No Dogs in Philly (8 page)

She turned around but she couldn’t tell where
she’d come from. Her vision kept spinning even as her legs stopped.
The fear had taken hold now, her breathing panicked, sweat staining
her lucky heart tank. A flat, logical part of her wondered how much
was natural and how much was induced by the hackers—because she had
been hacked. Her worst fear—everyone’s worst fear—to have your
implants hacked, controlled by another person. They could do all
kinds of nasty things—jack up your heart rate till you blew or just
straight poison you on your own bile. Fuck up your vision so you
saw your mom as a werewolf and stabbed her in the eye. Or make you
think you could fly and leap off a building. Those were some of the
better things you could hope for.

It wasn’t easy to do. Sure, people could hop
into your vision from time to time; it was a simple circuit. Maybe
they’d get in your ears or catch a stray feed. But to take
control—theoretically the implants were coded on the individual’s
brain signature. To take control you’d pretty much have to carve
out the brain and scan it. Theoretically. Her vision flickered and
she heard a laugh, a hyena laugh. Out of the corner of her eye she
caught a shadow, then it was gone. Then she saw him. Friar,
standing a few feet away, looking to the right of her. It was
Friar, perfectly, had to be him, but he was faint, not quite part
of the surroundings. He was talking:

“
The L’eilith Zoriathan complex
cannot be named a virus. Nor can it be understood within the more
accurate, but still inadequate terming of information science. (An
amusing coincidence of acronym, that IS truly is.
Existence—information, a pattern of atomic particles, so easy to
break and rearrange.) We perceive the Net in terms of place, and we
assign the Wekba a location; it is quaint to the point of despair.
In truth the Wekba is transactional, an exchange
rather…”

“
Friar?”

He turned to look at her as if he’d heard her.
Her vision began to flicker, his eyes opened wide, too wide, and
his mouth, and they stretched and merged and formed a black hole
where his face should have been. Her hearing cut out—all but a loud
ringing, and a sound like a tiny maggot crawling across her
eardrum, every scrape of its legs against her skin magnified a
thousand times. Friar started walking towards her, an unnatural,
jerking walk, and she wanted to run but her legs wouldn’t move. He
drew closer and closer, jerking and twitching and she opened her
mouth and screamed, but all that came out was thick, black, viscous
strings, pouring out and then Friar was in front of her and she
stared into the black and he reached up and—

A hand on her shoulder; she whirled and smacked
him in the knee with her prod. He crumpled with an
oomf
and
she screamed and kicked him with her steel-toed boots. She kicked
and screamed for about a minute until she realized she was back,
the hack was gone and she was normal, beating the ever-loving shit
out of the hip guard who had probably just come to help. She
stopped and grasped her knees, shuddering, thankful the kick knives
in her boots hadn’t flipped out. She grabbed at her hip flask and
took a long gulp. Fuck, she was too sober. The alcohol would flush
her system, drunk her up, scramble her brain waves and make it
harder for the hackers to lock onto her and crack her code. She
took another swig and finished the flask and then snorted the
contents of her ring stash—a mix of powdery accelerants that would
blend with the alcohol and scramble her pattern further. Yeah,
that’ll do it. Already she felt the ups and downs pulling her in
every direction.

The hip was on the ground, moaning. For a
second she thought of dashing, but it was hard to ignore her role
in this tragedy. Plus, the hips looked after one another—community
and all that bullhickey. Word got around and she didn’t want to
alienate half the population of Philadelphia over a freak-out.
She’d fix him up and then figure out the asshole trying to claw his
way into her brain. Lou, maybe? Twenty grand was a lot to toss
around, maybe too much. Maybe he sniffed more and was trying to
drill into her accounts. Hah, fat chance, Eugene had all her cash,
but of course Lou didn’t know that—or maybe he did now. Had they
taken anything, any important thoughts? The sick feeling came
back—the feasters, they were hacking her, trying to beat her to the
prey, but no, that didn’t make any sense, they couldn’t know about
her. Or care, even.

“
Huh,” she said aloud.
“Interesting. Alright buddy, let’s get you fixed up.”

