by Jeff Edwards
“Two questions,” I said. “Why? And how?”
“The ‘why’ part should be kind of obvious,” Vivien said. “You didn’t want me to get the mega-boobs, so I had to pick something else off the menu. The ‘how’ is easy. I was a lot closer to my target configuration than you were, so my procedure didn’t take nearly as long. Also, I told the staff to keep you in sleepy land until I was up and around.”
This brought another one of her quick-vanishing smiles. “I’m the one with the platinum bank chip, so they were extremely eager to follow my suggestions.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll buy off on the ‘how’ part. After they got a look at your credit rating, they probably would have given me gills if you had asked them to. But let’s get back to the ‘why.’ And let’s try for a straight answer this time.”
She restrained herself from giving me what I’m sure would have been a very interesting expression. “The ‘why’ part really should be obvious. I’m going with you.”
I shook my head, and regretted it immediately. It turns out that the muscles and tendons in your neck are attached to all kinds of things in your face, and every one of them went into near spasms at this unexpected abuse.
When I was certain that my face wasn’t actually going to fall off, I tried again, without the head shake this time. “You are not going with me.”
“That’s what you think,” Vivien said. “I’m going. With or without you.”
I kept my expression placid, the pain of the head-shaking fiasco still fresh in my mind. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve done a fantastic job,” Vivien said. “You’ve broken a lot of ground in places that no one else even thought to look. But you’re not the only Private Detective, David. If you force me to, I’ll hire someone else and go in without you.”
“And what will you do when you get there? Without me, you won’t even know what to look for.”
Vivien nodded almost imperceptibly. “True. But you know what? I don’t think you know what to look for either. I think your big plan is to infiltrate Akimura Nanodyne, and then improvise. Nose around behind enemy lines, and see what you can come up with.”
I couldn’t argue, because she was right. That was my big plan, although it sounded a lot more clever inside my head than it did when Vivien was saying it.
I gave her my best penetrating look. “You’d fire me? Just like that?”
“Not unless you make it absolutely necessary,” she said. “I want you on this case. I want you to climb up Akimura Nanodyne’s ass with an electron microscope. But I’m going to be there when it happens. If you can’t deal with that, let me know now. I’ll put you on the first shuttle going Earth-side, and I’ll give you a referral to a superb surgical boutique in Bel Air. You’ll have your own face back by the end of the week, all expenses paid.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” I said.
“I’m not asking anything. I’m telling you how it’s going to be. I’m going in. If you can get that through your head, then we can do it together. Otherwise, I’ll do it with someone else.”
“You don’t know what these people are like, Vivien. You have no idea how ruthless they are.”
She did another smile-grimace. “I think you’ve given me a pretty good feel for that. If they’re involved in the FANTASCAPE thing, then we know they’re guilty of rape, murder, extortion, racketeering, and—for all I know—income tax evasion and cheating at solitaire. And even if they’re not tied to FANTASCAPE, we know that they kidnapped you and threatened you with torture. I know all of this, and I’m determined to go anyway. So I think we can take it as given that I’ve been sufficiently forewarned.”
Once again, I couldn’t argue with her point, so I shifted tactics. “Do you mind if I ask why you insist on coming along?”
I intended this as a trap of sorts, to trick Vivien into admitting that her reasons were purely personal, and therefore, not in the best interests of her daughter. I was mentally queuing up a nice counterargument, loaded with high-minded pronouncements about not letting emotions get in the way of logical decision making.
Vivien flanked me with an answer that I was not expecting. “Because I speak Japanese, and you don’t. Also because I can read kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Without me, when you walk in the door of that place, you might as well be illiterate. You won’t be able to read labels, documents, name badges, or anything else. You could walk right past a giant flashing sign that says, ‘This way to the bad guys.’”
Again, I was without an argument.
“I’ll be your translator,” she said. “Your guide. Not to mention your backup, if it comes to a fight. And, of course, I’ll be immediately available if you suddenly need emergency sex.”
This time it was me struggling not to smile. Even the bare semblance of an active facial expression made me feel like I’d been punched in the head a couple of times. Funny how no one had mentioned post-operative pain during the sales pitch. Although, come to think of it, most of the browsers in the showroom looked like they’d already had some work done. Maybe this was a normal part of the cosmetic surgery process—expected and accepted, but never talked about.
“I’ll admit to needing a guide,” I said. “But what’s this about fighting? Having a Japanese face doesn’t all of a sudden make you Ninja Girl.”
“No,” Vivien said. “It doesn’t. On the other hand, I’ve been taking weekly personal defense courses since before Leanda was born. I’ve never left anyone unconscious on the floor of a men’s room, but I can hold my own if things get ugly.”
This time I couldn’t stop the smile.
The pain quickly drove it out of me. “Damn it! Is my nose going to fall off if I can’t keep my face from moving?”
“Nah,” Vivien said. “It feels like that, but trust me, everything is properly attached. They don’t let you out of dermal stim until your modified tissue structures have a solid hold. The Zen face thing is just for pain avoidance. It has nothing to do with the healing process. Your nerve endings will settle down. In a couple of days, you’ll barely notice it.”
