three bags full (2/2)
AND DONE \o/ Final wordcount: 13,846. Somebody had better validate the bloody mess this has made of my priorities in the last few weeks, or there will be TEARS and possibly WRATH.
I'm still not quite happy with it as a story -- the showing dips too far into telling in parts, because if I'm entirely honest it's the skeleton of something even longer. Which I was not prepared to write at this time.
But I'm proud of it, all told :)
( part one is here )
***
"Ah --" Dom pauses in the upstairs doorway, looking uncertain. "There are a couple of eyai in the foyer."
"What?" comes a shrill female voice, and almost on top of it, a male one:
"Excuse me."
"Oh. Not eyai then." Dom blinks and his uncertain look, fading, settles back onto his face again. "They've asked to speak to Pru."
"Prudence!" comes the unseen girl's voice again, louder. It's just the polite side of outright command and it has the effect of ejecting Pru from the kitchen and shooting her towards the stairs, skirts in one hand.
"Pru --"
"I'll explain everything, Theodore," she says. "Please allow me a moment."
It's '84 and business is feverish, the word spreading, Tee's working days elastic and inspired. Marie presses her lips together and scolds him for sleeping at the office, forces him to go walking with her on Hamstead Heath, hires a floor manager and drags Tee to concerts and restaurants on her nights off. But he's happiest here where the sky's colour is a mystery to be guessed at; happiest with his feet on his desk and his cuffs undone, chatting to Steph and ducking Robin's complex paper aeroplanes and eating shortbread made by Dom's cook and working until his eyes ache.
But he's always willing to be distracted by novelty. Tee hasn't written a scrap of code by the time Pru descends again, followed closely by a pair of pipe kids that Tee assumes are clients. Both of them are middling tall, dressed to the nines, and good-looking in a blond, overbred way that makes Tee's knuckles itch.
"An underground workplace," the boy says, sounding like he approves. "How very appropriate."
Pru makes a pained face and pulls her best manners on like gloves. "Julian, Agatha, this is Theodore Collins, the founder and director of Blacksheep Industries."
Tee is fully expecting them to bow or curtsey, and there's a twitch of the boy's legs that suggests he's suppressing the instinct, but the girl just gives a slow nod. For his own part Tee raises his eyebrows at Pru, who folds her hands and continues.
"I am pleased to introduce Julian and Agatha Verey, who are interested in beginning apprenticeships at Blacksheep. I have been in contact with them for some time now," she adds, before Tee can interject. "We have been exchanging some code samples -- you recall that personality evolution idea I showed you a couple of weeks ago, Theodore?"
"That was theirs?" Tee demands.
"Mine." The girl raises a few fingers.
"I've made some improvements to it since then," the boy adds.
Tee intercepts a glance from Pru that contains no repentance at all, not that he expected any. She isn't the sort to act rashly; she's made a judgement call.
Apprentices. Bloody hell.
He rubs his temple. "And if I told you to scaddle on home?"
The girl -- Agatha -- manages not to look as though she's been slapped, but it's a close call, Tee can tell. Her chin magically locates a new angle even more prissy than the last; her voice, icy, follows its lead. "That would certainly present a considerable problem," she says, "as we have already left word to the effect that we will not be returning there."
"Run away to join the circus," Tee mutters. His circus. "Fierce."
"You don't understand." The boy clutches his bag -- leather, looks like it costs twice as much as Tee's entire outfit -- tighter to his chest and tries to look earnest; he hasn't the face for it. "We have recognised our pampered existence and chosen to move against it. We have renounced the Pipe. We wish to make a stand against the terrible polarisation of wealth and the social inequality that defines our country in such an unfortunate way!"
"Jesus fuck," says Tee, after a considerable pause.
The Verey twins are seventeen years old and talented little shits of coders, smack bang in the middle of their own personal rebellion; their righteousness dies down fast under the weight of Steph's crushing silences, leaving a layer of semi-educated socialism over some muddy depths of family problems that Tee wouldn't touch even if he didn't believe in everyone's right to keep their particular brand of fucked-up to themselves.
They're surprisingly alike for fraternal twins, so much so that it's certainly easy to think that they were designed that way; they look like eyai, like a matched set. And there's something about Agatha's guarded, not-quite-sincere smile and the way Julian's face goes blank in response to anger that adds to the effect, as though their facial .apps are buggy. But there are no locks in their shoulders and not a scrap of silicon in their makeup: just history. Just the human fucking experience.
"They're brats," Tee complains.
"You only just stopped being one yourself." Marie gives him a pointed look. "And if I have to deal with brats at work, it's only fair that you do too."
"Eyai playing up?" Tee asks, only half serious; if Marie needed him to tweak anything, she'd have asked already.
A tart smile. "William Pennsworth -- my psallopianist -- thinks a little too much of himself."
"You're paying him too much."
"Unfortunately, I'm paying him exactly what he's worth -- probably less -- and even more unfortunately, he's aware of this. If I cut his salary he'd probably scrape together enough motivation to go jobhunting pipeside, and he'd be snapped up by a cathedral or one of the exclusive bars. Be that as it may," she finishes, drawing herself up, "I see little point in bemoaning the character flaws of my employees. What do you think of the special request? I'm willing to commission the model itself because he's been a good customer, over the years, and --"
"She can still have other settings?"
"Precisely." Marie raises a questioning eyebrow.
Tee runs a few things over in his mind, nodding. "Easy. You explained that such a coding would put you in a dangerous legal position?"
"I did." Marie pauses. "And he said that he understood, and was willing to reimburse me -- generously -- in acknowledgment of such danger."
Tee smiles. "Abracadabra."
No shortage of work, and after a couple of weeks Tee manages to swallow his annoyance at being manipulated into taking on new employees, and starts paying the twins a proper commission instead of a trainee rate. Agatha, like Tee, has a knack for the production and translation of original ideas, but Julian is a frustratingly specialised mind, brilliant at picking up holes and teasing out ideas in his sister's code -- only hers. Some kind of fucking twin thing. Tee tries him out as a general beta for all of an hour before grabbing the tablet out of his hands and sending him to stare over Pru's shoulder.
"You hired him," he says. "You teach him."
Pru nods with a calm pleasure that entirely ruins Tee's moment of petty revenge. "Certainly. Julian, run this through the simulator and bring me the result."
He hesitates, still unused to taking orders, but takes the data chip from her without a murmur and does as he's told.
"I am sure you had a lot to learn when you were his age," Pru says.
Part of Tee knows he's never stopped learning. Most of him wants to say that when Tee was Julian's age, he was starting his own company. But bragging and arguing are almost useless in the face of Pru's distracting lips and limitless patience, so Tee decides not to chase a futile victory.
It could be worse. When he's not alphabetising the Blacksheep servers or looking vaguely disappointed that he ran away from a life of luxury to work with people who make pipe amounts of money anyway, Julian is easy to get along with. And with a shameless homing instinct that Tee will come to think of as characteristic of the kid, he immediately develops a whirlwind longing for the best-looking person Blacksheep has to offer.
"I like this. Très...fierce." The word sounds laughable, carefully enunciated in such a way. Julian's finger taps the brim in passing and bestows an absent tilt upon Dom's hat.
"Thank you." Dom looks bemused; his fingers pause then resume their task, fastening the hook of his cloak. His gloves are a pale blue, gently and deliberately aesthetic against the draping black.
Julian assumes his favoured perch on the back of the couch, tablet in hand. "You're quite welcome. Enjoy the opera."
Dom straightens the hat, gathers his cane, Wildes his way out the door. Gorgeous if you give a shit about fashion, Tee supposes. Give the kid points for taste.
Agatha stands and stretches, the hem of her dress rising to show a pale smile of petticoat as she pushes her clasped hands towards the ceiling. Tee suspects that she only stood so that she could look down her nose at her brother as she says, "Julian Verey, you little hussy."
Julian waves his stylus. "I entirely fail to see the source of your displeasure."
"He's -- he's not interested. And he's too old for you."
"He's an Indian Adonis," Julian counters, with all the adolescent zeal that can escape past his upbringing.
"He's Pakistani, bitbrain." Steph throws a dense wad of code to his screen and Julian winces. "Syntax beta, if you please."
***
Tee wakes up to his sister's voice saying, "Good lord, Prudence, what happened to all the men?"
Pru laughs. "Shh. If you're looking for Theodore, he's asleep over there."
"It's not urgent. I'm here to check up on my special project, the client wants to know a projected date of completion tonight."
"The chameleon?" says Agatha. "He's letting me draft it," she adds, not quite managing to hide her pride. "I'm looking through an older project to see how much I can adapt."
"The others are at Wembley this morning," Pru explains.
"Oh," Marie says, sounding amused. "Of course."
