Division Zero (14 page)

His eyes snapped left. “Be gentle with it, please. This car has already been through a lot.”

“You’re still worried about her, aren’t you?”

Dorian glanced away.

Kirsten decided to leave that alone for now. With the tallest of the buildings below them and a straight line ahead of her, she slowed down to appease him. The map dot for Tubular Dreams headed for a collision with their yellow triangle.

“That’s kind of a weird name for a store. What do they sell, fancy plumbing?”

Dorian looked away from the window. “You’ve never heard of gel parlors, have you?”

“Do I even want to know?”

“Little Miss Pure is about to get stained.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not that pure, I just look like it.”

“Well, you know about hyperspace transit right? The breathable gel tubes?”

“Yeah. I’ve never been in one but I read… something about the density of the liquid absorbs the forces involved with jumps.”

“Yep, those tubes. Well, some genius decided to market a form of them for… entertainment.”

“Oh that’s sick.”

Dorian waved his hands around to illustrate. “Weightless, inverted, backwards, spinning.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry I asked.”

He pointed out the window. “Well you’re about to see it, better you know ahead of time what you’re getting into.”

“I am
not
getting into one of those.”

“Of course not.” Dorian scarcely managed to speak through laughter.

Sector 77 resided at the center of an area zoned to permit gambling and prostitution. With all the gang violence, corporate warfare, and unhinged cyborgs, the police seldom bothered enforcing prostitution laws, but those operating within approved zones could at least call for help if something went wrong.

Pale grey paint covered all the windows of what looked like an unassuming, long-abandoned warehouse. Cars huddled at the front wall, the only hint that anything happened there.

The front room looked like a mid-grade hotel, complete with a waiting area full of magazines and a desk clerk. The back end had a number of doors with ominous labels: Gel, Dolls, Live, and Other.

Kirsten stared at the last door, hoping with all of her soul she did not have to go in there. She walked up to the desk and knocked on it. An emaciated man drifted through a curtain of beads and wandered over to take a seat behind the counter. Wispy threads of steel grey hung off his face; his moustache looked as though he had devoured a live rat and forgotten to wipe, rather than something that would have grown there. He lacked several teeth, and a few gold chains glimmered through a thick blanket of chest hair visible through the folds of a dark unbuttoned vest. After the last clerk, Kirsten let his thoughts remain private.

“Hey there hot pants, what’s yer poison?” His voice came as a raspy croak, just a few decibels above a death rattle with a glassy twang bouncing around in it.

“Alveolar Crystallization.” Dorian gestured at him. “Side effect from inhalant drugs like Icewhisper, you can hear the chime in his voice.”

Despite her uniform covering everything but her head and hands, the snug thing made her feel awkward and exposed under his stare.

“Just information. Have you seen this man?”

The clerk looked at Adrian’s holographic face with a shrug. “I dunno… I get a lot of people in here. Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. Can’t say, you know… doctor-pervert confidentiality. Feel free to go look around if you want.”

She pictured tiny crystals in his lungs, a snow-scape of glittering blue and white in microscopic detail. She imagined some breaking free and swirling around in the air currents as he chuckled.

How much longer does this guy have?

Shaking her head, she steeled herself and went through the door labeled ‘Gel’. Dark maroon curtains and Mars-colored carpeting swathed the corridor in crimson. A dozen large cylinders loomed behind individual privacy barriers. Sporadic muted thuds of bodies banging into the plastic tube walls interrupted the dull thrum of filter machinery. Holographic signs hovered just inside the door, describing in detail how to cope with going from breathing air to breathing gel, and back again. Naked flesh moved within peach-colored haze, visible through gaps in the curtains by some of the tubes. A foot pressed into the clear surface here, a hand there, a face elsewhere; she tried not to stare more than necessary for identification purposes.

Her face glowed as red as the curtains.

At least I can’t hear them moaning.

Despite having legal authority to be here, and a valid reason to look, she felt as ashamed and uncomfortable as when Nicole had talked her into watching a dirty holo-vid back in the dorm. Now she played the ghost, drifting unnoticed past people doing things not meant for anyone else’s eyes. If ever she met a man, could she put the ghosts out of her mind long enough to get intimate? Thinking Adrian may be about to hurt someone else, she put aside her embarrassment and continued.

To her relief, most of the tubes were empty and the ones in use did not contain Adrian. She felt a twinge of sorrow for Daniel.

I don’t know if I could tell him that I found Adrian in a place like this.

The clerk tittered as she returned to the lobby and cut over to the ‘doll’ door.

More crystals flying.

The corridor on the other side was the color of ash. Lined with dark blue carpeting, numerous doors beckoned from both sides. Making her way along, she peeked through the rooms at several Class 1 dolls perched on beds with vacant stares. Alone, the androids sat in standby mode, unmoving statues. Lifeless eyes gazed into space like people frozen in time by some mad scientist. The sight sent a chill through her. Different dolls offered a wide variety; male and female, emulating various ages, races, and sizes. Some had even been done up like cat girls, and others in the likenesses of famous people. The oppressive silence made their lack of motion seem all the more eerie, as if walking through a world frozen in time except for her.

