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All the Retros at the New Cotton Club
Copyright © 2016 by DeAnna Knippling
Cover design copyright © 2016 by DeAnna Knippling
Interior design copyright © 2016 by DeAnna Knippling
Published by Wonderland Press
All rights reserved. This books, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author. Discover more by this author at www.Wonderlandpress.com.
All the Retros at the New Cotton Club
The top of the bar was solid Brazilian mahogany, the kind that looks like it’s made out of bourbon-colored smoke. The wood underneath the projected illusions of the New Cotton Club was real but it was the far less expensive oak.
The dame at the bar looked vaguely familiar, like Charlie had seen her before but never at the bar—like it had been a while. He slid her a gin rickey in an Old Fashioned glass and she rolled him a virtual coin across the bar for a tip. He closed his hand around it and made it disappear. She started stirring the ice cubes in her Old Fashioned glass with the tip of her finger. She had the whole getup on—Marcel wave, cigarette in a long black holder, and a black-and-gold striped dress that ended at her knees in black fringe. Voices chattered and forks rattled on china plates. On the stage at the other end of the hall a trumpet player in a penguin suit was using a tinny mute at the end of his horn to good effect. The trombone and clarinet players were trying to keep up.
Out of the corners of Charlie’s eyes the room looked like it was swirling with smoke, but it was just the rendering overlay. Tonight there was a heavy retro presence in the room and it was causing the servers some headaches. Over the last hour there had been about a hundred minor virus warnings. Somebody was infected. The system was trying to track down the source but it seemed to be coming from every direction. At any rate, some of the finer details up around the ceiling looked cheap and misty but otherwise there was no sign of the heavy server load. The floor was packed and the balconies were filled to the brim. A quick glance showed that the other bartenders were in the weeds but not so bad that they needed to break character. Just another Friday night at the club.
Later, when the diners finished eating and the amateurs left for the night, they’d clear a space in the center of the room for dancing. Miss Alice and the rest of the swing band would come up on stage and dancers doing the Charleston would take over.
Charlie mixed up a tray of cocktails for one of Dolores’s tables: a Mary Pickford, a Corpse Reviver, a retro Hanky Panky, and a bourbon on the rocks. Whoever ordered the bourbon was going to regret it. The stuff was authentically terrible. It didn’t contain anything that could kill you like it could have in Prohibition times—then as now, bad for business—but it was about as tasty as drinking an ashtray.
The dame at the bar said, “Charlie, I’m in trouble.”
He didn’t know her; it was just that all the bartenders were called Charlie at the New cotton. He just happened to be Charlie off-duty as well as on.
“Yes, miss?”
“Bad trouble.”
“Anything we can do to help?”
“I don’t know, Charlie, can you do anything about ghosts?”
Saying that word, here at the New Cotton Club, could be touchy. Some people liked to call the virtual presence of A.I.s “ghosts.” Some people liked to be rude. The more acceptable term was “retros.” Retros weren’t exactly legal—some idiots in Congress had used a bunch of scare tactics to make the retros seem like they were trying to tear down mortal society, and now A.I.s were supposed to be strictly modeled after a few safe “strains” and monitored closely.
Although when it came to rich people, of course the laws went out the window. The New Cotton Club was literally underground but it wasn’t exactly a secret. It was a place for retros and mortals to socialize. They even had rooms upstairs for more intimate activities. Charlie had taken a couple of retro girls upstairs a few times. With the lights off and the retro jacked directly into your nervous system, it was hard to tell the difference.
Charlie rubbed a lemon half around a bowl-shaped cocktail glass and sugared the rim. He iced the glass, then started assembling ice, triple sec, lemon juice, and French cognac in a French shaker. The metal went icy in his hands.
“Don’t know about ghosts, miss. Just spirits.”
The side of her mouth curled, showing of a dimple and a few lines around the eyes. She took a sip of the gin rickey in front of her.
“Let me tell you about it,” she said. “And you tell me what you think. Don’t worry. I won’t interrupt your mixology or whatever they called it in the Roaring Twenties.”
“Bartending, miss.”
She laughed again.
One of his waitresses, Dolores, had been keeping an eye on him; she swept in to pick up the etched silver tray just as he put the sidecar down on it and tapped the bell. She was moving at ninety miles an hour but the levels in the glasses barely rippled.
“Two French 75s,” she called over her shoulder. “One vee, one real.”
“Wait your turn, toots.”
She sneered at him and he started on a tray of drinks for the new girl, Yvette, who was waggling around the bar like a bee coming back to the hive.
“It all started when my husband died,” the dame at the bar said. “Or maybe it started before that. It’s hard to say. But I’m going to start it with Bobby, because that’s where it started for me. And I’m the important one, you know.”
He nodded. Three sidecars and a sympathetic ear coming right up.
She took another sip at her drink. “The god-damned center of the universe, as a matter of fact. Bobby was older than me. A lot older. But he was a good apple, a real peach. He got the full fountain of youth treatments when they first came out. If he maybe didn’t have the stamina of some of the younger boys, he made up for it with class. He was the kind of guy who paid attention. I didn’t deserve him.”
