Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

1

Folio Johnson was sitting at his usual table at Hallwell’s China Diner on Lower Thirty-third Street reading the Daily Dump on a tiny pocket screen. The high-res zircon imager was eight centimeters square and could display a maximum of five hundred lines of data at one time. Where most people decreased the display mode to eight or twelve lines per screen, Folio, with the help of his blue synthetic eye, read at maximum density. First he read the general International News Agency (INA) stories that the Dump supplied. There had been a 14 percent decrease in murders topside — above Common Ground — in the past ten-day span. The Mars colonization program was continuing even though the voters had made it clear in the monthly Internet poll that they did not want their tax money used in that way.

The Dump was an unauthorized news agency run by Pacific Rim anarchists and so a back story was supplied for each INA release. The murder rate in Common Ground had increased over 97 percent in the last three spans due to political unrest. This unrest had been caused, the anarchists claimed, by outside agitators paid by MacroCode America. The increase in crime was used to convince the White House that an interplanetary colonization plan would ease the burden on the labor cycles and reduce the cost of policing.

“What do you think, D’or?” Folio asked the small woman who stood behind the counter.

“About what?”

“You think Kismet wants to make Mars his new home?”

“You readin’ that Dump again? One day they’re gonna put you in the ground over that shit.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of freedom of the press?”

“They got prisons offshore that link you up to a chemical bag can make you into jelly if you sneeze outta turn,” D’or said. “That’s what I heard.”

D’or Hallwell’s blond-gray hair went straight out from her head, making her look quite mad. She wore a black T-shirt and a long, dark brown skirt every day while serving Chinese-American food to anyone who stopped by her eight-seat hole-in-the-wall.

“You scared, D’or?”

“Fear is the tenth intelligence quotient,” she said. “All the scientists say so. The more you’re scared of what can hurt you, the smarter you are.”

“Then I must be a la-la fool and you my face in the mirror.”

The small restaurateur shook her head and smiled. Johnson mimicked her movements and expression. She moved her head to the right and Folio matched it with a leftward nod. When she put her hands to her head he followed suit. Then they both laughed.

“Excuse me,” a man said.

Folio and D’or both turned to the door.

A slender young man stood there in a black and yellow checkered andro-suit with no blouse or tam. His skin was pale and his blond hair so fine that it set Folio’s teeth on edge.

“Bok choy, tofu, and oyster sauce is all I got today, M,” D’or said without apology. “Chicken and frog strike’ll last at least another twenty-four.”

“Are you M Johnson?” the blond man asked. “The investigator?”

D’or turned away and walked through a door that led to the kitchen.

“Who’s askin’?” was Folio’s reply.

The man approached the detective’s table and sat down, uninvited.

“A man named Lorenzo gave me your name for fifty general credits. I need someone to do something for me. He said that you were my man.”

Folio’s blue eye had already searched the man for eavesdropping devices. Now he was probing for anything else: the influence of drugs, rapid heartbeats, or synthetic implants. All he perceived was synthol and lime flavoring, a lot of it. It was surprising this man could stand up or compose a coherent sentence.

“Well?” asked the drunk. “Are you M Johnson?”

“What’s your name?”

“Spellman. Charles Spellman. I live on Upper Park, at a Hundred and Third.”

“So, M Spellman, what did you tell this Lorenzo?”

“Are you Folio Johnson?”

“I, M Spellman, am an unaffiliated citizen. Not from Common Ground and not off the employment cycle. This is my office and the woman who owns this restaurant is my friend. It’s one of only five independently owned restaurants in all the Twelve Fiefs of New York.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I’m not really here. Neither is this bistro. If you have something to say then say it” — Folio Johnson fluttered his fingers — “to the air. But don’t ask any questions. Save them for the upper avenues.”

“I don’t...” Charles Spellman said and then he stopped. “I mean, I understand what you’re saying. I mean, I am on the employment cycle, though I’ve been lucky enough to avoid Common Ground. But I belong to a club. We call ourselves the Seekers. It’s ten guys, only guys, who get together now and then to exercise our minds.”

Johnson’s blue eye was busy searching the public data-banks for Charles Spellman and his men’s club.

“Um,” Spellman said when he realized that the private detective wasn’t going to ask anything, “we get together, like I said, and talk about ideas. We come from all kinds of different business backgrounds. I lease and insure ancient Greek artifacts. Coins, busts, earthenware. Regular kinda stuff. Mostly I deal with interior decorators for corporations but I also have a few private clients...” Again Charles Spellman paused, expecting some kind of question.

Johnson silently went through the e-docs that described Spellman’s service, Alexander’s Bounty. He had customers around the world and offices on Middle West Broadway, Lefrak Avenue, and Rodeo Drive. He was an employee but his cousin Mylo Spellman owned the business.

“The others do different things. Leonard Li is an accountant for Mobil Fuels and Brenton Thyme makes lenses for space exploration. Do you need to know more?”

“I don’t need to know anything, M,” Johnson said. “And nothing so far has been important enough to say.”

“The Seekers ask questions, like I said,” Spellman continued. “Sometimes we ask theoretical questions about physics or genetics. Sometimes there are social questions, like for instance Does labor define citizenship?” The antique dealer seemed to think that this last question might get a rise out of Johnson, but when Folio didn’t respond he continued, “There is a theory that the right combination of bright minds can yield genius if the group maintains both rigor and sociable relations. It’s like playing the lottery, only with the contents of our minds, you see?”

“Uh-huh. Somebody lost his mind and you need someone to go find it?”

“Somebody’s been killing us, one by one.”

“Who?” Unconsciously Johnson leaned forward, blue gleaming from his black and angular face.

“I don’t know. First it was Laddie McCoy, two months ago while he was taking a midnight job on the arch above Central Park.”

“They said it was White Noise thugs who wanted his pocket med-computer,” Folio read from a report downloaded into his eye.

“How do you know that?” Spellman asked.

“I read the paper every day.” While he spoke his eye searched for the identities of the unemployed muggers but there was no record of an arrest.

“Bill Heinz was killed eight days later,” Spellman said. “They dropped a chunk of Upper Broadway on his head.”

“I remember that one too. Four people got killed. They were working on the new DanceDome.”

“Derrick James was killed by a freaked-out prostitute that he had been seeing for the last nine years. The guy picked up Derry and threw him out of the three hundred twenty-seventh floor of the IBC building.”

“Was the tramp usin’ drugs?”

“He was a divinity student,” Spellman said. “He only had three clients and wouldn’t even drink synth.”

Johnson was reading about James and Heinz in the back of his eye. The images of the dead, published by INA, superimposed themselves on his pale would-be client.

“My cousin Mylo died from an infection he picked up at the hospital they put him in after getting an AIDS booster. He got the virus from his mother, at birth you know, but everything was fine, he just needed to keep up the treatments. But something about the serum reacted with the hive and he got weak. They kept him overnight and suddenly he came down with a blood infection. That was okay too, they said, only the doctor prescribed the wrong ABs and before they knew what was going on his fever shot up to one oh nine and he died.”

