by Sean Platt
The blinking stopped. Blood trickled from his shattered nose, spreading into a macabre red mustache.
Kate stepped away, looking down at the body. Between her face and Levy’s corpse were two large, gravity-defying breasts.
“What the fuck is wrong with me that I’m still turned on by these things?” she said to herself as she cupped them.
EPISODE 9
January 29, 2086 — District Zero
“Mr. Stahl?”
Doc turned.
The agent — too tall, too beautiful, and too robustly endowed to be anything other than real estate bait — was standing across the apartment, trailing her long, delicate fingers across a property scan station sitting on the kitchen bar. Every movement was sexy, almost contrived. She was wearing heavy (but not overly heavy) eye makeup and, Doc was near certain, had glitter in her hair. Doc almost wanted to laugh. These days, it seemed like brokers all hired from modeling schools, stuffed the girls full of stats, and sent them out to woo their prospects with temptation and pheromones. Doc almost wanted to ask the girl a question about real estate law in DZ just to see if she’d bother with a bullshit answer.
“I was asking about your move-in plans. Are you eager to buy immediately or just looking?”
“Because this place will sell quickly, right?” Doc smiled. “Because there are several offers already on the table?”
The agent — whose name Doc seemed to remember sounding like a stripper’s, possibly Felicity — looked caught off guard. “Well, actually, yes. There is an interested party in…”
“Fuck it then. Let them take it.”
The agent’s fingers twitched over the scan station. The connection blipped, perhaps thinking she was interested in favoriting the property or making an offer on it. “So you’re not…”
“I like it, darlin’,” Doc told her. He turned then laced his fingers together behind his back. He’d worn one of his best suits for the showing, knowing full well that any decent agent’s snooper AI would look at the fine tailoring, decide what the prospect could likely afford, and cue the agent to negotiate accordingly. It didn’t matter. This was an important moment for Doc (one might even say “monumental” or “watershed”), and it deserved some honoring. Besides, he could handle Felicity the model-agent and whatever tricks she had up her sleeve.
“So…”
Doc turned again then took a few steps toward her.
“Let’s just get this out of the way, okay? I want this apartment, but I know what it’s worth because I’m a salesman too, Sparkles. I have clients in this building. I know those stupid bridges between the two towers are just hookup spots for kids and hotbeds of narcotic activity. But I also know that it doesn’t matter because the kids are the spoiled rich shits that come spilling out of spoiled rich parents, and because I got into plenty of trouble in my youth and didn’t hurt nobody by just being a jackass. But because there have been arrests, the law says you have to disclose that. And I know how much that disclosure turns most buyers away.”
“I…” she began.
“You don’t have other offers right now. I know you don’t. And it’s the end of the month, so this is your last chance to grab commissions. So let’s not play that game.”
The girl looked dizzy. Doc turned back to the windows and stared out across the city’s sprawl. Like all of the apartments he’d seen in Tuco Towers, an entire wall gleamed with floor-to-ceiling windows. Standing near them now gave Doc a feeling of weightlessness. Or perhaps of having risen high above, which was exactly what he’d done over the past few years.
“So…” the girl began.
“My move-in plans are immediate. Now, hon. But just show me around, and don’t yank my chain about the price. Two of my clients have empty apartments on their floors.”
The girl cleared her throat, apparently trying to regroup. He almost felt sorry for her. No one outsold the master salesman.
Doc felt his fingers twined together behind his back, the sides of both hands pressed against the rear of his fine bespoke suit coat. The rug under his feet was brand new and had a scent that made Doc think of wealth. The view, forty-seven stories up, gave him a grand view of the city — high enough to be above most of the surrounding buildings, but not so high as to feel totally alone. The apartment was on the spire’s far side, facing away from the eyesore of the other tower and the drug/sex bridges. Doc could see all the way to the monument crater, to the bridges out of the city.
He wanted to say something out loud, but Felicity (or whatever) the Agent was tapping her handheld behind him in an attempt to recover her edge. So Doc said it in his mind: I’ve made it. Finally, by fuck, I’ve made it.
Doc’s struggle had been intense. Even when he’d first started seeing successes selling add-ons to an increasingly impressive client roster (a level of quasi-security that felt only as solid as walking across an eggshell: fragile and likely to fracture at any moment), he’d told himself that the worst wasn’t over. And it hadn’t been. Just when he’d finally built up a respectable bank balance, there had been that dry spell when the resin used to bind his wholesalers’ nanobots to their substrates had become suddenly scarce. Doc had wiped his savings dry trying to scramble. He’d needed to stay afloat, but he was heavily invested in ocular heads-up enhancements on a wing and a prayer. Trends had gone the other way, though, and Doc’s clients had opted for quasi-immersives instead — from other dealers because Doc hadn’t thought add-ons that provided “partial immersion” was an idea worth dick. His semi-legal suppliers were raided, and that lost him too many clients. The economic dip two years ago had nearly ruined him. There were months when Doc had been sick — just a flu, but it had swept the city, and the medical nanos that fought it had to be refabricated rather than reprogrammed — and those nanobot deals, of course, had gone to the pyramid’s top first.
