Jack Newman shouldered past the six-inch reinforced alloy
frame of the self-driving armored personnel carrier into SoMa town, San
Francisco, shards of glass and crumbling asphalt crunching beneath his tactical
boots like the rib cages of small mammals. He squinted through mean wind that
tasted of burning batteries, to take in the broken majesty of AT&T park.
Half of the Giants Stadium had collapsed like some 20th century rendition of
the Roman Colosseum, its steel bones digested by the stomach acid of Pacific
sea salt and the floor-by-floor demolition of state budgets. The more obscure
consumption of the United States by its financial élite, that infestation of
white-shoed tapeworms who devoured all legitimate business, all productivity,
leaving nothing but stinking piles of economic feces and fraudulent bank paper
where metropoli once boomed.
The Bay itself had gone the color of bile, the
ocean heaving nauseous from a trillion tons of anthropocentric carbon, vomiting
itself across South Beach Harbor parking lot and playground, washing wrecked
yachts across the highway against bent street signs and abandoned cars and the
dark windowless husks of skyscrapers. Shoals of trash and untreated sewage
festered and smothered whatever remained of the coastal ecosystem. The bodies
of poisoned fish, seals and whales were left to rot, the fly-ridden flesh thin
and grey and everywhere, like black and white photographs of Nazi camp
mass-graves.
It’d been ages since Jack had actually seen un-mediated,
unpolished urban decay in meatspace, let alone actually had to wallow in it,
and it made his skin crawl with a kind of ambient tension and Rousseau-esque
guilt. It made his head hurt more to think about what it meant that he felt
such revulsion toward reality. Visions of the Agent Smith-Morpheus showdown
asserted themselves like popup ads into his mind’s eye.
"I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This
reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the
smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink
and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it." The
smell, that’s what it was. The smell of burning ash and rotting garbage and
dead mammals. All of these un-targeted, un-personalized stimuli, all this
terrible ‘serendipity’, this unprogrammed experience. It was viscerally
repulsive to Jack. He closed his eyes, nudged the microprocessors in his corneas
awake with a three-thought Ideocode sequence -- visualising his mother's face,
the melody to All Along The Watchtower, and the memory of his first successful
assassination with a humanoid drone. He clicked his heels together for good
measure. An Encephalock reader membraned over the tissue of his cerebral
cortex, scanned the chain of neural firings in his brain, unlocking a
transparent cerulean HUD of timestamp, taskbar, and compass that crept into his
peripheral vision. With a wink at a virtual tab, Jack papered over the sight of
disgusting reality with the clinical rectilinearity of his AR-overlayed email
inbox. He felt instantly better. Even if it was a wall of X-Pandgen penis
enargement gene-therapy spam and messages from his wife hounding him over some
birthday party planning he couldn't be bothered with. Even the ubiquitous
marquee ads for depleted uranium flechette pistols that kept chasing him across
the net were a comfort as they scrolled over the tangled snarl of a sixteen car
pile-up in South Beach playground. No place like home.
It was unusual, to say the least. The heavy brass had
called Jack and his team of Troubleshooters out of the bunker arcology down
into San Fran, demanding in-person oversight of the investigation. That never
happened, especially not beyond the Ameribank City barrier. RPLCNTS and air
drones were teleoperated in the field from climate-controlled C&C hubs, or
programmed for autonomous detective-mode as the primary means of on-the-ground
actual police work. That was the CyberSec M.O. If human beings were called out
of the green zone into the battlefield, it meant someone very high up was
personally pulling strings. Strings such as the fat end-of-the-year bonus that
had suddenly appeared in Jack’s bank account, one which his immediate
supervisor would never authorize, not even for cluster-bombing an abandoned
Costco full of World Class War jobless insurgents. Not that Jack had an
argument with the money, per se.
A Valkyrie drone transport was crouching near the crime
scene. The Emergency medical drones had made it in time to stop the bleeding
but the kid had slipped into a coma, and all the king’s nanites couldn’t put
his prefrontal cortex back together again. Multiple cerebral contusions, face
smashed unrecognizable- Jack hadn’t seen that kind of gutty gore since the
Compton prison guard robots went AWOL from a bad firmware update, pounded the
inmates’ skulls into corned beef with fire extinguishers. That incident had
been a bitch to cover up. It took the cleaners six hours to scrub the goopy
chunks of brain and hemoglobin from the cell walls and bars. The cover story
about a facility-wide prisoner revolt had been a stretch, but necessary to ward
off all the Human Rights and Anti-Robot organization limpdicks salivating at the
chance to score political points against the big-box automated prison industry.
