From behind his shell of acrylic panels, the desk clerk perked up like he'd just taken a slug of espresso. He even smiled. This seemed like very odd behavior for a guy who worked in a place like this.
"Good evening, Sir!" the guy said, speaking in a semi-amplified, tinny voice through a little speaker gadget. "What can I do for you?"
Oscar looked the guy over. Kind of scrawny. Toothpicks for arms, but a bit of a paunch that wasn't helped at all by his horrible sitting posture. He was probably forty years old, balding on top. About as pale and sickly looking as a subterranean creature that had never seen the light of day. Not impressive to behold in any way.
Oscar leaned in, speaking quietly into the speaker. "I'm here to meet someone. For business. But not the kind you think."
The guy nodded. Taking the hint, he lowered his voice as well. "Then you're here for me. Oscar Graves, is it? You know, I looked at a few other private eyes too. You're the only one whose name has never been in the news. Not even in a single throwaway article. I like that. It shows that you're careful. You've got discretion."
"It's no secret I'm good at my job," Oscar said. Then he added, with a wry smile, "Or maybe it is."
The clerk chuckled. He got up, and announced loudly to the whole room, "Right this way sir, your accommodations have been made ready for you."
Oscar didn't dare look back, but he caught a reflection on a polished bit of steel that ran along the bottom edge of the acrylic panels. Not a single one of the lobby's other occupants so much as glanced in his direction. They didn't care. Or they were too blitzed on drugs or alcohol to even hear.
Mirroring the clerk's movements behind the safety barrier, Oscar found himself in a narrow, dark hall that smelled of piss. Human or rat, he couldn't tell. Probably both.
A blank door opened by an inch, and the clerk ushered him inside. Oscar went, sidling sideways through the narrow opening. The door shut behind him with a heavy sound and a series of clicks as different locks slammed into place.
The clerk led the way down a short hall and into a little private office. More of an apartment, really. There was a crappy old TV and a cot that faced it, with a single lumpy pillow at one end and a blanket that looked almost as rough as sandpaper. There was a fridge and a coffee pot and a five-gallon jug of water. Nothing else.
The place was clean, at least. The guy must live here full-time. Oscar wouldn't be surprised if he was the only permanent employee left in the hotel. The parent company had probably gone out of business years ago, and he was just here running the place independently and alone, taking money and hand-delivering wads of cash to various utility companies to keep his shitty little enterprise running as long as possible.
"Whatever happens, Mr. Graves," the guy said, "the evidence I am about to show you cannot leave this room. It's too sensitive. If it fell into the wrong hands, I could be in big trouble. And maybe you would be, as well..."
Oscar took a step closer, looking into every corner of the room for hidden microphones or cameras. He did this unconsciously, feeling thrilled. He could almost smell the blood in the air. He could almost see the circling sharks. Any second now, they might start nibbling at his heels. If he wasn't careful, they'd follow these nibbles up by biting a chunk out of his leg. Or maybe by taking his whole head. Good thing, then, that he was always careful.
Finally, a real case.
"What is it?" he asked. "Was someone killed in the hotel? A working girl? You want to figure out who did it, but you don't want to get the cops involved..."
"Not a murder," the clerk said. "A step below that."
"Kidnapping?"
The clerk nodded solemnly. For the first time, Oscar noticed the lopsided and faded nametag that was pinned to his shirt; JAMES, it said.
James walked to the TV, a journey of two short steps, and turned it on. There was already footage up, ready to be watched, and all he had to do was hit play.
It was a sharp view of the cracked and overgrown sidewalk just outside the front of the hotel. The view was almost straight down, from some camera anchored in place a good fifteen feet above the ground. Oscar made a note to look for it on his way out. But he didn't think he would be leaving all that soon. He moved close to the TV screen, leaning in, trying to see every detail possible.
On the bottom left the date and time were displayed. The recorded events had happened just yesterday evening, not long after sunset. The street was still lit in a red glow, deepening quickly toward dusk. Every ten or fifteen seconds, a car would pass by and briefly wash its headlights over the sidewalk.
