Needlefish. Great in a food printer, vicious in the wild.
“So what’s for lunch?”
Kiro’s sullen voice breaks into my reverie, and I turn away from the view, wiping a hand across my brow. The downside of Glassbridge is amplification of the everpresent heat, especially on clear days. The climate control must be busted again.
“Johnny’s.”
“Awwww, Johnny’s is halfway into the Brown. Why do we have to walk all the way over there? Supernoodle’s way closer.”
“Because Supernoodle’s a shitty corp chain run by robots. I like getting my food from actual human beings, ones I can… talk to, if they try and hack my order. Besides, you haven’t visited Johnny in a while.”
Or Mom, you stupid lump. Not that you’ll let me tell you that without flying into a rage.
Kiro sniffs. “When did you become so paranoid, sis?”
It’s a struggle not to mention, yet again, the endless stream of abuse filling my public inbox from the socials, or the particularly inventive boardshit who caused a thermal detonation in the drink printer at my favorite caf shop minutes after I stepped away from it, or the gummie crisis squad that showed up at my last known address, killing the current resident’s barking pup after they busted down the door but before they figured out they got spoofed. Kiro’s my brother, and I love him dearly, but he can be impossibly dense sometimes. I’m just lucky they haven’t tracked down my latest living space. Yet.
“Some of us have to deal with the world differently because of who we are, bro,” I respond. “Anyway, I’m paying, so we’re walking.”
“…Whatever.”
We cross over Glassbridge from Highrise into the cooler air of the Brown, currently suffering one of its regular power failures. Emergency red lights illuminate shadowy passageways filled with residents going about their daily business, seemingly unconcerned by the muted crimson. Ubiquitous surveillance spheres rest quietly in their ceiling mounts, vacant eyes staring at nothing. Smaller, jury-rigged spheres twitch and jiggle madly beside their inactive cousins, torn between competing demands from whoever currently controls their open-access protocols, and I try not to smile. In the Brown, everyone watches the watchmen. Even the gummies.
With a quick hapcommand, my glasses switch to lowlight mode, and the narrow halls brighten to a shade approaching normal, the people moving through them shadowed in odd ways as the visual processors strain to keep up. A small ’Net icon appears in my vision, a grinning, pale white mask, but I ignore it—no need to log in yet. A small thud and a muted curse cause me to look over at Kiro, rubbing his head where he ran into an overhanging beam.
“Stupid Brownies. Can’t even keep their lights working right.” His voice is petulant, whiny. I stop, focusing on him.
“You ever considered that maybe the ‘Brownies’ know exactly what they’re doing with their lights?”
He scowls at me, and I try to keep my temper tamped down. He’s a teenager, he’ll grow out of it, don’t drive him off, he’s your brother, where are you going to get another support, stay calm, don’t get into a fight…
I make a conscious effort to relax the muscles in my face. Smile. Everyone’s always telling me to smile.
“Take a second to think, Kiro. You see any working gummie cams in here? Any tourists? Doesn’t it strike you as odd that we came from a fully functioning hapchamber into what looks like a Fundie compound, yet our ’Net connections still function perfectly and the climate control’s actually better? And the cam problems persist no matter how often the gummies try and fix it?”
“I don’t get it.”
I repress the urge to shake him.
“We’re going to have to work on those deductive reasoning skills. The only reason any of that makes sense is if this is grayhat territory. You do know who grayhats are, right?”
“…Stupid ’Net club.”
“Idiot. Grayhats are the last remnant of the old net, the one before it became the ’Net. Back before portals and ID linking, when you could be anyone you wanted. Anonymous.”
“Sounds dirty. Why should I care if everyone knows who I am? I don’t do anything wrong.”
“Jesus, Kiro. Try using your brain outside the Game for once. Follow me.” I turn away from Kiro and start walking, making my way through the twisting corridors by memory. “Sometimes it’s important for people not to know who you are. To have a place where you can be someone else. Where you can make mistakes, learn who you are and what you believe, what you’re willing to fight for.”
I nod to a one-legged man propped in a battered chair, eyes shut in his weathered face like he’s sleeping. An insignia peeks through the grime on his battered flight jacket, one of the southern drone squadrons from the Water Wars—the Dubs. He nods back, fingers twitching inside his hapgloves. I lead Kiro through another claustrophobic conduit, exposed wiring drooping overhead.
“Maybe you’re saying something nice, maybe something mean, maybe it’s the right thing to do, maybe not. What matters is that you can say it, and if it’s wrong, learn from it, and if it’s right, your door isn’t kicked down in the middle of the night. As long as it holds, anonymity keeps you safe from those who want to hurt you.”
Kiro brushes away a strand of wires, and I wince. Another couple centimeters and he would’ve channeled some serious voltage.
Then again, maybe that’s what he needs.
“But that doesn’t make sense. On the ’Net, no one can say bad things without you knowing who they are. Like the people who don’t like you, Ash. With portals, and IDs, why don’t you just block them?”
I resist the urge to slam my palm into my face.
“First off, I didn’t do anything to them other than exist. I shouldn’t have to block them; they shouldn’t be saying that shit. They can get fucked. Second, even if I wanted to block them, the gummies don’t give me that luxury.”
“What do you mean?”
Dammit Kiro, are you really that blind? That unaware of the world we live in?
“Seriously? Do you even history? Have you bothered to look at any of the archives I sent you?”
“…No. Been busy playing the Game.”
“The Game’s important, but the real’s important too. You should know this stuff.”
“Just tell me, then.”
I frown. Kiro still doesn’t understand how to learn, how to find information, how to sift the pure from the dross and draw a conclusion. This could be a problem. I try to figure out how to condense decades’ worth of history into something that might break through his obsession with ignorance.
“Back before the silkies and the gummies broke the world, the net was equal for everyone. Well, mostly equal; Han already had a prototype regional ’Net. All you needed was a connection. Then the Dubs began, the Split happened, and everything got chopped into pieces. Once the radiation stabilized, we ended up with the regional ’Nets, and the global ’Net. Everyone in power spun it as giving citizens a choice to access content exclusively meant for them, keep them safe from hospital hacks, autocar ransoms, all the scriptkiddy shit, but in the end, it was just plain old censorship. Info from the global ’Net has to make it through regional ’Net filters before we can access it, which means the gummies control everything we see. It’s like that everywhere now.”
I duck through a rattling bead curtain into a well-lit small restaurant, more a hallway than a room, and wave to the large, balding man standing behind the counter in an old-fashioned chef’s apron. He ignores me, madly shifting five steaming woks on a four-burner stove, his skin flushed from the heat of the electric coils and the constant motion, and I smile inside. I’ve never seen Johnny not juggling a million things at once. I grab a stool at the empty counter and motion Kiro to sit beside me, turning off my lowlight program and pushing my glasses up onto my forehead.