by K. W. Jeter
'Spare me. Self-pity doesn't suit you.' She stood up from the couch and walked into the center of the apartment's front room, the phone trotting beside her so she could keep the tethered headpiece to her ear. 'Giving me this job was your idea, remember.' Standing beside the barred window, she looked out at the first of the day's rains soaking the crowded traffic in the streets below. 'How soon can you have the gear ready for me to pick up?'
'You think I'm handing this kind of stuff over to you in broad daylight? Get real,' said Meyer. 'Tonight — and it won't happen at the station. I'll ring you with a stash-point location. I'll be there when you swing by for it.'
'I'm not expecting anything from you, Meyer. Not anymore.' She killed the connection and the excrypt protocols, and tossed the headpiece to the phone waiting beside her. It climbed onto the side table, settling down and switching itself off
'Play? Quality time?' The chat trotted beside Iris as she headed for the apartment's minuscule bedroom. 'Cuddle?'
'Not now,' said Iris. She had given the window blinds their programmed handsignal, shutting down the whole apartment into darkness. Dark enough by which to get some real sleep. 'Later. I've got to get some rest.' Inaction and fretting had tired her out more than a dead-run chase could have. 'Big job to do tonight.'
She was asleep and dreamless, as soon as her head hit the pillow. Outside, the hard LA sunlight, grayed by its passage through the monsoon clouds, turned the rain to steam against the window glass, but couldn't find her.
Intercut
'This should be good,' said the remote camera operator. 'She's got all the right toys now.'
The blue-tinged glow of the wall of video monitors turned the operations bunker into a subset of the neon-lit LA streets. Outside, night had consumed the rain-sodden scraps of day, pushing the city once more into its true and most authentic mode of being.
'Could be.' The director roused himself from his deep, meditative silence. 'She always had the right attitude. Smart enough to be scared, but too pissy to let it stop her.'
For the past quarter-hour, the camera operator and the director had been watching an interesting transaction take place, recorded and brought to one of the central monitor screens by a unit hidden in the exposed and cobwebby ceiling rafters of one of the abandoned Traction Avenue warehouses, down by the concrete ditch of the Los Angeles River. The monitor had shown the female blade runner they had been following, her black leatherite jacket glistening from the rain, accepting what looked to be two metal-cornered briefcases from her boss.
Watch out, the man named Meyer had told her, with a trace of sarcasm. They're heavy.
Even on the monitor screen, with the remote camera set to an elevated long angle, the slit-eyed look of disdain she'd given him had been apparent. They're supposed to be, she'd replied coldly.
It was as well for the director's purposes that the woman didn't pop open the lids on the fiat cases and check out the lethal gear inside; the camera operator figured that the sequence they'd been able to catch at the police station, where Meyer had surreptitiously extracted the items from the armory lockers, established sufficiently just what weaponry was involved. Anything that the audience wasn't clear on would be made plain when the hard action started.
The camera operator pushed himself away from the angled control panel, reverse-arching his spine with his hands shoved against the small of his back. A similar crick had lodged itself in the hinges of his neck vertebrae. That was the problem with these marathon gigs: too long sitting, too long watching, all to catch the quick little moments II at added up to the real story.
'At least she's not going to waste any time,' the camera operator said aloud. Up on the wall of monitors, one screen over from the one inside the abandoned warehouse, a wasplike motorcycle with bubble fairing and retrofit exhaust-waveform obliterators was picking up speed, silent and swift, heading back into the densely packed heart of the city. Cold blue streetlamps glistened from the metal corners of the cases, strapped behind the rider leaning over the insignia-less tank. The woman rode without lights or markings, the better to arrive at her destination before anyone else knew she was even on her way. The camera operator nodded in appreciation, for both the black wrapped-in-darkness visuals that the monitor held, and the inadvertent convenience the female blade runner's haste provided. 'Maybe we'll have this part wrapped up in the next couple of hours. With any luck.'
'Luck doesn't enter into it.' Still watching the monitor screens, the director slowly shook his head. 'Only fate.' He turned his unsmiling gaze toward the camera operator. 'And once we've got that under control . . .' The director shrugged. 'Then our job's done.'
The camera operator didn't like the sound of that last bit. This job, he thought, is getting way too creepy. He looked back up at the monitor screens. And to the one screen in particular, that showed the place where the woman would soon arrive.
