Cyber Noir Redux: (Book Six) (The Feedback Loop 6) Read online

  Cyber Noir Redux

  The Feedback Loop Book Six

  Harmon Cooper

  Edited by George C. Hopkins

  Copyright © 2017 by Harmon Cooper

  Copyright © 2017 Boycott Books

  Cover by White Comma

  Edited by George C. Hopkins ([email protected])

  www.harmoncooper.com

  [email protected]

  Twitter: @_HarmonCooper

  All rights reserved. All rights preserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Chapter One

  I kick my way through the cold and distorted streets, trying to get a sense of where I am. Everything is screwy, elongated or truncated. Uneven. Mismatched. Slightly off. The already jagged Gotham skyline is somehow more jagged; the dark alleys that entice even as they repel remain the same. Grifters huddled around flaming trashcans searching for unblown veins; the less-than-innocent bystanders with bean shooters in the pockets of their trench coats bump gums with their homies; the crooked coppers cruise the streets ready to shakedown dope peddlers and put the kibosh on glitzy gaycats; Devil’s Alley, Chinatown, the Mildred Pierce Projects, The Pier, The Badlands, Three Kings Park – home, bittersweet, home. I hardly need to remind myself of the two subjective years I spent cutting my teeth in these rotten, filth-encrusted streets. And to see the place so jumbled, so topsy turvy, so screwy…

  I take a deep, satisfying breath of the tainted atmosphere. Less than five minutes ago, I was in the real world, at Frances Euphoria’s digs when the urge to log in struck me like Chrono’s hammer. I’ve got a pretty good idea what the other members of the Dream Team – Dr. Sophia Snarky Buzzkill in particular – would say about my rash, spur-o’-the-moment decision, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Consider this closure, the curiosity that killed the cat, the last straw on the camel’s back – I needed to see for myself what has become of my old stomping grounds.

  You’d think there had been a Baumes rush around here or something. Everything has been vacated. Sure, there are a handful of NPCs about, but these aren’t your run of the Cyber Noir variety in the traditional sense. They’re all screwy bauhaus, pie-eyed, picassoed, boxy and twisted.

  Lightning cracks in the sky as a top-heavy frail in a pink pillbox hat and a short pink dress that’s just a leetle too tight saunters past Yours Truly; I smile as the clip-clop of her heels on the cracked concrete sidewalk reminds me of Doc’s hooves. The left side of her body is vertically displaced from the right by about two inches, as if she were cut down the middle and pasted back together by a one-eyed dyslexic toddler. Her right leg never touches the pavement, although she walks along just fine, as if her ruby slipper had an invisible built-up sole.

  “Say, you looking for something, mister?” she asks in a deep, sultry, hot-to-trot voice. She fluffs her hair with a white-gloved hand.

  “Always lookin’ for somethin’, Sister; you think maybe you got what I need?”

  The tough cookie with the alligator purse sidles up next to me and puckers her red painted, offset Kewpie doll lips. She pops open a white leatherette cigarette case, extracts a Black Death coffin nail and taps the filter against the case. “Whatever you want, Big Daddy-O. Think you could light a lady’s fire?”

  “I’ve lit plenty.”

  I lift my hand behind my back to scroll through my list. The jarring honk from an aeros taxi overhead trips my startle reflex and I fumble-finger item 4, my collector’s special, limited edition vintage Cyber Noir Zippo lighter. The taxi belches up a cloud of thick black smoke; another hovering taxi cuts through the cloud and further depletes what little is left of the ozone layer. The smog ain’t New Delhi thick enough to completely obscure the oddly distorted buildings, but it sure ain’t for lack of tryin’.

  The flint wheel skritches under my thumb and a blue and yellow flame flowers into existence.

  The bim bends from the waist with her legs straight, in classic pin-up style; her bilateral asymmetry doesn’t appear to give her any difficulty with this interesting maneuver. With more than just idle curiosity, I wonder if she’s bilaterally asymmetrical everywhere.

  She sucks in and blows out with evident satisfaction; even the cloud of high-tar, nicotine-plus vapor is offset.

