K Jeter - Farewell Horizontal

Still. You had to be careful. Nobody lets go that easy. “Why would the Havoc Mass want to dump DeathPix?” The logical question; DP had graffex resources unmatched by anyone else – designers, techs, terrorist shrinks up the butt. And all those years of accumulated expertise; hard to get that same level of service elsewhere. There were reasons why DeathPix charged so much.

Brevis shrugged. “You want my guess?”

“No, I don’t want your fucking guess. I want what you know .”

“Okay, Ny; but if you spill any of this, neither one of us will be worrying about our nuts, or anything else. Got me?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He shifted position in the sling. All this mysterioso talk had eaten up enough time to have given him cramps in his legs. “Just lay it on me.”

All the pitch machinery faded from Brevis’s voice. “This is the deal, Ny. The Havoc Mass is making its move . Finally. They’ve been building up to it for a long time, and now they’re finally gonna do it. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week or next month. Not this year, and probably not next year, either. But the gears are in motion, Ny. The process has been started; they think the time has come for them to go straight for the top. They’ve got the numbers; they’ve got the alliances – man, they’ve got secret alliances that nobody’s gonna be- lieve , until they see it all come down. Maybe they’re gonna be able to knock the Grievous Amalgam off the toplevel, or maybe they’ll go bust trying for it. But the time’s come. Simple as that.”

The time has come. That goddamned Guyer. Axxter had to shake his head in admiration. She knew . Something in the air that she could taste with all of her finely honed senses. She could just stick out her tongue and lick the insurrectionary molecules off the wind coursing down the building’s surface. Plus all the little rumors and whispers, the intimacies to which a person in her trade is privy. One way or another, she’d known something was up, and had told him so. Still -

“Well… that’s all fine. More power to ’em, I guess.” Axxter studied the other’s image for any further clues. “But what’s all this got to do with me?”

“Coming to that, man. This is the deal: the Mass wants to do two things in getting ready for the big push. They want to completely revamp their visuals – rank insignia, trophy decs, psych-outs, ikons – the whole schmazzola. Head-to-toe redesign. And they want to plug any possible leak of their plans to the Grievous Amalgam. When they roll, they want all their military imagery to take the Amalgam and any of its allies by surprise. Get the picture?”

Axxter scratched his face. “I don’t know… I don’t see why the Mass would want to dump DeathPix. I mean, if that’s what they want. DeathPix can do a complete redesign for them; Christ, they’ve done it three or four times already.” When he’d been working and saving up to go freelance, boning up on notable graffex achievements had been part of his preparation. You had to know what had gone down before, in order to come up with your own originals; plus it’d been cheap research, with nothing to pay but the Wire Syndicate access time to the toplevel copyright office. Some of the DeathPix redesigns for the Havoc Mass were considered classics, big conceptual advances in the graffex art – ten years ago, the “Bleeder/ Eater” ikon set had been the first to use optic phase-shift subliminals; that alone had been credited with bringing the pivotal Knives of God tribe into the Mass fold; the Grievous Amalgam had had to order up whole new graffex work to avoid any more defections. DeathPix had been the real winner of that little image skirmish, with big fees raked in from both sides and an even more solidly cemented reputation. So why would any tribe who could afford it want to bump a contractor like that? The absolute best – he couldn’t figure it.

Brevis shook his head. “They’ve gotten stale, Ny. What have they done lately? Nothing but the same old shit. The Havoc Mass wants fresh blood . They want something nobody’s ever seen before.”

“Yeah, well… maybe.” In spite of himself, he felt a little trickle of excitement wend past his skeptical defenses. It would be a wild thing… Some of the stuff he had in his design archives, the off-the-wall things he worked and reworked, getting every line and effect perfect, just waiting for the day… Some crazy things in there. Maybe the time had come. In more ways than one. “But what was that other bit? About the Havoc Mass not wanting any of this leaked to the Amalgam?”

“That’s right.” Brevis’s voice went up in pitch, feeding on the small interest detected in his client. “Top secret, Ny. Clamped down to the max .”

That was the part that tasted sour – and false – in his mouth. Producing unease. “I think somebody’s fed you one, Brev. That just doesn’t make sense. The Havoc Mass thinks that DeathPix has been playing doubles on them? Selling confidential info to the Amalgam? I don’t believe it. Why the hell would DP risk losing that big a contract? Let alone all the other shit the Mass could pay them back with. Those people love to make examples of people who screw with them. Plus, if they survived whatever payback came round, their big-money markets would be cut in half; without the Mass bidding against them, the Amalgam would be able to pick up DeathPix’s stuff for pennies. And they could scratch off any chance of lining up new clients, after getting caught out like that.” He shook his head. “I just don’t see it, man. DeathPix has got it set up too sweet to risk blowing it all with leak action.”

Brevis smiled, replete with craftiness and self-satisfaction. “True, true; DeathPix wouldn’t want to blow a nice, cozy setup like they got. But you’re forgetting something – DeathPix is a publicly traded company . They’re listed on the big board up here; Christ, I’ve got a few shares in ’em. They’re a solid blue-chip, though they might not be for long, once the shit starts to fly. But they’ve got to file quarterly reports with the trading commission, and anybody can read those; you just have to call up the commission and ask for a copy. They’re not secret info. And those reports include corporate earnings , Ny. There’s the giveaway. DeathPix may have done complete redesigns for the Havoc Mass in the past, but never the whole thing in one shot. And never in conjunction with the kind of big push they’re planning. If the money they’d have to pay DeathPix for a graffex project of this magnitude were to show up in those reports, then the Amalgam would flash on what was up, sure as shit. And that’d be the end of any surprise factor for the Mass. Get the picture, Ny?”

Got the picture. He looked away from the wall and the deadfilm, letting the bright morning light wash his agent’s image to a ghost. Out in the distance, a darker speck floated, as though it were an intangible particle of dirt caught against his eye; he blinked, and it was still there. He gave it no more thought, his brain filled with Brevis’s words. Get the picture? He supposed he did. Some crazy things in there … Just waiting for the opportunity to dig them out of his design archives and slap them into place, right onto the skin and armor of – the Havoc Mass? That’d be fine; my graffex for the Big Push, charging up and over the Amalgam. That’d be all right, indeed. Time has come . Maybe it has.

Brevis’s voice broke in, revved up to an even more excited pitch. “You see, that’s why the Havoc Mass wants to go with somebody small for this redesign project – they want a sole-proprietor operation, somebody who hasn’t issued stock that’s being traded on the board up here. Somebody who doesn’t have to file any reports with the trading commission . They need a freelancer.”