“You said there’s ten of you?”

Spellman nodded.

Johnson asked his blue eye what were the chances of four out of ten members of one club dying separately, and unexpectedly, in such a short span of time. The odds would have bought him a condo on Dr. Kismet’s island Home.

“Okay,” he said. “You got a story there. Four more or less healthy young men out of fifty-seven million in Greater New York, who know each other, die in a few days. That’s not natural, that there’s man-made, I agree. So what do you want from me?”

“I want to know why and who, hopefully before they kill me, too.” Spellman’s words were tough but, Folio thought, bolstered by the synth.

“It’s a tight fit, Charles. A conspiracy of some sort. What were you guys inventing that would scare somebody into this?”

“We aren’t inventors. I mean, we don’t work with electrics or chemicals or anything like that. We thought that that kind of work would slow down the process of pure thought. It’s all just ideas, notions. Like at our last meeting, Brenton asked if we made a pole maybe ten million miles long and then push it from one end so that ten million miles away a glass was knocked over, would that act exceed the speed of light? You see, if the pole moved as one unit, the glass would be knocked over almost simultaneously, in less than a second.” The young blond man lifted his head with pride.

“That’s the kinda stuff you expect to get you rich?” Johnson asked.

“Well, maybe it’s not so smart, but that’s the process of invention. You use your mind.”

Johnson’s blue eye was covering all available data through a wireless transmitting station embedded in the prosthetic baby finger of his left hand.

“Is this club of yours registered under the name Seekers?”

“No. We’re not registered.”

“Why not? It is the law that all intellectual property be catalogued with the feds.”

“We were worried that the government would sequester our ideas.”

“They only do that if the ideas are dangerous. Were any of your ideas threats?”

“No. No. Just things like that pole and some political questions. But most of them were pretty conservative. I mean, nine of us are International Socialists.”

Johnson put his fingers together, making a tent under his blue and brown eyes. D’or came in with two steaming plates of bok choy and tofu under gleaming sheaths of oyster sauce. Spellman put up a hand to wave away the food but D’or ignored him. Folio accepted his serving and bided his time using his blue eye to map molecular patterns in the steam. He considered the young man in front of him.

“What brought you guys together?” he asked at last.

“What do you mean?”

“How did you meet? How did you get together?”

“About half of us knew each other from school. Trent State. Lenny Li and Brenton both went there, and me and Mylo. Laddie did too. Mylo knew Billy from boarding school and Laddie was my friend from the gym. He was a lawyer for IBC. I think Derrick was a friend of Mingus.”

“Who is Mingus?”

“Mingus Black, he worked with Derry for a while. A real success story. You know, black, Backgrounder parents — but he worked his way topside and made it as a lawyer. Now he’s into buying up leases for Red Raven Enterprises mainly, he really works it. He was one of the four guys who bought up the Tokyo leases and moved those half million Kenyans to Japan.”

“Who else?”

“Fonti Timmerman and Azuma Sherman.”

“They from Trent?”

“Azuma went there one year and then transferred to Harvard. He did a leverage with Laddie at Macso. It was a real beauty too—”

“What about Fonti?”

“Him and Brenton were friends. He’s just a programmer but he’s real smart and he knows how to read crystal code. He went to City College.”

As the pale antique dealer gave names, Folio recorded them off the Ether with his blue eye and baby finger. He didn’t read the whole files into his mind because he was concentrating on what the kid had to say.

“No Jews,” Johnson said.

“What?”

“No Jews among your group.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Just an observation.”

“There are no Jews in International Socialism. Zionism is incompatible with social evolution.”

“You got a black kid in there,” the detective suggested.

“We’re not racist, we’re modernists in the modern world.”

“Then why not go all the way and accept Jews who agree with your beliefs?”

“A Jew can never fully accept International Socialism,” certainty worked its way into the wan kid’s words, “because of the deep symbolic knowledge his people have hoarded over the last six thousand years. They can never give up their primitive notions of how the world should be organized.”

“No place for them?” Johnson asked.

“Not in our group.”

For a moment the detective considered refusing to help the kid. Why bother saving this fool? he thought. But then he remembered that he’d been sleeping behind D’or’s counter for the past eight days and that his store of general credits was almost depleted.

“Five thousand credits and you’ll have to move out of your apartment.”

“What?” Charles Spellman half rose from his chair.

“... down into Common Ground, that’s right.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Listen, kid. You’re in the middle of a full-fledged murder spree here. The cops are obviously coverin’ it up because they never caught those muggers — and the cops catch everybody they want to catch. It takes a lotta money to rig an accident like that cave-in on Upper Broadway and more than that to make it look like an architectural flaw. The only reason you’re not dead is ’cause they haven’t gotten to your name yet. If they did you all at once somebody like the Daily Dump might pick up on it. I know a guy can make you a fake ID that’ll put you under and safe until I can get a handle on who’s doin’ what and why.”

“There’s no fake ID in the world that can beat the Molecular Tester Device,” Spellman said. Johnson noticed that he was looking even paler than when he’d walked in.

“You think they suspect people of sneakin’ into Common Ground? They don’t care. They don’t check. Anybody off of the cycle is welcome into hell.”

“I can’t just vacate my place. I have responsibilities.”

“You call in sick. I’ll stay in your hole. Maybe someone’ll try and check you out. That’s my best bet for a clue.”

“When?”

“Right now. We go to the bank and then to my friend. After that you take the Develator to Common Ground and stay there until you hear from me.”

The fear in the kid’s eyes delighted Johnson. He stood to his full six foot seven height, towering over the frightened fascist. He was happy to cause the young man pain, but he was happier to have a bed to sleep in and five thousand creds on his wild card.

2

“You wanna take some more vig and do me again, baby?” Tana Lynn whispered in Folio Johnson’s ear.

“Again?” he moaned. “Honey, thatta be seven times. I’ma start comin’ red if I do that shit again.”

“It’d only be six,” the ecstasy girl said, pouting. “And I love it when you make that little noise like you were crying.”

“Next time I’ll put on the rec-chip and you can listen to that while I heal.”

“Can we get somethin’ to eat, then?” Tana asked.

“Order whatever you want,” Folio said, crawling out of the great round bed. “But charge it to the apartment. I don’t want to spend my cash.”

She had fine features and dark skin, blond hair, and green eyes. When Folio had met her at the West Side DanceDome a few days earlier, he thought she was an Egyptian heretic. But when he took her out that night she’d told him that she was Ethiopian.

