Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [176]
And she’s gone. She’s vanished from the system’s sight, she’s just a blurry anomaly, a floating speck in its vision and a passing unease in its mind as its attention is turned forcibly to a stall-holder wheeling his urn of hot oil across a nearby junction without due care and attention and the we-got-an-emerging-situation-on-our-hands program kicks in…
But she’s still there, still walking fast, and we’re still with her, for reasons which will sometime become clear. We’re in her space, in her time, in her head.
Her pretty little head contains and conceals a truly Neo-Martian mind, an intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic as the man said, and right now it’s in combat consciousness. She’s running Spy, not Soldier, but Soldier’s there, ready to toggle in at the first sign of trouble. Body movement’s being handled by Secretary, in leisure-time mode: her walk is late-for-a-date hurry and doing fine so far. Except she’s walked farther and faster than any girl in such a circumstance normally would, and the skin over her Achilles tendons is rubbing raw. She sets a Surgeon sub-routine to work and – its warning heeded – the pain switches sensibly off.
She allows herself a diffuse glow of pleasure at having spotted and subverted the surveillance system. Her real danger, she knows, comes from human pursuit. She can’t see behind her because she daren’t switch on her sonar and radar, but she uses every other clue that catches her eye. Every echo, every reflection: in windows and bits of scrap metal and the shiny fenders of vehicles, even in the retinae of people walking in the opposite direction – all go to build an all-round visual field. Constantly updated, an asynchronous palimpsest where people and vehicles in full colour and 3D pass out of her cone of vision and into a wider sphere where they become jerky cartoon figures, wire outlines intermittently blocked in with colour as a scrap of detail flashes back from in front. (She could keep the colour rendering if she wanted to, let the visual and the virtual merge seamlessly, but she doesn’t have the processing power to spare right now. Spy is a demanding mind-tool and it eats resources.)
It tags a warning, unsubtle red arrowheads jabbing at one face, then another, both far behind her. She throws enhancement at those distant dots, blowing them up into something recognisable, and recognises them. Two men, heavies employed by her owner. Their names aren’t on file but she’s glimpsed them at various times over the years.
Spy analyses their movements and reports that they haven’t spotted her: they’re searching, not tracking. Not yet.
She sees a bar sign coming up on her left, ‘The Malley Mile’ spelled out in fizzing rainbow neon. By good luck the nearest pedestrian coming her way is huge and walking close to the sides of the buildings. She lets the two-metre-thirty, two-hundred-kilo bulk of the giant pass her – the only noticeable thing about him is the inappropriately floral scent of the shampoo he’s most recently used on his orangey pelt – and as he occludes any view of her from behind she nips smartly through the doorway.
It’s a trashy, tacky place, this joint. Lots of wood and metal. The music is a thumping noise in the background, like machinery. The ventilation isn’t coping well with the smoke, and somebody’s already had a poppy-pipe. Freshwater fish are grilling somewhere in the back. Low ceiling, dim lights. Her vision adjusts without a blink and it’s daylight, give or take the odd wavelength. Spy takes over fully for a staking-out, second-long sweep of the room. There’s surveillance, of course, but it’s just the hostelry’s own system, exactly as smart and dangerous as a dog. She pings it anyway, leaving it with a low-wattage conviction that this person who’s just walked in is nice and has just given it a pat on the head