The Fickle Finger of Fate: Chapter IV

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Malls are Hell on Earth, and it's times like this when I most hate being employed by a one-man agency. Can't send my partner to go do the shopping. I pushed through the revolving door of the mall and threaded my way into a mass of giggling high-school girls. (Munakata High, third year, division twelve; the stripe pattern for "twelve" is impossible to mistake.) I wondered what they were doing so far from home. Maybe a field trip? I mooched along the walkway looking for a mens' clothing store that would cater to humans and not charge a fortune.

I nearly tripped over some yahoo with a theramin. He was set up right in the middle of the floor, squatting behind his instrument and waving his arms dramatically, playing a sort of fusion pop from the last decade. Three little seru kids were break-dancing on a plastic mat to one side, and he had a hat out for people to throw in change. He'd collected a small crowd. That's something new - the city wasn't allowing street musicians indoors even five years ago. The price of globalization, I guess. The theramin player was a greasy little guy with a long pigtail down his back. He beamed up at me through thick glasses and asked, "Any requests, guv'nor?" I could think of several, but they've never been set to music, so I just sort of growled and walked around the knot of people.

On the other side I found the sort of store I was looking for, and what do you know, they had a sale on as well. Before going in, I checked my wallet for cash. A nasty scorched smell greeted me as I opened it; I realised that although I'd turfed my clothing from the previous night, the wallet had taken a solid dose of biological nastiness too. The zipper was clogged; some of the little plastic teeth seemed to have melted together. I tugged the pull-tab this way and that until it suddenly broke off, and the wallet pulled open with a ripping sound as the zipper teeth parted. The bills inside were in rough shape too, but still spendable, I judged; that teflon weave is great stuff. I'm all for it even if it isn't as pretty as the old cotton paper. Unfortunately, I only had a couple thousand.

I remembered having seen a bank machine just moments before. I walked back towards the crowd around the theramin player, looking in every direction, and then I realised that in fact, he was sitting right in front of the bank machine I wanted to use. Damn. I took the escalator to the lower level, walked past convenience stores, manga shops, and a sleazy-looking establishment with a neon sign in the front reading "Seru Doll Klub Kawaii". On a section of blank wall between that and a chain grocery store, I saw the friendly blinking lights of an AmsTex terminal.

I had to wait for some zit-faced teenager to finish making a withdrawal. He pulled handfuls of bills from the machine, retrieved his card, and then paused, looking longingly over at the "Klub". "They won't let you in," I said as I walked up to the terminal. "Don't even bother." He shook his head sheepishly. "No, sir. I guess not." He took his money into the grocery store. I polished my card's optical patch on my sleeve, and slid it into the receptacle. The light went on and I pressed my thumb to the reader. It was an old model without a nose.

But the light didn't go out. Damn, must be a flaky sensor, I thought. So I hit a few buttons on the keypad, tried to remember my secret code, and entered that. The machine took forever to come back with a response - I was starting to wonder if it was working at all - and then when the response did come back, it was a flat blue screen with "Privilege mode exception - invalid number of accounts (0) - we aporogise" and the same thing written below it in Japanese, minus the spelling error. Damn! I figured the machine was out of order, but it had worked fine for the teenager before me. I pulled out my card, not easy because the machine hadn't actually released it, stepped away from the wall, and wondered what to do next.

There was a seru rent-a-cop watching me from a couple store-fronts down the line. She wore a helmet with a black visor that covered her face entirely - or maybe that was her face. I could tell it was a female at all because the rest of her uniform was bright pink and looked like it had been painted on, revealing an unmistakably feminine shape. Well, I mean, of course her uniform was painted on, but it also looked like it, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, I guess I looked pretty rough in my old sweatsuit, poking at the machine like some kind of old geezer trying to re-live my wasted and glorious youth as a systems cracker. The rent-a-cop started to walk towards me with her arms doing that "I can draw my weapon in exactly one thirtieth of a second, foolish human!" thing; I debated whether to get upset, or ask her for help, maybe the location of another bank machine; but I decided neither would really be worth it, and retired to the escalator. When she saw I was going back upstairs she lost interest - I guess her assignment only covered the one floor.

This time I was a little smarter: instead of just wandering around, I found a mall directory and looked for the locations of the bank machines. One on each floor, all in the same corresponding location, no problem. So I rode the escalator up one more flight and tried another machine. This one was a CirroPlus unit, and it was a lot newer, with a synthesised voice and a little hologram of a human teller, who recited to me exactly the same error message (complete with mispronunciation in the appropriate place) that I'd gotten from the machine downstairs. I went up one more level, tried another CirroPlus machine, and got my card rejected there as well. Well, better be precise: it wasn't rejecting my card because it brought up my name and branch particulars, so it obviously knew who I was and that my card was a card. It just didn't seem to have any record of my accounts.

I sat on a bench near the machine, watched the crowd going by, and wondered what to do. Something was obviously wrong with my account, but there was no way to know if it was just some kind of stupid computer problem, or some kind of identity-theft thing. Either way, it could be weeks to resolve if I went to the bank, or forever if it was something done on purpose and they'd been bribed into it. I had plenty of food at home, but only a couple thousand yen in my pocket, no clothes fit to be seen in, and next week I'd be two months behind on the rent instead of just one.

Well, if I was saving my money, I'd better walk home, and if I didn't want to be walking through the Quarter after dark, I'd better start now. I made my way out of the mall and started walking among the zigzagging streets. I tried to follow the train track as much as possible, but that wasn't easy when it crossed over walls, through tunnels in buildings in mid-air, and so on. I knew the route pretty well, just not from the ground, so I didn't make too many wrong turns.

As I walked, I thought about my troubles. The purple-haired dame had left me with a threat of unspecified further "accidents" if I didn't take her case, and the yakuza goons who'd left me to stew in the biowaste puddle obviously planned mayhem if I did take her case. This would be one of those unfortunate episodes where I'd have to disappoint somebody. The dame was offering to pay me, whereas the gangsters would at best refrain from beating me up for a while, so that worked in her favour; on the other hand, it would be a good bet that she'd arranged my financial troubles in order to trap me into working for her, and it's partly because of people who do business that way that I don't take seru cases anymore. Flank Ploughman is nobody's bitch.

The ideal solution would be to simply leave town; but the money in my pocket wouldn't buy me a bullet-train ticket far enough away to be useful, and it would cause complications. Maybe I could sign up as a spaceman and get a long quiet work tour out to some place like Titan; last time I tried that I'd failed the physical, but I had been working out since. I knew I wouldn't be leaving town, though. It was just fantasy. The thing is, once I've gotten involved in a case I can't leave. It's like an addiction for me. Even if I didn't actually take Murasaki-san as a paying client or whatever, I'd be stuck thinking about her and her dead employee and her long, impossibly smooth legs and her goddamn little vinyl seru-girl skirt until I'd figured out what was going on at least to the point of getting those boys in the big black cars off my tail. I mean, is it really obsessive-compulsive to have trouble sleeping when there are people threatening you and you don't even know why?

Well, like it said in the instruction booklet that came with my badge, knowledge is power to the private detective. The first set of problems I needed to solve were those attached to the rectangular slip of plastic in my wallet. Fortunately, I knew just where to go to pursue those, and the place was almost on my way home.

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