New York Nights

by Eric Brown

Genres: Science Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Cyberpunk

Synopsis

New York in 2040 is a city of the lost. A good place to work in Missing Persons. But business is not quite good enough for Hal Halliday to forget his sister, burned alive when only child all those years ago. And now VR offers the chance of bringing her back, the future may yet allow Hal to live in the past. If he can survive the next job ...

Release date: July 26, 2018

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 284

Sample

That night was like a thousand others he’d woken to in Spanish Harlem, but looking back Halliday realised that it marked the beginning of what he would come to see as the darkest period of his life.

The alarm went off at ten. He blinked himself awake, his breath pluming in the icy air of the moon-lit loft. Kim lay beside him, her warmth tempting him to doze for another hour. The thought of what work Barney might have on file moved him to abandon the sanctuary of the futon and cross the loft to the bathroom, shivering in the sub-zero chill.

He showered, relishing the jet of hot water. As he stood below the drier, looking through the open door along the length of the loft, he noticed that Kim had rearranged the furniture yet again. The Salvation Army couch and threadbare armchair now faced the wall-window that overlooked the back alley.

Last week, intuiting a look from him as he tried to find the coat-stand, she had wrestled him to the bed and pinioned his arms with her knees, jet hair falling around her serene oval face. “I’ve known you how long now, Mr Halliday?”

“Seems like ten years.”

She slapped him, hard. “Not even ten months, Hal. And in that time, what’s happened?”

In ten months, his partnership with Barney had prospered: they never seemed to go more than a day or two without another case coming in, and their success rate in solving commissions was higher than ever. Halliday put it down to coincidence, or that psychologically he was feeling better for having this beautiful Chinese sprite enter his life like a miniature whirlwind and blow away his old apathy and desperation. He was feeling better in himself, and he was working harder: therefore, he was solving more cases.

“I see this place, Hal–” Kim had gestured around at the loft, “and I think negative energy, sick room, bad chi. I think, things need to change around here. So I rearrange things. And lo, your luck changes – you get more work, more dollars.”

Halliday heard a squeal from the loft. He finished dressing and stepped from the bathroom. Kim was dancing around the room like a naked dervish, long hair falling to her child-slim waist. She pulled on underwear, minimal panties and bra – managing in the process to stare at him with massive eyes. “I told you to set the alarm for eight, Hal!”

“When? You never said a thing!”

“I get in at noon, you wake, I say, Set alarm for eight, Hal. You say, Hokay.”

He barely remembered her sneaking under the thermal beside him. “I was dead to the world-”

“You answered!”

“In my sleep!”

She cursed him in Mandarin, hopping on one leg as she forced the other into a pair of jeans.

Halliday found his jacket and pulled the zip to his chin, shutting out the cold. “Anyway, why did you want to be out by eight?”

“Work to do, Hal. Stalls to organise. Busy night.”

“You could delegate.”

Briefly, she stopped dressing and stared at him, shaking her head. Delegate was a word that had yet to enter her vocabulary. Kim Long owned a dozen Chinese roadside food-stalls in the area, and Halliday had once calculated that she worked at least fourteen hours a day, every day. When he protested that he only ever met her in bed, she always went out of her way to make time for him – she’d take him to a restaurant, or a holo-drama, gestures to placate his dissatisfaction. Then, in a day or two, she’d be back to her gruelling work routine and they’d hardly go out together until the next time he moved himself to mention the fact.

“Can’t trust other people to do what you should do yourself, Hal,” she told him. “Gotta make them dollars. I’m a busy girl.”

He didn’t know whether to be amazed by her materialism, or sickened. She’d arrived from Singapore following the Malaysian invasion ten years ago at the age of fifteen, penniless after her father’s restaurant had been confiscated by the Communists. She’d taught herself English, bought herself a microwave and a patch in a side street, and slowly built up a thriving fast-food business.

He paused by the door. “Kim, why don’t you just slow down, take it easy? Enjoy yourself.”

