by Mark Lingane
Joshua could only wonder at the greed and insanity of it all.
A slender leg extended itself sensually across his aimless path, connecting with a post and barring his way. The leg was clad in a red stiletto shoe, a black fishnet stocking, and black suspenders: teenage-boy dream 101.
Joshua stopped.
“Hi, Joshua,” said the leg in what was a remarkably sexy, hushed little-girl voice. “How ya doin’?”
“Oh, it’s you, Miri,” replied Joshua. He squinted into the darkness.
The leg dropped gracefully, and the rest of the body stepped out into the light. Miri was barely dressed in her delicate lingerie.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“No, hon. I’ve dropped a couple of Leptins.”1
“Those things can’t be good for you, you know,” he said, trying to keep his gaze from falling below her neckline.
“Stop ya fussin’. I only drop them when I’m doin’ this job. I can’t afford to lose too much meat.”
“How are the studies going?” Joshua had visions of ice showers floating through his mind.
“Good. I’ve only got one year to go, then I’m into the work force.” She puffed seductively on a small cigarette. “Mind you, I don’t know if there are any more places available in this world for another civil engineer.” She looked slightly saddened. “Anyway, I gotta try.” She ashed her cigarette on the footpath and shrugged. “It’s gotta be better than this.”
“You know you really don’t have to do this.”
“I know, but you know how it is.”2
“Yeah, how it is,” Joshua mumbled. He paused and the silence was filled by screams of pleasure and pain. Here you could get what you wanted or have it taken from you.
“Ya see the crowd rush for the WarKU?”
“Yeah. Fairly mild tonight. I’ll never forget that rush two years back for the final-round battles. You remember the one with Peter Cowley?”
“Yeah. Talk about a laugh.”
As Miri giggled her breasts rose and fell in what Joshua considered a far too seductive way. He briefly closed his eyes but the image remained. He took off his hat and fanned himself.
“I see what you mean about it being hot in here.”
“Ya always such a boy, aren’t you?” She playfully laid her hand on his shoulder.
His heart skipped a beat. “You’ll certainly make one young man”—he searched for a word— “frustrated.” He thought about it and added, “Or not at all.”
She smiled and ground her cigarette out with her heel. She looked up at him, and he thought her intelligent eyes were more dangerous than a whole quiver of cupid’s arrows.
“You look stressed,” she said. “You want me to give you a massage, back rub, pedicure, wash your feet, lick you all over or something?”
“Er, no,” he said in a distracted way.
“What are you doin’ around here, anyways?” she said in the thick Mississippi accent she put on for tourists.
“I’m thinking.”
“Around here? I would imagine that would be exceedingly difficult in this area,” she said in her normal accent. Realizing she had dropped character, she resumed, “I thought men were no good at that stuff anyways.”
“No. They’re good at thinking, not listening.”
“Are you sure? I thought it was a famous scientific fact or somethin’. I’m sure I read it somewheres. Or was it that they thought with a different part of their body?” She smiled playfully at him.
A drunken sailor staggered past and collapsed against the post next to her. His head sagged and stopped a few inches from her open cleavage. He tried to say something but only spittle dribbled out of his mouth.
“Yeah, right,” Miri said. “You’ll be lucky. Go lie down with the sheep.” She pushed him backwards. The sailor fell away and was last seen as a pair of legs disappearing into the cave behind him.
“The weather’s good,” Joshua said.
“That’s the most pathetic attempt at changing a subject I’ve—”
“No, I meant that the weather’s good for thinking in. I’ve got some stuff on my mind I’m trying to sort out. This weather’s good for that. Good frosty air and plenty of boring, winding streets.”
Miri looked at him, disbelieving. “You think too much.”
“What was that?” Joshua tried to look over her shoulder.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I thought I heard a bleating.” He returned his focus to the busy folk on the street.
“Wouldn’t know,” she said, and took up classic position number three: leaning against the pole with one leg bent.
“Look, I’d better get along,” he said. “It must be coming up to your busy time.”
“They can wait until I’m ready. Otherwise they can pay themselves to do the job. I’m busy now.”
“You are?”
“Yes. Talking to you.” She shook her head. “You really are hopeless at some things, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“But if you gotta go then don’t feel attached to me.”
He turned to go but turned back. “Do you get important people down here at all?”
“Yes.”
“Do they ever like say anything when they’re, you know, exercising?”
“Yes, but usually words of one syllable. Like ‘Oh!’ and ‘Yes!’ or ‘No!’ Or ‘God!’ for the intelligent ones.”
“Anything about their work?”
“Sometimes like they’re trying to impress me and get better, or illegal, exercise.”
“Hmm, anyone from Dopey?”
“Not for a while. A long while for a fact.”
“Look, next time anyone comes through, asitwere, and says anything strange, could you give me a call?”
“What, like I’m your pardner or somethin’?”
“Well, not quite that far. But it could be helpful.”
“It’ll cost ya.”
Joshua rolled his eyes. “How much?”
“I’ll let you know, but I don’t think you’ll mind payin’.” She cast her face down and looked up at him through thick eyelashes.
