Tropical Punch (Bubbles in Space Book 1)

by S. C. Jensen

  I turned a sharp corner and skidded through a puddle. My feet slid out from under me. I caught myself on the upgrade and launched my body upright without skipping a step. What luck can’t buy, practice can earn. Lucky for me, I had a lot of practice falling down. I landed in a Grit strip, teeming with the late-night crowd. The hockmarket.

  HoloPops shouted from every corner, made bright in the rain, advertising goods and services from beyond the pale. A kaleidoscopic array of awnings sheltered the merrily misanthropic rejects of HoloCity. Hawkers and buyers, drunks and pinches. Stalls filled with disassembled electronics, illegal biotech, tanks with fleshy-bits floating in them. I hunkered under my white hood and forced my way into the crush of bodies. It would be slower going among the flood, but the exiles of polite society provided a temporary signal scatter better than my non-existent cred could buy.

  By the time I dragged myself to the slug hole, the crowds had thinned. The amber light of dawn spilled through the haze of smog and rain like watered-down liquor. Belowground, blue-white tubes of florescence flickered off glossy fashion posters and the haggard faces of bar hoppers trying to live the dream. A homeless man slept on a piece of cardboard beneath a huge mural of two glittering bodies locked in a carnal embrace with the words “Big Bang” superimposed over it in holographic text. The letters flickered and became “Cosmo Relagé in the Stars.”

  I shook my head and slipped into the restroom inside the tube station. It was still illegal to have cameras in the can and HCPD more or less played by that rule. Hard-white lights flickered in the water-stained ceiling with a high-pitched whining that scratched inside my brain like a sharp-toothed parasite. I dug inside the biohazard receptacle with my metal arm, pushing aside needles and used feminine hygiene products, and ditched the handbag and the pisskicker inside. The bin hadn’t been emptied in a few weeks and probably wouldn’t be for a few more.

  The best way to blend in in HoloCity is to stand out. I ducked into a stall and took my vest off. I shook the drops of rain off as best I could and turned it inside out so the fuzzy pink faux fox liner made my new skin. I stood in front of the mirror and applied a layer of red glitter to my lips. Just another go-go girl on the glow-down. I smudged the edges a little for effect. The old me stared out of the mirror with a sickly green complexion in the flickering light. Cheap habits and expensive lipstick. I punched the glass with my metal fist. My face shattered into a thousand fractals and broken pieces of me rained down on the tiles, tinkling like tears.

  I pulled up the hood and ducked my face as I exited the throne room. They might not have eyes inside the can, but they watched those doors like peeping toms with their peckers out. I brought up the ScanAnon ticket on my tattler as I passed through the gate. My heart took a little vacation in my throat while we waited for the green light, but it rated. I licked my teeth at the HCPD uniform watching the queue. He looked right through me.

  The ticket I rented my flat under was so flimsy a blind pincher could see through it, but it would hold for the early morning pencil pushers at HQ. I rode the slug an extra stop and hoofed it back to my block to be safe. I needed a little more abuse anyway. The sober life was making me soft. No way I’d have fallen for a setup like that when I was tuned up. I made a mental note to beat myself up again once my signal was good and scattered.

  My building was one of those institutional grey numbers with little barred windows and about as much personality as a puddle of wet concrete. A red door—the architect’s only concession to festivity—had faded to puce and hung off its hinges like a tongue out of a hanged man’s face. A pubescent beard of twisted grey shrubs sagged against the side of the building. It was just as nice inside as out.

  In the early morning light, the rain pissed down in dingy golden sheets that would make a urologist wince. I ducked inside the back door and shuffled up the stairs as forlornly as possible. Too much pep in the step would attract the wrong kind of attention. On the third floor, I dragged my feet along a narrow corridor. The electric-blue indoor-outdoor carpeting was dimly illuminated by bare tubes overhead that seemed to buzz out as soon as I passed beneath them. Something small and black flitted through the shadows and squeaked at me angrily. Home sweet home.

