by Sean Platt
“Yeah.”
“Good. Is it getting crazy in tech town?”
“You mean crazier than it is in tech poseur villages up in the mountains?” Dominic’s mood was sour, and he wanted to poke Leo. Up in what was supposed to be a blackout zone, Leo had a wireless connection capable of making calls like the one they were on that his hippie toadies didn’t know about.
Leo laughed, ignoring Dominic’s bait.
But Dominic felt like arguing. Things around the DZPD station had been downright infuriating lately. Shift was always an unsettling time rife with civil unrest, but the last few Shifts had been a walk in the park. They’d gone so smoothly, in fact, that after the last Shift Dominic had joked that the universe must be saving up for a doozy to come. This Shift hadn’t disappointed, and the idiocy was only just starting. The city had had riot after riot, and crime was up. The DZPD jail cells weren’t usually filled — the core of District Zero was so well watched by City Surveillance and sweeperbots that most DZ citizens managed to keep their hands to themselves or be sent quietly to Respero — but those same cells were overflowing now. Respectable people were raging and rioting. “Civil uprising,” they called it. To Dominic, it was hippie bullshit and a headache.
“You think it’s funny?” said Dominic.
“So things are crazy in tech town?”
“Goddammit, Leo. I know you get a feed up there. You’ve got your little gadget and your air signal, and I suspect you might even have a hard line…”
“I don’t have a hard line.”
“…and I frankly don’t feel like playing cutesy games. We have riots up the ass, and you send Leah into Quark? That’s beyond stupid. And now on top of all of these fucking riots, I’m cleaning up after you. You get to have the ideals, while I’m stuck cleaning up the mess.”
Onscreen, Leo finally looked affected. “It isn’t Organa that’s causing your riots. That’s about Directorate and Enterprise.”
Dominic grunted. He’d gotten his hippie movements confused. The Enterprise wanted freedom to make as many credits as they wanted, the Directorate wanted freedom from poverty, and the granola-fuckers in the mountains wanted freedom from technology. Or so they said.
“Organa isn’t helping,” said Dominic. It was a spiteful, groundless comment, but Dominic wanted to blame someone. Leo was the only one within range.
“This is your cause too, Dominic,” said Leo.
Dominic held his breath for a long moment then finally exhaled. Blowing steam at Leo changed nothing. The rioters were still rioting, and the Directorate was still bitching. The Enterprise was still making things worse by blustering back. It was a like a bunch of schoolchildren slap-fighting. Leo was at least ostensibly on Dominic’s side.
Besides, Leo hadn’t chosen Dominic; Dominic had chosen Leo. They’d known each other since Dominic’s school days, but it was Dominic who’d begun to put together bits and pieces of some giant puzzle over the past decade, a hunch tickling the back of his brain about Quark, The Beam, West, and whether the upper tier had more privilege than was commonly known amongst most of the population. It was Dominic who’d sought out Leo not just as a friend but as an Organa leader; it was Dominic who’d been shuttling drugs and information to keep the Organas one step ahead; it was Dominic who’d sent Leo the vagrant he was supposed to send to Respero and hence saddled both of them with a moral burden. Dominic had made his own bed with Organa, with Leo, and maybe even with Leah’s incursion into Quark. He was making his own bed with the riots even now, Dominic reminded himself. He could try harder to stop them — there were plenty of sweepers and apprehenders in DZPD’s garages to quell the riots at the first sign a new one was erupting — but in truth, Dominic intentionally let a few fires burn, because a little upheaval was good for the cause.
Instead of conceding Leo’s point, Dominic pinched the bridge of his nose and looked at his non-Beam-enabled desk blotter.
“I hate to make your headache worse…” said Leo.
The way Leo trailed off, Dominic knew what was coming. But he asked anyway.
“What is it, Leo?”
“Moondust.”
“Noah Fucking West.”
