The Body Scout: A Novel Read online

  9

  THE LOAN SHARKS

  I swung by my apartment to clean up and grab supplies for the Pyramid compound, including one of my remaining shock slugs in case Kang wasn’t home and I needed to break in. I put on my nicest suit, which was my only suit without decorative moth holes. Midnight-blue spiderwool lined with silver threads for the shine. It was a decade out of fashion, from back when they used CRISPR to splice silk producing genes into sheep embryos. The resulting wool was so sticky the sheep would get stuck to anything they walked by, so they had to be raised in nonstick cages and fed grass through tubes. Nowadays they had eight-legged ewes that secreted threads right out of the udders and the fabric was half as thick. Still, I was holding on to mine in case it came back into style.

  Locking my door, I felt a metal hand grab my right elbow, and then another clamp on my left.

  “Have you been on vacation, Mr. Kobo? We haven’t heard from you in a while.” The woman’s voice was as low and dull as a thuddering fan.

  “Yeah, Kobo. You on vacation?” the other one said.

  The two women pushed into me, lifted me up.

  “I was working,” I grunted as I was carried back into my apartment. “Can we do this another time? I’ve had a long week.”

  “I’m afraid it’s about to get longer,” the first woman said.

  “Haha. Gonna get longer,” the other said.

  My legs were smacked into the table, then the chair as the women twirled me around trying to find a place to deposit me. Eventually they settled on the couch and heaved me into the cushions.

  I got myself sitting straight. Flipped one leg over the other and tried to look comfortable. I slid an eraser out of the pack and slipped it between my lips.

  “Hello, Wanda. Hello, Brenda.”

  Wanda and Brenda Sassafras worked as medical muscle. Upgrade loan sharks for Sunny Day Healthcare Loans, the country’s biggest medical-loan outfit. The company’s slogan, stitched above the sisters’ half-human hearts, was It’s Always a Sunny Day When You Have Your Health.

  “You ever clean this place? It’s a pigsty,” Wanda said.

  “Yeah, it’s a pigsty!” Brenda guffawed. She slapped her metal hand against Wanda’s back with a sharp clack. Then she tugged on her ear. “Hey, Wanda, what’s a sty?”

  “Shut up, Brenda.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not your personal dictionary.”

  Brenda’s face deflated. She hung her head. Her hair flopped over her eyes. “Don’t tell me to shut up. I don’t like it,” she said to the floor.

  I lit my eraser and got a good look at my visitors. The Sassafras sisters were big ones, the size and shape of cryotanks and just as cold. Both were oilers like me. The right side of Wanda was bionic. As for Brenda, it was her left side made of whirring dark machinery. They wore two-toned jumpsuits, black on the metal halves and pastel blue on the flesh. Standing next to each other, they looked like one person separated by a black hole.

  Brenda and Wanda went everywhere together. They were former conjoined twins. Hadn’t been separated until they were teenagers and their parents could afford to have their missing halves replaced with metal and wetframe. Wanda had enough live wires to be called the brains of the operation. How Brenda could have identical genes yet be five times as dull was one of those genetic mysteries science still hadn’t solved.

  “We’re working, Brenda. Be quiet.”

  “I’m just saying it’s not nice.”

  “Okay, Brenda. Noted. Your complaint has officially been lodged.”

  “It’s not sisterly,” she whispered.

  Wanda shook her head and rolled her eyes, the red iris following the hazel one with a fraction of a second delay. “So, long week means you’re working? That’s good. Working means money. Money means you pay us back. Paying us back means we don’t break things.”

  “Shucks,” Brenda said.

  “Well, not as many things.”

  I’d taken out my first medical loans in my third and final Cyber League season, right when revenues dipped and the teams pressured the players to get increasingly flashy upgrades. “What about a new eye?” Coach Brumder had asked me after a five-run loss to the Toronto Blue Jets. “Something that glows bright enough to see from the stands? It’ll pay off in the long run.”

  At the time it seemed sensible. More upgrades meant better stats, which meant bigger contracts. Hell, with an entire league getting new parts each season, if you didn’t upgrade, you’d be left behind. Then the league folded, and I was even more worried about being left behind. I kept taking out loans and upgrading as my income slowed, then trickled, then evaporated.

