by John Meaney
Major Reilly seemed pretty serious, thought Yoshiko, but said nothing.
Something wet dripped onto her cheek. Above, at a drifting table, revellers clinked glasses and laughed uproariously, unheeding.
As they flew over mist-shrouded woods, Maggie raised the subject of LuxPrime technology.
“There's practically no info about it in EveryWare,” she said.
“I'm not surprised.” Vin must have been lightly interfaced, or not at all, with the flyer. Her attention was on Maggie and Yoshiko. “We don't discuss it much.”
“Please, don't talk about anything which makes you uncomfortable.”
“No problem. I guess you want your audience to think what it must feel like to be Tetsuo right now. I can't imagine.” Vin shook her head. “I'm no more conscious of my implanted plexcores than of my brain.”
“Plexcores?”
“Well—”
Yoshiko half-listened to them, feeling very tired. Down below were a few miserable sheep, bigger than the Terran norm. Soon, though, the pastureland was gone, swallowed by rolling mists.
“VSI comprises smartatom sheets, folded throughout the brain. Interfaces to the plexcores.”
“So a neural impulse can start in the organic brain, and continue seamlessly into the plexcore?”
Maggie's really very good at this, thought Yoshiko.
“And vice versa. Thought is distributed, almost holographic,” said Vin. “Consciousness is an emergent property of competing waves sweeping across the brain…or across brain-plus-plexcores.”
“So you've just increased, ah, processing capacity?” Maggie paused. “Or are there qualitative differences?”
“How can I tell? I've never been an unenhanced human. Er…Sorry.”
“No need to be embarrassed.” Maggie grinned. “I'm used to being stupid.”
Vin laughed.
“What about Skein?” Yoshiko surprised herself by asking.
Vin's laughter died. “I can't imagine life without it. That's why Septor hated Earth so much, I think. We had fast-comm links between the three of us, but our Skein access was limited to gateways through EveryWare. It was appalling.”
“Like fish out of water?” suggested Maggie.
“Exactly so.”
Entwined curves, like pale-blue nautilus shells, nestled among pristine lawns. Maggie's hotel.
Vin brought the flyer in very fast past some tennis courts, then dropped smoothly to land.
“Thanks, Vin,” said Maggie. “As soon as I've picked up Jason, I'll start work on my article.”
As the cockpit membrane softened, Yoshiko suddenly remembered what Vin had said to Major Reilly.
“Vin? Didn't you mention something about a sponsor?”
“For upraise? Yes, that's a requirement.” Vin frowned. “Tetsuo was sponsored by Rafael de la Vega.”
“Maybe Maggie could—”
“I've met him!” Maggie gripped Yoshiko's arm. “When I was interviewing someone at the Skein conference. I'm sure that was the name. Do you know him, Vin?”
“Not really, but Lori, my soul-mother, does. Very sexy, she thinks.”
“And—?”
“And she's right, but sometimes he makes my blood run cold. I can't say why.” With no physical gesture, Vin caused a holo still to appear: a dark-featured man, extraordinarily handsome, with piercing eyes.
“That's him,” said Maggie. “Rashella introduced us.”
Vin froze. “You mean Rashella Syntharinova?”
“Yes. I was interviewing her. Why? What's the matter?”
“It's not been released to the lower—ah, the public access levels, but Skein's awash with the news. Rashella Syntharinova killed herself.”
“Suicide? Are you sure?”
Vin looked from Maggie to Yoshiko.
“That's what everyone says.”
“Which would you recommend?” asked a coarse-looking man, raising his collar against the night's cold breeze.
“That one's OK.” His companion pointed at a floating bubble, which descended to the cobbled street.
The bubble's membrane opened, and a scantily dressed woman beckoned the man inside.
Rafael, from his seat under a glowglobe, watched as prostitute and client drifted upwards, into the darkness.
He pulled his dark heated cloak warmly about him.
The remaining man walked underneath bobbing spheres containing glamorous-looking girls, some performing dance steps, then stopped below one whose occupant was a huge woman, standing with her massive thighs apart. He gestured, and the bubble descended. He stepped inside and then that sphere, too, lifted and was gone.
Rafael stood up, unobtrusively pulled a smartfilm mask across his face, and continued his peregrination through the Floating Worlds district. No one glanced at him; the mask convincingly altered his features.
Dark alleys, bright sleaze: holos beckoning the unwary and the desperate into clubs where any taste was catered for. He walked, enjoying the feel of hopeless hunger which hovered behind the counterfeit glamour.
He turned away from the crowded main thoroughfare. The streets grew quieter, with unlit stretches between the clubs, and fewer floating bubbles. The lower end of the market plied their trade from doorways and street corners. Some of them bore black eyes, chipped teeth.
Rafael pulled up his cloak's hood, hiding his headgear.
A girl turned to look at Rafael. She stood casually, but her eyes were reptilian, hard and calculating.
“Show you a good time?”
Coarse accent, makeup thickly applied. Young. Legs in stockings, or perhaps a tattooed web—a centuries-old courtesans’ code. Narrow hips. Much scrawnier than the mature Luculentae that Rafael preferred.
“Why not?”
