“Thank you, ma’am,” said The Big League’s salesman.
Kage was too tired to correct him.
One of the buildings beneath the cab lit up in a yellow column of light, with a label floating above The Big League’s entrance. “We’ll see you tonight?”
Kage checked his jacket pocket. Three Anti-Sleeps left. He wasn’t sure if he had enough credits for more tablets. And Bubble Police Department hadn’t called him for work in almost a month. Not enough murders, and they only called him for homicides. Crime in the Bubble was down. Which was bad news for Kage.
He needed work. A serial would do it. There’d been none so far this year. But there would be. There’d been at least one serial killer a year in the Bubble since he’d started consulting. And then there were plenty credits available. Then the money flowed thick and sure. He could buy those hyena muscle implants. Hell, if there was a serial, he’d get an apartment.
“Yes. I’ll –” But Kage never finished. “Incoming call,” pinged his glasses. “Bubble PD.”
Kage almost fell off his seat. Maybe there was a god after all. He steadied his heartbeat.
“Captain Weeks, good to hear from you.”
“Kage. Death at the Promenade. You in?”
Kage’s eyes narrowed. The Promenade was on the border. Seedy. Barely out of the Gutter. Murders were unremarkable in the Promenade’s alleys. Bubble PD hardly investigated them, and almost never involved a consultant. Unusual. A high-profile victim maybe?
And high profile meant high budget.
“I’ll be right there.”
Things are looking up, thought Kage, as he scrambled into his suit pants.
Amputating Amy
“Daniel will open the tracking application by stating the password, ‘Rick Forrester’.”
He eyed the android. Who the hells was Rick Forrester? A memory hidden in the folds of Daniel’s brain twinged. An advert on a Law and Order rerun. Forrester … Forrester. Yes, that was it. One of the characters in The Bold and the Beautiful. He hadn’t pegged Margaret for the soap opera type.
The android had been fiddling with his glasses for some time now. The combination of excitement in Margaret’s human eyes and its deadpan mechanical jaw, made Daniel queasy.
“The tracking application is illegal. Daniel will not tell other humans about the application.”
“Alright,” he said.
Margaret held out the glasses. “Daniel brings Margaret four more fingers.” It tapped its remaining mechanical fingers on the tabletop. “In trade, Margaret gives the cornea to Daniel.”
He took the glasses from the machine’s steady grasp. “We have a deal,” he said.
“Rick Forrester,” he whispered, feeling idiotic.
His vision clouded over with a bird’s eye map of the Bubble. Countless faint red dots coated its surface. They reminded Daniel of the Great Infection that had rocked the Organ Farm when he was fourteen. Rejek hadn’t helped, and almost all the organs had been lost before Administration had found a cure.
Daniel glanced at the next name scrawled on the folded bible page in his pocket.
“Lincoln Russell,” he whispered.
Three of the red dots pulsed a golden yellow. “Please disambiguate,” prompted his glasses.
Daniel read Lincoln’s home address aloud.
Two of the dots turned back to red, leaving one golden point in the upper-left quadrant of the map.
Margaret had been fairly receptive to a deal. He needed the android’s cornea. Margaret needed fingers. But he had a feeling Lincoln Russell wasn’t going to be as receptive about returning Daniel’s knee. And the fingers. Removing his fingers might be a problem.
“Thank you,” he said, standing.
“It is good to meet Daniel,” said Margaret. And as the android showed him to the door, Daniel could swear its eyes smiled.
*
Half an hour later, Daniel sat behind the squash-courts on the rooftop of the Winston Hotel. The ball was hammered back and forth. Back and forth. His eye drifted to the soothing rhythm, organizing his thoughts. He took stock, and a plan emerged.
He had a place to stay – Thomsin’s. He had a way to find his organs – the combination of Hooplah’s list and Margaret’s tracking software. The cornea was almost secure. Margaret would give it to him soon enough. And soon he’d have his knee. He didn’t yet have a means to implant the organs inside himself. He’d thought about seeking out Geppetto and Florenza to help him with the implants, but that way he’d have to cross in and out of the Gutter-Bubble border. Hells, he didn’t even know whether Geppetto and Florenza were alive. Too risky.
