The Heist of Hollow London, page 8
She might be snapped up at any moment, and Arlo had no idea how to make Mia buy her. How would she fit into the plan?
“Okay,” Mia said thoughtfully, reading Drienne’s sales info. “Yeah, this could work—trained in brand policing, it says here.” She waved a finger at the window.
“Yes,” said Arlo. If he was honest they didn’t do much of that, because Oakseed fitted their slates with software that automatically checked for brand violations and could usually fix them. But the brand ambassadors did have training to cope with violations beyond the software’s capabilities, and Arlo was more than happy to make out Drienne as ideal.
“You know her, you say?” Mia asked him.
“We were partners the whole time we were in Shanghai.”
Mia stared at the window and tapped her fingernails on her teeth. “I’ll need you to pose as colleagues, so that could be really helpful. And you can vouch for her? She’s good?”
“She’s great,” Arlo said, not entirely sure what he was claiming she was great at.
“And would she cause trouble? I know some of you go all in on company loyalty, think of it like family and so on, and would find it hard to go against—”
“God no. Honestly, I think a heist would be exactly her vibe.”
“Very good.” Mia added Drienne to her basket. A window appeared and told her that transport for her purchase would be cheaper if she bought a greater quantity. It recommended a minimum of eight, and made a number of suggestions based on her interest in Drienne. Arlo recognized several of them from Shaw Apartments. One of them, Roman, he’d had a brief, listless affair with shortly after moving in, and they’d hooked up a few other times when they were bored and/or drunk. Roman had a strong dislike for Drienne: The summer before last, she stole a Brand Ambassador of the Week trophy he’d won and never gave it back. It briefly crossed his mind he could try to save Roman, make the case for him being added to the team, but did he care enough?
Mia tutted at the window, said “No,” and it closed. “See, it’s going to assume I’m buying them for business purposes and therefore I’ll need the same type or complementary types and that’s exactly what I don’t need.”
Well. Bye, Roman. Hope you land somewhere soft.
“But I’m sure I can find a support from the same location, you can always find a support…” Mia set up some parameters, quickly found a support she seemed happy with, and added them to the basket. She looked for more workers at the Pennsylvania site, but didn’t seem able to find anything that suited. She asked Arlo if he wouldn’t mind getting them both a drink from her fridge, and he didn’t mind, so he did it. When he returned and handed her the drink she was still listlessly scrolling through mades. He glanced at the basket and noted the workers Mia had chosen, including Drienne, would be released back into the pool in less than three minutes unless she checked out. He pointed this out to her.
“Yes, I know,” she replied with irritation.
“Sorry.” That was the first time she’d spoken to him unkindly since his arrival, and he didn’t want it to happen again.
Mia reset her parameters and searched again, twice. Then, as the clock on the basket ticked down to under a minute, she tutted and authorized it to check out, and Arlo could breathe again.
“How many more people do you need?” he asked.
“I don’t want the team to be too big,” said Mia. “Partly for budgetary reasons, but also the more moving parts there are in any machine, the more there is to go wrong, you know?”
“Makes sense.”
“So if we can double up on skills anywhere, that would be really helpful.”
“Yeah. I mean, mades are pretty specialized, though.”
“I suppose you are.”
“And we don’t really develop other skills off our own bat because we’ve got no control over whether we get to use them. I mean, some of us have hobbies, but…” He’d never had to explain this to anyone: people either lived like he did and understood, or they didn’t care. “We tend to do useless things in our downtime.”
“How do you mean?”
“All kinds of things—games and puzzles obviously but also mathematics, hand-coloring images, bird-spotting, cataloging stuff no one cares about. Almost everyone I know does it. We spend so much of our lives being useful—”
“Spending your time uselessly is a sort of act of resistance.”
“Yes.”
“Do you?”
“I like to bake. Pastries and stuff.”
“Are you good at it?”
“I’m okay. I’ve only ever had cheap ingredients, but I always get edible results.”
“Interesting.” Mia turned her attention back to the windows. “I can’t believe they didn’t have any muscle at that location,” she grumbled. “Where’s all the muscle?”
“Maybe they’re still using all the securits to guard the sites they’ve got left.”
“Yes, maybe.” Mia shifted to another window and broadened her search to all sites. Arlo wondered what conditions the mades were being kept in at these places. He imagined them all being stored on racks, like a capsule hotel, though he knew it wouldn’t be like that.
“There!” said Mia. “They have some securits in Montevideo. Fuck, that’s the resort. They’re using the xec resort for storage! Ha!” Mia quickly found a securit she liked and bagged her before anyone else did, then she actually checked the worker’s details. “What do you think?”
Arlo attempted to form an opinion, but the worker looked like any other securit—tall, powerfully built, humorless. “Yeah. I mean, I always think securits are going to be more company-loyal than anyone else. But I might be wrong, probably they’ll do whatever you want if it means they get a chance to punch somebody.”
