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Thom’s little doohickey arrived from Colorado Office Supplies in a worn and dirty envelope. It was shoved between the screen and wooden front doors of my house in Queens.
I was so disturbed by Thom’s death—and the mystery of the missing Charismite Juice—that I’d buried all hope that the device was actually on the way. It was bizarre that this extraordinary scientific breakthrough had shown up like some kind of bedraggled 20th-century marketing flyer. But everything that shipped by normal means was minutely inspected and analyzed. Thom had picked the only way to get it to me safely.
He had referred to the delivery method as a “Slow boat from China.” Now I could imagine the envelope passing from one contact in the Asian Commonwealth to another, and another (and possibly many more). Then someone made the final drop. I never did find out the name of the underground group that he’d relied upon to make the delivery.
I stared at it in my hand. It was a rectangular plastic-looking box about an inch long, not even remotely intriguing to the uninformed eye. The memories of it were so strong: how Thom had tossed it in the air, standing on the deck back at MIT, then how he’d pulled it out of a pocket and handed it to me on the island, just before he blew himself up.
The arrival was followed by a great deal of cursing down in my basement. There were no instructions for the thing. I could almost hear Thom laughing at me from his ocean grave.
“You always have to hold something back,” I accused him silently.
“What in the sodding hell do you want instructions for? You rarely use them.” That’s what he’d probably respond if he were still alive. Which was true, up to a point. Thom had always loved putting my intelligence to the test. Even now, after he was gone, he was doing it.
Finally, I hit pay dirt by using the hand gestures that unlocked Thom’s vault of graffiti in the 6Depe portal, followed by the gestures that opened mine. They involved a series of precise finger movements and larger concentric circles.
That command triggered the device to unleash a combination of quantum tunneling and reverse electron imaging. That caused the person holding it to not only become invisible but pass through solid objects. After a few desperate attempts to become visible again, I realized that making the gestures in reverse restored me to visibility.
When I was transparent, I could feel my own self—hands, legs, clothing, everything about me. Although no one else could. And if I gripped something with enough force, it went invisible as well. Nobody else seemed to sense me, except Count Down, who apparently could still pick up my scent. The dog would let out a snorty sneeze and shake his head so that his long ears sounded like wet towels flapping. Then he’d stare in my direction adoringly, with those old-man eyes of his.
That’s what Count Down was doing one sweltering August day in an old Boston T subway car. Deko had no idea I was keeping an eye on him as he hawked black-market merch to the packed-in passengers. The kid did a little twirly stroll through the car, splaying out tubes of lip gloss in his hands. The pooch and I ambled behind.
“If yo’ lips don’ pop, then he won’t stop,” he sang out with a grin bright as a theater marquee. Several old girls beamed like he was just too damned cute, but nobody was buying.
I didn’t like Deko doing that, selling stuff on the T, but he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t get a job because he was so young, and bots had taken most of the low-level positions. There wasn’t any better way for him to support the family. Although he sure recognized the danger. The cops had sent his older brother to prison for black-market dealing. Eventually, they harvested his brain so some guy with wealthy parents could have it.
So there I was, the guy with his brother’s brain, watching him and wishing like hell that Mama Neeta would accept my money so the kid would stop doing this.
Deko made it to the end of the car, letting his smile drop as he examined all kinds of stuff in the sack, trying to figure out how to interest the 8 AM crowd. Some of his merch was legit—like little kid overhauls, a skillet, and anti-diarrhea pills. That was his cover for an illegal and much more lucrative product line, including a few bottles of rum, some weed, and real tobacco. They were heavily taxed on the regular market.
Most people in the car looked so dull-eyed and overheated it didn’t seem like they could focus on buying anything.
“He purebred?” A teen girl stared at Count Down with a wolf-toothed smile, hair yanked into six ponytails that stuck out like water faucets. “I’d just love me a purebred.”
Deko gave her a hostile look, probably wondering if she ate dog meat. “He ain’t for sale.”
“Give you some sugar.” She fluttered her lashes.
“How about I give you some?” Deko pulled out some tiny packets of sugar. “Gimme 50 cent.” The girl just grinned and shook her head “no.”
Deko opened the heavy door leading into the next car and went on through, with Count Down just behind. It slammed shut so quickly I had to walk through a couple of metal walls to follow him into the next car. It always was shocking, the state I was in during the nanoseconds that it took to change all the particles in my body so that they could pass through a solid mass. If my analysis of the situation was correct, I dropped hundreds of degrees below zero. And if I hadn’t recovered with such extreme speed, I would have been dead.
All I knew for sure was that when I was in ghost mode and passed through a solid object, there was a sharp pain from the stabbing, momentary cold. People around me heard a funny little slurping sound and saw a blurring effect in the air. Which was why a man in the car I’d just entered whispered, “Hey! What dat?”
A funny look passed over Deko’s face as he and the dog paused. He’d experienced my “special effect” several times now when he walked through doorways. It always spooked him for a few seconds, but he let the feeling pass. The train screeched as it rounded a bend. Deko took a moment to turn his back on the packed crowd, facing the car’s wall so no one would see as he pulled out a little zippered purse and counted the money he’d made so far: 20 Americos. He was halfway to his daily goal.
He faced the new crowd and sized it up: everyone seemed more tired than the last group, and it smelled like there was a really bad-off person in there somewhere. Everybody was suffering from the odor.
