Beautiful Intelligence (21 page)

It had been a souped-up variant of dengue fever. That was nasty, but the 0-Max viral variants that had exploded through the blocks, and then the locality, were unstable mutations brought from Jamaica on waves of panic. Without hosts they were gone. It was in fact the terrible aura of the apartment blocks that led to them remaining empty. They were known to the locals as the Haemorrhage Apts, their legend red and notorious.

This could be good. This felt
right.
Beneath the best preserved block lay a car compound accessed by a single ramp. That ramp, she saw, was now overgrown with greenery. It would be a simple matter to create a hidden tunnel through it, allowing the soltruck entry. The problem would be driving the vehicle through without alerting anyone. The vicinity was populated far below the Portland average, but it only took one bum spotting the soltruck to create a problem.

Yet it could be done. She had ways and means. And then... back to the Hyperlinked.

Dirk walked all the way from Annaba to the seashore, where he stumbled into a European refugee camp. Stinking rows of tents spread as far as the eye could see, east to west, the Italians to his left and the French to his right. Yet even this gull-haunted dump was a magnet for nexus hawkers, kids mostly, wearing the tall white hats and smirking expressions of the local mercantile elite. Dirk buzzed them away with a, “No I not want dat and I never use
dat.
”

But he needed to get to the European continent. He needed to hide awhile.

“You goin’ the wrong way, mister,” he was advised. “You live longer in Afrique. Need hash for bong? Cheap black!”

Dirk brushed these advisers away, walking barefoot along the seashore, his boots tied together and hung around his neck like a scarf. But his attitude of dignity and his unusual clothes made him stand out, and eventually he was approached by an adult – an old man in a grey Berber robe and lime green sandals.

“You new here, ami?”

Dirk nodded.

“You go north? Bad times. Italia, a fuck-up. They have no oil.”

“Nobody got
oil,
you devio,” Dirk muttered. “Only rich megas on dere yachts.”

“I got a yacht, ami.”

Dirk paused to study the man’s expression. He could see this newcomer ached for money. Maybe he really did have a yacht. “You know Sardinia, Med-captain?”

“Oui!”

“Take me dat way?”

“Oui!”

Dirk grimaced. “How much?”

“Very expensive.”

Dirk smiled. “Go on. Hit me.”

“Rare elements.”

Dirk knew what this meant. He carried no currency, but he did have a stash of various lanthanides and some nonmetals. “Selenium?” he said.

“You got selenium, ami?”

Dirk shrugged. “A little.”

“Show me.”

“Turn round den.”

The old man turned away, showing the sweat-stained back of his robe. Dirk reached under his shirt for the lower of his two bum bags, feeling for a metal canister. He withdrew it, then checked its contents.

“Okay,” he said.

The old man took the canister then ID’d the ident scratched into the metal with a nexus probe. He sucked his teeth when the result came back positive. “This mark could be faked, ami,” he said.

“You think I bother, with dat little amount? Get real!”

“Easy to do. You a cool gent, oui?”

Dirk chuckled. “Dat thirty year old Swiss mark, as you well know. You think I fake dat? How? With Swiss computer?”

The old man frowned. “Okay. I just check, ami. So... you want ship to Sardinia, oui?”

Dirk nodded.

“Not back?”

Dirk shook his head.

“You a madman,” the old man remarked. “You won’t last a month.”

“I got Europe sussed,” Dirk replied. “You just get me dere.”

The yacht turned out to be a remodelled solboat with a Moroccan engine – a modern, clean engine, Dirk was surprised to notice.

As they stepped into the surf and headed for the boat, he put his hand on the old man’s arm. “Dat never
your
engine. You stole it. Who are you?”

The old man smiled. “A cousin of Moroccan king, mon ami, recently escaped.”

Dirk stopped, watching him clamber into the boat. The remark had been made without hesitation, and with sincerity – and it was insane enough to be true. Dirk shrugged. A deal was a deal. He carried an ace card anyway, a concealed inflatable ring, bought on the ferry from Gozo to Linosa. He did not care for open water.

But the old man was genuine. All he wanted was his selenium. During the 250 kilometre journey they spoke about events in various Moroccan lands, events in lands of the former Libya, and the state of the African solar energy business. Supper and white wine were complimentary.

