by Gregg Taylor
“Authorities now have reason to suspect that the two men had a business relationship of some kind, after telephone records revealed a series of calls between them over the last few days.”
The plot thickens. Felco and Monarch? Didn’t make much sense, but the Shade had called me, too.
“Dead are Thaddeus Felco, a self-described entrepreneur with several petty convictions, who was found strangled on the city’s waterfront last night, and Drake Finn, a local private investigator, who was found in an alley near his offices with a severe plasma wound to the chest.”
From the corner of my eye, I could see Claire look at me, but I couldn’t turn away from the screen. The news continued. I’m sure there was an appeal for any assistance in this matter. Then Politics, then Civic Events and so on. I saw none of it. I heard none of it.
Drake Finn... dead...? But I...
I...
And then suddenly it all made sense.
The paper money, and lots of it. No profile, no credit transfer. No credit transfer, no ExStick. It wasn’t lost or stolen, I’d never had one.
Carter’s goons had never fired a shot. Never patted me down in the restaurant. Never done much but nod a silent acknowledgment and wait for orders. When they were sure I had Claire secured at the hotel they’d taken off to fix Felco’s little red wagon. They even knew exactly what I would want for breakfast and how I liked my steak cooked. Cripes, how had I not seen this coming?
This is why we’d made it through the night... the cute little smirk from Carter at breakfast. He thought my Drake Finn routine was all an act to deliver the girl to him.
The note on the desk – Meet Mr. Monarch 3pm. Fountain. Bruce Square. A lure to get Finn out of the office so it could be searched? Maybe.
He came back. A struggle. Three plasma bolts fired and one found home. Somewhere along the way there must have been a solid blunt force trauma to the left side of my cranium. I’d stayed on my feet long enough to finish the job, but no longer.
I’d woken up behind Drake Finn’s desk, read his name on the door and made an awful big assumption. Awful big, and awful wrong. I still didn’t remember a thing, but there wasn’t any other explanation.
I must be... the Monarch.
Something in the revelation broke the spell, and I started as if I had been shocked. I looked at the empty seat across from me.
“Claire?” I asked no one in particular. “Claire?”
But she was gone.
TWENTY
There was only one place she could be going. 23910 Access Acre, Grid 4. The South Key Shipping Company. I knew it and she knew that I knew it. If she was trying to get the hell away from me, which seemed wise at first glance, she’d be trying to get there as fast as she could. Which meant that she was running, not walking, into the open arms of Cyrus the Locust.
It was raining again. Not hard, but hard enough to make it tough to find a cab that would stop, and impossible to find one that would take paper money. After my second attempt I couldn’t get one to stop at all, which meant they’d put the word out on the radio about some louse near Freeville with a pocket full of paper before I got frustrated and hopped a fare without asking first. Even that would have been no mean feat, since most Guild hacks would take your QuikSwipe before they moved a metre.
I turned and ran down the main drag into Freeville, known locally as the Corridor, looking left and right on the crowded sidewalk for what I needed. There was only one thing that was going to help Claire Marsland now, and they weren’t easy to find anymore. A hundred years ago they were everywhere. Even the piece of crap asking you for change for something to eat was sure to have two things in his pocket – cigarettes and a mobile telephone.
But times were different, I guess. My legs churned as I raced through the waterlogged streets as fast as I could. Transmission bandwidth cost plenty these days, and it was a price most people in Bountiful wouldn’t have been able to pay. Mostly because if you had a mobile phone, people had a tendency to do what I was about to do.
I spotted a man by a delivery truck with one in his hand. He was a big guy, but he wasn’t really expecting what happened next. I ran into him full force, as much as possible as if it might have been an accident. When we collided I brought my left elbow into him as hard as I could and took the wind right out of him. As he fell I pulled the phone from his grasp and ran on, almost without breaking stride.
I picked up the pace for a block, but it didn’t seem like anyone was following. I struggled to keep my balance as I ran at full throttle and dialed the number for Police Emergency.