Deko lit up with sudden inspiration and pulled a tiny vial out of his bag. As he uncorked it, the scent of roses hit everyone’s nostrils. Fifty pairs of eyes trained on the kid. Four young guys with bulked-up muscles and bandanas around their necks came through the car door on the opposite end, taking in the scene. Something told me to watch them.
Deko was oblivious as he homed in on a group of scrawny girls. “I call this stuff Zone, ‘cause when the ladies put it on, boys chase ‘em into the next Treasure Zone,” he said. “Spray it where you’re bare like you just don’ care. Then watch out! It’s powerful stuff.” The girls cracked up, shaking their heads no, no, no. Deko grinned. “Oh, I get it. That’s just too damn much for you to handle. But this one won’t be.” He uncorked another vial, and a musky smell wafted out. “It’s called Da Shit, ‘cause that’s what it is. Four Americos! That’s all you need to ‘tract the love of yo life!”
A sweaty hand stretched out, holding two Americos. “My girl need Da Shit.”
“You a good mama. Just gimme two more.”
The woman gasped in fake outrage. “Robber chile!”
As Deko started to give her some sass, the punks hurtled through the car so quickly I couldn’t react fast enough. They pulled the bandanas over their mouths. And the one in front clamped a hand on the Deko’s shoulder, spinning him around, shoving a laser gun in his chest. The asshole couldn’t have been more than 20. Only his feverish eyes showed. Whatever he was strung out on had helped him kill before and would do it now. That was clear.
“Don’ do dat! Don’ do dat!” somebody yelled way down deep in the car.
“Keep yo mouths shut!” roared another one of the punks as his partners emptied out Deko’s pockets.
Count Down was barking like crazy. They kicked him hard, again and again. Deko was in a state of torture, seeing that. Mama Neeta had warned him not to resist in situations like this, but it was hard not to.
The air rippled around the punks. The passengers watched in amazement as the robbers’ cheeks went concave, and blood sprayed out of their mouths. I was oblivious to all the screams as I punched first one, then another. The punks were freaked as they tried to find me, lashing out at air.
I grabbed their gun and started pistol-whipping the one that kicked Count Down. He let out a high girlish shriek. I gave the other ones a series of kicks to the groin, only stopping when I saw Deko’s terror. I’d never done anything like that in front of him before when I was a ghost. Hell, I’d never done anything like that, ever.
The train shrieked to a stop at Andrew station, and the punks stumbled out. Deko raced as fast as he could into the next car with Count Down on his heels. I followed them as they ran through several more. Deko finally slumped down on a seat, holding one hand in the other as if he could stop himself from trembling. I sat down beside him, wishing I could comfort the kid. But that would have spooked him even more.
Count Down spread out on the floor in front of Deko, whimpering a little, back legs splayed out like a frog. Deko felt the dog’s sides. “You okay, boy?” Count Down got up after a minute, wagging his tail like he was trying to please. But his black eyes were mournful.
They got out at Ashmont in Dorchester and walked toward home. I followed behind to make sure no one else would jump him. Pain from a bruise on my shin kicked in. The thugs had managed to do some damage, even though they couldn’t sense me.
Deko thrust his hands in his pockets, deep in thought. Something caught him by surprise, and he pulled out a fistful of money. He counted it carefully. Everything the thugs stole was there, and even more—42 Americos. I had just managed to slip them in the kid’s pants before he left the train.
Hot tears slid out of Deko’s eyes as he looked down the concrete street, trying to find the face he longed for endlessly. “I know you do this.” He waited a little, just in case his dead brother would reply. “Gracias, hermano. Gracias.”
# # #
THE SUN WAS SLEDGEHAMMERING the sidewalk on First Avenue in New York a half-hour later.
“Don’t talk to strangers,” I told my bike. The code words triggered a “whoop whoop” as its security field came to life. It was a short walk to York Street and the very tony digs of Cassandra, a former client. Through small bits and pieces of information we’d exchanged during massage therapy sessions, it had become clear that we both had outrage burning at our cores. She wasn’t exactly a kindred spirit, but she had a rebel soul that spoke to my own.
I waited outside Cassie’s 200-year-old townhouse until her security system recognized my mobile I.D. and face. A petite, delicate maid bot opened the door. It took me up an elevator to the rooftop, where Cassie was tending a rainforest patch in her greenhouse.
Cassie came from old Elite money that went back so far in time there could have been some 19th-century opium traders in the ancestral mix. She didn’t give a damn about appearances and had spurned chemical facelifts and the like. Her mildly wrinkled state was a bit eccentric by Elite standards, but her smile was luminous as a child’s. A slender, gray ponytail ran down the back of her well-worn blouse. One button was missing on the front of it. And baggy white trousers streaked with soil completed her ensemble. That was pretty much the way she dressed almost all the time.
“Couldn’t stay away from me, now could you?” she teased in the resonate voice of a trained theater actress, which she had been, long ago.
“Miss my touch?”
“You have the hands of an angel, my dear. But frankly, I’ve always been more interested in your mind.” She sat down on a bench. “Have a seat. Tell me anything and everything that’s happened since you so unceremoniously ended your practice. Nothing will go beyond these thin but very secure walls.” The word “secure” was very deliberate. She wanted me to know the space was safe.
“I want in to Theseus.”
As Cassie well knew. She was just waiting for me to say it.
