Read Brasyl for Free Online

tapered
pant-bottoms with a little dart in the side and white piping running
up to a matching jacaré belt. The pants belong to a black
jumpsuit, confrontationally retro in its cut, shoulder pads, trim and
kitschy tit-zips. All this detail gleams in Edson's edged perception.
Then the head descends from the suite upstairs. Third-generation
Japonesa cheekbones and nose—she's had the eyes done, round
anime doe-eyes. Hair that super-silky straightness that all aspire to
but only the Japanese have the DNA to achieve. Bobbed so severely it
might have been measured with a spirit level. Red is the color again,
this year. She wears top-marque Blu Mann I-shades pushed up on it.
    "Good bag," she comments.
    Edson opens his mouth and nothing comes out. It's not love. It's not
even lust. The closest emotion to it he can recognize is glamour . If he had a religious cell in his body, he might know it as
worship, in that word's oldest, truesr sense: worth-ship . She
fascinates him. She is all the things he hopes to be. He wants to
orbit in her gravity, circle her thrilling world and thrilling
clothes and thrilling friends and thrilling places to go and do and
be and see. She takes the jeito he thinks he has earned and spreads
it all over the road behind her like a mashed cat. She makes him feel
like favela scum. That's all right. Compared to her he is, he is.
    "They're about two minutes out," chides the bicha. "You
want to give me that bag?"
    "Um, can I watch?"
    "There's nothing to see. You'll be disappointed."
    "I don't think I will. I'd like to see."
    "You will. Everybody is."
    "About a minute and a half," says bicha-boy. Gerson is
having a cafezinho.
    She lets him carry the bag upstairs.
    "Fia? Fia what'"
    There's barely space for the two swivel chairs among the technology.
The cubicle is swagged with enough cable to rig a suspension bridge.
    "Kishida." She says it fast, with Japanese emphases though
her accent is pure Paulistana. Fia sets the Giorelli on an
illuminated white plastic tray under a set of micromanipulator arms.
She sweeps her Blu Manns down over her face. Her hands dance in air;
the robot arms gavotte over the handbag, seeking the arfid chip.
Edson sees ghosts and circuitry in increasing magnifications flicker
across Fia's shades.
    "I know this tune, I really like it. Do you like baile'"
Edson says, twitching his muscles to the house beat. "There's a
gafieira on Friday; I've a client doing a set."
    "Could you just shut up for thirty seconds while I try and do
some work?"
    The arms locate and lock. Icons appear on Fia's glasses: her pupils
dance across the display, issuing commands. Edson finds his attention
hooked by a glowing object beneath the glass surface of the desk. He
cups his hands around his face and presses it to the desktop. The
glass is cool enough for his breath to dew. Far below, seemingly
farther than the architecture of the trailer allows—below the
floor of the lab, below the club lounge, below the truck chassis and
the surface of the road—is a shifting, morphing glow.
    "What's that?" He lowers his brow until it touches the cool
glass. "Reality," says Fia. "Quantum dots in
superposition. The light is vacuum fluctuation photons leaking
through from some of the parallel states in which the computation is
being made."
    "Ah, you're the physicist," Edson says, and bites his
tongue: is it the pill that is making this muscle that has never let
him down before speak only stupid? She looks at him as if he has shit
on her glass desktop. She reaches across Edson to hit a key. The
robot probes move in a fraction of a hair, then withdraw to their
standby position.
    "Okay, that's it. Safe and anonymous."
    "What, you mean, that quick?"
    "I told you you would be disappointed."
    "But nothing happened."
    "I ran through possible
combinations in ten to the eight hundred universes. That's not
exactly nothing."
    "Of course," says Edson unconvincingly.
    "There's always an answer out there somewhere."
    Edson