No Dogs in Philly (5)

A Cyberpunk Horror Noir | Chapter 5: The Fish

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Morning. Shit—should have set an alarm. Saru jerked herself out of bed and lay on the floor. Across the dirty gray carpet and mounds of clothes and bottles she saw the clock—11:34 a.m. Time to get up, maybe. She stood and then shimmied to the toilet and barfed. She found her peacoat in a pile and grabbed a handful of Claritol. The sick in her stomach calmed and the jackhammer in her skull became a simple pat on the head. She surveyed her apartment—her third apartment in as many months—and was filled with disgust. No furniture but a mattress, no rooms but the kitchen-bedroom and toilet separated by a screen. What was she paying for this slum?

She found her nicest clothes in a pile and saw they were covered in blood. She’d broken the heels of her stilettos and tossed them in a dumpster on her flight back to the apartment, then when she’d gotten back she’d torn off her clothes, downed a bottle of gin, and cried herself to sleep. Sure she’d seen people dead, seen people killed, maybe even killed one or two herself in the end (it’s not like she went around checking). But to see a man, even if he was an elzi, rip himself apart like that, and then her friend, well, colleague at least—she’d seen him around—strap himself in and make her snuff him.

That wasn’t fair, Friar.

She found the faux-fox coat she’d bought after the Favre case; she’d had it less than a week and already it was covered in blood. A metaphor? A warning? The peacoat was as drab and dirty as ever and had that bitter all-night-drinking smell that never seemed to go away, but at least it wasn’t bloody. She found some clean(?) armored jeans and then chose the trickiest bracelet from her lineup—one with a microrazor and a tiny dart launcher in each fake gem. The range was six inches, maybe, but full of enough biotoxin to snuff a gorilla. She’d never gotten the chance to use it, but hey, why not have it just in case?

It was time to get out the lucky shirt, the pink tank top with the big purple heart in the center. Alright, lucky shirt, do your thing. She couldn’t quite remember why it was lucky—did she win a scratch-off when she was wearing it? No, that wasn’t it. It had something to do with Eugene, right? They went and had champagne at the Borazali Hotel after she nailed her first conviction and they both got a little too friendly. No…she’d dressed up for that, in that skimpy golden tube that her dad would’ve smacked her back to Jersey for wearing. Huh. It bothered her she couldn’t remember why it was lucky. What’s the point of a lucky shirt if you can’t remember the thing that made it lucky?

Ah, now the real question—the gun.

She didn’t like guns, not because they were guns. The actual shooting and the ritual of caring for them she found relaxing. But carrying a gun complicated the justice process. With her trusty cattle prod and a tranquilizer or two she could apprehend a suspect, deliver justice, collect her bounty at the police station and tap dance away. But a gun slowed everything down—why did she have the gun? Did she use it? Where did she get it? Did she have a permit? A license? What kind of bullets was she using? The longer she hung around answering questions the greater the risk. Better to be walking the streets with the elzi and the thugs, where you could run and fight and had options other than sucking down a beating from the cops if they didn’t like your answers.

But if this charade got all magical her prod wasn’t going to do much good. If these feasters had any tricks up their sleeves she wanted a few of her own. She strapped on the pancake holster—nicely concealed by the peacoat—and did a quick check of her Betty autopistol. It was illegal, of course, like everything fun, for being made of layered composite materials that nine times out of ten showed up as nothing more than a blip on a scanner. In her wilder days she’d gotten some back-alley saw jockey to patch it into her reflex implants because au natural she couldn’t hit a blimp—apparently aiming took patience and discipline. But with her add-ons she could circumcise a perp from fifty feet away with just a thought. The saw jockey must’ve gotten some nerves scrambled in the process because every time she used the damn thing it made her nipples itch like crazy.

Alright, all dressed up and no place to go.

