by Mark Budz
"In return, I give you some luggage to take with you. Simple as that."
She met his gaze. Was he trying to bait her? Trap her? His eyes, flat as tarnished brass, revealed nothing.
"What kind of luggage?"
He winked at her. Grinned.
"No." Her jaw tightened.
"Think about it," he said.
When he was gone she'd swallowed, out of fear and relief; felt the votive flicker of possibility warm her waxy breath.
And quickly snuffed it out.
Two weeks later, one of the bellboys didn't show up for Work. He'd taken a job in Moscow, a coworker told her.
A few days later, another boy took his place. A new hire. It went on like that, once every few months. Quietly, unobtrusively, employees transferred to another world, and to a new life. Nadice sensed Mateus watching her, the fishhook snag of his gaze tugging at her, wearing her down.
It was only a matter of time. He seemed to know this, even if she didn't. He could see things she couldn't. Signs written on her face that were invisible, or unrecognizable, when reflected in a mirror.
Then the baby came.
It was as if his eyes had... not put the child there, but watched it take shape inside of her.
Somehow he'd known that she would find herself in this position. He'd known that at some point she would need a way out. He wanted to help her, he said. But in return he expected to be helped.
Nadice hadn't even known she was pregnant until a routine biomed scan brought it to the attention of the Atherton on-site physician.
"Conception occurred four days ago," the doctor informed her.
Nadice sat in a sterile white examination room, the pink crepe gown pulled tight across her thighs. Chill air caressed her spine. "That's impossible."
The doctor nodded at the wall-mounted d-splay in front of her, where an image of a womb appeared. Her womb. A magnified inset showed a globular clump of cells.
"Fertilization occurred earlier this week. This is the resulting blastocyst, following implantation in the endometrium, the lining of the uterus.”
"That's the baby?"
"Yes."
"I don't understand." Shaking her head. It didn't seem real. Not the baby, not what he was saying. None of it.
"You should have been more careful," the doctor said. His tone, as stringent as the walls, stripped away all pretense.
"But I didn't—"
"Any unauthorized pregnancy is grounds for termination," he went on. "Those are the terms of your contract."
Nadice bit her lip, diffident. Despite his benign exterior—he had philmed himself as Albert Schweitzer, wrinkled with compassion—she found him intimidating. Rumor among the staff was that Atherton hired inexperienced interns, fresh from medical school, because it was cheap. The philm concealed incompetence or insecurity, which he tried to hide by being stern.
Feeling exposed, she smoothed the crepe gown across her lap. "What are you going to do?"
"That depends."
"On what?" The thin paper dimpled under the clammy pressure of her fingers.
"What you decide to do. It's your choice."
So she had gone to Mateus. What choice did she have? Without him, she would lose either the baby or her job. With him, she might keep both.
"When one door closes, another opens." She mouthed the Spanish proverb, heard her grandmother's voice in the words. The old woman's parting gift, whispered in her ear just before Nadice boarded the magtrain from Tangiers to Lagos, where she expected to spend the next five years and maybe the rest of her life.
_______
Now she was carrying not only the baby, but something else. What that might be, she wasn't entirely sure.
"It's better if you don't know," Mateus had said, just before he dosed her. They sat in a room in a cheap modular hotel, halfway up a tower of stacked hexagons. He'd philmed the room in blue, pink, and yellow stucco. Mediterranean or Mexican, she thought. Beyond the flimsy graphene-coated walls, Lagos sweated, the breath of the city congested, thickly phlegmatic.
Her chest tightened. "Is it dangerous?"
"Don't worry. Everything will be fine. Trust me, gurl. I've done this before. Lots of times."
He handed her the dustware. She stared at the purple bubble cap, uncertain what to do. Was she supposed to carry it by hand? Swallow it?
"You have to breathe it in." He sniffed, his nostrils flaring.
Fingers trembling, she inserted the capsule into one nostril, hesitated, her gaze fixed on Mateus, then pinched and inhaled.
Acrid vapor coiled into her, a damp oily smoke that smelled of dead geraniums and hot metal filings.
Mateus caught her by the wrist, lowered her hand, and took the spent capsule from her. "How you feelin'?"
