Part One – The Blithe Incident and the Introduction of Eva L. Yonge

The citywide Wifi was set to expand at midnight. Harlan Novak had been looking forward to it for days, five blocks outwards from its existing circumference.

“It’s all the Americans fault,” yammered some geriatric to nobody in particular. Harlan sidled between booths of gray ultrasuede and waitresses in midnight blue latex, “conquest, Manifest Destiny, all that shit.” If he showed the slightest interest (or the slightest boredom) Harlan never would hear the end of it. “Four things,” continued the man slurring his syllables monotonously, “four things that ever came from those Yanks — Westerns, jazz, musicals, and mutually assured destruction.”

Harlan signaled to the bartender for another scotch, twisting his citrus rind to a nub. The bar was composed of pure slate with a plexiglass cover scratched profusely. Beneath the countertop was a layer of pennies lined flat side by side, reflecting their copper archaism. Harlan leaned his elbow on the curved mahogany edge waiting for the lights to dim. The circular seats of scarlet velour were classic as were the chrome poles supporting them. The floors were a violet Astroturf, disastrous under a black light, stained with cocktail salts and other innocuous fluids deposited from a handful of loyal patrons.

Diablo, a fresh-off-the-boat Serbian with a shaved head and a mesh tanktop, refreshed his drink on a doily made of hemp. There was a patch of scar tissue on his left temple allegedly from a sniper’s bullet. Fragments of a copper jacket lodged deep in his cerebellum. “You think too largely,” said the bartender in fractured English, loose-shouldered and lax, “you’ve to learn not to give a shit. Find inner peace. Zen.”

The Orange Snail was originally a strip club just ten minutes walking distance from the motel. Music pumped through the walls, the same Retro-d’-funk that seeped through his Hy-V prior to crossing the border. Bodies were clustered throughout the establishment helping themselves to lap dances, virtual karaoke, and the like. There were remnants of drug use on the encroaching countertop, primarily Rapture and U-phoria. The photovoltaic lasers gyrated, siphoning neon-adverts of low-budget cruises on the sidelines projecting outward.

“There are other ways to find inner peace,” responded the old man belatedly, “some find it within themselves. Others find it at the bottom of a bottle.”

A latent stripper took to the limelight strutting rhythmically down the runway. A plexus of sensory output nodes reflected the image of a budding nymphomaniac. She traipsed around in a schoolgirl’s uniform, her Polo shirt tied at the navel as the path before her retrofitted to resemble a yellow brick road. Her voluptuous pigtails, that plaid skirt, those lace stockings that met just below her knees, only added to her Lolita-esque mystique. The crowd was relatively convinced, although Harlan still noticed the memory core beneath the tempered glass of the runway. No lagtime, no skipping, perfect voiceovers, though she didn’t speak. The interface connections were in complete simpatico with the figure Harlan saw before his waiting visors.

Rolling blackouts were expectant, lulling power surges brought about by momentary lapses of energy, random test runs from local power stations, and general angst from the population. If the lounge had done its homework, there’d be a backup generator on standby.

“Looks like I missed the matinee.” Harlan halfcocked his head over his shoulder and spotted a clean cut man with a prosthetic tan, dark and handsome, brush up beside him. The hologram Marlina faded upwards blowing butterfly kisses as her signature signoff before dissolving into oblivion.

“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.”

The Frenchman’s face was long and worn like used sandpaper. His accent poignant and intimidating. A hint of jasmine marked his aftershave. Harlan watched as his manicured fingernails grazed the border of his navy cotton lapels. The creases in his blazer were fresh, permanent. His tie was a power blue decorated with a white fleur-de-lis.

“Why you so damn jolly? Expansion’s nothing special. Most urban centers now annexed have lost their former glory.” Harlan ignited the thin-tipped end of his last cigarillo and crumpled the empty pack into an ashtray of gritty emerald. “Not from around here, are you?” But before the Frenchman could reply, Harlan continued, as if solely directing the interaction, “I can usually spot a foreigner when I hear one. Doesn’t take a lot to notice. Slight nuances. Inflexions in speech. You’re no different than the average immigrant stereotype.”

“Well, immigrant is a very fluid term,” answered the Frenchman, “You’re not exactly a native yourself.” Diablo returned with his neighbor’s order, a gin and tonic with a lime wedge on its rim and a sole shot of tequila. Harlan snatched his butane lighter and ended up fiddling with it, delicately tracing the monogrammed letters for no discernable purpose.

“What gave it away?” The whiteness of the Frenchman’s teeth jolted Harlan to his core, that inane glossiness that came with porcelain veneers or bleaching.

“Francois De Guerre. Et tu?”

He reached his hand over, fingers together, as if wishing Harlan would shake it. It was then that Harlan felt the true age in the coarseness of the Frenchman’s flesh, the firmness of Francois’s handshake. Square jewels of faux-ivory set his cuffs, each fixed in a shallow gold setting. In the cleft of Francois’s neck just behind his left ear lay a circular port of polished aluminium. The metal, graphed to his skin, had a translucent cover attached to prevent blockage and infection.

“Your artistry’s impressive,” mentioned Harlan, “where was your work done? Milan? Lisbon? I tell you these plastics have it mapped to a T.”

“You’re thinking too big, beaucoup trop grand. Try more local, centralized. The Via from Montreal, transferred at Syracuse.” Harlan always dreamt of DNI but settled for basic interface instead. The North American demand was not even close to peaking, a niche in the private market just waiting to be picked clean. “Went in for surgery this afternoon. Back in time for happy hour. No mess, no fuss.”

“And what do you do, Francois?”

“Freelance harvesting. The organ market is quite lucrative this time of year. The new real estate.”

“And the money’s good?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

Harlan inspected Francois’s wrist but saw no intravenous scarring. He must have been left-handed. A pixilated receipt from a Japanese businessman broke his immediate concentration. De Guerre drained his liquor before taking a venomous bite of the virgin lime slice. There was something primal and obvious in its action, something Harlan would dare not attempt.

“All right, check this. Made a killing, not literally of course but listen. Two livers, one pancreas, and a lung. And that’s just this week. Granted it was a good week but still.” Harlan surveyed him with a deadpan expression. Francois nursed his gin and tonic. “Not my own, gracious no. Thank God for finder’s fees. Comprenez? Never could handle that local anaesthetic. Wouldn’t celebrate by drinking neither. Nearly died on the table at eighteen having my appendix removed.”

It wasn’t long till exigency, zero hour. Harlan tasted the lounge on his tongue. Its delicate alloys, its versatile fabrics, the anticipation like pheromones swarming around his proximity. But he wasn’t having it, a kind of disconnectedness between him and the rest of clientele, and after browsing a menu of burlesque avatars (faces, costumes, nationalities) Harlan became suddenly attune to the thinning crowd.

“Bought me this,” said Francois, clanking the sturdy end of an acrylic skewer on the rim of his data port. “New hardware fresh off the line.”

“Any side effects?”

“Extreme vertigo. Some problems with depth perception. It’s the Cartesian way of seeing. Four-dimensional world on a three-dimensional plane. Fucks you to the nth degree but well worth every penny.”

DNI, the modern transcendence. An old college alumnus back West was a test subject for the first prototypes. His father patented Sony equipment and managed to snake his son into the trial runs. Consciousness, a higher plane his colleague called it, a headlong plunge into a lake of below zero temperatures. Zip codes pulsed, numbers ran like gravel into his numbing hands. Strings of computational numerics formed lattices in and around his periphery till his comrade’s paralysis kicked in, but the technology had improved remarkably in the last eight years.

“Very exclusive. By referral only. Western splicing clinics take special care covering their tracks. As far as the net is concerned these places don’t exist.”

Francois extracted a business card from his innermost breast pocket. Harlan’s fingers grazed the embossed Arial lettering. The thin gilded border made him nauseous, but that was the end of it.

In the rear pocket of his jeans, a patchwork of faded denim, Harlan retrieved a small monolith of moulded graphite and waved it before the sensor, however, he couldn’t view the receipt since the countertop was beyond repair.

“Closing time,” he muttered beneath stale breath. “It was nice to meet you Monsieur De Guerre.” He handed his numbered stub to a passing waitress, dressed as an airline stewardess in stiletto heals. A clammy palm fell on his right shoulder. There was an inexpensive ring of sterling silver set in an ebony crater.

“Seriously, neural interface. Wave of the future,” urged Francois, toasting his glass in Harlan’s direction, “think about it.” The Frenchman sleuthed to a nearby bombshell with red hair and a pink miniskirt. The waitress returned with his tan overcoat and black velvet fedora. That was the last Harlan saw of him.

#

Novak was twenty-eight. At twenty-three he graduated from Berkeley with a bachelor’s in law, magna cum laude, and a minor in computer science. The West Coast was better, purer, the California winds, though too much competition for one person. The only way to carve a niche in Silicon Valley was with a sledgehammer. The bulk of his tuition paid from the inheritance of a seedy uncle come intermediary out of under-the-counter deals with black markets, mostly former Soviet states. At least there was a funeral, a body, a death certificate, even if it was falsified.

Soon after, he moved to Seattle, taking a job for a security’s company. IT, information technologies, those little secrets that could wipe out a city block with a few direct key commands or turn traffic into pandemonium with a well-timed piggyback Trojan. In no time he penetrated the hacker subculture, not like a fuck, hard and pressing, but like a scalpel, cold, delicate, calculated. There were no names, only pseudonyms. Much of his underground knowledge was transferred by a group known as the Quintet. Their aliases were Snow, Soundwave, Durango, and Prodigy. Snow, Soundwave, and Prodigy were human, Durango was an AI construct.

This was strictly reconnaissance. More often than not Harlan’s comrades in the community were recruited by his company, the finest cyber-denizens this side of the Mason-Dixon Line. It was there he picked up the bulk of his technological prowess that the legitimate academia didn’t cover, a hodgepodge of the covert arts, surveillance, sabotage, programming, deprogramming, encryption, data recovery, and bugging. He was also a licensed bounty hunter.

Five years in the Emerald City didn’t do it for him anymore. Crime was slumping in the state’s worst areas. King County and Yakima were becoming more hospitable, with occupants lessening by the month. His city was now inhabited by multimillion dollar companies in the downtown core and a limited number of gated communities. The harbors were still plagued with illegal activity, counterfeit electronics from Seoul, drug trafficking from Melbourne, unauthorized imports from Victoria. A change of scenery was in order.

It was not five months ago did Harlan capture the tail-end of an online article from an independent media subsidiary. GOLDEN HORSESHOE TARNISHED? Seattle’s greater metropolitan area had been wireless for three years now. To even consider urban centres in the initial stages of Wifi was impossible for him to fathom.

Using Moore’s Law as a template, he was able to extrapolate, not only the date of the next Expansion, but how far it would extend from its former boundary. For the next forty-eight hours he combed the classifieds searching for leases, office space, one-bedroom condominiums, something tangible, a room of one’s own. Once a district went wireless, not only did the property value skyrocket, but so did the rent. Harlan put down a deposit without a moment’s hesitation.

#

The city was in lockdown. Many of the incandescent bulbs under the jutting marquee of the Orange Snail were either burnt out or missing. Most of the roads were deserted, fenced by candycane roadblocks of black and yellow that read ‘DO NOT CROSS’.

The readout on the bottom-right side of his lenses read 11:41:23. It started to rain, a low drizzle. Harlan knew if he hadn’t left the bar when he did, he’d have to endure the Expansion indoors. One-star motels didn’t bother with trite conveniences like transformers. His keycard wouldn’t work. He bought a half-pack of Swisher Sweets from a nearby vending machine and a one-time use umbrella with his credit card. It was fashioned from a synthetic polymer that degraded from acids in rainwater.

A stretch limousine lacquered white pulled up to the crumbling concrete. Its LED rims brandished Coca-Cola logos until the vehicle remained stationary, skidding. The adjacent alleyway held crustacean-like automata scuttling vertically up the brick wall. Their nickel carapaces reflected in the glare of streetlamps. Precision nozzles spray-painted insignias of this sector’s leading syndicate, the Organiks. Harlan didn’t give it a second look, witnessing his face in the gentle flotsam of a rather large rainbow oil-slick.

He glistened across the Cosmopolitan district, a kaleidoscopic mandala of fluorescence. Boarded-up store windows displayed Japanese characters like curvy, elusive hieroglyphics. Alternating magenta and lime strobe lights made holographic sims appear like they were skating on ice. He adjusted his belt so his armament didn’t jab his ribcage. Vending machines lined the avenue like dragon’s teeth; cigarettes, schoolgirl uniforms in Ziploc packages, zigzags, long-distance calling cards, lockpicks, sterilized hypodermics, floppy disks — not the solid flat relics of yesteryear but long, thin strips that could flex into helixes — as well as condoms. Monolithic hyperbase ads tainted the moonlight as he ventured onward across sidewalks littered with newspapers and torn bus transfers.

He flipped up the collar of his cloak and trekked through the remainder of the boulevard. The carcinogenic haze stung his corneas. The haze was offset by lucent emblems forged in the shape of martini glasses and casino die. They pruned his fingers, dangling lifelessly over the pea soup pent up from grimy sewer grates. However, just two blocks away using the zooming capabilities of his VisorGoggles, he clocked the daunting smile of J.T. Blithe over the striking neon of corner bodegas.

His temporary residence was a decrepit office building just on the fringes of Expansion. Its foundation was a rustic pawnshop for hi-tech salvagers and wannabe hackers. The second and third floors were the motel. The upper six had remained unoccupied since the dot-com bust.

He forked the third-level corridor. Its innards were asbestos and drywall. The smell of plaster and stale urine. Baroque-style doors ripped from their hinges. These things mingled together creating an eerie ambiance, a sort of eloquent decrepitude. The hallway chandelier flashed erratically, blinding his vision somewhat.

The card reader scanned the magnetic tape and the door beeped twice before opening. The turquoise shag carpet was flattened, worn through. Kernels of Styrofoam crunched under his feet. Instant noodle containers littered the floor. Harlan kicked a path to the bed. Bare stucco laid the walls under a thin coat of taupe shellac. His abode stank of cardboard and rust. Corrosion seeped through the ventilation. The smell gave the room its presence, horrid by city standards.

He searched mindlessly, clawing in the dark for a half-empty bottle of tequila. After helping himself to a hefty swill, he cupped his face in his hands, combing the hair from his eyes. Sodium light sliced through blinds of ductile plastic. Harlan didn’t bother closing them. In the afterglow of the evening’s events nothing much was accomplished. The VisorGoggles laid on his oak nightstand, downloading memory files into his core databank.

Tonight he’d get some sleep, but there’d be no parties in the streets tonight, no discothèques pumping techno ad nauseam. Tonight, the city was in darkness, yet nobody would be asleep.

The Behemoth flashed once, blinked twice, and flashed again for good luck. The main windows parted with flawless efficiency as he awoke to Beethoven’s Fifth. The following equation coursed through his brain every time he heard that first quartet of notes.

( * * * – ) = V = Victory

The bed stiffened to a harsher firmness as a meager incentive to get his ass out of bed, a sand-like rigidity, and he felt displaced to reality once again. Little sunlight beamed through the lunafilters which were set at a low intensity. The opaque wall was programmed to that setting as a hallucinogenic kaleidoscope of neon swirls sprawled over him. A syncopation of clarinets and cellos ejaculated as Harlan rolled out of the bed. Across his darkened closest the following proverb read ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME. The rainbow hummed to abysmal as the lunafilters lightened to twenty percent intensity, a minute after the Fifth died on queue.

No messages tallied his visors other than some spam. They were fully-charged and activated. It was early, pre-dawn. Checkout time was noon and the sun wasn’t up yet. In his rear pocket was a silver packet of aspirin, a paper wrapper with a generic logo, and he swallowed the two tablets dryly. Harlan waltzed over to an ancient bureau of woodstained azure, pulling open the uppermost drawer. Under a pile of cotton linens was a flat attaché case of corrugated, glossy black plastic. Its top face was of a Chinese dragon in plated sterling. Harlan pocketed the case alongside his portable taser and surveyed the condition of the room, before finally securing the VisorGoggles on the bridge of his nose.

“Play WotF from playlist Omega6,” he said over the sink. His suite was littered with pinhole mics, though he felt the need to lean in. Waltz of the Flowers whizzed through the room. His cup of Joe was simmering, two lumps of milk, one sugar, resting under the countertop’s ledge. He reclaimed two slices of recycled toast from the dispenser and headed to the table. First class complimentary breakfast. The Behemoth retracted the chair and he pleasantly coaxed himself into the seat.

“Messages,” he announced commandingly. The far branch of the table rose vertically. Thousands of pixels composed of electronic ink danced across the monitors. Broadband messages and LAN pop-ups contaminated his communal software. They were immediately quarantined and purged, swallowed by the gaping mouth of the Behemoth. Seven of fifty-six spammed messages were for him, whose radical high definition sent his retinas screaming.

Teeny boppers and sugardaddies at your disposal. Tell me young brother, what do you get with three brunettes and two blondes? Regular price five bucks, five bucks, five bucks. Order now!

By ten o’clock his U-Haul was filled to capacity, a 5×10 meter rental space of second-hand aluminum siding. Tocsins pervaded the morning. Just as Harlan suspected, Expansion had gone smoothly. The roadblocks were cleared, traffic ebbed and flowed. Ivory towers eclipsed his route, a penumbra leading to the downtown. The skywalks between buildings looked sparse, unpopulated. Exhaust fumes seeped into the cabin despite the front end filtration. Rush-hour was unavoidable. Even with GPS, it was a struggle.

#

Harlan got chills leaving the proximity. Once the rental truck was returned — and his deposit relinquished — he immediately scrounged enough change for the return trip. The lateral junctions weren’t as cutting edge, the monorails heading east/west. Pleather avocado seats, warped subway floors of burnt sienna. An influx of Austrian tourists swarmed their section; fanny packs, digital cameras, folding maps. The concave plasma stretched from one end of the train to the other, sprawling model shots like quicksilver.

He transferred at the next station, picking up a plastic bag full of wine gums and a free paper, and took the monorail to the financial sector. Electrostatic made his arm hair stand on end, gliding over the glass dome of the local Xanadu.

His new resident office was a Victorian replica, a historical simulacra of an age long forgotten. Porcelain tiles, synthetic ficus plants, glass honeycomb tiles decorating the southern wing. Standard Odyssey elevators were as follows: glass concrete planted in the floor, mirrors laced on all sides in frames of Venetian marble, miniature surveillance cams, and soft muzak playing from ill-equipped comsats. Harlan reached into his jacket, retrieving a folded envelope of discolored manila. His keycard was a dark crimson of tempered plastic, his name engraved in gilded courier.

#

Aiko was one of a hundred-and-twenty-eight avatars for Harlan to choose from, most of which were women. Her clothing for the moment was a default black pantsuit with navy heels and a burgundy waistcoat. Even the blackness of her pupils represented pages of digitized code, her blinking sequence a subcommand. If he’d substitute her personae completely all RAM would be lost. Not the files themselves necessarily but every shred of adapted personality that had evolved since her activation.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” demanded Harlan, tossing his holster onto the maple desktop, “I want no trace on the web. As far as you’re concerned I’m an island, a deserted island. History’s to be purged every other day. Cookies, nominal. Only a handful of sites will be bookmarked and checked regularly. Understand?”

“I don’t see what the big deal is?” said Aiko spastically. “My model’s full of antivirals. First sign of trouble firewalls kick in like the fucking Bay of Pigs.” Her spontaneity was also a subprogram, a subset of algorithms designed to mimic human empathy. She sauntered to the wicker chair in the far corner, crossing and uncrossing her legs, lighting a virtual cigarette expunged from a brass case. “You know I never took you for the paranoid type.”

Harlan propped up a tactile interface of airborne sapphire polygons. He accessed CNN and the New York Times with three precise swipes of his hand, pinching and dragging the headlines down in an enamel-framed display box.

“These are for starters, major networks, conglomerates. Crosslist these headlines daily for patterns and irregularities. Scan the local papers accordingly, especially the ones dealing with crime. Think you can handle that sweetheart?” He cupped his hands together, locking the display in place. The lenses of his VisorGoggles tinted scarlet before returning completely transparent.

“Is Novak your real name or is that just some fancy handle? Frankly, it sounds made up.”

“Are you even listening?”

“Of course I’m listening. Jeez, what do you think I run bandwidth-wise? Do you ever forget to breathe? Throughput baby, throughput.” Aiko drew in a long, slow intake of smoke, letting the fallen ash dissipate before ever striking the floor. “Look, don’t worry. Your preferences are saved. Any other request no matter how outlandish you wish to put forth before me. Please, I’m all ears.” She winked her right eye, now a vivid amethyst under a dusting of blue eye shadow, and blew him a kiss with pillowy lips.

“Thank you,” said Harlan resoundingly, “and just so you know my name’s real. Cross-reference Del Mar if you don’t believe me.”

“Ah, California dreamin’. Now the paranoia’s starting to make sense. Can’t walk down Ventura on a Saturday night with nothing less than a nine-mil.”

“You’ve been scanning my purchasing records haven’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“That was a long time ago.” Harlan excused to relive himself and washed the grit beneath his fingernails. Pale maroon distilled from translucent resin presently offset the lobby’s interior. It looked arid, depleted. He felt like a mosquito trapped in amber. Harlan opened his desk drawer fishing for a felt tip red pen. Without thinking, he turned to the paper’s classifieds. With any luck, there’d be a decent vehicle on the market.

“Speaking of California, we’re going to have to do something about these clothes,” interrupted Aiko, thrusting her hands into her pockets, “I’m not a dyke if that’s what you’re thinking. This outfit is so passé, pedestrian. I can’t pull off the whole upstanding office kitsch. Not like you detective.” Harlan did his best to ignore her. Pressing so hard into the gazette that the ink smudged his fingers.

“I’m younger I mean. I should dress age appropriate. I wasn’t found in a thrift store you know…”

“Do I have to tell you to stop talking or should I play some music?” Despite her silence he accessed Vivaldi’s Winter, unlocking the display through his VisorGoggles. The icon, a rotating compact disc, highlighted opal. The concerto streamed from his desk.

In the meantime Aiko was modeling ganguro fashions — a deep tan, false eyelashes, a tie-dyed sarong snug around her legs — in an oblong mirror framed with chestnut. Harlan folded the newspaper as a hibiscus flower blossomed over her right ear, her dress hemming up her bronze shins to resemble a free-flowing peach miniskirt, a kind of Valley-girl nostalgia.

“You don’t have to impress me you know. If I wanted cheap sex I would’ve opted for a pleasure model.”

“Well, you had your chance. Too late to get a refund now.”

“That’s fine. I wanted a secretary not a prostitute. Besides you came with the room.” There was nothing more depressing to Harlan than reviewing his monthly checking account. He lived in hyper-speed, not the mundane, a condition worse than jetlag experienced in real time. Slumming was a lot easier back West. There was a silent ethos to fraudulent activity, its unspoken allegiances, borders and limits. Living honestly is harder than people give credit for, and Harlan paid dearly for it.

The ceiling fan hummed.

Aiko flinched.

“Whoa we’ve got movement here. Some nice-looking chika just asked for you in the lobby.” He threw down the free paper and tapped the side of his VisorGoggles, reactivating the display on his lenses.

“Where is she now?”

“Heading north to the lobby’s elevator.”

“Can you patch me through to surveillance?”

“Of course.”

Aiko propped a bird’s eye view of the west wing Odyssey elevator. In there was a Latina in a stunning denim miniskirt with black stockings running just past the knees. Her white tank top presented low cleavage. The video’s contrast made it difficult to determine the extent of her tan, its authenticity. She was calm, erect, talking to herself in frustration.

“Bring up some audio,” said Harlan, “I hope you’re recording this, Aiko.”

“Please.” It did little good. Runaway Spanish flooded his eardrums behind low faded muzak. She exited the lift. The footage cut.

“Do I have to ask you to scram?”

Aiko spirited away. He expected a lengthy silhouette behind the frost glass of his door beyond the electronic plasma that read HARLAN COAX, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR but no one came. He stepped into the lengthy corridor. It was fitted with checkerboard tiles and oriental carpets, mosaics of lilacs and lotus flowers, but still no one came. Aiko’s flighty laugh echoed from his office and his anxiety wavered.

“You’re a real bitch you know that,” he said, igniting a fresh cigarillo. His lips numb over the gentle white plastic.

#

A person could live within the downtown core without ever touching a sidewalk, never mind leaving one’s apartment. The night’s sky was a violent pink hunkered over a canopy of clouds. Harlan bought a metropass the second he stepped off the subway. The tramway’s platform was vulcanized rubber constructed from recycled tires. They operated solo at night. Photovoltaic cells stored energy in flat wafers of silicone, anything left behind was carried over. The practicality of it was genius. Less people rode at night. Infrequent excursions to civilization only to be thrown in anarchy on the trip back.

The carriage’s interior was rife in ultramodern decadence. Plated steal scuffed the floor. Windows were festooned with slabs of cardboard held together by worn silver duct tape. A carriage normally fit for fifty, drawn to capacity at seventy-five, though it was incredibly sparse, tagged with graffiti on every visible surface. An elderly Chinese woman in an afghan shawl sat at the other end of the tram. The cabin buoyed, screeching relentlessly along the electromagnetic cable before descending over the apartment rooftop.

