ol drove with her brights on, squinting out into pouring rain. The wipers beat like an anxious heart, sluicing the water back and forth across the wet windshield.
Her backseat was filled with scavenged books; and so that was a success. But the guys at the dump had made her wait; and now it was late: too late to be driving alone. She’d already texted her dad, but he was at a meeting.
People said that you could come around a bend in the road to find a blockade. They said it was quick. The highwaymen faded back into the trees with all of your dreamcreds before the patrols answered the distress beacon.
Her dad used to go with her on these trips. But the physical books just weren’t as important to him as they were before her mom had left them. He was obsessed with making revolutionary pedagogy go viral. Paper books don’t go viral.
The rain was really pouring now and she slowed. Her brights bit into something up ahead. A person?
A lone figure normally meant “lucido,” but this abandoned strip of country was too thin for that.
She saw the outstretched arm. Someone with car trouble? She peered through the waves of rain but saw no car.
As she slowed, his face grew steadily paler in the harsh brights-light. Curious, she slowed a little further, until she saw a young man about her own age, soaking wet and squinting into her lights, hand shading his eyes, a baffled look on his face, his thumb out.
As the boy’s brights-white face flashed through across her vision, she felt the disorientating transplant of deja vu. Why was his face familiar? She slowed the car a little further after she’d passed until she was nearly stopped.
And suddenly it was illuminated: the operator boy who had come to her father to learn to read. What was he doing lost on the side of the highway in the rain?
And then in a second, she decided to pick him up.
She pulled over to the side of the road and beeped her horn, her tires crunching on the decaying shoulder. He ran to catch the car. As he came closer, she noticed—like before—that his datasignature was distinctly operator.
What the fuck am I doing? she thought.
But she interrupted herself, reaching into the silence that was close to the surface of her soul. She had to be careful. She moved into hot emotions quickly, but if she stayed there, she’d wake the recorder. But she hadn’t felt its unmistakable internal click as it clicked on and started to feed on carbohydrates in the blood, sapping her energy slightly.
She muffled herself in slow, deep thoughts, mixing in slowly the mundane things of her everyday life: her bookshelf, the flashing colors of the green and yellow forest. Her mother before she left them. She reached for the centering presence and found it in calming waves.
The boy reached the car and pulled up on the handle to open it, but the outside handle was broken, so it fell back with a dull thunk.
He cupped his hand over his eyes to peer into the dark car until she reached over to pull the latch, cracking the door.
He opened the door and climbed in. “Thank you! I thought no one was gonna stop.”
Isaac looked over at her noticing that she was beautiful, mestizo, his own age, and a vac. He felt suddenly bashful and stammered, “Desculpe. Puedo hablar espanol si prefieres. Prefiere.”
Then he stopped. “Wait. You’re the girl from the bookseller’s. Aren’t you?”
The rain bass-drummed against the windows, persistent, but he seemed not to notice, an air of unattached enthusiasm persisting through his awkward position. Water dripped from light-brown hair across his fierce green eyes and his nose jutted forward inquisitively.
She liked him. “I’m Sol,” she stuck out her hand, reaching across the table.
He shook. “I’m Isaac. Thanks for picking me up.”
“What was I gonna do, leave you out there?” She grinned at him. “So, where are you headed?” She put the car into first, accelerating onto the empty highway.
“North is good. I mean, back toward the city.”
She looked him over: his basesuit soaked was to his skin and his clothes projection was missing. She shifted into fourth gear. “I’m headed that way. So. I don’t want to be Captain Obvious here, but you’re an operator. What are you doing in the middle of this godforsaken thinspace?”
“Right? Last thing I remember, I was drinking a beer with The Jaguar. I woke up the middle of that field back there. All my dreamcreds gone. My car gone.” He gestured back down the highway with his thumb.
“So wait, he just drugged you and took all your stuff? Then, what, dumped you here to wake up?”
“Yep. My car, my creds, everything,” he said.
“Wow. That’s rough. So why are you hitchhiking? Can’t you just call your folks and have them pick you up?”
Isaac rolled his eyes. “They would kill me. If I really left the Mind, I’d probably never see them again. Plus, how would I even explain what happened?”
“Right,” said Sol, drumming her fingers on wheel in thought. What a strange operator. “So why were you visiting the Jaguar?”
