He finished his SoYummie cone, fended off snub-nosed Marjorie, who wanted him to join a game of croquet and acted hurt when he said he was awkward with wooden balls, then meandered over to where Glenn was still sitting, staring at the chessboard. He'd set it up again and was playing against himself. "Who won?" Zeb asked.
"I almost did," said Glenn. "She pulled a Grob's Attack on me. It caught me off-guard."
"What exactly does she do here?" Zeb asked. "Is she in charge of something?"
Glenn smiled. He liked knowing things Zeb didn't know. "Mushrooms. Funguses. Mould. Want to play me?"
"Tomorrow," said Zeb. "Ate too much, it's dulling my brain."
Glenn grinned up at him. "Chickenshit," he said.
"Maybe just lazy. How come you know her?" said Zeb.
Glenn looked at him a little too long, a little too hard: green cat eyes. "I already said. She works with my dad. He's on her team. Anyway, she's in the chess club. Been playing her since I was five. She's not too stupid."
Which, in the high-praise area, was about as far as he went.
Vector
At the next Thursday barbecue, Glenn wasn't there. Nor had he been in evidence for a couple of days. He hadn't been mooching around the cafeteria, or asking Zeb to show him a few more hack moves on the computer. He'd become invisible.
Was he sick? Had he run away? Those were the only two possibilities that Zeb could think of, and he ruled out running away: the kid was surely too young for that, and it was too difficult to get out of HelthWyzer West without a pass. Though with Glenn's newfound robinhooding cryptic skills he could probably fake one.
There was another possibility: the little smartass had been colouring outside the digital lines. He'd broken into some sacrosanct Corps database or other and helped himself, just for the heck of it, because he couldn't possibly be into shady trading with the Chinese grey market, or worse - the Albanians, they were incandescent at the moment - and he'd got himself caught. In which case he'd be in a debriefing room somewhere having his brain pumped out. A person could come out of such affairs with nothing but a year-old dishrag north of the eyes. Would they do such a thing to a mere child? Yes. They would.
He really hoped it wasn't that: if it was, he himself would feel very guilty, because it would mean he'd been a bad teacher. "Rule Number One," he'd emphasized. "Don't get caught." But that was sometimes easier said than done. Had he been sloppy about the coding fretwork? Had he shown the kid a past-sell-by-date shortcut? Had he missed a few Detour signs, a few spoor marks that meant that he and Glenn were not the only ones on what he'd thought was his very own self-created poacher's jungle trail?
Though he was more than concerned, Zeb didn't want to start asking the teachers or even Glenn's lax and neglectful parents about him. He needed to keep his profile low, not draw attention.
Zeb scanned the barbecue crowd again. Still no Glenn. But Pilar was there, over to the side, under a tree. She was sitting in front of a chessboard, which she appeared to be studying. He assumed his casual saunter and made his way over there, hoping he looked random.
"Up for a game?" he said.
Pilar glanced up. "Certainly," she said with a smile. Zeb sat down.
"We'll toss for White," said Pilar.
"I like to play Black," said Zeb.
"So I've been told," said Pilar. "Very well."
She opened with a standard queen's pawn, and Zeb decided to opt for a queen's Indian defence. "Where's Glenn?" he asked.
"Things are not good," she answered. "Concentrate on the game. Glenn's father is dead. Glenn is naturally upset. The CorpSeCorps officers told him it was a suicide."
"No shit," said Zeb. "When did that happen?"
"Two days ago," said Pilar, moving her queen's knight. Zeb moved his bishop, pinning it down. Now she'd have a job developing her centre. "It's not when, however, it's how. He was pushed off an overpass."
"By his wife?" Zeb asked, remembering Rhoda's tit pressing against his back, and also the earlet concealed in her bedside lamp. It was a jokey kind of question - he should have been ashamed of himself. Sometimes that kind of thing shot out of his mouth like popcorn. But it was a serious question, as well: Glenn's dad could have found out about Rhoda's lunchtime interludes, they could have gone for a walk to discuss it, outside the walls of HelthWyzer for more privacy, and decided to stroll along the overpass, for the view of the oncoming traffic, and then they could have had a fight, and Glenn's mother could have upended his dad over the railing, a move he'd been unable to defend himself against ...
