King of the Californias Pt IX

by Monk Eastman, New York City, NY, USA

I am pleased to wake up without my throat slit. No warnings painted on the wall in my own blood, no severed horse's head laid artfully at my feet. Just the warm, familiar smells of roasted coffee and steaming plantains. For a moment, I am almost fooled into thinking I conjured Cecilio Goncz from the bottom of a shot glass, and that I am actually hungover in my bed back on Pitt Street, Mississippi lapping a lazy tattoo at my door, Althea in the kitchen, preparing chickory and mofongo. Smile faintly, thoughts of sunning in my garden, watching the river roll by, maybe going to the French Quarter for some afternoon shopping.

Then I see the amber bedposts, the crennelated diamondine doors, great blue emptiness where Althea should be beside me, and the smile fades.

This is not Pitt Street and I am not in New Orleans.

This is Oakland. It is not my home.

The room knows my favorite smells, music, and foods; the room knows my news habits. So, before I'm even out of bed, I've seen Northern California's armies continue their police action on the East Side, because Sgt Enrique Pernil of the Golden Bear Republic Guard is broadcasting, with attendant maps and footage dancing across my skin. I listen to Khaled Bhargouti snark New York City's mayor for his latest public cocaine-and-ladyboy binge, bug-eyed mug-shots spinning three-sixty in the space behind my eyes. I chuckle as Eiko Orizumi's scathing assessment of Alaskan President McMenniman's foreign policy trickles through my left cochlear. That chuckle dims when my other ear echoes with news of sabotage on the Minneapolis SonicRail en route to Chicago (still counting the dead, aerial view of the disaster splayed beneath the skin of my right thigh). Above the chorus of morning news, word from the east, where The Voice of Free Sacramento declares his insurgents' victory over Prime Minister Pivens, images of the gutted city rolling across the palms of my hands.

Having met the Benny Pivens, I have a very clear vision of the tantrum he must be throwing right now. He had planned on parachuting into the wartorn city from California One, make a media event of it, sound the horn of the Golden Bear. After all, he made reclaiming Sacramento a keystone of his domestic policy; the whole 'Project: Normal' phase of his Golden Bear Initiative, ending in a single, functional government. Given the resources he's thrown at it, Sacramento's continued disobedience has become this terrible hemorrhaging gut wound in public perception. A Padanian commenter whispers seductively of regime change as the quick fix. His counterpart in Bogota cackles that regime change implies swapping heads, leaving some kind of system intact. As all his opponents have been dispatched with russian efficiency, Benny Pivens is the only system left. Somewhere in the chorus, I hear an economist moan of the next global contraction. Guandong's investment in the NoCal peseta, she says, hangs around the economy like a lead weight. Others hope at reconciliation with America to offset the creeping chaos. Or some kind of deal with Canada. Or Alaska. Or even Federal Mexico. A thousand geniuses light the dark with their brilliant analyses. It is, after all, the age of the prodigal amateur, and we are only too eager to engage.

I rise, shower, let the sonics flow over me, through me, shaking the filth off like a shaggy dog. It's not the same as a water shower, where there is at least a loose sense of baptism, renewal. The soundbath just insures no one gets me by spiking the pipes. Paranoid? Not after Ottawa, where the subject of my story tried to very politely shake me off his track with a tailored H-621 virus in the plumbing. I reason that if you're running among wolves, why tempt them with an exposed throat?

I throw on a simple white kaftan and orbiter boots, grab my gobag and let my luxury quarters go about cleaning and sealing itself from prying eyes. Once I'm out of range, the newsfeeds slough off like dead skin.

This morning, the lobby is a vaulted cathedral of white Italian marble, its streetside entrance a psychedelic animation embedded in diamond doors. Tomorrow it could be an angular ice palace made of sharp crystal and topaz. Or a replica of Napoleon's Court. Or a kitschy remix of Katz's Delicatessen on New York's Lower East Side. The whimsy of the Palma de Baía is legendary.

Onward to Oakland and a day without the specter of Cecilio Goncz and his pall of rape camps and genocide.

I hope.

In Search of... Pt III

By Chris Beckett, Hampden, ME, USA

Keenan Archer stared out the windows as they flew over the thick green expanse below. It was a stark contrast to the scorched earth that had greeted them as they’d come in off the Atlantic five minutes prior. Flying as low as they were made it seem as if this new verdant area went on forever. He shifted in his seat and leaned forward to the pilot.

“How much longer ‘til we’re there?” he asked.

The pilot didn’t turn, but grunted his reply, “You’ll know.”

Keenan leaned back in his seat. His hard features tightened as dark blue eyes turned to slits; he didn’t like being in the dark. Running his fingers through the short bristles atop his head, Keenan returned his gaze to the treetops skimming by below him.

•••

It was only a few minutes before a large cut in the trees became visible. A huge mansion rose from the middle of the clearing, which appeared to have no exit routes spoking off from the residence.

The sleek chopper set down easily, and Keenan pulled open the door and stepped out. A tiny lump clenched in his gut. He tried to ignore it as the chopper rose into the air, leaving him in the middle of a wide lawn.

Keenan surveyed his surroundings. There was a lot of money here. The ornate lintel above the front doorway, the delicate woodwork framing the many windows, and the meticulously trimmed hedges illustrated that. But the guards standing behind the tall shrubs at either corner, as well as the four stationed on the roof, told Keenan all he needed to know.

Satisfied, he proceeded up the small incline toward the marble steps.

•••

“You do understand. You will do this.” The old man wheezed as he steadied himself against the banister. The stilted movements of Elijah Kaczmerak were subtle, most people wouldn’t have noticed. The old man was wearing a sophisticated exo-skeleton under his finely pressed suit.

Keenan had been going back and forth with Kaczmerak for twenty minutes now, and they seemed no closer to a resolution than when he’d first entered. The only commodity worth trafficking in was information, but the old man refused to give an inch.

