1 – SOLACE SHELL
Sprawling out from downtown in the labyrinthine metropolis of Neo-Vancouver lay the skyscraper Perpetual Spire, headquarters of Dynosoft Incorporated. The corporate colossus was a top player within the Kingdom of Code, constantly vying for supremacy against other world contenders. Legions of employed technicians served in cubicles, service tables or call centers 24/7.
Software that had famously revolutionized the industry was the main product, most of which was mandatory on current computer systems, but following in its wake came the merchandising; ranging from gaming platforms and sports sponsored advertising all the way to customized straws, condoms and candy. Almost anything would fit as a name tagged product of the megalith within a society conditioned to pay for it.
There were alternative enterprises of course, but they were sparse and similar. Subscribing to the techno-overlords was like choosing between a Pepsi or Coke product; they were basically the same thing except different brands and marketing. It was advantageous in the retail world when there was some direct competition, giving the customers a simple choice. It made them feel like a special part of the exchange, acting as an empowering facade.
Solace Shell was the elite data security faction of Dynosoft specializing in complex code defense. The grid locked out potential hackers and cyber information thieves for big businesses such as the global government, the world’s top banks, military establishments and NASA space plans.
A group of sentient cyber-genetically enhanced humanoid hybrids were the guardians of Solace Shell. The mercenary squad had the body-frame of humans, albeit covered in scales, appearing to have the cranial features of some prehistoric species with protruding fangs and glowing red eyes missing the pupil.
They dressed in clothes varying from shirt and tie office attire to full-blown armored espionage suits. It depended on which individual it was, as they all had their own unique attributes, preferences and abilities. There were officially six of these creatures, so far, legally logged and identified – fully lingual and English speaking, their creation being some perverted birth from the newly founded deep state experimental science lab Daedalus Gulf. Infused with the brainwaves of previous Dynosoft denizens, the prefrontal cortex was transferred a knowledge base during the inception period resulting in split personalities beyond anything witnessed before. They bore the genetic amalgamation of real people spliced with dubious reptile DNA. The idea was to infuse a ruthless, coldblooded quality that would be useful in the business field.
The duties of these agents ranged from hacker to assassin to demolitions expert to spy, and some of them were even transported internationally on top secret missions during the Data War of 2047 – 2050, heavily involved in Canada’s confrontation with Russia, United States, Mexico and the European Confederation.
The outfit’s code name: Deep Stake.
Nepotism from the makers found a place for the beasts in the ranks of corporate security. Commercial genetic engineering was a relatively new phenomenon in the world and the ethical consideration of the potential there was creating a divided political uproar and an avalanche of mixed opinions. The extent of the subjects existence in reality wasn’t full public knowledge yet.
♜
Sandorne Shades was the commander of Deep Stake. His luxurious office was located in the Perpetual Spire, where he communicated with and delegated to the rest of the team via a hi-tech video broadcast system with a heads up display containing the statistics of each member. There was a huge whiteboard on the wall of Shades office riddled with dry-erase battle-plan diagrams and a section for sequences of events to engage in the future as well as analysis of past operations. He spent his days and nights rifling through endless stacks of information, deciding which were true or false and which paths were worth pursuing or useless while chain smoking cigarettes and receiving constant further reconnaissance from spies. It was more than a full-time job, it was his complete reason for existence.
Shades had suffered a serious leg injury in the past. Now it was constructed of cybernetic gunmetal chrome stitched into the flesh at the knee. He couldn’t feel the prosthetic, but bore a nagging itch around where it was connected to his body with hinges. It served its purpose of replacing his mobility, though he walked with a mild limp. He knew he was forever hindered and remained confined to the zone between work and his penthouse apartment on Phantom Street downtown, traveling between the two by personal limousine, taking careful measures to remain unseen by the common folk, covering his identity with hoods and masks.
The makeup of his freak genetic cipher rendered him with little interest in regular life. Things that normal people would aspire to like hobbies, dating, marriage and procreating were of no concern to him, not that he would be able to find a suitable mate if it were. He was created specifically as a modern war weapon and had one singular objective; total domination of the chessboard world map in which Dynosoft was a key player.
Dynosoft’s top spy and trusted purveyor of much of the reported info was also one of the Deep Stake caste. This gifted individual excelled in the areas of stealth, speed, stamina, acrobatics, hyper-attention and the art of remaining invisible. However, he was humble enough to know he wasn’t completely infallible and wore a cybernetic glove on his left forearm with a cyanide capsule on the ring finger in case he was ever captured.
His code name: Ghost Flake.
The two worked closely together on a regular basis as two crucial separate elements of a unit.
It was 2054 and countries had become the thralls of overarching global corporate bodies, the giants of which were engaged in a race towards laying the foundation for the future of Earth to be built upon their own vendettas.
♜
Shades paced around his night-fallen office, gazing out the tall windows contemplatively over the glittering concrete landscape before him, stroking his smoke-clouded chin. A new era had crept up and ambushed the world. Wars had become increasingly insidious, subtly undermining and attrition based. A battlefront had opened in cyberspace. The fighting wasn’t so blatantly barbaric anymore, like most of human history, at least not for first world countries. Now there were other invisible weapons.
Shades didn’t know what he was, but he knew he wasn’t human. It was up for debate exactly what species he could be quantified as but it would only amount to semantics. He didn’t much care at this point. It was pointless. He wasn’t built to be a philosopher.
One of the benefits of his genetic cryptograph was it held little interest for him to entertain melodramatic dreams of his origins or parentage. That was just a waste of time. Exploring the metaphysical themes and ideas of existence, personal or otherwise, didn’t matter to him. He didn’t feel like a victim or that he suffered a traumatic childhood, even though he was a monstrous being created in a black ops government laboratory to be rapidly matured and molded into a modern cyber warlord. He was alive and he had a job to do, that was what was important.
Whether it was some grim supernatural mission of fate that his personality turned out to be that of an obsessive Machiavellian schemer, or he was scientifically designed that way on purpose was a mystery that would probably never be solved. It would be a miraculous success if the mad scientists at Daedalus Gulf were able to achieve exactly what they were going for on the first try, then released it all into the wild to function as a team of elite shrouded and dangerous members of high society.
There were strings attached of course, mostly in the form of his overseers. He wasn’t simply immediately promoted to the top of the corporate food chain on pure merit alone. That would be absurd. There were his masters as well, but they generally kept a hands off approach, like planting a tree and going away for a long while, waiting patiently for it to grow, then coming back to witness its full potential. The chance of an epic failure was always looming too, but the nature of experimental work was essentially trial and error. Shades had been doing an exemplary job so far over the years. His achievements had catapulted Dynosoft leagues ahead of the competition when it came to impenetrable data breach walls and unbreakable mazes thrown down as traps for cyber attackers. The traps weren’t actually created by him but commissioned to the resident data-maze specialist. They not only pit culprits into a frustrated insanity inducing torture when they tried and blundered to infiltrate the info chests, their critical assets were also punished for trying, cast into an immobilizing purgatory with their own databases eradicated by some counter-attack digital nuke.
The code name of Deep Stake’s data-maze architect: Diamond Hand.
He got his name from earning an increasingly revered reputation for creating cyberbait and the follow-up inescapable jails that would befall the poor victims. This cunning individual’s method was godlike in its ubiquity, a mythical warrior of sorts, they all were, but the battlefield was all in the digital realm for him.
Physically he had a mustard-gold skin tone with a longer snout than the other specimens, thinner eyes and a long, lashing tongue.. Mostly he spent his time locked away as a lonely genius in a dark room surrounded by the world’s most hi-tech computer screens. They say a good offense is the best defense. Diamond Hand was the crux of expertise in the field, authoring a virtual world at his fingertips and remaining one step ahead of the competition.
The state of the world economy had been transforming. New currencies had been invented and implemented. The virtual world had become more consequential than the real one. It was so advanced, in fact, it was now one level away from a plateau where people could possibly even upload their previously intangible souls into a database cloud and become immortal in an abstract way.
The body and physical manifestation of a person was only the representation of the soul in reality. Dynosoft was running a beta-phase program where a person’s personality could be saved as a computer program.
This illustrious project was tentatively referred to as “Soulhaunt”.
Diamond Hand was responsible for this potentially magnificent leap in technology. It was his labor of love masterpiece that he worked on aside from his day job.
♟
2 – THE SHIFTING REALM
The lines between reality and the Shifting Realm were blurred indefinitely, most likely permanently. There was no way to distinguish to what extent, but one thing was clear; there was no going back. The situation had boiled over and spilled into utter chaos. The new territory opened a vacuum of possibilities far beyond anything anyone had prepared for. It was another dimension, not spiritual nor tangible, yet more real than life itself, as fiction tended to be.
