The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

V.A.O. - GEOFF RYMAN

Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to New Worlds, but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in Interzone- the magazine where almost all of his published short fiction has appeared-with his brilliant novella The Un-conquered Country that he first attracted any serious attention. The Un-conquered Country, one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version, The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His output has been sparse since then, by the high-production standards of the genre, but extremely distinguished, with his novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy winning both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His other novels include The Warrior Who Carried Life, the critically acclaimed mainstream novel Was, and the underground cult classic 253, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” which in its original form ran online on Ryman’s home page of www.ryman.com, and which, in its print form won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in Unconquered Countries. His most recent book is a new novel, Lust. His stories have appeared in our Twelfth, Thirteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Annual Collections.

In the wry and compelling story that follows, he introduces us to some people at the very end of life who find that there’s still some challenges to face-and some surprises ahead.

Jazzanova wandered off again. He was out all night.

They tell me that they’ve found him up a tree. So I sit in his room and wait for him and I remember that he told me once that when he was a kid, he used to climb up pine trees in the park to read comics-Iron Man, Dr. Midnight. I guess he was a dreamy kind of kid. Then he came to Jersey and started to live it instead. That’s when we met, in college.

They bring him back in. Jazza looks like a cricket that somebody’s stained brown with tea. I hate his shuffling walk. His feet never leave the ground like he’s wearing slippers all the time. The backwards baseball cap he always wears doesn’t suit Alzheimer’s either. He shuffles off to take a leak and I hear him getting into a fight with his talking toilet.

The toilet says, “You’ve been missing your medication.” It’s probably sampled his pee.

Jazzanova doesn’t like that. “Goddamit!” He sounds drunk and angry. He flushes the thing, to shut it up. He comes out and his glasses start up on him. “11:15,” his glasses say in this needling little voice. “You should have taken medication at 9:00 am and 10:30 am. Go to the blue tray and find the pills in the green column.”

They never let up on you. The whole place is wired. It’s so full of ordnance you can hear it. Jazza’s bedroom sounds like it’s full of hummingbirds.

He blanks it all out and kinda falls back onto the sofa. His callipers aren’t so hot on sitting down. Then he just stares for a couple of seconds. He’s looking at his hands like they don’t belong to him. Finally he says to me, “What say we get outa here for a beer, um…”

He’s forgotten who I am again. I can see the little flicker in his glasses as it goes through photos and whispers my name at him. “Brewster,” he says. Then he like, shrugs and says, “It’s all in the mix.”

It’s all in the mix. That’s what he always says when he’s pretending he’s chilled out and not gaga. Jazza’s still on planet Clubland, a million years ago. Maybe he’s happy there.

But he can’t pay his bills.

“Bar’s not open,” I tell him. I hold out his blue tray of pills. “Take one of these, man. Top buzz.”

Instead of taking one, he fumbles up a wholehandful and the tray says to him “Nooooooo.” It sounds like a bouncer outside a club.

“Shit,” he says and takes five of the fuckers anyway.

Outside his big window, it’s late summer, early morning, all kinda smoky. It’s a nice view; I’ll say that. Lawn, trees. The view is wired too. Whole place is full of VAO. Victim Activated Ordnance. To protect us rich old folks.

Once I saw this kid who’d climbed over the wall. He was just a kid. He probably just wanted to play on the grass. The camera saw him and zapped him. They used pulse sound on him. He clutched his head and tried to run, but his feet kept wobbling. Each bullet is 150 decibels and you can’t really think. He stumbled down onto his knees and he’d stand up, drop, stand up drop down again until they came for him.

I used to make that stuff. I used to make the software that recognises faces. Now it recognises me.

I go back and my room smells like a trashcan. It’s got grey hair in the corners. It pisses me off what I pay for this place. The least they could do is keep it clean. There’s got to be some advantages to being an old vegetable.

I push the buzzer and I get no answer. I push again, and nothing happens so I go to the screen and start shouting. I tell ’em straight up, “I push your buzzer and you don’t come, man. I could be dying of a heart attack up here. If I tell the papers, that’d blow your sales pitch. You don’t answer my buzzer, I scorch your ass!”

About 45 minutes later the Kid shows up moving real slow. He leans back against the wall, arms folded. I can’t even remember what fucked-up country he’s from, but I can read him. He’s got that mean, sour look you get when nobody gives a fuck so why should you.

I feel pretty pissed off myself. “Next time I ring the buzzer you fuckin show up.”

“Sorry, Sir.” Kid says ‘Sir’ like maybe it means Dog in his own language.

“What the fuck is up with you?”

“Nothing, Sir.”

I look for buttons to push. You know, like if someone blanks you out, you get them mad and maybe you find out what’s going on?

I insult the Kid. “Can’t you talk English?”

Nothing.

“It’s a helluva way to get a tip. Or no tip. You want no tip?”

His arms snap open like a spring lock, his head swivels like armed CCTV, and his mouth spouts garbage like a TV in translation. I pushed his button all right.

When he stops swearing in Albanian or Mongolian or whatever I finally hear him squawk. “I get no tip no how!”

So that’s it. He’s not getting his tips.

The assholes who run this place don’t pay the staff. You gotta give the nurses tips, the cleaners tips, the doctors tips, the waiters tips. If the toilets get more intelligent we’ll have to tip the toilets. And management makes sure you do it regular. That’s one of the things about this dump I hate the most. They keep sending you little forms to fill in to debit your bank account. Those fuckin forms show up on your computer, on your TV, on your microwave, on your specs. The forms have these horrible chirpy little voices. “I’m sure you want to express your appreciation for the staff.”

It costs 100 thousand a year to live here and they call the tips discretionary. That’s another hundred fifty a week. And I make sure I pay it because I want these bozos to motor if I get sick or something.

I keep my voice cool cause I want to make sure I got this right. “No tips? I pay your tips, man.”

I need this guy’s name. You cannot talk somebody down if you don’t know their name. My eyeglasses are running through all the photographs of staff, and finally I see him. I click a bit of my brain, like I’m going to ask him his name. The glasses tell me.

The Kid is called Joao and he’s from some part of Indonesia that speaks Portuguese.

“Joao?” I tell him. “I’m sorry. I am sorry. I pay. Really.”

He stands there swelling up and down like he’s pumping iron.

“Joao? I pay the tips. You don’t get them?”

Kid’s so mad his wires are crossed. He scowls and blinks.

“Lemme show you,” I say.

I try to ease him to the machine, you know, I just touch his arm, and he throws it off, like this. For a second I think he’s going to give me a Jersey kiss. So I keep my voice low and soft. “Hey, man, just be cool about it, OK. Lemme show you.”

So I open up my records. See? I show him all that debit. All those tips going out just as regular as spam. I point to the money, there on the screen. Right out of my bank account.

The Kid blinks and rubs his whole face with his hands. I begin to wonder if they teach people to read in the country he’s from.

Then suddenly he shouts. “I no get them!” He’s throwing up his hands and wiggling his cheeks. But I can see. Now he’s not mad at me.

I feel pretty sick myself, in my gut like my chicken was full of salmonella. I’m thinking, oh fuck. Oh fuck. We got ourselves a tips racket.

Somebody somewhere, probably one of the hotshot doctors who can’t pay for his new swimming pool or his lawsuit insurance is hacking out the cleaners’ tips.

I could complain, and I could call in the law. But. I got reasons. Know what I mean?

“How long you not been getting your tips?” I ask him.

He tells me. Months. I can see why he isn’t all that concerned about cleaning up my shit. I sit him down, pour him a whisky. This will take a while and I want him to know right in his balls who got him back his money. Me. Here. The Brewster.

I call up my contact. She’s top dope, a tough old babe still on the outside called Nikki. She’s got this great translation package. We have this audio conversation about her new bungalow which is a cover for a hack download. It comes in looking like a phone bill. It then runs a request from a nostalgia TV line. I load up and sit back and watch what looks like an old Britney Spears video.

It’s not a video, believe me. I can’t do anything that looks like a hack. The ordnance is always watching. They say it’s in case we get ill, but hey, why do they snoop our keystrokes? If you want to hack here, it’s a case of no hands. And everything has to look like something else.

I smile at the Kid and jerk my head at the cameras, glasses, TV, computer… all the surveillance. But hey, the Kid’s cool. He can’t speaka da English, but he gets what I’m doing. For the first time I get a smile out him. He chuckles and lifts up the whiskey glass. “Z24!” he says. Ah, that’s Kidtalk.

