From: gdg019@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Ridley McIntyre)
Subject: STORY: MONKEYTRICK [revised] (2/6)
Keywords: Rat 2.2
Organization: Fifth Column, Coventry, UK
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 16:42:16 GMT

                  	MONKEYTRICK - by Ridley McIntyre

                               2. Toys.

The suite on Floor 113 at the Miramar Hotel in the center of the St. James
Secure Zone has a dry, air-conditioned taste to it. Motorhead finds himself
pulling his stuck tongue from the roof of his mouth as he waits with Dex for
Sarah to get dressed down again. Sarah doesn't have that many street clothes,
as she doesn't touch the streets that much. She's much more used to this kind
of life, up here in the sky, where you can't even see the London Outzone thanks
to the dirty grey clouds that blanket the entire view from the window.
Motorhead almost feels like he could jump on top of them and they'd be sturdy
enough to take his weight.

 Piercing the clouds far away are the columnic towers of various other Secure 
Zones. Battle Bridge Points, Tottenham Court Points, Bowling Green Points, 
Camden Points, Canbury Points, the tip of the Smallpox Hospital spire and the 
various billowing stacks of the dustzone Workhouses. Underneath, he knows, are 
the countless crumbling, uncompleted, towers of the Outzone, none of which 
stand more than 100 storeys high.

 Unlike Motorhead, Dex has tasted rooms like this before. They are nothing new
to him, but they call up a certain brand of feeling that he doesn't want to
have running around his guts just now. So he distracts himself by checking out
the Disney channels on the colour TV, then, realising that they only make the
feeling worse, he switches off the set. To utter silence.

 Motorhead shuffles a bit, his hands slidingly nervously in and out of the 
pockets of his blue Sodhaboy baseball jacket. Then he slumps down on the couch 
and runs his fingers over ultravelvet smoother than the skin on a 20 Rupee 
kitten. He feels the need to take off the cap he's wearing and spin it around
on a finger. Finally he jerks himself back to his feet.

 "Have they got room service here?" he says.

 Dex points him to a machine in the corner that claims to produce anything to 
order within fifteen seconds. Motorhead orders a plastic bottle of cider.

 "Want anything?" he offers to Dex. His friend shakes his head. "Fair enough."

 When the cider arrives - Motorhead times it at 12.48 seconds on his ancient
Seiko digital - he opens it and downs it all in one. It has a lot of flavour, 
but no bubbles, and Motorhead wonders whether it's flat or that's the way it's 
meant to be.

 He stands in awe of the room, scared yet admiring. "Like the places in the
TV soaps, innit, Boy? Only in colour."

 Dex sits down with his hands in his lap and tries to think of nothing. But
that memory keeps coming back, and it's tied to his dream. That dream he had
in Berlin with the children and the girl called Pain. Somewhere there is a
link in all this. He had to be here for some other reason than Vijayanta's
threat, but his mind is averting it; everytime he tries to think about her,
tries to remember her face, he thinks of something else. Vijayanta wants him
to forget, and it has nearly worked. Remembering is the key to the pain he is
feeling, but remembering what?

 He looks at Motorhead, but he's trying to find a pocket in his black leather
jacket that will fit the bottle. Real petroleum plastic, worth a lot on the
streets of the Outzone.`No, he wouldn't know,' he thinks. `He wouldn't
remember.'

 The sun is starting to break through on this side of the Miramar building and
its tiny arc pours red/purple light into the room through large circle windows.
The light brings out the contours and some of the unhealable scars on Boy's
face. Motorhead notices for the first time that his black hair is all implanted
and bald patches show through it. It is also much longer than Dex ever used to
allow. Motorhead can see that something's wrong there. Vijayanta put his body
back together, but his brain isn't what it used to be. Dex has lost his old
self, and it sends a stealthy shiver crawling down Motorhead's thin neck.

                                ***

It takes them most of the morning to reach their destination. They find a
cycle-rickshaw that will take them and they ride in the back. Dex spends most
of the ride either watching the beggars and street vendors and kittens - pre-
pubescent prostitutes - plying trade in the darkness under the city's towers,
or hiding his face in amused shame as Motorhead makes a play for Sarah. She 
takes it all calmly, filling in her company background and other trivia.

 Motorhead learns that she was born in Milton Keynes, the centre of Thames 
Midland, that she followed her father into computers at Logica, one
of the companies that Vijayanta IG own. Eventually, she was picked up for 
contract work with Vijayanta and after only three years is slowly making a 
name for herself. Finding out what happened to Rhea is just the next step
on the ladder for her.

 "I nearly cried when Rhea disappeared. We looked for it everywhere within
the system. But it was nowhere. It wasn't compiled, or compressed. It was just
gone. No trace."

 By the end of the journey, Motorhead is starting to give up on the woman, who
is pretty, but not very interesting. Her entire manner seems to reveal to him
certain flavours of non-life that must exist in the world of the Secure Zone.
Sarah is People Who Don't Like To Party Because They Have Work To Do flavour.

