No Dogs in Philly (3)
A Cyberpunk Horror Noir | Chapter 3: Incarnate
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The Gaespora were a group of scientists who had pushed human experimentation to the point of becoming a new (superior) species. They were invaders from another dimension. They were superhumans born naturally with psychic powers. They were an ancient sect of nature-worshipping druids that had sworn to protect the last matchbox scab of grass on Earth. They were a hoax perpetrated by the American oligarchs. They were fake. They were real. They could have sprung from a radioactive pig anus for all Saru cared—the fact that mattered was they had her neck in a vise and were predisposed to squeeze.
They were called G-men, or Greenies, or even “little green men,” though there was nothing little about them. GaesCorp, the coalition of conglomerates they steered, was the closest thing to an international order that existed. Their memoranda were taken more seriously than laws. Their members lurked in every boardroom and C-suite. In the estates of the industrialists. On the waitstaff of celebrities. They stood behind Mayor Whitlow for his useless proclamations and “advised” the private militias that kept the vital ores of commerce flowing from the bloodied, war-torn shitholes of the world.
Saru had to be a special kind of cursed for them to contact her directly.
Their office was nice, she had to admit, top floor of the Vericast building, open air, with an ungodly expensive cloud shear to cut through the smog and bring real, honest daylight down around her. She had seen the light from the ground—the bright, golden beam that swiveled around the funky skyscraper in the city center—but she hadn’t realized it was the sun.
It felt good, the light; it was warm, and gazing up she saw blue. There were birds up here, and not just mangy pigeons and crows—little blue birds and red birds and birds with big funny tufts and brightly colored feathers. They sang and flew from tree to tree, more trees than she had ever seen, way more than even the ritziest nature bar could hold. She couldn’t even believe there were that many kinds of trees in the world—short and fat and tall and with wrinkly bark and smooth bark and apples and long limbs that drooped down; there must have been hundreds. There was a pond too, and the water was clear and reflected the blue of the sky. It was so perfect and beautiful it made her angry. She felt like crying and she didn’t know why.
“We had hoped to cloud shear the whole city,” ElilE said, making his third attempt at pleasantries. “But the city council would not partner with us. Imagine: sun and sky for all of Philadelphia.”
“Then why didn’t you just go ahead and do it yourselves?” Saru said, taking the bait, even angrier now that she’d spoken. “Who would stop you?”
“We desire symbiosis. We act only in partnership.”
“You mean it was too expensive.” She laughed (but why did she still want to cry?) The man, ElilE, was definitely human. Human face: check. Human body: check. He was barefoot like all the other Gaesporans—they had winced as she stomped through the grass in her steel-toed boots—ten human toes: check. He even wore a high-fashion black Kevlar-silk suit like any other ghoulish corporate stooge…and yet there were things that were undeniably odd about him.
His name…he hadn’t said it. Not out loud. But…she knew it somehow. It seemed to be more than a word—more like an echo that even now chattered in the grotto of her subconscious. His eyes, green, normal, but so steady—yes, steady, that was the word. She wasn’t a psychiatrist by any stretch, but she’d talked to a fair spectrum of humanity and could identify some cause-and-effect emotions: I whack your knee with a bludgeon; you scream. I accuse you of incest with your sister; you look shocked—or at least feign it. I drop hints and clues and suppositions—subtle and not—and your eyes twitch or your tongue licks your lips, or you blush or redden or sweat or gasp.
There was none of that with ElilE.
He sat cross-legged on a moss-covered boulder carved into a sort of dais—they’d brought her a chair, hard wood that made her sit too straight. He was still, perfectly still. His breathing never varied, his eyes blinked but the act was strangely regular, like he did it to not appear more strange. She decided to risk a scan with her implants, a quick visual that wouldn’t trigger any alarms. He might notice the dilation of her pupils or the fiberoptic camera in her hair and the processing power might cause her to slur, but for all he knew she was drunk and high.
Amazing.
Eight breaths a minute in even intervals. Six blinks per minute, again in even intervals. Pulse: forty. He was controlled for sure, but that didn’t signify anything inhuman. Good training could get you the same result, or psychoyoga, and of course there were drugs and mods you could take to make your body do anything you wanted—half of them manufactured by the Gaespora.
“Okay, what do you want? Why did you bring me here?”
It was time to get this charade over with. The chair hurt her back and the sun was in her eyes—damn it was bright, and it felt like it was burning her skin. She wanted to get back into the cool shade of the city below, away from this wind and bright and the noisy birds chirping everywhere. Also, she was fairly certain that something had crawled up her pants and was biting its way to the money spot.
