No roads tied the mine to Compson’s major cities. The only surface road was a rutted red track that cut across sage and chaparral, passed under the shadow of the antiquated atmospheric processors, and petered out among the gin joints and miner’s flats of Shantytown.
Shantytown wasn’t its map name, of course. But it was what the people who lived there called it.
What Li herself had called it.
She’d been sixteen, four years underground already, when she walked into a cash-only chop shop, clutching a pitifully thin wad of UN currency, and paid a gray-market geneticist to give her a dead girl’s face and chromosomes. That money had been the first real cash she’d ever held: her father’s life insurance payout. She didn’t remember much of that day, but she did recall thinking how funny it was that a man got paid cash money to die and only miner’s scrip for doing the job that killed him.
The genetic work itself had been painless, just a series of injections and blood tests. The scars on her face took longer to heal, but the stakes made it worth waiting for. She’d stepped into the chop shop as a trademarked genetic construct with a red slash across the cover of her passport. When she left, her mitochondria still carried the damning corporate serial number, but the rest of her DNA said she had three natural-born grandparents—enough to make her a citizen. Two days later, she walked into the Peacekeepers’ recruiting post, lied about her age as well as everything else, and started passing.
The recruiting board hadn’t asked too many questions. They’d been desperate for strong young bodies to throw at the Syndicates back then, and the same proprietary geneset that barred her from military service also made her tougher than kudzu vine. Besides, what questions needed asking? She was just another rim-colony miner’s kid looking down the long tunnel of forty years in the pit and deciding that a UN paycheck and a one-way ticket off-planet were worth fighting someone else’s war for.
Getting wired was the hardest part. The psych techs wanted to know everything. Childhood. Family. First time with a boy. First time with a girl. She’d told them whatever she could without letting the truth slip. The rest she’d just let slide. It hadn’t seemed like much of a loss at the time; there was little about growing up on Compson’s that she wanted to remember even if it were safe to have it kicking around in her hard files where the techs could get at it.
Now, fifteen years later, she remembered only the little things. Church bells and midnight mass. The high lonesome moan of the pit whistle. A pale-eyed woman. A thin, tired man, black-skinned on workdays, white as February when he washed the coal dust off his face on Sunday.
Their names were gone. They belonged not to Catherine Li, but to the woman Li had spent her entire adult life erasing—a woman who’d been slipping away, jump by jump, since the day she enlisted.
AMC Station: 13.10.48.
No one met Li at the boarding gate. She waited briefly, then went onstream and asked the station for directions to her office.
The UNSC field office was annexed to Station Security—not uncommon in poorly funded periphery jurisdictions—and Security was on the far end of the station, buried in the ramshackle maze of the public-sector arcades and gangways. Most of her fellow passengers peeled off into the corporate spokes, and soon she was walking alone. As she moved into the public arcs, magtubes gave way to slidewalks, slidewalks to solid decking, decking to virusteel gridplate.
She saw old people everywhere, people obviously out of work, though she didn’t see how anyone without at least a foreman’s salary could afford the air tax. As she moved into the poorer sections of the life-support ring, she understood: they were lung-shot miners, most of them, wearing nose tubes and towing wheeled oxygen tanks. AMC must have reached some kind of black-lung settlement since she’d left, given orbital residency to the worst cases.
She also saw women in chador. She tried to remember if there’d been any Interfaithers on Compson’s in her childhood. It was hard to imagine them converting the hard-luck, hard-drinking Catholics she’d grown up with. But then fanaticism of every stripe was a growth industry on the Periphery—and if you could see the Virgin Mary in a Bose-Einstein crystal, it probably wasn’t much of a stretch to see the Devil in an implanted interface.
She threaded her way through a maze of tired window displays, cheap VR signs, bars, fast-food joints. She ducked into a hole-in-the-wall called the All Nite Noodle; it didn’t look like much, but was crowded and it smelled better than the other places.
“What do you want?” asked the woman at the counter.
“What do you have?”
“Real eggs. Cost a lot, but they’re worth it.”
Li scanned the overhead menu. Holos of noodles and vegeshrimp; holos of noodles and vegepork; holos of noodles and every conceivable shape and flavor of algae-based protein. Someone had pasted a handwritten fiche under the noodles and fried eggs holo upping the price to twelve dollars UN.
“Hey,” the woman said. “You don’t want ’em, get something else. But get something; I got a line behind you.”
“Eggs, then,” Li said, and they shook left-handed to make the credit transfer.
“Sprang for the eggs,” the line cook said when she slid down the counter toward him.
“Haven’t had real ones in years,” Li said.
“My brother’s got chickens. Sends the eggs up from Shantytown on the mine shuttle. Shipped us a whole chicken last year. Not that we sold it.” He grinned, and Li saw the long indigo blue line of a coal scar slicing across the point of his chin. “Ate the sucker in one sitting.”
They were running spinfeed on the shop’s livewall. NowNet. Politics. As Li turned to look, Cohen’s face flashed across the screen, big and pretty as life. He stood on the marble steps of the General Assembly Building, formal in a dark suit and striped tie. A gaggle of reporters were hurling questions at him about the latest AI suffrage resolution.
“It’s not about special rights for Emergents,” he was saying in answer to a question Li hadn’t heard. “It’s simply a question of the basic respect owed to all persons, whether they’re running on code or genesets. The limited-suffrage faction would like to have things both ways. All pigs are equal, according to our opponents—but some pigs are more equal than others. That’s a step away from equality, not toward it.”
He was shunting through Roland, a golden-haired, golden-eyed boy who could have passed for a girl except for the coppery shadow above his upper lip. Li had met the kid once when he came by Cohen’s place on his day off. They’d had a surreal tea during which he’d explained earnestly to her over buttered scones and Devonshire cream that he was putting himself through medical school on what Cohen paid him.
The woman hanging on Cohen’s, or rather Roland’s, arm would have been taller than him even without the three-inch heels. Li recognized her face from the fashion spins, but she couldn’t tell if the carefully painted features were natural or synthetic.
“So what you’re after is one-for-one universal suffrage?” a reporter asked, seizing on Cohen’s last words. “That sounds like a nod toward repealing the genetics laws.”
Cohen laughed and put up a hand, fending off the question. “That’s someone else’s cause,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of trying to break up a squabble between primates.”
“And what would you say to those who claim that your own connections with the Consortium have had a negative impact on the AI suffrage movement?” asked another reporter.