by Gregg Taylor
I walked straight for half an hour without incident. Two Hovs flew past but without slowing down or displaying the slightest inclination to do me harm. I was solicited by a deeply disinterested prostitute, and a man in a green coat who looked even wetter than I was walked past me in the other direction without so much as a glance.
There was an off-chance that I was being tailed at a distance, just to see where I was going. Since I wasn’t going anywhere, it would make for kind of a long night. I reached the Royce Aquaduct and decided to turn off into the less well-lit street that ran beneath it. The overhanging concrete would mean that a high-flying tail would need to get to ground in a hurry, and the dim lights would mean they’d have to get in close if they didn’t want to lose me in the rabbit’s warren that ran back through the slums.
It was a curious sensation, strolling along the streets waiting for someone to jump me, made all the more curious by my increasing irritation when it didn’t happen.
I walked another ten blocks without incident. I started to wonder if I should head back to my office or the Golden Spider or another starting point where the comedy team of Windbreaker and Sweater could pick me up. That was going to be a long walk, and another one back in the morning since I was still broke.
I heard a sound off to the left, like something being dragged over concrete. The startled cry of a man’s voice was quickly muffled. There were more sounds that followed, and I didn’t have to stop and wonder what they were. I knew a beating when I heard one.
I stepped closer to the great iron and concrete supports. They seemed to be right beside me, but it was an illusion of scale. I had to walk almost half a block before I could see the source of the sound. The man who must have made the cry was on the ground in a ball, shielding his head as best he could against the kicks and blows raining down on him. His attackers were two men, maybe in their twenties, but not by much. They looked like typical Bountiful boys – poor, stupid and violent. I walked closer. I could feel an adrenaline buzz coming on, and it made my head throb.
They were both kicking the man now, and doing it faster, as if it were a contest. They were drunk, that much was sure, but not staggering. What I couldn’t figure is what the hell they thought they were doing. If they’d been mugging the poor bastard, they could have left long ago, but it didn’t look like they meant to stop.
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. Strictly speaking this was none of my business. I was employed by neither the city nor the state to keep the peace, but rather by one Miss Claire Marsland, whose interests would not be best served if I went and got myself dead. I stepped closer anyway, and kicked a can by way of announcing my presence.
The two yobbos stopped what they were doing for a moment and considered me.
“Shog off,” one of them said.
This was a problem for me. I had no particular reason to care about the man on the ground one way or another. But that was just bad manners.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think that I will.”
The one who had spoken was tall and pale, in what looked to be a football jersey that was clearly meant for someone built more like a man. His companion was in a plain black t-shirt that was, for contrast, several sizes too small, in this case probably intended to show off his bodybuilder’s arms, which could also have been the reason that he wasn’t wearing a coat. They grinned at each other and walked towards me, brimming with confidence. Football Jersey spoke first.
“Man, why you coming round here-,” he began. I smashed his nose flat with the heel of my hand and he sat down for a little while to think about what he wanted to say next.
T-Shirt didn’t think too much of this witty rejoinder and ran towards me bellowing like a Viking. A drunk, stupid Viking who didn’t expect me to fade outside his rush, grab his outstretched right arm, twist it behind him with his own momentum and shatter it at the elbow with a quick, well-placed pop. He shrieked like a woman as I dropped him, and started vomiting as he fell. That was very satisfying. I could feel the adrenaline settle in. I was past the initial rush now, but it wasn’t going anywhere, it was pumping in a steady stream. My heart controlled the raging current without effort. It struck me that this was clearly not my first rodeo.
Football Jersey was on his feet again, his mouth awash in the flow of blood from his broken nose, his face twisted with rage. I was unimpressed. The knife he waved, on the other hand, was much more impressive. It was a good looking blade, even though he was waving it like a pansy. I elected to up the ante and pulled the GAT from its holster with a smooth motion.
He froze. It was nice to know that I had his attention. I pointed the hand-cannon at the ground, with both hands settled in for a nice, active grip.
“You son of a bitch,” Football Jersey swore, the blood flying in a most gratifying manner on the hard B in bitch.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Now you boys are both fine dancers, and I’m flattered by the attention. But I am spoken for, so you’ll have to move along now.”
T-Shirt was having none of it. He must have been high as a kite, and the pain of what I’d done to his arm had turned into pure rage. Either that or he had a pretty good idea that I’d crippled him. In any case, he was back on his feet and let another of his mighty war cries loose and ran towards me, a knife of his own in his left hand.
Flashing a gun is a posture, just like flashing a knife. Especially with a big, nasty looking one like the GAT. You show it in the hopes that you won’t have to bother using it. But if someone calls your bluff, you can’t hesitate or you’re done. If I elected not to use the thing in my hand as a gun, then all it was doing was leaving me hamstrung and vulnerable. These were not terms that I thought it valuable to self-apply at that moment.
