by Sean Platt
Omar considered the story then said, “What did you see in the room at Xenia?”
“I don’t blame you for asking,” said Doc, “but that’s the one thing I won’t tell you.”
“I need to know what they’re chasing you for.”
Doc shook his head, causing his hair to wiggle like a model’s. His nanos were back at work, restoring his long mane’s old luster. “I’m still not sure enough that you’re not in on this. No offense. But they thought you sent me in because you needed to know what they had. I’m not in a rush to prove them right.”
Omar seemed annoyed. He took a sip of his coffee, looking out across the enormous room. Nobody was paying any attention to them. That was one thing about The Beam — for something designed to connect people, it did an excellent job of making sure they were distracted enough to pay attention to nothing.
“Fine,” said Omar. “Then let me tell you what I know. I do want to see what Xenia’s up to, but not because I want to pirate it. I want to know because whatever they’re involved in, it’s tied to Micah Ryan.”
“The Enterprise guy?”
Omar nodded. “Micah Ryan is in charge of Capital Protection for Enterprise. You heard of Project Mindbender?”
“No.”
“Of course not. No one has. I don’t know either, just that it has something to do with brains and computers. New levels of connectivity, way past what you’ve seen with those wetchips. I’ve heard rumors from the people I know.”
“What people?”
Omar shook his head, shaking a long finger. “No need for that. Just people. People with connections. People who make shit happen. Nobody knows what Mindbender is, except that it’s draped in black. Something Quark tried to roll out that never got legs.”
“What does that have to do with Ryan?”
“Capital Protection,” Omar repeated. “That’s the people charged with ‘preserving mankind’s mindpower.’ You saw that summit a few years back? Well, same deal. The whole ‘Noah’s Ark of Knowledge’ thing. But you stitch the rumors around Mindbender, and the idea of protecting capital — that’s intellectual capital, you understand — and the fact that the head of Capital Protection is also a majority stockholder at Xenia Labs…”
“He is?”
Omar nodded. “A place that makes add-ons and has a secret division that us lower life forms aren’t allowed to see. Only Beau Monde, which is what the too-goods above even us rich huckers call themselves. I hear there are special salespeople for those folks. Now, I know you don’t want to tell me what you saw; okay, fine. But just tell me this: Did you see anything that might represent huge leaps forward in brain/machine interfacing? Anything suspiciously mindbenderish, if you catch my drift?”
Doc slowly nodded.
“Doc, I’ll shoot straight. I know about this because if I’m in the right place at the right time, I’m going to be very rich. That’s also how you know you can trust me. Because this is about credits — enough to pop both of us into that Beau Monde if we skip rope together. I had to turn on someone today. I don’t like doing that, but…well, it was necessary to gather forces to my side.”
“I don’t trust you at all,” said Doc.
“I tell you I flipped someone, you’d be fool to. But you do trust me anyhow because I’m honest with you, seeing as you’re as slippery as I am. Big changes are coming, Doc. Maybe a sort of war. It’s been on simmer for a long while, but if what I think is going down is indeed going down, this world will soon be split into more than Directorate and Enterprise, poor and rich. Think bigger. Think mortals and gods.”
Doc laughed.
“Laugh now,” said Omar, looking more serious than Doc had ever seen him. “This may take a hundred years to blow, but blow it will. And I don’t know about you, but I plan on living as long as I can — and when this blows, I plan to be standing on the winning side.”
Doc took another long sip of his Suicide, wondering what was in it. Whatever it was felt very good. Not only was his lethargy and confusion gone; he felt positively high. What Omar was telling him should have made Doc, who’d just survived inhuman torture over his involvement with Omar, run the other way. Instead, the entrepreneur in him was tickled by potential.
“So what you’re saying is that I did get fucked up because of you.”
“Maybe they just got your subversive ass in advance,” said Omar. “But it don’t matter, Doc. You need friends on all sides. That includes the folks who caught you. You just need to demonstrate your worth. Credits talk plenty loud in the end.”
“I need a Beam ID reset. I know you know people who can do it.”
“Sure, but you can’t hide from these folks if they are who I think they are, and if they can do what I think they can. And you know as well as I do, your best allies are those who were once your enemies. That’s because they’ve already seen your cards. So we’ll go to Xenia. To Micah Ryan. You and me together.”
Doc looked askance at the thin black man in the white suit.
“You’re setting me up. To earn favor by taking me in like you did with your other man. The other guy you turned on.”
Omar reached to the side, pressed his palm to a wall beside his chair, and lit a panel. He said, “Canvas. Display my contacts. Micah Ryan.”
The screen changed to show a photo of Micah Ryan, headed by a Beam ID.
“You have Micah Ryan’s ID?”
Omar nodded. “I’ve never spoken to him, but it’s only a matter of time. Point is, I have it because I know the right people. All I had to do, at any point since you showed up, was step aside and send a ping, and they’d be all over you. Why would I bother to set you up, Doc? This way would be so much easier. I ping, they show. Why would I explain everything first?”
Doc stared at Omar then turned to the pic of Ryan. How the hell did a scammer like Omar have the personal contact information for one of Enterprise’s heaviest hitters?
