Mona Lisa Overdrive

6 - Morning Light

Slick spent the night on a piece of gnawed gray foam under a workbench on Factory's ground floor, wrapped in a noisy sheet of bubble packing that stank of free monomers. He dreamed about Kid Afrika, about the Kid's car, and in his dreams the two blurred together and Kid's teeth were little chrome skulls.

He woke to a stiff wind spitting the winter's first snow through Factory's empty windows.

He lay there and thought about the problem of the Judge's buzzsaw, how the wrist tended to cripple up whenever he went to slash through something heavier than a sheet of chipboard. His original plan for the hand had called for articulated fingers, each one tipped with a miniature electric chainsaw, but the concept had lost favor for a number of reasons. Electricity, somehow, just wasn't satisfying; it wasn't physical enough. Air was the way to go, big tanks of compressed air, or internal combustion if you could find the parts. And you could find the parts to almost anything, on Dog Solitude, if you dug long enough; failing that, there were half-a-dozen towns in rustbelt Jersey with acres of dead machines to pick over.

He crawled out from under the bench, trailing the transparent blanket of miniature plastic pillows like a cape. He thought about the man on the stretcher, up in his room, and about Cherry, who'd slept in his bed. No stiff neck for her. He stretched and winced.

Gentry was due back. He'd have to explain it to Gentry, who didn't like having people around at all.

Little Bird had made coffee in the room that served as Factory's kitchen. The floor was made of curling plastic tiles and there were dull steel sinks along one wall. The windows were covered with translucent tarps that sucked in and out with the wind and admitted a milky glow that made the room seem even colder than it was.

"How we doing for water?" Slick asked as he entered the room. One of Little Bird's jobs was checking the tanks on the roof every morning, fishing out windblown leaves or the odd dead crow. Then he'd check the seals on the filters, maybe let ten fresh gallons in if it looked like they were running low. It took the better part of a day for ten gallons to filter down through the system to the collection tank. The fact that Little Bird dutifully took care of this was the main reason Gentry would tolerate him, but the boy's shyness probably helped as well. Little Bird managed to be pretty well invisible, as far as Gentry was concerned.

"Got lots," Little Bird said.

"Is there any way to take a shower?" Cherry asked, from her seat on an old plastic crate. She had shadows under her eyes, like she hadn't slept, but she'd covered the sore with makeup.

"No," Slick said, "there isn't, not this time of year."

"I didn't think so," Cherry said glumly, hunched in her collection of leather jackets.

Slick helped himself to the last of the coffee and stood in front of her while he drank it.

"You gotta problem?" she asked.

"Yeah. You and the guy upstairs. How come you're down here? You off duty or something?"

She produced a black beeper from the pocket of her outermost jacket. "Any change, this'll go off."

"Sleep okay?"

"Sure. Well enough."

"I didn't. How long you work for Kid Afrika, Cherry?"

" 'Bout a week."

"You really a med-tech?"

She shrugged inside her jackets. "Close enough to take care of the Count."

"The Count?"

"Count, yeah. Kid called him that, once."

Little Bird shivered. He hadn't gotten to work with his styling tools yet, so his hair stuck out in all directions. "What if," Little Bird ventured, "he's a vampire?"

Cherry stared at him. "You kidding?"

Eyes wide, Little Bird solemnly shook his head.

Cherry looked at Slick. "Your friend playing with a full deck?"

"No vampires," Slick said to Little Bird, "that's not a real thing, understand? That's just in stims. Guy's no vampire, okay?"

Little Bird nodded slowly, looking not at all reassured, while the wind popped the plastic taut against the milky light.

He tried to get a morning's work in on the Judge, but Little Bird had vanished again and the image of the figure on the stretcher kept getting in the way. It was too cold; he'd have to run a line down from Gentry's territory at the top of Factory, get some space heaters. But that meant haggling with Gentry over the current. The juice was Gentry's because Gentry knew how to fiddle it out of the Fission Authority.