He’d find a way once he had the organs in hand.
“Organite stock is a sure buy,” said the man in the salmon shirt, as he struck the ball. “A little birdie tells me it’ll be up on Friday.”
Daniel had watched enough Law and Order to know what made a good criminal. Or at least, what made a bad criminal. Fingerprints. DNA. A recognizable modus operandi. A pattern. Lack of research. That’s why they were caught.
Daniel would be different. He’d be one of the rare few who got away. Although, he wasn’t too sure yet just how he’d do it. Somehow he’d have to get rid of Thomsin’s body back at the apartment. That could wait, though. Nobody else lived with Thomsin, or else they would’ve arrived at the apartment last night. No, the body could wait. He’d find a solution to that problem later.
Right now, he needed intel on the man in the salmon shirt. The man smashing the winning backhand. Lincoln Russell.
“Your point. How sure are you?” asked Lincoln’s opponent – a man clearly unaccustomed to a squash court. Sweat rained off his lumpy frame.
Daniel had been playing around with the interface on his glasses. He’d noticed that if he stared long enough at a person, their details popped up. Name, Facebook profile, Tweets, Instagram feed.
Lincoln Russell. Stockbroker. Statuesque wife. Hundreds of followers. Sunglasses and smiles in every picture.
“Trust me,” said the stockbroker, twisting on his left knee, on Daniel’s knee, to execute an effortless forehand winner. “Let’s just say this birdie knows what he’s chirping about.” Lincoln Russell flashed a leathery smile.
Through the Bubble’s meniscus, the sunshine on the rooftop of the Winston Hotel was hotter than Daniel could bear. He vaguely remembered his Geography teacher explaining that the refraction of sunlight off the Bubble created a current of air that drove the clouds around and away from the forcefield. The result was perfect sunshine for the Bubble, and perpetual clouds above the Gutter.
Daniel signaled the waitress. “Another one?” she asked. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen. He swiped his credit card (well, Thomsin’s, but Thomsin wouldn’t be needing it), and sipped the iced tea. It tasted better than anything he’d ever drank. No matter that this was the fourth he’d ordered.
“Good … game,” huffed Lincoln’s opponent. By degrees, he caught his breath. “How’s … how’s the wife? Still making that unprinted crème brûlée we had last time?”
“Yup, that’s Henrietta. Loves to cook it old style. Imports the ingredients from …” Lincoln trailed off as he ogled the waitress walking by the court. His eyes narrowed. He licked his bottom lip. “Those new uniforms …”
Lincoln’s drenched opponent shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Uh, quite something. Yes.”
Daniel scrolled through Lincoln’s Instagram feed. Plenty of photos of him posing with Henrietta. Shirtless on an alien beach. Shirtless on an air balloon on Kepler 452-b. Shirtless poolside. He thrust out his bronzed barrel chest in every photo. She had a nose as streamlined as the yachts in the vacation ads. Their eyes never met.
Family portraits. Two children. A boy and girl. Hair blond as their parents. The boy’s smile was as sophisticated as his suit. The girl … Daniel looked closer. The girl’s hands were curled inwards. Fingers tense and extended. The way mom and dad stood around her, it was easy to miss her wheelchair.<
br />
“Thanks for the advice, Lincoln.”
Lincoln shook his opponent’s dripping hand with far more gusto than could possibly be real. “Any time.” Lincoln’s ruddy cheeks beamed in the afternoon sun.
They arrived in a steady procession after that. Fat, breathless white men with questions.
“Organite,” he’d say to each of them. “Buy now. Trust me.” “Yes, yes, kids are well thanks.” “Coming to that dinner next week at the Presleys’?” “Send Susan our thanks for the Christmas gift. The kids love indoor scuba.”
Lincoln won every match.
It went on like this all afternoon. Daniel sunburned in the stands and imbibed more ice tea than his cybernetic liver could process. Every time Lincoln dived for the ball with irritating grace, every time he bounced on that knee with far too much energy, every time he smiled that leathery winning smile, or undressed the waitress with his corporate eyes, Daniel’s anger grew.
