Smoketown Read online

  Over the years, Rory’d thought of the photos thousands of times. Sometimes they seemed the only proof that Katherine, Mom, and the girls hadn’t been some elaborate hallucination designed to whittle his mind into a sharp stick that he would one day fall upon. At times, it seemed to him that only his mother’s photos would save him from that fate. But he didn’t want a stranger rifling through his family’s things.

  Rory had tried to go home once before, on the fifth day after he locked himself inside the apartment so many years ago. Standing at the door with his hands shoved into his jacket pockets, nowhere near the palmlock, he cursed himself.

  “Ridiculous. You’re a grown goddamned man! A goddamn soldier!” he screamed red-faced at the door. He’d been standing there for fifteen minutes with visions of his family playing through his head. His repeated calls still hadn’t brought a response. The service wouldn’t take any more messages. The circuits were overwhelmed.

  Rory wanted to think that they’d evacuated already or maybe that the phone in the panic wing had been disconnected for some reason. His contacts outside the city hadn’t heard from his family either. So he stood there unsuccessfully willing himself forward.

  He’d never known such fear and he couldn’t understand it. His hand shook each time he reached out for the palmlock, and much as Rory didn’t want to admit it, the thought of going outside made him nauseous. What would he do if he came across an infected person? Hell, when he came upon an infected person? The holo reports had already brought phantasms of former people, now walking corpses, whose faces had begun to cave in. Their pitiful wails could be heard faintly in the wind, and from the reports. He kept muting the reports, then turning the sound back up when a faint cry reached him from the street. Rory tried changing the channel, but couldn’t stand not knowing what went on beyond the front door.

  Disgusted, he’d gotten dressed and packed a bag for the journey. No trans service would come pick him up, and per the reports the trains weren’t running. If he wanted to get to McClaren Street, he would have to walk.

  There were reported suspicions that the virus was airborne. That couldn’t matter now. He had to see how they were. But the reports said it killed quickly and it had been five days. He stopped the thought, and his right hand lurched out once more and input the first two numbers into the pad, then Rory pulled his hand back as if it had been burned. Tears of frustration welled up in his eyes.

  “God. Damn. It!”

  In the silence that followed, the sound of muted pleading reached him through the door. It must have been from the street, but it sounded so close, too close. Rory backed slowly away from it, his gaze locked on the barrier that separated him from infection. His handheld rang loudly and he jumped, wrestling it out of his pocket. Katherine’s image appeared on the display. “Katherine!” He punched the talk button. “Katherine?”

  “It’s me,” she replied quietly.

  “Thank God.” He shook with relief.

  “Mom’s gone. The girls are gone, Rory,” Katherine whispered. “Wherever you are, you stay there,” she said. “Don’t you come out in this.”

  “Gone? What do you mean they’re gone? Katherine, please. How? It’s only been a few days.”

  “I have to go now.”

  “What?! No, Katherine. Tell me. Where are you now? Talk to me,” Rory pleaded.

  “I love you, Roar,” she said. And she was gone.

  Katherine didn’t die by disease. When her suicide had been confirmed, Rory did what his sister had told him to. He did not go out; instead he had ordered the family house closed. He gave strict orders that the family place be decontaminated, cleaned, and sealed. ICDC would not release the bodies to him. The McClaren women shared the same cremation as everyone who perished that winter, a single ceremony on March twenty-seventh—attended by few but watched by hundreds of millions via video feed.

  And on top of all that, someone half-crazy with grief at city administration had decided they should play the confessionals. The booths had been erected as a local McClaren Industries research and development evaluation. Research and development frequently used Leiodare and Leiodarans as the backdrop and subjects for its latest innovations and potential product lines. With McClaren Industries and research and development headquartered in Leiodare it made sense to test them on its diverse, transient population. And in a world obsessed with commemorating its own life, the idea of satellite booths where a patron could record their own thoughts, feelings, and spectral image for archives and broadcast seemed a good one. No one at McClaren had planned on the name of “confessionals”; they were much more enamored with their own Studio™. The booths could be found on streets in The Shallows and near The Spires, as common as telephone booths had been once, Pop Pop said.

  No one had any idea what role the messages recorded in these booths would play in the Crumble, but that role had of course become as well known as the Crumble itself, and synonymous with Leiodare. For years, The Last Word had been too expensive for most people to use, but the booths changed all that. They had specifically been placed in The Shallows to see what range of demographics chose to use the booths. Predictably, drunk people loved them and more than once the research and development recon team collected the data discs left inside and loaded in their communications trans only to find reals that would make a porn star blush, and a doctor woozy. But more interesting than these were the unexpected visits from shopkeepers and children (a veritable untapped market) who spoke about their wrongs, their fears, their lives in a raw confession few of them would probably share with anyone face to face. Little did they know that their most private moments would be broadcast and re-broadcast around the world.