“Your name, please,” the voice that answered ordered.
“Oh, God, please, you’ve got to get down here!” I shouted into the phone.
“Your name, please, sir.”
“I’m in the Access Acre. Near 24000. You’ve got to get down here.”
“Your name, please, sir.”
“Synths. Maybe two dozen of them. They’ve all got guns.”
“...How many Artificials, sir?” I had said the magic word.
“They’re on the rooftops. Please... they’re everywhere... Oh God!” I shouted and hung up. I threw the mobile phone over my shoulder. It would be reported stolen within minutes, which meant it would deactivate and start emitting a tracer for the cops, if they could be bothered. I suspected they were about to have bigger fish to fry.
The last time there had been anything like a Synthetic uprising, it had been run by a factory supervisor named Johnny One-One. He hadn’t been built for it, but he was a hell of a speaker. Had quite a little following of his own. The press made him out to be Satan. He was the machine that was coming to eat your children as far as the NewsNets were concerned. He and a few followers had stormed a credit transfer hub and tried to force them to power up every QuikSwipe in the place to the maximum. Could have grabbed fifty, sixty thousand and all of it untraceable. They could have been robbing from the rich to give to the poor for all I knew, but the cops operated under the assumption that they were going to buy more guns. I guess the two they had weren’t enough for a worldwide rebellion. Anyway, they’d thrown every cop in Bountiful at them, and every single one of them claimed to have been the one that brought Johnny One-One down. He’d certainly been shot enough times for that to be true.
That was about a year after Emancipation, but half of Bountiful waited with their breath held for it to happen again. If the cops thought there was a commando raid going on in the Access Acre, odds were you wouldn’t be able to move without bumping into a boy in blue armor. Suited me fine, but some corroboration was probably in order. I hoped I didn’t get the same operator.
The Asian girl I took the second phone from didn’t want to give it up, and I had to put her on her ass. I didn’t feel good about that, but what was she trying to do? What was the point in fighting a man twice your size for a piece of plastic? I turned into an alley and stopped. I whispered to try and sound as different as possible.
“Your name, please?”
“You have to help me. They’re all around me.”
“Your name, please, sir?”
“Please? There are Synths with guns all over the place. They’ve taken hostages.”
“...What is your location, sir?”
“I’m in Access Acre. Near the-,” and I hung up.
I threw the phone away and ran into the heart of Freeville as fast as my legs would carry me. It was a common enough sight, but usually people were running the other way.
Freeville was beyond a doubt the creepiest zone in Bountiful. It was an ethnic neighborhood of sorts, but these days, with only one language and a homogenized culture, ethnic neighborhoods didn’t usually mean much beyond should we get moo-shoo or burritos, and half the time they tasted the same anyway. Synthtown was as ethnic as they come, I guess, but the average Synth still just wanted you to look him in the eye and treat him like a person. It was a little sad, really. When you realize that the eight foot tall man-thing with jackhammers for hands really
just wants to be loved, it kind of just makes you want to kick him in the throat.
Freeville was different.
Sure, Section 23 seethed with hate, but that was something else. It was unfocused. The kind of hate that people who were born poor and would always be poor radiated out in every direction, including towards each other. In a way, everyone was safe because everyone was scared – it didn’t always work out that way. If you were weak, or careless, or just plain unlucky, the streets of Bountiful could eat any man alive. But there were rules, and as long as you abided by them, you had a chance.
Freeville was a whole other thing.
Who knows how these things get started. Why a neighborhood goes from being Jewish to Italian to Ethiopian to God-knows-what over a hundred years or so. It just happens. Somehow the place that is now Freeville became home to a handful of men and women that had escaped the company-owned slave pits that were the off-world colonies. And then more came. And more. No one knew how they got there. No one really cared that much at the time. They say when the Regent’s Crown Mine went bankrupt, the company just shut off the oxygen and left. Less than five hundred workers made it back to Earth out of sixty thousand. It was probably five hundred more than the company expected, but people will always find a way. That one had been too much to cover up. The assets of the corporation had been seized and the board of directors were shot in public. Everybody felt good about themselves and forgot all about it. That was fifty years ago, and only one case out of hundreds.
