Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

Oh, no. One of them zigzagged, running straight toward her. She unzoomed her lenses, looked around.

“Come on.” She pulled Jared along, slowly, very slowly, backing into the dried-up remains of an oak tree that had toppled over. This had once been a gravity-defying copse of oaks. It was now a tortured, surreal nightmare of dead trunks and burned stumps gathered around a failing river. Stomach acid burned at Kara as fear and hunger ate its way up out of her.

“In here again?” Jared complained. They sat underneath the bleached, twisted branches and looked out. Jared hugged their knapsack to his chest, though his bony arms offered it little protection.

The hopolite staggered on, coated in mud. He panted, arms flailing to keep balance. Jared squirmed, but Kara pushed him down and kept him from looking out.

Branches slapped them in the face as something jumped and ran down the length of the trunk. Jared whimpered, and Kara covered his mouth as a mud-covered ghost grabbed the hopolite, threw him to the ground.

Kara strained the lenses over her eyes at the ghost. Despite the Catastrophe, despite the famine, the world of Agathonosis itself still responded to her. The air sang information. Kara could still choose to augment anything she saw with her actual, organic eyes with information overlaid onto them with her implants. The standard public lamina appeared to her: a small triangular tag popped into her vision every time she looked at the tree. Information scrolled at her.

Oak tree 23. Planted the third year of the Evthria’s [the “eastern” side of Agathonosis, click for more] founding by the first human president under the benevolent Satrapy. Commemoration… It would have scrolled more information, but Kara killed the blather with a mental wave of the hand.

Any moron youngster in Agathonosis with a pair of data contacts or a wrist screen could see that particular lamina.

She had something else in mind: her own augmented reality. It would let her tap into a private lamina. It was something darker, more useful, encrypted and never spoken about because it was forbidden, as was any human addition or tinkering with the Satrapic Information Systems.

“Remember,” her mother had said before the stratatoi came for her and Dad. She’d crouched by Kara and run her fingers through Kara’s hair. “Things might get better. This might be temporary. So you only use this if it is an emergency!”

Kara had nodded. “I understand.”

“Take Jared with you if that happens, and don’t talk to anyone. You know the drill, we’ve gone over it enough. We’ll be back. We’ll see what the Satrap says about this. We have to try to petition it. We can’t let this go on.”

Her parents had been archaeologists. They’d studied the lamina, sometimes illegally, digging back down into the tiniest bits that talked and made it work. They were the most known lamina explorers in Agathonosis, well respected. They’d hoped their position would help influence the Satrap to fix the world and stop the stratatoi.

But they’d never come back.

And things had gotten worse. And worse.

So now Kara triggered the filter her mom and dad had created. When that filter came down over the world, the artificial rods and cones in her eyes painted very different things.

The ghost, the invisible man, appeared to her outlined in reds and oranges. She watched the man raise a large weapon, point the barrel at the hopolite’s forehead, and pull the trigger. The hopolite’s head exploded, fragments dripping to the ground. Kara looked down at the mud.

Jared squirmed. She grabbed his hand and squeezed as hard as she could. He understood and froze. Kara’s fingers waved a quick mantra to execute the code the whole family had worked on in secret when the troubles had begun. The invisible man turned, looked right at them. His face twisted, a rictus of heat lines.

Now you know, thought Kara. Now you know if it works. There’s always info around. Like air, but more pervasive even. Info gathered by nearby sensors under the ground, in the remains of the tree, built into the very fabric of Agathonosis on a molecular scale. Infodust hanging in the air, testing the ecology of the habitat. Information gathered, reformatted, and presented to her when she asked for it.

She’d accessed lamina all around her since she was a kid, seeing things that weren’t really there with her contacts on, playing games with other children that other people weren’t a part of. The world was always more mysterious, more layered, deeper, than it would have been without the various lamina they all used.

And the invisible killer staring right at her would see nothing of her because he used the lamina too. Like all stratatoi he got orders, maps, plans of attack, and info from his fellow murderers through his augmented reality. Kara’s private lamina had been developed slowly over three hundred years, exploiting small bugs in the meshes of realities the Satrapy had created inside Agathonosis. Kara’s parents were descended from a long line of tweakers who had carved out some small freedoms for themselves from the ever present and powerful eye of the Satrapy. Such as invisibility to allow them to gather and hold meetings.

They’d thought that one special, but it looked as if the stratatoi had it as well.

She let out a deep breath as the invisible man turned around and ran back toward the homemade mortar.

“Go,” she ordered Jared.

He obeyed her, slowly crawling out and skirting the oak tree with her.

They left the river. Kara didn’t think it was safe anymore. More stratatoi had appeared. They were securing the water, she guessed. Turning off the river’s pumps. That hadn’t been in short supply yet, and the Parvati was muddy, but apparently they wanted control of that too.

Like everything else inside Agathonosis.

Kara returned her vision to normal unaugmented reality as they walked out of the brown wastes of the public park and into a series of alleyways. The park reeked of urine, and it was worse here. Perfectly recyclable sewage oozed out of the gutters, piss stains splattered the paper walls of houses. Many maiche walls drooped, ripped off in the first rounds of riots. The houses revealed the insides of rooms and apartments. Frames poked through like skeletons.

A dead neighborhood. Flayed.

They passed houses with roofs that sagged from recent rain. Rain . In what had been a perfectly controlled ecosphere. It had all gone so wrong so quickly. Agathonosis had been a paradise. Lakes near great forests that had trees reaching up, unhindered, and less and less constrained by gravity as they grew taller. Sure they were somewhat crooked from Coriolis forces, but at those heights, you couldn’t tell if it they were bent or just tall .

Now Agathonosis was a festering disaster.

An occasional face peeked out from a hole in the walls, then disappeared.

“Can we stop and eat?” Jared asked. Too loud. Idiot ten-year-old kid. And all she had left. She hadn’t talked to any of her peers or seen her parents in weeks.

“Shhh. We’re not far from where we need to be,” she whispered. Don’t mention food, Brother. Damnit.

The air-lock door lay just around the next small alley, down underneath a manhole cover. Air locks would lead them into the skin of Agathonosis, into the heart of the Satrap’s traditional domain, but also to freedom.

She hoped.

Kara double-checked a heads-up map display in her personal lamina, looking around at markers and tags. She looked back down the street, at the good soil running down the gutters washing off into the storm grates, and heard something rustle.

“Open the manhole cover,” she ordered Jared.

He looked piteously at her. “You make me do everything. Carry the—”