Velvet Dogma

chapter 2



"I want to go."

"What? Where?"

"I want to go to my brother's apartment."

"He's not there. They've taken him away."

"Who took him?"

"He had several organs levied. Donor squads monitoring his status usually arrive within thirty minutes."

"What about the police?" Rebecca asked. "What about an ambulance?"

"They don't handle things like that."

"They don't handle—" How could they not handle death? Had things changed so much? "I still want to go. I need to go."

"But that's impossible."

"Why? Why is it impossible? You said I'd been released. Is there any paperwork? Is there something else I need to do? If there is, then let's do it."

"But there are contracts to sign," Kumi said hastily. "I need to explain things to you. Really, you can't just go into the world without knowing something."

A door opened inside Rebecca that had been shut for twenty years. Inside the door was a room filled with all the fury, consternation and disappointment that she'd once aimed at her world. The emotions had been locked away all this time, but no more.

She grabbed Kumi by her wrist and leaned close enough to see the pores on the younger woman's nose. "If I'm as free as you say, then let me go. If there are things that you need to tell me, then do it on the way, because there's one thing that I know and it's that the only way you're going to stop me from getting to my brother's house is if you kill me."

Kumi glared back at Rebecca for a moment, and then jerked her arm free. She backed away and ran a hand through her hair. "Listen, I don't know what to do. This is highly irregular. Let me confer with my supervisor." Before Rebecca could react, Kumi spun and ducked out the door.

Rebecca once again stared at the dog picture as she tried to control her breathing. The image swam in her tears. This was more than coincidence. There was no way that her brother had remained alive only to die on the day she was released. An hour before she was released, she reminded herself. Rebecca refused to believe it. Even so, she could hardly say the word to herself, so she whispered it. "Murdered." There it was. She'd said it. But it still didn't seem real. Had he really been murdered? Things like that only happened on the vids.

Kumi returned to the room, clearly upset.

Rebecca wiped her eyes, turned and placed her hands on her hips. "Well?"

"They said we can go. We still need to finish this, but we can do it later."

"Excellent." Rebecca started for the door.

But Kumi blocked her path. "Listen, we're not far from his place. I designed it that way so that you could go see him when we were done. We thought you deserved to see the face of someone you loved." Kumi let the words die in the air, and then began again. "But you can't go running off out there. Things have changed. This is not the Los Angeles you knew."

"I could always take care of myself."

"That was when you knew what to be scared of. Here you don't. Trust me, Rebecca, there are things out there that will blow your mind."

This did make Rebecca pause. She reminded herself that her brother was already dead. There was nothing she could do. The best she could do was find his killer. But as soon as she thought it, she dismissed it. This wasn't TV. Things just didn't happen like that. She swallowed a sob and nodded. "You're right. I'll follow your lead."

Kumi was visibly relieved. "Good. Then let's go."

They stepped through the door and found themselves in a small space, definitely not the outside. There was a door in front of them and a narrow hallway that bent back in the direction they'd come from. Without hesitation, Kumi opened the door and stepped out onto the street. Rebecca followed and discovered that they'd never been in an apartment or hotel room at all. They'd been inside an immense tractor trailer. And even as she watched, the trailer pulled away, leaving them behind on the streets of Los Angeles.

And what a strange place it was.

The night sky was alive with light and sound. Cars flew above her in ribbons of light, as if the busy 405 and 110 had been moved to the sky. Not a ribbon of light, Rebecca noted after getting a better look, but individual cars moving so fast that the lights merged. A smaller number flew at angles to the traffic. An awful hiss grew louder. Kumi jerked her from the street just in time to let a long, wheelless skateboard skim through where she'd just stood, the contraption apparently levitating. A man wearing red shorts and a yellow muscle shirt turned and gave her the finger. At least some things hadn't changed.

"Those in the sky are bullet cars, that thing that almost hit you is a gravBoard. The former shouldn't ever give you trouble, but the latter will kill you, especially the types of tweakers who ride them."

Rebecca just nodded. She'd ask questions later. If she began asking now, they'd have to stop every five feet.