“Tunis suburb twenty,” said the old man, “and free of glycerol.”

Dirk slept well during the night, more relaxed than he had been for some time. On a sandy beach near Cagliari the old man dropped him off: they embraced man-style, with faux kisses a few centimetres off the cheeks. Then it was “Au revoir!” and Dirk was on his way.

He walked into Cagliari undisguised. The advantage of hiding in Europe was also its disadvantage – most of it was a hinterland of gun-toting communities desperate to scratch a self-sufficient living from the land. Almost no eyes in the sky watched Europe.

Here, permaculture experts were more valuable than gold: often kidnapped and forced to give advice year after year, on pain of death if they refused. You did not advertise that you were a permaculture expert in Europe. Dirk observed hundreds of tree-shrouded plots as he walked into the urban mess that was Cagliari, all of them defended by kids with guns, or ancient automatic laser systems powered by the sun. He carried a white handkerchief, prominently displayed.

The nexus in Cagliari was not entirely defunct. Proximity to Africa meant a low level of sophistication. Now wearing spex and a wristband, Dirk found a chianti bar, sitting down to reactivate a few of his nexus accounts.

Not good. Two had been hacked some months back: empty. But his Tokyo account held good, as did his Singapore account. He still owned funds.

In his spex a whirl of rainbow mist span into view, as the nexus, reacquainting itself with him following the cash transfers, updated his data incarnation. He smiled to himself. Lacking Hound’s sophistication, his nexus doppelgänger was almost ninety eight percent true. Sure, he was known the world over as an interface specialist, but his disappearance into the AIteam had left a void that no journos seemed concerned enough about to investigate. Nonetheless, he did a self-search. Always wise to. An hour later he had all the articles labelled and summarised. Seemed his enigmatic departure into “obscurity” was not deemed important enough to scrutinise.

Good. For the nexus was
heavy.
It bore down on humanity, never sleeping, spying into every crevice – no respecter of privacy, which was a ridiculous, old-fashioned concept anyway. But Dirk liked privacy. Privacy allowed him the space and time to remind himself who he really was. And that was one of the attractions of shattered Europe now he was no longer with Leonora.

And so... where next? How to close in on his new goal?

He decided to treat himself to a small cash infusion. Outside the chianti bar, the young woman at a mobile credo peered over the armed brutes standing around her when he proffered a duocard with his photo on it.

“Real?” she asked.

“Retinascan me,” Dirk responded with a shrug.

She did. The credo soft beeped, “True.”

The young woman sneered, as if disappointed with this result. Probably she had hoped for a crim, and some bloody action. Instead Dirk reached over the rifles to take his cash with an orange grin and a, “Thank you lady.”

He prepaid for a room at the chianti bar – formerly its attic. Ghosts of old pipework and electricity conduits marked the wall where nobody had bothered to paint over the rips and crumbling masonry. But it was cheap.

He lay back on the remains of the mattress, which had been stuffed with hay to make it useable. He decided to stay here for a week at least. Vanishing was a relative term. He could not vanish completely, but he could make himself so unremarkable to the nexus that it reduced his significance level in response. He was hoping for a z rating.

Reducing significance level was something of an art, and most modern youth could not do it, their lives so intertwined with the nexus that any lessening of attention from it was experienced by them as an insult to their name. The Japanese had initiated the takeover of the internet by the nexus in 2080 – any kid aged about fourteen or less was a child of augmented reality, half real, half virtual. But Dirk, almost forty, remembered what it was like to walk solo.
Nakedness is a virtue,
the wise ones used to say.

He checked his sig level: j. That was pretty high, and like as not due to his fame before vanishing into the AIteam. Well, that j needed to reduce to at least a t.

He looked at himself in a mirror. First he needed to amend his appearance.

He walked out into town. At a barbers he had his afro shaved off – this the first time ever. He had his stubble shaved too, but left a moustache and an under-lip tuft. He got his ears pierced and had a couple of red baubles put in – also a first. He smiled at his reflection. The nexus didn’t like it when you did things first time. It didn’t like novelty in human beings.

Above all, he needed to get his teeth cleaned. Giving up smokes was not an option, but maybe a dental once-over...

