Tea From an Empty Cup (8 page)

This was a big place, even for an AR network traffic center. The windows in the distant walls were at least three storeys tall. The light they let in was diffuse, filtered, showing only a brightness and nothing else. Above her, the ceiling disappeared into soft, indistinct shadows.

‘Information?’ she asked, turning around and around, looking for anything indicating an entry, an exit, or a directory. It was hard to see over people’s heads but even more maddeningly, it was impossible to see any of the crowd clearly at all – faces, hair, clothing, colors, everything streaked past, trailed away, faded out.

A white glove identical to the ones she was wearing congealed out of the air above the blurry crowd around her. The only thing in focus, it beckoned to her. She took a step toward it and suddenly found herself looking at it on the hand of a tall orange-haired teenage boy standing behind a counter.

‘Righteous effect, innit?’ he said, leaning his gloved hand on the smooth, featureless surface between them. ‘You know there’s a special few comes in just for that effect? Do it over and over, till it goes away and they have to stop. Workin’ for her now, right? Like the man said, you best be steppin’.’ He laughed.

Yuki started to ask him something and then thought better of it. This was just a supply station and he was the distribution interface. DI’s never knew anything beyond inventory.

‘I’m here for my equipment,’ she told him, hoping he wouldn’t have to ask her what it was.

To her enormous relief, a vest with many pockets appeared on the counter in front of her. Another right guess; she had better hurry, she thought, before her luck turned. If there actually was such a thing as luck in AR.

She slipped the vest on easily, though the movement itself felt strange. All her movements felt strange, she realized, fuzzy and dreamlike. She thought that had just been a lingering effect of the vertigo, but it still hadn’t faded. Troubled, she touched the back of her neck under her hair but couldn’t find anything that might have been a bite or a sting. Maybe she could feel it better without the gloves, she thought, and tried to take them off.

‘Bad flex,’ warned the guy behind the counter, ‘unless you’re quitting so soon.’

‘Oh. Right.’ She started to turn away, hesitated, and turned back to him. Maybe he did know something. There had to be some information that came with the equipment. ‘Just between you and me, okay?’

The guy said nothing.

‘What am I doing here?’

‘Using the equipment I just gave you.’

‘Any information?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Only stock.’ He gazed at her with a receptiveness that she had to remind herself was in no way related to anything like concern. She looked down at the many pockets on her vest and then unzipped the topmost on the right. Perhaps there was an instruction book or a map.

All she came up with was a small round mirror. She stared at the reflection for some unmeasured time, a long time, maybe, or only a minute; she wasn’t sure. A minute often felt like an hour in AR.

The face in the mirror was as knowing as the distorted image she had seen in the headmount out there in her room. She tilted her head slowly to the left and then to the right to make sure she was seeing a true reflection rather than a transmission.

In the mirror, the face of Tomoyuki Iguchi stared back at her.

If the office had seemed cramped before, Miles Mank made it look even smaller by taking up at least half of it. When it became obvious that he actually knew next to nothing, Konstantin tried to get rid of him quickly, but he kept finding conversational hooks that would get her attention and then lead her along to some meaningless and boring point, where he wouldn’t so much conclude as change the subject and do it all over again. She was finally able to convince him that he was desperately needed at the parking lot to help sort out the clientele with her bewildered partner. Then she prayed that Taliaferro wouldn’t use a similar excuse to send him back to her. She still didn’t like his eyes.

The first of the other two employees was a silver-haired kid named Tim Mezzer, who was about the same age as the murder victim. He had the vaguely puzzled, preoccupied look of ex-addicts who had detoxed recently by having their blood cleansed. Officially, it was a fast way out of an expensive jones. In fact, it made the high better on relapse.

‘How long have you worked here?’ Konstantin asked him.

‘Three days.’ He sounded bored.

‘And what do you do?’ she prodded when he didn’t say anything more.

‘Oh, I’m a specialist,’ he said, even more bored. ‘I specialize in picking up everybody’s smelly ’suit when they’re done and get ’em cleaned.’ Mezzer put a plump elbow on the desk and leaned forward. ‘Tell the truth – you’d kill to have a job like that instead of the boring shit you do.’

Konstantin wasn’t sure he was really being sarcastic. ‘Sometimes. Did you know the victim?’

