“The problem,” Shiori said smoothly, “is that my husband’s just been mugged. By Sandrats...” It was neatly done, one delicate hand sliding out to move Fixx’s empty tube into neutral space on the bar in front of her. One arm sliding up round Fixx’s shoulders as if to comfort him.
Not drunk after all, but upset...
“Sandrats...?” one of the French boys asked, sounding suddenly very young.
Fixx nodded heavily, wincing at the pain that rolled through his head. His response wasn’t faked, either — real reaction, real pain. Sandrats wasn’t what the barman wanted to hear. And from the ugly twist to his mouth, Fixx realized it wasn’t something he wanted his customers to hear, either. Planetside had no street crime, that was one of its big selling points. It was cheap, tacky, out-of-date and beyond fashion, but you didn’t get mugged. That was what made it suitable for worried families, small children...
“You want to come in the back,” he suggested.
Fixx looked blank.
“Tidy up, maybe? I can get you a real doctor, on the bar...”
Jesus. The man was worried. No one used medics any more, except the very rich. It was well known that forty-three per cent of the educated Western world preferred to rely on MS MediSoft: the fail rate was lower.
Fixx said “No” just as Shiori said “Yes”.
“We don’t need a doctor,” said Shiori. “But somewhere to clean up would be good.” Her voice was soft, her accent liltingly Japanese. If Fixx hadn’t seen her slice open the first clone with one easy stroke, he’d have thought her a student, maybe a junior salariwoman. Only her slate-grey eyes gave her away.
The barman blinked, nodded and lifted the hatch on his bar, letting them through. Instinctively, his gaze flicked down the line of customers, checking their glasses were full, their plates weren’t empty, and then he turned to a steel door, allowing Fixx and Shiori to walk ahead of him into a small office. A bank of flat screens showed every part of the bar, including inside each toilet cubicle.
“We record everything,” the man said without embarrassment. “It helps with insurance claims.” He smiled sourly, “About every six months, some hick gets trashed, falls over and breaks his neck — even in a sixth G. Then his wife blames some imaginary bump in the floor.” He gestured at the old-model Sony screen bank and the basic m/wave vidcorder. “This is cheaper than paying out...”
“Not to mention more entertaining,” Fixx said bluntly, as one screen showed the fat New Yorker struggling to get slacks down over her hips.
The barman shrugged. “You really get mugged?”
Shiori lifted Fixx’s blond hair away from the side of his head, revealing a long gash. The man whistled and stepped in close, fingers touching the line of staples. “Haven’t seen a job that clean since...” The man thought about it. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen one this neat. How far out into the tunnels were you guys?”
“Far enough,” said Shiori.
“And they really were Sandrats?”
She nodded, her face serious.
“Sweet fuck,” the man said. “I thought the real san’rats were all dead.”
“Yeah,” said Shiori, “so did we.”
Fixx knew just why the Japanese woman was lying. Sandrats in Planetside were unlikely, but not as unlikely as a pair of shipped-in clones, so wet behind the ears their vocal cords weren’t even properly grown. Besides, if he really thought they’d been jumped by a sandrat he wasn’t going to start telling anybody anything... His concern was with the tourists and the last thing he needed was for them to start locking themselves in behind LunaWorld’s electrified fence.
“Seems they’re alive,” Fixx said, putting up one hand to touch the gash. His fingers came back dry, fragments of scab crusted beneath ceramic finger nails.
“Where are you staying?” the barman asked. But by then he wasn’t really concentrating anyway, his attention concentrated on the main screen as he watched customers grow restless waiting for his return.
“We’ve got a room at LunaWorld,” said Fixx. “If you just let us use your bathroom, we’ll clean up a bit and then leave.
“Sure thing. If that’s what you want.” The man breathed a sigh of relief. “Bathroom’s through there,” he said adding. “It’s a bit crude. But what isn’t round here...? You can let yourselves out through the fire door.”
