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VIDEO STAR
(Voice of the Whirlwind)
Walter Jon Williams
Ric has survived a rival’s attempt to poison him, but the hospital AIs pegged him as a suspect character with no job history and a suspicious amount of cash on his person, and they kept the treatments coming until he was broke.
Now he needs a new source of funds, and the hospital which stole his money is chock-full of a new neurohormone that’s worth a fortune. All Ric needs is to manipulate a street gang into committing the crime for him, and then he’ll betray everyone and live happily ever after.
But maybe he hasn’t counted on a new technology aimed at turning him into the star of a very nasty reality show . . .
From Walter Jon Williams, the master of hard-boiled speculative fiction.
Copyright (c) 1987, 2014 by Walter Jon Williams
Cover art by Adimas
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-99055-090-7
eISBN: 978-1-62579-331-7
Electronic Version by Baen Books
http://www.baen.com
1
Ric could feel the others closing in. They were circling outside the Falcon Quarter as if on midsummer thermals, watching the Cadillacs with glittering raptor eyes, occasionally swooping in to take a little nibble at Cadillac business, Cadillac turf, Cadillac sources. Testing their own strength as well as the Cadillac nerves, applying pressure just to see what would happen, find out if the Cadillacs still had it in them to respond...
Ric knew the game well: he and the other Cadillacs had played it five years before, up and down the streets and datanets of the Albaicin, half-grown kids testing their strength against the gangs entrenched in power, the Cruceros, the Jerusalem Rangers, the Piedras Blancas. The older gangs seemed slow, tentative, uncertain, and when the war came the Cadillacs won in a matter of days: the others were too entrenched, too visible, caught in a network of old connections, old associations, old manners... the young Cadillacs, coming up out of nowhere, found their own sources, their own products and connections, and in the end they and their allies gutted the old boys’ organization, absorbing what was still useful and letting the rest die along with the remnants of the Cruceros, Rangers, and Blancas, the bewildered survivors who were still looking for a remaining piece of turf on which to make their last stand.
At the time Ric had given the Cadillacs three years before the same thing started happening to them, before their profile grew too high and the next generation of snipers rose in confidence and ability. The Cadillacs had in the end lasted five years, and that wasn’t bad. But, Ric thought, it was over.
The other Cadillacs weren’t ready to surrender. The heat was mounting, but they thought they could survive this challenge, hold out another year or two. They were dreaming, Ric thought.
During the hot dog days of summer, people began to die. Gunfire echoed from the pink walls of the Alhambra. Networks disintegrated. Allies disappeared. Ric made a proposition to the Cadillacs for a bank to be shared with their allies, a fund to keep the war going. The Cadillacs in their desperation agreed.
Ric knew then it was time to end it, that the Cadillacs had lost whatever they once had. If they agreed to a proposition like this, their nerve and their smarts were gone.
So there was a last meeting, Ric of the Cadillacs, Mares of the Squires, Jacob of the Last Men. Ric walked into the meeting with a radar-aimed dart gun built into the bottom of his briefcase, each dart filled with a toxin that would stop the heart in a matter of seconds. When he walked out it was with a money spike in his pocket, a stainless steel needle tipped with liquid crystal. In the heart of the crystal was data representing over eighty thousand Seven Moons dollars, ready for deposit into any electric account into which he could plug the needle.
West, Ric thought. He’d buy into an American condecology somewhere in California and enjoy retirement. He was twenty-two years old.
He began to feel sick in the Tangier-to-Houston suborbital shuttle, a crawling across his nerves, pinpricks in the flesh. By the time he crossed the Houston port to take his domestic flight to L.A. there were stabbing pains in his joints and behind his eyes. He asked a flight attendant for aspirin and chased the pills with American whiskey.
As the plane jetted west across Texas, Ric dropped his whiskey glass and screamed in sudden pain. The attendants gave him morphine analogue but the agony only increased, an acid boiling under his skin, a flame that gutted his body. His vision had gone and so had the rest of his senses except for the burning knowledge of his own pain. Ric tried to tear his arms open with his fingernails, pull the tortured nerves clean out of his body, and the attendants piled on him, holding him down, pinning him to the floor of the plane like a butterfly to a bed of cork.
As they strapped him into a stretcher at the unscheduled stop in Flagstaff, Ric was still screaming, unable to stop himself. Jacob had poisoned him, using a neurotoxin that stripped away the myelin sheathing on his nerves, leaving them raw cords of agonized fiber. Ric had been in a hurry to finish his business and had only taken a single sip of his wine: that was the only thing that had saved him.
2
He was months in the hospital in Flagstaff, staring out of a glass wall at a maze of other glass walls— office buildings and condecologies stacked halfway to Phoenix, flanking the silver alloy ribbon of an expressway. The snows fell heavily that winter, then in the spring melted away except for patches of white in the shadows. For the first three months he was completely immobile, his brain chemically isolated from his body to keep the pain away while he took an endless series of nerve grafts, drugs to encourage nerve replication and healing. Finally there was physical therapy that had him screaming in agony at the searing pain in his reawakened limbs.
