by D L Young
“You think it’s funny,” he whispered, “watching me sweat? Maybe I turn the tables now and watch you sweat. I think that might be even more funny.”
Beatrice smiled. “Probably not a good idea.” If she felt at all threatened by the hustler, she gave no indication of it. She gestured to the target. “Go on, let’s see how you do.” As she said it, Maddox noticed she held a second, identical Ruger at her side. He hadn’t seen her take it out, didn’t even know she had a second gun. Lozano seemed to notice it at the same time.
A wry smile crept across the hustler’s face. He shook a finger at Beatrice. “I like you, Bright Eyes. We’re gonna be good friends.”
The hustler rotated toward the target, holding the Ruger no more capably than the kid. He raised the weapon, fired, missed. The kid burst out in laughter, pointing and stomping his feet. Lozano turned to Beatrice. “Let me shoot him in the foot, please? Just to teach him a lesson.” Abruptly, the kid stopped laughing.
Beatrice held out her hand. “Give.”
Lozano passed her the pistol. “It’s a woman’s gun, this little thing,” he snorted as he handed it over. “I’m used to a man’s gun.”
Beatrice turned to Maddox. “Want to take a shot, salaryman?”
He showed her his hands. “No, thanks. Not my specialty.”
“What about your turn?” Tommy asked her.
“I don’t need a turn,” she said.
“Hey, boss,” Lozano said to Maddox, spreading his hands out. “Why we wasting all this time on target practice? We got a job to do.”
“Yeah,” the kid agreed. “Beer belly’s right. We need to get to jacking.”
“Watch your mouth, boy,” Lozano warned.
“That wasn’t target practice,” Maddox said. “That was a test.” He nodded at Beatrice. “Our security here wanted to see if either of you could handle a gun. I think it’s safe to say she’s not going to let either of you pack anything on this job.”
“Bah!” Lozano waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t need some woman’s pistol. That’s not my business.” He tapped the side of his head. “This is my weapon, right here.”
“Come on,” Tommy prodded her, “let’s see you hit it, Miss Badass. Bet you don’t do any better than I did.”
She looked at the kid for a moment, a pistol in each hand, then stepped to the balcony’s rail, staring out at the target. When her hands raised the pistols, Maddox drew in a breath. He’d never seen a person move so quickly. He flinched at the crack-crack-crack of gunfire, a volley fired so rapidly he couldn’t count the shots. Across the warehouse, the light fixture danced as if animated by some manic puppeteer, sparks flying, pieces exploding.
She stopped firing, lowered the pistols back to her sides, and turned to Maddox. “Just so we’re clear, salaryman, I don’t like this arrangement any more than you do. So how about we just get it over with and get back to our lives?”
Her eyes still locked on his, she raised her left arm and fired without looking back at the target. The single shot severed the cable, and the fixture dropped like a rock to the warehouse floor.
Maddox stared at the broken, frayed cable dangling in the air. He thrust out his lower lip and nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
7 - Paradise
“In a hover, doing biz,” the boy Tommy said. “If Dog and Pancho and all them could see me now, bruh, they’d so shit theirselves.”
The kid had his face pressed his face against the passenger window like it was his first time in a hover. Which it probably was, Maddox guessed. He removed a cigarette from his case and pressed it between his lips.
“Nonsmoking flight, salaryman,” Beatrice said from the driver’s seat. Maddox frowned and returned the cigarette to the case.
The hover glided north through the City’s canyons, the transit lanes crowded with rush-hour traffic. There was no rain, and the sun made a rare appearance, revealing the buildingscape’s countless telltales of age and disrepair, an old person’s skin under a doctor’s bright examination light. Flaws normally obscured by the City’s near-permanent sheen of humidity and the forgiving diffusion of an overcast sky. Scores of dull, yellowed window glass. Aging gray concrete streaked with a century’s worth of grime and bird shit. Rainbow explosions of graffiti reaching twenty stories and sometimes higher. Hiverise after hiverise passed by, housing untold hundreds of thousands, teeming like insects. Like ants in a mound.
“So, Miss Bright Eyes, how did you make that shot back there?” Lozano asked Beatrice, leaning forward in his seat beside Maddox. “Without looking?”