The smugness of the clerk’s grin grew wider still as she went into the door marked ‘Live’. This hallway looked much the same as the last, though it smelled far worse. Cheap perfume, sprayed as a thin mask over flatulence, mixed with the smell of liquor and sweat. Early in the afternoon, the sex workers populating this wing had collected in a break room at the end of the corridor. Men and women sat in various states of dress, talking like employees at any other office. She edged up to the door and peeked in, finding no trace of Adrian.

Retreating before they could spot her, she jogged back to the lobby and stared at the final door before stomping up to the desk clerk.

“What’s in there?” Kirsten pointed at the door labeled ‘Other’.

“Oh, that’s where we keep the machines, the farm animals, and the pre-teens.”

His body ravaged by drug use, he put up a feeble fight as she hauled his skeletal frame over the desk by his vest. Snarling, she pounded his chest into the countertop; an entire field of snow crystals burst into the darkness of her imagination.

“Whoa, easy lady! I’m just fuckin’ wit you.” His voice gurgled into a spasmodic glassy cough.

She lifted him, tightening his shirt around his neck with a turn of her fist. “What’s really in there? So help me if there is one underage―”

He pulled at her arm to get some air. “Joke!”

She let go.

The skin-wrapped skeleton collapsed over the counter, cheek squealing over the stained brown laminate as he slithered back into the seat, dragging various objects to the floor. “It’s the goddamn helmet room, just VR.” Coughing came over him in a fit. “You can give it or get it from anything you want, but it ain’t real.”

Kirsten glared for a long moment before approaching the door. After drawing a breath, she heaved it open. The clerk had not lied. She faced a single chamber with about a dozen comfortable chairs arranged in a circle with their backs facing each other. A central processing unit stood at the middle of the ring with cables and leads going to a senshelmet on each chair. Aside from the tech, the room’s only occupant drifted past―a strange smell. A tiny cleaning droid rocked back and forth off to the left as it struggled to roll forward, stuck to the floor.

She stomped back to the desk and once again grabbed the clerk by the collar. “Okay, I’m done with games.
Tell me
.”

In dumbfounded silence, he fish-lipped as the psionic suggestion twisted at his brain. “Got five couples using the gel tanks…” He listed names, pivoting his terminal around to show Kirsten their ID photos.

“And?” She shoved him back into the chair.

Hollow crackling accompanied his deep breath. “No one with the employees, no one in the VR room, and one guy is in the sexbot wing, but it damn sure ain’t the pretty boy you’re lookin’ for.” He brought up an ID photo of a long haired man who, like the clerk, looked like he had been on the wrong end of a narcotic inhaler for many years.

Kirsten glanced at the doll door.
So quiet… Am I too late?

“Which room?”

He propped himself into the chair, coughing. “Three.”

E90 in hand, she ran to the door. Sex echoed from the other side. Nothing sounded alarming, but so far these dolls had all been fine until they freaked without warning.

I’m not too late!

Kirsten booted the door and swept her aim across the room over a scrawny man in his later forties in flagrante upon a female love doll. Kirsten got more of a view of him than she cared to as his scraggly black and grey hair thrashed around with his undulations and groans. So involved in his task, the man did not notice her storm in.

An unusual feeling in the air drew her to a small closet left of the bed. The door, open a crack, revealed the faint outline of a person beneath a bevy of stripper clothing. A sense of psionic energy wafted away from the silhouette. Dorian lifted an eyebrow at the closet.

She flung the door open. Adrian sat on the floor, gazing into nowhere. His face contorted like an active participant in what went on behind her, his body rocked with sporadic trembles. Kirsten jabbed him in the side of the head with her stunrod.

Adrian gurgled and convulsed, falling out of the closet face-first into the rug. Sparks came out of his mouth and walked like glowing spider legs over his cheek. As he flopped about, the doll lapsed into a fit of convulsing limbs. The man let out an awful wailing howl. By the time Kirsten turned to look at him, he had fallen out of her field of view. Wounded moaning floated over from the far side of the bed.

Dorian cringed away from him. “That’s not right.”

The doll continued to thrash around and shudder for a few seconds before undulating twice and sitting back up into a neutral ready position. It beeped as though it had just rebooted.

Kirsten glared at Adrian with a twinge of remembered pain flaring in her nose. She drew back the metal rod and sized him up for some payback. As her arm tensed, her mind filled with Daniel’s worried eyes. Kirsten lowered her weapon, and slammed it back into the retaining ring on her belt with a guilty scowl.

Dorian smiled.

She dragged Adrian into the room and secured his arms behind him. From another case on her belt, she produced a thin metal headband and put it on him. A series of blinking LED’s flickered around the ring as the psi inhibitor came online. Confident she had secured him, she ran around the bed to check on the man.

He curled in a ball with both hands clamped over his crotch, moaning as blood leaked through his fingers.

“Are you hurt, do you need a medic?”

“Constriction…”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Kirsten dosed him with a stimpak and covered him with a sheet from the bed.

“Command, this is Agent Wren. I need a MedVan and a suspect transport to my location.”

A nondescript voice came back. “Copy, Agent.”

irsten’s boots squeaked over the shiny floor as she walked in circles around the steel table. Adrian Lewis sat in a chair with his wrists locked together through a bolt between his knees. The lights orbiting the circumference of the headband blinked in rapid flurries, each cycle accompanied by a pained grimace. Saturated by pale fluorescent light, all color felt muted and overshadowed by the oppressive grey room.