by L. E. Price
He unbuckled his rebreather and let it dangle around his neck. His thick fingers rubbed two days of bristle along his lantern jaw, moist with clammy sweat. He scratched just under his right ear, where the dull pewter disk of his Werther implant nestled, about the size of a watch battery. The skin around it felt itchy, inflamed. Probably from being squeezed under the rubber of his mask all afternoon, he figured, but he still made a mental note to get it checked out.
Doors lined the pea-soup-green corridor, each with plastic windows in the style of pebbled glass. Up the hall, with his stepladder perched on a strip of yellowed linoleum, Diego craned his neck and dug into a junction box high up on the wall. The landlord wore grease-spattered denim, old coveralls that had more patches than original material.
“You ever think about that mural on the side of the building?” Jake asked him.
“Crazy, right? Glass bottles. Real glass bottles. Hand me that spanner?”
Jake crouched down, rummaged in Diego’s toolbox, and passed up the spanner.
“No, I mean…the people who painted that thing are probably dead now. The people who wrote the ad, they’re gone too. Everybody who had anything to do with that thing are gone, and nobody even knows their names. All we’ve got is what they left behind, and it’s just fading away to nothing out there.” Jake shrugged. “Feels like, I don’t know. Somebody should take a picture.”
Diego glanced back over his shoulder and lifted one bushy eyebrow. “You had a shit day. I can tell.”
“How’s that?”
“Every time you have a shit day, you get philosophical.”
“I’m a man of rare depths,” Jake deadpanned.
“You ought to drink, like the rest of us. Hey, I updated the building’s flatscreen feed. Eight new channels. They’re lousy, but they’re new.”
“Thanks, Diego.”
He climbed the creaking stairs to the second floor and took a left. His keys jangled in the door, Camden Investigations in block letters on the pebbled plastic. Inside, in the gloom of his office, his fingers found the alarm panel by muscle memory. He keyed in the code. The panel squawked once, then went silent.
“Eva, lights.”
A cool white glow filled the room, from his cluttered desk by the door — a surplus junker he’d picked up at an estate sale, years ago — to the three high arched windows shrouded under dusty venetian blinds at the far end of the office. Home sweet home.
He had everything he needed here. A battered sofa that folded out into a lumpy bed, a mini-fridge, a hotplate, a flatscreen TV mounted on the wall. Beyond the only other door was a bathroom with a chemical shower.
“You have one new message,” Eva told him. “It is marked urgent.”
“Put it up on the screen.”
His television flickered to life. The woman on the screen sat in shadow, but he recognized her silhouette — her serpentine dreadlocks, the artfully carved and lacquered circuit boards she wore as dangling earrings — in a heartbeat. Martika was in the information business. Uptown, upscale, but every now and then she found some juicy work to kick his way in exchange for a commission.
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all afternoon. You’re forgetting a cardinal rule of business, Jake: never duck a woman while she’s trying to give you money. Listen. I’ve got a client. Triple-A, okay? We’re talking big leagues. They’ve got a missing-kid situation and it’s both time critical and super, super politically sensitive. They wanted the best manhunter I’ve got, and that’s you, babe. Call. Me. Back. Not tomorrow. Tonight. Now. Do it. Now. You’ll thank me later. Call me. Do it. Bye.”
Jake looked at the unpaid bills piling up on his desk. The math wasn’t hard.
So much for a quiet night in.
* * * *
They sent a car for him.
It was a Lincoln Reeve, long and onyx with tinted windows and fins like an armored shark. Jake rode in the back. The driver was a tight-lipped man who kept his eyes shrouded under the brim of a chauffeur’s cap. Every now and then Jake caught him glancing into the rear-view, studying him like some species of exotic rodent as he wove around the potholes.
Martika had given him the few details she had, talking from the screen while he shaved on the other side of the open bathroom door. The clients were Gordon and Emily Kensington. Gordon was in software, Emily was in politics, and both of them had done well enough to land an upper-floor condo at the Barrymore Arcology. Their son Trevor was missing. Not a Romeo and Juliet job, this time. She said she couldn’t explain it on the phone. Jake needed to see for himself.
