Black Glass (8 page)

Zilia muttered, “Fuck the shitter-shatter, hode ...” And reset the projector, and this time the signal came through intact and she went to work at the other end of the table, screwing cryptic chrome and rubber parts together, saying only: “You can watch the holo, Rick, but just don’t hang around all day.”

Girl knows how to make a guy feel wanted.

He perched uncomfortably on the edge of a sofa and watched as he and his brother appeared in mid-rez 3D. It was a translucent image shafted by present day light and dirty air: the Candle brothers sitting together on this same beat-up olive-colored sofa, Danny whanging away on acoustic guitar, both of them already drunk ... The dust in Zilia’s loft spinning through their heads like the drunkenness ...

Oh.
That
day. Candle remembered they’d all been drinking, Zilia had come in with the holocam, wanting to experiment with her new-tech toy, and he and Danny had said “
Whatever!
” at precisely the same moment, both of them cracking up over that.

On the holo, Danny paused to take a drink from a pint of Jack,
then strummed sloppily on the pick-scored Martin, slapping out a bluesy kind of boogie.

“Okay now Rick–”

“No, no fucking haps, you gotta no-buy here,” Candle laughed, shaking his head. “Uh uh, hode.”

“Yeah, way, haps, do-buy, we’re gonna do it, come on Rick–” He started singing, quite well.

Both of them singing now; Rick Candle painfully off key
. “I hooked in and found ya on level five, that’s where I go to meet any other man’s wife! Ohhhhh yeah
—and all that shit!”

They both fell of the couch, laughing hysterically.

“FUUUUUUUUUCK!” Candle hooted, in the holo.

“Ugh ...” Danny dropped the guitar on an invisible cof-feetable—the holo cam hadn’t picked the table up. The guitar twanged hollowly in protest when it was dropped. Danny saying, softer: “Rick—how come?”

“How come I can’t sing? You got the chromosome and I didn’t. Injustice, man ...”

“No.
How come
. Why. Why’d you come to get me out of the j-pen? You hadn’t seen me for, like, two years. I was 17, I woulda been released on my own in a few months ...”

“I dunno, that was a long time ago ...” He picked up the pint bottle. “Shit, empty. Um ... I dunno ... You’re my brother, Danny, Christ. And, you know, those j-pen camps suck. I’d have come
sooner but, uh, I thought mom had taken you off somewhere. Then I heard she was dead. So I traced you to the j-pen.”

“I’m a fucking pain in the ass to live with ...”

“It’s okay to grow up slow ...”

“Yeah, but, you know, it’s only because I’m your brother, you got a sense of obligation. I mean—Rick—you don’t have to feel no fuckin’ sense of obligation, you know?”

Watching now, Candle realized that Danny was asking, over and over, for the same message. Waiting to hear that his brother accepted him. Wanted him around, cared about him. Cared no matter what he was, no matter what he had done. Willing to make sacrifices for him. He’d never got that message from his old man. Especially the sacrifices part. There’d always been a sense that he was his dad’s burden. And that there was only so far Dad was willing to carry it.

“It’s not obligation,” Candle said, in the holo. “You’re important to me.” It was hard to say, between two men. They weren’t
emos.
But Candle said it, as overtly as he could, though he couldn’t say it and look at Danny too: “You’re my brother and my friend, you know?”

Danny looked away—and now, seeing the thing on holo from another visual angle, Candle could see the tears he hadn’t been able to see back then.

Then Danny laughed it off, getting his machismo back online. “What a load of Happycrap! Okay–” He picked up the guitar, whanging. “—one mo’ time! ‘I hooked in and found you on level five—’ Come on, Rick—Sing it out!”

“No-fucking-BUY-THAT, asshole! Forget it, hode!”

“Come on, come on! ‘I hooked in and found you—’”

“No, no, no, NO—Oh all right—‘found you on—’”

“‘—Level five!’”

The image froze—Candle with eyes closed, laughing, Danny with his lower lip thrust out in parody of a bad-ass rocker, eyes crinkled with glee at the irony, guitar aimed at the ceiling—

The image froze—and cut to another scene, another day. The second time she’d filmed them. The afternoon had started off all right but Danny had decided he was going to get some virtual high ...

The holo showed Danny stalking toward the door, Candle going after him, grabbing his arm. As Danny shook loose, Candle glaring at Zilia. “Turn that shit off!” But she had ignored him, continued filming as Danny said, “You’re a cop, that don’t make you a judge, Rick.”

“You go down there, you don’t come back here.”

“Hey, the Ghost Machine is an inspiration thing. I come home and I write songs–”

“Bullshit. It’s a just greasy-ass addiction much as our old man on sniff X.”

“It ain’t a chemical, man–”

“Come on, hode, that kind of virtual reality is against the law for a reason. They fuck with your brain, Danny, it’s the same thing, it’s just remote drugging. It’s more than just some fucking fantasy–”

Danny pulled back his coat—exposing a pistol in his waist band. Carved into the ivory handle was the image of a skull screaming into a microphone.