Inside the Shifting Realm, the infinite dungeons coalesced into random caverns containing both treasures and pitfalls, facilitated somehow connected with the Kingdom of Code. The real world and the Shifting Realm intertwined in a marriage of codependent lunacy in which basic human nature took an influence as avatars and projections. Lines were drawn, teams were assembled, battles ensued. The ancient principle of asserting dominance and crushing foes for supremacy was alive and well within this macrocosm.
It was predictable for a long time for any true believer paying attention. Generally people had been so caught up in the moment with the immediate need to solve and survive the whack-a-mole problems of everyday life, only the most astute observers saw the inevitable void coming. As a natural progression of societal evolution, no one could do anything to stop it. It was like a freight train steamrolling a wounded and paralyzed mouse on the tracks which could only witness the humongous doom speedily bearing down to soon obliterate it. The constant onslaught of distraction tactics and implanted opinions championed by big media conglomerates served as a protective smoke-screen for the quicksand people didn’t know they were sinking in; neither did the news stations.
There was more than one Earth-based world now. An expanse of frontier more infinite than anyone knew how to properly control was now at the forefront of existence. Space was inaccessible to ninety-nine point nine percent of people. Only the ultra rich and approved astronauts could go there. The whole spectrum of the galaxy wasn’t attainable either, very little of it was in fact. The moon was reachable, albeit a long, boring journey’s ways away, aside from the hyper-sleep. However, once traveled to there was nothing there except a bunch of stardust and craters. No vegetation, no water; nothing. It was only ever ventured to in the first place as some macho competitive race between opposing Earth nations for historical world supremacy points. Once the thrill of the initial conquest took place, no one cared anymore. Mars wasn’t that exciting either and too far away.
The Shifting Realm was like some kaleidoscopic ocea, containing hordes of unheard of species of creatures. Science liked to think it had existence cataloged and explained in its hubris, but the fact was, there were many things that were inexplicable and underestimated in the pure limitless extent of it all. The Realm was even slowly gaining its own sentience, a growing part of the universe born of collective unconscious alive in a similar sense that the Earth is, with a conscience of its own human beings could never fully understand nor communicate with with words, only with signs.
♟
There were rabbit holes in the Shifting Realm. Once inside, certain places served as portals, shifting the balance of the current reality. Then subtle differences would occur. From the obvious to the mundane, things no one would expect to change sometimes would mysteriously alter. Colors would turn hue. Fauna and foliage would grow wild, winding and fluorescent, forming in ways unseen. On the more extreme end, something could even happen like a vast forest would interchange with where a town used to be, or vice versa. Mountains would become valleys; Lakes became rivers.
Even though the Shifting Realm was somehow commodified and purveyed by the avarice of real world tycoons, no one really knew how to manipulate it or where it came from. It was some bizarre limbo between the spirit world and technology; inexplicably linked all along.
Some expulsion of the life-force of the universe became available to enter as its own Gaia. It had likely always been there, latent and inaccessible. An unknown trigger spark somewhere along the line of unfolding history blended the access tunnels between the dimensions. The real world was just as much of a charade as its counterpart, more based in tedious bureaucracy; the Shifting Realm allowed the realization of magic and supernatural occurrences. There was simply no other explanation. Those kinds of mystical things happened in real life all the time, too, but it was more subtle and most people tended to pay no attention to the signs of an otherworldly force, as if ignoring it would mean weird things didn’t happen or make it go away. For the masses, sticking to a dictated regiment of how to act and what to do was the safest course. Every path led to the same oblivion in the end, from the lowliest derelict to the most extravagant billionaire.
In the Shifting Realm, like the real world, the most important method of lifestyle existed within the mind. The brain was a bodily organ that sufficed as a sort of cockpit for the pilot mind; separate but contained, a link to a greater galaxy of endless possibilities and esoteric geometry where anything could happen if unlocked by the proper code. The strength of the individual will could reap miracles if the right steps and sequence in thought processes were taken, intermingling with the pulse of the universe. Even tragic misfortune could be reversed in some rare cases by sheer hyper-focus.
✴
3 – DETECTIVE CLEMENTINE
Light rain drizzled from the dismal midday sky. Downtown Neo-Vancouver was bustling with the usual civilians, cops, homeless people and heavy, slow moving traffic. The overcrowded streets were laden with the aura of struggle and transience, decorated with fenced off construction sites, churned up concrete and casual garbage piles.
Dane Clementine was sitting on a bench beside Limbo Street, smoking a post-lunch Canadian Classic cigarette. An exhaled smoke cloud wafted in the breeze into the face of a passing bald man in a motorcycle jacket who dodged out of the way while coughing. Clementine barely noticed. The nicotine was causing his front teeth to ache and tingle. He had been using hydrogen peroxide tooth whitening products lately in an effort to salvage his neglected oral health. Otherwise, he was a handsome man, clean shaven, six feet tall with short brown hair and a square, symmetrical jawline, wearing gray jeans and hi-top Phalanx sneakers, a trench coat and a black t-shirt. His bright, cerulean irises scoured the landscape, observing the details of the amoeba-like juxtaposed movement of the people with a keen detective’s wit.
A news helicopter passed overhead, echoing a rapid rhythm of chopping percussive swipes into the atmosphere between the valley walls created by the surrounding skyscrapers. Clementine spied this airborne scout contemplatively. He loathed corporate news stations. Then he returned to devour the final bite of his Burgers Queen pulled porkanator sitting in its wrapper on his lap. He got up while still chewing, crumpled up the wrapper and tossed it in the trash beside the bench. His coat flapped in the mist as he walked down the street.
Like most days, he was not in a stellar mood. The overall vibe of existence was bleak, with little to look forward to and even worse to look back on. Employment wise, he was barely holding on. He had an office in a dilapidated building on Frost Street (one of the seedier streets in town) as the sole proprietor of his own private detective business. The jobs he got involved in were usually extreme and bizarre, to a normal person at least. That was the nature of his work. It was usually obscure cases no one else would accept that were brought to him by some desperate client. He had a reputation for the dirty work and was good at it, a natural born snoop.
Despite the mounting pressure against him and the circulating demons in his mind, he managed to maintain a fit physique. Rigorous exercise was something he told himself he had to do to help ward off the oppressive avalanche of modern life in a world where hope was a faery tale and life was an everyday survival course in disappointment. It helped.
He tried to look at the positive side sometimes. He worked for himself, he wasn’t some fledgling no-drive punk, deep-frying baskets of fries at Burgers Queen or Jumbo Doggo. He was almost forty years old. Any job’s a good job, or so he heard someone say once, though he didn’t agree with that sentiment.
The kind of self-reliance needed in his line of work required a vigilance most people did not possess. Often he wanted to sleep, go on vacation and hit reset on life, except there was nowhere to go and no one to go with. That wasn’t the kind of person he was, plus he couldn’t afford it and didn’t have much to celebrate.
No matter how dark it got and how hard it seemed his only option was to fight. It was better to at least try and fail than to not try and fail. It sounded pessimistic. Realistically though, winning these days wasn’t really on the option list, not down the path the world had gone. Now everyone was simply living in an aftermath crater.
The empires were titan corporations all linked in the Kingdom of Code, a global alliance of technocratic overlords ruling in synchronicity, garnering total power, systematically disabling any romantic hopes or dreams an individual might have ever entertained.
The focus of the status quo now more than ever was crowd control and profiting from it. It had turned into an art form. It became mandatory to possess papers in order to access certain places. It had to be worked for and purchased as well. Often tests had to be passed and courses needed to be studied and paid for. So not only were people paying for access cards but voluntarily ingraining the information deemed necessary by the system to do it. Everyone was meant to be the same; controllable, predictable, complacent and harmless. They were coerced or just plain brainwashed to spend on the privilege of being allowed to participate within society. The alternative was to be shunned into obsolescence, not having access to services. Even the grocery store required a verification card. Of course this plot could never be fully implemented. There would always be the rebellious aspect of the human condition, god bless it, and those pesky rogues unwilling (or unable) to conform were banished to the subterranean labyrinth or lost in hiding elsewhere. A new black market for fake IDs and forged documents was created.
✴
Down the street there was the cacophony of heavy machinery operating with shouts of construction workers within a rocky pit. Chopped off boulders, bulldozers and gravel mounds permeated the deep ground in there. The whole place was blocked off with barbed wire chain link fence from the street level. Clementine passed adjacent to it through a wooden tunnel on his way to his office. Lunch break was almost over and it was near time to return to his duties.