At the time, Doc had been poor and had nearly bankrupted himself trying to stay afloat as clinic fabricators barely kept pace with demand. That would never happen again.
Felicity the Real Estate Agent had moved into the spacious kitchen. She motioned for Doc to come over. He was halfway across the apartment when he realized that she hadn’t actually called him. What she’d done was closer to a wink. Damn her. Doc was immune to her sales bullshit, but if she wiggled her ass or shook her tits or pursed her lips like a blowjob in the offing, he’d end up being dragged around like a bitch on a leash.
“Full archive kitchen,” she said. “This complex has had them since construction, which means they’re both more efficient and more compact than the retrofitted apartments in older buildings.” She walked to a single black cabinet beside a brushed chrome Beam refrigerator and tented her fingers over the knob, glancing at Doc with what looked like fuck-me eyes. “You’ve used an archive kitchen before?”
“My last apartment had a partial archive.”
That wasn’t exactly true. Real archives shuffled large quantities of food into a single access cubby, available on demand, to save space. One of Doc’s last apartment’s cabinets had a manual lazy Susan built into it, allowing Doc to spin the wheel to bring his cornflakes to the front. The original archive, accessible by fingers even without The Beam.
She opened the empty cabinet. The shelves were smooth and black, with a dull look, like the refrigerator’s brushed chrome.
“Once you move in, the apartment’s canvas will of course be tuned to your Beam ID, but…here.” She pulled a handheld from her jacket’s interior pocket. The shirt beneath the jacket could be played off as professional and proper, but all Doc saw was cleavage. “Hold out your wrist.”
He surrendered his left arm. That limb had an appointment with a specialty shop down on Ninth in the morning to get the most pointless upgrade Doc could find — the kind a man would only get if he was no longer concerned about paying his costs of living. He was planning to get a nanobot tattoo watch. What the hell; he could afford it.
“What’s your name?”
“Felicia,” the a
gent answered, her tone annoyed. She’d already pegged him as a pig — a pushy and inconsiderate pig, probably, based on how he’d killed her scarcity ploy — and didn’t seem surprised that he’d already forgotten. The way she gave her name was both acquiescent and resigned at once.
The handheld beeped.
“You doing anything tonight, Felicia?”
She ignored him, tapping the screen. She closed the cabinet and, not taking her hand from the handle, met his eyes. There was a light tapping from below, and Doc realized she was clicking her toe against the floor like his mother used to do. To Doc, it was the sound of a rattlesnake shaking its rattle.
She opened the cabinet, which was now full, and pulled a blue box from the front row.
“Pop-Tarts? Really?” she said. She turned the box over in her hand with something like disgust.
Doc gave her his most charming smile. “What can I say? I’m a kid at heart.”
She replaced the box, and Doc almost wanted to reach after it. The Pop-Tarts had shown up because he wanted them, after all. The cabinet closed.
“Right now, this apartment is tied to a demo stock, but you’ll obviously fill your own. You can either do so right here, through the cabinet, or you can fill it through a conveyor in the countertop over there.”
Doc looked. “There’s no conveyor there.”
The agent gave him a condescending smile. “Pretty much everything in these units is keyed to Beam recognition algorithms, meaning the environment will constantly respond to you. The conveyor descends from beneath that slab in the middle, if you want it. There will be a training period where the AI will need to get to know you, and how you think.”
“What if I don’t want my apartment reading my mind all the time?”
“It’s not reading your mind. It’s responding to recognizable electrochemical patterns that are readable in the space surrounding…”
“That’s reading my mind.”
The agent gave a giggle. An actual giggle. “Well, Mr. Stahl, if you don’t want your environment responding to you, perhaps you should consider a less expensive apartment.”
“What else?”
“AI cookers, of course, if you’re into that.” She started to pace the kitchen and gesture. “Or you can cook for yourself. There’s a small appliance garage over there that operates on the same principle as the food archive. You can of course completely ignore it if you’d like, but the appliances are included. All of the individual appliances are unique to you, of course. Some people ask if you’d end up using the toaster your neighbor used yesterday, but no, everything is contained. That’s why you can’t order food from other places directly into your cabinet. It’s complicated; something to do with proprietary systems and access. A safety feature, basically, because you don’t want anyone having access to your food. Or, for that matter, your toaster.”
“What’s a toaster?” Doc flashed a smile that told Felicity he was only kidding, and she made a face right back. This was how Doc liked to deal. Nobody was bullshitting anyone, trying to be friendly to extort the other. Although the more Doc watched Felicity walk around and show him features, the more he found he’d like to be friendly with her.
“You can order up, of course, but to be honest I’ve never been a fan. Pizza does horribly in transit. It’s like the lift unsettles the cheese, and it sloughs off to the side. Other deliveries do better. Pharmaceuticals, for instance. Of course you can program recurring deliveries for that sort of thing and have them piped into your medicine cabinets. For some reason, it’s okay for people to have access to your medications, but not your food; go figure. Follow me this way, please.”
