by Sean Platt
Doc, who was usually impervious to embarrassment, felt a blush creeping up from under his collar. He’d done acres of dirty deeds with Kai, but all of them had been in the bedroom. He didn’t exactly appreciate her come-ons while they were crossing a street filled with hookers and junkies. They were passing a few clusters of people in the gutters, and despite the vagrants’ stupor, heads had raised at Kai’s remark.
“You know I can do things with my tongue that…”
“Do you ever get tired of being a whore?”
The comment was wrong on a dozen levels, but Kai took it as fair retaliation and smirked. She liked control, and sex was one of her ways to get it. Other ways were money and rapport, both of which Kai had in spades. Doc had always felt comfortable with her. It was as if they were a couple, rather than mutual clients. Kai bought from Doc, and she seldom paid with credits. Doc got the dust knocked off his boots and usually remunerated with gifts instead of cash. It was intimate, in a way. It was easy to forget that she probably had the same setup with dozens of guys.
“Can I ask you something, sweetheart?” Doc said.
“Always.”
“Why are you here?”
“Stanford,” she answered.
“I mean, why are you here with me.” He shook his head, already feeling dumb for where his question was going. “Never mind. You must get that all the time.”
“What?”
“Guys who think they’re getting special treatment.”
She laughed. It was a strange sound, down in the city’s gutter. “This is special treatment,” she said. “Believe it or not, I don’t help all of my clients vanish.”
“So again, why are you here?”
She shrugged. “This job isn’t about the money for me anymore. A girl can’t just do it for the money if she expects to stay whole.”
As strange as her laugh had been, hearing Kai talk about wanting to be “whole” was a thousand times stranger. She saw his look and continued.
“Don’t look so surprised,” she said. “We all — well, all of us in Enterprise, anyway — earn our credits so that we can do something else. We work hard so we can play hard. But when I’m done working, I don’t want to read books. I like to fuck. That’s the fun part. So I don’t have to work and then play. I turn parts of my work into play.”
“This is play?” said Doc, looking around. He still felt like he could get a knife in his ribs at any second.
“I’m not afraid of life’s dark corners, Doc,” she said. “I have my favorite clients, and doing things like this for them? Well, it’s my version of reading books after work. In fact, another of my favorite boys had me worried when you showed up. He called, then disappeared. Now I can’t find him. It has me bothered. So yeah, I have my little projects.” She caught him looking again and gave him a fake glimmer of anger. “What? You’ve never heard of a hooker with a heart of gold?”
Doc shook his head. “I guess I figured you did it for the money.”
“I’ve got more money than I can spend.”
That got Doc’s attention. They were nearing Stanford’s building again, but he stopped short of it and faced her.
“How much money you got, sunshine?”
“How much money you got, cowboy?” she retorted.
“Plenty.”
She looked around, seeming to notice her surroundings for the first time. Then, quietly, she said, “If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
Doc smiled. “On three,” he said. Then he counted down, and when he reached one, they both gave the balances in their credit accounts. Then both looked at the other, impressed.
“I thought you were a scrapper,” she said.
“And I thought you were a working girl.”
They resumed walking. Looking forward, he said, “You know, we’re not that different.”
“Sure we’re not,” she said, looking at him amused. She probably used that look a lot, probably when her clients fell in love.
“We’re both whores,” he said. “We screw people for a living. I do it with slick talk and you do it with your fancy fur box, but it really ain’t that different. I don’t know about you, but sometimes it’s hard for me to look in the mirror. I’ve sold defective upgrades when I had to eat. I once got my hands on a friend’s client list, and stole them all away. I’m not proud of it, but the thing is, sometimes things are tough and a man has to eat. I’d do it all again if I had to, and…”
Kai stopped him by reaching up and putting a thin finger against his lips. She said, “You should know I don’t have any fur on my box, unless that’s what the client wants. And please, don’t be a cliche.”
He shook his head. The finger left his lips.
“Men tell me secrets,” she said. “It’s not wise. Don’t just spill your guts to the pretty girl because she acted like you mattered.”
“Bitch,” he said, smiling, “I matter just fine without your approval.”
They arrived back at the sandstone building and turned toward its entrance. Doc had one foot on the first step in front of its door when Kai put a hand out to stop him.
“Stanford is the best, but I don’t trust him at all,” she said. “When he called me back, there’s a reason I tried to push you out of the shot and a reason I got annoyed when you shoved your face back into it. Believe me, he screencapped you and has run your image through enough filters to know exactly who you are.”
“So…” Doc began.
“So I’ll go up first,” she said. “You stay here, and I’ll buzz you when it’s safe.”
Chapter 5
Kai entered the lobby. The foyer of Stanford’s building, once home to the rich, displayed an enormously detailed Greek mosaic composed of small porcelain tiles. Here and there tiles were shattered and cracked, but a shadow of its former grandeur remained.
