Richard Kadrey: Metrophage

A crip by the name of Easy Money ran the HoloWhores down at a place called Carnaby's Pit. At least he had been running them the last time Jonny Qabbala, drug dealer, ex-Committee for Public Health bounty hunter, and self-confessed loser, had paid him a visit. Jonny was hoping that Easy was still working the Pit. He had a present for him from a dead friend.

The ugly and untimely murder of Raquin, the chemist, had left an empty spot in the pit of Jonny's stomach. Not just because Raquin had been Jonny's connection (since it was a simple matter for Jonny to get his dope directly from Raquin's boss, the smuggler lord Conover) but over the year or so of their acquaintance Raquin had become, to Jonny, something close to a friend. And close to a friend was as much as Jonny generally allowed himself to become. It was fear of loss more than any lack of feelings on his part that kept Jonny at a distance from most of the other losers and one-percenters that crowded Los Angeles.

Overhead, the moon was a bone-white sickle. Jonny wondered, idly, if the Alpha Rats were watching Los Angeles that night. What would the extraterrestrials think, through a quarter million miles of empty space, when they saw him put a bullet through Easy Money's head?

Jonny caught sight of Carnaby's Pit a few blocks away, quartz prisms projecting captured atrocity videos from the Lunar Border Wars. On a flat expanse of wall above the club's entrance, a New Palestine soldier in a vacuum suit was smashing the faceplate of a Mishima Guardsman. The Guardsman's blood bubbled from his helmet, droplets boiling to hard black jewels as the soundtrack from an ancient MGM musical played in the background: I want to be loved by you, by you, and nobody else but you… The words CARNABY'S PIT periodically superimposed themselves over the scene in Kana and Roman characters.

Jonny pushed his way through a group of Pemex-U.S. workers negotiating for rice wine at the weekend mercado that covered the street near Fountain Avenue. The air was thick with the scents of animal waste, sweat, roasting meat and hashish. Chickens beat their wings against wire cages while legless vat-grown sheep lay docilely in the butchers' stalls, waiting for their turn on their skewers. Old women in hipils motioned Jonny over, holding up bright bolts of cloth, bootleg computer chips and glittering butterfly knives. Jonny kept shaking his head. No, gracias…Ima ja naku…Nein…"

Handsome young Germans, six of them, all in the latest eel-skin cowboy boots and silk overalls (marked with the logo of some European movie studio) lugged portable holo-recorders between the stalls, making another in their endless series of World Link documentaries about the death of street culture. Those quickly-made documentaries and panel discussions about the Alpha Rats (who they were, their intentions, their burden on the economy of the West) seemed to make up the bulk of the Link's broadcasts these days.

Jonny swore that if he heard one more learned expert coolly discussing the logic of drug and food rationing, he was going to personally bury fifty kilos of C-4 plastique under the local Link station and make his own contribution to street culture by liberating a few acres of prime urban landscape.

At a stall near the back of the place, an old curandera was selling her evil eye potions and a collection of malfunctioning robot sentries: cybernetic goshawks, rottweilers and cougars, simple track and kill devices controlled by a tabletop microwave link. The sentries had been very popular with the nouveau riche toward the end of the previous century, but the animals' electronics and maintenance had proved to be remarkably unreliable. Eventually they passed, like much of the mercado's merchandise, down from the hills, through the rigid social strata of L.A., until they landed in the street, last stop before the junk heap.

There by the twitching half-growling animals, the crew set up their lights. Jonny hung around and watched them block out shots.

The film makers infuriated him, but in their own way, Jonny knew, they were right.

The market was dying. When he had been a boy, Jonny remembered it sprawling over a dozen square blocks. Now it barely managed to occupy two. And most of the merchandise was junk.

Chromium paint flaked off the electronic components, revealing ancient rusted works. The hydroponically grown fruits and vegetables grew steadily smaller and more tasteless each season. All that seemed to keep the market going was the communally owned bank of leaking solar batteries. During the rolling brown-outs, they alone kept the tortilla ovens hot, the fluorescents flickering, the videos cranking.

"Isn't it time you kids were in bed?" Jonny asked, stepping on the toes of a lanky blonde camera man. "Sprechen sie 'parasite'?"

Huddled in the doorways of clubs and arcades, groups of fingerprint changers, nerve tissue merchants and brain cell thieves regarded the crowd with hollow eyes, as if assessing their worth in cash at every moment. The gangs, too, were out in force that hot night: the Lizard Imperials (snake-skin boots and surgically split tongues), the Zombie Analytics (subcutaneous pixels offering up flickering flesh-images of dead video and rock stars), the anarchist-physician Croakers, the Yakuza Rebels and the Gypsy Titans; even the Naginata Sisters were out, swinging blades and drinking on the corner in front of the Iron Orchid.

As Jonny crossed Sunset, a few of the Sisters waved to him.

When he waved back, a gust of wind pulled open his tunic, revealing his Futukoro Automatic. The Sisters whooped and laughed at the sight of the weapon, feigning terror. A tall Sister with Maori facial tattoos crooked her finger and began blasting him with an imaginary gun.

Coming toward him from the opposite direction was a ring of massive Otoko Niku. Meat Boys- uniformly ugly acromegalic giants, each easily three meters tall. In the center of the protective ring, an old Yakuza oyabun openly stared and pointed at people. It was rare enough for people to see a pure-blood Japanese in the street that they stopped to stare back, until the Meat Boys cuffed them away.

Jonny thought of a word then.

Gaijin. Foreigner. Alien.

That's me. I'm gaijin, Jonny thought. He could find little comfort in the familiarity of the streets. Jonny realized that by acknowledging his desire to kill Easy Money, he had cut himself off from everybody around him. He walked slower. Twice he almost turned back.

A tiny nisei girl tried to sell him a peculiar local variation on sushi- refried beans and raw tuna wrapped in a corn husk- commonly known as Salmonella Roll. Jonny declined and ducked into an alley. There, he swallowed two tabs of Desoxyn, hijacked from a Committee warehouse.

It was good stuff. Very soon, a tingling began in his fingertips and moved up his arms, filling him with a pleasantly tense, almost sexual, energy. Beads of sweat broke out on his hands and face, ran down his chest. He thought of Sumi.

"I might not be back tonight," he had told her before he left the squat they shared. Uno tareja. "Got some deliveries to make," he lied. "Routine stuff."

"Then why are you taking that blunderbuss?" Sumi asked, pointing to the Futukoro pistol Jonny had hidden under his tunic.

Jonny ignored her question and tried to look very interested in the process of lacing up his steel-tipped boots. Sumi terrified him.

Sometimes, in his more callous moments, he considered her a slip-up, his one remaining abandonment to emotional ties. Occasionally, when he felt strong, he would admit to himself that he loved her.