Lost Time: Part 1 [Second Skyn]

by Boyes, Damien

  On the other side of downtown we dive even further into the past, and the architecture recedes another century. Galvan stops just outside the Market gates and we leave the car to fend for itself. The drones pop out and follow us in.

  I’ve got my tab back on my arm with Glavan’s sweep running, but the Market looks clear, just me and Galvan and a riot of green blobs milling about four criss-crossing levels of produce stands, restaurants, discount stores, pharma dispensaries, shyft huts and grey-market aug clinics. And those are just the places with signs out front. If you know where to look you can find every manner of unregulated thoughtmod or off-the-records dupe or untraceable, Past-Standard skyn here.

  Galvan tells me that if there's a Standards Offence committed in the city, odds are it's within a square click of where we're standing. Most of it untraceable.

  As we wend through the maze of stalls, with vendors hawking seared veat kabobs and knock-off designer pets slapped together by hobbyist Genitects and counterfeit feelE gear that was outdated before the African Wars began, Galvan points out the former hot spots. The places that burst into existence then disappeared before the Service even heard about them.

  Here an underground club that required an intimate relationship with the doorman or a 1000NAD chip to enter, but once inside shyfts and fuck puppets were in ready supply—except Galvan calls them sex skyns instead of fuck puppets.

  There a restaurant where restored clients cast to custom skyns equipped with the razor sharp mandibles and exotic sensory organs required to appreciate dishes a normal human would be unable to digest without excruciating gastrointestinal distress.

  Around there a back room where an unlicensed augmentation tech in a blood-stained smock would funk-up your eyes in exchange for a kidney.

  I bet if I kicked in a door at random, I’d find something to help prop Chaddah’s arrest stats. But where to start? In Homicide, we had a body. In Major Crimes, we had a robbery, or at least the threat of one. I’ve been out here less than an hour, but I already see the problem: most of the things the Service considers criminal, people here see as a regular Tuesday night. What’s the difference between altering your face and altering your thoughts? Who cares if the skyn you’re wearing isn’t registered—or passingly human for that matter? It’s all just part of the lifestyle. No one complains unless someone’s ripping off their shit or their memories.

  Besides, there’s so much going on, I can barely concentrate on one thing at a time. My senses are on overload. Between the stank of rotting produce wafting from the underground loading zones and the spice-laden steam rising from the food vendors, I can't tell if I'm hungry or nauseous. I feel like, if I knew what their names were, I could pick out the individual molecules wafting on the air.

  My face flushes and I have to stop walking, take shallow breaths and concentrate on the dull grey of the pavement beneath my feet.

  “Are you okay?” Galvan asks when he’s noticed I’m not beside him anymore and trots back to my side.

  “Yeah, I’m just a little—”

  “What’s…that?” he asks, pointing at the tab wrapped around my arm.

  I rotate my forearm to check the screen. A red circle is moving away from us, toward Kensington to the west. “Another cypher?” I ask him.

  “Yeah, but—” he says, squinting down at his open tab. His shows all clear, nothing but green. “That has to be a—”

  I cut left, jostling through the crowded stalls toward Kensington and immediately lose Galvan. He can't keep up while furiously tapping at his tab. Whether this is another cypher or a glitch in his system, it gives me a chance to stretch my legs and get a focus on something other than my overloaded senses.

  The drone is caught up in the Market’s overhead maze of wires and tarps and hanging lanterns, and I leave it behind as I race through the last row of stalls without knocking anyone over. I sail through an alley lined with knock-off t-shirts, cut north through a community garden, and emerge onto a row of coffee shops, pharma dealers and restaurants with patios near capacity.

  A glance at my tab shows the cypher moving up the next street, perpendicular to me, quickly but in no hurry. Galvan in gold is still working his way through the Market behind me. Way behind me.

  No point in waiting for him, especially if this is just a snipe hunt based on glitchy code.