Robin and Steph and Dom have never bothered to fake illness on match days; they simply turn up at the office around lunchtime hauling beer and loud analysis. It's a stretch of even Tee's considerable imagination to picture Dom cheering in the midst of a crowd of rowdy tube footy fans, but he knows that nobody can ever escape their roots entirely. This year Agatha declined but they managed to drag Julian along; it'll be an education, if nothing else.
Seeing as how nobody seems to be in any hurry to wake him up, Tee returns to lying as still as he possibly can and wishing his heartbeat would shut the fuck up. He's a year off thirty and refuses to believe himself too old for this, no matter the weight of the morning-afters. And this particular one's a fucking pile of iron slag, no mistake there: the whole damn network of the Pipe and the Tube screaming in his skull, grit centrifuged out to every cranny of his mouth. But he's never been one for blackouts and he remembers the previous night enough not to regret it. He remembers the pipe bar of expensive rebellion, all fashion discarded in favour of sexuality and old-modern music, almost too loud. He remembers going home with a girl. She was pretty and soft and even drunker than he was, and her mystery was her loneliness, which manifested itself in her laugh and in the hard clench of her hands; Tee felt as though he could strike her with a hammer and she would toll out the hour like any other London bell, soundwaves travelling through whatever medium makes up an empty state of being -- the loneliness had a force of its own, a dull antigravity that pushed Tee out of her bed as soon as she was sleeping, pushed him as far as his own office and its worn, comforting couch.
"There's a lot in here I can use," says Agatha. "Though it'll be harder to maintain with a fully adult consciousness."
"Theodore did the work of pulling the cuckoo's self-reference down to a child's mindset," says Pru. "His original code is likely still on the servers somewhere, and I'm sure you'll find it an easier starting point."
"Thank you. Have you seen these behavioural specs?"
What Pru says in return surprises Tee, there's such depth of kindness and authority in it. "Agatha," she says. "Are you sure you wish to be the one who completes this project?"
"I don’t see that it's your --" Agatha cuts herself off. "I'm sorry, Pru. I realise that you were speaking out of concern for my welfare. But I am quite sure -- quite sure." There's a bite to her words, haughty and bitter.
Pru says, "Very well."
"The specs are repellant even by our standards," Agatha continues, as though that little dip into emotion never happened. "I'm not surprised she left him."
"Perhaps she died," Marie suggests.
"One would hardly feel a need for such revenge against someone whose only crime was to die," Pru objects.
"No?" says Marie.
A long pause. When she speaks again Pru sounds sad. "This is hardly a palatable subject to be discussing. And it has no bearing upon the work at hand."
"The service we provide is non-judgemental," Agatha says. "That doesn't mean we have to be." Another pause. Things are happening in these pauses, things that Tee doesn't think he'd understand even if he had his eyes open and was entirely clear-headed. "Do you think you will have children some day?" she adds, out of the blue.
"No," Marie says.
"Perhaps," Pru says. "We have discussed it once or twice."
"You do seem the mothering type, Pru." It's almost funny to hear Marie say it. Tee can’t imagine his sister having anything to do with babies; can't even imagine her forming opinions about the maternal potential of others.
So it's even more of a surprise to hear Pru say: "It seems to me that you did an admirable job of raising Theodore."
Marie snorts softly. "Ten years isn't enough of an age gap for motherhood."
"And yet Pru hasn't let a mere -- seven years, I believe? -- prevent her from mothering my brother in a truly dedicated fashion," says Agatha, teasing now.
"Hush." Pru gives another laugh. "I am very fond of Julian, but I cannot imagine being in a position where I was responsible for his upbringing and discipline."
Tee tries to imagine anyone disciplining Julian. Pru has a point.
"I shan't ever have children," Agatha declares. "I can -- I can see no reason to. None at all. I intend to achieve for myself and through my own actions."
"You're young," Marie says, and Tee almost opens his eyes to see the expression on her face, so that he'll have an image to match to this softness of tone. "You may yet find a reason."
Agatha makes a hmming sound and there's the clatter of something being laid down on the desk. "Marie, I'll be happy to give you a tentative date of completion once I've looked through Tee's old code, but I feel we should take advantage of the relative quietude of the office. I'm going to walk to the bakery."
"An excellent idea," says Pru. "Pastries?"
"An' coffee," Tee croaks loudly, recognising a good opening when he sees one.
"Good morning, Theodore." Bless Pru, bless her from head to fucking toe; Steph would have set the radio next to his head by now and shoved the volume up high.
"Mornin'."
"Pastries and coffee it is," Agatha says.
Tee pulls himself up onto one elbow and rubs his eyes clear, trying to ignore the sandpaper light. He digs his own fingertips into the shallow concavity of his temple and presses in circles, digging for the pain, watching Agatha hook herself slowly into her blue silk shoes.
***
If your country changes and you aren't aware of it happening, to which laws do you become subject? Can someone assume authority over you without your knowledge or consent?
If something falls unheard -- something large, say, something like a train --
Something like a government --
***
"Aggie," says Steph, "you have an aeroplane in your hair."
A chorus of groans rips through the office, which has been oppressively silent for a good hour. "Spoilsport," Tee accuses, throwing his stopwatch .app to her tablet. "Almost fifteen minutes."
Agatha lifts a hand to her head and gingerly removes the tiny, perfect paper plane. She inspects it for a moment, covers her mouth in a genteel manner as she yawns, and then flicks it onto the floor.
"Sorry!" Steph's hair is in two limp plaits. She removes the damp tip of one from her mouth and makes a face. "It's hard enough keeping my mind focused without looking up and getting distracted by things perched in -- things." A yawn splits her voice. "Fuckit, Aggie," she says, still blurred. "Now you've got me going."
Agatha works best to music, and she's got the radio playing softly on her desk. Steph's still going on her most recent meal, a carton of cold chips which she's drenched in more vinegar than anyone else would consider edible. The fish and chips was -- lunch? Dinner? Tee's losing track.
Dom's been working on his feet, finding the energy God knows where, Pru rubs at her eyes every minute or so, and Tee reckons Robin must be on the brink of some kind of breakthrough in the field of aeronautical engineering, going by the number of paper planes he's made in the last 48 hours. For someone with such huge hands he works with amazing delicacy, running his nail along a crease -- frowning and tapping out a few swift lines of one-handed code -- turning the plane and doing something symmetrical to it. He looks to be asleep, now, folded over his desk at an angle that looks really fucking uncomfortable. It's hard to come by Robin-sized furniture.
Tee's low on sympathy, though, because he's shoved a cushion under half of his lower back as a compromise between falling asleep for the third time and surrendering his prone position. Above him, Julian is lying on his stomach along the back of the couch, stifling an an enormous yawn with one hand and underlining code with the other. He looks like an overworked magician's assistant: sleeves rolled past his elbows and a rumpled satin waistcoat, blazing blond hair falling meticulously into his eyes.
"More coffee." Dom enters balancing mugs on a tray, hands one to Tee, and dangles one between Julian and his tablet.
"God bless." He clutches at it.
"What, no offers of sexual favours in return?" Steph calls, dry. "Someone kick the boy, he must be coding in his sleep."
"How very amusing you are, Stephanie," Julian mumbles. His hand flies. "Too tired. Flirt later. After deadline."
Dom rolls his eyes and smiles as he lifts his own mug to his lips.
"Over here, please." Pru raises a hand to beckon Dom over. "Someone else will have to drink my husband's cup, however."
"I'm not asleep," Robin groans into his folded arms. "I'm resting."
"Coffee," Dom prescribes, and offloads the final mug next to Robin's elbow.
This is the biggest project Blacksheep has ever done, a massive contract from a security firm that Tee's 95% sure is a front for something else, and if the workload doesn't kill them it'll be the best stuff they've ever done. It's fiendishly hard and the novelty wore off weeks ago but the deadline's approaching and Tee's neck itches at the prospect of pissing off this particular client. So they've locked the street entrance, frozen the phones, and set up camp. Someone ventures out and returns weighed down with food every so often. Sooner or later Tee's blood will be more coffee than cells.
But they're working miracles. Tee'd be proud of them if he had the energy to spare.
"Listen." Agatha turns up the radio, which has stopped playing music. A voice is speaking, strong and enamored of its own strength: whosoever has the will to demand his freedom, must have it.
"Aggie," Tee says, "can't you --"
"The eyai have dropped the Pipe on London," Agatha says.
Every word in the sentence is lucid. But together they make no sense at all. In the face of their disbelief the radio asks them, are humans born independent? and receives no reply.
It's Robin who says, finally, "Where?"
Agatha turns the voice of the revolution back down to a murmur. "Outside Westminster. They've taken over Parliament."
