VRTP://HOUSEBOOK.EARTH/WHINEMANOR/USERS/DROW-WHITING/MUSIC -CONSERVATORY.VR
“Clementine hits her foot on a splinter, falls into the foamy brine,” Whiskey Sour said to Drow. “But which part is real? The splinter or the sea?”
She was reinventing a folk song about a woman with reality disassociation disorder. Easy work to do while hitching rides: their bodies were, even now, moving through the southern part of the megacity. Each night, they surfaced and played a small pop-in venue. Tour stops took them ever closer to the Geneseo historical district, where Drow hoped to find out more about Superhoomin smuggling and, hopefully, the @ChamberofHorrors.
Meanwhile, music. He was seated at a black beast of a grand piano, within the illusion of a glassed-in conservatory. Beyond the windows, thunder rumbled and rain torrented down. Whiskey stood a meter away, a banjo in hand. The score for her Clementine composition was projected on the window glass, beneath the storm, notes and lyrics that glimmered like banked coals.
Drow hummed notes, adjusting chords, marveling at the surreality of jangly-ass old tales. Every now and then a bump, from the surface, served to remind him that their bodies were parked aboard a southbound freight train.
The Great Lakes Reclamation Zone encircled a fifth of the world’s drinkable water supply like skyscraper-studded layers of pearl. Its megacity status was owed, largely, to Manhattan’s catastrophic #hydrofail. If New York had remained viable, all those decades before, the Northeastern seaboard would have densified there, stretching to include Washington, DC, and perhaps Philadelphia and Boston.
But the water failure, allegedly triggered by white supremacists from the Dixie Purity Project, had been the last in a series of disastrous straws. Tubercular pleurisy broke out in Massachusetts, and riots (over whether the US could officially be classed as a failed state, ironically) devastated the US capital. Adolescents went lemming in the tens of thousands.
Gotham withered and dried. Lakeside cities—Toronto, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit—beefed up. Greentowers rose; city management systems merged. Deburb crews liquidated single-family dwellings, and drones armed with joy buzzers glomerated people into urban centers.
Geneseo, once a quaint Finger Lakes town of ten thousand, was now a light industrial neighborhood within the larger metropolis.
Would anything there lead him to the Chamber? His @hoaxer chums seemed to think they had a shot.
No way to know but to look.
Drow helped Whiskey with her mash of folk songs until the train stopped, leaving them to disembark near a local transit hub. By way of thanking it for the ride, Whiskey offered to unload a few crates of fragile goods tagged for delivery a few blocks away.
Robin bounded down to the platform, barking cheerily. Drow followed at a stiff but tentative clamber.
“I need to walk out some kinks,” he told Whiskey.
“I’ll find our pop-in and talk to the venue manager.” With that, she skipped off toward the historic district.
As Drow watched her go, Crane tooned in beside him.
“Fuel and meds, sir?”
“On it.” His antipsychotics were laced into a printed slice of banana bread sheathed in pear skin; he pulled it out and began munching.
“What would you say to a few minutes’ meditation, in lieu of a nap?”
“I’d say I’m not five.” To forestall an argument, he began stretching his upper body, loosening his shoulders, another component of Crane’s pitiless daily regime.
Straightening creakily out of a forward bend, he saw the woman.
Her toon was tall, clad in a long coat with a high collar, and her eyes had cat irises the color of flame. Long limbs and alabaster skin put Drow in mind of his garden of statues. She had a shaved scalp and bushy black eyebrows. Beyond the cat eyes, there was little to indicate she was a toon. The fact that she was full color, rather than grayscale, indicated her flesh was nearby.
“Is there a problem, sir?”
Drow’s flesh was crawling.
The sidekick Whoozed the apparition: Allure Noonstar, originally from the Florida reclamation district, Project Rewild bioprinting expert. “Rather a prosaic career, I should say, for someone with such a high-fashion toon.”
“Well, she’s a specialist, right?” There was a lot of meat printing here. Everything from fauxsteak to transplant organs.
“Indeed.” Chilly voice. Sometimes, Crane took instant, irrational offense when someone was just looking him over.
Robin moved closer to Drow, pressing gently against his leg, a calming influence.
“She is staring at you. I suggest a privacy block.”
“Is that a bit extreme? It’s not like she’s actually here.”
“Consider the timing, sir.” An oblique reference to the real reason he had hauled his protégée and his dog into the remnants of New York State.
“Okay,” Drow said.
The cat-eyed toon vanished, returning the train station and Geneseo to an unaugmented state, but for Crane himself.
“Parish pariah, parish pariah,” Drow muttered. “Come on, Robin. Places to go, things to see.”
Tourist markers beckoned him toward a paved trail laid out along an experimental district of long buildings, concrete blocks matched to the curve of the train tracks. In effect, this created a giant-sized amphitheater, wide steps covered in grass, geese, goats, and gardens. The buildings were mostly purposed to turning agricultural harvest into printer stock. Augments on the warehouse walls offered educational modules. If you wanted to know how powdered corn got processed into glucose, starch, oil, edible plastic, glue, or silk, the Sensorium could offer detailed simulations and sometimes training opps.