‘Dunno. What was his name?’

‘Shantih Love.’

Mezzer grunted. ‘Good label. Must have cost him to come up with one that good. Sounds like an expensive whore-assassin. Someday I’ll be rich enough to be able to afford a tailor-made label.’

Konstantin was only half-listening while she prodded the archive for the victim’s reference file. ‘Real name is –’ she stopped. ‘Well, that
can’t
be right.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’ Mezzer yawned. ‘What’s it say?’

‘Tomoyuki Iguchi.’ Konstantin sounded out each syllable slowly and carefully.

‘Ha. Sounds like he was working on turning Japanese in a serious way.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, for post-Apocalyptic Tokyo, of course.’ Mezzer sighed. ‘What else.’

Konstantin was appalled. ‘There’s a post-Apocalyptic Tokyo now?’

‘Not yet.’ Mezzer’s sigh became another yawn. ‘Coming soon, to a hotsuit near you. S’posed to be the next big hot spot. They say it’s gonna make the Sitty look like Sunday afternoon in Nebraska, with these parts you can access only if you’re Japanese or a convincing simulation. It’s the one we’ve all been waiting for.’

‘“We?”’ Konstantin said uncertainly, wondering if he knew that something very like it had already come and gone a good many years before either of them had been born, and then decided that even if he did, he probably wouldn’t care. ‘Who’s “we”?’

He shrugged. ‘All the club rats. Mainliners. Headliners. Hardliners, old school, nu skool, no school. Plugged and unplugged.’

‘Does that include you?’ Konstantin asked him. ‘Is it the one
you’ve
been waiting for, too?’

‘I don’t know from Japanese, I’m a twentieth-century Ellay fox. I stalk the stars.’ He paused, as if she might have had something to say about that. ‘The bubble-up on this new site is, there’s some kinda secret coming-attraction subroutines for post-Apocalyptic Tokyo buried in the ones running now – the Sitty, Ellay pre- and post-, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Moscow, Black Forest, lotta places. They say you gotta be Japanese to crack them.
If
they’re really there. Shantih Love musta thought they were.’

‘But why take
two
fake names?’

‘
Told
you – he was trying to turn Japanese. He wanted anyone who stripped his label to find his Japanese name underneath and take him for that. Invite him into the special Japan area.’ Mezzer put his head back as if he were going to bay at the ceiling and yawned again. ‘Or he was getting that crazy-head. You know, where you start thinking it’s real in there and fake out here, or you can’t tell the difference. You need to talk to Body. Body’ll know. Body’s probably the only one who’d know for sure.’

‘What body?’

‘Body Sativa. Body knows more about the top ten ARs than anyone else, real or not.’

Konstantin felt her mouth twitch. ‘Don’t you mean Cannabis Sativa?’ she asked sarcastically.

Mezzer blinked at her in surprise. ‘Get
off
. Cannibal’s her
mother
. She’s good but Body’s the Big Dipper in
that
family.’ His sudden smile was unexpectedly winsome. ‘Pretty toff, actually that you’d know about Cannibal Sativa. You plannin’ to go talk to her?’

Konstantin didn’t know what to say.

‘Well, go see Body for sure. I swear she’ll be the one you want. Hell, I’ll even give you some icons you can use in there. Real insider icons, too, not what they junk you up with in the help files.’

‘Thanks,’ Konstantin said doubtfully. ‘But I think I fell down about a mile back. If he was turning Japanese, as you put it, why would he call himself Shantih Love?’

Mezzer blinked. ‘Well, because he was tryin’ to be a
Japanese
guy named Shantih Love.’ He frowned at her. ‘You just don’t ever go in AR, do you?’

‘Can’t add to that,’ said the other employee cheerfully. She was an older woman named Howard Ruth and her salt-and-pepper hair and soft, lined face were untouched by chemicals or surgery. Konstantin found her comforting to look at. ‘Body Sativa’s the best tip you’re gonna get. You’ll go through that whole bunch in the lot down the street and you won’t hear anything more helpful.’ She sat back, crossing her left ankle over her right knee.

‘Body Sativa wouldn’t happen to be in that group down the street, by any chance?’

Howard Ruth shrugged. ‘Could be, but I doubt it. This is just another reception site on the network. Considering the sophisticated moves Body makes, she’s most likely on via her own private rig, and that means she could be anywhere.’

