Read Part One Here:
Eric Noble trudges in the early pre-dawn glow and sleepily nods along to all of this. He yawns, “So, what? The moral of the story is don’t buy generic.”
Alex shifts the bucket of cleaning supplies to his other arm. “Don’t you think it’s a little suspicious Callosum was somehow able to break in and save the day?”
Eric shrugs. “Eh, security clearly wasn’t Cortix’s strong point.”
“But what if Callosum wasn’t the hero at all? What if they were the ones who did it? It was clearly corporate biological warfare.”
“And with a computer virus no less,” Eric adds with a smirk.
Alex goes silent, remembering Jin told him to play nice. Eric is an okay enough guy, but he’s definitely less of a friend and more the painfully heterosexual man your friend married.
A Social notification appeared by his side, @TheQuietPart: Checkmate is coming. Callosum will reveal itself. Alex automatically likes it and reposts it to his own followers.
They step out of the LAPD PubSec cameras' view and into an alleyway. Eric lights a cigarette and tempts Alex. Neither can afford to get fined for breaking the Public Smoking Ordinance, but Alex gives in.
Eric exhales, “So I take it Jin woke up screaming again? You usually don your tin foil hat when that happens.”
Alex nods. It’s been two years, and that day still comes to them as nightmares, Jin worst of all. He was conscious the entire time. Jin could only watch as he walked towards the edge.
They cut through the alleyway and face the old self-serve car wash. Every slot is taken up by a Displaced rolling up their tent. Eric drops their steam cleaner and moans.
@CordyInception: They will erase you to remake this world in their image.
These days, everything that can be automated is automated. It leaves too many able hands and not enough work. Alex and Eric thought they were onto something with SparClean, the remote car detailing gig. They had yet to invent the machine that could scrape crud out of a dashboard with a toothpick. They simply turned the app on, a car pulled up, they cleaned it, and then the car drove off. Rinse and repeat. Get paid per car. Most importantly, SparClean is the type of gig people call “Good node work.” The app is only available on the Callosum marketplace, meaning you need a Node to use it. That keeps the competition down, and it was a barrier that many people were coming to rely on.
They found early on that if they claimed a self-wash bay for the day, it could significantly cut down their time, which meant more cars and more cash. The only problem was that they weren’t the only ones with the same idea. Each morning became a race to claim the self-wash bay before everyone else, and the race was starting earlier and earlier each day. Then a week ago, SparClean launched a version of the app for tablets, and it was no longer “Good node work.” Almost immediately, the cars available to be detailed was cut in half. This morning, it appeared the Displaced even caught on to their self-wash strategy.
@TheQuietPart: Hate the symptom. Ignore the cause.
“How the Hell are we supposed to compete with fucking Dusters camping out like that?” Eric asks, working himself up into a solid statist rant.
“I don’t know,” Alex sighs, “Let’s just go find a parking spot near a spigot.”
“No, screw this! I’m sick of these transplants swarming over our fucking city! If it’s not some dehydrated Arizonan or inbred Salt Lake polygamist, it’s a goddamn Texan ’fugee fleeing the Lone Star Militia. I’m sick of it!”
Alex just turns around and walks back the way they came.
@DeathByDisk: They’re coming after dissenters. They’re trying to disappear us.
Eric catches up to him. “Sorry, that wasn’t my most shining moment. Don’t tell Dee.” He grabs the post out of the air, “Is this your feed? Christ, what are you tapped into?”
“The tinfoil hat types.” Alex says, “It keeps me sane, knowing I’m not the only one.”
“Said the patient inside the insane asylum,” Eric mutters.
They find a parking spot near a spigot, but are only able to clean one car. The rest of the time was spent waiting for the SparClean algorithm to favor them. Halfway through the day, it’s clear the well has dried up. The laws of Supply and Demand have struck again.
They give up and go to the mall for lunch. Alex lets Eric pull him into a Callosum Clinic showroom. Eric fawns over the specs of new node models, bad mouthing the manufacturers, and espousing brand loyalty as if any of it made a difference. The ancient behemoths of Silicon Valley, Cupertino, and Japan were nothing more than supplicants to Callosum these days.
Alex feigns interest, flicking his eyes towards each employee and the customers waiting in line to upgrade their hardware. He records it all, making sure to focus on each face for a full second. Afterwards, he sends a message to an anonymous account, “Mission complete.”
Back in Alex and Jin’s little studio apartment, they find their respective partners deep in their project. They slip out of their work shoes.
“This moment always reminds me of my Dad,” Eric says, “He’d come home from a long day of work and the first words out of his mouth were, ‘I’m not home. I know I look like I’m home, but I’m not. Give me a minute.’”
