Deadstock

CHAPTER ONE my little deity

"Burikko suru" was the Japanese expression for this popular look. It meant, "to fake-child it."

His client's daughter and her three schoolmates were sixteen years old-Jeremy Stake knew that part already-but they all seemed shorter perhaps than they should have been, not even five feet tall, as if they had willed themselves to remain so petite in order to further their cute and child-like appearance. Stake wondered if they had undergone some process that, at least temporarily, would suppress their height to engender this effect.

They all had the same figure, too, as far as he could make out: slender, delicate, with coltish legs. The legs were particularly noticeable, because as part of their uniforms they wore very short, pleated tartan skirts in black and gray with a touch of blue. Their trim blazers were black, with their private school's crest emblazoned in metallic gold and blue thread. They wore white blouses and blue ascots.

"Hello, mister-I'm Yuki," said one of the four girls, smiling shyly, blinking her long lashes under a mathematically straight fringe of bangs.

He could already tell she was Yuki, because she was the only one without a kawaii-doll. Despite the sameness of their uniforms and bodies, there were small touches of individuality about the four friends (but if one looked at all the girls from their school, one would no doubt see these individual touches widely repeated). One girl wore white ankle socks. Another wore very baggy knee-high white socks, bunched up in folds that contrasted in an interesting way with her smooth brown thighs. Another wore knee-high white stockings that instead clung tightly to her calves. Yuki wore socks like these, but hers were a deep navy blue color.

"You're here to see my father, aren't you?" Yuki went on, when Stake had smiled and nodded to acknowledge her greeting.

"Yes," he admitted, trying not to let his eyes flick down to her legs again. Her thighs were glaringly empty. The other three girls had dolls resting on their laps.

Yuki had long blue-black hair and huge eyes that were both black and luminous at once. There was another girl of Asian origins whose hair was dyed a reddish color. A third Asian girl had her inky hair cut very short, but with bangs like Yuki. The fourth girl appeared to have a more Hispanic bloodline, her long hair bunched into two tails on the sides of her head, floppy like the ears of a cartoon rabbit, but her thin features had a kind of imperious sharpness that disagreed with the cute effect. Yuki's two Asian friends might have been going for pouty but came off looking bored or sullen. Stake thought that only Yuki really pulled off the soft, sweet, innocent look that they were all shooting for.

"It's about my doll, isn't it?" Yuki said. "My father is asking you to find it for me."

The girls sat on a marble bench within the garden-like courtyard of the company that Yuki's father owned. It was a cylindrical building hollowed by this open core, the bright blue sky of the planet Oasis showing far above them like a telescope's view of heaven, but it was a deceptive view. Beyond the walls of this structure, Punktown was anything but heavenly. At least this courtyard seemed like a microcosmic paradise. A double-helix sculpture twined up from the fountain at the center of the garden, reaching almost to the top of the building like a ladder. Brightly blossoming vines had entangled the bronze chain's loops. Encircling windows looked out upon this rising symbol, so significant to the work being done within the building's offices and labs. Stake had passed through a lobby area, and been directed to wait here for Mr. Fukuda to join him.

"I really shouldn't discuss the business I have with your father," he said to the girl politely.

"Well, I'm sure my father will want you to question me about Dai-oo-ika's disappearance." Yuki smiled again, but her lips quivered and her eyes suddenly took on a moist sheen. The reddish-haired girl reached over to clasp her hand on one of Yuki's legs consolingly. Stake tried not to look at the small hand upon the plastic-smooth thigh.

"I'm sorry about… your doll," he said awkwardly. "So it's name is what?"

"Dai-oo-ika," said the short-haired girl. "It means 'great king of squid.'"

"I see." Stake nodded, and now took in the three kawaii-dolls of Yuki's pals. "Kawaii" was a Japanese word for "cute," and kawaii-dolls of all types had been the rage with children in the Earth colonies for the past few years. Of course, the more expensive and elaborate dolls held more value for collectors, and hence more appeal-more esteem. Stake had done a little reading about these toys on the net this morning and could tell that these three dolls were of the highest order.

The short-haired girl watched Stake staring at the dolls, so took it upon herself to introduce them. She hugged her own and said, "This is Mr. Gau." It seemed like a very realistic bear cub in some ways, but its eyes were too large and it had no nose or mouth and only stubby vestigial limbs. The lack of a mouth and ineffectual arms and legs were a common theme with kawaii-dolls, to make them look helpless, vulnerable, submissive. Stake had read that critics of the dolls viewed this as a conspiracy, sending signals to young girls that these passive qualities were what would appeal to men when they became adult women.

