Pornopsychedelica

by Chris Johnson

  Martin walked up to the barman. 'Four beers, please.'

  The man's eye twitched, thumb smoothed a thick moustache. 'I ain't serving her.'

  'Who?'

  'The brat.'

  The man had a fading tattoo of a snake on his forearm.

  'Ah, come on. She's nearly sixteen. It's hot outside.'

  The man made a wordless mumble. 'Is it ever anything else?'

  Four cold bottles appeared. The barman cranked off the caps one after the other. Martin handed them out, keeping the last for himself.

  He took a drink, long and slow, said to Teja, 'What's wrong?'

  'I've never had beer before.'

  Martin drank again. He rubbed the bottle across his forehead. He watched Teja take a tentative drink. She took another. 'That's good, huh?'

  'I'm not sure.'

  'Forget everything you've been told,' said Tomoko. 'You can do anything you like now.'

  'Can I leave?'

  'Sure.'

  'Then I choose to stay,' said Teja.

  Martin checked the time on his watch.

  'We're five minutes early.' Tomoko pushed her hair behind her ear and took a drink of her beer.

  'Are we meeting someone?' asked Teja.

  'We're waiting for a call from my friend Jimmy. A call to the cell phone could be traced.'

  The cue ball slammed another ball into a pocket. Teja looked across at the men. They were wearing the same company overalls, possibly belonging to the factory facing the bar. Their attention seemed to be split between the pool table and Tomoko and herself.

  'Where are we going from here?'

  Tomoko slipped onto a high stool. 'Martin and Jessica are going to Japan. They'll wait for us there until we can join them. We're going to find this man Fernandez I told you about.'

  'I don't know what you've got planned,' said Martin. Teja wondered if Tomoko found him attractive. 'Or how you're gonna do it. I'm just glad I won't be there to see it.' Before he took a drink from his bottle, he said to Teja, 'If you had any sense you'd leave.'

  From somewhere behind the bar a telephone buzzed. The barman answered it.

  'Hey. You with the tits.' The barman's voice cut through the bar like a horn. 'You Tomoko?'

  She took the call, spoke quietly for two minutes. When she finished the barman snatched the handset from her, as if she'd taken an extended liberty with his property.

  'Everything's set. Jimmy's arranged a high altitude flyer to get you and Jess to Osaka. If everything goes to plan I'll see you in about three days.'

  Martin looked as though he wanted to say something, though he only lifted his shoulders.

  Teja only knew a few details of what was being planned, what she'd learned from Tomoko during her visits to the hospital. Her sim mind was yearning for more information, though right now she was enjoying her first cold beer.

  Outside the bar, the rain had stopped and the sun was hot and fierce. Martin looked up and down the street. The girl sat on the passenger seat. Teja's bag was taken out and placed onto the sidewalk with a heavy metal briefcase. It looked as though Martin was taking the car and leaving Tomoko and herself to make alternative travel arrangements.

  Martin played with the dressing wrapped around his hand for a few seconds, checked the gun in the hip holster at his side, then got in the car.

  'I'll be seeing you,' he said to Tomoko.

  Teja watched the vehicle cruise down the street and turned at the first junction. She picked up her bag. 'Where do we start looking for Mr. Fernandez?'

  'The obvious places first. How are you feeling?'

  'Better.'

  Tomoko pulled a pair of sunglasses from her pocket and gave them to her. 'I got you these.'

  'I don't really need sunglasses.'

  'They'll hide your eyes so you don't have to make them change colour. You don't want to end up frozen on a freighter heading for some mining colony. Happens to a lot of sims. They just disappear.' Tomoko slipped on her own sunglasses.

  'Do we have transport?'

  Tomoko gestured up the street just as the bar door opened and the two factory workers came out. They were unshaven and smelled of beer and sweat. Teja felt the muscles in her stomach tighten.

  She walked alongside Tomoko, carrying her small bag. All the possessions she owned. It wasn't much, just basic toiletries and a few clothes, but they were hers. They came to a large square of gravel where a motorbike leaned on its stand. A man with a limp ambled out from behind a broken hoarding, layers of old adverts peeling away. He rubbed his left eye like a tired infant.