“Yeah,” Tommy added, pushing his wobbly square-framed government-issue specs up the bridge of his nose. “How’d you do that? That there was some straight-up voodoo shit if I ever saw it.”
Beatrice had the hover on autodrive as she gazed out at the traffic. “Lucky shot.”
“Sure, sure.” Lozano shook a finger at her. “Lucky shot, my Argentinian ass. With those pretty eyes of yours, you don’t need luck, yes?”
Maddox had speculated along similar lines when she’d made the shot. It had been a hell of a demonstration. He suspected she had the kind of killtech mod used by elite infantry, SEALs and rangers and such. Targeting software that sent biofeedback to nanofibers embedded into arm and shoulder muscles. Once you tagged a target, you could hit it with your eyes closed or in the dark. The military removed all killtech when a soldier decommissioned for the obvious reasons. You would no more want a soldier returning to civilian life with his killtech mods that you’d want him doing so with his machine gun or grenade launcher or his tank for that matter. Before the mercenary Beatrice, Maddox had never seen a private citizen with infantry-grade killtech. Heard rumors, of course, but there were always rumors. The woman’s unsighted shot erased any doubts Maddox might have had about her competence. The security part of this gig, at least, was solid. The bright-eyed Beatrice was a stone-cold pro.
Lozano settled back in his seat, turned to Maddox. “Boss, don’t you find it amazing we don’t know each other? We must run in the same circles, yes?” Behind his spec lenses, the hustler’s eyes blinked a recognizable sequence. He was running a facetrace on Maddox, and not being terribly inconspicuous about it. Maddox pretended not to notice, letting the man waste his time. When Maddox had started with the company, he’d gone to some trouble and not a small bit of expense to rewrite his personal history. In case things didn’t work out with Latour-Fisher, a sanitized background could help him land another legit job. If the hustler’s trace came back with anything at all, it would show only the history Maddox had concocted for himself. A lie of wealth and privilege, of corporati parents and private schools and upper-floor entitlement. Maddox watched as Lozano’s brow furrowed in confusion and disappointment, as if he’d expected to find a long rap sheet and a string of convictions.
“You could be less obvious about it,” he told the hustler.
Lozano played dumb. “About what?”
“That trace.”
The hustler grinned. “Very good story you got there, boss. I’m sure most people buy it, yes?”
Maddox didn’t react, concealing his surprise behind a blank stare. Had Hahn-Parker told Lozano about Maddox’s past? It didn’t seem likely, since Maddox hadn’t been given background info on any of the rest of them. Maybe the past he’d manufactured for himself was a bit too innocent, too good to be believed. Or maybe this hustler was simply more clever than he appeared to be.
Lozano scratched his chin. “A lot of trouble to go to, yes? And not cheap.”
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
Lozano lifted an eyebrow. “Maybe it’s true, then. Maybe you are a salaryman who knows how to datajack, like that Hahn-Parker said. Maybe you’re not hiding some other life.” He chuckled as if to say he believed nothing of the sort, but he didn’t pursue it further.
Earlier, and more discreetly than Lozano had, Maddox had run his own traces on the hover’s three other occupants. Lozano’s was an unsurprising history
. Court-sealed records from his childhood, a telltale of juvenile delinquency. Petty thievery during his youth, moving on to assault and a few minor busts for narcotics. A two-year stint in federal prison during his twenties. Conspiracy to distribute illegal firearms. The two-year part caught his attention. Two years for a crime that usually bought you ten to twenty. He must have flipped on a partner in exchange for a reduced sentence. In the decade since his release—if you didn’t count the three divorces—Lozano had managed to keep a clean record. The hustler’s legal history was a personal narrative of someone ambitious, self-serving, and smart enough to learn from the mistakes of his youth.
Tommy Park had no sealed records, which meant the kid had never been arrested. No formal education beyond primary school, not that he would have learned much in whatever passed for a school in the kid’s shithole stomping ground of Hunts Point, a rough Bronx neighborhood across the East River from Rikers Island. For a kid his age—fourteen according to his birth records—his data profile looked pretty typical: high-volume daily consumption of gaming channels and porn feeds taking up most of his waking hours. Boys will be boys.
Then there was Beatrice. He found exactly what he’d expected, which was absolutely nothing. No ID, zero history. She was an off-grid ghost. The best of her profession usually were.
