Truly grabbed the revolver and pointed it, two-handed, at a large man in a trench coat and high-laced combat boots. Her hands shook, but she looked like she meant to use it.Nio stepped back.
What remained of the intruder’s once-blond hair poked up sparsely from his scalp like cactus needles. His neck was covered in a tattoo of writhing octopus tentacles, like he had a mane of them. He held up his gloved hands at sight of the wavering gun, but he clearly wasn’t frightened. He walked toward her as if amused. Another man followed but stopped to block the door. He was tall but thin and had straight black hair. He looked Native. His eyes were covered in old AR goggles. They were meant to be an anachronism, or so his suspenders and ankle-length pants suggested.
The octopus man glowered at Truly. “That’s the problem with being blue, beautiful,” he growled in a deep Scottish accent. “Everywhere ya go, people notice.”
He grabbed the gun and Truly pulled the trigger, but she wasn’t used to firing a weapon. The trigger was stiff and she had to pull harder than she expected. By the time the hammer fell, the gun was pointed at the ceiling. The bullet blew off bits of plaster, which bounced off the man and fell to the carpet.
He pulled the gun away and she yelped. Then he caressed her hair as she cowered against the window.
“Didya think the TruBois were gonna protect your pretty face? Eh? That we’d be too afraid to come here?”
Nio noticed the girl’s neck and cheeks were beginning to turn magenta—another of Gogo’s colors. Although it was the perfect time for a vaginal flame attack, somehow Nio doubted it was coming.
She pleaded instead. “Mr. Dalrymple, if you just let me—”
“Oh, come, now,” he interrupted. “You know I’m not the person you gotta convince.” He looked around the room. “Who’d you con out of this shithole? Her?”
Nio was trapped in the corner by the second man, who had drawn his weapon.
“She’s just a friend,” Truly said.
“Is that right?” Dalrymple asked. “Well, hello, friend. My name’s Malcolm.”
He looked at the unrolled medic’s bag on the floor. He picked up Nio’s jacket and squeezed it between his gloved hands, feeling for contents. He pulled out her translucent phone and made sure it was off before slipping it into his back pocket. He felt her coat again and produced a small bottle of pills. He rattled them.
“I get headaches,” Nio explained.
He glanced at the scars just visible under her buzzed scalp and patted the coat more. He pulled out her official-looking letter, unopened.
“That’s private,” she said.
The big man replaced the letter and threw the coat at her. Then he pointed at the white woman on the bed. “Take her to the ranch,” he ordered the second man. “I’ll bring these two to the boss.” He smiled at Truly. “Time to go, beautiful.”
She paused for the briefest of moments before complying without argument. She didn’t even look at her friend, as if the white girl were already gone.
“It’s cold outside,” Dalrymple told Nio. “Better put that fancy coat on.”
She paused to feel his bioelectrics but stopped after a single staccato shriek.
Shingles by Frantic Frenetic.
A sleek black Maybach, a custom luxury sedan, waited in the parking lot like a crouching panther. Truly strode to the passenger’s side door. Dalrymple put a giant hand on Nio’s shoulder, like they were old pals.
“Get in, friend.”
The sun had set. Only a distant glow remained at the horizon. The second man appeared at the top of the stairs carrying Beckham in his arms. He had wrapped her in his trench coat. He whacked her head against the door frame accidentally and cursed.
“No rideshares,” Dalrymple called. “They have back seat cameras.”
The Native man stopped. “You’re gonna leave me here? Alone?”
“Call Carl. He’s not working doors tonight.”
The second man looked around nervously. “What do I do until he gets here?”
A group of heavy-booted TruBois emerged from the lower unit then, laughing with each other. They were a gangly mix of geek and skinhead. They stopped when they saw the car—and the man next to it—before lowering their heads and walking away in silence.
“These racist twats aren’t gonna do shit,” Dalrymple said. “Not to us.” He tightened his grip on Nio’s neck. “Get in,” he repeated.
She had little choice. She scooted over as Dalrymple got in behind her. Sitting directly behind Truly, he had quick access to either woman. The driver’s seat was empty. The fancy car would drive itself—and keep the doors locked.
“I’m sorry,” Truly breathed.
“Don’t be sorry, beautiful. We’re all friends here.”
