by Nas Hedron
Discreet prostitutes circulate. There are males, females, and some of indeterminate gender. They come in a variety of ages, races, and sizes. They never approach you directly the way they would on the street, though. There are security guards here and closed circuit cameras. Instead they let their clothes speak for them: revealing, garish, and suggestive, usually accented with heavy make-up. Apart from the clothes they wear sultry expressions, make lots of eye contact, and allow their hands to casually touch strategic parts of their own bodies, drawing attention to their lips, breasts, groins, and asses. If you make a connection with one of them there are always the disused upper floors where you can consummate the deal.
The Mega has a total of sixteen floors. Four are below ground, twelve above, but the top five were abandoned long ago. It turned out that, no matter what inducements you used, people would only disperse to a certain extent within the mall once they entered, and retailers near the top found themselves lacking customers. To make matters worse, despite an expensive air circulation system, the large enclosed space makes for congested air near the roof. Body heat, human breath, smog from outside, and ambient moisture collect more quickly than the circulators can disperse it, making the atmosphere swampy. Most of the time the roof is actually lost in mist when you look up from the lower floors, as though there was no roof at all.
Some upper-floor stores went out of business, while others were lucky enough to relocate lower down. As the population of the top floors thinned, the Mega’s management eventually decided to seal off the top five floors entirely. No elevators, escalators, or stairs will take you there. The only people who go there are maintenance crews and city inspectors, ensuring that the upper structure doesn’t deteriorate.
At least that’s the way it was supposed to work, but in L.A. a plan like that was doomed. Homeless people, sensing an opportunity, broke or picked locks, cut holes in fencing, or had their kids squeeze between the bars of the barriers and then open them from the other side. Teenagers looking for a place to hang out, screw, or get high, did the same. The prostitutes claimed retail spaces and installed their own locks, dressing up the former stores and turning them into lavish sex suites. Some people brought up small generators, while others brought battery-packs, so that they could have light, electric fans, sims, music, and whatever else suited them. Everyone who uses the area is careful to ensure that it still looks abandoned, but a rich life goes on up there. Lovers meet, children are born, people die. At first Mega security tried rousting the new residents, but they were outnumbered and usually came away bloodied. No one wanted to bring in the P.D. Doing that would invite a massacre and a lot of bad publicity. Eventually a tacit agreement was reached—the squatters wouldn’t bother the shoppers, and management would look the other way.
Despite this, only the lowest three of the ‘abandoned’ floors get any significant traffic, while the top two are generally avoided. The reason for that has nothing to do with security, or even with air quality. It’s pure spider. There are rumors about her, legends built up over time about her appetites. Occasionally people disappear inexplicably, sometimes two or three in a day, and as far as the squatters are concerned the spider is the reason for it. There is seriously bad juju up in the top floor where the spider lives, and everyone wants at least one floor of insulation between them and her.
Once you’re into the squatter’s territory, getting to the spider is easy. All the security barriers, functional or not, are below you at the seventh above-ground floor. The only thing stopping anyone from going beyond the tenth floor is fear, though for the most part that works well enough. I begin climbing a service ladder that even the homeless refuse to use.
The real obstacle to seeing the spider is getting past the Tics, one of the city’s many youth gangs. Their handle is an abbreviation of the word Frantic, their drug of choice. Like Dogware, it was a military creation that eventually leaked, although Frantic leaked a lot further than Cloud City, all the way down to the street. Designed for combat, it increases reaction time, coordination, balance, and sheer bodily speed and power, all without impairing perception or judgment. There are no intoxicating side-effects.
What Jocelyn had given me in exchange for that killshot in Boulder was a box containing fifty cannules of Forces-grade Frantic. The entire supply was supposed to have been incinerated when hard-wired shells began to be produced in significant numbers that could produce the same results, but Jocelyn is no fool. You never know what’s going to come in handy, so she incinerated some innocuous crap instead and stashed the Frantic for a rainy day. I doubt I’ve even dented her supply, but the amount I’ve got is worth a fortune on the street, especially considering its purity.