Kaczmerak wanted his daughter found, but had no idea where she would have gone. Keenan had prodded him for anything that could help – hobbies, friends, online avatars, strange behavior, family history – and Kaczmerak clipped off any discussion as if he were hiding some thorny secret. And that knot in the pit of Keenan’s stomach continued to throb lightly as he worked to remain focused on the withered face before him.

“Listen. Mr. Kaczmerak. If you’re unwilling to give me some shred of information, I’m not sure how I can be of service to you. It’s really as simple as that.” Keenan could hear the frustration rising in his voice and silently criticized himself for starting to lose control.

“Young man. I cannot see how trivial incidents in my daughter’s past might assist in discovering her current whereabouts. She has grown past any indiscretions of her tender years and you would do well not to probe any further.

“I do not think you realize with whom you are dealing.” Despite his obvious ill health, Elijah Kaczmerak spit out these final words with such venom that Keenan was momentarily taken aback.

“Now,” continued the old man, “I do have something of which you might be interested, if you can get past your affinity for tangential matters.” The old man’s eyes narrowed as he stared down the investigator.

“When my daughter was eleven she took ill – the details are unimportant – and she was rushed to the nearest hospital. It was necessary for her to undergo surgery, and I arranged for the doctor to implant her with a microchip, the better to keep track of her. I wasn’t sure I would ever need it, but felt it prudent to take such a precaution. I will share the frequency with you.

“But in doing so, you must understand that you will be agreeing to a contract that can only end one of two ways. I would suggest option A, which would be to return my daughter here. To me.” The menace in Kaczmerak’s voice was laced with a derision that Keenan had rarely encountered.

“And just to make sure you do not feel I am treating you wrongly . . .” Elijah Kaczmerak snapped his fingers and Gregory stepped into the atrium. The old man turned to his butler, who nodded subtly and told his employer, “It has been taken care of, sir.”

“Good,” rasped the old man. Turning back to Keenan, as Gregory softly removed himself, Elijah told the investigator to “check your account.”

Keenan reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his PalmCard. Tapping the screen, he accessed his professional account and saw the balance to be a million creds heavier than he remembered.

“Consider that a retainer,” said Kaczmerak. “I will also pay double your daily fee, plus all expenses.

“Just make sure you bring my girl home.”

Keenan’s head raced with questions – why hadn’t the old man offered the microchip information earlier being foremost – but instead he allowed himself a broad smile and told Kaczmerak, “It looks like we have a deal.”

To be continued . . .

The Living Tattoo | Binghampton, NY

by R. Soon, Atlanta, GA, USA

“Aaooooo…ahhh….ow! OUCH!”

“Hold still if you’re gonna make a racket, at least.”

“Goddam, that HURTS!”

“Didn’t I warn you it’d sting? Eh? I got a signature says you’s aware of potential discomfort, now you didn’t want to go under and I’m not gonna pay the price hearing you bellyache all night, so pipe down!”

“Shit, alright already, I’m piping down. If I knew you’d be stabbing me like that I’d’ve sprocketed up—”

“Bring that shit in my lab and I’ll kick your ass, beanie. Hold still. Now, after we’re done, you can shoot whatever you want, but whatever this stuff does, you’s to blame. You signed, you know the rules….”

nnp://wlcdb.la.net

Welcome to the World Languages & Cultures Database of Los Angeles, the only free and uncensored encyclopedia on the open ‘net!

(This site is being rendered in the high-resolution nanonet protocol. Here is the low-resolution http mirror.)

Your query for “livetattoo history” returned 643 results. Your filter “100% match” returned one result. Congratulations!

Livetattoo: body modification, external, primarily cosmetic

Top 3 related items: moveable tattoo, mindtattoo, net-tattoo

Abstract:

The first step towards the invention of the livetattoo is documented as having been realized in Binghamton, NY, in the year 2019, by a freelance biochemist named Berto Gomez. The first recipient, Atreo Pasquál, was a used car dealer at the time but eventually became an assistant to Gomez and continued his research after his passing in 2026.

Gomez first achieved his goal of a consistently moving tattoo image by mixing the latest dyes with components of a non-toxic, solarcatalytic chemical reaction. His first tattoo depended heavily on sunlight for catalyzation and quickly depleted its reactants, but subsequent efforts with newly developed organic capacitance, more efficient reactions, and specially formulated dyes brought far superior results.

By the time of his passing, Gomez was hailed as a pioneer in scientific and commercial industries, his breakthrough having won him the Nobel/Hawking Prize three months before his death. However, Pasquál took the original concept of the moving tattoo in an entirely different direction, convinced that advanced computer processing and miniaturization were the way to go. With the collaboration of a variety of software programmers and computing hardware designers and by experimenting liberally on himself, Pasquál eventually fathered the forerunner of the now widely popular livetattoo.

By far the most widespread permanent livetattoo configuration at present is the basic programmable organic dermal circuit layer (ODCL). By means of an integrated short-range transmitter, the user can design or upload images with most personal computing devices. The ODCL format was the first one to be standardized and made available commercially.

Also commonly found now are livetattoos that feature integration with various parts of the body, such as those that detect specific neurotransmitter firings (in effect displaying mood) or brainwave patterns, tie into the visual nerve bundles, or respond to touch, and translate the received data to visible patterns by program rules equally as available as common image packs. Numerous other configurations are possible, and thousands of ‘net sites are dedicated to them.

A more recent commercial development is the moveable livetattoo, similar to the ODCL model but attached to the epidermis’ exterior by adhesive and ergo designed to withstand the typical abuses to which the human skin is subjected. ODCL livetattoos, in contrast, can only be safely removed by a licensed surgical technician.

