She seemed afraid to look him in the eye. Her voice had a familiar quality, if he filtered the whispery cuteness away.
“I suppose I could.”
“That would be so sweet of you.” She smiled at last. “Can we meet for real? The men that killed him may be watching me in here. Is it true that you pulled off the Silver hack?”
With no accent and screaming, she would sound the same as the phantom yelling in Kenny’s house―the one calling out for Vincent. This girl was unlike most people he encountered in cyberspace. The vast majority liked their privacy and often went to great lengths to disguise their real identity. Most girls did not fancy thought of meeting in the real world at all, but this one suggested it after only minutes. She intrigued and frightened him at the same time, but in the end, the thrill felt worth it.
“Sure. You pick the place. Oh, if you don’t mind me asking… was his name Vincent?”
Avril’s eyes widened. She tried to take a step back, but already stood against the corner. “How… did you…” Her voice changed, more genuine.
“He died violently, didn’t he? You were calling out for him.” Joey tried not to sound threatening. “I heard it happen. Who was shot, you or him?”
“No… No…” She turned away, hands over her face. “How can you know?”
She squirmed with the look of a cornered mouse. Her dress, the room, the entire false reality around her swam into a claustrophobic mass.
“What happened? Are you still hearing him talk to you?” Joey leaned back, trying to give her some room. “Wait, you think I did the Silver?”
She broke into sobs and vanished. He leaned on the wall, about ready to gnaw on his fist at losing her. Perhaps, somewhere in reality, a woman sobbed over her deck.
The trip to New Hope offered little but more questions, and the face of an antique doll.
He had to find her.
oey leaned back in his chair, the ceaseless foraging of a four-inch roach distracting him. Its crawl through the mounded trash on the table was a microcosm of his existence in the grey. As it slithered out of sight into the pile, he let his thoughts drift back to the haunting visage he had seen at New Hope. The ghostly form, a glow of white and blue among a sea of red and gold, looped like a video through his mind. The instant at which her eyes looked up from the floor, meeting his, replayed again and again. Something about this girl felt as dangerous as it was alluring, and the risk made her even more desirable.
Mitch, the only one at New Hope without a ghost, had to be hiding something. Joey’s first thought was that he could be the one doing it, and went there to observe the results. In the event that did not prove true, the disparity of his not hearing voices could be a key toward an explanation. Over the past several hours, whenever he could wrest his brain away from Avril, he collected information on Mitch. Apparently, Mitch held a job as a shipping clerk for about a year, but had been let go a little more than two weeks ago for habitual lateness. Most curious of all, Joey found no trace of his marriage in the public records. He rubbed his eyes.
“That doesn’t mean much.” The roach peeked out, waving its antenna. “What do you think, Howard? Maybe they just married themselves.”
It zipped out of sight.
“Yeah.”
Joey stared at his NetMini, the old message from Alex that told him someone named Avril wanted to find him. A part of him hoped that this girl’s real appearance did not match her cyberspace persona. If she wanted to hurt him, he would be in trouble. The sight of the delicate living doll would stun him into a grinning fool. After snapping out of another daydream, he tried to find out more about Avril Boudreau; the name rang through his mind’s voice in a series of accents.
Ten minutes later, he stared at the shimmering holo-panels; unsurprised at the lack of information. He took a fry out of a plastic carton, bit it in half, and tapped it on the table until the roach came out. It accepted the offering and dragged it under the heap of old containers. Joey palmed his forehead and squeezed. A false name was nothing unusual on the net, but still frustrated Joey’s search.
What vexed him more was how the New Hope access logs did not show her connection. Even the GlobeNet servers showed no record of her. He squinted. Could she be the über-hacker behind all this? The more his mind wandered down that path, the more his desire to find her changed to desperation.
A plastic clatter made him jump.
A carton shifted, trapping the roach in an endless uphill sprint inside a sealed transparent box. Joey stared at it running in place, swimming back and forth, looking for escape.
“I know how you feel, Howard.”