Frantic makes the Tics formidable fighters. What makes them beautiful fighters is a technique they call Tarantella. A blend of dance gestures and fighting moves, Tarantella turns a street brawl into a ballet. Centuries ago slaves in Brazil developed a similar discipline, called capoeira. They pretended it was a form of dance, since slaves weren’t allowed to learn combat skills, and it can look like dance, but it’s also a deadly martial art. Tarantella is like that, mixing Karate and Tae Kwon Do with salsa, classical ballet, gymnastics, and a myriad of other influences. With the chemical enhancement of Frantic, though, it is far more dangerous and difficult than any ordinary martial art, requiring abilities which no unenhanced capoeirista or kung fu practitioner could possibly possess.
Apart from Tarantella, the Tics’ other distinguishing feature is their dress. Many gangs dress in a paramilitary style, using colored patches, crests, berets, and bandanas to distinguish one rank from another or one gang from the next. The Tics don’t look like that at all. They are colorful peacocks straight out of a Sunday Best hallucination. Their outfits are bright and garish, combining elaborate make-up, tattoos, and clothing styles pillaged from a variety of cultures and historical periods, or dredged up from the depths of their imaginations. Unlike most gangs, each member’s look is entirely individual, and is a source of particular, preening pride. Watching these human rainbows fight, using elaborate dance moves at the incredible speeds that only chemicals can provide, is a spectacular visual display that should not be missed—unless you’re their intended victim.
In that respect—their violence—they are not only similar to the city’s other gangs, they are preeminent: they are the most utterly ruthless. Their loyalties lie exclusively with each other, and no hint of sympathy exists for anyone outside the group. You are unlikely to see a Hungry Ghost fall in love, or hesitate to kill, but it has happened once or twice. I have never heard of a Shadowboy showing emotion for anyone outside his gang, but I know that one of them died when he swerved his motorcycle to avoid hitting a dog. Maybe it was an automatic reaction on his part, or maybe he actually felt something for the dog, but if it had been a Tic I wouldn’t have to ask myself that question because the Tic would simply not have swerved. Their reactions are under the most complete control I’ve ever seen—even beyond what I witnessed in the Forces—and their feelings exist only for other Tics.
Maybe that’s what attracted them to the spider in the first place. Like them it is impressive, intelligent, and utterly amoral. It is perhaps the only thing I’ve ever heard of that can move faster than they do and kill more efficiently. Despite its great size—at least ten meters in length—I’ve been told that when it kills it moves with almost invisible speed and with an accuracy that can be measured in millimeters. For this, I think, the Tics respect it, even revere it. The spider is what they wish they were, perhaps what they aspire to evolve into one day. In any event, for the time being they pay her their respects, feed her, and help guard and keep her eggs.
Because of my Forces wiring, my reaction times and physical strength are a match for any Tic—the wiring I have is exactly what made Frantic obsolete. But the question of whether I could win a fight with one Tic is irrelevant since there is no such thing as one Tic—they always move in groups. As I reach the summit of the ladder and step onto
a small steel platform, I am faced with a pair of them. Without question there are more out there in the murky darkness, all around me most likely, ready to move in should a fight start. Not that the first two would need help, the others would simply want a piece of the action.
It’s the female Tic who speaks first.
“Hm,” she says. It’s the sound of someone assessing something. “Food.”
She means me. She says it with an almost robotic lack of emotion that seems out of synch with her colorful appearance, although I think I can sense a kind of inhuman amusement slithering beneath her apparent absence of emotion. She is wearing pink tights, and below that, pink bootlets that resemble ballet slippers. Her slim, muscular torso is bare except for its elaborate tattoos: a mass of overlapping and intertwining flamingos that entirely covers her belly and breasts and even rises up her neck, though it stops somewhere on the underside of her chin. Her face is unadorned except for a scar above her right eye that bisects her eyebrow. Her hair is dyed blonde and spiked.