Theseus was an underground group bent on upending the power structure that had United America in its stranglehold. The organization was composed of secret cells spread across the nation, which mostly acted independently but shared common goals. Chief among them was the desire to replace Shelli Lyoncliff, the U.A. president, in the next election. They wanted someone with the interests of all citizens at heart and not just the upper crust. A Senator from Minnesota, Andrew Massot, was a favorite candidate among Theseus’s members.
She shrugged. “I’m not sure why you’re interested. The only Theseus cell I’m aware of hasn’t done a great deal so far.”
“I could help change that.”
A man came out from behind some rubber trees. He was a Middle with an astonishing flair for clothing. His shorts were made of a video fabric that projected a full-motion view of the solar system. The shirt covering his rotund middle featured a video of a bonfire flying up into black air. It was riveting.
Cassie was amused by my stunned expression. “Jarat, meet Ajit Sehgal.”
“Hello, Ajit,” I said.
“There’s nothing you can do to help Theseus,” he said in the lilting cadence of a Punjabi Indian. “Your track record has been quite unremarkable.”
“What are you talking about?” Cassie asked.
“He dropped out of MIT after a failed experiment to see through people’s clothes, and hacked into the navigational grid, only to get himself in a terrible wreck.”
“Who else do you know that hacked that damned grid?” said a curvaceous woman with straight blonde hair, who emerged from another part of Cassie’s greenhouse forest. She looked like she’d been poured into her shiny red dress and was sporting fang caps over her incisors.
“Hi. I’m Venice,” she said. A lean fellow with flyaway brown hair and round spectacles emerged beside her. “And this is my husband, Luko. As far as we’re concerned, anybody that Cassie believes should join the fold is absolutely perfect.”
“And I do,” Cassie said.
Everyone turned to look at Ajit. He broke into a grin. “Okay. I just thought we should give him a little bit of a hard time.”
“You mean it’s over?” I said with mock disappointment. “I was just getting in the spirit.”
“Speaking of spirits, Jarat happens to make an excellent martini,” Cassie said.
“Say no more.” Venice sashayed toward the door.
We retired to Cassie’s downstairs den and got to know each other as I mixed up a batch of my signature cocktail. As I’d already guessed, it turned out that Cassie was the unofficial leader, the money behind the group, and the primary source of communication with other cells around the country.
Ajit was a historian who had put together an uncensored, nakedly honest retelling of events that had changed the world over the last 30 years—the real reasons why certain wars had flared up; the covert moves of various politicos and their handlers; various corporate misdeeds. That history was significant because most news stories about major turning points were heavily redacted and massaged to fit specific political agendas. Some were outright fiction.
“He’s also a marksman of considerable ability,” Cassie said.
“Why, thank you,” Ajit replied.
Venice was a force of a somewhat different nature—a former U.A. soldier, with black belts in Karate and Judo. She was honorably discharged from the Marines, but underneath her well-mannered exterior had been a rebel in the making. She left behind her birth identity—the wholesome daughter of an agricultural magnate. Now she was a dominatrix, with the statuesque body of a showgirl, who cracked the whip on a clientele of policemen, judges, and politicians. Over the two years that she’d been part of Theseus, she managed to extract some highly sensitive intelligence from her clients, when they weren’t kissing her toes.
The most unassuming of the quartet, Luko, was also the most intriguing to me. He made his living as a plumber and electrical technician. Those tech skills led him to discover far more than anyone was aware of. Luko had accumulated inside intelligence about the infrastructure of a large number of towering office buildings, including all the nooks and crannies where their most sensitive technology centers were located.
“What about Nuhope’s headquarters building? Have you obtained the infrastructure grid for that one?” I asked.
“No. The company I work for doesn’t have a contract with them, but I bet I could impersonate someone who does.”
Cassie turned to me. “Before we get any further, maybe you should tell us what you think you can contribute.”
I chose my words carefully. “I have a highly gifted friend who was attacked, and an extremely valuable substance that he invented was stolen. He killed himself before the attacker could get even more from him.”
“Thomas Tseng, I presume,” Ajit said a bit smugly, showing off his research skills again.
“That’s right. It’s become my mission to find out who came after Thom and stole his substance. And I’ve tracked that person to Nuhope.”
“With all due respect, our mission has to do with political issues,” Venice said.
“This could become very political. It’s my belief that if this substance is exploited by Nuhope, the thought controls present in the world today could amplify to incredible levels. I can’t fight that corporation alone. That’s why I’ve come to you.”
The Theseus gang fixed on my face even more keenly than before.
“A substance could do that?” Luko asked. “What are you talking about, some kind of chemical?”
“If it’s exploited in certain ways, it has the power to persuade anyone to do just about anything,” I said.
# # #
THERE WAS A LOT TO unpack in what I’d just told them. My knowledge of the Juice alone was a biggie. Nuhope’s involvement was a whole other story.
My journey towards discovering Nuhope’s connection to the Juice had begun a few months before. At the time, I realized that if I was ever going to figure out who had taken Thom’s substance, I needed to get my hands on a Trilat system. They were break-the-bank expensive, at least for me. Stealing my father’s Trilat (temporarily, of course) was a possibility. But that might turn into a can of worms if he ever discovered what I’d done. There were too many containers of ugly memories between us already. Instead, locating one on the black market seemed much more appealing, difficult as it might be.
One night I went into ghost mode and followed in Deko’s wake as he rode Boston’s T line out to Logan Airport, a dilapidated shell of its former self. Gone were the days when it was a major travel hub. Private air pads on top of Elite buildings and the hypertube stations within downtown Boston and Cambridge had changed all that.