“It’ll be cheap, then?”
“Hon, cheap ain’t how I come. Now go away, ya hamperin’ my trade unless ya want to be a part of it.”
“OK. You got my number?”
“Sure, hon, and you certainly got mine.”
“Yeah, right.” Joshua patted his pockets, looking for his little phone book.
“I’ll be callin’ on ya,” she said as he turned away.
Miri stared after him as he wandered down the street bumping into various objects. A grubby hand grabbed her breast. She looked down and looked back up at the prospective client. He was a well-dressed man in a pinstriped suit and a hairstyle that said, “I’m embarrassingly rich.”
She shook herself free. “I’m not in service, loser,” she said, and strode off toward her hideaway.
6
JOSHUA MADE HIS WAY through the winding streets heading out to the dockside anomaly. The anomaly was his most favorite place in the whole universe, the horrible monstrosity of The Phone Company. It rose above the surrounding buildings like some form of monster rising from the grave, often invoking the same feeling from passing traders. Techno-fear in its worst form: solid.
Before he knew it he had walked halfway to the docks. He looked at his watch. He didn’t have enough time to walk home and then out here again so he settled for dropping in and visiting Damien.
Damien was a business acquaintance of Joshua’s. Joshua would never have admitted to actually liking him or being his friend, but Damien had a little something about him that made Joshua laugh. Not many people could do that these days.
The quality Damien possessed was total incompetence at whatever he tried. In his short lifespan this was quite a considerable number of things. Damien was more than a decade and a half younger than Joshua. They had met about five years earlier when Joshua investigated a robbery. Damien had been
working at a comic shop on a part-time basis, and he was intelligent enough to realize the job didn’t have the best career prospects. The shop had been held up by a couple of young ladies who saw that the best security the shop could offer was a stapler and a year’s supply of glue.
Joshua remembered the first meeting well. Damien was being interrogated or berated by the shop manager.
“Did they offer you temptations of the flesh?” the shop manager had cried. He had possibly read too many comics himself. “Did full-lipped, round yet firm-bodied Amazonians give you a glimpse of treasures that no mortal man could resist?”
“No,” Damien had said. “They … they pointed a gun at me. They didn’t point a gun at Basil, though. They tied Basil up, they did. With the Batman rope for special customers,” he added as supporting evidence.
“Are you sure they didn’t use their womanly superpowers to weaken your will and lead you into a dark and lascivious void of pleasure?”
The shop manager leaned against the Evian water dispenser and fanned himself with Wonder Woman Special Adults’ Edition Number 5.
“You all right, boss?”
“Yes. Why? What are they saying now? What would the customers know anyway? It’s all lies, you know.”
“It’s that … it’s, well, you’ve gone all red.” Damien was sure this whole incident wasn’t included in his job description.
Joshua, who had been listening to all this while scouting around the shop for clues, as well as a certain Man of Steel S.E. comic, decided this poor guy had had enough and needed rescuing.
“I think,” Joshua said to the shop manager as he wandered into the battleground, “we would achieve more if you stopped harassing your staff.”
“Who are you?” shrieked the shop manager. “You’re one of them. One of those pert-cheeked, lush womanly she-devils of—”
“Er, no.” Joshua was fairly certain about that. “I’m the detective you ordered.”
“I thought you ordered a pizza,” Damien said to the shop manager, struggling to keep up with the conversation.
“No,” Joshua said, turning to Damien. “He ordered me but I think it might’ve been better all around, and less painful, if he had ordered a pizza.”
“We could order one now,” said Damien.
“No, we have an investigation to carry out,” Joshua said after much internal struggling.
“The walls have eyes, you know. There are spies everywhere.” The shop manager looked hunched and frightened, huddling in the corner with the dying embers of the day falling on him in a dramatic fashion. He wrung his hands and his eyes darted around the room, occasionally in synchronization.
Joshua and Damien exchanged glances but decided their own ones were better.
At this stage, Joshua called in the experts, and the shop manager was quietly and gently removed to the nearest Betty Ford Clinic franchise.
Thus ended Damien’s short and less than promising career in the graphic-novel industry, which was fortunate because at heart, and in body, Damien was a young computer hacker. Not good enough to be a programmer, not good enough to be a game tester, but someone who had a knack of getting into other people’s work and ruining it. Actually, he wasn’t very good at that either, but in comparison to everything else he did badly he was quite gifted at hacking. He had tried lots of things. He had studied chemistry, physics, mathematics, geology, metalwork, woodwork, telecommunications, social work and—mainly—how to avoid going to lectures. Instead, he played bridge with the university computer club committee and mimicked their idiosyncratic speech patterns.
Joshua had the feeling all Damien ever wanted to be was a graduate.
There was The Past as well. As with all men with The Past it involved A Woman. He was young and foolish, well, younger and more foolish, and she had been educated, virtuous and, unfortunately, married. Her husband was old, quite a bit older than she, and rich—not to be forgotten, but she did love him and was loyal and doting. Damien and Judy, for that was her name, had met at a computer expo. Damien had been different in those days, too. A lot cleaner, a little thinner, happier and more confident, smelling of Old Spice rather than old socks. Then he met Judy and all that changed.
