Thinks this in the pilates studio in a remote spit of The Land, doing the Short Spine Stretch, her bare feet in leather loops that haven't yet been softened up with use. That's how new this place is. They should get some mink oil. Her soles are chafing.
"The Land" is what is called the outside world, meaning outside of the moving cities; doomed to use the outdated technologies wasted by our civilization.
And that's where she is now, doing her job as an organic android, surveillance and formal check to NFTs authentication.
She definitely would rather be home checking as usual, indeed.
Her knowledge of steganography would be useful there, watermarking and authenticating signatures by artists and buyers on the NFTs visual items and issuing them back to the blockchain, her usual world, in which the word "wallet" holds the sense it should have, a simple coin container.
Here, in The Land wallets are still everything, your identity, your future if you're a creator wishing to step into civilization, your only mean of survival.
So here she is, looking for a simple, mechanical, probably stinking wallet.
A stolen wallet that's worth a half of the city she lives in, and she really loves living in that place.
What she doesn't love is where she is now, a place in the middle of nowhere, where the sun's radiations destroy living creatures bit by bit, and where someone has killed and injured to get that NFT she's after. The owner, her employer, is actually the city itself and losing that asset would change the entire world political balances.
The Vault cannot afford her mission not to be accomplished.
And so here she is, in the slum of the world, with some cyberspace cowboy ready to kill for a wallet which is gonna be stolen the next day with the same move they're doing now, because without steganography you can't reach the blockchain block from the NFT image, you just get the token ID connected to the wallet, and here we go again, counterfeiting risks.
A slum without identities, the right place for Donny's Jack move.
Nobody's really been sure what Donny had meant when he'd say that; he said it when he was angry, or frustrated, and she's both. That bitch dicking with her collectable jacket and she doesn't do anything about it. She could tell one of her fellow androids, Jenny and Dan, but she doesn't trust them. She has no idea what's going on with Jenny, what she's capable of. The sensible thing to do would be to finish the job, grab the wallet, and write the whole thing off to experience.
But there'd still be that bitch, Lilith. Lilith with the scary connections. Lilith the mad bitch, just doing that things because she's decided to hate Josie, or maybe, why not, Jenny's idea, maybe she thinks Josie is being lined up to own the wallet once finally retrieved. Or maybe she's in the Dan's girlfriend pool. Anything could be equally possible, but some hard little knot in Josie's core keeps heating up, trying for meltdown: the hole in the Buzz Rickson's, her heavy burden, she'd like to get her hands around Lilith's throat and shake her till her fucking brains rattle.
She'd never bring a wallet around without watermarking the NFTs inside using her sophisticated steganography algorithm, that Lilith must be really from The Land...
Jack moves. Context, with Donny the cyberspace cowboy, seemed to indicate that these where deliberate but extremely lateral, thus taking the competition or opponent by surprise, or, more likely in Donny's case, simply crazy, same result. He'd never said what jack move, exactly, in a given situation, he was contemplating, and maybe that was because he didn't know.
Maybe it had to be improvisational and completely off the moment. Whatever it was supposed to be, she had an idea he'd never managed to do it. In memory now she associates the expression with his only-ever attempt at verbally communicating a sexual preference: "You think maybe you could make more, like, those Jane faces?"
Jane faces being, she'd later learned stripper-speak for, she guessed you'd call them, ritualized expressions conveying a certain ecstatic transport, or at least its potential.
And this cowboy has her only real clue to find that bloody wallet.
Fingerprints, not even a complete DNA chain.
The fingerprints were captured by a surveillance camera in the city, on an ancient mechanical wallet shaped like a very ancient drum mechanical calculator, like a Curta; with little knobs to type numeric keys and open it with the code, Donny's fingerprints were pictured on that knobs.
Or was a Jack move, she wonders now, simply a coin related move? Jack in the sense of money? Donny's Jack moves had tended to be invoked in situations of relative economic insecurity. Donny's ongoing situation being one of that, but to greater or lesser degrees. Resolved most often by asking Josie for a loan, but only after invoking the jack move.
If it meant a money move, she guesses she can't use the expression, because what she's tempted to do would just cost her.
What she's tempted to do, she knows, is crazy. She exhales watching her straightened legs rise up in the straps to a ninety degree angle, then inhales as she bends them, holding tension in the straps against the pull of the spring-loaded platform she's reclining on. Exhales, as they say, for nothing, then inhales and she straightens them horizontally, pulling the springs taut. Repeating this six more times for a total of ten.
She shouldn't be thinking about anything except getting this right, and that's partly why she does it.
Stops her thinking, if she concentrates sufficiently. She's increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn't help solve them, but she hasn't really found an alternative yet. Surely you can't just live them there. And this morning she has a big one, or several, because she's due soon for the meeting with Lilith and Dan, to see Heinzi's latest stab of one NFT piece. To watermark it with steganography using the passphrase chosen by Heinzi and the buyer, The Vault, on each pixel. Per her contract.
