PART THREE
Red stared out of the jet window, blankfacing at the cloudscape flowing beneath the plane. Labyrinth's last words kept going through her mind, like some goddamned GOTO loop. I need you alive and well, Red. I knew you would come eventually. You see, Johnson wants you to erase me.
The jet lurched slightly, reminding her that she wasn't on a carnival ride. She didn't like traveling -- one of the beauties of cyberspace was that travel usually wasn't necessary. In the Net, a Low Earth Orbit spa were just as accessible as the market around the corner. But every so often a nervous customer would demand to see their hired cowboy in the flesh. At those times, Red would hop a ramjet and spend the flight in a VR practice routine, coming out of it just in time to see the wheels hit the tarmac.
But not this time. This time, Bozo wanted company -- conscious company, he said, not some virtual bimbo with a talk show. Dumb yahoo, she thought sullenly. Without looking, she grabbed her drink and took another swallow, making a face. "Ecch. It's all melted."
"Well, if you'd drink the damned thing instead of making faces at the atmosphere, it wouldn't melt on you," Madrid said reasonably. For the flight, he was wearing his "conservative look" -- pastel makeup and button-down silks. "I'll get you another one."
"No, that's okay." She blinked, and the last image of her flatline came to mind -- the Mid-Axis Tower, cold polluted blue beyond plate glass. "The booze isn't helping."
Madrid glanced out at the salmon-colored clouds, resting his chin on her shoulder as he did so. "I know something that'll help," he said, delicately licking her ear.
The licking felt good. Red turned her head a notch. "Where?"
"The classic location."
She arched an eyebrow. "I've never done it in a ramjet john before."
"Life's full of new experiences, doll."
"So you've said. Let's go."
Chicago was a series of Fuller domes on the curve of Lake Michigan, stopping short of knife-edged highstacks that marked the perimeter of the Old Loop. Instinctively, Red glanced up from her seat in the southbound LSD mono, trying to pick out the Mid-Axe. Remembered riding up to the observation deck when it had still been the Sears Tower, and the sudden, violent nosebleed her little brother had gotten from the pressure drop. She smiled.
"You scare me when you smile like that," Madrid commented laconically, using a peculiar patois of ASL and jive to supplement his words.
Red shrugged, keeping the smile. "I scare everybody."
"Especially when you're not wearing makeup."
She let it pass -- he'd get his later on. "I was just thinking. About when I was out." She didn't like to say flatlined. "I mean, L had me cold--it could've just kept me in the Net and talked to me there. Why would it bother to conjure up a simstim of the Mid-Axe's observation deck?"
Madrid squinted at the building, crinkling the whiteface between his eyes. "It's an AI, Red, " he said patiently. "Nobody understands AI motivation, not even the hotshots who build them. We're talking true alien intelligence here -- humans can outguess an AI sometimes, but they can't actually predict what it's gonna do." He honked his nose thoughtfully, considering the black monolith ahead of them. "Maybe it likes the building. Hell, half of the fucker is Trump/Turner databank--" He blinked, glancing at her suddenly blank face. "Ah, shit. You don't think--"
He cut off, switching over to full signing. L can't be in the LMU tanks -- they're dead. It's gotta be somewhere.
And that kind of a core would be like a fucking mansion for an AI, as long as it wasn't too fussy about its neighbors.
"And T/T wants it out." Madrid tensed, sudden anger making the clown makeup gleam in the overheads as another piece slid home. "Fucking hell," he grunted aloud. "Yamujitsu."
Fairly intelligent for those schmoes , Red signed. Set up a dummy front, invite us to go in and investigate their pet annoyance, and they can catch the two proverbial birds with one stone.
Madrid followed the slight movements of her fingers, frowning. "Invite us to enter and dig deep a tame Limbaugh, so they can catch two wisdom pigeons with one hunk of rock?" he repeated, confused.
"Never mind."
