"Okay. How much?"
"I think he or she messed with ten minutes or so,” Lev answers, “which is why it's so hard to find. Best I can tell, it looks as though the doctored ten minutes occurred between when Roxx leaves the barn, and you show up. They replaced those ten minutes with a copied footage of Kyle working at his desk."
"So what we're looking for is that missing ten minutes."
"Right. But it's such a small thing that people must have overlooked it. I only found it because I got lucky and found a deleted video file with a slightly different time signature."
"I can't believe that once something is deleted, it's completely gone," I say. "It must be somewhere, right?"
"It is...kind of..."
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"You know how I said all security footage is on a continuous stream and save until the end of the day when it's clipped and stored in its proper place, right?"
"Yeah..."
"Well, the original stream and save could still be somewhere," Lev says.
"Where?" I ask.
"That's the problem," he says. "It's everywhere. I mean there may be a trace of it in Halcyon's cloud storage. Or it could be floating around in other databases outside of Halcyon. So that's what I've been working on for the past four hours."
"What?"
"I made a program that could go out into cyberspace to look for it,” says Lev. “It's not exactly legal, or foolproof. It's experimental, and I threw it together on the fly."
"Tell me you did it," I say. "Tell me you sent it out there."
"That..." he says while typing, "Is what...I'm doing...now." Then he presses the enter key. "But I gotta say..."
"What?"
"I don't know how long it's going to take."
"Can you estimate?"
"Okay well first of all. If it works, and that is a huge 'if.' It could take anywhere between two days to twelve years," he says.
"That's not an estimate!"
"It's the best one I can give you," he says. "Do you have any idea how much data is floating around up there?"
I give a deep, heavy sigh. "Well, it's something. I guess."
"It's a very long shot," he says.
I think about it for a moment. Twelve years is way too long to wait. Hell, even two days is too long.
"So, I'm still going to get paid right?" Lev asks.
"Yes, Lev, I'm still going to pay you,"
"Good," he says. "Cuz I got fired. And they want to charge me for the damages to the barn."
I close my eyes. "I'll take care of that too."
"Um...it's a lot of damages," he says.
"Yeah, I saw it. I was there. I'll foot the bill."
Lev takes a relieved breath. "Good. So what now?"
I think on his question a moment. "I think it's time we pay someone a visit."
"Oh? Who?”
“Thaddeus Berrett," I say. "We gotta go to Club Rapture."
Eighteen
Less than twenty minutes later, I am out of the hospital and behind the wheel of my car. Everything hurts, but the medical care I received makes it manageable. I am driving Lev home. I need him to get some rest before we go out tonight, and I hope the hundred thousand credits I transferred to his account will help him sleep better this afternoon.
Lev lives on District Three, where the motif is modest and affordable. Most of the buildings here are a few stories tall. There are ten or twelve buildings that have forty floors but nothing past that. When they built District Three, there was no Dome. The builders were cautious when it came to wind speed and structural integrity at higher altitudes.
The original engineers built from the ground up. When the tech to make floating districts came along, the city planners built as needed. First came District Two, and District Three came second. The buildings of the lower floating districts are conservative in design. A lot of them are over a hundred years old and were made with old fashioned concrete, wood, steel, and glass, with few propyl innovations.
Halcyon constructed The Dome after District Three came up. After which, districts went up every fifty years or so. It's what started the great Human Squeeze. Urban sprawl was no more. People came from all over, concentrating the human population into enormous Megacities, which left huge swathes of land for farming to feed the human population. It also allowed nature to reclaim the lands we'd ravaged since the industrial revolution. The Human Squeeze gave the forests, rivers, and oceans hundreds of years to heal themselves.
"Wow, I can't believe the guy we're going to see is Thaddeus Berrett," says Lev. "Do you think he can help us find that footage?"
I shrug. "I don't know. Maybe. But like you said, it's nearly impossible, right?"
"Yeah, but with him on our side, we might be able to find it sooner."
