2400.
The bed was not a bed. Or not just a bed. There was something on top of it. A shape wriggling around.
Kage.
Daniel dropped to the floor. Listened. His fingers were poised on the raised notches of the phase modulator.
He thought he heard a warbled moan. But no panic. No shouts. Kage hadn’t seen him.
Daniel watched the bed, a few inches from his right cheek. From his vantage point, lying flat on the concrete floor, he noticed now that the bed wasn’t a solid block. It was still out of phase, so he couldn’t be certain, but he thought the mattress might be hovering above the ground.
He reached out a tentative hand. It passed underneath the bed without resistance. Cautiously, he rolled under the mattress.
A garbled voice swum in the air. A woman’s voice. Maybe he was in the wrong room. He checked the map on his glasses. No, this was it.
The woman sounded like she was underwater. Staring at the dusty bottom of the mattress, he tapped down the phase modulator just a smidgeon. 2350.
“But it’s not … well you know, it’s not black.”
The voice was clearer now. But the edges of the words sounded undefined. Fluffy.
He switched the modulator down to phase 2300.
“See. White.”
Ah. Clear as the waters in the Promenade. This was the correct phase. Bubble default.
A bronze foot slapped down on the floor, not ten inches from his face. Startled, Daniel almost smashed his head against the bottom of the bed.
Was that Kage?
The toes were dainty. A tiny outgrowth of fine hairs dusted the knuckles. A woman’s foot. That didn’t help him. Unless Kage had replaced his feet, Kage still had female toes.
And the skin color? Bronze or black? Hard to tell in the sparse light.
The smell of apples tickled his nose, as the feet padded to the far wall. A hinge creaked open. “Another time, maybe.”
Daniel checked the tracking application. According to the map, no matter how much Daniel zoomed in, Kage’s red dot was exactly above him.
Daniel popped off the cap of the syringe.
*
Past the Jacuzzi. The sauna. The dark room.
There. The cubicles. The fourth door was open.
“Is here okay?” asked Kage.
Sunlight caught the blonde wave in the woman’s chestnut hair. Her eyes glowed when she nodded.
A single bed hovered on one side of the room. Moulin rouge lighting that would have been sexy in the absence of sunlight, framed the stark leather mattress. It wasn’t cotton, and she wasn’t Una, but this would do.
He lay her on the bed, proud of his chivalry. Stretched out beside her on the edge of the mattress. “What’s your name?” he asked in his lowest baritone.
A smile played across her lips. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Detective.”
Convincing himself that he hadn’t been caught off guard, trying to maintain his dominance, his masculinity, he persisted.
“A Detective needs to know.” He smiled, hoping it didn’t appear forced.
She wrapped her hands around his hips, and lowered him onto her. Something hard and thick lay between them.
Her lips found his. Her tongue probed his mouth. Cinnamon and wine flooded his senses.
His jaw relaxed. His shoulders. His will to know anything about her other than her body, evaporated.
He kissed the apple scent of her neck. Licked her breasts. Took her nipples in his mouth. He did everything a man does in the holo-films they played on channel 69. And all the while, Ben Stanton was hard as a fucking fire poker.
She held Kage’s midriff with surprisingly strong arms, and before he knew what had happened, he was on his back. Her tongue traced a thin band of fire between his pecs, down his abdomen, and –
“It’s white?”
The fire quenched. Her tongue was firmly in her mouth. A mouth embedded in a head held resolutely away from his crotch.
“Uh … I …”
“There’s nothing wrong with white,” she said, eyeing Ben Stanton. “But it’s not … well you know, it’s not black.”
Kage shriveled as if he’d stepped into an ice bath.
She nodded knowingly. “See. White.”
She stepped off the bed. Unlocked the door. “Another time, maybe.”
When the door clicked closed, he felt it.
The silence.
The empty space someone else had occupied a moment earlier.
He touched himself. Rubbed. Jerked. Tugged. He thought of Una. Keki. The nameless brunette who’d just stilted him.
Nothing. Ben Stanton was entirely disinterested.
Kage swung his feet over the side of the hoverbed. Hung his head in his hands.
