Chapter 6
Morning. Shit—should have set an alarm. She jerked herself out of bed and lay on the floor. Across the dirty gray carpet and mounds of clothes and bottles she saw the clock—11:34 a.m. Time to get up, maybe. She stood and then shimmied to the toilet and barfed. She found her peacoat in a pile and grabbed a handful of Claritol. The sick in her stomach calmed and the jackhammer in her skull became a simple pat on the head. She surveyed her apartment—her third apartment in as many months—and was filled with disgust. No furniture but a mattress, no rooms but the kitchen-bedroom and toilet separated by a screen. What was she paying for this shit?
She found her nicest clothes in a pile and saw they were covered in blood. She’d broken the heels of her stilettos and tossed them in a dumpster on her flight back to the apartment, then when she’d gotten back she’d torn off her clothes, downed a bottle of gin, and cried herself to sleep. Sure she’d seen people dead, seen people killed, maybe even killed one or two herself in the end (it’s not like she went around checking). But to see a man, even if he was an elzi, rip himself apart like that, and then her friend, well, colleague at least—she’d seen him around—strap himself in like that and then make her snuff him. That wasn’t fair, Friar. You knew what you were doing. You brought me in because you didn’t have the guts to do it yourself. You were a brave sonofabitch, braver than me for sure, but there’s different kinds of brave and you tripped on that last step.
She found the faux-fox coat she’d bought after the Favre case; she’d had it less than a week and already it was covered in blood. A metaphor? A warning? The peacoat was as drab and dirty as ever and had that bitter all-night-drinking smell that never seemed to go away, but at least it wasn’t bloody. She found some clean(?) panties and jeans and then chose the trickiest bra from her lineup—one with a micro-razor in the strap and a tiny dart launcher in each tit. The range was shit, six inches maybe, but enough to conk a lover if it ever got too hot. She wasn’t the honeypot type and she’d never gotten the chance to use it, but hey, why not have it just in case?
It was time to get out the lucky shirt, the pink tank top with the big purple heart in the center. Alright lucky shirt, do your thing. She couldn’t quite remember why it was lucky—did she win a scratch-off when she was wearing it? No, that wasn’t it. It had something to do with Eugene, right? They went and had champagne at the Borazali after she nailed her first conviction and they both got a little too friendly. No…she’d dressed up for that, in that skimpy golden tube that her dad would’ve smacked her back to Jersey for wearing. Huh. It bothered her she couldn’t remember why it was lucky. What’s the point of a lucky shirt if you can’t remember the thing that made it lucky?
Ah, now the real question—the gun. She didn’t like guns, not because they were guns. The actual shooting and the ritual of caring for them she found relaxing. But carrying a gun complicated the justice process. With her trusty prod and a tranq or two she could apprehend a suspect, deliver justice, pay the levy at the Po-Stop and be gone. But a gun slowed everything down—why did she have the gun? Did she use it? Where did she get it? Did she have a permit? A license? What kind of bullets was she using? The longer she stayed in jail answering questions the more the risk. Better to be walking the streets with the elzi and the thugs, where you could run and fight and had options other than sucking down a beating and likely something more if you weren’t too ugly to look at.
But if this charade got all magical her prod wasn’t going to do much good. She still had that flank-steak smell of ElilE’s hand roasting at full power, and if these feasters had any tricks up their sleeves she wanted a few of her own. She strapped on the pancake holster—nicely concealed by the peacoat—and did a quick check of her Betty. It was illegal, of course, like everything fun, for being made of layered composite materials that nine times out of ten showed up as nothing more than a blip on a scanner. In her wilder days she’d gotten some back-alley saw jockey to patch it into her implants because au natural she couldn’t shoot for shit—apparently aiming took patience and discipline. But with her add-ons she could circumcise a newborn from fifty feet away with just a thought. The saw jockey must’ve gotten some nerves scrambled in the process because every time she used the damn thing it made her nipples thrill. Bastard probably did it on purpose—you don’t get kicked out of med school for incompetence.
Alright, all dressed up and no place to go. Time to put the old brain to work. She grabbed a stick of Chew 20 to get some fuel in her system and then paced the room kicking at things in an attempt to mimic thinking. The girl is in the fish. Well, that’s pretty obvious—she’s in the Fish. It was a comforting thought. The Fish was a labyrinth of hip warrens, the kingdom of the homeless pseudo-society. It was huge and crowded and had a shitty network connection so it would be impossible to find her without more info. But what info did they have? She’d been dozing for twelve hours and her hunters, rivals, the dicks who were going to cost her ten million tickets out of Philly were out doing…what, exactly? How were they getting their information?
