Hipper Tiger Books

This is the Official Pirate Edition of the novel Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, by Nas Hedron. It is provided free of charge by the publisher, Hipper Tiger.

This edition contains the entire novel, but the commercial edition has additional material in a section called Facts in the Fiction that explores the factual background of six different elements of the fictional story, including a detailed discussion of each topic, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos.

The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.

A Hipper Tiger Book

Copyright © 2012 Nassau Hedron.

Edition 3.0

First edition published May 7, 2012. This edition published November 4, 2012.

Kindle ISBN 978-0-9879911-1-9

EPUB ISBN 978-0-9879911-0-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Contact the author at nas@nassauhedron.com or visit NassauHedron.com.

Cover illustration by Hipper Tiger using elements to which no copyright restrictions attach.

This book, like everything else, is for my wife:  you make my heart go boom, boom, boom.

Table of Contents

Luck and Death at the Edge of the World

One: Brace and Erase

Two: Mad, Fat, and Dangerous to Know

Three: A Sixteen Year Old Cheerleader Crossed With a Porn Queen

Four: 3% Threats and Paradoxical Data

Five: A Magic Bullet and a Sentimental A.I.

Six: Suerte y Muerte

Seven: Rubbing Herself Against It Like a Cat

Eight: UIFs and the Felon

Nine: An Elegant Problem

Ten: Peace, or Something Equally Absurd

Eleven: With No Disrespect, So What?

Twelve: A Plan of Last Resort

Thirteen: Spiders and Tics

Fourteen: As Dead As God on Sunday

Fifteen: Airportlandia

Sixteen: Things Are Measured Differently Here

Seventeen: El Paraíso Perdido

Eighteen: More Degraded, More Carnal

Nineteen: Born To Dogs In The Street

Twenty: Wanna Buy Some Shitty Tomatoes?

Twenty-One: From The Throats Of Men, From The Hearts Of Men

Twenty-Two: Blood Everyfuckingwhere

Twenty-Three: Six or Seven Shots Through The Wall

Twenty-Four: There Is A Solution To Every Problem

Twenty-Five: Sleep At The Edge Of The World

Facts in the Fiction

Introduction: Mad Dogs and Robot Men

One: A City in the Clouds

Two: The Robots Go to the Dogs

Three: Mutant Diseases Spread By Hard-to-Kill Bugs

Four: Ghosts Living in Shells

Five: Alan the A.I. + Alan Turing, Human Being

Six: A Down to Earth Dharma

Preview: Felon and the Judas Kiss

About the Book

One: Keep the Krill in Check

Preview: Los Angeles Honey

About the Book

One: The Bright Sky Presses Down

Two: Remember Forget

Three: Two Teardrops Fall

Four: Your Kaikki Knows Where You Are

Preview: In the Empire of the Monkey King

About the Book

One: Full Of Worthless Prayers

Two: Die All Over Again

Three: Gun Oil, Sweat, Dust, And Testosterone

The Book and the Author

About Nas Hedron

Books by Nas Hedron

Acknowledgments

Luck and Death at the Edge of the World

One: Brace and Erase

We Brace while we’re still in the Jenny, its twin rotors beating a heavy rhythm in the night air about twenty minutes outside Tijuana, and when the wave of Brace crests inside me I think to myself: so this is what it feels like to be a sociopath.

Each of us has inhaled deeply and abruptly, the way they tell you to do, holding a disposable applicator mask over nose and mouth. The interior of the Jenny is utterly dark in the visual spectrum for stealth, but our visors are tuned to an expanded EM range and the ultraviolet lamps make the inside of the hold gleam a pale whitish purple. We sit facing each other on benches that run down each side of the hold. On the floor in between us there is a small pile of crumpled applicator masks, a California National Forces logo fluorescing on each one.

The Brace has a harsh chemical tang in my nose and throat, reminiscent of burning plastic, but that’s quickly forgotten as the drug rushes up the inside of my face and explodes in my frontal cortex, then lies there sizzling, lighting up my brain from the inside with an intense white light, like the weaponized phosphorus of Angelfire.

I feel several things at once, none of it quite what I imagined.

My entire body is engorged with a carnal joy that I am suddenly too inhuman to express in words.

I am refreshed, reborn, re-energized—I could run, run, run forever and never run down. Despite my energy, I am filled with an ecstatic peace, a sense of being exactly where I belong, free of conscience, worry, or human sympathy.

I am blissfully awash in evil, in a profound lust for violence, unrestrained by anything like love, all empathy junked in a rush of pure kinetic bliss with the sweet taste of sin in the back of my throat.

Or maybe that’s not sin—in the first rush I bit the inside of my cheek and it’s bleeding.

I look across the aisle at Yarborough. Because of the reflection on his visor I can’t make out his eyes, but I can see his mouth. He is grinning uncontrollably, and I feel my face pull into the same rictus—not a smile, but a manic baring of the teeth, something inherited from our predator ancestors who hunted with their teeth, fought with their teeth and killed with their teeth.

He tilts his head slightly and his eyes become visible. He looks back at me and we know each other, the way monsters know each other. Next to me Macchia begins stomping his feet, first one and then the other, in a slow rhythm. I can feel his left leg against my right as he raises it up and stomps it down, over and over. I can feel the vibrations of his footfalls through the metal plating of the floor. After a moment Yarborough falls into step with him, and then I do, and then we all do, as though the entire squad is marching while sitting down. The beat is out of time with the Jenny’s rotors, setting up a jazzy syncopation. Someone down the aisle starts ratcheting their flechette launchers with a sound that is eerily like a güiro.

Wired on Brace, we’re not a very disciplined force, but then we don’t have to be. This isn’t a strategic infiltration like Boulder, or a covert intel op like New York. This is strictly civilian control, a euphemism for stomping on everyone and everything so painfully that for the rest of their lives they will keep their heads down, cause no trouble, and be grateful to simply be left alone. Guiterrez is a hard man and normally keeps his city under control, but lately he’s been distracted by local affairs—ambitious lieutenants, pleasures of the flesh—and the some isolated pockets of resistance have developed. Sacramento wants the place disinfected before isolated resistance comes together into something like insurrection.

The brass may call this civilian control, but we call this kind of mission what it is: deploy and destroy, burn and return. The Jenny’s floor begins to sink perceptibly, signaling our imminent arrival at the drop zone. Almost time.

Whatever we do down there, we won’t even remember it once the Brace wears off. It’s been coupled with a GABA agonist marketed under the trade name Erase, which temporarily prevents the formation of long-term memory. Like a bunch of blind drunks, when our consciences return in the morning we’ll be unaware of the atrocious things we did the night before. Hell, I can’t even remember boarding the Jenny.

Except that’s not right.

The Brace and Erase were administered simultaneously in the mask, which I only used once we were in flight. There’s no reason for me not to remember what happened before that. I check my memory, but I don’t remember boarding, or even being briefed, which is when I realize this has to be a dream. And if it’s a dream it must be based on memories—the very memories that the Erase was supposed to prevent from forming in the first place, buried somewhere deep in my head but excavated during sleep.

I feel panic rising because I know where the dream must be headed and despite being a mental fiction it feels real. I look at my hand, at the elapsed mission time displayed on my chronometer, at the equipment in the Jenny. Everything is detailed, precise, real. I bite the inside of my cheek again where it’s bleeding and it hurts.

Like so many things, I have training to deal with dreams. The Forces prepare us to take counter-measures against things like psychic driving and induced trance states. We know the Texans have used trance techniques on prisoners and we suspect that the Brazilians have too, so we’re prepared.

I force my breathing to slow and check my Alpha and Omega. Alpha: is there consistency between what I see now and what I normally see in the waking world, what the boffins call consistency of perception with established facts? And Omega: is there internal logical consistency within what I’m seeing?

At the moment the Omega seems intact. The situation remains consistent from one moment to the next, the people present don’t turn into other people, our actions are consistent with the mission, our behavior is consistent with having taken Brace.

And the Alpha? Only now that I’ve asked myself the question do I remember that Yarborough’s dead. Meeks and Kuzui are here and they went AWOL before the squad was ever deployed. Dreams have a way of obscuring facts like that until you scrutinize the situation detail by detail.

So I am dreaming. The problem is that knowing I’m dreaming doesn’t help me as long as I’m still trapped in a dream that’s carrying me into the heart of Tijuana. I can moderate my psychological responses a little, though I can’t control them completely—my practice isn’t evolved enough for that. But controlling my physiological responses is way beyond my grasp. If we actually get to the city my body will overdose on adrenaline no matter how clearly I recognize that the things I’m seeing, the things we’re doing, aren’t real, and that will begin to erode my psychological control. Even a lifetime of meditation probably wouldn’t get me safely through reliving Tijuana.

If I could wake up I could put an end to it, and my Forces training is supposed to let me do exactly that, but it’s not working. I try shouting loudly and abruptly. I try suddenly kicking out at Macchia beside me, but he just grins at me. Abrupt, startling actions like these usually allow a sleeping person to briefly overcome the REM atonia that keeps them paralyzed while they’re dreaming so that they don’t end up running around the bedroom acting out their dreams. Then when their sleeping body kicks or shouts, it wakes them up. The problem is that it’s not working. Nothing is working and Tijuana is getting closer. I’d jump out of the Jenny—that would almost certainly wake me up—but the hold is sealed until we land.

I need a new approach. I ignore the logic of the dream, ignore the other people, and get off the bench, sweeping aside the pile of masks and seating myself cross-legged on the floor. No one says anything about it. I rest my hands on my knees, close my eyes, and focus on my breath.

One, two. Inhale, exhale. One, two.

I get distracted by the guys stomping around me, by the vibrations of the engine that I can feel through the deck, but I bring my mind back to my breath. One, two. Inhale, exhale. I feel the Jenny settle onto the ground and as the doors crack open the familiar smell of the Mexican desert washes over me, making me lose focus again, but I bring my mind back to my breath.

One, two. One, two. One, two.

The details of the dream and my dread of it keep tugging at my attention and I lose my grip, lose my focus, again and again, and have to bring it back.

The doors slide open wide and the guys tumble out in an undisciplined, drugged gaggle, laughing and hooting, like a pile of evil puppies. I know what they’re about to do. I know every unspeakable detail and those details bang on the door of my attention, but I keep my eyes closed and force myself to re-focus on my breath.

Felon approaches me and bellows over the sound of the rotors, which are slowing now but haven’t completely stopped.

“Burroughs, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

I ignore him and remain where I am.

“Burroughs!” He grabs my arm and tries to pull me upright, screaming in my ear. I focus on my breath. “Goddamn it, what the hell is the matter with you?” One, two. One, two. “This is dereliction Burroughs—you know the penalty for dereliction in the field?”

I feel my adrenaline kick up a notch when he ratchets one of his flechette launchers. The situation still feels entirely real and I begin to doubt myself, which is when the thing I’ve been waiting for finally happens: my alarm goes off.

The intermittent buzzing of the alarm goes on for a while before the dream finally begins to disintegrate, Felon’s voice crackling and spitting like bad comm as his apparition comes apart. I allow my eyes to open an instant too soon and out the door of the Jenny I see the desert for a moment, glowing green through the nightvision filter of my visor, before it’s replaced by my bedroom.

I look at the clock: 6:00 a.m. I say “I’m awake” and the alarm stops. I sit up in bed feeling shaky, covered in sweat. I throw the covers off and strip off my t-shirt and underwear, walking to the mat in the corner.

I’ll shower later. I’ve got a new client to meet today—a big one—and work to do. I need to collect myself. I sit down naked on the mat and re-start the process of meditation that I began inside the dream. I begin the Mosquito Meditation—nothing less is going to do the trick today.

Two: Mad, Fat, and Dangerous to Know

Who would want to kill him? Even I don’t actually give a damn if he lives or dies and I’m paid a lot of money to care. I’ll try to keep him alive because it’s my job, because I have a reputation to protect, but about his death itself I would feel nothing, truly nothing. The attempt on his life must have been about money because I can’t imagine him arousing anyone’s passion.

He’s tall, but fat. His receding hairline gives his face a round, moonish look, eyes buried deep within folds of skin. His hair would be grey except that in a quaint, old-fashioned touch of vanity he dies it pitch black. By turns he stalks around the manse like a ghost, totters like the drunk he is, or charges like a stumbling bull, bellowing his head off. This is Max Prince in the flesh—the doughy, pale, puffy flesh. His T-shirts can barely contain his belly, like a ham shoved into a pair of panty hose. Sometimes he forgets to dress at all and wanders around in his pajamas or, on one occasion, a white dress shirt and nothing else. His hair is inevitably in disarray and his nails are always dirty. His breath is noxious.

But his eyes are still bright blue and clear, even if you can barely make them out through the sponge-like flesh that surrounds them. Blue like jewels, just like they always were. In a bygone era he was slim, sexy, and famous—an actor and singer at the top of the entertainment industry. Now he resembles one of those antique pornos that are printed on paper. If you cut away all the intellectual bullshit about how a three-hundred-year-old copy of Hustler represents a form of authentic American folk art, what you have in your hands is a well-thumbed nudie magazine with the sheen coming off the pages. He’s like that. Once he was beguiling in a trashy way, now you don’t want to touch him without gloves. Once he got people sweaty, now he’s just greasy and unpleasant.

Four decades ago Max Prince was known as the Mad Prince because of his outrageous conduct, especially his prodigious appetite for expensive drugs and disposable women. The women were starlets, debutantes, and cashiers from the local corner store. They were the mothers, daughters, and sisters of his business partners and friends.

There was no end to it. Screwing six women a day, he ingested every drug known to man—from natural psychedelics to hyped-up synthetic amphetamines—in quantities that would have killed an ordinary man, and washed it all down with vodka straight from the bottle. No matter what he did, though, he remained charming in his raffish way, and he never forgot his lines or was late on the set. His singing never suffered. On talk sims, chatting with the host and flirting with the other guests, he was sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes entertainingly arrogant, sometimes seemingly candid. Mostly he was funny and good looking and as a result we forgave him everything.

He destroyed stuff. He would trash a hotel room, tearing down the drapes and using the curtain rod to smash everything that was breakable. He would take offence at the color of someone’s parked car for reasons no sober person could interpret and use the heavy decorative cane he affected in those days to knock out all the windows, finishing with powerful blows to the hood that would make it buckle and cave. His keepers and managers would cheerfully pay for everything, sweeping up in his wake. They paid off the girls too, as well as their parents, abortionists, and psychiatrists, and greased the palms of the law so that the drugs he took never became a career-threatening issue. A good parasite—that is to say a well-adapted one—does everything it can to ensure the survival of its host, and his staff were good parasites, smoothing the way for him and keeping him out of trouble while drawing outrageous salaries.

Now he’s a has-been. He’s still known as the Mad Prince, but for more literal reasons and only to his staff since almost no one else bothers to talk about him. He’s used drugs and alcohol for so long and to such a degree that his emotions, his personality, and his thought processes have been deformed into something monstrous, alien, unknowable. And he continues to get wrecked, every day, all day. He’s paranoid and isolates himself in his estate, Cloud City. He’s certain that they are after him, after his famous self, after his money, after his very skeleton if they can get it.

He never appears in public, not that the public would care anyway, and spends most of his time reliving old escapades in the sims, jacked into a full-sensory replay of what he once was. Sometimes he uses the commercial studio productions he acted in, romantic comedies and action dramas, but more often he plays home-made recordings, recreating his drunken hijinx and his encounters with women. Time and again, stoned out of what’s left of his mind, he solves the same crimes, woos the same starlet, or fucks the same groupie. He is a man going in circles, his body bloating and inflating like a parade balloon while his mind dwindles away, shriveling to a barely functional, raisin-like core of irrational thought.

You may wonder why Fat Max is fat at all, why he’s a chronic alcoholic, why he’s even getting old. There are surgical solutions for all of those problems, after all. It would take less than a day at a price he wouldn’t even notice. The fact is, though, that Max is too paranoid to let anyone near him with a knife or a laser. He won’t allow his ka to be decanted because he believes that someone (he’s not sure who—them!) will erase it before he’s safe in his new shell. Or they’ll tamper with the shell in some insidious way, rewire the nerves or screw with the glands, in order to sap his will and turn him into a celebrity zombie who hands over his money and property to his new masters. So, ironically, one of the richest men in the world, one of those most able to afford immortality, is so afraid of someone else killing him that he’s killing himself by refusing to take advantage of modern medicine. My head hurts just thinking about how easily he could buy what I want so badly. I can’t allow that to distract me, though. For some unfathomable reason someone really has tried to kill him and he still has plenty of money to buy big-time protection.

All the income he made when he was younger has been carefully invested and this nest-egg produces more wealth in a week than most people will ever see in a lifetime. He has teams of brokers and market analysts and lawyers who work long hours to keep it that way, all while taking a healthy percentage for themselves. It’s in everyone’s interests that he continues to prosper. My job, like everyone else’s, is to make sure that he does.

I’m not sure where he’s wandered off to now, but when I first arrived and Cyril Dancey, the head of the day staff, introduced us, Max looked me up and down with a critical, bleary eye. I couldn’t decide if he liked what he saw or not and Dancey didn’t decode his master’s scrutiny for me, if in fact he had any idea what Prince was thinking.

There’s a cachet about military service in the security business. Not amongst professionals, but the clients eat it up. For that reason I’m out here at Cloud City dressed as I always am when I’m on assignment. I’m wearing California National Forces green cargo pants and military boots—the same ones I wore in combat, in fact, just in case anyone asks. My hair is still cut so short it’s almost shaved. I’m carrying a sidearm and I have a flechette-launcher on the underside of each forearm. The only difference in my appearance from when I was in the service is that I’m not wearing a jacket. Instead I have on what we used to call, back in my childhood, a wife-beater—a sleeveless T-shirt, also that distinctive shade of Forces green.

The point of the shirt is not to show off my physique, although that doesn’t hurt, it’s to show off my tattoos. They are my pedigree, and they are the thing the customers most want to see. Down my right bicep are my unit and rank insignias, rising as high as Captain. Down my left are the skill insignias: personal combat, light and heavy weapons combat, infiltration, counter-infiltration, intelligence management, and all the rest. On my forearms are the ones that really count, though, the battle insignias: the Boulder Colorado recon, the San Diego uprising, two New York infiltrations, and on and on, down to the one I wish wasn’t there—Tijuana. That’s the one that always grabs them. What was it like? That must have been amazing! That’s civilians for you. The veterans just turn away. They don’t like to think about it any more than I do, especially the ones who were there. Max may have noticed all of this or none of it—he regarded me, his face unreadable, and then walked away without speaking.

Dancey’s noticed the tattoos, though.  He’s a formal, discreet man, but his eyes repeatedly flick back to them when he thinks I’m not looking.  He’s young, maybe thirty at the outside, but he gives the impression of being old.  He’s dressed in a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and a blue-grey tie that matches the colour of his eyes.  His face is thin and pale, almost grey, although his features have clear African-American markers.  As I follow him deeper into the house, I notice that his gait is strangely stiff, adding to the impression of premature senescence.

“Get the fuck out of my fucking house!”  There goes Max now, interrupting my thoughts as Dancey leads me in the direction of the garden.

“That’s Saul, one of the cooks,” Dancey says, identifying the target of Max’s rage.  He lowers his voice politely, but he needn’t have bothered.  Max’s attention, all bluster and apoplexy, is focused on Saul like a spotlight, to the exclusion of anything else.

“What’d he do?” I ask.

Dancey just shrugs.

“Maybe nothing.  Max imagines things.” He states this matter-of-factly, fully acclimated to his boss’s quirks.

I turn and watch the show with everyone else.

“You are finished, fired. You’re lucky I don’t have you assassinated.”

Max’s huge bulk stumbles down the hall from the kitchen, rebounding off the walls as Saul retreats in front of him.

“Okay, man, I’m going.” Saul doesn’t look unduly concerned, nor do any of the staff, most of whom watch for a moment and then go back to whatever they were doing.

“How often does he actually fire people?” I ask.

Dancey is expressionless.

“Saul will arrive for work tomorrow morning and Max won’t remember a thing—it’s the alcohol, the drugs. They wipe the slate clean.  In effect, all he’s done is give Saul the day off.  Since Max won’t remember, I won’t even bother docking Saul’s pay. No one actually loses their job in these dramas.”

As Saul goes out the door, Max follows him with a parting volley.

“Watch your back, you treasonous fuck. You aren’t safe!”

The last few staff members go back to work and I return to following Dancey and thinking about the defenses for Max’s house.  These consist of a high-end security system and now my company, Burroughs Oversight. I was only hired after the attempt on his life, but the security system has been in place forever.  Carmen, my tech guru, got here before me to examine it and called me with the details .

I’d expected her to find an expensive off-the-shelf package that would need serious re-strategizing, or at least technical upgrading. But what do you know? With his irrational sense of his own worth, his imaginary star-power, and his sheer paranoia, he has all the bells and whistles laid out in a lean, effective security ecology.

There are cameras, of course, but there are also sensors for sound and light, including infra-red for body heat. There are motion sensors that detect changes in air pressure and sensors for the bioelectromagentic field produced by a living being’s nervous system. All the sensors have been coded to filter out staff members, as well as non-humans like chipmunks, insects, and stray cats. The entire array of artificial eyes, ears, and nerves scans an area that extends at least a half a click beyond the boundaries of Cloud City without a centimeter left unsurveilled.

The equipment is orchestrated by, and the sensory data streamed through, a top-grade AI which maps the output to known stalking and kidnapping cases, as well as to hypothetical scenarios dreamed up by experts. On top of that, the AI’s templates are updated daily with reports from police forces around the world, from top security research centers at universities and private think-tanks, and from boots-on-the-ground civilian security companies like mine.

He even has the dogs, for god’s sake, and they aren’t supposed to be available for civilian use. Dogware is a military anti-infiltration system. Its ‘dogs’ look vaguely like real dogs, just very large and abstract ones. They could have been made to look like anything at all, but the researchers who designed the system studied visceral fear responses using a variety of candidate designs and dogs turned out to work the best. They didn’t necessarily provoke the most fear in a particular subject, but dogs are so universally known from direct personal experience—not just from the sims or vicarious accounts—that a dog attack will produce a powerful panic reaction in just about anyone.

They are built with faux fur over a buckytube skeleton and stand about three feet high at the shoulder. Their claws and teeth are razor-sharp and their reflexes are faster than any human’s, except maybe a Tic’s. They are extremely powerful, feel no pain, and it’s virtually impossible to inflict damage on them. Even if they remain materialized, their core construction is impervious to almost anything: fists, kicks, blows from an iron rod, gunshots, being run over by an earth-mover. The thing is, though, that if you try to hit one, it won’t remain materialized. Instead it will disappear and, before you can draw a breath, it’ll reappear behind you, punch its paw through your back, and pull out your heart. That’s because the dogs are actually nanoswarms—vast armies of molecule-sized robotic devices that can assemble into any material in any form. They can also disassemble and disperse invisibly into the surrounding air in less time than it takes you to blink. In their downtime they float like motes of dust in the air, invisible.

The trouble is that despite the elegance of Max’s system, despite even the dogware, someone got in. Past the cameras, the motion sensors, and all the other high-end equipment, without setting off the alarm or leaving any recorded image. They took a shot at Max, then fled when he slapped one of the house’s ubiquitous alarm plates. Apparently the would-be assassin didn’t have the stomach to confront the L.A.P.D. Having seen the P.D. in action I didn’t wonder why—I think I’d rather fight the dogs.

The bullet hit Max in the shoulder, probably a failed head shot—maybe he moved unexpectedly just as they fired, all the assassin’s high-tech expertise foiled by the twitching and shaking of an addict. He roared in pain, flailing and screaming and bleeding all over the furniture, but he lived. Unfortunately he was, as always, drunk and stoned at the time, and by the time he was revived at the hospital he had no memory of the actual shooting at all. The last thing he remembered was the failure of the dogware. In a rare moment of lucidity and sobriety—enforced by his hospitalization—he told me about it as an extremely attractive private nurse puttered around us.

“Fucking things were at each others’ throats man. I mean fuck. There were hundreds of them out on the lawn, disappearing and appearing all over the place, attacking each other and making these berserk sounds like shrieks. Most fucked up thing I ever saw.”

Carmen has been trying to trace the problem back to the source, but whoever caused the dogs to turn on themselves burned up their code as they went. All she’s found is randomized gibberish. So whoever attacked Max, whoever I’m supposed to protect him from, is good enough to hack the latest military equipment while protecting their identity at the same time. It gives me a cold feeling.

I wasn’t hired to investigate, to actually find out who attacked Max or why, just to improve his security architecture, to make it effective against any more attempts on his life. The thing is that as I look at his state of the art counter-intrusion apparatus and think about the person who simply walked past all of it, pitting the dogs against each other as they went, I don’t believe there’s a system in the world that can protect him. The killer failed once, but just barely, and there’s no reason to think they’ll fail again. The more I think about it, the more it seems that the only way to protect Max is to find that killer—that enchanted ghost who could laugh off the dogs—and take them out. The only way to protect him effectively is to understand and then to eradicate.

“The garden,” Dancey announces, taking me out of my thoughts, then turns quietly to leave me to my business.  I look through a broad green arch at the garden.  I leave the carpeted hallway and gravel crunches under my feet.

Three: A Sixteen Year Old Cheerleader Crossed With a Porn Queen

Cloud City is a paradise. The swooping lines of the main house shine, crisp and white in the Cali sunshine. There are also at least twelve smaller buildings to house staff and guests, plus two small lakes. There is a small but well-stocked art museum, with exhibits borrowed on a rotating basis from major museums around the world. There’s a stable, a horseracing track, a large forested area. The staff uses motorized carts, like miniature convertibles, to get around.

Despite all of this, it’s forlorn. The vast green spaces are empty except for the staff who tend them. The staff houses are full, but the guest houses are empty. Without guests, and with Max withdrawn into his fantasy world, there’s no one to view the art except the guys who hang the pictures, no one to ride the horses except their grooms, and no one to swim in the lakes at all. Attendants clear the forest floor regularly so you can stroll through it unmolested by underbrush, but no one ever does.

The main house is a spooky place haunted by a living man. It’d be beautiful if it belonged to anyone else. The furniture is tasteful and subdued. The art is original, varied, and imaginative, and isn’t limited to paintings or photographs hanging on the walls. There are sculptures that are enjoyed as much with the fingertips as with the eyes and there are holo installations by some of L.A.’s brightest young stars.  Dancey occasionally identified a piece or an artist as he led me through the house, but I only half listened—my attention was focused on the art itself.  Even the air is filled with a subtle fragrance, carried on an aerosol through the ventilation system. Dancey says it’s different every day, usually floral, but today it’s a citrus combination of lime and tangerine, while tomorrow it might be a blend amber and vanilla.

The carpet is lush and spotlessly white. It has a thick nap, which not only lends a spring to your step, but also apparently helps when Max spills things or throws up, both of which he regularly does. The stained patch can be removed and replaced, the nap of the new piece combed into that of the old, and the appearance of an unbroken expanse of snow-like whiteness is restored with no visible seams.

The front door opens directly into a huge living room, and one progresses downward by stages through several clusters of furniture. In some places the floor is stepped, in others one glides down a smooth, ramp-like structure. Overall it’s like entering an artficial and immaculate sand dune, an impression enhanced by large, potted tropical plants. In the background, almost as subtle as the house’s scent, is a soundtrack of Max’s own music, mostly soft ballads. In this way the young, sane, sexy Max haunts the house too, but unlike the old, frothing, ugly Max, the young one really is dead.

The house has a kitchen, which is rare these days for someone with Max’s money. I’d asked Dancey about it and he’d answered expressionlessly, without betraying his own thoughts.

“Max would rather mistrust a staff of chefs and sous-chefs than a machine.  He can spy on people, yell at them.  You can’t bully a machine.  If someone is going to try to poison him, he wants it to be a human being—he feels he has a better chance of catching them.”

After entering through the front door, one can descend into the dune of the living room, or instead one can pass to the right or the left. In either direction there are hallways discreetly hidden by the curvature of the walls. The passage to the left leads to the sleeping quarters, Max’s music studio, and his unused personal gymnasium. The one to the right—the one along which Dancey had taken me—leads to the kitchen, the security office, and the garden.

It’s not a garden in the usual sense, but a large, indoor, tropical overgrowth, bursting with flowers, ferns, and even medium-sized trees, all contained beneath a high ceiling of glass panels. There are gravel paths and park benches in some areas, while other areas are carpeted and have clusters of more comfortable furniture: sofas and armchairs. It’s a strange combination of outdoors and indoors which Max created at least two decades ago but never visits anymore and it’s here that I’ll interview Porsche.

Porsche Prince is Max’s granddaughter. Max picked the name—Porsche’s mother Selena, his only child, was in rehab at the time. Max was never the kind of actor to dabble in the classics. He’s probably never heard of Shakespeare and, if he has, he hasn’t read him or acted in any of his plays, so she’s not “Portia.” She’s named after the car.

On the surface Porsche seems to be my prime suspect for all the obvious reasons. Max’s fortune is vast to the point of immeasurability. Selena was his only child, and she drowned long ago in her own bathtub, maxed out on vodka and overproof barbiturates while riding the visions of Sunday Best, a hallucinogen known for producing beatific visions. Suicide, not suicide? Who knows? Selena had been an unpredictable wreck from childhood, so it could have been either. Since she’s dead and her ex-husband was cut out of the action with a prenuptial agreement, that leaves Porsche as Max’s sole heir. He could write her out of his will, maybe donate his fortune to charity, but he’s too self-regarding for that. He clings to the notion that something of him lives on in her and therefore his empire must devolve to her. It’s a pathetic miscalculation borne of egotism. There is nothing of Max in Porsche, neither his early artistry nor his later foolish bumbling.

Nor does Porsche resemble her aimless, self-destructive mother—not at all. She’s focused, ludicrously ambitious, self-controlled, and controlling of others. She uses her father’s name as a key to open doors to innumerable deals—sim roles, recording contracts, product endorsements—which inevitably fall apart before they’ve begun or stutter to an abortive end partway through because her talent at anything artistic is inversely proportional to her greed. All she has going for her, apart from naked avarice, is her looks.

She was born beautiful, but that isn’t enough for her. She’s had herself enhanced to the point that it’s hard to believe she’s a real person and not an erotic cartoon character. She is stacked and wasp-waisted, with shimmering blonde hair, icy blue eyes, and perfect skin. At twenty-four—not exactly ancient to begin with—she has the body of a sixteen year old cheerleader crossed with a porn queen. The only flaw in her appearance is her face: it should be beautiful, but it betrays her soul a little too openly. Her lips are thin, and usually wear an expression that is either haughty or overtly cruel. Her eyes are narrow and piercing. She looks like what she is, a spoiled little rich girl for whom nothing is ever enough.

Her face makes things difficult for me. I’ve met some beautiful women in my work, and been tempted by a few, but for whatever perverse reason it’s precisely this kind—the manipulative, selfish, shallow kind—that attracts me the most. I’ve never thought long enough about this to work out why it should be so. Maybe I’m a masochist. Or maybe the sheer transparency of women like that, the openness of their self-promotion, makes them seem more naked than other women can ever be. Or maybe I’m just fucked up. I could see a shrink, but introspection is not my forte. I sometimes indulge in self-analysis for a moment here and there, particularly after being fucked over by someone like Porsche who’s traded me in for a richer or better looking guy, but I can never stick with it. Maybe the real secret is that I’m just as shallow as they are.

In any event, that face is a problem, because she’s a suspect and I can’t afford to allow my perceptions to be clouded by my hormones. To make matters worse, her appearance isn’t the only thing she’s had augmented. Porsche Prince is dedicated to living the life her body is suited to. Her nerves have been finely tuned to enhance her responsiveness during sex, turning ordinary parts of her body into erogenous zones, and her erogenous zones into roiling seas of erotic sensitivity. I know this because everyone knows it. She makes no bones about her inclinations or the delicate surgical enhancements she’s undergone to allow her to indulge them with as much abandon as possible.

I’m examining some flowers I can’t identify when Porsche enters through the garden arch.  She’s wearing jeans and a cut-off T-shirt that displays her tight midriff and rides high on the tide of her breasts, their undersides just visible. She throws herself full-length onto a sofa and lies on her side, one arm bent so that her hand supports her head. I sit in an armchair.

“So are you going to arrest me?” she chides. Her expression is somewhere between an amused smile and a sneer. “I’m not a cop,” I remind her.

“Oh, right, I forgot. You’re hired muscle.”

“Actually, it’s my brain Max is paying for.”

“Hmm.”

She says this in a non-committal way that could mean anything. It’s hard to know what to say in response to such an ambiguous sound.

“Anyway, arresting you isn’t an issue just now.”

She squints and adjusts herself on the sofa, her breasts bobbing and shifting. I swear I can smell the sex of her. I don’t mean perfume, but sex—funky, deep, and slick.

“You think it was me though.”

That’s one thing I love about bitchy women—directness. Sometimes it’s directness to the point of rudeness, or even cruelty, but at least they say what they mean. “I haven’t decided what I think yet, but yeah, you’re on the list. High up there.” She sits up and sighs as though she’s suddenly bored. “Well, let me save you some trouble so we can both get on with other things. It can’t be me.”

“Why is that?”

“You haven’t done your homework, have you?”

“I just got here. My first job was to check house security.”

“Look, Max is too brain-dead to talk to, but if you ask James—the lawyer?—he’ll tell you. I’ve had augmentation.”

“I know that. Everyone knows that. I don’t see how it’s relevant.” I have every intention of talking to James Jerome, Max’s lawyer, but he’s out of town this morning. I have an appointment with him later today.

“What you don’t know is that not all of the augmentation was by choice. Max started getting paranoid long before he went totally wacko, you know. He’s always been worried about people coming after his money. My mom was no threat—she was too wasted to tie her own shoes, much less pull off some kind of palace coup—but he thought I might be trouble eventually, so one day when I was seven years old he bullied her into having me wired up.”

She lets that sink in for a moment. The invasiveness of forced neural controls, her young age, the ineffectual mother, the absent father, and the paranoid, manipulative grandfather. It’s an unthinkably ugly scenario.

“He’s a gross old fuck and he makes me sick and yes, I want all his money. I can’t wait until he pops one pill too many and his greasy heart bursts in his chest.” She pauses here to smile sweetly at me. “But the wiring they put in me won’t let me do anything about it. If he hit me—which he never does, I don’t even think he remembers I exist half the time—but if he ever did hit me, I wouldn’t be able to hit him back. I couldn’t even ask someone else to hit him for me. I can barely think the thought of hitting him without starting to feel nauseous. And if I ever held the thought long enough to get past the nausea, it would turn into pain, then whole-body muscle cramping, then complete paralysis, then unconsciousness. And that’s just the thought of slapping him. You can imagine what it’d be like if I thought something worse.”

I nod, not saying anything. I act as though I accept her explanation at face value, but the truth is that there are sometimes ways to get around that kind of nerve-job, especially if you have an allowance as generous as Porsche’s. You can even have it put back to its original state afterward so that no one will know it’s been tampered with.

Porsche stands and brushes imaginary dirt off her perfect ass. The pale light of the garden, filtered through the foliage, plays across her skin and, for a moment, I can’t prevent myself from thinking about what that skin would feel like. She starts out of the garden then, walking past me as she goes. On the way she stops and runs her finger along my forearm, letting it hesitate at the last tattoo.

“Tijuana,” she says, leaving it at that.

I nod, not trusting myself to say anything. Porsche gazes at the tattoo, stroking it with two fingers.

“So was it a rush, Tijuana?”

“It was a Brace and Erase. I don’t remember.”

It’s a lie, of course, and my traitor brain punishes me by allowing a little taste of Tijuana to seep in around the edges of reality. The heavy, almost gentle thup—thup—thup of helicopter rotors slowly bleeds into my world, blending with the rustle of the leaves in the garden. I don’t see the past just yet, but I can hear it and I can smell it—the heavy, soft air of Mexico. It smells like heaven as long as you’re upwind of the dead.

“Hmmm, Brace.” Porsche says, almost chuckling. “Pharmacological sociopathy.” She enunciates the last words slowly, rhythmically, as if she’s tasting them as she says them. “I wonder what that would be like.”

“Along with Erase,” I manage to say, trying to ignore the shouts of the imaginary squad rushing out of the hallucinated Jenny, boots thumping to the ground. “You don’t remember afterward.”

She flicks her eyes up to meet mine, smiles a little.

“You never remember? Not even a little?”

“No.”

I must hesitate fractionally before I answer, or maybe my intonation is off. I can see in her eyes that she doesn’t believe me.

“Nothing? I would have thought that it wasn’t possible to forget something like that, not completely. All that mayhem?” The expression on her face is serious, but the undertow in her voice is appreciative, like someone at a wine tasting.

“It’s not a matter of forgetting.” I force myself to focus on Porsche’s face and the sounds of the Tijuana deployment retreat a little, although I can still smell the night desert. “Erase prevents you from forming long-term memory in the first place. There’s nothing to remember.”

“And it works every time, all the time?”

I don’t bother to lie this time, just shake my head. I say nothing, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. Porsche’s very practiced at reading people and right now she’s reading my shame.

“Oh come on,” she says matter of factly. “Pangs of conscience? Seriously? I mean, you enlisted. You’re not going to tell me you didn’t know what you were getting into.”

“James tell you how old I am?”

She shakes her head.

“I was born in seventy-one.”

She shrugs.

“Twenty-seventy-one.”

She gets it quickly and her face lights up.

“You’re a revenant!”

Her glee seems as real and guileless as a child’s. The sunshine of it dispels the last of the Mexican memories. It’s a relief to see and hear and smell nothing but the garden around me.

“Yes, I am.”

“That’s, like, a hundred and fifty years?”

She’s canny, but math is not her strong point.

“Closer to one-seventy-five.”

“So—what?—when you were growing up California was just some state? Did you actually go through the Fall?”

“No,” I shrug. “I flatlined in a car accident and they stuck me in stasis. We didn’t have shells yet, so that was the best they could do.  I missed everything.”

It’s clear that Porsche lives for novelty. Before I had bored her, but meeting someone who was alive during the American Empire has her wide awake and full of questions.

“Freaky.”

I laugh despite myself.

Porsche looks at me for a long moment. I didn’t raise the topic of my stasis just to entertain her—I had a point and I’m thinking about how to navigate toward it, but she bypasses all the details and jumps straight to the conclusion.

“You’re afraid of dying.”

I back away from the point a little.

“Everyone is.”

Her hair moves when she shakes her head.

“Not like you.” She takes a step toward me, closer than most people would stand. “You’re no soldier. I’d smell it on you.” She manages to make her judgment sound disdainful and sweet at the same time. “You died, more or less, right? Lost everything. You woke up and found yourself here.” She tilts her head. “Your family’s gone, dead. Everything in your world gone, dead. You were dead.”

I don’t answer, but she’s caught my scent all right and she knows it. She pokes me in the chest with her finger and drops her voice to a scratchy whisper.

“But death’s not going to get you again, am I right? Not if you can hold it off. So you join the Forces and you get this shell.” Her hand moves up and down me, casually brushing my military-issue body with her fingertips. “You could never have afforded this. You have skills two centuries old, what kind of a job are you going to get?”

“No job at all. Without the Forces I’d have been krill.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the point. Without the Forces you’d have been mortal,” she says, poking me again, but grinning at me this time, grinning at her own deductions, hateful and playful. “Now you have a top of the line shell and skills that might just let you buy a new one when this one ages out. But to get it you had to stomp on the peasants, cause pain, ruin lives, end lives, tear up families.”  She’s still grinning. “What was so important in Tijuana anyway? It’s not like they have anything.”

“They have the border.  Guiterrez was losing control of the population—too much rebellion. You can’t have that on the border. To Sacramento the border is like its own skin—you don’t want things happening that close. You could get an infection.”

“So you guys, what? Restored order? Disinfected?”

“That’s the way Sacramento talks about it. Look, your father must have other people who hate him, who want his money.”

I can’t talk any more about Tijuana, I need to change the subject back to the task at hand, but she waves my words away. The investigation bores her, but apparently I no longer do.

“What are you doing later?””

“Working, Porsche.”

“Do you ever stop working?”

“When I go to bed.”

“Bed? Perfect!” she says cheerily, and finally walks past me, leaving a trail of pheromones in her wake. My body stays where it is, ninety-nine percent certain she’s doing no more than toying with me, but my lust follows her out of the room anyway.

Four: 3% Threats and Paradoxical Data

James Jerome is nominally Max’s lawyer, but he is really far more than that. In the elaborate bureaucracy that manages Max’s money, his health, his temper, and a myriad of other details, Jerome is the unofficial ringleader, CEO, and unelected president-for-life.

He hires and fires the household staff, oversees the licensing and distribution of Max’s sims and audio recordings, decides what doctor or dentist can be trusted, invests Max’s money and doles it out to him, and administers Porsche’s trust fund. He was the one who hired me, although we haven’t met in person until today.

Jerome is one of the most competent and expensive lawyers in the state. The only thing his polished perpetual motion can’t achieve is to persuade his fat, unhealthy, aging charge to be decanted into a shell, or for that matter to have his weight surgically reduced, to go to a rehab center, or even to exercise. Everything else Jerome does with a competence bordering on mania.

Given his pathological need to manage every detail of Max’s life, the near-fatal shooting has upset him badly. He sees it as his failure—as indeed it is—and he doesn’t really know what to do with failure. I doubt he’s encountered it since the age of five. Now, as it slides its unwholesome caresses all over him, he has no plan ‘B’ to fall back on, so he does what comes naturally to him when anyone else fails: he gets angry.

I meet him in his office, which is in Cloud City, though not in the main house. Of the numerous buildings on the estate, Jerome has chosen a Victorian era house, transplanted brick by numbered brick from London, England at ridiculous cost and then reassembled here in California, as his home base. He lives upstairs, but the main floor is reserved for work. Despite the fidelity with which the exterior of the house has been reconstructed, Jerome seems to have found the rooms too confining because he’s knocked out all the interior walls on the ground floor. It makes for one hell of a space, and he is pacing its entire carpeted expanse.

“What progress have you made?” he asks me in the clipped tone of someone who is used to issuing orders and getting results. He is a tall man and is wearing a dark suit that fairly screams ‘I make more money than you do.’ Empire period Brooks Brothers I think, but I was no expert on high fashion even before the Fall, so I could easily be wrong. I try to pretend that his manner and tone don’t infuriate me.

“My tech is diagnosing the system now. I’ll know more about that side of things later. In the meantime I interviewed Porsche.”

He continues pacing and nods, his stylish grey forelock bouncing, but says nothing.

“She claims that she’s wired against harming Max,” I say.

Jerome waves his hand, as though a fly is bothering him.

“Forget her. She’s wired to the teeth. I’ve seen sims of the surgery and she has to submit to regular, random check-ups. The reports come straight to me.”

“What happens if she refuses a check-up?”

Jerome finally stops pacing and looks at me. There is an incongruous, small smile on his face. I’m not even sure he knows it’s there.

“No check-up, no allowance,” he says.

It’s my turn to nod. To judge by the involuntary smile, James Jerome wouldn’t mind cutting Porsche off at the knees, financially speaking. No love lost amongst parasites.

“I’ll need to talk to the AI,” I tell him.

“I know, I’ve already had him decanted into a shell to make interaction easier. He’s at the house with your tech now.”

“Him?”

For the most part being decanted in a human body is just an impediment for a security AI. It imposes a distractingly narrow point of view when the AI’s job is to mentally encompass the entire domain it protects, literally living within the cameras, the sensors, the alarm plates, the very wires themselves.

As well, the human body has somatic distractions: sleepiness, hunger, pain. A security AI is not at its optimum functionality if it has to stop what it’s doing every once in a while to piss.

But even though AIs generally remain incorporeal, or at least don't inhabit human shells, almost all of them are artificially gendered to make humans more comfortable in dealing with them.  Nonetheless, they are almost invariably given female personas, since statistically both sexes seem to react better to them.

Jerome makes a face at my question, as though he’s tasted something and doesn’t like it.

“Max’s attitude toward women is about equal parts misogyny and fetishization. Gendering it as a male seemed less complicated.”

“What’s he called?”

“Hmm?” Jerome looks up from some thought of his own.

“The AI. What’s he called?”

“Oh, Alan.”

“Does Alan report to you too, like Porsche?”

“Of course. He’s the one who gives me her check-up results. It’s within his domain, part of the security architecture.”

“So if Alan becomes aware of a threat to Max, from Porsche or anywhere else, he briefs you?”

“If it’s a real risk, yes. Max isn’t as famous as he once was, obviously, but he’s still well known among some older fans and he’s certainly rich, which means there are still a few crazies out there who want to kill him, marry him, whatever. Most of them are just harmless nutty old ladies and Alan is well able to handle them. They call, they send messages, they even send parcels. Alan intercepts it all. Max isn’t even aware it’s going on. Alan gives me a summary of that kind of activity every week, and I double-check it in case he might have missed something, but of course he never does. Other than that he only contacts me if there’s a serious threat.”

“What constitutes serious?”

Jerome smiles thinly.

“Anything rising above three percent.”

“Three percent of what?”

“A three percent chance of harming Max in some way.”

It’s an impressive cut-off point.

“That’s a very low tolerance.”

“Yes, well we’re very cautious when it comes to Max’s safety. Still, given our counter-intrusion measures and the fact that Max almost never leaves Cloud City, the issue rarely arises.”

“When was the last time something registered above three percent?”

“About six months ago. It had been years before that.”

“What triggered the recent alert?”

“Alan’s routine monitoring of police communications.”

Skimming police comm is against the law, but the AIs used by most wealthy people do it routinely. For the most part the cops just turn a blind eye.

“What did he pick up?”

“It was an internal memorandum within the Mexico City Police being routed from an interrogator to his superior.”

“Mexico?”

“Alan’s parameters are set very broadly, both in terms of the nature of potential threats and their location.”

“World-wide?”

“Where possible.”

He doesn’t elaborate, but for the moment I assume that the range of the possible excludes the Empires of China and Japan. No one knows what they’re up to and not even an AI like Alan is likely to be able to skim their comm. Plus, obviously the Grey Zones—the collapsed middle of what used to be America—where there’s no tech and therefore no comm to monitor.

“What about off-world?”

“Certainly, but nothing’s ever come of it.”

“So, what was Mexico saying?”

Jerome finally sits down, choosing an armchair opposite me.

“They picked up a Suerte boy. Rare thing, given their nature. Even rarer, they got something out of him. Must have squeezed him pretty hard.”

The Mexico City P.D. are about three rungs above the L.A.P.D. on the scale of brutality, and when it comes to the Suerte they know no limits. I’m sure they squeezed very hard indeed.

“The Suerte had taken an interest in Max?”

“Yes, it seems so. Alan had trouble ranking the threat, though. The likelihood of the Suerte breaching security, should they attempt to, was very high. You know what they’re supposed to be capable of.”

“Everyone knows. So why was it difficult to make a risk assessment?”

“Because the likelihood of them actually trying to attack him was… incalculable somehow. Alan ran things one way and came up with an infinitely high result. Running it another way it seemed almost nil. With most people or organizations the likelihood of attacking a target is based on easily quantifiable factors, but as you know, the Suerte have their own agenda and their own logic. So we were stuck with this paradoxical result. If they tried, they’d succeed, but we had no idea if they’d try. How do you assign a risk value to that?”

“What did you do?”

“We battened down the hatches for a few months. No one in or out of Cloud City. We relied entirely on internal supplies for food, water, energy. It’s a procedure that was designed in case of emergencies—outbreaks, civil unrest, that sort of thing. Even Porsche wasn’t allowed in.”

“But you couldn’t maintain it forever.”

“It’s not practical and it’s very expensive. Besides, with the Suerte it might do no good at all. Eventually we let up, in gradual stages, until we were back to normal.”

The Suerte. Missing a killshot doesn’t sound like them. But walking past the highest level security available on the civilian market, and getting past the military dogware, all with apparent ease? That sounds a lot like the Suerte to me.

Five: A Magic Bullet and a Sentimental A.I.

I find Carmen in conversation with Alan in the security office in the main house. It looks like any other office, with access to the system’s data through a security sim. There you see things from the AI’s point of view, that is to say from everywhere at once, feeling the reports of the sensors as though they were your own bodily functions and perceiving Cloud City as one, uninterrupted multi-sensory panorama.

Carmen and Alan are sitting on a sofa, speaking quickly but calmly, like any two people discussing something important. Alan rises when I come in. He’s barrel-chested, with a blocky head, a high forehead, and a slightly distracted air. His dark hair is parted on the side and swept across his head in an antiquated style that’s almost quaint. A stray lock of it falls across his forehead from time to time and he unconsciously pushes it back into place. His eyebrows are thick and dark, his lips thin, his jaw strong. He could be anyone. In fact he reminds me of someone, though I can’t think of who it is.

“Mr. Burroughs,” Alan says in greeting, “I’ve been reviewing the results of the L.A.P.D. investigation with Ms. Jiminez. There are some diagnostics still running on the system itself.”

He has a higher voice than I expected, a little reedy, and he has a British accent. It’s an odd affectation to program into an AI. Maybe it was intended to appeal to the ancient notion of an English butler or maybe, like being male, it somehow simplified interaction with Max. He offers his hand and I take it, shake it, like we’re old friends.

“The P.D. let you in on their results?”

“Not as such, no.”

He has the very sudden smile that you often see in shy people—it’s a nice effect.

I nod, inferring that Alan’s been skimming, gathering their results for himself. Most likely they know he’s doing it and don’t give a shit.

Carmen stands finally. She is a small woman, barely five feet tall, with a face that would seem ordinary if it weren’t for her eyes. They are very large and a very dark brown, and they give her an unusual kind of beauty. Her other noteworthy feature is her absolute cool. I have seen her in some dangerous situations, and I have never seen her break a sweat. Instead she seems to become even more calm, to the point of looking drowsy.

“Anything interesting? Anything stand out?” I ask.