The boy whistled softly through his front teeth, trying to stay brave as he walked along a cracked runway past the gutted-out terminal buildings. The pavement was black and slick under the heavy clouds ruffling the night sky. The pale expanse of Constitution Beach was just visible beyond a glassy inlet of the Atlantic Ocean.
Deko approached a boarded-up hangar and rapped on a side door. Private security cameras in the building’s peeling paint must have spotted him. Suddenly, the door softly clicked ajar, and Deko pushed through into an expansive dark interior. As our eyes adjusted to the black void, the whispery stripes of metal beams far above came into view. And there was a haunting odor of petroleum-based aviation fuel from decades gone by.
A strip of iridescent paint on the floor led the kid to an office door at the far side. No sooner had he reached it than the door flung open, and a gigantic schlub of a man threw his arms around him, and he was lifted off the ground into a wrestler’s hug. Another large male specimen, half a foot taller, emerged behind them. The two men had to be brothers; the deep folds in their bald heads were so similar.
“Put down! Put down!” Deko said. The brawny arms around his middle released him, and he dropped to the floor, panting.
“Zeek, get the boy something to drink,” said the smaller behemoth.
“I don’ got money for that,” Deko said.
“Pish, pish. You hear that, Ari? He thinks we want money already.” The big one, Zeek, picked up a cracked teapot and filled a dirty mug with a brown substance. “Mind your mannerisms. If you don’t drink, it will kill your mother and grandmother.”
“Don’t pay attention to him,” Ari said. “Just drink! Drink!”
Deko’s eyes went wide as Zeek poured one mounded spoonful of sweetener after another into the liquid. “Hey kid, how did Moses make tea?”
Deko just shrugged.
“He-brews it!” Ari shouted.
The brothers thought they were hilarious. Deko had managed to glug down half the cup of sludge. And they opened up a couple of walk-in vaults to show off their available wares, an impressive supply of cigarettes, booze, and laser guns. They were so neatly arranged; it was clear each one was prized.
“Ten Newport. Dat’s it,” Deko said.
As they dickered over the price, I inspected their contraband more closely, hoping to spot a Trilat. But none were visible.
“Check this out.” Zeek pulled some mobile earrings out of a box. They looked like standard-issue Chav devices, little silver balls on steel hooks that slipped through ear holes. “First class jailbreak. Picks up OuterNet shit. Everything a Chav ain’t supposed to get.”
Inwardly I yelled out Deko, “Don’t do it! That’s how your brother went to jail.”
The kid knew that already. He backed away quickly. “Just smokes. Gots to go.”
The brothers loaded Deko up with the cigs and cajoled him into parting ways with a few more Americos for some little bottles of cheap rum and bourbon. Within half an hour, the boy was back out the door looking pretty fat, with all the merch stuffed into the various inside pockets of his coat. I followed behind until he got home.
A return trip to Ari and Zeek’s hangar was definitely in order. They had to deal in Trilats; it seemed certain. But I had to prepare for that. I walked into a dark shadow to make myself visible again. Then I found my bike a couple of blocks away, where I’d parked it about four hours before, and zoomed over to a supermarket for Elites on the outskirts of the Boston Treasure Zone. My arms were loaded with nuts and water by the time I hit the checkout kiosk.
I was back hangin’ at the hangar around 3 AM, sitting on the floor in a far corner as the brothers opened their store doors for one customer after another. More often than not, the silly warmth they’d shown Deko was missing. They had a way of looking at street toughs with a radiating aura that promised hideous acts of violence if they were crossed in the slightest of ways. But with the street kids, bad jokes just kept coming out.
“Hey, Ari. How long you been married?”
“Twenty years. And I’m still in love with the same broad. If my wife finds out about her, she’ll kill me.”
“Hey, Zeek, what kind of bra does your girlfriend wear?”
“The kind that makes mountains out of molehills.”
After the fifth night, I couldn’t take it anymore. A few customers had come in asking for Trilats, and the brothers always said they didn’t have any. They didn’t offer hope that they’d get any in stock soon. My whole plan seemed to have gone bust.
I stood up stiffly from my habitual spot on the floor near their steel vaults, ready to leave. But then Zeek peered at the security feed on his mobile and said, “Here comes the Trilat schlemiel.”
“The Nose? Fuck, man.” Ari scratched nervously at the soft belly skin under his bulletproof vest.
Zeek threw open the door. “Shanoza!”
A spindly woman glided inside like a specter, dressed in a biker jumpsuit that was made out of some hardened tar-like substance with a helmet to match. It wasn’t entirely clear she was human until the front part of her helmet dissolved away. It revealed a buttery complexion, tiny penetrating eyes, and one world-class honker.
“How’re things in Uzbekistan?” Ari stared her up and down.
“Sweet. Very sweet.” Shanoza gave the room a sharp once-over. “Who’s here?”
Zeek shrugged. “You seeing things now?”
“A male. Different stink than you.”
“A lot of people move in and out.”
“This one stayed.” Shanoza glided over to the place on the floor where I’d spent the last half week. “He was sitting here. The dirt’s been moved. This place so filthy.”
Ari and Zeek looked flummoxed. She moved across the floor to where I was standing, puzzled. I didn’t breathe as her nostrils trailed up my torso. We were practically seeing eye to eye—or would have been if she’d been able to see me. She was fierce-as-fuck at close range, eyes hooking into the space where I should have been, nostril hairs dense. If she took one more step forward, she’d go through me; there would be a sound. And then what? I waited.
