“Cleo, I don’t know what’s going on in that twisted little mind of yours but so help me, when I find you…”
What was he going to do? As angry as he tried to be, most things he fantasized about doing to her were quite beyond his nature. He bore many similarities to his father, though he tried to cover it up and blend into the underbelly of society. Much to his good fortune, he did not have enough contact with the locals here for them to sense his inner nature, which was good.
“It’s such a shame your mother couldn’t make time for the trip down here, she misses you.”
That time, Joey could tell the sound originated from his deck. More proof, he thought, that Cleo did it. He lurched across the room and killed the power as he fell on top of it. With a sigh, he slid off the table into the rickety chair. For a while, he mocked himself for entertaining the thought that his father’s ghost had been visiting him. He ran his fingers through his hair as he waited for his breathing to calm.
That sounded just like him. How on Mars did she do that?
Joey tried to imagine how he would do a similar thing. Voice splicing would be the easiest way; a hundred different softs out there could reassemble sound bites and make it seem like a person said whatever you wanted them to. The only hole in that logic being that his father never published any videos to sample. He remembered seeing something similar in the news a few months ago. Not trusting the deck at that moment, he used his NetMini to find the NewsNet story he thought of. A netizen named Kyle Blank had offed himself by plugging his M3 jack into a high voltage power coupling; a few hundred amps right to the brain stem. Something like that would not often make the news at all, but he had been rambling about his dead wife talking to him for several weeks. Joey swiped through the various old stories, as Donna George rambled on about how Kyle hacked into the NewsNet as well as several healthcare systems to try to get someone to believe that his wife’s ghost spoke to him.
The news had seized on it at first to try to show ghosts to the world, but at some point they began to doubt. As soon as he died, the conspiracy wonks screamed that some corporation assassinated him and faked the suicide because he had seen something they wanted to keep quiet. It fell out of the limelight fast. People lost interest in some nut job that brain-lined main power and caught fire. In fact, the flaming body with the wire coming out of its neck became a GlobeNet meme for months.
The fine details of the story had Joey starting to wonder. Blank said that he heard his dead wife talking to him from his deck, placing vid calls to him and showing up in broadcasts. Paranormal investigators had been all over the story, but left after only a few days, citing a suspected hoax. The final nail in the coffin came in the form of a psionic publicly saying they could find nothing paranormal. The suicide note claimed he did it because he could not handle living without her. Of course, the NewsNet published the meandering diatribe about how she told him all about the other side―how he could be with her again, and how desperate she was waiting. Joey smirked as he read.
Someone played this guy for a fool just to see if they could drive him over the edge.
What are the odds of two deck jockeys hearing a dead relative within three months of each other? With no trace of any lingering doubt about ghosts in his mind, he fired up his Teradyne Silver to go digging around in search of information on Kyle Blank. He gave up after about an hour of nothing. In his opinion, someone tried to get their jollies by playing with people. He smashed his fist into the table at the realization that was what Cleo had been doing to him for the past few weeks, perhaps she was the cause of Blank’s ignition. Playful could turn murderous in an instant with a psychotic.
Joey contemplated going after her right there and then, but as it was quarter after nine, he did not have the time. Once he finished in Sector 12, however, he would not sleep again until he had his hands around her throat.
A knock drew his attention to thin fingers curling through the gap. The grunting of a female voice accompanied a futile attempt to shove the twisted slab of steel. She gave up and banged a few times.
“Joey, you still breathing?” The voice belonged to Katya.
“Yeah… Gimme a sec, be right out.”
Joey hit the bathroom, managing to give himself a quick sink bath of the critical points in about ten minutes before getting dressed and sprinting to the door. With both hands on the metal and his foot propped up against the wall, he still could not budge it. Now he remembered why he never tried to close it.
“Katya? Damn thing is stuck, can you hit it from the outside?”
“What do you think I am, a fool? You’re going to yank it open the minute I try.”
