The Grips of a Kicked Habit

Or: "Blanque City Blues"

A light in the dark, a midnight cigarette. An alley devoid of neon pollution. Smells like gutter water and spent flint.

I had quit nine years ago. The overhauling Digitization Protocol burned the past away and put the future under a microscope. I could be a new man under the new regime. The chase hadn’t been worth the catch in years, and it was starting to weigh on the ol’ conscience. No number of Means to Forget could blur all the memories permanently. Verrick Raz breathed down the collective neck of Blanque City.

I told Kasey the proprietor of the flesh trade was within a yarn’s stroke on the pin board. She told me it was a dead end, that Raz was too careful to get his hands dirty in the night market while his campaign was finally gaining steam. Donblue had told her as much, and Donblue did all her thinking. She was primed to accept this, of course. If the racket fell, the business would dissolve with it, and who would take her then? Spoiled rotten goods peddled into destitution. She was Donblue’s best girl, though. Enough Means to Forget had erased what needed to be erased such that she could operate at a productive level. Snort crushed kay-oh to erode established neural networks and catalyze neurogenesis. Maybe that was why she called me Forester.

It took Kasey’s son bleeding out in my arms under a digital rain to cement the truth in my head.

Downtown Blanque City was suffused with the cacophonic cocktail of thunderous rail traffic, the rabble of neon adverts and that static sound of crowd conversation. A sort of hazy corporate pop soundtrack raced through the streets like wind to cover any would-be silent beats. This world was basked in a ceaseless irradiated neon glow, giving the happenin’ Downtown streets a feeling of perpetual daytime. In the Yard, meanwhile, the mechanical hum of excavation, reclamation and refining brought to you by Crystus Industries rumbled on indefinitely. The electrically stained clomps of patrol mechs pounded regularly along as a reminder to all scrappers. Hypnotic, wordless dance rhythms bump-bumped from within strobing night clubs crushed under the weight of countless apartment levels above. String lights cobwebbed the stacks of disjointed living quarters, crossing over dim streets littered with kay-oh junkies. That smell of chemical refuse hovered above all, raining down from that ever-present cloud of industry smoke that obscured the sky and skyline. Long, looming shadows made one feel trapped in eternal evening here.

The earth taste of sweet smoke passed through my nostrils as I exhaled. Covered up the rot stench of behind-the-refinery. I had quit nine years ago, and almost again six months back. Raz hated that alleyways existed. Dark shadows obscured faces, couldn’t be caught by visor mechs.

“Our addictions are our masters,” Raz said with a face surrounded by little mechanical boxes with built-in mics. His face was drowned in synthetic light, giving his pale flesh a plastic look. Everything looked plastic on a telescreen.

I stomp out my smoke and look up the refinery wall.

Glass shatters and the pieces careen two stories down. After a beat of heart-clutching silence, they crush into soft fairy dust. It’s dark in there, save for some moonlit rays beaming down from high-up windows at steady intervals. The angled skylights reveal dormant machinery—inert conveyors, big ugly furnaces, a massive drill—and the alien-tendril cord bundles connecting them like veins. At the south end of the refinery that massive drill head sags hanging from its wrenched crane arm. The threads glisten galaxy purple and host a star array of tiny titanium specks. The head points down toward a floor of ripped apart earth leading to a deep, deep void. A circumference of banded metal scaffolding partitions the drill site from the concrete floor of the facility. I scan left to right. A pair of buzzing, tank-treaded visor mechs loop around the painted Safe Zone walkways in surveillance, one chasing the other by precisely half the length of the building. I extend a careful leg through the broken window and search with a pointed toe for purchase.

“Only when Man is free from his predilection, nay his attachment, to sin, can we finally fulfil our cosmic destiny. To paint the stars Human.” Uproarious applause. Flickers from a million visor mechs snapping headline photos for derelict news forums.

The Missing Link could be found in a particular, one-of-a-kind server in the data lounge of the Northshore Crystus refinery, Kasey explained before the ferry shuttled her away. Some, finally, hard evidence to nail Raz for good, I said. Nail him to a cell wall, I said. Let the prodigiously criminally inclined rip him apart like vulture mechs shredded dumpster heaps, I thought.

