The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter V

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The humans who live in the Quarter are all either very rich or very poor - I mean, the gap is even bigger there than among humans in general. It has to do with economic prosperity, I think; where there are corporations making money fast from a localised resource, the wealth gets concentrated more among individuals than in other places. I'm no historian and couldn't name you the examples from previous centuries, but the general principle is something I remember from high school social studies.

Anyway, in the Quarter, the resource that gets exploited is seru; and if you think they're people and shouldn't be exploited, well, the fact that people are people didn't ever stop anybody from exploiting people in any other time or place either. There are days when I sympathise with the SDL a whole lot, although I think their tactics are hard to defend and they're too hung up on the pornography thing to see the real problems. I've never gotten to the point of actually sending them money. It's hard to shed too many tears for seru when the average incomes of seru and humans, excluding say the top one percent, are what they are. In the Quarter, anyway, you know damn well who the second-class citizens are and they are not the synthetic ones.

The human I was going to see was definitely poor, but not absolute rock bottom - you could call him lower-upper-lower-class. He lived in a shack in a loading area behind a warehouse. The warehouse had been converted into seru cubbyholes, and a few humans who found it convenient or profitable to live among the seru were squatting in the back. They had a communal tap into the warehouse's power and Net feeds, and were tolerated because they kept other undesirable characters away at less cost than paying real security guards.

I had to climb a metal picket fence and drop down into a patch of weeds on the other side because there was a derelict sound trailer from some movie company blocking the usual entrance to the loading area. As I thrashed among the plants, which had a spicy herbal smell to them, I wondered who among my man's neighbours was maintaining this little garden back here and why. They weren't any drug plant I recognised, and I thought I knew all of those. Not really my business anyway. I tried not to destroy too many; no sense annoying the locals more than necessary.

It was plenty dark back there because the whole area was shadowed by tall buildings, and I navigated almost as much by feel as by sight, along the row of shacks to the one I thought was right. As I approached its door, a blue light snapped on, illuminating the sign over the nose: "Hideki Hirotaka the Happy Hacker". I don't think it's his real name. One time when I asked him about it, he laughed and said he just liked the letter "H". Okay, whatever. I waved my hand under the nose, waited for it to do its chemo-biometric thing, and turned the doorknob when I heard the lock click open.

Inside, the shack was a simple rectangular room backed by the warehouse wall. The other walls were homemade laminated boards of some kind of recycled material. A little bit of light from the neighbours on either side shone through them, and vague shadows could be seen as people moved around. At the back, a trapdoor led into the tunnel the squatters had built for access to power, sewer, and so forth. There was an LED patch on the wall for lighting, but it was turned off.

With the LED off, the room was filled with a strange, flickering glow. Hideki-san sat in an old swivel chair behind a desk that groaned under the weight of computer stuff. He used a real old-fashioned cathode ray tube for his main computer monitor; he used to claim that it helped him concentrate, although I suspect it may have been some kind of brain thing, like he'd become habituated to it or whatever. Those devices make my eyes hurt when I have to look at them.

I suppose it could also have just been an attempt to make himself look older, like, hey, I'm a genuine old-timer with antique equipment, sort of thing. I knew him to be in his mid-twenties, but from his acne and the way he dressed you'd swear he was about fifteen. The Quarter is full of adults who look like teenagers. Normally they're seru, and female, but maybe he felt more comfortable here than in normal human society just because nobody makes assumptions about your age based on your appearance in the Quarter. I suppose that could also be part of what made being a cracker appeal to him, but I'm no psychologist. Probably I was just reading way too much into my own perceptions.

He looked up, his face blue from the reflected light of the tube, and greeted me solemnly. I knew that his computer would have already pulled all his records of previous dealings with me, indexed by my scent presented to the door nose. "Good to see you again, Flank Ploughman. What's up? I'd offer you tea, but our water's pretty toxic this week; it wouldn't be good for your health." I said I wasn't here for my health, but I also wasn't thirsty. "Very well." He smiled. "You wouldn't be interested in some negative-day movies, would you? I got some nice ones this morning, good clean encodes without camera artifacts, but they haven't been as popular as I was hoping. I can cut you a good deal because I need to recoup my losses. They'll be worthless a week from now and you could be the first in your neighbourhood to see them. Really hot stuff here." I told him I wasn't here to be entertained either.

"Yesterday afternoon I had a seru dame walk into my office and set my desk on fire because I refused to take her case." "Hell hath no fury, sort of thing?" "Very funny. Then the yakuza beat me up and left me in an alley in a puddle of bio sludge, which gave me a rash where the Sun doesn't shine." "Well, if you're looking for someone to help you rub salve on it, uh, that's not in my line but I can make some phone calls for you..." "Oh, yeah, you're on a roll tonight, aren't you? That was just the setup to let you know that I have not had a pleasant couple days. No, the problem you can help me with is this card." I passed it over. "The bank machines know who I am, but they don't know what to do with the card. Some stupid error."

He'd flipped on a little light over his keyboard; with it on, there was nothing visible in the room except its cone of light and his hands with close-bitten fingernails turning the card over and over, examining it from each direction. Then he snapped off the light and while my eyes were adjusting to the dark again, I head the characteristic sound of card going into reader. "What was your username?" I heard a clickety sort of noise as he entered it on the keyboard.

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