The escher man, p.13
The Escher Man, page 13
“Right.” I said, non-committal. “And you can’t find him.”
“No.”
“Why don’t you think I’m in on it?”
“What?”
“What you think is going on but you’re too scared to say, because all the hyper-educated fear the word, is conspiracy. Something isn’t quite right with this entire town, and you reckon, somehow, it’s all related to your missing friend. Now that sounds to me like a conspiracy.” I took a drag on my smoke. “The problem with conspiracies, Professor, is that everyone is in on it. Especially the bloke who’s working security for the biggest place in town. So tell me, why don’t you think I’m in on it?”
He fixed his eyes on mine. “Because you’re not, are you?”
I shrugged. “I’m expensive.”
“I wouldn’t want you to come cheap.”
I ran a hand through my thinning hairline. “Stay in the hotel. I’ll have a look around. I reckon your friend will turn up any day now, at the end of some bender that got out of hand. But I’m still going to charge you full price until he does.”
The professor held up his drink. “It’s a deal, then.”
I clinked his glass and drank up.
28
I was eating a bowl of pho at The Stranger on Main Street when a bomb blew out the front windows. It was just me, the waitress, and an unfortunate female Scandinavian retiree hunched over a flexiscreen. The Stranger also happened to be the place Henry Yun had been the night before, according to his Ego feed. The Professor had sent me images of Henry dancing in a circle with his girlfriend and a bunch of Chinese tourists. He appeared to be having a whale of a time.
When I showed the waitress a picture of Henry she said she couldn’t remember seeing him. He was distinctive enough, a thin guy with a large head and an infectious smile. When I asked her if she’d been here the night before she couldn’t remember that, either.
So I was at the bar finishing my pho when the blast hit: a bright light, percussive shockwave, and then darkness.
When I came to, my medical system was flashing on-retina:
Mild Concussion.
Lacerations to the back and right shoulder.
Shrapnel above right hip.
Pain relief has been applied, clottocyte response has staunched bleeding.
I was on the other side of the bar. Whether from the force of the blast or quick reflexes I wasn’t sure. The waitress was lying next to me, half her face bloody. She was breathing. It took me a moment to realise I couldn’t hear anything other than a long, persistent ringing in my ears.
I touched a finger to my implant. “I can’t hear anything.”
“I’m not detecting any problems with your ear drums, Mister Pierce.”
I wiped the dust from my face. Combat programs weren’t perfect, but if it couldn’t detect a problem, then the damage probably wasn’t serious. I pulled my pistol and looked over the top. The front wall of the bar had been shattered, the large windows gone, save a couple of recalcitrant shards hanging from bent frames. The tables lining the front splintered, and the Scandinavian, who’d been at one of the window seats, had been reduced to little more than a red smear across the floor, ending in an unidentifiable side of meat near the counter. Her flexiscreen was lying a few feet away, still functioning. She’d been looking at her Ego feed.
It took a moment for my eyes to see through the bright white heat of the sun to the street outside. There was a crater three metres across in the main road and enough spare parts littered around to suggest a car bomb. Two more vehicles nearby were burning wrecks. I couldn’t see anybody, save the blackened husks in the cars.
I made my way from behind the counter, gun steady, ringing in my ears constant. I slipped in behind a brick pile where the front wall used to be, and peered up and down the street. There weren’t many vehicles and the ones that were there had stopped. Thirty metres away a woman stared at her bloodied arms with mouth open, her dress torn to strips. If she was wailing I couldn’t hear her.
I saw no profit in venturing out further.
Instead I settled back among the bricks and glass and twisted steel, and lit a cigarette. The ringing in my ears abated. Smoke and the raw heat of the day drifted in through the front window. A line of sweat ran down my cheek as I propped the cigarette in my mouth and checked the magazine of my pistol. It was peaceful there, in the rubble. No cars or voices. Nothing, save an alarm in the distance and, closer, the crackle of flames. I put my gun down and felt around the small of my back for the shrapnel. With a grunt I removed a three-inch splinter of metal. I got an on-retina message saying the damage wasn’t too bad, but, hey – have a lie down and don’t do any heavy lifting. I flicked the splinter away and finished my cigarette.
