CHAPTER 13
The Labor Zone swelled with people when Nick arrived. The streets were thick with besuited workers, industrial grunts decked out with cybernetic limbs, rough and tumble types, and the varied fast fashion plates of the city. Despite the name, the area was popular with almost everyone.
The sole exception being the Spire elites.
That was because the Labor Zone was named as such because it rejected one of the core growth areas of Neo Westphalia: dolls.
The city blocks that comprised the Labor Zone rejected the latest wave of automation. Hence its name. Some called it the android-free zone, or a human-only zone. Others, like Lucas, called it Luddite Central.
Nick made sure to approach by himself. Despite the reproachful look from Chloe, he’d managed to convince her to drop him off a good block away.
Not that the Archangels cared about the Labor Zone’s policy. A Mark 1 pointedly stood beneath a mural that read “DOLLS GTFO OUT” in glowing neon letters. Her relaxed stance and loaded SMG were a reminder that the people of the area could impose whatever rules they wished on each other, but the police didn’t care.
Hammond stood at the intersection which marked the eastern entrance to the zone. He looked as gruff and sullen as always. But as Nick approached, he raised a hand in greeting.
“’bout time you got here,” he grunted out. “Friday’s always too damn busy. Dunno if any of the dim sum restaurants will be available. You like dim sum, right?”
“I like a lot of food.”
“Yeah, but I’m asking about dim sum. We can grab some sushi or bibimbap if you don’t.”
“Let’s grab some dim sum, Paul.”
The detective nodded, then turned on his heel and headed into the zone proper. Nick followed. The two of them weaved through the crowds.
Music thrummed, rumbling through the ground, as a live band lit up a plaza with deafening speakers. Nick couldn’t see an accompanying light show, but he couldn’t see much of anything other than people and buildings here.
Such was life in the Labor Zone. The buildings were starker than the usual fare. All cost-efficient steel and concrete, with glass panels slapped down in the most visible places.
Hammond no doubt saw this place as a glowing Mecca. A cacophony of noise, obnoxious advertisements, overlapping music as every store blared music to fight the band, and dancing signage. The Altnet thrived here. No matter how cheap it looked in reality, augmented reality made the zone look like the stuff that dreams were made of.
“This place is always too damn noisy,” Hammond shouted. He wasn’t the only person shouting, although most people preferred Altnet chats due to the noise.
Nick nodded. He couldn’t hear most of what Hammond could, of course.
They wandered the winding streets, which remained as crowded as every other one. More than a few people bumped into Nick. Their glazed eyes would return to reality, and they’d stared at Nick in shock as if he’d just appeared from thin air. He simply pressed on.
It was old news that a lot of people couldn’t see him when their minds were absorbed in the Altnet. Nick focused on keeping pace with Hammond.
Shops burst with people, but had a human shopkeeper. Restaurants bustled, and the waiters were real people, not dolls. There were even some street markets, although they lacked the oddly rustic feel of the doll-run markets elsewhere in Babylon.
The only dolls that Nick saw were the occasional Archangel patrol, and the Mark 3s tailing him.
Eventually, Hammond grunted and stopped outside a Chinese restaurant that looked like a dozen others they had passed. It lacked physical signage and a menu, just like every other restaurant and store. Accessibility was low here for someone like Nick.
“This place suit you?” Hammond asked.
“It’s not easy for me to tell,” Nick said, tapping the side of his head. “But if you like it, let’s eat.”
Hammond frowned, then winced a moment later. “Right. Implant. You can’t whip out your phone?”
“It’s rare for one of these places to support non-neural Altnet apps. I sometimes use my own workarounds, based on some code an old friend wrote for me, but I can’t just click my fingers and magic up my own apps.” Nick shrugged.
“Well, this place is great. Been here more than a few times. They have a few spare tables, unless you like the bar.”
“Table.”
Hammond nodded, then led them in.
