Up Against It - M. J. Locke [137]
“Are you kidding? JimmyM counts on Obyx to keep the peace here. Fitzpatrick’s police force is underresourced anyway, and the beat cops don’t like it down here much. It creeps them out. And the Badlanders don’t particularly want a lot of chrome enforcers here, anyhow. Some of them have a bad attitude about mutes.”
“Chrome?” Jane repeated, looking at her askance. “What the heck is a chrome?”
“You are, dear. I am. People who cling to the basic genetic blueprint they were born with. The biologically leashed. That’s how they see us.”
It was all Jane could do not to stare at the bizarre changes the Viridians in this sanctum had made to themselves and their surroundings. Suffice to say, few people looked remotely human, and few spaces looked able to fully accommodate humans. Yet the Viridians stared as if she were the freak. She supposed she was.
She had heard the arguments over changing the human genome. Everybody had, by now. The Viridians argued that it was all simply a matter of degree. Everyone Upside had enhancements. Genetic screening and nanosurgery had long ago eliminated genetic deformities and illness; anyone with decent funds had access to treatments that dramatically slowed the ageing process. Like Jane, many Upsiders chose additional enhancements (extra fingers, enhanced vision or hearing) that made it easier to do their job or adapt to their physical environment. Even Xuan, who was rather a purist about mods, had had his eyes and visual cortex enlarged and adapted to see farther into the infrared and ultraviolet; it made rock hunting in the dim reaches of the belt much easier. Downside, where gene-mod laws in most countries were so strict, people had so many fleshware and waveware enhancements that they were just as modified in other ways.
“So they came to an understanding with JimmyM’s administration,” Sarah was saying. “I should know: I helped negotiate it. The Badlanders have their own volunteer neighborhood watch group and fire brigade and waste recycling services.”
This was a side of Sarah Jane had never known.
Soon they entered the Catacombs, deep in the heart of Viridian territory. Jane had heard of this place, even seen pictures. But it had not prepared her for the reality. The Catacombs were a segmented set of short, interlocking tunnels dedicated to Badlander nanoart. Assembler and disassembler jets ejected nanites, changing statuary and bas relief, works that moved across the face of the walls. It was living art. Faces and forms—obscene, horrific, stunningly beautiful—emerged from and receded back into the assembler troughs and vents: here a fabulous, quasi-fourth-dimensional, hypercubist rendition of the Mona Lisa; there a Pan with a grotesquely sized, erect penis chased a bald, nude nymph with oversized breasts, who first eluded him, laughing, then grew oversized and ate him, then melted into a new Pan and nymph; over there a crystalline doe and her twin fawns grazed on emerald grass against a backdrop of magnificent mountainscapes; yonder a miniature tableau of the Promenade, only when you looked closely, the people were made of machine parts. Occasionally, works of art stepped or floated out of their milieus and drifted away or melted, or integrated with another across the way.
Everywhere she looked, something strange, wonderful, or disgusting blossomed, moved, dissipated. The artists—or perhaps some were art patrons; it was hard to say—either sat alone, plugged into the assembler hackports, molding their creations with gesture and Tonal_Z song, or gathered in small groups to discuss the tableaux.
Sarah paused, her hand on the door to a building adorned with a fluid array of genetic and digital images. “Here we are.”
Jane looked up above the door. A sign scrawled FIRST UPSIDE