She stared off into the distance. Charlie kept working. Three sidecars in a row was a cake walk; he was done in jiff. Charlie hit the bell and Yvette made the sidecars disappear while blowing him a kiss with her bow-painted lips.
Next up a tray for Marie. His hands hesitated, though. He hadn’t seen Marie in a couple of minutes—he scanned the room for her.
The waitresses were dressed in short gold dresses covered with sequins that flipped from bright gold to tarnish depending on the direction they were flipped. Hard to miss them as they floated through the room. And hard to miss the signs of someone mussing their sequins. If you grabbed one of ’em you left a handprint of upside-down sequins for everyone to see. Charlie added an extra drink to the customer’s bar tab when he saw it.
Marie was leaning against the wall beside the stage with her hand over her face.
He sent a message over to Marie. UOK?
The dame at the bar said, “When he died I got a nice chunk of his money. His first wife and kids got most of it—got the mansion in upstate New York, too, although who wanted such a big old rattletrap of a place, I don’t know. I got a little brick place here along Willow Street and enough money to keep myself warm for a good long while.”
Willow Street in Chicago, a street where a one-room shack could go for over a million. Not that there were any one-room shacks on Willow Street. “But—?”
Leave it alone for once would you Charlie. My boyfriend left me this morning okay? I’ll pick up my drinks when they’re ready.
He nodded and started on the pair of French 75s for Dolores. He coul
d afford to give Marie a minute or two. She’d been dating a retro guy for a couple of months. Trying to keep up the appearance of being a normal couple had finally sucked the charm out of the relationship—it took someone desperate or saintlike to make something like that work. Or both.
Charlie started cutting long, thin strips of lemon peel. Most people used a lemon stripper but he liked doing it with a knife. The lemon oil got up in his nose, fresh and bright.
A horn honked outside like a macho guy whining. A door slammed, and two deep voices started shouting.
Across his retinal display a yellow icon flashed. He opened the alert. Situation at the door, two mortals one retro demanding entrance after being blocked, threatening to call police. All retro alert, yellow level. Server resources shifted to alert status. Stay in character.
The mists around the edges of the room thickened and the framerates dropped; the retros stayed as solid as ever, though—paying customers almost always got what they paid for at the New Cotton. Conversations dampened but the trio kept playing.
The dame said, “But there was a condition. I had to agree to let him haunt me for three years.”
Even though he was distracted by the alert, Charlie’s eyebrow rose. It was one thing for the dead to upload their personalities and memories online and become retros; it was another thing for them to haunt the living. Retros who got themselves installed directly onto a mortal tended to creep out both the retros and the living.
Charlie set up one champagne glass to chill, set the retro drink to copy the first—which the customers had long since decided was fair, since a bartender might make two identical real drinks at the same time if it was busy—then shook the gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup in the cocktail shaker along with some ice. The gin was ice-cold. He poured the first 75 into the real glass, then flicked the switch to retro on the bottom of the shaker and mimed filling the second.
They’d said to stay in character.
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Charlie said cautiously. “You liked him, you said.”
“I did. I loved him and I didn’t deserve him.” She stared at the pair of French 75s and frowned. She glanced up at him. She had dark circles under her pretty violet eyes.
Dolores was swooping in, Marie dabbing at her face with a napkin, Yvette was standing too close to a customer and he was slipping a business card into her garter, and sound of shouting upstairs had stopped. The yellow alert shifted to green and the muted conversations across the floor burst into relieved laughter.
“Ah. So having him so close was harder than it sounds.”
“I hadn’t been strictly faithful to him while he was alive, Charlie. Him being dead wasn’t gonna make it any easier…”
· · ·
Her name was Bernice.
The house was narrow but long, like a townhouse but not pressed up cheek to jowl with the neighbors on either side. The bricks had been erected in 1886 but the conveniences were all modern. The tile in the foyer was black and white in a crazy snowflake pattern that looked like the tile version of jazz.
The rest of the house was wood floors, white furniture, and marble counter tops. It had the kind of kitchen that begged for a gourmet chef—too bad Bernice had about as much talent in the kitchen as a eunuch had in bed. One of the bedrooms had been turned into a master bath upstairs, with a shower so big it was practically a three-seater. The walk-in closet looked like some kind of museum archives with all the drawers and shelves.
The top floor had skylights and the staircase was open so you could stand at the top and look all the way down, an M.C. Escher view of stairs and railings and hardwood floors. The back yard was a postage stamp of the most perfect green Kentucky bluegrass that you could imagine. A couple of lilac bushes accented the back.
She liked the place. It was killer for parties and lovely for inviting men over. It was even good for solitude.
Three years. She could play the good girl for three years, out of respect for Bobby’s memory. A respect that maybe she hadn’t treated so respectfully while she was alive. She sat in front of the white marble fireplace in the front room and drank a glass of champagne. The bandage behind her ear itched. She wanted to scratch it like a dog.
