Fiction: The Stars Are Tomorrow
LexIcon (lexicon@nc2600.org)
Chapter One
Monsoon season had stared early, and the sounds of an overbuilt storm filled the terminal. It wasn't clear if Jenny saw Andy first, or it was the other way around. The lights had gone out for a few moments, causing both to look up from their laptops. They saw each other in momentary flashes of lightning, processing ghostly images of past life and present circumstances. The lights came back on and they were staring at each other across the VIP vaping lounge. Both looked away. Jenny looked back and thought she recognized the old backpack at his feet, and then she was the one who crossed over.
They had barely started talking when a gate agent's voice announced the cancellation of all flights out of New Business Luck City 77. Andy said he was going to go home, Jenny was going to stay in the terminal overnight and try to get out in the morning. She said she had given up her place in the city and was moving back home. Andy stayed and they talked a bit. Jenny said she had been traveling around Southeast Asia for a few months, and it wasn't what she had expected. She could never seem to visit places like Hashima Island or Kowloon Walled City. Andy said she had to come and stay with him. With a smile, he said, "My life is so cyberpunk now. You will love my place. I have a quick way out of here. You can rest up, get some good ramen, and fly out in the morning." She was apprehensive for a moment, running her fingers past her right ear, performing the absent minded time stalling action of brushing away hair, but it was no longer present with her tropics-friendly pixie cut. She looked down the concourse for a moment and suddenly changed her mind. "Yeah, let's go."
It took a couple minutes to walk all the way out with the crowd. When they got outside, the usual throng of beggars and unofficial porters was gone from the front door, driven away by the weather and disappointment at seeing a crowd bearing only carry-on luggage. There was a cab line with hundreds of people standing around, but only moments passed until Andy's housekeeper showed up in an old beat up green Mercedes with six miscellaneous antennas bristling across the roof. Jenny took note of yellowed copies of Gibson novels and new manga stuffed into the seatback pocket. Cyberpunk and sci-fi were what they had bonded over in high school, before he disappeared. So far he had only told her he had gone traveling; she was the one telling the stories.
The Mercedes exited the highway at the first opportunity, almost immediately after pulling on, then following a long road through an industrial-looking area before pulling up to an odd assortment of apparently residential buildings. The housekeeper said almost nothing the entire ride, and dropped them off at the end of an alleyway where the car could not proceed. Neglected laundry hung soaking in the rain from a line high above, sending down streams of water that they had to dodge around as Andy led Jenny a few meters into the alley and then up some green stone steps into a generic slum building. They rode upwards in an elevator that seemed surprisingly clean and safe considering the surroundings.
Andy's apartment was a penthouse that spanned two buildings and, contrary to Jenny's impression from the dilapidated exterior, it had been renovated into a mostly open floor-plan with modern fixtures and a cross of Eastern and Scandinavian aesthetics. There was a workbench near the kitchen, but really disassembled technology and half-finished projects were everywhere. This was a hackerspace.
After drying off a bit, the two settled onto a western-style couch, and Jenny pressed again for an answer as to why Andy had disappeared all those years ago.
"Would you believe I won the lottery?" Jenny just smiled and raised an eyebrow skeptically.
"Do you remember how my dad was always throwing away my comic books and anything that wasn't for school? So, it was my 18th birthday, and you and some other people had given me some really great stuff, and my dad came into my room and ripped it all up, even snapped two CDs in half. As he was tearing out the pages of The Stars My Destination, he kept screaming 'The stars are tomorrow, the stars are tomorrow, the stars are tomorrow.' It was a major blowup. I made the mistake of screaming back at him, and he hit me hard. I snuck out of the house that night and hitchhiked to see my godfather, Lewis Grand, who was my mom's mentor when she was working in Chicago. He and my dad hated each other. Well, my dad hated Lewis, anyway. When I got there, he was so happy to see me. I didn't know if he would even remember who I was. He made me dinner, and it was my mom's lemon chicken recipe... rather, it was his recipe that she used. We talked half the night, and I could just feel this weight lifting. I hadn't trusted anyone in a long time, but I immediately trusted Lewis."
The housekeeper came in the door. "Fung, when you're dried off, would you make us some tea and a snack, please?" She nodded silently and trudged off toward the back of the apartment. "Who is that?" asked Jenny. "She's my housekeeper. Her niece used to work for me, but she was in an accident a few weeks ago, so Fung came to live with me." Jenny got a weird vibe from her, but wasn't sure why, so she prompted Andy to keep telling his story.
"The morning after I got to Lewis's house, there was this envelope on the coffee table with my name on it, and a birthday card inside that just said 'cash me.' Taped inside the card was a $20 bill and a lottery ticket. Lewis wasn't in the house, so I walked down the street to a convenience store on the corner and got a fried egg and mayo sandwich, and asked the guy to check the ticket... six million dollars. I didn't even have a bank account. It was insane. When I got back to the house, Lewis was there, and he was playing it all cool. I don't know what he did, but I don't think I won the lottery by random chance. He asked me what I wanted to do most, and I said I wanted to go see all those places in the books. So, he helped me set up a bank account and pick my first destination, and then I was off. Traveling the world, looking for Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, or Morpheus, or whatever the hell else was out there."
Andy went on, with Jenny starting to ask a lot of questions. He told her about the year in Shanghai, the year in Tianjin, living with the Tungusic and Mongols, and how he had met so many hackers and tinkerers in the Philippines. He didn't just burn the lottery cash, he had started making business deals, trading his knowledge of tech and cultures for shares in dozens of companies. Finally, he got a bit self conscious and realized he had been talking for hours. He wanted to know what brought Jenny to the city, but she dodged most of his questions. She kept getting up and looking out the window. Finally, Andy got up and went to see what she was looking at.