A wrinkled hand covered in liverspots fell on his shoulders as he was exiting. The old woman handed him a surgical mask.

“It’s the pigeons,” she said softly, “they’re carriers.”

#

St. James Town, Night City, a graveyard of condominiums sprouted from the earth. From Harlan’s vantage the depot’s nexus met half-a-dozen caged walkways leading to most district rooftops. He donned his black gloves, rough leather firm against his skin, as he ran his fingers along diamonds of rustic iron. Gravel crunched beneath his feet. When he entered the elevator most numbers were singed off the buttons. The doors didn’t close properly either, aluminum dented inwards slightly. He butted the tail end of his taser on any random circlet and waited for the lift to descend.

“And you weren’t here when the incident took place,” muttered Harlan. The lenses of his VisorGoggles framed in bright red neon.

“I told you ‘ready, man, got jacked during ‘pansion.”

“And what time was this?”

“Anywhere’s from ‘leven-thirty to one o’clock,” answered his client. C-Block was a catacomb of single room apartments slowly crumbling into oblivion. The stairwells were clotted with garbage. Its hallways set to rupture. So it only seemed fitting that his first client was named Ash. His domicile was a twenty cubed meter cell, half comprised of yellowed temperfoam, the other a platform of hardwood oak that smelt of fresh ground reefer.

Ash Wednesday was an expatriate, a ghost in the shadows, exiled without a trace, RL or otherwise. He had mocha skin, hulking muscles, and a shaved head with a light blanket of stubble. Gangland tattoos from a dozen syndicates blanketed his right arm. Hypodermic scar tissue inhabited his elbow’s cleft.

Oblong mirrorshades of a fine nickel sheen covered his eyelids. They appeared as

though graphed to the skin but on closer inspection were magnetized via a bridge piercing. His broad shoulders lumbered when he walked. A marginal paralysis due on long-term digital exposure. Not that there was much room to work with.

“What’s the security like in these parts?” said Harlan, scanning the room for evidence.

“These parts? Listen, boy, this ain’t no wild west. This is the jungle, survival of the fittest. You close your eyes for a second and you’ll regret it. I got a bounty on my head, ya hear? A low profile is priority.” Ash’s hands were shaking, not from apprehension, but from compulsion. Dollops of sweat beaded down his forehead. “Don’t ‘spect surveillance neither. They’re dummies, not worth the plastic they’re made from. Tried siphoning through the city’s mainframe, came up empty. Five layers of ICE and not a shred of interference, publicly anyway. District’s clean.”

Harlan zoomed in close, appraising Ash’s doorframe inch by inch. There was no forced entry albeit minute flakes of white paint chipped along the interior. This break-in was precise, calculated, planned.

“Take it Ash is your pen name?”

“My pen names have pen names, aliases upon aliases, handles upon handles. My identity’s like a deck of cards, pull one out and the rest come tumblin’ down.” Harlan sleuthed to the centerpiece of Ash’s abode, a semicircle of monitors perched at a downward angle. “Exile’s no easy fix, man. Burn your bridges. Leave no stone unturned. I was skeptical ‘bout calling you in the first place?”

“Yeah, why’s that?”

“’Cause I can’t exactly travel now. My freedom’s in lockdown for the moment. Can’t up and leave whenever I please, ya know. Used to be John Law was always on my ass, now it’s just junkies, Triads, gangstas. You name it. Ya wait long enough, the piranhas eventually eat themselves.”

The screens were an outdated Russian design comprised from an ashen-gray polymer, its corporate insignia branded on its exterior, its serial numbers scratched clean. Ash fastened the ‘trodes to his fingertips, cushioning his ass in a beat-up swivel chair before focusing the relay so that his palms were parallax with the counter.

The monitors powered up, a lulling phosphorescence. Ash clocked the feed behind his left ear, a chambered nautilus spitting lasers. Transparent keyboards of vivid amethyst cradled under anticipatory flesh as he plucked invisible keys en tandem with the gyrations of the lasers.

“Check this, boy,” continued Ash, nodding towards the monitors. Harlan leaned in closer to gain greater resolution, “not without contingency. Anything worth value I lojack. This guy owed me one, a dynamo with GPS, worked for some high-end enterprise back in the day.”

“What did they steal?”

“My piece for one but that’s no matter. Scowl the dumpsters after hours by the docks and you’re bound to find somethin’ good. Know what I’m saying?” The keys highlighted orange before fading a deep purple. Rhythm. Balance. A wireframe topographic of silver and matte black. The viewpoint plunged laterally sinking into the depths of Little Tokyo, strictly infrastructure, nothing pure. “This one was special, a real prize piece. An import from Helsinki back before they hit the mainstream.”

“The gun?”

Ash folded his stubby fingers into palms freezing the monitors in place. There were six drawers of thin-plated steel sunk deep within the walls. To Harlan’s surprise Ash crouched down to the floorboards, prying up two with brute force.

“A robopet,” he answered. Ash handed him a glossy brochure of saffron paper speckled with dirt and pine thistles. “That was the original design during test runs, more or less, saved them until launch. Kept the specs for myself. Had a friend retrofit the frame, modify the design, arm it with some serious intelligence, though nothing close to sentience.” A square Polaroid slipped from the brochure’s edge, drifting to the floor until Harlan picked it up. It had a vinegary aroma, fresh, no creases.

“Is this it?”

“Yeah, man that’s it.” An inch from the fallen Polaroid was an empty glass vial with no label. It had metallic top with a pinhole lid, perfect for a syringe. Harlan cupped it in his palm before Ash noticed.

“And what’s so special about this particular robopet that you called a P.I. to investigate?”

“Nothin’. Market value’s trash, man. The model itself is worthless. It’s what’s inside that matters.” Blueprints absorbed the adjacent monitors. Neon green specs against a charcoal backdrop. Lines of alphanumeric code scrawling from left to right. “The specs themselves for starters. Under GATS I could ‘spect a decade in the pen. The Sweds watermark and date their patents. No, man. That robopet was a vault, Fort Knox baby. Three years of activity in one enclosed space. If word leaks that this is in the open, not only’s my rep destroyed, but my life as a cypher is shot.”

Harlan didn’t suspect Ash’s sincerity. The life of a cypher degrades with age, the mind withers. True cowboys had this sixth sense, a ubiquitous foreshadowing that was cyclical in nature. The merging of the past with the anxiety and uncertainty of the future. Harlan mindlessly traced his name in the dust collecting on the alloyed desk, his true name, before wiping it clean with his palm. That was the life of a cypher.

“Let me guess how many companies you hacked on the Fortune 500 list,” said Harlan, cracking his knuckles, “don’t answer that. I know how the community rolls. It’s none of my business.” Harlan had Aiko on standby for any incoming messages. She was much less reliable, they all were. Avatars, not women. “Can you prop up the route and time of the GPS tracking?”

The air was stale, re-circulated from a substructure grow-op consuming most of the building’s juice. Ash uploaded a composite list of every item in his stash, passing Harlan a flat circuit of glossy pink from the drive.

“Now I can’t pay you, man. Not until I get my ‘wares back. But my mind and my resources are at your disposal.”

Harlan loved a good challenge. It didn’t hurt to start networking in a new city either, seeing no prospective clients currently registered on his VisorGoggles proved bothersome. Harlan himself was no professional, he knew it. His tricks were archaic, past their expiration date. Branching out into other disciplines left rust in the joints, and Harlan would take help wherever it was offered, whenever he could.

He stroked the dimpled rubber before gripping the edge of his taser, resting half of his armament on Ash’s steel countertop.

“What you doin’?” asked Ash, amputating the ‘trodes from calloused fingertips.

“Protecting my investment.”

#

Lucid dreaming was a temporal fix, blue strata weaving in and through an abysmal silver strobe. It took months of hypnotherapy to train his unconscious, that untapped potential like diamonds in the rough. Cyberspace wasn’t as linear or mechanized as most people would have you believe. It wasn’t based on mathematics or the entrenched laws of causality. It was fluid, organic, amorphous. That was the attraction to DNI, its allure and its reliance.

Imagine your subconscious as the blackened continent of Australia seen at a bird’s eye view from the stratosphere, an unearthed mass of earth functioning at twenty-five thousand channels a second. Your conscious mind is like a tennis ball dropped from that stratosphere, capable of performing, at most, two to seven tasks at any given time.

Harlan’s mind was active during REM sleep, sequenced patterns of blinking cobalt green processing visual data. It didn’t stop the nightmares though, only dulled the insomnia. He still saw her face in the afterglow of his dreams, a masque of white plaster with painted red lips, bloodstained handprints smeared on enamel tiles, the aroma of smoke in disintegrating helixes.

That was the virtual transcendence.

#

Harlan floundered in permanence. His pupils dilated to the tempo rubato of Debussy’s Claire de Lune. The lunafilters deadened jet black, sphinctering the residual light before shining a placid indigo.

His VisorGoggles were from Milan, intrinsically crafted with the latest standardized hardware. Half-life, a mode where microscopic cameras placed on the headgear extended the periphery thirty degrees. It contained a remedial sensor grid that cut reaction-time in half.

Harlan hugged the doorframe, half-naked, clinging to his revolver, a modified .457 Wildey magnum with a mounted laser sight. He wiped the hair from his eyes and adjusting the carbon mic of his VisorGoggles.

“Talk to me, Aiko.”

“I count one pulse in your office by the mantle, maybe five foot six.” People were desensitized to alarms. Attention spans dwindled. Its melody was generally preferred over jarring tocsins.

“Lock the doors.”

The fire escape was unstable, tarnished stainless steel with chipping black paint and sheered bolts along the edges, as he sliced his office through the weather-beaten glass of the alley window. He heard footsteps. The sound of platformed heels against parquet was almost instinctual to Harlan. He unlatched the lock with her back towards him, ducking behind a wall separator of oak and sequined canvas.

“Cut the music.”

He donned a plaid bathrobe of navy blue and eggshell stripes, the sash was missing. Harlan siphoned a spherical crosshair where he assumed her brainstem was located. He inched barefoot to his target’s position.

“Don’t move.”

She whirled around intuitively, terrycloth draped over his calves, and then there was a sharp pain, stillness. Harlan staggered backwards, the gun still firm in his right hand.

“You’ve got to be quicker than that.” Something vicious snaked his right forearm, cascading down as a result of gravity. It was blood.
“Don’t move,” repeated Harlan, only less brazen. He was now conscious of his injury. The same feeling he got before jacking in, alertness and longing, a calm-before-the-storm adrenaline rush. “You bitch.” She stood, eclipsed in shadow, wielding a stiletto style butterfly knife. He threw down his VisorGoggles and cocked the hammer of his magnum.

“Mierda, you’re the detective aren’t you?” She produced a midnight blue satin handkerchief from her ridiculously wide cleavage, applying direct pressure to the wound. This girl knew what she was doing.

“There’s gauze in the desk.” Aiko set the illumination to standard and Harlan pressed down firmly.

“You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

“You shouldn’t sneak into peoples’ apartments.”

“I didn’t. The door was open.”

Her eyes were a bittersweet nightshade, flexible contacts over a vibrant purple. Constellations of minute scars blanketed her chest and shoulders. Her hair was a raven black, infused by the follicle to the scalp and laced with lily-scented pheromones. A barcode tattoo stretched diagonally on her neck, a foreigner, refugee, with no aforementioned accent.

Harlan paralyzed at the sight of blood.

“Oh, don’t be such a pussy. It’s just a flesh wound.” She dabbed the sterilized cotton with peroxide and gently wrapped it around his forearm. “Besides, you’re a big boy, you should be so lucky.”

“Why’s that?”

“I was aiming for your heart.” She maneuvered the butterfly knife single-handedly back to its resting position, a thin plating of magnetized cobalt on the exterior of her belt. Harlan waddled to his seat, a padded office chair of burgundy leather, while she traced the aquamarine plasma on his front door. “Forgive me. I haven’t slept in more than two days.”

“What’s your business here?”

“I require your services. It’s my employer…”

“Let me guess, Expansion.”

She nodded.
As the woman turned to him, Aiko’s pixilated image appeared on the door’s window lying forwards on her stomach with her chin cupped in her hands. Her widening smirk.

“Let’s get some lunch.”

#

The Daytime Lounge was a franchised hybrid, part sushi bar, part cybercafé, wedged between the ground level bazaars of morning rush-hour. The place smelt of freshly cut ginger sheltered under a canopy of fluorescent lights. Harlan stared through the wide window of transparent magenta, spotting a Korean nail boutique across the road. The remainder of the avenue was obscured by swarms of commuters and a colonnade of street vendors lining the sidewalks. A webwork of suspended cables guiding mobile streetcars made upper level visibility impossible.

Their table was of worn limestone under a thin sheet of digitized silicone. Harlan felt out of place, more off put than usual. How they must have appeared to this homogeneous crowd, a regular Bonnie and Clyde. In the darkest corner of the restaurant a prepubescent schoolboy was jacked in wearing baggy olive drab khakis and a T-shirt with an obscene logo.

“He was murdered,” she interrupted, her mouth chewing around an exceptionally large slice of futomaki, “The police have begun with the preliminaries but they haven’t told me a thing.”

Harlan was surprised she could eat at a time of such trauma. He just settled for some miso soup and warm sake to calm his nerves. Not one meter outside was a Rastafarian fencer selling a plethora of counterfeit goods, among them, hookahs. Her name was Luna Veca, or at least her handle was. She wore a Gucci knockoff of pressed gabardine and a matching jacket to boot.

“Do you wish to port?” asked the waitress. Beside them were five circular outlets of variant sizes shielded behind tempered plastic. Before he could answer, Luna grasped his free hand lovingly, and said, “Not just yet.” Instantly, she let go, grimacing, “God I can’t stand these bubblegum setups.”

“You were saying.”

“I was saying. My boss was killed during Expansion. He was found two days ago in his apartment complex. I suspect it was an inside job.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because that place is tighter than the Pentagon. The auxiliary power’s meant for security only,” continued Luna, rubbing her wooden chopsticks together. “I mean think about it. Locked in that giant tower. No power. No phonelines. No lights except for emergency backup seventy-two floors up. Whoever killed him had a plan.”

“What about drop-downs, forced entry?”

“None that I saw. When I got word there’d been an accident at the condo I rushed over ASAP. And when I arrived at the suite there was nothing. No broken glass. No bashed in door. Nothing. Just his body slumped over the living room floor. There wasn’t even a drop of blood.”

“That’s strange.”

“It gets weirder.”

She signaled the waitress to unlock the data port and the cover clicked open readily. A flat panel of circuited yellow fit perfectly into the slot. The surface texture of the table glistened amidst a platter of Ichiban sushi. Luna clipped a wireless ‘trode to her index finger, connecting the feed, and ran the program.

A wireframe layout of Apex Towers emerged from the table’s epicenter, pulsating scarlet — easier on the eyes — beneath ambient light. Harlan’s VisorGoggles filtered the glare. Apex’s promotional insignia spun drearily in the bottommost corner, a neon version of Luna’s fingernails, a firm peach. Data sticks advertised for potential buyers were handed out like candy.

“Only it wasn’t his apartment. His place was on the ninety-sixth floor. But the apartment he was killed in belonged to a woman, Amy Lynch, which means he either boarded an Odyssey to her place before Expansion, or walked down twenty-four floors in near total darkness.”

“And who’s this mystery employer you speak so fondly of.” Luna remained stoic. A silence perforated by drowned-out horns, simmering grilles, and precautionary error messages. She took an elongated swill from her Perrier as the hologram rotated clockwise.

“James Blithe.” Harlan never laughed so hard in his life. He slammed the table so hard that his sake spilt and the Apex flickered. In the meantime, Luna traced a path from Blithe’s penthouse to Amy’s suite, an arduous journey to say the least.

“You’re telling me you worked for one of the richest men in the world. The person who brought the Supreme Court to its knees rewriting half the obscenity laws in this country, the head of a multinational conglomerates worth half the European Union.”

“Again, worked for.”

“Well, I can certainly see why this is so important to you,” continued Harlan, tears welling up in his eyes, “The real question is, why did you come to me?”

“Because you’re the best.”

“Don’t try and sweet talk me. Really now, cut the bullshit.” Luna reached into her pocket and pulled out a double-folded section of green printing paper. The visors clocked her vitals — increasing pulse, vapid heartbeat, dilated pupils. With Luna still plugged in, the hologram toppled ninety degrees. Harlan tapped the logo, resetting it to its default position.

“All right then. Four days ago I received an email from Blithe while he was in Prague. Standard networking overseas. Tells me to transfer funds to a private account locally. Very last minute, like on some kind of whim. So I did. The next day I rendezvous with him at Pearson for pickup. The second he steps off the plane, he tells me to cancel all his appointments till after Expansion.” Harlan surmised that was typical behavior for your archetypal fundamentalist, but not for a realist like Blithe.

“Is that normal?”

“What’s normal, really?”

According to the email’s URL the server wasn’t a private line, which meant he only had access via a public kiosk. The message may have been traced, though Eastern Europe wasn’t fussy about its tracking. Not by governments anyway.

“Did the police question her?”
“No, she’s been missing since Expansion. Vanished without a trace.”
A fresh train of salmon sashimi appeared before them. A diamond-clad bracelet on Luna’s wrist splintered lasers in a thousand directions. In addition to sleep, it was apparent Luna hadn’t eaten much either as she quickly reached for the slim bottle of soy sauce.
“Now this is where things get interesting. How was Amy able to be kidnapped during lockdown with absolutely no signs of forced entry?”

Harlan didn’t answer.

“What’s even more astonishing is if Blithe actually walked the twenty-four floors. I mean the man’s a-hundred-and-twelve-years old.”

“Have you considered that Amy might’ve had something to do with the killing?”
“Possibly.”

“And what role do you see me playing in all this?”

“A very lucrative one,” she said, removing her equipment from the ports. “You see Blithe had no living family members, no children, but guess who the primary beneficiary is?”

“Did you kill him?” The vividness of her eyes seemed to flash. Aiko up to her old tricks. As Harlan rubbed his eyes, he realized his morning sustenance consisted solely of alcohol and soup.

“Of course not. Besides I’m not privy to his will. His safety deposit box is magnetically sealed upon his death. Only he had access to it.”

“And how long have you been on the run?” She looked down, a sign of submission. It only takes one good rainfall to destroy a counterfeit Louis Vaton handbag. She removed a pneumatic needle with a stimulant cartridge in the chamber.

“Well, no use in hiding it now. Cat’s out of the bag.” She brought the nozzle to her wrist and injected without contrition. A flush of euphoria weaved through her body, muscles and tendrils relaxing. “A minor dose of Dex. Its effects are shit for a surprisingly high yield. I tell you I can’t go on like this.”

“You need sleep,” insisted Harlan.

“No use crying about it now. I’m good for another six hours.”

#

His first objective was to get her out of sight. Since the murder was still recent it would only be a matter of hours before her face appeared on every net feed in the city, if it wasn’t already. They boarded a truncated Odyssey lift and headed southeast to the Underground, a subterranean network of upscale boutiques and duty-free gift shops. It was characterized by broken escalators, poster-sized plasma ads, and mosaics of linoleum cobblestone. He crossed the threshold of revolving doors and drew in the re-circulated air vacuumed in from the nearby subway station just a mere thirty meters away.

The pharmacy was a panoptical ovoid of pearl whiteness, stationed between two junctions where the avenues met. He purchased six items in total: a two-liter drum of Pepsi, a large bag of Doritos, the current National Post, a professional hair-dye kit, large waterproof Band-Aids with clear seals, and ochre cover-up. Harlan accessed a payphone terminal once Luna entered the restroom. It had a rudimentary décor of grays and turquoise. A thin optic cable connected his VisorGoggles to the unit. A five digit access code was needed. Harlan punched the keys.

An automated voice recording, female.

“Welcome to the Human Resources Department. All of our operators are currently busy. Please stay on the line.”

“The crow flies at midnight,” said Harlan into the receiver. A bleep, silence, then laggard breathing on the other end.

“Novak, is that you man?” Ash’s voice flooded the earpiece.

“Yeah, it’s me. Listen, I don’t have much time. I’m going to have to call in that favor sooner than normal. How are you with background checks?”

“’spect nothin’ but the best.”

“Good. I need you to do some busywork for me. Do your best in locating these names for me. Jot these down. Luna Veca, handle. Amy Lynch, Apex Towers, possible handle. James Theodore Blithe, true name.” Celebrities were free game in electronic circles. No pseudonym could hold them captive. Public relations landed in droves. Intermediaries upon fields of intercepted code. If there was a shred of truth it lay in the source, not the code. Harlan fixed the bloody bandage that had loosened around his left wrist. “Think you can handle that?”

“No problem.”

“Contact me when you have the results.”

“Aight man, stay frosty.” Luna sleuthed to his side swiping the plastic bag from his hand. A Band-Aid on her neck shielded her tattoo blending in with her deep pallor. Blithe didn’t make headlines. That’s all that mattered. They ventured through a corridor of stale air boarding the nearest Odyssey. Sunlight pierced the cabin the second they penetrated the surface.

“So who were you talking to?” said Luna pedantically.

“Wrong number.”

“Funny.”

#

Luna crashed three hours later during her next interval coming down hard from a dopamine high. She dove head-first into cumulous temperfoam, then through a slipstream of unconscious vertigo. Harlan lit a fresh cigarillo and helped himself to warm scotch from a flat nickel flask in his desk. A concise manifest of Ash’s stock lay upright on a digital plane. He recognized three companies right off the bat that belonged to the same conglomerate: a leaked report that dealt with face implantation, bootlegged imaging software from a second-rate IT mainframe, and a self-propagating worm virus that had never been implemented.

There were four ionic columns of jagged Courier: type, client, date, and class. Mission achievement was traced by color. Gaps of negative space through a smoky lather. By-referral clients were listed as freelance, which didn’t further Harlan’s cause. The rest was crosslisted by Aiko and designated by priority.

“That wasn’t funny what you did,” said Harlan to Aiko.

“What? You mean elevator girl. Wondering why she’s here? I was surprised she even came.” He recognized Luna the second he laid eyes on her. The thought that Aiko had something to do with her presence was disturbing.

“Why did you bring her here?”

“I didn’t bring her here sweety. You did.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Hey you’re the detective Harlan, not me. I may have guided her here but she’s going to stay because of you. I’m like a lighthouse guiding a ship. In the end, no one blames the lighthouse.” Her rationale was damning, a testament to the technological revolution and the ensuing avarice that lingered behind.

#

“There’s a forty-eight hour waiting period,” said Zan, scribbling a receipt over faded carbon paper. “Lab’s waiting list is backlogged. May want to tack on an extra day or two for results.” The exchange was transacted through bulletproof glass, a local repository on the fringe of sanitary. It was a private niche carved from ingenuity and kept thriving by competition. Zan was a lanky Pilipino in a white lab coat reeking of formaldehyde with a German-engineered prosthetic arm that made legibility impossible.

Craning his neck over Zan’s shoulder Harlan spotted vats of liquid nitrogen lined along the parallel hallway. He viewed himself in the monitor surveillance cam and adjusted his belt for no reason. Zan snaked the mic closer to his lips, responding to Harlan’s inquiry.

“Nothing’s absolute. There’s always room for error. Results are pretty accurate though. Truthfully, how would you know if the results were tainted? Only inconclusive results are grounds for refunds.”

He wired the charges through Blithe’s expense account, a laissez-faire obelisk of polished ebony. Luna was confident it wasn’t blocked even if the authorities listed her a suspect.

Harlan sauntered down a prismed corridor to an arced skydeck set to depart. The lounge was a Western-style izakaya, an egg-shaped pod with a sprawling vista of the ward’s southern waterfront. He rested on an octagon fountain of gentle alabaster as the transport disengaged from the dock. The stench of the clinic lingered on his jacket. His armory jabbed his ribcage as he sat hunched over a bar of fluorescent saffron.

It was prior to rush-hour. Human traffic was no concern. Sporadic bodies flanked the establishment; an assemblage of yuppies drinking Heinekens, loan-shark metrosexuals on another nightly excursion, and the reclusive staff chaperoning the premises in Polo shirts and black aprons. Harlan was running on fumes. He felt lightheaded and groggy nursing back a double Bourbon.

The dimness provided a scene for interfacing. Ash’s robopet was a recalled model from Bonne four months after its initial distribution. Rumors grapevined through the blogosphere, an all-out smear campaign from its competition that their brand was going soft. This was easily circumvented with a lock pick and warped software, a news article originating in Greensboro where an owner’s jugular was drained clean.

A chill spread throughout his bones. His fingertips were tinged with numbness. The cubic tumbler Harlan was holding nearly slipped from his grasp. A jolt shook the shuttle jingling champagne magnums in their holsters. Static invaded his VisorGoggles, lines of freckled neon framing his rounded specs. Proximity, his heart clenched, a lurker stalked Harlan’s presence, though he remained completely stationary.

