And then the fights had begun, spilling out of the Palace Theatre onto Neva Prospekt. Every fucking Ishie in the city trying to eyecam the chaos without getting clubbed by some overwired member of Russia’s finest. By midnight the bells at the Armenian Church next to the theatre were being rung in descending order to announce the deaths. Fixx was finally world-famous and for more than his fifteen minutes. No one could number how many people downloaded his new sim: the Web counters just couldn’t cope. Hell, he’d claimed so much fucking bandwidth that, even with the new backbone in place, getting to his site was like drowning in treacle.
No one really knew what that meant until the media punters stopped and really thought about it. Fixx hadn’t known, not when they told him, hadn’t understood the implications at all. It only began to make sense when the credit started rolling in, the fractions of dollars, yen and euros adding up faster than his mind could comprehend.
He was more than rich, for a year or two he was beyond money. A mythical figure like Midas or the Gates-Hertoz dynasty. Fenced round with bodyguards and PAs, the bedrock of his finances so hard, so solid that stock-market dives and currency fluctuations broke against it like overwrought brokers hitting the pavement. And that’s how things should have stayed. That’s where he should have stuck...
Rubbing blood out of his hair, Fixx knew that was true. That was definitely where he should have stuck, with a firewall of tame lawyers between himself and the world. But he was addicted to grand gestures: to walking out on love affairs that weren’t entirely perfect; to throwing his cloak over puddles that nobody needed to cross. Between giving to charity, breaking his recording contract and trying to sue Bernie and his other managers for fraud, he’d spent everything he’d ever earned, moolah spiralling out of his account as fast as it had spiralled in. Half the world thought he was a long-dead saint, the other half just thought he was dead...
“You got a knife?” Fixx stuck his head round the cubicle door, watching Shiori lace and relace her boots, the old-fashioned way. He didn’t believe in any of that shit. His boots might have metal buckles all the way up the front, but they still undid at the side with a self-sealing molecular zip.
“Why?” Her eyes were amused, like she thought he might kill himself in the cubicle while she hung around fiddling with her boots.
“You want me to try shaving with a molyknife?”
Shiori didn’t even have to think about it. No one would be that stupid, not even a flake like Fixx. She flipped him her ceramic blade and Fixx caught it neatly in mid-air, by the hilt.
Shiori nodded, impressed despite herself.
Pure luck. Back inside the cubicle, Fixx considered running the ceramic edge razor-like over his skull, but that seemed a bit extreme for what he wanted. So instead he took the edge of Shiori’s blade to his chin, scrapping it against wet skin, losing the bristles.
If Shiori was surprised at the cleaned-up version of Fixx she didn’t let it show. “We need to move,” the Japanese woman told him flatly. “Now...”
Fixx picked up some new clothes in an alley that had been blocked off at one end and converted into a market. The man behind the third stall took his watch in payment. Shuffling the gold Patek Philippe from hand to hand, the trader had been busy congratulating Fixx on the quality of the fake, when he realized the watch was real.
For a second, it looked like the man was going to refuse to take it. If the timepiece had been reported stolen then it couldn’t easily be offloaded. Not if the watch was logged with Customs as missing on the way out. But something in Shiori’s eyes made the man decide to honour the trade.
“What are you looking for?” He asked looking doubtfully at Fixx.
Fixx examined the clothes on show. Levis, T-shirts, jackets. Most were two, maybe three seasons out of date. Some of them so old he didn’t even recognize the designer they were meant to be ripping off. Nearly everything was synthetic, some kind of clone-cotton/Kevlar mix that shed dirt by itself without having to be told.
In the end, Fixx took a black Thai jumpsuit, riveted in copper at the stress point of every seam. To go under it Fixx chose a blue T-shirt. The jumpsuit had been night-black once, a real light-swallower until someone washed it in water and most of its fluorescence went down the drain. Now it looked more slate-grey.
“I’ll take these,” said Fixx and stripped off his own Levis before the man had time to argue. Clambering into the jumpsuit, Fixx did it up at the side.
“Looks good,” said Shiori.
Fixx glanced round in surprise.
“What I mean,” Shiori said carefully, “is that in those clothes you look less obvious...”
“You mean I blend in?”
Shiori and the stallholder looked at each other. Which was enough. Fixx didn’t need their reply. He wasn’t going to blend in anywhere until he got rid of his metal hand and that wasn’t going to happen this side of getting rich again. All the same, the jumpsuit would do when they came to grab a shuttle. If he looked like anything in the faded-out garment, at least it was more like a maintenance engineer than anything else.
“Where’s the nearest CyKaff? Fixx demanded. He couldn’t believe there wasn’t one up here somewhere, here in franchise heaven. Actually, Fixx reminded himself, everywhere was franchise heaven these days.
“Back towards Aldrin Square,” said the man, pointing vaguely into the distance.
“Okay.” Fixx turned to Shiori. “I’ll see you later.”
“Where?” It was obvious from the way Shiori had her hands slung on her hips that she didn’t appreciate having to ask. But that wasn’t his problem.
“Planetside,” suggested Fixx.
“Arrivals or departures?”
“Well, what do you think...?”
Fixx left her standing there in the small square, a young Japanese woman with neat features and tidy hair, who just happened to have breasts to kill for... The kind of woman you saw in everyday novelas about a nice salariman family in Osaka. Except the world of nice families wasn’t where Shiori came from. This was a woman who killed for a living — and what was more, she enjoyed it. Fixx reminded himself to remember that...
Chapter Twenty-Six
LISA says
Two girls looked up when Fixx came through the door. But their eyes glazed over and all their attention had been turned back to the NinSim games machine in front of them before Fixx even reached the coffee-stained counter.
“Espresso,” he ordered, pulling out what was left of his loose change. Shit, with its idiot flag on one side and an idealized silhouette of LunaWorld on the other, it really was Mickey Mouse money.
He got something hot and wet, slammed carelessly down on the zinc by a ponytailed boy in a dirty red Nintendo sweatshirt. Espresso it wasn’t. Or rather, it was as close to real Italian coffee as the raddled Pigalle whores were close to the innocent Parisian schoolgirls featured in the bright holocards they busily pushed under hover wipers.
“I’ll take a machine,” said Fixx, looking round him. The place had that neon half-gloom that passes for slick when you’re about thirteen and it stank of cheap scent and cheaper coffee. Just being there made him nostalgic.
“Lucifer’s Dragon, Apocalypso or CloneSex?”
Click none of the above, thought Fixx. He had a heavy date with LISA, the only problem being he was over three days late and she hated to be stood up. The tall musician shook his head. “No sims. I just want a link.”