"Okay, first let's get one thing straight. Thaddeus is not on our side," I say. "At best he's an independent consultant in this matter. He's not going to help us any more than he has to."
"He's an independent consultant on what?" Lev asks.
"Thaddeus is a big name in the demonic underworld,” I say. “And something like Marchosias crossing over to our plane is big news. He's gotta know something."
"Wait...demonic underworld? What is he?"
"He's a demon," I say.
"You're kidding me."
"He's more of what we humans have traditionally called a vampire,” I tell him. “He's technically a possession. Do you know all those legends? Vlad the Impaler? Dracula?"
"Yeah..."
"It was all him. He is the original. All those legends were based on him”
"Get the hell outta here," says Lev.
"It's true," I say.
"Okay. So if all that vampire stuff is legend, what is he?" Lev asks.
"He's one of Asmodeus' faithful," I say. "Asmodeus is one of the big seven, one of the most powerful of all the 'evil' celestials. He's as ancient as they come — one of the first to evolve from the Field's emotional awakening. Asmodeus is born of desire and lust, the first and most powerful celestial to feed off of that part of the Field's emotional spectrum."
"So what does that make Thaddeus?"
"He's an Incubus," I say. "As of now, he's Asmodeus' oldest surviving follower, and he is still recruiting people to join Asmodeus' cause."
"This is all so weird," he says. "So what, he and his followers do sex stuff?"
I chuckle. "Yes, Lev. They do sex stuff. Asmodeus never had problems gaining followers, let me tell you. You ever heard of Sodom and Gomorrah?"
"No. What the hell are those?" Lev asks.
"They were two ancient cities," I answer. "They got into Asmodeus in a big way, and the demonic possessions and conjurations got out of control. Mom had to lay waste to both cities. Fire and brimstone. That's good ole mom and her army of angels."
"So how does Thaddeus fit into all this Asmodeus stuff?"
"Thaddeus was a powerful sorcerer back in the middle ages," I say to him. "Back then, we humans had magic users within our ranks. They were able to harness Field energies almost as well as the elves did. The only problem was, they didn't live too long."
"Why not?" he asks.
"The reason magic doesn't mesh with us humans is because our bodies can't handle it. Manipulating Field energies needs an element of the celestial and otherworldly. That's why elves do it so well; there's a bit of celestial in them. They're like mild possessions, except its part of their DNA. We humans don't have that, so when we use Field energies, it messes up our bodies something fierce."
"So if Thaddeus is a magic user, how come he's been alive so long?" asks Lev.
"That's because Thaddeus is a possession,” I answer. “He's got a demonic spirit inside him. Back in the Dark Ages, Thaddeus went by the name Vlad III, and he was a pretty adept conqueror. He and his armies spread over the Baltic region like wildfire. And the people he killed were used as a sacrifice to summon one of Asmodeus' greatest generals — a demon prince named Dracul. Now, if Vlad on his o
wn was formidable, Dracul and Vlad together were damned near unbeatable."
"Except for your mom," he says. "Fire, brimstone, an army of angels, the avenging hand of God, et cetera."
"Exactly,” I say. “She put a stop to them right quick, but she didn't know that Dracul and Vlad had combined their talents and used Field energy to bond themselves with each other. Dracul had considerably weakened himself so that a part of him could live on in Vlad as a possession, and was able to disguise himself and escape.
"After that,” I continue, “Vlad traveled around, building himself a bit of a following by gathering more humans to become Asmodeus' faithful. He gained the demon lord's favor with offerings of human lust. Soon Vlad was able to perform mass possession rituals where the lecherous spirits of lust would overcome their newfound human hosts, creating succubi and incubi alike. After a while, orgies and Bacchanals weren't enough for their ilk. They began killing. Blood made them stronger; it fueled their magic and powered their desires. That's when mom started hunting them down and killing them."
"So what happened after The Omega Treaties?" Lev asks.