Isaac looked over. Illuminated by the instrument panel glow, the lines of her face were smooth and strong: lines left by honesty and clarity of purpose. He felt a connection to her.
“Well.” He waffled for a moment. Then he decided. “I was looking to hack my mindscreen.”
“Hack your mindscreen? Nobody can do that.”
“Really? Because they said the Jaguar could. Can’t somebody?”
“They’re wrong. That’s encrypted one-thousand and twenty-four characters deep. So are all the access codes to the net. Unique.”
“Yeah I know but I thought there must be a—”
“There isn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Well—because, look. Because I know, that’s all.”
A pause stretched out between them. *She knows something,* thought Isaac.
“So. Most operators don’t really leave the lucids. Why do *you* want to hack your mindscreen?”
He blew out a long breath. “Man. I’ve been wanting it out of my skull for a long time. It’s up in every single one of my fucking thoughts. I can’t think straight. I can’t remember straight. And I don’t know who I am. I was trying to fight it. To learn how to be me. But it keeps pressing back. But gradually I started to realize that I don’t have the full picture. There’s a great big hole at the center. I don’t even know how to start to struggle against the Mind because the Mindnet is only source of knowledge there is. But the harder I press, the crazier shit gets. A guy I know got set up to fall, and I was supposed to watch. A threat. So, what was I gonna do? I can’t take this shit in my mind anymore.”
“But you can’t fight it. How old are you? Sixteen? You’re well into the puberty suppositories.” She wondered how deep her mom’s mindspider had grown.
“Well…” he smiled at her.
“Oh! So you aren’t taking them?”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“Sorry. Right. Did you ever learn how to read?”
“No. I think I’ve made some progress. Sometimes I think I can see a pattern, or I can read the lines, if they are thick or thin, sloppy or neat. At least I’m not querying it anymore.”
Sol laughed. “Querying a book? What, looking for a prompt?”
Isaac looked sheepish, “Yeah. I mean, how else would it work? But now I know that I need a dictionary. Like your dad said.”
“If that’s really all you need, I have one of those in the back,” she said.
“Really?” he said, turning around and catching sight of the tattered brown box filled nearly to overflowing with books.
“Yeah. The red one on top,” she said. “Have a look.”
Isaac turned around and pulled a large red book from the stack.
He took it into his hand with reverence. Its time-yellowed pages seemed to glow slightly in the dark. Was that real or an artifact of the Mind? He opened it and waited. After a moment, he looked up at her.
“So how do you install this thing?”
She laughed again and shook her head. “You don’t query a book! You have to read it. You look up words that you don’t know and read their definitions.”
“Oh.” He was crestfallen. “I thought that the dictionary would finally have a data index I could install. So I guess I have to learn from a person?”
She looked over and laughed again. “*And* you’re holding it wrong. Turn it around.”
He turned it upside down. “Like this?”
“No!” She reached over and rotated the book, brushing his hand. At her touch he felt electric shivers run through him, like metemotions in his body.
He’s kind of cute, she thought. Well, cute like a baby.
“It’s not that easy to learn how to read you know. It could take years to become proficient enough to read a decent novel. Why do you want to read so bad?”
“I can’t get anything that’s not filtered by the query daemon. You know. All my results are super user friendly. Exactly what I want to see,” he rolled his eyes. “Except that what I want to see is apparently not what I want to see. You’d be amazed at all the useless information it has on writing. All in picto, of course, which I don’t think even has the language to talk about it.”
“Hah! Just as worthless as the vidnet.”
“Right. It’s like this sense that there’s something just under the surface of things. Or like a hole. Once you start to see the edges of it, it’s enough to drive you crazy. And there’s nothing even referring to the holes. A perfect system.
“If I was to just take it at face value, you know, relax into it, I’d start to slip into it. But relaxing is definitely not in my short-term plans.”
“Hah! Right. Fuck that,” she said. She thought about her mom, on the other side of the chasm of the thickspace, an operator. Maybe if she understood this operator, she would understand her mom’s choice to leave them. And she wondered if there might be some way for her mom to come back.
“Right,” he said. “So that’s why I want to read. I need to figure out how things were. I want to break out of my filter,” he said.
