When I went into the kitchen, I was surprised to find a jug of unspoiled milk and an open box of cereal. The sheets in the bedroom were ruffled. There was a headset plugged into the wall. I wondered if a squatter had broken in after Zunz died.
In the back of the closet, beneath a rack of vintage MLB uniforms, there was a black security box. I could hear the electric current humming through it. I didn’t see the key anywhere, so pulled out one of the two shock slugs I’d brought with me. It slithered into the lock. The box sparked and the poor creature melted with a hiss that sounded like a cry. The room filled with a rank smell.
The box popped open.
Inside there was something black and metal in a velvet-lined case. I unfolded it. Held it up. It was a black, fleshy mask with small nodes dappling where the skull would go. There was a thick red tube around the base of the mask. The preservation system, I assumed. On the back, near the base of the neck, was a circular black device that looked like a robot’s mouth. When I clicked it on, a metal spike of a tongue shot out and nicked my finger.
It was strange and also somewhat familiar. The nodes around the skull looked similar to the bands Mrs. Z had worn to sync up with the orange-picking machines when Zunz and I were kids, except the tech here was much newer. The only other thing inside the box was a small chipcard stamped The Janus Club: An Out-of-Body Experience That’s Out of This World. There was a Midtown address underneath.
Was this the club Kang had mentioned? It certainly looked like the kind of place that would be discreet enough for dirty deals. I folded up the mask and put it and the card in my pocket, then went to look around more.
These old buildings weren’t wired for modern machines, so I turned on the old LCD wall mount. I scrolled through the recently watched videos. Most of them were what I was expecting. Short clips of cute new zootech creatures crawling their first crawls, news highlights, war updates, and reruns of pre-Dissolution era baseball games. But in the middle of these were videos from a channel called the Diseased Eden with titles like Pick Your Side in the Coming Flesh War and Juice and Oil: Corporate Corporeal Control. Edenist propaganda, I assumed. Not the kind of thing you’d expect a Future League player to watch.
I played the first video and a fat man with a beard as scraggly as a tumbleweed stood in the middle of a flowering field. On his right, there was a meal printer. On his left, a bloated feathered creature that I realized was a headless chicken. The neck ended with an inflamed nub topped with a metal ring for the feeding tube. I’d been eating headless meat for years along with everyone else, but I’d never bothered to look at one up close.
“The Buddhists believe the body is the vessel of the soul,” the fat man said. “What happens to our soul when it resides in a mixture of circuits and poisons? Does not the vessel sink the soul? The corporations call them upgrades, but they are downgrading our spirits. Reducing us. Christians taste the body of their lord, drink the blood of his blood and eat the flesh of his flesh. Society offers us only the poisons of its labs, the wires of its factories.”
I sat back, tossing an old leather baseball between my hands. I’d never heard Zunz express any sympathies toward groups like the Edenists. At most he’d smile, shrug, and say, “Hey, some of them buy jerseys too.” The Edenists didn’t just dislike people who ate modified meat. They hated anyone who upgraded at all. What could a biopharm baseball player like Zunz have to do with them? Zunz was tuned up with as many upgrades as anyone else in the Future League. Next to an Edenist, he’d been so modified he might as well be a different species.
Had Zunz himself started having doubts about what he’d been swallowing and injecting all these years? Did he come to this house, surrounded by antiques, wishing he could rewind his body to a previous form?
A young girl came on the screen. She looked so reedy I thought the wind would snap her in half. She held a knife as big as her forearm. “Flesh above machine,” she said. She stabbed the knife through the top of the meal printer. It shattered. “Blood above poison,” she said and sliced into the chicken. It shook noiselessly, struggling to get away as she sawed. The chicken split apart. Two headless halves inflating and deflating, blood seeping out onto the ground.
Yes, it was the girl. The one I’d seen by the human Zunz statue in Reunion Square. The one I was almost sure had been in the photo in Kang’s house. And, yes, I was shocked to see her materialize on-screen.
I was even more shocked when I turned around and saw her face pressed against the windowpane.
