“Winding down?” he asked, sipping from a glass.

  “Yes, and I can see that you are doing the same,” she said.

  “Long morning, baby, very nerve-wracking, but I managed to get into our synth-lover’s house,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah, I found out a number of things, especially about our man, Jordan. He’s a war hero, you know that? Fought in the War for Peace, and a number of smaller skirmishes after that. Found his chest with his uniform and guns. I think I got lucky tailing that dude. He was some sort of badass, got all sorts of medals for bravery. Had we come to guns … I wouldn’t be talking to you.”

  “A soldier, you say? Do you know where he was built?”

  “I dunno, Lurita, how would I know? Not like I can go check his tag.” He began to laugh as if it was the funniest thing ever, which annoyed her to the brink of disconnecting the call. “I’m sorry, sexy, I can see that you’re not laughing. Let me do some looking around, okay? Maybe there’s something in his rack to tell me—”

  “You have his rack?” she said.

  “Yep, got it, but using it is another thing altogether. I will need our old friend to crack it.”

  “Hiro!” she said, happy at the thought of working with the cypher again. “Speaking of soldiers, Dhata, did you know that most synth soldiers are built here, at AKR?”

  “What’s AKR?”

  “Akiyama Koch. It’s what they call themselves,” she said.

  “Interesting. So more than likely the explosion was either from a protestor or from one of their enemies. If it’s a national thing, I don’t want you anywhere near there, Lur. The government will be recording anything that happens, and you will get implicated just for being on site.”

  Lur got up out of the bath, grabbed a towel, and strolled out of the bathroom towards the window. She shut off the augment to make their call strictly audio and ignored his objections after he’d seen her in the nude. “I messed up, Dhata. They knew that I was false. Right now all I want to do is get away from here. It was a scary place. Like something you see in a movie, and the security guards there tried to question me to see who I really was.”

  She was about to say more when something made her pause. It was the soldier from the lobby sitting on a bench outside. There was something about the way he moved that reminded her of a synth, but the frightening part was that he was looking directly up at her room.

  Dhata was saying something to reassure her, but she was too preoccupied to hear. “Dhata,” she said, “I am going to send you the view from my ICL. Could you tell me what you think this man outside is doing?”

  She reached up and touched the node next to her ear, and closed her eyes to quickly launch her internal CPU. She selected the video sync and shared her view. When she opened her eyes to share her sight, the man was no longer seated. He was still looking up, but with his hand near his ear, and he too seemed to be doing something with his ICL.

  “Get out of there, fast,” Dhata said. “Those shades, he’s using them to track you and he’s being ordered to do something. Go, baby, go, he could be listening to our call.”

  Dhata hung up, and Lur pulled on her clothes, and was out the door as fast as she could move. Why did I come out here alone like an idiot? she wondered. Now instead, I am running for my life, after a long day of walking around a giant building. She promised herself that she would think things through from now on, since she never wanted to feel as stupid as she felt now.

  Since the man would be coming up from the bottom floor, she needed not go down there. She found the stairs and began climbing them as fast as she could. Where was she going? She had no clue, but she trusted her instincts and kept on climbing.

  When she gained the rooftop, she was exhausted, but she limped towards the edge to see if there were any lines left hanging. After the war, some buildings had leftover power lines that stretched out to poles that at one time linked the city’s grid. They were no longer active, since the synths—who rebuilt the country—connected everything wirelessly.

  Lur thought that if there was a line, she could use it to descend the building and make her escape. The sun was going down, and she felt like a superhero with her trench flapping aggressively in the wind. There were three lines that stretched off towards an electronic monolith, but what she couldn’t see was how to get down once she climbed across the line.

  They were eleven floors up, and below was all concrete, so she accepted the reality that this really was a dead end. She pulled out her pistol and slipped behind one of the air-conditioning units, watching the door to see if the man would emerge.

  She waited a long time but nothing happened, and she began to wonder if he was coming at her from the side of the building or in one of those flying cars. Her heart was racing, and it became increasingly hard to breathe. To add to her panic, there were now sirens and flashing lights coming from the street below.

  Lur slipped to the edge and cautiously peered over the railing. Below she saw no less than seven squad cars, and her pursuer was on his knees with his hands up. It was then that she realized that her phone was buzzing, and she touched her ear quickly to connect the call. It was Dhata, and she exhaled, an action that caused the strength in her legs to give out.

  “You okay, Lurita? Did the Johns grab him?”

  “Yes,” she said, “they’re taking him away. How did you know that they would be here?”

  “I called the police hotline and made up enough crap for them to get out there and take him into custody. It’s not safe in Atlanta, you need to get out. I bought you a train ticket and there’s a transport on the way. Make your way downstairs as soon as you can and come home, Lurita,” he said.

  “Wait, it’s not safe? What do you mean? Who was that man, Dhata?”

  “He’s a military-trained synth; I got that from your ICL. What I couldn’t tell though was whether he was an assassin or just a do-boy. Either way, he was after you, and I doubt that it was for a chat.”