Pilar was looking at him. Waiting for him to come to his senses, most likely.
"Okay, I take it back," he said. "It wasn't her."
"He found out something they're doing, inside HelthWyzer," said Pilar. "He felt this practice was not only unethical but dangerous to public health, and therefore immoral. He threatened to make this knowledge public; or, well, not public as such, since the press probably wouldn't have touched it. But if he'd gone to a rival Corp, especially one outside the country, they'd have made damaging use of the information."
"He was on your research team, wasn't he?" said Zeb. He was trying to follow what she was saying, thus losing control of his game.
"Affiliated," said Pilar, dispatching one of his pawns. "He confided in me. And now I'm confiding in you."
"Why?" said Zeb.
"I'm being reassigned," said Pilar. "To the HelthWyzer headquarters, out east. Or that's where I hope I'm going, though it may be worse. They may think I'm lacking in enthusiasm, or suspect my loyalty. You'll have to leave here. I can't keep you safe once I've been transferred. Take my bishop with your knight."
"That's a bad move," said Zeb. "It opens the way to ..."
"Just take it," she said calmly. "Then keep it in your hand. I have another one, I'll replace it in the box. No one will know there's a bishop missing."
Zeb palmed the bishop. He'd learned how to do that from Slaight of Hand, back in his Floating World days. Deftly he slid it up his sleeve.
"What am I supposed to do with it?" he said. With Pilar gone, he'd be isolated.
"Just deliver it," she said. "I'll fake you a day pass, with a cover story attached; they'll want to know your business in the pleeblands. Once you're outside the HelthWyzer West Compound, there'll be a new identity waiting. Take the bishop with you. There's a sex club franchise called Scales and Tails, you can look it up on the net. Go to the nearest branch. The password is oleaginous. They'll let you in. You'll be leaving the bishop there. It's a container, they'll know how to open it."
"Deliver it to who?" said Zeb. "What's in it, anyway? Who's they?"
"Vectors," said Pilar.
"In what sense?" said Zeb. "Like, math vectors?"
"Let's say biological. Vectors for bioforms. And these vectors are inside some other vectors that look like vitamin pills: three kinds, white, red, and black. And the pills are inside another vector, the bishop. Which will be carried by another vector, you."
"What's the thing inside the pills?" Zeb asked. "Brain candy? Code chips?"
"Definitely not. Best not to ask," said Pilar. "But whatever you do, don't eat any of them. If you think anyone's following you, shove the bishop down a drain."
"What about Glenn?" said Zeb.
"Check and mate," said Pilar, toppling his king. She stood up, smiling. "Glenn will make his way," she said. "He doesn't know they killed his father. He doesn't know yet. Or not directly. But he's very bright."
"You mean he'll figure it out," said Zeb.
"Not too soon, I hope," said Pilar. "He's too young for that kind of bad news. He might not be able to pretend ignorance, unlike you."
"Some of mine's real," said Zeb. "Like, right now, where do I switch identities? And how do I get the pass?"
"Go into the MaddAddam chatroom, there's a full package waiting for you. Then scramble your present gateway. You can't afford to leave your footprints on these computers."
"Does any of this involve differen
t facial hair?" Zeb asked, to lighten things up. "For my new identity? And dorky pants?"
Pilar smiled. "I've had my beeper switched off all this time," she said. "We're allowed to do that on barbecue days, as long as we're in full view. I'm turning it back on now. Don't say anything you don't want overheard. Journey well."
Scales and Tails
Zeb retrieved his thumbdrive from the desk drawer where he'd hidden it, removed the cough drops that were stuck to it like barnacles, activated Intestinal Parasites on his computer, then slipped through the voracious maw of the blind nightmare worm and thence by lilypad into the chatroom of MaddAddam. Sure enough, there was a how-to pack waiting for him, though no clue as to who had left it. He opened it, assimilated the contents, and scuttled backwards, whisking away his trail as he went. Then he ground the thumbdrive underfoot - or, more accurately, he placed it under one of his bed legs and then jumped on the bed, several times - and flushed the bits down several toilets. They wouldn't have gone down easily by themselves, being metal and plastic, but if you embed ...
