4619 words (18 minute read)

Father

When I finally crawl out of my rooms, exiting the club though the back door so I don’t have to deal with the morning shift of customers, I push the door open on a day even more dreary than my soul. Cold winds gust across the sparsely populated parking lot, channeled by the canyons between towering stacks of offices, workspaces, and apartments. I swear under my breath and hurry towards my summoned autocab, praying that it will have a working heater. Outside, the sidewalks and streets are crowded with people making last minute preparations for the storm, so the tardy autocab must pick its way slowly along the road, collision avoidance system stuttering to a halt every few dozen yards.

Sometimes, when I’m having a good day, I will find myself walking a crowded retail promenade in the midden, eyeing the other pedestrians, wondering what fictions are playing through their heads to convince them that they need to make another purchase on credit, pile another month of labor debt onto their employment license, keep on living for another miserable day. It can be enervating, even inspirational to observe. Then there are the more common days when, unable to lock myself away in my rooms, I stride through the crowd, weaving between sappy faced lovers, wage slaves frowning as they ponder their next ulcer surgery, and illegals desperate to rack up enough money for a bribe before they are caught in a random sweep. Walking among the wretched survivors of a world that has grown weary of our damned species and wondering whether I could claw my way to the top of this corpse heap with a few carefully selected murders. Judging from the lavish decor I see on television and the sprawling, thoroughly guarded compounds which crown hilltops across the city, there is plenty of comfort to be found in watching the end of the world from the bubbling depths of a champagne filled hot tub.

And so I suffer in silence as the vehicle crawls along the choked streets of the midden and lowdown, then up the hill to the lower edges of high society. No fences separate the neighborhood which is home to Coldheart’s Carriage Club from the lower districts, but with the crossing of a boulevard I note an immediate increase in the presence of Security drones and a marked absence of people walking anywhere but the designated sidewalks.

It is here in the middle-class districts of the city where the irony of the post-crash culture is at its finest. These people have locked themselves away behind invisible walls of monitoring drones and literal white picket fences, constructed for the express purpose of holding back the human tide of refugees and savages who would dare to walk across a neighbor’s yard, and yet they are as much prisoners as the trespassers they capture and send to work in corporate labor centers. When the city was originally founded, merging three towns into a single corpopolis whose citizens would be guarded from the ravages of the wilds by medical, technological, and social barriers, it was the strong middle class which provided the popular support for building the first ring wall along the border of the old state highways and beltways. When that project failed after several years of mismanagement and corruption, they replaced the idea of a physical wall with continually roving swarms of armed security drones. Those couldn’t entirely eliminate illegal immigration and crime, so concerned upper middle class parents, already skittish about their children’s welfare after having survived a plague, ordered fleets of drones to patrol their own streets in hope of saving themselves from the scourge of undesirables. That’s when it came out that much of the property crime was being carried out by their own precious children, and the majority of violent crimes were of the domestic variety. Still, most communities keep the drones, telling themselves the lack of privacy is a worthy trade for keeping the likes of Darby out of their communities. Too bad for them that the criminal syndicates don’t much care about the number of drones patrolling the streets.

My autocab accelerates and carries me up a steep hill towards the mid-level residential area where Coldheart’s Carriage Club is located. Out the rear window, I watch as a Security drone tails the autocab for a mile or so before pealing off to follow some other vehicle, likely having queried the transit authority and determined that I, the passenger of this cab, possess enough credit to pay for whatever I wants here in the more affluent district. It’s nice to know that the algorithms of the community council don’t consider me an imminent threat to local health and safety.

The Coldheart Carriage Club is located on a quiet street a few blocks downhill from a residential neighborhood, at the edge of a shopping district. It’s a baby blue victorian, probably a century or more old, with a gravel parking lot around back so visitors can come and go discreetly. Security drones flit around, but anyone willing to live in this community, with their every move outdoors continually scrutinized by Security restrillects and officers, would see these as more of an assurance that the Club’s employees are protected than a threat to the privacy of customers.

There’s no answer at the back door when I knock, so I figure that someone’s spotted me through the camera mounted above the door beside a bright yellow bug lamp and determined that I am not a member. That’s fine. There’s plenty of people I’ve banned from Tamar’s who wouldn’t get past our security, and nobody gets in our back door uninvited.

The front door is another matter. It opens right up and lets me in to the same plush waiting room I saw on the security video. It’s been about twenty hours since the video was recored and I’m pleased to see the same man behind the check in counter, a “happy to serve” smile fixed to his face.