  ‡Chapter 5‡

  Sub City Ramen

  They sat together on the tail of the disabled zeppelin that they were now calling home. It was a precarious position, but there was something alluring about intimacy beneath the stars with danger just inches away.

  Dhata leaned back on his elbows and stared off into the city. Lur, who had been gazing up at the stars, sat up next to him and hugged her knees the way she always did. They looked like children, innocent in their contemplation, hanging out in a place where they weren’t meant to be.

  “I’m trying to think of the last time I was this scared, Dhata, and I cannot remember,” she said.

  “You should have been scared. The threat is real, and that soldier was going to kill you. We took care of him though and he’s in jail, but if the government is backing Akiyama Koch, then the Johns will have to set him free in the morning. We got lucky. When I called Pete—my contact in the Atlanta precinct—he escalated the call’s importance and they got there just in time. Dude was packing a good amount of firepower. All to take you out.”

  “Do you think they know … who I am?” she said, and Dhata shook his head.

  “They probably figured you for press. An opportunistic reporter looking to expose them, so they detained you to see if they could get you to talk. When you called their bluff, they assumed you to be dangerous, and worse than that, they assumed that you had something on them.”

  “Maybe we should stop,” she said, staring out into the night as if she was afraid to look at him. “I am no coward, Dhata, but what I felt today … it made me feel like a tiny, insignificant insect biting the arm of a giant. Why are we doing this? There is no longer a client, and the FBI is now involved looking into Jordan.”

  Dhata thought of the best way to tell her that he intended to continue, but she had been shaken and he wanted to make her feel better.

  “You know, Lurita, there’s plenty of different reasons why men and women choose to do what we do. My personal choice? I want to make things better. I want to see Tampa Bay reverted to the way it was before my time. It’s why I do what I do out here, and I can’t just sit back and watch it go to hell.”

  “I’m not asking you to,” she said. “Just needed to hear your reason.”

  “You just need to lay low for a while, Lurita, snooping around on the grid. You know that’s where you’ve been the greatest help to me, not out there risking your skinny neck.”

  She glanced at him and cut her eyes, but he saw that she was fighting back a smile. “I got your skinny,” she said.

  “You’ll be alright,” Dhata said before leaning over and stealing a kiss.

  “I had no idea how bad the synths were treated in this country,” she said. “But now that I’ve seen it, I cannot just sit by, either, y’know?”

  Dhata smiled. “People tend to be the cruelest to the things that look most like them,” he said. “Jason used to say that and he was right. Plus, our laws make it easy to be cruel to the synths. You kill a human and you will get sent away to prison, for life. You harm one, and you could see fifteen years.” He shook his head. “Now, take out your angst on a synth, and you could get away free if you’re in the right neighborhood. Get arrested for it and a murder will get you one to five years. Assault a synth citizen without killing, you get a night in jail and you’re released. Considering those odds, it’s open season on the synths, and most Johns won’t bother to pursue a murder case if it’s not a human.”

  “How do we change that, Dhata? How do we make things fair for them?” she said.

  “We can’t,” he said. “Which is precisely why the Johns have always laughed at me. I’m a fool who’s fighting a losing war; you can even say that I’m obsessed. But I’m going to find out why Jordan did what he did, and I am going to expose it to the press. They don’t have to know that it was the two of us who solved it, but we can be the harbingers of a new period of peace.”

  “Like superheroes,” Lur said quietly.

  “Like superheroes,” he said. Dhata reached for her waist and pulled her in, hugging her closely to him. “Did your dad ever write back?” he said, and she shook her head slowly, no. Dhata found this to be odd. Jose Diaz loved his daughter more than life itself, so he wondered if the old don was either dead or missing. “I’m going to have to pay Hiroshi a visit. Do you want to come with me?” he asked.

  Lur looked conflicted. “When would you be leaving?” she said.

  “Tomorrow sometime. We don’t have much time, and you know he won’t talk business over phones. The rack I took from the Cranes, it’s encrypted, which leads me to believe that it has something important. If there’s a tracker, they’ll come for it here, and we would be forced to fight. Everything we’ve worked for will go up in smoke.”

  “I’ll stay on this side then. I can see Hiroshi later,” she said.

  He stood up and walked to the edge of the tail wing, then jumped off to land on the porch. Lur followed behind, and he helped her down, then watched her walk inside to sit down on the couch. “Do you think that rat who was supposed to marry you would be stupid enough to hurt your father?” he said, sitting down next to her and powering on the television.

  “You think that he did something to Papa?” she said, with a flat, expressionless tone. Dhata regretted bringing up her father; it was a gamble to get her mind off of Atlanta, but the choice in subject matter was poor. Now she seemed even more depressed and he had to find a way to fix it.

  “No,” he said, “if Don Jose was missing or hurt, I would’ve heard about it. Your father is a legend in the underworld, and that sort of news would go viral, immediately. Don’t stress over your dad, Lurita, he’s okay. It could be that he’s just backed up on his mail. Think about it. He’s a powerful man. Do you see him sitting around reading mail?”

  Lur burst out laughing and it was music to his ears. She had been so gloomy that he wasn’t expecting it. “Papa doesn’t read the mail. I used to remind him all the time. I miss his face,” she said.

