“No, just to the audience.”
“Oh. Well, that’s all right then. I always patch up lies in post-production, anyway. Just be sure to tell me if you ever want them to know you’re lying.” The bartender nodded toward her cup; she shook her head and dematerialized it. “So when I’ve got the research, what do we do next?”
“Then we look for an interview.”
Keishi raised her eyebrows. Oh—she’d tricked me into saying “we.” Well, it wouldn’t matter. We’d be reassigned soon enough.
“Then I’ll call you in the morning. You should sleep in. Shall we say around noon?”
I hesitated, nodded, then turned to the bartender and asked for the bill. He laid a matte black card before me on the bar. When I pressed my thumb into it, gold script numbers appeared, displaying the usual breakdown—this much of your cup of coffee was produced by human labor, and the rest is owing to the labor of robots, so we suggest you pay so much in green and the rest in red. I always read that stuff; it’s interesting; but I don’t go by it. It’s not always accurate, anyway. For example, they’ll tell you that your steak dinner is ninety percent robot-made, but they get that by counting animals as robots. And my Netcasts count as a hundred percent human, though my head’s as much metal as bone.
I touched the right side of the card, to pay all in red. Old habits—I like to use the robots’ earnings first, and hold on to what I’ve produced myself. Actually, of course, the Robot Dollar is just as good as the Reconstructed Ruble, unless you’re going to go to Africa, and what are the chances of that?
“Confirm,” I said to the card. Thank You, Maya Tatyanichna Andreyeva, it scripted.
The bartender picked up the card and glanced at the back, where my name and Net address were displayed. “That page earlier—it was for you. You’re on News One.”
This didn’t seem to be a question, so I didn’t bother answering.
“I’ve seen your Netcasts,” he said. “Not this history thing— that’s a little dry for me—but I saw your piece on that bastard Shimanski. You really told it like it is.”
I grunted noncommittally. After an awkward pause he blurted out: “You don’t look much like your Net-portrait.”
“It keeps me from being recognized by duraks whose fathers never taught them any manners,” I snapped back, out of reflex. But I could not help looking past him at the mirror behind the bar. I look in the mirror every morning, of course, but there are certain things my eyes have ceased to notice. In that mirror, I saw the five palm-sized holes drilled in my head, capped with black adapters into which the brightly colored modern chips were plugged. I saw the Net-rune in my cheek, a scar of garish luminescence slashing down from eye to jaw in swoops and angles. I saw the places where the hair has never grown back right since surgery, and the bumps and bulges in the left side of my skull where implants nestled in the connective tissue, like baby spiders hidden in the tangle of their egg sac.
“I saved you the trouble of killing him,” Keishi said from behind me. “Over the next thirty-six hours his body parts will be arriving in twenty different Historical Nations in the luggage of unsuspecting passengers.”
I stole a glance at the bartender. He was alive, but involved in a heated phone debate which he seemed to be getting much the worst of.
“Don’t punish him for pointing out the obvious,” I said.
She put her chin on my shoulder—not an easy feat for a virtual ghost—and looked my reflection in the eye. I hated the smoothness, youth, perfection of her face next to mine. “How many people know your face, Maya?” she asked me gravely. “A few hundred? Well, a hundred million know you from the inside out. They know who you really are, not just what you look like. What’s a face but Nature’s blind kludge at a way of letting minds communicate? You have a better interface than that, a faster cable. You’ve evolved beyond the body. The face is a sheath for the mind. It’s nothing—it’s maya, illusion,” she said, smiling. “Forget about it.”
I could think of nothing that she could have said that would have been less comforting.
She drew back. “Besides,” she said, “a lot of people think scars are sexy.” And she drew her finger along my cheek and around to the back of my head, over Net-rune and camerasoft and bare occipital socket. If she had been there in her body, my ruined nerves would have felt nothing. But because she was a virtual ghost, a thing of air and shadows, I could feel her soft, warm fingers just as if the flesh were whole.
Four
TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME
I woke at ten that morning to a pounding on the door. I answered it holding my bathrobe closed with one hand, with what hair I have matted or standing on end; hastily thumbed the offered card; and accepted the package. The box was a triangular prism a meter long, such as roses are sometimes shipped in. If Keishi had sent me roses, we were going to have to have a serious talk. I sat down in the little passageway between inner and outer doors, which in winter keeps the warmth inside the house from mixing with the cold outside, and opened it.
It was not roses. The box had three separate flaps, one for each side. I opened the first and found a set of kopek-sized chips, already plugged into the adapters that they’d need to fit my old style ruble sockets. Both the chips and the adapters were a medium brown and no thicker than a fingernail. When I pried one out of the foam and held it up, it slowly changed color and lustre until it matched the skin of my hand perfectly, even mimicking the pores. Oh, of course; a brown default color because they were African. It was probably the skin color of some drone in quality control—inspected by cafe au lait. If I put the chips in, then from a few feet away, maybe even close up, you’d hardly know I’d been drilled at all.
The second flap revealed another set of adapters and chips, just like the first set, but teal blue instead of brown. I touched one and it displayed a palette; when I chose a color at random, the whole set of chips turned a dusty rose. The chip asked if I wanted to explore textures, but I touched the box marked “no.”
Behind the third flap was a blaze of gold: some chips inscribed with hieroglyphs, others painted with jackal-headed gods and lapis scarabs, all in holographic bas-relief. Ooh, Egyptian kitsch. It was African, all right. I read the card:
Even though the mother country thought her girlchild was too white, I still have connections there. Nice to use them for something halfway legal just this once. Wear these if you ever decide to quit camera work and take up modeling—you’ve got the bones, girl.
With roses I would at least have known for certain. This gift was ambiguous. Certainly it was no ordinary podarok. She had spent sweatcoin on this—not robot labor, given in red to every citizen, but her own work in green Reconstructed Rubles. And at that, the gods only knew how she’d gotten them to take it; even red money is about as hard as a three-minute egg, in Africa. Connections, my ass—she had called in a favor for this, I would have bet on it. And getting an African to owe you a favor is slightly less difficult than putting God in your debt.
It might have meant nothing more than overactive thoughtfulness—not an uncommon vice in screeners. Or it could have been a truly world-class effort to curry favor. But there was a chance it was more than that, and no chip in the world, or even in Africa, was worth that kind of trouble.
I looked more closely at the chips, to see what she’d given me. One chip in each set was a memory wedge, and the skin-colored one had a moistdisk stuck into it—a cylinder actually, even less disklike than its Russian cousins. I plugged it in and found it held my research. That, at least, I need not refuse. Most of the others were just copies of what my head already held, some in more up-to-date versions. Then there were a few extra basics, such as four fluency chips with a total of sixty-four languages, most of them African. And there were a few things I didn’t recognize at all, chips popular in Africa, I guess: an intuition enhancer, a myth coprocessor. No, don’t ask me what a myth coprocessor does. Makes you act like a hero, I guess.