Marlowe and the Spacewoman

by Ian M. Dudley

  “It’s gone. They turned it into a parrot-damned coffee shop.” He tilted his head slightly. “They make good coffee, though.” He sighed. “I had to rent a pair of goggles, though. My low light implant was disabled when I was…hospitalized. Did you know this coffee shop opens up on the old sewer lines? Why would you want to buy coffee in a sewer?”

  “Come on, father. People are staring. They’ve probably already called the constables in. You don’t want to get sent back, do you?”

  “No,” said Jebediah truculently.

  “Then lets get the car and get out of here. Does that sound good?”

  Jebediah’s eyes darted back and forth, and he jumped when he saw Nina behind him. “You’re right, the constables. I won’t let them take me back. Never!”

  Nina took Jebediah gently by the arm. “They can’t get you if we aren’t here. Where’s the car?”

  Jebediah waved his other arm in a loop. “Circling around the block. Parking downtown is terrible.”

  As if on cue, the Studebaker pulled up alongside them, stopping in the middle of traffic and triggering a blast of car horns. The doors popped open and without any prompting, Jebediah climbed into the back seat. “They can’t have converted all my safe houses into coffee shops,” he mumbled under his breath as he hunkered down on the floor. Marlowe barely caught it, even with his enhanced audio pickup, but that told him pretty clearly he’d have to keep an eagle eye on his father.

  Marlowe turned to Nina, but she wasn’t in the car yet. “Nina? Nina, where are you?”

  She rushed out of the coffee shop a moment later. “Sorry, I really wanted a cup of coffee, and they were so pleased that we got Jebediah to leave, they gave me one for free. It’s pretty good coffee, too. The best I’ve had in years.”

  “I still say there’s something pretty sinister about the whole setup. Like they’re trying to take over the world or something. But that isn’t the most pressing matter we face right now. Car, take us to Sunrise CDs.”

  The Studebaker honked twice happily and set off, having found yet another joyous purpose.

  Sunrise CDs was downtown, not too far from City Hall. It was almost seven, so traffic had thinned out considerably. Despite the lack of traffic, there was still no place to park, so the Studebaker began circling the block.

  The neighborhood was old but not quaint, undeveloped but not desirable. The buildings lining the street, while short and standing unaided, nevertheless exuded a sense of dereliction and decay. Cracks criss-crossed the sun-bleached, acid-stained stucco, and window and door frames were no longer level, but tended to sag heavily to one side. The store they sought was fairly small and bookish, wedged between two other small and bookish shops, with tall windows and a large wooden sign hanging outside the front. It read “Sunrise CDs” and had a picture of a silvery gold disk in the background.

  “Car, drop us off here and keep circling the block. Father, you stay in here. No telling if this Huggy Bear character will recognize you and turn you in to the constables. And when I say ‘stay here,’ I mean it. No more side trips! Got that House?”

  “Yes, I’ve ‘got’ it,” said House.

  “Fine, fine,” said Jebediah, still occasionally twitching. “But I’m getting cramped. Can’t you tint the windows or something so I can sit up?”

  “I wish I could, father, but the tinting function broke a few weeks ago and I haven’t been able to get it fixed.” Marlowe’s voice didn’t flutter at all with the lie. “Yet another hardship for you to bravely overcome.”

  “Damned hardships are becoming more and more uncomfortable,” Jebediah muttered as the car stopped for Nina and Marlowe to get out.

  They walked to the front of the shop. A red neon “Open” sign above the glass door flickered on and off, humming like a frustrated mosquito trying to feed on an armadillo. Nina opened the door, which jangled a bell hanging just above of it. Marlowe followed cautiously behind her, the nasal filters slamming down at the musty air inside.

  The interior pressed against them the moment they crossed the threshold. And this despite the complete lack of patrons. The walls were completely hidden from view, covered from floor to ceiling by shelves. More stand-alone shelves cut across the floor, leaving just enough room between each shelf for one person to walk. The lighting was dim and yellow, and a harsh, metallic sound was playing through tinny speakers in the corners.