  My single Lucky Strike, item 545, appears in the corner of my mouth already lit and at a jaunty, Roosevelt-esque angle. Feels good.

  “What’s with the angles and the cubist be-bop deluxe, sweetheart?”

  She frowns, and boy does it look strange.

  “Don’tcha know? Been like this ever since the source code bomb.” The dame takes a long drag off her coffin nail and courteously blows a cottony cloud of smoke out the corner of her mismatched kisser and away from my face. Class act, this one.

  “Just asking, Toots,” I tell her with a shrug, “Been out of town for a while, and the place just don’t look the same.”

  “Uh-huh, but that’s yesterday’s news. Nothing we can do about that.” She drops her hand on my arm. “But there are more interesting things we can do, if you catch my drift,”

  Thunder rumbles and a cold rain sizzles the streets of my favorite digital furnace. I’m just about to reach my hand behind my back to equip item 79, my Kingsman umbrella when out of the corner of my eye, I catch movement in the shadows of the nearest alley.

  “Oops. Hang on Bo Peep; I’d better check on something.”

  “Whatsa matter,” she pouts as I disengage her hand from my arm. “You gonna let a little faulty rendering due to corrupted source coding scare you away, Mr. Tall, Dark, and Properly Proportioned?”

  “I’m disproportionate in one or two places, sweetheart,” I smirk. “But lemme take care of some business that just popped up and I’ll get back to you pronto.”

  ~*~

  No need to equip item 91, my Eyeclops Pro 3 NV Goggles when I have my Reaper mask, item 551. The mask forms on my head and I do a little air fingering to modify the settings. Dammit if everything in The Loop ain’t all womperjawed; the high contrast grid lines and shifting numerical values that the mask overlays on my vision pane make this abundantly clear.

  Just for shiggles, I equip item 560, the wrist gun I picked up in Steam. Good ol’ AI does the rest. With no gears to connect to, the wrist gun handshakes with my Reaper mask and I’m ready to murder if need be. My Rick Deckard signature trench coat with inlayed body armor also forms on my body, item 179, just so I have something to conceal the wrist gun. Clothes in The Loop are a dime a dozen – I think them and they form but every now and then during my two subjective years marooned in the grittiest of cities, I added the odd item of menswear to my list – especially the ones that were killer-diller, like this trench coat.

  “I’m here every day, big spender, every day,” the oddly proportioned pavement princess calls after me. “Just ask for Nelly!”

  I’m too distracted by the movement I just saw to issue a reply. The darkness of the alley engulfs me as soon as I dip inside. I can see the NPC moving away, his body outlined in the green targeting reticle on my viewing pane. Wasn’t sure if it was a clown wig or an unusually fluffy rat I’d glimpsed, but it looks like an eponymous being has decided to make an appearance in The Loop. It’s a clown, man. Definitely a clown.

  Something wicked that way goes with yours truly on its tail. The Man Who Laughs will soon become The Man Who Dies.

  I follow the jester deeper into the alley. Pipes jutting out of the building above drip questionable liquids onto the top of my mask. As I close the distance, I can make out a ticking sound, whic
h makes me want to equip my EOD 9 Bomb Tech Suit, item 268, but the damn thing slows me down and Pogo would get away if I did. Opportunity presents itself once the clown stumbles, giving me the seconds I need to catch up.

  “Put your hands where I can see ‘em, bozo, and keep your back to me!”

  He starts to turn.

  The warning shot takes off his red oatmeal box of a hat and attached red wig, but he vanishes before his headgear hits the pavement. I’m left pointing my wrist gun at a whole lotta nothing, and all I can see with my enhanced visuals are the beady eyes of a couple of marmot-sized rats rummaging through a sack of trash.

  A scratchy voice from behind me asks, “Looking for me?”

  I shoulder roll behind a mung-encrusted trashcan to find Mr. Jolly Joker with a Super Soaker aimed right at me.