Her focus darted away, and a gloved hand picked up one of my peanuts that had rolled off in a corner. She held it up for the brothers’ inspection. Dang! I didn’t realize I’d dropped that. Ari and Zeek were stunned. No one had been eating nuts that they knew about.
“I told you Bozos I don’t do business with people that got leaks in their security,” Shanoza hissed.
Zeek burst out laughing. “Get the fuck outta here. You think we got leaks? You paranoid, Baby Girl!”
She looked dead at where I was standing again, nostrils flared. “I never come here again.”
The brothers protested loudly, but she slammed out the door. I bolted through the wall with a loud slurp, detection be damned.
She hopped on her bike. I raced toward mine, parked behind a pile of trash in the back of the hangar. It wasn’t easy, but if I gripped the handlebars really hard, I could make my bike go invisible. By the time I was air bound, The Nose was but a distant red taillight on the horizon. It took all the maglev power in my little honey to keep the fence in my sightline as she disappeared into a hypertube. My bike followed her at a safe distance as we zoomed across the Atlantic.
Within a little over two hours, I was trailing her above Tashkent in the European Republic’s state of Uzbekistan. We soared over the gigantic Kukeldash Madrasa, with its tiled, sand-colored walls and jade domes, then various early morning streets. Her bike dropped onto the roof of a luxurious high rise, so stick-like it was clear there could be only one living quarter per floor. I parked on top of a building across the street and watched her descend in a transparent-walled elevator. If I was counting right, she got off on the 59th floor.
At that point, I needed to get some shut-eye and clean myself of any trace of peanuts and sweat before I went any further with her. So I descended the building I’d parked on, then wandered some halls until I found a couple in business clothes leaving for work, with two kids shuffling behind. After they’d trooped into an elevator, I listened through their apartment’s walls. No sounds at all. After passing through the door, a quiet inspection confirmed the place was empty. With any luck, I’d have it to myself for a while.
After going visible again, I took a shower, scoured my mouth of any possible nut residue, and threw my clothes in a Quick Wash. After about three hours of anxious dozing, I was ready. There was some musky-scented cologne in a medicine cabinet. Not to my taste, but what the hell. I applied it liberally, hoping to cover up any trace of my personal body odor that might still be there.
The only way to make a deal was to become visible. I could have just stolen one of her Trilats. But I was above that. The shortcomings of this noble stance would shortly become apparent.
At the front door of her building, I rang the buzzer for apartment 59 and turned my mobile’s language app. “What?” barked a male voice out of the intercom.
The app recalibrated my voice into Uzbek as I said, “I’m here to see Shanoza. Jarat Ellington.”
There was a pause. Must have been checking out my name and face. “Get lost!”
I laid into the buzzer again, shouting, “Come on. I just want to talk to her.”
The door on the elevator off to my left sparkled into nothing, and I rose up the building. I wasn’t entirely through congratulating myself on my new heights of chutzpah when the doors sparkled open on Shanoza’s apartment floor. Two blockheads attacked me with clubs. The world went black.
When I came to, I was on a fluffy white rug riddled with black cat hair. Old-timey spiked heels clicked back and forth on the hardwood floor off to one side. Up above them was the backside of a stunning woman with long blonde hair. Or so it appeared until she swiveled around.
A loose shift covered a substantial tummy and breasts. Shanoza’s disdainful face looked down on me, with that monumental snout and those hooking eyes. It was remarkable: how her backside promised something so different than her front, and how she’d managed to shift her body’s contours into that sleek form back at Ari and Zeek’s hangar.
“You got problem, Meester massage-parlor son of Evander Ellington?” she asked in English.
I coughed cat fur out of my throat. This wasn’t the time to correct her research. I moved slowly into a sitting position. “No. No problems. Happy to be here.”
Her bodyguards were sprawled out in chairs, watching me like well-fed crocodiles. Three Burmese cats with green headlight eyes walked over the thugs like they were part of the furniture.
“Sorry I surprised you with this visit,” I said. “But I didn’t have your mobile deets. Just want to do a little business.”
The Nose picked up a cat and slung it around her shoulders, her muscular fingers locking it in place. The animal’s ears folded back as it dug its claws into her shoulders, but that didn’t faze her. “What makes you sure I do business with you?”
“A secret admirer said you got some awesome Trilats.”
Shanoza’s nose flared as it went up and down my body, a mere inch from my skin. Fear welled up in me. She crouched down and lingered over my boots. The cat on her shoulder hissed at them.
“That’s right,” she said to the animal. “He got a piece-of-shit dog.”
“Used to.”
She considered me some more. “How could some massage guy pay for anything I got?”
It was a good question. “Wild optimism?” I ventured.
Nobody spoke. There was no telling what would happen next, but then the Nose repeated my words in Uzbek to her thugs. They laughed so hard I thought they’d piss their trousers.
Somehow, my stupidity relaxed them a little. It took some convincing that I could be trusted. After a while, sweet Shanoza pulled a Trilat system out of her vast reserves that I could actually afford. She didn’t empty my pockets but came damned close.
When I got back home, there was a lot more cursing in my secret lair as I figured out how the Trilat should be operated. The instructions Shanoza had given me only went so far.