So that was his crew. Hired muscle, a hustler, and a green kid. Not the best hand he’d ever been dealt, but he’d have to make it work.
“We’re going to have to park a few blocks south,” she announced.
Maddox leaned forward. A red warning light blinked on the hover’s dashboard. “What is it?”
“Looks like some kind of demonstration. Cops shut down all the parking grids in an eight-block radius.”
Maddox peered out the window as they descended from the transit lanes. Maybe ten blocks ahead, a sizable crowd had amassed, thousands clogging the streets.
A minute later they settled at street level and parked a handful of blocks from their destination, a Manhattan Valley hiverise named Paradise. As the hover doors lifted and the four exited the vehicle, the protest’s loud, restless rumble filled their ears.
“Let’s go around this mess,” Beatrice said, raising her voice above the din. “Not worth risking our necks over.”
Maddox nodded in agreement, and she led them west, down 118th Street, skirting the rear of the crowd. As they crossed Clayton Boulevard, the entirety of the assembled throng came into view. The four stopped and gawked.
“Holeeey shit,” Tommy said, whistling. “Gotta be ten thousand people up in this.”
Protest demonstrations weren’t an uncommon sight in the City’s canyons, and this was one was bigger than most. At the front there was a speaker on a raised platform, a woman with short white hair whose neck strained as she shouted and stalked back and forth like some caged animal. Three meters above her head, a holo version of her face, blown up tenfold, followed her every movement.
“AIs don’t breathe like you and me,” she hollered, her amplified voice reverberating against the towering facades. “They don’t love like you and me. They don’t have hearts or flesh and blood. AIs can’t make babies. They don’t cry when they’re hurt. Don’t laugh when they’re happy.”
Fists raised, voices roared. Agitation, palpable anger permeated the air. “Why would anyone want to join with such a thing?” the woman blared. “Why would anyone want to give up what makes us special? To surrender our human sovereignty to machines? To be nothing more than puppets on strings, obeying every command from an AI master? We’re calling on our leaders, our courts, to stop this insanity, this suicidal flirtation with the artificial. We must stop this madness HERE AND NOW!”
Another holo image appeared above the platform. A beautiful, slender woman wearing a flowing robe stared out at the crowd. The image zoomed to her smiling face as she tilted her head to one side and smoothed her blond hair away from behind her ear, revealing a series of small sockets. Brainjacks. The crowd jeered as the woman held up a small black rectangle of bioplastique and slotted it into one of the openings. The woman turned again toward the crowd, her smile replaced with an expressionless, inhuman stare, the pupils of her eyes glowing pale blue. The image sent a chill down Maddox’s back.
The speaker began to chant. “NO MORE ’NETTES! NO MORE ’NETTES!” She pumped her fist overhead, punctuating her words. ’Nettes, short for marionettes, the pejorative for those who illegally connected their brains to AIs. The crowd joined in, the chant growing louder with each refrain. “NO MORE ’NETTES! NO MORE ’NETTES!”
***
Ten minutes later, they arrived at their destination, the crowd noise reduced to a near-distant buzz.
Paradise was a twenty-story structure of gray brick, far wider than tall, its bulky mass stretching from 106th to 110th Streets and wedged between Broadway and Amsterdam. Deep inside, somewhere near the top floor they’d find Lozano’s man, a gear dealer named Hatano who Maddox had never heard of before this morning. The hustler swore the dealer carried all the high-end gear Maddox could possibly need. The hiverise’s facade was a graffiti tapestry of all shapes, sizes, and types. There were simple monocolor tags: KutU, Villanz, Ayleeus. There were the fat, nearly illegible letters of throw-ups that always reminded Maddox of overinflated tire bladders, rendered in intense mixtures of bright blues and greens and yellows. There were larger, complex pieces taking up huge swaths of the hiverise’s crumbling, pockmarked skin. A brown-skinned family wandering subway tunnels, lost and afraid. An enormous bloodshot eye, a single turquoise tear dripping from the corner, exaggerated and heavy like some giant water-filled bag. There was a stencil piece towering above the arched entryway, a boxy cartoon robot holding up a crying infant by the leg while laser-tatting a serial number onto the child’s back. A dozen more babies lay at the robot’s feet, half of them already numbered, the rest waiting their turn.