Time to put the old brain to work. She grabbed a stick of Chew 20 calorie gum to get some fuel in her system and then paced the room kicking at things in an attempt to mimic thinking. The girl is in the fish. Well, that’s pretty obvious—she’s in the Fish. It made sense. The Fish was a labyrinth of homeless warrens, the kingdom of the hips, a pseudo-society of anti-tech hippy communists. It was huge and crowded and had no Net connection so it would be impossible to find her without more info. But what info did she have?

The eyes…maybe there was something there. If this girl was like ElilE said then these eyes were magical, there was more to them than just the look. That was something you noticed. She giggled at the simplicity of it. She wouldn’t have to tromp around the garbage pits of the Fish at all—she’d just put a price on the girl’s head. Easy as pie. She’d make it really sweet. A straight twenty grand for a girl with blue eyes, the bluest they could find, they had to be really blue. Maybe the Gaespora were too chicken to send out an army but she sure wasn’t and now she had their money.

She clapped her hands together. A plan! A dangerous thin rope to hang herself on but better than she’d had five minutes ago.

***

Smokey Lou was at his bar, Smokey Lou’s, as usual, smoking, as usual. The bar was famous in the Northern Liberties district for, what else? Smoking. And smoking accessories. And girls. And boys. And everything outside and in-between. It all worked together in the center stage, some poor desperado dancing in a human-sized hookah with a thousand little squid tentacles running out, sucked on by fat and for some reason always hairy men. It was quite a spectacle, Saru had to admit—the dancers, somehow not puking out their lungs, swaying inside the swirling smoke. Different dancers, different flavors.

“You’re saying twenty thousand for a girl with blue eyes?”

Lou looked shocked, almost offended by this. He was, like his clientele, fat, hairy, and unpleasant. He was always sweating and his fancy white shirts and suits always looked like they’d just come out of the wash. His breath smelled like an orangutang’s nutsack. Now they sat in a booth in the back, side by side, watching the show. The plasticky seat was sticky with something and Saru didn’t want to know what.

“No,” Saru said, crossly—in her head this plan had not involved as much conversation. “I’m paying twenty thousand to find a girl with really, crazy, terrific, out-of-this-world blue eyes. I’m talking real eyes, no lab jobs, implants, or contacts.”

Lou looked at her shrewdly, which was fair because he was shrewd. Packed as it was with sweaty men, this hookah bar was just a place to park his rump while he sucked on body-sweat smoke and scanned the Net for shady deals.

“You’re not going to pay,” he said. He had an accent—Eurokan? Sinomer? “It’s a plot.”

“It is.” Saru winked. “But I’ll tell you what—find the girl and keep your ten percent.”

“That is not so much money considering the risk.”

“What risk?”

“The risk of doing business with you, Saru.”

She grit her teeth. Tough rap to beat.

“Fine, then. What price is worth the risk? And remember, you can’t just Net scan this one. I want honest human interaction. Send your people out to talk, have a chat, get to know the public.”

“In that, too, is a cost.”

“That’s why I’m saying it. Give it to me all up front, no surprises.”

“Fifty.”

“Fifty thousand?”

“It is much work.”

“It’s one girl.”

“That is the point. It is one girl. You are looking for one girl, a specific girl. This I see. A girl with very blue eyes. There will be many who want this money, and many false trails. This is much work. My associates do not work for free. I do not pay them in smoke.”

“You’re an extortionist.”

“Pshaw. I know you see the Gaespora. It’s clear you do this for them. You can pay. But I think it strange they hire you to do something they themselves can do.”

“It’s called outsourcing.”

“It is called dangerous. I think they would not like what you do. That means danger too for me. Danger is expensive.”

“Fine. I’d pay you fifty grand to shut up. Half up front, half on delivery. Get to work.”

“One thing.” He held up a fat finger. “I do not harvest. You do not take the eyes to sell. You must promise me.”

“Jesus, you really think I’m that scummy? I’m not going to hurt her; I’m trying to help her.”

He regarded her with a look that said he did in fact think she could be that scummy, and then nodded so his chin fat wobbled.

