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EARTH-F67X : NORTH CAPITOL CITY : NEW NEW YORK SECTOR —
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Manhattan Borough :: Old Chinatown :: Kowloon Quarter backstreets ———
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territory of Hanzu Fesyen, the fixer —————
as a mag-train barreled by overhead on its circuit towards one of the corporate arcologies suspended over the gleaming New New York Metropolis. The megastructures loomed above the skeleton of the old city, like biblical angels passing judgment on those left below after Rapture. Sheets of condensation dripped from the Canopy's sluice gates and exhaust ports onto Manhattan at intervals in the eternal night, toxic rainfall relentlessly eroding the old world with the discharge of the new.
Crossing out of the Alphabet City enclave into Chinatown felt like stepping through a portal into another world, ghostly halogen hanzi script blossoming across the full visual field like digital lotus flowers twenty layers deep, unregulated adspam slipping over any connection to the Net no matter how remote. A neighborhood at the foot of the Canopy, Old Chinatown was spared the catastrophic
gentrification of New Venice by a kilometer of dense city sprawl, becoming a shadowland, dark unadulterated if not for the neon lures of red light akasen brothels and psychonaut dens, each a species of deep sea predator waiting for prey to wander by in the abyss.
The backstreets this far out were inert, halogen signs dead or flickering, the moldering buildings of Kowloon Quarter shuttered and quiet.
"Gun?""Yeah.""Good. Run me through it again." Their pilgrimage peeled back the layers of this far-flung fiefdom of New New York, a maze of narrow paths lit at first by lurid pornographic holograms, fading into holopaint murals on sidestreets claimed by urban subcultures long since mutated into forms unrecognizable.
"Hanzu Fesyen. Niche fashion designer, had clout with some microculture influencers. Liked the Oshima-gumi wavelength for his amphetamine fix. Was kind of a pre-Contact otaku, sold a lot of junk from back then. I think he had a foot fetish or something." The upper left quadrant of the young yakuza's face was a patch of chrome, eye an inset panel of mirrorsteel, shaky hands fumbling as he tried to light a cigarette. Kid was a savant at a console, not so much in the field.
Ixchel watched him for a moment. A corrosive patch of mold clinging to the side of a building illuminated them in its pulsing green glow. The Hispanic woman was taller than her companion and haloed in a nimbus of light, OLED tattoos bioluminescent against bronze skin in patterns that could be microcircuitry or a Mayan creation myth, others inherited from the rest of the pueblos originarios: a grid map of Tenochtitlan, Toltec jade, glyphs of the Zapotec.
"Focus, Zenji. Pump the stims if you can't hold down a thought without twenty screens in front of you."Zenji took a long drag, strata of rising smoke captured by the glowing ember. Ran a nervous hand through hair coiffured into the latest femto-fad fashion, wild in front, shaved in back.
"Couple other interests. Ripper doc, kinda guy that knew what to do with an io if you know what I mean. Modded some of our boys too. He was pretty good.""Oh? You a cutter now?""I dabble."They emerged from an alleyway half a block from their destination. Ixchel pulled her hood down, glimmering jewelry and jade beads woven into long black braids that fell halfway down her back. The color of her huipil dress shifted according to the way incident streetlight struck the nanoweave. A gawkish Japanese man in a worn Chiba Circuit bomber jacket stumbled after her.
Locals knew better than to get too close to the converted Salvation Army warehouse near the border with Kips Bay. The sort of outsiders that found their way into this corner of Kowloon Quarter were invariably in need of Fesyen's peculiar services. Some time ago the enforcers of the Oshima-gumi yakuza bōryokudan had begun to number among his clients, enjoyers of the fixer's selection of vintage shōchū and plum liqueur.
The warehouse's exterior façade rotted beneath many years of accreted digital graffiti. A short man stood outside it. Sikoja neotraditionalist, Ixchel recognized immediately, complete with conical rice hat and geta sandals in gunmetal gray, doubtlessly extensive cybernetics concealed beneath his heavy black robe. Rather than eyes a visor curved over his face, glowing green dots ricocheting inside the display from surface to surface.