  Rory did not watch the ceremony held for the city and he did not watch the confessionals. He made arrangements for the family estate and the other extensive real estate holdings on McClaren Street, placing them in trust, and waited to feel differently. For the last twenty-five years a remote tech ran systems for half a day every three months, and no more, no cleaning crew, no journalists or historians, no visitors.

  Everything that had been in the house during that winter remained. His mother’s photographs, handsomely framed black-and-white images from their childhoods and from her own, still decorated the walls of the house. One of Katherine’s sweaters, no doubt, still hung somewhere on the back of a chair. His nieces’ drawings still covered the refrigerator in the back kitchen. Rory stared into the candlelight, envisioning those details. The thought of this permanency comforted him, as much now as when he’d made the arrangements in the cramped apartment where he had dreaded their demise. One thing in particular he thought of often.

  He wanted those photos. The images only existed in one place, his mother’s personal collection. Seeing them would be like looking through her eyes, her perspective on the intimate moments that made them family.

  He knew one person who wasn’t a stranger, one person who might be able to do what he could not. Watching the wax weep from the wick, Rory contemplated placing the call.

  He had been saving Peru for a rainy day. He’d commissioned reals from any number of stars in the field. For every kind of real there was a different class of virtuoso who excelled at it—a mainliner who specialized in extreme stunts and face-offs would be useless if the client wanted an intimate encounter with a favorite starlet. He’d linked into Peru’s work before and been impressed—not with the neuro peaks or courage, but more so with her blasé calm. In that way she seemed like the Rory of Yore that he had begun to crave the way he had once craved a new lover, a new frontier, a new real. And so he had begun to crave Peru.

  He’d started his bidding modestly. Peru was good but became less attractive to the general market with each passing year. Her emotional readings slunk down over time. Though lots of virtuosos got too used to their work, Peru’s peaks had once been so high that the drop showed clearly.

  Rory had gotten hold of some of her classic work: a white-water trip that ended with an impromptu mud
slide—an unbelievable ride, and one she handled calmly. But, people wanted to feel exhilarated when they drove two hundred kilometers per hour down a twisting country road, not as if they were reading the paper at a corner café. Not even if that was because reading at the corner café felt as exhilarating as that breakneck boat ride.

  Peru’s steady readings meant she might be suitable for psych projects, but judging from her reals Rory didn’t think she had the disposition to deal with the administrative side of those kind of assignments. So though he wanted her work badly, chances were, Rory was probably part of a shrinking pool of potential commission clients. So the businessman in him offered less than half of what he would pay.

  Starting where he did, she refused the first several offers. In fact Peru didn’t even bother to have her agent respond. Most virtuosos, in fact, most people, wouldn’t try this with a McClaren. The money behind the name usually did all of Rory’s work; once he’d been vetted to be who he purported to be, his agent might be able to get the Pope to record a real for Rory. So Peru’s reticence earned some respect and he redoubled his efforts, but not his bids.

  Over time, his agent sent word to hers less and less often, but always offered more. It proved to be a winning strategy. He convinced her with a sum of money and a promise of more to come. As it turned out Peru didn’t want one big score; she wanted a steady income. So in the summer of that year Peru had moved to Leiodare and Rory, for the first time in many years, took a visitor. He had very much wanted to meet this woman who would become his eyes and ears to the world outside. For the kind of work he wanted done, he had to be sure Peru was who he believed her to be. Rory had paid for a first-class ticket and escort to bring her to him, or as close as anyone ever came—the anteroom just outside the elevator into his rooms. Peru had refused the escort and taken the train into the city. She did, however, come directly to The Spires upon her arrival.

  She stood in the anteroom with her hands folded in front of her as if presenting herself for the service. Rory sat in his great room sipping a gewürztraminer in the shadows. Three layers of shatterproof plexi separated them.

  Peru’s appearance was different than he would have guessed. On a real, a competent virtuoso never looked in a reflective surface or otherwise showed his or her face unless the client directly requested a reveal. Rory never made such requests. So he sat, taking her in for the first time. His first thought was that Peru didn’t appear the least bit Peruvian. Though she had black hair and brown eyes, something in the structure of her face didn’t remind him of that place. In fact, she reminded Rory a bit of himself. Virtuosos seemed to choose their names purely for marketing purposes, but one did run into those who had named themselves after an ancestral home. But seeing her now, Peru didn’t seem to fit into that category. Rory studied her precariously high cheekbones, and short jagged scar at the corner of her jaw, the dead-set dazzle of her gaze and felt more intrigued by this woman.

  “Where will you stay?” he asked.

  “Why do you care?” Peru responded.

  “Because it will show in the real. Whether you like the place or are getting enough rest, whether the food is agreeing with you. Everything shows up in the real. And I’m paying for it. I want you as you are. As you’ve been. Too much change will affect that.”

  “Then why did you bring me here? That’s change,” she said.

  Rory peered at Peru, considering. She didn’t seem to care enough to be cautious of how she spoke to him. Perhaps what he took for calm was just self-destruction. Or sharp apathy. Still, he could use that. Or perhaps he’d become too accustomed to those who did his bidding without question or concern. Challenge was new.