His job really only allowed him to take on one case at a time. The stress of when his next paycheck was going to get deposited was always a nagging threat to him. The money that he did have was in jeopardy because he was spending a lot of it on cigarettes and whiskey. It was a good thing for him when something tragic and mysterious happened that needed investigating because that meant he would still be employed.
The stress of the ordeal of life suddenly weighed down on him further and he popped another cigarette out of the pack, placed it in his mouth and lit it. The packs were always sternly decorated with the horrors smoking caused the human body. It seemed like every disease known to man was caused by smoking, judging by the harsh propaganda pushed on the packs. It also seemed like a conflict of interest that the cigarette companies simultaneously were being made multi-billionaires but by some ridiculous legal loophole they were forced to shove it in peoples faces just how disgusting and suicidal the product they sold was. Smoking was supposed to be a reprieve. It was supposed to be a relaxing, enjoyable thing to do. Instead, the unseen powers-that-be made damn sure to shame the living shit out of anyone who tried to enjoy a simple aspect of life. It was all just a part of making people feel inadequate, doomed and powerless.
Somewhere along the line it became the strategy of the ruling class to bully people into utter resignation. That was probably one of the first schemes humans learned way back in the stone age, albeit unconsciously, inherited from Neanderthals. Children know how to do it instinctively. It had been that way for a long time, whether it be whipping the slaves until their will had dissolved into nothing or any other method of demoralizing a person until they gave up. Now they did it, blamed the victim and found a way to get paid from it.
The most important tool of war now was undermining. It wasn’t necessary to physically kill a person anymore. There was an easier, legal way. They could be rendered completely impotent in society and socially banished, canceled on every platform of any relevance and blacklisted by their peers. It was like a person had to subscribe to a false ideology of virtue and propagated belief in a sick system to get anywhere in life, but the goal spot to get to in the first place was a projected lie of a dream.
Aspiring to be sequestered in a personal castle of superficial wealth earned by sacrifice of time, effort, acquiescence and independent spirit; spending one’s life building a luxurious prison for a home and calling it success by other peoples standards. Those were the purported winners. With the curtain aside it was basically a slave-driven society. It always had been. Since ancient times, everything Before Christ and after, peasants were obsolete and condescended to; royalty was plotted against, overthrown, exiled or murdered for their position, only to repeat the cycle.
✴
Clementine reached his destination, an old brick four-storey building with a moderately busy coffee shop on the bottom floor called “Bean Caffeinated”. There was an entrance to this quaint establishment on the street. Beside that in the same building was another glass door with the address 1550 Limbo St. and a hallway behind it. Clementine entered through there and walked down past a meager office of tax professionals in cubicles located on the opposite side from the coffee shop.
He pressed the button for the elevator at the end and waited for it to arrive. A few moments later the mirror-chrome doors slid open. There was a haggard looking short indigenous lady inside in a ball cap, pink tank top and rainbow tights, who sauntered out without granting an acknowledgment, seemingly oblivious to his presence. Clementine had deduced that she lived in one of the apartments in the building. He saw her all the time. He was impressed actually because she looked like a homeless person, often spotted smoking and drinking on the street. He got in and rode the elevator to the third floor. The fourth floor was home to Limbo Street Dental. The second floor had apartments.
Outside the elevator on the third floor there was only one place to go; the door to his office. Once inside, there was a secretary’s desk in a waiting room with two chairs, a hunched over fern with two bending spawns protruding from its length, reaching up to the ceiling, a table with some magazines on it and another door beside that labeled “CLEMENTINE”.
His secretary, Joyce, was a portly lady in her thirties with heavy make-up including caked-on powdered cheeks, black and indigo eyeliner and bright red lipstick. Other than that effort, she wasn’t exactly dressed like the picture of professionalism with gray sweat pants and a purple t-shirt on, but that was normal. Joyce didn’t start working until the afternoon so it was the first time Clementine had seen her that day.
“Hi, Joyce. How’s it going?” Clementine said in his gruff but friendly tone.
“Mr. Clementine, hello. Oh, you know, good, yeah. How are you?” She said with her nasally voice and giggled softly. Clementine wasn’t sure why.
“Good, thanks,” Clementine said. That was the end of that conversation. He went into his office, hung up his coat and sat in his chair behind his desk in front of the window overlooking Frost Street, staring blankly at his door. It was raining slightly harder outside now. The gusts of wind were audible in their growing ferocity. He opened the desk drawer, which contained a bunch of papers and pens, a revolver and a half empty bottle of Firestorm whiskey. He took the revolver out and fastened it in a shoulder holster, then tossed it onto a chair in the corner of the room beside the coat rack. This was a good luck ritual for when he might need it next as business had been slow lately. It helped him stay in the proper mindset, like he was a relevant person in society.
His laptop was on his desk and the internet browser was open with the same multiple tabs that it usually had; his bank account (which he preferred to avoid looking at until he absolutely had to, but he kept the tab open so he could feel responsible), his e-mail, (the tab was open and he had new mail; a phone bill), the dictionary/thesaurus website and several cold case people’s social media. He had done research on them for past contracts that went nowhere and wasn’t able to let it go. His obsessive streak was his strength and weakness.
✴
The frustration was mounting, as usual. It seemed like no matter what he did, time was always bearing down in some gauntlet of undesirable ways he was forced to spend time. Haunted by memories and faced with constant challenges of patience and pointlessness, all for a pittance more to foot the bills, buy a bottle of Firestorm, a pack of cigarettes and pay his one staff member. There had to be a better way. It seemed so simple for other people. Maybe they were just faking it, though he doubted there were that many talented actors out there.
People seemed complacent with the bare minimum, working merely to sustain their time with little aspiration or drive; it had been that way over history, probably not even intentionally. Maybe that was the smarter method, choosing to be content versus an unbeatable machine. It had all gone way too far and he couldn’t imagine a solution or he’d start working towards it.
He didn’t do things for pleasure, only to mitigate suffering, rationalizing it as a survivalist mindset. It made sense that way. For instance, he didn’t drink whiskey as a celebratory gesture, it was a medicinal ritual. He didn’t watch movies or TV or subscribe to entertainment of that sort. That seemed like a gigantic waste of time in a world that was and always had been a savage race for supremacy. He sympathized with peoples resolve and resignation to the fact that they would have to show up and spend the fleeting time in their lives on a repeating task in a thankless position. Clementine couldn’t do that, but he had to because that was the model of society; there lied the inner conflict.
Everyone was placated with little rewards of distractions and carrot-on-a-stick mentality, except people rarely got to eat the carrot. He understood why the poor horde on the street would end up there. The system that wasn’t designed for individual people but for consumerist mobs. People generally were treated as cattle. The compensation for their time and effort merely cycled back into the economy so the whole thing self-propagated. It made sure the masses had something to occupy them, keeping them out of the way. From a governmental standpoint where the alternative was total anarchy it was clearly preferable.
Looking out the window, he almost respected the homeless teenagers sitting in the parking lot across the street from his office, smoking a bong on a picnic blanket thrown over gravel on the concrete. Those kids simply said no. A lot of times it wasn’t a conscious choice, it was just what happened. Except Clementine had the nagging sense that he had a higher purpose. He wasn’t sure what it was exactly and time was running out. He was beginning to think it might be his lot in life to rot as one of the miserable ones. That’s what had been happening so far. That was a regular fate for most intelligent people in his experience.
✴
4 – Kanamano Otosato
The buzzer on Clementine’s intercom sounded, interrupting his misanthropic chain of thought. He turned from the window and pressed the receiver button on the desk intercom.
“Yes?” Clementine said.
“Mr. Clementine, there’s a young lady here to see you,” Joyce said.
“Without an appointment? I wasn’t expecting any meetings today,” Clementine said. He was sure he didn’t miss something as he flipped through his day schedule.
“She doesn’t have an appointment. She just came in, but seeing as how your schedule is free, I thought I could send her in?” Joyce said.
Her rationale made sense. It was only the inconvenience of the surprise that was causing him to hesitate. Other than a prospective payday, walk-ins were never good news.
“Alright, just give me a minute to prepare,” Clementine said and clicked the receiver off. His preparation consisted of going over to the other end of the room where the chair with the gun was. He picked up the holster and hid it back in the desk drawer. Showing that off would be the kind of reckless bravado that was not only unnecessary, but likely scary and intimidating to a young lady who was probably already having a bad time, otherwise she wouldn’t be here. Or maybe she would think it was cool, but he wasn’t willing to take that chance.
