Still, his avatar suited the speeches he gave.
Hers suited him, somehow, as well––meaning, she looked like the kind of person that the man giving those speeches would marry.
Of course, his actual voice was altered digitally, too.
I’d listened to dozens of his speeches over the past however-many years, like everyone else. Daniel Caine was the most popular president we’d ever had, at least as long as I’d been alive. There was already talk of adjusting the presidential term limits again, so he might be allowed to run for a fourth term.
Opposite Caine’s wife stood his Vice President, Ethan Wellington. His avatar showed him to be a handsome black man in his late forties, roughly the same age as Caine. I remembered reading somewhere that they’d even gone to school together.
Both were young, energetic, articulate.
Both of them bothered me.
I honestly couldn’t explain to myself why.
I certainly didn’t try to explain it to anyone else.
To be clear, I didn’t think they were evil or anything, or even that they were hiding some sinister secret; I just didn’t fall all over myself with love for them, the way most people did. Maybe it was just a random distrust of any image that had so few apparent cracks. I knew most people would think I was crazy for thinking that, even Cass. Hell, even Jon liked President Caine, and he hated most politicians, no matter what side of the spectrum they fell on.
Objectively, I got it.
Caine ended years of stalemates and infighting in congress. He’d been the one to move the country as a whole back to a more moderate middle, socially and politically. He’d brought stability, boosted the economy, created jobs, improved our image overseas. He’d even fixed healthcare, and all without raising taxes too much.
If there were conspiracy theories about Caine, they usually involved him being too perfect. Like somehow that must be a trap, which I guess is how my mind worked, too.
Still, in almost ten years of running the country, he’d managed to avoid pissing off any of the major political factions, including the military and the corporate elite.
He was pretty universally liked.
Frowning slightly, I glanced at Mr. Monochrome again, wiping the counter off with a wet rag where I’d spilled the espresso bean grounds.
If I was right in my tinfoil hat theory, Mr. Monochrome likely believed a lot of the same conspiracy theories my brother, Jon, did. Jon had a whole paranoia thing about seers, in particular, and how our own government was likely using them against us, via our headsets and whatever else. To be fair to my brother––and possibly Mr. Monochrome––I had noticed a lot more seers in San Francisco lately.
Most didn’t seem all that involved in government espionage rackets though. From what I could tell, most worked in sex fetish clubs, or for corporations downtown.
Of course, rich people had been importing and maintaining privately-owned seers in San Francisco for years. They’d kept their “purchases” behind closed doors for the most part until about the 1990s, however, in part because of the strict Seer Containment Codes in California, and partly because they likely didn’t want people to know they had a psychic living in their house. After two world wars prominently featuring seers––primarily as villains, or the tools of villains––most people were pretty paranoid about them still.
I knew from listening to anti-seer talk feeds that a lot of people wanted them all deported from the United States entirely. Some people wanted them exterminated––as a species, I mean. The real nutjobs even wanted to kill the more docile variety of seers living in the monkish enclave of Seertown, a quasi-mythical town somewhere in Asia, supposedly filled with chanting robed seers and their human followers.
Since the feeds weren’t allowed to go there, I had no idea what Seertown looked like, but like many people, I was curious.
According to the political feeds, and what I’d learned in history classes back in high school and college, the World Court had an agreement with the seer government that seers who lived there couldn’t be owned, just so long as they never left.
Plenty of religious types still believed seers to be children of the Nephilim, though––if not outright spawns of the Great Horned One, Satan himself. Even moderates viewed seers’ increasing integration into human society as dangerous.
On a more practical level, most people simply didn’t want someone’s pet seer reading their minds and sharing their most private secrets with their human owners.
Apparently, a lot of rich people weren’t all that cool to their friends.
Despite all this, seer numbers in San Francisco were definitely increasing.
More and more, I saw seers out on the street, especially in the business district. From stories I’d watched on the feeds, most of the new arrivals were owned by corporations, not individuals, but I knew that didn’t reassure people all that much. It didn’t help that seers weren’t always easy to spot; they blended in more or less seamlessly with the humans they accompanied, wearing business suits and sporting expensive haircuts and shoes. A lot of times, given how valuable they were, and the investment they represented to their owners, they had their own bodyguards.
I’d read in the feeds somewhere that a highly-trained seer could go for more than the cost of an entire apartment building in San Francisco.
So yeah, being a peon myself, usually I couldn’t get very close.
A few times, I got within a dozen yards or so, though.
Only once did a seer seem to notice me. A female I’d seen out in front of a sex club caught me looking at her, and stared back.
It was difficult to pin down exactly, what was so different about her, as compared to a regular person, but some of it had to do with the way she moved. The differences there evoked an animal in my mind, even though she looked more or less like a human being. Wearing nothing but a white mesh bodysuit, she stalked around the buffed, black bouncer who stood beside her, her long, dark hair hanging down her back in thick braids. The bouncer held her leash––literally, in her case––but she didn’t appear to be trying to get away. Her careful steps, graceful and precise, reminded me of a cat’s, or maybe an insect’s.
She was beautiful and wild, and yes, a bit terrifying.