There was a little metal straw extending from between Mr. Gau's legs. Yuki's friend uncapped it, held the teddy bear up and sucked at the straw, keeping her eyes on Stake's. At this, the bear lifted its head higher, blinking, and made a rumbling sound like a purr or muffled growl in spite of its missing mouth. Its tiny half-limbs swam in the air. Finished, the girl recapped the straw and the bear went immobile again. She smiled, licking her lips. "Ruou gau is a rice wine the Vietnamese like, made with bile from a bear's gall bladder. The Chinese used to have bear farms where they put catheters in live bears to drain it. But Mr. Gau is filled with pineapple CandyPop." She giggled.

"Mm," Stake said. He hadn't realized the dolls could be so educational. But however slight his knowledge of animal anatomy, he knew a bear's gall bladder was not between its hind legs.

"There were only a hundred-fifty copies of the Deluxe Mr. Gau made," the girl announced proudly. She gestured to the reddish-haired girl's pet. "Suzu's doll is number four in a series of only a hundred!" She pouted as if in sad envy. Suzu giggled, less sulky all of a sudden, and held her doll higher for him to see. It was a thing like a clockwork robot from some long-antiquated future vision, made from a goldish tarnished metal (or plastic resembling metal), somewhat turtle-like in form. The whole time they had been talking, this thing had been watching Stake avidly, turning its head ever so slightly to track his smallest shift in position. He found it unsettling.

Not to be outdone, the Hispanic girl spoke up loudly with a kind of arrogant pride to say, "Mine is only one of four hundred. That's still pretty rare!"

Yuki was able to speak again. "Maria got hers for her Sweet Sixteen party two weeks ago, like I got Dai-oo-ika for my Sweet Sixteen party last month." At the memory of this event, she looked like a woman who had watched her child murdered before her eyes. Stake saw Suzu's hand give Yuki's thigh a squeeze.

Stake recognized that Maria's kawaii-doll was not an animated toy like the other two, but a bio-engineered organism. Its functions were simple; despite its seemingly higher evolution, it was as primitive a thing as a starfish. It was little more than an anthropomorphic starfish in shape, too: four pointed pink limbs and a pointed pink head with eyes like black marbles pressed in dough, and no other features but for its outie navel. The near-mindless organism squirmed with the uncertain slow-motion movements of a newborn infant.

"Yuki's dad's company makes Stellar," Maria said. "And he made Dai-oo-ika, too. But there's only one Dai-oo-ika."

Sniffing, Yuki nodded. "Dai-oo-ika is the rarest kawaii-doll in Punktown, Daddy says." Her voice came close to breaking as she squeaked, "And I love him, too!"

During an awkward moment in which he was at a loss as to how he might properly console a person in this situation, Stake heard the ring of a hand phone. "Oh. oh," said the short-haired girl urgently, digging the tiny device out of her blazer's pocket. "The channel is open." Maria leaned in close to gaze at its minuscule screen. The short-haired girl pressed some keys, then brought the phone to her ear. "Hello? Hello? Can anyone hear me?"

In a whisper, Suzu explained to Stake, "It's a Ouija phone."

"Ah." He nodded.

Another craze with the kids. At first, skeptics had accused the phone makers of recording false ghost voices that callers could tune in to, and there were a few disingenuous services where live people posed as dead people (when hassled by consumer groups, such services protested that their operators were sensitives, channeling the voices of the dead), but in fact the majority of these instruments did what they purported to do. The technology for them was based on the findings of government-commissioned Theta research groups, as they were called, which sent probes- and even researchers themselves-to investigate other planes of existence. Whether one chose to consider them souls in the religious sense, or merely sketchy traces of electromagnetic life energy imprinted on the ether, the voices on the Ouija phones didn't so much interact with the callers as moan and lament in more or less inarticulate despair, though some kids claimed to establish bonds with certain spirits. Other kids just liked to talk dirty and taunt them.

"Hello? What?" said the short-haired girl. She visibly shuddered and gave a nervous smile to the others. "Can you say that again?"

"What channel are you on, Kaori?" Maria asked, whipping out her own Ouija phone. It was shocking pink with tiny skull-and-crossbones all over it.

"Have you ever tried one, mister?" Suzu asked, watching Stake's face as he observed Maria's attempts to tune into the same frequency her friend was using.

Stake thought of the men who had died beside him, all around him, in the Blue War. But what would they have to say to him, if any of them should indeed be in that junkyard of spirit scraps? Would they rage at him in envy for returning home alive in their place? And then, what of the people he had killed? What would they want to tell him? Stake hoped his own shudder was not visible to the others.

"No," he said. "I haven't." "Want to try it?"

The short-haired girl, Kaori, was saying into the mouthpiece, "Can you tell me your name?"

Before Stake could say "no" again, a male voice behind him said, "Mr. Stake?"

