by Brian Hodge
Except for one thing.
One thing.
Screw it. That’s the best I can do. Why bother? Nobody’s going to believe it. And what do I care anyway? Obviously I didn’t die out there. Obviously I made it back to the shore that night. Somehow. Don’t ask me how.
So here I am in my little flop house trying to tell the story. Jesus. Who am I kidding? What am I going to do, write my memoirs?
I got the windows painted black, aluminum foil on some of the panes. Nobody can see inside. Which is good since I need to prepare for my work in private.
I tend to rotate my tools to keep the cops off the scent so I usually have a lot of stuff laid out on work tables. Knives for one, poison for another. Various and sundry handguns. I’m good at what I do. I can clear 50k on a single mob hit.
Maybe more if some captain of industry wants his loudmouth wife out of the picture.
Oh yeah. I almost forgot. That last sensation before I blacked out on the boat that night? There was one realization that struck me before I lost consciousness. I realized the Freak’s cell phone had fallen right through a hole in the bottom of the earth.
I realized something else.
I realized who it was wanted to talk to me.
GLORY HAND IN THE SOFT CITY
I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I still had my right hand.
It threw me for a moment.
I lay there in a cold sweat, my heart thumping. I brought my stump up in front of my face, waving invisible fingers back and forth. I could feel the twinges of phantom pain, the sharp aching in the knuckles that weren’t there anymore, and the hot, itchy sensations like sunburn tingling in the heart of my non-existent palm.
“What’s’matter, Glory?” The hooker lying next to me was stirring awake, gazing up at me through heavy-lidded eyes. She called herself Porsche, and her hair had that bizarre coppery color of laboratory-grown follicles. Earlier in the evening we had humped for twenty minutes, until I had climaxed my routine one and a half fluid ounces of sterile semen and Porsche had fallen fast asleep. I hadn’t had the heart to boot her out.
Now I was telling her I was fine.
“You’re sweating,” she insisted, sitting up, reaching for her box of synth-cigs.
“Nightmares.”
“You’re shitting me. You’re still sleeping natural?” Porsche lit a syn-stick, sucking a mouthful of pale blue smoke. “I sleep like a baby since I got the alpha implant put in. Word to the wise, Robert: Get an alpha implant.”
“Already tried it — didn’t work,” I said, flexing my non-fingers, concentrating on the ghostly feelings. The heat, the tingling: They were my first true neural sensations since I had lost the hand in a nasty kendo-fight with a couple of transgenic Sikhs in a juice den last month. I was on a missing person case that had gotten me mixed up with the Indo-Burmese Chimera Triad, and I was trying to fight my way out. It took a pair of emergency techs working non-stop just to save my hand’s nerve network and get the thing frozen before the cells shut down. They told me they could probably save the hand and restore the nerves, but I was devastated. My pipeline to true bio-touch had been inexorably threatened.
That’s when I started thinking about checking out of the private investigation game.
“When do you get that back?” The prostitute nodded toward my stump, toward the cap of surgical mesh and the network of medical tattoos drawn around my wrist for calibration during the reattachment.
I told her next Thursday, and then I glanced across the shadows of my measly little studio flat. The cracked plastic calendar was hanging by the autoclave, the digital face reading Friday, March 7, 2053, and I realized I had only six days left until my biological hand was done. And then I realized my right hand was all I had left in the world. The rest of my body had been grafted and treated so many times, there wasn’t much left with a decent nerve ending. Like most of the regular army, I had lost ninety percent of the skin on my arms and legs during the war in Pakistan. All those new viruses mingling, nasty hybrids surfacing everywhere. Of course, the plague years got the rest of me. My left hand, much of my torso, and a good portion of my left shoulder had atrophied during the Hanta plague in ’24; and most of it had to be re-seeded with test tube tissue. Even my ass had ninety percent lab-flesh on it.
But nobody was smart enough to see the shut-down coming.
