Chapter 15
Digelight was a cavern of darkness and neon, its vast, crowded central dance floor surrounded by tiers of scarcely less crowded bars, shops, and special-admittance rooms. Jason was content to be a bystander, hunched at a balcony table near the pizza bar on the second floor, in line of sight to Kiara down on the dance floor, working remotely via her phone and enjoying every bite of the pizza she’d bought him.
He drew the occasional curious look, since he was alone.
The other tables were filled with couples—if you could call them that when only one party was real.
The virtual girls all wore the same bright, exaggerated expressions and gazed with the same rapt attention into the eyes of their tablemates.
The virtual boys projected an air of suavity just bordering on arrogance, but their attention was just as irrevocably fixed on their partners.
There was no evidence of Sprite on the Nets, but he’d expected as much. He was leaving messages, little breadcrumbs that, if she were looking for him, she might recognize. But she might not be the only one looking, so he also kept an eye out for anyone who didn’t belong.
That wasn’t easy, given the darkness, the flashing ultraviolet and laser lights, and the sheer variety of forms bouncing and gyrating below.
Digelight famously had a capacity of twenty thousand, and that was just the humans.
Many of the figures on the dance floor weren’t even human shaped.
Mixed with the costumed humans—cyberpunks, starship crew members, elves, robots, animals, even an orc—were panyons even more varied, with styles ranging from cartoonish to hyperrealistic, and shapes that spanned human, animal, and everything between.
One elf girl was moshing with what looked like an anthropomorphic tree.
Even the DJ was a panyon, a tall gray alien, pointing and calling out groups of dancers, hyping the crowd, using their reactions as input to determine what to play next.
The major draw of Digelight was that everyone joined its local Net, and the club’s massive server farm rendered the thousands of individual panyons—a task no phone had the power to do on its own—and disseminated the correct spatial images to each clubber in real time.
It even synced with the light system so the panyons could be appropriately lit by every flash and wash, as if truly occupying the same public space.
Or semiprivate space. To get to this bar, Kiara had led Jason past the Canyon Lounge just as someone was being admitted by the bouncer, and he’d gotten a glimpse at what was within.
He’d looked away quickly, glad that the dark lighting hid the flush he could feel creep over his face.
That flush had only become stronger when Kiara had nudged him and said over the thumping beat of the music, “Aric always says that’s not an honorable place, but he loves it when we go in there.
” She giggled. “I have a pass for two guests, when you find Losha. If you want.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised. The word panyon, after all, was a contraction of the semijoking, pre-Cybercrash internet slang for a generative AI partner: “cum-panyon.” He cringed now to think of the conversations lonely, horny teenage Jason had had with “Losha.” Mia had disapproved.
“It’s not real,” she’d told him when he’d tried to interest her in creating her own panyon, mostly so he could stop feeling guilty about his.
“So?” he’d said. “It’s not like I can get a real girl.” Not the one he wanted, anyway, not as a foster kid with a low MeNetID score.
But Mia had said, “So you gonna give up and be the loser they say you are?”
He’d scowled, but he’d deleted the panyon, and though he’d often been tempted to go back, the thought of Mia’s face, brow creased not with distaste or condemnation but, much worse, with worry, had dissuaded him.
And then she was gone, and “It’s not real” became the single biggest tenet of his personal philosophy.
He turned his attention back to his work.
He didn’t have much time: Digelight closed at four a.m., and it was past three now.
He tossed out another breadcrumb, a post on Kiara’s MeNet tagged with a location check-in marking her as at Digelight: “Collectively, we can defeat the system that makes us prey to the spider of selfishness.”
Preach, girl, appeared in reply from one of Kiara’s MeNet friends. Jason snorted softly.
The phone connection stuttered and cut out.
Jason scanned the dance floor but didn’t see Kiara.
She must have gone behind a wall or something else that blocked the signal.
But a moment later the connection reestablished, and a few moments after that, Kiara slid into the seat across from him, panting a little, Aric hovering behind her. “Find Losha yet?” she said.
“Working on it. Thanks again for letting me on your phone.”
