Shine (6 page)

"Just give it a try. We trust you."

Rich teenage wallets were not uncommon, especially in the tech business. But this group was different. They were too young and seemed to have a different focus, too new for him to clearly identify. So his only option was to treat them as a common group of aggressive investors, the kind of people he had a history of hating. "Look, I know you know exactly what that company has been developing. You won't tell me for competitive reasons, of course, but if you are considering the investment then you've already measured how much money you can get from that. So why bother with carbon market regulations they're certainly meeting? Just go there and put your cash on it."

The young foreigner put his cloak-and-globe body back straight and raised, for the first time, a pair of ghostly hands. "You're not getting it, Mr. Lima." He looked like he was giving a lecture. "Money has meaning only to those old enough to remember it. No, Mr. Lima, we don't want to put a single penny on it. We want to find out if this project conforms to our working ethics. We want to invest our brains and bandwidth on it."

"They've been buying lots of carbon," yelled the fat man, his suit flashing back the lights of the cabaret, "and not just from companies. They paid a great number of civilians too. Some kind of sponsorship. You know, they pay you an advance so you minimize your footprint and pay again to get whatever credits you have left. Not very cost-effective, but some companies do it to raise their public images. Publicity."

The guy was called Josué Bispo, an old friend. Inácio got his reply still in the pier, disembarking from a late boat in the Sol Street. The stock broker was not the only one--not even the first--to answer Inácio's queries about Gear5, but the man told him he was around, in a brothel on the uppermost floor of the Sete de Setembro building, just a couple of blocks away. The place had a vintage feel, with loud technobrega music and hapticless soft porn playing on every table. Behind him, penciled on the remnants of a sheet of paper on the wall, the next inspection remained scheduled and three years late. "But what are they developing?" asked Inácio. "And how many people are involved?" Shouting over the music made his throat tired and sore.

Bispo nodded and balanced his weight with an elbow on the table. He finally took advantage of a gap between songs and spoke in a more normal tone. "Nobody knows for sure. What I've heard is that it's some really disruptive shit. But whatever it is, it's something that leaves lots of residues and raises too much controversy. So much they couldn't possibly be competitive. Otherwise they wouldn't be stocking." Bispo took his last shrimp tempura from a bowl full of soy sauce, and ate it whole. "Do you remember those shrimp farms up north? I must confess I miss the big, big shrimps they had there. Much bigger, and much cheaper."

Inácio grinned and raised a cup of iced tea.
He remembers the long-gone farms, the first to be raided years ago.
Hundreds of square miles of
mangue
, a whole ecosystem, turned into tanks for shrimps and oysters and then to fields of blood.
He remembers the battle
. "That's the price to be paid, old friend. Come on! Eat your expensive shrimp and be thankful that water isn't overpriced. We made our choice, pal, and I do believe it was the best option available."
Though I feel sorry for turning myself into a killer.

"Yeah. I guess so." Bispo stared at his beer glass. The data input was blank except for its temperature. A sign it had been smuggled. "So, are you fine?"

"About what?" The sudden change of subject took him by surprise.

"Lúcio. He'd have turned forty yesterday. But you know that."

He did, but it hadn't occurred to him. Until now. He completely missed his lover's birthday. Maybe he had put too much effort into forgetting Lúcio's death. He'd spent the whole year running from detailed memories, especially those which would take him by surprise and, for the briefest of times, make him believe Lúcio was alive somehow. Instead he concentrated on general, safe memories like the place they first met, their wedding, the sex. But their secret names, their songs and birthdays, caused him too much pain. He couldn't let that happen. He had to protect himself from suffering in the waking hours. And an empty house, an empty bed and an empty heart from dusk till dawn was pain enough. But yeah, he forgot Lúcio's birthday. And no, he wasn't fine.