He took the opportunity to unscrew the cap on the bottle of Firestorm and take a generous swig, then put the bottle back in the drawer and clicked the button again.
“Alright, I’m ready. Send her in,” Clementine said. He was standing behind his desk facing the door in anxious anticipation.
The woman entered and Clementine was struck dumb by her beauty. She had flowing, shiny black hair like the stallion of some dark fantasy wizard, looking tall for a girl, though still slightly shorter than him. Her attire was also themed in the darker category; leather jacket, black tank-top and gray jeans, belt adorned with an over-sized golden buckle emblazoned with a hawk. Her shoes were new snazzy looking Red Wraith sneakers which passed Clementine’s style approval at a glance. He should get some Red Wraith’s next time, he thought.
You could tell a lot about a person by their shoes. Certain shoes were really popular for certain types of people and it was easy to automatically fit the mold of the kind of person someone might want to be portrayed as simply by purchasing a pair and wearing them. Mostly he noticed the same classic Stonestompers on the hipsters in town. The idea, he supposed, was they were outdoorsy, rugged, tough and plain – the kind of shoes a bad-ass would wear who might aspire to ride a motorcycle through a forest before setting up a campfire to roast the latest slayed deer with a cold one and a ukulele.
Clementine’s imagination was getting away on him again and he turned his attention back to his new potential client.
“Hello, what can I do for you?” Clementine began.
“Hi. I didn’t know where else to go. Thanks for seeing me, I’m sure you’re very busy. I’ll just get straight to it – my partner has disappeared. I don’t want to go to the police. I feel like they probably wouldn’t do anything anyways and I don’t trust them. You’re a private detective, right? It seemed like a better idea to come to you. I thought you could do some more in-depth research,” she said.
“That is what I do,” Clementine said. “What’s your name?”
“Kanamano Otosato,” Kanamano said. By the looks of her she was only part Asian.
“You can call me Dane,” Clementine said, then added, “If you want to. So let’s get down to the meat of it. Can you give me a starting point here? Was your partner involved in any suspicious activity?” Then added, “from your perspective?” to mitigate the potential offense.
“Well, he works for Dynosoft, you know, that big tech company?” Kanamano said, as if that explained a lot. It wasn’t like Dynosoft was a criminal organization, not on the surface at least, but any enterprise of that size and power was going to have its skeletons in its closets. That’s just the way things were.
“Yeah, I know Dynosoft. Everyone does,” Clementine said.
“Well, he was starting to hint about some changes in the company. Weird stuff, like, creepy weird, you know. It wasn’t like he was acting outright worried or anything, it was just that the general vibe for him changed, like he was caught in between some tough places with no way out. He never really said that but I could tell he was suppressing the stress, trying to act tough. He’s a software engineer, it’s pretty harmless. I don’t think there’s anything that would put a target for danger on him, that’s why I can’t imagine what happened. He’s a sweetie pie,” Kanamano said, subtly squinting one eye sporadically as she spoke.
“What’s your partner’s name?” Clementine said. He was thirsting for a shot of Firestorm now. It was just in the drawer, but how could he do that without looking totally unprofessional in front of Kanamano? He couldn’t. He just had to persevere through this conversation.
“His name’s Ethan. Ethan Locke,” Kanamano said.
“Ethan Locke. OK,” Clementine said, memorizing it. Now he had a starting point. “How long has he been missing?”
“Since two nights ago. I was waiting for him to come home but he never did. He never responded to my calls. I was up all night worried sick but he never showed up. By the next afternoon I had accepted that this was really happening and that something was seriously wrong.”
“Are you sure there’s some misadventure at play here? Is it possible Ethan simply broke off contact?”
“Frankly, Dane, no. It’s not possible. Ethan would never do that. I know something must have happened to him,” Kanamano said, slightly offended, judging by her tone.
The distress was obvious now in her facial expression and her increasingly frantic voice.
Clementine was inclined to believe her. He could tell that she wasn’t lying, not intentionally. She didn’t seem like the type of wacko to show up here out of some crazed need for attention. Something wicked probably did happen to Ethan. Now it was going to be his job to discover what that was. What a world where his employment opportunities revolved around the mysterious misgivings of strangers lives. He sort of thrived on it though. This was just his lot in life.
People didn’t really pick what they became, it picked them. There was so much going on in the unconscious manifestations of reality it should be a section of science all to itself. Except that would never work because it couldn’t be quantified, even though it was one of the most prevailing aspects of human existence. Clementine wasn’t some mystic hippie nut-job or anything, but he had a basic knowledge and respect for the seemingly supernatural occurrences which he chocked up to the conflicting invisible spirits of individual people all mashed together in the cauldron of society. Thoughts were so prevalent and the extent of everyone’s mental processes all mingling simultaneously was such an omniscient phenomenon, the psychology of the ramifications was far beyond the league of full understanding.
“Alright, well, I can get started on an investigation for you. Joyce, that’s my secretary, will take you through the payment details and get your contact info,” Clementine said.
“Thank you, Dane, you seem like a genuine person. It’s nice to meet you,” Kanamano said.
“Likewise, Kanamano,” Clementine said and smiled. Kanamano offered her hand and they shook.
It seemed crude to charge people for providing them with the help they needed, but he didn’t make the rules and he had to get paid. Everyone else did it to. He wasn’t some egalitarian saint who was so wealthy and established in life he could afford to go around solving everyone’s problems for them for free. He had his own problems and they weren’t getting solved any time soon by the looks of it. Except, perhaps, his immediate financial one with this job.
When she went out the door, Clementine could vaguely hear the discussion between Kanamano and Joyce and he waited a few minutes, eavesdropping on the muffled voices while sitting in his chair staring at the wall. When he was sure Kanamano had gone he opened his desk drawer and drank another generous gulp of the Firestorm. He took the gun holster out and laid it on the desk.
Now he was destined to get into deeper territory. Snooping around in Dynosoft’s business was a big deal. He figured there was a lot more darkness there than any outsider knew about thus far and he was daunted to make that venture. He considered his own self-preservation. There wasn’t anything better to do for the foreseeable future and most of all he needed the money, plus this lady specifically searched him out for help and it was good to help someone if he could. That kind of justice was supposed to be what his job was all about in the first place. He drank one more shot of whiskey and started mentally preparing himself to find out what really happened to Ethan Locke.
♟
THE MOTHERBASE
It was Tuesday afternoon and Clementine wasn’t feeling very excited about life, but that was normal. He was half drunk on Firestorm but he now had a job to do, so he mustered the will to force himself to do it. He knew it was irresponsible to drink constantly throughout the day everyday, but the alternative of not doing it seemed far more bleak, so he could rationalize it as the right thing to do, at least until things started to improve.
He strapped on the shoulder holster with the revolver, concealed it by putting his trench coat back on, looked in the mirror begrudgingly and headed out the door, waving goodbye to Joyce on the way out. The preliminary thing regarding the case he had just accepted was to learn everything he could about Ethan Locke on the internet, which he had just done on his office laptop. That was the easy part.
The internet had become so prevalent and normalized a long time ago, now it seemed like people had pretty much forgotten the entire span of human history prior to it. How people lived before its inception (which in the grand scheme of things was quite recent, only less than a century ago), might as well be ancient history in terms of contemporary relevance. Things had devolved as much as grown in a social networking sense, maybe more. Gradually people had become more sequestered and ironically disconnected from one another, though they were all linked neurally through their hyperphones. Like any fanciful item of technology, the phones had continued on the trend of new models and minor incremental design improvements for decades now. They used to be called “smartphones” but a major advance in gigabyte space and camera quality, as well as the ability for the phone to fly like a drone led to the updated re-branding of the product. But that was back in forty-seven.
Clementine was born in 2013, so the zeitgeist of the techno-age had already been firmly established before he ever cried his first tear. Everyone under the age of sixty was born into a world in which this cyber-society was already an extension of the collective consciousness of Earth’s inhabitants, many of which were ranging from ignorant to downright idiotic. Everyone could have their personal podium for their output if they so wished, which most people did. It was unusual for someone to not have a social media presence or a purported avatar.
Choosing the path of the pariah in an ocean of superficiality wasn’t a bad idea, Clementine reckoned, and you wouldn’t be as easily traceable. There was a lot to learn about a person by simply studying the content they had disclosed into a plane of information that was tracked and hard to erase. Even when someone deleted something, it had usually been seen or saved into the Motherbase, forever logged for whichever digital sleuths came sniffing, armed with a magnifying glass and the save button.
