Up The Tower Page 2

  “I've got nothing for you, friend.” Victor held out his hands. “Step away.”

  He leapt at Victor, and Victor shot him. Thup thup thup. Quick as anything. Parts of the man splattered to the wall and trash behind him, landing in concise little circles. The knife clattered out on the stone. The man dropped to his knees and did a small pirouette, hands scrambling for what had been pushed out.

  Guilt, again, and then no guilt, again.

  The world was Victor’s office, and today was just another day there. At headquarters, people sometimes told him or asked him about how it must be tough being an assassin, but Victor wouldn't know. He had never been anything else—he had never possessed the conception that he might be something else.

  Victor walked out of the alley and headed East, toward the Dam. Once upon a time, St. Louis had been great—and then it had declined—and then it was great again, with the water boom. Now, helium was the energy of choice, and St. Louis was down again, worse than before. Maybe that was just the way with cities.

  This was his first time in this particular city. Really, he had not even spent much time in the Midwest. Largely he was deployed in Pan-Asian territories, or deep in Africa, places with bustling metropolises where economic limits were like bad rumors.

  Taking a directive from his own internal sense of where the target was, he drafted a shortcut off the sidewalk and stepped down a long stairway layered with car doors—a sort of alarm system, in that the bending fiberglass beneath his boots would alert anyone he was coming. Victor didn’t mind, though. There were only gangsters about—and small time ones at that, not the big shots who lived in The Tower. Oscar, the target, was far away still, and he knew Victor was coming, besides. Oscar knew he was coming just like Victor knew where to find Oscar.

  He thought of the man in the alley who tried to stab him. Insane, probably. Certainly unbalanced. Victor had picked up over the years that other people had cycles of moods, rotating up and down, sometimes even in extremes. He had dealt with many angry people, many depressed people, many serene people. He had killed all kinds. Emotional clarity, or a lack thereof, was not much of a determining factor for keeping someone alive if they landed on Groove’s list of targets for elimination.

  There was a real list that spelled out who would get assassinated and who would not. Corporations excelled at creating lists. Victor had not seen it, however.

  His own mood always was level. He was just built that way. Not a lot got under his skin; a prerequisite for his line of work. There were a lot of stressors in inter-corporational espionage.

  Victor didn't remember half the people he killed, and the other half he kept away from the focus of his thoughts. Sometimes, at night, he would think of these dead people, their faces and their deaths. When he did, something on the far end of his brain—some comforting, plush mammary of presence—pushed against his thoughts and told him it would be all right. All right. Everything all right.

  Most of who Victor passed seemed to be part of gangs—even the folks in shabby suits carried suitcases with symbols etched into the leather or bandanas wrapped around the handles. It was just safer to have an affiliation.

  In his tarp, he kept himself low, still walking East.

  With lots of targets, the location process could sometimes take weeks. Questioning the populace, running interrogations, sniffing out clues. Just doing this could tip a target off, as it had during Victor’s last mission. That target had been ready—he had been eliminated, but he had also killed Victor first.

  But there was no need this time for any long ordeal in locating the target. Victor knew where Oscar was. Every clone knew their own.

  * * * * *

  Today was Gary's day. He could feel it in his bones. Somehow, someway, he'd run into Ana.

  He dressed with vigor. Form-fitting khakis. A button-down shirt. His hair slicked back into a neato pompadour. Leather jacket hanging loosely around it all, hiding the outline of pudge that had been steadily building ever since he finished high school.

  He looked killer. He looked hip. He was neato, daddy-o. That was how they said it, right?

  “Neato, daddy-o.” He said to his reflection in the mirror, frowning. “Neat-o, daddio?”

  Probably there was a difference. There was a lot about being a jazzkid that he still had to figure out. He had hoped that inserting himself into the counter-culture movement would have been an easy way to find a place to fit in. All he thought he had to do was dress nice and do his hair all weird and complain about how everything was supposed to be free and how corporations were taking over too many parts of life. There was some damned philosophy to it, some lens that made it all make sense, but every time Gary tried to concentrate on it, he just let his thoughts turn off.