“They kept us in a field outside Addis Ababa,” she’d told him, “but then a Peace Corps guy named Lampton put me in a bag and brought me here. By the time I turned eleven he wasn’t attracted to me anymore and gave me to this guy named Jim. Jim put me to work cleaning his sister’s house and his. It wasn’t so bad, really. They let me study and I learned commodities trading. It was kinda weird, ’cause the day I moved out to my new place Jim told me that Lampton had paid him to kill me.”

After Tana ate she went to sleep. Johnson sat out on the deck of Charles Spellman’s two hundred first floor apartment. He stared at the red-tinged night sky and studied the information provided by his excellent eye.

He had downloaded the information of all ten Seekers while talking to Spellman, but absorbing that information into his brain took time. It was especially hard because the men had lived such boring lives. Everyone but Mingus, the black Backgrounder, was completely unremarkable.

After an hour he went back into the apartment. The entertainment room’s lasers were on. A 3D image of a shifting moonscape was being projected. The usual noise dampeners that this image used to simulate the silence of space weren’t engaged, or Folio wouldn’t have heard her from the bedroom. At first he thought that she’d gotten tired of waiting and was masturbating to take the edge off the vig she’d taken.

He peeked around the corner of the door to see if she wanted him to join in.

The man in the skin-tight glossy emerald one-piece had his hands around her throat. Tana was struggling but weakly. The detective had his knife out in a heartbeat. The targeting system of the eye was instantaneous, and so the hurtling blade severed the assassin’s spine in less than a second after Folio had seen him.

The Ethiopian’s eyes were bloodred but she was breathing and semiconscious. The dead man was white, with long, micro-braided eyebrows. Folio quickly stripped off the assassin’s suit, leaving the corpse nude. The man was bald, with no tattoos, ID jewelry, marks, scars, or defects. Other than his exceptionally well-conditioned physique there was nothing to distinguish him except for his hands — they had six fingers each.

“Assassin synthy,” Tana wheezed over Folio’s shoulder.

“German issue,” he agreed.

“I thought they weren’t allowed in the U.S.”

“I guess they are — sometimes.”

New York’s last private detective turned his attention to the blond Ethiopian’s neck.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, yeah. I had rougher make-out sessions when I was fifteen.”

“You don’t look much older’n that now.”

“I’m twenty-four and I been on my own since I was sixteen,” the woman said. “And this ain’t the first dead man I’ve seen.”

“You weren’t his first either,” Johnson said.

“There’s nobody who hates me that bad,” Tana said. “And even if there was he wouldn’t have the millions it’d take to buy a test-tube assassin.”

“No. They were after the dude lives here.”

“I thought this was your place.”

“It’s time for you to go home, girl,” he said.

“The fuck I am,” she replied. “I have to know why that man tried to kill me before I can sleep.”

“Okay. We’ll talk for a minute, but not here.”

Folio went to the bathroom and got a fiber swab. He dipped the swab in the assassin’s wound and then wrapped it up in tissues.

Then he looked up at the ecstasy girl and said, “Let’s go.”

Tana Lynn lived in a commune deep in Harlem. It was called the Mau-Mau and proclaimed the ethics of the Third and Fourth Black Radical Congresses. On the way there, Folio stopped at a communications booth and notified the police that there was a dead man in Charles Spellman’s apartment.

“Why you wanna do that?” Tana asked.

“Just chummin’ the water a little. Later on I might wanna catch me a fish.”

Tana’s apartment was on the fifth floor of the huge building, midway between Lower and Middle Adam Clayton Powell Drive. The view out of her picture window was eternally night and limited to the featureless walls of the Harlem jail just across the street. Her apartment was a single large room with a thirteen-foot ceiling. She had a bed in one corner and a tiled shower with no curtain or door in the other.

“Pretty spare,” Folio said.

“Good for the soul,” she said.

She kissed him hard then and he leaned away from her, a little perplexed.

“What’s that?”

“You killed that man the second you saw him,” she said with a smile. Her eyes got large, as if she was looking at something transform before her. “You didn’t hesitate, or I’d be dead now.”

“Li’l somethin’ I picked up in the Ukraine. You got a desk?”

Tana Lynn went to a door at the midpoint of one wall and opened it. An oak board a meter square fell out, landing against a prop that held it parallel to the floor. From under her bed she drew a metal folding chair.

“This is my chair,” she said proudly. “My own property. Not leased or rented or anything. Axel Alpha made it for me in his shop downstairs.”

Folio seated himself at the desk and took out the swab of blood. He held the sample five centimeters from his electric eye. It took a full three minutes to map the DNA patterns and another six to find and access the database that held the pod number to which the chromes were related.

“What is that?” Tana asked when he looked up.

“What?”

“That eye.”

“It was a gift from a grateful client.”

“What’s it do?”

“Watches out for trouble and then dives right in.”

Folio could see the thrill that went through the young ex — sex slave. Her pulse quickened, and his did too.

“No, baby,” he said.

“No, what?”

“I got to get to work on this job I got.”

“What job?”

“I’m looking for a reason and maybe looking for a man that has that reason.”

“Can I come?”

Folio’s eye counted nine hundred forty-two stairs from the eternal night of the lower avenues to the sunlit streets of the upper levels. The buildings that loomed over the busy business streets were clean and gleaming, while the lower and middle avenue walls were filled with graffiti and garish electric signs. Manhattan had been trisected into separate strata thirty years earlier with the architectural masterpiece of the middle, upper, and lower streets. The reason for this separation was to achieve an aboveground approximation of Common Ground. There were many New Yorkers riding the labor cycles who could not afford the high prices of Manhattan’s rents and leases but who were still necessary for commerce. It was the brainchild of Brandon Brown, a City College graduate, to extend the city even further into the sky, leaving the lower levels for those who could not afford the sunlight but who still worked for a living.

“I love it up here,” Tana said to her new friend. “When I was a kid I used to come up and run around until the Social Police would grab me and try to say I was White Noise. But Jim’d always come to the station and get me. He never got mad or nuthin’. Just tell me to come on and we’d go out for Macsands and maybe a vid.”

“Sounds like a good guy, this Jim.”

“Unless you was under his sights,” Tana said. “Where we goin’?”

“Grand Central Develator.”

“Cops?” For the first time Tana looked worried.

Folio nodded and smiled. “You scared?”

“I’ve been to Police Central before. They thought I was moving Pulse illegally. I seen what they did to the real dealer.” The look in her eyes made the detective want to laugh, but he held it in.

“I won’t let ’em hurt you, little girl.”

The last stop of Grand Central’s Develator, like all Develators around the world, was Common Ground. But this particular mass conveyance device made an intermediate stop one thousand feet belowground at Police Central, the hub of all law enforcement for the Twelve Fiefs of New York. This one massive center was connected, through underground trams, to all police stations in the city. This allowed for speedy deployment of officers on a military scale.

Folio and Tana rode the great flatbed with hundreds of others. At Police Central they debarked into a long hallway filled with people seeking entrée to the Law.

