Paul gets up, slowly, and wipes his hands off on his jacket. He waits for his Monocle to visualize the path to the coordinates specified on Oni’s wristband. It privately fires an arrow through the viscous black and hooks up a scuffled pillar a couple minutes down the line. With a flick of the wrist, Oni’s holographic map is fizzing in front of him in glorious orange. The PIT’s scaled-down re-presentation is reflected like a monadic vision in the muck sucking on his boots.
SCRAWNY HUMANOIDS sway along the canal’s shores. Paul can’t decide whether they live off of refuse and drippings from the ceiling, or if they’ve been sent down here to die. He notes how the mopey, swaying luddites intentionally avoid one another. Maybe they’re sick. What’s that say about the slime spreading down my pant leg?
One of them looks up to the sound of Paul, trudging through the grime. Its eyes flare-up red on Paul’s Monocle. Though partial to pre-emptive attacks, Paul knows not to start firing slugs, else all of Babylon should descend on him. The red eyes flash down, back to the miserable waste coursing by. Good thinking.
EVERYONE’S COUNTING on him, Paul reminds himself as he reaches the base of a corroded ladder off to the side of the canal. Even if they don’t know it yet. Rung by rung, he contemplates what needs doing and who’s got to do it. Katajima’s deck seems all the more important, now that it’s down to the wire.
To Paul, climbing into the hornets’ nest after two dead girls, a fragmentor, and a deck makes perfect sense, especially if the alternative is letting his girls die or letting someone stick a piece of hardware in his soul’s eye, pimping it out to everyone else, including his enemy-at-large. Paul knows what it’s like to have his psyche tested, tried, mutilated, and stretched threadbare…
He hadn’t shied from the CLOUD’s predecessors in immersive tech, and, as a result, found out firsthand just how impactful they were. He’d experienced ego-death on more than one occasion just running SIMHAP while surfing the deep Net. It’s the same with people, he reminds himself. Only, there’s so many layers of skin and convention between persons that you can actively sieve what influence you are willing to accept. To let that influence run free in your head turns every interpersonal connection and data exchange into a gamble, and every time it’s individuality being raised.
About one-hundred rungs up, he’s made it to a catwalk that feeds into a cement stairway carved into the load-bearing pillar. He feels like he’s walking through a dim dream with only the rudiments for mobility present.
The entrance to the stairwell is unlit and camouflaged by graffiti and posters. “‘QUINCY MARKS IS A DEAD MAN’…‘#79041 HAS THE BEST CANISTERS ON THE EASTSIDE’…‘FUCK THE REPUBLICAN GUARD’.”
It certainly isn’t kids who’re coming down here to decal walls unseen by virgin eyes. Paul can’t figure out who’d author the subversive writ, nor does he want to.
Upstairs, there’s a heavy black oak door, chipped around the edges. Paul pushes it slightly, and leers out at what of the world beyond the sliver has disclosed: a dark room, full of dusty iron-work, gears, and blanketed boxes. Leading with the barrel of his revolver, he leans into the door, and then into the room. Empty. The silhouettes of pipes and metal mesh show through the tarps nailed over the windows. Faint and subdued colours filter through in bursts. Must be sub-street level.
The enclosure is more or less hollow. Brick walls girded with heavplast and steel. Hooks and chains dangle from the ceiling, catching the muted oranges and pinks from the street. There’s more graffiti, this time almost all cryptoglyphs.
Paul searches for a subtle way out. Here, any attention is unwanted attention. He finds a double-door. One side has been boarded shut. The other is latched-closed, but the lock on the latch isn’t. Paul wipes his feet against the concrete and pops his collar, and then throws away the lock. He opens the door. The stale air behind him rushes out like an eager ghost to a haunting.
The street is abuzz with old, bio-fuel-fed cars and bicycles. Bulging eyes everywhere. Hemigraphic and neon signs authored in every imaginable language and dialect purr, alluding to businesses and consumption penned up within the brick and adobe frontages. He walks to a sidewalk, pretty much indistinguishable from the street—designated more or less with a coat of grey paint—and attempts to orient himself.