16
THE ISLAND CHASE
It doesn’t matter how upgraded you get. How many steroids or growth hormones or tendon stabilizers you swallow. If you don’t use your body, it starts to decay. Science hasn’t been able to change that. The physical doesn’t want to remain. It wants to destroy itself, to dissolve. Finish its decades-long race into the dirt.
I was reminded of this as I ran after the girl, huffing and wheezing.
She had a good lead on me. My lungs inflated rapidly and sadly, like a fish tossed on land. The girl, though, could run. She had the natural adrenaline of youth. By the time I was out the door, she was already far down the path, weaving between the trees. Her little legs were a blur.
“Wait,” I shouted.
She didn’t.
We ran out of one row of houses and into another. She was several hundred yards ahead of me, then stopped in front of the old military fort. Knelt. Coughed up something wet and red. Looked back at me, ran again.
I followed her into a cobblestoned courtyard inside the abandoned military fort. Old houses ringed the yard. Soldier barracks, I guessed, from some ancient war.
I spun around, looking for the girl. Saw her spindly legs slide through a broken window.
I balked at the front of the house. The windows were caked over with black gunk. Layers and layers of it in thick and gloopy coatings like a child’s painting. A sticky film stretched off the window when I touched it. I knew that substance. Void spit.
I jerked the doorknob, wasn’t surprised when it didn’t turn. I smacked it a few times with my shoulder, then cracked the door open with a kick. It took a while to push it inward.
The smell rolled out in a fetid cloud. The stench was followed by moans.
Three dozen people were inside. Maybe more. Mainly adults, but some had toddlers tucked into their armpits. Their clothes were tattered, bodies dressed in dried fluids. Blood. Shit. Drool. Void juice. The same substances shellacked the floor. Broken steel dispensers were scattered around the room. The people barely moved and when they did the dried void spit screeched.
I pinched my nose to block the smell. The people let out weak moans. They weren’t capable of noticing me. They’d been transported away from everything. Lost in their own bodiless worlds.
A vanishing house. Where the dull jobs came to disappear. Eraser cigarettes weren’t enough for them. They shot a pure form of the substance directly into their decaying veins. An eraser helped dull your senses. Let you unwind after work or calmed you before an important meeting. It was a kind of inhalable anesthesia, got you nice and numb. But an eraser was diluted, a drop per cigarette. I’m not saying it was a healthy habit, but it was a habit. The pure stuff was a disease.
Originally, void juice was sold by doctors after you upgraded. A way to ease your body into accepting new organs and alterations. It was too powerful to stay legal. If you injected yourself with a thimbleful of void juice, you didn’t just forget your pain. You forgot pain existed. The black liquid went through your veins, dulling each part one by one. Your senses were cut off. Bones and muscles and organs were a distant dream.
At least from the dull job’s point of view. The rest of us could smell their bodily functions continuing without their knowledge.
It was the type of sight that made you think maybe the Edenists had a point.
I stepped carefully around the bodies, my shoes squishing on the soggy floorboards. I listened for the girl.
The stairs creaked.
>
I followed.
When I emerged onto the roof, she was gone. I looked around every antenna and filter box big enough to hide a child. The girl had given me the slip.
I sat on the edge of the roof. Tried to catch my breath.
Down below, all I could see were the tiny houses of the island and, in the distance, the gigantic silver buildings of Manhattan rising out of the sea like the silver fingers of some bathing robot god. They soared up out of the murky smog of the city floor into the sky where, beneath the sagging white bellies of clouds, clusters of glittering cloud condos nested. Elsewhere, black ocean liners skimmed the green water around Manhattan. Yellow cranes dropped floors on top of each other, stacking new buildings up to the sky. If the city was a living thing, it was a mutating, cyborgian one. Constantly growing, expanding, and shooting out new bizarre limbs. A collaged monster changing and expanding itself each day.
The ferry sub honked in the distance, getting ready to make its next departure.
Only a few people walked around the island. Tourists mostly. A class of history students studying the preserved houses. Plus a whole crowd down by the ferry stop, waiting to board. None of them looked like Edenists, much less like the girl.
