Necrochip (2 page)

Before I left, however, I went over to the dark
booth where Number Six was sitting over his whisky.

“Good evening. Excuse me,” I said in my dreadful
Mandarin. “Could I talk to you for a moment?”

Number Six gave me the sort of look that made me
wonder briefly whether I’d managed to call him an arsehole rather
than bidding him a greeting: tonal languages are full of such
pitfalls. I took his stare for invitation and sat down.

“I’m sorry to trouble you,” I said. “But I saw you
talking to a young lady a while ago.”

“Yes. So?”

“Well, it’s like this,” I improvised hastily. “I’m
actually with the, uh, the franchise vice squad, and we have reason
to believe that the lady in question is engaged in certain illegal
activities.”

He looked utterly disbelieving.

“What sort of illegal activities?”

“Well, they’re of a varied nature that I’m not at
liberty to divulge right now, but I must inform you that it you
have completed a transaction of any sort with her, you should
contact your bank now and cancel it. I’m also asking you to hand
over any information that she gave to you. An address, for
instance.”

The stare did not waver.

“Do you have identification?”

“No. It would put me at risk, if it were
discovered.”

He must have thought I was some sort of lunatic.

“You’re not a cop,” he said in disgust. “I don’t
know who you are. But I’ll give you the address she gave me if it
will make you go away. Have you got a pod?”

I slid it across the table and he made a quick copy
from his pod to mine.

“Now go away.”

Did I really care, I asked myself, if this obnoxious
person had some horrible fate awaiting him? I decided that I
didn’t, and besides, I’d done all I could for now.

“Thank you,” I said pompously. “The authorities are
grateful.” Briefly, I remembered the adverts which littered the
city, encouraging people to turn informer. They featured a young
man in a pair of stripy pyjamas slumbering peacefully with his
glasses on the bedside table, having presumably shopped his mates
for a few franchise dollars and the gratitude of the municipal
police. ‘Sleep well!’ the adverts proclaimed. ‘You have done the
Right Thing!’ I wondered whether I’d sleep well that night.
Somehow, I doubted it.

I woke up somewhere around five am, with a queasy
dawn coming up over the city. Opening the window, I leaned out and
inhaled the usual heady blend of chemical fumes, unburned petrol
and steam from the city’s many restaurants. Almost breakfast time,
I decided. Yawning, I dressed and made my way down to the street. I
could feel the pod in the pocket of my shirt; the address Number
Six had given me seemed to weigh it down. I hadn’t even looked at
it yet. I took a seat in the noodle bar down the road, among
sweat-workers coming off their shifts, and mentally reviewed the
range of substances that I had most recently abused. Apart from
vodka, hypospray morphine and the occasional handful of
tranquillisers, I couldn’t think of anything powerful enough to
create a hallucination of the magnitude of the one that I’d
apparently experienced the night before. I could still see the
fragmented sparkle of her eyes in the shadows of the restroom
mirror. I was pretty sure that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing,
and besides, there was the address that the businessman had given
me. Absently, I twirled a chopstickful of nasi goreng into my mouth
and took out the pod. She had told part of the truth, anyway. The
address was somewhere down in Reikon, which meant the waterfront.
All right
, I thought, with a combination of excitement and
trepidation:
let’s take a look
. I don’t know what I thought
I was doing. I guess it seemed like an adventure at the time; the
sort of thing I’d drifted to Asia in order to experience. I don’t
think I really believed that anything could happen to me; you don’t
when you’re young. Or stupid.