Tana stayed close to Folio’s side, holding on to his sinewy forearm. The mob moved slowly, funneling down from a mob to a single-file line.

“Yeah?” a woman said from behind a three-inch-thick, bulletproof pane.

“Detective Thorpe,” Folio said with studied nonchalance.

“Name?”

“Folio Johnson and Tana Lynn.”

“Reason for visit.”

“Folio’s follies.”

“Come again?”

“I’d rather not.”

Tana snickered.

“This is no joke, citizen.”

“Listen, lady,” he said. “You got a job and so do I. You ask the questions and I give the best answers I can. Type in the words I gave you and that door there will pop open in thirty seconds. So let’s get on with it, all right?”

Tana and Folio walked down a long hall that was over a hundred feet in width. The walls were lined with official booths where citizens could file claims, make reports, or show up for warrants. The detective stopped at a door guarded by an armed and armored sentry.

“Folio’s follies,” the detective said.

The guard waited a moment, listening to an electronic feed in his helmet, then moved to the side. The pair entered a small elevator that began to descend.

“You’re quivering,” he said.

“I like to have an exit.”

“You the one asked to come along.”

“I know.”

The doors to the elevator slid open. A man stood before them dressed all in red except for a black collar ring that, Folio knew, was made from shatterproof glass. The policeman was white and not quite six feet. But what he lacked in height he more than made up for in width. Detective Aldo Thorpe was heavy with the natural muscle mass of a mesomorph.

“Got your black ring, eh?” Folio asked.

“What do you want?”

“Prussian six-finger, clutch forty-two,” Folio said.

“Come on in,” Thorpe said.

“How do you know about the sixer?” Thorpe asked.

“I killed him,” Folio replied.

They were in a room called Interrogations 419-ag. The room, and the furniture therein, was composed solely of bright and shiny Glassone, the shatterproof plaster of the twenty-first century. Everything was Glassone and everything was white — the walls, the long conference table, the chairs. There were no windows a thousand feet belowground.

“Murder?” Thorpe suggested.

“You can’t murder a synthy. You know that. Anyway, he was trying to kill Tana. I severed his spine.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t see you.”

Folio shrugged.

“Why didn’t you wait for the police unit?”

“I’m scared’a teenagers.”

Thorpe smiled, then he laughed. “Good to see you again, Tana,” he said.

“Inspector.”

“You two know each other?”

“Tana an’ me go way back. Every time I picked up Jim Rachman on a murder rap his little girl here would be his alibi.”

Folio glanced at Tana. He hadn’t checked her files because he felt it was gauche to research a woman he wanted to have sex with.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with us,” she said. Her light brown eyes seemed to care what he thought.

Folio allowed himself to fall into Rapture — a setting for his electric eye that removed him completely from the world, a place where there was nothing but his mind floating in an endless universe of mathematical possibilities. In Rapture his thoughts and impressions became idealized notions of energies that intersected and interacted as galaxies dancing freely. He saw her energy as a whirling haze of cosmic dust, not yet formed into stars. She hovered and approached then hesitated, drawn off toward the gravity of some unseen celestial body. They separated without incident or damage.

Folio smiled. He opened his eyes. It felt as if he had been far away for a long time but he knew that the timer on Rapture was less than a second in real time. Three seconds in that zone would drive any human insane.

“I’m on a job, Aldo,” the private detective said. “There’s a kid named Charles Spellman, an Itsie. He’s got a group of friends gettin’ knocked off. He’s worried that his turn was comin’ up and so he asked me to intercede.”

“You workin’ for the International Socialists now?”

“I’m not political, you know that.”

“Tell that to them when they get in power. As a black man you should know what they’ll do.”

“I know four black men went down in the Central Develator and they never came back. They were going in for some questions and stayed.”

Aldo Thorpe’s mouth tightened and his bushy eyebrows furrowed slightly — then he forced a smile. “Let’s hear it,” he said.

Johnson related everything he knew to the police detective — the dead men, their club’s activities, the assassin. The only thing he lied about was the whereabouts of his client.

“He’s off-continent,” he said. “I don’t know where.”

“What’s wrong with you, Folio?” the policeman asked.

“All systems functioning normally, sir.”

“This is no joke. If what you say here is true, I can’t do anything. The files’d be closed. These killings aren’t random, they’re sanctioned assassinations. Anybody close to it will be in just as much trouble as these Seeker people. Why don’t you forget this shit and come to work for us? We have lotsa independents on the payroll.”

“That means I’d be on a cycle right?”

“Yeah, but—”

“But nuthin’. I’m not a termite, Aldo.”

“You could be dead.”

“Will be,” Folio agreed. “One day. But at least I’ll be the one to call that last charge.”

“Idiot.”

3

“So,” Folio said over a steaming plate of bok choy and tofu, “you’re keeping secrets and we haven’t even known each other two days.”

“Most secrets are kept at the beginning,” Tana replied, “and I wasn’t hiding anything anyway. I told you that Jim was supposed to kill me. What did you think he did for a living?”

“I don’t know. It’s just strange to find the adopted daughter of an assassin fighting it out with a sixer in the house of a marked man.”

“You brought me there, remember?”

Folio used his plastic chop sticks to spear a limp leaf of bok choy. He held the dripping petal in front of his mouth a moment before biting it.

“Come on, Johnson,” the young woman moaned. “You met me three days ago. You said that this guy, this Spellman, only came at you yesterday morning.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I guess so.”

“I tried to get you to take me that first night.”

Folio let his mechanical eye roam back over its memory database (which had complete recall back over five years and partial memory back even further). She had been standing at the outer rim of the open-air DanceDome at the Sixtieth Street pier. She was wearing an orange-tinted transparent cellophane dress, with nothing underneath, and drinking a Blue Moon from an oversize crescent-shaped glass. Four men and two women were asking her to plug in with them and dance to music that only they would be able to hear. She chose a tall black woman who was bald and powerful. Before they twirled out on the floor she pulled away from the amazon and handed Folio a scrap of paper with her number on it.

“Maybe,” he said. He was trying to think of a way that she could have known that he would meet Charles Spellman. “Maybe.”

The China Diner was closed. D’or Hallwell was in her bed three floors below street level. She had served Folio and the girl and left them to lock up.

“I wouldn’t hurt you, Fol,” she said.

“Maybe. But anyway that doesn’t matter. We are where we are. You’re going home and I’m going to finish my business with whoever it was sent that sixer.”

“I don’t wanna be alone.”

“I’ll call you.”

“I might not be there.”

“Then, where will you be?”

“Either dancing or dead.”

“Mingus Black?”

The broad-shouldered young man turned to face the tall and slender black man who had called his name. “Yeah?”

They were standing at the railing of the Crystal Plaza Bar that hovered on invisible gasses above the East River at South Street Seaport.

“My name is Johnson, Folio Johnson.” Folio extended his hand.

