Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

“Do what you like, Trix. If you really, honestly think I was talking about us, when the whole conversation had been about the job…then fuck it. I’ll get my stuff and find a hotel. And you can do what you like. This is a stupid argument. You’re talking yourself around in circles and I just want to get done with this job that has scared the shit out of me and go back to some semblance of a life. With you, if you can get past the fact that it’s you I care about and not the endless parade of assholes, freaks, and crapsacks I meet every day. Without you, if you really believe my lack of love for the animal-humping community is a good enough reason to throw us away. I’m going out for a walk. You do what you like.”

Iwalked for an hour before I realized I no longer remembered what I was so pissed about. By which point I was totally lost and had no idea how to get back to the house.

So I lit up a cigarette (and I knew I was smoking too much), slowed down, and just strolled for a while, to see where the broad sunlit streets led me. Every now and then I stopped at a corner and looked around for a cab, reminding myself each time that I wasn’t in New York and that this wasn’t a civilized city.

Occasionally, a private car would go by, and I’d see faces pressed to the windows, staring at me like I was an alien. It eventually hit me that I was the only pedestrian I’d seen the whole time I was pounding the sidewalk, and that I stood out like a cheerleader in Riker’s.

I just walked. After a while, houses gave way to low, broad industrial units. I stopped on a corner to light another cigarette, just because I really was in that kind of a mood. It took me a moment to register someone yelling at me. I was about to yell back that smoking was still allowed outdoors when I realized the guy doing the shouting, standing at the entrance to the nearest industrial building, was waving an unlit cigarette. He was stocky, midthirties, glasses, and a Star Wars T-shirt that looked like it’d been printed when the first one came out. He was scratching at his short brown hair like a little monkey that’d been kept in a cage too long. I wandered over.

“Please tell me you’ve got a light,” he said in a strangled voice. “My lighter died and I swear no one in the entire building smokes anymore.”

I flicked my lighter and cupped the flame for him. He sucked at his smoke like a dehydrated kid putting a straw to a lake. None of the smoke came back out of him, as if his body had just absorbed the entire load. “Thanks, man. I was dying. People always said these things would kill me.”

“No problem.”

He stuck out a stubby-fingered hand. “Zack. Zack Pickles.”

“Mike McGill.” I nodded at the building. “This your business?”

“Yep. Welcome to the Farm.” He had a goofy, childlike grin that made me kind of like him right off the bat.

“What kind of business?”

“Internet business. You?”

“I’m a private investigator.” I laughed as he instantly turned paler than ghost shit. “Relax. I’m not from around here, I’m already on a case, and I never heard of you. I’m staying with a friend of a friend… hell, somewhere back over there, I’m a little bit kind of totally fucking lost at this point. And it’s a lost property case. So, you know, go me. You can restart your heart now.”

“That obvious?”

“’Fraid so. Whatever your business is, I give you my word I couldn’t care less.”

He blew out a breath, sagging in his skin. “Jesus. This is why I don’t leave the server room. You’re from out of town?”

“Manhattan.” I struggled my wallet out and gave him one of my few remaining business cards. The ones that survived going around the washing machine six weeks earlier. “The trail led me here, though I don’t hold out a hell of a lot of hope. And, well, I think I just fucked things up with a girl, and I’m walking, and…”

“And here you are. Girls are nothing but trouble anyway. They are not like us.”

“This one especially. Trust me.”

He grinned. “You look like a man who could use a drink. And I never met a real live PI before. You want a beer?”

“That is the first sane thing I’ve heard all day.”

“C’mon. I’ll give you the ten-cent tour.”

We went into the building’s lobby, where I was blasted half to death by L.A.-style arctic air-conditioning. A sour-looking girl gave me a handwritten visitor’s badge on a lanyard stolen from an adult movie expo in 2001 at Zack’s request.

“So what do you farm here, Zack?”

“Money. Information. Also cum.”

Pushing through the big double doors at the end of the lobby, we entered a massive space filled with three-walled cubicles. I leaned around the missing wall of the first one. The cubicle had been made to look like a teenager’s bedroom. On the single bed was a young woman in schoolgirl gear and a headset preparing to do something disgusting and probably quite painful with a pink rubber dildo the size of my entire arm. There was a laptop on the bed next to her. Set in the doorway was a camera on a tripod, thick cables running out of it and chasing into the floor.

I looked at Zack. “The hell?”

He pointed ahead, smiling proudly. Every cubicle I looked in had a similar arrangement. Some of them replaced girls with boys. A few had boys dressed as girls. One had a woman in her late sixties. The only cubicle with two people in it featured a pair of Japanese girls doing something just frighteningly hideous with a bucket of baby eels. Every last one of them was performing sex acts in front of a dedicated camera.

We went through the next set of heavy double doors, into a corridor.

“What did I just see, Zack?”

“One part of my business. Cool, no?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I just saw.”

“Okay. You go to one of my Web sites. The Web site connects to the laptops in the cubes. The girl with the laptop performs to the camera. The camera connects to the Net. The video from the cam shoots down the Net to the Web site. You see the girl in the cube. The whole thing’s on a ten-second delay. The signal basically wraps around the world before it comes to your computer. Legal reasons, I’m not going into it. You pay for the video by credit card, I sanitize the sale in Russia, we’re all good.”

“But…Why so many? Jesus Christ, man, why the eels ?”

Zack giggled. “Because everyone has a different kink, man. The more Web sites with unique content I provide, the more customers I get. Not everyone gets off on a softcore murder mystery on Skinemax, you know? And once the infrastructure was down, adding new sites was almost costless.”

“Kinda fringe-y, though, surely? I mean, girls with eels in their…Is there a lot of call for that?”

“Think of it as exploded television. Every station has at least one show you want to see, right? Well, on my network, your favorite show is on all the time. Everyone’s favorite show is on all the time, whenever you want to watch it. Add up all the viewers on my network, and I have a bigger audience than HBO. This ain’t fringe anymore, friend. If you define the mainstream as that which most people want to watch, then I’m as mainstream as it gets.”

“Exploded television.”

“Exactly. Exploded television. I am the ultra cable company. This is the way of the future. Anything you want, on a computer screen, whenever you want it, through a subscription or a micropayment of a few bucks through your credit card. That eel thing? For a buck a time you can download the day’s highlights to your iPod and watch it while you’re in the can. Huge in Japan. And it pays for all kinds of interesting stuff.”