No Dogs in Philly (9)

A Cyberpunk Horror Noir | Chapter 9: Mimesis

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The dog was getting bigger, it was impossible to ignore, and closer too. It used to hang around the sides of her vision, watching her from a distance, but now it was close, a few feet away, and huge, the size of a wolf, of a motorcycle.

Fine, dog, do whatever you need to do.

Ria still felt tingly, days after it had entered her and what? Made her invisible? Now, in the light of day, it was hard to remember the creature, that thing with the metal centipede body and the head of human torsos. Had it been real? How lit was she at the time? Had someone cut her a bad dose? Had she just been lying passed out on the subway platform having another nightmare? No, it had been real, just like the dog was real.

Someone was killing blue-eyed girls, as if she didn’t have enough problems. It wasn’t in the feeds, nothing official, but the rumor was out and the Fish was scared. It wasn’t your normal having-a-bit-of-fun killing or choke-too-hard killing either. It was religious, freaky, the kind that didn’t have a neatly tied shoelace ending. And that pig, sweaty Lou or gassy Lou or whatever the hell they called him was out putting bounties on her head—girls with great blue eyes, fantastic blue eyes.

Well, shit.

Ria paused to study herself in the cracked window of an abandoned storefront. There goes your moneymaker. Men and women had paid a lot of money—or what seemed like a lot of money, more than she’d ever dish—to buy memories looking out of those eyes, her recorded life, on display, naked, for the viewer’s pleasure. But who could say if it was an honest memory trade or a trap now—some freak wanting to carve out her sins with a knife.

She kept walking, wrapping her trench coat and scarf tighter, ducking her head so the passersby couldn’t glimpse her face. With any luck they’d think she was a leper and keep to their way. She’d tried wearing sunglasses to complete her disguise, but with the clouds and the dark she couldn’t see, kept stepping in crap and glass and syringes and tripping and potholes and the last time she’d had a condom dragging from her heel for about four blocks until the cashier at the liquor store pointed it out by yelling in his angry foreigner language.

But the real fear was that she’d accidentally trip over an elzi and kick his implants. So she ditched the shades. Contacts, microlenses, ocular implants—those were the answer. But that took money and she didn’t have any, not the four-digit kind that she needed.

Walking, walking, walking—where was this place? It had been ages…was it even open still? But of course it was. As long as there was a need there was a way, and everyone had needs. She wondered what they would take this time, if she even had anything left to sell. But there were memories there, good ones, good lays, good drug trips, good jaunts through abandoned warehouses and trains. She’d explored half the city and collected all kinds of experiences people stuck in the Net or boring lives would pay good money for—a hot summer rain on her face, climbing the smokestack of the old power plant, that day the smog broke and blue shined through, the time she stole an old Humvee and went joyriding through the slums.

And the memories she’d be glad to be rid of. Better to give them to someone else, someone who could enjoy them, view them like entertainment when the stakes weren’t there, and why not make a bit of cash for herself?

There it was, the little wood door that wasn’t wood, between the pizza place and the strip club—Pleasure Island. Five knocks, two up, two low, and then one on the third pressure point right in the middle, that rang the bell. The door swung open and a tough opened the door, one she didn’t recognize. It had been a long time. He didn’t smile, didn’t react to her. But she could see him looking at her eyes, see a few calculations.

How high was the price still on her head, for blue-eyed girls? Would he conk her out and throw her in a sack and drive her to Lou’s? Her hand tensed around the shiv hidden in her bodice, so thin, so clever, no one ever found it till she had it on their throat. She’d stick this tough in the groin, a straightforward, small-distance motion—god he was big—easy as ringing the doorbell.

“What’s your purpose?” he said, with the voice of a thousand cigarettes.

“I’m here to sell.” She tapped the side of her head. “I’ve got some high-value material up here.”

Up the stairs was a waiting room—that always made her laugh—just like a real doctor’s office. Plain beige walls with a flower print, with your standard ugly chairs, a television, even, for the scum like her not plugged in to the Net, and a few magazines.

She sat next to a nervous young man who couldn’t stop wringing his hands. His clothes were nice, fancy even, must’ve been some kind of corporate goon. She guessed he’d done something foul he wanted to forget, maybe he’d seen something weird on the Net, had wandered into a bad neighborhood, or maybe his girlfriend had left him. But the way he twitched it looked like guilt, or at least a knowing that he’d done something other people thought was bad. Probably he’d run over an elzi and thought he’d killed an actual person.