“I’ve tried not to mention it, Dominic, but we’re getting really low. I don’t want to press you, but you’re the only person I can ask. Ever since you stepped into Omar’s place as an intermediary…well…” Leo shrugged.
Now it was Dominic’s turn not to rise to the bait, because the truth was that Dominic had brought the moondust burden on himself, and they both knew it.
The Organas had been synthesizing their mind-altering hallucinogenic in labs since the ’60s, but in the late ’70s they’d discovered that the compound was especially potent when grown on the moon — something about the vacuum, alternating exposure to unshielded solar radiation and deep cold, and space dirt…or some other bullshit Dominic didn’t understand in the least. Opportunistic entrepreneurs with access to the moon elevator had immediately begun growing moondust and smuggling it back. Ever since, the drug had been intertwined with Organa like two hairs in a braid. Organas said Lunis allowed them to see truths The Beam couldn’t, and perhaps as a perverse kind of proof, the most elite Beam hackers were deeply, deeply addicted. Whether that was coincidence or not, Dominic couldn’t say…but it didn’t matter whether he thought it made sense or not. Organa didn’t function without moondust, and when addicts ran dry, withdrawal could be fatal.
Dominic didn’t need more pressure right now, but Leo was right: He was the one who’d stepped into the middle of the supply chain, who’d told Leo to stop buying directly from Omar because Omar was screwing the Organas every way he could manage. Like it or not, it was on Dominic unless he wanted his one “cause” to fall into a pile of twitching junkies and die.
“I’ll get you your dust,” said Dominic.
“Our stores are nearly depleted. People know it, too. If this goes on much longer, we’ll have to start rationing, and if we do that, we’ll have our own version of your riots.”
“I said I’ll get it for you.”
“Even if you have to make a run yourself, Dominic,” said Leo. “Don’t make me beg.”
“Okay.”
“Promise me you’ll do it. Just a few meterbars.”
“I’ll get it when I get it.”
“This week. Can you run this week?”
Dominic, annoyed, pushed down his own irritation as he watched Leo’s thin veneer grow thinner. Deep down, Leo was scared. There were hundreds of people who came and went in the mountain community, and that was a lot of need to fill. One person would run out then tear the rest of the others apart trying to find more. Organas were peaceful by nature, but all addicts were dangerous when their needs weren’t met.
“Look, Leo…” said Dominic.
“What?”
“One of the runners was pinched on the moon,” he admitted.
Leo’s eyes went wide. Dominic held up a hand.
“It’s not a big deal, okay? We have people coming down all the time. There’s usually a buffer supply, but, well, it belonged to this guy, and he fucked up. We won’t make the same mistake again. There are guys coming down every day, bringing a few dozen centimeterbars with them each time. One of the people we know is sending a hover with a nice big hidden compartment, and he’s taking your usual bribe with him. Okay?”
“When?”
“Two days. Tops.”
Leo seemed to force his face into a smile. “Okay.”
“I promise.”
“Don’t fuck it up,” said Leo.
That made Dominic’s head snap around. Leo was just scared, but bullshit was bullshit, and Dominic was doing his best.
“You know,” he said, “has it ever occurred to you — the irony of you trying to ‘free people’s minds’ while you’re all hooked on dope?”
Onscreen, the man with the gray braids scowled, and then his image vanished. It was the video call equivalent of slamming a door in someone’s face.
He picked up a trio and dropped all three under his tongue.
Dominic leaned back and looked at the ceiling, waiting for the moondust to show him truths The Beam could not.
Doc felt nervous in this part of town.
By contrast, Kai, walking along beside him, seemed to be right at home in a place where the servicing of raw human needs was done so openly. The drug dealers were almost unionized here, each with his or her own specialty, and Kai apparently knew them all. Some dealt dust; some dealt hypercrack; some dealt plain old-fashioned heroin. Kai treated them all like old friends, despite the fact that her clients were all from much higher social castes. She said she liked society’s castoffs. They were honest in a way law-abiders could never be. And everyone certainly knew Kai, even if they’d never met her in person. Her reputation as a woman with connections seemed to precede her.
