It Looks Like You're Writing a Letter

Thorner's first stop after leaving the murky sandstone building that housed his office was the bar down the street. Thorner enjoyed a drink, but didn't consider that he had a problem - it was other people who had a problem with it.

Back when Martha was alive, he'd rarely felt the need to drink but these days more often than not he found himself with a glass in hand. Aside from the welcome numbing effects, it was a good excuse to leave the house and be around people in one of the few physical social environments that still existed.

It seemed that Ora had managed to digitise, analyse and emulate everything from war, to sex, to drugs. But they hadn't managed to bottle the essence of hanging out in a flea-bitten dive, listening to an old digital jukebox play the same ten songs over and over again, while avoiding the approaches of desperate good-time girls. Perhaps the only real change to the landscape was a widening of the class gap. Drinking establishments were either exclusive, members-only clubs for high ranking officials and people high up the corporate ladder, or they were run-down rat holes populated with the dregs of society. Thorner was rarely allowed in the former.

From a business point of view he often learned a lot more through drunkenly conversing with barflies, street hoodlums, drug dealers and pimps than hobnobbing with CEOs.

It was called Bobby's Place, although who Bobby is or was had long since been forgotten. Thorner didn't think Bobby would be too pleased with the state of the place if he ever came back. Pushing open the sticky door, Thorner was hit with a miasma of synthetic smoke, stale beer, body odour and desperation. Ramshackle, vandalised chairs and tables were littered about, but somehow most of the pink neon strip lighting still worked, giving the joint a sickly vibe.

It wasn't busy, so he made his way to the bar and sat on a high stool. Chiv the barman approached, wiping a lipsticked rim with a cloth that was definitely dirtier than the glass.

"Thorner. Good to see you man, what's the news?" Chiv was some kind of South American mongrel. One eye missing and stitched rudely shut, he had been a prizefighter in his prime until an errant thumb ruined both his fighting career and his depth perception.

"Hi Chiv, let me have a beer would you. Cold would be good."

Chiv laughed heartily. "Hey man, you know my fridges are just for show!"

Thorner smiled thinly. "Warm is just fine."

The bottle was deftly opened and set in front of Thorner. Chiv may have been a hardened criminal but he took his bartending duties seriously. Thorner nodded his thanks and handed the barkeeper hard currency. Chiv looked disgusted but took it anyway.

"Got a new job today," said Thorner, grimacing as he swigged the acrid liquid.

"No shit? Hey, good pay? Good job yeah?"

"Pay is shitty, like all jobs. Could be interesting though."

"Who's missing this time? A hot little chica? You want some help huh?" Chiv roared again, always finding himself amusing. Thorner smiled - Chiv was much better to have on your side than against you.

"Chiv, you hear about that OraCorp data centre that got rolled over yesterday down in Wichita?"

Chiv grunted. "Fuck OraCorp. Whoever stole their shit, I hope they sell it for big bucks."

Thorner decided not to point out the irony. Chiv, like everyone else in the bar, had their arm piece on, which regularly chimed or beeped. Chiv was as reliant on the data stream as anyone else. Even as they were talking he reflexively glanced at it numerous times. It was like a nervous tic, and nobody even knew they were doing it anymore.

"Did you hear anything about it?"

"Eeeeshhh... I heard that Griffen was lined up for it."

"Yeah, I had that already - who hired him?"

"Search me, man - somebody with lots of dough. Word was he was tooled up big style for the job, you know what I mean?"

"Weapons?"

"Nah man, like a top secret experimental scrambler supposed to give you like two full hours of grey-out. A man can get a lot done in two hours!" Chiv made a gesture that was supposed to represent some kind of sex act and guffawed again.

"Who makes that kind of gear? Where would you get it?"

"Uhh shit, I don't know man. Maybe you should speak to the Reverend down on Eighth Street? He knows more about top-end tech than most, and I know he knows Griffen."