It took ages to get to Reikon. The trams were
running erratically that day, the result of terrorist activity down
in the banking district, and the one that I finally managed to
catch stopped at every halt. I dozed in my seat as the city lurched
by, waking with a start to find that we had reached the docks. The
water glistened in the heat, shimmering out towards the silhouette
of the islands. I could see a hoverfoil ploughing out beyond the
typhoon shelter, bound for Macau and leaving a white furrow in its
wake. I watched it go, wishing I was on it. I walked down towards
the docks, picking my way over fish wreckage and machine parts. The
warehouses were marked, but it was some little time before I
located the address that I’d been given. It was one of the new
facilities: a smooth high curve of grey plastic some three hundred
metres long, tucked away behind a mesh fence. The gates were
closed. I could hear the hum of the vibrolock from where I stood,
and as I stared at it a short, squat figure bolted out from behind
the warehouse and bounded towards the gate. It hurled itself at the
wire, barking. The long wedge-shaped head wove from side to side
like a cobra; within, I could see a triple row of teeth. Weird
women I thought I could handle; sharkhounds definitely not. Even
though it was contained behind the wire, I backed off hastily.
Well, that was that, I told myself. My little adventure had ended
in the usual inconclusive way, but it had been diverting enough at
the time. Filled with a kind of pleasantly world-weary ennui, I
made my way back to the tram.

After this, life continued in its customary way for
about a month. I did not see the girl again, though I kept a sharp
eye out for her in the bar. I did not see Number Six again, either,
and after a while I found out why. I’d come home in the middle of
the afternoon. It was summer by then, and too hot to do anything
except melt. The humidity was running at eighty percent and I felt
disgusting. I took the fifth shower of the day, donned a sarong and
slumped in front of the ancient DTV that I’d inherited from a
neighbour. Number Six’s face was plastered all over the news.
Within the next ten minutes I learned that he was the president of
a satellite company in Beijing and a man of quite preposterous
wealth. He had apparently gone missing in Singapore Three several
days before. It was known that he had a certain taste for the
seamier side of life (this was implied in the most delicate manner
possible and presented as a charming eccentricity: I suppose they
didn’t want to be sued), so his family were not unduly concerned
until he failed to show up for a board meeting back in Beijing.
Then the harbour police found his body, floating in the oily waters
of the Reikon typhoon shelter. Police had reason to link the case
to a number of unexplained and recent deaths in the area. An
exhaustive summary of Number Six’s most recent movements then
followed; including his visit to the Azure Dragon. The police were
apparently eager to interview a young man whom the victim had been
seen talking with.

At this point, despite the sultry day, I broke out
into a cold sweat. The franchise police were known for their
enthusiastic methods of questioning, and had little reserve about
applying them to foreigners. I pulled on a t-shirt and sandals and
left the flat with unseemly haste. I headed nervously out into the
street and caught a tram downtown, intending to lose myself among
the crowds. It was undoubtedly an over-active imagination that made
me think that everyone was staring at me. I wandered aimlessly
through Sheng Mai and New Kowloon until the apricot coloured sky
deepened into the soft south China twilight. My steps took me down
the familiar alleyway that led to the Azure Dragon. And then I saw
her.

At first I wasn’t sure if it was really her. She
looked different, somehow. Her hair straggled over her shoulders
and her shoulders seemed bowed. She looked twice as old as the girl
I’d seen in the Azure Dragon, but her dress and the shoes were the
same. She was talking to a Korean in a pale suit; as I watched, she
reached out and massaged his elbow. It was a curiously intimate,
affectionate gesture. Then they parted. She walked slowly along the
waterfront on her high shoes, into the twilight. I followed her.
She flagged down a taxi, and so did I.

We reached Reikon and the warehouse just as darkness
fell. I asked the driver to stop several streets away, and then I
ran down to the docks. The lights of distant ships glowed out to
sea and the city towered behind. I caught a glimpse of her as she
moved through the yards. As she neared the facility, she slipped
off her shoes and hobbled barefoot towards the fence. She fumbled
with the latch of the gate and as she stepped through she almost
fell. She vanished into the shadows, leaving the gate open behind
her. The shark-hound was nowhere to be seen. Curiosity got the
better of me and I followed her towards the facility. The door
stood wide open. Cautiously, I stepped through. I went down a long
corridor and paused before a second open door.
Why was the
facility so unguarded?
I wondered. It was not reassuring. I
could see light coming from a room ahead; a flickering glow unlike
the steady gleam of neon. Stealthily, I moved towards it; here,
too, the door was ajar. I peered through the crack.