Doc stared too long at everything, unable to help himself. There were walkers on every corner. Most of them, he knew, would have upgraded themselves with bargain-basement sexual enhancements that even Doc, with his loose morals and entrepreneurial impetuosity, would never sell. He’d heard of such things, though; they were advertised in rip-off shops throughout The Beam, pushing geotagged ads at everyone who connected to the network within twenty miles of this place. The walkers would have vaginas made of flexible Plasteel, with small rollers under the surface that provided ribs “for his pleasure.” The rollers vibrated and shook, and would do so to milk a john while stimulating his prostate via an appendage up his ass at the same time. The walkers’ faces were barely human. They had lips that looked like a joker’s, their skin stretched tight to conceal wrinkles that, in higher-class hookers, would have been erased by nanos. Many of the girls had long, dexterous synthetic tongues. They flicked them at Kai in greeting like obscene robot kisses. Kai waved back and called the walkers by name.
They finally came to a crumbling building with a sandstone facade that, Doc supposed, had once been beautiful and grand. It was just west of the park and had been home to the District Zero’s old rich before the upheaval of the 20s had turned the previous century’s elite real estate into ghetto.
Kai stopped and looked up. “This is it.”
Doc was unimpressed. The nicest-looking older buildings tended to be the worst, and he didn’t trust it. Something was running up and down his spine, warning him off like a sixth sense.
“Looks like a flophouse,” he said.
Kai, her eyes still on the building, nodded. “Pretty much,” she said.
After Doc — on the run from the police and whoever had broken into his apartment — had paged Kai and stormed into her building (and after Kai had soothed his jangled nerves in the way that only Kai could, for a price) she’d listened to his story, then busted his balls. After a suitable period of mockery, she’d called a man named Stanford who she claimed could make people disappear. She explained that Stanford’s process wasn’t simple, that it’d cost Doc more credits than he’d want to spend, and that it wasn’t foolproof…but that it was the best Doc would be able to do. It was possible to get your hands on a permanent solution, of course — a stolen Beam ID — but installing stolen IDs was more than tricky, and Doc had neither the time nor the money to make it happen. Beam IDs were mRNA-based and replicated inside a host’s body like a virus. Changing a person’s ID involved genetic manipulation that a skeeve like Stanford couldn’t safely do. What Stanford could do, though, was perform a full-body magic trick involving false eyes or lenses, skin lotions, and other spoofed parts that the bots were most likely to scan. Stanford couldn’t yank a person from the grid, but he could make that person invisible in the same way a good magician makes things invisible — by using misdirection and flair.
Standing in front of the sandstone building, Doc listened again to his sixth sense playing ominous notes across the back of his neck. Something was wrong. He took Kai’s wrist and pulled her farther down the littered sidewalk.
“What are you doing?” she said.
Doc kept his face neutral. “Just keep walking.”
Kai, who had seemed to find Doc’s reports on Xenia’s secrets as ominous as he did, obeyed. They crossed a street and skirted several burned-out hulks of ancient cars when Doc finally saw the unseen thing that had set his nerves on high alert.
“Shit,” he said.
“What?”
Doc didn’t answer. Instead, he shoved Kai into an alcove behind a refuse bin and pushed his body against hers, suddenly groping her small breasts, reaching around to grab handfuls of ass. He smashed his lips sloppily into her mouth, using plenty of tongue. It was wet and gross and desperate, and Kai pushed back at him until she heard the hum. Then she fell into it and let Doc do what he wanted.
They waited, playing out their little drama. Behind them, the hum increased in volume.
Doc rolled Kai to the side and glanced at the sweeperbot from the corner of his eye. DZPD didn’t try to disguise the bots and make them look friendly. Sweeperbots were all metal and menace, without any attempts to mimic human expression. The thing looked like an upright bullet with few visible features. Its sensors were all under the surface of its Alumix skin, able to see through what looked from the outside like a jacket of copper. It was floating now, but at least half the time you ran into sweepers, you’d see them prowling to conserve energy, stalking the streets on long chrome legs with pointed ends, like giant spiders.
