Meet Me in the Future

by Kameron Hurley

  As Abijah squinted at them through her one good eye, blood leaking down her face, one of her attackers opened the door, and in that slanted light from the hall she saw one of them, a squat figure, put her fists to her broad hips, and then self-consciously pat at her left breast pocket for a cigarette case.

  “Little fucking weasel,” Abijah muttered, or tried to. Her face wouldn’t cooperate, which was just as well.

  They gave her a couple more kicks, and then the combination of pain and drink finally took her away, mostly.

  Abijah dragged herself into proper consciousness only to find she had a dry mouth and painfully empty stomach. She wanted to eat a whale. She gagged and heaved, but only drooled saliva onto the floor. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been out, because her curtains were still drawn and her interface still wasn’t back online. She crawled to the door and planted her hand in something soft and foul. Dog shit. The fucking dog had shit in her fucking apartment.

  She snarled and flailed to her feet, fumbling her way to the wash room with her non-befouled hand. The lights were still off—nothing came on as she entered the room—but the water worked, and she scrubbed her hands and face clean. She put some painkillers in via fast-acting eye drops and pocketed a vial for later. They were prescription-only drugs, but she didn’t technically have her own prescription for them.

  Abijah tripped the emergency generator, cycling the power back on, and tromped down the stairs to the pub to get a drink, because sometimes that was the only thing that solved her problems. Certainly calling the garda to report being beat up by gardai wasn’t going to further her cause. The stiffness and pain bled out of her with every step as the drugs did their work, fuzzying the edges of her discomfort until she felt tired more than anything else.

  She pushed open the door to the pub and found the pub owner, Maliki, engaged in an engrossing game of some kind on her interface.

  Abijah waved a hand at her and called out, breaking Maliki’s concentration. Maliki blinked and focused on her. “Where the fuck you been?” Maliki said. “Been trying your interface for an hour. Maurille called and said you cut out.”

  “Need a reboot,” Abijah said. “Got a juicer in the back?”

  “Sure, the kid’s back there. You in trouble with the law again?”

  “Pour me a drink and I’ll tell you,” Abijah said.

  “Pay your tab and I’ll pour a drink!” Maliki called after her, but Abijah was already through the heavy curtains into the sprawling muck of the back room. Maliki’s kid, Popsy, bore a huge monocle over one eye, surgically implanted more for show and shock value than practicality. Popsy sat hunched at a loom full of disembodied interfaces. She swung her massively magnified brown eye in Abijah’s direction. Her hair was bright green, shaved on both sides and curled up on top into delicate ringlets like a fancy sea anemone.

  Abijah sat next to her on the skull of a whale and held out her blank arm. “Garda wipe,” she said.

  Popsy clucked at her. “In deep already? Didn’t you take the case yesterday?”

  “Always been popular with the garda. Bestest friends.”

  Popsy rebooted her interface and got it blinking at her again. There were two messages already from her wives, one from Pats, and one from her client.

  “Thanks,” Abijah said, blinking open the message from her client as she headed back out to the bar and initiating a call before it had even started replaying.

  “You owe me another favor!” Popsy said.

  “Sure!” Abijah said. “I’ll pretend I didn’t see all those illegal interfaces.”

  Popsy spit at her.

  Abijah settled up at the bar. She and Maliki were the only ones up. Her interface told her it was only three hours after dawn. Good a time as any, she supposed, and chugged the beer Maliki had left on the bar.

  Rylka vo Morrissey dominated her vision as the call connected, and Abijah blinked her back to her left eye only. Rylka sat out in her garden in a little automatic chair, or was projecting herself that way, surrounded in white and red roses with little purple tongues and waspish petals. During very wet seasons, roses often bred wasps, which made them the sort of hobby only those with a lot of time and maybe some masochistic tendencies got into. In the garden behind her, Abijah glimpsed a few laborers’ heads bowed to the task of cutting back the roses and watering their little flickering tongues. Rylka, like most of the vo Morrisseys, had a degenerative condition caused by chemical bursts during the war that limited her mobility. Abijah had the same thing, from the same cause, the doctors all said, but it was curled up in her like a serpent, waiting for some external condition to trigger it, like a bomb waiting in her body.