She flipped through Living with Less and read an article on a cake she could bake if she had an oven, that used Gaesporan flour to actually burn the exact number of calories you were cooking. It was under the title “Zero Sum Sweets.”

Delicious. How nice to be so swimming in cash you could eat yourself to death. That was an actual problem that people had. She was glad she wasn’t people, didn’t want to be people, didn’t want a house she had to paint, with cabinets that needed to have all the right color handles to match the wallpaper, glad she didn’t live on a track of five different stops: work, home, work, restaurant (well, that would be nice), and home again.

A nurse came out and called a name. The man next to her got up and went through the door to the operating room. She watched the television, but it was just thirty seconds of news crowded by ads.

The ads pissed her off—they were loud and flashy and up in her face, and if they were people doing that they’d get beaten sideways. They were always trying to sell her stuff, but she didn’t have any money so it was just a big F you. Buy this. You need this. You are nothing without this. This thing, right here, look at it, it’s got all the completeness missing from your life. You need this.

She walked over and turned off the TV, glaring around to see if anyone would challenge her. No one said anything. They were mostly outcasts, like herself, reading magazines, or nodding off, or head in hands staring at the floor, and that diva in the corner was pregnant and sobbing and she didn’t even want to know that story.

Ria sat back down. The dog had taken the young, nervous man’s seat. It was looking around but seemed relaxed, and she took that as a good sign. Here, at this very office, she’d tried to have the dog removed, but the doctor couldn’t find a thing that would be causing it, and short of a lobotomy there wasn’t anything he could do. Ever since the run-in with that monster on the subway (had the others made it?) she’d felt, not affection, but a sense of tolerance towards the dog.

Real or not, the dog had tried to do something, warn her, hide her, and so it was protecting her in a way. She was alive, and that was something, something she couldn’t count on day to day anymore. The thing to do was enjoy herself, drink, buy drugs, find some lay she wanted because the future was looking less rosy every day.

“Ria…” the nurse frowned when she saw the last name. Ria didn’t have one so she always put the filthiest thing she could imagine. She got up and followed the nurse through the door and into the operating room.

The best part of coming here was the bathroom; it was so clean, impossibly clean, and sterile. She loved that smell, that alcohol smell of clean; it gave her a rush. The nurse didn’t want to let her go but she threatened to piss herself right then and there so the nurse gave. Ria took her time and then cleaned herself up nice. Then she went and lay down on the operating table; it was so comfortable she could just drift off.

Dr. Alloche came in, a wrinkly old man like a prune stuck on a body made of toothpicks. He was hairless except for big white caterpillar eyebrows that gave out everything he was thinking.

“Hello, Ria, it’s been seven months since your last visit,” he said. God he was smart. He remembered her name, remembered everything about her, didn’t even glance at his records. Of course he had them all digital, plugged into his brain, but still the smarter you were the faster the access and with him there was no pause, no flicker—it was like he had her details on the tip of his tongue, like he’d been thinking of her the whole time.

Why was he here, operating in the Fish just shy of the Assistance Zone, between a caesarian-scar strip club and a saltine-ketchup pizza parlor? He should have been a TV doctor, in a big white hospital with sexy nurses, running back and forth with his lab coat blowing behind him, driving a sports car.

But they didn’t let you do the kinds of things he liked in a real hospital.

“So what do you have for me today?” he asked. “Something interesting, I’m sure.”

“Why don’t you poke around and see what you like?” she said. “I’ve got no secrets.”

“Very well.”

He placed a mask over her face and pumped in that lovely gas…ah she should come here more often…it was like a spa…like in the magazines…

She found herself lying in the apartment of a one-night stand—a married man, going down on her and doing a lousy job, but she moaned like he was Christ reborn. The first time she’d gone on a memory trip like this she’d freaked and panicked and jerked herself out of it. When Dr. Alloche finally calmed her down and eased her into it they saw her memories were so patchy that they were worthless. He still gave her a few bucks for the trouble, such a nice man.

Now she was a pro, probably better than most people at remembering things. She made mental notes, walked herself through each step of remembering to get all the little details that were so crucial to making it feel real—the noises he made and the noises she made, the sweat of their bodies, the wet slapping sounds, the hot breath on her neck, the scratches she dug in his back and the smell of two naked bodies forcing into one another.

That was money.

