Disclaimer:
If you are offended by bad noir imitations, obvious homages, gender realignment and people being shot, please, please do read on. Just don't complain when you don't enjoy it and do feel mildly soiled afterwards.
This was not the sort of bar Mary would choose to walk into, but she had no choice. The notepad in her hand said Joe’s, and this was Joe’s. They refused to meet anywhere else.
Mary had asked them to come to her, of course. She frequented the fashionable waterfront cafes, not the dockside diners and pubs. Bright sunlight and green water was her scene, not a back-alley bar stuck between a porn shop and a gun shop.
The flickering neon sign outside was the brightest part of the bar, and when she walked in, she got more attention from the shuttle jockeys at the bar than she did from the men she was here to meet. Her hands nervously played over the lapels of the ill-fitting new shirt. The latest fashion, all the rage back home on Earth, the bearded man had said as he sold it to her from a suitcase. She didn’t know. Ladies’ fashion had never been her thing. Come to think of it, being a lady wasn’t much of a habit either. Being businesslike wasn’t the same as being ladylike.
She jumped as the automated door buzzed and derailed behind her, trying in vain to shut out the clamour from the street. They’d already be here; she’d got lost twice trying to find the place. It wasn’t too hard to find them inside though. There wasn’t that much else to look at. The holovision was tuned to a dead channel. At one end of the bar, there was a pole. In better days, before the elevator linked up and lost the pilots jobs, the place might have made good money as a strip joint. Or maybe, Mary thought, it had always just made bad money from bad business with worse people. A ceiling fan lazily turning above them did not so much cool the room as redistribute the haze of smoke and stench.
They were in the back corner, in the last of three booths. One of them waved her over with a burger-filled fist.
“We start already. Call waiter, get you some food. Look at you, pretty lady but too skinny, no titties, no arse.” The voice was slow and deliberate. It reminded Mary of her father. Probably the same damage to the vocal cords. Maybe even from the same orbital yard.
She sat down, hesitantly.
“Barman, get here!”
“I’m washing a glass.”
“Lady need food!”
“And the glass needs cleaning. What does she want?”
The fat man’s fishy little eyes looked at her. “What you want, girl?”
There was no menu. She looked at the other two meals. They weren’t very appetising. The sign outside had said sushi, and the small man was eating it. “Vegetarian sushi, yeah, no wasabi.”
“Pussy sushi, no green!”
The barman grunted and a raised a steel finger.
“Hear you’ve got a bit of a problem then, lady,” said the man beside her.
Problem was an understatement. Mary was an operator. The only flickering lights she was used to looking at were old monitors, and she spent most of her uptime jacked in anyway. Most of the others in the bar looked like they’d been scraped out of the gutter.
“They call me Chase. The big bugger’s Gas Richie. What’s your problem?”
Chase was the easiest of on the eye, and the smallest. His jacket was stained, and the collar was popped up, but there was nothing intimidating about him. He had a small, sharp nose and a small, sharp chin. There was a tattoo on his cheek. He was wearing sunglasses inside. The sign outside was reflected in them, horribly distorted. Sushi and hot dogs was written in pink lettering across the bug-eyes of his glasses. Flash to purple: Babes and booze. Flash: Burgers and uppers. The effect was mesmerising, in a horrible way.
Chase licked his lips. His tongue looked reptilian. With a wash and a better dress sense, he could have passed as attractive. She wondered if he had a nice, tight arse. Probably; there was no fat on him, though no signs of any muscle either.
Flash: Teriyaki dolphin and soy-shakes.
Gas Richie was obese. That was unusual, these days. Bathroom liposuction kits were cheaper than most meals. Rolls of putrid, ruddy flesh fell lazily over his collar, which appeared to have been turned up, once, before being pushed aside by the putrid flesh. Gas’s neck could have fed a First Diaspora colony for a year. He had the neck of a dolphin. His bald head looked like it had been squashed. There were wires sown into his brown jacket. His right temple was covered with a chrome plate.
Mary wished that it was Chase that was sitting opposite her, not Gas, although sitting beside Gas would have risked wandering hands, or worse.
There was another man. She hadn’t noticed him, at first. Gas and Chase looked like just the people she was here to meet, but she wasn’t so sure about the last man. The last man sat in Gas’s shadow. Between the high collar of his coat, and the low, wide brim of his hat, there wasn’t much of him to be seen. He made no move to introduce himself, but at least his clothes looked clean, mostly. On a day like today, she wasn’t going to complain.
