“Horsepower is one thing. Experience is another.”
“I’ve got that, too. Over ten years of it.”
“Mirabara, you aren’t old enough to have ten years’ experience in anything.”
“I’m not in flesh, Maya. Virtual images don’t age unless you tell them to, you know. So I’m a little older than I choose to look—is that a crime?”
I had to admit, it was a likely enough explanation for someone like her. “That’s different, then. I suppose I might take off a few years myself, if I had the choice.”
“Really?” she said with bland surprise. “What for?”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic about it.” I had only been trying to be charitable.
“I’m not,” she said. “I can’t imagine why you’d change a thing.”
“I said, that’s enough.”
Keishi chuckled, leaning back in her seat. “You’re a difficult woman to compliment, News One.”
“I don’t need your compliments,” I said, more harshly than I’d intended. “What I expect out of a screener is a clean signal, period. I don’t need flattery, or companionship, or witty repartee—”
“Or help with recalcitrant rental cars?” she said mildly.
I fixed my eyes on the road and tried to will myself not to blush. There was no sense apologizing now. I’d been hostile enough to make her ask for repartnering, and that would be the end of it. And even if she didn’t ask, they would send me someone new within the week. They don’t pair men with men or women with women, for obvious reasons. The more so in my case. It was a mix-up, probably; her name looked like a weird transliteration of Keiji, a man’s name, and someone must have made the wrong assumption. If her assignment to me wasn’t a mistake, it was a test—or maybe both, since every screener is a test, in one way or another. When you run into one like Anton, who only works for the Postcops, you try to hold onto him. Most of them work for the Weavers, and the Weavers are a lot more dangerous.
“So,” she said briskly, “we’ve gone over what you want from a screener. What do you want from a research assistant?”
“Why do you ask?” I said with a sense of dread.
“Because I saw the request for an RA you posted. And I’d like to do it.”
“Oh, Mirabara,” I said, grasping for any polite cliché, “I don’t know that that’s a good idea. I don’t think we’re really ready to be living in each other’s back pockets just yet. These first few months of a partnering are always hard….”
“We don’t have to work that closely. After all, I’ve been mind-to-mind with you—I’ve got a pretty good idea how you’ll respond to things. Just give me a direction and turn me loose. If you want, I can even do fill-in recordings and make it look and feel just like your style.”
“You can do that? You’re wired camera?” When I got into the business, you could either be a camera or a screener, never both; when they wired you, you were tracked for life. It was nice. It cut down on the understudy effect. But I’d heard of people wired both ways, screening each other, a two-way connection. There were even some who left the link on all the time, merging their minds forever—people who had ceased to be human, by any reasonable definition of that word.
“Wired camera?” she said. “Girl, I’m wired everything.” And suddenly her face was bathed in light. An invisible Net-rune, no less. The tech in that head must have been worth more than the whole Kazakhi GNP. It was tempting. But it would be intolerable.
She must have seen “no” in my face. “Look,” she said, “we’ll be seeing each other less than if I just screen, because I can work independently. And if I’m doing some of the camera work, we won’t have to go mind-to-mind as much.”
“Look, I just don’t think—”
“If you want,” she interrupted, with bitterness in her voice, “you can send me instructions by Net-text and you won’t have to see me at all.”
I looked at her and, despite myself, felt sympathy. She seemed not far from tears. It was my fault—mine and the bastard’s who invented this technology. It’s his plotline we’re forced to repeat. For the camera, a stranger with the key to all your secrets. For the screener, feeling closer than a sister to someone who does nothing but push you away. And as I thought of this, I felt a grim determination to see things through with Keishi. There was a kind of poetry to it—her irreverence, my hostility. We deserved each other.
“All right,” I said, “we’ll try it. But there’s one thing you need to know.”
“What?”
I glanced over at her. “Do you know how I got this assignment?”
“No,” she said, her eyes narrowing with curiosity. “And I wondered. No offense, Maya, but you’re not exactly typecast.”
“I applied for it,” I said. “I put in a proposal.”
“What possessed them to accept? Sunspots?”
“They didn’t accept. I got back a curt little Net-text saying that they had no plans to do a story like that at this time. They were just going to let the anniversary go by.”
“Let me guess. You hacked the News One computers and inserted the assignment.”
“No,” I said irritably. “Are you kidding? News One is a fortress. I couldn’t pull off a thing like that. I don’t think anyone could.”
“I could,” she said smugly.
I looked at her skeptically out of the corner of my eye. “Be that as it may. I took a more low-tech solution. I was interviewing the camera who broke the Shimanski scandal—typical incestuous News One bullshit; I think I’ve interviewed more cameras than I have anyone else. That’s what happens when you slip this far down on the food chain.”
“A predator who feeds on other predators is at the top of the food chain,” she pointed out.
“Only if she takes them live. This was scavenging, and I wasn’t even the first jackal at the corpse. So I got down to question number six on the Universal Interviewing-Another-Camera Script, which is, and I quote, ‘What’s your position on invisible wiring and cameras without Net-runes? Is it really ethical to put someone on the air without his knowledge, or—’”
“‘Or is it an unwarranted invasion of privacy?’” Keishi chimed in the last words.
“Exactly. I see you’ve watched telepresence at least once in the last ten years. Of course the only political topics they let us cover are the ones that will never change anything—they are not going to go back and scar all the new cameras just so people will know what they’re dealing with. So this idiot I’m interviewing, who’s been asked the same question a hundred times in the last week, makes doe-eyes at me out of his perfect face and says, ‘Well, my goodness, Maya Andreyeva, you really ask the serious questions.’”
“Oh, God.”
“My reaction exactly. And I thought, I can’t go on like this. I just can’t do it anymore.”
“What did you do?” she asked, with a peculiar tenderness.
“Well,” I said, “it had to be sudden, or Anton would see it coming. So I just reached out with my foot and pushed over the table between us, and while Anton was racing to cover up the sound and create the image of a table and cover up the idiot camera’s shock, I said: ‘Well, that’ll certainly be useful next week, when I’ll be doing a story in honor of the anniversary of the liberation of the Square Miles. Um, a three-part series, actually.’ And it went out on the Net, and News One decided to run the story rather than have people wonder.”
“Didn’t the filters screen it out?”
“Why? The Calinshchina isn’t killfiled.”
“So it’s not,” she said appreciatively. “There’s a Weaver that keeps track of it, but Weavers don’t care how you pursue your career goals.”