It was heading into Slick's third winter in Factory, but Gentry had been there four years when Slick found the place. When they'd gotten Gentry's loft together, Slick had inherited the room where he'd put Cherry and the man she said Kid Afrika called the Count. Gentry took the position that Factory was his, that he'd been there first, got the power in so the Authority didn't know. But Slick did a lot of things around Factory that Gentry wouldn't have wanted to do himself, like making sure there was food, and if something major broke down, if the wiring shorted or the water filter packed it in, it was Slick who had the tools and did the fixing.

Gentry didn't like people. He spent days on end with his decks and FX-organs and holo projectors and came out only when he got hungry. Slick didn't understand what it was that Gentry was trying to do, but he envied Gentry the narrowness of his obsession. Nothing got to Gentry. Kid Afrika couldn't have gotten to Gentry, because Gentry wouldn't have gone over to Atlantic City and gotten into deep shit and Kid Afrika's debt.

He went into his room without knocking and Cherry was washing the guy's chest with a sponge, wearing white throwaway gloves. She'd carried the butane stove up from the room where they did the cooking and heated water in a steel mixing bowl.

He made himself look at the pinched face, the slack lips parted just enough to reveal yellow smoker's teeth. It was a street face, a crowd face, face you'd see in any bar.

She looked up at Slick.

He sat on the edge of the bed, where she'd unzipped his sleeping bag and spread it out flat like a blanket, with the torn end tucked in under the foam.

"We gotta talk, Cherry. Figure this, you know?"

She squeezed the sponge out over the bowl.

"How'd you get mixed up with Kid Afrika?"

She put the sponge in a Ziploc and put that away in the black nylon bag from the Kid's hover. As he watched her, he saw there was no wasted motion, and she didn't seem to have to think about what she was doing. "You know a place called Moby Jane's?"

"No."

"Roadhouse, off the interstate. So I had this friend was manager there, doing it for about a month when I move in with him. Moby Jane, she's just huge; she just sits out back the club in a float tank with this freebase IV drip in her arm and it's totally disgusting. So like I said, I move in there with my friend Spencer, he's the new manager, because I had this trouble over my ticket in Cleveland and I couldn't work right then."

"What kind of trouble?"

"The usual kind, okay? You wanna hear this or not? So Spencer's let me in on the owner's horrible condition, right? So the last thing I want anybody to know is that I'm a med-tech, otherwise they'll have me out there changing filters on her tank and pumping freebase into two hundred kilos of hallucinating psychotic. So they put me waiting tables, slinging beer. It's okay. Get some good music in there. Kind of a rough place but it's okay because people know I'm with Spencer. 'Cept I wake up one day and Spencer's gone. Then it comes out he's gone with a bunch of their money." She was drying the sleeper's chest as she spoke, using a thick wad of white absorbent fiber. "So they knock me around a little." She looked up at him and shrugged. "But then they tell me what they're gonna do. They're gonna cuff my hands behind my back and put me in the tank with Moby Jane and turn her drip up real high and tell her my boyfriend ripped her off ... " She tossed the damp wad into the bowl. "So they locked me up in this closet to let me think about it before they did it. When the door opens, though, it's Kid Afrika. I never saw him before. 'Miss Chesterfield,' he said, 'I have reason to believe you were until recently a certified medical technician.' "

"So he made you an offer."

"Offer, my ass. He just checked my papers and took me straight on out of there. Not a soul around, either, and it was Saturday afternoon. Took me out in the parking lot, there's this hover sittin' in the lot, skulls on the front, two big black guys waiting for us, and any way away from that float tank, that's just fine by me."

"Had our friend in the back?"

"No." Peeling off the gloves. "Had me drive him back to Cleveland, to this burb. Big old houses but the lawns all long and scraggy. Went to one with a lot of security, guess it was his. This one," and she tucked the blue sleeping bag up around the man's chin, "he was in a bedroom. I had to start right in. Kid told me he'd pay me good."

"And you knew he'd bring you out here, to the Solitude?"

"No. Don't think he did, either. Something happened. He came in next day and said we were leaving. I think something scared him. That's when he called him that, the Count. 'Cause he was angry and I think maybe scared.'the Count and his fucking LF,' he said."

"His what?"

" 'LF.' "

"What's that?"

"I think this," she said, pointing up at the featureless gray package mounted above the man's head.