Chapter Twenty-Three - Phones

“Phones! For well over a hundred and fifty years, humanity has been brought closer together thanks to the wired, and eventually wireless, communication networks that followed wherever we congregated.

Having your eyes shut off for missed payments is no joke!”

--Part of Freezerburn Electronics ‘stealth’ advertising campaign of 2031.

***

“Windows it is,” I said. I patted myself down, making sure everything was in place and stepped out into the little lobby we’d dropped down to. Myalis’ waypoints led out ahead and to the left, and I wasn’t about to argue with that.

Finding your way around in a mega building was a strange sort of skill you needed to hone pretty well if you were going to live in the bowels. There were some efforts to make things fit a certain mold, but those usually fell flat when every other building had a different company building it.

It reached the point where you could kinda tell who built what based on the way the building’s innards were arranged.

I couldn’t name any of those construction companies, of course, but I could recognize a pattern. Some had lots of tight corridors in the centre and bigger rooms on the outside, others the opposite. One group had a sort of open space in the middle that often reached out all the way to the sky above and was used as a sort of extra space for walkways.

It never ended up as fancy as it sounded.

I kinda recognized where we were going a few corridors down. I’d never been here, but I’d been in enough places like it that it wasn’t hard to figure it out. We crossed through one passage with peeling wallpaper set over cement walls and shoved through a doorway into a street.

Not a street in the old sense, like a passage on ground-level where cars went, but a proper modern street. That was a place with shops and houses along both sides, and enough foot-traffic to keep things lively.

Myalis’ waypoints hovered a little higher, pointing to the end of a long passage that, under the banners, stickers, holographic ads and shop fronts, was little more than a wider corridor under all the dressings.

A few auto-shops were selling stuff from ramen to microwaved meals to anyone with the credits to spare. There were bigger lines at the stalls with actual people behind the counters though. Something about being served by a machine always felt wrong to me, and it was the same for a lot of folk.

Vending machines spamming incessant jingles tailor-made to act as earworms and a few unmarked doors leading off to who-knows-where lined the sides. In the middle were a few squared off plant boxes with benches on their sides. Not that I’d be caught dead sitting there. Judging by the deadness of the plants, the place wasn’t exactly maintained all that often.

Gomorrah reached up and pushed her mask in. “I can never get used to places like this,” she said.

I turned, walking backwards a few steps. “Why’s that?” I asked. “These places are filled with life.”

“They’re... I don’t want to say filthy, but, well.” She turned to the side, and I could tell she was looking over to a pair of girls, teens if I had to guess, both in neon shorts and bikini tops and little else. Joygirls, probably. Looking for a gullible Joe to fuck and/or rob.

“It’s a bit low-class for you?” I asked.

“I’m hardly from a rich background,” she said.

I shrugged. A place like this had a community around it. The folk here knew each other, even if just in passing. They wouldn’t stop to help if one of them was bleeding out, but they might spare a friendly nod or something.

It was the kind of place I’d wished I’d grown up in. The lower-middles, where there was still work around if you knew where to look, and where the occasional idiot who’d pulled in a big win would spread the joy around a little.

You wouldn’t live long, but your life wouldn’t be complete shit.

“Are you hungry?” I asked as we crossed a shop where some pimple-faced teen was dropping slices of vat-protein into some sort of bread cone. There was an entirely fresh slab of pseudo-meat rotating on a spit behind him, perfectly square and sweating under the heat from a couple of red-hot elements.

“Not anymore,” Gomorrah said.

I shrugged. I still had that steak from early working around in my gut, but I figured it was a bit too healthy for me, and I had to balance it out with something more my class. “You do you,” I said.

The waypoints led us to a four-way, then off to the right down a street without half as many lights and twice as many ads hanging off the walls.

I slowed my pace down a bit. “Keep sharp,” I said.

“What?” Gamorrah asked.

“The ads. Cigarettes, vapes, pills, and guns,” I said while gesturing to the holograms. Half of them were of very sexy, very digital women smoking while trying to catch our eyes or of action-hero sorts endorsing guns that were made for people really into compensation.

“What of them?” Gomorrah asked.

There were fewer people around. Not as many beggars, more girls and the occasional boy next to intimately dark entrances. No manned food stalls either. “You can tell a lot from ads,” I said. “The folks that put them up have a vested interest and make sure they target their audience, you know?”

“I suppose.”

“Around your part of the city, I bet there are lots of ads for bibles or... I don’t know, Jesus wine? TV evangelists? Whatever it is you religious types like. Back there, there was food and insurance and job sites. The kind of stuff that the people living there need.”

“And here it’s drugs and guns,” Gomorrah said. She wasn’t dumb. “So the people here need those things.”

“The people here have proven statistically likely enough to buy those things that it’s cost-effective to put up ads for them,” I said. “At least, that’s how it was explained to me.”

Gomorrah nodded, and I saw her hunching a bit. She brought her arms up, sliding her hands into her opposite sleeves. I didn’t think it wise to make oneself small, but we were just passing by, and it wasn’t time for street living lessons.

There were two ways to move through a dangerous part. Three, really. You moved fast. You moved like you fit in. Or you made small and tried to look unappetizing.

The way we were dressed, even if we weren’t covered in chrome and spit-shined like some fancy corporate stooge, still hinted that we had a few credits to spare. It was better to make it look like that was because we weren’t to fuck with than looking like someone that had followed their GPS off to the wrong corner.

Catherine, could you look to your left? Behind the hologram of a woman with a cheap rifle.

I let out a sigh when I noticed a kid staring at us from behind a dancing holographic woman using a rifle as some sort of marital aid. He had one eye glowing with the tell-tale sign of someone with some cheap aftermarket aug.

“Myalis, why did you pick this road?”

It is the route to your destination that requires the least time spent lingering in gang-infested areas.

“Hmm, fair enough, I guess.” I looked at the kid again and made sure to focus on his eyes. “Any way you can tell me what he’s up to?”

Sending a live feed of you and Gomorrah to three young men with surprisingly varied criminal records who happen to be waiting in an alley some hundred meters away.

“That’s nice. Any chance you could tell them not to pull off whatever they’re thinking of doing?”

Only if I get creative. None of them have augmentations. They’re using a tablet of all things to see the feed from the child. Give me a moment, it might take some convincing them, at least if they’ve consumed as many narcotics as I suspect.

I reached into my jacket and pulled out my Trench Maker. “We might need to do some negotiating,” I said.

***