Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

later, the server set his fresh margarita down in front of him and whisked away his empty.

“Privacy, what a joke.” Jimi stared at his drink, words slurring just a bit. “I bet there’s a record of my dumps in some database or other.”

“Maybe how many times you flush.”

“Ha ha.” Jimi looked at him blearily, the booze hitting him hard and fast now. “When d’you stop asking why? Huh? Or did you ever ask?”

“Come on.” Aman stood up. “I’ll walk you home. You’re going to fall down.”

“I’m not that drunk,” Jimi said, but he stood up. Aman caught him as he swayed. “Guess I am.” Jimi laughed loudly enough to make heads turn.

“Guess I should get used to it, huh? Like you.”

“Let’s go.” Aman moved him, not all that gently. “Tell me where we’re going.”

“We?”

“Just give me your damn address.”

Jimi recited the number, sulky and childlike again, stumbling and lurching in spite of Aman’s steadying arm. It was one of the cheap and trendy loft towers that had sprouted as the neighborhood got popular. Jimi was only on the sixth floor, not high enough for a pricey view. Not on his salary. The door unlocked and lights glowed as the unit scanned Jimi’s chip and let them in. Music came on, a retro-punk nostalgia band that Aman recognized. A cat padded over and eyed them greenly, its golden fur just a bit ratty. It was real, Aman realized with a start. Jimi had paid a hefty fee to keep a flesh and blood animal in the unit.

“I got to throw up,” Jimi mumbled, his eyes wide. They made it to the tiny bathroom…barely. Afterward, Aman put him to bed on the pull-out couch that served as bed in the single loft room. Jimi passed out as soon as he hit the pillow. Aman left a wastebasket beside the couch and a big glass of water with a couple of old-fashioned aspirin on the low table beside it. The cat stalked him, glaring accusingly, so he rummaged in the cupboards of the tiny kitchenette, found cat food pouches and emptied one onto a plate. Set it on the floor. The cat stalked over, its tail in the air.

It would be in the database…that Jimi owned a cat. And tonight’s bender would be added to his intoxicant profile, the purchase of the margaritas tallied neatly, flagged because this wasn’t usual behavior. If his productivity started to fall off, Raul would look at that profile first. He’d find tonight’s drunk.

“Hey.”

Aman paused at the door, looked back. Jimi had pushed himself up on one elbow, eyes blurry with booze.

“Thanks…f’r feeding him. I’m not…a drunk. But you know that, right?”

“Yeah,” Aman said. “I know that.”

“I knew him. Today. Daren. We were friends. Kids together, y’know? Were you ever a kid? Suit’s gonna kill him. You c’d tell.” Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. “How come? You didn’t even ask. You didn’t even ask me if I knew him.”

Damn. He’d never even thought of looking for a connection there. “I’m sorry, Jimi,” Aman said gently. But Jimi had passed out again, head hanging over the edge of the sofa. Aman sighed and retraced his steps, settling the kid on the cushions again. Bad break for the kid. He stared down at Jimi’s unconscious sprawl on the couch-bed. Why? Didn’t matter. The suit wouldn’t have told them the truth. But Jimi was right. He should have asked. He thought about today’s profile of the Runner, that break where he had changed what he ate, what he wore, what he spent his money on. You could see the break. What motivated it…that you could only guess at.

What would Avi’s profile look like?

No way to know. Avi’s break had been a back-cutter.

Aman closed the door and listened to the unit lock it behind him.

He carried his groceries the few scant blocks to his own modest condo tower. No music came on with the lights. No cat, just Danish furniture and an antique Afghani carpet knotted by the childhood fingers of women who were long dead now. He put the food away, stuck a meal in the microwave, and thought about pouring himself another beer. But the stout he’d drunk with Jimi buzzed in his blood like street-grade amphetamine. He smiled crookedly, thinking of his grandfather, a devout man of Islam, and his lectures about the demon’s blood, alcohol. It felt like demon’s blood tonight. The microwave chimed. Aman set the steaming tray on the counter to cool, sat down cross-legged on the faded wool patterns of crimson and blue, and blinked his bioware open.