“I’m being traced,” he whispered under his breath. Aiko noted the time, his position both laterally and vertically. It was now zero-hour. He spotted a lean man in his extended periphery wielding a tracker beneath navy Armani. The capsule was autonomous, independent power supplies. The transmitting feed wasn’t localized or commercial but routed to a LAN-line from a love hotel nearby.

Harlan armed himself under the hem of his jacket. The target sauntered behind honeycombs of glass to the niche where the restrooms were held. Its faceplate was a square piece of sheet metal with a male ideogram in its center, carved using negative space with the word MEN in French and Japanese. If there was an opportunity for face-to-face confrontation Harlan would jump without question. This was the stuff being a detective was made of.

Fuchsia urinals of thick rubber lined the sloped western wall. Disinfectant swamped his nostrils. Wintergreen bleaches evanescing. Soft heating lamps warmed his already dry skin, a placid orange against scarlet wallpaper. Harlan dowsed his face in filtrated water from a spout of polished brass. The one stall closed was of matte black dead center within a tiled enclave.

A sienna loafer peaked under the stall. Pneumatic exhaust sounded through the barrel, a mosquito’s pinch. “Your tracer’s scrap man, yesterday’s news, west-end junkyards has them piled up as far as the eye can see.” An echo resonated through the chamber as Harlan’s gumshoe vernacular became congruent.

“You’re getting rusty my friend,” he continued, “As I speak, neotoxin’s already coursing through your bloodstream. Slowly disintegrating nerve endings like lye through flesh.”

Harlan kicked open the door. Inside was a young man in his twenties, Mediterranean-looking, with bloodshot eyes, gold teeth, and a cummerbund of C4 explosives. A bleach-blonde coiffe hung low down his right side, accenting his face somewhat. His weight was underestimated, a linear miscalculation, the prominent smell of sawdust with his hand clutching a detonator.

“How poetic is this? Just when you think you got your shit together, huh.” The man’s diaphragm sunk deep in his chest heaving. A dusting of cocaine coated his upper lip. “For old time’s sake, you know. One final hit before the long goodbye.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m scrap man just like you said, a freelance low-level transporter. My ass ain’t worth a dime on the street. They don’t tell me nothin’ I don’t already know. Can’t say I blame them. Stock’s been running dry till the next shipment comes in. ‘bout a dozen dicks capped in all to satisfy my selfish habit. How’s that for schadenfreude?”

“I want a name. Gimme a name.”

“You know she’s playing you.”

“Who?”

“The girl that’s who man. Do I have to draw it for you with a fucking stylus or something?”

The downtrodden martyr spat at nothing in particular as the shuttle whirled to a halt. The docking clamps started kicking in. A blue beacon situated lengthwise did a roundabout through tempered glass. Harlan remained steadfast, defiant, while his tweaked derelict rasped staccato knocks on marble fiberglass with his free hand.

For some reason he pictured Luna in the back of his mind in a one-piece denim jumper with a white rawhide belt and lifted platforms an inch off the ground, a statue of the Venus de Milo molded in reinforced plastique. And then it hit him, the flashpoint and realization that there was more at stake here than just his life and the lives of the people in the shuttle pod. Who truly knew how many gas lines ran through the building’s sector once it reached port? The number of hydro-cells? Electrical systems were endless. The chain reaction catastrophic.

Hitman be damned.

Murder, fuck it.

His life was in danger. Blunt force trauma was needed to ensure a swift concussion. Blood trickled from his assailant’s ears. Harlan’s VisorGoggles clocked a hairline cranial fracture in the rear part of the man’s skull. He dowsed his palms clean under the right-angled spout and reset the mysterious stranger to a comfortable sitting position before diffusing the explosives around his waist.

Like a vulture he stripped the man clean storing the C4 in the deep recesses of his khaki pants hoping they’d prove useful soon.

#

There was jurisdictional authority to be had for Harlan on his venture back home. Fusion is what allowed him to systematically (though unconsciously) sift through petabytes of visual data. Weeding out the interference as time rolled on. The feeling of paralyzing a man sent the adrenaline pumping. Picasso reprints and bronze sculptures dominated the financial district’s mezzanine, a good fifty floors off the ground. Within each cowboy there was this sixth sense, a Godlike intuition, where humans were seen as energy. Pure energy. Harlan felt the auras of pedestrians locking and interlocking as they crossed paths. A strictly symbiotic relationship.

The term ‘parasite single’ was a common and perfunctory one. Among cyphers and denizens alike it implied a force in the digital realm as well as a relinquishment of power. There was nothing tangible at stake when all was said and done.

Harlan entered his office. There was no sign of Luna in his place. She was gone. An imprint of her body lay molded in the temperfoam. Her scent in the fabric of the pillows. In the meantime Harlan chewed a stick of hyperbase to cleanse his tangy palette. Concentration wore thin in the wake of his brush with death.

“Ready to cruise?”

“I was born ready,” said Aiko mischievously, “just give the chemicals a second to kick in.”

“Nothing personal. Security’s just tight. You understand right?” She didn’t answer. “Just don’t leave me hanging once I’m on the other side.”

VR was falling endlessly without ever touching the ground, a patterned sequence of visceral lights in the wake of fortified firewalls. The first was traditional ICON, low-grade by conventional standards, a latticework of streaming neon with predictable alternate weak points. The second was its complement, a bombardment of static spheres packed to the brim with white noise. It was easy riding from there, its shockwave to the event horizon behind a lull of trance music.

In the lairs Harlan was known as Quickshot by a select cartel of cyphers. The construct was fashioned off a castle in the Nagasaki Prefecture. The pyramid-like pagoda stuck straight into the fractured overcast. The sky was geodesic ashes smudged into a uniform backdrop. Despite its brilliance it was ultimately useless. The meetings were always held underground.

“Welcome, gentlemen. It’s been a long time,” started Durango, portfolio in hand, “I’m glad everyone was able to make it.” He was in his classic G-man avatar, first-class business suit, lanky physique. His cheekbones were sunken and his skin weather-beaten. An outdated texture with low resolution. “Nice to hear you’re back on your feet Prodigy.”

The group consisted of five users: Snow, Durango, Soundwave, himself, and Prodigy, their latest addition. A pentagon table of stunning sandstone laid dead center in the inner sanctum. It was those little details that Harlan appreciated in lairs; the fineness of stone, water dripping from the crumbling masonry, those minute yet calculated imperfections that added mystique and underlying decadence.

“Any new business?”

“I’m having trouble finding people to sign up for the workshop without coming off as the sleazy salesman. God damn noobs. Think they can walk into Unreal City and take whatever they please.”

“Calm down, honey,” said Soundwave removing his reflective sunglasses, “they don’t see the big picture. Keep in mind most of these so-called hackers are in it for the short term. There’s no master plan there. They’re suggestible. Too distracted by the smallest success. Usually cop out before the check clears. Remember Attitude?”

Prodigy’s specialty was online real estate. Easily the most profitable segment on the net using nothing but space and bandwidth. His avatar was a shimmering blue sports jacket, baby-blue lipstick and silver eye shadow. Its controversy was its homosexual undertones. Ironically its allure as well.

“Well give it some time. Bootcamps are cropping up all over the place. Double-check the forums with some viral marketing. Wait until word-of-mouth spreads. Things are bound to pick up. Anyone else?”

“I was nearly killed this evening,” said Harlan. Everyone went silence minus the latent static and the leather coming off Snow’s swivel chair. He produced a flash disc the size of a business card and expanded it to fit the back wall. The projection was coarse and immobile but once the footage began — with the snap of Harlan’s fingers — the video became clearer. There was no sound unfortunately but it was better than nothing.

The girl that’s who man, thought Harlan, do I have to draw it for you with a fucking stylus or something?

“The man’s name, at least what I gathered from his wallet, is Randall Ozwald. The license was a clear forgery. Nothing else in there but coupons and some old condoms.”

“Let’s see what we got here.” Soundwave was also known as the Archangel. He wore ripped jeans, a tight white shirt, and a featherbed of wings behind his shoulderblades. He snatched the gilded halo above his head and enclosed it within the clip, filtering the interference as best he could.

“Perfect,” replied Soundwave. The static was less degraded than before, screened through a Jakarta-inspired feeding realm. This strained the constant static like dust caught in an air vent.

“Notice anything?” The three minute clip repeated as the group sat in silence. The overall quality improved. The key was switching formats. Another skill Harlan lacked.

“That dye job isn’t worth a dollar that’s for damn sure,” said Prodigy. “Could easily be a wig if you look hard enough. Plus the clothing is tasteless and uncoordinated. True Brazilian kitsch — ”

“Can you magnify that…” started Durango lifting from the chair, “…the ring on his finger.”

“What the hell is that?” Harlan froze the clip and quarantined the frame enclosing the gilded band on Ozwald’s hand. The awkward angle made it obscured. He winced.

“C4 is hard to come by. Even today. Black markets. Try scoping out military surplus stores, demolition construction companies, chemical supply shops. Message me back on that.”

Prodigy dug deep beneath his fingernail and gnashed it free with one tug. It took eight seconds to upload the file into his personal database. Durango tossed them each shimmering business cards framed in gold. These required identity recognition. He spat on its rear face, disarming the protocols that protected it. Harlan kicked his feet on the centerpiece — pleated snakeskin imported from Vienna- resizing the itinerary’s window as he saw fit.

“Next week’s assignment,” he concluded already jacking out of Dakar. Durango was just a product of Western corporate outsourcing gone awry.

#

It was close to midnight when Harlan awoke and deactivated the VisorGoggles. He tuned them to a wireless hot zone and let the unit charge for an hour or so before leaving. From the coral-tiled kitchenette, Harlan boiled some instant noodles and waited for the pot to simmer. Triangulating Ozwald’s signal to a fine point was simple, even without his headgear.

The love hotel was a sleek little joint at the corner of SEDUCTION JUNCTION located in the north-east section of the city’s largest Xanadu. These self-contained bubbles of interacted neon were simple geodesic domes of cemented glass, one-way mirrors unseen from the outside. Harland waited for an Odyssey elevator for nearly twenty minutes. These were incredibly cramped and built for only two people at a time, which was great for having sex. Escort calling cards were laminated beneath tempered plastic. Tubes of vertical magenta lined the lift’s interior. Torn condom wrappers lay scattered on the stained cheetah-printed carpet.

The bridged displayed holograms of Greek nymphets in laced negligee emitting bumping-techno arias worthy of the Sirens themselves. He was escorted to his destination by a seething dominatrix named Cleo with a spiked collar around her neck and leather corset. Harlan swiped the obelisk over the sensor and flat-paneled speakers announced, “Welcome to the pleasure dome, Mr. Blithe.”

The door’s iris sphinctered and Harlan entered through the anus of the building, a golden whore bent doggie-style, arms together tucked under her chin. The procession counter was framed in frothy pink shag and an aquarium counter with goldfish swimming inside. A laminated menu was posted in Japanese and English giving hourly rates and diverse room suites next to ‘special services’ involving sadomasochist paraphernalia — whips, heavy chains, butt plugs — a staple indulgence of Harlan’s generation and personal salute to hedonism.

He stored his request in a pneumatic tube of ruby acrylic which was promptly returned by the faceless connoisseur. A phallic keycard with a number attached as plasma monitors of frosted plasma played hentai vids.

“I’m about to cross the threshold, Aiko. Keep your eye on the wireless for anything suspicious. Look for the keywords I provided in the server networks.”

“Listen baby, I’ll do my best from this end but let me remind you that reception here is complete crap. These Xanadus are like localized sunspots for that sort of thing. Whatever you do on your end will take at least twice as much time on my end. Just keep your eyes sharp sweety.”

The keycard bleeped twice and the black lights activated. Harlan gaped through the central well outside the convex window that made up the building’s left areola. Pixilated fireworks stormed the main basin, a tepid atmosphere where the air tasted like champagne. This second circle of hell.

The pleasure domes was a circumferential spindle that ebbed and flowed with knee-jerk vivacity, smelling mainly of vanilla and tangerine incense. A rain forest biodome complete with palm trees, Romanesque statues, and cobblestone walkways laden throughout. Harlan surveyed his suite, gauging the tension in his face on a ceiling mirror. The flat panel activated with a wave of his arm, transparent ideograms of saffron and lime floating over stiff plexiglass. He ported the VisorGoggles at the bed’s footing and the aluminum pole brightened instinctively.

Sensor nodes. The rippled lining spewed pixels in midair transfiguring to a standard-issue pleasure model.

“What’s your poison, bitch?” said Astrid.

“Crème-de-menthe.” The sterilized crystal appeared before him halfway filled with chilled emerald.

“So are you here for business or pleasure?” She laughed garishly, mechanically, emotional algorithms coupled with seductive code working overtime.

She was sexual in her pulp-fiction exaggerations — buxom breasts, nymph-like stature, helpless demeanor — in a two-piece white lace ensemble, sporting a pluming foxtail out her backside and a rubber whip in her right hand.

“My business is my pleasure.”

“Specifically?”

“Murder for hire.” One swipe of her invisible palm would send his oxytocin bubbling and the serotonin flowing to his brainstem. These neurons, the natural opiates of the body, would cause blissful paralysis, a bulbous leech sucking his credit until near virtual bankruptcy. “There was a man here earlier tonight.”

“Like so many others who’ve traipsed through the doors of their local Xanadu.” She pivoted flawlessly on platformed heels though the lagtime was atrocious. Flickers of distraught programming siphoning through overused hardware.

“Let’s cut to the chase sister. Less than six hours ago I traced a signal to this hotel from a transport shuttle in Sector 31. I’m a little sketchy on the physical details, but sufficed to say he was an elusive one.” Harlan took another swig of his crème-de-menthe and wiped the grime at the corners of his eyes before checking that his VisorGoggles were still online. “This isn’t a request sugar. Download the electronic receipts of any occupants of this hotel.”

Rouge Avenue was the black market under-the-counter interplay within each and every Xanadu. Its syndicate of suppliers easily detectable by their feather boas, knee-high leather boots, and pink cowboy hates. Germanic software and counterfeit gear from the finest dealers around.

Harlan anchored her avatar before she had a chance to disengage from his suite. The rubber sheaths fit snuggly over his fingertips as he stretched the netting over his palm, a thin webbing of razor-thin fiberoptics, before snapping the metal latch at the wrist.

“Fuck off, preppy. You can’t fucking touch me,” she scowled, buttoning up her plaid cut-off tanktop, “You ain’t no pimp. Certainly no smooth talker that’s for sure. That is, unless you’re a day player.”

“Tell me. Does your programming include the Crusades? Brutal battles for such a dark age. Horrible atrocities. I minored in medieval history back west. Bullshit discipline history. The past isn’t going anywhere. Must keep that in mind. The past isn’t going anywhere.”

“Fascinating son but if there’s no use for me then I just be going — ” A sharp backhand ruptured the program’s left cheek. It took a few seconds for the pigmentation to set in and the wheels in motion for a hefty bruise later on.

“Ouch, that hurt.” True terror invaded her eyes. Astrid stumbled backwards into the sensor pole. A trickle of blood rolled down her lower lip. “What the hell? I can’t plug out.” Harlan clasped the ‘trodes on his hand round her neck, approaching the digital platform in his alligator skin loafers.

“Now you’re going to tell me everything about the tracker I mentioned or you can expect some very unpleasant things to come. See there.” He tilted her neck towards a duffel bag where his deck was wrapped in a Reebok sweatshirt. “I can hack into the security protocols and have your program uploaded into many a number of scenarios. Gamers aren’t simply button mashers these days. They’re intuitive. And let me tell you my dear Astrid. There are far worse things than death in cyberspace. Believe me, I know. And unless you tell me everything short of the cologne this guy was wearing I’ll hold you in electronic limbo for the next half-a-century.”

Her laquered nails dug deep in his wrist. The whites of her eyes bulged red as the day-old gauze from Luna’s wound miraculously still clung to his arm. And where was he now? In a love hotel strangling some banal holographic hooker working an investigation that served no purpose.

And where was Luna?

It was her investigation after all.

It had been almost two days and not a peep, not an email, not even single text message. Dollops of fresh blood trickled on the carpet as Harlan loosened his grip. He felt infected, polluted, psychologically contaminated like his blood was tainted, in desperate need of filtration.

“You are one sick bastard. Bet there’s not a single piece of hardware in that bag. All hat, no cattle. That’s what you are,” massaging her sensitive throat, “His handle was Jason Carter. Said he was part of some short-term trafficking ring in Sector 43.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Short guy, five foot six, shaved head for the most part. Had on one of those stylish gray jackets, pink shades, Korean I think, definitely Asian. Give me a moment. I’ll siphon through the transaction records. Maybe pick up something you may have missed.”

“Anything else?”

“Circumcised, if that’s what you mean. He didn’t have an accent. Actually now that I think about it his English was very concise and articulate, good vocabulary. Smoked extra-light cigarettes, the cheap, generic ones.”

Harlan snapped the glove off his hand and unzipped his duffel bag. He smothered the remnants of his cigarillo in the teal ashtray the hotel provided. Sin seemed to fester on his skin like a fine film. He took one last pan of the Xanadu’s promenade before unlocking Astrid’s protocol. She left flipping him off.

He bid adieu to this place and the night was over as he pocketed a complimentary pack of matches in his front jacket pocket.

#

Harlan reminisced. The email was tangible. His only tangible link to Luna. He’d read it a hundred times, unfolding the paper, framing the outline before it degraded any further, and copied the text to his database. It read as follows:

To : Eva L. Yonge <Yonge@gomail.ca>

Sent : 08/06/54 5:32:34 PM

From: J.T. Blithe <Blithe_James@btf.com>

Subject : Re: unflinching

Dear Evie:

Contact Daniel Keynes ASAP. Tell him to wire the international funds account to TD special interests. Create the account and hold it until I get back.

Don’t ask me why, I’ll explain later.

Y.T. (Yours, Truly)

Blithe

Code Number: e92mf2pj3la93j_39fa_3923

The air was ill-ridden at ground zero. He spat his tasteless hyperbase into the gutter, surprised he hadn’t done so hours ago, and collapsed on the bedspread once he arrived home for the second time that day.

“Give it to me straight then Ash. What’s the word?” said Harlan in between gulps of noodles. It rained. Smoke frothed from the restaurant’s niche on grilles where vegetable oil spat. A candycane-striped parapet sheltered him but the reception was lousy nonetheless. Listening to Ash was pragmatic, fractured and lowbrow, engaging subtitles on his VisorGoggles to avoid miscommunication.

“It’s like this. Your girl’s a foreigner. Dual citizenship. Moved here from Buenos Aires.”

“Before or after the Pulse?”

“Shit man I don’t know. You do the math. Came over on a workman’s visa more than a decade ago and never left.”

“What’re you telling me? Forged documents? Refugee?”

“Like indentured servitude man. Worked for BTF all this time for your boy Blithe. Did some social climbing along the way. You hear me? Six vertical moves up to executive assistant.”

“What about Lynch?”

“Forty-eight year old single mother ‘riginally from Akran. Husband was killed in a plane crash off the coast of Lake Erie seven years ago. Girl worked as a stripper in her early twenties, high-end contractor you know, paid a stage fee every week. ‘round the same time she got hooked on ice just as it was going out of style before getting herself clean.”

And the records from the Beacon Center proved it. Ash even included a missing person’s report of her daughter. The man did his homework. Blithe’s rap sheet was nothing new. The man had seven biographies written in his honor (two authorized, four unauthorized, and one memoir), a webseries based on his life that garnered bad reviews and several awards, plus databanks worth from local media outlets for Harlan to select and decipher at his own leisure.

He sidled through a cluster of Catholic schoolgirls enduring their babel of pop-idol ringtones boarding the tram before it departed. Electromagnets whirred as the induction track gained juice. Odyssey elevators were notorious for pickpocketers. That’s why he loved the trams. The current disrupted short-range signals for possible identity theft.

Steel caressed his mind, though he was only touching it.

Ice sent chills down his spine.

The city morgue was a standalone building situated in the northeastern ward, an oblong crystalline structure towering twenty stories high. After paying the toll (non-blood related patrons surrendered a small service fee) and reviewing Ash’s inventory one last time, Harlan was allowed access to Elysium Hills’ foyer.

Ant was a grad student in forensic anthropology working the late shift. He wore ripped jeans, sandals, and had black fingernails. Shirtless, with only a doctor’s scrub covering his chest.

“The tox report for the most part came back negative,” he said shuffling. “There were no chemicals in system. Stimulants, barbiturates, what have you.”

Blithe lay there, blue and resolute, on a slab of virulent chrome.

It was eerie. This wasn’t the first dead body Harlan had come into contact with but it was still unsettling. The thing, the person whose death was the catalyst for the events that happened, for the events to come. Whose influence and notoriety spewed forth like a nuclear reaction and knowing nothing was tangible, concrete. In the present it was unnerving.

“Is that the report?” Harlan adapted to the silence. Whenever he was jacked in there was this encroaching omnipresence from millions of interfaced users. A low murmur like the soothing calm of oceanic waves. Now there was nothing except his labored breathing.

“Can I borrow your stylus?” Ant offered no resistance.

Harlan gauged his database a meter from his eyes, a deep red in contrast to the white opaqueness of the morgue. He triggered Blithe’s record from his memory core and shifted the stylus accordingly, overlapping dental impressions with the real deal.

“They match. This is really J.T. Blithe.”

“No shit Sherlock. What did you expect? The autopsy was the tricky part,” said Ant patting Blithe’s thigh with a surgical gloved hand, “His age predates MID, micro-identification. Two implants, one pacemaker found once we opened him up, and one DNI port. The man had a virtual entourage for Christ’s sake. That’s when I noticed the scarring on his left shoulder. I thought one in a million chance, right? Took out a laser scapel and lo-and-behold the thing raised like Lazarus.”

By this Ant was referring to the tattoo, a stylized Ankh of worn jade. Harlan immediately photographed it for his archives.

“Anything else I should know about, scarring, abrasions? Something that might be of interest.”

“Well his corneas were a little worn. When they brought him in there were high levels of serotonin in his system. But that’s not unusual. Probably fucking some broad.”

It was only when Harlan dissolved the interface did he notice the data port behind Blithe’s neck, a trifle convenience for a mogol billionaire. It had a plastic cover pressed in the socket where the fiberoptics were meant to go.

Harlan’s deck was an octagonal shell of corrugated black plastic, the best Japanese replica on the market, and a plethora of cable jacks to boot. He located the appropriate plug and connected his portable.

“No use doing that man. He’s been brain-dead more than two days.”

“Maybe,” started Harlan absently, “but if there’s so much as a spark of juice left in this bastard I’ll be the one getting it.”

Harlan twisted the cap to a heap of flowing gunk, at least half-an-ounce worth gushing from Blithe’s brainstem.

“What the hell’s that?”

“What? Do you think I know?” said Ant, grasping a translucent container no bigger than a pill bottle. “I’ll get this to the lab ASAP.”

“I wanna know the results on that sample.” Ant nodded in response with a glazed look in his eyes, orbs which were bloodshot nonetheless. The faint aroma of medicinal cannabis filtered the air.

“Did the coroners bring in a woman alongside Blithe? Fortyish, short, blonde hair.”

“Don’t think so.”

“Could you check?” Ant sighed, sauntering to his desk. The monitor activated with a wave of his hand, a deep porcelain that blended with the morgue’s aquamarine tinge. His lacquered nails danced methodically over a vintage keyboard.

“What was her name again?”

“Amy Lynch.”

“Oh yeah I remember that one but I didn’t see her. Wasn’t on duty then. Morning shift, ya know. Now she was here for a while but it says here…” he continued, drumming a ringed finger on the steel countertop, “…that she was taken to the incinerator the same day she was brought in.”

“You mean burned?”

“Cremated, yeah.”

“Beautiful.” Harlan covered his mouth in blank frustration realizing only now that he was sweating. His lead suspect was nothing more than charred remains and a few bone fragments. It felt like a ghost was stalking Harlan, something always two steps ahead of him.

“Who ordered the cremation?”

“Daughter dearest.”

“You’re kidding,” blasted Harlan, rotating the monitor in his direction.

“’fraid not my friend. Not according to these records.” Ant examined the screen, double-checking the morgue’s dossier. “These things are pretty foolproof. Once a log’s plugged into the system it’s more or less permanent. Wasn’t bad looking either if you ask me?”

“What wasn’t bad looking?”

“The daughter genius. She came by here earlier. Spitting image of her mother if you ask me. Came to collect her mother’s possessions.”

“Goddamn motherfucker.” Harlan meandered dumbstruck, siphoning through a laundry list of birth records before Ant got suspicious, and copied them completely. Ant busied himself with Tetris. A module clasped to the desk like a vice grip sent lasers gyrating into images, burlesque dancers into direct syncopation with the deft metal playing.

Harlan was on the verge of burnout and needed sleep. Ant pulled open his desk

drawer before dropping a crumpled bag on the tabletop.

“What’s this?”

“Blithe’s possessions. No one came by to claim them. Figured they might help in your investigation.” Harlan grabbed the bag not bothering to look inside. As long as blood wasn’t seeping through the lining Harlan was more than satisfied. Ant opened a door of frosted glass behind him, producing the suit Blithe flatlined in shrouded in a saran wrap cover.

“Thank you,” said Harlan, altering the depth perception of his VisorGoggles slightly, “you’ve been of immense help to me.”