Steganography is about concealing information by spreading it throughout other information, throughout the image pixels in this case.
She wants to go in there, the hot little knot of rage at her core is telling her, wearing the Buzz Rickson's collectible jacket with the tape on the shoulder (which is starting to curl at the edges) so that Lilith will know that she hasn't simply neglected to notice the damage. But she won't say anything, they'll issue just the transaction in the blockchain and then Josie will leave with the container wallet on the next business class flight, with her return ticket to the city and an NFT that would make her life relaxed for the next 3 decades.
And probably blow the contract and her mission... but she'll be free from Jenny and Lilith, and Dan too, and all the weird baggage that seems to come with them. The Land will get pulled back into its box never to return.
Heinzi doesn't deserve that, such a talented creator, his work is worth getting him into civilization, with his first steganographically watermarked NFT.
She really doesn't want to lie to him, aside from knowing that it's ridiculous, infantile plan anyways. She'll lose the contract, probably do herself grave professional harm, and all for the sake of pissing Lilith off. And what a pleasure that would be.
Makes no sense, except for the knot.
Now she's sitting cross-legged, doing Sphinx, springs lightened. Turns her hands palm-up for Beseech. No thinking. You do not get there by thinking about not thinking, but by concentrating on each repetition.
She locks the door after the meeting, and crosses the flat to the holographic laptop, which sits there blank−screened, its illuminated static switches pulsing softly. It's time to check in on Fetish:Footage Discord and see what Adidust and Alegria and Eikaze and her other co−obsessives have made today with their NFTs.
There will be much to catch up on, taking it from the top, getting the drift of things.
Adidust is her favorite, on F:F discord chat. They DM when the chat really gets going, and sometimes when it's dead as well. She knows almost nothing about him, other than that he lives in Chicago and, she assumes, is gay.
But they know one another's passion for the NFT footage, as well as anyone in the world does.
Rather than retype the unbookmarked discord URL, she goes to the browser history.
SEE ASIAN SLUTS GET WHAT THEY DESERVE!
FETISH:FOOTAGE Discord
She freezes, hand floating, looking at this last logged site.
Then she starts to feel it, that literal folkloric prickle in the scalp.
And she can't, through sheer mental effort, make Asian Sluts and F:F reverse their order on the screen. She desperately wants Asian Sluts to be below F:F, but it stays where it is. She sits there, unmov−ing, peering at the browser history the way she once peered at a brown recluse spider in a rose garden in Portland, a drab little thing her host reliably informed her contained enough neurotoxin to kill them both, and horribly.
The Land's flat is not a friendly place, not that it ever was. But it has become a sealed and airless territory in which very bad things might happen. And it has, she now remembers, a second floor, to which, this trip, she has not yet even ascended.
Up there, she wonders, now, mightn't there be someone?
The someone who somehow got in here in her absence and idly took a look at those Asian sluts? It seems bizarre, and impossible, and yet horribly, if barely, possible. Or is it all too very possible?
She makes herself look around the room again, and notices the roll of black tape on the carpet. It is upright, as though it had rolled there. And remembers, very clearly, placing it, when she'd finished with it, on its side, so that it wouldn't roll off, on the edge of the trestle table.
She looks up at the ceiling and Donny's big grin is looking at her.
Josie is pretty sure she didn't hand him any key to her flat in The Land, but that doesn't seem like the point at the moment, he's acting like he's always lived there, and who knows how long it is that she doesn't check that floor up a narrow flight of stairs... Donny calls her name and comes downstairs to take something from the fridge.
Josie puts up her best Jane face, and quickly finds herself lying more or less happily, looking pleasantly abstracted, under Donny, though she never really planned to.
Donny had been more problematic than most other Josie's targets, and she has come to believe that this had all been signaled in the first place by the fact that he was called Donny. Donny was not something, a human friend had pointed out, that the men they went out with were usually called. Donny as a human was of Irish−Italian extraction, and had both a drinking problem and no visible means of support, like most of the native cowboys in The Land.
But Donny was also very beautiful, and sometimes very funny, though not always intentionally.
But this final and particular time, watching him phase−shift into what she'd learned to recognize as the run−up to one of his ever−reliable orgasms, she'd for some reason stretched her arms above her head, perhaps even luxuriously, her left hand sliding accidentally under the cockroach−colored veneer of the headboard. Where it encountered something cold and hard and very precisely made. Which she brailled, shortly, into the round butt of an cylider shaped metallic thing, curiously crowned by little pins moving and reacting to her tips.
Donny, she knew, was left−handed, and had so positioned this so that he could reach it conveniently as he lay in bed.
Some very basic computational module instantly had completed the simplest of equations: if Donny sleeps with this at hand it must be the one worthy thing that he wouldn't leave anywhere else, anywhere like his own appartment.
Josie's fingertip were moving against what she assumed were the trails of the handles that opened the wallet, with the right numeric code... and watched Donny take his last ride on that particular pony.