Alex chuckles as they don their moonwalkers, and the traction-control ball bearings sync to the sim. They leave the Real and enter the Digi. Alex and Jin’s little shoebox expands out into their cottage in the Grand Cayman Islands. Alex takes a deep breath as the white walls become a sunset along the beach. The view has long felt more like home than home. They walk down to the shore, moving several yards for every inch in the Real, feeling a simulacrum of the extra effort it takes to slog through the sand. They make their way over to where Jintao and Dee sit, surrounded by floating words and chalkboards covered in Neuro script.
Dee brushes a lock of curly red hair out of her face and smiles. She gives Eric a kiss on the lips, passionate enough to grace a romance novel in the discount download bin. Jin offers Alex a smile. It’s warm and genuine, but a cold, contact-free substitute in comparison.
Dee sniffs and points back towards the cottage, “Go shower, you stink.”
“Okay, okay,” Eric says and exits the sim, turning the five-minute walk back into a five-foot trek to the bathroom.
@TheQuietPart: They won’t stop until they have a monopoly over the world
Jin sees the post, and the smile dies.
Alex sets his feed to private and quickly shifts the focus, “How goes the mind reading?”
“‘Therapeutic word cloud.’” Dee corrects, “Calling it ‘mind reading’ raises privacy concerns. And it’s going well.”
“I actually think we might have this Brain Hack Competition in the bag,” Jin says, which is more than hopeful coming from him. Alex is usually the optimist in the relationship. If Jin and Dee make a splash in the Callosum competition, a third-party developer might offer them a job. The challenge these days wasn’t proving you were a good programmer. It’s proving you can code better than a guided AI construct.
“So it’s working?” Alex asks.
“Yep,” Jin says as words begin to float around him in various sizes and colors. ‘Shit’ briefly appears over his head as Jin realizes something. He flips a switch, and all the green words disappear.
“It’s been analyzing our thoughts for four hours now. The results have been… enlightening,” Jin says, his right dimple making an appearance in one of his more obvious tells. It usually means he’s embarrassed but doesn’t want to look embarrassed.
“What do the colors mean?” Alex asks, fixating on the words Jin filtered away. Alex could only catch one before disappearing, “Slipping.”
Jin’s dimple deepens. “It’s color-coded by association. Red are thoughts about life. Purple are thoughts about myself.”
“And the Green are about me? Do you think I’m slipping? In what way?”
“No, it’s just….” Jin swallows a grimace, “Jesus. Let’s not get into it.”
“Like he said. It’s been enlightening.” Dee says, quick to step in, pulling up her own word cloud. “Baby,” “mother,” “father,” and “The future” are most prevalent.
Alex gasps, “Oh my god. Dee, are you pregnant?”
Dee bites her lip and pulls the bathroom door out of the Real. She mutes the ocean to check if Eric has the shower running. “Apparently? It was news to me. At least, I wasn’t aware on a conscious level, but I took a test. And yeah, I am. Don’t tell Eric.”
Alex doesn’t know if he’s more excited for her or for their app. “That’s amazing.”
“You want to give it a shot?” Jin asks.
Alex hesitates, thinking what it may show, then nods. “Sure.”
Jin runs the app, and words begin to surround him. Or at least, they look like words. It’s a rainbow of letters, numbers, and symbols all mixed together into the shape of words.
Jin trades looks with Dee. “What the hell?”
“Shit,” Dee says, “What did we do wrong?”
They can live in paradise most of the day, but as they get ready for bed, they have to take their moonwalkers off and step back into the reality of their studio apartment. It’s uncomfortable and claustrophobic. They become hyper-aware of each other’s breathing, and it’s harder to ignore the conversations they each pinned for later.
As they lower the mattress, Alex finally broaches the topic. “Do you think I’m slipping away from you?”
“No.” Jin sighs and sits down. “Just no.”
“So are you slipping away from me?”
“Come here,” Jin says, patting the bed.
Alex sits, and Jin kisses him. It’s long, deliberate, with the promise of more folded into it. Alex can’t tell if it’s an answer or a deflection, but he takes it anyway. He always does. He lets Jin lead, reads every small hesitation, and pulls back the second he feels tension. He sticks to what he knows Jin is comfortable with, careful not to surprise him, careful not to want too much or let him feel smothered.
The therapist once called Jin “a survivor of rape, in some ways,” and it was the truth of it. The Cordyceps Trojan forced itself into Jin’s body, rewiring him from the inside while Alex stood there helpless, watching the person he loved get taken over inch by inch, neuron by neuron, pulled and pushed to the very edge.
That memory lingers now. It always lingers. Heavy as the humidity trapped inside their small confines. It sits at the foot of the bed like something alive, patiently waiting for a misstep, threatening to clear its throat and ruin the intimacy. They work around it, eyes closed, hands moving through shuddered breaths, pretending the shadow isn’t there. It’s the closest thing they have to peace. Some nights, that’s enough.
Other nights, it isn’t.