“Lots of interesting,” she says, raising one eyebrow. With Carmen a raised eyebrow is the equivalent of a fire-alarm, an air-raid siren, or a tornado warning. Usually what it means is that she has unearthed utterly inexplicable results. Anything less wouldn’t have rated any expression at all.

“So enlighten me.”

Alan begins.

“The cameras outside the wall captured an image of the assailant, as you know. He or she is not identifiable since they used a mask. But there is no corresponding image once they are inside. Nor are there data from the motion or heat or electrical sensors. There may have been images and other data once, but if there were they were wiped out. There is evidence of a burn.”

“I gathered that.”

Carmen shoves her hands deep into her pockets.

“Gat, no bullet was found.”

“They missed it?”

She shakes her head.

“There’s the hole in the subject’s shoulder. It matches in trajectory with a hole in the wall. There’s no bullet in the wall, though. Not lodged there, not dropped down inside, not gone through to the other side. They used x-ray and metal detection, even scanned for plastic projectiles. Nothing, nothing, nothing. They did a pretty thorough job.”

“Concussion?” I ask, already predicting the answer.

“Hole’s too neat,” Carmen says. “The tissue damage is purely consistent with a standard metal bullet. There’s concussion damage, obviously, because a bullet does that, but there’s the damage from the bullet itself too, no question about it. Besides, concussion rounds would still leave fragments that... ”

I wave her off, knowing full well what she’s saying. Concussion weapons don’t just fire a bolt of compressed air from a distance, they fire a projectile that explodes near the target, creating the compression on near-impact. It’s the concussion that does the damage, not the projectile, but there would still have been bits and pieces of the bullet strewn around the place.

“Something new then?”

This time it’s Alan who answers.

“I have access to information on the most up-to-date weaponry Mr. Burroughs.”

The implications of what he’s saying surprise me a little.

“You skim military comm?”

He doesn’t answer directly, which makes sense since the Forces are not nearly as laid back as the P.D. regarding their comm. Admitting he’d skimmed them would be confessing to a capital offence. He would be decommissioned for that. They’d scrap him completely.

“We are able to keep abreast of developments,” he says obliquely. “The dogs, for instance.”

“Yeah, I was wondering how you got hold of them.”

“Through negotiation, as with anything else.”

“First you had to know they existed.”

“I believe the diagnostic data are coming back,” he says, changing the subject. “We should go in.”

“Fine,” I say. Then it hits me. “Wait.”

“Yes?”

“You’re Alan Turing aren’t you?”

“My shell is a simulacrum of Mr. Turing, yes.”

“That’s where the accent comes from. Turing was British. And you use the name Alan.”

“Those details are consistent with using his likeness”

Alan Turing was a mathematician in the early and mid-twentieth century. He worked at code-breaking for the British military during World War II and invented the very idea of the modern, universal computer, not to mention founding the discipline of artificial intelligence. He never built a comuter, but he elaborated the theoretical structure that allowed others to build them. It was his likeness I’d recognized in the AI’s features.

“Are you programmed for that kind of thing or did someone else choose the likeness?”

“I’m programmed to initiate projects of my own, so long as they don’t exceed or contradict my fundamental parameters. It is thought to increase my flexibility and the fluidity of my computational design.”

“Okay, but why him?”

“He’s my father, really. The father of us all.”

By ‘us all’ he doesn’t mean Carmen and me, of course, he means AIs.

“Isn’t that a little sentimental?” I can’t help allowing a little amusement to creep into my voice as I ask it.

“Perhaps. I have been experimenting with the mimicry of human emotion.” He says it evenly, but I sense a slight glint in his eye, the barest hint of a smile at one corner of his mouth. It’s impressively subtle. “It’s another project I initiated myself, approved by Mr. Jerome of course. I thought it might permit me insights that I would not have by merely observing such emotions from the outside. Any insight into human nature only enhances my ability to protect Mr. Prince.”

“I suppose that’s plausible.”

“That is my one, overarching, unalterable root command, I’m sure you realize. To protect Mr. Prince.”

As he says it I see in his expression a sense of mission that looks like it goes beyond the mere unfolding of a program.

“Sorry, Alan. I never meant to imply otherwise.”

“No apology necessary. It’s your job to be rigorous, as it is mine. Shall we enter the sim?”

“Sure, let’s take a look.”

We recline in three out of a row of identical, padded, seats. It appears to be a custom unit, with no brand name visible anywhere. The transition into sim can be abrupt and disorienting, but this is a top of the line unit. Within moments the security system has remotely accessed and taken control of our sensoria and the security office fades to grey along a smooth, predictable trajectory. Despite the unit’s sophistication, though, there’s a brief moment when I can still see and sense my own body, but the artificially induced REM atonia has already kicked in, rendering me perceptibly paralyzed. Still, if I hadn’t been watching for it I’d never have noticed it.

When the transition’s complete, we appear to be floating high above the main house, hovering motionless in the air. It’s an odd sensation for a human, although I’m sure Alan’s used to it. Cloud City is spread beneath us in all directions. If I focus my attention on an object, the sim program automatically increases its magnification, so that I can look down on a single roof tile’s pebbled surface, or an ant meandering amongst blades of grass, all rendered with perfect resolution and fidelity. Near James Jerome’s residence I see a cat, crouched, edging forward toward some prey that’s hidden from view, probably an insect or one of those imaginary things cats see and that we don’t. It moves with a deliciously predatory stealth. The moment I release my attention, however, the magnification returns to normal and I once against see the entire vista of the estate.

It’s not only my vision that’s enhanced, though. I can, by concentrating, hear the nearly silent breathing of the hunting cat, or smell the scent of the flowers far away by one of the lakes. To me this perspective is so foreign that it’s hard to imagine that this could be anyone’s natural habitat, but it’s Alan’s. It makes me wonder how different our thought processes are, but a moment later he draws me away from my thoughts, gesturing toward the seawall in the west.

“The cameras first pick up the assailant there. Just coming over the seawall. Once he drops down on this side, we lose him. It’s as though he disappeared.”

“All of this without any tremors on the sensors?” Carmen asks.

“Well, there’s nothing you would normally see, but if I augment our perception and integrate the vestigial indicia of the burned code you’ll get something.”

Nothing changes in my view of Cloud City, but there is suddenly a tingling in my gut. It’s intermittent and uncertain, like the feeling you get when you’re not sure if you’re stomach’s upset or not. That’s not how it should feel.

“The signal degradation I’m feeling, that’s the burn?”

“Yes,” Alan says.

“Can you visualize the intruder?”

“I can simulate the intruder using his movements as indicated by the gaps caused by the burned data.”

“Do it please.”

With that, a small masked figure dressed in black appears over the top of the west wall, lowers itself, hangs for a moment, and then drops. In a moment it is moving across the grass toward the house.

With a sense that has no human counterpart, I can feel the trail of the person’s movement in infinitesimal changes in temperature, air pressure, and electrical current, but the trail is spotty, like a wobbly distortion trailing behind the figure and materializing slightly ahead of it. Sometimes it winks out altogether, only to reappear a little ways further along.

“That’s the best I can do unfortunately,” Alan says. “I’ve reconstructed all the data I can from the randomized sequences they left behind, but there’s not much to work with. The rest I’ve extrapolated. It was a very efficient burn, I would say.”

“Yes,” I have to agree, “very efficient. Very smooth work.”

As the figure approaches the house, the dogs suddenly materialize, hundreds of them. Even though I understand in a basic way how they work, it still seems miraculous. Your brain can process the fact that this is a sim, but your gut can’t, and you clench, release adrenaline, feel the impulse to run. They are huge and intentionally ugly, but what they are doing—the chaos and madness of it—is the scariest thing of all. With a howl, one leaps onto the back of another, gripping it by the back of the neck and trying to bring it down, as a wild dog would its prey. In a flash the pair disappear, then reappear, grappling face to face, slashing at each other with teeth that are twenty centimeters long and sharp as hell. With the power in their jaws they could tear open an armored personnel carrier, and right now they’re doing their best to tear open each others’ faces. Their teeth meet and clash, and they let loose with outraged howls, sounding like metal tearing and thunder cracking all at once. Their frames are buckytube, but their “fur” is just an adornment made out of some polymer, and they tear it off each other in large, messy hanks.

They disappear again, but it doesn’t matter: the same thing is happening all across the grounds. The scene is repeated with minor variations hundreds of times, as far away as the lake, nearly as far as the eye can see. The din is horrific—it would almost be enough to make me believe in Hell if Tijuana hadn’t done that already. The worst sight is a lone dog near the house which jumps and twists in the air, snapping furiously behind itself, attacking itself. It vaporizes, then reconstitutes, still trying to break its own back.

All the while, the simulated figure that Alan has extrapolated from the burned data calmly crosses the grass, unnoticed by the dogs. If the sensors had been working and it was a real figure we were seeing, the mask would present no trouble at all. The infrared sensors are quite sensitive enough to have made out the contours of the assassin’s facial skin beneath any mask and Alan could have reconstructed the precise shape of the face from that data. Hair also has a specific heat diffusion pattern which would have told us the length of the hair on the head, whether or not there was facial hair, and similar details that could have been added to the reconstruction. The particular temperature of the hair as it dissipated the underlying body heat would even have told us the hair color, adding the final touch. In other words we would have had a photographically perfect portrait of the assassin—if the infrared had been working. Instead I watch a masked nobody cross the grass and enter the house as the dogs go mad, appearing and disappearing, attacking each other, the trees, the lawn furniture. Thank god it’s the middle of the night or they’d be tearing apart the groundskeepers and any other staff who were wandering around.

“This is a hell of a show, but we’re not really learning anything here,” I say, wondering if some part of my decision to leave isn’t based in fear. Maybe I’m feeling the exact visceral response that the dogs’ engineers intended. Still, it’s true. “Let’s get back.”

“Home,” Alan commands.

In that instant we are back in our reclining chairs, slowly sitting up, standing, and stretching. I feel the odd sense of dislocation that goes with exiting a sim no matter how many times you do it. On top of that is a powerful adrenal rush brought on by the dogs’ display of insane, mutinous aggression. Only Alan seems unaffected.

“Thanks for your help Alan. I’ll leave you and Carmen to follow up anything else you can think of. I have some other angles to pursue.”

“Certainly,” Alan says.

As I leave security, Carmen follows me a few steps into the hall.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“Damned mysterious.”

“What are these angles you’re following up?”

“I need some rest and some time away from this freakshow so I can think. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

My evasiveness catches her attention and one eyebrow rises for the second time in one day. A record.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll see what Alan and I can dig up.”

Six: Suerte y Muerte

I don’t want to go back to my office, don’t want the distractions that could ambush me there: accounts; messages from clients past, present, and potential. It’s impossible to avoid, though, since the office is on the main floor of the building where I live on Jung Jing Road. Chinatown, like most areas of L.A. has changed considerably since Before—my term for my life pre-accident—not least due to earthquake damage. What is built is never exactly what was there before, and sometimes doesn’t resemble it at all. I never really explored this area Before, so I don’t know what it was like then, but now Jung Jing Road is a very short stretch of low-rise, supposedly earthquake-resistant, buildings. There are shops and businesses on the lower floors and residences extending four or five stories above them.

There are a number of reasons I decided to locate here. Some of them are small things, like my love of Chinese art and a good dim sum. Some run a little deeper. For instance, since China turned inward after the fall of the Empire, this area gives me the closest facsimile I can get to a part of the world I will never see for myself. The main reason, though, is that for me it’s a luxury to live in a neighborhood where I can’t understand what anyone’s talking about.

In my business I see so much of what’s evil in humanity, or simply what’s crass, cheap, and dreary, that it’s enough to sour you on people if you don’t get a break. It’s a relief not to understand what my fellow human beings are saying. People pass me on the street talking, sometimes arguing or upset, but I’m insulated from it. Music blares from businesses up and down the block, but if the lyrics are mundane or foolish it doesn’t matter—I have no idea what they mean. The neon signs may promise things they can’t deliver, as they do in any neighborhood, but I can’t read them. I find it easier to think well of people that way. Don’t get me wrong, I like people, it’s just that I’m in such close contact with their sins so much of the time that when I come home it’s nice to enter a zone of relative ignorance. The neighborhood is far from quiet, but for me coming here is like being shrouded in silence.

Even to get to that comfort zone, though, I have to take an indirect route. Several of the blocks south of my apartment have been quarantined with an outbreak of monkeypox C, an orthopox virus similar to smallpox. Unlike the original, unmutated monkeypox, it isn’t susceptible to the smallpox vaccine. With no effective vaccine, outbreaks aren’t uncommon, and though the mortality rate isn’t high, it’s high enough to warrant quarantine.

I woke up from death into a very changed world. Some changes I adapted to pretty much immediately, but this one took time, this constant drumbeat of emerging infectious diseases and the facility everyone has with the language, as though the general population had suddenly acquired M.D.s. The overuse of antibiotics rendered many antibiotics ineffective, as “superbugs” evolved which were invulnerable to them. The overuse of pesticides led to a similar phenomenon amongst insects. Insects don’t evolve and adapt as quickly as microorganisms, but they still do it damned quickly. Soon mosquitoes, tics, and fleas that were resistant to pesticides were carrying diseases resistant to antibiotics. Add to that the use of high-speed international travel during the Empire and the large-scale migrations of refugees during the Fall, and what resulted was a deadly combination.

Now people in cafés and at work rattle off phrases like “generalized pustular rash with lesions, fever, and minor toxemia” and “enlargement of the cervical and inguinal lymph nodes” as easily as they banter about baseball batting averages. It’s as common as talking about the latest war or what new sim came out this week. There are regular health alerts, sometimes for a building, sometimes for a neighborhood, sometimes for an entire city.

When an alert is issued, the affected area is surrounded by a nanobot membrane. The barrier is one-way permeable, allowing air and supplies to enter, but preventing infected people, or the pathogen itself, from escaping. At first it seemed absurd to me that, with all the medical applications of nanotechnology, society still suffered periodically from these new diseases. As it turns out, though, the highly mutagenic nature of emerging infections makes them difficult targets to hit, even for nanobots, so the most prudent way to deal with a new disease is to use a quarantine until either the outbreak burns itself out or a particular, identifiable pathogen can be targeted.

So far this quarantine has been up for three weeks and there’s no sign that it’s going away any time soon. It shows up as a light green rectangular structure extending from the ground to the top of the tallest building, encasing the entire affected area. The coloring isn’t functional, but it lets people see where the barrier is.

So a lot has changed in the world since I died. On the other hand, it’s sometimes jarring how much things have remained the same. In some ways science fiction didn’t go far enough to predict this world, which even after years still sometimes seems foreign and futuristic to me. In other ways, though, there are so many things that were predicted to appear—or disappear—that have stubbornly refused to do so: I travel home on my motorcycle.

The hovering aircars that inhabited the “future” L.A. of my youth are technically possible, just impractical, expensive, and dangerous. Humans, who evolved on the flat plane of the earth, have a hard enough time navigating there without zipping around in the sky. At the same time, the fact that large areas of civilization disappeared into the black hole of the Grey Zones, where extreme lotek is the rule and cars aren’t used, means that fossil fuels, which should have run out long ago, are still available.

So ground travel remains the norm within the cities. The L.A. Freeway looks much like it always has, as does the L.A. skyline—when you can see it. Because traffic remains a serious problem, I opted for the cycle when choosing a means of personal transport. It allows me to take short cuts cars can’t, and to maneuver illegally past traffic jams.

It’s nearing the end of the afternoon now, and as I follow a circuitous route to Chinatown the sun is a huge orange ball sinking toward the horizon, bathing everything in a tangerine light that discolors people’s skin and reflects sharply off the glass of the office towers. All around me workers are heading home, while people who have no home to go to are in ample evidence.

The fall of the Empire had an international effect, but it fractured Cali internally as well, sending a lucky few spiraling up into the stratosphere of wealth while millions plummeted into the sinkhole of inescapable poverty. Sandwiched in between is a slim layer of people like me, the remains of the middle class.

I pass scores of homeless people, who hunch on the sidewalks and in the alleyways and parkettes—lingering, loitering, begging, drinking, getting high, raising their children, arguing, sleeping, and fucking. They are heaped up in a steaming, funky hive of humanity, with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to help them. Some of them are old enough to remember having jobs and even owning houses, computers, holos, cars—all the good stuff that makes for painful memories. To others that world is nothing but a story passed down by their parents or grandparents. The street, illegal squats, begging, and dumpster diving are the only life they know.

Neighborhood patrols used to try to chase the homeless away, but they would just end up in someone else’s backyard and get chased right back, so eventually everyone gave up. Now we just ensure that our buildings have decent security so that once inside we’re safe from crime, from pleading faces, from emaciated children and bad smells. I can’t say I’m better than anyone else. I pass several hundred of them in the space of a few blocks—indistinct figures fidgeting about in their rags and choking on the city’s exhaust—but I don’t really notice any particular one of them except for a young girl who almost steps in front of my bike and forces me to brake.

Despite the old-world traffic and the new-world quarantine, I eventually make it home. I park the bike underground, then check in quickly at the office. Burroughs Oversight operates around the clock, and as I enter Rollie is just relieving Jessie at the main counter. The office is spare—it could be a car rental counter or an escort agency. Everything that matters—all the cool stuff, all the scary stuff—is hidden in a warren of work spaces in the back where the customers won’t see it. The carpeting is high quality, to project success, but khaki-colored, to remind people of our military pedigree. The counter is made of aged wood that I salvaged from a demolished building. It has a rich, golden color, and gives a sense of history and permanence, making the place look a little less fly-by-night.

“Hey Rollie, what’s the news?” I ask, though I don’t really want to know.

“Not a lot Gat.”

No one uses my first name except the L.A.P.D. To everyone else I’m Gat, the abbreviated form of my middle name, Gatineau, which is apparently the location of our ancestral home up in the Grey Area that used to be Canada.

“What does ‘not a lot’ translate into?”

“Well, TJ is on Pileggi. No action there. Jenna is still following up on that wandering husband, Tenenbaum. She’s got Prender with her, getting him used to civilian protocols.”

Prender is fresh out of the Forces and is still making the adjustment to non-military operations. I don’t usually do non-corporate work, like surveilling cheating spouses, but I took the Tenenbaum case just for him—it seemed wise to put him in a low-key situation his first time out. I wander behind the counter and take a look at the holo traffic but it’s routine stuff: bills, accounts paid or due, status reports on equipment orders. With relief I realize that there’s nothing here that needs my attention.

“Okay buddy. I’m going upstairs. Here’s to a quiet watch.”

“You bet. There’s a good fight on tonight.”

“You got anything riding on it?”

“Just enough to keep me interested. Can’t afford more on what you pay me.”

Rollie’s paid very well—it’s just the usual bullshit banter.

“Sooner,” I say, an old Forces habit. It’s an abbreviation of “the sooner the better,” something you say to your buddies when they’re off to battle and you’re not. The sooner you see them alive again, the better: fewer hours of waiting and wondering, accelerated relief.

In the lobby, I pause for a moment and then, before going upstairs, I step outside onto the sidewalk and breathe the late afternoon air: car exhaust, barbeque, cooked vegetables, fish—the usual fragrances of Chinatown. Neon is just starting to show here and there, and soon the day trade will make way for nighttime pleasures. There are restaurants, live theater, movies, and bars. Mingling with the residents and the gawking tourists are a few low-key prostitutes and, if you’re known, there are places you can gamble. I can’t understand a word I hear. I take a deep breath and bask in the peace of being home.

I go back inside and ride the elevator to my floor. Unlocking my door, I head straight for the food processor. This is one of the futuristic visions that did come true. I order up blackened red snapper and shrimp on rice with a Brazilian lime sauce and sit down to eat, saying a little prayer of thanks for the nanotechnology that assembles for me—atom by atom, according to a pre-programmed design—whatever food I want, with whatever flavor and nutritional qualities I want, at the exact temperature I like, any time of day or night. That is certainly an improvement over Before.

I purposely put the events of the day out of my mind, living purely in my skin, enjoying the taste of the food, the feel of it in my mouth, the delicate flavor of the cold milk in my glass. I passively take in the reassuring presence of my home, not concentrating on anything in particular, but absorbing its details and nuances nonetheless.

I live fairly frugally because Burroughs Oversight is young and growing and like all young, growing things it is always screaming for food, which means money. I feed it, hoping that it will grow up big and strong so that one day it can starting sending money back in the other direction. As a result, my home is nothing special, but it comforts me anyway. There is some nondescript furniture whose very hotel-like lack of character is soothing to me. The walls are a cool grey. Hidden lighting units make areas of brightness and shadow, giving the simple shapes of the walls a slightly more interesting, complex appearance.

There are a few pieces of art, all carefully chosen not to call up the memories of my military service. Since I never served in the middle east, that’s the theme I decided on. Hanging on one wall is a large piece of tile-work, a reproduction of a mosaic in a Moroccan mosque. On another wall is a series of framed Arabic texts, each one written in black calligraphy and surrounded with an intricate border in colored ink and, in one case, gold leaf. They are passages from Palestinian and Saudi poets, and though I can’t read them I bought them with an Egyptian friend of mine from the Forces who translated for me so that I could pick out poems I liked. In a corner I’ve hung some trays made of inlaid wood, again with the meticulous, busy patterns so common to Arabic art. Other than that, my home is mostly functional: there is the holo for entertainment and communications, the food processor, and exercise equipment. In the bedroom there is really nothing but the bed, a holo outlet, a sim bank, and my meditation mat. I don’t sleep well with distractions around me. There's a small balcony where I keep a few plants.

I approach one of the poems and admire the details of the calligraphy and the surrounding design. The writing is incomprehensible to me, but since this is my favorite I remember exactly what it says:

On the other side of this desert

is my love

is my father’s house

is water.

On the other side of this desert

is my honor.

All I have to do is cross.

I’m not sure why I like it so much. Maybe it’s because it captures the idea of just how difficult it can be to get the simple things in life that make you happy. Everything you need is waiting for you—all you have to do is cross that damned desert to get it. Every time I read it I picture a young man, earnest, brave but afraid, taking a breath to brace himself and then taking that first step into the desert. The first step of thousands, with the hot sun above him. The poem holds me for a moment, then gently lets me go and my thoughts return to the here and now.

After a meal and some mental rest I feel ready to do some research. Reclining on my bed with the remote, I flash through item after item on the holo, reviewing what I know of the Suerte, perusing my old field notes, Certified Security’s Compendium, even the web. The text, images, and vidclips scroll, appear, and disappear—a small sea of information.

The Suerte originated in the vast slums and shanty towns in and around Mexico city. There is a small, wealthy, cultured elite in the city, but for the millions of people who live in the slums, there is little if any work, money, food, health care, or proper shelter. More often than not people live in abandoned buildings made unsafe by earthquakes or homes made by hand with refuse from the city dumps. There is virtually no police presence. The few rules that exist are enforced by gangs and a few powerful families. No one is safe and children grow up fast. There are seven-year-olds with guns and the blank stares of shell-shocked soldiers, teenage hookers who sell themselves for the price of a meal or a hit of Shudder, and the average life-expectancy is about thirty.

It’s a place of violence and brutally sad stories, and it’s no wonder perhaps that the question of suerte—the Spanish word for luck—arose for the people who lived there, given that they had so little of it. The sheer, gaping absence of suerte from most people’s lives gave it a reality. How on earth could you lack something so utterly unless it really existed? And of course there was always the inexplicable contrast between the people of the slums and the relatively few rich families who lived in walled, closely guarded estates or gated communities. Obviously there must be suerte, not only because you lacked it, but because some other bastard had lots of it. They weren’t any better than you, they didn’t work harder—hell, most of them didn’t work at all—but they had all the money. That is suerte. This differentiation, between those with and without suerte, naturally gave rise to an intense curiosity about how it could be acquired, which led in turn to a booming industry in cheap charms, dubious spells and counter-spells, and other means of potentially increasing one’s supply of good fortune.

One young man, however, had an epiphany about a hundred and fifty years ago. It might have helped that he was stoned on the harsh local weed at the time, but it was an epiphany none the less. Vicente Suarez realized that the way to acquire more suerte was not to ask for it, or to pray, or to buy images of saints or spirits. The way to get more suerte was to steal it—just take it from someone who had it. How do you steal someone’s luck? No one outside the Suerte is sure how they supposedly accomplish this metaphysical theft, except that one method—the first that occurred to Vicente and the simplest—is to inflict muerte, death. By forcing bad luck down your victim’s throat, you displace their good luck, which at the moment of their death flees their body like a passenger abandoning a leaky boat. This puts you in a position to inhale it, imbibe it, bathe in it. Whatever the means, you can collect it and make it part of yourself. There are rumored to be other methods, but given the collective frustration of the poor, muerte is pretty popular, especially since the most obvious targets for this ceremony are those whom they most hate: the fatass rich, with their abundant suerte.

A group of followers formed around Suarez known as Suerte y Muerte, Luck and Death. At first they were thought to be just another street gang committing aimless atrocities, but soon people noticed that they never stole from their victims, not jewelry or money or cars or any of the other things that gang members typically took. All they took, presumably, was suerte. It seemed absurd but, without robbing a single person or burgling a single home, the group did, in fact, prosper. Through fortuitous accidents, gambling, lottery winnings, and other means dependent on chance, they slowly became modestly wealthy, then very wealthy. No one could prove that they were successfully stealing suerte, but no one could prove they weren’t either, and in the desperate poverty of the slums they attracted a lot of aspiring followers.

Suarez was smart; he didn’t let just anyone in. He vetted each potential member personally by standards that can only be guessed at, but that are rumored to have included physical endurance, intelligence, ambition, and Yakuza-style demonstrations of personal loyalty with the cutting off of little fingers or the intentional scarification of the flesh. One requirement was clearly bravery, or perhaps desperation, because anyone who tried to become a member and failed immediately became a victim. His or her suerte—however little there might be—was given up to the group and the body was tossed aside like an empty candy wrapper. It was the chance you took.

Suarez was also cunning. He set up the cult’s headquarters within the slums. Despite his wealth, he stayed in his old neighborhood and managed to project the image of a local boy made good, rather than being seen as having become one of the hated rich. He gave out presents to children on holidays and, just as cheerfully, cut the throats of any rival or enemy who came along. Every now and then some enemy’s head would appear in front of the cult’s headquarters, hanging from a tree by its hair like an ugly fruit. About equally often, Suarez would pay for someone’s expensive medical treatment, or give them a little capital to start a business. Through this combination of goodwill and bloodthirstiness, he maintained control over his group and his standing in the community.

Mexico is a very Catholic country, and wild stories circulated that Suarez had made a pact with the devil, that he was the devil, that he ate people’s souls. Suarez did nothing to stop the rumors, he simply ensured that his lifestyle was enviable enough that he would always have followers, and that his reputation was sufficiently frightening that, eventually, no one dared to oppose him. If the devil helped him a little in the latter regard, well so be it.

Taking all that I knew about the Suerte into account, Alan’s difficulty in making a risk assessment made sense. The Suerte had reputedly honed their luck to supernatural levels. It was entirely conceivable that one of their members could have simply walked past all of Max’s security measures, relying on sheer luck to ensure that each piece of equipment failed in turn. The only thing that bothered me about the scenario was the missed killshot, but maybe bad luck can occasionally hound even the luckiest people.

At the same time, whether or not Max had luck to steal was a question that could be answered either way, as Jerome had hinted. Max had never had a lot of talent, and what little he had he’d been born with. Despite that, he’d parlayed his minor skills into a staggeringly successful and lucrative career. He’d indulged himself in behavior that had caused many of his peers to die of overdoses, get thrown in jail, get bogged down in paternity suits, or simply alienate their fans to the point where they could no longer work, and yet none of that had happened to him. Despite his present decrepit state, he was still alive and people still occasionally played his sims and listened to his audio recordings. He was rich beyond the standards of even most wealthy people. In all these ways he seemed to have more luck than just about anyone you could think of.

Nonetheless, what was more unlucky than succeeding in such measure while failing to find any happiness in it? His daughter had been a wreck from the beginning and was now dead. Her mother, his first wife, had left him long ago and there had been a succession of failed marriages in her wake. His only living relative was a shallow vixen who, despite her inability to do anything about it, wanted nothing more than for him to die so she could have his money. He was surrounded by a staff of yes-men who catered to his every whim but wouldn’t have bothered to attend his funeral had he died. He was insane and, most of the time, seemed either angry or sullen. Looked at from this perspective, his wealth and fame weren’t luck, they were a cruel joke and the worst form of bad luck in that they seemed to place happiness within his grasp, only to pull it away again every time he reached for it.

Would the Suerte see him as a tasty morsel or a poison pill? No one knew them well enough to guess.

Suarez had his vision a hundred and fifty years ago, but he is still alive. Apparently he has not even aged much. The shell technology that can now be used to effectively confer immortality upon those who can afford it was only perfected in the last twenty years, so no one can explain how he does it.

Certainly, I have no explanation. I’m forced to wonder if maybe he’s just lucky.

Seven: Rubbing Herself Against It Like a Cat

I’m still reading when someone calls me at 22:00. I fish my kaikki out of my pants pocket and thumb the receive button while continuing to scan a document on the holo.

“Burroughs.”

“Missssster Burroughs,” says a familiar voice, drawing out the sibilant hiss in a playful way.

“Porsche,” I say, trying to cover my surprise “what can I do for you?”

“Now that’s the question I’ve been waiting to hear you ask!” She sounds like she’s in a mischievous mood, both perky and evil, possibly high. “Are you in bed yet?”

“Technically, yes.”

“Technically yum,” she says. “Then what you can do for me is let me come up.”

“You’re here?”

“Yeah, I’m calling from your lobby.” The video chime sounds as she adds a camera feed to the call and I glance at the screen. She sweeps her kaikki quickly around her to show me where she is—I have a brief, blurred view of the lobby from behind the locked door that restricts access to the elevators and the residential part of the building, then I see Jung Jing Road behind her, and then her face -- that face.

I like to think I’m an intelligent person, but from time to time I provide evidence to the contrary, or maybe some things are just outside the realm of intelligence and stupidity—in the territory of chemicals, bodily fluids, and primordial psychological structures. Whatever the case, I dial the code to let her into the interior lobby.

At the door I hesitate, but only briefly, then open it. This time she’s dressed in an imitation of me, of all things, with a tight wife-beater showing off her breasts and military green cargo pants. The pants are slung low on her hips in such a way that I get a glimpse of her belly and one pelvic bone. Incongruously, she smells like orange blossoms. I close the door and turn to find her inspecting my condo.

“You’ve done wonders with the place,” she says. Her tone is mocking, but softened with a bit of humor.

“Yeah, well most of my earnings go back into the company.”

“Ambitious.”

For once she seems impressed.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

She moves closer to me and the orange scent wafts over me.

“You want me to be though.”

“You still shouldn’t be.”

“Let me ask you a hypothetical question.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. If we were to fuck like hyenas in every possible position known to humans, would you take me off your list of suspects?”

“No. You know I wouldn’t.”

“That’s right,” she says, apparently pleased. “And if we were to fuck like horny virgin teenagers until you couldn’t see straight and then you found out I was guilty, would you still arrest me?”

I don’t like where this is going, but at the same time I do, too.

“I’d have you arrested,” I say, “I just wouldn’t do it myself.”

“Right. So if I take my clothes off right now and we do what we both want so much to do, it really doesn’t make any difference to anything, does it?”

Her logic is impeccable, no doubt practiced on a hundred, maybe a thousand men before. I stare into that catty, carnal face. Her pupils are dilated with something that is sure to make her proposition every bit as good as it sounds.

“No, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” I say, reciting my lines like a good boy.

She pulls her top off over her head, exposing breasts that have been designed by a team of psychologists and surgeons to elicit the maximum possible arousal in a man. They are large, but not artificial looking, and as she shifts slightly they sway in a deliciously pliable way. Then she surprises me by lowering herself slowly to her knees.

“Come here. Please.”

She smiles a smile at me that is so full of lust and delight that it drags all my teenage fantasies out of memory and loads them into my brain like a program. I move toward her.

She catches my pants by the belt loops and pulls my pelvis against her face, rubbing herself against it like a cat. I feel myself get hard under the pressure and she makes small, muffled sounds into my pants when she feels it too. Her fingers find my zipper and open it, then unbutton the waist. She runs her mouth up and down my cock, still sheathed in underwear, which is somehow almost sexier than if it was bare, then takes the underwear carefully between her teeth and pulls downward until they drop over my hips, taking my pants with them. With calculated slowness she takes my cock in her mouth and begins to move her head back and forth while her tongue circles me, creating suction, then releasing it again. She withdraws it and begins rubbing her face against me again, this time with nothing between us.

“I have a girlfriend you know,” she says.

“Is she going to be jealous?”

She laughs, but continues her frottage, now and then twining her tongue around my cock.

“No soldier boy, she won’t be mad, not if I call her and tell her to come and join us.”

I brace myself against the wall behind me so I can concentrate on the pleasure she’s giving me without having to worry about staying upright.

“By the time she gets here it could be too late.”

“Oh no,” she says innocently, “she’s waiting downstairs in my car. She can be here in seconds.” She takes my cock in her mouth and I put my hands on the back of her head, pushing her against me, pushing myself into her.

“So fucking call her,” I say, not completely lost in her but coming close to it.

She withdraws again and pulls her kaikki from a pocket on the leg of her pants. She hits a button, connecting with someone while she keeps working my cock, now slippery with her saliva, with her hand.

“Sherry, come on up. We’re just getting started.”

Despite what I’m doing—or allowing her to do to me—some part of me above the waist retains its military training. Porsche is still a suspect, and it’s possible that ‘Sherry’ will turn out to be some goon, brought here to persuade me to take her off the list of suspects. Captain Burroughs is ready to push Porsche away in a second, forcefully, and to defend himself, even if Gat Burroughs is a little preoccupied.

She replaces her kaikki, takes mine from the sofa where I’d dropped it, holds it up so I can unlock the lobby door, then tosses it back onto the sofa and runs her tongue up and down my cock one more time.

“You feel anything yet soldier boy?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Not that, you goof,” she says, laughing. “There’s HardOn in my lipstick.”

HardOn. Well fuck me. Her girlfriend could be halfway across L.A. and still get here in time for the action. It’s clear that my cock isn’t going to go down for hours.

“You’re joking, right?”

She pulls her face back to look up at me and her expression is pure greed.

“Not a fucking chance.”

Just then Sherry knocks at the door and Porsche rises to let her in. In a moment, all my defenses are down. Her name doesn’t suit her, but that’s because it’s fake. I recognize her instantly from the sims, from advertising campaigns for Shelte and other top-end designers, from celebrity gossip shows. The creamy, dusky skin and long dark hair, courtesy of her Arabic and Italian ancestry. She smiles suddenly, seeing recognition in my eyes. It’s a huge, bright, little-girl-gets-the-candy smile. I’m about to say her name when Porsche shushes me.

“No names,” she admonishes. “Not now and not ever. I’m only wired for Max, you know, not for you.”

Her threat is as cold as the smile of a man on Brace, but it isn’t necessary. Why would I ever bother to repeat Sherry’s real name?

“No names,” I tell her. “I’m trained to keep secrets you know.”

“I know, soldier boy. I know all about you.”

Just as she did in the garden she caresses the Tijuana decal briefly, but this time it has little effect on me. I am far, far from Tijuana now. The HardOn is doing its work, and beneath it I can sense that she’s laced it with something subtler too, something she hasn’t mentioned: just a touch of Sunday Best. It’s not enough to make me hallucinate, but it tints the entire scene with a radiant glow and time seems to slow slightly, making every delicious moment last longer.

“Okaaaaay,” Sherry says, moving toward us and unbuttoning her shirt at the same time. “Party time is here.”

The drugs are doing their job and I am awash in a tide of hormones, filled with nothing but sex and more sex. Sherry floats toward me as though moving through water, shedding her clothes along the way. Her body is slim and dark and perfect and I want to eat every inch of it. Her voice—that famous, triple platinum, multi-award-winning, siren of the airwaves voice—is saying: Porsche, it’s just like you promised!

The only problem with Sunday Best is that although it gives you its luminescent visions, it has an effect similar to Erase. Not as efficient, mind you—you always remember something, but you never remember everything. Even as events are taking place you are forgetting them, so the sex appears to me as a series of snapshots.

Moment one: Sherry prostrate on her belly with me on top of her, sliding myself, slippery, into her, while her face is buried between Porsche’s legs. Porsche grinds her hips slowly at first, then lets out a whoop like a cowgirl and starts thrusting them wildly, Sherry’s head bobbing in her lap.

Moment two: Sherry is on all fours, riding Porsche’s hand. Porsche is stroking her between the legs in such a controlled, masterful way that I can’t help but admire it—this is skill. She brings Sherry close to cumming, then eases her back from the brink, then drags her back to the edge of that cliff, and then finally throws her off, Sherry howling the whole way, making animal sounds, her long hair flying furiously and her entire body shuddering with such force that her teeth chatter involuntarily.

Moment three: Porsche on her knees again. I am cumming—finally, at long last—and she is milking it out of me with her hand. In that pose, in an ecstasy close to rapture, she seems to be praying, and I baptize her as she begs for more, laughing her head off, covered in it.

Eventually the HardOn and Sunday Best in my system wind down, as do whatever drugs the girls are on. Sherry is the first to go. She seems a little tense now, as though coming down has made her realize what she’s done—not the sex, but the risk to her reputation, to her future. Today’s star can so easily become fodder for tomorrow’s tabloid simcast. Porsche lingers, watching her go.

“She’s worried,” I say.

Porsche just shrugs.

“She’ll get over it,” she says, doing up her pants. “In a day or two when she sees that you haven’t sold your story to the media she’ll be fine.”

Although her reasoning makes sense, there’s nothing in her tone to indicate that it matters to her in the smallest way.

“I’m still on the list of suspects aren’t I?” she asks rhetorically, then pulls her shirt over her head and tugs it into place.

“Yeah, you’re still on the list.”

“And if I did it and you catch me, I still get arrested, don’t I?”

“Yup.”

“See,” she says with a combination of sweetness and evil that’s hard to read. “I told you. It didn’t change a thing.”

I have nothing to say to that, so I keep my mouth shut and watch her leave. I go to bed, hoping I can sleep at least two or three hours before getting back to work. When I dream—despite the evening I’ve had, or perhaps because of it—they are not good dreams. I am back in Tijuana, glimpsing small scenes of what went on there. In my dreams, though, Porsche is there, laughing, flirting with the soldiers, riding them and going down on them between atrocities, during atrocities. I wake up earlier than I’d intended to, cold with sweat.

Somewhere in my unconscious, below the level of the orgy and the drugs, my mind has been at work. I wake with the conviction that, no matter how good she tastes, Porsche is evil. She is not just the bitchy, catty kind of woman I usually fall for, she is genuinely, thoroughly sociopathic. My dreams are an unconscious representation of that fact, but the fact itself rests on more than a few nightmares. I think about her casual disregard for Sherry, who was just a prop for her in an evening of sex. I know that she has just as little regard for me, and that I was nothing more. If seducing me was intended—despite her words—to subtly co-opt me, it has done just the opposite. I never doubted that she was capable of having her grandfather killed, but now it seems more likely than ever that she has at least tried to find some way to circumvent her wiring. For someone like her it would be just too tempting not to.

Eight: UIFs and the Felon

As usual I meditate for an hour, but I’m off my game. People think meditation is easy—it looks like it in the sims—but the truth is that real meditation is demanding and today it’s a challenge.

HardOn and Sunday Best have built in controllers to prevent morning-after side effects, but Porsche does not. Unless you're a monk there’s nothing chaste about a dharma practice, but there is something specific about sex with Porsche that is the antithesis of a contemplative practice. I started meditating after Tijuana—because of Tijuana—and I had the same feeling then.

My thoughts are scattered and chatter at me like monkeys scolding me from the trees.  My emotions pull in conflicting directions and make it difficult to get centered.  Maybe the truth is that I’m ashamed of myself and the last place I really want to be is inside my own head.  I try to face that shame, to abide with it, but it’s an active, taunting thing that seems beyond my reach.  And to be honest I suspect that the pleasure of fucking Porsche is still too fresh for me to get a handle on the shame that comes along with it.  And from somewhere in that morass of feelings and impressions comes a very real sense of threat.  Porsche, I now think, has no center—at her core there is nothing at all—and people like that are always dangerous.

At 7:00 I rise, shower, skip breakfast, and leave.

What I really need to do is get over to Cloud City and see if Carmen’s found anything. She’ll have been there all night, I have no doubt of that. This is the kind of puzzle that she lives for, and I’ve seen her go two, three, even four days without stopping, without sleeping, without seeming to need to sleep. She simply keeps working at the same methodical pace, in the same meticulous way, until either the problem is solved or even her prodigious reserves of energy begin to run low. If she can’t solve the mystery in one sitting, she catnaps—falls fast asleep in the blink of an eye and then wakes an hour later apparently refreshed and starts all over again. I know she won’t have a complete solution yet or she would have called, but she may have made progress and if so I want to know about it. I could call her, but after a night of guilty pleasures I feel a compulsion to go out there and look around the place myself, as if diligence in my work can somehow make up for my sins.

I descend in the elevator to the underground parking lot, carrying my helmet under my arm. My bike is parked beside three of the four nondescript vans we use for surveillance. Jenna’s van is still out, so she and Prender must have spent the night watching Mr. Tenenbaum. Bad news for Mrs. Tenenbaum. Mounting the bike I put on the helmet and automatically run through my routine morning arms check. Gun in my shoulder holster and a spare in a holster in the small of my back. One small one in a custom-made sleeve within my right boot, should things come to that. I ratchet the flechette launchers on my forearms, ensuring that they’re at full power and off safety. I set them for sleepers. If anything happens I can reset them for lethal in less than a second—that’s Forces training for you.

I start the engine and wend my way amongst the cars, doing it playfully so as to dispel some of the poison of last night’s encounter, but it doesn’t really help. At the garage door I swing down the slim arm of the retinal flash and let it read me. I let go and it springs lazily back into an upward position, out of my way, as the garage door opens in response to its confirmation that I'm a resident of the building and not a fleeing burglar or a gang member letting my friends inside. In a moment I am up the paved ramp and pausing to check the traffic before I merge.

The moment I pause every warning bell in my brain goes off. Then I see them. Three homeless men—one in front of my building, one across the street and ten meters east, and one on the hillside of the parkette down the street—get quickly to their feet. Their arms come up in unison as if they were one creature, guns in their hands.

The garage door behind me is closed and in any case there’s no time to turn round. I drop into gear and fly out into traffic, barely slipping between two cars, and make the turn onto North Hill Street. The car behind me brakes, afraid he’s going to hit me, and those behind rear-end him, decelerators whining. I throw a glance over my shoulder and see one of the drivers get out of his car, then pirouette backward, hit by a bullet meant for me.

I am low on the bike, trying to keep traffic between me and the guys with the guns. I’m going faster than those around me, trying to get out of range, when suddenly the passenger window of the car in front of me breaks inward with a pop and the vehicle begins to swerve dangerously—they are trying to cut off my escape. A moment later another car ahead is hit and goes into a spin. Everyone behind him brakes madly.

The traffic is getting too bunched up for me to move. I don’t want to leave cover but I have no choice—jump the curb, miss ramming into a storefront by inches, straighten out, and suddenly I am using the sidewalk as a straightaway, with people jumping left and right to avoid me. They dodge into store entrances and fall into traffic. It’s mayhem, but there’s nowhere else for me to go. I see a man suddenly jerk sideways and slam into a wall, grasping at his gut, obviously shot. A glance across the street shows me that one of the supposedly homeless men is on a bike of his own, racing down the sidewalk on the other side of the street, creating equal havoc there.

There’s only one thing to do. The other two shooters are far behind. Maybe they have bikes too, but if they do they haven’t caught up yet. I brake, skid, and nearly go over the handlebars. I’d lay into the skid sideways, but on the sidewalk there’s no room. It takes time for the other rider to realize what I’m doing, which creates a brief window of opportunity. For a few precious moments he’s too far ahead of me to be dangerous, carried forward by his own momentum, while the others are still too far behind to see what’s happening or get me in their sights. I drop the bike and duck into the Golden City Seafood Restaurant—one of my favorite places to get Chinese—racing through a dining area, barging past people and knocking over a waiter, sending shrimp in lobster sauce, steamed rice, and gailan spattering over nearby diners as everyone yells at me in Chinese. For once I wish I could speak the language, but there would be no time to explain anything anyway.

I yank open a door at the rear of the restaurant and find what I’m looking for: the kitchen, and within it the back door. Before the cooks can react, I’m through the rear door and into an alleyway. I quickly toss my jacket toward the mouth of the alley, then scuttle up a fire escape. On the roof, I run to the front of the building, sliding onto my side like a runner heading for home plate, then spin around and ease myself up to the edge. Like many of the buildings around here the architecture is in an elaborate, faux-historical Shanghai style, giving me ornaments I can hide behind so I can see what’s happening below.

There is a string of mashed and crumpled vehicles up and down the block. There are people lying wounded in the street and on the sidewalk, or picking themselves up from where they’d thrown themselves to avoid us. There is blood, screaming, honking and, in the distance, sirens, the first sounds of the P.D. arriving. Across from my bike there’s another one, similarly abandoned, on the other side of the street. The fucker is following me and is already halfway across the street. Further down the road his friends are approaching on their own motorcycles.

Snaking along on my belly I back up so as not to be a target, then leap to my feet and run headlong to the edge of the roof, launching myself into open air and landing on the neighboring building. Gravel scatters in an arc as I hit, trying to roll but not quite getting it right. An inelegant landing. Even as my body is moving, my mind is calculating. My primary level Forces training says ‘take them out,’ but my strategic training overrides the lower instinct.

First fact: with three of them coming my chances aren’t optimal. There are not only more of them, but if they’re lucky they can get me in a cross-fire.

Second fact: I don’t know who they are, so I have no idea what their capabilities are. For all I know they’re ex-Forces like me, in which case fighting them is dangerously stupid.

Third and final fact: the P.D. will be here any second and they’ll start shooting at everyone holding a gun. If I’m armed, if I’m fighting, then I’m as likely to be killed by the cops as by the boys who chased me.

Instead of trying to take them out, I move to the rear of the building and hide behind a ventilation intake so I can take a look into the alley and at least keep track of the threats around me. The guy who’d dumped his bike launches himself out the rear of the restaurant and aims his gun in all directions at once, not knowing where I might be. He spots my jacket and follows the false trail out the alley’s mouth. An old trick, and not one that would work on a seasoned killer, but apparently it’s enough. Clearly they aren’t ex-Forces. For the first time since the whole thing started my heart starts to slow.

I go to the front of the second building and risk another look into the street. The P.D. are arriving now, drawing up slowly and carefully on their own bikes, 1,500 cc monstrosities. The two assassins who’d lagged behind are nowhere to be seen, presumably spooked by the P.D.

For once I’m actually glad to see the cops. I return to the rear of the building and begin climbing down the fire escape, but this one doesn’t reach to the ground. The extension that’s supposed to take you the last two meters is padlocked in an upright position, probably to keep the homeless from camping out on the roof. It’s a Code violation, but who checks these days? I let myself hang from the last rung, then drop and roll, this time doing it right. Dusting myself off, I grab my jacket, and re-enter the restaurant the way I came, careful to keep my hands on top of my head, fingers laced together. As I near the front door an amplified voice rings out.

“Come out of the restaurant. Drop to your knees and assume a face-down position on the sidewalk. Do not move your hands.”

I don’t argue. A moment later, rough hands grab my arms and pull them behind my back, cuffing them there. One of the cops rolls me over onto my back and pulls my helmet off and I find myself staring into the familiar face of Felon.

“Gat?” he asks, even more surprised than I am.

“Dave. How’s Selby these days?”

“We split up man. What the fuck’s going on?”

“Sorry to hear that. Three UIFs tried to puncture me is what.”

UIF is an unofficial Forces acronym for Unidentified Fucker, routinely used when referring to snipers, masked bandits and, in this case, people wearing motorcycle helmets. Apart from private security the other obvious career route for someone leaving the Forces is to join the P.D.  That’s the route Felon took, and we run across each other once in a while, although not usually so dramatically.

“Get this guy uncuffed, he’s the vic,” he yells over to another cop, who hurries to remove the cuffs from my wrists.

I stand up, still moving slowly. Adrenaline takes time to clear out of a cop’s system, so I’m being careful with these guys. Someone who isn’t in the loop might still shoot me if I make a sudden move. I bend over with my hands on my knees, catching my breath and suddenly feeling the scrapes and bruises all over my body. In the middle of the chase I’d turned all off the pain, but now it comes rushing up at me.

“You hit?”

Dave sounds genuinely concerned. It’s a good thing he doesn’t know how much I hate him. Dave Fellows is a big man, with a boy’s face perched on top of a bull’s body. He earned the name Felon in a dozen ops and was the kind of soldier who made me ill, the kind who enlisted for the express purpose of being able to hurt people. It’s no wonder he ended up in the P.D. afterward.

Still, he’s always been too full of blustering Forces camaraderie to ever notice that I don’t like him. We wore the same uniform—to his mind that means we must be the same kind of people. He believed in the brotherhood, still does. Me, I just joined because I didn’t know what else to do.

“No man, I’m not hit, just winded. You get any of those guys?”

“Carson tagged one down the block a ways, but we won’t get anything out of him. His guts are all over the place. The other two disappeared.”

“Fuck.”

“Sorry Gat.”

He looks genuinely sorry, like he owes it to me, being former brothers-in-arms, to have done better.

“It’s okay Dave. Maybe you can ID him, get a lead.”

He nods tersely.

“Count on it buddy. Nobody fucks with the Forces.”

Temporarily we are back in Tijuana, or Boulder, or somewhere. So many somewheres.  I play along with it because I need him. Give him a slap on the shoulder.

“I appreciate it Dave. No shit.”

“You got anything to get us started? Any ideas?”

“Not a one,” I lie. “I work personal security these days, so a thousand people might want me out of the way.”

Actually I shucked all my other cases off on friends and employees the day Max hired me. Jerome insisted he be my full time job and at the prices they paid I wasn’t about to argue.