At the end there was a new treatment, a new drug. It dripped into his arm slowly via an IV and he could feel a lightness in his nerves, a humming in his mind. Even the air seemed to taste better. The pain was no worse than usual and he felt better than he had since walking out of the meeting back in Granada with the money spike in his pocket.
“What’s in the IV?” he asked, next time he saw the nurse.
The nurse smiled. “Everyone asks that,” he said. “Genesios Three. We’re one of the few hospitals that has the security to distribute the stuff.”
“You don’t say.”
He’d heard of the drug while watching the news. Genesios Three was a new neurohormone, developed by the orbital Pink Blossom policorp, that could repair almost any amount of nerve damage. As a side effect it built additional neural connections in the brain, raised the IQ, and made people high. The hormone was rare because it was very complex and expensive to synthesize, though the gangs were trying. On the west coast lots of people had died in a war for control of the new black labs. On the street it was called Black Thunder.
“Not bad,” said Ric.
The treatment and the humming in Ric’s brain went on for a week. When it was over he missed it. He was a
lso more or less healed.
3
The week of Genesios therapy took fifteen thousand dollars out of Ric’s spike. The previous months of treatment had accounted for another sixty-two thousand. What Ric didn’t know was that Genesios therapy could have been started at once and saved him most of his funds, but that the artificial intelligences working for the hospital had tagged him as a suspect character, an alien of no particular standing, with no work history, no policorporate citizenship, and a large amount of cash in his breast pocket. The AIs concluded that Ric was in no position to complain, and they were right.
Computers can’t be sued for malpractice. The doctors and administrators followed their advice.
All that remained of Ric’s money was three thousand SM dollars. Ric could live off of that for a few years, but it wasn’t much of a retirement.
The hospital was nice enough to schedule an appointment for him with a career counselor, a woman who would find him a job. She worked in the basement of the vast glass hospital building, and her name was Marlene.
4
Marlene worked behind a desk littered with the artifacts of other people’s lives. There were no windows in the office, two ashtrays, both full, and on the walls there were travel posters that showed long stretches of emptiness, white beaches, blue ocean, faraway clouds. Nothing alive.
Her green eyes had an opaque quality, as if she was watching a private video screen somewhere in her mind. She wore a lot of silver jewelry on her fingers and forearms and a grey rollneck sweater with cigarette burn marks. Her eyes bore elaborate makeup that looked like the wings of a Red Admiral. Her hair was almost blond. The only job she could find him was for a legal firm, something called assistant data evaluator.
Before Ric left Marlene’s office he asked her to dinner. She turned him down without even changing expression. Ric had the feeling he wasn’t quite real to her.
The job of assistant data evaluator consisted of spending the day walking up and down a four-story spiral staircase in the law firm, moving files from one office to another. The files were supposedly sensitive and not committed to the firm’s computer lest someone steal them. The salary was insulting. Ric told the law firm that the job was just what he was looking for. They told him to start in two days.
Ric stopped into Marlene’s office to tell her he got the job and to ask her to dinner again. She laughed, for what reason he couldn’t tell, and said yes.
A slow spring snowfall dropped onto the streets while they ate dinner. With her food Marlene took two red capsules and a yellow pill, grew lively, drank a lot of wine. He walked her home through the snow to her apartment on the seventh floor of an old fourth-rate condeco, a place with water stains on the ceiling and bare bulbs hanging in the halls, the only home she could afford. In the hallway Ric brushed snow from her shoulders and hair and kissed her. He took Marlene to bed and tried to prove to her that he was real.
The next day he checked out of the hospital and moved in.
5
Ric hadn’t bothered to show up on his first day as an assistant data evaluator. Instead he’d spent the day in Marlene’s condeco, asking her home comp to search library files and print out everything relating to what the scansheets in their willful ignorance called “Juvecrime.” Before Marlene came home Ric called the most expensive restaurant he could find and told them to deliver a five-course meal to the apartment.
The remains of the meal were stacked in the kitchen. Ric paced back and forth across the small space, his mind humming with the information he’d absorbed. Marlene sat on an adobe-colored couch and watched, a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, silhouetted by the glass self-polarizing wall that showed the bright aluminum-alloy expressway cutting south across melting piles of snow. Plans were vibrating in Ric’s mind, nothing firm yet, just neurons stirring on the edge of his awareness, forming fast-mutating combinations. He could feel the tingle, the high, the half-formed ideas as they flickered across neural circuits.
Marlene reached into a dispenser and took out a red pill and a green capsule with orange stripes. Ric looked at her. “How much of that stuff do you take, anyway? Is it medication, or what?”