Joey sighed. “As utterly hilarious as that would be, I’m serious, it’s stuck.”
Between the two of them, they shoved. It moved in quarter-inch screeches over the series of several minutes, until Joey could squeeze through. Katya leaned on the wall, catching her breath. Joey grinned at her combat boots and loose black fatigue pants accompanied by a camouflage jacket. She had done everything she could do to hide her contours, including a thick wool collar that she could pull up to cover her face.
“Guess Masaru told you where we’re headed. You got a chastity belt on too?” He feigned reaching as if to check.
She caught his arm by the wrist and twisted just enough to control him with pain. He spun out of it, distancing himself by a few paces. She fixed him with a cold stare, but he just laughed.
“Ahh, I love it when ninety pound chicks try to act tough.” He smiled despite her continuing with a stare that could freeze water in a glass.
“I am not a helpless little doe.” She scowled.
He put on a bad Russian accent. “Relax. Here in the UCF we have things called jokes.”
The trading of barbs followed them all the way up out of the sunken area by Joey’s door and into Masaru’s car. Katya half expected the overgrown boy to yell “shotgun” as he raced for the passenger seat. Joey paused by the sleek ebon hovercar, glancing down the street at the progressing rot. His apartment was a little over four blocks deep in the grey zone around Sector 12, and about five away from the official start of the black. He hopped in and chuckled at the sight of Masaru’s armored helmet. It looked like an ancient samurai re-imagined in modern composites.
“Now, now, kids. Play nice.” Masaru offered a pleasant smile.
“I am no child.” Katya’s scowl shifted from Joey to Masaru.
“She doesn’t get this whole figure of speech thing.” Joey tapped a button, and his door closed with a pneumatic whisper.
“What museum did you steal that thing from?”
“This is Dragon Chitin. Made in the style of ancestral―”
“You look ridiculous.”
“…samurai armor.” Masaru gave up with a growl.
“Expecting it to get rough? Perhaps I should use the seat belt.”
“Expectation and hope are often disparate things.” Masaru pushed forward on the stick and the car began to roll.
Exasperated, Katya folded her arms and ignored them both for the remainder of the ride. Masaru decided to drive on the ground, knowing the reputation of the locals for making a game of firing missiles at things that flew.
Joey stared at the NavMap console, forcing salvia through gaps in his teeth as the yellow triangle glided towards the giant pin a mere six blocks from where he lived. The muscles in the back of his neck tightened as he thought about what went on there. The entire southern third of the West City gossiped about whatever now lurked in Sector 12, and whatever it was had been chasing the gangers out. In kind of a paradoxical way, the black zone might be safer than civilization now, unless they ran into the thing.
Progress slowed to a crawl; Masaru struggled to navigate around the decaying skeletons of the derelict cars that littered the street here. Most of these rusting hulks had been motionless for the better part of thirty years. Violence had orphaned this part of the city from civilization.
“We should get Kenny to
come down here. He might find something he can sell.” Joey laughed.
Even Katya cracked a smile. These areas had a lot in common with the Badlands. Law held little sway over the people, deadly things lived there, and both had been untouched by the hand of civilization for generations. At least these places had no bio-engineered mutants. Most of the gangers that congregated were not so far removed from humanity that they fell into that category, though a few came close.
The illegal augs were what worried Joey the most. Some of the cyber-junkies went way beyond parts considered legal, and lived like gods out here, free from the police. Underground cyber-docs, medical professionals removed from public practice for questionable moral character, often set up shop out here. According to rumor, some would kill for cyberware and then implant the same parts in others before the blood cooled. The less-disreputable ones only harvested parts from the already dead.
Katya draped herself over the gap between the front seats, looking up through the rolling grey fog at the ruins of buildings sliding past. The mist reduced them to indistinct skeletal forms, warped streaks of black against the blue-grey glow of the sky.
