Up The Tower (2 page)

Konnor filled the pockets of his overalls with his hands. “I don't want you to get mad at me for telling you this.”

“Just tell me, already.”

“I'm just saying, you're gonna get mad. I just want you to know I know you will.”

“Will you tell me what you're gonna say?”

“Last night.” Konnor sat down on the table, facing Ore at an angle. “Wallop calls us up after the job went wrong. When Wallop calls us up, we go. You know? We go.”

“And he offered you a new job, and you took it, because you’re a bunch of two-faced—”

“—That’s not what I’m telling you about, all right?”

“Fine. Go on.”

“So we're in his big damn office, and he tells us to wait a minute. He tells us he’s waiting on a new piece about to come in. A new piece of tech, I mean. He means. Anyway. He's got to look at it and then he’ll sit down with us. He's got fifteen men waiting on him, all with clipboards and all of that, waiting for something to do.”

“Get on with it.”

“This kid comes in, okay? Starts doing all this stuff with Wallop's tech fists. Powering them up and such. You know, they can bend steel, they can punch a man so far a distance, all of that. At first, I think this kid is pretty young, but then I see his eyes—they're old enough. I seen his eyes, they're about my age, those eyes. And it’s important, okay, how old he is. Because this kid? He looks a hell of a lot like me.”

“So what? Lots of kids look like you.”

“Yeah. So do Georgeson. So do Jonesboy. So do Figueroa.”

“What are you saying?”

“I'm saying...” he palmed the side of his head. “I’m saying, it ain’t no secret that you got yourself a certain type of person that you pick up. A type of boy. I sort of thought I knew why. Last night I found out for certain.”

Konnor was right. Ore was angry.

“The hell are you saying to me? Just say it.”

“You said you had a brother. His name was Samson. He was good with tech, you said. Well this kid? The one tailoring Wallop's new fists? Samson. That's what Wallop called him. ‘Samson, touch here.’ ‘Samson, look at that.’”

Ore didn't say anything.

“He's alive. Your brother. In The Tower. He’s maybe been alive this whole time.”

Silence, then. Even the whirring eyebots outside seemed to get quiet.

That goddamn Wallop. Her job, her Haulers, and her eye. Now he had her brother, or near enough.  Everything. Would he take everything from her?

Konnor stood up and headed to the door. The shack squeaked beneath him.

“If it was any other sort of job...if it was a job that maybe wouldn’t have gone against the Faces...”

“Shut up, Konnor. It’s all against the Faces. It’s under ‘em or it’s with ‘em. You know that.”

“All right. All right.” He opened the door. An argument had started down the street; someone lit a fire in a barrel on the balcony above her; an eyebot stopped, scanned the two, and then zipped away. “It’s a hell of a plan, though, Ore. A hell of a plan. And maybe I won’t get around to telling Wallop what’s what for a little while.”

* * * * *

V
ictor landed on top of a building somewhere in the middle of downtown. Always in cities, always on the tops of buildings. Never right where he wanted to be, either, always three or four blocks down.

Oh well.

He unhooked the harness on his back, and the wings he glided down with evaporated into nothing. One-use only. Made from some electrified, synthetic spider nest or bug web, something like that. Somewhere, thousands of feet above, negotiating the narrow range between different strata of the atmosphere, was the mobile operations unit from which he had been deployed. On that jet were many people like him, doing their work for this mission. Surveillance. Reconnaissance.

A few moments after landing, he negotiated the rusty handles of a fire escape and flipped down to the street. A man, impressed with his aerobatics, shouted out and called to his friends to come see. That was bad—attention was always bad for one of Victor’s kind.

He slunk away through an alley, pulling a tarp over himself from a dumpster. The action upended a few empty cardboard homes. Probably the people living in the cardboard had no better places to be—Junktown was not a nice place. Victor still gave himself solace, thinking these people would find something better, despite all logic to the contrary. This was a kneejerk response designed in the machinations of his expensive brain. Messes of guilt sprayed out onto the range of his thoughts from time to time. Each time, they slipped right off, like mud off stone in a storm.