The Net of course, hacking security cameras, hacking private implants, arrest records, viks—what anyone did when they wanted to drag up dirt on someone or find them and kill ‘em. But this girl was hard to find—unregistered, probably, no birthright implants or maybe she’d paid someone to dig ‘em out. She had a small profile so she was probably hip herself, no real residence, no money, day-to-day scraping it together—probably never went to school. So they’d tracked her to the Fish, not a huge surprise, not a huge concern except…they seemed to have that other thing, that special sense, ways of knowing the things you lock up in your head all private from the Net. That was their advantage.
So how to beat that? Well, not by sitting around the apartment. Boots on the ground. Experience. Asking around about a girl with blue eyes—hopeless—and what was the other thing ElilE had said? Fires. Asking about strange fires. That was no help either. Fires were every day, all the time. An elzi wanders into a house and busts up the stove. Fire. An elzi wanders into a power plant and gets fried. Fire. A woman catches her husband cheating on her. She shoots him and sets a fire to cover it all up. Fires all over the friggin’ place.
Alright, that was out. But the eyes…there was something there. They were strange eyes, pretty eyes. If this girl was like ElilE said then these eyes were magical, there was more to them than just the look. That was something you noticed. That was something that was worth something to a certain type of someone. And maybe this girl was a saint, but she had to eat, and probably needed a slap of something or other to shake reality for a spell, and if she was just regular folk she only had a few options. That meant pimps—no, too easy. She would have been found on the Net. That ruled out freelancing then too, she’d leave a footprint. Auction records too. Huh, was she just street walking? Then she was dead anyway…no, either she had another way of bringing or, or, or…a benefactor. A patron. Maybe a once-in-a-while thing when she really needed a fix or her stomach was caving in.
It was a shitty theory. There were infinite ways she could be occupying herself or scraping together what passed for a living. She could have worked in the hippy coop cleaning or cooking or planting vegetables. That would keep her off the Net and still give her a life. But she didn’t think so. ElilE said this girl had a troubled childhood, like hers—bastard, how dare you dig in my shit pile—and if she really did have an alien following her then that was sure to shake up her brain just a little. That meant drugs. That meant booze. Maybe it even meant body modding. All of that was expensive—more than a coop brought at least. The sell-sex theory was shit in a bag, but it felt right.
She giggled at the simplicity of it. She wouldn’t have to tromp around the garbage pits of the Fish at all—she’d just put a price on the girl’s head. Easy as pie. Whoever her benefactor was (if he existed) he’d be rich to her but he sure as hell wouldn’t be downtown real-person rich. What was the price, ten? No, she’d make it really sweet. A straight twenty grand for a girl with blue eyes, the bluest they could find, they had to be really blue. Get a picture and send it along, no Net, don’t wanna get the porkies involved. Real pics on real paper. She clapped her hands together. A plan! A dangerous thin rope to hang herself on but better than she’d had five minutes ago.
Smokey Lou was at his bar, Smokey Lou’s, as usual, smoking, as usual. The bar was famous in the Libs district for, what else? Smoking. And smoking accessories. And girls. The two worked together in the center stage, some poor skag in a woman-sized hookah with a thousand little squid dicks running out, sucked on by fat and for some reason always hairy men. It was quite a spectacle, Saru had to admit—the naked woman, somehow not puking out her lungs, swaying inside the swirling smoke, rubbing her bare tits and ass up against the glass from time to time. Different girls, different flavors.
“You’re saying, twenty thousand for a girl with blue eyes?”
Lou looked shocked, almost offended by this. He was, like his clientele, fat, hairy, and unpleasant. He was always sweating and his fancy white shirts and suits always looked like they’d just come out of the wash. His breath smelled like an orangutan’s nut sack and every conversation involved her warning him repeatedly to point his tongue-box somewhere else or she’d give him a bite of the prod. Now they sat in a booth in the back, side by side watching the show so he could only glance her. The plasticky seat was sticky with something and she didn’t want to know what.
“No,” she said, crossly—in her head this had not involved as much work. “I’m paying twenty thousand for a girl with really, crazy, terrific, out-of-this-world blue eyes.”
He looked at her shrewdly, which was fair because he was shrewd. Packed as it was with sweaty men, this hookah bar was just a place to park his ass while he sucked on girl-sweat smoke and scanned the Net for prospects.
“You’re not going to pay,” he said. He had an accent—Eurokan? Sinomer? What did she know? “It’s a plot.”
“It is,” she said. “But I’ll tell you what—find the girl and keep your ten percent.”
“That is not so much money considering the risk.”
“What risk?”
“The risk of doing business with you, Saru.”
She grit her teeth. Tough rap to beat.