Very recently, spates of livetattoo hacking have swept cities worldwide, but have been considered a minor problem given the extremely limited scope of possible damage, and as of yet no livetattoo manufacturers have reported taking steps to remedy the issue. Additionally, the city of Nagasaki, Japan has explicitly authorized commercial retailers the use of localized livetattoo transmitter overrides for advertising purposes, and also boasts a flourishing industry of full-body advertising. (end abstract)

http://peoplesnews.ind.us.net/archives/brdcst~nwsfd:searchyear=2049;term=Pasquál+missing;result=6

--TPN INTERNET ARCHIVES--

The People’s News - Optical Feed Edition (Brought to you by US.Net)

Your region: SE United States

Today’s date: 3 Sept 2049

You are reading the top story for this hour.

More rumors of scientist sightings

The latest sighting report for missing scientist Atreo Pasquál has come from Taos, New Mexico. Three pedestrians in downtown called authorities around the same time, giving search teams confidence that they were on the right track.

At this time, however, no more evidence of Pasquál has surfaced, and the federal manhunters’ newfound gusto is fading quickly.

Atreo Pasquál is regarded as the father of the modern livetattoo and had dedicated his life to furthering their development ever since he began work with mentor and collaborator Dr. Berto Gomez in the late 20-teens.

Circumstances surrounding his disappearance are murky, and federal authorities are not at all forthcoming. A popular, though unverified, story mentions livetattoo-based camouflage technology that Pasquál had been researching and that a private military firm (unnamed here to prevent libel) had threatened to take by force; as it goes, he covered himself in the camouflage, destroyed all records of his research, and subsequently took to the shadows. It bears reiteration that this allegation does not have fully verified sources.

But whatever the cause, Pasquál has evaded discovery with apparent ease so far, and the nationwide manhunt continues.

The Working Man's Blues Pt II | Cleveland, OH

by R. Soon, Cleveland, OH, USA

The little boy kicked a big, dry stick at the menacing green dome, shining with a peculiarly dull gloss and bearing warlike squared patterns. “Come outta there!” he yelled at it, angry that the fearsome beast would appear out of nowhere, then taunt him instead of attacking like a monster is supposed to. Nay, so far from ferocious talons and ghoulishly large and sharp teeth, this despicable offspring of evil wore merely an armored portcullis beneath the roof of its daunting fortress, and remained still, terrifyingly still.

Not that the little boy didn’t know his own name, but he knew that no name given him by mere mortals would suffice. Instead, he realized of himself, while out protecting his glorious homeland from the beasts of the wilderness, that he was the Guardian of the Dawnbreakers’ Legacy, a mighty name for a mighty defender. And thus, he was no little boy at all, but a fearless warrior redoubting his broken band of clansmen.

Yet this immense, unmoving foe unnerved him thoroughly.

Ever since he could remember, he had been doing battle with all manner of uncanny hellspawn. Every new encounter he made, he would fight bravely, and once victorious (for he was always victorious), he would ask his elder tribesman mentor of the type of demon that he had just vanquished: “Dad, what was that??” And the wise elder would consider the description yielded him, and maybe consult one of the precious few books he kept in a storeroom hidden far beneath Shaker Square, and then tell him, “Saif, that was a meerkat.” Or a white lab rat, or a ferret, or a squirrel-dog hybrid, or a skunk (a beast that fed on the souls of the unwary, did ye but know), or a miniature baboon, or a glowing designer cat, or one of so many other wicked opponents.

'Where did they come from, and why did they attack with such fury?' the Guardian asked the man of great knowledge. He had asked many times, soon knowing the gist of the answer by heart, but he loved hearing the story of the Tower of Case Western Reserve, a den of evil and madness that blighted the land. His father began the same way every time, “You see, Saif, years ago there was a great university not far from here, a place people came to from all over the world….” And the Guardian would sit rapt as the tale was told, and one or two enticing new details revealed about the Case Riots, and the discovery of the experiments carried out in Case’s vile dungeons, and how the huge and ghastly creatures that escaped spread out quickly and terrorized the hapless.

Not that there were all that many of the hapless out there for them to terrorize. “Saif, the wildlife aren’t the only things to be careful of out there,” the elder told him once, not long ago--

Had the soulless green thing moved? The Guardian was drawn back to the present; he had been letting his thoughts drift as he kept his eyes intently on the silent hulk. But no, he decided, it was surely still preparing a disastrous attack for him to overcome. He continued to concentrate on the patterned beast.

Just once, and recently, had his father declined to tell of the fall of Case Western Reserve University. The look in the wise man’s eyes had transfixed him, and he remembered his words too clearly…for the story told instead was very different, and his tone of voice very different.

“Son, there are people out there, bad people. They want to take you away, like they took away your cousin Farshad. Do you ever wonder why we only leave the Square when it’s late? Do you remember when we went to Thistledown, and we didn’t meet anyone till we got inside?” The Guardian nodded mutely each time. “There was nobody to meet, Saif. Those bad people took some of them, and the rest ran away so that they wouldn’t be taken, too. Those people are much worse than even the big bad skunk, you see…we’re trying to escape them too. We’re trying not to be caught by those bad men.”

His father’s expression was scarily intent. Saif had managed a voice, albeit a tiny, shaky one. “But Dad, why don’t we get out of here if there’s bad people?” And the elder revealed to him a great revelation, that the bad people had taken away a member of his clan, long ago. The man was the father of the father of the sage one, and ergo an ancestor to the Guardian. “Saif…your great grandfather’s name is Barry. And the name of the bad people who took him like they took Farshad, they’re called Halliworks. We’re still here because we’re going to rescue Barry, and we must show Halliworks that they aren’t welcome on our land and in our city.” And the great man fell quiet, and then just as quietly shooed the Guardian away.

The words shook the little boy, as little of it as he even really understood. For a couple of days afterward, he didn’t leave the bunker at all. But duty called, and he eventually took again to patrolling Shaker Square for freakish assailants to defeat…although he began to keep an eye on the streets out around the square, too, out beyond the camouflage line.

