Company Town

by Madeline Ashby

  “I’m down here,” a gravelly voice said, a few balloons away.

  Hwa walked. She kept her hands out, her wrists loose. She tried to avoid looking at any one particular tent or balloon.

  “Warmer,” the voice said.

  Hwa paused in front of one balloon that was actually two of them stitched together. Someone had painted an evil eye sigil across it. Outside stood a huge mask of bone and antler, so large it needed stilts to stand on. It loomed over Hwa. The wind rose up and she heard something inside it rattle.

  “Hot,” said the voice inside.

  Hwa went inside. The woman waiting for her sat in a wheelchair. She was Inuit. Her hair hung lank and gleaming with grease. The balloon smelled of her unwashed scalp. She was blind. Or rather, her eyes no longer saw. Hwa didn’t know if they were out of warranty, or what. But the machines where the old woman’s eyes were had gone pearly. Nonetheless, she motioned for Hwa to sit down on an old can of cooking oil. The whole place was cans. Corn. Peas. Tomatoes. Hwa only knew them from the pictures on the labels. The languages, she couldn’t read.

  “I’m sorry,” Hwa said.

  “For what?”

  “Not bringing anything. I didn’t know I’d be coming here. I was looking for my friend—”

  “Your friend isn’t here. She’s dead.”

  Hwa nodded. “I know. What I don’t know is what happened.”

  “She died.”

  Again, Hwa nodded. She listened to the ocean below. “I want to know how she died.”

  “She was murdered.”

  Hwa sat forward. “Did you see it?”

  A huge, rotten laugh exploded wetly from the old woman’s throat. Hwa wiped her face with the back of her hand. Now the tent smelled of tobacco and teeth and sickness, all at once.

  “Blood, first,” the woman said. “Yours is clean.”

  Hwa swallowed. “Organic.” She wasn’t sure if she should mention the anticonvulsants. Knowing whether to mention it would mean having some inkling of what the woman wanted with her blood, and she very much didn’t want to have that. “No machines,” she added, just in case. How had this woman known?

  “I see things,” the old woman said, as though she’d heard Hwa’s thoughts. “Through other eyes.”

  Outside, Hwa heard the synchronized clicking of tongues.

  “You control them?” Hwa licked her lips. “You hacked them? Through the skullcap?”

  “Did you know that the root of the word cybernetics comes from the ancient Greek for pilot? Of course they can be piloted. Give me your hand.” The woman reached into the folds of her flesh and tugged. An oyster knife appeared, the shiniest thing in the place, bright and hard as the edge of a fresh moon. She reached for Hwa’s hand.

  “No, my arm,” Hwa said. “I’m already wounded, there. Take that.”

  The woman shrugged elaborately. Smell rolled off her as her shoulders shifted. Hwa peeled up her sleeve and exposed the pink flesh of her bullet wound. The woman leaned forward and Hwa’s eyes burned and the knife rode up, up, up, gently, until it hit scar tissue.

  The old woman inhaled deeply. “That’s the stuff.”

  “What will you work with it?”

  Again, the woman laughed. It was a thick, awful sound. “Work? Nothing. People here need transfusions. They got bad implants. Hep C.”

  The knife slid in under the scar. Hwa expected it to hurt more than it did. But the knife was extremely sharp, and barely tugged the skin.

  “He’ll cut you places you don’t know about, yet.” Phlegm gurgled in the old woman’s throat. “He’s been coming for you for a while. Him and all his brothers. He has a lot of souls. You just have the one. Be careful you don’t lose it.”

  Hwa thought about asking where her other souls had run off to, but she wasn’t sure she’d like the answer. “Did he dump her from here? My friend? She was in pieces.”

  The old woman nodded. “He was here. But he’s everywhere. Behind you. In front of you. Almost touching but not quite.”

  Hwa frowned. “A shadowboxer?”

  “Aye.”

  “How do you know?”

  The woman tapped the ruined lenses of her machine eyes with one brown, mouldy fingernail. Then she pointed out of the hut. Again the mouths outside clicked. “My eyes see things most can’t.”

  “Ghosts?”