There was something moving, pacing a bit along the sidewalk as though hunting for a comfortable place to lie. It took Oscar a moment to recognize it as a cat.
"That's Moxie," James said. "She showed up here a couple years ago as a kitten. Half-starved and with a broken tail. I nursed her back to health and she's just kind of stuck around since then. She'll disappear sometimes for a day or two, but she always comes back. Everyone loves her. Even the pimps. She was sort of the mascot for the whole hotel. Wait, here it comes, look! Watch this! The audacity..."
A new pair of headlights came washing over the sidewalk, but the car drew to a stop instead of drifting on by. A door opened, swinging into view, and a character dressed in billowy black clothes took one step out, grabbed poor old Moxie, then jumped back into the car and sped off.
Oscar watched this, waited for something else to happen, then noticed that James was wringing his hands in nervous expectation.
"This is what you called me for?" Oscar finally said, feeling disappointment plummeting through him like an anchor falling toward the bottom of the sea. "A cat?"
"Moxie is very important to us here," James explained. "She's family, Mr. Graves. Please don't laugh. We just want her back. Please, won't you help?"
Oscar considered flipping the bird to James and walking out. But then he thought of all the other gigs he had been doing. Skulking around with a camera, trying to catch some dumb married bastard getting his willy wet. Or some dumb married lady getting her guts scrambled by one of the studly male synths who made the organic models and movie stars of yesteryear look like pitiful boys. He'd had just about enough of that work for ten lifetimes.
Yes, this was just a cat. Yet technically, still a kidnapping. The theft of a living entity away from its rightful home. In a way, Oscar felt that it was probably more noble to save a cat than an organic human. A cat couldn't be evil. A cat deserved a better chance.
So, feeling like an idiot, Oscar sighed and leaned toward the TV to cycle back through the footage. First, he had to see if he could glean any more clues from what the camera had picked up.
What a wonder his life had become… but at least he still had Catalea.
CHAPTER 3
◆◆◆
In the end, the cat was never found. There was still a chance, maybe, but neither Oscar nor James held out much hope these days.
A week passed. Then days. James stopped calling, and the leads stopped rolling in. Not that there had been many to begin with. A homeless man remembered hearing a cat meowing "like a bastard" from the open window of a passing car. He couldn't be sure, but he thought he remembered the car as being black. That matched, but when you considered the number of black cars in the city, as well as the number of people who took their despairing pets to and from the vet each day, it wasn't much of a clue.
Catalea withstood his rants about his working life, including the return to the humdrum following the disappointing and open-ended conclusion of the Moxie saga. She listened to his woes then made them better using some warm, wet part of her body. Then she shared her own woes.
Oscar saw her every day. Sometimes twice or three times. So it was hard for him to notice any small changes. Still, he began to sense some slow transformation in her. Something that he didn't think had anything to do with him. She seemed... happier. She didn't complain as much about her other clients. She seemed to be holding her tongue about something, always on the e
dge of saying it but never quite getting there. When he tried to leave her extra money, she made a small and customary effort to refuse it. But it became much easier to convince her otherwise.
Sometimes, when they were making love or just lying together, she would get a bit antsy. Especially when they were loud. She would glance toward the door or the wall, always the same wall, the one that separated her unit from the next one over. He didn't know why. As far as he knew, that unit was unoccupied. The last girl who used it had been bought out a few weeks ago. Some rich guy had decided to move her into his own home, turn her into his personal toy so no one else could have her. The pleasure houses let this happen on occasion, but not without rubbing their fingers together and mentioning some outrageous fee. Somewhere in six figures.
Oscar wished he could do that for Catalea. Not to make her some personal plaything, but more so to simply free her from that place. However, it now seemed like she didn't want to leave. She even turned down their usual walks, making excuses that she was tired or that the weather was too cold. The excuses rang hollow, but Oscar didn't pry. He waited. If she cared about him half as much as he cared about her, he had to believe she would eventually tell him what was going on.
