“Wow,” Marty said. “I don’t think I’ve had a customer pay in gold in… hell, I don’t even remember how long it’s been.”
“The boxes?” I said.
“What size you need?”
“Shoe-box size.”
“I have five that size,” Marty said as he shuffled through a curtain of hanging beads to retrieve the boxes. When he returned, he set five of them on the counter. One at a time, he opened the boxes to show me they were empty and that the special liners were intact. When he got to the fifth box, he slowed down, caught my eye, and smiled.
“I don’t have change for that much gold, partner,” Marty said, “and I know you said you don’t need Q. But Q is what I have.”
He opened the fifth box, and I saw it was filled with the little white pills of Quadrille, the drug used by almost 100 percent of the population to minimize the negative effect the direct-Internet BICE chips can have on brain function. Basically, Q exists to keep people passive and mind-surfing so they don’t go crazy from too much information assaulting them all the time.
“I don’t need the Q, man,” I said again.
“Take it,” Marty said and threw up his hands. “Like I said, I don’t have change and you already paid for it.”
I frowned and sucked in a deep breath.
“Listen,” Marty said, “I already told you this’s pure, off-grid stuff and untraceable. No tagents. But it’s in the box, so it can’t be tracked even if I’m lying, which I’m not. So just do me a favor and take it. Dump it off on a Q dealer or something. I know you run into a lot of people I can never get to. It’s good stuff, and when they come back to you for more because it’s that damn good, just point ’em my way. You’ll be doing me a favor.”
“I don’t like the stuff,” I said. “It’s off my radar, and it’s dangerous to deal in. They put you under the retraining camp if they catch you moving this stuff in quantity.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Kristy alert. No one else would have noticed it because she was an old master at this, but I saw her slide backward, pushing herself with her paws like she was stretching; then her hind end stood up so I could see her through the door.
In two steps I was at the door and had kicked it open before spinning on my heels and heading back to the counter in a hurry. Kristy calmly entered the store before the door slammed shut behind her, and in a single bound she was on my heel.
“Back door?” I said to Marty.
“What? What is it?”
“Back door! Now!”
Marty popped to attention and pushed the beads back with one hand while indicating with the other. “Through here, man.”
I snatched up the boxes, including the box with the Q, and rushed around the counter with Kristy hard on my heels. Through the back door and left down the alley. We picked up speed without running, and in ten steps we were turning right down a darkened narrow street, staying in the shadows.
“I need a hide,” I told Kristy, who immediately bolted ahead of me.
We were fast-walking along a frontage of New Detroit’s endless blocks of mostly empty condos and apartments. The streets were deliberately narrow, designed to make sure there would never be ground transport traffic on them. The city was made to be walker friendly. Designed to avoid the mistakes of the old world. What resulted was a maze of dark roads walled by uninhabited buildings, like cliffs stretching up to the sky.
Two, three, four entryways and then Kristy bolted into one of the alcoves and bounced her front paws off the door.
“Good girl,” I said as I set the boxes down and pulled a code card and thin scramble box from my pocket. I slid the card into the reader, then clipped two small alligator clips from the scramble to the metallic leads and pressed my thumb to the reader on the box. The door buzz-clicked and popped open half an inch. I snatched up the boxes before propping the door with my foot just as Kristy jumped ahead of me and cleared the first flight of stairs before waiting for me on the landing.
There was a maintenance bin near the bottom of the stairs and as I approached it, I snapped open the fifth box, the one with the Q in it, and dumped the contents into the container before kicking the bin back into the shadows.
Thousands of Unis worth of Q, but I didn’t need it, and no way was I going to get pinched moving contraband Q loaded with tagents that could lead Transport directly to me.
That’s if Marty was trying to screw me.
I couldn’t know if he was or not, and I wasn’t going to gamble and find out.
I took the stairs two at a time. Kristy bolted upward again, clearing each flight on her way up, watching for eyes in the night, sensing any danger. She knew what she was doing, and I let her work. In this part of the job I’m merely dumb hands, carrying contraband or working doors. She’s the brains of the operation.
She keeps me from getting caught.
On the seventh floor she waited at the fire door leading to a hallway, so I pushed through it and watched as she jetted to the left, sprinting toward the end of the hall. She stopped at an apartment, 794, and bounced both front paws off the door.
Scramble box and card out. The click as the lock retracted, and we were in the abandoned apartment. Not abandoned. Never inhabited. I pushed the door closed again behind us, and for the moment, we were safe.
She’d found just the right hide. Just enough walls to keep us from showing up on drone infrared or other scanning device.
Who knows how Kristy does it? I don’t. I just know she keeps me safe.
I try to do the same for her.
Two
Kristy
I sing an old song to her when she’s done a good job, and she loves it as much as she loves cheese sandwiches and canned meat. Dog food is impossible to find because there aren’t that many dogs up on the Shelf. Maybe there are a lot out in the wild, but in the cities they’re a luxury, I think.
Her tail wags and it’s almost like she smiles when I sing her song. At least that’s how it seems to me. I can’t tell you why or what this song might mean to her. It’s just an old song my mom used to sing to me back when I was young and before Dad died in the war and we made the move from New Pennsylvania up to the Shelf. To the Promised Land. Or promised city. New Detroit. One of the big cities built by Transport’s Central Planning Unit back when they thought the masses from Old Earth would be migrating here by the millions. Before the war came here too.
I press my back against a wall in the apartment’s back bedroom and slide down until I’m seated. Kristy sits in front of me and listens to her song.
Nobody came. To New Detroit, that is.
Almost nobody.
A city built for half a million colonists inhabited by a couple dozen thousand. Maybe fewer.
And here I am in a never-inhabited apartment in New Detroit singing Kristy’s song to her because I’m fresh out of cheese sandwiches and canned meat on this trip. She’s happy nonetheless. She’s always confident we’ll get home.
Home.
Funny word for a dissident camp where untagged refuseniks like me wait around to get raided and rounded up for lacking implanted ID.
Even as I think these thoughts, I sing for Kristy because I can sing that song without concentrating on it. My mouth knows it by heart and my voice knows it by feel, so my mind can drift.
So I sing and consider. Multitasking.
And Kristy smiles.
Another trip and, as I figure it, one day closer to getting caught. Everyone without some form of implanted identification eventually gets disappeared, and me with no BICE implanted in the back of my head, and no TRID in my arm… it’s always been just a matter of time.