TWENTY-TWO
As soon as the infostream from the tattune in Anthea’s palm dries up, Rigo slumps to his knees. Drags his fingers along the wall to the chalky floor tile and tries not to implode. He feels empty, on the verge of a total meltdown.
“Rigo?” Varda says. “What’s wrong?”
He rests his forehead against the wall. Breathes deeply a couple of times, heaving in air to fill the void inside him. Tries to hold on to the grainy bitcam image of Anthea standing in the doorway, lit by the blue cellophane glow of an overhead awning, the sidewalk dappled by variegated shadows, a Monet-splash of circuitree leaves as lively as castanets.
“Take it slow,” Varda tells him. “Your respiration and pulse rate are elevated and you’re sweating.”
Rigo sniffs. Swallows pasty saliva.
“I thought you’d be glad to see Anthea,” the IA says. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.”
Rigo tries to ease the steel bands constricting his chest. “I need to get out of here. This place is driving me crazy.”
“Are you turning into a loon?”
“Something like that.” He places his hands on the wall beside his head. “I need you to help me find someone else.”
“Who?”
“Ibrahim. The street kid Anthea was trying to help.”
“I can try,” Varda says. “But first you have to find yourself.”
Whatever that means. Sounds like the IA has been indulging in a little too much transcendental meditation. “Just tell me what to do,” he says, exhaustion giving way to exasperation.
“Relax.”
“I’m trying.” A few more breaths. In with the good air, out with the bad. Then, “Okay. Ready whenever you are.”
Varda takes him deeper into the ribozone. Interlocking strands of code, tangled as a mop of hair. Nested cryptoglyphs. Recursive protein folds. A real mess. The chemical equivalent of machine code.
“I’m lost,” he says. No way he’ll ever be able to make sense of this on his own. Find his way around.
In response, a walled-in garden forms around him. Assembles itself out of the fabric of code. Threads of molecules weaving a new virtuality. A canopy of interleaved branches tightly knitted together. Red, white, and blue flowered vines that trail to the ground, send out runners to a menagerie of sculpted topiary. It’s like visiting a zoo or a carnival populated with all kinds of freak animals. Some are recognizable—dogs, roaches, rats—but others are more exotic. Chimerical shit like winged spiders and beaked snakes. In addition, there are thorny cubes, leafy spheres, and basketlike cylinders that appear to be woven out of wiry twigs. Support structures for fungus and various infestations of ersatz bacterial colonies that look as if they’ve been transplanted straight from the refrigerator in his ap.
Then there are the butterflies. Thousands of them, fluttering from one plant to the next. Colorful, undulating streamers that link up into chains, break apart, and then reform.
“Talk to me,” he says. “Where the hell am I?”
“The central African ecotectural system. You’re looking at biomorphs of all the constituent components.”
The garden isn’t much larger than his hotel room, and there are wooden trellises on the walls of sun-hardened mud.
“I tried to present it in a form you are familiar with,” the IA explains. “A 3-D schematic seemed the best.”
“What’s with the butterflies?” Rigo strolls over to a cube covered with monarchs. Reaches out and touches it. Tastes cocoa and chrome in the seething mass of wings that generate no breeze.
“They designate data transfer at the molecular level,” Varda tells him. “Chemical infostream between ecotectural elements.” The IA could be a do-cent in a museum, or a tour guide in some Third World biological preserve.
“What about the geometric shapes? Spheres. Cubes. Cylinders. What do they represent?”
“Nonorganic systems. Power distribution centers. Waste-water filtration plants. Transportation nodes.” The IA could go on and on.
In short, public-ecotecture infrastructure. Rigo peers up at the canopy, catches a glimpse of domed Cistine blue, too close to be a real sky. It’s almost like standing under a bower in a well-maintained arboretum. Neatly pruned—everything under rigid control. “How about the branches? What are they?”
“The primary code for the base ecotecture. The public space that everybody has access to. Like a skeleton, it binds together all the other elements, provides the support structure for everything else.”
“Including the different clades?”
“Yes.”
Rigo looks around, searching for telltale anthropomorphisms. “Where are all the people?”
“To your left.”