It turned out to be impossible. Teeth too far gone. On a whim he had them all taken out and pearly white falsies put in. Now he looked like some kinda last century soul warrior. All he needed was shiny silver trousers and a Fender Precision bass for the transformation to be complete. Hah! Maybe he’d do that.

~

He travelled easy all the way to Siniscóla on the east coast of Sardinia. There were no solcars, soltrucks or solbuses, but a few of the more enterprising locals had made battery powered rickshaws using old NATO army equipment, and these were on hire to those with money. Dirk had money – enough to spend on luxuries like travel. But he did not want to stand out as rich, so he packed his good clothes away, nabbed damaged garments from dumpsters, used basic needle skills to repair them, and wore those. He described himself as a beggar on his last pilgrimage.

“Where to, sir?” asked the ten year old girl driving the electric bike at the front of her rickshaw.

“Eventually, Livorno,” he replied.

“What’s there?”

Dirk had not considered the possibility of this question being asked. “Chocolate,” he said.

“Is it sacred chocolate, sir?”

“It better be, da price you charging me. Just get me safe to Siniscóla.”

From Siniscóla he gatecrashed a party ferry on its way to the Isle of Elba. The super-wealthy brats aboard were all off their faces on modded DMT, only the ferry captain alert, and it was easy enough to hide in the life-raft tied to the stern of the boat. From Elba he took a commercial fishing trawler on to Livorno, paying the ancient captain in real coins.

Livorno, however, was far too dangerous to enter. A large-scale crim war raged between two sides, the majority of the population hiding out in the country. Small arms fire punctured the quiet of the night, and every so often ordnance would go off: an orange flash, then clouds of smoke turned milky grey by moonlight. Dirk walked forty kilometres around the city, returning to the coastal road at Viaréggio.

A kilometre outside Viaréggio he met up with a fellow hiker. At once suspicious, he appraised the fellow: Oriental, ragged, dirty. Well, the raggedness and the dirt was easily applied; he himself had used that trick. But if this was one of Aritomo Ichikawa’s team, no way would he display such a racial origin.

Dirk grunted, unhappy with the company – they were walking in the same direction. “Where you headed?” he asked.

“Monaco.”

Again Dirk grunted. He had considered travelling there. Monaco retained a hint of its previous glamour, like an anti-pimple on scarred, dying European skin. “Not me,” he said. “What’s your story?”

“Huh, married an Italian girl twenty years ago. Tried local business. Failed. Got a young woman pregnant. Bad shit.”

The man spoke with a slight Italian accent, but that too could be faked. Dirk cursed under his breath. Part of the lure of Europe was not having to worry about situations like this. “I dangerous,” he told the Oriental. “Thrown out for knife attacks. Da worst, you know?”

The Oriental laughed. “Me too, brother.”

Dirk shrugged. “What your name?”

“Luigi.”

“No. Your
real
name.”

“My real name
is
Luigi. I was born in Turin.”

Dirk nodded again, dissatisfied. “I Giovanni,” he said.

Luigi chuckled. “Sure you are!”

“What dat mean?”

“Don’t care what your real name is, bro’, so long as we protect each other on the road. You don’t hike Italy without risk, huh?”

Dirk nodded. “Dat da truth, I guess.”

They walked on in silence. Dirk began to relax. It was unlikely that already agents of his enemies had located him.

At La Spézia they halted for a day. The town was depopulated to the extent that its central urbs were ivy-covered, the demesne of goats and wild dogs, a small number of local residents living within stockades in which they had built new dwellings. Cats sat atop poles, as if guarding the place. One, Dirk noticed, was a Nippandroid go-to, made with polymers and fake fur. A real guard cat.

“Move on?” he asked Luigi.

The Oriental hesitated, then shrugged. “Hungry,” he said. “We’ve not got much food left, have we? What d’you think?”

“Move on,” Dirk replied. “Genoa a hundred kilometre away.”

“Huh, but that could be a nasty place.”

“Could be. Worth investigating though.”

Luigi shrugged. “Okay. You win.”

They continued walking the ruined, car-free road. They spoke of their pasts, their loves and their families, their careers. Luigi told Dirk he had been in the olives business, ruined only by the desperate push to permaculture initiated by the post-oil economic decline of the Western world. When people started growing their own, he was out of a job. That was when his troubles began, he said. His wife left him.