You stood a little ways behind the other men with your hands in your pockets. I knew that look: you were too tired to pretend to be having a good time.
I smiled at you as hard as I could. Finally, you looked up. I thought maybe you would recognize me somehow. Maybe you would cry out, “It’s you!” and take me in your arms. Or maybe, at the very least, you’d let your gaze linger on me a little longer than normal.
But you didn’t. You made that nervous grimace you do whenever a woman pays too much attention to you. Then you ambled off to look at a Lexus—a four-door with lots of cabin space. Good for families.
I watched you move. Your shoulders were slumped as though you carried something very heavy.
Then more bodies flowed between us, wealthy men and their school-aged mistresses, nouveau riche wives and their spoiled bachelor sons searching for a car to attract a pretty bride, broke students in designer knockoffs come to take selfies in front of BMWs so they can pretend to be rich on Weixin.
I lost you among them. I did not find you again.
An Evening with Severyn Grimes
RICH LARSON
Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and Edmonton, Alberta, and worked in a small Spanish town outside Seville. He now lives in Grande Prairie, Alberta. He won the 2014 Dell Award and the 2012 Rannu Prize for Writers of Speculative Fiction. In 2011 his cyberpunk novel Devolution was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His short work appears or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, AE, and many others, including the anthologies Upgraded, Futuredaze, and War Stories. Coming up is his first collection, Tomorrow Factory. Find him online at richwlarson.tumblr.com.
Here he delivers a suspenseful, fast-paced tale in which a kidnapped billionaire has to try to outwit his kidnappers while in captivity, and at the same time deal with an angry young woman who has some very real personal reasons for wanting him dead.
“Do you have to wear the Fawkes in here?” Girasol asked, sliding into the orthochair. Its worn wings crinkled, leaking silicon, as it adjusted to her shape. The plastic stuck cold to her shoulder blades, and she shivered.
“No.” Pierce made no move to pull off the smirking mask. “It makes you nervous,” he explained, groping around in the guts of his open Adidas track-bag, his tattooed hand emerging with the hypnotic. “That’s a good enough reason to wear it.”
Girasol didn’t argue, just tipped her dark head back, positioning herself over the circular hole they’d punched through the headrest. Beneath it, a bird’s nest of circuitry, mismatched wiring, blinking blue nodes. And in the center of the nest: the neural jack, gleaming wet with disinfectant jelly.
She let the slick white port at the top of her spine snick open.
“No cheap sleep this time,” Pierce said, flicking his nail against the inky vial. “Get ready for a deep slice, Sleeping Beauty. Prince Charming’s got your shit. Highest-grade Dozr a man can steal.” He plugged it into a battered needler, motioned for her arm. “I get a kiss or what?”
Girasol proffered her bruised wrist. Let him hunt around collapsed veins while she said, coldly, “Don’t even think about touching me when I’m under.”
Pierce chuckled, slapping her flesh, coaxing a pale blue worm to stand out in her white skin. “Or what?”
Girasol’s head burst as the hypnotic went in, flooding her capillaries, working over her neurotransmitters. “Or I’ll cut your fucking balls off.”
The Fawkes’s grin loomed silent over her; a brief fear stabbed through the descending drug. Then he laughed again, barking and sharp, and Girasol knew she had not forgotten how to speak to men like Pierce. She tasted copper in her mouth as the Dozr settled.
“Just remember who got you out of Correctional,” Pierce said. “And that if you screw this up, you’d be better off back in the freeze. Sweet dreams.”
The mask receded, and Girasol’s eyes drifted up the wall, following the cabling that crept like vines from the equipment under her skull, all the way through a crack gouged in the ceiling, and from there to whatever line Pierce’s cronies had managed to splice. The smartpaint splashed across the grimy stucco displayed months of preparation: shifting sat-maps, decrypted dossiers, and a thousand flickering image loops of one beautiful young man with silver hair.
Girasol lowered the chair. Her toes spasmed, kinking against each other as the thrumming neural jack touched the edge of her port. The Dozr kept her breathing even. A bone-deep rasp, a meaty click, and she was synched, simulated REM brain-wave flowing through a current of code, flying through wire, up and out of the shantytown apartment, flitting like a shade into Chicago’s dark cityscape.
Severyn Grimes felt none of the old heat in his chest when the first round finished with a shattered nose and a shower of blood, and he realized something: the puppet shows didn’t do it for him anymore.
The fighters below were massive, as always, pumped full of HGH and Taurus and various combat chemicals, sculpted by a lifetime in gravity gyms. The fight, as always, wouldn’t end until their bodies were mangled heaps of broken bone and snapped tendon. Then the technicians would come and pull the digital storage cones from the slick white ports at the tops of their spines, so the puppeteers could return to their own bodies, and the puppets, if they were lucky, woke up in meat repair with a paycheck and no permanent paralysis.
It seemed almost wasteful. Severyn stroked the back of his neck, where silver hair was shorn fashionably around his own storage cone. Beneath him, the fighters hurtled from their corners, grappled, broke, and collided again. He felt nothing. Severyn’s adrenaline only ever seemed to spike in boardrooms now. Primate aggression through power broking.
“I’m growing tired of this shit,” he said, and his bodyguard carved a clear exit through the baying crowd. Follow-cams drifted in his direction, foregoing the match for a celeb-spotting opportunity: the second-wealthiest bio-businessman in Chicago, 146 years old but plugged into a beautiful young body that played well on cam. The godlike Severyn Grimes slumming at a puppet show, readying for a night of downtown debauchery? The paparazzi feed practically wrote itself.
A follow-cam drifted too close; Severyn raised one finger, and his bodyguard swatted it out of the air on the way out the door.
Girasol jolted, spiraled down to the floor. She’d drifted too close, too entranced by the geometry of his cheekbones, his slate gray eyes and full lips, his swimmer’s build swathed in Armani and his graceful hands with Nokia implants glowing just under the skin. A long way away, she was dimly aware of her body in the orthochair in the decrepit apartment. She scrawled a message across the smartpaint:
“They’re, shit, they’re on their way. Stall him.” Pierce’s voice was distant, an insect hum, but she could detect the sound of nerves fraying.
Girasol jumped to another follow-cam, triggering a fizz of sparks as she seized its motor circuits. The image came in upside down: Mr. Grimes clambering into the limo, the bodyguard scanning the street. Springy red hair and a brutish face suggested Neanderthal gene-mixing. Him, they would have to get rid of.
The limousine door glided shut. From six blocks away, Girasol triggered the crude mp4 file she’d prepared—sometimes the old tricks worked best—and wormed inside the vehicle’s CPU on a sine wave of sound.