“I’m going home,” Hoskin told Quinlin. “Have the machines blink me if they find anything or if we get any footage from the Willows.”
“You know we ain’t getting that,” said Quinlin. “Shit was already wiped clean. And those were VIP rooms. No cameras. No mites. Rich fucks can do whatever they want in there. That’s what they pay for.”
“Yeah, I know. Blink me if we get anything.”
Hoskin wanted to get home, to exercise and read. He needed to exercise and read. He pinched his stomach. It was getting fatter, even though he still worked out when he could. It didn’t seem to matter much since he’d gotten older. He’d need a rejuve soon, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The department offered free auto-workouts: pills full of mites that chewed up the fat in you. They gave free rejuves too if you signed on for another stint. But he felt health wasn’t worth having if you didn’t earn it. “You have to actually do the work,” he’d told Quinlin a hundred times.
“You fucking dinosaur,” Quinlin would say. Quinlin believed in tech and the shortcuts it provided above all else.
“Some things in this life are better when you earn them,” said Hoskin.
It seemed like a good idea, except when he kept getting case after case without finding the time to work out. He’d been working for two days straight when the jumper case came in, and he was starting to hallucinate a little.
When he got home he didn’t want to work out at all. He looked at the antique mechanical weight set and it seemed ten times heavier. He stood there staring at it for a minute, rubbing his arm unconsciously, a habit from when he’d had an old wound there that had taken years to heal. He didn’t want to work out but knew that was just his mind’s weakness so he shook it off, stripped down to his boxers and went to work, slowly, in no hurry, starting with curls. It only mattered that he got started. It was easy after that. He knew that once he started, he’d finish. He moved slowly, intently, working up a good sweat, his augmented muscles hungry for more and more weight. It was critical that he push himself to work out and read and cook.
The little things mattered so much.
An hour later he finished up with some heavy bench-press sets and took a shower, a real one, with water, not one of those microbial showers that were so popular these days.
After that, his mind tried to get him out of reading, but he picked up the old fashioned holobook player and pulled up the Blake Omnibus. He could just blink up the ancient texts on his innervision, but he found it was easier to lose focus that way and he liked the weight of the player in his hands. It felt right. He’d already worked his way through “Songs of Innocence” and now plunged into “Songs of Experience.”
Poetry focused his mind, made him pay attention, pick out details, good traits for a detective. That night it didn’t work very well though. He managed to get through “Nurse’s Song” and “The Sick Rose” but he stumbled on “The Fly.” He frowned at the book. He didn’t have the energy to read it properly so it was better not to read it at all. He put it down and rubbed his face in frustration.
“Losing myself,” he thought, “Can’t focus.”
His mom had taught him about poetry, made him appreciate it, even if he never truly loved it. Instead, he’d grown to see it as spiritual Gong Fu. Hard work over time. She’d even named him after the poet Durante degli Alighieri, better known as Dante, but she’d never taught him what happened when you’d read so much that you couldn’t read anything anymore without seeing the tricks behind it, the construct. And she never told him what to do when that happened in life.
What would you tell me now, mom?
She’d never had much advice for him, didn’t believe in it. She usually just smiled and said, “You’ll figure it out.” About the only other sort-of advice she’d ever said to him was, “There’s only one Dante Hoskin and that’s all there’ll ever be.”
He wasn’t sure what it meant other than be yourself. He’d been himself. He just wasn’t sure what it had gotten him except a lot of water around his island.
He got up and went to the kitchen. He got out a long glass and a cutting board, found some limes, mint and sugar and went to work on a Hemingway Mojito. He made it just the way it was written on the wall at the La Bodeguita del Medio, scrawled there by the old author in a drunken haze. It was a Perma-Freeze glass but he filled it with ice anyway. He squeezed the lime and the juice cascaded over the ice. He dumped in some sugar and smashed the mint in it, then added club soda and a ton of rum.
Looking down at the drink, he shook his head. I’ve even gotta work at my vices. He couldn’t just pour himself a quick glass of whiskey and be done with it.
After that he started on dinner. Most people just used food synths, but he liked to do it himself. When he was growing up they didn’t have a food synth and he was home alone a lot. It got real boring eating the same boxed or vat-grown crap all the time and one night he’d wanted a chicken pot pie and there’d been no one home to make it, so he just made it himself. It wasn’t good, but he tried again and got better. That’s what he always did.
“You just keep getting up, old man,” Quinlin had said to him one day over drinks. “That’s what makes you the best. You just keep going. You keep on it until you figure it out. Most people just give up at some point.”
“Maybe,” he’d said, but it was probably true. If he did anything well, it was being relentless.
He pulled out two chicken breasts, some ancho chili powder, paprika and oregano. He chopped some garlic and dumped the spices in a bowl with some salt, pepper and olive oil, along with a few teaspoons of water and honey. He whisked it all up and coated the chicken. He got the frying pan hot, seared the chicken on one side, and then flipped it over quick. He hit it with some Mojito and finished cooking it. When he was done he sliced up the chicken and some good farmer’s bread and put it all together with some greens as a hearty sandwich. He ate and drank slowly, without distraction. He never watched the streams or read while he ate.