“Welcome to Coldheart’s Carriage Club,” he says, brushing the long half of his haircut back out of his eyes. Today he’s dressed in a velvet suit that’s so powdery blue I want to take him outside and nail him up to the wall of the house, just to see if it’s the exact same color. He’s saved by the velvet. I hate the feel of velvet on my skin. “Do you have a recommendation for membership or are you just here to learn about our services?”

“Looking for somebody.” I shake my head, taking in the plush armchairs and vases of blue and pink flowers. The carpeting on the floor and walls is a shade of orange that shouldn’t exist outside of a nuclear laboratory.  

“I’m sorry sir, but unless you have a warrant I’m afraid I cannot provide any information about our club members.”

I pull an eper from my coat and drop it on the countertop. “Not interested in your members. I just want to know about this man.” There’s a still from the security video on the eper, set to show both this clerk and the inquisitive father.

Bro-clerk’s eyes widen a bit and he glances up over my shoulder, probably eyeing the security camera in the rafters. He opens his mouth to speak, probably some sort of denial or deflection given how quick it’s coming, so I put my finger up in warning and shake my head. “Save it. I know he was here. I know you talked to him. The people who gave me this video know everything about this place. They own the owners, you might say. If you don’t help me I’ll just get word back to them and I guarantee that you’ll be looking for a new job by nightfall.”

He settles down a little, his face making that gentle transition from angry, through afraid, and into resigned. He knows that the club is crooked. In this part of town, chances are that Darby uses the club to launder money by sending mules through to pay for exorbitantly expensive entertainment packages which then funnel upwards of eighty percent of the fee back to him. Bro-clerk will know which packages are legit, and which are just a front.

“That’s right,” I say, tapping the eper on the counter without taking my eyes off of his. “Now, tell me everything you know about this guy. I especially want to know if he gave you a way to contact him.”

Bro-clerk gives me little I didn’t already know, but importantly he does give me contact details for the concerned father. It only takes a few chits and a scowl for him to decide that it is in his best interest to call Daddy Worried Face and, rather convincingly, tell him that his little girl has showed up at the club looking for work.

“Please tell me she’s still there,” the father says, his voice dripping with concern over the speaker phone.

Following the script that I suggested, while casually cleaning my nails with the tip of a blade, Bro-clerk haughtily explains that his establishment would never be involved in the exploitation of a minor, but he did get the girl to agree to come back around noon today. Says that he offered to forward her name to some other people who might have work for her if she is really interested and she should return to find out if they responded. That bit comes off so convincingly, so blithely, that I wonder how much truth he’s injecting into the narrative. I make a mental note to take a special interest in this guy once I’ve returned the girl to Ethie, maybe find out if the bit about never employing underaged manikins is a lie and, if necessary, introduce some of the more sensitive bits of his carefully cultivated anatomy to my ceramic blades. I’m all in favor of the city’s relaxed attitudes towards personal entertainment, especially since my legitimate business depends on it, but there are some lines that should never be crossed.

After bro-clerk hangs up I flash him a grin. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

He smiles back at me, nervously at first and then the smile grows wide and more genuine as the feedback loop of our mutual smiles intensifies. I let it grow until I’m about to break out laughing, then I decide that the lesson should happen sooner than later.

Next thing bro-clerk knows, I’ve got him by the collar and have pulled him half over the countertop, one of my knives pressed beside his eye. He cries out, blubbering that he did what I asked.

Just then that the front door swings open.

Without releasing my grip on bro-clerk, I turn and flick my knife into the floor just inside the door, then reach inside my coat for a replacement.

The elderly couple standing in the doorway freezes, the man’s droopy white mustache quivering as he inspects the blade at his feet. The woman gasps and darts back out of sight on the porch, but not before I catch a glimpse of tightly curled white hair and a broad forehead.

“You might want to find another club,” I say, my voice as calm as if I were telling them the time of day. “This one’s about to get raided by Security for trafficking in underage manikins and illegal drugs.”

“I never—“ bro-clerk tries to say, but I cut him off with a sudden wrenching of his collar that constricts his throat and rips a button off his shirt.

The old man frowns, nods, and turns back out of the club, muttering and shaking his head. As the door swings shut I can hear the woman scolding him for choosing this club over the one she had wanted to join.

“Now, where were we?” I say, pressing the flat of my new blade against the tip of bro-clerk’s nose.

“I swear I’d never hurt a little girl,” he whispers. His eyes are crossing in his head as he tries to keep both of them focused on the blade of my knife.

“And what about little boys?” I ask.

“No. Never.”