The sounds were as she remembered. It was the sound of a big city, except a little different. It was too early to put her finger on it. Rebecca noticed the street signs. They'd been moved to knee level, letters floating in mid-air indicating that she and Kumi were at the corner of Olympic and Pico. She'd been by this spot a hundred times, but everything she remembered was gone. There'd been an In and Out Burger on one side of the street, a surf taco stand that made incredible shark tacos on the other...but the world had gone meatless in 2032. Rebecca wondered if that included fish.

They headed down the street at a brisk pace. The construction was clearly new. Three-storied buildings made of concrete, steel and glass were interspersed with Japanese-inspired buildings that appeared to be made of wood and rice paper. But that couldn't be. They'd probably been constructed of some kind of carbon composite. High definition video monitors the size of Buicks hung from every building. Figures and faces and fast cars flashed advertisements from each one. Some signs faced her. The ones that faced away she was able to see through, catching the reverse image in a reduced resolution. Santa Monica had sure changed.

A few low slung, sleek cars moved down the street—but not even a tenth as many as back in her day. Then she remembered the bullet cars. With all the traffic in the sky, things were much less congested on the ground. A serpentine bus rumbled by, four long carriages attached to each other by some sort of cable. This was followed by what had to be a garbage truck, then another gravBoard driven by a boy dressed exactly as the other.

Besides the boy on the board, people filled the sidewalks. Their clothes were an eclectic mix of what passed for modern mixed with retro. She spied a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt worn above pants that seemed to have a video input, every surface showing a band playing music. Hairstyles went towards the punk, with every color of the rainbow. Then Rebecca focused on a few people standing on the sidewalk like listing ships, their faces blank and expressionless, what could only be a POD affixed to one of their eyes.

"They're inVids." Kumi stepped around a mound of crumbled brick and motioned for Rebecca to be careful.

"What is that?"

"Back in your day they had soap operas, yes? They have those here as well, but 2D TV went the way of the African lion. 4D interactive inDramas are downloaded directly into the cortex, buffered to prevent cranial overload."

"They're watching TV?"

Kumi skipped across the street between cars. Rebecca had to run to catch up. The woman might have smaller legs, but she knew how to move them.

"No. They're in TV, or vids as we call them now. An inVid is someone who's in the vid, participating like another character in the show. It's a pejorative mostly used to describe someone who spends most of their life inDrama."

"That sounds cool."

"Uh huh. Think of it as digital heroin."

"Oh. Is it that bad?"

"See that one over there." Kumi pointed to a woman who stood, her hip pushed out, her arms held out crooked before her, her head cocked at an odd angle. Drool slid from her lips. Her hair and clothes had an unwashed look to them. "She's hardcore. Probably hasn't been out of vid in months if that."

"Months? That's impossible. How do they take care of themselves? How do they eat?"

"The Sisters of ID take care of them. They feed them, clothe them, wash them...everything." Kumi suddenly turned off Olympic and headed north on 21st Street.

"Hold on," Rebecca gasped. She'd exercised in her cell, but nothing like this. Tai Chi and yoga made her strong and supple, but did nothing for her endurance. She bent over and grabbed the tops of her knees.

"We're only three blocks away."

"I need to catch my breath."

"I thought you were in a hurry."

Rebecca glanced up at Kumi. "Don't be petty."

"I only thought—" She stopped in mid-sentence, then bit her lip and frowned. "No, you're right. I'm sorry, Rebecca. I just don't understand why we're doing this. What do you suppose we're going to accomplish?"

Rebecca had found her breath and eased herself upright. "I don't know, Kumi. Part of me hopes that I'll find that this was all a mistake. Another part hopes I'll be able to find out what happened. I know those things are crazy. I know they'll never happen, but I haven't seen David in 20 years. At least I can go to his apartment and get a feel for who he'd turned out to be. At least I can get to know him." She ran fingers through her hair. "Does that make any sense?"

After a moment. "Yeah. A little."

"I'm ready then."