  He would table the phrase until later. He had too much on his mind. He had Ana on his mind.

  It was odd how he kept seeing her all over town. With so many occurrences in a row, Gary started to imagine destiny acting as some cosmic zookeeper, coaxing the two of them together like bears in captivity.

  Just two days ago he saw her in the theater, ordering a popcorn. He'd heard the film was popular with her demographic and gave it a shot. The gamble paid off—he stayed in the back of the theater, in the corner, not even paying attention to the story. That night he coaxed himself to sleep, remembering her face, covered with the spiraling lights and shadows from the screen.

  Then there was last week, the sale that had been on in the mall out in the county. He sort of wanted a new data slab for his screen, and he figured, why not? She might be out there. That was all it took to get his legs moving out the door. Gary lived in the middle ring of St. Louis—the densely-populated suburban university area between Junktown and the outer county. To get to the mall past the roadblocks, he passed through seven layers of security and gave up half of his monthly allowance from his science fellowship, but he saw her, buying shoes. Worth the expense, just for that. Just to see the tanned lines of her legs slide into those high heels. He would have paid more for that image.

  Of course, he didn't say anything to her—she had all those friends around—but if she had been alone...if she had been alone...

  He would have said something funny, that’s what he’d have done. “Man, last week all these shoes were only seventeen hundred credits...now they're on sale for sixteen fifty! What a bargain!”

  No, that wasn't that funny. A little too biting. Too harsh a commentary on the state of commercialism. Maybe she liked buying shoes. Stupid, a stupid thought thinking that.

  But he would embrace the moment. Live in it. Make her laugh, ask her if he could buy her a coffee—it's been so long. How has life treated you past introductory particle physics? That's great. Wasn’t Reinstein a difficult professor? Right, me too. How did you end up doing in the class? That’s so cool. Oh me? I got an A. It comes easy to me, you know. But enough about that. I really like your hair, it shines so well. Et cetera. A perfectly normal human conversation to have with a woman who you would be in love with for probably the rest of your life.

  Of course, there had been misses. You couldn’t go out every single day of the week, looking to run into someone like an Ana Konopolis, and not have a few misses. For instance, he had spent all of last Thursday in the airport, trying to take care of his rudimentary robotic physics homework while he waited for her to show. He didn’t know why he thought she would show there—just a gut impulse. He had been wrong, and he almost got arrested for loitering. That would have dumped him in the gulag. He didn’t have enough money to pay for being arrested.

  Today was a Wednesday. That meant he had time off from his university fellowship in the morning before starting his graveyard shift late in the evening to monitor the particle collider. St. Louis had one of only ten particle colliders in the world, but it was the last one that had been built, so most of the discoveries had been taken care of already. The collider was bought with the boom money and donated to the university, placed in an enormous skylab.


  Gary's job mostly consisted of taking notes, making sure the particle collider did whatever it was supposed to be doing. He didn't know much about it—all his interest and specialty was on the tech side of things—cybernetic enhancements, media screens, holograms. He didn't know everything about them, but he was trying. Gary had been something of a whiz with his father’s tablet growing up, always showing his dad some new way to access programs and the like. His success with that had encouraged him to devote his entire life to computer science—why the hell not? Seemed like a good gig.

  Truth was, it was a hard gig. It was not a good gig for him, but it was too late to back out now. Changing majors meant he would have to go before a tribunal and ask for more money to add onto his debt, and Gary couldn’t handle another tribunal after the first one, at his initial admittance to the university. They hadn’t wanted to give him a fellowship—he was not impressive enough. They were taking a chance on him; they repeated this to him through daily emails with computer-generated reflections of disappointment at his poor class progress. The university would have already cut his money supply off completely, except that if he stuck around another semester or two, they’d be able to legally sell him to a labor factory somewhere and earn back their investment that way.

