THE SURFACE—NORTHAM
GENESEO HISTORICAL DISTRICT, GREAT LAKES
Saved by the granola: Drow’s investigation had hit a dead end until Luce showed up. Garmin Legosi had indeed been at the show, and he’d talk your arm off … but by the same token, he’d shown no inclination whatsoever to play whistleblower.
Hackle and Jackal had tagged him as a possible breadcrumb to the @ChamberofHorrors. His pharma company had been #triaged by the global capital auditors, and in the mandatory public autopsy of the company, post-dissolution, Garmin had claimed they’d produced excess Superhoomin, one of the foundation drugs for life extension.
Back in the day, Legosi’s father had been a big-deal record executive, one of those bling-wearing fancy dressers who’d risen stratosphere-high in the years before the Setback imploded multinational capitalism’s house of cards. Legosi Senior disappeared, like so many billionaires … and he wasn’t one of the thousands who’d turned up, decades later, with a bullet in the back of his skull.
As such, he’d remained high on Drow’s personal list of @ChamberofHorrors suspects.
But at some point between ’fessing up about smuggled life-extension drugs and today, Legosi had changed his mind about coming clean. Had he been bought off? Threatened?
One thing was certain, though: he hadn’t mended his rule-fiddling ways, not entirely, or given up access to injection meds. Operating on the apparent assumption that all celebrities wanted were adulation and drugs, he’d slipped Drow three pharma vials—of Superhoomin, presumably.
“Take with food,” he muttered.
As if Hackle hadn’t loaded me down with enough contraband when he slipped Robin that vintage radio.
Luce Pox was frisking, tooned in as a macho goldfish, ostensibly bearing granola, offering him an escape from Garmin’s nonstop spieling about Geneseo history.
“So, what’s up, Doc?” Drow asked, taking a second to fiddle with Robin’s panniers, swapping the Superhoomin for a satchel that would hold the granola.
“Dunno. Wanted to see you. Is that a thing?”
“Sure, it’s a thing.” The pretzel he’d forced down, to pay off Luce’s marker and metabolize his meds, sat uncomfortably in his gut, a hot doughy stone.
Drow unloaded his cereal. The illusion of Luce promptly stepped off the bot, releasing it to fly off to its next gig.
“I’m taking my dog for a shit,” he said. “Want to come?”
The big fish undulated into place beside him.
A few days earlier, when Drow had Luce alone in Rubi’s hashed Cloudsight office, he’d written Luce a couple educational jingles about Haystack—ensuring that the client understood his every utterance, spoken, subbed, or texted—was being recorded. Everything he saw, every illusion his processors delivered to Drow’s implants, all of it was on the record.
To have any anonymity at all, Luce, you had to be boring as fuck, he’d explained—not worth searching. He’d told him about morsing and pussyfooting for good measure.
Had Luce understood? If he was truly a digital entity, cord cut and free of biomass, he couldn’t ever ghost his messages. Same problem as Crane—if you didn’t have skin, your every attempt to communicate had to be processed through a server.
So, now they walked—man, dog, and ghost—along the well-lit promenades leading to Onondaga Lake. The night air was cool and moist. An artist dangled from the high wall of a greentower, hand-painting a mural on the south wall by the glow of a flying spotlight. Point-of-interest tags popped up to announce they were within 1.6 km of a heronry.
“Who will you sing to tomorrow?” Luce asked.
“Tour’s wrapping. I may head back to Toronto.”
“You came all this way.”
“And mentored Whiskey through three live performance modules,” Drow said. “She’s passed with flying colors. Any other projects I may have had on the go have #crashburned.”
“There’s a nice bench,” Luce said, peremptorily.
Drow took the hint and sat. Acid-laced pretzel rolled in his guts.
“So, I’ve read your whole life story, far back as it goes,” Luce said. “Rubi’s too, and her love interests.”
“You’ve had some time on your hands.” Love interests? Plural? Gimlet Barnes and … who? Manitoule was old news.
“This thing you do. Hounding after blood trails?”
“It’s prosocial support for journalism. Fact-checking. Debunking. @Bloodhounds are a type of dog, incidentally.”
“It’s all dogs with you, isn’t it?”
“Dogs are loyal, noble, and true, my friend.”
“This dog tells you that you’re safe, right?” Luce indicated Robin.
“For some values of safe.”
“She tell you you’re safe now?”
This would be an attempt to pussyfoot. Big cartoon goldfish, fiddling with his gold medallion, trying to look innocent. So fucking subtle.
“I’m safe now,” Drow affirmed. “No warning bells—”
His drug port ticked, faintly.
He felt a little burst of panic-induced vertigo. If Luce hadn’t warned him, he probably would have jumped screaming to his feet.
And, immediately: “Sir! A redtooth—”
“Not now, Crane.”
Strong tick. Weak tick. A dot, a dash. Unpleasant sensation, like having a tiny hammer banging on his clavicle.
Breathe, breathe. Morse followed, spelling out This is off record. Old medical server; easy to hack. Is OK?
“Glorious.” Drow spat out the word.
You wanted something from this Legosi guy?
“Don’t you have enough problems?”
In our second appointment, you said focusing on others’ needs was sometimes a legit route to psychic pain relief.
