by Rusty Coats
Two men in Neuromantic jumpsuits appeared behind Janak, carrying ROM discs and sharing a chuckle. When they saw me, they traded the ROMs for heaters.
The short one flicked his jaw with the copper coils of his stun. "This guy bothering you, boss?"
I chuckled, unable to help myself, and the taller pug scowled. "I dint hear nothin' funny, Casey," he said to his pal. "You hear somethin' funny?"
I pushed my fedora up. "Stop. You're killing me."
"Maybe we will," Casey said.
"Now tell me you don't like wiseguys and you're gonna teach me a lesson," I begged. "Come on, fellas. Humor me. I don't get many laughs."
Janak stared, his mouth ajar. "Maybe you need a flashlight to see how deep a hole you're digging, soldier."
My cheeks burned from smiling. It felt unnatural. "Look at your pugs and give me the line again about the future of the species. The Neuromantics lured you out of the slaughterhouse, but they didn't change your crowd. You're still a cheap, hired gun."
He scowled. "And you're still a traitor."
"Because I won't march in your little parade?"
"Because you're working for Jenner Van Meter."
I watched the copters fly off. "Everyone seems to know my business these days."
"Maybe you should take that as a hint," Janak said. "A privacy hack who can't keep a secret might want to look into a new line of work."
"I'm too old for new tricks."
"We could teach you," Casey sneered.
Janak gave me a patronizing smile. "I don't think that’s necessary. Mr. Denys is a sensible -- if caustic -- man. I'm sure we can convince him to be reasonable."
"What's to be reasonable about?"
"Maybe you want to tell us what you've been doing all night," he said. "Maybe you want to tell us where. And with who."
"And if I don't?"
"You're a smart man."
I decided Rita deserved better than to have goons pounding on her door. I also decided I didn't like so many people staring over my shoulder, especially fascists who thought it was their duty to tidy up the future.
I showed him empty palms. "I've got nothing for you. Sorry."
"You're not playing this very smart. Not smart at all."
"If I was smart," I said, "I guess I'd be a Neuromantic."
"Look, Denys. I don't want to watch these two gentlemen turn you into charred pork over a pesky ghost."
I squinted hard. "Who said anything about a ghost?"
His grin was as thin as a trout line. "Me. Spooky, eh?"
"Look," I spat, "I've got a client and I'm doing my job. I'm not taking on your holy Crusade. But look at you. Cornering me in an alley with your two stubbies and giving me static. Tell me, spaceman, where do you fit into my puzzle?"
"Just giving a sucker some advice," he said. "Come clean and drop the case. Then we're all friendly again."
"We were never friendly," I said. "And we're twice as unfriendly now."
Janak let out a long breath, then shrugged and said, "All right, boys. I’ve exhausted all diplomatic alternatives. Teach this man some manners." He turned to leave and said over his shoulder, "See you in the new frontier, Jack."
The goons came closer, wanting to poke me in the alley. I backed up, shaking my head. Over how too many people knew who I was working for and what I was doing. Over getting zapped in an alley by two hobbits. Over bad, bad luck.
"We're dialin' it to seven," Casey said, adjusting his heater.
"That'll shut your mouth for a few hours," not-Casey said, raising his stun.
Suddenly the wool blankets covering the junkies around us swept aside, revealing packs of feral children. They were screaming an attack yelp -- Chee! Chee! Chee! -- and quickly surrounded Janak's gunmen like metal filings on a magnet.
Janak's eyes went wide as the children clawed the heaters out of the pugs' hands, then started climbing their trenchcoats, seeking their soft wet eyes.
"Hey! Jesus! Hey, offa me ya little rats! Jeeee-zus!"
Now the children were everywhere, boiling out of the alley like hornets. They brought the men to the ground. Their fedoras rolled away, exposing pink scalps. The men screamed, but the children were relentless, tearing at their Neuromantic jumpsuits.
Janak unholstered his own stun and blasted three children. They fell and were pushed aside by others, who continued stripping the men. Janak raised his heater again and one of the kids hurled a jagged ROM disc. Its sharp edges winked rainbows in flight, then dug a gash into his hand, dislodging the heater and spurting blood.
