Tropical Punch (Bubbles in Space Book 1)

by S. C. Jensen

  “It’s a quiet room,” Whyte said. “No outside bots. You’ll have to exercise your grey matter and remember our conversation on your own.”

  “It’s just a SmartPet.” I swung my upgrade in ahead of me and didn’t feel any resistance, so I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

  “We take every precaution,” he said from behind a grey desk.

  I sat myself in a hard grey plastic chair opposite him. The floor under my boots was grey. The walls. The filing cabinets. The only colour in the room was Whyte’s crisp navy uniform and his burnt sienna face. No pictures on the wall, no papers on the desk. The room had all the charm of a sensory deprivation unit.

  “Not every precaution, apparently.” I put my hands on my knees and leaned forward. “Who has access to your cargo ports?”

  The wrinkled skin of his sunburned neck strained against the collar of his uniform as he leaned in to meet me, hissing through clenched teeth. “I’ve got the Last Bloody Humanists ringing in complaints about the relentless assault on their religious freedom. My wife has just spent a fortune on complementary fashion accessories for the Gold Star guest rooms. I just had to break up a fight between two boutique cosmetics dealers. Comms are misfiring. I have about this much patience for incompetence right now.”

  He pinched his fingers in front of my face.

  “So I’ve still got a little wiggle room.”

  “What is this about, Marlowe? I was told that you would be an independent contractor. I don’t have time to babysit. That’s why I hired you in the first place. So what is it? The admiral’s job or my wife?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Is your wife is in the habit separating good-time girls from their thinking units?”

  The bluster oozed out of him like stale air from an old balloon. Whyte sagged into his chair. “What? The girl can’t be dead already.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But a corpse in a cute silver number floated past my viewing deck about half an hour ago minus the complicated bits. So if you’ve got an eye on the admiral’s girl we should probably take a peek. And regardless of who the lucky vetch was, we should take a look at a list of the crew who has access to those ports.”

  Whyte closed his eyes. “You should have called me directly.”

  “You think I didn’t try that?” I thumped his desk with my upgrade and left a dent in the flawless grey surface. “I don’t have access to you or the admiral from my tattler and the room has you both flagged as unlisted.”

  Whyte’s eyes snapped open and he barked a command that brought up a holoscreen between us. He flipped through a bunch of menus faster than I could follow and scanned a long list of names and numbers until he stopped on Betty Marlowe, Lucky Bastard. He tapped my name. Nothing happened. He tapped it again. He said, “Show me your tattler.”

  I tried to bring up his name on my tattler and showed him the fuzzed out exchange link.

  His teeth ground right through the end of his stogie, and the black stick fell onto his desk with a spray of tobacco so dark you’d think it had already been smoked. He spat the stub onto the floor. No scrubber bot appeared to clean it up. “I don’t believe this.”

  “I’ve got an extra piece of gum if you want.”

  “You’re being blocked.” The words hissed out between tightly clamped teeth. “The admiral is going to be furious.”

  “So you didn’t forget to add me to your buddy list?” I sat back, feeling slightly less annoyed at the situation. “Here I thought I just didn’t rate in your books.”

  “It shouldn’t be possible.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “I’m a delight.”

  “We have the best security money can buy,” he snapped. “The admiral spares no expense.”

  “You have the best security legitimate money can buy.” I flexed the fingers on my upgrade. “Black-market hackers are always a step ahead of their marks.”

  “We should have caught it.” The tendons in his neck worked as he attempted to swallow the news. “We have the best—”

  “You’re going to catch it if the admiral finds out,” I said. “Now that you know, maybe you can run some counter spyware and find the cracks in your armour. See if you can get a lock on the silver lady, or her last known location. The body was jettisoned from the same side of the ship as my viewing deck. If your cameras are working we should be able to see who gave her the long goodbye.”

  Whyte scowled at me. His deep voice rumbled in his chest as he said, “I know how to do my job, Marlowe.”

  “Don’t mind me.” I raised my hands up and leaned back in the chair. I spoke to the grey ceiling. “I’m just the help.”