“These people know people who know people,” Martika told him. “You do right by them, this could be your golden ticket. And of course, you won’t forget your ever-faithful friend on your way to the top, right?”
A garage door slowly rumbled up, and a uniformed guard came out to run a scanner over the license plate and the chauffeur’s ID card. The scanner beeped, flashed green, and the gates of heaven opened wide. The Lincoln rolled through a silent gallery of polished and gleaming cars. Last-century-retro was in this year. All the newest rides were pastel colored dreamboats, bodies twice as wide as their electric engines demanded, with fins and pseudo-chrome siding and big fish-eye headlights. Showpieces, polished up and never driven; after all, what kind of maniac would ever want to leave if they didn’t have to?
A second pair of guards stood sentry at a checkpoint just before the elevator banks. Jake stood impassive while one gave him the stink-eye and held his identification card with the corners of his fingertips, like it was covered in some invisible filth that might rub off on him. He understood. These guys were at the bottom rung of arcology life, a necessary evil to keep the self-contained city running. The waiting list for a job — and the sub-basement apartment that came with it – was a mile long. One slip-up, one mistake, one cross word from a real citizen, and they’d be Outside. Just like Jake. He was a living reminder of the punishment for failure, and they wanted him gone.
He didn’t take it personally. He’d been Inside once, too.
The elevator whisked him and the chauffeur up to the hundred and twenty-seventh floor. Faint chamber music played, piped in along a gauzy white corridor. The paint on the walls was textured, like stucco but softer, giving the impression of wispy clouds. A chemical scent hung in the air. Clean, Jake thought. Aggressively clean. He felt like a bacterium invading a healthy body.
Gordon Kensington met them at the door. He had a glossy helmet of chestnut hair and teeth too white to be real, and he took Jake’s beefy fist in his with a vigorous shake. Either he didn’t care that Jake was an outsider, or he was good at hiding it. Or maybe, Jake thought, catching the worry in his eyes, he’s too desperate to care.
“Jake Camden, right?” he said. “Ms. Sokolov speaks very highly of you. She says you’re the best in the business.”
Jake shifted his shoulders, uncomfortable with the praise. “Martika’s very kind. We’ve worked together, a few times, and I do have a track record for delivering results.”
“She said. She also said you’re discreet.”
“I consider that part of the package. Mr. Kensington—”
“Please. Call me Gordon.”
“My work involves me in a lot of…sensitive familial situations,” Jake explained. “My clients generally don’t want their business getting out to the public eye. So it doesn’t. Not from me, anyway.”
“Good. This is a—” Gordon grimaced and shook his head, waving Jake inside. The chauffeur followed, silent as the grave. “It’s hard to explain. You’ll see in a minute.”
Jake had already pegged the score, because he’d been elbows-deep in a job like this more than once. Odds were, Gordon had a first wife and she’d snatched their son in the middle of a custody fight. That was messy. If husband and ex-wife had a lifetime contract with two different corporations, even messier. There were matters of jurisdiction, legal authority…you could hire an army of lawyers and go bankrupt trying to sort out a proble
m like that.
Or you could hire a guy like Jake to go in under cover of darkness, snatch the kid back, and bring him home with no questions asked.
The Kensingtons’ place was modest, by triple-A standards. Real mahogany wood paneling on the walls, not synthetic. Real glass shelves, underlit by soft LED lights to display framed holograms of a happier family in happier times. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the city, high above the smog layer. It roiled, below, like storm clouds outside the porthole windows of a jet.
A woman rounded the bend, wringing her hands, and almost collided with them. She stopped short. She wore a tunic-cut dress in Federal blue, accentuated with a strand of pearls, and her face wore the glossy, too-tight look of a fresh visit to the plastic surgeon.
“Honey, is this—”
“He’s going to help us,” Gordon said. He rested a hand on Jake’s shoulder like they were old drinking buddies. “Jake, this is my wife, Emily. Emily, Jake Camden.”