He knew it might have been a problem. He should’ve asked Geppetto about dyeing the damned thing. He still could, of course. Kage would get this right. He’d been so fucking close. He’d get the penis dyed today. Fuck Daniel. The case would have to wait. This was important. This was his manhood.
He tapped the arm of his glasses to check the time, but a message flashed across the display. “Voice message from Yaron Emet. Play now?”
“Yes,” he said.
Yaron’s velveteen monologue filled his skull. “It wasn’t me …” He sounded panicked. “… but I think you should come over to seventy-seven Alderbury Lane. One of my clients, Autumn someone or other … well, I think she’s been taken. What is it you detectives call it? Kidnapped. Thought you should know, what with that Organ Thief running around. Anyway, I’ll get in touch with you soon. Got some A-grade testosterone in just yesterday that you’ll love. Call me. Cheers for now.”
Fuck. Daniel had already found Autumn. Now there was nobody left on Daniel’s list. Nobody except –
Ouch! Kage lifted his hand to swat at whatever had stung his left ankle. But as he lifted the hand, it doubled, quadrupled in weight. His head wobbled on his neck. He was underwater, back in the crushing depths of the Regulian ocean.
But he wasn’t.
Kage flopped back onto the mattress, his legs still hanging over the side. His eyelids were so damned heavy, but he forced them open.
Movement.
The room blurred. Swam around him.
He commanded his eyes to focus on the shadow that loomed over the bed.
Mopped hair. Wild Eyes. Gashes. Lips. They parted. Words. “Don’t fight it.”
Kage blinked. Tried, fuck how he tried, to open his eyes again. They were glued shut.
“No,” he mumbled.
Unconsciousness unfurled behind his brow in long, globular eddies of regret. It reached over and under the wrinkles of his mind, ironing out his resistance as it spread.
“Goodbye, Detective.”
The Brain in a Vat
Relief washed over Daniel, as he watched the Detective’s eyes roll back.
Sure, Daniel had plenty more to do. He had to deliver himself and Kage to Hal’s operating theatre – just how he’d manage that, he was unsure. Then the surgery – he had to survive the surgery. And before that, he’d need to find his face. Kage would know where the jar was. He and the Detective would have a conversation when the sedative wore off.
Despite all this, Daniel knew that the worst was over. His journey was almost complete.
He watched Kage’s contorted face. Even unconscious, the man resisted. And he was a man. Kage’s massive penis lolled against his thigh, stark in its pallor against his chocolate skin. Daniel thought about the images of Kassandra Jackson he’d seen on her social media pages. Daniel knew what it was like to be incomplete. Knew how it felt to have one’s body misrepresent one’s inner life. Standing over his nemesis, Daniel felt no hatred toward him. In a way, Kage was on the same quest as Daniel – the journey to wholeness.
He ran his fingers over Kage’s right temple. The scar was barely discernible. A slight lump where tissue had knitted over the incision.
He could do it right here. Smash the man’s skull against the wall
partition. Or if that was too flimsy, against the porcelain floor. He’d find something sharp. Gouge out the amygdala, with a healthy portion of gray matter on all sides.
But he couldn’t. And not just because he’d promised Hooplah he wouldn’t.
No, he’d stick with the plan. He would take Kage, one way or another, to Hal. Keep him there until he found the face in the jar. Hal would do the surgery. And then it would all be over.
First things first. Daniel wasn’t carrying Kage out of here naked. He glanced around the cubicle. There was a small polycarbonate chair in the far corner, but nowhere Kage might have stashed his clothes.
He examined Kage’s body. An elastic wrapped around the Detective’s wrist. A key. “176,” proclaimed its tag’s holographic label.
Daniel slid the rubber band onto his own wrist, and tiptoed to exit of the cubicle. He cracked open the door. Saw no one.
He was betting this key opened a locker containing Kage’s clothes. Presumably locker 176. He needed to find that locker.
176. Not a multiple of 7. But 1+7+6 was. He might get there safely.
What if someone saw him? He fingered the gashes on his forehead. They weren’t bleeding as they had earlier, but he doubted they’d healed sufficiently to go unnoticed in 2300.
