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.

King of the Californias Pt VII

by Monk Eastman of New York City, NY, USA

My subject steps onto the balcony as if his night just segued from a dinner party with foreign dignitaries. He sits, one leg folded delicately over the other, scoops up his abandoned martini, drains the glass in one gulp. Were it not for the pistol dangling from his free hand, there would be no obvious indication he'd survived an assassination attempt forty-three minutes ago, or that the sole survivor of the incident was perched in his hotel suite living room, pinned to the floor by a softknife. His livetattoos scroll by, a Gutenberg Bible worming across his brow, one prayer at a time.

I ask if he is alright.

Mr Goncz chuckles, extracts a vial of tobacco from his black linen jacket, some rolling paper, and reclines in a chair I reckon cost roughly the GDP of Guatemala. "I should be asking you the same thing, eh?"

I assure him of my condition, and ask who is attackers were, if he knows their motives.

"'Motive'," he says, popping the finished cigarette in his mouth, lighting it with a candle from the crystal tabletop. He inhales, brow furrowing. The livetattoos morph into a long line of question marks.

I tell him that if he doesn't know, it's an equally acceptable answer.

"Where you from, homes?" he asks.

I remind him of the dossier my employer forwarded to his press agent.

"I didn't ask about a presskit sent by some piece of shit necktie sitting behind a desk in Chicago. I asked where you're from."

Someone dumps a bucket of ice down my back. Heart rate spikes. Sphincter clenches. A battledrone built somewhere in Guandong swoops by. Someone has painted 'Central Coast Surfboy Nazis Say Hi, Niggers!' on its side. I wonder if whoever painted it thought the insurgents in East Oakland would ever pay that much attention, as the automated raptor dropped decompiler bombs on their nursery schools and churches. I think about the dead and dying just a few miles from here, and wonder if the Palma de Baís's security staff will be disposing of my body the way they disposed of Goncz's would-be assassins. I wonder if they would wake my mother from her voluntarily induced coma to tell her how her son died. Or if anyone would ever know.

I tell him where I'm from.

The answer pastes itself against Oakland's neon skyline, screeching ceramic warbirds flying past, bombing the Deep East End into a flatland of crushed mortar and powdered bone. Artillery thunders, cry of emergency sirens fifty stories below, soldiers clear Jack London Square; sound of bent-hip California thrashing in its bed. Cecilio Goncz, warlord and entrepreneur, still as a baby's corpse, his thousand-dollar-a-gram tobacco wasting away as his cigarette dangles idly from the corner of his mouth. The moon above seems to hold its breath.

"If that's the case," Goncz says slowly, "then you know 'motive' isn't always what does it."

I ask if he thinks the woman in his living room would agree with that sentiment.

"Ay," he growls. "Don't be getting smart with me now. Just because you're—" He stops, flicks some ash, uncrosses his legs. The livetattoos turn to lightning bolts. "Just because we're talking here, like people, doesn't invite you to get all fuckheaded with me, get it? It's a whole world out there, would kill you for something a lot less rational than 'motive.' Things in this world, you can't always put a name to them."

I agree, and tell him so.

He looks at me sideways. "Figured you might." He finishes his cigarette, flicks the butt off the balcony. Stares at me for a moment, then brandishes his pistol. "Am I going to need this around you?"

I ask why he didn't ask that before accepting my interview.

"Because I used to have an assistant. And a chauffeur. And a bodyguard."

And now he doesn't. He has to be his own security. Reminder that the old days of murder and pillage are not so far away, even at the Palma de Baís hotel. And that maybe, just maybe, he's grown tired of them. I tell him he won't need the pistol for me. He smirks, lays it on the table.

"For my peace of mind, then. Or maybe for mi amor in the living room."

When I ask him what he intends to do with his prisoner, his shoulders move a little. It's almost a shrug. Given his time in the bedroom, communicating with the shrinking community of expatriate Los Angeles warlords; I ask if there have been an similar precedents.

