New Canadian Noir

by Claude Lalumiere

  “You were saying how maybe you wanted to get your lips reshaped, or collagened, or something, because we’re in Thailand anyways and they still have all the best cosmosurgeons, but I said no, I said your lips are perfect, and then you said what about tattoos, the bamboo kind, we could do that together.”

  Prosper can hear the conversation, half-shouted in an oceanside nightclub with lime-green drink specials slithering over the walls, marijuana smoke billowing back and forth between them. He looks down at his wrist, where the IV slides into his skin, and for a moment his eyes project a string of cobalt-blue numbers onto the unblemished white.

  “But on our way to the tattoo shop we saw that little brain-box place, the place that sterilized all their plugs real good, and we still wanted to try it out, so we did the fantasy fuck module. They called it that, on the sign. When we finished, I was blue-balled so hard you couldn’t stop laughing, remember? And before we left we got a cold copy—”

  “So it would be like we were always young and in love and in Koh Phangan, circa summer of 2103.” Holly’s eyes were open. “Two neural imprints, two little ghosts of ourselves in code. You lost mine the morning we flew for Bangkok, because it was in the pocket of those blue shorts that you left in the laundry, but I never lost yours. I still have it.”

  Prosper feels the top of his head removed. He knows Holly, he knows this is too elaborate for her, too vicious a joke, and her eyes are so old. “You can’t put a neural imprint into a clone’s brain. It’s just. It’s just fucking code, alright? It’s not…”

  Prosper tears at the blankets, seeing for the first time that his skin is burned and bubbled in swathes, damage plastered in some sort of medi-gel, but the place on his thigh where the scar should be is milky white, untouched.

  For a long time, Holly didn’t visit the FleshFac. She tried to not even think about the FleshFac. Then Prosper started peeling her life apart. He’d left behind at least a dozen bankbugs that began locking her out of former joint accounts, funnelling funds to places she couldn’t reach or even see; until he thawed on the other end, the lawyer AI assured her, there was no effective way to take legal action. Even when he did, the time delay would stay glacial.

  It wasn’t losing the money that hurt – more the meticulousness of it all. Prosper had been planning to leave her for a long time. So Holly had her hair razored to the latest fashion, her implants lifted, her lips slicked carmine like war paint, and went alone to the Marina District to find someone Prosper would have hated. She hadn’t been properly IRL laid in ages.

  In a dopamine parlour, she met a man whose name wasn’t important to her. He had wolfish eyes, beautiful bones, and LEDs in his gunmetal teeth that scrolled slogans like existentialism is the only way, cunts and nous sommes des cadavres exquis. When their stools migrated together Holly felt dizzied in a way the Antarctican rosé could not account for. She suspected pheromones, but didn’t care.

  She bought him a drink; he told her he was a mortality artist. While their legs mingled under the table, he explained that death was the Platonic form of life, or something equally inane. Holly’s attention only sparked when he said he was planning to kill a clone on live feed. Her stomach gave a churn on the wine, her spine stiffened.

  “People aren’t affected by clone snuff anymore,” the man said. “They know there’s nothing in the shell, and brain-dead doesn’t sell. But there’s this new technique, this thing with neural imprints, cold copies. I’m going to write my memories into a clone’s brain, and then I’m going to murder myself.”

  “People pay for that?” Holly asked, removing his hand from her cooling thigh.

  “They’d pay a fortune if they thought it was a real person,” the man snorted. “Because they’re the Philistines, aren’t they? But they’ll pay enough, yes. Though I hate catering to sadists. It’s a necessity. I need capital for my work.”

  But those wolfish eyes said otherwise, and Holly wondered if hers looked the same in the bar’s half-light. She determined to find someone else, someone young and vapid and drowned by testosterone in the womb, but before she left the dopamine parlour she took the man’s contact information. She thumbed it in under Business.

  On the beach Prosper thinks of finding Holly, but a woman with red-slicked lips is hanging on his shoulder, and then there’s hubbub from the shore, because the Host is arriving, and he forgets. A scalpel of a speedboat tears toward the beach, halogens slashing at the dark. The guests howl their anticipation. Prosper howls loudest, waving his discarded shirt like he was hailing a taxi, and it catches on through the crowd.

