Praise for Paul Black
“…an imaginatively skilled story teller of the first order…”
~ Midwest Book Review
“Mr. Black has quite an imagination…”
~ Dallas Morning News
“Black is one of those writers that we who worship this genre look for every time…”
~ John Strange, the cityweb.com
T H E P R E S E N C E
By Paul Black
Published by Novel Instincts Publishing. A Smashwords edition.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Programmable Matter is a trademark of The Programmable Matter Corporation
Copyright ©2010 by Paul Black
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
ISBN: 9780972600743 Library of Congress: 2010934982
1. THE GREATER GOOD
“Deja?!”
Deja Moriarty sensed her boss’s beckon somewhere at the periphery of her consciousness. She left her virtual researching and peeled the Netgear from her head. Its microfiber-optics uncoupled into techno dreadlocks that glowed prismatic at their ends. She cautiously peered over her cubicle.
“Ah, there you are!” Bishop Green’s anger was clearly in professional check because Life’s a Bitch had dropped to a 22.0 share in the weekly ratings, now making it the second-most-watched program in AztecaNet’s prime-time lineup. Which meant the second-most-watched program on the planet. Which also meant his bid for the old Kennedy compound, out in the Hamptons, would have to hold at its present number. Since his earnings were directly tied to the Net ratings, the people who labored under Green had come to accept his emotional swings as part of the package. There had been other success stories, but nothing compared to Green’s. His prolific output of hit programming not only exceeded shareholder expectations, but also garnered him accolades usually bestowed on producers twice his age. Bishop Green was definitely AztecaNet’s undisputed “it” boy.
Deja passed a hand through her electric blond hair and strutted toward him with all the confidence her new senior producer title could bring.
“Be a dear and get Sotheby’s on the line for me. And if you’re headed that way ...” Green raised his coffee cup.
“What kind of sugar day are we having?” Deja asked, irritated with his lack of acceptance of her new role.
Green thought for a second, then a sly grin grew across his face. “Triple.”
“Oh! One of those days.”
“Yes, it is,” Green said, then suddenly shifted mien and announced to anyone in earshot, “and if we don’t get Life’s a Bitch back up to number one, there’ll be a housecleaning like you’ve never seen!”
Life’s a Bitch was Green’s brainchild and had perched at the top of the ratings for over a year. Its concept was simple: destroy an ordinary life as a ruthlessly brutal world looks on. Nanocameras disguised as houseflies provided a world audience with an unfettered view of the destruction, while AztecaNet’s patents on the camera’s technology ensured its reign as the leader in reality-based programming. It also gave new meaning to an old phrase.
In the beginning, the plan was to leave individuals destroyed. But after the pilot season’s first unsuspecting contestant, Leonard Smotts, decided to reduce himself to a puddle of matter by eating the butt end of a Light-Force, AztecaNet’s lawyers decided that revealing the prank and restoring a person’s life might be the preferred option. The finale had been completely reworked with a digitally processed Leonard morphed into a happy ending. Litigation with his family was still pending, but if the numbers held, final payoff to keep the Smott family’s contractual silence would be a drop in the bucket compared to the revenues from Life’s a Bitch.
“Three sugars, please,” Deja ordered into the system pad at the snack dispenser, but then thought better. “Wait! Make that four ...” The dispenser’s door slid aside and presented a steaming ceramic mug of coffee, specially blended to Bishop Green’s genetic profile. Only she had access to his codes.
Deja had worked with Green as his assistant since his producer beginnings on the soapy Net drama All of Their Days, where he would have probably gone unnoticed if it weren’t for the sudden exit of its head producer to the Chelsea Clinton Clinic. When Green took control of All of Their Days, it was floundering somewhere near the bottom of the ratings. And since the suits at AztecaNet considered it fodder for a demographic comprised mainly of those left floundering by the economic shift of the Biolution, they never noticed Green’s decision to “tweak” the formula when he fired all the writers.
Green felt the audience of the Net was better suited to dictating the comings and goings of the simple folk of Waterville. By switching All of Their Days to an interactive format, he created a promotion manager’s wet dream and offered weekly contests for the best scripts, which, conveniently, were judged by Green and his favorite assistant.
Slowly, ATD’s ratings began to climb as Green and Deja allowed a tasteless, insomniac audience to drive the daily actions of their show’s characters. Being a late Friday night product meant talent was barely “C” level, comprised mostly of young actors who would do practically anything for the mere possibility of Network exposure. So when Deja presented Green with a script written by a particularly horny housewife from Manchester, England, who suggested the show’s leads go ahead and give in to their characters’ carnal passions, Green announced to his stunned associates there had been a shift in direction for their little corner of the Net.
Since the show’s leads were sleeping with each other off camera anyway, the two actors merged business with pleasure and gave their worldwide fan base a season they would never forget. It was weeks before Network censors caught on, but by then All of Their Days was in the Top 10. It became an underground hit that redefined the late-night soap genre and catapulted Green to phenom status with many of the boardroom suits. It also brought Green to the attention of AztecaNet’s parent company, Grupo TVid Azteca, and its chairman, Alberto Goya.
Deja handed Green his coffee. “I need to show you this bit of info I’ve dug up on Billy Bob–”
“Ray,” he corrected, reviewing his Netpad. “Billy Ray.”
“Well, whatever his name is, our little Texas boy has a whole other offshore account he’s been diverting gobs of credit to for the last 10 months.”
Green looked up mid-sip and raised an eyebrow. “Mistress?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Green smiled around the edge of his cup and took a gulp. “That’s why I love you, Dej. You always have your priorities in the right place.” He turned and headed toward studio 2b, but stopped and glanced back. He pointed with the cup. “Oh, and ah, nice coffee, love ... just right.”
* * *
“Good night, Miss Moriarty.”
Deja looked up at the intern.
“Working late?”
Deja grinned tersely and returned to her Netport, its cerulean glow the sole light in her cubical. The kid sulked away.
“You alone?” Sonny Chaco’s image filled the screen.
Deja glanced about. “Yeah, it’s just me and the data.”
“You running that security program I gave you?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Sonny, I am.”
“Okay, don’t get upset.”
“I don’t like all this spy business.”