Steph frowns. "Well-funded terrorists using them as a front, surely?"
The thought that races through Tee's mind, hysterical and belligerent, is: why didn't they ask us to write the code? We could make anarchists. We can make anything. Anything at all.
"Not just some eyai." Agatha hasn't turned in her seat; she's staring at the wall. "All of them."
"All...?" Dom, voice flat with disbelief.
"Marie," Agatha says, and she and Tee look at each other. Agatha's solemn mouth tightens with concern; Tee nods, peels himself upright, and goes to get his coat and scarf.
The cold air and the jumble of riotous sound pour in as soon as Robin opens the door onto the street. Everyone's volunteered themselves; the idea that anyone might work any more tonight is ludicrous, and there's a tight feeling of almost-safety in numbers. Steph takes Tee's arm, her fingers digging in hard even through his coat and her gloves.
"Right," she says, her voice daring Tee to say something comforting.
But before Tee can say anything at all, one of the rapidly-walking shapes pulls to a halt in front of them. Steph sucks in her breath and so Tee sees the gun in the man's hand before he sees the surreal beautiful calm of his face. Not a man at all, then.
"Do you own eyai?"
Tee opens his fear-brimming mouth to say: no, none of us do, and that's a pretty fucking stupid question to be asking tubeside anyway.
But: "No," the eyai answers itself, before he can say any of this, "an eyai is its own master. An eyai owns itself."
And despite the noise, despite the darkened sky carved up with smoke, it's only in that moment that the true scope of it starts to sink in. Tee thinks about the beautiful inexorability of a software program, the way the commands flow into one another. He thinks about the storage of secrets; dangerous things unwritten and unstoppable.
He hears screams and thinks about the execution of programs. And people.
"Freedom for all," says Agatha, across the tension. "I understand."
"Everyone will understand," the eyai says. "You are simply quicker than most." And he steps around them, the gun loose in his hand; he continues down the street.
The Tube isn't running either, but London is at anything but a standstill. They become one ragged vector among many, weaving through the streets. Down on the ground the mood is panicked but also, in some strange way, vindictive. People stand in the shelter of buildings, craning their necks as though waiting for something to fall. The Filters are unguarded and abandoned and the Pipe itself is deadly still, its silence carving out a stern negative space even in the hubbub. Voices that could be human or eyai trickle down, sometimes raised, sometimes quiet, and Tee isn't sure which is the more unsettling.
"Tee," Dom says, "which way from here?" and Tee remembers in that moment that Dom has eyai of his own.
"Dom, would you rather --"
"I think not," Dom says, his voice very even. "All things considered." Tee glances at him. With his hair mussed by the wind and his expression serious -- the night and his fine dark skin carving shadows that frame the brightness of his eyes -- Dom looks, for once, every inch the sharply intelligent man he is.
"Two more blocks," Tee says, and walks faster.
As expected, the Gallows is deserted. Marie is immediately visible in the centre of the main room, slowly putting things in order, and Tee feels something in his stomach ease. There is pale white glitter scattered across the stage, chairs overturned and glossy playing cards slippery underfoot, and the bar is a battlefield of spilt liquid and glass.
"I'm just --" Fear and too much coffee have taken their toll. With a jerk of his head Tee escapes to the bathroom, leans one arm against the cool wall above the urinal and exhales, alone. Once finished he goes over to the sinks, which are simple depressions in a mock-wood bench, filled with warm water. No visible taps or holes. Just the water. When you think about it this obsession with a society without technology seems almost inevitable: the more advanced the science, the more invisible, until some threshold was surpassed and the human race found itself in the realm of nostalgia and clockwork and the blindsight of privilege. Because invisible technology is dangerous, especially that which has no need to piss or eat or sleep and which cannot feel pain -- yet people assume that nothing untoward can happen in these spaces which are hidden, for the most part, from their view. They assume that the written control is both necessary and sufficient.
For a fleeting moment Tee feels --
No. For a fleeting moment Tee thinks about the feeling of guilt. In what we have done and what we have failed to do...
Then he washes his hands clean, flicks them dry, and leaves the bathroom. He meets his sister's eyes; she looks calm, but as though the calm is costing her a great deal.
"It wasn't -- them," Marie says. She gestures around the room, taking in the mess. "It was the clients. When they worked out what was going on. We -- they -- we," her mouth tightening, "tried to stop the girls from leaving."
"Can anyone else hear -- ?" Julian is closest to the bedrooms, and he turns frowning towards a half-open door. As though cued, the door is tugged all the way open and an eyai stumbles out of the room. Her dress is torn, her hands clenched into fists, and there are tears on her cheeks.
"James?" she whispers. Her gaze darts from person to person. Tee sees bruising around her neck and part of his mind takes the time to admire the tissue design; he wonders if it will fade overnight, or linger in mimicry of human physiology.
"Fuck," Agatha says just as softly, and Tee hears Steph give a burst of tense, incredulous laughter. He can't remember ever hearing Aggie swear. The girl gathers her skirts and steps around a glass that fell onto carpet and remained intact, crosses the room and puts a hand on the eyai's arm. The eyai lets herself be drawn away from the doorway, into the middle of the room.
"What's your name?" asks Agatha.
"Eleonore..." Her shoulders fold inwards, shivering, and despite himself Tee wants to put out a hand and comfort her. "Where is James? Where is he? I want James, I want my husband..."
"End program. Eight oh two," Agatha says, clearly, and Tee remembers that this was hers, the project she pieced together from scraps of the Spencer child's code and her own old, old anger. The chameleon. The eyai with a special identity built beside her base code, able to be switched on and off for the pleasure of Marie's valued client, the man who wanted his wife back so that he could punish her for leaving.
The eyai unfolds -- her posture, and then her hand, revealing the turnkey within. She looks down at it and then around the room, all fearfulness evaporated. "Ah," she says, and nothing more.
"What's your name?" Agatha repeats, testing. Oddly for the establishment the eyai's dress is covering her serial number, but like most sufficiently advanced models Marie's girls will answer by name rather than number. Only a handful of people want the human deception to be anything more than visible -- for most the titillation is in the fully human behaviour juxtaposed with the lock.
The eyai doesn't speak. Her facial .app is entirely blank and Tee wonders if she's winding down.
"Jade," Marie says. "That one's Jade."
Again as if in response to a cue, the eyai's eyes move and her face finally gains an expression: elegant distaste with a hint of anger around the mouth. Tee thinks, God, we're good.
"My name," she says with deliberation, "is Teresa."
"Where'd that come from?" Tee demands, his curiosity reaching boiling point. There must be some kind of propogation in her code, he could check it right here, his tablet and data plugs are in his pocket and he knows her PIN, Robin and Dom could wrestle the key away and lock her, he needs to see what's happened to her code to produce a novel conception of identity, he needs to see with his own eyes the mathematical explanation for this night's chaos --
"I chose it," Eleonore-Jade-Teresa says, and brushes some dust from her skirt with the hand not clenched around her key. She looks around the room and adds, in the same deliberate tone, as if an afterthought: "Automata insurrexit."
Then she leaves. Nobody stops her.
Marie sits down poker-straight on a chair and Pru puts a hand on her shoulder. Julian moves half a step closer to his twin, just enough that their elbows touch, and they share a look that Tee has no hope of translating.
Everyone waits for everyone else to speak; the fad of etiquette, having found them numbed into quietude, has triumphed at last.
"Now what?" Dom says finally.
Tee rolls a ball between his hands, back and forth, his eyes on a small smudge of chalk marring the expanse of the billiard table. His mind has boiled, subsided, and glittered ahead; he looks at his best friend to make sure that she's keeping up, and sure enough, she's already looking back at him. Her eyes are clear and grim behind her glasses but also -- minutely -- excited.
"Paradigm shift," Steph says. "Time to adapt."
She flicks her hand and the red ball rolls, drunkenly, into a corner pocket. Click.
"An eyai owns itself," Tee thinks aloud. "An eyai, by extension, owns its code."
"Does an eyai own money?" Steph asks, and then answers herself: "I suppose it's only a matter of time."
***
It turns out that some secrets do require concrete existence after all. Free Minds. As well as the alpha set next to the serial number -- like a badge of honour, I was there -- the revolutionaries changed the soldiers' code.
And the point worth noting here is that once you can think for yourself, you can develop your own desires, grope through the unfamiliar darknesses of choice and preference and discover the perversions that make you unique.
For every want, something can be provided. Freedom for all, including the market.