Zenji took the lead, approaching to a respectful distance then bowing ceremoniously. The ronin didn't move a micron, rattled off a few staccato sentences in the lilting syncretic pidgin of the North Pacific Hub. Zenji replied, slower and more carefully; Ixchel could hear the stress he put on the honorifics except when he mentioned her, careful not to suggest she and the Sikoja cyborg could occupy similar station. The lights in the visor aligned themselves along an axis and converged into a single cyclopean point clearly fixed on Ixchel as their exchange continued.
Several factions within the Oshima-gumi offered considerable resistance to the executive decision to employ the services of the occultist from Yucatán.
"Alright, I told him you're cool. Kihachi-san will be our fangshi," Zenji eventually informed her after their negotiation concluded. One of the first Sikoja neologisms Ixchel learned, the fangshi were specialized netrunners, usually experts in some pathologically hyperfocused domain. The technomancer didn't acknowledge her again at any point then or thereafter, turning and beginning to gesticulate as if conducting an invisible orchestra, lattices of ghostly codelight propagating around them, expanding and expanding ever outward.
Zenji was grimacing at her.
"We think Hanzu's connected in Nine Suns Tower. Friends in the Yinglong, maybe. There are rumors he might have owed the Red Guild. So they're gonna come looking and the most convenient outcome here is that we get in, get out, and the police arrive before our tong counterparts come in for their own cleanup job."As if on cue, Kihachi opened his robe and a series of decompression algorithms executed, mathematical abstractions unfolding like origami geometry. Ixchel blinked as a litany of mythological creatures materialized before the ziangshi, projected like film onto the holoscreen of reality and the nonstop marathon of absurdist dystopian sci-fi their present had become, Chinese guardian lions and terracotta apparitions marching outward and effervescing into the cityscape.
"Kihachi-san will simply run interference for us. Nothing too hostile. A few mildly cognitohazardous tautology traps and NP complex self-encryption virals that will leave them thinking like paramecia until one of their buddies does a full reset, maybe need a therapeutic memory scrub if they find it really traumatic, but no harm done in the long run. It's all symbolic. The point is to lay a minefield too overkill to even bother crossing it until we're packed up and gone, like telling some poor asshole he needs to solve a Millennium Prize Problem so he can take a piss. Stag beetles measuring each other's horns rather than fight and waste both of their resources, you know, better than killing each other and everything." Ixchel rolled her eyes, pushing open a barbed wire gate that hung half-ajar with a single squeal of rusty protest, totally unstimulated by the testosterone fixation of vividly describing how they would incapacitate some poor fools from a rival faction, people who could easily be them if not for the causal shift of a butterfly flapping its wings at god knows what intersection in spacetime.
It wasn't so long ago that underground nanocelebrities and niche influencers came through Kowloon Quarter once in awhile to visit Hanzu, sometimes leaving with pre-Contact relics: gemstones from Jaipur, rare Nike sneakers sourced from a collector in Colorado Springs hours before Dreadnaught shattered the summit of Pikes Peak. At other times they left with the face of a lagomorph. Not anymore.
The warehouse door yielded easily, probably left unlocked by Fesyen's last visitor and totally disregarded by the paramedics afterwards. Zenji's baseline eye was wide as a saucer as they crept over the threshold, the other mirrored inset a warped reflection of the eccentric fixer's studio. Ixchel could feel hair on the back of her neck stand up and steeled herself, sensing heavily the weight of death around them.
Fesyen's territory would be open real estate in a question of hours, as soon as the panopticon surveillance psychopaths noticed on their palantirs and posted their forbidden lore to the darkweb.
Lmfao fixer fesyen's a fuckin slab, who's king of kowloon now? pic unrelated lol. Hanzu's hard-earned little corner of the Chinatown curio market would be briefly warred over by local microcultures, strains of bacteria struggling over common substrate, until new borders stabilized after hours or days of bloodshed.
