city blues 02 - angel city blues (38 page)

I tightened the sash on the brown kimono. “I need some clothes,” I said. “And some cigarettes. All of my stuff disappeared when I got snatched.”

Vivien gave me a mock curtsey. “Of course, your majesty. Anything else?”

“Yes,” I said. “Access to a computer.”

“Take off the kimono,” Vivien said.

I rolled my eyes at her. “I can’t be dropping my clothes every time you get an itch.”

She made a face and stuck out her tongue. “I don’t
have
an itch. So drop the fucking kimono.”

I loosened the sash and let it drop. I seemed to be spending a lot of time naked lately.

Vivien raised her voice. “Shogun, do a full surface scan of Mr. Stalin, please. Convert all measurements to local clothing sizes.”

The AI’s voice rumbled out of hidden speakers. “Of course, Vivien-san.”

The surface of my body was suddenly covered by a grid of pale green lines. I didn’t even bother to look for the projector. Like everything else in this hotel, it would be perfectly concealed.

“Raise your arms, please,” Shogun said.

I did as asked.

After about two seconds, the gridlines snapped off. “Thank you, Stalin-san.”

I picked up the kimono and pulled it on.

“You’ve seen Mr. Stalin’s clothes,” Vivien said. “Let’s have four or five outfits of the same general cut and colors. Good quality, but nothing flashy.”

“Of course, Vivien-san,” the AI said.

I retied the sash. “Computer access?”

“The Shogun
is
a computer.”

“Good point,” I said. “What about cigarettes?”

“You’ll have to solve that problem yourself,” Vivien said. “Aren’t private detectives supposed to be resourceful?”

“They are in the books and vids,” I said. “In real life, I think most of us fall a little short of the mark.”

Vivien raised an eyebrow. “You’ll figure something out. Now, take off the kimono.”

I sighed. “I thought you didn’t have an itch.”

She loosened the sash of her own kimono, and let the silk garment slide to the floor. “I
didn’t
have an itch. But that was
then
. This is
now
.”

“No,” I said. “I have work to do.”

Vivien came into my arms. “You’re right about that,” she said. “You most certainly
do
.”

Sometime later, Vivien and I settled onto the couch/lounge thing with my stolen data pad. A few minutes of determined fiddling yielded exactly nothing. The pad powered on without a hitch, but the menu structure came up blank. Evidently it had been programmed to act as a local peripheral device, slaved to the corporate data feed. The screen would probably light up with all kinds of useful information the second I walked back into the company facilities. But outside of its programmed operating area, the thing was useless.

I changed tactics, and spent an hour having the hotel’s AI run net searches for me. He used his unseen holo projectors to cast visuals in the air at a comfortable viewing distance, and I discovered that his default samurai-of-doom voice could be toned down for lengthy discussions.

I was primarily interested in finding out about Akimura Nanodyne. The company was a closed corporation, with charter registration in something called the Confederated Extraplanetary Economic Enclave. I gathered this was some kind of financial entity formed by the collective orbital colonies. Not just an offshore tax haven, but an off-planet tax haven, free from the bureaucratic snarls, shifting government allegiances, and tiresome restrictions of international trade laws. The orbital equivalent of Zurich or the Caymans before the global banking crackdown. Safely beyond Earth-side regulatory and law enforcement agencies.

Stock ownership in Akimura Nanodyne was limited to members of the Akimura family and a small number of selected corporate officers. Company stock could not be sold, traded, or given to anyone who did not belong to that narrow circle.

Not a zaibatsu, then. A corporate oligarchy, small, prosperous, and—judging from the scarcity of publically-available information—almost pathologically secretive.

It was clear from Vivien’s comments that she already knew a lot of this. Her financial counselors had done considerable research before advising her to invest in some of Chiisai Teien’s commercial properties. They’d given her a similar assessment of Akimura Nanodyne. Agile, capable, and highly-insular.

The company’s founder, CEO, and majority shareholder was Akimura Hideaki. Fifty-eight years old and reputed to be both a technical genius of the first rank, and a recluse of nearly equal magnitude. The only available images of the man were from more than ten years earlier, prior to his descent into seclusion after the death of his oldest son, Ichiro, in a shuttle crash.

There was no shortage of images of Akimura’s second son, Jiro. There was also no shortage of net gossip about young Jiro, but every rumor seemed to be contradicted by another of opposite polarity. Jiro was a ne’er-do-well playboy, with poor impulse control and no sense of personal responsibility and family honor. Or he was a good and loyal son, working diligently and brilliantly to earn his position within the Akimura corpocratic family. He was an overindulged and decadent slime ball, running wild with the worst kinds of criminal lowlifes. Or he was a paragon of integrity, self-restraint, and social rectitude.

I had no idea how accurate any of these assertions might be. But if he was hanging out with the likes of Arm-twister, I wasn’t inclined to give Jiro the benefit of the doubt.

As a company, Akimura Nanodyne seemed to have almost no marketing footprint. No advertising campaigns, no pithy corporate catch phrases, and no slickly-persuasive info-vids. Apparently, they already had a solid client base, because they sure as hell didn’t seem to be trying to attract new customers.

Even the nature of their product line was hazy. Something to do with nano-scale fabrication under conditions of microgravity. From this, I assumed that some of the company’s facilities must be located near the axis of the colony’s torus, where the effects of centrifugal force would be close to zero.