Del had been right. Everywhere Nio wanted to go was five minutes away. Their destination was a bit further, outside the town. The sky darkened completely on the trip, and the tinted windows of the car lightened automatically. The last glow in the west faded and stars appeared. Other than the occasional car headlight or porch lamp, the twin rows of blinking red lights on the sails of the distant deep core miner was all Nio could see. The on-board computer cheerily announced their ETA every few minutes. It was meant to be helpful. To Nio, it seemed like a countdown.
With a final satisfied ding, the vehicle pulled into a crumbling asphalt lot behind a tall windowless bar at the corner of a state highway and County Line Road. The neon sign on the pole in front was meant to say Raffe’s Day and Night but several letters were unlit.
“Out,” Dalrymple ordered.
Enough salt had been poured onto the nearly-empty lot that little remained of the snow. At the back was a dilapidated fence bounding the cluster of unmarked camping trailers in the field beyond. A four-foot gap between fence poles connected the bar with the trailers. The path between was worn to dirt.
A bouncer in a black suit and slim tie came out to greet them. He opened the door for Nio and held out his hand like she was a celebrity stepping onto the red carpet. He also blocked her only escape. Truly hurried inside as if desperate to use the bathroom. More of her skin had changed color.
At the door, Nio’s clothes were wanded for electronics. The paddlelike device chirped over her boots.
“Take them off,” Dalrymple ordered.
She looked down at the slushy, wet gravel under her feet. “Seriously?”
“Nothing wired,” he told her.
“They’re not powered. It’s just stupid smart clothes. I’ve never connected them to anything.”
“They can store data. Take them off and throw them in the dumpster.”
He nodded to the solid steel behemoth resting obliquely in its own wooden cage at the back of the bar. It smelled like a landfill.
On one hand, it was ridiculous. On the other, “smart” clothes often recorded enough information about their environment to be useful for law enforcement. Some sensed ambient temperature, for example, so as to know when to tighten or relax. Others sent data to an app where it could be cross-referenced with metabolic information, captured by smart watch or fitness bracelet, as part of a complex health monitoring algorithm—for weight loss or in preparation for pregnancy. Such data, all of which was gathered and sold, could be used to establish a person’s activity or impeach testimony. There was no way to know which articles were potentially incriminating. The simplest rule was to ban them all.
She slipped off her unlaced boots and tossed them one at a time into the dumpster. They resounded off the metal wall. Her socks were soaked instantly. Tiny pebbles poked her feet.
The steel double doors were opened and Nio was pushed into a large square storage room weakly lit by fluorescent lamp. The seafoam-colored walls gave everything a sickly look, including the eerie rack of plastic-wrapped sex dolls. Despite that most of their proportions stretched to the ridiculous, they looked completely real. Any of the twenty or so lingerie-clad figures could’ve been flesh and blood.
The doorway at the end of the room led to a hall paneled in faux wood. The open floor of the club was at the far end. Music thumped. The doorway to the kitchen was on the left. A large-bosomed waitress dressed like a sexy referee walked out carrying food in a plastic basket. Her skin glowed yellow-green under UV light. Halfway between the kitchen and the storage room, a staircase broke off to the right, but it wasn’t high enough to reach a full second floor, nor did the club have one. At the top, past the closed door, was a dim, low office overlooking the interior of the high-ceilinged strip club from a wall of tinted, floor-to-ceiling glass. On the right, a large desk faced two chairs. Truly waited in one. Her skin was now completely magenta and her hair was following suit. Her tail curled under the chair like a scared dog’s. On the left was a leather sofa and a short hall to a private washroom. By the light under the door, it was occupied.
“Have a seat,” Dalrymple ordered.
His head nearly touched the low ceiling. He pushed Nio toward the couch.
The back wall of the office was covered in framed pictures, none more than eight or nine inches across. Most held photos of smiling patrons, and together they recounted the entire 90-year history of the establishment, which used to be called The Day Club, then The Day and Night, now Raffe’s Day and Night. Hanging on the wall behind the desk, occupying the place of honor amid a cluster of recent photos, including several group pictures of all the dancers from certain years, was a child-sized, bright pink Hello Kitty shotgun. It seemed ridiculous in the dim, masculine room. It was also the only visible weapon.