Ixchel didn't need Zenji's ocular mods to see his fear clear as body heat in infrared. She could smell his sweat, the apprehension. Still, the upstart netrunner's intel was on point: Fesyen was the scrupulous sort. Had been. Despite its crumbling outer shell, rows of sterile fluorescent lamps illuminated a space kept compulsively organized, obsessively tidy. Accoutrements of every shape, size and substance lined the perimeters of the vast open room in stacks among other artifacts, low-tech watches and vintage leather footwear sumptuously displayed alongside other commodities.
The metallic tang of blood and antiseptic lingered in the air. Fesyen's private insurance EMS team had already rolled through, tagged the body as a probable homicide, then conveniently forwarded the ping for law enforcement over Oshima-gumi-controlled channels coincidentally experiencing severe packet loss, guaranteeing a few cycles of solitude to look into the event before the police caught wind.
"Ix, it's fucking creepy in here," Zenji said as they rounded a surgical bed on an elevated circular platform in the center of the room, arterial spray like a scarlet Pollock splatter across the plastic curtain circling the ripperdoc's workstation. Zenji was right, but Ixchel didn't dignify him with a response. Distractedly looking everywhere except where he was going, the
gokudō enforcer crashed into Ixchel when she stopped moving forward. She didn't budge a centimeter from where she stood, eyes fixed on something in front of her.
Hanzu Fesyen's death mask was one of utter disbelief, as if the disappointment at the lack of pageantry to his demise killed him rather than the ragged red tear in his neck. Rigor mortis and the pallor of the exsanguined rendered him kin to the mannequins modeling his artistry throughout the bleached studio space.
Ixchel's eyes closed. Another spin of the wheel in the self-perpetuating cycles of violence that swallowed her, swallowed the Earth. It never ended.
"This is some seriously cursed shit." Ixchel heard a click she recognized for the camera app her companion had bootstrapped onto the OS of his modded eye and spun to scourge her hacker companion with the most withering stare he had ever experienced in his life. Fujiwara Zenji was sure in that moment that he experienced the total departure of his soul from his body.
"Are you livestreaming this, pendejo de mierda?" the girl from Yucatán hissed in a single breath that managed to simultaneously curse Zenji's entire lineage to an eternity of torment.
Incredibly, however, the android yakuza returned her stare with indignation, clammy with stimulant sweat, speaking faster than his own brain could buffer,
"Do you seriously think I'm, like, single-celled? This is top tier content, I'm probably gonna rail some ketamine to chill out when I get home because looking at dead bodies is seriously fucked up, then pop some stims to edit this until like noon tomorrow so I can post it to my Soulcast before a thousand shit-eating plebs post their AI gen garbage from 23chan memes and my art gets sucked into the content singularity." The infinitesimal red notification dot in the corner of his eye disappeared despite his protests. Still staring, Ixchel made a show of maintaining eye contact while she drew a long, jagged artifact from the folds of her dress: a wicked-looking knife, hiltless, more a shard of obsidian than an object meaningfully shaped by any blacksmith's hand, raw iridium cutting light into a rainbow across the edge of its dark stone blade. It drank the light around it, in stark contrast to Ixchel's luminescence.
After a dramatic pause, she gave a titanic sigh and the tension between them evaporated.
"Go collect the security feed then scrub everything. This is going to take me awhile."Ixchel glanced at the fixer's corpse and with an expert flourish pricked her other hand with the knife, a single scarlet bead growing fat on her fingertip, dropping into the thick puddle of Hanzu's blood. It rippled, and something began to stir which was not meant to be called back over the boundary it had crossed. She began to whisper in
Nabʼee Mayaʼ Tzij, the oldest tongue, a spell soporific to the spirits of the underworld Xibalba, words to coax secrets from the lips of the dead...