‘Come on,’ said Konstantin irritably. ‘Even
I
know that everyone on-line has an origin code.’

Howard Ruth’s smile was sunny. ‘You haven’t played any games lately, have you?’

Konstantin was thinking the woman should talk to her ex. ‘On-line? No.’

‘No,’ agreed the woman, ‘because if you had, you’d know that netgaming isn’t considered official net communication or transaction, so it’s not governed by FCC or FDSA regulations. Get on, pick a name or buy a permanent label, stay as long as you like – or can afford – and log out when you’ve had enough. Netgaming is one hundred percent elective, so anything goes – no guidelines, no censorship, no crimes against persons. You can’t file a complaint against anyone for assault, harassment, stalking, fraud, or anything like that.’

Konstantin sighed. ‘I didn’t know this. Why not?’

‘You didn’t have to.’ Howard Ruth laughed. ‘Look, Officer –’

‘Lieutenant.’

‘Sure, lieutenant. Everybody knows the rules for regular on-line com backwards and forwards – no this, no that, encrypt, de-crypt, authorized, unauthorized, fines, imprisonment, and it comes out here. But unless you netgame regular, you
won’t
know any of
this
. You ever hear about the case years back where a guy used an origin line in a netgame to track down a woman in realtime and kill her?’

‘No,’ said Konstantin with some alarm. ‘Where did this happen?’

‘Oh, back East somewhere. D.C., I think. Life is so cheap there, you know, it’s a whole different world. Anyway, what happened was, back when they had origin lines in gaming, this guy got mad at this woman, somehow found her by way of her origin line, and boom – lights out. That was one of the first cases of that gameplayer’s madness where someone could prove it could be a real danger off-line. After that, there was a court ruling that since gaming was strictly recreational, games were entitled to complete anonymity if they wanted. No origin line. Kinda the same thing for fraud and advertising.’

Konstantin felt her interest, which had started to wane with the utterance
D.C
., come alive again. ‘What?’

‘Guy ran a game-within-a-game on someone. I can’t remember exactly how it went – beachfront in Kansas, diamond mines in Peru, hot stocks about to blow. Anyhow, the party of the second part got the idea it was all backed up in realtime and did this financial transfer to the party of the first part, who promptly logged out and went south. Party of the second part hollers
Thief!
and what do you know but the police catch this Salesman of the Year. Who then claims it was all a game and the money was a gift, received in good faith.’

‘And?’ said Konstantin.

‘And that’s a wrap. Grand jury won’t even indict, on grounds of extreme gullibility. As in, “You were in
artificial reality
, you fool, what did you expect?” Personally, I think they were both suffering from a touch of the galloping head-bugs.’

Konstantin was troubled. ‘And that decision stood?’

‘It’s
artificial
reality – all you can do is lie, no matter what you say, and the believers are the ones at fault. Because it’s all make-believe, let’s-pretend, the play’s the thing.’ Howard Ruth laughed heartily. ‘If you choose to pay someone out here for something in there, that’s
your
hotspot. Life is so strange, eh?’

Konstantin made a mental note to check for court rulings on AR as she pressed for a clean page in the archiver. ‘But if being in an AR makes people insane –’

‘Doesn’t make
everyone
insane,’ the woman said. ‘That’s what it is, you know. The honey factory don’t close down just because someone might be allergic to bee stings.’

Konstantin was still troubled. ‘So when did those things happen?’ she asked, holding the stylus ready.

‘
I
don’t know,’ Howard Ruth said, surprised at the question. ‘Oughta be in the police files, though. Doesn’t law enforcement have some kind of central-national-international information bank you all access? Something like
Police Blotter
?’

‘In spite of the name,’ Konstantin said, speaking slowly not only for the sake of making herself perfectly clear but also to conceal her irritation, ‘
Police Blotter
is actually a commercial net-magazine and not affiliated with law enforcement in any official way. We do have a national information center, but I need to know some kind of key fact that the search program can use to hunt down the information I want – a name, a date, a location.’ She paused to see if any of this was forthcoming. The other woman only shrugged.

‘Well, sorry I can’t be of more help, but that’s all I know.’ She got up and stretched, pressing her hands into the small of her back. ‘If anyone knows more, it’s Body Sativa.’