His AI had been working on the profile. It presented him with five options. Aman settled down to review the Runner’s profile first. It wasn’t all a matter of data. You could buy a search AI, and if that was all there was to it, Search Engine, Inc. wouldn’t be in business. Intuition mattered — the ability to look beyond the numbers and sense the person behind them. Aman ran through the purchases, the candy bars, the vid downloads for the lonely times, the gifts that evoked the misty presence of the girlfriend, the hope of love expressed in single, cloned roses, in Belgian chocolate, and tickets in pairs. They came and went, three of them for sure. He worried about his weight, or maybe just his muscles for awhile, buying gym time and special foods.

Someone died. Aman noted the payments for flowers, the crematorium, a spike in alcohol purchases for about three months. And then…the break. Curious, Aman opened another file from the download the suit had given him, read the stats. Daren had been a contract birth — the new way for men to have children. Mom had left for a career as an engineer on one of the orbital platforms. Nanny, private school. The flowers had been for Dad, dead at fifty-four from a brain aneurysm.

He had joined the Gaiists after his father had died.

Unlike Avi, who hadn’t waited.

Aman looked again at the five profiles the AI had presented. All featured organic, wild harvest, natural fiber purchasing profiles. Three were still local. One had recently arrived in Montreal, another had arrived in the Confederacy of South America, in the state of Brazil. Aman scanned the data. That one. He selected one of the local trio. The purchases clustered northeast of the city in an area that had been upscale suburb once, was a squalid cash-worker settlement now. He was walking. Couldn’t use mass transit without a chip and didn’t have access to a vehicle, clearly. Naive. Aman let his breath out slowly. Frightened. A little kid with his head under the sofa cushions, thinking he was invisible that way. He wondered sometimes if he could find Avi. It would be a challenge. His son knew how he worked. He knew how to really hide.

Aman had never looked.

On a whim, he called up the AI’S flag from his earlier search. It had flagged the woman who had died, who had probably been a live-in friend or lover. This time, the AI presented him with clustered drug overdose deaths during the past five years. A glowing question mark tagged the data, crimson, which meant a continuation would take him into secure and unauthorized data. Pursue it? He almost said no. “All right, Jimi.” He touched the blood- colored question mark. “Continue.” It vanished. Searching secure government data files was going to cost. He hoped he could come up with a reason for Raul, if he caught it.

His legs wanted to cramp when Aman finally blinked out of his bioware and got stiffly to his feet. The AI hadn’t yet finished its search of the DEA data files. The meal tray on the counter was cold and it was well past midnight. He stuck the tray in the tiny fridge and threw himself down on the low couch. Like Jimi, but not drunk on margaritas.

In the morning, he messaged Raul that he wasn’t feeling well and asked if he should come in. As expected, Raul told him no way, go get a screen before you come back. You could count on Raul with his paranoia about bioterrorism.

It wasn’t entirely a lie. He wasn’t feeling well. Well covered a lot of turf. The AI had nothing for him on the overdose cluster it had flagged and that bothered him. There wasn’t a lot of security that could stop it. He emailed Jimi, telling him to work on the Sauza search on his own and attached a couple of non- secure files that would give him something he could handle in what would surely be a fuzzy and hungover state of mind. He found the clothes he needed at the back of his closet, an old, worn tunic-shirt and a grease-stained pair of jeans. He put on a pair of scuffed and worn-out boots he’d found in a city recycle center years ago, then caught a ped-cab to the light rail and took the northeast run. He paid cash to the wary driver and used it to buy a one way entry to the light rail. Not that cash hid his movements. He smiled grimly as he found a seat. His ped-cab and light rail use had been recorded by citizen.net, the data company favored by most transportation systems. It would just