“You were pretty convincing with the father. Like you know something about that world.”

“Hey, man. I work the manikin business. People come in here all the time looking for something more than we’re allowed to offer.”

“And you provide it, under the table of course.”

“No! I swear.”

I lift my blade from his nose and, after holding it in front of his left eye for a long moment, use the flat to tap on his eyebrow. “That better be true. I’ll be checking up on you. I catch a breath of you dealing in anything even remote nonconsensual and I’ll be paying you another visit. Clear?”

“Clear.”

I release him and step away to extract my other knife from the floorboards by the door. Stowing both knives in their sheaths I poke my head out the door to see if our visitors are still hanging out anywhere on the porch. Finding it empty, I turn back and nod to bro-clerk. “I’ll be waiting for him to show up. When he does, you tell him that she’s already come and gone. He presses, tell him you suggested she look for work at Tamar’s over in the midden.

“What’s that going to accomplish?”

“You leave that up to me. Once he’s gone you’re welcome to go about your day, but remember that I will be watching everything. And I’ll be back to check in on you.”

I don’t give him time to respond.

There’s a Koffee shop across the street. The real kind, not the sort that got imported from Amsterdam after marijuana was legalized back in my grandparents’ day, and not the sort of hazy opium den that was briefly in vogue after most of the corporate city states dropped most restrictions on narcotics. Alright, strictly speaking its Koffee brand synthesized caffeine drink, but with the edges of a hurricane battling a cold front in the streets of the city, I’ll take whatever hot caffeine mechanism I can find. I cross the street and settle into a table by the window, then order a pot of thick Turkish from the clean-cut young man in a brown apron who shows up to take my order.

And then I wait.

And wait.

I am not naturally the most patient person. I’ve head to learn patience as a skill, like some people learn to be organized, or how to drive a manual car. The problem with being patient is accepting that I don’t need to be continually in action at all times. It’s learning that sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, it’s okay to sit still and let the world flow around you. I grew up a child of the deluge, taught that humanity’s inaction in the face of climate change was to blame for the mass relocations that had struck my parents’ generation. Half a lifetime ago I watched the Red Easter plague consume over half of the world’s population in a bioengineered orgy of bacterial replication. The sight of whole cities reduced to festering boils of decayed flesh was enough to break my mind, but it was that same madness that ultimately saved my life.

And I’ve mostly been grateful for that these last twenty three years.

Mostly.  

I’ve taken up meditation since coming to the city. With a locked door between me and the threats of the mire, I have been able to force my mind to go into power save mode for an hour or two in order to drive off the persistent background daemon that threatens to pull me back into madness. It isn’t a panacea, but let me tall you its better than facing this world with no coping mechanisms whatsoever. That’s what landed me in lockdown to begin with.

So it’s meditation that helps me through the next hour as I wait for the desperate father to show up. That, and two pots of the thickest Koffee this upper middle class urban oasis knows how to make.

When he does arrive, it’s in a private vehicle that I wouldn’t exactly call “fatherly”, unless we’re talking sugar daddy.

My man pulls into the rear parking lot in a glinting silver Thunderbird conversion. I assume it’s a conversion, because even the wealthiest showoffs in the city are hesitant to drive an actual internal combustion engine anymore, but the rumble of the engine is so lifelike that I have to wonder whether it is synthesized or genuine. I lose sight of him for a minute as he parks, then he reappears around the side of Coldheart’s Carriage Club, heading for the front door.

He’s definitely the same man I saw in the surveillance video and I’m certain that he is not a worried dad. No, not with that swagger. And certainly not with the way he turns the swagger off and switches to a harried shuffle as he approaches the front door of the club. This is a man who wants to find somebody and he’s willing to play any part to get it.

I leave a few chits on the table and hurry across the street.

I reach his car and peer in, examining the exquisite white leather interior. This isn’t my sort of car, I’m not sure I have a favorite type of car after spending much of my life riding in autocabs or whatever scrappy vehicle I could find out in the mire, but it’s definitely a beautiful piece of craftsmanship: all sleek chromed curves and white, tooled leather held together with fine stitches. I can see why someone would want to own a piece of mobile art like this, even though I feel as if I might die of embarrassment if I ever drove it.

I wonder…

The driver’s door is unlocked. I reach inside and pull the hood release, nodding in appreciation when the body gives a satisfying metallic clunk. Opening the hood, I let out an appreciative whistle.

“What the hell are you doing?” a voice shouts.

I look to my right and see the concerned father stalking towards me. I didn’t exactly have a plan for this moment, probably should have thought of one instead of using my waiting time for Koffee and meditation, but I’ll take it as a positive sign that he isn’t reaching for a weapon.

