by Kyle Harris
“Hey,” whispered a voice.
Chaz looked to her left; the henchman on the stone-potted fern was trying to signal her attention. She glared at him.
“Dyke, huh?” He rubbed his nose. “You ever try dick to be sure?”
“Have you?”
To that he just snickered.
Kennedy returned with a topped-off mug. He took a quick sip, placed it on the desk, and clapped his hands together. “Well, I hope my brief absence has given you time to think this over.”
“Yeah,” said Chaz, rising from the chair. “I’m out. Find some other lesbian to do your dirty work. I don’t like it, and I don’t like you.”
“Dirty work?” echoed Kennedy. “I fail to see how that describes the task I have outlined for you. In fact, I think it’s less dirty than what you usually do, isn’t that right? And depending on where Wallflower is, this might be the easiest job you’ve ever taken.”
“I’m not doing it.” She turned to leave, eager to put all this behind her.
“And if I offered you a hundred thousand dollars?”
The hand snapped at her from the shadows, grabbing her by the arm. She only knew it was Hoogen by the familiar reek of cat piss his clothes gave off and the sound of his breath whistling between his crooked front teeth.
The point of a knife glinted; the rest of it was eclipsed by shadow. All to see of his face was chapped lips and a scarred cheek. “How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail,” he said, “and pour the waters of the Nile on every golden…”
“Scale.”
“How cheerfully he seems to grin, how neatly spreads his claws, and welcomes little fishes in with gently smiling…”
“Jaws.”
The knife retreated into the darkness, and she heard the blade fold back with a click.
“I’ve been considerin’ something,” said Hoogen, his head now fully poking out of the shadow. The twinkle in his eye seemed too bright to be moonlight. “Early retirement. And I ought to live like a king in the noblest of castles, a princess betrothed to me and my good looks, and be the envy of all who tread these alleys.” His attention went to a congregation of beggars huddled around a drum spitting flames, hands stretched out for warmth. “One of them just cast his eye at me, you see that? Like it was nonsense I was sayin’.”
Chaz snorted. “You’re so full of shit I can smell it.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “It’s too much to dream a princess would find me good lookin’. But I’ll still have my castle.”
She pulled out a cigarette, and he offered her his lighter. “What’s with the stupid poem, anyway? Something wrong with your eyes?”
“My eyes see with only too much clarity, and sorcery is abound in this wretched world. When the machines began memorizing our faces, they stopped belonging to us. How do I know if who I see is who I see?”
“Because it’s me.” She took a long drag. “Nobody with all the correct brain cells would wear my fucking face. And don’t you think a robot would also know the words to your stupid poem?”
Hoogen sucked on his bottom lip. “Hmm.”
“Yeah.”
“How much to satisfy of mine becoming yours?”
Chaz held up two fingers, and he rummaged inside his pockets.
She buttoned up her coat. It was drafty in the alley, and she figured that was why the party of homeless was down on attendance. Besides the tight flock around the drum, she only saw one other: a guy sitting next to a dumpster, his legs kicked out like he was having a nap. There was a bottle of booze next to him—definitely a sign that Hoogen’s hangout spot had less traffic than normal. Any other day, that was barter for the taking.
“The legion of the sick continues to grow,” he said, sorting through his small baggies. He held out two of them containing lozenges of diazepam. “And when everyone is sick, who will be healthy?”
“Poignant.” Chaz counted the cash in front of him and made the swap. She stuffed the baggies into the pocket opposite her meds fund. “Stick to drug dealing. Otherwise you just sound smooth.”
“Ah, but don’t you know I’m called Hoogen the Wise?”
Chaz raised an eyebrow. “Who the fuck calls you that?”
“I do,” he said, defensively. Then he smiled a crooked-toothed grin. “Intelligence is only relative. In my immediate vicinity, who would dare lay a claim that I am not the wisest in these lands?”
She just shook her head and started to walk away.
“What does it feel like?” he asked. “The sickness of the light and dark that torments you.”
She looked ahead to the east, where the colors of dawn were creeping into the sky. The time on her tasker said it was 10:13 P.M. That was the only poke it needed.
“Like hell,” she said, shivering.
CHAPTER FOUR
Insomnia always made her think of being dead.
Up on the Nova Atlas, she had seen her fair share of beggars cold and blue, stinking like they’d shit themselves. It wasn’t rare to see one. Sometimes it’d be a couple days before anyone thought that something should be done. The morgue even had a dedicated furnace for them; no grieving family member wanted their deceased aunt or kid turned to ash in the same chamber that some homeless stinker had cooked in.
That was insomnia: those dead beggars and their thousand-meter stares, like they were waiting for someone to come close their eyes so they could sleep.
It was past eleven when she rolled out of bed. She’d left a baggie of diazepam next to her shoes, so she popped one and chased it down with water. She had taken one last night, but it hadn’t seemed to do much to the insomnia shit. Maybe Hoogen was lowballing the dosage. If so, that was a pretty smooth marketing strategy for a drug dealer, but Einsteins usually chose other career paths.
At least the heater was working again.