After a time there were sirens, then sometime after that the shouts of angry men. I emerged from the rubble and walked in the direction of the noise. Past the blackened crater and the smouldering cars, the fractured façades of the cafés and bars, past a shredded corpse on the sidewalk.
The air smelled of smoke and, strangely, almonds.
Military jeeps and an armoured personal carrier were parked fifty metres down the street; others were coming from the other direction to seal the road. A score of white-helmeted Chinese military police were swarming around the vehicles, yelling and waving guns in the air. The white-with-green-striped military cars looked familiar; I turned back towards the crater. The two blackened vehicles near the epicentre of the explosion were the same model.
It was the first time I’d seen MPs either swarming or agitated. Normally there were four of them, and they were sitting, top two buttons undone and helmets placed nearby. Watching the main street with a drink in hand, or inside the casino watching a Sic Bo table at close range. Jhun had said they were a special company formed specifically for Xuan Tang, and left it at that.
The local Vietnamese police were at the site as well. Thinner, uniforms rumpled, six or seven gathered underneath the shade of a storefront across the street, marking the commotion with lidded eyes. They wore green, red-banded caps, carried unloaded revolvers and white batons, smoked an endless supply of cheap cigarettes, and stayed away from everyone else’s business. Their presence was much like mine: curious observer.
As I neared, I saw what the MPs were yelling about. In their midst were three Vietnamese, two men and one woman, dressed liked they worked in a nearby café. The MPs were yelling “who did this” and “you did this” and “you fucking dogs”. The three staff were too busy taking kicks from hardened boots to address the accusations.
A black car with small fluttering flags on the front corners pulled up, the yelling stopped. It was the ride of the military police chief, a taciturn woman who went by the name of Broken-Tooth Koi. Koi had unblemished skin, small rounded lips, and always wore white gloves. Koi was young and beautiful, and the people that knew her would never think of her as either young or beautiful.
She eased herself from the back of the car and walked over to the commotion, gaze as flat and smooth as an ice rink, and shot one of the Vietnamese detainees in the head. I stopped ten metres away, shocked. Even the MPs managed a little surprise, especially the two with the spray of blood and brain matter on their uniforms.
Broken-Tooth Koi pointed the pistol at the next Vietnamese, the woman. The MPs near her let her arms go and backed away. “[Tell me who did this. You have five seconds,]” Koi said, calm, matter-of-fact.
I believed her.
“[Five.]”
I swallowed my disgust and made to move on past, up towards the Golden Dragon Casino at the top of the hill. Find an air-conditioned space not liable to get filled with shrapnel.
“[Four.]”
The thin Vietnamese woman looked at the barrel pointed at her face, outwardly calm. She didn’t seem to be considering the demand; she simply seemed to be waiting. I took another step and something jabbed at me from the corner of my thoughts.
“[Three.]”
I took another step and the world was silent, waiting for the trigger to be pulled. The phantom there in the corner of my mind, it expanded—
“[Two.]”
—as did the pain. The prick of conscience, foreign to my own.
“Stop!”
I was on the footpath, no more than two metres from Koi and the Vietnamese woman. The gun wavered in Koi’s hand as she turned to look at me. Her men turned as well.
“You’re Chinese,” I said. “We don’t behave like this.”
Koi smiled, surprised, the blue-metal caps on the top row of her teeth glinting in the sun. I found myself tired and not a little irritated at having my wife’s memories hijack my actions. At the start I liked it. I liked the flashes of memory that involved my daughters, vignettes of them as babies or toddlers. I liked that I had memories of myself that extended beyond breaking someone’s legs with an axe-handle or blowing up a rival gang leader with a booby-trapped cigarette lighter.