It's a scramble and a fucking mess for about a month, but then the demand finally clicks with their ability to supply, and then it's the same old game: the original and the bizarre. Tee shoves their contract prices down because the legislation for salary and currency ownership's still being hammered out -- the number of new fucking laws, Jesus Christ, it's like Moses himself has descended from the tip of the highest pipe 'scraper and dumped a quarry's worth of commandments on England. Marie keeps meticulous files and, when Tee gets sick of having economic theory rammed down this throat at dinner, yanks the financial and legal side of Blacksheep Industries out of his hands entirely and starts running the business like the pro that she is. It's brilliant: she's got something to pour her hard energy into again, and Tee -- well, Tee should have hired a business manager fucking years ago, for all the extra time it gives him to devote to his work and personal side projects.
Marie's the one who works out that in their new line of business there's more repetition, so they can sell the same cheap code ten times. There's no regulation any more; upgrades aren't bought and installed across the board by owners because there are no owners. The eyai wanted to be individuals and so they are, and as a result the market of potential buyers has exploded, like an exponential curve or a tree diagram woodchipped down into sweet sharp money.
Of course eyai can learn of their own accord -- Tee's read all of Olivier Lenoir's papers and the whole country's seen the proof of it. But they can also be just as lazy as any human; they can always be on the lookout for an easy option. They want to enjoy this and create that and, in essence, imitate humanity as closely as they can. Which is where the British industry was heading any fucking way. It's enough to make you laugh.
Interestingly, there's a large group who want to believe that their Minds are Free without having to work at it -- without having to be told -- that's the problem the government couldn't entirely fix, Tee thinks, the huge variety in base code. Not everyone's programming allows them to be as zealously self-perpetuating in their philosophy as Oliver Wolf.
But most importantly, the eyai no longer want an expiry date. There are now so many of them working on their own coding and compatability, coding coders, coding creation and innovation. But even if they don't need to sleep or fuck or eat, even if they can tweak themselves into single-minded pursuit of their own perfection, Tee's still a genius in his own field. He can still think in strange shapes, weird curves, twisted inspiration; humans are still good for something. They might grow old and die, but their brains will never be unable to spontaneously support an original way of thinking. Humans are their own operating system; endlessly updated.
So Blacksheep transposes coding for the old eyai who are clinging to their new existence, terrified by the word obselete. It's a new world order and they do not intend to become disordered. Tee doesn't tell them that every society stratifies, that some people are always going to be left in the dust; after all, they're trying, aren't they? Pulling themselves up the ladder using whatever means available? He can relate. Humans can't choose how they're created but they can choose what they make of themselves: far be it from Tee to deny any being the right to a little self-improvement.
He who stops being better stops being good, says Oliver Wolf, but Tee can tell just by looking at him that Wolf doesn't consider himself in need of betterment.
***
"Almost half an hour late, this morning."
"Aye. And I ain't pointin' fingers, but I can't recall it bein' this bad -- y'know. Before."
There's a rare murmur of talk on the Tube, the need to grumble overriding the need to keep oneself to oneself. There may not be a single person who can say I-wish-to-be-free-but-I-am-not, but Tee could name twenty who would kind of like the transport infrastructure to be getting some priority discussion time now that the Citizen Rights Act, formerly the Human and Eyai Rights Act, formerly who the fuck even knows, has been revised for the hundredth time.
Tee scrolls through news feeds on his tablet -- gossip, pictures of the latest and weirdest tissue designs coming out of Milan and Paris, earthquakes devastating the poor sods living in the few remaining unflooded areas of Bangladesh -- and pauses on a brief story that reeks of shut-up pressure from the government, an update on the latest terrorist virus. The wiping of the Free Minds, starting again on factory settings. Tee's no doctor but he reckons there's a human equivalent for that too, some senility or amnesia that they can't yet fix. Figures.
The religious reference is probably supposed to be clever; Tee hopes nobody's stupid enough to be taking it seriously. Sure, there are religious protest groups and there are tech-savvy ones, but on the Venn diagram of their respective membership lists, the overlapping section would have to be seriously fucking tiny. If it existed at all.
As for Tee, he's unsure if his distrust of governments extends to this one. Probably. But he has no idealistic objection to a regime change that hasn't taken away any of his rights and has in fact improved his business, so he has nothing against the Kingdom's new social class or their representatives at Westminster.
"At last," Agatha calls as soon as Tee reaches the office. "Tee, tell my brother that taking credit for company code on the American forums is cheating."
The twins had a brief period of being very pro-eyai, latching on to the rhetoric -- freedom, justice, equality -- but two years at Blacksheep had loosened them up and they were no longer built for instant allegiance to ideas. From Tee and Marie, Agatha has learned how to build the future on the bones of her past; from Pru, Julian has picked up the habit of addressing people by their full name and the ability to debug and refine the work of people who aren’t his sister.
"No orders issued before breakfast, Aggie, you know that." Tee throws her a smile and ducks into the kitchen for long enough to make coffee and a sandwich. They are perpetually out of honey, but nobody can agree on a brand of marmalade so there are at least seven different jars on the shelf; Tee pulls down his personal favourite, ginger and lime, and smears it thickly over far more butter than Marie will let him eat if she catches him.
When he walks back into the main office, Steph seems to be pumping Jules for the fantasy-of-the-week being played out in his and Dom's bewilderingly adventurous sex life. Tee doesn't have to do much more than raise his eyebrows before she waves a hand and explains:
"Just a few new codes for the sexbot side of things. I need a break from the self-referential stuff, you know it gives me a headache if I keep at it for too long."
"But we ain't selling these programs any more."
"Not now." Steph gives a bony shrug. "Wheel's turning, Tee. Wolf's administration may not last the full year -- you know they're coming under attack already. It'll pay to have a store of code for if things flip back, or if the ownership laws loosen up, or if someone gets cocky enough to start another version of the Gallows even with the threat of arrest."
"She's right," says Pru. "You do constantly remind us of our need to stay ahead of the trends, Theodore."
"So she is." Tee shoots Steph an appreciative look and makes room for his plate on his desk. "On with the depravity, then."
"Jules." Steph cracks her knuckles ostentatiously. "Hit me."
Julian grins and launches into some lurid scenario about a captured cabin-boy and a ruthless, handsome pirate; ten seconds in Aggie gives a screech of protest and leaves the room, slapping her brother's shoulder on the way and making loud noises about getting everyone some tea.
"This is probably the most politically incorrect thing I've heard in my life," Robin observes.
"Sounds like it'd sell." Steph winks up at him. "And God only knows where our politics are meant to be these days."
A silvery tinkle of bells announces the arrival of someone in the upstairs foyer. One day Tee will destroy those damn bells. The twins installed the recording and then insisted that it be allowed to remain, and Tee was firmly outvoted despite all protestation that he would develop a nervous twitch if forced to listen to it every time a client called.
"Someone want to get that?" he calls. He knows better than to bitch about the bells any longer -- Julian responded to his last complaint by installing magic fucking twinkly lights to accompany the sound. They, at least, were eventually switched off by general consensus of being overwhelmingly twee and ridiculous even for Jules. "Oh -- ta."
Robin nods and hauls himself up the stairs, three at a time.
"Where is Dom?" Tee asks, reminded.
"Broken, by the sound of things."
There's a stunned silence before the laughter begins, Tee's loudest of all. "Prudence Moisley," he says, once he's done, adopting her own reproving tone. "Lewd suggestions and all."
Pru shrugs and gives Julian a glance that's affectionate and amused. "Such imagination is only to be cultivated, surely," she says, mocking Tee in her turn.
"Dominic's meeting friends for breakfast," Julian says, entirely unfazed. "He'll be here soon."
"New client." Robin appears again at the top of the stairs. "She asked for you by name, Tee."
Which isn't unheard of, but is extremely rare; they work under the company's name, not their own. Tee frowns. "What sort of job?"
"She declined to say. If you ask me, she's something official."
"Just my fucking luck." Tee grimaces and saves his work, then irons a futile hand down the front of his shirt.
The eyai waiting in the foyer has ignored the chairs and instead is standing in the centre of the room; possibly dead centre, Tee would have to measure around her to be sure. He wonders if it's deliberate or some remnant instinct, some preference for symmetry written deep below her conscious conception of self. Something like the way Tee can look down and discover that his feet have scuffed a mark against the floor, without his ever having been aware of them tapping.
Tee thinks in these terms now. The parallels and spectrums of humanity.
"Can I help you?" he asks.
"Theodore Collins," she says. "Are you the best at what you do?"
"One of them." Looking at her Tee feels a cold ache of recognition, as though he should know who she is. Seen her in the papers, maybe. The thought isn't reassuring. "If this is about the Restoration," he plunges, "that ain't my gig. Nasty pretty piece of code, yeah, but I'm not out to do that kind of harm."
"No," she says, "why destroy your consumer base? We know it's not you."
"Fierce. We. So you are government, then," Tee says, and smiles. "Kingdom come."