He shrugged. "It's your fingers. What do you want to do?"
"I can guess why T/T's so hot to get rid of Labyrinth, but some particulars would be even better," Red said, gazing at the slightly sticky wall of the monorail car. Lurid advertisements for Richie D's Pizza Parlor and City Hall screamed at her tired nerves. "I want to get those first, then do some sleazing around the sector, find out what Lab's been up to for the past fifty years. For that, we're gonna need a local setup and some juice."
Grinning crookedly, Madrid fingered the squirt carnation in his lapel. "And I bet I know where we're gonna find that, right?"
Red rolled her eyes, frowning. "I don't like it any more than you do," she muttered.
"Hey, I never said I didn't like the Doctor," Madrid claimed. "Come to think of it, I've never actually met the Doctor. All you've told me about him is that he's got one of the biggest black tech setups this side of the Yak -- oh, and that he blots out the sun."
Red shrugged. "He does."
Idly, Madrid pumped a test squirt onto the seat in front of them. "The bigger they are, the less effort I have to use," he murmured, watching as the sulfuric acid ate a small hole in the seat's pseudoplastic. "They usually trip over themselves first."
"Boze -- behave, please? This isn't gonna be easy."
They disembarked at the 106th Street stop. Behind was the southern shore of Lake Michigan, partially hidden by the bombed-out shell of a Falstaff brewery and the I-90 Skyway. Red sniffed the air experimentally, enjoying the tang of seaweed and monocarbons. "Smells like home."
"Or industrial solvent," Madrid replied, pulling his trenchcoat around him. "This place is disgusting."
"Leftovers from the steel mills," she explained, kicking at the platform. A fine dust rose into the air, showing black against the slate gray platform walls. "Wisconsin, U.S. Steel, LTV -- they all closed down in the mid-1980's, but enough shit got pumped into the surrounding area to dye this place a permanent sludge. You can imagine what the locals' lungs must look like."
Madrid shook his head, fidding out a pair of Snoopy sunglasses from a jacket pocket. "Why didn't they just get it enclosed with a dome?"
"You'd have to understand the neighborhood," Red said, heading for the stairs. Madrid fell in step, and they picked their way down the crumbling concrete staircase. "The people around here are really insular, okay? I'm talking xenophobic -- had a high school teacher who said this was the only neighborhood in the city that handed out visas. And enforced them." She shrugged, glancing around at the industrial sites to the north. "When the city offered them a dome, they said no because that would've taken them out of isolation."
"I thought the domes were mandatory?"
"Not if your construction sites were constantly being blown up. Material shipments were delayed, a few aldermen got assassinated." Red shrugged. "The HLA was pretty strong back then."
"HLA?"
"Hegewisch Liberation Army." She sighed wistfully. "Those were the days."
They flagged a hovercab at the station's ticketbooth. The cabbie, a small black man with two copper rings set in his nose, glanced at the address Red handed him and frowned. "You sure you wanna go here, lady? That's some badass territory I gotta drive through."
"I got an appointment." She tossed a medium-thick roll of bills through the safety slot. "Here's a map."
The cash disappeared as if it wasn't there at all. "It's your ass, lady."
"You bet, baby. Now drive."
The cab kicked ito second and churned down 106th Street. "Just out of curiosity, where exactly are we going?" Madrid asked, gazing at the dilapidated two-story houses and false-front shops rolling by his window. "This looks residential. In a burned-out, 'only if I was desperate and couldn't afford a nice cardboard box' way, of course."
"It looks residential because it is residential. Doc bought our old house when they slated the block for demolition," Red said. "Bought the whole block, too -- turned it all into his place. It's pretty cool." The cab made a pavement-distorted left onto a new street, chugging to a halt in the middle of the potholed stretch.
"I'll believe it when I. . ." Madrid's jaw dropped, prosthetic fangs snapping into place in reflex. "Jumping Jesus H. Christ on a rubber crutch."
