Sensing the transition, some of the passengers reached languidly into pockets for earphone translators, or tapped jewelled ear-studs already in place. The babble quietened, lulled, resumed.
Geoffrey blinked away the few remaining error messages, leaving only the visa icon and a single symbol – a broken globe – to indicate that aug connectivity was currently impaired. The machines in his head were still functioning; they just didn’t have much to talk to beyond his skull. He sensed their restless, brooding disquiet.
The tram swerved and swooped along its shaft, dodging between the pupal carcasses of mothballed tunnelling machines. Ahead was a growing pool of light, a widening in the shaft. The tram picked its way between two rows of stacked shipping containers and came to a smooth halt next to a platform where people and robots waited. Geoffrey spotted his sister immediately. He truly felt as if it was only a few days since he’d last been in her company, even though it was years since they had been physically present with each other.
She waved. A very tall man next to her also waved, but awkwardly, his eyes shifting as if he wasn’t completely sure which passenger they were meant to be greeting. Geoffrey waved back as the tram’s doors huffed open and he stepped off. He walked over to his sister and gave her a hug.
‘Good to see you, brother,’ Sunday said, speaking Swahili. ‘Jitendra – this is Geoffrey. Geoffrey – this is Jitendra Gupta.’
Jitendra was about the same age as Sunday but easily a head taller, and very obviously a Lunar citizen: skinny, bald, boyishly handsome. Once Jitendra knew who to look at his smile warmed and he made a point of shaking Geoffrey’s hand vigorously.
‘Glad you made it!’ Jitendra declared. ‘Good trip?’
Around them robots fussed with suitcases, aiding those passengers who had arrived with non-locomotive luggage.
‘Uneventful,’ Geoffrey answered. ‘Can’t say I saw much from the train.’
‘You’ll have to come back during Lunar day. Some amazing places within easy reach of here, even if they’re not on the usual tourist maps.’
Jitendra’s Swahili was excellent, Geoffrey thought. He wondered if he’d made the effort just to impress Sunday.
‘How are you adjusting to life without the aug?’ Sunday asked.
Geoffrey took off his baseball cap and jammed it into his sweatshirt pocket.
‘Just about holding it together.’
His sister nodded approvingly. ‘A day here, you’ll forget you ever needed it.’
He gave her another hug, but this time trying to gauge the warm, breathing form under the clothes. ‘It is you, isn’t it? Not another claybot? Without the tags I’m not sure I trust anything.’
‘It’s me,’ Sunday said. ‘The claybot’s still on Earth, being driven by someone else.’ She shifted impatiently. ‘Look, let’s not stand here all day – where are the rest of your bags?’
‘This is it,’ Geoffrey said, swinging the holdall off his shoulder. ‘Travel light, that’s my motto.’
‘Don’t travel at all, that’s mine,’ Sunday said. ‘Remember what I said about eating out tonight – are you still up for that?’
‘Of course he’s up for it,’ Jitendra said cheerily. ‘Who wouldn’t be?’
Actually, Geoffrey was ready to eat – the light meal on the express hadn’t done more than dent his appetite. But he slightly resented Jitendra making that assumption for him. He eyed the other man warily, trying not to appear unfriendly but for the moment reserving judgement.
Some kind of minor commotion was going on a little further down the tram platform. Geoffrey recognised one of his fellow passengers – a big white man with chrome-tinted hair and a padded, wide-shouldered suit that made him look overmuscled. The man was being pulled aside by local officials. There was a lot of shouting and raised voices. The man was trying to break free of the officials, his face reddening.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Don’t know,’ Sunday said, as if it really wasn’t that interesting.
But Geoffrey couldn’t stop rubbernecking. He’d seldom witnessed anything resembling civil disobedience. In the Surveilled World, it hardly ever reached the point where anyone was in a position to resist authority. That man would have been on the floor by now, dropped into quivering, slack-jawed compliance by the Mech’s direct neural intervention.
Now one of the officials was holding the man’s head in a tight double-handed grip while another shone a pen- sized device into his right eye. Words were exchanged. The man appeared to give up his fight and was soon being bundled back to the tram.
‘His eyes should have stopped recording when he crossed the border,’ Jitendra said. ‘Yours will have, unless you went to great lengths to get around that limitation.’
‘I didn’t,’ Geoffrey assured him.
‘He must have had additional recording devices installed, hoping they wouldn’t get picked up by our normal scans,’ Jitendra speculated. ‘Very naughty. He’s lucky to get off with simple deportation. They’d have been well within their rights to scoop his eyes out on the spot.’
‘We’re kind of touchy about privacy here,’ Sunday said.
‘I see.’
The display of force had left Geoffrey rattled. He’d made no conscious efforts to break the Descrutinised Zone’s protocols, but what if that man had made an innocent mistake, forgetting about some function he’d had installed into his eyes years ago? The additional aug faculties that the clinic in Luanda had given Geoffrey . . . they couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anything in direct contravention of Zone regulations . . . could they? But with an effort of will he forced himself to stop worrying. He was in the Zone now. By its very nature, the amount of scrutiny he’d be