He followed her into a bleak hallway. Paint flaked from dank walls, and the corridor reeked of bodily fluids and despair.
The girl stopped and turned. “Thirteen credits, all the way.”
Light from a fitful glowglobe cast the lines of her young/old face into unflattering relief.
Wordlessly, Rafael held up his anonymous cred-ring to her sensor.
“Follow me, babe.”
His skin tingled. Surveillance system.
<<
Ignore.
His smartmask, which had already altered his features, was extending itself to cover hair and exposed flesh with an invisibly thin layer, melding at the throat with his monomolecular suit. His hands, too, were protected.
He would leave no trace of himself behind, in this place of tawdry dreams and disappointed fantasies.
The girl's room was bare, furnished only with a narrow bed and a stool. A blurry holo of a small house stood on the window sill. Her home? What kind of childhood had she led?
“Let's get you ready, honey.”
“If you like.” Rafael threw back his cloak, then ran a finger down her slender, fragile neck.
His senses quested, but there was no surveillance in here. Unless the girl yelled, her hidden help would not come to her assistance.
“Oh, yes, baby—” She closed her eyes and rocked her hips in a parody of pleasure.
She pressed herself against him.
“No—”
His fingers dug like steel claws, constricting her arteries, and her breathing quickened, like a runner at the marathon's end. His own excitement mounted.
Come on, fight. That's it. Fight for life.
She struggled.
Rafael's breath, too, was coming hard and fast.
She fought and kicked, and Rafael's heart thumped wildly with pleasure, ever faster as her strength slowly ebbed. Finally, in a nicety of timing, he climaxed just as death rattled in her crushed throat and life's light faded from her small pale eyes.
He let the body slump to the floor.
It lay there, twisted unnaturally. Already, a stench was rising from the soiled meat.
Rafael gathered his cloak and swept out of the room, down the ha
llway—ignoring the worthless surveillance system—and out into the street.
Power thrummed inside him.
At the corner, two big men took a step in his direction, perhaps just to sell him some illegal pleasure, but he met their eyes and they glanced away.
Power.
He used the underground tube system, in preference to an air-cab. As his car pulled into Lucis Central, it detached itself from the rest of the train and rose up a vertical shaft, and deposited him in a small cobbled plaza.
An unarmed proctor nodded to him, and Rafael smiled back. In the Floating Worlds district, only two kilometres away, the proctor would have had a partner and a drone, and carried a hand graser.
As Rafael walked, he retuned his cloak to a gaudy blue, slashed through with gold. He reconfigured his smartmask into an obvious caricature of a wolf.
The Lupus Festival was in full swing. Crowds were thronging Pietanaro Square, and the neighbouring Vitanova Gardens. Rafael took one of the suspended silver walkways, bought a drink from a vendor, and stood against a rail, admiring the dark trees and their bright symbiotic blooms lit by a thousand dancing glowglobes.
Flute music drifted through the leaves.
“Happy Lupus!”
A Luculenta, arm in arm with two Fulgidi—her staff, perhaps: it was festival time—greeted Rafael. She tuned her wolf mask to transparency. Her face was lovely.
“Happy Lupus,” Rafael replied, but kept his mask opaque. It was the most polite way to decline an invitation to join them at an opera or poetry contest.
She smiled without regret, and continued along the walkway. Elegant people passed below, going about their genteel celebrations. Floating Worlds, and the other Lowtown districts: did they ever think of them?
Rafael breathed deeply of the scented night air. It was so wonderful to be alive.
A light rain was falling as Rafael reached a small paved square, and he headed for the bright amber helix which advertised a taxi-pad.
A human driver opened the old-fashioned gull door for Rafael—as though he couldn't have gestured or spoken himself—and climbed into his separate cockpit only when he was sure Rafael was comfortable in the back.
Bright lights dropped away below them.
During the twenty-minute flight to Rafael's town house, he lay back and thought of the nameless little Fulgida wretch, and the wild light in her eyes—overcoming her cold detachment—which had faded as she died.
If he could somehow subsume the mind of an unenhanced woman, the way he could with a Luculenta…Would that make it more satisfying? Or less?
He suspected a Fulgida mind would be a petty thing, too light and insignificant to bother with.
“Here we are, sir.”
The courtyard lit up as Rafael stepped out. Not bothering with a cred-ring, he lightly entered Skein and transferred fare and generous tip to the driver's account. Then he stood back, and watched the taxi lift up into the darkness and disappear.
Something was wrong.
There were no squeals of alarm from the house systems, but subtle indications from external sensors—unnatural air-flow patterns, few nocturnal birds—were causing its AIs to quest heuristically through knowledge space. It was as though the house itself were uneasy.
Something massive passed across the alpha moon, blocking it from sight.
Blue bands of light grew from points and strobed backwards across delta-shapes. Three proctors’ flyers, descending from the night.
A uniformed woman with cropped grey hair alighted from the nearest flyer, and walked up to Rafael. Three armed proctors hung back, watching.
The crews of the other two flyers remained inside.
“Luculentus Rafael Garcia de la Vega?”
“At your service.” Rafael bowed.
“I'm Major Reilly. You may be able to help us.”
“My pleasure.”
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