Stormblood, стр. 28
I’d eventually found him sitting by the water fountain, watching a three-dee display. I’d been relieved and wanted to pound some sense into him in equal measure. I probably would have, if Kasia hadn’t taught me better. He’d seen me and grinned his cheeky grin before asking if I’d buy an album for him.
He seemed so different now. Could Kowalski be onto something, suspecting he was laced with a biochemical targeting agent or suicide trigger? Could it be he was trying to protect me? Or was he in it with both feet, and genuinely wanted nothing to do with me?
I wouldn’t find out unless I kept investigating.
People and aliens from across the Common filled the network of shops around us, text in over a dozen languages vying for our attention. Everything was on sale, from home decor and designer underskins to Rubix upgrades and the latest hardware. A squinting, grumpy woman sat buried in a nest of squirming wires, fibre-optic cables and multi-adapters. Children squatted atop teetering piles of storage crates, sneaking baklava and halva from the Middle-Eastern grocery, while a nearby Torven claimed to offer the best prices on lungship modifications across Compass. Graphic designers sketched paintjobs for chainships and men tinkered with hardware at cluttered workstations. A Torven wearing protective optics and a thick utility harness used a laser chisel to sculpt asteroidal debris into jewellery. Everything was in motion, every available square inch filled.
‘There’re a lot of Torven here,’ I said. I’d never been so surrounded by aliens before.
‘They have a nose for business,’ Grim told me. ‘When they first made contact with us, one look at our shipyards and spaceports and they knew there was money to be made that they’d never get from trading with other species.’
Something caught my eye in a shop. Someone was actually selling figurines of fully armoured Reapers, replica Reaper weapons, and what I could only assume were Shenoi plushies. I shook my head and glanced through the frosted glass of a Rubix mindmeld station. People sitting in uncomfortable-looking chairs, neuragel readers plugged into their skull sockets. Building AI was one thing, but every smart Rubix had a human mind behind it: their personalities and kinks were copied directly from human brains. It was living on after death, in a way. Grim had pondered doing it and I’d said that one of him was more than enough.
We reached the central market plaza, its full weight and scale almost crushing. Somehow, we had to find one seller in all this. We might have a stand number, but half the stalls had their tags torn off or faded away with use, and Grim had been unable to find any coherent system. With multiple levels, sub-flooring, and the haphazard geometry of the plaza, I didn’t know how the hell anyone functioned.
We paused so Grim could pick up some films in a shop dedicated to them, while I tried to get our bearings. Even the shop was a maze. A shoddy staircase spiralled up through multiple floors of towering shelves and platforms. Each platform was an access point for films, soundtracks, collector’s items, records, framed posters, and memorabilia from specific decades of Earth’s history, each shelf sagging under the weight. I asked the owner for directions while Grim was busy, but he seemed as mystified as us by the system. ‘I’ve been looking for these everywhere,’ Grim said when we finally left, a bundle of discs in his hands. ‘Didn’t think they even existed anymore.’
That was our only success. The maze of cluttered corridors and stairwells began to smear together. I swear the only thing we didn’t see was the stall number I was looking for. After walking past endless software stations, budget beauticians, shib installers, snackbars, parlours where aliens of multiple species lounged in micro-massage cradles, graphic designers for chainships, and tailors selling nanothreads that changed fabric and style by the hour to match the latest fashion, I was fed up. At this rate we’d still be searching as the next Reaper Blued Out on the streets.
Sometimes, you’ve got to grab the bull by the horns.
‘Grim,’ I said, ‘could you do some slightly illegal hacking for me?’
Grim wolfed down the last few bites of the crepe he’d been eating, smearing a thick glob of cream from the corner of his mouth. ‘For you, Vak, anything.’
We found a terminal sitting in a quiet alley of souvenir shops, the dimpled walls covered with graffiti. Grim swatted away the gaudy holos about daily offers, remotely hacking into the terminal mainframe with his shib. His visual cortex glazed over with flitting icons as he did his Deep Dive, digging through the composite layers of virtual worlds. ‘If there’s a shop with that ID registered with Compass, it’ll be in the mainframe,’ Grim said, his voice distorted from accessing the hardware, as if coming from a ghostly commslink signal.
‘And you couldn’t do this remotely?’
‘Hell no. Need to be directly in the terminal if you don’t want to get locked out. Watch the projection.’ A phantasmagorical riot of colours erupted around us in a wild blizzard, like an explosion of paint frozen in time. Membrane-thin strands grew between them like a nervous system in fast-forward, spiralling away in bewildering complex geometries that hinted at a larger world beneath the surface. A small cube, presumably Grim’s presence, navigated among them. I guessed we had a minute before someone spotted us. ‘Got to do a little virtual hunting is all.’
‘And we’ll find it? Just like that?’
His body twitched with convulsions, arm hairs all going stiff and rigid like bristles. Looked like he was having a seizure, but I think the little guy liked doing this. ‘Not so simple. Got to get the Rubix’s attention,