K Jeter - Noir

Angry shouts, crowd noises, fell from the speakers on the theater’s walls. McNihil turned and looked at the screen again. A mob of cartoon Londoners-fishmongers, cockney pearlies, comical bulb-hatted bobbies-were chasing the tragically misunderstood teenage Ripper through the fogbound streets. The massed chorus number told of how the townspeople’s own sexual frustrations kept them from accepting poor Jack’s attempts at finding love.

McNihil shook his head. “I think I’ll stick around for a bit.”

In the kid’s hand, the folded cash had already been activated. Nothing that the kid could sense, but McNihil knew it had happened. When he’d signed on as an asp-head, so long ago, he’d had the skin temperature of his hands surgically lowered-microscopic heat dissipaters, inert threads of directional-flow fibers, ran back through the centers of his forearms. The disadvantage was that up north, any farther around the top of the circle than here in Seattle, or down around the ice floes of the bottom curve, his metacarpals stiffened and ached like sonsabitches. The advantage-the reason for the modification-was that McNihil could hand an evidentiary prop like the treated money to somebody without triggering the heat-release chemicals that the bills had been impregnated with. By now, the kid’s hands, wherever they fell in the cash’s 98.6°-centered range, had sent the self-dispersive substances all the way past his elbows. The stuff went so deep into the pores that it couldn’t be washed off with acetone. Deeper, even; enough seconds had passed for it to have reached the bones. McNihil could haul the kid’s skeleton in and put it under the flickering UV’s-he’d done that to others, back in the old days-and he’d still be able to prove the kid had taken the money. The bait, the hook, the trap. The kid didn’t know it, but he’d already been stamped with the Cain mark of his sin.

McNihil pointed to the screen. “I want to see how this comes out.”

“It’s a pretty good one.” The kid had tucked the money into his jeans pocket. “I liked last month’s better, though. Something about oppressed workers of the world…”

“ The Communist Manifesto ,” said McNihil. He hadn’t bothered to go see it.

“Yeah-there were all these little chains with big-eyed faces, dancing and singing around the guys in the factories. It was cool.”

Pulling himself up in the theater seat, McNihil moved one foot to the side, a measured distance closer to the kid’s feet. Not enough to touch, but to knock over the half-finished soft drink that McNihil had spotted there when he’d sat down. The paper cup spilled its contents, complete with half-melted ice cubes, across the already-sticky floor.

“Was that yours?” McNihil pulled his foot back, as the kid looked down at the mess. “Sorry-I’ll get you another one. I was heading out to the lobby for a minute, anyway. I’ll be right back.”

While McNihil was in the men’s room-the tiled floor was nearly as sticky as in the theater proper-the micro-organics finished their job in his pocket. The last item on their programmed agenda was to form a tympanum a few molecules away from the pirate chip’s surface, stiffen, then reverse magnetic polarity rapidly and repeatedly enough to sound a tiny, bell-like note, soft and high enough that only the nerve implant in an asp-head’s inner ear could pick it up. That was the only signal that McNihil needed. It meant that the clever little creatures had finished breaking down the chip’s code, the enveloping membrane had run it through a fast-forward simulation of two days’ worth of time, and matched the resulting access key with the checksum already written in the micro-organics’ cores. There was no need to call anywhere in Peru; McNihil’s pocket held enough of the world to hang the kid in.

At the snack bar, which wasn’t more than a narrow sheet of plywood laid across folding metal sawhorses, he picked up a couple of drinks. The bored-looking girl behind the improvised counter hardly seemed to notice as McNihil took from his other pocket a gelatin capsule, snapped it in two, and poured the white powder into one of the cups. There were no other customers waiting behind him; with a plastic straw, he stirred the contents so that the powder was dispersed and invisible.

“Here you go.” Setting himself back down in the theater, McNihil handed the drink to the kid. The one he hadn’t messed with he kept for himself.

“Thanks, man. I’m dying here.” The kid had finished the last of the popcorn, and had thrown the empty tub into the strata of litter on the theater’s floor. “They put too much salt on this stuff. I guess that’s so you’ll spend more money on drinks, huh?”

You are a clever bastard -McNihil kept his reply silent. He figured the ironic intent would be lost on the kid, anyway. From the corner of his eye, he could see the cartoon figures on the screen, teenage Jack and the one London whore who’d always loved and believed in him, singing a treacly duet. Jack’s cartoon knife glittered like a narrow mirror, as McNihil watched the kid tilt the cup to his mouth.

Nothing for the kid to taste, nothing wrong to detect. The powder was inert, not even as close to living as the programmed micro-organics in McNihil’s coat pocket. From being dispersed through the drink, the powder had been activated, re-formed into a gel, and settled at the bottom of the cup, waiting for its next trigger.

“You know,” mused the kid, “that one last month, with them Communist guys-those people were right. Even if they were cartoons. Everything should be free.”

McNihil set his own drink down on the theater’s sticky floor. “It should, huh?”

“Yeah…” The kid nodded slowly, on to something. “Because it all wants to be free.”

“Does it?”

“Sure. You know… like the way information wants to be free.”

“Information wants to be free, huh?” McNihil didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, here’s some info you can have for nothing.” He swung his fist in a hard, flat arc, landing it straight to the kid’s nose, which exploded in a bright flower of blood.

He caught the kid’s drink before it could spill. The kid had both hands to his face, red leaking between his fingers. McNihil leaned forward, grabbing the T-shirt collar in one hand, bringing the plastic cup up to the kid’s face with the other. The Tanaka hydro-gel with which he’d doped the kid’s drink was keyed to McNihil’s parasympathetic system; the gel would respond to a shift in certain physical indicators, blood pressure and adrenaline level being chief among them. McNihil had been carefully keeping his emotions under control-he had worked so long as an asp-head that it was easy for him-but now he’d let them go. Pumped them up, just by letting the pure loathing he had for copyright infringers come boiling out of the little box he kept inside his skull.

The gel came alive as though it were part of him. He knocked the kid’s bloodied hands aside, as the stuff inside the cup swelled with explosive speed.

There was no time for the kid to react with anything more than the eyes going wide behind the glasses, his mouth taking in a quick gasp of air. His last one, for a while at least; the hydro-gel shot up from the bottom of the cup, spraying the remaining liquid and ice across the kid’s face. It trickled from his ears and down the tendons of his neck as the gel swarmed over all the human skin it was programmed to find. The gel expanded from its compression state, soaking up the spilled drink and moisture from the air, transforming itself into a sticky mass larger than the kid’s head.

McNihil leaned back from the scene he was watching. Dispassionately now; once the hydro-gel had been triggered by his worked-up emotional state, there was no need to maintain it. He let his anger subside, pulling his blood pressure back down with it.