“We record everything,” the man said without embarrassment. “It helps with insurance claims.” He smiled sourly, “About every six months, some hick gets trashed, falls over and breaks his neck — even in a sixth G. Then his wife blames some imaginary bump in the floor.” He gestured at the old-model Sony screen bank and the basic m/wave vidcorder. “This is cheaper than paying out...”
“Not to mention more entertaining,” Fixx said bluntly, as one screen showed the fat New Yorker struggling to get slacks down over her hips.
The barman shrugged. “You really get mugged?”
Shiori lifted Fixx’s blond hair away from the side of his head, revealing a long gash. The man whistled and stepped in close, fingers touching the line of staples. “Haven’t seen a job that clean since...” The man thought about it. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen one this neat. How far out into the tunnels were you guys?”
“Far enough,” said Shiori.
“And they really were Sandrats?”
She nodded, her face serious.
“Sweet fuck,” the man said. “I thought the real san’rats were all dead.”
“Yeah,” said Shiori, “so did we.”
Fixx knew just why the Japanese woman was lying. Sandrats in Planetside were unlikely, but not as unlikely as a pair of shipped-in clones, so wet behind the ears their vocal cords weren’t even properly grown. Besides, if he really thought they’d been jumped by a sandrat he wasn’t going to start telling anybody anything... His concern was with the tourists and the last thing he needed was for them to start locking themselves in behind LunaWorld’s electrified fence.
“Seems they’re alive,” Fixx said, putting up one hand to touch the gash. His fingers came back dry, fragments of scab crusted beneath ceramic finger nails.
“Where are you staying?” the barman asked. But by then he wasn’t really concentrating anyway, his attention concentrated on the main screen as he watched customers grow restless waiting for his return.
“We’ve got a room at LunaWorld,” said Fixx. “If you just let us use your bathroom, we’ll clean up a bit and then leave.
“Sure thing. If that’s what you want.” The man breathed a sigh of relief. “Bathroom’s through there,” he said adding. “It’s a bit crude. But what isn’t round here...? You can let yourselves out through the fire door.”
And then he was gone, leaving them in his office. Not that he was taking much of a risk. There was nothing in the place worth stealing, even assuming they wanted to. On the central screen, Fixx watched the barman scoop up tubes of what might have been Electric Soup — if it hadn’t been half the strength and four times the price of the cans in Jude’s bar — and begin distributing them, having skimmed the line of restless punters with a single glance to work out who was making the loudest noise so that he could serve them first. All the same, the bar wasn’t a clip joint. The tubes were still half the price they’d be in any of the cafes lining Aldrin Square.
“Okay,” said Shiori, glancing at the barman busy on screen. “Let’s go.”
“No.” Fixx shook his head and regretted it immediately. He could practically feel his brain rattling around inside its box. Besides, his scalp itched from crusted blood and he stank so bad even he wouldn’t have stood downwind of himself.
“I need a shower,” Fixx said firmly. The Japanese woman looked irritated, but she didn’t disagree. It wasn’t just stale sweat that clung to his body. The sour reek of comedown stuck like oil to his skin. Crushed fresh garlic and molecular chains broke along with the flesh, releasing that familiar stink. It was the same with blue crystalMeth.
He could scrub the smell from his skin but it would be back, and it would keep returning until he took another hit or fought clean. Word on the street was that, years back, the stink had been some Seattle biochemist’s idea of a bad joke, but if so no one had ever managed to rewrite the formula. Fixx certainly hadn’t.
They went through to the bathroom together. It might have been innocent on Shiori’s part but it certainly wasn’t where Fixx was concerned, not that it made any difference. Shiori stripped off her tight black T-shirt in a single motion, hands crossed over her front to grip the edge of her top, peeling it up and away in one clean sweep. Shiori almost had the body of a boy, Fixx decided, looking at her thin ribs, or she would have done if it hadn’t been for those small, high breasts topped with wine-dark nipples. But for all the attention she paid to Fixx he might as well have not been in the room.
Bending, Shiori stepped out of her crumpled Levis and tossed them into the corner of the bathroom, next to her T-shirt and leather boots. Watching her tight buttocks as she walked three paces across the ‘crete floor, pulled open a glass door and swung herself up into the sonic booth, Fixx realized he hadn’t seen anyone with a body that honed since CySatNY commissioned a piece on Bohemian Paris eighteen months back. There’d been a journalist hanging round the Crash&Burn, a green-eyed exec name of Passion.
She’d been good, thighs like steel, arms like whipcord and a vulva so tight she had to have put in a lifetime’s work on her pelvic floor muscles. But Shiori was younger, and Fixx was pretty sure Passion’s whole body had been a rebuild: something expensive from an offshore black clinic.
She sure as hell knew how to use it, though, wherever her body came from. She’d throated him whole and come back for more, kneeling on a bed in a wild apartment CySat owned in Montparnasse, so that fucking Passion had been like being suspended naked in the Parisian skyline. Just thinking about it hurt to bursting.
Fixx was still looking down at his erection when Shiori stepped out of the shower. They looked at each other and Fixx could almost swear he saw the Japanese woman curl her lip, then realized she probably wouldn’t do anything that obvious.
Shiori nodded at his groin. “You got a problem, you deal with it,” she said abruptly and turned her back on him, pulling the black jeans up around her hips, fixing her flies and buckling her belt before she even bothered to reach for her top.
She looked good from the back. But hell, she looked pretty neat from the front too. Fixx stripped off his clothes and stepped up into the glass booth. He’d like to do the same: set the controls to sonic and let the dirt, dead cells, sweat and microbes be blasted from his skin in a single sweep, but he couldn’t.
Brauhess marketed the cubicle as sonic, because the idea of laser cleaning still had people worried. It wasn’t as if sound wasn’t involved: it was, in three oscillating frequencies. But most of the cleaning was a rapid laser peel, so shallow that it zapped no more than the first few interlocking cells of the epidermis. What the Brauhess did was take a surface reading a nanosec ahead of the laser pulse, then take mere microns off the result.
There were rumours of pregnant women cooking their babies, fat men breathing out at the wrong time and finding their guts on the shower floor and children who forgot to close their eyes getting an involuntary corneal shave that changed their sight forever — but that was what they were, just rumours.
Urban myth had nothing to do with the reason Fixx didn’t choose the sonic option. It was simple self-preservation. Both his legs and one arm were bio-encased electronics. No way was he going to risk frying the chips.
No, he was going to shower the old way. His prosthetics might not stand a laser burst but at least they were waterproof.
Fixx let the cold trickle down his torso, slicking through body hair flecked with grey, picking up blood, dust and grit as it went. By the time he’d been under the shower for thirty seconds, the puddle at his feet was already grey with dirt, not that he could feel anything resembling water with his toes.
If he could have had his legs back, he would have done, height drop and all. Oh, they’d got him publicity, that night at the St Petersburg Palace Theatre when he stalked out on stage, half-man/half-machine. The tetsuos had been out in force, ranked along the front of the stage, providing security, whether the Russian police had wanted it or not.