Chaco’s holoimage quivered out from Deja’s Netport as he sat in the cramped confines of his office, deep in the lower levels of the National Security Agency. He relaxed and gave Deja that grin, just like he did the first time they had met at the National Netcasters Convention a year earlier.
“Look, if you’re uncomfortable–”
“It’s not that,” Deja said, not listening to her better self. “It’s just ...” She tentatively bit at one of her nails, and its color retreated into the cuticle.
“What, you feel like you’re ratting on your boss?”
“He’s not technically my boss, but yeah ... it feels weird.”
“What you’re doing is brave, and it’s for the greater good.
“I know, but this is my company. My future’s tied up here.”
“Taking down a suit like Goya isn’t going to faze a corporation as big as Azteca. It might even help. Did you ever think of that?”
“Well ... no.”
“Let’s make this the last one for a while, all right? And to celebrate, why don’t you jump a shuttle up here and let me treat you to dinner at Fusion.” Chaco leaned forward, and his image grew to the edges of the screen’s holo parameters.
“I don’t think they have my gen file anymore,” she said.
“They do. I’ve already checked.”
Deja matched Chaco’s action, knowing her image was enlarging at his end. She touched her index finger to his holo lips and narrowed her eyes into sexy slits. “You’ve got this all worked out, don’t you.”
“And what if I do?”
“Then this won’t be the only thing you’ll be getting this weekend.” She slowly grinned and clicked the Send button.
2. TOO LATE
Today should have been the day that he stopped throwing up. He lifts his head from the trashcan’s stench and sees his image in a store window. A curry-colored drop falls from his chin in a thick, slow motion. He had been warned. SI: Sensory Inundation – probably from the shift in travel.
He straightens and wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his coat, then centers himself in the black vibration that continuously emanates from the pavement. He studies the people who walk past ambivalently and succumbs to the realization that the populace of his new home is sadder than he ever imagined. He has spent the better part of his life studying for the assignment. They all do. But his studies, he now feels, have not prepared him for what he will face.
He looks up at the blanket of permanently ashen clouds and tries to understand what happened. The city where he was placed is the nation’s largest and is considered the cradle of everything current. Its urban dementia seems to merge into endless patterns of gray skies, liquor advertising, and parking garages slowly spreading like industrial lichen to the southernmost point a thousand miles away. The sheer mass of the sprawl isn’t what consumes him. It is something else – something more elusive.
The noise.
Day and night, its subtle presence is relentless, humming its processed merger of a trillion tonal discharges into what, he has been told, is affectionately called “the hum.” He fears it will take some getting used to, but he will. He’ll have to.
Most everything was set up before his arrival. He has plenty of credit, which was imbedded into the financial system five years prior so that its presence would be solid and unassuming – enough to live on for the rest of his life. But some essentials have been left out. “Be inventive” was the directive.
He enters the little bodega. “Yo, leather-boy, looking or buying?” asks the Asian clerk, who has categorized him by his shoes. An old man watches him with eyes that seem to distill every detail of his actions in even ocular movements. He can barely tell the clerk’s eyes have shifted, because the dark brown slits don’t easily reveal the direction they might be focusing.
“Looking,” he answers, trying not to reveal his complete naiveté with a culture he has barely greeted.
“Shitfuck,” the clerk says so under his breath that it sounds more like some ancient dialect than New American.
He walks the aisles and studies everything in the store, from the types of products to the styles of design. One thing this culture doesn’t lack is variety. They have a seemingly endless appetite for goods and entertainment, which can be produced, he concludes, in solid, liquid, virtual, or pharmaceutical forms. And if a need can’t be bought in a store, it might be found in any of the thousands of “entertainment cafes” that fill the cracks of their cultural landscape.
“If you’re goin’ to hang this long, what’s your deno?” The Asian is shaking a large wooden spoon at him through a thick haze of stir-fry and cigarette smoke.
Deno? He deduces that the clerk wants to know his name, which is yet another thing his instructors failed to provide. He recalls their teachings.
The revolution, or “Biolution,” as the media termed it, was a blessing and a curse. It caused whole industries to vanish, yet promoted, in a kind of sick display of reverse karma, a whole new wave of decadence and global promiscuity. Its fusion of organic peptides and nanotechnology erased, among other things, many of the medical threats from a century earlier. Now people could afford the luxury to destroy vital organs without worry. New liver, new lungs, new pancreas, a new attitude – modern medicine could regenerate whatever was needed, quickly and affordably. Cradle to grave, the Biolution force-fed the middle-class a steady diet of misery wrapped in festively colored mediocrity.
“Are jou deaf, too?” the clerk asks.
His focus settles on the dozens of cigarette packs competing for attention behind the protection of the counter’s armored plexi. “Hmm?” he says, having clearly heard the clerk, yet wanting to test his retail tolerance.
“Ko-chu-pado!”
The pack with the red triangle seems very popular.
“Yumago,” he replies.
The clerk’s eyes open with surprise. Then his lips part and form a smile that causes the skin of his face to fractal into hundreds of creases. The clerk appears to age before him.
“Jou spreak Korean!” the clerk declares, still aging. “So, what’s your deno?”
“Marl,” he answers, fixating on the pack with the red triangle. He needs a name, and the directive was: Be inventive.
“Where jou learn to spreak Korean?”
“I’ve been around,” Marl answers in the best street speak his memory can bring forth. The inflection is off, but with a few minutes of exposure, it will be easily corrected.
The tinkling of chimes signals the cramming of another customer into the store; Mr. Korean’s shop begins to fill with people getting their late-night meal supplements or bottles of their favorite entertainment. The woman entering is wrapped by an expensive biocoat whose collar demands she accept a measured amount of pain in service of fashion. Even her movement is different, which suggests that she lives a life free from the trappings that burden the other customers. They keep their distance while she glides through the store.
As Marl studies her, he has a sad feeling that she is faking it – that her act is a put-on and probably not her idea. He stands at the front counter: still, silent, rapt like the other men by her exquisite figure and hair that seems to be evolving from a different lineage than her makeup. Her coat’s living fabric senses the change in environment and relaxes. She slips through the store collecting a small contingent of party essentials: two bottles of Polish potato vodka, one bottle of standard meal sup, a bag of hydro-bars, a deodorant microchip, and a vid. A classic. She enters the checkout line, and a man in front of her steps back. The woman moves so in sync that Marl wonders if she is precognitive. She nudges a box of candy off its wire shelf and glances at her backside like it has acted on its own.