  The engine cuts, the boat sloshes to shore on its afterkick, and Prosper has his first glimpse of the Host as she disembarks: tall, regal on stilt heels, wrapped in soft whites. A floating cam darts in and suddenly her face is flashing across the sky. Her jaw is trimmed, her neck is taut from lifts, and her eyes are a thousand times deeper, hollower, older than they should be, but he could never mistake them.

  Impossibility freezes him to the sand as the Host makes her way out along the thronged beach. It freezes him as the numbers inked to his wrist bloom across the dark sky. Prosper realizes he is in a dream, or has always been in one. He reaches down for a scar the edge of a rusted metal chair left on his thigh at five, but the skin is smooth under his fingers.

  Now Prosper is silent and Holly is talking. He can only halfway hear her through the blood rushing in his ears. He is a clone, clone, clone.

  “Sometimes we twist your telomeres to age you up,” she’s saying. “Put a clamp in your spine, powder your hair. We have a whole team of plastic surgeons now. Sometimes we pump you with estrogen, give you tits, work on your face. Blonde damsels do better on the ratings, but for those we have to keep you lucied out of your mind.”

  Prosper is remembering fragments from last night, people he spoke with, things he heard. Some years by drowning, some years by fire.

  “But this is you,” Holly says. “You at twenty-three with no alterations.”

  “Did I die?” Prosper demands.

  “The original Prosper Rexroat is still alive.” Holly pauses. “Meaning you’re a technical non-person. He’s on Ganymede. He has children.” The smooth plaster of her voice is stretching thin. “He launched seven years ago. Like a fortieth fucking birthday present to himself.”

  Years mean nothing to Prosper now, they are fog and dust. But he seizes on alive. “If I’m alive, why did you clone me?” he croaks. “Why am I here?”

  “You’re here to die,” she says, and this time it’s her voice that breaks. “Like you do every year.”

  Prosper remembers the dark beach, remembers falling into a cauldron of searing steam. Maybe he was dead, then. Maybe he was dead and in purgatory.

  The Party was Holly’s idea, and finding guests over the nets was easier than she anticipated. Only six of them, that first year, four men and two women, all wealthy and restless with an inchoate dark in their eyes. Anonymity was paramount.

  The preparations had taken months. Holly had pulled Prosper’s old cold copy from its box in her dresser to take it in for testing. She was assured that the imprint had maintained its integrity over the years but was asked politely to leave when she inquired about putting it into a clone’s brain. For that, she had to take the suborbital to Taiwan.

  If she hadn’t been so quick to find a willing biotechnician, if things hadn’t fallen so smoothly together, maybe it never would have gotten off the ground. But she found Yeo, and Yeo was willing. With her dwindling funds, Holly flew Yeo and Prosper’s second clone to a facility in Bangkok for the upload procedure.

  She attended. It happened in a seedy concrete bunker, morgue-cold, because neural transfer was a dark shade of legal grey even in Thailand. Yeo’s team worked in coordinated silence, communicating by sub-audible microphones in their bunny suits. The clatter of Holly’s Louboutin pumps seemed impossibly loud in her own ears.

  Prosper never woke up, not really. Holly told herself as much. He stayed in a dopamine haze
all the way from Bangkok to Koh Phangan, where she’d rented an isolated stretch of beach and cliff. Holly didn’t attend the Party in person, but she watched. Six figures standing apart from each other up above the gnashing waves, hair whipped by a warm wind, and then the seventh brought up with a hood over his head.

  That first year, the Lotto was to decide who killed him. She’d pulled the idea of digitattoos from the offworld lotteries that sent less-monied migrants in the colony camps to Mars or Ganymede. The winner was a philanthropist who owned billions in solar sail stock, and he pushed with both hands instead of using the handgun. From the private live feed in her hotel, Holly watched Prosper plunge down toward razored rock and the diver waiting to retrieve his corpse. When his body struck stone she felt the same release she’d experienced at the FleshFac.

  If the guests suspected a clone, they made no sign of it. They wanted so badly to believe, and Holly was the same.

