by Bruce Bethke
Oh, bugger. I recognized that weapons signature. Plasma cannon. I slammed on the rear brake, threw the Harley into a long slide, and fought to bring her out of the slide and into a screaming U-turn. I succeeded.
A line of minigun fire ripped up the pavement to my right. The road that had been behind me exploded in a matching gout of fireballs and flame geysers.
And suddenly, that was it. I was trapped on a hundred-yard section of free-floating virtual viaduct, the road blasted into smoking ruin at both ends, with no way out but to jump. I rolled the bike over to the nearest rail and looked down. A flock of pterodactyls flew by far below me, chasing a squadron of tiny single-engine fighter aircraft. It was a good one-mile drop back down to ToxicTown, if it was an inch—and clearly, given that I was sticking to the roadway, but the roadway was floating in the air with no visible means of support, there was something very screwy about the local gravity.
I pulled my virtual .45 automatic out of my jacket and checked the load status. Seven rounds. Well, it wouldn’t be much of a fight against someone who could pack a plasma cannon, but dammit, I wanted to see my attacker before I got my ass kicked back to real time.
Whoever my attacker was, he/she obliged. I was still scouting for a defensive position when the air over by the far rail shimmered, a heavy-duty cloaking field got shut down, and a really evil-looking giant battlemech fractaled into visibility. I popped off a few shots at it, just in case they might do some good. The virtual bullets pinged harmlessly off the battlemech’s shiny chrome hull.
It waited until I was done shooting and had lowered my gun, then put up its plasma cannon, retracted its smoking minigun, and morphed into—
Eliza.
I wanted the battlemech back.
“Hello, Max,” she said as she came strolling across the smoking, fractured, bullet-scarred virtual pavement. “It’s been a while.”
“Not long enough,” I said. I considered the two rounds left in my .45 and wondered if I could bring it up and get them off before she morphed back into the battlemech, or something worse. She stopped about six feet away from me and studied me with the sort of expression usually reserved for examining disgusting insects impaled on pins.
I returned the favor. Eliza was in her Aryan Princess mode again: a slight, slender, elfin, waif like—aw, hell, a positively gaunt body, about five feet two, with a figure that’d look bad on a ten-year-old boy and a color scheme that’d pass for albino if it wasn’t for her ice-blue eyes. Her white hair was shorter than ever before, a half-inch long at best, and spiked out in a way that suggested a giant pollen grain.
On a scale of one to ten, she was a negative number.
I broke the silence. “I heard you were dead.”
“I got better.” This led to another minute of silent standoff.
“I was in Heaven last night,” she said. “Looking for you. Didn’t Sam tell you?”
“He did. I had other plans.”
Eliza vanished.
“I know you did,” she said behind me. I spun around. She wasn’t there—or at least, she wasn’t visible. “I followed you.” Behind me again! I spun once more.
Slowly, Eliza faded back into visibility. If she’d followed me, then at the very least she knew I’d been with Amber. And if she was able to intercept me here, then she’d probably followed me all the way to Amber’s place last night and spent some time peeking through the keyhole and listening at the door. I started to figure out just exactly where all her anger was coming from.
All the same, MAX_KOOL had an image to maintain. “So, You happier now?”
She bit her lower lip, narrowed her icy blue eyes, and balled up her right hand into a bony fist. Then slowly, with visible effort, she opened the fist and took a deep breath.
“You are scum, Max. You and Amber deserve each other,” Eliza’s lips went tight, and raw hatred flashed through her eyes. “But—” Slowly, a bit of a thaw forced its way in. “But because there once was a time when I was in love with you, I am going to ignore everything that’s in my heart and warn you.
“Max, you have no idea who you’re really dealing with. This ‘Amber’ bitch is way out of your league.”
Eliza seemed to think that statement was self-explanatory. She crossed her arms, snorted, and just stood there, waiting for me to respond.
I—rather, Max—did. “Is this a chick thing? Are you jealous?”