Lincoln couldn’t be a day under fifty, and he was prancing around on that knee like he was twenty. Or eighteen, Daniel corrected. That knee was eighteen. Daniel’s replacement cybernetic joint ached in the unrelenting heat. Throbbed under the Bubble sun.
By the time sunset had arrived, Daniel’s mind had relocated to that hairy fold behind Lincoln’s knee. Lincoln had been playing all afternoon, and Daniel could almost taste the sweat on Lincoln’s leg. He’d take the sinews between his front teeth, and rip them to one side. Until the skin split. He’d tear it open. Scoop out the fleshy back of the knee with his fingernails. Peel off the remaining skin, until he could see all of it. The patella. The joint. He’d cut. He’d cut until –
“We’re closing,” said the waitress.
Daniel blinked. The court was empty. Lincoln was gone.
“Shit,” he muttered, and hurried into the clubhouse. Lincoln’s bronzed face, its smile faded to an irritated frown, was being swallowed up by a pair of closing doors.
“Hold the elevator,” he shouted but Lincoln wasn’t interested. At the last moment, Daniel shoved a hand through the doors, and they sprung apart.
The stockbroker paid Daniel no attention as the two descended to the lobby of the building. Lincoln didn’t notice the young man’s eyes on his leg. He didn’t notice the way Daniel inhaled his musk. The way the boy’s fists clenched whenever the floor indicator passed a multiple of seven.
*
“Follow that taxi.”
“Certainly, sir.”
Outside the cab window, sunset soaked the Bubble in a delicious shimmering treacle. Daniel slowed his breath. Allowed himself to relax.
“Too much fun in the sun?” shouted an exuberant voice in his skull. “Skin redder than a Gliesian radish? Try SunAway. Say ‘YES’ now for free shipping to your door.”
Daniel groaned. Now that he thought about it, the heat radiated off his face in waves. He could hardly touch it. It hurt to adjust the glasses on his nose.
He considered turning the cab around. Diverting it to Phil’s Pharma, buying something for the sunburn, and catching up with Lincoln tomorrow. But what sort of criminal mastermind gave up because of a little sunstroke? This was serious. He had a knee and four fingers to harvest. And he still didn’t have enough information on Lincoln Russell.
The taxi begun its descent. This was an area of the Bubble he hadn’t seen before. The structures weren’t as tall here. Squat and older than their siblings in the center of the city, the buildings crouched under the downward slope of the Bubble. ‘The Promenade’, his glasses labelled the suburb. Near the edge, on the opposite border of the Bubble he’d entered with Thomsin the previous night. But not far from Margaret. According to the map, Hadbury Heights was just outside the Promenade. Off Canal Street.
Had only one night passed since he’d found his way to the Bubble with Thomsin? Hooplah. His mother. Geppetto. Florenza. They seemed a lifetime away.
Daniel alighted on a busy street, fifty yards behind Lincoln’s taxi. The thoroughfare bustled with pedestrians sporting various hues of smart fabric, many choosing to mimic the shades of the dying sun. Draped in burnt oranges and crimsons, Bubblers wafted through the streets in every direction. Lincoln’s shirt and shorts, still salmon and white from the squash courts, were striking against the tableau of warmth pulsing in the street.
As if he’d heard Daniel’s thoughts, the stockbroker’s smart clothes morphed to a pair of jeans and a florid mandarin t-shirt. Daniel decided to do similarly, whispering to his glasses to alter his clothes to a burgundy buttoned shirt and torn jeans. Not bad, he thought, rubbing the new fabric between his fingers.
Daniel followed the man down the street, and around a corner, maintaining the fifty yard distance. Lincoln turned into another alley. Then another. The stockbroker was fit, he’d give him that. Daniel’s lungs struggled to keep up with him in the summer heat. Sweat broke out on Daniel’s forehead. Seeped into his weeping left eye.
Lincoln and Daniel penetrated ever further into the bowels of the Promenade, and the feeling on the street shifted. It was still unmistakably Bubble – there was none of the stench of the Gutter, no sputtering cars (no ground cars at all), and no squalor. But Daniel could sense the subtle drop in affluence. The way the smart fabric on the pedestrians didn’t render quite right. The dead pixels and glitches in their clothing betrayed the white baseline color beneath. The stockbroker’s manicured hands were out of place beside the inhabitants’ grimy shoes and cheap cologne.