“Banging!” I say back. That’s my talk. “You’ve a Britney fan huh?”

The Kid’s sussed. He knows exactly what’s going on. “Britney… Whitney… all that old stuff.” He chuckles and nods and shakes his head. “I big big fan!” I know what’s he’s thinking. He’s thinking, this old guy is into some shit. He’s thinking, this old guy is hacking me back my tips.

The microwave pings like my dinner’s ready, only it’s not food that’s cooking. I put on my glasses, and then put the transcoder on top of them and suddenly Britney is translated into the Corporation’s accounts. But only if you are looking at ’em through my glasses.

I got a real good line on who’s been stealing a little bit of the Kid’s bandwidth.

My Medical Supervisor. Mr. trusted Dr. Curtis. So I siphon out the dosh and siphon it into the Kid’s corporate account. Ready for loading to his bank.

“Banging!” the Kid says.

Grand Dad House.

So then I call on Dr. Curtis. “You got a face like shit and your brains are all on your chin!”

Dr. Curtis leans back and looks like someone just been told a real bad joke. Behind him is a wall of screens, some of them showing people’s pumping insides.

You see, you get old, you end up in here and that gives them the right to monitor every last act and word. You’re a patient.

I’m one mad patient. “I may be 80 but I could still deck you!”

He leans back, with his eyebrows up and his eyes hooded. “I could always prescriptionize out all that aggressive testosterone. So unbecoming in the aged.”

I hate him. Really. I can take most people but if I could do Curtis an injury I would. Curtis has got hold of my pubic hair and can give it a twist whenever he wants.

“Look Curtis, you been hacking off our tips. Duh! Don’t you think the staff kinda of notice they’re not getting paid? And I know we’re all a bunch of senile old codgers, but even we can tell when we don’t get our asses wiped cause the staff can’t feed their kids. You leave our tips alone, asshole!”

The good doctor sniffs. “I’m afraid I have expenses.”

“Yeah, and they all got tits.”

“And I’ve only got one other source of income.” He starts to smile. A nice long pause, like it’s his close up or something. He purses his lips into a little bitty kiss. “You.”

He’s such a drama student. His breath smells of cheese. He tells me “If my account is empty, I’ll hack it out of yours.”

No he won’t. It won’t be that easy. But he has got a point. It is the whole point, the underlying point. I gotta sit on that point everyday and it goes straight up my ass.

I can’t walk without help. My kid’s poor. I gotta find a hundred thou a year.

So I take it out of other people’s bank accounts, OK?

Curtis is my doctor. He knows everything I do. I have to give him a cut.

I have a dream. I put Dr. Curtis in rubber mask and backwards baseball cap, and shove him out on the lawn at night so the cameras don’t recognise him and he gets area-denied. He gets sound gunned. He gets microwaved; his whole body feels like it’s touching a hot lightbulb. His whole goddamned shaven tattooed trendy fat little ass feels what’s like to be poor and hungry and climbing over our wall just to activate some ordnance.

All this is before lunch. It’s a well crucial day. Stick around, it’s about to get even more crucial.

It’s Saturday and that’s Bill’s day to visit. I go to the Solarium and wait, and then wait some more. Today he doesn’t show. I wait a little while longer. And then ring him up to leave a message. I don’t want sound whiney, so I try to sound up. “Hey, Bill, this your Dad. Everything’s cool, I hope it’s under control for you too.”

Then I sit and hang out. I don’t want to be some sad old fuck. I open up a newspaper. It tells me Congress wants to change tax rates, to ease the burden on younger taxpayers. Oh cool, thanks.

I go back to check out Jazza. It’s the afternoon, but he’s sleeping like a baby.

Jazza used to be so cool. It’s good to have someone from your time, your place. Even if he doesn’t remember who you are.

We wanted to send a rocket to Mars. We built it ourselves and called it Aphrodite and went to Nevada and launched it and it went straight up looking like 1969 and hope.

We made pretend-music; started our own company, developed a couple of computer games, called ourselves Fighting Fit and sold the company. We ran a pirate download and shared the same girlfriend for a while. After we lost all our money, we emptied the same accounts too. Amateur spaceships don’t pay for themselves. I decided to go mundane, and went into security software. I went straight for a while. Jazza never did. He still hung out there. From time to time I gave him some freelance. When Bill went to college I went to check Jazza out. He was still at a mixing desk at fifty. He was wearing one of those shirts that keeps changing pictures or told the punters what toons he was pumping out.

I hack Jazza’s bills as well. Otherwise, he’d be out on the street.

I sit there a while, just making sure he’s OK, if he wants anything. He snores. I give his knee a pat and leave. You get lonely sometimes.

I get to my room and there’s a message. “Dad, you probably know this already but Bessie was mugged. I’ll be over tomorrow.”

Bessie is my granddaughter. Never have a well crucial day.

The next morning we’re doing Neurobics.

They found out that even old people grow new neurons. If they give you PDA, it goes even faster, but you got to use it or lose it. So they make us learn. They make us do crazy stuff. Like brush our teeth with the wrong hand. Or read stuff from a screen that is upside down. Sometimes they make us do really off the wall stuff, like sniff vanilla beans while we listen to classical music. They’re trying to induce synaesthesia.

Today we were in VR. We’re weightless in a burning space station. We got to get out through smoke and there is no up or down. What way does the lever on the door pull?

I get a tug on my arm. It’s the Kid. He smiles at me real nice. “Mr. Brewster? I come find you. You son is here.”

These days I walk like Frankenstein, on these fake little legs. They make your muscles work so they grow back. Nobody’s supposed to hold me up. The Kid does though. To him I guess I’m some old granddad and that is how you show respect!

So I introduce him to my son. Joao, this is my boy Bill. Bill stands up and shakes the Kid’s hand and thanks him for taking care of me. My boy is fifty years old. He’s got a potbelly, but he still looks like a guy who never spent a day in an office.

Bill is real neat. I can say that. He’s a neat kid, he just never made any money. He’d work in the summers as a diving instructor and in winter he’d go south. He went to teach primary school in the Hebrides. He did a stint putting chips in elephant’s brains in Sri Lanka.

Today though his smile looks weirded out.

“How’s Bessie?” I ask.

Something happens to Bill’s face and he sits down. “Um. You didn’t see the news? It was on the news.”

“Bessie was in the news?” Oh shit. You don’t get in the comics just for stubbing your toe.

Bill’s voice rattles. “They did something to her face,” he says. He takes out his paper and fills it, and lays it out on the table.

I tell him, “I didn’t see anything about it. I think we’re filtered. I think they filter our news.”

“VAO. Only this time it really was a victim who got activated.”

VAO protects banks, shopping malls, offices. Anything First World, or Nerd World, got VAO. It’s supposed to zap thieves. For just a second I thought maybe Bessie had been on a job like maybe being a gangsta skips a generation or something.

Bill’s newspaper fills up with an animated headline.

The headline says V A O…

And the headline animates into

Very

Ancient

Offenders

And then, for your delectation and amusement, up comes my granddaughter’s mugging, caught on security camera and sold by the ordnance company to defray costs.

They run my granddaughter’s mugging for laughs. Because the muggers are old.

Ain’t dey cute, them old guys?

There’s my Bessie, going out to her car. Slick black hair, skinny red trousers, real small, real sweet. Able to take care of herself, but you don’t expect your own bolted, belted VAO parking lot to be the place where you get mugged.

These four clowns come lurching out at her. They’re old guys like me. They’re staggering around on callipers, they got the Frankenstein walk but they stink of the street. One of them is wearing old trousers that are too small. The legs end up around his calves, and they’re held up by a belt, they don’t close at the front. There is a continent of dingy underwear on display.

Bill says, “Microwave. Somehow they turned it on her instead of them. But they didn’t know what they were doing.” Bill can’t look at this, he’s hiding his face.

And on the paper, Bessie is denied her own area.

The keys in her hand go hot, she drops them. Her own shiny hair goes hot and she clasps her head, and she crouches down and tries to hide under her own elbows.

Bill takes from behind his hand. “It’s supposed to stop before 250 seconds. After that it does damage.”

These are old, old codgers. They shuffle. They forget to turn the fuckin thing off. They pick up the car keys and they’re too hot and they drop ’em. Well duh. Finally they shuffle round to some kind of switch.

We’re at 300 seconds and Bessie’s trousers are smoking, and the skin of her face is curling up.

“She’ll need a cornea transplant,” says Bill.

They pick up her purse and just leave her there. They get into the car. I get a look at them.

