One of Us

by Michael Marshall Smith

  There weren’t that many options available to me—you can either leave Ensenada up the coast or down. I figured on going up, but I had to try to convince the cops I was heading the other way. I made a series of hard turns towards the southern end of town—ignoring lights, screaming over the main drag at seventy and in general displaying very little concern for the finer points of road safety. A couple of cars ended up swerving onto the pavement, the drivers shouting after me before they’d even come to a halt. I could see their point, but didn’t stop to discuss it.

  After a few hectic minutes I couldn’t see anyone following me in the mirror, so I made a sudden left and slowed the car right down, pulling in to park neatly between a couple of battered trucks by the side of the road. I edged far enough forward that I could see the crossroads, and then killed the engine. Heart thumping, I waited.

  It worked. People don’t really expect you to park in the middle of a car chase. They sort of assume you’ll keep on driving. After a few seconds I saw the police car go flying over the intersection, but I stayed put a little while longer, wiping the sweat off my palms onto my jeans.

  Then I very sedately reversed out of the space and pootled off up the road.

  On the way back to the border I tried to call a friend of mine in the Net, a guy called Quat, but there was no reply. I left a message for him to get in touch with me as soon as possible, and then just concentrated on not driving into the sea. I was pretty calm by then, telling myself the Mexican cops had just been fishing, rousting a conspicuous Americano for kicks.

  Just outside Tijuana I stopped to get some gas from a run-down place by the side of the road. I could have waited until I got the other side of the border, but the station looked like it needed the business. While the guy was gleefully filling my car up I took the opportunity to throw the remaining packets of Kims in the trash, and get some proper cigarettes at contraband prices.

  I also elected to make use of their men’s room, which was a questionable decision. The gas station claimed to be under new management, but the toilets were evidently still under some old management, or more probably governed by an organization which predated the concept of management altogether. Possibly the Spanish Inquisition. The smell was bracing, to say the least. Both of the urinals had been smashed, and one of the cubicles appeared to be where the local horses came when they needed to empty their backs. If so, someone needed to introduce them to the concept of toilet paper, and explain where exactly they should sit.

  The remaining cubicle was relatively bearable, and I locked myself in and set about what I had to do. My mind was on other things, like what the hell I was going to do when I got back home, when I heard a knock on the door.

  ‘I’ll be out in a minute,’ I said, zipping myself back up. Maybe the guy was just worried he wasn’t going to get paid.

  There was no answer. I was groping through the same sentence in pidgin Spanish when suddenly I realized it wouldn’t be the gas jockey. He had my car keys. I wasn’t going anywhere without them.

  The knock came again, louder this time.

  I looked quickly around, but there was no way out of the cubicle—except, of course, through the door. There never is. Take it from me, if you’re ever on the run, a toilet cubicle isn’t a great place to hide. They’re designed with very little functional flexibility.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked. There was no answer.

  I had my gun with me, but that was no answer either. I’d like to think I’ve grown up, but it could just be that I’ve got more frightened. I was never a big one for firearms, and encouraging situations in which I might get my head splattered across walls had even less appeal than it used to. The gun’s little more than a souvenir, and I haven’t fired it in anger in four years. I’ve fired it in boredom, as my old CD player would testify, but that’s not really enough. You have to keep in practice at senseless violence, otherwise you forget the point.

  Extreme politeness was the only sensible course of action.

  So I pulled the gun out, yanked open the door and screamed at whoever was there to get the fuck face down on the floor.

  The room was empty. Just dirty walls and the sound of three taps dripping out of unison.

  I blinked, and swivelled my head both ways round the room. Still no-one. My eyes prickled and stung.

  ‘Hi Hap,’ said a voice, from lower than I would have expected. I slowly tilted my head that way, bringing the gun down with my gaze.

  The alarm clock waved up at me. It looked tired, and was spattered with mud.

  I lost it.

  ‘Okay, you fuck,’ I shouted hysterically, ‘this is it. Now I’m finally going to blow you apart.’