“So you’re a…” her voice trailed off as she studied him.
“Private investigator,” Jake said, “but that’s just part of what I offer. I’m fully licensed by the city of Philadelphia to act as a retrieval agent, either for bail bonds or for fugitives under corporate writ.”
“Ms. Sokolov said you used to be a police officer,” she said.
His lips went tight, and he looked for something nice to say.
“Used to,” Jake told her. “The training comes in handy.”
“She says you can find anyone.”
“I’m good at what I do,” he said.
Gordon and Emily shared a glance.
“We should show him,” Gordon said.
They led him down a stubby hallway and into a bedroom. They weren’t alone. A pair of men were standing off to the side of a king-sized bed, voices low and tense. Their argument faded as Jake stepped into the room. He didn’t pay them much attention at first. His attention was fixed on the limp, frail figure on the mattress, surrounded by softly beeping medical equipment. The kid was maybe sixteen, his slack arm hooked up to an IV drip.
“Jake,” Gordon said, “this is our son, Trevor.”
Jake squinted at him. “I’m sorry, I’m a little confused. Martika told me your son was missing.”
“He is,” Emily said.
She drifted over to the bedside and rested her hand on her son’s motionless arm.
“His body is here, Mr. Camden. His mind is missing.”
3.
Jake felt like he should look for the hidden cameras. That any second now, some vapid prank-show host was going to jump out of the closet and blast an air horn. But then he looked around the room, at the sea of grave faces around Trevor’s bed, and he knew this wasn’t a joke.
“You’re going to have to help me out,” he said. “His mind is missing?”
“Trevor was— is—” Gordon said, wrestling with past and present tense over his kid’s comatose body, “into those full-immersion VR games. He started playing the day he got his Werther implant, and since then it’s been his favorite pastime.”
“I hate those things,” Emily said, folding her arms tight.
Jake thought she meant the games, then he took another look at the woman as she turned her face away. The tiny metal disks, poking from the skin just under the ear, were ubiquitous. Everyone in the room had one. Everyone but Emily.
“Not a fan myself,” Jake said, idly scratching at the reddened skin around his own implant, “but everything from telecoms to pizza-delivery is on Grid two-point-oh these days. Hard to make a living without one.”
“It can be done, Mr. Camden.”
Sure, he thought, if you’re filthy rich and have human assistants with their own implants to do it all for you. He kept his opinion to himself and focused on Trevor.
“So he’s a gamer. Most kids are these days, right?”
Gordon gave Emily an awkward glance. “Not just kids. Full-immersion virtual reality sims are the fastest-growing industry on the planet. I’ve been known to dip a toe in myself, now and then. Do you play, Jake?”
“I like my reality the way it is. Real.”
“Trevor is especially fond of one game in particular, one of the newer ones. It’s called ‘Paradise Clash’—”
“Has this man signed an NDA?”
Jake glanced across the room. One of the two men who had been arguing when they walked in had finally spoken up again. He was tall, gaunt, with sunken eyes and an ink-blot birthmark on his bald scalp. From the look of his three-piece suit, Jake pegged him as a corporate operator. Not high enough on the ladder to be calling the shots, but high enough to be dangerous.
“He’s working for me, not for you,” Gordon told him. “Jake, this is Anton Kozlowski. Senior legal counsel for Strategic Design Simulations. The gentleman to his left is Woodrow Wendel, a professional gamer.”
“Woody,” the other man said, grabbing Jake’s hand and giving it a vigorous pump. He was short, squat, with the build of a wrestler gone to seed. “I wrote the book on Paradise Clash. Literally, three of them. Surviving the Clash: An Expert’s Guide, Winning with Style—”
“I’m still lost,” Jake said.
“So is Trevor,” Woody said. Then he looked over at the kid’s parents and cringed. “Sorry.”
“But you’re not wrong,” Gordon replied. He turned to Jake. “Wednesday night, Trevor logged in to play after dinner. We found him like this the next morning. Still connected.”
