very slowly: 639,219 shows no sign of seeing. Then the djinni speaks. “I strongly advise you not to engage with your alienated instance,” he says. “Remember, you can engage only in consensual transactions in this bar. I’m withholding my consent for discourse from her, and I think you should do the same.”
“Why?” says Huw, nipped by an imp of the perverse. “Don’t you think I could benefit from finding out why this bad sister went off on her little side trip?”
“No, you—” The djinni pauses. “Wait. Yes, I change my mind. You probably could learn something useful. But don’t you think it’s just possible that her viewpoint might be contagious? Engage too deeply, and you could pick up her bad memes by accident, and then where would you be?”
“Huh.” Huw sniffs. She turns her attention to the hovering bartender. “I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”
“And your companion?” asks the bartender.
Huw fiddles with her settings until she’s pretty sure 639,219 can’t hear them: “She’ll have what I’m having, only with Bhut Jalokia sauce instead of Tabasco.”
Two glasses appear on the bar. Huw reaffirms her consent to speak to 639,219: “this one’s on me,” she says, smiling broadly as she raises her glass: “Slainte.”
“Slainte—” 639,219 guzzles her drink as Huw watches with interest. The djinni winces, but Huw is disappointed: rather than exploding, 639,219 merely emits a small puff of smoke from each nostril and hiccups quietly. “Wow, some sober-up, sis. I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“What—” Huw bites her tongue. 639,219 is shaking her head. “I thought you were dumb’s’a plank, and then you pulled the fanciest freakin’ financial engineering stunt I’ve ever heard of ... How’ya do it?”
“Trade secret.” It’s the first thing that pops into her mind. “Seriously, you think I’d share with you before we’ve sorted out our differences?”
“Huh. What differences? You’re in here now, same as me. A cloud-bunny, getting to learn to like the mutable life. What’s to sort out?”
“Well. There’s the small matter of you trying to fuck me over, for starters, both impersonating me in the planning hearing—”
“Hey! I was invited to testify before the committee! You just barged in like you thought it was a meeting of the organic farming co-op planting committee!”
“No, I was the one they invited—” Huw stops.
639,219 stares at her blearily.
“We both got the invite. Someone is fucking with us,” Huw says.
“Huh.” 639,219 struggles to sit upright. “Well, I’m up for it if you are.”
“Wha?” Huw looks round at the djinni , but he’s sulking ostentatiously, rezzed out in a gray cloud from which a hand emerges to protectively cradle a mai tai the size of a paint bucket.
“We should arb,” says 639,219. “Let’s diff, baby, see where it’s at.”
“Excuse me one moment,” says Huw, and calls up a helpfile.
Arbing refers to a perverse practice whereby deviant software entities serialize their cognitive frameworks and subject them to differential analysis to identify points of dissonance. When it’s read-only, it’s perfectly safe for consenting sapients to engage in without risking their worldview—but it highlights differences and hauls memetic ruptures into sight like nothing else.
“Read-only,” Huw says.
“Sure,” says 639,219. “Like I was going to invite you to overwrite me with your stick-in-the-mud biophilia and change phobia!”
“Well?” Huw asks.
“You’re on.”
639,219 leans unsteadily toward Huw and extends a finger. Huw, not without some trepidation, touches it.
Arbing is painless, fast, and minimally confusing. Huw barely has time to blink—there is a sensation not unlike the door scanner but more intrusive, ants crawling up and down the small of her back and in and out of her ears—and then she is surrounded by mounds and heaps of interconnected 3-D entity/relationship diagrams, some of them highlighted in a variety of colors.
“It’s our cognitive map,” says 639,219. “How cute! Look, there’s me! That’s what makes me different!” She points to a large polydimensional word cloud that expands as her hand approaches it: it’s all in one color, tagged with her identity but not Huw’s. “Hey, wait a minute.” 639,219’s brows furrow, and for all that she is intrinsically prettier and more perfectly polished than Huw, there is something ugly in her expression. “What’s going on in there?”
“Djinni.” Huw turns and pokes at the cloud. “Hey, you. Wake up. I need you.”
“What?” The djinni rezzes in. “If it’s a hot threesome you’re after, you’re in luck—”
“What’s that?” Huw asks, pointing.
“I can’t see.”
“Well, fucking sign up to permit yourself to see 639,219 again, idiot! It’s important!”
“Why?” he asks. There’s a sulk in his voice. “I invited you here for a drink, and all you do is pay attention to your abusive girlfriend. ...”
“Listen, we arbed.” That gets his attention. “Only there’s something wrong.” 639,219 is staring at the alien word cloud intently and muttering. Her brow is shiny with not-perspiration.
“So what do you expect me to do about it?”