Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

The Tamil was sitting in a chair of plastic and tubing, eating Chinese takeout food off a formica table. The smell of it, ginger and prawns, made her stomach tighten painfully.

"Is that you?" she said at last.

He looked down at her. "Who you thinkin', eh?"

"Sticky?"

"Yeah," he said, with the chin-swiveling nod of the Tamils.

"I and righteous I."

Laura knuckled her eyes. "Sticky, you're really different this time ... your goddamn cheeks are all wrong and your skin ... your hair.... You don't even sound the same."

He grunted.

She sat up. "What the hell have they done to you?"

"Trade secrets," Sticky said.

Laura looked around. The room was small and dark, and it stank. Bare plywood shelving weighted down with tape cas- settes, canvas bags, frazzled spools of wiring. Heaps of poly- urethane sheeting, and styrofoam noodles, and tangled cellulose.

A bolted wall rack held a dozen cheap Chinese televisions, alive with flickering Singapore street scenes. Against the other wall were heaped dozens of eviscerated cardboard boxes: bright commercial colors, American cornflakes, Kleenex, laun- dry soap. Gallon paint cans, tubing, rolls of duct tape. Some- one had tacked swimsuit shots of Miss Ting inside the grimy kitchenette.

It was hot. "Where the hell are we?"

"Don't ask," Sticky said.

"This is Singapore, though, right?" She glanced at her bare wrist. "What time is it?"

Sticky held up the smashed wreckage of her watchphone.

"Sorry. Nah sure I could trust it." He gestured across the table. "Take a seat, memsahib." He grinned tiredly. "You, I trust."

Laura got to her feet and made it to the second chair. She leaned on the table. "You know something? I'm goddamn glad to see you. I don't know why, but I am."

Sticky shoved her the remnants of his food. "Here, eat.

You been out a while." He scrubbed his plastic fork on a paper napkin and gave it to her.

"Thanks. There a ladies' room in this dump?"

"Over there," he nodded. "You feel a sting, back at the

Bank? You be sure to check you legs for pinholes in there."

The bathroom was the size of a phone booth. She had wet herself while unconscious-not badly, luckily, and the stains didn't show through her Grenadian jeans. She mopped herself with paper and came back. "No pinholes, Captain."

"Good," he said, "I'm happy I don't have to dig one of those Bulgarian pellets out of you ass. What the fock you doin' in that Bank crowd, anyway?"

"Trying to call David," she said, "after you screwed up the phones."

Sticky laughed. "Why you nah have the sense to stay with your Bwana? He nah as stupid as he look-have the sense not to be here, anyway."

"What are you doing here?"

"Having the time of my life," he said. "The last time, maybe." He rubbed his nose-they'd done something to his nostrils, too; they were narrower. "Ten years they train me for something like this. But now I'm here and doin' it, it's... "

It seemed to drift away from him then, and he shrugged and waved it past. "I see your testimony, right? Some of it.

Too late, but at least you tell them the same things you tell us. Same in Galveston, same in Grenada, same here, same everywhere for you, nah?"

"That's right, Captain."

"That's good," he said vaguely. "Y'know, wartime

... mostly, you do nothing. Time to think ... meditate

... Like down at the Bank, we know those fockin' bloodclots hurry down there when the phones shut down, and we know they be just like those bloodclots we got, but to see them

... see it happen like that, so predictable ..."

"Like wind-up toys," Laura said. "Like bugs ... like they just don't matter at all."

He looked at her, surprised. She felt surprised herself. It had been easy, to say, sitting there together with him in the darkness. "Yeah," he said. "Like toys. Like wind-up toys pretending to have souls... . It's a wind-up city, this place.

Full of lying and chatter and bluff, and cash registers ringin'

round the clock. It's Babylon. If there ever was a Babylon, it's here."

"I thought we were Babylon," Laura said. "The Net, I mean. "

Sticky shook his head. "These people are more like you than you ever were."

"Oh," Laura said slowly. "Thanks, I guess."

"You wouldn't do what they did to Grenada," he said.

"No. But I don't think it was. them, Sticky."

"Maybe it wasn't," he said. "But I don't care. f hate them. For what they are, for what they want to be. For what they want to make of the world."

Sticky's accent had wavered, from Tamil to Islands patois.

Now it vanished completely into flat Net English. "You can burn down a country with toys, if you know how. It shouldn't be true, but it is. You can knock the heart and soul out of people. We know it in Grenada, as well as they do here. We know it better."

He paused. "All that Movement talk your David thought was cute, cadres and feed the people... . Come the War, it's gone. Just like that. In that madhouse under Fedon's Camp, they're all chewing. on each other's guts. I know I'm getting my orders from that fucker Castleman. That fat hacker, who's got no real-life at all just a screen. It's all principles now.

Tactics and strategy. Like someone has to do this, doesn't matter where or who, just to prove it's possible...."

He bent in his chair and rubbed his bare leg, briefly. The cast was gone now, but there were buckle marks on his shin.

"They planned this thing in Fedon's Camp," he said. "This demon thing, DemonStration Project... . They been working under there for twenty years, Laura, they've got tech like

... not human. I didn't know about it-nobody knew about it. I can do things to this city-me, just a few brother soldiers smuggled in, not many-things you can't imagine."

"Voodoo," Laura said.

"That's right. With the tech they gave us, I can do things you can't tell from magic."

"What are your orders?"

He stood up suddenly. "You're not in them." He walked into the kitchenette and opened the rust-spotted refrigerator.

There was a book on the table, a thick looseleaf pamphlet.

No spine, no title. Laura picked it up and opened it. Page after page of smudgy Xerox: The Lawrence Doctrine and

Postindustrial Insurgency by Colonel Jonathan Gresham.

"Who's Jonathan Gresham?" she said.

"He's a genius," Sticky said. He came back to the table with a carton of yogurt. "That's not for you to read. Don't even look. If Vienna knew you'd touched that book, you'd never see daylight again."

She set it down carefully. "It's just a book."

Sticky barked with laughter. He started shoveling yogurt into his mouth with the pinched look of a little boy eating medicine. "You see Carlotta lately?"

"Not since the airport in Grenada."

"You gonna leave this place? Go back home?"

"I sure as hell want to. Officially, I'm not through testify- ing in Parliament. I want to know their decision on informa- tion policy...."

He shook his head. "We'll take care of Singapore."

"No, you won't," she said. "No matter what you can do, you'll only drive the data bankers underground. I want them out in the open-everything out in the open. Where everyone can deal with it honestly."

Sticky said-nothing. He was breathing hard suddenly, look- ing greenish. Then he belched and opened his eyes. "You and your people-you're staying on the waterfront, in Anson

District."

"That's right."

"Where that Anti-Labour fool, Rashak .. .

"Dr. Razak, yes, that's his electoral district."

"Okay," he said. "Razak's people, we can let them alone.

Let him run this town, if there's anything left of it. Stay there and you'll be safe. Understand?"

Laura thought it over. "What is it you want from me?"

"Nothing. Just go home. If they'll let you."