And the latest devil’s seed to appear, clad in a maddeningly textured armor, filled him with loathing in its nonplussing outward slumber.

“Oh!” a voice behind the Guardian exclaimed. It was his father, the wise leader of their small band of remaining family. “Well, Saif, seems like you caught a box tortoise! I haven’t seen one in years…and it’s huge!” He laughed while striding forward, picked up the beast with both hands, and peered at the drawn gate at its fortress-like front.

And the Guardian filed this newest adversary away in his mind.

Boiler | The 50th Precinct | Kingsbridge, The Bronx

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

The 50th Precinct rises four stories above bullet-ridden aluminum walls, a soot-stained brick box only two blocks from the new W. 238th Street el station, itself a symbol of Mayor Jimmy Chu's urban renewal plan. Took two days for the train station's support branches to congeal, another three for its pollution-absorbing carapace to harden, then two weeks to install the responsive sub-flooring into the platform, made of blocks that depress slightly under the force of human steps. The blocks' slip against one another as people walk the platform, generating power through the dynamo principle, converting motion into current, fed directly to the third rail. Mayor Chu's motto is 'New York: Powered by the People.' 238th Street station, a twisting ceramic and chrome thing grown by Brasilian engineers, is a monument to that credo. By contrast, nearby Kennedy High School is 1,534 students over its legal limit, staffed by a skeleton crew of tenured crones and guileless substitutes. Chu closed the Senior Services office on 232nd Street, suspended weekday recycling pickup, stripped the 50th Precinct's staff to its bone marrow, and staged rolling blackouts all summer to plug his hemmoraging budget. That's just in Kingsbridge. Chu's privation of the central and northeast neighborhoods have become legends to scare children at night: abandoned ghost stations on the 4/5/6 line, home to bizarre subterranean monster tribes. Cannibals roaming the abandoned gardens along Pelham Parkway. Packs of mutant dogs on Webster Avenue. Rogue bands of Bangladeshi death-midgets pillaging White Plains Road.

Throughout the Bronx, Mayor Jimmy Chu is burned in effigy.

Detective Tiny Schwarzbaum steps over Mayor Chu's torched likeness and some lightly toasted protest signs, waddling through the 50th Precinct's security checkpoint at Kingsbridge Avenue. No one greets him. He is a breathing version of 238th Street station: segmented tentacles where his arms should be, flat red plates instead of eyes, weird metamaterials woven into the fatty tissues that make up most of his ungainly mass, and the pairing apparatus in his head that painfully emotes omniscient Big Bug's needs. He's a chimera, and not a cheap one. Real cops collect welfare so Tiny Schwarzbaum can wipe his ass with multi-million dollar snake-arms. Another reason he works his beat alone.

50th Precinct's lobby smells of piss, blood, and vomit. Biological decompilers keep the big white room sterile, but the stink predates the floor treatment. Wall straight ahead looks like ink pressed between sheets of glass. Ripple in the surface brings up the Precinct's compiled intelligence, really just an overgrown administrative routine written with generic, inoffensive front end. In this case, an ethnically neutral matron dubbed 'Marge', whose kindly monotone pours over the intercom.

"Detective Schwarzbaum," the lobby drones. "Your shift does not begin for another fourteen hours. Do you need assistance?"

"Left something in my locker," he replies.

"Very well," the compiled intelligence says. "Have a good evening, Detective."

Walls to the left give way to staff facilities. Door to the right is the booking area and holding cells. Off hours, Marge won't let him over there. Too many 'escaped' prisoners. 50th Precinct's staff facilities were offices until fifteen years ago, since converted to a single common space, dotted with modular data cradles where detectives process their case footage, and Marge processes forensic input. Cube-bunks for midnighters to sleep off their shifts. Plastic lockers for a few personal effects. Mixed command center/barracks. Schwarzbaum duckwalks past cot-like data cradles to his locker, where he grabs a heavy lacquered box filled with lead slugs, and swaps it with an equally weighted brown plastic bag. Marge keeps track of locker content by weight, which is the upside to Chu's cutbacks. Modern precincts down in Manhattan can actually smell personal items, and would know the brown bag is filled with half a pound of sprocket: black tar heroin stamped out with synthetic Sonoran desert toad secretion. Opiate and powerful hallucinogenic. Street value of a small house on the Long Island Sound. Schwarzbaum's swag from an earlier shakedown, and the gift his Captain has been expecting.

Because while Tiny Schwarzbaum may be a monster, he knows what loyalty is.

After all, the basement IED that tore him apart could have left him a cripple. It was Captain Ranjitsinhji who made it his personal mission to ensure Schwarzbaum got his due. Was it the sleek cosmetic job that legendary Tom Dunwitty got? Of course not, because Lt. Dunwitty caught an explosive shell to the torso, saving then-Mayor Abdullah, and worked the Financial District. Up in the Bronx, Schwarzbaum was lucky his prostheses weren't powered by rubberbands or wheel-spinning hamsters. But Captain Ranjitsinhji used his connections to get at Lt. Dunwitty, and finessed the public figure into taking pity on poor Tiny Schwarzbaum. Suddenly, the newsfeeds were running stories day and night about the poor cop up in Kingsbridge breathing through a tube after disarming a bomb in the projects. It became an election issue. Mayor Abdullah, who owed his life to a cop, was seen as ungrateful for not approving Schwarzbaum's medical procedures. Jimmy Chu's sloganeering pushed the public over the top. The three-time incumbent lost. Bitterly. And knew exactly who to blame. From the reaches of political oblivion, Abdullah reached out one last time, and sabotaged Tiny's future.

No sleek bionic arms.

No new miraculous, life-like eyes.

Just these horrific flailing things, flat plastic lenses, constant annoyance of Big Bug paired to his frontal lobe, and transfer from Anti-Terror into Vice: the NYPD's graveyard.