  The crowd was hungry mouths, and Prosper wonders how he didn’t notice that voracity before. They funnel him through, eyes hot and hard, and as he is dragged up the quickcrete stairs, up to the lip of the volcano, he cranes his head back up to the sky. As he waits on the lip, he stares into Holly’s sea-green eyes, cold and tired, wreathed by scalding steam.

  “Seven years?” Prosper demands. “You’ve done this for seven fucking years? Murdered me seven fucking times?”

  “Law moves slowly,” Holly says. “You still can’t murder a clone.”

  “So why am I here? Why didn’t you finish the job last night at your Party?”

  Holly looks away. “A thermostat glitch.”

  “No. No. You woke me up on purpose.” Prosper thrashes upright again and starts unplugging the IVs with deliberate ferocity. “You didn’t have to tell me this.” The gurney wails as Prosper frees himself of the tubes with a slick wet sound, a sharp throb.

  “You left me with fucking nothing, Prosper,” Holly snaps, then clenches her teeth, looks pained.

  Prosper gets up from the bed on his second try. “Not me.”

  “No.” Holly’s voice goes limp. “Not you. I’m sorry.”

  “You sending him the live feed or something?” Prosper demands. “Sending all this warped shit to Ganymede?”

  Holly’s eyes flash hot. “Never.”

  “Because you want me to think you’ve forgotten all about me, but you’re still here playing pretend every year.” Prosper tries to take a step forward and nearly falls. “Still punishing him,” he gasps, snatching for the edge of the gurney. His skin is beginning to burn all over again.

  “You enjoy it,” Holly says, throat raw. “You’re happy. You’re the centre of attention. You’re the gravity well.”

  Prosper gathers himself and staggers forward, past Holly, into an antiseptic white corridor. The trailing cords slither after him like snakes. A man in a surgical mask stands frozen as he passes.

  “I just have to ask you something,” Holly’s voice comes from behind him.

  Prosper stumbles on, his vision collapsing and expanding, dark and light. He stops to steady himself on the wall and shouts over his shoulder. “Why would you tell me all this? I can’t tell you why I fucking left. I haven’t yet. You hate me for something I never even knew I was going to do.”

  Holly shakes her head. “I don’t hate him anymore. Not for years.” She pauses. “But I still want to know.”

  Prosper sinks to a crouch. His head is hollow and spinning; pain is groping tendrils through every inch of him. The wall is not a wall. Through the fogged glass he sees a figure drifting in crucifix, tethered by feeding tubes.

  “Know what?” he asks.

  “If you ever did love me.”

  Prosper presses his face against the glass and suddenly looks into sea-green eyes, glazed by chemicals but no longer old, no longer tired. It’s not him drifting there in the nutrient bath. Holly. The Holly he remembers.

  “That’s why I had to ask,” Holly says. “Because you’re the last clone. I don’t hate him anymore. He won.” She smiles horribly. “Now I just hate myself. It’ll be me on the beach from now on. I had a new imprint made.” She steps closer. “So. Did you ever, Prosper?”

  They become statues in the cold corridor as the silence stretches, and stretches, and Prosper longs for the oblivion of the beach, for music and motion and frenzy, and he knows now he will never answer.

  And the Party will never be over.

  HEDGEHOGS

  Kevin Cockle

  She’s downwind from me, so I don’t smell her, but I hear her pretty good. Heart like a puppy’s heart – strong and rapid. She’s trying to be quiet but it’s pointless – autumn – too many dead leaves, too much dry grass around for her to be stealthy. Anyhow, I let her make her approach.

  “Hey,” I say before she can speak, just to let her know I know she’s there.

  “Hey,” she answers. Voice high, piping, and young.

  I turn in my seat on an old throwaway ottoman, putting the gunmetal grey of the Bow River at my back. The water’s greasy, not like I remember it at all, but I’ve grown used to the odour.

  Tracy looks good – thin, but looks like she’s had a few good meals this week. Black cable-knit sweater over black jeans; black boots two sizes too big for her – big silver buckles like ski boots. Dark brown eyes too big for her face; long brown hair in a braid.

  I see her looking at me – looking right at my face. I listen close to her heart, and there’s no change. No change in cadence at all.