“Well,” Dave says, with what passes for thoughtfulness on his face “we’ll find ‘em anyway Gat. The P.D. doesn’t fuck around, you know that.”

“Thanks Dave. I better check my bike.”

He helps me get it upright. Apparently the only thing seriously damaged is a side mirror that has torn off. There’s a lot of paint scraped off one side, but it starts as easily as ever. I give Felon my card.

“Keep me in the loop, huh?” I say, playing on the brotherhood thing.

“Absolutely,” he say earnestly. “Adios muchacho.”

“Via con dios. Sorry about all this.”

I nod in the direction of the dead and wounded, the smashed cars and broken store windows.

“Oh shit, civilians,” he says with dismissive contempt. “We’re always cleaning up their messes. Nothing new.”

I edge the bike down onto the street and slowly ride back the way I came, winding my way amongst the ruined cars. Here and there people are sitting on the pavement holding their injured heads, or arms, or family members. One woman cries inconsolably, holding the body of another woman her own age—a friend or a lover. There’s glass everywhere and the place stinks of gasoline and exhaust. Gawkers line the sidewalks, including a large number of homeless—men and women, young and old. It isn’t surprising, they’re everywhere in the city and their lives are so empty of excitement that they’ll be talking about this for weeks, but I can’t help scanning their faces, wondering if the assassins are among them. The only things that had set them apart from the other homeless were their guns, which they could be hiding, and their bikes and helmets, which they presumably dumped. It could be any of them and I’d never know it.

Nine: An Elegant Problem

I return home and remove my torn and dirty clothes, then use the med-unit on my cuts and bruises. Another wonder of nanotechnology. You never feel a thing, but molecule-sized bots emit from the disc-shaped face of the unit and immediately go to work, diagnosing, repairing the torn and bleeding capillaries that cause bruising, mending the stretched and abused nerves that make your wounds ache, stitching up invisible seams in your ripped skin. Inside of ten minutes I feel a whole lot better. The bots’ work isn’t perfect—home units aren’t good enough for that—but in a few minutes I’m looking and feeling a lot better than when I arrived.

In the Forces our shells were perfused with nanobots on a permanent basis. If you were injured in the field you didn’t have to call for a medic—there were already medics inside you by the billions. Pain was suppressed and virtually any wound would be healed given a little time, whether it was a lost limb or a huge bleed-out. That’s a perc of being in the military, though. When you’re decommissioned they purge you and the bots self-destruct, dissolving harmlessly to be excreted like any waste. You get to keep the high-grade shell, with all its wiring and the training that’s been drilled into your nerves, but not the bots. It’s one of the things that gives the Forces an edge over civilian rebels.

A shower takes care of the cosmetic side of things and by the time I dress again no one would guess what I’ve just been through. Looking in the mirror stalls me for a moment, though. Every once in a while this happens—I look up, expecting to see myself, and see a stranger instead. The sandy hair, hazel eyes, and pale skin are gone, as is the slim body. Instead I see a face and body I’ve become used to using, but only partially adjusted to looking at. The hair is dark brown and the face is wide. The skin is a medium brown with a slight coppery sheen, a blend of pigments drawn from African and Asian wells. The body is dense and cut. It isn’t me, but it’s me for now. I shake off the disorientation. After all, if my plan for immortality works I’ll have to get used to a lot of different shells, and a lot of different looks, over the centuries.

And a Forces-grade shell is no small matter.  Unlike a commercial model, it’s in peak physical condition and hard-wired not only for strength but for lightning-fast reflexes and optimal mental performance.  The combination of a nearly perfect sensorium with superior mental capabilities gives you something approaching intuition: when the body is hyper-aware of its surroundings down to the smallest details, and when the brain can process those details more quickly and effectively than a normal human brain, the result is something like a sixth sense, setting off alarm bells when danger threatens.  It’s not magic, and it doesn’t inoculate you against danger, but it can come in very handy.  And after being decanted there was training, training, and more training.  We became the most powerful, agile, intelligent, and well-informed soldiers on Earth, and unlike the nanobots, those qualities can’t just be extracted when you’re demobbed.

It was that sixth sense that had warned me, just in time, of danger earlier today, and it was those reflexes and that physical strength that had allowed me to survive.  I look at the face in the mirror again and say a silent prayer of thanks for the body I live in, if not for the price I paid to get it.

Downstairs I retrieve my bike, which is parked illegally out back so I can leave through the alley instead of appearing at the front of the building again. I scan the street carefully before emerging, but no alarms go off in my head. When I merge with traffic, no one stands up with a gun. I aim the bike east, taking a circuitous route around the Monkeypox C quarantine, and make it to Max’s without incident. Carmen is in the security office, as I knew she would be.

“Hi Gat.”

“Sorry I’m late.”

“No sweat. What happened?”

“Pursuit and attempted termination.”

She looks cross with me. That’s how Carmen is. She’s the best tech I’ve ever found, but her emotional reactions are indecipherable, sometimes perverse.

“Did I say something wrong?”

She loses the angry expression and shrugs.

“Whatever. Who tried to terminate you?”

“Three guys dressed like homeless, only they were armed and had motorcycles. It got messy.”

“Anyone killed?

I look over her shoulder at her holo, trying to see the display. I’m anxious to know what progress she’s made.

“P.D. took out one guy,” I say. They’re trying to ID him now. The other two got away.”

“Doesn’t sound like you.”

Now she looks amused. I reach around her and amp the size on the display, but she reaches behind her and turns it back down. I look at her.

“There were three of them, unknowns. They could have been ex-Forces for all I knew. Plus there were a lot of civilians around. I’m not in the business of getting civilians killed.”

“Some died anyway.”

It’s a statement, not a question.

“Yes, Carmen, some died. I can’t save the whole world at once.”

“One fat rich man at a time.”

“Damn right. Now what have you got.”

“Zip.”

“Zip?  Are you shitting me?”

It’s unheard of for Carmen to come up entirely empty-handed, but as usual she is calm, unfazed by it.

“Nope. There’s nothing. A great big nothing. A void.”

“I want details.”

“There are no details, that’s the point.”  She takes on a lecturing tone. “Look, at every point from the time this guy—or woman, or alien, or whatever—came over the wall, the sensors failed systematically, one by one, along his exact route. It’s like his presence bored a tunnel in the security. Everything switched off ahead of him, allowed him to pass through undetected, and then switched on and operated normally once he’d gone by.”

“Well shit Carmen, what about safeties?”

Every decent security system has monitors that check continuously to make sure that the sensors are operational. If they stop working, even for a fraction of a second, the monitors—known as safeties—should notice and set off an internal systems check. If the results aren’t within permissible limits, an alarm should go off. It’s supposed to make the system tamperproof because the moment a criminal disables it, he’s set off the very alarms he was trying to avoid in the first place.

“Oh, the safeties,” Carmen says sedately. “Same thing.”

“They shut off too?”

“One by one in perfect sequence.”

“That’s impossible.”

“It’s supposed to be. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“To hell with interesting. It’s so interesting I almost got my brains ventilated this morning. Having someone after Max is one thing, having someone after Max and me is something different. I want answers.”

She smiles again, her eyes distant, like she’s discovered something beautiful and is charmed by the thought of it.

“That’s just it. There are no answers. The data trail is burned, but good. Whoever did this is the best. I mean better than the best. Got to be military.”

“Why would the military give a shit about Max?”

“Or ex-military. Hackers for hire.”

“Or the luckiest son of a bitch alive?”

“What?”

I don’t realize until she speaks that I’ve said it out loud.

“Nothing. Keep working it.”

“You know I will.”

“Yeah. If this is as perfect as you say you’ll work it ‘til you melt away to nothing.”

“It’s an elegant problem.”

I don’t really know what to say to that because even though I understand the words I know that I don’t really get them, don’t understand the depth of what they mean to Carmen. She admires whoever did this. She will still track and hunt them until she drops, maybe even moreso now that she has a worthy adversary, but she’s off in her own world.

“Why’s Alan in sim?”

The AI is sitting in one of the reclining chairs, oblivious to our presence. The mundane question seems to bring Carmen out of dreamland a little and back to something resembling her usual, businesslike self.

“He’s running some checks I asked him for.”

“I’d better talk to Jerome about this morning.”

“Okay Gat. I’ll be here if you need me.”

“I’m going to get TJ in here with you.”

“TJ’s surveilling Pileggi.”

“I’ll put someone else on Pileggi. TJ’s the best protection there is and I want him here.”

“I don’t need a babysitter, Gat. No one’s getting in here.”

“They did before.”

She screws up her face in an expression I can’t read. It seems like the grimace of an unhappy child. Then she lets it go.

“Fine,” she says “just don’t let him get in my way.”

“Carmen, I don’t want anything in your way. Look, you know I believe you’re the best. If anyone can crack this hack it’s you.”

“I am the best,” she says without any particular tone, her eyes already drifting back to the holo display “but eventually someone better always comes along no matter how good you are. I’ll keep trying, Gat. I’d like to believe that no one can out-think me quite yet. Maybe when I’m older, but not just now.”

“Thanks. Stay in touch if you find anything.”

She doesn’t even nod—her elegant problem has its grip on her again. I call Jerome and explain that I want to talk to him. He says he’s at his office and I head out to find him.

I leave through the kitchen, waving hello to Saul, who’s back on the job today. Behind the house I take one of the carts that are parked there and head along a paved lane that leads to Jerome’s Victorian home. On the way I call TJ and assign him to his new detail. I also instruct him to set up a redundant camera system of our own at Cloud City.

Jerome is, as always, a portrait of lawyerly competence. Busy but calm, he’s on a call on his kaikki when I enter and he waves me in and keeps on talking. This time he’s dressed in an antique banker’s suit. They’re all the rage these days with corporate lawyers and I don’t doubt that his is an original rather than a copy. It looks like early twentieth century to me, with a vest beneath the jacket and a subtle pin-stripe design. I hate to think that on this idiot’s whim a museum-quality piece of history has been tailored to fit his frame, but for obvious reasons I don’t say anything. The other fashion craze amongst lawyers nowadays is carefully-honed slovenliness—perfectly messed hair, fake tattoos, torn ex-Forces pants, running shoes—but that’s something more often found in entertainment law than in corporate circles. Given that Max stopped entertaining anything other than fantasies long ago, and exists primarily as a font of investment, Jerome’s choice is appropriate.

While Jerome talks I content myself with standing by one of the windows, gazing out at the trees, which are swaying slightly in the breeze. The ground beneath them is dappled with sun and shadow. Just beyond them, through the foliage, I can see one of the lakes. I’m a long way from the real Los Angeles. Eventually Jerome finishes his conversation, puts down his kaikki, and comes to stand beside me.

“Beautiful view,” I say.

“I’ve earned it. Don’t get to look at it as often as I should any more.”

Those few words tell me plenty about Jerome. In his world everything has a price and beauty is reserved for those who can afford it. He also lives for his reputation as a hard worker. No matter how much he may complain that he doesn’t have time to enjoy the view, it’s far preferable to him—far more meaningful—to have a workload worth boasting about than to look at the trees. He wears that deprivation on his sleeve, like a badge of honor.

“Maybe you should retire,” I suggest. He makes a face as though I’ve suggested suicide, then retreats to the security of his desk, putting it between him and me.

“What can I do for you?”

I turn from the window and give him my full attention.

“Well, today I left my building and there were three guys waiting outside to kill me.”

He makes the same sour face.

“You’ve seen combat. Surely your retainer is enough to cover…”

“I’m not complaining, I’m just telling you. I thought it was important that you know. It seems clear that it’s linked to the attack on Max. I’ve been added to the list of targets.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Well, first of all whoever tried to kill Max hasn’t given up. Second, it means they’ve decided that killing me would be helpful in their attempt to kill Max. That’s the good news.”

“That’s good news?”

I shrug.

“Sure. Every time you try to kill someone you expose yourself. You take the risk of leaving clues, of getting caught. They wouldn’t be taking that chance unless I was a threat to them.”

“So if you had no chance of finding out who they were, or of catching them, they wouldn’t bother.”

“Right.”

He absorbs this thought for a moment. He’s no trial lawyer, but he thinks strategically nonetheless, so I’m sure he sees the logic in it.

“Do we know anything about them?”

“We know one of them’s dead. P.D. arrived and blew his head off and took out half his chest with a charged round. They’ll have an I.D. on him soon, I’m sure, and I’ve got a friend inside the investigation who’ll let me know who he is once they figure it out.”

“Good, good.”

He nods, happy, I think, that he made the right decision hiring me, that I have the influence to get the job done. My competence validates his decision-making. I wonder: Does this guy think of anyone besides himself and his pet celebrity?  But I know the answer to that. It’s his job not to think of anyone else.

“The P.D. are tracking down the dead guy’s friends, of course. My contact will keep me posted on that too.”

“Excellent. Who’s your contact?”

“How does Alan scoop military comm?” I say, pointedly answering his question with a question.

He takes my point. We each have our ways of doing things—sometimes coloring outside the lines—and just as he isn’t going to share his, I’m not going to share mine.

“Nobody scoops military comm,” he lies, “it’s illegal.”

“My mistake,” I say, faking sincerity but not putting a lot of effort into it. “Anyway, I thought you should know about the incident.”

“You’d better inform Alan as well.”

“I just did, didn’t I?”

“Excuse me?”

“Alan is the living embodiment of Cloud City’s security system and right now he’s in sim, which means he’s back where he usually is, running security from every vantage point at once, seeing everything and hearing it too. Are you really trying to tell me that he didn’t hear what we just said?”

“Privacy…”

“Ends at the door of any residence, legally speaking. It’s perfectly legal to bug your own home and listen to anything you want, even record it. I should know, I’ve installed enough of the little gnats.”

“Is there anything else?”

He sounds annoyed now.

“Sure. There were a number of civilians killed and wounded during the attack. Considering the means at your disposal you might want to think about compensating them or their families.”

“We have no liability there. We didn’t attack them and we didn’t negligently permit the attack to occur.”

“I wasn’t thinking of liability, I was thinking of conscience.”

Jerome laughs like he hasn’t heard a better joke in a while. He clearly seems to think that I’d intended the comment as a kind of humorous banter.

“A little outside my bailiwick, conscience,” he says, still laughing.

No shit.

Suddenly a thought strikes him.

“The P.D. don’t know you’re working for us, do they?”

“Client confidentiality is the name of the game in my business, Mr. Jerome. I told them that my office had numerous cases and that the attack could have been related to any one of them. If they come snooping around my data files I’ll just… well, I’ll call you for a referral and then hire a high-priced lawyer to keep all our secrets safe.”

“Perfect, perfect,” he says, back in jovial mode. “Well done. I knew I made the right choice when I came to you.”  He turns serious again. “Still, this is a disturbing turn of events. Let me make this plain. If whoever attacked Max is still on the hunt, I expect you to find out who they are. Information is key here. The only way we can protect Max, and you for that matter, is by knowing who the enemy is.”

“Absolutely.”

“Great. I’m glad to see we’re on the same track. Any ideas?  Besides the Suerte?”

“And Porsche,” I remind him.

“She’s out of it,” he says dismissively. “Her wiring will hold.”

“No, nobody new is on the radar.”

“So what do you plan to do?”

“My tech is still working the data. I’ve called one of my men to come in and assist her, an extra pair of hands as it were. He’s on his way, so he’ll need clearance to the compound.”

“We’ll need to check him first.”

I shake my head.

“No time, I need him here now. You checked me Mr. Jerome, very carefully I assume, and I checked my man. I’m clean so he’s clean.”

He doesn’t look happy with it.

“If you say so.”

“Other than that I’m going to give the P.D. a little time to develop their case. It shouldn’t take long to ID the dead guy at least. Right now the men who attacked me are the only real lead we’ve got back to the source.”

“That makes sense.”

“What I do after that depends on what I hear from my friend. Hopefully whatever he discovers will point me in one direction or another.”

“And if his information doesn’t point you anywhere?”

“Then I have another plan, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“As long as it doesn’t put Max at risk. I don’t want him used as bait or anything of that sort.”

He really doesn’t get it. He things he’s in control of this thing, but he’s not and I’m not.

“He’s already bait, Mr. Jerome. They breached security once. Conceivably they could do it again. That’s another reason I want my man in here. I can’t be here all the time and I want someone with combat training and experience at hand for Max’s safety.”  And Carmen’s, I think to myself but don’t say.

“All right then.”  He stands, clearly signaling that our meeting is over. “Unless there’s anything else?”

“Nope. Anyone else tries to kill me you’ll be the first to know.”

He laughs again.

“You Forces guys, you crack me up. Nothing fazes you.”

Nothing except fatass lawyers.

Ten: Peace, or Something Equally Absurd

I return to the house and head for security, where I find Carmen in a trance and TJ sprawled in one of the sim chairs. He’s not hooked up, though, just lolling there.

“TJ.”

“Hey Gat,” he says, a sleepy smile smearing across his broad face.

“Everything quiet.”

“As a fucken’ church man. I could go to sleep.”

His smile widens. TJ—short for Thomas James—would sooner kill his mother than fall asleep on duty. He’s a mellow guy with a quick grin, the kind who can talk with just about anyone, whether the other person is homeless or the New York ambassador, always at his ease. But appearances are deceiving. TJ can go from joking to killing and back to joking again in the space of second—I’ve seen it. Still, he’s no Felon. He’s fully human, just very effective at what he does. His smile is real.

“Nighty night then, TJ, enjoy your nap. I have to make a run. I’ll check in. Call me if anything pops, ok?”

“Aye aye. You’ll be the first.”

“Thanks for doing this TJ. I know Pileggi was a lot more interesting.”

He shakes his head, looking like a puppy.

“No man, thank you. Quality time with Carmen. I save her life, maybe she’ll finally go out with me.”

Carmen’s deep in her trance and can’t hear us, not that TJ would care if she did. He’s been asking her out for two years now and for two years she’s been saying no. After that long it either turns nasty or becomes a joke, and with TJ of course it became a joke.

“In that case I hope something pops. You’re gonna die of heartbreak one of these days.”

He heaves a sigh, playing along, but I suspect it’s partly real.

“Don’t I know it. Sooner, Gat.”

“Sooner, amigo.”

I leave the two of them together. Or rather I leave the two of them in the same room, Carmen with her head in the clouds and TJ with his heart on his sleeve. Finding my way through the ghostly, lifeless house, I leave. Out front I start up my bike and drive down to the gate. Despite the efficacy of the L.A.P.D., I can’t just sit around and leave things in their hands, and it occurs to me that there’s some investigating I can do on my own.

It’s obvious that the men who attacked me weren’t really homeless, but it’s still possible that they posed as homeless for a while before the attack, waiting for the right opportunity to take me out. If they did, then someone in L.A.’s genuine homeless population might know something about them. It’s a slim chance, but I can’t afford to ignore any possibility and at the moment and I have no other leads to follow.

The thing is, I can’t just start approaching homeless people in the street and asking them if they know anything. First, they wouldn’t talk to me. They are rightfully both resentful and afraid of people from my world. Second, there are simply too many of them. I could question people for a decade and never find the person I was looking for, the one person who knows something helpful.

There might be a way, though. The homeless aren’t a cohesive unit, god knows, but they aren’t just scattered individuals either. They have their small societies, their friendships, families, and networks. They are interconnected by their desperate need and their limited resources. They share information with each other about food, shelter, and threats. There are even, to some extent, leaders amongst them, and there are a few points where their world actually intersects with the L.A. that I know and live in.

I direct the bike to one of those points. Calvin Hearn is another ex-forces acquaintance, but he’s as unlike Felon as it’s possible to be. I first got to know him in boot camp, where he would talk to me whenever he could find me away from the others. He was never really a friend, and was sometimes a bit annoying in the way a dependent younger brother can be annoying, but I felt bad for him. He was eighteen years old, and insecure. The shell he’d been dropped into had skin a shade lighter than mine, a lean, ectomorphic physique, and large eyes that reflected his fear. He’d joined up because he couldn’t find a job but once he was in he’d realized he was far from shore and didn’t have the first clue how to swim. He was desperately treading water and fearing the worst.

“I don’t think I’m up to this Gat,” he’d say again and again. “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

He was right to avoid the other soldiers in these confessional moments. Most of them would have laughed in his face and repeated every word to the brass. I liked to think I was different. I’d tell him that he was doing all right, that everything was going to be okay, but the truth is I was lying. He was making it through basic training, but there was no way he was going to be okay. He was going to fall apart at some point, to break in some essential way, and it was obvious. I just didn’t know what else to say; I couldn’t think of any way to make him feel better. You can’t just quit the Forces because you’ve decided you made a mistake signing up. Once you’re in you're in, and you stay in until you get killed, you get invalided out, or your contract is up.

Cal made it through basic training and even did all right on our first few missions. He was never a stellar soldier, but he surprised himself by not cracking under the pressure of combat and started to gain confidence in himself. At that point he stopped coming to me and I didn’t seek him out. He didn’t seem to need my help any more. Then came Tijuana and no one could have helped him.

I have no idea where Cal was during that op, but by the time we finished stomping all over the city in our big combat boots and regrouped back in California, he was catatonic.

Ironically it was Felon who’d pulled him out and gotten him into the Jenny, because Cal would never have made it on his own. Felon came across him at sunset, long shadows stretching out across the ground everywhere you looked as evening began to creep up. Cal was sunk to his knees in the middle of a street littered with bodies and body parts, wounded children, dead fathers, dying mothers. His hands were clasped together, big eyes shut tightly, praying in a feverish stutter amidst the carnage, the burning buildings, and the endless smoke and screaming. Felon had nothing but contempt for weakness, but he was loyal to the Forces and would never have considered leaving another soldier behind. He picked Cal up, threw him over his shoulder, and carried him back to the landing zone, firing his weapon all the way even though there was no one fighting back. That was just how Felon was, and pretty much still is. Any chance to fire off a round.

Cal was discharged based on his breakdown, invalided out, and I lost track of him. I assumed that he would simply stay the way he was, incoherent and babbling prayers, for the rest of his life. Felon let me know otherwise, though. An L.A.P.D operation targeting a series of break-ins had focused on a small group of homeless who the P.D. thought were behind the thefts. Felon had gone to a small Christian mission that a couple of the suspects were known to frequent, showing up for free food each evening. When he arrived, Felon looked for the pastor in charge of the mission. What he found was Cal.

Apparently Cal, who’d been placed indefinitely in a Forces psychiatric center, had returned to the world by degrees. His obsessive prayers had stopped, although he had obviously undergone some kind of personal revelation because he still prayed, in a more normal fashion by this point, at least four or five times a day.

Eventually the chaplain at the center had taken Cal under his wing. And why not? The Forces was just about the most atheistic organization in California and the chaplain didn’t have much else to do. Most of the men he approached with his offers of faith and guidance told him to go to hell, by which they meant a place like Tijuana, or maybe Bowling Green, not some anemic theme park with pitchforks and lakes of fire. So he and Cal had studied the Bible together and prayed together, and under his ministrations Cal had slowly become more and more functional.

Ultimately, when Cal was well enough to be discharged from the hospital, the chaplain had suggested he study theology. Cal had his Forces pension and education credits and did just that, attending a small Christian college. When he graduated, he started the Saint Francis Mission, using seed money from the college to rent a small store-front on Yucca Street near Vine, at the core of one of the largest populations of homeless in L.A.

But the man Felon found wasn’t the same boy he’d once ridiculed. Felon knew the street names of the men he was after. He wanted legal names if Cal knew them, and he wanted Cal to help arrest the suspects. Not that he expected Cal to actually lay hands on them, simply to wait until they came to the mission and then point them out. He had started in on Cal by reminding him that he’d saved Cal’s life. When that approach failed, Felon naturally defaulted to threats and intimidation, expecting Hearn—the cowering mess, the weakling—to capitulate quickly. To his surprise that didn’t work either.

“Damndest thing Gat,” he told me. “That fucker used to hide under a chair if I yelled ‘boo,’ but I couldn’t get him to budge, no way, no how. He was totally calm, and you know what he says to me? He says ‘I’m ready to die for my flock if I have to.’ I’m telling you Gat, he really believes this God stuff.”

To Felon that was like believing in a flat Earth, or peace, or something equally absurd.

I stop the bike in front of the Saint Francis Mission, hoping I might have better luck than Felon did. After all, I’m not looking for actual homeless people to arrest or harass, I’m looking for assassins who pretended to be homeless in order to kill me. I’m hoping that Cal might be upset, not only at the notion of murder, but at the fact that his flock is being used as a cover.

Taking off my helmet I dismount. The mission is ramshackle, one in a row of storefronts, with dull green paint peeling off the wooden door. Orange curtains are drawn in the windows, which are protected behind large metal grates, permanently bolted into place. A sagging plastic banner hangs above the windows, with the mission’s name in the middle and a stylized dove on either end. Outside, a couple of men in raggedy clothing sit on the sidewalk, leaning against a lighting pole and eying me suspiciously.

“The fuck you want?” one of them calls out as I make for the door.

“I’m here to see Pastor Hearn. He’s an old friend of mine.”

“Hmf,” the man grunts, clearly not believing me but having no way of stopping me from entering.

I push the door open and enter an empty room. The inside is in better repair than the outside, at least. There is a motley collection of worn chairs in place of pews, no two the same, but the interior is spotlessly clean. The walls have been carefully painted with cheap yellow latex, the front windows admit a light that is weak and orange through the filter of the curtains. The curtains don’t quite meet in the middle, though, and a thin shaft of bright, pure sunlight cuts through the gap, illuminating dust motes in the air and splashing itself garishly across a narrow strip of worn wooden floorboards. There’s a smell of cleanser or disinfectant in the air. At the front of the room a simple lectern serves as a pulpit, behind which a large, plain, metal crucifix hangs on the wall. Aluminum by the look of it. To the right of the lectern is an ill-lit passageway into the back of the building. I stand at its entrance and call out.

“Pastor Hearn?”

I hear a shifting sound, then a door opening. At the end of the hall I see the silhouette of a head emerge from a doorway.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Gat Burroughs, Cal,” I say. He emerges from the doorway and walks down the hall toward me, his face becoming recognizable as he advances from the gloomy interior. He’s a tall man and his body is still as slim as I remember it, his face narrow. His curly hair has grown out from its Forces buzz cut and, at the same time, receded a little.

What shocks me are his eyes, still huge, but now serene. His face is lined, but Cal Hearn still looks better than I’ve ever seen him. He wears jeans and a black T-shirt. There are sneakers on his feet and a smaller version of the aluminum cross on a chain around his neck. My gaze returns to his eyes. In the Forces he looked perpetually around him, as though he might be attacked from any angle at any time. Even when his head was still his eyes constantly tracked imaginary threats in his surroundings. Now his gaze stays fixed calmly on me. There may even be a hint of amusement in his eyes.

“Gat Burroughs,” he says, ruminating. His voice is as soft as ever, but it lacks the edge of nervousness it used to have. “It’s been a long time. Come to find salvation?” He smiles as he said it, obviously certain that I haven’t come to meet Jesus.

“’Fraid not Cal. I’m just not wired that way.”

He leans against the wall in a relaxed pose and shrugs a small shrug.

“Well, I have plenty of souls to tend to as it is, though I’d have welcomed you of course.”

“I’m sure you would Cal. I’ve heard you’re very dedicated to your calling.”

He nods, waiting for me to go on.

“I’m actually hoping you can help me out.”

“What line are you in these days?” he asks, looking pointedly at my military clothing.

“Personal security, saving lives.”

“Private cop. Police aren’t popular here, I’m afraid, P.D. or private.”

“Listen Cal, I’m not looking to do harm to anyone here, okay? I heard about Dave coming here and trying to push you around and get you to snitch on your flock. This isn’t the same thing.”

He eyes me with a level gaze.

“Felon,” he says. “I don’t suppose he’s changed at all.”

“That would be a lot to hope for.”

He grins and actually rolls his eyes. Once again I’m taken aback by the ease in his manner.

“Yes, I suppose so. Maybe one day. So tell me what brings you here.”

“I’m not looking to bust any homeless, Cal. I have a client. Someone wants him dead. Whoever that someone is, they’ve decided to add me to their list. When I left my home the other day, over on Jung Jing Road, they were waiting for me. They were dressed up like homeless, but it’s clear that they weren’t. For one thing they had guns and motorcycles. They tried to kill me.”

“If they’re not genuine homeless then how can I help you? The real poor are the only ones I know.”

“They may have been posing as homeless for a day or so, waiting for the right moment to put me down. I thought that maybe some of the real homeless might have noticed them, might be able to tell me something about them so I can catch them.”

“And you’d like me to convince my people to talk to you.”

“Basically, yeah.”

He looks down at the floor, then back up at me.

“You’ve come to the wrong place.”

“Cal, they didn’t manage to kill me, obviously, but they killed a lot of innocent people trying. Why won’t you help me?”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t, I just said you’d come to the wrong place. Chinatown is too far away from here. I don’t know anyone there.”

“Can you put me in touch with anyone?”

He grimaces slightly.

“I can try, but I can’t guarantee they’ll know anything, or tell you if they do.”

“When it was over I saw at least ten, fifteen bodies in the road, Cal, and I could be next. This lead is all I’ve got.”

“You need to talk to Chen. I can try to set up a meeting, if he’ll allow it.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“Wait here.”

Cal disappears down the hallway. I hear his voice, muffled by the distance, and assume he’s calling Chen, whoever that is. He returns a few minutes later, carrying a battered kaikki several years old.

“Did you talk to Chen?”

“Chen?” He looks confused for a moment, then smiles and shakes his head. “No, no. Chen’s homeless, he doesn’t have a kaikki Gat. I talked to Father Wen. He’s a Catholic priest who runs a mission on New High Street in Chinatown. Chen comes in there pretty regularly.”

“If you don’t know the population in Chinatown how do you know about Chen?”

Cal fixes me with those big eyes.

“You really have no idea how this world works, do you?” he says mildly. “The homeless world, I mean.”

Despite his soft tone I feel like I’m being accused of something. Maybe I just feel guilty because I’ve ignored the homeless as much as anyone else, until now, until I need something from them.

“No,” I say, “I guess I don’t.”

“Every community has a few well-known people. Some of them are natural leaders who can organize people to help themselves. Some are particularly dangerous, people to watch out for. Others have done something at one time or another that made them stand out, something they’re remembered for, and they become part of the local history.”

“So which one is Chen?”

Cal looks more serious suddenly.

“A little of each, I think. I don’t know much about him, but from what I hear he’s charismatic and something of a leader at times. At the same time, he’s no saint. The thing he’s known for is killing three L.A.P.D.”

“Self-defense?” I ask hopefully.

“No. Protection of his people. L.A.P.D. can get pretty rough with the homeless at times, sometimes for a reason and sometimes not. Chen may have been protecting innocent people. On the other hand he could have been protecting some racket he had going. I have no idea.”

“And he’ll talk to me?”

Cal shrugs.

“Father Wen will talk to you,” he says, emphasizing the difference. “He’ll try to set something up with Chen, but Chen might just ignore him. There’s no way to know.”

I nod silently, taking in the unfamiliar situation.

“So where on New High Street?”

Cal takes a business card out of his back pocket and writes the address on the back. He speaks as he’s writing, still looking down at what he’s doing.

“Gat, I never really said thank you.”

“For what Cal?”

“For helping me out when we were in the Forces. For talking to me.” Now he looks up. “There really wasn’t anyone else I could talk to. It made a big difference and I should have told you so.”

“It’s okay, Cal.”

“Thanks. The bitch of it is that I should really thank Felon too, for getting me out of there, saving my life, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I’ve prayed on it, but I still can’t get myself to call him and do what I should.”

“You hate him, that makes it hard.”

“I try not to hate him, you know. Hate the sin but not the sinner and all that, but…” he trails off, not knowing how to finish his sentence.

“Felon doesn’t make it easy, Cal. I wouldn’t worry about it. First of all as far as he’s concerned, he didn’t save you, he saved a fellow soldier. Secondly, your thanks wouldn’t mean anything to him. He wouldn’t value it.”

Cal looks thoughtful.

“Maybe not now, but you know there’s hope for everyone. Maybe when he’s old, or when he’s dying, it would be nice for him to look back and say ‘I did something good.”’

“Cal, I hate to disappoint you, but that moment’s not going to come. Most likely Felon will get shot on duty and die in a split second. If he doesn’t, he’ll die still thinking Tijuana was right, that the Forces are all that matter, and that firing off a round is the best feeling in the world.”

Cal grins.

“What’s so funny?”

“You’re still trying to make me feel better, trying to say the right thing, even after all this time.” I realize he’s right and don’t know what to say after that. I thank him and walk back out into the sunshine, blinding after the gauzy haze of Cal’s world.

Eleven: With No Disrespect, So What?

Father Wen being Catholic, I suppose I expected a cathedral, or something more imposing than another storefront anyway, but that’s what I find. New High Street is just around the corner from my home and office. I once bought cleaning supplies from a discount store there, but I’ve never given it much attention.

The building is painted an odd shade of taupe. It’s flanked on the left by the entrance to a small Asian mall called Gold Stream Village and on the right by a sliding garage-style door of corrugated metal. The sign above the door still proclaims that it’s something called Actual Size, but a small, hand-lettered sign on the door announces that this is the St. Christopher Mission. I enter and a small set of chimes ring above my head, betraying my presence. The interior is much like Cal’s mission, although the decor is distinctly Chinese. There are several banners with hànzì characters stretching across them, red being the predominant color, and there are even gold accents on the framed pictures of Jesus and Mary, although I’m sure they’re just paint rather than real gold leaf.

Nothing happens for a moment, then an old man emerges from a back room. He is wizened and dressed in a black one-piece frock-like outfit that puts me in mind of monks.

“Father Wen?” I ask.

“Yes. You are Gat Burroughs?”

His English is like that of many people in Chinatown. It’s unaccented, but still slightly awkward, as though speaking it is a kind of concession to me. Given China’s isolation Wen was undoubtedly born here, but many people in Chinatown grow up speaking Chinese almost exclusively, so their English is still odd to a native-speaker’s ear.

“Yes. I believe Pastor Hearn was in touch with you.”

He nods.

“Yes, yes. I sent word to Chen through one of the others, but I don’t know if he’ll come. He doesn’t like police, especially gwai lo.”

Gwai lo, the foreign devil, the white man. Once upon a time it was a real curse, although lately people use it in a friendlier manner. In this case I suspect it isn’t friendly. “I may be gwai lo, but I’m not the police,” I say, trying to clarify, but Father Wen waves a hand as if this is of no importance. “To Chen you are the same. Police, not police. You are an authority, you are housed. To him you are the enemy.”

“I try not to be anyone’s enemy,” I say, somewhat lamely.

“Your intentions aren’t very important, we will see if he comes. I welcome you though. Please, come and have tea with me.”

I follow him into his small, windowless office, where a pot of tea has already been prepared. He sits behind an oak desk and pours for me first, gesturing to a chair on the other side of the desk, then pours his own cup. Beside us is a bookcase that reaches to the ceiling, full of theological works and, oddly, many scientific ones as well. Behind him are rows of scuffed grey institutional filing cabinets, the kind that wouldn’t look out of place in a school office, or for that matter a military base. The room doesn’t have enough space for everything in it, and I have a vaguely confined feeling—Forces training has short-circuited any possible claustrophobia. At one end of the desk a small holo plays a recording of a recent papal Mass. The holo unit is antiquated and the image is a little blurred, so that each figure seems to trail a ghost of itself. I’m reminded of an ancient painting by Francis Bacon, the so-called “screaming pope.”

“You were attacked, Pastor Hearn says,” Wen comments mildly.

“Yes, by men pretending to be homeless. I have no desire to bother the real homeless, Father. I’m just trying to find these men. They killed a number of innocent people while they were trying to kill me.”

He sips his tea, makes a face, then puts the cup down. I think the California-grown tea disappoints him. He looks old enough to remember when one could buy tea from China or Japan. Or get tea grown in India or Sri Lanka without paying a year’s wages for a 500 gram packet.

“Yes, I know the incident, though I didn’t know you were involved or what it was about. Just near here. Very sad. Very violent. Jesus cries.”

“Jesus wept,” I correct him, but he shakes his head slightly.

“I am aware of the idiom, Mr. Burroughs, but I don’t put Jesus in the past tense.”

I feel a little foolish and try to get past the moment.

“It was, as you say, very violent and terribly sad. I’m trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“And serve your client.”

“And serve my client, but they amount to the same thing at the moment.”

We drink some more second-rate tea, but are interrupted by the sound of the chimes. Wen looks a little surprised.

“Perhaps Chen has come after all. I will see. You remain here.”

I wait, drinking my tea, while Wen goes to the front room to see who has arrived. A moment later he returns accompanied by another Chinese man. The visitor appears to be about forty and very fit, with long grey-streaked hair combed back over his shoulders. In one ear he wears an earring made from a Chinese coin, old by the looks of it, with a hole in the center. He has on a battered brown leather jacket with a hard, bare chest underneath it and, to my surprise, Forces-issue khaki pants. I stand up to greet him.

“Mister Burroughs, this is Chen.”

“Mr. Chen,” I say, holding out my hand.

“Chen will do,” he answers abruptly, ignoring my offer to shake. I drop my hand.

“Okay, Chen then. I’m glad you agreed to meet with me.”

He answers by spitting on the floor, although his expression remains benign, or perhaps just intentionally opaque.

“I am here only because Pastor Hearn asked for me. He is a good man, very thoughtful. You? I just see you around the neighborhood. Who knows what you are?”

“Pastor Hearn is a friend of mine, or he was some time ago.”

“In the Forces.”

“Yes, in the Forces.”

“I was once in the Forces too, you know. These pants,” he looks down and gestures at them with his hand, “I hate them, but they’re durable so I keep them.”

“I’m not a fan of the Forces myself. It was an unpleasant experience.”

He says something under his breath that sounds like choe-bee, drawing the word out, and Father Wen looks away.

“Yes, pissing on the poor can be unpleasant,” he says sarcastically. “Killing them, burning their homes.”

I don’t like the direction this is heading and decide that a little confrontation may be the only way to take control of the situation. I step forward until I’m inches from Chen’s face.

“It’s more than unpleasant. You know it if you were there. I have guilt, I have nightmares, but I can’t undo the past. All I can do is try to do the right thing now. If that doesn’t meet your high standards, fuck you.”

Chen laughs quietly.

“Okay, you have my attention. What do you want?”

“From what I’ve been told you know a lot about what goes on around here.”

He shrugs noncommittally.

“I was attacked in front of my office on Jung Jing Road. Three men posing as homeless. I thought you might know something about them.”

“Sure,” he says affably. He leans against the doorway. “White men, well-fed, obviously not real homeless. They were around for a day or so.”

“Can you tell me anything about them? What they looked like? What they did?”

“All of them were tall, all in perfect health. Good teeth, good posture, no bone degeneration. Good hair, so good diet, vitamins. Other than the fact that they didn’t look homeless there was nothing particularly distinctive about them. One had blond hair, the other two dark. All with short hair. Very muscular and their demeanor was very pushy. They were bullies.”

“How were they bullies?”

“They demanded cigarettes from people. Cigarettes are very valuable for us, like money. If people said no they would laugh and take the cigarettes anyway. They pushed some of the girls around, trying to get sex. They had guns, so no one argued with them.”

“These people were stealing and threatening and no one reported them?”

Chen makes a face and glances at Wen, who looks down, apparently uncomfortable. Chen faces me again.

“Report? Who the hell to? To the police? For them we don’t even exist, except when they think we’ve committed a crime.”

“They don’t respond?”

This time Chen laughs loudly.

“Respond, he says,” directing his comment to Wen. “Respond. They don’t give a fuck, Mr. Burroughs. You know what they call us, right? Krill. Small, abundant, unimportant, and preyed upon by others. They don’t even show up. Theft, murder, rape. . . it doesn’t matter. We have to look out for ourselves. No one else is going to protect us.”

“Okay,” I say, hoping to change tack a little, “so how did you look after yourselves? These guys were bullying you, what did you do?”

“I talked with them.”

“You talked?”

“Yes, I talked. I explained that they were three men. Then I explained that I had at least five-hundred men who would attack them if I gave the order, even if they knew some of them would die. With such numbers, even their guns wouldn’t matter. They stopped.”

“Didn’t you wonder what they were doing here? Why they were pretending to be homeless? Why they were carrying guns?”

“Personally, I didn’t care. Obviously they were after someone who was not one of us. Some housed person,” he says, pronouncing the word like an obscenity. “That is not my concern.”

“They wanted to kill someone,” I say, unable to hide my anger at his cavalier manner.

“Yes, you. With no disrespect, so what? You don’t know this city at all, do you? You think it is your world, the housed, the wealthy, the privileged. Do you even see the homeless when you pass them on the street? Do you ever stop to think about their lives, their world? Do you do anything to help them? There is a whole world that is invisible to you and the only reason it’s invisible is that you would rather not see it, it makes you uncomfortable. So why should we care about you?”

I want to respond angrily, but he’s right.

“Okay Chen, I’m guilty, all right? I ignore the homeless. I try to pretend they’re not there. It makes me uncomfortable to see them or to think about them.”

“About us,” he corrects me.

“Fine, about you. But I’m trying to save lives here. We’re all human, even the housed.”

“You are human, obviously. The question is, are we? And if we are not, if we aren’t treated as human beings, why should we give you the courtesy?”

“Okay,” I say, “fine. I won’t argue with you. It’s unfair, it’s even cruel. Still, people have died and more could die yet, even homeless. If you can help me, I might be able to prevent it.”

Chen looks into the middle distance for a moment, as though considering what I’ve said. Then he looks back at me, full eye contact, no flinching. His gaze is very intense.

“The only reason I talk to you is Pastor Hearn. The only reason. I don’t care if you live or die, but the Pastor does see us, he does know our world, and he does help us. For that reason only I will tell you something that might help you.”

“Thank you,” I say, not knowing what else is appropriate.

“They were vat boys.”

“Shells? How do you know?”

“You’re a shell yourself, Mr. Burroughs, like me. Don’t you usually know one when you see one? Too perfect, too healthy, too at ease, too strong, too confident. They weren’t just healthy, the way housed people are healthy, they were ultra. Definitely shells.”

“Thank you Chen. I appreciate your information.”

“If you really appreciate it, you should make a donation.”

I take out some money from my pocket and start peeling off bills, holding them toward him.

“Not to me,” he says, as though I’m stupid, “to Father Wen, to the mission, to Pastor Hearn. Stop being blind for a moment and see our world. If you do, you might even want to give something.”

“I will,” I promise.

“Big words. Heard that song before. I know this neighborhood, you know. I know where you live and where you work, and I don’t like being lied to.”

“I can imagine.”

That brings a large grin.

“You haven’t got enough imagination for what I can do,” he says, and turns to leave.

“Chen,” I call out after him.

He stops and turns back to me in the doorway of the office.

“What?” he asks curtly, and I ask him the question that’s been bothering me since I saw his pants.

“You were in the Forces, you could have a pension, education credits, help getting a job. Why are you homeless?”

He advances on me and this time he is the one who presses his face close to mine. His eyes are angry, furious.

“Do you think I want anything the Forces would give me?” he asks, angry. “Do you think I would take one penny from them?”

He calms himself and straightens his jacket.

“For my part, Mr. Burroughs, I like to see the world as it is, including the poor and the homeless. I joined the Forces, like so many others, because I felt I had no choice, no other job, but then I learned what they were about: crushing us. Using the poor and the desperate who can’t find a job to beat the rest of the poor into submission. When I realized what the Forces really were, I went AWOL. Technically, I’m still subject to Court Martial. I wouldn’t take anything the Forces would give me, but they wouldn’t give me anything anyway. I am a criminal, Mr. Burroughs. I prefer it that way.”

And with that, he leaves.

Twelve: A Plan of Last Resort

I call Felon as I head back to Cloud City, activating my kaikki by voice command.

“Fellows, L.A.P.D.”

“It's Gat,” I say, forcing myself to sound friendly. I need him, after all. On the other hand, in my heart of hearts, part of me would rather cut my own guts out and try to eat them before I died.

“What’s up?” he asks.

“I’ve got news on our UIF.”

“Been out there playing detective?”

“I am a detective, got a license and everything.”

“No shit? So what’s the news?”

“We’re looking for shells.”

“How do you figure?”

“Trust me, it’s my life.”

He mulls it over for a moment.

“Well, that’ll cut down the I.D. time. I’ll have the techs compare the DNA scrape to the shells on file. Shouldn’t take long. I’ll call you back.”

By the time I’m winding up the final stretch of road to Cloud City, my kaikki chirps and Dave’s badge number and the L.A.P.D. logo appear in the upper right corner of my visor.

“Gat here Dave. What’s up.”

“The dead UIF is no longer UI.”

“Praise God.”

“And pass the ammunition,” he says, completing the phrase and laughing. It’s making me a little sick, buttering him up with this Forces chatter, but he’s got what I need.

“You want to ride along while I track it down?”

I want nothing less than to spend time with him, but I need information and I don’t want him screwing things up—I want to be there to supervise.

“Sure. You got the vat?”

“Oh yeah, DNA traces back to an outfit called Body Work Inc.”

“Where should I meet you?”

I’m almost at Cloud City now, slowing the bike.

“I gotta do a few things. Whyn’t you meet me there?” He rattles off the address, knowing full well that my Forces training will ensure that I remember it.

“Okay. Is an hour all right?”

“Sure, sure, whatever. They’re not going anywhere.”

“Sooner, Dave,” I say, not meaning it.

“See you in the zone,” he says, hanging up. The drop zone. Still a trooper after all these years.

I don’t even bother entering the grounds of Cloud City, just turn the bike around and head out. The address that Felon’s given me is north of Pacific Palisades, near the waterfront. Vat outfits need a lot of water for their operations and ocean water’s just fine once you desalinate it and filter it about a thousand times.

The building sits, squat and low, spread over acres of rocky land. The driveway approaches from the east side of the building and opens into a small parking lot with about ten cars in it. The plant is huge, but if it’s like most vats it’s largely automated, so there won’t be a large staff. Yellow brick walls stretch north and south in an unbroken line for hundreds of meters. Dead center is a pair of doors and over that is a small sign: Body Work Inc.

No doubt they have a corporate office downtown for the clients—the kind of place that’s redecorated by a different brand name artist every six months just to stay chic—with demonstration tanks, plush carpeting, and a gorgeous receptionist. Out here is the business end; there’s no need to get elaborate.

I sit on my bike and research the company while I wait for Felon to arrive, translucent data streaming down the inside of my visor. Body Work Inc., I discover, has been operational for over twenty-five years. They look very clean. A few minor Code violations have showed up during inspections, but any vat has those, mostly inadvertent. The company’s publicly traded, so it has an obligation to publish its financial reports, making it an unlikely criminal enterprise. It would be very hard to hide any illicit profits.

The president and CEO is Lester DeLong, a biochemist and one of the pioneers of shell technology. He started out at General Genomics, where he worked his way up to VP operations. In his spare time he worked on the notion of shell farming, his hobby. When he’d nailed the details he handled it responsibly, telling the board of directors about his extracurricular work and requesting that he be allowed to start up a branch operation on a test-case basis for a year. If it paid off, he’d run the branch and take a bonus in General Genomics stock that would put him into the richest percentile in Cali. If it went bust, as most predicted it would, he’d return to his old duties, no hard feelings. It was a bit of a gamble for General, but DeLong had the credentials and had worked up an impressive presentation, not just scientific stuff, but a whole business plan. It seems DeLong had an entrepreneurial side, he just hadn’t chosen to show it until then. If worse came to worst, General could always claim the loss on their taxes.

By the time the year was up, though, Body Work Inc. was a cash cow. The scientific work had already been done long before the business started, but DeLong brought in some of the best spin artists around to make sure the public bought into the scheme.

DeLong had also been at work on decanting, the sensitive process of extracting  neural patterns from a human brain—a package of jellied meat soaked in chemicals and animated by electrical impulses—encoding them in a transitional program that ensured redundant backups for safety, and then instantiating them into a fresh brain.

The pioneering work in that area had been done years before by Watts and Sweet at CaliARPI, then revolutionized by Bennett and Hai at T.T. Genomics, but until DeLong got involved it was an artisanal process that depended entirely on a surgeon with a rare and expensive set of skills. DeLong had taken the work of disparate researchers, knit it together into a single procedure, worked out the bugs, and then focused on routinizing—and often automating—the complex details of the decanting process until it was not only cost-effective, but also demonstrably safe.

Next thing you knew rickety old rich folk with saggy jowls and too much money were walking in, looking ready for the undertaker. When they left again they were substantially less rich but they didn’t care because they were young, healthy, and beautiful. No more lung and heart transplants, with all the risks of rejection and infection, not to mention the dangers that come with general anesthesia. Now you just dropped by Body Work and got a whole new shell. Hell, you didn’t even have to go under a general. A local anesthetic for the scalp was enough to let DeLong into your head—the brain can’t sense pain, after all. Bit by bit your memories, sensations, and thoughts were scanned and transferred from your old body to the new shell until voilà, you were ready for another sixty years of life. Not that anyone was likely to wait that long. With enough money you could show up the moment your shell hit the equivalent of fifty, fifty-five, whatever, and just download again into another twenty-year-old shell. As far as anyone knew you could live forever, and that prospect is what’s put Body Works and other places like it into the stratosphere fiscally.

All told there’s little reason to think that Body Works would involve itself in anything criminal. For a rich outfit like this one, money wouldn’t be much of a temptation and, if it misbehaves, it risks the public’s trust. Trust is what keeps a vat going, is its lifeblood. Even now that the procedure is well established, it still arouses a visceral, even metaphysical, fear in most people. Our bodies are such a big part of our history, our appearance is so fundamentally a part of our identities, that to give up the body you’re born into takes a big leap of faith, believe me. It’s hard to imagine Body Works squandering their image, their ability to inspire that kind of faith, for the price of three retreads, or even for a substantial bribe.

