#nano 1

“Lights to four,” I mumble as someone continues to knock on the door to my apartment. I finish eating the nutrifood bar half in the dark as the light moves up a setting closer to dawn, various settings informing me of the temperature and time outside. Early afternoon, so I slept for over ten hours. I half-think my apps judge how long I spend sleeping each day. I rummage for clothing, send a ping to the door that I’ll be a sec, get a ping back on a private line.

Jo. Definitely not who I expected to visit me in person: he’s one of a dozen people who have a passcode to get into my place, not that it matters in his case. I make a note to modify my settings for him, fling on some sweats and a top and open the door.

“Hey.”

He offers up a small smile, looking relieved.

“Come in,” I say, because I don’t trust the hallway. The landlord doesn’t even have the lights on any standard array and while the company claims the cameras are for our protection just about everyone in the building has breached them for one reason or another. Jo slips in quietly, like he does everything else. He’s moving slower than usual and sits stiffly on the small couch I have for guests.  I prefer meeting in safe spaces when I can but it’s not always possible.

He drops his privacy filter entirely. Most no one ever does; in his case it’s mostly because he needs to. He holds out a hand, and I shiftphase enough to see the message in the datafield, snag and run our usual decrypt on it before reading it.

‘Miri. Sorry for waking you. Went to Walker 8, found it shut down. Genuine police there, I think, setting up cordon. Ran into two police on way out, got away. Almost tagged, so avoiding my place. Info?’

Walker 8 is one of the better safe spaces I like to meet in. Solid encryption, private rooms for free and even offers temporary high-end privacy screens for a decent rate. “Got away?” I ask.

He grins, signs: ‘Hit and run.’

I shake my head. Jo is one of the few people I know who would take a shot at a police officer and get away almost unscathed. I think he’s about a year younger than me: maybe even as young as ten, but I’m not sure. I just know he can’t talk and it involves his brain being scrambled as much as anything else. Could be fixed, but he’d have to be government or corp for that and his family isn’t. I think he might end up being that later, if it comes to it. We don’t talk about it.

Most apps are voice-controlled. You can pull up hand-controls and the like when you want to be quiet, or configure enough macros to do most anything. But you need voice controls to do at least some of it. and voice just to set most of the macros up. I’ve helped him with a lot at his place, but it doesn’t help as much in other places. It does mean he spends a lot less time in the datafields and shiftphasing than anyone I know, but makes up for it by being in terrific shape and having taught himself a lot about dealing with physical problems.

He’s pushed me to give more of a shit about me; I’ve helped him navigate the real world better. We have friendly arguments on which one is more real. I shiftphase, skim datafields. It doesn’t take long to snag mention of Walker 8 and get a consensus on what went down. I’m ‘away’ for a minute tops. Jo just waits, having not moved at all. I stretch. “Business dealing. Some corporation was trying to go multinational under the radar and met in there, so the police are talking the entire space down – in this world and the real one.”

He rolls his eyes at that.

“They’ve pretty much closed off access points into Walker 8, and I think are working on the other Walkers as well. I would be. Close off the spaces in all locations, run traces, all of that. I imagine a lot of people are curious about it, so I doubt I got traced.”

I consider options. “Mind giving me a passkey to your system? Five minutes, tops.”

Jo starts, then nods, sending the file over a moment later. I shiftphase into his system, find the macros I made and port them over, throwing another copy into a semi-public cloud with an info tag about their use for other people like him. Something I should have done months ago.

Jo smiles and flicks his fingers, pulls up a display. <Thank you,> he sends over a private line. It’s not as fast as real talk, but he’s pretty quick at sending the messages. We tried him setting up a text-to-voice system, but the voice systems out there are all generic and would be horrifyingly easy to duplicate.

“I have an aunt who is waiting on an operation to fix her eyes, and she has more Access than you do.”

He shrugs. He’s used to it, even if he is slower at shiftphasing than others. It’s the lack of access to basic apps that makes it complicated. Most appliabces are set up for voice controls: cameras that can  react to sign language would be breachable, so almost no app has a camera option anymore.  He has to old school everything with command lines instead of voice commands, and a lot of modern apps don’t like those either, also for security reasons.

“There should be something that works for you,” I mutter.

Jo laughs at that, soundless as ever, and signs: ‘It’s not that bad most of the time. Just when I need to learn things in a hurry and am not home.’

“I know, but –.” I shake my head. I can feel the edges of something nagging at me, but he gestures to the door and I tell him to wait, use the shower quickly and then follow him to one of the common areas in the building to practise stretches.