“Nice ride you’ve got here,” I say, waving appreciatively at the engine block. “And your clients must pay hell of a lot better than mine for you to be able to afford this thing. The fuel alone has got to cost you a fortune.

He stops a couple strides away and scowls. His hands are clenched tightly at his side and I can just catch the glint of an interface implant over his left ear. That means at least one of his eyes is probably artificial, or there’s a tap on his optic nerve. He’s probably recording now, feeding my face and everything I say to a corporate syntellect to try and work out what I want with him. Definitely corporate, or at least on retainer to a corporate security office.

“Name’s Talbot,” I say, stepping towards him with my left hand extended. “Pleased to meet you.”

His eyes narrow. Shift from me, to the car, back again.

“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing with your car. Right? Well, I’m wondering what you are doing with my case.” Judging from the narrowing of his eyes, that’s probably a good tactic. Play the professional courtesy card. Try to get him on my side so he treats me as a colleague, rather than some unaffiliated interloper trying to horn in on whatever a corporation wants with a little girl.

“Your case?” he replies, cautiously.

“Yeah. I got word you’re looking for a little girl who’s gone missing. Been nosing around all over my usual haunts. Thing is, I’m looking for a missing girl myself.” He still hasn’t taken my hand, so I pull it back and extract a folded eper from my coat pocket then hold it out to him. “Now, what are the chances that two girls go missing in the sordid bits of our city in the same week?”

“Pretty good in this town,” he replies, but he still takes my eper and unfolds it to look at Ethie’s girl.

It’s a hard life without full citizenship and from what the news tells me most runaways are caught the first time they try to pass a biometric scan. No, we’re talking something darker. Maybe an illegal. Maybe an orphan taken for some unspeakable purpose because she doesn’t have anyone to speak for her.

“This isn’t my daughter,” he says, pushing the eper back at me.

I fold the eper and stuff it back into my jacket, shrugging. “Obviously. You don’t look like her dad and you certainly haven’t contacted the police like her dad would. Way I see it, you’re either some sort of creep looking for a slave who got away or you’ve been hired by someone else to find this kid. Maybe an organ farm looking for an escaped clone.

“Screw you.” He shoulders past me and releases the support rod on the car hood, lowers it to within a few inches of closed, then drops the heavy slice of steel down onto the frame with a ringing thud.

I smile and lean against the curved steel of the headlamp assembly. He glares at me, but I keep leaning and say, “I happen to be looking for a lost girl myself. In my case, I’ve been hired by a foster mom who doesn’t want YS to find out because that might trigger an audit and, well, you know how sometimes folks in the midden and lowdown have to bend the rules to survive. Not like hilltop, where the rules just don’t apply.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” he says, folding his arms across his chest.

“I’ve got a hunch that we might be looking for the same kid. You convince me that she’ll be safe with you and I might be convinced to help you out for, say, thirty percent of your fee. I’ve already been paid a little by the foster mom, but it’s clearly less than you’re making. Hell, promise to introduce me to whoever got you a permit for this piece of machinery and I’ll knock it down to twenty five. Not every day I meet someone with enough clout and credit to drive a classic internal combustion engine.”

He’s still scowling, but he hasn’t tried to push past me and get into the car, yet.

Finally, he nods. “Five.”

Twenty.”

“Ten.”

“Ten, and you get me a meeting with whoever scored you that permit.”

“You have an internal combustion car sitting in a garage somewhere?” he asks, one eyebrow creeping upwards.

“Nope, but I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on an unmonitored firearms permit.”

He whistles and shakes his head, chuckling. “Dream on buddy. Now get off my car before you scratch it.”

I jump and slide up over the hood, twisting about and landing on the far side. I pull the passenger door open and drop onto the soft leather seat.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asks, voice nearly cracking. “This car is worth more than you make in a year.”

“Which is why you’re going to give me a lift back to your office and fill me in on your side of the case. I haven’t ridden in one of these since I moved to the city.”

Moved in, eh?” he says, climbing into the car beside me. “Somehow I had you pegged for an import.”

“What gave it away?”

“The coat. It’s a piece of shit, but looks like its seen a lot of miles to get that way.”

I glance down at the worn canvas, tarnished zippers, and patched holes of my coat, then shrug. “It’s been through a lot with me. Probably should have the wrist cuffs replaced soon.”

Those stains blood?”

“Some of them.”

“Yours?”

“Better I don’t say.

Next Chapter: Soft