Cricket grinned. “I knew you’d come looking for some of the good stuff eventually, Bashie-boy.”
“No, it’s not like that. I appreciate your attention, really I do, but I need to find Dagny.”
Frowning, Cricket said, “You lost your girlfriend? Too bad. Why should I help you find her?”
“Because she’s going to destroy proteopape if I don’t stop her. Where would that leave you and your fellow Dubsters? Where would that leave any of us for that matter?”
This dire news secured Cricket’s interest, widening her iguana eyes. “Holy shit! Well, Christ, I don’t know what to say. I haven’t seen her since the Woodies. She might not even be in town anymore.”
“Can you get the rest of your crew together? Maybe one of them knows something useful.”
“I’ll do my best. Meet us at the clubhouse in an hour.”
Cricket cut the transmission, but not before uploading the relevant address to Bash’s phone.
Bash decided that a shave and a shower would help settle his nerves.
In the bathroom, Bash lathered up his face in the proteopape mirror: a sheet that digitized his image in real time and displayed it unreversed. The mirror also ran a small window in which a live newscast streamed. As Bash listened intently for any bulletins regarding the public malfunctioning of proteopape, he took his antique Mach3 razor down from the wall cabinet’s shelf and then sudsed his face from a spray can. Having been raised in a simple-living household, Bash still retained many old-fashioned habits, such as actually shaving. He drew the first swath through the foam up his neck and under his chin.
Without warning, his mirror suddenly hosted the leering face of Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Bash yelped and cut himself. The Hunchback chortled, then vanished. And now his mirror was as dead as his newspaper.
Cursing Dagny, Bash located a small analogue mirror at the bottom of a closet and finished shaving. He put a proteopape band-aid on the cut, and the band-aid instantly assumed the exact texture and coloration of the skin it covered (with cut edited out), becoming effectively invisible.
Bash’s shower curtain was more proteopape, laminated and featuring a loop of the Louisiana rainforest, complete with muted soundtrack. Bash yanked it off its hooks and took a shower without regard to slopping water onto the bathroom floor. Toweling off, he even regarded the roll of toilet paper next to the John suspiciously, but then decided that Dagny wouldn’t dare.
Dressed in his usual casual manner — white Wickaway shirt, calf-length tropical-print pants and Supplex sandals — Bash left his house. He took his Segway IX from its recharging slot in the garage, and set out for the nearby commuter-rail node. As he zipped neatly along the wealthy and shady streets of Lincoln, the warm, humid June air laving him, Bash tried to comprehend the full potential dimensions of Dagny’s meddling with proteopape. He pictured schools, businesses, transportation and government agencies all brought to a grinding halt as their proteopape systems crashed. Proteopape figured omnipresently in the year 2029. So deeply had it insinuated itself into daily life that even Bash could not keep track of all its uses. If proteopape went down, it would take the global economy with it.
And what of Bash’s personal rep in the aftermath? When the facts came out, he would become the biggest idiot and traitor the world had ever tarred and feathered. His name would become synonymous with “fuck up”: “You pulled a helluva applebrook that time.” “I totally applebrooked my car, but wasn’t hurt.” “Don’t hire him, he’s a real applebrook.”
The breeze ruffling Bash’s hair failed to dry the sweat on his brow as fast as it formed.
At the station, Bash parked and locked his Segway. He bounded up the stairs and the station door hobermanned open automatically for him. He bought his ticket, and after only a ten-minute wait found himself riding east toward the city.
At the end of Bash’s car a placard of proteopape mounted on the wall cycled through a set of advertisements. Bash kept a wary eye on the ads, but none betrayed a personal vendetta against him.
Disembarking at South Station, Bash looked around for his personal icon in the nearest piece of public proteopape, and quickly discovered it glowing in the corner of a newsstand’s signage: a bright green pear (thoughts of his parents briefly popped up) with the initials BA centered in it.
Every individual in the I2 society owned such a self-selected icon, its uniqueness assured by a global registry. The icons had many uses, but right now Bash’s emblem was going to help him arrive at the Dubsters’ club. His pocket phone was handshaking with every piece of proteopape in the immediate vicinity and was laying down a trail of electronic breadcrumbs for him to follow, based on the directions transmitted earlier by Cricket.
A second pear appeared beyond the newsstand, on a plaque identifying the presence of a wall-mounted fire extinguisher, and so Bash walked toward it. Many other travelers were tracking their own icons simultaneous with Bash. As he approached the second iteration of the luminous pear, a third copy glowed from the decorative patch on the backpack of a passing schoolkid. Bash followed until the kid turned right. (Many contemporary dramas and comedies revolved around the chance meetings initiated by one’s icon appearing on the personal property of a stranger. An individual could of course deny this kind of access, but surprisingly few did.) The pear icon vanished from the pack, to be replaced by an occurrence at the head of the subway stairs. Thus was Bash led onto a train and to his eventual destination, a building on the Fenway not far from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
As he ascended the steps of the modest brownstone, Bash’s eye was snagged by the passage of a sleek new Europa model car, one of the first to fully incorporate proteopape in place of windshield glass. He marveled at the realism of its “windows,” which apparently disclosed the driver — a handsome young executive type — chatting with his passenger — a beautiful woman.
The car windows were in reality all sheets of suitably strengthened proteopape, utterly opaque. The inner surfaces of the “windows” displayed the outside world to the occupants of the car (or anything else, for that matter, although the driver, at least, had better be monitoring reality), while the outer surfaces broadcast the car’s interior (the default setting) or any other selected feed. The driver and passenger Bash saw might have been the actual occupants of the Europa, or they might have been canned constructs. The car could in reality hold some schlubby Walter Mitty type, the president-in-exile of the Drowned Archipelagos or the notorious terrorist Mungo Bush Meat. (Suspicious of the latter instance, roving police would get an instant warrant to tap the windows and examine the true interior.)
Returning his attention to the door displaying his icon, Bash phoned Cricket.
“I’m here.”
“One second.”
The door opened on its old-fashioned hinges and Bash stepped inside, to be met by Cricket.
Today the woman wore an outfit of rose-colored spidersilk street pajamas that revealed an attractive figure concealed the previous night by her formal armor. She smiled and gave Bash a brief spontaneous hug and peck.
“Buck up, Bashie-boy. Things can’t be that bad.”
“No, they’re worse! Dagny is going to bring down civilization if she keeps on messing with proteopape.”
“Exactly what is she doing, and how’s she doing it?”
“I can’t reveal everything, but it’s all my fault. I inadvertently gave her the ability to ping and finger every piece of proteopape in existence.”
Cricket whistled. “I knew you zillionaires bestowed generous gifts, but this one even beats the time South Africa gave away the AIDS cure.”