"It's okay," says Toby. "I get the picture."
Zeb's new name was Hector. Hector the Vector, was what he figured. Someone had a reasonably foul sense of humour, but he didn't think it was Pilar: she was not so much the humorous type.
But of course he'd only activate his new Hector identity once he was outside the walls and away from the security cameras of HelthWyzer West. Until then he was still Seth, a minor code-slave chained in the galleyship of data entry, in his geekwear with the brown corduroy pants. If anything, he was betting his change of identity would score him better pants. There was said to be an outfit waiting for him in the pleeblands, stashed in a dumpster he hoped no tramps or crazy people or sacked middle managers would be picking through before he could get to it.
The cover story for his Seth persona was that he was making a service call at a local branch of a beauty-and-mood-enhancing Corp called AnooYoo, which was a dubious affiliate of HelthWyzer. Health and Beauty, the two seductive twins joined at the navel, singing their eternal siren songs. A lot of people would pay through their nose jobs for either one.
HelthWyzer's products - the vitamin supplements, the over-the-counter painkillers, the higher-end disease-specific pharmaceuticals, the erectile dysfunction treatments, and so on - went in for scientific descriptions and Latin names on the labels. AnooYoo, on the other hand, was mining arcane secrets from Wiccan moon-worshippers and from shamans deep in the assassin-bug-rich rainforests of Dontgothere. But Zeb could understand that there was an overlap of interests. If it hurts and you feel sick and it's making you ugly, take this, from HelthWyzer; if you're ugly and it hurts and you feel sick about it, take that, from AnooYoo.
Zeb readied himself for his mission by putting on a newly laundered pair of brown cords. He rearranged his face into his marginally shambolic Seth persona and winked at it in the bathroom mirror. "You're doomed," he said to it. He wouldn't be sorry to part company with Seth, who'd been foisted on him by Adam in an act of older-brother I-know-better bossiness. He longed to see Adam in person, if only to berate him for that. "You got any fucking idea of what those pants put me through?" he might say.
Time for Seth to go. He ambled in the direction of the front gate, exit pass in hand, humming to himself:
Hi ho, hi ho,
To jerkoff work I go,
With a hick hack here and a hick hack there,
Hi ho, hi ho, hi ho, hi ho!
Now to remember the cover story of Seth, junior code plumber. He was being sent to investigate the AnooYoo website, and to discover how it had been tampered with. Someone - maybe a jumped-up teenaged hacker like his own younger self - had altered the online images so that when you clicked on any of the mood-enhancing, complexion-improving products, a squad of puce and orange insect animations would nibble into them at hyperspeed and then explode, legs twitching, yellow fumes coming out. It was silly but graphic.
HelthWyzer West didn't want anyone working on the problem from inside their own systems, naturally: the thing, simpleminded though it looked, could be a trap, with its planners hoping for just such an intervention so they could ram in through HelthWyzer's firewalls and filch its valuable IP. Therefore someone had to go to AnooYoo in person: someone minor and - since the gang-riddled pleebs were hazardous - someone expendable. That would be Seth, though at least they were providing a HelthWyzer car, with a driver. Nobody would likely go to the trouble of grabbing Seth for brain excavation: he wasn't inner circle. But still.
AnooYoo didn't want to find out who'd done the hack job, or why: that would be too expensive. They just wanted their firewall repaired. Their own guys hadn't been able to do it, ran the cover story, which wasn't - to Zeb - ultra plausible. But then, AnooYoo was a cheap operation - this was before its plusher days, when it set up the Spa-in-the-Park - so its IT bunch wasn't the A team, and maybe not even the B or C team: ultrabrights got snapped up by richer Corps. They were more like the F team. Obviously, since they'd failed.
But they were going to have a long wait, thought Zeb, because within the hour he would morph into Hector, and Seth would be no more. He had the chess bishop; it was in his baggy corduroy pants pocket, where he was also keeping his left hand just in case, and if anyone was looking they might conclude he was engaged in an act of self-abuse. Which he simulated in a restrained way, in case the car was equipped with spyware, as was likely. Better a wanker than a defector, and a contraband smuggler to boot.