  ‘Hap, you don’t want to do that…’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  The clock backed rapidly towards the door. ‘You don’t. You really don’t.’

  ‘Give me one good reason,’ I yelled, racking a shell up into the breech and knowing that nothing the machine could come up with would be enough. By now we were back out in the lot, and I was aware of the gas guy standing by the car gaping at us, a smile freezing on his face. Maybe it wasn’t fair to take the situation out on a clock, but I didn’t care. It was the only potential victim around apart from me, and I was bigger than it was. I was also fading it big time. My temples felt like they were full of ice, and a patch of vision in my right eye was turning grey.

  The clock knew that time was running out, and spoke very quickly. ‘I was trying to tell you something down in that smelly place. Something important.’

  I aimed right at the AM/PM indicator. ‘Like what? That I have a haircut booked at four?’

  ‘That I’m good at some things. Like finding people. I found you, didn’t I?’

  Finger on the trigger, one twitch away from sending the clock to oblivion, I hesitated. ‘So? What are you saying?’

  ‘I know where she is.’

  Two

  I got into it the same way as most people, I guess. By accident.

  It was a year and a half ago. I was staying the night in Jacksonville, mainly because I didn’t have anyplace else to be. At the time it seemed like whenever I couldn’t find a road to take me anywhere new, I wound up back in that city, like a yo-yo bouncing back to the hand that threw it away in the first place. I was planning on getting out of Florida the next day, and after my ride set me down I headed for the blocks round the bus station, where everything costs less. Last time I’d worked had been two weeks ago, at a bar down near Cresota Beach, where I grew up. They didn’t like the way I talked to the customers. I didn’t care for their attitude towards pay and working conditions. It had been a brief relationship.

  I walked the streets until I found a place going by the inspiring and lyrical name of ‘Pete’s Rooms’. The guy behind the desk was wearing one of the worst shirts I’ve ever seen, like a painting of a road accident done by someone who had no talent but an awful lot of paint to use up. I didn’t ask him if he was Pete, but it seemed a fair assumption. He looked like a Pete. The rate was fifteen dollars a night, Net access in every room. Very reasonable—yet the shirt, unappealing though it was, looked like it had been made on purpose. Maybe I should have thought about that, but it was late and I couldn’t be bothered.

  My room was on the fourth floor and small, and the air smelled like it had been there since before I was born. I pulled something to drink from my bag, and dragged the room’s one tatty chair over to the window. Outside was a fire escape the rats were probably afraid of using, and below that just yellow lights and noise.

  I leaned out into humid night and watched people walking up and down the street. You see them in every big city, mangy dogs sniffing for a trail their instincts tell them must start around here someplace. Some people believe in God, or UFOs: others that just round a corner will be the first step on a road towards money, or drugs, or whatever Holy Grail they’re programmed for. I wished them well, but not with much hope or enthusiasm. I’d tried most types of MAKE $$$ FAST!!! schemes by then,
and they had got me precisely nowhere. Roads that begin just around corners have a tendency to lead you right back to where you started.

  Though I grew up in Florida, I’d spent most of the previous decade on the West Coast, and I missed it. For the time being I couldn’t go back, which left me with nowhere in particular to be. It felt like everything had ground to a halt, as if it would take something pretty major to get my life started up again. Reincarnation, maybe. It had felt that way before, but not quite so bleakly. It was the kind of situation that could get you down.

  So I lay on the bed and went to sleep.

  I woke up early the next morning, feeling strange. Spacey. Hollow-stomached, and as if someone had put little scratchy balls of crumpled paper inside my eyes. My watch said it was seven o’clock, which didn’t make sense. The only time I see seven a.m. is when I’ve been awake straight through.

  Then I realized an alarm was going off, and saw that the console in the bedside table was flashing. ‘Message’ it said. I screwed my eyes up tight and looked at it again. It still said I had a message. I hit the receive button. The screen went blank for a moment, and then fed up some text.

