Under the Twinkle of a Fading Star
by Jon Adcock
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
My right eye was an implant. As I rode down rain-slicked streets, the portable fed it a city map with the route traced in red. I followed the directions until I came to a small store on a rundown, darkened cul-de-sac. The lights in the store were still on, and a lone clerk was seated behind the counter. The customer area before him was cluttered with stock shelves filled with antique tech. Locked cages behind him presumably held the valuable junk.
A bell sounded above the door as I walked in. The clerk’s right arm quickly disappeared under the counter, and he looked at me with an expression of wariness and distrust. He was at least 70, grizzled and leathery, with a spider-web of scars on the left side of his face. His left arm was prosthetic.
“We’re closing up.” If possible, his voice was as grizzled and leathery as he was.
“Must be doing pretty well to turn down business.” I glanced around the empty store.
“Don’t worry ’bout me. I’m doing all right. What do you want?”
“I’m going to reach into one of these pockets and pull out my portable, Pops. I’m telling you this only if you have that right hand on something other than your dick. No need to start things off with an unfortunate misunderstanding.”
His eyes never left me as I slowly walked over to him. There was a brief hesitation before he took the portable and, after he glanced at the display, his right hand snaked back into view. He scrolled through the screen with interest.
“Most of this is old military tech,” he said. “Cybernetic stuff. Not too easy to get anymore.”
“I was told you’re the best scrounger around. Were they wrong?”
“If it’s out there, I can get it.” He looked up, trying to see my face past the shadow of my jacket’s hood.
“Great. Get it, and I’ll make it worth your while.” I pulled the hood back as I said this.
“Thought so. Marauder Class?”
“Nah, I was strictly recon.” I smiled slightly as he visibly relaxed. Towards the end, they used brain-wiped lifers and death-row inmates for the Marauder chassis. In theory, that should have worked, but there was usually enough residual personality left to make them a tad... unpredictable.
“So, how much of you is steel and Syntha-Flesh?” he nodded at his prosthetic as he jacked the portable into the data port implanted in his right temple.
“Pops, it’s easier to ask how much ain’t.”
We reminisced for a while. A couple of old soldiers trading war stories and a few bald-faced lies we were too polite to call each other on. Finally, I told him I had to leave and got a commitment to have most of the items on the list in three weeks.
“Ghost tech?” he asked as he reached out and fingered the fabric of my jacket. “How much you want for it?”
“Sorry, not for sale. Still comes in handy these days.”
“Hey,” he called out as I started to walk out the door, “is Jackson your first or last name?”
“Does that even matter anymore, Lucius? It’s what I answer to.”
* * *
I was state-of-the-art once, but now had more in common with those bins of discarded junk than anyone I passed on the way here. I was old tech embedded in even older flesh, and obsolescence was a bitch.
I rolled the motorcycle into the street and straddled it. Like me, the bike was Pre-Burn, but it purred as softly as a kitten when switched on. Technically, the bike wasn’t “mine.” I checked it out from the motor pool a year ago. Each week, like clockwork, an automated request was sent asking for it to be returned. I never got tired of deleting it.
The night was chilly, and tendrils of fog groped after me as I rode. Public transportation had ended hours ago, and the late evening streets were sparsely populated. All the good and conscientious citizens were snuggled under their covers, resting up for the drudgery of their jobs the next day. Few could be called good or conscientious where I was headed.
During the war, the city’s eastern section had been nuked. Over the years, a halfhearted attempt had been made to clean up the damage, but the area was still a raw wound. Like a magnet drawing in metal filings, the Fester drew in the city’s misfits and reprobates.
And Blissheads. Bliss was the drug du jour, and there was a never-ending supply of people willing to use a vial of it to numb the pain that gnawed at their souls. A vial that soon turned into a habit like a 1,000-pound monkey clinging tenaciously to their backs and whispering, “Feed me,” in their ears.
For two weeks, I’d been looking for a 15-year old girl lost among the drunks, druggies, and hard cases of the Fester. The girl was the daughter of an old friend, and I was determined to find her.
The afternoon’s rain had done little to wash the city clean. The streets were more oily than wet, and the buildings were smeared with soot and industrial filth washed down from the perpetually hazy skies. The closer I got to the Fester, the more things were dressed in squalor. In some blocks, the buildings had been razed, and the only thing left were foundations filled with stagnant water and trash.
