Cyber Noir Redux: (Book Six) (The Feedback Loop 6)

by Harmon Cooper

  I fire a burst and the bullets ricochet back and shred me into cat food.

  ~*~

  I respawn in Three Kings Park. The yeggs are holding a Sterno and Aquanet hairspray tasting party around the blazing contents of a trash barrel. They laugh as they pass a dented can back and forth. I head towards them, scrolling through my list behind my back.

  “I heard she’s back,” the shortest one says as I approach. “That’s right, she’s ruling the roost again, which explains why you ain’t look so screwy no more, Bert. Not as good as you looked before the booze and years of depravity, but not bad!”

  “Ernie, you shut you fat ugly mouth! You were da screwiest lookin’ all of us.”

  “Heh, heh! Never could take a joke, could ya pal?”

  “Both of youse, can it.” The biggest of the three finishes the can and pockets it. He’s wearing two overcoats, the second one missing its sleeves. Around his neck is a tattered scarf tucked into the front of his shirt.

  “Say, who’s dat?” the shortest one asks when he catches whiff of me. He takes one gander at the barrels of item 73, my pair of Halo M6Cs. “Don’t shoot, mistah, don’t shoot!”

  Two Coats steps in front of his shorter pal. “I don’t give a rat’s ass who you are,” he says real tough-like, “nobody comes into my park and scares Ernie!”

  I lower my weapon. “Now wait a second, Cochise, you three bozos don’t happen to be the three kings, do you?”

  Two Coats offers me a short bow. “I’m Grover Myrrh, this here is Bert Goldfinger, and the short one here that you threatened with your beanshooters is Ernie Frankincense.”

  “That must make me the baby Jesus. Howzabout this, fellas, tell me everything you know about what she has created around that hotel, and I’ll let you the three of you live.”

  “We don’t know nothing, mister,” Grover says, “honest.”

  “Yeah, he’s right,” Bert chimes in. “It just appeared and ain’t nobody knows nothin’ about it. Nobody we know anyway. No way, no how. Nothin’.”

  “I need to get in there,” I tell them.

  “Ha!” Bert snorts, “Get a load of this guy! Don’t we all, pal, don’t we all.”

  And Bert Gold is the first to die. Grover looks at me like I’m lower than toe jam and flips me off. Bing-bang-boom, and I turn to Ernie. “Last but not least.”

  Ernie flies backwards in a cinematic arc. I kick over the trash can and watch the fire blaze sideways for a moment. I need to get back to the hotel and equip something powerful enough to crack Dolly’s skeletal wall. Item 459, my Reason Railgun should do the trick. Maybe I’ll be able to charm my way in using item 172, my Light Ocular Kinetic Emotive Responses Gun (L.O.O.K.E.R. Gun), which is one of the more killer-diller pieces I own. If that doesn’t work, There’s always room for a little kaboomski, and I have plenty of items capable of that.

  My flare gun appears in my hand, item 24. I pop off a shot and a taxi lowers.

  Small talk is not what I’m going for, so I reach into the driver’s side window and stab him in the neck with good ol’ item 33, my stag-handled Bowie knife. As he chokes and splutters on his own digital life force, I drag him out of the cab and leave him to croak. Grim, I know, but this is The Loop and someone would have done it sooner or later. Into the stuffy little beater I go, and I buckle up – safety first, kids – the taxi lifts into the air.

  Mad Max meets Blue Max with just a touch of Maximum Overdrive as I weave in and out of the traffic in the skylanes above Shaitan’s Shithole. Some moll on an aeroscycle whips past me, smacks her leather-clad ass with a metal-studded glove and uses the same hand to give me the finger. Okay, Sleazy Rider – always happy to oblige! Tally-ho, and I give chase. I equip my Reaper mask, item 551, to get the targeting reticle that handshakes with whatever shooter I choose. I crank the window down and track her one-handed with my Deckard’s Bladerunner gun, item 120.

  This next little maneuver is going to permanently take the happy out of at least one of our birthdays, so timing is everything. I stay up and behind her like a Hun in the Sun and wait for the perfect moment.

  I punch the seatbelt release.

  Steady … steady … steady ...

  The targeting reticle cues to shoot, and with a quick squeeze of the trigger, I get her in the back of the neck.

