Finn's Golem (13 page)

“Listen-
,
” I said
.

Just then the tinny speaker hissed with the crackle of the top of the hour NewsNets breaking through. There was a general murmur of discontent at the terrible sound. It was worse than grating, and far too loud. The skinny kid behind the counter turned on the video feed, which allowed him to switch the audio-only off. An off-tinted display screen flickered to life and the sound from its speaker was infinitely better. I was about to continue speaking when
something caught my attention.

“What is it?” asked Claire.

“It
’
s not
P
olitics
,”
I said
.
“Something must have happened.”

“Police Services spokesmen have just concluded a news conference in which they discussed the matter of two seemingly unrelated homicides in Bountiful City yesterday.”

The morning newsreader was a statuesque blond who knew how to work the teleprompter as if each word had just occurred to her as she spoke it. She might have been the one person every soul in Bountiful felt they could trust. She
’
d probably end up running for office, unless she was computer generated. It was getting tough to tell.

“Authorities now have reason to suspect that the two men had a business relationship of some kind, after telephone records revealed a series of calls between them over the last few days.”

The plot thickens. Felco and Monarch? Didn
’
t make much sense, but the Shade had called me
,
too.

“Dead are Thaddeus Felco, a self-described entrepreneur with several petty convictions
,
who was found strangled on the city’s waterfront last night, and Drake Finn, a local private investigator, who was found in an alley near his offices with a severe plasma wound to the chest.”

From the corner of my eye, I could see Claire look at me, but I couldn
’
t turn away from the screen. The news continued. I
’
m sure there was an appeal for any assistance in this matter. Then
Politics
, then
Civic Events
and so on. I saw none of it. I heard none of it.

Drake Finn... dead...? But I...

I...

And then suddenly it all made sense.

The paper money, and lots of it. No profile, no credit transfer. No credit transfer, no ExStick. It wasn’t lost or stolen, I’
d never had one.

Carter’s goons had never fired a shot. Never patted me down in the restaurant. Never done much but nod a silent acknowledgment and wait for orders. When they were sure I had Claire secured at the hotel they’d taken off to fix Felco’s little red wagon. They even knew exactly what I would want for breakfast and how I liked my steak cooked. Cripes, how had I not seen this coming?

This is why we
’
d made it through the night... the cute little smirk from Carter
at breakfast. He thought my Drake Finn routine was all an act to deliver the girl to him.

The note on the desk –
Meet Mr. Monarch 3pm. Fountain. Bruce Square.
A lure to get Finn out of the office so it could be searched? Maybe.

He came back. A struggle. Three plasma bolts fired and one found home. Somewhere along the way there must have been a solid blunt force trauma to the left side of my cranium. I’d stayed on my feet long enough to finish the job, but no longer.

I’d woken up behind Drake Finn’s desk, read his name on the door and made an awful big assumption. Awful big
, and awful wrong. I still didn’
t remember a thing, but ther
e wasn’t any other explanation.

I must be... the Monarch.

Something in the revelation broke the spell, and I started as if I had been shocked. I looked at the empty seat across from me.

“Claire?” I asked no one in particular
.
“Claire?”

But she was gone.

There was only one place she could be going. 23910 Access Acre, Grid 4. The South Key Shipping Company. I knew it and she knew that I knew it. If she was trying to get the hell away from me, which seemed wise at first glance, she’d be trying to get there as fast as she could. Which meant that she was running, not walking
,
into the open arms of Cyrus the Locust.

It was raining again. Not hard, but hard enough to make it tough to find a cab that would stop
,
and impossible to find one that would take paper money. After my second attempt I couldn’t get one to stop at all, which meant they’d put the word out on the radio about some louse near Freeville with a pocket full of paper before
I
got frustrated and hopped a fare without asking first. Even that would have been no mean feat, since most Guild hacks would take your QuikSwipe before they moved a metre.

I turned and ran down the main drag into Freeville, known locally as the Corridor, looking left and right on the crowded sidewalk for what I needed. There was only one thing that was going to help Claire Marsland now, and they weren’t easy to find anymore. A hundred years ago they were everywhere. Even the piece of crap asking you for change for something to eat was sure to have two things in his pocket
–
cigarettes and a mobile telephone.

But times were different, I guess. My legs churned as I raced through the waterlogged streets as fast as I could. Transmission bandwidth cost plenty these days, and it was a price most people in Bountiful wouldn’t have been able to pay. Mostly because if you had a mobile phone, people had a tendency to do what I was about to do.

I spotted a man by a delivery truck with one in his hand. He was a big guy, but he wasn’t really expecting what happened next. I ran into him full force, as much as possible as if it
might have been an accident. When
we collided I brought my left elbow into him as hard as I could and took the wind right out of him. As he fell I pulled the phone from his grasp and ran on,
almost without breaking stride.

I picked up the pace for a block, but it didn’t seem like anyone was following. I struggled to keep my balance as I ran at full throttle and dialed the number for Police Emergency.

“Your name
,
please
,”
the
voice that answered ordered
.

“Oh, God, please, you’ve got to get down here!” I shouted into the phone.

“Your name
,
please
,
sir.”

“I’m in the Access Acre. Near 24000. You’ve got to get down here.”

“Your name
,
please
,
sir.”

“Synths. Maybe two dozen of them. They’ve all got guns.”

“...
How many Artificials, sir?”
I had said the magic word.

“They’re on the rooftops. Please... they’re everywhere... Oh God!” I shouted and hung up. I threw the mobile phone over my shoulder. It would be reported stolen within minutes, which meant it would deactivate and start emitting a tracer for the cops, if they could be bothered. I suspected they were about to have bigger fish to fry.