In moonboots and chunky climbing jacket, she widened her eyes at his apostasy. “I enjoy my work, Mr Halliday. If you enjoyed your work, you’d be happier person.”

She ran into the bathroom.

He almost let that one go, then thought about it.

“Hey, that isn’t fair. My work’s different.” He moved to the bathroom, kicked open the red-painted door with his boot, and leaned against the woodwork. “I spend hours looking for people… and sometimes I find them, sometimes I find corpses. And sometimes I find nothing at all – which can be even worse.”

She squatted on the john, jeans shackling her ankles, and pissed. “Well, I like my work!” she shouted. “I like what I do! Don’t blame me for that, Hal!”

“I’m not blaming you, I’m just…” He trailed off. He sometimes wondered why he bothered arguing. He’d never change her.

She was a creature of extremes. She combined a feminine gentleness, an almost obsessive desire to please him on the rare occasions they were together, with a fierce, driven determination to get her own way in matters where finance and business were concerned. On the street he’d seen her giving instructions to her managers, letting go with a rapid-fire burst of Mandarin that sounded like the high notes of a xylophone played by a madman. The depth of her rage often alarmed him.

He’d once accused her of possessing a split-personality.

She’d snorted, “Please don’t give me none of that Freudian bullshit, Mr Halliday! You never heard of yin and yang?”

Now he sketched a wave. “I’m outta here.”

“Hal, if you don’t like your work, why do you do it?”

He pushed himself from the jamb. I sometimes wonder, he thought to himself. “See you later, Kim.”

As he left the loft, she called after him, “And remember to be back by…” but the rest was lost as he closed the door. He wondered what she was talking about: he recalled no arrangement to meet her at whatever time.

He made his way down the steps to the office on the second floor, descending into the welcome, starch-laden heat that rose from the Chinese laundry.

A light was on behind the pebbled glass. He pushed open the door. The office was a long, narrow room with a mould-coloured carpet and nicotine-stained walls. A desk stood at the far end, before the window that looked out on a rusty fire escape. Most of the right-hand wall comprised a big screen, in twelve sections, the bottom right square defective for as long as Halliday could remember. The door opposite the wallscreen gave onto the bedroom where Barney slept nights.

A fan clanked on the ceiling, stirring the soggy heat. A portable fire puttered beside the desk. The warmth was a relief after the arctic temperature of the loft.

Barney sat with his outstretched legs lodged on the desk, a mug of coffee balanced on the hummock of his belly. As ever, the smouldering butt of a fat cigar was pegged into the side of his mouth.

Halliday had once asked him if he’d ever thought of giving up his cigars, on health grounds. But Barney had just laughed and said, “Part of the cliched image, Hal. What kind of private dick would I be without my cheap stogie? Anyway, I’m addicted.”

He was regarding the screen of the desk-com past the V of his slippered feet. Halliday guessed that his partner hadn’t ventured very far from the office today.

“I’m bushed, Hal,” Barney rumbled. “The graveyard shift’s yours.”

Halliday poured himself a coffee and sat on the battered chesterfield by the window, warming himself before the heater. “Anything new?”

“Just those on file,” Barney said, “and what Jeff sent along last week.”

Every so often Jeff Simmons, over at the NYPD, sent them old cases that the police had failed to solve. They paid Halliday and Barney two hundred dollars per file to take over the clerical work; if they happened to close the case they were given a bonus. It was donkey work, often futile, but it paid the overheads.

Halliday often thought back to how he’d started in this line of business, and wondered why he continued. He’d been posted to Missing Persons, under Jeff Simmons, when he worked for the NYPD ten years ago. Barney was his partner at MP and, along with Simmons, they got along well and made a good team. Eight years ago Barney had quit the force and set up his own agency, specialising in missing persons. Five years ago, after the death of his wife, Barney had approached Halliday with an offer: join me and do the leg-work for more than you’re bringing in down the precinct, and in five years you’ll be a partner.