"Vlad went legal,” I say. “He could continue living on this plane, as long as he doesn't infringe on the Free Will of the living. If people wanted to give themselves freely to him and Asmodeus, then so be it. But if he did anything, like used his magic to coerce such a following, then there'd be hell to pay. Since Vlad was older than most of the succubi and incubi he created, he was able to resist the call for blood. A lot of his followers, however, were too far gone. The blood had made them more demon than man. The spirit of lust and human host were so difficult to differentiate that my mom had to kill them."
"So if all this stuff happened between Thaddeus and your mom. How do you and Thaddeus, or Vlad know each other?"
"I knew him when he was Asimov Juergensen, porn king of L.A," I say.
"That's the same guy!"
"Oh, so that guy you know?" I say. "Sodom and Gomorrah don't ring any bells, but porn king of LA, and you're all over it."
"Well, the guy revolutionized the industry five hundred years ago,” Lev says. “I mean, of course, the internet had a lot to do with it, but he saw the potential and jumped on it."
I shake my head at Lev.
"So what were you doing?" Lev asks. "You weren't 'working' for him, were you?"
"Eww no," I say. "I was following Thaddeus around to make sure he was on the up and up. One of my duties as the Bearer was to keep tabs on these legal demonic celestials hanging around and banish the ones that were misbehaving.”
The porn industry was perfect for a guy like Thaddeus. He was there to ride the wave of the internet boom, and it wasn't as high profile as other profit sources in Hollywood. He found himself a nice little niche where he got rich, did honor to Asmodeus, and didn’t get too much attention outside of the industry.
When Vlad assumed the identity of Thaddeus Berrett at the last thirty years of the twenty-fifth century, he was the sole proprietor of Draco Robotics. They were the premier manufacturers of pleasure bots. It was a company he grew and inevitably sold to Halcyon. Now Draco Robotics is one of Halcyon’s many subsidiaries and manufactures a whole bunch of different bots with various purposes. Thaddeus' net worth now runs into the hundreds of billions, and his money funds a lot of District Eleven's infrastructure.
"I gotta tell ya, I'm a bit excited," Lev says. "I've never been past District Nine before."
"Well, hopefully, we won't get into too much trouble."
Lev directs me to his place, and when we get there, he tells me to park on the street. As I land and find a spot, a mild nostalgia strikes me of having to learn how to parallel park. I haven't done that in centuries.
"Thanks for the ride man," he says.
"No problem,” I say. “And get some sleep. You need to be alert tonight."
"I thought you said there's not gonna be any trouble."
"I said I hope we don't get into trouble. But it's always nice to be prepared. I'll be back here to pick you up at nine."
"Okay."
Lev gets out of the car and walks to the entrance to his apartment building.
I roll down the passenger window to yell out, "And wear something nice!"
Nineteen
"Lev, I said to wear something nice."
"What are you talking about? This is nice!" Lev protests.
I don't know why the guy loves gaudy colors so much. The avatar he's displaying is a bright orange suit, with a white shirt underneath, fringed with yellow. His shock of curly orange hair is sticking out with an up-and-at-em determination, and he is sporting a russet seven o'clock shadow on the bottom half of his face.
"I paid you a hundred grand, and this is what you got to show for it?"
"First of all, avatar packages have gone up significantly since I last went shopping,” says Lev. “And second of all, I look great!"
"You look like a teenager."
"I look young,” he says.
"That's not what we we're going for. Let's find you something more like what I'm wearing."
"You look boring," he says
I am displaying a two button, single-breasted, charcoal gray, sport coat; a black fitted shirt, and a silver tie. My bottom half is sporting a pair of black pants creased to perfection, a brown belt, and a pair of deep brown, Ferragamo, oxfords.
"Okay come on, stop fooling around,” I say to Lev. “Let's get you something else. You can save that outfit for when you want to perform at a kid's birthday party."