Down on the street, at the corner near the shuttered solenoid factory, just at the edge of the streetlight, a figure. The rain was temporarily abated, still falling but not nearly as hard. This person was just standing there in a wide brimmed hat and a trenchcoat - conspicuously western. "Who is that?" asked Andy. "Nobody. It's nobody." Jenny walked away from the window. "How do you know it's nobody? Who is that?" Jenny looked pained and rubbed the back of her arm.
It was at that moment they heard the hammers being pulled back on handguns from across the room. Three men in suits with tattooed faces had somehow entered the apartment unnoticed, and two were approaching with guns drawn. Andy put his hands up and stood between them and Jenny, while she stuck her hands deep in her pockets and backed up against the window. They didn't want Andy, they wanted Jenny.
Less than a minute and a half later, Andy and Jenny were running down the slick wet alleyways of the oddly assembled apartment block, with the housekeeper and a trenchcoated American whom Jenny had introduced as Monticello but addressed as Monty. Andy's lip was busted open and he winced a bit every few steps. Monticello held a handkerchief against a gunshot wound in his left shoulder but otherwise looked more or less unstoppable. One of those unreal action movie types who gets character from taking bullets and shovels to the head. They ran through a shopping arcade with huge spreads of vegetables and big baskets and cages full of small animals destined for stews, then turned and were in a red light district, then Andy led them through a brightly-lit cooking store that cut through the block, and down another alley into a basement with a strobing LED sign over the door that was so bright it almost hid the entrance.
This was Mandibles, a 187-station cybercafe, populated by gamers and travelers, businessmen and hustlers, kids and caff junkies... a dimly lit sea of screens and task chairs in row after row of cubicles and desks and zombies with headphones. No one paid much notice to the four soaking wet figures rushing down a sparsely populated row of older machines and practically crashing into the back room where they found the manager, Lim Ling, poking at a tray of takeout pork dumplings.
Andy was upset that no one was at the front desk. This was his business, and Lim was supposed to be on duty. Lim solemnly nodded to Andy, but couldn't stop staring at Monticello's painfully obvious gunshot wound. Andy sent Lim back to the front desk and ordered no disturbances. There was a first aid kit in the office, and Jenny showed surprisingly efficient medical skills, carefully extracting the bullet and suturing the wound.
"Where did you learn to do that?" asked Andy with a raised eyebrow. Jenny hesitated as Monticello glared at her, but after a moment she shook off his apprehension and her own, and started to explain. "Basic training. We're agents of The Nodes. I was headed back stateside when I ran into you at the airport. I was carrying something very important. Remember all those diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks dropped on the web a while back? Think bigger. So, it was supposed to be a silent operation, but those gangsters showed up right when you asked me to hang out."
The Nodes: National Observation and Defense of Electronic Systems and, as Jenny said, "We're a kind of cyberpunk CIA, an intelligence agency not answerable to DHS, a quasi-public enterprise. Corporate donors fund our operations to keep an eye on the electrons. We operate where hackers operate, where financial transactions happen, and keep hubrisine foreign corporations honest by reading their mail." Andy wasn't sure if she was joking or trying to scam him. The Nodes was popularly exaggerated, a running joke in the ex-pat tech community - like every cell phone, every ATM, every $12 generic electric beard trimmer on the planet was a piece of their surveillance network.
The gangsters would find them soon. All licensed businesses in the city had to point a surveillance camera at people walking in the front door, and all the feeds went back to a police surveillance system. At Mandibles, the system was conveniently transmitting static, and Andy was literally sitting on a pile of government notices about fines for noncompliance, but they had run past two dozen other businesses that weren't expressing a state of willful disobedience. The police weren't the problem exactly. It was the tech-savvy criminal gangs who regularly tapped into the system and its facial recognition database. Even if the gangsters chasing them didn't have regular access, they surely could get a favor in a matter of minutes, and with frightening precision narrow down accurate last known whereabouts. As soon as the group had passed through the cooking store, they were undoubtedly on the police radar, and in turn the gang's. Everyone knew this, but Andy had a plan.
"Bad Pandas," said Monty. He was looking out through the dark glass at the front door, where Lim was face down in his dumplings at the front counter, and the gangsters were already inside Mandibles, moving row to row roughing up the customers. Monticello recognized one as a leader of the notorious crime ring, Shulanqui Bad Pandas, who specialized in data ransoming. Jenny wondered aloud, "That was too fast. Monty, how did they know?" That was also the moment that the old housekeeper, Fung, inexplicably turned on the overhead lights in the back room, canceling the effect of the two-way mirror, and drawing the attention of the gangsters like velociraptors to a fallen spoon.
The group fled out a back door, deeper into the building and up to the roof. High above the dense concrete and steel blocks of the neighborhood, the rain had subsided, and blinding sideways electronic billboard light punched through a haze across the slick concrete flattops and corrugated aluminum lean-tos that framed the garden and birdcage penthouses, creating a mix of simple and complex deep shadows from the kaleidoscopic matrix of architecturally slapdash rooftop geometries. Even being chased by gunmen, Jenny looked around in a moment of wonder. After navigating over a dozen puzzle box parapets, and Monty taking down a perhaps innocent camera drone with his sidearm, they descended again into yet another stark concrete stairwell.
Now they were in a long hallway, multiple buildings connected with covered bridges. Andy seemed sure of where he was going. There was music ahead, and then all around them, but Jenny couldn't tell where it was coming from. Andy stopped in front of a large air vent and knocked on the opposite wall. A panel slid open and a fierce scowl eyed them closely. The vent popped back and slid open, and Andy led the group into the wall.