A week later, I finally accessed satellite feeds on the system, which showed Thom under attack at The Pinnacle. Reversing back in time, my Trilat tracked the militia bots to the warehouse where they were stored, and to their owner, one Spiro Agriopoulos. His hair was glossed back thickly like he used a whole bottle of cooking oil on his head at one go.
The Trilat then tracked the bot vendor back in time, to a meeting he held at the Four Seasons Hotel lounge with someone named Federico Reingold, better known as Rico. It was quite challenging to make out their voices in the cocktail din. But the Trilat managed to decipher Reingold’s orders. Spiro was to direct some of his bots to help Rico capture one Thomas Tseng, then steal his Juice and his computer-enhanced brain.
# # #
I EXPLAINED MY TRILAT exploits to the Theseus gang in abbreviated form, leaving out any mention of my ghost device. After all, it was just our first meeting. They considered me over their martinis. It was clear they’d guessed there was more to the story, but it probably wasn’t worth pressing me then.
“Isn’t Rico Reingold the Victory Star guy that defected to Nuhope?” Luko asked.
“Yep.”
“And you’re fuck-as-hell sure he’s the guy that ordered the Pinnacle attack?” Venice asked.
“Yes,” I explained that it took more time to tie Reingold to the attack on Thom’s secret island because I didn’t know exactly where the place was. But Thom’s grandfather Theodore finally coughed up the coordinates. I pinpointed the attacking aircraft, and the Trilat discovered they were owned by the same private militia company Reingold had used for the Pinnacle strike.
“So, you want us to help you nail Reingold?” Cassie asked.
“It’s a little more complicated. There are two creatures involved.”
Everyone traded glances. “Creatures?” Ajit asked.
“Charismites, to be exact.” And so began a whole new round of explanations.
# # #
I LEANED AGAINST A souvenir shop in lower Manhattan called The Parrot Giraffe, trying to ignore the twittering of Lamadoo holos in the window. Across the street, the multi-towered Nuhope H.Q. speared through the gray-flannel covering of clouds. It was within spitting distance of that other media monstrosity, Victory Star.
Six weeks had gone by since I joined Theseus, and Luko had come through with a map of Nuhope’s floor plans—all 200 stories were present and accounted for. The timer on my vision screen read 9:58. Two more minutes and the objects of my great curiosity would arrive.
I studied the 10-story holographic promotions surrounding Nuhope’s lower floors, which looked like a sort of merry-go-round cloud. A pop star named Sosha was front and center. Her long hair extensions flared out as she twisted in an intricately choreographed dance, snarling out a bouncy rendition of the old tune, “For the Love of America.” It had been on the top-music charts for months now.
As the pop star sang, a street vendor walked up to the people watching Sosha sing. He was doing a bang-up business selling United America flags—circles of white stars on a blue background—along with a bunch of Statue of Liberty figurines.
Shosha’s image swiveled out of view, replaced by a holo of the U.A.’s Vice President, Ralph Zinder. Nuhope, which was owned by the government, was under his direct control. He was jabbering with Nuhope’s most popular news anchor, the slinky, rusty-haired Elgo Hunter. You might say Hunter looked like a hyena ready to pounce, but it would be a shame to give hyenas a worse rep than they already had.
If I’d synched my mobile to the wallscape, Hunter and Zinder’s conversation would come in my ears. But I already knew what they’d be saying. News stories repeated so incessantly. The virus that had infected sperm banks in almost every country on Earth had been quelled. Researchers at the University of Toronto had figured out how to kill it off. The news had broken the previous week, and everyone was euphoric. But the mystery of who had unleashed it was still unsolved.
If they weren’t pontificating about that, then Elgo was probably trying to get the Veep to announce his run for the Presidency, which was inevitable.
Those thoughts dissolved as an unmistakable magnetic pull took hold of me. The Charismites were coming, right on time, sending out a secret thrill. People on the street looked around with a curious wonder that grew more pronounced as the flash of a certain car appeared in the distance. It hurtled ever closer and streaked to a stop before Nuhope, coppery Tseng insignias glinting as it floated down and landed lightly on the pavement.
A crowd instantly collected around it, like bees to honey, as the trunk popped open. A couple of bot bodyguards unfolded and stepped out, their long arms forcing the people to back away.
Two side doors swung up, and a pair of rhinestone boots touched the ground, followed by the rest of a male Charismite, known as Dove Brown. The one-time salesman and news correspondent had risen yet again. He was now the star of Nuhope’s new, ultra-hot Dove Brown Tonight late-night talkshow.
My heart was kicking hard as a slender young Charismite woman emerged from the car as well—Luscious Melada. She was wearing silver air slippers and a dress that sprayed out with the color of a cloudless sky at sunrise, the way it used to be.
It was easy to see why they needed the bot protection. Any star would excite a crowd of tourists; that was a given. But the Dove creature was sparking a heightened level of fanaticism. His female companion might not be famous, but she was riveting the attention of nearly every man, lesbian and half-grown boy nearby.
When the heterosexual ladies weren’t staring at the male Charismite, they were watching the female with a mixture of intense interest and trepidation. But the girl just grinned at them, throwing off the vibe of a loving sister. “I would never threaten you,” her expression seemed to say. And it actually worked; the women beamed back at her with delight.
The Luscious creature had a ballerina’s grace as she took the male’s arm. They headed toward the building as if moving to some music in their heads.
I hadn’t been aware of this second Charismite until she first joined Nuhope, about two months before. It had been an astounding jolt to discover how much more she magnetized me than what I’d experienced with the two male Charismites: first Thom, then Dove Brown.