The entire restaurant was full of patrons, save for a few two-seater tables in the back, and a half-dozen seats at the bar. All the furnishings were in an obnoxious beech, which was a fashion trend for a reason that boggled Nick’s mind. A few waiters and waitresses carried food to tables.
Nobody approached them when they entered. Hammond paused for a moment as they entered, his eyes glazing over. Then he began walking toward a table at the back.
“We’re good?” Nick asked.
“Yeah, I claimed it,” the other detective said.
They sat down at one of the free tables. It lacked a view, a menu, or anything of note.
“You know the menu for these sorts of places, right?” Hammond asked, and Nick nodded.
They haggled over what to order. Only Hammond could see the menu, but they tended to be fairly similar across dim sum places. What differed were the specialties. Nick relied on the other man’s judgment about what the chefs were good at, and what they weren’t.
“Alright, done,” Hammond said, after placing the order using his neural implant.
Not a single staff member had approached them the entire time, although a couple bustled back and forth between tables and the kitchen.
Shortly after Hammond’s declaration, a young waitress ducked over with a tray. She laid out bowls, chopsticks, and napkins. Then she opened a pair of beers and poured them, before vanishing into the back of the restaurant.
“Can definitely appreciate how efficient the service is. Don’t need tin cans, do we?” Hammond said after taking a swig of his beer.
Somehow, Nick knew that tonight was going to be one of those nights where heavy topics were discussed over too much alcohol.
“It’s efficient, sure. It’s also pretty cold,” Nick said.
“The waiters here have beating hearts. Can’t say the same about most of our ‘co-workers,’ eh?”
“If having a heart was what mattered, we could have gone to the zoo.”
Hammond chuckled. “You know, I figured you might like this place. Didn’t reckon on the implant being the issue. But I don’t get it. You’re even more cut off from this city than I feel. Why do you like the dolls? Why not just fuck off and, I dunno, get a decent job in the States?”
“Those are two very different questions.” Nick took a swig of his beer and looked around the restaurant.
Nobody gave a damn what the two of them were discussing. In fact, he suspected that the restaurant used some sort of sound-dampening field in the Altnet. While only the Archangels could access the lower-level functions of an implant, there were other ways to interfere with sight and sound.
To a Cipher, augmented sound and visual effects were trivial to undo. Nick didn’t consider them to be security. But it did mean he didn’t feel pressured to stay quiet for the sake of others around him.
“I won’t say that I like dolls. They’re often extremely annoying, actually,” Nick said. “But so is everyone else. I don’t see much difference.”
“Harsh.”
“Really?”
Hammond leaned back and crossed his arms. “You just said that humans are like machines to you.”
“I could have meant the opposite.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t. I was right. We are the same.” The detective grinned. “What about the other question? Why not leave? Not every city is as dependent on neural implants.”
“Yet. And the reality is that by the time I was able to leave, it didn’t matter.” Nick shrugged and stared out the window.
Chloe and the Mark 3s were rather pointedly patrolling the exterior of the building, and presumably scaring people away.
Nick continued, “My family didn’t really get how shit things were. School was basically impossible. Higher education unviable, no matter what I tried. When I looked for jobs, I found that entry-level work is basically non-existent if you don’t have a neural implant that the company can tap for processing work.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard about that shit.” Hammond grimaced. “Before the fancy new mainframes came along and blew everything else out of the water, companies thought that distributed mainframes were the future. They were leeching processing power off neural implants. Cubicle farms full of teenagers hired purely for the chip in their brain.”
“Or just for stealing data,” Nick said. “Offer a kid a job in exchange for information on his hopes, dreams, emotions, wants, and needs every waking hour. You’ll understand your target market better than they know themselves.”
“You’re in the wrong line of work to have a conscience about that sort of stuff.” Hammond pointed his bottle at Nick. “The Archangels don’t use the thoughts in our heads to sell us a new flavor of soda. They use them to track us down and arrest us when they think something is about to happen. Isn’t that what they’re doing right now?”