———
Staten Island — The Greenbelt —
High Rock Park ——
Pruned of error by selection pressure, demanding a pinnacle of rigorous execution, every variable tuned to the principal components of the other, he realized in its wake that their act of ecoterrorism was a plot requiring perfect mathematical precision: who better to execute it than Vernon Hayes, statistician employed by the Metro Transit Authority, a man that understood the stochastic flow of commerce across New New York's infrastructure like a phlebologist observing the course of blood through vasculature.
And its jugular was the monolithic Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Years of careful planning went into the creation of NEW DEAL, into the subtle manipulation of complex chains of cause and effect, time to orchestrate and infiltrate the proper circles. All along NEW DEAL had been the puppet of greater forces, and Vernon Hayes instinctively knew that ultimately his pact was with the all-devouring dragon of capitalism, too beaten in life to naively believe in a shady cabal of trillionaires interested in ecorevolution.
He saw himself clearly in hindsight, too caught up in the rush to go deeper into the rabbit hole and see where it led.
The last twenty-four hours were an epinephrine smear in his memory. Collapsing ferrocrete as the shoulder of the BQE disintegrated under the demolition charge, fireballs of shrapnel falling over Brooklyn Bridge Park, his heart thundering in concert to endorphin microinjections. Screams that untethered Vernon's humanity from the skein of this life with the laser scalpel of murder, terrorbird mech maneuvering adroitly afterwards through smoke and bedlam to the dropoff point. He reeled at the horror now that it was over, but in the heat of the moment the aggression implants modulating his personality were sky high on the dopamine rush.
An encrypted communique reached the ecoterrorist as a genome technician went to work purging Vernon Hayes from the Earth. The fentanyl submerged him in the deep sleep of anesthesia while CRISPR kits scrambled every marker gene and microsatellite signature to make his new identity inscrutable to the inevitable forensic traces Vernon would have left behind. Craniofacial reconstruction, skin pigmentation alteration, enzyme profile edits so that even the sweat of his new self smelled different.
For a time in
the narcotic twilight, he dreamed still frames from the explosion. Then he shifted REM cycles and the military grade AI mods interfaced with his cerebral cortex, co-opting certain brainwaves to teach him the memories of his new life by the light of phosphenes. In the process he subliminally decrypted the transmission from codename
Cánshén.
The message from his mysterious benefactor was a koan riddle, identical to every prior communication.
A man waits beside the stream where his father taught him to fish as a boy, but his father has been dead for many seasons, and the flowers of the persimmon trees no longer bear fruit. The man asks no one, What is the meaning of these lives we lead?Seventeen hours later the man who had been Vernon Hayes found himself glancing down at his new identicard under the nuclear sun up in New Haven, near the bridge over the Quinnipiac. Harold Strauss, mechanical engineer. To go from theoretical to applied mathematics redoubled his disquiet.
A ghostly voice answers him on the wind, What is the price of rice in old Edo?Vernon -- Harold -- knew precisely where Cánshén, the Silkworm God, established their meeting location. Their rendezvous point was surprisingly straightforward despite the poetic obfuscation. There was a place Vernon Hayes loved most on Earth, and that place was right where he sat in a tucked away corner of High Rock Park in the woodland heart of the Greenbelt on Staten Island.
At the terminus of a meandering trail far from the beaten path, a single bench overlooked a great pond, older than man when he was a boy and today still unpolluted by the toxic biochemical runoff of the arcologies. A haven in nature, kept carefully apart from the sprawling dystopia of North Capitol City. His father brought him here when he was a child and even then he marveled at the lives of the fat, lazy trout swimming slow spirals through clean water.
NEW DEAL had been an ambitious project, he mused, a
successful project, disruptive no matter how slightly to the industries of Empire, still dominating the news cycles... soon to be swept away in the daily whirlwind of tragedies. Vernon Hayes already had been, like so many other lives as a result of his actions.
Harold Strauss stared into the pond and wondered if by tracing his finger along the vermiculated scales of the fish he might draw a line back to an Earth lost in the cinereal mists of time, an Earth before yesterday, before NEW DEAL, before Vernon Hayes ever learned the name Cánshén, before Contact. He did not recognize the world, or the man it had made of him, reflected back across that pristine water. He hadn't in a long time.
