Free Annabel Scheme by Robin Sloan

almost blue against the dark steel of the Scepter. I couldn’t believe the view; I could see all the way from the Pacific across to the dark glittering bay. I could see the shrapnel of the Golden Gate Bridge. I could see Scheme’s house from here.
    “Ugh,” she grunted, pulling herself up onto the first tiny landing, forty feet off the ground. It was just a flat, triangular platform, featureless except for the place where it met the pillar, where there was a tiny row of industrial-looking ports and outlets framed by scorch marks.
    “We used to come here all the time,” Scheme said, sitting down. “Sebastian and me. To study.”
    To study.
    “Lots of studying. We discovered that the Scepter wasn’t just broadcasting radio stations. There were other signals, too. Signals from strange places. Try the network now.”
    Success. I was now connected to the internet—or some other net—and Scheme was, too.
    “So listen,” she said. “Seriously. Only go where I tell you.”
    Where to, then?
    Scheme sat back, bracing her spine against the dark bulk of the pillar. “Doctor Faustus.”

TRANSACTIONS
    That was doctorfaust.us and it looked like something from 1999, with the logo spelled out in a bouncy cartoon font. It was an auction site, laid out like eBay, with rainbow-colored listings in different categories and little ticking clocks all over the place.
    Except these were very strange listings.
MY LEFT ARM
MY RIGHT ARM
MY LEFT KIDNEY
    At first I thought it might be a secret market for buying and selling body parts—and if that was the case, it was probably being run out of Locust Grove—but no, there was more:
THE MEMORY OF MY FIRST KISS
MY ABILITY TO ENJOY WINE
MY FIRST LANGUAGE
    Scheme, what is this place?
    “Pretty simple, Hu,” she said, typing into the search box. “It’s eBay for the good stuff. The sellers are stupid people. The buyers are demons. Old idea. New tool.” Her screen flashed and I saw a familiar handle. Sebdex.
    “Jesus, Sebastian,” Scheme breathed. “No.” She was scrolling through his profile, his transaction history. It was a very long history. “You promised you’d stop.”
    Scheme, what do sellers get in return here?
    “Depends,” she murmured. “Sometimes money. Sometimes you get a better body. Get smarter. Or you get the guy you want. The job you want. Of course, you’ve got to be willing to give something up in return.”
    I loaded the section of the site labeled KIDS.
MY FIRST-BORN CHILD
MY SECOND-BORN CHILD
ALL MY CHILDREN, AND MY CHILDREN'S CHILDREN
    It went on and on.
    On Scheme’s screen, Sebdex’s transaction history read like an anatomy textbook cross-faded with a curriculum vitae. Fourteen years ago, the first listing:
MY LEFT PINKIE TOENAIL
    In return, he aced his thermodynamics final.
    “I can confirm,” Scheme said, “that nothing ever grew on that toe again. He’d show it off like a trophy. Fucking Sebastian.”
    Twelve years ago:
MY MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD
    “He wanted to get rid of those anyway,” Scheme said. “They weren’t good memories.”
    In return he—oh. Wow. In return he got Grail.
    You knew him then, Scheme?
    “I was looking over his shoulder when he posted it,” she said, and sighed. The wind was blowing harder now. The list continued:
MY HAIR
MY T-CELLS
MY SENSE OF HUMOR
    What did Sebdex get in exchange for his laughter?
    Quantum computation.
    So the great breakthrough—Grail’s great magic, the thing that scarred San Francisco, created Fog City, almost killed the Beekeeper—was a reward from a demon called Thrall, whose user icon was a horned goat-head with nuclear hazard symbols for eyes.
    “That’s when I left,” Scheme said. “When he did that. I told him not to. I screamed at him.”
    Recently, Sebdex’s seller ratings had been getting worse. For most of his history, it was all five stars—“A+ would do business again” from a whole host of different demons—but starting six years ago, complaints had been cropping