It was a foggy December, colder than usual.
An old woman waded through the shallows of a concrete-bound river. She wore overalls and a breather mask, a meshwork hopper slung over her back. She leaned hard on two sticks, one with a grabber on the end, the other a net. At intervals, she scooped some grey, slimy clump from the river and deposited it in the hopper.
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Dusk was falling as the woman paused for breath. She rested on the sticks and took off her mask. She gazed at the fog-shrouded stratoscrapers rising either side of the river, searching their mirrored facades. Lights were coming on, yellow rectangles against the colourless grid. Occasionally, a human silhouette appeared behind the glass, an anthracite statue looking out. They rarely looked down.
Big yellow taxis sped overhead, shuttling between the upper levels. Drones zigzagged on repeating errands, stitching fading, angular lines into the clouds and fog. Periodically, a larger one descended all the way to the river, collecting a loaded hopper and depositing an empty one in its place.
Lottie had been working the salvage contract for a week. It paid poorly and the conditions were terrible, but she just needed to stick it out a little longer, banking enough credits to reconnect with her daughter.
Just a couple more weeks, then Lottie would be with Amelia again.
It was all going well until the newcomer arrived, climbing down one of the rusting ladders hooked over the raised lip of the flood defence.
Lottie waded over, keen to spike this misunderstanding.
“Hey, friend,” she said, pulling her mask aside. “Welcome to the river. But I think you’ve got the wrong sector.”
The figure entered a boot at a time then turned. Her mask dangled from its straps. She was a much younger woman, shorter and leaner than Lottie. She possessed a sharp, feral face, two close-set eyes like double-tapped bullet holes.
“Say what?”
“I said this isn’t your sector.” Lottie nodded agreeably in either direction. “Just check with Global. Any help needed, come find me.”
The woman tightened her hopper straps, squaring bony shoulders against the coming load. “Think I got the right sector, mama. Sure you haven’t made a mistake yourself?”
“I’m pretty sure they’d have told me if there was a problem.”
“The problem is you weren’t getting through the assignment quick enough.” The young woman – she was 20 at the most – shrugged unconcernedly. “But you’re OK. They’re not taking you off the job just yet.”
Lottie bristled. “Just as long as we keep out of each other’s hair.”
“Where’ve you swept?”
“You saw the direction I was working in. Figure it out for yourself.”
“And a warm welcome to you too.” She made a mocking salute before fixing the mask. “Have a nice life, mama.”
She waded off, making quick progress through the boot-sucking shallows. She sang something, some refrain filtering through the mask, some words about Christmas and cutting down trees.
#
They avoided each other for a couple of days. The river swung a kink through the canyon of stratoscrapers, the other woman usually out of sight.
Lottie was just starting to think that she could deal with this arrangement when the newcomer came wading purposefully in her direction.
Lottie leaned in on her sticks, lifting her chin pugnaciously.
The woman removed her breather when they were close enough to speak. She held up her grabber.
“You know how to fix one of these?”
Lottie glanced at it with cursory interest. “What’s your problem?”
“It’s jammed.”
“Call in for a new one.”
“That’ll mean time when I’m not earning creds. I thought maybe…”
Lottie grunted. She made a terse, bad-tempered gesture. “Bring it over.”
The woman waded nearer. She looked tired, shrunken-in on herself, as if the river had taken its toll in just these few short days.
“I just thought maybe…”
“Old mama could fix it.” Lottie took the jammed grabber. She took off a glove, instructed the woman to hold it while she used her nails to pop open a seam. “Like this,” she said, exposing the innards. “Watch carefully because I’m not showing you twice.”
She freed up the mechanism, worked the grabber a few times, fixed the cover back into place.
The woman took the grabber, passing Lottie her glove. “Thanks… I guess.”
“It’s nothing.”
They stood there in silence for a few moments. Yellow machines zipped overhead. The buildings stood severely truncated by the fog, only their elephantine foot-slopes rising from empty plazas.
“Blue,” the woman said.
“Blue what?”
“It’s my name. Blue.”
Lottie nodded slowly, some part of her certain that the best thing was to say nothing, to turn away and carry on with her work.
“Ldzٳپ.”
“I didn’t mean to tread on your turf.”
“So long as you keep a few markers up or downstream, you won’t be.”
After another silence, Blue said: “Won’t be here too long, anyway. I just need a few more creds for the Up And Out.” She nodded into the clouds.
Lottie made no effort to mask her scorn. “You think it’ll be any different up there?”
