Girl in a Fishbowl (Crowbar Book 1) Read online

  Girl in a Fishbowl

  by Thomas A. Gilly

  Girl in a Fishbowl, First Edition

  Text copyright © 2016 Thomas A. Gilly

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover image Copyright Syda Productions

  Used under license from Shutterstock.com

  To my sister Barb, without whom this novel would not have been possible.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 1

  Conrad sat on a park bench on a deserted sidewalk surrounded by dilapidated brownstone buildings. Directly across the street was an alley, once gated by a short chain-linked fence that had long since rusted and now leaned like a dirty cobweb over half of the entrance. Wooden pallets, rotten and rain-soaked, were piled up against the brick wall at the far end. Occasionally someone would ride by in the street on a squeaky bicycle, weaving to avoid the pot-holes.

  Conrad’s black beater shirt was tight on his youthful teenaged frame—there was a hot spring breeze not doing enough to evaporate the beads of sweat forming under the translucent hair of his arms. Clouds mostly blocked the sun but it was allowed to peek through at times and cast sharp black shadows. The brown hair on Conrad’s head was light, almost blond, the kind that promised to become lighter over the next few months. On the faded jeans of his lap lay his smart glasses, silver tinted and sleek.

  He was afraid to put them on.

  Today was a big day—Biometric Authorization and Verification Day—BAV Day. For most of the people on the planet it didn’t matter, most people had already accepted biometric authorization and verification in order to access the internet. Today was the first day it was mandatory for everyone. The few internet service providers that still had anonymous accounts had been spamming their subscribers for months to update their smart glasses to those equipped with retinal scanners. Order now! Click here for an instant 40% discount! Don’t miss out on these lowest of low prices! Government subsidies automatically applied! The anonymous service he had been using cost him an extra monthly fee, so now at least his account price would be reduced. That was one good thing.

  Conrad, typical of eighteen year olds, was constantly short of cash.

  He gripped the glasses with both hands. If he put them on they would immediately send his biometric information to his service provider. Then they would have him, he would be one of the herd. His old smart glasses, now useless, dangled from a belt loop on his jeans.

  Something made him look up—a paranoid feeling, an isolated urge. Hovering just above the four story rooftops but below the white rail lines of the bullet trains was a surveillance drone. Disk-shaped with a hole in the center where its rotor moved too fast to be seen, it was about the size of a large pizza dish. Conrad could just barely make out the letters “MRPD” around the edge on the bottom. It was as if the drone was waiting for him to put on the smart glasses—waiting for him to succumb, to join with all the other law abiding citizens who believed that only the guilty had any need for privacy.

  This paranoia came from his dad. His dad had raised him to fear the dark forces of the one-percenters and their iron grip over the other ninety-nine. While growing up most of his friends (back when he had friends) had been willing to give up all of their information—their real-time locations, their buying habits, the names of everyone they knew, their interests and tastes, and the interests and tastes of their friends. Shit, most had competed to give out their information to as many people and corporations as possible—to get each of their individual personal brands as much exposure as they could.

  His dad was not taking BAV Day well. He had gotten well and thoroughly drunk and was having a raving fit. That’s why Conrad had to get out and sit on this bench with its familiar flaking green paint in this abandoned part of the neighborhood. He had to stare down the alley that had become a Zen touchstone for him—staring at that derelict cleft of ramshackle space between two tired buildings. He could be alone and let his mind go into that space and clear himself of the stale cigarette air and the raspy sound of his dad ranting about everything wrong with the world and all of the people in it.

  But he wasn’t alone here now. He had the smart glasses on his lap and an MRPD drone overhead. Welcome to the wider world. It was almost a relief—it was beyond his control—all of the forces of the establishment were making him join the herd and there was nothing he could do about it. It was impossible to stay off of the internet completely—well, impossible for everyone except for his dad. Despite the fact that no reasonable person would blame him for putting on the smart glasses, there was still the taint of betrayal.

  With a deliberateness that expressed the solemnity of the event, Conrad slid the glasses carefully over his pale blue eyes. There was just the slightest pause before a perky female voice said, “Welcome to the Sheeta network Conrad Hicks! Our eyes are the windows to your world! If you wish to personalize your online experience, please create a workspace and select the ‘Settings’ icon.”

  He looked across the street. All of the blank spaces on all of the buildings were now covered with a frenetic moving mosaic of advertisements. Smiling people were drinking Galaxy Gulp cola, running in Futbah sports shoes, playing Blood Raker combat, putting on Trojan condoms. Thankfully there was no sound, although when he lifted his finger over any one of the advertisements it offered to provide sound with a little speaker icon he could click. He moved his finger quickly away from them. He looked up at the sky and said, “There, you happy?”, but the drone was no longer there. Or was it? He pulled his glasses to the end of his nose so he could look over them, and the drone magically reappeared. Conrad had read about this somewhere—it was a “feature” to blot drones from the sky so as not to spoil a person’s view.