“Fine, then. What price is worth the risk? And remember there’s no netting on this one. I want honest-to-God human interaction. Send your people out to talk, have a chat, get to know the trappers.”
“In that, too, is a cost.”
“That’s why I’m saying it. Give it to me all up front, no surprises.”
“Ten.”
“Ten thousand?”
“It is much work.”
“It’s one girl.”
“That is the point. It is one girl. You are looking for one girl, a specific girl. This I see. A girl with very blue eyes. There will be many who want this money, and many false trails. This is much work. My associates do not work for free. I do not pay them in smoke.”
“Fine. Half and half. Get to work.”
She’d expected that. She handed him the first five thousand dollars and his eyes rolled a little as he sent out commands to all his runners. They’d spread out around the Fish dropping word of the bounty. She’d forgotten to specify that she wanted the girl intact, but Lou, for all his unpleasantness, treated his girls right enough. And anyway, that was the second part of the plan. If any of the catchers happened to die in a fire, well, then she’d know she was on the right track.
She left the bar and decided to take a stroll; it made her feel like she was doing something, contributing. Lou’s was on the border, the crossover area between the real city with the real people with jobs and incomes and lives, and the Fish. You could see it—trash everywhere, fenced-in plots of nothing, and then a restaurant, a dive, a few homes with the lights on and then a line of crumbling, caved-in brownstones. She didn’t like it, too much ambiguity. There needed to be clear lines: good city, bad city; elziland, and hippy coop. None of this blending; it made it too hard to see where she was going, what was about. This kid on the corner—what was he waiting for? Was that a gun bulge in his jacket; was he ready to spray? Or was it a trick, a fold of the cloth, a banana, a twelve-inch dick?
Condoms on the ground, needles, elzi lying in heaps of trash, and a dead elzi just lying there, guts all pulled out, run over and left. Another crawling his way over, easy meal, easy calories, easy way to keep going. She walked faster for no reason, moving closer to the Fish, away from the screech of cars and the angry honks. Not so much going on now. Getting into the hiplands, with their own rules. It was a safe place, safer than most, at least, with its rules and customs. Not quick to judge, the hips; she liked that much about them. Everyone was down for a reason and more often than not you were born to it. It was quieter here too; she saw gardens, passed a hip with a shotgun, took his nod and hustled by.
Something in the corner of her eye—a flicker, a motion. A tail? She kept on walking, activating the tiny camera on the back of her earlobe and looking through her implants. Nothing, just the hip scratching his ass. It happened again, a flicker, her whole vision now like a screen on the fritz. She switched back to her eyes. A cold, sick feeling was rolling up in her stomach. She pushed it down, gritting her teeth and walking faster. Again a flicker, longer this time. How much time did she lose, a second? A minute? The cold, sick knot moved up her throat and she recognized the fear, the dread. The brick wall to the left of her was swimming, swaying like a liquid but just the wall. A two-second delay on the right side of her vision, a crow flying past and then again and again, repeating his journey from telephone pole to roadkill.
She turned around but she couldn’t tell where she’d come from. Her vision kept spinning even as her legs stopped. The fear had taken hold now, her breathing panicked, sweat staining her lucky heart tank. A flat, logical part of her wondered how much was natural and how much was induced by the hackers—because she had been hacked. Her worst fear—everyone’s worst fear—to have your implants hacked, controlled by another person. They could do all kinds of nasty things—jack up your heart rate till you blew or just straight poison you on your own bile. Fuck up your vision so you saw your mom as a werewolf and stabbed her in the eye. Or make you think you could fly and leap off a building. Those were some of the better things you could hope for.
It wasn’t easy to do. Sure, people could hop into your vision from time to time; it was a simple circuit. Maybe they’d get in your ears or catch a stray feed. But to take control—theoretically the implants were coded on the individual’s brain signature. To take control you’d pretty much have to carve out the brain and scan it. Theoretically. Her vision flickered and she heard a laugh, a hyena laugh. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a shadow, then it was gone. Then she saw him. Friar, standing a few feet away, looking to the right of her. It was Friar, perfectly, had to be him, but he was faint, not quite part of the surroundings. He was talking:
“The L’eilith Zoriathan complex cannot be named a virus. Nor can it be understood within the more accurate, but still inadequate terming of information science. (An amusing coincidence of acronym, that IS truly is. Existence—information, a pattern of atomic particles, so easy to break and rearrange.) We perceive the Net in terms of place, and we assign the Wekba a location; it is quaint to the point of despair. In truth the Wekba is transactional, an exchange rather…”
“Friar?”
