Edredom

The phone rang. It was an old one, still wired to the wall, still part of the spiderwork of infrastructure that all the other technologies begrudgingly sat upon, depended upon, and would be nowhere without. Bits of entwined copper were excited as they traveled across thousands of kilometers, sending a signal from one end of the world to another. All the switching, at one point done by human operators, was now done by automated systems, load balancing and routing, all so that two machines, mostly, could exchange a few ones and zeros, and, usually, make someone richer in the process.

The absurdity of the pinnacle of human ingenuity riding on the skeleton of technology that predated it by hundreds of years would be akin to seeing a robot pushing a ploughshare, and nobody giving it a second thought.

Still, the phone rang. There were only two agents present, and the connection to the others was faint, but two was enough. Artemisa, tall and with silvery hair, picked up the phone. Ferônia, shorter with hair the color of rust, sat up in her chair, attentive.

“You'll want to reset the router by pressing a pin in the back and holding it there for three seconds,” said the voice on the line. Artemisa smiled. “When it has fully reset, you'll see the code CL53-X15N. Does that solve your technical problem?”

Artemisa held the phone to the voxbox on the wall. “Thank you, yes,” said the voice. “That worked.”

“Please let me know if you have any additional problems,” said the voice on the other line. Otherwise, when you get a survey, please make sure to give it five stars, as anything less than that is failure. My name is Rasa, and it's been a pleasure working with you.” Artemisa replaced the phone on the receiver.

“Confirming the details,” said the voxbox. “Transmitting.” Artemisa and Ferônia both leaned their heads up, their eyes rolling back. After a moment, they were back to normal. “I'm counting on you,” said the voxbox. “If we complete this job, I'll acquire another body to replace the ones we've lost.” Then it laughed. “Talking to myself again. It gets so lonely around here. See the world for me.”

Artemisa walked to a wall and pressed a button. The wall slid up, revealing an array of weapons: guns, knives, swords, many of which were low tech enough to pass through weapon scanners. Ferônia stood beside her. She selected a group of throwing knives, while Artemisa went for a pair of guns. Each checked their own weapon before laying it aside. They preferred tools with which muscle memories has been trained, but were not above acquiring more when they arrived on site, once they were past all the scanners.

The two went into another room, and moments later emerged wearing their uniforms, grey chameleon fabric with velcro spots to hold insignia. Artemisa's said Ag, while Ferônia's said Sn. Other than the feather of Edredom below that, they just looked like two women wearing practical, utilitarian clothes. They stowed their tools in the special stealth pockets, and each grabbed a duffel bag full of whatever they'd need on the mission.

A computer screen was spinning a model of a woman, adjusting sliders, customizing it. “Just window shopping,” said the voxbox.

The two left the building and stepped into the early afternoon light. The day was warm, a nice summer day. Ferônia locked the door behind them. They walked down a dirt road, side-by-side, duffel bags slung over their shoulders. They walked past a farm, where a robot pushed a ploughshare alongside a farmer doing the same. On the other side of the road was a makeshift cemetery with stones marking the bodies buried there. Each stone bore a chemical symbol.

They walked past the farms and cemeteries until they found a bus shelter. The modernity of the bus shelter was in stark contrast to the rural surroundings, and there they sat, waiting for the next bus to come lumbering by.

The bus was already loaded, so Artemisa and Ferônia clung to a handrail along the side, standing on a running board. Within the bus were several people in different states of augmentation, a few robots (though most of them were sitting on the roof or stowed in the luggage webbing), and a few cabeças engrenadas processing away at whatever tasks they had rented their brains out for at the moment.

The bus was an early model Hydrocel that had been fitted, retrofitted, and refitted for a variety of fuel sources. A mixture of pure water and carbon smoke coughed from the exhaust pipe as the bus lurched to life, taking its motley crew toward civilization.

The patchy farms sped past and turned to patchy suburbs which also sped past. Suburbs made way for cities and cities for the city, A Cidade da Árvore. They could see the namesake tree before they could see any of the buildings, a massive Araucaria on a hill, looking down at the city with its branches outstretched as if it was going to give the entire city a large hug. Drones bobbed around the tree, putting lights on the boughs, decorating it like a common Yggtree.

The bus stopped at a station, and Artemisa and Ferônia climbed off the back, hoisting their duffels over their shoulders. It was only a short walk to the airport, so they took the rest of the journey on foot, stretching aching muscles that had remained unmoving during the bus ride.

“The next flight will be tomorrow morning,” said the voice of Edredom. It spoke directly to their minds. “But I didn't want to risk missing it. You'll have to find some time to kill until then.” Laugh. “But don't actually kill. I'm putting you on semi-autonomous mode until then.”

For a moment, it looked like the two women had been marionettes with their strings cut. Stretching other muscles, ones they hadn't had control over for even longer than the bus ride, they looked at each other. Artemisa pointed to a cafe. Ferônia nodded. They lugged their bags and bodies toward it while they waited for the next step of their itinerary.