I looked at the boy who'd winged Janak. He smiled broken teeth, dreadlocks bouncing against his jade eyes, and held out his hand. I reached for it, thinking he wanted to shake, but instead found a clutch of ROMs. The ones he'd taken earlier.
I nodded. "Thanks, Ferret."
"Welcome, Denys."
He glanced over his shoulder. Janak had aroused the datacops and six of them were coming, stuns drawn.
"Kee-cho! Kee-cho!" Ferret called. The children broke from their attack and scrambled down the alley, bare feet slapping pavement and glass and grit.
By the time the cops arrived, the children had disappeared into a sewer grate. Janak gave me a ferocious stare, then glanced at his thugs, at the dark pool spreading beneath their ravaged necks. His men stared at the sky with empty, bloody sockets.
AVALON VI: Monk
An anemic sun burned through the grime on my apartment windows as I ate a simulated egg and hard toast, then dressed to go see Monk. My Tremayne was soggy and limp, but it was my only suit, so I pressed it until it hissed.
The hardwood floors of Kenosha Arms echoed as I walked past the empty apartments under the filthy skylights. The building had good bones but was losing its fight with the leprosy of neglect. Kenosha Arms once catered to upper-crust hackers during the heyday of the Avalon Project, offering vaulted ceilings and spectacular views of the Campus. But after Prohibition, hackers fled for Oregon’s digital sweatshops and the Mission traded its lofty purpose for junkies and lost souls. Now, Kenosha Arms belonged to the courts, slouching toward demolition. Until then, rent was cheap and neighbors were few, and you learned to ignore the ghosts haunting the halls.
In the lobby, I saw Regan, who was not a ghost. Regan was the house detective, paid to keep out junkies and, when things were slow, work maintenance for the twelve renters. I rapped the desk and waited until he lifted the derby over his massive nose to tell him I was going out. "I didn't want you to worry about me," I said.
Regan rubbed his wide-set eyes. "Nevah happen," he said, his Brooklyn accent still as thick as the day he got off the Tube. "Now git outta heah. I'm busy."
I glanced around the vacant lobby and said, “Downright frantic.”
Kenosha Arms was two blocks from the WPA Administration building, the outermost structure of the Campus, and the afternoon hour worked in my favor, since most junkies were already in their gloves. At the LaRue Hotel, I looked for Moon but found only an empty stoop; Moon had clocked out.
The WPA purchased eight blocks of warehouses to build the Campus. Some buildings were retrofitted; others were razed. Administration was a three-story automobile dealership that went belly-up when nuclear war killed the commuter culture. It stood on the north corner of Campus, opposite Compression, and once you could see lines of applicants, shuffling their feet on a Chevrolet logo, waiting for their names to be drawn. Prohibition brought looters and the torches of Sons of David arsonists to the lobby. As the Sysops seized control, the datacops encased the Campus in a wall of resin bricks and crowned the tomb with razor wire. Beyond the fence was what remained of the Campus, but getting through was like punching a hole in Dover's cliffs.
But if encryption teaches you anything, it’s this: Every lock has a key.
The resin bricks were clammy as I felt along the edges for a sash. Ten minutes later, I found the trigger brick, shoved its corner and stood back. The white-resin wall creased, then opened, providing a portal just wide enough for me to wedge
through.
Administration still smelled like mesquite and the second and third stories had collapsed like pancakes. Glass crunched under my feet as the resin door slid shut.
For a moment I was blind in the dark lobby. But then I saw a red light and stepped toward it. After falling over a burnt desk, I saw that the light framed a cellar door. I flung it open, revealing a ladder made out of broken furniture and elevator cable.
At the bottom of the ladder was Monk, who held an antique stun rifle.
"Say your prayers, sinner!" he shouted, then pulled the trigger. The rifle kicked and tossed him backward as the lightning arced toward me.
I let go of the door in time and watched the blast turn the corrugated metal into a griddle. Monk was almost sixty, but his trigger finger needed no repairs.
"Monk!" I called. "It's Jack Denys. Taylor and Ramona's boy. Remember me?"
Monk hit the door with another blast. Sparks jumped through the crack and zapped my ankles. I kicked the door with my heel. "Knock it off, Monk! It's Denys!"
The next blast tore the door open and Monk lit up the lobby with a thunderstorm until the battery pack sputtered and quit. While I brushed charcoal off my Tremayne, Monk banged his hand on the stock, then called out: "Jack? That really you?"