Nio stared.
“Pheasant,” came a young girl’s voice. It had a deep country accent.
Nio turned. What at first appeared to be a little person with fake boobs and permed blonde hair stepped out of the washroom. She was barely four and a half feet tall.
Almost immediately, Nio could see she wasn’t a little person at all.
“The shotgun,” she explained in her girl’s voice. “It’s for hunting pheasant. It was a gift from an old client. In my day, we had exactly two industries: Sturgis and the pheasant run. A girl had to make her year working those. I’m Raffela. And you are?”
Nio was too stunned to answer. She had heard about neoteny dilation, but she had never seen it in humans. Neoteny, or the retention of juvenile features into adulthood, had been a fad with pets a decade or so before. Although it was much less popular lately, neotenous pets—PermaPuppies by their trade name—were still available. At one time or another, every pet owner thinks they want their new family member to stay young forever. Since the onset of adulthood is mediated by a sudden rise in hormones, like a biological switch, it was possible to create a cocktail of suppressor proteins that inhibited the cascade. PermaPuppies never matured, meaning they never had to be spayed or neutered. The startup that developed the process argued their product would decrease the number of animals in shelters. Buying a PermaPuppy was supposed to be morally superior to rescuing a stray because the latter only saved one animal, whereas PermaPuppies, being too adorable to abandon, would solve the problem of unwanted pets forever.
In fact, exactly the reverse happened. Because they never matured—or in some breeds, matured incompletely—neotenous pets were extremely difficult to house train and would often have lapses. Many developed odd psychological habits, what would be called neuroses in humans, including obsessive chewing and outbursts of sheer rage that lasted until the animals collapsed from exhaustion. As a result, a high percentage of people abandoned the animals after a few years and shelters soon found themselves forced to cull.
Amid the furor that followed, there were odd news stories about people who had attempted neoteny on themselves, but Nio had never heard of it being successful. Plenty of people dreamed of looking like a teen forever, but the reality of human aging was complicated. The inevitable loss of elasticity in the skin and subsequent appearance of wrinkles could apply dignity to a mature face. On a juvenile one, the result was creepy. Raffela didn’t look like a teenager, although she did have a young girl’s petite stature. She didn’t look like the kids with premature aging syndrome either. She looked like a ghoul, the resurrected body of some dead girl covered heavily in makeup.
“She didn’t have any ID, boss,” Dalrymple said. “Just the phone.”
Raffela took it from him and walked her to her desk, where she stepped up a custom footstool to her chair.
“Let’s see what we have here.”
She unfolded Nio’s clear phone and placed it on a small electronic pedestal, like a wireless charger, and waited for the data scrape. The device couldn’t hack a phone, but it could use the phone’s broadcast ID to identify its owner and to collect all available information from any number of online data brokers—not just name, address, and vitals, but credit scores, hobbies and interests, sexual orientation, political affiliation, employment history, purchasing behavior, psychological strengths and weaknesses, recent movements, social media posts, and more.
But there was no number associated with Nio’s phone, which didn’t access commercial satellites or cell towers. It exclusively used Parfait, a voluntary, wireless, peer-to-peer anonymizing network.
The pedestal beeped and turned red.
“Interesting...” She turned to Dalrymple. “Where’s the kid?”
“Downstairs, boss.”
“Get him up here.”
Dalrymple nodded and poked his head out the door.
Raffela stood elevated behind her desk and shook her head at Truly, who fidgeted in the chair. Her devil-tail twitched.
“Darlin’, we were so worried. Couple more days and we woulda had no choice but to call the police. What were you thinkin’?”
“I don’t know,” she said nervously.
“You could get into a lot of trouble. Someone might even say you were holding her against their will. Why didn’t you come to me for help?”
“I don’t know,” Truly breathed.
There was a knock on the door.
“Come!” Raffe called.
A teenager in tight jeans entered sheepishly. He was skinny. He looked Southeast Asian. His finely coiffed black hair curled over his head like a breaking wave.
“Have a seat,” Raffe said. She waited for him to comply. “Did you have something to do with this?”
The kid looked to Truly like he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say.
“It’s not his fault,” she said.
“Quiet.” Raffe waited for the kid. “Well?”
“The sequence musta’ been bad.”