  I keyed in my code manually. The building had been built before tattlers took over for the part of our brains that had to remember passwords, ticket numbers, and ID signatures. Some nights, when I’d been too soused to access the flesh file, I’d slept out here with the buzzing lights and crawling carpets. That memory mote wasn’t going anywhere. It was here to stay.

  I slipped inside my flat and locked the door behind me. An undersized pig, fat and cartoonishly pink, blinked up at me from the living room floor. “What took you so long?”

  “That’s a new look.” I dropped my vest on the threadbare arm of a lopsided armchair. The living room was furnished with thrift store rejects I had found collecting rainwater in some of HoloCity’s finer hockmarkets. A dingy patchwork quilt of mismatched plastic planking made up the floor of the apartment. The planks came from filtered and recycled microplastics collected from Terra’s rivers and oceans. Our landlord had gotten it cheap, because it turned out breathing in the gas and particulate from recycled microplastics is only marginally better for you than drinking them in your water. Even so, he hadn’t bothered trying to find a matching set.

  “You didn’t seem to appreciate the cat module.” The SmartPet spun in a tight circle and wagged its curly tail to show off the new skin. “Though I did have fun knocking things off tables.”

  One of my posters had come loose and dangled morosely off walls the colour and texture of crushed eggshells and coffee grounds. Remnants of my past life. The print ’grams had been ripped from the slug tunnels on drunken nights out. I can’t remember exactly why any of them had appealed to me. I kept them up as a reminder that I’m not myself when I drink, and I really don’t like the me who liked those trashy posters. A round, charging pad blinked in the far corner. It was just me and the SmartPet. I didn’t even have a media screen to keep me company.

  I reached down to pet the little pink piggy head and went into the kitchen to grab a can of NRG soda from the icebox. The SmartPet trotted after me. I took a swig of the poisonous energy drink and dug through the top drawer of the desk that doubled as my kitchen table. “Mittens was a holy terror.”

  “You could take off your boots, you know.” The pig snuffled around my feet. “They’ve been contaminated by—”

  “Listen, Miss Piggy. I need as much holocred as I can get, and fast. Is there anything we can sell?”

  The pig mod rolled off toward the bedroom, its system making little clip-clop noises for its simulated hooves. It muttered, “You could stop giving so much of it to NRGCorp for one thing.”

  “One vice at a time, Piggler.” The next drawer in my desk turned up a handful of credit chips, and I stuffed them into my pocket. “I need some IDs too. What have we got instant access to?”

  “Would you settle on a name, please?” Beady brown eyes peered around the corner of my bedroom door. “It’s difficult to establish an identity for this mod without a proper moniker.”

  “Baconator?”

  “If you don’t want my help, just say so.” The pig huffed. “My battery is getting low. I’ll go charge myself and maybe when that’s done, you’ll—”

  “What do you have in mind, Princess Passive-Aggressive?”

  “I like Hammett.”

  “Like the OE play?”

  “That’s Hamlet. I mean Dashiell Hammett. The Old Earth pulp-fiction writer.” Hammett snorted. “I mean, you are a private investigator, and he practically invented—”

  “I don’t have time for a history lesson, Ham.” I kicked the last drawer shut and started digging through the hall closet for a backpack. “I need a fresh falsie, holocred, and as many pairs of clean underwear as we can find. I’ve got to fade fast or I’m going to get faded out.
”

  Hammett stamped a hoof. “You never listen to me.”

  “I know, I know.” I picked up a pile of laundry off the bedroom floor, gave it a sniff, and stuffed it into the bag. “I was supposed to do the laundry on Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday three weeks ago.” The pig wriggled under the bed and made a ping that made my heart sing. It wriggled out, pushing a blue credit chip with its little pink snout. “That’s it for the apartment. And your false IDs are all stored at the office now.”

  I stood up into the top drawer of my wardrobe and collapsed on the ground with a welt on my head to match the one on my throat. The room swung around a few times to show me its good side and settled in slightly off kilter. “Whose bright idea was that?”

  “Yours.” Hammett dropped the blue chip in my lap proudly. “In fact, you insisted. In order to maintain a professional—”

  “Mittens must have put me up to it.” I rubbed my head. “Damn that cat.”