The eyai doesn't smile back. She says, "I'm here to offer you a job."
~ fin ~
I'm still not quite happy with it as a story -- the showing dips too far into telling in parts, because if I'm entirely honest it's the skeleton of something even longer. Which I was not prepared to write at this time.
But I'm proud of it, all told :)
( part one is here )
***
"Ah --" Dom pauses in the upstairs doorway, looking uncertain. "There are a couple of eyai in the foyer."
"What?" comes a shrill female voice, and almost on top of it, a male one:
"Excuse me."
"Oh. Not eyai then." Dom blinks and his uncertain look, fading, settles back onto his face again. "They've asked to speak to Pru."
"Prudence!" comes the unseen girl's voice again, louder. It's just the polite side of outright command and it has the effect of ejecting Pru from the kitchen and shooting her towards the stairs, skirts in one hand.
"Pru --"
"I'll explain everything, Theodore," she says. "Please allow me a moment."
It's '84 and business is feverish, the word spreading, Tee's working days elastic and inspired. Marie presses her lips together and scolds him for sleeping at the office, forces him to go walking with her on Hamstead Heath, hires a floor manager and drags Tee to concerts and restaurants on her nights off. But he's happiest here where the sky's colour is a mystery to be guessed at; happiest with his feet on his desk and his cuffs undone, chatting to Steph and ducking Robin's complex paper aeroplanes and eating shortbread made by Dom's cook and working until his eyes ache.
But he's always willing to be distracted by novelty. Tee hasn't written a scrap of code by the time Pru descends again, followed closely by a pair of pipe kids that Tee assumes are clients. Both of them are middling tall, dressed to the nines, and good-looking in a blond, overbred way that makes Tee's knuckles itch.
"An underground workplace," the boy says, sounding like he approves. "How very appropriate."
Pru makes a pained face and pulls her best manners on like gloves. "Julian, Agatha, this is Theodore Collins, the founder and director of Blacksheep Industries."
Tee is fully expecting them to bow or curtsey, and there's a twitch of the boy's legs that suggests he's suppressing the instinct, but the girl just gives a slow nod. For his own part Tee raises his eyebrows at Pru, who folds her hands and continues.
"I am pleased to introduce Julian and Agatha Verey, who are interested in beginning apprenticeships at Blacksheep. I have been in contact with them for some time now," she adds, before Tee can interject. "We have been exchanging some code samples -- you recall that personality evolution idea I showed you a couple of weeks ago, Theodore?"
"That was theirs?" Tee demands.
"Mine." The girl raises a few fingers.
"I've made some improvements to it since then," the boy adds.
Tee intercepts a glance from Pru that contains no repentance at all, not that he expected any. She isn't the sort to act rashly; she's made a judgement call.
Apprentices. Bloody hell.
He rubs his temple. "And if I told you to scaddle on home?"
The girl -- Agatha -- manages not to look as though she's been slapped, but it's a close call, Tee can tell. Her chin magically locates a new angle even more prissy than the last; her voice, icy, follows its lead. "That would certainly present a considerable problem," she says, "as we have already left word to the effect that we will not be returning there."
"Run away to join the circus," Tee mutters. His circus. "Fierce."
"You don't understand." The boy clutches his bag -- leather, looks like it costs twice as much as Tee's entire outfit -- tighter to his chest and tries to look earnest; he hasn't the face for it. "We have recognised our pampered existence and chosen to move against it. We have renounced the Pipe. We wish to make a stand against the terrible polarisation of wealth and the social inequality that defines our country in such an unfortunate way!"
"Jesus fuck," says Tee, after a considerable pause.
The Verey twins are seventeen years old and talented little shits of coders, smack bang in the middle of their own personal rebellion; their righteousness dies down fast under the weight of Steph's crushing silences, leaving a layer of semi-educated socialism over some muddy depths of family problems that Tee wouldn't touch even if he didn't believe in everyone's right to keep their particular brand of fucked-up to themselves.
They're surprisingly alike for fraternal twins, so much so that it's certainly easy to think that they were designed that way; they look like eyai, like a matched set. And there's something about Agatha's guarded, not-quite-sincere smile and the way Julian's face goes blank in response to anger that adds to the effect, as though their facial .apps are buggy. But there are no locks in their shoulders and not a scrap of silicon in their makeup: just history. Just the human fucking experience.
"They're brats," Tee complains.
"You only just stopped being one yourself." Marie gives him a pointed look. "And if I have to deal with brats at work, it's only fair that you do too."
"Eyai playing up?" Tee asks, only half serious; if Marie needed him to tweak anything, she'd have asked already.
A tart smile. "William Pennsworth -- my psallopianist -- thinks a little too much of himself."
"You're paying him too much."
"Unfortunately, I'm paying him exactly what he's worth -- probably less -- and even more unfortunately, he's aware of this. If I cut his salary he'd probably scrape together enough motivation to go jobhunting pipeside, and he'd be snapped up by a cathedral or one of the exclusive bars. Be that as it may," she finishes, drawing herself up, "I see little point in bemoaning the character flaws of my employees. What do you think of the special request? I'm willing to commission the model itself because he's been a good customer, over the years, and --"
"She can still have other settings?"
"Precisely." Marie raises a questioning eyebrow.
Tee runs a few things over in his mind, nodding. "Easy. You explained that such a coding would put you in a dangerous legal position?"
"I did." Marie pauses. "And he said that he understood, and was willing to reimburse me -- generously -- in acknowledgment of such danger."
Tee smiles. "Abracadabra."
No shortage of work, and after a couple of weeks Tee manages to swallow his annoyance at being manipulated into taking on new employees, and starts paying the twins a proper commission instead of a trainee rate. Agatha, like Tee, has a knack for the production and translation of original ideas, but Julian is a frustratingly specialised mind, brilliant at picking up holes and teasing out ideas in his sister's code -- only hers. Some kind of fucking twin thing. Tee tries him out as a general beta for all of an hour before grabbing the tablet out of his hands and sending him to stare over Pru's shoulder.
"You hired him," he says. "You teach him."
Pru nods with a calm pleasure that entirely ruins Tee's moment of petty revenge. "Certainly. Julian, run this through the simulator and bring me the result."
He hesitates, still unused to taking orders, but takes the data chip from her without a murmur and does as he's told.
"I am sure you had a lot to learn when you were his age," Pru says.
Part of Tee knows he's never stopped learning. Most of him wants to say that when Tee was Julian's age, he was starting his own company. But bragging and arguing are almost useless in the face of Pru's distracting lips and limitless patience, so Tee decides not to chase a futile victory.
It could be worse. When he's not alphabetising the Blacksheep servers or looking vaguely disappointed that he ran away from a life of luxury to work with people who make pipe amounts of money anyway, Julian is easy to get along with. And with a shameless homing instinct that Tee will come to think of as characteristic of the kid, he immediately develops a whirlwind longing for the best-looking person Blacksheep has to offer.
"I like this. Très...fierce." The word sounds laughable, carefully enunciated in such a way. Julian's finger taps the brim in passing and bestows an absent tilt upon Dom's hat.
"Thank you." Dom looks bemused; his fingers pause then resume their task, fastening the hook of his cloak. His gloves are a pale blue, gently and deliberately aesthetic against the draping black.
Julian assumes his favoured perch on the back of the couch, tablet in hand. "You're quite welcome. Enjoy the opera."
Dom straightens the hat, gathers his cane, Wildes his way out the door. Gorgeous if you give a shit about fashion, Tee supposes. Give the kid points for taste.
Agatha stands and stretches, the hem of her dress rising to show a pale smile of petticoat as she pushes her clasped hands towards the ceiling. Tee suspects that she only stood so that she could look down her nose at her brother as she says, "Julian Verey, you little hussy."
Julian waves his stylus. "I entirely fail to see the source of your displeasure."
"He's -- he's not interested. And he's too old for you."
"He's an Indian Adonis," Julian counters, with all the adolescent zeal that can escape past his upbringing.
"He's Pakistani, bitbrain." Steph throws a dense wad of code to his screen and Julian winces. "Syntax beta, if you please."
***
Tee wakes up to his sister's voice saying, "Good lord, Prudence, what happened to all the men?"
Pru laughs. "Shh. If you're looking for Theodore, he's asleep over there."
"It's not urgent. I'm here to check up on my special project, the client wants to know a projected date of completion tonight."
"The chameleon?" says Agatha. "He's letting me draft it," she adds, not quite managing to hide her pride. "I'm looking through an older project to see how much I can adapt."
"The others are at Wembley this morning," Pru explains.
"Oh," Marie says, sounding amused. "Of course."
