by Nas Hedron
“You actually think I know who did it?”
“Fuck no. But you know the people. I got street names. Cairo, Caníbal, Dark Dan, a few others.”
“And you want me to put faces to the names.”
“Well I can’t look up their addresses and come pay them a visit, can I?” Felon growls, frustrated. “A couple of names is all, maybe places where they hang out. Or I could put a camera in here, covert. One comes in, you give a us the nod, be subtle. We won’t even take them from here, you have my word. We’ll pace them for a while once they leave and grab them somewhere else. No one will know.”
Hearn finally steps from behind the pulpit. He moves forward and stands face to face with Felon. He’s a gaunt man, but he’s the same height as Felon is. It costs him a lot to come this close. The air around Felon is thick with chaos, with murder. With sound: swearing, crying, whimpering, slavering. Inwardly Hearn is losing control, but outwardly it doesn’t show yet.
“No.”
“I saved your life, Hearn.”
“Yes you did, but I’d give it up for these people if I had to, do you get that?” Now an angry flush rises to his face. “I’m ready to die for my flock if I have to. I’m certainly not going to betray them to you.”
“Betray?” Felon bellows, inches from Hearn’s face. “Betray what? The people I’m talking about are criminals, or didn’t you hear me? It’s right in your damned commandments: thou shalt not steal.”
Despite the feeling of standing on a precipice, of nearly being absorbed into the ugliness Felon carries with him, Hearn laughs through a sneer.
“You getting moral on me Dave? You of all people?” He shakes his head. “Do you really think that people like you and me have any right to judge these people for a few petty thefts? No way. No Judas kisses from me old buddy.”
“Don’t make me fuck with you Hearn.”
“You don’t outrank me any more Felon, and you don’t scare me any more either.” His voice has become thin, a dangerous hiss, despite his attempts to control it. “You think we’re still back in the Forces? Take a look around you.”
Felon, suddenly calm, does a slow turn, taking in the whole room, then looks Cal Hearn up and down.
“I don’t see jack, Hearn.”
Cal Hearn stands in a room filled to the ceiling with ghosts, crowded with them. The spirits of children run in fear from one wall to another, then on to the next, endlessly, as though trapped. They climb the walls like geckos and hide behind the pulpit. Phantom horses charge in the aisles. The echoes of gunfire, years old, reverberate in the small room. Somewhere in the distance is the thud, thud, thud of mortars.
“No, you just don’t know how to see, Felon. You never did.”
Felon wags a finger in Hearn’s face, saying nothing, then turns to leave. The pastor watches him go, then strides across the room and locks the mission’s front door. Outside he hears Felon revving the engine of his monster motorcycle. Hearn stays at the door, his hands flat against its wood, until the last echo of the engine disappears. Behind him the ghosts are still there.
Preview: Los Angeles Honey
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Gat Burroughs doesn’t take domestic cases–they’re messy and people with broken marriages sometimes have more pressing things to think about than paying the investigator. But when Brian Forget’s wife shows up at his office, he makes an exception.
Gat and LAPD Officer Dave Fellows–known informally as Felon for his cheerful sadism–gave Forget a hard time during a previous case even though he hadn’t done anything wrong.
There wasn’t really a choice if Gat wanted to save his client’s life–and his own. Now, though, he feels just a little bit guilty.
The problem is that in this case almost nothing is what it seems and rather than making up for old sins, Gat’s involvement may end up getting Brian Forget killed.
The only way to stop that from happening is by solving the big, bad, very dangerous case that lurks behind the simple domestic one.
The Future is Noir
Also includes "The Facts in the Fiction," a look at the factual background to the ficitonal story, including:
cyborg insects, how they're built and used
the belief in luck and the case of the maneki neko
a new twist on the science fiction trope of uploading human consciousness into an artificial body
a look at state surveillance technology
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One: The Bright Sky Presses Down
Beneath me the surface of the roof is hot—above me the bright sky presses down. Sunlight reflects from the windows of the cars in the slow-moving traffic below, dragging starbursts across my field of view. The individual sounds of the city merge into a single busy drone, the bass line supplied by the low rumble of trucks and, in the highest registers, the soprano whine of a BoneCutter tearing up concrete at a construction site around the corner. I smell sun-baked concrete, car exhaust, and spiced chicken—a typical blend of fragrances for a Chinatown afternoon.
My building’s only five stories high, so I can’t see much from my perch on one corner of the utilitarian roof. I sit cross-legged, resting my hands on the low security rail that’s meant to keep maintenance workers from falling off the edge—no one is supposed to be up here. Cars pack the streets, and in the plaza directly below me pedestrians circulate in currents and eddies. Straight ahead is a jumbled skyline. Above it, two distant jets silently lay down contrails that approach one another, cross in an immense white “X,” and then diverge, their tail ends just starting to dissipate and blur. Somewhere in the distance is the Pacific Ocean, but there’s no way to see it from such a low perch and, in any case, I’m facing the wrong direction.