"This is the Palma de Baía, homey," he says reproachfully. "They don't call it a 'bedroom'. They call it a 'sleepvault'. Bed's this bean-shaped fucking coffin, filled with warm saline and those acoustic things that shut your brain off. And yeah there's 'precedent', and yeah, I'm going to have a little talk with my new ladyfriend at some point, but you don't need to hear all that. Take your ass downstairs. Go to sleep."

I ask him when he will sleep.

The livetattoos fade. He raises his chin to California's sky, closes his eyes. "There is no sleep. I maybe rest, some time. Maybe later, if the night lets me. But the biggest maybe is maybe you fuck off 'til tomorrow, write up your little write-up. Let old Cecilio do what he does best without those eyes of yours on me."

I make for the door, pause as I look at the woman nailed to the floor.

"She ain't gonna hurt you. Just go."

Look back, and those organic, grafted alligator's teeth leer at me from the darkness. If he has not had me killed in my bed, and I am alive in the morning, I will continue the interview. Do my best to remain objective.

And find out exactly what kind of man my father is.

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.

King of the Californias, Pt V

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

As its guest book reads like a who's who of global atrocity-makers, disposal of dead bodies has become a premier feature at the Palma de Baía. Oakland's foremost hotel has an experienced staff of morticians, equipped with forensic-baffling equipment that would give the CIA a mile-long erection. That, and the hotel's love affair with municipal law enforcement, makes the three dead women on Cecilio Goncz's living room a nuisance instead of a felony. From the balcony, I watch the men in papery silver jumpsuits strip the corpses naked, and clumsily dump them into transparent bodybags filled with some sort of icy green fluid, vapor rising sickly. They throw the giant bladders onto gurneys, and trundle out of the room with all the gravity of errant bellhops.

Goncz's prisoner slumps over her crucifixion, long passed out from shock. Hands pinned to her thigh, she looks like a supplicant, bowed in prayer; though I can't imagine to what. Her breath is audibly ragged to even my cheap recorder's amplifier, some twenty feet away and separated by a pane of artificial diamond. Mr Goncz hasn't caught on that I recorded his initial encounter with the assassins, and as he is busy making calls from the bedroom, I have no plan on stopping. I see him in the distance, hands flailing wildly, livetattoos above his eyes dancing through a dozen languages, always the same message: Only God Can Judge Me. When he gets like this, his tone takes an undulating quality: loud one word, quiet the next. It's impossible for my little recorder to make any sense of it.

I observed the first such call upon my arrival in NoCal. I waited at Pivens Aerospace Center for five hours, bleary-eyed from intra-orbital flight, assured by Mr Goncz's assistant that a driver would be there for me shortly. When one finally did, it was the assistant himself, in a rental car. I was told in hushed, cautious tones that the driver, Silvio, had been picked up that morning by agents of the Carter Center. By that afternoon, he'd been tried for war crimes in Los Angeles, and by that evening, publicly sentenced at West Hollywood's Sunset Plaza. Shipped off to Angel Island for some time with the Big Chair: fifty years of sensory deprivation compressed into ten minutes, courtesy of a hack directly into the parietal lobe. Survivors tend to wear diapers, and have trouble producing complete sentences. Mr Goncz spent the bulk of that day screaming at the phantoms on the other end of his communicator, at his assistant, and finally at me: the Piece-of-Shit-Reporter-From-Chicago.

Three days later, Goncz's assistant disappeared.

Another cycle was wasted on Goncz's rant, blasted to his peers across the globe in every medium available. He was unsure if Glen had just run off, been killed by one of his long-standing enemies, or defected to Los Angeles in exchange for leniency. Goncz's greatest fear is still the Simone J. Carter Center for Peace and Justice. Based out of the Watts Refuge, its agents span the globe, wrangling expats back to the Republic of Los Angeles, where their trials have a circus atmosphere: defendants paraded about in bright orange jumpsuits, barefoot, shaven, starved, ball-gagged and drugged; the proceedings little more than a high-verbal horsewhipping before the inevitable sentence, always the same: the Big Chair at Angel Island. The prospect of which sends Goncz into nervous fits, making hour-long calls to anonymous power-brokers, demanding midnight assurances that his position is secure, and the vulture-beaked specter of retribution is well at bay. As he has pointed out, his once-vast wealth is heavily invested in the Northern Republic of California's reconstruction. His belief is that he is insulated from his enemies.