The lobby itself was large and carried the same sense of forgotten glory. There were fluted columns that had split and now sat askew, leaking dust. There was an old-fashioned elevator with elaborate scrolling around its edges to one end, abandoned. When the building had been rescued as low-end Directorate housing in the 40’s, city engineers had decided that despite the boom in building technology that had come during the 2020’s renaissance, the fancy elevator was beyond saving. Bombs from the early skirmishes had unsettled the foundation. The building itself was still sound (“Sound enough for Directorate shit,” said civil rights advocates with scorn), but the elevator shaft was damaged past practical repair. So instead, repairs had focused on the freight elevator in the back. It, like the apartments upstairs, had the scantest level of Beam connectivity. The apartments had a single panel at the door and a plug for the rare resident who could afford a hard-wired, secondhand console. The elevator had a swipe panel.
Luckily, it also had buttons.
Kai approached what had once been an elegant front desk, turned left, and slipped behind a shattered marble countertop and through a nondescript door. She steeled herself for anyone who might be waiting in the back hallway, but it was mercifully empty. The place smelled like urine. Kai ignored the scent with some difficulty, crossed to the elevator, and pressed the button with her elbow. The button had a fingerprint scanner, but worked fine as a button. The technology wasn’t intended to allow privacy. It was just old. Back in the day, The Beam hadn’t touched as much as it did now. Adding connectivity to something as simple as an elevator had, at the time, seemed unnecessary.
The button lit. The elevator dinged, then opened. Kai stepped inside, looking around for a swipe pad. The doors grew impatient and closed. She’d been in old elevators before, but on the few occasions she’d been in this one, Stanford had been with her and he’d operated it. She couldn’t see how he’d done it. There seemed to be no gesture sensor. Sure, there was a call button in the lobby, but how could Kai tell the elevator where to go if she couldn’t gesture directions? Stanford lived on the fourteenth floor, but there wasn’t even a keypad.
“Console,” she said a
loud.
The elevator ignored her.
“Fourteenth floor,” she said, knowing it was breath wasted.
The elevator was starting to feel claustrophobic. Kai had never noticed before how tight the space was. The one in her building was lightning fast and operated by voice or gesture. This box was old and, if she remembered correctly, shuddered as it climbed at the speed of an old woman.
There were two rows of white buttons near the door, with numbers. She nudged the one labeled “14” with her elbow. The elevator started to move. Kai sighed.
But just as the display above the door clicked to three, the elevator shuddered to a stop. Did someone else want to get on, going up? That might make sense going down, but who would want to go from three up to another floor?
With some surprise, Kai realized she was nervous. Why would she be nervous? She was comfortable everywhere, from a Beau Monde penthouse to the bottom of the gutter. She had a variety of defensive add-ons and a naturally sharp ability to free herself from sticky situations. With no reason to expect danger, why were her nerves so keyed up?
It was the elevator. It was dawning on her how much she hated this fucking little coffin.
In front of her, the doors hadn’t opened. She’d assumed the elevator had been called on the third floor, but if that were the case, the doors should have opened by now. Why hadn’t they? What was wrong?
Relax, girl.
Kai took one, two, three deep breaths. But instead of calming her, her slow breaths simply reminded her of how much time was passing. Three full in-out cycles took Kai more than thirty seconds, and thirty seconds in a stopped elevator was an eternity. The doors should definitely have opened. Kai swore. The fucking thing was stuck.
In front of her, the bank of backlit buttons extinguished. The overhead light followed. The small strip of security lighting around the edges stayed lit, casting the box into an eerie twilight. The elevator had stopped humming, too, and suddenly everything was deadly quiet. The quiet in itself bothered her. Tenement buildings were usually loud with the sounds of decaying humanity. She tried to remember if Stanford’s building was that way, but couldn’t. The air seemed so strange, so far beyond quiet. It was as if the elevator had been soundproofed. But that wouldn’t make sense, either.
Standing in the scant light, Kai felt herself start to panic. She wasn’t the sort of girl to lose her shit. The feeling caught her off guard.
Relax. The elevator just went to sleep.
Of course. As off-grid as the building was (it only had the slightest Beam access), electricity would be tightly rationed. She’d seen that in the lobby, in the way the lights had subtly brightened as she’d approached, then dimmed as she’d passed. Of course the elevator slept when nobody was in it.
But she was in it.
Kai pushed buttons, trying to wake the thing. Nothing happened. Her heart started to beat faster.
She looked below the row of buttons and saw a keyhole intended for emergency operation. Beside it, there was a small pad. If Kai put her finger on that pad, she could let the elevator know she was there. Never mind that pressing the buttons should tell the elevator she was here; that was a fingerprint pad, mandatory in all forms of conveyance for just such an emergency. The pad and the brain behind it would run on an independent circuit, broadcast wirelessly, and allow her to wake the elevator remotely.
But Kai couldn’t use it. Because why would a girl who was currently knocking on the door of Beau Monde status be in such a seedy part of town? People would ask questions. They might send more bots, and this time they’d scan her… and anyone they found waiting outside.
Kai smashed her finger against the pad before she had time to reconsider. But nothing happened. The elevator stayed dark and didn’t wake.
“Fucker,” she said aloud.
Kai struck her fist against the door in frustration. She was starting to sweat, and hated the feeling. It was so undignified. She could fight; she’d had to fight plenty before. But what could she fight when her opponent was a stubborn metal box?