  “Your interface went down last night,” Rylka said. “Is everything all right?” She was young, slender and reed-like, with bold features and a full mouth that lent her otherwise willowy appearance some gravitas.

  “Got beat up by some garda,” Abijah said, “so your instincts were right. They’re certainly eager to keep me from finding anything out.”

  Maliki reappeared with a cold pack and bashed it on the counter to activate it, then handed it over to Abijah. Abijah gratefully pressed it to her throbbing head.

  “You’re continuing the search?” Rylka asked, and her eyes got all big and dewy. “I’d hate to think—” Rylka was descended from some of the founding families. While terms like rich and wealth weren’t really in vogue out here where everyone was supposed to toil alongside each other and share in the world’s prosperity, she was certainly well insulated and . . . well-gifted by her colleagues in exchange for political favors. Abijah was counting on being well-gifted for her own services, too. Everybody needed a good word at the council when shit went down.

  “Following up with the medical examiner today,” Abijah said.

  Rylka let out her breath. “Good,” she said. “These deaths are worrying to me personally, and to the council. If they get the attention of the continent, we could very well find ourselves occupied by their police forces. Our garda should be able to handle this issue. My family has proudly served among the garda for generations, and I won’t have a small crop of bad actors open us up to injury from the continent.”

  “If they come down here, it’ll be shit trying to get them to go back,” Abijah said. “I get it.”

  “Thank you, Abijah,” Rylka said, and ended the call.

  Abijah finished her beer and left a digital IOU on Maliki’s public message board.

  She caught a trolley out front and took it up north toward the forensics and medical research buildings while reviewing the message from Pats.

  “Confirmed the kid works up at the wight factory,” Pats said. “Meet you there after lunch. You’ll love the dirt I’ve got on the owner. Real piece of war work, that one.”

  Abijah confirmed the post-lunch date and stepped off the trolley at the medical examiner’s building. She transferred her credentials to the desk, which was automated, and it admitted her into the building.

  When she got upstairs, the medical examiner, Bataya, was waiting for her.

  “How’s your sister?” Abijah said.

  “Still annoyed you haven’t called,” Bataya said. “How are your wives?”

  “Still in love with each other,” Abijah said. “What do you have for me?” She moved past Bataya and into the morgue. The young man’s body lay atop a grooved stone slab. Without the tatters of his clothes, he looked even more diminutive and sad, a shriveled flower. Abijah ran her hands under the protective glove sprayer and shook the film on her hands dry, then approached the edge of the table. He had already been cut open; just a small incision in the chest and on the inside of the thigh where he was pumped full of recording devices that traveled throughout his body taking recordings, tiny and mobile as his blood had been.

  His face was lacerated; he had been lying on it when she last saw him.

  “You must have his name,” Abijah said. “Pats verified where he was working.”

  “Yes,” Bataya said, mov
ing to the other side of the table. “Turns out this one didn’t drown either, just like the last one. He was dead of head trauma before being dumped.” Bataya was a small woman, nimble, with luxurious purple-black hair and faux gray eyes. She was studying for a certificate in combat yoga and advanced reiki; maybe she’d already earned them. It had been months since Abijah was last in here. They had only almost slept together once, or as Abijah had explained it to Pats, “We were going to have sex . . . but then we decided not to.” And Abijah blamed that on the alcohol. Or perhaps her own fascination with what a woman trained in both reiki and combat yoga would be like in bed.

  “Did Pats give you the button?” Abijah asked.

  “Yes,” Bataya said, and her mouth thinned, and Abijah wondered if she’d done something wrong. Bataya went over to the counter and fished out the button, which rested now in a glass dish. The evidence webbing had been removed from it. Bataya set it directly on top of the body’s chest.

