More screams, more scuffles. “Get behind the bar,” he growled at the dame, stripping off his apron and tying it around his arm. The girls already had their holdouts in hand, slim gold weapons that stayed tucked into their garters most of the time.
Marie said, Charlie something’s wrong with the—
The network cut out.
Charlie slid open a panel in the side of the bar and swept a pair of stun guns onto the floor. Then he shoved the false floor open. “Ladder,” he hissed at the dame. “Follow tunnel to ladder leading up. Don’t take any turns. Opens onto alley. No lights but everything else runs on backup generators.”
“Okay,” she breathed. Then she turned onto her stomach and slid in. In a second she was gone. He closed the two panels, grabbed the two stun guns, and started to edge around the end of the bar.
And that’s when Yvette smashed him over the head with a thick glass bottle of Prohibition-style hooch.
· · ·
Bernice fled through the dark to the other end of the tunnel. She’d just reached the ladder going upward when a voice hissed behind her. “Miss? Miss!”
She hesitated.
“Miss! Don’t go that way, they’re waiting for you in the alley! You have to follow me!”
A small penlight flashed on. It was one of the girls from the New Cotton Club, dressed in shimmering gold sequins and holding a tiny gold gun.
“Miss! Can you hear me? Are you all right?”
Bernice looked up the ladder. The girl was walking in her direction. She only had a few seconds to make her decision.
She took a step toward the girl…then hesitated.
Behind her was the shadow that had been following her for weeks…it seemed like forever. Infecting her life like it was a…
A virus.
She shuddered. Her mind had been hacked. It was starting to make sense now. Someone must really want Bobby’s chip.
A deeper darkness lay off to the side of the ladder. A niche? Another tunnel?
She stepped inside. The niche was deeper than she’d hoped—it was a narrow corridor. She started backing away, trying to time her steps so they fell at the same time as the girl’s. The floor underfoot felt like hard-packed dirt.
The girl reached the ladder and looked upward. Her face looked perfect, even cartoonish. She looks like she’s had the full youth treatment lately, she thought.
A voice that seemed to come from directly behind her said, Hey doll.
She didn’t dare breathe, let alone say his name. She checked her retinal display; there wasn’t a single sign of a network connection.
The light in the tunnel brightened as the door opened from above. “Nothing,” said a voice. The girl in the gold-sequinned dress cursed, then turned around in a circle.
“This place is lousy with tunnels,” she said.
“You think she’s lost?”
“I think she’s hiding.”
The other voice cursed. “I’m going to pass the disruptor down to you. Don’t drop it.”
“I won’t.”
Bobby said, Hey doll. Come with me.
She was standing behind something square and metal, like a big air duct. The penlight swept over it.
“I see something.”
A bullet pinged into the duct and Bernice stepped back from it.
“She’s back there.”
She looked behind her and saw Bobby standing in his pinstripe suit, still wearing his mustache. He held out a hand to her and she took it. It wasn’t solid but she could feel the pressure of it.
Be brave for me, doll.
Footsteps came running down the narrow corridor toward her. It was pitch black. The penlight picked out the gold on her dress.
“I see her!”
The gun fired again.
Bernice stood in the middle of the corridor and shook. Her chest was burning. She put a hand to the gaping hole and caught the blood running out. Her cupped hand was filled in about a second.
She was going to die.
Bobby said, Come on, doll. If we hang around much longer they’re going to be able to shoot you with a disruptor gun and scan your data as it recompiles.
“But…”
He waved a hand and the wound went away. It’s all in your mind, doll. It’s all in your mind.
She started to cry.
· · ·
A few twists and turns later through the narrow corridors and they’d lost the footsteps behind them—but not the shadow, which followed them both relentlessly. Finally they made it to a heavily bolted steel door in a blank cement wall, one with a speakeasy grill at eye level.
Bobby stepped up to it and said, “It’s me. Let us in.”
A deep voice on the other side said, “What’s the password?”
Bobby said, “Stop kidding around, Monroe.”
“What’s the password?”
“Hanky-panky.”
The door opened and a bright light shone in Bernice’s face. She raised a hand to shade her eyes—but her whole arm had gone transparent.
Bobby pulled her inside and the door slammed behind them.
· · ·
Just like that they were back in the dining room of the New Cotton Club. This time it was just the two of them, a single table with a rosebud in a tiny white vase, two champagne flutes, and a bottle with a bow on it.
She collapsed into the chair. Her body was flickering in and out, a shorted TV signal. She buried her face in her hands and tried to ignore the fact that she could see through them about half the time.
He poured, and touched the rim of her glass with his. “Welcome home,” he said.
“How long have I been dead?” she asked. But as soon as she asked the question it came to her in a flash: ever since she’d put the gun in her mouth. The day his chip had been removed. She hadn’t even lasted a day without him. She’d pulled the trigger and they’d brought her back…
…but wiped her memory of it.
She’d stopped taking lovers and her only human contact was board meetings—which were so impersonal that they might as well have been held over a video chat session anyway. And the places she went all catered to the wealthy—and thus to retros. People had been pandering to a rich retro trying to keep up appearances.