“It’ll be something.” Blue’s dark, close-set eyes examined her searchingly. “I just need a change. What about you?”
“Me? I’m here because I love wading through sick rivers in winter, collecting junk.”
“Guess we should be grateful.”
Lottie blinked. “Grateful?”
“That we still have a use. What I hear, this is about the last thing robots can’t do for themselves.”
Lottie had heard the same thing. Robots could sort the junk, clean and grade it, recycle it back into more robots, more drones, more telepresence proxies, but the one thing they were bad at was getting the junk out of the river in the first place. They got stuck, becoming more junk in the process.
So for the moment – until the cost/benefit equation tipped minutely in the other direction – it was cheaper and easier to employ humans.
“You noticed many drones falling into the river lately?” Lottie asked.
Blue gave her a blank look. “I’m supposed to?”
“They’re getting more reliable. Things don’t drop out of the sky very often. What they’re paying us to fish out – it’s a non-renewable resource, the way coal and oil used to be. Once we’re done with this sweep, there won’t be much more work down here.”
“They’ll find something else. My friend used to say, there’s no bottom to the food chain.” Blue gave an easy shrug. “Anyway, I’ll be elsewhere.”
“Well, good luck with that.”
Annoyance pinched Blue’s colourless features. “You’re so wise, how come you’re stuck down here doing the same job as me?” She planted her hands on her hips. “You’ve got a plan, right? Some point to those creds?”
“I’ve got a plan,” Lottie said.
#
Of course it had been a mistake, exchanging names. Now Blue seemed to feel the need to shoot the breeze at least once a day. Lottie went along, guardedly. They fell into an unspoken arrangement, climbing out of the water when their hoppers were ready for collection, sitting on the bank not too far apart, legs over the edge, boots dripping back into the water, waiting for the drones to swoop in.
“How was your haul?” Blue asked.
“Fine.” Lottie brooded for a few seconds. “And yours?”
Blue rubbed a hand under her nose. “Had better. Hard to pick out the good stuff, sometimes. If I throw back the low-grade waste, I’ll just end up scooping it up again.”
“You can’t really win, you know that? The best you can hope for is not to get screwed too hard, too quickly.”
“I’m all right. Another 800, then I’m out of here. One-way ticket on the slev to Quito, maybe enough left over for some of those neural mods.” She showed Lottie her credit card, the tally glowing in snowy digits.
“You might make that in a week, maybe two, nothing goes wrong.”
“What I’m counting on.” Blue hummed to herself, rubbing absently at raw-rimmed eyes.
“What’s that thing you keep singing to yourself?”
“You really want to know?”
“I’m the one has to listen to it.”
“Some music my mother used to play me. Some song about Christmas coming on and cutting down trees.” She hummed a little more. “Something about river, and skating away. Or wanting to.” She dipped her face, some shadow of sadness passing across it. “It’s nothing. Stupid song, anyway. It’s cold here, but it’ll never get cold enough for the river to freeze.”
Lottie reflected quietly before answering. The light was sullen, advertising banners pushing through jackdaw clouds, scribbles and flickers of nervous yellow.
“Your mother’s up there? Is that why you want to take the Up And Out?”
Blue sniffed again. “No, she’s long gone.” She jammed defiance into her voice. “But I remember her. I always will, and that stupid damned song.”
Lottie dug into one of her waterproof pockets and came out with a little squeeze-tube. “The river’s getting to your sinuses. Smear this around your nostrils. Make sure that breather’s fitting properly, too.”
Blue accepted the tube. She squeezed a small dab of the grey gel onto her fingertips. “Thank you.”
“Don’t want you getting sick on me. They might send someone worse.”
#
Despite herself, Lottie came to appreciate these minor interludes of human contact. It was an unsettling epiphany, as if she had become a traitor to the cooler part of herself.
“I hope you make those creds,” she said, a couple of days on. “Whatever you do, though, promise you won’t blow a single one of them on neural mods.”
“That you speaking from experience?”
“I had retinal degeneration. A congenital condition. Back when I had money, I stumped for Chromeguard implants. Full vision restoration.”
Blue looked at her curiously. “There’s a downside?”
“Chromeguard were bought out. The new firm had a different subscription model. I couldn’t make the regular payments.” She paused, shuffling on the bank as the concrete chilled her bones. “I mean, I could, but only at the expense of something else.” She mulled the yellow-flecked fog. “What happens is that they turn off the receptors one by one, taking away your colour perception.”
A frown notched Blue’s brow. “So the world is… what?”