He flicked the lid open and it vanished without a glance back. His finger moved from the carton to his chin, rubbing. Mitch failed to fit the pattern. According to Nami, he had been going to New Hope the longest, but had never reported any voices. With cyberspace proving fruitless, he decided to pay Mitch a visit in person.
The conversation Joey had with his father while getting ready made him more determined. The old man rambled on about the same old crap he always did: picking at Joey’s lack of a job, his future, grandkids, everything.
Whoever did this was good―he almost felt real.
Joey ducked out of the apartment before it felt too real. On the ride, he mulled over what he would say to Avril if he ever found her. A little over a half hour later, he arrived in front of Mitch’s building, unable to come up with anything that did not sound cliché or ridiculous.
Two cars stood sentinel amid a vast expanse of open parking area in front of this building. For a moment, he stared at random cyclones of trash that swirled up for seconds at a time before dissipating in scatters of debris. Almost a quarter of a city block used on parking spaces; the place was old. If this sector were not in the grip of the grey, such a waste of ground would have been unthinkable. Echoes of bouncing metal cans and distant cats filled the air. He rolled the bike up to the porch and hit the button to extend the double kickstand.
Dozens of vagrants huddled against the walls in the front room, seeking shelter within the debris-strewn lobby from the wind. The place had the resigned feel of a building that knew it was in its December years. The only difference between it and Joey’s apartment was that someone had the gall to demand rent here.
It was a fringer pad just on the outskirts of the Sector 32 grey zone, a place where misfits and outcasts congregated. The area was dangerous, the rent cheap, and your neighbors were often every bit as fucked up as you. A sea of eyes tracked him through the lobby, making him feel like the new guy in prison. He hurried to the elevator. Pushing the button triggered laughter from the vagrants but did nothing else. He sighed; feeling like a tourist for even attempting the elevator in a place like this.
He shoved the stairwell door open, displacing a mound of disposable auto-injectors out of the way. The size of the pile made him think every addict in the building tossed empties there. In the center of the landing, he looked up, turning as he peered through a central shaft to the ceiling some sixty stories above. Thankful for his heavy boots, he crunched over plastic fragments coated in who-knows-what. Sleeping bags, boxes, and trash packed every landing from the ground floor up. Bodies lay about like human litter, most oblivious to his passage. The few that did notice him only moaned as he went by.
Reaching the 34th floor, he paused to catch his breath. The old metal door that separated the stairwell from the hallway had its window broken out so long ago that no trace of glass remained anywhere on the ground. Yellowing tatters of wallpaper wrapped the hallway beyond it, hanging in curled shreds. Some scratched at the wall, lofted by a breeze entering a broken window at the far end. Any trace of carpeting had long since vanished, replaced by fetid stains upon bare concrete.
Joey stopped at a patchwork of dark brown mixed with peeling spots of exposed beige that passed itself off as a door. A bullet hole was the cherry atop the blighted sundae of the door. Joey raised his hand to knock, jumping back as the door flew open before he e
ven touched it. Mitch, wide-eyed in a plain white shirt and powder blue boxer shorts, clung to the slab of false wood. Nothing could contain the unwashed smell wafting off him. Motionless, he stared agape as condensation from an auto cooled soda can ran over his fingers and dripped to the floor. Joey’s eyes tracked a droplet on its flight down, noticing one brown sock and one bare foot in a sandal.
“Oh hi… It’s you, from the headshrinker place. C’mon in.” Mitch remained still.
Joey offered a weak smile.
Drip… drip…
Mitch looked down and scurried into the apartment. Joey kicked old cans and empty snack boxes out of his way as he entered and closed the door behind him. A Jian Model 2 Gold Series deck sat on the only table in the room, its M3 wire spooled on the false wood. Weeks’ worth of delivery food cartons formed a three-walled castle around it. From the lay of the wire it was evident the retractor had broken and it had been out for quite some time.
“Jian-Tek?” Joey went to touch it, but hesitated.