“Do I know you?” Black was instantly on guard.

“No, no you don’t. I’m a security expert for Macso but I want to get into real estate. I’ve been studying the brothers in that field and you, Mingus Black, are at the top of my list.”

The black Seeker ran his tongue under his lower lip and wondered.

“Can I get you a drink, M?” a young, naked white girl asked Folio from the outward side of the railing.

Folio looked at the girl through the clear Glassone bar. She was shaven from head to toe and perfectly proportioned. He wondered what his hero, Humphrey Bogart, would have said in that situation.

“Real rum,” he said. “And, honey, do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Put in an ice cube and stir it with your finger.”

“You’re somethin’ else, mister.”

The young woman, who was unashamed to walk around naked in the bright sun of downtown New York, blushed under the detective’s intense blue eye. She moved away to get his drink.

“Macso, huh?” the real estate genius asked. “What division?” Folio was still watching the barmaid, enchanted by the words that had passed between them.

“Home,” he said.

“You shittin’,” Mingus said with a Backgrounder twang.

“No. I worked as Kismet’s main bodyguard. Nine years I was with him.”

“Was?”

“Seven years ago Home was hit by a Peruvian kick squad. They wanted to wipe out Kismet before MacroCode could annex their country. They got pretty close.” Folio ran a finger above his blue eye.

“You get that then?”

“A cinder broke loose from a wild shot. It ruined my eye and part of my brain.”

“Damn. That’s why I never work for nobody full out,” Mingus said. “They pay you to die for ’em, that’s all, they pay you to die.”

“You right about that, brother,” Folio said. “You right about that, but still that cinder was the best thing ever happened to me.”

“How you figure?”

“I saved Kismet’s life by puttin’ mine on the block. Motherfucker’s crazy to the bone but he’s loyal. Had his surgeons save me and then give me this synthetic eye to make up for what I lost. Between the fight and this new eye I see the world in a whole new light.”

“And in that light you see real estate?” Mingus Black asked.

“Sure do. I wanna move a half a million Kenyans to downtown Tokyo and spend my life lookin’ at cute girls at Crystal’s.”

“You’re here right now.” The black Seeker was getting comfortable.

“I’m working, though.”

“Here’s your drink, mister,” the bald girl said.

When Folio reached for the glass she dipped her finger into the amber liquid and stirred it around. Folio took her hand and put the finger into his mouth, sucking hard enough to get all the rum off. The girl’s eyes widened and she forgot to withdraw her hand when he let it go.

“Working on what,” Mingus asked, “a hard-on?”

Folio laughed, looking deeply into the starstruck girl’s eyes. “I sure am workin’ on that one.” Then he turned back to his target. “But today I’m here representin’ a new world Nazi boy named Charles Spellman.”

Mingus leaned back on his translucent barstool. For a moment Folio was afraid that he might bolt.

“What’s up with Chas?” Mingus asked.

“He’s drinkin’ synth and worryin’ about death.”

“He is?” Mingus looked down at his wristcom.

“If you wanna know the time, I can tell ya — it’s almost up,” Folio said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Mylo, Laddie, Bill Heinz, Derry James. They’re all dead before their time. All the little Itsies.”

Mingus looked around to see if there was someone with Johnson, then he looked the detective in the eye.

“What’s Charles to you?”

“A piece’a shit,” Folio said. “But a piece’a shit who laid out hard creds for me to save his ass.”

“You think that’s it?” Mingus asked. “That it’s because they’re in the IS?”

“We should be so lucky to live in a world where they kill the fascists and spare the lambs.”

“Maybe it’s coincidence?”

“Is that the kinda thinkin’ bought you downtown Tokyo?”

“So what do you think?”

“Nothin’ yet. I’d like to know who’s killing you boys. And in order to know that I have to know why.”

“I have no idea.”

“What were you guys discussing at your last meeting? Other than the ten-million-mile pool cue.”

“Education and labor and their relation to citizenship. Azuma was thinking that Elite Education Group had the right idea, that everyone should be tested as to their abilities and that their scores should be the basis of the degree of their citizenship.”

“Anything else?”

“No. Nothing. They thought they were getting somewhere, though. Fonti and Derry set it up so that we could have daily meetings. They were all excited by the possibility of presenting the IS with a model for political organization that would lead ultimately to social change.”

“How could you hang with Itsies, man?” Folio asked. He took his glass and drained it, thinking of the barmaid’s fingers as he did so.

“They ain’t worried about us, man. There’s a place for all the races up in there. All except Jews and Gypsies.”

“You believe that?”

“Sure.”

“Then why don’t you belong?”

“How do you know I don’t?”

“I know.”

“Another drink?” the barmaid asked. She had a glass with a doubleshot of rum in it. Her finger already submerged.

Folio took the glass and the hand. This time he kissed the fingers and then licked his lips.

“My name is Paradise,” she said.

“What else could it be?”

“I get off at midnight.”

“I have to work the next three nights,” Folio said seriously. “But I will be at the front door on the fourth night at midnight. And I won’t do anything until we’re together. You know what I mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Eightday night, then?”

“Uh-huh.”

Folio smiled and handed her his wild card. “My friend and I have to go, but I’ll see you then.”

Paradise swiped the card through a payment slot on her left wrist. When she handed the card back Folio tapped in her tip on the screen over her artery.

“See ya,” she said meekly.

“You bet.”

“How do I know that you’re working for Chas?” Mingus asked Folio on the way down the Crystal Stair escalator.

“You don’t. And I can’t prove it either. But I bet you you know what’s goin’ on, that your boys are being eradicated and that you’re on the list. I’m not trying to kill you. If I was, you’d have never seen me comin’.”

“Maybe you need something first,” Mingus said. “I don’t know.”

“I went to the police,” Folio said.

“What?”

“Don’t worry. It was a guy I know pretty good. He wouldn’t turn on me, I’ve done him too many favors.”

“What did he say?”

“He can’t do a thing.”

The escalator had completed its steep descent and was now almost parallel to the water. A large photo-animae sign covered the side of the monorail bridge before them. The sign displayed a cinematic picture of boy and girl children marching with automatic rifles and cinder guns, firing on a unit of adult troops. After a moment soldiers on both sides began to die. The wounds were very realistic. One child was hit in the chest with a cinder blast that charred her body, leaving only her pretty face intact. As the head fell from her shoulders the image faded into giant words composed of flaming letters: TWELVE IS TOO YOUNG FOR WAR.

On the pier they strolled under the transport bridge.

“Maybe I should disappear,” Mingus said.

“Give up everything?”

“Red Raven or nobody else could pay me if I’m dead.”

“Common Ground won’t hide a Backgrounder, M Black,” Folio said. “That’s the first place they’d look for you.”

“The cops won’t help. Common Ground won’t hide me. What are you sayin’?”

