In the City of the Future, you work in packs. Lone infomixers almost always end up spiraling the drain shilling for the millions of LogoS clearinghouses – nothing new comes out of the individual.
You already know Tommy Eighty-Eight. Marissa is his other half. Together, they make enough of a pack to survive in the City. Fed enough to pump blood, hungry enough to downlink and mix for the next meal. So, what’s Marissa like?
Marissa is what happens if you give Cyndi Lauper a job with the Russian NKVD.
When she catches up with Tommy at the Bastille that Friday morning, she’s got her confusion colors on – a mix of urban camouflage and nature’s poisonous brights. You hear her before you see her; jangly proto-Soviet medals like Marshal Zhukov wore, pinned and melted into the black skin of an oversized leather motorcycle jacket opened up to show a Major Grey’s chutney sweater braced up to the neck against the coming winter cold, barely softening the nerves that stand hyper-sensitive to the high notes of the City, a consequence of the stimulants that left her a near-savant in her teens.
A stolen Burberry scarf is a makeshift belt, the knot holding a clip-on LED light array; her reader board with a range of digital caricatures, faces that convey her thoughts on the world. Today, it’s smiling. Tomorrow, she’ll use the rig as a projector to read her messages on the walls of Faraday Street.
Tartans clash under the scarf – she wears a corduroy skirt pinned shut with a Maginot line of anti-LogoS protest buttons, her history of defiance to John French’s empire out in the open; to dare dissent is Marissa’s way, loud and unyielding, from lessons learned long ago that silence is convenience. This way, they can’t pretend she’s not there. And they won’t, not if the striped tights and engineering boots are speaking as loud as her anti-empire broadcasts.
Marissa’s not into music the way Tommy is – she’s a child of the Simulation School, a braincase overfull, the experiences of entire lifetimes, wars, and civilizations exploding off one side of her head in asymmetric, wavy red hair that hangs down her right shoulder with braided bleach stains, each strand another empire she’d watched rise and fall in starved riots as a young girl in neural training. Salvaged whip antennas keep the rest back in a messy bun; a spare memory stick is a barrette.
She keeps a link up to the digital world – she’s a PAXET regular, micro-messages machine-gunned out on the pancake rig swinging from a length of chain at her hip. The rig itself is plastered with stickers from the world she left home for; open air free-data festivals, months in the mountains, thousands of anomic fabrication mini-business co-operatives, before the world all changed and Marissa sunk, like Tommy did, into the bilge of the City.
Above all, the one sticker, the one worn down to just the negative space between the letters. The one that simply says: FREE. She started tracing the letters with idle fingers at every sit-down, counting the days ever since LogoS shut the routes and Foodland became their only link to survival. That day was ten years ago.
Even with the uppers, the downers, the sleepless nights and data trances, the neural backfires and overflashes, the drugs that eat a hole in her head with every passing day, Marissa hasn’t lost count once.