  The woman’s hand left her face and stroked Hwa’s. She pushed the hair back from Hwa’s face. The skin of her hand was surprisingly soft and warm. It occurred to her that Sunny had never touched her this way. This gently. This carefully.

  “Oh, my little one,” the witch murmured. “Wish t’were that simple.”

  * * *

  “This had better be good,” Kripke said, when she found him. “I was just about to lock up.”

  Hwa rolled her eyes. She nodded at the people still in the gym. They looked tired, and most of them clustered around two women leaning into each other and learning the finer points of a kidney punch, but they were still around. “Aye. I can see that, b’y.”

  He sighed. “Fine. What is it?”

  “Can we have your office?”

  His eyebrows lifted. Then he shrugged and led her back into the office. From behind a glass door, he could watch all the fights as they proceeded. It was still just as much of a disaster as she remembered: posters peeling off the walls, empty canisters of protein, dead aloe plants, greasy boxes of takeout.

  “So.” He dropped into a chair held together almost entirely with duct tape. It screeched terribly and he had to adjust himself in it in order to sit normally. It continued squeaking as he leaned back and crossed one ankle over his knee. “What is this about?”

  “Say I needed my blood looked at,” Hwa said.

  “Then I’d say this fine country of ours has universal healthcare, and you can visit any doctor you want and ask for a test.”

  Hwa rocked on her heels. She jammed her hands in her pockets. “Say I wanted something a bit more specialized.”

  He crossed his thick, hairy arms over his belly. He was still getting bigger. Hwa blamed the takeout. And the shitty printed protein. The man needed a produce subscription. Come to think of it, so did she. She could afford it, now. It was weird, being able to spend money. She’d spent hours deciding which new pair of shoes to get, before deciding on the ones she always wore. It just seemed safer. Like getting anything better would just be asking for trouble.

  “Are you pregnant?” he asked.

  “What?” Hwa backed away. “No! That’s insane! Like, completely, certifiably insane. I’m not pregnant, and I’m not going to get pregnant. And even if I were, that wouldn’t be any of your business.”

  “Sturge-Weber isn’t hereditary, you know. You could have a perfectly healthy baby, if that’s what you wanted to do.”

  “Good Christ, please stop talking.” Hwa found a poster to look at. It was a detailed explanation of the major muscle groups. Latissimus. Pectoralis. Soleus. She found the Latin names for things very calming. “I can’t even look at you, right now. That’s how fucking awkward this conversation is.”

  He heaved a deep sigh and leaned forward in his chair. “Okay. Fine. None of my business. I’m sorry.”

  Hwa met his gaze. “I’m fine. I just want to know where I can go to get a blood sample looked at.”

  “To look for what?”

  “Anything. Everything.” She stepped a little closer to him. “Quietly.”

  Kripke sucked his teeth. He set his jaw. Then he snapped his fingers at his desk, and the display lit up. It was old and flickery and uneven, but it still worked. He cleared a bunch of things away from it, before lighting on a single list.

  “This is a list of people I banned from the gym,” he said. “Most of them were trying to sell my customers on freelance regimens. If you buy into the open-source ones, that’s your choice. But these guys had no approval and they refused to give up the code, or show any testimonials. But their prices were great, and boxing makes you stupid.”

/>   He pointed at one name on the list. “This guy was selling blood-dopers. I kicked him out when he gave one of my guys the bends. I went to his place personally.”

  Hwa whistled low. “Damn.”

  “Yeah. That’s what he said, after his new jaw went in.” Kripke leaned back in his chair. “Anyway. He had a lot of equipment. And I think he still lives in the same place. In fact, I’m pretty sure he does.”

  “Oh aye?” Hwa smiled.

  Kripke smiled back. “Aye. You pays him a visit; you tells him I say hello.”

  * * *

  His name was Dixon Sandro, and his address was 4-31-24. Tower Four featured two concentric rings of units—the outer, even-numbered ring had windows out to sea, and the inner, odd-numbered units had extra space to compensate for the lack. You could choose storage, or aesthetics. Every day, the inner and outer rings rotated around each other like at a country dance, so that you had a different set of neighbours every day. Each wall in the residential units was modular. You could turn the walls on to get some privacy. Or you could leave all the walls off, and share a bunch of space with friends for a few hours, or all day, or all night.