They called it Miller’s Syndrome: the gradual atrophy of the nerve endings due to some faulty connection between laboratory grown skin and the natural subcutaneous fascia. In English: The world went numb. Four out of five survivors of the new plagues experienced the deadening effects within a year of being treated. I got it myself. After my discharge, I started going numb. And even throughout my years as a beat cop, I felt the nerve endings closing down.
Of course, I was lucky. I had fared a lot better than most of the poor schmucks creeping around the HardCity nowadays. Most folks born after the turn of the Twenty-first had a hundred percent reworked tissue, and the closest thing to a real neural sensation for them was jacking into a nerve-net box and letting some virtual Hindu mama jerk them off. I, on the other hand, possessed… well… the other hand. I was one of the small percentage of old timers who still owned a biological hand. A stretch of skin with its original nerve bundle intact.
And right now I wanted it back.
“Ouch!” I jerked back against the fiber steel headboard with a start. My unseen fingers were shrieking. The invisible heat was erupting.
“What is it, honey?” Porsche had managed to slip out of bed and climb into her sari. Now she was standing a few feet away, nervously puffing her cig.
“I dunno — I can — I can feel — OUCH!” I convulsed against the wall.
My phantom hand was going up in flames.
“Should I buzz somebody?” Porsche was gawking at me, chewing her lip.
“No — I’m just — I can feel the —” I climbed out of bed and turned on the halogens. With my numb left hand I managed to pull on my leather pants and guide my feet into my boots. The heat was like a cymbal crashing in my brain. I took a few deep breaths, then walked over to the window.
I looked out through the grey ozone filter.
My invisible hand throbbed.
The HardCity was shimmering in the toxic darkness, the sodium-bright residential blocks glowing sickly silver. At this hour the streets were still humming, the threads of directional lasers still stitching through the haze, looking like cat’s cradles. Off in the distance, I could see the blue flames on the horizon, the MicroSoft farms growing bio-circuits twenty-four hours a day. They owned everything. Even me: my skin, my organs. Either Microsoft or DuPont. They owned the patents on everything.
I started to say, “I think it’s just a twitch or something —”
Then it hit me.
The phantom pain could be a signal from some remote transmission. A warning. Something happening to my physical hand. My own flesh and blood.
A distress call.
“I gotta go check on something,” I muttered, heading for the closet.
“At this hour?” Porsche looked like an apparition, standing there in her coppery hair and ren-gen silk.
“Help yourself to some coffee, whatever you want,” I said, pulling on my ozone jacket, shades and gloves. There was an advisory tonight, and I didn’t want to jeopardize my pre-operative sight.
I walked over to the door, paused and added, “Make yourself at home, Porsche, I’ll be back in a flash.”
“But what about —?”
I had already shut the door in her face and was half way to the elevator.
The handi-cab skimmed along the slotted macadam of the HardCity, the sound of air circulators rattling in unison with the aging motor. I was sitting in back, my ghost-hand screaming at me, the pain constant now. I could barely see through the safe-shades tonight. There were several atmospheric advisories on the RT, and the air outside the shields was the color of pewter. Every few moments the belly of the cab woul
d thump over another magnetic terminal, clocking the distance to the Brooksfield industrial park.
A moment later I saw the flames.
A quarter mile away, the salmon colored smoke rose in a dense curtain above the smooth grey walls of the Re-Gen Center. Panic squeezed my heart. Tendrils of lights were cutting through the haze, reflecting off mirrored windows all around me, the whine of sirens seeping through the cab’s welded joints. I blinked the sting from my eyes, then I rubbed the cab’s grimy side-shield as the maelstrom loomed ahead of me.
I recognized one of the squad cars pulling up behind a fire wagon.
“Program stop! Right here!” I ordered the cab over to the side-track.
The cab rattled to a halt, and I snicked open the door with my money-chit.
“Jesus Chriminy, Glory — whaddya doing here?” The voice bellowed behind me as I climbed out of the handi-cab. I whirled around and saw the behemoth coming at me. A pituitary case named Zander, he was an old watch commander from my former precinct. He was built like a freight barge, with a half a dozen chins and beady little eyes set deep in his fleshy face like two little raisins. He wore a safe suit under his flak vest. “How’d you know about this so fast?”
