by M. S. Farzan
He shrugged, his ear and nose piercings jingling. “Nothing the police don’t already know.”
“I also put a tracer on your neck, so there’s that.”
The auric reached a hand back to probe at the device I had placed while applying the syringe. He squinted at me irritably.
“Try to remove it and it will stick you with a neurotoxin,” I continued. “I’ll be happy to find a VPen for you when you wake up.”
He looked at me for another heartbeat, then shrugged again and got on the cruiser. I wheeled it around and took it out of the cul-de-sac, charting a route out of the alleyway and towards the Columbus-Farrow storefronts, a figurative stone’s throw from the NIGHT headquarters.
When the aurics started multiplying and threatening local census percentages with their population numbers, public opinion quickly changed from what bordered on novelty and casual ignorance to fear and outrage. The first generation, though of humans, was not human, but could be tolerated as a sort of guilty by-product of ceridium research. The second generation, which began to gain some momentum as their numbers and support grew towards establishing their own communities, could not be afforded the same magnanimity. By the time the third generation of the so-called “underraces,” or even more pejoratively, “nonhumans,” came of adulthood, they would have a full-scale civil war threatening to bloody their hands.
The governments of most nations responded to the rising populations and unrest in similar clichéd fashions. Several European, African, and South American countries saw the opportunity for assimilation and immediately amended their legal codes to provide space for the new underrace communities. A handful of smaller nations, unequipped to deal with the new generations of tusked, horned, or pointy-eared people in their midst tried to squash any type of resistance with military might, and were wholly unprepared for the result. Laos, Moldova, and Côte d’Ivoire were now underrace territories. Ecuador, Estonia, and the Dominican Republic belonged to the revolutionaries. The underraces had claimed Iceland for themselves, and the majority of North America and western Europe had their hands full with trying to keep a lid on revolutionary dissent. Thog’run II, their self-appointed king, built his Northern California capital on the backs of his enemies and gave the newer races a title and a purpose: aurics, a people who were meant to rule over others, and worthy of the gold of their namesake.
Most countries with the political and military might to support it quickly developed a security organization to deal with this new threat, or hired a third party to do it for them. The United States spared neither expense nor time in creating the National Intelligence Guard of Human Technology, a paramilitary force built exclusively to identify and protect against the influx of people that the nation’s cities could not handle, and for which its fragile sense of ethnic identity could not make room. The American public at large, exhausted from years at war abroad, was only too happy to focus its military paranoia within.
The Pacific South NIGHT headquarters were strategically located on the island of Alcatraz, a choice which I had begun to find more and more fitting. It was stolen land from the Native Americans that had been turned into lighthouse, then prison, then tourist attraction, and now a bastion of humanity against a rising tide of underraces that humans had created but didn’t understand. A new lighthouse of sorts that was only accessible by water or air, with a good deal of the country’s internal defense budget behind it. The facility’s lower levels housed approximately two hundred NIGHT foot soldiers, officials, Daypaths, Nightpaths, and Inquisitors, with room for over fifty virtual penitentiary inhabitants. It was rivaled in size only by the Atlantic North headquarters on the reclaimed Liberty Island in New York.
I sped through the side streets adjacent to Old Market, taking advantage of the quiet midnight roads. I pulled up a number on my cruiser console and clicked it to connect.
“Nightpath,” Striker’s voice grated in my ear. “What the hell just happened?”
“Patch me into Karthax, Striker,” I replied.
“Karthax is in Cuba, hombre,” he said, a bit too lazily for my liking.
“Now, Striker,” I yelled into the air in front of me. The auric behind me shifted uncomfortably as we accelerated around a corner.
“Piss off, Nightpath,” Striker retorted, but the console clicked with a temporary display, asking me politely to hold.
“Yeah?” a sleepy voice spoke into my earpiece after a moment.
“Madge, is that you?” I said. “We have a situation here-”
“Do you know what time it is here, Eskander?”
“Are you sleeping?!”
“Quarter to three. AM. In the morning.” She sounded exhausted. Doubling up as a Daypath and the Inquisitor General’s personal security would do that to you.
“Just put Karthax on, will you?” I asked as politely as I could muster.
“Alright,” she said with a yawn.
I turned another corner, crossing Old Market and heading north for the Columbus-Farrow storefronts.
The earpiece clicked again as Madge authorized my call. After a few seconds, I could hear the muted sound of a conversation in the background.
“Karthax,” a gravelly voice said.
“Inquisitor General,” I acknowledged, launching into my report. “Our intel on the rigged storefronts may be compromised. Times and disarm code were both incorrect, and the location was full of ragers. I suspect the same of North Beach, and am headed there now.”
There was a brief silence on the call, broken only by the distant din of voices. I checked the upper level of traffic and engaged the cruiser’s boosters.
“That won’t be necessary,” Karthax’s voice came back on the line. “Return to headquarters for debriefing.”
“Sir?” I asked incredulously. “I’m five away from Columbus-Farrow, and if our intel on them is wrong as well-”
“Return to headquarters,” he said again, this time with authority. “That will do, Nightpath.” The console clicked. I punched the cruiser’s handlebar in frustration.