She grabbed the closest pair of pants off the floor, pulled them on, and checked her tasker. A notification from her bank account said that the last of Nicola’s payment had come in. She’d also attached a personal message to the money transfer, which included a thank-you for the service and the uncut video, although the contents of it were “deeply troubling.”
Yeah, thought Chaz, smiling at the screen. Have fun sorting that mess out.
While working through her second cigarette of the morning, Chaz figured she’d replace the battery in her right leg. It hadn’t gone totally kaput yet, but it was feeling sluggish, and that was always the first sign. She sat on the bed, rolled her pants leg up, and set her foot on the swivel chair. Tucked in behind the titanium kneecap was a small button that popped out the spring-loaded battery cartridge on plastic rails.
She thumbed off the little black lid, took out the dead battery, put in a new one, closed the lid, and shoved the cartridge back inside its compartment. A green light came on, and her thigh tingled a little. She tested the joints for responsiveness, found that the ankle ball still chattered some. Greasing it down—or worse, replacing it—would require taking apart the whole foot assembly, and she didn’t feel confident that she’d be able to get everything back together again. Maybe Sandiford could take a look at it.
Once that business was finished, she sat and smoked the rest of her cigarette and thought about the long day of work ahead.
After a quick bite of reheated lo mein, Chaz dropped into her chair and poised her hands above her desk, which roused the hardware out of its standby mode. Outlines of alphanumerics illuminated underneath her chipped fingernails, and she launched into her itemized list of mental to-dos.
First: compile a facial-rec profile for Lilibeth Pruitt. Unlike Patrick Letts, who had spent several years of his life in and out of employment, Chaz couldn’t just tap into a welfare database and take the biometrics. Odds were that Lilibeth’s facial-rec existed somewhere—family life insurance account, advertising algorithms, school directory—but there was an easier way. As daughter to the head honcho of Pruitt Financial, Lilibeth had loads of photos all over the net
, including candids, formal appearances, and social media galleries.
A few pics on the unfiltered results page showed her done up in pink-and-purple hair dyes and heavy goth makeup. Chaz clicked on one such photo and was taken to a tabloid website with the headline: PRUITT FAMILY SHOCKED—DAUGHTER COMES OUT AS GAY. The article featured info about underage sex parties and drug habits that Lilibeth was allegedly involved in.
Wait.
Chaz returned to the search page and compared the headshot to other images in the batch of aggregated results. The original was there too—the editors at the tabloid had doctored the photo to make her look like some clown freak, which meant the contents of the article were also probably bullshit.
“Go fucking die in a fire, you fucking pieces of shit,” muttered Chaz.
Constructing a facial-rec profile didn’t take but a minute. She plugged in twelve photos—all taken at slightly different angles with comparable lighting conditions—and fed them into a program called FACE-MAPΔ. After that, the process was entirely automated: using the different perspectives, FACE-MAPΔ could build a three-dimensional topographic output of Lilibeth’s face with a low margin of error. The higher quality the photos, the more accurate it was.
Chaz saved the result as LILIBETH1 and swiped the file toward the SAMSUNG-LINK tab, which instantly transferred it to her tasker’s internal storage. Then she opened the tether program on her tasker and accessed the network of CWS feeds in the city.
No immediate pings came through.
For now, she set her tasker aside. Whenever Lilibeth’s face appeared on camera, it would notify her. Nothing to be done about it until then.
Wallflower.
No bites from search engines. Unless Kennedy’s coveted computer program pertained to a bunch of fucking shrubs that couldn’t even grow on Trident, which didn’t seem likely. Then it was something else, maybe a reference to a person, a place, or any goddamn thing on the whole fucking planet because the fuckwad didn’t want to give her any more information. How the fuck was she supposed to do her fucking job?
Chaz breathed out slowly, closed her eyes. One hundred grand. Cigarette break.
She spent half an hour looking into Israel Kennedy, but afterward that time felt wasted. Perusing through the search results felt like skipping to different chapters in his biography. The second-in-command at Wehrlein had joined the company when he was thirty-one, worked his way up the ladder. Mastered in business administration at Crystal City University. His estimated net worth was just shy of three hundred million dollars, and he was a frequent donor to orphanages such as Shining Star. There were pictures of him with smiling kids, like he was a fucking superhero or something.
The rich guy gave away one percent of his yearly income, whoop-de-fuckin’-do.
Besides that? Nothing. Kennedy’s personal life was apparently so boring it didn’t deserve mention. There was zilch from his childhood or teenage years. Even the best scrubbers money could buy usually left a few breadcrumbs behind. The earliest history she could find talked about his arrival on Trident on the day of the Decennial—“an event of pure happenstance,” the article stated. The city’s official website had a small gallery of the arrival, titled DECENNIAL LANDING MARKS CELEBRATION. Of the mishmash of photos showing the weary travelers exiting the shuttle that had delivered them down to the mainland from orbit dock, Kennedy was in three of them. He looked like a different person without his silver hair. Same photochromic eyeglasses, though. She browsed through the list of arrivals, but he was the only Kennedy in the bunch.
The disparity in his cyberspace visibility now made sense; anything from the colony transport ship and before would be stored in the separate Earth archive. She could’ve logged in to the archive’s website hub, but she had everything she needed: he was single, he was an only child, both his parents were dead, and he didn’t seem to be hiding a secret life as a niece-fucker. So, that was cool.