  Hammett rested its simulated chin on my thigh and blinked up at me with long-lashed brown eyes that were growing bigger by the minute. “How long will you be away?”

  “Until it’s safe to come home, Hammett.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “HCPD is trying to set me up for murder,” I said. “You’d think it would be enough for me to be off the force, scraping the bottom of the barrel for private jobs. They could just wait for me to starve to death. Even Weiland is in on it now.”

  “Tom? He wouldn’t—”

  “He would,” I said. “And he has. That man puts his career before everything else. Even … whatever we were.”

  “Kind of like he said you did with—”

  I slammed my hand into the wall. “I quit drinking, didn’t I?”

  Hammett jumped. “I know. I helped.”

  “You did more than help.” I bent and scratched the pig between the ears. Hammett’s big eyes closed appreciatively. “Maybe Tom needs a SmartPet too. The Workaholics Anonymous support chicken.”

  “Would you prefer a chicken?” Hammett cocked its head at me. “I can check the archives.”

  I laughed and let my hand drop. The pig nudged me with a cold, wet nose. Nice touch. I had to give the mod designers credit. It was a class skin. “How much did this cost me?”

  Hammett’s eyes swelled to the size of billiard balls. “I used a coupon.”

  “I need holocreds, Ham.” I stood, narrowly avoiding the same mistake that had bought my last trip to the floor. “Is it returnable?”

  “I returned Mittens.” The pig’s little triangle ears wilted comically. “I’ve been saving up. You really need them that badly?”

  I pocketed the blue chip and did some mental bean counting. “You’re going to be in maintenance for a while.”

  “That’s okay.” Hammett clip-clopped over to the SmartPet charging station in the living room with its curly pink tail drooping. “I’ve got updates to do.”

  I slung the silver backpack over my shoulder and bent to pat the pig’s head one more time. “You sure there’s a falsie at the office?”

  “Two fresh ones and a handful of barely used,” it replied and settled onto the charger. “Any final instructions?”

  “Delete the transcriptions for this conversation.” I tossed my NRG can into the recycling chute and tucked a pink jacket under my arm. “Maintenance mode. Free upgrades only. And if anyone other than me tries to bring you out of hibernation, wipe it all. Here and at the office.”

  The SmartPet nodded its piggy head and blinked at me one last time. “And Hammett?”

  Return it. That’s what I wanted to say. It might get me another few hops toward the edge of town. I couldn’t get all the way outside HoloCity on the remaining ScanAnon hours. Scattering inside city limits would be expensive, too. Not to mention risky.

  But the pig suited me better than any of the free mods we’d test driven since I shelled out for the thing with my first disability cheque. When I locked myself in the apartment, determined to dry out, the SmartPet kept me company and probably kept me sane. The pig skin was kind of cute. Plus, it looked so damned sad.

  “Keep it.” Hell. I was getting soft.

  “Thank you!” Hammett stuck his nose in the air and grinned with Chiclet-white teeth no real pig ever sported.

  “If I don’t come back, it might get you a little better resale on the hockmarket,” I said. “Besides, who else am I going to spoil?”

  “Please be safe.” The pig’s eyes widened. “I’ve heard what happens to cheap sim units on the hockmarket, and I have no intention of becoming one of those sorts of companions.”

  “I’m sure they could fit you with the right holes and dongles.” I opened the door to the murky blue corridor and gave my apartment a final farewell. “But I’ll do my best.”

  I keyed in the code to lock the door. The faint electronic noises of the SmartPet powering down seeped through the thin walls and followed me down the hallway. A cheerful tune. I shuffled into the stairwell and the final notes lingered in my ears like a funeral dirge.

  I didn’t have the stomach for another slug tube, so I hoofed it the extra few blocks to a SkyTrain station. It’s not every day a girl scores the fast bird across town, and I only had about twenty hours left to use the ScanAnon ticket. I kept my jacket pink-side out and a bleary-eyed look on my face, but I cleaned up the red glitter a bit. Real down-and-out Grit skids only hit the fast bird stations to panhandle, and I didn’t want to draw attention from security. The SkyTrains use private knuckle crackers instead of HCPD because they can afford it. They had enough cush to buy a lot of enthusiastic muscle.