Colonel Goedrick was quite the qualified lookout, in that his ability to look out in the opposite direction of his boss’s crimes was next to none. He was so good, in fact, that even the visor mechs stationed to overlook his post seemed to hide their shameful viewing ports too. He had been the final brick in Raz’s fortress walls, a brick that needed to be seduced and extracted with absolute care.

“Apparently, imperium education didn’t teach the ancient dictum involving snitches and resultant stitches,” Kasey had said. “The big tough boy sang like a Pink Street queen when I pressed the tin snips to his balls.”

Did you get rid of him, I asked.

She winked an overly made-up eye.

Climbing down the cold steel piping no wider than my two-hand grip, the chill of the desolate factory suddenly struck me and sent a shiver shock through my skeleton. I leaped down the last few meters and landed in a soft squat. Look left, look right. The visors’ synchronous buzzing melded with the far-off hum and humbug of Downtown night life. One could not even commit a good, old-fashioned, off-the-grid B&E without the sonic invasion of the sleepless city. Look up. A dull, neon blue tube ringed the factory in the highest corners, keeping softly lit the circumference of cheap metal catwalk that allowed the day visors to keep an eagle eye on would-be unionizers. I clocked the surveying mechs on opposing ends of their infinite path. Look ahead. The double doors to the data lounge are a dead sprint across the facility. I break for them in a hunched-low dash.

Raz Towers, contrary to his factories, was a dangerous gold, spotlit from the ground and aerially with moonlight cannons. His running, performative gag had always been that he was a proprietor of love but had the necessary punch to tackle the big issues with gusto, like a rose and its thorns. He plastered a massive, glimmering, two-story rose on the tower’s face that watched over the Square. Security was dialed up to maximum-plus-one when Raz announced his candidacy. The mineral magnate had been on my radar since Crystus stocks went gangbusters after the great DP, and his cult o’ personality campaign drew me even further into his world. About six months ago I posed as a political reporter to gain access to the tower. A counterfeit press badge and accompanying lanyard weren’t worth what they used to be, but something told me Raz wouldn’t miss an opportunity to run his mouth. The inside was as sickly marble white and gilded as one assumed the inner sanctum of the World Bank might be. The lobby was twice the width of the average Yard apartment and doubled it again in length. The floral adornments next to every bench and table, the museum grade statues of proud historic men and the gallery of pastel and prude portraits were, alone, worth more than the combined wealth of every scrapper. Kasey always wanted a fancy apartment Downtown for her and her son. I could’ve ripped one rope of gold trimming from the walls so clean and white you could see your reflection in them and sold it to a crafter for enough jack to put half of the Northshore up in their own suite.

I lit a cigarette in the lobby and almost got detained. And for that, Raz knew who I was the moment I walked into his hundred-and-fifty-fifth floor office (which was, of course, his secondary office for less pressing affairs. His private suite was located on the one-hundred-and-ninety-ninth floor). Nothing transpired within the golden bricks of his obeliskine monument without his knowing about it. That was when I heard his famed rhetoric in full color, face-to-face.

“Our addictions are our masters,” he said with a handsome voice that emitted from the throat that held up his handsome face. “Our chains—” he looked at the laminated tag hanging from my neck and I clocked a slight frown appear on that chiseled face of his. “Mr. Forester.”

Then he smirked. He dug into the inner breast pocket of his tan corporate jacket and pulled out a smoquer. He brought the device to his lips and the little blue light on it’s ass-end torched on and danced in a simulacrum of a moving flame. He inhaled and the light smoldered. He exhaled digital smoke. Smelled like the toxic plume of a refinery.

He recognized my puzzled expression and put on a politician’s winning smile.

“Who knows evil better than the devil?”

Digital safecracking was as common a misdemeanor as jaywalking in the Yard. If a kid scrapper clutched his pearls at the thought of splitting open a safe’s panel, jacking into the terminal with an alphanumerometer and running the artificially intelligent code-cracking algorithm until the hitch popped his friends would throw ceaseless jeers, call him a wuss for life.

I cracked my fingernail prying open the panel that married the double doors to the data lounge and cursed at the stinging pain. A scanning visor hummed its way past the vestibule and I ducked behind a wide-bodied, steel barrel of god-knows-what. The hum faded and I returned to work. I pinched and twisted the twin wires of the AN and fired up the algo. A waterfall of letters, numbers and symbols trickled into the ten container nodes on the AN’s compact screen and were dumped out just as rapidly. It would take a moment for the AI to sort this one out. In the meantime, I thought about cigarettes.