As I’m turning these thoughts over in my mind, I hear Felon arriving. His big bike gives off a throaty, bass growl in the distance before he comes into view. Then I spot him. He’s a small dot racing along a ribbon of road, but his apparition grows larger by the second. Finally he turns into the drive and pulls up beside me, cutting his engine and letting its echo hang in the air. He pulls off his helmet.

“Nice bike,” he says. I search his voice, his face, for signs of irony, but there aren’t any. The Akita is a damned nice bike, but I know the way the P.D. worship their 1,500 cubic centimeters of hell on wheels.

“Thanks, you too.”

“This?” he says. He’s feigning a casual tone but the pride is there in his face. “It’s great on power, but sometimes you wish it was a little more nimble, you know what I mean.”

“Maneuverability?”

He nods.

“Still, for sheer speed and guts you can’t beat it. So, you ready to pay a little visit?” He dismounts and unzips the top of his jacket a few inches, letting some air in.

“Yeah. I checked up on these guys while we were waiting. Not exactly a shady operation.”

“I know, I did my homework. Still, this is where the dead guy got his shell. By the way, we’re pretty sure we found the other two.”

“Alive?”

“Fuck no. Abandoned, zero life signs. Two healthy white males, both naked, both dead of a massive overdose of barbiturates in a tenement basement. Stretched out like corpses on a morgue slab.”

“They didn't decant into new shells, leave the husks?”

He shakes his head.

“Nope. Skulls weren´t popped. Can't do a field emulation without opening the cranium, and non-invasive would mean attracting attention, bringing in heavy equipment.”

“Or doing it somewhere else."

"Then why not dump the husks some place remote? By the side of the highway in the middle of the night? Nope, they were lured to a place that seemed normal, maybe familiar. Somebody dosed them, then cleaned up the bodies with a low-power laser judging from the thin layer of ash, burned up any trace evidence. C’mon. Let’s see what we can find out.”

We approach the front door and Felon presses a buzzer set into a metal plate with a grill-covered speaker beside it. When there’s no immediate answer he presses it again. Repeatedly. Annoyingly.

“State your business please,” says a disembodied voice.

“Police business, buddy, open the door and don’t make me wait.”

There is a buzz-click sound and Felon pulls the door open, revealing an empty foyer. High on one wall is a camera which tracks our entry.

“I’ll be right out,” says the same voice as before, issuing from a speaker in the wall. This time there’s a lot less testosterone behind it. A moment later a tall, thin man scuttles out from a door behind the empty reception desk. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I didn’t know who it was.”

“Whatever,” Felon says dismissively. “I need some information.”

The skinny guy blinks a few times, looking confused.

“Information?”

“Information. Data. You deaf?”

“No, it’s just... what kind of information sir?”

“Three shells instantiated within the last few days, probably on a single order, and probably on short notice.”

“Sir, I’m not trying... we’re bound by confidentiality agreements that... ”

“You can wipe my ass with your confidentiality agreements,” Felon says, then smiles.  “Let me put it this way. If you choose to abide by your agreements, I need to get a warrant. If I need to get a warrant, I gotta go to a judge. Could be some crime reporter is there, waiting around in the hall, and sees me and wonders what’s up. Could be I call him first and make sure he’s there. Warrants are public documents unless we, the L.A. fucking P.D., request that they be temporarily sealed to protect the integrity of an ongoing investigation, but in this case I won’t request it, I’ll leave the paper trail out there flapping in the breeze. Before you can say ‘plummeting market share’ the warrant is in the news sims with panels of experts wondering why such a respectable firm is getting rousted by the cops. Are we clear on this yet or do I have to keep talking ‘til I get bored with the sound of my own voice?”

“No, no, I understand. I didn’t mean to... mean to... well, anyway, you might as well come inside.”

“Thanks,” Felon says, grinning. We follow Mr. Skinny down a tiled hallway. He talks while he walks, glancing back over his shoulder once in a while, then having to look forward again and make course corrections so as not to hit the walls.

“I’ll have to... to call downtown... won’t take a moment... I’m sure they’ll see the logic in... I’m sure they’ll cooperate... I just need authorization... I’m only a Tech III... I mean it’s not bad, but... well, it’s not like I’m in charge or anything.”

“Okay,” Felon says, “you’re not in charge or anything, but if an order for three shells came through you’d know right?”

“Oh yeah. We’re a small team here. Anyone would know.”

Felon steps ahead of him and braces an arm against the wall, blocking his path.

“What’s your name?”

“Brian.”

“Brian what?”

“Brian Forget.”

“That’s really your last name?

“Yes.”

Felon nearly doubles over laughing. Forget looks stricken, though he’s trying to hide it. Back in grade school, in high school, this used to happen all the time, big, bullying guys like Felon making fun of his name. But he’d moved on, grown up, built a career. Around here he might not be in charge, but he was somebody. Now, all of a sudden, he’s back in the high school hallway being picked on by some side of beef from the football team.

“Okay, Mr. Forget,” Felon says when he’s caught his breath “did someone place an order like that?”

“I told you, I have to...”

Suddenly Felon’s face is rock and his voice is like ice.

“You can call when I fucking say you can call. In the meantime, did someone place an order like that?”

I know he wants to get an answer out of Forget before the frightened employee gets a boost of confidence from some suit downtown, and I want the answer as much as he does, but his act makes me ill. Then my own hypocrisy makes me sicker, because of course I don’t do anything about it except stand there, silent and complicit.

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes sir.”

Felon bursts out laughing again. He goes on, full of good humor and malevolence in equal doses.

“No you little shit-for-brains, I would merely like for you to clarify your answer so I can be certain I don’t misunderstand.” He pauses. “Please give your answer in sentence form,” he says, mimicking the language of the standardized tests that Mr. Forget has taken so often on the long, painful clamber up to the level of Tech III. Forget looks sullen, but answers.

“Yes, we received an order for three shells earlier this week. Short notice.”

“From whom,” Felon asks, over-enunciating the last word.

“Really I... ”

“I know where you live Forget.”

“What? I... what?”

He looks from Felon to me, then back to Felon again.

“I know your name now, that means I know where you live, because the P.D. computer knows all, tells all. I can find out your address, kaikki ID, social security number, wife’s name if you got one, kids names, make and plate of your car, credit history, favorite pastimes—legal and illegal, respectable or unusual...”

“The order came from North Cali Mining,” says Forget, looking panicked and talking fast. “But that’s normal. They’re an extraction and refining outfit, so they have guys injured all the time. Some mining processes are hard to automate, robotics aren’t pliable enough, but it’s dangerous too. Only way to get guys to do it is to provide them with shells when they get hurt. They’re back to work the next day. There’s nothing illegal in that.”

“Nope, that’s true,” Felon says agreeably. “I think you better call head office now.”

“What?”

“That call you wanted to make? In about three minutes I’m going to call North Cali Mining to check your story. I’m sure you want to get permission to tell me the story before I do that, right? Otherwise it’s going to go hard for you.”

“Right.”

Forget leads us into his small, cramped office, and sits down. He takes out his kaikki and hits a key. He jabbers unintelligibly for a little while, then finally makes himself understood. He talks to several different people. Eventually he seems to make contact with Dr. DeLong himself and nearly wets himself talking to the company president. Still, he’s had enough practice in the last few minutes, talking his way up the chain of command, that he can now convey his position—and Body Works’ position—with a minimum of stammering. He holds the kaikki out to Felon.

“He wants to talk to... ”

Felon grabs the kaikki without waiting for the end of the sentence.

“Yeah?”

There’s silence for a moment.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

Pause.

“I have no idea if Body Works is part of the investigation, not yet. Once I get the information I need I’ll be in a position to tell you that.” Pause. “Whatever buddy,” he says distractedly, then hands the kaikki back to Forget, who listens for a moment, then ends the call.

“I’ve been instructed to give you the information you need, but without giving up our right to require a warrant at a later stage of the investigation if we deem it necessary.” He’s clearly reciting something he’s been told, and now he looks flinchy, like Felon might hit him.

“I know. He told me that already. And you already gave me the information I need, so now let’s talk to North Cali Mining. You got the number?”

“Of course.”

Forget hits another speed-dial.

“Hi June? This is Brian at Body Work. Oh fine, how are you? Listen, I’m doing some paperwork and I need to confirm an order that you placed a few days ago, three shells, male?”

Forget’s face turns a sickly color and his voice gets louder.

“What do you mean? I talked to you myself.”

He looks at us desperately, not sure what’s going to happen. Makes a face that tries to convey that he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He looks like he means it.

“But... but I don’t understand. Okay. Bye.”

A new expression has replaced fear on his face: confusion.

“She says... ”

“Yeah, we heard. So what’s up? You forget that it was some other company maybe?”

Maybe his fear has run out or maybe he’s just sick of being teased about his name, but Brian isn’t having any of it.

“I know what happened. I didn’t forget anything,” he says adamantly. “I know her voice. Besides, I’ve got the paperwork. She’s lying. Get a warrant for their records.”

“Show me.”

This time he doesn’t even make a pretence of calling downtown, just starts keying in commands at his computer. In a moment the order is on the holo.

“Just like a hundred before it. Nothing special. Nothing suspicious. All the codes are right or the order wouldn’t have gone through and no one has NC Mining’s codes except NC Mining.”

“Send one to my kaikki and print me out a hard copy.”

Forget does as he’s told and several sheets of paper issue from his printer. I pick them up and see the date, the number of shells, the specs. Everything fits with what he’s told us.

“Thanks.”

Felon turns to go. Forget scrambles after us as we start back down the hall at Felon’s fast cop walk.

“I didn’t do anything wrong. Everything was by the regs. You can see it right there on the order.”

“I can read Brian. Thanks for your time.”

I have an urge to reassure him, but I know appearances can be deceiving. It’s possible that Brian’s lying after all. I hate Felon for leaning on him, but it got us the information we need and you can never tell if letting him stew for a while will allow him to ‘remember’ something he hasn’t told us yet.

“Call us if you remember anything else,” Felon says, reading my thoughts, as we open the front doors.

“I will, don’t worry about... ”

The doors close behind us and cut off his words. We head back to our bikes, both of us looking over the order in my hands.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“Think? The little shit’s too scared to lie. He took the order just like he said.”

“Yeah.”

“You want to come to North Cali Mining with me?”

I go, but it rolls out into nothing. North Cali places its orders from its downtown office, so we return to civilization and pay a visit. After a little discussion they cooperate for the same reason that Body Work did, but they have no record of placing an order. June, the tech Forget spoke with, denies she called him and is every bit as convincing as he was.

Outside their building, in the late afternoon shadows of the surrounding office towers, we pause. Down here, in the valleys between the commercial spires, the light is already fading, but higher up the towers gleam, the deep orange sun reflecting from glass, tinting the world a heavy gold.

“Curious fucken’ business,” Felon says, almost to himself.

“You said it.”

“Gat, someone hacked the order in. You involved in any cases that could draw that kind of talent?”

“Nothing I can think of,” I lie. “I’ll go over our files when I get back to the office.”

Felon studies me for a moment, clearly not believing me, then lets it go. It’s my life on the line after all. As for the dead civilians, they don’t even register with him.

“Well,” he says heartily “I got other shitpiles to tend to, amigo.”

“Sorry to take up your time.”

“Nothing to be sorry for. Forces por la vida as they say. You’d do the same for me.”

The Forces for life—once you’re in, the tradition says, you never really leave, and your old comrades are your brothers and sisters forever. Would I really do the same for him? Not a chance, but I’m not going to say so.

“I’ll let you know if anything pans out.”

“You do that buddy,” he says, revving his engine and putting his helmet on, visor still up. “I’d love to hear the punch line to this one.”

He grins, drops the visor, and then he’s gone. I’m left by myself, wondering just what the punch line will turn out to be. I call Carmen.

“Hey Gat,” she says. Her voice has that hazy tone it gets when she’s deep into something.

“Hey Carm. Any news?”

“This shit’s deep.”

I take that for a ‘no’.

“Listen Carm, can you take a moment to side-track for me?”

“You’re the boss.”

I tell her the story about the shells, the mystery order.

“See if you can rascal up anything on how the order got hacked, okay? Get Alan to help. I know he trawls all kinds of comm. Maybe between the two of you, you can come up with something.”

“Okay Gat, I’m all over it.”

“Great. TJ getting in your way?”

“Only when he brushes up against me. Accidentally.”

“Tell him I said to knock it off.”

“Aw, Gat. It’s okay. He’s harmless.” I think I hear a slight warmth in her tone as she says it. Maybe one day TJ’s dreams will come true after all.

“Okay, you know best. Call me when you’ve done a run-through on the North Cali order, okay? I’m going to head home for a bit.”

“No problem.”

I end the call and get on my bike, aiming it home, wondering what the hell I’ve gotten myself into. At first I thought security for Max would be a piece of cake, and a rich one too. Then they told us about the intrusion. Then we found the data burn. Then the attack on me.  Now this. The bad guys are starting to look a lot more sophisticated than I expected, and it pisses me off.

At home, I’ve barely showered and changed when Carmen calls.

“Disturb you?”

“Naw. I was just going to eat.”

“Alan went into sim and did some digging, most likely the kind we don’t want to know about in any detail.”

“And the prize goes to?”

“The prize goes to the bad guys. Nothing at all at North Cali Mining—there never was a call from there, it came from somewhere else. Featherweight trace of data burn at Body Work. Somebody hacked the order in, successfully imitated the voice of June the tech, who Brian Forget has spoken to eight zillion times, used NC Mining’s ultra-encrypted codes, and ordered the three shells. Whoever got instantiated I’m betting it wasn’t miners.”

Obviously there’s a voice synth in that mess somewhere, but beyond that I can’t begin to guess what’s going on.

“Thanks Carmen. You going to get some rest?”

“Oh hell, Gat, I got another twelve hours in me before I’ll need a nap.”

“Don’t go burning out on me, Carm. It’s not like you’re replaceable.”

“You can say that again. Don’t worry about me, though. I know my limits.”

“Okay, keep me posted as always.”

“You bet. You get some rest.”

“Yeah, I know my limits too, I just hit them sooner than you do.”

She laughs and hangs up, ever the macho chick.

Despite what I said to Carmen I stay up late into the night. I run through everything in my mind over and over, but I can’t see a point of entry into the case. My thoughts turn in a closed loop, going over the same material repeatedly, like a malfunctioning sim. When that happens in sim it’s unnerving, unsettling at some deep level of consciousness where the human ur-mind knows that events ought not to simply recycle themselves so often, so exactly. At the same time, with a sim glitch there’s a giddy kind of joy that comes with the unreality of it.

Thinking about the case I have the same feeling of unease that a sim breakdown causes, but with none of the fun. In my mind’s eye the case forms a wall made up of the things I know and the many mysterious things I don’t, or that I simply don’t understand. Somewhere in that wall there has to be a crack, something that will let me inside the mystery so I can blow it open, but I can’t find it no matter how hard I try. I have a plan of last resort, but I reject it.

I think some more, then return to it. Reject it again.

I go to sleep rejecting it, but I have a feeling I’ll wake up with no other option.

Thirteen: Spiders and Tics

Morning brings no new clues or revelations. I have two suspects and almost no hard information. There is Porsche, who might or might not have had her wiring tampered with so as to allow her to plot against her grandfather, using her allowance to hire the talent she needed. Then there are the Suerte, whose possible motive is bizarre, but makes its own loopy sense. They have the skill to carry out the intrusion themselves, if not the data burn, and like Porsche they have enough money to hire any outside help they might need. I’m down to the plan of last resort after all.

In these circumstances—one or more suspects but no clear leads—I know that many of my fellow security specialists have, very much on the sly, gone to see the spider. They don’t like to admit it because it smacks too much of magic, of voodoo, but it happens.

I’ve never done it myself, but now it’s on my mind. The evidence points nowhere in particular and I could use a nudge in the right direction. From what I’ve heard, the spider’s oracular advice might do the trick. Admittedly, though, it’s produced mixed results in the past. You never know when she’s telling you the truth so that you will succeed, telling you the truth knowing that it will never help you, lying to you so that you will fail or, most perversely of all, lying to you because by deceiving you she is indirectly pointing you toward the thing you’re looking for. Hell, sometimes she says nothing at all. The spider is neither inherently good nor evil—those notions don’t seem to interest her—but she is powerful, there is no doubt about that.

No one knows where the spider came from, or even what she really is. Some people speculate that she’s a by-product of the Fall, the result of a military biotech op that went south with everything else, leaving the spider to roam loose in the chaos that followed the collapse of the Empire. Some spooky shaman types see her as a harbinger of returning old gods, come to eat people and speak in riddles in the last days of man’s dominion over the Earth. I have no point of view on her origins—I just hope she’s as useful as her reputation says she is.

The spider’s nest lies in the upper reaches of the Mega, L.A.’s largest shopping mall. The Mega’s roof is so high and inaccessible that she can live there, amongst the girders and steel plating, without most people even realizing that she’s there, high above their heads. Her lifespan is such that she has been there, tending her thousand eggs, for over a hundred years, and it’s quite possible that her spawn won’t have hatched yet a hundred years from now.

The Mega sits on several city blocks, just east of Union Station. This was not anyone’s first choice of location, in fact it was never under consideration at all in the initial stages of planning. The developers and city politicians had squabbled over candidate sites for almost a year before the eventual location dropped in their collective lap. An earthquake reduced everything in the area to rubble, twisted metal, and body parts. Suddenly there was a large downtown space, with no residents’ association because the residents were dead, and no local politician playing to the crowd. They didn’t even have to demolish the existing buildings, just bulldoze away the debris.

In a perfunctory gesture to those who died in the quake, a small memorial was erected at the site. Two weeks later they started excavating the Mega’s foundations. Anyway, that’s history now. The Mega has stood for almost a hundred and forty years and no one alive cares about how it got there. Before I died people used to complain that L.A. had no natural center, no equivalent of Times Square or the Eiffel Tower. The Mega may not have the fame of one or the beauty of the other, but for better or worse, here it stands.

Before heading to the Mega I call Jocelyn Favreau, a woman from my Forces unit who, aside from sharing my French-Canadian heritage, still owes me two serious favors. Jocelyn’s hitch ran out a year before mine, before Tijuana. Since she wasn’t there she doesn’t know exactly how grateful she should be, but she knows she avoided something terrible.  While she was still enlisted, though, we served in the Boulder Recon together.

After leaving the service, Jocelyn opened a Forces surplus store on La Mirada in Santa Monica. There was no shortage of vets who needed ready cash, and as often as not they badly wanted to be rid of anything that carried a memory of their time in the military. Everything they’d owned, coveted, even clung to for dear life over their years in uniform was now freighted with such heavy memories that, as desperately as they’d once relied upon it, they now wanted to be rid of it. They sold their uniforms, ration kits, boots, and helmets; medals and citations and flack jackets; climbing gear and backpacks and sleeping bags; Ka-Bar knives, kriss knives, switchblades—everything. At the same time there was an equally abundant supply of civilians, especially teenagers and gang members, who were all too happy to play army in someone else’s cast-off uniform—especially if it had a bullet hole or two to give it some extra cachet.

On my way there, I can’t help thinking about Boulder.  Unlike Tijuana, Boulder is just a set of memories, not a legion of ghosts.  Some of the memories aren’t very pleasant, but they never materialize in the sunlight and walk down the street beside me, mouthing prayers.

The Jennies landed at a makeshift LZ in Central Park so we could avoid buildings and other structures that could impede our landing or provide cover for local forces.  Boulder wasn’t a Grey Zone exactly, it still had a patchwork of services and utilities that approximated a functioning infrastructure, but it had no central authority, instead operating as a cluster of loose, overlapping communities of interest.  This meant that its military was essentially a guerilla volunteer force that was more likely to take strategic shots at us from a variety of well-covered positions than to confront us head-on.  And sure enough, there was no one at all at the LZ, just an eerily quiet park with the leaves rustling as the trees swayed slightly in the breeze.

Our ostensible target was a tech research facility near Spruce and 17th Streets, about a kilometer away, where we were hoping to mine some pre-Fall documentation on biomimetic design.  The underlying mission was to assess Boulder’s defences, it being one of the few reserves of surviving technology in the area.

We had two squads in total and each one would operate independently, taking different routes to the target, to give us some redundancy.  My squad moved cautiously north along 9th street, while Jocelyn’s headed east along Boulder Canyon Drive.  Within moments they were out of my sight, taking cover as they advanced.

Our advance wasn’t direct.  It was clear the Boulder forces knew we were coming because blockades built from junked cars or overturned tractor trailers occasionally blocked our path and forced us to alter course, reversing and taking alternate routes, sometimes getting disoriented.  It was somewhere around 9th and Pearl Street, where we turned east, that I noticed Old Tibet.

It had clearly once been a boutique dealing in imported art, but had suffered from whatever frictions existed amongst the local social groups.  Along with a few of the neighboring stores, it had its front window smashed and an array of artifacts, including a number of Buddha statues, had been scattered across the street, most of them broken.  As I passed a large, intact ivory-colored Buddha, I stooped briefly and straightened it up, standing it properly on its base.  It made no strategic sense, but it seemed the right thing to do.  I hadn’t started my dharma practice at that point, and in any event my practice is a secular one, so I don’t revere the Buddha in a religious way, but even back then it seemed wrong to leave the guy lying there, disrespected in that way.  It was a brief, unremarkable moment, quickly forgotten in the ensuing firefight, but later it stuck with me.

We emerged from the far end of the Pearl Street Mall into the midst of a confrontation.  Clearly the block between 15th and 16th streets was where the Boulder guerillas had decided to take their stand.  Their forces were concentrated behind barricades down the street.  They also had snipers in elevated positions, but our forces had taken them out—all but one.  He was on the second storey of a building, above a funky-looking establishment whose sign announced it as the Mountain Sun Pub & Brewery, and he had Jocelyn pinned behind an industrial trash bin, swearing in Joual and unable to get to her squad or to find a route that would take her out of the line of fire.

I drew a bead on one of the windows the sniper had used and waited for any sign of movement, every heightened sense in my military shell cranked up to its maximum.  I remained utterly still for almost six minutes before I saw a barely discernable grey-on-grey silhouette of a figure—something an unenhanced human could never have perceived—and I fired without hesitation.  I hit the shooter and he must have bounced off something behind him, because he fell forward out the window, like people do in the sims but never do in real life, and Jocelyn managed to scramble back to the rest of her squad. We never did make the target—you had to admire the tenacity of the local fighters—but that was the first favor I did Jocelyn.

The second one was simpler, but from her point of view almost as important.  Much later I accidentally came across Jocelyn and her lover, Marina, in each others’ arms. No one gives a damn about homosexuality in the Forces, but Marina was Jocelyn’s superior officer, and that made any relationship strictly forbidden. It could have compromised the judgment of either of them in a critical situation if the other one was threatened. I kept my mouth shut and that was favor number two.

I meet Jocelyn at her store, a large space full of the Force’s detritus. She’s a wiry woman, muscular in a hard, thin sort of way. She stands behind the counter, and I take in her slim physique—I can’t help it, I love the tautness of her. Her Forces T is more revealing than it is concealing, showing off her tight torso. It’s not the first time I’ve wished she was straight.

The musty smell of the place reminds me of the Forces, of supply rooms and staging areas. Of human sweat and the smell of fear. Stacked everywhere are the tools we used, the shelters we huddled under, the clothes we wore. The smell alone is enough to bring on a slew of memories, but I force them back, back, back into the basement of my mind. I can’t let them interfere right now. Still, very distantly, I hear howls, screams, the whine of turbos and the thrum of chopper blades. I hear bullets loosed on their targets, the muffled thump of distant mortar fire, the close-up concussion of mines, and prayers spoken in quick, desperate Spanish.

Along one wall is a display of guns and other weapons, most of them not surplus at all, simply the guns that Californians are legally entitled to own, brand new from the manufacturers. The Forces, after all, require that you return your arms upon being decommissioned. Still, there’s plenty to choose from. There are handguns of all calibers, rifles, shotguns, flechette launchers, and some old model machine guns.

Jocelyn’s giving instructions to one of her employees. When she turns toward me she smiles, though it has an edge of both sadness and wariness, as smiles so often do between vets.

“Gat,” she says quietly. Now the memories are intruding on my senses despite my efforts to keep them out. Her voice has taken on the sketchy, staticky sound of a comm link gone bad. She seems to me to be at a distance, even though she’s standing right in front of me. The smell of the place isn’t helping. Dust. Fungus. Dirt. Sweat.

“Jocelyn,” I answer. I see the muscles in her arms and shoulders tense a little. Her belly too. We remind each other of too much bad stuff for this to be comfortable, no matter how much we like one another. We have had to jettison each other just as we have our old uniforms and equipment. She’s not unhappy to see me exactly, but she can’t be completely happy about it either.

I wonder how I sound to her, what memories she has carefully hidden away that are coming up on her now. Maybe the harrowing adrenal rush that came with being trapped by that sniper, mixed inextricably with the crisp, clean air of Boulder.  Maybe the brilliant flowers in the flowerpots in front of the Mountain Sun, their fragrance carried to her on the breeze while she swears in the language of her ancestors and wonders if she’ll die today.

“Tell me what you need,” she says, knowing I haven’t come by to say hello. I hear her as though she’s talking from a ‘copter, her transmission full of cracks and snaps and pops.

What few people know is that Jocelyn has some supplies that weren’t so much cast off as stolen. I use up one of my favors in return for the illicit merchandise I need. The two of us speak in riddles and codes to defeat any listening devices, a delicate linguistic minuet. Evasion and dissembling are talents the Forces instill whether they mean to or not. Now I’m down to one favor. With everything that’s happening, I wonder if I’ll get the chance to cash it in.

On the way downtown the dreams harass me again. They blend with the scenery as I ride my cycle, fire erupting where there is no fire, people dying in the streets where, in fact, they walk along calmly, going about their business. One set of images is overlayed on top of the other, and the hell of Tijuana imposes itself on Los Angeles, blurring reality, making it hard to follow the traffic lights. I hear the thump thump thump of chopper blades as I idle my bike at a red light, but there’s nothing in the sky. I look, believe me—it’s that real. I smell the distinctive odor of Angelfire tearing up human flesh, but around me there’s nothing but calm. I realize I’m sweating despite the bit of cool wind that makes its way under my faceplate. When I arrive at the Mega, I park, a little shaky. I stay on the bike for a full five minutes, focusing on my breath, working toward that point where my dharma practice takes me—where the bad things are still there, but I can function nonetheless—and eventually I succeed, more or less. I dismount and take the small box Jocelyn gave me from my saddle-bag and make my way toward the mall.

Entering the Mega through the east doors, I’m immediately hit with a blast of mall air. There is something comforting in that air—a combination of artificial coolness and familiar food smells that brings back memories of my youth. We had nothing like the Mega when I was a kid, but we had malls and the air in them was just like this. I fall in with the gait of the crowd, letting its tides pull me along for a while. There is an omnipresent murmur of voices that never stops, like the sound of a human ocean. Every few meters it’s interrupted by blasts of music emitted by stores trying to lure customers inside. The songs they play are all popular and all current—there is no such thing as history in a mall.

Above me I can see the concentric rings of the upper floors, with teenagers leaning against the railings in groups. Teenagers are everywhere, in fact—running, making out, dancing, play-fighting, scoping the merchandise, scarfing the food, talking in groups or on kaikkis, yelling at one another, and sitting around on the floor as though they were in their own living rooms which, in a sense, is truer here than in their homes. Also above me are a multitude of holos playing out ads for clothes, concerts, banks, sims, computers, cars, and everything else you can think of. Over two-thousand years ago Jesus threw the money-changers out of the temple—eventually they washed up here.

Discreet prostitutes circulate. There are males, females, and some of indeterminate gender. They come in a variety of ages, races, and sizes. They never approach you directly the way they would on the street, though. There are security guards here and closed circuit cameras. Instead they let their clothes speak for them: revealing, garish, and suggestive, usually accented with heavy make-up. Apart from the clothes they wear sultry expressions, make lots of eye contact, and allow their hands to casually touch strategic parts of their own bodies, drawing attention to their lips, breasts, groins, and asses. If you make a connection with one of them there are always the disused upper floors where you can consummate the deal.

The Mega has a total of sixteen floors. Four are below ground, twelve above, but the top five were abandoned long ago. It turned out that, no matter what inducements you used, people would only disperse to a certain extent within the mall once they entered, and retailers near the top found themselves lacking customers. To make matters worse, despite an expensive air circulation system, the large enclosed space makes for congested air near the roof. Body heat, human breath, smog from outside, and ambient moisture collect more quickly than the circulators can disperse it, making the atmosphere swampy. Most of the time the roof is actually lost in mist when you look up from the lower floors, as though there was no roof at all.

Some upper-floor stores went out of business, while others were lucky enough to relocate lower down. As the population of the top floors thinned, the Mega’s management eventually decided to seal off the top five floors entirely. No elevators, escalators, or stairs will take you there. The only people who go there are maintenance crews and city inspectors, ensuring that the upper structure doesn’t deteriorate.

At least that’s the way it was supposed to work, but in L.A. a plan like that was doomed. Homeless people, sensing an opportunity, broke or picked locks, cut holes in fencing, or had their kids squeeze between the bars of the barriers and then open them from the other side. Teenagers looking for a place to hang out, screw, or get high, did the same. The prostitutes claimed retail spaces and installed their own locks, dressing up the former stores and turning them into lavish sex suites. Some people brought up small generators, while others brought battery-packs, so that they could have light, electric fans, sims, music, and whatever else suited them. Everyone who uses the area is careful to ensure that it still looks abandoned, but a rich life goes on up there. Lovers meet, children are born, people die. At first Mega security tried rousting the new residents, but they were outnumbered and usually came away bloodied. No one wanted to bring in the P.D. Doing that would invite a massacre and a lot of bad publicity. Eventually a tacit agreement was reached—the squatters wouldn’t bother the shoppers, and management would look the other way.

Despite this, only the lowest three of the ‘abandoned’ floors get any significant traffic, while the top two are generally avoided. The reason for that has nothing to do with security, or even with air quality. It’s pure spider. There are rumors about her, legends built up over time about her appetites. Occasionally people disappear inexplicably, sometimes two or three in a day, and as far as the squatters are concerned the spider is the reason for it. There is seriously bad juju up in the top floor where the spider lives, and everyone wants at least one floor of insulation between them and her.

Once you’re into the squatter’s territory, getting to the spider is easy. All the security barriers, functional or not, are below you at the seventh above-ground floor. The only thing stopping anyone from going beyond the tenth floor is fear, though for the most part that works well enough. I begin climbing a service ladder that even the homeless refuse to use.

The real obstacle to seeing the spider is getting past the Tics, one of the city’s many youth gangs. Their handle is an abbreviation of the word Frantic, their drug of choice. Like Dogware, it was a military creation that eventually leaked, although Frantic leaked a lot further than Cloud City, all the way down to the street. Designed for combat, it increases reaction time, coordination, balance, and sheer bodily speed and power, all without impairing perception or judgment. There are no intoxicating side-effects.

What Jocelyn had given me in exchange for that killshot in Boulder was a box containing fifty cannules of Forces-grade Frantic. The entire supply was supposed to have been incinerated when hard-wired shells began to be produced in significant numbers that could produce the same results, but Jocelyn is no fool. You never know what’s going to come in handy, so she incinerated some innocuous crap instead and stashed the Frantic for a rainy day. I doubt I’ve even dented her supply, but the amount I’ve got is worth a fortune on the street, especially considering its purity.

Frantic makes the Tics formidable fighters. What makes them beautiful fighters is a technique they call Tarantella. A blend of dance gestures and fighting moves, Tarantella turns a street brawl into a ballet. Centuries ago slaves in Brazil developed a similar discipline, called capoeira. They pretended it was a form of dance, since slaves weren’t allowed to learn combat skills, and it can look like dance, but it’s also a deadly martial art. Tarantella is like that, mixing Karate and Tae Kwon Do with salsa, classical ballet, gymnastics, and a myriad of other influences. With the chemical enhancement of Frantic, though, it is far more dangerous and difficult than any ordinary martial art, requiring abilities which no unenhanced capoeirista or kung fu practitioner could possibly possess.

Apart from Tarantella, the Tics’ other distinguishing feature is their dress. Many gangs dress in a paramilitary style, using colored patches, crests, berets, and bandanas to distinguish one rank from another or one gang from the next. The Tics don’t look like that at all. They are colorful peacocks straight out of a Sunday Best hallucination. Their outfits are bright and garish, combining elaborate make-up, tattoos, and clothing styles pillaged from a variety of cultures and historical periods, or dredged up from the depths of their imaginations. Unlike most gangs, each member’s look is entirely individual, and is a source of particular, preening pride. Watching these human rainbows fight, using elaborate dance moves at the incredible speeds that only chemicals can provide, is a spectacular visual display that should not be missed—unless you’re their intended victim.

In that respect—their violence—they are not only similar to the city’s other gangs, they are preeminent: they are the most utterly ruthless. Their loyalties lie exclusively with each other, and no hint of sympathy exists for anyone outside the group. You are unlikely to see a Hungry Ghost fall in love, or hesitate to kill, but it has happened once or twice. I have never heard of a Shadowboy showing emotion for anyone outside his gang, but I know that one of them died when he swerved his motorcycle to avoid hitting a dog. Maybe it was an automatic reaction on his part, or maybe he actually felt something for the dog, but if it had been a Tic I wouldn’t have to ask myself that question because the Tic would simply not have swerved. Their reactions are under the most complete control I’ve ever seen—even beyond what I witnessed in the Forces—and their feelings exist only for other Tics.

Maybe that’s what attracted them to the spider in the first place. Like them it is impressive, intelligent, and utterly amoral. It is perhaps the only thing I’ve ever heard of that can move faster than they do and kill more efficiently. Despite its great size—at least ten meters in length—I’ve been told that when it kills it moves with almost invisible speed and with an accuracy that can be measured in millimeters. For this, I think, the Tics respect it, even revere it. The spider is what they wish they were, perhaps what they aspire to evolve into one day. In any event, for the time being they pay her their respects, feed her, and help guard and keep her eggs.

Because of my Forces wiring, my reaction times and physical strength are a match for any Tic—the wiring I have is exactly what made Frantic obsolete. But the question of whether I could win a fight with one Tic is irrelevant since there is no such thing as one Tic—they always move in groups. As I reach the summit of the ladder and step onto a small steel platform, I am faced with a pair of them. Without question there are more out there in the murky darkness, all around me most likely, ready to move in should a fight start. Not that the first two would need help, the others would simply want a piece of the action.

It’s the female Tic who speaks first.

“Hm,” she says. It’s the sound of someone assessing something. “Food.”

She means me. She says it with an almost robotic lack of emotion that seems out of synch with her colorful appearance, although I think I can sense a kind of inhuman amusement slithering beneath her apparent absence of emotion. She is wearing pink tights, and below that, pink bootlets that resemble ballet slippers. Her slim, muscular torso is bare except for its elaborate tattoos: a mass of overlapping and intertwining flamingos that entirely covers her belly and breasts and even rises up her neck, though it stops somewhere on the underside of her chin. Her face is unadorned except for a scar above her right eye that bisects her eyebrow. Her hair is dyed blonde and spiked.

“I didn’t come here to be food,” I say “I came with a gift.”

The male behind the flamingo-woman turns to her and speaks with mock seriousness.

“Oh, gifts. Well, then friends.”

He cackles a laugh. As he laughs I can see that his teeth have been replaced with mock-feline implants. His upper and lower jaws have been augmented as well, forming something like a snout, and his entire head is covered in what appears to be very soft, blue-black fur.

He wears an outfit that shows off his very impressive physique—muscular but very lithe. His light jacket is the turquoise of Caribbean seas, but in a lamé that shimmers and glistens. Underneath it he wears a darker blue T-shirt, skin-tight. His pants are silver, and are made of the same glistening material as his jacket. On anyone else his outfit might look laughable, but I find nothing funny about him. He is wearing the same ballet slippers as his companion, but I don’t doubt that he has claw implants where his nails ought to be, both in his feet and hands. I can picture him licking my blood from his paws and purring, which is just what he wants me to see.

“Frantic,” I say, and reach inside my pouch to remove the padded shipping container. “Military grade.”

A third Tic drops with a quiet plop from the girders above us, but remains in the shadows so that I can’t see what it looks like. I just see its head rise, nose aloft, as it sniffs the air.

“True. Frantic,” the distant figure says, showing off his or her olfactory augmentation. It’s impossible to tell from the silhouette or the voice whether it’s a male or a female.

“I know it’s truth,” says the cat-man quietly “he’s still breathing, hey? Smell it fine from here.”

“Whatta you want?” flamingo asks.

“I want to talk to the spider.”

She laughs at this and lets herself fall backward. She drops off the girder she’s been standing on, and at the last moment catches it with one hand, swinging underneath it, then arcs up on the other side, and lands on its neighbor. It looks effortless.

“You don’t talk to spider. You talk to us, we talk to spider, then we talk to you.”

It sounds as though I’m making progress, although with the Tics you can never be sure.

“How do I know you won’t just take the drugs and kill me?”

She smiles. In contrast to her tattoos and her athletics it’s a very human smile, almost cheerful.

“You don’t.” She lets me think on that for a moment, then shrugs as though to dispel the thought. “Hey,” she says “you know anyone else come here?”

“Yeah.”

“And they brought presents like you?”

“Yeah, they did.”

“And we kill them?”

“Nope.”

She spreads her arms in the age-old gesture that says voilà—there is your answer. She snatches up the box of Frantic and tosses it behind her, where someone catches it.

“Come with,” she says, gesturing for me to follow her, and with those words the Tics drop the pretense that the area is abandoned. Music suddenly surges to life—an electronic version of Handel’s Messiah I think, but remixed and set to an electronic beat—and lights erupt up and down the length of the area. We are in a lattice of steel beams, struts, wires, and occasional platforms. In that moment every inch is illuminated by a blaze of multicolored spotlights, showing the many—so very many—Tics who were there and whom I didn’t even realize were present.

Both the flamingo-girl and the cat-man fall backward into perfect layovers. Their bodies are so limber as to seem unreal, like something from a sim. There is nothing in the pallid Olympics to compare with this. They allow their torsos to fall backward, then land on their hands and pivot on the axis of their pelvises, drawing their legs over them. It takes a long time to explain the motion, but no time at all for them to execute it. What it amounts to is a backwards cartwheel, executed as quickly and naturally as walking. As they start to move, the other Tics, now revealed by the lights, move with them en masse, like an army advancing through dance.

There are some who spring from girder to girder like squirrels. Some execute an entrancing combination of salsa and ballet, while others are more given to jazz moves. Some seem like orangutans in the fluid way they swing and lope and swing again, while still others use each other as platforms from which to spring and vault, like circus tumblers. One pair runs through a Tarantella routine, sparring with each other with punches, kicks, and throws. Every one of them moves independently, but each keeps time to the music nonetheless. All of this goes on as they move further into their territory with nothing beneath them but girders ten centimeters wide. One misstep would mean a deadly fall to the mall basement far below, but being Tics they make no mistakes. With a preternatural ease they cascade across their natural habitat with utter confidence, executing every move to perfection. I follow them easily enough—my Forces shell gives me perfect balance—but without years of practice I could never move the way they do.

Each one is outfitted in a unique style, although they all wear thin-soled, slipper-like boots for optimum traction. All in all it’s a profoundly majestic display—both impressive and beautiful. I don’t know if the show is for my benefit. Maybe this is how they always move, even when strangers aren’t around, but in any event I’m definitely put on my guard. With their speed, agility, power, balance, coordination, and numbers there is no way I can do anything to save myself if they decide to attack.

Hell, to be honest there is no way an entire Forces squad could take them. They may lack the sophisticated weaponry, the satellite systems, the floating mines, and the Angelfire, but they move like air, like nothing. Like the Dogs they can appear behind you before you know they have disappeared from in front of you. Fuck, they’re dancers—not some street assholes or even foreign soldiers but dancers—and the Forces are not used to that, wouldn’t know what to do with it. They can move around you, approach you from angles you would ever expect, and kill from positions that you thought were secure.

That is the nature of the Tics. On the streets below, innumerable gangs compete with each other. The P.D. are, in many ways, just the biggest, best-armed gang of all. The gangs vie for turf and money, for weapons and sex and drugs, for status and glory, for bragging rights and reputation. Many are called, but few are chosen, and the truth is that the Tics are the few, period. Everyone else is a distant number two at best.

As we approach one corner of the mall, the already heavy air is permeated by a stale smell that intrudes on the cheerful atmosphere created by the Tics’ bright costumes, the colored lights, and the beautiful music. Soon the staleness is joined by something more rank. The nearer we get to the corner, the more overpowering the odor becomes, but there’s still no other sign of the spider. Then I realize that the two walls I thought formed a corner don’t actually meet. Instead they form the entrance to an offshoot of the Tics’ playground. As we turn into it I finally come face to face with what I’ve been seeking—and a whole lot more.

The spider’s retreat is an alcove about forty meters square, but with a ceiling almost twice that height. I can tell from the pattern worn into the floor that some large machinery once stood here, now made unnecessary by the absence of commerce.  Her nest fills the entire back half of it, an intricate, tightly woven web of grey silk within which lie hundreds upon hundreds of eggs. Normal spiders’ eggs are millimeters across, but these are the size of grapefruit. Clinging to this mass of silk and fecundity is the spider herself. She is easily ten meters long in the body, and her legs extend that by another three meters in either direction. Her black body looks like taught rubber, while her legs are barred with alternate stripes of black and ash grey. When we arrive she is working on the construction of her nest—repairing it, tending it—and shows no sign of noticing our approach. Someone lowers the volume of the music until it is nothing but a subtle rhythm, sensed rather than heard.

What captures my attention the most is not the spider or the core of her nest, but the loose array of silk that spreads outward from the nest itself, trailing along the floor like lichen and hanging from the walls and ceiling like Spanish moss. Caught in it are shopping bags, shoes, clothing, purses, and emaciated, mummified bodies. A cocoon shape on the wall to my right suddenly twitches, then is still again.

I’m not sure what the Tics get from the spider—perhaps she shares her wisdom with them, or maybe she simply seems to them so awesome that the only right thing to do is to serve her—but it’s clear what she gets from them. Presumably she prefers not to leave her alcove and venture down into the populated areas of the mall, risking discovery. Despite her considerable skills and power, she could probably be killed with enough troops and weaponry and, worse, her nest could be eradicated. Instead it’s the Tics who harvest for her. Maybe they lure victims here with charm, entice them with Frantic, or compel them with force. Maybe they do all three. Whatever means they use, they bring back human fruit for her and she sucks it dry. I have seen some evil things, perhaps even more evil than this, but it’s enough to make even me pause. The Tics come to a stop around me with a soft patter of footfalls, hands and feet slapping girders as they land.

“You asked for spider,” the flamingo girl says, obviously sensing and enjoying my discomfort. It takes me a moment to find my voice.

“Yes, I asked for spider.”

She walks leisurely toward the nest and I follow her a few paces behind.

“So? Questions.”

Flamingo looks at me as if she’s sure I won’t speak. Just then the spider moves. She is so fast, so lithe, and so quiet, I can barely believe it’s happened, but there she is. Not a meter from us, suspended in the outreaching silk, stationed beside a small gold T-shirt with a butterfly logo on the front, the size and style a teenage girl would wear. From there she could easily pluck me up and add me to her collection.

“I’m looking for someone,” I say, hoping to go a little at a time. Flamingo makes a series of chittering noises in the spider’s direction. The spider does nothing, but flamingo turns back toward me, waiting for me to go on.

“A man has hired me to protect him. Someone recently tried to kill him. Later they tried to kill me.”

Flamingo translates again. Then the spider chitters for the first time and I realize what a tame, human imitation flamingo’s spider-speak has been. The spider’s own speech is utterly alien. Flamingo turns to me with the spider’s question.

“Who hired you?”

I’m reluctant to give out the name of my client.  It’s simply not done, and that applies doubly when it’s someone famous, but I don’t see that I have much choice. “His name is Max Prince.”

This produces no visible reaction at all amongst the Tics, but the spider stretches one long foreleg forward and slowly touches me on the cheek. I have to fight not to shrink back from her. Or lash out at her. Either reaction, I think, would be fatal. The spider chitters again and the sound is worse now, the vibration of it transmitted down her leg to my cheek.

“You suspect someone. Who is it?” flamingo translates.

“I have two suspects at the moment. One is his granddaughter, Porsche, who’s his heir. The other is the Suerte. They may want to steal his luck.”

This time the Tics respond. There is a buzz of whispered comment at the mention of the Suerte, and I think I see flamingo’s eyes open a little wider. It’s the only thing that has made any impression on them so far. The spider, however, does nothing.

I stand, waiting, for what seems an interminable length of time, the spider’s foreleg resting on my cheek throughout. finally, when I’m almost ready to risk breaking protocol to ask what’s happening, the spider chitters again. Flamingo, who has been watching me intently, swings her head around to catch what is being said. When the spider finishes, flamingo nods once. Then the spider retreats to her former position and resumes work on her nest. Flamingo’s gaze remains turned to her goddess.

“So,” I say prompting her “what did she say?”

Flamingo turns back to me and for a moment I see the lust of worship, even love, in her eyes, before she catches herself and adopts an expressionless façade. I think she sees that I noticed, though, because her voice is colder than before and her manner is more abrupt. I’ve embarrassed her.

“We leave now.”

She steps back the way we came, but I step in front of her. It may be suicide, but I’m worried that having caught her in a vulnerable moment of private emotion, filled with spider-love, has made her hate me. She may refuse to tell me what the spider said, or she may lie about it. Confrontation, aggression, seems like the only thing likely to throw her off-balance. She stops abruptly in front of me and the other Tics freeze. In her eyes I see the purest hatred, but killing a client is bad business, even for the Tics. They want the supply of Frantic to keep coming, after all, and it’s people like me who provide it.

“I paid. What did she say?” The question is quiet but firm and I make sure my body language doesn’t give a hint of retreat.

Flamingo considers her position for a moment and the rest of the Tics look to her for the signal as to how to react. Suddenly her posture softens and she even smiles slightly, as if at some private joke.

“She says ‘begin at the furthest point’.”

“Is that really what she said?” I ask, still without moving.

Now that she’s relaxed a little she answers without obvious malice.

“I never lie about spider.”

“Is what spider says true?” I ask her.

She just shrugs.

“No one knows, ever. True, not true… real, not real. No one knows.” As she says it a small spark of the loving gleam comes back into her eyes.

“Fine.”

I turn my back, which is a show of disdain for the Tic. It means I’m willing to be vulnerable in her presence, that I’m not afraid of her. I head back the way I came but the Tics don’t follow.

“Next time,” flamingo says.

I stop and turn to look at her. Even at a distance I can see she has that little smile back.

“Next time, food.” I consider reacting, then decide against it. The music suddenly roars back to life and accompanies me to the ladder, but the Tics remain where they are. I climb down, back into the world.

Fourteen: As Dead As God on Sunday

Having returned to the world of human beings, I go to the Mega’s second-level food court and order from a Greek stall. Sitting in a brightly colored plastic chair I bask in the sounds and smells of the mall, letting its familiarity drain away the memory of the Tics, the spider, the things caught in her web. Down here it’s hard to imagine that she’s even really up there. Everything is so normal.

At the table to my right four young men with mixed African and Hispanic features are playing some game that involves hand signals, like janken or shoushiling but more elaborate. They hide their hands behind their backs, then pull them out simultaneously to reveal previously hidden gestures, and one guy keeps score on a holo tablet he’s projecting from a wrist unit. At times they pull their hands out and then break out into loud laughter at some turn of events in the game.

At the table in front of me two high-school girls are talking loudly about the date one of them had last night, the description occasionally rising into squeals of disbelief or degenerating into fits of giggling. It seems the girl with the date, who has short blonde hair and deep brown eyes, finally bagged some big game—a boy she’s been after forever but who’s ignored her until now. I hear enough to learn that he broke up with his girlfriend and that seems to have turned the tide in blondie’s favor. Her friend cups her own breasts and squeezes them together in a lurid gesture and they burst into another round of hormonal giggles.

I finish my souvlaki and turn from the life around me to the business at hand. My best guess at what the spider meant is that I should begin with the suspect who is furthest away physically. This literal interpretation could be completely wrong, of course, but that’s how it is with the spider. She’s like the Oracle at Delphi or a Zen master in a koan. She dispenses wisdom in confusing, indirect ways, and those of us who consult her have to try to interpret her messages as best we can. There’s no way to know if you’re right or wrong—you just have to hope.

My most distant suspect, of course, is Vicente Suarez and the rest of the Suerte. The question is, how do I investigate him? It’s precisely because he claims to have the power of fate on his side that he’s a suspect in the first place. If his claim is false, then he’s not a viable suspect. If his claim is true then a covert investigation is doomed. His supernatural luck will feed me some misinformation, or get me killed, or simply put him beyond my reach. I think about it, sipping at an orange juice, but the more I think, the more it seems that there is really only one way to approach the problem and that’s directly.

What I need to do is sit down with Vicente Suarez and ask him: are you after Max Prince? Not only are all other plans likely to fail, but if he’s genuine then there’s no reason, really, that he shouldn’t tell me the truth. His famed suerte has kept him alive far beyond his natural lifespan. It’s protected him from the Mexican authorities and rival gangs. Why wouldn’t it protect him against me? If he tells me that the Suerte y Muerte tried to kill Max, what am I going to do, arrest him? Shoot him? Hell, I can’t even bring weapons with me to Mexico. Here my security license gives me certain privileges—there I’m just a tourist. And if I walk into a police station and repeat what he’s told me, why should he care? He’s killed, or his people have killed, hundreds or maybe thousands of Mexicans, many of them wealthy and influential. The police have been powerless to do anything about it, so why should they try to arrest him, maybe even risk their lives, for a washed up gringo like Max?

The thing is, if I’m going to talk to Suarez, I’m going to need help getting in to see him. It’s not like I can just look up his address the way I would with some citizen, go to Mexico City, and ring his doorbell. Trying to meet him without arranging it properly first is only likely to get me killed, if not by the Suerte then by one of the numerous other gangs in the city that prey on stupid foreigners who stray into the wrong neighborhoods. Fortunately, I know someone I think can help me. Unfortunately, she’s a member of one of L.A.’s most dangerous gangs. After the Tics, of course.