“You know this place?” Maddox asked Beatrice as they crossed Amsterdam.
She shook her head. “You?”
“Not for years.”
He’d come on an errand once, when he’d first partnered up with Rooney. They’d needed some specific piece of hardware, but their usual connections were out of stock. In those days Paradise was one of the City’s largest junk dumps, the kind of place you went only if you had days to bargain-hunt, digging through mountains of useless scrap metal and gear salvaged or stolen from around the City and beyond. Scavengers and pharma freaks usually snatched up anything of value.
“Paradise, they call it,” Maddox said.
“Rough?”
“Back then, not so much. More of a dump than a den of thieves.” He shrugged. “But nowadays, anybody’s guess.”
Each hiverise was a world of its own, constantly evolving with the shifting needs and desires of its impoverished populations or, just as often, the whims of its particular slumlord. Some were wildly violent anarchies, others were relatively peaceful cooperatives. In Maddox’s experience, the former far outnumbered the latter.
They approached the entryway, the cartoon robot looming ten stories above them. Two filthy children with matted hair sat smoking cigarettes on either side of the darkened, doorless entry. They sprang to their feet and blocked the path inside.
“You ain’t res’dents,” the shorter one cried.
“Entry’s a hundred a head,” the taller one demanded.
“It’s two hundred, asshole,” the shorter one snapped. “How many times I have to tell ya?”
As the pair bickered back and forth, Lozano stomped forward, grabbed them by the upper arms, and jostled them out of the way. They howled and cursed him, clutching at their shoulders. The hustler turned back to Maddox, Beatrice, and Tommy. Anger blinked away into a welcoming smile. He bowed his head slightly and flourished his arms like a restaurant host leading a party to a table. “Shall we?”
The small lobby was dark and quiet and empty of people. Where the wall met the floor, a few jagged fragments of ceramic tile jutted out like brok
en yellowed teeth, ancient remains of the exposed cement’s original covering. Broken pieces of wood lay strewn about and irregular black streaks marked the floor. Burn stains from cooking fires.
“Elevator’s this way,” Lozano said, motioning to a hallway.
“They’ve got a working elevator?” Beatrice asked. “In this place?”
Lozano grinned. “For VIPs they do.”
Maddox glanced at Beatrice, caught the roll of her eyes. Yes, he agreed silently. Crowing about VIP treatment in a place like this spoke volumes about the man, about the limits of his self-awareness. Lozano was a low-rent con who didn’t seem to know he was a low-rent con.
“Hells, yeah,” Tommy sniggered, swaggering forward. “VIPs. Melikes the sound of that.”
They followed the hustler down a hallway. Graffiti tags covered the walls. As they moved along the corridor, a low, steady thrum emanating from the building’s innards became noticeable. There was no other sound like it, Maddox mused, the hiverise’s life-throb, and no two ever seemed to be quite the same. A hodgepodge of food aromas grew stronger with each step. Fried pork and curry. Cumin and red chilis and garlic.
They exited the passageway into a bustling, noisy food bazaar. Voices assaulted them immediately in a mishmash of languages. Dozens of hands reached out from tiny food stands, frantically waving them over.
“Los mejores tacos, compadres! No hay iqual! Free drink.”
“Pork skins! Best price in Paradise.”
Lozano led them through a noisy, crowded maze of makeshift stands and kiosks. Cooks fussed over sizzling, steaming woks and tiny grills crowded with meat kabobs. What kind of meat, Maddox didn’t want to guess. Barefoot children scurried back and forth, runners replenishing supplies. The younger ones dashed about with armfuls of plastic bottles filled with peppers and cooking oil and beer. The older ones trudged more slowly, hauling thirty-kilo bags atop curved, straining backs. The air was heavy with fried oil, and after only a few moments Maddox felt as if he had a thin layer of it covering the skin of his face and arms. There were no chairs, and the standing customers for the most part ignored the four of them, concentrating on their bowls of noodles and tortilla-wrapped meats. A few diners threw wary-eyed glances at Beatrice. Despite the muting effects of her casual, unremarkable clothes, she still projected a don’t-fuck-with-this-one vibe the streetwise instantly recognized.