“I didn’t come here to be food,” I say “I came with a gift.”
The male behind the flamingo-woman turns to her and speaks with mock seriousness.
“Oh, gifts. Well, then friends.”
He cackles a laugh. As he laughs I can see that his teeth have been replaced with mock-feline implants. His upper and lower jaws have been augmented as well, forming something like a snout, and his entire head is covered in what appears to be very soft, blue-black fur.
He wears an outfit that shows off his very impressive physique—muscular but very lithe. His light jacket is the turquoise of Caribbean seas, but in a lamé that shimmers and glistens. Underneath it he wears a darker blue T-shirt, skin-tight. His pants are silver, and are made of the same glistening material as his jacket. On anyone else his outfit might look laughable, but I find nothing funny about him. He is wearing the same ballet slippers as his companion, but I don’t doubt that he has claw implants where his nails ought to be, both in his feet and hands. I can picture him licking my blood from his paws and purring, which is just what he wants me to see.
“Frantic,” I say, and reach inside my pouch to remove the padded shipping container. “Military grade.”
A third Tic drops with a quiet plop from the girders above us, but remains in the shadows so that I can’t see what it looks like. I just see its head rise, nose aloft, as it sniffs the air.
“True. Frantic,” the distant figure says, showing off his or her olfactory augmentation. It’s impossible to tell from the silhouette or the voice whether it’s a male or a female.
“I know it’s truth,” says the cat-man quietly “he’s still breathing, hey? Smell it fine from here.”
“Whatta you want?” flamingo asks.
“I want to talk to the spider.”
She laughs at this and lets herself fall backward. She drops off the girder she’s been standing on, and at the last moment catches it with one hand, swinging underneath it, then arcs up on the other side, and lands on its neighbor. It looks effortless.
“You don’t talk to spider. You talk to us, we talk to spider, then we talk to you.”
It sounds as though I’m making progress, although with the Tics you can never be sure.
“How do I know you won’t just take the drugs and kill me?”
She smiles. In contrast to her tattoos and her athletics it’s a very human smile, almost cheerful.
“You don’t.” She lets me think on that for a moment, then shrugs as though to dispel the thought. “Hey,” she says “you know anyone else come here?”
“Yeah.”
“And they brought presents like you?”
“Yeah, they did.”
“And we kill them?”
“Nope.”
She spreads her arms in the age-old gesture that says voilà—there is your answer. She snatches up the box of Frantic and tosses it behind her, where someone catches it.
“Come with,” she says, gesturing for me to follow her, and with those words the Tics drop the pretense that the area is abandoned. Music suddenly surges to life—an electronic version of Handel’s Messiah I think, but remixed and set to an electronic beat—and lights erupt up and down the length of the area. We are in a lattice of steel beams, struts, wires, and occasional platforms. In that moment every inch is illuminated by a blaze of multicolored spotlights, showing the many—so very many—Tics who were there and whom I didn’t even realize were present.
Both the flamingo-girl and the cat-man fall backward into perfect layovers. Their bodies are so limber as to seem unreal, like something from a sim. There is nothing in the pallid Olympics to compare with this. They allow their torsos to fall backward, then land on their hands and pivot on the axis of their pelvises, drawing their legs over them. It takes a long time to explain the motion, but no time at all for them to execute it. What it amounts to is a backwards cartwheel, executed as quickly and naturally as walking. As they start to move, the other Tics, now revealed by the lights, move with them en masse, like an army advancing through dance.
There are some who spring from girder to girder like squirrels. Some execute an entrancing combination of salsa and ballet, while others are more given to jazz moves. Some seem like orangutans in the fluid way they swing and lope and swing again, while still others use each other as platforms from which to spring and vault, like circus tumblers. One pair runs through a Tarantella routine, sparring with each other with punches, kicks, and throws. Every one of them moves independently, but each keeps time to the music nonetheless. All of this goes on as they move further into their territory with nothing beneath them but girders ten centimeters wide. One misstep would mean a deadly fall to the mall basement far below, but being Tics they make no mistakes. With a preternatural ease they cascade across their natural habitat with utter confidence, executing every move to perfection. I follow them easily enough—my Forces shell gives me perfect balance—but without years of practice I could never move the way they do.
