Timecaster (12 page)

“All your shit is in the laundry room.”

I walked out of the office. McGlade scooped up Penis and followed me.

“You want something to eat? I could order out. There’s a place up the street that delivers. They do the best bald eagle nachos. I know most people think bald eagles are vermin, like rats. But these things melt in your mouth.”

I found the laundry room. The clothes were on the drying cycle, with a few minutes left. My utility belt and gear were on top. I picked up my DT.

“Can you hack my Taser?” I asked. “Make it work again?”

“No. Wi-Fi is hackable because there are so many free hot spots. Tesla electricity is all chip-based, dependent on ID and account numbers. Unhackable.”

“Can I buy one of your Tasers?”

“Mine are DNA-specific. Only I can fire them.”

Just like mine and every other registered Taser out there. I couldn’t even use his bullets.

“How about the Magnum?”

“Sure. Do you have half a million credits? Because that’s what it’s worth.”

“You’re supposed to be this legendary black market dealer, McGlade. Don’t you have any weapons?”

“Really? Legendary?”

“Weapons, McGlade.”

“No, Talon. Weapons are so 2050. I deal in books, posters, art, real denim blue jeans, that kind of shit. Didn’t you hear we’ve given up violence as a species in favor of a green utopia?”

“I heard. But someone isn’t playing by those rules.”

McGlade folded his arms. “Yeah. You’re that someone. I saw the transmission, you and that old ugly chick. Remind me never to play Twister with you.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“The ID chip proved it was.”

I stared at McGlade. “ID chip?”

“Yeah. The transmission zoomed in with electromagnetic radiation.”

I picked up my DT and tuned in to CNN. They were playing the video of Aunt Zelda’s death. But not the early one; the one I assumed Teague made. They were playing mine, which showed the close-up of Alter-Talon’s ID chip.

Sata? Had he given his copy of the transmission to the police?

No. The channel cut to the wreckage of my beautiful Corvette, the newscaster saying they took my TEV out of the trunk and found the recorded footage. Teague came on next, talking to a reporter. His arm was in a sling, and he looked seriously pissed. I switched from closed captioning to sound.

“The woman is still unidentified, and I just spent the last two fucking hours chasing a fucking raccoon. But it doesn’t matter. I’m a timecaster. I’ll follow him like a bloodhound until his ass is mine.”

“Is that Teague?” McGlade said. “He looks seriously pissed. I thought you guys were buddies.”

I switched off the sound, then accessed uffsee.

“Franklin Debont, inventor of UFSE, bio,” I told the voice command.

Uffsee brought up the file on Debont. It was an extensive biography. I glossed over the early years, his fifteen search-engine patents, the global utilization of uffsee on the intranet, and got to his eventual retirement. No mention of his gender change, of becoming Aunt Zelda, or of living on Wacker Drive.

“Franklin Debont, living relatives.”

It came up with one. And it wasn’t Neil. It was Franklin’s nephew, a man named Rocket Corbitz.

“Rocket Corbitz bio.”

Rocket had a one-word intranet entry.

Disenfranchized.

“He’s a dissy, huh?” McGlade asked.

I didn’t answer, momentarily lost in thought. I still believed Teague had set me up, but I had no idea how. Hopefully Sata would be able to figure that out.

But why didn’t the intranet have any record of Debont’s sex change? Or of his nephew Neil? That was impossible.

Then again, Debont was the creator of the greatest search engine in the history of mankind. He could have easily altered the entry about himself. Maybe he was a private person, and wanted to live his new life out of the spotlight.

It still didn’t make sense why Neil didn’t know his aunt was really one of the richest men on the planet. And Neil had mentioned he went to Teague before coming to me. Were they in this together somehow?

I needed to talk to Teague, but I doubted I’d be able to get any quality one-on-one time with him. He was probably already tracing my steps, and as soon as he learned my whereabouts he’d call for backup. Neil might also be compromised, and Teague could very well be using him as bait.

I called Sata on my headphone, to see if he’d figured out anything about the TEV transmission. I got his voice mail.

That left only one lead to follow up on. Rocket Corbitz.