He was about to dart out the cracked doorway, when he realized that he was overdressed. From the description of the Orgia on its website, and from the looks of Kage, Daniel should be wearing nothing but a towel.
Grumbling under his breath, he unbuttoned his smartshirt. Removed his shoes and pants. He yanked the towel from Kage’s midriff, and wrapped it around his own waist. The smart fibers shifted around him. Swaddled his hips. It felt pleasant, until he remembered that Kage had worn that towel until a minute earlier. He swallowed a globule of disgust.
Daniel’s hand found the door handle. Blood thump-thumped through his fingers. He called up the map he’d used to follow Kage earlier. Orgia was roughly circular. If he walked its circumference, he’d find the changing room. He chose the least convoluted path to the opposite side of the circle.
In and out, Daniel. Keep your head down. You’ll be there and back in a minute. Locker 176. Why couldn’t it have been 175?
His heart bobbing on his tongue, Daniel slipped out of the doorway. Shut it firmly behind him. He did his best to appear relaxed, by walking in long, sauntering strides. He’d encountered nobody so far – the morning light seemed to have driven the patrons away. But he kept his head down nonetheless.
He turned right at the end of the corridor.
“Uhu … sor … sorry about that.”
He’d collided with a titanic belly travelling the opposite direction. Belly eyeballed Daniel through an intoxicated haze. The man’s brow creased momentarily, then seemed to relax as his drug-fueled attention span forced his gaze onto other, better vistas.
“Hmmph,” growled Belly, and pushed off Daniel into the corridor. His hand left a sticky residue on Daniel’s shoulder.
Daniel did everything he could to ignore the clawing discomfort of his own nudity. The itching, seething, scrabbling moisture on his shoulder.
He rounded another corner.
This was it.
Two phalanxes of bullet-gray lockers stretched along either side of the room. Nobody in sight. Yet.
He hurried to the closest locker. Stepped down the column of closets. His eyes fluttered over the numbers inscribed on the gleaming doors. 110. 130. 150. He switched to the other side of the room. 170.
176.
His fingers bumbled the key about the lock. Breathe, Daniel. The key found its grooves. Metal interlocked with metal, and the door popped open.
He scooped up Kage’s shoes. Pants. Daniel shuddered at the touch of the gun. He didn’t want to carry it with him, but a cleaner finding Kage’s gun in an unattended locker would involve the police sooner than they needed to be. Underwear – he ignored his repulsion. Jacket –
What the hells was that? Something unyielding, something dense, had thumped against Daniel’s elbow as he’d draped the jacket over his forearm.
He knew he shouldn’t linger. He’d have plenty time to rifle through the Detective’s clothes later, when he’d returned to the relative safety of the cubicle. But something in Daniel couldn’t ignore the heaviness of the object in the jacket pocket. The rounded edges.
He reached a trembling hand inside the leather flap. The object had smooth, planed edges. Cold. He lifted it out of the jacket pocket.
Gods, he almost dropped it right there on the porcelain tiles of the changing room. The jar. His face.
Quickly, he concealed the jar inside the locker. Stared at the two holes for eyes. In the shadows of the compartment, the face stared back. Winked at him as he rotated the glass in his hands.
He’d found it.
A fresh spike of adrenaline lanced through his chest. With equal parts urgency and relief, he tucked the jar back inside the jacket. Rolled Kage’s clothes up into a bundle, and scurried out of the changing room. He turned left. Scampered the rest of the way. Flung open the cubicle door, and shut it behind him.
Thank Gods. Kage still lay where he’d left him – feet hanging off the side of the hover-mattress, head lolled to the side, jammed against the cubicle wall. The Detective snored lightly.
Daniel dressed himself. Then dressed the Detective in everything but the jacket and the gun. The jacket, the jar, and the gun stayed with Daniel.
It was time to leave Orgia. The sedative wouldn’t last forever. Hal had been evasive when Daniel had pressed her on how long it would be effective. “Damned humans,” she’d muttered. “They tend to wake up.” He’d gathered eventually that he had about an hour before Kage would stir. He checked his chronometer. To be safe, forty-five minutes from now.
