“Please, don’t hurt him. He’s a gentle soul.”
Dorian sighed. “Gentle enough to smash a housekeeper?”
Kirsten ignored him, and nodded at Daniel. “I will do everything I can to prevent that, though I do owe him a pop to the nose.”
“He hit you?” Daniel lifted an eyebrow.
“You could say that.” She offered a brief summary.
He winced through most of it. “I don’t know the details, but he had some prior history with Division 0; I think he just panicked.”
“How much do you know?”
Daniel shrugged. “Said he was real little when they noticed him. His parents are paranoid, anti-government types. You know, run-around-the-mountains with rifles survivalist kooks? They took him into The Beneath when he was like six. He grew up down there, probably what messed him up. They filled his head with distrust about anyone in a uniform, especially the psionic cops.”
“Oh, that totally explains why he hooked up with an ex-marine.” Dorian accented his words with a hand gesture.
“Really?” She whispered with an angry rasp in Dorian’s direction, making it sound like a sneeze, before looking back to Daniel. “I spent a year or two under the city myself as a kid; I think I can sympathize to a point.”
Dorian gestured. “You also have the crazy parent thing in common.”
Kirsten closed her eyes and let out a meditative sigh.
“That’s kind of how he got whenever he talked about his time down there. I’m worried he might hurt himself. Please find him before he does something drastic.”
An electronic chirp came from the back of the room. Daniel rushed to grab his NetMini out from under a tank top thrown over the nightstand. Looking at the screen, he glanced back to Kirsten. “He just turned his NetMini on.”
His fingers blurred as he sent a ‘how are you’ message. Kirsten backpedaled to the door, pausing to point at Daniel.
“Don’t tell him I’m coming. As soon as I find him, I’ll call you.”
Dorian winked at her. “You’re such a softie.”
The terminal locked on to Adrian’s NetMini the instant it turned on, lighting a dot on the map a few miles away. It took a few minutes to get to the location―an artistic twist of chrome and blue-tinted glass wrapped around a hundred and four stories of high-end apartments.
Dorian made an appraising face. “Nice place, you should consider something like this.”
“I don’t know. It feels silly to spend so much on an apartment for one. They have so much space. I think it would make me feel lonelier.”
“You should be glad Zero pays so well.”
She giggled. “Psionics are a specialized skill, it’s merit pay.”
“What about that Temple guy? It seems Daniel’s not in the running, despite the way you were checking him out.”
She blushed. “What is your problem with Daniel?”
“Oh, nothing, I just like saying that stuff to watch you squirm. Nice dodge, by the way.”
“You’re impossible.” She guided the patrol craft down out of the hover lane, heading for the map dot. “I’m supposed to at least try to act professional.”
“At your service.” He made a flourish with his hand and bowed.
She circled the building until the terminal identified the fifty-fourth floor as the source of the signal. After a roof landing and a brief ride in a marble-paneled elevator, she roamed until she located the exact apartment with her armband display.
Kirsten took the police tool off her belt and zapped the lock. The door opened without a sound, and she followed her E90 inside. Creeping like a mouse, she found a large living room with a dark blue carpet. Electronics made the ceiling look like a starry sky complete with nebulas. Boxes that had once contained all manner of electronic gadgets and game consoles littered the area. At least a dozen entertainment systems lay scattered around, connected to a large holo-bar capable of creating a screen a hundred and fifty inches across. The place looked like the home of a twelve year old boy with unlimited money and no parents.
Dorian chuckled under his breath as he took in the scene. “Guess he was re-acclimating himself to the modern age.”
Kirsten conducted a tactical walkthrough until she confirmed it devoid of people. The master bedroom was soaked in the orange and blue light cast off by holographic fish swimming through a three by six panel on the wall. She found the NetMini abandoned on a desk.
Dammit, he ditched it.
Aside from a pile of empty synthbeer canisters, little indicated anyone had ever even used the king-sized comforgel pad.
