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FROM THE OUTSIDE OF Ding’s building, you’d never suspect a polished marble floor and a lobby bigger than a downtown bank lay on the other side. Granite columns in two rows led the eye toward the far wall, where the burnished-nickel finish of the single elevator door gleamed under muted overhead lighting. I could never spot the cameras covering the lobby, though I knew they existed. I suspected poison gas vents, anti-personnel laser beams, and a shark tank hidden under the floor, though Ding always denied it.
“You fed the shark today?” My voice echoed off the marble walls.
Nothing happened, so I squeaked across the floor in my damp shoes, and when the elevator door swished open, I slipped into a space as inviting as a woman’s arms. Teak walls, brass accents, offset lighting, orchestral music so soft it made love to my ears... no buttons, of course. The elevator went from the lobby to the third floor with no stops; it whispered upward with barely a sigh.
I skulked into an open loft filled with stack after stack of hard-shell moving boxes. Elephant-sized crates lay scattered across the floor. Sawdust, packing materials and bits of trash covered the glossy hardwood finish in a dusty rime of filth. The bare walls revealed faint outlines where pictures and panels once hung, a ghostly afterimage of technology burned onto the textured finish.
I didn’t have to be Agent Ramirez to figure out Ding was moving.
A woman swayed through the row of boxes. Calling her a woman was like referring to crème brûlée as vanilla pudding. Sheathed in a pale-cream dress that flared from opaque to translucent as she swayed, revealing hints of her sepia-toned skin, Aphrodite twined through the clutter and debris as if it didn’t exist. Diamond-studded hoop earrings glittered against her straight black hair, setting off almond-shaped eyes, a flaring petite nose and the reddest, fullest pair of lips I’d ever seen.
Phasers on stun.
“Mr. Warren?” Her voice glided across the floor, slid up my leg, and caressed my ear. “I’m Deandre, Mr. Winston’s assistant.”
Only the aftereffects of the erection-killing drug in my system allowed me to speak at all. Sort of. What came out of my mouth was “Gahp mullaka borrun.”
She understood me perfectly. “Right this way. Mr. Winston is expecting you.”
With a tilt of her head, the goddess swept her hand and led me through the box maze to a stripped-down version of Ding’s former office, against the middle of the back wall. At every slinky movement of her hips, Deandre’s creamy dress material flashed erotic images of tawny flesh. If the track-switching mechanism between Joe’s brain and Joe’s penis were functional, the express train to Hard-On Junction would have left the station like a rocket-sled.
She glided to one side when we reached a pocket of open floor. A battleship-sized desk hogged the bulk of the space. Ding had his desk made from the outer layer of polished Whipple shields recovered from the International Space Station after it splashed into the shallow waters off the coast of Bermuda.
Behind it, using a privacy-shielded 3D projection monitor that cost more than the gross domestic product of Norway, Marion Winston tapped a virtual control pad and made things happen on his screen that I couldn’t see.
“Joe,” he said. He didn’t look up, but I didn’t expect him to. Ding had a problem with eye contact. He also hated to be called by his first name.
“Marion.”
There were no visitor chairs. Deandre joined an equally stunning woman on the cream-puff sofa against the wall of stacked crates to my right. Her friend had milky skin and blond hair so pale it was almost white. Topaz-blue eyes regarded me over a straight nose and Nordic chin. Where Deandre’s cream dress contrasted with her cinnamon skin, this woman’s pale complexion was offset by a black dress of the same peekaboo fabric. She ran a hand through her hair, and I caught a glimpse of an impossibly pink nipple.
“You met Deandre,” Ding said. “Say hello to Signe.”
“Hello, Signe.” I hitched my chin at the blonde, whose pale lips curled in a wicked smile. The dynamic sexual voltage of the two women nearly shocked all the anti-androgenic out of my system and left me a helpless puddle of goo.
I cleared my throat and addressed my old pal, who’d grown to the size of a baby hippo, with jowly chins and a Hershey’s Kiss-shaped body. Have I mentioned he hated to be called Marion?
“So, Marion,” I said, “where’d you meet these two lost souls? Bingo night at the Ladies of Nocturnal Emission?”
“What do you want, Joe?” Ding had a eunuch’s voice, lilting and soft. He once confided in me that he lost interest in sexual contact—with men or women—not long after puberty, about the time his belly eclipsed his equipment. Sort of an if I can’t see it, it ain’t there philosophy.
So why employ female assistants who could cause a contact ejaculation? “Because,” he once explained, “they distract the opposition. Their undiluted pheromones make men dizzy, and dizzy men think only about their dick. Can’t bargain for shit.”
“I’m in a bind, Ding,” I admitted, standing in front of his space debris desk, a supplicant in the court of the King of Last Chances. If I had a hat, I’d twist it in my hands. “Chelle’s... dead. I’m flat broke and homeless—” Something cracked in my voice, and I focused on the watery drips sliding down the high window behind Ding’s head. “Shit, man, I don’t know what else to do.”
Ding glanced up from his display, shooting a peek at me before jerking his chin at Signe and Deandre. “Ladies, please give us the room. Joe? Over here, Joe. Sit down. Tell me what happened.”