She clenched her empty hand into a fist, forced a deep breath, waited for her pulse to slow. "Customs won't know about it?"
"Naw. 'Cause it's there, but it ain't there. Like that. Soon as they go to look at it, it changes. Mutates into something else."
She could feel the ware now. An erratic, insect-fast fluttering somewhere inside her. She wasn't sure where. Everywhere and nowhere. The fibrillation was hard to nail down. It flitted around, banging against bones, tendons, and nerves, like a moth trying to free itself from a cocoon, struggling reflexively toward light.
Nadice folded her arms beneath her breasts, barricading herself against the uneasy feeling. She squeezed herself, applying pressure to her ribs and abdomen until the bile in her stomach settled.
She was not going to fall apart, she told herself. She was not going to panic. She was going to hold on, to the baby and herself.
7
The basement morgue reeked of n-zyme disinfectants, centuries-old formaldeehyde, and refrigerated sweat.
Van Dijk wrapped his coat tighter against the stainless-steel chill and hard parabolic glare from the pendant surgical lights. He hated this room. He felt naked in it, stripped of whatever it was that made him human. Life broken down in the acid of cold, hard analysis, distilled into its most basic chemical elements ..
"Well?" he said. "You got anything yet?" His voice ricocheted off the white ceramic floor tile.
The coroner, Onjali Kostroff, looked up from the autopsy table where the body lay under a white sheet. "She just came out of the tank."
The "tank" was a liquid bath of dissemblers that detached the electronic skin from a body without destroying the matrix of artificial atoms and nanomechanical components in the graphene substrate.
"And?" He moved closer to her, drawn by the need for physical warmth as much as information.
"Trace levels of nRG4U and barn/B. Not enough to kill her."
"She a user?" Van Dijk didn't really care, one way or another. The only value the information had was that it might point him to a regular dealer or suppplier he could question. Motive didn't show up in test results.
"No." Kostroff shook her head. She wore her honey-blond hair in a ponytail, pulled back from Garbo features rendered in soft-focus repixilation above her blue nanopore face mask. "I don't think so. The drug levels were almost undetectable. Offhand, I'd say they were sexually transmitted or the result of incidental contact."
One of the local clubs, he thought, where the beat of the music practically pounded the drugs into you.
"You got an ID?" he said.
Kostroff removed the shroud. Gone were Barbara Stanwyck, Gene Tierney, and anyone else the victim had ever been or wanted to be. All that remained was a nameless young woman, naked except for the cloudy 'skin that had separated from the underlying flesh. The programmable graphene reminded Dijk of the dead skin shed by a snake—brush up against it and the substrate would slough off in a shriveled, micron-thin sheet. In addition to the gold-sequined dress, Kostroff had removed the azure-tinted necklace and earrings. They were with the dress in a sealed plastine evidence bag on the counter.
"DiNA bar code came up negative," Kostroff said. "Ditto her soft DNA fingerprint. Nothing on file."
"Masked," he said, "or undocumented?"
Kostroff shrugged under her loose-fitting scrubs. "There seem to be a lot of junk nucleotide sequences. It will take some time to filter those out, see if we get a match."
"What else?"
Kostroff blinked as she parsed an online d-splay. "The 'skin is from an unknown manufacturer."
"Import?"
"Or a modified bootleg." Kostroff began a careful visual examination of the body, paying close attenntion to the eyes and the inside of the mouth.
"You find a serial number or manufacturer ID?" van Dijk asked.
"Nope. It's clean."
"Anything identifiably foreign? Materials? Elec-tronics?"
"Not yet."
Which didn't necessarily prove the 'skin was homegrown. It could simply be a fresh import, too new to be in the datalib.
With a surgical laser, Kostroff shaved the cornea from one eye, exposing the translucent gray disk of an eyefeed d-splay. She snipped the CNT input wire, tweezed the disk off, and flagged it for latent-image analysis of the flash memory buffer.
"Any information on the philm?" Van Dijk asked. "It's definitely not off the shelf. I ran the usual faceprint scan, and it came up negative."
"Custom job?"
"Yeah. It looks high-end. Designer."