Ant reveled in the feel of paper money. He received a bundle of folded hundreds clasped tightly in the crest of his right palm. Harlan signed off on Blithe’s items and triplicate the release forms with a stylus, copying the morgue’s info before finally exiting the premises.

#

It was raining when Harlan awoke. A heavy patter on the windowpanes of his bedroom office. The rain formed a thick green film on the outer glass. He slept, three REM cycles worth, forgoing hypnotherapy or any other ‘relaxation’ technique. And still no sign of Luna.

Sector 44 of the city was known by its inhabitants as ‘The Cube’ but to the rest of the naïve metropolis living outside its opaque boundaries it was referred to simply as Mecca. Or rather Mecca was sector forty-four, a pilgrimage of consumers for the postindustrial age.

There were no maps once inside. No corridors or helpful guidance lights except for one’s own intuition. It was the natural law, social Darwinism at its apex, rival gangs budding for greater territory, store upon store beside store above store. The only sense of order was the varying sizes of pneumatic tubes where garbage was frequently deposited. Its only escape (or entrance, for him) was a monorail intersecting the sector laterally, appearing and departing every fifteen minutes about a kilometers and a half inland.

Harlan checked his ammo, exchanging his Widley magnum at the closest repository for a Browning nine millimeter. Aiko triangulated the stockpile Harlan was seeking not too far from his extraction point. He recalled passing two Taiwanese discothèques, a nail boutique, a Russian-run pawn shop, but not much else. At two minutes a store, including three major detours — while simultaneously leaving a digital trail of breadcrumbs to find his way back to the monorail — distinctions became a blur.

Legionnaire’s disease ran rampant within Mecca. The air was impure, recycled. Harlan meandered with the populace. Their ashen gray faces, corpse-like lethargy and sensitivity to light. That was a distinction he noticed right away.

“Get out,” murmured the man, flipping the pages of Anarchist Weekly without so much as a glance at Harlan.
“I was told this was the place to buy explosives.”

“You heard wrong.”

The stockpile called a store consisted of three aisles, fluorescent lighting stripped to the bone, and whatever light exhibited the floor — patterned like the Thames in a Monet painting, dingy and scuffed from military boots, vandalized scrapings from army knives. It was one of the most deserted outlets in all of Mecca

The Vietnamese trafficker was tall but lanky, built like a tank. His face was streaked with dirt and a plethora of scars. His teeth were another story, yellowed from nicotine and tar, full of metal bracery causing his words to slur.

“Well,” started Harlan, drumming his index finger on the dusty display case, “I’m not leaving here until the info I need.”

He unbuttoned his ultrasuede jacket to unveil a chain of plastic explosives wrapped around his abdomen. Harlan never considered himself a martyr but there was always a first time for everything. He quickly unlatched the explosives, held together by inexpensive Velcro, and willingly put the belt on the counter.

“I need to know the purchase orders of these explosives.”

“This isn’t the kind of place that keeps receipts.”

“Don’t forget I’ve got jurisdiction here. Besides I’m looking to port. What’s the surveillance like?”

“Basic setup like any other joint,” started the man in his Meccanian accent, “two maybe three cameras around the perimeter patched through the unit’s power system. I don’t keep up the maintenance. Too expensive. Too time-consuming. Lucky if you’ll get a picture at all. Those things are ancient,” he continued, more lax now discussing his daily affairs. “A good day is the one where I don’t get robbed. But really in the larger scheme of things who’d want to rob me? Try lugging this merchandise around Mecca without getting jumped by local mafias. Listen carefully though. Explosives don’t come by here much. Maybe two in the last month. Don’t remember a lick about them. You’re not running are you?”

The man was curious as to whether Harlan had any direct ties to local police or private security. To this Harlan shook his head no. The merchant retrieved a dime bag of cocaine and a single rustic razor blade, cutting irregular chunks into smaller segments then into a fine power.

“Wanna hit on this?”

“Nah, I’m not into that scene.” The man sighed.

“You’re thinking too dimensionally. Drugs in Mecca aren’t just drugs. They’re a currency basis. How do you think we’re able to survive? It’s not a scene man. It’s a genuine way of life.

“Any place I can port?”

The man directed him to a beat-up terminal intended for public access. With no virtual interface and the monitor profusely scratched it was impossible to view its contents. The jack was better protected. Harlan jimmied the latch with a paperclip and located the appropriate cable, hooking it into the back of his deck before the proprietor took sight. He immediately emptied his recycled bin, dumping whatever virtual memory he didn’t need, and downloaded three weeks worth of round-the-clock surveillance, which cost him most of his hard drive.

This took about twelve minutes.

Mecca was taking its toll on him. His breathing was short and asthmatic. His eyes were sore. He pulled some bottled water from his leather case but it did little to quench his thirst. Every time his joints flexed, they felt heavy like iron.

On his voyage back to the monorail Harlan vomited in a porcelain urinal steam-cleaned to perfection. Paid toilets were a priceless commodity. European manufactured alcoves set up like phone booths. At the midpoint of his voyage — the distant echoes of the monorail humming — Harlan grabbed whatever chocolate bars were abandoned from a nearby vandalized vending machine, following the ultraviolet path Aiko laid out for him.

He crossed five corpses on his way back to the terminal. Three, stripped to near nakedness, brandishing gangland tattoos. The others died of madness.

#

The chemical was called umbelliferone, a yellowish-white crystalline solid with a high solubility in ethanol. It was notable for absorbing ultraviolet light at many different wavelengths. That was his first clue. Harlan suspected drugs, most prominently heroine. He owed Ash an apology. After a short trip to the lab he collected the sample. His results.

#

Aiko propped up a particle display late the next morning before the rosewood hearth. On his bedspread, used and wrinkled, was a Styrofoam carton of tandoori chicken on a bed of wild rice. Curry was the prime aphrodisiac. Cleared his blocked nostrils, soothed the phlegm that hung deep in his throat.

The aftereffects of Mecca lingered in his body as well as his mind.

The weather reports didn’t help.

Beyond his brief trip for food at the bazaar his afternoon was pretty much free. Lightning woke him. Rain lulled him. Tram carriages were likely suspended during electrical storms. Jaded sessions of rolling blackouts causing time delays and the like.

“So what’s the deal with this Ash character?”

“I have no idea. Haven’t seen him in a week.” Harlan barely paid attention to Aiko as he bit down on the fork’s white plastic. He plotted a topographic layout of Ash’s inventory with regards to company locations. Searching, praying for patterns, anomalies, anything.

But nothing came to him.

“So what’s in this for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“With Ash.” Aiko turned sideways in her silk negligee waiting expectantly for his reply. He picked some chicken between his teeth before tapping his VisorGoggles. “Well if I understand things correctly, this information trafficker hired you to find his lost robopet. And in exchange he offered you his own expertise as a console cowboy pro bono?”

Harlan nodded.

“I’d say you got the short end of the stick.”

“You’re forgetting one thing. I still haven’t found his robopet.”

“Listen baby. I hope you know what you’re getting into. I’ve gone over his stash. This stuff’s deep. Half of it’s military, top secret. Shanghai, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, AI restraints. Why don’t you come to your senses?”

“I can’t do anything Aiko. I wasn’t born to live out my years in a cubicle plugging data entry like some white-collar junkie. I live in the fast lane, real-time. If I’m not occupied with something, good or bad, I feel like a waste of space. Like I have to apologize for my existence.”

Harlan wandered to a half-empty crystal and clunked two ice cubes into his glass. The information he gathered daily seemed to swim before his eyes. Nonsensical eddies of form, plasma blue, neon red, locking, interlocking, attempting to achieve some sort of synergy. That drive he got when he jacked in, that freedom of space — he hadn’t done it for so long, for without purpose he did not feel the need to, the necessity of it — was that withdrawal he’d been experiencing. No amount of time in cyberspace or expert shareware could remedy it.

“Aiko, what’s Unreal City really like?”

“It’s a twenty-four seven orgy of decadence and self-deprecation. A hedonistic free-for-all involving pleasures beyond the realms of human consciousness. Pure energy pumping round after round of dopamine into your neuroreceptors under you’re completely comatose.”

“Really?”

“Of course not.”

“How else am I supposed to know then? I’ve only heard stories, half-certified myths. That’s the irony of DNI. Once people are in they never seem to want to leave. That’s why I find Blithe to be such an anomaly. Why stay here when you could live in perpetual bliss all your life? I suppose it’s some kind of distinction. Honor. Guess that’s over now. I mean since his death.”

Harlan rubbed his eyes fervently.

“It’s actually a pretty desolate place really. Not like the real world. Can I tell you a secret?” Aiko pressed forward. Her pert breasts. Her jutting eyelashes. Harlan got in close, kneeling, retiring his VisorGoggles to the bedside table to listen what she had to say.

“The real world is so much unlike Unreal City. Where I come from, beyond the net, beyond cyberspace, there’s a war going on. To be honest this place is a recluse from there, a safe haven. The others that populate this wondrous city are already on the edge, set to explode at a moment’s notice. Now this might not seem important to you when you watch it on your plasma monitors or subtly interface with it virtually, but let me tell you something Harlan” — the first time he heard Aiko use his name with such seriousness — “before this war is over, when all is said and done, the consequences in this world will be greatly felt.”

He found his hands shaking. They went numb upon her invisible touch. He swallowed the lump in his throat, choking on the very words he meant to say. Never before fearful of an avatar.

“Then what will happen?”

“I’m sorry, Harlan, but we’re going to have to end this conversation.”

There was a stumble at his office entrance, glass breaking, disrupting data transfer from Sao Paulo by way of Atlanta. He jumped like a bat out of hell, stumbling over the velveteen ottoman. A woman with red curls lied faced-down whimpering, a palm print of red on the plasma door. Harlan cradled her underside and came to his senses like Aiko warned him to do.

Aiko’s reflection disappeared from the burgundy loveseat. The girl had a black eye and her front lip was swollen. A ring impression left a gash on her right cheek. She wore only one heel and didn’t speak for a time.

It took Harlan fifteen minutes to realize that this woman was Luna.

Harlan brushed the hair away from her neck and spotted the bruises under her jaw line. She had been gasping for breath. It wasn’t that she wouldn’t talk. It was that she couldn’t talk. The barcode tattoo that once patterned her neck was gone. Luna didn’t stop shaking until an hour when Harlan joined her, protecting her, as she fell asleep in his bed.

#

Luna was bedridden for a time. The reddened marks on her neck manifested into purple blotches that stayed there for days. She only spoke when she wanted water or a datapad. Her absence remained a mystery. More often than not Harlan waltzed into his bedroom and felt Luna was more like a stranger to him. Her hair shorter and curled. Her eyes once a vibrant purple were now a deep brown.

Durango had yet to confirm their latest assignment. Normally planning didn’t take this long. Harlan began to have his doubts. Even if it did take this long his friend would send him outlines, a dossier, broad strokes, but there were no messages. Upon entry Luna quickly shed her urban clothing. They felt like relics when Harlan held them between his fingers. Bloody torn silk that left a sickly taste in his mouth when he rubbed them. There was no purse, only the discarded waste of an extended voyage through the city — bus transfers, paper currency, her discontinued security pass from BTF — that provided few clues.

The rain receded during early morning while Luna was still sleeping. He donned his fully-charged VisorGoggles without hesitation, asking Aiko to keep watch on her if she woke up, to stall her if she did. At least that would buy him some time.

“I’m headed to your neck of the woods,” uttered Harlan into the side-mic. He hoped the message would be heard over the commuter babel. Ash didn’t speak. He didn’t even make a sound, a sigh, a whisper. The signal was being patched through Soviet hardware as he talked. There were two dial tones, followed by dead silence, before the irregular bleeps signaled for him to speak, “Hang tight, I’ll be there shortly.”

St. James Town was a mass exodus in the early morning dawn. By ten o’clock it was virtually deserted. The suspended trams were quite empty, yet the carriage swaggered to a northeasterly gale causing oscillated static on his VisorGoggles. Harlan lit a fresh cigarillo. He took in the noxious vapors as a reprieve over the blanketed smog. The emergency phone rang. It was secured in a shell of canary yellow plastic with a wire snaking to the tram’s undercarriage. This was a one-way connection.

“You won’t find me in Night City. I’m in the field today flyin’ solo. Transfer at the next station and head back. I’m loadin’ up the directions now.” Ash’s signal bounced off the ionosphere from a long-abandoned comsat over the Mediterranean. The hack was flawless. Harlan couldn’t respond.

Forty-three minutes passed. He arrived on the dense outskirts, the slums, sidling through hooded transients in the crowded bazaars of the marketplace. Steam erupted from the wayward pipework above. Interconnecting side streets were offset by crumbling concrete. Walls that weren’t battened down with aquamarine tarp were tagged in Arabic graffiti.

A sharp right led him to a door of frosted glass. There was a single bullet hole inside its framework. Its fractures spider-webbed their way out from its epicenter. The shisha bar was teaming with heat, a dozen languages implicitly berating him from all angles, the pungent aroma of singed apples and strawberries. It was a disarray of purples and soothing browns. Even the smoke felt digital in the afterglow of plasma screens as Harlan continuously searched for Ash.

“You wanna hit?” asked Ash, disengaging his lips from the hookah.

“Actually I’m more interested in business at the moment.”

“Fair enough, fair enough. Just wonderin’ where you been that’s all? How’s the investigation goin’?”

“Poorly actually,” admitted Harlan. There was no need to lie to Ash. He ordered Harlan a rum and coke and took a seat across. “Your inventory makes no sense. I can’t find a single discrepancy. There’s just no pattern. I’ve come up dead.”

“Relax man, I ain’t here for the third degree. ‘member I ain’t paying you. Just wanted to talk.”

Ash appeared different by candlelight. His dented steel-toed boots hung low on the gabardine ottoman. He sat up stretching his leather jacket open. Harlan caught sight of the bottom-end of the taser he’d leant him, tucked away neatly in an underarm holster. The last thing Harlan wanted to do was burden Ash with his personal problems, like telling him about the man who tried to kill him at the izakaya.

“I’m sendin’ you on assignment to the archipelago. Ever been?” Harlan shook his head as Ash took sporadic puffs from the hookah. “Let’s just say the clientele doesn’t look too favorably on my kind. Take you right to the source man. Where my shit got jacked.”

“You mean the robopet?” Ash dropped a crumpled envelope on the table. Inside were two tickets to the night’s banquet written in Japanese and English.

“Not the robopet. Just a trace from one of my virals that looked surprisingly similar. Swankiest joint in town my friend. Be ready to show up fashionably late. Wouldn’t hurt to have a pretty girl on your arm neither, or a piece. Fucking Yakuzas outnumber the place. One nigger ices a party some years back next thing ya know we’re the Ebola virus. Musta done somethin’ right though. Not a single drop has been spilt since. I’ll hook you up with a tracker and my pet’s last location. Strictly reconnaissance. I want you to come back in one piece. Spent six hours straight ‘crypting code just to get your name on the damn registry. I’d ‘spect you’d be more grateful.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Harlan, lighting another cigarillo. A middle-aged Sikh in a turban and white cotton dhoti sidled to the bar nearby mumbling a variant form of Urdu too fast for his VisorGoggles to translate. Other than the receding echo of the clattering beaded curtain they ignored him entirely. “You ever deal with equipment?”

“You talkin’ gear?”

“Medical.”

“What you gettin’ at?”

Harlan reached into his breast pocket and tossed a piece of polymer no bigger than a silver dollar on the tabletop.

“What the hell’s this?”

“A pacemaker I think. Extracted from none other than J.T. Blithe himself. I was wondering if there’s any information on it that could be of use to me. I’d do it myself but I don’t have the proper gear.”

“Damn man, you mean Blithe the billionaire. Didn’t think he was this country no more. Last I heard he was livin’ it up in Dubai somewhere. Shit, and here I am thinking I got off easy with your services.”

Harlan listed the discernable links between the inventory from mega-corporations in the Far East and the conglomerates in central Europe, concurrent headlines on the news e-links en tandem with Ash’s cache. It wasn’t much to go on but Ash knew his intellectual property better than Harlan. An LED blinked Morse code in the left corner of his VisorGoggles, Aiko informing him of Luna’s consciousness. He’d have to cut it short. Harlan did his best to look natural. He didn’t want to give Ash the impression something was up.

“Oh, I nearly forget,” uttered Harlan, rising up, “I got the results on that vial yesterday. Thought maybe you’d want to have a look.” He handed Ash the dot matrix printout and the vial in a Ziploc bag.

“Contact me tomorrow. It’ll give me a chance to sift through the data.”

#

It was a hack job three years ago. That much he remembered.

Harlan remembered the bitter taste of blood. One of the third generation inhabitants of the Jupiter Belt less than two miles into the Pacific. SeaCal had been nothing but a cluster of islands with secondhand cement for foundation and whatever landmass it could scrounge. Where subcultures emerged like microbes in a culture and coalesced after ‘The Big One’ hit.

The splintered sky gave off a microfiche sheen though the encapsulating geodesics allowed for filtration. Back then his gritty tenement was the third-floor of a Bastille overlooking the sinking coast, barely visible through the moguls of the port’s dead technologies. The troupe ran nine. Three on rotating shifts connected to the mainland — our resident cyphers — though there was always someone jacked in at any given time. Others were intermediaries for the Yakuza, the Triads, sporadic branches of the Costa Nostra, drug launderers, fencers, hackers, traffickers. Jupiter’s west peninsula was the densest population-wise. Catacombs of crumbling cinderblock prone to anonymous aftershocks.

Benzedrine ran rampant causing intermittent gaps in his memory. These freezeframes, like shattered glass, were the result of generic copycats. Aquatic strobes from a distant arcade. Obsolete first-person shooters left him strung out after long-hours in corporate mainframes. A patent-leather recliner lay stripped of its upholstery. Floors of cold cement were snaked with fiberoptics and photo-degradable containers that withered in sunlight.

Faces rekindled afterthoughts but only one name stuck, Kwan Yin. Dreads of dirty blond and black, baggy fatigues from army surplus, a white tanktop, a tattoo on her inner thigh.

It was a hack job, he repeated in the back of his mind. That much he remembered.

Someone ripped them off good.

She, the sole survivor of his return. Her body hung loose in a battened-down swivel chair. A silenced bullet left her lung perforated. Her pupils, lifeless pinpricks in the faint glimmer of vacant monitors.

Harlan traced the feed, cumulating the latent power from his deck and booted the system. The screens went nova, blinding him. Logic bombs. He couldn’t save Kwan Yin even if he wanted to. He remembers her in fragments. His fingers on the damp stucco walls. The bitter taste of blood on his lips. She existed now only as a memory.

The last image Harlan saw would lead to his permanent exile. The encrypted location of the fuckers that screwed him. He needed VisorGoggles after that. He vanished in the face of the crowd not long after, never to return to Jupiter Belt.

#

Aiko warned Harlan through a DOS prompt on his lenses that Luna was leaving his office halfway through his journey down the orbiting colonnade. The second message from his cushioned earpiece made him redouble his efforts home. He burst through his office door stumbling on his way to the bedroom, only to find Luna at the mosaic kitchenette finishing the last of a Denver omelet.

“Where’ve you been?” asked Harlan.

She didn’t look at him. Her eyes were more focused on the plasma screen, playing old reruns of Spanish soap operas. Luna was wearing a black silk kimono with patterned wild blossoms as she quickly downed her Taiwanese beer in one swift single gulp.

Four identical shopping bags dropped on the parquet floor. They were high-density polyethylene with globes on the packaging that rotated every three seconds. The durable nylon handles rubbed hard against his palms.

“Sky-diving. What do you think, I went shopping.”

“You didn’t use Blithe’s account did you?” She deactivated the screen nearly knocking the plate from her grasp. Her sudden attentiveness startled Harlan.

“Don’t worry about it. I used the retainer money you gave at the sushi bar. Jeez what’s you damage?”

“Do you have the obelisk?”

“Of course.” He fished glossy black acrylic from the pocket of his faded denims. It was hers after all or at least it was now. She snatched it the second it hit the adobe countertop.

“Blithe’s account’s tapped. Someone’s definitely tailing us. I can sense it,” she said, biting down feverishly on a manicured thumbnail. “I sensed it with Blithe when I accompanied him around the city.”

“Is that why you left so suddenly Luna? Or should I call you Eva?”

“Why? Did you miss me?”

“Don’t get soft on me sweetheart. Just because you go AWOL doesn’t mean the world’s going to explode.”

“Yet you obviously found time in your busy schedule to pay a visit to the Emporium. Doing very well for yourself aren’t you? Four bags of merchandise…” Luna winced in pain, cradling her wrist so it wouldn’t move.

“What’s the matter?”

“I think my wrist’s broken.” It was revealed to be a bad sprain. He handed her an ice pack, a plastic sac of refrigerant gel, to soothe her aching pain.

“So where’d you end up those last couple of days you went missing?”

“You first.” She removed a pack of Meia-Noite regulars and lit a menthol cigarette. Glare from the skylight fixtures bounced off her dancing corneas. They were glassy, her eyes. Contacts that phased with relative brightness to a predetermined spectrum of colors. Harlan explained the assailant who tried to kill him at the pod shuttle days ago. The encounter at the love hotel in the local Xanadu and his subsequent trip to Mecca. The autopsy of Blithe at the morgue and Lynch’s estranged daughter. It gave Luna a chance to quit talking. Her voice was still hoarse, though the bruises on her neck were more or less gone.

“Et tu?”

“There was some business I had to take care of. Do you remember that tattoo on my neck? Insurance that I’d stay in Blithe’s employment. But with Blithe dead I considered my tenure with him over. The first thing I needed was to get rid of it. Smart ink too. Radioactive isotopes burnt into the skin. That was my first priority.” She took in a long slow puff of smoke and exhaled slowly, tightening her silk sash to hold up her sinking cleavage. “So you could see the dilemma I was in. Normally those barcodes are removed until the debt is repaid but if authorities got hold of me all they’d have to do is scan it. Being Blithe’s assistant would be enough of a motive to charge me. You know how they operate. Arrest first, ask questions later.”

“And what about the blood? The torn clothing? If it wasn’t the cops that nearly bludgeoned you to death…”

Luna shook her head.

“I don’t know what happened. Last thing I remember was boarding the metro station at Sector 47. Everything from there is a blur. Somehow, for whatever reason, I ended up back here. Damn chikans must have slipped me something. My mind’s drawing a blank.”

There was no direct translation from his VisorGoggles. The term was of Japanese origin. The best paraphrase was ‘molester’ or ‘pervert’ but Harlan knew what she implied. Luna snuffed the butt of her cigarette in a scratched-up porcelain ashtray. She wearily wiped her nicotine-stained tips across both her front lips.

“You were in shock, probably running on adrenaline. This place was likely the last image you thought of before you were attacked. In times of traumatic stress the body reacts before the mind, a fight-or-flight response, which eventually led you here. I had my doubts though.”

“About what?”

“About the extent your injuries. You had an awful lot when you came back here. I had to check your body for cuts to make sure you didn’t bleed out.”

“I was attacked?” murmured Luna, as if she herself wasn’t convinced.

“But most of the injuries on your face and hands were superficial. The cuts were less than an inch deep. Now I’m not calling you a liar. There is no doubt in my mind that you were attacked. But most of the blood you had on you probably wasn’t yours.” Harlan remembered the butterfly knife she wielded on their first meeting. He mentally traced the scar beneath his Polo shirt. Luna cupped her forehead in her right hand, her elbow pressed firmly on the countertop.

“Oh shit. My father gave me that knife when I was a child as a gift. Do you think that guy who tried to kill you in the pod shuttle was the same person who attacked me?”

“I killed that guy in the bathroom with the butt of my handgun. Doesn’t mean that both weren’t in league with one another.”

A silence perturbed the air.

“How did it feel?”

“How did what feel?”

“Killing. Was it all that you hoped for?”

“The man who was tracking me had five blocks worth of destruction taped around his chest. Whatever I did I did to save those innocent bystanders in the shuttle and the dozens of others that would’ve been killed had I not intervened.”

“At least you remember killing him. Some of us wish to be so lucky.” Luna waltzed to the side bathroom closing the door behind her. Her silhouette flexed through refined translucent resin as she redressed into urban clothing. Harlan relaxed on the navy bedspread smelling her scent on his pillow, a mixture of eau de cologne and pheromones.

“What did he say?” asked Luna through the door. “When you were in the stall with the man, what did he say?” Harlan’s throat tightened. In the filters of his mind he recalled his last words.

You know she’s playing you.

Who?

The girl that’s who man. Do I have to draw it for you with a fucking stylus or something?

He said nothing.

#

The bowels close to ground zero were littered with ’58 Buicks. This unspecified southeastern quadrant of the city was the epitome of Raygun Gothic. Its upswept porticos, those curvaceous geometric shapes, the bold use of glass and steel. Neon splayed up buildings like festering algae. The spirit of a generation dwindled to nostalgia culminating in motels and coffeehouses. Half the people wore oxygen masks, a third were lathered in suntan lotion, a cosmological clutter of light.