I sank into the warm depression the blonde left in the sofa as the women swished away, butt cheeks flashing. Signe tossed a look over her shoulder, the wattage of her crooked smile lighting the power grid throughout the South Side. Any other day and my hair would’ve spontaneously combusted. I studied my hands, curled into lumps of water-wrinkled flesh in my lap, and ignored her.
“What happened?” Ding’s eyes—although not his attention—had returned to his display, safely hidden in the world inside his computer. Somehow, that made it easier... Ding not watching me, I mean. More like a confessional, where the priest stayed behind a screen while you spilled your guts, allowing you to open up without judgmental faces adding to the misery.
I sucked in a deep breath and said, “Chelle and I went to the doctor...”
***
SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE of my story, the rain started again. Drops ticking against the window provided the only sound in the cavernous room. I cradled an empty beer bottle with a strange label. Something foreign, with a strong scent of barley and a smooth finish. When Signe brought it to me, I was telling Ding about Rogair Killingsworth, OBW Employee of the Month. She gave me the cold bottle without a word, holding my hand a beat and a half too long, her eyes promising, lips parted. She slipped away with a lingering look, and I waited until she’d gone before I asked Ding what the fuck that was all about.
“Pay her no mind,” he told me. “That’s her job, but Signe doesn’t know when to turn it off.”
“It’s... disturbing.”
I wished now she’d come back with more beer. I hadn’t tasted real beer in ages, and I’d inhaled the first one with barely a tickle of a taste bud. My story finished—Chelle getting sick, the street riot, jail, Ramirez—I waited for Ding to render judgment.
“You’re about four months too late.” Ding sighed, and his eyes flickered to me and away, in less than a heartbeat. “Look around, Joe. What do you see?”
“This a trick question? A bunch of boxes.”
“I’m getting out of here while I have a chance.” Ding tapped a key, and a panel display lit up on the wall behind him. A news feed crawled up the screen, one headline clicky after another. Back when I had a working phone, I used a similar feed to keep up on baseball scores; if I wanted details on a game, I could tap the clicky, and the screen would fill with a summary and highlights. Ding was the only person I knew who kept a running feed from Fox, CNN, and ABS. “You see these headlines?”
“More trick questions? Jeez, no, Ding, all I see is a bunch of squiggly lines.” I glared a fuck you. The dipwad was always on me about getting my head out of my ass and paying attention, as if my awareness of current events would make a difference. “What about the headlines?”
“If you read them very, very carefully”—another eye flicker—“you’ll see the pattern. Not here, right this second, but if you follow the newsies every day, read what they say, and—more importantly—what they don’t say, the pattern emerges.”
“Now I know you’re shitting me. How do you read what they don’t say?”
Somehow he communicated with his female assistants by secret button, or telepathy, or hell, I don’t know, maybe they were programmed to know what he wanted. Deandre brought me another beer and refreshed Ding’s bowl of cupcakes and glass of whole milk. Her delivery was less sexually charged than Signe’s, but that was like saying a Jaguar was slower than a Ferrari. My hand tingled where she touched me.
Chelle is a Revivant, wandering the streets somewhere with a vacant expression.
I shuddered and sucked out the top third of my beer in one swig.
“How do I read what they don’t say?” Ding continued talking throughout Deandre’s appearance, and my brain caught up in a rush as she departed. “Simple. You were involved in a police action in downtown Chicago approximately three weeks ago, correct? You were there. You got arrested. You know it happened.” An eye flicker of slightly longer duration. About the lifespan of a quark.
“True.”
“And yet, when I search for the information on the official news sources”—he sneered at the word “official,” his light voice rising to falsetto pitch—“I find no mention of this riot. So what they didn’t say, very loudly, was that a group of citizens called the Children of Liberty were protesting the pervasive and invasive nature of the United States government and were arrested under provisions of the DTA.”
He let that statement sit there in the quiet room and allowed me to examine it at my leisure. My leisure decided it didn’t want to examine shit.
“Your point, Ding?”
“The press doesn’t report what the government doesn’t want reported.”
I slapped my forehead. “Holy-fucking-cow! I never would’ve guessed!”
Ding’s lips twitched in a smile, and he almost peeked at me again. “I forgot how sarcastic you could be. Let me try this one on you. What if I told you I’d learned through non-news sources that ninety-three percent of the current and former high-ranking executive, judicial, and legislative members of the federal government owned estates in mainland China, Bermuda, India, or South Africa? That I could prove it to you? And that no news agency anywhere has mentioned even one tiny hint of it. What would you think of that?”
“I... I have no clue what that means.” I drained my beer and slapped the bottle on his desk with a clang. “Why don’t you cut to the chase, buddy. It’s been a real fucked-up day, and all I want to know is do you have something I can do for money, or not.”
“It’s simple,” Ding said. “They’re running for the hills, Joseph. And so am I. In two days, three at most, I’ll be on board a sixty-foot yacht with Signe, Deandre, my two muscleheads, and any significant others those folks want to bring. I’ve liquidated my assets, and I’m getting the fuck out of the United States of America before the bottom falls out.”
