Analog SFF, March 2012 by Dell Magazine Authors

me. One thing it did mean was the morning was shot. If I ever got a chance to make suggestions, the first thing I'd have told H.S. was that their tuning was too sensitive. My ears burned, my eyelids twitched, my hand turned lobster-red. Each presumably meant something different, but what they really meant was the police would be shutting down half of Harborside again, plus the Halsey overpass and who knew what else. Then the Channel Twelve Eye Team would somehow find out I was the one who'd snarked up the commute—and make everyone think it was my fault. For a measly grand a month, it really wasn't worth it.
    It would help if they'd at least tell me what the hell my ears, eyes, or vermillion fingers were detecting, so I could keep away from obvious false alarms. I think red might have meant chlorine. There's a paper mill north of Harborside, and paper mills use bleach—I looked that up on my webwear—and the detection level for chlorine is down in the parts per gazillion. I looked that up too. Yeah, a gas bomb can be built with it, but hell, that's Word War I technology. My superiors treated it like the latest anthrax gene mod.
    The first time the news team found me, they'd been reasonably polite. By the third, they were acting like I did it on purpose. And assuming I didn't drop dead in the next few minutes, this would be the fifth in as many months. Maybe I should have signed up with the Department of Environmental Quality. It paid less, but nobody shuts down the commute because of some jalopy's over-age CO2 scrubber.
    * * * *
    Of course, they wanted me to do a drive-around. If it really was some fast-acting derivative of anthrax, I'd be dead by the time they localized it.
    One of the early times my ‘wear had done its thing I'd noticed another car making similar circuits. At first I thought it was the perps. Then I wondered how many of us H.S. had on payroll, even if it was always me the Eye Team blamed. Especially since that part was probably just the luck of an attention-catching name. Alphonse Blazac. Another of my mother's quirks. I mean, who else names a kid Alphonse? Not to mention it makes you an Alfie. Name like that, you've gotta have an edge.
    This time, there was a battered green tow truck I passed about six too many times. He'd probably been on a call when his ‘wear sounded the alarm, leaving some poor schlub out on the freeway, wondering what the snark happened to his roadside assistance.
    Still, a grand a month is a grand a month. There were worse ways to make a living. The office-drone job I'd been heading for when the alarm went off being Exhibit A. Though I could have done without also being Exhibit A on the why-the-commute's-all-snarked-up segment of the evening news.
    * * * *
    They never do tell you what it's about. I crisscrossed Harborside every way there is to crisscross it, then again for good measure. But nothing changed except that my ears didn't burn when I was close to the harbor itself. Since the wind was off the water, all that meant was the source wasn't in the bay, which I kind of figured. Not unless the gulls had joined the enemy.
    Eventually, they let me head to work. Officially, when H.S. makes you late, there isn't anything your employer can do. Unofficially? Well, on a Monday, it's hard to tell if that's the reason . . . or if it's just Monday.
    * * * *
    My mother was anything but retro. Upgrading the tattoo was just the beginning. But she had a sensibility to her, even though her early life had always been chaotic.
    I never met my dad—never knew his name. “Forget him,” she'd say. “You're worth a hundred of him, and you're just a kid."
    I was never quite sure how much of that she meant. Oh, I knew she believed in me. The fire of her belief was frightening—a blast furnace aimed too strongly in my direction. What I doubted was whether she'd ever really gotten over him. Just as she never told me his name, she never told me the story. Asked, she just changed the subject.