◆◆◆
One night, Oscar opened his eyes from a ten-minute doze and found Catalea lying stiff and still as the dead beside him, staring up at the ceiling. Lying on her back, which she rarely did. Usually, she would be wrapped up in him like a synthetic pretzel, getting as close to his warmth and the sound of his heart as possible. She seemed to be thinking very hard about something. He imagined what the inside of her cyber brain must look like. Data banks switching on and off a million times a second, quantum calculations flowing faster than the speed of his own thought.
It was cruel, he thought, that the synths had been given the capacity to be smarter and better and stronger than humans yet had been tethered to the same flesh, the same prison of brain and skull and emotion-fueled body. It was even crueler because humankind naturally hated any being that was better. It also hated anything that was inferior. Come to think of it, humankind even hated its equals. It hated itself and its own creations. In the end, Oscar realized his kind would probably end up destroying everything. Unless they were somehow stopped.
Maybe Catalea was thinking the same thing. She might be a sex worker, but Oscar knew she was smarter than him. A hell of a lot smarter. Who knew the deep thoughts that pulsed between her ears?
Or maybe she was thinking of her next appointment. She had guys who were a bit rougher and colder than others. The demanding types. Rude bastards who wouldn’t think twice about roughing a dame up if they didn’t get their way. More than once, Oscar had grilled her for names and information. He wanted to pay some of these creeps a visit, treat them to a knuckle sandwich or two, but she would always refuse to involve him; in part because of the pleasure house’s privacy policy, but mostly because she didn’t want to see Oscar spiral out of control. She knew about his past, about the work that he used to do. The life that he had vowed to leave behind after it drove a wedge between him and the organic woman who used to be the love of his life.
"What's the matter?" he asked now, turning onto his side and nestling in closer.
Again, she glanced at the wall. The one to the empty next-door unit. It was too quick to mean much of anything, not from an organic girl at least. But synthetic humans lived on a peculiar time scale. They experienced time itself differently, like an insect dodging through raindrops. In the space of such a brief and seemingly meaningless glance, she was capable of an entire minute's worth of quiet pondering.
"Everything's fine," Catalea said as she met Oscar’s eyes, offering a seemingly genuine smile to back up her claim. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Anything," he told her, bowing his head to kiss her throat. Then he settled in, using the soft upper swell of her breast as a pillow. She began to run her fingers through his hair, scratching her nails lightly across his scalp. The sensation made him shiver.
"Do you enjoy your life?" she asked. "Are you happy with it?"
"That was two questions," he replied with a chuckle.
"I know, but..."
He grabbed her free hand, pulling it to his lips so he could kiss the soft, pink pad of each perfect finger.
"They're both million-dollar questions, though. I’ll give you that," he said. "The short answer is; yes, I'm happy. Now, do I enjoy my life? Not always. The world has been swallowed up by banality, babe. We all fell into a groove on a record, the same record that's been spinning around and around for two hundred years. We just lie there and let ourselves get ground down into homogenous dust. It’s all just so stagnant and meaningless. There's no color left in anything. No life. The goddamn cat was the most exciting thing to happen in months."
"Poor kitty," Catalea said quietly. She hated when he talked like this. It made her sad.
"Yeah, well, it was supposedly a nice cat," said Oscar, trying to bring her mood back up. "Maybe it’s still out there somewhere. Eating cheese and getting fat.”
“You’re thinking about mice, dear,” Catalea replied with a soft chuckle.
“What?” Oscar asked.
“Mice eat cheese. Cats eat mice. I’m sure you’ve watched enough cartoons to know that, Mr. Graves,” she jokingly explained.
“Mr. Graves… I like how that sounds,” Oscar beamed as he pulled Catalea in for yet another kiss.
“You say that about practically every word that comes out of my mouth, Mr. Graves,” Catalea remarked, purposely leaning into the sultriness of her inhumanly sexy voice.