You could easily learn more about a person than they likely knew about themselves.
As soon as something was typed into a search engine, the algorithm began presenting linked content and advertising involved with the admitted interest, like casting nets for plankton, most of the targeted meat would get through, but not all.
Ethan Locke’s internet presence presented him as a completely normal person by Clementine’s account. There were pictures of him traveling, at the beach with friends, surfing, at friends weddings, playing volleyball and hiking, all of that sort of thing. There were a bunch of pictures of him with Kanamano, who Clementine researched just as much as Locke.
There was Ethan’s professional information on job-sites like Employee Mart and Jobs-R-Us. His virtual resume and four point five to five star ratings as an employee were the main attraction there. He was a good looking younger guy in fit shape with short hair, smiling or acting like a silly goose in most pictures with a non-threatening demeanor.
Kanamano was right, he did look pretty harmless. He looked like one of those big dummy boyfriends that was completely compliant but not a total weakling so he could be protective yet still controllable.
Sometimes just by the way a person looked, Clementine could see the cunning behind the eyes, something buried in there that was eerily dangerous yet subtle and unspoken. When he couldn’t tell it was even worse because that meant the person might have a cleverness and ability to mask it beyond his power to ascertain.
Ethan Locke didn’t have any of that.
Now that Clementine knew who he was, or at least as much as he could possibly know at this point in time, judging by everything on the internet and having never met the guy, it was time to step into the field and find out what happened to him.
It made sense when criminals went missing, or people who were so ignorantly vulnerable they were basically lambs for the vampires in the wild, but this guy looked like an amicable, competent guy with a good reputation and good job. That’s exactly the kind of person that wouldn’t ever get into real trouble, probably living to an old age with lots of children and grandchildren, eventually fading right off this planet like a well-behaved, decent citizen.
So, what was the story here? Maybe Locke saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. It could be as simple as that. That’s what his intuition told him, but reminded himself his impulse imagination wasn’t always right.
That led to the next area where Clementine had some trepidation about. Sticking his nose into Dynosoft’s business was going to be like shrinking down and going spying through a bees nest in search of a lost fly. He knew any mega-corporation like that (or any strengthened empire for that matter), could simply delete a person like him, call it a day and move on with no questions asked. If there did happen to be questions, the whole thing would be easily covered up. The person investigating the disappearance would disappear too.
No one would miss him. No one would even try to find out what happened to him. He was the guy that did that when it happened to somebody else.
This was getting overwhelming, but he had no choice. This is what he was good at, this is what he had to do. He had to summon the courage to go forth with it, every alternative was worse. It would be even more risky and suicidal for him to quit and get a job at Burgers Queen, hypothetically, or something like that. His sanity simply couldn’t withstand it. No disrespect to the people who worked at Burgers Queen, but personally he would rather be in some blood-soaked, death-stench crime scene, wondering, as he had been many times, with the responsibility of finding out who the perpetrator was than spend eight whole precious hours of his life dropping french fries to feed the low-lives who would ever order such a thing in the first place.
The entire projected idealism of the work world was so bent. Somewhere along the line it became that eight hours was the max capacity at which a person was able to work. Beyond the checkpoint respected, but actually legal. Anything less than that was deemed lazy, slacker territory. Anything more was the stuff heroes were made of.
✵
6 – STREETS OF NEO-VANCOUVER
It seemed only fair that Clementine get to work on the new case straight away in the real world. He didn’t have anything else to do and he had enough good sense to understand taking the rest of the day off was a bad idea. He still had the will to live, despite contrary evidence. Once an opportunity came, he didn’t want to blow it with careless self-indulgent behavior. Not this time. This was important. It was important to Kanamano at least and she was a paying customer, Joyce had already taken her first payment. That meant Clementine was morally and legally obligated to complete the task at hand to the best of his ability. It was now his sworn duty to track down Ethan Locke, or at least find out what happened to him. Except he had no idea where to begin. He already looked at everything about the guy that he could find on the internet. Now he had to find the real person out here in the wild.
He started walking downtown down Limbo street in the direction of The Peripheral Spire. It was in view from his location, towering above the other tall buildings. He wasn’t going to go in, not yet, not until he formulated some kind of plan and sobered up, which wasn’t going to be today. It became a sort of meditative obelisk as he rolled over what he had just learned in his lubricated mindstate and tried to put the pieces together. He started forcing himself to focus on the case, defending against various tempting or threatening ideas that came knocking inside his brain.
The rain had let up a bit now but the sky was still quilted in a massive gray cloud. The people on the street were the usual rabble. There were sporadic professional looking people walking towards or away from work dressed in suits, a bunch of homeless people sequestered in an alcove, that was pretty common, tents scattered around on the side of the street, construction workers, kids, bicyclists and dogs.
In a different world it would be pretty sad and horrific to witness even one person exiled to the streets living on the sidewalk in a tent or behind cardboard walls, but in this one it was such a prevalent scourge mostly people took it for granted and just tried to ignore it. These archetypes he was applying to this array of folks often blended with each other.
Clementine also noticed more often than not people bore resemblance to their dogs in some kind of weird spirit animal circumstances of fate. He was beyond the point of caring if that were simply delusion. It was his life and he was free to think what he wanted to, even if it were insane. It was what he didn’t want to think that he hadn’t discovered how to get rid of yet.
Clementine was accustomed to running by the same characters on the street regularly, like some circus sideshow with all the recurring cast. It was a distant community feeling, even though most of those people he would never talk to. In these types of relationships people encountered each other all the time but didn’t really know who the other people were other than that. He liked it that way, having people at a distance. Sometimes a relationship with someone close would sag and start doing damage, becoming more trouble than it was worth. Most of the time it was worse to be close with a person instead of alone in his experience.
He arrived at the threshold of busy midday downtown where Limbo Street crossed with Capilano Street. The bleak weather did nothing to stifle the numbers in population there. Many people could be seen with expressions of chagrin at the inconvenience Mother Nature had inflicted upon them at that moment, being oppressed by the rain and wind. Fog was rolling in from the southern dip leading down to the ocean where the park was. It was a giant wall of gray blocking out all visuals behind it, moving eerily fast into the downtown core. That was fine, and if it wasn’t, there was nothing anyone could do about it anyways, so he figured he might as well make the most of it. An ambient cacophony of vehicles, voices and rainfall filled the zone.
Clementine was passing by the Grand Sanctum Plaza, the downtown mall that was five storeys high with aerial tunnels leading into other buildings across the streets in every direction. In front of the building on Capilano Street was always a hot spot for people. There was a bus stop there, people constantly coming and going from the front doors of the mall, and a good place for derelicts and teenagers to set up camp and hang out, right in the middle of the crowded action. One blind old man with opaque irises was usually there handing out messages of satanic doom printed on little fliers. Clementine had accepted one once and read it, so he knew what they said. The poor old fool was blind and bat-shit crazy. He wondered how he got the messages written if he couldn’t see? He must have some accomplice in the matter. Either that or he was feigning being blind. He could be wearing contact lenses to get that creepy effect on his eyes. The old man could be more cunning than he was letting on.
“Clementine!” someone called out. Christ, Clementine thought. He turned to see who it was creeping up behind him and spotted Archer Lucas amongst the crowd, an old acquaintance. They had known each other for years and Clementine always seemed to randomly bump into him someplace. Archer was a shorter, stout guy who was balding, but he wore a baseball cap with the Neo-Vancouver Vandals logo on it to cover it up. Being a Vandals fan was half his identity, if Clementine remembered correctly. The other half was being a wasteoid but Archer didn’t talk about that part as candidly.
“What’s up man?” Lucas said.
“Just starting a new case,” Clementine responded, distracted and mildly irritated at the interruption in his thought process. It was difficult enough as it was to stay on task mentally without having random visitors on the street, but he didn’t have a serious disliking for Archer so he went with it for now. He pulled out a cigarette and offered one to Lucas, whose reaction was to smile and raise his eyebrows in a pleasantly surprised gesture at the gracious display of welcoming.
“Oh yeah? Still doing the gumshoe thing, huh?” Lucas said as he popped the cigarette in his stubble-surrounded mouth and lit it with his own lighter.
“Yeah, I don’t know for how much longer, but yeah, what else would I do?” Clementine said.
“I have no idea, man. What’s anybody going to do? It’s rough out here. I just got fired,” Lucas said.
“Again?” Clementine said, “Why?”
“Terminated without cause,” Lucas shrugged, “I don’t know, I think they’re just downsizing, I don’t mind too much, the place was a nightmare.”