She stared out at the road. The thudding of potholes was an arrhythmic counterpoint to the steady slashing of the wipers, the rain warping the light. Even with the brights, the car’s light was a small pool in a great darkness.
She had hatched a neural plan for her mother to break her brain free of the Mind, if she ever came back. Which she probably wouldn’t. Would she share her plan with this operator?
She looked over at him, this boy who had so much, yet here he was, totally soaked and broke because he wanted something she could give him. And despite the fact that he was richer than her, she saw his poverty. And she liked him.
“I could help you learn to read. I mean, if you want help,” she said.
“Really?” he said. “That would be amazing. I would so love that,” he said.
And then they sat in silence for that long moment which stretches out just after strangers have offered one other too much intimacy as they reflect on how little they know of one another.
“That would be amazing,” Isaac repeated unnecessarily. “How would we do it?”
Sol was quiet while she thought. He probably had no emotional discipline.
“Are you recording?” she asked, point blank. The implications of what she’d offered were starting to sink in. She couldn’t draw attention to herself because of the Library.
“Um, no. I mean, I have it off. And the Mind can’t read my thoughts yet. I’m not streaming that I know of.”
“We would have to meet in person. I can’t help you on virtual because anything digital you do can be monitored. Nothing digital. Only paper. In the thinspace, away from any streamers.
“I mean, look,” she continued. “If the Mind wants to monitor you, it can always do it. But the key is that you’re going to have to learn to monitor your emotions so the involuntary streaming doesn’t kick on.”
She continued, “But it’s going to take work. Like, every day. We have to teach you to control yourself first. Then after that you’re still going to have to study every day. So it’s going to be a lot of work. It’s not some reading mod you can just slip on. So, you still on for reading?” she looked at him pointedly.
Isaac was sitting forward, looking at her with a rapt expression. “Fuck yeah. I’d would do anything to learn how to read.”
“Alright. Awesome.” And then she turned up the music.
Isaac was elated as he stared out the window, the spent apocalypse of rotting farmhouses throbbing to the bass, the white-on-green of rusted-out road signs flashing like a piccolo snare counterpoint.
The nearness of the city awoke a corner of connection to the Mind for Isaac. There was a returning pull toward his home. They were on the edges of the thickspace now, lucido country.
He could feel the Mind’s rejoicing, tugging him toward the full thickspace, but he could not respond. It was as though an alien within him felt a thing. They were far out, still.
He looked back at her, noticing with interest the smooth curve of her cheek disappearing into the shadow of her neck as he had in the thinspace. But now he could feel the heavy blanketing of the Mind at this thought.
She looked over at him and he broke off his gaze rapidly, “I think I can take you all the way home,” she said. “Your address isn’t that far. But I’m going to have to drop these books off at home.” It would be colossally stupid to trigger the possibility of surveillance.
Sol turned off onto a road full of holes that had been filled with gravel. There was no sign, only two twisted metal stakes that thrust sharp spears toward the horizon. The industrial zone that belted the city was largely abandoned. Over to the left atop a hill stood a power cluster, a fence encircling it. There, in the light, behind the barbed wire, a dessicated man with no clothes squatted, hanging partially from the diamond-twisted wire by clawed fingers.
When Isaac’s gaze fell on his face, he began to spasm along the fence as though possessed by a current, his head quivering rapidly and gibbering with sounds that seemed like speech, yet impossibly high and fast.
Isaac felt a chill run down his spine, “What was that?” he asked.
She looked over, “That? That’s Electric. He’s far gone, but that’s where he mostly stays until he’s operated. I never saw him do that, though. He probably senses your operator datasig.”
The man lapsed back to a squat as they drove away.
They continued far past the clusters of stacks, puffing white, grey or black smoke into the air. A long conveyor belt ran from the ground high into an inert building, while yellow dozers lay like sleeping bulldogs.
The buildings began to stretch higher and higher as they got within range of the thickspace, where the well-off dreamers lived. Another human wraith slipped across an alley, moving lightly, a spectral anxiety.
Soon, they approached a dilapidated-looking checkpoint stretching between two apartment buildings leading to a tight alley. This was no Mind checkpoint. As they pulled up in front of it, off the street, car nearly touching the gate, a man approached their vehicle. Isaacs’ eyes were attracted to a flicker of motion at the sides of their vehicle and realized the presence of another person to the left of the car, moving behind a brown and stained dumpster.