He started to explain but she waved a hand to cut him off. “Never mind, I figured out what happened. But why?”
He nodded at the champagne; she sipped.
It tasted just right—not perfect, not an ideal kind of champagne, but right. A little drier than she liked, yet addictively bubbly. Her tongue felt like it was drowning in dryness. She finished the flute and Bobby refilled it.
“Your depression kept shutting you down,” he said. “You would collapse and it would start infecting the system. We had to keep you isolated…we thought we were going to have to quarantine you and leave you offline. But Mr. Codere—”
“The funeral director,” she said.
“The funeral director. He had a suggestion: we would isolate you from the wider retro community and erase your memories of killing yourself. We would force the memory of you taking the gun out of your mouth, convince you that it was your idea to go on living, and…see what happened. It worked for a while. Then the depression started to come back. Because you’re a retro you could see it—you could literally see your depression. We had it wiped from your native software but it had spread onto the network—it was trying to find a way back in.”
The shadow that had been following her.
Was something that she had created herself.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s just wrong. But what about the chip?”
“There was no chip. No hardware. Just a software upgrade…Dr. Wiltsey had the idea for it. It’s a fairly complicated algorithm for interrupting feedback routines without damaging the routine itself…the complication comes from all the coding necessary to keep the algorithm from being infected by the broken feedback mechanism in the first place, along with everything else.”
He grinned at her. “Don’t worry. I can’t follow how it works, either. But if it works—and it seems like it is, now that Dr. Wiltsey’s made a few more tweaks—it’s going to be revolutionary. We’re going in business together. Subject number two is his wife.”
“Doc Wiltsey deserves some happiness in his life.”
“So does his wife.”
“Speaking of wives,” she said. “And sons.”
She was pretty sure she knew who the attackers had been: the people who stood most to profit from Bobby’s new business venture. Retro business wasn’t supposed to cross over into the real world. If they managed to get the proof from her, they could sue to have all the assets turned over to them.
Bobby’s shoulders sagged. “I should have known not to tell them I was going retro at all. I didn’t tell them about the experimental treatment, but when they didn’t inherit the house after your death…when I set it up so you could project yourself…when they drove past the house and saw you through the window…they knew something was up.”
She sipped at her champagne. The bubbles felt real. Everything felt real. “They knew long before I did.”
“And I never would have guessed that Mary would take a full fountain of youth treatment and get hired on at the club. Yvette…what a name. Sounds like a French maid or something. She must have found out that I was part-owner and decided to take a chance that it would pay off at some point.”
Bernice shrugged. “I’m more concerned about the bartender. Why didn’t you tell me they were all named Charlie?”
“Because it didn’t matter which one you talked to. The system recorded every word you said once you walked in the door.” He hesitated. “You don’t know how many times I started to contact you to tell you…”
She put a finger on his lips. “I’m glad you didn’t. I would have infected you.”
He shrugged.
She looked around the New Cotton Club. “This isn’t really the club, is it? It’s a…a simulation? A virtual reality? What?”
“An instance,” Bobby said. “And yes. It is.”
“I’m really dead.”
“You’re really dead.”
“I didn’t even notice.”
“That’s how it goes when you’re a natural. Which you are. Me? I struggled with it. I couldn’t figure out how to have feet, let alone walk.”
She shook her head.
“So what comes next?”
“Next…next we live it up. We travel. We party. We follow whatever interests us…we explore the universes inside the retro servers…we hitch a ride on a probe headed into space. We can do anything, doll.”
She reached across the table. One hand went through the champagne bottle. Oops. Bobby didn’t seem to mind.
“Okay, Bobby. Whatever you say.”
The New Cotton Club faded out.
· · ·
Charlie blinked and turned off his retinal display. Getting shot with a disrupter canister and beat over the head with a bottle of rotgut hurt and he was already tired of lying around in a hospital bed. The dame had okayed giving him permission to see the final scenes, though, which was something. When you get shot for someone, you should at least get to see how it all turns out.
Although he really couldn’t complain.
The coin she’d rolled across the counter at him when she first arrived had at first held a couple of bucks; by the time he’d woken up it had also held her postdated will, including the deed to a Willow Street house and about eighty-five million bucks. He was supposed to split the money between him and the rest of the staff—except Yvette—but he could keep the house.
It was still a pretty good tip.
About the Author
DeAnna Knippling likes Left 4 Dead and Alice in Wonderland, and has finally found out a way to combine the two: Victorian zombies. Her new series is Alice’s Adventures in Underland, in which bad things happen to good rabbits. DeAnna has published short fiction in Crossed Genres, Big Pulp, Penumbra, and more. She lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which is also the setting of her first published book, Choose Your Doom: Zombie Apocalypse, a pick-your-own-adventure books for teens and up.
You can find out more about DeAnna at WonderlandPress.com, including a newsletter that will tell you when the next story is out...and give you a free book.
I like comments, reviews, responses, criticism, notifications of typos, general effusions, clever jokes, puns, barbaric yawps, and suchlike. Please look me up at Wonderland Press and drop me a line :)
As always, this story is dedicated to Lee and Ray,
without whose love none of this would be possible.
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