  I take off running down the middle of the street, dodging the slow moving Skütes and small cars. I stop in the middle of the intersection and hold my wrist up, scan the crowd. The street is busy but I get a second of red haze highlighting a figure before it disappears down another alley a hundred metres north of me.

  Galvan's app seems to think it’s on to something—but that doesn't explain why my version saw this guy and his didn't.

  The drone has finally caught up, and I yell at it to go ahead and tag the subject, but it responds with a purr of sadness and doesn’t move. Whatever I’m seeing that Galvan can’t, the drone doesn’t see it either.

  I sprint up the street, amazed by the power in my legs. I’m still used to my old body—the one that had taken so much punishment over the years that running had become a tactic of last resort—and duck into the alleyway that would barely let two people pass shoulder-to-shoulder. The drone shoots up in the air, follows me from above.

  The figure is near the other end. She's small, wearing stretchy jeans and a light jacket and holding a bag that’s half her size out ahead of her like a shield.

  I raise my arm, give the tab a good view. The app comes back with three messages:

  StatUS-ID: Unknown

  CYPHER PROBABILITY: 76%

  RECOMMENDED ACTION: Further investigation

  “You,” I shout and continue toward her at a walk. “Stop.”

  The figure slows, turns and cocks her head at me. She's Asian. Han Chinese if I had to guess, somewhere between eighteen and forty. Sixty, if she’s on reJuv. Black hair cut straight at the bangs and the jawline. High cheekbones. Dark eyes. Nothing obvious or conspicuous about her other than my tab says there is.

  “Police,” I say, still advancing. The lights on my badge flicker blue and red on the brick walls. My hand rests lightly on the weapon at my waist. “Hold it right there. I just want to ask a few questions. Put the bag down, easy.”

  I'm nearly to her, only five metres of freshly sprayed luminescent graffiti between us. Her eyes dart to her right, then to the bag she's carrying. She's going to bolt.

  “Don’t—”

  I blink and she's an afterimage on my retinas.

  By the time I make it out of the alley and into the laneway, she's already nearing its end. She's covered the distance in a few seconds, obliterating the world record for hundred-metre dash with luggage, but the narrow lane dead-ends at the concrete rear wall of a two-storey building. It’s got a hoop and a backboard hanging off of it and probably another meter between that and the top. Buildings on each side. There's nowhere else for her to go.

  She doesn't agree, just keeps running. Puts her shoulder behind the bag and heaves it up and over the wall then leaps without slowing, bounces a foot off the brick and catches the backboard’s curved support beam, spins up into a crouch with her hands between her feet. I hear the bag land on the roof with a distant clunk.

  She looks at me. Studying. Curious. Then leaps.

  She catches the top of the wall and pulls herself over in a single motion. Easy.

  Her footsteps rattle away over the building’s gravel roof.

  “Goddamit—”

  Not only is she a cypher, her skyn is way past Standard. Give-up-and-call-the-Feds advanced. Who knows what that girl’s capable of?

  I check my tab. She’s gone for a moment but when she reappears, she’s already back on the street, racing toward Galvan and the Skywalk.

  But she doesn't know I’ve tagged her.

  I’m going to catch her and hand her to Standards myself.

  I whip around and head back down the alley, pushing my legs as hard as they'll go, bursting out
onto the busy street in time to see her blur across half a block south and duck into another alley.

  I retrace my path back toward the stalls, following a parallel course to the cypher. She's got a free sprint to the Market, but instead, turns and heads north, directly for me. Trying to be clever.

  She doesn't know I'll be waiting.

  I take position beside a parked cargo van, breathing hard but not out of breath. Three days ago, a sprint like that would have left me bent over, sucking wind. I tell the drone to rise and hover out of sight, pull my weapon and watch her approach on my tab. First day back and I'm going to have to file a weapons report.

  The gun recognizes me and powers up. I thumb it to less-lethal.

  I want her talking.

  Then she's on me. I step out from around the side of the truck, barrel pointed dead centre on her chest.

  “Freeze,” I say, grit my teeth and fire when it’s clear she isn’t going to.