“Oh,” she says.
No, he figures, this girl is definitely a package deal. Probably grown to a customer’s specs in the vats of the Lesser Antilles, where binders of girls are churned up from the voodoo science that nibbles around the fringes of the Biolution. She catches his stare.
“Casablanca?” he asks, trying not to grace her acknowledgement with a shift in posture.
She glances into her basket, and a small grin forms at the edges of her full lips. The pattern of her gloss shifts. “Have you seen it?”
“Yes.” He instantly calls up all he can on the film and its actors.
“What’s your favorite part?” she presses.
His memory rallies. “When Ilsa asks Sam to play it again.”
She peels back her sunglasses and reveals a set of striking green eyes with rings of hot orange circling the irises. The pupils narrow like a cat’s. Custom. Probably aftermarket. And if he wasn’t so enthralled with how they were set above a pair of dimples he can only describe as perfect, he might have missed the slight discoloration of the bruise. Its mottled purple travels the length of the lid and conspicuously disappears into a delicate layer of makeup.
But he doesn’t.
The flinch is instinctive.
She quickly replaces the glasses, which reset with a sucking sound. “Yeah,” she says, edgy. “That and the airplane scene are my faves.” She disconnects.
“A night for Bogie ...”
She places her basket on the floor and quickly walks toward the store’s exit. The doors slide open, and her coat senses the rush of cold night air and tightens at the neck, cuffs, and thighs. Marl and the clerk watch her disappear into the fray that has descended on this part of the city for a night of whatever gets them off. The doors jitter before slamming shut.
“She’s crustom!” Mr. Korean says, pointing after her with his big wooden spoon. He returns to the sizzling contents of a large wok he has been nursing behind the counter.
“Who’s not?” Marl says, still staring.
“She’s not natwural.”
An odd statement coming from a man Marl suspects has a new set of regen’d lungs. He compassionately eyes the old Korean.
“Ah, dong-mongo!” And the clerk throws his attention back into the wok.
Intrigued, Marl exits the shop on the off chance that the woman, Miss Unnatural, might actually be in sight. Emerging, he finds himself in an endless sea of discarded faces, all perched atop their winter coats in a desperate attempt at comfort. The crowd moves along the viscera of the sidewalk like gray waste forced ahead by a peristaltic emotion he can only label “despair.” In the week since his arrival, he has sensed a connection forming. The people fascinate him, because each one is a stunning collection of eukaryotic history, all traceable to one singular start buried deep in a lineage that spans the millennia. He searches their faces and begins feeling a tremendous pressure, like a physical declaration of the intense importance of his assignment. Then a shift carves through his being, destroying the resolve that his foundation rested upon. Suddenly, he wonders if he has arrived too late, like a doctor realizing there is nothing left to do.
He becomes overwhelmed, and the nausea rises again.
Staggering, Marl leans heavily against the glass of Mr. Korean’s shop. He feels a hand at his shoulder.
“Hey, are you all right? You don’t look so good.”
The stranger’s eyes are calm, and his grip full of care.
Marl straightens and struggles to smile.
“You gotta watch yourself. New York can bite you in the ass if you’re not careful.” The stranger winks, then waves off the question and slips back into the flow.
3. DE ACUERDO
The courier measured his pace as he trotted down the long corridor. A minute too soon would be as damaging as a minute too late. He glanced at his watch. 11:58:04 a.m. He slowed to a walk.
12:00:00 p.m.
“Good afternoon, Stephen,” a disembodied female voice said.
The courier took the final step and leaned toward the reader panel. “Good afternoon, Ms. Sanchez.”
“Are you packed today?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am.”
The courier could feel the HVAC kick in, creating a faint hum somewhere at the edge of his hearing. The hallway was empty, the nondescript system panel the only element embellishing the stark white walls. The muscles of his neck tightened in anticipation.
“I’m ready,” the woman said.
The courier released the optic fiber from its cell with a swipe of his card and caught it as it popped free. A complex task reduced to an artfully simple move by hundreds of deliveries. He removed his sunglasses and snapped the fiber into the connector below his left eye. Widening his stance, the courier closed his eyes and prepared for the transfer of data.
“You’ve styled your hair differently.”
The courier opened his eyes. “Yes, ma’am, I have.”
“Muy atractivo.”
“Gracias, señora.”
There was a sound that resembled a laugh. “I think I like the new Stephen.”
The courier smiled.
“Are we ready?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Let’s begin.”
The courier took in a deep breath, and his vision dissolved.
* * *
Oscar Pavia was sitting comfortably in one of the overstuffed leather sofas that defined a meeting area near the front of his boss’s office.
“Mr. Pavia, Ms. Sanchez is here,” a smooth female voice declared.
“Thank you, Maria,” he said.
Hidden by the opening door, Pavia watched Isabel Sanchez walk into the room. He could always tell the importance of a file by where his boss would stand. By the windows was bad. By the desk was good. By the bar was personal. Sanchez placed the sliver of organic polymer next to the desk’s Netport. Alberto Goya turned from one of the large windows that ran the length of the office and eyed it.
“Gracias,” he said politely.
“De nada.” Sanchez turned but froze when she saw Pavia.
He smiled, forcing the genuineness.
Sanchez acknowledged him with a slight, awkward tilt of her head, then hurried from the room.
“Alberto,” Pavia said. “When are you going to enter the modern age?”
Goya looked up from slipping the file into his Netport. “When it’s secure, my friend.”
Alberto Goya was a tall, native Mexican who had been born just before his country’s merger with America. His hair was as black as his skin was dark, and his penchant for biosuits kept his look at the edge of fashion. He stepped into a shaft of early afternoon light, and his tie’s pattern changed.
“It is secure, and has been for about a century,” Pavia said with a taint of frustration. He uncrossed his legs, and the sofa complained with a noise that sounded like it could have come from the ass of some enormous beast. Pavia’s mass wasn’t built from fat. His bulk had been cultivated from a career that included 12 years in Special Forces and eight years of anti-terrorist duty with the NSA. As he waited for the file to appear, the muscles of his jaw worked under a skin speckled by the scars of childhood acne.