  I pulled a pair of opalescent visilens shades over my eyes and did a quick visual scan of my empty accounts as I filed up the corrugated metal staircase up to the bird. Hammett had been right. Even the secondary accounts were emptier than the hooch shop shelves on benefits day. I had nothing but the chips in my pocket. Maybe I had a few cred stashed away at the office with my falsies. That would be luckier than I had any reasonable hope to expect.

  The shades bought me just enough credibility in the early morning SkyTrain crowd for security to pass me over. I scanned my ticket and jumped the first bird downtown in a matter of twenty minutes. The rain even decided to take a breather though a vortex of sludgy grey clouds that whirled over HoloCity like the eye of God waiting to drown us for our sins. Sometimes I wondered if the weather system was manufactured for the sole purpose of making HoloPops more effective, rain being a much cheaper surface to project on than nanoparticles.

  The western edge of the city disappeared into the flat grey mist of the optimistically dubbed Sapphire Sea, where the first bangtail shuttles launched their way through the swirling clouds, the orange-gold glow of their boosters streaking upward like the tails of impotent firecrackers. I watched them anyway. Someday, one might burst in a climactic eruption of elitist wealth and rain flaming holocred chips on the city below. That would be a sight.

  When none of the bangtails exploded, I spun around to look out my own window. Riding the fast bird was a private pleasure. The view was completely unlike anything a Grit skid like me should ever get to see. I was a stranger to my own city up here, removed from the synthetic cesspool of street life. A silent observer soaring just below the clouds. The light of Sol burst through the cumulonimbus in violent spears of orange light, illuminating patches on buildings like beams from a plasma rifle. Target engaged. Bang.

  Only one building seemed immune. The Mezzanine Rose, a sprawling expanse of glittering pink and white glass, glowed as if with an internal light of its own to neutralize the wrath of Sol. It spiralled out from the centre in a bloom of fractals like an architectural wet dream. Inside those shimmering walls was perhaps the only respite from the techno vomit spewed across the rest of the city. No biotech, no cyber enhancement, no net access, and no inorganic intelligence was allowed within it
s walls.

  They called themselves the Last Humanist Church and the pink-robed acolytes followed the Four Absolutes: Absolute Honesty, Absolute Purity, Absolute Unselfishness, and Absolute Love. It’s the Absolute Purity angle that made them odd ducks in HoloCity. Purity to the Last Humanists had nothing to do with sex, but Purity of body, mind, and soul in the face of what they saw as the cybernetic threat to humanity. Powerful freedom of expression laws protected the Mezzanine Rose from literal and virtual contamination. Within the church, the human being in its purest form still reigned. The idea held some appeal. Maybe some day I’d ditch my upgrade, get a nanoparticle flush, and become a pink-robed acolyte in my retirement.

  I was still laughing at the idea when I slammed open the door to my office and made Dickie Rho fall out of my chair. He peered up at me from the floor with a magnifying glass pressed up against his eye. He winked at me like a lopsided cyclops. “Hey, Bubs, what’s the smoke?”

  “Get off the floor, Dickie.” I tossed my jacket and back on the chair he’d just evacuated. “I need you to dig up a fresh falsie for me and whatever cred we have laying around. I need to get out of town for a while.”

  Dickie picked himself up, but he turned his magnified eye on me and adjusted the ridiculous Homburg hat perched precariously on his head. “You didn’t just say that.”

  “The old-fashioned Private Eye thing is cute, Dick.” I pushed the chair back and got on my hands and knees underneath the desk, groping around for any chips that might have rolled underneath the furniture when I was feeling too flush to chase after them. “But I’m serious. I need a vacation, or I’m going to be retired permanently.”

  “I’ll have to change sign on the door.” He turned his big brown blinker to the frosted glass etching that proclaimed the dingy room to be the office of Bubbles Marlowe: Private Investigator. I still had trouble supressing juvenile giggles over that one, but Dickie was dead serious about our racket. “And the business cards.”