At the far end of the alley a man approached him with a knife. His face all scarred and diseased, one eye running something yellow. His other hand was open, palm up. Knife, open palm; here was the balance of the world.

“Whatever you got,” said the man. “That fancy shirt, how ‘bout.”

“I've got nothing for you, friend.” Victor held out his hands. “Step away.”

He leapt at Victor, and Victor shot him. Thup thup thup. Quick as anything. Parts of the man splattered to the wall and trash behind him, landing in concise little circles. The knife clattered out on the stone. The man dropped to his knees and did a small pirouette, hands scrambling for what had been pushed out.

Guilt, again, and then no guilt, again.

The world was Victor’s office, and today was just another day there. At headquarters, people sometimes told him or asked him about how it must be tough being an assassin, but Victor wouldn't know. He had never been anything else—he had never possessed the conception that he might be something else.

Victor walked out of the alley and headed East, toward the Dam. Once upon a time, St. Louis had been great—and then it had declined—and then it was great again, with the water boom. Now, helium was the energy of choice, and St. Louis was down again, worse than before. Maybe that was just the way with cities.

This was his first time in this particular city. Really, he had not even spent much time in the Midwest. Largely he was deployed in Pan-Asian territories, or deep in Africa, places with bustling metropolises where economic limits were like bad rumors.

Taking a directive from his own internal sense of where the target was, he drafted a shortcut off the sidewalk and stepped down a long stairway layered with car doors—a sort of alarm system, in that the bending fiberglass beneath his boots would alert anyone he was coming. Victor didn’t mind, though. There were only gangsters about—and small time ones at that, not the big shots who lived in The Tower. Oscar, the target, was far away still, and he knew Victor was coming, besides. Oscar knew he was coming just like Victor knew where to find Oscar.

He thought of the man in the alley who tried to stab him. Insane, probably. Certainly unbalanced. Victor had picked up over the years that other people had cycles of moods, rotating up and down, sometimes even in extremes. He had dealt with many angry people, many depressed people, many serene people. He had killed all kinds. Emotional clarity, or a lack thereof, was not much of a determining factor for keeping someone alive if they landed on Groove’s list of targets for elimination.

There was a real list that spelled out who would get assassinated and who would not. Corporations excelled at creating lists. Victor had not seen it, however.

His own mood always was level. He was just built that way. Not a lot got under his skin; a prerequisite for his line of work. There were a lot of stressors in inter-corporational espionage.

Victor didn't remember half the people he killed, and the other half he kept away from the focus of his thoughts. Sometimes, at night, he would think of these dead people, their faces and their deaths. When he did, something on the far end of his brain—some comforting, plush mammary of presence—pushed against his thoughts and told him it would be all right. All right. Everything all right.

Most of who Victor passed seemed to be part of gangs—even the folks in shabby suits carried suitcases with symbols etched into the leather or bandanas wrapped around the handles. It was just safer to have an affiliation.

In his tarp, he kept himself low, still walking East.

With lots of targets, the location process could sometimes take weeks. Questioning the populace, running interrogations, sniffing out clues. Just doing this could tip a target off, as it had during Victor’s last mission. That target had been ready—he had been eliminated, but he had also killed Victor first.

But there was no need this time for any long ordeal in locating the target. Victor knew where Oscar was. Every clone knew their own.

* * * * *

T
oday was Gary's day. He could feel it in his bones. Somehow, someway, he'd run into Ana.

He dressed with vigor. Form-fitting khakis. A button-down shirt. His hair slicked back into a neato pompadour. Leather jacket hanging loosely around it all, hiding the outline of pudge that had been steadily building ever since he finished high school.

He looked killer. He looked hip. He was neato, daddy-o. That was how they said it, right?

“Neato, daddy-o.” He said to his reflection in the mirror, frowning. “Neat-o, daddio?”