I pumped a plasma charge into T-Shirt’s chest that put the lie to all those hours he’d put in at the gym. Muscles are very nice, but they melt just like everything else. This time he was dead before he’d hit the ground.
Football Jersey screamed, and I could tell that it was fear, not rage, but he pulled his knife arm back as if to throw it. In retrospect, I’d have been astonished if he knew how to throw a knife. He certainly couldn’t hold one convincingly. But there was no time for that kind of analysis, and I wasn’t here to look out for him anyway. One charge, center mass, no need to get excited about it. He dropped beside his pal in the t-shirt with a sound like a bag of wet cement.
I walked towards the man on the ground. He was no longer in the fetal position, but was watching me approach, with something akin to wonder on his face. I could see at once why those two morons were beating him to death for fun rather than profit.
He was a Synth.
A slack-jawed menial little Synth with skin the color of goldenrod and the build of an ape. Dammit.
I didn’t want thanks, or a parade, or a hearty handshake from the chief of police, or an award of merit from the Citizen’s Council. I wanted none of those things, but if he’d been a lost tourist, they all could have been mine.
If he’d only been human... a few nice column inches in the dailies: Drake Finn, local Private Investigator, saves innocent man from ruthless thugs. Maybe a small citation. Not that I’d have had time to hang around for any of those things, but if you’ve just killed two men, even useless organ-banks like those two, it was nice to know you were on a firm foundation.
But I’d killed two humans to save a Synth. This would get me nothing but lynched. Assuming the cops didn’t take care of me themselves.
“Mister,” the little bastard said in awe, “Mister... you saved me.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying hard not to sound disappointed. “Yeah. Don’t mention it.”
“Bless you...”
“Yeah, thanks. Look, you’ve got to go.”
“Not sure I can... Maybe just rest here.” He’d taken a bad beating, but this was no good.
“You can’t stay here. Even if nobody heard those shots, the cops’ll be by eventually. And they can’t find you here. With them.” My
heart was racing now. This was bad.
“I won’t... I won’t give you up.” He smiled at me though the pain.
I shook my head. “Yes, you will. You think you won’t, but you’re a Synth lying by two dead humans. You have no idea what the cops are gonna do to you. You’ll talk.”
I looked around. In for a penny, in for a pound. I pulled him to his feet. He was solid as a rock and weighed about twice what a man his size would have.
“Mister...,” he almost blubbered, “bless you...”
“Yeah, yeah. Bless me. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
We staggered together like a pair of drunks, out from under the concrete and iron and into the maze of the slums. Into the night.
TEN
Two hours later I was sitting in the back room of a curio shop on the edge of Synthtown, cooling my heels. It hadn’t taken me a lot of conversation to suss out that the Synth I’d pulled out from under the Aquaduct was a low-level runner for somebody’s gang. It’s why I carried him the sixteen blocks he’d asked me to instead of getting him to cover and leaving him to fend for himself.
I’d brought him as far as a warehouse space in the Warrens near the A-88 Bridge. It had looked deserted at first glance, but after a few seconds the courtyard had begun to teem with Artificials of all shapes and sizes, all wondering who the sopping wet human was, and what he’d done to their pal.
They’d taken the little yellow bastard off my hands, but hadn’t looked ready to let me leave until they had the story. The Synth had given it to them right enough. Made me sound awful good in the process. Not like a bumbling idiot at all.
There was awestruck silence for a moment as they carried their wounded fellow inside. Then one of them had stepped out and put out his hand. It was a proper looking hand. In fact, the whole design of this model suggested that he was created with human interaction in mind. He had the right number of arms and eyes, and they were all in the right places. He wasn’t built pretty, and he was big enough to have been made with real work in mind, but he was smart and spoke well. In short, the perfect mid-level scumbag operator.
“Thanks pal,” he had said. “If there’s ever anything I can do-”
“Maybe there is,” I had replied.
And that was how I came to be waiting in the back of a crappy little shop that sold hand-made garbage to folks from the sticks that wanted to take something home made by a ‘real live Artificial’. Like everything they owned that predated Emancipation wasn’t enough.
Like I said, the Synth who took the beating was a low-level operator. Mister Handshake was the Lieutenant that ran whatever the operation in the warehouse was. Synths did nothing original. They didn’t know how. These ones were criminals and criminals knew things, or they knew who did. So calls were made and I was brought here. I was almost certainly not waiting for the boss. But I was waiting for someone, and so far it beat wandering the streets in the rain waiting for someone to jump me. Just.
The door opened and a giant walked in. He had three squat legs, all like tree trunks, and long, thick arms with hands like shovels. He didn’t speak. He probably couldn’t. He could mine coal like the devil himself, but he wasn’t meant to talk. He also made a helluva bodyguard, if you were shopping for something that would intimidate without being very effective in a firefight.
The giant looked at me for a half minute, then scuttled to one side, revealing a grey-skinned little grease ball standing in the doorway behind him.
