Sid was discovering the extent of the obsession with money and material luxury that filled the collective conscience outside Atopia. “Yeah, I got that.”
He was building virtual-world models of the rotator cuff joint of Bunky’s construction mechanoid, trying to fix a broken seal. Bunky and Shaky were riding along with him, in toy-balloon avatars attached to his consciousness as he spun through his virtual worlds. Sid looked up to see Bunky-balloon smile, a big grin with one front tooth broken in half.
“Do you not get your tooth fixed because of the money?” Sid asked.
Health care was the other fixation. Elective gene modifications could double life expectancy for the rich, but even basic health wasn’t always guaranteed for the poor. Atopia’s pssi technology was being applied across the systemic injustice like a numbing salve to treat a mortal wound.
Sid wasn’t philosophical by nature—that was Bob’s domain—but it was hard not to ponder the more time he spent out here. He understood that the basics of economics had moved from products to services, and were now moving to trading information for the purpose of self-advantage in the purest form of the idea. What exactly the “self” referred to was the new problem. The definition of a “person” was losing coherence in the face of synthetic intelligences, neural fusioning, and the expanding cloud of information that made up a person.
Shaky-balloon roared out laughing at Sid’s question. “Ha, no mate, Bunky here is deathly afraid of anyone drilling into that thick slab of a skull!”
Bunky-balloon glowed red. Sid smiled.
“Almost done,” Sid said, shifting attention away from Bunky. “Can you see the array?”
Sid tried splintering the solution sets to Bunky and Shaky, but their external meta-cognition frameworks were childlike. Instead he began flipping through a series of images, showing each option visually.
Bunky and Shaky nodded as one. “Yeah, sort of,” they both replied. If Sid didn’t know better, he would have suspected they were neurally fused, but he knew they were just best friends.
The simulations were set in motion, and Sid spun the most likely scenario, a hollowed-out view of a giant robotic arm rotating in a three-dimensional space around Shaky and Bunky’s perspectives. Sid chuckled. They weren’t the sharpest cheeses in the drawer, but they had no problem understanding complex geometries.
“What’s it like, like?” Bunky asked.
Sid was deep into modifying his virtual-world model. “What’s what like?” It was the first time he’d gotten to work on repairing a complex robot first hand.
“Being a pssi-kid—isn’t it kind of freaky, like? Is it true you don’t see any difference between the real world and virtual worlds?”
Sid paused. If you’d asked him that question a few weeks ago, he’d have agreed. His virtual worlds were as real as the reality he experienced on Atopia. But reality on Atopia wasn’t the same as out here. “Yes and no,” he replied as he fiddled with his model. “It’s not easy to explain.” An infinite number of alternate universes, and pssi as the backdoor to crossing the threshold—on Atopia it made sense, but here, the dream was fading.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Bunky said after a pause. “You’re like a bloody god to these glasscutters.”
Sid smiled. “Could have fooled me.”
“Naw, he’s right,” said Bunky. “Sibeal practically squealed when you contacted her. She’s got some serious fan girl going on.”
Sid ignored the praise, spinning the newest simulation into the hyperspace around their points-of-view. “So what do you think?”
Shaky-balloon frowned. “Not bad, but…” With a jittery phantom limb—he wasn’t good at adapting his nervous system in virtual spaces—Shaky grabbed the projection and squeezed, popping them back into real space. Sid, Bunky, and Shaky were standing next to each other on a gantry above the construction mechanoid’s shoulder.
“…I like things I can touch with my own two hands.” He banged the rotator cuff joint of the mechanoid with a hammer and laughed. “If you see what I mean.”
“And I”—Sid spread a dozen of his phantom limbs around his body like wings—“like things I can touch with my own twelve.”
Bunky laughed, and Shaky bent down to the mechanoid and began banging away, hammering at the joint.
“After all my simulation work, really?” Sid shook his head as he watched. He turned to Bunky. “So you two are Midtown miners?”
Bunky nodded. “New York central branch of the worldwide Urban Miners Association. We staked out Midtown years back, prospecting seams of urban ore under the streets.”
“And that makes you money?” Sid asked, trying to get into the flow of their thinking.
Bunky smiled. “Amazing amount of comatose stock down here—obsolete infrastructure, buried pipes, cabling, old landfill. We piece together old maps, way back to the 1850s all the way into mid-twenty-first century, mapping the city underground, and then dig it out, sometimes with city planning permission—”
“—but most of the time without!” laughed Shaky, kneeling beside them with a crowbar jammed into the mechanoid’s shoulder.
“Did you know”—Bunky paused, his eyes narrowing—“that a bin of electronics waste is a hundred times richer in precious metals than the finest wild ores dug from virgin soil?”
“Didn’t know that.”
Shaky stood up, satisfied with his work. “But the best is in the gutter.”
“This one’s mind’s always in the gutter,” Bunky joked, slapping Shaky on the back.
The arm of the construction mechanoid swung up and down. Whatever Shaky had done, it worked.
“What I’m talking about,” continued Shaky, “is street sludge. We filter it from the sewers. Platinum group metals—palladium, rhodium—plus gold, silver from medications, industrial effluent, better than the highest grade—”
Bunky elbowed him. “Enough, he knows, this is the great all-knowing Sidney Horowitz.” He winked at Sid. “Time for us to get to work, mate.”
Without warning, the construction mechanoid’s digger-hand swung in and scooped Sid up. Of course Sid’s proxxi, Vicious, saw it coming, and angled his body to sit into the hand at just the right instant, recognizing this as a “friendly.” At the same time, Bunky and Shaky were hoisted into the riding compartments of their respective mechanoids, and with a low whine the other digger bots and worms in the pit whirred into life.
Bunky looked over his shoulder at Sid. “We’re off to see what your friend Willy’s body was up to in the underground.”
Sid nodded. Willy’s body had been pinpointed stopping at specific locations. The underminers were going to see what it’d found so interesting.
In a few crunching strides, they were off down the tunnel leading from the repair pit. The smaller digger bots and worms followed behind. Where Sid’s neural system had plastically adapted to control his phantom limbs, Bunky and Shaky had trained theirs, through years of hard work, to be neurally adapted into their diggers and mechanoids, like learning to play a piano. Their tools and bots were as much a part of their bodies as their hands. Sid watched them disappear around a curve in the tunnel.
“Don’t even think about it.”
Spinning on his heels, Sid turned. The Grilla, Zoraster, emerged out of the blackness of one of the service tunnels to his left. Sid hadn’t even known he was there. In augmented space, a glittering security blanket sparkled around Zoraster. It was hiding his digital signature in the local wikiworld. In real space, the beast seemed to appear silently from nowhere.