Which was fine, sure, except that it was Bascal she’d sat down with, not some ordinary puke two years younger than her. And she hadn’t brought her friends, either. Probably hadn’t even told them, for fear of having to share.
“Hi,” Bascal said back, in imitation of her tone.
“Hello,” Conrad added, with no particular inflection, figuring he might as well at least try.
The girl nodded, sparing him half a glance before focusing her attention on Bascal once again. She asked, with mock indifference, “You wanted something?”
Bascal leaned back and smiled. “Seeing you, my dear, I can think of a lot of things to want. But I doubt we have much time, so I’ll get right to the point: I need access to a taboo fax machine. I’m carrying contraband. What’s your name, by the way?”
Her eyes widened. “I’m Xmary. You need acc—”
“Eksmerry? Is that a nickname? Short for what, Christina Marie?”
“Xiomara Li Weng,” she answered distractedly. “You want
what
, now?”
“A fax machine. A simple, ordinary fax machine that will copy
ta’e fakalao
. Forbidden objects and substances. My men are here are on a mission, for which they have certain material requirements. Clothes, for one thing,” he said, pinching his Camp Friendly shirt for emphasis.
And truly, that was one of the camp’s worst indignities: natural cloth. The shirts and culottes not only looked silly, they
would not change
their color or cut or permeability. They didn’t regulate temperature or dissipate sweat. They didn’t obey commands, or even hear them. They didn’t
do
anything.
“And what else?” the girl demanded, clearly concerned that this was a setup, that she was the focus of some sort of royal joke or sting operation.
“Jewelry,” Bascal said, with an inscrutable little smile.
“That’s all?” Her eyes flicked downward, then settled on the only jewelry Bascal was wearing: the wellgold signet ring on the middle finger of his left hand.
“Pretty, eh?”
“It’s not an ordinary ring.”
Now there was an edge to Bascal’s voice. “Of course it’s not an ordinary ring. I’m the prince of the fucking solar system. What do I wear, gold? Tin? It’s
information
, darling—quadrillions of terabytes in quantum storage. It wants out.”
With a shiver of excitement and dread, Conrad realized that they weren’t just playing at being bad here. They were
being
bad; they were going to be bad. Bascal was really pissed off about something. Hell, they all were. As fugitives from adult supervision, they had a fucking point to make.
This girl Xmary, hearing the tone of Bascal’s voice, huffed once and then said, “I know some people. I can ask for you. It sounds pretty serious, though.”
“It is.”
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Finally, the girl got up again. Before turning to go she asked, “Am I going to get in trouble?”
“Yes,” Bascal replied. “We all are. The question is whether anything useful is accomplished beforehand.”
“Great.”
She disappeared. Doing as she was told, choosing to go along with Bascal and against her own better judgment.
“So what’s in the ring?” Steve Grush asked.
“Garbage,” Bascal said.
“Garbage?”
“Garbage. Reorganization of matter at the atomic level. Into garbage.”
“You mean
programmable
matter, right?” Conrad asked, because otherwise that made no sense at all.
“Duh. Any wellstone surface. But that’s everything, right?”
Well, sort of. There were still an awful lot of natural materials around, especially in Denver. But Conrad remained confused, because wellstone was fundamentally a form of silicon. Woven nanofiber, right? Quantum dots to confine electrons in atomlike structures. In raw form the stuff looked and felt like some heavy, impermeable, beetle-shiny plastic, but by sending the right signals through it you could fill it with artificial pseudoatoms of any type. Silicon and gold, silicon and sulfur, silicon and plaster of fucking Paris. Then there were the transuranic pseudoatoms, and the asymmetric ones, and the ones that incorporated exotic particles. You could alter wellstone’s apparent composition in so many ways that even after three hundred years, a Queendom full of pseudo-chemists and hypercomputer search algorithms had barely cataloged even the fundamentals.
But pseudoatoms weren’t real, and silicon was.
Bascal was looking smug. “It’s Garbage Day in Denver, me boyos. If we each have one of these, and we spread out, we can make a lot of frigging garbage. We can even threaten infrastructure, which after all is the thing that separates us from the animals. If our demands aren’t met, they will at least be remembered.”
“Raw!” Steve said approvingly, and a number of the boys echoed him.