Rigo heads in that direction, skirts a bush with a leafy sphere atop a spindly trunk, and stumbles into what appears to be a person covered with different varieties of flowers. The person isn’t moving—is actually a topiary statue twisted out of rose-bush bramble. In addition to the flowers—petunias, goosefoot violets, and lilacs—there are a shitload of small black bees crawling on the stems and petals.
“There you are,” Varda says.
Hard to tell if the IA is talking in general terms, or about him personally. “So the flowers are? . . .” he prompts.
“DNA and pherion information,” the IA says. “The molecular code that identifies each individual in the ecotecture. The figure is a mannequin onto which the clade-profile of an individual can be mapped and visually displayed. It’s no one, and everyone.”
So, a generic template, in which each flower equates to a specific pherion, and its position correlates to the host range of glycoproteins on the surface of a virus. “I take it the bees are information carriers,” he says, “the same as the butterflies?”
“Not exactly,” the IA says. “They indicate hardwired data—not softwired.”
“In other words, biochemical information that can’t be updated remotely.”
“Yes.”
“What’s my clade-profile look like?” Rigo says.
“Touch the figure.”
Rigo moves a step closer to the topiary figure. “They’re not really bees, right?” He can’t hear any buzzing. “I’m not gonna get stung, or anything?” Not that he’s ever been stung by a bee. All he’s heard is stories from his mother.
“Don’t worry,” Varda says. “You would have to come into direct physical contact with the ecotecture to be affected by them. As it is, your remote link is set up to translate clade incompatibilities as different tastes and smells.”
Like the toxic stench of his ap when he got back from Costa Rica, newly claded for Tiresias. No problem. He can deal with that.
Rigo reaches for the topiary. Hesitates. What if he doesn’t like what he sees? It’s not like a bad haircut that will grow back, or an ugly shirt that can be taken off and tossed into a disassembler.
“What are you waiting for?” Varda says.
“Nothing.”
He fingers the petal of a rose. Several bees detach from the avatar and land on his hand. They crawl around for a few seconds, then buzz back to the flowers. As soon as they make contact, the flowers change, become lilacs, yellow pansies, blue columbines, and white Icelandic poppies. Except for one or two orange monkey flowers, which remain unmorphed. Several butterflies land on the newly transformed figure, stay for a moment, then wander off, making room for others. Each time, a fraction of a second after one lands or takes off, he gets a tickle or an itch in about the same location as the butterfly on the figure. Some sort of delayed feedback that loops back to his in-vivo body from the flowery avatar in the ribozone.
“What do you think?” Varda asks him, all excited. “I picked the flowers and their arrangement myself.”
Rigo’s face puckers, his expression sour as he considers the bouquet. “How come you included pansies?”
“Because they have faces.”
“Okay. But what exactly is it about them makes you think of me? I mean if this is supposed to represent me, what do the pansies stand for, personality-wise? Like possibly they’re colorful. Or bold. Confident.”
“They’re cute, cheerful. They always have a smile, no matter how sad things are for them.”
In other words, a clown. Just how he wants to be thought of. As if he hasn’t been humiliated enough lately. “Is that really the way you see me? Wait. No. Don’t answer that.”
“You don’t like it, do you?” the IA says, its enthusiasm fading, voice reminiscent of crushed leaves underfoot. Bruised and battered.
Rigo opens his mouth. Almost blurts out, “What if I said you reminded me of a bad tattune that’s missing a few lines of code?” Doesn’t. Thinks better of it. Manages to do a complete about-face. “I love it,” he says.
Varda brightens. “Really?”
“It’s beautiful,” he says. “Honest. It’s obvious you put a lot of thought into it, and it shows.”
“I wanted to abduct the real you.”
“Well, you did a great job.” Rigo exhales, puffing out his cheeks. “How do we find Ibrahim?” he says, anxious to move on. Get down to business.
“Do you want to spec his clade-profile?”
“Sure.” No way the kid will be represented by pansies. He only smiled once the whole time they were together, a brief glimmer of contentment am-bushed by the sudden, unexpected return of pain. After that, he’d been afraid to relax at all, to give in to comfort. Orchids would be more apropos, Rigo thinks. Something that’s dependent on others to survive.