“Rrrrrr!” I don’t know what Eliza started morphing into, but whatever it was had some pretty scary fangs and claws before she got control of herself and morphed back. “You bastard!” she spat, when her aspect was stabilized again. “I was a newbie! You were my first virtual lover! I trusted you!”
“Hey,” I shrugged, “all’s fair in love and virtual reality.”
“You—!” She vanished again, this time going up in a pillar of flame. The flame became smoke, the smoke a cloud, and the cloud settled out as a gentle fall of dusty snow. “You are such an asshole, Max Kool,” the snow hissed softly, as it fell. I am going to tell you this because I promised myself I would tell you this, but I really hope you don’t listen.
“Amber is a user, Max. She’s going to use you up, and suck you dry, and then she’s going to rip your heart out and feed it to the crows. She is evil, Max. And far more powerful than she’s letting you believe. For your own good, Max, stay away from her.” The snow stopped falling. A cold wind rose, and swept the icy crystals back into the air.
“Why are you telling me this?” I shouted at the wind. “I fucked you and I dumped you! You hate me! Why should I believe you?”
A freak of the wind formed a swirling cloud of snow dust, which for just a moment took on the nebulous form of a woman.
“Because she fucked me and dumped me, too,” the cold wind whispered, “and I hate her even more.” The snow woman flew apart then, and became a snow cyclone, which lifted away into the virtual sky. The wind faded. The virtual sunlight returned.
Interesting. Definitely interesting. For someone who was a green-hide newbie on the Net just two years before, Eliza had definitely developed some pretty impressive morphing skills. I shook my head in admiration, then went back to the problem of figuring out how to get off of this floating piece of virtual bridge. I turned to look at my Harley.
It was gone. In its place there was a pile of deconstructed mechanical rubble, and a message written in bullet holes in the virtual asphalt.
“HAVE A NICE WALK HOME, MAX.”
10: LIKE A BRIDGE OVER STAGNANT WATER
Thursday, local time: I got three phone calls that morning. The first was the damned fax again. The second was from Kathé in the MDE Outplacement Office, who reminded me I still had a company-owned copy of Dress For Conformity checked out and my paperwork was going to be held up until I returned it. The third was from Joseph “Gunnar” LeMat, who wanted me to meet him for lunch at a Lebanese restaurant in Lowertown.
I opted for Door Number 3. Lunch with LeMat.
Lowertown is not to be confused with ToxicTown, although there are some similarities. Lowertown exists in real space, and most of the time in real time, except for the service in a few restaurants and the lines in some civil service offices. In ToxicTown’s favor, on the other hand, is the fact that the St. Paul city government has never tried to “revitalize” it.
Lowertown has suffered that fate. Repeatedly.
The area called Lowertown is actually the old lower east side of St. Paul’s downtown business district. Its history dates back to the early 1800s, when Harriet Island was still an island, the Mississippi River was still the border between the Objibwa (Chippewa) and Lakota (Sioux) nations, and a rather disreputable and hygienically repulsive man named Pig’s Eye Parrant came up the river, looking for a quiet place to set up a trading post and pursue a life of selling shoddy trade goods and illegal whiskey to the Native Americans.
Now, if you look at a topographical map of the area, you’ll see that the Mississippi River makes an enormous S-shaped bend right through
the heart of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metroplex, and this bend resembles nothing so much as a giant U-trap, not unlike the one you’ll find on your main bathroom drain pipe. This bend in the river functions about the same as a U-trap, too, in that all the crap, detritus, and garbage floating down the Mississippi naturally comes to rest on the north shore of the second loop, right about where the clean-out port would be if this was a union plumbing job. The smell, on long hot days in late summer, is remarkable.
So of course it was on this spot that Pig’s Eye Parrant chose to build his trading post, and thereby found the settlement that would eventually become the city of St. Paul. Later settlers, having more discerning noses than Parrant, as well as an appreciation of the dangers of building on flood plains and an awareness of the workings of real estate marketing, wisely chose to expand the city on the bluffs above Lowertown and rename it after the first missionary church built in the area.