“That guy sounds like an ass,” the auric remarked from behind me.
“You could hear him?” I asked.
“I didn’t need to,” he said.
The Inquisitor General’s words didn’t sit well with me. Karthax, normally laconic by any standard, would still have more to say about a botched job. That he didn’t have further instructions for me or at least some vocal interest in my well-being made me a little nervous.
On a whim, I wheeled the cruiser off of the main road and down a one-way street to approach Columbus-Farrow from a less obvious direction. Something akin to intuition snaked its way uncomfortably around my torso and settled in the pit of my stomach, and I was suddenly paranoid about coming into contact with any other NIGHTs heading to the North Beach storefronts. I gunned the engine and flew through several intersections, buildings and floating streetlights blurring by me.
“Where are we going, man?” the auric complained. “I told you, I didn’t do anything.”
“What do you know about the ragers at the Oxidium dispensary?” I asked him over my shoulder.
“Are you my lawyer?” he objected. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“You’ve got one estranged sister in Queens who works as a security guard,” I said, reading off the police reports from the corner of my eye, “and two brothers who might as well be revolutionaries. Your probation is up in four months, but any other incidents will put you straight back into the VPen, for two weeks this time. Your most recent mailing address-”
“Alright, alright!” he relented. “Nothing much. It’s…it was just a safehouse. The store was on the bottom, and a shelter on top. The owners sold Ox to friends of the cause, and funneled it back behind the scenes to keep the ragers calm and fed. Hiding in plain sight, you know how it is.”
“You’re a good Samaritan, then?” I had a hard time believing the thief had a philanthropic streak, but people can surprise you.
“Something like that,” he said. “People need those drugs, man.”
He wasn’t wrong. The Oxidium, which was initially marketed as a prescription against the effects of ceridium exposure, turned out to be a double-edged weapon against its intended consumers. For humans, it had the addictive tendencies of a narcotic with performance enhancers. For those with the auric gene, it had the same qualities, but with the unintended benefit of combating the rage plague that had begun to appear in the second generation of underraces.
Its addictive dependency had proven to outweigh its usefulness, however. Over time, auric exposure to Oxidium usually still resulted in the user devolving into a particular kind of psychosis that could be set off by the slightest provocation, bolstered by Oxidium-induced strength and reflexes. The rage plague’s root cause eluded even the most erudite of government scientists, and its symptoms could only be mitigated, albeit temporarily, by Oxidium.
“What do you know about these two buildings?” I asked the auric, pointing at the North Beach locations on the console.
He shifted to peer over my shoulder, reading the map as I slowed the cruiser and doubled back to circle the storefronts.
“Nothing, man. Those aren’t ours,” Tribe said. “They’re run by the auric king’s people. You’ll have to ask him.”
“I’ll be sure to do that when I meet him,” I quipped.
As we turned on Columbus-Farrow, the lights and sounds increased exponentially, with augmented reality digital ads of local bars and strip clubs filling my vision like carnivalesque holograms. Small, carefully manicured trees sat at intervals along the sidewalks, the only semblance of nature in the neon and concrete neighborhood.
We didn’t get very far. Dozens of clubbers and pub crawlers milled about in the middle of the street, being ushered away from a hastily set up perimeter around one of the storefronts in question. A thin line of yellow police tape cordoned off half of the block, and SFPD officers directed traffic and spoke with passersby. Two NIGHT vehicles sat placidly on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the block behind the police tape, riderless.
My cruiser’s console beeped with an incoming call from Striker. I ignored it, lowering the bike onto the ground level and maneuvering in between the pedestrians and stopped cars towards the perimeter.
I brought the vehicle to a halt just outside of the yellow tape and swung my leg over the side. Tribe started to get off as well, but I put a hand firmly on his chest.
“Stay here,” I said, pushing him back onto the bike. His tanned face scrunched in protest, but he sat still.
I walked a few paces towards a couple of police officers standing on the sidewalk, and turned back towards the cruiser. Catching Tribe’s eye, I tapped pointedly at the back of my neck, and then at him. He understood my meaning, morosely rooting himself to the cruiser.
The Blues straightened perceptibly as they saw me approach. There was no love lost between the city’s peacekeeping force and the government’s pet defense agency, but SFPD had neither the technology nor the mancy training to back up anything more than hollow protests about NIGHT jurisdiction over their crime scenes. To them, interacting with us was a little bit like being forced to do a group project with the school bully.
“Evening, officers,” I said, trying to put them at ease. “What’s the scene look like here?”
“Under control,” one of them, a short Caucasian fellow with a close-cropped beard, replied gruffly. The other, a stocky African American woman, just stared at me.
“Bomb threat, taken care of,” he continued, eyeing my torn clothing and dirty brown hair, which must have been darker than usual with dust and who knew what else.
I nodded, looking at the building behind the police tape. “Have you evacuated? Any inhabitants?”
“Not that we know of,” he said tersely.