Gas chuckled, loud and slow. Even over the hubbub of the bar, Mary expected heads to turn. She’d heard quieter shuttle launches.
“Pretty lady got something that don’t belong to her, huh? Nasty little bug crawled into her head and just won’t come out. Someone break into your apartment, rip it all up, coming for you next, that right? Silly broad come to us for help, huh?” He took a large bite out of his second burger and kept talking. “Need some right hard geezers with wire to clean your mess. We be just right.” He had three platinum teeth, which flashed in the light, drawing Mary’s eyes towards the disgusting maw of his mouth.
The man in the corner wasn’t eating. He was slowly chasing bits of his meal around the plate with his chopsticks, and didn’t even look at her once. Maybe he was embarrassed by Gas. His coat looked a bit more expensive than either of his companions’ jackets.
That was it. He probably didn’t fit in here either. Mary sighed, and scratched the jack above her right ear, turning her head from the light. For a moment, she thought she saw eyes, but then the man in the corner nodded. His head seemed to be sinking ever closer to his full plate. That would be nice, she thought. Just to slouch down, down, down until she wasn’t even there anymore. Even just sleeping would be nice, or talking to someone who understood. He might, if he was awake.
There was a crash in front of her, like the sound of her boyfriend’s jaw breaking. She didn’t jump, did she? She wasn’t that scared. But Gas was looking at her and chuckling. She must have. The barman had just dumped a plate of sushi onto the concrete tabletop in front of her, and she’d jumped. Gas looked up at him and shook his head slowly. The barman stepped backwards, slipping on a patch of oil.
Mary picked up a piece of sushi. It seemed to be expected of her. It tasted metallic, but, then, everything did. She was scared and probably suffering wire withdrawal. Not that she was a wire junkie, of course. Jacking in nine hours a day was just habit, something she was used to. She’d give an arm to be able to jack in now.
Chase looked at her. She looked at his glasses. Flash: Sushi and hot dogs. His lips were moving. She hadn’t even noticed. “...our help? You here for business, or dinner?”
Her hands shook, white-knuckled. “No one else would even talk to me,” Mary said, “No one. I contacted all the data security firms and the recovery companies. Even the wire bounty boys disconnected me as soon as they saw my number.” She dropped a chopstick. Awkwardly, she picked it back up and lifted some sushi from her dirty plate. “There’s something inside me. I can’t run any ‘ware. It’s as if my jack is plugged into someone else.” One of her chopsticks broke, and rice and texturized vegetable protein splattered down onto her lap. “It’s in me.”
Chase smiled and removed his sunglasses. He had one dark brown eye. Where the other should be, there was just a gold-plated interface socket. “I guess I might have to have a look inside you then. I’ve got a mindfucking cable right here.”
Mary could feel herself blushing. Her cheeks were hotter than half the stolen goods being sold on the street outside. She’d heard of direct linking, of course. Wire junkies and jack rejects claimed that it was better than sex. No real, accredited operator would even consider it. But, then, no one in the Cartel would put a jack inside someone’s eyesocket. That was flashy, black-market work. These weren’t her co-workers.
This was not the way it was supposed to go. Ignore him, just like the guys who bulled the kid with the funny name at school, and he’d go away. She tried picking up a piece of sushi with her fingers. It slipped out of her grasp and rolled across the table. Gas’s horribly scarred hand picked it up. He had a burger in one hand and the piece of sushi in the other.
Somehow, he took a bite of both at once.
“Taste good.”
Mary shuddered. Chase slapped a cable down onto the table.
“No way, I don’t do that stuff.”
“Oh come on, baby, it’s not as if I’d even be inside you, is it now? There’s something in your jack’s wetware, right? If you can’t get out, I can’t get in. Stands to reason. If what you say is true, I won’t be going anywhere near your bioware.”
Gas dropped his burger and touched a finger to his temple. There was a buzz of static and a spark leapt across from the metal plate to his fingernail.