  ‘You could have earned $367.77 last night,’ it read. ‘To learn more, come by 135 Highwater today. Quote reference PR/43.’

  Then it spat out a map. I picked it up; squinted at it.

  $367.77 is a lot of nights’ bar tending.

  I changed my shirt and left the hotel.

  By the time I reached Highwater I was already losing interest. My head felt fuzzy and dry, as if I’d spent all night doing math in my sleep. A big part of me just wanted to score breakfast somewhere and go sit on a bus, watch the sun haze on window panels until I was somewhere else.

  But I didn’t. I have a kind of shambling momentum, once I’m started. I followed the streets on the map, surprised to find myself getting closer to the business district. The kind of people who spam consoles in cheap hotels generally work out of virtual offices, but Highwater was a wide road with a lot of grown-up buildings on either side. 135 itself was a mountain of black plate glass, with a revolving door at the bottom. Unlike many of the other buildings I’d passed, it didn’t have exterior videowalls extolling with tiresome thoroughness the virtues and success of the people who toiled within. It just sat there, not giving anything away. I went in, as much as anything just to find some shade.

  The lobby was similarly uncommunicative, and likewise decked out all in black. It was like they’d acquired a job lot of the colour from somewhere and were eager to use it up. I walked across the marble floor to a desk at the far end, my heels tapping in the cool silence. A woman sat there in a pool of yellow light, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, her tone making it clear she thought it was unlikely.

  ‘I was told to come here and quote a reference.’

  I speak better than I look. Her face didn’t light up or anything, but she tapped a button on her keyboard and turned her eyes to the screen. ‘And that is?’

  I told her, and she scrolled down through some list for a while. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Here’s how it is. Two options. The first is I give you $171.39, and you go away with no further obligation. The second is that you take the elevator on the right and go up to the 34th floor, where Mr Stratten will meet with you presently.’

  ‘And you arrive at $171.39 how, exactly?’

  ‘Your potential earnings less a twenty-five-dollar handling fee, divided by two and rounded up to the nearest cent.’

  ‘How come I only get half the money?’

  ‘Because you’re not on contract. You go up and meet Mr Stratten, maybe that will change.’

  ‘And in that case I get the full $367?’

  She winked. ‘You’re kind of bright, aren’t you?’

  The elevator was very pleasant. Tinted mirrors, low lights; quiet, leisurely. It spoke of money, and lots of it. Not much happened during the journey.

  When the doors opened I found myself faced with a corridor. A large chrome sign on the wall said ‘REMtemps’, in a suitably soul-destroying typeface. Underneath it said, ‘Sleep Tight. Sleep Right.’ I walked the way the sign pointed and ended up at another reception desk. The girl had a badge which said she was Sabrina, and her hair was done up in a weirdly complex manner, doubtless the result of several hours of some asswipe stylist’s attention.

  I’d thought the girl downstairs was a top-flight patronizer, but compared to Sabrina she was servility itself. Sabrina’s manner suggested I was some kind of lower-echelon vermin: lower than a rat, for sure, maybe on a par with a particularly ill-favoured vole, and after thirty seconds with her I felt the bacteria in my stomach start to join in sneering at me. She told me to take a seat, but I didn’t. Partly to annoy her, but mainly because I hate sitting in receptions. I read somewhere it puts you in a subordinate position right off the bat. I’m great at the pre-hiring tactics—it’s just a shame it goes to pieces afterwards.

  ‘Mr Thompson, good morning. I’m Stratten.’

  I turned to see a man standing behind me, hand held out. He had a strong face, black hair starting to silver on the temples. Like any other tall middle-aged guy in a sober suit, but more polished: as if he was a release-standard human instead of the beta versions you normally see wandering around. His hand was firm and dry, as was his smile.

  I was shown into a small room off the main corridor. Stratten sat behind a desk, and I lounged back in the other available chair.

  ‘So what’s the deal?’ I asked, trying to sound relaxed. There was something about the guy opposite which put me on edge. I couldn’t place his accent. East Coast somewhere, probably, but flattened, made deliberately average—like an actor covering his past.