At the time Halliday had been sickened by the grinding routine, the never-ending paper-pushing of police work. The extra pay and the promise that Barney would handle the clerical side of things had swung it. He’d joined Barney and they’d done okay; they charged by the hour and demanded a bonus if they located the missing person – and their success rate hovered around the fifty per cent mark, which was not a bad average in the business.

“I’ll leave you with the file,” Barney said. “I’ll work on the Lubanski case tomorrow, after I’ve been downtown.”

Halliday gave him a quizzical look.

“Last day of the course, Hal,” Barney reminded him.

He nodded. “Look, I haven’t said anything so far, okay?”

“You got a problem?”

He wondered whether it was because Barney’s application made him appear lazy. For the past month, Barney had been paying a private tutor to fill him in on the technical aspects of virtual reality. As far as Halliday was concerned, this was going to be just another nine-day wonder that swept America and died a quick death. But, then, he’d thought the same thing about holo-drama.

Halliday stared into his coffee. “You think we’ll need it in this line of work? The way you’re talking, people will be quitting the real world for VR like some crazy sci-fi holo-drama.” He gave Barney a look. “You think we’ll be having to go in after them to get them out?”

Barney was shaking his head. “Not as things stand. There’s a limit to how long you can stay jellytanked, for safety reasons. It’ll be a decade before you can remain under for any serious length of time.”

“How long’s serious? Weeks?”

Barney shrugged. “Some people are saying we’ll be able to live in VR indefinitely. But that probably won’t be in my lifetime.”

Halliday smiled. He envisaged a depopulated New York, great hangars stacked with tanks each containing a floating, dreaming human being.

“In the meantime,” Barney went on, “I want to keep my finger on the pulse. If it’s happening out there, and might affect my line of business, then Barney Kluger’s interested.”

Halliday smiled and took a long swallow of coffee. That’s what he secretly admired about his boss. Barney was what – over sixty now? He ran a third-rate detection agency in a run-down district of Spanish Harlem, his wife was six years dead and he wasn’t in the best of health himself – and yet he was still up for the fight. He reminded Halliday of an ageing, punch-drunk boxer who didn’t understand the meaning of the word defeat.

Knuckles rapped on glass, and the door at the far end of the room swung open. Kim leaned through, her scarlet moonboots and primrose padded jacket a rude intrusion of colour into the drab, smoke-hazed office. In her fur-lined hat she looked like an Eskimo.

“Hal, did you hear me? I said be back here for ten, okay?” She sketched a wave. “Hi, Barney.”

“Hi yourself, sweetheart. How’s trade?”

She stuck out her bottom lip. Sometimes the simple expressions of her unlined, almost unformed face gave her the appearance of a child. “Up and down, Barney.”

“You should be in the elevator business, kid.” It was a line Halliday had heard many times before. Dutifully, Kim rolled her eyes.

“What’s happening at ten?” Halliday asked.

“Hal always complains,” Kim said, addressing Barney. “He says I never go out with him, says we never go places. Big surprise tomorrow, Hal. Don’t be late.”

Before he could question her, she pulled the door shut and ran down the stairs.

“Big surprise. She knows how I hate surprises.”

Barney grunted. “You complain you never get out, and when she arranges something, what do you do? Complain. Listen, Hal. Lighten up. She’s the best thing that ever happened to you.”

“You think?”

“I know, buddy. A year ago you were one sad, miserable bastard, believe me. I had to share this dump with you.”

“That bad?”

“That bad.” Barney laughed. “Sometimes I think you don’t realise how lucky you are.”

Halliday shrugged. “I don’t know…” He considered how simple all relationships seemed to an observer looking in from the outside.

“Hal, do you love the kid?”

Halliday laughed. “Love? Jesus Christ, what’s love?”

“You know, that simple human emotion, care for another human being, lust mixed with care and affection. The need for each other’s company.”

“Yeah, all those things… But I don’t know if they add up to love.”