He passed a discreetly tagged bughouse. It offered a tutorial on protein production, but the posters and ads played it low-key, almost apologetic.
The Western taboo against eating insects had been another casualty of the Clawback. As mass production of animals for slaughter became ecologically and politically unsustainable, designers explored the printing of luxury-grade proteins, sim animal tish whose cell division was fueled by insect mash. Drow was old enough to remember the whole product development cycle, from the early tofu turkeys that tasted like sandpaper to the runaway success of a bug-based product called Cricky Chicky Fingers.
Everyone ate fauxmeat, but remnant aversion remained: many people preferred not to dwell on how cricket and maggot flour shored up the modern food pyramid.
As this thought slithered through Drow’s conscious mind, the bughouse disgorged a handful of giggers and apprentices, ropy young Bouncers like Rubi, so shiny that their ideals practically radiated from their bodies like cartoon sunbeams. Laughing, they passed around an antique vaper. Someone’s precious relic of the past: unique and irreplaceable. Skunky threads of old-school pot teased his nose.
One kid was tending a miniature version of a grow tank, repurposed jam jar half full of nutrient bath, a red strip of muscle strung on a harp of electrodes, thin wires that drove the muscle fibers to twitch.
Drow zoomed a little, capturing detail. The muscle tish throbbed, as if it was lifting something a hair too heavy for it. This kid would be unlocking modules on beef production—learning the underlying science, maybe, or quality control. A thread of crimson—manufactured blood—effervesced around the meat.
“Cutting-edge food tech,” said a voice.
Drow zoomed out. Hackle and Jackal were standing about a meter from Robin’s leash.
“Hey, girl,” he said, for the benefit of all the mics. They had prearranged this, through Father Blake, but were playing it as a serendipitous meet-up. “Remember my @Retreat pals?”
Hackle stuck out a hand for a sniff, remarkably human gesture for such a square peg, and was favored with a tentative tail-wag. He dropped to a knee.
“Go ahead, googirl, we’re okay,” Drow said.
The two began the gentle ritual of man-beast interaction. Jackal seemed to shrink further into themself, as if finding the demonstration of affection distasteful.
“Nice to run into you guys. Are you nomadding?” Standard conversational gambit, no different from bitching about the weather. Niceties made casual eavesdroppers tune out.
“Running the northeast tourism track,” Jackal said. “Project Rewild has their crèche here. They’re growing that baby tiger.”
Right. The toon he’d seen was an expert on that project. “You guys are Rewilders, then?”
“It’s the miracle of life.” Jackal offered Drow a tourism share, infographic showing the highlights of their factory tour. Soy, seaweed, locust, and other basics got ground into feedstock, mixed with spices, and configured for various types of meal. Vac-pressing facilities compressed each recipe into bricks for shipping.
Drow swiped past the production line for edible packaging: chugger bottles, sausage casings, wraps, stuffed Pocky. He slowed again when the feed reached a room filled with glass cases, each strung with a harp-like arrangement of stim wires. The frames anchored blankets of spongy red tissue, cradles for growing lumps of muscle tish in a variety of flavors: beef, lamb, fish, fowl.
Drow swallowed, watching the meat work out, random misshapen fruit quivering on silver vines.
He caught a glimpse of a discard pile, failed batches, covered in maggots. Sweat broke across his forehead.
“That’s research and development: they’re trying to develop super-fresh fauxmeat. Stuff you can rip out of a twitch box and throw straight on the grill,” Hackle said. His cataract-clouded eyes were blissful. “Go and see.”
“Not sure I want to get too close,” Drow said. “Smelling that much blood—”
“There’s an overlook.” Jackal led him past a goat paddock to a series of windows, angled over the shop floor. “See? There’s kitty.”
The Project Rewild tank could have housed a full-grown tiger, but all the big configuration of wires held, at the moment, was a tiny glob of tissue, pulsing within a white, stringy sac. Drow zoomed: it was vaguely mammal-shaped.
“It’s true de-extinction, Drow,” Hackle said. “I’m thinking of gigging here. Working on resurrecting dead species—” He popped aural moji: a whole crowd making WOW! noises.
The enthusiasm sounded sincere, but Hackle wouldn’t mix amniotics in a crèche just to get his name on the credits for a tiger cub. They had to be on to something.
He scanned the factory again, inadvertently homing in, while zoomed, on a crimson rack tagged #lamblegs. Bloody, twitching flesh …
Not helpless, not alive, no brain, no pain …
He yanked his gaze elsewhere; it fell on the maggot tank. From bad to worse. But … was that a vault door, just beyond the crèche? “What’s that?”
“Former pharma company, newly triaged. They had some kind of racket in stolen life-extension meds,” Jackal replied. “Project Rewild leased the locked labs for the proprietary tech while they print the tiger.”
