There are only three ways to get into Beverly Hills.

The first, the easiest, is to be a citizen. You just broadcast your ID to the border guards on your way through the gate and you’ll get a polite wave and a sincere greeting and some sort of elaborate complimentary chocolate, just for being rich and therefore deserving of random nice things.

The last, the hardest, is to try to sneak in. You will quickly be reduced to your component molecules and, if you’re lucky, some of you might drift into the city’s airspace, technically achieving what you set out to do. They take their security very seriously in Beverly Hills and the rumor is that they’re going to start running high-grade HEPA filters soon, just to eliminate the technicality.

The only other way in is on a tourist visa, a day pass, and in order to get one, you have to wait in the longest line in the world that doesn’t end with someone offering either sex or drugs or some particularly creative combination of the two. Because everybody who is a citizen considers everybody who isn’t part of the same churning, undifferentiated mass — Not-Citizens — the line at BH Immigration is one of the last places in Los Angeles that you can still find people from different economic and ethnic backgrounds standing next to each other without actively firing weapons.

People even interact, a little, standing there; tentatively, as if they remember some point in the distant past when a nod and a half-smile wouldn’t be taken as an invitation to deliver a bullet or a bodily fluid. Since Beverly Hills treats everybody the same — as dirt, of course, but the same — we do as well. The guards with the big guns and the stern looks help, but the great seething wad of humanity waiting to mingle with their betters actually gets along, is polite, acts as if the world works and courtesy wasn’t a laughably archaic concept, like the curtsey or respect for human life.

The woman behind me was live-in domestic help for someone in the Beverly Hills senate. We chatted for half an hour or so. She lived in the city — slept, ate, worked there — but had to make the trip outside and wait in this line every day to renew her pass. Her boss had voted for the 24-hour limit on visas and failed to see how this could possibly be construed as an inconvenience. He also docked her pay for the time it took to be here. She had spit in his food every day for two years.

The guy behind her was African, in a full length robe made of some fabric that allowed for pattern control. He had the color damped to a flat gray now, but before he had been bored enough to cycle it through a nice Madiba pattern, some animated and stylized savanna animals, and what I could only guess was a controller crash. Since nobody in Africa actually wore traditional dress anymore, he was either a well-off tourist making it widely known that he was a well-off tourist, or he was someone’s guru, on his way into the city to relieve them of the spiritual burden of a lot of their money.

Behind him was a shambling, shaggy derelict, or a college kid dressed like one. He would be politely invited into the sanitization room, drugged from behind and transported to Las Vegas later today. He would be dumped in any of half a dozen transportation hubs, making him, officially, somebody else’s problem. It wasn’t legal, but the only panhandlers — or people pretending to be panhandlers — who tried to get into Beverly Hills anymore actually wanted the free trip to Vegas, so it all worked out.

And behind him was another couple of thousand people, snaking between red velvet ropes in a space the size of an airplane hanger. Everybody wants into Beverly Hills.

Even President Madhumalati would stand in this line when she made her visit. BH authorities made no exceptions — the President of the United States was still a Not-Citizen — and so she’d end up having someone wait in line for her, and then trade places with them at the last minute. The sanitization would probably be skipped as a courtesy. Probably. In the line into Beverly Hills, we were all the same.

Except for guy in front of me.

He was just an asshole.

Everything about him said, in a bell-clear baritone, “Loathsome little prick.” He was the type of person you instinctively wanted to set on fire. He was a businessman, important, wanted everybody to know it and was willing to be as obvious and obnoxious as it took.

I’d left everything but the bonegun at the office to pass customs, but, man, did I want to kill this guy and kill him violently. Kill him, clone him and kill him again. And that was three hours ago.

He’d spent most of the morning failing to buy his way forward in line. He’d started with flattery; moved on to sympathy; took a small, failed detour into wildly obvious deception; and finally fell back on flat-out, cash-flashing bribery. None of it made a bit of difference. The only thing he received from the hunched old woman that stood in front of him was a dismissive scowl. At one point, he tried to sneak past her, on a turn, and then simpered and wheedled and somehow managed to make it her fault when he got a gun pointed at him.

