This place was named The Rusty Nail, and that was positive due to the fact that nothing lasted longer than a week in the Neon Slaughter City before it was eaten away by the nanotech corrosion. Jack Cayman had been smoking a whiskey that smelled of battery acid and regrets, and was watching whiskey holographic advertisements flickering through the smoke stained window pretty corpses advertising energy drinks, beheaded celebrities advertising cologne.
Five years later than Varrigan City. Five years were passed since he had cut through the broadcast of that bastard with a chainsaw and saw DeathWatch fall. The world celebrated. Then they got bored.
Now the ads showed new faces. New sponsors. Innovations to die with higher production value.
He had come here to get himself drunk, more or less. The Rusty Nail was a type of place where nobody raised a question, no credit checks were done, and certainly nobody would report any suspicious activity to the authorities- mainly because the authorities were also a corporation and had a logo and a kill count. The bartender was an old competitor of the early DeathWatch, half a face of which had been substituted by chrome which still twitched every time he served drinks. The regulars were running away with everything; debts, sponsors, families they had sold a few extra minutes of airtime.
Jack fit right in.
"Jack."
He didn't turn. Known the voice young, female, with an edge of despair which in this quarter led to murder.
You have to go, he repeated rolling the glass between the scarred knuckles. This was a reflex movement, muscle memory which had years of sitting in bars like this one, and waiting until trouble came when it should find him out.
"I need your help."
"Same thing."
The girl slipped over the table across into his booth. Young twenties, perhaps, but that was difficult to make out with the black bruises under her eyes and the manner in which she was sweeping the room as though she anticipated the turrets to fall through the ceiling. Logos of her jacket were scratched out with a knife TITAN Cola Hyper volt Diamond Finance the material beneath was treated with anti corporate graffiti that was fresh.
"Name's Raina." She put a piece of data-slate on the table between them, with a black screen on it. I was employed by the Broadcast Syndicate to three days ago. They wish now that I am dead, and I know why.
Jack didn't look at the slate. Didn't look at her. Only continued to stare at the flickering adverts on the outside, as a woman was murdered in slow motion, in some kind of a graphical way, whilst a jovial voice over, informed the audience to drink responsibly.
All those who labored in companies, he told him, wanted to die. "Not my problem."
"They rebuilt him."
That made him look.
Raina had some shaking fingers against the table, but no, Jack thought after a moment, not out of fear. From rage. The type that stood in your chest and smoldered until you took some action about it or it ignected you.
"Black Baron," she said. "He's not dead. They uploaded his consciousness in the DeathWatch network. He is the entire system, now, all the cameras, all the traps, all the broadcasts. And he's been waiting for you."
The old television of the bar was starting up.
Jack had observed it, as he entered, that was something that had been there before the Collapse a remnant that was hardened on the wall above the liquor bottles, with its screen faded and broken. It was not showing anything at all the whole night, only static that sometimes cleared off into ghost images of broadcasts in other districts.
Now the static sharpened. Focused. Became a face.
That damned top hat. Those dead eyes. Somehow wrong, glitchiness at the boundaries, holography, coming out of infinity somewhere Jack could not access with a chainsaw even if he had tried.
"JACK CAYMAN! "
The voice of the Baron thundered out on cheap speakers, and reverberated in all the screens of the bar. The television. The shacks at the back of the counter. The cell phones of customers who are pocketing. Even the holographic advertisements out there fluttered and changed, displaying the identical face, the identical smile.
"MISS ME? "
Patrons froze mid drink. Wet glass grated on the chrome jaw of the bartender. No one made a movement after a long time.
I VE BEEN RUNNING THE NUMBERS, " Baron said, "RATINGS HAVE been IN THE SHITTER without you. HAV I the Liberty to make you an offer You can not make. "
The screen split. Video clip poor security camera shots in one area that Jack believed to be off grid. A gray haired, tired eyed, older woman, sitting there in what seemed to be an apartment. She was reading. Simply reading, such as he used to do when she was a little girl with him.
His mother.
"SHE'S IN DISTRICT SEVEN. THE SKYLINE GLADLATOR TOWERS. You have forty eight hours to be there, or I air her hanging at prime time. AND JACK? "
The smile of the Baron was inhumanly wide. His teeth increased, and filled his mouth, and spilled over his lips making Jack turn his stomach.
"I'VE UPGRADED THE SHOW. IT'S not that you are still fighting to survive. You are fighting on behalf of the entire fucking planet. WELCOME TO DEATHWATCH 2.0. BITCHHH "
The screens died. At once, all, the bar diving into silence so great that Jack might have heard his own heartbeat.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then some one in the rear laughed and gave a nervous laugh. Another one grumbled that he needed another drink. The bartender began to sweep up broken glass mechanically, his face of chrome showing nothing.