Jerk.

Saru swiped in the air, transferring the first twenty-five thousand dollars to his account. His eyes rolled a little as he sent out commands to all his runners. They’d spread out around the Fish dropping word of the bounty. If this girl was just a regular old sad sack they’d find her. And if she was something else…well, maybe there’d be some mysterious fires she could look into.

Saru left the bar and decided to take a stroll; it made her feel like she was doing something, contributing. Lou’s was on the border, the crossover area between the real city with the real people with jobs and incomes and lives, and the Fish. You could see it—trash everywhere, fenced-in plots of nothing, and then a restaurant, a dive, a few homes with the lights on and then a line of crumbling, caved-in brownstones.

She didn’t like it, too much ambiguity. There needed to be clear lines: good city, bad city; elzi hellscape, and hippy coop. None of this blending; it made it too hard to see where she was going, what was about. This kid on the corner—what was he waiting for? Was that a gun bulge in his jacket; was he ready to spray? Or was it a trick, a fold of the cloth, a banana, a penile implant?

Condoms on the ground, needles, elzi lying in heaps of trash, and a roadkill just lying there, guts all pulled out, run over and left. An elzi crawling his way over, easy meal, easy calories, easy way to keep going. She walked faster for no reason, moving closer to the Fish, away from the screech of cars and the angry honks. Not so much going on now. Getting into the hiplands, with their own rules. It was a safe place, safer than most at least. Not quick to judge, the hips; she liked that much about them. Everyone was down for a reason and more often than not you were born to it. It was quieter here too; she saw gardens, passed a hip with a shotgun, took his nod and hustled by.

Something in the corner of her eye—a flicker, a motion.

A tail?

She kept on walking, activating the microcamera on the back of her earlobe and looking through her implants. Nothing, just the hip scratching his ass. It happened again, a flicker, her whole vision now like a screen on the fritz. She switched the view back to her eyes. A cold, sick feeling was rolling up in her stomach. She pushed it down, gritting her teeth and walking faster. Again a flicker, longer this time. How much time did she lose, a second? A minute? The cold, sick knot moved up her throat and she recognized the fear, the dread. The brick wall to the left of her was swimming, swaying like a liquid but just the wall. A two-second delay on the right side of her vision, a crow flying past and then again and again, repeating his journey from telephone pole to roadkill.

She turned around but she couldn’t tell where she’d come from. Her vision kept spinning even as her legs stopped. The fear had taken hold now, her breathing panicked, sweat staining her lucky heart tank. A flat, logical part of her wondered how much was natural and how much was induced by the hackers—because she had been hacked.

Her worst fear—everyone’s worst fear—to have your implants hijacked, controlled by another person. They could do all kinds of nasty things—jack up your heart rate till you blew or poison you on your own bile. Warp your vision so you saw your mom as a werewolf and stabbed her in the eye. Or make you think you could fly and leap off a building. Those were some of the nicer things you could hope for.

It shouldn’t have been possible. Not with her countermeasures. Sure, people could hop into her low-key implants from time to time and steal a glimpse if she was on an open Net connection. Maybe they’d get into a decoy datavault and make off with some fake data. But to take control like this—implants were coded to an individual’s unique brain signature. Lots of people were dumb enough to play fast and loose with their implant permissions but Saru wasn’t one of them. Theoretically a brute-force hack would require someone carving out a brain and scanning it.

Theoretically.

Her vision flickered and she heard a laugh, a hyena laugh. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a shadow, then it was gone. Then she saw him. Friar, standing a few feet away, looking to the right of her. It was Friar, perfectly, had to be him, but he was faint, not quite part of the surroundings. He was talking:

“Don’t hurt her. No…no…no…”

“Friar?”