“Let’s work together. I got resources and you know all about the guys gettin’ killed. Maybe we can figure it out.”

“Why didn’t you do that with Chas?”

“ ’Cause Chas is an Itsie. I hate fascists.”

“Then why work for ’em?”

“The job don’t have politics, Mingman. The job is straight.”

“I might not be in the IS, but all my friends are. Doesn’t that make me just as bad?”

“You’re just usin’ them.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Mingus Black,” Folio recited from an amalgam of reports gathered by his eye, “born twenty-seven years ago, given up for White Noise at the age of six months. Arrested for larceny at the age of seven. Transferred to a maximum juvenile authority at the age of eleven. Suspected of drug distribution from the age of twelve but never convicted because you became a fink for the Social Police. At sixteen you saw your chance. The Underground Party kidnapped the daughter of Mina Athwattarlon, chief counsel of Red Raven NorthAm. You turned in the cell and got a university berth and a good job once you graduated.”

“Nobody knows that. Nobody but Mina and me.”

“And me,” Folio said. “Brother, I got senses so sharp I can see the rhinoviruses grazin’ on your face. I can hear your heart rate rise and blood slither in your veins. But I don’t care. The UP means nothing to me. Neither do Itsies or cops. I took on a job and I intend to do it. And if you help me you might be saving your own life.”

“What do you need?”

“I need to know what you guys were sayin’ in the last few meetin’s you had — exactly.”

“We weren’t talkin’ ’bout nuthin’.” The Backgrounder came out in the land dealer’s speech again. “We—”

Folio put up a hand to cut Mingus short. He began scanning the upper area of the huge Glassone ramp. He moved his hand from Mingus’s face and pointed to a shadowy area just under the lip of the trestle’s underbelly. There, both men could make out a black form about the size and shape of an old American football.

“Noser,” Mingus hissed.

“It hasn’t uploaded yet.”

“How the fuck you know that?”

Folio ignored the question, concentrating instead on the image of a control panel conjured up by his eye. The panel exhibited a grid of Manhattan that had little yellow lights for every city spy device, commonly called nosers. Folio had already located their CSD and was busy downloading a series of commands.

The football began shaking, its fail-safe survival mode enacted, but then suddenly it plummeted forty feet, striking the ground with a brief flash of fire. It landed near a group of Infochurch priests in their iridescent blue cloaks and transparent skullplates.

“Let’s go,” Folio said.

“I told you already,” Mingus Black said. He was sitting on a couch the shape of a large, half-erect phallus. “Them guys didn’t have nuthin’ to say or think about that could scare anybody. They aren’t even real Itsies.”

“What does that mean?”

“They just belong to the fan club. Buttons and banners, you know. They pay dues and go out to drink synth on Six-days, that’s it. They don’t know nuthin’ an’ they don’t do nuthin’. Talk about all the great things they do in business but you know they’re just shopkeepers, dustin’ off the big boys’ merchandise.”

“If they’re so outside, then why you hang with ’em?” Folio asked, nestling back in a cushioned chair that was fashioned as an open vagina.

“Families got money,” Mingus said. “At least some of ’em. Chas and Mylo, Laddie and Azuma, too. Big bucks, baby.”

“And you like being around all that?”

“I trade in real estate. I’m good at it, too. Most’a these rich families got some liberal shit goin’ on about Common Ground. They wanna say they helped somebody crawl up outta there. I’m perfect for ’em ’cause I already did it. And I know how to turn a buck, too.”

“But they didn’t have some other kinda thing goin’ on?” Folio asked. The chair he sat in had all the colors and textures of a Caucasian woman’s genitalia, from thick brown fur to pink petal lips to a bright red interior. The fabric was covered by a clear material that had a liquid filling. The heat from Folio’s body caused the liquid to flow.

“Who?”

“The kids, their parents. Shit, I don’t know. I mean this New York is one crazy motherfucker, but people don’t start knockin’ off rich kids just ’cause they’re stupid.”

“No business I knew about.” Mingus lay back into the foreskin comforter. “Hey, you think they might find us here?”

“Who?”

“Don’t fuck with me, man. I don’t know who.”

“Sex pits are always the last on the list for searches. People payin’ cash and usin’ fake IDs. Almost every ID in this here sex hotel is fake. They have to send out manpower or fourth-generation nosers to check out a place like this. And even if they did come” — Folio tapped the orbital ridge over his blue eye — “I’d know they were here before they did.”

“That’s some eye there,” Mingus said. “How a street-level motherfucker like you hold on to that? I mean, I heard’a pirates stealin’ just a plain blue eye not even worth a thousand creds.”

“I’m wiry,” Folio said and then he laughed. “Was your boys gonna do anything soon? Anything different?”

“Naw. Them dudes just wanted to feel important. Last thing they managed to do was gettin’ us to talk every day at sixteen. I had some trouble with that ’cause I’m movin’ around all the time.”

“So? You could cell it.”

“Naw. They were doin’ it in-house to act like they were in business. But the internal lines have a security system that won’t allow external devices access. You know some people use those lines to transmit very sensitive information.”

“How much would that have cost the companies?”

“Hardly nuthin’. I mean, people do it all the time. Free calls just a perk in big business today.”

“So’s embezzlement.”

“I told ya, man, they got frog skins for guts. Any real trouble and them boys ran.”

“Runnin’ won’t help them now.”

Mingus scratched his eyebrow and looked away. When he moved around on the chair it arched upward in an approximation of a growing erection.

A searing pain sliced its way through Folio’s head.

“What’s wrong?” Mingus jumped up and grabbed Folio before he fell out of his chair.

Azuma Sherman was running down the lower ramp of the subterranean section of the Whitney Museum. Folio recognized the mutated inner organs created by the bio-artist Atta A that were on display. The point of view of the image came from the pursuer. Azuma’s long brown hair was flowing backwards; every few steps he would look back to see Folio’s mind’s eye catching up to him. Folio couldn’t think how this transmission had hijacked his eye.

Another pain exploded in Folio’s head.

“You okay?” Mingus shouted.

Azuma’s leg was nicked by a shard from a wide blast of a cinder gun. From his ankle to just above his knee burnt to a crisp in a second. The handsome youth fell to the floor. Through the eye-cam of the killer Folio saw Azuma’s amputated foot. The assassin kicked it away. Azuma looked up into the killer’s eyes. He was about to shout something and then his face burnt off.

The contact broke. Folio found himself sprawled on the floor, Mingus Black holding him by his shoulders. They were both shivering.

“Sherman’s dead,” Folio said.

“Mind if I share your bed, com?” Mingus asked Folio.

To shake off the nerves they had watched a very good matchup of Fera Jones against Mithitar the Mad Mongolian on the vid. The Mongolian had an interesting circular style of boxing, but he couldn’t deal with the amazon’s power. After six rounds Mithitar’s buzz-saw-like attacks had slowed enough for her logjam jab to take control; he was asprawl in the middle of the ring by the end of round eight.