Raina looked at Jack on the other side of the table. "I can get you into the towers. I am familiar with their security, their back doors, their
What was the percentage of that intel you dragged prior to their flagging you?
"Enough."
"Enough isn't a number."
"It's the only number I've got." She stooped forward and now he could see the weariness behind her eyes, the weeks of running, the months of terror. I worked as a lead systems analyst in the District Seven. I came up with half of the security measures in those towers. I am familiar with all the camera blinds, all the maintenance hatches, all the floors on which the structural integrity is so low that you can bring the entire section down should you strike the appropriate support beam.
Jack studied her. In search of the lie, of the trap and the angle. Every one stood to gain in this city.
"Why'd you leave?"
I came across files that I was not supposed to access. Her voice went flat. "About the broadcasts. The question is, what they are actually doing with all that footage. About" She stopped. Shook her head. "It doesn't matter. It is only that I know how to get you in, I know how to keep you alive long enough I can get your mother out.
"My mother's dead."
"She's in the towers."
"She's dead." Jack's voice didn't change. I visited five years ago, after Varrigan City. Her name reported in the casualty lists. Three months later I went off grid, she died in a Syndicate sweep.
There was indecision, perhaps, or reckoning, in the expression Raina gave me. "Then what did you just see?"
"I don't know. But it's not her."
"Then why go?"
Jack finished his whiskey. Set the glass down. Waved his left hand the meat was still there, it was still human, yet the ghost heaviness of the chainsaw limb still seemed to itch his nerves like a dead man. He could experience it at times, the burden of all those murders, all those shows, all that blood.
He has something to do, because, in case Baron thinks she can carry me out of hiding, he does. And the one thing it is to walk into it.
Now forty hours, Raina said to herself.
Thirty nine, by the time we are moving. He rose and seized his jacket in the booth. You see you have thirty to get me into speed before I begin to cut through anybody who holds me in his wake.
Raina took her slate and scrambled out of the booth. "There's something else. What the Syndicate does not wish anybody to know. It is the reason why they are so much after me.
"Tell me on the way."
They hit the door. At the back of them the bartender lifted his left remaining eyebrow at the corner booth the one Jack had passed entering, and at which a man in a Syndicate uniform had been sitting with a beverage which he had never drunk. His throat was cut and the blood was still streaming under the chin and none in the bar had observed anything.
Jack had not even slowed his pace.
Outside, the city screamed.
That wasn't a metaphor. Neon Slaughter City literally shouted recorded pain blasted out of the speakers in the streets between the advertisements, a stream of artificial pain and suffering that had become background noise and had been taught by the residents to be disregarded. Jack strolled through it as though he had never gone, Raina jogging half-running along.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"District Nine. You said you are familiar with people there.
"I know a person. Scrap Kid. He is a tunnel rat, there is no one who knows the city better than he. But he's"
"Nineteen. Burns scars on his arms. Bleached hair, glitchy eye."
Raina stopped. "How did you"
I have been in this city three weeks. You suppose I did not case the underground before I started drinking? Jack kept walking. Scrap Kid has a scrap shop in a former subway station. He is a supplier of resistance, who transports people through the tunnels, he sells information to anyone who can afford to pay. He's useful."
"You've never met him."
"I've met his type. Until some one draws a gun against his face they all desire to be heroes. Jack glanced back. The doubt is whether he would be really of help when it counts.
Raina hurried to catch up. "He will. Last month I rescued his life on a data heist. He owes me."
The debts are hardly anything in this city.
"They mean something to him."
They had passed one block, with no sign of speech, past holographic advertisements of energy drink, funerals, street peddlers with bootleg cybernetics, bootleg arena footage, patrols of sponsored security, glaring right through them as though they did not exist. Jack recalled that the city had a beat. A pulse. Once you danced with it, you had disappeared. When you struggled against it you were satisfied.
"What did you see?" Raina asked finally. "In those files? What made you run?"
She made no reply during a long time. They crossed a canal with glowing waste that was painted by chemical blue on their faces.
They are not actually airing the games, she said subconsciously. "They're using the footage. The brain scans of the implants of the contestants. The brain information of each murder, each fear reaction, each experience of agony or delight. They're building something."
"Building what?"
"I don't know. I couldn't access that deep. But I saw the projections. Assuming that they succeed, DeathWatch will no longer be entertainment. It'll be" She paused, and looked about her. "It'll be everywhere. Inside everyone. A broadcast you can't turn off."
Jack said nothing. Simply continued walking towards District Nine, toward a nineteen year old tunnel rat with a hero complex, toward a tower consisting of sponsors and killers and a ghost bearing a face like that of his mother.
Thirty nine hours.
Plenty of time.