Most of the off-world colonies were deserted now. They say there were still transmissions from out there, but the Omniframe said it wasn’t true, that no one could have survived. Of course, the Omniframe also said that I didn’t exist, so it could go whistle.
The workers that made it back didn’t have much to celebrate. They’d screwed up their lives on Earth so badly that a stint off-world had seemed like a good idea. Then they’d been worked like dogs and treated worse and finally, somehow, hit terra firma again. But the cities weren’t exactly thrilled with the arrival of a sub-class several rungs below dirt-poor. Their DNA was mostly a mess, screwed up by faulty shielding, radiation and cosmic rays. Nobody wanted them. But in every city around the globe they found a place, usually on the edges near an industrial wasteland or, like in Bountiful, by a maze of warehouses and delivery depots with transports whirring overhead day and night. They found those unwanted places and called them home. They must have seemed like paradise. Freeville.
But now their children had children, and those children had never seen a Martian mining colony, or processed ore on the dark side of the moon, or had their skin burned black in some idiotic attempt to terraform Venus. They didn’t want to hear Grandma’s stories about how good they had it again. They were riddled with deformities to the point that there were open discussions in the Assembly about having them all sterilized. They had no future and no hope. It was not a place you went willingly or wisely. And thirty-six blocks of it remained between me and the Access Acre.
I could hear the police command Hovs race overhead. Two great dirigibles were converging over the Access Acre with spotlights blazing through the growing clouds. Everywhere there were sirens. I hoped the rain that was pelting down harder now would help to feed the confusion, help to keep Claire Marsland safe until I could reach her. I hoped the cops didn’t find any Synthetics in the Acre to beat to death on account of my lies and their own fear. And most of all I hoped that the Freetown boys that lined the streets wondering what all the excitement was about wouldn’t notice the tall outsider in the ratty coat and mangled fedora, running like his life depended on it. I hoped they would be too busy wondering why the Cops had suddenly deserted Freeville en mass to do anything about it.
Funny thing about hope. It almost always lets you down.
TWENTY-ONE
As long as I was able to run flat-out, I was in pretty good shape. The good people of Freeville watched me go by, and there were a few shouts as I did so. One or two punks tried to catch up to me, figuring anyone running that fast must have something worth taking. It wasn’t a bad gamble, I guess, but they gave up pretty easily. There were easier pickings to be had all around them.
There were normally cops everywhere you looked in Freeville. You almost didn’t notice them, until they were suddenly gone. No cop in Bountiful would want to miss the opportunity to take out a mob of armed Synths, or at least say that they did.
After a mile my hands started to shake and I knew that it was either pull it back to something like a brisk jog or risk having nothing left in the tank. The main problem with this was that people did not jog in Freeville. They did not worry about keeping in shape, because they never had enough to eat, and those that did not meet a violent end would almost certainly live to see their systems collapse from one inherited malady or another by the ripe old age of thirty-five.
If I’d stuck to the Corridor I could have tried to hijack a cab. It was a risky play in itself, but it looked real good right now. But taxis did not come into Freeville. There was no point. I did see one rickshaw about three blocks in, but it had been turned over on its side by a swarm of kids who were pulling the thing apart, and the driver with it by the look of things. No cops in Freeville. It was a pretty common piece of graffiti, and now they had a chance to show just what they would do if they got their wish.
Over the steady bossa nova of the rain beating down, I could hear the shattering of glass. The few shops there were in the district were already being pulled apart by looters, squeezing through holes in broken windows with their arms full of anything they could carry. The few business owners willing to sell there would lose everything. For a couple of days the looters would feel rich, and then they would find themselves farther from everything. More isolated. And it would fuel their hate.