7
'Ever use anything like this?'
Iris watched as the figure in front of her lifted the automatic rifle in both hands, as though he were trying to judge its weight. 'Once or twice,' said Vogel. With a couple of quick manipulations, he snapped the folding barrel into place, pushed home the ammo clip and thumbed off the safety. He raised the gunsight to his eye, aiming down the empty alley in which he and Iris stood. 'This thing calibrated?'
She knew he was showing off, displaying his familiarity with the hardware she had taken out of the metal-cornered cases at their feet. 'You don't need it to be,' she told him. 'Not at the ranges we're going to be working at. This isn't exactly a sniper operation we're talking about. All indoors, up close and personal.'
Vogel gave her a wink. 'That's how I like it.'
Her own gaze rolled upward. What the hell am I doing? As far as Iris was concerned, the job was already out of control. Here she was, not only relying on possibly flaky information, but on the flake who'd provided it as well. A good way, she told herself, to get killed. For all she knew, this Vogel character had no more heavy armaments experience than what he'd picked up from male adolescent target-audience video feeds and game immersions. Soon as he pulled the trigger on what she'd equipped him with, he could be walking backward from the weapon's streaming recoil, lethally spraying everything in an expanding cone of fire, including herself. She'd be lucky to survive this operation, let alone retrieve an unshredded owl.
As if her premonitions had somehow leaked out into the real world, an amplified burst of gunfire sounded from the other side of the alley wall. The ground floor of the building was an original Golden-Era movie palace with dust-shrouded, burnt-out chandeliers hanging in the lobby behind the shell-scrolled ticket booth, once-red carpets worn through in widening patches to the concrete beneath, and stylized Art Deco murals under layers of grime and spray-can placa, depicting Los Angeles as a paradise studded with oil wells and golden citrus fruit. Now the buzzing neon marquee advertised a twenty-four hour rota of cheap, multi-patois Indonesian eye-gougers; half the audience, Iris knew, would be asleep, using the broken-hinged seats as flop-house bedding.
'Give me the layout again,' said Iris. 'Slowly.' Vogel had sketched a rough map in the alley's wet dirt, but she had already dismissed it from her mind. She preferred pure verbal input. 'How do we get upstairs?'
'Easy.' From above Vogel's brow, the drizzling rain darkened his close-cropped hair and trickled to the corner of his jaw. 'Service entrance behind the projection booth; there's a stairway that goes up to the next floor, which is all vacated insurance and old theatrical agency offices. Next floor up from that is where our friends are keeping watch on the owl. The elevator shaft will bring us up right in the middle of the layout.'
'What kind of alarms have they got rigged up?'
'All thermal detection, keyed to normal human body temperature.' Vogel nodded in admiration. 'Latest tech from Iblis Sicherheit Gesellschaft in Geneva, with full inductor-driven subsurface probe capability. Nice stuff.'
'Yeah, it's "nice", nice and impossible to get past,' said Iri
s. 'What were you planning on doing? Blowing out the electrical service to the building?'
Vogel shook his head. 'That wouldn't accomplish anything. They're running their gear on shielded isotope-decay power generators. Military equipment — these guys have some real heavy-duty stuff, besides the guns they're toting. Even if we pumped a disruptor wave through the building, we couldn't shut 'em down. So all that cutting the power feed to the building would do is let them know we're on our way in.'
'Then the job's over. Right now, before we start.' Iris looked at him in amazement. 'If we could sneak in there, we'd have little enough chance of pulling this off. Tripping the alarm circuits, we'd have zero chance.'
'So we don't trip them. Leave them running, and slide right past them.'
'And how do you propose doing that?'
'Simple.' Letting the automatic rifle dangle at one side, Vogel reached with his other hand inside his coveralls. His fist came back out, extended toward Iris, then unfolded to the flat of his palm turned upward. 'We use these.'
Iris looked at the two plain, unmarked gelatin capsules on his palm; inside them she could see a granular white powder, not much different from the other white-powder drugs she had seen before. She wasn't thrilled. 'What is it?'
'Slow death.'
They all are, she thought, then caught herself; she realized he meant something specific. 'Wait a minute,' said Iris. 'You're talking about . . .'