From what I’d seen on the feeds, most seers tended to have beautiful features, though. A few of the corporate-owned seer pop bands had cult-like followings in part because the male and female leads were so stunningly beautiful.
If I were being honest though, I mainly spotted seers by their collars.
By law, all seers wore them.
Most of those collars were silver with a greenish tint, a kind of brushed metal that glowed faintly, even in direct sunlight. I’d seen a few seer collars decorated more like jewelry or S&M bondage wear, but it was difficult to disguise them entirely. They all sat in identical places at the base of a seer’s neck, likely because of how they attached to the spine.
It was really, really illegal to have an un-collared seer out on the street.
That wasn’t just United States law––that was World Court law.
If you broke that particular rule and someone caught you, you’d have the international branch of Seer Containment, or SCARB, breathing down your neck. You’d not only get any future license to own or operate seers permanently yanked, you’d also do jail time, most likely, and pay a fine that would leave your grandkids in debt, and maybe their kids, too.
Of course, in reality, I knew this wasn’t a problem I’d ever have.
Like most people, the closest I’d ever get to a reallive seer was a glimpse on the street. All of my knowledge of the seer race would come via online feeds, movies, gossip and stories from my friends. The seer sex-fetish bars that offered services of various kinds throughout the city were way out of my price range, too, even if I was into that kind of thing. No amount of tattoos, digital renderings, or coffee-shop gallery paintings would ever buy me access to that world.
So yeah, unless I had a
rich relative somewhere I didn’t know about, waiting to donate a few million my way after they died, I would have to appreciate the beauty of seers from afar.
I was curious, though.
Most people were curious, I suppose.
Cass poked my arm, pulling me out of my reverie. When I looked up, she raised her eyebrows a few times at me suggestively.
“What’ll you give me if I go over there right now?” she grinned. “…and offer to blow him if he’ll give up his name?”
The man at the counter next to her coughed, spitting out some of his coffee.
Glancing at him, I grunted an involuntary half-laugh at Cass.
Realizing I’d forgotten the cappuccino I’d been making, I turned my back on her briefly, hooking the metal filter into the corresponding threads on the machine. After a bit of a struggle, I got it locked in place and stuck a wide-mouthed coffee cup under it, hitting the red button to turn it on. I waited for the tell-tale hiss, then turned towards her once more, quirking an eyebrow.
“What’ll I give you to blow my stalker? Hmmm.” I pretended to think. “How about a grilled cheese sandwich?” I said. “You like those, right?”
She exhaled in mock drama. “Cheapskate.”
“What were you hoping for?” I snorted. “I’m a starving artist, remember? I’m basically offering you my dinner.”
“Right.” She gave me a mock-serious look. “I guess I’d better let you blow him instead. If you do a good enough job, maybe he’ll give you a tip.” When I let out an outraged sound, smacking her arm with the counter rag, she laughed, tugging on my wrist. “Hey, starving artist. We’re going out tonight, right? You’re still in your ‘I’m getting even with my lousy, cheating, fuckwad, loser ex-boyfriend Jaden by going out to clubs, getting rip-roaring drunk, and picking up cute strangers with my best pal Cass’ phase, right?”
I snorted. “I think that phase has run its course.”
“Aww.” She pouted. “No. One more night. It’s Saturday.”
Again, I could only shake my head. “I’m supposed to work at Spider’s new tattoo shop tomorrow. He and Angie wanted to see a few more designs… so that’s what I’ll be doing tonight. I can’t draw drunk, so partying’s out, sorry.”
She frowned. “Boring. At least call that Nick guy, the bartender. Get him to come over and screw your brains out when he gets off work.”
I grimaced, shaking my head. “Ugh. No. I had to end that.”
“What?” Her mouth puckered disapprovingly. “Why? He was cute!”
“He started getting weird.”
She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Define ‘weird,’ Allie.”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Just weird. Clingy, I guess.”
Staring at me in disbelief, Cass snorted. “Jesus. The magic pussy strikes again.” Pouting her lips, she added, “You have to tell me how you do it, Al. I think I have the opposite… the anti-magic, dick-repellent pussy. They all want to bang me, then… poof! They’re gone. You get marriage proposals, I get vomit-stained notes on my bed stand.”
I let out an involuntary laugh. “You have bad taste in guys, Cassandra. That’s not the same thing as being dick-repellent or whatever. If I slept with those guys, they’d leave me crappy notes, too.”
“Sure, they would.”
“They would,” I insisted. “And you know it.”
Sighing, she propped her jaw on her hand, looking down the bar. “Maybe. I do manage to find the major bag of dicks in every crowd, don’t I?” she said, glum. Perking up slightly, she glanced at me. “Hey, is Jon coming in today? After his morning kung fu class?”
I nodded. “Far as I know.” Glancing up at the cat clock with the eyes that flicked back and forth for each second, its tail twitching in time, I sighed. “He should be here any minute, actually.”
“Now, he’s someone I’d blow for free,” she said wistfully.
I grimaced for real that time. “Seriously? Can you just… not? Talk about him like that, I mean? He’s my brother.”