The Reverend actually was a Reverend. Thorner had come across him a few years ago in a missing boy case. He still ran one of the few remaining churches down by the docks. Thorner drained his beer and just about managed not to gag.

"Thanks Chiv, you've been very helpful."

"Hey, give that naughty little chica a good spanking from me, huh!" Chiv handily mimed the motion. Thorner cringed.

"I'll do that Chiv. I've got to go. See you soon."

Thorner left Bobby's and hailed a passing cab. It slithered up to the curb like liquid mercury and silently opened its door. He climbed inside to be faced with the usual message, NO IDENT DETECTED. He punched the manual override button and told the cab to take him to Eighth Street. The cab was going to be disappointed when he tried to pay with a paper bill.

He pulled up outside the Church of Our Lord the Provider. The computer driver complained bitterly about the physical currency Thorner stuffed into the little-used money slot next to the monitor. It was still legal tender, for now. Thorner surveyed the building.

At night, you could just make out that the building used to be magnificent. The spire was now a dull rusty brown and the edifice had few angles left due to vandalism, neglect and erosion. It still stood out on a street consisting mainly of gaudy shop fronts and personalised holographic billboards enticing passersby to spend credits from their arm pieces.

The lights were on, so Thorner climbed the steps and went inside. Walking through the lobby he stopped to pick up a leaflet about night classes in programming. He had no interest himself, but for the past thirty years everyone had been encouraged to learn how to code. A variety of social programmes had sprung up, funded and controlled by OraCorp, to ensure a steady supply of tech-savvy workers from one generation to the next. The general gist of this particular course was that it didn't matter how old or poor you were, there were subsidised PayCubes available in this very building where you could take streaming classes taught by computers. It all seemed quite perverse to Thorner - computers building humans.

He entered the brightly lit, but completely empty nave. The Reverend kept it spotlessly clean, contrasting sharply with the dilapidated exterior. Quiet organ music played from concealed speakers.

The old pews were no more, now replaced with minimalist PayCubes. Thorner estimated there were around sixty workstations. His lack of interest in these machines sometimes surprised even him. On occasion he might stand and use one on the street to place an emergency video call to a client if they insisted, but beyond that he had no use for them. He walked slowly between the two blocks of workstations, his shoes sounding loud and incongruous on the concrete floor. The building smelled of furniture polish and cheap scented candles.

The Reverend emerged from a side door. "Can I help you?"

Thorner started towards him, hand outstretched. "Henry Thorner, you may remember we met a few years ago?"

The Reverend's face warmed with recognition. "Ah yes, Mr Thorner. Did you find poor Daryl?"

"Yes sir I did."

"And was he...?"

"Yes. Unfortunately he was dead by the time I got to him."

"Such a shame, that sweet child."

"I agree Reverend, I've lost a lot of sleep over that case."

They paused, as if in brief mourning. The Reverend motioned for Thorner to sit on a padded bench near the front of the banks of PayCubes. Thorner stretched his legs and loosened the buttons on his long brown coat.

"So Reverend, how's the religion business?"

The Reverend chuckled bitterly and pulled at his long silver beard. Thorner wasn't sure how old he was, but it couldn't be a day under seventy. He looked like a man with the weight of the world bearing down upon him. "Not great, Mr Thorner. Not great."

"Call me Henry, please."

The Reverend nodded gratefully. "How's the finding people business? You still doing that?"

"Yeah, it's slow. People are getting harder to lose."

"Physically perhaps," said the Reverend, wryly. "Most of them are already lost, they just don't know it."

Thorner smiled. "Do you see anyone coming back anytime soon? To church I mean - real church, with sermons and preaching and hymns and all that good stuff we both remember?"