Barney shrugged. “Hal, trouble is with you is you can’t see a good thing when it lands in your lap.” He paused, his eyes seeing something long gone, and Halliday wondered if he was going to start another riff about him and Estelle.

He smiled to himself. He wanted to tell Barney that you couldn’t judge one relationship against another. Every couple was different, made up of complex psychological imponderables. And anyway, things were different back then, thirty years ago. For a start, men and women married, supposedly – amazingly – for life. Halliday never looked further into the future than the next week.

Perhaps, he thought, it was because he saw so little of Kim that they were still together. Then he chastised himself for such cynicism and wondered what surprise Kim had in store for him tomorrow.

Barney stretched his arms above his head and gave a giant yawn. “I’m turning in, Hal. See you in the morning.”

He eased himself from his swivel chair, hardly any taller standing up than sitting down, all thick-set, thrusting torso, beer-belly and bandy legs. He closed the bedroom door behind him and a minute later Halliday heard the beat of the shower and Barney’s baritone rendition of some doleful Irish lament.

He slipped into the swivel chair and accessed the desk-com. He scrolled through the half dozen existing cases, familiarity filling him with frustration.

He was about to check a lead on one of the commissions – a businessman missing for the past month with a stash of company funds – when he saw a flashing star next to a name, denoting a new case. He wondered why Barney hadn’t mentioned it, and read quickly through the notes his boss had made the day before.

A woman called Carrie Villeux had come to the office on Monday morning, to report the disappearance of her lover, Sissi Nigeria. (Dykes – Barney had typed in his notes – which might account for the patriotic, back-to-my-roots name-change. Wonder why Villeux hasn’t changed her name to Quebec?) Nigeria had left the apartment for work one morning and had never been seen again. She’d failed to arrive at the offices of Cyber-Tech, where she worked as a computer technician. Villeux had left it a couple of days before calling the police, who had investigated and found nothing.

Halliday patched the com-recording of the meeting through the wallscreen and watched a tall, severely handsome woman in an expensive silver raincoat, her shaven skull tattooed with mandalas in the latest display of lesbian chic. She outlined the facts of the case in a steady, French-accented voice, but beneath the sophisticated exterior Halliday could tell that the woman was more than a little concerned about the safety of her lover.

She had brought a pix of Sissi Nigeria with her: a strikingly beautiful black woman with a shaven head and high, angled cheekbones.

Halliday smiled to himself as he remembered his sister’s anger at his chauvinist labelling. “The subjectification of any woman as beautiful is just another bigoted, male-centric criterion employed to label and demean womankind…” or something like that. The thought of Sue provoked a slew of painful memories. He glanced back at the screen, read Villeux’s address: Solano Building, Greenwich Village.

He knew why Barney had failed to mention the case. There was not much to go on. So Nigeria had taken off for a week, absented herself from work and not told her lover where she was headed… But Villeux had agreed to pay five hundred dollars an hour for the agency to try and locate her lover, and that was incentive enough for Halliday.

In the contact notes appended to the case file, Halliday read that Villeux would be at home most nights after seven. On Thursday and Friday she spent her evenings at the Scumbar, East Village.

He tapped her home code into the keyboard and waited out the dial tone for a couple of minutes. He considered whether to leave it until she was home, or brave the hostility of Scumbar in the hope of finding her. She had left an entry-card for the bar with Barney – another reason why Barney had not followed up the commission. The thought of Barney Kluger squaring his shoulders before the portals of a lesbian-separatist enclave like the Scumbar was as improbable as it was comic.

He located the card in a desk drawer and slipped it into his hip pocket. He left a note for Barney on the desk-com, then locked the door and made his way down the stairs to Barney’s battered Ford.

Frost covered the sidewalk with a treacherous, glittery film. Halliday turned up his collar and glanced into the night sky. For the first time in weeks, the cloud cover that brooded over the city had cleared, revealing a bright scatter of scintillating stars. The cold gripped at his exposed flesh, burning. He ducked into the Ford, which started at the second attempt, and edged out into the street.

