city blues 02 - angel city blues (34 page)

“I understand,” the voice says. “And the other reason? The one you don’t care for?”

 I light the cigarette and take a drag. The second Marlboro is a smooth as the first one.

I exhale the smoke slowly. “Because my feelings were hurt. And because I didn’t like the fact that she was trying to control the direction of my investigation.”

“Ms. Forsyth was, in a sense, your employer,” the voice says. “She was paying you—quite handsomely I believe—to carry out her wishes. Shouldn’t that have given her a certain entitlement to influence your actions?”

I take another hit off the Marlboro. “Maybe,” I say.

I sigh again. “Okay… Yes. I guess I didn’t like the loss of control. I don’t work by committee.”

The voice’s next question comes out of left field. “How is Akimura Jiro connected to your investigation?”

The name doesn’t sound at all familiar. “Who?”

“Akimura Jiro. In English, you would put the surname at the end. Jiro Akimura.”

The name still doesn’t ring a bell. I shake my head. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

The voice raps out two quick bursts of Japanese. “Machine wa kare ga shinjitsu o itte iru koto o kakunin shite imasu. Kono chiisai tenno no koto wa nanimo shitte imasen.”

I’m about to ask him to repeat it in English, when I realize that he isn’t talking to me. He has accidentally let part of his conversation in the real world bleed over into the pseudo-world of the SCAPE construct.

It’s nearly a minute before the voice speaks to me again. His tone is confused rather than angry. “This is the question we have brought you here to ask; your connection to Akimura Jiro. But the Magic Mirror confirms that your ignorance is genuine. You have truly never heard of this man…”

“Not that I can remember.”

There’s another prolonged silence. I assume that a conference is taking place back in reality.

After several minutes, a window of video opens in midair about a meter in front of my face. Not a vid screen, but like a rectangle cut from the very fabric of the evening gloom.

I try to move toward it, change my angle of view to catch sight of the edges, because I’m somehow convinced that the rectangle exists in only two dimensions. Width, and height, with no depth whatsoever.

My theory remains unproven, as the window shifts in perfect synchronization with my movements. No matter how I move or where I turn my head, it remains directly in front of my face, about a meter from my nose.

“I’m going to show you an image,” the voice says.

The picture of a man appears in the rectangle, like an old flat photo pasted against the surface of the twilight.

Unlike the earlier name, the face is familiar. I remember the refined Asian features from my encounter in the tram terminal. This is the aristocratic man I saw in the company of Arm-twister.

“Ah,” the voice says. “We see from your recognition index that you are familiar with Jiro-san’s face, even if you don’t know his name.”

“I’ve seen him,” I admit. “But I’ve never met the man, and I have no idea who he is.”

“There was a minor equivocation index on your last phrase,” the voice says. “Are you attempting to be clever again, Mr. Stalin?”

“No,” I say quickly. “I really don’t know who this man is, but…”

“But what?”

“I saw him in the company of a man that I do know something about. A thug. Muscle-boy type. So maybe your Jiro Akimura runs around with the same bunch of lowlifes I’ve been playing tag with.”

“Give me a name, please. For the man you saw with Jiro-san.”

“I don’t know his real name,” I say. “I call him ‘Arm-twister,’ because that’s what he was doing when we met. Trying to twist my arm out of the socket.”

I search my memory. “I think he’s traveling under a fake name. Soro, or Sori, or something like that.”

“Could it be Kai Sora?”

“That sounds right.”

The image in the video window is replaced by the face of Arm-twister. “Is this the man?”

I nod. “That’s him. Your man Jiro was tagging along with this guy.”

 “I’m quite certain that it was the other way around,” the voice says. “Jiro-san does not—as you say—’tag along.’ He leads. Others follow.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that. As I told you, I don’t know the man.”

The video window vanishes like a soap bubble.

“This is most puzzling,” the voice says. “I must ask you to make yourself comfortable, Mr. Stalin. I need to confer with my associates. It seems likely that you will be here for a while.”

“Wait!” I say. “Just a second…”

But I’m talking to myself. The voice is gone.

I’m alone on the fake beach, with a fake moon, a fake ocean, and a pack of fake cigarettes.

