“Tell me about social externalities.”
Riku blinked at his reflection in the oven window. His water was almost done heating. Whoever it was that chose to bother him this early in the “morning” would wait until after his first bowl of noodles. He attempted to yawn, his breath sucking in as a ceramic chop stick sliced pass his head, hitting the large button on the oven’s console. He stepped back in time to not get hit by the door swinging open.
“Tell me about social externalities.” This time the voice sounded irritated. Only sightly. Deftly grabbing the canister of water from the oven Riku spun around with a sheepish grin on his face. He didn’t want the voice to get any more disagreeable.
“Ah, uh, of course!” Riku laughed a bit, trying to relax a bit. He sat down at the large table that dominated the small galley. His assailant and conversation partner sat across from him. He, like most of the crew, were thankful for the width of the table, and for the exact same reason. Tachi often caught her victims during meal prep.
“So, um, social externalities, ne? Um, why do you ask? Are we going to port soon?”
Tachi cocked her head slightly. The little hacker regarded her a moment and went about preparing his bowl of noodles. She was hoping to catch him off guard, bullying him into an explanation without giving any in return. Maybe she was getting soft on the crew. A year ago Riku would have run from the room when she asked him. She reached down and picked up the remaining chopstick and began twirling it with the tips of her fingers.
“I am not going to ask again. Talk.”
Snapping shut the lid on his noodles, Riku began tapping the table on either side of his cooking implements. Glowing keyboards materialized beneath his hands, followed by two rectangles of light floating above the center of the table. One showed a timer, set at four minutes and counting down. The other one was a frozen frame of video, telling icons in the corner showing the timestamp and the paused state.
Riku began.
“I first heard of the phrase back in Chiba. I was down in the tronic district, speccing some new gear in an oxy bar when some otaku came running up, loud and drunk, going on about some dragon nonsense. You know the type, always going on about their Dragonlord, shining knight fairy tales…” Riku liked to go on tangents, especially if he could make fun of someone in the process. Tachi shifted her weight in the chair. That was warning enough.
“Um, ha, right! So, this lanky kid walks in, all hair down to the floor, braided. When she walked in they got real quiet, beckoned the new kid over and starting whispering into their fizzy drinks. Real serious drama. I started listening in, figuring they were going to rob a store or knew the release date for a new game. I moved closer, trying to be cool, when Lanky looks right at me, or so I thought.
“Her eyes were glazed over. I figured she was just, I don’t know, swinging her head around. I keep looking away, but somehow I am drawn to look at her again and again. It was creepy! I was going leave, so I decided to leave. I closed my apps and was about to unplug my terminal when I got an instant. Figuring it was the tronic guy getting back to me I opened it up and saw a photo. Of me. Sitting there. At the table…” Riku paused for effect, “From the perspective of Lanky!”
Riku felt a shiver go down his body. This story was awesome, he knew, but he couldn’t figure out why Tachi didn’t seem to react to it at all. Had Ari already told her? No, she wouldn’t be asking if she had already heard.
He looked up at the timer. Three minutes to go. Clearing his throat, Riku opened a finder window, glowing between the timer and the video frame. Twelve levels down into the complicated filing system and he found what he was looking for. A few taps and swipes and the image materialized, detached itself, and floated down to the table in front of Tachi.
She reached out and pinched her fingers around a corner of the photo, waiting the small moment it took for the table to realize she was interfacing with it. She lifted the photo up to eye level and examined it. Riku, hair unkempt, looking both uncomfortable and embarrassed. She could only imagine what it would take to make her look like that. She slid the photo sideways, her personal deck catching it, a blue rectangle adjusting its size to be barely larger than the photo. She had registered her profile with the table before Riku had noticed she was here. She looked into his eyes and nodded, the signal to continue.
“Of course I was freaked out. Okay, I panicked. I, um, feel out of my seat. Everyone in the place was looking at me. Except Lanky, she was gone. I grabbed my belongings off the floor, including a large part of the data jack I had just ripped from the wall, apologized, and ran out of there. I searched the street just outside for her, but it was a no go. She was gone, as far as I was concerned. Tracking is your thing, not mine.
“So I made it back here using the underways route. I figured that if anyone followed me the sensors would pick them up, or at least stall them long enough for me to get back. I mean, I was really shaken. Do you know what that photo means?”
Tachi had an idea, but decided to keep it to herself. She threw him a bone and shook her head once. Riku grinned, but immediately became serious again.
“She was only looking at me for a few moments, probably not longer than a couple of minutes. I never saw her move her arms, nothing to show she had a rig on her. And, she was in the middle of the room, away from the ports on the wall. Even if she had some rig and was really good with it, she wouldn’t have had enough time to auth in and send that photo to me!”