But the fact remains, Lowertown is the original commercial core of the city of St. Paul, and given the preponderance of historic buildings down there and the frequency of road repairs, Lowertown today still looks much the same as it did back in the early nineteenth century, in the days of fur trappers, keel boats, and horse-drawn wagons.
On long, hot, summer days, it smells about the same, too.
The coffee was thick, sweet, and almost undrinkable. I set my cup down, picked up my fork, and toyed with my falafel. LeMat tried his urgent, nervous smile on me again.
I decided to make him sweat some more. “The Hill Building?”
“Just try to keep an open mind, Jack.”
I narrowed my eyes and looked at him. “That mausoleum has got to be at least a hundred and fifty years old.”
“Yeah!” he said brightly. “Solid construction! They just don’t build ‘em like that anymore.”
“I got news for you, buddy. They haven’t built ‘em like that since the Maine sank.”
LeMat plunged into a funk, then found something buoyant to bring him back to the surface. “Well, what does it matter anyway? You’re going to be in virtual reality most of the time.”
“Yes,” I nodded, “I shall. I will bring my marvelous Babbage Engine up to a full head of steam, and if the situation requires more computational power, I have but to open the gas valve another quarter-turn! Ah, the wonders of science!”
“Jack,” LeMat hissed. “People are looking at us, Jack.”
“Artists,” I announced loudly to everyone else near us. “We are conceptual artists and will be performing a gallery opening this June in—” With remarkable speed, everyone nearby either called for their checks or leapt into intense, animated, and loud conversations.
“The art of not being heard,” I whispered to LeMat.
“The art of not being an asshole,” he whispered back.
I tried another sip of my coffee and found it more palatable this time. “Seriously, though,” I resumed in a far softer voice. “At the very least, we have some major power requirements. Does this dump have the wiring to support us?”
“It was completely modernized in the late eighties. 1980s.”
I nodded. “Okay. What about Net access?”
“Wired for that in 2003. Federal grant. You remember President Gore’s plan to revitalize the inner cities by putting everyone on the Internet? St. Paul put their share of the grant money into wiring Lowertown.”
I nodded again. “So we’ll basically be on an empty spur. Good. Any chance of a satdish?”
LeMat smiled. “We’d be getting a top-floor office. The landlord says we can put anything we want on the roof, including a dovecote.”
“That could come in handy.” I paused, to think through everything that LeMat had told me so far, and try to find room for that one last forkful of baklava.
“Question,” I said at last. “I thought the whole point in looking for an office down here was to find someplace cheap we could rent on short notice, with no money down and no questions asked. If this place is so nice, how come the landlord is willing to meet our terms?”
LeMat spooned more sugar into his coffee, gave it a slow stir, and then looked up at me. “Because the building is ninety-percent vacant. No one in their right mind wants to live or work in Lowertown.”
I figured as much. “Because of the senseless, random, violent street crime?”
LeMat shook his head. “Because there’s no place to park.
“After lunch we walked over to the Hill Building and met the landlord, a short, fat, and balding guy named Jerry, and he gave us a tour of our prospective office. The space he showed us was basically the entire eighth floor of the building, and it was huge, empty, and more suggestive of an old warehouse loft than an MDE corporate office—which, the more I thought about it, the more it appealed to me. We explained to Jerry that we would probably be working late often and might want to partition some space off for a bedroom or two; he explained to us that it would be a serious violation of building codes for anyone to actually live in the office, then showed us where the kilchen and bathroom facilities were and pointed out how the CPA on the fourth floor had done some really nice things in converting her space. We found a broken window on the north side of the building, which explained the feathers and pigeon shit all over the place. Jerry promised to fix that immediately, then showed us the freight elevator and took us down to the Basement Where Office Furniture Goes To Die. It seemed a number of his previous tenants had bugged out leaving their furniture as collateral for back rent, and he was willing to let us use anything we felt like lugging up to the eighth floor. By pure accident we bumped into Inge Andersson, the CPA who officed on the fourth floor and the building’s only other tenant, on the stairs: she was another one of those short, stocky, totally humorless middle-aged strawberry blondes that Minnesota seems to produce in such abundance, and she was wearing the traditional uniform of frumpy dress, hair in a bun, and white tennis shoes. Ms. Andersson, however, did achieve something remarkable in that she did not get a testosterone fluctuation out of LeMat. I’d always figured if it was bipedal, female, and not on a coroner’s slab, he’d make a play for it.