  He leaned forward and turned the console on the desk to face me. ‘See if there’s anything you recognize,’ he said, and pressed a switch. The console chittered and whirred for a moment, and flashed up ‘PR/43 @ 18/5/2016’.

  The screen bled to black, and then faded up again to show a corridor. The camera—if that’s what it was—walked forward along it a little way. Drab green walls trailed off into the distance. On the left-hand side was another corridor. The camera turned—and showed that it was exactly the same. Going a little quicker now, it tramped that way for a while, before making another turn into yet another identical corridor. There didn’t seem to be any shortage of corridors, or of new turnings to make. Occasional chips in the paint relieved the monotonous olive of the walls, but other than that it just went on and on and on.

  I looked up after five minutes to see Stratten watching me. I shook my head. Stratten made a note on a piece of paper, and then typed something rapidly on the console’s keyboard. ‘Not very distinctive,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the donor’s very imaginative. And you lose a great deal, just getting the visual. Try this.’

  The picture on the screen changed, and showed a pair of hands holding a piece of water. I know ‘piece of water’ doesn’t make much sense, but that’s what it looked like. The hands were nervously fondling the liquid, and a quiet male voice was relayed from the console’s speaker.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ it said, doubtfully. ‘About five? Six and a half, maybe?’

  The hands put the water down on a shelf, and picked up another bit. This water was a little smaller. The voice paused for a moment, then spoke more confidently. ‘Definitely a two. Two and a third at most.’

  The hands placed this second piece down on top of the first. The two bits of water didn’t meld, but remained distinct. One hand moved out of sight and there was a different sound then, a soft metallic scraping. That’s when I got my first twitch.

  Stratten noticed. ‘Getting warmer?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, leaning to get a closer look at the console. The point of view had swivelled slightly, to show a battered filing cabinet. One of the drawers was open, and the hands were carefully picking up pieces of water—which I now saw were arrayed all around, in piles of differing sizes—a
nd putting them one by one into different drop files. Every now and then the voice would swear to itself, take out one of the pieces of water and return it to a pile—not necessarily the one it had originally come from. The hands started moving more and more quickly, putting water in, taking water out, and all the time there was this low background noise of the voice reciting different numbers.

  I stared at the screen, losing awareness of the office around me and becoming absorbed. I forgot that Stratten was even there, and it was largely to myself that I eventually spoke.

  ‘Each of the pieces of water has a different value, not based on size. Somewhere between one and twenty-seven. Each drawer in the filing cabinet has to be filled with the same value of water, but no-one told him how to figure out how much each piece is worth.’

  The screen went blank, and I turned my head to see Stratten smiling at me. ‘You remember,’ he said.

  ‘That was the dream I had just before I woke up. What the fuck’s going on?’

  ‘We took a liberty last night,’ he said. ‘The proprietor of the hotel you stayed in has an arrangement with us. We subsidize the cost of his rooms, and provide the consoles.’

  ‘Why?’ I reached unthinkingly into my pocket and pulled out a cigarette. Instead of shouting at me or pulling a gun, Stratten simply opened a drawer and gave me an ashtray.

  ‘We’re always looking for new people, people who need money and aren’t too fussy about how they get it. This is the best way we’ve found of locating them.’

  ‘Great, so you found me. And so?’

  ‘I want to offer you a job as a REMtemp.’

  ‘You’re going to have to unpack that for me.’

  He did. At some length. This is the gist:

  A few years previously someone had found a way of taking dreams out of people’s heads in real time. A device placed near the head of a sufficiently well-off client could keep an eye out for electromagnetic fields of particular types, and divert the mental states of which they were a function out of the dreamer’s unconscious mind and into an erasing device. The government wasn’t keen on the idea, but the inventors had hired an attorney trained in Quantum Law, and no-one was really sure what the legal position was any more. ‘It depends’ was as near as they could get.