I broke down into a state of obsession whenever she was present. I felt frustrated and disappointed in myself to have such a lack of control, but there didn’t seem to be a way to change that.
The Trilat system had helped me pinpoint Rico Reingold’s connection to the male and female Charismites. Researching Brown in my secret lair, I discovered that about two years back in time, he’d had a face that resembled a bull. But he had a natural ability to charm the pants off people, literally and figuratively. And that was probably why Reingold chose him to become a Charismite.
I had watched satellite feeds that showed Brown transform as the Juice took hold. Looking at images of him walk down the street from one day to the next, I could see how the shape of his face gradually altered. His forehead became higher, hairline pulled back slightly, and that he no longer looked bovine. And his unremarkable eyes became positively arresting, flashing with blue or green, depending on how the light hit them.
It only made sense that there would be just a hop, skip, and jump in time before Reingold created an “Eve” to go with his “Adam.” I discovered that this Luscious Melada creature had spent her childhood in a little backwater village called Pompey Hollow in the Catskill mountain range’s foothills.
Her own transformation was even more mesmerizing than Dove’s. Not only did she change from a drab, teenaged Chav into the most alluring person I’d ever encountered, but she seemed to have aged. That was undoubtedly due to the learning enhancer drugs and the Juice she’d been taking for about nine months. She’d spent most of that time down at a school in Atlanta called Graystone and joined Nuhope’s forces about a month ago. Her mobile’s I.D. now claimed she was 21. And she certainly looked it.
I sprinted across the street in ghost-mode form and caught up with the Charismites as they reached an exterior elevator. It was reserved for Nuhope’s top executives and talent. The door sparkled into nothingness and then re-solidified as soon as Dove and Luscious were inside. I walked through the elevator’s steel wall as it began its ascent.
The female brightened, keenly focused. “Fuck a duck! Did you hear that sound?”
“Hey. Watch the lingo.”
“Jeeesus H. Christ. I bet everybody in this building says shit like that,” she teased.
“Listen, kiddo,” the male said. “People at this company know how to use their ‘work mouth.’ And you’re still in training. So I want you to practice.”
“Okay. But you did hear that sound?”
“Yeah. It was weird. Like somebody polishing off a milkshake or something.”
The female’s eyes shifted to the spot where I was standing. I held my breath. Did she have Shanoza’s extra-smell perception? There was nothing about the way she was using her nose to suggest that. What was she sensing, then?
“They shooting your commercial today?” Brown asked.
She sighed. “2 PM.”
“Can’t you act a little more disinterested?”
“I don’t want to turn into a commercial actor.”
“It won’t be like that. You’re just on training wheels now. Before you know it, you’ll be in space, tumbling like a maniac.”
“Maybe.” A sad restlessness shadowed the female’s face as she stared out the glass wall, watching the grounds around Nuhope grow smaller and smaller.
“By the way, I want to take you to that anniversary party coming up in a few weeks,” Brown said.
“Aw c’mon.”
“Just a little protection.”
“Fuck that shit.”
“Use the work mouth! Is it so bad going with me?”
“I don’t need a chaperone, and you sure aren’t my daddy.”
“I want everyone to know that you’re protected.”
“It’s a little late to start censoring my love life.”
“I made a promise to your gramma that I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to you if I can help it,” he said. “Anybody who’s after you has got to pass my sniff test.” She gave his tenderness a crooked smile.
They came out onto the 102d floor, with me traipsing behind. The corridors bristled with Nuhope staffers on the move, coming off other elevators, filling their coffee bottles, diving into studios and offices where various shows and commercials were in production.
Everyone was intensely excited by the Charismites, who answered everyone’s “hellos” as they swished past. The male strode into Studio B, and the female continued on down the hallway, eventually veering off into a dressing room. She shut the door so quickly that I had to enter through the wood. She was standing right there on the other side of the door, so I had to pass through her body. I forced back a gasp as a tingling jolt of Charismite energy charged through my system.
I couldn’t tell if she felt the sensation too, or if her surprised expression was only a reaction to my giant slurping sound. She looked in my direction, on alert, but I wasn’t sensing any fear, just curiosity. Whatever it was, this wasn’t good; I really had to become adept at keeping my presence unknown.
She seemed to shrug off the notion that anything was odd and threw her lacy sweater on a chair. Her air slippers got the heave-ho too, landing in a corner.
Padding over the thick carpeting, she took a space suit off a rack and pulled it on, which made her roly-poly, like a cartoon figure. A pack of young lovelies rushed through the door and greeted the Charismite with affection. They were a raucous lot, chattering about the Dove Brown show that had streamed the night before as they pulled on their spacesuits.
“You sure he’s like a brother to you?” asked a woman with auburn hair. Her angular features and skeptical intelligence might have attracted me once, before the Charismite showed up.
“Pshh!” The Charismite waved off the question. “Not interested whatsoever.”
Her friends traded a look. It was a little hard for them to believe. “So when are you going to introduce us?”
“He’ll stick his nose in the studio. Just wait and see. Hey, what are you all doing after work? Want to grab a drink?”
As they debated which watering hole to go to, I studied how the Charismite had decorated her section of the long dressing table that ran down one side of the room. There was a little bobbing-head version of a hulking metallic monster named Morthorp from one of Nuhope’s best-selling games. Oversized eyeshades signed by the late-night talkshow host Esperelda were hooked over a lampshade. And attached to the mirror was a backscratcher that looked like a skeletal arm, emblazoned with the Nuhope Horror-Comedy channel logo.