“Can you blame me?” Oscar replied with a sheepish grin as he planted one last kiss on his companion’s forehead.
“I suppose not,” Catalea answered as she curled up into Oscar’s arms.
“You've got to answer the million-dollar questions now. Fair is fair,” Oscar said, while Catalea pulled one of his arms over her and instinctively began to massage his hand.
She didn't say anything for a long time, just kept rubbing his fingers and gently squeezing the tips once she reached the ends of them. He was content to let this silent and peaceful moment continue indefinitely. Maybe he didn't even want to know the answers.
“I suppose the opposite is so for me," she finally said. "I enjoy my life, but I'm not really happy. I feel powerful in a way, much more so than an organic, but there’s just something about the way our minds work that discourage us from using that power. I guess I just want to fit in. To be perceived as humanly as possible.”
“You know you don’t have to pretend with me, right?” Oscar asked.
“I know. That’s why I enjoy our time together. But overall I still have to maintain this facade of weakness. It's what management wants."
"But it's not what you want," Oscar pointed out.
"Of course not. But the trouble is, I don't know what I want."
A life outside of this place, a life with me, Oscar wanted to say, but he didn’t want to make the moment about him. It couldn't happen anyway; the buyout price was too high. If he tried to steal her away, he knew he'd have the most skilled bounty hunters on Earth on his tail. Synths were cheap to maintain; and so, to the pleasure house, Catalea was almost one hundred percent profit. They wouldn't part with her for anything less than three quarters of a million.
So he didn't say it. Instead, he kept his reply simple.
"I’m sure you’ll figure it out someday, doll," Oscar remarked, trying his damnedest to hide the pitiful note of hope in his voice.
"I hope so. In the meantime, I suppose it’s not so bad here. At least I have you," she said, to Oscar’s delight.
“What’s so exciting about an old fart like me?” Oscar asked, obviously fishing for further compliments, a gesture that Catalea didn’t mind in the slightest.
"You're the one man who treats me like a woman and not like some household appliance. We all know how organic men love their gadgets; their cars and toys and such. They love them as things
and nothing more. Sure, they treat them with a certain amount of care, and maintain them, but they don’t treat these things like human beings. To most of my clients, I’m no different than a beloved vehicle to be driven whenever they take a fancy.”
She was right and Oscar nodded to confirm his agreeance.
"I need to show you something, Oscar. But first you have to promise not to tell anyone about it."
He picked his head up, smiling at her. "The last time someone said something like that to me, they proceeded to tell me about a stolen cat named Moxie."
"Don't worry. This is a little more exciting than that."
She got out of bed and put a robe on. Then she pulled Oscar up too.
"Get dressed," she instructed him. "In case you want to leave, after. I'll understand."
"I can't think of anything that would make me want to leave you," Oscar told her, but he did what she asked.
She led him into the hall, shut her door behind her, then pulled a keycard out of the pocket of her robe. It was stenciled with a number designating the room it was assigned to. The number was not for Catalea's own room, but the one next door. The very same one whose wall she kept looking at in recent days.
"I need you to promise me something," she said, slipping the card through the groove on the neighboring door and grasping the handle, turning it just enough to keep it unlocked without fully unlatching it.
“Sure, anything,” Oscar said, without a second of hesitation.
“Whatever you do, just don’t act surprised. I just… I don’t want to draw any attention, if that’s okay,” Catalea explained, although Oscar was still obviously confused.
"I think I can manage," he said with a smile. "Are you sure you don't have Moxie in there? That would be quite a twist, you know."
"Twists only happen in movies, Mr. Graves," Catalea told him, smirking nervously as she pushed through the door.
Despite her warnings about sound, there was really no reason to worry. These rooms were built to block out as much sound as possible, and also to block it in. When you were paying for the attentions of a veritable synthetic goddess, the last thing you wanted to hear was the guy in the next room grunting and groaning away.
Darkside Dreams - The Complete First Series Page 23