  'I looked after it for ya, Tomoko.'

  'Did you see anyone?' She secured the briefcase to the rear luggage rack.

  'Nobody.' He used his hand to shade his eyes for a moment. 'Hot today. Girl like you gonna go nice and brown.'

  'It's always hot. You should get yourself a hat.' Tomoko pulled a crinkled bill from her back pocket and gave it to him.

  'Fifty?' His arms flopped to his side, a marionette with its strings cut. 'What am I gonna do with fifty? That ain't gonna get me jacked in for even an hour. Oh, fuck.'

  'Jonny. Jonny.' Tomoko's voice was soothing. 'Take it easy. I'll give you a hundred. Just stay away from China Town.'

  'But that's where --'

  Tomoko gave him another fifty. 'You can use the Ampang facility. If I see you again you know what will happen.'

  He stepped back. 'Yeah, some bad shit.'

  When the man had gone, shuffling down the street, Teja asked, 'Who's he?'

  Tomoko got on the bike and thumbed the ignition. 'Metal junkie. Got himself addicted to the Fractal Wood Corporation's cyberscapes. I use him now and then to snoop around. He brought my bike here.'

  'Will he die?'

  Tomoko kicked up the bike's stand and shrugged. 'I don't know. Some lose their sense of touch. Nothing is real anymore.' She throttled the engine and the bike purred. 'Come on, get on.'

  Teja straddled the bike behind Tomoko, her skirt riding up her thighs. She put the bag across her knees and held onto Tomoko's waist.

  There was little traffic on the roads that Tomoko used. Occasionally they were on Kuala Lumpur's busy main streets, though only for a few seconds as they cut across from one alley or back street to another. They fishtailed in front of a bus, stopping close to a police car waiting at a red light. Tomoko kept her head low, then took the first left as the light changed to green. Teja held on, the bike's engine vibrating between her thighs, the wind whipping her hair back.

  They stopped on an upper level of an empty multi-storey car park, behind a concrete pillar. Tomoko placed the briefcase on the floor ten feet away from the bike and pressed a stud recessed into the top. Something inside beeped twice.

  Teja watched, curious, though she was more interested in simply observing Tomoko than in knowing what she was doing. 'Is this place safe?'

  'There's nowhere safe. You can leave your stuff here.'

  They started the winding walk down the ramp. The art gallery where Fernandez had an exhibition was just around the back of the car park. They paused at a white stone bench where yellow and blue flowers spelled out the logo of an Off World courier on the grass, one of the art gallery sponsors.

  Teja straightened her clothes and loosened her hair with splayed fingers. It had been a long time since she had an appearance to take care of, though she'd slipped into that way of thinking almost as soon as she had seen her re-formed face in the mirror at the hospital.

  'You know what to do?' asked Tomoko.

  'Don't worry.'

  Teja made her way across the street to the art gallery, moving quickly up the stone steps leading to the glass frontage. A sign read 'exhibition closed'. She tried the first door and found it locked. Peering inside, she could see tall packing crates, rolls of bubble wrap and the general untidy litter of a place about to be deserted. To her left, two men were dragging something wrapped in plastic down the corridor. She didn't recognise Fernandez from the videos Tomoko had shown her. A se
curity guard startled her when he tapped on the glass door.

  'Closed,' he said, his voice muffled.

  'Is Mr. Martinez-Perez here? I have an appointment with him.'

  He leaned away, shouted something, turned back to her. 'No. You might try and call his office. The number's on the posters at the front.'

  She started to walk away. 'Thank you.'

  Tomoko waited on the bench, sat with her legs crossed. Her hair had a slight reddish sheen under the bright sun, like cherry wood. Teja hadn't noticed that before. In the apartment there had been plenty of things she had never noticed, when she had watched Tomoko coming and going on the street below through the slats over the windows. She sat next to Tomoko, remembering how they'd first met. The sun seemed to darken.