Raz kicked a leg over his knee and reclined in his leather chair. Behind him, a floor-to-ceiling wall of windows portrayed a Blanque City night from on high, blurred and blued by a blanket of chemical fog tinted by moonlight. A static, muted pink glow of neon commotion gave the miniature diorama of Downtown a candied effect. The eastern coast rippled as waves came in and came out, its unpredictable nature kept safely away from the city by the port authority’s grand barrier. As one who still remembered the old songs, the beauty of the shore did live up to its poetic reputation. The Northshore was alight with the dim, orange lines of string-lit alleyways. The Crystus refinery, though, was dark and abandoned at this hour. Thankfully, I marked that down in my notebook of journalistic integrity.

I asked Raz about his plans to eradicate crime in Blanque City, because that’s what I thought a reporter might ask. He told me if you can’t cure the soil, the weeds will keep sprouting. I asked him what that meant.

“There is a sickness in this city, and its deeper than cellular. It’s genetic. It’s in the DNA. The people it produces can’t help but inherit the disease.”

I asked him if this disease had a name.

“I believe you know it well, Mr. Forester.”

The disease had a name and I knew it. I knew it long before Raz was on my telescreen ranting about it. Before he decided to run I had just about thrown this case in the incinerator. I told Kasey the trafficking network couldn’t be decapitated because it didn’t have a head. These girls would continue to arrive by the shipping container-full from Jiao and Alberesque and the Great States, and they would be endlessly sold off and used by Raz-rich goons and their Raz-rich friends because the system had shielded itself from the vulnerability of a leader. This mechanism was headed by a silhouette on a pin board, and, because of that, it could maneuver like an amoeba around any potential threat while the engine kept churning. Even in crisis its vitals would function, and the organism would survive. Parasites were easy to exterminate. Kill the host. But this business was no parasite. It was symbiotic, and its purposes aligned with its benefactor around a singular domain.

If that domain were discovered, that Missing Link, the system may just implode. The silhouette would concretize. After Digitization I thought the Missing Link would never be uncovered, and I thought I might just quit. Six months ago, Verrick Raz convinced me not to quit.

The AN meter beepbeepbeep’ed and I awoke from a sleepless reverie. I pocketed the meter, peeled the heavy doors apart and slipped inside.

Overhead was a shadowed dome that might have gone forever skyward for all my senses could figure. A two-story flight of perforated metal stairs descended into a pit surrounded by darkness. In the center of the pit a matrix of five-hundred-some-odd server towers flickered and blinked and whirred with digital effort. A telegramming codebase transferred and sorted the active data of the entire Northshore’s populace instantaneously. A host of visor and tinker mechs sped on their tire treads through the alleyways of the server array, visors watching and tinkerers tinkering.

A clank echoed through the dome with each step as I proceeded toward the heart. I dove behind the first server I reached and awaited an opening between passing mechs. I investigated each tower in my path for that particular, one-of-a-kind server that housed my Missing Link, but they all looked the damn same. A plastic black frame as tall as I, each encasing a calculator-looking device with buttons and a screen and a series of maybe fifty or so little rectangles that strobed like twinkling festival lights. I pressed on toward the center of the array.

“The DNA implants an addiction to addiction,” Raz said. “We can’t help but become addicted. Before the advent of electricity, they called it worship. Before the advent of high-fructose corn syrup, instant speed internet, lab-grown hallucinogens and augmented virtual reality, they called it God.”

Raz tapped his handsome butt chin and smirked. “I am curious to ask everyone I meet, so I hope you’ll indulge me… Who is your God, Detective Bisquane?”

I told him that wasn’t—that’s not my—I’m not a detective—I… I held up the badge of my lanyard.

Raz’s smirk turned sour and his steel blue eyes unfocused as they aimed at the face of his polished, dark wood desk. “You thought the past was behind you, Detective.” He looked at me again, robotic. Angry. Righteous. “Information is my God.”

I sighed. Okay, I said, you caught me.