A number of display screens appeared over her arm as her fingers danced along. Within a minute, she accessed the management company’s financial records and found Adrian used his real name. From the look of the file, he had been paying the twenty thousand and change credits rent for three months so far.
Dorian feigned an impressed frown. “Not bad for an unemployed fringer.”
“If he’s trying to hide, why use his real name?”
He shrugged. “People hide in many ways.”
“Yeah.” Kirsten stared into nowhere for a moment. “I guess we all do. How is Nila?”
“He might be running for the roof.” Dorian darted out.
She stared at the empty doorway for a moment before looking back to the display on her arm. The trail ran cold, unable to find the source of the payments. With a feeling she knew what Adrian did, she went downstairs to pay the building manager a visit.
At the rear of the lobby, beyond a short hallway, a white door with the word ‘Manager’ inscribed upon it hung ajar. Quiet sounds of activity drifted from behind it, and she walked in without knocking. Crisscrossing beams of simulated sunlight streaked through the dust, angling down from fiberoptic light pipes embedded in the wall. Boxes were stacked here and there amidst piles of datapads and holodisks. At the single desk, a middle-aged Asian man leaned forward, mouth agape, picking at a terminal.
“Excuse me?”
“Gah!” His body made whorls in the airborne dust as he shot upright. “You should knock.”
Kirsten flashed her ID. “I need to see the records for unit 5448.”
“Just a second.” He waved his hand past the screen, tossing whatever he had been doing to the side. His eyes darted to her every few seconds, her presence made his trembling fingers mistype several times. When the screen stopped moving, he looked down his nose at it. “Adrian Lewis took on the lease three months ago. He’s current with the rent, no problems and no complaints. Why are the police here?”
“Why don’t any of his rent payments show up in your management company’s deposits?”
His trembles ceased. “What? That’s not possible.”
She held her arm to the side so he could see. “The logs show a Mr. Chen signed off on the rent being paid, but there’s been no change to the receiving account. The payments are marked in the tenant files, but the financials have no record.”
“I am Mr. Chen.” His voice rose with indignation. “I would not mark rent paid without the credits. What are you insinuating?”
“Calm down, I’m not accusing you of anything other than being a victim.” She held up a hand, trying to stem the tide of his rising offense.
“A victim?” He thrust himself back in his seat. “Of what?”
“All I’m saying is that if someone knew how to ask, they could be very convincing. Like if they told you to cluck like a chicken.” A glow flashed in her eyes.
Mr. Chen made a series of strange noises. All the while he clucked, he stared with growing terror. When the compulsion subsided, he scowled.
“Isn’t it against the law what you just did?” The paranormal undertone brought a tremor to his fingertips.
“If you want to split hairs, I suppose it’s somewhere between disturbing the peace and misdemeanor assault. I have a feeling Mr. Lewis is using the same kind of ability on you to make you think he paid his rent.”
Mr. Chen stopped shaking,
straightening in his seat as he stared at the sixty-thousand-credit loss. “I want him arrested if this is true.” He thumped his fist on the desk, causing a swarm of small objects to jump.
“It’s too difficult to prove these things right now, so we have a tendency to handle matters quietly. The bad news is you’ll have to sue him to recover the money and will probably lose, but the good news is he will get punished for what he did.”
Mr. Chen deflated into his seat. “That’s just brilliant. If you find Mr. Lewis, tell him his possessions are in storage and he can get them back when he pays.”
“There you go.” She smiled. “Perfectly legal.”
Kirsten stared at the ceiling outside the office. Mr. Chen had no information about Adrian that she did not already have; no alternate address, no next of kin, nothing. Her armband beeped once more. The credstick had just been used not too far from her location.
She had no time to waste.
he city blurred into streams of light and color as Kirsten pushed the patrol craft’s speed toward the edge of controllability. Advert bots streaked past like neon comets; the car swayed side to side as she dodged one after the other. She cursed them for failing to move out of her way; the active police lights and transponder should have made them divert course well ahead of her.