The lights came on. The buttons lit. The elevator began to move down.
Of course. It was going to the lobby. Doc had finally come after her, thank God.
But it didn’t go to the lobby. The elevator stopped when the display above the door read “2.” The floor settled, and something in the old metal clunked. Kai waited for the doors to part. But it didn’t matter which floor she ended up on; she just wanted out. There was a staircase. She’d walk the thirteen floors up to Stanford’s apartment, then would walk all fourteen down. She’d do the same again with Doc in tow. But she wasn’t getting into this fucking coffin again.
The doors slid open and Kai found herself facing three men holding slumberguns. They were dressed head-to-toe in black: black shoes, black socks, pressed black dress pants, black belts, black gloves, and black T-shirts under long black trenchcoats. They all wore black dress hats with brims, circled by black bands. On their faces, each man wore a black visor. The visors had integrated over-the-ear headphones and covered everything but their mouths. Around the visors’ edges, Kai could see light leaking from the projections they were watching.
Kai’s heartbeat quickened. Beamers.
“Get out,” said the man at the group’s front, pointing his slumbergun.
“Look, I’ve got no spar with you,” said Kai, holding up her hands.
“Get out,” the man to the far left echoed.
Kai kept her hands high and slid sideways out of the elevator. She wanted to put the hallway to her back and sprint off the second she saw an opening, but the Beamers seemed to anticipate the move. The man on the far side shifted his position to block. Kai found herself pinned to the wall beside the elevator, its call button at her back.
“I’ll just go,” she said.
“Kai Dreyfus,” said Beamer at the front of the group. “High-end escort. Dealer in secrets. Rumored assassin. Lives at…”
“I have it,” said the other.
Kai looked from one Beamer to the other, understanding what was passing between the men. They were reading her stats from Beam feeds plugged into their visors, but the experience of being assessed by someone who couldn’t, literally speaking, see her was unsettling. Kai had tried on visors before, of course, but she’d only used them for immersion. Beamers weren’t usually fully immersed, because as much as they believed that The Beam’s reality was more accurate than the world’s, they couldn’t escape the truth that things still happened in front of them that they needed to be aware of. If they’d been standing in the middle of the grid, they might not even be using first-person visual because The Beam around them would tell them more about her than sight could, but out here, the visors worked more or less as enhanced cameras. Kai felt X-rayed, and found the sensation invasive, as if they were under her skin.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Data,” said two of them at once.
The response sounded like the ritual it was. Beamers always wanted data. They wore their visors at all times unless they were sleeping or in a simulator. They never unplugged. Unplugging a Beamer was like death because it forced them to contend with the inferior nature of an inferior world that failed to evolve by the second. The Beam, on the other hand, was always changing, always evolving. Reality, to Beamers, felt like standing still.
“I could give you plenty of data,” said Kai. She lifted her shirt to bare her breasts, then traced her fingers across her nipples.
“You’re coming with us,” said the man on the right.
“Careful,” said the one in the middle. “Her temperature’s rising.”
“So is yours,” she said, reaching for the closest Beamer’s belt.
The man stepped away.
“Oh, come on,” she purred. “I could take all three of you.” Her fingers traced the line of flesh above the hem of her pants. “Let me show you boys some reality that’s still better than The Beam.” She ran her fingers over her lips. She slid her thu
mbs under her waistband.
The man on the left leaned forward a fraction of an inch. It was exactly enough.
Kai’s professional ability to deliver pleasure gave her body the significant side effect of incredibly fast and responsive muscles. Doc had been selling her monthly injections of scavenger nanos for over a year, and hour by hour, the tiny machines tuned her nerves and muscles, making her leaner and faster and stronger. Her legs and arms had learned to move with inhuman speed, and she could strike with surprising amounts of force. Men twice her size were always surprised when she could easily turn them over, throw them from bed to wall to floor without any effort. She could stretch her body into a pretzel — handy as a prostitute, and deadly in fights as an occasional assassin for hire.
Kai reached forward, grabbed the man by the neck, and blew her fist through his visor with shocking ease. The Plaxi shattered, shards digging into his cheeks and forehead. She saw shocked, naked eyes staring at her for a split second before she turned, parrying, and struck him in the side of the head with her elbow. The other two Beamers raised their guns to fire, but Kai split low, one leg forward and the other back, a skill learned through decades of ballet and honed by nanobot muscle reconstruction. One of the Beamers discharged his weapon, but the shot flew above her head and struck the man she’d hobbled, sending him unconscious down the hallway and into a heap on the floor.
The other two attackers tried to compensate and aim downward, but Kai sprung back up, squeezing her split legs and rising like an accordion. On the way up, she gripped one man in the crotch with a tuned-up fist capable of cracking concrete and squeezed until something popped. The man crumbled, going limp above her, so Kai ducked under his stomach as he screamed, blocking a slumbershot from the remaining man. Then she released her grip on the man’s testicles, feeling him fall inert over her and, deflecting with the body, simply reached up and took the remaining man’s slumbergun in her hand. And with that, fifteen seconds after the melee had started, Kai stood pointing her final assailant’s own gun at his chest.