Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [157]
“No problemo, fizz.”
Someone handed Bash a phone. He downloaded his identity into it, then established an open channel to Harnnoy. After tucking the phone into the neckline of his shirt, allowing him to speak and be spoken to hands-free, Bash darted from the underground room.
7
Phantom of the Opera
Bash made it as far as Killian Court before the first of Dagny’s attacks commenced.
On all the canvases of the amateur painters, on all the individual sheets of proteopape held by the idling students, Bash’s face appeared, displacing laboriously created artworks, as well as the contents of books, magazines and videos. (Dagny had unearthed a paparazzo’s image of Bash that made him look particularly demented.) And from the massed speakers in the proteopape pages boomed this warning in a gruff male voice:
“Attention! This is a nationwide alert from Homeland Security. All citizens should immediately exert extreme vigilance for the individual depicted here. He is wanted for moral turpitude, arrogant ignorance, and retrogressive revanchism. Approach him with caution, as he may bite.”
This odd yet alarming message immediately caused general consternation to spread throughout the quadrangle. Bash turned up his shirt collar, hunched down his head and hurried toward the street. But he had not reckoned with the kites.
Homing in on his phone, the co-opted kites began to dive-bomb Bash. Several impacted the ground around him, crumpling with a noise like scrunching cellophane, but one scored a direct hit on his head, causing him to yelp. His squeal attracted the eyes of several onlookers, and someone shouted, “There he is!”
Bash ran.
He thought briefly of abandoning his phone, but decided not to. He needed to stay in touch with the Masqueleros. But more crucially, giving up his phone would achieve no invisibility.
Bash was moving through a saturated I2 environment. There was no escaping proteopape. Every smart surface — from store windows to sunglasses, from taxi rooftop displays to billboards, from employee nametags to vending machines — was a camera that would track him in his dash across town to the Paramount Theater. Illicitly tapping into all these sources, utilizing common yet sophisticated pattern recognition, sampling and extrapolative software, Dagny would never lose sight of her quarry. Bash might as well have had cameras implanted in his eyeballs.
Out on Mass Ave, Bash faced no interception from alarmed citizens. Apparently the false security warning had been broadcast only in Killian Court. But surely Dagny had further tricks up her striped sleeves.
He spoke into his dangling phone. “What’s she doing now?”
Harnnoy’s voice returned an answer. “Noodling around with her pape. She’s got her back to the camera, so we can’t see what kind of scripts she’s running.”
“Okay, thanks. I’m hitting the road now.”
Once aboard the Segway, Bash headed back toward downtown Boston.
He came to a halt obediently at the first red light, chafing at the delay. But something odd about the engine noise of the car approaching behind him made Bash look over his shoulder.
The car — a 2029 Vermoulian with proteopape windows — was not slowing down.
In a flash, Bash realized what was happening.
Dagny had edited out both the traffic light and Bash’s scooter from the driver’s interior display.
Bash veered his Segway to the right, climbing the curb, and the Vermoulian zipped past him with only centimeters to spare. In the middle of the intersection it broadsided another car. Luckily, the crash of the two lightweight urban vehicles, moving at relatively low speeds, resulted in only minor damages, although airbags activated noisily.
Bash drove down the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians, and continued around the accident.
Things were getting serious. No longer was Dagny content merely to harass Bash. Now she was involving innocent bystanders in her mad