“Where was that again you were working?” Clementine asked, remembering he was supposed to be working for Kanamano Otosato right now on a missing persons case.
“The Salty Dog, it’s a pirate-themed bar in the inner harbour,” Lucas said, turning his head and exhaling a cloud of smoke.
“Oh yeah, I’ve been to the Salty Dog,” Clementine said and took a long drag of his cigarette, then he took a sneaky glance at his watch. It was 4:23pm.
“Yeah, I think I’m done with the service industry for now though, too many dummies. I was just looking at jobs on the bus, think I might try my hand at security. Saw Dynosoft was hiring and they don’t require much experience or even any paperwork or nothing, which is pretty rare these days,” Lucas said.
“That seems odd, why would a company as monolithic as Dynosoft have such low requirements? You’d think a company like that would have the highest standard,” Clementine asked, interested now because the topic was connected with what he was supposed to be investigating. Now he felt like he wasn’t procrastinating by stopping and having this conversation, but hell, this was real life and sometimes it was hard to get away amicably in certain situations. This particular one he could have just blown Lucas off and left but he didn’t.
“Beats me. Probably because not that many people want to be a security guard, I guess. Mostly you just stand around all day and spy on people, I think. Call the cops if something suspicious happens or tell homeless people to get off the property or something. I dunno, but they’re looking for people and I’m unemployed now, so it might be worth a shot,” Lucas took his hat off and scratched the top of his balding head with the brim while he spoke.
“Well that makes sense,” Clementine humored him, “Listen, I gotta jet but let me know how that turns out for you, I’m supposed to be investigating Dynosoft right now myself,” Clementine said. He didn’t know if he should have said that but it was too late. What was Archer going to do in a negative way with that information? Most likely nothing, and who knows what he might get informed with if Archer did manage to get a job there, which, knowing Archer, he probably wouldn’t. The guy was a dirt fiend, if Clementine remembered correctly. He spent a lot of time sitting around in a chair drinking beer snorting dirt, high out of his mind in another dimension. Clementine knew because he had personally participated in this with him on several occasions. Dirt was like a nastier progression of the old narcotic ketamine. Like a lot of the old drugs, it was virtually impossible to come across pure ketamine anymore, it was all this dirtier brown version of crystals nowadays. It had a similar effect, or so Clementine had heard.
“Oh, crazy, alright take it easy,” Lucas said, tossed his cigarette butt on the ground, turned and disappeared into the crowd in the other direction. Clementine noticed Archer’s class for asking no further questions on the subject, not that there were any answers to give, but it showed a level of trust and respect that he couldn’t help but appreciate. Or maybe Archer just didn’t care.
Clementine kept walking down Capilano Street. The fog had arrived now and visibility was seriously impaired. It was kind of cool in a creepy sort of way, all the passing figures appearing and disappearing into a light gray abyss. He had no idea where to go now with the case except to listen to his intuition. Why would a guy like Ethan Locke who looked totally healthy and happy, who had a beautiful girlfriend and a good job in a titanic organization suddenly disappear? The name Dynosoft kept ringing a bell today. What was that thing called? Occam’s Razor? Where the simplest explanation was probably the true one. What was the simplest explanation here? Ethan Locke was kidnapped or killed because he found out something he wasn’t supposed to find out. Maybe he was asking too many questions. Kanamano did say that he had mentioned some strange things happening at Dynosoft as of late. What kinds of things?
That was something he probably should have asked her. He had her number of course, Joyce had taken it down, but he wanted to give it some space for awhile. It would look better in a professional sense if he could figure out some stuff on his own.
Clementine was getting more curious. That was good, he needed to be interested in his work. He needed to enjoy his work and be passionate about it, or this was never going to get done and most importantly he wasn’t going to be enjoying his time. If he wasn’t enjoying his time then he wasn’t going to be enjoying his life. Too much time spent like that was going to add up to him wasting his life, then he was going to die. That didn’t seem like a very desirable prognosis for his future so he convinced himself to perform properly and stay focused. He had to deliver in this clutch situation.
The Peripheral Spire was actually close to The Salty Dog. Clementine tended to rely on divine intervention to guide his way, and regarding the conversation he just had with Archer Lucas, coupled with his inability to walk into Dynosoft right at the moment due to being moderately inebriated and suspicious looking, he decided to pay a visit to the Salty Dog and see what kind of information could be garnered there from the peripheral conversations. It didn’t matter if it were ones he was involved in or if he were sneakily eavesdropping. He could just sit there by himself and scribble things in his notebook, which he happened to carry on him almost all of the time in his coat pocket while having a beer and appearing completely nonchalant. That seemed like a perfectly reasonable next step in the investigation.
7 – THE SALTY DOG
Clementine walked along the railing on the sidewalk of Pier Street. The raised level of the road was overlooking the waterfront above a spacious parking lot with docks and boats jutting out into the harbour. The Salty Dog was at the bottom of a hotel beside the parking lot close to the water. The entrance was at the top of a wooden staircase with a large porch area surrounding the outside of the bar facing the ocean. The tables had red and black striped umbrellas over them with skull and crossbones graphics screen printed on. There was a dock which connected to the front of it at the foot of the stairs and it had many smaller personal boats lined up there. There were also very large visiting yachts clearly owned by the super-rich docked nearby. One of them had a black helicopter on a landing pad on the stern with the title “LIVIDCUB” painted on in yellow font.
Those kinds of people had so much money they could just cruise around the world on their own yachts and park anywhere for a while apparently, garnering tons of money from the passive income funds they had set up, or whatever it was they were involved in to live in such obnoxious luxury.
Clementine had to walk down another wooden staircase beside another restaurant to get to The Salty Dog. Behind all of this on the other side of the street was an old town relic area with adjacent alleys and parkades, unofficially called Hanging Square by the locals. It was infamous for being the location of public hangings, back when those morbid spectacles were championed and common public occurrences. Now it was just a basic brick and mortar pass-through soaked in urine, littered with garbage, surrounded by bars and street merchants, haunted by the ghosts of the past.
The Peripheral Spire was a few blocks up in the opposite direction, between the mall and the harbor. Clementine felt like merely being in the vicinity of the tower was good enough work for now as he let his thoughts grow and coalesce into possibilities of the next best path to follow.
He crossed the parking lot and climbed the steps to The Salty Dog and entered the golden framed double doors. Despite the poor weather it was bustling in there. There was a stand-up sign in the entranceway that said “Please wait to be seated”. He obliged. There was a line-up in front of him and he was in no real rush anyhow. He was waiting for something to come to him; for answers to present themselves.
After the old couple in front of him was seated, it was his turn. The cute young hostess greeted him with a simple “Hello,” that seemed uncharacteristically genuine for a person in her position. She was wearing a long red skirt and cotton white sweater over a black tank top. Sweet girl. She had a handheld machine that she used to scan Clementine’s Access Card.
He sat in a booth seat near the front window looking out towards the ocean, which was shrouded in mist, but he could still make out a pod of orcas surfacing strangely close to shore, spouting geysers of water out of their blowholes before submerging again.
He pulled his notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. There were three different sized pens clipped onto the cover. One was blue, two were black. He used the blue one and began jotting down thoughts while waiting for the waitress to come and take his order. He thought he should have sat at the bar if he wanted to pick up the most amount of information, but it seemed annoyingly cramped. He appreciated his personal space. It occurred to him then; was this really his plan? To go to the pirate bar and miraculously overhear something about the whereabouts of Ethan Locke just because it was semi-close to The Peripheral Spire? Could it be that he was just some washed-out insane person? All of the sudden the reality of his plan seemed so ridiculously absurd he became slightly depressed. He was supposed to be good at this. Then the waitress walked over. She was wearing gray dress pants and a white blouse which nicely framed her attractive breasts, sporting medium length blond hair worn down with red lipstick applied on her small pouty mouth. She was very pretty and had a friendly demeanor, which lifted his spirit.
“How’s it going?” She said.
“Good, thank you,” Clementine lied. He was actually in a living hell, but that would just be rude and stupid to admit to a stranger. When someone asked you how you are in this society any response other than “good” was wrong. “How are you?”
“Good. What are we drinking today?” She said.
Clementine had peeked at the drink menu and the Monkey Back Lager was on special today. It was a fine beer in his opinion, very basic but he was no connoisseur, so that suited him.
“One Monkey Back, please,” Clementine said.
“The Monkey Back Lager? I’ll get that going,” She said. Nice girl. Then she walked away to get that going.
Where the fuck was Ethan Locke?
