Chapter 1

The Girl's not in the Pub

I just came back from a dark place. I hate the cases where kids are involved. She was a happy little girl whose only crime was being born in the wrong place at the wrong time on the wrong world. The reality of it is, I really don’t care about her, or her mom, I just hate to see waste. And havin' to put a kid on e-ice like that is a complete waste. Sure, there’s purists out there that think we’re all just information and our physical forms don’t matter, but if that’s true, why’s there so many prettified morphs out there and why are they so expensive? On the other hand, there’s a lot of folks that say that we shouldn’t be messing with the maker’s intentions, but those people are just radical nut-jobs waiting for the permanent seeyalater.

Me, I’m about survival. Not your survival, my survival. I learned long ago, even as a kiddie, the world’s not gonna stop because I fell out of a tree, or got shot, or died in a horrible wildfire (which I happened to set myself—is that technically suicide? Story for another day.). And as for the infomorph nutters, I spent a long time in the ether and I can tell you, it ain’t any better in there than it is out here.  Billions of infugees already, and people think it’s better inside? HA! Things move faster in there for sure, but, then again, things always move faster.

Anyways, this piece walks into my shop and does the typical double-take-pleased-to-not-make-eye-contact-meetcha bullshit. I’m so sick of this damn morph. It’s not that I’m ugly, but, as the francophiles would say, oh contrary! I’m about at the pinnacle of human male beauty. According to the pamphlet, my body is “Genetically designed for distinctive good looks. Perfection is not only our goal, but it’s the lowest of our goals”. Blah, fucking blah.  If I had the moolah, I’d trade this fucking pretty boy in for something with some real benes. I’d love to get myself into a bouncer, or something with multiple arms. But, since I ain’t got the dough, I’m stuck with this rust-forsaken pretty boy.

I guess it’s not all bad, the metabolism has been engineered to help keep toxins out and I never have any problems getting a one night stand. It’s just that every time I hook up with someone, they end up being too clingy or, even worse, jealous as fuck. Look, babe, I can’t help it if I pher-attract everything from splicers to rednecks to the rich and famous. They see me and think “that guy’s a real hunk of man”. I’ve even been propositioned by one of those damn baboon-dog things everyone seems to have around here. (If you can call being dry humped from behind by a horny ape counts as being propositioned).

So, I’m alone most of the time and that’s how I like it.

I remember the first interaction running something like this.

“Look dame, close your mouth and shut the door, and not necessarily in that order. You’re letting the rust in”

“I… I… I…” she stammers

“You, You, You” I mock her tone and inflection, “Seriously, sister, close the damn door, and I have a tissue for you if you need to wipe the drool. I’m just going to go back to drinkin my hooch and waiting here. You take your time.”

“Oh Wow” was all she could respond with.

But in her defense, I had been sleeping in my office for the last couple of nights due to a particularly interested guy I made the mistake of bumping into on the maglev back from my previous gig. Every time I do that, the pheromones just seem to build up. If you’re a little bit susceptible, and I forget to crack a window, it can be a little overwhelming.

This dame was a real piece of work, bumbling speech aside. Her clothes looked like they were made for a morph with genetically non-existent color sight and slightly shorter and a lot fatter than our femme-fatale wannabe.

“My…My… daughter’s been stolen” she almost whispered.

“Aw that’s too bad” I replied “Cops are just up the road there, and I’m sure they actually care”

“I tried, but those bastards wouldn’t get off their asses for someone like me.” She answered. “I think a couple of rednecks are responsible.”

“Again, you should amscray back to the crud you came from, I don’t do personal like this. I’m more of a hardware guy than a meatware guy” but I have to admit, she had me intrigued. Something about her eyes that probably reminded me of dear old mom or something. Anyways, I got the feeling she wasn’t really going to take no for an answer so I sat her in the chesterfield and took a deep draught from the bottle to mask my inner dialog with my muse Geralds.

“Yes my liege” in typical Geralds fashion. He’d been doing research on earth-based Arthurian legend and had decided that he was my squire, whatever the rust that meant. “The report is available on this person”

Turns out she was a low-level support assistant at MIT, working to get her daughter an education.  Turns out, also, that she was in debt from the gene-treatments her daughter needed and taking a little on the side from PC.  The police report she filed claimed that she’d been walking with her daughter in some random souk in Janks-Yao and turned around to find the girl gone. She assumed it was the Tarsis League and contacted whoever she could to get Teena back, but to no avail. Her last hope was the police, and her last, last hope, apparently, was me.

I finally convinced her that I was, despite my morph’s appearance, an accomplished private dick. And more importantly, convinced her to leave my damn office. I have no idea how she boozled me into doing her bidding, but I agreed to help for a pittance (plus per-diem) and began the hard work of gum-shoeing.

This amounted to sending Geralds off to check all his contacts with the Rangers and The Tharsis league while I continued to drain the pipe. Several hours later, when Geralds had crapped out on his end (again) I decided that the best way for me to find out what happened was to actually head to the site of the abduction.

Well, it wasn’t more than a couple of hours later when I realized that the girl wasn’t anywhere in Shen O’Sulu’s Pub and Grille, so I moved to the Lucky Tap. Turns out the girl hadn’t been seen there either.

Geralds made the suggestion that we’d exhausted our prospects in the pubs and that we should look in the souk. Little fucker.

So off to the souk we go. A 30 minute walk would do me good, I thought. I remember thinking that Shen had put something in my drinks that interacted poorly with the hooch from the Tap. So anyway, the 30 minute walk turned into a 60 minute walk including a stop to piss in a corner, which turned into a 30 minute run from the local cop-bot.

Anyways, I took a look at the souk (heh). One thing that stood out in this particular souk was the number of technical feral artificials there were hanging around.  Well, I must have blacked out from the atmosphere because a multi-armed red and white artificial with a penchant for pinching had tossed me in a dumpster (I’m sure the headache was because it hit me with a rock, or something). Lo and behold, I had found the girl! She was, unfortunately, about 4 minutes from dead storage, and I had a helluv time getting her out of the dumpster where I assume the same damn artificial had dumped her, and into the hands of the bot-cop and med-bot in the neighborhood.

Needless to say, once the girl cashed, her mother wouldn’t be too long away, so I stuck around hoping to get paid for finding her.

Well, wouldn’t you know the dame stiffed me! She claimed I was supposed to find her daughter alive of all things and I hadn’t held up my end of the bargain. I complained, but not too much, I did have to stare in that little girl’s dying eyes for a lot longer than I hoped to. And she never did pay me. I would get the magistrate on her ass, but, honestly, I’d probably get that technical bitch from New Dazhai and she frakking hates me!

Watching a kid die next to me really cramped my style for the day. And this lady needed her money anyway. Being low-man on the totem pole necessitated that she keep her daughter in dead storage for the foreseeable future. Poor Kid. On the other hand, maybe a rest from all that will get mom’s head screwed on right and her daughter can get a more gene-stable morph next time. But I digress.

Like I said, I hate the jobs involving kids.