I laughed at the thought of doing something so simple. So normal.
I sat with my feet up on the PC and listened to Merry 3# gab my messages back to me.
Several from small-time sharks who’d heard I was the new capitan. Two from Gigi the Cashier who’d no doubt seen the transfers from Jamon’s account. And one call from Stenhouse.
Stenhouse bootlegged the Sensil tekware from the supercity corps and sold it to the movers in The Tert. He also fixed it when it broke.
Another from The Cure. The Cure was the cute name for a bunch of shady medics who inserted the Sensil routes in between punters’ vertebrae.
A while back one of them, who practised under the name of Doc Del Morte, got ambitious and started biomek butchery on stolen kids as a sideline. When word got out about his failure rate, and how he was getting his test subjects, the Cabal ran him out of The Tert.
Even they had limits as to what they would tolerate. Del Morte left behind him forty or more kids - Pets - in varying stages of bio-robotic decay. No one else knew how to maintain them. Their specs had disappeared along with their architect. They were all dying from their condition - some more quickly than others. Roo was one of them.
From my understanding, The Cure and Stenhouse’s crowd splashed each other’s boots and scratched each other’s balls.
A headache started behind my nose and climbed up into my forehead. Frustration. I didn’t have time for all this. And yet I had no trace on the missing karadji . Perhaps Larry wasn’t the one. Perhaps . . .
I put my head in my hands and spoke sternly to myself. Larry was the one. If he couldn’t find a lead, there wasn’t one. Meantime I had to keep busy.
‘Problems?’ The voice started me out of my chair. The blistered face and singed blond hair had me falling back into it. ‘Jees, you look terrible. I’m so sorry, Teece.’
He ignored my apology, staring at Merry 3# who’d flashed back, dancing to some tune in her empty head.
‘Maybe she’s the one I’m in love with. Someone who I think is you,’ he said hoarsely.
‘Then you’d better go home to your bikes, Teece. Things are gonna get worse here,’ I said levelly. ‘If I can’t take it, they’ll get me. And I’m not ready to go anywhere yet.’
I waited for him to answer.
‘I’ll stay around, Parrish. But you hung me out today because of your own ambitions. That’s hard to forget.’
It wasn’t forgiveness.
‘I promised you nothing, Teece. Except maybe a rough ride.’
A smile ghosted his lips. ‘On that you could never let me down.’
He went into the living room, booted Roo off the couch on to the floor, lay down and closed his eyes.
I got the hint. No sex for Parrish and stale adrenalin aftermath plagued me, escalating the chances of a vision. The visions lingered so close to my conscious state now I feared they were becoming part of my reality.
Dread kept me from rest. So did my need to flick all this tedious housekeeping and get on with finding the missing karadji .
‘I’m going for a run,’ I said and copped the beginnings of a snore in return.
Torley’s at three a.m. teemed with the backwash of chemical attitudes and tragic karma. Sensil parlours. Cockdog fights. Street sex of the sordid kind. Sights that once had amused or fascinated me suddenly made me heavy with responsibility. I wore my new job like hi-cut concrete boots.
But night also had a masking beauty. Even in The Tert.
I jogged past the neon replica of a chained dog on Hein’s roof, along the gen-powered glittery emerald and ruby halo of The Stretch and in amongst the eerie, metallic garden silhouettes of Shadoville. An uninterrupted twenty klick loop if you knew when to duck and weave.
An alien inner voice dogged my footsteps.
Not long, human. Not long . . .
It had wired itself into my thought processes. Sometimes it was a heavy presence, gorging on every fix of brutality. At others, when I starved it of rage, it subsided into a hard
I sat with my feet up on the PC and listened to Merry 3# gab my messages back to me.
Several from small-time sharks who’d heard I was the new capitan. Two from Gigi the Cashier who’d no doubt seen the transfers from Jamon’s account. And one call from Stenhouse.
Stenhouse bootlegged the Sensil tekware from the supercity corps and sold it to the movers in The Tert. He also fixed it when it broke.
Another from The Cure. The Cure was the cute name for a bunch of shady medics who inserted the Sensil routes in between punters’ vertebrae.
A while back one of them, who practised under the name of Doc Del Morte, got ambitious and started biomek butchery on stolen kids as a sideline. When word got out about his failure rate, and how he was getting his test subjects, the Cabal ran him out of The Tert.
Even they had limits as to what they would tolerate. Del Morte left behind him forty or more kids - Pets - in varying stages of bio-robotic decay. No one else knew how to maintain them. Their specs had disappeared along with their architect. They were all dying from their condition - some more quickly than others. Roo was one of them.
From my understanding, The Cure and Stenhouse’s crowd splashed each other’s boots and scratched each other’s balls.
A headache started behind my nose and climbed up into my forehead. Frustration. I didn’t have time for all this. And yet I had no trace on the missing karadji . Perhaps Larry wasn’t the one. Perhaps . . .
I put my head in my hands and spoke sternly to myself. Larry was the one. If he couldn’t find a lead, there wasn’t one. Meantime I had to keep busy.
‘Problems?’ The voice started me out of my chair. The blistered face and singed blond hair had me falling back into it. ‘Jees, you look terrible. I’m so sorry, Teece.’
He ignored my apology, staring at Merry 3# who’d flashed back, dancing to some tune in her empty head.
‘Maybe she’s the one I’m in love with. Someone who I think is you,’ he said hoarsely.
‘Then you’d better go home to your bikes, Teece. Things are gonna get worse here,’ I said levelly. ‘If I can’t take it, they’ll get me. And I’m not ready to go anywhere yet.’
I waited for him to answer.
‘I’ll stay around, Parrish. But you hung me out today because of your own ambitions. That’s hard to forget.’
It wasn’t forgiveness.
‘I promised you nothing, Teece. Except maybe a rough ride.’
A smile ghosted his lips. ‘On that you could never let me down.’
He went into the living room, booted Roo off the couch on to the floor, lay down and closed his eyes.
I got the hint. No sex for Parrish and stale adrenalin aftermath plagued me, escalating the chances of a vision. The visions lingered so close to my conscious state now I feared they were becoming part of my reality.
Dread kept me from rest. So did my need to flick all this tedious housekeeping and get on with finding the missing karadji .
‘I’m going for a run,’ I said and copped the beginnings of a snore in return.
Torley’s at three a.m. teemed with the backwash of chemical attitudes and tragic karma. Sensil parlours. Cockdog fights. Street sex of the sordid kind. Sights that once had amused or fascinated me suddenly made me heavy with responsibility. I wore my new job like hi-cut concrete boots.
But night also had a masking beauty. Even in The Tert.
I jogged past the neon replica of a chained dog on Hein’s roof, along the gen-powered glittery emerald and ruby halo of The Stretch and in amongst the eerie, metallic garden silhouettes of Shadoville. An uninterrupted twenty klick loop if you knew when to duck and weave.
An alien inner voice dogged my footsteps.
Not long, human. Not long . . .
It had wired itself into my thought processes. Sometimes it was a heavy presence, gorging on every fix of brutality. At others, when I starved it of rage, it subsided into a hard
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