  That is, unless Gary sharpened up his act. And he could do it. He just needed Ana on his side. That would fix everything. She would motivate him. She would make it all okay.

  There were a good twelve hours before he had to be at work. So, he devoted the first part of his day—up until about seven or eight in the evening—to organizing a random encounter with Ana. It would work. He would make it work, this time. This day would not be like all the other days. This day was Gary’s day.

  He stepped outside. His apartment was on the seventh floor—a bit of a luxury, that close to the ground—but it was tiny. The balcony was bigger than the apartment by half, and he shared it with his neighbors. He wished, as he had often wished, that he hadn't sold his Dad's place, but it was no use. He had needed the money. Khakis, button-down shirts, hair product, these all cost money, and Gary had to look good if he was ever going to bag someone like Ana. No, not someone like her—her. Alone. Just Ana.

  There was a tablet on the balcony, egressed into the stone behind a plastic pot full of plastic dirt and a plastic tree. The tablet only had a few operations—either sending for different kinds of food or calling for cabs. He had modified the tablet so that instead of waiting for a service to call him back, it sent a signal straight to whatever cab was available, signaling them direct to his apartment. There were a lot of how-tos on the net to teach how to fix something like that up—so much so that the cab and food services depended on them. The software workarounds and circuitry weren’t too hard to set up, probably a seven year-old could do it, but Gary had felt triumph that first time he made it work for him a few months ago, calling in a pizza that took up a fourth of his week’s budget.

  Gary knew Ana’s boyfriend worked somewhere in Junktown—all it had taken was a few calls, pretending to be some businessman—so he headed to Junktown. His mother was there, in the hospital. He would stop and see her on the way, he supposed. Get a little bit of good karma in.

  The cab arrived and hovered down, lowering its guns after it scanned Gary and found him unarmed, except for the baton around his ankle. In a few moments, he was off.

  * * * * *

  Before anything else—before the riot, before the flood, before the gap and the deaths and the fires and the pain—before all of that, Ana just wanted to get the hell out of Junktown.

  But she was stuck there with Raj, and Raj had all the bodyguards, so she couldn't very well leave on her own. Walk into Junktown without any protection? No, thank you. She had a knife on her, but that was hardly enough. The knife fit neatly in a small, luxury, Cardion-brand sheath at her side.

  The rest of her outfit was direct out from a fashion magazine. She wore tight black Cardion slacks and patent leather Aushwere ankle boots—attractive and stylish and perfect for inner-city walking. Her dark blue blouse was Cardion again (there had been a sale); already, she had noticed the way Raj had noticed how it cupped and clung to her body. He would have been looking a bit more, perhaps, but she wore her favorite Kadaya Sarin-brand leather jacket, allowing her a bit of modesty with the long sleeves and tight collar, despite the thinness of the material. Her hair, blond, was wrapped into a neat knot in the Sarin style. She was a woman dressed to impress, but she also was no tramp—she had her man. He liked her dressed in a manner that was attractive but not trashy. Ana knew what he wanted, because what Raj wanted was her entire life, as she saw it, from now on.

  They were inside the ground floor of a tall building. Cleanbots rushed around them, sweeping up dust, guided along by retrofitted eyebots that spied out areas of dust and disrepair.

  “Here's where we'll have the lobby,” said Raj, opening his hands out wide to the open space.

  Ana had the presence of mind to hold her tongue.

  What she wanted to say was, “Really, dear? Here in the first possible place that someone could enter from the street? That's where you'll have the lobby? That's so inventive. You're so smart.”

  What did she say was, “Oh! It will look beautiful, I'm sure.”

  “Perhaps we will hang up pictures of you, to make it more beautiful than ever, eh?”

  “Oh, stop.” She blushed, an informed reaction. Men like Raj didn’t like for a girl to know she was pretty already. It took the power of validating her self-worth out of his hands.