  Conrad pushed his glasses back up and used his index fingers to trace a rectangle in the air. The rectangle became a workspace with a menu bar on the top. He clicked on the gear icon in the corner that universally meant “Settings”. A long list of setting icons scrolled onto the screen. He had
no idea which one led to the setting he wanted.

  “Sheeta, how do I see the drones?”

  The settings category “Esthetic Enhancements” with an icon that looked like a painter’s canvas of a sunny landscape became highlighted and moved to the center. He clicked that and found “Hide Extraneous Entities”. That’s intuitive, he thought sarcastically and clicked it off. He looked up and the drone was now visible. He considered turning off the advertisements, but the longer they were visible the more the Sheeta network would discount his bill.

  “Hey you!” a familiar female voice said to his left. He turned his head quickly, startled. Standing next to his bench was a virtual blue shimmering image, slightly transparent, of a slim young woman with long wavy black hair and large dark eyes—eyes that looked like black swirls within the electric blue projection. The voice had actually come from the left speaker of his glasses frame.

  “Hey!” he said, attempting to collect his composure. Terri Vieira.

  She found me quickly enough.

  “Never thought I’d see your name on peeper,” she said. “You think they’re ice-skating in hell now?”

  “Hell doesn’t exist. And I just put these on. I forgot peeper is active by default.”

  “That’s okay. It’s good to see you join the modern world. Now we can talk, like we used to.”

  He and Terri used to talk—when they were kids. They would talk for hours at a time, most times on this very same bench. He felt exposed with her finding him on this bench, on their bench. It was like he was giving away too much information, showing her that he hadn’t grown up, that he was still this loser kid living with his crazy dad in McGee’s Rocks, sitting alone where they used to sit together.

  But she had a broad smile that showed off her high cheek bones and dimples and it was infectious and he couldn’t help but smile too. He noticed she was wearing a fancy dress—a fancy mini-dress with draping neckline that swayed as she shifted her weight back and forth on high heels.

  “You’re dressed up,” he said, the words blurting out as soon as they came into his mind.

  “Yeah, graduation party. You know, because we graduated.”

  He knew what she meant by “we”. For the last four years, on the few times they spoke together, Terri rarely said “I”.

  “How is Natalya doing these days?” Conrad asked, consciously trying to sound like he actually cared. But then, impulsively, he added, “Did her dad buy her a corporation for a graduation present?”

  Terri put on a little frown of disappointment—at his attitude, apparently. “We’re both going to Princeton University. After we graduate from there Natalya is going to start her own business and I’m going to help her.”

  “‘Help’, as in ‘do whatever she tells you.’” He realized as soon as he said it that he was intentionally trying to push her away—he hadn’t asked for her to appear, to see him surrender to the herd. She did look incredible, and that made it worse because she wasn’t really there, she was an illusion living in Stanwich in some fancy skyscraper, truly beyond him. He didn’t trust whatever whim brought her here as she prepared for her party—whatever curiosity or pity or some stirred nostalgia for a youthful magic that could never be conjured again.

  She turned quickly away toward someone or something in her reality. She looked back at him and said, “I have to get ready for the party, Natalya is waiting. Later.”

  And then she was gone.

  Did she really have to leave? Probably not. He had chased her away. But she could still be watching him. There were cameras on every street corner, on every street light. He made a workspace again, found peeper, and went into stealth mode so no one could track him—at least no one outside of his internet service provider and law enforcement. He then directed all incoming calls to voice mail.

  He wasn’t quite ready to be immersed in the world yet—and he no longer wanted to be on the bench either. He stood and looked around him, at the formerly bland world that had been transformed into a kaleidoscope of advertisements. Above him, a hundred meters in the sky, propped up by slender white arches, the bullet train railway traveled between the islands of steel and glass skyscrapers that rose up at scattered points on the horizon amid a sea of smaller brick and wood and brownstone structures. He turned west toward the incongruous vision of the Bergs. Twenty years ago there had been a terrorist attack, a dirty bomb had detonated on the top floor of the fifty story Armada Bank building, dispersing radioactive caesium-137 over one of the busiest sections of the city. Only thirty-four people had died in the initial blast, but the caesium-137 made the surrounding blocks uninhabitable. The contaminated area had been abandoned and a wall was first put up to keep people out of what had become a dark, dead scab in the city. Five years later a number of corporations had decided to beautify the dead space by constructing replicas of the most famous mountains in the world, all scaled to 300 meters tall. On the left side of the range was Mount Fuji, its slopes whitened to perfections with artificial snow. Next to that was Everest, jagged and hostile; then flat-topped Kilimanjaro; and last was the angular Matterhorn. They shone surreal from the reflected sun, a mist rising above them, taking what had been a tragedy and “declaring the strength and determination of the people of the city not to succumb to fear.” Most people in the Rocks thought that it was really put there so the rich folks living in Stanwich would have a pretty view, and not have to look down on their less than picturesque neighbors. A rail line slipped between Everest and Kilimanjaro toward Stanwich, where Terri was now preparing for her party.

