[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 18

^{source
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16
Part 17}

The pneumatic and hydraulic principles involved were mind boggling. They must’ve hired one hell of a plumber. I asked if Dave’s plan involved explosives. He then asked why I needed to know that.

“If there’s even a slim chance of shattering that aquarium, it’s not worth it. Not for one safe, I don’t care what’s in it. If you watch enough news to be aware of the ongoing hunt for climate fugitives then you also know how tense negotiations are with the conshelf territories right now.”

He assured me that no explosives would be utilized. I began to ask him to swear it until remembering how little the promise of a criddler is worth. “Besides” he added, “anything powerful enough to shatter spinel would bring the whole building down too. I’m not a butcher.”

That much seemed true. Crazy Dave is a shifty turd of a human being, on account of how quickly meth sucks every last trace of honor out of a man, but he didn’t strike me as a murderer. Then again, perhaps that’s only because it hasn’t yet been necessary in order to keep the meth coming.

He supplied the date, time and location. Tonight? In the canal? Just under the skyway apartment. What are you up to, Dave? No matter. With his floating chop shop confiscated as evidence, and most of his lackeys behind bars, he’s on shaky footing now. I should be able to squeeze actual payment out of him this time. If he thinks otherwise, he’s in for a rude awakening.

My stomach growled. Yet again, as if I’d eaten nothing. What’s in those dumplings? Styrofoam? I considered ordering a pizza, but pizza is fucking weird in China. They put heinous stuff on it. Stuff that probably appeals to the palette of somebody raised on traditional Chinese cuisine, but then much of traditional Chinese cuisine consists of the sort of edible nightmares you’d only put in your mouth on a schoolyard dare.

I did order myself a crabjuice, dimly recalling that I used to drink a lot of it for some reason when I lived with Aubrey. Upon cracking it open and getting a whiff of the contents, those memories came rushing back. “Oh, right” I muttered to myself before pinching my nose and downing most of the bottle at once.

I arrived in the ebike storage corridor to find it cleaned out. No ebikes, not even any dangling charging cables. At first I assumed it was simply because, unlike me, the majority of tenants had a job to go to during the day. Then I poked my head outside to see a small crowd of them giving statements to a police robot.

Asking one of them on the periphery of the group what exactly happened, he confirmed my worst fear: There’d been a mass ebike theft during the night. I asked him to repeat all of it. Not because I didn’t hear him properly, but because I desperately hoped I’d misunderstood.

No such luck. I haven’t even been here a month and my ride’s already been jacked. Could it be karma for the mass ebike theft I facilitated the other day? If so, it sure fucking kicked in quickly. I couldn’t even be mad because of it. Not without feeling intensely hypocritical.

Looks like I’m back to hoofing it. One step forward, two steps back. But crying doesn’t get anybody anywhere, so I filed it away as a problem to be solved when money and time constraints permit, and headed for the canal.

A few blocks from my apartment building, I began to notice clusters of makeshift shelters hanging off the sides of some buildings. Often two or more stories up off the ground, they resembled wasp’s nests but made from tarps, cardboard, coroplast, and scraps of mylar insulation.

I wondered what they could be for until I saw a criddler poke his head out from inside one of them. He coughed for a bit, then cleared his throat loudly enough I could hear it from ground level and spit a considerable wad of saliva and mucus that landed just a few feet from me.

I didn’t care enough to shout at him, lest I awaken any of the others I now knew to be tucked away in these bizarre suspended trash pods. They hung from a hook, which led me to suspect they were built around the portaledges that seasoned climbers often sleep on during a multi-day ascent of a cliff face.

Like the barges out in the bay, they’re presumably just enough of a hassle for police to reach that they don’t bother to. I imagined a documentary style voiceover explaining how the wild Chinese criddler nests high up in the concrete jungle to evade its primary pedators.

Wherever two buildings were near enough to one another, I also saw enclosed hammocks the likes of which I recall are intended for backpackers strung between the wall of one building and the other adjacent to it. Again, just high enough so that it wasn’t worth the time, effort or police resources to cut them down.

They did bother to set up awnings in the alleys to protect shop owners from getting pissed on while taking out the trash, though. It powerfully motivated me to invest in an umbrella as soon as my finances allowed.

When I arrived at one side of the immense concrete canal, I was surprised to note that my prosthetic leg’s battery level wasn’t depleted nearly as much as I worried it might be. I was also somewhat tired, but nowhere near as exhausted as I would feel if I’d walked all this way on two meat legs.

I took an odd sort of satisfaction in the discovery. That’s fucking teamwork, is what that is. After the demoralizing blow of losing my bike earlier in the day, I welcomed any victory, however small it may be.

There was a weird little bubble car type thing parked across the canal. I’ve seen a bunch of those. China’s got as loose a definition of “car” as it does “bicycle”. Really more of an enclosed electric trike with a weatherproof clear plastic canopy that retracts the same way an armadillo shell opens, so you can get in or out. There’s a rear seat for two passengers, but you’d have to be pretty tiny to fit.

The dizzying variety of half-way bikes, half-way scooters and half-way cars supplies many intermediary steps one can ascend between bicycle ownership and car ownership, like specialized subspecies filling out their respective niches in the ecosystem. Though the fact of the matter is that car ownership is still out of reach for most.

Autocabs also render full sized, full price personal automobiles economically uncompetitive and arguably pointless unless you need to impress somebody. I rubbed my stubbly chin, mulling over my upgrade options should tonight’s heist be as lucrative as expected. “That assumes Crazy Dave doesn’t fuck me again”, I thought.

