Virtually True (5 page)

“I had a big problem.”

“You’re learning. Some guy got popped, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“A friend.”

“Drag.” She flicks ashes. “Need some FREEze to get you through the day?”

“No.”

“Some meth? Ganja? Girl to keep you warm?”

“I’m all right.”

“Bong Bong try any shit? Piña hates that motherfucker. Always trying to slice in on her action.”

“Does he?”

“Sometimes.” She blows on her nicotine ash, watches it glow. “Since Bong Bong started bizzing with the yakuza, you want to connect with Japan, you gotta go through him.”

“How much business is the yakuza involved in?”

“Lots.”

“Who do they work with?”

Piña flutters her hand as if she just touched something hot. “Shit. They’re into everything. It’s not like there’s a difference between the yakuza and Japanese gov. They’re doing the same shit. Running factories, cutting down trees, shipping whores back and forth, organ trading.”

“Organ trading, as in musical instruments?”

“Yeah, right.”

Medical technology lags when it comes to transplants. So many variables: chemical, biological, mathematical, that artificial organs require significantly more maintenance—something that doesn’t sit well with a society addicted to fast food, instant cash, and home shopping. “People make a living selling their own body parts? Sounds like a short career.”

“Sell an organ, you don’t have to work no more. No jobs anyway, so you gotta do what you gotta do. Practically Luzonia’s only export.”

“How else can you get organs? From corpses?”

“That too.”

That explains the zipper marks and scars on the corpses at the police station. Aslam’s missing eyes, too, as if True can’t rely on Aslam as a witness to help solve his own murder. Bong Bong must be doing a thriving business. Between cancer and debilitating illnesses caused by pollution and pesticides creating demand, and Bong Bong’s world of torture creating supply, it’s an almost perfect model of capitalism.

True back on track. “What do the Japanese get from Bong Bong, besides unfettered access to delicacies like pancreas, alveoli, and islets of Langerhans?”

“Huh?”

“Why do the Js need Bong Bong?”

“Bong Bong keeps the factories open. Keeps order. You know how the Js love order. They fucking live for it. You ever hear of any strikes here?”

“No.”

“Bong Bong tells them what’s going down.”

“Kind of like an outpost.”

“Yeah, kind of.”

True takes a long swallow of coffee. “How does Piña know Bong Bong’s working with the Js?”

“Like she knows everything. The word.”

The word on the street. A strictly low-tech response to the preponderance of high-tech. True may be able to float through reams and RAMS of data, access billions of bytes of information, and hold virtual statistics in his hot little hand, but Piña can surpass all of that by checking with her contacts.

“What else does Piña know?”

She cups her hands behind her neck and makes her biceps dance. “The Js’re also bizzing with the ethnics. Word is, they gonna help the ethnics end the insurgency.”

True didn’t know this, but now that he thinks about it, it makes sense. Right after Luzonia’s independence, Japan promised all sorts of aid packages. Now, if Piña’s to be believed, Japan’s government and the yakuza are throwing their weight behind the small ethnic enclaves. By supporting instability, they promote Japanese power in the region.

“Why would the Js end the insurgency? And how? They don’t have an army.”

“Why’s easy. Some fucking Japanese tire company came out with a new tread design, and I shit you not, it spelled out
Allah
. Can you believe that? You peal out in your car and leave the mark of God. This pissed off some insurgency commandos, who started fucking with some J holdings here. You know how J corps stick together—wound up real tight—so they got together and started stoking the ethnics.”

“With what?”

She lowers her voice. “You won’t believe this. Piña heard the insurgency almost wiped out because of the Js.”

“What?” News to True.

“In one battle.”

“How?”

“Some new weapon. The insurgents had like ten times as many soldiers.”

“What kind of weapon?”

Piña shrugs and True watches her deltoids dimple. “Fuck knows. All Piña knows is the insurgents are here one day, almost gone the next. If it’s true it’s some serious, serious shit. That means there’s a technology window, a gap some corporation could step into, then nab control of the Global Fortune 1000. That’d be bad for bizzing everywhere. Bad for the black market. Bad for Piña.”

“You know any insurgents I could talk to?”

“Don’t last in town here, you know? Your friend was of the faith, no?”

“Yeah. What else did Piña hear about the murder?”

“Had to be an outside job. DNA bomb, right? Piña’d know if somebody local had one. If you want, though, she can check around town, do some four-one-one action.”

“Thanks.”

Piña spins, tears down a Jackpot card. “Try your luck.”

“I don’t play.”

“Come on. Somebody’s gotta win.”

True taps on the card twice and watches the wheels inside the slot machine:
gram
spin, a jack, a queen, a king—True holds his breath—an ace. But then the last card is a three. A loser. “Been that kind of day.” True waves his card through her ADC machine.

She plugs in her standard info fee. “Jackpot’s on the house.” She squints into his face. “You look like shit. Want a ride home?”

“It’s not far.”

“Piña will drive.”