“Slow, partner, slow. Don’t go scaring our pretty lady, huh? Don’t worry, broad, Chase don’t swing your way anyhow. He like his girls, yeah” – he paused and looked her up and down – “but he only like them frosty. But we getting ahead of ourselves. Yous just met, and now he want to jack into your skull? We gotta know some things first. When do it get into you? Where do it come from? Who do the wrecking and breaking and chasing you, girl, huh? Gotta know that before we jump in any skull.” Gas’s finger tapped his temple again, with another discharge. As the light from outside caught it, Mary saw that there was a delicate tracery of wires on the skull-plate. “Else we maybe get hurt. Partner no good if he got virus in skull.”
Chase looked crestfallen, for moment, and then put his glasses back on. He smiled, revealing teeth sharpened into neat triangles.
Flash: Methamphetamine toasties and fugu salad.
Mary looked from one to the other, her glance pausing on the nameless man in the middle. Chase, beside her, looked like a cyborg bloodhound ready to hunt humans. Gas, opposite her, looked like he’d just lost a boxing match. And the man in the corner, beside Gas and opposite Chase, he was surely asleep, with his arms loosely folded, hands tucked under the open front of his coat and that huge hat pulled, she would swear, even lower than before.
“The fat man’s right.” Chase spat into a pool of green saliva coalescing on his plate. It and he had been here when she arrived. Mary had thought it was badly made wasabi, which was she wanted none with her meal. “Need to know what we need to know. Who, where, what? Then, maybe, we can get…friendlier.”
Mary swallowed. “I was working black. I’m sure you know the protocols. They flashed my memory when I signed off work. I don’t know what I was working on. Something Cartel.” Perhaps the man in the corner glanced her way then, or perhaps his head just fell a little sideways as he slept. “Not yesterday, the night before, I went straight out with my boyfriend after leaving work. We were hitting a club up by Basin, in the old quarter. They had a new HJ on the decks. I tried a new drug there, strictly designer, so new they hadn’t even blacklisted it. G they called it, said it would make you feel totally new. Didn’t make it home until about twenty-seven or so, and when I did, my apartment was on fire. I staggered to an all-night jack place, to call in for company security and insurance, but I just couldn’t get anything from the wire. Nothing. Running old-style with touch-board, I found myself locked out of everything…everything.”
“Hey, Chase, pretty girl by all teary, give her a hug.”
“No, no, I’m okay, really, but, I was so scared then. The jack…it’s part of me, you know. Of course you do. You’ve got one. But for me, it’s different, because the company, they put my jack in, you know, and I’ve worked for them since. I called my boyfriend’s place, but another guy answered. That was the last straw. He didn’t like what I’d become on G, so he cheated on me. Last fucking straw. I just ran. Lucky for me, I guess. Saw on the ris-feeds that the whole building burned down. There was camera footage too. I saw it in full holo, those thugs smashing his face. He cheated on me, but, but, even when I had the strength, I wouldn’t beat him like that. My life just fell apart overnight, because of this… thing … in my head. I just wandered the streets yesterday.”
It was better to look at Chase. Gas had started using his fingernail to clean his teeth. When they touched, blue sparks flickered and died. As distracting as it was, the neon sign was better to watch than Gas.
Flash: Hormone replacement and chips.
It was hard to believe that sign would attract anyone, but the bar was filling up now, as the red sky darkened outside. No one seemed to look at the back booth, and there was no one there worth looking at, anyway. Ugly bastards all.
“Then you contact my rotund partner and I, yeah?”
“Not quite…I proxied at another wire café, used a few of my old alternates and tried everyone else, but the moment I mentioned that I had worked for a Cartel company, they disconned me.”
“So,” said Chase, “the only question left is…what’s in you? Something crawled in while you were working the nets like the little waged wire slave you are, and it won’t come out. Oh deary deary me.”
Flash: Cloned baby and nanoware marinade.
“No, is all wrong, buddy, she all wrong. Cartel don’t fuck around. She walked them streets all yesterday and most of today, and they don’t spot her? Cameras everywhere, we know it hard to avoid them, we both know that the hard way. Or even a little flying bug just prick her, pick up her helix and, boom, Cartel stormtroopers be all down in the place.”
Flash: Frosty gents and razorboys welcome.
Mary took a sip of her suspicious-looking blue drink. She’d been hoping to avoid this. It was awkward. Behind those stupid shades, Chase must be suspicious too.
Flash: Testosterone dip and deep friend sashimi.