She could see over the married man’s head, Dr. Alloche in the background, projecting himself into her memory. He looked around, nodded, and then the scene blurred and changed. This one was darker, she knew that would happen, that’s what the sickos wanted, what they would pay for, to see other people hurt and put down. This was a mugging. Some kind of mod addict grabbing her arm, trying to suck out her wrist ID, but she didn’t have one. She’d screamed and cried—but only because she wanted the memory to be more interesting. From all her show the mugger had panicked and scuttled away on the treads he had instead of legs. That had pissed her off—it made the memory short, less valuable. The doctor could shorten it, cut out the boring parts, but he couldn’t lengthen it with any technical wizardry.

Dr. Alloche nodded and then switched scenes again.

She was bent over a railing on a bridge in the Fish practically choking on her own tongue. Ten hours earlier she’d popped a brain-splatting dose of euphorics into the strap-on drug injector in her wrist and then wandered the riverside in a trance. This was a good memory, she knew, she was proud of this one, this was Hollywood quality right here. Even with all the drugs she’d been able to focus and capture scenes and sensations—her bare skin on the sand, the chemical salt breeze, the thrum in her lungs and guts and heart. She’d even focused on the aftermath, puking over the rail, dragging herself up from the pavement, the ache as she bent to pull up her skirt that had fallen down, and the limp away to the hip coop she was crashing at. People could get all the feels of a trip and still pass a drug test with this one.

“Very good, exquisitely done,” Dr. Alloche said. He was watching the scene, mesmerized, a connoisseur, the perfect audience for her work.

“Thanks, Doc,” she tried to say, but of course she was just her memory self and could say nothing.

“Now what’s this…this is very interesting here…”

She sat in front of a trash fire in the abandoned subway station. The others sat there too, but they were puppets, faceless, motionless bodies. She’d tried to blank them out, didn’t want to think about their fates. She didn’t want to be here, didn’t want him going into this memory, but of course he would find it, so recent, so terrifying, so thrilling, so many chemicals released—it was just what he wanted. Dr. Alloche stood in the shadows next to her, face illuminated by the flickering fire.

“What is this…?” he said. “So much fear here…”

She tried to speak again, tried to tell him to get away, to skip this memory. She was afraid now, afraid that he wouldn’t believe it—who would?—and that he would think it was fake and then he would think her other memories were fake too and she wouldn’t get anything for them. The quality of this memory was all off…the dog hadn’t been sitting next to her, he’d been standing out on the platform, hovering like a ghost. Could the doctor even see the dog in her memory? Had he seen it lurking in the shadows when she drooped in a chemical stupor on the bridge?

There was a tremor, a shower of bricks and the dog looked at her. She got the odd sense that this was not the memory dog, that the dog couldn’t exist in a memory like this, that it could only exist in the Now and this was her dog, acting in the Now within her memory. The dummies, the fake people she’d tried so hard to forget shuffled to their feet and ran down the corridor. She was almost certain they had died now because that’s what she believed and so had tried to forget them. Another tremor.

“How curious,” Dr. Alloche said.

It was curious, what would happen? What would the memory show without the dog making her invisible? And then she heard it, the slithering vinyl sound, the whimpering of men and women and then the creature, the ball of human flesh and the long centipede body of twisted metal legs scrabbling into the floor and walls and ceiling and then rearing up onto the platform. She heard a gasp and saw the doctor step back. The look on his face was of sheer terror, like he’d forgotten he was in a memory. And then she felt it too, her own terror, reaching up and playing the fiddle with her nerves, making the hair on her skin poke up.

It’s not real; it’s a memory. It can’t hurt me.

The head drew closer and closer, the whimpering as real as it had been, the eyes all closed, and the hands and fingers with the naked bone fluttering out, probing like the antennae on a cockroach. And then she saw, amidst the bodies, the nameless unknown dead, four faces that she recognized, vaguely, from a chance meeting—a young girl, an androgynous person, an old man with a beard and no teeth, and his friend, their clothing hanging in scraps, arms out fluttering with the rest, eyes closed, moaning, she could hear their voices! And then the eyes all shot open at once and fixated on her, and the mouths twisted open, whispering in their dead-leaf voices: “Come…come…come…come…come…”

Footsteps, and the doctor walked past her, jerking like a puppet tugged by strings, reaching out his arms to embrace his loved ones, and then his finger touched theirs and the arms reached and clamped around him, the mouths now screeching in glee, baring their teeth, dragging him in and ripping at his flesh, licking his blood and devouring him. A scream, his own scream, loud and cutting through the sounds of tearing flesh, loud, overwhelming everything, her vision blurring and swimming back into focus, the light of the operating room glaring in her eyes, the sweet, sterile smell, and still the scream and claws on her skin, the doctor grabbing at her, and blood pouring from his mouth and ears and nose and the two black holes where his eyes had been.