Goya leaned onto his desk and lit a cigarette. He exhaled smoke just as the holochive appeared in the center of the room.
“Shade, level 4,” he said. The room obeyed, dimming the window’s glass into dark gray panels that blurred the cityscape beyond. His smoke spread lazily through the data stream, and it rippled slightly.
Pavia leaned forward and intently studied the flow of information as it quivered before him.
Goya drew again from his Gitane a long drag, then let the residual smoke linger about his face. He had built upon his father’s empire by leveraging Grupo TVid Azteca’s world audience share into the second-most-watched Network on the Net. Having grown the company through shrewd acquisitions, Goya had amassed an empire that would secure him a place in business history.
“Stop!” he said.
The data stream froze.
“What is it?... What do you see?” Pavia asked.
“I don’t know.” Goya, his face lined from years of dealing with serious matters, peered at the bits of information.
Pavia rubbed his chin, and his meaty fingers scraped across his afternoon shadow like it was 220-grit sandpaper. “Hell,” he said, glancing at his watch, “if you don’t know, I certainly won’t!” He extracted himself from the sofa, leaving a crater no bioleather could restore.
“Sit down, my friend,” Goya said with a tone of authority his head of security had come to respect.
Pavia sat, and his pant legs hiked to expose the fur-covered trunks that were his calves. He scoffed as he settled back into the sofa.
Goya continued studying a certain area of the file. “See this?” he finally said, pointing.
Pavia focused on the section.
“Why would she need this?”
Pavia edged between two chairs to get closer to the holochive, leaned in and read.
“I couldn’t say,” he said, straightening.
Goya crushed out his cigarette. “Look at the download path.”
Pavia reviewed the data again.
“Why would a 10-year employee – one who has an exemplary record – move this kind of data in such a convoluted manner?”
Pavia thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his Trussardi pants and shrugged.
Goya sighed. “She is either harmlessly retrieving it for some kind of research ...” He eyed Pavia in a way that caught the veteran security man off guard. “... or she’s retrieving it because someone has paid her to.” Goya lit another cigarette.
“But this is useless information. What could anyone do with this sort of crap?”
“Resume,” Goya said, and the holochive began to slowly stream. “Stop. Extract these files here, here, and here.” He touched the holochive, and it instantly separated into three separate files. “Isolate and enlarge.” The holochive divided again and extracted the data into large info-panels.
Pavia stepped closer and studied them. Suddenly, his mind saw the pattern nestled in the bits of seemingly banal information. He whistled.
“Yes, my friend,” Goya said. “When they are separate files, they have no significance. But seen together–”
“They reveal that our model employee isn’t so model.” Pavia rubbed his chin again and felt the scar from that assignment in Jordan.
“No, she appears not to be, eh? Light, level 10!”
The window’s grayness quickly vanished, and the office filled with early New York afternoon sunlight. Goya eased into his chair and propped his vintage kangaroo Noconas on his desk. They had been his father’s.
“Do you want me to bring her in?” Pavia asked.
Goya crushed out his cigarette in the large glass bowl. “No,” he said after some thought. “I think we’ll let her continue.... It should be interesting to see where this goes.”
“I must advise you, for the record, I think that is unwise. We don’t know who she’s working for, or what they are trying to do.”
“Don’t worry, Oscar. You’ll figure it out before it goes too far, eh?” Goya ejected the file. “Here, take this.” He flicked it at Pavia.
The tiny wafer sailed through the air; Pavia lumbered and caught it with cupped hands. He grunted from the effort and straightened. “Who is she, anyway?” he asked, pocketing the file.
Goya glanced at his Netport. “Moriarty ... Deja Moriarty. She’s in Entertainment.”
Pavia turned to leave.
“Oh, and one other thing ...” Goya folded his hands behind his head. “The more I think about it, the more I feel this one should be off the grid.... Agreed?”
Pavia pondered the request. “De acuerdo,” he replied in the best Mexican accent his New Jersey heritage would allow.
“Bueno,” Goya said, and snapped his Netport shut.
4. PARIS
“You goin’ to hang upside down all morning?” Deja asked from the cocoon she had created with the bed’s thermo-blanket.
Chaco relaxed and let his arms dangle. He looked at her. “No,” he said. “One more and I’m done.” A drop of sweat fell from his forehead and hit the cement floor with a delicate “thap.” It vanished into the puddle that had been forming under him for 20 minutes. He grunted and pulled himself up for the 50th time.
Deja stretched and watched her lover hang from one of the loft’s ceiling supports. She often thought how unfair it was that Chaco’s muscle tone was more the blessing of genetics than of any structured lifting. What workout he did consisted of the occasional 50 reverse pulls and some new yoga he had been into since before they met. All she knew was that it involved chrome balls the size of melons and required a Liquid Fiber connection to the Net. But what got to her wasn’t the fact that it was taught remotely from somewhere in India by a hot female instructor who had thighs that could crush coconuts. It was more that Chaco just had to disappear to the class twice a week. He referred to it as “me” time. “Suspicious” is what Deja called it.
She pulled her knees in and tightened her cocoon. “Doesn’t that make you sick, hanging like that?”
“Not really. You get used to it after a while. Throw me that towel, will you?”
Deja flung it in kind of a blind, reverse-flick. It missed his outstretched hands and landed on Chaco’s cat. The big tabby growled from under the towel, then scooted blindly across the floor, pawing and jabbing, until it slammed into one of the concrete columns.
“Oh, shit, Meatball!” Deja said.
Chaco twisted to get a better look at the heap crumpled at the base of the column. The cat’s exposed tail twitched angrily.
“Don’t worry, he’s all right. He does that all the time, don’t ya Meat?”
The cat’s tail flicked and curled as if in answer. Then Meatball popped his head out and bolted across the loft in a kind of crazy sideways gallop.
“See? He’s fine.” Chaco disengaged the boots and lowered to the floor. “He’ll probably have a headache for the rest of the morning, but that’s a cat’s life, isn’t it?” Deja groaned and pulled the blanket over her head. Chaco fell onto the bed and began playfully grabbing at where he thought her waist might be. She squealed and thrashed at his repeated jabs.
“Jesssus, Sonny!” Deja sat up and pulled the blanket off her head. She caught her reflection in the floor mirror and saw her product-brittle hair was splayed as if a small nocturnal animal had been nesting in it.