The car slowed to a stop by a barricade of old cars and fallen high-rise. The visor in Masaru’s helmet closed with a faint whirr; the dour-faced ebon samurai turned to face Joey.
“This is as far as I go with the car.”
Joey faced him, pressing right fist into left palm in front of his chest. He nodded in a sharp bow, dropping his voice two octaves. “Hai!”
A low growl simmered in the air.
he blockade proved an arduous climb; the layering of cars seemed like a deliberate attempt to wall off the road, a theory that gained traction at the sight of crumpled handprints in some of them. Katya coughed at the breath-stealing acridness in the air; she lacked Masaru’s sealed helmet or Joey’s tolerance for such aromas. Neither warm nor cool, it brought tears to her eyes.
A cloud of plasfilm scraps rolled across the street, swirling along in a tiny cyclone. Hundreds fluttered in the wind; affixed to utility poles, traffic boxes, even the hulks of cars. They floated everywhere, as if a truck carrying them had exploded. The thin white sheets effused a pale blue glow in the dim moonlight.
Katya pulled her sweater up over her face and squatted by one of the old cars. On the door, a plasfilm sheet displayed the image of a bright-eyed blonde girl of around sixteen. The image smiled and then turned ninety degrees to the right before it came back to face her. Words in plain black typeface scrolled along below the picture.
‘Missing Daughter: Amber Wortham, 17. Last seen leaving for school, April 2411. Reward if found alive: Ͼ500,000.’
Katya sighed as the lure of the reward fell aside. She fixated on the girl’s innocent and happy face. Finding the posters here carried two implications, neither of which painted a good picture.
Joey made a face at a cloud of smiling blonde faces dancing down an alley. “Probably kidnapped, doesn’t look like the kind of kid that would run away to join one of these gangs.”
Katya wondered if this girl had more choice in what had happened to her than she had in her own fate. The desolation here brought her back to Vidnoye, just south of Moscow, when she was a little girl crawling through the night in search of food. Images of soldiers, searching beams of light leaking through holes in the wall. She remembered running. Tiny legs pumping away until too-large boots skidded to a halt in the shadow of an armored man. A hand covering her mouth and her feet leaving the ground.
Katya shivered into a squat. Being homeless was better than what they did to her. Sadness became jealousy. She flung the poster into the wind with its brethren and ignored Joey’s teasing about littering fines. Rubbing the cold out of her arms, she stood and followed them, wary glances moving from the broken buildings to the street and back again. A smear of red-orange in a wrecked car up ahead stood out in the blue; her cybereye found heat.
“Thermal signature in that car up ahead, one man in the driver’s seat.” She pointed.
Masaru moved his coat to expose the handle of his Katana as Joey eyed the car. The last time that vehicle moved was many times his life ago. Little remained of it aside from rusting metal and carbon fiber body panels. Even the insulation on the wiring had rotted off. A layer of muck cemented the windows in opaque grey. Katya took cover behind another nearby husk as Joey approached and kicked it twice in the trunk as if to knock.
Rust flakes covered his boot.
A pale man in a long sand-brown coat rose through the gap in the door like a charmed snake. At least fifty, he was quite thin, and glanced around with a wariness that seemed just shy of losing control. Joey wondered if the man was C-Branch or Division 9; he radiated government spook.
“Joseph Dillon?” His voice, throaty and cracked, made him sound in desperate need of something to drink.
“Yeah. Let me guess. You’re going to say that who you are is not important as long as you tell me something.” Joey walked up with his hand out.
The man ignored his offer of a handshake. “Something like that.” Once more, he glanced about.
His paranoia rubbed off on Katya who all but crawled beneath one of the cars, but kept watch. Masaru stood in quiet calm a step behind Joey, close enough to interdict if hostilities erupted. The stranger’s hand slipped into the light. The glint of a holodisk reflected across Joey’s face.