My bionic eye stored a few hours of footage, and I rewound the feed. Past the vanishing house, past the trees and buildings, all the way back to that face in the window. I’d barely had time to start recording before she sprinted away. Her face was gaunt but somehow familiar. Like someone I used to know decades ago. Light brown skin, with a slight gap between the front teeth. I captured a still. A small dimpled girl with fierce eyes and brown hair.
I called Sergeant Okafor. Started to explain what happened as soon as they appeared on my screen.
“Kobo, slow down. Are you staying out of trouble?”
“I don’t have time for a lecture, Sil. Get to this location.” I shared my coordinates. “It’s a vanishing house. About thirty bodies, and at least twenty of them still alive.”
“That’s a job for vice management.”
“Then tell vice. They need help, and the building needs fumigation. Call them, and then look up this girl,” I said, sending a still from my eye.
“Who the hell is this?”
“A girl. An Edenist, I think.”
Okafor tapped their fingers against their coffee mug. “Maybe this doesn’t mean shit to you, but I’m in homicide. I investigate murders, likes Zunz’s. Not drug users or fanatics.”
“It’s about Zunz. I’m at his house.”
Okafor tossed their hands in the air, gave me that look they used to give when Zunz and I were planning a prank and didn’t invite them. “Kobo, fucking hell. I told you not to get involved.”
“He was my brother, Sil.”
“And I’ve known him since I was a baby. It kills me too.”
The ferry horn honked in the distance like a dying prehistoric bird. I tried to pitch my own voice for pity.
“Can you do me this one favor? Find this girl for me and let me talk to her. Just for a couple minutes, face-to-face. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Christ, Kobo.”
“Sil, you’ve known both of us for decades. I need this one thing. Someone killed Zunz. Maybe one of her Edenist friends. I’ll never be able to live with myself if I don’t talk to her.”
“Fine. If I can even find her, I’ll let you talk to her. We’ll call you a CI. Then you’re giving me a statement with everything you know and backing off.”
“Thanks, Sil. I’ll owe you one. Or two. Or twenty.”
“Kobo. Hold on. Kobo, do not—” I clicked off the call as I saw the girl speed down the road on a hover bike. Heading down the hill toward the docks. The ferry sub sat waiting, bobbing in the dark green waters.
I took the fire escape down, leaping as fast as I could. The structure was old and rusted, barely clinging to the wall. It almost cracked off the bricks and ended my case right there. But I made it down, dangled from the last floor. Dropped.
The girl ditched her bike right at the edge of the crowd and squeezed herself on board.
My lungs were rebelling. Trying to convince me they’d pop inside my chest if I didn’t stop running. I didn’t listen to them.
The horn honked.
There wouldn’t be another sub ferry to Manhattan for half an hour. Only the surface ferries to Brooklyn would be left.
I got up to the throng of people, panting. “Hey,” I shouted. I could see her tunic weaving between the tourists. I pushed closer. Reached out. She was in front of me, maybe a foot beyond my fingertips.
“Hey,” I said. “One second!”
Then I ran into a twin wall of muscle and steel. Next thing I knew, I wasn’t looking at the backs of heads but the bottoms of clouds. I could taste a little blood in my mouth.
“Kobo, we thought we’d find you here.”
“We found you. We did!”
The Sassafras sisters stood over me like two large axes ready to chop apart a log.
Wanda knelt on my chest and grabbed my cybernetic arm, pinned it to the pavement. “You went on this lovely trip and couldn’t pick up the phone to invite us?”
“He can’t use a phone? Really?”
“Clam it, Brenda.”
The ferry sub operator was scanning around for stragglers. I saw the girl look back at me, smile, and shake her head. She waved, then went beneath.
Brenda kicked me when I started to shout.
“You ladies could ask me on a date. You don’t have to follow me around.”
“You used your account to buy a ferry ticket, dum-dum,” Wanda said. “Sunny Day monitors anyone late on payment.”