 "How comes we're doing it this way? I mean, you lose something that big and
it's a Fed problem, innit? The FDI should be doing this."

 "Let's just say that Rhea knows some things that we don't really want to go
public. Understand? Best to keep your trap shut about this." Her voice is
stern, but calm. Dex can still feel her temperature bunny-hop a degree.

 "So just tell me one more time why I should help you and the Boy find it," he
asks her with a frown.

 "Do you enjoy life?" she replies. He nods. "Then you do as I tell you."

 Covent Garden Market is a technical bazarr. A rectangle covered by rusting 
corrugated iron and sheets of gas-planet pvc. The surrounding towers cast a 
grim shadow over the whole affair, and though the far-off sky is blue,
twinkling with the new stars of low-orbit workstations, down here the air is
cold and thick with a sweaty dampness.

 "Who did you say we could find here again?" Sarah asks.

 Motorhead barges his way through the slow-moving crowds, jostling with scores
of people who seem intent to just stand at look at the merchandise, rather than
buy or move on. The couriers sell laserdisks, microsofts for those who like
plugging things straight into their neural systems, stolen Fednet PC's, valve
amps, monochrome TV's and even headset radios at their stalls. None seem to want
to undercut anyone else's prices.

 "Nukie. He's one of the best technojacks this side of the river. If he can't 
build us a deck, no one can. He built mine for me."

  Nukie is a white-boy steamer. His hair trails lank and greasy around his 
broad shoulders, eyes wide open and wild, with pin-prick pupils; and he stands
taller than anyone Sarah has ever seen, at least two metres high. Sarah
concludes that Nukie is the biggest, ugliest man this side of Milton Keynes.

 "Howay, Mo. Who're they?" Nukie's Geordie accent is slowly tempering in the 
London Outzone. A product of growing up in one place and having to work in 
another. South Shields, the small industrial complex where he was born, has 
been abandoned by Nissan, and the whole workforce can now be seen dotted 
around Thames Midland trying to find work. Nukie's father worked on computer 
components for Nissan automobiles, and the young man picked up a lot of his 
technical flair.

 "This is Sarah. And this is the Camden Town Boy."

 "Pleased to make your acquaintance," he says to them. His face doesn't register
Dex's old handle. The Boy must have been before his time, yet Nukie's scarred
face makes him look old enough to be Motorhead's father.

 "So what're you after?"

 Boy steps in before Motorhead can make any comprimises or deals. "I need a
cyberdeck. As fast as you can build it, with military-level signature masking. 
It'll need to run about five cartridges. And a Fednet PC to write the software 
on. Unlicensed, of course."

 Nukie's scarred face breaks into a toothy grin. "Not after much, are we? I'll
have you one by tomorrow morning, depending on how much you're willing to pay
for it."

 "Depends on how much you're willing to charge."

 Three roughriders at the stall to their right argue over the price of a Drum
microsoft, drowning out much of the conversation, making them repeat nearly
everything twice. The roughriders wear insect-like, plastic armoured suits, 
spray-painted in wild day-glow colours. One of them wears a jacket like 
Motorhead's, orange leather baseball-style, with a patch on the breast shaped
into a letter S. Sodhaboys. Sarah stands back and watches everything. In a 
place like this, it's all she can do.

                                ***

The following morning, Dex is woken by a tickling sensation on his cheek.

 Unconsciously, he goes to scratch his face when his fingers knock an unphased
roach to the dusty carpet in front of his face. The roach scuttles off towards
the safety of the skirting board. Dex opens his other eye and remembers that
Motorhead somehow managed to convince him to sleep on his floor at his place
after a night at the Blue Cross.

 "Drink, Boy?" Motorhead is standing at the door to the kitchen. It instantly
makes him remember Kitty in Manhattan, only she used to lean against the door
frame; while Motorhead has his arms stretched across the entrance, and peers
in.

 Dex has a dry mouth, filled with carpet dust, so answers with a nod.

 "Can I ask you something, Boy?" He hears Motorhead shuffling around the tiny
kitchen. "How much thumb has she got on you? How badly do you belong to her."

 He rubs his eyes and yawns. "Well, I can't say she saved my life, but... Look,
if I find this thing then they might leave me alone." He feels like telling 
him about the dreams, but he decides to leave that in case of emergency. He 
didn't want the younger decker to know too much.

 "Must be weird, being officially dead. Means you have to really lay low."

 Dex agrees to himself. Yeah. Really weird.

 Motorhead comes in with coffee made from a Vijayanta ration pack and scalding
water. "You'd better get ready. It's nearly eight o'clock. Sarah'll be here
soon, and I've gotta date with Dev Lung."

 "Where to today?" Dex asks, then burns the roof of his mouth with the coffee
and is glad for some sensation there.

 "Gridland, matey. Your toys have arrived."

(c) COPYRIGHT 1993 BY RIDLEY MCINTYRE
-- 
 ____ @     |  | Ridley McIntyre  -  gdg019@cck.cov.ac.uk | EARTH      CALLING |
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