Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

Dagny, eyes shuttered, made sleepy noises. But, as evidenced by the subversion of Bash’s Boston Globe on the morning of June 25, when his newspaper had played a symbolical version of their harsh breakup on the shoals of Bash’s eventual honesty during their aborted second date, she had plainly heard every word.

5 The Fugitive

Bash stood up from the breakfast table. His dead newspaper continued slowly to absorb the juices of his abandoned breakfast. The fish-scale wall clock morphed to a new minute. Everything looked hopeless.

Dagny Winsome had hacked the hidden trapdoor in proteopape, the existence of which no one had ever suspected until he blurted it out. Why hadn’t he eliminated that feature before releasing his invention? Hubris, sheer hubris. Bash had wanted to feel as if he could reclaim his brainchild from the world’s embrace at anytime. The operating system trapdoor represented apron strings he couldn’t bring himself to cut. And what was the appalling result of his parental vanity?

Now Dagny could commandeer every uniquely identifiable scrap of the ether-driven miracle medium and turn it to her own purposes. For the moment, her only motivation to tamper appeared to consist of expressing her displeasure with Bash. For that small blessing, Bash was grateful. But how long would it take before Dagny’s congenital impishness seduced her into broader culture jamming? This was the woman, after all, who had drugged one of MIT’S deans as he slept, and brought him to awaken in a scrupulously exact mockup of his entire apartment exactly three-quarters scale.

Bash felt like diving into bed and pulling the covers over his head. But a moment’s reflection stiffened his resolve. No one was going to mess with his proteopape and get away with it! Too much of the world’s economy and culture relied on the medium just to abandon it. He would simply have to track Dagny down and attempt to reason with her.

As his first move, Bash took out his telephone. His telephone was simply a stiffened strip of proteopape. His defunct newspaper would once have served the purpose as well, but most people kept a dedicated phone on their persons, if for nothing else than to receive incoming calls when they were out of reach of other proteopape surfaces, and also to serve as their unique intelligent tag identifying them to I² entities.

Bash folded the phone into a little hollow pyramid and stood it on the table. The GlobeSpeak logo appeared instantly: a goofy anthropomorphic chatting globe inked by Robert Crumb, every appearance of which earned the heirs of the artist one milli-cent. (Given the volume of world communication, Sophie Crumb now owned most of southern France.) Bash ordered the phone to search for Cricket Licklider. Within a few seconds her face replaced the logo, while the cameras in Bash’s phone reciprocated with his image.

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