"Ha...ha"
It takes me an hour to cut Lev's hair, get him all cleaned up, groomed, and dressed properly. He's now displaying a navy blue blazer — the kind that intuitively hides a shoulder holster underneath the illusion. It's an expensive mod, but it's worth it. He has a sky blue shirt, with white pants, a black belt, and Versace double buckle derby shoes. Then we complete the ensemble with an orange and navy blue striped necktie to give him the 'stand-out' color he craves.
He looks at himself in his visor mirror, as we make our way up to District Eleven in my Tracker. He strokes his clean-shaven face and tickles his hair with his fingertips.
"I look good," he says.
I smile. "I know you do. See, isn't this better than looking like a human Cheeto? Now, remember, this isn't a get drunk, party, and have fun kind of thing. We're gathering info. So keep your eyes peeled. If things go sour, we are going to be up against some vampiric possessions. They can get pretty nasty. You feel comfortable using the pistols?"
"Yeah, I think I'm good," he says.
"Maybe we should watch some more videos on how to use them. And I can give you pointers along the way," I say
"Good idea."
He opens up the central video display and presses a button on his wrist applicator to play the video on the windshield, right above the dash, in between both of us.
As the video plays, Lev unholsters one of his guns and inspects it. "Aren't these like five hundred years old?" he asks.
"What are you talking about? They're brand new." I tell him.
"What? Where would you even get guns nowadays?" he asks.
"Dwarves," I say.
"Are you kidding me?"
"No," I say. "My mentor's a dwarf."
"Mentor?"
"Yeah, he taught me how to fight, swing a sword, and shoot,” I say. “He's a good guy. I see him every thirty years to replenish my stock."
Lev shakes his head, smiling. Then he turns his whole seat around (another feature I love about my car) and faces the back seats.
"Are you gonna let me use one of those?" Lev asks, pointing at my twin silvered katanas, and The Destroying Angel propped up in the back.
"Those will take a lot more training than watching videos,” I say. “I mean I'll teach you if you want me to, but it takes a whole lot of conditioning."
Lev turns his chair back around to face the front.
"Like running and stuff?" Lev asks.
"Yeah."
"Then
no thanks," he says. "Question."
"Shoot," I say.
"How do you plan on using them?” he asks. “I mean you are pretty messed up right now."
He's not wrong. I am not at a hundred percent. The flex-wrapping covering me from the neck down, and the nanobots inside my body are working full-time to repair me, but they have a long way to go. If I have to do any fighting, I'll re-injure myself, and it'll leave me worse off than when I started.
"I hope I don't have to use them," I tell him. "But I'll get by."
"Maybe you should be the one using guns," Lev suggests.
"Oh, don't worry, I'll still be packing some heat."
"Packing some heat! Ha! Classic," he says. "You should invest in some pulse cannons. They're way easier to use. So I've heard. I mean, I can't afford one, but I'm sure you could."
"They don't affect demons much," I tell him. "For conjurations, nothing works better than silver. Iron and steel will hurt them too, but not as bad as silver. Energy blasts from pulse cannons will maybe tickle them a little."
"Really...what about possessions?" he asks.
"A pulse cannon will work, but the demon inside them will heal them up pretty quick."
"Really?"
"That's how it works,” I say. “The demon wants to survive, and to do so it needs to preserve the body. It takes longer to kill a possession, but it is possible, and once the body is dead, the spirit isn't powerful enough to remain on this plane and gets sucked back through the Field. And, once again, silver is best. Nothing slows down demonic regeneration like silver."
"Uh-huh. And where do you get so much silver?" he asks.
"Dwarves."
"Of course," he says.
We watch more videos on the ride up to District Eleven. With my commentary, it should be enough training. He may need a couple of practice shots, but I'm not too concerned. If Lev can learn to shoot an assault rifle from watching a video, then he can learn to use a pistol. A lot of people are like that nowadays. The ability of humans to learn through osmosis and observation has improved over the centuries as the video medium became ubiquitous and convenient. Call it evolution, I suppose.
When we crest over District Eleven's protective fifty foot tall perimeter wall, Lev swipes the windshield display off and looks out at the district's cityscape with wide eyes.
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