AcolyteOfDeath

This is the rewritten form of a story I made up about 2 years ago, titled Rotovilla Noir. Rotovilla was the city which marked my introduction to the world of Mindjacker and now, I guess, I'm coming back. I'm writing this pretty fast now, so expect frequent chapter updates.

ROTOVILLA NOIR

1.

The name's Dystopia Joe, and I'm a P.I.; private investigator, not paranormal insurance - for that, try old Granma Fungo down the hall and to the right. I used to think that being a private detective was something cool or exciting, similar to a bounty hunter or a cyberspace cowboy, like Suicide Kelly and Johnny Livewire. I found, with not all that much surprise, that it was a lot like the rest of my life - washed-out, lonely, and with a long run of bad luck.

You're probably wondering why I call myself Dystopia Joe. Well, long story short, I call 'em as I see 'em, and I see myself every morning in the mirror.

Still, I managed to make something of a living uncovering secret affairs for suspicious lovers. True, it was mundane, boring, and repetitive - I saw so much illicit sex that I get sick even looking at the holos over the nudie bars - but it was a living, and it kept old Crazy Akhmed off my tail. Contrary to the weather outside, business had run drier than vat-chicken at the Happy Chow Restaurant, and old Akhmed was earning his title and going bananas at his tenants; if I knew him he'd have more than an eviction notice out with my name on it.

I watched the ghosts of smoke curl and waft from the dying embers in the ashtray on my desk. Outside the rain crashed and poured, filling the air with soft jazz, like the sound made by the grey fuzz on the television across the room. I put my feet on the desk and shifted my trusty brown fedora back over my face. It was a slow night in Rotovilla, and I was already on the edge of tumbling down that long dark rabbit hole into sleep. I didn't need to be hypnotized by the lazy spirals of the fan on the ceiling.

It rains a lot in Rotovilla, especially down here near Dockside where the city meets the big Sludge Sea. All that cooled air or something. Bad stuff, rain. There was a brown stain on the wall where the acid had eaten away at the plaster. One thing good about rain, though, was that it tended to mute things - even the dancing hologrammes out there in the night. Made it easier to sleep, which was what I was about to do when the door rapped.

I snapped to attention and whipped out my trusty old needle pistol. We were loaded, the gun and I, one with lead and the other with hard liquor, but pretty soon there'd be more than one smoker in the room.

"Back away from the door, Akhmed. Slowly. Keep those hands up - I can see your shadow through the glass. And don't even think of trying anything funny, or you'll be waking up next morning to a lead breakfast."

The figure behind the glass raised its arms and backed away slowly, but its voice wasn't Akhmed's.

"This is Dystopia Joe's, right?"

"Who wants to know?"

"Well I don't know who this 'Akhmed' character is, but I'm not with him. I've got a job for you. Will you let me in?"

I took a puff from the cigarette and ground it into the ashtray, keeping the pistol trained on the door.

"Ya okay. Come in the door nice and slow, no fast moves, doll-face."

It entered, passing in from the dim fluorescents in the hall to the feeble orange glow of my green-shaded desk lamp. It stayed in the shadows of the room, but from the faint silhouette I could tell that it was a dame. That didn't make me take the gun off of it, though. More often than not dames these days were more dangerous than guys.

She sat down in the overstuffed old chair in front of my desk and her face was suffused in an orange light. She had big blue doe eyes smudged with black paintstick and eyelashes so long and heavy I assumed she was injecting steroids straight into her eyelids and doing five hundred bats a day just to keep up the strength. She was a long, leggy blonde in a demure robin's egg blue skirt cut at the knee, a big black wide-brimmed hat, and a big conservative affair with padded shoulders and long sleeves. The dame wore black gloves and clutched at a handbag. You can imagine my surprise, at seeing someone dressed more retro than I was.

You know how some crazies like Ol' Granma Fungo down the hall believe in superstitious bullcrap like astrology and auras and stuff? Well if auras were real, then this dame positively reeked of one, and I could tell that it radiated in shades of pure business. She wore it like I wore my trenchcoat, and the sense of "don’t-mess-with-me-you-piece-of-shit-or-I'll-tear-your-fucking-cock-off" seemed to drip right off of those luscious red lips of hers.

"Lemme guess," I said, swinging my feet off the desk, "you're want me to snoop on your boyfriend or husband, right?"

"Not quite," she said and opened her handbag. She took a bunch of slips of something out of it and tossed them with a fapp in front of me. I slowly picked them up with my left, still tracing a bead on the dame's forehead with my right.

Slightly blurry black and whites. Slim woman, short-cropped black hair, wearing a white jacket and tight PVC pants. She carried a briefcase in one hand and an ugly-looking magnum in the other.

"These are photos of a certain mnemonic courier named Memory Jane who disappeared last Sunday with about thirty exebytes of raw corporate data in her head. She's been missing ever since. We need you to help us find this woman and bring her back to us."

"'We'?" I said, grinding another cigarette into the ashtray. "Just who do you represent, doll-face?"

"VatGen."

That single word gave me all I needed to know. This was a corporate war between the big genetic companies, VatGen and MetaFact, and they wanted to drag me into their private feud.

"Look, sister, I'm not gonna be pulled into your little vendetta here. I may be poorer than the guy who flunked out of homeless college, but I don't need to be cannon fodder in your war. Try the other channels - the big detcorps or something - but leave me outta this."

"We can't. All the detcorps are in with MetaFact. We've been skimming the biz at lower levels, and we've turned up zilch. All the bounty hunters want is Jane's head on a stick, and whenever we raise our bid, MetaFact raises it by twice as much. Believe me, we didn't want to resort to this, but you're our only hope, Joe."

"Alright, alright. Say I do take your snoop job. What's in it for me? How do I know you won't be knocking me off when I turn Jane into you?"

The dame opened her black handbag again with a click and pulled out a transparent rectangle, laced with coloured fibres. At one end was a golden square and at the other was an imprint in the shape of a human finger. I pushed it into the slot on the MTU on my desk and gave it back to her.

"Does this answer your question?"

My usually calm surface just had a boulder the size of the big Scrap Mountain tossed into it from high orbit. I watched the display flicker in neon green before my eyes and sat back, taking a shot from my hip flask of good old '25.

"Damn," I said, "That's a lot of zeroes."

"You'll get the second half when you turn in Jane."

I nodded, lighting a cigarette. The dame smiled, the way cats do when they've pinned a mouse between their claws and were about to bite its head off.

"So, Joe, do we have a deal?"

2.

When she left, swinging that gorgeous ass, she told me that her name was Sayonara, and she left her calling card as a red lip-print on my right cheek, along with those prize photos of the mnemonic courier in question.

I decided to try the local roughneck hangouts that I knew were frequented by data jockeys and the like. If this Memory Jane character was any good they'd either know of her and tell me, or know of her and blow my head off for asking. I threw my trenchcoat over my shoulders and walked down the hall to the stairwell when a bony sinewy claw shot out and grabbed me. I whirled around, the needle gun whining with power and saw myself confronted by Granma Fungo's wrinkled old kisser.

"Granma? What d'you want?"

"You are in much danger," she said in what I judged to be a Romanian accent.

"Whaddya mean?"

"Come with me."

She waddled off, shawl and burlap dress flapping to the sound of her sandals, down the hall towards her door - number 999 - but the screws had fallen off so now it read "666" instead of what it was supposed to. I couldn't help but think that that meant something. She was always wanting people to come visit her or listen to her crazed ramblings. Fungo could be annoying at times, crazy as she was, but she never meant any harm. Personally I never did have time for her, but it seemed that this night was one for strange surprises.

I entered the door, and the rush of stuffy air - the smell of old people - hit me harder than being run over by a maglev train pulling a hundred cargo containers full of lead driven by a hyperactive conductor doing some serious speed. It was a proverbial jungle in there, and the only light came from the urine glow of a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The walls, ceiling, and floor were covered in tin foil, and I think I managed to step in something that reminded me of a shrunken head.

There was a shrine covered in lit candles and medley of little ceramic saints, deities, and prophets from what I judged to be about seventeen different religions. Granma Fungo took a few items from the shrine, scattered them on the floor and puffed from a hookah.

In a trancelike voice, Fungo whispered, "You are a man of questions, Joe, and you shall go many places to answer these questions. But wherever you go, no matter how many answers you find, you will only create more questions for yourself. Because of this you are in great danger. Beware the woman in blue."

"But what do you want me to do? Where should I go?"

"You will travel to the place where there is no darkness. Held therein are both the beginning and the ending."

I paused there for a moment, staring at the crazy old woman swaying in the room. She was clearly on some serious drug, but I couldn't help but feel that, behind all the mystic-alien-anal-probe-second-coming-of-Jesus bullcrap, lay some sort of truth. I threw the cigarette to the floor and put it out with my foot.

"You're full of shit, Granma. See ya 'round."

The last thing I saw before the lift slid down below the levels was old Granma Fungo standing forlornly, shaking her solemn old head.

**

The rain struck white noise off of the mottled pavement. I pulled my fedora down and turned up my collar. It didn't help much, but at least it was something. The crowd around me was decked out in their cloaks and breathing masks; the air seemed to have teeth this night, because of the acid mist made by the rain, either way I didn't have one and couldn't do a thing about it. I looked ahead, and saw a million black umbrellas shift and move before me, their sticks lit by soft green glowtubes. Pale neon glowed dimly through the rain, lighting it up, making it strike electric sparks on the sidewalk.

The city extended some several hundred metra downwards. Every now and then someone would fall off of the sidewalk, but nobody helped. It was too common an occurrence.

Somewhere a police siren wailed. It was a tired, depressing sound, like an old man trying to recall a faded memory. The police didn't work, because there was never really a city government, so now they simply hired themselves out to the highest bidder, not better than a street gang, except with better cars and uniforms.

I lit another cigarette and began to think about the job. Some corporate chick dumped me a load of cash and no more info than a name and some blurry photographs. Not much to go on. In a place like Rotovilla all you had to do to hide yourself was just follow the crowd and pretty soon it'd carry you, like a river, somewhere else and unfamiliar, and that'd be that. Unless, of course, you knew enough people to leave a trail. There was a problem with having too many friends, and it was that friends tended to talk no matter how chummy you were with them, all a guy'd have to do is know what buttons to press and anyone would sing like a canary.

I found the place - the Lunatic's Parade - and stepped in. You could hear the music jive in your belly a kaymetra away, and entering the bar was like detonating a bomb between your ears. A laser-light show twirled over the heads of the dancing crowd, and I got the feeling that the AI piloting it was having an epileptic attack the way it shifted through the spectrum faster than a toygirl shifts johns. I was drenched in the nauseating perfume of drugs, and I fought to keep my head on straight.

Moving through the gyrating, swirling Technicolor crowd, I eventually made it to the acid bar where skinny hackers sat doped out on chemical cocktails cradling looking anorexic-looking joegirls in one arm and tall flasks of toxic-waste coloured drinks in the other. The counter was lit from below by a lining of blue neon, giving it an even more psychedelic glow.

I leaned over the counter and waited till the barkeep came by. He was mixing two tall glasses of some milky-looking pink and blue concoction.

"Yeah, what do you want?"

"I'm looking for a mnemonic courier going by the name of Memory Jane. D'you know her?"

"Dunno. People come, they get high, they go. I wouldn't know - I just work here. Might wanna try that feller over there." He gestured with a stubby finger towards a ratlike man in a purple and brown business suit. "Guy by the name of Citizen Gedaechtnis. I'd watch yourself if I were you. Meanass motherfucker, he is."

"Gedaechtnis? What's that?"

"Means 'memory' in one of them old-fashioned languages. The guy's a memory broker. Sells mnemonic plugs."

"Ah. Well, thanks."

I moved to get up from the stool and the man gripped me with a surprisingly strong hand, taut with wiry strength, like a suspension cable made of bonded carbon fibre-wire. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger under my nose.

"Twenty creds says I don't sing like a lark to G's buddies."

I nodded and gave the man his money.

He let me go and I brushed my jacket, moving through the crowd down to the far end of the bar where the memory broker sat flanked on either side by a smiling white-faced geisha girl. He sucked his drugdrink from a curly blue straw and the geisha girls took turns feeding him purple ice cream sprinkled with white crystal meth powder. He sat there, bathed in blue neon and psychedelic laser light, laughing his head off. Flecks of spittle and melted ice cream dotted his goatee.

I pulled up a stool.

"Hey you!" I shouted over the noise, "You that guy they call Citizen Gedaechtnis?"

He laughed, a high-pitched, squealing noise, like the sound a helium-breathing gerbil makes when having an orgasm, and turned bulging eyes at me, "Who wants to know?"

"I'm told you know a girl named Memory Jane. I'm looking for her."

His joviality vanished like a puff of blue smoke from a hookah, and a pair of bodyguards stepped out, muscle grafted shoulders rippling. The geisha girls scrammed.

"Who the hell are you, Mister?"

"They call me Dystopia Joe," I said, sitting back, lighting a cigarette.

"You some kind of coppa? Some private flatfoot snoopin' around?"

"You might say that I'm a man with some questions that need answerin'."

"Well you ain't getting nothin' from me! I don't know no Memory Jane."

"Oh really?" I asked, pulling the pictures out of my pocket. I tossed them across the bar counter and they slid before Gedaechtnis, who wrinkled his nose, looking at them as if someone had served him a plateful of shit. "This help jog your memory?"

He blinked hugely dilated eyes, waved his guards away, and leaned over to me. Gedaechtnis's breath stank of alcohol and drugs, mixed in with a foul patina of hookah smoke and sour milk. He spoke in a ragged whisper.

"Listen you piece of shit, I don't know nothin' - you hear me? Nothin'! Now I don't care who you're with, or where you come from, but you better get the hell outta this bar or you gonna wake up next mornin' wit' your brains scattered on the sidewalk from here to Ash City!"

"You don't own this place," I said coolly, putting out the cigarette in his cocktail.

There was a whining noise and a click, and Gedaechtnis began to turn his bulging toad eyes down.

"Uh-uh," I said, waving a finger under his nose, "I got this pointed at that hotrodded pancreas of yours. This needler uses high frequency electromagnetic fields to fire lead slugs at supersonic speeds, but I can rig it to make an EMP burst that'll disrupt all the fancy cybernetics in there. Without them you won't be able to absorb the shock of all them drugs flowing in your blood right now. You'll crash so hard you'd wish I'd have blown your brains out right here and now."

It was a bluff, of course, but I was counting on the drugs in his system to override his rationality - whatever shreds of it were left. Gedaechtnis was getting really nervous now.

"Okay, okay I'll talk!" he said, putting sweaty palms up in a placating gesture, "Whaddya wanna know?"

"Names. Places. What was she carrying? Where was she going when you last saw her? Did she say anything to you?"

"All I know is that last Friday Mem J. came to me lookin' for a mnemonic dump. The girl looked totally out of it, y'know? Like she was crashin', hard. I told her I didn't have a sequence analyser and that I couldn't do a hardlink interface. Was like someone had wired her brain so that she'd keep the information and if somebody without access tampered with it they'd cause some serious shit to happen in her head. She was really disturbed about something."

"Did she tell you anything about where she was going?"

"Gee I dunno."

I lit another cigarette and armed the needler. The green light switched to red and it began to hum steadily, getting louder. I jabbed the nozzle at his gut.

"Okay! Chill, man! All I know is that she needed to get somewhere - fast and easy. She didn't tell me where! That's all I know, I swear! I swear!"

The rat man began to sweat profusely, positively leaking pure gin and heroin.

"Did she tell you how?" I asked, smiling coolly.

"She asked me to lend her fifty creds, that's all!"

"And did you?"

"Yeah. We've known each other a long time. Wouldn't say we were pals or anything - she wouldn't let me get within two feet of her, much less let me get her in bed. Besides, she got me lots of business, the least I could do was repay her."

I smiled and grabbed my pictures, putting the gun away. I tipped my fedora at Gedaechtnis and walked out of the bar, from the whirlwind seizure of techno rhythm to the white fuzz of the pouring monsoon outside.

Fifty creds. Somewhere fast and easy.

The railbus cruised by, screaming on a rusty aerial monorail, striking white sparks as it rattled and shook. I snapped my fingers and threw my cigarette into the abyss below, the leaving a smoke trail to dissipate in the rain. Of course! The railbus trains!

One of the last vestiges of public transportation. Cheap, fast, and light, the only reason nobody took them was that they never went where you needed them to go, because the railbus lines were laid down before anyone remembered, and the times had changed in the last few thousand years. Unless… you wanted to escape.

I took off down the crowd towards the nearest railbus terminal, ignoring the iridescent neon glitter of the rain as it fell, acid and piss-coloured, from the black abyss above.

3.

The railbus terminal was a rickety shack poised on an outcropping of ferrocrete with a long rusty strip of electric monorail running through it and a grungy old bench nestled up against the corner. The corrugated aluminum awning over the terminal was riveted with holes, and pools of acid rain gathered in inky pools on the pavement. Even so, the minimal shelter had become a haven for the homeless insane, who were indistinguishable from the piles of trash that they slept in. Inanimate human trash mixed with inanimate human-produced trash; the cast-offs of human civilisation. I stood in another corner, yelling at the AI terminal.

It was a tall steel and chrome cylinder with a flat pseudo-holographic readout panel behind an entropy-frosted plastic box. The once-clear plastic was scratched a dull white from years of use, as if the nervous tension of countless swarms of people had worked its way onto the surface, and part of the plastic was punched out and broken off.

"What do you mean? Why can I get a printout?"

"I'm sorry, sir, but it's against my programming. It is required by corporate law to protect the confidentiality of passengers."

"Alright, fine. Just one thing, robot, if you can overcome your programming just for one little thing."

"Yes, sir, my terminal is standing by for input."

I pulled out the pictures of Memory Jane.

"You've got optic cameras on your railbuses, don't you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Can you tell me what train this person got on? Have you seen this person?"

"I'm afraid I cannot answer your query, sir. My programming disallows this."

I put the pictures back and walked away, into the rain. There was only one way I was gonna find out what train she got on, and that was if I got someone to hack the train system. Now there was no way I was gonna go back into the Lunatic's Parade with Citizen Gedaechtnis and his goons on the lookout for me, so I had to track down some other hacker hangout and hope that there was someone out there that was cheap and loose enough to help me.

A wind stirred, blowing a hot stinking breath of pollution into my face from some forgotten corner of the city, and the ruffling of something caught my eye. On a pile of trash lay a white faux-leather jacket. I looked back at the photos. It was the same jacket, even despite the blurriness of the photos, I could tell from the distinctive cuts.

I picked it up and riffed through the pockets. I came up with nothing, until I looked at the inner pockets. I found one with an extra lining and ripped it open. A black leather wallet fell out, with some scraps of notes and a few round pieces of metal. I examined the metal bits between my thumb and forefinger. Most were circular, but others were octagonal. They had holes of different shapes cut in their centers. I assumed that they were washers of some sort, belonging to a machine.

The papers were marked in ink, written in a childish scrawl.

FTR SNS = WHO?
82905 52 23:12
FND M-

The rest of it was a blurry mess. I couldn't read a thing. I looked at the next little wad of paper. It was a printout of some kind, hurriedly made. As I unfolded it something dropped out - a little beige oval thing made of some kind of shiny, hard material I assumed to be plastic. Some sort of fake nail, maybe, judging from the glitter on it.

223015 SUBJ ARG REF 115027982
223016 SUBJ ARG REF 721057982
223017 SUBJ ARG DNL 448710245
223018 SUBJ NEW DNL 279060245
** UNAUTHORISED ENTRY DETECTED CUTTING TRANSMISSION **
[---]

The rest was somehow corroded, as if eaten by acid and partially burnt with a cigarette. She had to have been looking for something, hacking through a database, and just got cut off by the system.

The last bit of paper was a grayish stub with a perforated edge, that'd been torn off. There was a bit of writing printed widthwise down the side of it, a series of numbers, and a series of black bars. It was a railbus ticket stub. Not the one that she had taken here - railbus tickets were bought at the terminals and torn on the train - plus the writing indicated that the station she had left was a different one. I walked over to the AI terminal. That was all the stub had, the second part of the ticket would have all the rest, including customer information, destination, date of purchase, and estimated time of arrival. But for the moment this bit was enough.

"Yes, sir?" it said.

"Can you gimme a printout of the location of this station?" I read the name of the station on the stub.

"Yes, sir, right away."

A sheet of mimeoplastic extruded from a printout slot. I took it and began walking back into the pounding rain, when the machine gave a loud beep. I whirled around.

"Excuse me, sir," it said, "I require payment. Five credits, please."

I growled and fumbled with my MTU and plastic rectangle. Everything needed payment. My dad always said in a distant, downtrodden voice, that the world was one big complicated machine, and that money was the thing that greased its wheels. I asked him one day, what function he did in that machine. He answered that the machine was a recycling machine and that he, my mother, and myself, and everyone else stuck here down in the bottom of the city, were the bits of junk on the conveyor belt. At the time I didn't know what he meant with that statement, but now that I'd grown up, I knew what he meant.

I gave the machine its money and stepped back, looking at the printout. 52nd Block. The same thing that was written on that scrap of crumpled paper.

"Hey. Do you have a connecting line to Block 52?"