There’s two ways you get old. One, you shrivel up. The other, you puff out like a cloud. One guy has a face like melted marshmallow in these dead-white hanging lumps.

“Old farts,” I hear myself say. I’m so sick of feeling angry. I feel angry all the time and there’s nothing I can do about anything. There’s nothing I can do about Bessie, nothing I can do about those old stupid jerks.

“She’ll be OK,” says Bill and he’s looking at me and for just a sec I’m his Daddy again. I never was much of a Daddy when he was a kid, always off on a job or working for the company. He ended up being the kind of guy who never stops looking for a father. Christ, Billy. I wanted to have enough money so that you would never have to work, to make up for not being around. But all my money goes into being old.

We latch hands. Bill’s spent all his life helping people. Bill’s just a better man than I am.

“I’m sorry, Billy,” I say, and I mean for everything.

That night Jazza and I finally go for a beer at the bar in the Happy Farm, but J’s in bad shape. He just sits staring. Neurobics make him dizzy. They got a new timed drug dispenser on his wrist. He does a little jump and groans when they dose him. We’re hanging out with Gus.

Gus does this sweet little hippie routine. He says that he sold plankton to places like Paraguay so they could get carbon reduction credits. Now. Everybody who was awake knows that it didn’t work and nobody made any money at it. In fact they lost their shirts.

So I ask myself: where does Gus’s money come from? I mean you got this greasy little dude who took too much whizz. His dialog is just too sussed for an eco-warrior.

“You heard about this VAO stuff?” he asks me.

“Only cause my granddaughter got mugged. I didn’t know they filter our news.

“I got something that filters the filter,” he says. “This is news we need to know.”

“About my granddaughter?”

“No. Look me in the eye. The guys that do this are a crew. It’s several crews all over the country, but they’re all linked, and they’re all old guys. And they’re doing this kind of stuff a lot.”

Suddenly, I am aware of the surveillance all around us. “So?”

“Kind of blows our story, doesn’t it? Sweet little old guys playing computer games and taking physio.” Gus’s eyes are steady as a rock.

I knew it. Gus is a player.

I ask him, “How much are you uh… tipping Curtis?”

His face and smile are less expressive than an armadillo’s behind. “Too much,” he says. His eyebrows do a little jump.

“Anybody else?” I ask him, meaning who are the other Players. It’s nice to know that even at our age we can make new friends and acquaintances.

“Oh yeah,” he says looking around. “You could start with The Good Fairies.” The Good Fairies are a couple, been together 50 years. They look up from their table, and they look pretty mean to me.

“I’ll get you that filter,” says Gus.

Good as his word, I get mail. Takes me a while, because it downloads as dirty pictures. I try a couple of times and finally get the code. Load it up and I got a different personalisation on the news.

So I fill up my newspaper and I read the backstory. This crew has been at it for months. Old guys who hijack armed intelligent cameras, old guys who spray clubs with paralysis gas, or shoot electricity through whole trainloads of commuters. They edit out every single last purse and wristwatch while the ordnance that is supposed to protect the punters is turned around on them.

There are zapped grannies, zapped babies, zapped beautiful teenage girls who should have been left to enjoy life. I never had any respect for direct-action crime. Money is magic, it’s a religion. All you gotta do is just walk into the temple and help yourself and nobody gets hurt.

Not these geeks. For them, hurting people is part of the point. They’re not even really crooks. Crooks want to be invisible. These guys are so stupid and vicious that they want everybody to know about them.

They got this crazy leader who calls himself Silhouette. Aw Jesus can you believe that? He probably grew up wanting to be Eminem or something. He still does that dumb thing with the splayed open hands pointing down. Silhouette is skinny like a model. His knees are fatter than his thighs and ho-hum, he’s all in black and he has his whole face blanked out, just black, no eyes no mouth. Oh, Daddy Cool.

I take one look at this guy and I know just who he is. My generation, you know, we never fought a war. We grew up watching disasters on TV and worrying about our clothes. This guy is sitting there and he’s holding his face so that we can see he’s got killer cheekbones. The guy’s probably eighty and he’s worried about his looks.

And of course he’s got a manifesto. He croaks it at me, in this real weird voice, until I figure out it’s been recognition masked. No voiceprint. It makes him sound like he’s talking underwater.

“You sniff money on old people, and just because we can’t run and can’t hurt you back you strip us naked. You leave us in cold water flats and shut us up in expensive prisons you call Homes. You don’t pay us the pensions you promised When we get sick, you tell us our insurance that we paid for all our lives doesn’t cover the cost of care. You want us to die. So. We’ll die. And take we’ll everything from you when we go.”

You want to know the spookiest thing of all? I know where he’s coming from I know exactly what Silhouette means.

“Age Rage,” he says and clenches a fist.

So the next day I’m back down in the bar with Gus. I got Jazzanova with me like he’s my good luck charm. Gus has his squeeze Mandy. Mandy used to be a lap dancer. She’s still got a body, I can tell you.

She’s also got a mouth and the brains to use it. Her cover is that she used to be in property development. Well yeah maybe. A certain kind of old babe has the hardest eyes you’ll ever see.

Mandy says, “The trouble with that scum is they’ll turn the heat up on all of us.”

“Yup,” says Gus. “We’ll end up on the street.”

“I’ll take Curtis with me,” I promise. “I got evidence on the guy.”

Mandy’s not impressed. “Good! You can share the same cardboard box. Hope it makes you feel better.”

We’re too old for fear. We just turn our backs on it. If we get the fear at all it takes us over, and our legs don’t work and we go little and frail and old. So we got to be like old dried leather. It used to be soft, but now it’s as hard as stone.

The Good Fairies sit listening. They are as cerebral as fuck. I mean these guys are the only people I know who can tell their genitals what to do. They got married fifty years ago and they’ve only fucked each other since. I blame Aids.

The Good Fairies sometimes talk in unison. It’s like twins who’ve been locked up in the same closet since they were born. “We have to take out Silhouette.”

Best, as we cogitate. True. Beat. Us? Beat.

Then we all start roaring with laughter. Mandy barks like a dog with its vocal chords cut out. Gus squeaks. I know I sound like gravel being milled. Jazzanova stares into outer space, and doesn’t want to be left out, so he laughs at the strip lighting and then he swallows a chip off the table edge thinking it’s a pill.

Mandy is barking. “The Neurobics Crew!”

The Good Fairies sit holding hands, sipping their cigarettes, and they don’t move a muscle.

Fairy One says, real calm. “It’ll be real funny inside that cardboard box.”

“Specially when it rains,” says the other. This guy is five foot two with a dorky beard. He looks like a failed Drag King, but he calls himself Thug, which has to be some kind of joke.

“Yeah, but you guys,” says Mandy. “I can hear where you’re coming from, but what are going to DO?”

Fairy One calls himself Jojo but I bet he’s really called George and he says, “We ask him to stop.”

“Oh yeah? Sure!”

“His position doesn’t make sense. He says he does it because he’s old. But it is the old he’s hurting.”

Mandy shakes her head. “He’s in it for the money.”

Thug disagrees. “He’s in it for the showbiz. Money won’t be enough.”

Jojo says, “We show him how to get on TV and say something that makes sense for a change. I’m sure that most of us have something to say on the position of the old.”

Mandy says, “How you gonna do that.”

Jojo says, “I used to make TV shows.”

Thug says. “All we gotta do is find who Silhouette is.”

And I get this real weird, sick feeling and I don’t know why.

Mandy jerks like she’s laughing to herself. She flicks cigarette ash like it’s going all over their pretty little dream. “You better get hacking,” she says.

I don’t know if they did, but the next day my dear Dr. Curtis runs in to tell me we’re all about to get a visit from the cops.

Curtis looks terrified. He looks sick. He leans against my door like they’re going to hammer it down. Plump smooth-skinned pretty little doctor, he’s got so much to lose.

“How’s your system?” he asks smiling like he’s relearning how to use his facial muscles. He’s got something he doesn’t want to say in front of the ordnance.

I don’t get it. “What’s it to you?”

He makes a noise like someone’s jammed a pin in his butt. His eyes start doing a belly dance towards the window. I look out and see that the front drive of the Happy Farm is stuffed like a turkey with police cars.

I just say, “A shape outlined against the light?”

I mean a silhouette. Curtis sorta settles with relief and nods yes. “You’ve been following the news.”

I get it. The cops are here to find out if any of us nice old folks are funding Silhouette’s reign of terror. That means that they’ll be going through our accounts. For once Curtis and I have exactly the same self-interest.