  “My brother just died. Isn’t there bereavement wiggle room?”

  “You had a brother?”

  “Adopted. I grew up with JJ Zunz. The baseball star.” I nodded toward the poster on the wall of Zunz sliding home. He grinned behind the cloud of dust.

  “Wanda, isn’t that the guy from the news? The one who went all drippy?”

  “We’re a SouthernChem household,” Wanda said. “Their Apex Zika cure saved our grandmother’s life. We buy from and root for the Rebels. Still, I’m sorry. That looked like a bad way to go.” I thought I saw a bit of human emotion leak into Wanda’s face. She frowned, looked away from me. Then she rattled her head. The sympathy drained away like sludge through a sewage grate. “How come you can’t pay us with all these fancy brothers? That makes me angry, Kobo.”

  “I live a lavish lifestyle,” I said, waving my hand around the dinky, cluttered apartment.

  “You bought new parts. You pay for them. Or your lifestyle will be moaning in a hospital bed.”

  “Yeah, we’ll send you to the hospital.”

  “Shut up, Brenda. I already said that.”

  “I know you said it. I’m just saying.”

  “Give Mr. Kobo his present already.”

  Brenda’s grin curved exponentially toward her ears. “I like presents.” She dropped a green bag on the floor, squatted to unzip. Stood back up with a long metal spike, about the size and shape of a pool cue. Spindles of electricity crackled at the tip.

  My heart was pounding so hard I thought it might stab itself on a rib. I tried to get up. “Look, I’m on a case. Big case. The money will come rolling in soon. Let’s take a rain check, and I’ll throw in a bonus for both of you.”

  Wanda shook her head robotically. “Stop making us come back here. It smells, and the commute is an hour. Have a bytewallet ready next time, or we’ll slice out all the parts that Sunny Day paid for.”

  “I’ll have it. There’s no need for any threats.”

  “Sorry. Company policy. We need to send in photos of at least one injury or our boss will dock our pay. We’re trying to save up for a down payment on an East River floater home.”

  “No, listen. One minute.”

  I turned to Brenda, thinking maybe she’d be a better bet for mercy. She wasn’t looking at me. She glared at her electric pole with a strange grin.

  I kept protesting, yet there was no point arguing with lugs like the Sassafras sisters. And part of me was ready to accept what was coming. With Zunz dead, and my lungs filled with eraser smoke, I was numb to everything. Or so I thought.

  Wanda held me down, stretched my bionic arm across the couch. Brenda lifted the buzzing rod. “Look, we got other clients to visit. This job ain’t all fun and games. We got our own quotas to fill. Please be quiet.”

  I was never good at following instructions. Wanda wanted me to shush, but as the spike went through my hand all I could do was scream.

  10

  THE ELEVATED PARK

  My hand was twitching so badly that on my way to the Pyramid compound I had to get out at Reunion Square and run to the nearest kiosk. Brenda’s spike had popped the nerve module like a pimple. I’d hidden the injury inside a black glove. It was already filled with thick blue discharge, which began leaking down my wrist.

  With the module broken, my nerves didn’t und
erstand what they were attached to. My brain didn’t know what to feel. I could sense my childhood arm, the one that had been injured in the apartment cave-in, floating in the broken metal case. The phantom hand was trying to grip, trying to hold on to something. Cyber surgeons never tell you about that. How the flesh misses what’s been cut away. How your body wants to be whole. Only the right electrical pulses keep that need at bay.

  “You look awful, pal,” the kiosk worker said, without taking off his video game visor. “How about some dope chews? They’ll put a smile on your face.”

  I showed him a pained snarl. “Pack of erasers. Mets.”

  “Yanks okay?”

  “Is that all you have?”

  The guy paused his game and frowned. His arms were all curves, muscles so engorged they were striped with stretch marks. He’d clearly been sampling his wares. “Look, bud, this is a Yankees kiosk. We don’t sell Monsanto. Smoke Yank or go home.”

  I bought the pack anyway, plus a tube of sealant. I stumbled through the elevated park, chain-smoking the erasers.