Bobby would “wake up” when he “woke up,” the black market doctor had said. It might take a couple of hours or a couple of months for his software to integrate with her wetware—that was the thing about a ghost. It didn’t just upload itself into a living person’s hardware. It could read their memories, use their senses, and even project itself onto their retinas, eardrums, and tactile nerve endings. Ghosts could touch you; they could even make you feel their breath on the back of their necks. Only things they couldn’t do were make you taste or smell them. The technology just wasn’t that evolved yet.
Bobby wouldn’t hurt her. She knew that. But it was still creepy.
Three years—and then she’d be able to have his hardware chips removed. Bobby-the-ghost would get uploaded onto a server, and then he and Bobby-the-regular-A.I. would negotiate what memories they kept, what they deleted, and to what extent they merged before Bobby-the-ghost was deleted. None of this would affect the will. As long as she showed up for the removal in three years she would be set for the rest of her life.
She refilled her champagne and touched the rim of the glass on the other flute sitting on the glass-and-steel table in front of her. “Cheers,” she said. Bobby had died of a cancer that finally had outwitted the doctors, something that started in his pancreas and spread until it had seemed like there was more cancer than Bobby at the end.
She loved him but the last six months had been rough. She’d wanted at least a couple of weeks to mourn, but no—she had to have the chip put in the day after he died, or nothing.
Were you always this demanding and I just didn’t know it?
No answer.
She sipped her champagne and waited.
· · ·
It didn’t happen for a few weeks. She was almost ready to go back to the doctor and have him check. She’d started to worry. She’d made it through the funeral, feeling self-conscious in front of Bobby’s first wife and his two sons. The first wife, Mary, had been decent, but the two sons were assholes, one skinny smart one (Robert) and one beefy bland one (Ted). They’d demanded to know when she was leaving the big house (she’d already left it) and when they could have the keys to the house on Willow Street (they couldn’t; it was hers and they knew that). They’d found out about the chip somehow and demanded that she have it removed (she’d removed the bandages but the dissolvable stitching was still in place, a delicate Frankenstein detail that nobody could see unless she wore her hair up) and that they be able to speak to their father (who wasn’t speaking to anyone). By the time it was over she was exhausted. Mary leaned over and took her arm in the funeral home. “Just block them.”
“I can’t do that. They’re grieving.”
“So are you.”
Bernice dabbed at her face with a handkerchief that one of the funeral directors had given her. “I don’t feel like I have the right to grieve.”
“Because you’re…so young?” Mary gave her a look of almost prurient interest and Bernice had to force herself not to flinch.
“Because of the chip.”
“Ah. I’m sure you must be…proud. To carry it for him. He carries some extremely valuable information in that mind of his. A financial genius.”
Bernice didn’t answer. The sons sniggered.
Mary shot the two sons a look that suggested that it was backed up with a nasty message or two via a short-range network and they backed off. She turned back to Bernice with a look of genuine interest on her face.
“Would you like to come to the reception?”
Bernice pressed her lips together. The message Are you nuts? appeared on her retinal display, almost of its own accord. She deleted the message and shook her head. “I’m going to have a gathering at the house for a couple of friends that we had in common. If you’d lik
e to come?”
Mary shuddered. She was almost ninety and had chosen for a less intense fountain of youth treatment than Bobby had; Bobby had always laughed at her fears that the full treatment would do something bad to her genetically. The doctors had assured Bernice that Bobby’s cancer had nothing to do with his youth treatments, but…
“Goodness, no.” Mary chuckled. “You’re all right, but some of the people he’d been spending time with. Just no.”
Bernice had lifted an eyebrow. But by then the service was wrapping up; it was almost time for the family to file out of the room and follow the casket to the grave site. Bobby had always intended to die young and leave a pretty corpse. In a sense he’d achieved neither—but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
· · ·
Bobby woke up while Bernice was in the middle of taking a bubble bath. She was pacing herself now that the funeral was over: one bottle of champagne a day. If Bobby didn’t show by eleven in the evening, she’d drink the bottle and go to bed.
The tub looked as fragile as a teacup but was made of some kind of super-insulating polymer. She’d put the open champagne bottle on a small table next to the tub and had turned on some music—some of Bobby’s favorites, old-time jazz and swing. He’d been a fan of the Roaring Twenties and had had all kinds of old movies and music uploaded to her hardware.
She was lonely. She’d almost picked up a guy at a club earlier in the evening in an effort to bring Bobby back faster—on the theory that it always rains right after you wash the car—but had chickened out. Or rather grieved out.
Bobby. I miss you like crazy, babe.
At first she hadn’t liked the idea of hosting his ghost for three years. Now she was terrified that she wouldn’t be able to.
The trumpet playing in her eardrum sounded like it was about a hundred years ago and a half a block away. She sank into the bubbles and imagined that outside the house, down the block was a street party going on, a couple of hundred people out in the street barbecuing and dancing on the asphalt, carrying drinks in one hand and paper plates with cake on the other.
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