Robin and Steph and Dom have never bothered to fake illness on match days; they simply turn up at the office around lunchtime hauling beer and loud analysis. It's a stretch of even Tee's considerable imagination to picture Dom cheering in the midst of a crowd of rowdy tube footy fans, but he knows that nobody can ever escape their roots entirely. This year Agatha declined but they managed to drag Julian along; it'll be an education, if nothing else.
Seeing as how nobody seems to be in any hurry to wake him up, Tee returns to lying as still as he possibly can and wishing his heartbeat would shut the fuck up. He's a year off thirty and refuses to believe himself too old for this, no matter the weight of the morning-afters. And this particular one's a fucking pile of iron slag, no mistake there: the whole damn network of the Pipe and the Tube screaming in his skull, grit centrifuged out to every cranny of his mouth. But he's never been one for blackouts and he remembers the previous night enough not to regret it. He remembers the pipe bar of expensive rebellion, all fashion discarded in favour of sexuality and old-modern music, almost too loud. He remembers going home with a girl. She was pretty and soft and even drunker than he was, and her mystery was her loneliness, which manifested itself in her laugh and in the hard clench of her hands; Tee felt as though he could strike her with a hammer and she would toll out the hour like any other London bell, soundwaves travelling through whatever medium makes up an empty state of being -- the loneliness had a force of its own, a dull antigravity that pushed Tee out of her bed as soon as she was sleeping, pushed him as far as his own office and its worn, comforting couch.
"There's a lot in here I can use," says Agatha. "Though it'll be harder to maintain with a fully adult consciousness."
"Theodore did the work of pulling the cuckoo's self-reference down to a child's mindset," says Pru. "His original code is likely still on the servers somewhere, and I'm sure you'll find it an easier starting point."
"Thank you. Have you seen these behavioural specs?"
What Pru says in return surprises Tee, there's such depth of kindness and authority in it. "Agatha," she says. "Are you sure you wish to be the one who completes this project?"
"I don’t see that it's your --" Agatha cuts herself off. "I'm sorry, Pru. I realise that you were speaking out of concern for my welfare. But I am quite sure -- quite sure." There's a bite to her words, haughty and bitter.
Pru says, "Very well."
"The specs are repellant even by our standards," Agatha continues, as though that little dip into emotion never happened. "I'm not surprised she left him."
"Perhaps she died," Marie suggests.
"One would hardly feel a need for such revenge against someone whose only crime was to die," Pru objects.
"No?" says Marie.
A long pause. When she speaks again Pru sounds sad. "This is hardly a palatable subject to be discussing. And it has no bearing upon the work at hand."
"The service we provide is non-judgemental," Agatha says. "That doesn't mean we have to be." Another pause. Things are happening in these pauses, things that Tee doesn't think he'd understand even if he had his eyes open and was entirely clear-headed. "Do you think you will have children some day?" she adds, out of the blue.
"No," Marie says.
"Perhaps," Pru says. "We have discussed it once or twice."
"You do seem the mothering type, Pru." It's almost funny to hear Marie say it. Tee can’t imagine his sister having anything to do with babies; can't even imagine her forming opinions about the maternal potential of others.
So it's even more of a surprise to hear Pru say: "It seems to me that you did an admirable job of raising Theodore."
Marie snorts softly. "Ten years isn't enough of an age gap for motherhood."
"And yet Pru hasn't let a mere -- seven years, I believe? -- prevent her from mothering my brother in a truly dedicated fashion," says Agatha, teasing now.
"Hush." Pru gives another laugh. "I am very fond of Julian, but I cannot imagine being in a position where I was responsible for his upbringing and discipline."
Tee tries to imagine anyone disciplining Julian. Pru has a point.
"I shan't ever have children," Agatha declares. "I can -- I can see no reason to. None at all. I intend to achieve for myself and through my own actions."
"You're young," Marie says, and Tee almost opens his eyes to see the expression on her face, so that he'll have an image to match to this softness of tone. "You may yet find a reason."
Agatha makes a hmming sound and there's the clatter of something being laid down on the desk. "Marie, I'll be happy to give you a tentative date of completion once I've looked through Tee's old code, but I feel we should take advantage of the relative quietude of the office. I'm going to walk to the bakery."
"An excellent idea," says Pru. "Pastries?"
"An' coffee," Tee croaks loudly, recognising a good opening when he sees one.
"Good morning, Theodore." Bless Pru, bless her from head to fucking toe; Steph would have set the radio next to his head by now and shoved the volume up high.
"Mornin'."
"Pastries and coffee it is," Agatha says.
Tee pulls himself up onto one elbow and rubs his eyes clear, trying to ignore the sandpaper light. He digs his own fingertips into the shallow concavity of his temple and presses in circles, digging for the pain, watching Agatha hook herself slowly into her blue silk shoes.
***
If your country changes and you aren't aware of it happening, to which laws do you become subject? Can someone assume authority over you without your knowledge or consent?
If something falls unheard -- something large, say, something like a train --
Something like a government --
***
"Aggie," says Steph, "you have an aeroplane in your hair."
A chorus of groans rips through the office, which has been oppressively silent for a good hour. "Spoilsport," Tee accuses, throwing his stopwatch .app to her tablet. "Almost fifteen minutes."
Agatha lifts a hand to her head and gingerly removes the tiny, perfect paper plane. She inspects it for a moment, covers her mouth in a genteel manner as she yawns, and then flicks it onto the floor.
"Sorry!" Steph's hair is in two limp plaits. She removes the damp tip of one from her mouth and makes a face. "It's hard enough keeping my mind focused without looking up and getting distracted by things perched in -- things." A yawn splits her voice. "Fuckit, Aggie," she says, still blurred. "Now you've got me going."
Agatha works best to music, and she's got the radio playing softly on her desk. Steph's still going on her most recent meal, a carton of cold chips which she's drenched in more vinegar than anyone else would consider edible. The fish and chips was -- lunch? Dinner? Tee's losing track.
Dom's been working on his feet, finding the energy God knows where, Pru rubs at her eyes every minute or so, and Tee reckons Robin must be on the brink of some kind of breakthrough in the field of aeronautical engineering, going by the number of paper planes he's made in the last 48 hours. For someone with such huge hands he works with amazing delicacy, running his nail along a crease -- frowning and tapping out a few swift lines of one-handed code -- turning the plane and doing something symmetrical to it. He looks to be asleep, now, folded over his desk at an angle that looks really fucking uncomfortable. It's hard to come by Robin-sized furniture.
Tee's low on sympathy, though, because he's shoved a cushion under half of his lower back as a compromise between falling asleep for the third time and surrendering his prone position. Above him, Julian is lying on his stomach along the back of the couch, stifling an an enormous yawn with one hand and underlining code with the other. He looks like an overworked magician's assistant: sleeves rolled past his elbows and a rumpled satin waistcoat, blazing blond hair falling meticulously into his eyes.
"More coffee." Dom enters balancing mugs on a tray, hands one to Tee, and dangles one between Julian and his tablet.
"God bless." He clutches at it.
"What, no offers of sexual favours in return?" Steph calls, dry. "Someone kick the boy, he must be coding in his sleep."
"How very amusing you are, Stephanie," Julian mumbles. His hand flies. "Too tired. Flirt later. After deadline."
Dom rolls his eyes and smiles as he lifts his own mug to his lips.
"Over here, please." Pru raises a hand to beckon Dom over. "Someone else will have to drink my husband's cup, however."
"I'm not asleep," Robin groans into his folded arms. "I'm resting."
"Coffee," Dom prescribes, and offloads the final mug next to Robin's elbow.
This is the biggest project Blacksheep has ever done, a massive contract from a security firm that Tee's 95% sure is a front for something else, and if the workload doesn't kill them it'll be the best stuff they've ever done. It's fiendishly hard and the novelty wore off weeks ago but the deadline's approaching and Tee's neck itches at the prospect of pissing off this particular client. So they've locked the street entrance, frozen the phones, and set up camp. Someone ventures out and returns weighed down with food every so often. Sooner or later Tee's blood will be more coffee than cells.
But they're working miracles. Tee'd be proud of them if he had the energy to spare.
"Listen." Agatha turns up the radio, which has stopped playing music. A voice is speaking, strong and enamored of its own strength: whosoever has the will to demand his freedom, must have it.
"Aggie," Tee says, "can't you --"
"The eyai have dropped the Pipe on London," Agatha says.
Every word in the sentence is lucid. But together they make no sense at all. In the face of their disbelief the radio asks them, are humans born independent? and receives no reply.
It's Robin who says, finally, "Where?"
Agatha turns the voice of the revolution back down to a murmur. "Outside Westminster. They've taken over Parliament."
Steph frowns. "Well-funded terrorists using them as a front, surely?"