That assessment may have undergone a dramatic turn with today's events.

Assurances aside, it seems to me that Cecilio Goncz's life has become defined by a series of concentric circles, himself at the center. As each surrounding ring is worn down, his response becomes more frantic. I'm concerned that this has yet to translate as violence towards me. My host has a long, documented history of ending interviews at knife-point. Since my arrival, two of his closest companions have disappeared, and now, these assassins. By my own reckoning, I'm bad luck, writ large in neon. What Mr Goncz is thinking is beyond me.

But as he comes from the bedroom, pistol in hand, it is of rising priority that I find out.

King of the Californias Pt IV

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

A softknife isn't much more than a floppy length of plastic, malleable enough to tie in a bow until contact with electricity, when it goes rigid as aircraft-grade aluminum. At ease, the human body generates about 120 watts, and since electro-sensitive plastics aren't detectable by anything short of costly tight-bandwidth spectrometers, the softknife has become modern upgrade to the common prison shank. It’s not actually surprising, then, that Cecilio Goncz sneaked one past the Palma de Baís’s security. What's dazzling is that he got an actual chrome-and-ceramic pistol into his room, and used it expertly on the invaders who crashed midway through our interview.

From the balcony, I have a reasonable view of the suite’s living room, where Goncz confronts his attackers in the brutally forthright manner that death-proofed him against rival Los Angeles warlords. Three black-cloaked forms litter the floor, haloed by evaporating pools of their own vital fluids, decompiled by the expensive self-cleaning rug. Goncz stands over a fourth figure, bowed on its knees, hands pinned to a single thigh by the softknife, pistol to the throat. Goncz leans in, his lips moving. The lightning bolt livetattoos above his eyes flicker red and black, pale nictitating membranes blinking out of sync with his actual eyelids.

Distant bomb blasts over East Oakland remind me I was left outside for reasons apart from safety. Separated by a door of synthetic, grown diamond, I have a moment for contemplation. It is an important moment in my project. I have only gotten this far with Mr Goncz by being passive. History is littered with men like me, who maybe thought too much, pushed too hard at the wrong moment, and abruptly discovered just how disposable they were. Modesty has worked to my advantage thus far. So long as I balance my subject's monstrous past with my own clinical detachment, the project can continue apace. But as much as I want to remain in his good graces, I know this thing will never develop without some initiative. Scripted questions and canned answers won't get me my Pulitzer. Minor risks, I reason, will take me further than the safe route I've taken. I adjust the acoustics on my recorder, set it to use the balcony door as an amplifier, and am soon listening to my subject’s conversation.

“...did you find me?” he asks.

The survivor makes a moaning sound. I realize at that moment those aren’t black cloaks. They’re hijabs. Goncz’s attackers are women. When the survivor doesn’t make any meaningful sound, he twists the softknife. She shrieks.

“I’m asking nicely,” Goncz says evenly. “You can make this last five seconds or five weeks. I have all the time in the world to get an answer out of you.”

She shakes her head violently, mumbling rapidly under her breath. I adjust the volume. She’s praying.

Goncz clicks his tongue and shrugs. “Fine. Okay. I’m just going to leave you here to think it over for a little bit then, okay? Let me know when you want to have a conversation like a grown-up.” He presses the softknife to its hilt, effectively nailing her to the floor through her hands and thigh.

The soundproofing of the room is all that shields the rest of the hotel from the cries: piercing crescendo, tapering to gurgling sobs. Almost blows out my eardrums. I reduce the volume on the recorder. Loud enough still to hear Goncz smack his lips as he leans forward, kisses her lovingly on the veiled forehead. I see him pocket the gun, start sifting through his attackers’ bodies.

Hundreds of miles away, Los Angeles’ provisional government continues trying war criminals as they trickle in from the international manhunt, handing out lifetime sentences as soon as they step into the courtroom. They’ve imported thousands of counselors, therapists, medical groups, and health systems from mainland America to compensate victims of some of the most brutal human rights violations in modern history. Half of Los Angeles’s national budget is set to build a permanent healthcare apparatus to repatriate and normalize freed factory slaves, crippled Hollywood gladiators, and brutalized rape camp survivors. The women inside could have been any of these. Whatever their beef, they came to Goncz for justice, and leave this life disappointed. I watch Cecilio Goncz pick through their remains.