“It’s the G I took. The stuff lasts for a few whole days, apparently. You wouldn’t have thought a pill could do so much. Didn’t really know much about it when I took it, just that it’d give me a new perspective, and maybe make my boy a bit happier. He always said he was bi and wanted new things. My name, Mary, well, my old mother was a nun and she swore that I was a virgin birth. She always was a bit confused. They didn’t recognise me because I wasn’t the man they were looking for. One chromosome got … swapped.”
Flash: Genocide dogs and stem cell curry.
No one spoke. Gas stopped picking at his teeth. An aircar landed on the street outside, distorted by the curved glasses into a horrible insectile thing, like tank designed by a cockroach. And then it was below the sign and she/he had more important things to think about than illegal parking.
Flash: Lying scum and hunted men.
Flash: Sex tapes and live violence.
Flash: Genetic recombination and tempura teens.
Flash: Su nd ho gs
Something else was reflected in Chase’s bug eyes. Two somethings.
Mary’s gaze faltered. She/he glanced around. Gas was looking at her, and one of his eyes was slowly turning orange. There was someone behind him, with a briefcase. A briefcase, here? It seemed incongruous. The last man was asleep, still.
And then he wasn’t. One moment, he was slouched in Gas’s shadow, sleeping like a cat. The next, he was bolt upright, a pistol pointed back over each shoulder, spitting lethal fire. He didn’t seem to move in between. His hands were folded under his arms, then, flash, his guns were spitting and the holsters she/he hadn’t even spotted under his arms were hanging empty.
Flash. He had spun around, still firing. Slugs were ripping into the wall above them. The barman rose from behind the counter, spraying the doorway with some huge tri-barrelled cannon. The window shattered. And then he was under the cover of the booth’s half-height wall. A clip was spat from the bottom of each gun. New ones clicked home. He was up firing again.
The man moved in stop motion. He was like a protector slideshow run by a boardroom of crystal mainliners. Mary never saw him move. She/he just saw the effects of his movement.
Chase slid across Mary’s lap, diving to the floor. He felt hard and cold. Mary vomited. Everyone seemed to be fighting everyone else, with fists and knives, tasers and bats, elbow-guns and cut-down toxin-sprayers, and, most commonly, mechanical bits of themselves.
Ponderously, as if in slow motion, Gas stood up. His fingernails sparked violet. “It a party now, huh?” His hand clamped to the table, ripping it up. He flipped the polarity of the electromagnets in his hand. The table slammed into the bar, scattering people in its way. “This how you run bar, bastard?” The barman turned his tri-barrel towards Gas. As the bullets hit him, his sparks flew from his grey skin.
Hands were closing around Mary’s arms. “They call me Dead Man Johnny, brother, now we leave these kids to their fun, and we move. I chose this table because it’s handy to the exit. It’s in front of you. The door’s designed to look like part of the wall. You see it now? Get ready. You go first, I’ll follow. Stand on three, two…”
He stood and spun again. From somewhere behind his back came an automatic weapon. Johnny pushed Mary towards the exit with one hand and fired short bursts of suppressing fire out into the chaotic bar and street with the other.
Mary found the door and fell through it into a stark white-panelled corridor. The brown stains seemed welcoming now. She/he staggered down the corridor towards the red sunset, hazily visible under a half-open roller-door.
As he/she slipped slowly from consciousness, Mary felt Johnny push her into an aircar. She looked at him, silhouetted against the cloudless sky. He looked professional, cool, calm and totally detached.
“Johnny … you’ve done this before…”
“Yes,” he said, on the other side of her now, shutting the driver’s side door.
“How many men have you killed?”
His hands ran over the control panel. “I haven’t shot many people who didn’t deserve it.”
Her vision swam. They were in the air now. “How many?”
“Ninety-seven people.”
“What did you say?” Mary’s head rolled back against the foam seat-back.
“I said, I’ve shot ninety-seven people who didn’t deserve it.”
He/she wasn’t going to argue. The voice was mesmerising. He/she felt unwell. Maybe the sushi had been off. “And how many have you killed, total?”
Johnny paused. “That’s a hard one.” He took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair. Lines appeared on his forehead, like a map of the streets below. “Thirteen billion, seventy-four million, nine-hundred and sixteen thousand, three hundred and seventy one. And a half.”
As he/she finally passed out, Mary's last words were: “…a half?”
Author's Note:
This is no longer 2000 words. I edited it. What can I say? I lie all the time, when I'm writing fiction.
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