Clementine had a look around, as if Ethan Locke might be coincidentally sitting in the corner. The place was lit up with electric tiki torches and decorated with pirate paraphernalia like gold coins, treasure chests and parrots. Not real parrots but figurines of parrots. There were paintings on the walls of desert islands and turbulent oceans with pirate ships riding the rolling seas, booze barrels and swashbuckling scimitars, peg-legs and eye-patches worn on the various scallywag characters living in a fantasy world. The staff wasn’t dressed like pirates, they were clad in their regular clothes, except for the bartender who actually had a wide black captain’s hat on and red coat adorned with a multitude of golden badges, like he got his fashion style passed down from Captain Hook himself. Clementine admired his guts to dress like that alone. There were also a bunch of flatscreen TVs showing various sports like curling, baseball (the Vandals were playing) and a virtual game of solitaire’ which all kind of conflicted with the pirate theme. He supposed those things kept the people entertained and paying so it was worth it for the establishment. It wasn’t really fully about the gimmick, it was about the dollars. The thought occurred to him it might be hard to find a full staff of decent, hardworking people who were willing to come to work dressed as pirates everyday. They were lucky they had one. Nonetheless, Clementine decided he liked this bar. Then he reminded himself he wasn’t here to have fun, he was here to do work. That’s when his pint of Monkey Back arrived with an accompanying coaster from the server and he said, “Thank you very much.”
The server responded predictably and walked away to spray some tables with sanitizer spray and wipe them down.
Clementine sipped his beer; it was refreshing and delicious, just as he expected. Then he took a bigger swig and braced himself to put his thinking cap on. He had the latent feeling that he was about to get into trouble on this case; it just had that vibe to it. That’s the kind of thing that went with the territory when you were a private detective. This one seemed worse, but he had already agreed. It was too late to back out now and he needed money.
There was a creepy looking man dressed all in black with a golf cap on, frizzy gray hair puffing out the sides of his head and an eye-patch in a booth across from him on the other side of the room, eating fish and chips with yam fries, which was an odd combination that Clementine didn’t see too often. He had never seen it before, in fact. He thought most people wouldn’t notice a thing like that; that was why he was a detective. He got a little bit of a boost of self-esteem and motivation and smiled wryly to himself. The man turned his attention and made eye contact with Clementine so he quickly looked back into his notebook. That’s when the waitress appeared again.
“Any food today, or what are we thinking?” She said. Clementine hadn’t looked at the menu. His stomach was rumbling a little bit though.
“I haven’t decided yet, thank you though,” he said.
“OK, just the beer for now,” she said.
“Yeah, just the beer for now,” Christ, it was like some cryptic mantra of alcoholism. At least he was being polite properly and remembering his manners. He congratulated himself on that one. Then he decided he’d better get some food or he was going to look like a creepy lone drunkard.
It was a bar; a pirate bar no less, there were lots of creepy lone drunkards in here, that’s what this place is for, he reminded himself. Now he was getting overwhelmed with panic for no real reason other than the constant underlying dread of life. He had to go to the washroom so he got up and walked across to the other side of the bar where it was and went in. It was full of men inside and he had to stand awkwardly in the corner and wait for the others to finish their business before he could use the urinal. When it was his turn he swiftly swapped in.
“Clementine, what’s up, man? I haven’t seen you in awhile,” someone said while Clementine was about to unload. He looked over and it was Gideon. He didn’t know his last name. He was surprised he even knew Archer Lucas’ last name at that point.
“Oh hey, how’s it going?” Clementine said. It was hard to start relieving himself with Gideon standing right there. He was from Saudi Arabia or something, a war ravaged region of the world as of late; a handsome, bearded little man, but modest; a real chipper and friendly guy. Clementine had no quarrel with him except that this was probably the most inappropriate time to say hello, as he literally had his junk in his hands and was currently unable to empty his bladder because Gideon was standing right next to him talking to him. There were still a bunch of other men in the room too, which made it even more uncomfortable.
“How’s work these days, man? Still doing the detective thing?” Gideon said.
“Yeah, just got a new case. Just starting. That’s why I came here, you know, to sort of collect my thoughts,” Clementine said, realizing how stupid that sounded.
“Oh, cool, cool. Good to have work, man. Any job’s a good job,” Gideon said. Now Clementine remembered that it was Gideon who had said that to him once; now he said it again. What was that this guy’s catch phrase or something? It threatened him because he was insecure about the case, he had no leads, he had been drinking all day and he was still drinking now. He started to be able to piss at that point, instigated by the thought of liquid.
“Yeah, I guess so, how are you?” Clementine said, out of basic obligated politeness.
“Oh, awesome bro, just got married, so awesome, just got back from my honeymoon. We went to Hawaii,” Gideon said.
“Hawaii must be nice this time of year. Which island did you go to?” Clementine inquired. The other people in the room were probably wondering what the fuck was wrong with these two guys.
“Maui. It was really cool. We went snorkeling, we went surfing and hiking in the jungle mountains. Not alone, we had guides. My wife got bitten by a jungle bird at one point so that kind of sucked, but all in all it was a good trip. She’s a pretty tough cookie so no major harm was done. One of our guides was a shaman and he concocted this drought for her to drink to cleanse the potential diseases, like rabies. They ended up killing the bird with a blowgun before the little bastard could fly away. Oh well, I’m just glad she’s OK. It was scary but nothing’s perfect, you know, that’s just unrealistic, but we had a good time other than that. So many cool places to go in the world,” Gideon said.
“Yeah,” Clementine agreed, disbelievingly. Personally, he didn’t want to go anywhere except out of this bathroom.
“You married Clementine?” Gideon inquired. Why was he so interested in me all of the sudden, Clementine thought. He finished his stream.
“No, no. I’m not married,” Clementine admitted.
“Girlfriend?” Gideon said.
“No,” Clementine said.
“Why aren’t you married, bro? You should get married.” Gideon advised.
“I’ll think about it,” Clementine said as he zipped up his pants and moved out of the stall and towards the sink.
“OK, well, it was good to see ya bro, you take care now,” Gideon said as Clementine was washing his hands and inspecting his own face in the mirror.
“Yeah, you too, thanks. Good talk,” Clementine said. Gideon was already walking out the door. Clementine followed soon after, tossing a wet, squashed up paper towel from the dispenser in the overflowing garbage on the way. He returned to his seat and perused the menu. His beer was about a quarter depleted so he took a generous gulp to catch up for his lost time that Gideon had wasted. Gideon was sitting in the corner across the bar with some girl, maybe his wife, but not necessarily. Judging by their body language it didn’t look like that. Clementine understood that things aren’t always what they seem, and not to assume things.
The waitress returned and Clementine ordered a cheeseburger with a Caesar salad. The classics couldn’t be beat. They were classics for a reason. He got back to his beer and his notebook.
Gideon was someone he barely knew, he had only met him briefly regarding a previous case, which is why he found it irksome he was acting so familiar.
A man had turned up in a vile situation, deceased in an industrial sector warehouse. Clementine had received an anonymous tip by phone call and arrived before the cops did. He found the victim crucified on a wall with rebar impaling his hands and feet, naked with a cryptic note taped to his chest, writing scrawled on it with sharpie stating “Omnipotent, omnipresent, invincible – K.” It must have been intended to taunt the cops. Some sick freak’s idea of amusement.
That particular visual was a memory Clementine would like to erase, but it wasn’t going anywhere. He never did find out who K. was.
The crime scene was so nightmarish it was surreal, but unfortunately that’s the kind of grotesque occurrence that would really happen sometimes. Gideon was one of the connected people to the victim who Clementine ended up talking to, naturally having some questions about the relationship between the two. Gideon had worked with the guy at some restaurant, he couldn’t remember which one at the moment, nothing much more than that, allegedly. Sometimes a person got to know someone better by being forced to be around them a lot and not necessarily being friends. Those two guys were just pitted in the same situation together over and over again until Gideon became one of the most viable people to ask questions to regarding what might have happened. It was kind of depressing that the people closest to the guy weren’t even his friends, they just had to spend time with him not of their own choosing and make the most of it. He must have not had very many redeeming qualities, at least that was the idea Clementine got from the investigation. He couldn’t even remember his name, but he remembered the case. It was all a huge waste of time and a waste of life.
Clementine didn’t get the feeling Gideon had anything to do with the debacle. He was 99% sure he didn’t, in fact, his intuition told him that. But in any 99% situation, that missing 1% was huge. He didn’t think Gideon even liked the guy, judging by what they talked about, but that was a long time ago, several years back. However, clearly Gideon had remembered Clementine and even taken a shine to him.