I tried a new tactic. “Listen, Brenda Sassafras. Wanda Sassafras. Did I ever tell you Sassafras is a beautiful word? Rolls around the tongue like a breath mint. Let me be straight with you. I need to get on that ferry. I’m chasing someone who will help me get a real check. One to pay you off for good.”
“No ferry, Kobo. That’s not an original trick.”
“It’s not a trick. And you already broke my hand.”
“You have another hand,” Wanda offered.
“Let’s use the hammer, Wanda. Come on. The hammer!”
“Okay.” She patted her sister on the shoulder. “You can use the hammer.”
Brenda pulled open a control panel on her forearm, typed in a code. Her fingers began cracking, rotating 90 degrees in the wrong direction. Her cybernetic arm clicked and buzzed.
While Brenda’s arm finished transforming, I maneuvered my left hand in my coat pocket. “Look, I’m begging you,” I said, gripping Brenda’s cyber ankle with my right hand. Wanda was still holding the upper part of my arm. All three of us were connected by our metal parts.
I found what I was looking for. The other shock slug I’d brought. I tried to relax my muscles.
“Hammer time,” Brenda said.
I tossed the shock slug into my mouth. Prayed I didn’t bite off my tongue.
At first, it didn’t taste good. Then it tasted like nothing but pain. My whole body trembled. The sky seemed to turn black. I must have screamed.
All three of us were on the pavement, convulsing.
I rolled on my stomach. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Angry flashes of light danced around my vision. Aftershocks pulsed from my throat to my toes. I rolled to my side, spat up the slug along with a good amount of blood. The spent creature squirmed in the red puddle. Began to dissolve.
“Gwaaarg,” Wanda said, grunting low and slow. “What? Urgh?”
I got on my knees. Stood up. Fell again. I couldn’t stop my right hand from twitching. I had to force my eyes open. I vomited more.
“Wanda. Wanda, where are you?”
“Brenda,” Wanda moaned. “Brenda.” Her arms were flailing around on the ground.
“Wanda, I can’t feel you. I can’t touch you.”
I staggered to my feet. My whole body felt dried out, scorched to a crisp.
I left the siste
rs rolling on the ground, groping for each other. Ran as fast as I could. It wasn’t very fast. I felt like I was moving through a pool filled with molasses. I could barely move myself down the hill.
The ferry sub was closing its hatch. Then it was sinking. Then it was gone. All that was left was a circle of dark blue water inside the layer of green filter algae on the surface.
Either Wanda or Brenda was shouting. “Please, touch me. Sister, touch me!”
I stood on the edge of the water, looking at the ferry sub carrying my clue into the murk.
There was a bobbing two-story boat on the other dock. The floater ferry. It was heading to Brooklyn instead of Duracell Park, but at least it was heading away from the Sassafras sisters. I got on board. Leaned against the railing. Retched a little more into the surf.
The electric shock was still thrumming inside me, but growing fainter.
From the top deck, I watched the sisters struggle up, groping for each other. They were reaching out blindly. Their arms barely missing one another. Wailing. They crawled across the pavement. Found each other. Grabbed hold to make sure the other was real, pulled their bodies close together, and wept.
17
THE UNEXPECTED VISIT
While I was looking for a way to break open the case, the Mets caught a lucky break. The Sphinxes started game two with a bang. Two-run dinger from shortstop A. G. C. Thompson right over the left wall. Smacked a jellyfish vending drone on the third level. Beer rained on a row of fans. But the Mets pitcher, “Mad” Marsel Schultz, settled down after the second inning, switched from her fastball to cutters and sliders. Kept the batters walking right back to the dugout.
The Sphinxes had Capablanca on the mound. A smart young kid whom my pal MacGill had found smashing beer bottles on the streets of Havana with a perfect four-seamer. But he was young. Only his second year in the league and no playoff experience. The Mets started to wear him down. By the sixth inning, Capablanca’s arm couldn’t have stirred a pot of soup. The Mets loaded up the bases before the Sphinxes pulled him. It was too late. A double from Van Young and a single from “Triple M” Morgan and the Mets were up 4–3. The score stayed that way to the end.
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