“Bottom falls out?” My clothes had nearly dried, but a few damp spots left me itchy. I scratched my shoulder blade, twisting one arm over my head to reach it. “Explain it for the dummy in the room.”
Ding met and held my eyes for a full second. Then another after that. Unnerving. “In a few months,” he said, matching stares with me, “maybe a year, at most, the USA won’t draw enough taxes to service the interest on the debt. News sources have stopped reporting the actual debt itself. A CNN tweet hit the wires a few days ago about the rate of the deficit at $400 billion per month, then it disappeared from the feeds.” Ding sighed and looked away. “Stay with me for a second here, okay? In 2014, the average deficit added around $80 billion per month to an $18 trillion debt. Annual interest on the debt was around $230 billion. Today, the interest payment is two trillion dollars, which sucks out over half of all tax revenue. When tax revenue can no longer pay the interest and maintain daily operation, the government goes into default. The military will not get paid. Grandma’s social security draw will bounce. Food subsidy programs, social services, government housing, the FDA, the FBI, and the US Forest Service will have no money. Government bonds, which prop up a huge segment of the financial market, will be worth less than toilet paper. Everything from the Department of the Treasury to the goddamned Bureau of Indian-fucking-Affairs will have... no... money!”
Ding settled back in his chair and mopped his face with a handkerchief. He popped a cream-filled chocolate pastry in his mouth and chewed on it while I digested what he told me.
“So,” I said into the silence, “does that mean you got something for me, or not?”
Ding said, without hesitation, “You can have everything, my entire operation, wall to wall, floor to ceiling.”
“Even Signe?”
“Not Signe.”
Thunder grumbled, rattling the window. Night had snuck in early, and the lights inside Ding’s loft flickered whenever lightning danced on the other side of the dark pane. I considered myself duly impressed that his power stayed on; he must have greased the right palms at the electric company to keep the juice flowing.
“You want to be a crook, Joe?” My friend’s chair creaked as he settled back and rubbed his bald head with both hands. He seemed tired. “I’ll give you my How to be a Crook starter kit. Fingerprint replicator, ID creator, hidden bank accounts, secret decoder ring, and all.”
My face scrunched in suspicion. “Why so generous?”
“Not generosity. I told you, man, I’m out. The United States is done, and all this stuff in boxes is headed for a shipping container. When I find a place—probably an island, somewhere cool—I’ll have it shipped there and set up house again. Who knows? Maybe I’ll go on a diet, get buff.”
I pinched my nose to stop the snort. “You and the Pheromone Fillies, living the dream.”
Ding shrugged. “Why not? Seriously, man, listen... I’m doing you no favors.” Ding reached into a desk drawer and removed a small plastic box. He popped the top and dumped out a half-dozen snack-size baggies, each with a white label printed in black ink. “Here, pick one.”
I snagged a baggie at random and read the label: Johnson, D’metria T.
Below that, in smaller print, was a laundry list of vital statistics. I opened the bag and found a clear latex-like finger cot, larger than a thimble, smaller than a condom. Nothing else.
“Okay, I give,” I told Ding. “What’s with the rubber?”
“It’s a replica fingerprint of”—he read the label—“D’metria T. Johnson. D’metria passed away and became a Revivant at some point in the recent past, and we were able to obtain her fingerprint without too much trouble.”
“And this gets you...?”
“Any and all benefits to which D’metria was entitled during her life, up to and including social security and unemployment compensation.”
“But... she’s dead. Don’t they—Doesn’t the government keep records of dead people?”
“Sure they do. But Revivants aren’t registered as officially, quote-unquote, dead until their body is retired from service. Supreme Court ruled on that in ’43. There’s paperwork to prevent fraud, but it’s easy to get around if you know how.”
I sank back into the sofa and tried on D’metria’s identification. It fit like a one-finger glove. “So now what do I do with this?”
“With that? Nothing. Those were made for welfare scams.” Ding flicked his hand in my direction. He extracted a shiny metal cube from his desk drawer and slid it over to me without looking. “Fingerprint replicator. Use it wisely. If I were you, I’d work on one big score, something involving a corporation. Scam a pile of cash and blow town. Head for greener pastures, dude. When the government shuts down, things will get ugly, fast. You don’t want to be anywhere around when that happens.”
“A big score, huh?” My mind was totally blank. “Help me out here, Ding. I’m not the huge—pardon the pun—criminal mastermind in the room. I—” A headline in the crawl caught my eye. “Freeze that!”
Ding tapped a key, and I read the clicky twice more to be sure I had it right. A static charge sizzled from my cold heart all the way down to my fingertips.
“That’s it,” I said.
“What?” Ding frowned and followed my pointing finger. “Renascentia,” he read, “inventor of the Revivant app, will be holding a dinner event honoring the tenth anniversary of their signature invention Wednesday, May 30th at Chicago’s Huateng Tower.”
“Click for details, man.” A fever burned bright in my face; my eyes simmered, hot and moist. “I’m going to get the fucks took Chelle away. That’s gonna be my big score.”