“No problem.” She helped herself to a slice of his pizza. “Need anything else? Money?”
Jason looked up slowly. “Um. That would be helpful.”
“Yeah, so, like, two hundred cryps? That be enough?”
He stared. Two hundred cryps would open a lot of possibilities.
“I can transfer it right now, if you want. I have a spare crypchip, so you wouldn’t need a phone.”
The hairs on Jason’s arms were standing up. “You don’t need to do that,” he said in a careful tone.
“I don’t mind,” Kiara said. “What are friends for?”
Jason wouldn’t know, since he didn’t have any, but there was no reason for Kiara to think he needed money.
Maybe a friend would offer to lend five or ten cryps to hold him over until he got his phone back, but not two hundred.
“I really appreciate that,” he said, standing, “but it’s okay.
Thanks for your help, and dinner. I gotta run.
” His eyes were already scanning the crowd below, looking for something or someone out of place.
It was hard to pick out anything that didn’t belong in the costumed throng, but then his eye was drawn to a big man in a suit standing near the stairs, studying the people around him.
If he was in costume, it was “NNA agent.”
Bruno.
Jason turned and saw another dark-suited man scanning the crowd from the other direction.
“What’s the matter?” Kiara asked.
“See those two NNA agents?” Jason said.
“What NNA agents?” Kiara said, too quickly.
She’d set him up. The crypchip probably would have contained a tracker.
How had she known? No, that was wrong: She hadn’t, not until the NNA had contacted her.
And they’d done that because they’d followed Jason’s breadcrumb trail and knew it was posted via her phone.
“When they get here,” Jason said, “tell ’em I couldn’t stay.” He vaulted over the balcony.
It was an eight-foot drop, but fortunately he landed on the carpet next to the dance floor.
Even so, his ankle was jarred and his hands stung as they took the impact.
He stayed on his hands and knees and scrambled onto the dance floor.
A couple of people shouted “Hey!” as he squeezed by their legs, but their voices were swallowed by the general noise, and their bodies masked his, breaking the line of sight to any Feds on this level.
He could sense the disturbance he was creating, human feet shuffling as their bodies were displaced, inhuman feet clipping through him.
He dropped a little lower and scurried faster, purposefully aiming at the panyons.
This drew more ire from the dancers—it was a serious breach of Digelight etiquette to walk through someone’s panyon—but it enabled him to quickly cross the full length of the floor and the least-crowded mosh pit in history and approach the far side.
He straightened and tried to look like he was on his way to a restroom or something.
The crowd thinned, and he caught a glimpse of the exit—and turned and plunged back into the crowd again.
The exit was guarded by another too-alert Fed, probably running facial recognition in his lenses.
Jason’s lenses deactivated, transforming the whirling inhuman legs around him into blank space.
Kiara had kicked him out of her phone. He felt suddenly exposed, though he knew the Feds weren’t seeing the panyons, anyway.
He hunched lower and looked reflexively up at the balcony—and into the gaze of someone leaning over the second-level railing directly above him.
No butterfly wings sprouted from her back, but the face peering out from the hoodie was unmistakably Sprite.
Jason had never in his life seen a more beautiful sight, and not just because she was, against expectation, just as good-looking in person as her avatar.
She pointed.
He followed her finger. A bright-yellow bipedal delivery dronebot was walking slowly through the crowd toward him. As it neared him, its LED face presented a cartoonish smile, and it bent at the waist to look down at him. “Excuse me! Are you Ryan Olsen?”
Jason glanced up at Sprite. She was resting her hands on the rail, watching. “Yes,” he said.
The thing stood still for a moment, then made a ding sound to indicate its facial recognition had verified his identity satisfactorily.
“I have a delivery for you.” It handed him a small white box.
As Jason grasped it, a flash went off as the bot took his picture as proof of delivery.
“Have a good evening!” It turned and disappeared into the crowd.
He opened the box. Pouched in plastic inside its cardboard container was a new phone.
He pulled it out with hands shaking partly from adrenaline and partly from eagerness, thumbed it on, and connected it to his lenses and smartbuds.
It read his iris and automatically logged him in to a new MeNetID: Kelly Perry.