by Sean Platt
Nicolai knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to write; he wanted to paint; he wanted to learn to play the fantastic piano collecting dust in his apartment. Sure, he had the credits to be pointlessly artistic for a while, but then what? He was well-off today, but he was still Presque Beau, not the mythical Beau Monde. The ultra-rich could achieve critical mass if they invested right; they could use their existing money to stay wealthy forever. But Nicolai’s bank account, while large, was finite. He didn’t have critical mass. Every day he eschewed a job and acted like a future starving artist, his account would lose a handful of credits. After enough time — probably before the next Shift in 2103 — he’d run empty. Then what would he do with his writing and piano playing? He’d be just another creative soul in the gutter, selling the fantastic piano for another year’s rent in a middle-of-the-road apartment.
Of course, that was the worst-case scenario, and not at all likely. Nicolai had gone from an insane amount of family wealth to nothing while crossing Europe before he’d returned to crazy (not-quite-insane) wealth in America. During his days of wandering, he’d hunted animals to live, built shelters, killed those who threatened him, and ambushed those who had what he needed. There was no shame when civilization’s cheery mask crumbled from its face — no honor among thieves, one might say. Nicolai had no doubt that if he were thrown naked and penniless into the darkest Enterprise ghetto, he’d claw his way out in a matter of weeks. He wasn’t the kind of man who fell under another’s foot. He wasn’t usually arrogant, but truth was truth: Nicolai was far too fine for the gutter. The best and most cunning always survived, Nicolai knew he was both.
But right now, he wasn’t poor, and he wasn’t being thrown into the gutter. He was rich, and if he made the right moves now, he could stay rich forever. He could even remain Directorate, collect a dole, do nothing all day, and let his accumulated wealth sustain him indefinitely. But Nicolai wasn’t like that. He couldn’t be idle. He couldn’t leave his abilities in their holsters. He had to come out blazing and do something remarkable. The question was: What?
Nicolai didn’t want to crawl back to Isaac. He didn’t really want to go to Micah Ryan’s camp either, though that was probably the most logical move. For one, Micah was everything his brother wasn’t and didn’t need a right hand. Every politician needed strong, persuasive speechwriters, but Nicolai wasn’t cut out to be just one man in a stable of others. He wouldn’t want to be a speechwriter; he’d want to be the speechwriter. And really, he didn’t want to be a speechwriter at all. Wasn’t that what he’d been lamenting for years — the feeling that he was whoring out perfectly good talent to manufacture half truths and outright lies? No, he didn’t want to be in politics. And he didn’t want to work for Micah Ryan.
Nicolai saw Micah in a way that Isaac was blind to. Micah was ruthless. He hadn’t led Ryan Enterprises into the empty north when the ice had melted to seize unseized spoils. He’d driven out those who were already there, already staking their claims. He’d aggressively bought them out, made threats, and (Nicolai suspected but couldn’t prove) hired roughnecks to sharpen the point on his message. Micah’s men had a way of getting into trouble with the law then suddenly no longer being his men. Sometimes, Micah’s men vanished. Yet Isaac was blind to his brother’s manipulations — his brother’s manipulations of Isaac prominent among them. Micah could play his brother like a fiddle, and Isaac never quite saw it happening. They even met once a month in private, despite their public rivalry. Ostensibly it was “a brother thing that Nicolai would never understand,” but it wasn’t just Nicolai who was excluded. Nobody was allowed in those meetings — not Natasha, not Micah and Ryan’s mother, Rachel, not anyone — and Isaac always came back from them beaten. Nicolai had been urging Isaac for years to cut his brother from his life, but Isaac always said that blood was blood, and you didn’t turn your back on blood.