  Whyte did some cursing and swiped furiously through the holoscreen windows. I stared at the uniform cracks between the tiles of the ceiling. A tiny, black fly flicked its wings and crawled toward the overhead light in a zombified stupor. You can take a fly into outer space and it’s still just a fly, mindlessly buzzing for the light. And humans are just apes in funny suits.

  My tattler pinged and I looked down to see a notification from Whyte. I flicked open a file on his wife. “You got through.”

  “I told you, I know how to do my job.”

  Patti Whyte was everything her husband had described, and more. Smooth brown skin like polished marble, and a thick cascade of mahogany curls down her back. She had full purple lips and eyes as sharp as tacks. Whyte, with his smoked-meat complexion and dried out husk of a personality, didn’t rate for half a wife like that. Unless the security gig was more lucrative in the luxury space cruise sector than it was anywhere else—which, I supposed, it had every right to be. My eyes flicked to Whyte through the ’gram. Was he seeing what I was seeing? No, he just saw his wife. I saw an almost exact duplicate of the girl in the silver dress. Different hair. Different makeup. Same build, though. Same look in her eyes. Patti stared at me out of the ’gram like she was daring me to guess her secrets. I made her a promise and killed the ’gram.

  “Find anything on the pro skirt?” I looked up at Whyte

  He looked back at me with the blank look of someone working on a difficult puzzle, then he brought up a live feed of a laughing woman in a low cut silver dress. A choker-style necklace with a ruby tear glittered in her clavicle. “Game Room Twelve, Fortunes’ Favour, at the roulette wheel.”

  I brought up the original ’gram of my girl from the mystery client and compared the two. Like Patti, she had the same petite build and the vaguely familiar look of all people who wear too much makeup. She could be the same woman as the one I found in techRose who had no sister but managed to do the twin show with another woman with the right build in the right dress and makeup. She could be the same woman, or she could be someone else entirely. Either my client had neglected to mention that her sister was a triplet, or something else was going on.

  “They’re decoys.”

  “For what?”

  “No missing persons reported yet?” I called up a map to Fortune’s Favour and sent it to the visilenses. “I’m going to check on our silver lady. I want to see her with my own eyes.”

  “The feed is secure.” Whyte flexed his jaw at me a couple of times. “You’re sure you saw what you think you saw?”

  “I haven’t been hitting the Lucky Bastard if that’s what you’re asking.” I stood abruptly and sent the fly buzzing. “Speaking of which, can someone relieve me of the gin-splosion happening in my room right now? I haven’t been sober for so long that I feel the need to prove it to myself or anyone else.”

  He stood up to walk me to the door. “We’ll keep an eye on the girl. I want you to watch Patti.”

  “Rendezvous at 1900 hours tomorrow,” I said. “I got it.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to find her before then so you can—”

  “You know how to do your job, Hank. I know how to do mine.”

  “Fine.
I’ll check the footage from the cargo docks. Try to keep it low key.”

  I opened the door and bent to pat Hammett on the head. The nanoparticle field tickled my fingers. Then it tickled my brain. My cheek muscles smiled on autopilot. I said, “I don’t know any other way to play.”

  I left the security dome with Hammett prancing along beside me in the sand. Instead of following the holomap toward the game rooms, I pulled up a different list. A pattern itched at edge of my consciousness, but a thread was tugging them together now, as thin and red as a plasma wire. I needed a bathing suit. Despite what I’d told Whyte, it might be time to hit the holobeaches and see if I could run into Mrs. Hank Whyte a little ahead of schedule.

  Upon Hammett’s enthusiastic recommendation I dropped all of my Lucky Bastard retail credits on a deconstructed wetsuit that looked more like go-go boots and short shorts than swimwear to my stylistically challenged eye. As much as I hated to admit it, my porky companion knew the glad-rag landscape. In the beach district, I blended in like a diaphanous blob in the effulgence of ultra-modern swim sophistication.