“What happened, Zanny?” I couldn’t take my eyes off the burning building.
“How’d you know about this?”
“What happened here?”
“Answer my question, Glory.”
I told him it was hard to explain… but I felt it. I felt the fire.
“You what?” The fat man was staring at me now, his eyes contracting into tiny black diamonds.
I looked at him. “My hand’s in there, Zanny, I gotta go make sure it’s okay.”
I started walking toward the fire scene, toward the giant burning monolith. The building was as wide as a city block, as high as the clouds, with thirty-inch thick walls carved out of super-slate and artificial mortar. Another wholly owned subsidiary of MicroSoft, the Re-Gen Center was a place where amputated limbs and cancerous organs could be given another chance, cleansed through hyper-radiation, reconstructed through genetic engineering. My hand was in there somewhere, in its final stages of regeneration, and now the top floors were blazing bright liquid silver. Goddamn idiots had too many alkaline metals stored in the vaults again. These magnesium fires could burn through Fort Knox. I could feel the dry heat on my face as I approached, my phantom hand tingling.
Then a steel vice-grip was on my shoulder, yanking me backward.
“Easy does it, Sweetheart,” Zander growled at me, spinning me around. And there might have been a scintilla of sympathy in his tiny cinder eyes, I’m not sure. Two other plain-clothes cops were approaching us, the pink glow refracting off their mirrored shades.
“Lemme go, Zanny!”
“You don’t get it—”
“Let go!”
I tried to wriggle free but his grip was like a channel lock on my neck, so I just gave him a sharp nudge to the ribcage, trying to shove him off me, but it must have triggered his goons because they were on me in a blink, driving rock-hard fists into my kidney, then a few knuckle-balls to my gut, their genetically-enhanced hands like sledgehammers. They snapped my feet out from under me, and I just folded like a paper doll, the ground coming up and smacking me in the side of my face.
Zander leaned down close enough for me to smell the beans on his breath. “Bad news, Glory,” he was saying. “The fire’s a diversionary thing.”
“— what? —”
“Whole thing’s a boost job.” His big meaty face was glowing magenta-pink, melting before my eyes.
I managed to utter, “What are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you the place was knocked over, scumbags pinched a buncha organs, extremities and what-not.”
Everything was going dark, and I got one last question out: “My hand—?”
Zander sighed. “Sorry, Sweetheart… they got it. They got your paw.”
I shivered suddenly, adrenalin coursing through me. I tried to stand up, tried to yell, tried to grab for Zander’s sidearm. I didn’t even notice the other cop coming toward me. His fist came out of nowhere.
Tagged me square across the bridge of my nose.
It was like a switch being turned off.
I woke up in a holding cell. They brought me some food, and I got my bearings. And then I started pacing, and I must have paced the length of that cell for hours, thinking.
I just couldn’t figure out why some second-story man would risk life and limb to get himself a natural hand? Sure, there was a healthy black market for natural organs, but nowadays test-tube extremities were being farmed everywhere, and they worked a lot better than the originals. All you needed was a plastic scaffold that mimicked the shape of a hand— and a few cells to “seed” it with— and pretty soon the cells assembled, and the plastic degraded, and voila! You got a brand new hand, stronger and more dexterous than the original. It just didn’t make any kind of sense that a local cat would try to boost one.
Funny thing was, I had no idea how close I was to the answer.
Around five o’clock that night, Zander showed up and sprang me.
“Dicks ain’t exactly supposed to brief ‘civvies’ on law enforcement matters,” Zander grumbled as he led me through a narrow corridor toward the processing bay. He was chewing a stinky cheroot, and the brown smoke swirled around his huge head as he walked. The ‘civvies’ reference was definitely a dig. Cops hated ex-cops. But for some reason— be it pity, amusement or what-have-you — Zander had a soft spot for yours truly. “I’ll tell ya this much,” he went on. “We’ve already recovered ninety-five percent of the organs.”