Van Dijk ran a hand through his hair. If it was a one-off OEM, that put a different spin on things. Original equipment manufacturers weren't cheap. "What about a cause of death?"
"Nothing conclusive on the preliminary scans." Kostroff straightened. "I'm going to open her up as soon as I finish the preliminary. You want to stick around?"
"Not really."
But want had nothing to do with it. He watched as she inspected the vaginal cavity for anything obvious the dissemblers might have overlooked, folllowed by the anus and the rectum.
"Any sign of forced entry?" he asked.
Kostroff shook her head. "There're no indications of trauma. No minor tearing or bruising."
"Unforced?" he said.'
"Not recently." Kostroff straightened. "What about the mouth?" he asked. "Clean."
With a ceramic scalpel, she made the Y-cut, starting at the shoulders and ending at the pubis.
"What's going on there?" He pointed out a puffy, ngy-Iooking secti~n of tissue along the edge of cut.
"I don't know." She ran a CNT-tipped probe over area. "Looks like the e-skin has grafted onto, or laced, some of the underlying tissue and nerves." I didn't know that was possible."
"Neither did I."
She biopsied the region, then removed the internal organs, weighed them, and set them aside. "You got a hard-on yet?" she said.
It took him a moment to realize the question wasn't part of the official autopsy log she had been dictating. "Should I?"
"Half the cops who come down here do."
Van Dijk frowned. He couldn't tell if she was joking or not. He'd never been able to get a read on her. Most people in the department hadn't. "Yeah?"
"You'd be surprised. Men and women. Personally I don′t see the attraction. Stiff, yeah. Cold, no."
"Maybe some guys just want to find out if there really is a light at the end of the tunnel."
Kostroff frowned. Whether it was his halfhearted attempt at humor or something else, he couldn't be sure. She inspected the shaved scalp, then retrieved a cranial saw from the instrument tray next to her in preparation for resecting the top of the skull. "You sure you're up for this?"
Van Dijk made a face as she positioned the blade over the forehead. "I'm not that hard-core."
She snorted. "Maybe you should be."
"I'll work on it. In the meantime—"
"Yeah. I'll send you the report as soon as it's done." Kostroff thumbed the I/O on the saw. With a whine, the diamond-tipped teeth on the blade chewed through bloodless tissue into cold, gritty bone.
8
Pelayo lost the TV on the magtube from Santa Cruz to Palo Alto.
The guy had either given up or lost innterest. It didn't seem likely he had rephilmed himself—that wasn't how TVs operated. They rescreened en masse and in sync. There was little individual variation. The overall theme was unified, connsistent. It went against their core faith to deviate from the big picture.
Stepping off the train, into the raw unfiltered glare on the station platform, Pelayo opened an online message, mentally keying in the address for Lagrante Broussard. There was no answer, a sure sign the rip artist was in.
_______
Lagrante worked out of an apartment on the second floor of a four-level parking garage. A quarter of a century ago, in the aftermath of the Point Pinole quake, the structure had been converted into emergency housing for refugees. Over the years, ad hoc businesses had moved in, gradually displacing the hapless apartments. Actual residential space was confined to the outer walls, where windows of aging photoelectric plastic strained the light to piss yellow.
The exterior architectural philm was a hodge-podge of styles: sleek Le Corbusier strip windows, aluminum Art Deco trellises, and colorful glass tesserae set in decorative arabesque patterns on the walls, support pillars, and outer circumference of the Moorish horseshoe-shaped arches that framed the entrances.
Pelayo cut a quick glance up-down the street—nothing but the usual assortment of waterfront workers, street vendors, Monospaces, and delivery truck drivers—then ducked past the tinder-dry fronds of a squat palm tree next to the open security gate.
Inside, the smell of brine gave way to espresso, grilled vegetables, chicken kebabs, and falafel in warm pita bread. He hurried through the street-level food court, the tables, partitions, and planters that subdivided the space. It was noon and the place was jammed, the din deafening despite the suspended ceiling panels.
The elevator was just as loud, a cacophony of newzine segments, nanoFX commercials, vidIO game clips, and ad masks as watchful as gargoyles. Most of it hadn't changed since his last visit, four months ago. New look, same worthless content.
