James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

Elsewhere, sedentary proteopape users read magazines or newspapers or books, watched various videofeeds, mailed correspondents, telefactored tourist autonomes around the globe, or performed any of a hundred other proteopape-mediated functions.

Conducting Bash through the quad and toward the towering Building 54, Harnnoy said, “I’m glad you decided to trust the Masqueleros, Applebrook. We won’t let you down. It’s a good thing we have our own ways of monitoring interesting emergent shit around town. We keep special feelers out for anything connected with your name, you know.”

Bash didn’t know. “But why?”

“Are you kidding? You’re famous on campus. The biggest kinasehead ever to emerge from these hallowed halls, even considering all the other famous names. And that’s no intronic string.”

Bash felt weird. Had he really become some kind of emblematic figure to this strange younger generation? The honor sat awkwardly on his shoulders.

“Well, that’s a major tribute, I guess. I only hope I can live up to your expectations.”

“Even if you never released anything beyond proteopape, you already have. That’s why we want to help you now. And it’s truly exonic that we managed to get a spy — me — into place for your meeting with the Dubsters. Those sugar-bags would never have lifted a pinky finger to aid you.”

Despite the worshipful talk, Bash still had his doubts about the utility and motives of the mysterious Masqueleros, but the intransigence of Cricket’s friends left him little choice. (Ms. Licklider herself, although expressing genuine sympathy, had had no solid aid of her own to offer.)

“I really appreciate your help, Tito. But I’m still a little unclear on how you guys hope to track Dagny down.”

“Cryonize your metabolism, pard. You’ll see in a minute.”

Descending a few stairs into an access well, they stopped at an innocuous basement door behind Building 54. A small square of proteopape was inset above the door handle. Harnnoy spit upon it.

“Wouldn’t the oils on your fingers have served as well?” Bash asked.

“Sure. But spitting is muy narcocorrido.”

“Oh.”

The invisible lab in the paper performed an instant DNA analysis on Harnnoy’s saliva, and the door swung open.

Inside the unlit windowless room, a flock of glowing floating heads awaited.

The faces on the heads were all famous ones: Marilyn Monroe, Stephen Hawking, Britney Spears (the teenage version, not the middle-aged spokesperson for OpiateBusters), President Winfrey, Freeman Dyson, Walt Whitman (the celebrations for his 200th birthday ten years ago had gained him renewed prominence), Woody Woodpecker, SpongeBob SquarePants, Bart Simpson’s son Homer Junior.

“Welcome to the lair of the Masqueleros,” ominously intoned a parti-faced Terminator.

Bash came to a dead stop, stunned for a moment, before he realized what he was seeing. Then he got angry.

“Okay, everybody off with the masks. We can’t have any proteopape around while we talk.”

Overhead fluorescents flicked on, and the crowd of conspirators wearing only the cowls of their camo suits stood revealed, the projected faces fading in luminescence to match the ambient light. One by one the Masqueleros doffed their headgear to reveal the grinning motley faces of teenagers of mixed heritage and gender. One member gathered up the disguises, including Harnnoy’s full suit, and stuffed the potentially treacherous proteopape into an insulated cabinet.

Briefly, Bash recapped his problem for the attentive students. They nodded knowingly, and finally one girl said, “So you need to discover this bint’s hiding place without alerting her to your presence. And since she effectively controls every piece of proteopape in the I 2-verse, your only avenue of information is seemingly closed. But you haven’t reckoned with — the internet!”

“The internet!” fumed Bash. “Why don’t I just employ smoke signals or, or — the telegraph? The internet is dead as Xerox.”

A red-haired kid chimed in. “No latch, pard. Big swaths of the web are still in place, maintained by volunteers like us. We revere and cherish the kludgy old monster. The web’s virtual ecology is different now, true, more of a set of marginal biomes separated by areas of clear-cut devastation. But we still host thousands of webcams. And there’s no proteopape in the mix, it’s all antique silicon. So here’s what we do. We put a few agents out there searching, and I guarantee that in no time at all we spot your girlfriend.”

Sighing, Bash said, “She’s not my girlfriend. Oh, well, what’ve I got to lose? Let’s give it a try.”

The Masqueleros and Bash crowded into an adjacent room full of antique hardware, including decrepit plasma flatscreens and folding PDA peripheral keyboards duct-taped into usability. The trapped heat and smells of the laboring electronics reminded Bash of his student days, seemingly eons removed from the present. Several of the Masqueleros sat down in front of their machines and begin to mouse furiously away. Interior and exterior shots of Greater Boston as seen from innumerable forgotten and dusty webcams swarmed the screens in an impressionistic movie without plot or sound.

Tito Harnnoy handed Bash a can of Glialsqueeze pop and said, “Refresh yourself, pard. This could take awhile.”

Eventually Bash and Tito fell to discussing the latest spintronics developments, and their potential impact on proteopape.

“Making the circuitry smaller doesn’t change the basic proteopape paradigm,” maintained Bash. “Each sheet gets faster and boasts more capacity, but the standard functionality remains the same.”

“ Nuh -huh! Spintronics means that all of proteopape’s uses can be distributed into the environment itself. Proteopape as a distinct entity will vanish.”

Bash had to chew on this disturbing new scenario for a while. Gradually, he began to accept Harnnoy’s thesis, at least partially. Why hadn’t he seen such an eventuality before? Maybe Dagny had been right when she accused him of losing his edge….

“Got her!”

Bash and the others clustered around one monitor. And there shone Dagny.

She sat in a small comfy nest of cushions and fast-food packaging trash, a large sheet of proteopape in her lap.

“What camera is this feed coming from?” Bash said.

“It’s mounted at ceiling level in the mezzanine of the Paramount Theater on Washington Street, down near Chinatown.”

When Bash had been born in 1999, the Paramount Theater, one of the grand dames of twentieth-century Hollywood’s Golden Age, had already been shuttered for over two decades. Various rehabilitation plans had been tossed about for the next fifteen years, until Bash entered MIT. During that year, renovations finally began. The grand opening of the theater coincided with the churning of the economy occasioned by the release of proteopape and also with a shortlived but scarily virulent outbreak of Megapox. Faced with uncertain financing, fear of contagion in mass gatherings, and the cheapness of superior home-theater systems fashioned of proteopape, the revamped movie house had locked its doors, falling once again into genteel desuetude.

“Can you magnify the view?” Bash asked. “See what she’s looking at?”

The webcam zoomed in on the sheet of paper in Dagny’s lap.

And Bash saw that she was watching them.

In infinite regress, the monitor showed the proteopape showing the monitor showing the proteopape showing…..

Bash howled. “Someone’s got proteopape on them!”

Just then a leering Dagny looked backward over her shoulder directly at the webcam, and at the same time Bash’s chin spoke.

“It’s you, you idiot,” said Bash’s epidermis in Dagny’s stepped-down voice.