The girl was faltering as she circled the room. She
was lighting sticks of incense, and the thick smoke filled the air.
She groped her way towards a raised bier in the centre of the room
and, as I watched, she collapsed across it. She dragged herself up,
until she was lying on her back, and I heard the breath go out of
her in a long sigh. Her head lolled to one side, displaying her wan
face. At that point, I heard footsteps coming down the corridor. I
ducked out of sight around the corner.

After a moment, a man appeared. Like the late
lamented Number Six, he was middle aged and wearing a dark,
expensive suit. He, too, was Chinese. He paused, briefly, to smooth
back his hair before stepping through the door of the room. I could
hear him moving about. I returned to the door and glanced through.
The businessman was bending over the supine figure of the girl; his
fingers touching first her throat and then her wrist. I heard him
give a brief hiss of satisfaction. He picked up her arm and let it
fall again, and it dropped to the side of the bier like a dead
weight. The businessman laughed. He began muttering under his
breath, and started to unfasten his shirt. I did not even want to
think about what he might be about to do and I certainly had no
inclination to watch. It was, I thought, high time to get out of
here. Once I was well away, I would phone the police. I could hear
the urgent rustle of movement from within the room. I was halfway
down the corridor when someone screamed.

It was a high, whistling scream like a boiling
kettle. I stood paralysed in the middle of the corridor. The scream
abruptly stopped. I am sorry to say that at this point, I turned
and ran. I reached the main door and stumbled through into the warm
dusk. It felt like the freshest air I had ever tasted. And then I
saw her. She was crouched by the outside wall, rocking to and fro
on her haunches. I could see her eyes glinting in the shadows. She
was panting. As I stared she rose and began prowling around the
perimeter fence. She looked nothing like the elegant young woman I
had first set eyes on in the Azure Dragon. Her face was distorted
with fury like a Japanese theatrical mask and her breasts were
mottled with something that looked suspiciously like blood. A long
tongue lolled out and licked at it. I fled in the opposite
direction but I could hear the scrape of her taloned feet against
the concrete as she bolted in pursuit. I ran around the side of the
building and there was a howl like a banshee from somewhere in
front. For a terrified moment I thought she’d come over the roof
ahead of me, but then I saw the cage containing the shark-hound. It
must have scented the blood that sprayed her body. The animal
hurled itself against the bolted mesh of the cage and I saw my
chance. I jumped onto the top of the cage and pulled out the bolt
at the moment when she sprang. The shark-hound collided with her in
mid-air. They both gave a remarkably similar horrible yell and fell
to the ground. I could hear them snarling at each other as they
rolled over and over, but I was out of the complex and sprinting
alongside the harbour wall, just in time to meet the police as they
came in through the main gate.

In the end, it was not the police who charged me.
They found a diverting scene back at the facility: a girl and an
engineered dog with their teeth locked in one another’s throats,
and inside, freezer facilities suitable for the storage of meat and
a curious, incense-lit tableau, in the middle of which was a thing
that the papers described as a husk. I could shed very little light
on any of this, beyond telling them about the necrochip, which when
found served as some degree of corroboration. The press was rife
with speculation; everything from cults to assassination, and I
don’t think it was ever satisfactorily resolved. But I have lived
in Singapore Three for long enough to know that legends still live
on even in the mid-twenty first century. It seems to me that if one
was a supernatural creature that needed, say, human sperm to bring
one back from the dead, then one would necessarily have a problem
obtaining it. Perhaps in these decadent times it is easier for
demons to survive than in the cautious ages of the past: six
customers is not bad going, after all.

I mentioned that it wasn’t the police who charged
me. Instead, it was the corporation who owned the storage facility,
via their insurance company. They sued for breaking and entering,
plus damage in transit and the loss of a valuable genetically
enhanced guard dog. The bill totalled some twenty thousand
franchise dollars, and I can’t leave the country until I pay. I
have, in these desperate straits, revived the idea of the
necrochip. I confess to being startled at its success: there are
plenty of people who wouldn’t want to sleep with me living, let
alone dead, and I don’t even want to think about the logistics. But
I have been advertising for over a month now, and I already have
three customers: one woman and two men. I’m not quite sure, yet,
whether I’ll be in any position to honour my part of the bargain,
but I suppose I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.