Jian Corporation made Chinese street hardware, the cheapest of the cheap. Someone had the audacity to label that thing ‘gold’ series. The sight of such a deck made Joey shiver. Most hackers considered his Teradyne Silver a noob’s toy, but it was better than a Jian.
Joey turned, gaze tracking Mitch past a couch, one table, and one dinky little chair. Near tattered, moss-colored curtains, the plain pea-green of the walls gave way to a single picture above the couch. In it, an elevated view looked down on a smiling clean-shaven Mitch with his arm around a pleasant looking girl in her early thirties. Joey approached it, studying her. She was darker than he was, a mixture of Indian and Hispanic, and wore business attire. She was the sort of exotic beauty that Joey doubted would even look at Mitch twice. I guess miracles do happen. Both smiled up at the image capture device. The scenery behind him resembled a PubTran station, and an odd white fuzzy blur entered the image from the left side. It resembled one of those ghost smears the paranormal loons often posted as evidence; but more opaque.
Joey pointed. “Is that her?”
Mitch ran a hand over the right side of his head, grabbing the back of his skull. He swayed back and forth. “Yes. That’s her. Have you seen her?”
Joey shook his head. “Where did you get the picture? Angle makes me think security camera.”
“No.” Mitch chuckled with tears in his eyes. “We went to a photo booth at the station a few blocks from here. We had a little time before she went to work. Christina got jealous of the Neko girl that worked there.” His face contorted with exaggerated derision, as if trying to prove himself to his missing wife. “Tart wasn’t wearing much.”
“Do you have any more pictures?” Joey wandered in a circle, appraising the empty apartment.
Mitch shook his head. “She don’t like cameras. Always moves out of the way when I try to take her picture. Says she’s fat. I got lots of pictures of walls.”
A glimmer from the window caught his eye. He drifted over, pulling the curtain to the side to reveal smears of gold paint on the glass. They took the form of random pseudo-religious iconography and unrecognizable letters. Joey picked up a datapad from the windowsill, smirking at the e-book that appeared on its screen. Of Demons and Darkness: A Mystic’s Guide.
“Seriously?” Joey blinked.
“Careful!” Mitch darted over and swiped the pad. He tugged Joey away from the window. “She… it… she… it… might see you. Don’t break the barrier or it’ll come, she’ll come in. Red eyes! This keeps it out!” He clung to the datapad as if it were a beloved doll.
“Chill out, there’s no one there.”
“I know.” Mitch nodded so fast his jowls flapped. “It’s not there all the… she’s not there all the time, just when I’m not looking.” He pointed at the window. “Maybe Christina’s mad at me for not being dead too? Bad girl with red eyes is following me. It!”
“Do you think it’s her?” Joey pointed back at the picture. “Would you mind?” He held his NetMini up to the picture as if to snap a digital still of it.
Mitch turned and ambled into the room, back to Joey. “Beautiful. She was so perfect; I don’t know why she even spoke to me.” Mitch slumped into the sofa in a sad heap. “She loved me, we got married. She always told me that I was doing well and she’d stay.” Mitch’s voice broke apart into soft sobs. “She wouldn’t leave, we were doing fine. I had a good job and everything was so nice.”
As Mitch had ignored his question, Joey took an image capture. He zoomed in as much as he could to get only the image and not the wall behind it.
“So you haven’t actually seen her dead, nor has anyone else told you that they found her?” Joey sat inverted on the faux wood chair, folding his arms over the back.
Mitch looked up and the sobbing ceased as if on a switch. His face twitched as his brain chewed on the idea. “No?”
“Do you think she may have been abducted? Some of the gangs take pets. Do you think she just left?” If she saw him like this, no wonder she took off.
Mitch shook his head from side to side messing up his hair. “No. We were in love. She wouldn’t have left.” He looked away with a frown. “I know her. She would have told me if she wanted to leave, she wasn’t like that, she wouldn’t just disappear. Something happened to her. Maybe the red eyes got her.” Mitch crumbled his fingers into his mouth as his face contorted with worry.