Probably there was a difference. There was a lot about being a jazzkid that he still had to figure out. He had hoped that inserting himself into the counter-culture movement would have been an easy way to find a place to fit in. All he thought he had to do was dress nice and do his hair all weird and complain about how everything was supposed to be free and how corporations were taking over too many parts of life. There was some damned philosophy to it, some lens that made it all make sense, but every time Gary tried to concentrate on it, he just let his thoughts turn off.

He would table the phrase until later. He had too much on his mind. He had Ana on his mind.

It was odd how he kept seeing her all over town. With so many occurrences in a row, Gary started to imagine destiny acting as some cosmic zookeeper, coaxing the two of them together like bears in captivity.

Just two days ago he saw her in the theater, ordering a popcorn. He'd heard the film was popular with her demographic and gave it a shot. The gamble paid off—he stayed in the back of the theater, in the corner, not even paying attention to the story. That night he coaxed himself to sleep, remembering her face, covered with the spiraling lights and shadows from the screen.

Then there was last week, the sale that had been on in the mall out in the county. He sort of wanted a new data slab for his screen, and he figured, why not? She might be out there. That was all it took to get his legs moving out the door. Gary lived in the middle ring of St. Louis—the densely-populated suburban university area between Junktown and the outer county. To get to the mall past the roadblocks, he passed through seven layers of security and gave up half of his monthly allowance from his science fellowship, but he saw her, buying shoes. Worth the expense, just for that. Just to see the tanned lines of her legs slide into those high heels. He would have paid more for that image.

Of course, he didn't
say
anything to her—she had all those friends around—but if she had been alone...if she had been alone...

He would have said something funny, that’s what he’d have done. “Man, last week all these shoes were only seventeen hundred credits...now they're on sale for sixteen fifty! What a bargain!”

No, that wasn't that funny. A little too biting. Too harsh a commentary on the state of commercialism. Maybe she liked buying shoes. Stupid, a stupid thought thinking that.

But he would embrace the moment. Live in it. Make her laugh, ask her if he could buy her a coffee—it's been so long. How has life treated you past introductory particle physics? That's great. Wasn’t Reinstein a difficult professor? Right, me too. How did you end up doing in the class? That’s so cool. Oh me? I got an A. It comes easy to me, you know. But enough about that. I really like your hair, it shines so well. Et cetera. A perfectly normal human conversation to have with a woman who you would be in love with for probably the rest of your life.

Of course, there had been misses. You couldn’t go out every single day of the week, looking to run into someone like an Ana Konopolis, and not have a few misses. For instance, he had spent all of last Thursday in the airport, trying to take care of his rudimentary robotic physics homework while he waited for her to show. He didn’t know why he thought she would show there—just a gut impulse. He had been wrong, and he almost got arrested for loitering. That would have dumped him in the gulag. He didn’t have enough money to pay for being arrested.

Today was a Wednesday. That meant he had time off from his university fellowship in the morning before starting his graveyard shift late in the evening to monitor the particle collider. St. Louis had one of only ten particle colliders in the world, but it was the last one that had been built, so most of the discoveries had been taken care of already. The collider was bought with the boom money and donated to the university, placed in an enormous skylab.

Gary's job mostly consisted of taking notes, making sure the particle collider did whatever it was supposed to be doing. He didn't know much about it—all his interest and specialty was on the tech side of things—cybernetic enhancements, media screens, holograms. He didn't know everything about them, but he was trying. Gary had been something of a whiz with his father’s tablet growing up, always showing his dad some new way to access programs and the like. His success with that had encouraged him to devote his entire life to computer science—why the hell not? Seemed like a good gig.

Truth was, it was a hard gig. It was not a good gig for him, but it was too late to back out now. Changing majors meant he would have to go before a tribunal and ask for more money to add onto his debt, and Gary couldn’t handle another tribunal after the first one, at his initial admittance to the university. They hadn’t wanted to give him a fellowship—he was not impressive enough. They were taking a chance on him; they repeated this to him through daily emails with computer-generated reflections of disappointment at his poor class progress. The university would have already cut his money supply off completely, except that if he stuck around another semester or two, they’d be able to legally sell him to a labor factory somewhere and earn back their investment that way.