“I don’t want them to punch anybody if possible, the idea is you get in and out without anyone ever knowing anything was stolen. No one but us knows there’s anything to steal. That’s what makes this so perfect.”
When she talked like this, Arlo felt there was no possibility they could fail. He didn’t know if he should be worried by that.
9
THINGS WOULD HAPPEN BECAUSE SHE WAS HERE
Loren always knew they’d miss the routine when it was gone. It was not the same as missing the company. Some of Loren’s former colleagues had always insisted it was foolish to resent Oakseed, because without the company, they would never have been created; that they ought to accept the life the company allocated them because it was the entire reason for their existence. And okay, that was true up to a point. But it displayed a total ignorance of human affairs and/or a desperate need to make their situation palatable. A parent who produced a child just so they could brutalize it did not deserve love from that child, and would have no defense in the eyes of the law.
Loren didn’t view this “abused child” example as a direct analogy with their own situation, just as a means of proving the fallacy of the argument. Oakseed did not treat them as it did for its own gratification, but for profit. It limited their freedom of expression because doing so made them easier to deal with. Loren had always wanted to be free of the routine, but ultimately they had been engineered to like the routine, find it reassuring, and enjoy its repetitious nature without ever becoming bored. Their brain had been shaped to be restless and anxious without the routine. It made them reluctant to stop work at the end of a shift, and drove them to log overtime for which they received no extra pay.
Right now, sitting on the flight to Vancouver, Loren wanted—on a gut level—to have their old life back. They experienced their removal from the workplace as a profound wrongness, a distressing absence. But they did not confuse this with liking their old life or the company to which they formerly belonged, because they knew the company had made them like this on purpose. Loren was good at separating how they felt from what they thought, but man, it wasn’t good for you to feel like this. It made you feel like you were two people: one who did the work and felt good about it, and another one sitting on your shoulder thinking Fuck, look at that loser who’s happy doing this shit.
Loren’s new holder would assign them a new job with its own routine, because that was the kind of worker they were and it would make no sense to obtain them and not give them a routine. They didn’t know how they felt about that yet. Hopefully it would be better? But Loren found it unlikely it would liberate their other self, the one they tried to dress up as. The routine was a set of sturdy ropes that bound the other self.
Drienne was telling Loren tales of when she worked in Shanghai and the partner she’d had there. The stories varied in how interesting or funny they were, but the sound of Drienne’s voice was a good distraction and helped stop Loren from thinking about the old routine.
* * *
“My god,” said Drienne as the forest at the edge of the city came into view through the car’s windshield.
“You never seen a forest before?” asked Loren.
“Not for a long time. We don’t get to travel out to low-density areas. No one to sell shit to in a forest.”
Loren had been lucky enough to live in Wellington, where a reasonable amount of woodland survived, and they had sometimes ventured out into it, but usually only when a remote relay needed attention. People who only ever got to see the scorched landscapes that surrounded so many of the world’s urban sprawls might have felt jealous of Loren having access to leafy green space, and felt perplexed they made no use of it. Back then Loren had liked the forest well enough, but going too far from the IM farm made them uncomfortable to the point they couldn’t enjoy it. But now it was different. Loren didn’t have that sense they were meant to be somewhere else. And as the car drove along the avenue leading up to the apartments, the forest filled the view ahead, a surge of rich dark green, and an unfamiliar sense of calm came over Loren. It might be nice, they thought, to be in the middle of the forest. Even though there would be nothing for them to do there, no routine, it might still be nice.
It might—and this thought struggled a little as it pushed its way to the front of their consciousness—be nice because there would be nothing for them to do there.
Then the car turned again and all they could see was the inside of the block’s parking garage. The car unlocked its doors, Loren and Drienne got out, and a really classy-looking, gorgeous woman was standing there, welcoming them. The woman introduced herself as Mia Ostrander and she knew Loren’s and Drienne’s names, because she was their new holder. “I’m so glad you’re both here,” she said. “This is so exciting. I think you’ll be excited too when you hear what I want you to do.”
Loren already did feel excited. Mia’s presence apparently had that effect: you felt like things would happen because she was here. They went up to Mia’s apartment, which was not what Loren had expected to happen. They could imagine Drienne being purchased as live-in staff—women like that were often retained as nannies and companions and housemaids, but surely no one would want Loren around their home. And the apartment, though plush and spacious, seemed like it would be crowded if it had more than a couple of people living here.
As Loren looked around the apartment, they became aware Drienne was speaking in a shrill voice, apparently overcome with emotion, and this seemed to be a reaction to the other person in the apartment who wasn’t Mia. Loren caught his name, Arlo, and they recalled this was the name of Drienne’s partner from Shanghai.
“What the fuck, I thought you were dead!” Drienne was saying. She hadn’t mentioned that part when she’d spoken about him on the flight. “Wait, why are your eyes brown now?”