Riku had his hands palm up in front of him, transmitting the significance of this situation while pleading with his listener. It might as well been an empty room, as Tachi made no move to assist him in his analysis. He sighed, moving his hands back over to the dimmed keyboards, their keys brightening when he began typing again. Two more windows materialized, text scrolling down as some set of events were being logged, timestamped, and disappearing in a waterfall of neon lines. He grabbed them by their corners and swung them inwards, inverting the text so Tachi could read them. He placed his hand behind them, gently swiping up the backs of the boxes, causing the text to slow on both of them.
The one on his left came to a stop. Switching his attention to the opposite box swiped a less gently, the text stopped and reversed its direction until he made it also stop. Tachi squinted slightly, turning the lines of text into blobs of light. She noticed that a few of the blobs were shaper similar. He was pulling up diff log, but she couldn’t see what they were for. Riku gestured towards both boxes with his pointer and pinky fingers extended, and then touched his hands together. The two rectangles wobbled into each other, creating a larger box with the difference in text becoming bright red.
Sitting back in his chair Riku made a blowing motion over his palm at the diff log. It floated across the table lazily until Tachi swatted the screen aside, deflecting Riku’s neon kiss. Again her bright blue deck caught the screen, resizing to allow both the log and the photo to be of equal size, as per her preference. She stuck out her fingers in a vee, highlighting the top and bottom of the red text, and spun her hand clockwise to increase the size.
:0:0:0:se.pic:0:0:0:
The fields for term address, app name, everything except the file, were empty.
“How is that possible?” She asked without turning away from the file.
“That is what I wanted to know. I dug around on the local nets for something, but it seemed like neither Lanky nor this particular hack were going to be found. I started thinking about when I remembered that Vaia had told me to take a term that had radio on it, in case something came up. When I think about that it makes sense there isn’t an entry for that transfer from the bar’s logs. It was sent there directly over the air.”
Both of them sat in silence for what Riku felt like five minutes. It was actually 39 seconds before Tachi spoke up. One minute and twelve seconds left for the noodles.
“What does this have to do with externalities?”
“Ah, yeah, well not just externalities, right? I mean, those are just like some old technical phrase used by old people. I mean, it is pretty simple if you have some language skills, it obviously means something that is happening on the outside of whatever. Turns out it means stuff that happens to other parties, or something.
“Look, it is like you and me are talking here, and say we are going to bet on who cleans up. If I win, and I am not saying that I could, just imagine! If I win, and then you make Ari clean up for you. Then that is an externality. I think. Like, it is our thing affecting other people. That is what Vaia told he anyhow.
“Now if that isn’t weird enough, there are different kinds of side effects, and they are categorized. Say Kartik makes a deal with us to create a dozen new disks. Well, that takes time, so some piddily plate out there is going to have to wait to fix theirs, which could be really bad if there is a storm or something. Check the meta on that image.”
Tachi brought up the embedded information on the image. Again all the fields were blank except the name: social externalities.
“So, I read up on all this stuff, or rather Vaia did. And then we put out a few searches for the social thing. I mean, aren’t all of these things social? They are all dealing with people, and stuff. We waited until a bunch of free ships came in from Amp before downloading the local nets and scrapping for something like a keyword. I figured some fringe logger was using it to tag their philosophy.”
Riku stopped suddenly, looking down at his bowl. Taking a deep breath he looked up and looked Tachi straight in the eyes. She felt a little unnerved by his behavior. She tried to calm herself without moving, mentally relaxing her anxiety, dissolving anticipation.
Riku moved his hand up to the frozen video frame, spun it towards her and pressed the play icon in the corner. The images flashed by, people running about, weapons being discharged at them and the sky. In the background a large machine like a mobile turret rolled into the crowd. All of this she had seen before, either as part of the Order’s propaganda warning against the barbaric behavior they had saved humanity from, or from the games coming out of Chiba.
Something didn’t sit right with this one, though. It wasn’t the violence, nor the children being trampled by the throng, or the snapping of the bodies beneath the treads of the tank. After thirty seconds the video started over, people running in front of the camera, the turret coming into sight, the shimmering wall serving as a backdrop to the whole scene. She reached over and hit pause.
Riku looked up knowingly. “Do you see it, too?”
She leaned across the table, neon rippling from where her hands met it. Squinting, she zoomed into the wall of light behind the tank. She put it on a five second replay and let it run for a minute. Sitting back in her chair she asked, “What is it?”
Riku smiled. “Mizu.”
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