"Yeah, I know." Red looked past Madrid at the building. Three stories tall at its highest point, the hulking structure had orginally been a block-long series of two-story houses. At some point, someone had gone around and covered every open space on the perimeter with sheet metal, armor plating, construction blocks, even the occasional dome segment. If it was big, relatively flat and mobile, Red mused, it could be found on the outside of the building, welded into place and painted dull black. The result looked like an Escher painting brought to unfortunate life. "Doc's people went through and gutted all the houses, so that they're all connected to this humongous tunnel. It kinda looks like a batcave from hell."
Madrid raised both eyebrows, suddenly glad that he had packed a few extra surprises in his silks. "I can imagine."
The cab door opened with a hiss, depositing them on the rotting sidewalk. As soon as they were clear, the door slammed shut and the hovercab huffed into high gear, heading down the block. Abruptly, Madrid realized that, other than the hover's dying rumble, he heard almost nothing else. None of the normal street sounds, not even an occasional burst of horns from the Skyway. It was like they had walked into some kind of aural vacuum.
"Is it always this dead around here?" he muttered.
Red listened for a minute. "Nope. They're watching us. Probably had us scoped out three blocks back." She stepped over a large chunk of dusty concrete and made her way up to one of the housefronts. "He usually likes to freak people out with the silent treatment."
"It's working."
Red flashed him a quick grin before climbing a series of black concrete steps to the door, a massive old piece of oak sawn down to fit inside the doorframe. Hinged to the door was a knocker shaped like a cast iron hand with an old Mac mouse in its palm. Red grabbed the knocker and banged it in a syncopated rhythm:
BUM bum ba DUM dum.
She waited. Finally, the answering code came back:
BUM BUMP!
The door was opened by a wizened old man wearing a filthy t-shirt that appeared to have been white a few millenia ago. Written across the front in lab alphanumerics was a slogan: I WAS THE PRODUCT OF BIOGENETIC FIELD TESTING. "Ehhhh. . .whaddya want?" he gargled.
"You got that right," Red replied.
The man blinked. "What?"
"Exactly. And tell him to get his ass out here before Red comes in there and kicks it for him."
A few brain cells fired in the right sequence. The old man ducked back into the building with a speed that surprised Madrid. "Um, hon," he said diffidently, "far be it from me to question your actions, but are you sure you know what you're doing?"
"I grew up around here, Boze. Violence is the only kind of language the Doctor understands." She paused. "Well, that and AD&D."
Another minute passed before one of the largest humans Madrid had ever seen appeared in the doorway. "Appeared" was really too weak a word, he thought in amazement -- the creature emerged from its lair much as a Tyrranosaurus Rex must have peered from a cave. "Jesus, he does blot out the sun," he said reverently.
"Told ya." Red walked up to the behemoth, thumbs hooked in her belt loops. "Hi, Doc."
"Red." It wasn't a word -- it was the sound of concrete on steel. "Long time no see, girl."
"Yeah, sorry about that. My Supersaver fares never included Chicago." She cleared her throat, turning back to the clown. "Doc, I'd like to introduce you to my hardware artist -- Bozo Madrid, Esquire. Boze, this is Dr. What. Slamman, part-time fence, master of black law. Also my brother."
"Nice to meet you." Madrid extended a hand, saw it engulfed in the Doctor's massive paw. "Boy, you're big."
"Yeah, I know." The Doctor looked bored, like he'd heard it a million times before. Which, Madrid mused, he probably had. "Thought you'd cleared out for good, Red."
"Yeah, I thought so, too," she said tiredly. "Unfortunately, something made me come back."
The Doctor grunted, sucking his teeth. "You in trouble?"
"Not yet. Something grabbed me when I was on a run, something in this area. I want to check it out up close and personal."
He grunted again. "And you probably want to use my setup while you're here," he mused.
Red gave him a bright smile. "That's what family's for, hon."