I’m a thief and I’ve never been caught and that’s not because I’m smart, but because I know I’m not. So I worry. So I prepare.

I got about ten minutes and that’s all I need. I start running my emergency program. It looks like a rerun of pro golf. Curtis hangs around. He wants to see how I do this. I need to put on my specs but I don’t want him to know about the transcoder.

“Curtis, maybe you should go talk to our guests.” I mean slow them down. I mean get out of here.

Then there’s a knock. In comes the Kid. Maybe he’s come to tell me about the cops too. He sees Curtis and I swear his eyes switch on with hate like a lightbulb.

“Joao, maybe you could take Dr. Curtis out to greet our guests.” And that means: Joao help me get him out of here.

That Kid is sussed. “You,” he says to Curtis, and punches the palm of his hand. Curtis understands that, too. Note. Not one of us has said anything that would sound bad in court.

I hear the door shut. Finally I put on my specs and the transcoder shows me data download on one eye lens and data upload, on the other.

It’s a fake I’ve had worked out for years. It’ll cover my whole account and make it look like I’m some kind of gaga spendthrift, that I gamble a lot on a Korean site, lose my dosh, win some dosh. It matches, transaction for transaction, money in, money out.

That’s what’s uploading. On the other lens, I’m encrypted my old data. I got maybe five minutes now.

Just having some encrypted data on my system will be enough to make trouble. I’m ghosting the encrypted file and then I go to get it off my disk. It starts to squirt into my transcoder.

I hear big heavy boots. I hear Dr. Curtis babbling happily. I hear a knock on the front door. Mine? No, next door.

Six… five… four… stuff is still downloading. Three two one zero. Right, off comes the transcoder. It looks like the arm from my glasses.

On my hard drive, iron molecules are being permanently scrambled. Sorry Officer, I’m just this old guy and I’ve been having these terrible problems with my system.

I go take a shower. They monitor your heartbeat and video your keystrokes but the law says they can’t perve you in the shower.

And while I’m in the shower I take the transcoder and like I rehearsed a hundred times, I push it up the head of my penis.

The transcoder’s long, it’s thin. In an x-ray, it’ll look like a sexual prosthetic.

When the knock on my door comes, I’m out, I’m dry, and I’m in my nice baggy shiny blue suit. I am the picture of a callipered, monitored neurobic modern Noughties Boy. With money of his own.

The Armament comes in. He looks like somebody who divides his time between weightlifting and V-games, hairy golden biceps, a smile like a rodent’s and heavy-duty multipurpose specs. His manner is unfriendly. “You’re Alistair Brewster. Hello. We’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

“I don’t see what’s stopping you.” I don’t do polite even with Armament.

“Fine.” He sits down without being asked. His specs have a little blinking light. Smile, you’re on candid camera. “Mr. Brewster, you used to work for SecureIT Inc.”

“Was that a question or a statement?”

He blinks. “You worked on the design of security systems.”

There is no lie as effective as the truth. “That’s how I made my money. I came up with some of the recognition software, the stuff that means the ordnance knows who it’s dealing with.” I try to make it sound rich.

He nods and pretends to be impressed. “I was wondering if you could help us understand some of the ways in which these safety checks could be subverted. During the recent spate of thefts.”

Now this is trouble. It’s coming from an angle I was not expecting. They don’t think I’m a thief. They don’t think I’m a donor.

They think maybe I’m part of Silhouette’s crew.

I stall for time. “Can I confirm your ID?”

“Sure.”

“I’m not talking security until I know who you are.”

“Very wise, Mr. Brewster.”

“Not wisdom. Habit. You get by on habit at my age Mr…”

Secret Squirrel here won’t give me his name, just a look at his dental work. So he leans forward and my TV checks out his retinas. We share a polite, stone-cold silence as it chews over this for a while. Then out comes his stuff.

Secret Squirrel is 36 years old, has a tattoo on right knee which sounds real romantic and is validated as Armament, Security Status Amber… oh, it takes me back to the good old days. It still won’t give me his name. Psychological advantage.

I always hated Armament, for the same reason I hate Silhouette. They shoot people. Also, they never gave SecureIT a clear brief. “OK, Secret Squirrel, shoot. I don’t mean that literally by the way. Feel free to make a few more statements you already know the answers to.”

“Smart ass,” says the Armament.

“Look Squirrel, I’m rich, I’m happy, I don’t have to take anything from anybody and it was difficult getting to the point that I can say that with confidence. I didn’t ask you in here, and I don’t have to cooperate. In fact I signed a nondisclosure agreement with SecureIT when I left. What they would prefer and what I would prefer is that you go talk to them instead of me. So. You want me to be nice to you, you start thinking nice thoughts about what a sweet old guy I am and how much you respect me.”

“Age Rage,” he says sweetly, calmly. “You’re a suspect Mr. Brewster, not an information source.” He keeps smiling, and waits for me to fall over in shock.

I just do Mr. Rich Disgusted. I roll my eyes. And hold up my hands like, I live in this place, so why would I have Age Rage?

He keeps his poker smile. “So Mr. Brewster, it is in your own interests to cooperate fully. In the first place Mr. Brewster, it is true that you came up with alot of this stuff, and it is also true that it is all patented in the name of SecureIT and that you didn’t get a bean. Isn’t that so.”

“I got paid,” I say. “A lot. A lot more than you. And I’m smart with my money.”

“Eighty percent, Mr. Brewster. Eighty percent of online crime is by employees or former employees. You fit the profile like a glove. Your profile is in neon lights all around your head.”

I don’t like his attitude. “First thing, I got nothing to do with all this crap. My own granddaughter just got her face burned off so don’t come here with some fairy tale about how I’m a big Age Rage freak.”

He blinks. And I think gotcha. I have no problems pressing my advantages. I go for it. “You dumb fuck, you didn’t come here and not know that Elizabeth Angstrom Brewster is my granddaughter did you? I mean you have read the files, I take it? Victims? Try 13705 Grande Mesa Outlook, apartment 41, Loma Linda, CA.”

And for once Dr. Curtis does something smart. “It would be very difficult indeed for any of our guests to be involved in something unsavoury. You have to understand that for their own protection, our guests are monitored 24-7-365. We know every keystroke on their computers.”

I play along. “Damn right. I can’t even download any porn.”

The Armament’s face settles and his eyes narrow. He’s mad. Somebody he relies on didn’t add up Brewster and Brewster and come up with four. He coughs and blanks out his face. “How did they circumvent the recognition software?”

I answer him like I’m talking to a baby. “They… turned… it… off.”

It was easy after that. I cooperated fully. I didn’t know how it was done. You guys have been on the scene what did you find there? He didn’t wanna say, so I speculated, and I speculated for real. Infrared input, transcoding images? Not EMP, the stuff is hardened against that. Maybe they just broke the box and put their own software in. Maybe, yeah, it was an inside job.

When the Armament left he looked like there was some poor guy back in research was going to get a full body electrolysis for free. We all shook hands.

I’d lucked out. That was all. I was one dumb fuck who’d lucked out. All this VAO uses my stuff. I should just have known they’d think maybe I was part of it. I just didn’t see it coming.

I’m getting old.

And something else.

It was very far from a dumb idea to check out SecureIT staff. I should have thought about it myself. Remember how I said I took one look at Silhouette and thought I knew him?

Well suddenly I realised that I did. I knew who he was, I could think how he used to talk, I knew he still had all his own hair.

I just couldn’t for the life of me remember who he was or where I knew him from. So I’m gaga too. I sat there and ran through every single face in my address book. Nothing. Who?

I am clearly going to spend much of my declining years with people’s names on the tip of my tongue, and no idea whether or not I’ve turned off the gas.

What I’m thinking is: I need something to get the Armament looking somewhere else. The best way to do that would be to ID Silhouette.

That night we’re back in the bar, licking our wounds.

None of the Neurobics Crew got stung. But. The Armament got one old dear for illegal arms trading. Really. She and her son on the outside were dealing in illicit ordnance. That lady had the biggest, highest, roundest widow’s hump I’d ever seen, and I swear she was even more out of it than Jazza. It’s kind of sad and sick and funny at the same time.

Mandy has no time for sympathy. “We’re next.”

Gus is reading the paper and suddenly he drops it and says. “Holy shit. Have you seen this?”

He lays the paper out on the table. “It’s another job,” Gus says.

AGE RAGE ATTACK. VAOs use VAO again.

