Up Against It - M. J. Locke [1]
He and Amaya exchanged a glance, nodded to each other. “Set.”
Kam’s voice whispered the countdown. “Ten seconds … five … two, one. Amaya, go!”
Amaya strode into the plaza, not glancing up at Kam’s shadowed spot, nor over at Ian. Kam said in his ear, “… two, one. Geoff, go!”
Geoff crossed the plaza, about six paces behind Amaya and to the left. He might as well have been invisible. Amaya had dressed up in Downsider chic: bustier, translucent beaded overshirt, short-shorts, lace-up sandals; makeup, hair, neon animated tattoos that ran the length of her exposed flesh; the works.
She transected the plaza, headed away from the fountain, pulling the college students’ gazes along in her wake. Geoff reached the fountain. He tossed the packet of triggering proteins he held into the dirty water. Then he headed for the coffee shop. No one seemed to notice; everyone’s gaze was on Amaya as she strode breezily away.
Geoff sat down next to Ian at a small table near the plaza. His heart beat so hard it hurt. He tried to catch his breath and as nonchalantly as he could, turned to look.
Some guy had fallen in step with Amaya, trying to chat her up.
“Shit!” Geoff started upright, but Ian grabbed his wrist.
“Relax, doof. We’re chill.”
Geoff forced himself back down. Ian was right. Amaya shed the college student—smiling with a shrug, turning to walk backward as she made a reply, then spinning again to continue at a swift, casual pace—without even breaking stride. She exited the plaza.
Geoff checked his waveface again. The blackout had just ended—the “Stroider”-cams were now live. It was close. He couldn’t tell whether she had been on-scene or not when the cameras came on.
“Stroiders” was a reality-broadcast back to Earth. Up to two billion Downsiders tuned in to see what the good people of Zekeston were up to at any given moment. The “Stroider”-cams made it hard to be sneaky. But there were always ways to get around the cams. You just had to put your mind to it.
Sneaky? They had been downright paranoid.
Geoff had done the bug programming. That was how it had all started. In Honors Programmable Matter last semester—the only class he’d ever done truly well in; the only one he cared about—he learned that assemblers were made from complex silica-based molecules.
You manipulated assemblers by washing them with certain chemicals in set sequences. In response, they gathered all the right molecules trapped in their suspension fluid—a silicone-ethanol colloid with metal salts and other stuff—to build what you wanted. The resulting tiny machines burned alcohol and excreted tiny glass pellets that under the right conditions clumped together and made what everybody called bug grapes. Geoff had always wondered what those lumps were at the seams and joints of the utility piping. Yep, they were bug turds. Spent bug juice contained lots of these glass pellets, which ranged in size from marbles to grains of rice. Which was why bug juice spills sparkled under the lights so beautifully. He had always wondered about that, ever since he was a little kid. Who would have thought spewage could be beautiful?
So yeah, it had been the glass turds that had given him the idea. Assemblers shit glass turds! How cool was that? It was a shame to let them go to waste. But to pull this off, they needed real bug juice. Since the good stuff was closely monitored, they would have to steal used juice, and see if they could distill it down and make it usable for their purposes.
Amaya had figured out how to tap the assembler discharge lines. They ran inside the maintenance tunnels that fed down the spokeway utility lines into the Hub. She had enlisted the help of her boyfriend, Ian, and they had spent two months collecting, distilling, and priming depleted bug juice until it was at sufficient strength to handle Geoff’s programming. The resulting juice was feeble, but Geoff had figured how to make it work. (In a lab. If he had gotten all of the glitches out of the protein code. If, if, if.)
While all this was going on, Kam had been making a detailed