Analog SFF, March 2012 (9 page)

Anyway, it was Monday, and my ‘wear wasn't going to quit doing its job just because I wasn't in the mood. So I tapped the wake-up button on my satphone, glad I hadn't left the thing on my dresser top, the way I did the first time my ‘wear kicked in the alarm. That one nearly got me canned.

"Call Momma,” I said, then waited for the connection.

Okay, I wasn't really that far up the hierarchy. Just a contract ‘wearer. But I could set the phone to let me refer to the home office as anything I wanted, so long as it was nonpolitical. Political would probably have been okay, too, if it wasn't the wrong
kind
of political. The folks back there didn't have a sense of humor, but that was by choice, not edict. Saving the world every day's the type of thing that makes you take your work a bit seriously.

I picked “Momma” from some old vid. When you're young and near broke, pretending to be a secret agent is one of the few cool things you can do. Though now that I think about it, I bet half the beginning ‘wearers do something similar. Maybe the really cool thing would have been to just call it the office.
Cool
is relative.

"Hi,” I said. No need identifying myself. “My ears are burning."

There was a murmur in the background. The operator calling up my file, no doubt. Nobody likes Mondays. “Which ear?"

"Both.” I had no idea what that meant, and if prior experience meant anything, the H.S. drone wasn't about to tell me. One thing it did mean was the morning was shot. If I ever got a chance to make suggestions, the first thing I'd have told H.S. was that their tuning was too sensitive. My ears burned, my eyelids twitched, my hand turned lobster-red. Each presumably meant something different, but what they really meant was the police would be shutting down half of Harborside again, plus the Halsey overpass and who knew what else. Then the Channel Twelve Eye Team would somehow find out I was the one who'd snarked up the commute—and make everyone think it was my fault. For a measly grand a month, it really wasn't worth it.

It would help if they'd at least tell me what the hell my ears, eyes, or vermillion fingers were detecting, so I could keep away from obvious false alarms. I think red might have meant chlorine. There's a paper mill north of Harborside, and paper mills use bleach—I looked that up on my webwear—and the detection level for chlorine is down in the parts per gazillion. I looked that up too. Yeah, a gas bomb can be built with it, but hell, that's Word War I technology. My superiors treated it like the latest anthrax gene mod.

The first time the news team found me, they'd been reasonably polite. By the third, they were acting like I did it on purpose. And assuming I didn't drop dead in the next few minutes, this would be the fifth in as many months. Maybe I should have signed up with the Department of Environmental Quality. It paid less, but nobody shuts down the commute because of some jalopy's over-age CO2 scrubber.

Of course, they wanted me to do a drive-around. If it really was some fast-acting derivative of anthrax, I'd be dead by the time they localized it.

One of the early times my ‘wear had done its thing I'd noticed another car making similar circuits. At first I thought it was the perps. Then I wondered how many of us H.S. had on payroll, even if it was always me the Eye Team blamed. Especially since that part was probably just the luck of an attention-catching name. Alphonse Blazac. Another of my mother's quirks. I mean, who else names a kid Alphonse? Not to mention it makes you an Alfie. Name like that, you've gotta have an edge.

This time, there was a battered green tow truck I passed about six too many times. He'd probably been on a call when his ‘wear sounded the alarm, leaving some poor schlub out on the freeway, wondering what the snark happened to his roadside assistance.

Still, a grand a month is a grand a month. There were worse ways to make a living. The office-drone job I'd been heading for when the alarm went off being Exhibit A. Though I could have done without also being Exhibit A on the why-the-commute's-all-snarked-up segment of the evening news.

They never do tell you what it's about. I crisscrossed Harborside every way there is to crisscross it, then again for good measure. But nothing changed except that my ears didn't burn when I was close to the harbor itself. Since the wind was off the water, all that meant was the source wasn't in the bay, which I kind of figured. Not unless the gulls had joined the enemy.

Eventually, they let me head to work. Officially, when H.S. makes you late, there isn't anything your employer can do. Unofficially? Well, on a Monday, it's hard to tell if that's the reason . . . or if it's just Monday.

My mother was anything but retro. Upgrading the tattoo was just the beginning. But she had a sensibility to her, even though her early life had always been chaotic.