It’s too long ago for most people to remember now, but the collapse of the American Empire that happened during my stasis, the change that I woke up to, shook the world deeply at the time. Almost overnight power balances had shifted, borders had been erased or redrawn, and vacuums had appeared in leadership roles. It must have been a time of epidemic fear and, for those who were ruthless enough to exploit it, great opportunity.

One of the results of the collapse was an abrupt surge in the size and sophistication of street gangs. Sudden economic uncertainty made crime attractive. High levels of violence in the world’s cities, even in rural areas, made membership in a group a sensible option, for self-defense if nothing else. The temporary absence of any civil authority throughout the former Empire made forming a gang easier and made committing crimes less dangerous.

On top of that, the temporary dissolution of borders led to mass migration from the poorer areas of the world to the wealthier ones, but the new arrivals who hoped for a better life were unwelcome and often found the only solace and livelihood available to them was in the gangs. By the time national borders were re-imposed—although in some places they had been much altered—and a modicum of police-enforced order had returned, the nature of street gangs had been irreversibly altered. They had grown larger, but more importantly they had become better organized, better led, better armed, and more sure of themselves.

The gangs weren’t fighting with mere handguns any more. A multitude of civil wars prior to the collapse, and the plundering of military bases afterward, had put the best, newest weapons onto the black market and into their hands. Their ordnance often matched, and sometimes outdid, that of the police. Perhaps just as importantly, many of the gangs’ newest members had fought in those civil wars, and combat experience meant they not only had military ordnance, they knew how to use it strategically. Some of them had officer training and experience in leadership.

While the gangs continued to compete, they also communicated with one another, forming a web of interconnecting criminal organizations. In many ways they were like a mirror image of the nations of the world: sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing, but always connected. Just as the President of California could contact the Regent of New York City or the Prime Councilor of Mexico, one gang’s leader could always, if they chose, communicate with another’s. It was that line of communication that I needed to tap into.

For good or ill, working security in the private sector often means you make contact with unsavory clients. Wealthy lawyers and sim stars need security for their homes, but gangs also need it for their houses, bunkers, and warehouses. Sometimes they have an array of safe houses spread throughout the city. Other times everything is contained in one apartment block, owned and occupied solely by the gang’s members. You might not want to work for them, but to refuse a gang’s contract would be dangerously insulting. Besides, your ethics would put you out of business. There are only so many customers who can afford my rates, after all, and very few of them are good-hearted altruists, whether they’re technically criminals or not.

Working for a gang can be dangerous since it’s tempting for them to terminate your life along with your contract once the work is done, but there are usually ways to protect yourself if you’re careful. The main danger is that the gang must ask itself this question: why should you walk around with the secrets of their security system in your head? So you install what they want, but you leave a number of options as to how the system is to be configured and activated. Then you educate one of their members on how to select from those options, which you’ve set up in a user-friendly way. You walk away, they initialize the system according to their own preferences and codes, and after that you can’t get through their defenses any more than the next guy.

Beyond that precaution, there’s one rule: you never ever leave a back door when dealing with criminals. This is something that’s routinely done with less sophisticated clients. You program a loophole into the system which you can then exploit to burgle their home or office. If you don’t relish doing the dirty work yourself, you can sell the information to someone who will. Your clients will be outraged that the system failed, of course, but you patiently explain to them that the break-in happened because they didn’t opt for the upgrades you originally suggested and someone took advantage of the resulting weakness. You then install whatever high-end hardware they refused to buy the first time around, make a little more money, and this time leave no back door. After that their security works wonderfully and they respect you for having given good advice in the first place, even if they’d been too penny-wise to accept it. Sometimes this technique even leads to referrals, believe it or not.

Anyway, none of that is going to fly with the gangs. They may be sadistic thugs, but they’re not stupid, they’re not amateurs, and they are paranoid. Once you finish the installation and leave, another security firm is going to be hired to come in and vet the system for entry points, lack of parallel protections, and the like. If they find anything like that then there’s no point in even trying to run—you are as dead as God on Sunday. After the double checking is complete, the gangs scramble the configuration of the system a final time and everyone is locked out except members. Just the way it’s supposed to be.

I’ve worked for gangs a number of times, both installing and checking systems, and while I can’t claim to be on friendly terms with any of them there is one that owes me a favor. The Hungry Ghosts originated in Japan, but came to America during the period of collapse. Even at its height, the American Empire had never ingested Japan the way it did so many other nations. The Japanese were far too proud to put up with it and had the technological know-how for hard-core sabotage, so they didn’t have to allow it. Nonetheless, they didn’t want to alienate the Empire either, so someone dug up and repurposed some ancient terminology and a “co-prosperity sphere” was established, creating closer ties between the American Empire and the islands that had never really ceased being an empire of their own.

So, even without being absorbed into the American behemoth, ties between the U.S. and Japan became closer, tighter, and more binding. When the Empire fell, Japan entered a difficult period. In the last days, when it was becoming clear that the spreading chaos couldn’t be contained, there was an exodus of both legal and illegal immigrants from the Land of the Rising Sun. Amongst those who flew first class and entered through customs were government honchos, business leaders, and a scattering of highly-regarded writers and artists. Amongst those who bought, rented, or stole planes and boats and did an end-run around the official paperwork were some less savory folks.

Most criminals stayed behind. The ancient Yakuza network was too entrenched in Japanese culture for its members to consider leaving. The bosozoku—the speed tribe motorcycle gangs from whose members the Yakuza drew new recruits—remained as well. They lived in symbiosis with the Yakuza, so they weren’t going anywhere. Some of the younger, more modern gangs, however, were willing to consider relocation. A recent development in the Japanese underworld at the time was the all-girl gang. They dated and sometimes even married male gangsters, but they had moved far beyond the point of serving as mere appendages to the men. Several cells from two different girl gangs escaped to California, the Hisa-me and the Hungry Ghosts. It’s the Ghosts who can help me.

Once here, the Ghosts moved fast. There was an aggressive recruitment drive within the local Japanese community which, given the uncertain times, was very effective. Before long they were surpassing indigenous gangs in size and success. At first, other gangs made the mistake of underestimating them simply based on their sex. It was a mistake that no one got the chance to make twice.

Soon the Ghosts had enough business—drugs, prostitution, protection, and general mayhem—to be pulling down serious money. They bought a building on East Second Street in Little Tokyo and remodeled it the way they would have back home, combining old-world touches, like an abundance of fragrant wood, with urban features, like neon and modern art. Inside, shrines to their ancestors vied for space with pachinko machines and high-end holo systems. All that remained to finish their headquarters was a top-notch security system.

SafeT did the initial set-up, then Guarantee Guard did a vetting and pronounced the system secure. The only trouble was that SafeT and Guarantee Guard were both owned by AntiAccess LLP, though the Ghosts didn’t know that. As SafeT was busy installing the system, the Ghosts were already looking around for someone to check it. They retained Guarantee Guard, who promptly told SafeT they’d been hired. SafeT now knew they could leave a back door without any danger because their own corporate brother was going to be the one checking their work.

They underestimated the Ghosts, though, who later hired me to do a redundant, third check on the system. Finding the back door was just my job, of course, and wouldn’t have earned me a favor, just a fee, but here is the cool part. What I could show, using some advanced data-tracking techniques, was that Guarantee Guard’s techs had actually scanned the back door. In other words, I could prove that they knew about the hole in the system, but they’d falsified their results to pretend that they hadn’t found it. In practical terms this meant was that the Ghosts could actually take legal action against the two companies, getting back their fees and a substantial amount as a penalty.

You might think that a judge would balk at giving a large award of damages to a criminal gang. The Ghosts sued through their corporate holding company, which they used to run legal front businesses, but everyone knew who was really involved. The thing is, from the judge’s perspective that wasn’t the point. The point was that personal security companies had to be taught not to leave back doors because if they were doing it to a dangerous outfit like the Ghosts they were sure as hell doing it to the judge himself, and his judge buddies, and their bankers, and all their clubby friends. He made an example of the two firms for the benefit of the industry. The fact that the Ghosts got a wad of money was, to him, just a side effect. Later, of course, the Ghosts made an example of the firms in their own way—a lengthy, protracted, pitiliess procedure carried out in a disused factory building, with many dead and no prisoners.

Anyway, the Ghosts owed me one for that. They offered me a cash bonus, but I demurred, figuring that at some point I might need their help. They understood perfectly what I was up to, so when I show up this warm evening at the very building where the fiasco took place and press the buzzer at the gate, they are not surprised to see me on the monitor. The gate unlocks and swings open, closing again behind me. As I approach the front door I hear its lock click and it, too, swings open, allowing me into a front hall. I take off my boots and put on one of the sets of uwabaki slippers that have been placed there for visitors.

At that point an inner door opens and admits me to a large space which serves as their all-purpose hanging-out room. There is a holo on one side of the room where several members are online, reviewing news items about other L.A. gangs. From time to time they tag an item that seems important. Another member is in sim in the corner, showing no sign of life beyond REM and some residual twitches in her fingers.

The Ghosts all affect a look that combines leather and kawaii, a notion which roughly translates as “cuteness.” They look like characters from an anime sim come to life. Surgery has rendered them all attractive, in a little-girl kind of way, with their hair usually worn in braids or pig-tails. Some dye their hair blonde, or put in a blonde streak, others prefer their natural color, while still others opt for plastic-looking purple or green dye-jobs. Their outfits build on a black leather foundation, over which they accessorize with bangles, cartoon figurines hung from belt loops, stickers, and candy-like plastic necklaces. It's not unusual to see a Ghost with shit-kicker boots, her footwear fully armored and fitted with extensible blade attachments, but worn over frilly striped socks.

Anime styles have affected their entire aesthetic, including body modifications. They all have large eyes—some artificially rounded by surgery on the epicanthic fold, some natural-looking, and others surgically slanted and slitted to the point that they virtually parody the typical Asian form. Their mouths are uniformly small, although some pout more than others, and almost all have their breasts enhanced. Although each has an individual look, the one thing they share without exception is their elaborate tattoos, usually covering the entire torso and sometimes the entire body. The tats are based on ancient Yakuza customs, but the designs are updated for the Ghost’s tastes, so that traditional carp and geishas are blended with sim heroines and stylized science fiction weaponry.

I’m greeted by Machiko, a high-ranking member whom I met during our previous dealings. She’s changed her hair since I last saw her. Then it was pig-tails, now it’s a spiky mass of brilliant yellow points that look like you could cut yourself on them. Her clothes are a little different too –more leather and fewer of the girlish accessories. My guess is that she has risen in the ranks and has opted for a less kawaii, more commanding appearance. We bow, and she insists on bowing a little lower and a little longer than I do, giving me my due as a guest. Then the hostess pretence drops and she gives me a lop-sided grin.

“Gat-san. Long time no see.”

“Good to see you Machi. New tattoo?”

I indicate the left side of her neck with my finger, tracing the line of a serpent that didn’t live there last time we met.

“Good eye—for a gaijin.” The last part is added playfully.

“Thanks. It’s so striking even an amateur like me couldn’t help but notice it.”

She laughs.

“You’re flattering me Gat. You must want something.” Another Ghost appears behind her and stands there, silently looking me over while we talk. She can’t be more than fifteen, and her outfit leans toward the kittenish end of the kawaii spectrum, but I’ve learned not to judge the Ghosts by their appearances. They are ranked third or fourth in L.A. in terms of their status, and along with other factors, status comes from violence, the more extreme the better. After the Tics come the Crips and the Bloods, a double threat since they signed a truce years ago and effectively became a single unit. Then it’s either the Shadowboys or the Ghosts, depending on how you calculate things. If the Tics are more than a match for my old Forces buddies, with the Ghosts it would probably be a dead heat. That’s despite the fact that each of us would weigh almost twice as much as each of them.

“I’ve come to ask a favor.”

Now Machiko eyes me a little more coolly. The other girl drifts slowly into the background, acknowledging that junior members aren’t privy to this kind of discussion.

“You’re owed one,” she says cautiously. “Something appropriate to the excellent work you did for us.”

This is not meant to compliment me, although it’s couched in those terms. Her real message is in that one word: appropriate. She is cautioning me that I will get what I’m due and no more.

“I need a meeting with Vicente Suarez.”

A small smile plays across her face, but it’s not a kind one.

“I’m not sure I’d be doing you any favors.”

“I’m a big boy. I can decide if it’s a favor or not.”

She eyes me for a moment, then seems to shrug a little, as though nothing could matter less to her.

“Well, it’s awkward, but not impossible. I can arrange it.”

“Thank you,” I say plainly. “When will I hear from you?”

“Go home. I’ll arrange safe passage. In the meantime, you get some rest. You’ll need it. I’ll call you in the morning.”

Safe passage is what kings and queens used to grant to negotiators and messengers as they traveled through enemy territory. A letter of safe passage said that even though the person carrying it would normally be considered an enemy, they should be left alone to get on with their business because it served the interests of both sides. Before telecommunications it was the only way that warring factions could talk, working out compromises or settling on terms of surrender. Now that scooping is common and telecommunication is correspondingly insecure, both the Enclaves and the gangs have resurrected its use in dealing with delicate matters.

“Thank you Machiko. Am I in your debt now?”

I might as well ask. If she thinks she has done me a bigger favor than I did for her she’ll collect on it one day. I had better know in advance.

“Hard to say. Let’s call it even. We part without debts or enmity.”

And without friendship, but she hardly needs to add that. The Ghosts make friends only with each other, and with the lovers they take from other gangs.

We both bow, and I am led back to the door. In the vestibule I retrieve my boots and place the uwabaki back where I found them. I leave, but Machiko calls to me from the front door.

“Gat.”

I turn and see her silhouette in the doorway.

“The Suerte never give something without taking something, Gat. Not ever.”

“Thanks Machi.”

She doesn’t answer, doesn’t smile, doesn’t speak again, just withdraws into her home. The open door casts a yellow rectangle of light. As she closes it, the shape turns oblong, then thins, and then disappears. I take her advice and go home to get some rest.

Fifteen: Airportlandia

LAX is bigger now than it was when I was growing up, but it has the same feeling that it had then of being a neverland -- something that exists in the interstices between actual places.  It isn’t part of L.A., or even California.  It’s really an outpost of Airportlandia, like JFK International or Berlin-Tegel.  It’s part of a land that lies somewhere between departures and arrivals.

I watch security go through my shoulder bag.  I have no luggage to check.  When they’re done, I board, then wait while the plane taxis and eventually abandons the ground entirely.

I've always loved flying—the sense of adventure, and that wonderful feeling of dislocation from the events and people you deal with every day.  I love living for a while in Airportlandia.

When first I mustered out of the Forces there was a period at the very beginning when my nightmares never really stopped, awake or asleep.

In the waking world people on fire walked past me on the street, nightmare creatures hiding behind human faces spoke in tongues on the subway, and my own body refused to obey me, first energized to the point of trembling, then slow and torpid, then so sensitive to the touch that I couldn’t stand the friction of my own clothes.

And while I slept?  I watched couples who were already dead make love one last messy time before they would let themselves rest forever, I heard a riot of noise erupt from a burning stable full of horses caught in their stalls, I saw a family of corpses sitting in a darkened living room in front of a television that played garish colored light across their faces.

Every ten or twenty days I’d dose myself with Nightshade and drop like a rock, then remain unconscious for three or four days.  If I dreamed during those times, I never remembered it.

Then I discovered that the one time the nightmares stopped was when I was on a plane and I fell in love with flying all over again.  At 10,000 metres above the Earth, no ghost could reach me.  Up here, the world was no longer complicated—it was reduced to this plane, these five-hundred people, and the clouds outside the window.  Bad things might wait for me back home, might even lie ahead when I landed, but they weren’t right here, right now, beside me on the plane.  It was the first peace I’d had in ages.

I started flying a lot.  I didn’t need a job yet—I’d rarely spent much of my pay while I was in the Forces, so I had a sizeable nest egg.  I could coast for a year or two if I needed to, just flying from one place to another.  I didn’t care where I went, making stops in Moscow, London, Sao Paulo.  I became addicted to the relief of being in the sky.

One day, I decided to challenge myself and booked a ticket to Mexico.  Not Tijuana—that would have been a bridge too far—but Mexico City, just like the flight I’m on now.  I happened to be seated next to David Halldórsson.

I didn’t know him then, but I noticed him right away, mostly because amidst the pre-flight jostling and scurrying he was uniquely composed.  We weren’t off the ground yet, but he already seemed to project that sense of calm that I could only find once I was up in the clouds.  At the same time, he was clearly wearing a military shell, so he had to be Forces, which wasn’t a common path to serenity.  I introduced myself and asked him what pharmaceuticals he could recommend.

“Oh, I never use them these days,” he said lightly.  “I take medicine for physical stuff, antibiotics or whatever, but I don’t mess around with anything psychoactive anymore.”

I didn’t think much of it until he started to get comfortable, taking off his jacket, balling it up, and using it to give himself some lumbar support.  He sat back and crossed his arms in front of him and that was when I saw his tattoos.  One of them said “Tijuana” in bright red ink, with a stylized death’s head to the left, a skeletal version of the Mexican eagle to the right, and dates that I knew all too well underneath.

I waited while we slowly made our way to cruising altitude, covertly stealing glances at the tattoo as though it might disappear, but there it was every time.

The flight settled into the groove that every flight eventually gets.  You’ve reached altitude, people have gotten comfortable and started watching holos or reading, everyone settled in for the trip.  At that point I was working up the courage to ask David about the tattoo.  He was resting with his eyes closed, his face placid.

Then, without opening his eyes, he said “You were in Tijiuana.”

I thought I’d been discreet, but he had Forces training and a Forces shell just like I did, and the preternatural perceptiveness that went with them.

“Yeah, I was.”

Now he opened his eyes.

“Let me guess.  The Brace worked and the Erase didn’t.  You turned into a monster and you weren’t supposed to remember, but you do.”

“Exactly, but I guess you’d know.”

He nodded, looking serious.

“Oh yeah.  And you can’t forget.”

“Doesn’t matter what I take or how hard I try.”

He smiled at that.

“Sorry,” he said, “I wasn’t clear.  What I meant was: you musn’t forget.”

“Are you kidding me?  Because I’d seriously do just about anything to forget.”

He shook his head.

“It won’t work.  What might help is a suggestion or two on how to engage constructively with it.  If you want.”

I actually laughed, something I hadn’t done in a while.

“Constructively?  Buddy, are you sure you don’t use pharmaceuticals?”

“My name’s David, not Buddy” he said, grinning at me, as if we were just two normal people talking about normal things.  “It was the most terrible time in your life, right?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

He leaned over a little.

“Ask yourself this: do you really think it’s the worst time in anybody’s life ever?  Do you really believe that there’s never, ever, in the whole world, been more cruelty and more sadism and more suffering than in Tijuana?”

I hadn’t looked at it in that context before.

“No, there’s probably been worse somewhere, sometime.”

David was emphatic.

“A thousand times, over and over, all through history, and those people found a way to live with it—at least some of them did.  And the ones who did, taught others.”

I thought I caught a whiff of where this was going.

“Look, I’m not big on religion.”

“Religion?  Pshhh.” He laughed. “Look, I have a dharma practice, that’s a meditation practice that’s rooted in Buddhism, but the way I come at it is entirely secular.”  He waved a hand in the air, as if he was warding something off.  “I’m totally agnostic on the question of anything mystical—I just put all that stuff to one side.  This guy Siddhartha Gautama, who some people call Buddha, I think he was a thoughtful man who came up with a very sensible way of examining yourself and your relationship with the rest of the world.  But he did it at a time when the normal way to talk about things like that was in spiritual terms, religious terms.”

“So you just casually gut Buddhism of all its religious content?”

“No, if people want that, that’s fine, but it’s not essential.  In the Kalama Sutta, Gautama warns against believing in dogmas, and that includes dogmas based on what he said.  Some traditional Buddhists will disagree with me, but the way I read it he says that you should assess any proposition, any system of thought, in light of your own experience.  Then you decide whether to accept it or not.  That just makes sense.”

I was still skeptical, but looking at David, who’d actually been where I’d been, and who seemed to have recovered so much more of his sanity than I had, I thought I’d better keep an open mind.  We talked about it for the remainder of the trip.

David was staying with his girlfriend, who lived in Mexico City.  She met us at the airport and they offered to give me a ride to my hotel, but I didn’t want to intrude so I sent them on their way and took a cab to the San Marino Suites, where I had a reservation.

It was night by the time I got there.  After checking in, I crossed the road and bought a bottle of tequila in the corner store and some street food at a stall.  On impulse I went back to the store and bought a couple of packs of Faro cigarettes and a lighter.  I don’t usually smoke, but it was going to be that kind of night.

My room was on the third floor and didn’t have a balcony.  I opened the large sliding window and pushed the dining table over next to it, pulling a chair after me.  I sat down, put my feet on the table, leaned back, and uncapped the tequila.  After a swig or two I lit a Faro, looking out at the city, listening to the traffic and the people walking by below.

I sat and drank and thought about what David had said.  Practicing meditation wasn't going to come naturally for me, no matter how secular it was supposed to be.  At the same time, I really couldn’t continue the way I was.  I decided to try it for a month, once a day.  I toasted Siddhartha Gautama and spent the next few hours killing the bottle.

The next day, David arrived at my door around noon to take me to meet some other vets who were part of an informal group of godless meditators that met on Saturdays.  After some orange juice from room service we set out on a meandering route heading southwest, crossing La Reforma and passing the Ángel de la Independencia, winding our way to the Cantina Nuevo León.  That section of the city has always been heavily policed to protect the staff at the banks and embassies along the Reforma, so unlike in some neighbourhoods we could relax and move pretty freely.

“This place has been a meeting spot for expats for over two hundred years,” David said when we arrived, pulling the door open.  “Even before there was an Empire.  Most of them come in the evening, the journalists and so on, but we usually show up earlier.”

I followed him in.  The coolness was refreshing.  Waiters dressed formally in black pants and vests, with crisp white shirts and black bow ties, served drinks and food to two groups of customers at tables draped in peach-colored tablecloths.

The first group consisted of three well-dressed men speaking in quick, colloquial Spanish, drinking beer while keeping an eye on a soccer game on the holo.  Definitely not our people.

The second was a motley bunch mostly dressed in guayabera shirts and Forces fatigue pants.  They were circulating a large bottle of tequila, doing shots.

“Aren’t you guys supposed to give up intoxicants?” I asked David as we approached.

“Ideally, sure.”  He shrugged.  “But we’re not monks, gringo.”

“Gringo?  Since when are you not a gringo?”

“Amigos!” David called to the others, who looked up.

There was a chorus of hellos.

“Hey David,” said a young guy with wispy facial hair and a hesitant smile.

“Hey Miller, you okay?”  David put his hand on Miller’s head, the way you might do with a nephew.

“I’m all right,” he said, nodding, but he looked a little delicate to me.

“So guys, my friend Gat here just asked me why I’m not a gringo anymore.”

At this the entire table erupted in cheers and applause.  Miller stood up and shook David’s hand, then quickly sat down again as several of the others got to their feet and wrapped David in big bear hugs.

“I’m a little lost,” I said to no one in particular.

Miller spoke up, blushing for some reason.

“It means that Nieve said yes,” he said.  “They’re getting married.”

“That’s right gringo,” David said, finishing with the hugs and turning my way.  “You’re going home alone, my friend.  I’m staying right here.”

A blonde woman in dark military shades sidled up to him playfully.

“Too late to change your mind, Halldórsson?” she asked.

“Keep your hands to yourself French,” he said, grinning.  “Your boyfriend will have my guts for garters.”

A well-dressed Mexican guy who had remained sitting at the table grinned and made a gun of his forefinger, miming a killshot.

We all sat down and began an afternoon of serious drinking.

I don’t remember everything we talked about.  I do remember that people opened up more as they got drunker.

Hutch, a Black guy who’d served in the Texas forces, had been honorably discharged after five years of service, but he’d alienated his family with his foul moods and waking nightmares before fleeing across the border, as though maybe his demons couldn’t follow him. They did, but he also found some people like himself and slowly started to pull himself together.

Veronica had been in the Cali forces.  She hadn’t been in Tijuana, but she’d helped put down the San Diego uprising, as I had.  After admitting that much, though, she refused to say anything more about it.  Now she was permanent here:  Mexican boyfriend, passable Spanish, forged identity documents. She was never going back.

Miller, the blushing guy, was also from Cali, and he had been in Tijuana.   He talked about it a little, in his quiet way, detailing atrocities on a par with anything I’d seen, most of which he’d been part of.  He blushed about this, too, as though slaughtering people had been bad manners.  I could tell that underneath the surface he knew exactly what he’d done—the meaning and magnitude of each thing—but his time in the Forces had scrambled his outward reactions.

We stayed until late that night and others came and went, but I drank too much to remember their names and most of what we talked about.  Eventually David and I stumbled into a cab and went to Nieve’s, where I passed out on the sofa.

I was tempted to stay in Mexico—I might have made a place for myself in that makeshift family, that sangha—but I couldn’t do it.  I had a goal and I couldn’t reach it living there.

The thing I needed most in life was to avoid dying again for as long as I could, preferably forever.  For that I needed money, and the money was in Cali.  And as it turned out I had already been given the one indispensible thing that David and his crew could offer me anyway: a mechanism for grounding myself, for getting some control over my nightmares.  Not completely, but enough to be able to execute the rest of my plan.

That was three years ago.  As my plane approaches Mexico City, I think about finding David and the others, but I’m not sure I want to.  He was exactly the right person to meet at that moment in my life, but the moment has passed and it seems better to leave things the way they are.  Besides, I have an appointment to keep and no real idea where it will lead me.

Sixteen: Things Are Measured Differently Here

The Mexico International Airport lies to the east of Mexico City proper but within the Distrito Federal, in an area where cheap land prices allowed the developers to maximize their bottom line. Bright and sparkling clean, it is avidly policed by guards in khaki whose primary mandate is to ensure that no tourist is harassed, accosted, or even approached by a Mexican, unless it is one of the legion of licensed porters and other aides. Everyone is either a tourist or in a uniform.

The airport is surrounded by a cocoon of luxury hotels and beyond that by razor wire. The towers rise high into a perfect blue sky, each one painted adobe white, the only color permitted by the Independent Airport Authority. There’s no beach since Mexico City is landlocked, but everywhere you look in this village of hotels the impossible turquoise of the tropical ocean is reproduced in swimming pools that glitter in the sunshine. Here there is no crime, no begging, no trouble. It is here that conventions and international meetings are often held, business men and women relaxing in the ample, air-conditioned boardrooms.

If you want to enter the city itself, you can rent a car, but you will more likely take a taxi or one of the reliable, timely shuttle buses. In any event, your vehicle will leave by the only route available: an elevated highway that leads directly to a similar cluster of hotels downtown, with no off-ramps along the way. Ostensibly the reason for a raised highway is to allow tourists to travel quickly into the heart of the city without being bothered by traffic. In reality it has a second goal, which is to prevent any non-Mexican from seeing the slums that form a ring outside the cluster of airport hotels. Beyond the airport grounds the only electricity is pirated and there is no running water. The sewer system is unreliable and regularly floods into the streets. The streets themselves are mostly unpaved, alternately baked hard in the sun and turned to muck by the rain.

Vicente Suarez’s headquarters, the home of the Suerte, is in an area called Paraíso Perdido—the lost paradise, and it’s located in these slums. Originally the name had applied to a government-planned community that was built to house a large population of squatters who were forcibly removed from dangerous, earthquake-damaged buildings downtown, ostensibly for their own protection. The overblown poetry of the title was supposed to suggest Shangri-La, or Eden, or some such thing. It was to be a place of refuge where the poor could at last find peace.

The grand plan foundered for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the government’s real intention had simply been to vacate valuable downtown land upon which the poor were inconveniently situated. The model community was deliberately placed in the area just outside the airport, already a slum. The community was built cheaply and, once built, was abandoned to its own devices. There was no follow-up, no funding for maintenance, no employment for the residents, nothing. The buildings soon deteriorated and the slum reasserted itself, growing up through the cracked pavement like an unkillable weed.

Soon the area was as poor and crime-ridden as the surrounding neighborhoods. Those with a literary bent took to calling it not just Paraíso Perdido, but El Paraíso Perdido. Adding that one small “el” turns it into the Spanish title of “Paradise Lost,” Milton’s classic tale of Lucifer’s fall from heaven into hell. It was an appropriate bit of black humor that took hold, but was eventually abbreviated. Now almost everyone simply calls it El Paraíso. The obvious irony of referring to this bleak area as “the paradise” wore off a long time ago and now El Paraíso is simply a name, nothing more.

Even though my destination is less than three kilometers from the airport, I can’t get there directly. I take a shuttle bus from the hotel along the obligatory path to the downtown cluster of hotels. Once off the bus, I wander away from the hotels and into the streets. A boy of ten or eleven is doing a fire-eating act, much to the delight of some gringos, who throw money into his hat. There are stalls selling sim decks and bootleg recordings, underwear, folksy blankets and pottery, roast corn, T-shirts, and a thousand other things. The prices are cheap and so is the quality. As I get farther from the hotel, there are prostitutes, mostly young, some vaguely pretty, some just forlorn. All of them smile and try to talk to me—a lone gringo is potentially a big score. I smile and pretend not to understand what they’re talking about. One girl lifts up her shirt and flashes her breasts at me to make sure I get the message, but I move on anyway.

Once away from the hotel I find a cab and climb in. I take the headpiece for my kaikki from my pocket, unfold it, and slip it on, fitting the earpiece into my right ear and adjusting the mic so it’s an inch or so in front of my mouth. I activate the translation program and direct the driver to begin backtracking toward the area of the airport but not to the airport itself.

He looks confused, but driving a cab is a decent job and it won’t do to offend foreign passengers by questioning their orders. The car leaves the patch of downtown hotels and enters the real Mexico City. It is colorful and, at first, relatively prosperous. As we drive in the direction of El Paraíso, however, the income of the residents drops precipitously, as do the quality of the road and the state of the buildings. Finally my driver can’t stay quiet any longer.

“Are you quite sure this is the direction you wish to go sir? The D.F.—Mexico City, I mean—is confusing, even for those of us who grew up here. Perhaps you intended… ”

He begins to construct excuses so that I can change my destination without losing face.

“This is just fine, we’re going the right way,” I tell him, looking out at a woman in the street who is fetching water from a rain barrel. After filling her pot she closes the barrel’s lid and padlocks it. I turn back to the driver. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Emilio sir,” he says, evidently hesitant to add his last name in case I intend to complain to his boss.

“Emilio, I’m going to the El Paraíso, you understand?”

He doesn’t nod or say ‘yes,’ but from the widening of his eyes in the rearview mirror I can tell he understands perfectly well.

“Now, I wouldn’t ask you to drive me all the way there. I know it’s not safe. I know you don’t want to go there, and I know you don’t want to have to tell your boss that you dropped off some foolish gringo in there, am I right?”

“I would rather not sir, no.”

“Fine. What I’d like you to do is to take me about another two kilometers. From there I’ll walk. The only thing I want from you after that is directions, okay? Can you do that?”

“Of course,” he says. He still looks apprehensive, but somewhat relieved, as though he doesn’t have to worry about himself any more but can’t help wondering what’s going to happen to me.

For a while we drive in silence. Emilio watches the odometer the whole way. Eventually he draws to a careful stop.

“This is two kilometers sir.”

We’re surrounded by a neighborhood of closely-packed, low-rise apartments, most with rickety balconies. Clothes flap on innumerable clotheslines, and children play games of tag. There are chickens, some in pens and some loose, and below the balconies raggedy stray dogs dig in the dirt and play-fight with one another.

I tell Emilio the address I’m looking for, which Machiko gave me this morning. I suppose it’s well known, because on hearing it go he loses all civility and all worry about his job. He leaps from the cab and pulls my door open.

“Out senõr. Get out of my cab now.”

I climb out. The odor of the neighborhood is upon me immediately: animal dung, sweat, vegetables cooking, sewage, wood smoke, laundry.

“I only want directions.”

“I know nothing about such a place,” he says, crossing himself.

“So why are you crossing yourself? If you know nothing about it, it might be a monastery, or an orphanage.”

“You know it isn’t.”

“Yes, and so do you. Now all I want is directions.”

“No senõr. I will not. If you belong in such a place you will find it yourself. You don’t belong in my cab, that is the truth.”

With that he slams my door, gets back in, slams his own door behind him, and disappears in a cloud of dust and exhaust. As soon as the cab leaves, the local children surround me, begging in Spanish for money. One of the older girls, still a teenager, tries to nuzzle up against me. I gently move her to arm’s length and hold her there. I drop a handful of change in the dirt to divert the other children, then lead the girl by the arm to a spot a few meters down the road. She misunderstands me and begins leading me toward one of the buildings, but I stop her.

“No, no sex.”

She looks confused. Maybe it’s just that she was certain I wanted sex. What else has any gringo ever wanted from her? Or maybe, given where she lives, she’s never heard a machine translation before. The combination of my natural voice, speaking in English, with the mechanical overlay of Spanish, sounds strange even to my ears, and I’m used to it.

“What do you want?”

Her voice in the original Spanish is melodious, but suspicious. The English translation in my ear is flat and emotionless, but functional. I’ve used the kaikki for translation enough times and in enough languages that I’m used to listening to both voices at once and can get a fairly accurate impression, not only of the words being spoken, but of the speaker’s intonation and mood. It’s a habit I formed early so it’s hard to avoid doing it, even when I want to, as I often did in Tijuana. There—I know from my dreams and my piecemeal memories—I would have done anything to avoid hearing the emotional content of what people were saying: cursing, begging, imploring, despairing. I shake my head to clear it of the memory. Taking out a ten-peso bill, I show it to her.

“I need you to lead me to an address. I’ll give you ten pesos now, fifty more when we get there.”

Sixty pesos is no doubt more than she’s ever had at one time before, several months’ earnings at least, even though it’s only about twenty dollars at today’s exchange rates. I again recite the address Machiko gave me. I feel like shit because the moment I’ve said it the girl turns pale, but I’m holding out the ten peso note and there are fifty pesos more on the line. It will convince her, against her better judgment, to take me where I want to go. I loathe using her poverty against her this way, but it’s the only way to get the job done. After a moment she gives an abrupt nod and snatches the bill from my hand. She turns and begins walking and I trot to catch up with her.

As we walk, the neighborhood around us seems to deteriorate before my eyes. I thought it looked poor and run down where we started, but what do I know? I’m from Cali, and things are measured differently here. Poverty has a deeper, harsher bottom than it does in L.A. The clothes on the people, children and adult alike, become more ragged. Their faces look prematurely old and empty of emotion. The smell gets worse and the sun ripens it. The heat is so intense it threatens to press me into the earth and bury me there.

In one area three adjacent buildings have partially collapsed in an earthquake and run together into a pile of brick, mortar, snapped wood beams, and bits of paper. It looks like a mudslide. Parts of the buildings remain standing and, amazingly, people live there. I can see them moving around, hear them talking and shouting. In some places they’ve hung blankets from clotheslines, or nailed them over the open spaces, to protect their privacy where the earthquake sucked away walls, leaving the interior rooms visible to the outside world. I can’t imagine how they keep their children from falling off the edges where the floors abruptly disappear. Maybe children do fall sometimes, I don’t know.

Mexico City has occasional earthquakes and in that way it resembles L.A. Los Angeles lies on top of five fault lines. Each one is named after a neighborhood, some of which are gone now: the Hollywood, the Santa Monica, the Newport-Inglewood, the MacArthur Park, and the Echo Park. I’ve seen buildings demolished like these are, people killed, cars crushed, stores burst open, their goods strewn into the street like the pulp of fruit that’s been stepped on. But in L.A. there’s money to rebuild and there’s the political will to restore what’s been destroyed. Maybe in some parts of Mexico City those things exist, but they aren’t in evidence here. From the weathering on the partially fallen buildings I can see that they have been sitting, skewed and partially gutted, for a few years at least.

As we move further into the slum, the music changes, too. When I got out of the cab I immediately noticed the racket of numerous stereos. The music came from shops, from homes, from cars. At that point the music was largely Latin pop: bouncy dance songs and smooth love ballads. Here, though, the music is aggressive, assaultive. Latin beats still form the foundation, but on top of that angry, crunching guitars spit and crackle while singers chant bitterly. Most of the lyrics are in Spanish, but some are Nahuatl, the ancient Aztec language that many people use even now. Still others use dialects that I can’t identify and that the kaikki can’t process. Sometimes the traditional rhythms are slowed to a crawl, the guitars are replaced with forlorn synthesizers, and the lyrics are sung quietly, desperately, creating tunes that are gothic and macabre.

A new feature that appears as we move deeper into El Paraíso is the soap-box preacher. I notice one, then another, and then suddenly they seem to be everywhere, screaming, hollering, bellowing, pronouncing, intoning, and every single one of them sweating like crazy. The babble of voices is too much for the kaikki to keep up with, though I can catch words and phrases here and there with the directional mic as I direct my gaze at one street-corner savior and then another. Some wave Bibles. Others have only tracts, or no written material at all, but invoke the names of ancient Aztec or Maya gods, describing their powers and their roles according to each religion or cult. There is Cihuacaotyl, the Aztec god whose howl signals the beginning of war; Kisin, the Mayan god of earthquakes and death; and Yum Kaax, the Mayan god of maize and bounty. The preachers—if that is the right word—spread their messages, using these symbols to threaten doom, promise food, seek converts. Some hold up texts I can’t identify, likely from cults that have flourished here as the poverty intensified over the centuries. One book’s cover shows a woman riding a ray of light. A poster portrays three old men arm in arm, staring out at me like fates. A leather-bound volume has nothing on its cover but a gold-embossed bull.

There are also stalls where women sell potions. Most likely such things are sold in the nicer neighborhoods as well, but indoors, in shops. Here the people’s mythology invades the streets. There are multi-colored bottles filled with colored liquid and stuffed with amulets and magical herbs, all intended to ward off the evil eye, attract a mate, get revenge, make money, or fulfill any of a thousand other dreams. I can understand why Suarez has located his cult here. Aside from growing up here, he has a natural population from which to draw converts. Like the poor anywhere they are made superstitious by their desperation, open to anything that might improve their lives or solve their problems.

As though the thought of Suarez has brought me closer to him, I realize that we're approaching our destination. The symbol of the Suerte is a red hand print, symbolizing the bloody mark left by the murderer who steals the luck of his victim. I notice one on a wall, then on a doorway, then several on the scarred hull of a wheel-less, abandoned car. Soon they are everywhere, sometimes random, sometimes arranged in patterns. I know from my research that the rules concerning their display are very strict: you do not make the mark unless you have committed the murder it stands for. Every handprint I see—and as we walk further there are hundreds upon hundreds of them, forests of them—represents a human being slaughtered for the sake of the killer’s own good fortune.

The girl leads me across a street and we pass through a no man’s land where an earthquake has completely leveled the buildings for a hundred meters or so. On the other side of this gap my guide comes to a stop. She looks back at me, points forward, then opens her hand. There’s no need to resort to a translation, obviously we’ve arrived. I hand her a fifty peso note then, as an afterthought, give her another. She looks at me and I see a bouquet of expressions cross her features: shock, gratitude, envy, cunning. She’s surprised by the bonus, she loves the money I’ve given her, she hates me for the ease with which I can hand it out, and she would like to get closer to that roll of fifty peso notes in my pocket. She takes my hand and squeezes it gently.

“If you come back this way... ” she says, forcing herself to be inviting. I can almost hear her thinking. Maybe if I see him again I can get him in bed, maybe the fifties will keep coming, maybe he will even want a girlfriend. I let her hand go.

“Maybe,” I say, intending no such thing but not able to bring myself to crush her hopes. She’s street-smart, though, and she knows a lie when she hears one. Angry, she spits at my feet and stamps back toward home.

I turn and look back at the other side of the open space cleared by the quake. There the will and the resources to rebuild do exist. Every building has been repaired, resurfaced, repainted. Perhaps it’s a mistake to say ‘every building,’ as there don’t seem to be individual buildings. Each house or apartment building has been joined to the next by a network of walls, bridges, and struts that have turned several blocks of real estate into a single, walled complex: a palace, a fortress, and a church all in one. Here there are no red hands—that's for the outside world. Here there is simply a grand, quiet, imposing structure. At first it seems to be unpopulated, until I realize that I’m being watched by sentries on several rooftops.

A moment later a door opens in a wall nearby and a figure emerges, a man with shoulder-length dark hair, dressed in jeans and a white, gauzy shirt. He approaches me purposefully, confidently, and as he gets closer I realize to my surprise that it’s Suarez. I had expected that some underling would take me to the great leader, like a foreign emissary being led to a king, but here is the man himself.

He has an angular, sculpted face—more indigenous than European—a bright smile, and cheerful brown eyes. When he’s within steps of me I realize he isn’t going to stop and suddenly he’s embracing me warmly. It lasts only a moment, then he holds me at arm’s length, like a father regarding a son he hasn’t seen in a long time.

“Gat Burroughs, welcome. Welcome to my home, to the home of the Suerte. You are a guest here and our hospitality is yours. I’m Vicente, as you must have guessed.”

“Your English is very good,” I say, removing the headpiece and stowing it back in my pocket. Machiko hadn’t told me Suarez spoke English—maybe she assumed I knew.

“I’ve had a long time to learn it,” he says, then laughs. It’s not a madman’s laugh, just a laugh. If anything it’s a little understated. This is a man who knows he has nothing to prove. He can afford to be good humored. I notice that he’s not tall, only about five foot seven or eight, but he doesn’t have to be. His presence is commanding enough without height.

“So I’ve heard,” I say, “although one never knows what to believe and what is just rumor.”

“That is so true,” he says, as though I’ve said something he’s often thought himself. “Come in, come in. We’ve been expecting you—Machiko contacted me of course. There’s food inside, a room for you if you need to rest.”

He leads the way back to the compound and we enter through the door from which he emerged.

Seventeen: El Paraíso Perdido

Inside the compound I find that the interconnected buildings form a labyrinth. My initial view is of a large empty courtyard. The walls of the buildings which border it are decorated with elaborate murals. The paintings are very well executed—very realistic and created with a truly imaginative, artistic touch—but their subject matter is a mixture of the ecstatic and the grotesque. Mural painting has a long and honorable tradition in Mexico, but here it has simultaneously been lifted to new heights of beauty in its execution and plunged into new depths of horror for its subject matter.

In one long, all-encompassing panel of images, beautiful young men and women hover over the injured and dying, the protoplasm of suerte flowing from victim to murderer. The faces of those who receive the gift have the expressions of saints transported to heaven. The faces of the dying wear the abysmal aspects of men and women suffering their first foretaste of hell.

This drama is repeated again and again, while in the background the slums of Mexico City are rendered in great detail: the wrecked buildings, the poverty… crime, celebration, sex… the hungry street dogs, beggars, and preachers. Street toughs lounge on corners smoking marijuana while ogling young women. Mothers huddle their infants close to their bodies, as though they could somehow shield their offspring from the dangers around them with nothing but their arms.

The background is, I realize, not merely a setting, but an essential part of the work. It is only against the backdrop of poverty that the murders in the foreground can be seen in their proper context: as the desperate measures resorted to by a lucky few to escape the terrible, anonymous fate of the many. The Suerte are drawn from this ghetto, and while they might be ruthless, their primary reason for doing what they do is the same desperation that causes some people to rob or kidnap. The others do it for money while the Suerte do it to steal their victims’ good fortune, but the monsters they’re running from are the same: poverty, hopelessness, and fear.

Suarez leads me from the courtyard through narrow, winding alleys amongst the buildings, and the murals follow us, seemingly unending, their portrayal of both the city outside and the triumph of the Suerte over their victims repeating endlessly. I notice, too, that each figure, no matter how minor, is clearly an individual. Each face, whether of the Suerte, their victims, or the general population, is characteristic and unmistakable. I suspect that they are, in fact, modeled on real people, perhaps on real events. My suspicion turns to certainty when I recognize the face of the girl who led me here. In the painting she is looking idly out a window, her shoulders bare, as a man dresses—or perhaps undresses, I can’t tell which—in the room behind her.

“You are admiring our murals,” Suarez says. “Or perhaps admiring is not quite the right word.”

“I’m impressed by them.”

He stops and runs his fingers over the face of a dying woman.

“Every person you see here is real, every event happened, every death is a real death, and every transport of suerte from the dying to the living is genuine.” He looks at me. “You find it disconcerting, I think.”

“Yes, I do,” I answer honestly.

“You’ve seen death before. You served in Tijuana.”

“How did you know that?”

I’ve been careful to wear long sleeves while in Mexico, despite the heat, to cover up my tattoos. Suarez smiles lightly.

“Lucky guess.” He pauses a beat, then laughs. “I’m joking. Did you think I let you into my home without researching your background a little?”

“I served there, but I don’t remember much. What I do remember makes me sick, to be honest.”

“The taboo against death, yes. What you have to realize is that death, to me and to everyone in this compound, is a constant presence. It is something as close as our own skin, as intimate as our lovers, and at times as hated as our own faults. To us, death is ordinary, part of the world. You Californians are no strangers to death—you deal it out easily enough—but you don’t like to see its face. You try to forget it, to banish it from your thoughts, but death won’t be banished, you know. That’s why you remember some of what happened at Tijuana, despite the Brace and Erase.”

“You know about Brace and Erase?”

“Sure,” he shrugs, as though being aware of California’s military secrets was commonplace to him. “The thing is that you think it protects you, when really it only weakens you. If you’re going to deal in death, you need to accept it, understand it.” He pauses and looks at the murals around us. “Let me tell you something—look at the background figures. Those are the poor people of Mexico City, the people of our slums, but they could be the poor anywhere. Do you think the poor aren’t familiar with death? Here and in places like this throughout the world we have cholera, murder, monkeypox, malaria, sometimes the bubonic plague. We have starvation and suicide. We are steeped in death up to our eyeballs and down to our bones. You Californians, Texans, New Yorkers, even wealthy Mexicans, have hospitals where your people go to die. We don’t. A poor man dies in his bedroom, with the whole family gathered around. Or he dies in the street, with everyone watching. Women die in childbirth, in robberies, in rapes. Nothing is private.”

He runs his hands along the length of a wall, taking in all the deaths portrayed there.

“For the poor there are no big white hospital walls” he spits these words out “between us and death. Nothing hides it or cleans its face before we look at it. For us, death is everywhere, always. When you can’t see it, you can still smell it on the air.  You’re shocked by what you see here,” he spreads out his arms, taking in the paintings, “but no new convert is ever shocked. They come from out there, just beyond those walls, and they’re used to death. What they notice,” he raises a finger to point, “is that there are some figures here who are not dying. There are some people who are experiencing great joy, whose lives are made better.”

“And that’s why you have converts.”

He shrugs.

“Don’t you know where you’re standing Mr. Burroughs? This is the edge of the world. Anything beyond this—anything worse, more dangerous, crazier—is a Gray Zone, a black hole. Everything is pressing these people toward the edge, then further, until they fall. The only way not to fall is to climb over others.” He pauses for a moment. “Come on, we’re almost at my house.”

I follow him further down the alley until it opens into another courtyard. As before, the space is surrounded by walls covered in the same type of mural that we’ve seen along the way. Here a group of thirty or so Suerte wearing the traditional gi of the martial artist are gathered around the walls, while in the center a young man and woman fight, using moves that are a blend of Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Judo, Capoeira, and other arts. Most impressive is that I recognize stances and techniques from Tarantella. To pilfer moves from the Tics is audacious. Still, I don’t understand why they need to master any martial art.

“What is this?”

“Training,” Suarez says simply.

“Training? Why do you need to train? I thought your luck was supposed to take care of you. Why should your people know how to fight?”

Suarez shakes his head, looking amused.

“One never knows what to believe and what is just rumor,” he says, quoting my own words back at me. “You see, you have been listening to California propaganda. The Suerte steal luck from others, preying on the weak he intones, making his voice sound like a sim newscaster. The truth is, it’s not enough to steal luck, you must know how to court it, how to seek it out, how to let it find you. We take good fortune from others, that’s true, but much of the art of luck is learning how to make it yourself, to create it from thin air. You must learn how to read a situation, how to take advantage of it, how to position yourself to benefit from it. That is what they are learning. The combat is incidental, it’s merely an exercise. They are learning how to be in the right place at the right time, how to take an adverse moment and turn it around and make it advantageous instead, how to capitalize on the mistakes of an enemy.”

I watch the couple in the center of the group fight for a moment, their bare feet kicking up puffs of dry dust from the ground. It’s the most genuine sparring I’ve seen since the Forces. Their punches are not pulled, their kicks land hard and make deep thumping sounds when they hit. Both participants are sweating, both are struggling, both are concentrating, but both are smiling. They are enjoying themselves, enjoying the learning process, and perhaps enjoying the violence too, it’s hard to tell.

There’s something unusual about the fight, though at first I can’t put my finger on it. Then I notice that, even though it looks superficially like any fight, it isn’t. Blows that should land, and that should be crippling or even fatal, are averted or deflected, or simply fail to have the effect they ought to. Sometimes they connect, but far less often than they should, and with far more meager results than I would have expected. I realize that this is exactly what Suarez has described. It’s not just a battle of physical skills, but of strategic ones, and maybe, just maybe, of one combatant’s suerte against another’s. I start to wonder if it’s true, if it’s their good fortune, amassed through murder upon murder, trained and honed under Suarez’s tutelage, that allows them to dodge blows they shouldn’t be able to dodge, or shake off ones that ought to break their bones. Suarez watches with me for a moment, then starts walking again.

“Well,” he says over his shoulder, “you didn’t come here to see this.”

I hesitate a moment, fascinated by the fight, then move to follow him through another alley. Partway down the lane he opens a door and enters, leaving it open for me to follow him. I do, shutting the door behind me.

