Part Eight: Cuba Street Improv

MY IN-TRAY WAS STACKED
with a load of new referrals which I dutifully signed, stamped and passed to my out-tray. The more interesting-sounding ones I reserved for more testing, leaving the paper-work in my middle tray that I had comically named my Shake-It-All-About-tray. These were the drugs that I’d take out on the streets, publicising them at the same time as I gauged the reaction of the sceners who’d take them, deciding whether they were worth putting money into. I got through this in a few minutes and spent a little while relaxing, doing nothing in particular, shuffling things about on my desk, putting paperclips in my stationery tray, that sort of thing. I fluffed around on the media for a while, and checked the office media to see how the CEO was doing. A little vid-window showed Richard was casually operating on him, throwing out organs that displeased him, sewing in strangely shaped bits of machinery and faux-flesh as required.

I was no medicine man, but even I could see that a lot of Richard’s surgery was unnecessary. He was gifted, sure, and I know that the Medical Journal gave his every operation rave reviews, but he was rather eccentric, and, personally speaking, eccentricity was the last thing I wanted noodling around inside my body.

AS I WATCHED, THE BLUE GUY
superimposed himself over the gory scene. “Hello, Dylan.” I ignored him, he’d caused me enough trouble all ready. “No one can see me but you, it’s safe to talk.”

“Metzger,” I entered my private directory, where I knew I’d be safe from prying lines, and Manisola the Teacher followed me there.

Part Seven: Psychedelic Super Nazis

I WENT TO MY DESK
And tried to formulate a business plan for my beggars agency, but couldn’t get it to work out. It sounded too much like a political manifesto, a pathetic welfarist cry for tolerance that failed to match the intensity of my kerb-side epiphany minutes before.

A pile of new magazines had accumulated on my desk, flotsam gathering in a rock pool, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at them. On the media, Katy’s murder hardly rated a mention. A feed from some hack-at-the-scene dwelt on Arthur’s recordings of the event (it seemed he’d stayed in circuit around the car park to get the denouement on disc). No one had claimed the body. Katy had (like most of the school kid rebels) murdered most of her family during the revolution and, being an independent, there was no-one to take the body away and give it a decent burial. I immediately patched a claim into the media, bumping a ghoul from a necro-bar off the top of the list with a more legitimate claim: we’d once been exclusive lovers, after all. I could probably cover the cost myself, but maybe the Ministry would pay, just to have her cremated, didn’t have to be anything big. We could use it, after all fold it into this illumination plotline.

Then my set went blank: the mainframe was down.

Part Six: Body Fuck/Mind Fuck

I HAD A QUICK DRY CLEAN AND CHANGED
into skin tight black leggings, the old faithful monster boots, red silk polo neck shirt, black kid driving gloves with golden demon rings - my Satan-S identity.

In those days, before we advanced across the electronic frontier, there were many more bodies and many more mouths to feed them. Accordingly, there were many restaurants and meat joints to shovel food into those mouths and they came and went with the all the endurance of mayflies as the fickle diners of the city flitted from one to another on the ineffable zephyr of the zeitgeist. I slipped on my set and hooked into the restaurant gallery: Café Economique was rated highly, so I tagged it and set the car to go. It was in the basement of a dilapidated old government building at the bottom of the Terrace and the name was some sort of joke which I didn’t quite get (just like the “Backbencher” on Molesworth - I’d thought it was some sort of joke about the arena, but there were pictures of old fashioned men and women in suits and stuff - I just don’t get it). It had never attracted a regular clientele in the eight months since opening and had been starved of the publicity that a regular scene can generate, so I was surprised to see it rating highly. When I got there I understood what had happened: it had re-done itself andy-style: cold steel, pink and blue neon, lots of black paint. A stage had displaced the tables by the kitchen door and two naked andies writhed around to their tuneless, rhythmless music.