  Lur paused as images of synths being terrorized were reflected across the television screen, and this transitioned into an address from the president. Dhata and Lur watched quietly as President Joseph Frank mounted the podium and began to speak.

  He begged for peace between the humans and synths, reminding them of everything the synths had done to rebuild civilization. He denounced the violence, calling them a series of cowardly acts. To Dhata’s surprise, he even went as far as saying that these “domestic murderers”—as he called them—were borne from the infighting and the climate of hate.

  He called for unity, and for people to report suspicious activity wherever they saw it. He looked tired and worn through, which made Dhata realize that there was more going on. He then went on to beg the synths to “stop the bombings,” which meant that the FBI had briefed him on Jordan and Natalya.

  Does this mean that Jordan was part of a terrorist organization? Dhata wondered. Maybe he was compromised by one of their cyphers?

  “I’ll figure something out. I mean, about your dad, okay?” Dhata said, and Lur leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0

  Security at the shuttle port looked as if the city was preparing for war. Armed Johns, human and jacked up on muscle enhancers, paced the halls with electro-tubes, looking for anyone suspicious. Dhata was glad that he’d left his pistol at home, or he would’ve been in for a world of hurt.

  He noticed that most of the people seemed scared. It was much quieter than he had ever seen a shuttle port, and everyone was watching for suspicious activity. He felt relieved when he boarded his shuttle, but even better when he was in Tokyo, Japan. There he was able to relax, since nothing had changed since the last time he was there.

  The place was still a neon paradise, and the translucent blue highway that led out from the shuttle port still impressed him with its beauty. Cars were everywhere, sleek and fast, most painted in bright, primary colors. Even the darker models had neon highlights, yellow auras around their tires, or windows glowing green or red. Tokyo was built for partying and innovation— this was immediately obvious. The way he felt as he stood there taking in the sights reminded him of how excited Lur had been when she’d called him from Atlanta.

  After a few minutes of awestruck observation, he noticed Hiroshi waiting by his cobalt Mazda. He was sporting a new silver streak in his hair, and his wardrobe was spectacular. The synth cypher was looking a lot richer just by the way he dressed, and he noticed that the Mazda had an anti-gravity booster, an expensive enhancement for the older vehicle.

  He waved Dhata over, and he got inside the car where they exchanged greetings and spoke about Lur. This wasn’t odd since Hiroshi adored his Cuban girlfriend, and looked at her as a mentee to the exotic cypher arts.

  “I take you to a place where they make the best ramen, Dhata,” he said with a glint in his metallic, insectoid eyes.

  The Mazda zipped through downtown past a variety of buildings, and then somehow they were passing through the road down towards a junkyard. Dhata noticed that the bright lights and neon brilliance of Tokyo was merely the outer shell of a complex onion of civilization. Hiroshi drove them through a tunnel that took them below the streets into what appeared to be a wet, smelly underworld. They parked by a lake that reeked of sewage and walked for a few minutes until they got to a gate. Hiroshi stepped forward and pulled up an augmented keyboard where he typed in a code to gain entry. The doors slid open and what appeared beyond was another world in Dhata’s eyes.

  Here people dressed differently, and they used old technology and makeshift inventions to get by. He pulled his duster close and thrust his hands in his pockets as if this would keep the shadows at bay. Rats scurried past them, and the lights in the buildings were failing, but the people down here were actually friendly, and it seemed to be a melting pot of humans and synths.

  He looked up to see the underside of the bright blue, glass highway where they had been driving earlier. From where he stood it looked like the blue sky peering down through a mass of dark clouds and wires. He was in awe. How was it that they had managed to stack so many layers on one city?

  “This place is out of this world,” Dhata said.

  “Down here, we call it the ‘sub city’,” Hiroshi said. “The sophisticated do not come here, but older synths … we remember this place. This was where we lived originally.”

  He motioned to a stool in front of a food vendor, and Dhata took it gratefully. They had been walking for some time and he was eager to rest his legs since he still felt some pain from his earlier injuries. Hiroshi ordered something for them in Japanese and then settled in beside him, slapping him on the back in a friendly gesture.

  “So, Dhata, why the visit? Lurita would not give me details, so I know that it means you’re here for work.”

  “Talked to her, eh? Well, she knows the rules about business and calls, so you assumed right, my friend. We have a rack that I lifted, but it’s encrypted. It has a synth-specific interface that we can’t crack. Hiro, this is a dangerous job. The government may be involved. If you don’t feel safe—”

  “A rack you say? However did you come by it?” Hiroshi said, ignoring Dhata’s warning.

  “This synth who blew up our shuttle port, he had it in his office at home. It’s encrypted in a way that we can’t crack it.”

  “Was he a cypher?” Hiroshi said, and Dhata shook his head at him slowly.

  “Then it must be a basic encryption, written for synths. Complex to a human, but easy for us. Why did he choose to blow himself up?”

  “That’s the million UCC question, my friend, and what I’m trying to find out. This man was a soldier, he fought in wars, then all of a sudden, boom,” Dhata said.

 

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