“You are a private investigator,” ElilE said.
“Obviously you know that already.”
“We want you to find someone.”
“Kidnapping?”
“No. This person is in danger. There are others looking for her. If they find her they will kill her.”
“What kind of ‘others’ are we talking about? Jilted lovers? Bored cops? Angry creditors?”
“We believe she is hunted by feasters.”
Saru stopped scratching her thigh. Well, that was interesting.
“Sorry, I’m not the one you want. You need to talk to Morgan Friar—he deals with that crap.”
“We have already contacted Dr. Friar. He has refused. You are our second choice.”
If this was a ploy to grab her attention it had worked. Friar refusing a case from the Gaespora? Did he think it was a wild goose chase? Or was it real, too real, too dangerous? She thought again of the pudgy little man hunting down feasters—a group as ensnarled in rumor and legend as the Gaespora. All that was known for sure was that people who went looking for them wound up in shreds.
“Why didn’t he take the case?”
“He did not say.”
“Why do you think he turned it down?”
“We do not speculate.”
“Honey, this whole case is speculation. You believe she’s in danger? You believe there are feasters involved? The only fact you’ve managed to produce is that the best man for the job doesn’t want it.”
Seven blinks—an extra half-blink at the end. Did that signal annoyance? Frustration? Persuasion? She took it as a victory she’d managed to stick a pinhole in his poker face. He said nothing. He closed his eyes. The vast, glassy, sail-like cloud shear suddenly stopped—she hadn’t even noticed the sheen of energy across it until it stopped. The wind picked up, the birds chirped more frantically, the black clouds of smog spiraled overhead.
In a fraction of a second, ElilE darted forward, so quickly her eyelids had just reached their peak in surprise as his finger touched her forehead. She blinked; it was night, quiet, the birds chirping softly, the sound of insects in the bushes, a black sky overhead crowded with a billion stars, so bright it lit the world around her—and color, she had never known there was so much color in the universe. ElilE sat across from her still, as though he had never even moved. He stared and his eyes reflected the sky—black, so black, with a billion points of light.
“There will be no doubts, hesitations, or delays,” he said, and his voice was different now, not the tenor of a man, but a rustling many-voice of wind in trees and rippling ponds and clicking insects.
“You will hear my words and you will know them to be true and sacrosanct. You will understand what I say to the best of your cognitive abilities and capture it in your memory within concepts you can understand.”
“What—” Saru tried to speak but her mouth refused to move. She felt ElilE’s words boring into her, worms needling through her skull.
“This is what you now understand: as many stars as there are in this universe, there are universes within a higher plane of existence. These universes are living, sentient superorganisms. The mechanisms of their bodies compose the fabric of our existence and infinite forms of existence beyond our own. You will know and understand these beings as gods.
“Within their plane of existence, these gods are mortal flesh and blood to each other. They struggle against one another for survival. They fight, procreate with, and consume one another. Their wars and their deaths are the suffering and extinction of the lifeforms that exist within them.”
He pointed up to the sky and her gaze followed as if bewitched.
“The gods battle on the frontier where their bodies can overlap. This is the margin of similarity. In this space the physical rules are similar enough that the organisms living within one god can affect the organisms living within another. It is through the margins of similarity the gods wound, kill, and devour one another. The organisms within each god influence, invade, and conquer the other, with the goal of pushing the margin in their favor. Through these battles across the frontiers of their bodies, one god will eventually triumph and absorb its rival. Even now, this battle in microcosm occurs on Earth.
“You will know that I and all those bearing the name Gaespora are humans with margins of similarity that allow us to hear the commands of the Sad Gods. Upon hearing the name you will experience emotional phenomena equivalent to sorrow, empathy, and awe. You will understand the Sad Gods as a union of gods who willingly intermingle their margins to create an even more powerful being. You may consider this a super god, or god of gods. They do this to once and for all end the cosmic bloodshed and bring eternal peace. Yet they are not alone in the goal of transcendence.
“There is a god that you will understand as evil and know as an enemy. Its power is greater than that of the Sad Gods and its servants are innumerable. It seeks no union, no shared knowledge, no balance, no compromise, no existence other than its own. It has consumed many other gods and grown in power with each consumption. It is the Hungry God. Such is its power you have already felt its presence on Earth and named it even; it is the dark place in the human shared consciousness, the thing you call the UausuaU. It grows ever stronger as its servants turn the margin of similarity and remake the Earth in its image.