Chaco retreated from his attack to the edge of the bed and looked her over. “Nice style, baby.”
Deja smiled and answered with her middle finger.
“So elegant this early in the morning.” As Chaco left the bed, he passed his hand over the tips of her spiked hair, and Deja swatted him away. He walked into the kitchen, and its lights slowly greeted him. Deja fell back onto the pillows.
“About last night,” Chaco said. “That was incredible. What got into you?”
Deja opened her eyes to the cobwebs that were building in the rigging of the loft’s trusses and smiled. Meatball hopped onto her chest and began kneading. A large drop of drool fell from the cat’s mouth and spread into the threads of her T-shirt. She stroked his back, and Meatball purred with appreciation.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Chaco looked up from pouring orange juice into a large glass and smiled.
Something fluttered across Deja’s heart, and for the first time in their relationship, she felt a defined sense of comfort. From the beginning, she had innately sensed a connection with Chaco, and even though he never mentioned it, she was sure he felt it, too. But now, snuggled in the familiar comfort of his bed and barely descended from a passionate ledge that only two people in love could reach, she decided to allow herself the sole emotion she knew little about.
“Hey,” Chaco said, filling a second glass. “Are you happy?”
“Yes,” she replied warmly.
He entered the bedroom. “Aha! In bed with another man.”
“Guilty as charged.” Deja gently pulled Meatball’s tail as he jumped from her chest onto the shelf behind her. “And this guy never bitches about cold feet. Do you?” The cat playfully sparred with her from the protection of his high ground.
“He’s a good guy, as cats go.” Chaco settled onto the bed and handed her a glass. He paused and took her in.
“What? Is it my hair?”
“No, baby, it’s not.”
Chaco took a small sip from his glass, set it on the nightstand, leaned over, and tenderly kissed her. “You know,” he said softly, “I felt something last night.”
Deja wrapped an arm around his neck. “Me too,” she whispered, and leaned in to kiss him.
“Agent Chaco.”
Deja stopped in mid-kiss.
“Agent Chaco-san,” the voice said again.
“Fuck,” Chaco said against her lips.
Yoichi Tsukahara’s pudgy figure formed in the center of the loft.
“Good morning, Agent Chaco,” he said, with a slight bow. His eyes moved to Deja; she pulled the blanket around herself.
“Tsuka,” Chaco said, shifting to face the holoimage. “This better be damn good!”
Tsukahara bowed again, more deeply this time. “I’m so sorry to disturb you, but there’s been a–”
“Listen, if the drives for the NetLinks are acting up again, get one of the techs to check them.”
“No, not NetLink Hubs. They’re running at 100 percent efficiency.”
“If it’s the Data Transfer Units, Davis can fix them. We saw him last night at a party down in the Lower-”
“No, Chaco-san!” Tsukahara’s face was grave, and his bow was much slower this time.
“Yeah?” Chaco said cautiously. The holoimage rippled slightly, and its linear waves of pixels oscillated into little moiré ovals.
Tsukahara finished his bow. “Protocol demands you return to the unit.”
“Why?”
“This is not a secure channel-”
“Damn it, Tsuka. What the hell is going on?”
Tsukahara hesitantly opened his Netpad and nodded to himself. He looked up. “We believe there has been an incident.”
“What magnitude?”
“Ten.”
“Oh my God,” Chaco said under his breath.
Deja looked from her lover to the holoimage and back. “What, Sonny? What does he mean?”
Chaco turned slowly, his brow furrowed.
“Sonny?”
“A ten is biothermonuclear.”
Deja gasped.
“Yeah,” Chaco said, “just like Hawaii.”
When the Biolution arrived, it swept away many industries that were once the anchors of modern life, and in so doing, changed the dynamics of the world order. The technology it spawned created new sources of synthetic fuels and reduced the Middle East to the status it enjoyed prior to the development of the internal combustion engine. This drove radicals within the Middle East to show the infidels one last act of Arab anger.
On a beautiful spring day in the Hawaiian Islands, the terrorist detonation of an untested biothermonuclear weapon caused the tropical paradise to debiolize, or what TVid pundits aptly labeled “merged.” At precisely noon, one million Hawaiians, tourists and military personnel (not to mention all animal, plant and aquatic life within a 300-mile radius) merged like an ice cream sundae on a hot afternoon. There was no flash of light, no rain of fire – just a congealing of matter that shocked the world. What had once been a concept was now a brutal reality whose specter hovered at the rim of the world’s collective nervous consciousness like a low-grade fever.
Chaco slowly rose from the bed.
“Sonny,” Deja said, “your legs, they’re shaking.”
“Probably from the workout.” He turned to the holoimage. “Disengage this connection.”
Tsukahara bowed, and his image disappeared.
Chaco collected his clothes and began walking toward the bathroom.
“Sonny?”
Chaco stopped, but didn’t turn. “Yeah?”
“Talk to me.... What’s going on?”
“Deja, level 10 could mean anything from a contaiment issue to a ….”
Deja could only think that his mind was struggling to wrap itself around the enormity of the situation.
“I better get going,” he said, and hurried into the bathroom on the other side of the loft.
Deja sat in the middle of the bed as the morning sun exploded over the top of the city and flooded the loft with hot yellow light. She gathered the blanket around her and began to rock. Moments before, she had been delighting in her newfound ardor, but now, all had changed. Meatball hopped from the headboard and nestled into the crux of her legs. He looked up and purred. Deja gathered the cat into her arms and nuzzled his face into her neck. The cat licked the tip of her chin.
“Oh, Meat,” she said. The cat blinked sleepily. “You’re so lucky.”
Deja took in the loft, and her attention stopped on a small lip of shelf cantilevered from a wall. It held about a dozen holophotos and hung there, glowing, as a collection of moments that was Sonny Chaco’s life: the day he graduated from the Academy, his mother and father’s 40th anniversary, the birthday party when he turned 30, and he and Deja on their trip to France. She stared at the holoprint from Paris for several minutes, lost in memory.
Chaco emerged from the bathroom and hurriedly walked across the loft to the dining table. He yanked his coat from the back of a chair and slipped it on in a move that always reminded Deja of a dance step she had learned in high school. He removed his Netpad and pointed it towards the desk by the front door. A drawer slid open.