Despite the attempted blasé attitude he’d used to unseat the agent, Doc couldn’t help but feel impressed by the apartment. He’d seen others in Tuco when visiting clients, but opulence rose with the floor numbers. The buildings were each fifty-two floors tall, and the upper two were massive penthouses. This apartment was on the forty-seventh floor and couldn’t be too shy of the best. It took up a quarter of the floor and was way, way, way more expensive than was reasonable. There was a hoverport down the hall for docking his car. Because the elevators were keyed to owners’ Beam IDs, there were only three other apartments’ worth of people who could even get off on Doc’s floor. The bridges and their infamy didn’t matter because the kids couldn’t come up and Doc would never stop on those floors. It had the most advanced canvas Doc had ever seen in an apartment. He wouldn’t need to do anything. He could just come up here, sit in a chair, and wait for life on a silver tray.
As Doc followed Felicity’s twitching rear down the hallways and into more opulent rooms than Doc had ever seen in a single living space, he took a moment to wonder if buying this apartment would be a mistake. He didn’t actually think it would be, but he enjoyed the contemplation. Reminding himself just how absurd his purchase was (the monthly mortgage payments would be more than twice what Doc had made per year just a few years ago if he were getting a loan to buy it, which he wasn’t) reminded Doc how secure he finally was.
Doc had grown up poor, had wanted to be rich as a kid, had planned to be rich throughout his teens, and had logged off of schooling at sixteen to start his pursuit. Then, when he’d turned eighteen and had faced his Choice, he’d of course chosen Enterprise. He’d moved out and into an Enterprise Hopefuls group house (the name was a laugh; EH houses were like hostels except that it took sixteen kids in a single room to manage the group rent, even with a rare stipend from Enterprise’s “Start Right” program) then had proceeded to fail. And he’d failed spectacularly. It had taken more than a decade to see his first profitable year and a few years after that to hold an apartment for longer than it took for eviction proceedings to oust him. Even then, life had been like a porcelain figurine balanced atop a bull’s back.
But those days were finished. He’d always scrap, but now he’d do so in tune with his nature. He’d never scrap for food. He’d never need to steal — though it was always possible he’d steal for pleasure. He’d never need to run from debtors…though a man like Doc, with a sweet tooth for dangerous deals and deadly women, probably was never quite through with running.
Felicity led him into a bedroom. The room was empty, but there was a master bathroom visible through a door to the side.
“Do you have cochlear call implants? Heads-up corneas? An archival cloud chip?”
“Some,” said Doc. Truth was he had some moderate-grade nanobots, a few muscular enhancements he’d gotten back when he’d erroneously believed his ship had come in five years before, a cochlear implant, and the same social upgrades that pretty much everyone got with their first handheld, seeing as the two sort of went hand in hand. Despite having sold upgrades for over a decade, Doc still hadn’t been able to justify getting many for himself. Things had been too tentative, and storing credits in irredeemable ways inside his body had, up until now, felt like asking for trouble. Now that would change. Starting tomorrow with his new tattoo.
“The canvas has the standard interface toolset, of course,” said the agent. “Like I said, it will take time to learn your patterns. While it might sometimes feel like the canvas is reading your mind, it’s merely parsing patterns as they pass back and forth with The Beam. Good behavior and intention prediction depends a lot on the native processor and especially on the sensor capability of the system. This one is state of the art, fully refurbed last week, between owners, when the carpet and painting was done. The more enhancements you have, the better its predictive abilities will be. Not just parlor tricks like putting the foods you’re hungry for up in front of the cabinet, but projecting holos and screens where you most want them, siphoning off uploaded factual data that would be best sent to the cloud, determining what you’re working on and helping you analyze it all and prepare for your day, helping you solve problems while you sleep, then reading project details back to you in the morning while you shave, and…”
“What if I don’t want all the details of my work out on
The Beam?”
Felicity turned and gave Doc a snakelike smile. After spending most of the showing being beaten down by Doc’s dominant personality, she’d finally gotten one up on him. Her smile said that Doc was naive, that the answer would have been obvious to anyone who truly belonged in Tuco Towers. She now knew he hadn’t always been rich. Good thing Doc could afford the punishment she’d now bake into the price.
“You’ve never had an AI data gate, have you?”
Doc considered lying, but there was no point.
“Tell me.”
“The canvas’s protection isn’t just about encryption. It’s more like having millions of minuscule soldiers at every entrance and exit.”
“What if I want to do something the AI doesn’t approve of?”
“AI is impartial, Mr. Stahl.”
“Doc.”
“You should think of the canvas as an extension of your brain. It learns from you, like a baby learns from its mother. Children grow up believing that what their parents believe is right. Of course, if you are conducting illegal activities here, you’d better be sure to hide them well from your neighbors and…”
“I meant more like if I hire some company.” He winked.
Felicity rolled her eyes. “Escorts aren’t illegal.”