I’m not meditating, as I sometimes do on this spot, just sitting and looking at the city. The nightmares of Tijuana that often disrupt my sleep and sometimes even intrude on my waking hours—hallucinatory atrocities striding down the street next to me as I go about my day—have taken a break today, as they do from time to time, leaving behind a ringing in my ears and a world where everything’s tinged with a faint glow, like an aura. At times like this my senses seem especially sharp. Every fragrance, texture, and sound seems sweeter, softer, and more melodious than usual. Every color is magically bright and even a cheap sim seems like a ballet. Eventually this dream-like state always ends and the nightmares return, but for the moment I’m enjoying their absence and letting myself swim a little in the sensory overload.
I notice a woman passing through the Gate of Filial Piety, a large Chinese arch at the entrance to the plaza. Slim, late twenties, dark hair. I can’t see her features from here, but there’s something familiar about her appearance—the shape of her face, the way she holds her purse, even her gait. Recognition hits me: that’s Annalie Frye. Then, immediately afterward: no, it isn’t. In theory it could be her granddaughter—Annalie Frye has almost certainly been dead for a hundred years or so, along with everyone else I knew at university.
I experience jarring moments like this once in a while, and I know other revenants go through the same thing. It’s unavoidable when you’ve been preserved in the limbo of stasis for a century or more before awakening in a world where almost nothing is what it was. Some people volunteered for stasis, willing test subjects travelling into the future by cancelling themselves out of the world for decades at a time. But most, like me, simply got sick with something incurable, or were injured in a way that was untreatable, and hitched a ride into the future in the hope that more advanced medicine would solve their problems.
For me it was a car accident. One moment I was twenty years old and stupidly carefree. The next moment—thanks to a collision and an insurance policy with a stasis provision—I was pushing a hundred and fifty, everyone I knew was dead
, and I was wondering how to get by in an unfamiliar world. I died—at least it feels like I died—in the United States of America, then woke up in the Nation of California, with large sections of the continent reduced to feral Grey Zones. I’m told that there wasn’t even a cataclysm as such, just a kind of grotesque slippage that started slowly and then gained momentum, an uneven social and technological collapse that spread virulently in some areas while treading more gently in others, bringing down the American empire and leaving behind independent enclaves like California, Texas, and New York City, plus the unclaimed and uncivilized Grey Zones.
The woman who isn’t Annalie meets a friend, embraces her, and they enter a restaurant. As I watch them go, my kaikki chirps in my shirt pocket and I fish it out.
“Gat Burroughs.”
“Gat it’s me,” Rollie says, “There’s someone here to see you. Wants to retain us. She says she’ll only talk to you.”
“Okay Rollie.”
I pull myself out of my reverie, look around me. To my left, a cloud of tiny gnats is circling a sticky patch on the roof. I stand up and go over to look more closely: dead bird, or what’s left of one. A fan-like wing of thin, white bones with a few grey feathers clinging to it, all of it anchored to a pale segment of spine. I turn away and open the battered maintenance door with the broken lock, making my way into the coolness of the building.
Two: Remember Forget
In my current state, even the elevator ride to the lobby involves an entire world of sensory input. Instead of music, the sound system is playing an ocean soundscape today. Normally I might not even notice it, but today I take in every detail. Gulls cry and wail against a background of surf, which crashes and then sighs, and there’s a happy babble of human voices whose words you can’t quite make out, occasionally pierced by sudden laughter. I slide my fingers across one of the walls, savoring the texture of the surface, cream-colored fabric above smooth wood wainscoting. A pale violet indicator light ignites and then fades, ignites and fades, showing the number of each floor as I descend and leaving a brief afterglow each time.
I pass the upper floors—which are filled with apartments, including mine—and arrive at the lobby. The doors slide silently open on a cool space of subdued light: dark wood, red walls, gold trim. It’s old school Chinatown décor—too lavish for a lot of gwei, but I love it. I pass through a set of doors that leads from the private, residential area to the public lobby. Here there are three options to choose from. To my left is Fan’s Market, a convenience store that’s accessible from the lobby or from the street. Straight ahead is the outside world—cars and tourists and street vendors and Nouveau Asian pop music—all of it insulated behind an expanse of sound-deadening glass. To my right is the entrance to my company, Burroughs Oversight.
I go into the market first, procrastinating a little. Small brass bells suspended on a red string hang in the path of the door and ring with a glassy jangle as I enter. The interior of the store has a strong, pleasant smell of medicinal herbs and roots—there’s a large array of them in a row of wooden drawers at one end of the counter. Nanotech processors, which didn’t exist during my pre-stasis life, are in common use for food now, and in theory they would work just as well for medicines, but the pharma companies have so far been able to restrict them to a few public domain drugs, dispensing the proprietary ones themselves, which produced an accidental . windfall for vendors of traditional medicines as well.
Mrs. Fan looks up as I come in, and given her age I say a respectful nín hao, but she just smirks. My Mandarin is lousy. I buy a small vial of ginseng extract with ginko biloba and follow it with a chrysanthemum tea. I take out my kaikki to check my lottery numbers. I could look up the official numbers myself, but I always check with Mrs. Fan. It seems like if I win there should be someone around to share the moment with, even if it’s someone I barely know.