  Teja realised she was passing out. She managed to fall sideways with her head on Tomoko's lap before blackness completely engulfed her. For a brief moment she could feel Tomoko's fingers in her hair, smell the flowers that lined the road.

  20

  In the Service of Humanity

  Teja remembered most things clearly, though nothing more clearly than the day she had been taken into service. That was what Gentech called selling one of their simulants, a euphemism that didn't fool any of their bio-engineered products.

  When Teja had been called from her room, where she had been playing chess with Vanaja, she guessed that it was because she had been sold. She had walked down the long, cool corridors without any particular thoughts in mind, without any fear or apprehension. She had known this day would come, had known from the day she was created that she was a simulant, brought into life to serve mankind.

  She had walked into the Director's office like she had many times before, wide-eyed and innocent. She had moved between the two men and gone straight to the aquarium, looking for the khooli loaches. She knew they were in there somewhere, hiding at the bottom amongst the rocks and shells. Perhaps behind the diver and the bubbles bursting from a treasure chest.

  'As you can see, this is our most curious simulant,' had said the Director. 'Teja, I want you to meet Mr. Tito.'

  The man had held his hand out, the cuff of a white shirt poking out from under the sleeve of his black jacket. A tie with dancing snowmen on it. Teja had never seen snow. She had shaken Mr. Tito's hand at eleven years old. Five years later she would join his company's staff as their lead programmer, creating software for automechs on deep space refining stations.

  She had gone back to her room and spoken to Vanaja in Punjabi. Tito was Italian she'd told Vanaja. She'd spoken to him in his own language to help calm him. Why? Vanaja had asked. Teja had reached to the bag of candy smuggled in by one of the gardeners. The human had looked as though he needed reminding of home.

  Pleasant memories. Bad memories.

  Teja couldn't forget any of them. They could never fade over time, they could only be locked away in a dark part of the brain. Sometimes memories were like severed limbs, reattached and growing from her body in places where they didn't belong.

  She slowly opened her eyes. She saw Tomoko, laid on her side facing her. Teja didn't have to look around to know that she was on a hotel bed. Tomoko smiled, and she chased away the dark, sticky residues of Teja's dreams, the memories she could only control during the waking hours.

  'I dreamed of a stickman with a huge erection and two pink lizards playing poker,' she said softly.

  Tomoko pushed back strands of hair stuck to the sweat on Teja's forehead.

  Teja lightly touched her face, the smooth, restored skin. For a few seconds she could still feel the motions of the truck, rising and falling over a thick slurry of mud that had washed down from green slopes. It was a recurring dream.

  The air conditioning hummed and random chatter came from a cell phone on the table at the foot of the bed. A television was on with the sound turned down, and a song in Malay about broken mirrors and lost love murmured from a radio. Teja brushed her hand down Tomoko's naked arm. She was wearing a yellow vest and the panties Teja had seen before, the ones with a small purple flower in the middle.

  'Do you dream about the past, Tomoko?'

  'I dream about my father. And my mother.' Tomoko paused to listen to the cell phone for a few seconds, something about a mech gladiator spotted at a Jiffyquick food store. 'Sometimes I dream about the dōjō where I grew up.'

  'I wish I didn't dream. I dreamed of the auction again. It was different this time. The woman they pulled from the back of the truck and shot in the face didn't die. She was decaying in the heat. By the time we reached the auction she was just rotten clothes and black bones. I guess that's what she looks like now, in the jungle where they'd dumped her.'

  'The past can make us stronger, Teja.'

  Teja sighed. Her apartment in up-town Saigon was gone. So was her allowance that furnished her with the best of everything. Mr. Tito had taken care of her, protected her, up to the point where his company profits had begun to slide and he had realised he would have to move Off World. Teja never had never found out why he didn't want to take his four simulants. Too expensive perhaps, more cost effective to sell them to another company. Kaori had been sold to IBM, Tabatha transferred to Force Eleven's office in Hong Kong. Teja and Penelope, the sim everybody called Ponytails, had been sold to one company and then another. Sold and transferred, like bad shares a stockbroker wanted to hide and forget.