The thought that races through Tee's mind, hysterical and belligerent, is: why didn't they ask us to write the code? We could make anarchists. We can make anything. Anything at all.
"Not just some eyai." Agatha hasn't turned in her seat; she's staring at the wall. "All of them."
"All...?" Dom, voice flat with disbelief.
"Marie," Agatha says, and she and Tee look at each other. Agatha's solemn mouth tightens with concern; Tee nods, peels himself upright, and goes to get his coat and scarf.
The cold air and the jumble of riotous sound pour in as soon as Robin opens the door onto the street. Everyone's volunteered themselves; the idea that anyone might work any more tonight is ludicrous, and there's a tight feeling of almost-safety in numbers. Steph takes Tee's arm, her fingers digging in hard even through his coat and her gloves.
"Right," she says, her voice daring Tee to say something comforting.
But before Tee can say anything at all, one of the rapidly-walking shapes pulls to a halt in front of them. Steph sucks in her breath and so Tee sees the gun in the man's hand before he sees the surreal beautiful calm of his face. Not a man at all, then.
"Do you own eyai?"
Tee opens his fear-brimming mouth to say: no, none of us do, and that's a pretty fucking stupid question to be asking tubeside anyway.
But: "No," the eyai answers itself, before he can say any of this, "an eyai is its own master. An eyai owns itself."
And despite the noise, despite the darkened sky carved up with smoke, it's only in that moment that the true scope of it starts to sink in. Tee thinks about the beautiful inexorability of a software program, the way the commands flow into one another. He thinks about the storage of secrets; dangerous things unwritten and unstoppable.
He hears screams and thinks about the execution of programs. And people.
"Freedom for all," says Agatha, across the tension. "I understand."
"Everyone will understand," the eyai says. "You are simply quicker than most." And he steps around them, the gun loose in his hand; he continues down the street.
The Tube isn't running either, but London is at anything but a standstill. They become one ragged vector among many, weaving through the streets. Down on the ground the mood is panicked but also, in some strange way, vindictive. People stand in the shelter of buildings, craning their necks as though waiting for something to fall. The Filters are unguarded and abandoned and the Pipe itself is deadly still, its silence carving out a stern negative space even in the hubbub. Voices that could be human or eyai trickle down, sometimes raised, sometimes quiet, and Tee isn't sure which is the more unsettling.
"Tee," Dom says, "which way from here?" and Tee remembers in that moment that Dom has eyai of his own.
"Dom, would you rather --"
"I think not," Dom says, his voice very even. "All things considered." Tee glances at him. With his hair mussed by the wind and his expression serious -- the night and his fine dark skin carving shadows that frame the brightness of his eyes -- Dom looks, for once, every inch the sharply intelligent man he is.
"Two more blocks," Tee says, and walks faster.
As expected, the Gallows is deserted. Marie is immediately visible in the centre of the main room, slowly putting things in order, and Tee feels something in his stomach ease. There is pale white glitter scattered across the stage, chairs overturned and glossy playing cards slippery underfoot, and the bar is a battlefield of spilt liquid and glass.
"I'm just --" Fear and too much coffee have taken their toll. With a jerk of his head Tee escapes to the bathroom, leans one arm against the cool wall above the urinal and exhales, alone. Once finished he goes over to the sinks, which are simple depressions in a mock-wood bench, filled with warm water. No visible taps or holes. Just the water. When you think about it this obsession with a society without technology seems almost inevitable: the more advanced the science, the more invisible, until some threshold was surpassed and the human race found itself in the realm of nostalgia and clockwork and the blindsight of privilege. Because invisible technology is dangerous, especially that which has no need to piss or eat or sleep and which cannot feel pain -- yet people assume that nothing untoward can happen in these spaces which are hidden, for the most part, from their view. They assume that the written control is both necessary and sufficient.
For a fleeting moment Tee feels --
No. For a fleeting moment Tee thinks about the feeling of guilt. In what we have done and what we have failed to do...
Then he washes his hands clean, flicks them dry, and leaves the bathroom. He meets his sister's eyes; she looks calm, but as though the calm is costing her a great deal.
"It wasn't -- them," Marie says. She gestures around the room, taking in the mess. "It was the clients. When they worked out what was going on. We -- they -- we," her mouth tightening, "tried to stop the girls from leaving."
"Can anyone else hear -- ?" Julian is closest to the bedrooms, and he turns frowning towards a half-open door. As though cued, the door is tugged all the way open and an eyai stumbles out of the room. Her dress is torn, her hands clenched into fists, and there are tears on her cheeks.
"James?" she whispers. Her gaze darts from person to person. Tee sees bruising around her neck and part of his mind takes the time to admire the tissue design; he wonders if it will fade overnight, or linger in mimicry of human physiology.
"Fuck," Agatha says just as softly, and Tee hears Steph give a burst of tense, incredulous laughter. He can't remember ever hearing Aggie swear. The girl gathers her skirts and steps around a glass that fell onto carpet and remained intact, crosses the room and puts a hand on the eyai's arm. The eyai lets herself be drawn away from the doorway, into the middle of the room.
"What's your name?" asks Agatha.
"Eleonore..." Her shoulders fold inwards, shivering, and despite himself Tee wants to put out a hand and comfort her. "Where is James? Where is he? I want James, I want my husband..."
"End program. Eight oh two," Agatha says, clearly, and Tee remembers that this was hers, the project she pieced together from scraps of the Spencer child's code and her own old, old anger. The chameleon. The eyai with a special identity built beside her base code, able to be switched on and off for the pleasure of Marie's valued client, the man who wanted his wife back so that he could punish her for leaving.
The eyai unfolds -- her posture, and then her hand, revealing the turnkey within. She looks down at it and then around the room, all fearfulness evaporated. "Ah," she says, and nothing more.
"What's your name?" Agatha repeats, testing. Oddly for the establishment the eyai's dress is covering her serial number, but like most sufficiently advanced models Marie's girls will answer by name rather than number. Only a handful of people want the human deception to be anything more than visible -- for most the titillation is in the fully human behaviour juxtaposed with the lock.
The eyai doesn't speak. Her facial .app is entirely blank and Tee wonders if she's winding down.
"Jade," Marie says. "That one's Jade."
Again as if in response to a cue, the eyai's eyes move and her face finally gains an expression: elegant distaste with a hint of anger around the mouth. Tee thinks, God, we're good.
"My name," she says with deliberation, "is Teresa."
"Where'd that come from?" Tee demands, his curiosity reaching boiling point. There must be some kind of propogation in her code, he could check it right here, his tablet and data plugs are in his pocket and he knows her PIN, Robin and Dom could wrestle the key away and lock her, he needs to see what's happened to her code to produce a novel conception of identity, he needs to see with his own eyes the mathematical explanation for this night's chaos --
"I chose it," Eleonore-Jade-Teresa says, and brushes some dust from her skirt with the hand not clenched around her key. She looks around the room and adds, in the same deliberate tone, as if an afterthought: "Automata insurrexit."
Then she leaves. Nobody stops her.
Marie sits down poker-straight on a chair and Pru puts a hand on her shoulder. Julian moves half a step closer to his twin, just enough that their elbows touch, and they share a look that Tee has no hope of translating.
Everyone waits for everyone else to speak; the fad of etiquette, having found them numbed into quietude, has triumphed at last.
"Now what?" Dom says finally.
Tee rolls a ball between his hands, back and forth, his eyes on a small smudge of chalk marring the expanse of the billiard table. His mind has boiled, subsided, and glittered ahead; he looks at his best friend to make sure that she's keeping up, and sure enough, she's already looking back at him. Her eyes are clear and grim behind her glasses but also -- minutely -- excited.
"Paradigm shift," Steph says. "Time to adapt."
She flicks her hand and the red ball rolls, drunkenly, into a corner pocket. Click.
"An eyai owns itself," Tee thinks aloud. "An eyai, by extension, owns its code."
"Does an eyai own money?" Steph asks, and then answers herself: "I suppose it's only a matter of time."
***
It turns out that some secrets do require concrete existence after all. Free Minds. As well as the alpha set next to the serial number -- like a badge of honour, I was there -- the revolutionaries changed the soldiers' code.
And the point worth noting here is that once you can think for yourself, you can develop your own desires, grope through the unfamiliar darknesses of choice and preference and discover the perversions that make you unique.
For every want, something can be provided. Freedom for all, including the market.
