Page 22 of Tapeworld Induction

Elodie made a sound more akin to a grunt than any word he could recognise. It rapidly morphed into a sentence. “What happened to the full roll I gave you a couple of weeks ago?”

He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to soften the oily styling his bed had provided overnight. It was a nervous gesture, and he was aware of it, but that still didn’t stop him from doing it. “Astrid is quite demanding.”

“Oh, really? She’s been running you ragged, has she?”

“Exactly! Got me doing too many gigs.”

Elodie smiled and nodded. “Yes, yes… Bullshit!” Her smile twisted into a scowl. “You had enough for a month. The only way you’d have run out is if you were taping in and out all the time. And it’s never just a quick stride for you, is it?”

He fidgeted in place, like a boy told off. It was true that he tended to stay in the Tapeworld for hours. That place was special.

“I’ve brought someone new in,” he said in a low voice, making his body as small as he could, avoiding looking Elo directly in the eye.

“Of course.” Elodie’s eyes narrowed, enlarged by the prescription glasses she wore. She flipped her arms to the side and waved them in a gesture that looked like a magical spell, and the reflections on her raincoat ceased – all the displays in front of her turned off in sync.

She didn’t want to risk this part of the conversation being overheard.

“Your employer’s not gonna like that,” she said quietly. “Everyday throughput is growing.”

“What’s one person going to do?” he argued. “You keep track of everyone going in, right? You’re the only one who dishes out tape. Hell, you bring people in too!”

“That’s my job. Find people like you to run through the mince machine.” She said the last few words even more quietly, almost with disdain. Whether for Astrid or for him, he couldn’t say.

She smoothed the impossible wrinkles on the Mackintosh, producing creaky ASMR sounds in the process, then stepped down from her platform. She walked around the bank of computers and displays to stand in front of him.

Their height difference was obvious now, Elodie’s puke-green hair reaching up to around Isaak’s chest. Underneath the transparent-blue Mackintosh, her legs, torso, and arms were encased in a deep-purple leggings-and-dress combo, and she wore dark-pink Converse shoes, low top. A relic these days.

Isaak rarely saw her off her platform like this. Hands suddenly feeling restless, he bunched them into the pockets of his jeans and took a deep breath, trying to stay cool. The thought crossed his mind that Elodie must have seen all sorts by now. Like Astrid, he had no idea what she really did, other than broker duct tape to striders, but if the multitude of screens and loose bits of hardware strewn about her flat-slash-office were any indication, the Tapeworld wasn’t her only gig.

“It’s a pretty girl, right?” Elo asked him, grin slashing her face.

“Uh…” He aborted a retort and he quietly admitted it. “Yes. But that’s not why I gave her the roll. I…” Having to explain again why he had handed this girl the roll of tape, and despite having seen her just last night at Laguna Beach, he realised he missed her. Coming to terms with that sunk his stomach mid-conversation.

“Oh, please, Isaak,” Elo said. “I’m not a fool. You wanted to impress a girl, so you showed her the tape. People have been using technology to impress potential mates since the invention of fire. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Cool, cool,” he said, relaxing, though a line of sweat had formed on his forehead, Dylan playing on his mind again.

“Usually,” Elodie continued. “There’s nothing wrong with that usually. But we both know the tape’s anything but usual.” Her eyes were stern again. The iridescent eye shadow shining behind her glasses made her look like a ghost, almost see-through.

He tensed. “Are you going to tell Astrid?”

“You misunderstand the working relationship I have with Astrid. That one is your boss, not mine. Let’s just say we share a mutual interest in the continued secrecy of the duct tape.”

“I wondered about that. With the number of people I’ve seen in the Boulevard, are you sure you’re really keeping it under control? Someone will post about it on StreetSocial eventually.”

Elodie must have been keeping a list of everyone she’d ever given the duct tape to. But if someone else was handing out tape, they might not be as diligent as her. Surely the tape’s going to leak. Everything does.

“They already do post about it,” she said, all-knowing. “My bots either drown out talk about the tape with irrelevant noise, or intercept the senders and feed them dummy replies from net randoms. Plus, our moles…”

Isaak blinked. Moles? She had people inside the Book?

“What, they delete these posts for you?”

She shook her head. “Never mind, never mind…”

Something bumped into his foot. One of Elodie’s errand drones, a boxy rectangle of plastic, tiny wheels. An assemblage of plastic fingers attached to its front held out a roll of duct tape. What he’d come here for. Isaak bent down and picked it up. The empty claw opened and closed rapidly, in a “gimme-gimme” motion, startling him.

“Do they bite?” he joked, pretending it hadn’t scared him one bit.