In the end, Schwarzbaum knows he got off lucky. The sprocket in his locker is his Captain's painkiller. Only thing that evens him out these days. Mayor Abdullah had a lot of people invested in his incumbency. Powerful people. When the house of cards fell, it mostly landed on Ranjitsinhji. Or more accurately, on his beautiful family.

Who have been missing since Mayor Jimmy Chu's inaugural address.

Browning

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

Danny Felder hears his dad's girlfriend slam the front door, screaming Estonian in a pitch that scrapes the spectrum heard only by dogs and orbital surveillance equipment. His father meets her in the living room, where the battle unfolds something like this:

Her: "Little Indian bitch stole my phone!"

Him: "The one I got you last week?"

Her: "With a gun, she stole it! What kind of country is this where old ladies rob their social workers at gunpoint?"

Danny shakes his head. He helped his father pick that phone specifically because it was one of the few models with local memory. She insisted, 'In Estonia, all systems hacked. I want phone holds my information in hand. No netmemory. I want the real thing.' His father, technological prowess of a mildly intoxicated sea-otter, relegated research to his smarty-pants son. Who doesn't hate his prospective stepmother so much as reserve her to a pantheon of Demon Bitch-Goddesses, drawn from his father's generous lineage of mistresses and candy wives. Now Svetlana has lost all her contacts, afloat with some well-armed dowager in the Bronx wastelands who has either sold it for diabetes medication, or is making calls to the Pacific Rim. 'Which is what you get, buying high-priced toys for low-class hookers,' Danny thinks. 'Hey, dad, why not get her a new, more expensive phone to make it up to her? And maybe some jewelry, so she knows how petite you think her ass is.' He sighs, scratches his chin, comes away with a handful of mottled white skin, and smiles.

The treatment is working.

Brushing a curtain of skin flakes from his shirt, he disrobes, heads to the shower. The Felder penthouse is equipped with real water showers, a rarity even here, on the Upper East Side. Danny's private shower qualifies as a minor World Wonder, ranked just after World's Fastest Orbital Transport. Twenty-six individual jets of chemically purified water from delicate rotating pipestems blossom from the smooth ceramic walls. The twenty-seventh pours water from the ceiling with the tenderness of the Virgin Mary or the fury of Poseidon, depending on Danny's mood. Today he goes for gusto, those twenty-six jets working his body like a shiatsu, shower floor soon carpeted with great irregular sheets of dead white skin. Danny lets the shower work him while he motions at the wall for communication options. He goes for 'nonverbal', and is greeted by projected avatars that slide across the shower curtain like an oil spill. He spots a well-armed Orc, yellow canines dripping blood (Marty); a pulsing red sphere (Zhang); an ultra-retro Bugs Bunny (Amit) and finally; a balled up kitten (Diana!!!). He waves his fingers and the shower lights with a glyph for 'good morning! how r u?' The kitten uncurls, and Diana responds with a blueish, sort of unenthusiastic glyph indicating that she got his message, acknowledges Danny is indeed alive and marginally sapient, but doesn't really want to pursue a conversation. Satisfied he got that far, Danny signs off, enthusiastically scrubbing excess skin from his arms and thighs.

Diana is the living embodiment of all that is good and pure in Danny's universe. It took half of forever to get her chat ID, tortuous nights of playful coaxing before she added him to her buddylist, and he's not about to make the same mistake every other adolescent male has made by getting pushy. No, the goal is to get her to want him. He's gone weeks trying everything—anything!—to rubix cube his way into her life: livetattoos squirming all over his body, metal fins in place of hair, not bathing, webbed ear like batwings, flashy media embedded all over his face, organic grafted fangs, nylon muscle implants, androgynous traits, bullying other kids, sports, a replacement eye with built-in movie projection, and an on and on in almost infinite combinations. Combing her preferences had been damn-near impossible until she added him to her buddylist, gateway to her personal mediavault, which included all sorts of stuff on past lovers. She had a thing for desis—South Asians—in all shapes, sizes, and genders.

Danny is not South Asian by even the broadest definition.

So while he sleeps, a tiny signal transmitter in Broca's Region of his brain has been receiving modular wave signals from NYU's Eastern Language Department. He awakens each day with a new language mastered: Pashtun, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Indonesian, and Filipino-Creole, thus far. His dermatologist's gene therapy is clearly taking, and by this time he steps out of the shower and towels off, he will be a smooth brown. It'll take a few days for eye pigmentation to respond to treatment, so until then, his blue eyes will look sort of exotic; and yeah, it might look a bit like he has dandruff throughout the day. But otherwise, when he meets Diana in the cafeteria for lunch, he'll be able to pass as up to five different South Asian nationalities. It cost a lot of his dad's money, but what the Hell else is the old man going to spend it on: his Estonian whore? Danny's needs are greater.

It's not easy being 12 years old.

The Working Man Blues

by R. Soon, Atlanta, GA, USA

The Cuyahoga River had caught fire when he was a toddler; Barry didn't remember too much from then, but every day when his train crossed the chipped concrete bridge, with its supports mutely bearing their streaked scars, he was taken for a brief but often painfully interminable moment back to the second time it happened. He usually closed his eyes when the train came around that bend nowadays, but he could still feel with three decades twice daily of memory yielded up by his ever-aching body when it crossed over the river, and the fire lit anew in his mind anyway.

Barry had been a proud, dedicated manager of a temp agency at that time, and ironically one of the only people remaining in Cleveland even back then with a benefits package attached to his position; ironic, indeed, given that the only way to get a steady check these days was to sign up for Halliworks, and there wasn't a more permanent job than that, not unless you were able to escape the camps and get far enough away fast enough. Only the lazy bastards doing chemical reclamation at the river and around the Case site tended to run off, though, and neural running speed governor implants prevented repeat attempts. Halliworks was the only thing sustaining the remains of Cleveland's economy, both in providing work and in redeveloping the city's infrastructure from the ground up. Sure it was dangerous work, but it had to be done.

