THE DAMNED DON’T DIE
For this party Sam had repoed a dead light industrial unit on the edge of the reclaim zone. Wednesday didn’t go there immediately; she headed uplight a couple of levels to a boringly bourgeois housing arc, found a public fresher, and used the facilities. Besides getting the muck off her boots and leggings and telling her jacket to clean itself over the toilet, her hair was a mess and her temper was vile. How dare those scumbags follow me? She dialed her lips to blue and the skin around her eyes to angry black, got her hair back into a semblance of order, then paused. “Angry. Angry!”
She shook her head; the face in the mirror shook right back, then winked at her. “Can I recommend something, dear?” asked the mirror.
In the end she let it talk her into ordering up a wispy, colorful sarong, a transparent flash of silky rainbows to wrap around her waist. It didn’t fit with her mood, but she had to admit it was a good idea — her jacket, picking up on her temper, had spiked up across her shoulders until she resembled an angry hedgehog, and without the softening touch she’d have people avoiding her all evening. Then she used the mirror to call Sam’s receptionist and, swallowing her pride, asked for directions. The party was impromptu and semi-random; as good a place to hide out as anywhere, just as long as nobody tailed her there. And she had no intention of letting herself be tagged and followed twice in one night shift.
Sam had taken over an empty industrial module a couple of levels below the basement slums, spray-bombed it black, and moved in a bunch of rogue domestic appliances. Light pipes nailgunned to rubbery green foam flared erratically at each corner of the room. The seating was dead, exotic knotworks of malformed calcium teratomas harvested from a biocoral tank, all ribs and jawbones. Loud waltz music shotgunned into screeching feedback by a buggy DJ-AI attacked her eardrums. There was a bar full of dumb and dumber, the robot waiter vomiting alcoholic drinks, and passing out joints and pink noise generators. Sameena knew how to run a party, Wednesday grudgingly acknowledged. Decriminalization lite, prosperity-bound urban youth experimenting with the modicum of risk that their subtly regimented society allowed them. A cat lay on top of a dead solvent tank, one foreleg hanging down, staring at everyone who entered. She grinned up at it. It lashed its tail angrily and looked away.
“Wednesday!” A plump boy, mirrored contact lenses, sweat gleaming red in the pit lights: Pig. He clutched a half-empty glass of something that might be beer.
“Pig.” She looked around. Pig was wired. Pig was always wired, boringly religious about his heterocyclic chemistry: a bioresearch geek. Ten kilos of brown adipose cells full of the weirdest organic chemistry you could imagine boiled away beneath his skin. He kept trying to breed a better liposome for his gunge-phase experiments. Said it kept him warm: one of these days someone was going to light his joint, and he’d go off like one of those old-time suicide bombers. “Have you seen Fi?”
“Fi? Don’t want hang round Fiona! She boring.”
Wednesday focused on Pig for the first time. His pupils were pinpricks, and he was breathing hard. “What are you on?”
“Dumbers. Ran up a nice little hydroxylated triterpenoid to crank down the old ethanol dehydrogenase. Teaching m’self about beer ’n’ hangovers. What did you bring?” He made as if to paw at her sleeve. She ducked round him gracefully.
“Myself,” she said, evaluating and assessing. Pig, sober, would just about fill her needs. Pig, drunk, wasn’t even on the cards. “Just my wonderful self, fat boy. Where’s Fi?”
Pig grunted and took a big swig from his glass. Swaying, he spilled some of it down his chin. “Next cell over.” Grunt. “Had bad day thinking too hard this-morn. ’M’I dumb yet?”
She stared at him. “What’s the cube root of 2,362?”
“Mmm … six-point-nine … point-nine-seven … point-nine-seven-one…”
She left Pig slowly factoring his way out of her trap in a haze of Newtonian approximation and drifted on into the night, a pale-skinned ghost dressed in artful black tatters. Fancy dress, forgotten youthful death cults. She allowed herself to feel a bit more mellow toward Pig, even condescending to think fondly of him. Pig’s wallowing self-abasement made her own withdrawn lack of socialization feel a bit less retarded. The world was full of nerds and exiles. The hothouse of forced brilliance the Septagon system produced also generated a lot of smart misfits, and even if none of them fit in individually, together they made an interesting mosaic.
There were people dancing in the next manufactory cell, accelerated bagpipes, feedback howls, a zek who’d hacked himself into a drum-machine trance whacking on a sensor grid to provide a hammering beat. It was an older crowd, late teens/early twenties, the tail end of high school. There were fewer fashion victims than you’d see at a normal high school hop, but wilder extremes; most people dressed — or didn’t — as if they picked up whatever was nearest to their bed that morning, plus one or two exaggeratedly bizarre ego statements. A naked, hairless boy with a clanking crotch full of chromed chain links, dancing cheek to cheek with another boy, long-haired, wearing a swirling red gown that left his pierced and swollen nipples visible. A teenage girl in extreme fetish gear hobbled past; her wasp-waist corsetry, leather ball gag, wrist and ankle chains were all visible beneath a transparent, floor-sweeping dress. Wednesday ignored the exhibitionist extremals: they were fundamentally boring, attention-craving types who needed to be needed and were far too demanding to make good fuck-friends.
She headed for the back of the unit, hunting real company. Fiona was sitting on top of a dead cornucopia box, wearing black leggings and a T-shirt locked to the output from an entropy pool. She was chatting to a boy wearing a pressure suit liner with artfully slashed knees. The spod clutched a nebulizer, and was gesticulating dreamily. Fi looked up and called, “Wednesday!”
“Fi!” Wednesday leaned forward and hugged her. Fiona’s breath was smoky. “What is this, downer city?”
Fi shrugged. “Sammy said make it dumb, but not everyone got it.” (On the dance floor Miss Ball Gag was having difficulty communicating with some boy in a black rubber body-stocking who wanted to dance: their sign language protocols were incompatible.) Fi smiled. “Vinnie, meet Wednesday. You want a drink, Wednesday?”
“Yeah, whatever.”
Fi snapped her fingers and Vinnie blinked slowly, then shambled off in the direction of the bar. “Nice guy, I think, under the dumb layer. I dunno. I didn’t want to get wasted before everybody else, know what I mean?”
Wednesday hitched up her sarong and jumped up on the box beside Fi. “Ack. No uppers? No inverse-agonists?”
Fiona shook her head. “House rules. You want to come in, you check your IQ at the door. Hear the jammers?”
“No.” When she said it, Wednesday suddenly realized that she could: the pink noise field was like tinnitus, scratching away at the edges of her implant perceptions. Does Herman talk to Sam? she wondered. “So that’s what’s got to Pig.”
“Yeah. He’s cute when he’s thick, isn’t he?” Fi giggled a bit and Wednesday smiled — sepulchrally, she hoped, because she didn’t really know how Fi expected her to respond. “ ’Sa good excuse. Get dumb, get dumber, stop thinking, relax.”
“You been at it already?” Wednesday kept her voice down.
“Yeah. Just a bit.”
“Too bad. Was hoping to talk about—”
“Shh.” Fi leaned against her. “I am going to get in Vinnie’s pants tonight, see if I don’t!” She pointed at the spod who was swaying back and forth, and working his way toward them. “Ass so tight you could drop him and he’d bounce.”
The music was doing things to him and to Fi that sent a stab of jealousy all the way from Wednesday’s amygdala to her crotch. She smoothed her skirt down. “What do you expect to find in his pants? A catfish?”
Fi giggled again. “Listen, just this once! Relax. Let go, ducky. Stop thinking, fuck like a bunny, learn the joy of grunt. Can’t you switch off?”