criminal gangs operating in the Urals, he was so successful that within four months he was transferred to UNPOL Headquarters and given the opportunity to work with them on a permanent basis. As thin as Fatima was fat, Stanislav was one hundred and eighty cents tall and weighed fifty-five kilogs. He was also an albino.
Stanislav was hopelessly in love with Fatima, but never dared to say it. He didn’t have to, because Fatima knew it, but she was hopelessly in love with Dom, who also knew it, but he was hopelessly in love with Marty and hoped she didn’t know it. Marty loved them all but she had already given her heart to another and all that was left was for her to guide them and love them with what was left over. Misfits all, including Dom, who was so handsome, and so perfect, and so chronically insecure. The Cave was their sanctuary and Marty, through being ‘normal’, was their leader and representative. The thought made her smile. She was the biggest misfit of them all.
Martine Shorne, Marty, Queen of the Dev. She understood more about the labyrinths of the digital landscape than anyone she knew. Most people have blood running through their veins but she had Dev code running through hers. Somehow, and she didn’t know how, it had just always been there. She saw the essence of data and was able to perceive its origin and meaning.
Stanislav was laid out on his sleeper. A Dev helmet over his head, the mirrored visor reflecting the black of the ceiling.
She left him alone and walked back to her Devcockpit.
Chapter 10
Jonah’s Env, Unit A, 20th floor, Woodlands Envplex, Woodlands, New Singapore
Thursday 12 December 2109, 10:15am +8 UTC
Picking up my Devstick I smiled thinking of the trip ahead. I couldn’t remember feeling this excited about anything in a long time. My smile faded as I remembered Gabriel’s thoughts again inside my head, ‘You are not Jonah’, and I remembered that the only thing of me that I really knew for sure was mine was my thoughts. The door to the Env swished open and I headed out.
I got on my Devstick and called up a map of walkys around the Envplex my Env was in, and planned a trip on the walkys that would take me around the edge of New Singapore to the main Lev ports that allow travel to Phuket. Taking a vac was unusual behavior for me, but I believed that my message to Sir Thomas and the little shopping excursion I was planning would allay suspicions. I rode the Lev down to surface and walked over to the nearest walky that took me to the main southeast walky from my Complex in Woodlands down to Tampines and Changi — the main Lev concourse and airship port. It was a sunny day but humid. Soon my cotton outer was soaking up the sweat tracking off me in little streams, but it felt good to be out and about as I traveled the walky with my hand on the rail as advised by the safety warnings.
At Tampines there was an old open air market where all kinds of things were sold and purchased. It was here that I planned to use my cred and buy some beach clothes. The morning’s late starters had all but gone by the time I entered Tampines. I got off the PSE1 walky and headed over to the Lev that would take me to Sun Plaza Park. It was just after ten and if I could get the shopping done quickly I could still make it to Tha Sala before lunch.
The Sun Plaza Open Air market was a mass of white sails and brightly colored banners, each proclaiming the wares of the stalls under the sails. I entered into a narrow aisle between the stalls and asked my Devstick to give me a layout of the market. The map came up and the clothes stalls were two rows over from where I was. I cut through the aisles selling fashionable teenage outers and footwear. A pair of white cloth shoes caught my eye, hanging from the sail of one of the stalls.
A fat Chinese woman, sat on a blue plastic stool which was placed on a low wooden table, looked down at me from within the stall. I reached up and touched the shoes with my hand and said, “Do you have these in a size 10?” She nodded and using a long plastic pole with a hook on it, extracted another pair and dipped the pole. They slid down to my hand.
“How much?”
“Twenty cred.”
I nodded. I could have bargained but that wasn’t why I was here. In my pro bono work with UNPOL the one thing I see time and again is how criminals are caught because someone else is caught. Your name comes up because you bought something or called the person who has been contained and as such you get tagged for surveillance. I assumed that since I was the last person to talk with Jibril, that no matter how innocent I may appear, I would be tagged. With my call to the Vacenv, my message to Sir Thomas and buying beach clothes on cred in Tampines market, I hoped to show whoever might be watching me that I was going to the beach.
I called up my cred and held up my Devstick, the fat woman held up hers and I checked to see that only twenty cred had been deducted from mine. “Thanks,” I said, and got a smile in return as I walked on.
Two rows over, all of the stores were selling clothing, inners and outers of all descriptions. About twenty meters down the lane, between the stalls, I spotted what I was looking for — the stall I had seen when I had been here before. I headed towards a sign saying ‘Life’s a Beach’, which had a smiling droopy mustached guy standing on a beach wearing nothing but a sombrero next to the name written in red on a white background.
The guy behind the stall was about one hundred and fifty cents tall and couldn’t have been older than nineteen, with a beard that refused to be and mustache equally struggling to define itself. He looked up at me and with a smile said, “Hi man, you need some threads for the beach?”
He had a very high toned squeaky voice and, stifling a laugh, I said, “Yeah.”
“Awesome,” he replied, smiling even more broadly. He had braces on his teeth. “So where you headed to, dude?”
I returned his smile and said, “I’m heading up the coast to the Thai Geographic for a few days.”
“Cool.”
I spotted a pair of black knee-length swimming shorts and asked, “How much?”
“Oh those, they’re great man, super-fast dry and the color never fades. Only fifteen cred and I’ll throw in a ‘Life’s a Beach’ T-shirt.”
“I tell you what, I’ll give you thirty creds for the shorts and that white cotton — that is cotton right? — shirt hanging there, and that bag,” I said, pointing first at the shirt hanging on the wall of the stall behind him and then a ‘Life’s a Beach’ white cloth bag on the side of the stall.
His eyes suddenly got older and wiser and dropping the beach bum slang he said, “I’ll tell you what, forty creds and it’s a deal.”
I looked at him, smiled and said, “Deal.” He climbed up on a stool to get the shirt and grabbing the shorts and my free T-shirt stuffed them into the cloth bag and handed them to me with another smile. I held up my Devstick and swiped the transaction.
“Stay loose dude,” he said, dropping back into his beach character now the deal was done.
I retraced my steps out of the market and back to the Lev that had brought me here. Twenty minutes after I’d left the PSE1 walky I was back on it. Mission done, my thoughts turned to the travel that was ahead of me, and especially the fact that within a couple of hours at most I’d be by the sea on a white sandy beach.
Reaching Changi ten minutes later I headed for the Lev port that would take me to Phuket. The massive domed concourse of the Changi Lev and airship port was as busy as any place that operates on a continuous time cycle with zero downtime. In the cool muted echoes of the concourse I checked the times for the Levs to Phuket and saw that I had at least twenty minutes to spare before a Lev with an empty seat was available.
I was hungry. I hadn’t had anything to eat that day and I’d been awake for over four hours. I headed down a short walky to the lower level of the concourse where travelers of all Geographics were taking a time out. Just off the walky there was a small cafe set by a fountain with a violinist entertaining the people while they ate.
I took a table near the fountain and studied the Devscreen set into its surface, selecting a croque monsieur and a latte as I confirmed the deduction from my cred. Three servbots were serving food and taking orders, their squat white bodies shining and bearing the blue Panasonic logo. One of them dispatched itself from the serving hub and propelled itself towards me around the edge of all the tables. With a polite 'thank you for your custom' it
