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EXTRAS
Scott Westerfeld
Simon Pulse
Science Fiction/Adventure
Hardcover: 9781416951179
Paperback: 9781416971214
448 pages
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• Author Talk –– October 2007
DOWN AND OUT
"Moggle," Aya whispered. "You awake?"
Something moved in the darkness. A pile of dorm uniforms rustled, as if a small animal were stirring underneath. Then a shape slipped from among the folds of spider silk and cotton. It rose into the air and floated towards Aya's bed. Tiny lenses gazed at her face, curious and alert, reflecting starlight from the open window.
Aya grinned. "Ready to go to work?"
In answer, Moggle flashed its night-lights.
"Ouch!" Aya squeezed her eyes shut. "Don't do that! It's vision-wrecking!"
She lay in bed another moment, waiting for the spots to fade. The hovercam nuzzled against her shoulder apologetically.
"It's okay, Moggle-chan," she whispered. "I just wish I had infrared too."
Lots of people her age had infrared, but Aya's parents had this thing about major surge for uglies. Like most crumblies, they liked to pretend the world was still stuck in the Prettytime.
The only surge Aya had ever gotten was an eyescreen, which was only to make sure she never missed her parents' pings. She clicked her tongue and it flickered to life, layering the city interface across her vision.
"Uh-oh," she said. "Almost midnight."
She didn't remember dozing off, but the tech-head bash had started two hours ago. It was probably crowded by now, packed enough with surge-monkeys and manga-heads that nobody would notice one extra ugly snooping around.
Besides, Aya Fuse was an expert at being invisible. Her face tank was proof of that. It sat unmoving in the eyescreen's corner: 451,396.
She let out a slow sigh. In a city of a million, that was total extra-land. She'd had her own feed for a whole year now, had kicked a great story juts a week ago, and was still anonymous.
Well, tonight was finally going to change that.
"Let's go, Moggle," she whispered, and slipped out of bed.
A gray robe lay in a shapeless puddle at her feet. Aya pulled it over her dorm uniform and tied it at the waist, then sat down on the windowsill. She turned to face the night sky slowly, easing one leg, then the other, out into the cool air.
She glanced at the ground fifty meters below.
"Okay, that's dizzy-making."
At least no monitors were skulking around down there. That was the kick thing about a thirteenth-story room -- no one expected you to sneak out your window.
Thick clouds hung low in the sky, reflecting work lights from the construction site across town. The cold tasted of pine needles and rain, and Aya wondered if she was going to freeze in her disguise. But she couldn't exactly throw a dorm jacket over the robe an expect people not to notice.
"Hope you're all charged up, Moggle. It's drop-time."
The hovercam drifted pas her shoulder and out the window, settling close against her chest. It was the size of half a soccer ball, sheathed in hard plastic and warm to the touch. As Aya wrapped her arms around Moggle, she felt her earrings tug and tremble, caught in the magnetic currents of its lifters.
She squeezed her eyes shut. "Ready?"
Moggle shivered in her arms.
Clinging to the hovercam with all her strength, Aya pushed herself into the void.
Getting out was much simpler these days.
For Aya's fifteenth birthday, Ren Machino -- her big brother's best friend -- had modified Moggle. She'd only asked him to make it quick enough to keep up with her board. But like most tech-heads, Ren took pride in his mods. The new Moggle was waterproof, shockproof, and powerful enough to carry an Aya-size passenger through the air.
Close enough, anyway. With her arms wrapped around the hovercam, she fell no faster than a cherry blossom twirling toward the ground. It was much easier than stealing a bungee jacket. And except for the nervous-making part of jumping, it was kind of fun.
She watched the windows flicker past -- dreary uglies' rooms full of standard-requisition squalor. No one famous lived in Akira Hall, just loads of face-missing extras grinding out merits from test scores and menial jobs, wearing generic hole-in-the-wall designs. A few ego-kickers sitting and talking into their cams, watched by no one. The average face tank here was six hundred thousand, despair-making and pathetic.
Obscurity in all its horror.
The dark ground rushed up at her, and Aya bent her knees, rolling as she hit. The wet grass squished beneath her like a sodden sponge, soft but shivery cold.
She let go of Moggle and lay for a moment on the rain-soaked earth, letting her heartbeat slow down. "You okay?"
Moggle flashed its night-lights again.
"Okay...that's still blind-making."
Ren had also done something to the hovercam's brain. Real AI might still be illegal, but the new Moggle was more than just a wedge of circuitry and lifters. Since Ren's tinkering, it had learned Aya's favorite angles, when to pan and zoom, and even how to track her eyes for cues.
But for some reason, it didn't get the whole night-vision thing.
She kept her eyes closed, listening hard as she watched the spots across her vision fade. No footsteps, no whir of monitor drones. Nothing but the muffled thump of music from the dorm.
Aya rose to her feet and brushed herself off. Not that anyone would notice a few blades of wet grass; Reputation Bombers dressed to disappear. The robe was hooded and shapeless, the perfect disguise for party-crashing.
With a twist of her crash bracelet, a hoverboard rose from its hiding place in the bushes. Stepping on, she faced the glittering lights of New Pretty Town.
Funny how everyone still called it that, even though most of the residents weren't pretty anymore -- unless you found surge-monkeys and pixel-skins appealing. New Pretty Town was full of them, and plenty of other strange new fads and fashions.
But in one way the name still fit. It was still a place where uglies couldn't go. Not at night, when all the good stuff happened.
Not if they were extras. Losers. Unknowns.
Gazing at the city, she felt engulfed by her own invisibility. Each of its sparkling lights stood for one of the million people who had never heard of Aya Fuse. Who probably never would.
She sighed, urging her board forward.
The government feeds all said that Prettytime had been washed away forever, freeing humanity from centuries of bubbleheadedness. They said the mind-rain had unleashed a host of new technologies, setting the future in motion again.
But as far as Aya could see, the mind-rain hadn't changed everything....
It still pretty much sucked, being fifteen.
Excerpted from EXTRAS © Copyright 2009 by Scott Westerfeld. Reprinted with permission by Simon Pulse, Inc. All rights reserved.
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