  The green NPC icon that flashes over his head sheds just enough light for me to get a better look at the bastard. His fat face is shiny white with large blue triangles painted over his eyes. A sharp-cornered red mouth covers the lower half of his face from his white painted nose to his double chins and from ear to ear. Around his neck is an oversized Flavor Flav clock necklace, which holds down the ruff of his baggy blue clown costume. Garish purple and green size thirty-eight DisNike Skunque 4:20 high tops complete the ensemble.

  “If you so much as twitch, I’ll blast you into next week, Krusty. Drop the squirt gun. You don’t want it with me.”

  “The name’s Nicky, Nicky the Wig,” he says, his voice the sound of sandpaper grating against sandpaper. I have to strain to understand him as he says, “and you got some nerve packing heat into my alley, Marlowe.”

  “This is your alley now, huh? We’ll just have to see about that.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, tough guy. All of this is mine.” He bares his disproportionately large piranha teeth in a grin that’s set in the same sort of off-center mug that seems to be all the rage around here this season.

  My AA bar activates and, I’m behind him before he can squeeze the bulb of the novelty rubber petunia pinned to his ruff. I grab him by the back of his collar; the wrist gun’s now at ‘can’t miss’ range.

  “You got me, Sam Spade.” He raises his hands into the air. “The stash is over there,” he says, “honest, I was just watching it for a friend.”

  “Yeah, sure you were,” I tell him. “Look, I ain’t no copper, so I don’t give a pig’s puckered pink patoot that you got Riotous stashed in this alley.”

  “Riotous?” He snickers. “Try cat salts.”

  “So that’s the piss smell that keeps making me want to pinch my nose.” I lower my weapon and the hopped up clown turns to me. “Listen, Shaggy 2 Dope … ” I put a stop to his funny business by blasting him in the chest. He flies backwards and lands in a pile of trash bags and starts up the laugh track. Damn does he laugh; it rattles inside my skull and orbits my head like the rings of Saturn.

  “Enough!” I approach him with my wrist gun and put one between his eyes.

  Once he’s done dying, I return my wrist gun to my list and equip my Bloodhound, item 116, whom I’ve affectionately named Sir Charles Warren. What would Loop-Quantum do? This is exactly what he’d do: kill first and ask questions later.

  “Find the dope, boy,” I tell Sir Charles as I add Nicky’s Flavor Flav clock to my inventory list, item 585.

  He barks once and sniffs his way to the end of the alley. I follow behind him, happy to be my old self again.

  It feels good to be back.

  He finds the cat salts, about three bricks’ worth, and I add them to my inventory list, item 586. Never know when this stuff will come in handy.

  ~*~

  For old time’s sake.

  Into my Hefty Strongflex Odorshield Cadaver-Ready trash bag, item 76, goes Nicky the Wig. Once I’ve tied off the end, I hoist the body over my shoulder a la Chris Kringle with malicious intent, and strut out of the alley.

  I stop at the curb of an uneven street and look up. Digital Jehovah’s answer to my hasty murder comes in the form of .30 caliber-sized rain drops. I’m just about to equip my flare gun, item 24, when a taxi lowers on its own accord.

  Some mug with a suspicious trash bag thrown over his shoulder? In The Loop, this is called ‘a paying customer’!

  “Where to, mistah?” the hack jockey asks through a cracked window.

  The door pops open and I manhandle the bag into the back and follow it in. Yet another variation of a human fly, the driver’s beezer looks like a morel mushroom due to the post-source code bomb glitch that plagues an already plagued place. The cab interior’s fragrance is reminiscent of low tide at high noon, overheated gears and burned oil, unwashed clothes and a pernicious unfamiliarity with warm water and soap – typical Eau de Loop Cab. The laughably ineffective green pasteboard pine tree hanging from the rearview mirror reduces the stench not even the teensiest bit.

  “The Pier,” I grit, “and make it snappy.”

  “You got it, bustah,” he says as the vehicle lifts.

  ~*~

  The cabbie speeds along, quiet for once, just how I like my drivers. Graphic novelesque gothic spires, rain adding a sheen to everything, the darkness of the streets lit only by small halos of orange light cast by streetlamps, rooftop gardens choked with vines that descend down the sides of the buildings – with or without the glitchy landscape, the place just ain’t the same without Dolly.