  Conrad had ridden that train once, just once, shortly after Terri had left.

  He really didn’t know where to go now. He wasn’t ready to face his dad. The bench no longer felt like a sanctuary. So he just walked in the opposite direction of the Bergs, the walls around him promising every possible worldly pleasure in silence.

  Chapter 2

  Terri looked out of a pink tinted wall of glass down at the wide forested park at the foot of the Bergs. Below the Matterhorn sailboats skimmed the placid surface of Lake Wren. Tiny from this distance, they looked like mayflies that had taken up skating on a puddle of ice.

  “Who was that you were talking too?” Natalya Borgan’s voice said from inside Terri’s head.

  “An old friend . . . from the Rocks.”

  “Well, you don’t even have any jewelry on yet. You’re going to be wearing that necklace I gave you for your birthday, right?”

  “Of course, it matches the dress perfectly,” Terri said, turning away from the window toward the broad interior of her bedroom. Pink lace curtains hanging from the ceiling partitioned it into a billowy maze. She pushed through them to her white Baroque vanity and opened a tiny drawer in one of her jewelry boxes, taking out the emerald necklace. She put it on and turned toward the full length mirror to see how it looked on her neckline. She tilted left and right to see the gem glitter against her light brown skin. As she turned back to the vanity she was slightly startled to see the projected image of Natalya standing in front of her. Natalya’s petite frame, one and a half meters tall, was accurately represented by the blue projection. By convention all 3D projections shimmered blue and were slightly transparent—to let you know that they weren’t really there. Terri didn’t need smart glasses to see Natalya; she was wearing the latest smart contact lenses that could project images directly to her retina. They also had cameras that could observe and respond to her gestures. They were gifts from Natalya as well—no friend of Natalya’s was going to be seen wearing anything as dorky as smart glasses.

  Natalya’s round face and soft features gave her a naturally sweet and harmless aura. Terri’s friendship with Natalya had taught her just how deceiving looks could be.

  “I didn’t know you still had friends in the Rocks,” Natalya said suspiciously. “We have big plans in motion for tonight—you know how paranoid I get when I have big plans in motion. Who’s this mysterious Rockhead you were talking to?”

  “You’ve
actually met him once,” Terri said quickly. “Conrad Hicks. I was really surprised to see him online, even on BAV day—he’s real big on privacy. When his name popped up I just had to say ‘hi’.”

  Natalya’s hands were gesturing rapidly in front of her even before Terri had finished her sentence. Her brow furrowed, first with confusion, then with frustration as her fingers became blurs. After a few seconds she wiped the space in front of her and looked directly at Terri. “Is this guy for real? He looks like a sock puppet. A badly made sock puppet. You know Marja has sock puppets. You have been maintaining my security protocols, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, of course!” Terri replied defensively. “Conrad is real. Like I said he’s real big on privacy. You met him, about four years ago he came over here to see me, remember?”

  Natalya’s eyes fixed again on the empty space in front of her, her fingers moving in the air again. After almost a full minute she said, “Oh yeah, that dweeb.” She still looked confused. “Are you sure this guy is the same guy? Do you realize he has virtually no dox to speak of? Not a single psychological profile? No social impact rating? The only thing I see about him is under ‘Interests’, and all that says is ‘Birds’. How is that possible? What the fuck does that even mean, ‘Birds’? I have a few hundred terabytes under my ‘Interests’ alone.”

  “Yeah, his father is really nuts about privacy; he wouldn’t let Conrad develop any online identity.” Terri had been worried about Natalya thinking she had made a careless breach in security, but now she felt uncomfortable talking about Conrad. When they were kids she never talked about him to her other friends out of respect for his privacy. But now that he was online she guessed it was probably okay.

  “I need to look into this,” Natalya said and disappeared.

  Terri exhaled deeply and reached to her vanity to get her earrings, but then remembered that the ones she wanted to wear tonight were on the nightstand. She walked over next to her bed and grabbed them, and as she turned around Natalya was back in front of her. She was grinning.