Something about Clementine tended to rub people either the right way or the wrong way. Rarely were people ambivalent towards him. They loved him or they hated him, and either way there was nothing that could be done to sway the person’s opinion in the opposite direction.
Gideon had been a line cook or a chef or something, Clementine wasn’t sure of the proper nomenclature these days. More importantly he didn’t much care. He didn’t have space in his brain for those kinds of mundane details in title that other people cared so much about, unless it actually mattered, which in this case it did not. Gideon might even know Archer Lucas as well, come to think of it, just from crossing paths in their professional lives. Well, not Archer’s profession anymore, now that he was newly unemployed. Maybe Gideon was a regular here. If so it would be totally reasonable to think Archer and Gideon would have crossed paths. They could be aware of each other in passing, or they could actually know each other personally.
It didn’t apply to the case Clementine was supposed to be working on now. He was making hypothetical connections outside of the realm of relevancy.
Still, all these people in the service industry seemed to frequent the same establishments and be semi-aware of each other, even though it was by no means a famous line of work. Not for Gideon and Archer Lucas at least. Those guys would be hidden in the back sweating their asses off over fryer grease, charcoal and flames, Clementine imagined. From what he had heard, it wasn’t some glamorous thing like on old TV shows where it was cool and entertaining when the celebrity Chef was screaming in peoples faces with witty abusive catchphrases about how much the staff suck at their jobs.
None of this stuff was fact. He was letting his mind wander. His train of thought was mildly amusing at the moment. The beer was doing it’s thing and he had just been reminded of both Archer Lucas’ and Gideon’s existence, which triggered the digression.
Clementine didn’t really have to deal with anyone else who did the same job as him.
Except for Ace Hill, who was the other private detective in town. Him and Ace didn’t much care for each other, being direct rivals professionally, and generally kept their distance, sticking to their own territories. Ace was more of an uptown guy, that’s where his office was based anyways. Clementine had the downtown area. The business they did was pretty ugly, so there was a mutual respect and sympathy for one another, even if they weren’t bosom buddies.
Gideon was a fair tempered individual, even the grisly murder of his co-worker didn’t seem to really bother him that much past a mild sadness at the dire reality of the world. Clementine didn’t share the same kind of apathy about such things and he didn’t envy that attitude either. Long ago he came to terms with what his nature and disposition were like. There was no use trying to change it now that he was pushing forty.
He drank a gulp of beer. He was three quarters of the way through his Monkey Back now, scanning the restaurant, thinking in a meditative way, tapping his pen on the table in some rhythmic mini-drumming. It helped keep the wheels of his mind turning. The frizzy haired, eye-patch gentleman was reading a book now, with an empty plate off to the side. He looked over and made eye contact with Clementine for a second time. The watched had become the watcher.
Clementine tried to focus. What did he know about Dynosoft? Not much, other than it was one of the biggest computer companies in the world with its headquarters just up the street. Even if he were to infiltrate the place, there were thousands of employees in the Peripheral Spire alone, not including all the affiliate people elsewhere who must be involved in such a mammoth endeavor. It was going to be like some gigantic global spider web, each strand with countless people bound to it.
How was he supposed to find one missing employee? His track record for missing persons cases wasn’t very exemplary. People who went missing usually stayed missing. It was the cases that involved spying on people who were totally unaware of having a hired spy on them that were the easy ones. Those were the jobs Clementine liked. Peeping through a window or stalking someone down the street, reporting on their behaviors. Catching people in the act of adultery or other shady dealings was his preferred method of work. It was easy and usually not that dangerous.
It was when people were impaled on warehouse walls in a supernatural way with no clues and the whole disaster was virtually unsolvable that was when he started to get really frustrated and doubt his ability.
Maybe Gideon had been eager to talk to him because he was suffering from some well concealed PTSD and that was his way of finding some connection and comfort with someone who would understand. Or maybe Clementine was projecting and it was really himself that had PTSD. A disturbing thought. One that he pushed away immediately.
Gideon wasn’t there at the crime scene like Clementine was. Gideon hadn’t seen the gory details. Gideon just heard about it afterwards from Clementine and he didn’t even describe what happened in detail. Clementine had seen all kinds of that sort of thing in his time, but that one was one of the worst in his experience. It ate him up inside. He could never pin down the motive, or even how the rebar spikes got through the person’s body into the wall, unless they were already there. The whole mess was pretty savage. It would have taken some kind of superhuman strength or some machinery that there was no evidence of left on the premises to drive those metal bars into a man’s hands and feet through the concrete wall. No footprints, no fingerprints, nothing; except that morbid note.
His appetite was waning at the memory just in time for his cheeseburger to arrive. It was the hostess who brought it to him, saying simply “Cheeseburger,” as she dropped off his food.
People seemed so lost in a hopeless mood these days, pretending for politeness sake. Well, come to think of it, it had been that way for a while. Somewhere along the line people had accepted the dystopian nightmare of modern life and lost touch in a godless world usurped by technocratic tycoons way back. Now people had no chance. The disparity between the super rich and everyone else was so far separated there was no getting it back again. The pitchfork revolutions of the past were long gone. Present people’s spirits had been too massacred with laziness and complacency for such a thing. Maybe in some faery tale hero story of the future some miracle solution would happen, but as of now, everyone was just struggling to survive, pretending everything was OK.
Clementine thought he might be old fashioned in the way where he still respected the truth, justice and freedom. This didn’t feel like freedom. It could be worse, he wasn’t in jail, but even in jail there would be more of a sense of order in his life, and a clear antagonist. Here he was just growing older and treading water in an ocean of chaos; a steadily worsening situation on the whole where the super rich only prospered further and everyone else had resigned to the fact that they were trapped in slavery disguised as business and entrepreneurship. Every dollar more didn’t really go anywhere. It was what was inside the individual that really counted. That’s one area where the whole thing got twisted.
People often dedicated themselves to what they thought other people wanted from them, not what they wanted from themselves. They may not even realize what they want from themselves, and with far too little free time to devote to discovering that, the repression began to build until it was destined to explode in one way or another. Some people liked it. It was like being in a war and certain soldiers were actually right at home there and having a great time, because they were killers at heart.
There was no way around it; nowhere to run. With a lot of money and passes, fleeing the country was an option, but this was the best one. The only other alternative would be to forfeit nearly everything and move into the forest to live off the land, though almost everybody lacked the necessary survival skills to do that. Even the forest fringe was being rapidly overtaken by the marching construction of commerce.
Snap out of it, he thought. He was supposed to be tracking down Ethan Locke, not lamenting the state of the world. He began eating, dismissing his prior thought process. He reminded himself he wasn’t in any immediate danger right at that moment and tried to think positive. He had a beer and dinner, there were some nice looking girls around and the room was well lit. For the first time he noticed the music playing. This was the kind of establishment where they played oldies. It was some hit he recognized from a couple decades back; “Victims of the Night”, judging by the chorus lyrics. He didn’t know the singers name, but she had a catchy and powerful voice. The chorus was so emphatically sung it was almost comical, though that surely was not the intention.
As he chewed his burger he noticed the bartender pouring a row of shots for some businessmen sitting at the bar. The professional appearance of the men conflicted with the innate irresponsibility of slamming shots at dinnertime.
Who was he to judge? He had been drinking all day; let’s face it, everyday, for a good long time now. He remembered a time in his younger years when someone had casually referred to someone else as an alcoholic, much to his surprise and horror. That was something he hadn’t encountered much at that point in his life. It was some kind of dark legend that you would hear about but could never happen to you. Something so dangerous and addictive was also so normalized, socially accepted and even expected.
It did help. It helped his mood, a lot. It took the fear away; but the fear was there for a reason. It was part of an ingrained survival mechanism. It warned about things. There became so many things to be warned about, life wasn’t enjoyable anymore. Maybe it never had been. The little boy who had been playing with a magnifying glass and a toy pistol, watching detective movies and reading crime comics was long gone now. He had realized his original goal. He had become a real detective, but it wasn’t the fantasy he had construed for himself; a child’s dream.
The reality now was washing down a mouthful of beef with beer alone in a pirate bar, demoralized and, starting today, desperately trying to find a needle in a haystack named Ethan Locke. He reminded himself, in a moment of self-sympathizing, it wasn’t his fault. How was he supposed to know things would turn out like this? He tried to be a good person. He was simply a victim of the circumstances. He had to cope with the things that had happened to him and the things he had seen somehow. At least he wasn’t a dirt fiend.
He didn’t think it was a good thing to do. Not anymore.
♜