On a deserted side street, I parked down a narrow, garbage-filled alley that smelled like piss and slapped a holoprojector on the bike. It disappeared, replaced with an image of the wall. That was as safe as I could make it.
Other than a random sweep every few months, Security had given up on the Fester years ago. At one point, the authorities had tried to use sentry drones to patrol at night, but the attrition rate was too high. The scavenged scrap metal, tech, and weaponry made a downed drone worth its weight in gold. People devised various imaginative and innovative ways to swat them out of the sky.
A streetlight flickered on and off on a far corner. The dark swelled and seethed at the edges of light, then rushed in to fill the void like an inky tide. A group of wannabes was gathered near it. There were five of them, all in their 20’s, and their laughter and horseplay stopped when they noticed me. To a man, they each struck a pose that they thought intimidating. Something they’d probably learned from watching old vids. I tried not to roll my eyes.
“It’s late, Gramps. Must be past your bedtime... Heh, heh,” one of them said when I got closer. He was about four inches shorter than me, stocky, with long hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“I’m good. Took a nap this afternoon.”
“Took a nap... Heh, heh.”
“Looking for a girl.” I reached out my arm. A foot-high holo of Toni appeared in the air over my open palm. “Seen her?”
“Looking for a girl... Heh, heh.”
My frustration over the last few days flared into anger. “This will go a lot faster if you stop repeating everything I say, son.”
“Didn’t just see her, Gramps. Raped her and killed her. Should’ve heard her squeal when—”
Whatever else he was going to say was cut off when I lashed out with my right arm, grabbed him around the throat, and lifted him off the ground.
“So, how ’bout the rest of you? Seen her?” I asked their retreating backs as the one I held scrabbled and clawed at my arm. When his pawing grew weaker, I let go, and he fell to his hands and knees.
“If I thought you idiots had done something to her, there wouldn’t be enough left for Body Retrieval to bother with.” I knelt, grabbed his hair, and pulled until he made eye contact.
I walked away and left him there. When I was down a few streets and out of sight, I reached up and rubbed my right shoulder. It would be one more thing: stiff and sore when I woke up the following day.
* * *
For the next four hours, I talked to street people and visited bars, gambling dens, and brothels. The result was the same one I’d gotten each night since I started. No one had seen Toni or knew anything about her. This wasn’t some Pre-Burn vid. There wasn’t a trail of clues like breadcrumbs leading to her, and the feeling that I wasn’t up to the job grew with each passing day.
This is a tale of two cities, a story of haves and have-nots. The have-nots lived up here in the filth of Old Town, under skies perpetually hazy from the smokestacks of the city’s industrial section. The haves lived in an underground enclave in the hills outside the city. The enclave existed pre-Burn and, back then, had a name that reflected the pretentiousness of the one-percenters residing there. Nowadays, if it was called anything at all, it was called Grubville by the Townies.
Toni had left Grubville one morning three weeks ago. She was chipped, and enough infrastructure was left to track some of her movements that day. The public transportation she took out of Grubville dropped her off at the open-air market in the town center. She walked to the Fester from there, and then her chip went dark.
I’ve gotten a few errant children of the elites out of jams before. Usually, it was a teenage boy with more hormones than common sense, someone who wanted a little taste of danger and thrills. An idiot I had to drag out of some drug house or brothel. This was different. Her chip going dark strongly indicated that someone had snatched her. People see things and hear things. They’ll talk for the right price, but two weeks of showing her holo and dangling a reward had gotten me nothing.
Home was a small, two-story townhouse in a section of the city a few steps above the Fester. The floor plan was simple. There was a kitchen, dining nook, and living room downstairs. Two bedrooms were upstairs. The décor was dumpster-dive, rummage-sale chic. When I got home, I rolled the bike in, left it leaning against the living room wall, and looked for something to eat. Most of the things in the fridge were of questionable age, but there was a container of grilled meat I had bought from a street vendor two nights before. It wasn’t vat-grown and gave a new definition to “mystery meat,” but at least it hadn’t been two-legged when breathing.
After dinner, I grabbed a bottle of booze from the cupboard and settled on the threadbare couch to read Don Quixote. I’d bought it and a box of other books from a vendor in the marketplace a few weeks ago. The books were old and musty, with loose bindings and yellowed pages, but they gave me an escape from reality’s harsh edges. So did the booze.
* * *
Copyright © 2024 by Jon Adcock