“You still have ties to the dissys?” I asked McGlade.

“You need a tracer?”

“Rocket Corbitz. He may know something.”

McGlade stroked his elephant’s trunk in a vaguely obscene manner. “My standard fee is a thousand credits a day, plus expenses. And if Teague is on your ass, it will lead him here, so expenses are going to include disappearing me until this shit all blows over.”

“My Vette was insured. Two hundred thousand credits.”

He bowed. “Harry McGlade, tracer extraordinaire, at your disposal.”

McGlade smiled. Penis farted. I rubbed my eyes, figuring with McGlade’s help I had maybe a 10 percent chance of clearing my name.

Penis farted again. I waved away the foul air.

“It’s all the beans he eats. This elephant is crazy for beans. I know I shouldn’t keep giving them to him, but after a while you get used to the smell. It’s actually kind of aromatic.” McGlade took a large sniff. “Like elephant fart incense.”

Make that a 5 percent chance.

TWENTY

The Mastermind is nervous.

It will work. The math is good. The tech is solid. He’s not worried about witnesses, because even if he is seen, no one will know who he is or what he’s doing.

So why the dry mouth and the sweaty palms?

Perhaps it is simply a symptom of incipient genocide.

But then, it isn’t really genocide. Not technically. Or, at least, not immediately.

He muses about the mouse. Talon is doing well. Better than expected. Still not close to figuring it out, but the clues are difficult.

Perhaps he’ll never figure it out. Perhaps he’s not good enough.

Perhaps he’ll die first.

The Mastermind hopes he’ll have a chance to meet with Talon. To explain himself.

He doesn’t care how history judges him. He can pick the history that suits him best.

But he wants respect from his adversary. Wants him to appreciate the breadth and scope of his genius, the depth of his determination, the brilliance of his plan.

If you play chess against yourself, you’ll always be the winner.

Where’s the fun in that?

He buys his ticket. Sits in his seat. Double-checks his settings; the world shrinks.

He envies Talon, in a way. The joy of discovery is such a pure pleasure. The unknown happens to everyone, but so few quest to discover it.

That fool Sata never understood that simple point. Debont whored it for wealth.

As he looks down over humanity, he recalls a poem by T. S. Eliot.

Do I dare disturb the universe?

Yes. I dare.

I dare in a big fucking way.

TWENTY-ONE

The fence was beaten to hell by weather, neglect, and mistreatment. Made of steel mesh, it stood about twenty feet high, and stretched off in either direction, cordoning off the street. Someone had stuck a large, plastic sheet on the fence, and graffiti announced:

DISSYTOWN
HOME OF THE
DISENFRANCHIZED
DISINTERESTED
DISILLUSIONED
DISMISSED
DISSERTED
DISTROYED

“Abandon all hope, youse who enter here,” McGlade said.

We’d taken McGlade’s biofuel bike, me riding bitch, and he’d chained it to the fence. Every major metropolitan area had a dissytown. These were the people who didn’t pay taxes, and were kicked out. The abolition of welfare was one of the reasons, though welfare was replaced with workfare programs that allowed those of lesser means and with disabilities to continue being taxpaying utopeons and upstanding members of society.

Bleeding hearts and human rights crusaders bemoaned the slum-like conditions in many dissytowns. They made frequent trips inside, trying to persuade folks to join regular society, trying to show the children born there that an alternative to poverty and crime existed. And crime did exist. In the absence of police, timecasting, and ID chips, crime not only existed, but it flourished in dissytown. But no taxes meant no votes, no representation, no acknowledgment, so the crimes didn’t actually exist in the eyes of the government.

My personal feelings were a bit right-wing, but years of experience hunting for runaways in Chicago’s dissytown had forged me into a cynic. These weren’t people whom society had given up on. These were people who had given up on society. If you want a nice place to live, be willing to work for it and follow the rules. If you don’t want to work, or follow rules, a place like this was where you ended up.

McGlade and I were dressed for the part. He lent me a ratty old T-shirt and some stained camouflage khakis. His disguise was a holey sweatshirt that reeked of body odor, and some jeans with rips from the crotch to the cuffs.