He turned to look at her as if he’d heard her. Her vision began to flicker, his eyes opened wide, too wide, and his mouth, and they stretched and merged and formed a black hole where his face should have been. Her hearing cut out—all but a loud ringing, and a sound like a tiny maggot crawling across her eardrum, every scrape of its legs against her skin magnified a thousand times. Friar started walking towards her, an unnatural, jerking walk, and she wanted to run but her legs wouldn’t move. He drew closer and closer, jerking and twitching and she opened her mouth and screamed, but all that came out was thick, black, viscous strings, pouring out and then Friar was in front of her and she stared into the black and he reached up and—

A hand on her shoulder; she whirled and smacked him in the knee with her prod. He crumpled with an oomf and she screamed and kicked him with her steel-toed boots. She kicked and screamed for about a minute until she realized she was back, the hack was gone and she was normal, beating the ever-loving crap out of the hip guard who had probably just come to help.

She stopped and grasped her knees, shuddering, thankful the kick knives in her boots hadn’t flipped out. She grabbed at her hip flask and took a long gulp. She was too sober. The alcohol would flush her system, drunk her up, scramble her brain waves and make it harder for the hackers to lock on to her and crack her code. She took another swig and finished the flask and then snorted the contents of her ring stash—a mix of powdery accelerants that would blend with the alcohol and scramble her pattern further.

Yeah, that’ll do it. Already she felt the ups and downs pulling her in every direction.

The hip was on the ground, moaning. For a second she thought of dashing, but it was hard to ignore her role in this tragedy. Plus, the hips looked after one another—community and all that. Word got around and she didn’t want to alienate half the population of Philadelphia over a freak-out. She’d fix him up and then figure out the asshole trying to claw his way into her brain. Lou, maybe? Fifty grand was a lot to toss around, maybe too much. Maybe he sniffed more and was trying to drill into her accounts.

No his dumb hairy chimp brain couldn’t pull a stunt like this. It had to be the Gaespora. Tracking her, maybe? Some kind of monitoring hack gone haywire? They were the only ones with tech this sophisticated…Or. Or were they?

The sick feeling came back—feasters. They were hacking her, trying to beat her to the prey, but no, that didn’t make sense either. She’d barely even started the case. They couldn’t know about her, could they?

“Huh,” she said aloud. “Interesting. Alright buddy, let’s get you fixed up.”

She took a Panaceum Easy-Ject from her gun belt and jabbed it into his arm. He stopped whimpering. It would pump him up with painkillers, increase blood and platelet production, start him healing up. Wouldn’t mend bones, she knew, and it was too slow for a bullet hole or a deep cut, but it was handy for the smaller stuff. The hip was looking at her, more confused than afraid, curling up at the pain and making it harder for her to see if anything was broken. She sighed.

“Look, bud, I’m sorry about that. I had a freak-out, okay? I glitched. You know how it is. I really didn’t mean to rough you. I’m gonna try and patch you up.”

He relaxed, a little, and she felt him up, making sure she hadn’t smashed any ribs or ruptured any organs. She didn’t think so. He’d be making a lot more noise for one thing, and also she discovered a layer of hockey pads under his flannel. Say what you would about the hips; they were resourceful. She patted him on the head.

“There you go, bud, all set.” She hoisted him to his feet and peeled out a couple of hundreds. “For your troubles.”

He took the money and looked at it, looked at her, and then back at the money. Mute? Dumb? Who cared? She set off, back to Lou’s.

“You’re not right,” the hip called to her when she was about a dozen steps away. His voice had a strange, almost musical cadence. “You’d best come with me.”

She switched on her lobe camera and looked at him. He wasn’t pointing the shotgun at her. She turned and put her hands on her hips.

“Oh,” she said. “How’s that?”

“You wander in search of god. I can show you where she rests.”

This took her a while to process. Was it a ploy? A robbery attempt? Had she over-dished again and now this idiot was after her money? But no, it didn’t seem that way. If this guy was a true hip and played by the book then he was honest, relatively. And really, what choice did she have? This was the closest thing to a lead she had.

“Alright,” she said. “Lead on.”