Black Glass (5 page)

Now say you pair that image with a nostalgic smell — cut grass, baking bread. Or something more personal — the scent of a lover who never loved you back … Right, now you get it. Ouch, huh? Now that painting is hooked up to a completely different mood. So every experience can be enhanced, shifted. That's what we do.

No it's not an exact science — memory's a big part of it too, and memory's subjective. Take me, for example: can't stand the smell of boiled cabbage. To me it smells like failure, like poverty, and that goes right back to my upbringing. But say mint, or ginger, or lemons — to me, they never smell anything but good.

Anyway, you get the picture. A moodie is … What's a good way to put it? A moodie is an architect of atmosphere. He makes life into art.

Ah, come on, man — Damon, isn't it? What about you? Your job paid for that watch — Gucci, right, I can read the brand name from here. And that Regions accent: you must have come to the city for some reason. Why should we starve, us creative types? What does that prove to anyone?

[Intercept: internal msg system: casino owner | operations manager]

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Fw: proposal

JJ — this msg just came out of nowhere. Who the hells this guy? Does this sound like something vyable? And how did he get this address, thought you said it was private?

[Machine 1267, main floor, Double Six Casino: Milk | Carol]

From up here Milk can monitor the whole place: every blind corner, the gaps between a patron's fingers. A croupier's blink, the tone of a bartender's voice, blood jumping all nervous in a young gambler's veins.

Black one-way glass fronts the tiny booth. In its surface Milk is a pale streak hovering over screens and consoles. A bank of monitors brings the whole room under his gaze. He checks the drive, aligns the scent vials, adjusts his silver airbox, double-checks the cables snaking off into the casino's ventilation system. The set-up is not ideal. Milk's equipment is factory fresh and customised, but the casino's gear is older; where the two meet, he's had to improvise with duct tape. And the boss had shot him a hard-eyed look when he'd said he always works alone. The guard was eventually sent away, but in his place is the black stare of a surveillance camera. Milk glares back, then looks away. He works best invisible.

Ignore it. Focus
. The Milkboy is ready. For luck he's wearing new sneakers, immaculate white Pumas. He reminds himself that no one else on this planet can claim his particular mix of skill and intuition. The world is on the verge of realising this. That funny-looking journo with the hair gel who's been hanging round lately: recognition-wise, he's just a sign of things to come.

The floor is busy, and it's impossible to watch everywhere at once. He needs one average gambler, midway between a first-timer and a lost cause, to be the room's emotional barometer. Once a mood starts to roll through a space a strange kind of automated beauty will take over. Tune your test bunny, goes the theory, and the rest will follow.

He scans the patrons, searching for his subject, your typical punter. A couple of excitable young guys, look like students, probably first-timers — no use, too green. Man in a tracksuit with thinning hair, tattoos poking out of his sleeves, watching the croupier with a starving look — no, too desperate. A woman with a long blonde ponytail, retro-style polka-dot dress, shapely legs crossed atop her stool, tapping mechanically at her machine, sipping a martini with an apple slice … He zooms in — no. Older than she'd looked, spike heels and face worn hard from a tough life, that ruined look of women who've survived too much; sex worker, most likely, long-termer. Not her.

Then Carol's face fills a monitor screen: tidy eyebrows, complimentary cocktail. Just past the middle of her life, plays a bit of this, a bit of that — hopeful, but not a complete sucker. Never had a fancy job or shot junk up her arm. An optimistic tilt to her head, a hint of individual will behind that familiar foolish gleam. Perfect. Milk checks his controls, clears his mind and zooms in.

baseline check: heart rate 72 | base spend: $2 per min …

glow: soft amber | low metal slush | gold tumble plastic cup | bird chirps tiny bells | spend: $4 per min …

scent: four-leaf clover | glow: warm amber | subsonic: applause | low gold slush | $5 per min …

jasmine | dreamsound 14 | smell of velvet | tickle of dice | skin of a dark-haired man | gunpowder | heart rate 86 | $8 per min …

Oh yes, thinks Milk. Very nice.