Deja hated what was inside.
Chaco walked to the desk and pulled his Light-Force from the drawer. After inspecting its safety, he slipped the weapon into its holster under his coat. He straightened and adjusted the cuffs of his shirt, walked to the front door, reached for its handle, and paused.
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he said so quietly Deja could barely hear him. He finally turned. “Feed Meatball, will you?”
Still holding the cat to her chest, Deja nodded.
Chaco forced a smile, then carefully turned the handle and stepped from the loft. The echo of the door clicking shut rebounded off the hard surfaces.
5. EMPTY THE SOUL
Marl is haunted by shadows that move through the landscapes of his dreams. Crowds in nameless streets, chanting and screaming, their colorful features twisted into shapes that resemble masks from the largest city on the planet.
Waking, he finds that he is drenched in a sweat that could only come from fear of failure. He opens his eyes to a black void and listens. The hum is still there.
A need to scream rises deep from his being, but he refuses to succumb. He wipes the sweat from his face and stares at his hands. In the blackness they seem detached, foreign. He turns them over and strains to find their form.
Then it strikes.
The overwhelming sense of a million souls – screaming to him over a threshold that he has come to understand as his gift. Something has happened on the planet, or might have happened. He never quite knows, but its presence is dense and catastrophic.
The accompanying pain slams into his essence with all the force of the universe. He fights the urge to wretch and slowly climbs out of the bed. The tile floor coldly welcomes his feet.
Moving through the darkness, he cautiously inches his way to the bathroom. Its light greets him with the brilliance of a sun, and he collapses onto the lip of the sink. Water automatically flows, and he cups his hands and splashes his face, hoping he can wash away the visions. They begin to recede.
Upon leaving the bathroom, the light fades and plunges him back into the shadows. As he climbs onto the bed, he knows that when he closes his eyes he will see the faces again. They will greet him on the plane of his dreams and ask him why. He does not have the answer. It is not his reason – his purpose – to exist. He has been trained only to stop the madness. He fights for the strength that seems to elude him. He is scared, like a child in a war bigger than he can fathom; he does not see or understand the complexities that shape his future.
Then, with a sudden and desperate realization, he accepts that he must return to his dreams and face the many who are gone. Only then will he know what to do.
He closes his eyes and empties his soul.
6. YOU DID ALL RIGHT
Yoichi Tsukahara was the latest in a series of “Exchange Agents” the NSA had paraded through Echelon unit over the last year. He was young and talented but still uncomfortable with New American culture. He jumped to his feet and bowed as Chaco entered the room.
“Cool it, Tsuka, you’re in the big New ‘A’ now. We don’t show respect here – for anybody.” Chaco threw his coat against an available chair and settled against the counter of Tsukahara’s Netport station. He accepted a cup of coffee from Cooper.
“Morning,” Davis said, engrossed with something on his Netport screen.
“Hey, boss.” Steiner busily consumed the last of a crusty apple Danish. The other techs didn’t even look up.
Chaco studied each one of his console-jocks and tried to get a read on their emotional states. “So, what do we got?”
Davis turned and stretched. “One hell of a headache,” he said yawning.
Chaco kicked his legs out from under him, and Davis almost toppled backwards. “We have a Mag fucking Ten in system, and you’re bitching about a hangover?”
“We do?” Steiner said, spitting Danish past Chaco’s legs.
All the techs turned to their Netports and began clutching at their VirtGear. Davis struggled to his knees and tried jacking into the system.
“Wait, wait, wait a second!” Chaco said, pissed. “I came down here on my day off because of a Mag Ten alert!” He turned toward Tsukahara, who was slowly recoiling from a deep, apologetic bow.
“I am so sorry, Agent Chaco. I misread the alert.”
“Well, what the hell is it? Are we under an alert or not?”
“Yeah, boss,” Steiner said, wiping his mouth. “Technically, we are.”
“But it is not a Magnitude 10,” Tsukahara said. “It is a magnitude one point zero.”
Everyone in the cramped lab restrained their laughter.
“Give me your Netpad,” Chaco said.
Tsukahara sheepishly offered his Netpad and flinched when Chaco grabbed it.
“Jesus, Tsuka, the organics in this pad are almost dead. Get over to the Cage and requisition a new one.” He threw the Netpad, and Tsukahara clumsily tried to clutch it before it clattered to the floor.
“Hands like a fish.” Chaco relaxed against the counter and rubbed his face. “Any more surprises this morning?”
“Negative on that,” Davis said, righting his chair.
Chaco sighed, knowing that what could have been an excellent day with Deja was now going to be another “issue.” It wasn’t like he didn’t want to be with Deja. It’s just that working for the NSA meant you basically were 24-7. It was a small price to pay for national security. Or was it? He sniffed at his cup. “Who made the coffee this morning?”
Everyone looked at Tsukahara.
Chaco shot a look at his intern. “Not your day, is it?”
Tsukahara nervously grinned. “Ah, no, Chaco-san. Not Tsukahara’s day.”
“Agent Chaco?”
“Yes, sir?” Chaco asked as the image of his superior appeared on the console’s screen.
“Please stop by my office when you get a moment.”
“Yes, sir,” Chaco replied, knowing that, with Slowinski, “when you get a moment” meant right now.
“Trouble, boss?” Steiner asked.
Chaco shrugged. “Not that I can think of.” He began to leave but got only as far as the door. “Hey, what was the Mag 1 about, anyway?”
Davis searched through some online files at his Netport. “Looks like a biopharm lab outside of Paris had a loss of pressure in their resonance chamber.”
“Can you isolate it?”
Davis slipped on his VirtGear, and its optic couplings wrapped around his head like the tentacles of some deep ocean crustacean. They hissed as they searched for their contact points. For a moment he looked about, riding the wave of data back to its source. “Got it!” he declared. “Looks like some biotech firm. Let’s see, my French is a little rusty, but I thinks it’s pronounced La Société...commerciale des...MarionNettes de Viande?”
“Okay,” Chaco said. “I think I caught some of that.”
“La Société commerciale des MarionNettes de Viande,” Tsukahara said in perfect French. “Literally translated: The Meat Puppet Corporation.”
“What was it? Can you tell?”