Damn greedy corporate sons of bitches, probably skipped the receiver to save a few credits.
She twisted the sticks and pulled up over the layer of traffic. Free of the clutter, the patrol craft climbed among the buildings in the most direct path to her destination. As she rolled to the side to take a turn, Dorian cringed into the seat.
“What are you worried about? I’m not going to crash.”
His eyes snapped left. “Be gentle with it, please. This car has already been through a lot.”
“You’re still worried about her, aren’t you?”
Dorian glanced away.
Kirsten decided to leave that alone for now. With the tallest of the buildings below them and a straight line ahead of her, she slowed down to appease him. The map dot for Tubular Dreams headed for a collision with their yellow triangle.
“That’s kind of a weird name for a store. What do they sell, fancy plumbing?”
Dorian looked away from the window. “You’ve never heard of gel parlors, have you?”
“Do I even want to know?”
“Little Miss Pure is about to get stained.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not that pure, I just look like it.”
“Well, you know about hyperspace transit right? The breathable gel tubes?”
“Yeah. I’ve never been in one but I read… something about the density of the liquid absorbs the forces involved with jumps.”
“Yep, those tubes. Well, some genius decided to market a form of them for… entertainment.”
“Oh that’s sick.”
Dorian waved his hands around to illustrate. “Weightless, inverted, backwards, spinning.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry I asked.”
He pointed out the window. “Well you’re about to see it, better you know ahead of time what you’re getting into.”
“I am not getting into one of those.”
“Of course not.” Dorian scarcely managed to speak through laughter.
Sector 77 resided at the center of an area zoned to permit gambling and prostitution. With all the gang violence, corporate warfare, and unhinged cyborgs, the police seldom bothered enforcing prostitution laws, but those operating within approved zones could at least call for help if something went wrong.
Pale grey paint covered all the windows of what looked like an unassuming, long-abandoned warehouse. Cars huddled at the front wall, the only hint that anything happened there.
The front room looked like a mid-grade hotel, complete with a waiting area full of magazines and a desk clerk. The back end had a number of doors with ominous labels: Gel, Dolls, Live, and Other.
Kirsten stared at the last door, hoping with all of her soul she did not have to go in there. She walked up to the desk and knocked on it. An emaciated man drifted through a curtain of beads and wandered over to take a seat behind the counter. Wispy threads of steel grey hung off his face; his moustache looked as though he had devoured a live rat and forgotten to wipe, rather than something that would have grown there. He lacked several teeth, and a few gold chains glimmered through a thick blanket of chest hair visible through the folds of a dark unbuttoned vest. After the last clerk, Kirsten let his thoughts remain private.
“Hey there hot pants, what’s yer poison?” His voice came as a raspy croak, just a few decibels above a death rattle with a glassy twang bouncing around in it.
“Alveolar Crystallization.” Dorian gestured at him. “Side effect from inhalant drugs like Icewhisper, you can hear the chime in his voice.”
Despite her uniform covering everything but her head and hands, the snug thing made her feel awkward and exposed under his stare.
“Just information. Have you seen this man?”
The clerk looked at Adrian’s holographic face with a shrug. “I dunno… I get a lot of people in here. Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. Can’t say, you know… doctor-pervert confidentiality. Feel free to go look around if you want.”
She pictured tiny crystals in his lungs, a snow-scape of glittering blue and white in microscopic detail. She imagined some breaking free and swirling around in the air currents as he chuckled.
How much longer does this guy have?
Shaking her head, she steeled herself and went through the door labeled ‘Gel’. Dark maroon curtains and Mars-colored carpeting swathed the corridor in crimson. A dozen large cylinders loomed behind individual privacy barriers. Sporadic muted thuds of bodies banging into the plastic tube walls interrupted the dull thrum of filter machinery. Holographic signs hovered just inside the door, describing in detail how to cope with going from breathing air to breathing gel, and back again. Naked flesh moved within peach-colored haze, visible through gaps in the curtains by some of the tubes. A foot pressed into the clear surface here, a hand there, a face elsewhere; she tried not to stare more than necessary for identification purposes.