“Whoa Mitch, calm down. I didn’t mean anything, just asking.” Joey put a hand on Mitch’s shoulder. “Maybe someone took her; don’t call her dead until you know for sure. Let me see if I can find anything before you panic.”
Mitch pulled his fingers out of his mouth. “Okay.”
Joey went for the door, but Mitch ran up on him and held him back. “Wait.”
He scurried over and checked the peephole. After intense staring, he looked back. “Okay, it’s not… she’s not there.”
“Red eyes?” Joey lifted an eyebrow.
Mitch nodded his jowls into a flap. “Yes, bad woman. Taller than Christine, thinner. Dresses like a whore in black leather. Boots up to here.” Mitch tapped himself on the thigh. “She stares right through me, wants to kill me. If I go outside, she’ll find me. It… It…”
“Okay, well. Thanks for checking.” Joey smiled, humoring him and hoping the sarcasm did not bleed through too much.
The elevated tram rail, drab steel green against the city, offered an easy navigation aid to the nearest station. He left the bike on the street below, and jogged up the moving steps into the aroma of coffee emerging from the random fragrances of trash, stale oil, and urine. The walls on both sides of the massive concourse glowed with dozens of display screens: city maps, routes and schedules, status updates, and adverts. The whole system ran on automatic; the only live employees were mechanics, programmers, and administrative weasels.
Following his nose, he settled down in a coffee shop and decided to splurge on some non-reassembled coffee. Made from hydroponic beans, a genuine mocha java ran him forty-five credits. It had been almost six years since he tasted coffee that was not the product of molecular rearrangement, and it was worth every credit. He melted into the seat, cradling his drink. The warmth spread through him and made the events of the past week tolerable. When the wonderful liquid ran out, he spent ten minutes just inhaling the scent of it out of the empty cup.
He wanted to do a little checking before he went wandering again. After transferring the image of Christine to his deck, he plugged in and dove into cyberspace. Within minutes, the dark cowboy stood amid old dusty file cabinets in a police data node. The electronic journey underlined his growing dislike for his dive apartment; even in this part of town, the wireless ran almost twice as fast.
Despite his considerable skill, messing with the police net still had its risks. As of late, his virtual exploits had not offered much of a challenge. This one would give him back the rush he so craved.
He settled into his seat, put his feet up on the facing bench, and clicked t
he wire in behind his ear. The coffee shop pulled away from him, twisting and warping into a tunnel of color and roaring fury into which he launched after three seconds. The sense of falling through darkness faded, and he found himself standing in a plain green room―an unenhanced replica of the coffee shop. In defiance of the GlobeNet protocol, he concentrated on a distant location and appeared instantaneously in front of the nearest police node. He took on the outward appearance of Jacob Roth, and strolled right through the network to an information storage node in the back.
The ancient gunslinger opened his coat, sending a pack of DataMoles trundling into the room. The furry things crawled everywhere, sniffing at the rows of simulated filing cabinets as they went looking for any match for “The Russian.” After only a few minutes, one stopped and stood up on its hind legs, wagging its stumpy tail. Gravelly laughter echoed as he walked over; the animations of cyberspace never ceased to amuse him.
Taking the data tile from its mouth, he sifted through research notes and many pictures of victims. The gore was severe enough to make him cringe and scroll through them too fast to take in the details. Amber panels of light filled with horrible images that jumped off the stack with each swipe of his hand.
A few shadowy glimpses depicted the man, but nothing distinct enough to reveal a face. From the look of it, one Jacob Roth, a Detective with Division 2, got the case after a fatality involving a Division 1 officer. The notes were scattered and not well organized; however, from reading it he learned a Division 5 unit almost apprehended The Russian almost eleven months ago, before he got that name. Gun camera footage from an armored vehicle revealed the man in brief flashes as he staggered away into the night. Explosive ammunition rendered each night vision image progressively more blurred. Detective Roth pieced together that the suspect lost his other natural arm that night and replaced it with the hammer fist that gave him his street name.
Virtual Immortality Page 43