"Why certainly, sir. There is a railbus coming in approximately ten minutes that has a connexion to Block 52."

"How much for a ticket?"

"Fifty credits, please."

I grumbled and paid the machine, grabbing the grey ticket. I waited for an hour and a half, narrowly avoiding a gangrape by hiding in a pile of trash. Just stupid street punks. They pulled a prostitute from the crowd, ripped off her skimpy little one-piece and had their way with her. Then they pulled a homeless man from his trash pile and gangraped him too. When their fun was over the gang shot both in the head, execution style and sauntered off, laughing their heads off.

I stirred and brushed myself off. Just stupid street punks. I could have taken the whole lot while their backs were turned, caught them all with my needle gun. But what was the point? They were just your generic street kids, the man your generic homeless wino, and the woman your generic bioengineered whore. Nobodies fighting nobodies. There wasn't any point to doing any heroic vigilantism, because the same thing happened everywhere else, and no one person could stop it. Just a waste of ammunition.

The train came and I got on, giving the AI on the train my stub.

"Time for a little run-in with the past."

4.

The railbus was the way I remembered from when my old dad used to take me traveling. No particular direction or place, just traveling for the sake of traveling. We always ended up back where we started.

It was moldy, stank of countless years of piss and soap, the forces of alcoholic wanderers and automated cleaners vying for control, with no regards to what their little war was doing to the thin, brownish-yellow carpet. The overstuffed seats were bleeding foam padding. Some were mummified in bandages of duct tape, others were patched, but it looked like that selfless caretaker with the roll of duct tape had gotten tired of repairing the damage and just let everything decay. A flickering fluorescent lamp hung from a wire in the ceiling, and the banks were exposed, the plastic coverings long broken off and forgotten. They cast an evil green glow on the yellow-brown seats.

I sat down and watched the world go by, the railbus rocking and screaming outside. The in-transit radio cut in with a burst of electric squeals and coughs, quietly playing some depressing music in a different language.

"You see that, m'boy?" my father used to ask, pointing at the blinking lights streaking by the windows.

I always looked at what he pointed at, but it always passed before I could make it out. When I did catch what he was so excited about, it was always just some other mundane thing, made very different from another perspective.

Dad taught me to look at everything from a different viewpoint. Told me that nothing ever looked the same once you looked at it from every direction. That's what helped me want to be a detective. He was always fascinated by things, anything, really. It was the learning that appealed to him. I could never really understand him. I was just content to be around him.

The railbus pulled in at an underground subway station. I waited for the ancient AI to slowly ease open the sliding double doors and stepped out.

It was a white ceramic tiled affair, with a pair of circular benches at the center where a pair of hobos slept. A gust blew as the railbus car retreated backwards out of the station, groaning and squeaking on the single track, a buzz of electricity sparking blue from a frayed circuit, rustling up a paper whirlwind that soon settled, dying on the tracks and the platform like ash-grey insects. The moaning of the railbus was a solemn, ghostly sound, and I turned up the collar of my trenchcoat, taking the stairway up and out.

I found myself standing in an abandoned transit terminal. Papers and trash seemed to have taken up residence in the absence of people. The ceiling extended for about twenty or thirty metra, the walls were encircled by walkways, and the roof was held up by six big white columns, the bases scratched and etched by hundreds of years worth of graffiti. A draft blew, and even the hologrammes and neon signs were dead and grey.

This place had seen better days, I knew. A faded corporate logo, gold paint peeling away, lay in a pile of rubble on the floor. In its heyday, maybe when the big transit corps still existed, this terminal could have been a busy, lively place, like the Rotovilla Market Squares were, away in Downtown, but judging from the boarded, darkened signs and broken windows of abandoned shops, huddling together, the place had been long abandoned and more than forgotten. It had been eaten by the city.

I looked back at the few scraps of info I found in the jacket.

No clue where to go from here. This might have been the place where she started, but it was more than likely that it was some sort of rendezvous, or maybe just a transfer point for her. At any rate it couldn't hurt to look around.

Now Memory Jane was one of those hacker types, dealers in information. They tended to have their own kitschy little subcultures, and regular hangouts. I knew that it was probably unlikely that anyone would know her around here. I looked at the numbers again.

52. Well I was on Block 52, but what did those other numbers mean? 23:12 probably meant the meeting time for something - or someone. I had no clue as to what the first block of numbers meant, though. Probably some sort of address or maybe an apartment cubicle.

Immediately I began looking for a local area map of the Block on the columns. Bulletin boards, rusted scraps of old staples, iron-stained leaflets, faded and decrepit, loose sheaves of papers, memos and posters, but no maps. The information signs were about the terminals, transit information, railbus schedules and things. Nothing about the Block.

It wasn't too surprising that there wasn't any info. The last time anyone ever made a map of the city was back thousands of years when Rotovilla was small enough, simple enough to be mapped accurately. But times changed, populations increased, and things were built up. Like a drunken anthill, the city piled expansions, the buildings grew taller, and pretty soon only an insane person would try to map it - even a single Block was too complicated.

I took the exit and went out into the night.

I was still in Rotovilla, but it was a whole different city. Even the looming, black skyscrapers and their blinking lights and rolling neon signs seemed strange and unfamiliar. At least it wasn't raining.

I stuffed the whole 'lost tourist' attitude and winged it - I asked around. Fortunately one thing was familiar to me - the crowd's attitude. If there was anything that stayed the same in Rotovilla, it was the crowd. No matter where you went, you ran into the same old deal. Most people turned me down or turned away, but I still managed to get a few snatches as to nearby hacker hangouts. Turns out that a popular one down on the bottom of the city was called the "Crystalline Pink", but I must've gotten at least fifty different names and locations. By the sound of its name I could tell that it was some sort of combination bar and brothel, so naturally I assumed that it'd be the perfect place to dig up dirt on someone.

Seemed to me that this place was an information broker's heaven, their own little Mecca, right here in Rotovilla. It was the biz that attracted them, mothlike, to this place, and the c-space lounges alone made it seem like just the spot for any dealer in data.

The Crystalline Pink was an ugly little number squatting under a pink neon sign in an alley that had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed in the morning. I bribed the robot bouncer and went down the stairs, through the grubby little door.

Walking into the hangout was like waking up after a night of hard liquor to a sledgehammer swung by a piledriver operator. The air was so stuffy I felt I'd be flattened by the pure smell of it if I hadn't been sober. Plus it was an eyeball-burning shade of electric pink.

Man, can you get any closer to stating the obvious with that name? I thought as I ambled over past loveseats and tables.

Contrary to my expectations, the Crystalline Pink seemed to lack strippers and prostitutes, but more than made up for it in strangeness. The tables were circular. Instead of an ashtray in the middle, or some sort of cheesy candle, there were round things with cable jacks in them. Comatose looking people vegetated four to a table, decked out with IV drips and with neurotrodes connected to their temples. Some soft, jazzy kind of techno was playing quietly in the background, and the dominant sound was a white noise chuckle of information being sent through the busses on the tables. My footsteps were muted on a stained pink shag carpet.

Definitely a hacker hangout. Now my trouble was to find someone who wasn't out of it, and I found that person quickly. He was a skinny kid no older than seventeen with the air of a bartender around him, and walked from table to table checking the IV drips and round things, occasionally making an adjustment with the machines, or injecting chemicals into the plastic bags.

"Hey," I said.

"Whatchou want?" sneered the boy.

"I'm lookin' for somebody."

"Yeah? Who?"

"You ever hear about a girl going by the name of Memory Jane?"

He seemed to freeze over, go all glacial, his expression growing cold, and a funny light going out in his bloodshot eyes.

"Why you askin' 'bout MemJay? Who the fuck are you, man?"

"Just a friend."

"Oh really?" he smiled, tossing an oil stained rag onto the table. "You a friend of MemJay's?"

"Yeah."

The kid gave a Tommy gun burst of laughter, like bullets of noise were coming out of his mouth at six hundred rounds a minute. He wiped a greasy tear from an eye and paused to pull out a small info-glass crystal from the plug at the base of his skull. The kid replaced it with another from his vest pocket, popping the crystal into a small cigarette case, and stood for a moment, eyes dilated, staring into space. Then he turned and his expression was cool and relaxed. His hands hung at his belt, loose. He chuckled.

"MemJay never had any friends. Who are you really? Some kind of snoop?"

I knew this kid meant business. He struck me as the type who liked playing Russian roulette, except with five bullets in the gun instead of one. I hoped that the bet wasn't on my head.

"You might say," I said, lighting up a cigarette, "That I'm a man who likes to ask questions."

"Questions can get you into deep shit, man."

"They can get you out of it, too."

We stared at each other for a while, neither of us willing to draw and blow the other's brains out all over the floor.

"What's up?" asked the kid, fingering his vest. "What you want with MemJay?"

"I've been paid a large sum to figure out where she's gone. I don't wanna hurt her or anything."

"Bullshit, man. Bullshit. You just another bounty hunter, aren't you?"

"Would a bounty hunter bother risking his ass in places like this? You sound like you got a close relationship with this girl. Now she had a date sometime last Sunday that she's about five days late for. You know anything about that? I'd suggest you do the right thing and help find your friend."

"Didn't I say that MemJay didn't have any friends?"

"Oh yeah? The way you talk about her makes it seem you knew her in more ways than in passing."

"Look, man, I got a job to do. These nervejobs," he said with a spit, "can't take care of themselves while they're whacking off in cyberspace. So just piss off and don't come back, okay?"

I stood there a while, feeling stupid, while the kid moved from table to table again. I noticed something funny in the corner of the room, though. There was an entire table, empty.

"What's with the empty table?"

"MemJay used to sit there. She and the Boss had an arrangement. That's MemJay's corner, and we leave it like that, in case she ever came back."

"She used these jacks?"

"Yep."

"Mind if I take a look?"

"Go ahead. You won't find anything."

I looked at the bus and its neurotrode jacks. Only one. Something caught my attention. I turned the round disk over and checked out the serial number under it, compared it to the numbers on the slip of printout.

"Hey kid. MemJay make some printouts lately?"

"I dunno. Go see for yourself."

He gestured vaguely at the room behind the bead curtain with a sign saying "Printers" taped over it.

I entered, and found the place to be messier than a rat's nest after a paper airplane convention. Printout sheets and mimeoplastic papes were lying everywhere around the room, and it was filled with the chattering of a hundred separate printers, dyed blue with the light from the buzzing fluorescent on the ceiling. I knew that I wasn't gonna find anything here, rifling through the mess like this.

I tried anyway. I found the printer that I was looking for - I could tell because its pile of sheets was a lot smaller than any of the others - and sorted through the files.

All sorts of strange things regarding memory, brain implants, information. All of them were printed within seconds of each other. The last one seemed to have been ripped off as it was printing. I could tell that she had been in a hurry, but for what? I gathered the printouts up and stuffed the papers into the inside of my trenchcoat and scrammed.

It was a cold night, and breezy. Actually I wasn't sure if it was day or night, as the shadows from the buildings made it impossible to tell, unless you were rich and corporate, or well-to-do and employed, living up Topside in the arcologies. I walked aimlessly on the street, my eyes cast down to the ground, a stupid thing to do because if you're not watching you might get sticked badly, or worse. But I didn't care at the moment. I had too many questions.

For example, why was everyone so scared about talking about Memory Jane? From what I could gather she had left in a hurry with a lot of info about memory plugs and data couriering and whatnot. She was scared, and her friends - despite what they told me about her, they seemed friendly enough to protect her from just one lousy snoop - were jittery about something too.

Could it have been about the data she was carrying? Sometimes when you try to cram a data courier in too much too fast their systems tend to go all wacko and neural atrophy sets in. Depending on the size and type of data they're carrying, the rate of neural damage was either fast or slow, but by the looks of it, old Memory Jane seemed to be in quite a hurry, which meant that either the data in her head was too high volume for her little brain to carry, or, secondly, that it was too volatile. She was probably looking for a way to remove the blocks - searching for a mnemonic password to break the code and dump the data. Given the situation I assumed the latter.

I looped around back to the Crystalline Pink.

When I reached the alley I saw a couple of strange guys, suits probably, judging by the way they dressed - in long dark trenchcoats and wide brimmed hats. If looks could kill, I'd be dead by now; I knew that they were up to no good. They were standing outside the door at the back of the alley, under the neon sign. There was a big tall guy and a shorter guy. Big Bill was silent, and the little skinny guy did all the talking, but I couldn't hear so well. I threw myself against the wall of the alley and peeked around the corner.

The kid came to the door first and he seemed nervous - really nervous. His tough cynic rap was flat on the floor, and he looked like he was trying to be nauseatingly obsequious. The two guys went down the stairs and into the door.

"Looks like Trouble and his little Brother are around for a visit," I muttered, readying the needle gun.

"Ya think?" came a grunt from behind me. I whirled around and saw myself confronted by an eight foot tall, six hundred kilo trained gorilla with brass knuckles. He patted his knuckles - the words Bruno were tattooed on them - and smiled. "You ain't goin' nowhere, flatfoot."

When woke up I found myself sleeping on a mattress of potato shavings with a bag full of wax Chinese food cartons for a pillow, and judging by the shape I was in he'd been practicing his accordion skills with my spine. My stuff was still pretty much intact - I even had my gun - and none of my clues were gone. I groaned and rubbed my stomach and found a hastily scrawled note on it.

It read: "No more snooping, flatfoot, or else."

I crumpled the paper and tossed it aside. Then I realized there was something crumpled and hard inside my pants pocket.

I pulled it out. It was a mimeoplastic card treated with invision fibres. I'd finagled it from the hired goon's pocket when he was roughing me up. The card had a special invisibility imprint - the letters would be clear unless a certain voltage was run through it. Get the wrong current and it'd vape and be useless. Luckily I had been snooping for quite a while and knew how it was done. I took out my pocket analyzer and had the computer run through an analysis of the fiberplastic. These things were rare and expensive. I would've never had the money to buy one if my dad hadn't scrounged it up out of spare parts. It found the voltage and I keyed in the voltage. The words shone clear and true in fibres of jet black.

"The gig is up. Rendvee today at 13:20, 52, 827.113. We need to talk."

I had a lead. Something was going down, and by the looks of it, was going down somewhere at this Block, most likely several levels up. I checked the chrono on my wrist - it was about 12:00. I only had an hour and twenty minutes, and I knew I had to make it fast or lose my chance at getting Memory Jane. But before I could I'd have to pay the Crystalline Pink one last visit.

I pulled myself out of the dumpster, gun at ready, and began walking down the alley again.

Splitstar

wow exelent. i can wait to see what happens when he goes back to the hackers club. and later at teh meeting place.

Nice sig too.

gj exelent work, as i wouldent expect less from you.

AcolyteOfDeath

Oh yeah. I better explain that signature... my handle is "Guest" at another forum, where I made the banner.

Heh. ;D

AcolyteOfDeath

5.

The place was a mess. Most of the nervejobs who weren't comatose were dead - it was hard to tell the difference if you couldn't see the bullet holes - and there were holes and marks on the walls. Someone made wet, dying sounds in the corner, and I pushed past broken tables and sparking electronics to find the kid curled up in a corner, bleeding from his mouth and nose, leaking a little pool of blood on the floor. I put the gun into its holster and approached him. He regarded me with frightened eyes, animal eyes, like those of a caged thing.

"Relax, kid. I'm not here to hurt you."

He gasped and sighed, a red bubble escaping from his lips. I checked his pulse. Weak, erratic, but still alive, at least.

"Who did this to you? Why were those men here? C'mon tell me, kid."

"Det-det-detCorps. S-s-said we didn't k-keep quiet en-en-enough."

"Did they give you any names?"

"N-n-no. No."

I could feel his hand growing cold against mine.

"Y'know kid, these men are after MemJay. I'm not. I'm on your side, kid. Did she tell you anything before she left?"

The kid struggled, choking a gasp, and pink froth came out of his mouth.

"C'mon, kid, breath. Breathe! Don't die yet!"

His voice came out as a strangled gasp.

"Buh-buh-Boss. Knows it. Th-th-they t-t-took him."

"Where, kid, where?!"

"S-s-s-something 'bout… room one … thirteen."

"What does he know? Where'd MemJay go? What was she carrying?"

Suddenly the kid's eyes flew open, and he spoke with a calm, clear voice.

"Sheeze," he whispered, "I dunno. Don't ask me. I just work here."

He died on the floor, staring at a blinking light bulb on the ceiling.

The pieces were beginning to drop together faster than garbage fell from the sky. I assumed that the meeting place on the mimeocard was where they had the Boss, and looked at the time. It was getting short, so I split.

The place where the gig was going down was a decaying apartment block, a ramshackle structure precariously perched upon the abandoned exoskeleton of what had once been some sort of corporate office - I could tell on the way up that it was a former corporate building because the windows that weren't boarded up revealed what had once been a hive of sweatshops.

I entered the apartments from a rickety side entrance that seemed ready to fall off of its rusty hinges. Miraculously it slid open and closed without a sound. The corridor seemed to epitomize ramshackle scrap architecture. It seemed to have been painted green at one time or another, but it was hard to tell, with the drywall exposed from the peeling flecks of paint and sickly wallpaper. A transcendentalist in black lace and fishnet, her eyes smudged with black paintstick, sneered at me as I passed by her and slipped away down an adjacent corridor. It was narrow, and dust seemed to cling to the place as if the floor was statically charged.

The place seemed to be either leaning to the side in some places or built at an awkward angle in some others, almost as if it was some sort of demented washed-out funhouse whose foundations had weakened and was now leaning against the neighbouring building the way a drunk leans against the guy helping him walk.

I found myself at the door, staring the holes where the brass numbers used to be nailed. I could hear voices on the other side - crass and angry sounding ones, and I think I recognized one. Inside there was some low muttering periodically pierced by an angry scream and the wet sound of flesh on pulpy flesh.

I couldn't quite make out what was said, though. Rickety as it was, the door seemed abnormally good at absorbing sound. I took out the needle gun and felt it hum in my hands. I checked the doorknob, and found it to be locked. Luckily there was a keyhole. I put my eye to it and looked inside.

There was a man sitting bound to a chair in the room. It was lit by a single feeble orange light bulb dangling from a loose wire from the ceiling. Three men confronted him - the big man who beat me up with the brass knuckles was looming over the man, doing the hard work, with Big Bill Trenchcoat holding the prisoner's chair steady, and Little Bill Trenchcoat asking the questions.

I assumed that the guy they were roughing up was the Boss that the kid told me about.

From the looks of it they were experienced in the subtle art of buttwhoop for the purposes of information and they were taking this job real quiet-like. Probably didn't want any curious neighbours snooping by, but the silencer cube was taking it a little too far. People didn't hang on the door or make worried calls. They'd either shout for them to shut the hell up, ignore the row, or do something about it, and I was more than sure that having a bullet placed through your head tended to mess up a good interrogation. It might have been that they were afraid of some vital info being given that they didn't want any others to know about except themselves.

I heard someone come up the stairs and down the hallway, so I made like an atom and split, turning the corner at the end of the hall.

When I heard the footsteps stop and a knock come at the door, I turned and peeked around the corner.

My heart did a few jumping jacks as I saw who it was. I could have recognized that conservative get-up and ornate black hat, placed at a rakish angle, anywhere. It was Sayonara. I whipped around the corner again to catch my breath as she disappeared into the room. Old Granma Fungo had said, "Beware the woman in blue". Well maybe all that fortune-telling mumbo-jumbo wasn't so crazy.

I'd assumed that those guys had been detcorp agents hired up by MetaFact. What was Sayonara doing with them? There were two possibilities: either Sayonara or the guys weren't actually with the biotech companies, or the biotech companies weren't actually fighting. Just my luck, this was no open and shut case. Every lead I took seemed to only explode with more questions.

A loud thump made me prick my ears up, stirring me out of my quiet mutterings, and I checked around the corner again.

Sayonara walked out first, snapping black gloves back onto her delicate white hands. I thought I saw blood under her nails, but it might've just been a trick of the light. She was followed by Big Bill Trenchcoat and his little sidekick. Finally came the brute with the fists dragging a limp, lumpy thing in a big black bag.

"Dump this somewhere where he won't be noticed," said Sayonara, her voice like a bullwhip in the air.

"But Sayo," protested Little Bill Trenchcoat, "wouldn't it be easier just to drop 'im?"

"No buts!" Whip-CRACK! Ouch. "I don't want anything getting leaked here."

Too late for that, I thought.

Sayonara left the way she came, down the corridor. They took the body out of the apartment block through a side exit leading into an alley. Big Bill Trenchcoat and old Brass Knuckles threw the bag into the dumpster and closed it. I hid behind a garbage can in the shadows, and could hear them whispering.

"You sure this is safe?" came Brass Knuckles' deep voice.

"Yep."

"But what if someone comes by and checks it?"

"Nope."

"Why?"

"Nobody takes out the trash."

Big Bill Trenchcoat seemed like the big, strong, silent type to me. It was the first time I'd heard his voice, but he didn't say anything anymore, at least, nothing that I could hear.