I heard a woman’s voice scream from up the block and it almost stopped me in my tracks. Women scream for all kinds of reasons, I told myself, and it was true enough. If I’d sat down and thought about it, I probably could have figured the first place the cops would have to come from to deal with a Synth uprising in the Access Acre would be Freeville. Who the hell cared about Freeville anyway? Except that these weren’t Synthetics, these were humans. Deeply broken humans. And there’s nothing more dangerous than that.
Three blocks past the ironically named Kings Court a crowd of about thirty spotted me and started hurling stones. Whatever they could get their hands on. But they were deep into the square, and there was the skeletal remains of a fence they would have had to navigate, so they settled for a rain of rubble, followed closely by a second rain of abuse, and then nothing. It had to be frustrating for them, living all of their lives leashed by a heavy police presence only to realize that they had no idea what to do with an hour of freedom.
By the time I’d gone another six blocks the air was already thick with smoke. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but it didn’t matter. Not to them and certainly not to me.
Ten minutes after I’d left the last of my fan club from Kings Court behind, something in a grey sweatshirt with a hood jumped on my back. I couldn’t tell if it was a woman or just a man who’d never learned to tackle worth a damn. I also didn’t care. I flipped the grasping shape over me, grabbing hold of an arm as it sailed past. I twisted the arm behind as the shape fell forward and broke it at the elbow with a well-placed stomp of my foot. I dropped the arm and brought my foot down on the thing’s neck twice, after which it didn’t protest any more.
At that moment, an armored police assault transport rumbled past on heavy tracks, tearing up the pavement as they roared by. They weren’t stopping for anything until they reached the armed Synths that were nowhere to be found in the Access Acre. I hauled my protesting frame back into gear and began to run after them.
This worked well for a few minutes, but it was like getting behind a blocker that was moving at forty times your speed. They cleared a path, but it didn’t stay open long enough.
If I’d had the time to
move carefully, stick to the shadows, I might have been able to get through without incident. But time was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Somewhere on the other side of this chaos was a woman who was walking straight into a fire. Sure, she’d lied to me, and circumstances dictated that I hadn’t exactly been straight with her either. But she was my client, and that was supposed to mean something.
I stopped in my tracks. I had maybe nine blocks to go before I hit the edge of the Acre. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but every step I got closer to the wail of sirens made the odds of being swept away by the rioters and looters narrower. I was close, but I couldn’t keep going.
I needed to get my wind back, it was true. My heart was pounding in a way that said however I normally conducted my business, it didn’t involve quite this much running. As I leaned over and set my hands against my knees I could see the vapor start to rise off my exposed flesh. I took my hat off and let the rain soak my hair. I was steaming like a horse now. But none of that was what had really stopped me dead in my tracks. It was a realization. A simple fact.
Claire Marsland was not my client.
I didn’t have clients. I was not a detective. I was not Drake Finn. I didn’t know who Drake Finn had been, but the little I’d learned about him told me I didn’t like him very much. The rain was falling harder now, washing the stinging salt of my sweat into my eyes.
I was still operating under the assumption that some of the handful of things that I knew about myself were true. But they weren’t – I was no one. And if I owed loyalty to anyone or anything, it seemed likely that it was Cyrus Carter. Was that why I hadn’t been able to pump a charge into his chest at the restaurant? From somewhere deep inside, was the Monarch reasserting himself? The lieutenant, the killer, the un-person. That was who I was. Wasn’t I?
I heard a cry from the road ahead of me and moved up a set of concrete steps and pulled into a doorway. There wasn’t time for this, I tried to tell myself. But the truth of the matter was that there was all the time in the world. That the woman who was out there all alone had given me the highlight of the eighteen or nineteen hour span that I called my life was indisputable. But that moment wasn’t up against a lot of competition. The steak... some of the banter with Sixteen... there wasn’t much in the plus column.