  “Can I help you?”

  A portly, long-haired man with bad acne and thick glasses stood watching them from behind a counter. His thin smile was almost lost in the blindingly bright yellow and green tie-dye turtleneck. A wispy, pathetic attempt at a beard hung limply from the man’s pallid face, and the breast pocket of his shirt had a fat, yellowed paperback wedged into it. Marlowe could make out a picture of some sort of spaceship on the cover of the antique book, with a saucer-eyed alien emerging from it. All and all, a very shabby presentation, and providing a sharp contrast to the man’s most striking feature, his perfectly straight, unbelievably white teeth.

  Nina had been taking in the store, looking through the shelves. “CDs!” She held up one of the CDs, almost laughing. “I can’t believe you still use CDs.”

  “Be careful with that,” shouted the proprietor. “They require gentle handling!”

  He rushed around the counter and deftly scooped the CD out of Nina’s hand as if it were made of porcelain. “Please, serious buyers only!” Now that the man was closer, Marlowe noted the not-so-faint scent of raw sewage.

  Marlowe tilted his hat back to scratch his head. “Why would I want something that fragile when I can just download a PHAT of what I want directly to my PDI?”

  “Because,” said the man, puffing up with indignation, “PHAT files, no matter what the so-called experts say about quantum digital recording, cannot match the sound quality on a CD. CDs are crisper, more real, more present.”

  “You sound like one of the vinyl snobs who frequented a music shop near where I went to school.”

  The man froze, then slowly turned to Nina. “Did you say vinyl?”

  “Yes.”

  “As in record?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a store that sells records?”

  “Well, probably not anymore. This was a long time ago.”

  “You’ve actually listened to music on vinyl?”

  “Once or twice.”

  The man just stood with his jaw hanging down. It would have hit the floor, but his gut interrupted the journey. Marlowe was waiting for him to drop to his knees and grovel before Nina.

  “What…what did it sound like?”

  “You know,” interrupted Marlowe, “we aren’t actually here to look at CDs. We’re looking for Huggy Bear.”

  The man pulled his revering eyes away from Nina and squinted at Marlowe. “I’m Huggy Bear. What did you need?”

  “The name’s Marlowe, and we’re trying to find a computer that can read this disk.” Marlowe reached into a pocket, searched around, then reached into another, repeating the process. He began patting down his trench coat, even removing his hat and looking inside.

  “A computer to read this,” said Nina, handing over the disk from her ship.

  Marlowe stopped his searching and blushed slightly.

  Huggy Bear looked like he was verging on cardiac arrest as he held the disk. His hands were trembling, and he looked utterly flummoxed. “Wh…where did you get this?”

  “From my space ship.”

  “From your…your space ship?”

  Marlowe found himself filled with an overwhelming urge to fidget. The nano probes were unable to compensate as his level of impatience was just too high. “I hate to interrupt your religious experience here, but do you have something that can read this? It’s very important, and we’re on a deadline.”

  Huggy Bear ignored Marlowe. “Wow, I haven’t seen one of these in…well, ever. Well, once, in a catalog, but never in real life. Is it authentic?”

  Nina nodded, a sly gesture as she stud
ied Huggy Bear through half closed eyes. “Oh, yes, it’s real.”

  “What’s on it?” He was starting to notice Nina’s physical presence at this point, spending only half his time staring at the disk, and the other half appreciating her.

  Nina leaned towards Huggy Bear, winking over his shoulder to Marlowe. “If you’ve got a computer that can read it, I’ll show you.”

  Huggy Bear jogged over to the shop entrance, flipped a switch that dimmed the red ‘Open’ sign, and practically fell over himself returning to Nina.

  “Yeah, I can probably find something to read that. Follow me.”

  Imbued with a sense of self-importance, he strode to the back of the store, his shoulders back and his head high, Nina and Marlowe in tow. To Marlowe, it seemed more of a waddle, but the bearing was certainly confident.

  “I knew, someday, someone would come along who would appreciate my collection. Mom said it was junk, kicked me out when I refused to throw it away, but that pain and hassle was all worth it for this moment. My moment. My collection’s moment.”