Their destination, the Archipelago, was modeled off a Shanghai replica, the pinnacle of retro-futuristic design surrounded by artificial platforms. Through the white darkness Harlan led Luna to a service elevator ostensibly wide and flanked with rust. She wore a sheer white blouse with a Cordova skirt and a vinyl handbag to match. Her radiance didn’t dim Harlan’s luster. He paraded the concrete walkway in a double-breast jacket and tailored pants with a contrasting pink shirt for style.

Luna craved excitement, adventure. Ash’s assignment was the perfect aphrodisiac for her wayward albeit idiosyncratic slump. Harlan simply shrugged. Without a weapon he felt naked. Paranoid that leering eyes were staring at him. He knocked three times on the dented steel, reverberations felt through the metal.

A Japanese girl answered their call. She had creamy skin with hair in a diagonal streak of blonde and pink. A headset wrapped around her jaw.

“Are you Mr. Novak?”

“Detective Novak yes, and this is my associate, Luna Veca.”

“Follow me.”

The pair funneled to the rear of the warehouse. It was a thinned niche above a grated staircase blocked off by walls of square glass. Forklifts rumbled behind them. This sector (aside from the neon) was nothing short of a glorified storehouse. High-bay skids for offshore outsourcing. Imported crates from Helsinki, Kotka. The girl’s confidante was already wired in next to a desk of faded rosewood. A head mounted display of fire-retardant polyurethane covered his eyes. ‘trodes extended from his fingers. Deadened veins at the wrist posed an IV drip, plus a biteplate of molded plastic between clenched teeth.

“What’s he running?”

“He’s unconscious. Been at it for six hours now. Jetta here’s just got some top-secret military hardware from Malaysia. He’s been itching to try it out.”

“You mean he smuggled it here. That is what you do right? Traffic the goods to a third-party launderer and have them transported to this warehouse.” The girl flexed her fingers together. Harlan struck a chord in her that jostled her very being. Terminals reflected the user’s interface, what Jetta saw, sprawling distinctive lithograms Harlan recognized as the Eastern Port Authority. Monochromatic layers of scarlet and black gave the illusion its depth.

The place reminded him of the Jupiter Belt, the girl Kwan Yin. This warehouse had a presence about it. Vacuum tubes of diluted light cascaded through the sloped sunroof.

“You may want to tell your friend there that if he wants to shave a couple of hours off his duration to adjust the residual harmonics a few points, unless he wants migraines for the next week. He also might want to stick close to subsidiaries. No less than four degrees of separation at all times.”

“Are you a tracker?”

“I’m freelance, private dic.”

“But not officially I take it. Because anyone who knows the intricacies of shipping protocols that well is no amateur.” She rested her thin legs on the desk, long patent-leather boots ran up her shins, and lit a Meia-Noite cigarette (Luna’s brand) before speaking again. “I remind you you have no jurisdiction here. Ash owes me favor. Anything you see is purely circumstantial.”

“Look we’re sorta in a hurry,” said Luna, “Would you mind if we leave the chitchat for later?”

“All right.” She double-checked Jetta’s heartbeat and blood pressure. Her nails were a vibrant pink. The girl’s handle was a mere five character mix of letters and digits which Harlan couldn’t decipher. “Hand me your identification.”

She secured their cards in a white envelope — credit cards, driver’s licenses, social security — and produced a fresh one smelling of incense. Inside was a one-page dossier for each of them. Their fictional life histories spread before them on a virtual plane, that brilliant tactile interface of mauve and coral pixels.

“My name’s Angel in case you were wondering.”

A drawer slammed behind him. Harlan was startled. He licked his fingers unnecessarily scrolling down the final remnants of his profile.

“Who goes first?”

Angel held a pneumatic injector. As she closed the GUI Harland gazed outwards through tempered glass, steel barred windows, that endless blitzkrieg.

“These nanites will disintegrate in your bloodstream within the next fours hours so it’s a good idea to get off the premises by midnight. It’s just easier that way.”

“Like Cinderella.”

“Sort of. Only these glass slippers are manufactured in a lab.”

“Then I guess that’d make you our fairy god mother.”

“I’m only doing this as a precautionary measure. Ash instructed me to give you the best treatment possible. If he’s taught me anything it’s that these mafia joints can afford whatever their heart’s desire. Metal detectors that can scan on the cellular level. Laser readers that can trace ID tags from space. The sky’s the limit for these people.”

Harlan winced at the trigger-happy Angel. The puncture points kissed his flesh for a split second.

“Now believe me when I tell you that these people are ruthless. And there are far worse ways to die than at the barrel of a gun. You see, that’s the difference between the real and the virtual. Online, you can cower away in the digital niches for hours without ever realizing you can jack out. The point I’m trying to make detective is be careful. Because, if you get caught in the Archipelago, there’s no jacking out.

After the injection into his arm Harlan adjusted his VisorGoggles’s output, fixing for depth perception and calibrating the frequency to scan for miscellaneous anomalies.

“Listen Angel. Slow down if my pulse tweaks suddenly. Keep us under the radar. Is he burning clean?”

“Does anyone?”

“What stims?”

“Acetylcholine’s in the drip. Figure that’ll buy you a couple hours.”

Harlan felt an empty lucidity as the nanites took effect, a placebo effect at that, but an effect nonetheless. They’d mask his signature, at least temporarily, burrowing microscopic fissures in the markers that defined his genetic code. He worried his VisorGoggles would cause suspicion but it was too late now.

“Ready to go,” said Luna.
“I was born ready.”

#

Harlan propped up a dialog box on the inside of his VisorGoggles of the persona he was meant to inhabit. He remained erect facing forward as the private elevator oscillated upwards — an overabundance of blunt-shaped chrome, globes of translucent wax swimming in glass tubes — as the light amplitude automatically got dimmer with the increasing altitude of the lift. A glint of something caught sight in his periphery, a miniscule shunt lodged deep in Luna’s esophagus. No wonder she had no accent.

“Nervous?”

“Always.”

“Try to relax and take deep breathes.”

Jeff Lafayette was his handle, an up-and-coming e-vid distributor of harlequin fiction. Luna was a high-end escort from the outsourced Taipan line. With the majority of invites clinging to some sort of wildcat cartel Angel vied that Luna keep the scars from her assault.

Little Tokyo, the Archipelago, opened to bustling commerce of laissez-faire capitalism. Two divergent corridors provided sprawling vistas of Unreal City. The sky glowed a dark saffron that encompassed much of the horizon. Harlan bustled lazily on terrazzo floors. He scoped the lower plateaus that made up Little Tokyo’s eastern wing. Each domed nautilus was bubbled in cement glass. Its arched walls led to a metal spire. These plateaus were linked by serpentine walkways whose exterior shells were also see-through. He counted twelve in sight.

The walkways were public domain for corporations. Harlan sauntered through phantasmal avatars bearing corporate insignias. The evening’s motif was the proverbial outlaw: western gunslingers, the ronin, misguided derelicts of the underground.

Passing as Jeff Lafayette was like swimming through the personal histories of everyone around him. Abstracts of data flooded his lenses. The area teemed with decadent opulence. Luna made a makeshift emery board from the underside of a discarded matchbook. Harlan got the urge to smoke. Nano-filtration at this altitude was ultra-hardcore. Sheets of diffuse fiberglass covering the slanted roof.

The Aqua Bar off the rotunda was teeming with archaic electroclash. Music that left a nostalgia in Luna that was both artificial and perversely attractive. Furniture was situated at right angles — khaki-colored chairs, polished red oak tables. The languid scent of sandalwood lingered in the air.

“You picking up anything?”

“Nada. Nothing out of the ordinary anyway. Other than the fact I’m starting to get a headache.”

“Some alcohol will get rid of that,” said Luna, passing him a champagne flute.

“Thanks.”

Dense plexiglass rested beneath their elbows. Goldfish swimming amidst a heliotrope pulse. Tracers wore three piece suits with high white collars and solid matte black ties. Earpieces were graphed permanently in their left ears. A pale overcast of toxic green descended on Luna’s face as the unassuming Algerian bartender handed her a cosmopolitan.

“What’s the story morning glory?”

“Can’t tell. Normally bars are rife with subvocalized info-tracking over the Wifi but not here. Mobility’s weak. Transactions are slim to nil. But I’m sure our illustrious hosts are just glad the guests aren’t killing each other.”

“That tense huh?”

“Not sure but these elevated heat levels aren’t for nothing. Everyone’s on edge.

I’m just saying one dropped fork and the whole place will explode.”

“Then what the fuck are we doing here?”

Luna led Harlan across a staircase of coarse limestone. The elliptical corridor was slim, dimly lit, and contained Chinese lanterns covered in rice paper that provided the only floodlight. Wires stretched from the walls above to the dome’s central axis. Gnarled petals modeled off Potsdamer Platz draped cotton sheets against a lavender backdrop.

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“What’s that?” Luna’s stilettos clunked monotonously against the floor like a code pleading to be deciphered. “Come on now. Don’t leave me hanging.”

“I need to know where you got you’re work done.”

“Fair enough. I had an acquaintance over in Sector 13 that promised a good discount on my credit if I’d get the mods done by him. It was strictly an external procedure.”

“Was he certified?”

“Let’s just say Blithe had a lot of connections. Some of which were shadier than others. Some of whom I’ve kept in contact with for a long time.”

How many connections? Harland wondered.

And that was it. Sector 13, the undisputed wasteland of the city. Even in broad daylight it was an urban no-holds-bar battle royale. The pieces of Luna’s assault were finally falling into place.

“And your personal safety didn’t factor into the equation?”

“Don’t be silly. I had my knife with me.”

“Is that all?”

“This may come as some shock to you Harlan but I’m not the harmless little damsel in distress you make me out to be. I don’t need rescuing, especially by you. I’ve survived much worse in my life. But it’s you that has to realize that there are easier, more inventive ways of killing a man than with a knife or a gun.”

He was startled back into her past. ‘The Pulse’, the blackout, the ensuing chaos, and eventual quarantine. What impacted Harlan more was her strident, unflinching tone. The pure malice rooted in her speech that left Harlan to question her true motives. Specifically the death of J.T. Blithe.

A snapshot of Jetta drifted through the light of the bar. This was his avatar, the unshakable truth. He was a cyberkid, branded in full regalia of the cyber subculture; ultra-modern tunic with Dintex webbing, military boots, uniform stretch-panel trousers with an asymmetrical hemline, hazard goggles that rested under shards of cobalt blue hair, not to mention the LED collar.

Aiko was transmitting a live feed to St. James Town. Harlan’s faith in Angel dwindled in that their success in the mission relied solely on barely legal jailbait. He fiddled with his naphtha lighter in his jacket pocket. The coldness reassured his nerves.

“You okay?”

Her voice receded into matte darkness. Miniscule details skewed his brain in the company of Yakuza. Teardrop tattoos, Italian silk ties, imitation jewelry that bore the words ‘loyalty’ and ‘family honor’ in their native language.

“Aiko, get me the point of origin.”

Constellations of pixels flooded the interface. Wireframes pulsed from the terminal perspective. His limbs were disembodied pieces of meat. Harlan waved steadily through the crowd outside the main ballroom, down various antechambers. The spectral clunking of Luna’s shoes dawdled not too far behind. Trickles of ultraviolet breadcrumbs led him from the final transmitted position of Ash’s robopet to some undetermined locale. The robopet was nowhere in sight.

Was it endless?

Aiko routinely refreshed the bandwidth but it stayed within normal parameters. She strung him along like a digital marionette far into the Archipelago’s east wing, three domes away from the main hall. He continued, following the same traces of umbelliferone found in Ash’s apartment. Invisible to the naked eye yet disastrous under a black light.

The thin corridor forked south unveiling a blend of Japanese décor and art-deco sensibilities; walls of rice paper, inlaid wood, shallow lighting, sharkskin, poly-carbonated cherry blossoms.

“Don’t tell me, you found something,” said Luna, breathless.

“The trail ends here.” No other access points were available, no adjoining junctions, airtight or otherwise. The only door was an ill-hidden storage closet a few meters away. “I’m picking up low-level heat signatures behind this door.” It was a rugged, lacquered mahogany. The stainless-steel handle was smeared with variant fingerprints, which he scanned immediately into his VisorGoggles. “Stand back.”

He turned the knob. Harlan’s eyes widened. There were no assailants ready to split his skull. No assassins waiting to ravage him despite the high concentration in the Archipelago. Harlan grabbed Luna’s wrist and bolted across the checkerboard floor. It became transparent, X-rays through a sequence of taps on his visors.

The main hydrogen line branched below to the subsystems of five nearby geodesics. Luna dug her fingernails hard into his skin insisting that he slow down but Harlan was having a hard enough time navigating the foyer with invisible walls around him.

Once inside the closest service elevator he pushed the lowest button on the panel. The buttons weren’t numbered. This lift was likely just a bypass. A direct route to the ground began.

“Have you lost your fucking mind?”

“Do you really expect me to answer that?”

“What?”
“The time. What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Harlan’s ears popped as the elevator increased speed. Bands of light flashed rapidly in succession. The cascade was instantaneous, branching its digital fire-light to the nether-regions of Little Tokyo before ultimately going nova.

Horizons released skies.

Falling Towers.

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air.

Silence. Absence. Fire.

#

Harlan became conscious first and foremost of the smells of the warehouse’s interior, timber, sterile steel, vulcanized rubber. His eyes had a type of double-vision as he gazed at Angel’s silhouette. In the static tinted monitors he attempted rubbing them, his eyes, though ‘trodes were still clipped to his fingertips. Harlan was pent double on a salvaged dental chair, nauseated and dismayed.

“Are you awake?” said Luna.

Harlan said nothing.

After disconnecting the fiber-optics from the port of his VisorGoggles he took in heavy gulps of saturated air. That virtual program, the Archipelago, the construct that Ash tried so hard to accommodate was at this point in time irretrievable. Constant was the shrill bleep of Jetta’s flatline as he lay there mere meters away, and the flow of Angel’s tears.

“Are you awake?” she asked again.

Evasion was a hollow pursuit if someone wasn’t trying to kill you. Harlan and Luna were tired of being fugitives. Sure they avoided daylight like the plague, only venturing out at night. Harlan with his VisorGoggles, Luna with her proxy appearance. Their avatars at the Archipelago were so far from their semblance in real life. Then again Harlan’s mental state was a consistent downward spiral. Because the more he thought about the explosion, the more paranoia seeped in. That maybe there were dozens of cartels explicitly hired to track down his location.

“You’re lucky I take you anywhere,” said Harlan, plunging chopsticks into a ceramic bowl, lo-mein noodles simmering in a mélange of curry broth. “Figured you’d be grateful just getting you out of Hiro’s place, like an old-fashioned night on the town sort of thing.”

“What I’d really like is to go home without being harassed by Feds or chinks. Tell me this then, how long do we have to live like this?”

“One week.”

The restaurant was a Vietnamese noodle-house drizzled in bamboo and low-grade Christmas lights. Despite this dubious attempt to cultivate atmosphere, Harlan was surprisingly comfortable in a chair of mauve micro-suede and a table of polished granite. The aroma of ginger wafted from the back kitchen. Luna leaned forward excitedly, nearly tipping a lean bottle of soy sauce. This place was a neutral sight with only the bare minimum of electronic devices.

“Are you serious?”

“Give me one week and you’ll never have to see me again.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch, honest,” answered Harlan, examining the cocktails. The menu was a flexible sheet of flat plastic. “Listen I don’t want to be stuck with you. No more than you want to be stuck with me. So if you bear with me for just seven more days, I’ll promise you’ll never have to see me again.”

The words he’d uttered were drier than the air itself as he stared into the dead brown irises of Ms. Luna Veca. Harlan gulped a shot’s worth of sake from an American-produced bottle of frosted glass. Floor-to-ceiling panels displayed Japanese idorus in hypnotic pinks and blues, liquid crystal displays against transparent plastic. His VisorGoggles could decrypt the foreign characters but they were otherwise superfluous.

“So why are we really here Harlan?”

“Aiko completed the trace on the man who bought the C4 at Mecca. She found that the man who made the purchase was in this city illegally as a cleaner. Megacorps large enough to cross national boundaries are often exempt from immigration statutes. Likewise, megacorps with enough reach and funds to back it up hire cleaners to cover their collective asses, corporate espionage, network subterfuge, reconnaissance, and in some cases…”

“…assassination.”

“Took the words right out of my mouth.”

“But what does this have to do with the asshole that tried to kill you?”

“Nothing, at least I thought there was nothing. The man who we thought was named Randall Ozwald has a handle by the name Mr. Esquire. Aiko cross-referenced his work history with at least eight corporations in the last year alone. Shortly before he came after me he was hired by a company specializing in medical equipment. Now on the surface that may appear just like any other empty fact until I took a closer look at this.”

Harlan handed her Blithe’s pacemaker and freed his VisorGoggles from his temples. Luna bent the flexible rubber to fit her skull’s thin frame. Once hooked onto her temples she accessed the zoom feature, 100x magnification down to the microscopic level, tracing the company’s hallmark embossed on the shell’s exterior.

“Fusion Corp.”

“So you’ve heard of them.”

“Are your dense? Of course, I know them. They’ve been BTF’s largest competitor for the better part of the decade.”

“Explains why Blithe may’ve been hesitant dealin’ with them.” Harlan hadn’t shaved in days, felt the scruffiness on his beard under his chin. The waitress, a buxom Japanese girl with fair skin presented their check on a flat sheet of imaging film. “Not only that. Esquire was hired not too long after Blithe’s death, which leads me to suspect there might’ve been some foul play involved.”

“Why don’t you just say what you want to say,” said Luna tersely, flinging his VisorGoggles back into Harlan’s lap.

“All right then, no bullshit, I think someone at Fusion caught wind of your disappearance. And once they discovered you hired someone sniffing around Blithe’s death they came after me. I also tracked liability cases involving Fusion Corp.’s product line and found that the number of defective pacemakers that have proved fatal is few and far between. Too far to be considered coincidental.”

“But not impossible,” said Luna, always getting the last word.

“But not impossible,” repeated Harlan.

Harlan reveled in the irony of the moment. It was almost palpable. How in the beginning she sought him for guidance and protection, seeking answers to an endless string of questions. Now it seemed all Luna wanted to do was to get as far away from him as she could. To deny the fragility of her existence rather than confronting it head on, as if she didn’t care.

“Well tonight was a bust.”

“Surely you didn’t think the only reason I brought you here was for a nightcap did you?”

#

Harlan’s infrequent circuits through Sector 13 were not without genuine purpose. A lingering thread remained, ever since Ash copied the permanent records of Blithe, Luna, and Amy Lynch. It wasn’t the counterfeit stimulants that drove him to Sector 13, it was the thrill, the here and now that grounded him to reality in lieu of the lax strata online. It was surveyance, pure and simple. Two tocsins echoed in the distance. Crossing the border into this particular sector was an unspoken death sentence on the part of the transgressor. Entrance had to be done at ground level. Sector 13 wasn’t so much a place as it was an ethos or a state of mind. No buildings stood higher than four storeys, no dataports, no plasma screens whatsoever.

Wifi was a feeding frenzy. Harlan clocked five signals currently active within a miles radius. He lo-jacked an Ethernet network bridge hours before his arrival, ancient by today’s standards. Already fifty vital signs registered on his VisorGoggles. The zones with legitimate access were the densest in the sector. The lenses lit up fantastically and guided him through the broken streets. The alleys were a safe bet. Shadows were not simply black, they were charcoal, obsidian, matte, pitch, ebony. They had textures, a tone.

Bazaars dominated its nucleus where there was little threat of violence, a buffer zone. The smell of Cuban cigar smoke gave way to Tudor arches of crumbling granite as they pressed on through the river of bodies.

“So you’re saying these guys are street?”

“Stick to perceptions Luna. The Organiks? They’re as hardcore as they come. Been in this sector less than a decade and have already staked claim to two city blocks, most of which is property. The irony of it all is the Organiks have one of the lowest membership rates for a long-standing gang syndicate.”

A niche, kindled by emergency floodlights draped under silken canopies, beneath high-impact acrylic plastic, was jewelry, Katana swords, Faberge eggs, and weapons embedded in molded vinyl padding.

“Hook your arm in mine,” said Harlan.

“What?”

“I want you to place your arm in mine and trace my back for good measure. These Muslims might be traditional but have balls of brass.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they don’t appreciate women gallivanting around their turf unescorted.”

“What you talking about? Prostitutes? Wives? Since there’s only one of me here…” Harlan cut her off.

“A little tradition never hurt anybody.”

“Last time I was here there was one of those Battle Royales happening,” said Luna. “These cypher assholes use the airspace as their own personal playground, helicopters whizzing back and forth dogfighting.”

“Then we should consider ourselves lucky.” He felt the butt of his Browning tucked firmly in his underarm hostler, as if it would dissolve in the air like smoke. “Answer me this Luna. If there was some way to find more information on Blithe’s death, would you be adverse to take it, even if it meant certain death?”

“Believe or not Blithe didn’t hire me for my looks. I’m a big girl, I can take care myself.”

Luna instinctively felt the inner cleft of her thigh, nicking the stainless steel blade playfully with her thumb. Harlan clocked half-a-dozen denizens staring in his direction, and Luna hooked her arms in his. Even under the faded moonlight, his light pallor attracted attention.

“Good. Then answer me this. Why do I always get the feeling you’re not telling the truth when it comes to your former boss?”

“Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in the past month. Despite what the e-feeds may or may not have reported on Blithe he was as closed off emotionally as he was about the details of his personal life. I hadn’t even heard of Amy Lynch until she was found that night in Blithe’s apartment complex.”

“Well what do you know?”

“I know that in the seven years I’ve worked for Blithe I’ve killed twelve people, which makes it roughly one and a half persons per year. I’ve incapacitated over fifty. But who knows how many stab wounds, broken arms, and idle threats I’ve shelled out during the tenure. I used to keep them in my little black book otherwise known as my datapad, which was stolen. Remember?”

“Enough to warrant death?” said Harlan nonchalantly.

“For every person that was happy for Blithe’s success there were a dozen others who loathed him for it.”

A sudden waft of raspberry shisha piqued Harlan’s senses. They approached the threshold of a nondescript door tagged in Armenian graffiti. He knocked three times. The echo resonated throughout the antechamber. A hulking man, not unlike the Aussie, answered, sporting tattoo sleeves up and along his massive forearms. His muscles teemed with hormonal injections and narcotics, a bootlegged Bolivar cigar wedged between porcelain veneers.

“We’re here to see the guardian,” said Harlan casually. With reluctance, the watchman stepped aside and let them enter. He walked ahead of them, emergency skylights at irregular intervals wired to a central generator.

“I’m going to need to take any weapons you have on you.” Harlan complied readily. The only hardware he carried was his custom Browning 9mm. His taser was in Ash’s possession, wherever Ash was now. Luna dislodged her armory, two switchblades and a hira shuriken.

“I can only allow one of you to speak with her.” As far as Harlan was concerned Luna was mere collateral, physical insurance for a guaranteed rendezvous. The bodyguard escorted him alone to the third level mezzanine. Diametric fibers coated the walls, a faint sheen against a backdrop of Arabesque wallpaper. The titanium bar was parabolic, lining the room’s east section. Harlan helped himself to a bourbon whiskey on the rocks, observing his reflection in mirrors.

“Detective Novak.” He didn’t turn around. Aiko, or at least a facsimile of Aiko, approached him with slight lagtime as she squatted on a vinyl barstool. She’d interfaced with his VisorGoggles and copied a replicant avatar. Harlan leaned on the frigid countertop lighting a fresh cigarillo before facing her. “What are you doing here detective?”

“I’m investigating a case involving your mother’s murder.”

“And?”

“And I thought you’d help me fill in some of the gaps with regards to her death.”

“You’re lucky I didn’t kill you at my doorstep. Frankly it would’ve been a boon to your credibility if you’d admitted straight up that you were a cop instead of dancing around the issue like a fucking schoolgirl.”

He saw no trace of the Aiko he’d come to recognize in this counterpart. There was a tact almost passive-aggressive vindictiveness to her programming. Minute imperfections that stemmed from an autonomous personality, parading around the truth like a holographic marionette.

“Be that as it may. You seem hostile towards your mother.”

“Don’t you fucking start. I didn’t head the Organiks by spreading my legs for every Johnny Newcome that threatened to kill me. I’d go to the nearest Xanadu if I wanted to get off so badly. Fortunately for me that’s not the case. I never knew my father. Instead I killed to support my drug habit while my mother whored her way to some gold-digger living on the Lower East Side. Tell me, what’s the real reason you came here?”

“Look I couldn’t care less about your mother. In the larger scheme of things, she was merely collateral damage. I’m investigating the murder of J.T. Blithe. My associate, that girl you’re holding in the other room, hired me to find her employer’s killer. She found him dead in your mother’s apartment a few weeks ago.”

“I know. My inferiors have been feeding me information steadily. Believe me when I tell you this detective but my mother is better off dead. You, however, still haven’t answered my question.”

“When I visited the morgue where Blithe and your mother were being held, I was a little more than surprised to find that you already signed off on her cremation. The only question I can’t answer is why.”

Lynch remained silent. Harlan smothered his cigarillo in a quartz ashtray with the Organiks emblem etched on the clear surface.