  “Shouldn’t we be prioritizing the admiral’s case?” Hammett snuffled around in the vicinity of my toes, inspecting the spray of sand along the imitation boardwalk. “I mean, I’d love to see the beach but this isn’t really the time—”

  “I am prioritizing the admiral’s case.” I blinked my eyes up at the massive neon signs advertising doors to various virtual aquatic experiences—Lonely Lagoon, White Sands of Paradise, 80th Moon of Jupiter, Glacial Runoff, Relaxing Reefs. “But there are too many coincidences lining up here and I don’t like coincidences. I’m going to pay a visit to Patti Whyte and pick her brain.”

  The scent of sun-warmed skin, tanning oils, and salt water wafted out of the air-circulation system with hints of melted ice cream and burnt street cart hot dogs—artificial sensory triggers from a time lost to memory but which evoked a bizarre sense of residual nostalgia. I’d never been to the time or place these scenes were from and yet it was familiar as a dream. I puzzled over the possibility of genetic memory until I realized the sensation itself was another neurochemical stimulation. These cush pushers have all the fun. The farther off the glam path I trudged, the stronger the feeling became, until I turned to a collection of back-alley sims labelled as “Memory Lane.”

  I tracked the Whyte’s wife to a lesser-used sim with a shabby driftwood sign painted with a young woman on a flotation device and “Amity Island Welcomes You” in peeling blue letters. As if as an afterthought, someone had scrawled a rough, black triangle poking out of the water beside the girl.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?” Hammett whispered up at me. It sniffed the air cautiously.

  “He’s managed to get a tracker on her,” I said and grabbed a towel from a faded rainbow of cotton terry fabric crammed haphazardly onto a sun-bleached wooden shelf leaning against the wall. “All I have to do is follow the pretty lights.”

  Hammett sniffed at the entrance to the Amity Beach simulation and said, “I can’t go in there.”

  “Can you drop the skin?” I picked the pig up and set it on the towel shelf. “Watch the crowd for me.”

  Hammett disappeared, leaving a smooth metallic sphere in its place. The sphere reflected the colour of the towels, so that in most directions it blended in seamlessly with the shelf. Not that there was anyone else in Memory Lane to worry about. The scent of sunscreen and nostalgia was for me alone. The SmartPet made a blip inside my ear tubes that only I could hear. “There is no crowd.”

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  “This is discrimination, you know.” The pig snorted even without its little pink nose. “I’m filing a complaint.”

  “Thanks, Ham.”

  I glanced over my shoulder just as a trio of Last Humanist acolytes entered “Memory Lane.” They scanned the empty corridor with their faces set in eerie facsimiles of benign curiosity. But their eyes hardened when they passed over me. Cold disapproval radiated from the group as they paused, then turned back the way they came.

  I waited until they were out of sight, then slipped through the holoscreen separating Amity Beach from the corridor outside and stepped into another world. I stood in a flat concrete parking area with old-fashioned gas burning cars packed in like the canned, meat-free sausages they always have for sale in the Grit District. A gentle sea breeze carried cries of white gulls as they soared across blue skies in like a choreographed kite display. Rays of intense sunlight beat down and burrowed into my exposed flesh like burning worms. The asphalt radiated the heat back up at me with an oily petroleum burn in it.

  I grabbed a discarded bottle of sunscreen sitting on the concrete barrier between the parking lot and the beach and sluiced some hot, greasy lotion into the palm of my hand marvelling at the way the white liquid slid across my skin. Some people like the sun-exposed look, and I knew there were simulation units that used actual radiation to complete the experience for their customers. I hoped that using the lotion would signal to the algorithms that I didn’t want any roasting today. Judging by the leathery hides crawling around on the beach the de rigueur look for this particular beach set was “well-done.”

  Inside the simulation, my visilenses no longer gave me a signal on Patti Whyte’s location. Hundreds of bodies swarmed over the beach. Patti preferred the sentimental flesh pollution of traditional Old Earth public beaches where every square inch of synthetic sand was packed with oversized bottoms spilling out of undersized triangles of fabric. In my deconstructed wetsuit, I stood out like a thumb dipped in molten platinum. The beach goers ignored me. If there were any other real people in here other than Patti, and judging by the hollowness of Memory Lane there weren’t, they likely had their settings tuned to scene blending. That way any foreign intrusion into the aesthetic landscape would be adjusted by the simulation in order not to disrupt the fantasy.