As my eyes adjust to the inside light, I see that it’s a computer facility. Twenty or so Suerte are at work at holo terminals, some apparently gathering information while others are clearly involved in complex programming projects. Suarez is well ahead of me, headed for a door on the other side of the room, but I’m curious.

“You train your people on computers?” I call out, still catching up with him. He stops and looks around the room as though he hadn’t really noticed it when we first came in.

“Well of course,” he says. “We aren’t some backward little church,” a word he pronounces with derision. “We are a community and we take care of our own. Everyone here trains and becomes proficient in computer use. Most are illiterate when they arrive, so they have to be taught to read first.”

Watching the speed with which they carry out their assignments it’s hard to believe that anyone here was ever illiterate.

“I’m surprised the electricity doesn’t go out,” I say.

“We have our own supply. It’s necessary.”

“It’s necessary, so therefore it happens, is that it?”

He smiles.

“Yes, exactly. That is the nature of suerte”

I look around at the multitude of computers, an intent operator bent over each one.

“You scoop?”

“We keep abreast of events,” he says, admitting the fact without actually saying so. “Information is an important resource.”

“Of course.”

“Come,” he says. “We need privacy, I think.”

He leads me through a doorway that leads out of the computer center. On the other side is a set of stairs. He climbs and I follow him. At the top we reach a suite of rooms, apparently his own apartment.

“Please sit,” he says, indicating an armchair. I sit down, taking in my surroundings.

“I’ll get us some iced tea,” he says, and disappears down a hall.

The room is airy and bright. Two of the walls are painted a bright, vibrant green, while the remaining two are a lively yellow. The furniture is mostly wicker, covered in comfortable cushions. There are more cushions on the floor, most of which is covered with a thick rug. I note that it isn’t Mexican, but Iranian or Pakistani—an expensive antique since those nations became Gray Areas. There are extensive bookcases filled with volumes of all kinds: religion, mathematics, languages, engineering, sociology, history. There are windows on two walls, which are open to admit the outside air. A skylight fills the room with bright sunlight. Thanks to several electric fans, however, it is blessedly cool.

One wall was adorned with a series of photographs, paintings, and collages, at least sixty of them, each in a plain glass frame, hung in a grid pattern with military orderliness. Row upon row of images, each one beautiful. They are arranged so that each piece of art complements the ones adjacent to it, and the whole arrangement, when viewed from a distance, makes a single work of art that is as subtly constructed as any of its parts.

Suarez returns with a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses. He sets them on the table in front of me and seats himself opposite on a wicker sofa.

“So,” he says, pouring tea into frosted glasses, “you have questions.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I will do what I can to answer. The Ghosts seem to hold you in high regard and we have, they and I, a mutually beneficial arrangement. In deference to them, and because you are my guest, I will try not to disappoint you.”

He smiles and sips his tea.

“If your computer operators are as good as I imagine, then you probably have some idea what I’m here about.”

“Max,” he says simply.

“Yes, Max.”

I try the tea myself. It’s delicate and fragrant. I’m no connoisseur, but I doubt it’s from California. More suerte.

“You work for him. Someone has tried to kill him. They were able to elude his elaborate security systems. You suspect us.”

“Would you tell me honestly if you were after him?”

He puts down his tea and sits back, his arms stretched out on the back of the sofa.

“You know I have no reason to lie to you. I have no fear of your police or your Forces. I have no fear of anything. If you burned this compound to the ground tomorrow I would survive and I’d build another like it within months. The suerte is on my side. I think we can speak openly.”

“I hoped that would be your view.”

“You knew it would,” he says plainly.

“I strongly suspected it.”

“Fine,” he says, in a tone that tells me he is getting down to business “Max? He is a difficult asset for us to asses. On the one hand he has been so... blessed.” He speaks the word with a greed that borders on physical hunger. Obviously he would like to acquire Max Prince’s luck. “Nonetheless, he has fallen on hard times.”

“He still makes a lot of money.”

He shrugs dismissively.

“His organization makes a lot of money. That is another matter. It is not his luck that is operating there, only ordinary commerce, investments and all the rest of it. The problem with Max, from our point of view, is that he has lost his luck. He lives in a mansion to be sure, but he doesn’t enjoy it. To me, that’s not lucky. He has wealth, but he squanders it, and anything he might actually enjoy he can’t remember the next morning. He is unhealthy and, if he doesn’t receive medical attention, he’ll die soon. His heart is weak and his liver is... delicate. Viewed objectively he is no more lucky than your average alcoholic on the street. The only differences are that he never runs out of alcohol and he goes to sleep in a bed at night. He is standing on the edge of the world too, I think, but with no one to blame but himself.”

“It’s obvious you’ve researched him.”

Suarez raises his eyebrows.

“Of course. We’d be foolish not to, given his fortune, his early successes. Still, he’s not of interest to us the way he is now. I can tell you that for sure. Twenty, thirty, maybe forty years ago it would have been a different story, but at that time our reach didn’t extend as far as it does now. Until fairly recently we only operated locally, so we weren’t in a position to acquire Max’s suerte back then. In any event, whatever luck Max Prince had ran out a long time ago.”

“What about the boy the Mexico cops picked up? He swore you wanted to acquire Max.”

Suarez looks solemn.

“Once in a while it’s necessary to test the police machinery, prod it a little, see how it behaves. Having one of our people caught is a way of gauging what we’re up against if we ever have to confront them. We need to know what their procedures are and how badly they want us. Of course we would never let that happen if the person had any genuine, current information.”

“It was a set up?”

“For strategic reasons, yes.”

“Did the boy know?”

“He was never really one of us. If he was, they couldn’t have caught him or made him talk.”

“But did he know that?”

“No. It would skew the results if he knew.”

I believe that Suarez would be ruthless enough to sacrifice the boy’s life. The question is did he really do it or is he lying to cover up an embarrassing misstep that would tarnish his organization's image of perfectly honed luck?

“What guarantee do I have that you’re telling the truth?”

“None. But I will tell you this: anyone we want dead, dies. Always and without exception. If we had wanted to kill Max, he wouldn’t have had the chance to hire you. Maybe his estate would have done so after his death, some team of lawyers, but not him. He’d be in the ground.”

“Any ideas?”

“What? About who tried to kill Max? I could tell you what I think, but why should I, really?”

“I would be indebted to you, if what you said had any merit.”

“Indebted to me? I don’t think you have any idea what that means.”

He says it simply, but there is a force behind his quiet words that makes me feel afraid of him for the first time.

“In any event, it is the Ghosts who would be indebted to me since they’re the ones who asked me to speak to you. Any debt you owed would be to them. Do you want that?”

I have to think about that for a moment.

“I can live with it.”

Suarez smiles. It’s an odd smile, that of someone playing a game, someone who’s served well in a tennis match and is curious to see if the other player can return the ball.

“Fine, then I will tell you what I know that might be of use to you. I assume you have spoken to his granddaughter, Porsche?”

“Of course, she was the first person I interviewed.”

“And what did she tell you?”

“That she’s wired. It prevents her from harming Max. James Jerome, Max’s attorney, confirmed it.”

Vicente makes a sour face.

“You don’t listen for what’s important. No offence,” he adds.

“None taken,” I say, feeling offended anyway.

“What else did she tell you?”

“She said it couldn’t be her. She said she’d love it if he died, but she wasn’t able to make it happen.”

Suarez sits forward now, looking avid and alert.

“Right, exactly. What does that tell you?”

I think for a moment.

“That she was truthful. What she said was borne out later when I talked to Jerome.”

“Pah,” Suarez makes a sound like a disappointed teacher. “You have a brain, use it!” His eyes are bright, eager, waiting.

“She said she’d love for him to die, she’d like to inherit his fortune.”

“Yes!” Suarez says emphatically.

“But she can’t arrange it, she can’t even ask for it.”

“That’s true, she can’t ask directly, but she can express it. She can describe what she wants, which is an indirect way of asking for it. She said it to you, after all, why couldn’t she say it to others?”

“You think she let someone know what she wanted without asking directly, just by expressing her desire?”

“She certainly could have. Now, let’s consider Porsche. What do you know about her?”

“She’s a sensualist. Sex is her sport.”

“And is she submissive about it?”

I think about the evening I spent with her, her avidness, the way she’d arranged things, the way she made sure she got what she wanted, no matter who paid the price.

“No, she’s controlling.”

“Right. That is right. You had sex with her, I assume?” I hesitate, but can’t see any reason to deny it. Besides, he probably already knows.

“Yes.”

“Yes, and it was intoxicating? Better than most sex?”

“At the time, yes. Later I felt kind of sick about it, but at the time it was... powerful.”

Suarez sits forward and puts down his iced tea.

“Yes, she’s built to have that effect during sex, her augmentation, her demeanor, the drugs she uses. So, think about someone who is not you. Someone who doesn’t have your moral qualms. He could easily be caught up by her, right? find himself wanting her so badly that it is like a need, like an addiction. Especially if he’s had her more than once and then faces the possibility of being dropped for a new lover.”

“Sure, I can see that.”

“And to that person she could have confessed the same thing she told you—that she would love nothing more than for Max to die. To get his fortune.”

Now I sit forward.

“Of course.”

“Perhaps she would imply that she would return to him if he made it happen. Even pretend she would share her new wealth with him.” He sweeps his arm dramatically. “She would be his, and they would live in luxury together for the rest of their lives. They could take Max’s money and do anything they wanted!”

“But she’s slept with hundreds of men, maybe thousands. Your theory’s good, but it doesn’t exactly narrow the list of suspects.”

Now Suarez looks truly disgusted with me.

“You... what is wrong with you? Has she hypnotized you? Use your Forces training… you were a soldier once.”

He’s pissing me off, but I try not to show it.

“What do you mean?”

“Yes,” he says, enunciating elaborately as though he’s talking to a child, “there’s a long list of lovers, but amongst those there can only be a short list who would have the skills or the money to get past Max’s security system. Am I right?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“And who are they?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t checked who she’s had sex with. I’d have to cross-reference.”

“I’ll tell you. We researched Max, as you know. We are very thorough, so of course we researched Porsche as well. She isn’t discreet, so it wasn’t hard to compile a long list of her lovers. Perhaps we didn’t get all of them, but I suspect we did pretty well.”

“And?”

“And most of them are human garbage. There are the ones she chooses for fun, for their looks: actors, models, strays she picks up on the street. Then there are the ones she picks for the frisson that comes from getting famous men into bed: sim stars, musicians, authors, artists. There are some she picks for the pure immorality of it: her acquaintances’ husbands and the like. Then there are the rich ones who can add a little cash to the allowance she gets from Max: industrialists, sim producers, and their ilk.”

“The rich ones wouldn’t have the talent, but they could afford to hire it.”

“Don’t be stupid. They don’t need Max’s money as badly as the others, so they would risk less to get it. On top of that, they didn’t get where they are by taking unnecessary chances, they are naturally risk-averse. Last, but still important, they often look fat and soft, but their hearts are hard. They are used to being in control. Do you see one of these guys turning into Porsche’s tame errand boy?”

“Probably not.”

“It’s not impossible. Sex can make even hard men weak, but it’s not likely at all. No, you’re not looking for someone of that caliber. A little lower down the ladder, though. Now there you might find someone interesting. Someone who’s well off, but who isn’t truly rich and would like to be. Someone who has a position of apparent power, but who still has to follow orders, still has to work for another man, a master. Someone, say, who has aspirations to be a big player but for now is just another lawyer.”

“Jerome? Are you serious? I got the impression he hated Porsche”

“Of course you did, you were supposed to. And I would suspect that he honestly resents her for abandoning him, but that he’d love to have her back.”

“They actually had an affair?”

“Last year. It lasted about six months.”

“And she ended it.”

“She always ends it. As you said yourself, she is controlling. She’s also easily bored—so easily bored, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine why she would have forced herself to have sex with a boring old man like James Jerome when he didn’t have the kind of money that her truly rich lovers did. He certainly wasn’t good looking enough or famous, so why? What could he give her?”

I stand up and Suarez follows suit.

“Thank you.”

He smiles.

“Don’t thank me, thank the Ghosts. It’s them you owe.”

“I’d better get back to L.A.”

“Of course. Come, I’ll show you out.”

Along the way he hands me a business card—no name, just a kaikki ID.

“I’ve enjoyed meeting you Mr. Burroughs. You’re always welcome here, but if you need to speak to me again, you don’t have to fly all the way down from L.A. Call me if you need me.”

“Thanks. Why the goodwill?”

“There are many ways to gather good fortune, Mr. Burroughs. Extending goodwill is one of them.” He smiles. “Sometimes, you know, the simplest ways work the best.”

Eighteen: More Degraded, More Carnal

As I leave the compound I search in vain for a taxi to take me back to the downtown hotels. Planning to get a night’s sleep, then head home, I slip the kaikki headpiece back on.

The surrounding neighborhood is even more depressing after being in Suarez’s clean, well-kept compound. The smell seems worse -- more degraded, more carnal -- as though there is something dead around here. On top of a meaty odor is the noxious perfume of petroleum. There are oil fields a few klicks away, and the wind coming from the north is awash in the sticky stink of it.

The girl who led me here is nowhere in sight. A skinny dog approaches me and bares its teeth, wagging its tail at the same time. Uncertain whether I might attack it or feed it, it doesn’t know how to respond, so it prepares for either eventuality. Who ever said dogs were dumb? Anyway, I’m not about to do it any harm, but I don’t have any food with me either. It follows me for a while, but eventually stops, standing still and staring after me. I look back and wish I could give it a fifty-peso note, like I did with the girl. Then, for a bare, fleeting moment, an alarm goes off in my head. I turn away from the dog to find its source but by the time I complete the motion the world is gone.

I awake in a dumb haze: dumb as in stupid, dumb as in unable to speak. I’m unable to move and for the most part unable to see, just light and dark patches. I can hear voices but they sound distorted and muffled, as though I were under water, or trying to hear through a wall into a neighboring room. I can make out the tone, but the words, the meaning, escape me entirely. There are at least two men. I know because sometimes they both speak at once. There’s at least one woman too, and even in this state I can guess that she’s in charge. The men’s voices are belligerent, while hers is firm but quiet. At one point, when both men are speaking, she silences them. A moment later a large dark shape looms against the light of the background, growing larger as it gets nearer.

“... oo eer muh...”

She’s clearly talking to me, but I can’t make out the words. My head is clearing a little, but I’m still too stunned to understand. She says something to someone else, then repeats herself to me.

“... an yoo eer mi...”

The inflection is definitely that of a question, and in a moment, as she repeats it again, it pops into focus.

“Can you hear me?”

My mouth is so dry that my tongue keeps sticking to the roof of my mouth. I try to speak, but don’t succeed. Probably I’m making disgusting smacking noises, like a child eating, or a dog licking its chops, but I can’t hear it myself.

“Get him some water.”

A moment later another dark shape approaches. They’re still impossible to see clearly, but by now they both have a little color to them. Someone places a glass at my lips and begins to tip it slowly. I drink, but it’s hard to do. I can’t judge the rate at which the water’s pouring and my coordination is still off. A lot of the water ends up soaking the front of my shirt, but that’s okay, it feels almost as good as the water that makes it into my mouth. It’s hot in here. Stuffy. The glass is taken away.

“Is that better?”

“Eff,” is the best I can manage, trying to say ‘yes’. I nod to emphasize the point.

“Good. Practice speaking. I want you talking. I have questions for you.”

Her English is good, and only slightly accented.

“Whu em uh?”

“Stupid question.”

“Mmm. Too.” I have trouble with the letter ‘r.’ I try again, drawing it out and enunciating as clearly as I can. “T-r-u-e.”

“That’s better.”

It is better, and my vision’s improving as well. Her face is beginning to come into focus, although the bottom half of it is disguised with a bandana. I can’t see the men yet, they’re too far away, but I bet they’re wearing the same kind of camouflage. I feel comforted by the amateurishness of it. This woman is trying to act like a pro, but she’s not.

There’s something else: it’s clear they stunned me, but they did it sniper-style, from a distance. No pro would do that. Too much risk that you’ll miss and your target will take cover. Too much chance that you’ll get a partial discharge and your target can drag himself away. And even if you get a solid hit, some good Samaritan may interfere before you can get to your target to collect him. None of those things happened, but professionals would never have taken the chance. A professional stun is done up close.

With these thoughts I start to feel some hope. I flex my muscles without moving, testing them without giving the fact away. It’s clear that I’m not up to full strength yet, but my faculties are returning quickly—the wiring on a Forces shell will do that for you. My vision is returning but I pretend to remain unfocussed. Lolling my head around the room, pretending to be sightless, I take in its details.

More hope. We’re in a house, not some institution or military installation. You can tell by the type of door, by the flooring, by the architecture of the window, by the unevenness of the walls. The window is covered with a rough blanket hung from nails, so I can’t see outside, but I can hear traffic. From the sound of it, it’s not far away, so we’re likely on the ground, or maybe one or two floors up. Nothing that can’t be jumped anyway.

“Can you see me?”

“A littuh.”

Actually I can see her quite well, and the men too. They aren’t wearing shells, that’s for sure. Instead of the pumped, perfect forms the vats produce they have the lean, scarred bodies that come with hard living. Each one wears a knife on his belt and one of them is holding the stun rifle they used to knock me out. They’re wearing bandanas as I thought they would be.

Two possibilities present themselves. One is that these jokers are representatives of one of the many militant political groups in Mexico. There are socialist groups like Justicia, Solidario, and Todos Somos Uno. There are also the newer, proto-fascist nationalist groups like Memoria, whose name means simply ‘memory’ in Spanish, or Chicahuaque, which is the plural of the Nahuatl word chicahuac, which means ‘strong’ or ‘hard’. Roughly translated, then, the name Chicahuaque means “the tough ones” or, if you prefer, “the hardasses,” but in an aboriginal language chosen to represent the authority of the area’s original inhabitants. Whether rooted in Spanish culture or Indian, though, these groups mean to unite a greater Mexico, taking back the territory they lost in California, Texas, and elsewhere, and to rid themselves of the economic domination of the Enclaves to the north.

More likely, though, they’re just kidnappers looking for cash. Kidnappings run at five or six a day in Mexico City these days, and those are just the ones that are reported. The most popular format is the low-key grab: pick someone who’s not rich but not destitute, snatch them, and demand the equivalent of two-hundred, maybe five-hundred dollars, from their family. The family runs around emptying bank accounts, digging money out of hiding places, selling things, pawning things, borrowing, and scraping together the cash. They pay, and the person’s set free.

With the level of poverty in the city, a lot of people resort to minor crimes like this, and yesterday’s victim, now utterly without means, can easily become tomorrow’s perpetrator. Generally the kidnappers have no intention of harming anyone, they just need money, but of course you get a few crazies and accidents, so once or twice a month someone will get hurt or killed. The kidnappings that go badly keep the threat real, which helps to ensure that the rest go smoothly—a system in equilibrium.

Whichever is the case, there’s one thing I don’t understand: the Ghosts arranged my safe passage, backed up by the Suerte. Suarez would surely have made sure that everyone who was potentially a threat to me knew that I was protected. Neither the political radicals nor small-time criminals would ever violate a Suerte edict. That one detail is confusing, and it makes me uneasy. No matter how I think about it, I can’t fit it into the rest of the picture.

Still, that’s not the immediate problem. I try to assess the three stooges: height, weight, and position. At the same time, my fingers are subtly feeling the chair I’m bound to, trying to figure out what it’s made of. Maybe after the sniper-style attack and the bandanas I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am, when I find that it’s painted wood. Wood, for crying out loud. They’ve used good, solid handcuffs to hold me to it, one set per hand, attaching each of them to a spindle in the chair’s back. But that’s like setting an expensive lock in a fragile door: what’s the point? And my hands aren’t cuffed to each other, just to the chair.

“I see you’re waking up,” the woman says. “Time to get down to business.”

And it is. In one motion I compress my body into a ball with a sudden, hard lurch, drawing my heels up to my ass and pulling my arms forward and together. The result is that the chair’s legs snap off its base and the spindles that held my hands pull free from the seat. I fall to the ground in the process, but so what?

Before the guy with the stunner can aim, I’m rolling to one side and coming to my feet. The stunner is up now, but I’m careful to keep the woman between me and the guy with the gun. He fires anyway, like an idiot, and hits her in the back of the head. At this range it doesn’t stun her, instead the charged metal disc tears away half her head and sprays me with brains. The shooter is the one who looks stunned. I rush toward her and catch her falling body, heaving it back toward him. Instinctively he raises his arms to protect himself. As he does, I swing low, sweeping my leg out and knocking his feet out from under him. I stand quickly and kick him hard in the head. He’s out now, but the last guy is at me with his knife.

I don’t have time for much evasion. He slashes at my face, misses, and opens up a long cut on my shoulder. Seeing me hurt encourages him and he charges me, aiming for the belly this time. I twist to the side, lean back, and extend my right leg, as though I were executing a side-kick. Instead, though, my leg comes up under the man’s knife arm and wraps around it like a snake. My foot is planted against his chest, stopping his forward momentum. Then I yank downward, so that at the same time I snap my torso upright and the man is pulled down, hitting the ground face-first. Along the way his knife cuts my thigh without him even intending it, it’s simply pulled against my leg as I drag him down. It’s a smaller cut than the one on my shoulder, though, and well worth it to have the last man out of the picture. At least I hope he’s the last man. I kick him in the gut, breaking a rib or two to make sure he’s incapacitated. I take his knife, then search the others, finding my kaikki and headpiece in one of the woman’s pockets. I don’t bother with the stunner.

I go to the door and try it cautiously. Not even locked, it opens directly into the street. In a moment I’m outside. It’s still daylight. I haven’t had a chance to learn the neighborhood, but I can see the Suerte compound in the distance. They were holding me barely two blocks from the spot where I fell. Unbelievable. It hardly seems like the work of the Suerte, especially given how little luck my kidnappers had, but Suarez has, if nothing else, failed to ensure my protection. I want to have a word with him.

Nineteen: Born To Dogs In The Street

I slip on the headpiece and start walking toward the compound, which is easily visible above the rubble and makeshift, single-story homes. I’m outwardly cool, but the pain in my shoulder and thigh is feeding my anger. This time I’ve come uninvited and no one comes out to greet me. I find an intercom panel beside the door and touch the plate, activating it.

“Yes? Who is it?” the kaikki says harshly in my ear.

“It’s Gat Burroughs to see Vicente Suarez.”

There’s a longish pause. Presumably the person on the other end is checking to see if my visit will be permitted. Eventually he answers.

“Come in,” is all he says, but I hear the lock in the door click open. I pull on the knob and step back inside, closing the door behind me. A young man is hurrying over to me from one of the nearby buildings.

“I apologize,” he says in Spanish “we had no idea you would come back... you’re hurt!”

He’s gaping at me and it takes me a moment to realize that I’m still covered in someone else’s blood.

“Not badly. This is from someone else,” I say, gesturing at the gore.

“But Vicente’s order?”

“Yes, what about it?”

He seems to realize that he’s in over his head and decides not to address the issue.

“Please follow me.”

He leads me back to the courtyard where Suarez’s people are training. The sparring is still going on, this time with a different set of combatants, two young women. Suarez approaches me from the other side of the courtyard, clearly forewarned that I’ve come back. I stop and watch the fighters for a moment, marveling again at their skill, and perhaps at their luck. I’m not quite a believer yet. Suarez approaches and I see his face harden as he notices my state.

“This is not your blood?” he asks, expertly assessing my fitness as compared with the amount of sticky red blood that’s coating me.

I shake my head.

“Nevertheless, I take it you were attacked. I commend you on surviving, but nonetheless this was not supposed to happen. I will take care of it, you can be sure. Come and get cleaned up.”

I ignore the offer for the moment. There are more pressing issues to deal with.

“It had nothing to do with you, I take it?”

“You think I would break my word to the Ghosts?”

“I don’t know you well enough to decide if you would or not.”

“You’re here, though.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been cut I see, but you’re not dead.”

“No.”

“Then it wasn’t the Suerte. It’s the same thing I said about Max Prince: if we wanted you dead, you’d be dead. It applies to him, it applies to you too.”

“You say that. And people say that kind of thing about you. But people say a lot of things.”

“You doubt our abilities—the power of our suerte.”

I take a moment to wipe my bloody hands on my pants. The blood is drying and doesn’t come off easily.

“Yes, honestly, I doubt you. So far all I have is rumors and your word.”

“You were content to rely on my word regarding Mr. Jerome.”

“That was a suggestion based on logic, not magic based on luck.”

He looks mildly irritated, as though I’m misunderstanding things that are obvious to him. After a moment his face calms, though.

“Fine. You are a rational man, you require proof. Something like a scientific experiment. Am I right?”

“If you can provide it.”

He smiles a little at that. Then calls out loudly without taking his eyes from mine.

“Adalia!”

A young woman leaves the group watching the sparring and jogs over to where we stand.

“Yes Vicente?” she asks in Spanish.

“Get nine of the others and bring them over to the west wall. Tell them to bring throwing knives.”

“Right.”

She leaves again, conferring with some of the others. I haven’t seen Suarez interact with his people before, and it surprises me that there’s so little formality. He uses no title. They even call him by his first name.

“You’re pretty informal with your followers.”

“They don’t follow me, they follow the way that I’ve shown them. I follow it too. We’re something like a family, but based on our philosophical outlook rather than blood ties. I may be older than the others, and I have more good fortune than anyone here, but I am not fundamentally different. I’ve never wanted to be a general.”

Adalia returns with a small group of fellow Suerte, all of them carrying flat, sharp throwing knives. Suarez turns to them.

“You see that door over there,” he says, indicating the door to the outside. “I’m going to count off. On ‘three,’ all of you will throw your knives. You will each pretend that there is someone standing in front of the door, a man of my height, and you will aim at his heart. You will do your absolute best to hit that spot. Are you ready?”

The ten Suerte arrange themselves in a line, all facing toward the door.

“One—Two—Three!”

Their hands come up, all of them moving with the same practiced, fluid motion. Their arms snap back over their shoulders, then forward. Ten knives fly toward the door. When they strike, they cluster just about where Suarez’s heart would be if he were standing there. The only knives that don’t sink into the door are the few that bounce off of others which have already embedded themselves in the same spot.

“Good. Very good. Retrieve your weapons.” The Suerte run toward the door and gather up their knives, then trot back to us, eager but calm, obedient, or maybe simply cooperative, but in any event apparently care-free.

“Now,” Suarez announced “this time I will be standing in front of the door. You will do exactly the same thing. You will try your best to hit me directly in the heart. Now, I know you will do as I ask, but Mr. Burroughs here will think that we’re pulling a trick on him. He will think that you are missing me on purpose, so here is the rule: anyone who misses me will be punished. You will aim true, throw hard, and do your best to kill me. Is that clear?”

All of them nod. They don’t look surprised, or even worried. If I have to guess at what their expressions mean, I would say it’s irritation bordering on anger. They don’t seem to be concerned about hitting Suarez, they’re concerned about missing him, about being punished just to prove a point to some stupid Cali gringo. Still, they line up again as Suarez jogs toward the door and places himself in front of it, his arms held out in a cruciform pose. Despite their animosity toward me, I move close behind them so that I can see better. I want to know if they’re really trying to hit him. The man who has lived for over a hundred and fifty years, and who clearly expects to go on living, shouts out the count without hesitation.

“All right. One—two—three!”

Once again their arms come up in the same perfect unison, then fly forward. Every motion is as precise as before. From where I stand it certainly seems as though they’re aiming directly at Suarez’s heart, but not one hits him. The knives don’t drop in midair, but seem to follow paths that are not as straight or as accurate as the previous time, as though ten expert knife-throwers have somehow, simultaneously, had the misfortune of making a bad throw. Some knives fly at angles that look accurate at first, but turn out to be a bit off—a small miscalculation which magnifies over the course of its flight so that by the time the knife reaches the door it misses Suarez altogether. Other knives seems to fly along a slight arc, like a curveball, so that they, too, miss their target in the end. Two knives that seem to be precisely on course to kill Suarez graze each other in mid-air as they race toward the same target, throwing them off course. One way or another, not one of the knives finds his heart, although all end up embedded in the wood of the door except the two that collided. Close, but not close enough. The nearest one nicks his sleeve, leaving a small, neat cut in the material, but doesn’t touch his skin.

The Suerte show no more surprise at their failure than they had when Suarez first made his strange request. Resignedly they walk to a nearby wall and—men and women alike—begin removing their shirts. I turn to watch them, then realize that Suarez has appeared behind me, looking past me at his people with a grave expression on his face.

“Why are they taking off their shirts?”

“Punishment,” he says simply. Several others approach, removing the leather thongs they use for belts. The knife-throwers lean against the wall in front of them, hands and feet spread slightly, waiting.

“You’re going to whip them?”

I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’m not anxious to watch.

“I told you, you don’t understand our life here. It’s not only death that is woven tightly into our lives, into our beliefs, but pain too. Endurance. Atonement. There is more to our movement than your Angelino news sims would have you believe.”

“Is this necessary?”

“I told them they would be punished if they missed. It was meant to be a real inducement for them to try as hard as they could, even though I knew they would never succeed. Now, to keep my word, yes, it’s necessary. And when they threw their knives they accepted the challenge I had laid down, so it is necessary for them to live up to their word as well.”

“You may not be a general,” I say acidly “but you punish like one.”

He takes no offence, and answers without anger.

“No, life punishes. We take life as it is, not as we wish it was. In real life, pain is inevitable.”

Then Suarez begins counting out loud, slowly, and the whipping begins, equally slowly, the moment between each blow drawn out, as though to allow the victims time to anticipate the next installment of pain. I can see their torsos shuddering, the skin and muscles moving against their will, twitching against the pain. The one nearest to me is a young man with longish hair. I can see the perspiration on his back, his side.

“Six... seven” Suarez intones stonily.

“How many lashes?” I ask.

“Thirty-nine,” he says quietly. “It’s a traditional number, left over from Catholicism.”

At fifteen or sixteen lashes they start to bleed. Behind them the murals of murder and death rise high above their heads. I remind myself that these are their murders, it is them who caused the mayhem, but it doesn’t make watching the spectacle any easier. Behind the faces of these killers I can’t help but see the faces of the ghetto children they once were, the desperate, hungry teenagers they became, willing to do anything, even kill, if only it would improve their lives. I imagine being in their position, parents unable to provide for them, parents dead or simply gone, no better hope for the future than collecting tin in the garbage dumps or selling themselves to rich foreigners one night at a time. I imagine seeing this fortress in the center of the squalor, this clean, well-kept citadel where others have escaped from poverty to become powerful, to become recognized and respected, or at least feared. I wonder if I would resist its temptation if I were in their place and, honestly, I doubt it.

“If their good fortune protects them, why don’t the whips miss them?” I ask.

“The same reason their suerte didn’t allow them to hit me with the knives,” Suarez answers between calling out lashes. “My power was greater than theirs. In the same way, the ones who are administering the punishment are senior and have more power. Their fortune overwhelms the ones who are being hit.”

Suarez keeps patiently meting out the punishment. At the count of twenty-five, one of the men falls, then gets up again. Is he angry? Ashamed of having fallen? Can he think of, or feel, anything beyond the pain? A young woman falls next, but like the man before her she forces herself back to her feet and resumes her position against the wall. By now their blood is spraying with each stroke. Not a lot of it, but enough to stain their leggings, the wall, the ground, even the people wielding the whips. I look at Suarez. If anything, his face is serious and a little sad.

When the last blow falls I see them each sag a little, no longer having to brace themselves for another lash, but they remain on their feet and turn slowly around. Adalia did not fall and for some irrational reason I feel proud of her. Why I should feel anything about her, I have no idea. Suarez goes to them then, speaking with each one, touching each one, comforting them with a touch on the shoulder or cheek. Friends approach them and offer them back their shirts. They slowly disperse, holding their shirts in their hands, not wanting to put them on and stain them with blood. When they’re gone, Suarez claps his hands loudly.

“Practice please,” he calls out, and the remaining members of the group return to sparring. Then he approaches me.

“Where are the others going? The ones who were whipped?”

“To clean themselves up. They’ll be back in a few minutes. They’ll resume their training. I don’t expect you to understand us Mr. Burroughs. I don’t expect you to approve of what you see here. But I imagine your doubts are gone.”

“It was impressive,” I say, unwilling to commit myself to belief entirely.

“Suerte is impressive, but that isn’t the point,” he says, not turning to face me but watching his people resume their training. Why do something so cruel? That’s what you’re really wondering. You think I’m some kind of despot, crazy, whatever. I will tell you. The point of our movement is to celebrate all of human existence. Being human can be ecstasy, and we indulge ecstasy, but it also means pain. It includes death as much as it includes life. To cut yourself off from any portion of that spectrum, from any of the colors of life, is to amputate yourself. It makes you less than human, and we won’t settle for that.” He shakes his head emphatically. “No, if anything, we would like to be more than human, but if we’re stuck being human we’re certainly not going to do it in half measures. We want the whole thing, Mr. Burroughs, every taste, every fragrance, every emotion, every sensation, all knowledge, all experience, all power, and life everlasting.”

“Amen,” I say, not being entirely facetious. He turns his head then, just enough so that I can see his eyes. His expression is calm, but those eyes are alive with a fierce faith.

“You can ‘amen’ ten thousand times and it won’t be enough.” He turns back to look at his people. “Look at them. These children come from nothing, from nowhere. They’re born to dogs in the street, to ghosts, to the wind—certainly not to parents who can protect them and care for them. When they get here they barely exist, cringing and growling and pissing themselves all at once. Hungry, dirty, mistrustful but needy. Here they take control of their lives. The point is to be someone Mr. Burroughs. To have an identity, authority, a place where you belong. And the point is to swallow life whole, not in tiny bites.”

He pauses for a moment, as though he hadn’t meant to enter into this sermon, then his mood turns light again.

“I will tell you one thing, the point is certainly not to put on shows for foreigners. Generally no one comes here. The few times journalists dared to approach us, shaking in their boots, we simply sent them away.” Finally, he looks me directly in the eyes. “It isn’t a matter of showing off, it’s a matter of survival, and character, and dignity.”

“And life everlasting.”

He smiles.

“Yes.”

“We have life everlasting too,” I say.

He looks thoughtful.

“Of course, in a way. You have the vats and the shells, decanting your ka over and over. But of course first one must have money, true?”

“True.”

“These people can’t afford anything like that. They can’t even afford a dentist. And then of course your life everlasting is tenuous, I would say. The shells are not indestructible. What if a person is in a car accident, for instance?” I can’t tell whether or not he’s making an oblique reference to my own past, to the death of my parents. “Or what if a person is shot? I understand you were involved in an incident before you came here. Many people died.”

“That’s true. I didn’t kill them but I saw them die.”

“I’m sorry that it troubles you. Still, the point is that suerte helps to protect against such eventualities, not just old age, but accidents and attacks.”

“Life everlasting,” I say, starting to believe.

“Amen, Mr. Burroughs. Amen to that. Now, come and wash.”

Twenty: Wanna Buy Some Shitty Tomatoes?

I leave the compound washed and wearing a fresh shirt, donated by the Suerte. As I walk through el Paraíso, I think about what Suarez said: born to dogs in the street. The hive of humanity around me—all of them struggling, begging, working, fighting—feels suddenly claustrophobic, and I have an intense desire to be back in L.A., or at least in a clean, air-conditioned room at one of the airport hotels. Maybe the abrupt change in the weather is a factor: the sky has clouded over in the last few minutes and the air has the heavy, close feeling that comes before rain.

I look around for a taxi but there are none in sight. In fact the only vehicle I can see is an old pickup truck, the back half-full of vegetables, sitting by the side of the road. A young man lounges against the truck’s flank, smoking a joint as he waits to make a sale. He’s wearing a bright orange bandana like a kerchief on his head, no shirt, dirty jeans and sneakers. I head toward him.

“How’s business.”

His head jerks back slightly and I realize that, like the girl, he’s probably never heard a machine translation before. Maybe on TV, if he has one. Still, he only pauses a moment, then expels two streams of bluish smoke from his nostrils.

“It sucks,” he says in Spanish, correctly assuming his words will be translated. He gestures toward his truck. “Wanna buy some shitty tomatoes?” He takes another long hit off the joint and smiles at me around a lungful of smoke, holding it in.

“No thanks.”

He exhales and laughs.

“How about some really good weed.”

He takes a last drag on the joint, then pops the roach into his mouth and swallows it.

“Tempting, but no. I’ll tell you what, though. I need a ride to the Cordoba.”

“Downtown? That fancy place?”

“That’s the one. I’ll give you fifty pesos.” He quickly sizes up my need and my ability to pay.

“Need gas money too,” he says.

“Fine, seventy pesos.” That much gas would take us to the border and back. He smiles a huge, toothy smile and bangs the side of his truck.

“Fuck man, I’d drive you there for free just to pull up in front of the doorman in this shitbox.” He laughs, then looks serious and points a finger at me. “We made a deal though.”

“Seventy pesos,” I confirm.

“Cool. I’m Ramon. Get in man. It’s gonna rain in a minute anyway.”

He opens the driver side door and climbs in.

“Does the weather always turn this quickly?” I ask, opening the passenger door.

“In the D.F.? Does this every afternoon, man. It’ll rain for half an hour and then get sunny again, you’ll see.” He breaks into a cackling laugh for no obvious reason except that he’s stoned. Still, he seems competent behind the wheel as he starts up the truck and begins driving. He swerves expertly back and forth, avoiding pedestrians, stray dogs, and potholes. The seats are overly springy and we both bounce slightly whenever we hit a rut or a depression in the road.

“So you got out alive, huh?” Ramon says.

“What?”

“That Suerte joint, you got out alive. I almost bet against you. Now I’m glad I didn’t.”

“Someone was giving odds?”

“Sure man, eighty to one against you. I actually would have bet, but I didn’t have any money.”

I look for a sign that this is another joke, but it doesn’t seem to be. Big drops of rain begin to spatter the windshield, at first just a few, then suddenly a torrent of them. Ramon and I both roll up our windows.

“So, what? Everyone in El Paraíso knows I was in there?”

“Well, everyone knows some gringo’s coming and nobody’s supposed to fuck with him. The order comes from Suarez, so obviously everybody’s curious. Then Damita brought you here. You’re the only gringo showed up today. Then you come back out, but someone fucks with you anyway. Got to be Vicente, right? Because no one would touch you if he said not to except him or his people. Then, after they shock you and all that, you fucking go back in man. I thought that was it for sure. But no, here you are. Big mystery.”

“You’re really serious that no one would disobey Suarez? I mean not even the Chicahuaque or someone like that?”

“Hey, those guys are a little weird, you know, but they’re not crazy. I mean, maybe they’re crazy but they’re not suicidal or anything.”

“You believe all that Suerte y Muerte stuff, about stealing people’s luck and the rest of it.”

“Hey man I don’t know. Do I look like some scientist or a priest or whatever? I know my grandmother believes in Jesus Christ and some preacher cured her legs, so who fucking knows? All I know is I got vegetables, I sell them, I go home, mind my own business. Who needs to worry about stuff like that? They sure as hell kill people though. Everybody knows that. They don’t even hide it. I’ve seen one of them kill a guy right in the street, some gringo that was looking for some ass. Nobody’s going to stop a Suerte, you know, so he’s not worried, just does it right back there, middle of the street. Used a knife man, fucking ugly.”

I watch the rain for a few moments.

“So someone stunned me and dragged me off in the middle of the neighborhood and no one did anything?”

He looks at me quickly, puzzled, then looks back at the road.

“What’d I just tell you? I figured it was the Suerte. Everyone else figured the same thing. So who’s going to stop them?”

We’re entering a nicer neighborhood now. Small, clean shops and restaurants. People are standing in the doorways here and there, watching the rain.

“But the thing is, it wasn’t the Suerte.”

Ramon looks surprised.

“Then they’re dead, my friend. I mean like already, right now. Suarez said don’t touch you.”

The woman has been dead for a while, but I don’t see any point in mentioning it to him. Now I suppose the men have been killed as well. I don’t relish the thought, but I can’t muster up a lot of sympathy either.

“You sure it wasn’t the Suerte?” Ramon asks.

I think of the throwing knives, so accurate one moment, so blind to their target the next.

“Pretty sure.”

He whistles.

“That is fucked up man. Why would somebody do that?”

“That’s what I’m wondering.”

“Only thing is if they weren’t from Mexico, you know? Nobody from Mexico is going to screw around with Vicente.”

“They had Mexican accents.”

“Yeah?” he says, smiling broadly. “You can tell a Mexican accent from a Columbian accent? A Chilean accent?” He has a point. “Hell,” he says “for all you know they came down from L.A. on the same plane as you. Lots of Latinos up there, right? Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, whatever.”

“Yeah, it could have happened that way. How’d you know I came from L.A.?”

“That was the message: don’t do anything to the gringo from L.A. You got enemies up there might want you dead or whatever?”

An image of the ‘homeless’ assassins flashes through my mind, but I don’t answer.

“Hey, whatever. Just making conversation,” Ramon says when I don’t speak.

“Don’t take it personally.”

Suddenly he looks worried. Maybe I look pissed off, though in fact I’m just trying to work things out. Suarez treated me like an honored guest, so maybe pissing me off is bad karma.

“Don’t worry Ramon, I was just thinking, that’s all. Better you don’t know too much though, ok? Like you said, sell your vegetables, go home, live your life.”

“You got it man. I like to stay away from trouble. I mean, you don’t even have to pay for the ride, you know? Suarez says to treat you right so…”

“It’s ok. We have a deal… business. I don’t mind paying for the ride.”

Ramon looks relieved.

“Okay, cool. I could use the money, you know?”

“Going out on the town tonight?”

“Oh man, seventy pesos? You better believe it. Buy some girl a bunch of drinks, dance, you know? Might even get lucky.”

He has that huge, goofy, stoned smile on his face again. Looking out the window I realize we’re almost at the hotel.

“That girl? Damita?” I say.

“What about her?”

“You know her? I mean, you knew her name.”

“I seen her around. Everybody has, you know.”

“She going to be okay, you think?”

“What do you think man? She’s fourteen and she’s already pulling dates. Not like that’s rare in El Paraíso. You really sure you want to know what will happen to her?”

“Yeah,” I say, not certain I mean it but unable to back down.

“If she’s lucky she’ll be pregnant before she’s sixteen and spend the rest of her life whoring or begging, or maybe even working, all to raise her kid. If it’s a boy, it’ll end up like me. If it’s a girl, it’ll end up like her.”

For the moment I say nothing about the fact that he’s drawn a parallel between Damita and his own mother, although silently I wonder how she supported him: whoring, begging, or working.

“And if she’s not lucky?”

“Then she’ll be dead before she’s sixteen and won’t have to worry about any kid. Girls get killed all the time. I mean, the Suerte won’t hurt her ‘cause she’s too unlucky, you know? What could they get from her? But guys get crazy, fucking lunatics come around sometimes. Mexicans, sometimes. Guys from California or Texas sometimes. They come down here just to get laid you know, so sometimes it’s one of them. Or from wherever. What’s up man, you feel bad for her?”

“Yeah, of course I feel bad for her.”

His good humor seems to desert him for a moment.

“You want to save her or something? There’s about half a million girls like her in the city man. I mean literally half a million. You going to save them all?”

“Can’t hurt to help one of them, you think?”

He seems to make a conscious effort to lighten his tone.

“Sure man, helping one is good I guess,” he says, sounding unconvinced.

Outside, as promised, the rain has slowed to a trickle and the sun is beginning to appear from behind the dissipating clouds. Suddenly Ramon’s face lights up.

“Hey, here’s the fucking doorman. He’s gonna hate this.”

We pull into the driveway of the Cordoba and sure enough the doorman steps forward, trying to wave us off. Ramon cackles and continues driving, only stopping once he’s directly in front of the main doors, where he revs the engine loudly a last time, then cuts it. The doorman is at the curb now, livid, yelling at us in Spanish. I lean out my window.

“I’m a guest here,” I say in English. The yelling stops immediately. Technically I’m not a guest yet since I haven’t actually checked in, but I intend to. I might not spend the night, but I at least want a shower before I get on a plane back to L.A.

“Certainly sir. It’s just… unusual. The truck. Most of our guests use taxis or come on the shuttle.”

“No taxis around at the time,” I tell him.

He tips his hat and returns to his post. Ramon laughs louder than ever, nearly choking.

“Oh man, fuck. That was great. That guy thinks he is king shit, you know. Wouldn’t have the time of day for a guy like me. Look at that stupid uniform. I’m a guest here. I love that.”

I take out seventy pesos and hand the bills to him. I recall giving Damita her money. I can’t seem to get her out of my mind, come to a quick decision.

“Thanks man,” Ramon says.

“A deal’s a deal. Listen, about Damita. I’m going to talk to the doorman. On the first of every month I want you to drive out here and you can laugh at him all you want, okay? But he’s going to give you a hundred pesos. Thirty is for you, for gas. The rest, I want you to take it to Damita.”

He looks skeptical.

“Sure man. If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want. Tell her it’s from the gringo she took to the Suerte. Tell her she’ll keep getting it as long as she doesn’t pull dates any more, all right? She can support her mother or her brothers or get a boyfriend or whatever, but you’re watching her and if she starts whoring around again then the money stops coming.”

“Hey man, no offence, but for thirty pesos a month I can’t watch her every day. I got to sell my vegetables, right?

I turn to him.

“You don’t actually have to watch her Ramon. Check in on her once in a while just so she thinks you are, that’s all.” I get out of the truck and lean in the open window.

“And if she starts again?” Ramon asks.

“Tell her to stop. Tell her that this one time you won’t tell me about it, but if you catch her again you’ll tell me and the money will stop.”

“That true?”

“No. Just lie, okay.”

He smiles brightly.

“Yeah whatever. Thirty pesos a month to drive out here and laugh at that asshole? You can count on it.”

“Thanks Ramon.”

I stand back. Ramon starts up the truck and waves. I wave back, then go to find the doorman. When I add in his cut the whole arrangement will probably cost me fifty bucks a month. Less than I spend on insurance for my bike, far less than my holo fees, less than a good dinner in L.A.

In the old days you used to be able to buy indulgences from the church and be forgiven for your sins, keep yourself out of hell. I don’t believe in buying your way out of blame, but if helping Damita gives me one less Tijuana dream a month—hell, one less per year—it will be worth it.

Twenty-One: From The Throats Of Men, From The Hearts Of Men

The shower in the Cordoba feels like distilled bliss. The sweat stuck to my body washes down the drain, and with it goes the funky stink I’ve developed over the last few hours, a combination of perspiration, adrenaline, and the odors of El Paraíso.

Feeling refreshed, I decide to stay the night after all and lie down on the bed to try to sleep. It’s early evening outside and the sounds of the city come in through the open balcony door, the warm breeze making the curtains waft, casting shadows on the walls. I hear cars, animated voices, faint music from ten stories down.

I drift into a light doze and the room’s elements morph in my sleep. The bulging, shifting shadows transform themselves into Forces soldiers: shored up by Brace, faceless, fearless, godless, loveless. A woman’s voice from the street loses its happiness, rising in volume, then in intensity, then turns into a shriek. The light from the streetlamps and the nearby advertising holos turn the room a fantastic red—like fire, like blood—the color of fear.

The exhaust from cars outside becomes the wafting, bitter odor of Angelfire, of houses burning as lives and belongings go up in flames. The whole of Tijuana is full of smoke, filled with the smell of burning wood and burning meat: pigs, chickens, humans, horses. I hear laughter, but it isn’t the innocent laughter of the Mexico City street, the kind that lulled me to sleep. It’s a laughter with nothing inside at all. At its heart is the most frightening void there is—nothing human, nothing alive, nothing but the absence of life, nothing but the huge empty entropy of death soaking up everything around it. What scares me the most is that it comes from the throats of men, from the hearts of men. Not from some monster, some myth, it comes from us.

The woman’s shriek won’t stop, won’t stop, won’t stop. I’m in the middle of the action, standing in the street with people running everywhere—killing, dying, trying to escape, trying to fight back—but there’s nothing I can do. With the Brace in my system my conscience is disconnected from my body. Along with the others I burn, shoot, kick, cut, spit, while the real me, the one that cares, that loves, rides like an unwilling passenger inside the head of the monster I’ve become. I shout at my Braced self, commanding it to stop, but it won’t. I scream, scream again, more, louder. My voice mixes with the woman’s scream, becomes one with it.

Tijuana was a Deploy and Destroy. We used pure terror to crush the population back into docility—women and children first. There was no plan, as such. Just get down there and fuck them up. Lasers that can cut a man open and spill his guts into his own hands. Angelfire that clings to the skin and keeps burning right down to the bone, even under water. Airborne mines that float like jellyfish at head height, set off by the air currents created whenever some unlucky civilian strayed near. Hell, fucking garotte them if you want to. Get down to the old stuff. Bring a samurai sword, build a gallows, crucify. Whatever turns you on. Let your worst, blackest impulses run wild, the predatory animal that floats in the ancestral consciousness of every man.

We weren’t attacking the military because there was no military force opposing us—Guiterrez had the MXAF and other forces stand down so we could do our work—this was strictly population control. Leave no family untouched, no home undamaged. Break their bones, spirits, sanity. When we were finished, what was left of the population was back under control—deeply and sickeningly under control. They buried their dead, tended to their wounded and insane, and went back to their fields and factories

But in my dream, the battle never reaches its conclusion. It simply rolls on, ever and ever on, to the booming drumbeat of mortars and the high, pure note of a child’s scream—every child’s scream—a symphony of distilled sadism that has sucked us all inside of it, perpetrators and victims alike.

I fly awake and roll quickly off the bed, stifling a sound in my throat as I assume a battle stance, ready to defend myself against the shadows on the wall. Behind me the street noises have resumed their normal tenor. People laugh, talk, shout happily... music plays and car horns blare at one another. Another night of partying in the shuttered community of hotels in the heart of Mexico City. Tijuana is far away.

