by Jeff Edwards
“It’s not so bad,” Dancer said. “Scary, but fun. Did it all the time when I was a kid.”
The vibration was getting stronger now, and I began to feel the stirring of artificial wind currents as the oncoming car shoved a column of air through the tube.
“Ever get hurt?”
“A few broken bones,” she said. “Some staples. But I lived to tell about it. Just make sure you hang on to your surfboard.”
I had an even more terrifying thought. “What if this thing isn’t steel? What if it’s one of the nonmagnetic alloys?”
“Ouch,” Dancer said. “If it’s not steel, I guess you’re fucked.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but my words were overwhelmed by the roar of the onrushing tram.
Then the metal plate was up off of the insulator strip, caught up in the leading edge of the moving magnetic field, and I was shooting forward at what seemed like the speed of a rifle bullet.
It was a hurtling maelstrom of noise and wind. The rushing air stung my eyes and whipped my clothing painfully against my skin. The acceleration nearly ripped the metal plate out of my hands, but I hung on—quite literally—for dear life.
The world was a blur of strobing light and darkness as the half-seen glow strips shot past me at impossibly short intervals.
“I’m going to kill you for this!” I shouted into the tumult.
There was no answer. Maybe Dancer couldn’t hear me over the rush of the air.
My fingers were starting to cramp. I could feel my grip weakening, my body starting to slide off of the thin metal plate that shielded me from disaster.
How the hell did kids do this? Probably with straps, and built-in handholds, and other features that my improvised surfboard didn’t have.
I was mere seconds from an extremely messy death when the tram began to decelerate. The wind tunnel effect subsided as the car lost momentum. The maelstrom faded to a gentle breeze, and inertia lost its determination to shove me off the door plate.
The tram slid out of the tube and braked to a stop at the terminal platform. I coasted a few meters into the next section of tube, until my steel plate slid down the leading edge of the car’s electromagnetic field and came to rest on the insulator strip.
I staggered to my feet, still gripping the plate, stumbling toward the platform. If I was going to mix it up with Arm-twister and his genteel buddy, I would at least have something to club them with.
My heart was still pounding, and my knees were shaky, but I intended to put up a fight. Anything would be better than another round on the surfboard of doom.
When I stepped up onto the platform, it was deserted. No sign of the two thugs.
I looked toward the exit. “Where did they go?”
No response from Dancer.
I glanced around. “They couldn’t have made it all the way up the ramp that quickly, could they?”
No response.
I tapped the ear bug with a fingertip. “Dancer? You awake?”
No answer.
The doors of the tram whooshed closed, and I looked reflexively toward the sound.
Through the side windows of the car, I caught sight of Arm-twister and his unidentified escort; still seated on the tram. Apparently, this had not been their stop, and somehow they had missed my unceremonious venture into Lev surfing.
Arm-twister spotted me as the car started to pull away. We locked eyes for a brief instant, and then he was on his feet, trying to get to the door.
Too late. The cigar-shaped tram car disappeared into the tube, accelerating rapidly as it went.
I leaned the steel plate against the wall of the terminal and started up the exit ramp.
“I thought they had us,” I said.
Still no response from Dancer.
I dug into the pocket of my windbreaker and pulled out my phone, still bundled to Dancer’s Turing Scion by nano-pore tape and a few centimeters of fiber optic cable. I thumbed the phone’s menu button, but the screen remained black. The phone had somehow shut itself off.
I held down the power key, and waited for the green restart icon. Nothing. The screen remained dark and inert.
I unwrapped the tape far enough to get at the phone’s battery compartment. I ejected the coin-sized power cell, counted to thirty, and then reseated it. This—or so I had been told—was called a ‘hard reset.’ It was supposed to dump the phone’s volatile memory, and allow its internal processors to come back on line with a fresh start of the operating kernel.
It didn’t work.
The phone showed no signs of life.