When the goons left I walked over to the dumpster and saw the bag lying with a bunch of other filth and crap, half buried by other black bags of trash. I tore open the plastic and saw the Boss's face. It was like someone took a sledgehammer to it and decided to dip it in sulphuric acid for good measure. I felt his pulse - he was still alive, but barely. Blood was everywhere, leaking from his nose, his mouth, his eyes - everywhere. I jostled him a bit and he came awake, groaning.

"Now look, man, I'm not gonna hurt ya, I just need some information. Okay? Don't die on me now, don't die. You gotta stay alive so we can help your friend Memory Jane, alright? You got that?"

The Boss groaned again.

"Okay, did she tell you where she was going? Before she left?"

He closed his eyes and laid back, groaning.

"No, hey! Don't go back to sleep now. You do you'll wake up dead. C'mon, man, stay alive… Now tell me, please."

I leaned in close, his lips were moving, and the voice that escaped was a gurgling whisper.

"Did she tell you where she was going?"

"Away."

"Okay. She took the railbus, right? What train? What line?"

"Don't remember," he said with a whimper.

"Alright. Okay, tell me where she used to live. What was her apartment number? Do you know that one?"

"Eight…. eight… eight… Seven Two Five Nine Zero One."

I rushed to scribble it down on a small notepad that I carried around with me.

"Okay, okay, that's fine. Now all you need to do is-"

His eyes rolled upwards into their sockets and I could hear his shallow breathing stop.

"Hey! Don't die on me, man, I need that info! Oh, c'mon man!"

Nothing. He was deader than a cadaver in a meat grinder, and then some. I pushed the corpse away and shut the lid of the dumpster and began walking out of the alley again.

This was a dead end lead. Back to Square One, I guessed.

"Shit."

Splitstar

alot more death in this chapter. lol

keep it up. i cant wait.

AcolyteOfDeath

6.

I looked at my clues again as I wandered around on the streets, passing by shops lit by electric neon lights, moving through the haze of steam and smoke from food vendors' cooking. Around me the crowd swarmed with people, with strange, unfamiliar, alien faces, wearing more kinds of clothing than you'd see at a fashion exhibition. So far I'd turned up mostly dead end clues and bad evidence, but everything seemed to point to the fact that this might be more than just a dirty little war between the corps. Why would MetaFact and VatGen want to look like they were working against each other? And why all the secrecy? Was someone going around (maybe the detcorps?), trying to keep people quiet? It'd be unnecessary unless… of course!

There had to be a third party. MetaFact and VatGen probably didn't like each other that much, in fact, they probably hated each others' guts, but the information in MemJay's head seemed to be so valuable or dangerous that there would be no way in heaven or hell that they'd let it get into other peoples' hands.

I looked back at the number I'd scribbled and looped back towards the apartment block.

There might be clues there, maybe something that'd give me a solid lead on Memory Jane's whereabouts. I didn't know what I might find, but it would be something, at least.

During the way, I riffed through the things I'd gathered from her jacket. The printout was pretty much useless for now, I was no hacker so I couldn't really understand what was going on. Looked like she was downloading and cross-referencing something, but without the help of a hacker or anything I would be pretty much on my own as far as it was concerned. I took out the fake nail and examined it. What might it have to do with anything?

Maybe nothing at all. It probably wasn't prudent to overlook anything, but it was just a fake nail. It couldn't tell me where she was going… but it might tell me where she had been. If this was hers it'd have something of a record as to where she had gone and what she had touched. All I had to do was get someone to analyze the various crud under the nail. I pocketed the thing, saving it for later.

And then there was the handwritten note. It was an apartment, I knew this now, but who had she met and why? Since they were in the same block I decided to pay whoever it was a visit on the way to MemJay's.

MemJay's apartment floor was in a little better shape than the one where Sayonara & Co. tortured the Boss, but not much. Instead of flickering fluorescents dyeing the corridor a filthy, school cafeteria floor tile shade of green, we had urine yellow incandescents glowing paley off of peeling white plaster and tacky wallpaper inexpertly glued helter-skelter like some cockamamie worn-down version of a bulletin board. The floor was made out of some waxy plastic material treated to look like old-fashioned wood in a vain attempt to be stylish. There wasn't any wood anymore - you only saw the stuff in old reels and e-books - except if you were super-rich, and this wasn't any fancy-shmancy Topside hotel.

I checked out the door and tried the handle. It was locked, of course. Memory Jane probably wasn't going to be coming back anytime soon, so I aimed at the knob and fired the needle gun. Wood splintered and metal sparked, with needle bullets glancing off it at supersonic speed. Smoke filled the hall, but the door swung wide open.

I took a step inside.

It was a pig sty in there. Clothes and electronics were strewn everywhere, along with empty soda cans, books, women's porn zines and loads of huge printouts. I flicked on the light and started poking around.

What I found was really weird. All around, the printouts and files and books turned out to be all about memories, mnemonic techniques, cryogenics, cybernetics, and all sorts of that kind of medical stuff. Then I hit the jackpot - Memory Jane's diary. It was a real surprise, actually, because nobody really kept diaries anymore - not that I knew of - much less physically written ones. I guess it was some sort of weird retro quirk she had - lots of people had funny eccentricities like that.
At any rate, the diary had some real leads. I sat down on the bed, puffing on a cigarette, to read. It was written in a difficult script, full of curls and funny lines that ran into each other like passengers at rush hour trying to cram onto a subway. I tried reading it anyway. It turned out that the thing read like a drunken novelist's idea of a suspense story - it kept getting worse and more incoherent at the same time. She was getting more and more desperate as time went on.

It was weird, though. As I read backwards from the last entry - a couple days before she disappeared - I found that certain pages were missing or unreadable. The marks didn't look intentional. It was almost like someone had already been through this apartment, which would explain the mess. But if these guys wanted to get rid of evidence, why leave the diary around? It wouldn't make sense just to leave a whole book if you wanted to just eliminate traces that could help any potential passers by - unless… unless you wanted the info for yourself!

Then, towards the beginning, something caught my eye.

Dear Diary,

It's been three days since VatGen put this information in my head. Something about it gets me. My head's been feeling skootchy ever since I got it in here. Today I woke up with nightmares in my eyes, something about biology - something very very VERY bad. I think the info is leaking - I think they might have stuffed too many bytes into my brain and it's corrupting, coming out into my active memory. So far their 'transport' hasn't arrived yet, and I'm getting pretty damn nervous about this thing in my head. I don't even know where I'm going. I don't know what I'm gonna do - I think I'm dying. I'm gonna go see Greez tonight at 23:12, hope he can make something out - something which can help me.

Jane

I looked back at the scrawled paper inside my trenchcoat. Of course! I closed the diary and stuffed it into my pocket with all my other stuff.

It was time to pay this Greez guy a visit.

He was a creepy little man with one cybernetic eye and a wild halo of white hair around his bald head, kind of like a male version of Granma Fungo. He wore a big fishbowl lens over the human eye, magnifying it grotesquely. A raggedy moustache perched on his lips, below a hooked, beaklike nose.

"What do you want?" he had said to me when I knocked on his door.

"Hey. I'm lookin' for a person, and I've got a few questions."

"T'ain't no people been here," he grated, and began to shut it. I stuck my foot in the crack and held it open, sticking my pistol through the jamb.

"Her name's Memory Jane. Perhaps you'd know her?"

Greez began to get a little edgy, his eyes staring down the nozzle of my needle gun. If his expression were on top of a building it'd have fallen six hundred metra down to splatter on the sidewalk. He stared at me with his fishbowl eye, keeping the other trained on the gun.

"I - I don't know anybody named Memory Jane…" he said in a ragged whisper.

"Oh really?" I asked, smirking. I thrust the diary entry into his face, book-marked with the photos. "This help jog your memory? Seems to me that Memory Jane knew you pretty well."

He gave a sigh and opened the door. I entered. The room smelt musty, like a pie made of old wet socks seasoned with a sharp flavouring of mildew. The old man sat down on a tiny bed with a sagging mattress, rusty iron springs groaning. It was dark in the room, the only light coming from a bank of neon signs glowing in acid green and pink outside.

"What do you want to know? Who are you? Some bounty hunter? Did they send you again for me?" the old man asked in a quiet voice that plainly said "I give up."

"I'm just a man with a few questions, that's all," I said, putting the gun away. There wasn't anything to fear from this harmless old shell. He popped a pill and gulped it down with a tall glass of water on the nightstand.

"About Memory Jane?"

"Yeah. And some other stuff."

I looked around. The old man's apartment was in a state of ruin. It wasn't messy or anything, it just seemed that everything inside was a shade of brown and yellow, in a state of decay. Yellowed papers and dust-covered photos sat on rusting old tables and chairs. The air was so full of dust motes it was a wonder old Greez didn't choke to death.

"When did you last see MemJay?"

"Few days ago. Maybe a week or more. Last Wednesday, I think."

"What'd she tell you?"

"She told me that she had some info in her head, and she was worried. She wanted me to do a brain-scan and see what was up."

"What'd you find?"

"Bad stuff. They overloaded her. Mnemonic circuits started falling out everywhere. It was horrible. I knew she had to get it out before some real neural damage started setting in, but when I asked her, she said that she didn't know where they wanted her to go, just that they hadn't come yet. Memory Jane was always a calm girl, as I remember it, and it must have really been something to make her nervous like that".

"Ah." Nothing that I didn't already know. "Did she mention any plans? Any place she was going to go?"

"Well, when we last talked she was rambling on about 'Getting it out of my head'. I got the feeling that she wanted the information out of her head at any cost."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I think she may be looking for a way to get the information out of her brain - or at least stop the spread of neural decay - other than by getting the password and disabling the locks."

"How?"

"The cybernetics in her brain just help the process of uploading and securing the data. They also help increase memory capacity, but the bulk of information storage is done by the brain's neural network. That's why brain damage occurs if you overload it - the cybernetics tries to compensate and ends up corrupting the brain. Neural activity - and the rate of decay - decreases if you cool the brain's functions down. Then there might be enough time to find the key and get the data out."

"So you think that MemJay put herself in cryostasis and hired someone to break the code?"

"I do."

"Alright, thanks for your help Greez," I made moves to split.

"Wait!" he cried, and I turned, staring at him from the door. Sitting hunched like a little grey gnome on that bed, he looked even more pitiful than when I first saw him. "You'll find her, won't you?"

"Yeah."

"Please do. I have a feeling… that you are a good person. Find her and bring her back safely, would you? Jane… is like a daughter to me. I would be crushed to lose her."

I extinguished the cigarette.

"Yeah. Sure, pops."

Splitstar

You know i always wanted to be frozen in cryostasis...

Anyway excellent part in the story. Offers a little twist. Cant wait for the next part.

And where are the rest of your fans. I would think everyone in the officers loung would read this. Maybe they are just shy.

But carry on the good work. hopefully you will finish this before school impedes your work.

gj

AcolyteOfDeath

7.

After I left the old man's apartment I made my way back to my home Block by railbus after I went over Memory Jane's a second time. I didn't find anything, as I expected, except a lot of junk and a lot of musty old books. When I looked over the electronic crap I found some interesting stuff, however. In a foamboard box I found a collection of optic plastic tapes - hundreds of them. It was marked "video diary" in bold black ink, and each of the little tapes were precisely labeled and categorized according to date and entry.

Memory Jane was turning out to be a lot more interesting than I first made her out to be. She seemed to be obsessed with recording every crazy little monologue running through her brain. I had no time to look through all of the tapes, so I pocketed a couple from the last two weeks that I thought might be useful.

In another box I found package after package of audio cubes - hundreds and hundreds of filament glass cubes. She must have been obsessed with recording everything, almost as if she had trouble with her long term memories. I listened to a few and that convinced me to look back for the earliest cubes she made. Maybe that'd give me some clues, not really as to where she went or what she wanted, but just what kind of person she was. From there I might make some reasonable assumptions as to what she'd do.

I found it after a few minutes of searching. It was lucky that MemJay was such a compulsive neat freak - and judging by the way she had almost obsessively labeled and organised everything I knew for sure that someone had run through her apartment, looking for something, and probably in a hurry, too.

It's been two weeks since I got my implants. I had better get good value from this - I wonder if it was worth throwing away all my childhood memories for this. Lately I've been having some trouble remembering certain things, forgetting stuff - little stuff like where I put the keys and things. The black surgeons down at the cybershops all say that it's not possible for their wetware to do this, but I'm not so sure…

And later:

The forgetfulness has been getting worse. I've started keeping a diary and a video monologue just to remember what I've been doing. I'm probably going to carry an audio cube around with me, too, so I'll make sure I won't forget anything. By now I'm sure that it's the implants, but I can't help it. I still need that money.

Definitely bad. She had been in a damn bad fix, and I'm pretty sure that having thirty exes stuffed into her head didn't help it one bit. I blew the place and headed home.

When I got home I found that someone had stuck a death threat on my door, with an eviction notice right under it. A welcome home present, courtesy of Crazy Old Akhmed himself. I ripped them off and went inside, barricading the door with a series of locks that would make a conspiracy theorist feel claustrophobic.

I logged on to the computer and ran a search of all the cryohospitals in the Western Region. Fortunately there were few enough of them to make it an easy search - just fifty instead of the hundreds that I was expecting. I had no luck trying to find a list of recent patient check-ins, though. For that I'd have to hack their database, and I wasn't even sure of their databases were even connected to the inter-network. Soon my search turned up a list of the cheapest hospitals around, the ones I assumed that a mnemonic courier with no money at the end of her rope would drop into.

Then I booked a railbus ticket to the Western Region, third class, though it didn't really matter what class you rode in - the railbus was generally empty, old and dirty enough to make it all the same no matter what class you rode in. It made no difference, except in how much you paid, which was why everyone rode third class - those who actually rode the railbus, at any rate.

It had been the longest trip I'd taken in my life. People these days really didn't go far past their own neighbourhoods, their home Blocks at most. I sat on that musty old car for at least two hours while the city whizzed past the windows.

The railbus almost had a hypnotic effect, with its gentle shaking and rocking. Electric neon swirled in the dark windows, the night passing by in a blur of darkness and light. Catwalks and wires snaked lazily across the abyss, and I wondered briefly how the railbus had managed to avoid hitting them. It was almost as if the city had grown up around the track, keeping it in a tunnel of neon light and shadow.

We passed over a wide, flat region dominated by a forest of black smokestacks and blooming chemical burnoffs lit the place with an eerie orange glow. I looked up to see if I could catch a glance of Topside and the sky above, but the buildings seemed to have grown around the burning oil wells and industrial complexes, closing it off like a metal cave. I took a puff from a cigarette and a shot of whisky.

The railbus station in the Western Region was huddled in one of their famous black market squares, next to a greasy little Chinese food outlet and a massage parlour. A bum slept in the doorway, and every blast of wind brought with it a storm of wrappers and discarded papers. I lit another cigarette and stepped outside, my hands in my pockets. It was raining again, in the Western Region.

The thing about this place was that it seemed poorer than the rest of the city. There was trash everywhere, like all of it decided to migrate to this section of Rotovilla, and more city had sprung up, with scavengers building their homes of trash around piles of rubbish. You couldn't see the bottom of the city through all the piles of garbage, so everyone had to walk on the aerial sidewalks and bridges. Down at the bottom I saw something move, and I could have sworn that it was some sort of human being, only stunted and moving with a crawling gait, like an animal.

"What was that?" I said, unconsciously.

"Rat-kids. Scavengers," came a voice from the crowd. I whirled around and saw a man in a dark cloak and a cowboy hat. He wore a moustache, and at his belt were two things that I could have sworn were some kind of crazy samurai sword.

"Who are you?" I asked as he walked over to the railing and stared down at the stinking garbage and puddles of raw sewage below.

"You gotta be careful around them rat kids. They're human beings, y'know, and that what makes 'em so dangerous. They can think, and they've got instincts like animals. You get a pack of 'em on your tail down there and you wake up next morning with your arms and legs scattered all over the place. I've seen 'em keep people alive just to slowly eat them so the meat won't rot. Scavenger-hunters."

The man seemed to grin, though his lips didn't move, and he stared at me with those piercing steel grey eyes.

"Scavengers like them like to prey off of people. They latch on to the trail and don't get off until they've tracked that down and taken it."

"Yeah?"

"Yep."

"I get who you are…" I said, backing up, "You're a bounty hunter. Did they send you after me?"

"I'm only a man doing what he has to."

He drew the blades. They were long, sharp, and they made a ringing sound just like in the movies. He twirled them expertly in his hands and attacked. I dodged to the side, the blade singing past my ear, and pushed a pedestrian into his way while I drew the needle gun. I ran, the crowd scattering around me, parting as the maniac in the cowboy hat made a beeline for me down the catwalk. I let off a pair of shots when he was about ten metra away, the scream of lead needles soaring in my ears. I swear that everyone within a kaymetra could hear my jaw dropping to the ground when he deftly whirled his swords, bits of shrapnel falling harmlessly to his sides.

"Disruption field," he grated. "Slows the bullets."

"No shit."

I ran down the corner, pushing people on the sidewalk out of my way as the bounty hunter leapt forward, keeping up pace with me. He jumped up onto a pile of crates, upsetting them, grabbed a nearby wire with one hand, severing it with the other, and swung across the sea of faces, closing the gap between us. I shot off several more blasts with the needle gun, the barrel shrieking, and held my fedora, my chest heaving.

What is this guy? I wondered, Some kind of fuckin' ninja?!

I swerved the corner into an alley and ducked into a club.

Pounding music and writhing bodies hit me harder than the smell of beer and sweat, and the air was a red haze of smoke and flashing lights. I had almost made my way through to a back entrance behind the stage when I saw the bounty hunter's black cowboy hat appear in the doorway. I scrammed and found myself running through a narrow corridor filled with moving women in glittery costumes. I pushed past them and down an adjacent corridor, half falling down a flight of stairs and turned a blind corner.

There was an animal smell in this place and I stared up at the stairs, the needle gun whining, half expecting to see the bounty hunter come leaping down them, his black cloak billowing out behind him like a bat wing.

My heart was pounding, the adrenaline searing through my blood vessels, and I took ragged, heavy breaths.

I looked around and in cages I saw slim, naked, blonde toygirls sitting or lying, doubled up on mattresses of cheap newsprint. A few sucked water from bottles or engaged in a sort of idle, repetitive oral sex, but most were either sleeping or just staring stupidly at the wall. They seemed underfed, and I wondered what kind of a sicko would keep his toygirls looking this unhealthy. He'd never make a profit that way.

I wrinkled up my nose and snorted. It looked like the bounty hunter had stopped chasing me, for now.

"So it's fifty creds an hour or fifty creds per girl?"

"Fifty creds per hour, unless you kill one, then it'll be triple the price and two hundred more."

"Damn, Lenny, what kind of biz you runnin' here? Damn expensive."

"Hey, man, I gotta get money somehow."

The voices came from behind a door at the side of the room. I covered my mouth and nose and huddled in the corner next to some empty cages, in the shadows.

Two men entered, one short and skinny, the other not all that different except he was taller, fatter and stupider looking. The little one flipped on a light and on the other wall a pale fluorescent flickered and buzzed, gasping to life. It cast a dim glow, and I balled up behind the pile of cages. Luckily, they turned as the big guy inspected the girls in the cage.

Animal eyes staring at animal eyes, but which one was really behind the cage? I couldn't tell.

"They're skinny."

"What you don't like skinny girls? I can get you a couple fat ones, but that'll cost you extra."

"Nah, skinny is fine," Fat Perv said, fingering a nipple through the cage. "Think I'll go with this one…"

He rubbed a stubbly chin, "And this one."

They passed out the money. C'mon, c'mon, finish up already. I thought to myself. The smell was overpowering. Sweat, blood, and piss all inextricably mixed up with the rotten pungency of mildew. Breathing through my mouth with the lapel of my trenchcoat over my face, I could still smell it, and it stank like Hell.

Little Perv unlocked the cage and led two frightened-looking toygirls out, followed by Fat Perv. They went into another door and a few minutes later out came Little Perv. Almost immediately after he left I could hear heavy breathing and the rhythmic sound of a whip crack followed by a shriek of pain, then another crack and shriek. Crack and shriek, crack and shriek. Little Perv lit a joint and added the smell of bad weed to the already foul medley of human and inhuman smells in the cage room. I heard a zip and made the unfortunate mistake of looking again. He was jerking off to the sounds.

I took out the needle gun and turned on the silencer. Within seconds Little Perv was lying face down on the floor, a pool of brains and blood spreading from his head where the needle bullets had ripped finely through his skull and out the eyes. I took his wallet and went outside.

Then, motivated by an urge that I didn't understand at the time, and still don't, I went back, threw open the door and saw one of the most revolting scenes I could imagine, and I could imagine some pretty grotesque stuff. I needn't describe to you what happened thereafter, but needless to say, I chalked up another homicide and two cases of theft.

So much for the Western Region. Hardly two hours after I got there I had been chased by a psycho samurai with a pair of katanas and some sort of magnetic shield that I'd never even heard of, executed a pair of perverts and stole their money, and released a pair of worn-down skinny toygirls into the wild. And I still didn't know which cryohospital she went to.

I looked back at my list and started asking around. Turns out that most of the cryohospitals that were cheap enough to be in Memory Jane's range were either abandoned or leased to a new owner, so there were only three left, all of which were in relatively close range to where I had left the pervert club. I shrugged and went by the first of them.