Nick winced.
That was, after all, what the “drudge work” really was. The Archangels knew more about the city than anyone else. That included a massive list of people who weren’t a major danger, or had yet to cross lines, but who might take those steps in the future.
But the Archangels could calculate who was likely to do so. And when they faced otherwise impossible problems such as the NLF, who were untraceable through normal means, the Archangels could tap into all of these “potential NLF members” to see who was of use.
Given Rie’s attitude toward data and privacy, he often wondered if the police and Spires viewed the city like some sort of farm. The Archangels were quality control, and used all the data gathered from the farm to prune any crops growing too slowly or showing problematic signs.
Except that the crops were the people of Neo Babylon.
Nick drummed his fingers against the table. He wasn’t sure if there was an easy way to describe his point of view.
Then again, Hammond seemed to have a surprisingly open mind. Or at least, a willingness to listen.
“By the time I was old enough to remember anything, neural implants were completely integrated into society,” Nick said. “The Altnet was part of the fabric of society. Even as a kid, before I had an implant, I knew that the Altnet was really amazing and awesome. That once I was old enough to get my own implant, I’d see this bright and amazing world that I only saw through tablets and old AR glasses.”
Hammond grimaced. The old man knew where this was going.
“Then I went into a clinic for a routine test—the sort of thing they do before you get your implant, that 99.99% of people don’t even remember because it doesn’t matter to them.” Nick paused, and his gaze turned distant. “I knew something was wrong when my parents immediately took me to another clinic. But the results didn’t magically change. Eventually, I was one of the handful of poor bastards diagnosed with Nanoneuron Rejection Disorder.”
“There are cures for it these days,” Hammond said abruptly.
“Not cheap ones. If you own your own central bank, you can install a special implant in your kid that suppresses the disorder. But it has horrific side-effects if installed as an adult. The ‘cheap’ cure is to take some pricey pills once a month and put up with blinding migraines, occasional implant malfunctions, and be even more uninsurable than I already am.” Nick let out a dark laugh. “So, no, it’s not really curable.”
Hammond nodded slowly. “Then things got worse.”
“That’s putting it lightly. Talent and intelligence don’t matter if school is built around something you don’t have. Higher education became unattainable. Eventually, I gave up on the dreams I had. Then I ran into the black companies of Alcatraz, and they didn’t think I was quite the lost cause that everyone else did.”
A long pause. Nick realized his beer was finished. A few moments later, a waiter came out with another two. Hammond gestured for him to continue.
“Well, I found my feet. I became a Cipher, learned everything I could about dolls and mainframes, and tried to learn what I could about neural stuff. Then the military happened. And while the last several years have been a frustrating dead end, it was still worlds better than anything I ever dared to dream of as a teenager. And it’s not because of this”—Nick gestured at the invisible tendrils of the Altnet around him—“but because of the dolls and mainframes I worked on as a Cipher.”
A long pause. Hammond’s face was stony.
Nick wondered if he’d said too much, or pushed one of the detective’s buttons.
Then the food came out.
“I have some words to say about all that,” Hammond said gruffly while a waiter dumped a half-dozen steaming trays of food on their table. “That was too heartfelt to just brush aside, and I know enough about rough histories to sympathize damn well with you. But for now, let’s eat.”
With only two of them, they’d remained restrained. But even so, they had a feast to dig into. Plates and bamboo steamers laid out the food before them.
A handful of pork and shrimp dumplings still glistened with the steam they had been boiled in. Two dumpling dishes, one fried, one steamed, waited to be eaten. Bamboo leaves hid dense balls of sticky rice and tender pork. Some egg tarts would need to wait until after they’d finished with everything else before being demolished.
And, of course, there were three balls of steamed pork buns. There had to be three, just so Nick and Hammond would have to fight over who got the third.
Hammond grabbed the odd-shaped bottle of sauce on the table and poured it into two small dishes. He slid one across to Nick.