  “This is where it happened,” Rory replied. “So what has to be done, has to be done here.”

  “What is to be done?” Peru asked.

  Rory stood and walked over into the light, until he was just a few meters from the plexi.

  “You’re going to do something I’ve wanted to for twenty-five years.”

  And of course, she hadn’t. He’d assigned Peru dozens of reals in the last three years. But not yet this one. Rory had postponed it countless times, sending her off to explore some new part of town first. But now he would finally ask her to go to the family home and to make a real of it.

  He’d even dreamed of it: the ring of absolute silence that always followed pressing the virtu rig’s ‘Play’ button. And then in it would flood, the real’s world. He’d waited so long for this particular real, the one he’d searched through dozens of virtuosos for, who felt purely and powerfully enough to approximate the feelings he would have felt if he could have done it himself. Rory had found her, and wooed her and honed her. Now he needed to send her on the assignment that would mean more than all the others, to be his proxy and bring him home and his family back.

  “Call—” Rory began.

  “One new message,” the home system interrupted.

  “Ignore,” Rory said with irritation. “Call Peru.”

  The line rang a dozen times before an automated voice prompted him to leave a message.

  “Call me immediately. I have an assignment,” Rory said. His annoyance grew. This was the second time he’d called Peru to be greeted by her answering service. He hadn’t heard from or spoken to her in days—for the amount he paid her as a retainer fee, this should never happen. He started to dial his security to track her down when he remembered the new message. Perhaps she’d been in touch after all.

  “Play message.”

  A man’s voice began to speak.

  “Mr. McClaren. This is Dr. Oliveira, Eugenio Oliveira. Mr. McClaren, I’ve found something I think you should know about. It’s not all done as you said. Peter Warrel, that engineer, you know the one, he was attending a McClaren Industries conference. That’s all I could find in the public records. There are no other records that I have access to. But I imagine you are a man with many more resources than I. I hope to speak with you soon.”

  Rory collapsed on the divan. The holos continued to drift past him as his thoughts raced. How could he have not known that? Rory shook his head. Of course, he wouldn’t have known that. He attended the quarterly meetings he was required to and usually messaged his friends and conquests throughout. One thing he did know though was that every McClaren conference was a preamble or pretext to research and development. And if Warrell had been at the conference there had to be a connection between his work and McClaren—and quite possibly one between that work and the Crumble. That kind of outbreak and infection had never been seen before. Research & Development existed to create what had never been seen before. What had they developed that year?

  “Log in to remote access McClaren Industries intranet. Prepare for retinal scan.” Rory pushed himself up and walked over to the scanner, placing his eye in its beam.

  “Access granted.”

  “Search research and development. Keyword—”

  “Access denied. Research and development modules are not accessible by remote server.”

  Rory clenched his jaw and stared into nothingness, trying to figure out a solution.

  “Log off.”

  There had to be some way of accessing those files. He had to know if there was a connection. He tried to remember the names of any trusted contacts or malleable flunkies who might still be available. He had to get to those files. He stopped on the brink of the next thought. Those files. Maybe not those, but his own. Twenty-five-year-old files were about the only drives he had at the penthouse.

  Rory turned in one fluid motion and strode toward the library.

  11

  The second time that Anna met Seife she had an unmistakable reaction to the feel of Seife’s skin beneath her hand. Anna had seen Seife as soon as she entered the station. She approached the other woman from behind and laid her hand momentarily on Seife’s shoulder to get her attention. At first contact, a single, impolite, and powerful throb made it difficult for Anna to meet Seife’s eyes. When it subsided, they still st
ood in the train station inside a burgundy beam of light waiting for the train that would take them separate ways. Anna mustered up her courage.

  “Hello,” Anna said. Not terribly original, she thought.

  “Hello,” Seife answered, a broad smile blooming on her face.”I have your parcels.”

  Anna’s eyebrows knitted together. “My parcels. . .”

  “The ones you left at the club,” Seife said.

  “You kept them for me?”

  “And this surprises you?” Seife replied, a hint of playfulness in her tone.

  “Yes, it does.”

  “Well, I have them. I mean, they are at the club, safe. No need to worry, Anna Armour.”

  “Please, just call me Anna.”

  “You said . . .”

  “It sounds so formal when you say it. Just Anna.” She smiled.

  “Anna,” Seife said it softly, as much a whisper as a word.

  Warmth rushed to Anna’s face. “So what brings you to McClaren? So late in the day I mean. You seem to have some parcels of your own.” Anna pointed at the bag Seife held.

  “Yes, it’s an old format piece I’ve wanted. A special recording.”

  “There’s a song I’ve been thinking about these past few days—”

  “The Life of Ever,” Seife finished.

  Anna looked over at her slyly.

  “Do you know it?” Seife continued.

  “You know I do.”

  “Yes, I suppose I do,” Seife said; she looked at Anna intently. “Have dinner with me—before all.”

  Anna laughed, pushed an errant tendril of hair behind her ear. “Where shall we go?”