“Less than a week before I was nearly killed in an izakaya shuttle,” he continued. “At first the pieces didn’t fit together. And then it hit me. Who better to send an assassin than the leader of the local crime syndicate?”

“Why would I want to kill you Novak?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you felt so much rage towards your mother that killing her seemed like the perfect comeuppance for your drug-addled childhood. And when you got word from one of your agents that a lone detective was poking around the crime scene of your mother’s murder, you made the effortless decision to take him out of the picture before he became too much of a nuisance.”

“First of all detective, I was aware of the relationship between Blithe and my mother years before her death.”

“You’re saying they were in a long-term relationship?”

“If you think two years constitutes a long-term relationship?”

“And when was the last time you saw your mother?” Lynch’s avatar rose, pacing monotonously on the splintered encaustic tiles below their feet.

“The last time I saw her was five months over the high-wire Systemtax. It was a secure network, very compact, the main lobby of the ice hotel in Kiruna. Coincidentally it was one of my childhood favorites. Wouldn’t be surprised if a lurker was there spying on us. With the ransom on my head she probably just wanted to meet for some half-decent recon. Anyway the meeting only lasted for a few hours. Nothing special, the usual jargon.”

“And how did she seem at the meeting?”

“Seem?”

“You know, cheerful, sad, angry?”

“I don’t know. What’s the emotional equivalent of indifference? Apathy. Passivity. Although…” Lynch’s gait was strong and unflinching. The carriage of a leader. Unlike Aiko her eye contact was steadfast, her posture immaculate, her answers processed instantly and thoroughly.

“…now that I think about it. There was something interesting she said at the meeting, something Blithe brought up. He was worried about some sort of hostile takeover in the works, some small-time acquisition of a private company but I forgot which one. Not that I was paying any particular attention. But she said he was having second thoughts about the merge. That the whole thing might turn into one giant proxy battle.”

A rippled sheen cast over the walls as they sat in silence contemplating. Four siphons at the room’s vertices compiled her image flawlessly with smooth transition during movements. She lit a faux-cigarette with a bronze Zippo lighter. The smoke a million lines of code, the plumes an entire source code.

“But I never did answer your first question. When you asked me why I decided to come here in the first place. Like I said before, I knew the Organiks’ reputation in this sector. As a detective I’m privy to that sort of information. But when I discovered Amy Lynch’s daughter was affiliated with them, I thought to myself who better to try and kill me than the mafia don herself. So to answer your question Ms. Lynch the reason I came here in the first place was to kill you.”

She traced her index finger on the digitized marble tabletop, lifting no dust in the process. Lynch scanned his frame while Harlan mutely hacked the building’s surveillance, bypassing the server’s main line as a foreign intruder. He viewed Luna in the main foyer through his VisorGoggles sipping a Vermouth martini.

“There’s something I think you should see,” said Lynch.

No name was specified. Ash’s profile on her was as rigid as it was sparse. ‘Lynch’ was her true name as far as genealogy went. Nothing was more difficult than deciphering a person’s true name from near-total anonymity, than having a positive ID without a first name.

It wasn’t that the Organiks were particularly low profile, nor were they particularly masochistic in their deviousness. They held the illicit monopoly on data flow, its hotspots and dry-zones. Wifi wasn’t absolute as far as this sector’s domain was concerned.

Lynch sauntered on grimy mosaic tiles down a thin stretch of translucent corridor. Sodium light gave way to low-lit baroque chandeliers and a dense, pungent odor like wet cardboard. Her form was nearly lost in the darkness. Had it not been for his VisorGoggles she would’ve disappeared completely, mapping boot imprints in the settled dust.

“This is where as they say the plot thickens.”

Harlan stepped forward, crossing the threshold of the room. A medical ventilator wheezed beside the bedstead and Lynch in her corpse-like lethargy. The Medusa entanglement of IV lines and plastic tubing crawled beneath her skin. Her body lay encased in a sarcophagus of inch-thick fiberglass, the glow of life-support systems offset her ashy-pallor.

“You didn’t believe me, did you?”

Lynch sidled beside Harlan at the foot of her bed, her skin completely changed. The semblance of her avatar similar to the coffin’s interior, shoulder-length auburn hair, freckles, a canary yellow sundress just above the knee.

“Even after all these years it never ceases to amaze me what a few days of shooting up heroine will do to a six-month old fetus.”

“Let me guess, Blithe paid for all of this.”

“As soon as he started seeing my mother. Better than being a vegetable I suppose. Not nearly as much a drain on resources either. Kind of reminds you of Sleeping Beauty doesn’t it? DNI runs solid twenty-four seven. From here I can direct myself to anywhere in the city.” Lynch peered at herself through the smoky plastic of the casing. “The switch for the ventilator is on the other side. That is, if you still wish to kill me. But answer me this detective, you saw my signature at the morgue firsthand. How could I have signed off on my mother’s cremation while hooked up to all of these machines?”

Harlan thought about this for a moment. The reality of the situation — watching Lynch hovering over her corporeal self, her living self, her ‘real’ self — hit home. The walking, talking reflection of her mother had struck a cord in him. His mission reinvigorated, his purpose unwavering, the substantial events triggered on the individual rather than on the larger scheme of things.

“Are you saying the person I saw at the morgue was lying?”

“I’m saying for a detective you certainly have a tendency to take information at face value. If you saw a definite signature with my name on the dotted line then it’s obvious someone forged it in my place.” Harlan engulfed his bare forearm in the nexus of Lynch’s avatar, his limb swimming effortlessly in a pixilated ocean, she not even flinching.

“I’ve made my bed Ms. Lynch. And whether or not I choose to sleep in it is really none of your concern. What I’m interesting in is how a paralyzed woman becomes leader of the Organiks?”

“It’s quite simple really. Less than a hundredth of a percent have access to direct-neural interface, and even fewer are capable of walking and talking. Being connected allows me to streamline a year’s worth of knowledge in a day. Not to mention I don’t sleep.”

The morgue was devoid of surveillance. Harlan surged through network pathways and found no outputs on the other side. Aiko confirmed this later.

“Then answer me one question. Who fitted your port?”

#

Lynch offered respite in one of the syndicate’s guest suites. She even provided protection from outside sources. Earlier Luna instinctively amputated the doorman’s index finger with a serrated edge when he became to close for comfort. It was weird. As time went on, Harlan found it less and less likely that a woman like Luna would get assaulted. Whatever protection offered by the Organiks was in vain. She’d have to sleep with one eye open. Fortunately for Luna, Harlan never slept as he paced in their room for most of the night. When boredom finally overtook him, Harlan lo-jacked his VisorGoggles to the headquarters’ server, signaling Lynch only meters away.

“I need to know who did your work.”

“Why?”

“Because a man’s been abducted and it’s probably my fault.”
“Ash Wednesday.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Like I said earlier, DNI allows me to become God. It takes the grand scheme of things and immediately simplifies them.”

Her domain was an ultra-chic loft with a panoramic view of the downtown metropolis. She lay on a patent leather therapy couch, her arm tucked beneath her chin as she gazed luridly into the nightscape.

“I take it you wouldn’t know where he is then?”

She didn’t answer, nor did Harlan expect her to. Even if she knew the answer she wouldn’t tell him upfront.

“Fine then but at least answer me this. One thing that’s been bugging me since this investigation began. Your mother died the same night Blithe was found but she wasn’t in the apartment. Where’d they find her body?”

“She was found in a pile of her own vomit approximately three blocks away, a half-an-hour after Expansion. Anything else?” Harlan jacked out. She wasn’t worth his time or patience. The last thing Harlan needed was another gang wanting to kill him.

#

She referred them to a specialist in Sector 13. The zone had a reverse curfew policy. Daylight was brutal. Soundwave had left five messages on his VisorGoggles at approximately hour-an-a-half intervals. Fortunately the practice was surprisingly close to the border, and they could reach it before dawn. Never had he seen a more atrocious skyline than at its border. It was vintage, real trees in the park, real gravel in the cement, real sand in the glass. Otherwise Sector 13 was crumbling into oblivion. A skilled ace could dog-fight his aircraft in and between buildings, which only heightened Harlan’s worry as a target for retribution.

He journeyed onward across the main avenue where there was not a soul in sight. Flaming Chevrolets, eddies of discarded Xeroxes, malfunctioning animatronics, and a severe infestation of potholes were all commonplace in this monstrosity. The outermost face of the Continental Hotel shimmered dimly from a few archaic neon lights and he pressed on. His sensors generated scarlet silhouettes from the third floor windows. Ghosts, pixilated blobs of heat-vision morphing between spokes of glass, his targets.

There were elevated hormonal levels of both testosterone and estrogen from a distance, this in addition to several unmoving subjects (allegedly human) that registered a violet hue on his visors. More solitude haunted the lobby, ashes everywhere, mirrors cracked, remnants of faux-porcelain powder sprinkled all over the floor. A biohazard sign blinked on his myopic lenses indicating high levels of radiation were present but only those with long-term exposure inside the building required caution. This made sense, such that I.R.M Corporation, Atami Solutions, and Robotics International had been freely dumping waste underground for decades and the beta isotopes he clocked in the area jumped off the scale.

He pressed the UP button scuffed with nail scratches of a thousand ex-patrons that blinked twice before the twitching light above the elevator froze at the second floor. The corroded cogs and rustic pulleys whizzed and churned, echoing — as if experiencing indigestion or excessive diarrhea. He gamboled up the crumbling staircase with Luna, being able to gaze half the metropolis skyline through glass-cement windows.

STEALTH MODE! The VisorGoggles overcastted a myriad of toxic greens and putrid blacks, Night Vision, with an extra 0.3% pm nanometer variation. However, the electromagnetic radiation was interfering with his readings, distorting wavelength patterns, so he upped the dosage to 0.85% to compensate. Auto-crosshairs were standard, able to trace through walls in case of hostile forces.

He forked the third level corridor, the innards of asbestos and drywall, the smell of plaster, Baroque-style doors ripped from their hinges. These things all mingled together and, in a eerie sense, created an ambience of decrepitude while a chandelier flashed erratically, slightly blinding his vision.

The plasma buzzed against the e-ink receptors, chiseling millions of cells that looked as though the lettering had been drizzled in Sulfuric acid. His eyes were parallax with the words on the door.

Chase Infidel, M.D.

24 Hour a Day Cosmetic Surgeon and Mac Daddy Extraordinaire

He knocked three times and the door jerked open. He sidled against the brittle spine of the frame and removed his VisorGoggles. Against the backdrop was a neon VACANCY sign that streamed through the window.

The man who he assumed was Chase stood there ambiguously in the antechamber of his surgical foyer. He wore enlarged, pink sunglasses that bombarded his eyes from his face, and blond spiked hair that jutted forward. His alligator skin jacket and loafers reflected a glossy mahogany, overshadowing his cheetah patterned undershirt peaking just over his collar.

“What the fuck do you what?” said Chase neutrally as if it were part of his natural shithole-jargon vernacular.

“I made an appointment with you yesterday over the e-link.”
“Ah yes of course,” he said clicking his heals, “Facial implementation, right? Caucasian white modeling.”

His office contained a fixed influx of prepubescent girls, some not over the age of sixteen, and Harlan wondered if Luna saw a little of herself in this cabal. The girls were decorated in plastic clothing that stretched and scrunched from a cross-legged to a spread eagle.

One in particular that caught his eye was silhouetted in the double-haze of the fluorescent billboard. High-heeled boots with zippers running up her shins, golden masquera underscoring her eyes, and Primo-infused nails that absorbed light. He always had a thing for young girls. Now he knew where the elevated heat levels originated. He could practically arouse them by a wave of his hand, the hormones in the room absorbing him like an intoxicating hex. Luna took a seat in a corner love-seat, watching her there appeared eerily unsettling amongst the other girls.

“No, no, no,” insisted Harlan, “I’m here for information. I was told you were the best for that sort of thing.”

“Ah yes, the man with a plan. Okay, let’s see what I’m up against.” He plucked a hair from Harlan’s scalp and dotted over to the portable plasma-screen, casting the hairline fiber in a Petri dish below the standard-issue imager. “A claim of redemption. You’re treading on thin ice my friend…” Chase grabbed a pair of latex gloves and penetrated the interior lining, “…but money’s money I suppose. You know you’re on the clock?”

“Are you the only attending here?”

“It would seem so.”

Inside the surgical bay was a feral Lolita, another one of Chase’s upscale clientele from the Red Light District. He settled into the pneumatic bench (avoiding the metallic stirrups) as the doctor sat in a battened-down swivel chair that screeched horribly. Beside him was a chrome tray of second-hand surgical instruments, most of which were tinged with blood.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” he asked casually.

“Can’t. Permanent insomnia,” said Chase, wiping powder from beneath his nostrils, “back in the day I was a siphon junkie. You know, overdosed one too many times on Rapture. Can’t even sleep without analgesics jacked into my system.” He then explained the amount of generic pharmaceuticals needed just to zap his brain into REM sleep.

I can relate, thought Harlan.

“So what have you got for me?” asked the doctor in the gleam of his framed Doctorate on the wall. Harlan reached into his jacket pocket and fished out Blithe’s pacemaker, the only piece of legitimate medical equipment in the building, and handed it to Chase.

“Maybe I should’ve placed this under the imager first,” continued Chase, redirecting a comsat signal to the plasma screen. Atmospheric sunspots regularly sent the pulse line on the fritz, slamming his portable XL_Module tethered to his belt.

“Can you access it?”

“Absolutely.” The monitor presented Blithe’s lifespan, sixty-three year’s worth of an elongated EKG. “Interesting.”

“What have you got?” Chase zoomed in on the final segment, a good five minutes before and after his death. Harlan thought it best not to mention Blithe’s identity. He would either induce hysteria or threaten impartiality.

“This is the electrocardiogram from the pacemaker you just gave me. These things are designed to stay active twenty-four hours after death unless the person is revived. But from what I gather, and this is what’s strange here, is there’s nothing indicating some sort of bodily trauma before his death. You see, these lines wouldn’t be this rhythmic. They’d be erratic, but at his death the lead just bottoms out, flatlines, no change, nothing. Like the heart suddenly decided to shut down.” Chase straightened the lapels of his jacket, brushing his hand through his bleach-blonde hair in frustration. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Can you tell me anything about the pacemaker?”

“Not much. It’s odd. Pacemakers aren’t used anymore. There’s almost a nostalgic quality to the thing. It would have been easier to engineer a replacement heart, or at the very least buy one on the open market. It’s almost as if the person wanted someone to find it.”

“Then why would someone still use one?”

“Several reasons. Could be that he was too weak to undergo another open-heart surgery. Or maybe they just didn’t feel the need to go through with it. Now this isn’t the standard-issue pacemaker used back then. It’s a composite model. Even the pacemakers today are like five times smaller than this one. This one’s more or less hollow. Its shell is meant to withstand high levels of electrostatic activity.”

“Wait a minute. What was that thing you said about ‘wanting to find it’?”

“You know like a backup system,” started Chase, stretching, “the reverse of what those info-traffickers do in case something was to happen. Might still have some data on it.”

“Can you find out?” A brief puff of air nicked Harlan’s jugular and he slipped into the medical chair slowly falling victim to the anesthesia.

#

In the moments that Harlan was conscious he witnessed Chase begin a decryption algorithm on Blithe’s pacemaker.

“Try not to blink,” he suggested, “Are we simpatico?” binding Harlan’s wrists to the leather straps of the chair. “Who knows,” he continued nonchalantly, “there may actually be something of value on here. Of course if that doesn’t work,” he said, reaching for a bloody scalpel, “there are alternatives.”

By this point Harlan was no longer conscious. The last image he saw was a skull-and-crossbones pulsating a toxic green in the lower-right corner of his lenses. He’d later view the chilling aftermath from his still recording VisorGoggles. “That’s the beautiful thing about fugitives. They don’t have any rights.”

The footage was fast and off-kilter. Chase’s voice cut dead but the audio remained responsive, laggard breathing into the side mic. Chase slumped into view, collapsing headfirst with two inches of steel in his back. Luna whipped her patterned shuriken into the terminal monitor, retrieving Blithe’s pacemaker from the Petri dish where it lay.

Sparks erupted.

Wires frayed.

Luna snaked her delicate hand inside Harlan’s jacket and fired five rounds from his Browning 9mm straight into Chase’s hard-drive, destroying it, before she severed the feed to his VisorGoggles.

#

Harlan eventually awoke with a splitting migraine. It was enough to make him vomit. Through some miracle of divine intervention he’d made it back to Hiro’s flat, which technically made Luna his guardian angel. He didn’t ask questions. The very sight of blood would’ve floored him in Chase’s office anyway. The residual effects of the sedatives were gradually fading into his bloodstream, and even then he hadn’t viewed what happened until hours later.

Was it a dream? he thought.

Was it a paradigm shift?

Hiro’s guest bedroom was unusually warm. It must have been night because it was completely dark, but in a residence with no windows and only halogen light for comfort it wouldn’t have mattered either way.

Aiko appeared brazenly before him wearing a silk kimono that was remarkably similar to the one Luna wore days earlier.

“There’s my girl,” said Harlan as Aiko sat cross-legged, perched on the side of his bed. He fished the last cigarillo from his crumpled pack and inhaled the rich tobacco scent, knowing full well the additives would do nothing to alleviate his headache. Maybe Lynch was right. His faith in his abilities as a detective waned. And now here was Aiko and all he could think was who was going to kill him next.

“Hiro’s furious with you.”

“What else is new?”

“No sweetheart, I mean he’s really bent out of shape. Been watching him pace back and forth all day. His fingers have been twitching worse than ever.” Harlan reached into a dusty jar and downed two Qualudes to steady his nerves. “Maybe you should go talk to him.”

“I’m not his mother. As far as I’m concerned he doesn’t control my comings and goings.”

“And what about Luna?”

“Luna’s can take care of himself. Where is she anyway?”

“She’s in the next room sleeping.” Harlan detached his VisorGoggles and gave his corneas a rest, conversing with Aiko in the tepid darkness like some disembodied spirit.

“And what have you been up to lately?”

“Nothing. Just contemplating the futility of existence. I’ve been going over the schematics for your latest escapade.”

“The Mirrorman’s Shadowrun,” said Harlan promptly. Aiko nodded.

“You do understand the logistics in accepting a heist for a man who’s given you nothing more than a handle and an objective right?”

“You saying it’s a suicide mission?”

“It’s always a suicide mission babe. The real question is whether or not you’re being set up?”

The thought had struck his mind. Why bother having people chase Harlan when they could simply dangle the right bait to draw him in. He’d successfully mounted five operations prior to the Mirrorman’s. Each with the same company of cyphers, but in his gut he felt the last thing the mission was was a setup.

“None of them would go that far. Heck, Durango’s a fucking AI and he’s been with us since the beginning. I sure as hell trust him over you.”
“You sure know how to flatter a girl, don’t you?” Aiko’s voice was now inches from his face. It didn’t matter if she was near him. She was invisible nonetheless.

“I’m just saying if things were to go wrong in Sector Nine it wouldn’t be because there was a mole in our den. Unless you’re thinking of turning me in?”

“Not today hon.”

Harlan questioned his rationale. That upon reflection the line between justice and vengeance wore thin, and whatever raison d’etre his handle endowed him with as ‘private dic’ was negligible. His situation was different though. The mere idea that he was conspiring and mounting a shadowrun — for profit, for prestige — led him to reevaluate his moral code, and question whether or not he was any better than Amy Lynch’s daughter or Chase Infidel.

“Wait a minute. It’s the mission right? That’s it, isn’t it? You know how it’s going down. Whether or not it’s going to fail?” Aiko remained silent. His joints ached. He activated his VisorGoggles to read her expression. She wouldn’t tell him a thing.

“I’m just saying, I think you should talk to Luna before you head out on your little escapade. That’s all.”

#

Hiro was a prime candidate for sick-building syndrome. Although technically his hideaway was more of a shelter than a building. About five minutes after first meeting Hiro in the flesh, Harlan scanned his lungs and clocked higher-than-average levels of asbestos, dust, and carbon particulates infused to his lungs. Aiko estimated Hiro had five to ten years to live if he didn’t die of Legionnaires Disease first.

“You’re saying it short-circuited?” said Luna.

“I’m saying the feed was cut nearly five minutes after I passed out. It does that automatically to save power.” Harlan smacked the antique cherry wood as the virtual chessboard went on the fritz again. Its only version was composed of bronze chess pieces emulating Lewis Carroll characters. Apparently Luna was winning.

“I still don’t understand how you were able to drag me all the way from Sector 13?”

“Then maybe I should just show you.” Luna wore a bedraggled ebony halter-top and faded denim jeans. Her hair was held up with a single discarded chopstick from Hiro’s stockpile. “It’s amazing what a person’s capable of when the adrenaline starts pumping. Of course sometimes I need a boost.”

Luna reached behind and laid the pneumatic gun on the simulated board, the pistol inundated with chips and scratches along the barrel’s hard plastic. Harlan was taken aback. It took him a few minutes to start making connections.

“Where’d you find it?”

“Right where I thought it would be. And it took a while before it finally clicked.” Luna tossed the hollow stim-cartridge on the tabletop. It clanked noisily as she deactivated the game board. “When you left me in the foyer I started exploring, walking up and down the hallways, peeping into the abandoned rooms that lined the defunct hotel. And then this strange feeling crept inside me. Like déjà vu only more terrifying. Like I was sure I’d been there before and just didn’t know it. But I knew for sure once I came up to Chase’s door.”

Luna stood up from the stained velvet armchair, supporting her weight against the doorframe nearby, fighting back tears. Uncharacteristic of her to say the least. Harlan leaned forward and saw the counterfeit handbag she’d lost in the wake of her assault, her unannounced venture into Sector 13.

“Chase Infidel,” said Harlan.

“I went to him for DNI. That was plan B. Chase was one of the medical bottom-feeders from Blithe’s directory. Fact of the matter was I needed a discreet job done without any outside intervention. Keep in mind this wasn’t long after I’d been accused of murdering my boss. Direct-neural interface. It was a provision in my pension, unlimited access to the Catacombs. Of course I didn’t know this until after Blithe’s death. All I needed was to get a port graphed.” Luna wielded her butterfly knife, fastening the steel bite handle to her belt. “It was only when I saw Chase’s office door that things clicked, and I felt this inscrutable rage once I entered that room. Honestly I don’t remember what happened after that. Next thing I know I wake up in the next room covered in blood, a gun with no bullets, and the handbag that I’d lost sitting across from me.”

“Do you still have the gun?”

Luna sidled over to where her handbag lay. She relinquished the firearm, and Harlan — noticing obliquely that one of her nails were chipped, the glossy peach lacquer only visible along the cuticle — reloaded the Browning with a fresh clip.

“You think Chase was a harvester?”

“Harvester, snuff producer, sociopath. Doesn’t matter. He’s dead, that’s all I care about. The fact that he won’t hurt or kill another innocent bystander is enough closure for me.”

“All right,” said Harlan. “So where does that leave us?”

“It leaves us with five days before I leave.” It was a lax conversation to say the least. Aiko casually informed him that Luna was three moves away from checkmate. He hadn’t been online in days and the withdrawal was starting to eat away at reality. “Does that make us even then?”

“For what?”

“For saving my life.” Luna didn’t respond. Harlan simply lit another cigarillo and hoped her silence would suffice. “You know when I promised we would part in one week it wasn’t entirely random. You see, there’s a shadowrun taking place in a couple of days, and Aiko, in all her infinite wisdom, believes it’s going to be a death sentence. She thinks she has a knack for predicting the future.”

“So what’s the problem? You don’t believe her?”

“It’s not that I don’t believe her,” began Harlan, “I just don’t believe that our paths are set in stone, predestination. If I were to fail this mission it’d be of my own volition, no one else’s.”

“So what it comes down to is you’re going on this shadowrun to spite a computer program.”

“It comes down to fate Luna. Something tells me this mission isn’t just a simple hack job. I believe it’s a test.”

“A test of what?”

“That I’m not sure. Aiko said I should talk with you before going on this mission.”

“Were you originally going to talk to me before you went on this shadowrun?” snapped Luna. After stumbling over a pile of frayed wires and entrailed hardware she grasped a green bottle and downed the remainder of cheap, stale beer.

“Honestly, no. I don’t know much about what lies ahead. Durango ensures us that our patron is legit. Says he was referred by a previous client and I have no reason to doubt him. We’re swiping some highly-sensitive material from Sector Nine.”

“Then maybe Aiko wasn’t so crazy after all.” Luna waltzed over to the vacant seat and adjusted her rear in the upholstery. “Listen, there’s something I think you should see.” She interfaced her datapad with the desktop, displaying an email that was marked unread. “I noticed this yesterday once I regained consciousness. Notice anything?”

“You mean other than the fact that it was sent nearly two weeks after his death? No, nothing. Why didn’t you open it when you had the chance yesterday?”

“I thought I’d leave that to you detective. Give you the chance to read the email before my biased opinions and worthless doublethink polluted your brain.” A virtual keyboard prompted Luna to type in her password. Harlan unlocked his wireless and blue-jacked the message to his database. All he had to do now was tap his right temple to open the letter.

