Cyberpunk

entered the ejection tube, found its wheels, and braked. Lights flashed through the windows, and she saw signs stenciled on the tube wall, “APRT 24, Stanchion 4 Depot.”
    “What is Nancy’s favorite color?”
    “That’s it. That’s enough. No more questions, Bug. You heard Ted; you’re off the case. Until I ship you back, let’s just pretend you’re a plain old, dumb belt valet. No more questions. Got it?”
    “Affirmative.”
    Pneumatic seals hissed as air pressure equalized, the car came to a halt, and the doors slid open. Zoranna released the harness and retrieved her luggage from the cargo net. She paused a moment to see if there’d be any more questions and then climbed out of the car to join throngs of commuters on the platform. She craned her neck and looked straight up the tower’s chimney, the five-hundred-story atrium galleria where floor upon floor of crowded shops, restaurants, theaters, parks, and gardens receded skyward into brilliant haze. Zoranna was ashamed to admit that she didn’t know what her sister’s favorite color was, or for that matter, her favorite anything. Except that Nancy loved a grand view. And the grandest thing about an APRT was its view. The evening sun, multiplied by giant mirrors on the roof, slid up the sides of the core in an inverted sunset. The ascending dusk triggered whole floors of slumbering biolume railings and walls to luminesce. Streams of pedestrians crossed the dizzying space on suspended pedways. The air pulsed with the din of an indoor metropolis.
    When Nancy first moved here, she was an elementary school teacher who specialized in learning disorders. Despite the surcharge, she leased a suite of rooms so near the top of the tower, it was impossible to see her floor from depot level. But with the Procreation Ban of 2033, teachers became redundant, and Nancy was forced to move to a lower, less expensive floor. Then, when free-agency clone technology was licensed, she lost altitude tens of floors at a time. “My last visit,” Zoranna said to Bug, “Nancy had an efficiency on the 103rd floor. Check the tower directory.”
    “Nancy resides on S40.”
    “S40?”
    “Subterranean 40. Thirty-five floors beneath depot level.”
    “You don’t say.”
    Zoranna allowed herself to be swept by the waves of commuters toward the banks of elevators. She had inadvertently arrived during crush hour and found herself pressing shoulders with tired and hungry wage earners at the end of their work cycle. They were uniformly young people, clones mostly, who wore brown and teal Applied People livery. Neither brown nor teal was Zoranna’s favorite color.
    The entire row of elevators reserved for the subfloors was inexplicably offline. The marquee directed her to elevators in Stanchion 5, one klick east by pedway, but Zoranna was tired. “Bug,” she said, pointing to the next row, “do those go down?”
    “Affirmative.”
    “Good,” she said and jostled her way into the nearest one. It was so crowded with passengers that the doors—begging their indulgence and requesting they consolidate—required three tries to latch. By the time the cornice display showed the results of the destination adjudication, and Zoranna realized she was aboard a consensus elevator, it was too late to get off. Floor 63 would be the first stop, followed by 55, 203, 148, etc. Her floor was dead last.
    Bug , she tongued, this is a Dixon lift!
    Zoranna’s long day grew measurably longer each time the elevator stopped to let off or pick up passengers. At each stop the consensus changed, and destinations were reshuffled, but her stop remained stubbornly last. Of the five kinds of elevators the tower deployed, the Dixon consensus lifts worked best for groups of people going to popular floors, but she was the only passenger traveling to the subfloors. Moreover, the consensual ascent acceleration, a sprightly 2.8-g, upset her stomach. Bug , she tongued, fly home for me and unlock my archives. Retrieve a file entitled “cerebral aneurysm” and forward it to the elevator’s adjudicator. We’ll just manufacture our own consensus.
    This file is out of date , Bug said in her ear after a moment, its implant voice like the whine of a mosquito. Bug cannot feed obsolete data to a public conveyance.
    Then postdate it.
    That is not allowed.
    “I’ll tell you what’s not allowed!” she said, and people looked at her.
    The stricture against asking questions limits Bug’s functionality , Bug