The Anarax Gala

Her fingers drum nervously at her hip.

No, she reminds herself, not nervously. Bored. Impatient.

They dance over the deep blue fabric, the small pocket concealed within it, stitched into the side seam. She fights to keep her hand from balling up into a fist and hiding itself away. Likewise, she resists the urge to toy with the ring, distracting in its unfamiliarity, that sits heavy at the base of her right index. It is already somewhat at odds with the rest of her delicate attire, the metal thick and dull where her dress is light and the rest of her jewellery bright silver, and seemingly engraved with a series of thin, alternating triangles - inoffensive, but unusual. She knows better than to invite attention to it, here and now, before she has even entered the Anarax building. And after a lifetime of cataloguing people’s tells, she refuses to let herself be so easily given away. Her mind is anxious enough without her body betraying its state to the world at large.

Impatience, though, she can get away with. It is safe - expected, even. Thirty people, perhaps, line the street, all having arrived - as instructed - before the doors are due to open, all shivering in clothing designed to invoke wonder, not warmth, and none so important that they can be sure of receiving so coveted an invite again. They are all eager to hurry inside, fidgeting with excitement, or irritation, or perhaps mild concern; she would be more suspicious standing still.

She looks around, slowly, measured, and catches sight of a strange face, staring back at her from the full glass panels that make up the building’s walls.

Glass, might not be correct. Anarax supposedly re-outfitted all of their buildings a few years back, to improve security - she suspects that she’s looking at some kind of bullet-resistant polycarbonate, rather than the silica windows she made faces in as a child. But functionally, the building looks unchanged. She lets memory wash over her, for just a moment, and sticks her tongue out at the woman, as her nose and eyes scrunch up. Unsurprisingly, the reflected stranger moves with her, in twinned harmony.

Ax really has outdone himself, she thinks. She is rendered unrecongisable, functionally invisible to eye and algorithm alike. Her jawline is chiseled, the point of her chin sharp, and though she had tried to object to the waxold raising her cheekbones, calling it excessive, she cannot deny its effectiveness now. Her features seem lengthened, her eyes more crowded, and she knows instinctively that it will take a FaceReg program far more sophisticated than anything in casual use at some biannual gala, to link the woman she is to this woman she has become.

The thin smile she wears relaxes, fleetingly, into something real.

****************************************************************************

For a certain circle of people, there is no greater honour than being invited into the gala scene. Galas are glamorous; they reek of wealth. Whole evenings can be whiled away in the company of A-list artists with visions that the world will soon forget, and D-list celebrity dramas that will live on eternal, and all the politicians and industrialists who run the overworlds of the ‘Del. Ballrooms fill with every powerful person in the city who can still afford to sign papers with their real names, and every insignificant person who can con their way in with either charm or circumstance.

Long lines of unmoving people, waiting restlessly to pass through ugly security checkpoints, is hardly glamorous, so the invitees deemed mostly irrelevant are generally asked to arrive anywhere up to an hour before the doors are slated to open, to hurry them inside before the press show up. This allows the many, many guests of prestige and honour, to make their entrances without suffering the indignities of being photographed besides the common people, uncultured and uncouth.

It also allows the occasional guest-who-is-not-a-guest-at-all, to slip inside under minimal scrutiny. And so Miss Ziya Iqbal, known to her friends and to herself as simply Gul, walks through the x-ray body scanner with her false persona and false face, and as long as the Anarax PrivSec team can verify she has no firearms, explosives, or undeclared drugs, they will wave her through without giving her patchwork histories and resumé a second thought.

It’s almost too easy. Even so, it’s a struggle not to fidget with the extensions she’d tied in that morning, an even blend of synthetic hairs and lead threads, that work to hide the shiny cybernetic set into the left side of her skull.

But she stills her twitching hand, and the woman at the screen waves her through, and then she’s standing in a large atrium, standing where she hasn’t been in years. The last time she’d been here, looking out through the arching windows, she had been Gulzar Narayan, and she had belonged, for some definition of the word. Gulzar Narayan, a single cog in the upper social circles, unnoticed and replaceable.