“You follow me,” Danny said, with icy conviction, “and that’ll be the last fucking time you’ll ever see me if you don’t buy a ticket.”

He turned away, and walked out of the shot. Candle, in the holo—and now—shook his head. And both Candles said, at once: “You dumb son of a bitch.”

The Rick Candle in the holo turned and strode angrily toward the camera. “I said turn that fucking thing–”

The holo vanished.

“Thanks, Zilia,” Candle said, now.

He went to the door, opened it, turned back for a moment as she said softly, not looking at him, “I want to know where he is, Rick. And ... if you want, if you get hard up, you can stay here and we can ... you know, talk and shit ...”

“I thought you said I gave you the ugly quivers?”

She shot him a glare. “You want to lose the invitation, just keep giving me shit.”

He grinned at her, waved, and went down to the wet streets.

Turned out Flip’n’Chip had bought out Wireless Shack three years earlier.

Looking in the window of the discount electronics store, Candle watched the words and images, that seemed to be built into the window, but animated:

Under the display, a panel of mediaglass played a piece of a VR encounter, a man and two women, nude and engaged in a three-way, floating alone in a rubber raft in the sea, their genitals blurred for street consumption.

To one side was a wafer-thin screen on which, soundlessly, a presidential press conference was ending, the president—an Asian-American woman, who had been vice president when he went under—was waving as she walked away from the podium. He couldn’t recall her name. The credits said the press conference was sponsored by “Slakon Automotive: Today’s Car for Tomorrow’s Needs. And by Slakon Sportswear. And by Slakon Digital. . . Slakon Pharmaceuticals ... Slakon Entertainment ...”

“Slakon,” Candle murmured. “Slakon.” Paul Slake, the guy who’d started Slakon, forty years earlier, probably wouldn’t recognize it now, if he were around to see it.

But Candle was looking at something else in the window: the reflection of the curvaceous, glossy black sedan pulling up behind him. The car window started to roll down.

“You could at least change cars, dumbshit,” Candle said, and ducked around the corner.

Candle heard the car back up and he dodged into a men’s boutique. An over-bright place; flamboyant men’s clothing. He was still wearing his jeans and bomber jacket from four years ago. The fashions in the boutique made him wince as he hurried to put mannequins and displays between him and the guy following ...

Those short little jackets. Aren’t we precious ... And string neckties were back in style, at least among the set that could afford
to spend a few hundred WDs on fashion accessories. Shit.

He paused to peer from behind a mannequin at the thug following him. Hispanic guy, pitted face, baseball cap, long black coat, coming in with a clip-phone pressed to his ear. Calling for back-up. Candle thought he recognized the guy from some perp file on the job.

Halido,
was that the name?

Candle let Halido see him slip through the door that went to the changing booths.

Halido heard someone yelling, “Hey, get your hands off me–” A high-pitched voice, but he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He ran down the hallway to the changing booths—and heard a woman screaming from the one at the end. He went to the booth and drew his gun.

Angry voices, a woman and man, interrupting each other from inside the booth—the booth shook as someone was pushed against the wall–

Halido checked the load on his gun.
Just follow him—but better to kill him than let him get away ...

Grist probably hadn’t meant this situation exactly, but, you know, he could tell Grist anything so long as Candle stopped being a problem—

Halido glanced around to see if there was any kind of surveillance bird flying around. No, nothing.

Just get this fucking thing over with. Just fucking kill Candle.

“Get out of here, you sleazin’ troll!” the woman yelled.

“Lady, I’d like to, but I’m stuck in your–”

Halido kicked the door open, leveled the gun. A fat, balding guy in his underwear was shoved outward by the half-dressed Filipina; the fat man sprawled on his belly at Halido’s feet. “I didn’t wanna go in there, you can’t arrest me,” he yelled, covering his head, “—some asshole shoved me in there and the door was blocked—”

Okay, Halido thought, he thinks he’s cute because he can use a decoy. But the fucker is around here somewhere. He was on foot, he’s got to be close.

Halido ran into the main store, and
bang,
stumbled right into a robot mannequin of an elegant model: Candle had pushed it from behind, left it blocking the door.

“STAY WHERE YOU ARE. YOU ARE SHOPLIFTING AND VANDALIZING,” the mannequin said. “STAY WHERE YOU ARE–” The mannequin grabbed Halido and held him with whirring arms. “YOU ARE UNDER CAMERA OBSERVATION–”

Halido struggled, but he knew you couldn’t get away from an anti-shoplifting mannequin until it was remote-switched, any more than you could get a detainer boot off your car without the code.

“The son of a bitch ...” He managed to access his phone. “Targer? I’m gonna need back-up—Pup Benson? That’s bullshit. No, you gotta do better than that! I’m gonna need major backup—”

“STAY WHERE YOU ARE, YOU ARE UNDER CAMERA OBSERVATION–”

“—and probably bail.”