Dear Evie,

This letter is an automatically generated email sent to your inbox ten days after my death. If you’re reading this it means I’ve unfortunately come to pass. And while you’ve no doubt been an invaluable boon to my personal (as well as professional) life, I also consider you a reliable friend and colleague. But now’s not the time for pleasantries, for there’s a task I must ask you and you alone to undertake.

With my death come rival megacorps and assailants in search of my fortune. For years I’ve had BTF work on side-projects that, for reasons otherwise unimportant, I’ve deemed top secret. One such prototype (entitled the Lazarus Project) has been kept in a secure location for some time now and as I leave this letter for you, my last will and testament, I also believe you’re the only one I can truly trust. There’s a safety deposit box in my name at Sector Nine’s central facility for which I’ve given you exclusive access to. Fusion Corp. has threatened repeatedly tried to take over the company at even the slightest sign of weakness. Believe me when I tell you Evie that if Fusion acquired BTF, they’d sell off the company piece by piece. The information in this vault is vital to the longevity of my empire. Don’t let what I’ve worked so hard for be taken away from me.

Y.T. (Yours, Truly),
James Theodore Blithe

Harlan copied the email and immediately sent it to Luna’s datapad. Luna transferred the file to the rosewood coffeetable, its pixilated letterhead streamed across the scratched surface in Arial typeface.

“And you expect to just walk into Sector Nine and steal one of their most prized possessions?”

“First off,” began Harlan, “I know for a fact that the clientele that patronizes Sector Nine is given a certain degree of leeway when it comes to anonymity. So for all they know Blithe’s most prized possession is a toaster. Secondly, no one on the outside knows, or at least they shouldn’t know, that there’s anything of Blithe’s in Sector Nine at all. And lastly, how long is it going to be before that small percentage that does know of Blithe’s fortune breaks into Sector Nine and steals it for themselves.” Luna drummed her nails on her datapad contemplating.

“You believe they’re connected?”

“What am I supposed to believe? That the timing of the Mirrorman’s shadowrun and the message from Blithe are mere coincidences. No, I can’t accept that. Not when you take into account everything that’s happened so far.” Luna looked distressed. She slumped in her chair, soothing her aching forehead as best she could. “I need you to do a favor for me.”

“Do I really have a choice?”

“Of course you have a choice. But would you regret your decision if you say no?” She leaned forward once again, her eyes glazing over the letter. She tapped the table twice and the file vanished into her datapad.

“What do you need me to do?”

#

Being online was a welcome change of pace. The restrictions of physical reality — sleeping, eating, pissing — and the fluidity of virtual reality helped ease the encroaching anxiety. It was twelve hours until emergence point. He took a capsule of dex from Luna’s pneumatic gun and hoped it’d be enough to sustain him for however long the meeting was going to last.

What surprised Harlan the most about Prodigy’s lair was its specificity to detail. The Grasshopper was a large chalet-style coffeehouse on the edge of Amsterdam’s Red Light District. It was twilight just off the Damrak. Harlan combed over the sex-shops, cinemas, the avenue’s neon rippling over the putrid water. De Wallen, the cobblestone arteries lining the canal, was public domain. The undulating crowds ambling in the side-streets were real uplinked people. This was private though, exclusive and personal. Juicebar, De Dampkring, the Greenhouse Centrum. Harlan silently listed the bars and coffeehouses in his mind, gauging a second-storey view from the café’s west balcony. The room smelt of hash oil and ground cannabis.

“The plans have changed,” announced Harlan to the rest of his consortium. Each member appeared in rough five-minute successions. Although none seemed deterred by his comment, most of their best laid plans were changed at the last minute.

“What do we know about Sector Nine?” asked Soundwave. Prodigy, our resident master of subterfuge, removed a business card from his back pocket before whipping it at the empty cork wall. The card expanded to aquamarine schematics of Sector Nine, translucent floorplans of the facility’s interior, and whatever pics they could scrounge on the net.

“Imagine a giant Turing Test rendered in real-time,” started Durango, “The schematics we have obtained are mere glimpses into what Sector Nine is capable of. But I have heard stories. You see most vaults are designed to keep people out and protect whatever is inside. What separates this stronghold from all others is that in terms of access there are few restrictions for gaining entry, as long as you have a reason for being there. However, no one knows exactly what the interior looks like, its true structure.”

Durango rubbed the cheeks on his thin face. “I wasn’t kidding when I said at our last meeting that Sector Nine is a hotbed for unheard-of technologies. Sector Nine has no cameras, no alarms, no security guards, no keys, no keylocks, no trip lasers, no nothing. Picture a giant room that not only conforms to the object being protected but also to the person trying to gain access.”

Harlan viewed his ornate reflection in a scratched mirror framed in dry-rotted ebony. He’d forgotten the color of his eyes, a light emerald speckled with orange. He tapped the faceplate of his watch twice, and lowered the ambient noise coming from the domain’s exterior. Closing the window seemed too outmoded.

“I think a change of plans is in order,” requested Soundwave. Harlan would have agreed outright if he weren’t a few feet away from Hiro in real life. He didn’t want to appear suspicious, fearing one of them had breached their secret and was working under false pretenses.

“Agreed,” answered Snow and Prodigy.

“Breaking and entering is out of the question. By that I mean there’s no conceivable way of entering the premises other than the front entrance.”

“That’s not where I was going,” started Soundwave, flexing his featherbed wings so they fit around the low bar chair. “I understand this Mirrorman wants certain discretion when it comes to his identity. But we can’t even begin to circumvent Sector Nine without a reason for entering it first.”

“I have a reason,” said Harlan without thinking. The cartel glared in his direction as the room fell silent, minus the muffled gibberish from the outside. “By that I mean I’m fairly certain I can get in there without detection.”

“Then please, share with us.”

“You leave that up to me. Sufficed to say I think I can get a visual on the inside, back-and-forth communication is another story.” He said this almost haphazardly. In truth, he worried more about the departure between him and Luna than he did about criminal incarceration or rivaling cyphers. If there was no light at the end of this tunnel the consequences would extend farther than a bruised ego and a migraine from virtual exposure.

“Maybe that was the point.”

“About what?”

“Maybe the Mirrorman didn’t give us a lot of information on purpose,” started Prodigy in his metrosexual avatar, “Maybe that was the reason behind the whole mission.”

“Explain that to me.”

“What I’m saying is if Sector Nine adjusts to the individual, then maybe not knowing exactly what we need to know is a good thing. Durango said it himself. Maybe all we need for this shadowrun to work is the belief in obtaining the Mirrorman’s cache.”

“I think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Snow, “but we’ll find out soon enough tomorrow.” Despite being online Harlan felt the distinct aftertaste of hyperbase swimming in his saliva. It added a translucent vividness here, unsurpassed by any other recreational drugs or hallucinogen.

“So with Quickshot in Sector Nine, where the hell does that leave us?” said Soundwave directly to Durango this time.

“It leaves us with plenty. One person records the moment he enters the facility to the time he exits. Another will track Quickshot’s vitals. Prodigy will distribute the link and maintain the feed from his post. Then of course someone has to quarantine the signal and make sure no one piggybacks it.”

Harlan didn’t care much about anyone anymore. He was selfish like that. His first priority was to get into Sector Nine. The rest was a cakewalk. It wasn’t that Harlan didn’t have faith (in himself, in his team) it was more a question of lulling into routine, using the same old tricks, getting too comfortable, and then being overtaken. That was the fear that permeated Harlan’s existence.

“So that’s the deal then?” said Prodigy. The residual interference coming off his friend was difficult to ignore. Harlan did his best to tune him out. “In-fucking-credible. With any luck Durango’s gonna stick me on reconnaissance again. I tell you where’s the fun in that? Honestly, sometimes I think he’s doing this just to get a rise out of me.” The realism of Harlan’s fingernail was enough to make him vomit. He plucked it upwards, downloading any excess materials into his core memory before jacking out. “I’m just saying is all.”

#

Although neither of them showed fear when venturing into the nightlife, it didn’t mean there was nothing to be scared of. The nightly platforms for elite traveling were routinely monitored by surveillance cameras and patrolled by privatized security personnel. Dellinger shuttles were two-person maglev pods set on a single electromagnetic track. Luna ordered the luxury-class vehicle. As such it was lined with the finer amenities not custom to substandard pods; Nappa leather interiors, champagne, daily newspapers, fresh condoms. They were also less prone to malfunctions and vandalism, and required less maintenance than the average shuttle overall.

She must have found some poetic quality to the voyage, since the trip to Sector Nine was maybe twenty minutes nonstop at most. Perhaps it was her version of a Last Supper or a swan song. What it really meant was that Luna truly believed she would not return, or Harlan was too stubborn to realize his own futility.

Sector Nine had no known location on GPS or any standard mapping grid. The oblong lunafilters kicked in five minutes before their destination, eclipsing any sense of relative position in matte darkness.

The shuttle’s door collapsed in on itself, and Harlan stepped onto flax linoleum. He escorted Luna out of her cushioned seat as they headed through the vacant lobby. His walk was slightly off-kilter. Inside Harlan’s jacket was a sawed-off shotgun held vertically by a makeshift sling of plastic twine. She hadn’t spoken the entire ride, finally breaking the silence as he exited the vehicle.

“Maybe I should’ve told you this earlier, but I don’t handle DNI well.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” said Harlan around a fresh stick of hyperbase. “The trick is to keep your eyes forward and to not look at your feet.” A small envelope blinked in the bottom-right lens of his VisorGoggles so Harlan set up a tactile interface.

“Didn’t think you’d actually make it inside the damn thing?” said Prodigy. As predicted, Durango had him working to establish the feed. While the company’s location was a mystery, its network was as public as any information kiosk. Prodigy, however, was a pro. He promised a visible link to Harlan’s VisorGoggles within ten minutes of entrance.

“Just make sure you work fast, man. I don’t know how long I can stall these

fuckers. Contact me when you’ve got confirmation.”

The den was spartan to say the least. Ivory columns towered ninety-floors up near into the stratosphere, galvanized steel beams tinted indigo offset the art deco ambiance. One centerpiece dominated the central lobby, a coy pond outlined in lapis lazuli. The water was holographic, automated catfish with reactionary knee-jerk response swam within. They ambled forward to the sole desk in the room, fearing the worst.

“Can I help you?” inquired the secretary, sifting the TeleGoggles onto her forehead before responding.

“Yes, we have an appointment in Sector Nine.”

“Both of you?”

“Correct.”

“Very well. Hold on a moment.” She resurfaced her TeleGoggles while simultaneously scrambling through an infinite consciousness of data, all via a virtual keyboard that was invisible to them. The headset that coiled around her left ear had a forty million digipixel screen posted before her left eye — rechecking agendas, editing correspondences, delivering packages — seeing that she was right-handed.

“May I have your true names please.”

“Eva L. Yonge,” said Luna brusquely.

“Detective Harlan Novak.”

If it weren’t for his detective status he wouldn’t have been permitted entrance into Sector Nine. Despite Luna’s exclusive access, no other persons were allowed this kind of indulgence. Harlan slung the duffel along his back and placed his thumb on the scanner to verify his identity.

“Please come with me,” she said, leading them across glossy quarry tiles to a nearby Odyssey elevator. Her high heels spiked in his ears like tsunamic waves, another aftereffect of his hyperbase addiction. Harlan was getting nervous. Fortunately Prodigy contacted him as they both entered the lift.

“Good luck Quickshot. I’m distributing the feed to the others now.”

#

The night was gone.

Harlan gnarled his fingers inward surprised to find the digits spread, brushing finely against coarse asphalt. The ‘trodes were also gone. In an age where technology progressed so rapidly that paradigm shifts occurred daily, adaptation was the sole means for survival. But nothing prepared him for the potency of this simulation. What Aiko would refer to as Unreal City.

This wasn’t ‘real’, however. He took deep breathes and could almost feel the transparency of the program, the limitations of his current existence soaking what made up his lungs. Harlan shielded his eyes while coughing incessantly.

The silence irritated him. So did the light.

The purity of the air made him dizzy, brought on by this new equilibrium. His palms were streaked with dirt. Grit was beneath his fingernails. Harlan crouched up on his haunches only to realize that the suede loafers he’d been wearing were gone, as was his beat-up leather jacket and sawed-off shotgun that grazed his hip.

It took less than three minutes for him to realize that this wasn’t true reality. At best it was a poor man’s DNI — if indeed there was such a thing. No corporation found it economically feasible. The global economy would collapse with enough participants inexplicably linked, granted, if permanent admission could be sustained through an alternate reality — with no indulgence except for the truly rich, other than a lifetime inheritance.

This landscape was foreign. Harlan arose from the middle of a traffic intersection unable to get his bearings. No power was being supplied to the traffic lights. He looked up at the sky, standing up on his two feet for the first time. The upper atmosphere wasn’t teeming with electrical storms, nor did it reflect in the typical monochromatic sheen as most constructs, an ashen grey expanse slightly tinged with sapphire.

A gust of wind blew a discarded newspaper at his feet. The crumpled newsprint was blank other than carefully spaced geometric rectangles of burnt orange and saffron, the tabloid’s layout, and a few innocuous smudges from his hands. Language was devoid in this barren scene, billboards, benches, signs, maps, all were bare, only adding to the macabre of the simulation.

Harlan heard a sudden clank. He walked a few meters and seized the object, a navy blue umbrella with a parabolic handle of sturdy oak.

“Are you all right?” said Luna behind him. The sky quickly darkened but Luna seemed unperturbed by its suddenness, her umbrella sprawled over her head. She wore a scarlet trench coat and matching fedora that left her face in shadow, obscuring her eyes. When her eyes were visible, they were usually brown, although in certain lights they were blue.

It made him think of her avatar in the Archipelago. In earlier versions her hair color was given to be ‘auburn’ or ‘black’. Here it was long brown. She wore red high-heeled shoes and distinct black gloves that fit snugly on her hands. In the original sense-net she wore a yellow or orange dress with a fedora. She seemed to have a flair for elegance, often wearing jewelry. However, in this creation her appearance was retooled so that she wore pressed velour under her trench coat with a stripe on her long-brimmed hat to match.

“I didn’t think you’d adjust so quickly,” said Harlan, instinctually opening his umbrella.

“Sometimes things have a way of working themselves out.”

“I suppose you know where you’re going?” It started raining, a thickened drizzle. While ambling beside Luna Harlan stuck out his hand. His palm was slowly drenched in what felt like acrylic paint but less viscous, not blood, and rubbed it between his fingers like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“You have beautiful eyes Harlan. I’ve never seen them up close before.”

“Well don’t get too comfortable. This is just temporary. We have more important things to worry about.”

“What do you suppose the others are doing?”

“I have no idea. Trying to keep the connection stable I suppose. This place is big enough without participants linked to the network. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing shuts down due to information overload.”

“Mustard seeds,” said Luna under her breath.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s like in the bible, that parable. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed.’ That’s what this place reminds me of.”

They pressed forward through the empty, wide street when it stopped raining. Harlan squeezed the umbrella closed, dragging a fractured trail of red dripping out the object’s stem. The liquid disappeared on impact, so it left no imprints as they ventured forth. And while no signage was rendered on storefronts, neon hummed in the twilight.

“Do you know where you’re going?” asked Harlan.

“You don’t see it do you?” They’d been walking in the same direction for more than an hour. He was simply following Luna’s lead in the hopes of finding some answers. “There’s a tower shining in the distance, maybe a mile away.”

“God damn it Luna. Why didn’t you say something before?” Harlan stopped in his tracks wiping dirt off his forehead. He fell down on his hands and knees, tracing his fingers carefully in the murky asphalt. “It’s a stand-alone network, this program. It exists for one and only one person, but in case someone manages to circumvent Sector Nine’s defenses there’s a failsafe added to the program.”

“What we need to do is keep moving,” insisted Luna, urging him onward.

“There’s a feedback loop in the system. It didn’t hit me until what you said about the tower. That’s why there’s no signs here. They act as markers. All this place needs to fool us is a few tweaks to the simulation, but I don’t know how long it’s been repeating.”

Harlan pressed his ear to the ground, seeking minute variations in the crumbling surface. There was a minor depression straight ahead. If they were precise enough Harlan would be able to pinpoint its emergence point.

“It’s called a Haraway Fissure, invisible walls programmed into the simulation.

Keep your eyes open for cracks in the asphalt.” The sky lightened somewhat, flickering brief deposits of glare from the upper stratosphere. No contrast made searching difficult. About forty feet from their position two diagonal cracks confluenced into one jagged line. The one inch chasm was warm to the touch, pulsating a putrid black green that extended downwards indefinitely.

“Hand me your umbrella,” said Harlan. Luna obeyed his command and gave it to him. “You may want to stand back.” She backed off a few meters, sheltering her eyes from the saturated light. He closed the umbrella, gripping the water-resisting canopy with his hands, and jabbed it in the heart of the fissure. Beams of pure light shot up from the precipice, which sent a curtain of bright sprawling into the night’s sky. Harlan’s ears popped. The pressure built so much that Harlan found himself being pressed flat against the pavement until his eyes finally shut and darkness ensued.

#

Harlan awoke to a harsh burning between his index and middle fingers. He leapt headlong from a chaise lounge chair with faded burnt sierra upholstery. Glass splintered on ornamental carpet to the inert clattering of ice. A cigarillo was thrown to the floor, the stub shortening to a nonexistent flame.

There was no sign of Luna. Lifting off the ground, Harlan realized his clothes were different, the ones he’d worn upon entering Sector Nine. He was in his now defunct private eye firm and former permanent residence. Instinctively, Harlan gripped for the cold brass of the doorknob but it was locked. This place was in stark contrast to the vast emptiness of the previous environment. After pounding on the door until his knuckles cracked and bled, he craned his head sideways and viewed Luna flickering in and out of permanence, sleeping on his silken sheets, arms akimbo, wearing one of Aiko’s custom negligee skins.

“What happened?” said Luna awakening.

“I think we made it passed the fissure. Doesn’t look like there’s any residual damage. Here.” Harlan gave her a ragged terrycloth robe and Luna hastily rose. “Recognize the place?”

“Not since we left it four days ago. You think this is what he wanted?”

“Who?”

“The Mirrorman,” said Luna tying the robe. “You know I think you’re right in what you said before. The longer I stay here the more I can’t help but feel we’re being tested.”

“The best cyphers usually are,” started Harlan, grazing the vividness of the bedspread, “or else it wouldn’t be worth doing. That’s the thrill of being challenged. It’s what drives us, pushes us forward. Tested? Of course we’re being tested. What would lead you to think otherwise? Whoever’s plucking the strings of this program is irrelevant. They don’t do this for the fun of it Luna. The work is its own reward.”

Despite his seemingly natural aptitude for prowling the innards of cyberspace, the longer he spent online the more impotent and helpless he felt. It was in the futility of it all. That virtual reality essentially didn’t exist, and being jacked in for continuous lengths of time was a fate worse than death. The body withered while the mind prevailed.

Music flowed from his office, drawling and scratchy and dull. They stood at the threshold of the room. An old-style gramophone sat in the corner, vinyl turning monotonously in elongated circles. The back of the club leather armchair faced them, swirls of digitized smoke plumed upwards. Nothing but a thin tuff of hair peeked over the chair’s curved edge, and nothing but the chair separated them from the Mirrorman.

“You were expecting someone else?”

“No,” said Harlan, advancing around the chair with Luna, “I suppose not.”

Ash Wednesday sat before them halfway through a Diamond Crown cigar. Harlan smothered the remaining embers from his smoldering nub still burning on the carpet. Nothing changed relative to the projection last seen in Ash’s apartment. Ash wore a dark velvet smoking jacket, a sensitive delicate green, with a shawl collar, turn-up cuffs and toggle fastenings near the waist.

“You’re not Ash are you?” said Luna.

“I don’t know anyone by that name, Ms. Veca. Or is it Ms. Yonge? That is unless you’re talking about true names? Now there are remarkable similarities to a couple of handles out there, particularly Ash Wednesday. This network is like an egg-shell sweetheart, the program gives me just enough power and information to live nicely, I am however confined to the whims of this network.”
“So you’re the Mirrorman?”

“I’m a rogue program,” he answered, taking in another soothing puff from his cigar. “A copied version created by Blithe. Meant to abide to the conditions set out by Sector Nine. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“We need answers.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Blithe creates this insurance policy and a few days later he’s killed. Why?”

“That I cannot answer with any due certainty. This class represents a sub-C type network, completely affordable for the average individual working steadily for thirty to forty years, but for Blithe the purchase would’ve been more significant than financial.”

“Did you know this?” said Harlan to Luna. She shook her head, biting on an artificial fingernail.

“He may’ve had some other purpose in mind,” continued the Mirrorman. “Sector Nine is usually anonymous, very discreet. If Blithe truly didn’t want to be discovered he would’ve sought a different avenue.”

There was a near empty bottle of single-malt scotch in Harlan’s front desk drawer and he helped himself to a light swig. He threw off his jacket, reached into his back pocket, and lit a fresh cigarillo with his monogrammed bronze lighter.

“What did you mean when you said ‘discovered’?” asked Luna. “Why was Blithe murdered?”

“Despite what Aiko may’ve told you earlier detective, this isn’t Unreal City. There are things in this world that are larger than you and me, Detective Novak. As far as murder’s concerned, you already know the answer to that. You call me the Mirrorman, so I’m here to present you with a choice, a simple choice that constitutes the sole purpose of this program. I present you with two options and before you wake up from this simulation a decision will have to be made. I can give you all the answers you seek but it will come at a great cost, the virus set at the Archipelago was only a glimpse of things to come if you choose to accept this.” The Mirrorman snubbed his cigar in an oblong melamine ashtray. Harlan relaxed his arms, surveying Luna’s expression before focusing his attention on the facsimile that comprised Ash Wednesday. “Blithe’s death was no accident. But it was his greed, not his wealth that killed him. The wanting for knowledge, the need to posses it. So believe me when I tell you both that there’s no turning back once this decision is made, but I do need one.”

Harlan thought long and hard, delving into the recesses of his mind while contemplating another hundred deaths or so. His indoctrination as an executioner ultimately held no bounds.

And then he came to a decision.

“I wanna know who murdered Blithe?” said Harlan.
“I never said it was your decision detective. You’re here by proxy, invitation only. And by any standard you’re still not truly here. Not in the way Luna is anyway. I can actually feel her in the system, her pulse, her energy. You’re presence constitutes nothing more than a two-bit connection behind second-rate VisorGoggles, and while your authority may supersede death in real-time detective, rest assured that in here all bets are off. Don’t think for a second it has relevance here.”

The Mirrorman uncrossed his legs. Empty static cycled from the record’s inner core, low-frequency noise, seconds after the song ended. Ash rose from Harlan’s favorite chair, palms open, gazing at Luna.

“So what’s it going to be then, eh?”

Harlan walked over to the gramophone and plucked the needle from the record, placing the heavy and crude tone arm on its steel perch. To him this action was as cataclysmic as unleashing a virus into a system or killing a man, a feat Harlan completed numerous times before. He didn’t want Luna’s decision to be influenced for his sake. That’s the last thing Harlan desired, but he didn’t want to be wholly burdened by another stranger’s consequences, even if it was Luna.

“I want to know the truth,” she answered, her eyes watering. “I want to know everything.”

“Very well then. There’s one more thing I need before the task is complete. I need the key.”

“What key?”

“The one in your left hand.” Luna slowly unfurled her palm and in it laid Blithe’s pacemaker, frayed and powerless but otherwise intact. Ash undid the satin sash holding his smoking jacket closed only to reveal a deep wound over his heart. Blood trickled onto the carpet in spurted heaps as Luna stepped closer to Ash, delicately wedging the slab of titanium into the laceration.

“It’s all going to change from here guys,” said the Mirrorman matter-of-factly, “Everything’s going to change.”

Part Three – The Ankh, the Djed, and the Was

‘Unreal City’ was an umbrella term for a standalone system with discreet transparency, allowing the user to access information while simultaneously filtering everything out. With their hasty egress from the program, the Mirrorman’s environment self-destructed, decompiling in on itself before finally shutting down. Sparks invaded Harlan’s eyes. What woke him? Was it the intense searing of human flesh or the cosmic star that blinded his eyes?

He shielded his face in agony, hugging the Berber carpet after flinging off his VisorGoggles. ‘trodes still clung to his fingertips as the headgear banged against the floor. When his sight came to, he watched Luna convulse back and forth on the adjacent chair like some radioactive herring. He braced his forearm on the carpet (the shotgun’s barrel digging deep into his shoulder) and struggled to get his footing. A serpentine tube of fiberoptic cables stretched from the back of her head. Harlan grabbed the lightweight butt of his shotgun and fired point blank at the faggot of wires.

Luna collapsed on the table. The aroma of gunpowder overtook the chamber.