And his two-man hit squad was a personal detail. An article she found cited “repeated threats against Kennedy’s life” as the reason for their hiring, but looking into it further led her nowhere. Whatever. Rich people having bodyguards wasn’t that unusual anyway.
Chaz yawned and got up to grab a soda. While she was moving around, she dumped her ashtray and filled Donny’s food bowl. Since the apartment was warmer now, she opened his cage in the hopes that he’d run around and burn off that gut.
Yeah, pipe dream. The little bastard just kept on snoozing next to his plush dinosaur.
Next, Matthew Rolf Pruitt. If you could dress up a turd and teach it to walk and speak human, it would have more esteem than this grade-A fucking shit heel.
The prevalent theme was evident from the top news results: two months ago, he’d fired a couple of temps that he’d accused of being “homosexual demons” and of “partaking in the egregious act of sodomy” on company property, despite a noted lack of evidence by the author; last year, a female accountant had filed charges alleging that Pruitt had sexually assaulted her twice after business hours—the first time in her office and the second at her home—but the case was settled for an undisclosed amount of money; three years ago, he’d lobbied for legislature to ban “all manner of gays” from the workforce, stating “their inhuman sicknesses waive their protections against all forms of discrimination” and “a holy and just governance would seek to eradicate the diseases of homosexuality and transgenderism by the broad acceptance of healing through faith”; and that same year, he’d tried to sue a sixteen-year-old girl, Aida Nelson, for tempting his daughter toward homosexuality with “infernal perversion and lesbian filth,” but the case was thrown out, the “proven acts of faithless immorality” notwithstanding.
It went on and on. His cyberspace footprint was a bottomless well of discrimination against the gay crowd. Cute.
Chaz could only stomach a few pages before her opinion of the guy crusted over. He was, without a doubt, a major fucksicle. And if she followed Kennedy’s plan to the letter—entering the Pruitt residence in search of Wallflower—there was a good fucking chance she and Pruitt would cross paths. What would happen then?
She knew what should happen: someone should take a titanium shin to his useless dick. Fun option, but no. She’d have to control herself, even if the fucker would be better off as a slobbering vegetable.
With a few choice keyword exclusions, she was able to get a clearer picture of Pruitt’s personal history. From what she gathered, he hadn’t been in the spotlight much until late in ’31, when his uncle had stepped down from the CEO position of Pruitt Financial and handed him the reins. The notables: the company’s gross profits had been on a steady annual climb, real estate loans accounted for 83 percent of all revenue, former custodians had staged a protest after their positions were replaced with civvies, and the hiring process in his company included a religious background check. Plus, the fucking nutjob believed every schoolchild should have a Bible and participate in prayer during class, Trident was the Messiah’s gift to the faithful, abstinence should be law, disease only killed people who had not taken God into their hearts—big religious douchebag this and that.
Nothing about Wallflower. Of course.
And then there was Christian Science. Holy fucking shit.
Pruitt, along with thirty-six other deranged psychos, were members of the Crystal City Church of Christ, Scientist. Kennedy had summed up most of the details: they squarely believed that prayer could heal disorders and bodily injuries, and they apparently thought the entire physical world was a hoax—because Christianity wasn’t batshit crazy enough, apparently.
There weren’t any nuggets about Pruitt’s infertility that she could find, but it was pretty fucking easy to infer that he wouldn’t see a doctor about it because it would clash with his religious convictions. And how many times was that sick fuck on his knees praying for the divine spirit to eradicate his daughter’s lesbianism?
Chaz snickered a little.
The most interesting article was from a r
eligious blog called God and the Earth, and it had been published almost half a century ago. It detailed a huge rift in the Christian Science community about Trident and whether or not the planet was included in God’s domain. There were arguments and counterarguments—“Earth is the hearth for the holy unity of God and man, and also of Adam and Eve” but also “If God is the artist of the universe, would not all worlds with life be from His divine brush?”
Near the end, the author of the blog post contended that there was still much to be learned. And, like a fucking punch line, he mentioned that, of the twenty-two initial Christian Scientists who had arrived on Trident and declined all mandatory vaccinations, all but two had died within a week.
Chaz had a good, long laugh at that. Darwinism, bitch.
Everything else on Pruitt was same old same old—more reasons why he was human scum, more examples of how fucking insane Christian Science was.
Oh, and that tabloid that had clowned up his own daughter’s photograph? Pruitt had owned it for more than seven years. He wasn’t hiding that Lilibeth was a lesbian; he was the guy at the theater handing the crowd vegetables to throw at her while she was on stage.
How did Lilibeth handle her father being King Wacko? Hard to say. If her social media profiles were anything to go by, her life at home wasn’t remarkable. She was single, she had a thing for tomboys, she was a God superfan, and she was smiling in every photo. Even those that included her family. Chaz did find one article of interest: in it, Pruitt talked about the “ever-spreading infection of same-sex relationships,” and he had gone so far as to bar his own daughter from ever moving out on her own until she could “shed her homosexual exhibitionism.”