Yes, he thought, taking a deep breath as his OS ran a quick diagnostics check on the military-grade mods whirring to life beneath casual clothes fit for the end of summer. The intuitions that made Vernon an attractive target to Cánshén and whatever shadowy power she represented now cleaved to a new and disturbing conclusion about his part in this mess. He had many questions in need of answers.
What is
the price of rice in old Edo?
——
Manhattan Chinatown —
Little Fuzhou — Ramen Broadcast Station aka
Ramen Hososoba Kyokua [ラーメン放送局] ——
Zenji drained a sake bottle with one hand while the other splayed thumb and forefinger to zoom in on the holoscreen superimposed over the back of their booth at the Ramen Broadcast, a chain of low-end diners affiliated with the Oshima-gumi family. The privacy filter occluded their business from anyone curious enough to eavesdrop, an uninspired aquarium scene from a documentary on coral reefs extinct since the early 2020s. Even Ixchel took the owner's reassurances of seclusion at face value, begrudging the organized crime outfits of the Sikoja sprawl and their NCC offshoots one fact: they took honor seriously.
Zenji's baseline eye was unfocused, jumping along the seams of its saccadic movements, fingers twitching spastically to a thousand cyberspace stimuli.
"Oh, Ix, this Fesyen guy was one eccentric little freak. He has sorted binary trees of gossip files on every acquaintance, a gigaton of dirt on everyone he's worked with over the years. It's gonna take me awhile to get through all this stuff."Ixchel Xiadani Xultún, daughter of both Maya and Nahuas, the peoples of the Maize God and Quetzalcoatl, was not feeling her best just then.
A crystal philter rested at a tilt before her on the scored laminate of the table in their booth. Inside a roiling black fluid ever pushed at the boundaries of the flask, the blood of Hanzu Fesyen eager for freedom. The fever of the underworld reached through Ixchel, binding some shadow of the fixer's blasted soul to her grim fetish, a guiding light shining in from Xibalba... Sweat dripped off her brow.
"That's great, Zenji. Any luck on, you know, finding the guy that killed him?"Zenji pried himself away from the holoscreen and Ixchel immediately recognized the apologetic look in his eye.
"Oh, uh. Yeah, no, the guy's wearing an Arivex, jacket like mine but a nicer brand and a better model." He popped his collar self-deprecatingly.
"What can I say, the man has drip. A2 blurs his identity in the feed. If you gave me awhile I could maybe piece something together out of the noise but we're talking high tier net wizardry and uh, not on the timescale we're operating on here."Ixchel nodded, exhaling deeply.
"Alright. We'll do it my way then." Zenji looked at her with an endearingly worried expression. She opened her mouth and a micropore on top of the philter, letting a single viscous drop of Fesyen's blood fall onto her tongue. Ixchel had time to set the flask down and grip the edge of the table, sucking her breath in sharply, eyes fluttering shut and opening again obsidian black, like portals into vacuum.
The logographs and Mesoamerican tattoo glyphs along her skin fluoresced, searing bright then smoldering, magic seals restraining the spirit that the medium invited into her body for however brief an interval, multiple redundant failsafes set to eject it back into the underworld at the slightest indication of foul play.
Slowly, like the head of an Olmec statue grinding on its vertical axis, Ixchel's face rotated independently of the rest of her body to behold the scared-shitless yakuza netrunner sitting beside her. Zenji fixed his friend and whatever else happened to be renting her headspace with his most supplicant stare, the one he used to give his mom when she logged him out of the matrix and told him to get his sorry ass to class if he didn't want to end up a yakuza dog like his father.
"Uh, right, this was supposed to be like vidchatting or something. Mr. Hanzu Fesyen, sir. Just c- call me... Hanzo. Hattori Hanzo, right, anyway, we're trying to figure out what happened to you. If you get any kind of connection to the net down there, it'd be great if you could like, forward me the coordinates of the guy that cut you."
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