Necrochip

Copyright 1999 by Liz Williams

Published by NewCon Press at Smashwords

Necrochip

About A Glass of
Shadow

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A complete story taken
from the
collection...

by Liz Williams

NewCon Press

England

“Necrochip” copyright 1999 by Liz
Williams. This story originally appeared in Albedo 1.

“A Glass of Shadow” compilation
copyright 2011 Ian Whates

All rights reserved.

“A Glass of Shadow”
c
over art by Anne Sudworth

“A Glass of Shadow” cover design by
Andy Bigwood

Minimal editorial interference by Ian
Whates

Text layout by Storm Constantine

e-Book design by Tim C Taylor

“Sure, you can sleep with me,” she said,
with a small, cool smile. “But only after I’m dead.”

I have to admit that this was not precisely the
answer I’d been expecting when I made my rather incoherent
proposition, and if I hadn’t been a bit the worse for wear due to a
combination of vodka and spray-on opiates, I doubt whether I’d have
had the courage to proposition her in the first place. She was so
far out of the league of blokes like me as to be practically out of
sight. She was one of those international girls: tall, with skin
like suede plastic and a slight crease to her long eyelids that
made me suspect Asian ancestry – unless, like so many of the
fashion set these days, she’d had her eyelids tucked to give her
that essential Pacific Rim mystique. The accent was neutral;
anywhere between Sydney and Beijing. It did not occur to me that
she might be native to Singapore Three; only the poor remained
where they were born these days and the franchise city was full of
voyagers. I’d been here for almost eighteen months now, which made
me virtually indigenous. I was supposed to be making videos, but I
ended up working in a bar in the backstreets of Jiang Min and it
was here, fortunately on my night off, that I made my disastrous
proposition. I peered at her through the haze.

“Sorry?” I mumbled. “Did you say ‘dead’?”

She reached into her Miucci wallet and took out a
sliver of something. It had the soft glaze of organic material;
like a very thin slice of liver.

“Here,” she said, distantly. “This is my necrochip.”
Her voice took on the sing-song note of a rote lesson. “If you’d
like to sleep with me after my death, we can put it on your credit
card now and then when I’m dead, you will be notified and can come
and visit me.” She added in a more normal tone, “I’m due to be
placed in one of the franchise facilities in Reikon, so you won’t
have far to go.”

“I’m sorry,” I echoed. I felt like a complete idiot;
this was obviously some game she enjoyed playing on hapless
Westerners. “I’d really rather you were alive when we, um, I
mean...” My voice trailed uncomfortably away. She shrugged.

“As you wish.”

She slipped the necrochip back into her wallet and
stood up to leave. She was wearing a pair of hydraulic Japanese
pattens, I remember, and when her weight came down on them I heard
a faint hiss. She gained an inch or so in height and stood looking
down on me. This wasn’t difficult: at that point in the
conversation I felt about three feet high.

“Wait,” I said. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you doing this? I mean – hiring out one’s
corpse for sexual purposes... It’s hardly usual, even these days. I
just wondered – well,
why
?”

“Isn’t it usual?” she said, with vague
curiosity.

“Not unless I’m very far behind the times.”

“The man at the facility said there’d be plenty of
interest,” she said. “And you’d be number six – there is a queue,
you know.” She made it sound as though I’d questioned her
desirability.

“Wouldn’t you be a bit – well, past it by then?”

Disdainfully, she said

“I’d be perfectly preserved. Quite flexible. I
wouldn’t want to be involved in something
distasteful
.”

“But why are you doing it in the first place?”

“To pay for my treatment.”

“Your treatment?”

At that point, a group of similar girls swept in,
giving those thin high cries that Japanese women seem to emit at
moments of astonishment or pleasure. They clustered around my new
friend and gathered her up with them. The last thing that I saw of
her was her blonde head at the bar, bobbing over the assembled
crowd. She seemed to be laughing, but I wasn’t. I drained my drink
and left; the alcohol didn’t seem to be working any more and the
opiates had long since worn away. I scratched absently at the rash
they had raised on my skin and shambled out into the street. Before
I headed home, I bent down and dropped a couple of cents into the
little shrine that stood at the foot of the wall. Inside, the small
plastic god stared placidly out and, as I watched, he raised a hand
and blessed me. It was only the motion of the coins crossing the
infra-red sensor that made him do this, but I felt better, somehow.
It was hard not to be superstitious in Singapore Three; ironically,
for such a high-tech city, the media was full of talk of magic and
demons and it got to me, after a while.

Back at the box I rented on Hsin Tsu Street, I
stared out of the minuscule window at the lights of the city. The
night sky was a permanent orange glaze, but up the coast, towards
the Yellow River estuary, I could see an edge of darkness: a storm
coming in over the South China Sea. I shivered, despite the stuffy
night heat. I had no wish to spend another steaming summer in
Singapore Three, but it wasn’t looking as though I had much choice.
I was living pretty much hand to mouth in those days, and if I
really wanted to get back to Glasgow (which I sometimes doubted),
I’d have to find a better-paid job. That night, however, thoughts
of home didn’t occupy me for long. I couldn’t get the girl out of
my mind. I’ve never considered myself a particularly moral
individual, but her matter-of-fact acceptance of something so
extreme disturbed me. I told myself that it was up to people what
they did with their own lives and their own bodies, but my brief
conversation with her had given me an insight into the macabre that
I didn’t feel I could handle. And what had she meant by
‘treatment’?

I didn’t see her again for a couple of days, and
when she next came into the Azure Dragon I was once again working
behind the bar. In between serving drinks, I watched her as she
struck up a conversation with some middle-aged businessman. He was
wearing one of those heat-sensitive suits that had been all the
rage in Beijing the year before last and I could hear the drift of
colloquial Mandarin as they talked; the slurring accent like a
drift of static above the words. With a disorientating sense of
déjà vu, I saw her fish in her bag and take out the necrochip. She
handed it to him. The businessman studied it for a moment, then
reached into his pocket and took out a credit card. I watched,
disbelieving, as she ran it through her pod. He gave a small, curt
bow and walked away. It seemed my friend had collected number six.
Her face did not change as she replaced the necrochip in her
wallet, but remained the same passive mask. She clicked her bag
shut and walked towards the unisex restrooms.

On impulse, I put down the glass I was polishing and
followed her. I think I had some hazy thought of offering to help
her, save her from a life of prostitution – or a death of one, to
be more accurate. How I intended to accomplish this, I had no idea.
I suppose she appealed to whatever vestiges of romance I still
possessed: I saw her as a tragic figure, desperate to be saved. I
didn’t want to alarm her, so I opened the restroom door quietly.
She was leaning over the basin, spitting blood. As she heard my
footsteps her head came up and I met her eyes in the mirror. They
glittered a crystalline red, like neon in the rain. Her head
swivelled around and she hissed. I took a hasty step backwards and
fell over a mop that someone had thoughtfully placed by the
entrance to the restroom. When I extricated myself, she had gone.
The tiny window beneath the ceiling, a good eight feet from the
ground, was hanging open. Tottering back into the bar, I told the
manager that I was feeling unwell and would have to go home. He
acquiesced with a sour nod.