She grabs a skateboard propped up in the corner and pushes herself along with her hands. At a cybersex game she stops to jam her thumb into the key lock. The game shuts down and a breathless woman, a smile smeared on her face, emerges. Piña indicates the bar with her thumb and the games-woman stumbles over. True follows Piña out of the arcade.

“Get on.” She points to the glitter-sprinkled board, which is measeled with stickers advertising batteries, tires, sex toys.

“On this thing? Where?”

“Behind Piña, asshole.”

She plants his hands on her shoulders. He can feel her muscles work to pull them through the mall, straining at the extra weight. Wonders why she doesn’t buy an electric board, or simply hire a chauffeur; suspects the answer is that Piña takes pride in doing things on her own. She slides them through a side exit and onto the sidewalk, bellows a warning at which people scatter, then jumps the curb. True struggles to stay upright. She cuts off an electric limo and grabs the bumper of an ancient gas guzzler with a grapple hook.

Grappling
is ubiquitous in Luzonia, endorsed by a government intent on conserving energy but without the means to convert from gas to solar-powered cars. At all hours Nerula’s streets are crisscrossed with elastic cords connecting auto and truck to skateboarder, in-line skater, bicyclist. Weaving through traffic, Piña maneuvers over gravel, around pot holes and roadkill. When the car pulls them into the left lane, Piña springs them free and they’re thrown toward a jeepney. She latches on and they roll down the boulevard.

Piña shouts back to True. “This jeepney isn’t right. Piña wants the 707”—a city bus.

True hangs on as Piña swerves around a gravelly section of road. Poking up through the smog are twin 10-story towers. Almost home. Piña reels them close to the 707, the bus so laden with people hanging out of doors and windows it lists drunkenly. True can see how worn the tires are, how worn out the riders look. How soon will it be before the bus topples over? If not from weight, from sorrow?

One last burst of speed and Piña releases the grapple hook. They coast down a narrow stretch, past the edge of the shanties and into a one-way tunnel, through the echoing darkness to True’s apartment complex, where she leans hard left and they skid to a halt. True’s building is constructed in prefabricated mall-like architecture motif—the foreigners’ ghetto. But since few
guarangs
call Luzonia home, True lives in relative isolation.

True, his eyes watery from leaded exhaust, steps off the board. “Thanks for the ride.” Wobbles slightly.

Piña grins until she notices a boy slumbering in a doorway a few steps away. “Fuck. He thinks he’s going to earn money sleeping off the FREEze?”

“One of Piña’s boys?”

“He’s one of Piña’s. He gets fucked up, now he doesn’t want to work. That little bitchy boy wouldn’t be doing shit if it wasn’t for Piña.”

Or wouldn’t be whoring for her if she didn’t pump him full of drugs. But life, True decides, is full of these cycles of dependency. Piña depends on the boy. The boy depends on Piña. True depends on Piña who depends on the boy who depends on Piña. But Piña doesn’t depend on True. That’s one way the cycle is broken. And it worries him.

“Tell me if Piña finds out more. I want to know what happened to my friend.”

“Yeah, yeah. Listen. Word don’t like insurgents, so don’t wait up for me, daddy.”

True walks into the lobby. Looking through the window, he sees Piña beat the boy, but can’t hear anything through the thick glass. But he can see the boy crying, curled up on the ground, trying to protect his face from her blows. She burns him with a cigarette.

*          *          *

True’s in his apartment, studying the piece of Aslam’s collar and the bloodstained coins. He uses scissors to cut out his pocket, stuffs the whole mess into a plastic bag, scribbles a note, puts it all into an airfreight envelope and calls a courier. Then he checks into the bomb information Bong Bong sold him. Gubbish. Well, Bong Bong
did
call them “bums.” True fingers Aslam’s debit card, which he’d palmed before the police arrived. As soon as Aslam’s death is logged—and that depends on Bong Bong’s efficiency—all transactions would be voided retroactively. Then Bong Bong would piss ammonia, maybe bust a kidney. But he’d just scare up a replacement anyway, maybe one of True’s.

He pulls up Aslam’s dossier. Nothing regarding his latest job, just his life as an insurgent and Pakistani military officer, college transcript, credit rating, the usual personal data; no links to defense contractors. As if Aslam had started a new life but hadn’t told anyone. He expands his search. Nothing. True codes his wrist-top to link with his computer and plays back the explosion, trying to isolate the missile on screen. He replays the section, watches Aslam’s eyes round in terror. Slows the scene down. The missile shoots through the air, under a parked car, over a street stall, through a vendor’s legs. True freezes it. He orders the computer to identify the weapon based on aerodynamic tendencies, velocity, size, suspected outer-shell materials, but the computer keeps repeating
Insufficient Information
.

He lets the video play out again, sees Aslam pull the young girl down with him, and at the point of impact, True instructs his computer to ID the type of explosion. The missile struck Aslam and the girl simultaneously, and as the blast grows into a fiery sunflower, the computer flashes:
Compressed TNT
.
Genetic-seeking guidance system. Manufacturer unknown
.