The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [83]
Teenagers were energetic and had poor impulse control. Teenage kids were stigmergic, they learned and acted like termites—they had no grand master plan, but they learned fast and easily from their peers, whatever they saw other kids doing.
So many places like that in Los Angeles … in every big town really … where security cameras had stored months of perfectly shot and focused video of a steadily gathering mayhem. The mere fact that a machine “saw” things happening didn’t mean that a machine could apprehend the crime, prosecute it, convict it, put an end to it…
What if the surveillance itself was the victim of the crime? They called that “sousveillance”—when angry people countersurveilled the surveillance. Some bold souls made it their business to spy out all the surveillance spies, map them, track them, spot them, shoot them, steal them, hack them, tap them, hold the machines to ransom …
Radmila rolled around on the grimy, derelict, unlit floor, testing the plastic wires that bound her arms. Her wrists were cinched, her arms were trapped behind her back, her ankle was snagged to a piece of furniture. Wire had no knots. She couldn’t break wire or pick wire or chew wire.
Nobody would ever find her in here. Not in this blackspot. She was as good as dead. That fast, that simple.
Radmila was strong and her body was flexible. Given a week, she might have shrugged and wriggled her way out of the wires. But whenever she worked hard to escape her bindings, she needed some air, and the duct tape over her mouth was there to deny her that air.
It was extremely dangerous to have her mouth duct-taped shut in this way. She could die easily from that, because she might begin to weep in here, from her fear and despair and shame, and then her nose would clog from the weeping, and she would black out, and smother to death in her own snot.
That simple, that quick, that dead.
She had vanished from her world in twenty seconds. She had left the set, carrying the heavy hem of her costume, and naturally followed a friendly, beckoning ninja security staffer, then suddenly, instantly, with no warning, wham, her elaborate costume went stone-dead all around her. Then she was body-blocked straight into the open trunk of a car.
In seconds, off rolled the car, one mobile blackspot with Mila Montalban hidden inside of it. Who would ever see that? Who would ever guess that? Who would know?
Frantic with herself, Radmila had managed to squirm free of her destroyed costume, inside the cramped black confines of the car trunk. That was an impressive physical feat, something few women could have done, but the air was thick and stuffy in the black car trunk, and when she was done she was half stunned.
Then the trunk popped open. Before Radmila could think, act, or even shriek, she was struck by something that shot through her like lightning. Her hands were lassoed, her mouth gagged with tape.
When her kidnapper ran out of wire and tape—that took a while—she was hauled, ankles-first, up a set of barnacled stairs and through the yawning, graffiti-bombed door of a derelict Malibu beach house.
This blackspot lair featured drooling patches of mold on every wall, warped wooden flooring, strange arching cantilevered walls of old cement … custom-designed and full of architectural genius. This must have been a gorgeous Malibu beach getaway, once, back when the sky was stable and the sea behaved itself. Some nice place for a rich family.
The airy living room, its sea-viewing windows sprayed opaque, was full of loot.
Someone had been on some dainty feminine crime spree. Cosmetics, mostly. Sweet, tempting little beauty kits that a thieving woman could easily hide in her hands. And other loot, more ambitious: handbags, women’s boots and shoes … stockings, perfumes, jewelry exploding from small discarded plush boxes … pink-cased electronics, sexy vicuña scarves, sunglasses in crushproof cases, cashmere throw rugs, thirsty towels, thirsty hand towels, thirsty face towels … Thirsty tampons, thirsty condoms … And