“We know you have some of the data, but we’re not sure who you’re working for. One of our P-SEC nodes was infiltrated, and they think you did it.” The man fidgeted again, leaning to the side to stare down an ally.
“I’m not even sure what a P-SEC is.” Joey grasped the holo disk, but the man did not let go of it. “Someone sent me a file.”
“How much do you know about the Mayberry inci―”
His head detonated in a shower of hot gore.
The derelict car buckled inward at the midpoint and slid up onto the sidewalk six feet back, bending in half as the front and rear bumpers pointed in the same direction. Burning streaked the side of Joey’s face, causing him to howl. The headless man twitched on his feet as his heart beat twice more, throwing blood into the air from the exploded orifice of his neck. His fingers slipped away, leaving the holodisk in Joey’s hand.
The left side of Joey’s face was on proverbial fire. Masaru grabbed him by the shoulder, kicked on his neural amplifier, and flew a Joey kite down the street for a block and a half. Another two projectiles came out of the fog. Blurry spectral lines lingered for in an instant in their wake, connecting a distant rooftop to where the street cratered inches shy of them. Masaru roared, incensed at the dishonorable attack. An adversary owed you the decency of showing himself.
Ducking into the first passable alley, Masaru slowed his run back to human speed and Joey scrambled to get his feet under him. He did not draw the katana, as there was no point. Even if Masaru had been a grand master, which he was not, one did not cut railgun slugs out of midair. Even if he could hit something moving that fast, which he could not, the projectile had too much energy and would shatter the Nano katana.
He pushed Joey into the hollow of a boarded up window. “Stay put, he’s on the roof. He has no angle on you here.”
“That goddamn thing will go right through the building.” Joey laughed from fear.
“No. He is too high up. Too many layers, even if it got to you, it would not be lethal. Besides, he has to see you to shoot you and even if he has a ghosteye scope, it can only see through about thirty meters.”
Masaru turned to jog back to the street.
“Where the fuck are you going?” Joey glared. “What the fuck is a ghosteye?”
“It is a targeting system that can see through walls. Call it a hunch, but I think you are the target. I’m going after him before he gets a clean shot.” Masaru ran to the street, as close as possible to the wall.
Joey leaned against the alcove and noticed it gave a little. He sighed and tried to relax. This was a little too much, even for him. He liked da
nger and risk, but a railgun was beyond the pale. Risk implied chance, but if that thing hit him, there would not be much probability of living through it. Ergo, the situation had transcended risk and moved firmly into foolishness, and he did not like it.
A cracking sound made Joey’s eyes pop open, but he was too slow to react. The wood gave out under his weight, dumping him into the building. He rolled backwards over a heavyset man in a blue windbreaker, and stopped a few feet away on all fours in a sea of choking dust.
“Sorry about that man.” Joey looked up at a corpse.
Bloat had set in, and Joey’s impact loosed a black geyser of mung from the mouth and nose. Bald save for a stripe of hair around the back of his head, he had been a little portly and looked like he was over forty. His skin had turned greenish purple and his right arm was missing from the elbow down. The jagged nature of the wound made it seem as though it had been ripped out. His jacket had a NewsNet logo on the breast, and he looked as though he had been dead for a week or two.
The smell that hung in this room did not reach Joey’s conscious perception until after he had finished vomiting. It was so bad it could forever taint clothing and linger for years in the back of one’s mind.
He crawled around searching for a door with his arm folded over his face. He did not care if it felt like his jacket sleeve sandpapered the burn on his cheek; it made him think the stench less intense. When he found a door, he shoved and wound up riding it down a metal staircase before landing on his chest at the bottom. The clatter of his fall and the cloud of dust from his impact drew the attention of about fifteen men sitting around what looked like a mechanic’s shop. Joey knew the pattern of blue and black clothing was indicative of a gang. A thing on their shirt, as if a four year old tried to draw a vampire bat, cemented his opinion. Joey tried not to laugh at it.
Virtual Immortality Page 19