“What?” Folio asked.

“Just need to lie next to somebody. That’s all. It ain’t sex.”

Folio sighed. He knew the trauma of ex-Backgrounders, especially those who’d spent their entire lives underground. They feared the loneliness of a full-size room.

“Just keep your pants on,” he said.

Folio awoke on a small blue island adrift in a scarlet sea. The sky was pink and yellow. Violet pelicans soared on the wind above him. Folio was completely aware that this place was a dream provided by his eye. It was an attempt to ease his tension, but as usual, in these hard times the mechanical eye was at war with Johnson’s troubled unconscious. He supposed that the eye had been trying to create a Caribbean island but was disrupted in color and size by Folio’s own fears.

There was a disruption in the water. Somebody was swimming toward his islet. When she climbed out of the water he could see that it was the young woman from the Crystal Bar. Immediately he felt a powerful erection.

“Is that for me?” Paradise asked.

“Every inch.”

“Keep it hard like that for me, baby,” she said. “But we can’t do anything yet.”

“Why not?”

“You have to keep out of trouble.”

“What’s that got to do with you?”

“That’s just the problem.”

“What?”

“I’m not important but you still want me. Your dick wants me. He can’t help himself but you have to hold it back.”

“Who are you?”

“Paradise.”

“Are you from the eye?”

“I met you today, at the bar.”

“But where are you from in my mind?”

“I’m your stupid side. You’re my fool.”

Folio felt his erection straining and suddenly he wondered if it wasn’t Mingus trying to be more than friendly.

The detective pulled himself awake and turned angrily toward his bedmate.

Mingus’s eyes were wide open, his throat cut from jawbone to jawbone.

With a heavy sigh Folio rose out of bed and switched on the vidphone.

4

“What was your relationship to the deceased?” the man’s voice asked.

“We were both natural-born human beings as far as I know,” Folio replied.

He was gazing into a mirror, in a room composed entirely of mirrors — floors, ceilings, and walls — everything was a bright reflective surface.

“This is murder we’re talking about here, Johnson. It’s no joke.”

“I’m not joking,” Folio said to a thousand thousand images of himself. “I met Mingus because I was told by a man named Spellman that a group of friends were dying mysteriously. Spellman wanted me to find out if it was some kinda conspiracy, and if so, who was the perpetrator. I was talking to Black about that.”

“In bed?”

“No. We were sleepin’ in bed. At least I was. He was dyin’ — I guess.”

“Who else died?” a woman’s voice asked.

Folio reeled off the long list, including the sixer he had killed.

“Seven murders and you didn’t report it?”

“I did,” Folio replied. “I told Aldo Thorpe.”

There was a moment of silence in the infinite field of himself. Johnson’s baby finger could not transmit or receive from the heart of Police Central but the memory chips still held more information than the UN’s Library of Earth. Instead of giving in to the dizziness of the tilting images he began a restructuring routine of the images of Azuma Sherman as he died.

The young man was wide-eyed with fear and pain after his leg was disintegrated under him. He stared right into the lens that transmitted the execution to Folio’s eye. He cropped out the left eye and expanded the block of that image. He increased the image until there was a face, reflected in the pupil, a face unknown to Folio or his electronic memories. It was the wide white visage of a man who hadn’t shaved in two days or more. It was an evil face, a gleeful image. He was smiling. Folio imagined the rank breath. The man wore an ocular camera over his left eye; nothing special. Nothing that would explain where he had gotten the protocols to transmit directly to Folio’s eye.

“Who were the other members of this organization?” the male interrogator asked. “The ones that survive.”

“Leonard Li, Brenton Thyme, and Fonti Timmerman. And my client, of course, Charles Spellman.”

Another spate of silence ensued.

Folio had another idea. He searched his synthetic memory, but the data was unavailable without his transmitter.

“All dead,” the woman said.

“Accidental or murder?”

“They were assassinated.”

“That’s some hard luck.”

“You don’t seem surprised,” the masculine voice said.

“Are you?”

“It was your job to protect them, you say.”

“I said no such a thing. I said that Spellman hired me to find out why they were being killed and by whom.”

“Where is Charles Spellman?”

“OC. I don’t know where.”

“You know nothing?”

“I didn’t say that. I said that Spellman’s off-continent. I don’t know who’s been killin’ his friends but I do know that it’s too much of a coincidence for it to be anything but a conspiracy.”

“We are allowed by law to administer a level-two pain injection if we believe that you are lying.”

“Check my med files,” Folio said.

“A Macso injunction against invasive interrogation,” the female voice said. Folio doubted she’d meant him to hear those words.

“You got all bases covered, huh?” the man said.

“Enough to stay in the game.”

Folio got back to Hallwell’s China Diner at eight fifteen in the morning. D’or was behind the counter. Three lady latenighters were eating fried rice and frogs’ legs trying to garner enough strength to make it through the day without getting thrown off the cycle.

“Hey, Johnson,” D’or said, and he knew there was trouble. D’or saying Johnson was a code meaning that his dick was exposed.

Folio looked around the small restaurant. The lavender-haired partygirls didn’t seem to see a problem.

D’or moved close enough to whisper, “She’s downstairs. Spread out two meters just for an intro.”

“Cash credit?”

“Yessir.”

The tiny underroom of China Diner was dark and damp, with a ceiling barely high enough for Folio to stand up straight. She was sitting in an ancient wooden chair looking as if she were receiving infection from every breath. She wore a gray dress of real wool and a light gray shawl that had to be silk. Folio placed her age at mid-forties, but with the recent advances in dermal surgery she could have been sixty and no one would know.

“You were looking for me, ma’am?” Folio asked.

He reached out in greeting. She clasped her hands together and moved her shoulders in a defensive manner.

“Are you the detective?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I am Liliane Spellman.”

“Charles Spellman’s mother?”

“No. I’m Mylo’s mother.” There was no trace of tears or sorrow on her face, but her blood pressure was extremely high and her nervous system was playing a dirge.

“I’m sorry about your loss, ma’am.”

“It’s... It was a shock. He had always been sick. That was my fault. I infected him. When I was pregnant the doctors told me that he could live a normal life if he kept up a moderate health regimen.”

“Lots of people live with the hive and worse today. It’s not like back when we were kids.”

“I know. I was heartbroken, of course, when I heard. But today the police called my husband and said that they were opening a file on Mylo, that he might have been murdered.”

Folio looked around for another chair. There was none. “They said that you were hired by Charles, that he might also be dead.”

“I don’t think Charles is dead. His nine friends are, though. Some say it was accidental but I wouldn’t bet on that.”

“The police have claimed Mylo’s body. They exhumed him from the royal cemetery in England—”

“He had a royal funeral?”

“Of course. His great-grandfather is Jason Randisi.”