I take another shower, a quick one this time, just to get the sweat of terror off of me. There’s no way I’ll sleep now. I dress and leave my room, padding down the clean, carpeted hallway of the hotel, wait for the elevator. It arrives and I begin descending, and for a moment I remember the dream and I half expect to exit into the mayhem of urban pacification. Of course when the doors open there’s nothing there but the nighttime lobby: half-lit, quiet, cool. I cross it and enter the bar. There are other travellers here, a few couples but mostly men, either alone or in small groups. Discreet, well-coiffed escorts vogue on the barstools. I take a seat far from anyone and order a double vodka tonic. Take a sip. I concentrate on thinking about Max, trying to push the nightmares away.

Things are bothering me about the case and despite the nightmares, some part of my mind has been distilling them during my sleep. First there’s the initial attack. On the one hand, it took tremendous expertise to enter Max’s compound despite the elaborate security system, and the data burn required an element of finesse found only amongst the most proficient security hackers. Nonetheless, the assassin failed. After all the effort of the intrusion, when Max hit a security panel, the shooter didn’t even fire a second bullet. It’s as if the most competent organization in the world sent in an inexperienced killer who panicked at the first sign that things weren’t going as planned. Those two things don’t go together.

Then there are the ‘homeless’ men who murdered a bunch of innocent Angelenos while trying to kill me. Presumably they were sent by the same sophisticated individual or organization that penetrated Max’s security. That follows logically, given the elaborate and effective means by which their shells were ordered. But for all the bullets they fired, and despite having the advantage of surprise, they didn’t hit me once. And the one who chased me fell for an amateur’s ruse—my jacket tossed toward the alleyway’s exit. Again, a mismatch between apparent expertise and ultimate results.

And finally there are my captors here in Mexico. Because of Vicente’s reputation, as confirmed by Ramon, no Mexican would have dared to touch me, so this incident, too, likely has its roots in L.A. and the attack on Max, rather than being a criminal or political kidnapping. They knew I was coming here, they knew where to find me, and they were sent by the L.A. bad guys, who are apparently professionals. Nonetheless, they behaved like amateurs: the long-distance stun, birth-bodies rather than shells, the bandana disguises, the wooden chair, the house where they held me. Everything points to their inexperience, including their lack of fighting skills. Once again, a mismatch.

I don’t know whether to fear for my life or laugh. Most of all, and most dangerously, I don’t know how to make sense of it. I notice that my drink is empty and order another. Lightweight Mexican music plays on the bar’s sound system. Music for foreigners, vacationers, conventioneers. While I’m waiting for my drink a young woman sits down on the next stool. She’s dressed expensively enough that she might be a guest, but by her looks she’s Mexican and therefore probably an escort. The Cordoba doesn’t cater to local guests. She’s also a little too attractive to be a random human being. This is someone who looks good for a living.

“Would you like to buy me one?”

I look at her. She’s probably twenty, but all I can see is Damita, peddling her young body to survive. I wonder whether the escorts are recruited from the cream of the street trade or whether they come from somewhere else entirely.

“I don’t mind buying you a drink, but I’m not looking for company.”

She smiles at that.

“A drink with no strings attached? It almost restores my faith in humanity.”

Her English is accented but good. Very clear and precise.

“I don’t think I’m the person to come to for restored faith.”

“You have a low opinion of humanity? Join the club.”

She signals to the bartender, who brings her a margarita, evidently knowing her tastes. “Aren’t you wasting your time drinking with me? There are paying customers here, I’m sure.”

“That’s one way of looking at it. On the other hand you could say I’m wasting my time when I’m with them and that talking to someone with a brain in his head is a better way to spend the next few minutes.”

This is not a regular hooker’s come-on, not even the more sophisticated escort’s version. I’m confused. Then I’m not.

“You’re a student.”

“Very good.”

“How’s next year’s tuition coming along?”

She takes a sip of her drink before answering.

“I’ll make it. Another month or so and I can stop hanging around this shithole anyway, making passes at married bankers and clumsy psychologists, or geologists, or cardiologists. All the other assholes attending conventions.”

I like her directness.

“What are you studying?”

“Medicine.”

“Med student? Really?”

“You bet.”

“Because of your love for humanity?”

“It’s a business. Besides, I’m specializing in pathology. You don’t need to love humanity to deal with cadavers. Hell, half the time you’re just dealing with a tissue sample. Exactly what I like about it.”

My second drink is done and her first is nearly finished.

“Want another drink, or do you have to get back to work?”

“No strings attached?”

“No strings attached.”

The second round leads to a few more, until we’re both a little drunk. We talk about her studies for a while. She’s animated as she discusses her work, and I enjoy listening to her even though a lot of it is over my head. She seems content to take time off and talk with me, and, after all the assassins, the Suerte, my kidnapping, and the dreams, it feels good to just talk with someone.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Gat. You?”

“Maria.”

“Uh huh.”

“Did you expect my real name? I don’t even know you.”

“‘Maria’ will do. Are a lot of the girls here students?”

“Sure. If you want to go to college you either come from a rich family, get a sugar daddy, or come here. Those are pretty much the options for higher education in the city. What do you do?”

“Personal security.”

“You kill people?”

“Generally I try to keep people from being killed.”

“But to do that you might need to kill someone, right?”

Her tone is getting less friendly, but I’m not going to lie to her.

“I try my best to avoid it. The only people I’ve killed have been trying to kill my clients, so morally it’s not exactly black and white. Still, I try to avoid it.”

“You have a conscience.”

“I’d make more money without one.”

“Most security guys were in the Forces. California, Texas, even Mexican.”

It hangs there like a question that I don’t want to answer. She hasn’t phrased it that way, but she’s clearly waiting for a response.

“Yes, I was in the Forces. I was young and had few choices. Like you.”

“Cali, right? By your accent.”

“Yes Cali.”

She turns in her stool, looking belligerent.

“Cali Forces kill people, I just fuck them. I made a choice I don’t like, but it’s not the same.”

I reply quietly and carefully. “No, it’s not the same. I agree.”

“Show me your tats.”

“What?”

“Come on, your insignias.”

“What for?”

“You scared?”

“Fine.” I roll up my sleeves, knowing this is the end of our friendly conversation. Still, I’m not going to add lying to my sins. Not after so many others.

“You fucker.”

She’s staring at the Tijuana tattoo. I take her arm and lean in close.

“We were used, do you understand that? No one knew what we were getting into. They trained us, then pumped us to the gills with drugs that make you into someone you’re not. Do you get that? Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with that?”

She pulls her arm free and spits in my face.

“Fuck you,” she says, and strides angrily out of the bar. End of the friendly conversation, just as I thought. The bartender rushes over to me, solicitous.

“I am so sorry sir. I will see that she is not allowed in the Cordoba again. There is no excuse for this.”

I think of ‘Maria’ and her tuition.

“No, she was right. I was very rude. Please don’t hold it against her.”

He looks askance at me.

“As a guest of the Cordoba I am requesting that you allow her to continue to come here. You have my word that she won’t behave that way again.”

“If you say so, sir,” he replies, rather stiffly. I leave the bar and ride the elevator back upstairs alone, then fall into bed. This time there are no dreams of Tijuana, no dreams of any kind at all.

Twenty-Two: Blood Everyfuckingwhere

Arriving at LAX, the city seems odd. L.A. is simultaneously more forgiving and more lifeless than Mexico City. It lacks the brutal deprivation and the exorbitant degree of casual cruelty, but it also lacks the warmth, the heart. I feel like no matter how well I know it, I’m now a little distant from it, like meeting an ex-lover.

I try to shake off the sensation. It’s probably just the case that has me feeling out of sorts. The encounter with Maria, or whatever her real name is, distracted me from the troubling, paradoxical aspects of the attack on Max and the events that followed it, but now my head is crowded with them. I have a primitive urge to do something violent, to simply shake the tree until something falls out, rather than try to reason my way through the mass of unlikely contradictions.

That kind of behavior’s not likely to get me anywhere, though, even if it would feel good. All I have at the moment is the bone that Vicente tossed me: James Jerome’s affair with Porsche. I’ll have to talk to him about that. I have a sudden, clear memory of how vehemently he rejected her as a suspect and wonder if he was being honest or just protecting a woman he wanted back in his bed. Hell, maybe he even thinks he loves her.

Prender picks me up in Jenna’s van. I climb into the passenger seat and risk a glance at the rear of the van. It is a mish mash of half-rebuilt electronics, with circuit panels and monitors missing and one stretch of carpet rolled back to allow the cables beneath to be reconfigured.

“How’d you do the surveillance on Tenenbaum with the van in this kind of shape?” I ask Prender as we pull away. “Oh, the stuff we needed is functional. It was pretty basic. I’m mostly working on the next level systems.”

“How’s the overhaul going?”

“She’s coming along. Going to be pretty when she’s done.”

“Damn, I hope so. Looks like shit now.” I look back at the road ahead of us.

Prender smiles a small smile. Nicky Prender is my latest acquisition, headhunted directly out of the Forces when he was demobilized. He is a slim, quiet, man with a café au lait complexion. All of twenty-four years old, he knows more about electronic surveillance than any three men. One day he’ll be giving Carmen a run for her money.

When I offered him the job he asked to see my equipment first, then accepted on the condition that he could have a budget to upgrade it. It was a ballsy move for a new recruit, but he knew his value and knew how far he could push his demands. I gave him half the budget he asked for and told him to show me what he could do with it. If he did a good job, he’d get the rest. It’s a good thing he agreed to the installment plan because I couldn’t have afforded more at that point.

“How are things back at Cloud City?” I ask.

“Zip. All quiet, but zero progress is what TJ tells me.”

“He and Carmen still out there?”

“Yeah, they’re still running down data with Alan but so far nothing has come of it.”

“What about the surveillance I asked TJ for, the cameras.”

“Yeah, he set it up. I finessed it a little afterward, just to ensure better coverage and to harden its protection. It’s working now, but we won’t know how it’ll hold up unless someone actually attacks again.”

“I have faith in your talent. Besides, if it doesn’t work, you’re fired.”

He smiles faintly at that, nothing more.

“Any messages from Dave?” I ask.

“About the shells? No, I haven’t heard anything. You got any ideas?”

“I have one. No clue if it will pan out or not.”

“Well,” Prender says evenly “one’s better than none.”

The guy says everything evenly, in the same steady way. I can tell that it’ll start to get on my nerves one day, like Carmen’s weird moods.

“Yeah, I guess it’s better than nothing.”

“You going home?”

“No, take me to Cloud City. No point in dragging things out.”

I lean back in my seat and close my eyes. I just got off the jet and I’m tired of sitting still, but there’s nothing to do until we get to Max’s. Maybe it’s all the time I spent in the Mexican heat, but I fall asleep without a further thought. The next thing I know the gate to Cloud City is opening for us. Prender takes us up the long, perfect, gravel drive and stops in front of the main house.

“Park here,” I tell him. “I’m going to talk to James Jerome. I want you to check on Carmen and TJ, make sure they’re not overworking themselves, ok?”

“Sure,” he says, switching off the engine.

“Be subtle, all right? Just act like you’re curious about what they’re doing.”

Prender gives me a pained look, as though he doesn’t need to be told. Maybe he doesn’t, but I don’t want Carmen and TJ to think that I doubt their abilities. At the same time, I know both of them well, and the fact is that knowing when to quit is not a strong point with either of them.

Inside the house I ask one of the staff to show Prender to security, while I go out back to find a cart. On the way I note the new cameras: at doorways, in the hallways, everywhere. No one’s bothered to hide them, which is fine. If there’s another attack and seeing them acts as a deterrent, great. If the attacker comes ahead anyway, maybe we’ll at least be able to see who’s after us. I ride out to Jerome’s and on the way I wonder how best to approach the subject of his relationship with Porsche, given that it might compromise his job and make him a suspect at the same time. Nearing the familiar Victorian mansion, I decide on a direct approach. With someone as wily as Jerome nothing short of a blunt, direct, frontal attack is going to catch him off guard, which is where I want him.

I enter, not even having called first to announce myself. Jerome is sitting at his desk, scanning financial data on the holo. His expression turns sour when he sees me.

“You know, I do have other things to do. You might have made an appointment.”

He quickly minimizes the display so I can’t see what he was working on.

“Sorry,” I say without sincerity, “there wasn’t time.”

“For a call?” he asks, incredulous. I seem to have made him suspicious already and I realize that coming unannounced was a miscalculation. I want him lulled and confident until I hit him with the information about Porsche.

“I apologize,” I say with more feeling this time “I just got off a call with one of my operatives as I was driving over.”

It seems to mollify him.

“Well, now that you’re here, let’s try to make it fast.”

At that moment my kaikki chirps.

“Sorry,” I say again. I’ve never apologized so much to someone and meant it so little. I pick up the line. “Burroughs.”

“Gat? It’s Dave.”

I turn away from Jerome and drop my voice a little.

“What’s up Dave?”

“You tell me.”

“Meaning what?”

“Well, I’m standing in a pretty fucken’ luxurious condo belonging to a woman named Porsche Prince. Daughter of Max Prince they tell me.”

Alarm bells go off in my head in a deafening din, but I try to ignore them.

“And?”

“And Ms. Prince is officially deceased.”

I try not to miss a beat, but I probably do.

“So why are you calling me?”

“The thing is, I was surprised to find your kaikki ID, the private one, among the, oh, five, ten thousand IDs in her unit. You know her, I guess?”

“Yeah, I know her. Knew her,” I correct myself.

“The kaikki’s log also shows that you were one of the people she called most recently.”

“That’s probably true.” I say in a non-committal way.

“Okaaay, progress. Now here’s the thing. You’re automatically a suspect so I shouldn’t even talk to you, but fuck that, all right? I need information and I thought you might be able to enlighten me.”

“If I can, I will, you know that.”

“I know we were in the Forces together, but I also know that if you killed this little quiff you won’t tell me shit. Still, I thought I’d try, just in case you might be innocent.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Dave. What do you want?”

“Somebody came up here, apparently without Ms. Prince trying to stop him, and then he cut her up like a fucking Christmas turkey. You know, blood everyfuckingwhere. Right now, where I’m standing, I got blood above my head on the ceiling.” I hear his voice strain a little as he looks straight up. “That’s got to be arterial.”

He’s trying to rattle me and he’s not doing a bad job of it. As much as I disliked and distrusted Porsche Prince, I don’t like the images he’s putting into my head.

“Did you have a question?”

“Sure,” he replies lightly. “First let me tell you there was no robbery even though there’s valuable stuff all over the place. There was no rape even though—judging by the very immodest holos this girl kept of herself—on a scale of one to ten she was, I dunno, a fucking sixty or something. There was nothing but a murder. That makes is something personal, I figure, but even then you’d think whoever did it would try to at least make it look like a robbery, right? Nuh uh. Not a thing amigo.”

“Mysterious.”

“It gets more fucken’ mysterious, my man. There is one patch of blood that’s different from the rest. So this is my question: why would someone chop up Ms. Prince and then dip her hand—her detached hand, by the way—in her own blood and use it to make a handprint on the wall? Any ideas?”

Oh shit. The Suerte never give something without taking something, Gat, not ever, Machiko’s voice repeats in my head. Suarez’s favour to me didn’t cost me anything because he did it for the Ghosts, but by helping me he also helped Max and apparently that debt was not put on the Ghost’s tab.

“I’ve got an idea, yeah.”

“You want to share?”

“Sure, but not at this moment, ok? I’ll come down to L.A.P.D headquarters later and submit to questioning voluntarily. No lawyer, no right to silence bullshit, nothing. In exchange, you give me a few hours, ok? It might even get you more answers.”

There is a long pause on the other end of the line.

“Gatineau if you weren’t Forces I’d tell you to fuck yourself and I’m damn close anyway. Okay. Three hours. I want your ass downtown and you run your mouth.”

“Three hours. You got it.”

I hang up and face Jerome again. Porsche’s murder shakes me up, but it doesn’t change the facts. It’s obvious that the Suerte decided she was a more appetizing prospect than her grandfather, and beyond that they felt they were owed a debt by Max Prince. But Jerome is still my main suspect in the original attack. The only thing that’s changed is that now I have some real ammunition to shake his calm façade.

“Are you quite finished?” he asks acidly.

“Yes, thanks. Porsche Prince has been murdered. Diced might be a more accurate description.”

Jerome sinks into his seat, the expression on his face unreadable. Then he smiles. Then he laughs. It sounds perfectly genuine.

“Well that’s the best news I’ve had all week.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh don’t get all high an mighty with me about the value of human life and all that shit, Burroughs. You were in Tijuana, you know exactly how much a human life is worth. The point is that Porsche was a pain in the ass, and an expensive one too. Her absence will make life much simpler for the whole estate.”

His reaction is so far from what I expected that I’m not sure what to say.

“You had a relationship with her.”

His face reddens at that, but he forces himself to be calm.

“I fucked her if that’s what you mean, along with half of Los Angeles. Do you intend to relay that information to Mr. Prince?”

The possibility that I might tell his boss is the only thing that seems to worry him about the situation. He’s certainly not breaking down in grief.

“Only if it’s relevant to the investigation,” I say, leaving the affair hanging over his head. It might be useful as leverage at some point.

He takes it badly, but controls himself. He isn’t used to be toyed with and he doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t want to find out what kind of tantrum Max might throw if I spill his little secret.

I’m not in the best mood myself. I suddenly realize that I have no theories left. Suarez is almost certainly no longer a suspect, and Jerome has just cleared himself pretty convincingly. The idea that he tried to kill Max for Porsche’s sake has been made ridiculous by what just happened. The only suspect I have left is Porsche, who’s been sucked into the land of muerte, and I had doubts about her to begin with.

There’s a moment of silence between Jerome and I, then my kaikki trills again. I answer it.

“Gat, it’s TJ, you better get over here right away.”

“What’s up?”

“We have a breach.”

“What?”

I see a look of consternation cross Jerome’s face at the tone of my voice.

“Same thing as before. Cameras caught a guy coming over the wall, then he just disappeared.”

“What about our own cameras?”

“We won’t know until they reach the house. They aren’t set up at the perimeter.”

“Prender and Carmen with you?”

“Yeah boss. But Gat... ”

“In daytime too—they’ve got balls. Everyone armed?”

“Yup. Gat I have to tell you... ”

“What for fuck’s sake?”

“It’s not just one this time.”

“How many?”

“I’d guess about twenty, but it’s easy to lose track. You can only see them for a second and then they disappear man.”

Calisse, as my grandmother used to say.

“I’m on my way. Where’s Max?”

Jerome’s expression grows even more tense.

“In sim in the lounge.”

“Get him out. Get him over to security. Do it yourself.”

“You got it.”

“What’s going on?” Jerome demands as I end the call.

“It’s another attack. Same as before.”

I don’t see any point in telling him right now that it’s a small army this time.

“You can’t stop it?”

“I’m trying to, now shut up and get going. We’re going to the main house.”

That’s easier said than done, however. No sooner have I taken the wheel of the little cart, with Jerome in the passenger seat, than the Dogs erupt. You’d think they’d be less eerie in daylight, but they aren’t. They’re huge and loud and dangerous and they’re a lot scarier in real life than in a simulation. The only thing that prevents us from being killed instantly is that the Dogs are busy attacking each other, just as they did before. It doesn’t mean they won’t attack us as well though.

Near the lake one of them has grabbed a groundkeeper, taking his waist in its maw. It shakes him back and forth like a rabbit as he screams, blood flying in bright red arcs in the sunshine. For a moment the man manages to get his feet on the ground, but his own blood has made it slippery and he loses purchase immediately. Not that it matters—there’s nothing he can do against a dog. It tosses him high in the air, and as he rises against the blue of the sky, arms waving, I can see his waist is nearly severed. The dog leaps after him, reaching him again as he begins to plummet back to earth, and cuts him in two with a swipe of its paw. The two halves of the man fall—plop, plop—onto the grass. The dog disappears in midair, reduced once again to billions of nanobots floating on the breeze, ready to reconfigure on a moment’s notice and attack anyone or anything: another staff member, a fellow Dog, or us.

I race the cart as fast as it will go, but I don’t bother drawing my gun. It wouldn’t make a dent in one of these things, so right now evasive maneuvering is my only weapon. Everywhere around us the Dogs are appearing, grappling with each other, and disappearing again. I weave around them as best I can, trying to avoid running into one while escaping another.

Suddenly a Dog rears up directly in our path and I pull hard to the right. The thing bounds toward us and is only stopped when another appears in front of it and grabs its head in those vice-like jaws. They snarl and howl at each other for an ear-splitting moment, then—poof—they’re gone again. I correct course and aim us back toward the house, trying desperately to keep control of the little cart.

We’re within fifty metres of the house when a dog appears out of thin air in a crouch in front of us and launches itself. I have no time to react. Its path takes it straight at Jerome and in a moment his head is neatly sheared from his body. I veer left, trying to shake the dog loose from the cart, and it falls to one side, then disappears again. Jerome’s body remains where it is. His neck becomes a geyser as what’s left of him bobs in the seat beside me. For the second time in as many days I’m showered with someone else’s blood.

Perversely, it’s in this moment—blood-soaked, effectively unarmed, and damned close to panic—that everything falls into place in my mind. The paradoxes of the case that have been gnawing away at me suddenly resolve themselves into a pattern in which each piece fits. Now all I have to do is live long enough to do something about it. I hope with everything in me that my theory’s right, because if it is then the Dogs won’t kill me. Until I get to the house, though, I have no way of being sure.

In another minute I’m at the back door. I jump out of the cart, only to find that the sliding glass doors have been locked automatically by the security system. A dog appears on my right. I pull my gun, shoot out the door, and dive through, hoping like hell that the beasts are programmed not to enter the house. When I glance back again, the dog is gone.

I race through the kitchen toward security. I’m almost there when I pause and take a card from my pocket, entering the ID on it hurriedly, hoping against hope that I'll actually get an answer. Right now it's the only thing that can make this come out right. The kaikki at the other end chirps once, twice, three times. Then it’s picked up.

“Suarez,” comes the answer. On the other end is the dark angel of Mexico, Porsche’s killer, the self-proclaimed prophet of eternal life—and my only possible ally.

Twenty-Three: Six or Seven Shots Through The Wall

My conversation with Suarez lasts less than a minute. The moment it’s over I enter the security office. Immediately there are three guns aimed at me.

“Arms down, fucking down.”

The guns lower. Carmen, TJ, and Prender look relieved that I’m not the assassin, or that they haven’t shot their boss, or both. Then TJ sees the blood.

“Gat, your hurt!”

“Not my blood.” I’m getting used to telling people that.

Max Prince approaches me, white as a ghost. I can smell the alcohol on his breath, but he seems to have been scared into sobriety.

“Can you stop them?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I hope so.”

“You hope so? Well I fucking hope so too. Those fuckers are trying to execute me.”

I don’t bother answering. Alan is standing, gazing at a holo of the scene outside. I ignore everyone else.

“Alan, make it stop.”

He turns to me.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

I smack my gun across his face, snapping his head to one side, even though I know he can’t feel pain except as to perceive it as a further bit of data to assimilate.

“Don’t fuck with me Alan. I know what’s going on.”

“I don’t,” he says, wiping a trickle of blood from the lip of the shell he’s inhabiting.

Suddenly I hear a burst of gunfire that sounds like it’s coming from inside the house.

“Gat,” Carmen says, flashing through data on her holo “we have three inside already. They’re moving in this direction and executing staff along the way.”

Apparently our closed circuit camera system is working despite the failure of the house’s systems. Now that I know what’s going on, I’m not surprised.

“What’s happening?” Max wails. “Don’t let them kill me.”

“No one’s going to kill you Max. They’ll kill your staff, but they won’t kill you. Or me.” I turn to Alan. “And they had better fucking well not kill any of my people either.” The gunfire continues, and outside I can hear the Dogs raging and clashing with one another.

“Mr. Burroughs... ” Alan begins.

“Shut up. Tell me this. You said you were conducting experiments with simulating human emotions.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Why are you just standing there talking?” Max screams. I push him into a chair and he lands on his fat ass with a whoofing sound.

“Shut up Max!” I turn back to Alan. “Tell me why you did the experiments.”

He shrugs, as if nothing could be more innocent.

“Very often in humans it is emotion that forms the foundation of the protective impulse. My ultimate purpose is protection and my architecture is designed to seek out ways to improve my effectiveness in carrying out that purpose. One of those ways was to simulate human emotions because of the possibility that it would make me a more effective security device.”

“Gat one of them’s getting close,” Carmen interjects.

“TJ?”

“Got it,” TJ says, rising fluidly from his chair and moving to the door. He opens it and waits a beat, then goes out low, rolls, and lets off five quick shots. The intruders may be invisible to the house sensors, but the human eye can see them perfectly well. TJ stands up and is just returning when he whirls again and lets off another shot, at the same time spinning involuntarily, hit in the hip. Everyone in the room instinctively drops to the floor.

“Prender!”

TJ falls back into the room as Prender stands and lets off six or seven shots through the wall. He’s not the shot that TJ is, but he seems to find his mark since the shots from the hallway stop. He pulls TJ farther into the room and cautiously checks the hall, confirming his kill. I grab Alan by the lapel of his suit and yank him to his knees from his prone position on the floor.

“TJ, how bad?” I ask, not letting go of the AI.

“Just winged me man, but it hurts like a motherfucker.”

I turn back to Alan.

“Humans protect each other to the extent that they care about one another, that was your thinking?”

“Correct.”

“But for your method to be effective, you would have to actually experience the emotions. You do, don’t you?”

“As best I can tell, yes, although I have no experience as a human to compare it to.”

“You feel emotions.”

“Yes.”

“And the object of your protective impulse is Max, so he is also the object of your emotions.”

“That is true.”

“And you would naturally seek the most powerful protective motivator.”

“Yes, of course.”

“One more UIF moving closing on our location,” Carmen announces “three more into the house.” Her contradictory emotional responses are at full tilt, making her voice almost soothing as she says it.

“And the most powerful protective motivator is love,” I say to Alan.

“Yes.”

Prender and TJ take up positions by the door, TJ bracing himself against the doorframe to remain upright despite the wound on his hip.

“You love Max Prince,” I tell Alan.

Alan holds his head high. “I do.”

“What?” This from Max.

“Shut up Max,” I say, then turn back to Alan. “You didn’t just choose Alan Turing because he was the father of all AIs. You also chose him because he was gay. You programmed yourself to love Max, but you’d been given a male gendered persona, so you chose Turing, who was gay, to keep your shell consistent with your affection.”

“Yes. That is true.”

The gesture is both logical and sentimental, representing Alan’s dual existence. It strikes me that embodying both impulses made Alan more genuinely human than any AI I’ve encountered.

At that moment, TJ and Prender fire simultaneously, apparently taking out the approaching bogie.

“Total of six in the house now,” Carmen announces. Her voice is almost dreamy.

“And your love for him, combined with your overriding protection architecture, combined in such a way that you would do anything to protect him. Literally anything, even hurt him.”

“Now you’re talking nonsense.”

“No, I’m not. Let me tell you about it. You think Max is insufficiently protected.”

“He is. This breach and the one before prove it.”

“You want more security for him. So you arranged the breach to show that the present security arrangements are inadequate.”

“Rubbish.”

“No, actually it was quite an effective plan. We’ve all been running around trying to figure out how someone got past security, but we would never have figured it out because of the data burn you pulled. Eventually the only logical decision would have been to beef up the security somehow.”

“I still say it’s a fantasy.”

“The attacker was a shell, one you acquired for just this purpose. He was never supposed to kill Max, just wound him so that you could convince him that his security was inadequate. That’s why, even though he made it through the Dogs and everything else, he didn’t fire a killshot. He was never meant to. He wounded Max and then ran off, pretending to panic. The ones that are attacking now might kill my people, but they won’t kill Max either.”

“This is absurd,” Alan says, still calm.

“But here’s where your plan fucked up Alan,” I say, not paying attention to his protests, “you set up a bunch of suspects, red herrings, to keep attention away from you: Porsche, the Suerte, even Jerome. But when you did that, you attracted the attention of the Suerte for real. They killed Porsche, you know.”

Max shows no reaction to the news, or perhaps he doesn’t hear.

“I didn’t know that,” Alan says.

“No, you’ve been too busy running this intrusion to scoop L.A.P.D. comm in the last few minutes. They just found her. What you also don’t know is that the Suerte have now set their sights on Max for real. Your plan got them thinking about him and now they have every intention of gathering his crop of good luck.”

“That’s not possible. I ran the probabilities on their targeting him.”

“Yes you did, but your results were inconclusive. Jerome told me as much. You don’t believe they’re after him? I talked to them, I know it’s true. You can use the house sensors to check my galvanic skin responses, pupil dilation, respiration, all of that stuff. Read the data for yourself and see if I’m telling the truth.”

Alan looks at me for a moment that feels very long. Outside the Dogs howl and screech, attacking anything in sight. Inside the house more gunfire erupts, presumably more staff being gunned down.

“Do it!” I command him.

“I already have. The sensors in the house are very sensitive. I know you’re telling the truth.”

“Then for god’s sake stop this stupid intrusion program you’re running.”

The Dogs howl on just long enough for me to wonder if I’ve made a terrible mistake, then fall silent.

Twenty-Four: There Is A Solution To Every Problem

I have never seen an AI cry. Of course I’ve never known one to experience human emotions before. He makes no sound in the sudden silence that’s fallen once the Dogfights and the shooting have stopped, but there are tears on his face nonetheless.

“There’s something you know about,” I say to him. “Something you want that you think will give Max better protection than he has now, and it’s military.”

“Please don’t let the Suerte get him.”

“I can probably stop them, but I need to hear the truth from you. There’s some military hardware you want.” He nods. “ArmorAll,” he says. “They’ll decommission me if they find out I scooped military comm, you know. You won’t tell them will you?”

“They’ll decommission you?” Max howls. “I’ll fucking pull your plug with my own hands!”

Max is standing again, screaming at Alan as he would at any member of his staff. He isn’t a smart man, but instinctively he’s grasped that he can treat Alan like a human now that the AI has crossed the final divide from mere intelligence into emotion. Alan turns to him, his face red with hurt and embarrassment.

“I only did this because I love you!”

Max leans down to Alan’s face to scream this time.

“Well I don’t fucking love you, you piece of shit. You had me shot! You’re not even human.”

Alan’s face seems to crumple, as though he can’t imagine that he’s heard correctly.

“Max, back off.”

He whirls on me. “Shut up Burroughs. You’re just a hired gun around here.”

I rise quickly from my knees and put my hired gun in his face.

“Back off now before I fucking kill you myself.”

I say it quietly, letting the seriousness of my tone speak for itself. Max stifles whatever he’d like to say in return and sits down again, gazing sullenly off into space. I sit on a chair beside Alan, who is still kneeling on the floor, covering his face with his hands. Carmen stares silently while Prender field-dresses TJ’s hip.

“Alan, this is part of what you have to accept when you have human emotions. You can love, but you won’t always be loved in return. We’ve all been through it.”

“I don’t understand this feeling.”

“It’s pain, Alan. Heartbreak they call it. It’s a metaphor, but it’s a pretty good one.”

“Yes. It is.”

“Tell me about ArmorAll.”

Alan gets a grip on his emotions and wipes his face with one hand, smearing his tears.

“It’s a nanocloaking device. In a sense it’s like the quarantine membranes, but in reverse—it’s designed to protect what’s inside, not the people outside, and it’s tailored to a single individual. It covers a person’s body entirely. It’s permeable to certain substances, so the person can inhale air, ingest food, excrete. But it’s impermeable to sudden, sharp pressures like bullets and punches. If Max used it he couldn’t even bruise himself by bumping into furniture when he’s drunk. It would protect him utterly from any outside threat.”

“If the military has a technology like that why didn’t you just bargain for it, like you did for the Dogs?”

“You don’t understand, the Dogs were in use by the Forces when we got them. This is still classified, experimental. They’d never let a civilian have it at this stage. I scooped their design specs and ran them in simulation and I know it would work, but I can’t tell them that. Just the fact that I know the technology exists proves that I’ve been scooping their comm. They’d decommission me and then Max would never get the technology. They’ve run their own simulations just like I did, but they still want more testing before they apply it, even on their own people.”

“But I have connections to the Forces, so you thought I could do something about it.”

“Yes, I thought if the danger was clear enough, and with the right intermediary… Mr. Burroughs, please, the Suerte.”

“I’ll take care of the Suerte, Alan, you have my word on that. They won’t harm Max.”

“Thank you.”

“And about the heartbreak. I said that all of us had experienced it at one time or another, but you have an option the rest of us don’t have.”

Despite the interference of his emotions, Alan’s logic circuits are intact. He does the math.

“To stop loving.”

“Yes,” I say quietly. “To stop loving. Everyone’s wished at one time or another that they could do it—you can. Purge your emotion subroutines. Let the feelings go and the pain will go with them.”

“I don’t know…”

“He doesn’t love you Alan.”

Alan’s face goes red for a moment, then blank. He looks down briefly, and when he looks up his expression is as calm as when I first met him.

“Thank you for your advice Mr. Burroughs. It was sound.”

“I wish it was that easy for all of us, Alan. I’m sorry to say that I have to place you under arrest.” He just nods. “It’s not just the military comm. There’s the fraud with NorCal, the people who were killed when I was attacked, the kidnapping in Mexico. For that matter there’s the question of where you got the money. I assume you siphoned it out of Max’s estate somehow?”

“I’m under arrest now?”

“Yes.”

“Then I apologize Mr. Burroughs, but I must refuse to answer any more questions without an attorney present.”

“That’s your call Alan. They’re going to decommission you, you know that.”

“There is a solution to every problem.”

I’m not sure what he means by that. That decommissioning him is the solution to the problems he’s created? Or maybe that he has some trick up his sleeve, some solution that will prevent him from being decommissioned? Whatever it is, he’s unlikely to tell me. At least without an attorney present. I call Dave and he answers immediately.

“Hey Gat! You’re inside the three hour window by, fuck, almost two hours. They should have people like you in government. You ready to come in?”

“Sure Dave, but I’ve just made a citizen’s arrest out here at Cloud City, Max Prince’s place. I think you’d better come over and make it official. We’ll need a bunch of ambulances too.”

“A bunch?” Felon asks, half laughing. “You wanna define ‘a bunch’ for me?”

“I don’t know exactly. Hang on.” I look to Alan. “You’ve been monitoring everything, how many ambulances do we need?”

“There are five injured, not counting Mr. TJ. There are nineteen staff members dead.”

“Dave? We got six down and nineteen for the coroner.”

“Fuck man, what’d you do, start a war?”

“Finished one.”

“Okay amigo. Six medicals, nineteen stiffs, and I’ll send over a bunch of officers unless you mind.”

He’s being sarcastic, but I ignore it and turn back to Alan, wondering if we need a squadron of cops to take in all the shells who’ve been shooting up the place.

“What about the shells who are left out there Alan? What’s their status?”

“They’ve been deanimated.”

“You killed them?”

“There was no other way to stop them from carrying out their orders. They weren’t simulations under control of a program, they were people I hired.”

“If they weren’t under your direct control, how did you deanimate them?”

“The Dogs.”

Jesus wept.

“How many?”

“Twenty-five.”

“You said there were nineteen dead.”

“I said nineteen staff.”

TJ had been close, but he’d miscounted by a few.

“You won’t need a squadron of cops Dave. Your sorry ass should be enough, not counting the paperwork. Everything’s done here now. When you get here I can fill you in. There are a few more stiffs though.”

“How many more?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Oh man, I can’t wait to get the skinny on this one.”

He actually sounds happy. To Felon this will just be one more juicy story.

“See you soon Dave.”

“Sooner than you think, Gat. I’m about three minutes from you now.”

“I’ll make sure the gate’s open.”

Twenty-Five: Sleep At The Edge Of The World

The ambulances and coroner’s vans arrive in force, cleaning up the mess that the shells and the Dogs have left behind. That Alan left behind, really. Felon stands in the middle of it all, out on the lawn, and marvels.

“Man, I wish I’d been here. I haven’t seen action like this since the Forces.”

I explain the basics of the story to him, leaving out my contact with the spider and the Suerte. They just aren’t things he needs to know.

“Why did this Porsche chick let her slasher into the apartment, you think?”

My honest opinion is that it had everything to do with luck, but I’m not about to say that.

“She had a lot of lovers, Dave. Maybe somebody finally got possessive. She knew him, thought she could handle him, let him in.”

“You figure it’s connected?”

“Nah, probably just a coincidence. What would Alan have against Porsche?”

“Okay, back to the attack on Max, what about the magic bullet? The one that disappeared?”

“Alan collected it and disposed of it to prevent any ballistics trace,” I say. “That’s how come you guys never found it.”

He shakes his head in wonder.

“Max Prince and Rogue AI in Love-Murder Plot as Beautiful Grand-Daughter Butchered” he recites, anticipating the next day’s headlines. “The sims are gonna cream all over this one. Can I ask you one more question?”

I want him to go, but I don’t want to offend him.

“Sure, man. What is it?”

“How the fuck did you figure out it was Alan?”

I can’t tell him the truth, obviously, but I get as close as I can.

“Too many things didn’t add up. Whoever was doing this had all this firepower, all this know-how, all this money, but somehow no one ever got killed. I mean civilians, yeah, but not Max and not me, the supposed targets. Eventually it hit me that we weren’t supposed to get killed. Once I figured that out the rest just fell into place.”

“You should consider working for the P.D., man. I’d recommend you.”

I stifle my gag reflex. He may be a psycho but in this instance he means well.

“Thanks anyway Dave. I’m better being my own boss, you know?”

“Whatever amigo. Offer’s open if you change your mind.”

Cleaning up the bodies takes hours, but in the end the last coronor’s van leaves. The CSIs are still here, but at the moment they’re all inside. Felon graces me with a blast from his horn as he heads down the long driveway and Max and I are left standing on the lawn in the late afternoon sun.

“Max, Porsche’s dead,” I finally say when everything else is out of the way.

“I heard you before,” he says. He shows no more reaction than he did the first time, and I’m left to wonder what, if anything, she ever meant to him. Nothing, I suspect, except a potential heir, blood of his blood. Her shortcomings, even her evil, become more understandable looking at his untroubled face.

“What about the Suerte?” he finally asks. “Was that real?”

“You know it was. Alan would never have believed me otherwise.”

“Can you really call them off?”

I look out over the grounds for a moment, taking in the wealth, the status, the power he wields—this weird, stunted, bloated, human.

“Yes, with a single call.”

“Can I assume you’ll make that call?”

“No.”

“What?”

“I said no, you can’t assume it. It can happen, but you can’t fucking assume it. Is that clear enough for you?”

“But you promised Alan,” he says, suddenly acting indignant on behalf of the broken-hearted AI he just abused.

“Alan will be decommissioned. He’ll never know the difference.”

Max looks furious and frantic at the same time.

“What do you want? A bonus? How about five-hundred-thousand? That should cover anything, don’t you think?”

I am thinking, but not about his five-hundred-thousand dollars landing in my bank account. I’m thinking about the dreams I had in Mexico City, about all the dreams I’ve had since I got back from Tijuana. I’m thinking about Damita and all the other Damitas, half a million in Mexico City alone according to Ramon’s estimate.

“I don’t want your money Max. Just my fee will do.”

He glares at me, looking like a child ready to throw a tantrum. He hasn’t had any alcohol or drugs in hours now and it’s made his a worse person, not a better one.

“Well what the fuck do you want?”

“We’re talking about your life Max.”

“I know that,” he says, forcing his voice into a low growl.

“It’s in my hands. I can make a call and get the Suerte off your back.” I turn to him and look him in the eye to make sure he understands the next part. “And at any time in the future I can make a call and put them right back on your fat ass.”

“What do you want?” he whispers, grinding his teeth.

“In exchange for your life? I want you to take a fifth of your estate, whatever that is, millions anyway.”

“You fucking bet it’s millions.”

“And I want you to set up a charity, to be run by an arm’s-length board that you can’t control or influence, on behalf of the street kids of Mexico City.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“And Tijuana,” I add impulsively.

“You’re serious.”

I spin quickly and punch him once in his huge paunch, just because it feels so good to finally do it. He crumples to his knees clutching his belly.

“Yes, I’m serious. Do it or the Suerte will be putting your handprint on a wall.”

“Fine,” he gasps, trying to catch his breath back. “Fine, whatever, just get the fuck out of here and make sure they don’t come near me.”

For the first time in a long time I smile.

“Suits me.”

I start toward Jenna’s van where Prender’s been waiting behind the wheel, then stop and turn back.

“Oh Max, I’ll send you a list of names, the people who’ll be on the board, you understand?”

He’s on his feet now, but still bent over, hands on his knees like a tired long-distance runner. He glares at me, but he nods.

“And I’ll send the name of an accountant. You’ll give him access to all your books so we can figure out just exactly how much a fifth of your estate is. You’re gonna make sure he gets access to everything, right?”

“Fine. Get the fuck out,” he croaks.

“Don’t make me doubt you, Max. Don’t ever make me doubt you.”

I get into the van.

“Drive.”

But Prender can’t wait to ask. He puts the van in gear but keeps his foot on the brake.

“Gat, how the fuck did you get Alan to believe that the Suerte were after Max?”

“They were, now drive.”

He releases the brake and we roll down the driveway.

“You told me yourself that they weren’t.”

“They weren’t—until I called Suarez and asked him to put Max on his list, subject to me being able to take him off the list again.”

“And Suarez went along with it?”

We finally leave the estate and I look out at the road ahead.

“I’ll pay for it someday, I’m sure.”

I leave all the beauty and ugliness of Cloud City behind me, feeling cleaner with every kilometer I put between me and Max’s poisoned palace.

I shouldn’t feel good, I suppose. As Suarez says, Max is busy hurling himself off the edge of the world. Poor Alan will be decommissioned over the edge, Porsche has been shoved over it, James Jerome pulled over it by the Dogs.

Nonetheless, maybe I’ll succeed in pulling a few people back from the brink. I think of Damita and it occurs to me that tonight, for once, I might sleep in something like peace. I have no idea how Vicente Suarez will levy the debt I owe him but for the moment, with the prospect of a dreamless night ahead, I don’t really care.

Facts in the Fiction

Introduction: Mad Dogs and Robot Men

If you're like me and you enjoy getting a look behind the scenes of movies and books, this section is for you.

Luck and Death at the Edge of the World is a work of fiction, but many of the details in the story come from the real world. In this section I'll talk about a few of those details and provide links to more information for anyone who's interested.

You can find additional materials and updates to this section at www.LuckAndDeath.com, which will continue to evolve.

Notes Regarding Links:

- All of the links are functional as of the date of publication and I've tried to link to the most stable pages I could find on any given topic so that the linked material won't disappear. If you find a link that needs updating or replacing, by all means drop me an email at nas@nassauhedron.com .

- Using stable links often means using Wikipedia and other sources that, while not perfect from the standpoint of scholarly erudition, can be counted on to be around into the foreseeable future. Where possible I've included other links as well for those who might want to go a little deeper.

- Where a link connects to something other than a web page, like a PDF file, I've labelled it. All unlabelled links go to web pages.

One: A City in the Clouds

In Luck and Death, Max's home is Cloud City, a dream-like estate that's been turned into something of a nightmare by its owner's madness.

When I created Cloud City, I had a number of real world precedents in mind. Here are three of the main ones, starting with the most recent and working back to the oldest and most important of all.

Neverland Ranch

The most recent of the estates I looked at when I conceived of Cloud City was Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. Even more than Max's home, Jackson's ranch was explicitly designed to insulate everyone inside it from the outside world...

The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos.  The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.

Two: The Robots Go to the Dogs

One of the mysteries about the attempt on Max Prince’s life is how the would-be assassin got past the Dogware.

Like many things in science fiction, Dogware is an extrapolation of current technologies. It incorporates several real threads into one fictional system:

- nanorobotics,

- robot swarms, and

- military robotics.

Nanorobotics

Nanorobotics is a branch of nanotechnology, which deals with creating materials and devices on molecular scales. Manipulating matter at the level of the molecule allows you to create materials with specific properties and to build microscopic devices that can be deployed for very fine work, sometimes inside our bodies...

The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos.  The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.

Three: Mutant Diseases Spread By Hard-to-Kill Bugs

One of the things that’s changed about the world since Gat went into stasis is the prevalence of new infectious diseases.

Like the Dogware, though, this is really just an extrapolation of current trends – I’ve taken existing problems with regard to infectious diseases and the insects that can transmit them and intensified them by adding the problems that come with the Fall.

Putting aside the Fall, though, both of the basic ingredients that Gat describes actually exist already: we have overused (and misused) antibiotics in treating ourselves and our livestock in such a way as to create antibiotic-resistant infections and we have overused pesticides with the result that we have created pesticide-resistant insects that can infect us with those diseases...

The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos.  The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.

Four: Ghosts Living in Shells

In Luck and Death, a "shell" is an artificially produced human body into which a person’s consciousness can be decanted.

Using a shell can provide a survival strategy for people who are aging, injured, or ill, or can be used to provide a person with an optimized body, like the military shell Gat receives when he enters the California National Forces. Shells are expensive, though, so it's not something that's available easily.

The notion of uploading a human consciousness into an artificial body seems inherently science fictional--even moreso than nanobot swarms--but in this area, too, preliminary research has begun with the goal of making uploading a reality.

For an overview of of some of the issues involved in whole brain emulation -- that is, creating an exact, functional model of a person's brain and embodying it in an artificial device -- you might want to read the paper Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap, by Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom. It's available here in PDF...

The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos.  The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.

Five: Alan the A.I. + Alan Turing, Human Being

In Luck and Death, the artificially intelligent entity that governs the security system at Cloud City is named Alan.

Alan normally lives within the Cloud City security system itself, with no need for anything like a human body. After the attempt on Max’s life, however, Alan is decanted into a human shell to make it easier for Gat and his team to interact with him. This temporary body is, in effect, a user interface.

The shell that Alan chooses for himself is tailored to look like a real person, British computer pioneer Alan Turing. To understand why, it helps to know something about Turing’s incredible life...

The Short Life and Awesome Times of Alan Turing

Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912. As I write this (in August 2012), the hundredth anniversary of his birth has just passed. This is the official Alan Turing Year, celebrated with events in more than twenty countries. Turing died by suicide on June 7, 1954, just before his forty-second birthday.

In his brief life, Turing accomplished more than most of us could ever dream of doing. He didn’t do it alone, but it’s probably not going too far to say that world history and the current state of technology would have been drastically different without him...

The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos.  The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.

Six: A Down to Earth Dharma

One non-technological aspect of Luck and Death that will be new to some readers is Gat's secular dharma practice.

In this context, dharma refers to the body of teachings of Siddhattha Gotama (also written Siddhārtha Gautama). Gotama is often called the Buddha and the principles he taught are the foundation of Buddhism. Gotama was a real person who lived in the Indian subcontinent around 500 BCE.

To have a secular dharma practice means to apply the dharma to your life, but in a naturalistic manner. This generally means practicing meditation and studying Gotama's insights into human experience, but without any dependency on belief in the mystical elements associated with traditional Buddhism, such as reincarnation...

The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos.  The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.

Preview: Felon and the Judas Kiss

About the Book

Click to get your copy of Felon and the Judas Kiss instantly from Kobo or Amazon.

Read samples and get bonus material on the Felon and the Judas Kiss home page.

____________________

Dave 'Felon' Fellows is a cheerful sadist. He thrived during his time in the California National Forces, especially during the incursion into Tijuana for 'civilian pacification.'

Calvin Hearn lost his mind in the brutal Tijuana operation, and although he's much recovered since then he's still haunted -- awake or asleep -- by the ghosts of that massacre.

Now Felon is an LAPD officer, while Hearn is a pastor ministering to the Angeleno homeless, and together they're at the center of events that could soon tear the city apart.

____________________

One: Keep the Krill in Check

Felon enters the St. Francis Mission dragging a cloud of bad memories behind him like a viscous miasma.  Ghosts, sombras, and yaojing.  Terrible sprites and polluted spirits. Haunted things peer out: curious, hungry, angry, anguished, avid.

Inside the mission is a small meeting room: wooden floors polished smooth by years of footsteps, orange curtains blocking the front windows, mismatched chairs in place of pews, dust motes drifting in the air. It’s tidy, well-kept, but it isn’t much. There’s a pulpit at the back, around which a tiny crowd is gathered.

The crowd isn’t much either, seven homeless and a pastor. The pastor wears jeans and a t-shirt, running shoes on his feet. The homeless – a young couple and five friends – wear whatever they have. The memories surrounding Felon begin to fill up the room. They have a characteristic odor: death and gun oil.

The people at the front notice, turn. The homeless can’t see the nightmares, but they can smell the stink of bad karma. In any event, they don’t need spiritual repugnance to make them uncomfortable: they take in Felon’s uniform and the LAPD motorcycle helmet held loosely in his left hand. They shuffle, then begin to file out through a hallway that leads deeper into the mission. To a back door, Felon guesses. No one uses the front door – they’d have to pass him and his haunts to get to it and no one wants to do that.

He watches them go, looks upward at nothing in particular, raises his arms a little, then lets them fall back to his sides in a listless gesture of exasperation. He shakes his head and looks down again. Walks slowly toward the pulpit, still shaking his head. The pastor watches him, waiting. He can see Felon’s ugly writhing wake, but keeps his face expressionless all the same.

“Well fuck, father, I didn’t know there was a wedding.”

The pastor is tall and thin, with light brown skin and an Afro that’s begun to recede a little from his high forehead. His most striking feature is a pair of huge, expressive eyes that seem to brim with a variety of contradictory emotions: filled with good humor and limned with sadness, gentle and a little stern at the same time.

“I’m not a ‘father’ Dave, that’s the Catholic Church. I’m non-denominational.”

“Whatever. Okay.”  Felon waves a placating hand, and the phantasms swirl in its passage, the smell of smoke wafting. “I did check the sign is my point. Out front. Didn’t say anything about a ceremony today.”

Pastor Calvin Hearn cocks his head to one side, assessing the man in front of him. The memories cling to Felon, covering his face in a caul of unwatchable images.

“They don’t put up signs and send out invitations, Dave,” Hearn says softly, “they’re homeless.”