I searched the casing of the Turing Scion for any sign of a battery compartment. Maybe a hard reset of the Scion would get things moving again. But the black carbon-polymer surface of the casing was featureless. If there was a seam or a slot, I couldn’t find it.
I jiggled the connectors for the fiber optic cable.
Nothing.
And that exhausted my entire repertoire of troubleshooting ideas. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I had no hope of fixing it myself.
There were bound to be plenty of repair techs in the Osaka district. I’d have to go find one when I had the time. At the moment, though, my first priority was getting my hands on a gun. I didn’t want to be unarmed the next time I came up against any of my Asian bad boys.
I slid the dead phone and Scion back into my pocket and started up the ramp. I was going to miss having Dancer’s voice in my ear, offering insults and useful advice in roughly equal proportions, but I could deal with it.
I had been alone before.
CHAPTER 23
My first thought as I emerged from the tram terminal was that the Roppongi district looked an awful lot like the Zone, back in LA. Narrow streets lined with garish holo-facades and laser neon, interspersed with the dark forms of multistory buildings and even darker alleyways.
Other than the disproportionate number of Asian faces, the people didn’t look much different either. The usual sidewalk circus of muscle punks, wire-heads, party boys, hookers, and street freaks—with a liberal seasoning of tourists in scruff-drag, trying to blend in with the local toughs.
Like the Edo district, this was a homogenized approximation of the real thing. An idealized marketing-friendly simulation of deliciously dangerous street life. I wondered how much of it was based on the Roppongi section of Tokyo, and how much had been cribbed from vids and the fertile imaginations of corporate designers.
I had no doubt that you could get yourself laid here. Or high. Or injured. Or even killed.
But there probably wouldn’t be organ poachers waiting to carve up the tourists for spare parts as soon as their bodies hit the pavement. Instead, I had visions of emergency medical teams lurking not too far out of sight, ready to rush in with defibrillators, resuscitators, units of blood surrogate, and surgical robots programmed for trauma work.
I didn’t know that for certain, but it seemed like a logical necessity. A resort that gains a reputation for killing off its customers tends to lose allure as a tourism hot-spot. On the other hand, it probably didn’t hurt for an occasional visitor to go home with heroic surgical scars and a story about being dead on the operating table for three minutes, after a vicious knife fight with a gang of bōsōzoku.
Analyzed from the risk management mindset of corporate investors, that probably added up to a significant measure of permissible danger, constrained by the statistical limits of the colony’s business model. Bottom line: you could get hurt here, but the staff would try not to let you die.
Of course, I wasn’t sure whether or not the business model applied to me. I didn’t know where Nine-fingers, Messenger-boy, and Arm-twister fit into the scheme of things. If they were not plugged into the station hierarchy, I would theoretically enjoy whatever protections were accorded to other customers of Chiisai Teien. On the other hand, if they were working for someone high up in the colony’s power structure, I might have no protections at all. The Nine-fingers gang might have official c
learance to shove my corpse out an airlock with no questions asked.
In other words, I couldn’t assume that the colony police or staff would intervene if I got in trouble. Fair enough…
I took a leisurely stroll up the street, fending off several offers of recreational chemicals, and a few more overtly personal propositions as I walked.
About three blocks later, I found what I was looking for. A public access kiosk, set into the front wall of a cosmetic surgery boutique.
I angled over to it, and tapped the display screen to bring the unit to life. I located the icon to toggle the language to English, and then ran a quick search for the Glass Planet Club, or Club Glass Planet, or whatever the nightclub was called.
The name turned out to be just Glass Planet. It was about five blocks away. I called up a map, memorized the directions, and then ended my kiosk session.
I looked around to get my bearings. The holo-sign above the door of the surgical boutique spelled out the words ‘Face Replace,’ the text morphing cyclically from English, to kanji, and back.
According to the map, Glass Planet was back the way I had come, so I found myself walking past the same lineup of hustlers and street crawlers.