The empty shell casing dropped to the ground burning Harlan’s left forearm in the process. He packed his deck into the duffel bag alongside the shotgun and useless VisorGoggles. The signal feed was, no doubt, severed from his position, lost in the haywire that was the Mirrorman’s shadowrun. The mission’s success was the farthest thing from his mind. Luna’s survival was paramount, even if it meant sacrificing all that came before him. After failing to wake her up, Harlan rushed to her handbag, loading a single round of barbiturates in the pneumatic gun’s chamber. Rookie mistake. No stimulant intake before jacking in ultimately translated to a more difficult resuscitation.
“Damn it girl, you should’ve known better,” spurted Harlan, probing his cheek with his tongue. Sometime during the shadowrun he had swallowed his stick of hyperbase. He unfurled Luna’s arm, pressed down the iron nozzle, and pulled the trigger. She awoke gasping for air, pale and numb. In the meantime, he summoned an Odyssey elevator with a wave of his hand, while slinging the duffel bag around his shoulder.

With time running out and adrenaline wearing thin, Harlan pushed Luna into the return shuttle, making sure Sector Nine’s secretary was nowhere in sight. The door rose closed, the hydraulics kicked in.

“Christ Harlan you can see?”

“Apparently so.”

Harlan chalked up his unexplained eyesight to his encounter in SeaCal. The virus that had taken his vision years ago had most likely given it back. Or was it a gift? He wasn’t sure. Delusional freezeframes sparked in his head as he practically dragged Luna across the abandoned subway terminal.

“And when exactly were you going to tell me you underwent DNI treatment?”

“You know the thought never came up. Hang on a moment. I need to rest.” They pressed on, kicking tabloid newspapers ankle-deep in their wake. Luna vomited in the transit’s underpass, stumbling on the platform’s dimpled yellow rubber lining. The remaining cables dangled from her neck.

“We need to get you to New Bedlam.”
“I’m fine. I don’t need to go to a fucking hospital. Give me a day. I’ll be right as reign.” Her pallor personified the cold deadness that was direct-neural interface. Harlan parted her dyed hair, the blackened roots beggining to show. The metal spigot was wedged deep in her neck between the medulla oblongata and the spinal cord. He traced his fingers ‘round the circular jack lining Luna’s skin and gripped the entrails snaking down her back. However, none of the cartridges in her pack were sedatives. Like it or not, the plug had to be removed to prevent infection.

“This might sting a little.”

She screamed from the back of her throat, a manic, dispirited screech. Her echoes reminded Harlan of a lulling void, the kind familiar to experienced cyphers like himself. With the cable free Luna became deadweight, crouching in a fetal position against the tiled wall. If he wanted to get the truth out of her, now would be the time.

“Start talking. The truth”

“I went in for DNI treatment four years ago on my own dime. When I saw you wore VisorGoggles I didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t want to inadvertently sabotage my case before it even started, so I decided to just let things be. Put yourself in my shoes. What would you have done?”

“What about Blithe’s will?”

“Blithe didn’t know about it. When I told you I didn’t know about the stipulation in his will I was telling the truth. I had no idea that part of my inheritance involved going in for DNI.”

“You’re full of surprises aren’t you?” Harlan handed her a bottle of mineral water from his duffel bag. Some color returned to Luna’s face and her high fever cooled down somewhat. It wouldn’t be long before the authorities at Sector Nine would be coming for them looking for answers. “What about the Mirrorman? Do you know anyone who’d want to kill you?”

Luna shook her head.

“Besides Fusion Corp. not many. My best guess is that it was a plant like you said. Maybe it was the same person who killed Blithe. Who knows? If you hadn’t been there with me I’d have been killed.”

“Does that mean you’re not leaving?” Luna raised her arm and Harlan helped her to her feet.

Modern subway terminals relied on crowd farms for power, panels of translucent flooring that turned kinetic energy into electricity. With the exception of a few scattered emergency lights, the station was flooded with darkness. They slumped through the subterranean labyrinthine, combing the walls for moisture and gas leaks. Harlan knocked three times on Hiro’s Apartment and the doorknob retracted from the wall.

“Honey we’re home,” called Harlan, slumping passed the apartment’s threshold with Luna closely in tow. He threw the duffel bag onto a heap of empty computer towers.

“Good evening detective,” said a voice from the far corner. The only working lamp in Hiro’s shelter turned on, an upside-down electric sconce fixture. There were two men occupying the apartment, with Hiro nowhere in sight. The first, lounging in the stained velvet armchair Luna occupied earlier, cross-legged and stoic, was an older Japanese man in a double-pleated off-white suit and black alligator-skin loafers. The bodyguard that stood behind him had Legionnaire status, ensuring his position as ‘protector’. Harlan recognized the diamond insignia tattooed near his jugular, and probably had more weaponry on him than Luna and Harlan combined. If only he hadn’t put his weapons in one place, foolish.

“Glad to see everything’s in order,” continued the seated man. “Everyone’s safe I take it.”

“Where’s Hiro?”

“He’s fine. Tucked away nicely in the next room. I gave him an enzyme inhibitor. He won’t be waking up anytime soon.”

“What do you want?”

“A moment of your time. Keep your hands at your sides where I can see them and everything will go smoothly.” Luna was unconscious, slouched along the harvest gold wall. From his vantage Harlan gauged the butterfly knife magnetized to her inner thigh, attempting to grab it would be futile.

“Who are you?”

“You’ve been a busy boy, Mr. Novak. Embezzlement, assault, murder on a massive scale.”
“I didn’t blow up Little Tokyo.”

“We know,” said the seated man, “that’s why we came to see you.” He fished into his breast pocket and tossed a crumpled envelope into Harlan’s hands.

“What’s this?”

“An advance on your payment. And that’s only a portion of what you’ll receive. You’ll get the rest when you complete your mission.”

“What about Luna?”

“She’s coming with us. She’s integral to the operation’s success.”

“If this has to do with Blithe. Why do you need me?”

“Blithe was only one factor in a greater master plan. One that can destabilize the natural order of things. I need you, Mr. Novak, because for the past several weeks you’ve been working very closely with Ms. Veca, and whether or not you agree to this mission is besides the point.”
“Yeah, why’s that?”

“Because you’re one of the good guys detective. And despite what you fear, what you may encounter as the unknown, you shuck that aside in the name of justice. We know you too well Mr. Novak.” From his pants pocket, the seated man removed a half-eaten bag of trail mix, gnawing minute handfuls with porcelain-veneered teeth. Harlan’s time with his quartet of cyphers was over, that he knew for certain. His future, on the other hand, was another story. After a fresh change of clothes and downloading

Aiko to his deck, Harlan bid farewell to Hiro’s apartment for the last time.

“First things first, we gotta get to a hospital.”

#

Before they left Harlan injected Hiro with a shot of dopamine giving them twenty minutes lead time before he woke up. Luna was immediately admitted to New Bedlam shortly after their departure. At first glance, the opulent whites and array of fluorescence was a kind of shellshock for Harlan. He’d seen varying degrees of decadence — smoke, rust, grime, ash, dirt, dust, and the like — but was stunned by the mandatory cleanliness the hospital took upon itself. Depth perception was a real quagmire without the aid of his VisorGoggles. His first priority: connectivity. Being disconnected was the equivalent to being stranded on a desert island packed with thousands of people. He’d have to do something about it.

There was less foot traffic at night. Harlan felt a roughness in his jacket pocket strolling through the hospital’s lobby. Once the nameless man and his protector were seated in the waiting room, Harlan went to the restroom to remove it. Without a combination of neons and strobes to guide him maneuvering through the hospital was proving cumbersome. He regained his composure after stumbling three times on his way to the gift shop, purchasing a fresh pack of cigarillos, a disposable cell-phone, and a few other personal amenities.

Harlan accessed a public kiosk with his back towards the waiting room. It was a standard vinyl-surfaced obelisk near an enclave of convex windows that overlooked the sector’s midsection. The interface was of foreign design. It took a moment to contact Aiko, her avatar drenched in a rainbow of media-suns. He plugged his deck into the kiosk and the other end into his cell-phone. She dissolved onto the widescreen terminal, wide-eyed and shaken.

“Jesus, Harlan, you look like shit. Where the hell have you been? You know how I hate being cooped up in that thing.”

“Glad to see you too sweetheart. Surprised you even recognize me.”

“Who else would’ve rescued me? Take it the mission didn’t go quite so smoothly. You look a little worse for wear.”

“I’m on eighteen hours no sleep. Listen until I get my hands on some new gear I’m gonna use this phone for in-and-out communication.” Harlan inputted the activation code and loaded a hundred dollar’s worth of minutes into the device. After ordering an instant coffee from a nearby Dutch automat, he returned to the terminal’s monitor. The roughness in his jacket was a restaurant-style napkin with Luna’s lip stamp in the corner. In the center were the words D I V E S — T H E A N K H stenciled in dark turquoise eyeliner. He remembered the soft press of her lips before jacking in, the quiet malaise of Sector Nine’s databank, the slip of her hand into his jacket pocket.

“You can reach me at this number. Do me a favor. Keep an eye on Hiro for me for the next twenty-four hours. Don’t try to contact him. Don’t give him any leads. If he tries to find me throw him off the scent by sprinkling a few red herrings his way but that’s it.”

“What’s the magic word?”

“I’m serious Aiko. You saw the guys in Hiro’s apartment. Now I don’t know their angle yet but I’ll contact you soon with further info.”

“It can be done.”

“Oh, and another thing. If the others try sniffing around for me, Prodigy, Snow, Durango, do the same for them. In my absence they’ll think I pilfered whatever it was we were supposed to steal from Sector Nine. With any luck they’ll think I’m dead.”

“I’ll do what you ask but you owe me one.”

“I owe you shit.” The gauze surrounding Harlan’s eyes absorbed whatever sweat accumulated. He sipped his coffee with shaking hands, waiting for Aiko to respond. Harlan didn’t inform Aiko where he was or about Luna’s condition. He didn’t want to jeopardize his situation any further than it needed to be. He eyed the two men from around the terminal using the napkin to wipe his palms. “Don’t let me down girl.”

The duffel bag was stored in a rental locker four floors below his current location. Luna was hospitalized only meters away from the room where she allegedly killed Mario Juarez. Without causing too much suspicion Harlan returned the deck to his jacket, making sure it didn’t slump when he walked. The dark roast coffee warmed his right hand as he slumped down in ergonomic pleather.

“Does he ever talk?” said Harlan to the Japanese man, whose bodyguard stood erect behind him.

“Had to get his throat removed. Can’t say a damn word.”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” said Harlan, gingerly sipping his drink. “Does he ever sleep?”

“Can’t. Insomnia.”
“Well that makes two of us.” Harlan was surprised to find cigarillos being sold in a hospital gift shop. He waited a few seconds for the directed filtration to kick in then sparked a fresh one to concentrate.

“So what should I call you? I think I deserve the right to know the name of the person who broke into my apartment.”

“First of all, detective, it wasn’t your apartment. It was Hiro Patel’s apartment. But we’ll get to that later.”
“Then what can you tell me?”

“I can tell you we were contacted by a woman from Sector Nine,” he answered, straightening his collar. “No doubt she found it quite intriguing when a detective showed up to claim Blithe’s inheritance. Don’t feel too bad. There was probably a sight on every person who so much as thought about breaking into that place. What intrigued us was the fact you escaped.”

“That happens when you try to electrocute someone in cold blood.”

“It was a timed pulse. Purely a failsafe measure. Neither of you would’ve been killed. But I assumed, like most detectives, you’d have DNI status.”

“You thought wrong. I’m not like most detectives. And Luna’s condition in there is not exactly what I’d call failsafe.”

“But she’s not dead. Not until you sent that shock through her system. She’ll recover in a few days. Besides, we’re on the same team, looking for the same thing.”

“I know,” said Harlan.

“You know what?”

“I know that if you knew how Blithe was murdered you wouldn’t have sought us out so quickly. And if you thought we had anything to do with his death, Luna and I would be in jail by now.” The protector stared fixedly into Harlan’s eyes while his companion appeared indifferent to the situation entirely. A smile widened on the seated man’s face, subtly rubbing the stubble on his chin. “What I’d like to find out is what Blithe has to do with you.”

So what it really comes down to is what you know, thought Harlan.

“My name is Hosaka.”

At first hearing this Harlan’s heart jumped in his throat, the Yakuza seeking vengeance for the death of their members and most valued virtual property. But that wasn’t the case.

“I would think this would be more of a symbiotic relationship Mr. Novak. We deal the goods, and you serve your part by providing us with information that led to Blithe’s death. That’s the agreement.” Harlan sent him a wry smile but the stranger chose to ignore it. Instead he removed a single cigar case of monogrammed gold. “And don’t worry about Luna. We’ll fix her right up. Same goes for your eyes. I know a great plastic surgeon. As soon as Luna’s recuperated we’ll have to pay them a visit. I just hope there’s no permanent damage.”

“I tend to work better alone.”

“That may be detective, only it would lead us both to nothing but a bunch of empty answers. Whether you like to admit it or not, Luna is the key to many of those answers. This isn’t about the murder of one anymore, but the survival of many.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They’ll be time to explain later. Right now your health is our first priority.”

“Then I have a few demands.”

“All right.”

“First I want to undergo DNI treatment. If your boys can deliver the goods like you say they can, I’ll need to bring my A-game to the table. Hacking isn’t just some leisurely sport for me. It’s a gift. I see things other people don’t. Patterns, codes, strata of information, like I was programmed to act and react to any situation. So naturally I will need a replacement.”

“Done.”

“I’ll need a new top-of-the-line workstation also. And, as a token of good faith, I think a change of wardrobe is in order.”

“We’ll see what we can swing. In the meantime, Hotei will be your on-call bodyguard. He’ll be your eyes and ears from this point onward.” Hosaka answered his headset, excusing himself while igniting the cigar. Harlan basked in the afterglow of the hospital’s fluorescence, reminiscing of his times with Luna and how they now seemed so small, how fragile Luna had become in a mere couple of hours. He rubbed his eyes, using a hospital site map of variant neons to focus, and traced a grimy finger to her room.

#

They called him ‘The Guardian’. In a world where the lowest perception was the ultimate reality, Mr. Hosaka didn’t wholly exist. Hotei attached to Harlan like a parasite, following his every move, but Hosaka simply vanished less than ten minutes after they separated. He was a myth, the guardian. Inner circles heard of stories — rumors really — circulating of a person who would one day transcend the corporeal shell of skin and bone, surpass human intelligence, and become something greater; the soul of a new machine. And as far as Harlan knew, Hosaka was the man to do it.

Luna was sleeping when he entered her chamber. The honeycomb framework of the hospital allowed for maximum space with minimum wastage, fireproof insulation and independent mechanisms allowed for quick detachment in case of catastrophe. Harlan snaked his arm into Luna’s purse, downloading the contents of her datapad before she woke up. Color returned to her face somewhat even with all her makeup removed. Wired tubing infused facial orifices with compressed oxygen. The usual antiseptic aroma of the hospital was quickly replaced by the lily-scented pheromones in Luna’s hair as she stirred herself awake.

“Hey, how are you doing?”
“A little groggy. Where am I?”

“You’re in the Level III trauma center of New Bedlam Hospital. You collapsed shortly after we arrived at Hiro’s apartment.”

“How long was I out?”

“About four hours. Doctors said it’ll be a couple of days before you make a full recovery. That pulse from Sector Nine gave quite a jolt to your system. But for the time being they’re going to wean you off the stimulants with some methadone. Make you clean eventually but withdrawal’s going to be a bitch.” Luna rose slightly, rubbing her forehead from a sudden onslaught of a headache. Harlan opened an ionized bottle of water, pouring small amounts into an oversized Dixie cup.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” said Luna tersely, combing through her purse.

“Looking for this,” began Harlan, opening his jacket to reveal her pneumatic gun in his underarm holster, “I took the liberty of temporarily relinquishing your gun until you’re in a position to make decisions with a clear head.”

“Is that right? So you’re just going to keep watch on my room twenty-four hours a day. Is that it?”

“No, that’s not it. But our circumstances have changed slightly since our last encounter.” Harlan circled around the room, pulling the violet armchair to her bedside in order to speak quieter to her. “We escaped Sector Nine all right and made it to the terminal fine, but shortly after I…we returned to Hiro’s apartment there was some unexpected company there waiting there for us. Two men. A man named Hosaka and his bodyguard.”

“Did you kill them?”

“Believe me I would have. That is to say, I would have if I didn’t have you in my left hand and the duffel bag in my right. Thank God I didn’t though. They seemed more interested in Blithe than about killing.”

“What else is new?”

“I’m serious Luna. If we’re to get through this next juncture you’re going to have to be functioning. Believe it or not, I know a little something about DNI, enough to realize that when mixed with enough stimulants the combination can be fatal.” Harlan threw a sepia-stained dossier onto the bed and Luna thrust forwards, snatching it with outstretched arms.

“What the hell is this?”

“The life of one Mr. Hosaka. I didn’t ask for the file. He thinks it to be a gesture of good faith. That if we’re to work together in the future there should be no secrets between us.”

“There’s no picture here,” noted Luna, scanning the file.

“Impressive isn’t it? Reads more like a missing person’s report than a Feds rap sheet. It seems our friends at the CIA don’t have much of a clue than we do about him. Even his name. However, they seem convinced Hosaka exists. But instead of building a profile based on his crimes or physical characteristics, they try to piece it together through like events, coincidences, in an attempt to reverse engineer his identity. As far as they’re concerned he’s guilty until presumed innocent.”

“At least we know it. His true name anyway. Why’s this important?” Harlan tossed two additional dossiers on her lap as he washed his palms in a nearby enamel sink.

“Because we’re in the exact same boat. It appears one of Hosaka’s favorite hobbies is seeking out the world’s greatest hack-jobs and paying them off to do his bidding. Fortunately there’s enough in those files to have someone locked away for a lifetime.”
“Why is that fortunate for you then?”

“Because they don’t have much on me. You, on the other hand, are a whole other story. Once Blithe was killed all bets were off in terms of freedom. Why is it fortunate Luna? Because he can’t risk turning either of us in without getting himself caught.”

With Harlan’s vision coming into effect he realized the true extent of Luna’s condition. The dark circles beneath her eyes were contrasted only by the paleness of her skin. She’d lost weight in the weeks of their camaraderie, and the added stress brought on by Hosaka and his companion didn’t help her recovery, only hindered it. And the paranoia (that seemed so natural to Harlan) gradually took hold on Luna’s sense of reality to the point where the real seemed lurid and untrustworthy.

“So that’s your great plan. You standing there perched at the foot of my bed until I’m all better.”

“No. My plan is to go in for DNI on Hosaka’s dime. Your seven days are up, Luna. Whether or not you’re going to be there with me is entirely up to you. Under one condition. That you’ll be clean and sober when you finally make that decision. Until then, Hosaka’s bodyguard is going to keep tabs on you to make sure you don’t leave the hospital.”

“You son of a bitch,” spat Luna, doing her best to restrain herself.

“Now don’t make me ask the doctors to strap you to the bed. Or I could just unleash a small sedative into your system with your own gun. Kind of poetic don’t you think?” Before she could respond to Harlan’s request he pumped 30ccs of diazepam into her forearm, hoping there were no ill-effects as a result of the drug.

#

Luna’s treatment consisted of a VR regimen to trick her synapses into recovery. He hoped the infirmary’s staff wouldn’t take in account the harlequin paperbacks and dog-eared fashion magazines (left accidentally by the previous patient) as a representative sample of Luna’s psyche, having her subjected to moonlit soirees in Tuscany, or clichéd seductions of some media mogul until the toxins drained from her brain. The therapy was a variant of lucid dreaming, remarkably similar to the unconscious maladies Harlan experienced to improve reaction-time.

Hosaka’s imaging software successfully masked Luna’s signature from authorities, and was akin to the thermo-optical camouflage she used weeks before to kill Mario Juarez. Otherwise her actual presence was easily disguised through forged documents and the like. Luna only managed to escape from Hotei’s sight once, and even then she didn’t make it passed the third-floor elevators or rouse enough suspicion to get caught.

“You’re saying there’s nothing on Hosaka that I can use as leverage.”

“Look babe, like I told you before, there are thousands of people named Hosaka out there matching the physical description you submitted, both as handles and true names,” said Aiko from the clinic’s public kiosk. “Want my advice. Take whatever Hosaka says with a grain of salt and try not to question his motives so much. I’m having a hard enough time keeping your friends at bay.”

“Which one’s giving you the most trouble?”

“Who do you think? I’ll contact you if I get any leads.”

The clinic was a rented ward in the sector’s east end, a two-minute venture by private shuttle that Hosaka was more than happy to shell out for. Luna took a little over eleven days to sober up, now with their situations reversed. Harlan was still extremely nauseous as a result of the anesthetic. His vision blurred and he felt as though he could vomit at any moment. Hotei remained in the waiting-room until he was settled. Fortunately for him the surgery went off without a hitch. Feeble power surges interrupted the procedure momentarily, but never fully postponed it. A backup generator was always present during office hours.

“Would you relax,” said Luna. “The doctor said the last thing your body needs is any unnecessary stress.”

“One thing I hate worse than setting foot in a hospital is being a patient in one.”

She offered him a champagne flute of fresh orange juice and he took timid sips. Harlan traced the rim of his port through the gauze taped to his neck. The skin surrounding it was swollen and tender. He was so unused to feeling pain. The sensation brought back fond memories of when Luna slashed his forearm at the onset of their first encounter.

“By the way Harlan, I never got to ask you. What’s it like? You know, being able to see for the first time in three years?”

“VisorGoggles are a poor man’s substitute for sight,” he admitted. “I just hope DNI will do more for my brain than what the VisorGoggles did for my eyes.”

“How do you suppose it happened?”

“Fuck if I know.” Unlike New Bedlam the Jarvic Clinic catered to the obscenely rich despite the recent price drops in DNI treatment. Harlan was instructed by doctors not to twist his neck by more than ten degrees, for risk of infection. The fear of sepsis alone was enough to make him turn his whole body to Luna before answering. It would be another week before Harlan could jack in, more than enough time for the wounds to heal. “But enough about that. What I’m more interested in is if you’ve made your decision yet. Whether or not we’re still in this thing…together?”

“Jesus Harlan. I was so doped up on morphine I can’t remember anything after entering Sector Nine.”

“Do you remember the shadowrun? What the Mirrorman said before we jacked out?

“Vaguely.”

“He said, ‘I can give you all the answers you seek but it will come at a great cost’ but it was you who wanted to know the truth Luna. You were the one who made the decision to stay already. You’re not going anywhere, are you?”

“And leave you to your own devises, not bloody likely.” Luna wore a light-khaki miniskirt cropped slightly above her shins with an embellished scoop neck tunic and a striped vest underneath. She died her hair to its original sheen, a glossy seal brown, and her skin appeared lively with a fresh coat of makeup. “So what do you think Hosaka’s hiding?”

“More than he can handle. Something irks me about him. I can’t put my finger on it.”

“What did he say while I was out?” Harlan explained the deal they agreed to while the short-lived coma incapacitated Luna. The dossier he perused earlier did little to ease his suspicions with Hosaka, even with Aiko’s help. Luna removed a prescription bottle from her purse, taking two capsules of methadone to take the edge off. The suspense alone was enough to make her relapse.

“And you just went in for DNI,” continued Luna, allowing the pills to take effect, “Plus we’ve got no place else to go. That last thing we need is another pissed-off person coming after us.”

#

It was night. The Ritz International was a library hotel with rooms set up along the Dewey Decimal System. Harlan was to meet Hosaka at the French café in the lobby but not without a warm shower, a good shave, and at least three hours of solid sleep. He’d been shopping with Luna the entire afternoon and she decided to continue with Hotei. Its theme was erotic literature. Renoir and Degas reprints decorated each wall in spray-painted gold frames. Harlan grabbed his leather jacket off a statue of Priapus and headed for the ground level.

He wore an Armani pin-stripe jacket with matching pants and a pair of Oakley sunglasses due to his light sensitivity. Depth perception was still an issue, the serpentine patterns of the lobby floors were hypnotic, seductive, causing him to stumble frequently on his way to the café. In the nearby restroom Harlan replaced the bandage behind his neck with a fresh square of gauze, antiseptic spray, and four strips of masking tape.

“You’re talkin’ about setting a dangerous precedent detective,” said Hosaka, nursing a Singapore Slim. “Unless I’ve accidentally misread you in some way.”

“Let’s face facts. You wanted the best. And the best required, at the very least DNI, a bodyguard, and complete and total sobriety. So don’t insult my intelligence and tell me that this is another simple shadowrun.”

“All right Mr. Novak, what do you wish to know?”

“Why have you taken Luna and me under your wing?”

“Are you aware of the Dives?” Harlan shook his head. He took a sip of Evian from a table glass with a lemon wedge floating on its surface. Hosaka swiped a stone of rose quartz across the acrylic table, adding the drink to their tab.

“The Dives are a triad made up of three very powerful entities. The first was Blithe who, as you know, headed BioThermoFlex Enterprises, better known as BTF. The second was the President of Fusion Corporation, the medical conglomerate owned by one Dr. Wittenberg. The final person to that triad, however, is still unaccounted for. We have it under good authority that this third person does exist. And we think you and Luna are the closest people to have come into contact with him or her.”

“It all comes down to the Mirrorman doesn’t it?”

“‘For it is only in death that one can see clearly’. That’s the closest our people have come to contacting him. It’s some type of moniker. That shock you experienced in Sector Nine was our fault but whatever else happened inside the construct was Him.”