But Barry didn't think about all that. He was too old to escape arthritis and the occasional mini-malaria bout, nevermind the horrifying security patrolmen with metallic tentacle-things for arms, rumored to all come from the same recruitment office/lab in New York. Besides, at 70 years old, with eight teeth, bad knees, and no neural or physical implants whatsoever, he was happy just to have a comfortable bunk and regular meals.

Nah, better to keep his place as Senior Building Inspector with the Halliworks Westlake camp. He was the one who came up with the idea of using amplified soundboxes to pacify guerrilla residents who refused to sell their houses and business properties, and the 60% cut in surface operations casualties along with the huge boost in live-capture recruitments catapulted him out of the Erie Tunnelpass project, whose survival rate was frighteningly low, to a relatively cushy management job. So what if he couldn't leave? He was doing right by Halliworks, and they were doing right by him as far as he was concerned. Five more years and he would even be eligible for retirement if camp recruitment kept pace.

But five years was still five years off. Today, it was cloudy outside, though he knew as well as everyone crowded onto the incongruously sleek and clean passenger train cruising towards the mothballed Old Lakewood/W.117th St. Station that the clouds didn't do a damn thing for your skin. He studied as he did every day, through the Solaplex window, the quiet, dusty streets, where every single mailbox and old newsbox in sight was shorn entirely of its paint by the stealthiest but most dangerous of the sun's rays, further removing them from his more distinct childhood recollections. Things have sure changed, he mused for the thousandth time, and the train rocked back and forth lullingly on the warped track rails, encouraging his mind to wander. He often mulled over his day's work of testing buildings for integrity at this stage of the daily journey, but sometimes less comforting thoughts crept in.

The second time the Cuyahoga erupted in hellish flames was five years to the day after the first day of the weeks-long Case Riots. Barry shuddered, but nobody on the traincar looked at him; life in a camp housing 11,000 people taught everyone to mind their own business. The riots, they were bad. Bu the poor guy the news van caught staggering up Euclid, that monstrous eyeball-looking thing that took up part of his head….

The trees growing back along the tracks fell away, and earth gave way to gravel along the bridge's path. He had been more lost in thought than usual, and having not closed his eyes in time, they were now fixed on the mesmerizing landscape around the twisting, winding Cuyahoga River.

Dominating the view on the Flats riverbank, a tall, majestic experimental biofuel facility left much of its shell, though one wall had blasted clear across the river, four pieces smashing some cars parked along Canal Rd. and one biting deeply into the eighth floor, the eighth floor of all of them!, of the Federal Corporate Management center, right where his dear, hardworking son had….

Barry shuddered again, harder this time. The fire had spread from the contaminated cooling system, the news said, and the river had plenty of fuel topping it off to blaze on down to the mouth, violently combusting everything too close to the water's edge. A fine blue dust had begun raining on the Flats and along the banks due to some chemical mixture catalyzed by the fire, and it was later decided that this blue dust was why all the plants and trees down there, even those away from the water, had died off with nothing ever growing back. And he vividly recalled the bridges being blocked off by police for a panic-stricken month, and the reports of a renegade driver heading off across the Shoreway only for a 30-foot chunk of concrete causeway to break off and fall, taking him with it down into the deadly water.

Barry hated how clearly all the images glowed in his mind, even has he fought to pull his gaze away from the now-empty site of the FCM building, seeing so sharply the jagged brick disc clutching at the eviscerated tower's tattered, ripped Solaplex windows once again. He hadn't tried to identify his son's remains, on the advice of the rescue squad at the scene, but imagination-driven nightmares had plagued him for a full three years anyway.

His traincar shook over a rail joint, and he squeezed his eyes shut. When he dared to open them again, the river was past and the train was off of the bridge, heading into the final tunnel leading to Halliworks Central Station.

King of the Californias pt II

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

With the promise of trials at the Hague's High Court of Human Rights, Los Angeles's warlords seem finally to have run aground. Recent captures of narcoterrorist Willis "Grip-Up" Tollridge in his Brentwood fortress, and Ricky "Tweaks" Neuman of the notorious San Bernadino Popular Front have stricken powerful blows to LA's infrastructure of violence. With elections around the corner and international aid pouring into the provisional civilian government, the beleaguered island nation seems finally to have found its footing, after close to thirty years of continual bloodshed. But even with these victories, many claim the war-torn nation of 12 million cannot truly begin its healing, as war criminals such as Kelvin Black, Lucien Cree, Darlanda Stuart, Jesus Cruz, and Rolando Montoya are loose. The infamous 'Inglewood Five' have been sighted as far away as Vanuatu, luxuriating in wealth generated over decades of brutal exploitation and oppression. And while the provisional government works tirelessly to rebuild and reconnect Los Angeles's diverse communities, they do so knowing the funds to effectively perform their job are sitting in banks on the other side of the globe.

Oakland, in particular, seems to have a lot of loose cash these days.

Ask anyone out West, and they'll tell you the monsters of Los Angeles made off with billions, leaving their countrymen in squalid, sometimes medieval conditions. Where have they gone? The nations of CariCom want nothing to do with them. The United States, Alaska, Canada, Brasil, and Quebec have all issued warrants to seize on sight anyone from the High Court of Human Rights' wanted roster. Hugo Ranieri's capture in Buenos Aires last month effectively flushed out the war criminal populace of Argentina. For the discriminating fugitive, the Western hemisphere has all but shut its doors. Yet nestled between Canada and Federal Mexico, the Northern Republic of California has taken a stance that has made it enormously attractive to Los Angeles's oligarchy-in-exile. With no official stance regarding the upcoming international tribunals, nor any existing extradition treaties with their neighbors, Prime Minister Benny Pivens has eliminated even the possibility of extraditing admitted war criminal against their will. And so Oakland, NoCal's largest functioning metropolis, has become haven to some of LA's wealthiest absconders. Paramilitaries, gangsters, murderers, narcotics cartels, and slavers have found new homes in any of the twenty luxury hotels to spring up in downtown Oakland these past three years. With all this new money pouring in, new banks pop up almost daily to accommodate new offshore accounts, and the Californian peseta is currently one of the most traded currencies on the international market.

