The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [82]
Glyn was intelligent, so it didn’t take her long to defeat her false assumptions. “I was really stupid. I should have known that some idiot embezzled all that stuff. Someone is pretending to be Mila Montalban.”
“Wow, that’s identity theft!” said Lionel. “I thought that was impossible! I mean, they’ve got all kinds of secure biometrics and stuff.”
Glyn and Radmila said nothing.
Lionel bulled on. “You know, I mean biometric security for your credit purchases—like, they measure your body so they know it can only be you.”
Radmila put her fork aside and rubbed at her aching eyes.
“Okay, now I get it,” said Lionel. “There is someone here who is just like you. There’s a clone loose here in Los Angeles.”
Glyn and Radmila glared at him silently.
“I mean, another clone besides both of you two gals. A clone who’s like an evil-twin identity.”
The two of them exchanged glances.
“Wow!” said Lionel. “That is dynamite! This is a hot entertainment property, all of a sudden! Because we’re living in a real-life crime! How many suspects are there? Wait a minute, wait a minute—I already know that! There’s Sonja … There’s Vera from Mljet … Hey wait, there’s your mom!”
Glyn leaned forward and slapped him.
A HOLE IN A SENSORWEB was called a “blackspot.” The laws of physics decreed that there were always blackspots in the world. Computer science could assume perfectly smooth connections, but the Earth had hills and valleys and earthquakes and giant volcanoes. The sky had lightning storms, and even the sun had sunspots. Wireless connections were not magic fogs. Real-world wireless connections were waves, particles, bits: real things in real places.
So: If you didn’t want to be seen, or heard, or known in a world of ubiquitous sensorwebs, there were options. You could find a blackspot. Or create a blackspot. Some blackspots were made by organized crime or official corruption. Other blackspots just grew in their natural blackness. Maybe there was nobody home to plug things in, or to reboot systems. Enterprises went broke, buildings fell down or went derelict.
The unsustainable could not be sustained. There were climate-crisis disaster areas—China, Australia, India, central Asia—where the blackspots were colossal.
When the seas rose, when hurricanes blew through, Earth tremors shook the land. Plague, famine, and pestilence … Stuff just got lost. Even in the modern world. Even in Los Angeles. There were always places in any major city where crime was visible, and yet tolerated. Red-light districts, narcotic shooting galleries, corporate boardrooms, city halls … There were thousands of tiny blackspots. Steel elevators. Brick basements. Narrow alleyways between two metal barns.
Or the black, stuffy, terrifying innards of a car trunk.
Sometimes people had mental blackspots hidden inside themselves. People forgot that they lived in a dangerous world. They prospered for a while, they got used to being privileged, they got fatally complacent. People forgot to see straight, they overlooked things, they stubbornly ignored the obvious.
You could try to obscure that human limitation, deputize it to surveillance systems, conceal all the seams, try to make the system perfect, perfect, superperfect, secure, secure, supersecure … but any simple breakdown in sanitation was enough to chase people away. Any place with no running water and no toilets was halfway to a blackspot already.
And you might end up in a place like that. Tied up. Abducted. Alone. Hungry. Thirsty. Humiliated. Reeking of your own urine.
Derelict buildings, dreadful places, worse even than the car trunk from which you had just been dragged … Even a little kid could set fire to a wrecked building. How many kids were you willing to wound, or injure, or kill with an automatic antitheft “armed response”? After all, the kids were just kids … kids were always trying to look around … explore … do some graffiti … throw some bricks through the glass windows … steal some furniture … vandalize