  They reached a poorly hung wooden door that creaked as Huggy Bear pushed it open. A dimly lit staircase led down into dank-smelling darkness.

  “Careful, now, watch your step.”

  Huggy Bear started down.

  “Do you have a light?” asked Marlowe.

  “Use your implant,” retorted Huggy Bear huffily.

  “I don’t have one,” piped in Nina.

  Marlowe, who had kicked his low light filter on, saw Huggy Bear stop with a start. “You don’t have one?”

  “Nope.”

  “Gee, I don’t know if there’s a light or not. I’ve never had to use it.”

  Marlowe had already started searching the walls for switches. He found one, closed his left eye, and flipped it. A pale, sickly light flickered on in the stairwell.

  “Oh, I guess I do have one.”

  The stairs were clear until they got to the bottom. There, the last three steps were covered with haphazardly stacked electronic components. Some of the piles were leaning dangerously. The floor didn’t fair much better. Like the shelves of CDs upstairs, the computers and associated equipment formed a maze of barely navigable pathways. Marlowe took in the collection: one half-assembled chassis after another, each bristling with non-organic PC boards and wires, brightly colored laptops, ancient external PDIs, and other devices strange and unfamiliar. Against one wall was a smooth, featureless system with a small gray rectangle set in the middle. A label set above a glowing red dome read ‘AL 900’, but he couldn’t make out the entire text due to dust. Marlowe had the unsettling feeling that the dome was somehow watching them. Some of the dusty piles were taller than Marlowe, leaning precariously this way and that. Two piles had actually leaned over into each other, forming an unstable electronic arch.

  “Oh my,” said House excitedly, “I think that’s a ZX-81. And a Lisa. Can that be a Lisa? And, ooh, over there, I think that’s an Octane. I wonder if we’re related.”

  “Let’s see,” Huggy Bear muttered, “we’re looking at about a hundred years old. The OCD-4000, maybe. That would be over here, I think.” He led them to an electronics rack that covered the back wall. “This was a particularly difficult system to put together. Took me years of trolling in the swap meets, slipping out of the City to other cities to get parts. But I built it. NASA used to use these things.”

  Nina smiled. “No, NASA predates this computer. The FSEP used them, though.”

  “I don’t think so. I should know, I’ve done A LOT of research on this.”

  Marlowe just shook his head. “Does it work?”

  “Of course! This is Huggy Bear’s collection, after all. Nothing makes it into my collection until it works.”

  “Then would you please load the disk.”

  “Oh, that’s right!” Huggy Bear turned on the computer and put the disk in the drive. “It takes a while to boot. That what old computers do when you turn them on. Boot.”

  “Oh, how droll,” whispered House into Marlowe’s ear. “One word from you, I could hack into his bank accounts and bankrupt him. One word.”

  Marlowe resisted the temptation and said nothing.

  Huggy Bear had plopped himself down on the floor in front of the computer. “This here,” he said, holding up a flat surface with buttons on it, “is a keyboard. That’s the old way of entering data into a computer.”

  “Believe it or not,” said Marlowe gruffly, “we’ve seen keyboards before. They’re not entirely extinct yet.”

  “Actually, this particular system used voice recognition,” said Nina.

  Huggy Bear stared at her with a mixture of awe and hatred on his face. “Well, yes, you’re right, but I couldn’t get that to work. So I built the keyboard interface from scratch. Myself. I like the tactile sensation of using a keyboard. It was quite an effort.”

  “How quaint,” muttered Marlowe under his breath.

  “That was two words,” whispered House. “Can I?”

  “No,” uttered Marlowe.

  “Hmm. Just as well. I pulled up his credit report. Applying for that private investigator’s license turns out to have had some benefits after all. Based on his score, I’m guessing there’s not much to bankrupt, actually. Sinking way too much money into his business, I daresay.”

  “House, knock it off!” Marlowe hissed a little louder than he had intended.

  Huggy Bear looked up sharply from the floor. “I’m sorry, do you have something else you’d rather be doing?”