Pungent clouds of steam hung above the food-stalls lining the sidewalk, colourful with red, white and blue polycarbon awnings. Small knots of people congregated before each stall, stamping their feet as they awaited their orders. The food-stalls were open night and day and constantly busy, catering for the shift-workers from the nearby factories and warehouses, refugees and the occasional insomniac. There were perhaps fifty stalls on either side of the street, serving a variety of Oriental cuisine – Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, Chinese – and Kim owned about ten of them, with one or two outlying stalls a block away. The night air was filled with a cacophony of strident voices, and the distant wail of patrolling police drones.

He turned onto East 10th Street towards Madison Avenue. He passed down streets lined with tents, polycarbon boxes and any other container that could be pressed into service as a makeshift home. Some families were without even the luxury of cover: they camped out in the open, huddled around spitting braziers or flickering gas stoves. The arrival of refugees from the south had begun five years ago, with a steady trickle of refugees moving into the city following the Raleigh meltdown. The terrorist attacks on the other nuclear power stations at Memphis, Knoxville and Norfolk had displaced millions: not every refugee from the radiation-stricken areas had headed for New York – many had migrated south, to New Orleans and Florida – but the majority had come north, and the city, overpopulated before the influx, was bursting at the seams. Last year had seen riots in New Jersey, street-fights between refugees and angry locals, and entire tracts of tenement housing had been put to the torch. As a consequence, these once densely populated, middle-income districts were strictly no-go, the haunt of gangs and, Halliday had heard rumoured, refugees irradiated in the blow-ups who had fallen through the welfare safety-net instituted by the Government after the first meltdowns.

The damned thing was, he reflected, that the change had happened so gradually he found it hard to recall a time when New York had not resembled some run-down, third-world capital city. The authorities claimed they were working to solve the homeless problem, of course, but nothing ever seemed to improve. The poor still starved on the streets and daily more refugees poured into the city.

And Halliday had the job of locating missing persons among a population of some thirty million. It was like trying to find the proverbial needle in a scrapyard. The miracle was that he sometimes succeeded.

While the sidewalks were packed with the homeless, the streets themselves were quiet; he counted only half a dozen other vehicles on the road at any one time. That was another change that had hit the citizens of New York. Two years ago the Arab Union had increased the price of oil in anticipation of falling yields, and consequently the cost of fuel had had gone up some five hundred per cent. Gas now cost almost fifty dollars a gallon. Most people left their cars at home and used public transport; Halliday and Barney used the Ford sparingly, usually at night when coaches ran infrequently.

He eased the Ford past a knot of sleeping refugees which had spilled onto the road, turned onto Madison Avenue and headed downtown, passing a row of buildings adorned with the latest holographic facades. He knew they were not what they seemed because last week he’d seen engineers adorning the front of these buildings with arrays of holo-capillaries. At the flick of a switch they changed from dull brownstones to whatever architectural wonder their owners desired. For the most part they were tastefully decorated in the style of Victorian town-houses, with honey coloured columns and ornate cornices. Halliday had seen other, more ostentatious, examples of architectural extravagance: miniature versions of the Taj Mahal, the occasional pyramid concealing nothing more than a general store.

He had thought that the last thing in holographic wizardry had been the long-range persona projections favoured by business-people and the rich. He’d never considered the possibility of cosmetically-enhanced buildings. He wondered what the next holographic advance might herald… if the technology was not superseded, as Barney was forever forecasting, by virtual reality.

He was considering what Barney had said earlier about virtual reality when he saw, in the distance, the city’s first VR parlour – or rather the holographic advertisement alerting citizens to the recently opened wonderland. Projected out above the intersection with East 72nd Street was a scene of tropical luxury: a golden beach enclosing an azure lagoon. A rolling header stretching between the buildings made the crass proclamation: Cold? Come in and feel the sun!