He can’t make out any identifying features above, owing to the sea of umbrellas employed by the freaks and geeks sauntering up and down the way. Before he can fully articulate the question, “Why umbrellas?” the answer hits him in the head, wet and stinky, explaining away the fetid stench. How medieval.
Paul’d imagined that when he’d got to the PIT, he’d find a stagnate pool rippled by the occasional massacre. This first-look dispels his assumption.
The PIT is booming with activity. Somehow electricity makes its way along the chaotic weave of wires threading together the buildings, the pulsating Chinese characters, and the old neon brand names. Somehow there’s water routed to the dives, SIMHAP dens, and whorehouses lining the streets. Somehow there’s garbage pick-up. Whether it’s a warlord who benefits from this modicum of civility, or some fat-walleted and big-brained NGO, the traffic keeps moving, and bodies aren’t left out too long to rot. As for Becket’s goggled specters, there’re plenty.
Paul waits for a gap in the line of cars, mopeds, and bikes, and hurries across the road. He’s almost decapitated by a hover-scooter making a b-line for the off-ramp leading to the second tier.
“Watch it!” Paul yells. His bark can’t compete with the volume of the traffic.
Heeding the arrow provided by his Monocle, Paul deviates from the street, and turns up an alley. It’s more of a tunnel, really; the buildings on either side converge about ten stories up.
“Ten blocks over, three blocks north,” Paul reminds himself. He breaks into a light jog, but is accosted by a rotund man in a wrinkled suit, standing over a food printer wired to an old car battery.
“Hey, you t’ere!” he blathers, spraying Paul with cholesterol.
“Let go of my arm,” growls Paul, in no mood for a lecture.
“You ain’t allowed t’rough here.”
Paul pulls his arm free of the fat man’s grasp. “Yeah, okay. I was just leaving.”
“No. Not okay.” The fat man directs Paul’s gaze with a finger point to a flayed body strapped to the fire escape overhead.
Jeeze. As Paul realizes his mistake, the fat man turns to the door ajar behind him, and screams something in Russian.
The free fly doesn’t stick around to debate the spider.
Paul throws all of his weight into a punch. His knuckles slide across the Russian’s temple and catch his brow, sending him wind-milling into the door. Paul instantly realizes why anything works in the PIT: fear and movement.
He runs out of the alley, and barrels through the next street on the other side. The mirror on a three-wheeled cab catches his shoulder, knocking him to his knees. A van smashes into the back of the cab, and another car side-swipes the van. The drivers disembark, rolling-up their sleeves and screaming vulgarities. Paul staggers to his feet, engorged in a concern of cusses and horns. He glimpses the Russian and two other men emerge from the alley. Damn. He back peddles from the mob of angry commuters, and resumes his course.
The alley, continued on this side of the road, looks as miserable and as dangerous as the last one. With the Russians in tow, however, Paul has to carry on. He decides to improvise on Oni’s directions, and enters the flow of traffic. Brushing shoulders with daunting figures adorned with spikes and furs and pig leather, Paul knows to be on his guard. He does not, however, discount his own ferocity. He has something left to lose.
Feeling his pursuers close-in, Paul ducks into the doorway of a dimly-lit diner. The street-side windows are boarded up from within, but the sign on the door says OPEN in toxic blue-green. He shimmies into the joint. Leaning against the door closing behind him, he takes a breath. Outside in the street, amidst all the noise and confusion, he hears yelling. Angry yelling. In Russian
.
The diner’s empty, except for a stark-white Chinese man, face flush with cybernetics, snoring and encircled with empty cola bottles, and an android tending bar. It’s a dingy place, but you could find no better in Anaheim or in New Sacramento. Like the neon sign outside, the colour scheme is white and turquoise. Pock-marked turquoise walls. Turquoise booths. White and turquoise stools. The countertop would likely be turquoise too, if the android, who someone thought would look better without facial-skin, hadn’t compulsively buffed the colour out.
“What can I get you?” it asks Paul, its metal skeleton baring through synthetic musculature.
“Huh? Oh, nothing for me. Just wanted to get out of the—” Paul wants to say rain, but he doesn’t want to get metaphorical with an andy.
“Sorry,” says the android, ocular implants turning a burgundy colour in their micromesh coffers, “No solicitors. No visitors. No police. Paying customers only.”