Shading my eyes with one hand, I peered up at the inverted apartment. Magnifying revealed luxuries undreamt of for someone of my standing. A polar bear rug, probably authentic. A jacuzzi sized to accommodate easily a dozen people.

Even without knowing what I knew about his background, I hated the guy enough by this point that I could scarcely wait to relieve him of that safe. What could be in it? That’s part of why I’ve long had a predilection for safe heists, I think. The mystery prize waiting inside.

When I spotted a dolphin approaching me on its motorized carrier, I began hastily rehearsing excuses in my head for why I was loitering here. Not that I was breaking any particular law, just force of habit.

It stopped in its tracks for a moment. “Disable Panopticon now” commanded a muffled voice from inside the wheeled carrier. Seriously? No fuckin’ way. The voice returned, once again instructing me to begin my attack on Panopticon for this block...so I did.

Within thirty seconds, all cameras and sensor clusters in our vicinity went cold. Then the door to the lower portion of the carrier, where I assumed all of the waste handling and life support machinery should go, folded open to reveal Crazy Dave’s filthy grinning mug. Now, I’ve seen some shit in my day. I’ve seen some seriously fucked up shit. But this? I’ll have to revise my definition of fucked-uppedness.

I prodded the dolphin atop the carrier, worrying they’d imprisoned it. Nope, animatronic. I don’t know why it surprised me. I mean, I might ask where they got their hands on an animatronic dolphin, but then where did they get their hands on a hollowed out trash barge? Or the submarine? Or the industrial O2 cylinders?

Useless to ask, the first step down a tangled path I felt sure I wouldn’t like any of the multitudinous ends to. Dave climbed out and brushed himself off. The water circulation system still worked so as to give every appearance of legitimacy, though apparently it leaked as Dave’s tank top was soaked through.

He casually invited me to climb in. I’d have done a spit take had I been drinking anything. “I’m not joking. Not even a little bit. This is how you get inside, the carrier has all the clearance flags you’ll need. Get in before somebody sees us.”

The sun was low on the horizon by this point but it wasn’t properly dark yet. With less than a minute left before Panopticon coverage of this block was restored, I didn’t have many options. So, begrudgingly, I climbed into the cramped little compartment.

“I’ll be in contact with you over subvoc. You’ve got subvoc, right?” I searched my device list and confirmed it. Switching it on, I paired to the address he supplied and inaudibly sang part of the Speedfoam jingle to test the connection.

“Loud and clear” I got back, in the form of equally inaudible vibrations sent through my skull to my inner ear. “We really could use some of that stuff right now.” I badgered him to explain what for. “Don’t you watch the commercials?” he balked. “It does everything! Plus, you wouldn’t believe what happens when you snort it.”

A few minutes later, having gotten the hang of the controls, I was scooting through the front door of the embassy. There was a joystick that looked to have been salvaged from an old power wheelchair for movement. The dolphin’s bodily movements were on a simple canned loop. The facial expressions, insofar as dolphins have them, were mapped to my own.

I felt like an ass. Unavoidable really, the whole situation reeked of half-baked baboozery if I allowed myself to stop and think about it for longer than a second or two. Better to just plow ahead then and do my best to trust that tweaker asshole is going somewhere with all of this.

If there’s a cultural appropriation championships, I’ve got to be in the running. Wearing an honest to God dolphin costume, driving my own dumb ass through the security scanner in a wheeled metal box with what amounts to a complex silicone puppet on top of it.

When it dawned on me what sort of business Dave might have gotten a silicone dolphin replica ready made from, the slow dripping on my shoulder became a much bigger concern. That’s water, right? That’s just water running down my back right now. It’d better be.

“Continue past reception. Don’t speak to anyone. I included a recording to the effect that the translator is broken which you can play back if cornered. There should be a service elevator in the Northwest corner of the building.”

I wasn’t stopped. Surprising until I gave extended thought to how ridiculous a plan it was, and what a great strength that was turning out to be. Who, in security, would anticipate something like this? Not that the Trojan Horse approach isn’t perfectly foreseeable, you’d just have to be implausibly perverse to apply it this way.

So it was that I cruised straight past disinterested robot guards and was able to enter the service elevator without issue. The scanners evidently were designed only to key into the constituent chemicals of commonly used explosives.

Had they bothered with volumetric X-ray or acoustic imaging, I’d never have made it through so easily. Dolphins can acoustically image the insides of objects in water without technological assistance as well, but not in air.

The elevator was a tight fit, having been designed with human or humanoid robot maintenance workers in mind. Dolphins were meant to use the vertical tank to reach the various floors instead. The fact that I passed it up for an elevator I didn’t properly fit into will make easy work of identifying the intruder later on, once the theft is reported.

No amount of footage of a fake dolphin will help them trace it back to me however, which brought me some small measure of comfort as I waited for the elevator to reach the floor specified in Dave’s schematic.

The skyway was not entirely taken up by the apartment. Rather, it consisted of three floors, only the lowest of which was residential. I approached through the middle floor, drawing a few sidelong glances as I made my way past a sparsely populated dance studio.

“Oh look, another one” commented one of the skeletally thin instructors as she bent her body into painful looking shapes. “He’s really brazen lately, having so many of them come directly to his apartment. It’s like he doesn’t care who knows about his...predilection.”

I mulled that over. Then shuddered, and pressed on. It did make sense of why there was a ramp leading down to the front door. If I hadn’t overheard that tidbit, I’d probably have just assumed it was for wheelchair access or something. I’d really, really rather it be.

It only got worse once I was inside, however. After passing through something like a cramped, rotating foyer, I emerged into the upside down residence. That’s one of my questions answered, at least. What a hassle! But then, status symbols typically are.

---

^{Stay Tuned for Part 19!}