“Remember me?” said Frankie, pressing himself deeper into the public phone booth. “We had a little chat about cars a couple of nights back.” He squinted at the screen, making out the shape of a well-lit room and what looked like a pile of machines on a bed.
“You,” said the youth on the other end of the line, pouring burning hate into that single word. “You got balls calling me.”
“Listen,” Frankie said. “If you weren’t just bragging about being hooked up with the triad societies, I could have a deal for you. I need a job done.”
“The fuck?” spat the other voice. “You piece of worm shit, you do this to my blood and then you call me up trying to play me? I’ll fucking ice you!”
Frankie blinked. This wasn’t going how he had expected it to. “Wait, what are you talking about?”
The camera view wobbled and rushed in close to the bed, and with a start Frankie understood what he was looking at-a haggard woman on a life-support machine. “What was it, huh?” snarled the car thief. “Is this your way of getting your own back on me for jacking that Vector? You pump my sister full of that blue poison and leave her to die?”
A cold trickle of recognition shot through the executive. The woman’s face was familiar to him. “I know her… I saw her at the party…”
“What d’you say?” snapped the thief. “Tell me, damn it! Where did you see her?”
Frankie stuttered, wrong-footed. “Uh, with Mr Tze. At the Yuk Lung tower… But she seemed fine then.”
“Tze? I know who he is,” came a growl.
“Wait, no-” The screen went dead, and Frankie was left there in silence.
Ko snapped the phone shut and pocketed it.
Feng gave him a narrow stare.
“Boy, don’t do anything foolish.”
“I’m going to get a weapon,” he said, his voice low and loaded with menace. “And then I’m going to kill a man.”
Next on ZeeBeeCee Ultrasports Daily, we go Hue to Sao Paolo for the World Series of Celebrity Cockfighting. But first, live coverage of the day’s endorsed highway combat matches in the Denver Death Zone, including the triumphant comeback bout for John Knoxville and the surprise result on the Hasselhof Memorial Circuit CLICK…
I don’t care what you think, Susan.
But Bill, it’s just unnatural.
Love is the most natural thing of all, damn you! And Flippy and I are going away to the sea together and you can’t stop us! I love her! *sob* Oh Bill, how could you CLICK…
Hey kids, it’s Pepe The Robomule!
CLICK…
I promise not to kill you CLICK…
In a statement released earlier today, British Prime Minister Peter Mandelson said that he was “fully confident of the support of the nation” and that he felt that challenges to his recent policy statements by the Liberal-MetaMarxist-Democrat leader Edward Izzard were nothing more than blatant electioneering. Izzard was unavailable for comment, but his second-in-command William Bailey said CLICK…
Stay tuned to The Arthaus Channel for our retrospective on the works of stud actor Billy Priapus, following a hypertext-enhanced screening of his masterpiece Shaven Ravers IV CLICK…
And coming in at number ten on the Billboard Chart, the new single from Bombs Not Burkas, “Jihad My Ride” CLICK…
Now, the fourth season finale of Firefly, only on Wave-Net, followed by back-to-back episodes of Sundowners. Next: on a very special CSI: Baghdad CLICK…
Sea of stones, sand waves. Harmony, come with me. Taste the blue CLICK…
This gorgeous photodiamante necklace and nose-piercing set, only twenty left now and numbers are dropping fast. If you look here you can see a lovely crystal colouration. Call now, the number is on the bottom of your screen, we accept all major creditchips, indenture warrants and PRC-certified viable transplant organs CLICK.
9. Days of Being Wild
There were entire microcommunities living within the confines of Ocean Terminal. People crammed into the spun ferrocrete dorm blocks retrofitted to the upper decks, if they were rich enough, and beneath the waterline if they were the poorer folks. Parts of the terminal were turned over to maintaining the armoured corporate liners that rolled in from the South China Sea bristling with anti-pirate hardware, or the exclusive submersible party boats that sailed about the Golden Triangle on endless loops of debauchery. A liner was there today-the NeoGen Delphi, out of Osaka. Her decks were crammed with salarymen and their one-partner, one-child families, forbidden from disembarking but free to observe the city from their sealed viewing bubbles. While the NeoGen wageslaves looked down, the people who lived and worked in Ocean Terminal looked up. Almost everyone in the terminal was an employee of the Chinese State Corporation, never without the subtle red bracelet on their wrists bearing the happy face of the CSC’s Panda spokestoon Di-Di. The smiling bear beamed down from the walls of the dorms, above the school clutches and the clinics, inside the toilets and shared washrooms. The Panda provided; the terminal complex was a city-within-a-city, wrapped around the edge of Tsim Sha Tsui on Kowloon side, extending out into the bay like a giant growth of smooth white fungus. The Panda didn’t encourage people to quit life inside the terminal, once they’d been born into it-after all, why venture outside when the place you lived in had it all? It wasn’t uncommon for people to be born, to live and work and then perish without ever having crossed outside the boundaries of the massive mallplex. Ocean Terminal had grown so large that it had its own microclimate, its own emerging subculture. People living outside the ’plex in Kowloon called the residents “termites” and made fun of them on the late night comedy vids; the Panda’s people in turn watched the rest of Hong Kong go in and out of the thousands of stores and entertainment centres, and laughed amongst themselves as they took their money.
There were a lot of stories about Ocean Terminal; that it would one day break off and become an island, or expand to smother the whole southerly tip of the New Territories; some said there were gangcults on the lower levels who traded in human cargo, and indeed the APRC would make vague but unspecific comments when the question of abductions came up; others said that the Panda salted the drinking water in there with chemicals that made you need less sleep, so you could work more. But the story that kept circulating on the screamsheets, the one that had recently risen to the surface and failed to fade away, was about Juno Qwan.
She kept her private life private, and in interviews Juno would often give a coy smile and ask people to respect her wishes. That did nothing to deter the armies of stringers and newsnets eager to fill vid-time and fax pages with every iota of data they could unearth about the pop star. The rumour was that Juno was a former Panda Girl, a termite chick spotted by a talento hunter from RedWhiteBlue during a shopping expedition. The young Qwan, bussing tables at a Burger Konig and singing in that crystal clear voice, had been plucked from obscurity and thrust into the global spotlight.
It made for great copy and it played big with the natives in Hong Kong, that whole “local girl does good” angle. The odd thing was, there were forty-three Burger Konig franchises within the mallplex, but none of the managers had ever admitted to having the pre-famous Juno on their waitstaff. Reporters who tried to track down the fast food joint she worked at got dissimilar answers, conflicting shots of different yellow and blue storefronts for their webcasts; and if you scratched the surface, dug a little deeper, it was hard to find anything about the girl before her explosive debut at the top of the charts. But then the termites were terrible that way, weren’t they? Not very talkative to outsiders, a bit slow. They trusted in the Panda, and like everyone else who cheered Juno’s limobus as it slid to a halt on Canton Road, they had short memories. They didn’t remember the other performers that had topped the charts two, three, four years ago. Lisle Yep; TriniTriniTrini; Cressida; the Lovely Angels. Musichips bearing the names of these idols didn’t even appear in the bargain bins anymore; they’d been crushed and used for landfill.