How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobucar by Rich Larson

Author:Rich Larson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

* * *

Nat is in the bathroom of Flux, and because she’s cutting me into her eyefeed there’s a blissy moment where I am her, where the reflection in the smart mirror is my reflection. The geometry of her dark hair hitting her perfect collarbone is so beautiful it hurts. She puts a pill between her puffy lips and washes it down with a slurp of water from the faucet.

We’re at the safe room, I chat her.

The rental timer on the stall behind her expires; the electronic bleating almost drowns out the sound of the occupant vomiting.

He’s on the upper level, she chats me. Can you reach?

She drops her defenseware, which we both know is a polite fiction—I installed that defenseware. Her body becomes an antenna, boosted by the graphene conduction pads she taped to her dress, and I can suddenly see every implant in the club. Quini’s are tagged a bright red, but I can’t touch them.

Bathroom must have a concrete ceiling, I chat her. Get out in the open.

The smart mirror makes a read on her body language and throws up a filter, unfurling blackened wings behind her shoulder blades, turning her into an avenging angel. It probably thinks she’s about to pull or punch someone. I put another five minutes on the stall for whoever’s puking.

Nat slices past the vending machine, where a couple girls are already printing up cheap flats for the stumble home, and plunges out into the club. This is her element in the way I’ve only ever pretended it’s my element: She moves through the crowd like a fluid, depositing precise air kisses and brief embraces where she has to, never getting caught in conversation.

In another world, I can hear Yinka moving beside me, putting on the bodysuit designed to give him Quini’s almost exact proportions.

Nat’s eyes scan the upper level and suddenly there’s Quini, wearing a specifically tailored spidersilk suit, arm wrapped through the railing. He’s got his chin to his chest, laughing at something that makes the people around him look vaguely uncomfortable. She ducks behind the steroid-pumped bulk of a bouncer to break line of sight. The signal flares strong.

Got it, I say, and I start the spoof, using Nat’s implants to mirror Quini’s and send the signal, by rented pirate satellite, all the way to the villa.

The bouncer moves, and for a second it feels like Quini is looking right at us, but then I realize his eyes are squeezed shut. There’s a glimmer of tears on his face, sickly green in the strobing lights. Nat slides away into the crowd.

Please don’t let him see you, I chat her.

No shit, she chats back. You tell Yinka yet?

“Man, they fucked up,” our Fleischgeist says, not in my head but in the air beside it. His whisper is hoarse. “The suit’s missing one sleeve.”

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s the thing.”

I drop Nat’s eyefeed and come back to the safe room door. I should have told him back in the car, or back in virtual.

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