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But I didn’t have time for his crazy games right then. Sometimes you just have to focus on the job at hand.
10
Golem Home
The Rainbow Lounge has a retro name and revo clientele. Once you step past a flickersign that says NO REALFOLK ALLOWED, it feels like you’ve entered some nightmarish TwenCen sci-fi movie, filled with cavorting mutants and leering androids.
Of course, a lot more than just a warning keeps archies away. True-flesh can’t endure the bone-jarring rhythms hammered by a vibrating dance floor. Staccato-strobes hurl juttering lightning arcs that would send organic neurons into co
Back in one-body days, Saturday night mattered. Now, places like the Rainbow hop around the clock, even on a Tuesday afternoon — whenever fresh dittos can arrive, baked for harsh pleasure in their owners’ kilns, decorated in everything from paisley spirals to moiré patters that turn skin into blurry art. Some come molded as gaudy sex caricatures or sport scary accessories, like razor talons or acid-dripping jaws.
“Would you like a head-check?” The red attendant behind a counter offers me a glowing tag. Next to coatracks stand refrigerated cubbyholes. A tag for cranial storage can help ensure that violent memories will be savored later.
“No thanks,” I tell her. And yes, I admit that I used to frequent spots like this. Hey, who gets past their teen years nowadays without sampling depths of hedonism that would shame Nero? Why not, if the only thing you keep are memories? And even that’s optional. Nothing that happens to your ditto can harm the real you, right?
That is, if you ignore certain rumors …
For many, the intensity fix is addictive — inloading experiences too raucous for mere protoplasm. Especially the unemployed, spending their purple wage to beat back the e
“Please wait over there, ditMorris. I’ll come for you shortly.”
Jarred from doorway contemplation, I glance at my guide, another red-hued femdit. Her speech carries through the racket with remarkable clarity. Sonic interference dampers, embedded in the walls, shape a cha
“Pardon? Where should I wait?”
Queen Irene’s red golem points again, past the dance floor and beyond the Grudge Pit. This time I see an empty table with a winking RESERVED light.
“Will this take long? I haven’t got all day.”
That expression has special meaning for a creature like me, self-sentenced to oblivion for the good of my maker. But my guide only shrugs, then heads off through the crowd to inform her sisters that the hired spy has arrived.
Why should I spend my last eighteen hours working for people I don’t like, doing a job I don’t understand? Why not escape! The street is just meters away.
But if I did escape, where could I go? realAlbert would force me to spend all of my remaining span in quick-court, fighting the maestra’s breach-of-contract suit. Anyway, I’m probably being watched right now, targeted by a sighting beam. I can see more copies of the same umber-colored female hurrying about, serving drinks, mopping spills and sweeping bits of broken customers. Several of the reds glance my way. They’ll know if I make a break for it.
I head for the table, wading through a maelstrom of noise. Living noise that grabs your body like a cloying lover, hampering every move. I don’t like this “music,” but the garish dancers do, throwing themselves into frenetic collisions that few could mimic in flesh. Bits of clay fly, as if from a potter’s wheel.
Staunch partiers have a saying — if your ditto makes it home in one piece, you didn’t have a good time.
Seating booths line the walls. Others lounge at open tables that project garish holo images — whirling abstractions, vertigeffigies, or gyrating strippers. Some draw the eye against your will.
Sidling around the mob, I pass through a fringe minimum, where the sonic dampers overlap, canceling everything to a hush, like inside a padded coffin. Stray bits of dialogue converge from all over the club.
“… so there’s this clamber-amble, creeping up my leg? I look down an’ see it’s wearing Josie’s face, gri
“… the committee finally accepted my thesis, only they slapped a perversion tax, on account of ‘sadistic themes’! The nerve. I bet none of those old turds ever read the gospels of deSade!”
“… uh … taste this … d’you think they’re watering the benzene?”
Another step, and I’m beyond the quiet fringe minimum, abruptly staggering under a double-reinforced roar. Screams bellow from the Grudge Pit, where swaggering bravos carve each other while other clients tender themselves as prizes to the wi
The wi
A similar victory might have won him a chiefdom in some olden tribe. Now, well, at least he gets a moment to pretend. Of course, a real pro like my Clara could eat punks like this for breakfast. But she has better things to do right now, two hundred klicks away at the front lines, defending her country.
The RESERVED light goes dark when I sit where I’m expected, wondering how Clara’s war is going. Part of me feels sick that I’ll never see her again. Though of course I will, as soon as one army or the other wins … or else when combat breaks up for the traditional weekend truce. realAlbert had better be good to her, or I’ll come back from wherever golems go, and haunt the lucky bastard!
“What’ll it be?” a waitress asks. A special model, resembling the other Irene-copies, but voluptuous, with big hands for carrying trays.
“Just a Pepsoid. With ice.” My grays are self-sufficient, but it’s hot in here and an electrolyte boost won’t hurt. On Wammaker’s expense account.
Turns out that I’m near another sonic fringe. If I lean to one side, I can slip my head into a zone of relative silence, damping out the thudding music and shrieking battle cries, leaving only dribbles of chatter from the booths.
“… What’re you smoking? Izzat buckyball-black? Can I sniff?”
“… Did you hear they closed the Pithy Pendulum? Health spectors found a zhimmer virus in the filters. Your infected ditto brings it home and WHAM! Next thing, your rig’s drooling in a psycho ward …”
“… I love that bug-eye look! Are they functional?”
Wordless sounds of ersatz passion also carry. Through haze, I glimpse couples and trios writhing in alcoves. And if your body plan won’t fit your partner’s, the management rents adapters.
“Hush,” I tell the table, which erects a curtain of white noise, quashing the surrounding din. “Give me news from the war front.”