  “Here’s fine,” I tell the cabbie once I see some of the abandoned warehouses of The Pier. Lightning in the sky cracks like a wet towel. After I pay the man, I kick open the door and go around to the other side to get the trash bag.

  “Say,” the driver asks, his beady eyes trained on me through the rearview mirror, “what’s in the bag?”

  “Nicky the Wig,” I say as I shut the door. “And since when was I paying you to ask questions?”

  “You mean da clown?”

  “No, I mean Supreme Court Justice Nicky the Wig, you moron. Of course I mean the clown. You familiar with him?”

  He hacks and sneezes, snorts a glob of snot into his hand, examines it, and wipes it across the front of his shirt. “No need to take dat tone, Ace. Everyone knows Nicky; dat damn clown been running da place since she left.”

  “This clown?” I start to laugh. “We talking the same clown here?”

  “There’s only one Nicky the Wig,” the driver says, “and I’d wager he ain’t the clown in that bag, mistah.”

  Come to think of it …

  I drop the bag on the ground and it bursts open. Rats, snakes, worms, and hairy spiders the size of my fists spill out and stampede into a storm drain. I look back to the cabbie just in time to see white grease paint spread across his face.

  Nicky laughs like the Monarch as he tosses the black cartoon bomb at my feet.

  Flash of white. Fade to black.

  Chapter Two

  Zotzed by a killer clown – I can mark that one off my bucket list. A prompt asks me if I’d like to respawn. I decline and wavelengths on the inside of my NV Visor wind to a close. A final message box tells me that it is now safe to remove my visor, but to do so slowly and remain seated while doing so.

  The visor comes off and Frances’ living room blurs into focus. I can’t say what I was expecting, but I definitely wasn’t expecting to be kablooeyed by a grubby clown.

  “Bested by a carnie,” I mutter, proof that I’m getting soft around the edges. The old Quantum would have used his chainsaw – dammit, I knew I shouldn’t have traded that thing to Aiden – to puree the bastard. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and speaking of which, the freeze upgrade on Hackie, item 554, might be the only way make sure that clown doesn’t get out of the bag next time.

  “Where are you?”

  Frances Euphoria’s voice interrupts my reverie and I fumble-finger with her NV Visor before I catch it just in time and set it on the couch.

  “In here,” I reply, “coming.”

  “Come back to bed.” She sounds half-asleep still; I wonder how long
she’d been calling for me.

  I peel out of the too-tight haptic gloves, toss them on the couch and slowly make my way to her bedroom. My lower back is pestering me for attention – it ain’t as bad as it gets yet, but it’s bad enough and I feel it with every step I take. Before he sold us out and got himself killed, Zedic told me that there are all kinds of biomechanical spine repairs available. Call me hard-headed, but I’m still against it.

  “Where did you go?” Frances asks. There’s just enough light from outside to softly highlight her features.

  “I was meditating.”

  She laughs. “You? Meditating? Is that what they’re calling Pornhub VE now?”

  I sit on my side of the bed and slowly maneuver myself into a resting position. “I wasn’t looking at porn.”

  “So what were you were actually doing then, because I’m still not buying the meditating thing.”

  “What’s with the Spanish Inquisition, Frances? I was quietly sitting in your living room, minding my own business and thinking about my past – close enough to meditation, if you ask me. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Jeez, someone’s edgy,” she says as she scoots closer to me.

  “Sorry, I was kind of having a nightmare.”

  “I thought you were meditating.”

  “I was meditating, but then I fell asleep and I had a nightmare.”

  “About what?”

  “A killer clown,” I tell her as I sit onto the bed.

  “Really?” She laughs. “It sounds like you had too much sugar before bed.”

  “Did I?”

  “There was that German chocolate cake we ordered from EBAYmazon … was the clown German?”

  Nein, er war nicht.

  I think back to the potluck we had the previous evening. “I’m pretty sure Rocket ate more cake than I did. Sophia definitely had some.”