Time to see the doctor.

Splitstar

"I'm only a man doing what he has to."
:sam:

lol i see you finally added ninjas to the story to spice it up lol

gj

im glad this story has more then 4 parts. Because im realy enjoying it. lol

AcolyteOfDeath

8.

The cryohospital was little more than a refitted black surgeon's open-air body shop. It still had the dentist-chair style operating seats, and a couple of cyborgs were strapped to them, being vivisected by a psychotic-looking apprentice surgeon.

"Hey, you!" I called.

"Yeah, what? I'm busy!"

"You the owner of this hospital?"

"No! That's Bloody Lucy, she's out back." The kid jabbed a bloodstained glove backwards and adjusted his goggles, going back to work on his comatose patient.

I entered. The place definitely used to be a body shop. I could tell just from the smell of it - it smelled like a butcher's shop - of dried blood, fresh blood and frozen blood. A revolting smell. You'd have to be a psycho to actually want to be a black surgeon, but hey, a lot of people were psychos.

I found Bloody Lucy shooting some sort of green-coloured chemical into her arm while leaning against a rack full of white pods. She was decked out in a getup that looked like a madman's combination of a surgeon's operating wear and a butcher's apron. It was stained with splotches of dried blood. Then I noticed her eyes. They glowed orange, like the light of an animal, and were almost completely red, bloodshot.

"Who're you?" asked Lucy in a dreamy voice.

"I thought this was a cryohospital," I said, lighting up.

"I get more money doing both."

"You mind if I smoke?"

"Nah."

"Pretty nice operation you got goin' here," I said, looking around. The floor crawled with white fog, and the racks of white capsules were laced with a network of wild, tangled pipes, wires, and tubes.

"Look," said Bloody Lucy, "willya cut the crap? What do you want?"

"I'm looking for someone that I think may have checked into your hospital a few days ago. She goes by the name of Memory Jane, she's a mnemonic courier."

"Oh yeah?"

I took the photos out of my trenchcoat's inside pocket and showed them to her.

"You see this girl?"

Bloody Lucy looked at the photos and smiled, lips curling, showing blackened teeth.

"I dunno."

I turned, pocketing the pictures, and moved to leave from the junkie doctor and her big back room full of human frozen dinners when she grabbed my shoulder.

"My memory's a little off, but I'll let you check out the coffins… for the right price."

I took out the MTU and my card, but Lucy shook her head.

"You know," she said, leaning against a bank of ancient electronics, spilling some of their dusty innards onto the floor, "you're pretty handsome. And when you get to be my age, the men really don't look at you anymore. Especially not when your eyes are like this."

So the crone wanted sex. I took one quick glance at her, trying to do a drugged-up, brittle imitation of a sexy pose, and instantly my stomach started doing the hula-hoop. I backed off and got out of that shop as fast as I could. Back into the darkness of the moving crowd and vapid neon lights I found that I could breathe again, so I started walking to the next cryohospital. Actually I'd been so caught up with the case and all that I'd forgotten I was hungry, so the pangs hit me just when my stomach stopped doing the horizontal tango with my intestines. Luckily there was a cheap food vendor nearby, so I cruised in and ordered a bowl of ramen.

Like any food store it was greasy, loud, hot, stuffy and dirty, and the same could be said for the food, minus the loud, rowdy, shouting restaurant patrons. Vat-grown flesh hung from juicy meathooks, dripping with oil, and in the back the crackle and pop of a dozen frying pans sent up a smoke that was blown, courtesy of the big suction fan they had roaring back there, into the faces of the eaters squatting in the main room. I pulled up a little plastic stool and sucked at my ramen as I pondered over the clues.

There were two cryohospitals left in the vicinity. I began to wonder if Memory Jane would actually check into them just to freeze her brain until someone found the code. It didn't seem like her style, but heck, old Greez knew her better than I did. It just didn't seem to fit into her pattern.

You see, MemJay was the strong individual type, so strong and individualist that she tended towards the paranoid, and she wasn't the type to rely on others to help her. Maybe she was desperate, maybe she didn't know the code and didn't know when they'd dump the information, but that'd probably just make her look even harder for another solution. MemJay probably wouldn't put her brain on ice, but I still had the feeling that the cryogenics had something to do with her, some sort of connexion.

I finished the bowl of ramen and paid the money.

I had no other leads, so I headed for the second nearest cryohospital.

It was quiet there, really quiet. Looked like the place that people would go to if they wanted to keep a low profile. Probably a good place to ask around. It was a weird place that huddled at the back of a long alleyway, with a blue plastic tarp over the front and a flickering green neon sign tacked hastily to a plate of corrugated aluminum hanging over the entrance. Tyres were stacked up in front of it, supporting the posts that held up the low plastic tarp roof.

I dropped by, ducking under the tarp and found myself standing before a big reinforced metal outhouse with a nasty-looking machine gun barrel sticking out of it.

"Put your hands up."

"Wha?"

"I said put your fokin' hands up!"

A slat of metal slid aside and a pair of cybernetic eyes stared out, glowing a dull red. A bouncer. I raised my hands, dropping my gun.

"That's it… nice and slow. Now what do you want?"

"You know you must not get very many customers if this is the way you treat them."

"Shut up. What do you want?"

"I've got a few questions."

"Oh yeah? Well you ask 'em here. You got an appointment with Doc Cryo?"

Cryo. That must be the owner.

"I do. I'm a close personal friend of the doctor's. I need to see him about a … mutual acquaintance of ours."

"You do, do you? Well that's very nice, but if you're such a good friend of his, why haven't I seen you hanging at the door before?"

"We were buddies back when we were kids. I've got some business with the Doc."

As I said it, I pulled out my MTU and flashed a sum at the bouncer. I could have sworn that those cybernetic eyes telescoped at least ten seemetras forward.

"Uh… yeah… go ahead…"

I took out the transfer card and swiped it into the bouncer's MTU slot. He chuckled gleefully as the main door swung open and I stepped in. Kids at a candy store.

I found myself in some kind of crazy industrial warren. I could have sworn that I'd stepped onto some horror movie set in outer space, looking at the gloomy corridors and catwalks of the place. Tubes ran all along the low ceiling, and it was lit with yellow mining lamps strung in series. From time to time a jet of white coolant spouted from a valve somewhere. I stared at the signs and walked down the right corridor, towards the place marked 'Doctor's Office'.

I knocked on the door and a muffled voice drawled, "Come in."

When I entered I was staring at a full-fledged botanical garden. Weird, twisted, green plants grew on hydroponic ponds, suspended under banks of yellow lamps. At the center of the room a man sat, wearing dark goggles and wrapped from head to toe in bandages, rags, and scarves. A pair of respirator tubes trailed from what I assumed were slits for nostrils, and locks of wild, greasy black hair sprouted from seams on the bandages.

Geez. The weirdos I meet doing this job.

"Pretty nice garden you got here. You must get lots of business, to buy vat-plants like this and keep 'em growing."

"I do. Why are you here, snoop?"

"I'm doing a case. I've been paid to look for a woman, a mnemonic courier by the name of Memory Jane. MemJay for short. She disappeared some days ago, and I think she might've checked into one of these cryohospitals down here in the Western Region."

I tossed the photos onto the bandaged man's desk, and lit a cigarette as he examined the pictures before him. His goggles caught my cigarette and he started, screaming and raving.

"NO! NO! NO! YOU MUST NOT LIGHT UP IN HERE! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT, DAMN IT!"

I stamped it out with my foot.

"I hate cigarettes. I hate them!!!" he hissed. "Poison for my beautiful plants…"

With a free hand he caressed the nearest sprout, running gloved and bandaged fingers over green foliage.

"As for this MemJay I know nothing of her. Nobody like this has checked into this cryohospital recently - at least, none that I can remember."

"Ah, I see. Well can you tell me about everyone who came in the last… say… five days?"

"Many check in. Some check out. I can get you a list, show you the latest patients in the coffins, but…"

"But you want money," I sighed. I was glad that Sayonara had dumped so much money into my lap that day. This case was getting to be really hard on my bank account.

I got the man his money and he drew up a list on his computer. I gave it a little thought, seeing the records. No recorded entry of anyone by the name of 'Jane'. Then a light bulb went off in my head. She must have been using an alias of some sort.

"Hey, do you have cameras over the entrance"

"Yes, why?"

"Can I see the video footage of all the people who went in your entrance within the last few days?"

"Sure… go ahead and waste your time."

He ran through a set of video clips, then something caught my eye. A pair of guys hung on the bell and talked to the bouncer. There wasn't any audio, but I could tell that they were threatening him somehow. There was a short guy in a trenchcoat and a bigger guy. Both wore fedoras, which concealed their faces. The bigger one carried a large and heavy looking suitcase.

"Hey, wait! Freeze that!"

"What?"

"I know those two guys."

They were Big and Little Bill Trenchcoat. Bad signs. But what were they doing here? And I had a bad feeling about that suitcase that the big guy carried. They entered the door.

"Ahh yes them. They wanted to withdraw something that we were storing."

"Wait, wait, wait," I said. "So you do storage jobs, too?"

"Yah. We store internal organs in cold-freeze for the organ hospitals."

"Did they take anything out?"

"No. They came, tracked down the thing, and found nothing in there. Then they left."

"So someone had already withdrawn whatever it was from cold storage?"

"Yes."

"What? Who?"

"Some sort of container, I believe. Brain surgery replacements. They had withdrawn their deposit the day before."

"Who did? Can you draw up a video clip of them? Info sheets?"

"One moment."

He typed a few things into the computer and it came up with a blank.

"Hmm…" said Doc Cryo. "This is very strange. The database is missing an entire day. I think someone has tampered with this information."

"What about the slot?"

"Yes, I can show you this, but there is nothing there."

"Show me anyway."

He took me down another corridor and past a series of locked metal doors into a room that looked like a crypt. White coffins lay on racks on either side of the narrow corridor, puffing coolant. There was an air conditioner roaring in the back. I shivered, and it wasn't just the cold. Place gave me the creeps, because it felt like I was being surrounded by rack after rack of dead people.

The Doc led me down another corridor. Endless racks, extending beyond vision in every direction. I followed him till we got to a certain rack and pulled out a coffin. It ground, click-clacking on heavy metal wheels, and hissed open. There wasn't anything there.

I took out the fingernail and showed it to the Doc.

"Could you dust over this and find some DNA samples and match them to the DNA on this?"

"Er-"

"Never mind, I'll do it."

I took my computer out and loaded the genetic analysis module. Moving the suction nozzle over the surface of the coffin, I began picking up readings. Bleep, bleep.

"Got it."

"A match?"

"Ye- No… Something else. Something different. It doesn't match hers."

"Ah. I see."

"Hey tell me, Doc. You wipe these things often?"

"No, not at all, actually."

I spat. That meant that MemJay never even touched this coffin. There went another lead, down the drain. I thanked Doc Cryo for his time and split. Lighting a cigarette, I walked down the sidewalk again, splashing in the big puddles and streams that ran down into the pit below.

One more to try. Well, third time's the charm.

Splitstar

See your up late for new years too... lol

I liked this part of the story and im thankfull it does not have too may details.
I would just dread to be in a hospital like that.

So thanks for laying off the details and grime in the hospital area.... but keep writing however you want it to be written.

gj exelent work. waiting for the next chapter... also waiting for another slice on Mindjacker

AcolyteOfDeath

Ahhh... Black Splitstar. I can always count on you to be there, can't I? I'm afraid that MJ has gone on temporary hiatus, but I bet that, as the weather grows worse and rainier here, it'll soon be back up and running.

Actually, somehow I get the feeling that I didn't put enough detail into the cryohospitals, but I don't think it's in DJ's style to go into as much detail as I want to. I have to tell it like a detective's monologue, after all...

AcolyteOfDeath

9.

I had to wonder, though, as I walked towards the third cryohospital, what were those two guys doing at the Doc's anyway? They were looking for some sort of organ on ice, that much I knew, but what it had to do with Memory Jane and their supposed assignment, I had no clue. There was something up, though, and I could tell that it ran deep. I puffed at the cigarette, staring at the mottled pavement under me as the white noise of the rain played a regular, tuneless jazz in my ears.

I had a killer after me, Sayonara seemed to be working with these goons, and now the Trenchcoats were snooping around looking for frozen organs. Something wasn't quite right. After all, if she was working with detcorp snoops, what'd she need me for?

MetaFact and VatGen were working together on this, I granted, and they wanted to keep a tight lid on it. Whatever MemJay had in her head, it was worth big, they knew it, I knew it, and whoever else probably knew it too.

Now since they were on the same side, neither of the biotech corporations would be sending a bounty hunter after their own man, which implied a third party. But wait a minute, I thought to myself, why hire me if they've already got the big detcorps working for them? It wouldn't make any sense to waste more money, unless… unless Sayonara wasn't actually working for them! Then they'd have reason to send their big bounty hunters after me - to keep their trail quiet. Of course!

I laughed at the simplicity of it. Sayonara, you sneaky little bitch. So you're really a turncoat, working for that third party of yours. But who?

But just who was this third party? Another biotech company would be unlikely; there were only two big biotech corps in Rotovilla - MetaFact and VatGen - they had eaten up all the other competition and were now duking it out amongst themselves. So it had to be one or more of the larger Crime Syndicates, who somehow got wind of the big deal and were probably wanting MemJay's data for themselves, to sell back for ransom to the biotech corps. Nobody else, besides other corps, would have that kind of power.

I spotted something out of the corner of my eye. A big black cowboy hat. Poncho-looking cloak. And, unmistakably, the bulge of a pair of crazy steel samurai swords. Squatting on a short stool, eating some sort of slab of greasy steak. I took out the needle gun and crept up on the bounty hunter. The pistol clicked and whined, electrical elements humming to life. The nozzle buried itself in his neck.

"Don't move. We wouldn't want any 'accidents', now would we?"

"No, and I think you should do the same."

I looked down. He had his sword point tickling my gut.

"So we're about even," I said.

"Yep."

"How about telling me something?"

"What?"

"Who hired you?"

"What do you mean, 'who hired me?' Nobody hired me, I took the bounty over the net."

"Well then who put it out?"

"Some guy named 'the Crow'. Seemed to be working independent. I dunno. All I know's that he offered a cool one mill' for your head on a stick."

So, the Syndicate began rearing its ugly head at last. There was the third party, now, I was sure of it.

"Get off my tail, man," I said, "Get off and go away. Go far away. You don't wanna be messin' into this. The only thing that'll happen is you'll get pulled into some deep shit. So just walk away, okay? Just walk away. This is one bounty you don't wanna take."

I lowered my gun and he drew back his sword, sheathing it with a ring and click of metal. He was an honourable man, I had to give him that one. I holstered the pistol and walked away. The form of the bounty hunter slipped into the darkness of the rain and neon, and I could tell, even as he disappeared, the smell of grease receding, that he was staring at me. I shivered and walked on.

The last hospital was located in a big white, steel and marble building that looked like it belonged in some sort of novel or movie from thousands of years ago. People simply didn't build like this anymore, but judging by the looks of it, the building wasn't more than seven hundred years old. It stood like a big marble pillar next to two tottering old skyscrapers and was flanked by a lunatic's graffiti wall of blinking, flashing video billboards that danced and played without rest, screaming to the neon night. The ground floor consisted of some two-bit schmo's idea of a ritzy drug bar and strip club. The crowd there was a motley array of wannabes dressed up like a rich crowd out of the Topside arcologies. Consequently the effect was that the placed looked even more fake and worn down than it would have been without the getups.

Before that I couldn't imagine anything tackier than zebra stripes and psychedelic video-frescoes, but apparently, I was wrong, because it had that and more.

I sneered and took the elevator up a couple levels till I got to the cryohospital. It was a gritty place, and looked more like a second-rate card-op dry cleaner and Laundromat than a cryohospital. A bored-looking kid in ragged flannel sat reading a porn mag while sucking at a soda, and he didn't bother to look up at me when I went through the door. The window outside was flanked by a pair of bulbous columns, streaked with green aerosol.

"Hey."

"W'sup, man?"

"I wanna see your records. I need info on any recent patients that checked in," I held up the pictures and some video footage that I'd taken from MemJay's apartment. "You see this girl drop by here in the last few days?"

"I dunno."

Kid was out of it. I could tell by the way he stared, unblinkingly. Usually kids were surly, acid-spewing punks that wanted nothing to do with you. This guy just seemed ambivalent about everything. Also, the needles sticking out of his neck and arm helped me tell.

"Look, I got no time for this shit. Lemme see your computer records."

"Ya. Okay."

I stepped up towards the desk and stared at the cryo coffins on the motorized racks behind it. The kid tapped at his computer and pulled up some info on the sheet of mimeoplastic strung across the desk. Coloured squares danced across the screen. He chuckled dreamily.

"Heh. You want fries with that?"

"Just shut up, kid."

"Okay, okay. Jus' chill…"

He pursed his lips, licked them with a blue tongue, and sat back with a glazed look on his face.

"I got nothin', man."

"Okay. What about your organ storage? You do organ storing?"

"Sure."

"Anything dropped by in the last five days?"

"Ya. Gimme a minute."

He tapped a few keys. For a kid on drugs, he was pretty handy with the computer. I wondered if he was a hacker, but dismissed it. Hackers relied on their brains to survive, and they sure as hell weren't gonna nuke their nerve cells just for a rush.

"Ya. Okay."

The kid pointed at the mimeoplastic sheet and grinned, sitting back, slurping at his soda.

"Go ahead."

I looked at the information scrolling down. Lots of body parts. Hands, legs, feet, you name it. Internal organs too. I was revolted. I knew the organ business over here in the Western Region was big, but not this big. This was biotech central, Rotovilla. A virtual organ hunter's gold mine. No wonder all the black surgeons and hospitals worked over here - close access to business and commerce.

"Wait, stop there. Scroll up."

It paused over one entry.

"Pull up a pic on that."

A square opened with a rotating image. A suitcase, looked like a cold-storage case.

"What's in there?"

"Brain."

"What kind?"

"Human."

"Modifications? Any neural plugs? Mnemonic upgrades? Neural jacks? Things like that?"

"Didn't check. Just one human brain."

"How long did it stay in here?"

"Maybe two or three days. I dunno."

I scanned the information a while.

"Hey, if you really wanna know, you can go ask Big D. He takes care of stuff."

"Yeah, maybe you should call him out for me."

The kid chuckled again, glassy eyes staring through me.

"The Big D's not back there. He's sleeping and he doesn't like to be bothered."

I smiled, winked and took out my gun, talking all nice-like to him.

"I think that the 'Big D' can spare to wake up a little early. Now call him out, willya?"

"Okay, man."

He tapped at the keyboard and gestured at the cafeteria-tile green telephone sitting collecting dust on the corner. I picked it up.

"Yeah, this Big D?"

From amidst the electric jive of whistles, pops, and white foam came the pixilated voice of Big D.

"And who art thou, young knave, to be disturbing my slumber?"

"Hell. You're an AI aren't you, D?"

"Yes I am, though it be courtesy for a guest to give his name before the host give his. I ask thou again - who art thou and why hast thou disturb-ed mine midday slumber?"

"My name's Dystopia Joe, you can call me DJ for short, or just Joe. Now howsabout telling me what was in the suitcase that was put in Coffin 250?"

"Why should I?" said the AI sleepily.

"It'll cost you nothing. Someone took it out, right?"

"Good point. Within the case there was placed a brain."

"Okay, that I know already. Any modifications?"

"Yes. A mnemonic upgrade."

I flipped to the pages of notes that Memory Jane had stuffed into her diary along with her entries. They mentioned that, while it was possible to do operations on the brain with the body still attached, it was far easier to remove it and keep the body and brain in cold freeze, while the plugs were being installed. She must have had tried to get a black surgeon to do an operation on it of some sort, this was hinted at in some of the entries. But in that case, what was her brain doing in a suitcase? What if it wasn't her brain at all?

"Hey Big D, do you have the DNA sequence off that brain?"

"Verily."

"Compare it to this one." I uploaded the genetic information that I'd gotten from her fake nail and jacket.

"It be a match."

It hit me. The pieces were falling together. She had had an operation done and while she was asleep, someone had stolen her brain, while it was still on ice. It was ridiculously simple. Why bother with a living, kicking human body when you just need to steal the brain that has the information welded into it? Then they must have preserved it in the case and transported it to various hospitals. That's why the Trenchcoat Bros had carried a suitcase like that with them - they must've wanted it for themselves.

"Okay. Who put it in?"

"That… I am not at liberty to tell."

"Why, because someone put you up to it? Someone blocked you?"

"No… not that. Some fortnight ago my systems wert broken into and some data deleted. I was in sleep at the time, and woke up only too late. The vagrant had already gone. This data was the deposit information of that day."

"Damn."

It was the third party, whatever it was, and I suspected that the Crow, whoever he was, had something to do with it. The conspiracy ran deeper. I didn't bother to ask the junkie kid. Would've been a waste of time. He sat turned, reading his porn mag again, and I noticed a cortical jack near the base of his skull, below the left ear. A pair of software crystals were stuck in. Not only was he a junkie, he was a VR addict as well. Sickening.

"Well, thanks anyway."