I never met my dad—never knew his name. “Forget him,” she'd say. “You're worth a hundred of him, and you're just a kid."

I was never quite sure how much of that she meant. Oh, I knew she believed in me. The fire of her belief was frightening—a blast furnace aimed too strongly in my direction. What I doubted was whether she'd ever really gotten over him. Just as she never told me his name, she never told me the story. Asked, she just changed the subject. Sometimes artfully, sometimes not.

There were never any other men. My father was either the one true love she'd lost or such a jerk she'd sworn off men forever.

Whatever his flaws, I chose to believe the former. But what, then, to make of her assertions about me? How could anyone live up? It was better not to try.

The next alarm was the most inconvenient yet. Let's just say Allison wasn't amused when flickering yellow starbursts appeared on the back of my hands and I told her I had to call Momma.

That was when I realized my secret-agent charade was too arcane. There are phrases which, even if uttered with a good, prefatory
damn
are first-class mood killers. From then on, I vowed, I was referring to H.S. simply as that.

It turned out to be something in Allison's perfume. Nobody told me what, but it was the last I saw of Allison. Which was a real loss. Things between us had just been getting interesting when her apartment was invaded by lab techs and the evening degenerated into tears. Hers, not mine or the techs'. Though by the end I was ready to join in. Allison was the most beautiful woman I'd ever dated. Then suddenly she was gone, just because of a bunch of stupid yellow stars.

By then, I was wondering if everything was a false alarm. Maybe false alarms were what kept the economy running. Just how many people like me were there? Every time something happened, we called Momma, who summoned a legion of techs.

Someone once defined economic stimulus as pouring money down a rat hole. Any rat hole will do. Mars exploration? Low-income housing? Analytical-chem ‘wear? As far as the economy's concerned, it really didn't matter, so long as it can snarf up endless cash.

But of course, I wasn't about to voice that. I still needed the job and Momma might be listening. Terrorists or not, there are always subversives.

My mother wasn't a subversive. She was barely political. Just as I never knew my father, I never knew which way she voted.

What I do know is that she respected people, not political slogans. Not just me, but the neighbors, even when their dog barked. The guy who lived in the decrepit motor home in the church lot next door and made his living Dumpster diving? My mother made him snickerdoodles. She with the watch that once was always three-quarters past happy.

I also know she abhorred the early nanospam. It wasn't adwear as we know it today; it was mostly pranks. Things that could make your forehead break out with weird slogans: anything from “I want to believe” to “Check out this man's manhood,” the latter triggered by the heat and humidity of a high school locker room. Believe me, I know. I was on the receiving end of both.

That stuff was illegal, for all the good it did. There's only one real way to rid the world of spam, and that's for folks with big bucks to want a share. Or the government. You and me? We can't do much about the hacker-jacks. Billionaires? They'll clear the amateurs out of the way every time, then tell you you've consented to their ‘wear when you buy the products that made them rich.

At least the government
pays
. Apparently there's something in the Bill of Rights about it, though I'll be damned how George Washington and all those guys managed to envision nanowear. Maybe those Supreme Court justices everyone loves to hate made it up. “Due process?” “Private property?” It's not like I'm uneducated. It's just that, like my mother, I'm not political. All I know is it's better to be paid.

Allison was followed by Dinah. She wasn't as pretty, but she had a better body. And she was classy. As in year-in-England classy, with a sort of mid-Atlantic accent that made you think maybe she was Canadian. Or upper-crust Manhattan. House in the Hamptons, sailboats, tennis pros, that type of thing.

Actually she was from D.C. and the class had come by hard work. Kind of like three-quarters-past-happy turning digital. And yeah, I know about Oedipus and all that. I took a bit of psych, back in college, though I'm not sure how much I believed.

I'd learned my lesson, though, and never wanted to be phoning Momma again on a perfume alert. Or “H.S.,” for that matter. But I couldn't afford to quit. Dinah might have worked her way up, but she had expensive tastes.