Davis paused. “Yeah, kind of. It’s all in French and ... Latin? That’s weird. Anyway, it was a small accident, and yeah, just as I thought, right in the resonance chamber. Hmmm, that’s interesting.”
“What is?”
“This data doesn’t look like your typical corporate tech.”
“Cloning?”
“Possibly.”
“That’s not a Mag 1. Alert ops. Do they have it contained?”
“Yeah. Seven injured, no deaths. It’ll probably hit the French news in a half hour. Be on the majors later today. Nothing special as far as I can tell.”
Davis jumped to his feet and began grabbing wildly at his VirtGear. He knocked his chair across the room. “Jesus H. Christ!” he screamed and stumbled into his console. “Get this goddamned thing out of my head! SHIT!” Davis clenched his teeth in a seizure-like lockdown, and his body froze in a contorted spasm.
Some of the techs started to approach.
“Don’t touch him!” Chaco yelled, and the techs stood their ground.
“Man, what the hell hit him?” Steiner asked.
“I’m not sure.” Chaco stepped closer and inspected Davis. “It looks like something backwashed into his VirtGear’s Network, but the security walls should have stopped that.”
“Predator stream,” Tsukahara said, referencing his console.
Chaco looked at Tsukahara and frowned. “If you got a clue, I want to hear it.”
Tsukahara glanced again at his console. “Russian made, very dirty.” He looked up and wiped sweat from his upper lip. “We study this extensively at University. If he not released within two minutes, the stream will begin restructure his nucleotide polymorphisms, and any other deoxyribonucleic acid sequence variants.”
“In English.”
“It will make him a vegetable.”
“Okay.” Chaco turned to the group. “Anybody got any ideas?”
Tsukahara stepped over to the emergency shut-off button on the far wall and lifted its plastic cover.
“Wait a second!” Steiner said. “He’s totally Virt-In. You can’t auto-down on him. That’s for fires and shit. It’ll kill all the power to this grid, and probably him with it.” He looked at Chaco. “Won’t it?”
Davis was beginning to take on the appearance of a freakish modern sculpture. He was slowly vibrating like an electrical surge oscillated in him, and foam was building at the corners of his mouth.
“Hell if I know,” Chaco said. “This isn’t in any of my background. Tsuka, do you know what you’re doing?”
Tsukahara studied the room. “Russian Predator Stream is very black-ops. It can’t be stopped. It operates like a virus, just keeps adapting.”
“Shit,” Chaco said under his breath.
Tsukahara hit the button; the room went black.
Being a “clean” room – which had always struck Chaco as such an odd holdover since rooms didn’t really need to be sterile anymore – buried 10 levels below the Maryland landscape meant that when the power was cut, it got, as his grandfather used to say, as black as the Ace of Spades.
“Everyone all right?” Chaco asked into the darkness.
There were grumbles in various degrees of “yes.”
Steiner clicked on a miniature flashlight and directed the beam to where Davis had collapsed. As the light passed over Davis’ VirtGear, it caught the edges of some disconnected fiber optics, and rainbow arcs danced across the room. Steiner moved it over the rest of Davis’s body, which had fallen forward in a sick-looking heap. One of his arms was contorted to one side, while the other had been caught awkwardly under his chest. A small puddle of drool and blood was slowly spreading from his partially opened mouth.
Steiner lifted the light, reflecting it off the ceiling like a spot so the others could see. They rolled Davis over, and Chaco pulled out his Netpad and passed it the length of the body. The glow from its tiny screen cast Davis in a steely blue tint.
“What’s it read?” Steiner asked.
“He’s alive, but his breathing is shallow. His pulse is a little slow, and his blood pressure is off, but not too bad. Except for some broken teeth, I’d say he’s pretty lucky.” He clicked off the Netpad and placed it on the counter. “Nice job, Tsuka,” he said into the blackness. Steiner swung the light to the wall where the shut-off button was, and all heads followed. Its narrow beam cut a path through the dark, like a spotlight in one of the old prison vids Chaco had enjoyed watching with his father.
Steiner swung the beam around. “Hey, where’s Yoichi?”
“Hey, Tsuka?” Chaco called out, but there was no response.
Chaco’s Netpad hummed. “Yeah?!” he yelled.
“This is Security Station 4. Your unit is off-line. Fire crews are headed your way.”
“Cancel that, security! No fire, repeat, no fire. We have a medical emergency, Category 5.”
“Affirmative. Do you want power restored?”
“No! Do not restore power. We have a man who’s still Virt-In.”
“Affirmative. Holding power restoration until we hear further. ETA for med team is three minutes.”
There came a pounding at the entrance door that made everyone jump. It sounded to Chaco more like a SWAT battering ram, the kind they used on a TVid show he’d seen once – what was it called, Cop for a Day?
Steiner swung the light toward the noise, and Chaco stepped toward the door, but something caught his foot and sent him stumbling. Steiner left the door and shined the light on what had tripped Chaco. There was more pounding.
“What the hell?” Chaco watched Steiner’s light crawl up the unconscious mass of Yoichi Tsukahara. He was sprawled on the floor with the back of his head against the wall. In the dim light, he looked nearly peaceful.
“Agent Chaco?” Slowinski beckoned from the Netpad.
“Jesus.” Chaco stepped back over Tsukahara and followed Steiner’s beam back to the counter.
“Your ‘situation’ has come to my attention.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Slowinski. You see, we had this Russian Predator thing–”
“Sonny?”
“Yes, sir?”
There was a slight pause that Chaco took as his boss preparing to unleash his own special brand of disciplinary action. “See me when your situation is under control.”
“Yes, sir.” Chaco wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve and leaned against the counter. He looked down at Cooper, who, along with another tech, was trying to extract Davis’s VirtGear. “Be careful of the optic couplings,” he said. “They usually carry a little residual juice.”
The pounding at the lab door stopped.
Steiner handed the flashlight to another tech and began helping the others delicately uncouple the dozen tentacles that entwined Davis’ head. This would have been a simple task in any other situation, but because Davis was still connected to the Net, they had to uncouple the connectors in the correct order, or his nervous system could go into shock.
Harrison read aloud from his Netpad how to release the connectors. When Steiner removed the last one, its living properties sensed freedom and recoiled into the main housing at the front of the headgear.