“Mostly monochrome,” Lottie said. “Mostly shades of grey.”
#
They worked to their different rhythms, Lottie slow and discriminating, Blue quicker but not so careful, but the two of them always finding time to sit and talk while the drones came in.
“What was your mother doing listening to music from a hundred years ago?”
“She was weird. She didn’t really belong in this century.”
Lottie chuckled quietly. “I’m not sure any of us do.”
“She was cool, though. She wanted more for me than this. More than just being at the bottom of the heap. I’ll turn things around, though.” Blue raised her eyes to the sky again. “There’s a life for me out there. It might not be perfect, but it’ll be closer to the one she had in mind.”
“I hope you make it. Be sure to send me a postcard.”
“A what?”
“Just send me a message, tell me how you’re doing.” Lottie sat silently for a few long moments. She felt on the brink of something dizzying, as if the drop to the water had become a thousand vertical metres. “I had a daughter once. Her name was Amelia. She’s lost to me now.”
Blue took her time answering. “You don’t talk?”
“She’s dead. One of those mid-century ‘demics they probably taught you about in school. When I say lost, I mean I can’t reach my memories of her.”
“What happened to them?”
“They’re paywalled.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The company was called Mnemonic Gate. Neuroprosthetic memory storage and retrieval services. They put something in you, deep in the hippocampus.”
“There was something wrong with you, like the eye thing?”
“No. They put it in me because my employer insisted on it, a condition of work. That wasn’t uncommon. Mnemonic Gate was an offshoot of Cloud9, and Cloud9 was part of Omniserve, and Omniserve was basically running the world. They said jump, you said how high.”
“All right. Pretty sucky. I guess you had Omniserve, we have DEUS and Gladius Biomech and Global Workspace. What went wrong?”
“Another case of buy-outs and mergers and changing terms. Suddenly I ended up having to pay to maintain Mnemonic Gate ‘legacy services’.” Lottie gave a morbid little laugh. “If I didn’t cough up, my own memories stayed locked away. Including the entire part of my life with Amelia.”
Blue sat still. A slow rage formed on her face. “That’s not right.”
“It isn’t, but what could I do? For a while, I managed the payments, managed to hold onto Amelia. But I was running just to stand still. I couldn’t meet the rising fees, so I lost her again. A second death, but worse than the first because this time it was my failing, not the fault of some damned virus.”
“It wasn’t your failing!” Blue said fiercely.
“That’s what I tell myself, but it doesn’t always work. Especially around this time of year. She liked Christmas. It gets raw. Same thing happens each time: I make one last bid to raise enough to buy back my memories, take on whatever work I can find.”
Blue nodded forlornly. “That’s what it’s about for you, then. Trying to earn enough creds to own the thing that already belongs to you.” She snarled. “Screw them! Screw DEUS, screw Global Workspace, screw Omniserve!”
Lottie smiled. “I got angry too. It fades, eventually. There’s no point being angry. You can’t stay like that all the time.”
“You have to earn those creds,” Blue said with sudden conviction. “How short are you?” She made a motion toward her own card.
“No,” Lottie said firmly. “We’re not doing that. Besides, I’m way off. And even if I was close, I’d still have to make a choice. My world isn’t totally monochrome. I kept up the payments on yellow.”
ԨǷ?”
“It was Amelia’s favourite colour. Yellow Christmas lights, her yellow bicycle, yellow crayons, her first dress. These things I remember. The colour, her favourite ice cream, the sound of her shoes on the hall, the smell of her. It’s secondary, though – a whole suite of peripheral feelings, with the centre gone. Like a galaxy of yellow stars with a vast black hole at the middle.”
“I’m sorry,” Blue said quietly. “You’ll get her back one day, won’t you? You’ll find a way to make those payments?”
“That’s the plan,” Lottie said flatly. “Got to have a plan, right?”
#
It all became clear in retrospect, hours after the bad thing itself. Blue stopped work suddenly and came wading over to Lottie, ghost-faced and shivering.
“What?” Lottie asked concernedly.
“They…” But Blue could hardly form the words. Lottie took hold of her, squeezing her tight, both up to their hips in filthy water.
“Tell me.”
“They’ve deducted 600 credits.”
“There has to be a mistake.” Lottie snapped her fingers. “Show me the card.”
Blue did. There had been no error.
“They told me,” Blue said, still shivering in her embrace. “It was something I dug up out of the muck. Some kind of damaged power-pack or maybe a bomb someone left in the river. The drone collected it. It went all the way back to the grading facility, then it blew up.”