Her face glowed as red as the curtains.
At least I can’t hear them moaning.
Despite having legal authority to be here, and a valid reason to look, she felt as ashamed and uncomfortable as when Nicole had talked her into watching a dirty holo-vid back in the dorm. Now she played the ghost, drifting unnoticed past people doing things not meant for anyone else’s eyes. If ever she met a man, could she put the ghosts out of her mind long enough to get intimate? Thinking Adrian may be about to hurt someone else, she put aside her embarrassment and continued.
To her relief, most of the tubes were empty and the ones in use did not contain Adrian. She felt a twinge of sorrow for Daniel.
I don’t know if I could tell him that I found Adrian in a place like this.
The clerk tittered as she returned to the lobby and cut over to the ‘doll’ door.
More crystals flying.
The corridor on the other side was the color of ash. Lined with dark blue carpeting, numerous doors beckoned from both sides. Making her way along, she peeked through the rooms at several Class 1 dolls perched on beds with vacant stares. Alone, the androids sat in standby mode, unmoving statues. Lifeless eyes gazed into space like people frozen in time by some mad scientist. The sight sent a chill through her. Different dolls offered a wide variety; male and female, emulating various ages, races, and sizes. Some had even been done up like cat girls, and others in the likenesses of famous people. The oppressive silence made their lack of motion seem all the more eerie, as if walking through a world frozen in time except for her.
The smugness of the clerk’s grin grew wider still as she went into the door marked ‘Live’. This hallway looked much the same as the last, though it smelled far worse. Cheap perfume, sprayed as a thin mask over flatulence, mixed with the smell of liquor and sweat. Early in th
e afternoon, the sex workers populating this wing had collected in a break room at the end of the corridor. Men and women sat in various states of dress, talking like employees at any other office. She edged up to the door and peeked in, finding no trace of Adrian.
Retreating before they could spot her, she jogged back to the lobby and stared at the final door before stomping up to the desk clerk.
“What’s in there?” Kirsten pointed at the door labeled ‘Other’.
“Oh, that’s where we keep the machines, the farm animals, and the pre-teens.”
His body ravaged by drug use, he put up a feeble fight as she hauled his skeletal frame over the desk by his vest. Snarling, she pounded his chest into the countertop; an entire field of snow crystals burst into the darkness of her imagination.
“Whoa, easy lady! I’m just fuckin’ wit you.” His voice gurgled into a spasmodic glassy cough.
She lifted him, tightening his shirt around his neck with a turn of her fist. “What’s really in there? So help me if there is one underage―”
He pulled at her arm to get some air. “Joke!”
She let go.
The skin-wrapped skeleton collapsed over the counter, cheek squealing over the stained brown laminate as he slithered back into the seat, dragging various objects to the floor. “It’s the goddamn helmet room, just VR.” Coughing came over him in a fit. “You can give it or get it from anything you want, but it ain’t real.”
Kirsten glared for a long moment before approaching the door. After drawing a breath, she heaved it open. The clerk had not lied. She faced a single chamber with about a dozen comfortable chairs arranged in a circle with their backs facing each other. A central processing unit stood at the middle of the ring with cables and leads going to a senshelmet on each chair. Aside from the tech, the room’s only occupant drifted past―a strange smell. A tiny cleaning droid rocked back and forth off to the left as it struggled to roll forward, stuck to the floor.
She stomped back to the desk and once again grabbed the clerk by the collar. “Okay, I’m done with games. Tell me.”
In dumbfounded silence, he fish-lipped as the psionic suggestion twisted at his brain. “Got five couples using the gel tanks…” He listed names, pivoting his terminal around to show Kirsten their ID photos.
Division Zero Page 9