The guard approached the car, looking at Isaac as he approached the driver’s side window. The brief white stubble set off the deep seams in his face, a landscape of care. His eyes were unreadable, shiny on the surface with taciturn depths.
She rolled down the window as he approached the passenger side and they began to converse in rapid-fire Spanish. She answered a question and gestured toward Isaac. The guard looked at Isaac for a long time and then nodded.
As they rolled into a gated apartment complex, Isaac asked, “Isn’t it dangerous to live so close to the thickspace?”
“Yeah, it is. I hate it here. But my dad needs to seed the Library.”
“The Library?”
“A big collection of political stuff. History. Radical Religion. Dystopias. Stuff like that. He stays near the thickspace to keep it online. To me, I’m like: if nobody else is seeding, why does it matter? But he says he gets some downloads and it’s worth it.
“Wow. Where can I get it?”
She laughed. “We can talk about that after you learn how to read.”
***
They pulled up in behind of a gray cement building hemmed in all all sides by cinderblock apartments. Its roof jutted with a massive receiver dish pointed toward the thickspace. The bottom two stories were sheer and windowless, with small, definitively-barred windows appearing at regular intervals at the higher levels.
Operators usually didn’t carry stuff, but Isaac wanted to help carry in the boxes of books. Sol stopped him, “Just wait here. It’ll be easier if I don’t have to tell my dad.” She knew that her dad would not approve of this young operator.
The more time elapsed since Valeria’s departure, the deeper his hatred for operators went. He’d dug into seeding the library even further, going to more and more secret meetings. And Sol wasn’t invited. Something was happening in his brain, and it wasn’t good. She slipped out of the car and started staging the books to the front door.
The air smelled faintly of chemicals and dogfood to Isaac. Was there a soyplant nearby? Isaac sat in the car and felt himself shrinking like a matroshka into himself, smaller and smaller. He thought back to the way the guard had looked at him. He didn’t belong here. Perhaps if he imploded, he would simply disappear. He wouldn’t have to tell his parents anything, he wouldn’t have to choose. He would drift up, a part of the wind, a tiny air molecule colliding with others, borne into the upper atmosphere, swallowed by a drop of rain plummeting down, and freed again in the crash of earth to begin again.
She returned, breathless from the climb up and down the stairs with the boxes of books.
“Okay. He thinks I’m going over to a friend’s. Let’s go,” she said. She put the car into reverse and headed out.
They slowed as they came to the city’s first checkpoint, rolling over inset traffic spikes as the snoopers scanned their cars. They rolled through the checkpoint quickly.
As they crossed, the Mind was the deep caress of a massage, stripping away the layers of built-up tension he was holding. He’d been away for so long that the relief was untempered by contrarianism. He was just relieved to be back, safe and sound, and excited.
He looked over at Sol, “When can we meet?”
“Umm, how about this week? Tuesday? I get off at five and can pick you up like 5:30 if you get to the end of the line. At Cafe Spirál, across the street from Perdido Station. “
“Yes. I’ll be there,” he said.
***
She turned into the winding streets of his neighborhood and the houses scrolled.
Wow, she thought. Just like a fucking pictofeed of the white American dream. Everything was so clean and neat. She had a creeping sense of presence, a hand resting on the back of her neck. Anyone in this neighborhood could find her off switch and put her to the ground like spilled bowl of spaghetti noodles.
His house lay supine in the midst of a green lawn, a single story. All the buildings in her neighborhood went straight up, yet here, in the midst of the thickspace, his house was a single story. She looked over at him as though he shared her shock, but he was staring fixedly ahead with a preoccupied look on his face.
They pulled into his driveway. Just now, he was looking away from the house, toward the street. He looked like a bird that wanted to take wing and fly.
“It’s going to be alright. I mean, look. You got robbed. Your parents aren’t going to kill you. They have to understand that it’s not your fault!” said Sol.
“Right.” He looked down. “Thanks for giving me a ride. You totally saved my ass. So I’ll see you on Tuesday?” he asked. She nodded.
On his way in, he picted his parents and told them he was home, and they responded with a torrent of relieved images. He watched her in as she backed out of the driveway, her lights cutting across him as she turned.