There.
Lincoln disappeared through a neon-lit purple doorway.
Daniel hurried to catch up. There was no signage above the open entrance, but as he neared, his glasses threw a ghostly sign over his vision.
AMPUTATING AMY
Daniel had hardly set a foot through the doorway when a purple beehive took him by the arm.
“Boys or girls, hun?”
She cocked her towering headful of hair to one side when he didn’t answer.
“First time here?”
“Uh, yes ma’am.”
“Boys or girls?”
The walls were black. Darker than the insides of his eyelids. Darker than the uniforms of the men who’d surrounded Florenza. An iridescent obsidian hue that caught his reflection as the Beehive lead him deeper into Amputating Amy.
“Ah, you’re one of those. Not sure what you like, eh?”
Daniel nodded. The Beehive broke out into a grin.
“Not to worry, hun. We’ve got a three-for-two special running at the moment.”
“Uh, three of what ma’am?”
“Look at you! So polite. You know what they say … it’s the quiet ones you gotta watch. No matter. You like them with arms or without?”
The Beehive shoved him in front of what looked like a large metal box, half a yard wide and taller than he was.
“You really haven’t done this before, have you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Press the red button, hun.”
Daniel gasped.
The metal plate he was looking at swooshed aside, to reveal a tank. And inside the tank floated a child without –
“I … why is he …?”
“Ah, you prefer ‘em with arms.” The Beehive stretched across Daniel. Slapped the red button repeatedly. A blur of bodies cycled past the glass, sloshing the water as they were wrenched aside. “Hmmm… this one has no arms … no legs … no face … no eyes … ah! You’ll like him. Complete. Everything intact. Came in just a few weeks back. He’s a little pricy, but I’ll give you a discount, seeing as it’s your first time. He’s hardly touched. Minor scratches. Nothing serious. Wanna play?”
“Play?”
The Beehive shook her head, mystified. “Where d’ya say you were from?”
“I didn’t.”
“Right.” She looked him over. “I guess you might need a tutorial.”
She snatched his hand. Her arm’s-length fingernails dug into his skin. “We offer all your basic implements. Machetes, knives, hatchets, barbed wire.” She’d de
livered him in front of a room-length window. “The basics. Mind you, we charge an extra for the barbs – helluva mess to pick them out after. Know what I mean?” The Beehive beamed. Her incisors blazed luminous yellow in the purple light.
Behind the glass window, a girl lay on a hovering plastic mattress in the center of the room. The child had only one foot, but otherwise, most of her was whole. Her eyes were greener than Hooplah’s. Darker than the purest bottle of Rejek at Phil’s Pharma. Puke green.
A man circled her bed in casual strides, tossing an ax from one hand to the other.
“What’s he –”
In a fluid circular motion, the man raised the ax above his head, and chopped.
“Gods, he –”
“Oh, you’re wondering why she isn’t screaming? Anesthetic or sedative comes standard – chopper’s choice. But you can choose to have them off the drip if you prefer. All our rooms are sound-proofed.”
The girl stared up at the ceiling, seemingly unbothered by the blood that coursed down the plastic mattress. She ignored the hand that lay, twitching, on the ground.
“Self-sealing arteries. You can lop them all off, the hands, feet, everything, and she won’t bleed out.” The Beehive lowered her voice. “But no funny business with the children. This is a respectable establishment. And if you kill one of them, we charge a cleanup fee.”
The man circling the little girl raised the ax again. And that’s when Daniel recognized him. Sure, the face was blurry through the stained glass, but he knew that look. From the squash courts. The hunger in his eyes as the man had watched the waitress walk by. His stealthy stance. His jeans. That awful mandarin shirt – becoming ever redder with each swing of the ax.
Lincoln Russell.
Every ounce of remorse evaporated at the notion of retrieving his knee from this … this cretin. And the fingers. It would be a pleasure to take his fingers too. Remove them one by one. And unlike the girl on the table, Lincoln wouldn’t be anesthetized.
Defragmenting Daniel: The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 10