I split the place. I'd gotten a lead, of sorts, at least. It was turning out to be one hell of a case. That, I realized, was the easy part. I shuddered and thought back at the clues and leads.

Well. Here started the hard part.

Splitstar

ooo i wonder were he goes next. this is a pretty weak lead.

lol and the details in the hospital could be changed but they are just fine.

I also thought the confrentation with the bountey hunter was a bit short. But he will probobly be back.

And you can always count on me.

gj keep writing. and dont forget you droped us off in a very tight spot in MJ. The pirates were attacking and we are still waiting for more...

But take your time art takes time.

gj AOD, or shall i call you Guest?

CCTSMaster

real cool. looking forward to the next parts!

AcolyteOfDeath

10.

I began looking around the Western Region. If I was gonna do any hardcore snooping I had better have some place to crash. Lady Luck seemed to have smiled, because after a short while spent searching I found a nice studio in an abandoned warehouse down in the old Industrial part of the Western Region. It was rife with crime, and the gangs ruled the streets, but at least it was pretty much free space, and besides, I was pretty quick on my feet and with the trigger if it ever came to that.

I travel light, and I'm not one for creature comforts, so it was no problem setting up shop in that studio. I improvised a mattress and a blanket, and scrounged myself some canned vat tofu and a bunch of refried aquaculture krill. Mmm-mmm. The staple food of any city dweller.

After I'd gotten myself established I began cruising the local bars and clubs for gossip about the Syndicate operating in the Western Region. I figured that if I could get into one of their speakeasies I'd stand a pretty good chance of learning about where they operated, what they trafficked in, and from there get a clue as to what they did with Memory Jane's brain.

Word on the street was that some place known as the Blue Heron was a popular hangout joint for Syndicate gangsters and their little tag-alongs, so I dropped by for a visit.

You could tell from the moment you stood before its one whole skyscraper floor on the corner of the third level of the bottom City that it was a Syndicate place. Blue neon ran along the entire corner of the joint, and formed a big blue heron that hung off of the edge of the corner.

I could tell from the moment I entered that it was a happening joint. Seemed a little slow on the day I first got there, but it still seemed to reek of the Syndicate's prosperity and the Syndicate's sponsorship. Men looked at me suspiciously when I came through the door, presumably they were bouncers of some sort, and they clearly meant business; one carried a mean looking riot gun with a barrel the size of my fist and the other carried a flamethrower. To one side there was a bar, stocked with more kinds of liqueur than I'd ever known existed. The rest of the Blue Heron was room for round tables with white tablecloths and plush loveseats on the wall at the opposite side. In the front was a stage, and a tired-looking band played a low ragtime tune that wafted through the smoky air of the Heron.

A couple of guys sat at one of the tables, talking in low voices over tall drinks, but the bar was free, so I sauntered over to it and ordered a whisky on the rocks.

"Slow night?"

"Yeah. Thursdays are always slow."

"Say, bartender."

"What?"

"Word on the street says that this is a Syndicate hangout. Would you know anything about that?"

"Word on the street's right. Why do you ask?"

Huh. This was easier than I'd expected. I was almost expecting for him to pull a gun on me at the mention of the word, but I guess I was lucky to find a bartender not specifically paid not to squeal.

"Well you see, I have some business to attend to in private, if you know what I mean, and let's just say that the doorman and I aren't on particularly good terms."

The barman nodded knowingly and smiled. He bent down and got me a glass, but as soon as he did I found myself flanked on either side with a pair of rectangular men that looked like they would've burst out of their zoot suits if the things weren't made of Kevlar. The next thing I knew I was flying through the air, landing in a pile of dead heroin junkies.

"AND STAY OUT, FLATFOOT!"

Well, that didn't work so well. I picked myself up and went around back, through an alley, to the Blue Condor. There was always a back door to everything, and if I couldn't get any clues through the regular channels, I'd always have the old-fashioned detective trick up my sleeve - find someone and shadow him.

I staked out for a while and saw the bartender come out into the alley. From the street came a man wearing a heavy cloak and hood, walking with a heavy step, like his shoes were filled with lead and he broke both his legs while trying to escape from a freezing chamber. I hid behind a dumpster, moving while they had their backs turned to me, coming closer to get a lowdown on what they were saying. I had the suspicion that they were talking about me.

"Some guy, looked like a detective or somethin', just dropped by lookin' for a password into our speakeasies."

"You talk? He pay you?"

"No! I didn't talk, he didn't gimme any money, and I wouldn't have talked anyway if he had, not even if he'd put fifty thousand creds in front of me and pointed a gun at my face. No, sir, I wouldn't talk."

Bartender Bill seemed to be really scared. What of, I wondered - the man in front of him or what the Syndicate would do.

"You better not have. If I catch word you squealed to some spy from the Geishikis, I'll make sure that big mouth of yours will never flap again."

"No, man, no way! I didn't talk! I don't know nothin'. Nothin'!"

He nodded obsequiously and the cloaked man stomped out of the alley, and into the neon glow of the city outside. Wiping his forehead, the bartender began walking, presumably back home after a day's work. I waited until he'd rounded the corner and went after him, keeping an eye out for him as I passed into the pedestrian traffic. It wasn't too hard - this area of the Western Region was a lot more desolate than others, and instead of a bustling human sea, it was more like a running human stream. Still, the guy walked fast, and kept looking behind himself, as if he was expecting someone to jump out and whack him.

He first stopped off at a small out of the way restaurant wedged in between a roughneck hangout and cheap massage parlour, the whores and fat biker-types from either side mixing freely with the greasy little eatery. I followed him in and watched him as he went to the back of the room and talked to a fry cook. The cook shrugged, getting back to his stir fry and the bartender went through the bead curtain to the cooking room behind. I ordered some chicken and asked to go to the bathroom.

Imagine the most filthy place in the world. Their restroom was a hundred times worse, and then some. It looked like a tribe of diarrhoetic elephants had been tossed into the place on a wave of used condoms, drunken vomit and human pisswater. I closed my eyes and breathed through my mouth. At least I didn't have to see what was in the stall that I holed up in. Now I was just unzipping my pants when all of a sudden, who else but my little friend Bartender Bill comes barging in. I could tell by the way he mumbled to himself and the shoes he wore that it was him.

He walked over to the sink and seemed to be washing his hands, only the water wasn't running on any of the faucets, so I had to wonder what that funny gurgling sound was. He sounded like he was in a lot of pain, almost as if he was bleeding all over the sink. Maybe he had insulted one of the cooks in back? Long after I'd finished pissing for real, Bartender Bill started talking.

To whom, I had no idea, but it almost sounded like he was talking on the phone with somebody, that or somebody in the room whom I hadn't seen.

"Yeah, yeah, I got the money. Yeah, I got it right here! N-n-no no sir, no way. Yeah? Yeah. Okay. Right. Right right, yeah! Yeah I know, right? We're buddies, we're partners, right? Uh… what? Oh, no, don't worry, I-I-I'll get there with your money right away, no doubt about it, sir! The deal is down, sir, all you gotta do is set the time and place. Er… what? Say that again? Okay. 51209, Sixty-second block, Midnight, gotcha. What’s the password tonight? Sword fish? Okay. Oh yeah, you don't have to worry about that at all, sir, yeah, yeah, it's all been taken care of. Yeah, see you la-. Ter."

The gurgling stopped and the bartender gasped. How he could breathe this awful toxic gas I had no clue. A couple of seconds later he walked out again, and I busted out of the stall, looking at what he left behind on the sink. The only thing I could see was a whitish-yellow, gauzy square that lay, glistening and slightly red, at the bottom of the sink. I pulled it up and looked at it. Some sort of note? The words were all distorted, though, so I couldn't make anything out. I dropped the thing back into a sink.

There was a meeting tonight. There was one chance in a gazillion that it'd have anything at all to do with the whereabouts of Memory Jane's brain, but it was something of a lead, and at least I had a password. Wasn't sure if it was to one of their speakeasies or to some apartment, but it led somewhere.

I came out of the bathroom and saw my food lying there, glistening and oily. I think I saw a human hair somewhere in there, mixed inextricably with the fat, grease, and brown sauce. Feeling mortified, I paid my money and went out. I looked around for the bartender, but he'd disappeared into the crowd.

I checked my chronometer. There was still a good amount of time left until midnight, so I decided to walk around, and maybe see if I could snoop out a Syndicate speakeasy without too much trouble.

I figured that the Blue Heron would be a good place to start if one wanted to trail a gangster, so I hung around, well out of distance of the bouncers' guns, waiting for someone to come out. At around seven or eight a real luxury hummer with four turbines, one at each corner, hovered by to the sidewalk and stopped, disgorging a rich-looking crowd. Definitely Topside folk, down from maybe one of the Syndicate arcologies for a night of fun. I lit a cigarette and followed them in.

I'd expected to be stopped at the door, but either the bouncers had their fedoras pulled down too much to even see me, or they were just really stupid. Either way, I managed to get in without having my brains shot out on the floor, which was more than I could say for some. The problem, it seemed, with the Blue Heron, was not getting in, but getting away. Snoops check in, but they don't check out, a regular snoop motel.

I lowered myself into one of the big plush seats in the corner and ordered their best. What the hell, I hadn't had a real meal before, and I might as well have indulged myself while I had the chance. I'll have to say, though, that vat-grown lamb chops tastes a lot different from the chops made from live clone-tube lamb. Plus, the stench of soybeans and krill was gone. It was the real thing that I was eating there, no doubt about it, and the real deal going on several tables away.

The women were all decked out in fancy black gowns and dresses, and the men were tied, mustachioed, and suited. One man, though, seemed to dominate the scene. He had coiffed, greasy black hair and a wide mouth, and he wore a pinstriped purple suit. What was different about him, though, was that his nose and eyes were replaced with cybernetics, forming a sort of y-shape of gunmetal grey. Now, I hesitated to amble over to the bar and ask around, so when the waiter came over with a bottle of champagne, I just sat back with an easy expression my face - saying "No snoops here, bob, just your average new guy" - and asked him who the dude with the eyes was.

"Oh him? That's Eyes McLane. Real mean one he is."

"Oh yeah?" I said as the waiter popped the cork and poured more of the bubbly into my glass.

"Yep. He's the local boss of the Western Region. I'd hate to be on his blacklist."

The waiter was only a kid. Clean-faced, honest. Wide-eyed and innocent. God how I wish life could still be that simple. I sipped from the glass. It was the honest-to-goodness real stuff they had here, and the effect was more desensitizing than being a black surgeon at one of their cyber butchery shops. The champagne, after a lifetime of hard bathtub whisky, was incredibly mild. Like grape-flavoured water. But the meat was good, no doubt about it.

I puffed another cigarette and stared at Eyes. I strained my ears a little and caught a little snippet of "business I gotta do tonight" and "meeting at". Most of it, though, was jokes, sexual innuendo and raucous laughter. The Topsiders all puffed at big fat stogies which gave off more noxious a perfume than anything that clung to those gazelle-like decorative women in the gowns. I knew, then, that Eyes McLane might just be the lead that I was looking for. I remembered to hang on to him for a while, after I'd followed up the meeting at midnight with Bartender Bill.

The party wore on into the night and around ten o'clock at night the gang left in their hummer again. When the waiter came by again I gave the kid a fat tip.

"Hey kid."

"Yeah?"

"Does ol' Eyes come here often?"

"Yeah. Likes this place. Every other day, I think, around this time."

He sighed.

"What is it, kid?"

He put down the tray he was carrying and stared at me like I was some sort of retard.

"What do you think?" he said, quietly, "Ever since Eyes started hangin' around here things've been different. Gangsters come in, they come out. And where they went, they brought their trouble. It's been good for business, sure, but … It's like those giant fuckin' bug swarms that come outta nowhere, you know, like what they got up in the Northern Region, near the Sea; they just come in and push everyone out and don't care what you do."

I nodded knowingly. The Northern Region was my home part of Rotovilla, and I was familiar with what the kid was talking about. Every now and then bugs would just rise out of the bottom of the city - something having to do with the monsoons from the Sludge Sea - and just go on a swarming rampage through the city and there wasn't anything you could do about it except try to deal with it.

From the way he talked, I could tell that this kid was no fan of the Syndicate. Maybe I could use this.

"Tell ya what, kid."

"What?"

"Can you do me a favour and listen in on the conversation when you cruise by some of the bigshot gangsters talking? I'm doing a case here, y'see, and I need all the info I can get. Could you do that?"

"Well I dunno," said the kid abashedly, "I could get into a lot of trouble if someone found out."

"Well you want the Syndicate outta here?"

"Yeah?"

"Gimme enough info and the case I'm assembling might just bust 'em wide open. They just might get into a bit of trouble with the local corps, if you know what I mean."

I winked and the kid cracked a grin. We shook hands and soon thereafter I exited the restaurant, making my way to Block 62 for a midnight meeting with a bunch of new friends.

Splitstar

lol sorry for not reading this sooner. I did not realy notice it and then i had midterms...

I realy like this part. Not alot of action but sets the base down for the second part of the story.

gj AoD

O and i didnt know they had speakeasies.. werent thoes for the prohibition?

AcolyteOfDeath

Well in the context, a speakeasy would be someplace where you can 'speak easy' - a safe place to discuss secret gangster-type stuff.

Not prohibition - alcohol runs free in Rotovilla. :buddies:

AcolyteOfDeath

Sorry - I've been a little sporadic. School and all.

11.

Turns out the place was a cramped little thing at the back of a small abandoned underground storage facility. Pipes ran everywhere on the ceiling, and I carefully crept through the corridors until I had reached a large door. I knocked twice and the slit opened.

"Password?"

"Sword fish."

"Come on in."

It swung open, revealing a Spartan-looking little bar with overstuffed plush couches spilling their innards on one side and a counter stocked with liqueur at the other. I looked around for the little rat man, and there he was, at a small table, wringing his hands anxiously. He didn't see me, fortunately, as the place was crowded enough for me not to be too noticeable. Nobody turned a head, as they figured that if someone knew the password, he could generally be trusted. The air stank of cigarette smoke, and there was an atmosphere of sleep deprivation and nervous tension, mixed in with the white noise of human conversation. I ordered some whisky and lit a cigarette, keeping half an eye on Bartender Bill over in the corner.

I didn't have to wait long. Someone - I wasn't sure if it was a slim man or a slim woman - wearing a long black overcoat with a turned up collar and a wide brimmed hat, came in the door and moved through the crowd over to the little rat man at the table and sat down. The person's voice was muffled, from the big black scarf that he wore over his face.

They spoke in low, hushed voices, almost as if they were afraid of their fellow gangsters overhearing them, so it was nearly impossible for me to hear anything they said. I inched some stools closer. There was something passed over from the bartender to the cloaked person under the table. Both looked around anxiously and resumed their conversation. Apparently the deal was done.

"So what's up, Jill? What's goin' on round here these days? Why's everyone seem so funny all of a sudden?"

Jill looked around suspiciously and I turned away the moment her blue tinted goggles came my way, bending down to my glass.

"It's the big deal. Something goin' down. They say that big Don Vid-Vid's got something new, something worth like a bajillion credits, and he's gonna bust it all out soon."

"No kidding?! That's insane! Don Vid-Vid?"

"Seriously. Yeah."

"Man," the bartender rubbed his chin, "This goes real deep."

"No kidding. Look, man, I gotta go now, okay? Thanks for the dough."

Jill got up and left and I thought that was the end of that, but the bartender stayed in his seat, looking at the time, fidgeting nervously. Obviously his real meeting hadn't even begun yet.

Within minutes the big guy clunked in, swathed in a beige trenchcoat and a big basket-shaped hat, sitting down at Bartender Bill's table. The little man looked even more like a rat than ever, sweating from every pore, bulging eyes glancing to and fro. He leaned forward.

"D-d-don Vid-Vid. He's got it, I think. It's him you want."

"You just find out?"

"Yeah, Jill Slice just left. Got through talking with her. Says that Don Vid-Vid's holding it for himself."

"McLane won't be happy about this," muttered Clunker.

"Yeah, that's what I'm worried about."

Bartender Bill wiped his forehead and sipped nervously at a drink.

"Um, Garth, can I talk to you about something?" he said, glancing around.

"What?"

"I think that detective - you know the one we threw out today - I think I'm being followed. Don't know who he is, though."

"The cams just got finished ID-ing him. It's a match, he's the guy that we put the bounty on."

"Shit! How come he's still alive?!"

"Beats me, but if we catch him…"

After some muttering Garth stood up stiffly and tossed a credit card onto the table.

"W-wait, where're you goin'?" asked Bill.

"I'm gonna go have a talk with McLane. See what he wants to do with Vid-Vid. Don't come. You just go right home, or else."

Garth pressed something in his palm and Bartender Bill winced and clutched at his hand, bulging eyes staring, terrified at the huge guy standing near the door. Garth pulled at his hat and clunked out of the bar.

God. There were too many clues, too many links; too much politics. It seemed that there was infighting within the Syndicate as well, and that this 'Don Vid-Vid' had Memory Jane's brain. Who was the Crow, then? Was he Vid-Vid? And who was Sayonara working for? I still had questions, but I trusted my gut, and figured that it'd all get resolved once I found that brain. Now I had no idea where Vid-Vid was, so the only way to him was the hard way. I got up, paid my due, and started shadowing the big guy. I couldn't help but feel that I was going to my death, but I had a job to do.

I followed Garth out to the street, where he turned into the crowd and stomped his way onto the catwalk set over the valley between the two buildings. It looked so rickety, supported by what looked to me like duct tape and electrical cables, I half expected him to fall straight through, dropping like a brick through wet tissue paper. Amazingly it didn't and I waited for the giant to get to the other side before I started crossing it myself.

On the other side, Garth turned and disappeared through a door into what looked like a shabby little tenement.

I paused for a moment in the middle for a smoke, letting the hard press of human bodies march past me. Something caught my eye - a glint of metal, or the flourish of a big black poncho - and I looked up at the catwalk directly across and above from me. There was nothing. I felt a creepy feeling run up my spine, like ants doing the horizontal polka under my skin, and walked towards the tenement.

I pressed the buzzer on the side and after enough tries I managed to coax the landlady into coming down and talking to me.

There were two layers of door - one wooden and the other metal grate. She stayed behind the grate as she talked to me. The landlady was a senile old Chinese hag with big fishbowl goggle lenses and looked more like a wrinkled clove of garlic on feet than a human being.

"Yeahwhayyouwant?"

"Got a question. Does a big stumpy guy, walks around like he's got two artificial legs, big tall black-looking chap - does he live around here?"

"Nnnnoooo…. he don't live here. He come and go, but don't live here."

"Who's he come to see?"

"Hell if I know!"

"Look, well he just came in, and I gotta talk to him, so can you open up?"

She scrutinized me, squinting behind magnifying goggles, looking more like a frog than ever, her mouth puckering up like a dog's asshole.

"You look like gangster, but I know gangsters. They don't make trouble with me," she said, puffing up importantly, "Okay you come in, but don't make a mess or I shoot you."

Hefting a double-barreled shotgun, the hag trained it on me as I ascended the rickety and narrow flight of stairs. As I went she lowered the gun and crept back into her little apartment.

There were noises - first the tinkling of glass and then screaming - from upstairs and I pulled out my needler. As I went up the stairs I could hear the screaming subside for a bit and then start up again, more rhythmically. I reasoned that either someone was having sex or someone was being beat up; whatever difference there was between the two, they sounded the same. I exited the stairwell at the third floor and walked down the dingy hall, the walls scrawled with graffiti, stepping around piles of sagging drywall. I wound up at room 113, where the sounds were loudest.

There were slapping noises, punctuated by shrieks, and someone roared, "WHERE DID YOU PUT IT?!" I got up flat against the wall and raised the needler, ready to fire, and touched the doorknob, pleased at finding it unlocked.

I burst into the room, screaming, "Hey!", my needler gun whining as juice flowed through its coils. It was entirely dark, except for the shaded lamp that cast a filthy green-yellow glare on the figure sitting on the chair under it. A figure in a black cowboy hat and a poncho, smoking a cigarette. The figure reached for something and there was a click, and the sound stopped. I started backing towards the door.

"Now you don't wanna do that."

"Why?" I gasped.

"Because this here-" there was a click and a blurb of noise, like squirrels talking Street-Lang, and it played again, "- has got what you want."

"Now Jane, you are gonna tell us…" began the recorder. Click. It stopped in mid sentence.

My eyes flicked from the recorder in the bounty hunter's hands to his swords, to his face.

"What's up?" I said, my body flat against the door, my hand on the knob, "Why haven't you killed me yet?"

"You fit into the plan."

"What am I? Just another pawn in some game?"

"We all are. Do you want this or not?"

"Yes…"

"Well you'll have to take it from me."

"I don't have time for this, give me that recorder!"

I fired a burst of needles at him and leapt for the recorder. He threw it down to the corner and raised his swords, whirling them through the air. The needles pinged and flew away, harmlessly. The swords rose, fell gleaming, time slowing down to a crawl…

"My God," I thought, "He really is a samurai ninja!"