Money, they say, makes the world go 'round. And that is the topic du jour as evening falls on Oakland's Palma de Baía hotel, where we watch the sun set from Cecilio Goncz's private rooftop suite. Overlooking the gutted shell of Goldengate Bridge Memorial, Goncz has set aside his trademark sunglasses, revealing milky white eyes behind nictitating membranesm installed for protection against pepperspray (and worse).

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages," he says, inhuman eyes set on the Bay. By the time it dawns on me that he's quoting Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, he's facing me, looking for some kind of response.

The worse part about his eyes is you can never tell exactly where he's looking. When the silence becomes awkward, he chuckles, grafted alligator teeth adding signature menace to his smile. Goncz's mythology swirls with tales of missing journalists. I sip my mochatini and smile back, trying to look impartial, unshaken, never happier in my life than for the tracking culture injected before I left Chicago. I ask about his money.

"Money?" he smirks. "Homey, I don't have two centavos to rub together. Money implies income, and baby, I have none. I spread it around. Charitable causes. Rebuilding efforts here in Cali. LA didn't want me anymore, hey, peace. Move on. That's life. But this?" He motions to the Bay. "This is California. Home."

I remind Mr Goncz politely that by his own admission he technically only lived in California for a few years before the Little Big One separated Greater Los Angeles from the continent, and devastated the rest of the West Coast. And that one night at the Palma de Baía costs two weeks my salary.

"You don't get it, do you?" he asks sadly. "California, that was the American Dream. 'Go West, young man.' Cowboys. Indians. The Gold Rush. Hollywood. Blondes. Money. Fame. Live fast, die young. All that shit. When you reached the Pacific, you knew you'd achieved something, you'd made it. The earthquake broke something fundamental, you know? In people's hearts. We felt that shit in LA, homey. Believe that. When the Little Big One hit Cali, that was the American Dream got strangled right there. Now, I can't fix things in LA like I want to, so I brought my money here. And yeah, I got a nice pad, but like I said, I'm paying to fix a lot of broken things."

I mumble something about nobility, which I hope isn't taken too snidely as I want to live to finish my drink. Then I ask how that relates to his quoting Smith.

His trademark smile resurfaces, tone reminiscent of the journalism professor at Northwestern who flunked me. Twice. "No one cares how the job gets done, homey, or where the money comes from. Just so long as it gets done, and the money's there."

The Deegan Pt. II

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

A standard paingun is about the size and shape of an old billy club. Non-lethal, barring occasional heart attacks from the sudden, intense sensation of full-body burning caused by a 94GHz millimeter wave. It is the standard peacetime sidearm of the NYPD, powered by a fuel cell that nominally offers up to five days' juice, 2,356 yard range, and a networked targeting system plugged into the old ATHENA surveillance satellite for around-the-corner shooting and nighttime auto-targeting. It's a beast of a weapon, ruggedized for melee as well, with an enforced ceramic frame, integral shock baton function, and retractable bayonette.

Unfortunately for Detective Anton Choudry, those little beauties are tagged and tracked every time they're checked out of the 50th Precinct's weapon locker. So, for his purposes, he relies on the fallback: a twenty-four year old version with cracked plastic casing held together with duct tape. Thing's got the form factor of an old assault rifle and uses disposable batteries that have to be replaced every time it's fired, like a shotgun. It's also about as conspicuous as a samurai sword. He'd use the less obvious slugthrower he keeps as a throwaway piece, but he's saving it for an unspecified special occasion. Ballistic weapons are even harder to come by these days than disposable weapon batteries.

From the undercover police van, he spots his guy coming out of the Deegan Motel, dressed in dirty white kaftan, bright red Rocketeer™ boots, and one of those animated dragon belts everyone under 30 seems to be wearing. Bailey Avenue hasn't had more than three street lights since the mid-1990s, so the broad four-lane street is sort of ideal for an ambush, lined on the west side by a century of carbon monoxide-poisoned trees and the Henry Hudson Parkway, on the east by burnt-out old warehouses, a few trucks, and the two-story Deegan. Choudry's target tugs his robes a little bit to get them across his widening gut. He's gotten all the right body modifications, marking himself with blood red skin and goat horns jutting from his forehead. Very recognizable, Les Diables Nordiques, but not necessarily the smartest gang. All bodymods have drawbacks. Grafting external bone, for instance, increases sensitivity around the modified area, like a new piercing.

So when Choudry hits him with the paingun, it's like pouring lemon juice and saltwater onto fresh third-degree burns.

Guy doesn't even scream, just makes a gurgling sound before hitting the cracked pavement, clawing at his face until skin comes off. Choudry jogs across the street, kicks the guy in the face a few times to stop his thrashing, throws him over his shoulder, and takes him back to the police van. Loads a stimulant into the handcuffs, checks that the remote works, then snaps it onto the guy's wrist, looping the other hand to the van's back door.

Choudry sits back for a second, staring at his prisoner. 'This is the guy who killed you, Pete,' he thinks, reaching absently for the soundbox in his pocket, musing what blackout, the final mystery high, feels like. Consoled that he hasn't tried it yet, absently wondering if it's the last line to cross before he's beyond salvage.

"Okay," he croaks, fumbling at the tiny black remote, jolting the guy with a stimulant through his handcuffs. "Wake up, dickbag. We've got some talking to do."