  Hwa used to do a lot of work in Tower Four. It was a party tower.

  Dixon Sandro was entertaining. Both his door and his neighbours’ were wide open and completely transparent. Before she entered, Hwa changed the defaults on her halo. Now no one who peeped her would know she worked for Lynch.

  Smoke hazed over both units. The people inside were mostly cuddled around pillows that cuddled them back. Their faces were blank. Occasionally they would all giggle at the same moment. They each had the same “huh-huh-huh” stoner laugh. Hwa stepped in and around them, but they didn’t notice. Their cushions inched out of her way as she walked, parting like some soft velour sea.

  “Dixon?” Hwa looked around. Nobody perked up. “Dixon here?”

  Above her, an arrow in the ceiling came to light. It was a soft, minty green, and it pointed back and to the right, around a corner wall that Hwa guessed was the washroom. The washrooms were generally all in the same spot, in these places. Otherwise the pipes wouldn’t line up. It was the same with the central air ducts. It was part of what made Tower Four so easy to build—you just printed the same unit, over and over, without any need for customization. Hwa followed the green arrow past the people on cushions. To the right was a nook with a window. A man sat watching the feeds in his eyes. He’d cracked the window, a little.

  “You nervous about that shit getting in your lungs?” Hwa asked.

  He jolted. His legs and arms flailed for a moment and he struggled to stand. Dixon Sandro was a tiny man, bald, with a head too big for his body, with Liefeld muscle definition on a frame two sizes too small. That was the actual brand name for the regimen: Liefeld. Hwa knew other guys who had taken it. Like Dixon, all of them had the worst acne imaginable. You had to, if you were fucking around with your testosterone like that. Dixon’s acne was everywhere: his face, his shoulders, in the creases of his neck, in the cuts across his muscles. Awful, cystic, painful pustules. For a moment, Hwa almost felt sorry for him.

  “What the fuck happened to your face?”

  The moment passed.

  “Kripke sent me,” Hwa lied.

  Under his acne, Dixon went pale. It made the red spots seem redder, like little eyes embedded in his skin slowly going bloodshot. “What does he want?”

  “He wants you to do something for me.” Hwa slung her pack down from her shoulder and opened it. Out came her old shoes, in a vacuum-sealed bag. “He wants you to take a sample from the blood on these shoes, and tell me about it. Now.”

  “Now? Like right now?”

  “Yes, like now. Like right fucking now.”

  Now he got petulant. “Why should I? What’s in it for me?”

  “What’s in it for you is you don’t need your jaw reprinted. Again.” Hwa looked at the shoes, and then at him. He really did have a lot of equipment. And he was surprisingly neat about it. The scanners weren’t at all dusty, and the big live-cell imager was still gleaming, no dents. He was probably the real deal, once. Maybe even had some education, and a real degree, until he did his version of the thing everyone did that brought them to New Arcadia. “You do this, we leave you alone. You can’t come back to the gym, but we don’t come around anymore.”

  “For real? You swear?”

  Hwa made a show of examining the room and its inhabitants. “I think there’s enough business for you in this tower, don’t you? Don’t think you need to go looking for work.”

  “Yeah.” He licked his lips. They were peeling. Blood seeped out from the cracks. “Okay. Got it. Just … run the sample?”

  “Aye.”

  “Am I checking for anything specific?”

  “Whatever you can find.” Hwa waved her hand over a cushion and plucked the air with her fingers. The cushion inched over to her. “I have time.”

  Dixon got right to work. He took a scraping from the soles of her shoes, activated it in vital serum, and ran it through the imager.

  “Been dead a while,” he said, looking at the screen.

  “Aye.” Hwa stood up. “She has.”

  “You know the sample?”

  “I’m the one asking the questions,” Hwa said.

  “How long was she sick for?”

  “Sick?”

  “Yeah. Her white count was through the roof.”

  Hwa thought of the last time she’d seen Calliope’s face. If she was seriously ill, that might explain a suicide attempt. But the witch under the bridge had said it was murder. And the bloodstains in the stairwell didn’t look like a gunshot wound. They looked like an explosion. Someone had popped Calliope’s body like an over-full balloon.