  “It’s a garda Inspector-class, all-weather coat button,” Bataya said, “which I assume you knew. The rest—there’s no evidence on it. No fingerprints. No DNA. No unusual organic material. It’s possible this was just something washed up on the beach near the body.”

  “How’d you know it was near the body? I didn’t tell you or Pats that.”

  She smiled thinly. “Particles,” she said. “That beach has a very unique signature because of the burning of the palace. Lots of base metals, including mercury, after it got blown up during the war, settled into the sand there. It was toxic to swim there until twenty years ago.”

  “So the body had these same particles, then?”

  “Of course. I mean, it was found there.”

  “Both sides, clothing too, I mean. Nothing out of the ordinary there? Let’s say the body had been dropped upriver, say, near the factory? Would it bear traces of other particles from its journey downriver that could help us identify where it came from?”

  “I see,” she said. “Well it did, yes. The fingernails tend to be good for that. No human DNA under them, but there was silt, and it’s not a match for the beach near the pier. That’s all glass. That beach is glass all the way up to the factory.”

  “So the body was dumped no further south than the factory.”

  “A reasonable conclusion. But that leaves a hundred kilometers of river.” She pursed her mouth. “I was getting to the silt under the nails, you know. But you started with that banter about the button.”

  “Entirely my fault.”

  “Just so,” she said, and sniffed.

  “Any way to match the silt to a smaller patch of river?”

  She sighed. “We can try, but you should know that the garda aren’t happy about me running these tests.”

  “It’s a private contract,” Abijah said, “from Rylka vo Morrissey. They can be unhappy all they like, but the job is legitimate.”

  “I’ve seen the order,” Bataya said, “or I wouldn’t have let you in.”

  “It’s good to see you again too,” Abijah said.

  “You didn’t have to call me,” Bataya said, “but you should have called my sister.”

  “I’ve been—”

  “Drunk?” she suggested.

  “That too. But . . . on a case, so.”

  “On a case for a day,” Bataya said. “Sorry, you just . . . disappoint me a lot. All the time.”

  “We’ll keep things professional, then. I promise.”

  Bataya sighed. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “One drink,” Abijah said. “But later. I’m meeting Pats at the factory to ask about the boys.”

  “Boys,” Bataya said, shaking her head. “We had no word for such a thing, sixty years ago.”

  “We did,” Abijah said, “it just wasn’t very polite.”

  Pats waited outside the factory gate, chewing on betel nut leaves and scratching at what Abijah confirmed were mosquitoes as she stepped off the trolley and onto the packed gravel of the factory road.

  “You look like shit,” Pats said. “Garda?”

  “Katya was with them,” Abijah said, “if you can believe that.”

  “No shit? Cheeky weasel.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Abijah presented her credentials at the gatehouse and asked to see the factory supervisor. There was a human attendant here, and she closed up the door and conferred with a superior for a few minutes before admitting them. Abijah fixed her with a grin, but the woman only glared at her.

  Inside, they were met by one of the owner’s aides, maybe a secretary or a deputy, who warbled on the whole time as if they were there for a public investor tour.

  “We employ over six hundred people here,” the little birdish woman said; she was approaching fifty, and she zoomed about in a little chair like Rylka vo Morrissey’s, no doubt afflicted by the same ailment. Nobody asked about injuries much, after the war. Not sober, anyway.

  “All off-worlders?” Abijah asked.

  “The floor workers, yes,” the woman said. Which meant most everybody. “Management and skilled labor are all local. You can see our public safety records. We abide by all treaties and accords. Getting placed here is considered a boon for off-worlders.”

  “No doubt,” Abijah said, “when the alternative is living three thousand to every cramped can in the sky.”

  “Certainly we provide them with many opportunities!” the woman said, and showed them into the factory owner’s office.