  She slumps forward over the handlebars and the aeroscycle’s AI keeps her ride straight and level. I half-roll the cab, shoulder the driver’s door open, and then plummet earthward like the Frecce Tricolori at Flugtag ’88. I time it right and come down behind her hard; the landing knocks the wind out of me and the aeroscycle bucks and jumps as it compensates for my sudden additional weight.

  I get my hands on the handlebars and onto the handgrip controllers. Ms. Leather-clad smartass is all loosey-goosey and as dead as a dodo. Her weight shifts and she starts to slide off to the left, but her leg catches under the fairing. We’re suddenly as unstable as a North Korean dictator on a greased unicycle. The AI screams its Danger, Will Robinson collision alarms as we go into a flat spin.

  I kick her leg out and over the side she goes; I almost get a twofer as she takes the side mirror off a cab on her way down. But even with her dead weight gone and the aeroscycle semi-stabilized, a water tower still rushes up to swat Mrs. Hughes’ pride and joy out of the sky.

  Lean back hard, goose the juice, scream YEE-HAAA, and hope for the best – what could possibly go wrong?

  In a scrape of paint and shower of sparks, I clip the water tower and narrowly miss popping the neon olive out of the oversized martini glass on the billboard that touts Fat Tony’s Tropical Paradise Bar & Grill.

  Now that’s what I call entertainment!

  ~*~

  I land like a gentleman in front of Dolly’s Fortress o’ Solitude. No crash-landing, no jumping the Motorcycle River Canyon on a snake, no noggin floggin’ and buzzing the pedestrians. Just a good ol’ fashioned, obey the traffic codes landing.

  “Not bad,” I tell the aeroscycle, “not as fast as my Akira motorcycle, item 205, but real steady.”

  I look up at Castle Dollystein. I hate to brute force my way in, but if I can just talk to Dolly, just for a minute, I’m sure I’ll be able to smooth all this out and at the very least, I’ll be able to log out and get back to limpin’ and gimpin’ around the RW.

  I lift my finger just to confirm I’m indeed still trapped. What else was I expecting, a frickin’ prize? More like, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. I grimace and give the place where the logout screen should be the middle finger, which makes it look like I’m flipping off Dolly’s fortress.

  “Sorry, Doll,” I say as I lower my hand, “that wasn’t for you.”

  She can read my thoughts. It suddenly dawns on me that if an NVA Seed can actually read someone’s thoughts, she didn’t need any information leaked to her regarding my … um … relationship with Frances. What else, then, could Strata have told her that set all this crap in motion? Screwy, all of it. My life, my decisions, my subsequent actions – and that’s just in the Proxima Galaxy.

  Sooner or later, Frances is going to come home and find my dumbass glued to her couch in an unresponsive vegetative state. It’ll probably take me soiling myself before she figures out that I’m trapped in The Loop again and boy-o-boy, when I get out, will there ever be some serious ‘splainin’ to do. Well, I guess that’s if I get out. Smart money says that Dolly has stop measures in place to keep unwanted visitors spawning here again, so the cavalry ain’t likely to come riding to my rescue this time around.

  Things definitely ain’t looking up right about now. That is, unless I can get Dolly to chill out and forgive me enough to return the logout option to my dashboard.

  “All right, Doll,” I tell her fortress, “I hate to tear the place up unnecessarily, but we really need to chat.”

  I scroll through my list behind my back and item 459, the Reason Railgun, materializes in front of me. I step up to it, aim the blasting end at the fortress, and squeeze the
trigger. Git-r-done? Not so much. The neon-green blast from the railgun doesn’t even leave a smudge on the spiny, hard-shelled exterior. I fire again; the place doesn’t even quake.

  When in doubt, try using a lightsaber.

  I equip my Darth Maul replica, item 251, and I momentarily channel Rocket as I execute a few cool spins and twists would have made Episode One even better. I charge the wall, and the lightsaber shatters upon impact. Darth Sidious won’t be happy, but them’s the breaks here in the gritty city.

  I step back and equip my L.O.O.K.E.R. Gun, item 172. It’s a bit of a longshot, but maybe I can razzle-dazzle Festung Mondegreen and hypnotize my way in. It puts on a pretty impressive discoball show, even if I do say so myself, but the dazzling rays of light do absolutely nothing to Dolly’s fortress. In retrospect, it was a stupid idea, but if it’d worked, it wouldn’t have been stupid, which is innovation in a nutshell.