Halliday slowed as he passed the parlour. It was the old Paradiso, he saw – a holo-drama cinema that had closed down last year. He recalled Barney’s words, and wondered if this was a sign of things to come.

The sidewalk outside the bar was packed with a two-abreast queue of citizens stretching back for a block. From time to time they shuffled forward minimally, and Halliday calculated that they must have been waiting for hours. Despite his earlier scepticism, his curiosity was piqued. If the experience really was as authentic as Barney had claimed, if you could enjoy ersatz sunlight in the middle of winter without being able to tell it from the real thing, then perhaps it was worth the price of a ticket. But that was another consideration – how much were they charging? He’d tackle Barney on that one in the morning. He accelerated past the bar, heading south.

The Scumbar occupied a narrow side-alley off Christopher Street, a crimson neon in the shape of a double-bladed axe glowing in the darkness above a closed doorway. Halliday left the Ford on 7th Avenue and hurried along the alley, chivvied by a wind that seemed to come fresh off the tundra. The alley was lined with a dozen huddled figures wrapped in thin blankets, each one extending a hand into the icy air. “Dollar, man. Gimme a dollar!”

Ahead, the occasional dark-garbed figure approached the door of the Scumbar, showed a card at the grille and slipped inside.

When he reached the door he raised the card Villeux had given Barney. He waited, hunched against the cold, expecting to be told to take a hike. Perhaps a minute later, to his surprise, the door opened a fraction, and he turned sideways and slipped through into warmth and darkness. He was met by an adenoid-pinching chemical reek and the blinding glare of a flashlight in his face. Then something like the claw of a mechanical tree-planter gripped his upper-arm, causing him to gasp. “What do you want?”

“I have a damned card,” he gasped.

The claw relaxed, minimally. “This way.” He was pushed sideways and almost lost his footing. Another door opened into a tiny side-room, this one so brightly illuminated with fluorescents that the glare was like a supernova. He covered his eyes, blinking. The chemical reek intensified. When his vision adjusted he saw that the room was occupied by two women in dark suits. One sat behind a desk and the other, improbably, sat cross-legged on top of an antique safe.

They were inhaling spin from pressurised aerosol canisters.

The claw released its grip and Halliday almost gasped with relief. He looked around: his captor was smiling, sweetly. She looked about twelve, and as innocent as a schoolgirl – but her right hand winked silver with a steel metacarpal brace.

Behind the desk, the hatchet-faced dyke with a shock of blonde hair was staring at him. He wondered if the malice in her expression was drug-induced, or a manifestation of her political bias.

“What do you want?” she asked, punctuating the question with a long draught of spin. Ecstasy showed, briefly, in her glacier-blue eyes.

“I have a card. I arranged to meet Carrie Villeux here.”

The woman held out a hand. “The card.”

Halliday handed it over. The woman stared at the silver rectangle, looked up at him. “Where did you get it?”

“I told you – Carrie Villeux.”

“What do you want with her?”

How much should he tell her? He wondered how favourably disposed she was towards private investigators. “She came to my office yesterday. He lover’s missing – Sissi Nigeria. I’m trying to locate her.”

The woman looked disbelieving. “Why would she use your agency?”

“She obviously heard that I’m good,” he said.

The woman perched atop the safe spoke – and Halliday didn’t understand a word. Some private Sapphic lingo?

“My sister says, how do we know you didn’t attack Carrie and take the card?”

Paranoid, addled with spin, or just plain stupid?

“Steal a card to gain admittance to this place? Why the hell would I do that?”

The two women conferred, the words meaningless but their tone angry.

“Look,” he interrupted. “I’m a friend, okay? Carrie trusted me and gave me the card. I’m on your side. Just let me into the club and talk to Carrie.”

Hatchet-face stared at him and inhaled more spin.

He tried the trump card, knowing that he might be making a big mistake. “Do you know Sue – Susanna Halliday?”

“How do you kn. . .