It was beyond frustrating. Nicolai’s job was to give Isaac advice to help him succeed and keep him safe, but when it came to Micah, Isaac flat-out didn’t listen to anyone. The brothers shared the responsibility of taking care of Rachel — mainly shuttling her to her many enhancement appointments; she was nearly 130 years old, so her add-ons never quite took — but Isaac always ended up doing most of the work. Micah sat with Rachel; Isaac ran errands for Rachel. Micah had long discussions with his mother; Isaac hired contractors to do work around her house and walked her dog. Nicolai tried to point out the inequity in the relationship, but Isaac was willfully blind. Rachel still controlled the family fortune and held the majority stake in Ryan Enterprises, which their father had founded. Micah was gaining favor, strengthening his position as her favorite. Isaac, on the other hand, was checking off her list of to-do’s.
Well, fuck Isaac. If Isaac was too stupid to see how his brother, his mother, and his wife used him like a puppet to get what they wanted, then he deserved what he got. Nicolai didn’t want to — and now, no longer had to — be part of it. Not part of Isaac’s faltering machine or Micah’s steamroller…and definitely not part of Natasha’s machine. Hers might be the most dangerous of all. She’d tried to get Nicolai into bed no fewer than a dozen times over the years they’d all known one another, and she’d nearly succeeded several times when Nicolai had been weak or lubricated. The fallout, had he succumbed, would have been disastrous. Nicolai liked Natasha. He kind of wanted Natasha, when he wasn’t loathing or afraid of her. So maybe it was best to stay away from her entirely now that he’d cut the cord.
Nicolai’s ear rang. He answered without bothering to ask for the caller’s ID then nearly fell over when he heard Natasha’s voice. She’d bloomed from his thoughts, grabbing him by the cortex and scrambling over him like a spider, a black widow, a beautiful and deadly thing that…
But it was only Kai Dreyfus.
“Nicolai! You are alive!”
It was a bizarre thing for Kai to say. He thought he might have misheard, but Kai had spoken as plain as day.
“Me?” he said. “I was trying to reach you.”
“When?”
“Yester…” He stopped mid-word, remembering his missing day and a half. Yeah, that was another thing he needed to spend some time working out. “The other day,” he finished.
“You’re not pleasantly surprised that I’m alive?” she asked.
Okay. He could play along. “Sure,” he said. “Go, you.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Hurt? Why would I be hurt? No, I’m not hurt.”
“Did you get Neuralin? Are you hiding, or did they really let you go free?”
Nicolai cocked his head to the side. His implant thought he was trying to add another party to the call so he kicked his head the other way to cancel the accidental request. He’d have to go right at this. The games were driving him nuts. “Kai, what the hell is going on? Just give me the full rundown, okay?”
There was a long pause. Nicolai heard a thumping on Kai’s end, as if she’d dropped an armload of laundry. He thought he heard someone grunt. Kai sounded almost out of breath. She wouldn’t call him while screwing some guy, would she?
“Oh,” said Kai. “Nicolai, when did you talk to me last?”
“Few days, I think. When we went to Vesuvio. I left you a message or two after that.”
“I see.”
“What?”
“I’ll explain in person. Now unfortunately, this is going to seem stranger to you than it should, so just trust me that there’s a reason for it. Promise?”
He wasn’t about to promise shit regarding this particular conversation. So he just said, “A reason for what?” He felt both bothered and intrigued. Kai was never like this. For one, she was being so mysterious. She was normally dead straight, and not into games. And secondly, though Kai had always been honest with him, Nicolai had never heard her so…so real. Kai the escort had a way of speaking, a way of breathing, a way of lilting her voice that she’d trained herself to do and could now no longer help, even when she was with Nicolai. This wasn’t Kai
the escort. This was Kai the woman. This was her as she’d been born, with no posturing, seducing, or bullshit added. This was her naked voice — ironically, the voice she’d use when there would be no getting naked anytime soon.
“I need you to get me into the Ryans’ penthouse,” she said.
She might as well have said she needed him to dress like a clown and run the DZ marathon pulling a wagon filled with Twinkies.
“What?”
Now she sounded even more out of breath. She was almost heaving. Nicolai gave Kai a lot of latitude and not a lot she did could bother him, but he didn’t think he wanted to hear her have an orgasm. Or fake one. But then, as he listened, there was another thump, and she yelled at someone on her end of the connection. Something about “stop dropping him.”
“What the hell are you doing, Kai?”