The CCTV rerun shows the whole thing. The little label says:

Chase Manhattan Bank NYC, 1:00 am this morning.

You’re looking at the inside of a vault and suddenly this iron door starts to rip. You see this claw widen the gap and then nip off some of the raggedy bits, and then they duck inside. This time my jaw drops.

This time they’re wearing firemen’s suits.

Walking exoskeletons that respond to movement pressure from the guys inside them. With training you can wear those things and walk through fire. You can lift up automobiles or concrete girders. You wear those things, you’re Superman for a day.

The old codgers don’t lurch anymore. Those suits weigh tons, but they dance. They duck and dive and ripple and flow. They shimmy, they hop, they look like giant trained fleas.

I’m saying over and over. “It’s brilliant. It’s fucking brilliant.”

I worked on those things. You see, you can’t send in rescue workers carrying hydrocarbon fuel or nuclear power on their backs and even those suits can’t carry enough ordinary batteries. So you beam the power at them. You beam microwaves. All you do if there is a disaster is you turn on your VAO, and the microwaves fuel the suits.

About the only people my software is programmed never to zap are rescue workers in exoskeletons.

Carte Blanche. We’ve given them Carte fucking Blanche and her sister Sadie too.

All four of them move like fingers playing piano. They scamper up to rows of strong boxes and just haul them out of the wall.

The suits already have these huge blue tubs on their backs. Nobody likes to say, but they’re for the body bags. The crew just dumps everything into them-heirloom jewellery and bearer bonds and old passports for new identities. Bullion or rare stamps. For the suits, it all just weighs a feather.

I say. “They’re not going for virtual. They’re going for atoms.”

Mandy turns and looks at me like I’m a lizard. “Well duh! That’s why they call it burglary.”

Just then the bank’s security guards come running in. They’re covered head to toe in foil, so they can’t be area-denied. They start shooting.

You’ve never seen anything as beautiful as the movement in those mechanical arms. The old guys inside don’t have to do a thing. The arms just weave magic carpets in the air. And they go ping ping ping like harps as the bullets hit off them, and they flash like fireworks.

Then the suits coil and spring, and one of them grabs a guard by his head and throws him three yards straight into the wall. The guard kinda hangs there for a second and starts to slide down it. Through the back of the silver suit, blood gets sprayed in a pattern like a butterfly. The guard hits the ground stays sitting, his head dumped forward. He looks like the bridegroom after a stag party.

I don’t see what happened to other guards, but it looked messier. He’s nothing but a shape in the corner.

And then these beautiful suits turn to the cameras and wave like astronauts. They put a hand on each other’s shoulders. And they dance off in line, like Dorothy and her tin men.

And Jazza is still staring at the strip lights.

I say, “This is one problem we gotta own.”

Mandy barks a laugh. “Hell, I was thinking of running off and joining them. That looked like a lotta fun.”

“Those guards got kids,” says Gus. From the look on his face, I don’t think he likes Mandy much right now.

“We gotta get information and we gotta get it to the cops.” I tell them. “We all got to start hacking. I can get into SecureIT.”

Gus is still in pain. He can’t get the guards out of his head. “You reckon the company that sold that video will use any of the money to help their families?”

Thug says. “What do we hack?”

I got this one sussed. “They either bought those suits or they stole them. Either way they’ll be a transaction or a report. The manufacturers are called…”

Great, I draw a blank. I hate this, I really hate this. Just before despair comes, I remember the name. “XOsafe. XOsafe Ltd. They’re in Portland.”

Mandy cuts in. “The first thing I’m doing is take care of my own business so I have some money. That’ll take a while.” Suddenly she looks down and says in lower voice. “Then maybe I can look at who the guys in the crews are, OK?”

It’s probably as close to an apology as Mandy can get. Since nobody ever apologised to her.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she tells me and goes off.

I go and give Bessie a call. “How ya doing, babe?”

“Aw, grand Dad,” she says soft and faraway and grateful. She tries to sound like it’s all covered, skin grafts etc but it can’t be covered, it can never be covered. You see she was confident, she was sussed, and I’m scared. I’m scared it will make her timid when she used to be so up front.

All I can say is, “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, you’re the Brewster. Nothing gets you down.”

“We’re going to get him for you, babe,” I promise.

I retrieve my transcoder, which is a more delicate operation than sticking it was. I get my glasses back and go to Jazza’s room because I want to use his station to hack. Never put an old hack back from the same place. I go to his room but he’s not there. I keep the lights low, and make like I’m loading my pro golf program onto his machine. Money starts flowing back into my account but from a different source this time.

After a while I ask: where is Jazza?

I go back to the bar. My crew’s not there. Neither is Jazza. Oh god, he’s wandered again.

I get worried; I turn on his terminal to trace his bracelet. It’s pumping out signals. It’s coming from the shower. But there’s no shower running.

At our age, you’re always thinking in the back of your head: who’s going to go next? And I’m thinking maybe this time it’s Jazza. I can just about see him crumpled up on the floor. So I go to that shower with everything in my chest all shrivelled shut like a fist. I turn on the light, and there’s no Jazza there.

Just his bracelet on the shower floor.

Oh fuck. I push the buzzer. It seems to take an age. They’ve done these experiments that show why we always think a second is longer than it really is. The brain is always anticipating. It starts measuring time from the thought, not the vision. So I cling on to the buzzer saying come on, come on.

I think of all those times I check Jazza’s buzzer before going to bed. Jazza nice, and secure in his bed, it shows, or Jazza happy in the shower.

Has he done this before? You see Alzheimer’s, they wander off, they try to buy ice cream in the middle of the night in a suburb or they pack a couple of telephone directories and go catch a plane. They don’t understand, they feel trapped, sometimes they get frustrated and start to punch. They disappear and leave you to worry and grieve and hope all at the same time.

“We find him, don’t worry Mr. Brewster,” says the Kid.

So I see them, on the lawn, with flashlights. A light little feather duster of a thought brushes past me: the ordnance is turned off. The lights dance around the trees. The bricks in the wall are lit from underneath like a Halloween face.

Nothing.

I haul myself off to bed, and the callipers are really doing it to the side of my knees, scraping the skin, and I’m old and I just don’t sleep. Here in the Happy Farm there aren’t even passing car lights on the ceiling to look at. There’s only walls, and what’s up ahead, closer now. At night.

When you’re old you got a few things left and one of them is your promises. You can keep a promise as slow as you like, and as fast as you can, just so long as you don’t give up. I promised Bessie. I turn on my machine and hack.

Who knows SecureIT like me? Well, it’s been a few years. I get to work through a whole new bunch of stuff, but I do get into the Human Resource files. I mean, who would want to hack personnel, right? Just everybody.

And I go through every name, every face, every voiceprint recording. I see a face, I know it, but only sort of. I know that girl, sort of. She went and got a patent out on a new polymer, then joined. Real scholarly, real pretty, real nice legs. And I realise hell, she’ll be 40 now. She left years and years ago. After I did.

I see some old guy like me, pouchy cheeks and glasses and I can’t place him at all, except there’s a weird sensation in my chest, like I’m a time traveller. I used to say hi to that face every day.

One after another after another. Who are these people, being replaced?

One guy I knew now heads up a department. What? He was nothing. He was a plodder. Guess what? That’s who becomes head of the department.

I look a skinny, hollow staring scared face and I suddenly realise, shoot, that’s Tommy. Tommy was a nice young kid who taught himself to program, he had talent. Now he’s staring out at me wide-eyed with creases round his mouth like he’s been surprised by something. Like failure, like going nowhere. It makes me want to get in there and sort it out, and tell them, no you got it wrong, this guy’s got talent, you’re supposed to use it for something!

It makes me want to show up again every day at 8:00 am, and work my butt off, and take the kids out for a drink. It makes me want to make something happen again, even if it’s just in some little job in an office.

And I look at face after face and there is no Silhouette. There just is no Silhouette.

And then I find my own record. I see my own face staring out at me. Hey, maybe that guy’s Silhouette.

First time I saw that photograph I couldn’t take it, I thought that’s not me, that’s not the Brewster, who is that old, double-chinned geezer? Now, I look at it and I’ve got most of my hair and it’s black, and think how young I look.

And I read my record, and it tells the story of a middle manager who got a couple of promotions. It doesn’t say I came up with loop recognition iterations. It doesn’t say I was the first guy to use quantum computers on security work. It doesn’t say I was the guy who first told the CE about ISO 20203 and that getting registered to that standard got us Singapore and Korea and finally China.