She had hated going to the galas, had hated the dull conversations and the duller facades, people dressed up in all their finery, with smooth unblemished skin and tight, purposeless clothing, as if they had never left the twenty-first century. She hated the hypocrisy, the reverence with which people worshiped days past, as if they were not themselves more than happy to laser away their wrinkles and reconstruct their blood vessels and implant overlay displays into the very lenses of their eyes. The streets had called to her, the world of the Cryptons, where cybernetics were shown off with pride, and no BodyMod was deemed too revolutionary, too Frankensteinien. 

Gulzar Narayan had dropped both her high society life, and most of her old name, and ran. And the first thing she did, as she began her life as Gul, was to strip the ugly, rubbery synthetic skin from her metal right leg, brutally, with neither care nor caution, as she tore it apart beyond repair. 

The prosthesis was a work of art - her childhood may have lacked authenticity but money had never been an object - and she has upgraded it since, with storage compartments and row upon row of ports, many of the later modifications done completely by herself. In fact, most of the hardware she carries is stored there, for convenience, and accessibility, and also perhaps because it is the least invasive place for them to be.

She is not oblivious to the hypocrisy of her own actions.

And she knows why she has been chosen to do this job - whether she likes it or not, she still blends in. She has the ‘netic in her skull to hide, of course, with false hair and a small silicone patch over what that could not cover. And her leg is bold and brash, and if it is easily concealed with some flowing fabric then that is not entirely her fault. But for all her considerable defiance, she is still yet to augment her eyesight, or structurally reconfigure her face, or fuse blades to the knuckles of her fists, or any of the thousand other Mods that lured her away in the first place. For all her internal sanctimony, she is aware that she is not so dissimilar from the people surrounding her now, different only in that if she will not commit to displaying her enhancements openly, she will simply go without.

She doesn’t quite know why she cannot bring herself to take further augmentations. She doesn’t quite know why being back at the Anarax gala fills her with such dread. She has the disquieting thought that the two may be related, and she would rather not know that too, than examine it further.

The job itself is simple. Or, if not simple, then at least not too involved with the gala itself. The gala is simply her ticket in, and now that she is in it ought to be no different than any of the other hundred jobs she’s pulled. Slip in, slip away, and slip her riders into as many data ports as she can find. The programs are preloaded, stored on chips in a compartment in her thigh; the slit of her dress pocket runs level with the compartment that holds her riders; the ring on her finger unfolds to a sharp point that can sever the pocket bag to provide access. If all goes to plan, the ring folds back, she reenters the main atrium and leaves the same way she came in, with the knowledge that no gateway security team ever cares about the person quietly walking away. Her disguise has held up and her plan is solid, she could be home and splitting a beer with Ax within the hour.

And still there are butterflies, unsettled, in her stomach.

She had hated these galas, she knows that much is true. But she can’t help but wonder whether she’s been leaving herself a pathway back, subconsciously, into this life that she once knew. She can’t help but wonder if her nerves don’t come from the fear of finding something here that she misses, that she might even enjoy.

Does something in her want to come back?

Something jostles her from behind, and Gul realises that she has been standing unmoving in the middle of the atrium for some minutes now. She sighs, and then begins to walk, slowly, to the double doors at the far end.

****************************************************************************

She is starting to recall, on some visceral level, why she has always hated these galas.

It is claustrophobic, walking through the throngs of people. Gul has been in the ‘Del’s centre, at high noon, while the DRL was giving out free lunches. She has been in far greater crowds. But outside the masses are fuelled with brutish force, and everything has a purpose. Here, collisions are merely accidental brushes, light, straying fabric or fingers. The chatter is limited to murmurs, but they build to an incessant buzz in her ears that she cannot escape, and her mind is torn, instinctively trying to follow each and every half-heard conversational thread.

It is overwhelming, and her skin prickles, and her hand clench into fists no matter how hard she wills them not to. But, there is a comfort, steadily growing deep within her, and even as her irritation spikes, her stomach is settled as it hasn’t been all day.

Gul reaches the set of double doors, and it is the work of mere moments for her to slip through, inconspicuous. The rubber soles of her shoes silence her footsteps as she walks, and her left hand passes over her right to unfold her ring with practiced ease.

And she smiles, because she is here, and she has made it, by the time she is preparing to lay backdoor channels into the software infrastructure at the headquarters of the biggest private arms provider in the 'Del, she isn't feeling nervous at all.