“A couple of days?”
“Yes,” Vivien said. “That’s about how long it takes. Why? Are you on a schedule?”
“I guess not. I’m just ready to get started.”
“So am I,” Vivien said. “But we can’t tackle anything major until our eyes have adjusted.”
I looked at hers more closely. “Is there something wrong with your eyes? Because mine feel okay.”
“They feel okay for now,” she said. “But the chromo mod is the easy part. That’s a relatively straightforward gene tweak. It doesn’t get ugly until the histamine reaction sets in.”
I sighed. “That sounds lovely. Are you going to tell me what I’ve got to look forward to? Or is it more fun if you don’t spoil the surprise?”
Vivien made a mock slap at my shoulder. “All of this was your idea, remember?”
I sighed again. “Yeah, yeah… Part of my great master plan. All except for turning into a post-operative trauma victim, which nobody bothered to warn me about.”
She somehow managed to give me a wry look without losing her Zen face. “You didn’t expect beauty to be painless, did you?”
“Unless you changed the plan while I was under anesthesia, I seriously doubt that my new face could be classified as beauty. And I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve never done any of this before.”
“Never? Not even a little chin lift or a wrinkle tuck?”
“A field medic pulled a few shrapnel fragments out of my left foot in Argentina. That’s the only time I’ve ever been under the knife.”
Vivien’s voice was playful. “Are you certain about that? Because I’m pretty sure that at least one part of your body has been enhanced…”
“If I agree to take that as flattery, can we get back to the topic of discussion? What is this histamine thing going to be like?”
“Not pleasant,” Vivien said. “
We’re both going to spend about three hours with our tear ducts in overdrive. Then the itching starts. That’s good for a couple of hours of pure misery.”
“This just keeps getting better and better,” I said. “Shouldn’t we head to the hotel before we turn into pumpkins, or lumps of quivering protoplasm, or whatever?”
“Definitely,” Vivien said. “If we leave now, we can make it before the ugly stuff starts kicking in.”
I climbed off of the recovery table. “Okay, Ms. Ninja Guide. Lead the way…”
CHAPTER 34
The histamine reaction came on like a freight train about twenty minutes after we got back to the Shogun. Vivien had gone under the knife about thirty minutes after me, so her reaction cycle lagged mine by roughly a half hour.
It was not pretty. My eyes watered continually and profusely. They burned so fiercely that I couldn’t force myself to open them for more than a few seconds at a time. I sat on the sofa, toweling the streaming tears from my cheeks, and guzzling water to stay ahead of the fluid loss.
Then the itching started. A sharp tingling prickle of unbelievable intensity that seemed to radiate from the very centers of my eyeballs. The kind of itch that’s almost worse than pain.
It couldn’t be ignored. It couldn’t be scratched. It could only be endured. The only thing that kept me from clawing my own eyes out was a deep-rooted suspicion that even that wouldn’t stop the itching.
When the reaction finally tapered off, I was so exhausted that I curled up right where I was and slept for at least two hours.
Vivien was up and around by the time I opened my eyes, her newly minted Japanese face looking very pretty, but utterly wrung out. I realized that I probably looked about the same, except for the general lack of prettiness on my part.
I spent the remainder of the two days in our suite, studying and preparing while my body recovered from the indignities of cosmetic tinkering. Vivien wandered in and out, sometimes coaching me on common Japanese phrases, and sometimes off on business of her own. Beyond the assurance that she wouldn’t leave the hotel, she refused to talk about whatever she was up to.
The hotel AI coached me in parroting acceptable responses to common conversational gambits in something not too far removed from a Japanese accent. I also watched footage of Japanese men, paying attention to their gestures and body language, and trying to replicate it.
If this had been a Hollywood vid, this part of the story arc would have been depicted as a montage, capturing repetitive humorous failures in my performance until I began to get the hang of things. It would have ended with a touchingly triumphant scene in which my film mentor pronounced me ready for the coming adventure. That didn’t happen. Life doesn’t follow the cleverly crafted plotlines of vid stories.
I did have a lot of failures, but most of them weren’t particularly amusing. Nor did I ever have a ‘Eureka’ moment, when all of the elements of my crash training regimen finally came together in my mind to form a useful understanding of the material. Instead, I plodded along, hoping that some of what I was trying to learn might actually come in handy when Vivien and I were in the belly of the whale.
Gradually, my reconfigured face began to feel less like an over-tenderized pork chop, and more like human flesh and bone. I slowly got over the shock of seeing a stranger staring back at me from the mirror.
Late into the second day, when the pain had receded to an occasional twinge, Vivien interrupted my studies by plopping down next to me on the couch. “I need to borrow one of the guns.”
I was too startled to respond immediately.
“Shogun has been showing me training vids,” she said. “And I’ve been practicing with a very realistic shooting simulator. But I need some real experience. I want to practice sight alignment, and I need to know what recoil actually feels like.”