The swords fell, my finger pulled the trigger. Pain burst in my leg, like icy liquid steel sliding on cold velvet, and I groaned, sliding into the corner. There was a grunt and the bounty hunter fell to the other side of the little apartment, the bullets having torn neatly through his calf, one sword clattering to the floor. In the silence as we glared at each other, clutching our wounds, breathing heavily, someone upstairs turned on a scratchy recording and the calm tones of La Boheme filtered down through a pipe leading from the ceiling.

"What's wrong?" I hissed across the room, "Shield batteries low?"

"Field takes a second."

"Seconds are long."

He winced and stood up abruptly as little silvery lines flashed across the wound, stitching it together. The bounty hunter drew his other sword. I reached for my gun with one hand, the other palming behind me, falling on the recorder's battered plastic case. I pocketed it. A thunk noise and starbursts of pain exploded like LSD fireworks behind my eyelids. I peeked and saw a ninja star buried in the back of my left hand. The bounty hunter advanced, sword upraised, a black shadow in a big black poncho. Black cowboy boots thumped on the fake hardwood floor and silvery spurs jangled. In the background the opera came to my favourite movement, the "Che Gelida Manina".

"Shame," he said with a tone of anticlimax in his voice, "it had to end this way."

"Shit," I grated. "Who died and made you referee? Nobody ever said anything about it ending."

The alto soprano trilled as his sword fell; I whipped my free hand into my breast pocket and pulled out the cigarette pack, flicking a button on the bottom and crushing it. I threw it. Twenty miligrammes of inflammable material, packed into a capsule the size of my thumb went nova, and a burst of light exploded before his eyes. The bounty hunter recoiled, covering his eyes and I rolled away. He stumbled back and I jerked the star out of my hand in a spurt of blood, then reaching for the gun.

An eye, the pupil shrunken to a pinpoint, popped open behind his hand and he pulled out a stubby-barreled pistol and fired. My gun exploded and I stumbled up, pressed against the wall, clutching my hand, blood leaking from the gash on my leg.

"So. What happened said to the 'honourable cyber samurai' routine?"

"Never said I was honourable."

He leveled his pistol at me. I felt a glass pane behind me.

"Sorry," I said, "but it looks like the party's over now, so I'll just be dropping out."

I launched myself backwards just as he fired. Glass shattered into a million diamond shards, and his bullet passed straight through my fedora, just grazing my scalp. I fell into the abyss, buoyed by the glowing colours of a sea of neon, my beige trenchcoat billowing out like a wing under me.

AcolyteOfDeath

12.

I landed hard on a cushion of human bodies, who burst out in a fit of cursing, struggling to get my broken body off of them. I struggled off just as someone's revenging laser bolt narrowly grazed my ear and ran along the catwalk, clutching my wounded hand, jagged iron spikes of pain jabbing up from my leg. I cast an eye backwards at the apartment building. Nothing in the lit window. Then a black shadow of movement and a dark figure leapt from one catwalk to another, arms outstretched, black cloak billowing out behind him like the wings of some kind of giant vampire bat.

"Oh shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!" I spat and ran, pushing past the people on the bridge.

There was a loud crack and the metal rang out hollowly right in front of me, a ten centimet hole blasted through it, still smoking.

I looked over the side. There was another catwalk down there and thought, "Here goes nothing" to myself and jumped, just as a score of ninja stars whizzed past like flying razor starfishes. I fell, hit hard on the metal below, and waves of red pain shot up my leg like lightning spikes, but I ignored it and ran the other way. My hand was leaking blood like a rusty old faucet, but I didn't care - I had a psycho ninja on my tail and when that happens you tend to ignore certain things while you try and save your own ass.

The shadow leapt, swung, caught hold of an electrical wire and landed on the catwalk directly adjacent to mine and above, a gulch of about seven metra separating us. I heard the sha-WING noise of his two samurai swords being drawn and ducked low into the crowd, running onto the pavement and down the sidewalk. My heart was like a drum beat by a hyperactive kid on methamphetamines, I could swear that it wanted to leap right out of my chest and run down the street with me. Every time my foot landed on the mottled concrete below me waves of pain shot through my leg, crawling up my spine like fire, every step an agony. I was losing blood pretty badly and I knew that I couldn't keep it up for long.

Then I saw an open Chinese food restaurant and ducked in, the black shadow of the bounty hunter leaping down from some high ledge in hot pursuit. I pushed through the greasy little joint, upsetting tables of greasy food, angering lots of greasy patrons. It was ill lit by greenish-yellow fluorescents and the vapid walls were a grimy brownish colour from years of stinking cooking and human touch, the drywall sagging off in many parts, the wallpaper peeling in others. I crashed through, ignoring the lemon chicken wetly spreading oil on my shoulder and the all-too-dry rice on my pantlegs.

I could hear the bounty hunter closing in behind me, the regular light "tump-tump-tump" of his cowboy boots and the funny singing song that the swords made as they passed through the air like a pair of steel sirens, like sharp metal dames, angry bitches that lusted for blood - my blood.

The Two Dames sliced through the table that I pushed up behind me and two confused and dazed men that stood near it. I turned my head away from the carnage and ran through a bead curtain, just as three angry Oriental thugs with miniguns charged past me and opened fire on the bounty hunter.

I ran down a greasy little corridor, the sounds of commotion blending together like a neon angel, suffused with light and the grind of violence and metal. I began coming down from the withdrawal. The cigarettes I smoked contained a mild additive that I had custom made to put down the aftereffects of the other drugs I took, like sticking my pinky finger in a dam to hold back a neurochemical cascade. Without them I was crashing, bad. I had to get a fix for one of them, or another pack. The world did an adrenaline ballet around my head, and I retched, leaning against the wall. I turned the corner and tumbled down the stairs, my head feeling more than ever like pureed watermelon insides.

An old lady laughed at me and I spat in her general direction. I stumbled, the world crashing around me in a burst of colour and darkness, into a kitchen where I hit my face against a blurry chicken, dripping grease and oil over my trenchcoat. They yelled at me in Chinese and I staggered drunkenly to the back room, pulling open the door to the cooler and snapped it shut behind me, little puffs of vapour cloud smoking from my mouth and nose. I snuggled in next to a pair of beef sides, made myself into a little ball behind the rack, and leaned on the cold vatgrown meat, reality doing a somersault in my eyes as my tongue unconsciously lolled out over my cold, sausagey lips, and got stuck on the frozen beef until I woke up.

When I did my brain felt like it had been through the spin cycle - eight times, on maximum heat - but at least my sense of reality was more or less intact. Unfortunately for me I was half frozen by the time I woke up. The only reason why I wasn't a block of ice was because the guys who owned the restaurant didn't much care to keep things fresh. I stared out the little window and made sure the coast was somewhat clear before I stepped out of the freezer and walked out the backdoor of the eatery.

Still a little tense from the adrenaline rush, and still groggy from the withdrawal, I attempted without much success, to shuffle the deck of cards that was my mind. Clues, clues, clues. There were too many damn loose ends - that was the problem. I couldn't go to anyone - everyone seemed to be all mum about the whereabouts of MemJay's brain and just exactly what was on it. I didn't have any leads, except what few I could still remember, and the little recorder in my back pocket.

I decided to try the more reliable one.

It started about halfway into the interrogation; I reckoned that was about when my katana-wielding friend started eavesdropping.

"I'll ask you again," said a male voice, "Where is the CASE?!"

"I told you already," came a slurred voice. Female. "I don't know."

There was a thudding kind of smack sound, like the sound of eggs hitting wet concrete. The female voice groaned. It was somehow familiar, I thought I heard it somewhere before. I didn't recall where, but it belonged to someone I thought I knew. I thought back, remembering recorders… voice recorders… Memory Jane! It was MemJay's voice!

"I'm warning you, Vector Kane, either you tell us or you die."

What the hell? I pondered. They called her by a different name. I stopped the recording and fumbled for the snapshots of Jane that I'd been given.

There it was. The photo of her, in regular courier gear - gun and suitcase. I looked closely at the suitcase. Different. Mnemonic couriers generally carried suitcases for their brain-download/upload gear, and they were generally light, thin affairs that could easily be moved around from place to place. The one she carried in the case was a heavy, silver and chrome plated thing that looked like it could carry either a lot of something, or one little thing in some pretty heavy insulation. Insulation!

"Oh shit! Shit, shit, shit!"

I staggered over to a payphone and kicked the bum out as I called Sayonara.

"C'mon, c'mon…"

"Hello, this is Sayonara Jones speaking," came the dreamy, sensuous voice.

"Hey, it's Joe. Gotta question for you."

"Shoot."

"You know the photos of MemJay that you gave me? When was it taken?"

"I don't know. Wait, lemme check, can you hold?"

"Yeah."

She went away for a moment and I could hear the faraway sounds of distant rummaging. There was a shadow of movement behind me for a moment, and I glanced back and saw nothing. No way. He couldn't have followed me here. He couldn't have followed me - or I'd be dead. He wasn't there. I turned away, spitting. "God, this guy's making me paranoid," I muttered under my breath.
"Yes, Joe you there? The photographs are dated the fifteenth."

The fifteenth! That'd make it one day after her voice and video records cut off.

"You need anything else?"

"No, that's fine, thanks. Oh wait! Are the photos you gave me the most recent ones you have?"

"Yes, yes, they are."

White noise, click, and ringtone. Then the phone billed me twenty credits to my account and asked me to slide in my MTU card again. I didn't want any more corporate bounty hunters on me, so I snarled and paid the machine its dues.

I clicked on the recorder again.

"I told you," said the person called Vector Kane in MemJay's voice, "I don't know where it is!"

There was a wet slapping noise again and a groan of pain.

"Then who'd you give the case to? Answer me, or you get it."

"I- " Panting. Heavy breathing. "D-Don Vid-Vid."

Flashback. The conversation between the bartender and his shady friend in the Syndicate speakeasy. They mentioned Don Vid-Vid, busting out with something. By his name I'd assumed that he was some sort of media kingpin about to bust the block with some innovative new porn flick.

"Holy crap!" I muttered to myself.

Things were falling together alright, but the way jigsaw puzzle pieces manage to fall together when shaken up by a hyperactive kid and thrown off the top of an arcology. Pure random luck.

Everyone wanted the case. This Don Vid-Vid seemed to have gotten wind of the brouhaha and figured he'd play middleman and sell to the highest bidder. Only it meant going against Syndicate policy, which was why Big Clunky and Eyes McLane was after Vid-Vid. All I had to do now was get the case out of Vid-Vid's hands before the big sale and that'd be it.

I groaned. "This is definitely not one of my better cases."

Sighing, I checked around to see if I was being followed, looking for the ripple of a big black poncho, the slight glint of a wicked katana. Nothing. I was becoming more paranoid than a crystal meth addict on the run from a drug lord's goons. I walked on down the street, navigating by the video billboards on the buildings, back to my flat in the warehouse, the smooth zeroes and ones of my paycheck dancing in my head. I had some calls to make.

Splitstar

Sorry i missed one of your chapters... I did not see the thread when you posted.

Anyway this time you made the Samuri character much better. last time at the chiken join you made him look weak and quickly got over him. But this time you added more detail and took away his weakness.

GJ

AcolyteOfDeath

13.

One of the stupidest things I'd ever do was to try to be helpful and give my employer a progress report. I called Sayonara and gave her the lowdown on the situation that I'd dug up so far and my initial impressions of it.

"Do you have any idea when the deal is going to be set?"

"No, but I think it's going to be damn soon, because things are getting pretty messy over here."

"Okay, Joe, here's the deal. VatGen wants that brain, and it wants it bad, and it's sure as hell not wanting to buy it for twenty times what it's worth from some shock-jock media Don. You get that suitcase or the deal's off."

"Hey! Wait, I never agreed to this! Run half way around Rotovilla, fine, but I am not going to go straight into a crime Syndicate lair and get this package, dame. You wanna fall guy, dollface, you go hire yourself a street thug - leave me out of this."

"Wait!"

"What?"

"Meet me in person. I don't think it's safe to talk by wire."

"Okay, where?"

"Under the Galvinex Arcology Transbridge, forty-fifth sector. I'll be there at 24:00. Never look when the needle calls your name."

The line went dead and that familiar monotone came flooding back into my ear. I hung up the phone and sat back, inhaling a pair of cigarettes. They weren't my customs, but at least they helped me a little in coping with my recent breakup with a woman, a particularly dashing dame named Lady Drug Abuse.

Anyhow I still had plenty of time before the meeting, so I decided to check in on the Blue Heron club to see if my informant had dug up anything during his rounds waiting tables for big crime bosses, plus the joint was only a detour from my rendezvous place anyway, so it wouldn't take much time to stop by. My shoes had hardly ground on the hard pavement outside the warehouse before I remembered why I couldn't just walk there. I'd tried unsuccessfully to fix myself after the bounty hunter near mauled me, and the pain, despite the cigarettes, was like being jabbed in the leg with ice picks wielded by every vengeful dame I'd ever dated and dumped.

I dialed for a taxi and settled down on the dirty steps in front of the warehouse, lighting another cigarette, keeping a good three metra between me and the hobo that lay on the other side in a puddle of his own piss. The taxi company was called "Speedy Taxis", and naturally I assumed that it'd take at least an hour or two for them to get here from whatever remote spot the dispatch was at. To my surprise it was no less than ten minutes before a chequered yellow and black taxi came roaring through the rusty chain-link in front of the warehouse.

The cab squeaking to a stop in front of me, a kid with a backwards baseball cap and a scraggly dirty blond beard stuck his head out the window and screamed, "Hey, man, you gonna get in the fucking car or what? Meter's running!"

I got in and he crashed the taxi through another part of the fence.

"God, kid, don't you ever use the gate?" I screamed, holding on to my hat.

He took a soggy, limp little cigarette out of his mouth and added another to the little mountain in the passenger's seat. "No way, man. So what'll it be? Express or fast?"

"Uh…"

"Express's twice the rate, but gets you there thrice as fast."

The kid grinned and pointed to the meter, which was ticking as merrily as a broken down fifty year old taxi meter could.

"Express, I guess."

"Okay man, hold on!"

You could tell the kid either liked going suicidally fast or else there was some major drug in the shit he was smoking. The kid pulled a lever and flipped a button. There was a whine and then the taxi roared off. I looked out the back window and saw a pair of turbines flip out of where the trunk should have been and shoot rocket exhaust.

"Holy shit!" I screamed as the city turned into a blur of neon and colour around me.

The kid chuckled and whooped, "It's what they always say, man! Woooo!"

When I finally managed to get my heart out of my throat and step out onto the sidewalk, it was like I'd been doing the horizontal shimmy and being chased all at once. Adrenaline was singing in my veins like an opera soprano doing a high C note, and my head felt like it had been poured one too many times in a blender set on 'liquefy'. I handed the kid my MTU card and he cackled with glee, roaring off in a blast of rocket fuel, turbines belching flame like some backwards dragon.

My breath was so lost that I had to catch it with a net, but once I did, I managed to stumble into the Blue Heron without much ado. I sat down at a table and waited for the kid to walk by. I ordered a martini and some pasta and sure enough, the kid came with a big silver platter. He didn't seem to recognize me at first, but I discovered a note in the napkin that asked me to meet him in the bathroom as soon as I'd finished. He warned me to take my time - he didn't want it to look too suspicious.

I cleaned up the plate and crumpled the note, leaving a few chips as a tip, then I went to the john.

He was there, pretending to wash his face. I leaned against the bathroom door and said, "What's the scoop, kid?"

"McLane's real mad at a guy, I think his name was Vid-Vid or something. I waited their table a few times when McLane wasn't in with some of his Toplander floozies, and from what I heard this Vid-Vid fellow stole something of his, something about messing up a Syndicate deal. I dunno, that was all I heard, I swear."

"You ever hear about anyone named Memory Jane?"

"No."

"What about his friends? Did McLane bring anyone with him? Do you remember?"

"Yeah. A couple of old dudes and some of the guys with violin cases for protection. Oh yeah, one time there was a woman with them, she looked kind of beat up."

Bingo. I took MemJay's photos from my pocket and showed it to the kid.

"She look a little like this?"

"Yeah, that's the girl!"

"Alright, cool. Here's a little something for your trouble." I gave the kid a fifty cred chip and blew it.

Outside the night was cool and dark. Some power troubles had busted out something down below, so many of the lights and neon signs were dimmer than usual or not working at all. A pair of adblimps cruised by, oily and silent, screaming to the night crowd about enjoying Sani-Cola or buying sexual implants. I reviewed my leads so far.

The deal, as far as I could tell, was that this Memory Jane had been late for a delivery of corporate information - probably from a VatGen subsidiary to the HQ - because she was looking for a way to cure herself - they'd stuffed her too full of data and the leakage was giving her brain damage. The way to do it was through cybersurgery, so she had the operation done and when that had happened, a bodysnatcher probably switched places with her and had his own brain implanted into her body, putting her brain into the suitcase. That was Vector Kane. The corporations sent people after him to get the brain back. The Syndicate probably got wind of this and got to Kane first, as the Western Region was pretty much the headquarters for the Syndicate, whereas the corps mainly dwelt towards Downtown Central and North. They were probably planning to sell it to the highest bidder or something similar, only the Syndicate had its own internal power struggles. That's where this media broker, Vid-Vid, came in. He was probably the guy that brought Kane in with MemJay's case, and decided to keep it for himself to make it big. Challenging the Syndicate, which was, in this particular sector of the Western Region, controlled by Eyes McLane, was one big step for a minor media don. Now everyone was trying to get it back, everyone was trying to find Vid-Vid and the suitcase.

But where did the big Clunker fit in to all this? Having reviewed the bounty hunter's recording it was probably safe to assume that he'd managed to get a hold of Kane before the Syndicate did. Which either made him a bounty hunter hired by a corporation, or a detective, like me. By the way he treated Bartender Bill, I assumed that he was a detective like me, though a lot more clandestine in his snooping than I.

I caught another taxi, this time driven by a somewhat less maniacal adrenaline junky, and drove to the rendezvous.

It was like a scene from an old noir film, in that the bridge was between two huge buildings, built in the old days, towards the bottom, in a place where the most shadows happened to fall. Rain fell gently, making soft jazz with the metal and asphalt on the ground, and the city's lights were far away and remote. An open sewer ran on one side, smelling like a rotten perfume of moldy gym socks, kerosene, and lost dreams, and a bum was busy puking into it. I leaned against the slimy wall under the greenish glow of a halogen lamp, cigarette smoke curling and disappearing into the air.

After a couple minutes a black car purred to a stop under the bridge and three people got out - Sayonara and the two Trenchcoats. They walked towards me, ready to draw.

"What the hell is this?" I said, hands up.

"Boss McLane's tired of your shit," snapped the little Trenchcoat.

"I'm sorry, Joe," said Sayonara.

"Sayonara," I spat, "I should've known. Look, guys, it was just a job."

"We know you're working for the corps, gumshoe, and we ain't gonna tolerate any more snoopin'. The gig is up."

The little guy clicked his pistol and it whined with power, charging up. Three barrels stared at me, and I stared back, without much else to do.

"Sayonara."

"Joe. I'm sorry, but-"

Sayonara pulled a tiny four-shooter out of her handbag and blasted the little trenchcoat guy's head, knocking his hat off and leaving his brains bleeding out in the gutter. She snapped the Little Trenchcoat's laser pistol out of his hand and tossed it to me, and in a second I'd drawn a bead on Big Trenchcoat's forehead, with Sayonara on the other side.

"-I betrayed you," she finished.

"B-but…"

"We had a deal, yes. You paid me, so the deal's up. Sorry about that, Joe. It was the only way. These two guys are like parasites - I couldn't get them off without you. I believe you may have some questions for our friend here?"

I nodded and motioned with my pistol, and got Trenchcoat man up against the wall. I disarmed him and pocketed the gun. With my laser pistol to his back, I crossed his hands together and pressed - hard. He groaned.

"That hurt?" I increased pressure and he moaned, "Good. Now you say you're working for Eyes McLane, right?"

"Awk! Yes!"

"Good. You probably know all about our lost little brain, now, don't you? Probably reached the same conclusions as I have. In fact, I'd guess that if anything you've already made up your minds and started on getting back the goods yourselves. Anyway, there's just one thing that I don't know and that's Don Vid-Vid's hideout. Tell me where it is and you get to keep two arms to hold the crutches."

I blasted his right leg through the thigh and his left foot. He screamed and I slammed him against the wall.

"Where is he?!"

The trenchcoat man struggled to speak, "Fifty-third block. Tenth level."

"There," I said, waving the laser gun under his nose, "that wasn't so bad now, was it?"

I let him go and left him there, lying bawling on the wet pavement. Then I turned to Sayonara.

"I think you owe me some answers, dollface."

"Like what?" she said, turning those big blue eyes up at me.

"What's in that brain? Why does everyone want it so much? What's going on here? Ever since I heard about this goddamned brain everyone I've met has been on edge, looks like four different groups want to go apeshit to get it for themselves, and meanwhile a fuckin' ninja is out with my head on his bounty list!"

Sayonara paused and looked away, distraught.

"I-"

"What?"

"I can't. Because what's on that brain is beyond us all. It's a company secret - I don't know what they'd do if I told anyone outside the company's upper echelons about what's on it."

"It's really big, then. Something that could bust the company wide open."

"No shit, Joe, this isn't just codes and numbers. It's … I'm afraid what might happen to me if the word got out. What would happen to you."