She took a Panaceum Easy-Ject from her gun belt
and jabbed it into his arm. He stopped whimpering. It would pump
him up with painkillers, increase blood and platelet production,
start him healing up. Wouldn’t do shit for bones, she knew—Panaceum
my ass—and it was too slow for a bullet hole or a deep cut, but it
was handy for the smaller stuff. He was looking at her, more
confused than afraid, curling up at the pain and making it harder
for her to see if anything was broken. She sighed.

“
Look bud, I’m sorry about that. I
had a freak-out, okay? You know how it is. I really didn’t mean to
rough you and I’m gonna try and patch you up as soon as you
unclench your asshole.”

He relaxed, a little, and she felt him up,
making sure she hadn’t smashed any ribs or ruptured any organs. She
didn’t think so. He’d be making a lot more noise for one thing, and
also she discovered a layer of hockey pads under his flannel. Say
what you would about the hips; they were resourceful. She patted
him on the head.

“
There you go bud, all set.” She
hoisted him to his feet and peeled out a couple of hundreds. “For
your troubles.”

He took the money and looked at it, looked at
her, and then back at the money. Mute? Retarded? Who cared? She set
off, back to Lou’s.

“
You’re not right,” he called to
her when she was about a dozen steps away. He had some kind of
foreign/redneck accent. “You’d best come with me.”

She switched on her lobe camera and looked at
him. He wasn’t pointing the shotgun at her. She turned and put her
hands on her hips.

“
Oh,” she said. “How’s
that?”

“
It looked to me from where I was
lying,” ha ha, “that someone had been messing with your head. You’d
best come with me.”

This took her a while to process. Was it a
ploy? A robbery attempt? Had she over-dished again and now this
idiot was after her money? But no, it didn’t seem that way. If this
guy was a true hip and played by the book then he was honest,
relatively. Which still didn’t explain why he wanted her to come
back with him. So ask, dummy.

“
Why?”

He nodded at a point just behind her. She
turned and looked around, couldn’t figure it out. Then she realized
he was nodding at the security spike, the two-story steel tree of
antennae and monitoring devices. They were so common as to be
invisible. She realized immediately what he meant—he wasn’t so dumb
after all. If someone was hacking her implants then a good place to
bounce a signal and sneak a peak was a good old-fashioned US
security spike. There weren’t too many of those in the Fish. It was
a good bet that she’d be safer from hackers there than just about
anywhere else in Philly. Well, why not? She had time to kill and
she was just about out of booze anyway. They made a good grog, the
hips.

“
Alright,” she said. “Lead
on.”

Chapter 7

The hip was leading her astray. She hadn’t been
much in the Fish but her map told her she wasn’t heading towards
any of the major hip coops. Possibly it was a smaller one,
unknown—they moved around enough—or her map could’ve been fried in
the hack, or maybe it was just a secret entrance, but she didn’t
think so. It smelled like a trap, or a hidden purpose at least. The
terrain told her nothing—sinkhole streets with sewer-pipe bones and
burning gas lines. Crumbling warehouses and factories, glimpses of
gardens poking through—what were they growing? Corn? She was
impressed with their horticulture, forcing green up out of ashy
basements and asphalt fields.

She studied the hip, scanning for signs of
deceit. He seemed relaxed enough—did he limp before or was that her
handiwork?—not tensed, not glancing around for signs of
compatriots. The shotgun he carried was an ancient Harrier model,
more likely to blow up in his face than kick out a bullet, and she
doubted any of the munitions he’d managed to scavenge or nick would
put much oomph against the micromesh woven into her clothes. Still,
he could get lucky and stick a pellet in her eye. Or a friend of
his could drop a brick on her head. She sped up a little to walk by
his side. He smiled and nodded at her. For the first time she
really looked at him and saw he was good to look at, with kind
green eyes, and younger than he’d appeared, though his beard had
streaks of gray. He was dirty, but not filthy, and skin
surprisingly free of blemish, boils, cuts, or disease. This wasn’t
some wretch—he was a healthy man in his prime.