And then he was gone, leaving them in his office. Not that he was taking much of a risk. There was nothing in the place worth stealing, even assuming they wanted to. On the central screen, Fixx watched the barman scoop up tubes of what might have been Electric Soup — if it hadn’t been half the strength and four times the price of the cans in Jude’s bar — and begin distributing them, having skimmed the line of restless punters with a single glance to work out who was making the loudest noise so that he could serve them first. All the same, the bar wasn’t a clip joint. The tubes were still half the price they’d be in any of the cafes lining Aldrin Square.
“Okay,” said Shiori, glancing at the barman busy on screen. “Let’s go.”
“No.” Fixx shook his head and regretted it immediately. He could practically feel his brain rattling around inside its box. Besides, his scalp itched from crusted blood and he stank so bad even he wouldn’t have stood downwind of himself.
“I need a shower,” Fixx said firmly. The Japanese woman looked irritated, but she didn’t disagree. It wasn’t just stale sweat that clung to his body. The sour reek of comedown stuck like oil to his skin. Crushed fresh garlic and molecular chains broke along with the flesh, releasing that familiar stink. It was the same with blue crystalMeth.
He could scrub the smell from his skin but it would be back, and it would keep returning until he took another hit or fought clean. Word on the street was that, years back, the stink had been some Seattle biochemist’s idea of a bad joke, but if so no one had ever managed to rewrite the formula. Fixx certainly hadn’t.
They went through to the bathroom together. It might have been innocent on Shiori’s part but it certainly wasn’t where Fixx was concerned, not that it made any difference. Shiori stripped off her tight black T-shirt in a single motion, hands crossed over her front to grip the edge of her top, peeling it up and away in one clean sweep. Shiori almost had the body of a boy, Fixx decided, looking at her thin ribs, or she would have done if it hadn’t been for those small, high breasts topped with wine-dark nipples. But for all the attention she paid to Fixx he might as well have not been in the room.
Bending, Shiori stepped out of her crumpled Levis and tossed them into the corner of the bathroom, next to her T-shirt and leather boots. Watching her tight buttocks as she walked three paces across the ‘crete floor, pulled open a glass door and swung herself up into the sonic booth, Fixx realized he hadn’t seen anyone with a body that honed since CySatNY commissioned a piece on Bohemian Paris eighteen months back. There’d been a journalist hanging round the Crash&Burn, a green-eyed exec name of Passion.
She’d been good, thighs like steel, arms like whipcord and a vulva so tight she had to have put in a lifetime’s work on her pelvic floor muscles. But Shiori was younger, and Fixx was pretty sure Passion’s whole body had been a rebuild: something expensive from an offshore black clinic.
She sure as hell knew how to use it, though, wherever her body came from. She’d throated him whole and come back for more, kneeling on a bed in a wild apartment CySat owned in Montparnasse, so that fucking Passion had been like being suspended naked in the Parisian skyline. Just thinking about it hurt to bursting.
Fixx was still looking down at his erection when Shiori stepped out of the shower. They looked at each other and Fixx could almost swear he saw the Japanese woman curl her lip, then realized she probably wouldn’t do anything that obvious.
Shiori nodded at his groin. “You got a problem, you deal with it,” she said abruptly and turned her back on him, pulling the black jeans up around her hips, fixing her flies and buckling her belt before she even bothered to reach for her t
op.
She looked good from the back. But hell, she looked pretty neat from the front too. Fixx stripped off his clothes and stepped up into the glass booth. He’d like to do the same: set the controls to sonic and let the dirt, dead cells, sweat and microbes be blasted from his skin in a single sweep, but he couldn’t.
Brauhess marketed the cubicle as sonic, because the idea of laser cleaning still had people worried. It wasn’t as if sound wasn’t involved: it was, in three oscillating frequencies. But most of the cleaning was a rapid laser peel, so shallow that it zapped no more than the first few interlocking cells of the epidermis. What the Brauhess did was take a surface reading a nanosec ahead of the laser pulse, then take mere microns off the result.
There were rumours of pregnant women cooking their babies, fat men breathing out at the wrong time and finding their guts on the shower floor and children who forgot to close their eyes getting an involuntary corneal shave that changed their sight forever — but that was what they were, just rumours.