“I’ve got anxieties.” She put the pills into her mouth, and with a shake of her head dry-swallowed them.
“How big a dose?”
“It’s not the dose that matters. It’s the proper combination of doses. Get it right and the world feels like a lovely warm swimming pool. It’s like floating underwater and still being able to breathe. It’s wonderful.”
“If you say so.” He resumed his pacing. Fabric scratched his bare feet. His mind hummed, a blur of ideas that hadn’t yet taken shape, flickering, assembling, dissolving without his conscious thought.
“You didn’t show up for work,” Marlene said. “They gave me a call about that.”
“Sorry.”
“How are you gonna afford this taste you have for expensive food?” Marlene asked. “Without working, I mean.”
“Do something illegal,” Ric said. “Most likely.”
“That’s what I thought.” She looked up at him, sideways. “You gonna let me play?”
“If you want.”
Marlene swallowed half her wine, looked at the littered apartment, shrugged.
“Only if you really want,” Ric said. “It has to be a thing you decide.”
“What else is there for me to do?” she said.
“I’m going to have to do some research, first,” he said. “Spend a few days accessing the library.”
Marlene was looking at him again. “Boredom,” she said. “In your experience, is that why most people turn to crime?”
“In my experience,” he said, “most people turn to crime because of stupidity.”
She grinned. “That’s cool,” she said. “That’s sort of what I figured.” She lit a cigarette. “You have a plan?”
“Something I can only do once. Then every freak in Western America is going to be looking for me with a machine gun.”
Marlene grinned. “Sounds exciting.”
He looked at her. “Remember what I said about stupidity.”
She laughed. “I’ve been smart all my life. What’s it ever got me?”
Ric, looking down at her, felt a warning resonate through him, like an unmistakable taste drawn across his tongue. “You’ve got a lot to lose, Marlene,” he said. “A lot more than I do.”
“Shit. Motherfucker.” The cigarette had burned her fingers. She squashed it in the ashtray, too fast, spilling ashes on the couch. Ric watched her for a moment, then went back to his thinking.
People were dying all over California in a war over the neurohormone Genesios Three. There had to be a way to take advantage of it.
6
“You a cop, buck?” The style was different from the people Ric knew in Iberia. In Granada, Ric had worn a gaucho mode straight from Argentina, tight pants with silver dollars sewn down the seams, sashes wound around nipped-in waists, embroidered vests.
He didn’t know what was worn by the people who had broken up the Cadillacs. He’d never seen any of them.
Here the new style was something called Urban Surgery. The girl bore the first example Ric had ever seen close up. The henna-red hair was in cornrows, braided with transparent plastic beads holding fast-mutating phosphorescent bacteria that constantly re-formed themselves in glowing patterns. The nose had been broadened and flattened to cover most of the cheeks, turning the nostrils into a pair of lateral slits, the base of the nose wider than the mouth. The teeth had been replaced by alloy transplants sharp as razors that clacked together in a precise, unpleasant way when she closed her mouth. The eyebrows were gone altogether and beneath them were dark plastic implants that covered the eye sockets. Ric couldn’t tell, and probably wasn’t supposed to know, whether there were eyes in there anymore, or sophisticated scanners tagged to the optic nerve.
The effect was to flatten the face, turn it into a canvas for the tattoo artist wh
o had covered every inch of exposed flesh. Complex mathematical statements ran over the forehead. Below the black plastic eye implants were urban skyscapes, silhouettes of buildings providing a false horizon across the flattened nose. The chin appeared to be a circuit diagram.
Ric looked into the dark eye sockets and tried not to flinch. “No,” he said. “I’m just passing through.”
One of her hands was on the table in front of him. It was tattooed as completely as the face, and the fingernails had been replaced by alloy razors, covered with transparent plastic safety caps.
“I saw you in here yesterday,” she said. “And again today. I was wondering if you want something.”
He shrugged. It occurred to him that, repellent as Urban Surgery was, it was fine camouflage. Who was going to be able to tell one of these people from another?
“You’re a little old for this place, buck,” the girl said. He figured her age as about fourteen. She was small-waisted and had narrow hips and large breasts. Ric did not find her attractive.
This was his second trip to Phoenix. The bar didn’t have a name, unless it was simply BAR, that being all that was said on the sign outside. It was below street level, in the storage cellar of an old building. Concrete walls were painted black. Dark plastic tables and chairs had been added, and bare fluorescent tubes decorated the walls. Speaker amps flanked the bar, playing cold electronic music devoid of noticeable rhythm or melody.
He looked at the girl and leaned closer to her. “I need your permission to drink here, or what?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Just to deal here.”
“I’m not dealing,” he said. “I’m just observing the passing urban scene, okay?” He was wearing a lightweight summer jacket of a cream color over a black T-shirt with Cyrillic lettering, black jeans, white sneakers. Nondescript street apparel.
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