It bothered her, somehow, that her judgment had
been so off. She thought she knew about the hips—what was there to
know? They didn’t have jobs, didn’t have homes, half of them
weren’t registered and they kept to themselves. She felt suddenly
tired, incredibly tired, tired of thinking, and having her notions
challenged. Why couldn’t things be easy? She let her mind
drift—ambush be damned—to straight lines and right angles, a city
of walls and sharp divides, clean separations between good and
evil, person and object, worthy and unfit to live.

For the thousandth time she thought of skipping
town, taking her five hundred thousand buckaroos and hopping the
first jet outta this joint. She’d have to head to another zone,
another Net, across the ocean maybe with the Eurocrats or the
Sinomer or even the Xing-2 if she got desperate. It was a pipe
dream, of course. The Gaespora would never let her skip town, order
unfulfilled. They’d slap an injustice lien on her and in ten
seconds flat every roly-poly would-be hero with a gun would be on
her ass, lickin’ for the bounty. More and more she realized how
stupid, how empty, how useless all this money was. Every bill had a
string attached. Ten million. What would she do with it? She had no
idea. It was just a number, a big, bold, impressive-sounding number
that even the dumbest math reject could understand would make her
rich. Friar, he was a thinking man—now haunting her for some reason
(was that part of the hack or just her memory toilet coming
unclogged while some bastard poked around in her skull?) He knew
exactly where every dollar would go, what kind of instruments it
would buy and how many fifty-foot holes he could secretly drill
into the sewers. He had taken calculated risks until his sanity was
worth more than a buck or two—and still lost in the end. She, she
had just seen a fat piece of meat hanging from a tree and yanked,
missing the bear trap underneath.

“
You’re a detective.”

It was so quiet in this part of town that his
voice startled her. Her Betty leapt halfway from the holster, drawn
to her hand by twitchy nerves and custom magne-plants in her palm
and trigger finger. He noticed the bustle at her side, like she had
an angry pigeon in her pocket, but didn’t comment. She cursed that
dimwit saw jockey but really it was her fault. She’d dialed the
twitch response up about as high as it would go—better to shoot
first and scamper—but now she saw it was a liability, showing off
all her secrets before she got a chance to tease. Had he seen the
gun? Did he know the ball buster in the barrel would rip a hole in
him the size of a beach ball, hockey pads or no? She sent a command
to the holster, switching out the ammo for flashers. They’d make a
fuck of a noise and were bright as the Fourth of July, but they
wouldn’t leave anyone in pieces.

“
How do you know?” she said. How
did he know?

“
Saw you on the feed. You solved a
mystery. Found a lost kid.”

“
I thought you hips didn’t watch
the feeds.”

“
We watch them on a screen, as God
intended. Nothing in our brains. Our thoughts are our
own.”

“
Sounds inconvenient.”

“
There are more important things
in life than convenience.”

“
So, where are you taking
me?”

“
Somewhere safe.”

“
For who?”

“
For the both of us. I mean you no
harm…though by God’s teaching you had given me the justice to raise
a hand, you did ask forgiveness and I gave.”

That wasn’t strictly true, but whatever you
want buddy. Somehow she trusted him. She got on the Net (already
slow as hell here) and browsed information on the hips. There
wasn’t a whole lot to go on—who wanted to study the homeless
anyway? They had an organization, of sorts, or at least principles
handed down by their God. The damnedest thing was that they seemed
to follow them. She tracked through all the police reports and
couldn’t find any incidences of hip aggression. There’d been
posers, other homeless and vagabonds not taken by the Book, but it
didn’t seem like the real hips had so much as slapped an ass
without permission. There were plenty of accounts of vandalism
though, massive amounts actually, almost all against Net
fixtures—power stations, routing stations, security spikes, and the
underground pipelines. Shit, they’d even launched rockets at
satellite dishes and antennae. It was a war on modern society. She
understood now why Vericast was lobbying for a population
cull—round ‘em all up, fix ‘em with a plee collar, and stick ‘em in
a factory gutting fish or folding sheets.