“You will be the last casualty of the old world,” Raz taunted. “But for now, I have but two questions for you. One—as I’ve already inquired—who or what is your God? Whom or what do you worship? What is your brain and blood addicted to? And secondly: What exactly are you investigating here at Raz Towers? Or, more pointedly, why are you investigating Verrick Raz?”

A slasher mech carves its heat blades through the night sky in a breath-taking laser light show. Stunning neon trails cut through the black of a hardly starlit sky, masked over with the buzzing, vision-doubling haze of chemical smoke. A shield mech is diced down the center and its twinned halves fall apart while sparks spray like blood. The slasher lands and sheaths its pair of heat blades like a victorious gladiator. The kids lucky enough to see this event live all swear its viewing port was looking directly at them. There was a time when life was simpler and this was the televised event of the summer, an epic sporting event that young boys would drunkenly recount in amazement into their elder years, arguing playfully about the minutia until the sun broke over the eastern barrier. Patrol mechs cut up scrappers in front of their homes like boiled potatoes in [current year].

Kasey said the server would be unique looking, couldn’t miss it. She didn’t know its precise qualities, though, as it was hard to fully register the Colonel’s exact words through blubbering, teary-eyed iterations of “Don’t cut off my balls, please.”

Looking down the grid of servers it seemed to go on forever, a labyrinth of immeasurable data useless and inaccessible to nearly everyone in Blanque City. Raz had a function for it, though. It had made him a wealthy man. But the chase was almost up.

It was probably the gold-plated server with the glimmering rose plaque on its face, right?

I told Raz that I quit nine years ago. Didn’t pick it up again until a few months ago when I realized that everything had gone to shit so there was no reason to fight anymore.

“A rather dull outlook,” Raz mocked.

The truth isn’t supposed to make you feel good, I said. That’s why it’s so hard to find—buried so deep beneath layers of meaning and unmeaning that the chase starts to feel like a game of inevitable failure. Those who aren’t prepared for it go mad, I tell him.

Raz cocked his head and smirked. “I don’t think you really believe that.”

The truth is that I’ve forgotten, I say. A sufficient intake of Means to Forget.

Nine years ago it felt like the truth would illude me for the rest of my natural life. I say natural because I couldn’t even find the strength to end mine unnaturally. My punishment needed still be served. My addiction hadn’t been conquered; a God yet usurped. But that was then and this is now.

The golden server had no code to break, only a panel that required the antiquated art of ripping shit apart with one’s bare hands to open. I pried it from the main console and looked into the compartment. Inside was a small folder, a relic of a more physical time. I had been nine long, long years. Clipped to the folder was a photo and I squinted to sharpen the image in the low light. A man in a long tan jacket appeared, wearing a black cap that shaded his eyes, standing in an alleyway, his face ablaze with the flash of a cigarette lighter.

The document concealed within the folder: A police report. It was dated nine years ago nearly to the day. I knew that date well, as anyone who remembered the old world did. The day before the Digitization Protocol. And I happened to know that this was the very final physical document ever transcribed. It was supposed to have burned with the rest of them.

Detective Kilmichael, Bisquane

On the afternoon of [day/month/year], B. Kilmichael pled guilty in a private judicial proceeding to engaging in sexual acts with undocumented and underaged women smuggled into Blanque City illegally. He will be terminated from the force at once and forfeit his pension; to be recycled back into the Community Fund for the Reconstitution of the Residential District. As a public servant who has pled guilty, B. Kilmichael will not face a televised hearing. He will be barred from employment in the public sector indefinitely.

No one knew my name except Raz and Kasey’s boy. I told him before he died in my arms under a digital rain. I told his mother that we were searching for the truth, and that we would avenge him, but the chase would take us deep within the heart of Raz’s backward, twisted, despot’s wet dream of an administration. That was six months ago.

I’m not a bad person, I promise. Kasey’s son died in my arms, killed by an errant patrol mech, caught in the crossfire.

Kasey was safely on a trash ferry, free from this wicked city at last.

Raz is a proprietor of love and truth and information. His thorns cut deep.

I’m just an addict.

The file and attached photo went up in a quick flame right there on the data lounge floor underneath Crystus Industries’ Northshore refinery. Drifting ash was something beautiful, like snowfall from a grimmer world.

That’s why these days I turn toward the wall when I light up a cigarette.