  “How do you do that?” I ask. Having just heard her voice, I’m extra-aware of my own. That artificially low, resonant, battlefield timbre they gave me. I murmur the words to keep from booming up and down the river valley.

  “What?” she says, eyes bright.

  “You should be scared shitless, kid.”

  “Yeah. You’re not so bad.”

  I smile, pop a river-stone slick with green algae into my mouth. I grind away, shattering the stone, tasting the minerals as I break them down.

  She grins, thinks it’s cool when I eat rocks and shit off the ground. She looks so young when she smiles – ten, or something. I’m not so good at judging age anymore. And age doesn’t mean what it used to mean, anyway.

  “They want to talk to you,” Tracy says, walking onto the stones of the rivershore, looking out onto the leaden water.

  “Yeah?” That’s new. Things must be awful desperate, they want to talk to me.

  “Yeah. There’s trouble.”

  “Not yet there’s not. I show up, there’ll be trouble.”

  “You’re not so bad.”

  I think about Tracy’s heart rate, her weird calm, her perspiration and ocular cues. I don’t faze her, and in turn she doesn’t set me off. It might not actually be healthy, a kid being as unflappable as she is. Not everyone’s like that; when people get jumpy, it brings out the worst in me. Or best, I guess. Context is everything.

  “You’re a sweetheart,” I say, “but most people get scared, I show up. They can’t control themselves.”

  “Mom wanted me to give you this.” Tracy roots in a pocket, pulls out a bottle of pills, tosses it to me. I recognize the little powder-blue pellets without reading the prescription: military grade adrenal suppressants. Tracy’s mom works at one of the lower-tier private clinics across town. I pop one of these babies, I can handle people’s fear without going into attack mode. For a while.

  “Okay then,” I smile, showing her my big incisors for a cheap thrill. “Tell ’em I’ll be by in half an hour.”

  The big Mex hits the wall about halfway to the ceiling, body parallel to the floor. His body cracks drywall and I hear him groan, but I also hear a hammer being cocked behind me. I turn and smile, take the nine-millimetre shell in my chest. Don’t like to get shot, but the psychological effect on the bad guys when they see me doing it is usually worth the aggravation.

  It is this time, that’s for sure.

  The shooter – a scrawny white skinhead – pulls the trigger again and
again in panic. Small calibre non-explosive rounds ain’t gonna get it done. I stride toward him, bat the gun out of his outstretched hand, then pick him up by the throat.

  The first guy – not the guy I threw into the wall – but the guy I punched in the chest when I first crashed the joint – that guy has finally caught his breath. I throw the skinhead into him and they both go down hard – skinhead breaking a wrist en route.

  Wall guy’s just whimpering. Something’s broken loose inside him, something’s shifted out of position. He’ll stay put.

  I walk to the pile of thugs and kick the guy on the bottom in the mouth. I wear custom combat-boots in size 26 or so. Steel-toed.

  Skinhead’s whining, trying to scramble up off his buddy, so I help him up by the back of his neck and the seat of his pants.

  Carrying him, I walk into the broken-down kitchen of the townhouse-condo. We’re right above the garage, so basically a floor above ground level.

  Out the window he goes – half of the glass was broken anyway so I doubt it’ll hurt property values much. He hits once off the slope of the garage roof, then tumbles down from there to asphalt. The condo board and a bunch of the neighbours look up at me from the street. If I hadn’t taken one of those little blue pills, there’d be more than enough panic out among those people to draw me to them. They’re doing a good job though, outwardly. Standing and staring, hands in pockets, nobody wanting to appear provocative in any way, shape, or form.

  Holes in my shirt from the bullets. I pull at my rubberized skin, ejecting the compressed lead while I walk back to the dining room. Mouth-kick guy’s on his back, moaning, hands up near his mouth, but afraid to touch broken teeth.

  Wall guy’s trying to push up off his chest, so I walk over and crouch down, my knees popping like coals settling in a fire.

  “Where’s your lab?” I say. Can’t smell their stash, but it’s gotta be around here somewhere. That was the story anyway: meth heads operating out of a vacant unit; residents nervous about the business being done.

  “Nothing…man, there’s nothing…” He’s having trouble breathing. Punctured lung from a broken rib, I reckon.