“There,” he said with an air of accomplishment. “That’s the last one.” Steiner lifted the VirtGear from Davis’s head with the reverence of a surgeon. Davis’s head rolled out of the housing, his cheek stopping just shy of the pool of blood and drool. He eyes were half open and partially rolled back. His jaw had unclenched, but his nose looked broken. Chaco’s Netpad hummed again.
“This is the med team. We’re standing by outside. Is your victim still Virt-In?”
“Negative,” Chaco said. “Bring us back online.”
The overheads, along with the lab’s equipment, emitted a collective drone, and Chaco and the others shaded their eyes from the harsh light. The door to the lab hissed, and the med team rushed in and quickly surrounded Davis.
“We have another one, over there.” Chaco pointed to Tsukahara, who had come to and was trying to sit up.
“Hey, Yoichi,” Steiner said. “You okay there?”
Tsukahara glanced toward Davis, who was being raised on a med platform to be hovered out. “Will he die?” he asked..
“He’s going to be okay, Tsuka.... Isn’t he?” Chaco asked of the lead med tech, whose name patch labeled him as Morrison.
“His vitals are stable, and he’ll probably eat with a straw for the next two weeks. We’ll know more after we get him into Scanning. What did you say that stream was called?” He signaled his team to begin moving Davis out.
“Russian Predator,” Chaco said.
Morrison frowned. “I haven’t seen anything like that in a long time. Wonder why the Walls didn’t stop it?”
“Hell if I know. I thought they could stop anything.”
“They’re supposed to. You better run a diagnostic on your Virt Hubs before I have to come back down here and haul out another one of your fried asses.”
Morrison scanned the room. His attention landed on Steiner’s collection of antique cell phones. “You Net agents are an odd bunch.”
Chaco shrugged.
“What do you boys do down here, anyway?”
“Just keepin’ the peace.”
“Peace, my ass.” Morrison followed his team out. “I’ll let you know about your agent here, as soon as I know something,” he said over his shoulder. The door shut behind him with a clunk.
The room filled with a tense energy as Chaco, Tsukahara, and the techs all stood silently collecting themselves. Chaco edged the tip of his boot into the puddle of drool and blood. “Somebody want to clean this up?”
“Way ahead of you, sir,” Cooper said, making his way forward from his desk. He slipped on some latex gloves and began attacking the puddle with a bottle of the bio agent Chaco had used to use when he was a cop. It turned body fluids into dry putty that could be scraped up.
Tsukahara stepped up as Cooper spayed the stuff across the puddle. Chaco could tell the scene disturbed him.
“Don’t sweat it, Tsuka. You did good.”
“Agent Davis could have died.” Tsukahara said, still watching Cooper.
“He would have definitely died, if you hadn’t acted. You did the right thing, and that’s all that matters.”
Tsukahara faced Chaco. “I did all right?” he asked.
Chaco put his hand on Tsukahara’s shoulder. “He would have definitely died, if you hadn’t acted. You did the right thing, and that’s all that matters.”
7. COOL
Since her day off had been blown by one of Chaco’s dumbass interns, Deja decided to grab a commuter jump jet back to New York City. The world had never been in danger, and Chaco had apologized profusely, even buying her an expensive dinner at U-Topia before her flight. But Deja wanted to get ahead of the week’s business, and besides, Chaco hadn’t seemed all that insistent on her staying the weekend, anyway. All in all, she at least got a great night of sex and a good meal, which unfortunately summed up their relationship at times. Not that that was bad, but she knew she had felt something the other night that had vaguely presented itself as love – and she just wanted to know if Chaco had felt it, too.
Deja played with the volume of the vid screen in the seat in front of her. She moved up and down the range, but the sound didn’t change. It was loud enough to irritate, yet not enough that people would turn and stare. Resigned to the fact that she was powerless to control the only real luxury afforded to passengers these days, Deja went back to staring out her window. It was weird, she thought, watching the ground shrink as they ascended into the late Maryland evening, that she was traveling on an airline called Southwest in the Northeast. But after the airline industry collapse earlier in the century, which facilitated Southwest’s purchase of American and United, she figured they were big enough to call themselves whatever they wanted.
One of the holo attendants cleared its throat, an odd act, considering it had neither esophagus nor anything to clear. Deja figured it was the result of programmers who couldn’t think of a better way to get a passenger’s attention.
“Would you like anything to drink?” it said too politely.
Deja peeled herself from the window. “Yes, please. I’ll take a vodka tonic.”
“Thank you. That will be 20 Ameros.”
Deja handed over her chip card, which the holo attendant held for a moment to read the encoded information before it returned it and moved on to the next row. A real attendant came up the aisle and passed through the holo image, creating, for a split second, the eerie illusion of two faces merged.
Suddenly, Deja’s seat started reclining. Its cushion, which had already reshaped into a basic reading position, began contorting to Sleep Mode by firming itself and creating a small pillow. Deja quickly reset the seat’s protocols, and it started to reconfigure. The seat was designed to monitor Deja’s vitals, but she wasn’t that tired.
A human attendant returned with Deja’s drink and set it on her tray table. Deja took a sip and settled back. She started flipping through the channels on her vid screen and landed on an NNN news segment about advanced language chimps being tested by the telemarketing industry in California. The woman next to her stirred and gave out a small moan.
“I’m sorry,” Deja said. “The volume on this screen must be stuck.” She fiddled with the buttons in her armrest. The woman, who had been facing the aisle, turned.
Deja gasped.
The woman smiled knowingly and blinked. Her catlike eyes dilated in the dim cabin light to reveal bright rings of orange around the pupils.
Embarrassed, Deja quickly focused her attention back to NNN, which had segued to a news segment concerning the hazards of bioregeneration for correcting cosmetic issues in preteens, now that it had become all the rage in upper middle-class suburbs. There was a moment of awkwardness, then the woman lightly touched Deja’s arm.
“What do you think?” she asked.
Deja hesitated. “Excuse me?” She tried not to stare.
“I asked what you thought of that news piece.” The woman gestured at the vid screen, which now displayed a commercial for biodiapers with nanotechnology that actually “ate” the baby’s waste. The woman’s pupils narrowed, then dilated back to normal. They were beautiful, although Deja sensed a great deal of sorrow behind them.