Lottie shuddered. Down in the fine print, they were responsible for any damage to upstream assets, anything or anyone higher in the food chain, robot, AI, human.
“Was anyone hurt?”
“No,” Blue sniffed. “I think it was just machines. But it’s still cost them.”
“You mean it’s cost you.” Lottie steeled herself. “You need those creds, girl. We’ll say there was a mix-up, that the bad thing was in my hopper.”
“We try that, they’d just punish both of us.”
“They would.” Lottie felt something shift within herself, some piece of her soul moving silently and irrevocably into a new configuration. “And even if you stayed here for another month, who’s to say it wouldn’t happen again?” She paused. “Show me your card.”
Some glimmering of understanding reached Blue. “No. This is my mistake; I’ll own it.”
“It’ll be my choice.”
“I don’t want it. You need what you’ve earned, for Amelia.”
“Amelia’s gone,” Lottie said, suddenly dry-mouthed. “I’ve known that a long time; I just wasn’t able to face the truth.”
“She’s still there, behind the paywall.”
“Something’s still there. Maybe my memories, maybe not. Would I even know, at this point?” Lottie shook her head, furious in her defiance. “No. What mattered about her, I’ve still got. Those traces of her I clung onto. Those yellow things. The feelings that surround the void. It’s enough.”
“You’re only saying that because you want to help me.”
“I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to pay for those memories. I’d be surrendering, giving in to them.”
“Why would helping me be any different?”
“Because it’s a human deed they don’t get to monetise. Because right now, you need this more than I need Amelia.” She swallowed. “Because it would please me to do one good thing for a friend. Because… hell, it’s Christmas.”
“If I take this offer… promise me you’ll be all right?”
“I’ll be fine. Like you said, there’s never a bottom to the food chain.”
“I hope you’ll take care of yourself.”
“I will. And you’ll send me that postcard. Tell me about the Up And Out.”
Blue extracted her card. Lottie offered hers to it and authorised the credit transfer. The digits on her card tumbled down, while those on Blue’s incremented.
“Thank you,” Blue breathed.
“That’ll get you to Quito?”
“And more. I promise I won’t use any of it on those mods.”
“Good girl. I mean, at some point you’ll probably have to, but at least you’re going in with your eyes open.”
“I am.”
“Don’t let them take anything more from you than they need to, Blue. And keep singing that song. It’s not stupid wanting to skate away, even if the river never freezes. It’s beautiful.”
“I promise.”
Blue left. She had no reason to finish her shift, and what remained in her hopper she invited Lottie to tip out and load into her own, one small recompense.
Lottie watched her walk away from the bank, diminishing to a tiny spectre against the rising flanks of the buildings. Fog curdled low, forming a platinum screen. Blue waved a hand, turned around and stepped into the mist. Lottie never saw her again.
#
She did hear from Blue, though. After about three months, she sent a message to say that she was finding her way in the Up And Out, that it was tough, but she was adapting. Three months after that, another message. She was doing better now. She’d found some regular work, some rare niche that still needed a particular quirk of human talents. It might not last, but she was keeping her options open.
It was nearly six months before the next message, and that meant it was nearly a year since they had worked the river together. Lottie was somewhere else by then, no longer scraping muck and mud for recyclables. It wasn’t better work, exactly, but it was a change. Something different.
Blue was doing well now. She had gone further out. She was starting to find that her skills were valuable, to the right people. She was making better money. It was expensive, out there, but she had begun to save more than she was spending. And she wanted to send a little bit of those funds back to Lottie.
“I know it’s not as much as you gave me,” Blue said, older and wiser in just the 12 months she had been away. “And no kindness of mine can equal the thing you did for me, back when I needed it. I still want you to have this, all the same. Maybe it helps you get a bit closer to Amelia, if that’s what you still want. Just don’t think of it as surrendering, however you make use of it. You’re better than that, and you’re better than them. I’ll always be grateful that we worked that stinky old river together.”
Lottie did the decent thing, which was to accept the gift. When the transaction had completed, she closed her hand around the card, treasuring the memory of her sharp-faced friend from the river, hoping that things kept on working out for Blue. Then she went and wandered the grey world until, with an equal measure of pain and joy, something yellow stabbed her right through to the core.
Biography
Alastair Reynolds
After working as a scientist with the European Space Agency, Alastair Reynolds turned full-time writer in 2004. His science fiction novels include Eversion and the forthcoming Machine Vendetta (2024), both published by Orion.