“CEO of Randac Corp.?”

“You didn’t know?”

The chime of intuition rang in Folio’s eye, but he had already made the leap. All of this information was stored in his eye but he skipped over biographical data, not thinking it important.

“Is that Charles’s great-grandfather too?”

“Yes. Yes it is.”

“Tell me, M Spellman, were Mylo and Charles wrapped into the Randac communications system?”

“Only for communication with the family,” she replied. “You know public communication is so unreliable these days. It’s perfectly legal.”

“What did you want from me, ma’am?”

Liliane Spellman looked into Folio’s eyes for a moment. She began to speak but then stopped herself. She raised her hand and clutched the throat of her woolen dress.

“Why don’t you wear a lens?” she asked.

“What?”

“For that eye. It’s very disconcerting.”

“It has a crystal code covering,” Folio said. “Data capture would be thrown off by a lens.”

“Did I kill my son, M Johnson?”

“No, ma’am, you certainly did not. You gave him life and that life was taken. They used the hive but he would have lived if they had let him alone.”

Folio had never seen a real person laugh and cry at the same time. He’d seen it in the movies, but never in life.

“I will pay you a million general credits for the arrest of the murderer,” she said then.

“Ma’am, I’ve given you all I can.”

“You won’t help me have revenge?”

“Your son is dead, lady. He was killed by a big plan. A major design. If you try and get at it they won’t hesitate to blank you too.”

Corridor 23–97 triple-G S I was paved in crumbling plaster that had once been painted coral pink. At the far end of the Common Ground hallway was head locker 512–419. Folio had to climb a forty-foot ladder to reach the octangular slip where Charles Spellman slept.

When Johnson popped the lid he saw Spellman and his guest. Her hands were at either side of his head, holding down the rope across his throat. They were both naked. She was riding his erection while he came and came near to death. Tana looked up, the grin of a satisfied orgasm on her lips. Folio hit her with his fist. When she fell the boy started coughing and choking. He was spitting blood and trying to pull away from the weight of his assassin.

“Stop it, kid!” Folio yelled. “You’re okay!”

But Charles Spellman kept flailing and kicking until he finally pressed himself out of the sleep slip, knocking Folio to the side of the ladder. The young Itsie’s body crashed forty feet below. Folio swung back on the ladder and looked in at the girl. She wasn’t unconscious but neither was she aware. The detective descended the ladder, leaving her to moan in her victim’s bed.

At midnight he approached the Infochurch tabernacle on Middle Bowery. The Blue Abbot allowed him entrance when he mentioned a certain code given him by the splendid Doctor Kismet. He entered a private booth and knelt before the giant monitor, which instantly switched on.

A tall man, even taller than Folio, with one shining silver eye and one normal gray orb, appeared on the screen.

“Hello, Folio.”

“Ivan,” the last detective said.

“I’m surprised it took you so long to find me. You must be slipping.”

“I should have guessed when you gave Tana and her step-father my protocols.”

“I didn’t give your access code away, Folio,” the doctor said in a friendly voice. “I merely let them piggyback on a transmission from Home to you.”

“Why?”

“Such a large question.”

“I know most of the big stuff. You and the other corps had a thing working with the IS. You had a communications system that the Seekers stumbled onto without knowing it. IBC, Red Raven, MacroCode, and Randac. You killed the kids because somewhere in the trillion trillion trillion bits of data they downloaded for their afternoon talks there might have been some clue to your secret.”

“Congratulations,” Kismet said with a paternal smile.

“Why me?”

“Charles Spellman told Azuma Sherman on our own frequency that he was going to get in touch with you. When your name shows up on our system I am always contacted. I love you, Folio.”

“So you sent the assassin after me?”

“Only to check you out, to find out where your client might have been. She fell for you, you know. Another unit from the Blue Zone had already engaged the sixer. She fought him to save your life.”

“If you didn’t give her my protocols how did she follow me?”

“In your right-hand front pocket.”

Folio reached into his pants and came out with a tiny scrap of paper that had Tana Lynn’s number on it.

“Micro-mitter?”

“No.”

“Radioactive?”

“Nothing. Just what it appears to be, a simple piece of paper torn from a discarded instruction sheet.”

“So? How do you track that?”

Real pleasure came into the madman’s face. “We’ve made an amazing discovery, Folio. The most important discovery in the history of the world. Every atom, every electron, proton, and maybe all subatomic particles — they are all, each and every one of them, unique.”

A small subsystem in Folio’s eye began transcribing the doctor’s words.

“Unique? You mean you can tell one atom of oxygen from another one?”

“By submyrral variance mathematics we could give every electron on this planet a name.”

“She put this paper in my pocket...”

“... and we tracked it.”

“Usin’ submyyral whatever?”

Kismet grinned broadly. Folio knew how rare this was and he was afraid.

“What’s all this got to do with the kids?”

“Nothing, really. It’s just that they mistakenly downloaded a series of files in a secret intercorporate database.”

“What files?”

“My Dominar and certain investigative branches of Randac, Red Raven, and IBC had run across a gene-testing project that the IS has been conducting in preparation for their so-called race war. We had entered into negotiations with the Aryan branch of the organization to prepare, financially, for any situations that might arise.”

“Prepare what?”

“For whatever, my friend. Of course, these negotiations needed to be private. And even though we knew these children would be unlikely to break our codes, we had to take steps.”

“So you killed ten human beings just on the off chance that they might read a file?”

“Ten lives,” Kismet said on a sigh. “If the IS gets their way, billions will die. Billions.”

“So in order to stop them you had to kill the kids?”

“First we need to understand the viability of a genetically run race war. Then we’ll consider actions, if indeed there are actions to be taken.”

“Race war? Genes? Man, are you sick?”

“Hardly, Officer Johnson. Hardly.” Kismet’s long face became downcast. “I’m sorry about the girl.”

“Tana?”

“She had to die, you know. By the time I realized that you and she had something the poison was already in her. Her and that adopted stepfather of hers, the one who transmitted the Azuma killing to your eye.”

Folio resisted the urge to dive into the screen.

“You know I can’t let this thing lie, Ivan.”

“I know.”

“You killed that woman. I owed her something. She was a killer but she saved my life. And I’ll have to find these Itsies before they do something crazy.”

“It will be a glorious time, won’t it, old friend?”

“Why did you connect with me, Ivan?” Folio asked.

“It was fate, Folio. Kismet. Your name came up and I realized that this race war will be waged against you, your people. I included you to give you a chance to fight against the Aryan branch of the ISD. I’m giving you a chance to save your people.”

“They’re your people too, man,” Folio sputtered. “Black people are your largest membership on three continents.”

“One day everyone will be my devotee. You, Folio, you are one of my apostles. It is your job to save these people. It is my wish.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Am I?”

Folio put his foot through the screen, then stormed out of the tabernacle and into the night.