The Charismite wrinkled her nose as she caught sight of the mobile stud in her left ear, which looked like a bright green caterpillar. It wiggled around her lobe, giggling. “Clam it!” she said. The caterpillar froze. She studied the time on her air screen. “Wowza. It’s already 10:30.”
“We gotta get a move on!” someone else said.
The women rushed out the door. I followed them into a vast rehearsal room, which was dominated by a gravity-reduction chamber made of thick thermoplastic polymer. It was about the size of a basketball court and 30 feet in height.
“Ladies!” called out a plump woman in a stretchy black bodysuit, whose commanding presence made it clear she was their coach. “There’s no time to waste. Get your gear on.”
I found a spare corner and sat down to watch as the space-tumblers-in-training pulled helmets and air tanks off some hooks in the wall and put them on. Then they moved into the gravity-reduction chamber. After the door sealed shut, there was a whish as oxygen was sucked out, and their bodies began to float. Giggling wafted from the intercom unit as the ladies got their bearings, then tested out various gymnastic dance moves.
A new music recording from a rocket-science group The Viper Vixens flooded the space. The young women swooped and sailed together through the chamber, tumbling in unison with a series of twirls, arabesques, and backflips. At first, there was the occasional collision and clumsy move. The coach shook her head in disappointment and impatience after each one. They repeated the sequences again and again until the woman finally barked out approval. Her face brightened with satisfaction. As the hours passed, the tumblers became ever more graceful—and none more so than the Charismite.
The director couldn’t stop watching her, eyes drooping slightly with desire. But she pulled herself out of it and finally ended the rehearsal just shy of noon. The Charismite looked at the time on her air screen as she filed out of the tank with the others. “Crap,” she said softly.
# # #
THE OLD PHRASE “GILDING the lily” came to mind as I watched a makeup artist fuss over the female Charismite in a guest dressing room. It wasn’t the one she usually occupied. This one was smaller, with posher furnishings. A spread of fruit, cheese, and various drinks was off to one side.
A makeup artist, Enrique, was preparing the Charismite for the commercial shoot with a kind of ecstatic air as if he was working on his most exquisite masterpiece. He was a queen of the highest order, so there wasn’t much sexual heat going on.
Rico Reingold finally breezed through the door and said, “Enough.”
“But if I just –”
“No, enough.”
Enrique looked so disappointed. The girl shot Reingold an annoyed look, then gave Enrique a bright smile. “Thank you so much.”
“My pleasure.” He cleared out immediately.
“Here.” Reingold reached into his inside waist pocket and pulled out some injector tubes filled with a clear, almost syrupy looking liquid.
It was the first time that I’d seen the Juice since Thom’s death. I came close enough to the female Charismite to see tiny pricks on her forearm, just below the inside of her left elbow. “Can’t I go back to just drinking the chems?” she asked.
“We’ve been over this. They work better this way. It’s one of my newest discoveries.” She took one of the vials submissively enough. “No. You need to take all three,” he said.
Her eyes widened in surprise. “That’s triple my normal –”
“Yes, yes, so it is. We need to make this little promotion exceptionally magnetic.”
She started to swipe the air, placing a call. But Rico wagged a finger at her. “Uh, uh, uh!”
“I just want to talk to Dove.”
“He doesn’t have a say in this.”
“I want a second opinion.”
“What? You think you two can gang up on me? Now, if you want out of this, I’ll end this little Cinderella carriage ride of yours, and you can go on back home.” The girl gave him a long stare. “Your call,” he added.
A gritty, determined look came over her as she positioned one of the injector tubes about five inches above her left arm. A pressurized stream of liquid shot out into the air with the press of a button on top. She gasped in pain as it pierced her skin and sought out a vein. Then she went still, with just a little smile playing on her lips, and I could sense her floating up into some heightened realm of happiness.
Within a few seconds, my heart was racing madly, just to look at her. And after she shot up the Juice in the other two tubes, it took all my stamina not to rush over, grab her in my arms, and kiss her hard.
She stumbled a little as she reached over and grabbed the edge of a table. Her face was white under the golden tone. “You better leave.”
“There’s still a few minutes,” Reingold said.
“Please. Just go.”
“Okay. Just—just take that ridiculous caterpillar out of your ear and put on this one,” he said, handing her a pearl mobile stud. Then he left.
She switched out the mobile studs with a kind of bubbling humor, then horror spread over her face as something convulsed inside her. One of her elbows brushed the caterpillar off the dressing table. She swept toward the bathroom and started retching into the toilet.
I picked up the caterpillar and put it on top of a little pot of rouge, then went out into the hallway. Rico was standing there, hands trembling as he gripped a handrail on the wall. The Charismite was clearly affecting him. He didn’t walk so much as plunge down the hallway away from her.
I tried to get calm again, conscious that the girl was dressing for the commercial shoot in the room I’d just vacated. I couldn’t go back in, couldn’t see her naked. That would probably destroy what remained of my will power.
This should be terrifying, what she’s doing to you. You need to stop that commercial before her power spreads. Right now, I told myself. Kill her, if that’s what it takes. But that was a futile idea. Rico would just create another Charismite. And how could I even begin to murder her? I was in her grip, filled with an overwhelming desire to go back inside, consume her mouth with my own, brush my hands down her middle to her labia.
Somehow, I didn’t.