Not wanting to anger the PIT droid, Paul reluctantly answers: “Beer, please.”
“Sorry, sir. Mr. Akbari does not permit alcohol in any of his establishments.”
Vexed and tempted to retire the hunk-of-junk, Paul concedes defeat. “A cola, then.”
The android reflexively yanks a bottle from under the counter and thumbs-off the cap. “Will you be paying in Yuan or US dollars?”
Paul jostles around in his slime-filled pocket for a tenner. “Here,” he says, throwing the damp bill at the droid. “What’s the fastest way to get to Gladstone Park?”
The android stashes the bill away in an antique register, and tilts its head back.
Paul waits for a response.
The sleeping man jerks forward, knocking a bottle over. The clank incites the hammer back on Paul’s revolver. Noting the man’s sustained languor, Paul holsters his piece before the droid can register him as a threat, and walks over to right the bottle.
Snapping back, almost excitedly, this time with green eyes, the android answers Paul: “By foot.”
“Great,” Paul says snidely. “Mind if I use the backdoor?”
“No. Watch your step,” it replies, gesturing to the door lit-up by a turquoise holographic of a root-beer float on the other end of the diner.
“Thanks. Hey, if anybody comes in here looking for someone matching my description, know: he’s a solicitor, and he means Mr. Akbari harm.”
“Duly noted.” The android goes back to scrubbing the countertop.
Paul heads over to the backdoor.
“Sir?” the droid calls out after Paul.
Paul stops, and half-turns.
“It is reportedly dangerous past Occam Street. Exceptionally so. I advise you to avoid it, unless you are affiliated with the Sangre de Dios.”
“Duly noted,” replies Paul.
Chapter 24: GRAY MATTER
THEY AREN’T CANNIBALS. Cannibals wouldn’t waste so much meat.
In the seats of melons halved, between wet, useless tendrils thrown in locks to the carnage, each victim’s temporal lobe was tongued-out methodically. Their assassins’ kinky fingers worked with special care around the thalami where Outland-Corp’s tripwires had been said to be hidden. In the PIT, at least past Occam Street, life’s a fiat currency.
The kinks, all three of them, loom above their victims in a repurposed market square, formerly Gladstone Park, nestled at the bottom of a tall, narrow hollow.
Had the victims blinking on Paul’s borrowed wristband still the faculty, they’d be staring up into the guts of the grid—at a web of severed stairways, pipes, wires, and catwalks, criss-crossing above, all silhouetted by LEDs, make-shift neon, and holograms—digesting glow in perpetual conflict with the creeping shadow. The structures alluded to by the tiny portals and balconies lining the hollow extend back into a forest of vertical slums that towers to the heavens, blocking out both the sun and the Son, cursed twice-over with darkness.
Here, on the filth-stained bottom, these scavengers prey on the fallen and the messianic, or whatever else weeps into the abyss. There is no cavalry, no hope, and no second chances. And if there are, they certainly don’t make their way into this region of the PIT.
The square is spotlighted by sodium bulbs, which, sapping energy from forgotten and unattended battery cells, flicker orange-yellow. Appended to the dying street lamps are dated holograms advertising: “A-FRICTION TRANSPORT. ONE WAY TO MEXICO CITY: $28/¥1530.” In synch, they depict a maglev transport scorching past white, sandy beaches on repeat. Exhaust from the upper levels funnels onto the floor, throwing extra dimension to the cancerous blossom and the repeating promise of leisure and escape.
A large red-and-white metal sign for “Bob’s Deli,” with a Yakuza tag, hangs crooked behind the bodies formerly occupied by Emily and Constance, contextualizing this butchery in other forms. Pacific waves crash against the exhaust, splashing a little bit of colour on Bob’s wholesome cartoon smile.
Looking-on through jagged glass teeth at the three murderers as they pick and pluck, Paul actively suppresses his flee response. He maintains a sniper’s placidity despite the nerve-fed acid’s slow climb up his throat. The second-storey apartment’s charred floorboards evidence Paul’s presence with a Styrofoam hiss and squeak.
Paul’s too late, again. He hadn’t believed the android, but wished he had. But if my wishes were any good, I’d wish this all away.
