Quote:
The City has always been a creature of shadows and whispers, of clinking coin and creaking doors. A thief learns to read its tells, the glint of a guard's helm under a gas lamp, the rustle of silk in a darkened alcove, the weight of a carelessly placed purse. But of late, a new trinket has begun to worm its way into the hands of even the most witless burgher and the most ostentatious noble: the "smartphone," they call it. A curious name for a device that seems to make most folk deaf, dumb, and blind to the world around them.
I've lifted a few, of course. At first, they felt alien, cold, and unnervingly smooth - not like the honest heft of gold or the intricate workings of a well-made lockbox. These rectangles of polished glass and metal hum with a silent, inner life. They glow with a light that isn't fire or magic, yet it holds a strange sort of enchantment. Tap the glass, and visions appear - maps more detailed than any I've painstakingly charted, moving portraits that speak, and scrolls filled with an endless torrent of secrets, desires, and the most bafflingly mundane pronouncements.
The City's secrets, once whispered in confessionals or scrawled in guarded ledgers, now spill forth onto these glowing screens with an eagerness that would make a gossip blush. People carry their lives in these things: their finances, their correspondences, their trysts, their schedules. A careless owner - and taffers, they are almost all careless - lays bare more vulnerabilities than an open window on a moonless night. For a man in my profession, it's like the Keepers themselves decided to hand out master keys to every vault in the city. Why pick a lock when a fool will simply tap his deepest secrets into a device he then leaves on a tavern table?
The initial allure, I confess, was the sheer density of information. Imagine, the Watch's patrol routes, updated in real time. Or the layout of a noble's new vault, "shared," as they call it, by the very architect who designed it. It's a tempting bauble, this concentration of knowledge. It whispers of efficiency, of targets acquired with a tap and a swipe. No more leaning in doorways, straining to overhear a loose-lipped guard. No more bribing disgruntled servants for a hint of the master's movements. The smartphone offers it all, laid out like jewels on velvet.
But there's a hook in this glittering lure, as there always is. These devices are not passive observers. They watch the watcher. They track. They record. They leave a trail brighter than a phosphorescent slug. The same magic that reveals a merchant's illicit dealings can also pinpoint the last known location of a purloined device - or its purloiner. It's a new kind of Mechanist tinkering, I suspect, more insidious than any clanking automaton. The old Watch had to rely on snitches and squealers, on footprints in the mud. This new Watch, the one behind the glass, has eyes and ears everywhere its tendrils reach.
And it changes people. They walk the streets, faces buried in these glowing rectangles, oblivious to the cutpurse slipping through the crowd, to the assassin in the rafters, to the very rain on their faces. They've traded the world for a shimmering reflection of it, and in doing so, have become easier prey than a fattened calf. They carry these talismans to ward off boredom, perhaps, but they invite a different, more tangible kind of danger.
So, what's the verdict from Garrett, master thief, on these "smartphones"? They are a paradox. A treasure trove of ill-gotten information and a beacon for unwanted attention. A tool of immense potential and a snare for the unwary. Like any powerful artifact, its true value lies not in its inherent qualities, but in how it's wielded. For the masses, it's a leash, a distraction, a glittering cage of their own choosing. For a discerning professional, however... well, let's just say that even the most advanced lock has a tumbler that can be turned. And these glowing bricks, for all their sorcery, are just another lock waiting for the right touch.
The trick, as always, is to take the prize and leave the trap unsprung. Let the fools stare into their little lights. I'll be in the shadows, an older, wiser kind of intelligence, making my way as I always have. But I'll keep an eye on these devices. Anything that holds so much of what people value, and makes them so dangerously blind, is bound to create opportunities. And opportunities, in my world, are the only magic worth believing in.