[Intercept: internal msg system: casino owner | operations manager]

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Fw: proposal

No idea, Frank, your address is protected. Never heard of this guy, dunno what his game is. But I'm curious. What you think?

[Machine 942, main floor, Double Six Casino: Carol]

Three cherries, thinks Carol, three cherries means I cut my hair into a bob and stop eating cheese after seven p.m. (causes weird dreams, goes straight to the hips). A snappy little bob and a summer tint maybe. Come on, come on … Pft.

Oh Jesus. Did I turn the gas off? Bet the battery's flat in the smoke alarm … Right, if I get a spade now I'll get back tonight to find the house burned down, and the Elliots' place, and the next one along … No spade, no spade, please … Phew. Heh. (Silly: don't think like that.) Now … if a heart stops in the middle, that means he's thinking about me. Or I get a clover on the left. Heart or clover, he's thinking of me right now.

[Excerpt, audio interview, location unspecified: Milk | Damon]

Sure, that's your job — ask questions. But you'll paint the wrong picture if you misunderstand the motive here. Earning a living … Okay. Forget it.

Yeah, a very new field — but the potential. I mean, take hospitals: you've got sick people, women giving birth. Newborn babies, kids getting tonsils out, guys having heart surgery. So what do they get? Blank corridors, fluoro lights. And that smell: sickness and antiseptic, lukewarm plastic, boiled scalpels. Just a big people factory, a setting for bad dreams. Get well soon? I don't think so.

Now imagine gentle light, warm colours, low-frequency sound pulses. At night, for the insomniacs: waves on a beach, so soft it's almost imperceptible. You pipe in a subtle mix of ozone, jonquils, cut wood, maybe a hint of human breastmilk. Jonquils are almost guaranteed. Very few people can recall a negative experience with jonquils. Right, the cancer ward: you synthesise each person's unique childhood scent, the smell of them in perfect health, dab it on their pillow. Grandpa wants morphine: he gets colour saturation, audio therapy, internal projections. And surgeons: always exhausted, right? So you tune the operating theatres to keep them alert. More skill per hour. The drop in medical misadventure suits would pay for the whole thing.
And
it's altruistic.

Of course we don't. That's illegal.

I do my own tuning experiments around the city. As research, you know? I'll just set up somewhere, tune up an atmosphere — usually a nostalgia-based mood, all nostalgia has some common ingredients — and monitor the effects. Times are hard enough already, so it's all positive stuff I'm putting out there; people don't even know it's happening, but they feel good. Scores me brownie points for the soul, heh. Don't put that in.

Not really. Mostly, ah, shopping centres so far. But that's my point: the infrastructure's there, we just have to realise the potential. And build up a greater respect for the art form too. Hopefully that's where you come in.

[Main floor, Double Six Casino: Milk | Carol | unidentified male patron]

Three hours into Milk's shift the casino is humming, but despite his best efforts Carol has left her blackjack table and headed for the bar. Doubt prickles through him; she didn't look like a drinker. She still has credit, he'd set her into a nice rhythm, and according to his calculations she should have stayed put.

But his human barometer, with her neat hair and cheerful handbag, has abandoned her seat and wandered away, distracted by something invisible. Milk has no idea what. But what does it matter? It's not personal, and his test rabbit has done her job. So he scans the room for another type of subject.

Milk has made progress. The electricity in the room is fizzing somewhere near hip level. The grim downward slant repeated across each pokies player's mouth has tilted upwards by half a degree. The hard-faced blonde is still at her machine, feeding in coins at a steady rate. He shoots out a squirt of peppermint to mask the sour feet of a baccarat player; women unwrinkle their noses, nearby seats begin to fill. He sees a Chinese woman in a red dress, stacking her tigers high, and outlines her shape in rosy velvet; three men soon converge. An elderly couple playing craps look limp and jaundiced so Milk softens their light, gives them a shot of oxygen. Any reminder of death, that futureless place where loot counts for nothing, must be banished.