Eventually, maybe an hour ago, he gave up — “Fine. Bitch.” — and started making calls on his implant. Against every probability, this actually made him more annoying. There’s a sociologist out there who will make his reputation explaining why some people speak out loud to their implants.

Subvocalizing is not a hard trick. You talk low and keep your mouth closed and the implant picks up the audio from your throat, filters out a lot of the muffled low end and transmits it. Simple. Quiet. And the people standing around you don’t have to hear the ugly details of whatever financial, romantic or gastrointestinal trauma you’re currently undergoing.

Not Businessman, of course. Social conventions are for the unexceptional. He was important. He had things to do and places to be, and if he couldn’t be in those places and doing those things, well, he was going to talk about it, loudly, in a confined space with a lot of tired, irritated people standing around.

He apparently started at the low-end of his to-do list, because his first call involved getting so angry while issuing a subordinate beat-down that he put half a mouthful of spittle into the hair of the old woman in front of him. Over the next hour, his tone softened from sputter rage to fury to anger to displeasure to mild irritation to a flat, diplomatic neutrality. For the past five minutes, he’d apparently called ahead to whoever he was headed into Beverly Hills to meet, because he’d ramped up to fawning obsequiousness and artificial hearty laughter.

Finally, the old woman in from of him reached the head of the line, and stepped away from the rest of us to the interview station. She spent a few minutes having scans taken, tokens checked and orifices probed and then disappeared into the city.

Businessman said — to himself, the person he was talking to and the rest of us behind him — “Finally,” and crossed a bright yellow line painted on the floor. This marked the electromagnetic damping field that surrounds the interview station. His implant immediately went dead, dropping the call.

“Hello?” he said, startled. “Hello?”

“Sir,” said the BH Immigration officer said from behind a heavy composite desk, fully intending it to mean, “Hey, shithead.”

“Hello?” Businessman said again, a note of desperation crawling into his voice.

“Sir.”

He held up a finger at the officer, and said again, “Hello? Goddammit! Fuck!”

“Hey, shithead,” the officer said.

“Why did my call hang-up?” Businessman said to him. “I need to finish my call!”

“If you would just answer a few questions, you can continue your conversation inside the city.”

“No, no, no,” he said. “I need to finish my call now.”

“Then please exit through that door to return to Los Angeles.”

“I’m not waiting in that line again!”

“Sir—”

“I need to finish my fucking call now, asshole.”

“Sir.”

“Shit!”

The immigration officer unfocused his eyes — he was hopefully using his implant to requisition a savage beating — when I stepped up to the desk and said, “Excuse me.”

Businessman spun on me and said, “What he fuck do you want?” The officer said the same thing, only he pronounced it, “Yes, sir?”

“I think I can be of some help,” I said. “I’ve seen this kind of problem before.” I motioned at Businessman’s head, the side where the implant was. “Can I see, just for a second?”

“Um,” he said.

“It should be easy to fix,” I said. “It’ll just take a second.”

“OK, yeah, sure,” he said. “I really need finish to my call.”

“You don’t say?” I said.

He leaned towards me, and I bent forward to examine the small scar behind his right ear where the implant had gone in, maybe fifteen years ago. I put one hand on the back of his neck to steady him.

“Ah,” I said. “Here’s the problem.” And I brought his head down as hard as I could on the desk, leaving a very shallow dent in it.

The immigration officer arched an eyebrow and waved off the sudden attention of the guards. I pulled Businessman back up by the collar of his shirt, and he said, “Buupf.”

“Smup. Hrr.”

A long streamer of drool ran out of his mouth, down his very expensive tie and mingled with the urine that was collecting around his shoes.

Urine is playing an entirely too prominent role in my life lately.

Businessman said, “Zub.”

“That should do it,” I said, and slapped a datacard with my passport on it onto the desk.

The officer looked at me steadily for a moment, then at Businessman, then back at me. He picked up the card, dropped it into a slot next to him and said, “Is the purpose of your visit business or pleasure?”

“A little of both, now,” I said.