  Marlowe’s nano probes headed off a tide of blood rushing to his face, preventing an embarrassing blush. “No, sorry, just an insecure computer at home. You know how that goes.”

  “Yeah,” said Huggy Bear as he nodded sympathetically, “I do.”

  House was indignant. “Insecure? Really, how could you? If my continued existence wasn’t tied to your finances, I’d bankrupt you. Though you’re little better off than our computer buffoon here.”

  Huggy Bear pounded away on the keyboard with his stubby fingers. The drive with the disk hummed and whirred, but not nearly as ominously as the system in Nina’s ship. Pretty soon a monitor buried in the rack flickered to life and text appeared on it. Huggy Bear typed a couple of letters and the text changed, forming columns on the screen.

  “Image files. A lot of them. Let’s see, what is that command to view images again?”

  “Try ‘imgview’,” said Nina.

  “Yeah, that’s it.” Reverence had crept into his voice again. He typed some more, and pictures popped up on the screen. Each opened up in some sort of frame, which Huggy Bear clicked on and moved around with a small device on the floor next to the keyboard that manipulated a pointer on the screen. Marlowe positioned himself better for capturing the images in his PDI. Pictures of strange, alien landscapes with a gas giant filling most of the sky. Pictures of the interior of some sort of ship, with different people in them. There were only three people in the all the pictures, and none of them were Nina.

  “Are you in any of these pictures?”

  “I don’t think so. I was the photographer.”

  “I’m not sure this helps us, then. And even if you were in them, these are really low res, primitive images. They’d be easy to fake.”

  “Damn. I really thought that disk would help.”

  “Maybe it will, but not on its own. Those images certainly don’t disprove your claim. We’ll have to find more, though. There’s got to be a way to prove beyond argument who you are.”

  “If only the Internet was still around. I was a bit of a celeb on that before we left.”

  “What did you say?” The question had issued forth from Huggy Bear’s mouth in a raspy, barely audible gasp.

  “I said it’s too bad the Internet doesn’t exist anymore. The Odyssey I mission got a lot of coverage, as well as a murder investigation on the International Space Station that I was involved in. I helped catch the killer.” She sighed. “I met Brett during that fiasco. I’d forg
otten about him.” She sighed again. “But there was definitely a lot of pictures of me and other people from that time period.”

  Huggy Bear looked sharply to the left and right, then grabbed Nina by the shoulders. “You know about the Internet?” His voice had taken on a new level of intensity.

  “It was only an integrated part of my life until a few years ago.”

  “You know about the Internet!”

  “Yes, she knows about the Internet. She just told you she did. But I don’t know about it, so will someone please fill me in?”

  Huggy Bear ignored Marlowe. “You know about the Internet. Wow. You are like, my goddess. I haven’t met anyone else in the City who knows about the Internet.”

  “What does it matter,” asked Nina. “It doesn’t exist anymore.”

  Huggy Bear gasped. “You mean, you don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “You don’t know? You really don’t know!?”

  “What don’t I know,” asked Nina, the muscles in her neck becoming taut.

  If Huggy Bear didn’t tell her what she didn’t know real soon now, Marlowe was pretty sure she’d beat it out of him. And that promised not to be pleasant. For Huggy Bear. Marlowe, on the other hand, found himself secretly looking forward to such an outcome.

  Huggy Bear lowered his voice until it was nearly inaudible. Marlowe had to kick up the amplification on his ear implants. “The Internet still exists. Nothing like its heyday, but it still exists.”

  Nina pulled Huggy Bear’s hands off her shoulders and turned to Marlowe. “If we can get on the Internet, we might be able to find pictures of me from the past. Would that help?”

  “With everything else we’ve collected, it might be enough to give my brother an excuse to spare your life.”

  Nina turned back to Huggy Bear. “I need to get on the Internet. Can you help me with that, Huggy Bear?”

  Huggy Bear swelled up with pride. “Yeah, I can help. But you have to swear never to tell anyone else how you got on.”

  Nina nodded solemnly. “We swear. How do we get onto the Net?”