She looked away, and the pale greenish-yellow light illuminated the side of her cheek. Her mascara was melting down from her eye, drawing a thin black streak. I pocketed the other gun and moved closer to her. There was a rumble as a static discharge leapt between the skyscrapers, and the rumble of thunder. Outside of the bridge the rain fell like a whitish sheet, overlaid with a patchwork quilt sewn with threads made of neon lights, making a backdrop of grey jazz.

"Try me."

"Biological warfare."

"What?!" I said, taken aback.

"Her brain contains the sequencing and growth procedures to code up a genetically engineered bacterium that can be induced into the water supply and the air. With MetaFact's links to the water and air purifier companies, if the bacillus got out they'd make a killing - people everywhere would be forced to buy MetaFact pharmaceuticals. VatGen would be slaughtered - being as nobody in the company is allowed to buy outside the company."

"Killing two bums with one shot."

"Exactly."

"Wait! You mean MemJay was delivering for MetaFact? I thought she was working with you VatGenners."

"No, she's a freelancer. Works for whoever pays her the higher price. MetaFact bidded higher than we could - or would."

"I see."

Like a jigsaw puzzle designed by an epileptic, the pieces were carefully being knocked into the whole framework with a sledgehammer. It was complex, but on the whole it seemed to make sense. I lit a cigarette and sat down on a nearby pile of old tyres, about to dial for another taxi. Out of the blue Sayonara's phone rang in her handbag and she answered it with a flurry of yes-sir's and no-sir's and I'll-get-on-it-sir's.

"Bad news, Joe."

"Is there ever anything to the contrary?"

"I've just been informed that Vid-Vid's just announced the deal to MetaFact and VatGen. The closing time for the deal is in six hours."

"It's the middle of the freaking night. No way those guys are in a state to bid smart."

Damn, I thought, he's good.

"Indeed. You've got six hours to get the suitcase to me, or the other half's off."

"We already talked, toots. I said I'm not gonna risk my ass trying to get this thing."

"You're the only detective that really knows the job."

"Sorry, but if you need a thug to do your dirty work, get another guy."

She paused, biting her lip.

"I'll double your pay."

Now that sounded better.

"Triple."

"Fine. That's still far less than what the initial price is. Just get the case and you'll get your triple."

"You got yourself a deal," I said, puffing the cigarette.

"Excellent."

Sayonara got into the black car, gorgeous legs and hip swinging, I knew, just for my sake.

When the taxi came screeching in, leaving smoke and burnt rubber even in the cold, heavy rain, I got in and told the driver to wing it to the destination, Devil take the cost of express. I checked the juice and ammo on the pistols one last time, feeling the thrum of the handgrip echo the jive of my own heart. Well, I thought to myself, here goes nothing.

Splitstar

mmm this guy is going to be filthy rich by the end of the job.

Really liking it AoD

AcolyteOfDeath

14.

As the taxi tore through the grimy Rotovilla streets like a hysterical housewife through a toy store just before Christmas, I lit more cigarettes and smoked them, gloomily staring out the time-fogged windows, watching streaks of neon blur past me like fireflies in an acid dream. Splashes of colour oozed over the windshield, poured like last Wednesday's coffee through the flimsy plastic, staining my lap with a rainbow tint; and glossy video billboards slid slickly past my eyes, bantering in shades of pure business. The guns in my pockets were like dead animals, still slightly warm; stiff and dead.

Christ, it hurts, I thought, wincing, absently grabbing a spot on my leg.

Out of the corner of my eye I spotted something and I told the driver to pull over on the kerb and wait.

"It's your money," she said, shrugging absently.

The sign in front of the place glowed pink, the scrawl spelling out a simple phrase: "Tea". I pushed through the door and for a moment, felt as if I'd been transported to another world. It took a second, but I began to notice the perfume of tea and herbs - it was so delicate I could hardly smell it, so used was I to the reek of city pollution. An old Jewish-looking man polished the lonely countertop with a rag so threadbare it was falling to pieces on the varnished ersatz rosewood.

If there was ever anything kitschy in Rotovilla (and God knows, there was) this place would have been its mean old grandfather. Next to a pile of withered oranges sitting on a shrine was a plastic light-up statue of Jesus, swathed in traditional neon, flickering quietly. Towards the right side an array of glass tea containers clashed with tired-looking posters of yesteryear's girls clad in transparent thread, and a battered-looking little black and white television, radiating dead fuzz, huddling in the corner. It looked like a jumbled patchwork attempt at putting together every failed fashion trend in interior decorating, held together by an attempt at some sort of imitation Japanese style, and topped off with a pasty incandescent that struggled to cast a pallid orange light over everything.

Despite this fact, the place still managed to feel at least halfway decent, unlike the other ninety-nine percent of the joints in Rotovilla; almost cozy. I got myself a seat and ordered a cup of the strongest tea the guy could bring up. Maybe it was the memories the place brought up.

Papa had always loved tea, and would try to get his hands on the stuff any way he could. It was goddamn expensive to get, though, because they couldn't just cook it up out of the yeast vats like everything else - it just wouldn't come out right no matter what they tried - so they'd have to get hydroponics and little radiation-cookers and the like. I could never really get the hang of the stuff at any rate. Papa was a relic, something out of an era that was six feet under and cold as nails a thousand years ago.

But maybe that was why he liked it. Because of the memories. Even as I sipped at the bittersweet brown liquid, and muttered under my breath that it tasted as much like shit as I could ever have imagined, I could almost feel the half-remembered past come fluttering up to the surface like the grainy black dregs at the bottom of the cup. Memories. It was all about memories. Nothing mattered, not the future, which didn't exist yet, or the past, which already went by, and not the present, which would be gone anyway. Only what you could dimly remember mattered; only that was what made you who you were. All else was bound to go in the trash-heap anyway, so who cared?

I was woken up from my depressed musings by a pasty face with bristling brows and heavy glasses.

"Finish up that cup. It's closing time."

I glanced at a sign tacked up on the wall.

"It says here that closing time's not for another hour. What kind of all-nighter are you running here, pops?"

"Gotta. It's dangerous these days. Didn't you hear? Lots of corporate manpower's been stalking around here lately. It's unsafe - more than usual. There! You hear that?"

I listened and could hear the grumble of a huge helicopter-liner as it flew past.

"What's that?"

"Transports. Coming and going a lot these days, carrying men, lots of men. All in suits and guns. You know what I think?" he said, leaning forward conspiratorially.

"What?"

"I think there's going to be a war soon."

"War? No way - the companies wouldn't risk an open war - it'd damage their reputations! It's way too costly, way too much risk for too little profit."

"I don't know. But something is coming, and I think it's coming soon. Two hundred, by the way."

The immediacy of the situation grew on me like a looming shadow over my shoulder, and I paid the man his money and split. I threw myself into the taxi and told the driver to put pedal to the metal. I had to get to Don Vid-Vid's place - pronto.

The taxi jostled and jived its way through the night city like a speeding black and yellow reptile, screaming out a cry so loud I thought it's motor would explode from the concussion alone. Orange, red and yellow drifted past me, coloured shadows in the night. As we reached the spot it turned out to be a large abandoned warehouse built towards the middle of the old industrial warrens, a ruined graveyard of last year's boom factories and warehouses. I told the driver to go easy and drive quieter than a game of solitaire in a mortuary. The taxi crawled along the side of the rusty chain-link fence, purring to itself, and I scoped out the place, my breath fogging up the window.

It was lonely and dark, being far away from the bright neon glow that lit up the city in parts where business was still alive and kicking. It seemed to me that the only light came from the weak green of fluorescents left behind by drifters and deadbeats that had come and gone. Seemed to me like the perfect place for a shady little deal.

We parked in a little alley next to a ragged hole in the fence, and I gave the driver my due pay. I hobbled through the hole, careful not to get my trenchcoat caught on the rusty wires, and slipped in, gravel crunching underfoot. I drew a pistol, hearing it whine to life. Suddenly a pair of lights lit up in the dark and I dodged behind a corner, pistol raised. There was some talking and out of the warehouse came a pair of men, who opened the gate. A black car slid in like an oily snake in the dark, high beams lighting up the deserted lot. The door opened and four people stepped out and followed the two gatemen inside.

I waited a couple of minutes for them to walk out of hearing range and ran over to the warehouse door, making sure there wasn't anyone around. That was strange - for a place like this, with a deal like that, you'd figure that there'd be a bunch of goons with mean weapons and worse attitudes snooping around. I reached the warehouse door and found that it was a lot larger than I'd assumed it to be; about ten metra tall and fifteen wide. Crying rust from every little hole, it seemed flimsy enough to break into until I saw the steel rebar making plaid patterns over its corrugated surface. I looked around until I saw a small door carved into it, with hinges bolted to the metal with nuts the size of my fist. I tried the handle. Unsurprisingly, it was locked.

"Sealed up tighter than an eel's asshole," I muttered to myself, feeling the door.

As usual, old Lady Luck had a bone to pick with me, and instead of smiling she was going after me with a wooden two by four with a nail stuck in it. If there was any way I'd get into that building it'd be the hard way or the highway, and I'd used up all my money.

On the other side of the warehouse I spotted an old service ladder so weatherbeaten it looked like it was trying to huddle from the cold in a jacket of red iron fillings, looking more corroded and eaten than a hobo's rags that'd gone through a washing machine. I lit a cigarette, gritted it between my teeth and pulled myself up onto the ladder, trying to climb as the rungs fell to dust under my feet. Somehow I managed to drag myself to the top of the building. I could see that the roof curved up somewhat, and was dotted with a handful of weird little air vents and grates that looked as if they had been taken out of a junk bin and stuck there at the whims of a drunk architect. There was a stairwell at the far end of the building and I walked towards it quietly, puffing on the cigarette.

The door was closed, but I tried the handle and found it to be unlocked, just stuck shut. Vid-Vid apparently didn't know the importance of old maintenance entrances. After a bit of jostling it came loose and I slipped down the stairwell.

Inside it was darker than a funeral in a cave with the walls painted black. I lit a match and held it up. Far as I could tell the stairwell kept going down for a couple metra and reached a sharp turn to the left. Cobwebs dripped from the ceiling, gathering dust, as if the spiders themselves had abandoned the building in search for better business. I walked down carefully and when I turned, found myself on a dark catwalk, orange light streaming downwards under me from lamps hung from the ceiling. The catwalk ran straight across the warehouse and all around the periphery, next to the banks of lightless windows, all spiderwebbed with broken glass. The warehouse was piled with last year's junk - this year's decomposing piles of ash-covered garbage - reaching almost to the ceiling. Rusted iron t-beams criss-crossed in a matrices around me, holding up the roof.

I heard voices and got down on my belly, staring through the grate.

There was a short, balding man in a purple pinstriped suit, a fat stogie clenched between his pronounced, Italian lips. He was flanked by a pack of snarling, leering gangsters in black and white zoot-suits. It was like a meeting of survivalists at a gun fanatic's convention held inside a munitions factory; you could smell the reek of too much testosterone from twenty kaymetra away.

They stood in the narrow aisle made by the two opposing piles of crates and giant, time-melted metal hulks. Facing them were two other groups, made up of a lunatic's gallery of shifty-looking suits, accountant-types, paper-pushers, crusty-looking businessmen and weapon-wielding cyborgs rippling with one too many muscle grafts. They walked towards the center of the warehouse, where four aisles, meandering through the abandoned junk, met.

"Okay," said the short, fat man whom I assumed to be Don Vid-Vid, "here's de deal. Foist tings foist, drop your weapons; I got this whole place covered."

He gestured with a pudgy hand covered in so much gold I thought it was a glove. The two corporate groups looked at the piles and out of the tops, emerging from the shadows, were more gangsters, armed with nasty-looking sniper rifles. Pleased with himself, Vid-Vid went on.

"Second: Bidding closes in four hours. You got yawselves dat much toime to buy, or your little brain gets it."

A female gangster dressed in fire-engine red and a big lacy black hat came forward, hips swinging sensuously, and placed a heavy-looking metal suitcase down on the floor. It wore a belt made of dynamite sticks, with a buckle made from an alarm clock. The liquid crystals ran backwards, a little red countdown dancing down till doomsday. Some of the corporates gasped, but most of their meat just growled. Vid-Vid chuckled.

"I got the remote detonator. We sell dis shit, I turn off the bomb. Else… KABOOM! Heheh. Thoid: Bidding stawts at ten thousand. Let's do some business, shall we, men?"

I lit a cigarette and was about to shuffle forward and do some sort of action-movie buttkicking with two guns, when all of a sudden there was a silent whisper of black boots and a curious singing noise so familiar to me it was almost a cliché, and the blunt edge of a polished blade ran like liquid steel along my jugular.

"Well, well, well," said the bounty hunter's deep basso, "Looks like I caught a rat."

"I got some questions for you, pal," I said, not moving.

"Curiosity killed the cat, Joe. Question time's over. Before I'm done with you you'll be singing like a bird."

"So we're on a first name basis, now are we? Pleased to meet you."

"The pleasure's entirely mine, I assure you."

The blade slid past and disappeared and before I could turn I felt a sharp pain in the small of my back, numbness spread like liquid ice through my body and I blacked out faster than my apartment building on a hot day with all the appliances on.

TechnoTorgo

so mindnumblingingly long.....

Splitstar

mindnumblingly long... but mindnumblingly great.

cant wait what will happen to him next.Why do you leave me hanging so!

AcolyteOfDeath

Okay... umm... for those of you who haven't picked it up by now, this novel is really quite a satire on the cliches in detective noir, cyberpunk novels, and action movies.

Just a primer for this ARGH-ingly clichéd chapter...

15.

When I woke up the Rotovilla Technopercussion Orchestra was doing a tour through my head and I had front row season tickets. I was touring the modern art gallery in a museum designed by an epileptic on an acid trip and was dizzier than a drunk housefly in a whirlwind, and the first thing I felt for was the cigarette packet in my breastpocket. It was empty.

I was in a grimy little back room - not more than a closet - lit by a piss-coloured incandescent hanging from the ceiling. Gaining a little more of my senses, I realized that I was trussed up like a turkey up for roast, and by the looks of it, was about to be basted with a marinade my own fluids, if these guys knew anything about standard interrogation methods. The pistol I'd been holding was confiscated, but I had the other in my pocket - the lunkheads must've done a pretty shoddy job one-upping me. If only I could reach it…

I'd hardly managed to wiggle my fingers before the door burst open and in came a pair of big hairy apes so bristling with muscle that it was a wonder that their zoot suits weren't torn into confetti. They grabbed me and dragged me to my feet, putting me up against the wall.

In walked Don Vid-Vid, and behind him stood his flunkies. I spotted the woman gangster and the weak light managed to catch a little of her face under that hat. I saw half of a pair of luscious red butterflies and a flash of powder blue eyes.

"Sayonara," I spat, "I knew you were wrapped up in this somehow."

"Joe, I'm sorry. I had no choice," she said.

"That's what they all say, Sayonara, that's what they all say."

"I hate to break up dis little reunion," interjected the Don, "but we got some questions dat need answerin'."

"Well, I've got a few questions of my own."

"Sorry, mister, but youse ain't gonna ask anytin'. 'Ey Gino, Butch!"

"Wait," said a low voice from behind that I immediately recognized as the Bounty Hunter's, "What if he doesn't survive? He's worth a lot to me."

"'Ey, don't worry, Bounty Hunter, Butch an' Gino know when to quit."

The Don chuckled and made a little nod with his pudgy head, slicked black hair bobbing. One of the apes raised a fist and it was like boxing in the ring with Cyborg Lee aboard a train conducted by a charging rhinoceros. I reeled and the world was reeling with me.

"An' dat's just a taste of what's in store for youse. Now we can make dis hard or we can make it easy, youse give us de info we want or you'll sleep wit' de fishes."

"Fuck you, man, fuck you," I said, acid and bile almost spewing from my lips.

Vid-Vid smiled tightly, a smile full of venom and needles.

"Mess 'im up, Gino. I'll be back in an hour ta check on da 'progress'. C'mon Sayonara, ain't nuttin' ta see here anymore."

Gino and Butch stepped into the little room after Vid-Vid and his entourage left to continue with the bidding. Gino sized me up for a second, then turned to Butch.

"'Ey Butch, 'ee looks like a junky to me. Got the shakes pretty damn badly dontcha think?"

"'Ey yeah! Les' just lock 'im in dere for a while and let 'im sweat. Save me from hurtin' my fist. 'Ey, you got de cards?"

"Yep, all fitty-two positions an' de chips too. Les' go."

Butch and Gino walked out and pulled over a pair of stools, then locked the door with a click that sounded like a .35 being cocked. Now they were pretty right about the withdrawal setting in, my system had been pumped so high with adrenaline that I plain forgot about the pain in my leg and the sweet siren song of drugs calling my name. Now with some time to cool down, the plain wanting was singing high and true in my head like a pair of alto sopranos hitting C-major to the tune of fingernails on chalkboard. But the muscleheads overestimated just how bad it was. I was a junky, sure, but not as bad as they thought I was.

The room swirling in dizzy colours as if coated in a paint job by Salvador Dali on a mescaline trip, I struggled to my feet and pulled my pistol out of my pocket.

I went over to the door and pawed it over, doing the classic withdrawal act, mumbling and groaning to myself just to lure the poker addicts into a false sense of security. It was made of flaking iron, coated in peeling rust wallpaper, and I found a couple of holes. They were there, not far from the door, right across the small corridor; whether they were more intent on the game or the holographic nudes on the cards, I couldn't tell. I raised the pistol and made three well-placed bets.

Gino went down like a sack of wet rice, and Butch got it in the arm. He turned and went out of my line of sight. I could hear him curse into a comm.

"Shit! He's gotta gun and just plugged Gino. Get someone here, fast!"

A burst of riot gun bullets tore through the flimsy door like an angry cat through a wet paper bag and I ducked to the side. I stole a glance and whipped back just as a spray of ripper bullets made more holes in the flaking iron than a Swiss cheese through a drill factory, managing to crack off a few blasts of my own. The air was pregnant with the smell of ozone and smoke.

Suddenly there was a far-off thump and I heard Butch's comm scream, "Holy shit, it's Eyes McLane's men!" as it drowned in white noise. Butch began to yell into the comm.

"What do you mean? Whaddaya talkin' about? Hey! Anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Shit!"

I took advantage of the distraction and quickly scanned the room. On the ceiling I spied a vent shaft. The grille seemed to be connected to larger air vent system, probably accessed from outside, in the corridor. I could use that to get around without being noticed. I pulled an extra ammo clip from the inside pocket and snapped it in, the gun whining as it warmed up. I fired and blew the lock open, and rushed into the corridor just as Butch snapped up and whipped out a withering hail of fire with my name on it.

I ducked and rolled, snapping off several shots, and Butch went down, his leg seared in a puff of red. I put myself flat up against the wall, in the narrow recess of the door opposite of the torture room. He dragged himself past the corner at the other end of the corridor.

Adrenaline flew through my blood like an aircar driven by a speed addict. I let off two shots and Butch returned fire with a flurry of bolts, eating away at the mealy fibercrete wall. Suddenly there were voices down the other corridor, to my right, and Butch yelled to them, "Over here! He's got himself jammed in. Over here! I need backup, now!"

"Get 'em!" came a voice from down the corridor.

An oddly hollow sound, like that of a metal can bouncing, came and a canister ricocheted off the corner and rolled down towards Butch. I whipped my trenchcoat around myself and ducked into the jamb. An explosion rang, louder than a Death Metal concert trying to play over the sound of a piledriver crew. Bits of Butch, red and flecked with bits of black, charred skin, went flying. Smoke filled the corridor, and through it I heard the tramp of footsteps.

"Damn turncoats! Once McLane gets troo wit Vid-Vid he'll come afta youse! Give up!"

I bolted, turning down the other corridor as searing yellow bolts came screaming after me. In the corridor I saw a vent grate, a pile of boxes to the side, and an opportunity. Maybe Lady Luck wasn't such a bad dame after all. I pushed off of the boxes, grabbed on to the grate, and it snapped open as the smoke began to clear and the other gangsters began pouring down the adjacent corridor. I scrabbled and pulled myself into the air vents just as a flurry of black suits and trenchcoats came running down under me.

Okay, I thought to myself, now where do I go? I looked forward. It was black, except for the pale orange light streaming up through grates every five metra. I could hear explosions and gunfire further onwards. I decided to let the noise help me and follow the carnage. Likely it'd lead back to the main warehouse room. I crawled along the vents, stopping to observe every now and then, taking note of the fact that the air was unusually still and hot, probably owing to the fact that the fans didn't work anymore. Like everything else, the vents were coated in thin moisture, and were eaten with pools of ugly red and yellow rust, with gaping holes from where acid rain had corroded through.

After a short while it began to slope up, and the square walls soon became curved, kinked in most places, of course, and I could tell that I was reaching the main room. It had pipe-vents. I scrambled my way up a slope. The muffled sounds of fighting carried, echoingly, through the vents, and I could hear gangsters scream and swear as they killed each other in the corridors. I began to discern the sounds of frantic numbers being screamed out. I reached one of the grates and peered down.