“You didn’t write it?
He hesitated. “I had help.”
Raffela looked furious. But she held it. “From who?”
“A guy. On the mod boards.”
Raffela made tsk-tsk sounds. “Now Guillermo, why would you do something like that?”
“I scanned it,” he protested. “I don’t know what happened.”
“What did you use?” Nio asked from the couch.
“Kitkat,” the kid said coolly. “And Base10. And a buncha’ custom shit. I was careful. I know what I’m doing.”
“Kitkat and Base10 are good,” she said.
Guillermo raised his hands. “See?”
“But?” Raffela asked Nio.
“But... off-the-shelf anti-virus apps only compare random snippets from a digital sequence with a library of known threats. And they reduce everything to an algorithmic fingerprint first so home computers can handle the complexity in short order. It’s a good screen. It’ll catch most of your run-of-the-mill malnomes. But RNA isn’t like computer code.”
“I know that,” Guillermo objected. “Raffe, I—”
Raffe raised a small manicured hand and waited for Nio to finish.
“There are ways of hiding malicious seqs. Since RNA can be read in either direction, translation can flip-flop. And there are snip sequences, junk bits removed after translation. Makes it hard for the software to identify what the final coding strand will even be. To be fair to your artist, the guy who wrote that seq is very clever.”
“Friend of yours?” Raffe asked.
Nio hesitated. “Not exactly.”
“Boss, just listen. I—”
Raffela shushed him. “I want you to go back to the ranch and take care of things.”
There was a long, silent pause.
“Do you understand?”
“But...” The kid looked to Truly, who was trembling and trying not to cry.
“We already had the fight in here last week,” Raffe explained. “The last thing we need right now is more trouble. Carl and Jim are at the house. You take care of the problem and they’ll make sure it goes away. Am I clear?”
The kid nodded weakly. Nio could see the glint of a tear reflecting the purple neon from the club. Music thumped through the glass as the DJ announced the next dancer. Coming on the main stage, give it up for Roxy!
“Good,” Rafella said. “Now, go on.”
Everyone watched him leave in silence, including Nio, who realized she had just been allowed to witness the exchange. Her heart beat faster.
Raffela turned to Truly. “You’re working, aren’t you?”
Truly nodded.
“Then you’d better go get cleaned up. You look like a steer’s ass. What do we give every day?”
“110%,” Truly breathed. She glanced once to Nio before scurrying out, magenta face to the carpet.
Raffe sighed deeply. She stepped back down to the floor and walked to the windows overlooking the club. The two small circular stages at the back, both with poles, were empty. In the corner, a human-sized holographic cylinder rose from a heavy base. It was unplugged and turned sideways. The 3D hologram craze had died almost as quickly as it had exploded. The once-expensive machine was junk.
The clubs’ main stage sent a runway into the center of the room. Twirling around the pole at the end was a pale topless woman with engorged breasts who appeared about eight months pregnant.
“One of Guillermo’s,” Raffela explained. “Can you tell she isn’t actually pregnant?”
Nio could feel Dalrymple watching her silently from the door, his gloved hands crossed in front of him. She glanced to the stage. “Kid’s got talent.” Then back to the shotgun on the wall.
“He even put a fake fetus in the saline,” Raffe went on, doing her best impression of a genteel Southern hostess. “Sometimes, as part of her act, Roxy will shine a light against her stomach so folks can see. There’s a small but perpetual market for a pregnant dancer. Not everyone likes that kind of thing, but the fellas that do...” Raffe shook her head. “It’s getting harder and harder to tempt the little perverts out of their caves. They’re catered to online—every possible fetish. Our only edge is to offer them something they can’t get digitally. Something they can actually touch. Still, if it wasn’t for the mining platform, I wouldn’t have a business. Men come up from Texas and California for seasonal work and get tired of being stuck in the barracks. I know it isn’t much” —she looked around the room lovingly— “but without this little place, a lot of my girls would get pushed into a seedier trade, if you know what I mean.”
“Isn’t that what the trailers are for?”
Raffe held up her small hands. “Honey, what happens in the private trailers is nunna my business. I merely rent ‘em to consenting adults.”
“Only six guys out there,” Nio said.
“Well, it is only Thursday.”