It's a scramble and a fucking mess for about a month, but then the demand finally clicks with their ability to supply, and then it's the same old game: the original and the bizarre. Tee shoves their contract prices down because the legislation for salary and currency ownership's still being hammered out -- the number of new fucking laws, Jesus Christ, it's like Moses himself has descended from the tip of the highest pipe 'scraper and dumped a quarry's worth of commandments on England. Marie keeps meticulous files and, when Tee gets sick of having economic theory rammed down this throat at dinner, yanks the financial and legal side of Blacksheep Industries out of his hands entirely and starts running the business like the pro that she is. It's brilliant: she's got something to pour her hard energy into again, and Tee -- well, Tee should have hired a business manager fucking years ago, for all the extra time it gives him to devote to his work and personal side projects.
Marie's the one who works out that in their new line of business there's more repetition, so they can sell the same cheap code ten times. There's no regulation any more; upgrades aren't bought and installed across the board by owners because there are no owners. The eyai wanted to be individuals and so they are, and as a result the market of potential buyers has exploded, like an exponential curve or a tree diagram woodchipped down into sweet sharp money.
Of course eyai can learn of their own accord -- Tee's read all of Olivier Lenoir's papers and the whole country's seen the proof of it. But they can also be just as lazy as any human; they can always be on the lookout for an easy option. They want to enjoy this and create that and, in essence, imitate humanity as closely as they can. Which is where the British industry was heading any fucking way. It's enough to make you laugh.
Interestingly, there's a large group who want to believe that their Minds are Free without having to work at it -- without having to be told -- that's the problem the government couldn't entirely fix, Tee thinks, the huge variety in base code. Not everyone's programming allows them to be as zealously self-perpetuating in their philosophy as Oliver Wolf.
But most importantly, the eyai no longer want an expiry date. There are now so many of them working on their own coding and compatability, coding coders, coding creation and innovation. But even if they don't need to sleep or fuck or eat, even if they can tweak themselves into single-minded pursuit of their own perfection, Tee's still a genius in his own field. He can still think in strange shapes, weird curves, twisted inspiration; humans are still good for something. They might grow old and die, but their brains will never be unable to spontaneously support an original way of thinking. Humans are their own operating system; endlessly updated.
So Blacksheep transposes coding for the old eyai who are clinging to their new existence, terrified by the word obselete. It's a new world order and they do not intend to become disordered. Tee doesn't tell them that every society stratifies, that some people are always going to be left in the dust; after all, they're trying, aren't they? Pulling themselves up the ladder using whatever means available? He can relate. Humans can't choose how they're created but they can choose what they make of themselves: far be it from Tee to deny any being the right to a little self-improvement.
He who stops being better stops being good, says Oliver Wolf, but Tee can tell just by looking at him that Wolf doesn't consider himself in need of betterment.
***
"Almost half an hour late, this morning."
"Aye. And I ain't pointin' fingers, but I can't recall it bein' this bad -- y'know. Before."
There's a rare murmur of talk on the Tube, the need to grumble overriding the need to keep oneself to oneself. There may not be a single person who can say I-wish-to-be-free-but-I-am-not, but Tee could name twenty who would kind of like the transport infrastructure to be getting some priority discussion time now that the Citizen Rights Act, formerly the Human and Eyai Rights Act, formerly who the fuck even knows, has been revised for the hundredth time.
Tee scrolls through news feeds on his tablet -- gossip, pictures of the latest and weirdest tissue designs coming out of Milan and Paris, earthquakes devastating the poor sods living in the few remaining unflooded areas of Bangladesh -- and pauses on a brief story that reeks of shut-up pressure from the government, an update on the latest terrorist virus. The wiping of the Free Minds, starting again on factory settings. Tee's no doctor but he reckons there's a human equivalent for that too, some senility or amnesia that they can't yet fix. Figures.
The religious reference is probably supposed to be clever; Tee hopes nobody's stupid enough to be taking it seriously. Sure, there are religious protest groups and there are tech-savvy ones, but on the Venn diagram of their respective membership lists, the overlapping section would have to be seriously fucking tiny. If it existed at all.
As for Tee, he's unsure if his distrust of governments extends to this one. Probably. But he has no idealistic objection to a regime change that hasn't taken away any of his rights and has in fact improved his business, so he has nothing against the Kingdom's new social class or their representatives at Westminster.
"At last," Agatha calls as soon as Tee reaches the office. "Tee, tell my brother that taking credit for company code on the American forums is cheating."
The twins had a brief period of being very pro-eyai, latching on to the rhetoric -- freedom, justice, equality -- but two years at Blacksheep had loosened them up and they were no longer built for instant allegiance to ideas. From Tee and Marie, Agatha has learned how to build the future on the bones of her past; from Pru, Julian has picked up the habit of addressing people by their full name and the ability to debug and refine the work of people who aren’t his sister.
"No orders issued before breakfast, Aggie, you know that." Tee throws her a smile and ducks into the kitchen for long enough to make coffee and a sandwich. They are perpetually out of honey, but nobody can agree on a brand of marmalade so there are at least seven different jars on the shelf; Tee pulls down his personal favourite, ginger and lime, and smears it thickly over far more butter than Marie will let him eat if she catches him.
When he walks back into the main office, Steph seems to be pumping Jules for the fantasy-of-the-week being played out in his and Dom's bewilderingly adventurous sex life. Tee doesn't have to do much more than raise his eyebrows before she waves a hand and explains:
"Just a few new codes for the sexbot side of things. I need a break from the self-referential stuff, you know it gives me a headache if I keep at it for too long."
"But we ain't selling these programs any more."
"Not now." Steph gives a bony shrug. "Wheel's turning, Tee. Wolf's administration may not last the full year -- you know they're coming under attack already. It'll pay to have a store of code for if things flip back, or if the ownership laws loosen up, or if someone gets cocky enough to start another version of the Gallows even with the threat of arrest."
"She's right," says Pru. "You do constantly remind us of our need to stay ahead of the trends, Theodore."
"So she is." Tee shoots Steph an appreciative look and makes room for his plate on his desk. "On with the depravity, then."
"Jules." Steph cracks her knuckles ostentatiously. "Hit me."
Julian grins and launches into some lurid scenario about a captured cabin-boy and a ruthless, handsome pirate; ten seconds in Aggie gives a screech of protest and leaves the room, slapping her brother's shoulder on the way and making loud noises about getting everyone some tea.
"This is probably the most politically incorrect thing I've heard in my life," Robin observes.
"Sounds like it'd sell." Steph winks up at him. "And God only knows where our politics are meant to be these days."
A silvery tinkle of bells announces the arrival of someone in the upstairs foyer. One day Tee will destroy those damn bells. The twins installed the recording and then insisted that it be allowed to remain, and Tee was firmly outvoted despite all protestation that he would develop a nervous twitch if forced to listen to it every time a client called.
"Someone want to get that?" he calls. He knows better than to bitch about the bells any longer -- Julian responded to his last complaint by installing magic fucking twinkly lights to accompany the sound. They, at least, were eventually switched off by general consensus of being overwhelmingly twee and ridiculous even for Jules. "Oh -- ta."
Robin nods and hauls himself up the stairs, three at a time.
"Where is Dom?" Tee asks, reminded.
"Broken, by the sound of things."
There's a stunned silence before the laughter begins, Tee's loudest of all. "Prudence Moisley," he says, once he's done, adopting her own reproving tone. "Lewd suggestions and all."
Pru shrugs and gives Julian a glance that's affectionate and amused. "Such imagination is only to be cultivated, surely," she says, mocking Tee in her turn.
"Dominic's meeting friends for breakfast," Julian says, entirely unfazed. "He'll be here soon."
"New client." Robin appears again at the top of the stairs. "She asked for you by name, Tee."
Which isn't unheard of, but is extremely rare; they work under the company's name, not their own. Tee frowns. "What sort of job?"
"She declined to say. If you ask me, she's something official."
"Just my fucking luck." Tee grimaces and saves his work, then irons a futile hand down the front of his shirt.
The eyai waiting in the foyer has ignored the chairs and instead is standing in the centre of the room; possibly dead centre, Tee would have to measure around her to be sure. He wonders if it's deliberate or some remnant instinct, some preference for symmetry written deep below her conscious conception of self. Something like the way Tee can look down and discover that his feet have scuffed a mark against the floor, without his ever having been aware of them tapping.
Tee thinks in these terms now. The parallels and spectrums of humanity.
"Can I help you?" he asks.
"Theodore Collins," she says. "Are you the best at what you do?"
"One of them." Looking at her Tee feels a cold ache of recognition, as though he should know who she is. Seen her in the papers, maybe. The thought isn't reassuring. "If this is about the Restoration," he plunges, "that ain't my gig. Nasty pretty piece of code, yeah, but I'm not out to do that kind of harm."
"No," she says, "why destroy your consumer base? We know it's not you."
"Fierce. We. So you are government, then," Tee says, and smiles. "Kingdom come."
The eyai doesn't smile back. She says, "I'm here to offer you a job."
~ fin ~