"I'll live," Inácio said and sipped some tea, now barely cold. "Have to." He met Bispo's gaze, ready to offer a friendly shoulder, but Inácio refused, slightly shaking his head. "Gotta pee. And then go." It was his turn to change subjects. "They want the whole story by morning, you know." But he didn't move. Bispo nodded once more and was gone before Inácio could stand and shake his hand. As real good friends usually do, he let Inácio pay the bill, so he eye-commanded the payment and asked for a copy of his footprint. It took the bar's AI systems some time to arrange things, as their usual costumers rarely asked for a carbon sync. Meanwhile, he summoned his tracker and was partly relieved to see it was still under the established mark, but uncomfortably close.
Could be worse
, he thought.

As he turned his contacts on, the stream of incoming replies filled his inner screen. Silver discs linked by gossamer lines formed a cloud of social networks, as his best data miner started doing its magic. He was a spider, a vulture looking for something worthy in a herd of captured information. He assembled all the data his miner got from the cloud and started digging.

He quickly found bits and pieces about Gear5. A rather new wikindustry, but older than what he and his contractors believed. It was about three years old, but was previously registered as Gear4, an entertainment company focused on ARGs and multimedia packs for mobbands. They were doing well in the long tail chart but for some reason, eleven months ago, they killed their assets, changed their name and started buying carbon like crazy, both from small businesses and citizens alike.

Something uncomfortable was rising in the back of his mind.

That wasn't right, he thought. They spent billions of reais buying carbon. It was as if Haiti, Angola, or another developing country wanted to compensate their whole footprint in a single financial year. Inácio turned the haptics on. He had to be faster. He moved blocks of data with eyes and hands, building diagrams and going through even deeper into the cloud. But no matter where in the web he went he couldn't find who the people behind Gear5 were and who was paying for their carbon trade. Not to mention that damn product. For all he knew it didn't exist.

He felt that unease again marching over his spine up to his neck, crossing his brain and into his eyeballs. But he kept his focus on a spreadsheet conjured to list all the reported trades Gear5 made in the past few months. The numbers would never match. There wouldn't be enough companies or individual carbon sellers available and with sufficient margins left in their footprints to feed that stock. No, there wouldn't.

And this meant they were buying from the black market.

Pressure from within his eyes forced him to press his palms against his face in an attempt to release the pain, to keep his mind from going out. He was so tired. He wanted to sleep.

When he opened his eyes again he noticed a man who seemed to be watching him, half-hidden under a curtain of smoke and red stroboscopic light at the far end of the cabaret. The figure had a familiar silhouette but Inácio didn't recognize him. He felt a rush of adrenaline in his blood and quickly packed the sheets and docs and messages in a cloudlock. But the man was already gone, vanished behind the swinging bodies of two live performers. He definitely needed some rest. But it was time to leave.

On the way to the bathroom, Inácio stumbled over three customers and a chair, and almost fell twice. The place looked odd, stretched and oblong. It seemed bigger inside than it actually was. If he'd had any alcohol, he'd say he was feeling hung over, dizzy and suddenly sick. He stumbled at the white door of the bathroom, curved as if seen through a peephole, and brightly colored by too many opened eydgets. Inácio tried to shut up the blabbers feeding their voice messages with news and comments and rants and flames, but found he was unable to close any of the transmissions.

Tens, hundreds or thousands of voices talked to him simultaneously, making his head a new Babel, too heavy a mind, unsustainable. Under the cacophony a single sound, constant yet barely distinguishable, drew his attention. He finally leaned over the sink with eyes closed, but even so he'd see an augmented reality version of his inner cavities, filled with interfaces and white noise.

And then it stopped.

Both his hands were shaking uncontrollably and his shirt was damp with sweat. Slowly, he moved his palms into the sink and cupped them under the water. He kept the tap running, not giving a damn about water resources or the new stories being built in the counter's black bar.

Two voices entered the bathroom talking about yesterday's futebol game. They were followed by men visible from the bottom of the large mirror. Inácio felt spam coming and instinctively blocked their sports network's invitation and the game footage hovering over their heads. The two men walked past him and carried on their dialogue at the urinal, their voices going lower and lower, finally engulfed by the sound of a hum, a murmur from the past causing an itch deep inside his eardrums.