“Sure. But even if you had a hundred times that on the weekend, it would still take six decades to afford that Maybach. But then it’s a cash business, right? Not many of those left.”
Raffe’s genteel smile faded. “What are you implying?”
“Nothing. Just... who’s to say how many men show up in a day? Or whether they drop a thousand in bills or ten times that much? Modding is illegal in South Dakota, isn’t it?”
“It’s illegal to purchase and it’s illegal to provide, but it’s not illegal to possess, as long as you got it in a red state. Can’t exactly turn our fellow citizens away at the border, can we?”
“Beckham wasn’t modded out of state,” Nio said coolly.
Whatever else she was running—prostitution, at least, and probably drugs—Raffela was also laundering money for someone. The club was the perfect cover. But it was a dying industry and only survived on modding. Guys wouldn’t make the journey otherwise, over what they could get virtually at home. If Raffe got into trouble with the police, her silent partners might start to wonder what she would say to avoid a felony charge. That meant any extraneous illegalities had to quietly disappear.
“Beckham’s a beautiful girl,” Raffe said. “Came up from Florida over the winter to escape her ex. Guillermo’s a little smitten, I think. He’s a good boy. Mom’s a doctor in town. They came over from the Philippines together. He’s all she has. Spoiled him something awful. If he goes off to college or gets a real job, they’ll expect him to work. He’s never had to work. Whereas with me, he gets to be the envy of every teenage boy in the state. But he doesn’t have the stomach to keep with our line.”
Raffela was smart. By implicating the kid in a murder, she made sure neither he nor his mother would go to the police.
A drawer opened. Raffe set a pearl-handled .22 pistol on the desk.
“Funny thing about you,” she said. “When Malcolm told me we picked up a stranger, I thought we had a problem. A real problem. Made me a little sick. But look at you. No driver’s license. No credit card. No public data file.” She picked up Nio’s phone. “I see from the little icon here that you’re running Parfait. Maybe you didn’t think us country bumpkins knew what a layered encrypted communications network was. It’s interestin’, though, for what it tells me. This little icon tells me you thought it’d work out here. But since it doesn’t—probably not since Sioux City, I’d guess—that tells me there’s not a soul on God’s green earth that knows where you are right now. Ain’t that right?”
Dalrymple stepped forward and put a hand on Nio’s shoulder.
“Get rid of her first.” Raffe said. “Then make sure the kid goes through with it.”
The big man gripped the back of Nio’s neck again. “Let’s go, friend.”
She wanted to say something, to object, to make some witty quip that showed she wasn’t afraid. But she was.
Dalrymple walked Nio down the stairs to the wood-paneled hall, where a strange man was peering into the kitchen.
“Bathroom’s are at the front, pal,” Dalrymple called.
It was Del. He froze for a moment when he saw Nio. He looked at her socked feet. Then he pointed with his thumb toward the front.
“Front. Gotcha. Sorry ‘bout that.”
For a moment, Del’s and Nio’s eyes met.
“Right.” He nodded and took several steps backward before turning for the club.
Dalrymple watched him go.
“This way.”
He tugged Nio toward the back to the storage room, where several of the life-sized sex dolls lay on the floor. The back doors were open, and the bouncer was loading them into a van. A cook walked in carrying a plastic rack full of glassware. He passed without looking at Nio and she high-kicked. Glasses flew over their heads and everyone looked up reflexively, including Dalrymple, and Nio pulled free. She made it out the door, where the cold, wet gravel stuck into her soles like daggers and slowed her down. Immediately, she felt Dalrymple’s gloved hand grab her coat. As he yanked her back, Nio wondered how he had closed the distance so fast.
She landed hard and smacked her head on the concrete.
“Ow...”
A rolling glass stopped at her ear. The open cylinder amplified the staccato of clicks from above. Dalrymple’s left arm was synthetic and had split into evenly-spaced sections, with metal pivots between. As the sections snapped back together, one after the next, they made a popping sound. Around his neck, the tentacle mane was writhing. It was a motion tattoo, probably keyed to his heart rate. The whole world knew when the man was angry.
After his arm reassembled, Dalrymple flexed his hand, like it was stiff.
“Must be heavy,” Nio quipped.
Her supposition was proved correct a moment later when his fist landed in her face.