Stake turned around a little too quickly, to meet the gaze of a tall and handsome Asian man in a five-piece suit, terracotta in color, expensive but cut loose-fitting and comfortable so that he didn't suffer that embalmed bureaucrat look. He grinned and extended a hand tipped in shiny manicured nails. "I'm John Fukuda."

"Mr. Fukuda."

"I trust my daughter and her chums were keeping you entertained?" He looked past Stake at the group of uniformed girls. "And what are you ladies doing here?"

Yuki pouted. "I thought you might need me to join you, Daddy, to talk to your friend about Dai-oo-ika."

"My dear, if I need you to talk to Mr. Stake I will be sure to summon you. But you just trust me to take care of this. For now, I will tell him all that you've told me, and we'll go from there-all right?" He reached out to cup her lovely face. "I know how much this hurts you." She nodded miserably.

Fukuda faced his guest again. "At the end of the day I customarily use the gym here for an hour. Would you mind accompanying me? And you're welcome to use the equipment, too, while we talk."

"Um… it's fine to talk there. Any place you like."

"Very good. I'm a creature of habit. Habit is the closest I can come to self-discipline," he joked.

"Can you give us a ride to the Canberra Mall on the way home, Daddy?" Yuki spoke up.

"Yes, yes, very well. If you don't mind waiting another hour. Why don't you girls go sit in the cafeteria or something?"

"Okay, Daddy."

"And I wish you'd stop using those morbid phones," he added, but with a weary sigh rather than disgust. "This way, please, Mr. Stake."

"Nice to meet you girls," Stake said, his eyes drawn back to Kaori with her Ouija phone cupped to her ear. She was intent on whatever it was she was hearing, ignoring the conversation of the living people.

The fitness center of Fukuda's company consisted of two floors, and its facilities included a swimming pool, though it was currently hidden by its retractable cover. The windows looked out upon the central garden where the girls had formerly been sitting. Popular music played over a sound system.

Whether it had been arranged this way or not, Fukuda and Stake were the only two people currently in the gym. Fukuda had quickly changed into a T-shirt, shorts and sneakers in the men's locker room, though Stake hadn't even removed the jacket of his rumpled, mustard-colored suit. He sat on the edge of a weightlifting bench, watching his client pump his legs in an elliptical walker. He saw that Fukuda's arms and leg muscles were rock hard. Most of those people who could afford them took nonprescription meds to control their weight, but many others like Fukuda preferred to shape their bodies through a more personal process. They no doubt found the ritual of exercise rewarding in some very primal way; maybe it put them more in touch with themselves. Was it a source of pride, a narcissistic achievement, a self-intimacy like masturbation? Personally, Fukuda's pedaling looked quite boring to Stake, mindless, like a hamster racing in a wheel.

At thirty-three, Stake figured himself to be at least five years younger than his client. Others found his age hard to pin down. He was of average height, and average weight without the intervention of either exercise or meds. Because of the blending of races over many generations, most people of Earth ancestry had dark hair and dusky skin. Stake's short hair was dark, and his skin was somewhat olive. But upon very close examination, despite a normal smoothness of texture, his skin had an oddly grainy look, as if pixilated. There was a blandness to Jeremy Stake's face that made him more than nondescript; he was almost unfinished looking. There was something both eerily infant-like in his face, and mannequin-like. A drunken young woman he had once tried flirting with in a bar had asked him if he were an android. It had killed his own half-drunken lust for her.

Fukuda was looking over at him, and Stake knew his host was speculating on his appearance. Stake straightened his slouched posture, hoping the man didn't think him lazy for not joining in his workout.

"I heard about you from one of my people," Fukuda explained in a voice only slightly strained. "Do you remember a Troy Leman?"

"Yes. He had me follow his wife. I figured there might be a connection between you two, when you told me who you were."

"Her boyfriend attacked you, and you took care of that situation very, uh, adeptly. Clearly a case of justifiable homicide." He smirked. "But an ice swan?"

"It was a Christmas party, in a posh hotel. I didn't have my gun on me at the time."

"I see. I appreciate resourcefulness. Well. I have a security team here, Mr. Stake, but this is out of their range of expertise. It's investigative skills that I mostly require. Still, if you need me to give you a little extra manpower, by all means just ask. But I was impressed that you're able to handle things on your own when they get ugly."

"You don't expect this to get too ugly, do you, sir? I mean, it's got to be another kid at school who stole this thing, from what you told me on the phone."

"That is the obvious answer. But even then things could become unsavory, getting the doll back. You don't shy away from the unsavory, do you, Mr. Stake?" "Unsavory comes with my job description, Mr.

Fukuda."

Fukuda slowed his pedaling to the point that he could step down from the walker. He switched to a crunch machine, set the weight level, gripped its handles, then began sitting back and forward, back and forward, breathing in and out accordingly. In between that, he managed to go on, "Security at Yuki's school is tight, as it well should be, but I'll make some calls so that you'll have access to question teachers and even students, discreetly, should you need to do that. I have influence there."

