Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

He was gifted, and he knew it.

And, addictive as a drug to a man who had — even within human limitations — trained himself to perform mental gymnastics on three or four levels at once, who had comprehended the puissance of questioning assumptions, the new and not-so-human version of Feynman had processing power.

He also had nearly instantaneous access to the world’s unprotected data. Including the information that a recently released female convict he was personally interested in had taken employment with Unitek, working alongside the father of a rather charming young girl. If Feynman had had a physical body, he would have settled back in his chair and stared at the wall, the tip of one loafered foot flipping rhythmically. As it was, he freed a few more of his widely appropriated resources, and continued his siege of Unitek systems.

What on earth do you keep behind a firewall like that?

Feynman wasn’t limited to a single focus of awareness. Thus, even as he worked, a traffic camera in Hartford pivoted on its post, following the course of a motorcycle hissing through a darkness defined by shattered streetlamps, southbound on Asylum Avenue.

0417 hours, Thursday 7 September, 2062

The Federal Café

Spruce Street

Hartford, Connecticut

If you live long enough, you eventually put a real fine point on what you’re willing to do to stay alive — and what you’re willing to sell. The first thing I sold was my body — first on the street, then to the army once I got old enough. Later on, I graduated to selling the intangibles. I like to think I stayed loyal to my friends, though. That was something. Something to hang on to when I’d parceled out flesh and bone and honor and innocence alike.

The music is still rolling out onto the street when I put my kickstand down in front of the Federal, locking the fork and arming the antitheft system. I’m lucky enough to find a spot under an unshattered streetlamp in front of the weathered brown building, but it never hurts to be sure.

Trust Bobbi Yee to leave me an urgent message and then fail to check her hip to see if I got back to her. I knew she’d be at the Federal — she always is, weeknights. It might as well be her front office.

I open the neon-washed glass door with the faded green-and-gold lettering — complete with a “founded” date in the early part of the previous century — and walk into the tavern. Essentially a single long dark hallway with an old wooden bar on the right wall and a few tables on the left, it hooks around to the right before opening out somewhat. The music is too loud to hear how the wood floor creaks under my boots. Like most of New England, Connecticut still has blue laws about the hours an establishment serving liquor may keep. The police don’t enforce anything this far north of downtown, however; the party is just getting warm.

The Federal sits on the boundary between their turf and ours —the haves and the have-nots, if you will. A line only they can cross, into the world of we who have a use for every bit of trash they pitched because it doesn’t match the decor. Should they find that they have any use for us .

They live in another world. A cleaner world.

I walk around to the back, to the corner near the pool table. Bobbi Yee is acceptable to the haves. Even as they skulk into our part of the city to hire her for the sort of tasks they don’t dare carry out themselves, they prefer to find somebody who doesn’t look too much different from them. And Bobbi — Bobbi fits the decor.

Dragon ladies are supposed to be tall and thin and deadly, with long ebony hair and expensive cigarettes in ivory holders. Bobbi is one of the above. And, as usual, she’s surrounded by a half-dozen good-looking young men, jostling each other for position. I lean across the shoulder of the shortest one and wave my hand to catch her attention. The boy recoils, glimpsing me from the corner of his eye. If he thinks I’m rough trade, he ought to take a better look at what he’s chasing.

Bobbi looks up from the boy standing at the head of the line to court her. She tosses an iridescent violet lock over her shoulder, grinning.

“Maker!” She moves with the predatory grace of a praying mantis, tapping the shoulder of the little boy who was startled by my profile. She wears a sleeveless white shirt and a chrysanthemum-embroidered vest, showing the rippling muscle in her arms. For Bobbi, she is lightly armed — I see only the one handgun, and a knife on her other thigh. “Peter, let the lady have a seat. She and I need to talk shop.”

He gives me a surly look and offers me his stool, which I accept with a nod that might be misconstrued as thanks if he’s feeling generous. In effortless dismissal, she brushes the rest of her coterie aside. “Cute,” I say as he sulks away.

Bobbi grins, wryly angling perfect dark eyes. Not more than twenty. I hope she lasts. Ronin usually don’t. I know she’s wired, too — much newer tech than mine. There are still problems with it. So what, right? You break something, you throw it out. Get a new one, break that, too.

But what if you break something you can’t replace with a credit card? A heart, a life, a city? What about your word?

“You want him?” Her voice has a delicate timbre — at odds with her personality, but not her slender frame.

“I got my own problems, eh?”

Bobbi waves the bartender over and points to her mug, then to me. “Problems, sure.” She laughs like chiming bells. “Problems, men, what’s the difference? You’ve maybe got problems you don’t know about.”

“Is that why you called me?”

Two Irish coffees arrive and I spend a moment figuring out how to sip mine without getting whipped cream up my nose. She uses that time to chew over her answer and then nods, smiling. Her lips are tattooed slick shiny red. “Somebody wanted to hire me to find you,” she says.

I drain my coffee in a single long, scalding pull, feel it hit my stomach like roofing tar, wave for another. “What sort of a someone?”

Bobbi shakes her head, sipping her own coffee delicately. “Maker, you’re a fucking lush.”

I let my smile widen. “In twenty years, so shall you be, too. So who was looking for me?”

“Funny thing. She looked a bit like you. Tall, thin, jet-black hair, and a very determined nose. Long-lost sister?”

“I don’t have any sisters.” Not anymore, I don’t. “She was looking for me? Maker? Or somebody answering my description?”

“You. And she had another name for you. Is it really Genevieve?”

I fix her with a look. “Is yours really Bobbi Yee?”

“It’s Yin Bobao, actually. Don’t go spreading that around.” Her dark eyes sparkle, wet and sharp, and she quirks a sculptured eyebrow and smiles at me. “I didn’t trust her, Maker. She said you were a deserter from the Canadian military, and there was a good bounty on you. S’at true?”

I laugh in surprise. How like her. “Nope. Not even a little.” Somebody turns up the music. It thumps in my ears, loud enough to hurt.

That intelligent gaze, piercing and hard. She leans toward me and shouts into the intimacy created by the anonymous crowd, the rising noise level. “Then what are you hiding from? Go home to Canada. Things are still okay there. The U.S. is a war zone, and it isn’t going to get any better.”

“The dikes are still holding around New York City.”

She shrugs. “Yeah, and people are starving in the streets.”

“It’s too cold in Canada, Bobbi.”

“Not for long.” She grins at her own wit. “You know you’re getting too old for this game.”