Joshua could imagine the first time they had laid eyes on each other. The mist in his mind swirled …
“Excuse me, do you work on this stand?” she would have said.
“Er, no. Why?” he would have said.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I just wanted to know how this thingamajig works.”
“Do you mean the duel overdrive docking desktop oscillator?”
“Yeah. One of them.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Well, I’m not personally interested but my husband is.”
“Is … he … an … electronics … fan?”
“Very … much … so.”
Then the conversation would have ground to a halt, they would both be looking into each other’s eyes, and there would be one of those moments. When time stops and the world becomes some background story, and a radio you couldn’t quite hear before is turned up with “It Must be Love” by Madness playing. A moment that could last forever. Then she would have quickly looked away, and he would have pulled his collar to let the steam out. If she had been carrying books she would have pulled them closer to protect her fragile environment. The world would have rushed back into prominence and the radio would be quiet again.
Then again it might have been nothing like that, but Joshua Richards wasn’t an investigator for nothing. No way, chum. People paid him to do it.
Joshua knocked on Damien’s unit door. He could hear Damien grunting and groaning, trying to prize the door open against all the junk that was piled up behind it. Damien’s chubby face peered around the door.
“Oh, it’s you, Joshua. Come in. If you can fit.”
“Much obliged. Thanks.”
Joshua breathed out, and wedged himself in the gap available. After pushing for a minute he managed to get through and into … the abyss. That was the only way he could describe Damien’s unit. Somewhere dark and horrible, where not much escaped.
Especially pizza boxes. Damien felt a need to collect them like they were orphans or something long lost, needing care and shelter. Currently, about twenty were making a determined leap for freedom from their resting place behind the door, cascading over the floor toward the exit and the hope of freedom.
The corridor traveled, thankfully, only a few feet before opening into the major sanctum where Damien worked. He thought it would be wrong to call it a study, but as no single word could describe the utter devastation that filled the room it would have to suffice.
Further inside the abyss a similar pizza-box fate had happened to various other bits and pieces from life’s great hackers. Bits of machinery stood everywhere. None of it ever worked but that wasn’t the point, Damien had continually campaigned. It was important scientific equipment, and with a little TLC would work fine, Damien often said. The fact that it had been looking for the TLC for the last one hundred years was never the issue.
Joshua stood in the center of the room, dripping. The big anomaly was the dual overdrive docking desktop oscillator. It actually worked and was in one piece. The beast took pride of place on a pedestal dominating the center of the room, surrounded by a green neon tube and shrouded by a bulletproof glass case. It was the only one in the city and Damien was embarrassingly proud of it and, of course, what it stood for.
“I read somewhere that things left unfinished in your life are actually pointing to something incomplete in yourself,” Joshua said, looking around the devastation of the room.
He took off his coat and draped it over the back of a chair. It was hard to start a conversation around Damien unless it was heavy from the start. He thought Damien’s flat could benefit from an introduction to the obsessive Ms. Friday.
Damien had sat down in his student’s gas-lift chair and resumed soldering a piece of wire to something, which, to Joshua,
looked like a … he couldn’t actually tell what it was. It was all wires and tubes, and surely something someone who knew better had thrown out. Damien’s holo-screen on the terminal intermittently flickered behind him, the aging green lasers working overtime. Holographic green letters hung in the air.
“Are you trying to say something about me?” Damien said. He had nearly soldered the wire to the long thing.
“Yes. Look at this junk around here.” Joshua’s arm swept around the room, which was more than a broom had done.
“It’s not junk. It’s highly expensive equipment.” Damien had now attached the other end of the wire to a round bit with a small spike on its edge.
“Does it work?” Joshua’s eyes rose upwards.
“No, not as such,” came the distracted reply.
“Well, it’s junk then, and if you ever got around to fixing any of it then it would possibly have some value. Maybe to a museum or something.”
“When I get around to fixing it all I shall be able to achieve quite a lot.”
“For who?”
“For me. I shall be the greatest hacker of all time, and I can tell you, Mr. Detective”—Damien paused to thump his fist on his chest, which wobbled—“that when I’m on my way I shall be unstoppable.”
Joshua turned his gaze back to Damien and gave him a look that one might give a puppy trying to get a trick right. Joshua thought Damien sort of had a point about momentum, but he didn’t seem to realize you needed to be moving first.
Damien surged on in search of some approval. He picked up a small cylindrical roll of paper that had been minding its own business in the corner of the table. He turned around and stood up tall and proud. Taller than wide, that is.
“I’ve got my hacker diploma now. It’s official and everything. It’s even got a seal on it.” He unrolled the diploma and held it up proudly for Joshua to see, his hands grasping it like a life jacket.
“How can you be an official hacker? It’s like being a qualified thief.” Joshua leaned over and squinted at the bottom of the page. “Anyway, that’s not a seal. It’s a penguin.”