  A green lance of ionized air hits her with enough power to drop a charging lineman. Catches her in the chest, dead center. She winces, stutters briefly but doesn’t go down, jukes out of the beam and before I can correct plants her foot, spins, swings the duffel and catches me under my gun arm with enough force to throw me sideways into the truck's rear door. She spins in a graceful pirouette until she's facing back toward the Market, off and running before I've even hit the ground.

  I shake my head, clear the spangled motes from my vision. My entire left side is throbbing, but I don’t think she broke anything. I can't believe how heavy that bag is. And how easily she's carrying it. Fucker's playing with me.

  I scramble to my feet, reholster my weapon, lock into her back, and take chase. If she hadn’t just humiliated me I’d be impressed. She's deking and dodging foot traffic like an All-Star Center on a career breakaway, all while carrying a bag that felt like it was full of cinder-blocks.

  I'm not going to catch her.

  I spot Galvan, tab in hand. He looks up and catches sight of me. If he notices the cypher he doesn't show it.

  “Galvan,” I yell. “10-37!”

  He blinks. His face freezes.

  “Cypher—coming at you!”

  By the time he catches sight of the girl-sized bullet rocketing toward him, he only has time to open his mouth and watch her race by.

  He checks his tab again and looks back up at me, confused. “You're right,” I yell as I run past, “Two for two.”

  He says something in reply but I'm already too far away to hear. The crowded labyrinth of stalls lies ahead, and that maze will slow even this jacked-up chick down. Maybe enough I can make up some distance.

  She hits the Market, rounds a curry stand, headed south, and I lose sight of her. I skid to a stop where she turned, the smell of stewed goat filling my nostrils.

  She's gone.

  I check the tab and, somehow, she's already above me, up on the walkways. I scan the area but the closest stairs are too far. Even fast as she's going, she couldn’t have—no, there’s a feelE vendor directly below the walkway complaining to his stall-mate, pointing up, a shocked look on his face, a table of spekz and vizrs and haptic clothing in disarray.

  Let’s see what this body can do.

  I take a breath and run full-out at the table. The vendors are staring, disbelief in their eyes. Disbelief that snaps to anger when they realise I’m not going to stop either.

  They yell and wave their arms and then duck as I jump and launch off the table. I slam chest-first into the walkway above them and wrap my arms around the bottom railing, startling a stooped Chinese woman who’s shuffling past with what has to be a dozen bulging bags of produce in each gnarled fist.

  The feelE merchant is cursing up at me in Tagalog, swinging a broken table support at my dangling legs.

  I haul myself up through the bars and catch sight of the cypher running along the railing with the duffle clutched to her chest, like she’s part of a circus act. I push through the stream of midday shoppers, trying to reach her, but before I can get halfway across the bridge she's leapt from the railing, bounced one foot off the glass wall of a rising elevator, neatly grabbed the bars on the third-floor walkway, flipped herself over and disappeared.

  Shit.

  I stop, check my tab for her position. She's headed back the way we came, toward a set of stairs behind me.

  Asymmetry of information.

  I get to the bottom as she's halfway down. She sees me and stops, squints like now she's irritated. We assess each other for a beat and then she sees my tab, realises I must be somehow tracking her. My advantage is blown. I won't be able to catch her again.

  I pull my weapon, keep it down at my side and switch back from less-lethal. No more chances.

  She's got nowhere to run, halfway between floors on a stairway with an open-air market twenty-feet below. There are three people between us: a man going up, a woman and little boy coming down at me.

  She could still take a hostage, but the chase is over. This will end in the next ten seconds or it will go on all night.

  “I appreciate the chance to stretch my legs,” I say and take a step up, waiting for the space between us to clear. “But playtime’s over. Even you can't outrun SecNet.” I hold up my forearm, show her the bright red dot on my tab. The man walks past without sparing her a glance. She doesn't move.

  I hold my breath as the young mother takes her son’s hand, helps him down the stairs, taking one step at a time, placing each foot beside the other as he goes.