  We were twenty floors above the old Union Square, which had been sold off to developers when I was a teen. Reunion Square might be higher up, but it hadn’t changed. The park was filled with overdressed tourists, underdressed goths, hover skaters, and chanting activists. Genohippies sold organic pearl necklaces they’d secreted from oyster glands spliced into their necks, and head hackers hustled games of 4D chess, black beanies hiding their implants from the rubes.

  The supraway entrance had a row of medical beggars, each holding a sign that listed the operation they needed and the code for their bank account. One of them had a screen that said Mextexan Vet with Lichen Lung Pls Help and a video of the disease. I watched the bioengineered spores travel down a cutaway of a human form, black patches spreading across the walls of the lungs.

  I didn’t give him any money. But I did consider plopping down next to him, seeing if I could trade my pity for enough change to patch up my injured hand.

  Someone next to me spat on the ground. Elbowed me. “Moochers. Get a job and pay your bills like the rest of us, right?” He handed me a flyer that said Keep America for Americans above a description of President Newman’s second-term plan to boost fertility rates while locking out climate refugees. The American dream is for American genes.

  “Can we count on your vote?”

  The man was white as a lab rat, all the pink bleached out with epidermis upgrades. He had a Rebel Reborn tattoo on his neck. A bald eagle clutching a pair of nukes. It looked like it had been burned into the skin.

  “Not much of an America left to keep these days,” I said, flexing my hand and grimacing.

  His pale lips looked like dead earthworms as he scowled. “You don’t like it you should go the fuck back to—” He looked me over trying to decide what ethnic slur to hurl, then gave up and settled on my cybernetics. “The fucking trash heap!”

  I crumpled the flyer up as he walked away. As I tossed it, I saw a hulking man in a trench coat and a Jupiter hat pulled low on his face. His chin was overgrown with black scruff, and beneath I could just make out the blotch of a glove-shaped birthmark.

  It was Zunz. Back from the dead.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  I pushed through the crowd, knocking people away with my arm, too excited to wince. He kept disappearing before me.

  Reunion Square was one of Zunz’s and my old haunts. We’d spent countless teenage nights fighting with kids from other schools or spitting on the rich dorks playing augmented reality games from the benches.

  “JJ?” I said, grabbing his shoulder.

  The man didn’t turn around. “Back off, weirdo.” The stranger disappeared into the crowd.

  The pain in my arm was making me delirious. I was hallucinating. I stumbled. Wiped a slick of sweat off my brow. I needed a doctor. A legit one I could afford. Which is to say, I wasn’t going to a doctor.

  I walked by a bone band plucking strings between the frets and bridges implanted on their forearms. Their skin vibrated with each pluck. The arm violinist was crooning about lost love. “I’d sever my limbs / to touch you again. / I’d burn off my skin / to kiss you again.”

  Then I saw Zunz towering above me, immobile as stone. He was green and grinning.

  I stopped. Stared.

  It was a busker dressed as JJ Zunz, a human statue on an injection pad. His sign scrolled R.I.P. to a New York Hero. Ya Gotta Bereave! The busker was posed with the bat out, having finished an imaginary home run.

  Across the path was a Sphinxes busker dressed as a pharaoh with a baseball glove. Every time he moved, he sang, “Beat the Mets! Beat the Mets!” and passersby cheered or booed. America had always been like that. Coke or Pepsi. Republican or Democrat. Monsanto or Pyramid. You were expected to pick a side and then scream like hell.

  A thin, sickly girl stood next to me in front of the Zunz busker. She had that frail bone structure that you see in old movies and history exhibits. A twig. There was a sticky sheen to her skin that I guessed was sunscreen. She wore a gray-and-blue tunic. Probably a No Grow or an Edenist, one of the sects that claimed that living without upgrades was what god had intended for humanity. As if god intended anything about the way things had gone.

  “He was a good guy,” I said.

  The twig heard me, twisted her head with a blank expression. “I heard he was a piece of shit.”

  I ignored the comment. The human statue looked down at us with begging eyes. They were the only part of him that could move while the chemical was circulating. White balls rolling in the green field of his painted skin. “If you flick him a dollar, he gets an injection that lets him change poses.”