The Outland mechs crashed into an apartment complex, one block over. At least one’s survived, leaving Emily and Constance with the highest bidder, just like Booker said they would. Paul’s sure that the girls had died slowly, as part of the deal, simply for wasting the Sentinels’ time.
Get the case and get out, he reminds himself.
Like the ramshackle building secreting him—pressured askew on its pilings by the monoliths of glass and metal grown around—Paul is out of place, out of his element. No, I’m out of my goddamned mind.
Through his aperture in the Atlassian wall of stucco and wood, he watches history repeated: more stats heaped on a pile of chalk-outlines and derms.
Above vacant eyes, slack jaws, and mouths forever silent, the ring leader of this carnivalesque slum-show candles the night’s loot: two in-tact Outland implants. Noose knots for noosnauts.
Below, a look of satisfaction crosses the scavenger’s face, yanking taut the acne-scarred skin around his eyes and the wrinkled gang tats snaking down his neck.
The harder Paul looks, the more the scavengers look like demons, pricked with horns and devilish flare. He pops another SIK pill, not that his delusion has really changed anything.
“Nothing on this one’s mind,” says the ringleader with a sneer. He stashes Emily and Constance’s implants and swings forward a brain stem like a limp croquet mallet, freeing it such that it plunks between his lackeys. “Shame, seen? Although renk and sipple, these would’ve made I and I a pretty coin Shanghai-way. Sexing robots wets tongues for the real thing.”
His cronies shift anxiously, rattling the bones threaded and dangling about their shoulders.
The ringleader’s facial skin loosens, and bunches-up into a frown. He scrapes the remaining occipital lobes off of his salvage. “Just two’s no good.” He turns his back to them.
One of the two lackeys, a wraith-like woman, steps through the mulch and bends over one of Oni’s dead. She flicks active her wristband, and scans their PILOT mechanisms for synch IDs.
“Yan nuh see, Whitney?” she says waving the probe over the steaming meat. ”S’more around to sweeten the pot. Just a minute.”
“A minute’s waning.”
Paul shakes-on his Monocle and zooms-in on the bandits. A stream of data filters across Paul’s iris, detailing armaments, vital signs, heat signatures, etc. Definitely not demons, at least not in any literal sense. The Monocle-scan throws a reticle around a metal object, buried beneath the bodies. “UNKNOWN” flashes in red.
That’s gotta be it. That’s got to be the briefcase. Paul recycles his only option, praying for a revelation—for anything. B
artering credit or airtime for the implants would make Paul complicit in this bight of a long string of brutal murders. There is no deal on the table. No negotiation to be had.
His revolver, cold and heavy in hand, feels purposed somehow, fated even—a hammer weighted to fall on the nails below.
Fuck it. Desperation and amorality make uninhibited bedfellows. Paul sequence-blinks off his Monocle. He knows where he’s got to go and what he needs to do.
He shuffles across the chipped and weathered floor. Heeling into a feigned tip-toe, he pops constellations of glass shards en route to the rot-iron staircase. Half-way down the broken helix, he jostles one metal step against the stringer. With the creak, he pauses.
A sudden quiet floats the interruption, and washes away the alley-curate’s sense of solitude. Biting his lip and palm-muting his heavy exhalation, Paul focuses on the threat. The banister frames a bloody triptych.
Alarmed, the ringleader reels back towards his lackeys. He hastily wipes gray matter off on his pant-leg, and hands the trodes over to the wraith-like woman towering at his side. Yanking the front lip of his crusty coat open, he jerks loose a sawed-off. With a nod to the third in his party—nothing more than a feral boy—he creeps forward into the tangerine corona of the square.
“Shit,” Paul murmurs, gripping one of the balusters tightly. The whisper and the fear spiriting the bane seem to urge the demons closer.
The ringleader fires a random shot into the second floor.
“Nice try,” Paul sneers, recomposing himself and numbering his targets with the barrel of his firearm. He needn’t preserve their skulls’ contents.
“D’be in there?” the ringleader shouts at the façade. “Yah might wonder what d’is you saw. Come out now, slow-like…Jah knows there’s no need for ketch up.”
Cypulchre Page 18