  “She wasn’t sick.”

  “Fine. Just making conversation. Not like I’m an expert, or anything. Come look.” He gestured for Hwa to lean down and look at the image. On the display were a series of schooling machines. As she watched, the machines trembled for a moment and then divided. Each looked just like the other. They swam off in different directions. After a moment, they divided again.

  “That’s…”

  “Illegal.” Dixon leaned back in his seat. He picked his jawline, squeezing a cyst that seemed unready to burst. He continued anyway, digging at it with his fingernails. “Really, really illegal. And I know from illegal. This is it. Bio-nano is strictly subscription-only in Canada. No replication. No copying.”

  “Um…” Hwa scratched the back of her neck. “I don’t have any … You know, implants, or augments, edits, or whatever. So, I’m kinda in the dark, here.”

  He groaned, like he was explaining something to his dotty old grandmother. “The copyright,” he said. “You want the augment, the subscription, you gotta pay the licensing fee. Or your provider does, if you’re covered.”

  “So? You can’t bootleg a copy?”

  “Sure. But your devices will report you. The toilets. The specs. Everything. There’s random scans everywhere. And then, boom, a C-and-D and a big fine.” He leaned back in his chair. “Besides, it’s bad for you. Serial replication error. A copy of a copy of a copy. You want a shitty knockoff unclogging your arteries from the inside? I don’t think so.”

  Hwa chose not to comment on the irony of Dixon Sandro making this particular argument. “Well, do you recognize them?”

  “The machines? No. I can try running a match, though. It would take a while.” Sandro kept squeezing. Blood bubbled up between his fingers. He didn’t notice. “Could I try building with them? I’d know more if I got my hands dirty.”

  “Aye.” Hwa frowned. It had not occurred to her until now to ask this question, but it made sense to, here. “Do you know where I could find some good camouflage? Like real poltergeist shit. Army grade.”

  “Lázló,” Sandro said, without hesitation. “He lives in this tower. Moves around, though, unit to unit. Paranoid.” Sandro spun a finger beside is temple.

  “You know for sure he has
a suit? Or a line on one?”

  Sandro nodded. “I’ve bumped into him, wearing it.”

  “Bumped into? Like you walked into him?”

  Again, Sandro nodded. “He wears it all the time, see? Says he feels better with it on.”

  “So how do you know he’s there?”

  “You don’t.”

  The hairs on Hwa’s arms rose. “What if I wanted to talk to him?”

  “Then you go to the elevator in the nine o’clock position, with a bunch of fresh chips and vinegar,” Sandro said. “And you wait.”

  * * *

  In the elevator court, she ran into Eileen. She was with Sabrina and two other women whose names Hwa couldn’t remember. By the looks of things they were just getting started: the four men they were with were laughing and wrestling each other and making bets about who could flip who fastest.

  They had no bodyguard.

  Hwa missed her elevator and jogged over to the party. The men ignored her—filters, probably, or maybe they were just high—and Hwa sidled up to Eileen as casually as she could. “Everything okay here?”

  Eileen startled. She started to smile, and then it fell from her face. She put it away like a summer dress after the first fall rain. “What do you care?”

  Hwa frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t you have another job to get back to? One that pays better?”

  Hwa’s mouth worked. “What?”

  “You said you were quitting,” Eileen hissed. “You told me, at Calliope’s funeral, that you were quitting.”

  “Well, yeah, but…” Hwa didn’t know how to explain. She watched the elevator’s display. It would be there soon, to take Eileen and her party away. “It’s complicated.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s not complicated at all. You’ve always wanted to leave this town, and now you’re going to. Congratulations.”

  “It’s not like that,” Hwa said. “Really. It’s not. I’m doing something important.”

  “Oh, yeah, going to homeroom with Richie Rich. That’s real important.”

  Hwa looked down at the floor. The carpet had an odd pattern that ripped in her vision the longer she stared at it. Orange and pink and brown. It was astoundingly ugly, now that she really looked at it. “I’m sorry.”