Entering Orgia had been easy enough. Leaving with an unconscious man on his shoulder wouldn’t be quite as simple. He and Kage’s sleeping body were currently in the Bubble default phase 2300 – not the best phase to be waltzing around with a lifeless Detective and a shredded face. 7049 was the obvious phase in which to travel unfettered. But how to get the unconscious Detective to phase up with him?
Daniel wasn’t sure how the phase modulator worked. Did it switch the phase of everything it touched? That wouldn’t make sense, because Daniel was in contact with the floor, and the modulator was in contact with Daniel. So, when he switched phases, the floor should switch with him – which it didn’t. The porcelain tiles seemed firmly fixed in phase 2300. Orgia’s floor in 7049 was unpolished concrete.
Maybe the modulator worked by switching up any organic matter it touched? Then he could hold onto Kage, switch up his phase, and the Detective would switch up with him. But that wasn’t right either. If organic matter was all that the modulator switched up, then his clothes wouldn’t switch up with him – which, thankfully, they did.
He brought up a Wiki on phase modulation, but couldn’t get past the first few lines of the entry without feeling like an idiot. Object differentiation. Phase mechanics. Frequency fields. All gobbledygook to Daniel.
In the end, he decided to ignore the technicalities, and rotated the phase modulator on Kage’s chest, while at the same time staring at the large “+” sign beside his own phase setting on his glasses overlay. At first the Detective switched up quicker than Daniel did. Kage’s modulator became rubbery in his hand. It took time for Daniel’s phase modulator to catch up. As he did, Kage’s modulator felt more dense, more defined, against his fingertips.
With practice he got the hang of it. By turning Kage’s dial slower, while staring at the “+” sign on his overlay, he was able to shift them up synchronously. 5000. Kage sunk slowly through the dematerializing mattress. 6500. The sleeping man lay supine on the concrete floor.
7049 – the maximum the modulators allowed.
Daniel slipped on the jacket. Tapped his glasses, and ordered a taxi. It pinged back quicker than usual for a 7049 cab, letting him know it had arrived.
Kage’s b
reath was stale on Daniel’s cheek as he hauled the Detective over his shoulder. Thankfully, Kage was light.
Daniel lumbered by the Only Cleaner on his way to the exit. The haggard man didn’t so much as glance up at the spectacle.
The jar jostled against Daniel’s ribs as he staggered out the rotten ebony door. Past Bushy, whose hirsute hands still gesticulated wildly, trying to explain to Bronwyn that he was doing his best, his level best Bronwyn, to manage the intricacies of Orgia cleanup. Did she know the conditions under which he worked? The measly budget she’d allocated him?
Daniel flumped the Detective’s body onto the rotting suede seat of the taxi, and clambered in beside him.
“W-w-where to?” asked the cab.
He was tempted to give Hal’s address. Walk right through her front door. Gods knew he wasn’t in the mood to climb the stairs to her apartment with Kage slung over his shoulder. His back throbbed against the taxi’s moldy upholstery. But knowing Hal, she’d be incensed if a taxi delivered an unconscious man to her doorstep. Taxis kept records. Hells, she might not do the surgery if he didn’t respect her privacy.
Godsdammit.
He gave the cab an address in the Promenade a block away from Hal’s. He’d climb the damned stairs.
*
The sedative began to wear off halfway up the climb to Hal’s thirteenth floor apartment.
“Wha … iiiis …”
Daniel’s legs shook under the strain of Kage’s weight. He didn’t have any of the sedative left – he’d pumped the Detective with the full dose already. He forced his calves to hike faster. Thank Gods for his knee.
Kage moaned. His fingers twitched. Scrabbled on the back of the leather jacket Daniel was wearing.
Sweat streamed down Daniel’s face. They were on the twelfth floor now. One more to go. He gritted his teeth. Ignored the grunts in his ear. His left thigh spasmed, but he ignored it. That leg wouldn’t be his problem much longer.
He’d arrived. Thirteenth floor landing.
He pounded Hal’s door.
Roger growled on the other side.
Daniel lifted a leaden fist to hammer the door again, but Hal opened before he had the chance. Roger tore into the corridor, colliding with Daniel’s shin.
Defragmenting Daniel: The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 39