Each one is outfitted in a unique style, although they all wear thin-soled, slipper-like boots for optimum traction. All in all it’s a profoundly majestic display—both impressive and beautiful. I don’t know if the show is for my benefit. Maybe this is how they always move, even when strangers aren’t around, but in any event I’m definitely put on my guard. With their speed, agility, power, balance, coordination, and numbers there is no way I can do anything to save myself if they decide to attack.
Hell, to be honest there is no way an entire Forces squad could take them. They may lack the sophisticated weaponry, the satellite systems, the floating mines, and the Angelfire, but they move like air, like nothing. Like the Dogs they can appear behind you before you know they have disappeared from in front of you. Fuck, they’re dancers—not some street assholes or even foreign soldiers but dancers—and the Forces are not used to that, wouldn’t know what to do with it. They can move around you, approach you from angles you would ever expect, and kill from positions that you thought were secure.
That is the nature of the Tics. On the streets below, innumerable gangs compete with each other. The P.D. are, in many ways, just the biggest, best-armed gang of all. The gangs vie for turf and money, for weapons and sex and drugs, for status and glory, for bragging rights and reputation. Many are called, but few are chosen, and the truth is that the Tics are the few, period. Everyone else is a distant number two at best.
As we approach one corner of the mall, the already heavy air is permeated by a stale smell that intrudes on the cheerful atmosphere created by the Tics’ bright costumes, the colored lights, and the beautiful music. Soon the staleness is joined by something more rank. The nearer we get to the corner, the more overpowering the odor becomes, but there’s still no other sign of the spider. Then I realize that the two walls I thought formed a corner don’t actually meet. Instead they form the entrance to an offshoot of the Tics’ playground. As we turn into it I finally come face to face with what I’ve been seeking—an
d a whole lot more.
The spider’s retreat is an alcove about forty meters square, but with a ceiling almost twice that height. I can tell from the pattern worn into the floor that some large machinery once stood here, now made unnecessary by the absence of commerce. Her nest fills the entire back half of it, an intricate, tightly woven web of grey silk within which lie hundreds upon hundreds of eggs. Normal spiders’ eggs are millimeters across, but these are the size of grapefruit. Clinging to this mass of silk and fecundity is the spider herself. She is easily ten meters long in the body, and her legs extend that by another three meters in either direction. Her black body looks like taught rubber, while her legs are barred with alternate stripes of black and ash grey. When we arrive she is working on the construction of her nest—repairing it, tending it—and shows no sign of noticing our approach. Someone lowers the volume of the music until it is nothing but a subtle rhythm, sensed rather than heard.
What captures my attention the most is not the spider or the core of her nest, but the loose array of silk that spreads outward from the nest itself, trailing along the floor like lichen and hanging from the walls and ceiling like Spanish moss. Caught in it are shopping bags, shoes, clothing, purses, and emaciated, mummified bodies. A cocoon shape on the wall to my right suddenly twitches, then is still again.
I’m not sure what the Tics get from the spider—perhaps she shares her wisdom with them, or maybe she simply seems to them so awesome that the only right thing to do is to serve her—but it’s clear what she gets from them. Presumably she prefers not to leave her alcove and venture down into the populated areas of the mall, risking discovery. Despite her considerable skills and power, she could probably be killed with enough troops and weaponry and, worse, her nest could be eradicated. Instead it’s the Tics who harvest for her. Maybe they lure victims here with charm, entice them with Frantic, or compel them with force. Maybe they do all three. Whatever means they use, they bring back human fruit for her and she sucks it dry. I have seen some evil things, perhaps even more evil than this, but it’s enough to make even me pause. The Tics come to a stop around me with a soft patter of footfalls, hands and feet slapping girders as they land.