But I didn’t much like moments like this. When Jian’s ideals ran up against the grim reality of a world where the rain fell on the just and unjust alike.
The military police were all around; I felt their dark intent pressing in on me. I took a step away so my back was near the shuttered door of a shopfront. Jian’s thoughts, her memories, the primal matter of human identity, were retreating now as my adrenaline rose.
Koi’s eyes unfocussed for a few moments before tracking back on me. “[Three Scars Pierce. You’re with the casino.]” Her eyes ranged over me. “[I see a lot more than three scars. I also see a third-in-command with far less sense than he should.]”
The Vietnamese service staff kept their eyes down.
I cleared my throat. “Executing people on Main Street doesn’t seem too smart to me, either. This is a holiday resort, not some deserted paddy field where you people can do as you wish.”
The men around had hands on weapons, shoulders tense, waiting on the signal from Koi.
Koi lowered her gun to her side. She took three steps, calm and measured, and stood face to face with me. Her dead gaze now curious as she looked up into my eyes. But that only lasted a few moments. “[Yes. Happy Jhun was right not to tell you. A basic model thug.]”
She turned her back on me, raising her pistol again as she stepped towards the Vietnamese woman, and shot her in the head. Those were the woman’s last moments: standing on the baking asphalt, treated as an outcast in her own country, hands clasped together in front of a white smock she wore as she served officers of an occupying army who either saw her as someone they could fuck, or not at all. Her head kicked back and she dropped to the baking hot pavement, cheap plastic shoes shining under the white sun.
Broken-Tooth Koi looked back at me, teeth glittering as she smiled.
Yeah, that’ll do it.
One of the MPs had let himself stand too close to me as his eyes drifted to Koi. Two very stupid mistakes. I grabbed him by the shirt collar and groin, heaved him above my head, and threw him into the thickest clot of white helmets. The next guy didn’t have time to pull his pistol out before I shattered his jaw. As I pulled my fist back to punch the next man, I noticed the brass knuckles gleaming with blood. I didn’t recall slipping them on.
I waded towards Koi swinging, breaking arms and heads.
Koi’s expression didn’t change as she watched me fight my way towards her. If anything, her smile widened. My vision blurred with rage and sweat and I heard myself yelling; I could see only one thing: blue-capped teeth, shining in the noonday sun.
Two white-helmets managed to get close and hit me with their force rods, discharging a full load of the dancing blue electric charge into my ribcage. It stopped my forward momentum and I staggered, teeth gritted, but didn’t fall. My not-falling shocked them. I knocked one over with a left hook, the other backed away.
I gasped for breath, heart ready to burst, sides throbbing.
There were two rings around me. One of fallen military police, a second of them standing two metres back, force rods crackling. That no-one else had tried to draw a gun and shoot me suggested that Koi had given them a command, through their implants, to take me alive.
She stood at the edge of the ring of men, casting her eyes over the carnage. At least eight of her police were unconscious or clutching at broken limbs. A dislodged white helmet sat at her feet, three drops of crimson slowly making their way down the dome.
Broken-Tooth Koi held something metallic in her hand pointed at me. It looked like a grey box with a wide, circular opening at the front.
“[Now I see why Jhun likes you so much,]” she said, and shot me.
29
We were silent for a few moments, looking out through the windows over the city. I pulled a cigarette from the pack, lit it, savoured the sting of the smoke on my lungs. I shifted in my seat, a soft white cushion in a moulded burnished-bronze frame, running my fingers over the armrest. Two Cs, little one inside the big one, were engraved on the arm.
I exhaled a cloud of smoke and said: “Jian, did I…”
“Did you?”
“Did I ever hurt you – was I violent?”
She shook her head, blue mohawk glinting in the light, sadness on her face. “No. You never had the will to do what was necessary.”
I breathed out a long breath. “So it was all a lie – me cheating on Jian, me hurting her and the kids. All just a fucking lie.”
She looked down at me with incurious eyes. “Life isn’t so simple, Endgame.”