  What else, what else …

  I give the list a scroll and stop at item 101, my Roger Rabbit portable hole. I slap the portable hole on the wall, back up, and take a diving leap at the hole. The hole performs exactly as advertised, and I’m deposited on the other side of the fortress, amidst the beer cans, used needles, takeaway coffee cups, and Wendy’s Hut fast food wrappers collected in the slimy green bottom of the Mondegreen’s long-neglected pool.

  “Sonuvabitch.”

  I look up at the cracked diving board.

  I’ve never so much as dangled my tootsies in this pool, mainly because there’s never been any water in it, but I do remember using item 122, my duct tape, to secure an unconscious Morning Assassin to the diving board, setting item 281, a five gallon glass carboy of nitroglycerine, underneath it with item 230, my German EVA Naval mine, and item 153, a three-pack of scalable offensive hand grenades right next to the nitro. Once I climbed out of the pool and comfortably positioned myself in my Ikea Söderhamm chaise lounge, item 404, I threw doorknobs from item 266, a burlap sack full of, well, doorknobs at the glass carboy of nitroglycerine until the predictable thing happened.

  Needless to say, we both went out as a rapidly expanding cloud of vaporized e-tissue. Not the best way to start one’s day, but I’ve experienced worse.

  An idea strikes me.

  I equip Link’s hookshot, item 66, and point it the top of Dolly’s fortress. One squeeze of the trigger and a cable connects me to the building’s pigeon-poo encrusted parapet. I release the trigger and zip towards the top.

  A quick scroll towards the end of my list and I stop on item 540, an Acme Roadrunner-safe jackhammer. This is the first time I’ve had a reason to have it out, and for all the effect it has, I might just as well have left it in my inventory.

  Well, all work and no play makes Quantum a dull avatar, so it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to unlax a bit and drown my sorrows in an ethylated bevvie or two.

  I open item 79, my Kingsman Umbrella, step off the parapet, and practically perfect Quantum Poppins descends to the street in a most supercalifragilisticexpialidocious manner. The brolly returns to inventory, and the turbine whines up as I kick the aeroscycle to life. Time to raise Hell, lower Heaven, and crush everything in between.

  Devil’s Alley, here I come.

  ~*~

  Daddy’s home.

  I don’t need the light at the end of the alley to confirm that Barfly’s is still here; the sounds of a fight in the street outside is signal enough for me. Two bruisers go toe-to-toe. One shirtless, tattooed titan has a broken beer bottle in one hand and the leg of a bar stool in the other. The opposing gladiator has a trash can lid shield in one hand and eighteen inches of belt with a solid brass buckle dangling from his other fist.

  Dirty money shifts from sweaty palm to filthy paw as bets are made and covered in the surrounding crowd. A chippy with great big chesticles in a too-tight sweater and a too-short leather skirt screams and pumps her fist in the air. An old man with gin blossomed cheeks and a thicket of blackheads on his lumpy and misshapen nose froths at the mouth as he yells, “Kill! Kill! Kill!”

  The electricity in the air, that feeling of unpredictability – I live for this shit.

  When I’m with you baby, I go out of my head, and I just can’t get enough, I just can’t get enough. Even back when my days were on repeat, I still got that same excitement every time someone threw down. No matter how many times I found myself behind the eight-ball, there was comfort in knowing that all I had to do was simply die and voila, back to life, back to reality. Or some type of reality.

  Or what is reality?

  Fuggeddaboudit.

  A square-shouldered gaycat with a duck’s ass hairdo sprinkles a little something something onto the back of his hand. One big sniff and he’s howling at the moon.

  I tap on his shoulder. “Say, junior, whatchoo got there?”

  He spins around and puts his fists up.

  “Easy, pal,” I tell the gunked up gink, “you wouldn’t want it with me, trust me on that. Now I’ll ask again, whatchoo sniffin’, bub?”

  “Cat salts,” he says through chattering teeth.

  “Don’t mind if I do.” I grab him by the collar and drag him to the ground. The commotion from the fight gives me just the cover I need. Towering over him, I jam the end of my sawed off shotgun, item 21, in his cakehole. “Cough it up.”