The ghosts of Los Angeles find no peace here in Oakland, a place where exiled kings dance atop crystal castles, and weak men sit at their feet, chronicling safely behind the wall of journalistic neutrality. The recorder's still going, animal grunts from the survivor as she desperately tries to un-skewer herself. Goncz whistles the tune from a children's show that was on in the background of our early interview. I'm sweating. At some point, I've squeezed the recorder tight enough to draw blood. Set it aside.

My project is mutating. I've lost my balance, fallen directly into Goncz's narrative, trapped as witness to another of his horrible secrets. Wondering how much longer I can hold out.

Before he discovers mine.

King of the Californias Pt III

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

Midnight at the Palma de Baía is surreal and alarming. Atop a fifty-story spire shaped a bit like a melted candle, you can still hear the artillery in East Oakland's flatlands as the Northern Republic of California continues its purge of the Deep East Side. Guandong, another breakaway republic across the Pacific, has long subsidized arms sales to NoCal in return for preferential shipping rights, and with all this money floating around, the Pacific Arms race is at full steam. Combat drones made in the factory hives of Guanzhou screech overhead like pterodactyls, dropping decompiler bombs on ghostly suburbia. NoCal's Army uses Guandong-made bioweapons and nerve bombs to 'pacify' great swaths of urban NoCal, against almost every recognized convention of human rights. And while the old men in Beijing stomp their feet in impotent rage, their dreams of Chinese hegemony stalled when the wealthy provinces quit the country. They, like their counterparts in Washington, have learned some hard lessons in modern politics the past few years. None could teach these old dogs new tricks better than Prime Minister Benny Pivens, whose Golden Bear Party made its bones reclaiming vast stretches of the country and putting them back on the grid. Yet as the country's largest city, Oakland has proven particularly difficult to tame, especially given meager police resources. While NoCal's constitution gives Pivens sweeping power to maintain order, using the Army to clear the Deep East Side seems excessive to my tender Yankee sensibilities.

Cecilio Goncz fancies himself a scholar of the human condition, and I haven't the backbone to dispute him. He thinks my outrage is cute. Amusing, even. His own human rights record consists of petabytes of footage that might convince Dante to re-write his portrayal of Hell. Goncz's former territories were among the most savagely oppressed in Los Angeles' history. He justifies this often by remarking on how his was one of the few enclaves on the island with electricity and clean, running water. People ate regularly. There was rudimentary net access. Running local newsfeeds. Hospitals. Relatively low murder rate. Lowest infant mortality rate in Los Angeles. But all that was alongside death camps and narcofactories. A burgeoning slave trade and vigorous gladiator culture, arguably unparalleled since the days of ancient Rome. To this day, the provisional government has found his the least manageable of all its cantonments. Cecilio Goncz's throne was built of human bones. In his mind, Benny Pivens is an amateur. He says so.

"If he was smart," my host says, picking at his sharpened teeth, "he'd arm a counterinsurgency. Get one of the other gangs to do his work, absorb the survivors into the police or army. It's win/win. Blooded vets loyal to the state, and you've cleared the streets of dissent."

I have nothing to say to that. Our silence is interrupted by a distant explosion that rains combat drone over Jack London Square. Rumors place U.S. military advisers in East and West Oakland, arming guerillas. Pivens' public rhetoric has heated up over the past weeks. I quietly wonder if North America can take another war.

He lights a little black cigarette and answers my unspoken question. "People can take anything, kid. Human rights bastards wring their fucking hands all day, but people are resilient. I mean, shit, we didn't always have electricity, the net, cars, mortgages, and a Bill of Rights. We lived a long time before that stuff. Loving, hating, fucking, killing, making babies, losing babies—the whole thing. I mean, shit, homes: you think the first caveman complained about human rights when the next guy tried to step on his neck? Hell, no. He picked up a rock and beat the guy to death, or rolled over and showed his belly. That's what it boils down to when you strip away all the fatty tissue. That's people, homey. Get yours or get got. You'd be surprised how quickly people get used to that, no matter how civilized they been brought up. They adapt to adversity. It's what makes us what we are. Our dreams are only as deep as our nightmares, yeah?"