I remembered LAPD’s structural analysis of the FANTASCAPE 389 chip found in Leanda Forsyth’s apartment. Supposedly, the chip had been manufactured in a microgravity environment.

I had no evidence that Akimura Nanodyne had fabricated the FANTASCAPE chip, beyond the fact that their vague technical prospectus hinted that they might have the capability. Given the possible link between Akimura Jiro and the Nine-fingers gang, I figured they would do as a suspect until I found something better. I was a long way from the proof stage anyway. I was still struggling to sketch in the basic outlines.

Twenty more minutes of searching with Shogun’s help failed to turn up anything that struck me as useful, so I told the AI that we were done for the moment.

Then I sat in silence and thought for a while, a process that could have been greatly aided by a couple of Marlboros.

Finally, I rolled my neck to get the kinks out, and stood up.

“I’m going to need your help,” I said.

Vivien’s ears perked up instantly. “Okay. What can I do?”

There was no good way to broach the subject, so I just jumped right in. “I need to become Japanese.”

Vivien smiled. “No problem. They’ve got a pill for that. Take one to become Japanese-American. Take two pills, and you’re full-on Nihonjin.”

“This isn’t a joke,” I said. “I need to become Japanese.”

Vivien gave me a sideways look. “If you’re not kidding, then you’re crazy.”

I shrugged. “I won’t deny the possibility. But let me tell you what I’ve got in mind, and you can decide for yourself...”

CHAPTER 33

We walked under the holo-sign and through the front entrance of the Face Replace boutique. The front room/sales area was clean to the point of near sterility. The design ethic was a paradoxical balance between the restrained elegance of a hover-car showroom and the plasticized commercial slickness of a fast food restaurant.

There were five or six other potential customers paging through the holographic sample catalogues, but most of them had that desultory manner that separates casual browsers from actual buyers.

Vivien elbowed me in the ribs and nodded toward a woman who was shopping for a breast upgrade. The woman in question had that over-optimized look that comes from addiction to cosmetic enhancement. Her upper chassis was already so exaggerated that she would probably need spinal reinforcement to go any larger.

“What do you think?” Vivien whispered. “Should I get some of those?”

“That depends,” I said. “Do you want to look like a human being, or a cartoon character?”

“Maybe just for a few days,” she said. “For fun.”

I shrugged. “If that’s your idea of fun, go right ahead.”

She elbowed me again. “Asshole.”

I caught the eye of a sales rep, and motioned him over.

He stopped a respectful distance away, smiled, and gave the middle-of-the-road bow that’s apparently appropriate when you are not certain of the other person’s social station.

He was still smiling when he straightened up. “Konichiwa.”

Vivien started speaking before I could open my mouth. “Konichiwa. Watashitachiha, atarashī kao o kōnyū shitai to omoimasu. Watashi no yūjin de hajimaru kudasai.”

I tried not to look surprised. I’d never thought to ask Vivien if she spoke Japanese. Come to think of it, I didn’t know very much about her at all.

The sales rep looked at me and shifted to English. “Do you have a particular face in mind, sir? If not, may I suggest something from our Justin Reinholt line? Handsome, but not too handsome. Very popular, but not too trendy.”

I pulled a trid out of my pocket and handed it over. It was a reproduction of the face from the security badge I had stolen. I wasn’t willing to show the actual badge, because I didn’t want anyone in this place to link me to Akimura Nanodyne. Their staff would be understandably suspicious if they knew that I was trying to make myself look like an Akimura employee. One phone call to the wrong person, and my neck would be in a noose.

The salesman examined the trid, regarding the nondescript Japanese face from several angles. “Interesting,” he said. “May one ask who this is?”

Once again, Vivien forged ahead. “Don’t you
know
? That’s Richie Kato, lead guitar for Hedgehog Rocket. Isn’t he just a
cream-dream
?” This last came out of her mouth in something close to a squeal.

That seemed to be my cue. “You
have
heard of Hedgehog Rocket, right? Slash-rock band out of Phoenix. Cutting-edge, and coming up fast. They crash a real hover-car on stage at the end of every performance, did you know that?”

The sales rep nodded sagely, as if a band as up-to-the-minute as Hedgehog Rocket couldn’t possibly have escaped his attention.

I swatted Vivien on the rump. “Sugar britches here is wetting her pants over Richie Kato. So I figure I’ll take him out for a spin,
before
he gets so famous that everybody is wearing his face. Know what I’m saying?”

The rep glanced at the trid again and then gave my face an extended visual appraisal. “We’ll need to do some work with bone structure, but nothing drastic. Basic morphology doesn’t look too far from the target. Some adjustments to melanin loading, to adjust the skin color. And then of course, the eyes.”

I nodded. “Epicanthic folds?”

“Certainly,” the man said. “But I was speaking of color. Your eyes are green. Mr. Kato’s appear to be brown. Unless you prefer to retain your natural eye color, and change only the face.”

“No, we should definitely do something with the eyes,” Vivien said. “Otherwise, you won’t look like the real Richie.”

I forced myself to smile. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of going under the knife at all. I was even more dubious about letting someone mess with my eyes. I hadn’t forgotten the SCAPE torture I’d been subjected to in Leanda’s apartment. My eyeballs flashing to steam under the laser, seared tissue erupting from my scorched eye sockets as I screamed and tried to wriggle away from the deadly beam. A cycle of unimaginable pain that repeated itself over, and over, and over…