So I opted for an upgrade. ‘Wear that would report itself, via a tattooed-on sat link. The installation hurt a bit, but it came not only with a five-hundred-a-month raise but a promise that even the lab techs wouldn't know who the call-in came from if we did get interrupted at a . . . delicate moment. Ideally there would be no interruptions at all, but if I wasn't babbling on the phone at the time I could at least argue it was the weird guy across the courtyard who everyone hated because he kept grilling things that smelled like garlic-smoked socks.

By the time I was in high school, my mother's body art had maxed. The digital watch hardly even looked like a tattoo. She even had a way to make it disappear. A nanosensor in the bone at the base of her thumb. Tap it just right, and the watch vanished. Tap it again and it would reappear. My satphone tat now does something similar, but hers was the first I'd ever seen.

"Cool,” I said. “Can you make it into a stopwatch?"

"Uh-uh. Could have, but didn't want to."

"Why?” Stopwatch, calendar . . . hell, she could probably have gotten traffic reports. An entire hand-held, imprinted on her wrist.

"Didn't want it. Just ‘cause you can do something doesn't mean you should."

With all of us H.S. ‘wearers around, terrorists must be idiots. How could they expect not to be caught?

The guy I helped nab was in a hardware store on the edge of Harborside. The type of store I thought extinct until I needed one. I was looking for sheetrock screws. Not the type you use to hang sheetrock: the hollow, plastic things you hammer into the wall to hold real screws to keep pictures and things like that from falling off and scaring your girlfriend to death. They probably have a real name, but it's not the type of thing they teach you in college, studying all those credit hours of uselessness.

I have no idea what the terrorist was looking for. All I know was that my ‘wear went nuts.

They'd offered to discontinue the visuals and just use the cell link, but I figured I might want warning, so I wouldn't be caught by surprise when the techs descended on me. (Okay, the perfume thing had been scary. There are situations I just don't want to be in if they override the code on my door and clomp into my bedroom.) But I'd never before encountered anything like these. Green lightning bolts on my palms. A ferocious itch behind my earlobes. Even my fingernails got in the act, getting this iridescent color like something you might see on spoiling fish.

I kind of figured it might be the real thing.

Nobody had ever told me what to do in such circumstances, so I had to improvise. I wound up roaming the store, trying to triangulate via the brightness of my fingernails and strength of the itch.

When I spotted him, he was screamingly obvious. Not that he looked all that threatening. He was a small guy, about five foot seven, wiry, with an odd, loose-limbed gait like you sometimes find in construction workers. Carpenter with an attitude—that's how I'd have described him, though it might have been because I'd spent college summers on a house-building crew, and he reminded me of the guy who . . . never mind.

Not that any of that mattered. Even nonpolitical me had heard of diesel-and-fertilizer bombs. His forehead bore ‘wear for Pellier Bros’ Truck Stop, his right cheek said
Gramp's,
and his left continued,
Farm Store.
The cheaper the source, the more garish the wear. He might as well have been proclaiming himself a charter member of Bombers-R-Us. Not to mention he was in an aisle full of building stuff: screws mostly, but also angle brackets and other widgetry that would probably make a dandy timer. There was even a bin of PVC pipe, in case he was looking to make a pipe bomb.

No surprise that instead of techs, this time I got a full-fledged SWAT team. They spotted him even before I could point, and faster than you could say “Momma” he was pinned to the floor.

This time, there was no Eye Team report. Nobody calling me to ask what it was like to be a hero . . . but nobody calling me all kinds of skrull for snarking up the commute, either. The SWAT team had hit, grabbed their guy, and vanished, all in a matter of minutes.

At first I thought nobody'd even noticed. But I couldn't resist going back to the hardware store.

I pretended that in the excitement I'd forgotten to get my sheetrock whatever-they-are's. But I needn't have bothered. The same geezer was at the cash register and he recognized me. I don't know whether that made him super-good at customer service or simply in one of those dying businesses where you get almost no customers, so of course you recognize everyone. I mean, who fixes things anymore? I'd only been looking for the screws because Dinah was moving in with a whole wall full of pics of her family, and the damn things were antiques that wouldn't upload to my SmartFrames. You had to actually hang them, and you can't buy the hangers on the web if you don't know what they're called. You have to go somewhere where there's someone who understands when you say,
I'm looking for those things you use to
. . .