They ate in near silence for a few minutes. A waiter brought out a pot of green tea for them, and poured two cups, then left the pot. Patrons came and went. Only the tapping of their utensils against the dishes greeted their ears.
“I said we’re the same. That holds true,” Hammond said abruptly, a dumpling in his grasp. “The difference is how we reached that point, and where we’re going. You never had a future in this city. I thought I had one, only to see it burn down in the riots decades ago. Both of us then built our own future, but the replacements are hollow, cold shells of what dreams are supposed to be.”
Nick blinked. Hammond was surprisingly eloquent. “Your future burned down?” he asked.
The older detective nodded. Some soy sauce dripped down his beard. Nick pointed this out, and Hammond wiped it away with a napkin.
“I don’t really need to explain the riots,” Hammond said.
“I did notice that they’re not in the police records.”
“They are. Look up the Great Neo Westphalian Unrest.”
Nick nearly snorted, which would have covered the table with half-chewed chunks of shrimp balls. “Unrest? The riots burned for months, caused the deaths of tens of thousands, burned down entire city blocks, and shook the Spires themselves. I heard they sent in the military, because the police stood down.”
“Eventually.” Hammond’s fists clenched around his chopsticks. “The law runs in my blood. Granddad came over when they first built Babylon, when people dreamed about this place being something other than a neon shithole. My old man followed in his footsteps. He was in the front lines in the riots. I remember them. Hiding in the basement while all hell broke loose outside.”
The look on Hammond’s face was of a man who had a lot more to say on the riots. There was a painful twist to his lips. Nothing about the riots conjured up good memories for him.
“But like I said, I don’t need to explain them,” he said, anticlimactically, and a whole load of tension left his body. “I’m not drunk enough to go down that rabbit hole. But afterward, they brought in the dolls. When the Liberators rolled out, ready to replace my old man, he told me, ‘They’re the future. Make sure you’re part of theirs.’ Words of wisdom. That’s why I’m potentially the last survivor of nearly every police Cipher in the division.”
Nearly every…
“They’re firing that many?” Nick blurted out.
Hammond nodded. “Like I said, the department is on fire. The Liberators replaced patrol officers. The Custodians the special response units. Mark 1s slashed detective numbers and were basically the final nail in the coffin for anyone still issuing fines. These Mark 3s? They’re replacing basically everyone leftover. All they need are the people at the top, giving them direction.”
A funny feeling filled Nick’s body from the bottom-up.
Because in Rie’s mind, she didn’t even want the people at the top. The Mark 1s had apparently been trying to puzzle out why they were given orders from the very start.
“You don’t seem to hold it against me,” Nick said slowly.
Hammond laughed. “Maybe we’ll talk about that one day. Like I said, I haven’t had enough to drink. We are the same, though. Maybe you can show me some fancy Cipher tricks at some point. Everyone else is brushing up on their skills, because they need to job hunt, and I’m feeling like a relic.”
“Maybe you are a relic, old man.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m the one being preserved while they toss the rest in the dump.” Hammond grinned.
With that piece of dark humor, they shifted to lighter topics.
After the food, they rose. Hammond waved off any attempts by Nick to cover part of the check.
“I’m your boss. Let me cover a meal,” he said. “Now let’s find a bar and enjoy some real drinks. A few beers aren’t nearly enough.”
As they left, Nick noticed Chloe and the Mark 3s tailing them. But while the denizens of the Labor Zone steered clear of the dolls, they paid no attention to the detective duo.
The night was young. And Hammond was desperate to prove he was as well, based on how much he knocked back that night.
But it had been far too long since Nick had felt welcome somewhere. He never really forged friendships at Tartarus, due to the way he was forced to work there. As grizzly as Hammond was, he reminded Nick of what he’d lost.
Come morning, Nick was reminded of the other things he’d left behind in the past. Namely, the brutal hangover after a hard night of drinking.