The sweeper stood behind them as if enjoying the show, humming as it hovered. Inside its smooth copper-colored jacket, something whirred, reversed, whirred again.
Doc couldn’t see the thing fully without being obvious, so he kept waiting, groping Kai while she groped back, now seemingly adding her considerable work experience to her performance. The bot wouldn’t be able to scan them without cause, and making out in public certainly wasn’t cause in this part of town. But if the bot was looking for a missing man with shoulder-length blond hair in a suit jacket too nice for the district? Well, that might be cause aplenty.
After a long moment, the bot hovered on, searching for criminal activity that violated the low standard it was programmed to accept in this part of town.
Doc exhaled then parted from Kai. She didn’t peel off the wall with him. Instead, she continued to hold on south of his belt.
“You fucking pig,” she said. “You’re totally hard!”
“Come on,” he said, ignoring her. “We can go back now.”
But Kai kept holding his crotch and refused to lose her infuriating sideways smile. Doc couldn’t believe she wanted to play this game right now. Of course he was hard. Her pointing it out was like a ninja observing his way with a blade.
“Goddammit. Knock it off,” he said.
“You started this.”
Doc wrenched free, then took Kai roughly by the arm and pulled her back in the direction of Stanford’s sandstone building. She was tiny compared to him, but right now the small pale-skinned woman with the dark-brown hair clearly had the upper hand over the broad-shouldered blond man. She dragged her low heels as he tugged her, giggling.
“You like me, Doc Stahl,” she teased.
“Come on.” He released her hand and took the lead, figuring she’d either follow or she wouldn’t.
“I can see it in your eyes,” she cooed. “And in your pants. I could do things to you right here and right now, you know. In this part of town, nobody would think anything of it. That sweeper wouldn’t have thought twice if I’d dropped to my knees and put your cock in my mouth.”
Doc, who was usually impervious to embarrassment, felt a blush creeping up from under his collar. He’d done acres of dirty deeds with Kai, but all of them had been in the bedroom. He didn’t exactly appreciate he
r come-ons while they were crossing a street filled with hookers and junkies. They were passing a few clusters of people in the gutters, and despite the vagrants’ stupor, heads had raised at Kai’s remark.
“You know I can do things with my tongue that…”
“Do you ever get tired of being a whore?”
The comment was wrong on a dozen levels, but Kai took it as fair retaliation and smirked. She liked control, and sex was one of her ways to get it. Other ways were money and rapport, both of which Kai had in spades. Doc had always felt comfortable with her. It was as if they were a couple rather than mutual clients. Kai bought from Doc, and she seldom paid with credits. Doc got the dust knocked off his boots and usually remunerated with gifts instead of cash. It was intimate, in a way. It was easy to forget that she probably had the same setup with dozens of guys.
“Can I ask you something, sweetheart?” Doc said.
“Always.”
“Why are you here?”
“Stanford,” she answered.
“I mean, why are you here with me.” He shook his head, already feeling dumb for where his question was going. “Never mind. You must get that all the time.”
“What?”
“Guys who think they’re getting special treatment.”
She laughed. It was a strange sound, down in the city’s gutter. “This is special treatment,” she said. “Believe it or not, I don’t help all of my clients vanish.”
“So again, why are you here?”
She shrugged. “This job isn’t about the money for me anymore. A girl can’t just do it for the money if she expects to stay whole.”
As strange as her laugh had been, hearing Kai talk about wanting to be whole was a thousand times stranger. She saw his look and continued.
“Don’t look so surprised,” she said. “We all — well, all of us in Enterprise, anyway — earn our credits so that we can do something else. We work hard so we can play hard. But when I’m done working, I don’t want to read books. I like to fuck. That’s the fun part. So I don’t have to work and then play. I turn parts of my work into play.”