  The desk was clear of all items except a single nameplate, which read, “Ofram Fucking vom Amadson.” One wall was projected with a view of the factory floor, a teeming morass of bio-machines and humanity merged to perform complex manufacturing tasks. The woman behind the desk blinked and rose as they entered, no doubt immersed in some real-time shooter on her interface. She was a top-heavy woman with razor-cut hair dyed a bright red; the fringe was long and hung into her eyes. The haircut made her look young, but if Abijah had to guess, she’d say the woman was forty.

  “You own the place?” Abijah said.

  “Can we call you ‘Fucking’?” Pats said, and that elicited the smallest moment of confusion for Ofram, who seemed to have momentarily forgotten about the nameplate.

  “Ah,” Ofram said, giving a smile that was so obviously forced it hurt Abijah’s own pride to watch it. “The nameplate, yes. A joke from my mother. Can I help you? I read over your credentials. You’re looking into the death of the workers? A tragic case.”

  Ofram didn’t invite them to sit, but Pats did anyway, and Abijah followed. She tracked the movement of the workers on the floor as she did. “You all made weapons here during the war,” she said. “What you make now?”

  “Fertilizers, cleaning products,” Ofram said, settling into her own seat again. Behind her was a stretched canvas banded in several colors. Abijah couldn’t figure out the medium, but it seemed like a freshman effort.

  “You play rugby?” Pats asked. She had brought out a little switchblade knife and was cleaning her fingernails with it.

  “No,” Ofram said. “Did the boys play rugby?”

  “We’re here about the latest one in particular,” Abijah said. “Name was—” She glanced at Pats, realizing she never had gotten around to getting his name from Bataya. Shit, she was as bad as all of them.

  “Sam Kine,” Pats said. “I have his little tin pod number here”—she tapped her head—“which I’m sure you used to tell his family he’s not coming back.”

  “That’s correct,” Ofram said. “We were given permission to beam out that message.”

  “And you’re getting a replacement sent down, then?” Abijah said.

  “Per the treaty,” Ofram said, “yes. It’s protocol. There’s really nothing strange about it. The boys here get lonely and stupid. They don’t understand water. They never see much of it up there, and when they get here they get dangerous in it. Go paddling around, and the little fucks can’t swim, and they drown.”

  “Three of the four didn’t drown,” Ab
ijah said. “They were dead before they hit the water.”

  “There is disagreement among the boys,” Ofram said. “They fight a lot in those cans up there. Hard to break them of it once they’re here in a civilized place.”

  Pats snorted.

  “I’ve told the gardai all of this,” Ofram said. “You can read it in the report.”

  “Seems the kids would be happy here,” Abijah said, and her gaze moved again to the projection window. It immediately turned off, then flickered again and showed an image of a massive red cherry tree blowing in the breeze. Abijah raised her brows and regarded Ofram.

  “They’re never satisfied,” Ofram said.

  “That why you sell them out?” Pats said casually. “Got some reports that boys here get sold out for labor, the ones that don’t do what they’re told.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Ofram said. “That’s against the treaty.”

  Abijah cocked her head at Pats. “Where did you hear that?”

  Pats shrugged, but a message pinged at the bottom left of Abijah’s vision, and she blinked it open. It was from Pats, and read, “Maliki hears the best shit at the bar. Listen more than you talk over there, lushie.”

  Ofram leaned over her desk. “These people are trash,” she said. “You know what we called them when they first started coming here forty years ago, twenty years after those blasted space boats got stuck in orbit on the way to some exploded star? ‘Not-people.’”

  “I know.”

  “Then you understand.”

  “Do I?”

  Ofram said, “These people, you call them, they’re aliens. Alien biology, alien urges, alien customs.”

  “So that justifies their treatment?”

  “What do you think?” Ofram said. “Dogs are tools. These boys are tools, too. Companion animals. They send us these ones because they’re useless to them. They don’t bear babies. They can’t feed babies. At best, they’re useful for brute labor, and that’s what we use them for too. Maybe it’s not us you should be questioning, but the sort of people that send their own down here to dig shit and die.”