The livetattoos in place of his eyebrows have translated into animated Japanese, kanji characters tracking across his brow: 'Only God Can Judge Me.' I ask if he's saying humanity is only as good as the evil it does. He smiles.

"Look at us, esé," he motions to the penthouse balcony overlooking the Bay. "We're sitting on top of a building that was grown out of the fucking shattered Earth, yeah? Brasilian engineers come up the coast, seeded the ground with nanocrap, and five weeks later, I have a private suite with spigots that pour any drink I want. Furniture that grows out the damned floor and changes color when I clap. That's pretty amazing, right? But flip it around. That same nanocrap goes into decompiler bombs and man-eater bullets. Side by side, homey. That's the human condition. One foot in the gutter, one on the curb."

My follow-up question is interrupted by a crashing sound from inside the penthouse. Shapes move on the other side of the balcony's crystal doors.

Goncz's alligator smile widens, livetattoos morphing to red lightning bolts above his eyes. He passes me his cigarette. "Hold this, and don't smoke it," he growls. "Pendejos found me. Only a matter of time, I suppose. Stay out here. This shouldn't take too long." He pulls a long narrow strip from his belt buckle, quiet buzz as the softknife goes rigid with electric current. A tiny pistol has materialized in his other hand.

I had no idea my host was armed with blade and gun.

Or that I would witness him use them.

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."

King of the Californias

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

Cecilio Goncz favors the Indian side of his Ecuadorian heritage, sort of an ageless quality trapped in his high cheek bones and almond-shaped eyes. His neatly-trimmed mustache is his only facial hair, livetattoos in place of his eyebrows. This week, they read 'Solamente El Dios Puede Juzgarme', solid animated monobrow in pulsing Old English type. His head appears recently shaved, beads of sweat popping between veins and faint wrinkles. Dressed in an informal black linen suit, matching cowboy boots, he sits on the balcony of one of Oakland's thousands of bistros, overlooking the twisted graveyard of the Goldengate Bridge, coolly sipping a blood-orange martini. I make sure the recorder sits prominently on the table so there is no impression of guile on my part, frame him generously with Bay over his shoulder, and listen, translation services running to keep up with his pidgin of Spanish, English, Korean, Tagalog, and Russian.

"I was maybe ten when the Little Big One hit," he says. "We lived in Pico Union back then. Few of us. Came up for work, ended up spending most of our time hiding from Customs, Immigration, Homeland Security. Little Big One hit, everything south of Santa Barbara became its own real estate. I mean, they say SoCal actually took it light, you know? Ended up an island overnight. NoCal's the one got screwed. Nothing left standing. Frisco...well, you can look at Frisco from here. Nothing pretty anymore."

When I ask Mr Goncz about the Inglewood Five, he smiles, showing off the seven-hundred thousand dollar organic alligator tooth graft that has become his trademark. When he doesn't answer, I ask about what most newsfeeds refer to now as The Shadow Years. The killings. The dictatorship. The narcotics factories. Rape camps. Slavery. Goncz chuckles, drains the rest of his martini, looks out at the Bay.

""It was bad days, right? Lot of bad days. The Fed pretty much walked away, right? 'Southern California is no longer viable for reclamation,' the President said. Well, I mean, yeah. Bad days and all, but we made it. And yeah, some people got stepped on along the way, and I'm not going to say they didn't, but ordo abchao, right?"

I check the translation services. Mr Goncz lays a callused hand flat on the table and looks at me. "Order out of chaos."

I ask about his diplomatic status now that Los Angeles has had its first democratic elections in twenty-plus years. He drums his manicured fingernails on the black matte table and looks out at the Bay. "U.S. wouldn't take me, but NoCal still got love for me. Put a lot of money into rebuilding up here. Californians know how to show appreciation."

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.