We ended up our tour back on the eighth floor, listening to the pigeons coo in the rafters. Jerry rubbed his hands together and looked at me. “So, what d’ya think?”
I shrugged and looked at LeMat.
A passing pigeon flew between us.
“Um, about these birds,” LeMat said.
“I called City Hall,” Jerry said, “and the animal control office told me they’re urban masonry doves. That makes ‘em protected by the Migratory Songbird Act.” He looked at me, then leaned in next to LeMat and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “But personally, I think they’re fucking rats with wings, and I wouldn’t cry if any of them met an untimely end.” He leaned back and smiled. “Of course, I didn’t say that.”
“Of course,” LeMat said, nodding. “Snares? Poison?”
Jerry shrugged. “You can use ‘em for fucking indoor skeet practice, for all I care.”
LeMat broke into a big smile. Oh no, I knew that smile. It meant guns, is what it meant. LeMat only smiled like that when he thought he’d get a chance to shoot one of his guns.
He turned to me, that idiotic grin all over his face. “I like it, Jack. What do you think?”
I sighed, wondering once again what I’d gotten myself into. “I guess we’ll take it,” I told Jerry.
We split up after that. LeMat had parked his urban assault vehicle in a secured ramp near the restaurant, while I’d parked my Toyota on a side street near Mears Park. Doing that always involved a certain amount of risk. Even though it was broad daylight on a weekday, and even though the park was theoretically police patrolled, there always seemed to be a few new junkies who staggered out of the bus station, got confused, and wandered down Otto Street into Mears Park, instead of going up Otto Street to Enablement Row, where they would be welcomed with open arms and immediately registered as voting Democrats.
At fir
st my car seemed to be okay. Then, as I got nearer, I saw that the passenger side door was ajar, and picked up the pace. I practically ran the last few yards as it became obvious that someone had broken into my car.
When I found a new radio sitting on the passenger seat, and the note in shaky handwriting explaining that the guy had broken into my car and then realized I needed a radio worse than he did, I just shrugged and drove home.
LeMat showed up on my Mom’s doorstep that night, not thirty seconds after the pizza delivery driver. “Okay, it’s all set,” he said, as we carried the Pepperoni Pig-Out special past Psycho Kitty’s really overripe litter box on our way down to the basement and a couple of frosty cans of root beer. “I’ve opened a DBA account at Midwest Federal, with both our names on the signature card. You’ll have to sign it later, of course.”
I bit off a slab of hot, greasy pizza and wolfed it down. “What name did you wind up using?”
LeMat looked at me as if wondering how he could get away with changing the subject. “CompuTech,” he said at last.
“I hate it,” I said.
“I know.” He separated another piece from the mass of molten mozzarella and navigated it toward his open mouth.
“It’s a nothing name,” I continued. “A company called CompuTech could be almost anything.”
He choked down a huge mouthful of pizza, and followed it with a slosh of root beer. “Exactly the point, Jack.”
“Now 2Kool Enterprises, that would have been a good name.”
“It would have been a dumb name,” LeMat snapped back. “The whole point of a DBA account is to give Don Vermicelli something to make deposits to without knowing our names. We want a bland company name that’ll just disappear into the background clutter.”
“I still hate it.”
“Well, tough.” The toppings on his slice started to slide off of their own accord. LeMat folded his pizza and took another bite. “That’s the name I put on the account, and that’s the name I gave Don Vermicelli.”
I swallowed hard. “You’ve seen him already?”