Urban myth had nothing to do with the reason Fixx didn’t choose the sonic option. It was simple self-preservation. Both his legs and one arm were bio-encased electronics. No way was he going to risk frying the chips.
No, he was going to shower the old way. His prosthetics might not stand a laser burst but at least they were waterproof.
Fixx let the cold trickle down his torso, slicking through body hair flecked with grey, picking up blood, dust and grit as it went. By the time he’d been under the shower for thirty seconds, the puddle at his feet was already grey with dirt, not that he could feel anything resembling water with his toes.
If he could have had his legs back, he would have done, height drop and all. Oh, they’d got him publicity, that night at the St Petersburg Palace Theatre when he stalked out on stage, half-man/half-machine. The tetsuos had been out in force, ranked along the front of the stage, providing security, whether the Russian police had wanted it or not.
And then the fights had begun, spilling out of the Palace Theatre onto Neva Prospekt. Every fucking Ishie in the city trying to eyecam the chaos without getting clubbed by some overwired member of Russia’s finest. By midnight the bells at the Armenian Church next to the theatre were being rung in descending order to announce the deaths. Fixx was finally world-famous and for more than his fifteen minutes. No one could number how many people downloaded his new sim: the Web counters just couldn’t cope. Hell, he’d claimed so much fucking bandwidth that, even with the new backbone in place, getting to his site was like drowning in treacle.
No one really knew what that meant until the media punters stopped and really thought about it. Fixx hadn’t known, not when they told him, hadn’t understood the implications at all. It only began to make sense when the credit started rolling in, the fractions of dollars, yen and euros adding up faster than his mind could comprehend.
He was more than rich, for a year or two he was beyond money. A mythical figure like Midas or the Gates-Hertoz dynasty. Fenced round with bodyguards and PAs, the bedrock of his finances so hard, so solid that stock-market dives and currency fluctuations broke against it like overwrought brokers hitting the pavement. And that’s how things should have stayed. That’s where he should have stuck...
Rubbing blood out of his hair, Fixx knew that was true. That was definitely where he should have stuck, with a firewall of tame lawyers between himself and the world. But he was addicted to grand gestures: to walking out on love affairs that weren’t entirely perfect; to throwing his cloak over puddles that nobody needed to cross. Between giving to charity, breaking his recording contract and trying to sue Bernie and his other managers for fraud, he’d spent everything he’d ever earned, moolah spiralling out of his account as fast as it had spiralled in. Half the world thought he was a long-dead saint, the other half just thought he was dead...
-=*=-
“You got a knife?” Fixx stuck his head round the cubicle door, watching Shiori lace and relace her boots, the old-fashioned way. He didn’t believe in any of that shit. His boots might have metal buckles all the way up the front, but they still undid at the side with a self-sealing molecular zip.
“Why?” Her eyes were amused, like she thought he might kill himself in the cubicle while she hung around fiddling with her boots.
“You want me to try shaving with a molyknife?”
Shiori didn’t even have to think about it. No one would be that stupid, not even a flake like Fixx. She flipped him her ceramic blade and Fixx caught it neatly in mid-air, by the hilt.
Shiori nodded, impressed despite herself.
Pure luck. Back inside the cubicle, Fixx considered running the ceramic edge razor-like over his skull, but that seemed a bit extreme for what he wanted. So instead he took the edge of Shiori’s blade to his chin, scrapping it against wet skin, losing the bristles.
If Shiori was surprised at the cleaned-up version of Fixx she didn’t let it show. “We need to move,” the Japanese woman told him flatly. “Now...”
-=*=-
Fixx picked up some new clothes in an alley that had been blocked off at one end and converted into a market. The man behind the third stall took his watch in payment. Shuffling the gold Patek Philippe from hand to hand, the trader had been busy congratulating Fixx on the quality of the fake, when he realized the watch was real.
For a second, it looked like the man was going to refuse to take it. If the timepiece had been reported stolen then it couldn’t easily be offloaded. Not if the watch was logged with Customs as missing on the way out. But something in Shiori’s eyes made the man decide to honour the trade.