Jake looked to the bed. A small magnetic clamp was fixed to the disk of Trevor’s implant, and a serpentine cable ran to the game-deck on his bedside table. Rows of lights on the sleek plastic curve of the deck held a steady green, with one occasionally flickering.
“So, what’s the problem? Pull the plug and wake him up.”
Woody’s head shook like a dog with a chew toy. “Uh-uh. Bad idea. You never want to yank somebody out of full immersion like that. Game decks have triple battery backups in case of a power failure, to make sure that can’t happen by accident. The shock involved, well, you could be looking at cardiac arrest, potential brain damage, it’s a bad situation.”
Jake frowned at the deck. “I thought these things were supposed to be totally safe.”
“They are,” Anton said. “And Paradise Clash complies with all of the latest safety standards. Above and beyond, in fact. People can’t stay submerged for too long even if they want to: there’s an automatic log-out timer every six hours, which gently removes the player from the game and encourages them to spend time in the real world.”
“And yet.” Jake pointed at Trevor’s motionless body.
Anton’s hands curled in frustration. “And yet…we can’t explain this. Every single failsafe designed to prevent a situation like this has failed. This is a public-relations nightmare in the making.”
“That ‘public relations nightmare’ is my son,” Emily snapped.
Jake held up his hands, getting between them. “Could somebody have messed with his deck?”
“I had three senior SDS technicians look at it,” Anton said. “The deck is working perfectly.”
“Okay, so it’s a software issue. Can’t you just find his account on your end, and log him out from there?”
Anton’s sunken-eyed gaze fell to the floor.
“That’s the problem,” he said. “Data packet-tracing shows that Trevor is logged into Paradise Clash right now. According to the deck, he’s an active player, and his connection is perfectly normal. But according to our servers, he’s not. There’s no record of him, anywhere in the simulation. Our top coders are on the job, and they’re at a loss to explain it.”
Jake took a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. Every single mechanism that can boot Trevor out of the game isn’t working, including the ones that are supposed to work automatically, and you lost him? You literally lost a player.”
“It shouldn’t be possible. I’ve been working for Strategic Design Simulations for over a decade, Mr. Camden, sinc
e before full-immersion sims were approved for civilian use. SDS operates five successful games with a combined total of over one billion subscribers, and this has never happened. Not once.”
“Then this isn’t a glitch,” Jake said. “This is deliberate product tampering. And if his deck’s clean, you’ve got a problem on the software side. Which means that right now, either Trevor’s lost track of time and he’s having a blast in fantasy-land…”
“Or our son has been abducted,” Gordon said.
Jake ran the numbers. Trevor went missing on Wednesday night. Four days to scramble the lawyers and an army of technicians, tear into the problem and try to pull the kid out…and still no ransom demand? That didn’t make sense. Any professional kidnapper knew that time wasn’t on their side, and the longer the exchange dragged out, the less likely they were to get away with the cash.
All the same, his gut told him Trevor wasn’t gone because he wanted to be. He’d been taken. Mind-snatched.
“Hell of a thing,” Jake said. “But I have to be honest, I’m still not sure what I’m doing here.”
“We want you to do what these people and their computers can’t,” Emily told him. “We want you to do what we’re told you’re quite good at. Go into the game, and find our son.”
Jake furrowed his brow. “I told you, I don’t know anything about games.”
“But you know about humanity, Mr. Camden. You know how to find the missing and the lost. Our son is missing, and he is lost, and Martika Sokolov says you may be the only person with the skill to find him.” Her eyes glistened, wet. “Please. Will you help us?”
On the other side of the bed, Woody cleared his throat.
“And as far as the game itself goes, that’s why I’m here. I’ve studied Paradise Clash inside and out. If you can handle the private-eye stuff, I can walk you through the rest. Consider me your personal tour guide and strategy book, all rolled up in one.”
“While Gordon is correct,” Anton added, “and you would be officially under contract with the Kensington family, SDS has authorized me to offer you a substantial bonus if you can determine how, exactly, our game was compromised and find the person or persons responsible.”
