The Caryatids

"Wow!" said Lionel. "That is dynamite! This is a hot entertainment property, all of a sudden! Because we're living in a real-life crime! How many suspects are there? Wait a minute, wait a minute-I already know that! There's Sonja...There's Vera from Mljet...Hey wait, there's your mom!"

Glyn leaned forward and slapped him.

A HOLE IN A SENSORWEB was called a "blackspot." The laws of physics decreed that there were always blackspots in the world. Computer science could assume perfectly smooth connections, but the Earth had hills and valleys and earthquakes and giant volcanoes. The sky had lightning storms, and even the sun had sunspots. Wireless connections were not magic fogs. Real-world wireless connections were waves, particles, bits: real things in real places.

So: If you didn't want to be seen, or heard, or known in a world of ubiquitous sensorwebs, there were options. You could find a blackspot. Or create a blackspot. Some blackspots were made by organized crime or official corruption. Other blackspots just grew in their natural black-ness. Maybe there was nobody home to plug things in, or to reboot systems. Enterprises went broke, buildings fell down or went derelict.

The unsustainable could not be sustained. There were climate-crisis disaster areas-China, Australia, India, central Asia-where the blackspots were colossal.

When the seas rose, when hurricanes blew through, Earth tremors shook the land. Plague, famine, and pestilence...Stuff just got lost. Even in the modern world. Even in Los Angeles. There were always places in any major city where crime was visible, and yet tolerated. Red-light districts, narcotic shooting galleries, corporate boardrooms, city halls...There were thousands of tiny blackspots. Steel elevators. Brick basements. Narrow alleyways between two metal barns.

Or the black, stuffy, terrifying innards of a car trunk.

Sometimes people had mental blackspots hidden inside themselves. People forgot that they lived in a dangerous world. They prospered for a while, they got used to being privileged, they got fatally complacent. People forgot to see straight, they overlooked things, they stubbornly ignored the obvious.

You could try to obscure that human limitation, deputize it to surveillance systems, conceal all the seams, try to make the system perfect, perfect, superperfect, secure, secure, supersecure...but any simple breakdown in sanitation was enough to chase people away. Any place with no running water and no toilets was halfway to a blackspot already.

And you might end up in a place like that. Tied up. Abducted. Alone. Hungry. Thirsty. Humiliated. Reeking of your own urine.

Derelict buildings, dreadful places, worse even than the car trunk from which you had just been dragged...Even a little kid could set fire to a wrecked building. How many kids were you willing to wound, or injure, or kill with an automatic antitheft "armed response"? After all, the kids were just kids...kids were always trying to look around...explore...do some graffiti...throw some bricks through the glass windows...steal some furniture...vandalize the building and burn everything to the ground.

Teenagers were energetic and had poor impulse control. Teenage kids were stigmergic, they learned and acted like termites-they had no grand master plan, but they learned fast and easily from their peers, whatever they saw other kids doing.

So many places like that in Los Angeles...in every big town really...where security cameras had stored months of perfectly shot and focused video of a steadily gathering mayhem. The mere fact that a machine "saw" things happening didn't mean that a machine could apprehend the crime, prosecute it, convict it, put an end to it...

What if the surveillance itself was the victim of the crime? They called that "sousveillance"-when angry people countersurveilled the surveillance. Some bold souls made it their business to spy out all the surveillance spies, map them, track them, spot them, shoot them, steal them, hack them, tap them, hold the machines to ransom...

Radmila rolled around on the grimy, derelict, unlit floor, testing the plastic wires that bound her arms. Her wrists were cinched, her arms were trapped behind her back, her ankle was snagged to a piece of furniture. Wire had no knots. She couldn't break wire or pick wire or chew wire.

Nobody would ever find her in here. Not in this blackspot. She was as good as dead. That fast, that simple.

Radmila was strong and her body was flexible. Given a week, she might have shrugged and wriggled her way out of the wires. But whenever she worked hard to escape her bindings, she needed some air, and the duct tape over her mouth was there to deny her that air.