  “Can you still hear me, Hammett?”

  The speakers in my ear tubes crackled and the pig’s voice came through as if from the bottom of a well, full of echoes and static. “Barely. There’s something blocking the comms here, like at Whyte’s office, but stronger.”

  “Hang tight. She’s got to be here.”

  I shoved my way into the throng and moved toward the water. Children screamed and parents scolded. Teenagers shrieked and giggled and chased one another across the sand, careless of whom they sprayed with cold water and wet sand. Bits of silica stuck to my skin where I had applied the lotion, and I longed to escape the crowd of people by diving under the crystalline waves of the wide blue ocean just visible above the sandy mops of hair ahead. But when I got to the shoreline, the pristine waters of the horizon were torn apart by thrashing limbs and the joyous squawking of sunburned primates.

  At the edge of the chaos, something else moved through the water. A slick black blade cut through the waves like a knife paring away the outer flesh as it sliced closer and closer to the core. The simulated crowd hadn’t noticed the threat yet. I stood on the wet sand with waves crashing over my boots and cold water seeping between my toes with my eyes on that blade as it swept—back and forth, back and forth—toward a young boy floating on a raft just a little too far from the crowd.

  The muscles in my chest tightened. The part of my brain that knew it was floating through outer space on a luxury cruiser, hundreds of kilometres above Terra Firma and far from the threat of oceanic predators, was a tiny inconsequential thing in the face of the screaming panic of the monkey brain. My eyes were glued to the black blade and the little boy. When the blade slipped under the waves I couldn’t tear my eyes from the expanse of glittering water ahead of the boy, so deathly calm.

  “Beautiful isn’t it?”

  A woman in a wide brimmed black hat appeared next to me. A funereal veil fluttered about her face in the breeze, black lace embellished cheerfully with polka dots. Beneath the veil, large black sunglasses hid her eyes from me
. I said, “Patti?”

  A primal scream tore through the air from somewhere in the mass of swimmers and suddenly everyone was dragging at one another, trying to get their own fleshy bodies to shore before anyone else. Other cries rose out of the water, piercing the splashing of waves and the screeching of gulls. The kind of noises that rake through your brain and turn off all other inputs. Panic. Escape. Sunburned flesh thrashed and crashed in the white foam and chunks of flying sand and seaweeds.

  As each swimmer made it to shore they blinked out of existence. The beach behind us stretched on infinitely, a desert planet of endless swirling dunes and hot dry air blasting sand at my face. Eddies of star-strewn indigo hung with huge purple and pink moons replaced the sun-shining skies. The screams stopped.

  “If you’re here,” Patti said. “It may already be too late.”

  I looked back out onto the water where a glassy twilit surface reflected the berry hues of the galaxy kissed sky. Tiny waves lapped at the soft pink sands of the desert beach, kissing gently. The black blade sliced back and forth smoothly, parallel to the shore.

  “I’m here,” I said. “But where are you?”

  “I can’t tell you that.” She pulled the hat off, pinching the brim between her fingers and tossing the hat into the water where it sunk slowly beneath the glassy surface. Her mahogany hair appeared black in the strange light. Her pale skin was darkened by the simulation. She wore a silver choker at her neck with a pendant, like a drop of blood, at her throat.

  “Your husband is worried about you.”

  She smiled sadly, looking more and more like the girl in the silver dress. “I never meant to hurt Hank. He’s a good man.”

  “I can help you,” I said. “Whatever this mess is, we can get you out of it.”

  “You can help me,” she said. “But not in the way that you think.”

  “I’m not taking any more falls for you.”

  “I’m sorry for techRose. I tried to warn you. There was nothing you could do, but I had hoped—Jimi trusted you, so I thought—”