Omar removed his hand from the wall. The panel went blank, back to being nothing but wall.
Doc inhaled then exhaled slowly. “Okay. Say I believe you. What’s my role?”
“Same as always. You’re a man who can get things. You’re good at making friends. You’re every bit as slippery and self-centered as I am, and not afraid to get your hands dirty.”
“And your role?”
“Deep pockets. Connections. Charm.”
Doc nodded. He believed what Omar said about running being futile, based on what he’d seen at Xenia, what he’d heard, and all that he’d come to unwittingly know over the past few days. Doc’s best bet was to lean into the threat. To call it out, face it down, and make it his friend. Right now, he was a loose end who knew what he shouldn’t. If he could convince his pursuers of his value, he’d become a man with connections who knew what he needed to know. What did you call a man like that?
You called him Partner.
“Okay,” said Doc, nodding subtly. “Let’s see what happens. But first, there’s one loose end I’d like you to straighten. Something I caused. Something I feel guilty for.”
“The woman, right?” said Omar. “Kai Dreyfus, who you were with when you were attacked by Beamers?”
Doc nodded.
“I thought you’d say that.”
Omar was smiling, but his smile made Doc want to punch him. This was about an innocent party he’d put in danger, not getting his pole waxed. Doc was a slippery son of a bitch, but he was still one with values.
“Why?” Doc retorted.
“Because my guys say Micah Ryan has a personal hit girl who matches her description. An escort, who’s good at making men believe whatever she needs them to believe.”
Doc was about to take the final sip of his drink but lowered the cup. “What the hell are you saying, Omar?”
“I’m saying she set you up. Just like you already know she did.”
Kai could feel the pod on the back of her head, under her hair. She didn’t have to reach up and touch it with her fingers to know it was
there; she could feel the thing on her scalp like a poker-chip-sized tick. She’d never seen anything like it, but it made sense to believe that it did what Soldier Whitlock said it did, just to be safe.
Whitlock had told Kai that the pod on her head contained what were known as reapers — a murderous species of nanobots that were essentially spinning food processor blades. On Whitlock’s command, reapers would spill from the pod, enter her skull, and use nanoscalpels to turn her cerebellum and brain stem to pulp. He told her that they were a new breed, invisible to all known defensive nanos and able to communicate with their handler via a protocol that was unjammable and easily surmounted firewalls and other so-called protections. Lastly, Whitlock told her that if she tried to remove the pod, the nanos would simply begin their work immediately. The experience would not be pleasant. First, she’d lose her senses of coordination and balance, causing her to stumble and appear drunk. Then she’d lose her lower motor control and collapse. At some point thereafter, her breathing and heartbeat would cease. At that point, the nanos would leave her system, and the pod itself would dissolve, leaving lower-99 police investigators to assume that a bomb had simply detonated inside her skull.
Kai stood casually, out of obvious sight in an alley near the Starbucks entrance, waiting for Doc to exit. Whitlock had told her that he had an exact bead on Doc’s location inside the immense building, and she believed him. He told her that Doc had entered through the door where Kai now stood, and she had no reason to doubt him about that, either.
Sooner or later, Doc would leave. The person Doc was with (Whitlock didn’t say who it was; maybe he knew, and maybe he didn’t know everything after all) was still in there with him, and Kai was to wait until this second party was out of the way before engaging Doc. How she proceeded after that was entirely up to her.
Kai still didn’t know what she was going to do. She wanted the limbo she was in to last forever so she wouldn’t ever have to decide, but sooner or later Doc was going to come out, and she was going to have to face a choice — should she kill a friend and stay alive, or should she let them both die? Math favored the former, but Kai didn’t know that she’d be able to live with herself if she did it. She’d been an escort for a long time, but she had never really, truly been a whore. She’d always had her standards and had always made her own decisions. She loved sex, and a part of her even loved killing. She had always done both by her own choice, no matter who was painting the targets or paying the bills.
She felt the alley’s cool stone at her back, her leg kicked up and her posture sexy like a common streetwalker. Then she realized the comparison and dropped her leg, turning her side to the wall. She could see Whitlock across the street, sitting in a chair at an outside cafe. He had pulled a pair of loose pants and a long coat from somewhere and had dragged them on over his shiny suit of liquid metal to hide it. A few minutes after sitting, he’d seemed to have remembered the visor and then had done something to make it vanish, and now, Kai could see his face as she looked at him from across the street. She couldn’t make out his features, though. And as a girl for whom information was the best weapon, she resented it. His partner, Jameson, sat across from him at the same table, his face similarly vague from where she was standing. On the other hand, given the complexity of their suits, Kai thought it likely that they could see every detail of her just fine. They might be able to see her neck pulsing with nervousness or see the messy area at the back of her head where her dark-brown hair had been disturbed to plant the pod.