What it does have is my retirement date. And then it says down at the bottom. “Left without visible security compromises. No distinguishing features.”

No fucking distinguishing features. What was I expecting, a thank you? A corporation that tried to credit its employees? I guess I was expecting that since I did some pretty extraordinary stuff for them, big stuff, stuff that got a whole congress of my peers on their feet and applauding, I guess I somehow thought I’d made some kind of mark. But they don’t want you to make a mark. They want that mark for themselves. But they don’t get it either.

We just all go down into the dark.

And I feel the fear start up.

Oh you can blank out the fear. You can turn and walk away from it. Or you can let it paralyse you. The one thing you can’t do is what you would do with any other fear. You can’t just turn and walk right at it. It won’t go away. Because this fear is the fear of something that can only be accepted.

The only thing you can do with death is accept it, and if you do that at our age, it’s too close to dying. You accept it, and it can come for you.

You get something like angry instead. You do what you do when you’re trapped. You writhe.

I can’t stay still. I go lolloping and limping like I’m stoned and drunk at the same time, because my room is like a coffin and the dark is like my eyes will never open. I go off down the corridor hobbling and jerking like some kind of goddamn puppet that something else is making move. I’m slamming my ribs against the wall and I don’t care.

And then I see a light under Mandy’s door. I don’t have my shirt on, but what the fuck. I’m scared. And I can’t afford to let myself stay scared. I knock on her door.

“Kinda early for socialising,” she says. She checks out my sagging pecs. “Are you inviting me for a swim?”

She still has her make up on, she looks sussed, she looks great, she looks like it’s a big bright beautiful Saturday.

For me, everything starts to fall back down into normal. “I… I just need to talk. Do you mind?”

“Not much. I hate nights as well.” She walks off and leaves her door open.

Her room smells of perfume. On the bed there are about eight stuffed toys… puppy dogs, turtles. On the shelf there is a huge lavender teddy bear, still wrapped in cellophane with a giant purple bow.

“I got nothing,” she says, and flings her fake fingernails at the TV screen. For a second I think she means nothing in her life. Then I get it: she’s been hacking. On the screen are eight old faces and the photo of the guy who mugged my granddaughter.

I take a chair, and I start to feel strong again. “Me neither,” I say, meaning I got nothing out of SecureIT. “I’m… uh… kinda surprised that you’re doing this so openly.”

“Are you kidding? We’re doing our bit to catch Silhouette. I want any brownie points that are going.”

That TV is pointed straight at the surveillance. I gotta smile.

“You’re smart,” I say.

“Oh wow, really? Like I didn’t know that without you telling me.” She looks at me like I’m bumwipe.

I like her. “So has anybody else said you’re smart recently?”

She nods. She accepts. “Most people don’t give a fuck what you are so long as you can pay.”

“You got any family?” I lean forward, into the conversation. I want to hear.

“No,” she says, just with her lips, no sound. She breathes out through her nose. “I got property instead.”

“For real.” I understand. I flick my eyebrows. It’s like: so why do you have to hack, then? . She gets it. She answers the question without having to hear it. “Keeps the brain in gear,” she says. “Beats talking to teddy bears.”

“At least you got one smart person to talk to.”

“Who?” She turns around and she’s dripping scorn, expecting some egotistical guy kind of remark.

I lean forward again. “You.”

“Oh.” She looks down and finally smiles. “Yeah, OK, I’m smart. Thanks. You want a whisky while you’re sitting there?”

“That’d be great.”

“Just a few more months in Neurobics and a six month course of PDA will replace the neurons you’re destroying.”

And I say, “Maybe I’ll die first.” It’s not such a joke.

She turns with the glass. “I hope not. Here.”

Mandy tells me about how she bought land in Goa and sold it for a dream. She talks about investing in broadband pipes while she was in her twenties so she could get out of lapdancing. She really did lap dance. I try to get her to talk more about herself. The only thing I get out of her is that she lived with her mother in a trailer until her Mom met a car dealer and they settled into a little bungalow in Jersey. “I’d go into my room and run shootemups on my video. I kept pretending I was shooting him.”

Finally I say, “I better go and see if they found Jazza.”

She nods and we both get up. And she says to me, “It’s real cool the way you still look out for him after all these years.”

I say, “He’s part of my crew.”

“Come off it,” she says. “He’s the only crew you got.” But she says it in a real sweet way.

The next morning, I got a mail on my TV.

It’s from the Kid. They’ve found Mr. Novavita on a Greyhound bus going to south Maryland. Jazza hasn’t lived in Maryland since he was a kid and his parents moved to Jersey. How the hell did he do that?

They bring him back in about noon and he looks like the night has been beating him up: purple cheeks, brown age spots, clumps of thick greasy grey. It wasn’t the night: this is how Mr. Novavita looks now and keep forgetting that. But he still climbs trees.

“He’ll be OK. He’ll sleep,” says the Kid.

I see his glasses on the table, and there’s another feather duster thought. “He was wearing these?”

I put them on. There’s a transcoder, but it’s built right into the arm. High tech. Higher than mine. There’s glowing fire all along the Kid’s arm. Heat vision. For night?

“Fancy glasses,” I say.

I go down to my crew. We’re all hacked back, so we’re sorted for cash flow. Thug has done some work on the suits. He has this little radio he plays, so they can’t snoop our dialogue.

Thug says, “XOsafe’s iced solid. So we hacked into the police files.”

“What!” My voice sounds like an air pump on arctic ice.

“We have a plant on the police computer,” says Jojo. Tells us whenever we’re mentioned. We added Brewster. Got a lot. They reckon Silhouette could be you.”

“What, ME?”

Mandy just barks, and waves at the smoke like she’s waving away the dumbest thing she’s ever heard.

I’m still stuck in high gear. “They think I’m Silhouette!”

“You were the prime suspect. Until your own granddaughter got it.”

I’m outraged. “Dumb shits!”

Jojo says: “Not so dumb, apparently. There’s a line they’ve been following, right into the Happy Farm.”

Mandy barks. “Oh I don’t believe it. This place?”

I take a look at her cheekbones. There’s this funny tickle in my head. It’s recognition. Of something. All of a sudden it’s like I’m hearing someone else ask her, “Is it you?”

Only it’s me that said it. The room goes cold. The radio plays dorky lounge. “Mandy. I asked are you Silhouette?” What I mean by this is strange: I really want to tell her don’t worry, we’ll protect you if you are, I kind of feel like I’ve said that. But that’s not what’s coming out. Actually, I’m just not in control. Because, as you will see, there’s something else going on here.

Mandy’s face kind of melts. All the lines in it sag, like she holds them up by constant effort. Her eyes go hollow and suddenly you see how she would look if she let herself become a little old lady. Hurt, confused. She shakes her head and the jowls go in different directions. She stands up and her hands are shaking. “Dumb old fucks.”

I get a feeling like I’ve just been real mean to someone, who I shouldn’t be mean to. And I don’t know why.

Gus shouts after her. “You haven’t exactly shown much concern about the people they hurt.”

I go gallumphing after her in my callipers. “C’mon Mandy, nothing personal.” She just shows me her back. “Mandy?”

She spins around and she’s got a face like a cornered porcupine. “Space off!”

“Mandy, the cops think there’s a line out on this stuff from here and they’re not dumb.”

Her eyes point towards the floor. She’s talking to the air. She’s talking to her entire life. “Every time I think maybe, just maybe, there’s somebody who has any idea… who just… SEES! ME! That’s when I get kicked in the teeth again.” She looks up with eyes like a mother tiger, and she’s sick and mad. “Just space off back to your little crew. Go play your little boy games.” Her voice goes thin like mist. “I don’t have time.”

None of us have.

“I’m sorry.”

She stays put, staring out through the grey window onto the lawn.

“Mandy. I’m sorry. You know why I asked? It’s because I know I know that face under the black stuff. I’m sure I know who it is, if I could just remember. And for a flash I thought… hey. Who says Silhouette is a guy? I just said it, the minute I thought it. I’m sorry.”

She turns and looks back at me. Unimpressed. Tired. “I found something out,” she says. “I was so proud of myself. I actually thought, Brewster’ll be pleased.” She sniffed and pulled in some air. “I got the faces of the guys in the suits, and the guys who mugged your granddaughter. I kept running ’em though, all night long. The cops must know this. But.”

She looks so tired. She looks like she’s going to fall asleep standing up.

“All those guys have Alzheimer’s.”