“Where did this software come from?” Conrad couldn’t help asking.
“Wrote it myself. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”
Conrad proceeded warily, not wanting to sound negative. “How does it work?”
“I archived a year’s worth of patterns from the palace waste chutes, and fit them together with a tesselationtiler. Any surface is mapped with the best possible fit in stored garbage, and the boundaries between garbage objects are heated and acoustically shocked to cut them away from the parent body. Slap it on a wall, and you get a pile of steaming garbage.”
“Except that it wouldn’t steam,” Conrad said. “It wouldn’t stink. It might look like shit, or half-eaten food, or whatever. Probably even feel like it. But pseudoatoms don’t have a smell. They can’t leak out into the air, like real atoms and molecules do.”
“Oh,” Bascal said, suddenly uncertain. It wasn’t a look that fit his face.
“Still, that’s pretty amazing that you thought of that. You’ve got power for the separated objects, right? They’re photovoltaic enough to maintain their own memory and programming? And composition?”
“Um. I don’t know.”
“Oh,” Conrad said. “Probably not, then. You’ll just wind up with garbage-shaped chunks of nanofiber silicon. It’s probably dangerous, too. I mean, there’s more wellstone in a building than just the facade, right? You’d better be
real
careful what you touch with that thing, or you’re going to hurt somebody.”
“Who made you the voice of reason?” Ho Ng asked acidly.
“Um, nobody.”
“Why don’t you shut up, then? Pussy.”
Conrad had no response to that. He’d already blurted out the thing that needed blurting. Getting any farther on Ho’s bad side was not a smart idea, and he could see that Bascal was brooding, too, looking around with dark, embarrassed anger. That anger could, Conrad knew, be directed at him at any moment. He considered apologizing, but didn’t see how that would help. Better just to shut up and pretend he wasn’t here.
“Are we still doing this?” Steve Grush wanted to know.
“Yeah,” Bascal said, waving a hand distractedly. “Let me think about it for a minute.” Then he pinched his chin in a gesture so reminiscent of his father that for a moment Bascal might have been a younger image of the king himself. A little swarthier, perhaps. A bit more angular. Conrad felt a fresh burst of affection for this boy, this young man, this Poet Prince of all humanity.
“I have to visit the ’soir,” Feck announced loudly, from the other end of the balcony. That was short for “pissoir,” and told everyone exactly, biologically, what he’d be doing when he got there. If he’d said “ ’toir,” or “shittoir,” that would convey a different intention. You always knew more about Feck than you wanted to. Still, it was funny— Feck
was
pretty funny sometimes—and suddenly there was a lot of laughter, and the conversation turned to other subjects.
“Sorry,” Conrad said quietly, seeing his Bascal opening as Feck shuffled past. “It’s still a pretty raw idea.”
“Shut up,” Bascal said vaguely, not looking at him.
Taking the hint, Conrad finished his beer, then just as quietly finished his coffee. Both were making him thirstier, but he resisted the urge to chase them with a glass of water. In a few minutes he was going to have to visit the ’soir himself. He supposed they all were. He toyed with his coffee mug instead, clinking it a few times on the glass tabletop. Turning it over a few times in his hands. Good, old-fashioned stoneware, courtesy of the Friendly Products Corporation, whose swirling green logo was glazed into the underside.
This didn’t take any great scrutiny to discern; the same instantly recognizable design appeared on their Camp Friendly tee shirts, and on thousands of child-oriented products printed daily by the fax machines of the world. Seeing it here, however, was admittedly somewhat surprising. What was child-oriented about a coffee mug? He fantasized briefly that this whole café—perhaps this whole ghetto—was just one more Friendly Park, in a carefully supervised Friendly Park World.
Oh, God, he was getting “maudlin,” as his Irish mother would say. It was exactly why she didn’t allow him any alcohol, even weak and watered as this. If he drank any more, he’d become “rash,” and
then
where would Queendom civilization be?
“Does anyone else want more beer?” he asked, looking around. But they were still ignoring him, which was probably good. He’d just order for himself, then, maybe even pay. Per the waitress’ instructions, he leaned over and rapped on the deck’s ratty old railing. It rang solidly under his knuckles, though, more like plastic or soft stone than wood. Because yeah, of course, it wasn’t wood at all, just a clever wellstone facsimile. Why would knocking on a wooden rail summon a waitress?