But then, that might have been McGlade’s normal ensemble.

“I don’t get it,” I said. We hadn’t even crossed the border yet and already the garbage smell had gotten to me. “Who would choose to live here?”

He shrugged. “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”

That was too much insight for McGlade. “Who said that?”

“Some dead singer. Janis somebody. Got a nude poster of her.”

We stood at the entrance. Not a door or a gate. Just a rusty, jagged hole in the fence. I heard rancid music coming from beyond it. Someone yelling. Someone crying.

“They should close all the dissytowns and force these people to get jobs,” I said, fingering some rust off the fence and rubbing it onto my chin.

McGlade spit a loogie into his hand and messed up one side of his wavy brown hair. “The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizens’ skin.”

“Who said that?”

“Some dead feminist. Gloria somebody. She had a nice rack. I have a poster of her in a Playboy Bunny outfit. Feminists are hot.”

And after imparting that nugget of wisdom, we strolled into dissytown.

It wasn’t exactly like stepping through the looking glass, but it was close. We left the clean, green, orderly world behind, and traded it for ugly chaos and anarchy. This used to be the south part of town, part residential, part business, now 100 percent awful.

There was a shocking lack of plants, and an even more shocking pileup of trash littering the streets. No recycling, no garbage pickup, so people left refuse everywhere.

The apartment buildings looked like they’d been bombed, not a single window intact. Storefronts had been converted into hovels. The sidewalks and streets were ripped up to shit, but no one had vehicles because there was no fuel.

There were a few people wandering about when we walked in. The stares were either suspicious or hostile. They wore dirty, ripped clothes. The bleeding hearts insisted water mains remain open, so stinky shirts and greasy hair were by choice. Other utilities—phone, electric, gas—were shut off, but like many bigger dissytowns, this one somehow provided electricity for itself. Probably a combination of solar and hydroelectric, as Tesla was beyond their technology and traditional power plants required fuel sources they didn’t have.

“Untuck your shirt,” McGlade said. “Your belt is like a badge, announcing you’re a cop.”

I complied. “Will we need duckets?”

“I brought some. I’ll add it to your bill.”

“What’s the exchange rate?”

“Whatever I decide.”

Because dissys had no ID chips or bank accounts, currency in towns like this was still paper-based. That meant a lot of predators, trolling for cash. Luckily, Tasers and firearms were either useless here or sold off decades ago, so the only weapons available were of the cutting and bludgeoning type. While this kept me on my toes, at least I would see it coming, unlike a projectile.

“Watch out for arrows,” McGlade said. “They make them out of femur bones.”

So much for no projectiles.

I took in my surroundings, which were both dangerous and depressing, and wondered about the lack of people. I saw a few figures disappear behind doorways, a few heads duck beneath broken windows. Who would want to live in fear like this? Who could think this was freedom?

A clearly out-of-whack dissy paraded in front of us, holding up a plastic sign that read, REPENT NOW.

“Repent?” McGlade said. “I never pented in the first place.”

The dissy sneered. “God is watching you.”

“Sounds like he needs a better hobby,” McGlade answered.

Finally, we had our first approach. Weaselly looking guy standing on the corner. White, twenties, clothing and face so dirty it looked like he had recently been mining coal. He came up with his palms raised—a dissy gesture that showed he wasn’t holding a weapon.

“Got food? Duckets? I’ll suck you off for two duckets.”

“Tempting as that sounds,” McGlade said, “we’re looking for information. Know a guy named Rocket Corbitz?”

His eyes went from McGlade to me to McGlade to me, like he was watching a hypertennis match. “I know a lot of people. Whatcha paying?”

“Whatcha know?”

“Roider. Biggest in town. Got the rage.”

“Know where he is?” McGlade asked.

“How much?”

“Ten duckets. Five when you tell us. Five when we get there and you point him out.”

“Y’all are fuct. I’m not bringing you to Rocket. He’ll rip off my arms and shove ’em up my ass.”

“Okay,” McGlade said. “Eleven duckets.”