“Ninety-five percent?” I gave him a sidelong glance as we strode through pools of halogen.
“That’s what I said, Glory.”
I tried to control my emotions. “My hand’s been recovered?”
“No sir, I didn’t say that.”
“My hand’s in the five percent?”
“Yessir, unfortunately, yes.”
“Where’s my hand?”
“Go home, Glory,” he said, pausing by the gigantic exit door, punching out a code on the keyboard.
I stood there, gaping at him. “Do they know who cribbed it?”
“I said go home.”
“Has it been fenced yet?”
The door hissed open. Zander turned to me and grasped a handful of my collar and very softly, very patiently, asked me to vacate the premises.
I knew it was the last time his request would be soft or patient.
I waited two days.
Pacing the length of my place, zoned out on restrex, flexing fingers which were once attached but were now noisy ghosts, sputtering, tingling, sparking, I could feel my sanity — what was left of it — denaturing into something primal. Something black and poisonous. I’ve been known to have a temper — I won’t lie — but now a new kind of rage was coursing through me with each twinge of phantom pain.
I had to do something.
On the second evening, I jacked into the net, trying to scare up some of my own leads. I threw out some cockamamie call for bone marrow cells as bait, and started sorting through all the fences working angles on hot tissue. Process of elimination got it down to a single shit-bird.
Georgie Quine was a small time scrounger. Specialized in hot molecules copped from indie labs, research schools and the like. He lived under a co-op down near the hover station; I decided to take a chance and pay him a visit.
By the time I got down there the night air had turned gelid, the city a rancid mélange like too many perfume counters clashing. The clouds were faded black muslin, cracked and veined with yellow age and pollution.
“Who dat?” The blurred image of Georgie Quine was flickering on the rez-box moments after I pushed the toggle.
“It’s Glory,” I told him.
“Glory?” the pallid face on the screen crackled at me. “What’s the panic?”
“Got questions need answers.�
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“No can do, Brother. Sick as a dog.”
I told him he’d better get well quick or I’d make him terminally ill.
A minute later the door seal hissed, and the little stick figure poked his wan face out the crack. “I got the blue lung, Glory,” he wheezed. “Chrissake, I can’t hardly take in a breath.”
“All I want to know is who stuck the Re-Gen Center, and don’t give me any noise about you not knowing anything.”
The junkie sucked his sallow cheek for a moment. Dressed in grey leather and a mole skin mask, he was a couple of years away from the incinerator, his skinny body riddled with genetic dissonance. He had one good laboratory eye left, which flashed and sputtered like a dying light bulb as he replied. “You didn’t hear this from me, okay? Alright?”
I grabbed him with my jacked-up lab-hand and slammed him hard against the jamb, hard enough to rattle his brain. Made his eye flash tilt. My phantom hand was cold now and twinging with filaments of pain, and I was losing control. “I’m on a goddamn schedule!” I barked at him. “Tell me who did the goddamn job and you can keep your teeth in your skull!”
“Stains, Stains did the job, Stains did it, Rupert Stains, that’s the guy.”
I blinked, incredulous. Rupert Stains was a major player in the biotech arena, a genetic designer with more awards than the head of Rotary. Rupert Stains was also a boy-wonder who had made designer-in-residence at Big Softie before his thirtieth birthday. Word was, Stains had started to decline in recent years, contracting an especially virulent form of Miller’s syndrome. But who the hell needs natural tissue when you’re rich, right? Word was, Stains had replaced every major organ and every square centimeter of his flesh with the finest tissue money could buy. His delicate little physique was trimmer than ever, his handsome mug more handsome than his press pictures. But rumors were also rampant that Stains had gone completely bug-fuck loony. Maybe it was the loss of all that feeling, or maybe it was just the natural course of a genius intellect. Regardless, it made no kind of sense that a guy like Stains would do a B&E job on a re-gen lab. He had a family, according to news reports, and was not the type of guy to get caught with his pants down.