Drow turned his back on the windows, staring at the goats as he considered. The corrupt pharma company was, they all hoped, a tie to the @ChamberofHorrors. And now someone was using its locked-down digs for Rewild stuff?
It might be a standard repurposing of space. Still, it felt … suggestive. He could see why Hackle and Jackal were planning to hang around, nurturing twitch boxes.
Everything seems suggestive to @hoaxers.
“What’s up with you?” Jackal said. “Big music tour, right?”
“Small music tour. Little venues with the latest protégé. Small-batch beer and printed pretzels.”
“I hear you’re playing Syracuse.”
“Did you? Maybe.” Syracuse was the southern tip of the US densified zone … after that, there was nowhere to go except for the tourist ring that included Blingtown’s pyramids at Scranton, and the Old New York zoos. Central NorthAm was mostly abandoned terrain, shrink-wrapped suburbs. Topsoil printers and carbon sinks, unfolding carpet of green studded by ghost towns, at least until you hit Tampico.
“There’s a decent old nightclub there.”
“Syracuse?”
Hackle shared a historic brick facade, with an option to click into an interior walkthrough. It was the kind of watering hole nobody built anymore: cavernous space within the basement of an old hotel, with a long bar. Exposed ceiling pipes, painted black and wound with clusters of tiny copper wires, winked lights down from above, LEDs simulating starlight.
Simulation of simulated starlight, Drow’s inner voice corrected.
Robin had left off being loved by Hackle. Her panniers were bigger than before.
As if on cue, Crane spoke up. “Sir…”
He blinked the warning away, concentrating on the sim of the bar. “Looks good. We’d definitely play Syracuse.”
“It’s a venerable family business,” Hack said. “Last of a dying breed. Cousin of mine, a master hospitality specialist, runs a module there. Heritage brewing.”
“Real beer?”
“Yeah, he has a microbrew license. Spends half his time teaching. Propagating the old skills.”
Were there patterns in the starry blink of the LEDs? Drow counted out a four-four beat, running an internal metronome and searching the virtual space for anything with a pulse that might be Morse.
Wrong answer. Try again.
The trick to passing info discreetly in the open was for the listener to maintain spidery alertness, sensing for patterns within the web of their senses. Did he hear drops of water in a bad pipe? Dot dot-dash, dot … No, that was random, too.
“I’ll book it,” he said. “What does it sit?”
“Three hundred on the floor, fifty at the bar. Your girl Whiskey ready for that?”
“She’s building confidence with every gig.”
“Here’s some old crowd shots.” Jackal gestured and Drow saw framed prints—
Leg of lamb, maggots on fauxmeat—
He tapped his hands together three times, same trick he’d taught Luce. Stop, stop, stop. It was just food.
Just printed meat, boy’s gotta eat, lambs screaming in that old serial killer sim corpse copse parish pariah …
Stop stupid stop!
Look at the pictures. The bar was so old that someone had taken it upon themselves to type up newspaper-style captions, tagging the people in each shot by gluing paper directly to the cheap frames.
Names.
Drow perused the photos. They were variations on a theme: the original bar owner had collected selfies with the various virtuosi who’d played his stage.
And there! Garmin Legosi: former pharma CEO and possible member of the @ChamberofHorrors.
Legosi was posing with his arm around a two-time Grammy Award winner, a blonde smear of unhappy-looking talent, in the shadow of a big-shouldered alpha male.
“Place like this holds a neighborhood together,” Jackal went on. “Gives people a sense of having roots.”
“Crepits still go to shows in their neighborhood local,” agreed Hackle.
“Well. If they’re music lovers, maybe.”
“You filling up, Drow, on this tour?”
“Some come to hear me sing. Others wanna to see me blow a gasket,” Drow said. Whiff of bitterness in his voice. Which was ridiculous, since his problems were—
—maybe they weren’t exactly his fault, but he’d spent long enough trying to amend his self-destructive patterns.
Anyway, he had his tip now. The boys thought Legosi would come to their gig if he and Whiskey booked this club in Syracuse.
Robin nudged him, looking expectant. Hackle and Jackal had clasped hands within their long drapey sleeves and were no doubt morsing on each other’s forearms.
“We’ve got an appointment,” Jackal said. “But here’s an invite if you want to visit our e-state sometime.”
“I—I assumed you guys didn’t dive much.”
“Sensorium,” Hackle said. “You will get wet. You might get soaked.”
“Invite your daughter,” Jackal agreed.
Two dime-sized snowflakes appeared in Drow’s peripheral. One for him, one for forwarding to Rubi.
“I’ll put it on her tray,” he said.
They turned, in step, heading away, solemn as monks.
He fingered the imaginary snowflakes. “What’s that about?”
Long suffering sigh from Crane. “I believe, sir, that it was an offer to level your friendship.”
Drow stared at their retreating backs, befuddled, fingers almost itching as he contemplated how he could go somewhere safe enough to let him figure out what they’d stuffed into Robin’s carrying bags.