He turned to look at her as if he’d heard her. Her vision began to flicker, his eyes opened wide, too wide, and his mouth, and they stretched and merged and formed a black hole where his face should have been. Her hearing cut out—all but a loud ringing, and a sound like a tiny maggot crawling across her eardrum, every scrape of its legs against her skin magnified a thousand times. Friar started walking towards her, an unnatural, jerking walk, and she wanted to run but her legs wouldn’t move. He drew closer and closer, jerking and twitching and she opened her mouth and screamed, but all that came out was thick, black, viscous strings, pouring out and then Friar was in front of her and she stared into the black and he reached up and—
A hand on her shoulder; she whirled and smacked him in the knee with her prod. He crumpled with an oomf and she screamed and kicked him with her steel-toed boots. She kicked and screamed for about a minute until she realized she was back, the hack was gone and she was normal, beating the ever-loving shit out of the hip guard who had probably just come to help. She stopped and grasped her knees, shuddering, thankful the kick knives in her boots hadn’t flipped out. She grabbed at her hip flask and took a long gulp. Fuck, she was too sober. The alcohol would flush her system, drunk her up, scramble her brain waves and make it harder for the hackers to lock onto her and crack her code. She took another swig and finished the flask and then snorted the contents of her ring stash—a mix of powdery accelerants that would blend with the alcohol and scramble her pattern further. Yeah, that’ll do it. Already she felt the ups and downs pulling her in every direction.
The hip was on the ground, moaning. For a second she thought of dashing, but it was hard to ignore her role in this tragedy. Plus, the hips looked after one another—community and all that bullhickey. Word got around and she didn’t want to alienate half the population of Philadelphia over a freak-out. She’d fix him up and then figure out the asshole trying to claw his way into her brain. Lou, maybe? Twenty grand was a lot to toss around, maybe too much. Maybe he sniffed more and was trying to drill into her accounts. Hah, fat chance, Eugene had all her cash, but of course Lou didn’t know that—or maybe he did now. Had they taken anything, any important thoughts? The sick feeling came back—the feasters, they were hacking her, trying to beat her to the prey, but no, that didn’t make any sense, they couldn’t know about her. Or care, even.
“Huh,” she said aloud. “Interesting. Alright buddy, let’s get you fixed up.”
She took a Panaceum Easy-Ject from her gun belt and jabbed it into his arm. He stopped whimpering. It would pump him up with painkillers, increase blood and platelet production, start him healing up. Wouldn’t do shit for bones, she knew—Panaceum my ass—and it was too slow for a bullet hole or a deep cut, but it was handy for the smaller stuff. He was looking at her, more confused than afraid, curling up at the pain and making it harder for her to see if anything was broken. She sighed.
“Look bud, I’m sorry about that. I had a freak-out, okay? You know how it is. I really didn’t mean to rough you and I’m gonna try and patch you up as soon as you unclench your asshole.”
He relaxed, a little, and she felt him up, making sure she hadn’t smashed any ribs or ruptured any organs. She didn’t think so. He’d be making a lot more noise for one thing, and also she discovered a layer of hockey pads under his flannel. Say what you would about the hips; they were resourceful. She patted him on the head.
“There you go bud, all set.” She hoisted him to his feet and peeled out a couple of hundreds. “For your troubles.”
He took the money and looked at it, looked at her, and then back at the money. Mute? Retarded? Who cared? She set off, back to Lou’s.
“You’re not right,” he called to her when she was about a dozen steps away. He had some kind of foreign/redneck accent. “You’d best come with me.”
She switched on her lobe camera and looked at him. He wasn’t pointing the shotgun at her. She turned and put her hands on her hips.
“Oh,” she said. “How’s that?”
“It looked to me from where I was lying,” ha ha, “that someone had been messing with your head. You’d best come with me.”
This took her a while to process. Was it a ploy? A robbery attempt? Had she over-dished again and now this idiot was after her money? But no, it didn’t seem that way. If this guy was a true hip and played by the book then he was honest, relatively. Which still didn’t explain why he wanted her to come back with him. So ask, dummy.
“Why?”
He nodded at a point just behind her. She turned and looked around, couldn’t figure it out. Then she realized he was nodding at the security spike, the two-story steel tree of antennae and monitoring devices. They were so common as to be invisible. She realized immediately what he meant—he wasn’t so dumb after all. If someone was hacking her implants then a good place to bounce a signal and sneak a peak was a good old-fashioned US security spike. There weren’t too many of those in the Fish. It was a good bet that she’d be safer from hackers there than just about anywhere else in Philly. Well, why not? She had time to kill and she was just about out of booze anyway. They made a good grog, the hips.
“Alright,” she said. “Lead on.”