'Thermatos.' Vogel smiled, one corner of his mouth lifting. 'A bastard coinage, from therm and thanatos, meaning heat and death. A bastard word for an orphan compound, otherwise nameless. Since the pharmaceutical lab that first invented it didn't want to even talk about it.'
There was a reason for that, Iris knew. Of all the cumulatively lethal, supposedly pleasurable chemicals ever on the street, this was the worst. Pleasure being a subjective concept: she had never seen the attraction of anything that lowered one's biological functions by stunning and cutting the brain's paleocortex, the mammalian buffer layer between the evolved, higher-level neocortex and the primitive reptilian brain core, out of the central nervous system's gestalt. When Iris had been fresh out of LAPD basic training, and before she had managed to engineer her promotion to the blade runner division, she had gone along on a raid to clean out a nest of thermatos addicts, down in the warrenlike cribs of Old Chinatown. They had been using the stuff for so long that the drug's short-cut integration between their reptile cerebral sections, just above the brain stems that regulated the body's unconscious autonomic respiration and pulsatile actions, and the fully human parts just under the curved lids of their skulls, was no longer temporary but fused solid, synapse to synapse, neuron to neuron. Iris had had the sensation, upon looking into their cold, unblinking eyes, that the spaces behind the dark pinpoint pupils were no longer inhabited by anything human, but only by the usurping reptilian brain core itself. It had been like staring into a nest of vipers — real ones, not artfully crafted fakes — but with human faces and skin.
It was no wonder, then, that the thermatos compound had been made illegal, both in its manufacture and possession, and ruthlessly suppressed, at the same time that every other narcotic and stimulant was de facto available and even encouraged in LA. The authorities had enough trouble sorting out real human beings from fake ones — replicants that had been faux human from their inception date — without having to cope with people who had made themselves non-human. And worse, the inversion of the old Tyrell Corporation motto, More Human than Human; in the case of the thermatos addicts, less human than even the replicants were. So that the human condition, the definition of being human, was no longer a binary matter, yes or no, but something on a sliding scale, from way not-human to very human at the other end. Which meant that the blade runners, the enforcer's of that definition, were playing the averages when they did so; when they put a gun to somebody's head, they were grading on a bell curve. Passing the test meant you got to live for another term. Flunking was death, the collapse of the scale into a simple, terminal on-off state.
Iris had wondered before, when remembering, what the response would have been if anybody on the raid had slapped a Voigt-Kampff machine on one of the thermatos users. Whether the gauges would have lit up at all, or the needles have moved from zero. And as the machine's little bellows pump had moved back and forth like a concertina playing a sad, silent waltz, sucking in and analyzing the test subject's exhalations and sweat molecules, the cold-eyed creature on the other side of the table would have done the same, flicking out a thin, black forked ribbon of a tongue, sniffing the air for traces of its prey, like even a phony snake did . . .
'Where the hell did you get this?' Iris regarded with repugnance the two colorless capsules in Vogel's palm. 'Nobody makes thermatos anymore; it's a capital offense.'
'Old stock,' said Vogel. 'From when they did.'
'Great.' Iris's voice soured with disgust. 'On top of everything else, it's stale.'
'Fresh enough. Carefully preserved, in a vacuum-extraction deepcryo chamber. Like the corpses of dead rich people dipped in liquid nitrogen, awaiting the call, as in Bach's cantata 140, Wachet auf, raft uns die Stimme.'
'“Sleepers, awake.” But nobody wakes up from being dead,' said Iris. 'Which is what that stuff will do for you, if you're caught with it.'
'Worth the risk.' Vogel held the two pale capsules up between his thumb and forefinger. 'Since these are what will make it possible for us to go cruising past the alarm systems up there.' He nodded toward the building that formed one side of the alley. 'Among the other, less desirable effects, thermatos also has the useful physiological effect of slamming the normal human body temperature by about twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Those alarm systems our friends are using won't trigger on anything below eighty degrees. Which means that we'll be I effectively invisible to their security perimeter.'
'Yeah, and we'd also be screwed up out of our minds, and moving at about the speed of an iguana on an iceberg. I've seen what that stuff does to people and their reaction times. It's a perceptual dilation effect: kiss your clocks, internal and external, goodbye. We get past the alarm systems fine, and then we'll be standing there like window-display dummies, not even blinking while these people walk up and dismantle us at their leisure.'
