A golden revolver had appeared in Balot’s grip.
Balot stared at the revolver. She wondered whether this was the answer. As she did so the trigger cocked itself. Click. She felt the bullet loading in the steel chamber inside the gun. This was, without a doubt, Balot’s snarc. The gun knew of Balot’s despair.
“Well, I didn’t think it would take the form of a gun with such accuracy.” The Doctor stared, fixated on the gun, and continued. “Now your psychoprint is recorded inside Oeufcoque. Physical evidence of your heart, as it were. And, using your heart as our foundation, we’re going to protect you and fulfill our objectives. So, we’ll defeat the man known as Shell-Septinos, smash OctoberCorp—”
“You’ve got it wrong, Doctor,” Oeufcoque interrupted, still in the form of a revolver. “She’s going to shoot herself.”
The Doctor’s eyes widened.
“She still has feelings for the man?”
“No, not that,” Oeufcoque said. Balot realized then for the first time that the gun didn’t have a trigger.
That was Oeufcoque’s will. And it was the first act of kindness that Balot had received from this curious little mouse.
She felt the warmth of a body in her palms. The gun lost its form with a squelch and turned into a golden mouse before looking up at Balot from within her grip.
“She just can’t break out of the shell inside her heart. There are too many things around her that cause her pain.”
Balot breathed the air, deeply. She opened her eyes wide and stared at Oeufcoque.
“What’s this?”
The Doctor’s face was doubtful.
“The girl’s lost everything. We’re the ones who saved her. It’s our responsibility to help her find a sense of purpose in the life she’s now living. My usefulness at the moment is to make sure she doesn’t make the choice to abandon life.”
Oeufcoque looked right into Balot’s eyes. Mature eyes, as if they were filled with a mixture of dignity and courtesy. In the end even the Doctor couldn’t argue with Oeufcoque’s words. Balot understood that quickly. She also understood the reason.
She didn’t know how, but Oeufcoque had the ability to search a person’s heart, see through them in an instant. Also, the power to evaluate the value of that heart. A power that Balot, the Doctor, the people of this city, all seemed to have lost.
The mouse and the girl stared each other down. As if two pieces of a whole had finally met. They remained like that for a good while.
Eventually the Doctor, who had been left all on his own, nonplussed, said, “How’s about I shine a spotlight on the happy couple?”
It was all he could say.
Chapter 2
MIXTURE
01
Adagio string music floated through the bar, caressing its contours.
A man sipped a scotch at the counter.
It was a basement bar in a hotel on the East Side of Mardock City. The hotel epitomized the postwar excesses of the city: brash, shiny, flourishing.
As the night went on customers flocked to the bar. Here and there, business was discussed. Big deals—the sort you wouldn’t even hear of in the south or west parts of the city—were discussed as if they were a new type of drug.
The man listened to the noises of the joint, as expressionless as the bartender in front of his eyes.
The man’s name was Dimsdale-Boiled.
Right now he worked for Shell. His body was big, but cold-blooded.
Before long, Shell-Septinos appeared in the bar and sat down next to Boiled.
Shell took his lead-gray Chameleon Sunglasses off and ordered a gin. Cut a lime in two and drop the halves in, Shell ordered, and don’t forget the powder.
The bartender silently chopped the lime, took a capsule in his hand, and sprinkled its contents on the flesh of the fruit. He squeezed the lime into the gin and dropped it into the glass.
The powder was from a Heroic Pill, one of OctoberCorp’s special bargains. It had recently started getting popular with the East Side rich, so in this place it was actually quite pricey. Drugs leaking in from the west could actually go for almost ten times the rate in the east. The Social Welfare Department had put some safer drugs on the market, but no one liked them. They didn’t have the same effect. The Garden Plaza in Central Park supplied this bar, and most of those who went shopping there returned home with these pills. There were those who fed them to babies who wouldn’t sleep. They helped you quit smoking, give up drinking. But whether from the east or west, very few of those people who took the drug actually knew what happiness was.
“What’s it like to be reborn?” Boiled asked.
“Like I was in a long dream.”
Shell smiled a watery smile.
“Clapping—memory preservation—that’s what I’m about.” He pointed to a spot just above his right eyebrow. A small pin was embedded there. “I attach a cord here. It’s linked to my frontal lobe with fiberoptics. From here I can download my memories and save them. This wipes them neatly from my mind at the same time. I have to do this once in a while, apparently, or my brain wouldn’t be able to cope with all the memories and would start decaying. Originally I had the operation done to cope with the aftereffects of A-10 surgery, but now I’m finding it useful in all sorts of other ways.”
“Sounds useful.”
“Oh, it is.”A crackly laugh spilled from Shell’s lips. “And when you say you’ll let them fiddle about with your brain you get a free pass to any hospital you like. Gives them invaluable clinical data, you see. You’re treated like royalty.”
“And what happens to the data? I mean the stuff downloaded from your brain, not the clinical sort,” asked Boiled.
“Put it like this: are there any dentists who want their patients’ cavities after they extract them?”
“And what’s the chance the data is being copied?”
“I won’t say zero, but the odds are tiny. I’d say about the same chance as someone going all-in in a poker game when they have nothing at all in their hand.”
“How many times has that situation come up during the course of your life?”
“Who knows. We’re talking about what happens in my dreams, after all.”
Shell grinned. A smile as cold as the drink in his hand. And, his expression suggested, would be just as sharp as the glass would be when it smashed. “With my most recent memories, I’m now ready to proceed with the deal. Not a deal like the sort that’s always come down from higher up. A deal that I’m proposing myself. My memories are the chips. And in order to beat any concealed card, I have you as my ace.”
Boiled nodded silently.
“And, as payment, the past. For most people it’s invaluable. In my case it’s just worthless. We’re just talking about a josh, stuff I don’t even want to remember, stuff that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.”
A low-pitched laugh leaked out of Shell. Boiled said nothing.
“I started life as a cheap little bookie—a punter—for OctoberCorp. Then I earned my stripes as a star gambler. I had a casino entrusted to me, and money started flowing in left, right, and center. That led to a job cleaning money. I cooked up schemes to launder their money—and accrue interest at the same time—that they hadn’t even dreamed of. I gave rookie politicians—those on their way into federal government—the chance to enjoy themselves at preferential rates. I got them to pool the money from their parents’ businesses in our treasury. All sorts of dirty deals.”