The figure morphs, changes size and shape. Sure enough, the pansies vanish, are replaced by dahlias and some kind of purple thistle. There aren’t nearly as many blossoms or bees, and the butterflies drift off in a disorganized cloud. Don’t want to have anything to do with this new arrangement of flowers.
“Doesn’t look healthy,” Rigo says. Scraggly, he thinks. Sick. Like he’s clinging to life. “So where is he now? Where did they take him?”
“The last location on record is your mother’s apartment. His profile hasn’t been updated since then.”
Rigo walks around the figure, pacing, hands knotted in frustration. “There must be some way to find him. Sniffers, or whatever. That’s the way BEAN or whoever found him, right? What about all the bitcams in plants and buildings, uploading images to the Net? Isn’t there a way to parse those?”
“A random search?”
“Doesn’t have to be random. It could be targeted— based on likely possibilities, or extrapolation.”
“That could steal a while,” Varda says.
“Yeah, well, it’s better than doing nothing.” Rigo feels caged, can still spec the wall against his fingertips. A solid barrier.
“It would be easier if he was remote-linked,” Varda says. “But he’s not. I have to wait for a regular upload to pinprick him.”
“What kind of upload are you talking about?”
“Medical. Environmental. Demographic. Those records get updated periodically. Usually once every twenty-four hours, to keep them current.”
“By the government?”
“Yes. But private interest groups also maintain extensive networks of sniffers and other information gathering agents. Advertising and marketing firms in particular do a lot of realtime in-situ datamining. So do news agencies. It’s hard to avoid detection by all of these infosources. Especially when there are so many of them.”
“So it’s a good bet he’ll show up on one of them,” Rigo says. “It’s just a matter of time.”
“Yes.”
“The problem is,” Rigo says, “we might not have twenty-four hours or however long it takes for an update to reference him.”
“Another problem,” Varda says, “is that I’m not sure what ecotectures or clades to monitor.”
True, Rigo thinks. By now he could’ve been recladed, or doped with an antipher, and LOHopped anywhere in the world. “How many different clades are there? Total, I mean?”
“There are sixteen distinct ecotectural systems,” the IA says, “and approximately two thousand clades.”
“You don’t know the exact number?” It seems that an accurate count should be on record somewhere.
“There are an estimated three hundred unregistered clades in existence. The precise number is fuzzy.”
Some of those clades are probably black-market. But he’s willing to bet the majority are politicorp maintained. Clandestine incarceration, security or espionage clades that only a few people belong to or know about.
A translucent 2-D window appears in front of Rigo, floats at eye level—a sort of wall-less wallscreen that looks like a jigsaw puzzle. A patchwork of color stitched together by the outlines of continents. He can’t make out any obvious pattern or shape. It’s pretty much a Rorschach blob.
“This is a worldwide clade-distribution map,” Varda says. “It includes all of the current registered clades, and the ecotectural system or systems they belong to.”
He can see the central African ecotectural system he’s in—a bulbous aneurysm of burnt sienna around the Congo River basin—and that it contains just four clades. Meaning there’s not a lot of fine-grain social stratification here. So the economic gap between the clades is pretty pronounced. Not much chance for clade-switching or movement between classes. The social structure is fairly rigid. Looking at the map, he notes the same ecotectural system is in other parts of Africa, as well as India, Australia, and the Argentine desert.
Rigo locates San Jose. SJ is a ringworm welt of pink around the San Francisco Bay, clinging to the high ground of surrounding hills. It’s got about a hundred clades. Diversity up the yin-yang compared to central Africa and the balance of the Third World. But not quite as much as the eastern U.S. seaboard or most of Europe, for that matter.
Rigo raises one index finger to the map, pauses a few millimeters short of actually making contact.
“Gopher it,” Varda says, encouraging.
Rigo touches San Jose. The walled garden metamorphoses around him. The trees change into familiar circuitrees and umbrella palms. The canopy of interleaved branches becomes vines of white and pink flowered wisteria. The color and patterning of the bees and butterflies shift with the change in molecular code. He inhales the unfettered scent of almonds.
“I can do this with any of the ecotectures?” he says. “See what they’re like just by touching them?”