I scanned the storefront for a few more moments, wondering who among the other NIGHTs had been sent to investigate it and what they had found. I suspected that the other North Beach building was similarly under control, and it made me shiver. I didn’t care for the idea that the downtown dispensary was special, or that someone knew when I would be there, and why. It made me feel like an open target.
“Any drones catch anything?” I asked at length.
“Aren’t any drones left around here,” the man said.
I nodded again, expecting as much. “Carry on.” I turned on my heel, walking back towards the cruiser.
“I hate them,” I heard the woman say when she thought I was out of earshot.
My earpiece buzzed twice as I walked over, alerting me of two waiting messages. Tribe had moved into the driver’s seat and was holding up a small digitab and fiddling with the console. The device finished syncing as I reached the cruiser, enabling the vehicle’s sound system and beginning to play a turn-of-the-century reggae anthem.
The auric looked up as I approached, grinning. “I’ve never sat in one of these before!” he exclaimed.
“Why do I not believe you?” I muttered under my breath, waving a hand and killing the sound system. He jumped back into the passenger seat and I straddled the cruiser, enabling the messages on my lens display. The bike lurched forward under my touch as we turned away from the perimeter.
Both messages were sent within twenty seconds of each other. The first, from Striker, read simply: Return to HQ. The second, barely more informative, was from Madge.
HQ not safe, it read. Disappear.
I allowed the messages to fade from my display, letting the bike cruise for a few blocks. Until thirty minutes ago, my occupation had been fairly straightforward: root out enemies of the state, neutralize or otherwise eliminate them, and generally keep myself out of harm’s way while doing it. I’m ordinarily very good at my job, but in the past half hour, things had become infinitely more complicated. The network of NIGHT informants was normally airtight, and I had never been given a reason to doubt my intel. For things to have gone south so quickly was a huge warning sign, never mind Madge’s message, which I trusted implicitly.
The night wind ruffled my hair as I drove us along aimlessly, considering. I needed time and I needed information, and didn’t know how to find either. As much as I hated to admit it, I needed help.
“We’re going to take a detour,” I said to the auric behind me.
“Whatever man, I don’t have any place to be,” he replied lazily.
Taking a deep breath, I used the cruiser console to disengage the bike and my digitab from the network, leaving me technologically blind against anything that was happening in the digital sphere, but protecting us from being traced.
“Know anyone that can hack into a mainframe?” I asked Tribe.
“No,” he said thoughtfully from behind me, “but I bet I know someone who does.”
THREE
Baseball is the best human sport in existence. After soccer. Soccer is the best human sport in existence.
-The Sigil of Sparks
It took a lot longer to reach Tribe’s contact without the cruiser’s network-enabled routefinder, but as soon as we pulled into the Richmond district I had a fair idea of whom he was taking me to see. Paradoxically, there were very few fences who worked this far out from the city center and close to the Golden Gate. Only a small number of people had sway with the auric king’s outpost beneath the erstwhile Presidio less than a mile away.
Alina Hadzic was a former big leaguer and relief pitcher, leading the San Francisco Giants to three Global Championships and two World Series, headlining the papers as the first half-auric woman to play in the majors. A rookie sensation, she skyrocketed to the top of the player rankings for her first decade of play, retiring early to serve in the Fourth Gulf War and returning with a well-documented interest in visiting the underrace capital north of the city, Aurichome. Rather than making the rounds as a politician or sports commentator, as seemed to have become the standard pipeline for retired athletes, she quietly opened a sports-themed bar on the outskirts of the Richmond.
It was, however, much less known that her bar was an underground railroad for rev movement. Most underrace citizens with their pointed ears to the ground knew about her operation, and that hers was a safe place for revolutionaries. Among their own, they called her the Pitcher.
We pulled up in front of the sports bar, a large space that was all windows, stuck between two towering, hastily constructed apartment buildings. Flags from various Bay Area sports teams stuck out colorfully from an orange- and black-painted awning. A small, AR-enabled sign hung over the heavy front door, flashing They Might Be Giant in three-dimensional curvilinear script. The place looked closed for the night and empty, dark except for a few small lights within.
My temple had started throbbing during our ride as the Oxadrenalthaline wore off. I rubbed at it gently as I parked the cruiser, reaching into the side compartment for another syringe.
“You want one?” I asked the auric, who had hopped off the bike and was making his way to a tiny corridor on the left side of the building.
“Nah,” he drawled, his mouth visibly swollen, “she’ll take care of it.”
I pricked my temple and felt my vision clear immediately. Scanning the street for any movement and seeing none, I followed the thief into the alleyway.
He was already tapping away furiously at his digitab, pressing it up against a mechanism on the building’s side entrance. The lock quietly beeped, and Tribe pushed the door open with a palm. He flashed me a toothy, blood-stained grin, and stepped inside.
Roughly two seconds later, he came hurtling back out of the door, slamming into the wall of the adjacent building and falling into a heap on the ground. My hand shot to the pistol within my coat, but before I could move, a shadow leapt through the side entrance and on top of the hapless auric, growling and tearing at his jacket.