Chris Moriarty - Spin State

The crowd broke over her like surf, with all the stylish, hard-edged excitement of 18 billion people scoring and scheming and consuming at the absolute center of everything. She looked around, getting her bearings. A day trader leaned against an interactive Public Arts Commission sculpture, scanning virtual ticker tape, making quick bidders’ and sellers’ gestures on a trading floor that only he could see. Tourists and corporate concubines hurried by clutching designer shopping bags and talking into the elegant earbuds of external VR rigs.

Just for fun Li dropped into the numbers so she could see who was real and who wasn’t. Half the people around her faded into compressed code packets. Digital ghosts. Simulacra. She dipped idly into some of the codes as she walked—and as always was amazed at the number of people running cosmetic programs. Her own interface was about as stripped-down as they came. It scanned her, packaged and compressed the scan data, and relayed a running simulacrum into streamspace. She couldn’t imagine caring enough about how she looked to bother with anything more. And if she did care, she certainly couldn’t imagine admitting it. Obviously, people in the Zone felt differently.

She crossed the Zócalo, passing the war memorial and threading through the ever-present clumps of schoolchildren gathered around the EarthWatch Monument.

“And here,” a holo-docent was explaining as she passed, “we see a time-lapse image of the seeding and spread of the artificial glaciers. Notice how the weather patterns change over the course of the recording. In the first frames the Sub-Saharan and Great North American Deserts have almost no precipitation, while in the later frames, the precipitation moves north from the Amazonian snowfields and disperses on the jet stream. This produces a macroclimatic change that we anticipate will break the cycle of postindustrial desertification and eventually allow us to reseed the reconstructed genomes stored in the EarthWatch databases. Just think, in less than two thousand years, humans—not all of us, of course, but a lucky, adventurous few—will actually be able to live on Earth again.” She paused and smiled serenely at the children. “Have your teachers taught you about Earth?”

Why bother, Li wondered. It wasn’t their planet. These children had been born in space, like their parents and their parents’ parents. They hadn’t killed Earth, or seeded the glaciers, or negotiated the Evacuation and Embargo Treaties. Earth was just another moon to them: a pretty light in the night sky, an exotic travel destination. But when she looked around she saw them watching, rapt, as the glittering ice swirled across the equator. Except for a few boys in the back, of course, who were imitating the bow hunters in the aboriginal lifestyles hologram, aiming imaginary arrows at the scurrying pigeons, gleefully pondering mayhem. Li, who had been a back-of-the-class kind of kid herself, couldn’t help grinning at them.

When the docent started in on the standard-issue spiel about the brave new era of peace and international cooperation, she walked. She could look down even from this height and pick out all the still-bubbling hot spots on the dead planet. Ireland. Israel. The icebound fortress of the Northern Rockies. The ice might have swallowed their borders, but the old wars were still on, though the UN had spent fortunes trying to squash them. And the old combatants were still keeping the home fires burning so they could start right up where they’d left off whenever the UN finally managed to make the planet habitable again. Li herself had watched a generation of angry young men and women disappear from Shantytown’s Irish quarter and come back a few years later—if they came back at all—with stories of the street fighting in Dublin and Ulster, deals cut between the UN and the English, the Embargo Enforcement Division’s smart neuroweapons. Thank God Li hadn’t been assigned to the EED when the war ended; there were some things even she couldn’t swallow.

She threaded her way through the children and dodged the midafternoon traffic to reach one of the Zócalo’s many outdoor cafés. She took a table in the back. A good table, by her standards: one with a solid wall behind it and a clear view of the approaches.

Three chicas buenas turned away from their foamed matés de coca to look at her. Their long hair was gold-leafed and twisted into elaborate fronded topknots in the style of the season. With their black Mayan eyes and brightly painted faces they looked like chimeras from a cyberartist’s menagerie. Li considered them briefly and decided the tall-hair thing was even sillier than most fashions. The chicas buenas gave Li’s buzz cut and UN-issue ripstop a cool once-over, frowned at her construct’s features, and turned back to their conversation. This was the Zone. Not even a construct in a Peacekeeper’s uniform could surprise people here.

Li drank her coffee in the refracted sunlight, looked up at Earth’s blue-and-white belly, and thought about what the hell she was going to say to Cohen.

Metz stank, no matter how you looked at it. And instead of pride at having pulled it up short of total disaster, Li felt only cold fury at Soza, at the Security Council brass, and most of all at Cohen. Four Peacekeepers had been shot. Li had had to kill a civilian, something that still gave her cold sweats after all these years, no matter that the civilian in question had been armed and aiming at her. And it had all happened because she trusted Cohen—and he failed her.

The trouble with friends was that you couldn’t get rid of them. There was no way to take back a friendship in the wake of betrayal or disappointment. The friendship, and everything that went with it, stayed. It just became unreliable, like an abandoned house; you still knew where all the rooms were, and which stairs creaked underfoot, but you had to check every floorboard for rot before trusting your weight to it.

And Cohen had become a friend more or less without her noticing it. Only now, in the aftermath of Metz, had she seen just how important it was not to have him disappoint her.

She paid her bill on-line and nodded to the waiter, whose glazed expression suggested he was checking his tip. She crossed the Zócalo and caught the crosstown to Avenida Cinco de Mayo.

She stepped off it into a huge, pressing, gawking crowd.

Tourists, mostly, she realized. And they were staring at a two-meter-tall woman with full-body tattoos and cat’s teeth.

Li didn’t know the model’s name, but she recognized her from the fashion spins. A street celeb, the heartbeat of Ring-side hip. Flash today, gone by simulated sunset.

She sprawled across a blood-colored neodeco sofa, six and a half feet of sinuous flesh, vamping to the camera as single-mindedly as if there were no crowd gaping at her from behind the lights and lenses. But Li barely noticed. All she saw was the man standing over her.

Taller than the model, he hovered just out of the camera’s viewfield. One hundred plus kilos of genesculpted muscle rippled under his expensive suit—as well as the discreet, angular bulk of a Moen-Pfizer vest. A commline sprouted from his cranial jack and ran down beneath his collar. The sunglasses were purely cosmetic: camouflage for the implanted optics that were scanning the crowd in a preprogrammed surveillance pattern.

Hired muscle. The expensive kind. And an ex-Peacekeeper too, most likely. Plenty of washed-up line soldiers ended up turning their skills and wire jobs to profit in private security.

The scanning eyes snagged on Li and stopped, breaking pattern. Viruflex lenses depolarized, revealing flat pupils within a gunmetal gray ring of military-application optical implants. The guard flicked back his jacket with one hand, giving Li a momentary glimpse of the nickel-plated pulse pistol tucked into his belt. A pretty thing, it caught the sunlight and sparkled, dazzling her.