“I’m sorry. I’m taking a heavy load here.”
“Gross.”
“No, not…hang on.” She yelled at the other person again. This time it was just swearing, nothing specific. When she returned, she was all business and to the point. “Noah Fucking West, Nicolai. Just trust me, okay?”
“Um…”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“In the park.”
“Where in the park?”
“By the monument.”
Pause. More out-of-breath noises.
“Okay. I’ll meet you there. Ten, fifteen minutes. I’m bringing Doc Stahl. You know him, right?”
Doc?
Something desperately wanted to connect in Nicolai’s mind. Doc had something for Nicolai. He grasped for what it was then found it. His chip. His upgraded creativity wetchip. He’d been so eager to get the chip. He’d been bugging Doc about it for days. Doc had called him and had left a message telling him it was in. Factoring in his missing time, that had to have been days ago. So why hadn’t Nicolai picked it up? Reflecting, he seemed to remember being excited, anticipating, going for the chip. Yet he didn’t have it; he couldn’t sense it inside him. How had his trip to Doc’s ended? He had a vague sense that he’d arrived to find Doc gone then went home empty-handed, content to try the next day. The memory was dull but ill-fitting, like a patch-job. When the brain had a hole, it tended to make up something to fill it. So was that the beginning of his missing time? What had happened between going to Doc’s on Friday night and waking up this morning?
“Yeah, I know him. Ask him if he has my wetchip,” said Nicolai.
Kai laughed. Her voice pitched to that same someone else, who was apparently Doc. She asked him if he had Nicolai’s wetchip. Doc laughed, dry in the distance. Some joke was passed between them that Nicolai didn’t get. But at least he was beginning to believe they weren’t having sex.
“He says he’ll give it to you if you get us into the penthouse,” Kai said.
“I don’t even work for…” Nicolai started, but then the connection broke as Kai ended the call. “I don’t even work for him anymore,” he finished.
Alone again, Nicolai stood and strolled listlessly around the monument. It showed an enormous stern-faced soldier in an American military uniform holding an old machine gun over his shoulder. Nicolai had never understood the monument. It was supposed to commemorate the shelling of New York, but the preserved bomb crater near Houston commemorated the same thing and was much more impressive. The greenbelt had barely been struck; the (at the time) high-rent apartments and shops and lower Manhattan offices had taken the brunt. As far as Nicolai knew, there hadn’t even been any soldiers in DZ at the time. That was why it was such a tragedy. So why was the monument of a soldier?
He walked in circles, pacing. Nicolai always did his best thinking while he was in motion, but even after making many tiny laps, nothing made sense. He could call Kai back, but there was little point. She’d be at his side in a few minutes, and based on all that grunting and heaving, whatever she’d been doing was keeping her hands full in the meantime. Besides, she’d been speaking in a subtly guarded way that Nicolai (as a high-ranking political official) and Kai (as a high-strata escort with a secret second life) were both fluent enough to use when it seemed possible that their conversation might not be private.
It must have to do with his missing time, he thought. The day and a half in which Micah Ryan had made an incendiary speech, Isaac had felt abandoned, Nicolai had gave Kai reason to think he might be hurt, and she had given him reason to think she might be dead.
Nicolai suddenly, out of the blue, wondered if he’d been right to leave his post with Isaac. It had nothing to do with Kai and her odd need to break into his penthouse. It had to do with the unknowns. Nicolai had never before, to his knowledge, experienced missing time. Was this what a mind wipe felt like? He’d heard it was possible. He’d read an article or two and viewed a handful of Beam vidstreams made by conspiracy theorists who announced that all of their paranoid fantasies had come true, that the government could now officially control minds. There was also a handful of vidstreams made by nut jobs who wanted to tell the world that their memories were erased, and aliens were real. The latter had kept him busy for an entire night, laughing until he cried. But it all seemed so fringe, so unnecessarily paranoid.