Stake didn't doubt it, from the looks of this building. This business. But its exact nature was still somewhat unclear to him. The private investigator glanced toward the windows, that massive double-helix sculpture looming up from below. "What do you do here, sir, if I might ask? Do you make. toys?"

Fukuda laughed, and stopped pumping his body like a bellows to look over at his guest. "Yes, we make toys, Mr. Stake, but I'm not a toy maker. This isn't the North Pole." He laughed again. "Fukuda Bioforms designs and manufactures a wide variety of bio-engineered life forms, for any number of purposes, depending on our clients' needs. Everything from microscopic, organic and partly organic nanomites for the repair of people and machines alike, to very large organisms such as deadstock."

"Deadstock?"

"Sorry; it's an unappetizing slang we use for comestible battery animals."

"Ahh. Livestock. Deadstock. I see. A fitting name for a lot of chickens and cows with no heads or limbs."

"Do you know we bought out Alvine Products after that scandalous situation they had a couple of years ago? We rebuilt their facility and grow our own meat products there, now."

"Oh yeah, Alvine. They turned out to be owned by a religious cult. They weren't just growing deadstock, but some kind of army of. monsters, too. They thought Armageddon was coming."

"Something like that. It was run by Kalians. Religious fanatics. There was an attempt to cover it all up, afterwards, and I have to say I've helped to blot out that facility's history myself. It's all in the past now and we don't want to be associated with those former activities. No Armageddon army for us." He chuckled.

"But you do make toys, too. Living toys, like that girl Maria's doll, there. And like your daughter's 'great king of squid.'"

"Dai-oo-ika. He is a one-of-a-kind. I suppose it was naive of me to think that no one would dare steal him. Even at a good school like that, people are people. Of course, Yuki was envied for Dai-oo-ika, and envy in little girls can fester into very ugly shapes."

"What do you estimate his… its value to be?"

"There's nothing like him, so even if you look at the collector's guides for kawaii-dolls, it's hard to say. But comparing him to other one-of-a-kind dolls, even a conservative estimate would put him in the tens of thousands of munits. Maybe a hundred thousand munits or more."

Stake whistled. "For a toy."

"Not just any toy. A kawaii-doll. And a custom-made kawaii-doll. But it isn't so much the money, at the end of the day, is it? The thing is, this creature belongs to my daughter." For the first time, Fukuda's face looked hard. He at last betrayed the cold force that a person needed in order to raise up a business of this size. "Whoever did this has made my daughter unhappy. And my child is everything to me, Mr. Stake."

"I'll do all I can, sir."

"Good man. So now, I'll run over everything that happened to Yuki that day, as she related it to me. I'm trying to keep her out of this in case it does get, uh, unsavory. But I'm not afraid of unsavory, either. Not when someone has brought pain to my child. Still, should you need to talk to her in person, just ask me and I'll arrange it promptly." Fukuda rose, picked up a towel to mop his face. "Care to sit with me in the sauna as we go over this?"

"I don't really like heat, sir."

Fukuda smiled. "No? I find the sauna to be a soothing discomfort. Let's go to the upper level and have a juice, then, instead. And I'll tell you the plight of our dear, lost Mr. Dai-oo-ika. He's become a sort of grandchild to me, I suppose."

Stake smiled a little at Fukuda's joke, his eyes wandering restlessly around the room. This was his habit. He had tried not to let his gaze remain on John Fukuda for very long. And yet.

Fukuda startled him by reaching out and taking his chin. It was not a forceful gesture, but Stake complied with it and let his client stare directly into his face. "Amazing," Fukuda said in a tone of fascination.

With every moment since they had been alone together, Jeremy Stake's eyes had subtly grown narrower. They had even, at last, developed a fold of skin over their inner corners in what is called the epicanthus. Thus, his eyes had become slanted, like Fukuda's. Even his muddy irises had grown darker, nearly black. His lips thinner. His skin more taut over his cheekbones.

"You don't do this on purpose, then?" Fukuda marveled almost boyishly.

"No. Some can do it at will. Not me. I have no control over it, except to look at someone. Or not look at someone."

"Caro mutabilis, isn't it?"

"It's in that broad spectrum. But my specific disorder is called Caro turbida," Stake explained. Even his voice was oddly undistinguished, unaccented, like a machine's. "It means 'disordered' or 'confused' flesh."

Fukuda lowered his hand, and nodded as if with satisfaction. "Frankly, Mr. Stake, it's another of the attributes that compelled me to hire you."

Stake was uncomfortable talking about it. He was always uncomfortable talking about it. "If you don't mind, sir, how about that juice?" he said.