* * *
Your name is Endel Ebbinghaus. You are travelling under the pseudonym Three Scars Pierce.
It’s Sunday, 2 October, 2101. 0726 hours.
You’re in Xuan Tang Resort, North Vietnam. You work casino security for a man called Happy Jhun. This is your eleventh day on the job.
You have been hired by a man called Professor Samuel Kam Ching to find his friend, Henry Yun. Like you, the professor thinks something isn’t right about this town. Sometimes it feels like everyone else knows the secret, except you.
* * *
I groaned and rolled onto my side. I read the message twice, trying to get my head around it, past the dregs of some dream circling the drain of my subconscious. Next to the names of the two professors were their pictures. Professor Ching looked familiar.
A small icon of a lock flashed on-retina as well. There was something encrypted, in my exo-memory. I had a feeling I didn’t want to read what was in there right then, and reached for my cigarettes on the side table. I found only air. After a few seconds I realised I wasn’t lying on a soft mattress in a luxury hotel, but on a hard plank of wood, and my finely appointed room was a grey polycrete cell, water dripping from the ceiling. The space smelled of wet dog and toilet.
“[Sleep well?]”
I jolted upright on my bed plank. When the room stopped spinning, I managed to focus on the person sitting on another plank in the opposite wall, no more than two metres away. He was a thin Vietnamese man, one foot up on the wood, back against the wall, arm resting on his knee. Young, hollow-cheeked, stained green singlet, intelligent eyes under unusually large eyebrows.
There were bars to my right, windowless wall with a rusted steel toilet to my left.
“Got a cigarette?” I grunted.
He smiled with one corner of his mouth. “[I was about to ask you the same thing,]” he said, in Vietnamese.
I leaned back against the wall, wincing as I did so. My hands and feet had little feeling in them, save for some distant tingling at the extremities. The muscles I could feel ached like buggery.
“Where am I?”
“[I’ll give you one guess.]” His hand – the one resting on his knee – moved a little each time he spoke. Like he was conducting his half of the conversation.
I winced again as I tried shifting to a comfortable position. “This doesn’t feel like a hangover.”
He gave me the one-corner smile again. “[Not drunk, my friend. Broken-Tooth Koi shot you with a nerve siren after you beat up a dozen of her men. The whole block is talking about it. They’d all shake your hand, if they could.]”
That explained the pain. Nerve sirens were normally wall-mounted, static defence systems. They were expensive and relatively rare, an area-of-effect weapon not known for its accuracy. The memory returned of the military police near me screaming as Broken-Tooth pulled the trigger, blood gushing from their noses. They collapsed as I screamed, every nerve on fire, eyes blurred with tears. I fell to one knee and tried to pull my pistol from its holster. My fingers spasmed and I dropped it. Then I vomited.
The last thing I recalled was looking up and seeing her teeth, shining in the sun.
“It stinks in here,” I said.
“[You pissed yourself.]” He shrugged. “[Don’t worry about it. People have done a lot worse in this cell.]”
I leaned forwards and sniffed. I was pretty ripe. “Fucking nerve sirens.” I flexed my fists, trying to get the feeling back in them. “What’s your name?”
“Kien. [I know yours.]”
“That so?”
“[Yes.]”
“So what you in for, Kien?”
“[Being Vietnamese in a time of war.]”
“Sounds serious.”
“[Yes. Quite serious.]”
“Many of you down here?”
“[Yes. They rounded us up last night after the attack.]”
The memory of the burning cars drifted into my forebrain, I nodded. “I saw it. Your people hit their mark: at least two cars, maybe eight military police.”
If Kien had any reaction to that news, he didn’t show it. He just flicked his hand as he said: “[Who says they are my people?]”
I said nothing, and went back to making and unmaking fists.
“[Why’d you help?]” he asked, after a minute.
I looked up from my hands. “Help what?”
His eyes were fixed on mine. “[The three Vietnamese they captured.]”
I paused, the incident seeping back to me. “Blame my wife.”