No, I still didn’t want a good deal on any Jag, Crystal-Z, or specially-enhanced companionship. Nor did I need tickets to the zero-g ninja cage fights, special death match of the century.
I passed the tram terminal, then two more blocks of the same sorts of offerings, differing only in details and price points.
Glass Planet turned out to be a squalid little psycho-rock bar on the second floor of a building with a surrealistically green rainforest holo-facade.
The street-level entrance was through an archway of conveniently-curved fern fronds, of a size that probably hasn’t been seen since the demise of the dinosaurs. About a quarter of the way up the narrow staircase, I had to edge past a trio of surly-looking gaijin boys—maybe late teens (cosmetically at least), bristle-cut hair, heavy eye makeup, and theatrical tough-guy scowls.
One of them made a go at the pocket of my windbreaker, attracted no-doubt by the bulge caused by my phone and the Turing Scion.
I didn’t check to see who it was. I just grabbed the questing hand, rotating it away from my pocket, and into a wrist lock. I twisted hard, and jerked downward, eliciting a cry of pain and bringing the would-be pickpocket to his knees.
I released my grip and kept climbing, not looking back as his buddies scrambled to keep him from tumbling down the steps.
I listened for the sound of one or more of them pounding up the stairs after me. They didn’t.
I wasn’t too worried. These were wealthy tourist kids, playing at being street punks. I could see it in their eyes. They lacked the hard and predatory edge of true sidewalk soldiers. When their little role-playing vacation was over, they’d go back to school on Earth, or to cushy jobs somewhere in the big money arcologies.
There was a good chance that they’d work each other up to a real fighting anger by the time my business in the club was settled. They’d probably be lying in wait when I came back down the stairs. I might have to teach them a lesson about talking to strangers in bad neighborhoods. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be necessary to hurt them too much in the process.
As I stepped through the doorway at the top of the stairs, I passed through some kind of acoustic suppression field that was apparently in place to keep the club noise from bleeding out onto the street. The field was clearly necessary, because a wall of sound slammed into me like a punch in the face.
Most of the tables in Glass Planet were empty. What the club lacked in patronage, it apparently tried to make up in raw decibels. I’ve never been a fan of the atonal snarl that substitutes for melody in psycho-rock. And I’m frankly not crazy about the idea of subliminal audio cues polluting my musical selections or my subconscious mind. But the soundtrack in this place was so loud that it surpassed my usual dislike of the so-called music genre. It was cranked up into the realm of assault with intent to deafen.
I took the nearest empty table to the door, settling into a chair with its back to a wall and trying not to flinch with each pulse of the song.
A rectangle of the tabletop was a photo-active data pad displaying a drink menu. I couldn’t figure out how to switch the language to English, so I browsed through images of drinks until I found something that looked more or less like scotch on the rocks. I thumbed the order icon, and settled back into my chair, trying to ride out the audio barrage until my drink showed up.
Despite the general lack of customers, it took nearly ten minutes for the waiter to arrive. He was lean and compact, with nondescriptly handsome Asian features, offset by flint-hard eyes. He had the look that the tourist kids on the stairs had been lacking—that finely honed edge of intensity that comes from being equally comfortable with questionable deals and acts of sudden violence.
He set a drink on my table, and waited for me to pay.
I hadn’t bothered to exchange my cash for yen, but I knew from the digital brochures that Euro-marks were acceptable currency all over the colony. I held out an €m 50 bill, about five times the cost of the drink.
The waiter reached for the fifty, but I didn’t let it go. We each held on to one end of the bill.
I leaned toward him, practically yelling to be heard over the music. “Are you Sato?”
He gave me a bland stare. “Wakarimasen.”
I didn’t speak Japanese, but you hear a smattering of it around the Zone sometimes, and I had picked up that particular word a long time ago. It translated literally as ‘I’m not sure,’ or ‘I don’t know.’ Contextually, the meaning was closer to ‘I don’t understand.’ As in, ‘I don’t know you, asshole, so I’m going to pretend not to speak your language.’
