{"id":1782,"date":"2021-11-04T16:14:05","date_gmt":"2021-11-04T16:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1782"},"modified":"2022-08-10T19:03:02","modified_gmt":"2022-08-10T19:03:02","slug":"how-quini-the-squid-misplaced-his-klobucar-by-rich-larson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1782","title":{"rendered":"How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobu\u010dar by Rich Larson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobu\u010dar<\/em><\/strong> by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 15th<\/sup> January 2020) opens with the narrator asking a woman called Nat for her help in stealing a Klobu\u010dar, a piece of art, from a gangster called \u201cQuini the Squid\u201d. In the ensuing conversation we learn a number of things: (a) this is set in a cyberpunky\/implants future; (b) Nat is Quini\u2019s ex; and (c) the narrator, a former employee of Quini\u2019s, is doing this for revenge.
We also learn about the Klobu\u010dar:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not much for gene art, not much for sophisticated shit in general, but even I know Klobu\u010dar, the Croatian genius who struck the scene like a meteor and produced a brief torrent of masterpieces before carving out her brain with a mining laser on a live feed.
Anything with a verified Klobu\u010dar gene signature is worth a fortune, especially since she entwined all her works with a killswitch parasite to prevent them being sequenced and copied. But Quini is the furthest thing from an art fence, which makes the acquisition a bit of a mystery and explains him seeming slightly panicked about the whole thing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Once the narrator convinces Nat to help, they realise that they\u2019ll need to provide a sample of Quini\u2019s DNA to fool the scanners which protect the safe room where the artwork is stored. We learn that they\u2019ll also require something else for the job:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having Quini\u2019s helix is only half the battle: We also need a body, and neither mine nor Nat\u2019s fits the bill, in large part because we\u2019ve got implants that are definitely not Quini\u2019s. Masking or turning off tech built right into the nervous system is actually a lot harder than simply hiring what our German friends call a Fleischgeist<\/em>.
It\u2019s not as snappy in English: meat ghost. But it gives you the idea\u2014someone with no implants. None. No hand chip, no cranial, no optics or aurals. Nothing with an electronic signature. In our day and age, they might as well be invisible.
Ergo, the ghost part.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The narrator then goes to meet a Nigerian called Yinka\u2014the prospective Fleishgeist<\/em>\u2014on Shiptown, a floating migrant settlement off the Barcelona coast. Then, after hiring him, all three meet up at a sex house to practise various robbery scenarios in virtual reality. Eighteen hours of run-throughs later, the narrator suggests one more to finish, only to be told by the others that they are not in VR anymore but in the real world. The narrator realises that they have pod-sickness from the VR sessions, and concludes that it must be a side-effect of the sex-change hormones they are taking (and which were mentioned previously).
This isn\u2019t the only problem the three encounter and (spoiler), when they start the job, they only just manage to hack the robotic guard dog before it saws the narrator and Yinka into bloody pieces. Then Yinka learns he will need to have his arm amputated to match Quini\u2019s body shape. Finally, after Yinka gets into the safe room, the narrator discovers that the time stamps of video footage showing the guards playing cards is faked, and that have been discovered. At that point Anton, the new chief of security at Quini\u2019s house, points a scattergun at the narrator\u2019s head and takes them prisoner.
The final section has Quini return from a nightclub with Nat (who has been relaying Quini\u2019s personal signal to help the other two fool the security scanners), and start an interrogation. During this we learn how he got his \u201cSquid\u201d nickname, a violent anecdote that involves the amputation of this brother\u2019s limbs for telling made-up stories. When Quini is finished questioning the three, he tells the narrator he is going to do the same to them but, before he does this, he opens the pod (recovered from Yinka) to show off the artwork\u2014and finds it empty.
This is just the first of two final plot twists that complete the tale (although there is also a short postscript to the action where the narrator tells Nat about their pending transition from male to female, and why they wanted revenge\u2014a sexual slur from Quini).
This is a continually inventive, tightly plotted, and well done caper story that feels, in parts, like a Mission Impossible<\/em> movie on steroids. The only weakness is that, despite all the hardware and gimmickry and feel of a hard SF story, there isn\u2019t any central SF theme or concept here, and the human tale that is here instead is the weakest part (I wasn\u2019t particularly convinced of the narrator\u2019s motivation, and I\u2019m getting bored of stories where trans characters struggle with their transition\u2014it\u2019s becoming a clich\u00e9).
Still, not bad.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,450 words. Story link<\/a>.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobu\u010dar by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 15th January 2020) opens with the narrator asking a woman called Nat for her help in stealing a Klobu\u010dar, a piece of art, from a gangster called \u201cQuini the Squid\u201d. In the ensuing conversation we learn a number of things: (a) this is set […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[309],"tags":[296,217,454,7,310,453,116],"class_list":["post-1782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rich-larson","tag-296","tag-3-5","tag-cyberpunk","tag-novelette","tag-rich-larson","tag-robbery","tag-tor-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1782"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5285,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782\/revisions\/5285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}