Suddenly, his paranoid fantasy seemed less paranoid, less fantastic. If that rail wasn’t full of microphones already, it easily could be on a moment’s notice. If the Constabulary had tracked the boys here, for example, or if the café staff had decided something suspicious was going on. Hell, the building could even make that judgment itself; most of the symptoms of human intelligence could be duplicated with a wellstone hypercomputer the size of a fingernail. Conrad’s own house was always scolding him, checking up on him, ratting him out to his parents....
The black-haired, fiery-lipped Xmary reappeared, inserting herself deftly between Conrad and Bascal once more. “I found someone who can help you, Bas. Several someones.”
Bascal looked up at her, and the confidence was back in his eyes. “Excellent. Thank you. And will these someones require payment?”
“I didn’t ask, but I also didn’t tell them who you were. When they see your face, they’ll want to help. They’ve snuck out of the house, right? Hoping something interesting will happen. And what’s more interesting than you, on a mysterious errand? I’m sure you realize, you’re kind of a symbol around here.”
“The prince who won’t be king? Lord of the oppressed? Spokeschild for the permanent children? I can’t imagine.” Bascal flourished comically with his arms, but couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Take me to your underground, then. We’ll see what mischief this town can endure.”
“You need more people?” she asked. “I can find more people. Easily.”
“Bascal,” Conrad warned, raising his voice above the general hubbub, “we should get out of here. This place isn’t as run-down as it looks. This isn’t wood; it’s wellstone. It could be a—”
The prince arched an eyebrow, and not in amusement. “There’s business at hand, Conrad. Connections to be made, a whole underground to be mobilized. One way or another, Garbage Day is a party I intend to throw.”
Conrad became aware of some noise in the street, rising up like the soft
clickety-click
of a few dozen tap shoes. Like marching boots, approaching at a trot? Like the platinum feet of robots, dancing fluidly along the street?
“Bloodfuck!” Ho Ng called out, from his seat along the railing. “Constabulary coming. Lots of them.”
“Ah,” Bascal said, and his tone was of regret, not surprise. “All right, lads, hit the ground running. Scatter for me, and do as much damage as possible. Brew me up a genuine riot.”
Conrad
was
surprised, and afraid, and maybe not entirely sorry they’d been caught. He looked Bascal in the eye, almost challengingly. “What are you going to do?”
“What do you
think
?” the prince snapped, then walked to the railing and punched it with his signet ring, producing a kind of porcelain
clink
. At the point of impact, there was a momentary sparkle of blue-white light, fading quickly to darkness. Nobody moved; nobody spoke. Conrad didn’t so much as breathe. Half a second after impact, the change began: a sprouting and sprawling of shapes and colors. It shot along the balcony rail, down through its supports and onto the floor, onto the wall, up along the roof. The sound of it was like tearing paper, like crinkling foil. The building turned to garbage around them, and the narrow spaces between the garbage glowed, and sang, and cracked away.
Conrad watched Ho Ng drop right through the floor, just moments before the whole structure gave way, and suddenly they were
all
falling, in a storm of hand-sized wellstone fragments, like shiny black bugs. The sound of the building’s collapse was remarkably low, more felt than heard. Weightless for so short a time that it barely registered, Conrad thudded onto the steep riverbank, his fall partly broken by the plasticky fragments raining around him. His momentum carried him downward, skidding, briefly glimpsing the lights of an upside-down suburb reflected in the blurry water. And then a load of crap fell on top of him, stunning, immobilizing, whooshing the air out of his lungs.
He lay there for a few seconds, taking stock, trying to breathe, wondering if he was hurt or killed, if his parents would have to print a fresh copy of him from stored patterns. He’d died once before, in some kind of fence-climbing accident that had smashed his head when there were no other copies of him at large. Lost damn near the entire month, and never did find out what happened.
Finally, he had enough breath for a grunt of pain, and then a groan. Other groans rose up around him. And screams. And then suddenly the Constabulary was there, all around, men and women in bright blue, and faceless robots in naked, mirror-bright impervium. Hands were grabbing him, lifting, digging him out.