Arlo explained why he wasn’t dead, and at first Loren thought this wasn’t something they needed to know about, but they quickly became very interested indeed in his story of how he’d been taken away to be reaped at the very moment the company’s collapse was declared, and now he was here drinking good coffee in Vancouver while his xec donor lay dead in Shanghai.
“That’s the best story I’ve ever heard,” said Loren, smiling.
“Thanks,” said Arlo and went right back to speaking to Drienne. He and Drienne looked so right together. They were completely caught up in talking about what had happened to them both in the days since Oakseed collapsed, and Loren and Mia found themselves united in exclusion.
“Can I get you a drink?” asked Mia.
“A beer?” Loren asked. “Is a beer out of the question?”
Mia smiled. “Of course not.” And she went and got it herself, as if Loren was a guest and not someone she had full contractual rights to. This all felt deeply odd. It was like this woman wanted to have a party, a small informal gathering of friends, but she didn’t have any friends so she’d bought some.
Mia returned with a can of beer, a brand Loren was only aware of because Oakseed sold it and carried advertising for it on its entertainment networks, and Loren had once resolved a context issue with those ads. The ads were never shown in their own feed, as they were not the target market for it. It was absolutely delicious.
“I’m very glad we found you,” Mia said. “I think you’re going to be ideal.”
“Okay, thanks,” said Loren.
“Yes—I know the profiles in the catalog are probably a little exaggerated, but yours said you actually know how Oakseed’s systems work. Like, not just what they do and how to use them, but you understand the code.”
Loren nodded. They felt surprised this information had made it to the catalog. Everything they did at work was monitored in every detail, but the workplace vibe was always that no one paid much attention to this data unless you fucked up, so it had never occurred to Loren that HR had any sense of who they actually were. “Yeah. I mean not everything, you must know how complex it is—”
“Mm. Of course.”
“But yeah, I like getting stuck into code.” Most people in their line of work neither knew nor cared how the code worked—for them, the job was done entirely through explaining to the system what they needed it to do, and refining these processes through observation and feedback. Loren also did this, but they liked making it cleaner and simpler, and that meant going into the code. Systems had a tendency to sprawl as they evolved, adding new code instead of finding ways to make the existing code do new things. The more code there was, the more of it there was to go wrong, and the more you had to plow through in search of the part that had gone wrong—which caused a lot of headaches when the system refused to recognize something was wrong with itself. So Loren would get in there and find out what was changing and how it worked on a nuts-and-bolts level. There was too much code in even the most basic program for anyone to hold more than a fraction of it in their head, but the trick was to find the fraction that mattered.
“Good,” Mia said. “I’ve got some tools you’ll really enjoy using for this. I was very lucky to find you. I can’t believe how cheap you were.”
Loren wasn’t sure if this was a compliment, or if it was intended to be, so they just nodded and shrugged. “So what’s the work? I mean, it’s not located here, is it?”
“No, no.” Mia turned to Drienne and Arlo, who were still occupied with each other. “I’ll let them catch up, but I’m sure you’re impatient to know so I’ll explain to you now and talk to her when she’s done.”
And Mia explained.
Loren blinked. “Well that’s interesting.”
“Is it?”
“It’s certainly not boring.”
“Because the only one who doesn’t have a choice in this is Arlo. He’s irreplaceable. I can force you to do it, of course, but I don’t want anyone on this team who’s going to choke or screw it up. Are you going to choke or screw it up?”
Loren considered. “I don’t think so, no.”
“You’re sure?”
“What’s the alternative?”
“I send you back for a refund and buy someone else.”
“And I get sold to someone else. I mean, the prospects for that aren’t great.”
“No. The main buyers at the moment are plastic dredgers.”
Yeah, that made sense. The people who did that shit kept drowning.
Mia put her hand on Loren’s shoulder. The base of Mia’s hand rested on Loren’s collarbone while her fingertips sat comfortably on the top of their shoulder blade. It felt comforting, reassuring. “You do this job, you get a cut of the money. I very much doubt anyone will offer you that.”
“No. But we’re taking a big risk, right?”
“I don’t think so. Not if you stick to the plan.”
“But c’mon. My entire job is plugging holes and fixing bugs, I know nothing’s infallible. And if we get caught, we’re screwed, and I assume you will disown us and say we went rogue.”
Mia gave a rueful smile. Her hand was off Loren’s shoulder by now. “Well, yes. I’m using you because you have the skills I need, but I also want to maintain some distance from the operation.”
“And if we try to run off with it, you tell the cops we stole it from you? Yeah?”
“I hadn’t thought about it that far—”
Loren heard this but did not believe it. “You can tell them anything. ’Course they’d believe your word over ours.”
“The thing is,” Mia continued, “I don’t think you’ll steal the money from me. Firstly you’d have to decrypt and launder it—”
“Yeah, I reckon I could work out how to do that. If I wanted to.”