“I didn’t know you were planning to carry a weapon,” I said.
“Why not? We’ve got two. Unless you’re two-pistol Pete, you’re only going to need one of them.”
I sighed. “Is this another one of your deal-breakers? If I don’t do things your way, you fire me and go with somebody else?”
She shook her head. “No. This one’s definitely not a deal-breaker. When we get inside, you’re going to need to have your head completely in the game. It won’t be good for either one of us if you’re distracted by worrying that I might accidentally shoot you in the foot.
“It’s not my feet I’m worried about,” I said.
She grinned, a sure sign that her facial muscles were close to full recovery. “I promise not to shoot my own toes off. And I give you my word that I won’t start shooting until you do. Is that good enough?”
I nodded. “Good enough.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go practice.”
I glanced around, as if expecting targets to magically materialize. “Where exactly did you have in mind? Has this place got a shooting range?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Vivien said.
She led me out of the suite to an unmarked door near the rear of the hotel. The door, which had no handle and no external hardware, slid silently aside at her touch.
The hallway on the other side was clean but starkly utilitarian, with no attempt to simulate Feudal Japan, or even comfortable hotel amenities. This was clearly an employees-only section, not intended to be seen by paying guests.
A few meters in, we encountered two stern-looking men in dark clothes. Security personnel, I assumed.
Vivien spoke to them in rapid Japanese, using none of the conversational phrases that I had so painstakingly memorized.
The security men answered in kind.
When we were past them, I asked, “anything I should know about?”
“I was just warning my staff that we’re going to be shooting up the lower level storeroom.”
“They’re okay with that?”
“Yes. I’ve explained the plan to the head of my security team, and I gave him a detailed description of the weapons and ammunition we’ll be using.”
I was curious about Vivien’s notion of what constituted a detailed description. “Exactly what did you tell them?”
She gave me a quick sideways glance. “I told them that we’ll be firing a 9.6mm Nambu-Sendai, loaded with 122 grain Ceramicore safety rounds. And also a 10mm Miroku Goryō, with 180 grain nylon-jackets over metal-matrix composite cores. And that both rounds have a frangibility index of 90 or better, so they should shatter on impact, without penetrating the walls.”
I whistled through my teeth. “You’ve been doing your homework.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve never needed to know this kind of thing before. I need it now, so I’m picking it up.”
“You certainly are. But let me give you a piece of advice. When it comes to guns, don’t ever depend on any advertised safety feature. The real test of any bullet is not what it’s supposed to do, but what it actually does. Even with top-rated frangible ammo, you should always assume that some of your shots will penetrate walls. So the fact that you can’t see the people in the next room doesn’t mean you’re not putting them in danger when you pull the trigger.”
Vivien nodded. “I’ll remember that.”
We reached the lower storage room, where someone had obviously been preparing for our arrival. With the exception of two large stacks of futons, everything had been pulled out of the room and neatly arranged along the walls of the corridor outside. The futons were at the far end of the room. If my sense of direction wasn’t too far off, the wall behind them faced into the side of the hill into which the Shogun was built. So there should be several meters of compacted dirt and regolith on the other side of the wall.
The banked soil should have no trouble stopping our rounds, even if they didn’t turn out to be quite as frangible as they were designed to be. The futons would soak up stray fragments and slow the bullets down before they struck the hard surface of the wall.
I nodded approval. Vivien had done a good jo
b in setting this up. She had done her research, and she was obviously taking the gun safety thing seriously. Probably more seriously than I did.
“Nice work,” I said. “You’ve been busy.”
She nodded. “The colony has a police firing range, and another one for corporate security personnel. We can’t exactly rent time on either one of those, so I had to improvise. This was the best I could come up with.”
“I don’t see how you could have done any better,” I said. “This looks like a good setup.”
I pulled out the Nambu, and handed it to her butt-first, swallowing the urge to offer last-second advice on safe handling. Ordinarily, I would never hand off a weapon without making sure that it was unloaded, but I wanted to see what she did with it.
Vivien accepted the automatic without hesitation. She kept her finger outside of the trigger guard, and immediately brought her gun hand around, swinging the barrel down range, into a safe sector. She checked the position of the safety, ejected the magazine, and racked the slide to clear the chamber. No round popped out of the ejection port, as I hadn’t been keeping one in the pipe.
When she was sure that the weapon was unloaded, she slipped the magazine into her pocket and spent a minute or so getting a feel for the layout and heft of the weapon.
Then she took a step toward the target wall, left foot coming forward, right foot staying back in the supporting position of a walking stance. Simultaneously, she brought the Nambu up in the two-handed Weaver grip—long out of favor with many law enforcement agencies, but still preferred by most militaries.
She dry-fired a couple of times, and then brought the weapon down. “It’s not as heavy as I expected.”
“A lot of composites in the construction,” I said, “so it’s on the light end. Some of them are a lot heavier.”
She nodded, digesting this new datum.
“You learned all of that from a simulated shooting game?”