There’s silence, then a single sob. Alex doesn’t hug or hold Jin. Making him feel constricted would only make it worse. Instead, he lies beside him, stroking his back.
Jin doesn’t apologize. He stopped doing that long ago. An apology implies that something can be fixed.
“Wake up.”
Alex rubs his eyes. His node syncs with the sim, and he’s taken back to the beachside cottage. A message waiting for him. ‘I’m outside.’ Alex sits up and looks out the window. A shadow stands against the moonlit sky. He turns to check if Jin is still asleep. He is.
Alex stands and starts recording a POV, finding some comfort in at least having a record of whatever the hell these weird rendezvous were. He slips on his moonwalkers and turns on the patio light. The shadow remains a void cut out of his surroundings, one Alex has never been able to look at for too long. Looking at the shadow was like staring at an optical illusion, and it leaves his brain trying to make sense of the elephant with four legs and five connected feet.
Alex walks outside. A foraging crab scuttles off the deck. The high tide crashes against the rocks beneath them.
“Were you noticed?” The shadow asks.
“No,” Alex says and hands over several video files, including the one he recorded inside the Callosum Clinic. He checks on Jin through the window. “And a little warning next time.”
“I have a new task for you,” the shadow says.
“Hold on. You still haven’t explained the last task. I don’t even know why you’re here.”
“I’m here because you want the truth, and I need your help. Too many contacts have been burned. I can’t trust this to someone who might be on their radar.”
Alex tries to protest, but the shadow stops him, “No. Just listen. They’re trying to trace my connection. We don’t have time. All I can say is that I work on the inside, and I have evidence: proof that Callosum created Cordyceps and that their attack on Cortix is just the beginning, but it needs to be delivered to the right hands through an intermediary. Can you do that?”
Alex nods, “Yeah—Yes. Of course. I’ll help.”
“Good. Then it’s time we meet IRL.” The shadow conjures up a card with an address. “Be here. Three o’clock tomorrow.”
“Alex?”
The shadow abruptly disappears. Alex spins and faces Jin.
Jin doesn’t take the news well. “You’ve been casing clinics for this guy for months, and you don’t even know why!”
Alex pulls out the POV he recoded of the shadow, “I’m about to find out. I swear I was going to let you in, once I did.”
“You could be aiding and abetting a Luddite bomber for all you know.”
“He’s not a terrorist. Jin, just listen—”
“No, you listen. This obsession isn’t healthy. You need to let it go. Your entire life has become wrapped up in these insane conspiracy theories.”
“They’re not insane. Do you know what’s insane? Not being able to take you anywhere that has a railing. There’s a whole group of friends we no longer see because they live above the second floor, and it’s only gotten worse. You barely go outside. I can’t even hold you anymore because it reminds you too much of that goddamn day. Do you know how hard that is for me?”
Jin goes silent, and Alex feels like an asshole, but it needed to be said. He continues, “I’m doing this for you, Jin. If we can just get some accountability, find the bastard who coded it….”
“Nothing will change, Alex. The damage is done… We just need to live with the scars.”
“I can’t.” Alex says and presses the video forward, “Not when their tech is in our heads.”
Jin watches Alex’s POV, then watches it again, messing with the settings, trying to figure it out. Finally, he leans back with an exhale and shakes his head, “I don’t understand.”
“What’s not to understand?” Alex says, “We need to go.”
“No, hold on.” Jin takes his hand and slows him down, “I couldn’t find anyone besides us connected to our network, and something is off with your POV. Look:” Jin rewinds the video to the moment Alex turns the porch light on. “See how the light doesn’t touch him?”
“I know, it’s weird.”
“No, that’s not just weird. That’s not right. That’s not how light works with nodes. Light…” Jin mulls over how to get the idea across, then conjures a glowing lightbulb and moves it around, “Okay, you see how this is illuminating the room? In old physics-based graphic engines, this was a massive resource suck to do realistically because the GPU needed to calculate and simulate how the rays bounced off all the surfaces. Nodes don’t do that. Instead of simulating a lightbulb, it describes the lightbulb, directly manipulating your visual cortex into thinking there actually is a lightbulb in my hands.”
“Yeah, it’s a hallucination. I get it.” Alex says, growing impatient.
Jin holds up a finger, “But so is the light that it creates, and that’s the problem. When you turned on the light, your node told your brain to illuminate the porch, but Mister Shadow Man wasn’t included. It's almost like someone copy-pasted him over the sim, which made me think to do this:”
Jin toggles a switch. In the POV, the shore and starry night become a bare white wall, but the shadow remains.
Alex shakes his head, “What? Do you think I’m pranking you?”
“No,” Jin says quickly, “I’m saying your node wasn’t causing you to see Mr. Shadow Man. That’s weird—On top of what already sounds like a plot from a freakin’ spy thriller.”