Nicolai had wanted out of his job as a speechwriter so he could finally create, could finally take risks and build his own future, could finally get out from under Isaac’s passive-aggressive thumb and Natasha’s unrelenting seduction. But he’d made his decision without having all of the information. What might have happened to him during the missing weekend? What might have happened to Isaac? Maybe Isaac had really, truly (for real this time!) needed Nicolai. Maybe whatever had happened (and what might happen next) was the pearl-in-the-oyster he had been waiting for. Nicolai was paid to turn lemons into lemonade — or had been until a few hours ago. Weren’t conspiracy and scandal excellent lemons? Maybe he’d screwed up.
Nicolai spent the next few minutes pacing the monument, pondering the soldier. Maybe it represented the proud military who’d fallen in battle, if not specifically in the shelling. But then why position it as a monument to the shelling rather than to the conflict as a whole? The bronze plaque clearly said it honored those lost during the shelling of District Zero. Nicolai looked up at the soldier, mystified.
A noise behind him turned his attention to Kai as she pulled up behind him on a screetbike, inexplicably wearing a baseball cap and a large wrap around her neck and shoulders. Alone.
“That’s an interesting look for you,” he said.
“Get on.”
“Where’s Doc?”
“In an alley,” she said, brushing a runaway strand of long brown hair behind her ear. “In a dumpster with another man.”
“Is that a gay joke?”
Kai didn’t seem to be in the mood for joking, and Nicolai, always observant, saw things in her manner that he didn’t like as he climbed onto the bike behind her. She looked around nervously, as if afraid of being followed. Her clothes — blue jeans and a plain white shirt — were clean and unassuming (if far less sexy than her usual wares), but there were spots of dirt and what might be caked blood on the back of her neck, as if she’d changed quickly but not had time to properly shower. She seemed to have spritzed herself with perfume, but under the flowery scent was an earthy smell tinged with sweat and adrenaline.
“What happened, Kai?” he asked.
“It’s complicated.”
“I was there, wasn’t I? Whatever you’re running from, I was there.”
She looked back at Nicolai, and for a moment, he was afraid she might strike a woman pushing a baby carriage down the sidewalk. She turned forward, jogged the bike around the woman, and said, “Yes.”
“I’ve been wiped?”
“Sounds that way. What’s the last thing you remember?”
Nicolai told her about going to get the wetchip from Doc on Friday then knowing nothing after that.
“So you don’t remember the simulator. Fighting with Doc. Me being tortured then taken away for evap
oration?”
“Jesus. No. Why?”
Natasha and Isaac’s apartment, where Kai said she’d left Doc and another man named Whitlock, was across town from the park. So during the long ride through traffic, Kai told Nicolai a story that chilled his bones.
When she was done, she told him about the rock and the hard place she found herself between. Then, she told him exactly how she planned to kill Doc Stahl inside the Ryans’ lush uptown penthouse.
In 2041, Natasha won a Best Artist award from the Music Artists’ Alliance. It was a particularly brilliant honor, and the one award among her many that Natasha particularly cherished. The MAA was the recording industry’s first truly meritocratic organization. As early as the turn of the twenty-first century, musicians were breaking out without needing help from the big businesses who had grown comfortable raping them, but at the time, truly independent artists were the exception rather than the rule, and it was hard to buck the system and distribute music on your own. Things had progressed nicely by the ’20s, and around the time the world was celebrating its AIDS and cancer cures and the unparalleled scientific discoveries being made on the new lunar base, it looked as if musicians might finally get their fair shake on a more global level. But then the weather went bad and the chaos started, and people stopped caring about music for a decade. In 2038, however, the MAA was formed, structured as a virtual co-op that granted artists a 60 percent cut of music they produced on their own. Musicians rejoiced. And in 2041, Natasha won the MAA’s most coveted award. The award statue was simple but beautiful. Its base was brown marble formed into the shape of a shallow bowl. A solid ball of brushed metal rested in the bowl’s basin. Natasha didn’t know what kind of metal it was, but it was heavy, about the size of a shot put and maybe half of a shot put’s weight. She loved to pick the ball up out of the bowl, feel its heft in her hands, and read her name. The legend read Best Artist of 2041 — and below that, Natasha Ryan.