“What are you looking for?” He asked looking doubtfully at Fixx.
Fixx examined the clothes on show. Levis, T-shirts, jackets. Most were two, maybe three seasons out of date. Some of them so old he didn’t even recognize the designer they were meant to be ripping off. Nearly everything was synthetic, some kind of clone-cotton/Kevlar mix that shed dirt by itself without having to be told.
In the end, Fixx took a black Thai jumpsuit, riveted in copper at the stress point of every seam. To go under it Fixx chose a blue T-shirt. The jumpsuit had been night-black once, a real light-swallower until someone washed it in water and most of its fluorescence went down the drain. Now it looked more slate-grey.
“I’ll take these,” said Fixx and stripped off his own Levis before the man had time to argue. Clambering into the jumpsuit, Fixx did it up at the side.
“Looks good,” said Shiori.
Fixx glanced round in surprise.
“What I mean,” Shiori said carefully, “is that in those clothes you look less obvious...”
“You mean I blend in?”
Shiori and the stallholder looked at each other. Which was enough. Fixx didn’t need their reply. He wasn’t going to blend in anywhere until he got rid of his metal hand and that wasn’t going to happen this side of getting rich again. All the same, the jumpsuit would do when they came to grab a shuttle. If he looked like anything in the faded-out garment, at least it was more like a maintenance engineer than anything else.
“Where’s the nearest CyKaff? Fixx demanded. He couldn’t believe there wasn’t one up here somewhere, here in franchise heaven. Actually, Fixx reminded himself, everywhere was franchise heaven these days.
“Back towards Aldrin Square,” said the man, pointing vaguely into the distance.
“Okay.” Fixx turned to Shiori. “I’ll see you later.”
“Where?” It was obvious from the way Shiori had her hands slung on her hips that she didn’t appreciate having to ask. But that wasn’t his problem.
“Planetside,” suggested Fixx.
“Arrivals or departures?”
“Well, what do you think...?”
Fixx left her standing there in the small square, a young Japanese woman with neat features and tidy hair, who just happened to have breasts to kill for... The kind of woman you saw in everyday novelas about a nice salariman family in Osaka. Except the world of nic
e families wasn’t where Shiori came from. This was a woman who killed for a living — and what was more, she enjoyed it. Fixx reminded himself to remember that...
Chapter Twenty-Six
LISA says
Two girls looked up when Fixx came through the door. But their eyes glazed over and all their attention had been turned back to the NinSim games machine in front of them before Fixx even reached the coffee-stained counter.
“Espresso,” he ordered, pulling out what was left of his loose change. Shit, with its idiot flag on one side and an idealized silhouette of LunaWorld on the other, it really was Mickey Mouse money.
He got something hot and wet, slammed carelessly down on the zinc by a ponytailed boy in a dirty red Nintendo sweatshirt. Espresso it wasn’t. Or rather, it was as close to real Italian coffee as the raddled Pigalle whores were close to the innocent Parisian schoolgirls featured in the bright holocards they busily pushed under hover wipers.
“I’ll take a machine,” said Fixx, looking round him. The place had that neon half-gloom that passes for slick when you’re about thirteen and it stank of cheap scent and cheaper coffee. Just being there made him nostalgic.
“Lucifer’s Dragon, Apocalypso or CloneSex?”
Click none of the above, thought Fixx. He had a heavy date with LISA, the only problem being he was over three days late and she hated to be stood up. The tall musician shook his head. “No sims. I just want a link.”
The boy shrugged and flicked his fingers over a screen, not quite touching. “Squid?”
“No.” Fixx shook his head and tapped the pocket of his new jumpsuit. “Just the machine, I’ve got my own ‘trodes.”
You could see sad fuck written in the guy’s eyes but he didn’t say it, just pointed across the filthy bar. “That one in the corner...”
The box he pointed to was slate-grey, bolted to a table top and decorated with a peeling tri-D sticker of Stepping Razor and what was left of a SlickShack logo. The other half of the logo had been cracked off with a knife a long time back. Some kid trying to lift the thing to brand his own clone box: Fixx could remember doing the same.
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