The last time there had been anything like a Synthetic uprising, it had been run by a factory supervisor named Johnny One-One. He hadn’t been built for it, but he was a hell of a speaker. Had quite a little following of his own. The press made him out to be Satan. He was the machine that was coming to eat your children as far as the NewsNets were concerned. He and a few followers had stormed a credit transfer hub and tried to force them to power up every QuikSwipe in the place to the maximum. Could have grabbed fifty, sixty thousand and all of it untraceable. They could have been robbing from the rich to give to the poor for all I kn
e
w, but the
c
ops operated under the assumption that they were going to buy more guns. I guess the two they had weren’t enough for a worldwide rebellion. Anyway, they’d thrown every cop in Bountiful at them, and every single one of them claimed to have been the one that brought Johnny One-One down. He’d certainly been shot enough times for that to be true.

That was about a year after Emancipation, but half of Bountiful waited with their breath held for it to happen again. If the cops thought there was a commando raid going on in the Access Acre, odds were you wouldn’t be able to move without bumping into a boy in blue armor. Suited me fine, but some corroboration was probably in order. I hoped I didn’t get the same operator.

The Asian girl I took the second phone from didn’t want to give it up, and I had to put her on her ass. I didn’t feel good about that, but what was she trying to do? What was the point in fighting a man twice your size for a piece of plastic? I turned into an alley and stopped. I whispered to try and sound as different as possible.

“Your name
,
please?”

“You have to help me. They’re all around me.”

“Your name
,
please, sir?”

“Please? There are Synths with guns all over the place. They’ve taken hostages.”

“...
What is your location
,
sir?”

“I’m in Access Acre. Near the-
,
” and I hung up.

I threw the phone away and ran into the heart of Freeville as fast as my legs would carry me. It was a common enough sight, but usually people were running the other way.

Freeville was beyond a doubt the creepiest zone in Bountiful. It was an ethnic neighborhood of sorts, but these days, with only one language and a homogenized culture, ethnic neighborhoods didn
’
t usually mean much beyond
should we get moo-shoo or burritos
, and half the time they tasted the same anyway. Synthtown was as ethnic as they come, I guess, but the average Synth still just wanted you to look him in the eye and treat him like a person. It was a little sad, really.
When you realize that the eight
foot tall man-thing with jackhammers for hands really just wants to be loved, it kind of just makes you want to kick him in the throat.

Freeville was different.

Sure
,
Section 23 seethed with hate, but that was something else. It was unfocused. The kind of hate that people who were born poor and would always be poor radiated out in every direction, including towards each other. In a way, everyone was safe because everyone was scared
–
i
t didn
’
t always work out that way. If you were weak, or careless, or just plain unlucky, the streets of Bountiful could eat any man alive. But there were rules, and as long as you abided by them, you had a chance.

Freeville was a whole other thing.

Who knows how these things get started. Why a neighborhood goes from being  Jewish to Italian to Ethiopian to God
-
knows
-
what over a hundred years or so. It just happens. Somehow the place that is now Freeville became home to a handful of men and women that had escaped the company-owned slave pits that were the off-world colonies. And then more came. And more. No one knew how they got there. No one really cared that much at the time. They say when the Regent
’
s Crown Mine went bankrupt, the company just shut off the oxygen and left. Less than five hundred workers made it back to Earth out of sixty thousand. It was probably five hundred more than the company expected, but people will always find a way. That one had been too much to cover up. The assets of the corporation had been seized and the board of directors were shot in public. Everybody felt good about themselves and forgot all about it. That was fifty years ago, and
only one case out of hundreds.

Most of the off-world colonies were deserted now. They say there were still transmissions from out there, but the Omniframe said it wasn
’
t true, that no one could have survived. Of course, the Omniframe also said that I didn
’
t exist, so it could go whistle.

The
workers that made it back didn’t have much to celebrate. They’
d screwed up their lives on Earth so badly that a stint off-world had seemed like a good idea. Then they
’
d been worked like dogs and treated worse and finally, somehow, hit
terra firma
again. But the cities weren
’
t exactly thrilled with the arrival of a sub-class several rungs below dirt-poor. Their DNA was mostly a mess, screwed up by faulty shielding, radiation and cosmic rays. Nobody wanted them. But in every city around the globe they found a place, usually on the edges near an industrial wasteland or
,
like in Bountiful
,
by a maze of warehouses and delivery depots with transports whirring overhead day and night. They found those unwanted places and called them home. They must have seemed like paradise. Freeville.

But now their children had children, and those children had never seen a Martian mining colony, or processed ore on the dark side of the moon
,
or had their skin burned black in some idiotic attempt to terraform Venus. They didn
’
t want to hear Grandma
’
s stories about how good they had it again. They were riddled with deformities to the point that there were open discussions in the Assembly about having them all sterilized. They had no future and no hope. It was not a place you went willingly or wisely. And thirty-six blocks of it remained between me and the Access Acre.

I could hear the police command Hovs race overhead. Two great dirigibles were converging over the Access Acre with spotlights blazing through the growing clouds. Everywhere there were sirens. I hoped the rain that was pelting down harder now would help to feed the confusion, help to keep Claire Marsland safe until I could reach her. I hoped the cops didn
’
t find any Synthetics in the Acre to beat to death on account of my lies and their own fear. And most of all I hoped that the Freetown boys that lined the streets wondering what all the excitement was about wouldn
’
t notice the tall outsider in the ratty coat and mangled fedora, running like his life depended on it. I hoped they would be too busy wondering why the Cops had suddenly deserted Freeville
en mass
to do anything about it.

Funny thing about hope. It almost always lets you down.