They left together, this time at a slower pace. The farther north they traveled, the worse the land and the buildings appeared to be. The huge vids were everywhere, but here they were affixed to older buildings, brick and mortar crumbling in knee-high piles. Some looked so rotten that he was afraid they'd fall on them as they passed.

For Rebecca's benefit, Kumi kept up a dialogue as they walked.

The Earthquake of 2025 was only matched in sheer cataclysmic violence by the tsunami that followed. The Alquist-Priolo and San Andreas Fault Lines responded to a tectonic shift on the continental plate along the Pacific Rim. Hundreds of earthquakes shook California, ranging from 5.0 in the Mojave to 9.7 in Los Angeles. Over ninety percent of the infrastructure and buildings were destroyed in areas experiencing 8.5 and higher.

When the next day dawned, the Governor of California looked at an unprecedented clean-up. He didn't know where to begin. From San Francisco to San Diego, California had been reduced to splinters and rubble.

Then came the tsunami.

The wave that hit California was over 175 feet high, sweeping away all that had been destroyed before it. In Los Angeles, everything between Rancho Palos Verdes and Beverly Hills was washed into San Bernardino County—Santa Monica, Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, Culver City, West Hollywood, and on and on and on. The low ground was decimated, while the structures that remained standing on higher ground crumbled.

When it was all over, the rebuilding began. Independent contractors were outlawed, partly blamed for shoddy craftsmanship over the years. The government took over clearing the land and rebuilding to code. The buildings along Olympic were examples of their solid, if unimaginative construction. Nothing more than three stories was allowed and every building had to have at least a three foot earthquake shift system, which meant that the buildings moved along rails to offset the shaking if it occurred.

Rebecca's brother lived in an older section of what was now called St. Monique. Six stories and a thousand years old, the brick barely looked able to support the mortar, much less the reverse. The entrance to his building was a battered wooden door that hung partly open.

Kumi gestured at it. "He lived on the fifth floor. Room 5D."

Rebecca took the steps one at a time, her slow, methodical pace an upwards funeral march. When she reached the fifth floor landing she turned right, then retraced her steps and went to the end of the hall. 5D was on her left.

She stood there until Kumi crested the stairs behind her. It wasn't that she didn't want to go in; she just didn't want to go in alone.

There was no handle on the door. Instead, there was a small, square metal plate against the wall near where a handle should have been. She placed her hand against it. She'd meant to push, but just her touch did the trick. The door clicked open, revealing a room that had been decimated by something or someone. Computer parts, papers, books and other odds and ends were scattered everywhere. No, not scattered. And perhaps her earlier idea had been wrong. There was a sense of order to the place. She could tell that the detritus of her brother's life had been organized after a fashion.

She stood in the middle of it all not knowing where to begin. The smell of sweat, old socks, sour milk and peaches filled the room. Nothing much had changed over the years. The twenty-year-old young punk with dreams of short-cuts to becoming rich and famous had turned into a forty-year-old punk with the same dreams. Her brother had always been the type to pass up a sure hundred bucks for the sliver of a chance at a thousand.

"My brother was messy, too."

"Was he this bad?" Rebecca poked at a carton of purple food, pushing it over a stack of keyboards until it fell to the floor.

She stepped into what once had been a dining room. The table was stacked with letters and pictures and postcards from their past life. Rebecca picked up one of the pictures. It was her and David standing in front of Devil's Tower in Wyoming. She'd been twenty and he'd been ten. They had their arms around each other. Rebecca remembered that just a second before the picture was shot they'd been arguing about the number of prairie dogs they'd seen. He'd said 435 and she said 455. She could admit now what she never could admit then. He'd been right. She'd lost count and made up a number. No way was she going to let her little brother get the best of her.

Sitting next to where the picture had been was the source of one of the smells. A half-filled can of peaches with a spoon jutting out. They smelled as fresh as canned peaches could smell. This meant that he'd been looking at that picture when he'd died. The idea of it choked her as a ball of emotion lodged in her throat.

"Rebecca, is that you?" came a man's voice from the hall.

She whirled.

"It's you! My God!"

She hadn't seen his face in twenty years, but she recognized him like she'd never been away.