The Reverend looked impossibly sad. It was a moment before he spoke again. "Henry, we both know religion is dead in this country. Ten years ago, some people still came in on a Sunday and may even have said grace before meals, but not any more. I suppose people just got new habits, like going to a sports game on Saturday or reciting those damn brainless Grid memes round the water cooler at work. To my mind, everything has just..." He trailed off for a second, before recollecting himself: "Somehow, gradually so that nobody would notice, everything just got less... meaningful, I suppose. People stopped thinking about things, like they didn't need to anymore and even if they wanted to they didn't find the time. It's hard for God to fit in when there's no gap to accommodate Him."

"Are you talking about faith, Reverend?" asked Thorner.

The old man shrugged. "Perhaps, yes. The personal faith that people used to have - that space just doesn't exist anymore. There's no need for grass because there are too many buildings and nowhere to grow it."

"But surely religion always meant more than personal faith? I mean, faith is like a moral code, or your position on matters of ethics, peculiar to yourself, right? How do you know men and women of faith don't still exist out there, but they're just not attracted to the trappings of organised service?"

"Let me ask you a question Henry - how many good people do you see out there?" he gestured to the doorway. "I mean truly good, selfless people who operate out of some kind of community spirit? People who want to improve their world, who truly respect the gifts given to them by God, or nature, or evolution or whatever you want to call it?"

Thorner had to stop and think. He recalled his brief three-way conversation between himself, Chiv and Chiv's arm piece. Chiv had killed men - more than once - for insulting his sister. He was pleasant to Thorner, sure, but then, he had no reason not to be. Chiv shared the gossip he knew about the Wichita heist, but not out of any sense of justice. He genuinely did not care if Tanner Griffen was alive or dead. Did Thorner himself care? This thought made him shiver. He wrapped his coat around himself and avoided the Reverend's question.

"But Reverend, if you're so cynical why do you still run this place? Why do you wear that collar?"

The Reverend sighed and leant back on the bench, stretching his hunched back. "Ah Henry. The question I ask myself every day. We do good work here still. We still provide that sense of community, where we can. We educate people who come in off the streets, make them computer-savvy, give them prospects. Sure, none of them are likely to become OraCorp star programmers, but just that little we can give them makes them a step above the average street bum - they can find work."

"So you think getting them on the Grid is helping them?"

The old man cackled. "Ha! I knew it when I saw the cut of your coat - you've still not got yourself an arm piece! Well come on, you tell me - does being off the Grid help you?"

Thorner shook his head. "No Reverend, life is a struggle every day. Every day it gets harder to live the way I do. I'm a social pariah and can't function in society much longer."

"Exactly! But I assume you have a source of income that somehow you maintain - I'm guessing through your real-world connections? The people who know the people you know and all that? If you're not on the Grid, your contact list will be about 20 people, on average. Probably less if you're at the bottom rung of the ladder like my poor unfortunates. People cannot live in that bubble - they can't find work, they can't find relationships. They curl up and they die, Henry. If my church does nothing else, it prevents that - that social atrophy."

Thorner nodded slowly. The Reverend was of course correct. Thorner's life worked as much as it did due to his network of pre-Grid contacts from the police force, justice system, previous clients and a town's worth of miscreants, gangsters, junkies and other detritus. For different reasons, all these contacts would eventually die and his connections would be severed. He had very few opportunities to replenish his network these days. Depressingly, the best he could hope for would that he would die before his network dwindled to nothing.

"A lot on your mind, chum?" chided the Reverend with a glint in his old blue eyes.

Thorner had clearly been silent for longer than he realised. He forced a smile. "I don't understand this new world, Reverend."

"It's not new, Henry. It's always been this way, and you know it. It just creeps up on you by degrees. People are happy. Not too long ago, people had an omnipotent being to look up to and trust. Now they have the Grid, an omnipotent entity they carry around with them on their arm - with instant answers. God is a hard sell compared to Ora." He shrugged again and smiled wanly. "Anyway, you didn't come to see me to chat theology, I'm quite sure. What can I do for you?"