  He tries to speak around the business end of my shotty, but all he does is make noise.

  “I said, cough it up!”

  There he goes running his gums again. Even though I get the feeling that I shouldn’t, I remove shotty’s barrel from his lips, given him just enough room to say whatever it is he’s trying to say.

  “You,” he chokes on his own spit for a second, “a copper?”

  I jam the barrel back in.

  “Last chance, buster.”

  He pat his front pocket.

  “Good.” I keep the barrel in his mouth and reach my other hand down into his pocket where I find a little plastic baggy. A quick glance at the bag and I see the image of a clown’s face printed on the plastic. “Nicky the Wig?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “I’m going to let you up now. If you open your yap or do anything but beat feet … ” He gets the crux of my gist and dissolves into the crowd.

  I saunter towards the red light over the door of an opium den cum hourly hotel twenty yards east of Barfly’s. I open the bag of crystals and take a closer look at Nicky’s goods. The texture is similar to Riotous, but the color is all cat salts.

  You only live once, unless you can’t die. I sprinkle some onto the back of my palm and equip item 308, my rolled thousand dollar bill. One end of a vintage Grover Cleveland goes up my nose and with a quick huff the cat salts hit my brain like a rocket-propelled caffeine enema with a methamphetamine chaser.

  My vision pane pulses.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Pulsey McPulseface left no trace when he tasted waste when he wasted fate away at the dawn of the day in the world of the damned in the place of the lost in lieu of the cost. Vision pane flash, image match slash latch onto something worth holding, scolding, lying, dying! Glitterbomb calm my words. The songs of the stricken the tampered and lifted and pamper-painted blasted, razed, confused and dazed.

  Whooo-cowboy!

  Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup. If there’s no one to guide you when your soul departs, then I will follow you into the dark. You shake my nerves you rattle my brain … I’m not a number, dammit, I’m a man!

  Blasted binary addition and subtraction traction and reaction!

  Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself.

  “All energy flows according to the whims of the great magnet. What a fool I was to defy him.” I slap my face, twice, three times, four times. The words continue to John Lennon leak creep out of my head. They slither while they pass they slip away across the nethersphere.

  “That’s the guy!”

  Mother superior jumped the gun!

  Sure enough, the baked bruno that I p
oached from the crowd is back with a blubber-fisted pack of rats and they’re gunning to kill but I’m a trigger happy and ready to whack.

  Ca-ching! Ca-ching! Ca-ching! Shotty is a slot machine dishing lead until everyone’s dead.

  I place my stomper on the one of the bruisers’ chest. “He got monkey finger, he shoot Coca-cola. He got blood up to his chin, got to be a killer cause if not it’s a sin!”

  Barrel in his mouth, I paint the pavement with his brains.

  “Shotty,” I tell one of my more trusted combat items, “you never let me down pal.”

  The muzzle of the gun opens like a pair of cartoon lips. “You’re a great shooter, Quantum, especially at ‘can’t miss’ range,” it tells me. “Not a bad guy either!”

  “Hey! Nobody likes a talking gun!” I toss the shotgun over my shoulder and take a pew amongst the three I’ve recently corpsified. “You know, you guys ain’t so bad.”

  My whirling head spins. My spinny head whirls. My whirling thoughts dart between my ears whistling and jiving, screaming and high-fiving. Terrible moans set the tone for the voices to follow. Chuckles from hell, I got laughter in my skull verberating in the place where my brain once shat.

  “Where am I?”

  Paranoia sweeps over me. My surroundings narrow, my life bar thins, my AA bar all but disappears. The willie-nillies practically kill me as choice words shart out of my head like endless waste into a porta-john. Figuring I got nothing left to lose, I empty what’s left of the bag of cat salts onto my waiting tongue.

  The incredible, edible cat salts. I love chicken, I love liver, cat salts, cat salts please deliver!

  My AA bar grows until it peaks at the other side of my vision pane. I activate it and rather than slowing time, time speeds up to the point where I’m falling-down-throwing-up-nauseated, and the contents of my stomach splatters the shine right off my stompers. Tangerine trees and marmalade skies – I wish! More like terrifying thunderclouds alit with jilted demonic faces. Busted flush for Steamboy_889, the accidental tomcat. Jittery bojangled arms suffocate Yours Truly as the salt wave cauterizes the wound that is my life.