CHAPTER 28

It’s impossible to measure the passage of time. I have no watch, no phone, and no clues by which to judge elapsed duration. I try counting seconds in my head, but the monotony of the exercise begins to lull my brain into a stupor.

After three more cigarettes, I pick a random direction and walk along the beach for what must be at least a couple of hours. The waves continue their ceaseless incursions against the sand, always reaching roughly the same height on the shore. The tide is neither coming in, nor going out, and the moon never moves from its appointed position in the sky.

There will be no sunrise. No tomorrow. No change in the conditions of my canned environment.

No matter how far I walk, the beach never ends. When I look over my shoulder, I can see the double-line of my footprints trailing off into the darkness. Otherwise, there’s no sign that I’m moving at all.

I’ve been hoping to reach the geographic limit of the simulation, but there doesn’t seem to be one. Possibly the terrain is created by some pattern-driven code loop that will keep generating new shoreline for as long as I care to keep walking. If that’s the case, I can trudge along for weeks. Months. Years.

Which makes this little digital paradise into a highly effective prison. My captors can hold me here indefinitely. I can’t tunnel under a wall, climb over a fence, or smuggle myself out in the laundry cart. I can’t even bribe a guard.

Then again, there might be limits after all. My real body is out there somewhere. Without food and water, it will eventually begin to die. Unless they plan to kill me, they’ll have to let me out before long, even if only to feed me.

But I quickly recognize this as wishful thinking. Anyone with even rudimentary medical training could hook my body up for intravenous feeding and hydration. Hell, doctors knew how to keep coma victims alive for decades, even back in the twentieth-century. If my captors want me here, it won’t take much effort to keep my body going.

So I really am stuck here until they decide to let me out. That might happen ten seconds from now, or fifty years from now, when my withered body finally decides that it’s had enough.

I turn around and start the other way, following my own footprints back down the beach.

I’m half expecting the trail to run out quickly, to discover that the SCAPE construct hasn’t bothered to keep track of details as trivial as hours-old footprints. But the trail continues into the distance. The environment hasn’t forgotten them, or reabsorbed them into its memory matrix to free up processing resources.

Three Marlboros later, I come to the end of my own trail. The scuff marks of my earlier sit down are still visible, along with the two cigarette butts I left in the sand.

I’m back to where I started, and I’m still nowhere.

I’ve been through nearly a half pack of cigarettes, which is close to what I usually go through in a day.

Has it actually been that long? It must have been. But in all those however many hours, I haven’t felt the first pang of hunger, or a single twinge of thirst. For that matter, I haven’t felt any signs of nicotine cravings.

I’m not blazing through the Marlboros because of my dependency. I’m smoking because that’s what I do. The habit isn’t just biochemical. Cigarettes have long-since become ingrained in my persona. They’re part of my interface with the universe.

So, by my Marlboro clock, I’ve spent roughly a day in this non-place.

The voice hasn’t returned, and he’s had plenty of time to powwow with his buddies. I have a sudden certainty that he’s not coming back. That he and his unknown partners have decided that this is the perfect place to keep me safely out of their collective hair.

David Stalin in a bottle. Detective under glass. Not going anywhere. Ever.

I think back to my discussions with Tommy Mailo, when he had first introduced me to the concept of SCAPE technology. He hadn’t mentioned anything like this. We had talked only about recordings of sensory experiences. Nothing about software-generated sensory environments. Nothing about the possibility of being trapped in self-contained SCAPE constructs.

I sit back down in the sand, settling into my old spot, and thumping another Marlboro out of the pack. My supply is dwindling. Maybe when the last one is gone, the pack will magically refill itself. Or maybe the SCAPE software will automatically spawn a convenience store just down the beach, where I’ll be able to buy more cigarettes. Or maybe I’ll just be out of fucking cigarettes, and out of fucking luck.

If that happens, I’ll have to take drastic measures.

The idea makes me smile.

I fritter away a couple of minutes conjuring up imaginary scenarios in which I meditate about the nature of sensory perception until my thoughts become somehow attuned to the SCAPE software. The fantasy is appealing—my mind fusing with the algorithms, intertwining seamlessly with the binary code stream, to become the god of this moonlit world of endless beach.

That sounds much better. It’s a lot more entertaining to imagine myself as a godlike digital entity, than as a poor hapless bastard who isn’t going anywhere.