"I need your help," whispered the voice under the buzz.

In the mirror Inácio saw a third man standing right behind him. He turned, startled, ready for a fist fight. He fell backwards when his dead lover spoke.

"I'm dying," said Lúcio and the lights, the web and the world went black.

Inácio threw up his dinner and passed out.

"Will you be long? I've got a fever." The video with Lúcio speaking lay open in the corner of his vision. In the recording, showing the very European face of his deceased partner, Inácio was just a voice actor, answering his plea with a hurried 'in a moment' and then shutting down the call. That was their last conversation. Two years ago Lúcio was diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease, treatable in most cases. Nine months later he was dead. Fuck!
He misses him so much.
Not for a single moment did the man he fell in love with give up living. He never surrendered. He loved the simple fun of being alive. Be it a walk in the park, a hotly disputed videogame home championship or a kiss after slow, contemplative sex.

A low whistle put an end to his waking dream. The street printer in front of Inácio was old, expensive and prone to malfunction, but at least it used organic polymers and was able to embed processors in the fabric. It was two in the morning and printing himself a new shirt on the go was way faster than doing the same at home for free. Inácio had thrown his ruined button-down away at the first recycler and walked bare-chested, looking for the machine. After the blackout, as energy and communications came back online, the two men back in the bar's bathroom insisted on calling him an ambulance, but Inácio told them he was fine and that he only had a blood pressure peak. Tough day, he said. It was his dead husband's birthday and he thought he had seen him right there, before falling unconscious for a few seconds. Yeah, stress does that, they replied.

After checking if all the systems were functioning he put the brand-new shirt on and headed to the São José quarter, in the south side of downtown. He was going to the big Market enclosed in the maze of alleys in one of the city's oldest quarters. He was going to Recife's black market, where he believed some of Gear5's carbon smugglers could be found.

He was halfway to São José when the blinking icon of an incoming moIP call blossomed in his sight, automatically pausing the video's loop. He accepted the virtual meeting, slowing his pace to free the connection of time-lag. Preliminary conclusions were highlighted in the report, still in its infancy, minimized for quick access. He promptly opened the document knowing who might be the caller.

"We tried to contact you earlier. You went offline for almost an hour," asked his foreign client. Cloak-and-globe's AI made his avatar walk along with Inácio. "What happened?"

"An hour? I think I ate some rotten shrimp and passed out for a few minutes. Nothing serious. Oh, and there was a little energy shortage or something. Blabbers are saying lightning has struck a major power line, so communications might be a little messy."

Two parallel plasma lightnings, just like eyes inside the glass globe, turned to face the analyst. "Have you made any progress?"

With the haptics on, Inácio threw the report and some of the evidence in a collaborative space pocketed in the moIP connection. "Yes. I'm almost sure they're buying illegal carbon credits from the black market. See the numbers? They aren't real." Inácio had an animation running, with dozens of names cascading into the image of a plastic bucket floating between them. "Those are the names of companies Gear5 has claimed to have traded regularly in the past six months. All fake."

Cloak-and-globe picked a name and drew it closer to his face. He seemed to examine its typography. "And that means...?"

"That means Gear5's probably a carbon washer. It claims to be developing some high-impact product and starts buying cheap credits from a large number of sources. Since their product has a really large footprint, they naturally
need
many sources, right? So no one notices the fraud."

Inácio had just put together the pieces, forming an almost complete picture in the jigsaw. But that kind of illegal activity was uncommon, for carbon trade was conspicuously watched. And not only by national agencies, but also by non-government organizations, both private and voluntary, like CrediCarb, Carbon Watch and E-Missions, the latter founded by GreenWar veterans and allowed to conduct limited investigations if called. An activity absent from Inácio's curriculum.

"But in reality," he continued, "they're buying cheap credits like, say, carbon dioxide, and trading large chunks of it in the black market for heavier credits, mostly stolen, and sold at the lowliest of costs.