“I didn’t mean my needs.”
I’ve pretty much alienated everyone else.
How to crumb this out? Drow fought his stomach, forcing himself to take in the lake view. His thoughts circled and whirled, multiple voices chasing musical compositions and peer-counseling modules and travel plans. He heard the call-and-response from an old catechism class, word for word, seventy years earlier but as clear as if he was in church now, immaculate and untouched. He toyed with the wording on a snatch of text from one of his journo articles, a decade since it went live on NewsReef. He pictured fake meat, twitching in a box, under maggots.
“That guy Luce Pox,” he said, maintaining the feeble illusion, for the record, that he thought the fish was someone else. “Was soapboxing for martial law. He wanted power concentrated in the hands of the few.”
“So?”
“You’ve read my whole life, right? I’m interested in that, too. Where power concentrates.”
This is your @ChamberofHorrors obsession.
He smiled by way of saying yes.
Which supposedly is #hoax #rumor #urbanmyth.
“Someone told me Garmin was a local historian.”
“Someone.” Luce let his toon’s eyes cloud over, showing Hackle’s white cataracts. He’d followed the breadcrumbs through Drow’s transcript.
“Sadly, Garmin wasn’t feeling chatty tonight. Old men, we’re moody. We flip-flop. Someone really paranoid might even note that his nose looks newly healed.”
“How can you tell?”
“Superhoomin leaves a bit of a burn in its wake. But healing, see, implies it was recently broken.”
His implant morsed: Want me to see what I can glean?
Might Luce be able to find dirt on Garmin?
He sighed. “What did you say? I’ve come all this way.”
I’ll give his tumblers a roll.
Drow expected Luce to toon out then, but instead he sat, cross-legged, glubbing, waving his tail.
… meat in a twitch box …
… corpse copse corpse copse …
… parish pariah, parish pariah …
Drow banged his fists together, one, two, three. Robin yawned and climbed onto his lap, warm and smelling a little of the lake.
“Dogs are loyal, noble, and true,” Luce mused. “What about all the bird toons? Stupid Crane?”
“Master Woodrow was not consulted about my design features,” the sidekick put in.
“Right, right. The programmer daddies.”
What was this? Chitchat?
Drow asked, “Are you attempting to … hang out?”
A shrug from the fish toon.
A piece of driftwood rocked on the edge of the water, neither afloat nor truly on the beach. The lakefront had little traffic this late; there was nobody to disrupt.
“Tell me you can’t see the appeal of this.” He slid off Robin’s harness, sliding the Superhoomin vials even deeper within her panniers, and then picked up the stick.
The dog sprang onto her toes, bouncing and barking.
Drow threw, an easy one. His arm wore out fast these days. She bounded after it, frolicking in the shallows. Returning it for another throw, then another.
As he played, Drow assembled quick shares for Luce on the total awesome of dogs. Everything from #puppypix to research on the theory that their two species had co-evolved. He wrote lyrics for a song, “Loyal Chum Robin.” They’d have to run it through legal—the same people who owned the rights to Crane’s inspiration, Alfred Pennyworth, watched carefully for actionable MadMaestro infringement on other Batman properties.
Wouldn’t do to launch a #brandwar.
Luce watched the dog run to and fro. “It’s base mammal bondage. Correction: bonding. Body heat, soft hair, eyes like a tiny human. Substitute offspring.”
Therapist Drow was supposed to be off duty, but Leonardo gave him plenty of bandwidth. Few people—non-sociopathic ones, anyway—were immune to this level of cute puppy love. “And you’re not a cat person, either.”
“Haven’t tasted cat.”
Drow considered, researched, and discarded the possibility of autism spectrum disorder.
The seizures …
Wait! The seizures had been attacks after all.
He shuddered.
Had Rubi ever figured out why a #triage program, of all things, had been so bent on chasing Luce up and down the Sensorium?
He had worn out both arms with throwing. Bracing, he changed up the game, wrestling Robin for the stick. “I’d be interested in seeing what you thought of cats, Luce. There’s a Project Rewild crèche in Geneseo, holed up in Garmin’s old pharma corp. Techs think they can gestate a living tiger—print enough embryonic cells in the right medium to get a fetus going.”
“Earth has cats.”
“Kitty cats. Tigers are another level.”
“Resurrection tech’s not invented yet.”
Drow shrugged. “Some Rewild woman—what was her name, Crane?”
“Allure Noonstar.”
“Noonstar says she’s made the requisite breakthrough.”
The fish made awoogah eyes at him. “Why don’t I know about this?”
“Um. You’re more interested in oxygen security?”
“This was really fun,” Luce said, in a false, hearty voice. “We should do it again!”
His implant twitched again, morsing: Garmin obsesses about the Scranton Pyramids.
The beach sand turned, momentarily, to a sweep of sandcastles. Illusion of pyramids and other monument-scale structures grew outward, in every direction, around him. At Drow’s feet, a circular navel of a structure swirled down, down. This one in particular.
“Subtlety’s not your strong suit, friend,” he said.
“Fuck subtle,” Luce said. With that, he vanished, leaving Drow with his next clue—the Blingtown-Manhattan Zoo tourist loop, apparently—and a wet, happy dog.