“People should do one thing at a time and focus on it,” he’d said to Quinlin a hundred times. He felt best by himself and hated to waste the time when he could be with his own thoughts. He sipped his Mojito, savoring it.
They had much better drugs than alcohol now: uppers, calmers, floaters, sinkers. Whatever you wanted: safe, legal, cheap. A gram, 100 micrograms. Lasts a week. Lasts a minute. Love, motivation, joy, drive, self-satisfaction, all of it in a bottle, boiled down to its chemical essence, delivered instantaneously through the Tanglenet. Better living through chemistry. Made sense. There was no reason not to switch except that Hoskin liked being unhappy, as far as he could tell, and any drug that took away his dissatisfaction and rage took away part of what made him, him.
He sipped his drink and thought about his last wife and how they used to lay right next to each other for years while he felt the gulf between them widening. It seemed like everything he did to close the gap just made it worse.
“We never do anything together,” she’d said.
They weren’t going anywhere, weren’t progressing like “normal” couples did. She wanted things: change; children; a new house; anything; just something different. He could see their divorce coming like a bullet train. They both could.
“What do you want? Do you want anything?” she said.
“No. I want what I got.”
“What do you have?”
“I have me.”
“And that’s all you’ve got. There’s only you and there’s no room for anyone else. There is only you and what you’re chasing.”
She complained he never told her anything, so he tried to tell her about how the pattern of blood spatters could tell him so much about how somebody died and the angle they were cut from. Of course, she didn’t want to hear anything after that. Eventually they didn’t talk about anything at all.
When he was alone, he had to admit it wasn’t working and they stuck around far longer than they should
have. He was nothing if not consistent. He wasn’t even sure why he did it most nights, except what the hell else was there? They’d both been married three times. He’d been rejuved at least six and her too. At 200 plus or whatever the fuck age he was now, what did it matter? Like he was gonna get rejuved again and slip on the body of a twenty-five-year-old and go out and find crazy romance in the maze of clubs in New Diamond City? He was too old to think like that now. Eventually she left him.
A lot of people changed jobs as they relifed. They spent one life as a doctor, another a businessman, another as a whatever. But Hoskin had always been a cop and would always be a cop. There was nothing else. There was only him and the thing he was hunting. Predator and prey. Primordial. Simple. Only that made sense. Only that had meaning.
He took a huge gulp of his drink and wondered if he would ever get rejuved again or if he’d just “fade,” as they called it now. RD. Real Death. He took another big drink.
He raised his glass in salute to his ex and everything else that was gone. He downed the rest in one gulp then got up to make another while looking out the windows at the seething scorpion’s nest of a city below.
***
Bleary-eyed and hung over, Hoskin awoke to his innerphone hammering in his head. He swiped at the bedside table, knocking off a half-empty glass. His forehead felt like cement.
“Answer,” flashed Hoskin and a woman hidden by a dark veil appeared on his innervision, like a patron saint, glowing brightly. Hints of her skin showed luminous under the dark robe.
“Detective Hoskin,” said the woman. She sounded sick, like she had a runny nose. There was a busy street behind her, buzzing with people, and a building he thought he recognized but his brain wouldn’t work yet.
“Hoskin. That’s me…” he started to say.
“I…I need help,” she said, choking, sobbing.
That shocked him awake.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “Tell me what’s wrong.” But she couldn’t talk yet. “It’s all right. I can help if you just tell me what’s going on.”
"Please... we…"
"Slow down. Take your time. Whatever it is, I can help you with it."
She got control of herself. “You don’t know what you’re up against,” she said softly.
He recognized her now. The girl from the Willows. What was her name again? Sakura.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Can’t talk now. They’re following me, I think. I… meet me at this address. Tonight. Around ten.”
An address popped up on his innervision.
“By the old factories? North Edgelands?”
“Yes,” she said. “By the old fountain. I’ll tell you everything.”
The Chameleon
2406 Orthodox Western Calendar
5104 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Rat
The Lightman Society Academy, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement
Because he was a nobody, Venadrik found he could be anybody he liked.
At fifteen, when he could escape from his mother, he would cut school and take the Tangles to New Diamond City and watch the rich kids. Up on New Wilshire and Antioch was the Lightman Society private school. He would hide in the bushes just beyond the energy barriers, their oil-on-water effect distorting his view of the kids, but he could still see them, study them.
They all dressed perfectly, never wearing the same clothes twice. They laughed easily, but not with their eyes. They judged constantly and stung their rivals with words and body language. He didn’t know the phrase body language then, but he could see it, mimic it. He understood it intuitively, could see the way hunched shoulders or shoulders thrown back affected how people saw a person. The way they walked, whether they looked at you or turned away, affected people so powerfully in ways they weren’t even aware of. He saw how a woman’s smile or cold eyes could encourage or disable a boy instantly.
On a day in early spring, he watched a young blonde girl, already an unconscious master of manipulation, at the center of a circle, brushing back her hair and laughing. The other girls looked at her jealously and the boys looked at her hungrily. Venadrik could smell the sweet flowers from the school’s hanging gardens drifting down on the soft wind over the schoolyard.