'I share your concern,' said Vogel with elaborate mock-patience. 'Which is why this stuff isn't straight thermatos. It's cut with a micro-encapsulated dosage of a high-powered niacinamide analogue; once the stuff is in your gut, and the thermatos has kicked in, the niacinamide's thin-film barrier is timed to evaporate exactly five minutes later. You'll feel the heat rush all over, because the molecular load will already have dispersed throughout your body. That'll purge the thermatos effects, like flipping a switch, and you'll be ready to rock-'n'-roll. We both will, 'cause I'll be standing right next to you.'
'Nice plan,' Iris grudgingly admitted. 'Except for one thing.'
'What's that?'
'Down the line, after this job's over — if we survive it — what happens to me if I like the effects of this thermatos junk? And I decide I want more of it?'
'Then you're screwed,' Vogel told her. 'That's a one-way avenue, sweetheart. Either you don't find a source for more of it, and you suffer, or you do find a source and you suffer more.' He turned his head slightly, regarding her from the corner of one eye. 'You really concerned that you might enjoy being less than human?'
'It's a concern. Some people dig it.'
'Tell you what, then. I'll make you a promise.' He lifted the automatic rifle at his side. 'If it turns out later that you're screwed up from the stuff, I'll come around and put a bullet through your head, and put you out of your misery. Deal?'
'You're all heart,' said Iris.
'I told you you'd be glad you ran into me.'
Iris looked at the capsules in the center of Vogel's extended palm. 'You know ... I'm getting tired of people talking me into doing stuff. Especially when I wind up doing it.' She reached out and took one of the capsules. 'What the h
ell?' She popped it into her mouth and ground the soft gelatin shell between her molars. Something gritty and stinging, like wind-sharpened ice crystals, spilled across her tongue. 'Let's go.'
'No time like the present,' said Vogel. He swallowed the remaining capsule, then knelt to fold up the automatic rifle and pack it into the open metal-cornered case sitting on the pavement. Smiling, he stood up. 'Or no time at all.'
The thermatos kicked in as they were crossing the theater lobby. Iris felt the deep cellular impact that the long-term users called the 'glacier' hit her in a cascading surge up her spinal column. Her free hand, that wasn't toting the other weapons case, spasmed open; the torn red ticket stub fluttered and sped from her fingers toward the darkly stained carpeting, as though pulled by some new, urgent gravity. Everything in the lobby, human or not, instantly assumed a jittering, vaguely menace-filled animation, as the optic processors behind her eyes shifted down to the red end of the available light spectrum. A small tribe of cinephile squatters, indoor-pallid beneath their habitual dirt, their own eyes like lemurs', peered out at her and Vogel from the makeshift tents they had erected between the broken door of the men's room and the constantly trickling water fountain. Even their slow movements seemed frenetic and sharp to Iris, as her own kinetic functioning fell closer to absolute stasis.
Only Vogel's motions, as, he strode alongside her steps, seemed normal; the thermatos had hit him as well, putting him on the same long-wave temporal plane. With eyes half-lidded, as though an inner herpetoid nature were manifesting itself on the angles of his face, he smiled and held up one hand, fingers spread apart to indicate the number of minutes he and Iris had to reach and break into the fortified area upstairs.
Iris nodded. Something in her mouth, seeping from beneath her tongue, seemed to taste of both blood and metal, as the reptilian core at the center of her brain locked itself in a neural embrace with the higher thinking functions. I can see — the thought crystalized itself, in a dark room inside her skull — why people get into this stuff. The blood in her veins seemed to transform into a crawling, numbing substance, closer and closer to freezing, and eradicating all human pain. Better than any synthetic opiate, legal or illegal, that she had ever tried; Iris realized now that those had only obliviated the conscious and unconscious misery of the human and awaked condition, by flooding those sharp rocks with an oceanic endorphin tide. Whereas the thermatos had dissolved the rocks at the bottom of the sea, deepened the lightless trench in which she sank, to the extinguished core of her own being. That's how you get hooked, all right . . . not by pleasure. The words moved slower in the icy corridors inside her skull. But by the true absence of pain . . .