  Ana was pretty. She was too tall, she knew, to ever be taken seriously enough as a real powerhouse beauty. She hoped in maybe a couple of years, when she was twenty-one and had safely stopped growing, that Raj would pay for some height reductions. Raj could afford such procedures. His chin and his jawline, for example, were entirely artificial. They suited him—strong, sharp lines of tech implants covered over with dark bioskin fabric.

  Raj ran a business contracted under Trandam, which was under GenEnTo which was under Barbacoa which was under Woodflap, which was under the inescapable umbrella of Tri-American. With only four corps away from the tip-top, Raj was on his way up in the world. He was handsome, with a short dark beard that contrasted neatly with his tanned skin. He had dark eyes that glittered in the dark when he said nice things to her in his bed. She liked all these things about him—his eyes, his handsomeness, and most especially his ability to get her out of Junktown.

  His business, Choice Thought, offered choice consultation to the Tri-American folks in the surrounding region. Soon, powered by Tri-American’s money, they hoped to become a national entity.

  Choice consultation was an outgrowth of the overwhelming possibilities of entertainment and direction offered to the employee class. A person could spend every hour of their life soaking up just three channels of cable and never once watch the right thing. It was a sad state of affairs. When a person was required to spend a quarter of their income—disposable or not—on products sponsored by Tri-American, they wanted to make sure they were getting their money’s worth.

  In an odd hiccup, Choice Thought was actually not sponsored as a product by Tri-American, so people could spend their money on the service assisting them with what to buy without actually burning up their requirement to spend. This was said to be a courtesy for the consumer.

  Raj’s business had started with entertainment—what channels to watch, what shows to binge through. When that business picked up, Choice Thought expanded to other areas—places to eat, diets to maintain, where to live, what to wear, who to be seen with, who to date, where to go to school, what careers to pursue. The contracts were ironclad, and everyone who signed one also signed up to be a spokesperson for Choice Thought. Failure to comply, like failure to comply with any contract, sent a person off to the gulag.

  Choice Thought offered packages—you could buy singles, in threes or fives or bulk, even. You could tailor the kinds of choices, restricting them purely to social activ
ity, for example, or gambling up and choosing economic activity or lifestyle choices. The first choice was free. Usually, Raj had explained to her, they offered something simple and guaranteed to satisfy. Dropping sugar out of a diet. Eating blueberries for lunch, but only the synth-organic kind. Things like that. Things with tangible, bodily results. This drew folks in.

  Feeling bored with their romantic life not too long ago, after more than six months of dating, Raj had suggested she buy a package. Raj told her to do things by suggesting them, but it was telling, all the same. This is how Ana wound up exercising more than she ever studied, and getting a regular new hairdo every other Thursday at the second-most expensive salon in town (Raj paid for half). As a result, so far, she felt tired most of the time, and also had begun to feel as though her appearance was some sort of doll’s game to Raj; a doll’s game that he portioned out to dolls higher up on the totem pole than Ana.

  Raj's business was very specific, very thorough. She knew that these activities he picked out for her were ones she enjoyed. She just didn't enjoy them yet, that was all. There were no errors by Choice Thought, simply errors by users.

  “We’re really getting a lot of funding,” said Raj, gently inspecting a cleanbot as it brush-shuffled up a wall. “I just heard from Chairperson Howell that President Solap himself is highly invested in where we’re going with this.”

  “That’s wonderful, dear.”

  Automatic response, the tone filled with enough pride to let him know somewhere inside of her, she cared. Perhaps she did.

  They approached a tall set of elevators with golden doors. Raj turned, smiling, his hands gathered in front of his waist.

  “And this,” said Raj, “this is where you get off.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  He pointed at the entrance, winking. “You have to go, now. There’s a cab waiting outside.”

  “Oh. All right.”

  She was a little surprised. Usually when he asked her over during business meetings, she followed him around, looking nice until he wanted a break. Then he’d push her into a closet or a bathroom and make use of her and relax a bit. He told her she was good at that. Ana didn’t see how what she provided differentiated from something Raj could take of with his hands, but Raj was her first boyfriend. Perhaps this was just how things worked.