The black shadow of an iron beam bisected my view, but from one side I could see Don Vid Vid and his crew, with the suitcase in their hands, crouching in one of the alleyways formed by the stacks of boxes, and the suits in other alleys, screaming their bids as they madly competed with the increasingly loud sound of gunfire in other parts of the warehouse.

"One million!"

"One-point-five million!"

A deafening explosion thundered out from the side, and more gangsters - I wasn't sure if they were Vid-Vid's goons or McLane's thugs - poured in through the still-smoking hole in the wall and ran down a nearby corridor, Tommy guns brandished.

"Two million!" screamed an exec.

"Two fifty!"

"Two hundred six-"

KABOOM!

"What's dat?" screamed Vid-Vid.

"Three million!"

I felt carefully for the screws and lowered myself out from the vent. I found myself standing between a hard place and a harder place - in the rafters of the warehouse, surrounded by criss-crossing iron I-beams, looking down on the scene. It was pretty shadowy up here, and I was pretty sure that the people down there were too busy minding their own asses to worry about one snooping detective on the ceiling.

I got comfortable on my perch and was settling in to watch the scene develop, trying to figure out a plan in my mind to get that suitcase and Vid-Vid's remote at the same time.

All of a sudden I sensed a presence up here with me, watching, and in my mind I could almost feel the hiss of a black poncho through the air, and hear the low, silent hum of a pair of wicked samurai swords being drawn. I whipped my head around, and instantly the world around me did a Technicolor minuet. I grabbed my forehead with one hand and an iron beam with the other. It must have been the withdrawal. Making me see things.

I took a few breaths and glared back at the scene. Then the gentle, sibilant whine of a laser pistol warming up focused my mind the way only a gun to the head could, and I quietly raised both hands.

"Go on," I said, sighing. "Gimme your best."

"Deal's changed," said the Bounty Hunter.

"Oh yeah?"

"Now I gotta get you alive. Get up. Slowly. Keep your hands up."

I was about to stand when an explosion rocked the building and the entire south wall shuddered. As the smoke cleared, I could hear an all-too familiar sound slowly resonate through the warehouse. The sound of huge, heavy metal feet goose-stepping on a flimsy metal plate floor. A menacing, synthesised voice ground out, and I could see the slight flourish of a big beige overcoat advance down Don Vid-Vid's alleyway.

"MetaFact police!" said the Big Clunker as many metal-shod boots tramped in behind him; the blue, beetle-like forms of armoured corporate police. "You have no right to remain silent. Every action you take will be dealt with using maximum force. Desist immediately."

"Fuck that!" screamed a voice from atop a pile of crates across the room. A row of Vid-Vid's hired gorillas popped up, decked out in submachine guns, fedoras and black coats flying. Just as the thugs were about to open fire, a corridor to another part of the warehouse trembled and through a blanket of grey smoke came a line of McLane's men in beige and white, wielding more kinds of weapons than a survivalist inventor's booth at a gun fanatic convention. As good a time as any to take advantage of the distraction.

I turned, whipping out my pistol, expecting to do or die, but to my surprise, the Bounty Hunter was gone. That was enough. I brushed off my trenchcoat and stalked out onto the central beam, into the forest of criss-crossing iron.

Things were about to get interesting…

Splitstar

sexy stuff AoD. now i realy cant wait for the nest part. why dont you just sit and write all day.

gj keep writing

AcolyteOfDeath

Heheh Yaaaay! A reply from one of my most dependable readers! You know, I really haven't said this enough, really, but I really appreciate your comments and feedback, Splitstar! You're one of the few reasons that I keep writing!

I'll try and finish the next chapter by tomorrow (the OMG! Epic CLIMAX!) and maybe the last chapter by the day after.

Anyhow, thank you, Splitstar, I always appreciate your devoted readership, and I hope you'll like the stuff that I'll churn out in the future (and it will be a lot... it's just that I'm a high school junior and I have lots of studying to do, that's all. I'm not a full-time author or anything. ;D )

Mazel tov.

~AoD

AcolyteOfDeath

IT'S FINIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISHED! WHOOPEEEEEE! REJOICE! HALLELUJAH!

16.

When he was still alive, Papa would always say to me, "When you're stalking a psychotic ninja bounty hunter in the rafters of an abandoned warehouse, remember to always, always check: One, where you're stepping and Two, where you're shooting. Every shot has to count, and every step has to count. Remember that, kid."

I could remember thinking at the time, Now when the hell would I ever need that advice? Now I was glad that Papa told me that when I was still young and impressionable, because if there was ever a time when every step and shot mattered, this would be it.

I felt my breast pocket for a cigarette and remembered that I was out. A pang of regret echoed its way through my body, and I remembered for a second that I was suffering from some pretty heavy withdrawal. I shrugged; it could wait for later. I had a bounty hunter to hunt. Quickly, I stole a glance at the brouhaha down below. It looked as if there was still a lot of gunfire going on elsewhere in the warehouse, and that Vid-Vid and his buddies were busy trying to sneak out as the MetaFact cops were pinned under the glare of a dozen rifles. Since everyone was busy pointing guns at each other, pretty much everyone ended up stuck tighter than a virgin nun in a trash compactor.

I stalked through the rafters, the beam trembling like a speed junky under my feet with every step. I shifted the fedora on my head and glanced around, ears open, straining to listen over the sound of now-not-so-far-off gunfire for the whisper of a black poncho, or the soft singing of a polished samurai blade. Unfortunately for me, I was no cyber-samurai, so to me, moving around and trying to find the guy in the dark rafters was harder than looking for a black needle in a lightless room while wearing gloves and blindfolded.

Suddenly, there he was! He was standing in the elbow where two iron beams met, and I could see the light flicker off of the sword. I took cover behind a pole and raised my pistol, getting ready to give him a 38mm salute.

My aim was disrupted when all of a sudden there was a crash from the ceiling. A dozen black armoured, pale-faced troopers crashed through the roof to the sound of black chopper blades, toting black rifles, blackly. Searchlights shone through the gaping holes in the roof, and a loudspeaker screamed, "Surrender! VatGen police! Anything that you do or say will be dealt with using maximum force!"

A cry from down below, from the MetaFact suits, "That's a copyright infringement! There'll be litigation to see!"

"Hey, shut the fuck up and surrender already, okay?"

I backed away, leaning against a pole, into the shadows, when there was a groan and the sound of twisting metal. The beam was buckling worse than a seventy year-old hooker during an asthma attack. It gave one last creak before the entire shebang came crashing down, followed by a blanket of dust so thick it made the smoke weep in self-pity. Then the shooting started. I lost the Bounty Hunter in the confusion, but I bet that it had been a set up all along, just another one of his traps.

I landed in the narrow walkway between some crates and piles of junk, groping for my pistol. When I felt it, I snapped it up, the magnetic chamber whining up. I glared around, coughing, and more helpless than a blind paraplegic in a darkroom. Naturally, I decided to run forward blindly, gun drawn and hope for the best. I'd made it at least five metra through the blinding grey blanket before I met with a do-not-cross sign made of tempered polysteel with my name on it. I thought it was the Bounty Hunter, before the blade withdrew and out of the smoke charged a gangster in black, wildly flailing his samurai sword, cutting the air between me and him.

"Yaaaaaah!" he screamed.

"AAAAAAAH!" I screamed, more out of surprise than fear, but at the time, both more mixed up in me than a martini through a blending machine.

"Yaaaaaah! DIE, CORPORATE SWINE!"

He swung to the left, I parried to the right, and then dodged to the left, as he swung to the right. A feint, a jab, a quick cut along the kisser (mine, of course), my pistol got sick of running backwards with me and fired off a lead retort, and somehow I ended leaning against a crate with a samurai sword sticking into it, just centimetra from my ear. I wiped at the blood flow on my cheek and moved down the alleyway, a little more slowly this time.

The air smelt of fear and gunpowder. The Rotovilla orchestra was collaborating with the gun loonies in making a lead and laser fire symphony. Someone had taken out his pet rocket launcher and was introducing it to everyone within a hundred metra to it, personally. From above there was the whirring sound of hovership turbines and the screams of death and bloodshed as the two corporate police squads, McLane's syndicate goons, and Don Vid-Vid's mercenary thugs clashed. It was hotter than an oven in the middle of a blast furnace during a nuclear meltdown, and there were only three things on my mind: staying alive, getting the suitcase, and staying alive. Also, it'd would've been great to have had something to smoke - anything.

As I stalked through the alley more evidence of the battle going on around me became clear, as I stumbled from one corpse to the other. Fortunately for me I managed to pull one man's smoking cigar out of his cold, dead fingers and get a fine reunion with good Old Man Nicotine, with sweet Lady Tar following up the rear. For a moment I paused, sucking in that godawful smoke, letting the seductive taste of carbon monoxide, tar and creosote soak into my lungs and throat. Tasted like charcoal and sulphur. Then I coughed for a while and noticed the label on the cigar.

I mumbled a string of swear words and tossed it away - far away. Soon afterwards I heard an explosion louder than a piledriver to the head after a night of vodka, and two gangsters came flying through the air my way, Tommy guns still spitting fire as they careened, screaming their heads off.

I heard a yell and the sounds of running footsteps. In front of me was an intersection where my alleyway joined the slightly larger one. I raised my pistol in anticipation and heard loud whispers of, "Quick, dis way! C'mon!" and "You got dat case?"

Vid-Vid and his personal cadre! I readied for action, peering out around the corner. Vid-Vid, surrounded by gangsters, with Sayonara at his side, was running through the smoke and ash, jiggling like gelatin in an earthquake. I spotted a gangster lagging behind, and in his hand was the heavy suitcase. As the group ran past, I dashed forward and pushed the gangster into the alleyway on the other side. I slapped my hand on his mouth and plugged him through the head. Picking up the suitcase, I began heading towards one of the holes in the wall when there was a click at the back of my head, and the hairs on the nape of my neck prickled as they were caressed by cold metal.

"Put the case down, Joe."

"Sayonara!"

She leaned down beside me, grabbing the case with one hand, keeping the magnum trained at the base of my skull. She smelled of cigarettes and cheap perfume. I caught a glimpse of a well-placed mole on her cheek, and glistening red butterfly lips.

"I'll have to thank you, Joe, for getting me this."

"Sayonara, you double-crossin' Benedict Arnold! We had a deal!"

"I'm sorry Joe, but the deal's over."

"Here's what you wanted," came a voice from beside her. Deep, quiet voice. I caught a glimpse of a black poncho and wide-brimmed cowboy hat. Spurs jingled and jangled on black boots next to me. The Bounty Hunter.

"So, you were working with each other all along!"

"That's right. My friend here," said Sayonara as she turned me to face the Bounty Hunter, "has been extremely helpful in pushing you from place to place. And now that I've got the brain, and the codes, you are of no more service to me. Thanks again."

She kissed me on the lips and trained the gun on my forehead.

"Sayonara, Joe. Sayonara and see you later."

There was a click.

"Wait!" I asked, "What about the codes? What're you gonna do, Sayonara?"

"Memory Jane conveniently hacked some data. I found the tapes, and it turns out that the companies long knew of the bacterium. While VatGen was cooking up the bacteria, MetaFact was engineering a cure. Jane stole the cure to this, and without it, both companies are helpless. My bounty hunter here managed to get Jane's memlock code, so all I need to do is unlock her brain and download her data."

"You - you're gonna hold them ransom, aren't you?"

"Bingo, Joe," a cattish smile, "Once I release the bacterium into the MetaFact and VatGen acology water supplies they'll have no choice but to buy the cure from me or die. Then he and I-" she pointed at the Bounty Hunter, "- will split the earnings. It's the perfect deal."

"You just wanted a fall man. A go-to guy to help you get the brain! Damn. And I thought I had you figured out. You dirty bitch."

She blew me a kiss, "I love you too, Joe."

She squeezed the trigger and there was a deafening explosion. I winced and opened an eye. The afterlife looked a lot like the present. I was covered in flecks of blood and gore, and Sayonara's headless body stood there for a second, motionless, and then fell, with a sickening crunch, to the floor. The Bounty Hunter lowered his still-smoking gun.

"All those times you tried to kill me," I said, breathlessly.

He walked calmly over to the case and picked it up by the handle.

"Just business. Memory Jane got me to keep her safe until she got the data out of her system. She didn't have the money yet when she hired me, and we were planning to split the earnings once she got paid. I thought you were one of them, out to get her data before she and I did. It's worth a lot of money. I'm just fulfilling my part of the bargain. I'd advise you to stay out of my way - for your sake."

"Don't worry," I said, picking myself up, shaking more violently than a railbus driven by a junky during an epileptic attack, "I'm not gonna get myself into anything else. I'm in far too deep as it is."

Then I saw the red numbers running down, doing the liquid crystal Charleston.

"What about the timer?"

"That was an unforeseen complication. We need to get the detonator and defuse it."

"What, can't you use your cool cyber-samurai ninja skills and disarm it?"

He gave me a look that would've frozen the gas in the air if it hadn't been full of deafening gunfire. The Bounty Hunter stowed the case into some spot on his back under his poncho and ran off, swords drawn, slicing through the gangsters like a whirling blender set on liquefy. I took off after him.

Until now I hadn't paid attention to how fast he could run, but now, chasing after him instead of the other way around, I noticed that he was going faster than a Rotovilla taxicab in a race with half a minute to the finish line. Following him was easy - all I had to do was follow the trail of neatly sliced gangsters - it was keeping up that was the hard part.

I turned down a corridor and up a flight of stairs, hearing the sounds of gangster puree being prepared as I ran along. Adrenaline soared in my blood like an electrical surge through the power grid. Finally I caught up with him as he was whirling through a pack of gangsters armed with everything from rapiers, to machetes, to chainsaws. Down the hall was a door that led to the warehouse office. The Bounty Hunter was a blur of black, a whirlwind of flashing silver and shadow. I heard the singing of the swords as a single note, ringing through the air like the whistles at the Shopadopolis downtown on opening day.

Gun at ready I sneaked past the commotion, hugging the wall, counting on my clothing to disguise me amongst the press of trenchcoat-clad, fedora-wearing Mafiosi that swarmed towards the Bounty Hunter.

I busted through the door and saw Vid-Vid, busy trying to squeeze his bulk through the cluttered office, towards a service ladder leading to the roof. Oozing sweat from every pore, he looked like something from Happy Chow Restaurant, pasty white, round, and swimming in grease and oil. He turned and noticed me pointing my gun at him.

"I don't got nothin' coppa, I swear! Dey… dey dropped da case back dere! Dat's whatchoo want, right? Just da case! Listen, flatfoot, if we get outta dis alive, I'ma give you summa my proime real-estate. Woith a fortune!"

I was silent, cocking the gun, feeling the chamber load a magnetic bullet. Vid-Vid tugged nervously at his collar.

"You want cash? H-hey, I got cash! I got lotsa cash! Here, lemme get my MTU ou-"

I plugged him in the neck as he reached for a Tommy gun, conveniently placed in a violin case next to his feet, and took the detonator out of his pocket, switching it off.

A huge, subterranean rumble growled through the air, making the windows shake, and I looked up at the ruined mess of the ceiling. MetaFact gunships, big, long, fish-looking things with four turbine rotors, one on each corner, flew in to serenade the VatGen choppers with a song of ripper cannon fire. One got caught in the blades and it plummeted down, smashing into the side of the warehouse in a scream of metal and flame. The fire spread…

There was an explosion outside. It must've caught some high powered ammo still in storage. I ran out the door, past the carnage, screaming to the Bounty Hunter, "Run! Get outta here! It's gonna blow!" as I dodged down the stairs and through the war-torn wreckage. The last I saw of him was a black-ponchoed form, clutching a suitcase in the crook of his arm, half a sword in the other hand, crashing through a window and into the night.

I pushed past panicking gangsters too busy either killing or being killed to notice yet another guy in a fedora and trenchcoat running around, escaping through the hole. I was running full-kilter across the lot, gravel crunching under my feet, bleeding sweat faster than I jogged. I turned back for a moment and saw squads of corporate gunships in a deadly dance of death swinging in lazy circles around the warehouse, exchanging love-tokens made of metal and napalm. The sound of chopper blades and turbines and rocket fire was clanging in my head, as if a hyperactive kid on methamphetamines was playing percussion with pots and pans in my skull.

Then bloody hell broke out of its cage and went on a midnight tour of the town. I threw myself to the ground, eardrums pounding in protest, as exploding gas and flame billowed out from the warehouse to a marching tune made of tinkling glass. Explosion after explosion rocked me like a baby in a cradle tended by an abusive mother during a storm on the Sludge Sea. For a second I blacked out and when I came to the fires had died down to a hellish simmer, licking against the twisted iron skeleton of what was left of the warehouse. Around me lay bits of debris and charred bodies.

I stumbled up and tottered out of the lot. I turned the corner next to a darkened building into the alley. The cabby was gone, so I called another one. What did I have to lose?

As the city flickered past, eternal night life dancing like a neon stripper in a laser show, the taxi murmuring around me, I fell into a deep sleep, and dreamt of stolen hopes and dark women.

17.

When it came time to pay the bills, it was almost assured that I'd have the reliable alarm clock of Crazy Akhmed's fist pounding on my door to wake me up in the morning. Every day he'd threaten to throw me out if I didn't cough up the dough this instant, and every day I'd put another bullet hole through the fogged glass on my door to chase him away. If I knew Crazy Akhmed, I wouldn't be keeping this act up for long.

Business was no better now than before, and I was down and out on my luck. I'd spent what few thousand credits remained in my bank account getting high and seeking help at AI consultants over the net. They all said that I had no hope of survival if I didn't get some new organs - and fast.

So it wasn't really much concern for me that Akhmed would be bringing his big guns on me to throw me out or, more likely, kill me. After all, what did a man who had only a few more months to live worry about except how to make it come faster?

I'd stopped trying to figure out the Memory Jane case long, long ago. It had more intrigue, twists, and turns than a pulp novel written by a sewer mutant, and made just about as much sense. Suffice to say, I was not going to be stupid enough to take a case like that for a very long time. I was pretty content to stick with sleuthing low and quiet - that is - spying on love affairs for suspicious spouses. Even that market, though, was pretty dry nowadays, as angry husbands and wives were more content to hire bounty hunters to kill their lovers outright and get different ones. I couldn't argue. There were plenty of fish in the sea, but none were biting my line.

When the phone rang, I placed down one more ace of spades and took a swig of good old '25 on the rocks before sighing and picking up the handle. Lover cases tended to be worth about three day's worth of food and amenities, and the anticipation of a meal that wasn't picked out of the dumpsters tended to make one go for anything.

"This that snoop?"

"Yeah, it's me. Whatcha need?"

"I need you to investigate my wife…"

I sighed, "Yeah? Who's d'you think she's sneaking out with?"

"No, it's not that. She's dead. I want to know who did it."
Now this seemed much more interesting, but I could sniff the edges of a Memory Jane case sneaking up on me. A note of caution came into my voice, and I could tell it sounded a lot more like fear and apprehension than anything else.

"Oh yeah?"

"I - I think gangsters might have done it."

He had a sobbing, tight kind of voice that reminded me of a rat, even over the phone.

"Where are you?"

"Eastern Region. Th-th-Third level."

I gritted the cigarette in my mouth. That was a long way from the Northern Region.

"Oh yeah?"

"Uh… uh-huh. We've had some trouble with the Raging Salamis for some time."

"The whats?"

"Local Syndicate goons. I think they're behind this. Please, I'm desperate, mister. You gotta come. You're my last option - I don't know who to turn to. Everyone's with the Syndicate, or the drug barons, or the gangs here. Please…"

Now that turned me off. Sounded exactly like how the Memory Jane case began.

"No way, man. I'm afraid I can't take your case."

"But-"

"Sorry. Try another guy. Try a bounty hunter. I hear they're taking over sleuthing in this town."

I began to pull the handle away from my ear when the man cried out.

"W-wait!"

"What?"

"I- I- I can pay. We've got money."

"Oh yeah? How much?"

"W-w-well.. Umm. How does a million credits sound to you? Enough?"

I swear he could have heard the sound of my jaw dropping to the floor from across the phone lines from here to there.

"Er… will this be… after the case?"

"I can pay it all in advance if you want! Just anything to find out who killed my wife!"

"I'll be there before you can say 'murder'."

I snapped the handle down to the receiver. It sounded like my luck was about to turn. I threw on my trenchcoat, checked the MTU, and sure enough, there were those zeroes, smiling in neon green. I grabbed a few things, threw them into my suitcase and set my fedora on at a rakish angle. The last thing I did was tack a note on my door. I'm leaving. So long and sayonara.

Splitstar

I love your use of clichés.

I would have posted quicker but i wanted to bump this thread in response to your appreciation post. I didn’t notice that you posted a story rite afterward.

Now let me say again I love your use of clichés. The ending was great. I big storm then calm rite before another storm.

gj another beautiful story written

Falcrum

Hey AoD, are you still writing Mindjacker or have you postponed it for now? Regardless, this is still a brilliant story.

AcolyteOfDeath

I am, but now, as I look back on the text, I'm growing more and more convinced that it needs a great deal of refinement and revision. You should expect an update by today or tomorrow, if all goes well.

~AoD

Falcrum

Thnx, can't wait.