Jack had pulled multiple Red Bull-powered all-nighters taking down
whistleblower blogs and humanitarian sites using DDoS hacking attacks, shouting
down activists in forums and chatrooms with an army of AI-run counter-poster
accounts. Jack nipped all attempts to expose the incident in the bud. The spin
team CGed black faces onto all the released security footage; the undying fear
of the angry black man could always be counted on to sway public opinion in a
pinch.
But this wasn’t an airbrush job for the corporate Elite;
for the first time in months, Jack was actually being asked to solve an
honest-to-Gnossis crime.
"I’m feeling like a real police officer, I think I
need to up my dosage," Jack bantered into his mic.
"Book ’em, Dano." Stasia laughed back, exiting
the vehicle beside Jack, ballistic leather-analog creaking as she slapped him
on the shoulder.
"The boy, one Justin Diamond. Stable condition. Son
of Alistair and Margaret Diamond, Divorced. Father is a senior executive at
Vitanet Medical. Former governer of New Hampshire and New Jersey. On the board
of the American Medical Association. Duck-hunting buddy of President
Vanderlyle’s old man."
"Vitanet? Jesus. That explains, well, everything. Of
course the trillionaires can afford to buy their own personal investigation
into their son’s near-murder."
Jack pulled up the boy’s files into an unused section of
retina real estate, thankful for the overlay’s breakup of the real-world
overload. The brick and mortar was starting to grate on his eyeballs.
"Last connectivity, today, 9:34 AM. Via a dVice
Ubiq." Jack fiddled through the kid’s pockets, coming up with only lint
and date-rape pills.
"No dVice on him. Looks like someone out there is
running around with stolen hardware. Let’s run it by the registries."
Jack examined the area surrounding the chalked outline,
stepping over the metal column of a fallen street lamp, fluted green metal
blistering with rust. There was another dead body, thirty feet away. A spider
crawled over to the mess, scanned the face and took a DNA sample. A tiny hooked
implement like a dentist’s scraper ejected from the forensic bot’s mandibular
area. It used the scraper to extract a dollop from the pool of blood beneath
the corpse’ head. The blood had congealed in a pothole like strawberry Jell-O.
The results for the second victim were instantaneous, and
the dossier tabbed itself like a playing card beside the primary’s file.
"Amit Garcia. Ex-accountant. Former Ameribank City
citizen till a few months ago when his citizenship was revoked due to
consecutive delinquent payments."
"Double homicide? Or a separate incident?"
Stasia hypothesized.
"Maybe. Hard to say. It’s dangerous, chaotic out
here in the Bay Area. Life expectancy rates aren’t so great."
"Chaotic? Aren’t we going to at least look into
it?"
"He had his citizenship taken away for failing to
make payments. That means this guy’s a Deadweight. An Unemployed. He doesn’t
count as a person as far as we’re concerned." Jack pointed to Amit’s
former white collar office shirt, turned grey from living in the street, as if
it was QED.
"As far as we’re concerned? So we’re going to look
the other way?"
"As far as our bosses are concerned. We’re not being
paid to investigate deaths of unimportant individuals."
Stasia performed a Premium Internet search with Amit’s
facial biometrics.
"Look, there’s a video of Amit and some other
jobless San Franciscan tearing at each other’s throats. A human dogfight. It’s
got fifty thousand hits on the ‘Tube and is circulating semi-viral on
Friendbook. It looks like Justin here wasn’t exactly innocent." Stasia
held the jittery clip up in Jack’s face. Jack feigned incredulity.
"We don’t know that. It could’ve been anyone filming
the brawl." Jack said.
"’San Fran Food Fite to Teh Deth’, uploaded 9:34 AM
today by Darkshado, registered name: Justin Diamond." Stasia held up the
streaming video of the soon-to-be-dead Amit having his head crushed against the
point of a fire hydrant by another unemployed Deadweight bum. A cracking teen
voice laughed and wagged a bag of fast food at the starving Deadweights, egging
them into killing one another in sick gladiatorial fashion.
"It’s just high schoolers being stupid high
schoolers, that’s what they do. Things got out of hand." Jack brushed the
video aside.
"Jesus, somebody is dead, Jack! And this rich little
silver spoon brat was directly responsible. We have to do something."
Jack sighed, pulled an Altoid tin from the inner pocket
of his double-breasted trenchcoat, one of the few pieces of dumbware he kept on
him for sentimental value.
"I said I feel like a police officer, Stas. But
that’s not what we are. Police don’t exist anymore. We’re Troubleshooters.
Sooner or later you’re going to learn what that means." He offered her one
of the flat white cylinders. She turned away.
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