The Caryatids

Radmila put her fork aside and rubbed at her aching eyes.

“Okay, now I get it,” said Lionel. “There is someone here who is just like you. There’s a clone loose here in Los Angeles.”

Glyn and Radmila glared at him silently.

“I mean, another clone besides both of you two gals. A clone who’s like an evil-twin identity.”

The two of them exchanged glances.

“Wow!” said Lionel. “That is dynamite! This is a hot entertainment property, all of a sudden! Because we’re living in a real-life crime! How many suspects are there? Wait a minute, wait a minute—I already know that! There’s Sonja… There’s Vera from Mljet… Hey wait, there’s your mom!”

Glyn leaned forward and slapped him.

* * *

A HOLE IN A SENSOR WEB was called a “blackspot.” The laws of physics decreed that there were always blackspots in the world. Com­puter science could assume perfectly smooth connections, but the Earth had hills and valleys and earthquakes and giant volcanoes. The sky had lightning storms, and even the sun had sunspots. Wireless con­nections were not magic fogs. Real-world wireless connections were waves, particles, bits: real things in real places.

So: If you didn’t want to be seen, or heard, or known in a world of ubiquitous sensorwebs, there were options. You could find a blackspot. Or create a blackspot. Some blackspots were made by organized crime or official corruption. Other blackspots just grew in their natural blackness. Maybe there was nobody home to plug things in, or to reboot sys­tems. Enterprises went broke, buildings fell down or went derelict.

The unsustainable could not be sustained. There were climate­-crisis disaster areas—China, Australia, India, central Asia—where the blackspots were colossal.

When the seas rose, when hurricanes blew through, Earth tremors shook the land. Plague, famine, and pestilence… Stuff just got lost. Even in the modern world. Even in Los Angeles. There were always places in any major city where crime was visible, and yet tolerated. Red­light districts, narcotic shooting galleries, corporate boardrooms, city halls… There were thousands of tiny blackspots. Steel elevators. Brick basements. Narrow alleyways between two metal barns.

Or the black, stuffy, terrifying innards of a car trunk.

Sometimes people had mental blackspots hidden inside themselves.

People forgot that they lived in a dangerous world. They prospered for a while, they got used to being privileged, they got fatally complacent. People forgot to see straight, they overlooked things, they stubbornly ig­ nored the obvious.

You could try to obscure that human limitation, deputize it to sur­veillance systems, conceal all the seams, try to make the system perfect, perfect, superperfect, secure, secure, supersecure… but any simple breakdown in sanitation was enough to chase people away. Any place with no running water and no toilets was halfway to a blackspot already.

And you might end up in a place like that. Tied up. Abducted. Alone. Hungry. Thirsty. Humiliated. Reeking of your own urine.

Derelict buildings, dreadful places, worse even than the car trunk from which you had just been dragged… Even a little kid could set fire to a wrecked building. How many kids were you willing to wound, or in­jure, or kill with an automatic antitheft “armed response”? After all, the kids were just kids… kids were always trying to look around… explore…do some graffiti… throw some bricks through the glass windows…steal some furniture… vandalize the building and burn everything to the ground.

Teenagers were energetic and had poor impulse control. Teenage kids were stigmergic, they learned and acted like termites—they had no grand master plan, but they learned fast and easily from their peers, whatever they saw other kids doing.

So many places like that in Los Angeles… in every big town really… where security cameras had stored months of perfectly shot and focused video of a steadily gathering mayhem. The mere fact that a machine “saw” things happening didn’t mean that a machine could ap­prehend the crime, prosecute it, convict it, put an end to it…

What if the surveillance itself was the victim of the crime? They called that “sousveillance”—when angry people countersurveilled the surveillance. Some bold souls made it their business to spy out all the surveillance spies, map them, track them, spot them, shoot them, steal them, hack them, tap them, hold the machines to ransom…

Radmila rolled around on the grimy, derelict, unlit floor, testing the plastic wires that bound her arms. Her wrists were cinched, her arms were trapped behind her back, her ankle was snagged to a piece of fur­niture. Wire had no knots. She couldn’t break wire or pick wire or chew wire.

Nobody would ever find her in here. Not in this blackspot. She was as good as dead. That fast, that simple.

Radmila was strong and her body was flexible. Given a week, she might have shrugged and wriggled her way out of the wires. But when­ever she worked hard to escape her bindings, she needed some air, and the duct tape over her mouth was there to deny her that air.

It was extremely dangerous to have her mouth duct-taped shut in this way. She could die easily from that, because she might begin to weep in here, from her fear and despair and shame, and then her nose would clog from the weeping, and she would black out, and smother to death in her own snot.

That simple, that quick, that dead.

She had vanished from her world in twenty seconds. She had left the set, carrying the heavy hem of her costume, and naturally followed a friendly, beckoning ninja security staffer, then suddenly, instantly, with no warning, wham, her elaborate costume went stone-dead all around her. Then she was body-blocked straight into the open trunk of a car.

In seconds, off rolled the car, one mobile blackspot with Mila Mon­talban hidden inside of it. Who would ever see that? Who would ever guess that? Who would know?

Frantic with herself, Radmila had managed to squirm free of her de­stroyed costume, inside the cramped black confines of the car trunk. That was an impressive physical feat, something few women could have done, but the air was thick and stuffy in the black car trunk, and when she was done she was half stunned.

Then the trunk popped open. Before Radmila could think, act, or even shriek, she was struck by something that shot through her like lightning. Her hands were lassoed, her mouth gagged with tape.

When her kidnapper ran out of wire and tape—that took a while­—she was hauled, ankles-first, up a set of barnacled stairs and through the yawning, graffiti-bombed door of a derelict Malibu beach house.

This blackspot lair featured drooling patches of mold on every wall, warped wooden flooring, strange arching cantilevered walls of old cement… custom-designed and full of architectural genius. This must have been a gorgeous Malibu beach getaway, once, back when the sky was stable and the sea behaved itself. Some nice place for a rich family.

The airy living room, its sea-viewing windows sprayed opaque, was full of loot.

Someone had been on some dainty feminine crime spree. Cosmet­ics, mostly. Sweet, tempting little beauty kits that a thieving woman could easily hide in her hands. And other loot, more ambitious: hand­bags, women’s boots and shoes… stockings, perfumes, jewelry explod­ing from small discarded plush boxes… pink-cased electronics, sexy vicuna scarves, sunglasses in crushproof cases, cashmere throw rugs, thirsty towels, thirsty hand towels, thirsty face towels… Thirsty tam­pons, thirsty condoms… And crates and crates of thirsty booze.

Dying of thirst from the shock of her abduction, unable to move her bound, numbed arms, Radmila stared in anguish at a wooden rack of California chardonnays.

After dark fell, Biserka returned from her busy wanderings. Biserka was still wearing the Family-Firm ninja costume she’d used when she had kidnapped Radmila, only now this fake, phony costume of hers—it was amazing how shoddy it looked now, it was a cheap, halfhearted ef­fort like some kid’s Hollywood souvenir—it was ominously covered with freshly dug dirt.

Biserka plucked her black ninja hood off and ran her black-gloved fin­gers through her sweaty, smashed, blond hairdo. Biserka had six fancy emerald studs in her ears and green weepy eyeliner streaming down both cheeks. She’d been sweating like a pig inside that cheap costume.

“Time for Miss Montalban to go walkies,” Biserka remarked. Radmila lashed out and kicked Biserka in the