Page 48 of Coldwire
“Ready to go?”
“Yes, sir.”
The tea is extremely hot when I pass him his cup, and Kieren takes it with a sniff, trying to determine what it is without opening the lid. It’s busy in the hallway. Two doors stay propped ajar for their occupants to have a lively conversation. A cleaning lady pushes her large cart along. We’re forced into single file to skirt around it. At the elevator, a woman is leaving her room at the same time and enters with us, giving a brief nod but otherwise staring ahead with her gaze unfocused, watching something on her display.
We stay silent the entire way down. The elevator reaches the ground floor. As soon as we emerge from the hotel’s main door, the woman swerves in the opposite direction to us, her shoulder bag thudding against her hip. There’s a key chain in the shape of Threto’s skyline dangling from the bag strap.
“Did you hear about the zoo in Threto where they painted a dog to look like a panda because they didn’t have the cash to import an actual one over?”
Kieren has already finished his tea. He tosses the cup into a trash can at the corner. We turn out the smaller street for a main road.
“That was a propaganda campaign, Ward,” he says. Immediately, the bustle starts around us. Upsie in the morning is a different city. It trades the nightlife for the coffee runs, the neon for a stream of gray and beige. Avatars who came in for the bars and the karaoke have logged out and left space for the daily users entering to work. Now it’s all pencil skirts and briefcases and pedestrian lights going off every ten seconds to facilitate a flow of peoplewalking from landing stations into their corporate buildings. “You didn’t see the correction note that got added?”
“What?” I open my display quickly. I run a search to find the post again, and sure enough, a clarifying note has been added to the Atahuan news account that uploaded this to the feed.Post is intentionally portraying Medaluo in negative light by implying zoogoers wouldn’t know the difference between a dog and a panda. Threto National Zoo dressed up these dogs as pandas on purpose to open a “panda dog” joke exhibit for a viral moment.
“Damn,” I mutter. I trusted it without thinking—Teryn Moore was the one who shared it with an angry emoji and put it on my feed, so I reacted accordingly. “It got me.”
“Don’t feel too bad. Who’s ever heard of opening a joke exhibit to get hits online?”
The places that need more frequenters to stay afloat, I suppose. We approach the crosswalk light, and Kieren indicates we can cross to the other side of the road while the perpendicular light is going. I can see the precinct already, a red and blue blinker flashing from the wide double doors as though there might be a chance of mistaking the bright sign out front too, declaring the station to be operating on the second to fifth floors. It’s a very round building, shaped like a beehive built from steel.
Kieren and I break from the crowd after the next light and head into the building. He takes the steps up two at a time, but I make a more careful trek, watching where I’m placing my feet. There’s an old man and an old woman by the entrance in the middle of an argument—their accents are thicker than I’m used to, the sort of Medan that was spoken back when the country still raised children in rural regions, when different areas could develop twangs and idiosyncratic sounds. It’s all straight and narrow city-polished syllables now. Purely to be nosy, I turn on Global Ear in my settings—and suddenly their words switch to Atahuan, translated by the system before hitting my perception. They’re arguing about a traffic ticket.
Kieren casts me an amused look to signal he’s eavesdropping too, and Iswitch off Global Ear hurriedly, as though he might be able to tell I cheated by some glint in my eye. The academy teaches us language acquisition diligently despite the alternatives available. Global Ear is great for tourists, but not so much for undercover students. When we’re relying on Global Ear, we can’t actually tell if someone is speaking a different language than us, which makes things horribly awkward if we reply in Atahuan.
“I’ll wait here,” I say inside reception. I would have forgotten it was daytime the moment I entered through the doors. Heavy drapes smother the windows, blocking all natural illumination. The naked orange bulbs on the reception desk cast a sharp glow in the morning’s stead.
Kieren nods. “I shouldn’t be long. I can’t imagine they’re going to ask me anything hard.”
He heads toward the receptionist. I fold my arms, resolute to stay put, but my eyes wander the ground floor’s rounded walls, finding a directory that announces floor six as a lawyers’ office and floor seven a nail salon.
Kieren is waved into the elevator, exiting the lobby. I stay put for a full two minutes before my attention snags on one thick exposed wire that runs along the wall, then down a set of stairs. Each time the bulbs at the reception desk flicker, the wire glows pink like a summoning. Brighter and brighter.
I go to investigate. It seems an odd design choice until I curve around reception and inspect the descending staircase, where the wire ends with a pointed arrow.Ah.It’s only showing the way to the basement.
Kieren’s interview will need a good fifteen minutes or so, assuming he doesn’t mess up wildly and get the military called on us. I have time to spare.
I start down the steps, sniffing at the aroma wafting up. Just as my nose predicted, I reach the basement and come upon a small collection of shops, each one thronged with building employees waiting to make their pick. They’re serving Medan breakfast foods that I’ve seen in the feed videos I watch. Fried dumplings, soy milk, dry noodles. The walls glow in varying yellow and blue, lit by the wires that thread through the shop signs, and Idon’t draw any attention when I slink into the busy space, tipping my head back to read the menus. Though my mouth waters, it doesn’t feel right to take a seat among the employees of the building. It’s too blasé, too forgetful of what I’m doing here. I am not in Medaluo for a cultural heritage trip.
“Sample?”
The server bot behind a counter extends its arm, offering a chunk of a meat bun with a toothpick through it. The other stalls have lines, but this one is empty. The server’s facial emoticon looks sad, the square surface of its head scuffed and missing a piece on the left.
“Thank you,” I say, taking one.
As soon as I try the sample, I know why the stall is so empty. The meat inside is at once sweet and too salty, which doesn’t seem physically possible. Maybe it’s not—perhaps the system coded this wrong, and the human owner of the stall hasn’t caught the mistake yet. I barely stop myself from gagging, quickly swallowing the sample. I’m glad I’ve already shielded my expression away from the server. I don’t want its sad emoticon to turn even sadder.
The basement level isn’t large, so I reach the end of the shops quickly. The final stall hides a discreet corner that turns into a corridor, running a short length before it gives way to an emergency exit marked with a neon-green sign. I would have expected to find a bathroom or a supply closet hidden here, but instead my eyes land upon a booth pressed to the wall and a seat inside glowing red.A.I. LOVE PSYCHIC!the exterior reads.YOUR HIGHLY ACCURATE READING.
I slink over to the booth and pull the half-drawn curtain aside, settling myself onto the red seat.
“Welcome.”
The sudden greeting comes with all-surround sound. I jerk back, hitting my skull hard on the booth wall, and my display immediately offers a pop-up asking if I need help. I swipe away the notification with a wince. There’s no danger here except my own lack of spatial awareness.
“I didn’t even activate you yet,” I grumble. The screen in front of the seat has woken up. Though there’s a voice speaking to me, there’s no visual depiction of the bot, only an audio waveform that trembles to signal its presence. It’s just like the call we had with Kam, except this is an intentional choice to help us forget there’s no one real present. In tenth-grade economics, my final project was about the millions of dollars that get dumped into market research every year to choose what sort of AI a select group of audience is most receptive to. Artificially generated faces creep most people out. Service bots that use anything other than the plain emoticons get significantly fewer customers. Driver bots should be nothing more than text on a screen to respond to emergency stop instructions. I guess the love psychic market decided to forgo the face entirely and focus on voice.
“I sensed your presence in my domain,” the booth replies. It’s soothing, vaguely female. That specific timbre must be extensively market-researched too. It must also switch languages depending on the user sitting inside, because I didn’t have to click anything to activate it in Atahuan. “Would you like me to begin your psychic love reading?”