I let go of the fifty. “That’s funny… My friends tell me that your English is better than mine is.”
That was a calculated bluff. I had no idea if Sato spoke English, assuming that this was actually the right guy. Dancer had never gotten around to discussing Sato’s language skills, so it was entirely possible that the man’s ‘wakarimasen’ was genuine. He might not understand a word I was saying.
The waiter kept the bill in plain sight, as though he hadn’t yet decided whether or not to accept it. He reached over to the menu pad, and did some rapid finger work on several of the icons.
The decibel level at my table instantly dropped by about ninety-percent, displaced by a low pitched humming sound and a continual shush of white noise. The same kind of active acoustic suppression that was in use on the front door, or so I assumed.
“Who are your friends?” the waiter asked.
I pretended to examine the drink. “It might be better to stay away from names.”
“Okay,” the man said. “Then we start by staying away from my name.”
I took a short sip of the drink; definitely not scotch.
I nodded. “That sounds like a good idea. No names.”
He shoved the fifty into a pocket. “What can I do for you, Mr. No-name?”
“I’m looking to indulge my hobby,” I said. “I like to shoot at things.”
That brought me a very hard look. “What kinds of things?”
I shrugged. “Mostly people who shoot at me first.”
“That happens to you a lot, does it?”
I took another sip of the not-scotch. “I wouldn’t say it happens a lot. But definitely more often than I like.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” the waiter said. “I don’t talk to cops.”
I shook my head. “If I was a cop, you’d already be screwed.”
“Why is that?”
“A friend of mine did a little snooping in the local cop-shop’s suspect database. Somebody answering to the name of Sato is the presumptive perp in about a half-dozen illegal weapons sales. That, as they say, is the bad news.”
“So what’s the good news?”
“The good news is that the cops aren’t planning to come after yo
u—or rather, Sato—anytime soon.”
“How do you know that?”
“According to his police file, our Mr. Sato never deals in heavy weapons. And he doesn’t sell in quantity; just an occasional handgun or flechette pistol. Nothing fully automatic, and nothing that could poke a hole in the habitat shell. Basically, he hasn’t pissed off the local police enough to attract serious attention.”
“Let’s say that’s true,” the unnamed waiter said. “You could still be a cop.”
“So could you,” I said. “For all I know, that file could be a trap, planted in the police database to lure idiots like me into trying to buy black market weapons.”
The man who might be Sato gave me a half smile. “I’m not a cop.”
“And neither am I. I’m just a plain old gaijin with enemies. If they start shooting at me, I want to be able to return the favor.”
“I don’t sell guns,” the waiter said. “But I can bring you a sandwich from the kitchen.”
He put an odd emphasis on the word ‘sandwich.’
“Fine,” I said. “Bring me a sandwich. How much will it cost?”
“That depends. How many pickles do you want with it?”
Pickles, I assumed, were bullets. I shrugged. “Why don’t we say thirty? And make sure the mustard is spicy.”
I hoped he’d interpret this last bit to mean that I wasn’t looking for a low-caliber pop gun. I wanted a weapon with decent knockdown power.
The waiter rubbed the side of his face. “One sandwich, plus thirty pickles... That’s going to run you about fifteen-hundred.”
I did some quick mental inventory. I was carrying about two-thousand marks. This little investment would put a major dent in my operating capital, but my client was wealthy and this was a business expense after all.
I nodded. “If the mustard is spicy, you’ve got a deal.”
The waiter walked away, moving in the general direction of the bar.
I sat with my back to the wall, keeping an eye on the door, and enjoying the blissful near-quiet of the acoustic suppression field.
I took another sip of my drink. It wasn’t scotch, bourbon, sake, vodka, or gin. I didn’t know what it was, but it was pretty good. I considered ordering another one, but that was probably not such a great idea. Better to nurse this one until my business was concluded, and then leave with a clear head.