"Reverend, have you heard of a guy named Tanner Griffen?"

"Sure, I've had dealings with Griffen in the past."

"Dealings? In what way?"

"Oh, he used to come in here, hack the PayCubes so they'd play porn on a loop none of us could switch off, or create a botnet out of all the machines to mine credits. Usual dumb kid hacker stuff but nothing too malicious."

"When did you last see him?" Thorner pulled a leather bound notebook and pencil out of his pocket and started jotting down notes. Even the Reverend raised his eyebrows at the anachronism.

"Eh... probably a couple of months back. He wanted a contact for a group out in Oregon, wouldn't tell me why."

"Group? What kind of group?"

"My church isn't the only one of its kind. Pretty much all of the church buildings still standing have been repurposed in this way - community PayCube clusters providing free Grid access to the disadvantaged. I have a colleague out there running a similar operation."

"Did Griffen tell you why he wanted the contact details of the Oregon group?"

"I'm afraid he didn't, but I gave him the ident of the leader over there and he left happy enough. Not that the boy ever had a smile on his face."

"Could you share that ident with me?"

"Of course, pass me your pencil - I'm pretty sure I can remember how to use one of these."

The Reverend scrawled a series of letters and numbers on a blank page of Thorner's notebook. He squinted at his handiwork at arm's length, like an artist admiring a sketch. "Huh, not bad!"

Thorner checked it was legible. "Thank you, Reverend, you've been a great help."

"Anything else I can do for you Henry? Sure I can't tempt you with some Grid-time?"

Thorner smiled. "No thank you Reverend. It's funny, when I was a young man I couldn't be tempted into a church, and now I'm an old man the situation is the same, but the reasons are different."

"At least the Grid can't send you to hell and damnation!" The Reverend's tone was genuinely warm and cheery.

"Are you sure about that, Reverend?" asked Thorner, pointedly. "Take care Reverend, we'll speak again soon."

Thorner stood up, buttoned his coat against the brisk November air and left the church and its banks of twitching monitor screens.

Back at his office building, Thorner stopped at the public PayCube on the street corner. Heavily vandalised but still operable due to the bulletproof construction methods required of public facilities, the cracked screen winked at him. IDENT REQUIRED, then in tiny text at the bottom of the screen "or insert credits below". Thorner fished a few credit coins out of his trouser pocket and inserted one.

Punching in an ident from memory, he leant against the cubicle wall and waited for the connection. Presently a young woman's face filled the screen, unkempt and cross.

"What?"

"Linda, I need a quick favour."

"It's 12am and I have a big meeting in the morning, why can you never call at a reasonable time of day?" She brushed blonde hair out of her eyes.

"If I give you an ident can you get me a name and contact information?"

"For pity's sake dad, when are you going to stop playing private detective, get an ident and get on the Grid? You just type that in and the data comes back - you're not making a deal with the devil." She was genuinely angry. Thorner felt his stomach drop. She was 24 and not his little girl anymore. But she was sensible and reliable, not someone he felt the need to worry about. She was one part of his network that he wanted to keep connected more than anything, but since her mother died and she had landed a good job out of town, they had grown distant.

"Linda, I'm sorry to wake you, I lost track of time. It's important, I've got a case."

Linda silently disappeared from view and reappeared with her arm piece, disconnected from her body but still powered up and operational. "OK, what's the ident?"

"Krukew76354."

Linda read from the screen in an exasperated tone. "William Kruke. 45. Caucasian. Retired Colonel in the Security Armed Forces, honourable discharge. Located currently at the Church of the Divine in Fort Smith, Oregon. No kids, likes blues music, allergic to peanuts - stop me anytime?"

"That's enough, thank you Linda. I really appreciate it."

"Can I go now?"

"Sure. Goodnight."

Linda disappeared and the screen went dark. The cold November wind whipped his wet coat collars into his cheeks. After a moment, he walked up the steps to his building and went back up to his office.