  She hadn't known how she'd come to be on the mud road, riding in the back of a truck with eight other women, in the hands of criminals dealing in flesh. They'd stopped at an old holiday resort, empty for decades and left to Nature's undoing. There had been men in this place, men with money, men with guns, men who had wanted to force their way into the soft folds of her body. She didn't want to remember the man's short beard scraping over her face, but the memory was persistent. His tongue licking across her chin and over her lips. Her hand pushing against his face, until there was a crunching sound. His head twisting sharply.

  She concentrated, trying to force the memories away. The painful impact of a machete on her skull. A mad flight through a forest, where she'd lost the men chasing her. A dark room with the metal bars over the entrance was the last ghostly image to fade, the place where Tomoko had found her, cowering behind machinery that hadn't been operated for decades.

  'Come on,' said Tomoko, rolling across the bed. 'Get dressed. I've been starving waiting for you to wake up.'

  Teja watched Tomoko stretching her arms to the ceiling. The lean muscles on her shoulders flexed and relaxed. 'I'm sorry. I feel fine now.'

  'It's my fault. You were supposed to have five days recovery and observation at the hospital.' Tomoko tied her hair into a ponytail with a red band.

  Teja sat up and looked around the room. They were in a hotel. Through wooden blinds, she could see an en suite bathroom. 'Were you bored watching me sleep?'

  'I can think of a better way to spend seven hours.' Tomoko pulled a white tank top from a holdall. 'Oh, the TV and the radio. I'm listening for any signs of Fernandez. He's in this city somewhere. I've got the cell phone set up for Celebwatch. It's a group I joined who message each other whenever they spot someone famous.' She slipped on the top and moved to her pants lying on a chair.

  'What happens when you know where he is?'

  'We go get him. Are you hungry?'

  'Yes.'

  Teja rose quickly. She could already feel the new strength in her body, a spring in her step that wasn't there before. Dr. Foster had done a good job.

  She made use of the toilet before taking a shower. A small bottle of complimentary shampoo told her where she was, the Hotel Istana on Jalan Raja Chulan. She thought about getting the shampoo she preferred from her bag, though didn't want to test Tomoko's patience. For now the green goo she squeezed onto her palm would do, washing away the still-lingering smell of the hospital.

  When she was dried and dressed, she brushed her hair one last time and turned to Tomoko, seeing her folding a wad of HK bank notes and slipping them into a back
pocket.

  'How many times do you need to brush your hair?' Tomoko picked up her cell phone. 'You look great. Let's go before it gets too late.'

  'Too late for what?'

  Outside on the corridor, Tomoko said, 'Too late for whatever we need to be doing.'

  They found a place to eat in an open corner of a shopping mall not far from the hotel. Only two of the tables were taken, one by a group of Chinese, drinking beer and waiting for their food to arrive, the other by an American couple, trying to talk between the playful antics of two girls. Tomoko asked the man shuffling from the desk to the kitchen area what was good.

  'Everything's good,' he said in Cantonese. He seemed as much animated by the sight of Tomoko as he did by the quality of his food being brought into question. 'She thinks our food is shit,' he shouted to the kitchen. 'Shall we beat her?'

  The men at the woks, dropping vegetables into hissing oil, turned slightly and returned various comments. They were laughing.

  'Do you have lobster?' asked Teja.

  The man shook his head.

  'What about . . .' Tomoko made a claw-like pinching sign with her hands, unable to remember the Cantonese word for crab.

  Teja was about to help out, when the man realised what Tomoko wanted. He nodded and they followed him into the kitchen.

  'Fresh,' he said, lifting the lid from a large bowl on the floor. Inside were two crabs. One had a leg detached. 'I'll do you a good price.'

  'How much?' Tomoko tapped the hard, chitinous shell of one. A claw made a feeble attempt to grab her finger.

  The man's face wrinkled in thought. 'Three-hundred. Cheaper if you pay in HK dollars and not ringgit.'

  Tomoko clapped her hands. 'Okay.'

  'My first dinner date,' said Teja in Japanese. They sat at one of the tables. Four big fans spun on the ceiling.