I let that sink in. Mandy didn’t move. It was as if her whole body was swelling up to cry. She just kept staring out the window.

“Alzheimer’s?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of like Attack of the Zombies? We lose our minds and they send us in to steal. We’re just bodies, meat. They won’t need us for even that soon.”

The grey light through the grey window, on her nose, on her cheeks. It made her beautiful.

I thought of the glasses on the bed, with built-in transcoders. The glasses will tell you who your friends are. They’ll tell you it’s time to take your pill. They’ll tell you that you have a plane to catch, and how to get out of the Happy Farm and where the pickup point is.

I think cheekbones. I think a shrivelled cricket’s face.

“Oh shit,” I say, like my stomach’s dropping out. “Oh, SHIT!” Already I’m walking.

“Brewst?” Mandy kind of asks. Godamn callipers. I’m hobbling up and down like a fishing cork, I’m trying to run and I can’t.

“Brewst. What is it?”

Hey, you know, tears, are streaming down my face? I suddenly feel them. My elbow kind of knocks them off my face. Those bastards, those bastards are making me cry.

“Brewster? Wait.”

Mandy’s tripping after me.

And all I can think is: Jazza. Jazza, you’re worth so much more than that. You used to design things, mix music, girls would look at you with stars in their eyes. Ahhhhccceeeeed! Dancing with your shirt off on the brow of a bridge, young and strong and smart and beautiful. Jazza.

You’re not just a meat puppet, Jazza. I hope.

I’m still crying, and I’m bumping into things because I can’t see.

Back in his room Jazza is sitting up on the edge of his bed staring, looking at the corners of the ceiling like he can’t figure them out. I sit and stare and look at the flesh that’s as shrivelled as his life tight all around his wrists, his ankles his skull, his cheeks.

I’m aware that Mandy’s standing next to me.

I put on Jazza’s glasses. I try a couple of passwords: Age Rage, Silhouette. Nothing. Then I take a stab at something else:

Iron Man.

And then his glasses say to me. “Where did you read comics as a boy?”

I say back. “Trees.”

And there’s a flash of light, brighter than the sun, up into my eyes, into my head. And I know for certain then. It’s checking my retinas.

Then it all goes dark. I’m not Jazza. So the program won’t open, but hey, it doesn’t need to open.

I look at the face again, just to be sure.

“Mandy,” I croak, and I’m real glad she’s there. “Meet Silhouette.”

And the only thing I’m feeling is gratitude. I’m just glad that Jazza was more than a zombie. I’m just glad that he was more than that. I still can’t quite see, my eyes inside are dappled by the retina check. I’m thinking of all the times he did freelance for me: on the software, on all that VAO. He worked on it, he would know how all the ordnance cooked.

And I get it.

You see, you’re this smart guy. You’ve buzzed all your life, but there’s no money, and you’re losing your mind. Maybe you get told by some young stuck-up intern doing time on the social programs that he’s real sorry that your insurance won’t pay for the drugs. You’re poor so you get to lose your marbles. So you get mad. You get mad at everybody, at the world, at God. You turn all your brain onto one final thing. You plan ahead, for when you’re gaga and beyond being charged or convicted. You invent Silhouette and store him up, and set the bugs loose to search for a new kind of crew.

You get your revenge.

Mandy takes my arm and shakes it. “Brewst. Brewster,” she says. All she can see is some sad old fuck dissolving into tears. She can’t understand that I’m crying because I’m happy. I can’t understand it either.

I just know in my butt: Jazza thought of this.

“He was Silhouette,” I say, and breathe in deep.

“How?” demands Mandy. Hand on hip, Mandy won’t buy just any fairy story.

I feel reasonably cool again as well.

“Silhouette’s not a person, its a program, a series of programs that all work on the same algorithms. The programs take you over, tell you what to do, how to do it. Maybe what to say. Maybe you get to be Silhouette for a while and if you’re gaga enough you won’t even know it. So trace Silhouette then. One week he’s in Atlanta, the next he’s in LA, the next week he’s in New York. They’ll be hacked into the glasses. The glasses and the terminals and the crude little chips in your head.”

I go to Jazza’s machine. And look for the files. I won’t be able to open any of them, of course, but of course there is a whole directory. Anything encrypted is enough to get you. The directory is called Aphrodite. What we called our spaceship to Mars. Everything in it’s encrypted and the file sizes are huge. That ain’t no banking hack.

“That’s it,” I say. “That’s the masterplan.”

I look back at Jazza. He looks like a little boy in a bus station waiting for his Mom to show up before the bus goes.

I open up the e-mail package and start keying in. I shop Jazza. It’s painless. Just an e-mail to Curtis, to the Armament. Over in two minutes. And all the while I’m doing it, I feel proud. Proud of him.

“Sorry, Jazza.” I tell him. I take hold of his hands. That makes me feel better. “They’ll wipe the program. That’s all. No more trips to Maryland.”

He looks back at me like a baby. He’s not sure who I am, but he trusts me.

Five minutes later, the Kid slips in.

“Sorry Mr. Brewster,” he says quietly. “Sorry it was your friend.”

The Kid comes from a country where people are still human. The sorrow is upfront in his eyes.

I ask him. “What’s Curtis doing?”

“Damage limitation.” It’s the kind of jargon you learn early in our part of the world. It eats your soul. “He worry about the Home.”

“His own ass,” corrects Mandy.

The Kid can’t help but smile. But he sticks to the point. “You do right thing, Mr. Brewster.”

Isn’t it great how people can still care about each other? Isn’t it some kind of miracle sometimes?

This time the cops show up in a plain car, and this time it’s IT specialists not Armament. They start going through Jazza’s station. Jazza starts to sing to himself, some dumb old toon about everybody being free, it’s all love, let’s just party down. Did we really think that was all it took?

He lets them take away his machine, and he just curls up on the bed, back to us all. I say something corny like “Sleep well, old friend.”

And the Kid says, “I watch him for you, Mr. Brewster.”

Mandy and I slump off to the bar and the Neurobics are all there before but before we can say anything Gus jumps us and says, “you guys gotta see this!”

Mandy says. “Do we?”

The whole crew are leaning over the newspaper. “I’ll rerun it,” says Gus.

“Fasten your seat belt,” says Mandy, and she gives me a long look like: I’m tired of these bozos.

On the newspaper is a wall of people and the label says:

Latest VAO attack SHU TZE STADIUM 8.35 pm last night.

The whole thing looks like diamonds, huge overhead lights, flashing cameras, halfway through a night game. Gus has plugged in his speakers, so we get the TV announcer too, and the sound of the crowd. The camera moves to a big guy on the mound chewing gum, thumping the ball into his mitt, and looking pissed off.

Over the stands a kind of rectangle just hangs in midair. It looks like it should be there, just part of the stadium, you have to blink to realize its hovering. It’s a rescue platform, designed for getting people out of tall buildings in midair. It looks as small as a postage stamp, only it’s crowded with exoskeletons.

On all the tall cathedral lights, red lights start flashing and sirens rouse themselves.

One announcer says, “That’s the fire alarm, John.”

“Yup and those are firemen. Though I have to say right now, I can’t see any sign of a fire.”

“If there is, John, official figures estimate that it takes 15-20 minutes to clear the stands here at Shu Tze Stadium.”

On the field the players stand morose and still, hands on hips. Their show is over.

Firemen stumble off the platform. It bobs. Close up, the platform is more unstable than a rowboat. The suits hop down, straighten up and start to jog up the steps through the stands. You can see it now that there’s a lot of them in unison: the suits move in unison.

On the field one of the fat little umpires is running as fast as he can.

A police car comes driving straight onto the diamond.

“Certainly something is happening here at She Tze, Marie, but it may not be a fire. That’s Lee van Hook, manager of the Cincinnati Reds getting out of the police vehicle. And he’s waving his hands, yes, he’s waving the players off the field!”

You hear a crunching. It’s a nasty goose-stepping sound, and the camera blurs back to the stands. All the suits have raised automatic weapons at once. And they’re jammed straight at the crowd.

Speakers crackle and a feedback whine shoots round the stadium.

And a voice like Neptune bubbling out of the sea says, “This is a public service announcement.”

Announcer cuts in. “John, reports are saying this is a VAO attack.”

“You are going to help the aged. You will pass all valuables, watches, wallets, jewellery to the men and women with the guns.

“Just to repeat that, we are witnessing a VAO attack here live at She Tze Stadium.”