“Your brother is seriously fine. And he’s an adoptive brother, right? So no reason to get all skeeved over hearing me lust over your non-blood relative.”
I winced, shaking my head as I hung the rag on the counter behind the bar. “You know he’s gay, right? I mean, it’s not like we haven’t known that since, what, kindergarten?”
She sighed wistfully. “A girl can dream.”
Internally, I sighed. Not only was Jon probably the person I was closest to in the entire world, but my mental image of him was still closer to how he’d looked when he was fifteen than it was to how he looked now.
Of course, objectively, I knew he barely resembled that person anymore.
Back then, everyone called him “Bug” and he got stuffed into garbage cans and gym lockers on a semi-regular basis. Predictably, he got picked on mainly for being a “little faggot,” since kids were oddly perceptive about that kind of thing. Sometimes, though, they went after him for being a bookworm, being a know-it-all, being skinny, or for wearing corrective glasses so thick they distorted the size of his eyes––thus earning him his nickname––or just because he wouldn’t back down or cower like they felt he should.
Eventually, though, as people do, Jon got older.
He picked up martial arts at the end of high school, not long before Dad died. He also switched from glasses to contact lenses, filled out, and started getting tattoos.
Now Jon had like five black belts, part ownership of a software company, and taught Choy Li Fut, a type of kung fu, as his day job.
No one had stuffed Jon into a gym locker in a very long time.
“You’re sure he’s not bi?” Cass said. “Not even a little? Like a secret bi?”
I let out an involuntary laugh. “You’re welcome to ask him.”
Her lips pursed. “Maybe I’ll just show up at his place in a trench coat and a teddy one of these days. See how he responds to actual real-girl stimulus.”
The men sitting there all looked away as her eyes turned in their direction, trying to hide the fact that they were staring at her.
“Yeah,” I grunted. “Good luck with that.” Walking the cappuccino over to the guy at the counter who’d ordered it, I walked back to her, shrugging. “Personally, though, if you’re going to start going after guys who aren’t card-carrying members of the bag-of-dicks crowd, I’d suggest trying with males of the species who actually like sleeping with, you know, women.”
She grinned, shrugging eloquently. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Thinking, I added, “Speaking of dating non-jerks, Jon has good taste in guys usually.” I quirked my mouth in a half-smile. “Instead of playing ‘scare the hot gay guy,’ maybe just ask him for tips on how to pick up, you know, men. With an emphasis on guys who aren’t anything like your father or your bag-of-dicks brothers.”
She laughed, but I saw my words reach her, even as she shook her head ruefully.
“Yeah,” she conceded, dumping part of a salt-shaker on a napkin and spreading the granules around with her index finger.
We’d been friends since we were kids, like I said. There were advantages to that.
“How’s your mom doing?” she said, even as I thought it.
I shrugged. “She’s okay.”
“Really?”
I looked up from where I’d been rearranging the stack of paper napkins behind the counter. Seeing the probing look in her eyes, I inclined my head. “More or less. Her last bender was two weeks ago, so she’s probably due for another one pretty soon. Last time I went over there, she was watching old tapes of us when me and Jon were kids.” I grimaced, remembering. “She yelled at me when I tried to turn it off, then started crying.”
“Jesus,” Cass said, wincing.
“Yeah,” I said flatly. “It was awesome.” Frowning, I shrugged. “Jon tried to talk her into going to rehab again… or at least some kind of grief therapy, but no go. She still won’t even talk about Dad. She watches those videos
of him with us, you know, before he got sick… I swear she wants to pretend it never happened. Like he’s on a business trip or something.”
Cass frowned, watching my eyes. “I really like your mom.”
I nodded, my throat tightening. “Me, too.”
I didn’t add that I missed her, but I thought it. In a lot of ways, it felt like my mom died when my dad did.
Shoving the thought aside, I bit the inside of my cheek, annoyed with myself for even going there.
I was still lost in my own head when a throat cleared not far from where we were talking.
I turned, a little startled that it came from so close. I usually had better peripheral radar than that, but this guy walked right up on us like a ninja.
When I glanced up, I felt my jaw loosen.
Light, strangely glass-like eyes met mine. A narrow mouth pursed under absurdly high cheekbones and a narrow, angular face. His almond-shaped eyes hinted at what might have been Eurasian ancestry, but his ethnicity was impossible to pin down, and could have been anything from Native American to Mongolian. Whatever it was, it had to be mixed with Scandinavian or German or something, given how tall he was. His coal black hair was straight but curled just the smallest bit where hung down by his ears.
It was Mr. Monochrome.
2
MR. MONOCHROME
HE CLEARED HIS throat again. I heard impatience that time. Annoyance.
“May I speak with you?” he said. “It’s important.”
I blinked.
Nope. He was still there.
He was also definitely talking to me.
I glanced at Cass, who was staring up at him, too, her red-lipsticked mouth ajar where she still leaned over the lunch counter, her short-skirted butt in the air. When I glanced back at Mr. Monochrome, though, he hadn’t followed the direction of my gaze.
Those clear eyes remained locked on me.
His narrow lips curled in a frown. The impression of impatience strengthened.
Black To Dust: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 7) Page 35