When the guy rouses, his worldview has narrowed to the barrel of a gun. Choudry knows he's got his attention. "Remember me?"

"Oui."

"Then you remember my partner," Choudry smirks.

The guy nods. "Nous n'avons pas voulu dire pour n'importe quoi mauvais de se produire—"

"We're well past good intentions, jackoff. Pete's dead, you pulled the trigger, and you and I both know that as of right now, you're never going to see the inside of a courtroom. Your boss is lubricated like the fucking space elevator," Choudry says. His voice shakes. He's more surprised by that than anything. The guy gets very quiet, stares at the paingun. Choudry continues. "So here's how it's going to go. All Pete's accounts are mine now, you understand? Whatever you were paying him to keep out of your little thing in Melrose, you pay me now. Double. Once for me, once for my partner."

"Ce qui?" the guy spits. "Merde! Ce n'est pas juste!"

Choudry kicks him in the face. The guy spits teeth onto the van floor.

"Double, you understand me? Or I kick that fucking door open with you cuffed to it and go for a little drive," Choudry says. The guy nods mournfully, and Choudry smiles. Not for Peter Singh, who was a liar and a douche. But for the upgrade he's planning on the soundbox singing to him quietly from his pocket.

48th Street + Avenue of the Americas

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

Some call him the International Man.

About five-foot-three, built like an overgrown badger: most of the mass in the upper third of his body, especially around the neck and shoulders. He's seen a lot of life in his time, and almost as much death. Formative years in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, then when that fell apart, in the Counterrevolutionary Army. When that fell apart, he joined an Azeri ethnic insurgency cell, picking Iran's carcass like the rest of the jackals. When the scavengers grew too thick, he snuck into Azerbaijan and got a cousin to vouch for him. His next five years were spent in the Doorkicker Squad of Baku's police department, breaking up terrorist and slavery rings, before rushing to the front lines in the Nakhchivan Secession. When the Federalists lost and the country split, he found himself in the oil-impoverished half of What-Was-Once-Azerbaijan. On the road again, this time to a cousin's house in Gush Katif, where he got a job as security in an an international shipping company. His legs got blown off in a botched hijack, woke up in Beth Israel Los Angeles. He liked the meat on his Mexican nurse's backside, and decided to stay. One day he just wheeled himself out the front door, and the next, he was staying with her in a one bedroom shack in South Los Angeles, just in time for the Little Big One, which wrenched southern California out of the continent's pelvis and tossed it like a severed penis into the Pacific toilet. Like most refugees, he ended up in Phoenix. Not exactly content with the gelatin quality of the air, he used his last three gold fillings and the sale of his slightly pickled kidney to fly him to Paterson, New Jersey, where he stayed with the brother of his dead Mexican nurse. After the first week, they opted for separate living arrangements, what with the knife he'd buried in his roommate's chest. His time in the overcrowded prison was mercifully short given he wasn't technically a citizen. But, then, there wasn't a whole lot of paperwork confirming his citizenship anywhere, so when the New Jersey State Police delivered him to the Azerbaijan Embassy in Manhattan for formal diplomatic eviction, there wasn't a whole lot the ambassador had to say.

New Jersey didn't want him.

There was no Azerbaijan to ship him back to.

Properly vested in purgatory, the International Man got himself a room in Rego Park, Queens from a Bukharanian woman with terrible scars on her face and neck, but full heavy breasts and thighs you could crush aluminum girders between.

The International Man has seen a lot in his time, but not with his own eyes. Those were blow out back in his Counterrevolutionary days. These were re-grown for him in a lab outside Isfahahan, along with most of his jaw. His ears haven't worked in eighteen years, function replaced by a second-rate cochlear implant implanted by an unexpectedly skilled surgeon in backalley Baku, recently expatriated from Nigeria. Well, loosely Nigeria: most of Africa was desert these days, and the borders were more than a little blurred. All that mattered was the surgeon's steady hand, and the tinny quality to the cochlear implants were better than no quality at all. His right arm is mostly short-string polymer and fiber optic cable, plugged indelicately into a mauled shoulder socket after a rocket attack on the warehouse in Gush Katif. Built somewhere in a Tel Aviv factory, with the same warranty as a Yugoslavian ultracompact car. His legs below the knee are noticeably darker than the rest of him. That's probably because they were salvaged from someone of African-American descent, and transplanted hastily in a West Los Angeles hospital by a Korean-designed surgical robot. His biological arm is something of an art piece: animated tattoos from a carnival of anonymous donors, some in Farsi, some in Arabic, some in Hebrew, some in English, dancing languidly across his skin like a sun-scorched movie screen.

His English is pretty thin, but he's mastered the epithets. I'm a bit of a pussy, by his reckoning, using my cellphone to check my mail, the news, weather. He points to a new glowing tattoo on his forearm that streams news from Al-Jazeera, Ha'aretz, the Daily Wallstreet Post, and a bunch of esoteric feeds I've never heard of. He refers to my phone as a 'woman's purse' and my only argument is that I hate the idea of live tattoos, because of all the GPS crap embedded in them. I ask him if his right arm is the only thing made out of pipestem parts, or if maybe he'd had the optional upgrade done below his waist as well. He flips me the pincer-equivalent of the bird.

Which is polite compared to the nearby street vendors, who call him 'Blackfoot' because of his mismatched limbs. When I see him, it's the same lop-sided ceramic smile, pat on the shoulder from his tri-pincered arm, and offer of high-octane diesel coffee and stale baklava. Sometimes fresh halvah from a store in Kew Gardens, cut into slices from a turd-shaped loaf wrapped in wax paper. Always the same fare: tin carafe burning sugar, coffee, and distilled tap water over a small upright propane burner. Buck-seventy-five for coffee and a pastry.

Some people call him the International Man.

I just call him the coffee cart guy on 48th Street.