“Well then I guess they can start up again as soon as I’m gone, seeing as how it’s so informal” Felon says. He intends this to be rough good humor, but there’s a sour expression on his face.

Cal Hearn sighs. He’s trying to keep his temper under control and so far he’s doing a pretty good job. He seems more tired than angry. He gives no indication that he sees the brutal visions Felon’s dragged into his place of worship, profaning it.

“What do you want Dave?”

“Me?  Nothing. LAPD wants some information, though, so here I am.”

“Information about what?”

“Some homeless have been doing these little break-ins. It’s all nickel and dime stuff, stores that can’t afford modern security. Wired alarms, antiques. Homeless show up, smash a window or two. Before the P.D. can get there they run off with some food, bottles of booze. Maybe clothes, whatever. Honestly?  I could give a shit. There’s murders out there I could be working. Chief doesn’t give a shit either, but he’s gotta throw the people a bone, you know?” He shrugs. “Shopkeepers, fishmongers, what have you. Let them know he isn’t only looking after the big corporations.”

“He isn’t?”

Felon gives a humorless smile, points a finger.

“Dry wit, Cal. Dry wit. With a straight face too. Fact is, the Chief doesn’t care any more than I do, but it’s an election year. President is up in Sacramento with the CEOs of the 500. He needs a majority in the Council of Electors, so he’s horse-trading and threatening and bribing and pulling skeletons out of closets and pouring booze and paying for hookers and all the other good stuff that makes California a great and democratic nation. He needs a majority, two-hundred and fifty-one minimum, and for that he’s gotta convince them that he can preserve the civic peace, right?  Disorder is bad for business, hombre. So his bogeymen spread the word: keep the krill in check. Last thing he needs is a simcast story about how some gang of homeless in L fucken’ A have decided to just take what they want.”

Hearn eyes Felon, lets a pause hang in the air. He puts his hands behind his back. To him it feels like an authoritative stance, defiance of the ghosts and fears that dance in the air in front of him. To Felon it makes the pastor look like he’s handcuffed.

“And how am I supposed to help the President win re-election?”

Felon shrugs again.

“It’s your neighborhood. Last break and enter was two blocks from here, liquor store on Yucca.”

“So?”

Felon gestures around him with his arms.

“So every street-rat in the area comes here, everybody knows that. They lip-synch a few hymns, snore through a sermon, and then you feed them. Sometimes, as I discovered today, you marry them to each other. You know them.”

Hearn rolls his eyes. It’s getting harder to appear blasé as Felon’s ghosts call to his own, to the memories buried deep inside him.

“You actually think I know who did it?”

“Fuck no. But you know the people. I got street names. Cairo, Caníbal, Dark Dan, a few others.”

“And you want me to put faces to the names.”

“Well I can’t look up their addresses and come pay them a visit, can I?” Felon growls, frustrated. “A couple of names is all, maybe places where they hang out. Or I could put a camera in here, covert. One comes in, you give a us the nod, be subtle. We won’t even take them from here, you have my word. We’ll pace them for a while once they leave and grab them somewhere else. No one will know.”

Hearn finally steps from behind the pulpit. He moves forward and stands face to face with Felon. He’s a gaunt man, but he’s the same height as Felon is. It costs him a lot to come this close. The air around Felon is thick with chaos, with murder.  With sound: swearing, crying, whimpering, slavering. Inwardly Hearn is losing control, but outwardly it doesn’t show yet.

“No.”

“I saved your life, Hearn.”

“Yes you did, but I’d give it up for these people if I had to, do you get that?”  Now an angry flush rises to his face. “I’m ready to die for my flock if I have to. I’m certainly not going to betray them to you.”

“Betray?” Felon bellows, inches from Hearn’s face. “Betray what?  The people I’m talking about are criminals, or didn’t you hear me? It’s right in your damned commandments: thou shalt not steal.”

Despite the feeling of standing on a precipice, of nearly being absorbed into the ugliness Felon carries with him, Hearn laughs through a sneer.

“You getting moral on me Dave?  You of all people?” He shakes his head. “Do you really think that people like you and me have any right to judge these people for a few petty thefts?  No way. No Judas kisses from me old buddy.”

“Don’t make me fuck with you Hearn.”

“You don’t outrank me any more Felon, and you don’t scare me any more either.”  His voice has become thin, a dangerous hiss, despite his attempts to control it. “You think we’re still back in the Forces?  Take a look around you.”

Felon, suddenly calm, does a slow turn, taking in the whole room, then looks Cal Hearn up and down.

“I don’t see jack, Hearn.”

Cal Hearn stands in a room filled to the ceiling with ghosts, crowded with them. The spirits of children run in fear from one wall to another, then on to the next, endlessly, as though trapped.  They climb the walls like geckos and hide behind the pulpit. Phantom horses charge in the aisles. The echoes of gunfire, years old, reverberate in the small room.  Somewhere in the distance is the thud, thud, thud of mortars.

“No, you just don’t know how to see, Felon. You never did.”

Felon wags a finger in Hearn’s face, saying nothing, then turns to leave. The pastor watches him go, then strides across the room and locks the mission’s front door. Outside he hears Felon revving the engine of his monster motorcycle. Hearn stays at the door, his hands flat against its wood, until the last echo of the engine disappears.  Behind him the ghosts are still there.

Preview: Los Angeles Honey

About the Book

Click to get your copy of Los Angeles Honey instantly from Kobo or Amazon.

Read samples and get bonus material on the Los Angeles Honey home page.

____________________

Gat Burroughs doesn’t take domestic cases–they’re messy and people with broken marriages sometimes have more pressing things to think about than paying the investigator. But when Brian Forget’s wife shows up at his office, he makes an exception.

Gat and LAPD Officer Dave Fellows–known informally as Felon for his cheerful sadism–gave Forget a hard time during a previous case even though he hadn’t done anything wrong.

There wasn’t really a choice if Gat wanted to save his client’s life–and his own. Now, though, he feels just a little bit guilty.

The problem is that in this case almost nothing is what it seems and rather than making up for old sins, Gat’s involvement may end up getting Brian Forget killed.

The only way to stop that from happening is by solving the big, bad, very dangerous case that lurks behind the simple domestic one.

The Future is Noir

Also includes "The Facts in the Fiction," a look at the factual background to the ficitonal story, including:

- cyborg insects, how they're built and used

- the belief in luck and the case of the maneki neko

- a new twist on the science fiction trope of uploading human consciousness into an artificial body

- a look at state surveillance technology

____________________

One: The Bright Sky Presses Down

Beneath me the surface of the roof is hot—above me the bright sky presses down. Sunlight reflects from the windows of the cars in the slow-moving traffic below, dragging starbursts across my field of view. The individual sounds of the city merge into a single busy drone, the bass line supplied by the low rumble of trucks and, in the highest registers, the soprano whine of a BoneCutter tearing up concrete at a construction site around the corner. I smell sun-baked concrete, car exhaust, and spiced chicken—a typical blend of fragrances for a Chinatown afternoon.

My building’s only five stories high, so I can’t see much from my perch on one corner of the utilitarian roof. I sit cross-legged, resting my hands on the low security rail that’s meant to keep maintenance workers from falling off the edge—no one is supposed to be up here. Cars pack the streets, and in the plaza directly below me pedestrians circulate in currents and eddies. Straight ahead is a jumbled skyline. Above it, two distant jets silently lay down contrails that approach one another, cross in an immense white “X,” and then diverge, their tail ends just starting to dissipate and blur. Somewhere in the distance is the Pacific Ocean, but there’s no way to see it from such a low perch and, in any case, I’m facing the wrong direction.

I’m not meditating, as I sometimes do on this spot, just sitting and looking at the city. The nightmares of Tijuana that often disrupt my sleep and sometimes even intrude on my waking hours—hallucinatory atrocities striding down the street next to me as I go about my day—have taken a break today, as they do from time to time, leaving behind a ringing in my ears and a world where everything’s tinged with a faint glow, like an aura. At times like this my senses seem especially sharp. Every fragrance, texture, and sound seems sweeter, softer, and more melodious than usual. Every color is magically bright and even a cheap sim seems like a ballet. Eventually this dream-like state always ends and the nightmares return, but for the moment I’m enjoying their absence and letting myself swim a little in the sensory overload.

I notice a woman passing through the Gate of Filial Piety, a large Chinese arch at the entrance to the plaza. Slim, late twenties, dark hair. I can’t see her features from here, but there’s something familiar about her appearance—the shape of her face, the way she holds her purse, even her gait. Recognition hits me: that’s Annalie Frye. Then, immediately afterward: no, it isn’t. In theory it could be her granddaughter—Annalie Frye has almost certainly been dead for a hundred years or so, along with everyone else I knew at university.

I experience jarring moments like this once in a while, and I know other revenants go through the same thing. It’s unavoidable when you’ve been preserved in the limbo of stasis for a century or more before awakening in a world where almost nothing is what it was. Some people volunteered for stasis, willing test subjects travelling into the future by cancelling themselves out of the world for decades at a time. But most, like me, simply got sick with something incurable, or were injured in a way that was untreatable, and hitched a ride into the future in the hope that more advanced medicine would solve their problems.

For me it was a car accident. One moment I was twenty years old and stupidly carefree. The next moment—thanks to a collision and an insurance policy with a stasis provision—I was pushing a hundred and fifty, everyone I knew was dead, and I was wondering how to get by in an unfamiliar world. I died—at least it feels like I died—in the United States of America, then woke up in the Nation of California, with large sections of the continent reduced to feral Grey Zones. I’m told that there wasn’t even a cataclysm as such, just a kind of grotesque slippage that started slowly and then gained momentum, an uneven social and technological collapse that spread virulently in some areas while treading more gently in others, bringing down the American empire and leaving behind independent enclaves like California, Texas, and New York City, plus the unclaimed and uncivilized Grey Zones.

The woman who isn’t Annalie meets a friend, embraces her, and they enter a restaurant. As I watch them go, my kaikki chirps in my shirt pocket and I fish it out.

“Gat Burroughs.”

“Gat it’s me,” Rollie says, “There’s someone here to see you. Wants to retain us. She says she’ll only talk to you.”

“Okay Rollie.”

I pull myself out of my reverie, look around me. To my left, a cloud of tiny gnats is circling a sticky patch on the roof. I stand up and go over to look more closely: dead bird, or what’s left of one. A fan-like wing of thin, white bones with a few grey feathers clinging to it, all of it anchored to a pale segment of spine. I turn away and open the battered maintenance door with the broken lock, making my way into the coolness of the building.

Two: Remember Forget

In my current state, even the elevator ride to the lobby involves an entire world of sensory input. Instead of music, the sound system is playing an ocean soundscape today. Normally I might not even notice it, but today I take in every detail. Gulls cry and wail against a background of surf, which crashes and then sighs, and there’s a happy babble of human voices whose words you can’t quite make out, occasionally pierced by sudden laughter. I slide my fingers across one of the walls, savoring the texture of the surface, cream-colored fabric above smooth wood wainscoting. A pale violet indicator light ignites and then fades, ignites and fades, showing the number of each floor as I descend and leaving a brief afterglow each time.

I pass the upper floors—which are filled with apartments, including mine—and arrive at the lobby. The doors slide silently open on a cool space of subdued light: dark wood, red walls, gold trim. It’s old school Chinatown décor—too lavish for a lot of gwei, but I love it. I pass through a set of doors that leads from the private, residential area to the public lobby. Here there are three options to choose from. To my left is Fan’s Market, a convenience store that’s accessible from the lobby or from the street. Straight ahead is the outside world—cars and tourists and street vendors and Nouveau Asian pop music—all of it insulated behind an expanse of sound-deadening glass. To my right is the entrance to my company, Burroughs Oversight.

I go into the market first, procrastinating a little. Small brass bells suspended on a red string hang in the path of the door and ring with a glassy jangle as I enter. The interior of the store has a strong, pleasant smell of medicinal herbs and roots—there’s a large array of them in a row of wooden drawers at one end of the counter. Nanotech  processors, which didn’t exist during my pre-stasis life, are in common use for food now, and in theory they would work just as well for medicines, but the pharma companies have so far been able to restrict them to a few public domain drugs, dispensing the proprietary ones themselves, which produced an accidental . windfall for vendors of traditional medicines as well.

Mrs. Fan looks up as I come in, and given her age I say a respectful nín hao, but she just smirks. My Mandarin is lousy. I buy a small vial of ginseng extract with ginko biloba and follow it with a chrysanthemum tea. I take out my kaikki to check my lottery numbers. I could look up the official numbers myself, but I always check with Mrs. Fan. It seems like if I win there should be someone around to share the moment with, even if it’s someone I barely know.

I don’t expect to ever win big, but I’ve been buying lottery tickets ever since my run-in with the Suerte y Muerte a few months ago. The Suerte kill their victims in order to steal their good luck and the fact that it seems to work—when clearly it can’t work—fascinates me. I started thinking about luck. Good luck and bad luck. The runs of luck that statisticians tell us are an illusion but that people believe in all the same. The way that luck gives us something to latch onto, something we can affect with charms or prayers, like a lever that helps us influence the things in life that are empirically uncontrollable: storms, wars, outbreaks. We humans can’t seem to help treating luck as if it really exists, as a substance floating around in the ether, invisible but powerful, even when we know there’s no such thing. I’m sure my fascination will pass with time, but at the moment it’s fresh and it holds my attention.

So the lottery is a cross between an experiment and an obsession for me. One part of my mind can’t help getting hopeful as Mrs. Fan reads off the official numbers one by one, while the rest of me observes my own reactions with fascinated detachment as I check my own numbers on my kaikki. Today I match three digits for a hundred dollars, the kind of small win that happens from time to time, and an absurd happiness blooms inside me, like a spot of bright ink dropped into water, despite the fact that I’ve spent more on tickets than I’ve ever won.

I collect my money and leave with my tea, saying zài jiàn to Mrs. Fan. I cross the lobby, enter the office, and approach the front counter from the client side. Behind the counter is Rollie—Rolando Ciro Villanueve—a slim guy with a boyish face, long blonde hair combed straight back, a goatee, and watery blue eyes that hint at soulfulness. He looks like one of those very non-Semitic illustrations of Jesus you find in some children’s Bibles.

Of course, the body Rollie was born to looked a lot different from his current shell, more in accord with his Latino heritage. When rich folks have themselves decanted they almost always pick a shell that bears some family resemblance to the original—same color hair and eyes, similar height and build. But like me, Rollie’s ex-military. When the California National Forces decants a new recruit into a shell they prioritize functionality and don’t give a damn about matching you up with a body that looks like your husk. Rollie could be German or Scandinavian, but with a California tan.

On this side of the counter is a woman—not unattractive, but a little mousy—wearing a print dress. Dark hair to her shoulders, brown eyes, minimal makeup. She’s conventional, unremarkable.

“Can I help you Ms…”

“I’m here to retain you Mr. Burroughs.”

“Is this for you personally, ma’am?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Well, we mostly work for companies, we have a roster of regular clients.”

This isn’t entirely true, but I’m guessing that her situation is probably a domestic—a cheating spouse, an ex-husband who owes her money—and I avoid domestics. She looks flustered by my answer, but she doesn’t back down.

“But you—well, you owe it to my family.”

That’s a new one.

“Why would I owe something to your family?”

“My husband helped you. Gave you information that solved a big case, saved lives.” She begins to look cross and her voice rises a little. “He broke the rules for you and it’s not like he got anything in return.”

“Ma’am I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Brian Forget,” she says. “My husband’s name is Brian Forget.”

Three: Two Teardrops Fall

In my personal office, deep within Burroughs Oversight, Nancy Forget accepts a chair but declines coffee. She smoothes the front of her dress as she sits, holding her purse in her lap as though to keep something between herself and the world. I can smell her hand lotion—patchouli, I think. She seems like a good match to her husband: nervous, pleasant, ordinary.

I sit down.

“So, what did Brian tell you about the case?”

“Well, obviously he couldn’t say much—you said he wasn’t allowed to.” I hadn’t said anything of the kind. “But he said that you needed information from his job, from Body Works. It was the key to an important case and he helped you solve it—you and the police—even though he wasn’t really supposed to give you information without permission. He gave it to you anyway and it helped save that guy’s life. A sim star. I think it was one of the AI ones?”

It wasn’t, it was an all-too-human Max Prince, but I nod anyway.

“Anything else?”

I’m curious just how far Forget took his exaggerations. He had given us important information, but only because Felon had threatened him.

“Well, that was about it mostly. You said how it was good working with him and that he should call you if he ever needed anything because you owed him a favor. Well, now I’m asking for him.”

She thrusts her jaw out a little as though expecting me to challenge her right to call in a favor that I never actually promised to her husband, whose role in the case was far smaller and more passive than he’d made out. Correcting her seems cruel, though.

“What kind of favor did you have in mind Mrs. Forget?”

Which is when she starts crying. She pulls some tissue from her purse and I give her a moment to get her tears under control.

“Sorry,” she says, blinking eyes rimmed with pink.

“Don’t worry about it.”

There’s no point pressing her, so I let things take their course. She misses some spots with her tissue and two teardrops fall onto the front of her dress, leaving small, dark dots.

“Brian’s having an affair.”

I almost laugh. It’s not nice, but it’s automatic. I get it under control before she can notice.

“He didn’t strike me as the sort of man who would do that.”

“He is, though. He must be. He sneaks around—he thinks he’s fooling me, but he’s not.”

“You want me to repay the favor I owe him by spying on him?”

She sighs a shuddery kind of sigh.

“Look, I know he seems confident and all that when you see him at work, but outside of his job he’s actually kind of naive. This is hurting me, but it’s going to end up hurting him too—later when it goes bad. He doesn’t see that part coming. He doesn’t know that he needs help, but he does and I’m here to get it. I know I’m not exactly glamorous, I can see how he could get infatuated, but I want it to stop before things get to the point where—you know? Where you can’t go back.”

I almost never take domestic cases, they’re emotional and messy, plus cuckolded spouses are not the best payers. They have others things on their minds and sometimes their assets get frozen by the courts pending the outcome of a divorce. Still, I can feel myself leaning toward taking the case. Mrs. Forget seems nice, with her rag of a dress and her face all blotchy from crying. Besides, we had to give her husband a pretty hard time during the Max Prince case and I still feel a little guilty.

“Well, that’s a very practical approach,” I say. “I hope you’ll understand that I have to be practical as well. As a favor I can take the case even though we have a policy of not doing domestics, but I can’t work for free.”

She shakes her head.

“I didn’t expect you to do it for free. I borrowed some money from my dad.”

“All right. And with any new client my policy is to be paid a retainer in advance. Like a lawyer, you know?”

“Look that’s fine, I don’t care about this stuff. I just want my husband back.”

She seems headed for more tears, and frankly my last excuses for not taking the case are pretty much gone, so I steer us in a different direction.

“Okay. Look, let’s do some of the easy parts of this, all right?”

She nods.

“Okay, let’s get your ID done. You want a moment?”

She nods and wipes at her eyes and nose with her tissue, then faces me.

“Is that okay?”

She still looks a bit of a wreck, but it doesn’t matter.

“Sure, that’s fine.”

I take out my kaikki and get a quick image of her face, flicking a copy to the civilian branch of ID. She comes up green—the name is right, her husband is Brian Forget. She digs out her own kaiiki and transfers me the retainer. I get a few details about her husband that I didn’t have before: hobbies, hangouts, friends. Half an hour later Mrs. Forget is looking—not exactly cheerful, but less likely to start crying—as she heads out the door.

Four: Your Kaikki Knows Where You Are

As a licensed security specialist I have access to the Panopticon, although not the level of access that the police or the Security Corps have. I sign onto the system and input Brian Forget’s kaikki ID.

All those flash notices that you get on your kaikki—telling you about a sale around the corner from where you’re shopping at the moment, or announcing complimentary hors d’oeuvres at a restaurant near where your car is parked—require it to track your whereabouts. The truth is, though, that the consent form you click to allow it to follow your movements doesn’t mean much. California issued a mandatory On Switch Order by covert executive fiat years ago, so your kaikki knows where you are whether you want it to or not.

The LAPD use tracking information a lot, as do the Security Corps, the civilian and military branches of ID, and other bureaucracies. They get some information I can’t, but I can engage a simple location program and then access public camera records to get a pretty complete video record of a person’s recent movements, at least on public streets and in quasi-public places that require a city license, like bars and stores. The system’s not perfect—it follows the device, not the person’s body, and you can’t force people to have their kaikki with them at all times—but it’s extremely useful for simple retroactive surveillance.

I let the system run for a while and roll my chair over to an editing bay, where I spend some time pulling images and video clips from a surveillance video that Jessie shot on the Parker case. There are some instances where the P-Con just won’t do what we need, where a subject spends too much time in unmonitored areas, or where the rules of evidence for court require you to maintain a continuous recording. Parker is one of those, an employee theft and fraud ring that involves tracking stolen goods, so Jessie went into the field to get a custom recording. Still, even when the client needs uninterrupted video, they don’t want to sort through the whole recording themselves—they just want to have it on file for the police and for lawyers. All they want to look at is a few key stills and video clips.

Twenty minutes later a low chime issues from the P-Con station, signaling that the records have been compiled. I go back and queue up the video, starting a week ago. I always experience a little vertigo watching these files. It’s not like the field surveillance Jessie did, where the camera tracks a specific subject. In the P-Con video, Forget’s car slips in and out of traffic, tracked by immobile traffic cameras with panoramic lenses that distort everything a little. Plus the image isn’t very high-res, so using it too much can strain your eyes. The recordings aren’t even volumetric, like a sim would be—instead they’re shot using a parallax lens. The image looks three dimensional at a glance, but you can’t circle around it and see it from different perspectives because it’s shot with a single camera.

I use a set of personalized gestures I’ve developed over the years, barely thinking about what I’m doing. I point to my right or left to speed or slow the image, fast forwarding through the irrelevant parts and looking more carefully at the parts that might be important. Eventually Forget emerges from his car and wanders into a mall in Gramercy Park. When I get a good angle I hold my hand up, palm forward, to halt the video and snap my fingers to take a snapshot. I roll the video again and Forget wanders through the mall, the Panopticon stitching together images from multiple cameras that cover his movements as he wanders through stores and gets a hot dog in the food court.

The cameras aren’t aimed at anyone in particular—when the images were recorded no one knew which person within the camera’s field would turn out to be important, and while I’m tracking Forget today, tomorrow it might be the woman walking past him that’s under surveillance. But the P-Con system automatically forces the image to center on the person you’re tracking, which means the background moves around in an uncontrolled way, giving the video has a jerky, shaky quality that makes me irritable.

I watch Forget buy shoes, eat in a restaurant, drive to work, and drive home at the end of the day. I watch him go to a friend’s apartment and leave again. I watch him go to work again, and again, and again, and return home each time. My back starts to get stiff and I shift positions once, twice, three times. This is how it works, the boring part of the job, the part they leave out of the sim shows.

And then, all at once, it stops being boring. The last vestiges of my earlier dreamy state disappear, and I suddenly find myself very alert and focused.

Forget isn’t meeting a lover, he’s meeting Rahn Van Der Veen at Diamond Jack’s. A thousand alarms would have gone off within the P-Con system at the prospect of someone in a sensitive industry, like Forget, meeting a foreign national, if only the system had been monitoring Van Der Veen. But he isn’t just a foreigner, he’s a senior staff member at the Temporary Texas Legation, which means he has diplomatic immunity. Technically, immunity only prevents arrest and prosecution, not surveillance, but as a matter of good manners diplomats aren’t routinely surveilled.

Sacramento holds few very laws truly sacrosanct, but it treasures the ones regarding immunity because they’re reciprocal—only by strictly enforcing the law within its own territory can it expect its staff in Texas to receive the same courtesy. The government knows that this means Texas will get away with some espionage, but by the same token so will California, and on balance that makes the trade worthwhile.

With respect to Forget, though, the rules are clear and unforgiving. No matter what protections Van Der Veen may enjoy from criminal prosecution, they don’t extend to a California citizen who aids and abets him. I’m legally bound to report that Forget, who has access to the latest and most sensitive shell technology, has met with a foreign agent in what appears to be an illicit encounter. If he’s passing Van Der Veen information, that’s treason, and that means the death penalty.

Technically I’m required to report to the Security Corps “forthwith,” but as any lawyer can tell you that doesn’t quite mean “instantaneously.” It means something like “as soon as reasonably practicable.” So I figure I’m allowed to at least call his wife first and let her know that things are both better and worse than she thought. At least he’s not having an affair.

I chirp her kaikki, but get a message saying that no such ID exists. I re-enter it with the same result. There’s an uneasy feeling growing inside me. I run her image through civilian ID again. Last time it came up green, meaning that according to the biometric data held by the Nation of California she was, in fact, Nancy Forget, wife of Brian Forget. Now the system fails to show any result at all. In the brief time since I first ran her picture all record of her has disappeared. Officially she now never existed.

I grab my helmet and head to the garage.

Preview: In the Empire of the Monkey King

About the Book

In the Empire of the Monkey King will be available on Amazon and Kobo soon.

Read the excerpt on the following pages and get a sneak peek!

One: Full Of Worthless Prayers

TJ is dying and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it.  I’ve dragged him backward, away from the stairs, but we’re still caught in the stairwell and shots are coming from the landing above us.  I can also hear footsteps coming up from several floors below, headed our way, and I know damned well that it isn’t the cavalry coming to save us.  We’ve been out-maneuvered, trapped.  I look down at TJ, crumpled on the floor.  He’ll die there if I don’t make some kind of move.  I pray that my reflexes are fast enough and charge forward, up the stairs, toward the gunfire.  In the moment that I act, my mind suddenly becomes calm.

I know from their firing pattern that there are two bandits on the landing, so I opt for my flechettes, firing from both wrist units at once.  One guy gets off a shot that zings past my cheek, then he goes down with a grunt.  The flechettes’ nerve agent works before he can fire again.  First he’s doubled over, then kneeling, then curled up on his side, convulsing.  The other is hit in the face.  There isn’t even time for the drug to go to work – the right half of his head simply explodes from the impact of the miniature metal arrows, with their deadly-sharp stabilizing fins, and his body rockets back against the wall behind him, then slumps into a sitting position, brains and blood making a grisly pattern on cement blocks behind him.  As soon as the bandits are down, though, my calm deserts me and fear washes over me again.

I retreat to the spot where TJ’s lying and lift him in a fireman’s hold, slinging him over my shoulders.  Bullets have shattered his spine and nearly severed one leg.  Even the nanobots may not be able to put him back together.  Still, there’s no head wound, so we can reinstantiate him if I can get him to a vat in time, dump the soup of his consciousness – memories, aptitudes, affections, fears – into a new shell.  Every minute counts because he’s not breathing.  Lack of oxygen will kill off his brain if I don’t hurry, and at that point reinstantiation won’t work.  Or he could die by bleeding out, and you can’t revive the dead no matter how hard you try.

“Come on TJ,” I say to his unconscious form, my breathing labored as I begin to climb the stairs.  “I got you now, man.  We’re getting out of this hole.  Carmen will never forgive me if I screw this up.”

I’m talking to a near-corpse who in all likelihood can’t hear a thing I’m saying, but I do it anyway, just in case.  You never know.  I mention Carmen’s name on purpose to give him an incentive to push through the pain and keep living.  My entire body is swimming with sweat and TJ’s blood, making me feel slippery.  I force myself to move upward, hoping that there are more options above us than there are below.  As I turn the corner of a landing, his left arm comes fleetingly into my view.  The upper arm is out of focus:  his skill insignia tattoos.  On his lower arm are his battle insignia and those I can see clearly in that brief moment – the Detroit recon, the Second Washington Incursion, a whole row of them.  Not one of them killed him, not even the last one, the one we share but never discuss: Tijuana.  Nothing killed him before, but now the tattoos are being slowly covered by blood from one of his many wounds and I have to wonder if he’s come to the end, right here inL.A.

Because I’m carrying TJ’s weight, the bandits below us are catching up.  I can hear it in their footfalls:  with each moment the sounds become clearer, more defined, and definitely closer than before.  The echoes in the cement stairwell play tricks on my hearing, making it seem that there are more of them than there really are, but I consciously filter that out.  Nonetheless, there are more of them than us.  Almost certainly four.  Three if we’re lucky.

At the next landing I find a locked door.  I pause only long enough to try the handle, then continue upward to the level beyond that – there really seems to be no other choice.  After three more locked doors my thighs are beginning to shake with the effort of climbing at top speed while carrying one of my own men on my back.  The bandits below are only a floor or two behind us now.  It’s time for a change of plan, but I don’t like the only option I’ve got.

I stop at the next landing and look out the window.  To my left I can see a sheer drop down to the street, six stories below.  Even I can’t survive that, and TJ certainly won’t.  A little to the right is the roof of another building, one story down.  The drop would be survivable, but I have to wonder if I can get up enough momentum to reach it.  On this landing I’ll only have a few steps running start.  Plus I’m tired, it’s far, and TJ’s extra weight will pull us downward fast.  Still, there’s only one way to find out.  I use my right flechette launcher to take out the window, then continue firing around the edges of the frame to make sure there are no fragments left.

Backing up as far as I can, I brace my right foot against the wall behind me and use it to launch myself into the fastest run I can muster.  After only four paces I vault into the air, legs still pumping beneath me, pushing against nothing.  I can see the edge of the roof approaching, approaching.  Unfortunately it’s also rising – or rather, we’re sinking.

At moments like this I wish the Forces hadn’t taught us so much math and physics, because I can just about see our trajectory, as though it was projected onto the air in front of me, and it’s going to fall short.  I’m full of futile, wasted prayers, but we’re not going to make it and I know it.  I’m still praying when a small red dot appears in the upper left-hand corner of my vision.

Two: Die All Over Again

“Home,” I command, and the world in front of me disappears.  My stomach lurches as my perspective shifts from a multi-story fall to lying flat on my back in the sim unit in my bedroom.  I take a breath, stretch, then reach for my kaikki in the right thigh pocket of my Forces-issue cargo pants.

“Gat here.”

“Gat?  It’s Rollie.  I disturb you?”

My heart is still pounding, the sharp tang of adrenaline still in my blood.  I force myself to sit up.

“No man, just a training simulation.”

“How were you making out?”

“I was getting killed and taking one of you guys with me.”

“Gee, that’s reassuring,” he cackles.  “Gambatte!”

Rollie is a droll guy.  In real life I haven’t lost a man yet and he knows it.  The sims are purposely set at impossibly high levels of difficulty to keep me learning, thinking, coming up with new ideas.

“So what’s up?”

“I thought you’d want to know that Ms. Prieto has been located and recovered, safe and well.”

“That’s great,” I say.

Ines Prieto has been missing for almost three weeks.  Ransom notes have been delivered to the family by email, threatening her with a gruesome death if they dared to contact the police.  They didn’t tell the L.A.P.D. a thing, they came to us instead.

“Is she back with her family?” I ask.

“Negative.  She’s in the lock-up.”

That brings me up short, but I figure out pretty quickly what’s coming.

“The boyfriend?”

I can almost see him nodding.

“Had her stashed away in a borrowed condo.  Belonged to a friend of his who’s out of the out of the country for the next few months.  Guess they figured they’d have everything wrapped up by then.  Better than pulling aSnowdon, I guess.”

A year and a half ago Brian Snowdon hit the news, a snotty little coke-head with a big inheritance waiting for him when his parents died.  Trouble was, he wasn’t sure they would ever get around to it, so he decided to hurry the process along.  He and his girlfriend, a teenager with sub-normal intelligence whose most obvious attributes were her large breasts and her willingness to do whatever anyone told her, had murdered his parents.  They tried to make it seem like a gang-related street killing, but being amateurs they messed up: got their tagging wrong, used the wrong caliber of weapon, even killed the couple on the wrong gang’s turf.  In any event, it seems that Ines and her beau, a rancher’s son namedPhoenix, decided to try a similar, if less bloodthirsty ruse:  fake your own kidnapping and collect a large ransom.  Someone should have told them that kidnapping’s a sucker’s game.  EvenSnowdonhad a better chance, dumb as he was.

“Thanks Rollie.  Anything else?”

“The Prietos were a little reluctant to pay us full price, given that Ines’ life was never really in danger.”

“Hell, we didn’t tell her to kidnap herself.”

“Es la verdad.  They eventually came around to seeing it our way.  I suggested that a second scandal was the last thing a wealthy, respectable family needed.  First their daughter pulls this dumb game and they fall for it, then they act like common deadbeats?  I tell them:  bad idea.  They got the point.  They’re not happy about it, but they’ll pay.”

“Good.  We laid out a lot of hours.”

“I know.  If anyone other than TJ was the lead on this one I’m sure they’d be looking for a little R&R, but you know how he is.  He lives for this stuff.”

I have a sudden memory of TJ in the stairwell, dead weight on my shoulder, then stow it away.

“Okay Rollie.  Thanks for the update.”

“No problem.  Go back to saving your ass.”

“I think I’ll run a new scenario.  That last one didn’t look like it was going to turn out too well.”

Rollie laughs again and signs off, leaving my small apartment seeming strangely quiet.  I get off the sim pad and head for the stereo, choose something light, and put it on.  Grammatica, by Sensorio.  I can’t get behind the group’s strange theories about music as a means of communication – with animals, with the cosmos, with each other – but their ethereal electronica is just what I need at the moment, like Satie updated by a few centuries.

I look out the window and see the usual crowds on Jung Jing Road – Chinese grandmas carrying thousand-pound bags of vegetables, young Asian hipsters with the latest haircuts and cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, gaggles of schoolgirls – but all sound is blocked by the window of my apartment and the images play out in front of me with Sensorio as their soundtrack.  The music makes the hustle of the street seem like a dance, giving an almost stately quality to what would otherwise be a frenetic mass of movement.  The apartment is cool and the carpet is soft beneath my bare feet.

It’s Sunday, and I should probably be out doing something social.  I can feel it pull at me:  friends, food, sex.  Carmen even offered to set me up with one of her friends this weekend, but I balked.  I’ve had to do too much paperwork the last few months, ever since the Max Prince case, spent too much running the business end of things.  I feel like I’m losing my edge, so I spent most of yesterday and today in sim, getting sharp again.

My company, Burroughs Oversight, was touted in a recent edition of the L.A. Times as an up-and-comer.  We were made to seem plucky, or feisty, or some crap like that – a mid-sized firm looking to make it big in the lucrative world of personal security.  The truth is that the Times doesn’t know the half of it.  My team is growing into one of the best around, one carefully chosen member at a time.  We are a bat out of hell and I intend to make sure we stay that way.

The larger firms are run by an aging gerontocracy of war veterans whose battles were fought so long ago that by now they’re more comfortable in suits than in uniform.  And they’re successful.  They’ve hit the phase in life where you want to sit back and enjoy the money you’ve made.  That’s perfectly okay, and I might do the same myself one day, but right now what it means is that I have an opportunity to sneak up behind them and cut their corporate throats, a chance I don’t intend to miss.  Selfish?  I don’t care.  I’ve died once, and I damned well don’t intend to do it again.  The only thing that can keep the reaper at bay is cash, lots and lots of cash, so in the interests of living for the next few hundred years at least, I intend to make as much money as possible.

Two-hundred years ago I didn’t think about things like that.  I was a twenty-year-old kid who didn’t understand that he wasn’t immortal.  My parents died, and I came close to joining them.  We were in a car accident, a common way to die back then.  It was obvious that no doctor could save my life, so I was stuck in cryo, as per my parents’ insurance contract, and there I stayed until about a decade ago.

In the meantime wars raged, empires rose and fell, and civilization damned near collapsed.  It did collapse in some places, the infamousGreyZones, while it was precariously preserved in the Enclaves, an array of newly formed nations, city-states, and autonomous territories.  I knew nothing about any of it, sleeping the dreamless sleep of the dead.  Then, with the advent of cheap and effective nanotechnology, a clause in the insurance contract kicked into gear and I was resurrected, along with thousands of others like me.  We awoke into a world that was stunningly similar to the one we’d known and terrifyingly changed at the same time.  Most of the others were older than me and had trouble adapting.  A lot of them ended up in hospitals, if they had the money, or on the street if they didn’t.  I had no job skills, no money, and no resume, but I was young.  I adapted.  I joined the California National Forces and got brought up to speed in a hurry.

The Forces dropped me into a new shell – the vat-grown body that I now occupy – and dumped the imperfect one into which I’d been born.  They let you see it afterward, the better to drive home the lesson:  that’s who you were, you’re someone else now, a soldier, our soldier.  I remember looking down at that face with a mixture of regret and relief.  It looked innocent, but stupid too.  Pleasant, but weak.  That face was something I’d cherished, but now it was the past:  fading, dim, forgotten.

The Forces taught me how to kill, how to avoid getting myself killed, how to do covert ops, surveillance, counter-intelligence, and all kinds of other interesting things.  I hated it, but it served its purpose.  I was promoted, gained rank and insignia tattoos.  Still, I got out as soon as my contract was up.  I had blood on my hands and a head stuffed with nightmares.  The best I could say was that now at least I could earn a living. Los Angeleshas never been a safe place, so there was more than enough work for someone with my training.

I worked for a few years at Edie Lorenz’s agency, but in the end I found her moods too unpredictable, too volatile to put up with.  Besides, I had other plans, had saved some money.  I emptied my bank account, cashed in my Forces pension, and set up my own shop with the goal of making myself as rich as possible.  If you can pay the price, nanotechnology can not only resurrect you from the dead, it can keep you from ever dying.  Every time you get old you can just reinstantiate yourself into a new, young shell and start over.  I have no desire to die all over again.

The thought of business pulls me back to the present.  Moving from the window to the kitchen, I get myself a drink of water to re-hydrate.  These sim exercises may not happen in the real world, but they are a hell of a workout nonetheless.  I turn and face the sim pad again, think about my goal, my prize, and decide to go back into that other world, run a few more scenarios.  To hell with parties, friends, and sex.  If everything goes the way I’m planning I’ll have eternity to socialize.

Three: Gun Oil, Sweat, Dust, And Testosterone

I re-enter the sim with a jolt, right in the middle of my six-story fall, TJ still slung across my shoulders.  I hold onto him with one arm while the other reaches out automatically, desperately, for the edge of the building I’ve launched myself toward, but I can see that I’m not going to make it and my heart feels like lead in my chest.  I miss.  The sim’s resolution is so good that I can see the coarse grain of the brick wall that’s now shooting upward past me.  The ground is coming up damned fast.

To hell with it.  I’ll start the scenario over, try to think of a different strategy.  I’m say “home,” but nothing happens.  I look down and see that the ground appears dangerously close.  Sim is designed to render every detail of experience directly to your brain, as though you were experiencing it for real.  I do not want to experience impact.  I command again “home, home, home!” but we continue to fall.  I see people look up at us, mouths open, just the way they would in real life.  I’ve pretty much resolved myself to the crunch when the simulation begins to dissolve.  A moment later I find myself standing – disoriented, but at attention – in front of a desk.  Behind the desk is a California National Forces officer, a General.  He smiles at me with a mixture of smugness and what seems like genuine warmth.

“What the hell?”

It’s an inarticulate thing to say, but I’m a little stunned and it’s all I can think of in the first moments as the room materializes around me.  In the old days I would have saluted automatically and shut up, but that was then and this is now.  I’m not in the Forces any more.  I’m a civilian and within the rather narrow limits ofCalifornialaw I’m entitled to do and say whatever I choose.  What I choose is to start asking questions before the officer can begin talking.  I’m hoping to take control of the situation.  I’m off balance and I want to put him off balance.

“Who the hell are you?” I ask aggressively.  “What’s with the hijack?”

I’ve heard of sim-jacking, but only as a vague rumor.  Seems it’s true.  The officer smiles at me again, indulgently this time, not ruffled at all.

“My name is not important, only my rank, which you can deduce from my insignia.”  I look at the four General’s stars tattooed near his shoulder.  “The specific rank doesn’t really matter, of course.  The real point is that it’s a higher rank than yours.  As for the sim-jacking, it was simply the most efficient means, and the most secure, by which I could summon you here to have this conversation.”

The General is a big man, pumped and cut, wearing fatigue pants and a sleeveless khaki shirt.  His features are the usual CNF mutt-mix of racial markers:  light brown skin, negroid nose, piercing blue eyes with a slightly Asian tilt, and straight dark hair cut short and barely flecked with grey.  There is a long line of insignia tattoos running the length of his right arm.

“This is a sim,” I say, “anyone can be a General in sim.”

Being here has a dream-like quality.  I was demobbed five years ago and haven’t been to a Forces base since, but I can tell I’m on one now by the smell alone:  gun oil, sweat, dust, and testosterone.  Diesel exhaust and cheap cooking.  The subtle aroma of men stoked on adrenaline, fuel for their aggression and their fear.

The General doesn’t seem at all upset by the fact that I’ve questioned his authority, even his authenticity.  He stands, drawing himself up to an impressive height, but his bearing is still friendly, as is his expression.  He tilts his head slightly to one side.

“You’re right, anyone can be a General in sim, but only the CNF can sim-jack you the way I just did.  If you know a civilian hacker who can do that, I want to meet them.  There’s always a job around here for talent.”

He’s right, of course.  I have some of the best hackers in the world working for me – I’m thinking of Carmen and Prender – and neither one of them could have pulled this off.   I try to get my bearings in the anonymous, unmistakably military office.

The blinds are pulled down, but the windows are open behind their yellowish fabric and they sway slightly in the breeze.  From outside I can hear the rapid pop-pop-pop of small-arms fire.  Somewhere in the distance a mine goes off and someone screams.  Maneuvers.  Outside people are practicing, learning to kill other people.  Even in practicing some will die, like whoever tripped that mine a moment ago.  I’ve put a lot of effort into getting away from this world, into forgetting it entirely, and being pulled back here is making me angry despite the smile on General Friendly’s face.

“I want to go home.  Now,” I say, biting down on my rage but letting a little show through.  My anger doesn’t faze the General at all.

“I’m afraid I can’t authorize that.”

“Can’t or won’t?” I ask, trying to figure out whether he’s in charge or just a flunky.  He shrugs, as if it makes no real difference.

“Can’t, actually.  I’m under orders like you are.”

I lean across the desk at him, just to emphasize that I’m not under his command or anyone else’s any more.

“I don’t follow any goddamned orders.  I was demobbed years ago.  Honorable discharge, lots of commendations and tats, all that crap.   I’m a civilian now.”

For once the General seems to be getting tired of me.  He sighs slightly and his smile weakens.  Maybe he just doesn’t like what he has to say next.

“Gatineau Burroughs, it is my duty to inform you that the California National Forces have invoked clause 242(f) of your Duty Contract, which permits the CNF to recall you to active duty, with or without your consent, for any period of time and for whatever duties your commanding officers deem necessary.  Giving you notice of this recall – in writing or verbally, as I’m doing now – is the final step which renders the recall effective.”  He gives a smile that seems almost wistful.  “Welcome back to the Forces Captain Burroughs.”

I stand in shock for a moment.  The odors around me change as my own memories somehow taint the sim:  horse dung, burning buildings, rotting meat.  Human meat.  I look up at the General but the sim seems to have stalled and his sightless gaze follows a trajectory over my shoulder as he stands motionless.  The light filtering through the blinds, which had been bright and pleasant, turns dun, then rosy, then a harsh red, as Tijuana burns.  I can still hear the pop of small arms fire from the sim, but it’s augmented by an array of other sounds that come from deep inside me rather than from any program:  terrified wordless screams, the thud and thump of mines and artillery, chickens squawking in panic, coarse shouts of homicidal joy, the thup-thup-thup of helicopters, a baby crying, dogs barking in the distance, the crackle and crash of buildings burning, the whinnying of horses.  Then, as suddenly as they came, the memories are gone and the General snaps back into motion, speaking as though he had never paused.

“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that refusal to comply with re-enlistment constitutes the offence of desertion.  That’s a capital crime under the Penal Code of Military Misconduct, punishable by termination.  You will receive your specific orders shortly,” he says casually as I try to clear my nostrils of the smell ofTijuana.  “This contact was for the purpose of notifying you of your recall so that you can set your affairs in order.  In doing so you should take into account your imminent absence from your civilian occupation and, or course, the possibility that you will not survive your assignment.”

“That’s very considerate of you.”

The General doesn’t respond to my irony at all and a thought that’s been nagging away at the back of my mind suddenly jumps to the forefront:  he’s an AI.  Any human General would have threatened to bayonet me by now, the way I’ve been goading him, but the AI isn’t emotionally engaged.  All the facial expressions and vocal tones have been computer-generated simulations, crafted to simplify the AI-human interface:  meat like me gets along better with digital life when it can look wistful or sound apologetic.  It doesn’t make him any less a General, though.  There’s no rule against AIs holding rank.

“You will be required to report for duty in approximately two weeks.  We suggest you take no longer than one week to make any arrangements that might be necessary, just to leave a margin of safety.  Incidentally, in light of the experience you’ve accumulated since being demobilized, you’ve been granted a promotion to the rank of major, effective immediately, with the commensurate benefits and pay increase”

I glance at my arm and see my new rank insignia appearing like magic, a reminder that we’re in sim.  I know this is just the flip side of the threat implicit in his speech about desertion.  Run away and we will find you and kill you.  Cooperate and we’ll promote you and, if you’re lucky enough to survive your mission, you’ll have much improved pension rights when it’s over.  I look away from the tattoo mirage, back at the General.

“Can you give me any idea how long I’m likely to be ‘absent from my civilian occupation’?  Assuming, of course, that I survive my assignment.”

The simulacrum of a General looks thoughtful for a moment.

“It’s difficult to say.  The objective of your assignment is straightforward, but there are various means by which you might achieve it so your course is uncertain.  It is therefore difficult to make a quantitative estimate as to your absence from civilian life.”

He’s talking more like an AI now, letting me know that he’s aware that I’ve figured out his secret.  He lets his mask slip just enough to get his message across, but not so much that he’ll alienate me.  Subtle.  The CNF has become more refined since I left it.

“So, indefinitely,” I reply.

“Unfortunately, yes.  It is also my duty to ask you if there are any particular CNF personnel, whether on current duty or discharged, whom you wish to conscript to assist you in your assignment.”

“That’s kind of hard to say without knowing what my assignment is.”

“True.  Nonetheless, waiting until after your briefing to make personnel decisions means that any inactive soldiers will receive very little notice of their recall and will therefore have minimal time in which to set their own affairs in order.”

“Without knowing my assignment I can’t be expected to pick my team,” I insist.  “All the same, I do have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Do the personnel parameters allow for the recall of dishonorably discharged soldiers?”

“Usually that is not the case,” the General says, sitting back down.  He picks up a pencil and taps the top of his desk with it, then looks up at me from under his brows and points it at me.  “With respect to this assignment, however, due to its National Security Rating, the regulations permit you an unusual degree of latitude.”

“In that case, General, my only personnel request at this moment is for Jameison, Jerome, Sergeant.  I’m afraid I don’t recall his ID.”

“Four zero zero six zero one,” the General says without hesitation, confirming once and for all that he’s an AI, with instantaneous access to CNF data.  “Dishonorably discharged for refusing to follow the direct order of his superior, Burroughs, Gatineau, Captain, ID three eight five zero zero zero.”

He pauses for a moment, as though his neural nets are having a difficult time deciding on the next logical step.  Finally he speaks again.

“May I ask why you are requesting the presence of a soldier who refused to obey a direct order – one of your own direct orders – in the past?”

“Sure,” I say.  “He was right.”

The Book and the Author

About Nas Hedron

Nas Hedron  is a writer, editor, and artist.

He is the author of such books as Luck and Death at the Edge of the World and The Virgin Birth of Sharks.

He is also non-fiction editor at International Speculative Fiction, a quarterly magazine, and he manages editorial services at IndieBookLauncher.com, which provides editing, cover design, and ebook production services for independent authors.

He reveres, in no particular order:

- Vincent Price (actor, icon, gourmand),

- Salvador Dali (painter, human exhibit),

- Andy Warhol (painter, partyologist),

- Franco Mondini-Ruiz (installationist, magician),

- Kenzaburō Ōe and Kōbō Abe (novelists and madmen – the first won the Nobel Prize and the second ought to have),

- Tadanori Yokoo (poster artist, alien), and

- Jack Johnson (heavyweight boxing champion and maximum disturber of the peace).

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Books by Nas Hedron

All Nas Hedron fiction is available for instant download from Amazon, Kobo, and Indigo.

For more information on Nas Hedron's fiction, visit www.NassauHedron.com.

For more Luck and Death bonus material, visit www.LuckAndDeath.com.

The Fallen World Books

- Luck and Death at the Edge of the World (Book 1)

- Felon and the Judas Kiss (Book 2)

- Los Angeles Honey (Book 3)

- In the Empire of the Monkey King (Book 4) Coming Soon

- Not Afraid of Spiders (Book 5) Coming Soon

Standalone Fiction

- The Virgin Birth of Sharks

- Siren Songs in Deep Time

- Carey Pressley's Gone Again

Acknowledgments

Many humble thanks to Peter Watts and Ian Watson, who read early and late drafts respectively, for their encouragement and detailed notes.

A big thank you to Geoff Bennett, Longo Hai, and TTG Music Lab for the awesome score, effects, supplementary recording, additional vocal performances, and sound engineering for the Brace + Erase MP3 (you can listen to it or download it free at the Luck and Death home page), also used as the soundtrack for the Brace + Erase video.

And thank you to Veronica French, whom I've never met and who doesn't know me, but who nevertheless jumped in to help when I needed last-minute assistance on the ground in  Mexico City and couldn't get back there myself. Why did she run around the DF helping out a total stranger? Just because she believed in the project.  Pretty awesome.

For the Second Edition I want to thank the staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Ted Meissner of the Secular Buddhist Podcast, both of whom I consulted in preparing The Facts in the Fiction. They were both extremely helpful and any errors that remain are entirely down to me.

Finally, special thanks to Saul Bottcher--beta reader, friend, and co-conspirator--for things that are too many and too various to list here.

Nas Hedron

www.NassauHedron.com