AnooYoo was located in a seedy piece of real estate on the edge of a grey-market pleeb. So it wasn't alien to the streetscape to find an overturned SecretBurgers stand blocking the way, with a full-scale red-sauce fracas going on and a corona of yelling and honking surrounding it, plus flying squadrons of airborne meat patties. Zeb's own driver leaned on the horn, though he knew better than to roll down the window to yell.
But before you could say prestidigitation, the car was mobbed by a dozen Asian Fusions. One of them must've had a digilock popper keyed with the HelthWyzer car's passcode because up shot the lock buttons. In about one second the Fusion thugs had winkled out the thrashing, yelping driver and were going for his shoes and shucking him out of his clothing as if he was a cob of corn. Those pleeb gangs were fast and professional, you had to hand it to them. They'd get hold of the car keys, reverse, and be off like a shot, to sell the vehicle whole or strip it for parts, whichever paid more.
This was Zeb's moment. It had been paid for in advance: the Asian Fusions were dirty but they were also cheap, and happy to take small jobs. Checking first to make sure the driver's sightlines were blocked - they had to be, his entire head was now covered in red sauce - Zeb dove out the back door and frog-marched himself down the adjacent alleyway and around the corner, then around another corner, and then a third, where he kept his rendezvous with the designated dumpster.
The brown corduroy pants went into it, good riddance, and some well-aged jeans came out, with accessories to match. Black pleather jacket, black T that read ORGAN DONOR, TRY MINE FREE, reflector shades, baseball cap with a modestly sized red skull on the front. Gold clip-on tooth cap, fake 'stache, newly minted smirk, and Hector the Vector was ready to saunter. He'd taken care to keep the chess bishop safely to hand, and now he zipped it into the inside pocket of the pleather.
Off he went, in a hurry but not in any way looking it: best to seem unemployed. Also best to seem up to no good, in non-specific ways.
The Scales and Tails where he was heading was deeper into the pleeb. If he'd gone there in his geekwear he'd probably have had to defend his personal territory beginning with scalp, nose, and balls, but as it was he attracted not much more than a few narrow-eyed assessments. Worth taking on? Not, was the verdict. So his sauntering went unimpeded.
There it was, up ahead: ADULT ENTERTAINMENT in neon, For Discerning Gentlemen in subscript. Pics of reptilian lovelies in skintight green scales, most of them with impressive bimplants, some in contorted poses that suggested they had no backbones.
A woman who could hook her legs around her own neck had something to offer in the way of novelty, though exactly what was unclear. And there was March the python, looped around the shoulders of a red-hot cobra lady who was swinging from a trapeze, and who greatly resembled Katrina WooWoo, the lovely snake trainer from the Floating World he'd so often helped to saw in half.
Not even very much older. So she was still keeping her hand in. As it were.
It was daytime: no customer traffic inbound. He reminded himself of the ludicrous password he'd been saddled with. Oleaginous. How to use it in a plausible sentence? "You're looking very oleaginous today?" That might get him a slap or a punch, depending on who he said it to. "Oleaginous weather we're having." "Turn off that oleaginous music." "Stop being so fucking oleaginous!" None of them sounded right.
He rang the doorbell. The door looked thick as a bank vault, with a lot of metal on it. An eye peered at him through the peephole. Locks clicked, the portal opened, and there was a bouncer as big as himself, only black. Shorn head, dark suit, shades. "What?" he said.
"Hear you've got some oleaginous girls," said Zeb. "Ones that butter you up."
The guy stared at him from inside his shades. "Say that again?" he said, so Zeb did. "Oleaginous girls," said the guy, rolling the phrase around in his mouth as if it was a doughnut hole. "Butter you up." His mouth upended at the corners. "Good one. Right. Inside." He checked the street before shutting the door. More locks clicking. "You want to see her," he said.
Down the hallway, purple-carpeted. Up the stairs: smell of a pleasure factory in the off hours, so sad. That moppet-shop smell that meant false raunchiness, that meant loneliness, that meant you got loved only if you paid.