I peered over the edge and saw him squinting up the ladder, crouching to compensate for a birth defect that had given him a full-sized right leg and a runt that ended where his left knee should have been. A snowy tuft of hair framed his bald dome and his brown, leathery cheeks ticked with the first traces of a smile.
"How are you Monk?"
He laughed. "Been better. You?"
I started down the ladder and said, "I've been worse."
Monk's parlor was the original depot to Avalon, where President Geddes and U.N. Premier Illona strapped inside second-generation scuba suits and walked into the digital prairie to cut the tape. Now the suits were gone, but the four transport booths remained, half-shell Lucite beakers gleaming on the black Vitrolite stage, surrounded by a control panel, a crescent-shaped mass of electronics spanning the stage like a raised orchestra pit. Dust caked the stage, thick everywhere except for the transport booth on the left, which had been scuffed clean from recent footprints.
For a backdrop the stage used a holographic portrait of the city-in-progress, with Avalon’s skyline emerging from the monochrome Flux, the buildings only partially finished. During Construction the portrait changed daily, even hourly. Now it was frozen.
"Does it still look like that?" I asked, staring at the holographic skyline.
"Nah," he said spitefully. "She's painted up and trashy. The pimps pull her chains and make her dance for nickels. She's an old whore now."
I pointed at the scuffed footprints leading to Booth Four, undoubtedly Monk's handicapped stride. "But you still visit her, don't you, Monk."
He stared at the fiber-optic pipe, and spoke to the beaker, the forgotten front door to the city. "She's still alive under all that lipstick. Most people don't see her anymore, they just see the whore houses and fight clubs." A smile crossed his dark lips. "She's clever that way. When people go there, they only see reflections of themselves."
"What do you see, Monk?"
"Possibility,” he said quietly. “Maybe the only possibility left in the world.”
Monk had been one of the oldest recruits, an expert in tactile delivery. The WPA stole him from a carnival in pre-Depression Florida, where he designed harnesses for the virtual roller coasters. His radical designs took immersion suits past limits we'd thought were absolutes. The vests he designed weighed less than five pounds and delivered illusionary vertigo and gravity by force-injecting carbon dioxide into a grid of Mylar pockets -- thousands per suit, mimicking the sensation of touch. The degree of inflation was determined by the action pumping into your retinas from a shoulder-mount VR helmet, processed through the computing muscle of a Mensa and wired through a fiber-optic bungee attached to your scuba suit. It seemed like magic at the time.
"Why do you keep going there, Monk?"
"I’m prospecting. Wrecking Ball was an efficient bastard, but a lot survived, buried under Digerati accounts or just floating out there like dandelion tuft. So I prowl the Flux, fish for memories, bring 'em back and string 'em together." He glanced at the cityscape on the wall. "Someday Avalon will shake these looters off her back like a case of mites. When she does, people are gonna be happy these heirlooms weren't lost."
"You're forgetting the feds," I said. "They're still launching tapeworms, hoping to crack the fabric. If they get rid of Avalon, they figure they'll lick SDS and CNI."
"That disease is a bogeyman with a big advertising budget. Zamora's cult bankrolls the research, which tells me it ain’t exactly science." His eyes glistened. "I tell ya, Jack, somebody had designs on our city before we set the first brick."
"Mmmm."
"I'm serious," he said. "Avalon surges with so many crosscurrents ya can't even count 'em. Lots of people want the city for themselves. Lots of 'em."
After Prohibition railroaded through the International Congress, conspiracy theories buzzed through Campus -- and Jasper -- like dogma. Even my parents fell under the spell; my mother blamed the Neuromantics and fought like a wildcat to give testimony to the United Nations that the programmer's disease was a fake, siding with a Surgeon General named DeMaster. Neither of them lived long enough to testify.
"When Avalon returns, I'll be ready. I've got thirty-seven percent of the University files from the syllabus, a handful of operas and a few heats from the first Olympics." He stared at the panel's infrareds and shrugged. "It's an excuse, Jack. I just miss her."
He led me to a sitting area of low-slung sofas. The wallpaper had warped from halon sprayed on the fires above, but otherwise the room was as immaculate as a museum exhibit. He pulled out a decanter of Ephedria from a maple smoke stand.