  The girl scrunched her face. “Thanks, Mr. Creepy Stranger. I’m twelve, not four. I know how muscle concreter works.”

  I looked away. I’d forgotten how nature had genetically modified preteens to be assholes.

  “Zunz isn’t dead! It’s a hoax!” someone yelled. “They can even fake holorecordings now. You can’t believe anything you see with your own eyes.”

  The human statue didn’t flinch. I flicked the man a few dollars, and the pad whirred. I thought I saw him grimace as the needle stuck into his ankle. A tremor moved through him, relaxing each part.

  I got dizzy. Stepped back. Grabbed the railing. He was collapsing again. Just like he did at bat.

  But the busker didn’t collapse. Instead, he spoke, voice cracking as the larynx softened. “Go Mets! Win the World Series for JJ Zunz. M-E-T-S Mets!” He tapped the platform three times with his bat, then crouched into a batting stance. A needle went into his other ankle and slowly his flesh froze again.

  A few people cheered.

  “Look! Abomination transformed into idolatry.” I turned to see an old man shouting, wrinkled hands sticking out of a gray tunic. It looked like his thin flesh was barely hanging on to his skeleton. His two-foot beard dangled down to his belly button. “Zunz died for his sin of self-pollution. He rotted himself from the inside. So will you, unless you repent.”

  He pointed his wrinkled finger at different people in the crowd. There were boos and hisses in response.

  My blood was gurgling, working its way to my flushing face. I grabbed him with my broken hand. Winced as it clamped.

  “What do you know about Zunz?” I said. I pushed him into a nearby fence. Anger flowed through me like electricity through a filament.

  “God’s genes! Let go of me, you filthy oiler.” The old man spat out the last word, glaring at my cybernetic eye. The crowd grew bigger. I saw several people livestreaming. They shouted different things. “Shut that twig up!” “Be peaceful!” “Fight!” “Love!”

  I let go. My hand was killing me. I didn’t have time for this. Fighting with religious nuts wasn’t going to solve Zunz’s death.

  “See the violence that electric defilement leads to?” the old man shouted after me as I stumbled away. “Drain yourself or be damned.”

  I stumbled to the tube station. Whe
n I looked back, I could see the young girl staring at me with half of a smile on her face.

  11

  THE RIVAL PLAYER

  The sealant had closed the hole in my hand, and the pain was subsiding. Still, I smoked another numbing eraser on the ride across the Hudson to the Pyramid Pharmaceuticals compound.

  Pyramid was the third FLB team in New York’s six boroughs. Greater Newark may have incorporated into New York ten years ago, but it still smelled like Jersey to me. The compound was impressive though. A walled-off corporate headquarters on a ten-foot bed of concrete to fight against the rising waters. In the middle was the Pyramid stadium itself. Bright red and constructed from sound-absorbing bricks. The top layers were glass and at the apex a golden sphinx sat with a baseball in its mouth. The ball was swapped out when the Pyramid hosted other events. A basketball when the Jackals played, soccer ball for Pyramid FC, and a tennis ball when the US Mech Open was in town.

  As I walked to the employee entrance, I noticed shining silver nests inside the bushes. Heard the warning buzz of security zootech. If Dolores’s eyeball scan didn’t work, I’d be twitching on the ground in seconds. But it did. My bionic eye re-created her brown iris, and the door slid open. The modified wasps stayed sleeping in their mechanical homes.

  Inside, the compound was hectic enough for me to pass around unnoticed. People ran around setting up stands as delivery drones restocked supplies. Everything was humming and alive. The World Series started in two days.

  Kang’s house was in the back of the compound, small and unadorned. Only a tiny American flag hanging in one window and a sprinkler drone dog that barked woof woof as it sprayed the yard with insecticides.

  I tried to clean myself up as much as I could. Wiped the grimace of pain off my face. Straightened my spiderwool lapels.

  Jung Kang answered the door sucking on two smoothies. One bright blue and the other a pale yellow. Sphinxes team colors. He wore shorts, moss shoes with bioengineered soles, and a sweat-absorbing shirt. The shirt wasn’t working. Drenched oblong patches flowed like oil spills from his neck and armpits.