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Trilby throws a silky towel at her. “I hope you understand that I removed
your clothes to provide you with medical treatment. I would have been
waiting for you on the landing pad, but you showed up way too early. Why
didn’t you go down on a slower trip, with the animals? That would have been
a lot safer for your fragile human body.”
“They would have caught me,” Mandica explains briefly. “What is this?”
“Temporary,” he says. “I call it the cloak of invisibility. You will be
perfectly visible to the naked eye while we’re out there, but the identity
sensors won’t spot you. You will appear as an infrared aberration, caused
normally by too many people beaming data to each other’s devices at the same
time. We will take a particular route to where we’re going so that sort of
thing doesn’t stand out.”
She frowns at the towel. Yeah, it isn’t a cloak, it is a towel. No hood, no
draw string. It is see-through, but still just a big cloth square.
“Will I not look a little odd, walking around with this thing over my head?”
Trilby laughs heartily. “Odd? Sweetheart, you’re on Castlebourne now.
My next door neighbor is a giant beetle, and is probably smarter than me.
They might as well call this world Substrate City. You’re not going to stand
out. There is no way to stand out on this planet. Everyone is here to
formulate their unique identity, and they change by their whims all the
time. Now. Functionally, you’re rare. There are a few communities here who
are just as unenhanced—less unenhanced, in fact—and they are not
insignificant, but most people change bodies like you might change your
hairstyle. But don’t worry, you can’t tell, and people are careful around
each other, because there’s no way to know. No one’s gonna shoot you with a
gun under the assumption that you’ll survive.” He taps his middle finger
on a screen. “I took the liberty of building you your own modified
prospectus. The green domes are fine. You’ll be safe in any of those. I’m
talkin’ your residential areas, your museums, your educational historical
recreations.
“Yellow, a little more dangerous. They have ways of protecting visitors. If
they’re a normal human, the Custodians will make accommodations. They might
even separate the unenhanced from the enhanced so there’s never any
question. Red are no-go zones. Most of them are specifically designed for
people who have disposable substrates. A visitor might even end up getting a
whole fleet of bodies to switch to one by one. If someone like you without
the spoof lenses were to try to sneak in, the sensors would flag them so
fast, their head would spin off. Apparently, there was one guy years ago who
got stuck in a dangerous game and nearly died because the people who were
trying to murder him hacked the system. They won’t let that happen again.
They installed new sensors all around the world, and are constantly
checking. You will be walking around basically as an admin. They’ll let you
in anywhere, but that’s why I made this list for you, so you can decide what
you’re willing to risk. You need to understand your options.”
“You said something about spoof lenses?”
“Yes, it’s not just those. They have multiple ways of tracking identities,
the most common of which is an eye scan. They also—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Mandica interrupts. “If people are changing bodies, and
your neighbor is an insect, how would a retinal scan even be possible in a
place like this?”
“It’s not only a retinal scan. The retinal scan is a second stage identifier
that the system will only perform if the first stage scan turns up blank.
Everyone capable of transferring their consciousness is given a unique
watermark, placed upon their optic nerves. I don’t know if you know this,
but humans have a natural blindspot in their eyes due to where the optic
nerves connect to the eyes. Your brain fills in the blanks, but you
can’t see light that hits that spot. Fortunately for optic void scanners,
though, light does still hit that spot. They shoot an invisible laser into
it to read someone’s watermark, to know who they are. They don’t even have
to keep their eyes open. It can pass through eyelids, and many other
materials. For a normal person, if it doesn’t detect that watermark, it will
default to the retinal scan, and register your preferences and
restrictions.” He points at the invisibility towel. “The scanner can’t pass
through that, so it will see infrared interference, and not see your
unregistered eyes.”
“Why do I need the towel if I have these spoof lenses?”
“You don’t have the spoof lenses yet. The woman who’s getting them
for me is on the other side of the planet. We have to travel to her first.
Before you ask, she can’t come to us, because she’s also protecting you from
brainwave scanners. That’s another thing you need in order to be a ghost.
They’re becoming more common. They’ll never do away with the optic void
scanning system, but spoofing an authorized watermark is easier than fooling
a brain scan. Don’t tell anyone, but about zero-point-zero-zero-one percent
of the time, a cloned or bioprinted body doesn’t produce the watermark
correctly, and it has to be fixed, either with a new replacement, or a visit
to the optomeger.”
“This woman with the brain scanner—”
“The baseline imager. A brain scanner verifies your brainwaves. The baseline
imager is the thing that inputs in the data. It’s highly regulated. There
are only a few of them in the world. People would notice if she borrowed it
and took it on a vactrain.”
“I see. The baseline imager woman; can she be trusted?”
“She’s already done for me what she’s about to do for you,” Trilby explains.
“She holds a special office in a special government for a special community.
They were refugees fleeing oppression, and live here permanently, not simply
as visitors. Apparently, her now-husband initially refused to be enhanced,
so she’s sympathetic to that sentiment, even though he’s now just like her,
and I am too. The only reason she’s keeping him out of it is so that he can
have plausible deniability, but I told her about you, and she thinks you and
the Superintendent would get along.”
“Okay, I think I have all the information I need. I should say, I trust you.
Let’s go out there and walk around like ghosts, me moreso than you.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”
And so the two of them leave the apartment. Trilby already has his spoof
lenses on, but Mandica has to stay under the towel the whole time. He seems
to have been right. People don’t even just ignore her. They smile and greet
her as if she is just another regular person on this bizarrely accepting
planet. She doesn’t see any giant beetle people, but a few who look
decidedly unhuman. A lot of animals, but also alien-like beings that don’t
match to something that ever existed on Earth. She’s starting to feel more
comfortable here, like she can actually breathe and live a life.
After only a few hours, they have made it to a dome that’s just called
Capital. They enter a gorgeous woman’s office, who holds her hand out,
sporting a very kind smile. “Hi. I’m Deputy Superintendent Yunil Tereth. I
hear you would like to stay unregistered. Why don’t you have a seat?”
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