The digital gurgle goes on. “For your own safety please remember, that some of the people with the guns will die soon and have nothing to lose. Many of them cannot think for themselves and so will shoot anyone who resists.”

A kind of roar is spreading all through the crowd.

“You won’t pay taxes. You won’t let us into your houses. We save and plan and invest and insure and in the end that still is NOT enough. What you should do is love us. It’s too late for love, now. Now is the time for money. What you are going to do now is give us your wallets.”

Some fat guy in a baseball cap is shouting. An exo arm is raised. The suit is like a metal cage around some ancient old dear, and you can see that she’s blinking and confused. I realize all the CCTV is on, and it’s edited out later. That’s entertainment.

The gun goes off. The fat man ducks and yelps, but his hat has already spun off his head. Those suits can aim to within a fraction of a millimetre.

“That’s one move he won’t pull again in a hurry,” says announcer John. He chuckles, like it’s a wrestling match. This stuff, you react to it like a movie. It performs the same function.

All along the rows, a gentle sideways motion begins towards the suits, like a rippling river. It all looks so gentle and calm. On the field police cars pull up and rub noses like it’s a BBQ on a bank by a river on a summer’s day.

The announcers can only tell us what we can see for ourselves. But you know, it becomes more real when they say it. “John, it looks like the police on the field are conferring with both the team heads and stadium security managers.”

“It’s a real problem for them, Marie. How can they apprehend the VAO without injuring any of the fans?”

The great burbling voice begins again. “What do you think of, when you see us? Do you think getting old is something we did to ourselves? Do you think it won’t happen to you? Do you think you won’t get ugly, sick, and weak? Do you think health foods, gyms, and surgery are going to stop that? We’re going to go now. But just remember. Your kids are watching you. And learning. What you do to us, your kids will do to you.”

The crowd is kind of silent, no motion, just a kind of hush, as if the sea had decided to be still. The siren goes round and round, but you have the feeling no one’s listening. The suits march the old guys inside them back down from the stands towards the rescue platform.

The weirdest thing: some kid in a foilsuit helps one of the VAOs up. And I realise that they understand. They’re halfway there, all these people in this stadium, with their soyaburgers and beer and team shirts. They’re halfway there to being on our side.

You got to them Jazza.

And the platform snores itself awake and coughs and whirs, and sort of tilts a bit getting up, like all of us old stereotypes. But once it’s steady, it soars straight up.

And Jazza stands. Just stands still. The program has given him nothing to do, but’s also like he’s finished. He looks up to the sky, like he always does now, up at nothing. He stands like a king on the prow of his ship praying to heaven, and sails away.

And oh god I’m leaking again. Mandy can’t look at me. Her mouth does a bitter little twist and she says. “Silhouette was Jazza…”

Gus says, “What?”

I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to explain or talk or do anything at all, but I can’t sit still either. I feel sick. I feel messed up. I feel angry. I stand up and lurch out of there. Gus calls after me. “Hey, Brewst, what is this? Brewst?”

I’m walking and I don’t know where or why. I walk into the Solarium and walk into the gym, and walk into the garden, and I go to the library but that only has books, and in the end, there’s only one place to go.

I go back to Jazza’s room. The Kid is still there, like he said he would be. “Scram,” I tell him.

I really look at Jazza. I think that maybe he was going back to Maryland for one last time. Maybe he was going to climb a tree and just stay there.

I’m thinking how we lose everything. Everything we were, everything we made ourselves into. If you were strong that goes, if you were smart that goes, if you were cool that goes.

Jazza’s face is brown and blue like a map. He’s sitting up but his head has dropped backwards, so he’s staring up at the ceiling with his mouth pulled open. His blue eyes go straight through me to nowhere, like he’s looking for an answer but forgot the question.

And that’s when I finally say to myself. He’s gone. Jazza leaked away a long, long time ago. There’s been nothing left of Jazza for months. So I let him go.

I’m not too clear about the whole show after that.

Armament comes back and tries to sound like they’re going to be tough on my ass. Secret Squirrel keeps asking the same questions over and over. The message is: if we find you had anything to do with this, we’ll still get you.

The Armament looks at me. “We know about your hacks. That’ll have to stop.”

Curtis stands there watching, and he starts to squirm a bit and look in my direction.

“Given that you cooperated, we may take a tolerant view of that. But only if you continue to cooperate, only if the attacks stop.”

What I do next is deliberate. I turn to Curtis and shrug and apologise with my eyes. That’s all it takes. Secret Squirrel snaps his head round at Curtis’s, and narrows his eyes.

“24 by 7 by 365, huh?” Armament says in a quiet little voice.

He’s got it. I shrug an apology to Curtis again, just to drive my point home.

Curtis goes edgy, jumpy, mean. “Well. Well, if that means what I think it does, you cannot continue to be a guest here, Mr. Brewster.”

After that, things moved quick.

I told Bill about the hack and the police and it was decided. I would live with my boy. It’s just a beaten-up old bungalow on the Jersey side. Like the kind of house I grew up in, when computers were new and cool, and everything was new and cool from shoes to playing cards and you had takeaway pizza for dinner. Even Mom was cool with headphones. Hot in summer with screen doors for the flies, and dry and warm in winter.

I’m on the phone to Bill and I say, “At least I’ll get out of this goddamned dump.”

There’s a minute silence and then Bill says. “Dad. They’ve worked miracles for you.”

And I think about the neurobics and how my legs are learning to walk, and I have to acknowledge that. So I guess I can lose being mad at the Farm. I guess I can feel I got a pretty good deal.

I go to see Mandy. I fill her in. She says. “You’re the only man here with any cool whatsoever.” She’s got a face like the badlands of Arizona. And I don’t know why but right now, that’s as sexy as fuck.

Remember that transcoder jammed into my dick? Found a new use for it.

So I’m lying there with all the teddy bells and the scent of Miss Dior and I say to Mandy. “Come to Jersey with me.”

She looks down and says, “Oh boy.” Then she says, “I gotta think.”

I ask her, “What’s to think?”

“Baby. If I wanted a bungalow in Jersey, I could have had it. Here, I got a Solarium, I got quiet, I got my own room.”

“You dumb cluck. You’ll be alone.”

I see her looking at different futures. I see her get the fear. It makes all the skin of her face sag like old chamois leather. I hold her and hug her and kiss the top of her dyed conditioned perfumed hair. I try to open up things for her. “Come and be part of my family, babe. Bill’s a great kid; he’ll let us stay up late drinking whisky. We’ll watch old DVDs. They’ll be people round at Thanksgiving.”

And her head is shaking no. “I’ll be stuck in one tiny bedroom, with someone else’s family. That’s where I started out.”

She grunts and slaps my thigh. “I can’t do it.” She sits up and lights a cigarette and then she lets me have it straight.

“I danced for fat old men. I’d get into a bath with other women and they’d look at our cunts through a pane of glass. I was that far from being a whore. I took the money and I got smart with it, and I kept it. Even though asshole after asshole man tried to take it away from me. This, here, fancy pants Happy Farm is my reward.”

She takes a breath and says. “I’m too scared to go to Jersey.”

“I’ll come and see you,” I say. She doesn’t believe me, and I’m not entirely sure I do either.

So suddenly I’m standing outside the Happy Farm, and thank God they’re not currently microwaving anybody, and I’m saying goodbye to the place and you know, I think I’ll miss it. Mandy isn’t there. Gus is there, which is big of him, and he shakes my hand like maybe he thinks he’ll get Mandy back. But I can see. His arms are thin like sucked-on pens, and his tummy is big like a boil. Gus isn’t going to be with us long.

The Kid comes, and he brings his sweet tiny little wife with him. She’s rehearsed something to say in English. She says it with her eyes closed and giggles afterwards. “Thank you very much Mr. Brewster you have been so good to my Joao.” And then she holds up her beautiful new baby daughter for me to see.

Life goes on. And then it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean anything. Which means that death doesn’t mean anything, either. It means that while you’re here you can do what the hell you want.

I took off the callipers. I wanted to show them that I could do it. I walked for all of us old farts with no money, all the way to the bus. Bill caught me and helped me up the steps.

I looked around for Jazzanova, but he wasn’t there, and never will be.

One thing those bastards don’t know about is the hack that pays Jazza’s bills. It’s a one-off on the bank’s system. It’s not on my machine or on Jazza’s. Curtis doesn’t know that and the Armament doesn’t know that. We’re gonna keep Jazza cared for.

And all I’m feeling is one solid lump of love. I give the Farm one last wave goodbye and go home.

Total buzz.