  I'm waiting for the cypher to so much as flinch. She goes for the kid I put a bullet in her head.

  Then they’re beside me. The cypher doesn’t move. Hasn’t taken her eyes off me once.

  Then they’re past, walking away. We’re alone. No bystanders.

  I thread my finger through the trigger guard and thumb the firing stud. My eyes are burning but I can't risk a blink. She's too fast. I don't want to give her any opportunity.

  I raise the weapon, cup the butt with my right hand, lock the sights—if she moves, if she so much as flinches, I'll put her down. “Drop the bag, turn around, kneel on the steps and lace your fingers behind your head.”

  I close the distance on her, one step at a time.

  Eight steps between us. Seven.

  If she isn't kneeling by the time I get to five, I pull the trigger.

  She stays still, eyes rigid on me as I approach.

  “I said, drop the bag and get on your knees. Last warning.” She doesn't respond.

  Six.

  I take another step and her eyes flick over the railing, down to the market. She's going to jump.

  Not this time.

  I squeeze the trigger but the bag is already flying at me, shielding her escape.

  The duffel takes the bullet instead, and I have to fling my arms up as it hits me like a chest of drawers and sends me reeling sideways down the stairs.

  I flail out at the railing, scrambling to stop myself from cartwheeling to the bottom, to regain my balance for another shot, but the cypher's already vaulted the bar.

  By the time I'm back at the railing, she's crashed through the plastic roof of a stall below and disappeared into the tented plastic. I consider leaping off after her but not for long. It’s too late anyway. Even if I got back up after that fall, I wouldn't be in any condition to run. I follow on my tab as the cypher's signal weaves through the Market, crosses Dundas St. and blinks twice before it fades.

  Then the pain hits. All along my forearms and my chest and abdomen. I’m going to be mostly bruise tomorrow.

  What the hell was she carrying?

  I secure my weapon and go down to find out. The bag’s clasp is bio-tied but there's a ragged hole in the fabric. A handful of thin plastic cylinders, about three centimetres long by a centimetre wide, lie scattered on the walkway.

  They look like little vials, each with a red hanzi adorning one end, a silver contact port on the other and a display skin in between.

  Shyfts.

&n
bsp; Got to be tens of thousands, and each worth at least ten bucks a hit. Someone's going to miss them.

  I gather up the half-dozen or so loose cylinders that spilled out on the stairs and drop them in my jacket pocket.

  Then I flex my knees, straighten my back, wrap my hands around the duffel's handles, pull, and nearly yank my arms out.

  I can barely lift this thing and she threw it two stories in the air.

  I try again, but feel like I’m going to pop an aneurysm before I move it for ten steps, and resort to dragging it along the concrete.

  I flash back to the Forces, to one drunken early-morning in Douala on the second day of a two-day pass. Me and Mugarry and Weng and a few other guys had stumbled across one of those small plastic Indian cars that had been everywhere, the ones held together by nothing but dog-shit polymers and crossed fingers as their daredevil drivers skirted death under the wheels of the massive resource haulers and military caravans that dominated the pockmarked inland highways.

  We took turns trying to lift it, and as flimsy as it seemed, even in our drunken, pain-numbed states, individually we could barely get the back wheels off the ground. Mugarry had finally won, getting it up about thirty centimetres before the bumper ripped off and the wheels came crashing back down, a tire barely missing Weng's foot.

  It took all five of us to pick it up and carry it down the block to the Chinese embassy. When the guards came out, guns raised, to see what five guys were doing with a car next to their blast-wall, we dropped it where it was and ran, like teenagers pulling a prank on a rival high school instead of soldiers on the verge of an international incident.

  This bag feels only marginally lighter than that car.

  By the time Galvan reaches me a few minutes later I've only managed to pull it to the next set of stairs, a trail of scuffmarks and sweat charting my effort.

  After wrestling with it for another five minutes we give up and call for a forensics team and a mule to help get it back to the station.