In the Mahogany corner a tall Caucasian in a charcoal Savile Row suit observes the roulette wheel, hands behind back. Deep-set Spanish eyes, slight stoop, bony shoulders poking at the fine wool of his jacket. Money. Milk studies the man's gold wedding band, his watch.

(But the cameras can't penetrate the cloth of those well-cut trousers; the sensors miss the tiny creak of the prosthetic limb strapped, not quite comfortably, below the man's knee joint.)

This one could absorb a decent loss: an extraction is called for. But first the entire room needs an extra push. Milk picks a young, good-looking group playing blackjack for a laugh; amateurs with university degrees and expensive clothes, slumming it amongst the tracksuits and perms, the gold flash and grim jaws.

When a caramel-blonde solicitor draws twenty-one twice in a row, winning enough to buy the silk dress she saw downtown this morning, Milk magnifies their whoops, flicks an acoustic pulse through the air and fills the whole room with scent 42: Competition. It smells like the start of a race. The room turns to watch — the young woman's head thrown back, laughing; her friends touching her arms, shouting wordless delight. Adrenaline ripples across the floor. People lean forward, chips hit felt, cards flip. The casino's take spikes sharply.

But Milk sees he's overdone it. Some of the croupiers have lost their detachment: they're dealing too fast, calling too loud. One young dealer, eyes too bright, scrapes away chips like a squirrel scooping nuts. A punter protests, a supervisor hovers. It takes Milk half a nervous minute to restore calm. A slow, subterranean heartbeat issues from his fingers; the pattern shifts slightly, the fright dissipates. Angles dissolve into curves. The room steadies.
Focus
.

Carol calculates her credit burn and lets herself choose a third cocktail, a Silver Bullet — the nickname, she recalls, of the star of some cop show she watched as a kid: stocky guy with a crew cut, patrolled the badlands, always got shot at, never got hit. Good-looking guy who lingered in your head long after the TV was turned off.

Now something calls Carol outside. With the dark swirl of alcohol in her blood, she disengages from her barstool, weaves through the jangle and flash, across the coin-spangled carpet, out to the balcony. She lights a cigarette and watches the car park, the koala sweeping the night with its searchlight eyes, people streaming up escalators and trudging down stairs.

Out on the perimeter, in the gloom beyond the floodlights, she spots them again: a small shadow huddled against a dumpster, and further along another thin little figure, hesitantly approaching a couple as they head for their car. More undoc beggar kids, the city's lost causes — nothing to be done for them. Carol turns away. It all fades out. In a quiet corner of her mind sits something to dream about, something private.

Milk lets her go. He zooms in on the tall man in the fine suit.

[Intercept: internal msg system: casino owner | operations manager]

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Fw: proposal

Heard about this stuff. Couple of big joints in Japan use these guys to mess around with the room, minipullate the lights whatever. But dunno sounds like bullshit. Paying enough staff already.

[Mahogany corner, Double Six Casino: Milk | unidentified male patron]

The tall man hunches over the roulette table, right hand in his pocket, twirling his wedding ring on one bony finger. Since the crash, his wife farewells him from the porch whenever he leaves the house; arranges the specialists' bills on the table, neatly marked up with a yellow highlighter pen; makes him listen in on the extension when she negotiates with the insurance company. Cooks the meals he used to love, reminds him of his exercises. And tries not to turn away, he thinks, when the lights go out.

Milk just sees a tall guy with one hand in his pocket, a sure sign of holding back. He reads him again, notes the watch, the sharp attire, the high-denomination chips. Takes it all in. And begins.

glow: rose gold | scent: four-leaf clover, smell of good luck | subsonic: yesbigyesbigyes | a rise a roll a swell …

A neat flick of the dealer's hand has set the wheel in motion. The players place their chips, the lanky guy stooping forward to stack his monkeys on eight; the ball spins, jitters, drops to silence. The dealer calls, ‘Number nine.'