“Finally, you will know this: within human DNA exists the shared history of Earth’s evolution. And within that slender margin other gods have found footholds. Among them is the Blue God, a creature of living light and fiery violence. It wages war against the Hungry God across many frontiers, yet here on Earth it waits. Its motives are not known. Perhaps the margin is too small for it to act. Or perhaps it waits for humanity, to see if we will fight, if this planet is worth the battle.”
It was day, the sun shone, the birds were back to their annoying chirping and the chair was just as hard as ever. ElilE sat staring at her as he had been.
“We see a girl. A girl with blue eyes and a dog that is not a dog. She is here, in Philadelphia. This girl is very important. She is the foothold upon which the Blue God relies. She is the margin of similarity that allows it to exist here. The feasters also search for this girl. If they find this girl they will kill her and destroy the margin.”
“Christ,” Saru muttered. She took out her jacket flask (damn, her hands were shaking) and found it was empty. She got the hip flask and downed it.
ElilE’s eyebrow crept up half a notch. A human reaction if she ever saw one.
“Do you understand?” he repeated, like she was an idiot or a child.
“I understand alright. You’re an asshole. What the hell was that?”
Hesitation. Why? What had he been expecting? Was that a data upload or a backdoor hack? Had he injected her with a chemical brainwashing agent or nano-parasite? Tough luck, buddy. As if she weren’t prepared for shenanigans. As if every species of gutter scum weren’t trying to screw her sideways ten times a minute in this line of work. She had countermeasures coming out the wazoo—counter hacks, antitoxins, cerebral firewalls, fake implants, decoy datavaults stuffed with real memories fresh off the black market, and good old-fashioned drugs and alcohol that kept her brainwaves scrambly and hard to lock on to.
Still. Whatever that was had felt…different.
“Your briefing,” ElilE said. He raised a finger and a subordinate appeared by Saru’s side and handed her a sealed gray envelope. “That contains information suitable for subcontractors. Share what was said here with no one.”
Saru let the envelope hang a moment and then took it. She fanned her face with it.
“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “But there’s one glaring flaw to your plan—you don’t need me. You own the city. Put out an APB, get the cops on it, the army, a big fat load of mercenaries. Slap a bounty on her head.”
“There is danger in the use of force majeure,” ElilE said. Still, hesitation. What was she missing here? “It would be a great loss if the girl were to die, but it would be safer.”
“What do you mean, ‘safer’?”
“Our understanding of the Blue God is incomplete. We know it battles the Hungry God but its actions are unclear. It does not understand humanity well, does not communicate. It could interpret pursuit as a threat and…overreact.”
“Like, what, kill somebody?” She was fairly certain that however this ended it was going to involve a few body bags.
“It would likely kill many…the city. The continent. The planet. Planets beyond Earth. We do not know its power or constraint. We see fire. Destruction. Ashes. Entropy that was once life.” He said it dead serious, not even a whiff of a joke.
Saru laughed—a real laugh, not some bitter chuckle. Oh, this was funny. A mission to rescue an alien that sure didn’t need her help, with a bonus of potentially destroying Philadelphia?
Sign me up!
She imagined the parking authority going up in flames, the rat-infested slum housing, the banking district with its swarms of self-righteous yuppies. She was perfect for the job—the end of the world was a no-pressure consequence as far as she was concerned. And her qualifications—
“So, you want me because I’m too clumsy to be seen as a threat, and simple-minded enough to be understood by the dumbest of aliens.”
“You are not subtle. You think and act directly. And you know the less well-documented parts of the city.”
“Sure, I do,” she said. “You’re saying ‘girl,’ not ‘woman,’ so she must be young. She must not have a birth chip or any traceable implants or even photo ID if you lot haven’t found her yet. Low profile deal. Lots of leg work. And my legs get tired easily. So now the real question: what does all this pay? Keep in mind the imminent destruction of the universe and my uniquely moronic qualifications—I don’t know if you’ve seen the feeds lately, but I’m a celebrity too.”
“We are prepared to offer you the same contract we offered Dr. Friar. Ten million United States dollars upon successful closure. Five hundred thousand to be paid up front for necessary expenses.”
“God damn, why didn’t you just spit that out at the beginning?” Saru had to grab her leg to keep from jumping out of the chair. She held out a hand and grinned. “You’ve got yourself a detective.”
Money talks. I’m hooked.