“So this is him,” the grease ball said to no one in particular.
“It is,” I replied anyway.
“This is the human who shot two of his own kind to save poor Joey’s skin.”
“Joey?”
“The man you saved.” His yellow eyes seemed to look right through me.
“No one mentioned his name,” I said. “I thought you people all had numbered codes.”
He stiffened. “What the hell does you people mean?” he asked.
“What does it usually mean?”
The Synthetic smiled and shook his head. “You’re quite the hard-ass, aren’t you?”
“Some have said.”
“So tell me, hard-ass, why would you risk your neck and blow away two of your own kind to save somebody whose name you didn’t even know?”
“What the hell does your own kind mean?” I said with something between a smile and a sneer, which was about the best I could manage. “And nobody’s asked my name either, Mac, but you’re here in the middle of the night, and that says something.”
He nodded. “I suppose it does. Mickey said you want information.”
I had nothing to say to that, so I didn’t.
“Are you a cop?”
I snorted. “Yeah, Mac. I’m a cop. That’s why I blew away those two yobbos instead of helping them kick Joey to death.”
He smiled. “All right then.”
“The name’s Finn. I’m a shamus.”
“A what?”
“A private detective.”
He seemed amused by this. “A... what was the word you used... shamus?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t find any of this as cute as he did.
“All right then, Finn. I’m Vince.”
We shook hands. It was like shaking a water balloon.
“Vince. Joey. Mickey. You boys consult The Big Book of Hoodlum Names when you set up the gang?”
Vince smiled. I could get real sick of looking at that smile. “In our business we interact with many human operators. It helps to play to the expectations. Besides, for Synthetics, it is an act intimacy to reveal one’s full alpha-numeric designation. You don’t just throw that around, especially to humans.”
“Synthetics? I thought the politically correct term was Artificials.”
“Artificial means not real.”
I nodded.
“I feel real,” he said simply.
I tried not to roll my eyes. “You’re reclaiming the word.”
“We’re reclaiming the word. Just so you know, I can say Synth. You can’t.”
“So noted. Look, I didn’t come here for a Civics lesson.”
“No. You came here for information.”
“I did.”
“That is a valuable commodity.”
“More valuable than Joey’s ass?”
Vince looked amused by this. “Almost certainly, but I take your point. I wonder, Finn, did you save Joey in order to trade for information?”
“I did what I did, and I’m not sorry that I did it. I’m not going to try and snow you into thinking I’m progressive, okay? But I did what I did. Those two punks? They’re not my kind, Vince. My kind don’t kick unarmed people to death for fun, artificial or otherwise.” I got up out of my chair. The walking dump truck behind Vince stiffened, but didn’t move. “You don’t want to help me, don’t help me.”
Vince held up his hand. “I didn’t say that. Regardless of your intent you did a good turn for one of my boys and I am grateful. But my business is dependent on a certain mutual respect for fellow travelers.”
“All I need is a little information on an out-of-town operator. A human operator. Somebody that might not normally work out of Bountiful, but could have a team here now. I need to know.”
Vince seemed amused. “What makes you think that I would have such information?”
“I don’t,” I said. “But I know that I don’t have it, and I know that I need it.”
Vince looked at me a long time. At last he spoke. “Is the water over your head, Mister Finn?”
I had nothing to say to that, so I didn’t. I didn’t need philosophy from a Synth.
He looked at me for a moment longer then spoke over his shoulder. I couldn’t follow any of it. It was that God-awful gibberish they spoke between each other. It sounded almost like real words, but garbled. Sometimes it seemed to be in code, and then a word you almost recognized would pop in. I’d never been sure that they didn’t do it just to annoy us.
The giant nodded mutely a
nd turned to go. Vince gave me a chuck on the shoulder. “Follow Carl,” he said. “He’ll take you to a junior associate of mine who will take you to see someone.”
“And that someone will have the information I need?”
He shrugged. “Or she will know who will. And she will know it is a favor to me. Do you have any further questions?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Did you say that monster’s name is Carl?”
ELEVEN
At first glance, I thought she was human.
The light in the bar wasn’t very good, but it was one of those lounges on the borders of Synthtown where the crowd was pretty mixed. The brunette behind the bar wasn’t tall, but she sure was well put together. The rest of the staff deferred to her like she owned the place and as I approached her I looked back to make sure I hadn’t been pointed the wrong way. The Synth at the door gave me a nod and slipped out. There was nothing for it now.
I sat down on a stool at the end of the bar, away from the rest of the crowd. She called off a unit with green skin and tentacles that tried to serve me and a moment later wandered over herself.
She was only maybe five-four, but it wasn’t what you noticed about her first. She wore a kind of bar-chic elegance that hung low enough to distract but not look trashy. The kind of view of more exciting locales that was impossible to resist because it seemed like it wasn’t intentionally on display. My guess was that it was perfectly calculated.