A security drone approached him from behind as he stood there watching.
“What are you doing here?” it said, startling him.
He whirled around as it swooped down on him. It looked like a mutated wasp.
“How dare you talk to me that way,” he said, affecting a subtle North Diamond accent. If there was one thing Lightman students did better than anything, it was get indignant around their lessers.
“Identify yourself,” it said.
“Identify yo…self,” he said.
“Agent 355. Lightman security.”
“Well now, 355,” he said, his lip turned up in disgust. “You are wasting my time. I was a Lightman student before momma and poppa moved us to The Glass Beads community, a real community I might add, not this backwards Snowstorm Clan so…ci…ety. But I have come back to visit. My name is Braddock Jansonian.”
“Hold—I have no record of a Braddock Jansonian ever having attended the Lightman Society.”
“Well then clearly your databases are corrupted,” he said with a sneer. He crossed his arms and stared at the drone.
A woman approached. She was beautiful, but beauty was cheap among the rich. She wore a charcoal-gray business toga that fit perfectly to her curves. Like most rich women, she probably rejuved every few years into the body of a twenty-five-year-old. She could be 400 for all he knew. Her features were taken from a variety of popular faces that year.
“What is going on here?” she said.
“Ma'am, this—thing is bothering me,” said Venadrik. He smiled brilliantly. Venadrik wore an eggshell-white toga that he’d stolen from an Insta-Port he’d corrupted with a virus.
She smiled. Then she looked at the drone and frowned.
“Madam, this boy claims to be a former student of Lightman Society, but I have no record—”
“I’ve told this thing that clearly it’s mistaken and that perhaps its databases are corrupted, but it simply will not listen.”
Venadrik turned half towards her, his arms uncrossed now, palms open.
“Clearly there is some kind of mistake here,” said the woman, turning to the drone.
Her lips had smashed bits of diamond embedded in them. They caught the light like a chandelier in the early morning.
“I don’t believe so, Madam,” said the drone. “My databases are verifiable.”
Venadrik could see the Nero logo in the corner of her designer eyes, its gold swoop unmistakable.
“Ma’am, I must say that the choice of Nero eyes is a fan—tastic one. Too many people just tastelessly choose the more popular, but crude, Ikons.” He nodded subtly, as if genuflecting to her style choices.
Her smile widened then she glared at the drone.
“My databases are verified,” said the drone, “the one-way hashes match—”
“Now I don’t need any of this mumbo jumbo,” said the woman. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying. You’re about as smart as a tack.”
Venadrik giggled.
“Madam, please—”
“No you please. Clearly this boy went to school here. Why would he lie? Now let’s get him inside, so we can get him reunioned up with his friends.”
“I am not authorized—”
“You’re not authorized to invade my space. My family probably paid for you. I will escort this boy in and I trust you can scan me and see who I am.”
“Hold. Yes, Mrs. Westmore. As long as you take responsibility for this boy—”
“I do take responsibility. Now get out of my way.”
She put out her hand and Venadrik took it. When he was far enough away, he turned to the Security Drone and smiled maliciously.
&
nbsp; ***
Years later, when working in law enforcement, Venadrik was obsessively researching the background of a kindly cop who’d once rescued him as a kid, when he came across the files of one of the cases the cop had worked, the case of Johansson Sebastian Ripley.
Ripley was a master of identity theft and identity creation. A true raconteur, he’d started off as a card cheat, his Cajun accent thick and heavy, his eyes always hidden behind a dark purple hat and scraggly hair. Venadrik had watched the memories on Ripley’s blackbox multiple times and knew many of the scenes of his life by heart. After a series of arrests for petty crimes, he’d disappeared.
For more than three hundred years, nobody had any information on him. Then one day police were called in to the orbital mansion of Marilstone Webber Langley, one of the world’s most revered hydrogen gas speculators. His family hadn’t heard from him in a year. That wasn’t too far out of the ordinary for Langley, as he was estranged from most of them and never left the mansion. The police agreed reluctantly to check it out. They suspected his family only gave a shit because Langley had made a stunning amount of money that year, all in the grips of horrible bear markets in exchanges all over the Collective. His cult status had only grown as traders tried to shadow his every move.
What the police found was a dead Langley, his corpse decomposing hideously in his huge, canopied bed. His custom trading AIs had gone on the amazing trading run, not him. He’d been dead for seven months and his house personality had failed, so it had been unable to alert the police. Only the Mansion’s lesser functions were online, so his house had kept to its daily routines without him, making and clearing breakfast, changing sheets, washing clothes he never wore, vacuuming and polishing, fluffing his pillow, weeding gardens and trimming ancient trees.
His family scrambled to put together a relife order, since the legendary trader had left no will and kept no secure store. There was only his blackbox. Because it was a weekend, the automated courts were backed up, so the police had jurisdiction over the box, despite the family’s protests. They took it back to their station and slotted it into a memory decoder.
The Scorpion Game Page 3