I don’t expect to ever win big, but I’ve been buying lottery tickets ever since my run-in with the Suerte y Muerte a few months ago. The Suerte kill their victims in order to steal their good luck and the fact that it seems to work—when clearly it can’t work—fascinates me. I started thinking about luck. Good luck and bad luck. The runs of luck that statisticians tell us are an illusion but that people believe in all the same. The way that luck gives us something to latch onto, something we can affect with charms or prayers, like a lever that helps us influence the things in life that are empirically uncontrollable: storms, wars, outbreaks. We humans can’t seem to help treating luck as if it really exists, as a substance floating around in the ether, invisible but powerful, even when we know there’s no such thing. I’m sure my fascination will pass with time, but at the moment it’s fresh and it holds my attention.
So the lottery is a cross between an experiment and an obsession for me. One part of my mind can’t help getting hopeful as Mrs. Fan reads off the official numbers one by one, while the rest of me observes my own reactions with fascinated detachment as I check my own numbers on my kaikki. Today I match three digits for a hundred dollars, the kind of small win that happens from time to time, and an absurd happiness blooms inside me, like a spot of bright ink dropped into water, despite the fact that I’ve spent more on tickets than I’ve ever won.
I collect my money and leave with my tea, saying zài jiàn to Mrs. Fan. I cross the lobby, enter the office, and approach the front counter from the client side. Behind the counter is Rollie—Rolando Ciro Villanueve—a slim guy with a boyish face, long blonde hair combed straight back, a goatee, and watery blue eyes that hint at soulfulness. He looks like one of those very non-Semitic illustrations of Jesus you find in some children’s Bibles.
Of course, the body Rollie was born to looked a lot different from his current shell, more in accord with his Latino heritage. When rich folks have themselves decanted they almost always pick a shell that bears some family resemblance to the original—same color hair and eyes, similar height and build. But like me, Rollie’s ex-military. When the California National Forces decants a new recruit into a shell they prioritize functionality and don’t give a damn about matching you up with a body that looks like your husk. Rollie could be German or Scandinavian, but with a California tan.
On this side of the counter is a woman—not unattractive, but a little mousy—wearing a print dress. Dark hair to her shoulders, brown eyes, minimal makeup. She’s conventional, unremarkable.
“Can I help you Ms…”
“I’m here to retain you Mr. Burroughs.”
“Is this for you personally, ma’am?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Well, we mostly work for companies, we have a roster of regular clients.”
This isn’t entirely true, but I’m guessing that her situation is probably a domestic—a cheating spouse, an ex-husband who owes her money—and I avoid domestics. She looks flustered by my answer, but she doesn’t back down.
“But you—well, you owe it to my family.”
That’s a new one.
“Why would I owe something to your family?”
“My husband helped you. Gave you information that solved a big case, saved lives.” She begins to look cross and her voice rises a little. “He broke the rules for you and it’s not like he got anything in return.”
“Ma’am I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Brian Forget,” she says. “My husband’s name is Brian Forget.”
Three: Two Teardrops Fall
In my personal office, deep within Burroughs Oversight, Nancy Forget accepts a chair but declines coffee. She smoothes the front of her dress as she sits, holding her purse in her lap as though to keep something between herself and the world. I can smell her hand lotion—patchouli, I think. She seems like a good match to her husband: nervous, pleasant, ordinary.
I sit down.
“So, what did Brian tell you about the case?”
“Well, obviously he couldn’t say much—you said he wasn’t allowed to.” I hadn’t said anything of the
kind. “But he said that you needed information from his job, from Body Works. It was the key to an important case and he helped you solve it—you and the police—even though he wasn’t really supposed to give you information without permission. He gave it to you anyway and it helped save that guy’s life. A sim star. I think it was one of the AI ones?”
It wasn’t, it was an all-too-human Max Prince, but I nod anyway.
“Anything else?”
I’m curious just how far Forget took his exaggerations. He had given us important information, but only because Felon had threatened him.
“Well, that was about it mostly. You said how it was good working with him and that he should call you if he ever needed anything because you owed him a favor. Well, now I’m asking for him.”
She thrusts her jaw out a little as though expecting me to challenge her right to call in a favor that I never actually promised to her husband, whose role in the case was far smaller and more passive than he’d made out. Correcting her seems cruel, though.
“What kind of favor did you have in mind Mrs. Forget?”
Which is when she starts crying. She pulls some tissue from her purse and I give her a moment to get her tears under control.
“Sorry,” she says, blinking eyes rimmed with pink.
“Don’t worry about it.”
There’s no point pressing her, so I let things take their course. She misses some spots with her tissue and two teardrops fall onto the front of her dress, leaving small, dark dots.
“Brian’s having an affair.”
I almost laugh. It’s not nice, but it’s automatic. I get it under control before she can notice.
“He didn’t strike me as the sort of man who would do that.”
“He is, though. He must be. He sneaks around—he thinks he’s fooling me, but he’s not.”