"You're still in the city, I guess."
"Kenosha Arms. It echoes at night. But the rent's my style."
"I'd rather live in a hole." He smiled. "I guess I do."
"A little heavy on the nostalgia," I said, looking around. "But it suits you."
"You're one to talk about nostalgia," he said. Then: "How's your parole?"
"I'm a blue-ribbon con. I do my work and I make them happy."
"Smithsonian work?"
"Yeah."
"Ahhh!" he spat, and handed me a glass. "Bureaucratic busywork. A waste of good material. They oughta put ya with the Department."
"Data enforcement?"
"Yeah."
"Not on your life."
"You'd still get to ride the nets," he said, then toasted the reverie. "Jack Denys on the nets again -- imagine that! You were like a phantom back then -- cookin' down some pipe in Hamburg while they were lookin' for ya in Flagstaff, just a blur, Jack, just a blur. Like hot coal up an air shaft. Your parents would ask me what you were into and I didn't know where to begin. They suspected, but they didn't want to know, not really. When the feds busted you, it broke their hearts, but they weren't surprised -- even if I'd told your parents about Icarus, they couldn't 'a stopped ya. Nobody could." His smile cracked. "But look at ya now. Livin' in a Mission flop, helpin' feds fill their time capsules, lookin' backward. At least if ya went to work for the datacops, you'd have a purpose."
The Ephedria went down hard. "I've got a purpose."
"Nah. Ya got a hole in your heart, and every time ya start to care about something, it leaks out. So now ya don't even try." He slugged his Ephedria. “I lost my two closest friends the day your parents died. I never expected to lose you, too. But you're just as dead, Jack. Ya just don't know it."
“You charging by the drink or by the hour, Monk?”
He gestured at the beakers. "Maybe if ya just plugged in one more time," he said. "If ya just touched her --"
"I don't want to touch her!"
Monk leapt back, blanching. My hand shook and I realized I was out of booze.
"I hope you're
carryin' something other than that grudge, Jack," he said. "A man that bitter might someday find out he's forgotten what sugar tastes like."
"I still like sugar," I said, filling my glass. "I just can't seem to find any."
As the Ephedria spit-polished our synapses, I filled him in. When I was done, he said: "So you're here 'cause ya need a pipe to the city, right?"
I nodded. "Postcard. I just want to see this guy. No immersion."
He rolled his eyes. "Of course not." Then he glanced at the dust on the beakers. "That won't be a problem. I'm glad to help, even if you're workin' for Van Meter. I'd rather see ya workin' for the devil than takin' pity from the Lord."
I nodded thanks. "When the trap snares my ghost, it'll ring my hat. I figure ten minutes, in and out."
He stared at the city of the hologram, thinking out loud. "We'll bounce your signal through two speakeasies in the Mission so they can't trace ya back here. I used the combination yesterday and didn't see a flare. It's tight."
"Good. So’s my trap. The only way he can bust out is by breaking his cloak. I want to be there for that."
"Whoever it is ain't gonna like it when he starts settin' off alarms."
I thumbed my fedora higher on my forehead. "It's just a lockout. He'll think --"
"He’ll think someone's onto him." Monk shook his head. "This don't sound like a junkie, Jack. This fella knows Avalon and knows her good."
"You've seen him?"
He stared at me, dark eyes like onyx. "No. But I've seen ghosts. I never see them straight-on, but out of the corner of my goggles, I can see the scenery shift. Now, either I'm goin' crazy or the city's got a bad case of the gremlins."
He finished his Ephedria. "Here's my take. Since the spook is runnin' on such good gauze, I understand why Jenny hired ya. But look: Your trap may catch him, but don't think that's gonna be the end of it."
"That's the job," I said. "One ghost. Then I'm out."
He chuckled a thick rolling sound. "Right."
Nothing to do now but wait, so Monk pulled out another bottle and filled me in.
Since Prohibition, Monk made a living repairing black-market scuba suits. Danny Marrs was his biggest client, a Digerati half-wit almost as powerful as Van Meter. Marrs ran six joints in the virtual city, the biggest being the Tarot Club, where Madame Sax read your fortune in Avalon's bitstream while the brass bands blew Creole. Marrs' other clubs catered to the fetish crowds and required custom suits. Monk was his tailor.