After a few minutes, Doc stepped through the door of the Starbucks door with a tall black man in a bright-white suit. Kai frowned. She didn’t know the man, but she was curious about the ostentatious stranger Doc had chosen to run to after fleeing those he’d seen as captors. And with that thought, a wave of irritation welled within Kai. If Doc had simply trusted her and not run — if he’d never decided that Whitlock and Jameson were captors in the first place — they’d both have been taken to headquarters and dosed with Neuralin. Maybe that would have been the end of it. Micah and his officers might still have messed with Doc afterward — maybe even killed him — but Kai wouldn’t have had to be the one to do it.
Feeling her anger rise, Kai tried to hold onto her senses of ire and irritation. She tried to magnify them. She tried to hate Doc for putting her in this position, tried to summon a desire to kill him or at least to hurt him for what he’d done. If she could just get angry enough…If she could just become furious enough with him…
But then the wave of irritation passed, and the heavy feeling of coming regret returned to her stomach. She turned away. Then she turned back, knowing she had to face it, had to do it regardless of how much it bothered her. She felt the pod like an itch on her head. If she didn’t kill Doc, the soldiers would kill him just the same…after, of course, killing her.
The man in the white suit said a few final words to Doc and walked away with a wave. Doc looked toward the alley, and Kai dove out of sight just in time. A moment later, she peeked back around the corner and saw him check his wrist, noting the time. His simple gesture tugged at her heart. Kai had never known anyone with an add-on as stupid as Doc’s tattoo watch. It said so much about him. It spoke of arrogance, of a respect for yesterday’s style, and of a particularly biting kind of fuck-you to people he grew bored with.
“Doc!” she hissed. She didn’t know why she did it. But now that he was turning and seeing her, she didn’t know what she would do next. Would she just snap his neck the minute he reached her? No, that would be careless. She couldn’t do it right out here in public.
Doc approached her, seemingly back in full possession of his usual swagger. He was still wearing the wardrobe Kai had given him days ago — the one she’d kept for him in the way she kept a set of clothes for any of her clients who wanted to leave one. Blue jeans. A white T-shirt. A light-brown suit coat, stylishly tailored. And, on his feet, a pair of Doc-standard cowboy boots. He was a cowboy in his chosen profession, too. He was the only person Kai knew who was just as slippery and underhanded as she was but who managed to be fiercely loyal when it mattered.
She waved him into the alley. Seeing the way she was hiding seemed to remind Doc that he was supposed to be keeping a low profile, so he immediately began looking around, ducking as if a three-inch reduction in height might make him invisible. Kai watched him approach, warring internally. She still wasn’t sure what came next. She was in charge, and yet she had no idea what she was in charge of, or how she felt. So when she slapped Doc hard across the face, she was every bit as surprised to see herself do it as he was.
“What the hell, sunshine?” he said, raising his hand to the reddening spot on his cheek, his eyes somewhere between shocked and angry.
“You asshole,” she spat, surprising herself. “Why did you run? Why couldn’t you just fucking trust me?”
“Hey, how could I know what you were up to?” he said, shuffling into the alley beside her. “I get my ass tortured and about lose my mind, then a few guys in silver suits storm in and whisk us off somewhere else, God knows where. And you? You’re just going right along with them. They were just like those Beamers, in my eyes. You know…showing up out of the blue to get me. After you left my side, I mean.”
“Those men saved me! I was dying!”
“You look fine to me,” said Doc, giving her lean body a long lecherous once-over with his eyes. “Good enough to eat, in fact.”
Kai felt disoriented. This wasn’t going how this was supposed to be going. “Because I got Neuralin,” she said. “Which we were taking you to get, too, if you hadn’t run.”
“Interesting.”
Kai pushed him in the chest. “Are you kidding me with this?” she railed. “You came to me in the first place because you trusted me to help you! I called those soldiers, you ass!”
“Why are you so worked up, if you called them?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Oh, it always is. How exactly did you call them? Robot ma
n hotline?”
“I called a connection. He sent them.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Someone I trust.”
“Who did you call, Kai?” Doc asked her, leaning back and kicking his boots up against the stone wall behind him.
Kai shook her head. Something was wrong. Doc was too upright, too confident, too borderline righteous. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been running for the gutter like a frightened rat. Now he looked ready to waltz into a big sale and knock ‘em dead. What had happened between then and now?
“Someone who could help me. Us.”
“Someone really powerful, I’ll bet,” he said with a knowing look. The look felt like an X-ray, as if he could see right through her.
“What’s the matter with you? You’re still in danger. People are still after you. Why are you acting like a cock?”
“Which people are after me, kitten?” said Doc. “Not the people I ran from, right? Because that just plain wouldn’t make sense, seeing as you’re with ‘em and all.”
Kai tried to reply but found herself short on words.
“You’re right,” said Doc. “It was stupid of me to run from those silver guys on the bikes, seeing as I’m now in danger from them and they’re chasing me. So tell me. How do you fit in, if they’re with you and they’re dangerous to me?”
Then, as Kai watched with shocked eyes, Doc pulled a toothpick from his pocket and put it between his teeth. The motherfucker put a toothpick between his teeth. Somehow, somewhere, Doc had taken control of the conversation. He wasn’t scared at all. He wasn’t acting like a man on the run. Something had solved every problem in his mind between when he’d ditched her and when she’d found him.