Hopefully, Lagrante would have something more to offer.
_______
The rip artist was screening Archibald J. Motley, Jr. with a touch of Romare Bearden that added a jagged, almost demented edge to the otherwise suave exterior. Raw jazz seeped out of his pores, as unfiltered and unhurried as the Hongtasan hanging from his lips.
"What's playin'?" Pelayo said. He could see himself reflected in the black lenses of the sunglasses Lagrante wore as an extension of his anatomy.
"'Kind of Blue.'" The cigarette bobbed, scattering volcanic gray ash. "You know?"
Pelayo shook his head.
"Miles Davis. It's a classic." Lagrante let out a breath and creaked back in his leather chair. He ran hand over the triangle of stubble on the right side of scalp. "That's some crunk 'skin· you're waring. Treal retro."
Lagrante fancied himself an artiste, an adherent of the true and real when it came to philm, clothing, and music. It wasn't about being genuine, in a radiocarbon sense. It was about being true to the spirit of authenticity. Pop wasn't treal unless it was a riff on Andy Warhol. Otherwise it was simply derivative, no different from a Chinese knockoff. According to Lagrante, treal was all about taking something old and making it new, spinning it in a different direction without losing the gestalt, the existential integrity, of the original.
"Well?" Pelayo asked.
Lagrante tilted forward in the chair. "Looks first run. I haven't seen anything else like it."
"Influences?"
"Hard to say for sure." He tapped his chin thoughtfully with one finger. "Offhand, I'd say Bible-thumping minister with a little Wall Street mixed in. You've got Pastor Lud and Pat Robertson mixing it up with Peter Douglas from Stalk Market. Conservative and clean-cut on one hand, gritty and cutthroat on the other. Kind of sends a mixed message?"
"To who?"
"Corporate executives. Politicos. Lawyers. That's the target audience. If I had to venture a guess."
"Not exactly your demographic. That wh
at I'm hearing?"
Lagrante shrugged. "There's no shortage of busiiness types who want to come off as straitlaced, but not rigid. Competent and self-assured but not immmoral." He pursed thin lips. "How long you been out of the tank?"
"Couple of hours."
Lagrante stood. He stubbed out his Hongtasan in a dissembler-shiny ashtray, then walked around Pelayo in a slow orbit, as if checking out the lines on a hooker. "How was the install?" he said. "Clean?"
"As far as I know." If there were any problems, he wasn't sure Uri would have told him.
"Awright." Lagrante cracked his knuckles. "Let's pop trunk on this motherfucker. See what we got."
_______
"Well?" Pelayo asked. He stared at Lagrante's brow, knotted in concentration over his glasses.
Lagrante didn't answer. Pelayo wasn't sure if Lagrante was listening, if he was too deep in to hear anything, or just ignoring him. In the ashtray, all that remained of the Hongtasan was a minute curl of paper.
"I'll be damned," Lagrante finally whispered. He let out a low whistle infused with frustration and addmiration.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Lagrante sucked on his front teeth. "The platform is new. Hardware. Firmware. Software. We're talking from the ground up."
"You saying you can't rip it?"
Lagrante pinched the bridge of his nose, then let the glasses slide back into place. "I need to do some research, make some inquiries. Check if there's a crack out there. Know what I'm sayin'?"
"Yeah. I'm fucked."
"Relax. IBT wouldn't hull one of its guinea pigs. Not on purpose, leastways. They need the test data."
"Thing is, they don't care if I get hulled or not. If you screw up and something goes wrong, that counts as data, the same as anything else."
"It won't come to that," Lagrante assured him. Pelayo sniffed, uncomfortable with the rip artist's laissez-faire attitude. "Easy for you to say."
"Everything will be fine. Don't worry, you'll get our percentage. It might take a little longer this time around, that's all, but it'll be worth it. Trust me. That's some bomb-ass shit you're waring."
Pelayo's gaze drifted past Lagrante to the artwork the walls. Reproductions of several Archibald Motley, Jr. paintings and grainy photos of jazz musicians wreathed in cumulus smoke. "How long?"
